The Complete Works of

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

(1874-1965)

Contents

The Novels

LIZA OF LAMBETH

THE MAKING OF A SAINT

THE HERO

MRS CRADDOCK

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

THE BISHOP’S APRON

THE EXPLORER

THE MAGICIAN

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

THE PAINTED VEIL

CAKES AND ALE

THE NARROW CORNER

THEATRE

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY

UP AT THE VILLA

THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN

THE RAZOR’S EDGE

THEN AND NOW

CATALINA

The Short Stories

INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORIES

THE SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

THE SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Plays

A MAN OF HONOUR

LADY FREDERICK

JACK STRAW

MRS DOT

PENELOPE

THE EXPLORER

THE TENTH MAN

LANDED GENTRY

THE LAND OF PROMISE

THE UNKNOWN

THE CIRCLE

CAESAR’S WIFE

EAST OF SUEZ

Selected Non-Fiction

THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

ON A CHINESE SCREEN

FRANCE AT WAR

BOOKS AND YOU

The Autobiographies

THE SUMMING UP

STRICTLY PERSONAL

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

© Delphi Classics 2017

Version 1

The Complete Works of

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

By Delphi Classics, 2017

COPYRIGHT

Complete Works of W. Somerset Maugham

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78656 068 1

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: sales@delphiclassics.com

www.delphiclassics.com

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The Novels

Hôtel de Charost, the official residence of the British Ambassador, Paris — Maugham’s father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a lawyer that handled the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for Maugham to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil.

Central Paris, c. 1900

Maugham as a young man

LIZA OF LAMBETH

Originally entitled A Lambeth Idyll, this novel was written in response to advice given to Maugham after he submitted two short stories to publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin. Unwin rejected the stories on the advice of expert reader Edward Garnett (a critic and literary editor), but did advise Maugham that if he chose to write a longer piece of fiction he would be happy to receive it.

Maugham therefore wrote his first novel whilst working as a medical intern at St. Thomas’ hospital in Lambeth, which was to provide rich source material for the story. This time Garnett was impressed by the realistic setting and storyline and Unwin published it in September 1897. For a first novel it attracted a pleasing amount of attention and the respectable initial sum of £20 in royalties.

Maugham described the novel as “the story of a nine days wonder in a Lambeth slum” and confessed to being influenced by the great authors of realistic novels, such as Maupassant; however, Maugham was also accused of being overly influenced (to the point of plagiarism) by other gritty novels set in the slums, such as Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, published in 1896. Some themes are bound to recur in such novels — descriptions of living conditions, the brutality of relationships, the dangers of living and working in such insanitary districts — so the critics that accused Maugham of copying were perhaps being unduly harsh, as his characters and settings are as unique to this novel as they can be. It is tempting to think that the doctor who appears briefly towards the end of the story is a “walk on” part for Maugham himself in his professional role as a community hospital doctor. In later life, Maugham presented the manuscript for this novel to his old school, King’s School Canterbury, the establishment that was so unflatteringly portrayed in Maugham’s later novel Of Human Bondage.

This story unfolds over about four months in the late summer and early autumn of 1887. Eighteen-year-old Liza Kemp is a factory worker and the youngest of thirteen children. She lives in cramped, unpleasant conditions with her siblings and her widowed, alcoholic mother. A strikingly attractive, cheerful and sociable girl, who makes the best of her appearance and life in general, Liza is popular with neighbours and local boys alike and it is not long before she receives (and rejects) a proposal of marriage from Tom, a respectable lad, who is besotted with her. Liza is instead drawn to the socially unacceptable — an affair with Jim Blackston, a forty year old man, who is married, has several children and a pregnant wife. Their courtship begins right under the noses of their neighbours on a bank holiday outing and develops into a full blown affair – after Jim rapes her. This is a gruelling scene which, while not sexually explicit, will more than likely upset many modern sensibilities, but is especially uncomfortable as the rape is the trigger for the start of the affair, not something that ends it.

Liza and Jim continue with their affair, meeting in railway waiting rooms to try to avoid local prying eyes and gossips — hardly the grand romance Liza had in mind. Nor does the discretion work, as people begin to talk about them and soon Jim’s wife finds out. Jim faces strife at home and Liza feels disappointed and trapped. She cannot leave home because of her ineffectual mother and Jim makes no moves to leave home either; Liza’s work friend Sarah gives up work and marries a man that beats her and is soon also pregnant and Tom, her former admirer, is less attentive than he was. Jim’s wife has vowed to do Liza harm when she finds her. Instead of opening up into a brave new life of romance and freedom from society’s constraints, the world is closing in on Liza, who is now seen as the neighbourhood reprobate. What will become of her?

This is an engaging story with believable characters set against an authentic backdrop and a very strong beginning to what was to become a long and illustrious career for Maugham. Like virtually all novelists of his day, Maugham attempts to reproduce in prose the dialect of the characters. To some readers this will always be irritating at best, but Maugham does manage to achieve an element of authenticity without it grating too much. He does not judge his characters and presents them as rounded people, so we see Liza as attractive, even charismatic, yet she is also amoral and self seeking. The brutality is not sanitized, but at the same time we do see Liza and her neighbours enjoying themselves, whereas Morrison in Child of the Jago is unremittingly bleak and rather condemnatory of both his characters and of society.

The first edition

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

The first edition’s title page

The first edition of ‘A Child of the Jago’ (1896)

1

It was the first Saturday afternoon in August; it had been broiling hot all day, with a cloudless sky, and the sun had been beating down on the houses, so that the top rooms were like ovens; but now with the approach of evening it was cooler, and everyone in Vere Street was out of doors.

Vere street, Lambeth, is a short, straight street leading out of the Westminster Bridge Road; it has forty houses on one side and forty houses on the other, and these eighty houses are very much more like one another than ever peas are like peas, or young ladies like young ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of the line from one end of the street to the other.

This Saturday afternoon the street was full of life; no traffic came down Vere Street, and the cemented space between the pavements was given up to children. Several games of cricket were being played by wildly excited boys, using coats for wickets, an old tennis-ball or a bundle of rags tied together for a ball, and, generally, an old broomstick for bat. The wicket was so large and the bat so small that the man in was always getting bowled, when heated quarrels would arise, the batter absolutely refusing to go out and the bowler absolutely insisting on going in. The girls were more peaceable; they were chiefly employed in skipping, and only abused one another mildly when the rope was not properly turned or the skipper did not jump sufficiently high. Worst off of all were the very young children, for there had been no rain for weeks, and the street was as dry and clean as a covered court, and, in the lack of mud to wallow in, they sat  about the road, disconsolate as poets. The number of babies was prodigious; they sprawled about everywhere, on the pavement, round the doors, and about their mothers’ skirts. The grown-ups were gathered round the open doors; there were usually two women squatting on the doorstep, and two or three more seated on either side on chairs; they were invariably nursing babies, and most of them showed clear signs that the present object of the maternal care would be soon ousted by a new arrival. Men were less numerous but such as there were leant against the walls, smoking, or sat on the sills of the ground-floor windows. It was the dead season in Vere Street as much as in Belgravia, and really if it had not been for babies just come or just about to come, and an opportune murder in a neighbouring doss-house, there would have been nothing whatever to talk about. As it was, the little groups talked quietly, discussing the atrocity or the merits of the local midwives, comparing the circumstances of their various confinements.

‘You’ll be ‘avin’ your little trouble soon, eh, Polly?’ asked one good lady of another.

‘Oh, I reckon I’ve got another two months ter go yet,’ answered Polly.

‘Well,’ said a third. ‘I wouldn’t ‘ave thought you’d go so long by the look of yer!’

‘I ‘ope you’ll have it easier this time, my dear,’ said a very stout old person, a woman of great importance.

‘She said she wasn’t goin’ to ‘ave no more, when the last one come.’ This remark came from Polly’s husband.

‘Ah,’ said the stout old lady, who was in the business, and boasted vast experience. ‘That’s wot they all says; but, Lor’ bless yer, they don’t mean it.’

‘Well, I’ve got three, and I’m not goin’ to ‘ave no more bli’me if I will; ‘tain’t good enough — that’s wot I says.’

‘You’re abaht right there, ole gal,’ said Polly, ‘My word,  ‘Arry, if you ‘ave any more I’ll git a divorce, that I will.’

At that moment an organ-grinder turned the corner and came down the street.

‘Good biz; ‘ere’s an organ!’ cried half a dozen people at once.

The organ-man was an Italian, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious moustache. Drawing his organ to a favourable spot, he stopped, released his shoulder from the leather straps by which he dragged it, and cocking his large soft hat on the side of his head, began turning the handle. It was a lively tune, and in less than no time a little crowd had gathered round to listen, chiefly the young men and the maidens, for the married ladies were never in a fit state to dance, and therefore disinclined to trouble themselves to stand round the organ. There was a moment’s hesitation at opening the ball; then one girl said to another:

‘Come on, Florrie, you and me ain’t shy; we’ll begin, and bust it!’

The two girls took hold of one another, one acting gentleman, the other lady; three or four more pairs of girls immediately joined them, and they began a waltz. They held themselves very upright; and with an air of grave dignity which was quite impressive, glided slowly about, making their steps with the utmost precision, bearing themselves with sufficient decorum for a court ball. After a while the men began to itch for a turn, and two of them, taking hold of one another in the most approved fashion, waltzed round the circle with the gravity of judges.

All at once there was a cry: ‘There’s Liza!’ And several members of the group turned and called out: ‘Oo, look at Liza!’

The dancers stopped to see the sight, and the organ-grinder, having come to the end of his tune, ceased turning the handle and looked to see what was the excitement.

‘Oo, Liza!’ they called out. ‘Look at Liza; oo, I sy!’

It was a young girl of about eighteen, with dark eyes, and an enormous fringe, puffed-out and curled and frizzed, covering her whole forehead from side to side, and coming down to meet her eyebrows. She was dressed in brilliant violet, with great lappets of velvet, and she had on her head an enormous black hat covered with feathers.

‘I sy, ain’t she got up dossy?’ called out the groups at the doors, as she passed.

‘Dressed ter death, and kill the fashion; that’s wot I calls it.’

Liza saw what a sensation she was creating; she arched her back and lifted her head, and walked down the street, swaying her body from side to side, and swaggering along as though the whole place belonged to her.

‘‘Ave yer bought the street, Bill?’ shouted one youth; and then half a dozen burst forth at once, as if by inspiration:

‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!’

It was immediately taken up by a dozen more, and they all yelled it out:

‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road. Yah, ah, knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!’

‘Oo, Liza!’ they shouted; the whole street joined in, and they gave long, shrill, ear-piercing shrieks and strange calls, that rung down the street and echoed back again.

‘Hextra special!’ called out a wag.

‘Oh, Liza! Oo! Ooo!’ yells and whistles, and then it thundered forth again:

‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!’

Liza put on the air of a conquering hero, and sauntered on, enchanted at the uproar. She stuck out her elbows and jerked her head on one side, and said to herself as she passed through the bellowing crowd:

‘This is jam!’

‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!’

When she came to the group round the barrel-organ, one of the girls cried out to her:

‘Is that yer new dress, Liza?’

‘Well, it don’t look like my old one, do it?’ said Liza.

‘Where did yer git it?’ asked another friend, rather enviously.

‘Picked it up in the street, of course,’ scornfully answered Liza.

‘I believe it’s the same one as I saw in the pawnbroker’s dahn the road,’ said one of the men, to tease her.

‘Thet’s it; but wot was you doin’ in there? Pledgin’ yer shirt, or was it yer trousers?’

‘Yah, I wouldn’t git a second-’and dress at a pawnbroker’s!’

‘Garn!’ said Liza indignantly. ‘I’ll swipe yer over the snitch if yer talk ter me. I got the mayterials in the West Hend, didn’t I? And I ‘ad it mide up by my Court Dressmiker, so you jolly well dry up, old jellybelly.’

‘Garn!’ was the reply.

Liza had been so intent on her new dress and the comment it was exciting that she had not noticed the organ.

‘Oo, I say, let’s ‘ave some dancin’,’ she said as soon as she saw it. ‘Come on, Sally,’ she added, to one of the girls, ‘you an’ me’ll dance togither. Grind away, old cock!’

The man turned on a new tune, and the organ began to play the Intermezzo from the ‘Cavalleria’; other couples quickly followed Liza’s example, and they began to waltz round with the same solemnity as before; but Liza outdid them all; if the others were as stately as queens, she was as stately as an empress; the gravity and dignity with which she waltzed were something appalling, you felt that the minuet was a frolic in comparison; it would have been a fitting measure to tread round the grave of a première danseuse, or at the funeral of a professional humorist. And the graces she put on, the languor of the eyes, the contemptuous  curl of the lips, the exquisite turn of the hand, the dainty arching of the foot! You felt there could be no questioning her right to the tyranny of Vere Street.

Suddenly she stopped short, and disengaged herself from her companion.

‘Oh, I sy,’ she said, ‘this is too bloomin’ slow; it gives me the sick.’

That is not precisely what she said, but it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story, the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue.

‘It’s too bloomin’ slow,’ she said again; ‘it gives me the sick. Let’s ‘ave somethin’ a bit more lively than this ‘ere waltz. You stand over there, Sally, an’ we’ll show ’em ‘ow ter skirt dance.’

They all stopped waltzing.

‘Talk of the ballet at the Canterbury and South London. You just wite till you see the ballet at Vere Street, Lambeth — we’ll knock ’em!’

She went up to the organ-grinder.

‘Na then, Italiano,’ she said to him, ‘you buck up; give us a tune that’s got some guts in it! See?’

She caught hold of his big hat and squashed it down over his eyes. The man grinned from ear to ear, and, touching the little catch at the side, began to play a lively tune such as Liza had asked for.

The men had fallen out, but several girls had put themselves in position, in couples, standing face to face; and immediately the music struck up, they began. They held up their skirts on each side, so as to show their feet, and proceeded to go through the difficult steps and motions of the dance. Liza was right; they could not have done it better in a trained ballet. But the best dancer of them all was Liza; she threw her whole soul into it; forgetting the stiff bearing which  she had thought proper to the waltz, and casting off its elaborate graces, she gave herself up entirely to the present pleasure. Gradually the other couples stood aside, so that Liza and Sally were left alone. They paced it carefully, watching each other’s steps, and as if by instinct performing corresponding movements, so as to make the whole a thing of symmetry.

‘I’m abaht done,’ said Sally, blowing and puffing. ‘I’ve ‘ad enough of it.’

‘Go on, Liza!’ cried out a dozen voices when Sally stopped.

She gave no sign of having heard them other than calmly to continue her dance. She glided through the steps, and swayed about, and manipulated her skirt, all with the most charming grace imaginable, then, the music altering, she changed the style of her dancing, her feet moved more quickly, and did not keep so strictly to the ground. She was getting excited at the admiration of the onlookers, and her dance grew wilder and more daring. She lifted her skirts higher, brought in new and more difficult movements into her improvisation, kicking up her legs she did the wonderful twist, backwards and forwards, of which the dancer is proud.

‘Look at ‘er legs!’ cried one of the men.

‘Look at ‘er stockin’s!’ shouted another; and indeed they were remarkable, for Liza had chosen them of the same brilliant hue as her dress, and was herself most proud of the harmony.

Her dance became gayer: her feet scarcely touched the ground, she whirled round madly.

‘Take care yer don’t split!’ cried out one of the wags, at a very audacious kick.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when Liza, with a gigantic effort, raised her foot and kicked off his hat. The feat was greeted with applause, and she went on, making turns and twists, flourishing her skirts, kicking higher and  higher, and finally, among a volley of shouts, fell on her hands and turned head over heels in a magnificent catharine-wheel; then scrambling to her feet again, she tumbled into the arms of a young man standing in the front of the ring.

‘That’s right, Liza,’ he said. ‘Give us a kiss, now,’ and promptly tried to take one.

‘Git aht!’ said Liza, pushing him away, not too gently.

‘Yus, give us a kiss,’ cried another, running up to her.

‘I’ll smack yer in the fice!’ said Liza, elegantly, as she dodged him.

‘Ketch ‘old on ‘er, Bill,’ cried out a third, ‘an’ we’ll all kiss her.’

‘Na, you won’t!’ shrieked Liza, beginning to run.

‘Come on,’ they cried, ‘we’ll ketch ‘er.’

She dodged in and out, between their legs, under their arms, and then, getting clear of the little crowd, caught up her skirts so that they might not hinder her, and took to her heels along the street. A score of men set in chase, whistling, shouting, yelling; the people at the doors looked up to see the fun, and cried out to her as she dashed past; she ran like the wind. Suddenly a man from the side darted into the middle of the road, stood straight in her way, and before she knew where she was, she had jumped shrieking into his arms, and he, lifting her up to him, had imprinted two sounding kisses on her cheeks.

‘Oh, you —— !’ she said. Her expression was quite unprintable; nor can it be euphemized.

There was a shout of laughter from the bystanders, and the young men in chase of her, and Liza, looking up, saw a big, bearded man whom she had never seen before. She blushed to the very roots of her hair, quickly extricated herself from his arms, and, amid the jeers and laughter of everyone, slid into the door of the nearest house and was lost to view.

2

Liza and her mother were having supper. Mrs. Kemp was an elderly woman, short, and rather stout, with a red face, and grey hair brushed tight back over her forehead. She had been a widow for many years, and since her husband’s death had lived with Liza in the ground-floor front room in which they were now sitting. Her husband had been a soldier, and from a grateful country she received a pension large enough to keep her from starvation, and by charring and doing such odd jobs as she could get she earned a little extra to supply herself with liquor. Liza was able to make her own living by working at a factory.

Mrs. Kemp was rather sulky this evening.

‘Wot was yer doin’ this afternoon, Liza?’ she asked.

‘I was in the street.’

‘You’re always in the street when I want yer.’

‘I didn’t know as ‘ow yer wanted me, mother,’ answered Liza.

‘Well, yer might ‘ave come ter see! I might ‘ave been dead, for all you knew.’

Liza said nothing.

‘My rheumatics was thet bad to-dy, thet I didn’t know wot ter do with myself. The doctor said I was to be rubbed with that stuff ‘e give me, but yer won’t never do nothin’ for me.’

‘Well, mother,’ said Liza, ‘your rheumatics was all right yesterday.’

‘I know wot you was doin’; you was showin’ off thet new dress of yours. Pretty waste of money thet is, instead of givin’ it me ter sive up. An’ for the matter of thet, I wanted a new dress far worse than you did. But, of course, I don’t matter.’

Liza did not answer, and Mrs. Kemp, having nothing more to say, continued her supper in silence.

It was Liza who spoke next.

‘There’s some new people moved in the street. ‘Ave you seen ’em?’ she asked.

‘No, wot are they?’

‘I dunno; I’ve seen a chap, a big chap with a beard. I think ‘e lives up at the other end.’

She felt herself blushing a little.

‘No one any good you be sure,’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘I can’t swaller these new people as are comin’ in; the street ain’t wot it was when I fust come.’

When they had done, Mrs. Kemp got up, and having finished her half-pint of beer, said to her daughter:

‘Put the things awy, Liza. I’m just goin’ round to see Mrs. Clayton; she’s just ‘ad twins, and she ‘ad nine before these come. It’s a pity the Lord don’t see fit ter tike some on ’em — thet’s wot I say.’

After which pious remark Mrs. Kemp went out of the house and turned into another a few doors up.

Liza did not clear the supper things away as she was told, but opened the window and drew her chair to it. She leant on the sill, looking out into the street. The sun had set, and it was twilight, the sky was growing dark, bringing to view the twinkling stars; there was no breeze, but it was pleasantly and restfully cool. The good folk still sat at their doorsteps, talking as before on the same inexhaustible subjects, but a little subdued with the approach of night. The boys were still playing cricket, but they were mostly at the other end of the street, and their shouts were muffled before they reached Liza’s ears.

She sat, leaning her head on her hands, breathing in the fresh air and feeling a certain exquisite sense of peacefulness which she was not used to. It was Saturday evening, and she thankfully remembered that there would be no factory on  the morrow; she was glad to rest. Somehow she felt a little tired, perhaps it was through the excitement of the afternoon, and she enjoyed the quietness of the evening. It seemed so tranquil and still; the silence filled her with a strange delight, she felt as if she could sit there all through the night looking out into the cool, dark street, and up heavenwards at the stars. She was very happy, but yet at the same time experienced a strange new sensation of melancholy, and she almost wished to cry.

Suddenly a dark form stepped in front of the open window. She gave a little shriek.

‘‘Oo’s thet?’ she asked, for it was quite dark, and she did not recognize the man standing in front of her.

‘Me, Liza,’ was the answer.

‘Tom?’

‘Yus!’

It was a young man with light yellow hair and a little fair moustache, which made him appear almost boyish; he was light-complexioned and blue-eyed, and had a frank and pleasant look mingled with a curious bashfulness that made him blush when people spoke to him.

‘Wot’s up?’ asked Liza.

‘Come aht for a walk, Liza, will yer?’

‘No!’ she answered decisively.

‘You promised ter yesterday, Liza.’

‘Yesterday an’ ter-day’s two different things,’ was her wise reply.

‘Yus, come on, Liza.’

‘Na, I tell yer, I won’t.’

‘I want ter talk ter yer, Liza.’ Her hand was resting on the window-sill, and he put his upon it. She quickly drew it back.

‘Well, I don’t want yer ter talk ter me.’

But she did, for it was she who broke the silence.

‘Say, Tom, ‘oo are them new folk as ‘as come into the street? It’s a big chap with a brown beard.’

‘D’you mean the bloke as kissed yer this afternoon?’

Liza blushed again.

‘Well, why shouldn’t ‘e kiss me?’ she said, with some inconsequence.

‘I never said as ‘ow ‘e shouldn’t; I only arst yer if it was the sime.’

‘Yea, thet’s ‘oo I mean.’

‘‘Is nime is Blakeston — Jim Blakeston. I’ve only spoke to ‘im once; he’s took the two top rooms at No. 19 ‘ouse.’

‘Wot’s ‘e want two top rooms for?’

‘‘Im? Oh, ‘e’s got a big family — five kids. Ain’t yer seen ‘is wife abaht the street? She’s a big, fat woman, as does ‘er ‘air funny.’

‘I didn’t know ‘e ‘ad a wife.’

There was another silence; Liza sat thinking, and Tom stood at the window, looking at her.

‘Won’t yer come aht with me, Liza?’ he asked, at last.

‘Na, Tom,’ she said, a little more gently, ‘it’s too lite.’

‘Liza,’ he said, blushing to the roots of his hair.

‘Well?’

‘Liza’ — he couldn’t go on, and stuttered in his shyness— ‘Liza, I — I — I loves yer, Liza.’

‘Garn awy!’

He was quite brave now, and took hold of her hand.

‘Yer know, Liza, I’m earnin’ twenty-three shillin’s at the works now, an’ I’ve got some furniture as mother left me when she was took.’

The girl said nothing.

‘Liza, will you ‘ave me? I’ll make yer a good ‘usband, Liza, swop me bob, I will; an’ yer know I’m not a drinkin’ sort. Liza, will yer marry me?’

‘Na, Tom,’ she answered quietly.

‘Oh, Liza, won’t you ‘ave me?’

‘Na, Tom, I can’t.’

‘Why not? You’ve come aht walkin’ with me ever since Whitsun.’

‘Ah, things is different now.’

‘You’re not walkin’ aht with anybody else, are you, Liza?’ he asked quickly.

‘Na, not that.’

‘Well, why won’t yer, Liza? Oh Liza, I do love yer, I’ve never loved anybody as I love you!’

‘Oh, I can’t, Tom!’

‘There ain’t no one else?’

‘Na.’

‘Then why not?’

‘I’m very sorry, Tom, but I don’t love yer so as ter marry yer.’

‘Oh, Liza!’

She could not see the look upon his face, but she heard the agony in his voice; and, moved with sudden pity, she bent out, threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘Never mind old chap!’ she said. ‘I’m not worth troublin’ abaht.’

And quickly drawing back, she slammed the window to, and moved into the further part of the room.

3

The following day was Sunday. Liza when she was dressing herself in the morning, felt the hardness of fate in the impossibility of eating one’s cake and having it; she wished she had reserved her new dress, and had still before her the sensation of a first appearance in it. With a sigh she put on her ordinary everyday working dress, and proceeded to get the breakfast ready, for her mother had been out late the previous night, celebrating the new arrivals in the street, and had the ‘rheumatics’ this morning.

‘Oo, my ‘ead!’ she was saying, as she pressed her hands on each side of her forehead. ‘I’ve got the neuralgy again, wot shall I do? I dunno ‘ow it is, but it always comes on Sunday mornings. Oo, an’ my rheumatics, they give me sich a doin’ in the night!’

‘You’d better go to the ‘orspital mother.’

‘Not I!’ answered the worthy lady, with great decision. ‘You ‘as a dozen young chaps messin’ you abaht, and lookin’ at yer, and then they tells yer ter leave off beer and spirrits. Well, wot I says, I says I can’t do withaht my glass of beer.’ She thumped her pillow to emphasize the statement.

‘Wot with the work I ‘ave ter do, lookin’ after you and the cookin’ and gettin’ everythin’ ready and doin’ all the ‘ouse-work, and goin’ aht charring besides — well, I says, if I don’t ‘ave a drop of beer, I says, ter pull me together, I should be under the turf in no time.’

She munched her bread-and-butter and drank her tea.

‘When you’ve done breakfast, Liza,’ she said, ‘you can give the grate a cleanin’, an’ my boots’d do with a bit of polishin’. Mrs. Tike, in the next ‘ouse, ‘ll give yer some blackin’.’

She remained silent for a bit, then said:

‘I don’t think I shall get up ter-day. Liza. My rheumatics is bad. You can put the room straight and cook the dinner.’

‘Arright, mother, you stay where you are, an’ I’ll do everythin’ for yer.’

‘Well, it’s only wot yer ought to do, considerin’ all the trouble you’ve been ter me when you was young, and considerin’ thet when you was born the doctor thought I never should get through it. Wot ‘ave you done with your week’s money, Liza?’

‘Oh, I’ve put it awy,’ answered Liza quietly.

‘Where?’ asked her mother.

‘Where it’ll be safe.’

‘Where’s that?’

Liza was driven into a corner.

‘Why d’you want ter know?’ she asked.

‘Why shouldn’t I know; d’you think I want ter steal it from yer?’

‘Na, not thet.’

‘Well, why won’t you tell me?’

‘Oh, a thing’s sifer when only one person knows where it is.’

This was a very discreet remark, but it set Mrs. Kemp in a whirlwind of passion. She raised herself and sat up in the bed, flourishing her clenched fist at her daughter.

‘I know wot yer mean, you —— you!’ Her language was emphatic, her epithets picturesque, but too forcible for reproduction. ‘You think I’d steal it,’ she went on. ‘I know yer! D’yer think I’d go an’ tike yer dirty money?’

‘Well, mother,’ said Liza, ‘when I’ve told yer before, the money’s perspired like.’

‘Wot d’yer mean?’

‘It got less.’

‘Well, I can’t ‘elp thet, can I? Anyone can come in ‘ere and tike the money.’

‘If it’s ‘idden awy, they can’t, can they, mother?’ said Liza.

Mrs. Kemp shook her fist.

‘You dirty slut, you,’ she said, ‘yer think I tike yer money! Why, you ought ter give it me every week instead of savin’ it up and spendin’ it on all sorts of muck, while I ‘ave ter grind my very bones down to keep yer.’

‘Yer know, mother, if I didn’t ‘ave a little bit saved up, we should be rather short when you’re dahn in yer luck.’

Mrs. Kemp’s money always ran out on Tuesday, and Liza had to keep things going till the following Saturday.

‘Oh, don’t talk ter me!’ proceeded Mrs. Kemp. ‘When I was a girl I give all my money ter my mother. She never ‘ad ter ask me for nothin’. On Saturday when I come ‘ome with my wiges, I give it ‘er every farthin’. That’s wot a daughter ought ter do. I can say this for myself, I be’aved by my mother like a gal should. None of your prodigal sons for me! She didn’t ‘ave ter ask me for three ‘apence ter get a drop of beer.’

Liza was wise in her generation; she held her tongue, and put on her hat.

‘Now, you’re goin’ aht, and leavin’ me; I dunno wot you get up to in the street with all those men. No good, I’ll be bound. An’ ‘ere am I left alone, an’ I might die for all you care.’

In her sorrow at herself the old lady began to cry, and Liza slipped out of the room and into the street.

Leaning against the wall of the opposite house was Tom; he came towards her.

‘‘Ulloa!’ she said, as she saw him. ‘Wot are you doin’ ‘ere?’

‘I was waitin’ for you ter come aht, Liza,’ he answered.

She looked at him quickly.

‘I ain’t comin’ aht with yer ter-day, if thet’s wot yer mean,’ she said.

‘I never thought of arskin’ yer, Liza — after wot you said ter me last night.’

His voice was a little sad, and she felt so sorry for him.

‘But yer did want ter speak ter me, didn’t yer, Tom?’ she said, more gently.

‘You’ve got a day off ter-morrow, ain’t yer?’

‘Bank ‘Oliday. Yus! Why?’

‘Why, ‘cause they’ve got a drag startin’ from the “Red Lion” that’s goin’ down ter Chingford for the day — an’ I’m goin’.’

‘Yus!’ she said.

He looked at her doubtfully.

‘Will yer come too, Liza? It’ll be a regular beeno; there’s only goin’ ter be people in the street. Eh, Liza?’

‘Na, I can’t’

‘Why not?’

‘I ain’t got — I ain’t got the ooftish.’

‘I mean, won’t yer come with me?’

‘Na, Tom, thank yer; I can’t do thet neither.’

‘Yer might as well, Liza; it wouldn’t ‘urt yer.’

‘Na, it wouldn’t be right like; I can’t come aht with yer, and then mean nothin’! It would be doin’ yer aht of an outing.’

‘I don’t see why,’ he said, very crestfallen.

‘I can’t go on keepin’ company with you — after what I said last night.’

‘I shan’t enjoy it a bit without you, Liza.’

‘You git somebody else, Tom. You’ll do withaht me all right.’

She nodded to him, and walked up the street to the house of her friend Sally. Having arrived in front of it, she put her hands to her mouth in trumpet form, and shouted:

‘‘I! ‘I! ‘I! Sally!’

A couple of fellows standing by copied her.

‘‘I! ‘I! ‘I! Sally!’

‘Garn!’ said Liza, looking round at them.

Sally did not appear and she repeated her call. The men imitated her, and half a dozen took it up, so that there was enough noise to wake the seven sleepers.

‘‘I! ‘I! ‘I! Sally!’

A head was put out of a top window, and Liza, taking off her hat, waved it, crying:

‘Come on dahn, Sally!’

‘Arright, old gal!’ shouted the other. ‘I’m comin’!’

‘So’s Christmas!’ was Liza’s repartee.

There was a clatter down the stairs, and Sally, rushing through the passage, threw herself on to her friend. They began fooling, in reminiscence of a melodrama they had lately seen together.

‘Oh, my darlin’ duck!’ said Liza, kissing her and pressing her, with affected rapture, to her bosom.

‘My sweetest sweet!’ replied Sally, copying her.

‘An’ ‘ow does your lidyship ter-day?’

‘Oh!’ — with immense languor— ‘fust class; and is your royal ‘ighness quite well?’

‘I deeply regret,’ answered Liza, ‘but my royal ‘ighness ‘as got the collywobbles.’

Sally was a small, thin girl, with sandy hair and blue eyes, and a very freckled complexion. She had an enormous mouth, with terrible, square teeth set wide apart, which looked as if they could masticate an iron bar. She was dressed like Liza, in a shortish black skirt and an old-fashioned bodice, green and grey and yellow with age; her sleeves were tucked up to the elbow, and she wore a singularly dirty apron, that had once been white.

‘Wot ‘ave you got yer ‘air in them things for?’ asked Liza, pointing to the curl-papers. ‘Goin’ aht with yer young man ter-day?’

‘No, I’m going ter stay ‘ere all day.’

‘Wot for, then?’

‘Why, ‘Arry’s going ter tike me ter Chingford ter-morrer.’

‘Oh? In the “Red Lion” brake?’

‘Yus. Are you goin’?’

‘Na!’

‘Not! Well, why don’t you get round Tom? ‘E’ll tike yer, and jolly glad ‘e’ll be, too.’

‘‘E arst me ter go with ‘im, but I wouldn’t.’

‘Swop me bob — why not?’

‘I ain’t keeping company with ‘im.’

‘Yer might ‘ave gone with ‘im all the sime.’

‘Na. You’re goin’ with ‘Arry, ain’t yer?’

‘Yus!’

‘An’ you’re goin’ to ‘ave ‘im?’

‘Right again!’

‘Well, I couldn’t go with Tom, and then throw him over.’

‘Well, you are a mug!’

The two girls had strolled down towards the Westminster Bridge Road, and Sally, meeting her young man, had gone to him. Liza walked back, wishing to get home in time to cook the dinner. But she went slowly, for she knew every dweller in the street, and as she passed the groups sitting at their doors, as on the previous evening, but this time mostly engaged in peeling potatoes or shelling peas, she stopped and had a little chat. Everyone liked her, and was glad to have her company. ‘Good old Liza,’ they would say, as she left them, ‘she’s a rare good sort, ain’t she?’

She asked after the aches and pains of all the old people, and delicately inquired after the babies, past and future; the children hung on to her skirts and asked her to play with them, and she would hold one end of the rope while tiny little ragged girls skipped, invariably entangling themselves after two jumps.

She had nearly reached home, when she heard a voice cry:

‘Mornin’!’

She looked round and recognized the man whom Tom had told her was called Jim Blakeston. He was sitting on a stool at the door of one of the houses, playing with two young children, to whom he was giving rides on his knee. She remembered his heavy brown beard from the day before, and she had also an impression of great size; she noticed this morning that he was, in fact, a big man, tall and broad, and she saw besides that he had large, masculine features and pleasant brown eyes. She supposed him to be about forty.

‘Mornin’!’ he said again, as she stopped and looked at him.

‘Well, yer needn’t look as if I was goin’ ter eat yer up, ‘cause I ain’t,’ he said.

‘‘Oo are you? I’m not afeard of yer.’

‘Wot are yer so bloomin’ red abaht?’ he asked pointedly.

‘Well, I’m ‘ot.’

‘You ain’t shirty ‘cause I kissed yer last night?’

‘I’m not shirty; but it was pretty cool, considerin’ like as I didn’t know yer.’

‘Well, you run into my arms.’

‘Thet I didn’t; you run aht and caught me.’

‘An’ kissed yer before you could say “Jack Robinson”.’ He laughed at the thought. ‘Well, Liza,’ he went on, ‘seein’ as ‘ow I kissed yer against yer will, the best thing you can do ter make it up is to kiss me not against yer will.’

‘Me?’ said Liza, looking at him, open-mouthed. ‘Well you are a pill!’

The children began to clamour for the riding, which had been discontinued on Liza’s approach.

‘Are them your kids?’ she asked.

‘Yus; them’s two on ’em.’

‘‘Ow many ‘ave yer got?’

‘Five; the eldest gal’s fifteen, and the next one ‘oo’s a boy’s twelve, and then there are these two and baby.’

‘Well, you’ve got enough for your money.’

‘Too many for me — and more comin’.’

‘Ah well,’ said Liza, laughing, ‘thet’s your fault, ain’t it?’

Then she bade him good morning, and strolled off.

He watched her as she went, and saw half a dozen little boys surround her and beg her to join them in their game of cricket. They caught hold of her arms and skirts, and pulled her to their pitch.

‘No, I can’t,’ she said trying to disengage herself. ‘I’ve got the dinner ter cook.’

‘Dinner ter cook?’ shouted one small boy. ‘Why, they always cooks the cats’ meat at the shop.’

‘You little so-and-so!’ said Liza, somewhat inelegantly, making a dash at him.

He dodged her and gave a whoop; then turning he caught her round the legs, and another boy catching hold of her round the neck they dragged her down, and all three struggled on the ground, rolling over and over; the other boys threw themselves on the top, so that there was a great heap of legs and arms and heads waving and bobbing up and down.

Liza extricated herself with some difficulty, and taking off her hat she began cuffing the boys with it, using all the time the most lively expressions. Then, having cleared the field, she retired victorious into her own house and began cooking the dinner.

4

Bank Holiday was a beautiful day: the cloudless sky threatened a stifling heat for noontide, but early in the morning, when Liza got out of bed and threw open the window, it was fresh and cool. She dressed herself, wondering how she should spend her day; she thought of Sally going off to Chingford with her lover, and of herself remaining alone in the dull street with half the people away. She almost wished it were an ordinary work-day, and that there were no such things as bank holidays. And it seemed to be a little like two Sundays running, but with the second rather worse than the first. Her mother was still sleeping, and she was in no great hurry about getting the breakfast, but stood quietly looking out of the window at the house opposite.

In a little while she saw Sally coming along. She was arrayed in purple and fine linen — a very smart red dress, trimmed with velveteen, and a tremendous hat covered with feathers. She had reaped the benefit of keeping her hair in curl-papers since Saturday, and her sandy fringe stretched from ear to ear. She was in enormous spirits.

‘‘Ulloa, Liza!’ she called as soon as she saw her at the window.

Liza looked at her a little enviously.

‘‘Ulloa!’ she answered quietly.

‘I’m just goin’ to the “Red Lion” to meet ‘Arry.’

‘At what time d’yer start?’

‘The brake leaves at ‘alf-past eight sharp.’

‘Why, it’s only eight; it’s only just struck at the church. ‘Arry won’t be there yet, will he?’

‘Oh, ‘e’s sure ter be early. I couldn’t wite. I’ve been witin’ abaht since ‘alf-past six. I’ve been up since five this morning.’

‘Since five! What ‘ave you been doin’?’

‘Dressin’ myself and doin’ my ‘air. I woke up so early. I’ve been dreamin’ all the night abaht it. I simply couldn’t sleep.’

‘Well, you are a caution!’ said Liza.

‘Bust it, I don’t go on the spree every day! Oh, I do ‘ope I shall enjoy myself.’

‘Why, you simply dunno where you are!’ said Liza, a little crossly.

‘Don’t you wish you was comin’, Liza?’ asked Sally.

‘Na! I could if I liked, but I don’t want ter.’

‘You are a coughdrop — thet’s all I can say. Ketch me refusin’ when I ‘ave the chanst.’

‘Well, it’s done now. I ain’t got the chanst any more.’ Liza said this with just a little regret in her voice.

‘Come on dahn to the “Red Lion”, Liza, and see us off,’ said Sally.

‘No, I’m damned if I do!’ answered Liza, with some warmth.

‘You might as well. P’raps ‘Arry won’t be there, an’ you can keep me company till ‘e comes. An’ you can see the ‘orses.’

Liza was really very anxious to see the brake and the horses and the people going; but she hesitated a little longer. Sally asked her once again. Then she said:

‘Arright; I’ll come with yer, and wite till the bloomin’ old thing starts.’

She did not trouble to put on a hat, but just walked out as she was, and accompanied Sally to the public-house which was getting up the expedition.

Although there was still nearly half an hour to wait, the brake was drawn up before the main entrance; it was large and long, with seats arranged crosswise, so that four people could sit on each; and it was drawn by two powerful horses, whose harness the coachman was now examining. Sally was  not the first on the scene, for already half a dozen people had taken their places, but Harry had not yet arrived. The two girls stood by the public-door, looking at the preparations. Huge baskets full of food were brought out and stowed away; cases of beer were hoisted up and put in every possible place — under the seats, under the driver’s legs, and even beneath the brake. As more people came up, Sally began to get excited about Harry’s non-appearance.

‘I say, I wish ‘e’d come!’ she said. ‘‘E is lite.’

Then she looked up and down the Westminster Bridge Road to see if he was in view.

‘Suppose ‘e don’t turn up! I will give it ‘im when ‘e comes for keepin’ me witin’ like this.’

‘Why, there’s a quarter of an hour yet,’ said Liza, who saw nothing at all to get excited about.

At last Sally saw her lover, and rushed off to meet him. Liza was left alone, rather disconsolate at all this bustle and preparation. She was not sorry that she had refused Tom’s invitation, but she did wish that she had conscientiously been able to accept it. Sally and her friend came up; attired in his Sunday best, he was a fit match for his lady-love — he wore a shirt and collar, unusual luxuries — and be carried under his arm a concertina to make things merry on the way.

‘Ain’t you goin’, Liza?’ he asked in surprise at seeing her without a hat and with her apron on.

‘Na,’ said Sally, ‘ain’t she a soft? Tom said ‘e’d tike ‘er, an’ she wouldn’t.’

‘Well, I’m dashed!’

Then they climbed the ladder and took their seats, so that Liza was left alone again. More people had come along, and the brake was nearly full. Liza knew them all, but they were too busy taking their places to talk to her. At last Tom came. He saw her standing there and went up to her.

‘Won’t yer change yer mind, Liza, an’ come along with us?’

‘Na, Tom, I told yer I wouldn’t — it’s not right like.’ She felt she must repeat that to herself often.

‘I shan’t enjoy it a bit without you,’ he said.

‘Well, I can’t ‘elp it!’ she answered, somewhat sullenly.

At that moment a man came out of the public-house with a horn in his hand; her heart gave a great jump, for if there was anything she adored it was to drive along to the tootling of a horn. She really felt it was very hard lines that she must stay at home when all these people were going to have such a fine time; and they were all so merry, and she could picture to herself so well the delights of the drive and the picnic. She felt very much inclined to cry. But she mustn’t go, and she wouldn’t go: she repeated that to herself twice as the trumpeter gave a preliminary tootle.

Two more people hurried along, and when they came near Liza saw that they were Jim Blakeston and a woman whom she supposed to be his wife.

‘Are you comin’, Liza?’ Jim said to her.

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I didn’t know you was goin’.’

‘I wish you was comin’,’ he replied, ‘we shall ‘ave a game.’

She could only just keep back the sobs; she so wished she were going. It did seem hard that she must remain behind; and all because she wasn’t going to marry Tom. After all, she didn’t see why that should prevent her; there really was no need to refuse for that. She began to think she had acted foolishly: it didn’t do anyone any good that she refused to go out with Tom, and no one thought it anything specially fine that she should renounce her pleasure. Sally merely thought her a fool.

Tom was standing by her side, silent, and looking disappointed and rather unhappy. Jim said to her, in a low voice:

‘I am sorry you’re not comin’!’

It was too much. She did want to go so badly, and she really couldn’t resist any longer. If Tom would only ask her  once more, and if she could only change her mind reasonably and decently, she would accept; but he stood silent, and she had to speak herself. It was very undignified.

‘Yer know, Tom.’ she said, ‘I don’t want ter spoil your day.’

‘Well, I don’t think I shall go alone; it ‘ud be so precious slow.’

Supposing he didn’t ask her again! What should she do? She looked up at the clock on the front of the pub, and noticed that it only wanted five minutes to the half-hour. How terrible it would be if the brake started and he didn’t ask her! Her heart beat violently against her chest, and in her agitation she fumbled with the corner of her apron.

‘Well, what can I do, Tom dear?’

‘Why, come with me, of course. Oh. Liza, do say yes.’

She had got the offer again, and it only wanted a little seemly hesitation, and the thing was done.

‘I should like ter, Tom,’ she said. ‘But d’you think it ‘ud be arright?’

‘Yus, of course it would. Come on, Liza!’ In his eagerness he clasped her hand.

‘Well,’ she remarked, looking down, ‘if it’d spoil your ‘oliday — .’

‘I won’t go if you don’t — swop me bob, I won’t!’ he answered.

‘Well, if I come, it won’t mean that I’m keepin’ company with you.’

‘Na, it won’t mean anythin’ you don’t like.’

‘Arright!’ she said.

‘You’ll come?’ he could hardly believe her.

‘Yus!’ she answered, smiling all over her face.

‘You’re a good sort, Liza! I say, ‘Arry, Liza’s comin’!’ he shouted.

‘Liza? ‘Oorray!’ shouted Harry.

‘‘S’at right, Liza?’ called Sally.

And Liza feeling quite joyful and light of heart called back:

‘Yus!’

‘‘Oorray!’ shouted Sally in answer.

‘Thet’s right, Liza,’ called Jim; and he smiled pleasantly as she looked at him.

‘There’s just room for you two ‘ere,’ said Harry, pointing to the vacant places by his side.

‘Arright!’ said Tom.

‘I must jest go an’ get a ‘at an’ tell mother,’ said Liza.

‘There’s just three minutes. Be quick!’ answered Tom, and as she scampered off as hard as she could go, he shouted to the coachman: ‘‘Old ‘ard; there’ another passenger comin’ in a minute.’

‘Arright, old cock,’ answered the coachman: ‘no ‘urry!’

Liza rushed into the room, and called to her mother, who was still asleep:

‘Mother! mother! I’m going to Chingford!’

Then tearing off her old dress she slipped into her gorgeous violet one; she kicked off her old ragged shoes and put on her new boots. She brushed her hair down and rapidly gave her fringe a twirl and a twist — it was luckily still moderately in curl from the previous Saturday — and putting on her black hat with all the feathers, she rushed along the street, and scrambling up the brake steps fell panting on Tom’s lap.

The coachman cracked his whip, the trumpeter tootled his horn, and with a cry and a cheer from the occupants, the brake clattered down the road.

5

As soon as Liza had recovered herself she started examining the people on the brake; and first of all she took stock of the woman whom Jim Blakeston had with him.

‘This is my missus!’ said Jim, pointing to her with his thumb.

‘You ain’t been dahn in the street much, ‘ave yer?’ said Liza, by way of making the acquaintance.

‘Na,’ answered Mrs. Blakeston, ‘my youngster’s been dahn with the measles, an’ I’ve ‘ad my work cut out lookin’ after ‘im.’

‘Oh, an’ is ‘e all right now?’

‘Yus, ‘e’s gettin’ on fine, an’ Jim wanted ter go ter Chingford ter-day, an’ ‘e says ter me, well, ‘e says, “You come along ter Chingford, too; it’ll do you good.” An’ ‘e says, “You can leave Polly” — she’s my eldest, yer know— “you can leave Polly,” says ‘e, “ter look after the kids.” So I says, “Well, I don’t mind if I do,” says I.’

Meanwhile Liza was looking at her. First she noticed her dress: she wore a black cloak and a funny, old-fashioned black bonnet; then examining the woman herself, she saw a middle-sized, stout person anywhere between thirty and forty years old. She had a large, fat face with a big mouth, and her hair was curiously done, parted in the middle and plastered down on each side of the head in little plaits. One could see that she was a woman of great strength, notwithstanding evident traces of hard work and much child-bearing.

Liza knew all the other passengers, and now that everyone was settled down and had got over the excitement of departure, they had time to greet one another. They were delighted to have Liza among them, for where she was there  was no dullness. Her attention was first of all taken up by a young coster who had arrayed himself in the traditional costume — grey suit, tight trousers, and shiny buttons in profusion.

‘Wot cheer, Bill!’ she cried to him.

‘Wot cheer, Liza!’ he answered.

‘You are got up dossy, you’ll knock ’em.’

‘Na then, Liza Kemp,’ said his companion, turning round with mock indignation, ‘you let my Johnny alone. If you come gettin’ round ‘im I’ll give you wot for.’

‘Arright, Clary Sharp, I don’t want ‘im,’ answered Liza. ‘I’ve got one of my own, an’ thet’s a good ‘andful — ain’t it, Tom?’

Tom was delighted, and, unable to find a repartee, in his pleasure gave Liza a great nudge with his elbow.

‘‘Oo, I say,’ said Liza, putting her hand to her side. ‘Tike care of my ribs; you’ll brike ’em.’

‘Them’s not yer ribs,’ shouted a candid friend— ‘them’s yer whale-bones yer afraid of breakin’.’

‘Garn!’

‘‘Ave yer got whale-bones?’ said Tom, with affected simplicity, putting his arm round her waist to feel.

‘Na, then,’ she said, ‘keep off the grass!’

‘Well, I only wanted ter know if you’d got any.’

‘Garn; yer don’t git round me like thet.’

He still kept as he was.

‘Na then,’ she repeated, ‘tike yer ‘and away. If yer touch me there you’ll ‘ave ter marry me.’

‘Thet’s just wot I wants ter do, Liza!’

‘Shut it!’ she answered cruelly, and drew his arm away from her waist.

The horses scampered on, and the man behind blew his horn with vigour.

‘Don’t bust yerself, guv’nor!’ said one of the passengers to him when he made a particularly discordant sound. They  drove along eastwards, and as the hour grew later the streets became more filled and the traffic greater. At last they got on the road to Chingford, and caught up numbers of other vehicles going in the same direction — donkey-shays, pony-carts, tradesmen’s carts, dog-carts, drags, brakes, every conceivable kind of wheel thing, all filled with people, the wretched donkey dragging along four solid rate-payers to the pair of stout horses easily managing a couple of score. They exchanged cheers and greetings as they passed, the ‘Red Lion’ brake being noticeable above all for its uproariousness. As the day wore on the sun became hotter, and the road seemed more dusty and threw up a greater heat.

‘I am getting ‘ot!’ was the common cry, and everyone began to puff and sweat.

The ladies removed their cloaks and capes, and the men, following their example, took off their coats and sat in their shirt-sleeves. Whereupon ensued much banter of a not particularly edifying kind respecting the garments which each person would like to remove — which showed that the innuendo of French farce is not so unknown to the upright, honest Englishman as might be supposed.

At last came in sight the half-way house, where the horses were to have a rest and a sponge down. They had been talking of it for the last quarter of a mile, and when at length it was observed on the top of a hill a cheer broke out, and some thirsty wag began to sing ‘Rule Britannia’, whilst others burst forth with a different national ditty, ‘Beer, Glorious Beer!’ They drew up before the pub entrance, and all climbed down as quickly as they could. The bar was besieged, and potmen and barmaids were quickly busy drawing beer and handing it over to the eager folk outside.

THE IDYLL OF CORYDON AND PHYLLIS.

Gallantry ordered that the faithful swain and the amorous shepherdess should drink out of one and the same pot.

‘‘Urry up an’ ‘ave your whack,’ said Corydon, politely handing the foaming bowl for his fair one to drink from.

Phyllis, without replying, raised it to her lips and drank deep. The swain watched anxiously.

‘‘Ere, give us a chanst!’ he said, as the pot was raised higher and higher and its contents appeared to be getting less and less.

At this the amorous shepherdess stopped and handed the pot to her lover.

‘Well, I’m dashed!’ said Corydon, looking into it; and added: ‘I guess you know a thing or two.’ Then with courtly grace putting his own lips to the place where had been those of his beloved, finished the pint.

‘Go’ lumme!’ remarked the shepherdess, smacking her lips, ‘that was somethin’ like!’ And she put out her tongue and licked her lips, and then breathed deeply.

The faithful swain having finished, gave a long sigh, and said:

‘Well, I could do with some more!’

‘For the matter of thet, I could do with a gargle!’

Thus encouraged, the gallant returned to the bar, and soon brought out a second pint.

‘You ‘ave fust pop,’ amorously remarked Phyllis, and he took a long drink and handed the pot to her.

She, with maiden modesty, turned it so as to have a different part to drink from; but he remarked as he saw her:

‘You are bloomin’ particular.’

Then, unwilling to grieve him, she turned it back again and applied her ruby lips to the place where his had been.

‘Now we shan’t be long!’ she remarked, as she handed him back the pot.

The faithful swain took out of his pocket a short clay pipe, blew through it, filled it, and began to smoke, while Phyllis sighed at the thought of the cool liquid gliding down her throat, and with the pleasing recollection gently stroked  her stomach. Then Corydon spat, and immediately his love said:

‘I can spit farther than thet.’

‘I bet yer yer can’t.’

She tried, and did. He collected himself and spat again, further than before, she followed him, and in this idyllic contest they remained till the tootling horn warned them to take their places.

At last they reached Chingford, and here the horses were taken out and the drag, on which they were to lunch, drawn up in a sheltered spot. They were all rather hungry, but as it was not yet feeding-time, they scattered to have drinks meanwhile. Liza and Tom, with Sally and her young man, went off together to the nearest public-house, and as they drank beer, Harry, who was a great sportsman, gave them a graphic account of a prize-fight he had seen on the previous Saturday evening, which had been rendered specially memorable by one man being so hurt that he had died from the effects. It had evidently been a very fine affair, and Harry said that several swells from the West End had been present, and he related their ludicrous efforts to get in without being seen by anyone, and their terror when someone to frighten them called out ‘Copper!’ Then Tom and he entered into a discussion on the subject of boxing, in which Tom, being a shy and undogmatic sort of person, was entirely worsted. After this they strolled back to the brake, and found things being prepared for luncheon; the hampers were brought out and emptied, and the bottles of beer in great profusion made many a thirsty mouth thirstier.

‘Come along, lidies an’ gentlemen — if you are gentlemen,’ shouted the coachman; ‘the animals is now goin’ ter be fed!’

‘Garn awy,’ answered somebody, ‘we’re not hanimals; we don’t drink water.’

‘You’re too clever,’ remarked the coachman; ‘I can see you’ve just come from the board school.’

As the former speaker was a lady of quite mature appearance, the remark was not without its little irony. The other man blew his horn by way of grace, at which Liza called out to him:

‘Don’t do thet, you’ll bust, I know you will, an’ if you bust you’ll quite spoil my dinner!’

Then they all set to. Pork-pies, saveloys, sausages, cold potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, cold bacon, veal, ham, crabs and shrimps, cheese, butter, cold suet-puddings and treacle, gooseberry-tarts, cherry-tarts, butter, bread, more sausages, and yet again pork-pies! They devoured the provisions like ravening beasts, stolidly, silently, earnestly, in large mouthfuls which they shoved down their throats unmasticated. The intelligent foreigner seeing them thus dispose of their food would have understood why England is a great nation. He would have understood why Britons never, never will be slaves. They never stopped except to drink, and then at each gulp they emptied their glass; no heel-taps! And still they ate, and still they drank — but as all things must cease, they stopped at last, and a long sigh of content broke from their two-and-thirty throats.

Then the gathering broke up, and the good folk paired themselves and separated. Harry and his lady strolled off to secluded byways in the forest, so that they might discourse of their loves and digest their dinner. Tom had all the morning been waiting for this happy moment; he had counted on the expansive effect of a full stomach to thaw his Liza’s coldness, and he had pictured himself sitting on the grass with his back against the trunk of a spreading chestnut-tree, with his arm round his Liza’s waist, and her head resting affectionately on his manly bosom. Liza, too, had foreseen the separation into couples after dinner, and had been racking her brains to find a means of getting out of it.

‘I don’t want ‘im slobberin’ abaht me,’ she said; ‘it gives me the sick, all this kissin’ an’ cuddlin’!’

She scarcely knew why she objected to his caresses; but they bored her and made her cross. But luckily the blessed institution of marriage came to her rescue, for Jim and his wife naturally had no particular desire to spend the afternoon together, and Liza, seeing a little embarrassment on their part, proposed that they should go for a walk together in the forest.

Jim agreed at once, and with pleasure, but Tom was dreadfully disappointed. He hadn’t the courage to say anything, but he glared at Blakeston. Jim smiled benignly at him, and Tom began to sulk. Then they began a funny walk through the woods. Jim tried to go on with Liza, and Liza was not at all disinclined to this, for she had come to the conclusion that Jim, notwithstanding his ‘cheek’, was not ‘‘alf a bad sort’. But Tom kept walking alongside of them, and as Jim slightly quickened his pace so as to get Liza on in front, Tom quickened his, and Mrs. Blakeston, who didn’t want to be left behind, had to break into a little trot to keep up with them. Jim tried also to get Liza all to himself in the conversation, and let Tom see that he was out in the cold, but Tom would break in with cross, sulky remarks, just to make the others uncomfortable. Liza at last got rather vexed with him.

‘Strikes me you got aht of bed the wrong way this mornin’,’ she said to him.

‘Yer didn’t think thet when yer said you’d come aht with me.’ He emphasized the ‘me’.

Liza shrugged her shoulders.

‘You give me the ‘ump,’ she said. ‘If yer wants ter mike a fool of yerself, you can go elsewhere an’ do it.’

‘I suppose yer want me ter go awy now,’ he said angrily.

‘I didn’t say I did.’

‘Arright, Liza, I won’t stay where I’m not wanted.’ And  turning on his heel he marched off, striking through the underwood into the midst of the forest.

He felt extremely unhappy as he wandered on, and there was a choky feeling in his throat as he thought of Liza: she was very unkind and ungrateful, and he wished he had never come to Chingford. She might so easily have come for a walk with him instead of going with that beast of a Blakeston; she wouldn’t ever do anything for him, and he hated her — but all the same, he was a poor foolish thing in love, and he began to feel that perhaps he had been a little exacting and a little forward to take offence. And then he wished he had never said anything, and he wanted so much to see her and make it up. He made his way back to Chingford, hoping she would not make him wait too long.

Liza was a little surprised when Tom turned and left them.

‘Wot ‘as ‘e got the needle abaht?’ she said.

‘Why, ‘e’s jealous,’ answered Jim, with a laugh.

‘Tom jealous?’

‘Yus; ‘e’s jealous of me.’

‘Well, ‘e ain’t got no cause ter be jealous of anyone — that ‘e ain’t!’ said Liza, and continued by telling him all about Tom: how he had wanted to marry her and she wouldn’t have him, and how she had only agreed to come to Chingford with him on the understanding that she should preserve her entire freedom. Jim listened sympathetically, but his wife paid no attention; she was doubtless engaged in thought respecting her household or her family.

When they got back to Chingford they saw Tom standing in solitude looking at them. Liza was struck by the woebegone expression on his face; she felt she had been cruel to him, and leaving the Blakestons went up to him.

‘I say, Tom,’ she said, ‘don’t tike on so; I didn’t mean it.’

He was bursting to apologize for his behaviour.

‘Yer know, Tom,’ she went on, ‘I’m rather ‘asty, an’ I’m sorry I said wot I did.’

‘Oh, Liza, you are good! You ain’t cross with me?’

‘Me? Na; it’s you thet oughter be cross.’

‘You are a good sort, Liza!’

‘You ain’t vexed with me?’

‘Give me Liza every time; that’s wot I say,’ he answered, as his face lit up. ‘Come along an’ ‘ave tea, an’ then we’ll go for a donkey-ride.’

The donkey-ride was a great success. Liza was a little afraid at first, so Tom walked by her side to take care of her, she screamed the moment the beast began to trot, and clutched hold of Tom to save herself from falling, and as he felt her hand on his shoulder, and heard her appealing cry: ‘Oh, do ‘old me! I’m fallin’!’ he felt that he had never in his life been so deliciously happy. The whole party joined in, and it was proposed that they should have races; but in the first heat, when the donkeys broke into a canter, Liza fell off into Tom’s arms and the donkeys scampered on without her.

‘I know wot I’ll do,’ she said, when the runaway had been recovered. ‘I’ll ride ‘im straddlewyse.’

‘Garn!’ said Sally, ‘yer can’t with petticoats.’

‘Yus, I can, an’ I will too!’

So another donkey was procured, this time with a man’s saddle, and putting her foot in the stirrup, she cocked her leg over and took her seat triumphantly. Neither modesty nor bashfulness was to be reckoned among Liza’s faults, and in this position she felt quite at ease.

‘I’ll git along arright now, Tom,’ she said; ‘you garn and git yerself a moke, and come an’ jine in.’

The next race was perfectly uproarious. Liza kicked and beat her donkey with all her might, shrieking and laughing the white, and finally came in winner by a length. After that they felt rather warm and dry, and repaired to the public-house  to restore themselves and talk over the excitements of the racecourse.

When they had drunk several pints of beer Liza and Sally, with their respective adorers and the Blakestons, walked round to find other means of amusing themselves; they were arrested by a coconut-shy.

‘Oh, let’s ‘ave a shy!’ said Liza, excitedly, at which the unlucky men had to pull out their coppers, while Sally and Liza made ludicrously bad shots at the coconuts.

‘It looks so bloomin’ easy,’ said Liza, brushing up her hair, ‘but I can’t ‘it the blasted thing. You ‘ave a shot, Tom.’

He and Harry were equally unskilful, but Jim got three coconuts running, and the proprietors of the show began to look on him with some concern.

‘You are a dab at it,’ said Liza, in admiration.

They tried to induce Mrs. Blakeston to try her luck, but she stoutly refused.

‘I don’t old with such foolishness. It’s wiste of money ter me,’ she said.

‘Na then, don’t crack on, old tart,’ remarked her husband, ‘let’s go an’ eat the coconuts.’

There was one for each couple, and after the ladies had sucked the juice they divided them and added their respective shares to their dinners and teas. Supper came next. Again they fell to sausage-rolls, boiled eggs, and saveloys, and countless bottles of beer were added to those already drunk.

‘I dunno ‘ow many bottles of beer I’ve drunk — I’ve lost count,’ said Liza; whereat there was a general laugh.

They still had an hour before the brake was to start back, and it was then the concertinas came in useful. They sat down on the grass, and the concert was begun by Harry, who played a solo; then there was a call for a song, and Jim stood up and sang that ancient ditty, ‘O dem Golden Kippers, O’. There was no shyness in the company, and Liza,  almost without being asked, gave another popular comic song. Then there was more concertina playing, and another demand for a song. Liza turned to Tom, who was sitting quietly by her side.

‘Give us a song, old cock,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he answered. ‘I’m not a singin’ sort.’ At which Blakeston got up and offered to sing again.

‘Tom is rather a soft,’ said Liza to herself, ‘not like that cove Blakeston.’

They repaired to the public-house to have a few last drinks before the brake started, and when the horn blew to warn them, rather unsteadily, they proceeded to take their places.

Liza, as she scrambled up the steps, said: ‘Well, I believe I’m boozed.’

The coachman had arrived at the melancholy stage of intoxication, and was sitting on his box holding his reins, with his head bent on his chest. He was thinking sadly of the long-lost days of his youth, and wishing he had been a better man.

Liza had no respect for such holy emotions, and she brought down her fist on the crown of his hat, and bashed it over his eyes.

‘Na then, old jellybelly,’ she said, ‘wot’s the good of ‘avin’ a fice as long as a kite?’

He turned round and smote her.

‘Jellybelly yerself!’ said he.

‘Puddin’ fice!’ she cried.

‘Kite fice!’

‘Boss eye!’

She was tremendously excited, laughing and singing, keeping the whole company in an uproar. In her jollity she had changed hats with Tom, and he in her big feathers made her shriek with laughter. When they started they began to sing ‘For ‘e’s a jolly good feller’, making the night resound with their noisy voices.

Liza and Tom and the Blakestons had got a seat together, Liza being between the two men. Tom was perfectly happy, and only wished that they might go on so for ever. Gradually as they drove along they became quieter, their singing ceased, and they talked in undertones. Some of them slept; Sally and her young man were leaning up against one another, slumbering quite peacefully. The night was beautiful, the sky still blue, very dark, scattered over with countless brilliant stars, and Liza, as she looked up at the heavens, felt a certain emotion, as if she wished to be taken in someone’s arms, or feel some strong man’s caress; and there was in her heart a strange sensation as though it were growing big. She stopped speaking, and all four were silent. Then slowly she felt Tom’s arm steal round her waist, cautiously, as though it were afraid of being there; this time both she and Tom were happy. But suddenly there was a movement on the other side of her, a hand was advanced along her leg, and her hand was grasped and gently pressed. It was Jim Blakeston. She started a little and began trembling so that Tom noticed it, and whispered:

‘You’re cold, Liza.’

‘Na, I’m not, Tom; it’s only a sort of shiver thet went through me.’

His arm gave her waist a squeeze, and at the same time the big rough hand pressed her little one. And so she sat between them till they reached the ‘Red Lion’ in the Westminster Bridge Road, and Tom said to himself: ‘I believe she does care for me after all.’

When they got down they all said good night, and Sally and Liza, with their respective slaves and the Blakestons, marched off homewards. At the corner of Vere Street Harry said to Tom and Blakeston:

‘I say, you blokes, let’s go an’ ‘ave another drink before closin’ time.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Tom, ‘after we’ve took the gals ‘ome.’

‘Then we shan’t ‘ave time, it’s just on closin’ time now.’ answered Harry.

‘Well, we can’t leave ’em ‘ere.’

‘Yus, you can,’ said Sally. ‘No one’ll run awy with us.’

Tom did not want to part from Liza, but she broke in with:

‘Yus, go on, Tom. Sally an’ me’ll git along arright, an’ you ain’t got too much time.’

‘Yus, good night, ‘Arry,’ said Sally to settle the matter.

‘Good night, old gal,’ he answered, ‘give us another slobber.’

And she, not at all unwilling, surrendered herself to him, while he imprinted two sounding kisses on her cheeks.

‘Good night, Tom,’ said Liza, holding out her hand.

‘Good night, Liza,’ he answered, taking it, but looking very wistfully at her.

She understood, and with a kindly smile lifted up her face to him. He bent down and, taking her in his arms, kissed her passionately.

‘You do kiss nice, Liza,’ he said, making the others laugh.

‘Thanks for tikin’ me aht, old man,’ she said as they parted.

‘Arright, Liza,’ he answered, and added, almost to himself: ‘God bless yer!’

‘‘Ulloa, Blakeston, ain’t you comin’?’ said Harry, seeing that Jim was walking off with his wife instead of joining him and Tom.

‘Na,’ he answered, ‘I’m goin’ ‘ome. I’ve got ter be up at five ter-morrer.’

‘You are a chap!’ said Harry, disgustedly, strolling off with Tom to the pub, while the others made their way down the sleeping street.

The house where Sally lived came first, and she left them; then, walking a few yards more, they came to the Blakestons’, and after a little talk at the door Liza bade the couple  good night, and was left to walk the rest of the way home. The street was perfectly silent, and the lamp-posts, far apart, threw a dim light which only served to make Lisa realize her solitude. There was such a difference between the street at midday, with its swarms of people, and now, when there was neither sound nor soul besides herself, that even she was struck by it. The regular line of houses on either side, with the even pavements and straight, cemented road, seemed to her like some desert place, as if everyone were dead, or a fire had raged and left it all desolate. Suddenly she heard a footstep, she started and looked back. It was a man hurrying behind her, and in a moment she had recognized Jim. He beckoned to her, and in a low voice called:

‘Liza!’

She stopped till he had come up to her.

‘Wot ‘ave yer come aht again for?’ she said.

‘I’ve come aht ter say good night to you, Liza,’ he answered.

‘But yer said good night a moment ago.’

‘I wanted to say it again — properly.’

‘Where’s yer missus?’

‘Oh, she’s gone in. I said I was dry and was goin’ ter ‘ave a drink after all.’

‘But she’ll know yer didn’t go ter the pub.’

‘Na, she won’t, she’s gone straight upstairs to see after the kid. I wanted ter see yer alone, Liza.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer, but tried to take hold of her hand. She drew it away quickly. They walked in silence till they came to Liza’s house.

‘Good night,’ said Liza.

‘Won’t you come for a little walk, Liza?’

‘Tike care no one ‘ears you,’ she added, in a whisper, though why she whispered she did not know.

‘Will yer?’ he asked again.

‘Na — you’ve got to get up at five.’

‘Oh, I only said thet not ter go inter the pub with them.’

‘So as yer might come ‘ere with me?’ asked Liza.

‘Yus!’

‘No, I’m not comin’. Good night.’

‘Well, say good night nicely.’

‘Wot d’yer mean?’

‘Tom said you did kiss nice.’

She looked at him without speaking, and in a moment he had clasped his arms round her, almost lifting her off her feet, and kissed her. She turned her face away.

‘Give us yer lips, Liza,’ he whispered— ‘give us yer lips.’

He turned her face without resistance and kissed her on the mouth.

At last she tore herself from him, and opening the door slid away into the house.

6

Next morning on her way to the factory Liza came up with Sally. They were both of them rather stale and bedraggled after the day’s outing; their fringes were ragged and untidily straying over their foreheads, their back hair, carelessly tied in a loose knot, fell over their necks and threatened completely to come down. Liza had not had time to put her hat on, and was holding it in her hand. Sally’s was pinned on sideways, and she had to bash it down on her head every now and then to prevent its coming off. Cinderella herself was not more transformed than they were; but Cinderella even in her rags was virtuously tidy and patched up, while Sally had a great tear in her shabby dress, and Liza’s stockings were falling over her boots.

‘Wot cheer, Sal!’ said Liza, when she caught her up.

‘Oh, I ‘ave got sich a ‘ead on me this mornin’!’ she remarked, turning round a pale face: heavily lined under the eyes.

‘I don’t feel too chirpy neither,’ said Liza, sympathetically.

‘I wish I ‘adn’t drunk so much beer,’ added Sally, as a pang shot through her head.

‘Oh, you’ll be arright in a bit,’ said Liza. Just then they heard the clock strike eight, and they began to run so that they might not miss getting their tokens and thereby their day’s pay; they turned into the street at the end of which was the factory, and saw half a hundred women running like themselves to get in before it was too late.

All the morning Liza worked in a dead-and-alive sort of fashion, her head like a piece of lead with electric shocks going through it when she moved, and her tongue and mouth hot and dry. At last lunch-time came.

‘Come on, Sal,’ said Liza, ‘I’m goin’ to ‘ave a glass o’ bitter. I can’t stand this no longer.’

So they entered the public-house opposite, and in one draught finished their pots. Liza gave a long sigh of relief.

‘That bucks you up, don’t it?’

‘I was dry! I ain’t told yer yet, Liza, ‘ave I? ‘E got it aht last night.’

‘Who d’yer mean?’

‘Why, ‘Arry. ‘E spit it aht at last.’

‘Arst yer ter nime the day?’ said Liza, smiling.

‘Thet’s it.’

‘And did yer?’

‘Didn’t I jest!’ answered Sally, with some emphasis. ‘I always told yer I’d git off before you.’

‘Yus!’ said Liza, thinking.

‘Yer know, Liza, you’d better tike Tom; ‘e ain’t a bad sort.’ She was quite patronizing.

‘I’m goin’ ter tike ‘oo I like; an’ it ain’t nobody’s business but mine.’

‘Arright, Liza, don’t get shirty over it; I don’t mean no offence.’

‘What d’yer say it for then?’

‘Well, I thought as seeing as yer’d gone aht with ‘im yesterday thet yer meant ter after all.’

‘‘E wanted ter tike me; I didn’t arsk ‘im.’

‘Well, I didn’t arsk my ‘Arry, either.’

‘I never said yer did,’ replied Liza.

‘Oh, you’ve got the ‘ump, you ‘ave!’ finished Sally, rather angrily.

The beer had restored Liza: she went back to work without a headache, and, except for a slight languor, feeling no worse for the previous day’s debauch. As she worked on she began going over in her mind the events of the preceding day, and she found entwined in all her thoughts the burly person of Jim Blakeston. She saw him walking by her side in the  Forest, presiding over the meals, playing the concertina, singing, joking, and finally, on the drive back, she felt the heavy form by her side, and the big, rough hand holding hers, while Tom’s arm was round her waist. Tom! That was the first time he had entered her mind, and he sank into a shadow beside the other. Last of all she remembered the walk home from the pub, the good nights, and the rapid footsteps as Jim caught her up, and the kiss. She blushed and looked up quickly to see whether any of the girls were looking at her; she could not help thinking of that moment when he took her in his arms; she still felt the roughness of his beard pressing on her mouth. Her heart seemed to grow larger in her breast, and she caught for breath as she threw back her head as if to receive his lips again. A shudder ran through her from the vividness of the thought.

‘Wot are you shiverin’ for, Liza?’ asked one of the girls. ‘You ain’t cold.’

‘Not much,’ answered Liza, blushing awkwardly on her meditations being broken into. ‘Why, I’m sweatin’ so — I’m drippin’ wet.’

‘I expect yer caught cold in the Faurest yesterday.’

‘I see your mash as I was comin’ along this mornin’.’

Liza stared a little.

‘I ain’t got one, ‘oo d’yer mean, ay?’

‘Yer only Tom, of course. ‘E did look washed aht. Wot was yer doin’ with ‘im yesterday?’

‘‘E ain’t got nothin’ ter do with me, ‘e ain’t.’

‘Garn, don’t you tell me!’

The bell rang, and, throwing over their work, the girls trooped off, and after chattering in groups outside the factory gates for a while, made their way in different directions to their respective homes. Liza and Sally went along together.

‘I sy, we are comin’ aht!’ cried Sally, seeing the advertisement of a play being acted at the neighbouring theatre.

‘I should like ter see thet!’ said Liza, as they stood arm-in-arm  in front of the flaring poster. It represented two rooms and a passage in between; in one room a dead man was lying on the floor, while two others were standing horror-stricken, listening to a youth who was in the passage, knocking at the door.

‘You see, they’ve ‘killed im,’ said Sally, excitedly.

‘Yus, any fool can see thet! an’ the one ahtside, wot’s ‘e doin’ of?’

‘Ain’t ‘e beautiful? I’ll git my ‘Arry ter tike me, I will. I should like ter see it. ‘E said ‘e’d tike me to the ply.’

They strolled on again, and Liza, leaving Sally, made her way to her mother’s. She knew she must pass Jim’s house, and wondered whether she would see him. But as she walked along the street she saw Tom coming the opposite way; with a sudden impulse she turned back so as not to meet him, and began walking the way she had come. Then thinking herself a fool for what she had done, she turned again and walked towards him. She wondered if she had seen her or noticed her movement, but when she looked down the street he was nowhere to be seen; he had not caught sight of her, and had evidently gone in to see a mate in one or other of the houses. She quickened her step, and passing the house where lived Jim, could not help looking up; he was standing at the door watching her, with a smile on his lips.

‘I didn’t see yer, Mr. Blakeston,’ she said, as he came up to her.

‘Didn’t yer? Well, I knew yer would; an’ I was witin’ for yer ter look up. I see yer before ter-day.’

‘Na, when?’

‘I passed be’ind yer as you an’ thet other girl was lookin’ at the advertisement of thet ply.’

‘I never see yer.’

‘Na, I know yer didn’t. I ‘ear yer say, you says: “I should like to see thet.”’

‘Yus, an’ I should too.’

‘Well, I’ll tike yer.’

‘You?’

‘Yus; why not?’

‘I like thet; wot would yer missus sy?’

‘She wouldn’t know.’

‘But the neighbours would!’

‘No they wouldn’t, no one ‘d see us.’

He was speaking in a low voice so that people could not hear.

‘You could meet me ahtside the theatre,’ he went on.

‘Na, I couldn’t go with you; you’re a married man.’

‘Garn! wot’s the matter — jest ter go ter the ply? An’ besides, my missus can’t come if she wanted, she’s got the kids ter look after.’

‘I should like ter see it,’ said Liza meditatively.

They had reached her house, and Jim said:

‘Well, come aht this evenin’ and tell me if yer will — eh, Liza?’

‘Na, I’m not comin’ aht this evening.’

‘Thet won’t ‘urt yer. I shall wite for yer.’

‘‘Tain’t a bit of good your witing’, ‘cause I shan’t come.’

‘Well, then, look ‘ere, Liza; next Saturday night’s the last night, an’ I shall go to the theatre, any’ow. An’ if you’ll come, you just come to the door at ‘alf-past six, an’ you’ll find me there. See?’

‘Na, I don’t,’ said Liza, firmly.

‘Well, I shall expect yer.’

‘I shan’t come, so you needn’t expect.’ And with that she walked into the house and slammed the door behind her.

Her mother had not come in from her day’s charing, and Liza set about getting her tea. She thought it would be rather lonely eating it alone, so pouring out a cup of tea and putting a little condensed milk into it, she cut a huge piece of bread-and-butter, and sat herself down outside on the doorstep.  Another woman came downstairs, and seeing Liza, sat down by her side and began to talk.

‘Why, Mrs. Stanley, wot ‘ave yer done to your ‘ead?’ asked Liza, noticing a bandage round her forehead.

‘I ‘ad an accident last night,’ answered the woman, blushing uneasily.

‘Oh, I am sorry! Wot did yer do to yerself?’

‘I fell against the coal-scuttle and cut my ‘ead open.’

‘Well, I never!’

‘To tell yer the truth, I ‘ad a few words with my old man. But one doesn’t like them things to get abaht; yer won’t tell anyone, will yer?’

‘Not me!’ answered Liza. ‘I didn’t know yer husband was like thet.’

‘Oh, ‘e’s as gentle as a lamb when ‘e’s sober,’ said Mrs. Stanley, apologetically. ‘But, Lor’ bless yer, when ‘e’s ‘ad a drop too much ‘e’s a demond, an’ there’s no two ways abaht it.’

‘An’ you ain’t been married long neither?’ said Liza.

‘Na, not above eighteen months; ain’t it disgriceful? Thet’s wot the doctor at the ‘orspital says ter me. I ‘ad ter go ter the ‘orspital. You should have seen ‘ow it bled! — it bled all dahn’ my fice, and went streamin’ like a bust waterpipe. Well, it fair frightened my old man, an’ I says ter ‘im, “I’ll charge yer,” an’ although I was bleedin’ like a bloomin’ pig I shook my fist at ‘im, an’ I says, “I’ll charge ye — see if I don’t!” An’ ‘e says, “Na,” says ‘e, “don’t do thet, for God’s sike, Kitie, I’ll git three months.” “An’ serve yer damn well right!” says I, an’ I went aht an’ left ‘im. But, Lor’ bless yer, I wouldn’t charge ‘im! I know ‘e don’t mean it; ‘e’s as gentle as a lamb when ‘e’s sober.’ She smiled quite affectionately as she said this.

‘Wot did yer do, then?’ asked Liza.

‘Well, as I wos tellin’ yer, I went to the ‘orspital, an’ the doctor ‘e says to me, “My good woman,” says ‘e, “you  might have been very seriously injured.” An’ me not been married eighteen months! An’ as I was tellin’ the doctor all about it, “Missus,” ‘e says ter me, lookin’ at me straight in the eyeball. “Missus,” says ‘e, “‘ave you been drinkin’?” “Drinkin’?” says I; “no! I’ve ‘ad a little drop, but as for drinkin’! Mind,” says I, “I don’t say I’m a teetotaller — I’m not, I ‘ave my glass of beer, and I like it. I couldn’t do withaht it, wot with the work I ‘ave, I must ‘ave somethin’ ter keep me tergether. But as for drinkin’ ‘eavily! Well! I can say this, there ain’t a soberer woman than myself in all London. Why, my first ‘usband never touched a drop. Ah, my first ‘usband, ‘e was a beauty, ‘e was.”’

She stopped the repetition of her conversation and addressed herself to Liza.

‘‘E was thet different ter this one. ‘E was a man as ‘ad seen better days. ‘E was a gentleman!’ She mouthed the word and emphasized it with an expressive nod.

‘‘E was a gentleman and a Christian. ‘E’d been in good circumstances in ‘is time; an’ ‘e was a man of education and a teetotaller, for twenty-two years.’

At that moment Liza’s mother appeared on the scene.

‘Good evenin’, Mrs. Stanley,’ she said, politely.

‘The sime ter you, Mrs. Kemp.’ replied that lady, with equal courtesy.

‘An’ ‘ow is your poor ‘ead?’ asked Liza’s mother, with sympathy.

‘Oh, it’s been achin’ cruel. I’ve hardly known wot ter do with myself.’

‘I’m sure ‘e ought ter be ashimed of ‘imself for treatin’ yer like thet.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t ‘is blows I minded so much, Mrs. Kemp,’ replied Mrs. Stanley, ‘an’ don’t you think it. It was wot ‘e said ter me. I can stand a blow as well as any woman. I don’t mind thet, an’ when ‘e don’t tike a mean advantage of me I can stand up for myself an’ give as good as I tike; an’ many’s  the time I give my fust husband a black eye. But the language ‘e used, an’ the things ‘e called me! It made me blush to the roots of my ‘air; I’m not used ter bein’ spoken ter like thet. I was in good circumstances when my fust ‘usband was alive, ‘e earned between two an’ three pound a week, ‘e did. As I said to ‘im this mornin’, “‘Ow a gentleman can use sich language, I dunno.”’

‘‘Usbands is cautions, ‘owever good they are,’ said Mrs. Kemp, aphoristically. ‘But I mustn’t stay aht ‘ere in the night air.’

‘‘As yer rheumatism been troublin’ yer litely?’ asked Mrs. Stanley.

‘Oh, cruel. Liza rubs me with embrocation every night, but it torments me cruel.’

Mrs. Kemp then went into the house, and Liza remained talking to Mrs. Stanley, she, too, had to go in, and Liza was left alone. Some while she spent thinking of nothing, staring vacantly in front of her, enjoying the cool and quiet of the evening. But Liza could not be left alone long, several boys came along with a bat and a ball, and fixed upon the road just in front of her for their pitch. Taking off their coats they piled them up at the two ends, and were ready to begin.

‘I say, old gal,’ said one of them to Liza, ‘come an’ have a gime of cricket, will yer?’

‘Na, Bob, I’m tired.’

‘Come on!’

‘Na, I tell you I won’t.’

‘She was on the booze yesterday, an’ she ain’t got over it,’ cried another boy.

‘I’ll swipe yer over the snitch!’ replied Liza to him, and then on being asked again, said:

‘Leave me alone, won’t yer?’

‘Liza’s got the needle ter-night, thet’s flat,’ commented a third member of the team.

‘I wouldn’t drink if I was you, Liza,’ added another, with  mock gravity. ‘It’s a bad ‘abit ter git into,’ and he began rolling and swaying about like a drunken man.

If Liza had been ‘in form’ she would have gone straight away and given the whole lot of them a sample of her strength; but she was only rather bored and vexed that they should disturb her quietness, so she let them talk. They saw she was not to be drawn, and leaving her, set to their game. She watched them for some time, but her thoughts gradually lost themselves, and insensibly her mind was filled with a burly form, and she was again thinking of Jim.

‘‘E is a good sort ter want ter tike me ter the ply,’ she said to herself. ‘Tom never arst me!’

Jim had said he would come out in the evening; he ought to be here soon, she thought. Of course she wasn’t going to the theatre with him, but she didn’t mind talking to him; she rather enjoyed being asked to do a thing and refusing, and she would have liked another opportunity of doing so. But he didn’t come and he had said he would!

‘I say, Bill,’ she said at last to one of the boys who was fielding close beside her, ‘that there Blakeston — d’you know ‘im?’

‘Yes, rather; why, he works at the sime plice as me.’

‘Wot’s ‘e do with ‘isself in the evening; I never see ‘im abaht?’

‘I dunno. I see ‘im this evenin’ go into the “Red Lion”. I suppose ‘e’s there, but I dunno.’

Then he wasn’t coming. Of course she had told him she was going to stay indoors, but he might have come all the same — just to see.

‘I know Tom ‘ud ‘ave come,’ she said to herself, rather sulkily.

‘Liza! Liza!’ she heard her mother’s voice calling her.

‘Arright, I’m comin’,’ said Liza.

‘I’ve been witin’ for you this last ‘alf-hour ter rub me.’

‘Why didn’t yer call?’ asked Liza.

‘I did call. I’ve been callin’ this last I dunno ‘ow long; it’s give me quite a sore throat.’

‘I never ‘eard yer.’

‘Na, yer didn’t want ter ‘ear me, did yer? Yer don’t mind if I dies with rheumatics, do yer? I know.’

Liza did not answer, but took the bottle, and, pouring some of the liniment on her hand, began to rub it into Mrs. Kemp’s rheumatic joints, while the invalid kept complaining and grumbling at everything Liza did.

‘Don’t rub so ‘ard, Liza, you’ll rub all the skin off.’

Then when Liza did it as gently as she could, she grumbled again.

‘If yer do it like thet, it won’t do no good at all. You want ter sive yerself trouble — I know yer. When I was young girls didn’t mind a little bit of ‘ard work — but, law bless yer, you don’t care abaht my rheumatics, do yer?’

At last she finished, and Liza went to bed by her mother’s side.

7

Two days passed, and it was Friday morning. Liza had got up early and strolled off to her work in good time, but she did not meet her faithful Sally on the way, nor find her at the factory when she herself arrived. The bell rang and all the girls trooped in, but still Sally did not come. Liza could not make it out, and was thinking she would be shut out, when just as the man who gave out the tokens for the day’s work was pulling down the shutter in front of his window, Sally arrived, breathless and perspiring.

‘Whew! Go’ lumme, I am ‘ot!’ she said, wiping her face with her apron.

‘I thought you wasn’t comin’,’ said Liza.

‘Well, I only just did it; I overslep’ myself. I was aht lite last night.’

‘Were yer?’

‘Me an’ ‘Arry went ter see the ply. Oh, Liza, it’s simply spiffin’! I’ve never see sich a good ply in my life. Lor’! Why, it mikes yer blood run cold: they ‘ang a man on the stige; oh, it mide me creep all over!’

And then she began telling Liza all about it — the blood and thunder, the shooting, the railway train, the murder, the bomb, the hero, the funny man — jumbling everything up in her excitement, repeating little scraps of dialogue — all wrong — gesticulating, getting excited and red in the face at the recollection. Liza listened rather crossly, feeling bored at the detail into which Sally was going: the piece really didn’t much interest her.

‘One ‘ud think yer’d never been to a theatre in your life before,’ she said.

‘I never seen anything so good, I can tell yer. You tike my tip, and git Tom ter tike yer.’

‘I don’t want ter go; an’ if I did I’d py for myself an’ go alone.’

‘Cheese it! That ain’t ‘alf so good. Me an’ ‘Arry, we set together, ‘im with ‘is arm round my wiste and me oldin’ ‘is ‘and. It was jam, I can tell yer!’

‘Well, I don’t want anyone sprawlin’ me abaht, thet ain’t my mark!’

‘But I do like ‘Arry; you dunno the little ways ‘e ‘as; an’ we’re goin’ ter be married in three weeks now. ‘Arry said, well, ‘e says, “I’ll git a licence.” “Na,” says I, “‘ave the banns read aht in church: it seems more reg’lar like to ‘ave banns; so they’re goin’ ter be read aht next Sunday. You’ll come with me ‘an ‘ear them, won’t yer, Liza?”’

‘Yus, I don’t mind.’

On the way home Sally insisted on stopping in front of the poster and explaining to Liza all about the scene represented.

‘Oh, you give me the sick with your “Fital Card”, you do! I’m goin’ ‘ome.’ And she left Sally in the midst of her explanation.

‘I dunno wot’s up with Liza,’ remarked Sally to a mutual friend. ‘She’s always got the needle, some’ow.’

‘Oh, she’s barmy,’ answered the friend.

‘Well, I do think she’s a bit dotty sometimes — I do really,’ rejoined Sally.

Liza walked homewards, thinking of the play; at length she tossed her head impatiently.

‘I don’t want ter see the blasted thing; an’ if I see that there Jim I’ll tell ‘im so; swop me bob, I will.’

She did see him; he was leaning with his back against the wall of his house, smoking. Liza knew he had seen her, and as she walked by pretended not to have noticed him. To her disgust, he let her pass, and she was thinking he hadn’t seen her after all, when she heard him call her name.

‘Liza!’

She turned round and started with surprise very well imitated. ‘I didn’t see you was there!’ she said.

‘Why did yer pretend not ter notice me, as yer went past — eh, Liza?’

‘Why, I didn’t see yer.’

‘Garn! But you ain’t shirty with me?’

‘Wot ‘ave I got to be shirty abaht?’

He tried to take her hand, but she drew it away quickly. She was getting used to the movement. They went on talking, but Jim did not mention the theatre; Liza was surprised, and wondered whether he had forgotten.

‘Er — Sally went to the ply last night,’ she said, at last.

‘Oh!’ he said, and that was all.

She got impatient.

‘Well, I’m off!’ she said.

‘Na, don’t go yet; I want ter talk ter yer,’ he replied.

‘Wot abaht? anythin’ in partickler?’ She would drag it out of him if she possibly could.

‘Not thet I knows on,’ he said, smiling.

‘Good night!’ she said, abruptly, turning away from him.

‘Well, I’m damned if ‘e ain’t forgotten!’ she said to herself, sulkily, as she marched home.

The following evening about six o’clock, it suddenly struck her that it was the last night of the ‘New and Sensational Drama’.

‘I do like thet Jim Blakeston,’ she said to herself; ‘fancy treatin’ me like thet! You wouldn’t catch Tom doin’ sich a thing. Bli’me if I speak to ‘im again, the —— . Now I shan’t see it at all. I’ve a good mind ter go on my own ‘ook. Fancy ‘is forgettin’ all abaht it, like thet!’

She was really quite indignant; though, as she had distinctly refused Jim’s offer, it was rather hard to see why.

‘‘E said ‘e’d wite for me ahtside the doors; I wonder if ‘e’s there. I’ll go an’ see if ‘e is, see if I don’t — an’ then if ‘e’s there, I’ll go in on my own ‘ook, jist ter spite ‘im!’

She dressed herself in her best, and, so that the neighbours shouldn’t see her, went up a passage between some model lodging-house buildings, and in this roundabout way got into the Westminster Bridge Road, and soon found herself in front of the theatre.

‘I’ve been witin’ for yer this ‘alf-hour.’

She turned round and saw Jim standing just behind her.

‘‘Oo are you talkin’ to? I’m not goin’ to the ply with you. Wot d’yer tike me for, eh?’

‘‘Oo are yer goin’ with, then?’

‘I’m goin’ alone.’

‘Garn! don’t be a bloomin’ jackass!’

Liza was feeling very injured.

‘Thet’s ‘ow you treat me! I shall go ‘ome. Why didn’t you come aht the other night?’

‘Yer told me not ter.’

She snorted at the ridiculous ineptitude of the reply.

‘Why didn’t you say nothin’ abaht it yesterday?’

‘Why, I thought you’d come if I didn’t talk on it.’

‘Well, I think you’re a —— brute!’ She felt very much inclined to cry.

‘Come on, Liza, don’t tike on; I didn’t mean no offence.’ And be put his arm round her waist and led her to take their places at the gallery door. Two tears escaped from the corners of her eyes and ran down her nose, but she felt very relieved and happy, and let him lead her where he would.

There was a long string of people waiting at the door, and Liza was delighted to see a couple of niggers who were helping them to while away the time of waiting. The niggers sang and danced, and made faces, while the people looked on with appreciative gravity, like royalty listening to de Reské, and they were very generous of applause and halfpence at the end of the performance. Then, when the niggers moved to the pit doors, paper boys came along offering Tit-Bits and ‘extra  specials’; after that three little girls came round and sang sentimental songs and collected more halfpence. At last a movement ran through the serpent-like string of people, sounds were heard behind the door, everyone closed up, the men told the women to keep close and hold tight; there was a great unbarring and unbolting, the doors were thrown open, and, like a bursting river, the people surged in.

Half an hour more and the curtain went up. The play was indeed thrilling. Liza quite forgot her companion, and was intent on the scene; she watched the incidents breathlessly, trembling with excitement, almost beside herself at the celebrated hanging incident. When the curtain fell on the first act she sighed and mopped her face.

‘See ‘ow ‘ot I am.’ she said to Jim, giving him her hand.

‘Yus, you are!’ he remarked, taking it.

‘Leave go!’ she said, trying to withdraw it from him.

‘Not much,’ he answered, quite boldly.

‘Garn! Leave go!’ But he didn’t, and she really did not struggle very violently.

The second act came, and she shrieked over the comic man; and her laughter rang higher than anyone else’s, so that people turned to look at her, and said:

‘She is enjoyin’ ‘erself.’

Then when the murder came she bit her nails and the sweat stood on her forehead in great drops; in her excitement she even called out as loud as she could to the victim, ‘Look aht!’ It caused a laugh and slackened the tension, for the whole house was holding its breath as it looked at the villains listening at the door, creeping silently forward, crawling like tigers to their prey.

Liza trembling all over, and in her terror threw herself against Jim, who put both his arms round her, and said:

‘Don’t be afride, Liza; it’s all right.’

At last the men sprang, there was a scuffle, and the wretch was killed, then came the scene depicted on the posters — the  victim’s son knocking at the door, on the inside of which were the murderers and the murdered man. At last the curtain came down, and the house in relief burst forth into cheers and cheers; the handsome hero in his top hat was greeted thunderously; the murdered man, with his clothes still all disarranged, was hailed with sympathy; and the villains — the house yelled and hissed and booed, while the poor brutes bowed and tried to look as if they liked it.

‘I am enjoyin’ myself,’ said Liza, pressing herself quite close to Jim; ‘you are a good sort ter tike me — Jim.’

He gave her a little hug, and it struck her that she was sitting just as Sally had done, and, like Sally, she found it ‘jam’.

The entr’actes were short and the curtain was soon up again, and the comic man raised customary laughter by undressing and exposing his nether garments to the public view; then more tragedy, and the final act with its darkened room, its casting lots, and its explosion.

When it was all over and they had got outside Jim smacked his lips and said:

‘I could do with a gargle; let’s go onto thet pub there.’

‘I’m as dry as bone,’ said Liza; and so they went.

When they got in they discovered they were hungry, and seeing some appetising sausage-rolls, ate of them, and washed them down with a couple of pots of beer; then Jim lit his pipe and they strolled off. They had got quite near the Westminster Bridge Road when Jim suggested that they should go and have one more drink before closing time.

‘I shall be tight,’ said Liza.

‘Thet don’t matter,’ answered Jim, laughing. ‘You ain’t got ter go ter work in the mornin’ an’ you can sleep it aht.’

‘Arright, I don’t mind if I do then, in for a penny, in for a pound.’

At the pub door she drew back.

‘I say, guv’ner,’ she said, ‘there’ll be some of the coves from dahn our street, and they’ll see us.’

‘Na, there won’t be nobody there, don’t yer ‘ave no fear.’

‘I don’t like ter go in for fear of it.’

‘Well, we ain’t doin’ no ‘arm if they does see us, an’ we can go into the private bar, an’ you bet your boots there won’t be no one there.’

She yielded, and they went in.

‘Two pints of bitter, please, miss,’ ordered Jim.

‘I say, ‘old ‘ard. I can’t drink more than ‘alf a pint,’ said Liza.

‘Cheese it,’ answered Jim. ‘You can do with all you can get, I know.’

At closing time they left and walked down the broad road which led homewards.

‘Let’s ‘ave a little sit dahn,’ said Jim, pointing to an empty bench between two trees.

‘Na, it’s gettin’ lite; I want ter be ‘ome.’

‘It’s such a fine night, it’s a pity ter go in already;’ and he drew her unresisting towards the seat. He put his arm round her waist.

‘Un’and me, villin!’ she said, in apt misquotation of the melodrama, but Jim only laughed, and she made no effort to disengage herself.

They sat there for a long while in silence; the beer had got to Liza’s head, and the warm night air filled her with a double intoxication. She felt the arm round her waist, and the big, heavy form pressing against her side; she experienced again the curious sensation as if her heart were about to burst, and it choked her — a feeling so oppressive and painful it almost made her feel sick. Her hands began to tremble, and her breathing grew rapid, as though she were suffocating. Almost fainting, she swayed over towards the man, and a cold shiver ran through her from top to toe. Jim bent over her, and, taking her in both arms, he pressed his  lips to hers in a long, passionate kiss. At last, panting for breath, she turned her head away and groaned.

Then they again sat for a long while in silence, Liza full of a strange happiness, feeling as if she could laugh aloud hysterically, but restrained by the calm and silence of the night. Close behind struck a church clock — one.

‘Bless my soul!’ said Liza, starting, ‘there’s one o’clock. I must get ‘ome.’

‘It’s so nice out ‘ere; do sty, Liza.’ He pressed her closer to him. ‘Yer know, Liza, I love yer — fit ter kill.’

‘Na, I can’t stay; come on.’ She got up from the seat, and pulled him up too. ‘Come on,’ she said.

Without speaking they went along, and there was no one to be seen either in front or behind them. He had not got his arm round her now, and they were walking side by side, slightly separated. It was Liza who spoke first.

‘You’d better go dahn the Road and by the church an’ git into Vere Street the other end, an’ I’ll go through the passage, so thet no one shouldn’t see us comin’ together,’ she spoke almost in a whisper.

‘Arright, Liza,’ he answered, ‘I’ll do just as you tell me.’

They came to the passage of which Liza spoke; it was a narrow way between blank walls, the backs of factories, and it led into the upper end of Vere Street. The entrance to it was guarded by two iron posts in the middle so that horses or barrows should not be taken through.

They had just got to it when a man came out into the open road. Liza quickly turned her head away.

‘I wonder if ‘e see us,’ she said, when he had passed out of earshot. ‘‘E’s lookin’ back,’ she added.

‘Why, ‘oo is it?’ asked Jim.

‘It’s a man aht of our street,’ she answered. ‘I dunno ‘im, but I know where ‘e lodges. D’yer think ‘e sees us?’

‘Na, ‘e wouldn’t know ‘oo it was in the dark.’

‘But he looked round; all the street’ll know it if he see us.’

‘Well, we ain’t doin’ no ‘arm.’

She stretched out her hand to say good night.

‘I’ll come a wy with yer along the passage,’ said Jim.

‘Na, you mustn’t; you go straight round.’

‘But it’s so dark; p’raps summat’ll ‘appen to yer.’

‘Not it! You go on ‘ome an’ leave me,’ she replied, and entering the passage, stood facing him with one of the iron pillars between them.

‘Good night, old cock,’ she said, stretching out her hand. He took it, and said:

‘I wish yer wasn’t goin’ ter leave me, Liza.’

‘Garn! I must!’ She tried to get her hand away from his, but he held it firm, resting it on the top of the pillar.

‘Leave go my ‘and,’ she said. He made no movement, but looked into her eyes steadily, so that it made her uneasy. She repented having come out with him. ‘Leave go my ‘and.’ And she beat down on his with her closed fist.

‘Liza!’ he said, at last.

‘Well, wot is it?’ she answered, still thumping down on his hand with her fist.

‘Liza,’ he said a whisper, ‘will yer?’

‘Will I wot?’ she said, looking down.

‘You know, Liza. Sy, will yer?’

‘Na,’ she said.

He bent over her and repeated —

‘Will yer?’

She did not speak, but kept beating down on his hand.

‘Liza,’ he said again, his voice growing hoarse and thick— ‘Liza, will yer?’

She still kept silence, looking away and continually bringing down her fist. He looked at her a moment, and she, ceasing to thump his hand, looked up at him with  half-opened mouth. Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his fist gave her a violent, swinging blow in the belly.

‘Come on,’ he said.

And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.

8

Mrs. Kemp was in the habit of slumbering somewhat heavily on Sunday mornings, or Liza would not have been allowed to go on sleeping as she did. When she woke, she rubbed her eyes to gather her senses together and gradually she remembered having gone to the theatre on the previous evening; then suddenly everything came back to her. She stretched out her legs and gave a long sigh of delight. Her heart was full; she thought of Jim, and the delicious sensation of love came over her. Closing her eyes, she imagined his warm kisses, and she lifted up her arms as if to put them round his neck and draw him down to her; she almost felt the rough beard on her face, and the strong heavy arms round her body. She smiled to herself and took a long breath; then, slipping back the sleeves of her nightdress, she looked at her own thin arms, just two pieces of bone with not a muscle on them, but very white and showing distinctly the interlacement of blue veins: she did not notice that her hands were rough, and red and dirty with the nails broken, and bitten to the quick. She got out of bed and looked at herself in the glass over the mantelpiece: with one hand she brushed back her hair and smiled at herself; her face was very small and thin, but the complexion was nice, clear and white, with a delicate tint of red on the cheeks, and her eyes were big and dark like her hair. She felt very happy.

She did not want to dress yet, but rather to sit down and think, so she twisted up her hair into a little knot, slipped a skirt over her nightdress, and sat on a chair near the window and began looking around. The decorations of the room had been centred on the mantelpiece; the chief ornament consisted of a pear and an apple, a pineapple, a bunch of grapes, and several fat plums, all very beautifully done in wax, as  was the fashion about the middle of this most glorious reign. They were appropriately coloured — the apple blushing red, the grapes an inky black, emerald green leaves were scattered here and there to lend finish, and the whole was mounted on an ebonised stand covered with black velvet, and protected from dust and dirt by a beautiful glass cover bordered with red plush. Liza’s eyes rested on this with approbation, and the pineapple quite made her mouth water. At either end of the mantelpiece were pink jars with blue flowers on the front; round the top in Gothic letters of gold was inscribed: ‘A Present from a Friend’ — these were products of a later, but not less artistic age. The intervening spaces were taken up with little jars and cups and saucers — gold inside, with a view of a town outside, and surrounding them, ‘A Present from Clacton-on-Sea,’ or, alliteratively, ‘A Memento of Margate.’ Of these many were broken, but they had been mended with glue, and it is well known that pottery in the eyes of the connoisseur loses none of its value by a crack or two. Then there were portraits innumerable — little yellow cartes-de-visite in velvet frames, some of which were decorated with shells; they showed strange people with old-fashioned clothes, the women with bodices and sleeves fitting close to the figure, stern-featured females with hair carefully parted in the middle and plastered down on each side, firm chins and mouths, with small, pig-like eyes and wrinkled faces, and the men were uncomfortably clad in Sunday garments, very stiff and uneasy in their awkward postures, with large whiskers and shaved chins and upper lips and a general air of horny-handed toil. Then there were one or two daguerreotypes, little full-length figures framed in gold paper. There was one of Mrs. Kemp’s father and one of her mother, and there were several photographs of betrothed or newly-married couples, the lady sitting down and the man standing behind her with his hand on the chair, or the man sitting and the woman with her hand on his shoulder.  And from all sides of the room, standing on the mantelpiece, hanging above it, on the wall and over the bed, they stared full-face into the room, self-consciously fixed for ever in their stiff discomfort.

The walls were covered with dingy, antiquated paper, and ornamented with coloured supplements from Christmas Numbers — there was a very patriotic picture of a soldier shaking the hand of a fallen comrade and waving his arm in defiance of a band of advancing Arabs; there was a ‘Cherry Ripe,’ almost black with age and dirt; there were two almanacks several years old, one with a coloured portrait of the Marquess of Lorne, very handsome and elegantly dressed, the object of Mrs. Kemp’s adoration since her husband’s demise; the other a Jubilee portrait of the Queen, somewhat losing in dignity by a moustache which Liza in an irreverent moment had smeared on with charcoal.

The furniture consisted of a wash-hand stand and a little deal chest of drawers, which acted as sideboard to such pots and pans and crockery as could not find room in the grate; and besides the bed there was nothing but two kitchen chairs and a lamp. Liza looked at it all and felt perfectly satisfied; she put a pin into one corner of the noble Marquess to prevent him from falling, fiddled about with the ornaments a little, and then started washing herself. After putting on her clothes she ate some bread-and-butter, swallowed a dishful of cold tea, and went out into the street.

She saw some boys playing cricket and went up to them.

‘Let me ply,’ she said.

‘Arright, Liza,’ cried half a dozen of them in delight; and the captain added: ‘You go an’ scout over by the lamp-post.’

‘Go an’ scout my eye!’ said Liza, indignantly. ‘When I ply cricket I does the battin’.’

‘Na, you’re not goin’ ter bat all the time. ‘Oo are you gettin’ at?’ replied the captain, who had taken advantage  of his position to put himself in first, and was still at the wicket.

‘Well, then I shan’t ply,’ answered Liza.

‘Garn, Ernie, let ‘er go in!’ shouted two or three members of the team.

‘Well, I’m busted!’ remarked the captain, as she took his bat. ‘You won’t sty in long, I lay,’ he said, as he sent the old bowler fielding and took the ball himself. He was a young gentleman who did not suffer from excessive backwardness.

‘Aht!’ shouted a dozen voices as the ball went past Liza’s bat and landed in the pile of coats which formed the wicket. The captain came forward to resume his innings, but Liza held the bat away from him.

‘Garn!’ she said; ‘thet was only a trial.’

‘You never said trial,’ answered the captain indignantly.

‘Yus, I did,’ said Liza; ‘I said it just as the ball was comin’ — under my breath.’

‘Well, I am busted!’ repeated the captain.

Just then Liza saw Tom among the lookers-on, and as she felt very kindly disposed to the world in general that morning, she called out to him:

‘‘Ulloa, Tom!’ she said. ‘Come an’ give us a ball; this chap can’t bowl.’

‘Well, I got yer aht, any’ow,’ said that person.

‘Ah, yer wouldn’t ‘ave got me aht plyin’ square. But a trial ball — well, one don’t ever know wot a trial ball’s goin’ ter do.’

Tom began bowling very slowly and easily, so that Liza could swing her bat round and hit mightily; she ran well, too, and pantingly brought up her score to twenty. Then the fielders interposed.

‘I sy, look ‘ere, ‘e’s only givin’ ‘er lobs; ‘e’s not tryin’ ter git ‘er aht.’

‘You’re spoilin’ our gime.’

‘I don’t care; I’ve got twenty runs — thet’s more than you  could do. I’ll go aht now of my own accord, so there! Come on, Tom.’

Tom joined her, and as the captain at last resumed his bat and the game went on, they commenced talking, Liza leaning against the wall of a house, while Tom stood in front of her, smiling with pleasure.

‘Where ‘ave you been idin’ yerself, Tom? I ain’t seen yer for I dunno ‘ow long.’

‘I’ve been abaht as usual; an’ I’ve seen you when you didn’t see me.’

‘Well, yer might ‘ave come up and said good mornin’ when you see me.’

‘I didn’t want ter force myself on, yer, Liza.’

‘Garn! You are a bloomin’ cuckoo. I’m blowed!’

‘I thought yer didn’t like me ‘angin’ round yer; so I kep’ awy.’

‘Why, yer talks as if I didn’t like yer. Yer don’t think I’d ‘ave come aht beanfeastin’ with yer if I ‘adn’t liked yer?’

Liza was really very dishonest, but she felt so happy this morning that she loved the whole world, and of course Tom came in with the others. She looked very kindly at him, and he was so affected that a great lump came in his throat and he could not speak.

Liza’s eyes turned to Jim’s house, and she saw coming out of the door a girl of about her own age; she fancied she saw in her some likeness to Jim.

‘Say, Tom,’ she asked, ‘thet ain’t Blakeston’s daughter, is it?’

‘Yus thet’s it.’

‘I’ll go an’ speak to ‘er,’ said Liza, leaving Tom and going over the road.

‘You’re Polly Blakeston, ain’t yer?’ she said.

‘Thet’s me!’ said the girl.

‘I thought you was. Your dad, ‘e says ter me, “You dunno  my daughter, Polly, do yer?” says ‘e. “Na,” says I, “I don’t.” “Well,” says ‘e, “You can’t miss ‘er when you see ‘er.” An’ right enough I didn’t.’

‘Mother says I’m all father, an’ there ain’t nothin’ of ‘er in me. Dad says it’s lucky it ain’t the other wy abaht, or e’d ‘ave got a divorce.’

They both laughed.

‘Where are you goin’ now?’ asked Liza, looking at the slop-basin she was carrying.

‘I was just goin’ dahn into the road ter get some ice-cream for dinner. Father ‘ad a bit of luck last night, ‘e says, and ‘e’d stand the lot of us ice-cream for dinner ter-day.’

‘I’ll come with yer if yer like.’

‘Come on!’ And, already friends, they walked arm-in-arm to the Westminster Bridge Road. Then they went along till they came to a stall where an Italian was selling the required commodity, and having had a taste apiece to see if they liked it, Polly planked down sixpence and had her basin filled with a poisonous-looking mixture of red and white ice-cream.

On the way back, looking up the street, Polly cried:

‘There’s father!’

Liza’s heart beat rapidly and she turned red; but suddenly a sense of shame came over her, and casting down her head so that she might not see him, she said:

‘I think I’ll be off ‘ome an’ see ‘ow mother’s gettin’ on.’ And before Polly could say anything she had slipped away and entered her own house.

Mother was not getting on at all well.

‘You’ve come in at last, you —— , you!’ snarled Mrs. Kemp, as Liza entered the room.

‘Wot’s the matter, mother?’

‘Matter! I like thet — matter indeed! Go an’ matter yerself an’ be mattered! Nice way ter treat an old woman like me — an’ yer own mother, too!’

‘Wot’s up now?’

‘Don’t talk ter me; I don’t want ter listen ter you. Leavin’ me all alone, me with my rheumatics, an’ the neuralgy! I’ve ‘ad the neuralgy all the mornin’, and my ‘ead’s been simply splittin’, so thet I thought the bones ‘ud come apart and all my brains go streamin’ on the floor. An’ when I wake up there’s no one ter git my tea for me, an’ I lay there witin’ an’ witin’, an’ at last I ‘ad ter git up and mike it myself. And, my ‘ead simply cruel! Why, I might ‘ave been burnt ter death with the fire alight an’ me asleep.’

‘Well, I am sorry, mother; but I went aht just for a bit, an’ didn’t think you’d wike. An’ besides, the fire wasn’t alight.’

‘Garn with yer! I didn’t treat my mother like thet. Oh, you’ve been a bad daughter ter me — an’ I ‘ad more illness carryin’ you than with all the other children put togither. You was a cross at yer birth, an’ you’ve been a cross ever since. An’ now in my old age, when I’ve worked myself ter the bone, yer leaves me to starve and burn to death.’ Here she began to cry, and the rest of her utterances was lost in sobs.

The dusk had darkened into night, and Mrs. Kemp had retired to rest with the dicky-birds. Liza was thinking of many things; she wondered why she had been unwilling to meet Jim in the morning.

‘I was a bally fool,’ she said to herself.

It really seemed an age since the previous night, and all that had happened seemed very long ago. She had not spoken to Jim all day, and she had so much to say to him. Then, wondering whether he was about, she went to the window and looked out; but there was nobody there. She closed the window again and sat just beside it; the time went on, and she wondered whether he would come, asking herself whether he had been thinking of her as she of him; gradually her thoughts grew vague, and a kind of mist came over  them. She nodded. Suddenly she roused herself with a start, fancying she had heard something; she listened again, and in a moment the sound was repeated, three or four gentle taps on the window. She opened it quickly and whispered:

‘Jim.’

‘Thet’s me,’ he answered, ‘come aht.’

Closing the window, she went into the passage and opened the street door; it was hardly unlocked before Jim had pushed his way in; partly shutting it behind him, he took her in his arms and hugged her to his breast. She kissed him passionately.

‘I thought yer’d come ter-night, Jim; summat in my ‘eart told me so. But you ‘ave been long.’

‘I wouldn’t come before, ‘cause I thought there’d be people abaht. Kiss us!’ And again he pressed his lips to hers, and Liza nearly fainted with the delight of it.

‘Let’s go for a walk, shall we?’ he said.

‘Arright!’ They were speaking in whispers. ‘You go into the road through the passage, an’ I’ll go by the street.’

‘Yus, thet’s right,’ and kissing her once more, he slid out, and she closed the door behind him.

Then going back to get her hat, she came again into the passage, waiting behind the door till it might be safe for her to venture. She had not made up her mind to risk it, when she heard a key put in the lock, and she hardly had time to spring back to prevent herself from being hit by the opening door. It was a man, one of the upstairs lodgers.

‘‘Ulloa!’ he said, ‘‘oo’s there?’

‘Mr. ‘Odges! Strikes me, you did give me a turn; I was just goin’ aht.’ She blushed to her hair, but in the darkness he could see nothing.

‘Good night,’ she said, and went out.

She walked close along the sides of the houses like a thief,  and the policeman as she passed him turned round and looked at her, wondering whether she was meditating some illegal deed. She breathed freely on coming into the open road, and seeing Jim skulking behind a tree, ran up to him, and in the shadows they kissed again.

9

Thus began a time of love and joy. As soon as her work was over and she had finished tea, Liza would slip out and at some appointed spot meet Jim. Usually it would be at the church, where the Westminster Bridge Road bends down to get to the river, and they would go off, arm-in-arm, till they came to some place where they could sit down and rest. Sometimes they would walk along the Albert Embankment to Battersea Park, and here sit on the benches, watching the children play. The female cyclist had almost abandoned Battersea for the parks on the other side of the river, but often enough one went by, and Liza, with the old-fashioned prejudice of her class, would look after the rider and make some remark about her, not seldom more forcible than ladylike. Both Jim and she liked children, and, tiny, ragged urchins would gather round to have rides on the man’s knees or mock fights with Liza.

They thought themselves far away from anyone in Vere Street, but twice, as they were walking along, they were met by people they knew. Once it was two workmen coming home from a job at Vauxhall: Liza did not see them till they were quite near; she immediately dropped Jim’s arm, and they both cast their eyes to the ground as the men passed, like ostriches, expecting that if they did not look they would not be seen.

‘D’you see ’em, Jim?’ asked Liza, in a whisper, when they had gone by. ‘I wonder if they see us.’ Almost instinctively she turned round, and at the same moment one of the men turned too; then there was no doubt about it.

‘Thet did give me a turn,’ she said.

‘So it did me,’ answered Jim; ‘I simply went ‘ot all over.’

‘We was bally fools,’ said Liza; ‘we oughter ‘ave spoken to ’em! D’you think they’ll let aht?’

They heard nothing of it, when Jim afterwards met one of the men in a public-house he did not mention a meeting, and they thought that perhaps they had not been recognized. But the second time was worse.

It was on the Albert Embankment again. They were met by a party of four, all of whom lived in the street. Liza’s heart sank within her, for there was no chance of escape; she thought of turning quickly and walking in the opposite direction, but there was not time, for the men had already seen them. She whispered to Jim:

‘Back us up,’ and as they met she said to one of the men:

‘‘Ulloa there! Where are you off to?’

The men stopped, and one of them asked the question back.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Me? Oh, I’ve just been to the ‘orspital. One of the gals at our place is queer, an’ so I says ter myself, “I’ll go an’ see ‘er.”’ She faltered a little as she began, but quickly gathered herself together, lying fluently and without hesitation.

‘An’ when I come aht,’ she went on, ‘‘oo should I see just passin’ the ‘orspital but this ‘ere cove, an’ ‘e says to me, “Wot cheer,” says ‘e, “I’m goin’ ter Vaux’all, come an’ walk a bit of the wy with us.” “Arright,” says I, “I don’t mind if I do.”’

One man winked, and another said: ‘Go it, Liza!’

She fired up with the dignity of outraged innocence.

‘Wot d’yer mean by thet?’ she said; ‘d’yer think I’m kiddin’?’

‘Kiddin’? No! You’ve only just come up from the country, ain’t yer?’

‘Think I’m kidding? What d’yer think I want ter kid for? Liars never believe anyone, thet’s fact.’

‘Na then, Liza, don’t be saucy.’

‘Saucy! I’ll smack yer in the eye if yer sy much ter me. Come on,’ she said to Jim, who had been standing sheepishly by; and they walked away.

The men shouted: ‘Now we shan’t be long!’ and went off laughing.

After that they decided to go where there was no chance at all of their being seen. They did not meet till they got over Westminster Bridge, and thence they made their way into the park; they would lie down on the grass in one another’s arms, and thus spend the long summer evenings. After the heat of the day there would be a gentle breeze in the park, and they would take in long breaths of the air; it seemed far away from London, it was so quiet and cool; and Liza, as she lay by Jim’s side, felt her love for him overflowing to the rest of the world and enveloping mankind itself in a kind of grateful happiness. If it could only have lasted! They would stay and see the stars shine out dimly, one by one, from the blue sky, till it grew late and the blue darkened into black, and the stars glittered in thousands all above them. But as the nights grew cooler, they found it cold on the grass, and the time they had there seemed too short for the long journey they had to make; so, crossing the bridge as before, they strolled along the Embankment till they came to a vacant bench, and there they would sit, with Liza nestling close up to her lover and his great arms around her. The rain of September made no difference to them; they went as usual to their seat beneath the trees, and Jim would take Liza on his knee, and, opening his coat, shelter her with it, while she, with her arms round his neck, pressed very close to him, and occasionally gave a little laugh of pleasure and delight. They hardly spoke at all through these evenings, for what had they to say to one another? Often without exchanging a word they would sit for an hour with their faces touching, the one feeling on his cheek the hot breath from the other’s  mouth; while at the end of the time the only motion was an upraising of Liza’s lips, a bending down of Jim’s, so that they might meet and kiss. Sometimes Liza fell into a light doze, and Jim would sit very still for fear of waking her, and when she roused herself she would smile, while he bent down again and kissed her. They were very happy. But the hours passed by so quickly, that Big Ben striking twelve came upon them as a surprise, and unwillingly they got up and made their way homewards; their partings were never ending — each evening Jim refused to let her go from his arms, and tears stood in his eyes at the thought of the separation.

‘I’d give somethin’,’ he would say, ‘if we could be togither always.’

‘Never mind, old chap!’ Liza would answer, herself half crying, ‘it can’t be ‘elped, so we must jolly well lump it.’

But notwithstanding all their precautions people in Vere Street appeared to know. First of all Liza noticed that the women did not seem quite so cordial as before, and she often fancied they were talking of her; when she passed by they appeared to look at her, then say something or other, and perhaps burst out laughing; but when she approached they would immediately stop speaking, and keep silence in a rather awkward, constrained manner. For a long time she was unwilling to believe that there was any change in them, and Jim who had observed nothing, persuaded her that it was all fancy. But gradually it became clearer, and Jim had to agree with her that somehow or other people had found out. Once when Liza had been talking to Polly, Jim’s daughter, Mrs. Blakeston had called her, and when the girl had come to her mother Liza saw that she spoke angrily, and they both looked across at her. When Liza caught Mrs. Blakeston’s eye she saw in her face a surly scowl, which almost frightened her; she wanted to brave it out, and stepped forward a little to go and speak with the woman,  but Mrs. Blakeston, standing still, looked so angrily at her that she was afraid to. When she told Jim his face grew dark, and he said: ‘Blast the woman! I’ll give ‘er wot for if she says anythin’ ter you.’

‘Don’t strike ‘er, wotever ‘appens, will yer, Jim?’ said Liza.

‘She’d better tike care then!’ he answered, and he told her that lately his wife had been sulking, and not speaking to him. The previous night, on coming home after the day’s work and bidding her ‘Good evenin’,’ she had turned her back on him without answering.

‘Can’t you answer when you’re spoke to?’ he had said.

‘Good evenin’,’ she had replied sulkily, with her back still turned.

After that Liza noticed that Polly avoided her.

‘Wot’s up, Polly?’ she said to her one day. ‘You never speaks now; ‘ave you ‘ad yer tongue cut aht?’

‘Me? I ain’t got nothin’ ter speak abaht, thet I knows of,’ answered Polly, abruptly walking off. Liza grew very red and quickly looked to see if anyone had noticed the incident. A couple of youths, sitting on the pavement, had seen it, and she saw them nudge one another and wink.

Then the fellows about the street began to chaff her.

‘You look pale,’ said one of a group to her one day.

‘You’re overworkin’ yerself, you are,’ said another.

‘Married life don’t agree with Liza, thet’s wot it is,’ added a third.

‘‘Oo d’yer think yer gettin’ at? I ain’t married, an’ never like ter be,’ she answered.

‘Liza ‘as all the pleasures of a ‘usband an’ none of the trouble.’

‘Bli’me if I know wot yer mean!’ said Liza.

‘Na, of course not; you don’t know nothin’, do yer?’

‘Innocent as a bibe. Our Father which art in ‘eaven!’

‘‘Aven’t been in London long, ‘ave yer?’

They spoke in chorus, and Liza stood in front of them, bewildered, not knowing what to answer.

‘Don’t you mike no mistake abaht it, Liza knows a thing or two.’

‘O me darlin’, I love yer fit to kill, but tike care your missus ain’t round the corner.’ This was particularly bold, and they all laughed.

Liza felt very uncomfortable, and fiddled about with her apron, wondering how she should get away.

‘Tike care yer don’t git into trouble, thet’s all,’ said one of the men, with burlesque gravity.

‘Yer might give us a chanst, Liza, you come aht with me one evenin’. You oughter give us all a turn, just ter show there’s no ill-feelin’.’

‘Bli’me if I know wot yer all talkin’ abaht. You’re all barmy on the crumpet,’ said Liza indignantly, and, turning her back on them, made for home.

Among other things that had happened was Sally’s marriage. One Saturday a little procession had started from Vere Street, consisting of Sally, in a state of giggling excitement, her fringe magnificent after a whole week of curling-papers, clad in a perfectly new velveteen dress of the colour known as electric blue; and Harry, rather nervous and ill at ease in the unaccustomed restraint of a collar; these two walked arm-in-arm, and were followed by Sally’s mother and uncle, also arm-in-arm, and the procession was brought up by Harry’s brother and a friend. They started with a flourish of trumpets and an old boot, and walked down the middle of Vere Street, accompanied by the neighbours’ good wishes; but as they got into the Westminster Bridge Road and nearer to the church, the happy couple grew silent, and Harry began to perspire freely, so that his collar gave him perfect torture. There was a public-house just opposite the church, and it was suggested that they should have a drink before going in. As it was a solemn occasion they went into  the private bar, and there Sally’s uncle, who was a man of means, ordered six pots of beer.

‘Feel a bit nervous, ‘Arry?’ asked his friend.

‘Na,’ said Harry, as if he had been used to getting married every day of his life; ‘bit warm, thet’s all.’

‘Your very good ‘ealth, Sally,’ said her mother, lifting her mug; ‘this is the last time as I shall ever address you as miss.’

‘An’ may she be as good a wife as you was,’ added Sally’s uncle.

‘Well, I don’t think my old man ever ‘ad no complaint ter mike abaht me. I did my duty by ‘im, although it’s me as says it,’ answered the good lady.

‘Well, mates,’ said Harry’s brother, ‘I reckon it’s abaht time to go in. So ‘ere’s to the ‘ealth of Mr. ‘Enry Atkins an’ ‘is future missus.’

‘An’ God bless ’em!’ said Sally’s mother.

Then they went into the church, and as they solemnly walked up the aisle a pale-faced young curate came out of the vestry and down to the bottom of the chancel. The beer had had a calming effect on their troubled minds, and both Harry and Sally began to think it rather a good joke. They smiled on each other, and at those parts of the service which they thought suggestive violently nudged one another in the ribs. When the ring had to be produced, Harry fumbled about in different pockets, and his brother whispered:

‘Swop me bob, ‘e’s gone and lorst it!’

However, all went right, and Sally having carefully pocketed the certificate, they went out and had another drink to celebrate the happy event.

In the evening Liza and several friends came into the couple’s room, which they had taken in the same house as Sally had lived in before, and drank the health of the bride and bridegroom till they thought fit to retire.

10

It was November. The fine weather had quite gone now, and with it much of the sweet pleasure of Jim and Liza’s love. When they came out at night on the Embankment they found it cold and dreary; sometimes a light fog covered the river-banks, and made the lamps glow out dim and large; a light rain would be falling, which sent a chill into their very souls; foot passengers came along at rare intervals, holding up umbrellas, and staring straight in front of them as they hurried along in the damp and cold; a cab would pass rapidly by, splashing up the mud on each side. The benches were deserted, except, perhaps, for some poor homeless wretch who could afford no shelter, and, huddled up in a corner, with his head buried in his breast, was sleeping heavily, like a dead man. The wet mud made Liza’s skirts cling about her feet, and the damp would come in and chill her legs and creep up her body, till she shivered, and for warmth pressed herself close against Jim. Sometimes they would go into the third-class waiting-rooms at Waterloo or Charing Cross and sit there, but it was not like the park or the Embankment on summer nights; they had warmth, but the heat made their wet clothes steam and smell, and the gas flared in their eyes, and they hated the people perpetually coming in and out, opening the doors and letting in a blast of cold air; they hated the noise of the guards and porters shouting out the departure of the trains, the shrill whistling of the steam-engine, the hurry and bustle and confusion. About eleven o’clock, when the trains grew less frequent, they got some quietness; but then their minds were troubled, and they felt heavy, sad and miserable.

One evening they had been sitting at Waterloo Station; it was foggy outside — a thick, yellow November fog, which  filled the waiting-room, entering the lungs, and making the mouth taste nasty and the eyes smart. It was about half-past eleven, and the station was unusually quiet; a few passengers, in wraps and overcoats, were walking to and fro, waiting for the last train, and one or two porters were standing about yawning. Liza and Jim had remained for an hour in perfect silence, filled with a gloomy unhappiness, as of a great weight on their brains. Liza was sitting forward, with her elbows on her knees, resting her face on her hands.

‘I wish I was straight,’ she said at last, not looking up.

‘Well, why won’t yer come along of me altogether, an’ you’ll be arright then?’ he answered.

‘Na, that’s no go; I can’t do thet.’ He had often asked her to live with him entirely, but she had always refused.

‘You can come along of me, an’ I’ll tike a room in a lodgin’ ‘ouse in ‘Olloway, an’ we can live there as if we was married.’

‘Wot abaht yer work?’

‘I can get work over the other side as well as I can ‘ere. I’m abaht sick of the wy things is goin’ on.’

‘So am I; but I can’t leave mother.’

‘She can come, too.’

‘Not when I’m not married. I shouldn’t like ‘er ter know as I’d — as I’d gone wrong.’

‘Well, I’ll marry yer. Swop me bob, I wants ter badly enough.’

‘Yer can’t; yer married already.’

‘Thet don’t matter! If I give the missus so much a week aht of my screw, she’ll sign a piper ter give up all clime ter me, an’ then we can get spliced. One of the men as I works with done thet, an’ it was arright.’

Liza shook her head.

‘Na, yer can’t do thet now; it’s bigamy, an’ the cop tikes yer, an’ yer gits twelve months’ ‘ard for it.’

‘But swop me bob, Liza, I can’t go on like this. Yer knows  the missus — well, there ain’t no bloomin’ doubt abaht it, she knows as you an’ me are carryin’ on, an’ she mikes no bones abaht lettin’ me see it.’

‘She don’t do thet?’

‘Well, she don’t exactly sy it, but she sulks an’ won’t speak, an’ then when I says anythin’ she rounds on me an’ calls me all the nimes she can think of. I’d give ‘er a good ‘idin’, but some’ow I don’t like ter! She mikes the plice a ‘ell ter me, an’ I’m not goin’ ter stand it no longer!’

‘You’ll ave ter sit it, then; yer can’t chuck it.’

‘Yus I can, an’ I would if you’d come along of me. I don’t believe you like me at all, Liza, or you’d come.’

She turned towards him and put her arms round his neck.

‘Yer know I do, old cock,’ she said. ‘I like yer better than anyone else in the world; but I can’t go awy an’ leave mother.’

‘Bli’me me if I see why; she’s never been much ter you. She mikes yer slave awy ter pay the rent, an’ all the money she earns she boozes.’

‘Thet’s true, she ain’t been wot yer might call a good mother ter me — but some’ow she’s my mother, an’ I don’t like ter leave ‘er on ‘er own, now she’s so old — an’ she can’t do much with the rheumatics. An’ besides, Jim dear, it ain’t only mother, but there’s yer own kids, yer can’t leave them.’

He thought for a while, and then said:

‘You’re abaht right there, Liza; I dunno if I could get on without the kids. If I could only tike them an’ you too, swop me bob, I should be ‘appy.’

Liza smiled sadly.

‘So yer see, Jim, we’re in a bloomin’ ‘ole, an’ there ain’t no way aht of it thet I can see.’

He took her on his knees, and pressing her to him, kissed her very long and very lovingly.

‘Well, we must trust ter luck,’ she said again, ‘p’raps  somethin’ ‘ll ‘appen soon, an’ everythin’ ‘ll come right in the end — when we gets four balls of worsted for a penny.’

It was past twelve, and separating, they went by different ways along the dreary, wet, deserted roads till they came to Vere Street.

The street seemed quite different to Liza from what it had been three months before. Tom, the humble adorer, had quite disappeared from her life. One day, three or four weeks after the August Bank Holiday, she saw him dawdling along the pavement, and it suddenly struck her that she had not seen him for a long time; but she had been so full of her happiness that she had been unable to think of anyone but Jim. She wondered at his absence, since before wherever she had been there was he certain to be also. She passed him, but to her astonishment he did not speak to her. She thought by some wonder he had not seen her, but she felt his gaze resting upon her. She turned back, and suddenly he dropped his eyes and looked down, walking on as if he had not seen her, but blushing furiously.

‘Tom,’ she said, ‘why don’t yer speak ter me.’

He started and blushed more than ever.

‘I didn’t know yer was there,’ he stuttered.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘wot’s up?’

‘Nothin’ as I knows of,’ he answered uneasily.

‘I ain’t offended yer, ‘ave I, Tom?’

‘Na, not as I knows of,’ he replied, looking very unhappy.

‘You don’t ever come my way now,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know as yer wanted ter see me.’

‘Garn! Yer knows I likes you as well as anybody.’

‘Yer likes so many people, Liza,’ he said, flushing.

‘What d’yer mean?’ said Liza indignantly, but very red; she was afraid he knew now, and it was from him especially she would have been so glad to hide it.

‘Nothin’,’ he answered.

‘One doesn’t say things like thet without any meanin’, unless one’s a blimed fool.’

‘You’re right there, Liza,’ he answered. ‘I am a blimed fool.’ He looked at her a little reproachfully, she thought, and then he said ‘Good-bye,’ and turned away.

At first she was horrified that he should know of her love for Jim, but then she did not care. After all, it was nobody’s business, and what did anything matter as long as she loved Jim and Jim loved her? Then she grew angry that Tom should suspect her; he could know nothing but that some of the men had seen her with Jim near Vauxhall, and it seemed mean that he should condemn her for that. Thenceforward, when she ran against Tom, she cut him; he never tried to speak to her, but as she passed him, pretending to look in front of her, she could see that he always blushed, and she fancied his eyes were very sorrowful. Then several weeks went by, and as she began to feel more and more lonely in the street she regretted the quarrel; she cried a little as she thought that she had lost his faithful gentle love and she would have much liked to be friends with him again. If he had only made some advance she would have welcomed him so cordially, but she was too proud to go to him herself and beg him to forgive her — and then how could he forgive her?

She had lost Sally too, for on her marriage Harry had made her give up the factory; he was a young man with principles worthy of a Member of Parliament, and he had said:

‘A woman’s plice is ‘er ‘ome, an’ if ‘er old man can’t afford ter keep ‘er without ‘er workin’ in a factory — well, all I can say is thet ‘e’d better go an’ git single.’

‘Quite right, too,’ agreed his mother-in-law; ‘an’ wot’s more, she’ll ‘ave a baby ter look after soon, an’ thet’ll tike ‘er all ‘er time, an’ there’s no one as knows thet better than me, for I’ve ‘ad twelve, ter sy nothin’ of two stills an’ one miss.’

Liza quite envied Sally her happiness, for the bride was  brimming over with song and laughter; her happiness overwhelmed her.

‘I am ‘appy,’ she said to Liza one day a few weeks after her marriage. ‘You dunno wot a good sort ‘Arry is. ‘E’s just a darlin’, an’ there’s no mistikin’ it. I don’t care wot other people sy, but wot I says is, there’s nothin’ like marriage. Never a cross word passes his lips, an’ mother ‘as all ‘er meals with us an’ ‘e says all the better. Well I’m thet ‘appy I simply dunno if I’m standin’ on my ‘ead or on my ‘eels.’

But alas! it did not last too long. Sally was not so full of joy when next Liza met her, and one day her eyes looked very much as if she had been crying.

‘Wot’s the matter?’ asked Liza, looking at her. ‘Wot ‘ave yer been blubberin’ abaht?’

‘Me?’ said Sally, getting very red. ‘Oh, I’ve got a bit of a toothache, an’ — well, I’m rather a fool like, an’ it ‘urt so much that I couldn’t ‘elp cryin’.’

Liza was not satisfied, but could get nothing further out of her. Then one day it came out. It was a Saturday night, the time when women in Vere Street weep. Liza went up into Sally’s room for a few minutes on her way to the Westminster Bridge Road, where she was to meet Jim. Harry had taken the top back room, and Liza, climbing up the second flight of stairs, called out as usual.

‘Wot ho, Sally!’

The door remained shut, although Liza could see that there was a light in the room; but on getting to the door she stood still, for she heard the sound of sobbing. She listened for a minute and then knocked: there was a little flurry inside, and someone called out:

‘‘Oo’s there?’

‘Only me,’ said Liza, opening the door. As she did so she saw Sally rapidly wipe her eyes and put her handkerchief away. Her mother was sitting by her side, evidently comforting her.

‘Wot’s up, Sal?’ asked Liza.

‘Nothin’,’ answered Sally, with a brave little gasp to stop the crying, turning her face downwards so that Liza should not see the tears in her eyes; but they were too strong for her, and, quickly taking out her handkerchief, she hid her face in it and began to sob broken-heartedly. Liza looked at the mother in interrogation.

‘Oh, it’s thet man again!’ said the lady, snorting and tossing her head.

‘Not ‘Arry?’ asked Liza, in surprise.

‘Not ‘Arry— ‘oo is it if it ain’t ‘Arry? The villin!’

‘Wot’s ‘e been doin’, then?’ asked Liza again.

‘Beatin’ ‘er, that’s wot ‘e’s been doin’! Oh, the villin, ‘e oughter be ashimed of ‘isself ‘e ought!’

‘I didn’t know ‘e was like that!’ said Liza.

‘Didn’t yer? I thought the ‘ole street knew it by now,’ said Mrs. Cooper indignantly. ‘Oh, ‘e’s a wrong ‘un, ‘e is.’

‘It wasn’t ‘is fault,’ put in Sally, amidst her sobs; ‘it’s only because ‘e’s ‘ad a little drop too much. ‘E’s arright when ‘e’s sober.’

‘A little drop too much! I should just think ‘e’d ‘ad, the beast! I’d give it ‘im if I was a man. They’re all like thet— ‘usbinds is all alike; they’re arright when they’re sober — sometimes — but when they’ve got the liquor in ’em, they’re beasts, an’ no mistike. I ‘ad a ‘usbind myself for five-an’-twenty years, an’ I know ’em.’

‘Well, mother,’ sobbed Sally, ‘it was all my fault. I should ‘ave come ‘ome earlier.’

‘Na, it wasn’t your fault at all. Just you look ‘ere, Liza: this is wot ‘e done an’ call ‘isself a man. Just because Sally’d gone aht to ‘ave a chat with Mrs. McLeod in the next ‘ouse, when she come in ‘e start bangin’ ‘er abaht. An’ me, too, wot d’yer think of that!’ Mrs. Cooper was quite purple with indignation.

‘Yus,’ she went on, ‘thet’s a man for yer. Of course, I wasn’t goin’ ter stand there an’ see my daughter bein’ knocked abaht; it wasn’t likely — was it? An’ ‘e rounds on me, an’ ‘e ‘its me with ‘is fist. Look ‘ere.’ She pulled up her sleeves and showed two red and brawny arms. ‘‘E’s bruised my arms; I thought ‘e’d broken it at fust. If I ‘adn’t put my arm up, ‘e’d ‘ave got me on the ‘ead, an’ ‘e might ‘ave killed me. An’ I says to ‘im, “If you touch me again, I’ll go ter the police-station, thet I will!” Well, that frightened ‘im a bit, an’ then didn’t I let ‘im ‘ave it! “You call yerself a man,” says I, “an’ you ain’t fit ter clean the drains aht.” You should ‘ave ‘eard the language ‘e used. “You dirty old woman,” says ‘e, “you go away; you’re always interferin’ with me.” Well, I don’t like ter repeat wot ‘e said, and thet’s the truth. An’ I says ter ‘im, “I wish yer’d never married my daughter, an’ if I’d known you was like this I’d ‘ave died sooner than let yer.”’

‘Well, I didn’t know ‘e was like thet!’ said Liza.

‘‘E was arright at fust,’ said Sally.

‘Yus, they’re always arright at fust! But ter think it should ‘ave come to this now, when they ain’t been married three months, an’ the first child not born yet! I think it’s disgraceful.’

Liza stayed a little while longer, helping to comfort Sally, who kept pathetically taking to herself all the blame of the dispute; and then, bidding her good night and better luck, she slid off to meet Jim.

When she reached the appointed spot he was not to be found. She waited for some time, and at last saw him come out of the neighbouring pub.

‘Good night, Jim,’ she said as she came up to him.

‘So you’ve turned up, ‘ave yer?’ he answered roughly, turning round.

‘Wot’s the matter, Jim?’ she asked in a frightened way, for he had never spoken to her in that manner.

‘Nice thing ter keep me witin’ all night for yer to come aht.’

She saw that he had been drinking, and answered humbly.

‘I’m very sorry, Jim, but I went in to Sally, an’ ‘er bloke ‘ad been knockin’ ‘er abaht, an’ so I sat with ‘er a bit.’

‘Knockin’ ‘er abaht, ‘ad ‘e? and serve ‘er damn well right too; an’ there’s many more as could do with a good ‘idin’!’

Liza did not answer. He looked at her, and then suddenly said:

‘Come in an’ ‘ave a drink.’

‘Na, I’m not thirsty; I don’t want a drink,’ she answered.

‘Come on,’ he said angrily.

‘Na, Jim, you’ve had quite enough already.’

‘‘Oo are you talkin’ ter?’ he said. ‘Don’t come if yer don’t want ter; I’ll go an’ ‘ave one by myself.’

‘Na, Jim, don’t.’ She caught hold of his arm.

‘Yus, I shall,’ he said, going towards the pub, while she held him back. ‘Let me go, can’t yer! Let me go!’ He roughly pulled his arm away from her. As she tried to catch hold of it again, he pushed her back, and in the little scuffle caught her a blow over the face.

‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘you did ‘urt!’

He was sobered at once.

‘Liza,’ he said. ‘I ain’t ‘urt yer?’ She didn’t answer, and he took her in his arms. ‘Liza, I ain’t ‘urt you, ‘ave I? Say I ain’t ‘urt yer. I’m so sorry, I beg your pardon, Liza.’

‘Arright, old chap,’ she said, smiling charmingly on him. ‘It wasn’t the blow that ‘urt me much; it was the wy you was talkin’.’

‘I didn’t mean it, Liza.’ He was so contrite, he could not humble himself enough. ‘I ‘ad another bloomin’ row with the missus ter-night, an’ then when I didn’t find you ‘ere, an’ I kept witin’ an’ witin’ — well, I fair downright lost my ‘air. An’ I ‘ad two or three pints of four ‘alf, an’ — well, I dunno—’

‘Never mind, old cock. I can stand more than thet as long as yer loves me.’

He kissed her and they were quite friends again. But the little quarrel had another effect which was worse for Liza. When she woke up next morning she noticed a slight soreness over the ridge of bone under the left eye, and on looking in the glass saw that it was black and blue and green. She bathed it, but it remained, and seemed to get more marked. She was terrified lest people should see it, and kept indoors all day; but next morning it was blacker than ever. She went to the factory with her hat over her eyes and her head bent down; she escaped observation, but on the way home she was not so lucky. The sharp eyes of some girls noticed it first.

‘Wot’s the matter with yer eye?’ asked one of them.

‘Me?’ answered Liza, putting her hand up as if in ignorance. ‘Nothin’ thet I knows of.’

Two or three young men were standing by, and hearing the girl, looked up.

‘Why, yer’ve got a black eye, Liza!’

‘Me? I ain’t got no black eye!’

‘Yus you ‘ave; ‘ow d’yer get it?’

‘I dunno,’ said Liza. ‘I didn’t know I ‘ad one.’

‘Garn! tell us another!’ was the answer. ‘One doesn’t git a black eye without knowin’ ‘ow they got it.’

‘Well, I did fall against the chest of drawers yesterday; I suppose I must ‘ave got it then.’

‘Oh yes, we believe thet, don’t we?’

‘I didn’t know ‘e was so ‘andy with ‘is dukes, did you, Ted?’ asked one man of another.

Liza felt herself grow red to the tips of her toes.

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘Never you mind; nobody you know.’

At that moment Jim’s wife passed and looked at her with a scowl. Liza wished herself a hundred miles away, and blushed more violently than ever.

‘Wot are yer blushin’ abaht?’ ingenuously asked one of the girls.

And they all looked from her to Mrs. Blakeston and back again. Someone said: ‘‘Ow abaht our Sunday boots on now?’ And a titter went through them. Liza’s nerve deserted her; she could think of nothing to say, and a sob burst from her. To hide the tears which were coming from her eyes she turned away and walked homewards. Immediately a great shout of laughter broke from the group, and she heard them positively screaming till she got into her own house.

11

A few days afterwards Liza was talking with Sally, who did not seem very much happier than when Liza had last seen her.

‘‘E ain’t wot I thought ‘e wos,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind sayin’ thet; but ‘e ‘as a lot ter put up with; I expect I’m rather tryin’ sometimes, an’ ‘e means well. P’raps ‘e’ll be kinder like when the biby’s born.’

‘Cheer up, old gal,’ answered Liza, who had seen something of the lives of many married couples; ‘it won’t seem so bad after yer gets used to it; it’s a bit disappointin’ at fust, but yer gits not ter mind it.’

After a little Sally said she must go and see about her husband’s tea. She said good-bye, and then rather awkwardly:

‘Say, Liza, tike care of yerself!’

‘Tike care of meself — why?’ asked Liza, in surprise.

‘Yer know wot I mean.’

‘Na, I’m darned if I do.’

‘Thet there Mrs. Blakeston, she’s lookin’ aht for you.’

‘Mrs. Blakeston!’ Liza was startled.

‘Yus; she says she’s goin’ ter give you somethin’ if she can git ‘old on yer. I should advise yer ter tike care.’

‘Me?’ said Liza.

Sally looked away, so as not to see the other’s face.

‘She says as ‘ow yer’ve been messin’ abaht with ‘er old man.’

Liza didn’t say anything, and Sally, repeating her good-bye, slid off.

Liza felt a chill run through her. She had several times noticed a scowl and a look of anger on Mrs. Blakeston’s face, and she had avoided her as much as possible; but she  had no idea that the woman meant to do anything to her. She was very frightened, a cold sweat broke out over her face. If Mrs. Blakeston got hold of her she would be helpless, she was so small and weak, while the other was strong and muscular. Liza wondered what she would do if she did catch her.

That night she told Jim, and tried to make a joke of it.

‘I say, Jim, your missus — she says she’s goin’ ter give me socks if she catches me.’

‘My missus! ‘Ow d’yer know?’

‘She’s been tellin’ people in the street.’

‘Go’ lumme,’ said Jim, furious, ‘if she dares ter touch a ‘air of your ‘ead, swop me dicky I’ll give ‘er sich a ‘idin’ as she never ‘ad before! By God, give me the chanst, an’ I would let ‘er ‘ave it; I’m bloomin’ well sick of ‘er sulks!’ He clenched his fist as he spoke.

Liza was a coward. She could not help thinking of her enemy’s threat; it got on her nerves, and she hardly dared go out for fear of meeting her; she would look nervously in front of her, quickly turning round if she saw in the distance anyone resembling Mrs. Blakeston. She dreamed of her at night; she saw the big, powerful form, the heavy, frowning face, and the curiously braided brown hair; and she would wake up with a cry and find herself bathed in sweat.

It was the Saturday afternoon following this, a chill November day, with the roads sloshy, and a grey, comfortless sky that made one’s spirits sink. It was about three o’clock, and Liza was coming home from work; she got into Vere Street, and was walking quickly towards her house when she saw Mrs. Blakeston coming towards her. Her heart gave a great jump. Turning, she walked rapidly in the direction she had come; with a screw round of her eyes she saw that she was being followed, and therefore went straight out of Vere Street. She went right round, meaning to get into the street from the other end and, unobserved, slip into her  house, which was then quite close; but she dared not risk it immediately for fear Mrs. Blakeston should still be there; so she waited about for half an hour. It seemed an age. Finally, taking her courage in both hands, she turned the corner and entered Vere Street. She nearly ran into the arms of Mrs. Blakeston, who was standing close to the public-house door.

Liza gave a little cry, and the woman said, with a sneer:

‘Yer didn’t expect ter see me, did yer?’

Liza did not answer, but tried to walk past her. Mrs. Blakeston stepped forward and blocked her way.

‘Yer seem ter be in a mighty fine ‘urry,’ she said.

‘Yus, I’ve got ter git ‘ome,’ said Liza, again trying to pass.

‘But supposin’ I don’t let yer?’ remarked Mrs. Blakeston, preventing her from moving.

‘Why don’t yer leave me alone?’ Liza said. ‘I ain’t interferin’ with you!’

‘Not interferin’ with me, aren’t yer? I like thet!’

‘Let me go by,’ said Liza. ‘I don’t want ter talk ter you.’

‘Na, I know thet,’ said the other; ‘but I want ter talk ter you, an’ I shan’t let yer go until I’ve said wot I wants ter sy.’

Liza looked round for help. At the beginning of the altercation the loafers about the public-house had looked up with interest, and gradually gathered round in a little circle. Passers-by had joined in, and a number of other people in the street, seeing the crowd, added themselves to it to see what was going on. Liza saw that all eyes were fixed on her, the men amused and excited, the women unsympathetic, rather virtuously indignant. Liza wanted to ask for help, but there were so many people, and they all seemed so much against her, that she had not the courage to. So, having surveyed the crowd, she turned her eyes to Mrs. Blakeston, and stood in front of her, trembling a little, and very white.

‘Na, ‘e ain’t there,’ said Mrs. Blakeston, sneeringly, ‘so yer needn’t look for ‘im.’

‘I dunno wot yer mean,’ answered Liza, ‘an’ I want ter go awy. I ain’t done nothin’ ter you.’

‘Not done nothin’ ter me?’ furiously repeated the woman. ‘I’ll tell yer wot yer’ve done ter me — you’ve robbed me of my ‘usbind, you ‘ave. I never ‘ad a word with my ‘usbind until you took ‘im from me. An’ now it’s all you with ‘im. ‘E’s got no time for ‘is wife an’ family — it’s all you. An’ ‘is money, too. I never git a penny of it; if it weren’t for the little bit I ‘ad saved up in the siving-bank, me an’ my children ‘ud be starvin’ now! An’ all through you!’ She shook her fist at her.

‘I never ‘ad any money from anyone.’

‘Don’ talk ter me; I know yer did. Yer dirty bitch! You oughter be ishimed of yourself tikin’ a married man from ‘is family, an’ ‘im old enough ter be yer father.’

‘She’s right there!’ said one or two of the onlooking women. ‘There can’t be no good in ‘er if she tikes somebody else’s ‘usbind.’

‘I’ll give it yer!’ proceeded Mrs. Blakeston, getting more hot and excited, brandishing her fist, and speaking in a loud voice, hoarse with rage. ‘Oh, I’ve been tryin’ ter git ‘old on yer this four weeks. Why, you’re a prostitute — that’s wot you are!’

‘I’m not!’ answered Liza indignantly.

‘Yus, you are,’ repeated Mrs. Blakeston, advancing menacingly, so that Liza shrank back. ‘An’ wot’s more, ‘e treats yer like one. I know ‘oo give yer thet black eye; thet shows what ‘e thinks of yer! An’ serve yer bloomin’ well right if ‘e’d give yer one in both eyes!’

Mrs. Blakeston stood close in front of her, her heavy jaw protruded and the frown of her eyebrows dark and stern. For a moment she stood silent, contemplating Liza, while the surrounders looked on in breathless interest.

‘Yer dirty little bitch, you!’ she said at last. ‘Tike that!’ and with her open hand she gave her a sharp smack on the cheek.

Liza started back with a cry and put her hand up to her face.

‘An’ tike thet!’ added Mrs. Blakeston, repeating the blow. Then, gathering up the spittle in her mouth, she spat in Liza’s face.

Liza sprang on her, and with her hands spread out like claws buried her nails in the woman’s face and drew them down her cheeks. Mrs. Blakeston caught hold of her hair with both hands and tugged at it as hard as she could. But they were immediately separated.

‘‘Ere, ‘old ‘ard!’ said some of the men. ‘Fight it aht fair and square. Don’t go scratchin’ and maulin’ like thet.’

‘I’ll fight ‘er, I don’t mind!’ shouted Mrs. Blakeston, tucking up her sleeves and savagely glaring at her opponent.

Liza stood in front of her, pale and trembling; as she looked at her enemy, and saw the long red marks of her nails, with blood coming from one or two of them, she shrank back.

‘I don’t want ter fight,’ she said hoarsely.

‘Na, I don’t suppose yer do,’ hissed the other, ‘but yer’ll damn well ‘ave ter!’

‘She’s ever so much bigger than me; I’ve got no chanst,’ added Liza tearfully.

‘You should ‘ave thought of thet before. Come on!’ and with these words Mrs. Blakeston rushed upon her. She hit her with both fists one after the other. Liza did not try to guard herself, but imitating the woman’s motion, hit out with her own fists; and for a minute or two they continued thus, raining blows on one another with the same windmill motion of the arms. But Liza could not stand against the other woman’s weight; the blows came down heavy and rapid all over her face and head. She put up her hands to cover her face and  turned her head away, while Mrs. Blakeston kept on hitting mercilessly.

‘Time!’ shouted some of the men— ‘Time!’ and Mrs. Blakeston stopped to rest herself.

‘It don’t seem ‘ardly fair to set them two on tergether. Liza’s got no chanst against a big woman like thet,’ said a man among the crowd.

‘Well, it’s er’ own fault,’ answered a woman; ‘she didn’t oughter mess about with ‘er ‘usbind.’

‘Well, I don’t think it’s right,’ added another man. ‘She’s gettin’ it too much.’

‘An’ serve ‘er right too!’ said one of the women. ‘She deserves all she gets an’ a damn sight more inter the bargain.’

‘Quite right,’ put in a third; ‘a woman’s got no right ter tike someone’s ‘usbind from ‘er. An’ if she does she’s bloomin’ lucky if she gits off with a ‘idin’ — thet’s wot I think.’

‘So do I. But I wouldn’t ‘ave thought it of Liza. I never thought she was a wrong ‘un.’

‘Pretty specimen she is!’ said a little dark woman, who looked like a Jewess. ‘If she messed abaht with my old man, I’d stick ‘er — I swear I would!’

‘Now she’s been carryin’ on with one, she’ll try an’ git others — you see if she don’t.’

‘She’d better not come round my ‘ouse; I’ll soon give ‘er wot for.’

Meanwhile Liza was standing at one corner of the ring, trembling all over and crying bitterly. One of her eyes was bunged up, and her hair, all dishevelled, was hanging down over her face. Two young fellows, who had constituted themselves her seconds, were standing in front of her, offering rather ironical comfort. One of them had taken the bottom corners of her apron and was fanning her with it, while the other was showing her how to stand and hold her arms.

‘You stand up to ‘er, Liza,’ he was saying; ‘there ain’t no  good funkin’ it, you’ll simply get it all the worse. You ‘it ‘er back. Give ‘er one on the boko, like this — see; yer must show a bit of pluck, yer know.’

Liza tried to check her sobs.

‘Yus, ‘it ‘er ‘ard, that’s wot yer’ve got ter do,’ said the other. ‘An’ if yer find she’s gettin’ the better on yer, you close on ‘er and catch ‘old of ‘er ‘air and scratch ‘er.’

‘You’ve marked ‘er with yer nails, Liza. By gosh, you did fly on her when she spat at yer! thet’s the way ter do the job!’

Then turning to his fellow, he said:

‘D’yer remember thet fight as old Mother Cregg ‘ad with another woman in the street last year?’

‘Na,’ he answered, ‘I never saw thet.’

‘It was a cawker; an’ the cops come in and took ’em both off ter quod.’

Liza wished the policemen would come and take her off; she would willingly have gone to prison to escape the fiend in front of her; but no help came.

‘Time’s up!’ shouted the referee. ‘Fire away!’

‘Tike care of the cops!’ shouted a man.

‘There’s no fear abaht them,’ answered somebody else. ‘They always keeps out of the way when there’s anythin’ goin’ on.’

‘Fire away!’

Mrs. Blakeston attacked Liza madly; but the girl stood up bravely, and as well as she could gave back the blows she received. The spectators grew tremendously excited.

‘Got ‘im again!’ they shouted. ‘Give it ‘er, Liza, thet’s a good ‘un!— ‘it ‘er ‘ard!’

‘Two ter one on the old ‘un!’ shouted a sporting gentleman; but Liza found no backers.

‘Ain’t she standin’ up well now she’s roused?’ cried someone.

‘Oh, she’s got some pluck in ‘er, she ‘as!’

‘Thet’s a knock-aht!’ they shouted as Mrs. Blakeston brought her fist down on to Liza’s nose; the girl staggered back, and blood began to flow. Then, losing all fear, mad with rage, she made a rush on her enemy, and rained down blows all over her nose and eyes and mouth. The woman recoiled at the sudden violence of the onslaught, and the men cried:

‘By God, the little ‘un’s gettin’ the best of it!’

But quickly recovering herself the woman closed with Liza, and dug her nails into her flesh. Liza caught hold of her hair and pulled with all her might, and turning her teeth on Mrs. Blakeston tried to bite her. And thus for a minute they swayed about, scratching, tearing, biting, sweat and blood pouring down their faces, and their eyes fixed on one another, bloodshot and full of rage. The audience shouted and cheered and clapped their hands.

‘Wot the ‘ell’s up ‘ere?’

‘I sy, look there,’ said some of the women in a whisper. ‘It’s the ‘usbind!’

He stood on tiptoe and looked over the crowd.

‘My Gawd,’ he said, ‘it’s Liza!’

Then roughly pushing the people aside, he made his way through the crowd into the centre, and thrusting himself between the two women, tore them apart. He turned furiously on his wife.

‘By Gawd, I’ll give yer somethin’ for this!’

And for a moment they all three stood silently looking at one another.

Another man had been attracted by the crowd, and he, too, pushed his way through.

‘Come ‘ome, Liza,’ he said.

‘Tom!’

He took hold of her arm, and led her through the people, who gave way to let her pass. They walked silently through the street, Tom very grave, Liza weeping bitterly.

‘Oh, Tom,’ she sobbed after a while, ‘I couldn’t ‘elp it!’ Then, when her tears permitted, ‘I did love ‘im so!’

When they got to the door she plaintively said: ‘Come in,’ and he followed her to her room. Here she sank on to a chair, and gave herself up to her tears.

Tom wetted the end of a towel and began wiping her face, grimy with blood and tears. She let him do it, just moaning amid her sobs:

‘You are good ter me, Tom.’

‘Cheer up, old gal,’ he said kindly, ‘it’s all over now.’

After a while the excess of crying brought its cessation. She drank some water, and then taking up a broken handglass she looked at herself, saying:

‘I am a sight!’ and proceeded to wind up her hair. ‘You ‘ave been good ter me, Tom,’ she repeated, her voice still broken with sobs; and as he sat down beside her she took his hand.

‘Na, I ain’t,’ he answered; ‘it’s only wot anybody ‘ud ‘ave done.’

‘Yer know, Tom,’ she said, after a little silence, ‘I’m so sorry I spoke cross like when I met yer in the street; you ain’t spoke ter me since.’

‘Oh, thet’s all over now, old lidy, we needn’t think of thet.’

‘Oh, but I ‘ave treated yer bad. I’m a regular wrong ‘un, I am.’

He pressed her hand without speaking.

‘I say, Tom,’ she began, after another pause. ‘Did yer know thet — well, you know — before ter-day?’

He blushed as he answered:

‘Yus.’

She spoke very sadly and slowly.

‘I thought yer did; yer seemed so cut up like when I used to meet yer. Yer did love me then, Tom, didn’t yer?’

‘I do now, dearie,’ he answered.

‘Ah, it’s too lite now,’ she sighed.

‘D’yer know, Liza,’ he said, ‘I just abaht kicked the life aht of a feller ‘cause ‘e said you was messin’ abaht with — with ‘im.’

‘An’ yer knew I was?’

‘Yus — but I wasn’t goin’ ter ‘ave anyone say it before me.’

‘They’ve all rounded on me except you, Tom. I’d ‘ave done better if I’d tiken you when you arst me; I shouldn’t be where I am now, if I ‘ad.’

‘Well, won’t yer now? Won’t yer ‘ave me now?’

‘Me? After wot’s ‘appened?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind abaht thet. Thet don’t matter ter me if you’ll marry me. I fair can’t live without yer, Liza — won’t yer?’

She groaned.

‘Na, I can’t, Tom, it wouldn’t be right.’

‘Why, not, if I don’t mind?’

‘Tom,’ she said, looking down, almost whispering, ‘I’m like that — you know!’

‘Wot d’yer mean?’

She could scarcely utter the words —

‘I think I’m in the family wy.’

He paused a moment; then spoke again.

‘Well — I don’t mind, if yer’ll only marry me.’

‘Na, I can’t, Tom,’ she said, bursting into tears; ‘I can’t, but you are so good ter me; I’d do anythin’ ter mike it up ter you.’

She put her arms round his neck and slid on to his knees.

‘Yer know, Tom, I couldn’t marry yer now; but anythin’ else — if yer wants me ter do anythin’ else, I’ll do it if it’ll mike you ‘appy.’

He did not understand, but only said:

‘You’re a good gal, Liza,’ and bending down he kissed her gravely on the forehead.

Then with a sigh he lifted her down, and getting up left  her alone. For a while she sat where he left her, but as she thought of all she had gone through her loneliness and misery overcame her, the tears welled forth, and throwing herself on the bed she buried her face in the pillows.

Jim stood looking at Liza as she went off with Tom, and his wife watched him jealously.

‘It’s ‘er you’re thinkin’ abaht. Of course you’d ‘ave liked ter tike ‘er ‘ome yerself, I know, an’ leave me to shift for myself.’

‘Shut up!’ said Jim, angrily turning upon her.

‘I shan’t shut up,’ she answered, raising her voice. ‘Nice ‘usbind you are. Go’ lumme, as good as they mike ’em! Nice thing ter go an’ leave yer wife and children for a thing like thet! At your age, too! You oughter be ashimed of yerself. Why, it’s like messin’ abaht with your own daughter!’

‘By God!’ — he ground his teeth with rage— ‘if yer don’t leave me alone, I’ll kick the life aht of yer!’

‘There!’ she said, turning to the crowd— ‘there, see ‘ow ‘e treats me! Listen ter that! I’ve been ‘is wife for twenty years, an’ yer couldn’t ‘ave ‘ad a better wife, an’ I’ve bore ‘im nine children, yet say nothin’ of a miscarriage, an’ I’ve got another comin’, an’ thet’s ‘ow ‘e treats me! Nice ‘usbind, ain’t it?’ She looked at him scornfully, then again at the surrounders as if for their opinion.

‘Well, I ain’t goin’ ter stay ‘ere all night; get aht of the light!’ He pushed aside the people who barred his way, and the one or two who growled a little at his roughness, looking at his angry face, were afraid to complain.

‘Look at ‘im!’ said his wife. ‘‘E’s afraid, ‘e is. See ‘im slinkin’ awy like a bloomin’ mongrel with ‘is tail between ‘is legs. Ugh!’ She walked just behind him, shouting and brandishing her arms.

‘Yer dirty beast, you,’ she yelled, ‘ter go foolin’ abaht with a little girl! Ugh! I wish yer wasn’t my ‘usbind; I wouldn’t  be seen drowned with yer, if I could ‘elp it. Yer mike me sick ter look at yer.’

The crowd followed them on both sides of the road, keeping at a discreet distance, but still eagerly listening.

Jim turned on her once or twice and said:

‘Shut up!’

But it only made her more angry. ‘I tell yer I shan’t shut up. I don’t care ‘oo knows it, you’re a —— , you are! I’m ashimed the children should ‘ave such a father as you. D’yer think I didn’t know wot you was up ter them nights you was awy — courtin’, yus, courtin’? You’re a nice man, you are!’

Jim did not answer her, but walked on. At last he turned round to the people who were following and said:

‘Na then, wot d’you want ‘ere? You jolly well clear, or I’ll give some of you somethin’!’

They were mostly boys and women, and at his words they shrank back.

‘‘E’s afraid ter sy anythin’ ter me,’ jeered Mrs. Blakeston. ‘‘E’s a beauty!’

Jim entered his house, and she followed him till they came up into their room. Polly was giving the children their tea. They all started up as they saw their mother with her hair and clothes in disorder, blotches of dried blood on her face, and the long scratch-marks.

‘Oh, mother,’ said Polly, ‘wot is the matter?’

‘‘E’s the matter.’ she answered, pointing to her husband. ‘It’s through ‘im I’ve got all this. Look at yer father, children; e’s a father to be proud of, leavin’ yer ter starve an’ spendin’ ‘is week’s money on a dirty little strumper.’

Jim felt easier now he had not got so many strange eyes on him.

‘Now, look ‘ere,’ he said, ‘I’m not goin’ ter stand this much longer, so just you tike care.’

‘I ain’t frightened of yer. I know yer’d like ter kill me, but yer’ll get strung up if you do.’

‘Na, I won’t kill yer, but if I ‘ave any more of your sauce I’ll do the next thing to it.’

‘Touch me if yer dare,’ she said, ‘I’ll ‘ave the law on you. An’ I shouldn’t mind ‘ow many month’s ‘ard you got.’

‘Be quiet!’ he said, and, closing his hand, gave her a heavy blow in the chest that made her stagger.

‘Oh, you —— !’ she screamed.

She seized the poker, and in a fury of rage rushed at him.

‘Would yer?’ he said, catching hold of it and wrenching it from her grasp. He threw it to the end of the room and grappled with her. For a moment they swayed about from side to side, then with an effort he lifted her off her feet and threw her to the ground; but she caught hold of him and he came down on the top of her. She screamed as her head thumped down on the floor, and the children, who were standing huddled up in a corner, terrified, screamed too.

Jim caught hold of his wife’s head and began beating it against the floor.

She cried out: ‘You’re killing me! Help! help!’

Polly in terror ran up to her father and tried to pull him off.

‘Father, don’t ‘it ‘er! Anythin’ but thet — for God’s sike!’

‘Leave me alone,’ he said, ‘or I’ll give you somethin’ too.’

She caught hold of his arm, but Jim, still kneeling on his wife, gave Polly a backhanded blow which sent her staggering back.

‘Tike that!’

Polly ran out of the room, downstairs to the first-floor front, where two men and two women were sitting at tea.

‘Oh, come an’ stop father!’ she cried. ‘‘E’s killin’ mother!’

‘Why, wot’s ‘e doin’?’

‘Oh, ‘e’s got ‘er on the floor, an’ ‘e’s bangin’ ‘er ‘ead. ‘E’s payin’ ‘er aht for givin’ Liza Kemp a ‘idin’.’

One of the women started up and said to her husband:

‘Come on, John, you go an’ stop it.’

‘Don’t you, John,’ said the other man. ‘When a man’s givin’ ‘is wife socks it’s best not ter interfere.’

‘But ‘e’s killin’ ‘er,’ repeated Polly, trembling with fright.

‘Garn!’ rejoined the man, ‘she’ll git over it; an’ p’raps she deserves it, for all you know.’

John sat undecided, looking now at Polly, now at his wife, and now at the other man.

‘Oh, do be quick — for God’s sike!’ said Polly.

At that moment a sound as of something smashing was heard upstairs, and a woman’s shriek. Mrs. Blakeston, in an effort to tear herself away from her husband, had knocked up against the wash-hand stand, and the whole thing had crashed down.

‘Go on, John,’ said the wife.

‘No, I ain’t goin’; I shan’t do no good, an’ ‘e’ll only round on me.’

‘Well, you are a bloomin’ lot of cowards, thet’s all I can say,’ indignantly answered the wife. ‘But I ain’t goin’ ter see a woman murdered; I’ll go an’ stop ‘im.’

With that she ran upstairs and threw open the door. Jim was still kneeling on his wife, hitting her furiously, while she was trying to protect her head and face with her hands.

‘Leave off!’ shouted the woman.

Jim looked up. ‘‘Oo the devil are you?’ he said.

‘Leave off, I tell yer. Aren’t yer ashimed of yerself, knockin’ a woman abaht like that?’ And she sprang at him, seizing his fist.

‘Let go,’ he said, ‘or I’ll give you a bit.’

‘Yer’d better not touch me,’ she said. ‘Yer dirty coward! Why, look at ‘er, she’s almost senseless.’

Jim stopped and gazed at his wife. He got up and gave her a kick.

‘Git up!’ he said; but she remained huddled up on the  floor, moaning feebly. The woman from downstairs went on her knees and took her head in her arms.

‘Never mind, Mrs. Blakeston. ‘E’s not goin’ ter touch yer. ‘Ere, drink this little drop of water.’ Then turning to Jim, with infinite disdain: ‘Yer dirty blackguard, you! If I was a man I’d give you something for this.’

Jim put on his hat and went out, slamming the door, while the woman shouted after him: ‘Good riddance!’

‘Lord love yer,’ said Mrs. Kemp, ‘wot is the matter?’

She had just come in, and opening the door had started back in surprise at seeing Liza on the bed, all tears. Liza made no answer, but cried as if her heart were breaking. Mrs. Kemp went up to her and tried to look at her face.

‘Don’t cry, dearie; tell us wot it is.’

Liza sat up and dried her eyes.

‘I am so un’appy!’

‘Wot ‘ave yer been doin’ ter yer fice? My!’

‘Nothin’.’

‘Garn! Yer can’t ‘ave got a fice like thet all by itself.’

‘I ‘ad a bit of a scrimmage with a woman dahn the street,’ sobbed out Liza.

‘She ‘as give yer a doin’; an’ yer all upset — an’ look at yer eye! I brought in a little bit of stike for ter-morrer’s dinner; you just cut a bit off an’ put it over yer optic, that’ll soon put it right. I always used ter do thet myself when me an’ your poor father ‘ad words.’

‘Oh, I’m all over in a tremble, an’ my ‘ead, oo, my ‘ead does feel bad!’

‘I know wot yer want,’ remarked Mrs. Kemp, nodding her head, ‘an’ it so ‘appens as I’ve got the very thing with me.’ She pulled a medicine bottle out of her pocket, and taking out the cork smelt it. ‘Thet’s good stuff, none of your firewater or your methylated spirit. I don’t often indulge in sich things, but when I do I likes to ‘ave the best.’

She handed the bottle to Liza, who took a mouthful and gave it her back; she had a drink herself, and smacked her lips.

‘Thet’s good stuff. ‘Ave a drop more.’

‘Na,’ said Liza, ‘I ain’t used ter drinkin’ spirits.’

She felt dull and miserable, and a heavy pain throbbed through her head. If she could only forget!

‘Na, I know you’re not, but, bless your soul, thet won’ ‘urt yer. It’ll do you no end of good. Why, often when I’ve been feelin’ thet done up thet I didn’t know wot ter do with myself, I’ve just ‘ad a little drop of whisky or gin — I’m not partic’ler wot spirit it is — an’ it’s pulled me up wonderful.’

Liza took another sip, a slightly longer one; it burnt as it went down her throat, and sent through her a feeling of comfortable warmth.

‘I really do think it’s doin’ me good,’ she said, wiping her eyes and giving a sigh of relief as the crying ceased.

‘I knew it would. Tike my word for it, if people took a little drop of spirits in time, there’d be much less sickness abaht.’

They sat for a while in silence, then Mrs. Kemp remarked:

‘Yer know, Liza, it strikes me as ‘ow we could do with a drop more. You not bein’ in the ‘abit of tikin’ anythin’ I only brought just this little drop for me; an’ it ain’t took us long ter finish thet up. But as you’re an invalid like we’ll git a little more this time; it’s sure ter turn aht useful.’

‘But you ain’t got nothin’ ter put it in.’

‘Yus, I ‘ave,’ answered Mrs. Kemp; ‘there’s thet bottle as they gives me at the ‘orspital. Just empty the medicine aht into the pile, an’ wash it aht, an’ I’ll tike it round to the pub myself.’

Liza, when she was left alone, began to turn things over in her mind. She did not feel so utterly unhappy as before, for the things she had gone through seemed further away.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘it don’t so much matter.’

Mrs. Kemp came in.

‘‘Ave a little drop more, Liza.’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t mind if I do. I’ll get some tumblers, shall I? There’s no mistike abaht it,’ she added, when she had taken a little, ‘it do buck yer up.’

‘You’re right, Liza — you’re right. An’ you wanted it badly. Fancy you ‘avin’ a fight with a woman! Oh, I’ve ‘ad some in my day, but then I wasn’t a little bit of a thing like you is. I wish I’d been there, I wouldn’t ‘ave stood by an’ looked on while my daughter was gettin’ the worst of it; although I’m turned sixty-five, an’ gettin’ on for sixty-six, I’d ‘ave said to ‘er: “If you touch my daughter you’ll ‘ave me ter deal with, so just look aht!”’

She brandished her glass, and that reminding her, she refilled it and Liza’s.

‘Ah, Liza,’ she remarked, ‘you’re a chip of the old block. Ter see you settin’ there an’ ‘avin’ your little drop, it mikes me feel as if I was livin’ a better life. Yer used ter be rather ‘ard on me, Liza, ‘cause I took a little drop on Saturday nights. An’, mind, I don’t sy I didn’t tike a little drop too much sometimes — accidents will occur even in the best regulated of families, but wot I say is this — it’s good stuff, I say, an’ it don’t ‘urt yer.’

‘Buck up, old gal!’ said Liza, filling the glasses, ‘no ‘eel-taps. I feel like a new woman now. I was thet dahn in the dumps — well, I shouldn’t ‘ave cared if I’d been at the bottom of the river, an’ thet’s the truth.’

‘You don’t sy so,’ replied her affectionate mother.

‘Yus, I do, an’ I mean it too, but I don’t feel like thet now. You’re right, mother, when you’re in trouble there’s nothin’ like a bit of spirits.’

‘Well, if I don’t know, I dunno ‘oo does, for the trouble I’ve ‘ad, it ‘ud be enough to kill many women. Well, I’ve ‘ad thirteen children, an’ you can think wot thet was; everyone  I ‘ad I used ter sy I wouldn’t ‘ave no more — but one does, yer know. You’ll ‘ave a family some day, Liza, an’ I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t ‘ave as many as me. We come from a very prodigal family, we do, we’ve all gone in ter double figures, except your Aunt Mary, who only ‘ad three — but then she wasn’t married, so it didn’t count, like.’

They drank each other’s health. Everything was getting blurred to Liza, she was losing her head.

‘Yus,’ went on Mrs. Kemp, ‘I’ve ‘ad thirteen children an’ I’m proud of it. As your poor dear father used ter sy, it shows as ‘ow one’s got the blood of a Briton in one. Your poor dear father, ‘e was a great ‘and at speakin’ ‘e was: ‘e used ter speak at parliamentary meetin’s — I really believe ‘e’d ‘ave been a Member of Parliament if ‘e’d been alive now. Well, as I was sayin’, your father ‘e used ter sy, “None of your small families for me, I don’t approve of them,” says ‘e. ‘E was a man of very ‘igh principles, an’ by politics ‘e was a Radical. “No,” says ‘e, when ‘e got talkin’, “when a man can ‘ave a family risin’ into double figures, it shows ‘e’s got the backbone of a Briton in ‘im. That’s the stuff as ‘as built up England’s nime and glory! When one thinks of the mighty British Hempire,” says ‘e, “on which the sun never sets from mornin’ till night, one ‘as ter be proud of ‘isself, an’ one ‘as ter do one’s duty in thet walk of life in which it ‘as pleased Providence ter set one — an’ every man’s fust duty is ter get as many children as ‘e bloomin’ well can.” Lord love yer— ‘e could talk, I can tell yer.’

‘Drink up, mother,’ said Liza. ‘You’re not ‘alf drinkin’.’ She flourished the bottle. ‘I don’t care a twopanny ‘ang for all them blokes; I’m quite ‘appy, an’ I don’t want anythin’ else.’

‘I can see you’re my daughter now,’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘When yer used ter round on me I used ter think as ‘ow if I ‘adn’t carried yer for nine months, it must ‘ave been some mistike, an’ yer wasn’t my daughter at all. When you come  ter think of it, a man ‘e don’t know if it’s ‘is child or somebody else’s, but yer can’t deceive a woman like thet. Yer couldn’t palm off somebody else’s kid on ‘er.’

‘I am beginnin’ ter feel quite lively,’ said Liza. ‘I dunno wot it is, but I feel as if I wanted to laugh till I fairly split my sides.’

And she began to sing: ‘For ‘e’s a jolly good feller — for ‘e’s a jolly good feller!’

Her dress was all disarranged; her face covered with the scars of scratches, and clots of blood had fixed under her nose; her eye had swollen up so that it was nearly closed, and red; her hair was hanging over her face and shoulders, and she laughed stupidly and leered with heavy, sodden ugliness.

‘Disy, Disy! I can’t afford a kerridge. But you’ll look neat, on the seat Of a bicycle mide for two.’

She shouted out the tunes, beating time on the table, and her mother, grinning, with her thin, grey hair hanging dishevelled over her head, joined in with her weak, cracked voice —

‘Oh, dem golden kippers, oh!’

Then Liza grew more melancholy and broke into ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

‘Should old acquaintance be forgot And never brought to mind?

For old lang syne’.

Finally they both grew silent, and in a little while there came a snore from Mrs. Kemp; her head fell forward to her chest; Liza tumbled from her chair on to the bed, and sprawling across it fell asleep.

‘Although I am drunk and bad, be you kind, Cast a glance at this heart which is bewildered and distressed. O God, take away from my mind my cry and my complaint. Offer wine, and take sorrow from my remembrance. Offer wine.’

12

About the middle of the night Liza woke; her mouth was hot and dry, and a sharp, cutting pain passed through her head as she moved. Her mother had evidently roused herself, for she was lying in bed by her side, partially undressed, with all the bedclothes rolled round her. Liza shivered in the cold night, and taking off some of her things — her boots, her skirt, and jacket — got right into bed; she tried to get some of the blanket from her mother, but as she pulled Mrs. Kemp gave a growl in her sleep and drew the clothes more tightly round her. So Liza put over herself her skirt and a shawl, which was lying over the end of the bed, and tried to go to sleep.

But she could not; her head and hands were broiling hot, and she was terribly thirsty; when she lifted herself up to get a drink of water such a pang went through her head that she fell back on the bed groaning, and lay there with beating heart. And strange pains that she did not know went through her. Then a cold shiver seemed to rise in the very marrow of her bones and run down every artery and vein, freezing the blood; her skin puckered up, and drawing up her legs she lay huddled together in a heap, the shawl wrapped tightly round her, and her teeth chattering. Shivering, she whispered:

‘Oh, I’m so cold, so cold. Mother, give me some clothes; I shall die of the cold. Oh, I’m freezing!’

But after awhile the cold seemed to give way, and a sudden heat seized her, flushing her face, making her break out into perspiration, so that she threw everything off and loosened the things about her neck.

‘Give us a drink,’ she said. ‘Oh, I’d give anythin’ for a little drop of water!’

There was no one to hear; Mrs. Kemp continued to sleep heavily, occasionally breaking out into a little snore.

Liza remained there, now shivering with cold, now panting for breath, listening to the regular, heavy breathing by her side, and in her pain she sobbed. She pulled at her pillow and said:

‘Why can’t I go to sleep? Why can’t I sleep like ‘er?’

And the darkness was awful; it was a heavy, ghastly blackness, that seemed palpable, so that it frightened her and she looked for relief at the faint light glimmering through the window from a distant street-lamp. She thought the night would never end — the minutes seemed like hours, and she wondered how she should live through till morning. And strange pains that she did not know went through her.

Still the night went on, the darkness continued, cold and horrible, and her mother breathed loudly and steadily by her side.

At last with the morning sleep came; but the sleep was almost worse than the wakefulness, for it was accompanied by ugly, disturbing dreams. Liza thought she was going through the fight with her enemy, and Mrs. Blakeston grew enormous in size, and multiplied, so that every way she turned the figure confronted her. And she began running away, and she ran and ran till she found herself reckoning up an account she had puzzled over in the morning, and she did it backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, starting here, starting there, and the figures got mixed up with other things, and she had to begin over again, and everything jumbled up, and her head whirled, till finally, with a start, she woke.

The darkness had given way to a cold, grey dawn, her uncovered legs were chilled to the bone, and by her side she heard again the regular, nasal breathing of the drunkard.

For a long while she lay where she was, feeling very sick and ill, but better than in the night. At last her mother woke.

‘Liza!’ she called.

‘Yus, mother,’ she answered feebly.

‘Git us a cup of tea, will yer?’

‘I can’t, mother, I’m ill.’

‘Garn!’ said Mrs. Kemp, in surprise. Then looking at her: ‘Swop me bob, wot’s up with yer? Why, yer cheeks is flushed, an’ yer forehead — it is ‘ot! Wot’s the matter with yer, gal?’

‘I dunno,’ said Liza. ‘I’ve been thet bad all night, I thought I was goin’ ter die.’

‘I know wot it is,’ said Mrs. Kemp, shaking her head; ‘the fact is, you ain’t used ter drinkin’, an’ of course it’s upset yer. Now me, why I’m as fresh as a disy. Tike my word, there ain’t no good in teetotalism; it finds yer aht in the end, an’ it’s found you aht.’

Mrs. Kemp considered it a judgment of Providence. She got up and mixed some whisky and water.

‘‘Ere, drink this,’ she said. ‘When one’s ‘ad a drop too much at night, there’s nothin’ like havin’ a drop more in the mornin’ ter put one right. It just acts like magic.’

‘Tike it awy,’ said Liza, turning from it in disgust; ‘the smell of it gives me the sick. I’ll never touch spirits again.’

‘Ah, thet’s wot we all says sometime in our lives, but we does, an’ wot’s more we can’t do withaht it. Why, me, the ‘ard life I’ve ‘ad—’ It is unnecessary to repeat Mrs. Kemp’s repetitions.

Liza did not get up all day. Tom came to inquire after her, and was told she was very ill. Liza plaintively asked whether anyone else had been, and sighed a little when her mother answered no. But she felt too ill to think much or trouble much about anything. The fever came again as the day wore on, and the pains in her head grew worse. Her mother came to bed, and quickly went off to sleep, leaving Liza to bear her agony alone. She began to have frightful pains all over her, and she held her breath to prevent herself from crying  out and waking her mother. She clutched the sheets in her agony, and at last, about six o’clock in the morning, she could bear it no longer, and in the anguish of labour screamed out, and woke her mother.

Mrs. Kemp was frightened out of her wits. Going upstairs she woke the woman who lived on the floor above her. Without hesitating, the good lady put on a skirt and came down.

‘She’s ‘ad a miss,’ she said, after looking at Liza. ‘Is there anyone you could send to the ‘orspital?’

‘Na, I dunno ‘oo I could get at this hour?’

‘Well, I’ll git my old man ter go.’

She called her husband, and sent him off. She was a stout, middle-aged woman, rough-visaged and strong-armed. Her name was Mrs. Hodges.

‘It’s lucky you came ter me,’ she said, when she had settled down. ‘I go aht nursin’, yer know, so I know all abaht it.’

‘Well, you surprise me,’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘I didn’t know as Liza was thet way. She never told me nothin’ abaht it.’

‘D’yer know ‘oo it is ‘as done it?’

‘Now you ask me somethin’ I don’t know,’ replied Mrs. Kemp. ‘But now I come ter think of it, it must be thet there Tom. ‘E’s been keepin’ company with Liza. ‘E’s a single man, so they’ll be able ter get married — thet’s somethin’.’

‘It ain’t Tom,’ feebly said Liza.

‘Not ‘im; ‘oo is it, then?’

Liza did not answer.

‘Eh?’ repeated the mother, ‘‘oo is it?’

Liza lay still without speaking.

‘Never mind, Mrs. Kemp,’ said Mrs. Hodges, ‘don’t worry ‘er now; you’ll be able ter find aht all abaht it when she gits better.’

For a while the two women sat still, waiting the doctor’s coming, and Liza lay gazing vacantly at the wall, panting for  breath. Sometimes Jim crossed her mind, and she opened her mouth to call for him, but in her despair she restrained herself.

The doctor came.

‘D’you think she’s bad, doctor?’ asked Mrs. Hodges.

‘I’m afraid she is rather,’ he answered. ‘I’ll come in again this evening.’

‘Oh, doctor,’ said Mrs. Kemp, as he was going, ‘could yer give me somethin’ for my rheumatics? I’m a martyr to rheumatism, an’ these cold days I ‘ardly knows wot ter do with myself. An’, doctor, could you let me ‘ave some beef-tea? My ‘usbind’s dead, an’ of course I can’t do no work with my daughter ill like this, an’ we’re very short—’

The day passed, and in the evening Mrs. Hodges, who had been attending to her own domestic duties, came downstairs again. Mrs. Kemp was on the bed sleeping.

‘I was just ‘avin’ a little nap,’ she said to Mrs. Hodges, on waking.

‘‘Ow is the girl?’ asked that lady.

‘Oh,’ answered Mrs. Kemp, ‘my rheumatics ‘as been thet bad I really ‘aven’t known wot ter do with myself, an’ now Liza can’t rub me I’m worse than ever. It is unfortunate thet she should get ill just now when I want so much attendin’ ter myself, but there, it’s just my luck!’

Mrs. Hodges went over and looked at Liza; she was lying just as when she left in the morning, her cheeks flushed, her mouth open for breath, and tiny beads of sweat stood on her forehead.

‘‘Ow are yer, ducky?’ asked Mrs. Hodges; but Liza did not answer.

‘It’s my belief she’s unconscious,’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘I’ve been askin’ ‘er ‘oo it was as done it, but she don’t seem to ‘ear wot I say. It’s been a great shock ter me, Mrs. ‘Odges.’

‘I believe you,’ replied that lady, sympathetically.

‘Well, when you come in and said wot it was, yer might  ‘ave knocked me dahn with a feather. I knew no more than the dead wot ‘ad ‘appened.’

‘I saw at once wot it was,’ said Mrs. Hodges, nodding her head.

‘Yus, of course, you knew. I expect you’ve ‘ad a great deal of practice one way an’ another.’

‘You’re right, Mrs. Kemp, you’re right. I’ve been on the job now for nearly twenty years, an’ if I don’t know somethin’ abaht it I ought.’

‘D’yer finds it pays well?’

‘Well, Mrs. Kemp, tike it all in all, I ain’t got no grounds for complaint. I’m in the ‘abit of askin’ five shillings, an’ I will say this, I don’t think it’s too much for wot I do.’

The news of Liza’s illness had quickly spread, and more than once in the course of the day a neighbour had come to ask after her. There was a knock at the door now, and Mrs. Hodges opened it. Tom stood on the threshold asking to come in.

‘Yus, you can come,’ said Mrs. Kemp.

He advanced on tiptoe, so as to make no noise, and for a while stood silently looking at Liza. Mrs. Hodges was by his side.

‘Can I speak to ‘er?’ he whispered.

‘She can’t ‘ear you.’

He groaned.

‘D’yer think she’ll get arright?’ he asked.

Mrs. Hodges shrugged her shoulders.

‘I shouldn’t like ter give an opinion,’ she said, cautiously.

Tom bent over Liza, and, blushing, kissed her; then, without speaking further, went out of the room.

‘Thet’s the young man as was courtin’ ‘er,’ said Mrs. Kemp, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.

Soon after the Doctor came.

‘Wot do yer think of ‘er, doctor?’ said Mrs. Hodges,  bustling forwards authoritatively in her position of midwife and sick-nurse.

‘I’m afraid she’s very bad.’

‘D’yer think she’s goin’ ter die?’ she asked, dropping her voice to a whisper.

‘I’m afraid so!’

As the doctor sat down by Liza’s side Mrs. Hodges turned round and significantly nodded to Mrs. Kemp, who put her handkerchief to her eyes. Then she went outside to the little group waiting at the door.

‘Wot does the doctor sy?’ they asked, among them Tom.

‘‘E says just wot I’ve been sayin’ all along; I knew she wouldn’t live.’

And Tom burst out: ‘Oh, Liza!’

As she retired a woman remarked:

‘Mrs. ‘Odges is very clever, I think.’

‘Yus,’ remarked another, ‘she got me through my last confinement simply wonderful. If it come to choosin’ between ’em I’d back Mrs. ‘Odges against forty doctors.’

‘Ter tell yer the truth, so would I. I’ve never known ‘er wrong yet.’

Mrs. Hodges sat down beside Mrs. Kemp and proceeded to comfort her.

‘Why don’t yer tike a little drop of brandy ter calm yer nerves, Mrs. Kemp?’ she said, ‘you want it.’

‘I was just feelin’ rather faint, an’ I couldn’t ‘elp thinkin’ as ‘ow twopenneth of whisky ‘ud do me good.’

‘Na, Mrs. Kemp,’ said Mrs. Hodges, earnestly, putting her hand on the other’s arm. ‘You tike my tip — when you’re queer there’s nothin’ like brandy for pullin’ yer togither. I don’t object to whisky myself, but as a medicine yer can’t beat brandy.’

‘Well, I won’t set up myself as knowin’ better than you Mrs. ‘Odges; I’ll do wot you think right.’

Quite accidentally there was some in the room, and Mrs. Kemp poured it out for herself and her friend.

‘I’m not in the ‘abit of tikin’ anythin’ when I’m aht on business,’ she apologized, ‘but just ter keep you company I don’t mind if I do.’

‘Your ‘ealth. Mrs. ‘Odges.’

‘Sime ter you, an’ thank yer, Mrs. Kemp.’

Liza lay still, breathing very quietly, her eyes closed. The doctor kept his fingers on her pulse.

‘I’ve been very unfortunate of lite,’ remarked Mrs. Hodges, as she licked her lips, ‘this mikes the second death I’ve ‘ad in the last ten days — women, I mean, of course I don’t count bibies.’

‘Yer don’t sy so.’

‘Of course the other one — well, she was only a prostitute, so it didn’t so much matter. It ain’t like another woman is it?’

‘Na, you’re right.’

‘Still, one don’t like ’em ter die, even if they are thet. One mustn’t be too ‘ard on ’em.’

‘Strikes me you’ve got a very kind ‘eart, Mrs. ‘Odges,’ said Mrs. Kemp.

‘I ‘ave thet; an’ I often says it ‘ud be better for my peace of mind an’ my business if I ‘adn’t. I ‘ave ter go through a lot, I do; but I can say this for myself, I always gives satisfaction, an’ thet’s somethin’ as all lidies in my line can’t say.’

They sipped their brandy for a while.

‘It’s a great trial ter me that this should ‘ave ‘appened,’ said Mrs. Kemp, coming to the subject that had been disturbing her for some time. ‘Mine’s always been a very respectable family, an’ such a thing as this ‘as never ‘appened before. No, Mrs. ‘Odges, I was lawfully married in church, an’ I’ve got my marriage lines now ter show I was, an’ thet one of my daughters should ‘ave gone wrong in this way — well, I can’t  understand it. I give ‘er a good education, an’ she ‘ad all the comforts of a ‘ome. She never wanted for nothin’; I worked myself to the bone ter keep ‘er in luxury, an’ then thet she should go an’ disgrace me like this!’

‘I understand wot yer mean. Mrs. Kemp.’

‘I can tell you my family was very respectable; an’ my ‘usband, ‘e earned twenty-five shillings a week, an’ was in the sime plice seventeen years; an’ ‘is employers sent a beautiful wreath ter put on ‘is coffin; an’ they tell me they never ‘ad such a good workman an’ sich an ‘onest man before. An’ me! Well, I can sy this — I’ve done my duty by the girl, an’ she’s never learnt anythin’ but good from me. Of course I ain’t always been in wot yer might call flourishing circumstances, but I’ve always set her a good example, as she could tell yer so ‘erself if she wasn’t speechless.’

Mrs. Kemp paused for a moment’s reflection.

‘As they sy in the Bible,’ she finished, ‘it’s enough ter mike one’s grey ‘airs go dahn into the ground in sorrer. I can show yer my marriage certificate. Of course one doesn’t like ter say much, because of course she’s very bad; but if she got well I should ‘ave given ‘er a talkin’ ter.’

There was another knock.

‘Do go an’ see ‘oo thet is; I can’t, on account of my rheumatics.’

Mrs. Hodges opened the door. It was Jim.

He was very white, and the blackness of his hair and beard, contrasting with the deathly pallor of his face, made him look ghastly. Mrs. Hodges stepped back.

‘‘Oo’s ‘e?’ she said, turning to Mrs. Kemp.

Jim pushed her aside and went up to the bed.

‘Doctor, is she very bad?’ he asked.

The doctor looked at him questioningly.

Jim whispered: ‘It was me as done it. She ain’t goin’ ter die, is she?’

The doctor nodded.

‘O God! wot shall I do? It was my fault! I wish I was dead!’

Jim took the girl’s head in his hands, and the tears burst from his eyes.

‘She ain’t dead yet, is she?’

‘She’s just living,’ said the doctor.

Jim bent down.

‘Liza, Liza, speak ter me! Liza, say you forgive me! Oh, speak ter me!’

His voice was full of agony. The doctor spoke.

‘She can’t hear you.’

‘Oh, she must hear me! Liza! Liza!’

He sank on his knees by the bedside.

They all remained silent: Liza lying stiller than ever, her breast unmoved by the feeble respiration, Jim looking at her very mournfully; the doctor grave, with his fingers on the pulse. The two women looked at Jim.

‘Fancy it bein’ ‘im!’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘Strike me lucky, ain’t ‘e a sight!’

‘You ‘ave got ‘er insured, Mrs. Kemp?’ asked the midwife. She could bear the silence no longer.

‘Trust me fur thet!’ replied the good lady. ‘I’ve ‘ad ‘er insured ever since she was born. Why, only the other dy I was sayin’ ter myself thet all thet money ‘ad been wisted, but you see it wasn’t; yer never know yer luck, you see!’

‘Quite right, Mrs. Kemp; I’m a rare one for insurin’. It’s a great thing. I’ve always insured all my children.’

‘The way I look on it is this,’ said Mrs. Kemp— ‘wotever yer do when they’re alive, an’ we all know as children is very tryin’ sometimes, you should give them a good funeral when they dies. Thet’s my motto, an’ I’ve always acted up to it.’

‘Do you deal with Mr. Stearman?’ asked Mrs. Hodges.

‘No, Mrs. ‘Odges, for undertikin’ give me Mr. Footley every time. In the black line ‘e’s fust an’ the rest nowhere!’

‘Well, thet’s very strange now — thet’s just wot I think. Mr. Footley does ‘is work well, an’ ‘e’s very reasonable. I’m a very old customer of ‘is, an’ ‘e lets me ‘ave things as cheap as anybody.’

‘Does ‘e indeed! Well Mrs. ‘Odges if it ain’t askin’ too much of yer, I should look upon it as very kind if you’d go an’ mike the arrangements for Liza.’

‘Why, certainly, Mrs. Kemp. I’m always willin’ ter do a good turn to anybody, if I can.’

‘I want it done very respectable,’ said Mrs. Kemp; ‘I’m not goin’ ter stint for nothin’ for my daughter’s funeral. I like plumes, you know, although they is a bit extra.’

‘Never you fear, Mrs. Kemp, it shall be done as well as if it was for my own ‘usbind, an’ I can’t say more than thet. Mr. Footley thinks a deal of me, ‘e does! Why, only the other dy as I was goin’ inter ‘is shop ‘e says “Good mornin’, Mrs. ‘Odges.” “Good mornin’, Mr. Footley,” says I. “You’ve jest come in the nick of time,” says ‘e. “This gentleman an’ myself,” pointin’ to another gentleman as was standin’ there, “we was ‘avin’ a bit of an argument. Now you’re a very intelligent woman, Mrs. ‘Odges, and a good customer too.” “I can say thet for myself,” say I, “I gives yer all the work I can.” “I believe you,” says ‘e. “Well,” ‘e says, “now which do you think? Does hoak look better than helm, or does helm look better than hoak? Hoak versus helm, thet’s the question.” “Well, Mr. Footley,” says I, “for my own private opinion, when you’ve got a nice brass plite in the middle, an’ nice brass ‘andles each end, there’s nothin’ like hoak.” “Quite right,” says ‘e, “thet’s wot I think; for coffins give me hoak any day, an’ I ‘ope,” says ‘e, “when the Lord sees fit ter call me to ‘Imself, I shall be put in a hoak coffin myself.” “Amen,” says I.’

‘I like hoak,’ said Mrs. Kemp. ‘My poor ‘usband ‘e ‘ad a hoak coffin. We did ‘ave a job with ‘im, I can tell yer. You know ‘e ‘ad dropsy, an’ ‘e swell up — oh, ‘e did swell; ‘is  own mother wouldn’t ‘ave known ‘im. Why, ‘is leg swell up till it was as big round as ‘is body, swop me bob, it did.’

‘Did it indeed!’ ejaculated Mrs. Hodges.

‘Yus, an’ when ‘e died they sent the coffin up. I didn’t ‘ave Mr. Footley at thet time; we didn’t live ‘ere then, we lived in Battersea, an’ all our undertikin’ was done by Mr. Brownin’; well, ‘e sent the coffin up, an’ we got my old man in, but we couldn’t get the lid down, he was so swell up. Well, Mr. Brownin’, ‘e was a great big man, thirteen stone if ‘e was a ounce. Well, ‘e stood on the coffin, an’ a young man ‘e ‘ad with ‘im stood on it too, an’ the lid simply wouldn’t go dahn; so Mr. Browning’, ‘e said, “Jump on, missus,” so I was in my widow’s weeds, yer know, but we ‘ad ter git it dahn, so I stood on it, an’ we all jumped, an’ at last we got it to, an’ screwed it; but, lor’, we did ‘ave a job; I shall never forget it.’

Then all was silence. And a heaviness seemed to fill the air like a grey blight, cold and suffocating; and the heaviness was Death. They felt the presence in the room, and they dared not move, they dared not draw their breath. The silence was terrifying.

Suddenly a sound was heard — a loud rattle. It was from the bed and rang through the room, piercing the stillness.

The doctor opened one of Liza’s eyes and touched it, then he laid on her breast the hand he had been holding, and drew the sheet over her head.

Jim turned away with a look of intense weariness on his face, and the two women began weeping silently. The darkness was sinking before the day, and a dim, grey light came through the window. The lamp spluttered out.

THE MAKING OF A SAINT

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

EPILOGUE

The first edition’s title page

INTRODUCTION

THESE are the memoirs of the Beato Giuliano, brother of the Order of St Francis of Assisi, known in his worldly life as Filippo Brandolini; of which family I, Giulo Brandolini, am the last descendant. On the death of Fra Giuliano the manuscript was given to his nephew Leonello, on whom the estates devolved; and has since been handed down from father to son, as the relic of a member of the family whose piety and good works still shed lustre on the name of Brandolini.

It is perhaps necessary to explain how the resolution to give these memoirs to the world has eventually been arrived at. For my part, I should have allowed them to remain among the other papers of the family; but my wife wished otherwise. When she deserted her home in the New World to become the Countess Brandolini, she was very naturally interested at finding among my ancestors a man who had distinguished himself in good works, so as to be granted by the Pope the title of Beatus, which was acquired for him by the influence of his great-nephew not very long after his death; and, indeed, had our house retained the prosperity which it enjoyed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he would undoubtedly have been canonised, for it was a well certified fact that the necessary miracles had been performed by his remains and that prayers had been regularly offered at his tomb, but our estates had dwindled, so that we could not afford the necessary expenditure; and now, when my wife has restored its ancient magnificence to our house, times, alas! have changed. The good old customs of our fathers have fallen into disuse, and it is impossible to create a saint for ready money. However, my wife desired to publish an account of her pious ancestor. But a difficulty arose in the fact that there were no materials whatever for any relation of the life which Fra Giuliano led when he had entered the Franciscan monastery of Campomassa, and it was obvious that, even if there had been good works, prayer and fasting could not have afforded a very interesting story; and so we have been constrained to leave untold his pieties and recount instead his sins, for which there was every facility in the memoirs he had himself left behind him.

Not content with writing the story of his own life, Fra Giuliano begins with a mythical Consul of the Roman Republic, who is supposed to have founded the family by a somewhat discreditable union with somebody else’s wife. He then carries the story through countless ages till he arrives at his own conception, and the prodigies attending his birth, which he describes with great minuteness. He gives very amply the history of his childhood and boyhood, the period he spent as page at the Court of the Bentivogli of Bologna, and his adventures in the Neapolitan armies under the Duke of Calabria; but the whole story is narrated at such length, with so many digressions and details, and is sometimes so vague, incoherent and disjointed that, with whatever editing, it was considered impossible to make a clear and continuous narrative.

Fra Giuliano himself divided his life into two parts: the one he named the Time of Honey, being the period of expectation; the other the Time of Gall, being that of realisation. The second half commences with his arrival at the town of Forli, in the year 1488, and it is this part which we have decided to publish; for, notwithstanding its brevity, this was the most eventful period of his life, and the account of it seems to hang together in a sufficiently lucid fashion, centring round the conspiracy which resulted in the assassination of Girolamo Riario, and finishing with the author’s admission to the Order of St Francis. This, then, I have given exactly as he wrote it, neither adding nor suppressing a word. I do not deny that it would have pleased me a little to falsify the history, for the Anglo-Saxons are a race of idealists, as is shown in all their dealing, international and commercial; and truth they have always found a little ugly. I have a friend who lately wrote a story of the London poor, and his critics were properly disgusted because his characters dropped their aitches and often used bad language, and did not behave as elegantly as might be expected from the example they were continually receiving from their betters; while some of his readers were shocked to find that people existed in this world who did not possess the delicacy and refinement which they felt palpitating in their own bosoms. The author forgot that Truth is a naked lady, and that nudity is always shameful, unless it points a moral. If Truth has taken up her abode at the bottom of a well, it is clearly because she is conscious that she is no fit companion for decent people.

I am painfully aware that the persons of this drama were not actuated by the moral sentiments, which they might have acquired by education at a really good English public school, but one may find excuse for them in the recollection that their deeds took place four hundred years ago, and that they were not wretched paupers, but persons of the very highest rank. If they sinned, they sinned elegantly, and much may be forgiven to people whose pedigree is above suspicion. And the writer, as if unwilling to wound the susceptibilities of his readers, has taken care to hurl contempt at the only character whose family was distinctly not respectable.

Before making my bow, and leaving the reader with Filippo Brandolini, I will describe his appearance, shown in a portrait painted in the same year, 1488, and till the beginning of this century in the possession of my family, when it was sold, with many other works of art, to travellers in Italy. My wife has succeeded in buying back the portraits of several of my ancestors, but this particular one is in the collection of an English nobleman, who has refused to part with it, though kindly allowing a copy to be made, which now hangs in the place formerly occupied by the original.

It represents a middle-sized man, slim and graceful, with a small black beard and moustache; an oval face, olive coloured, and from his fine dark eyes he is looking straight out into the world with an expression of complete happiness. It was painted soon after his marriage. He is dressed in the costume of the period, and holds a roll of parchment in his hand. At the top right hand corner are the date and the arms of the family; or a griffin rampant. Gules. Crest: a demiswan issuing from a coronet. The motto: Felicitas.

I

‘ALLOW me to present to you my friend Filippo Brandolini, a gentleman of Città di Castello.’

Then, turning to me, Matteo added, ‘This is my cousin, Checco d’Orsi.’

Checco d’Orsi smiled and bowed.

‘Messer Brandolini,’ he said, ‘I am most pleased to make your acquaintance; you are more than welcome to my house.’

‘You are very kind,’ I replied; ‘Matteo has told me much of your hospitality.’

Checco bowed courteously, and asked his cousin, ‘You have just arrived, Matteo?’

‘We arrived early this morning. I wished to come here directly, but Filippo, who suffers from a very insufferable vanity, insisted on going to an inn and spending a couple of hours in the adornment of his person.’

‘How did you employ those hours, Matteo?’ asked Checco, looking rather questioningly at his cousin’s dress and smiling.

Matteo looked at his boots and his coat.

‘I am not elegant! But I felt too sentimental to attend to my personal appearance, and I had to restore myself with wine. You know, we are very proud of our native Forli wine, Filippo.’

‘I did not think you were in the habit of being sentimental, Matteo,’ remarked Checco.

‘It was quite terrifying this morning, when we arrived,’ said I; ‘he struck attitudes and called it his beloved country, and wanted to linger in the cold morning and tell me anecdotes about his childhood.’

‘You professional sentimentalists will never let anyone sentimentalise but yourselves.’

‘I was hungry,’ said I, laughing, ‘and it didn’t become you. Even your horse had his doubts.’

‘Brute!’ said Matteo. ‘Of course, I was too excited to attend to my horse, and he slipped over those confounded stones and nearly shot me off — and Filippo, instead of sympathising, burst out laughing.’

‘Evidently you must abandon sentiment,’ said Checco.

‘I’m afraid you are right. Now, Filippo can be romantic for hours at a stretch, and, what is worse, he is — but nothing happens to him. But on coming back to my native town after four years, I think it was pardonable.’

‘We accept your apology, Matteo,’ I said.

‘But the fact is, Checco, that I am glad to get back. The sight of the old streets, the Palazzo, all fill me with a curious sensation of joy — and I feel — I don’t know how I feel.’

‘Make the utmost of your pleasure while you can; you may not always find a welcome in Forli,’ said Checco, gravely.

‘What the devil do you mean?’ asked Matteo.

‘Oh, we’ll talk of these things later. You had better go and see my father now, and then you can rest yourselves. You must be tired after your journey. To-night we have here a great gathering, where you will meet your old friends. The Count has deigned to accept my invitation.’

‘Deigned?’ said Matteo, lifting his eyebrows and looking at his cousin.

Checco smiled bitterly.

‘Times have changed since you were here, Matteo’ he said; ‘the Forlivesi are subjects and courtiers now.’

Putting aside Matteo’s further questions, he bowed to me and left us.

‘I wonder what it is?’ said Matteo. ‘What did you think of him?’

I had examined Checco d’Orsi curiously — a tall dark man, with full beard and moustache, apparently about forty. There was a distinct likeness between him and Matteo: they both had the same dark hair and eyes; but Matteo’s face was broader, the bones more prominent, and the skin rougher from his soldier’s life. Checco was thinner and graver, he looked a great deal more talented; Matteo, as I often told him, was not clever.

‘He was very amiable,’ I said, in reply to the question.

‘A little haughty, but he means to be courteous. He is rather oppressed with his dignity of head of the family.’

‘But his father is still alive.’

‘Yes, but he’s eighty-five, and he’s as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat; so he remains quietly in his room while Checco pulls the strings, so that we poor devils have to knuckle under and do as he bids us.’

‘I’m sure that must be very good for you,’ I said. ‘I’m curious to know why Checco talks of the Count as he did; when I was here last they were bosom friends. However, let us go and drink, having done our duty.’

We went to the inn at which we had left our horses and ordered wine.

‘Give us your best, my fat friend,’ cried Matteo to mine host. ‘This gentleman is a stranger, and does not know what wine is; he was brought up on the sickly juice of Città di Castello.’

‘You live at Città di Castello?’ asked the innkeeper.

‘I wish I did,’ I answered.

‘He was ejected from his country for his country’s good,’ remarked Matteo.

‘That is not true,’ I replied, laughing. ‘I left of my own free will.’

‘Galloping as hard as you could, with four-and-twenty horsemen at your heels.’

‘Precisely! And so little did they want me to go, that when I thought a change of air would suit me they sent a troop of horse to induce me to return.’

‘Your head would have made a pretty ornament stuck on a pike in the grand piazza.’

‘The thought amuses you,’ I answered, ‘but the comedy of it did not impress me at the time.’

I remembered the occasion when news was brought me that the Vitelli, the tyrant of Castello, had signed a warrant for my arrest; whereupon, knowing the rapid way he had of dealing with his enemies, I had bidden farewell to my hearth and home with somewhat indecent haste.... But the old man had lately died, and his son, proceeding to undo all his father’s deeds, had called back the Fuorusciti, and strung up from the Palace windows such of his father’s friends as had not had time to escape. I had come to Forli with Matteo, on my way home to take possession of my confiscated property, hoping to find that the intermediate proprietor, who was dangling at a rope’s end some hundred feet from the ground, had made sundry necessary improvements.

‘Well, what do you think of our wine?’ said Matteo. ‘Compare it with that of Città di Castello.’

‘I really haven’t tasted it yet,’ I said, pretending to smile agreeably. ‘Strange wines I always drink at a gulp — like medicine.’

‘Brutta bestia!’ said Matteo. ‘You are no judge.’

‘It’s passable,’ I said, laughing, having sipped it with great deliberation.

Matteo shrugged his shoulders.

‘These foreigners!’ he said scornfully. ‘Come here, fat man,’ he called to the innkeeper. ‘Tell me how Count Girolamo and the gracious Caterina are progressing? When I left Forli the common people struggled to lick the ground they trod on.’

The innkeeper shrugged his shoulders.

‘Gentlemen of my profession have to be careful in what they say.’

‘Don’t be a fool, man; I am not a spy.’

‘Well, sir, the common people no longer struggle to lick the ground the Count treads on.’

‘I see!’

‘You understand, sir. Now that his father is dead—’

‘When I was here last Sixtus was called his uncle.’

‘Ah, they say he was too fond of him not to be his father, but, of course, I know nothing. Far be it from me to say anything in disparagement of his Holiness, past or present.’

‘However, go on.’

‘Well, sir, when the Pope died the Count Girolamo found himself short of money — and so the taxes that he had taken off he put on again.’

‘And the result is—’

‘Well, the people are beginning to murmur about his extravagance; and they say that Caterina behaves as if she were a queen; whereas we all know that she is only the bastard of old Sforza of Milan. But, of course, it has nothing to do with me!’

Matteo and I were beginning to feel sleepy, for we had been riding hard all night; and we went upstairs, giving orders to be called in time for the night’s festivity. We were soon fast asleep.

In the evening Matteo came to me, and began examining my clothes.

‘I have been considering, Filippo,’ he said, ‘that it behoves me on my first appearance before the eyes of my numerous lady loves to cut the best figure I can.’

‘I quite agree with you,’ I answered; ‘but I don’t see what you are doing with my clothes.’

‘Nobody knows you, and it is unimportant how you look; and, as you have some very nice things here, I am going to take advantage of your kindness and—’

‘You’re not going to take my clothes!’ I said, springing out of bed. Matteo gathered up in his arms various garments and rushed out of the room, slamming the door and locking it on the outside, so that I was left shut in, helpless.

I shouted abuse after him, but he went away laughing, and I had to manage as best I could with what he had left me. In half an hour he came to the door. ‘Do you want to come out?’ he said.

‘Of course I do,’ I answered, kicking the panel.

‘Will you promise not to be violent?’

I hesitated.

‘I shan’t let you out unless you do.’

‘Very well!’ I answered, laughing.

Matteo opened the door and stood bolt upright on the threshold, decked out from head to foot in my newest clothes.

‘You villain!’ I said, amazed at his effrontery.

‘You don’t look bad, considering,’ he answered, looking at me calmly.

II

WHEN we arrived at the Palazzo Orsi, many of the guests had already come. Matteo was immediately surrounded by his friends; and a score of ladies beckoned to him from different parts of the room, so that he was torn away from me, leaving me rather disconsolate alone in the crowd. Presently I was attracted to a group of men talking to a woman whom I could not see; Matteo had joined them, and they were laughing at something he had said. I had turned away to look at other people when I heard Matteo calling me.

‘Filippo,’ he said, coming towards me, ‘come and be introduced to Donna Giulia; she has asked me to present you.’

He took me by the arm, and I saw that the lady and her admirers were looking at me.

‘She’s no better than she should be,’ he whispered in my ear; ‘but she’s the loveliest woman in Forli!’

‘Allow me to add another to your circle of adorers, Donna Giulia,’ said Matteo, as we both bowed— ‘Messer Filippo Brandolini, like myself, a soldier of distinction.’

I saw a graceful little woman, dressed in some Oriental brocade; a small face, with quite tiny features, large brown eyes, which struck me at the first glance as very soft and caressing, a mass of dark, reddish-brown hair, and a fascinating smile.

‘We were asking Matteo where his wounds were,’ she said, smiling on me very graciously. ‘He tells us they are all in the region of his heart.’

‘In that case,’ I answered, ‘he has come to a more deadly battlefield than any we saw during the war.’

‘What war?’ asked a gentleman who was standing by. ‘Nowadays we are in the happy state of having ten different wars in as many parts of the country.’

‘I was serving under the Duke of Calabria, ‘I replied.

‘In that case, your battles were bloodless.’

‘We came, we saw, and the enemy decamped,’ said Matteo.

‘And now, taking advantage of the peace, you have come to trouble the hearts of Forli,’ said Donna Giulia.

‘Who knows how useful your swords may not be here!’ remarked a young man.

‘Be quiet, Nicolo!’ said another, and there was an awkward silence, during which Matteo and I looked at one another in surprise; and then everyone burst out talking, so that you could not hear what was said.

Matteo and I bowed ourselves away from Donna Giulia, and he took me to Checco, standing in a group of men.

‘You have recovered from your fatigue?’ he asked kindly.

‘You have been travelling, Matteo?’ said one of the company.

‘Yes, we rode sixty miles yesterday,’ he replied.

‘Sixty miles on one horse; you must have good steeds and good imaginations,’ said a big, heavy-looking man — an ugly, sallow-faced person, whom I hated at first sight.

‘It was only once in a way, and we wanted to get home.’

‘You could not have come faster if you had been running away from a battlefield,’ said the man.

I thought him needlessly disagreeable, but I did not speak. Matteo had not cultivated the golden quality.

‘You talk as one who has had experience,’ he remarked, smiling in his most amiable manner.

I saw Checco frown at Matteo, while the bystanders looked on interestedly.

‘I only said that,’ added the man, shrugging his shoulders, ‘because the Duke of Calabria is rather celebrated for his retreative tactics.’

I entertained a very great respect for the Duke, who had always been a kind and generous master to me.

‘Perhaps you do not know very much about tactics,’ I remarked as offensively as I could.

He turned and looked at me, as if to say, ‘Who the devil are you!’ He looked me up and down contemptuously, and I began to feel that I was almost losing my temper.

‘My good young man,’ he said, ‘I imagine that I was engaged in war when your battles were with your nursemaid.’

‘You have the advantage of me in courtesy as well as in years, sir,’ I replied. ‘But I might suggest that a man may fight all his life, and have no more idea of war at the end than at the beginning.’

‘It depends on the intelligence,’ remarked Matteo.

‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ said I.

‘What the devil do you mean?’ said the man, angrily.

‘I don’t suppose he means anything at all, Ercole,’ put in Checco, with a forced laugh.

‘He can answer for himself, I suppose,’ said the man. A flush came over Checco’s face, but he did not answer.

‘My good sir,’ I said, ‘you have to consider whether I choose to answer.’

‘Jackanapes!’

I put my hand to my sword, but Checco caught hold of my arm. I recovered myself at once.

‘I beg your pardon, Messer Checco,’ I said; then, turning to the man, ‘You are safe in insulting me here. You show your breeding! Really, Matteo, you did not tell me that you had such a charming fellow-countryman.’

‘You are too hard on us, Filippo,’ answered my friend, ‘for such a monstrosity as that Forli is not responsible.’

‘I am no Forlivese, thank God! Neither the Count nor I.’ He looked round scornfully. ‘We offer up thanks to the Almighty every time the fact occurs to us. I am a citizen of Castello.’

Matteo was going to burst out, but I anticipated him. ‘I, too, am a citizen of Castello; and allow me to inform you that I consider you a very insolent fellow, and I apologise to these gentlemen that a countryman of mine should forget the courtesy due to the city which is sheltering him.’

‘You a Castelese! And, pray, who are you?’

‘My name is Filippo Brandolini.’

‘I know your house. Mine is Ercole Piacentini.’

‘I cannot return the compliment; I have never heard of yours.’

The surrounders laughed.

‘My family is as good as yours, sir,’ he said.

‘Really, I have no acquaintance with the middle-classes of Castello; but I have no doubt it is respectable.’

I noticed that the listeners seemed very contented, and I judged that Messer Ercole Piacentini was not greatly loved in Forli; but Checco was looking on anxiously.

‘You insolent young boy!’ said the man, furiously. ‘How dare you talk to me like that. I will kick you!’

I put my hand to my sword to draw it, for I was furious too; I pulled at the hilt, but I felt a hand catch hold of mine and prevent me. I struggled; then I heard Checco in my ear.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said. ‘Be quiet!’

‘Let me be!’ I cried.

‘Don’t be a fool! You’ll ruin us.’ He held my sword, so that I could not draw it.

Ercole saw what was going on; his lips broke into a sarcastic smile.

‘You are being taught the useful lesson of discretion, young man. You are not the only one who has learnt it.’ He looked round at the bystanders....

At that moment a servant came to Checco and announced, —

‘The Count!’

The group broke up, and Checco advanced to the further end of the hall, with Ercole Piacentini and several other gentlemen. Matteo and I lingered where we were. There was a rustle, and the Count and Countess appeared attended by their suite.

First of all my eyes were attracted to Caterina; she was wonderfully beautiful. A tall, well-made woman, holding herself proudly, her head poised on the neck like a statue.

‘One would think she was a king’s daughter!’ said Matteo, looking at her with astonishment.

‘It is almost Francesco’s face,’ I said.

We both had an immense admiration for Francesco Sforza, the King of Condottieri, who had raised himself from a soldier of fortune to the proudest duchy in the world. And Caterina, his natural daughter, had the same clear, strong features, the strong piercing eyes, but instead of the Sforza’s pock-marked skin, she had a complexion of rare delicacy and softness; and afterwards she proved that she had inherited her father’s courage as well as his appearance.... She was dressed in a gorgeous robe of silver cloth, glittering and shimmering as she walked, and her hair was done in her favourite manner, intertwined with gold and silver threads; but the wonderful chestnut outshone the brilliant metals, seeming to lend them beauty rather than to borrow it. I heard her speak, and her voice was low and full like a man’s.

Matteo and I stood looking at her for a minute; then we both broke out ‘Per Bacco, she is beautiful!’

I began thinking of the fairy stories I had heard of Caterina at Rome, where she had enchanted everyone by her loveliness; and Sixtus had squandered the riches of the Church to satisfy her whims and fancies: banquets, balls, pageants and gorgeous ceremonies; the ancient city had run red with wine and mad with delight of her beauty.

Suddenly Matteo said to me, ‘Look at Girolamo!’

I lifted my eyes, and saw him standing quite close to me — a tall man, muscular and strong, with big heavy face, and prominent jaw bones, the nose long and hooked, small keen eyes, very mobile. His skin was unpleasant, red and coarse; like his wife, he was dressed with great magnificence.

‘One sees the sailor grandfather in him,’ I said, remembering that Sixtus’s father, the founder of the family, was a common sailor at Rovese.

He was talking to Checco, who was apparently speaking to him of us, for he turned and stepped forward to Matteo.

‘The prodigal has returned,’ he said. ‘We will not fail to kill the fatted calf. But this time you must stay with us, Matteo; we can give you service as well as the Duke of Calabria.’

Matteo smiled grimly; and the Count turned to me.

‘Checco has told me of you also, sir; but I fear there is no chance of keeping you, you are but a bird of passage — still, I hope you will let us make you welcome at the Palace.’

All the time he was speaking his eyes kept moving rapidly up and down, all round me, and I felt he was taking in my whole person.... After these few words he smiled, a harsh, mechanical smile, meant to be gracious, and with a courteous bow moved on. I turned to Matteo and saw him looking after the Count very sourly.

‘What is it,’ I asked.

‘He is devilish condescending,’ he answered. ‘When last I was here it was hail fellow, well met, but, good God! he’s put on airs since then!’

‘Your cousin said something to the same effect,’ I remarked.

‘Yes, I understand what he meant now.’

We strolled round the room, looking at the people and talking.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s a handsome woman!’ pointing to a voluptuous beauty, a massive creature, full-brested and high-coloured.

‘Your eye is drawn to a handsome woman like steel to a magnet, Filippo,’ answered Matteo, laughing.

‘Introduce me,’ I said, ‘if she is not ferocious.’

‘By no means; and she has probably already fixed her eyes upon you. But she is wife to Ercole Piacentini.’

‘I don’t care. I mean to kill the man afterwards; but that is no reason why I should not make myself pleasant to his spouse.’

‘You will do her a service in both ways,’ he replied; and, going up to her, ‘Claudia,’ he said, ‘your fatal eyes have transfixed another heart.’

Her sensual lips broke into a smile.

‘Have they that power?’ She fixed them on me, and made room on the couch on which she was sitting. Neither Matteo nor I were slow to take the hint, for I took my place and he his leave. ‘I wonder you have not already fallen victim to Madonna Giulia,’ said Claudia, looking languorously at me, and glancing over to the other lady.

‘One does not worship the moon when the sun is shining,’ I replied politely.

‘Giulia is more like the sun, for she gathers all men in her embrace. I am more modest.’

I understood that the rival beauties were not good friends.

‘You boast that you are cruel,’ I replied. She did not answer, but sighed deeply, smiling, and fixed on me her great, liquid eyes.

‘Oh, there is my husband.’ I looked up and saw the great Ercole glaring viciously at me. I laughed within myself.

‘He must be very jealous of so beautiful a wife?’ I asked.

‘He torments me to death.’

Under these circumstances I thought I would pursue my advantage; I pressed closer to her.

‘I can understand it: the first moment I saw you, I felt my head whirl.’

She gave me a very long glance from beneath her eyelashes. I seized her hand.

‘Those eyes!’ I said, looking into them fervently.

‘Ah!’ she sighed again.

‘Madam,’ said a pageboy, coming up to her, ‘Messer Piacentini begs that you will come to him.’

She gave a little cry of annoyance.

‘My husband!’ Then, rising from her seat, she turned to me, holding out her hand; I immediately offered my arm, and we solemnly crossed the room to Ercole Piacentini. Here she bowed very graciously to me, and I smiled on the happy husband with the utmost sweetness, while he looked very grim and took not the faintest notice of me; then I marched off, feeling particularly pleased with myself.

The Count and Countess were on the point of taking their departure: they were followed by Ercole and his wife; the remaining guests soon went, and in a little while there were left only Matteo and myself, two other men and Checco.

III

CHECCO led us to a smaller room, at some distance from the great hall of the reception; then, turning to a man I did not know, he said, ‘Did you hear the Piacentini?’

‘Yes!’ he answered; and for a moment they looked at one another silently.

‘He would not have been so bold without good cause,’ added the man.

I was told that his name was Lodovico Pansecchi, and that he was a soldier in the Count’s pay.

Checco turned round and looked at me sharply. Matteo understood what he meant, and said, ‘Have no fear of Filippo; he is as safe as myself.’

Checco nodded, and made a sign to a youth, who immediately rose and carefully closed the door. We sat still for a while; then Checco stood up and said impatiently, ‘I cannot understand it.’ He walked up and down the room, stopping at last in front of me.

‘You had never seen that man before?’

‘Never!’ I answered.

‘The quarrel was brought on solely by Ercole himself,’ said the youth, whom I found to be Alessandro Moratini, a brother of Giulia dall’ Aste.

‘I know,’ said Checco, ‘but he would never have dared to behave thus unless he knew of some design of Girolamo.’ He paused a moment to think, then turning to me again, ‘You must not challenge him.’

‘On the contrary,’ I replied, ‘I must challenge him; he has insulted me.’

‘I don’t care about that. I will not have you challenge him.’

‘This concerns myself alone.’

‘Nonsense! You are a guest of my house, and for all I know it is just such an opportunity as this that Girolamo is seeking.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Listen,’ said Checco, sitting down again. ‘When Sixtus obtained possession of Forli for his nephew, Girolamo Riario, I, like the fool I was, did all I could to bring the town to his allegiance. My father was against the plan, but I bore down his opposition and threw the whole power of my house on his side. Without me he would never have been Lord of Forli.’

‘I remember,’ said Matteo. ‘You used Sixtus to keep the Ordelaffi out; and you thought Girolamo would be a catspaw in our hands.’

‘I did not give the city for love of a person I had never seen in my life.... Well, this was eight years ago. Girolamo took off the heaviest taxes, granted favours to the town and entered in solemn state with Caterina.’

‘Amid shouts and cheers,’ remarked Alessandro.

‘For a while he was more popular than ever the Ordelaffi had been, and when he went out the people ran to kiss the hem of his garment. He spent the great part of his time in Rome, but he employed the riches of the Pope in beautifying Forli, and when he came it was one round of feasts and balls and gaiety.

‘Then Pope Sixtus died, and Girolamo settled here for good in the palace which he had commenced building on his accession. The feasts and balls and gaiety continued. Whenever a distinguished stranger passed through the town, he was welcomed by the Count and his wife with the most lavish hospitality; so that Forli became renowned for its luxury and riches.

‘The poets ransacked Parnassus and the ancients for praises of their rules, and the people echoed the panegyrics of the poet....

‘Then came the crash. I had often warned Girolamo, for we were intimate friends — then. I told him that he could not continue the splendour which he had used when the wealth of Christendom was at his command, when he could spend the tribute of a nation on a necklace for Caterina. He would not listen. It was always, “I cannot be mean and thrifty,” and he called it policy. “To be popular,” he said, “I must be magnificent.” The time came when the Treasury was empty, and he had to borrow. He borrowed in Rome and Florence and Milan — and all the time he would not retrench, but rather, as his means became less, the extravagance became greater; but when he could borrow no more outside, he came to the citizens of Forli, first, of course, to me, and I repeatedly lent him large sums. These were not enough, and he sent for the richest men of Forli and asked them to lend him money. Naturally they could not refuse. But he squandered their money as he had squandered his own; and one fine day he assembled the Council.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Alessandro, ‘I was there then. I heard him speak.’

Checco stopped as if for Alessandro.

‘He came to the Council chamber, clad as usual in the richest robes, and began talking privately to the senators, very courteously — laughing with them, shaking their hands. Then, going to his place, he began to speak. He talked of his liberality towards them, and the benefits he had conferred on the town; showed them his present necessities, and finally asked them to re-impose the taxes which he had taken off at the beginning of his reign. They were all prejudiced against him, for many of them had already lent him money privately, but there was such a charm in his discourse, he was so persuasive, that one really could not help seeing the reasonableness of his demand. I know I myself would have granted him whatever he asked.’

‘He can make one do anything he likes when he once begins talking,’ said Lodovico.

‘The Council unanimously voted the re-imposition of the taxes, and Girolamo offered them his thanks in his most gracious manner.’

There was a silence, broken by Matteo.

‘And then?’ he asked.

‘Then,’ answered Checco, ‘he went to Imola, and commenced spending there the money that he was gathering here.’

‘And what did they think of it in Forli?’

‘Ah, when the time came to pay the taxes they ceased their praises of Girolamo. First they murmured beneath their breath, then out loud; and soon they cursed him and his wife. The Count heard of it and came back from Imola, thinking, by his presence, to preserve the town in its allegiance. But the fool did not know that the sight of him would redouble the anger of the populace. They saw his gorgeous costumes, the gold and silver dresses of his wife, the jewels, the feasting and riotry, and they knew that it came out of their pockets; the food of their children, all that they had toiled and worked for, was spent on the insane luxury of this papal favourite and his bastard wife.’

‘And how has he treated us?’ cried Lodovico, beating his fist violently down on the table. ‘I was in the pay of the Duke of Calabria, and he made me tempting offers, so that I left the armies of Naples to enter the papal service under him. And now, for four years, I have not received a penny of my salary, and when I ask him, he puts me aside with gentle words, and now he does not even trouble to give me them. A few days back I stopped him in the piazza, and, falling on my knees, begged for what he owed me. He threw me violently away, and said he could not pay me — and the jewel on his breast was worth ten times the money he owed me. And now he looks at me with frowns, me who have served him faithfully as a dog. I will not endure it; by God! I will not.’ He clenched his fists as he spoke, trembling with rage.

‘And you know how he has served me,’ said Checco. ‘I have lent him so much that he has not the face to ask for more; and how do you think he has rewarded me? Because I have not paid certain dues I owe the Treasury, he sent a sheriff to demand them, and when I said I would not pay them at that moment, he sent for me, and himself asked for the money.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I reminded him of the money he owed me, and he informed me that a private debt had nothing to do with a debt to the State, and said that I must pay or the law should take its course.’

‘He must be mad,’ said Matteo.

‘He is mad, mad with pride, mad in his extravagance.’

‘I tell you,’ said Lodovico, ‘it cannot be endured.’

‘And they tell me that he has said my tongue must be silenced,’ added Checco. ‘The other day he was talking to Giuseppe Albicina, and he said “Let Checco beware; he may go too far and find the hand of the master not so gentle as the hand of the friend!”’

‘I, too, have heard him say things which sounded like threats,’ said Alessandro.

‘We have all heard it,’ added Lodovico. ‘When his temper overcomes him, he cares not what he says, and one discovers then what he and his silent wife have been plotting between them.’

‘Now, sir,’ interrupted Checco, speaking to me, ‘you see how things stand: we are on thin ground, and the fire is raging beneath us. You must promise not to seek further quarrel with this countryman of yours, this Ercole Piacentini. He is one of Girolamo’s chiefest favourites, and he would not bear to see him touched; if you happened to kill him, the Count would take the opportunity to have us all arrested, and we should suffer the fate of the Pazzi at Florence. Will you promise?’

‘I promise,’ I answered, smiling, ‘to defer my satisfaction to a fitter opportunity.’

‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Checco, ‘we can separate.’

We bade one another Good-night; Alessandro, as he was going, said to Matteo, ‘You must bring your friend to my sister to-morrow; she will be glad to see you both.’

We said we should be enchanted, and Alessandro and Lodovico Pansecchi left us.

Matteo looked at Checco meditatively.

‘Cousin,’ he said, ‘all this looks very like conspiracy.’

Checco started.

‘I cannot help it, if the people are dissatisfied with Girolamo.’

‘But you?’ pursued Matteo. ‘I imagine you do not greatly care whether the people are taxed or no. You knew the taxes would have to come on again sooner or later.’

‘Has he not insulted me by sending a sheriff to demand his dues?’

‘Is there nothing further than that?’ asked Matteo, looking at his cousin steadily.

Checco lifted his eyes and gazed back into Matteo’s.

‘Yes,’ he said at last; ‘eight years ago I was Girolamo’s equal, now I am his servant. I was his friend, he loved me like a brother — and then his wife came, the daughter of Francesco Sforza, the bastard — and gradually he has lifted himself up from me. He has been cold and reserved; he begins to show himself master; and now I am nothing more than a citizen among citizens — the first, but not the equal of the master.’

Checco kept silence for a moment, and in his quietness I could see the violence of his emotion.

‘This concerns you as well as me, Matteo. You are an Orsi, and the Orsi are not made to be servants. I will be no man’s servant. When I think of this man — this bastard of a pope — treating me as beneath him, by God! I cannot breathe. I could roll on the floor and tear my hair with rage. Do you know that the Orsi have been great and rich for three hundred years? The Medici pale before them, for they are burghers and we have been always noble. We expelled the Ordelaffi because they wished to give us a bastard boy to rule over us, and shall we accept this Riario? I swear I will not endure it.’

‘Well said!’ said Matteo.

‘Girolamo shall go as the Ordelaffi went. By God! I swear it.’

I looked at Matteo, and I saw that suddenly a passion had caught hold of him; his face was red, his eyes staring wide, and his voice was hoarse and thick.

‘But do not mistake again, Checco,’ he said; ‘we want no foreign rulers. The Orsi must be the only Lords of Forli.’

Checco and Matteo stood looking at one another; then the former, shaking himself as if to regain his calmness, turned his back on us and left the room. Matteo strode up and down for a while in thought, and then, turning to me, said, ‘Come.’

We went out and returned to our hostelry.

IV

NEXT day we went to Donna Giulia’s.

‘Who is she?’ I asked Matteo, as we walked along.

‘A widow!’ he answered shortly.

‘Further?’ I asked.

‘The scandal of Forli!’

‘Most interesting; but how has she gained her reputation?’

‘How do I know?’ he answered, laughing; ‘how do women usually gain their reputations? She drove Giovanni dall’ Aste into his grave; her rivals say she poisoned him — but that is a cheerful libel, probably due to Claudia Piacentini.’

‘How long has she been a widow?’

‘Five or six years.’

‘And how has she lived since then?’

Matteo shrugged his shoulders.

‘As widows usually live!’ he answered. ‘For my part, I really cannot see what inducement a woman in that position has to be virtuous. After all, one is only young once, and had better make the best use of one’s youth while it lasts.’

‘But has she no relations?’

‘Certainly; she has a father and two brothers. But they hear nothing or care nothing. Besides, it may be only scandal after all.’

‘You talked as if it were a fact,’ I said.

‘Oh, no; I only say that if it is not a fact she is a very foolish woman. Now that she has a bad reputation, it would be idiotic not to live up to it.’

‘You speak with some feeling,’ I remarked, laughing.

‘Ah,’ answered Matteo, with another shrug of the shoulders, ‘I laid siege to the fort of her virtue — and she sallied and retired, and mined and countermined, advanced and drew back, so that I grew weary and abandoned the attack. Life is not long enough to spend six months in politeness and flattery, and then not be sure of the reward at the end.’

‘You have a practical way of looking at things.’

‘With me, you know, one woman is very like another. It comes to the same in the end; and after one has kicked about the world for a few years, one arrives at the conclusion that it it does not much matter if they be dark or fair, fat or thin....’

‘Did you tell all this to Donna Giulia?’ I asked.

‘More or less.’

‘What did she think of it?’

‘She was cross for a while. She wished she had yielded sooner, when it was too late; it served her right!’

We had arrived at the house, and were ushered in. Donna Giulia greeted us very politely, gave me a glance, and began talking again to her friends. One could see that the men round her were more or less in love, for they followed every motion with their eyes, disputing her smiles, which she scattered in profusion, now upon one, now upon another.... I saw she delighted in adulation, for the maker of any neat compliment was always rewarded with a softer look and a more charming smile.

Matteo surpassed the others in the outrageousness of his flattery; I thought she must see that he was laughing at her, but she accepted everything he said quite seriously, and was evidently much pleased.

‘Are you not glad to be back in Forli?’ she said to him.

‘We all delight to tread the ground you walk on.’

‘You have grown very polite during your absence.’

‘What other result could have been, when I spent my time thinking of the lovely Giulia.’

‘I am afraid you had other thoughts in Naples: they say that there the women are all beautiful.’

‘Naples! My dear lady, I swear that during all the time I have been away I have never seen a face to compare with yours.’

Her eyes quite shone with pleasure. I turned away, finding the conversation silly. I thought I would do without the pleasant looks of Madonna Giulia, and I decided not to come to her again. Meanwhile, I began talking to one of the other ladies in the room and passed the time agreeably enough.... In a little while Giulia passed me, leaning on the arm of one of her admirers. I saw her glance at me, but I took no notice. Immediately afterwards she came again, hesitating a moment, as if she wished to say something, but passed on without speaking. I thought she was piqued at my inattention to her, and, with a smile, redoubled my attentions to the lady with whom I was talking.

‘Messer Filippo!’ Donna Giulia called me, ‘if you are not too engaged, will you speak to me for one moment?’

I approached her smiling.

‘I am anxious to hear of your quarrel with Ercole Piacentini. I have heard quite ten different stories.’

‘I am surprised that the insolence of an ill-bred fellow should rouse such interest.’

‘We must talk of something in Forli. The only thing I hear for certain is that he insulted you, and you were prevented from getting satisfaction.’

‘That will come later.’

She lowered her voice and took my arm.

‘But my brother tells me that Checco d’Orsi has made you promise to do nothing.’

‘I shall get my revenge — having to wait for it will only make it sweeter.’

Then, supposing she had nothing further to say to me, I stood still, as if expecting her to leave me. She looked up suddenly.

‘Am I incommoding you?’ she said.

‘How could you!’ I replied gallantly.

‘I thought you wanted to get rid of me.’

‘How can such an idea have entered your head? Do you not see that all men lie humble at your feet, attentive to every word and gesture?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘but not you!’

Of course I protested.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I saw very well that you avoided me. When you came in here — you hardly came near me.’

‘I did not think you would notice my inattention.’

‘Certainly I noticed it; I was afraid I had offended you. I could not think how.’

‘My dear lady, you have certainly done nothing to offend me.’

‘Then, why do you avoid me?’ she asked petulantly.

‘Really,’ I said, ‘I don’t. Perhaps in my modesty I thought it would be a matter of indifference to you whether I was at your side or not. I am sorry I have annoyed you.’

‘I don’t like people not to like me,’ she said in a plaintive way.

‘But why should you think I do not like you? Indeed, without flattery, I can assure you that I think you one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.’

A faint blush came over her cheeks, and a smile broke out on her lips; she looked up at me with a pretty reproachful air.

‘Then, why don’t you let me see it more plainly?’

I smiled, and, looking into her eyes, was struck by their velvet softness. I almost thought she was as charming as she was beautiful.

‘Do you really wish to know?’ I said, in reply to her question.

‘Do tell me!’ she said, faintly pressing my arm.

‘I thought you had so many admirers that you could well do without me.’

‘But, you see,’ she answered charmingly, ‘I cannot!’

‘And then I have a certain dislike to losing myself in a crowd. I did not wish to share your smiles with twenty others.’

‘And would you for that refuse them altogether?’

‘I have always avoided the woman who is the object of general admiration. I think I am too proud to struggle for favours; I would rather dispense with them.’

‘But, then, supposing the lady wishes to favour you especially, you do not give her the opportunity.’

‘That is so rare,’ I replied, ‘that it is not worth while breaking the rule.’

‘But it may happen.’

I shrugged my shoulders. She paused a moment, and then said, —

‘You do like me, then, after all?’

I saw a slight trembling of the lip, perhaps the eyes were a little moist. I felt sorry for what I had done.

‘I fear I have given you pain,’ I said.

‘You have a little,’ she replied.

‘I am sorry. I thought you did not care.’

‘I like people to love me and be pleased with me.’

‘I do both!’

‘Then you must show it,’ she replied, a smile breaking through the beginning of tears.

I really had been brutal, and I was very sorry that I had caused a cloud to gather over her sunshiny nature. She was indeed very sweet and charming.

‘Well, we are good friends now, aren’t we?’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘And you’ll come and see me often?’

‘As often as you will allow me to,’ I answered. She gave me her hand to kiss, and a bright, happy smile lit up her face.

‘A rivederci!’ she said.

We went home, and Matteo found waiting for him a message from Checco, bidding him leave the inn and take up his quarters with me at the Palazzo Orsi. On arriving, we found Checco excitedly walking up and down a long corridor lined with statues and pictures.

‘I am glad you have come,’ he said to Matteo, taking his hand and nodding. ‘You must stay here; we must all keep together now, for anything may happen.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Matteo.

‘The catastrophe nearly came to-day.’

We both looked at him with astonishment, not comprehending. Checco stood still abruptly.

‘He tried to arrest me to-day — Girolamo!’ Then, speaking very quickly, as if labouring under great excitement, ‘I had to go to the Palace on business. I found him in the audience chamber, and we began to talk certain matters over, and I grew rather heated. Suddenly I noticed that the place had emptied itself. I stopped in the midst of my sentence and looked up at Girolamo. I saw he was not attending to me; his eyes were fixed on the door.’

Checco was silent, and drops of perspiration were standing on his forehead.

‘Yes! Yes!’ we both said eagerly.

‘The door opened, and the Master of the Guard walked in. “By God!” I thought, “I’m trapped!” “I have been waiting for you, Andrea,” said Girolamo. Then he turned to me, and said, “Come into the Room of the Nymphs, Checco. I have some papers there to show you.” He took hold of my arm. I loosed myself. “I pray you, excuse me,” I said, “I have some very urgent business.” I walked to the door. Andrea glanced at his master, and I thought he was going to bar my way; I think he was waiting for some sign, but before it came I had seen through the open door Paolo Bruni, and I called out, “Paolo, Paolo, wait for me. I want to talk to you urgently.” Then I knew I was safe; he dared not touch me; and I turned round and said again, “I pray you, excuse me; my business with Paolo is a matter of life or death.” I brushed past Andrea and got out. By Heaven! how I breathed when I found myself in the piazza!’

‘But are you sure he meant to arrest you?’ said Matteo.

‘Certain; what else?’

‘Andrea might have come in by accident. There may have been nothing in it at all.’

‘I was not deceived,’ answered Checco, earnestly. ‘Their looks betrayed them — Andrea’s questioning glance. I know he wants to kill me.’

‘But would he dare seize you in cold blood?’

‘He cares for nothing when he has an object in view. Besides, when he had me in his power, what could have been done? I know Girolamo too well. There would have been a mock trial, and I should have been condemned. Or else he would have me strangled in my cell, and when I had gone you would have been helpless — my father is too old, and there would have been no leader to the party but you — and what could you do alone?’

We all remained silent for a while, then Checco broke out.

‘I know he wants to rid himself of me. He has threatened before, but has never gone so far as this.’

‘I agree with you,’ said Matteo; ‘things are becoming grave.’

‘It is not so much for myself I care; but what would happen to my children? My father is safe — he is so old and helpless that they would never think of touching him — but my boys? Caterina would throw them into prison without a scruple.’

‘Well,’ said Matteo, ‘what will you do?’

‘What can I do?’ he answered. ‘I have been racking my brains, and I see no way of safety. I can wear a coat of mail to preserve me from the stray knife of an assassin, but that will not help me against a troop of soldiers. I can leave Forli, but that is to abandon everything.’

‘No, you must not leave Forli — anything but that!’

‘What can I do? What can I do?’ he stamped his foot on the ground as if almost in desperation.

‘One thing,’ said Matteo, ‘you must not go about alone — always with at least two friends.’

‘Yes, I have thought of that. But how will it all turn out; it cannot last. What can I do?’

He turned to me.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘He means to kill me.’

‘Why not anticipate him?’ I answered quietly.

They both started up with a cry.

‘Kill him!’

‘Assassination! I dare not, I dare not,’ said Checco, very excitedly. ‘I will do all I can by fair means, but assassination—’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘It seems a matter of self-preservation,’ I said.

‘No, no; I won’t speak of it! I won’t think of it.’ He began again to walk excitedly up and down the room. ‘I won’t think of it, I tell you. I could not.’

Neither Matteo nor I spoke.

‘Why don’t you speak?’ he said to Matteo, impatiently.

‘I am thinking,’ he answered.

‘Not of that; I forbid you to think of that. I will not have it.’ Then, after a pause, abruptly, as if he were angry with us and with himself, ‘Leave me!’

V

A FEW days later, Matteo came to me as I was dressing, having rescued my clothes from him.

‘I wonder you’re not ashamed to go out in those garments,’ he remarked, ‘people will say that you wear my old things.’

I took no notice of the insult.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To Madonna Giulia.’

‘But you went there yesterday!’

‘That is no reason why I should not go to-day. She asked me to come.’

‘That’s very obliging of her, I’m sure.’ Then, after a pause, during which I continued my toilet, ‘I have been gathering the news of Forli.’

‘Oh!’

‘Madonna Giulia has been affording a great deal of interest....’

‘You have been talking to the lady whom you call the beautiful Claudia,’ I said.

‘By the way, why have you not been to her?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why should I?’

‘You told me you had progressed a long way in her favours during the half-hour’s talk you had with her the other night; have you not followed up the advantage?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I don’t think I like a woman to make all the advances.’

‘Don’t you?’ said Matteo. ‘I do!’

‘Besides, I don’t care for the type; she is too massive.’

‘She feels very much hurt at your neglect. She says you have fallen in love with Giulia.’

‘That is absurd,’ I replied; ‘and as to her being hurt at my neglect, I am very sorry, but I don’t feel any obligation to throw myself into the arms of every woman who chooses to open them.’

‘I quite agree with you; neither she nor Giulia are a bit better than they should be. I’m told Giulia’s latest lover is Amtrogio della Treccia. It seems one day he was almost caught by old Bartolomeo, and had to slip out of the window and perform feats worthy of a professional acrobat to get out of the way.’

‘I don’t think I attach belief to all the scandal circulating on the subject of that lady.’

‘You’re not in love with her?’ asked Matteo, quickly.

I laughed.

‘Certainly not. But still—’

‘That’s all right; because, of course, you know it’s notorious that she has had the most disgraceful amours. And she hasn’t even kept them to her own class; all sorts of people have enjoyed her favours.’

‘She does not look very much like a Messalina,’ I said, sneering a little.

‘Honestly, Filippo, I do think she is really very little better than a harlot.’

‘You are extremely charitable,’ I said. ‘But don’t you think you are somewhat prejudiced by the fact that you yourself did not find her one. Besides, her character makes no particular difference to me; I really care nothing if she’s good or bad; she is agreeable, and that is all I care about. She is not going to be my wife.’

‘She may make you very unhappy; you won’t be the first.’

‘What a fool you are!’ I said, a little angrily. ‘You seem to think that because I go and see a woman I must be dying of love for her. You are absurd.’

I left him, and soon found myself at the Palazzo Aste, where Donna Giulia was waiting for me. I had been to see her nearly every day since my arrival in Forli, for I really liked her. Naturally, I was not in love with her as Matteo suggested, and I had no intention of entering into that miserable state. I had found her charmingly simple, very different from the monster of dissipation she was supposed to be. She must have been three or four-and-twenty, but in all her ways she was quite girlish, merry and thoughtless, full of laughter at one moment, and then some trifling thing would happen to discompose her and she would be brought to the verge of tears; but a word or caress, even a compliment, would make her forget the unhappiness which had appeared so terrible, and in an instant she would be wreathed in smiles. She seemed so delightfully fragile, so delicate, so weak, that one felt it necessary to be very gentle with her. I could not imagine how anyone could use a hard word to her face.

Her eyes lit up as she saw me.

‘How long you’ve been,’ she said. ‘I thought you were never coming.’

She always seemed so glad so see you that you thought she must have been anxiously awaiting you, and that you were the very person of all others that she wished to have with her. Of course, I knew it was an affectation, but it was a very charming one.

‘Come and sit by me here,’ she said, making room for me on a couch; then when I had sat down, she nestled close up to me in her pretty childish way, as if seeking protection. ‘Now, tell me all you’ve been doing.’

‘I’ve been talking to Matteo,’ I said.

‘What about?’

‘You.’

‘Tell me what he said.’

‘Nothing to your credit, my dear,’ I said, laughing.

‘Poor Matteo,’ she answered. ‘He’s such a clumsy, lumbering creature, one can see he’s spent half his life in camps.’

‘And I? I have spent the same life as Matteo. Am I a clumsy, lumbering creature?’

‘Oh, no,’ she answered, ‘you are quite different.’ She put the pleasantest compliments in the look of her eyes.

‘Matteo told me all sorts of scandal about you.’ She blushed a little.

‘Did you believe it?’

‘I said I did not much care if it were true or not.’

‘But do you believe it?’ she asked, insisting.

‘If you’ll tell me it is not true, I will believe absolutely what you say.’

The little anxious look on her face gave way to a bright smile.

‘Of course, it is not true.’

‘How beautiful you are when you smile,’ I remarked irrelevantly. ‘You should always smile.’

‘I always do on you,’ she answered. She opened her mouth, as if about to speak, held back, as if unable to make up her mind, then said, ‘Did Matteo tell you he made love to me once, and was very angry because I would not pick up the handkerchief which he had condescended to throw.’

‘He mentioned it.’

‘Since then, I am afraid he has not had very much good to say of me.’

I had thought at the time that Matteo was a little bitter in his account of Donna Giulia, and I felt more inclined to believe her version of the story than his.

‘He has been beseeching me not to fall in love with you,’ I said.

She laughed.

‘Claudia Piacentini has been telling everyone that it is too late, and she is horribly jealous.’

‘Has she? Matteo also seemed certain I was in love with you.’

‘And are you?’ she asked suddenly.

‘No!’ I replied with great promptness.

‘Brutta bestia!’ she said, throwing herself to the end of the couch, and beginning to pout.

‘I am very sorry,’ I said, laughing, ‘but I cannot help it.’

‘I think it is horrid of you,’ she remarked.

‘You have so many adorers,’ I said in expostulation.

‘Yes, but I want more,’ she smiled.

‘But what good can it do you to have all these people in love with you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it is a pleasant sensation.’

‘What a child you are!’ I answered, laughing.

She bent forward seriously.

‘But are you not at all in love with me?’

I shook my head. She came close up to me, so that her hair brushed lightly against my cheek; it sent a shiver through me. I looked at her tiny ear; it was beautifully shaped, transparent as a pink shell. Unconsciously, quite without intention, I kissed it. She pretended to take no notice, and I was full of confusion. I felt myself blushing furiously.

‘Are you quite sure?’ she said gravely.

I got up to go, foolishly, rather angry with myself.

‘When shall I see you again?’ I asked.

‘I am going to confession to-morrow. Be at San Stefano at ten, and we can have a little talk in the church when I have finished.’

VI

THERE had been a great commotion in Forli during the last two days; for it had become known that the country people of the Count’s domain had sent a petition for the removal of certain taxes which pressed so heavily upon them, that the land was speedily going to ruin. The proprietors were dismissing their labourers, the houses of the peasants were falling into decay, and in certain districts the poverty had reached such a height that the farmers had not even grain wherewith to sow their fields, and all around the ground was lying bare and desolate. A famine had been the result, and if the previous year the countrymen had found it difficult to pay their taxes, this year they found it impossible. Girolamo had listened to their arguments, and knew them to be true. After considering with his councillors, he had resolved to remit certain of the more oppressive taxes; but in doing this he was confronted with the fact that his Treasury was already empty, and that if the income were further diminished it would be impossible for him to meet the demands of the coming year.

It was clear that the country could not pay, and it was clear that the money must be procured. He set his eyes on the town, and saw that it was rich and flourishing, but he dared not, on his own initiative, propose any increase in its burdens. He called a council, showed the state of his affairs, and asked the elders for advice. No one stirred or spoke. At last Antonio Lassi, a creature of the Count, whom he had raised to the council from a humble position, rose to his feet and gave utterance to the plan which his master had suggested to him. The pith of it was to abrogate the taxes on the country people, and in compensation place others on certain food-stuffs and wines, which had previously gone free. Girolamo answered in a studied speech, pretending great unwillingness to charge what were the necessaries of life, and asked several of the more prominent members what they thought of the suggestion. They had met Antonio Lassi’s speech with silence, and now applauded Girolamo’s answer; they agreed with him that such taxes should not be. Then the Count changed his tone. He said it was the only means of raising the money, and gathering anger from their sullen looks and their silence, he told them that if they would not give their sanction to the decree, he would do without their sanction. Then, breaking short, he asked them for their answer. The councillors looked at one another, rather pale but determined; and the reply came from one after the other, quietly, —

‘No — no — no!’

Antonio Lassi was cowed, and dared not give his answer at all. The Count, with an oath, beat his fist on the table and said, ‘I am determined to be lord and master here; and you shall learn, all of you, that my will is law.’

With that he dismissed them.

When the people heard the news, there was great excitement. The murmurs against the Count, which had hitherto been cautiously expressed, were now cried out in the market-place; the extravagance of the Countess was bitterly complained of, and the townsmen gathered together in groups, talking heatedly of the proposed exaction, occasionally breaking out into open menace. It was very like sedition.

On the day after the council, the head of the customs had been almost torn to pieces by the people as he was walking towards the Palace, and on his way back he was protected by a troop of soldiers. Antonio Lassi was met everywhere with hoots and cries, and Checco d’Orsi, meeting him in the loggia of the piazza, had assailed him with taunts and bitter sarcasms. Ercole Piacentini interposed and the quarrel nearly ended in a brawl; but Checco, with difficulty restraining himself, withdrew before anything happened....

On leaving Donna Giulia, I walked to the piazza. and found the same restlessness as on the preceding days. Through all these people a strange commotion seemed to pass, a tremor like the waves of the sea; everywhere little knots of people were listening eagerly to some excited speaker; no one seemed able to work; the tradesmen were gathered at their doors talking with one another; idlers were wandering to and fro, now joining themselves to one group, now to another.

Suddenly there was a silence; part of the crowd began looking eagerly in one direction, and the rest in their curiosity surged to the end of the piazza to see what was happening. Then it was seen that Caterina was approaching. She entered the place, and all eyes were fixed upon her. As usual, she was magnificently attired; her neck and hands and arms, her waistband and headgear, shone with jewels; she was accompanied by several of her ladies and two or three soldiers as guard. The crowd separated to let her pass, and she walked proudly between the serried rows of people, her head uplifted and her eyes fixed straight in front, as if she were unaware that anyone was looking at her. A few obsequiously took off their hats, but most gave no greeting; all around her was silence, a few murmurs, an oath or two muttered under breath, but that was all. She walked steadily on, and entered the Palace gates. At once a thousand voices burst forth, and after the deadly stillness the air seemed filled with confused sounds. Curses and imprecations were hurled on her from every side; they railed at her pride, they called her foul names.... Six years before, when she happened to cross the streets, the people had hurried forward to look at her, with joy in their hearts and blessings on their lips. They vowed they would die for her, they were in ecstasies at her graciousness.

I went home thinking of all these things and of Donna Giulia. I was rather amused at my unintentional kiss; I wondered if she was thinking of me.... She really was a charming creature, and I was glad at the idea of seeing her again on the morrow. I liked her simple, fervent piety. She was in the habit of going regularly to mass, and happening to see her one day, I was struck with her devout air, full of faith; she also went to confessional frequently. It was rather absurd to think she was the perverse being people pretended....

When I reached the Palazzo Orsi I found the same excitement as outside in the piazza, Girolamo had heard of the dispute in the loggia, and had sent for Checco to hear his views on the subject of the tax. The audience was fixed for the following morning at eleven, and as Checco never went anywhere without attendants, Scipione Moratini, Giulia’s second brother, and I were appointed to accompany him. Matteo was not to go for fear of the presence of the two most prominent members of the family tempting the Count to some sudden action.

The following morning I arrived at San Stefano at half-past nine, and to my surprise found Giulia waiting for me.

‘I did not think you would be out of the confessional so soon,’ I said. ‘Were your sins so small this week?’

‘I haven’t been,’ she answered. ‘Scipione told me that you and he were to accompany Checco to the Palace, and I thought you would have to leave here early, so I postponed the confessional.’

‘You have preferred earth and me to Heaven and the worthy father?’

‘You know I would do more for you than that,’ she answered.

‘You witch!’

She took my arm.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘come and sit in one of the transept chapels; it is quiet and dark there.’

It was deliciously cool. The light came dimly through the coloured glass, clothing the marble of the chapel in mysterious reds and purples, and the air was faintly scented with incense. Sitting there she seemed to gain a new charm. Before, I had never really appreciated the extreme beauty of the brown hair tinged with red, its wonderful quality and luxuriance. I tried to think of something to say, but could not. I sat and looked at her, and the perfumes of her body blended with the incense.

‘Why don’t you speak?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry; I have nothing to say.’

She laughed.

‘Tell me of what you are thinking.’

‘I daren’t,’ I said.

She looked at me, repeating the wish with her eyes.

‘I was thinking you were very beautiful.’

She turned to me and leant forward so that her face was close to mine; her eyes acquired a look of deep, voluptuous languor. We sat without speaking, and my head began to whirl.

The clock struck ten.

‘I must go,’ I said, breaking the silence.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘but come to-night and tell me what has happened.’

I promised I would, then asked whether I should lead her to another part of the church.

‘No, leave me here,’ she said. ‘It is so good and quiet. I will stay and think.’

‘Of what?’ I said.

She did not speak, but she smiled so that I understood her answer.

VII

I HURRIED back to the Palazzo and found Scipione Moratini already arrived. I liked him for his sister’s sake, but in himself he was a pleasant person.

Both he and his brother had something of Giulia in them — the delicate features, the fascination and the winning ways which in them seemed almost effeminate. Their mother had been a very beautiful woman — report said somewhat gay — and it was from her the sons had got the gallantry which made them the terror of husbands in Forli, and Giulia the coquetry which had given rise to so much scandal. The father, Bartolomeo, was quite different. He was a rugged, upright man of sixty, very grave and very dignified, the only resemblance of feature to his children being the charming smile, which the sons possessed as well as Giulia; though in him it was rarely seen. What I liked most in him was the blind love for his daughter, leading him to unbend and become a youth to flatter her folly. He was really devoted to her, so that it was quite pathetic to see the look of intense affection in his eyes as he followed her movements. He, of course, had never heard a word of the rumours circulating about Giulia; he had the utmost faith in her virtue, and I, it seems to me, had gained faith from him.

After talking a while with Scipione, Checco came, and we started for the Palazzo. The people in Forli know everything, and were well aware of Checco’s mission. As we walked along we were met by many kind greetings, good luck, and God speed were wished us, and Checco, beaming with joy, graciously returned the salutations.

We were ushered into the council chamber, where we found the councillors and many of the more prominent citizens, and several gentlemen of the Court; immediately the great folding doors were opened and Girolamo entered with his wonted state, accompanied by his courtiers and men-at-arms, so that the hall was filled with them. He took his seat on a throne, and graciously bowed to the left and to the right. His courtiers responded, but the citizens preserved a severe aspect, quite unsympathetic towards his condescension.

Girolamo rose to his feet and made a short speech, in which he extolled Checco’s wisdom and knowledge and patriotism, saying he had heard of a controversy between him and Antonio Lassi on the subject of the proposed tax, and consequently had sent for him to hear his opinion on the subject.

He stopped and looked round; his courtiers obsequiously applauded. Then, at opposite ends of the room, doors opened, and through each filed a string of soldiers; the citizens looked at one another, wondering. A flourish of trumpets was heard in the piazza, outside, and the tramp of soldiers. Girolamo waited; at last he proceeded, —

‘A good prince owes this to his subjects — to do nothing against their will freely expressed; and though I could command, for I am placed here by the Vicar of Christ himself, with absolute power over your lives and fortunes, yet such is my love and affection towards you that I do not disdain to ask your advice.’

The courtiers broke out into a murmur of surprise and self-congratulation at his infinite graciousness; the trumpets flourished again, and in the succeeding silence could be heard cries of command from the officers in the square, while from the soldiers standing about the hall there was a clank of swords and spurs.

Checco rose from his seat. He was pale and he almost seemed to hesitate; I wondered if the soldiers had had the effect which Girolamo intended. Then he began to speak, quietly, in even, well-turned sentences, so that one could see the speech had been carefully thought out.

He called to mind his own affection for Girolamo, and the mutual friendship which had solaced many hours of doubt and difficulty, and assured him of his unalterable fidelity to himself and his family; then he reminded him of the love borne by the people towards their ruler, and their consciousness of an equal love on the part of the Count towards themselves. He drew a picture of the joy in Forli when first Girolamo came to it, and of the enthusiasm caused by the sight of him or his wife walking through the streets.

There was a little applause, chiefly from the Count’s suite; Checco paused as if he had come to the end of his preface, and were gathering himself up for the real matter of his speech. There was deadly silence in the hall, all eyes were fixed on him, and all minds were asking themselves, ‘What will he say?’ Girolamo was leaning forward, resting his chin on his hand, looking anxious. I wondered if he regretted that he had called the meeting.

Checco resumed his speech.

‘Girolamo,’ he said, ‘the people from the country districts lately sent you a petition, in which they showed their sufferings from rain and storm and famine, their poverty and misery, the oppressiveness of the taxes. They bade you come and look at their untilled fields, their houses falling to ruin, themselves dying by the roadside, naked and hungry, children expiring at their mothers’ breasts, parents lying unburied in the ruin of their home. They bade you come and look at the desolation of the land, and implored you to help them while there was yet time, and lighten from their backs the burdens you had laid upon them.

‘You turned an eye of pity on them; and now the land smiles, the people have shaken themselves from their sleep of death, and awakened to new life, and everywhere prayers are offered and blessings rained on the head of the most high and magnificent prince, Girolamo Riario.

‘And we too, my Lord, join in the thanks and praise; for these to whom you have given new life are our cousins and brothers, our fellow-countrymen.’

What was coming? The councillors looked at one another questioningly. Could Checco have made terms with the Count, and was it a comedy they were playing? Girolamo also was surprised; he had not for long heard praise from any but his courtiers.

‘Eight years ago, when you acquired the sovereignty of Forli, you found the town weighed down under the taxes which the Ordelaffi had imposed. Depression had seized hold of the merchants and tradesmen; they were burdened so that they could not buy nor sell; they had given up effort, and the town was lying numb and cold, as if dying from a pestilence. The streets were deserted; such people as there were moved sadly, and with downturned faces. The inhabitants were becoming fewer; there was no motion, no life; a few years more and Forli would have become a city of the dead!

‘But you came, and with you life; for your first deed was to remove the most oppressive imposts. As the bow, doubled up, when the string is loosened shoots back with a sudden impulse which propels the arrow to its mark, so Forli rebounded from the weight it had borne before. The Goddess of Plenty reigned in the land; it was the sunlight after storm; everywhere life and activity! The merchant wrote busily at his desk, the tradesman spread his wares anew and laughed in the joy of his heart. The mason, the builder, the blacksmith returned to their work, and through the city was heard the sound of hammering and building. The news spread of a beneficent lord, and the goldsmith and silversmith, the painter, the sculptor, came to the city in throngs. The money passed from hand to hand, and in its passage seemed to increase by magic. On the faces of all was happiness; the apprentice sang as he worked, and mirth and joy were universal; Forli became known as the home of delight; Italy rang with its feasts and celebrations — and every citizen was proud to be a Forlivese.

‘And everywhere prayers were offered and blessings rained on the head of the most high and magnificent prince, Girolamo Riario.’

Checco paused again. An inkling of his meaning was coming to his hearers, but they dared not think he would say what was in all their minds.

‘Then,’ Checco went on, ‘you re-imposed the taxes which you had taken off.’

‘That is a lie!’ interrupted Girolamo. ‘They were imposed by the council.’

Checco shrugged his shoulders, smiling ironically.

‘I remember quite well. You called a meeting of the Ancients, and showing them your necessities, suggested that they should re-impose the taxes.

‘I forget if you reminded them that you could command, and that you were placed here by the Vicar of Christ on earth.

‘And you forebore to let us hear the ring of trumpets and the tramp of soldiery in the square. Nor did you think so numerous a suite necessary for your dignity.’

He looked round at the soldiers, thoughtfully stroking his beard.

‘Proceed!’ said Girolamo, impatiently; he was beginning to get angry.

Checco, in talking, had recovered the assurance which at first seemed to fail him. He smiled politely at the Count’s command, and said, —

‘I will come to the point at once.

‘You replaced the taxes which you had taken away, and thereby undid the benefit you had done. The town soon felt the effect of the change; its prosperity is already declining, and it is not doubtful that a few years more will bring it to the condition in which you found it. And who knows, perhaps its last state may be worse than its first?

‘And now you propose to make the townspeople pay the duties which you have taken off the countryfolk. You have sent for me to ask my advice on the subject, and here I give it you.

‘Do not put on, but take off. In the name of the people, I beseech you to do away with the taxes you imposed four years ago, and return to the happy state of the first years of your rule.’

He paused a moment, then with outstretched arm, pointing to the Count, he added solemnly, ‘Or Girolamo Riario, the magnificent prince, may share the fate of the Ordelaffi, who ruled the town for two centuries and now wander homeless about the land.’

There was a cry all round the room. They were astounded at his audacity. Girolamo had started in his chair — his eyes were staring, his face red; he was dumb with rage. He tried to speak, but the words died in his throat, and nothing was heard but an inarticulate murmur. The soldiers and courtiers were looking at one another in surprise; they did not know what to do or think; they looked at their master, but found no help in him. The citizens were bewildered, and by turns felt wonder, dismay, fear, pleasure; they could not understand....

‘Oh, Girolamo!’ said Checco, unmindful of the excitement round him, ‘I do not say these things in enmity to you. Come among your people yourself, and see their wants with your own eyes. Do not believe what your courtiers tell you — do not think the land in your charge is a captured town, which you can spoil at your pleasure. You have been placed here as a guardian in our perils and an assistance in our necessities.

‘You are a stranger here; you do not know this people as I know it. They will be faithful, meek, obedient — but do not rob them of the money they have hardly earned, or they will turn against you. Forli has never supported an oppressor, and if you oppress them, beware of their wrath. What do you think are these soldiers of yours against the wrath of a people! And are you so sure of your soldiers? Will they take part for you against their fathers and brothers, their children?’

‘Be quiet!’ Girolamo had risen from his seat, and was standing with his arm threateningly upraised. He shouted so as to drown Checco, ‘Be quiet! You have always been against me, Checco,’ he cried. ‘You have hated me because I have overwhelmed you with bounty. There has never been trouble between me and my people but you have come to make them more bitter against me.’

‘You lie!’ said Checco, passionately.

‘Oh, I know you, Checco, and your pride! As Satan fell by pride, so may you, notwithstanding all your riches and power. You thought you were my equal, and because you found me your master you gnashed your teeth and cursed me.

‘By God, you would kill me if you could!’

Checco lost his calm, and gesticulating wildly shouted back at Girolamo.

‘I have hated you because you are a tyrant to this town. Are these not my fellow-citizens, my brothers, my friends? Have we not been together since childhood, and our fathers and grandfathers before us? And do you think I look upon them as you who are a stranger?

‘No; so long as you obtained money from the rich, I said nothing. You know what sums I have myself lent you; all that I freely give you. I do not want a penny of it back — keep it all. But when you have extorted the uttermost from us, and you turn to the poor and needy and rob them of their little, then I will not keep silence. You shall not impose these taxes on the people! And why is it you want them? For your riotous, insane extravagance; so that you may build yourself new palaces, and deck yourself in gorgeous robes, and buy diamonds and precious stones for your wife.’

‘Do not speak of my wife,’ interrupted the Count.

‘So that you may pile gold in the hands of the parasite who makes a sonnet in your praise. You came to us and begged for money; we gave it and you flung it away in feasts and riotry. The very coat you wear was made out of our riches. But you have no right to take the money of the people for these ignoble uses. You are not their master; you are their servant; their money is not yours, but yours is theirs. Your duty before God is to protect them, and, instead, you rob them.’

‘Be silent!’ broke in Girolamo. ‘I will hear no more. You have outraged me as no man has ever done without repenting it. You think you are all-powerful, Checco, but by God you shall find that I am more powerful!

‘Now go, all of you! I have had enough of this scene. Go!’

He waved his hand imperiously. Then, with a look of intense rage, he descended from his throne and, scowling, flung himself out of the room.

VIII

THE courtiers followed on their master’s heels, but the soldiers stood undecided. Ercole Piacentini looked at us, and spoke in an undertone to the Captain of the Guard. I thought they were discussing the possibility of boldly arresting Checco on the spot, which they doubtless knew would be a step very acceptable to Girolamo; but he was surrounded by his friends, and evidently, whatever Ercole and the Captain wished, they dared nothing, for the former quietly left the chamber, and the soldiers, on a whispered order, slid silently from the room like whipped dogs.

Then the excitement of our friends knew no bounds. I, at the end of the speech, had seized his hand and said, —

‘Well done.’

Now he was standing in the midst of all these people, happy and smiling, proud of the enthusiasm he had aroused, breathing heavily, so that a casual observer might have thought him drunk with wine.

‘My friends,’ he said, in answer to their praises, and his voice slightly trembled, so that his sincerity was conspicuous, ‘whatever happens, be sure that I will continue to uphold your rights, and that I will willingly give my life for the cause of justice and freedom.’

He was choked by the violence of his emotion, and could say nothing more.

The cries of approbation were renewed, and then, with an impulse to get into the open air, they surged out of the council chamber into the piazza. It was not exactly known what had passed in the Palace, but the people knew that Checco had braved the Count, and that the latter had broken up the meeting in anger. Wonderful rumours were going about: it was said that swords had been drawn, and there had almost been a battle; others said that the Count had tried to arrest Checco, and this story, gaining credence — some even saying that Checco was being kept a prisoner — had worked the citizens to fever height.

When Checco appeared, there was a great shout and a rush towards him. ‘Bravo!’ ‘Well done!’ I don’t know what they did not find to say in praise of him. Their enthusiasm grew by its own fire; they went mad; they could not contain themselves, and they looked about for something on which to vent their feeling. A word, and they would have attacked the Palace or sacked the custom-house. They surrounded us, and would not let us pass. Bartolomeo Moratini pushed his way to Checco and said, —

‘Quiet them quickly, before it is too late.’

Checco understood at once. ‘Friends,’ he said, ‘let me pass quietly, for the love of God, and do you return to your work in peace. Let me pass!’

Moving forward, the crowd opened to him, and still shouting, yelling and gesticulating, allowed him to go through. When we arrived at the gate of his palace, he turned to me and said, —

‘By God! Filippo, this is life. I shall never forget this day!’

The crowd had followed to the door, and would not go away. Checco had to appear on the balcony and bow his thanks. As he stood there, I could see that his head was whirling. He was pale, almost senseless with his great joy.

At last the people were persuaded to depart, and we entered the house.

We were in Checco’s private room. Besides the cousins and myself were present Bartolomeo Moratini and his two sons, Fabio Oliva and Cesare Gnocchi, both related on the mother’s side to the Orsi. We were all restless and excited, discussing the events that had occurred; only Bartolomeo was quiet and grave. Matteo, in the highest of spirits, turned to him.

‘Why so silent, Messer Bartolomeo?’ he said. ‘You are like the skeleton at the banquet.’

‘It is a matter for gravity,’ he answered.

‘Why?’

‘Why! Good God, man, do you suppose nothing has happened!’

We stopped talking and stood round him, as if suddenly awakened.

‘Our ships are burnt behind us,’ he proceeded, and we must advance — must!’

‘What do you mean?’ said Checco.

‘Do you suppose Girolamo is going to allow things to go on as before? You must be mad, Checco!

‘I believe I am,’ was the answer. ‘All this has turned my head. Go on.’

‘Girolamo has only one step open to him now. You have braved him publicly; you have crossed the streets in triumph, amid the acclamation of the people, and they have accompanied you to your house with shouts of joy. Girolamo sees in you a rival — and from a rival there is only one safeguard.’

‘And that — ?’ asked Checco.

‘Is death!’

We were all silent for a moment; then Bartolomeo spoke again.

‘He cannot allow you to live. He has threatened you before, but now he must carry his threats into effect. Take care!’

‘I know,’ said Checco, ‘the sword is hanging over my head. But he dare not arrest me.’

‘Perhaps he will try assassination. You must go out well guarded.’

‘I do,’ said Checco, ‘and I wear a coat of mail. The fear of assassination has been haunting me for weeks. Oh God, it is terrible! I could bear an open foe. I have courage as much as anyone; but this perpetual suspense! I swear to you it is making me a coward. I cannot turn the corner of a street without thinking that my death may be on the other side; I cannot go through a dark corridor at night without thinking that over there in the darkness my murderer may be waiting for me. I start at the slightest sound, the banging of a door, a sudden step. And I awake in the night with a cry, sweating. I cannot stand it I shall go mad if it continues. What can I do?’

Matteo and I looked at one another; we had the same thought. Bartolomeo spoke.

‘Anticipate him!’

We both started, for they were my very words. Checco gave a cry.

‘You too! That thought has been with me night and day! Anticipate him! Kill him! But I dare not think of it. I cannot kill him.’

‘You must,’ said Bartolomeo.

‘Take care we are not heard,’ said Oliva.

‘The doors are well fastened.’

‘You must,’ repeated Bartolomeo. ‘It is the only course left you. And what is more, you must make haste — for he will not delay. The lives of all of us are at stake. He will not be satisfied with you; after you are gone, he will easily enough find means to get rid of us.’

‘Hold your peace, Bartolomeo, for God’s sake! It is treachery.’

‘Of what are you frightened? It would not be difficult.’

‘No, we must have no assassination! It always turns out badly. The Pazzi in Florence were killed, Salviati was hanged from the Palace windows, and Lorenzo is all-powerful, while the bones of the conspirators rot in unconsecrated ground. And at Milan, when they killed the Duke, not one of them escaped.’

‘They were fools. We do not mistake as in Florence; we have the people with us, and we shall not bungle it as they did.’

‘No, no, it cannot be.’

‘I tell you it must. It is our only safety!’

Checco looked round anxiously.

‘We are all safe,’ said Oliva. ‘Have no fear.’

‘What do you think of it?’ asked Checco. ‘I know what you think, Filippo, and Matteo.’

‘I think with my father!’ said Scipione.

‘I too!’ said his brother.

‘And I!’

‘And I!’

‘Every one of you,’ said Checco; ‘you would have me murder him.’

‘It is just and lawful.’

‘Remember that he was my friend. I helped him to this power. Once we were almost brothers.’

‘But now he is your deadly enemy. He is sharpening a knife for your heart — and if you do not kill him, he will kill you.’

‘It is treachery. I cannot!’

‘When a man has killed another, the law kills him. It is a just revenge. When a man attempts another’s life, the law permits him to kill that man in self-defence. Girolamo has killed you in thought — and at this moment he may be arranging the details of your murder. It is just and lawful that you take his life to defend your own and ours.’

‘Bartolomeo is right,’ said Matteo.

A murmur of approval showed what the others thought.

‘But think, Bartolomeo,’ said Checco, ‘you are grey-headed; you are not so very far from the tomb; if you killed this man, what of afterwards?’

‘I swear to you, Checco, that you would be a minister of God’s vengeance. Has he not madly oppressed the people? What right has he more than another? Through him men and women and children have died of want; unhappiness and misery have gone through the land — and all the while he has been eating and drinking and making merry.’

‘Make up your mind, Checco. You must give way to us!’ said Matteo. ‘Girolamo has failed in every way. On the score of honesty and justice he must die. And to save us he must die.’

‘You drive me mad,’ said Checco. ‘All of you are against me. You are right in all you say, but I cannot — oh God, I cannot!’

Bartolomeo was going to speak again, but Checco interrupted him.

‘No, no, for Heaven’s sake, say nothing more. Leave me alone. I want to be quiet and think.’

IX

IN the evening at ten I went to the Palazzo Aste. The servant who let me in told me that Donna Giulia was at her father’s, and he did not know when she would be back. I was intensely disappointed. I had been looking forward all day to seeing her, for the time in church had been so short.... The servant looked at me as if expecting me to go away, and I hesitated; but then I had such a desire to see her that I told him I would wait.

I was shown into the room I already knew so well, and I sat down in Giulia’s chair. I rested my head on the cushions which had pressed against her beautiful hair, her cheek; and I inhaled the fragrance which they had left behind them.

How long she was! Why did she not come?

I thought of her sitting there. In my mind I saw the beautiful, soft brown eyes, the red lips; her mouth was exquisite, very delicately shaped, with wonderful curves. It was for such a mouth as hers that the simile of Cupid’s bow had been invented.

I heard a noise below, and I went to the door to listen. My heart beat violently, but, alas! it was not she, and, bitterly disappointed, I returned to the chair. I thought I had been waiting hours, and every hour seemed a day. Would she never come?

At last! The door opened, and she came in — so beautiful. She gave me both her hands.

‘I am sorry you have had to wait,’ she said, ‘but I could not help it.’

‘I would wait a hundred years to see you for an hour.’

She sat down, and I lay at her feet.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘all that has happened to-day.’

I did as she asked; and as I gave my story, her eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed. I don’t know what came over me; I felt a sensation of swooning, and at the same time I caught for breath. And I had a sudden impulse to take her in my arms and kiss her many times.

‘How lovely you are!’ I said, raising myself to her side.

She did not answer, but looked at me, smiling. Her eyes glistened with tears, her bosom heaved.

‘Giulia!’

I put my arm round her, and took her hands in mine.

‘Giulia, I love you!’

She bent over to me, and put forward her face; and then — then I took her in my arms and covered her mouth with kisses. Oh God! I was mad, I had never tasted such happiness before. Her beautiful mouth, it was so soft, so small, I gasped in the agony of my happiness. If I could only have died then!

Giulia! Giulia!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The cock crew, and the night seemed to fade away into greyness. The first light of dawn broke through the windows, and I pressed my love to my heart in one last kiss.

‘Not yet,’ she said; ‘I love you.’

I could not speak; I kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her breasts.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

‘My love!’

At last I tore myself away, and as I gave her the last kiss of all, she whispered, —

‘Come soon.’

And I replied, —

‘To-night!’

I walked through the grey streets of Forli, wondering at my happiness; it was too great to realise. It seemed absurd that I, a poor, commonplace man, should be chosen out for this ecstasy of bliss. I had been buffeted about the world, an exile, wandering here and there in search of a captain under whom to serve. I had had loves before, but common, grotesque things — not like this, pure and heavenly. With my other loves I had often felt a certain ugliness about them; they had seemed sordid and vulgar; but this was so pure, so clean! She was so saintly and innocent. Oh, it was good! And I laughed at myself for thinking I was not in love with her. I had loved her always; when it began I did not know ... and I did not care; all that interested me now was to think of myself, loving and beloved. I was not worthy of her; she was so good, so kind, and I a poor, mean wretch. I felt her a goddess, and I could have knelt down and worshipped her.

I walked through the streets of Forli with swinging steps; I breathed in the morning air, and felt so strong, and well, and young. Everything was beautiful — all life! The grey walls enchanted me; the sombre carvings of the churches; the market women, gaily dressed, entering the town laden with baskets of many-coloured fruit. They gave me greeting, and I answered with a laughing heart. How kind they were! Indeed, my heart was so full of love that it welled over and covered everything and everybody, so that I felt a strange, hearty kindness to all around me. I loved mankind!

X

WHEN I got home, I threw myself on my bed and enjoyed a delightful sleep, and when I awoke felt cool and fresh, and very happy.

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Matteo.

‘I am rather contented with myself,’ I said.

‘Then, if you want to make other people contented, you had better come with me to Donna Claudia.’

‘The beautiful Claudia?’

‘The same!’

‘But can we venture in the enemy’s camp?’

‘That is exactly why I want you to come. The idea is to take no notice of the events of yesterday, and that we should all go about as if nothing had happened.’

‘But Messer Piacentini will not be very glad to see us.’

‘He will be grinding his teeth, and inwardly spitting fire; but he will take us to his arms and embrace us, and try to make us believe he loves us with the most Christian affection.’

‘Very well; come on!’

Donna Claudia, at all events, was delighted to see us, and she began making eyes and sighing, and putting her hand to her bosom in the most affecting manner.

‘Why have you not been to see me, Messer Filippo?’ she asked.

‘Indeed, madam, I was afraid of being intrusive.’

‘Ah,’ she said, with a sweeping glance, ‘how could you be! No, there was another reason for your absence. Alas!’

‘I dared not face those lustrous eyes.’

She turned them full on me, and then turned them up, Madonna-wise, showing the whites.

‘Are they so cruel, do you think?’

‘They are too brilliant. How dangerous to the moth is the candle; and in this case the candle is twain.’

‘But they say the moth as it flutters in the flame enjoys a perfection of ecstasy.’

‘Ah, but I am a very sensible moth,’ I answered in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘and I am afraid of burning my wings.’

‘How prosaic!’ she murmured.

‘The muse,’ I said politely, ‘loses her force when you are present.’

She evidently did not quite understand what I meant, for there was a look of slight bewilderment in her eyes; and I was not surprised, for I had not myself the faintest notion of my meaning. Still she saw it was a compliment.

‘Ah, you are very polite!’

We paused a moment, during which we both looked unutterable things at one another. Then she gave a deep sigh.

‘Why so sad, sweet lady?’ I asked.

‘Messer Filippo,’ she answered, ‘I am an unhappy woman.’ She hit her breast with her hand.

‘You are too beautiful,’ I remarked gallantly.

‘Ah no! ah no! I am unhappy.’

I glanced at her husband, who was stalking grimly about the room, looking like a retired soldier with the gout; and I thought that to be in the society of such a person was enough to make anyone miserable.

‘You are right,’ she said, following my eyes; ‘it is my husband. He is so unsympathetic.’

I condoled with her.

‘He is so jealous of me, and, as you know, I am a pattern of virtue to Forli!’

I had never heard her character so described, but, of course, I said, —

‘To look at you would be enough to reassure the most violent of husbands.’

‘Oh, I have temptation enough, I assure you,’ she answered quickly.

‘I can well believe that.’

‘But I am as faithful to him as if I were old and ugly; and yet he is jealous.’

‘We all have our crosses in this life,’ I remarked sententiously.

‘Heaven knows I have mine; but I have my consolations.’

So I supposed, and answered, —

‘Oh!’

‘I pour out my soul in a series of sonnets.’

‘A second Petrarch!’

‘My friends say some of them are not unworthy of that great name.’

‘I can well believe it.’

Here relief came, and like the tired sentinel, I left the post of duty. I thought of my sweet Giulia, and wondered at her beauty and charm; it was all so much clearer and cleaner than the dross I saw around me. I came away, for I was pining for solitude, and then I gave myself up to the exquisite dreams of my love.

At last the time came, the long day had at last worn away, and the night, the friend of lovers, gave me leave to go to Giulia.

XI

I WAS so happy. The world went on; things happened in Forli, the rival parties agitated and met together and discussed; there was a general ferment — and to it all I was profoundly indifferent. What matter all the petty little affairs of life? I said. People work and struggle, plot, scheme, make money, lose it, conspire for place and honour; they have their ambitions and hopes; but what is it all beside love? I had entered into the excitement of politics in Forli; I was behind the veil and knew the intricacies, the ambitions, the emotions of the actors; but now I withdrew myself. What did I care about the prospects of Forli, whether taxes were put on or taken off, or whether A killed B or B killed A, it really seemed so unimportant. I looked upon them as puppets performing on a stage, and I could not treat their acts with seriousness. Giulia! That was the great fact in life. Nothing mattered to me but Giulia. When I thought of Giulia my heart was filled with ecstasy, and I spat with scorn on all the silly details of events.

I would willingly have kept myself out of the stream which was carrying along the others; but I could not help knowing what happened. And it was indeed ridiculous. After the great scene at the Palace people had begun to take steps as if for big events. Checco had sent a large sum of money to Florence for the Medici to take care of; Bartolomeo Moratini had made preparations; there were generally a stir and unrest. Girolamo was supposed to be going to take some step; people were prepared for everything; when they woke up in the morning they asked if aught had taken place in the night; and Checco wore a coat of mail. On the Count’s side people were asking what Checco meant to do, whether the ovation he had received would encourage him to any violent step. All the world was agog for great events — and nothing happened. It reminded me of a mystery play in which, after great preparation of dialogue, some great stage effect is going to be produced — a saint is going to ascend to heaven, or a mountain is to open and the devil spring out. The spectators are sitting open-mouthed; the moment has come, everything is ready, the signal is given; the mob have already drawn their breath for a cry of astonishment — and something goes wrong and nothing happens.

The good Forlivesi could not understand it: they were looking for signs and miracles, and behold! they came not. Each day they said to themselves that this would be one to be remembered in the history of the town; that to-day Girolamo would surely leave his hesitations; but the day wore on quite calmly. Everyone took his dinner and supper as usual, the sun journeyed from east to west as it had done on the previous day, the night came, and the worthy citizen went to his bed at his usual hour, and slept in peace till the following sunrise. Nothing happened, and it seemed that nothing was going to happen. The troubled spirits gradually came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be troubled about, and the old quiet came over the town; there was no talk of new taxes, and the world wagged on.... Checco and Matteo and the Moratini resigned themselves to the fact that the sky was serene, and that they had better pursue their way without troubling their little heads about conspiracies and midnight daggers.

Meanwhile, I laughed, and admired their folly and my own wisdom. For I worried myself about none of these things; I lived in Giulia, for Giulia, by Giulia.... I had never enjoyed such happiness before; she was a little cold, perhaps, but I did not mind. I had passion that lived by its own flame, and I cared for nothing as long as she let me love her. And I argued with myself that it is an obvious thing that love is not the same on both sides. There is always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. Perhaps it is a special decree of Nature; for the man loves actively, caresses and is passionate; while the woman gives herself to him, and is in his embrace like some sweet, helpless animal. I did not ask for such love as I gave; all I asked was that my love should let herself be loved. That was all I cared for; that was all I wanted. My love for Giulia was wonderful even to me. I felt I had lost myself in her. I had given my whole being into her hand. Samson and Delilah! But this was no faithless Philistine. I would have given my honour into her keeping and felt it as sure as in my own. In my great love I felt such devotion, such reverence, that sometimes I hardly dared touch her; it seemed to me I must kneel and worship at her feet. I learnt the great delight of abasing myself to the beloved. I could make myself so small and mean in my humility; but nothing satisfied my wish to show my abject slavery.... Oh, Giulia! Giulia!

But this inaction on the part of Girolamo Riario had the effect of persuading his subjects of his weakness. They had given over expecting reprisals on his part, and the only conclusion they could come to was that he dared do nothing against Checco. It was inconceivable that he should leave unavenged the insults he had received; that he should bear without remark the signs of popularity which greeted Checco, not only on the day of the Council meeting, but since, every time he appeared in the streets. They began to despise their ruler as well as hate him, and they told one another stories of violent disputes in the Palace between the Count and Caterina. Everyone knew the pride and passion which came to the Countess with her Sforza blood, and they felt sure that she would not patiently bear the insults which her husband did not seem to mind; for the fear of the people could not stop their sarcasms, and when any member of the household was seen he was assailed with taunts and jeers; Caterina herself had to listen to scornful laughs as she passed by, and the town was ringing with a song about the Count. It was whispered that Girolamo’s little son, Ottaviano, had been heard singing it in ignorance of its meaning, and had been nearly killed by his father in a passion of rage. Evil reports began to circulate about Caterina’s virtue; it was supposed that she would not keep faithful to such a husband, and another song was made in praise of cuckoldry.

The Orsi would not be persuaded that this calm was to be believed in. Checco was assured that Girolamo must have some scheme on hand, and the quiet and silence seemed all the more ominous.

The Count very rarely appeared in Forli; but one Saint’s day he went to the Cathedral, and as he came back to the Palace, passing through the piazza, saw Checco. At the same moment Checco saw him, and stopped, uncertain what to do. The crowd suddenly became silent, and they stood still like statues petrified by a magic spell. What was going to happen? Girolamo himself hesitated a moment; a curious spasm crossed his face. Checco made as if to walk on, pretending not to notice the Count. Matteo and I were dumbfounded, absolutely at a loss. Then the Count stepped forward, and held out his hand.

‘Ah, my Checco! how goes it?’

He smiled and pressed warmly the hand which the Orsi gave him. Checco was taken aback, pale as if the hand he held were the hand of death.

‘You have neglected me of late, dear friend,’ said the Count.

‘I have not been well, my lord.’

Girolamo linked his arm in Checco’s.

‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘you must not be angry because I used sharp words to you the other day. You know I am hot-tempered.’

‘You have a right to say what you please.’

‘Oh, no; I have only a right to say pleasant things.’

He smiled, but all the time the mobile eyes were shifting here and there, scrutinising Checco’s face, giving occasional quick glances to me and Matteo. He went on, —

‘You must show a forgiving spirit.’ Then, to Matteo, ‘We must all be good Christians if we can, eh, Matteo?’

‘Of course!’

‘And yet your cousin bears malice.’

‘No, my lord,’ said Checco. ‘I am afraid I was too outspoken.’

‘Well, if you were, I have forgiven you, and you must forgive me. But we will not talk of that. My children have been asking for you. It is strange that this ferocious creature, who tells me I am the worst among bad men, should be so adored by my children. Your little godson is always crying for you.’

‘Dear child!’ said Checco.

‘Come and see them now. There is no time like the present.’

Matteo and I looked at one another. Was all this an attempt to get him in his hand, and this time not to let him go?

‘I must pray you to excuse me, for I have some gentlemen coming to dine with me to-day, and I fear I shall be late already.’

Girolamo gave us a rapid look, and evidently saw in our eyes something of our thoughts, for he said good-humouredly, —

‘You never will do anything for me, Checco. But I won’t keep you; I respect the duties of hospitality. However, another day you must come.’

He warmly pressed Checco’s hand, and, nodding to Matteo and me, left us.

The crowd had not been able to hear what was said, but they had seen the cordiality, and as soon as Girolamo disappeared behind the Palace doors, broke out into murmurs of derision. The Christian sentiment clearly gained little belief from them, and they put down the Count’s act to fear. It was clear, they said, that he found Checco too strong for him, and dared nothing. It was a discovery that the man they had so feared was willing to turn the other cheek when the one was smitten, and to all their former hate they added a new hate that he had caused them terror without being terrible. They hated him now for their own pusillanimity. The mocking songs gained force, and Girolamo began to be known as Cornuto, the Man of Horns.

Borne on this wave of contempt came another incident, which again showed the Count’s weakness. On the Sunday following his meeting with Checco, it was known that Girolamo meant to hear mass at the church of San Stefano, and Jacopo Ronchi, commander of a troop, stationed himself, with two other soldiers, to await him. When the Count appeared, accompanied by his wife and children and his suite, Jacopo pressed forward and, throwing himself on his knees, presented a petition, in which he asked for the arrears of pay of himself and his fellows. The Count took it without speaking, and pursued his way. Then Jacopo took hold of his legs to stop him, and said, —

‘For Heaven’s sake, my lord, give me a hearing. I and these others have received nothing for months, and we are starving.’

‘Let me go,’ said the Count, ‘your claim shall be attended to.’

‘Do not dismiss me, my lord. I have presented three petitions before, and to none of them have you paid attention. Now I am getting desperate, and can wait no longer. Look at my tattered clothes. Give me my money!’

‘Let me go, I tell you,’ said Girolamo, furiously, and he gave him a sweeping blow, so that the man fell on his back to the ground. ‘How dare you come and insult me here in the public place! By God! I cannot keep my patience much longer.’

He brought out these words with such violence of passion that it seemed as if in them exploded the anger which had been gathering up through this time of humiliation. Then, turning furiously on the people, he almost screamed, —

‘Make way!’

They dared not face his anger, and with white faces, shrunk back, leaving a path for him and his party to walk through.

XII

I LOOKED at these events as I might have looked at a comedy of Plautus; it was very amusing, but perhaps a little vulgar. I was wrapped up in my own happiness, and I had forgotten Nemesis.

One day, perhaps two months from my arrival in Forli, I heard Checco tell his cousin that a certain Giorgio dall’ Aste had returned. I paid no particular attention to the remark; but later, when I was alone with Matteo, it occurred to me that I had not heard before of this person. I did not know that Giulia had relations on her husband’s side. I asked, —

‘By the way, who is that Giorgio dall’ Aste, of whom Checco was speaking?’

‘A cousin of Donna Giulia’s late husband.’

‘I have never heard him spoken of before.’

‘Haven’t you? He enjoys quite a peculiar reputation, as being the only lover that the virtuous Giulia has kept for more than ten days.’

‘Another of your old wives’ tales, Matteo! Nature intended you for a begging friar.’

‘I have often thought I have missed my vocation. With my brilliant gift for telling lies in a truthful manner, I should have made my way in the Church to the highest dignities. Whereas, certain antiquated notions of honour having been instilled into me during my training as a soldier, my gifts are lost; with the result, that when I tell the truth people think I am lying. But this is solemn truth!’

‘All your stories are!’ I jeered.

‘Ask anyone. This has been going on for years. When Giulia was married by old Tommaso, whom she had never seen in her life before the betrothal, the first thing she did was to fall in love with Giorgio. He fell in love with her, but being a fairly honest sort of man, he had some scruples about committing adultery with his cousin’s wife, especially as he lived on his cousin’s money. However, when a woman is vicious, a man’s scruples soon go to the devil. If Adam couldn’t refuse the apple, you can’t expect us poor fallen creatures to do so either. The result was that Joseph did not run away from Potiphar’s wife so fast as to prevent her from catching him.’

‘How biblical you are.’

‘Yes,’ answered Matteo; ‘I’m making love to a parson’s mistress, and I am cultivating the style which I find she is used to.... But, however, Giorgio, being youthful, after a short while began to have prickings of conscience, and went away from Forli. Giulia was heart-broken, and her grief was so great that she must have half the town to console her. Then Giorgio’s conscience calmed down, and he came back, and Giulia threw over all her lovers.’

‘I don’t believe a single word you say.’

‘On my honour, it’s true.’

‘On the face of it, the story is false. If she really loves him, why do they not keep together now that there is no hindrance?’

‘Because Giulia has the heart of a strumpet and can’t be faithful to any one man. She’s very fond of him, but they quarrel, and she takes a sudden fancy for somebody else, and for a while they won’t see one another. But there seems some magical charm between them, for sooner or later they always come back to one another. I believe, if they were at the ends of the world, eventually they would be drawn together, even if they struggled with all their might against it. And, I promise you, Giorgio has struggled; he tries to part with her for good and all, and each time they separate he vows it shall be for ever. But there is an invisible chain and it always brings him back.’

I stood looking at him in silence. Strange, horrible thoughts passed through my head and I could not drive them away. I tried to speak quite calmly.

‘And how is it when they are together?’

‘All sunshine and storm, but as time goes on the storm gets longer and blacker; and then Giorgio goes away.’

‘But, good God! man, how do you know?’ I cried in agony.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘They quarrel?’ I asked.

‘Furiously! He feels himself imprisoned against his will, with the door open to escape, but not the strength to do it; and she is angry that he should love her thus, trying not to love her. It rather seems to me that it explains her own excesses; her other loves are partly to show him how much she is loved, and to persuade herself that she is lovable.’

I did not believe it. Oh, no, I swear I did not believe it, yet I was frightened, horribly frightened; but I would not believe a single word of it.

‘Listen, Matteo,’ I said. ‘You believe badly of Giulia; but you do not know her. I swear to you that she is good and pure, whatever she may have been in the past; and I do not believe a word of these scandals. I am sure that now she is as true and faithful as she is beautiful.’

Matteo looked at me for a moment.

‘Are you her lover?’ he asked.

‘Yes!’

Matteo opened his mouth as if about to speak, then stopped, and after a moment’s hesitation turned away.

That evening I went to Giulia. I found her lying full length on a divan, her head sunken in soft cushions. She was immersed in reverie. I wondered whether she was thinking of me, and I went up to her silently, and, bending over her, lightly kissed her lips. She gave a cry, and a frown darkened her eyes.

‘You frightened me!’

‘I am sorry,’ I answered humbly. ‘I wanted to surprise you.’

She did not answer, but raised her eyebrows, slightly shrugging her shoulders. I wondered whether something had arisen to vex her. I knew she had a quick temper, but I did not mind it; a cross word was so soon followed by a look of repentance and a word of love. I passed my hand over her beautiful soft hair. The frown came again, and she turned her head away.

‘Giulia,’ I said, ‘what is it?’ I took her hand; she withdrew it immediately.

‘Nothing,’ she answered.

‘Why do you turn away from me and withdraw your hand?’

‘Why should I not turn away from you and withdraw my hand?’

‘Don’t you love me, Giulia?’

She gave a sigh, and pretended to look bored. I looked at her, pained at heart and wondering.

‘Giulia, my dear, tell me what it is. You are making me very unhappy.’

‘Oh, don’t I tell you, nothing, nothing, nothing!’

‘Why are you cross?’

I put my face to her’s, and my arms round her neck. She disengaged herself impatiently.

‘You refuse my kisses, Giulia!’

She made another gesture of annoyance.

‘Giulia, don’t you love me?’ My heart was beginning to sink, and I remembered what I had heard from Matteo. Oh, God! could it be true?...

‘Yes, of course I love you, but sometimes I must be left in peace.’

‘You have only to say the word, and I will go away altogether.’

‘I don’t want you to do that, but we shall like one another much better if we don’t see too much of one another.’

‘When one is in love, really and truly, one does not think of such wise precautions.’

‘And you are here so often that I am afraid of my good name.’

‘You need have no fear about your character,’ I answered bitterly. ‘One more scandal will not make much difference.’

‘You need not insult me!’

I could not be angry with her, I loved her too much, and the words I had said hurt me ten times more than they hurt her. I fell on my knees by her side and took hold of her arms.

‘Oh, Giulia, Giulia, forgive me! I don’t mean to say anything to wound you. But, for God’s sake! don’t be so cold. I love you, I love you. Be good to me.’

‘I think I have been good to you.... After all, it is not such a very grave matter. I have not taken things more seriously than you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I cried, aghast.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I suppose you found me a pretty woman, and thought you could occupy a few spare moments with a pleasant amour. You can hardly have expected me to be influenced by sentiments very different from your own.’

‘You mean you do not love me?’

‘I love you as much as you love me. I don’t suppose either you are Lancelot, or I Guinevere.’

I still knelt at her side in silence, and my head felt as if the vessels in it were bursting....

‘You know,’ she went on quite calmly, ‘one cannot love for ever.’

‘But I love you, Giulia; I love you with all my heart and soul! I have had loves picked up for the opportunity’s sake, or for pure idleness; but my love for you is different. I swear to you it is a matter of my whole life.’

‘That has been said to me so often....’

I was beginning to be overwhelmed.

‘But do you mean that it is all finished? Do you mean that you won’t have anything more to do with me!’

‘I don’t say I won’t have anything more to do with you.’

‘But love? It is love I want.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘But why not?’ I said despairingly. ‘Why have you given it me at all if you want to take it away?’

‘One is not master of one’s love. It comes and goes.’

‘Don’t you love me at all?’

‘No!’

‘Oh, God! But why do you tell me this to-day?’

‘I had to tell you some time.’

‘But why not yesterday, or the day before? Why to-day particularly?’

She did not answer.

‘Is it because Giorgio dall’ Aste has just returned?’

She started up and her eyes flashed.

‘What have they been telling you about him?’

‘Has he been here to-day? Were you thinking of him when I came? Were you languorous from his embraces?’

‘How dare you!’

‘The only lover to whom you have been faithful, more or less!’

‘You vowed you did not believe the scandals about me, and now, when I refuse you the smallest thing, you are ready to believe every word. What a love is this! I thought I had heard you talk so often of boundless confidence.’

‘I believe every word I have heard against you. I believe you are a harlot.’

She had raised herself from her couch, and we were standing face to face.

‘Do you want money? Look! I have as good money as another. I will pay you for your love; here, take it.’

I took gold pieces from my pocket and flung them at her feet.

‘Ah,’ she cried in indignation, ‘you cur! Go, go!’

She pointed to the door. Then I felt a sudden revulsion. I fell on my knees and seized her hands.

‘Oh, forgive me, Giulia. I don’t know what I am saying; I am mad. But don’t rob me of your love; it is the only thing I have to live for. For God’s sake, forgive me! Oh, Giulia, I love you, I love you. I can’t live without you.’ The tears broke from my eyes. I could not stop them.

‘Leave me! leave me!’

I was ashamed of my abjectness; I rose up indignant.

‘Oh, you are quite heartless. You have no right to treat me so. You were not obliged to give me your love; but when once you have given it you cannot take it away. No one has the right to make another unhappy as you make me. You are a bad, evil woman. I hate you!’

I stood over her with clenched fists. She shrank back, afraid.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ I said; ‘I won’t touch you. I hate you too much.’

Then I turned to the crucifix, and lifted my hands.

‘Oh, God! I pray you, let this woman be treated as she has treated me.’ And to her,’I hope to God you are as unhappy as I am. And I hope the unhappiness will come soon — you harlot!’

I left her, and in my rage slammed the door, so that the lock shattered behind me.

XIII

I WALKED through the streets like a man who has received sentence of death. My brain was whirling, and sometimes I stopped and pressed my head with both hands to relieve the insupportable pressure. I could not realise what had happened; I only knew it was terrible. I felt as if I were going mad; I could have killed myself. At last, getting home, I threw myself on my bed and tried to gather myself together. I cried out against that woman. I wished I had my fingers curling round her soft white throat, that I could strangle the life out of her. Oh, I hated her!

At last I fell asleep, and in that sweet forgetfulness enjoyed a little peace. When I woke I lay still for a moment without remembering what had happened; then suddenly it came back to me, and the blood flushed to my face as I thought of how I had humiliated myself to her. She must be as hard as stone, I said to myself, to see my misery and not take pity on me. She saw my tears and was not moved one jot. All the time I had been praying and beseeching, she had been as calm as a marble figure. She must have seen my agony and the passion of my love, and yet she was absolutely, absolutely indifferent. Oh, I despised her! I had known even when I adored her madly that it was only my love which gave her the qualities I worshipped. I had seen she was ignorant and foolish, and commonplace and vicious; but I did not care as long as I loved her and could have her love in return. But when I thought of her so horribly heartless, so uncaring to my unhappiness, I did more than hate her — I utterly despised her. I despised myself for having loved her. I despised myself for loving her still....

I got up and went about my day’s duties, trying to forget myself in their performance. But still I brooded over my misery, and in my heart I cursed the woman. It was Nemesis, always Nemesis! In my folly I had forgotten her; and yet I should have remembered that through my life all happiness had been followed by all misery.... I had tried to ward off the evil by sacrifice; I had rejoiced at the harm which befell me, but the very rejoicing seemed to render the hurt of no avail, and with the inevitableness of fate, Nemesis had come and thrown me back into the old unhappiness. But of late I had forgotten. What was Nemesis to me now when I thought my happiness so great that it could not help but last? It was so robust and strong that I never thought of its cessation. I did not even think the Gods were good to me at last. I had forgotten the Gods; I thought of nothing but love and Giulia.

Matteo came asking me to go to the Palace with him and Checco, at the particular desire of Girolamo, who wished to show them the progress of the decorations. I would not go. I wanted to be alone and think.

But my thoughts maddened me. Over and over again I repeated every word of the terrible quarrel, and more than ever I was filled with horror for her cold cruelty. What right have these people to make us unhappy? Is there not enough misery in the world already? Oh, it is brutal!

I could not bear myself; I regretted that I had not gone to the Palace. I detested this solitude.

The hours passed like years, and as my brain grew tired I sank into a state of sodden, passive misery.

At last they came back, and Matteo told me what had happened. I tried to listen, to forget myself.... It appeared that the Count had been extremely cordial. After talking to them of his house, and showing the beautiful things he had collected to furnish it with, he took them to Caterina’s apartments, where they found the Countess surrounded by her children. She had been very charming and gracious, even deigning to compliment Matteo on his gallantry. How it interested me to know all this! The children had run to Checco as soon as they saw him, dragging him into their game. The others looked on while the Orsi played good-humouredly with the little boys, and Girolamo, laying his hand on Checco’s shoulder, had remarked, —

‘You see, dear friend, the children are determined that there should not be enmity between us. And when the little ones love you so dearly, can you think that I should hate you?’

And when they left he had accompanied them to the gates and been quite affectionate in his farewell.

At last the night came and I could shut myself up in my room. I thought with a bitter smile that it was the hour at which I was used to go to Giulia. And now I should never go to Giulia again. My unhappiness was too great for wrath; I felt too utterly miserable to think of my grievances, or of my contempt. I only felt broken-hearted. I could not keep the tears back, and burying my face in the pillows, I cried my heart out. It was years and years since I had wept, not since I was quite a boy, but this blow had taken from me all manliness, and I gave myself over to my grief, passionately, shamelessly. I did not care that I was weak; I had no respect for myself, or care for myself. The sobs came, one on the heels of another like waves, and the pain, as they tore my chest, relieved the anguish of my mind. Exhaustion came at last, and with it sleep.

But I knew I could not hide the change in me, and Matteo soon noticed it.

‘What is the matter with you, Filippo?’ he asked. I blushed and hesitated.

‘Nothing,’ I answered at last.

‘I thought you were unhappy.’

Our eyes met, but I could not stand his inquiring glance and looked down. He came to me, and sitting on the arm of my chair, put his hand on my shoulder and said affectionately, —

‘We’re friends, aren’t we, Filippo?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, smiling and taking his hand.

‘Won’t you trust me?’

After a pause I answered, —

‘I should so much like to.’ I felt as if indeed it would relieve me to be able to confide in somebody, I wanted sympathy so badly.

He passed his hand gently over my hair.

I hesitated a little, but I could not help myself, and I told him the whole story from beginning to end.

‘Poverino!’ he said, when I had finished; then, clenching his teeth, ‘She is a beast, that woman!’

‘I ought to have taken your warning, Matteo, but I was a fool.’

‘Who ever does take warning!’ he answered, shrugging his shoulders. ‘How could you be expected to believe me?’

‘But I believe you now. I am horrified when I think of her vice and cruelty.’

‘Ah, well, it is over now.’

‘Quite! I hate her and despise her. Oh, I wish I could get her face to face and tell her what I think of her.’

I thought my talk with Matteo had relieved me, I thought the worst was over; but at night melancholy came on me stronger than ever, and I groaned as I threw myself on my bed. I felt so terribly alone in the world.... I had no relation but a half-brother, a boy of twelve, whom I had hardly seen; and as I wandered through the land, an exile, I had been continually assailed by the hateful demon of loneliness. And sometimes in my solitude I had felt that I could kill myself. But when I found I was in love with Giulia, I cried aloud with joy.... I threw everything to the winds, gathering myself up for the supreme effort of passion. All the storm and stress were passed; I was no longer alone, for I had someone to whom I could give my love. I was like the ship that arrives in the harbour, and reefs her sails and clears her deck, settling down in the quietness of the waters.

And now all was over! Oh God, to think that my hopes should be shattered in so short a time, that the ship should be so soon tossed about in the storm, and the stars hidden by the clouds! And the past delight made the present darkness all the more bitter. I groaned. In my misery I uttered a prayer to God to help me. I could not think I should live henceforth. How could I go on existing with this aching void in my heart? I could not spend days and weeks and years always with this despair. It was too terrible to last. My reason told me that time would remedy it; but time was so long, and what misery must I go through before the wound was healed! And as I thought of what I had lost, my agony grew more unbearable. It grew vivid, and I felt Giulia in my arms. I panted as I pressed my lips against hers, and I said to her, —

‘How could you!’

I buried my face in my hands, so as better to enjoy my dream. I smelt the perfume of her breath; I felt on my face the light touch of her hair. But it would not last. I tried to seize the image and hold it back, but it vanished and left me broken-hearted....

I knew I did not hate her. I had pretended to, but the words came from the mouth. In my heart I loved her still, more passionately than ever. What did I care if she was heartless and cruel and faithless and vicious! It was nothing to me as long as I could hold her in my arms and cover her with kisses. I did despise her; I knew her for what she was, but still I loved her insanely. Oh, if she would only come back to me! I would willingly forget everything and forgive her. Nay, I would ask her forgiveness and grovel before her, if she would only let me enjoy her love again.

I would go back to her and fall on my knees, and pray her to be merciful. Why should I suppose she had changed in the few days. I knew she would treat me with the same indifference, and only feel a wondering contempt that I should so abase myself. It came like a blow in the face, the thought of her cold cruelty and her calmness. No, I vowed I would never subject myself to that again. I felt myself blush at the remembrance of the humiliation. But perhaps she was sorry for what she had done. I knew her pride would prevent her from coming or sending to me, and should I give her no opportunity? Perhaps, if we saw one another for a few moments everything might be arranged, and I might be happy again. An immense feeling of hope filled me. I thought I must be right in my idea; she could not be so heartless as to have no regret. How willingly I would take her back! My heart leaped. But I dared not go to her house. I knew I should find her on the morrow at her father’s, who was going to give a banquet to some friends. I would speak to her there, casually, as if we were ordinary acquaintances; and then at the first sign of yielding on her part, even if I saw but a tinge of regret in her eyes, I would burst out. I was happy in my plan, and I went to sleep with the name of Giulia on my lips and her image in my heart.

XIV

I WENT to the Moratini Palace, and with beating heart looked round for Giulia. She was surrounded by her usual court, and seemed more lively and excited than ever. I had never seen her more beautiful. She was dressed all in white, and her sleeves were sewn with pearls; she looked like a bride. She caught sight of me at once, but pretended not to see me, and went on talking.

I approached her brother Alessandro and said to him casually, —

‘I am told a cousin of your sister has come to Forli. Is he here to-day?’

He looked at me inquiringly, not immediately understanding.

‘Giorgio dall’ Aste,’ I explained.

‘Oh, I didn’t know you meant him. No, he’s not here. He and Giulia’s husband were not friends, and so—’

‘Why were they not friends?’ I interrupted, on the spur of the moment, not seeing the impertinence of the question till I had made it.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Relations always are at enmity with one another; probably some disagreement with regard to their estates.’

‘Was that all?’

‘So far as I know.’

I recollected that in a scandal the persons most interested are the last to hear it. The husband hears nothing of his wife’s treachery till all the town knows every detail.

‘I should like to have seen him,’ I went on.

‘Giorgo? Oh, he’s a weak sort of creature; one of those men who commit sins and repent!’

‘That is not a fault of which you will ever be guilty, Alessandro,’ I said, smiling.

‘I sincerely hope not. After all, if a man has a conscience he ought not to do wrong. But if he does he must be a very poor sort of a fool to repent.’

‘You cannot have the rose without the thorn.’

‘Why not? It only needs care. There are dregs at the bottom of every cup, but you are not obliged to drink them.’

‘You have made up your mind that if you commit sins you are ready to go to hell for them?’ I said.

‘It is braver than going to Heaven by the back door, turning pious when you are too old to do anything you shouldn’t.’

‘I agree with you that one has little respect for the man who turns monk when things go wrong with him.’

I saw that Giulia was alone, and seized the opportunity to speak with her.

‘Giulia,’ I said, approaching.

She looked at me for a moment with an air of perplexity, as if she really could not remember whom I was.

‘Ah, Messer Filippo!’ she said, as if suddenly recollecting.

‘It is not so long since we met that you can have forgotten me.’

‘Yes. I remember last time you did me the honour to visit me you were very rude and cross.’

I looked at her silently, wondering.

‘Well?’ she said, steadily answering my gaze and smiling.

‘Have you nothing more to say to me than that?’ I asked in an undertone.

‘What do you want me to say to you?’

‘Are you quite heartless?’

She gave a sigh of boredom, and looked to the other end of the room, as if for someone to come and break a tedious conversation.

‘How could you!’ I whispered.

Notwithstanding her self-control, a faint blush came over her face. I stood looking at her for a little while and then I turned away. She was quite heartless. I left the Moratini and walked out into the town. This last interview had helped me in so far that it made certain that my love was hopeless. I stood still and stamped on the ground, vowing I would not love her. I would put her away from my thoughts entirely; she was a contemptible, vicious woman, and I was too proud to be subject to her. I wondered I did not kill her. I made up my mind to take my courage in both hands and leave Forli. Once away, I should find myself attracted to different matters, and probably I should not live long before finding some other woman to take Giulia’s place. She was not the only woman in Italy; she was not the most beautiful nor the cleverest. Give me a month and I could laugh at my torments....

The same evening I told Matteo I meant to leave Forli.

‘Why?’ he asked in astonishment.

‘I have been here several weeks,’ I answered; ‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome.’

‘That is rubbish. You know I should be only too glad for you to stay here all your life.’

‘That is very kind of you,’ I replied, with a laugh, ‘but the establishment is not yours.’

‘That makes no difference. Besides, Checco has become very fond of you, and I’m sure he wishes you to stay.’

‘Of course, I know your hospitality is quite unlimited; but I am beginning to want to get back to Città di Castello.’

‘Why?’ asked Matteo, doubtfully.

‘One likes to return to one’s native place.’

‘You have been away from Castello for ten years; you cannot be in any particular hurry to get back.’

I was beginning to protest when Checco came in, and Matteo interrupted me with, —

‘Listen, Checco, Filippo says he wants to leave us.’

‘But he sha’n’t,’ said Checco, laughing.

‘I really must!’ I answered gravely.

‘You really mustn’t,’ replied Checco. ‘We can’t spare you, Filippo.’

‘There’s no great hurry about your going home,’ he added, when I had explained my reasons, ‘and I fancy that soon we shall want you here. A good sword and a brave heart will probably be of good use to us.’

‘Everything is as quiet as a cemetery,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders.

‘It is quiet above; but below there are rumblings and strange movements. I feel sure this calm only presages a storm. It is impossible for Girolamo to go on as he is now; his debts are increasing every day, and his difficulties will soon be impracticable. He must do something. There is certain to be a disturbance at any attempt to put on the taxes, and then Heaven only knows what will happen.’

I was beginning to get a little vexed at their opposition, and I answered petulantly, —

‘No, I must go.’

‘Stay another month; things must come to a head before then.’

A month would have been as bad as a year.

‘I am out of health,’ I answered; ‘I feel I want to get into a different atmosphere.’

Checco thought for a moment.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we can arrange matters to suit us both. I want someone to go to Florence for me to conclude a little business matter with Messer Lorenzo de’ Medici. You would be away a fortnight; and if you are out of sorts the ride across country will put you right. Will you go?’

I thought for a moment. It was not a very long absence, but the new sights would distract me, and I wanted to see Florence again. On the whole, I thought it would suffice, and that I could count on the cure of my ill before the time was up.

‘Very well,’ I answered.

‘Good! And you will have a pleasant companion. I had talked to Scipione Moratini about it; it did not occur to me that you would go. But it will be all the better to have two of you.’

‘If I go,’ I said, ‘I shall go alone.’

Checco was rather astonished.

‘Why?’

‘Scipione bores me. I want to be quiet and do as I like.’

I was quite determined that neither of the Moratini should come with me. They would have reminded me too much of what I wanted to forget.

‘As you like,’ said Checco. ‘I can easily tell Scipione that I want him to do something else for me.’

‘Thanks.’

‘When will you start?’

‘At once.’

‘Then come, and I will give you the instructions and necessary papers.’

XV

NEXT morning I mounted my horse and set out with Matteo, who was to accompany me for a little way.

But at the town gate a guard stopped us and asked where we were going.

‘Out!’ I answered shortly, moving on.

‘Stop!’ said the man, catching hold of my bridle.

‘What the devil d’you mean?’ said Matteo. ‘D’you know whom we are?’

‘I have orders to let no one go by without the permission of my captain.’

‘What tyrants they are!’ cried Matteo. ‘Well, what the hell are you standing there for? Go and tell your captain to come out.’

The man signed to another soldier, who went into the guard-house; he was still holding my bridle. I was not very good-tempered that morning.

‘Have the goodness to take your hands off,’ I said.

He looked as if he were about to refuse.

‘Will you do as you are told?’ Then, as he hesitated, I brought down the butt-end of my whip on his fingers, and with an oath bade him stand off. He let go at once, cursing, and looked as if he would willingly stab me if he dared. We waited impatiently, but the captain did not appear.

‘Why the devil doesn’t this man come?’ I said; and Matteo, turning to one of the soldiers, ordered, —

‘Go and tell him to come here instantly.’

At that moment the captain appeared, and we understood the incident, for it was Ercole Piacentini. He had apparently seen us coming, or heard of my intended journey, and had set himself out to insult us. We were both furious.

‘Why the devil don’t you hurry up when you’re sent for?’ said Matteo.

He scowled, but did not answer. Turning to me he asked, —

‘Where are you going?’

Matteo and I looked at one another in amazement at the man’s impudence, and I burst forth, —

‘You insolent fellow! What do you mean by stopping me like this?’

‘I have a right to refuse passage to anyone I choose.’

‘Take care!’ I said. ‘I swear the Count shall be told of your behaviour, and nowadays the Count is in the habit of doing as the Orsi tell him.’

‘He shall hear of this,’ growled the Piacentini.

‘Tell him what you like. Do you think I care? You can tell him that I consider his captain a very impertinent ruffian. Now, let me go.’

‘You shall not pass till I choose.’

‘By God! man,’ I said, absolutely beside myself, ‘it seems I cannot touch you here, but if ever we meet in Città di Castello—’

‘I will give you any satisfaction you wish,’ he answered hotly.

‘Satisfaction! I would not soil my sword by crossing it with yours. I was going to say that if ever we meet in Castello I will have you whipped by my lacqueys in the public place.’

I felt a ferocious pleasure in throwing the words of contempt in his face.

‘Come on,’ said Matteo; ‘we cannot waste our time here.’

We put the spurs to our horses. The soldiers looked to their captain to see whether they should stop us, but he gave no order, and we passed through. When we got outside, Matteo said to me, —

‘Girolamo must be planning something, or Ercole would not have dared to do that.’

‘It is only the impotent anger of a foolish man,’ I answered. ‘The Count will probably be very angry with him when he hears of it.’

We rode a few miles, and then Matteo turned back. When I found myself alone I heaved a great sigh of relief. I was free for a while at least.... Another episode in my life was finished; I could forget it, and look forward to new things.

As I rode on, the March wind got into my blood and sent it whirling madly through my veins. The sun was shining brightly and covered everything with smiles; the fruit trees were all in flower — apples, pears, almonds — the dainty buds covered the branches with a snow of pink and white. The ground beneath them was bespattered with narcissi and anemones, the very olive trees looked gay. All the world laughed with joy at the bright spring morning, and I laughed louder than the rest. I drew in long breaths of the keen air, and it made me drunk, so that I set the spurs to my horse and galloped wildly along the silent road.

I had made up my mind to forget Giulia, and I succeeded, for the changing scenes took me away from myself, and I was intent on the world at large. But I could not command my dreams. At night she came to me, and I dreamed that she was by my side, with her arms round my neck, sweetly caressing, trying to make me forget what I had suffered. And the waking was bitter.... But even that would leave me soon, I hoped, and then I should be free indeed.

I rode on, full of courage and good spirits, along endless roads, putting up at wayside inns, through the mountains, past villages and hamlets, past thriving towns, till I found myself in the heart of Tuscany, and finally I saw the roofs of Florence spread out before me.

After I had cleaned myself at the inn and had eaten, I sauntered through the town, renewing my recollections. I walked round Madonna del Fiore, and leaning against one of the houses at the back of the piazza looked at the beautiful apse, the marble all glistening in the moonlight. It was very quiet and peaceful; the exquisite church filled me with a sense of rest and purity, so that I cast far from me all vice.... Then I went to the baptistery and tried to make out in the dim light the details of Ghiberti’s wonderful doors. It was late and the streets were silent as I strolled to the Piazza della Signoria, and saw before me the grim stone palace with its tower, and I came down to the Arno and looked at the glistening of the water, with the bridge covered with houses; and as I considered the beauty of it all I thought it strange that the works of man should be so good and pure and man himself so vile.

Next day I set about my business. I had a special letter of introduction to Lorenzo, and was ushered in to him by a clerk. I found two people in the room; one, a young man with a long, oval face, and the bones of the face and chin very strongly marked; he had a very wonderful skin, like brown ivory, black hair that fell over his forehead and ears, and, most striking of all, large brown eyes, very soft and melancholy. I thought I had never before seen a man quite so beautiful. Seated by him, talking with animation, was an insignificant man, bent and wrinkled and mean, looking like a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop, except for the massive golden chain about his neck and the dress of dark red velvet with an embroidered collar. His features were ugly; a large, coarse nose, a heavy, sensual mouth, small eyes, but very sharp and glittering; the hair thin and short, the skin muddy, yellow, wrinkled — Lorenzo de’ Medici!

As I entered the room, he interrupted himself and spoke to me in a harsh, disagreeable voice.

‘Messer Filippo Brandolini, I think. You are very welcome.’

‘I am afraid I interrupt you,’ I said, looking at the youth with the melancholy eyes.

‘Oh no,’ answered Lorenzo, gaily. ‘We were talking of Plato. I really ought to have been attending to very much more serious matters, but I never can resist Pico.’

Then that was the famous Pico della Mirandola. I looked at him again and felt envious that one person should be possessed of such genius and such beauty. It was hardly fair on Nature’s part.

‘It is more the subject than I that is irresistible.’

‘Ah, the banquet!’ said Lorenzo, clasping his hands. ‘What an inexhaustible matter! I could go on talking about it all day and all night for a year, and then find I had left unsaid half what I had in my mind.’

‘You have so vast an experience in the subject treated of,’ said Pico, laughing; ‘you could give a chapter of comment to every sentence of Plato.’

‘You rascal, Pico!’ answered Lorenzo, also laughing. ‘And what is your opinion of love, Messer?’ he added, turning to me.

I answered, smiling, —

‘Con tua promesse, et tua false parole,

Con falsi risi, et con vago sembiante,

Donna, menato hai il tuo fidele amante.’

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Those promises of thine, and those false words,

Those traitor smiles, and that inconstant seeming,

Lady, with these thou’st led astray thy faithful lover.

They were Lorenzo’s own lines, and he was delighted that I should quote them, but still the pleasure was not too great, and I saw that it must be subtle flattery indeed that should turn his head.

‘You have the spirit of a courtier, Messer Filippo,’ he said in reply to my quotation. ‘You are wasted on liberty!’

‘It is in the air in Florence — one breathes it in through every pore.’

‘What, liberty?’

‘No; the spirit of the courtier.’

Lorenzo looked at me sharply, then at Pico, repressing a smile at my sarcasm.

‘Well, about your business from Forli?’ he said; but when I began explaining the transaction he interrupted me. ‘Oh, all that you can arrange with my secretaries. Tell me what is going on in the town. There have been rumours of disturbance.’

I looked at Pico, who rose and went out, saying, —

‘I will leave you. Politics are not for me.’

I told Lorenzo all that had happened, while he listened intently, occasionally interrupting me to ask a question. When I had finished, he said —

‘And what will happen now?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Who knows?’

‘The wise man knows,’ he said earnestly, ‘for he has made up his mind what will happen, and goes about to cause it to happen. It is only the fool who trusts to chance and waits for circumstances to develop themselves....’

‘Tell your master—’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I interrupted.

He looked at me interrogatively.

‘I was wondering of whom you were speaking,’ I murmured.

He understood and, smiling, said, —

‘I apologise. I was thinking you were a Forlivese. Of course, I remember now that you are a citizen of Castello, and we all know how tenacious they have been of their liberty and how proud of their freedom.’

He had me on the hip; for Città di Castello had been among the first of the towns to lose its liberty, and, unlike others, had borne its servitude with more equanimity than was honourable.

‘However,’ he went on, ‘tell Checco d’Orsi that I know Girolamo Riario. It was his father and he who were the prime movers in the conspiracy which killed my brother and nearly killed myself. Let him remember that the Riario is perfectly unscrupulous, and that he is not accustomed to forgive an injury — or forget it. You say that Girolamo has repeatedly threatened Checco. Has that had no effect on him?’

‘He was somewhat alarmed.’

‘Besides?’

I looked at him, trying to seize his meaning.

‘Did he make up his mind to sit still and wait till Girolamo found means to carry his threats into effect?’

I was rather at a loss for an answer. Lorenzo’s eyes were fixed keenly upon me; they seemed to be trying to read my brain.

‘It was suggested to him that it would be unwise,’ I replied slowly.

‘And what did he answer to that?’

‘He recalled the ill results of certain recent — events.’

‘Ah!’

He took his eyes off me, as if he had suddenly seen the meaning behind my words, and was now quite sure of everything he wanted to know. He walked up and down the room, thinking; then he said to me, —

‘Tell Checco that Girolamo’s position is very insecure. The Pope is against him, though he pretends to uphold him. You remember that when the Zampeschi seized his castle of San Marco, Girolamo thought they had the tacit consent of the Pope, and dared make no reprisal. Lodovico Sforza would doubtless come to the assistance of his half-sister, but he is occupied with the Venetians — and if the people of Forli hate the Count!’

‘Then you advise—’

‘I advise nothing. But let Checco know that it is only the fool who proposes to himself an end when he cannot or will not attain it; but the man who deserves the name of man, marches straight to the goal with clearness of mind and strength of will. He looks at things as they are and puts aside all vain appearances; and when his intelligence has shown him the means to his end, he is a fool if he refuses them, and he is a wise man if he uses them steadily and unhesitatingly. Tell that to Checco!’

He threw himself into his chair with a little cry of relief.

‘Now we can talk of other things. Pico!’

A servant came in to say that Pico had gone away.

‘The villain!’ cried Lorenzo. ‘But I daresay you will want to go away too, Messer Brandolini. But you must come to-morrow; we are going to act the Menacchini of Plautus; and besides the wit of the Latin you will see all the youth and beauty of Florence.’

As I took my leave, he added, —

‘I need not warn you to be discreet.’

XVI

A FEW days later I found myself in sight of Forli. As I rode along I meditated; and presently the thought came to me that after all there was perhaps a certain equality in the portioning out of good and evil in this world. When fate gave one happiness she followed it with unhappiness, but the two lasted about an equal time, so that the balance was not unevenly preserved.... In my love for Giulia I had gone through a few days of intense happiness; the first kiss had caused me such ecstasy that I was rapt up to heaven; I felt myself a god. And this was followed by a sort of passive happiness, when I lived but to enjoy my love and cared for nothing in the world besides. Then came the catastrophe, and I passed through the most awful misery that man had ever felt: even now as I thought of it the sweat gathered on my forehead. But I noticed that strangely as this wretchedness was equal with the first happiness, so was it equal in length. And this was followed by a passive unhappiness when I no longer felt all the bitterness of my woe, but only a certain dull misery, which was like peace. And half smiling, half sighing, I thought that the passive misery again was equal to the passive happiness. Finally came the blessed state of indifference, and, except for the remembrance, my heart was as if nothing had been at all. So it seemed to me that one ought not to complain; for if the world had no right to give one continual misery, one had no cause to expect unmingled happiness, and the conjunction of the two, in all things equal, seemed normal and reasonable. And I had not noticed that I was come to Forli.

I entered the gate with a pleasant sense of homecoming. I passed along the grey streets I was beginning to know so well, and felt for them something of the affection of old friends. I was glad, too, that I should shortly see Checco and my dear Matteo. I felt I had been unkind to Matteo: he was so fond of me and had always been so good, but I had been so wrapped up in my love that his very presence had been importunate, and I had responded coldly to his friendliness. And being then in a sentimental mood, I thought how much better and more trustworthy a friend is to the most lovely woman in the world. You could neglect him and be unfaithful to him, and yet if you were in trouble you could come back and he would take you to his arms and comfort you, and never once complain that you had strayed away. I longed to be with Matteo, clasping his hand. In my hurry I put the spurs to my horse, and clattered along the street. In a few minutes I had reached the Palazzo, leapt off my horse, sprung up the stairs, and flung myself into the arms of my friend.

After the first greetings, Matteo dragged me along to Checco.

‘The good cousin is most eager to hear your news. We must not keep him waiting.’

Checco seemed as pleased to see me as Matteo. He warmly pressed my hand, and said, —

‘I am glad to have you back, Filippo. In your absence we have been lamenting like forsaken shepherdesses. Now, what is your news?’

I was fully impressed with my importance at the moment, and the anxiety with which I was being listened to. I resolved not to betray myself too soon, and began telling them about the kindness of Lorenzo, and the play which he had invited me to see. I described the brilliancy of the assembly, and the excellence of the acting. They listened with interest, but I could see it was not what they wanted to hear.

‘But I see you want to hear about more important matters,’ I said. ‘Well—’

‘Ah!’ they cried, drawing their chairs closer to me, settling themselves to listen attentively.

With a slight smile I proceeded to give them the details of the commercial transaction which had been the ostensible purpose of my visit, and I laughed to myself as I saw their disgust. Checco could not restrain his impatience, but did not like to interrupt me. Matteo, however, saw that I was mocking, and broke in.

‘Confound you, Filippo! Why do you torment us when you know we are on pins and needles?’

Checco looked up and saw me laughing, and implored, —

‘Put us out of torture, for Heaven’s sake!’

‘Very well!’ I answered. ‘Lorenzo asked me about the state of Forli, and I told him. Then, after thinking awhile, he said, “Tell this to Checco—”’

And I repeated word for word what Lorenzo had said to me, and, as far as I could, I reproduced his accent and gesture.

When I had finished they both sat still and silent. At last Matteo, glancing to his cousin, said, —

‘It seems sufficiently clear.’

‘It is, indeed, very clear,’ answered Checco, gravely.

XVII

I MADE up my mind to amuse myself now. I was sick of being grave and serious. When one thinks how short a while youth lasts it is foolish not to take the best advantage of it; the time man has at his disposal is not long enough for tragedy and moaning; he has only room for a little laughter, and then his hair gets grey and his knees shaky, and he is left repenting that he did not make more of his opportunities. So many people have told me that they have never regretted their vices, but often their virtues! Life is too short to take things seriously. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.

There was really so much to do in Forli that amusement became almost hard work. There were hunting parties in which we scoured the country all day and returned at night, tired and sleepy, but with a delicious feeling of relief, stretching our limbs like giants waking from their sleep. There were excursions to villas, where we would be welcomed by some kind lady, and repeat on a smaller scale the Decameron of Boccaccio, or imitate the learned conversations of Lorenzo and his circle at Careggio; we could platonise as well as they, and we discovered the charm of treating impropriety from a philosophic point of view. We would set ourselves some subject and all write sonnets on it, and I noticed that the productions of our ladies were always more highly spiced than our own. Sometimes we would play at being shepherds and shepherdesses, but in this I always failed lamentably, for my nymph invariably complained that I was not as enterprising as a swain should be. Then we would act pastoral plays in the shadow of the trees; Orpheus was our favourite subject, and I was always set for the title part, rather against my will, for I could never bring the proper vigour into my lament for Eurydice, since it always struck me as both unreasonable and ungallant to be so inconsolable for the loss of one love when there were all around so many to console one....

And in Forli itself there was a continuous whirl of amusement, festivities of every kind crowded on one, so that one had scarcely time to sleep; from the gravity and instructive tedium of a comedy by Terence to a drinking bout or a card party. I went everywhere, and everywhere received the heartiest of welcomes. I could sing and dance, and play the lute, and act, and I was ready to compose a sonnet or an ode at a moment’s notice; in a week I could produce a five-act tragedy in the Senecan manner, or an epic on Rinaldo or Launcelot; and as I had not a care in the world and was as merry as a drunken friar, they opened their arms to me and gave me the best of all they had....

I was attentive to all the ladies, and scandalous tongues gave me half a dozen mistresses, with details of the siege and capture. I wondered whether the amiable Giulia heard the stories, and what she thought of them. Occasionally I saw her, but I did not trouble to speak to her; Forli was large enough for the two of us; and when people are disagreeable why should you trouble your head about them?

One afternoon I rode with Matteo a few miles out of Forli to a villa where there was to be some festivity in honour of a christening. It was a beautiful spot, with fountains and shady walks, and pleasant lawns of well-mown grass; and I set myself to the enjoyment of another day. Among the guests was Claudia Piacentini. I pretended to be very angry with her because, at a ball which she had recently given, I had not received the honour of an invitation. She came to me to ask forgiveness.

‘It was my husband,’ she said, which I knew perfectly well. ‘He said he would not have you in his house. You’ve had another quarrel with him!’

‘How can I help it, when I see him the possessor of the lovely Claudia!’

‘He says he will never be satisfied till he has your blood.’

I was not alarmed.

‘He talked of making a vow never to cut his beard or his hair till he had his revenge, but I implored him not to make himself more hideous than a merciful Providence had already made him.’

I thought of the ferocious Ercole with a long, untrimmed beard and unkempt hair falling over his face.

‘He would have looked like a wild man of the woods,’ I said. ‘I should have had to allow myself to be massacred for the good of society. I should have been one more of the martyrs of humanity — Saint Philip Brandolini!’

I offered her my arm, suggesting a saunter through the gardens.... We wandered along cool paths bordered with myrtle and laurel and cypress trees; the air was filled with the song of birds, and a gentle breeze bore to us the scent of the spring flowers. By-and-by we came to a little lawn shut in by tall shrubs; in the middle a fountain was playing, and under the shadow of a chestnut-tree was a marble seat supported by griffins; in one corner stood a statue of Venus framed in green bushes. We had left the throng of guests far behind, and the place was very still; the birds, as if oppressed with its beauty, had ceased to sing, and only the fountain broke the silence. The unceasing fall of water was like a lullaby in its monotony, and the air was scented with lilac.

We sat down. The quiet was delightful; peace and beauty filled one, and I felt a great sense of happiness pass into me, like some subtle liquid permeating every corner of my soul. The smell of the lilac was beginning to intoxicate me; and from my happiness issued a sentiment of love towards all nature; I felt as though I could stretch out my arms and embrace its impalpable spirit. The Venus in the corner gained flesh-like tints of green and yellow, and seemed to be melting into life; the lilac came across to me in great waves, oppressive, over-powering.

I looked at Claudia. I thought she was affected as myself; she, too, was overwhelmed by the murmur of the water, the warmth, the scented air. And I was struck again with the wonderful voluptuousness of her beauty; her mouth sensual and moist, the lips deep red and heavy. Her neck was wonderfully massive, so white that the veins showed clear and blue; her clinging dress revealed the fulness of her form, its undulating curves. She seemed some goddess of Sensuality. As I looked at her I was filled with a sudden blind desire to possess her. I stretched out my arms, and she, with a cry of passion, like an animal, surrendered herself to my embrace. I drew her to me and kissed her beautiful mouth sensual and moist, her lips deep red and heavy....

We sat side by side looking at the fountain, breathing in the scented air.

‘When can I see you?’ I whispered.

‘To-morrow.... After midnight. Come into the little street behind my house, and a door will be opened to you.’

‘Claudia!’

‘Good-bye. You must not come back with me now, we have been away so long, people would notice us. Wait here a while after me, and then there will be no fear. Good-bye.’

She left me, and I stretched myself on the marble seat, looking at the little rings which the drops made as they fell on the water. My love for Giulia was indeed finished now — dead, buried, and a stone Venus erected over it as only sign of its existence. I tried to think of a suitable inscription.... Time could kill the most obstinate love, and a beautiful woman, with the breezes of spring to help her, could carry away even the remembrance. I felt that my life was now complete. I had all pleasures imaginable at my beck and call: good wines to drink, good foods to eat, nice clothes; games, sports and pastimes; and, last of all, the greatest gift the gods can make, a beautiful woman to my youth and strength. I had arrived at the summit of wisdom, the point aimed at by the wise man, to take the day as it comes, seizing the pleasures, avoiding the disagreeable, enjoying the present, and giving no thought to the past or future. That, I said to myself, is the highest wisdom — never to think; for the way of happiness is to live in one’s senses as the beasts, and like the ox, chewing the cud, use the mind only to consider one’s superiority to the rest of mankind.

I laughed a little as I thought of my tears and cries when Giulia left me. It was not a matter worth troubling about; all I should have said to myself was that I was a fool not to abandon her before she abandoned me. Poor Giulia! I quite frightened her in the vehemence of my rage.

The following evening I would not let Matteo go to bed.

‘You must keep me company,’ I said, ‘I am going out at one.’

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘if you will tell me where you’re going.’

‘Ah, no, that is a secret; but I am willing to drink her health with you.’

‘Without a name?’

‘Yes!’

‘To the nameless one, then; and good luck!’

Then, after a little conversation, he said, —

‘I am glad you have suffered no more from Giulia dall’ Aste. I was afraid—’

‘Oh, these things pass off. I took your advice, and found the best way to console myself was to fall in love with somebody else.’

There was a little excitement in going to this mysterious meeting. I wondered whether it was a trap arranged by the amiable Ercole to get me in his power and rid himself of my unpleasant person. But faint heart never won fair lady; and even if he set on me with two or three others, I should be able to give a reasonable account of myself.

But there had been nothing to fear. On my way home, as the day was breaking, I smiled to myself at the matter-of-fact way in which a woman had opened the little door, and shown me into the room Claudia had told me of. She was evidently well used to her business; she did not even take the trouble to look into my face to see who was the newcomer. I wondered how many well-cloaked gallants she had let in by the same door; I did not care if they were half a hundred. I did not suppose the beautiful Claudia was more virtuous than myself. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had revenged myself on Ercole Piacentini at last; and the quaint thought, coming unexpectedly, made me stop dead and burst into a shout of laughter. The thought of that hang-dog visage, and the beautiful ornaments I had given him, was enough to make a dead man merry. Oh, it was a fairer revenge than any I could have dreamed of!

But, besides that, I was filled with a great sense of pleasure because I was at last free. I felt that if some slight chain still bound me to Giulia now, even that was broken and I had recovered my liberty. There was no love this time. There was a great desire for the magnificent sensual creature, with the lips deep red and heavy; but it left my mind free. I was now again a complete man; and this time I had no Nemesis to fear.

XVIII

AND so my life went on for a little while, filled with pleasure and amusement. I was contented with my lot, and had no wish for change. The time went by, and we reached the first week in April. Girolamo had organised a great ball to celebrate the completion of his Palace. He had started living in it as soon as there were walls and roof, but he had spent years on the decorations, taking into his service the best artists he could find in Italy; and now at last everything was finished. The Orsi had been invited with peculiar cordiality, and on the night we betook ourselves to the Palace.

We walked up the stately staircase, a masterpiece of architecture, and found ourselves in the enormous hall which Girolamo had designed especially for gorgeous functions. It was ablaze with light. At the further end, on a low stage, led up to by three broad steps, under a daïs, on high-backed, golden chairs, sat Girolamo and Caterina Sforza. Behind them, in a semicircle, and on the steps at each side, were the ladies of Caterina’s suite, and a number of gentlemen; at the back, standing like statues, a row of men-at-arms.

‘It is almost regal!’ said Checco, pursing up his lips.

‘It is not so poor a thing to be the Lord of Forli,’ answered Matteo. Fuel to the fire!

We approached, and Girolamo, as he saw us, rose and came down the steps.

‘Hail, my Checco!’ he said, taking both his hands. ‘Till you had come the assembly was not complete.’

Matteo and I went to the Countess. She had surpassed herself this night. Her dress was of cloth of silver, shimmering and sparkling. In her hair were diamonds shining like fireflies in the night; her arms, her neck, her fingers glittered with costly gems. I had never seen her look so beautiful, nor so magnificent. Let them say what they liked, Checco and Matteo and the rest of them, but she was born to be a queen. How strange that this offspring of the rough Condottiere and the lewd woman should have a majesty such as one imagines of a mighty empress descended from countless kings.

She took the trouble to be particularly gracious to us. Me she complimented on some verses she had seen, and was very flattering in reference to a pastoral play which I had arranged. She could not congratulate my good Matteo on any intellectual achievements, but the fame of his amours gave her a subject on which she could playfully reproach him. She demanded details, and I left her listening intently to some history which Matteo was whispering in her ear; and I knew he was not particular in what he said.

I felt in peculiarly high spirits, and I looked about for someone on whom to vent my good humour. I caught sight of Giulia. I had seen her once or twice since my return to Forli, but had never spoken to her. Now I felt sure of myself; I knew I did not care two straws for her, but I thought it would please me to have a little revenge. I looked at her a moment. I made up my mind; I went to her and bowed most ceremoniously.

‘Donna Giulia, behold the moth!’ I had used the simile before, but not to her, so it did not matter.

She looked at me undecidedly, not quite knowing how to take me.

‘May I offer you my arm,’ I said as blandly as I could.

She smiled a little awkwardly and took it.

‘How beautiful the Countess is to-night!’ I said. ‘Everyone will fall in love with her.’ I knew she hated Caterina, a sentiment which the great lady returned with vigour. ‘I would not dare say it to another; but I know you are never jealous: she is indeed like the moon among the stars.’

‘The idea does not seem too new,’ she said coldly.

‘It is all the more comprehensible. I am thinking of writing a sonnet on the theme.’

‘I imagined it had been done before; but the ladies of Forli will doubtless be grateful to you.’

She was getting cross; and I knew by experience that when she was cross she always wanted to cry.

‘I am afraid you are angry with me,’ I said.

‘No, it is you who are angry with me,’ she answered rather tearfully.

‘I? Why should you think that?’

‘You have not forgiven me for—’

I wondered whether the conscientious Giorgio had had another attack of morality and ridden off into the country.

‘My dear lady,’ I said, with a little laugh, ‘I assure you that I have forgiven you entirely. After all, it was not such a very serious matter.’

‘No?’ She looked at me with a little surprise.

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘You were quite right in what you did. Those things have to finish some time or other, and it really does not so much matter when.’

‘I was afraid I had hurt you,’ she said in a low voice.

The scene came to my mind; the dimly-lit room, the delicate form lying on the couch, cold and indifferent, while I was given over to an agony of despair. I remembered the glitter of the jewelled ring against the white hand. I would have no mercy.

‘My dear Giulia — you will allow me to call you Giulia?’

She nodded.

‘My dear Giulia, I was a little unhappy at first, I acknowledge, but one gets over those things so quickly — a bottle of wine, and a good sleep: they are like bleeding to a fever.’

‘You were unhappy?’

‘Naturally; one is always rather put out when one is dismissed. One would prefer to have done the breaking oneself.’

‘It was a matter of pride?’

‘I am afraid I must confess to it.’

‘I did not think so at the time.’

I laughed.

‘Oh, that is my excited way of putting things. I frightened you; but it did not really mean anything.’

She did not answer. After a while I said, —

‘You know, when one is young one should make the most of one’s time. Fidelity is a stupid virtue, unphilosophical and extremely unfashionable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Simply this; you did not particularly love me, and I did not particularly love you.’

‘Oh!’

‘We had a passing fancy for one another, and that satisfied there was nothing more to keep us together. We should have been very foolish not to break the chain; if you had not done so, I should have. With your woman’s intuition, you saw that and forestalled me!’

Again she did not answer.

‘Of course, if you had been in love with me, or I with you, it would have been different. But as it was—’

‘I see my cousin Violante in the corner there; will you lead me to her?’

I did as she asked, and as she was bowing me my dismissal I said, —

‘We have had a very pleasant talk, and we are quite good friends, are we not?’

‘Quite!’ she said.

I drew a long breath as I left her. I hoped I had hurt; I hoped I had humiliated her. I wished I could have thought of things to say that would have cut her to the heart. I was quite indifferent to her, but when I remembered — I hated her.

I knew everyone in Forli by now, and as I turned away from Giulia I had no lack of friends with whom to talk. The rooms became more crowded every moment. The assembly was the most brilliant that Forli had ever seen; and as the evening wore on the people became more animated; a babel of talk drowned the music, and the chief topic of conversation was the wonderful beauty of Caterina. She was bubbling over with high spirits; no one knew what had happened to make her so joyful, for of late she had suffered a little from the unpopularity of her husband, and a sullen look of anger had replaced the old smiles and graces. But to-night she was herself again. Men were standing round talking to her, and one heard a shout of laughter from them as every now and then she made some witty repartee; and her conversation gained another charm from a sort of soldierly bluntness which people remembered in Francesco Sforza, and which she had inherited. People also spoke of the cordiality of Girolamo towards our Checco; he walked up and down the room with him, arm in arm, talking affectionately; it reminded the onlookers of the time when they had been as brothers together. Caterina occasionally gave them a glance and a little smile of approval; she was evidently well pleased with the reconciliation.

I was making my way through the crowd, watching the various people, giving a word here and there or a nod, and I thought that life was really a very amusing thing. I felt mightily pleased with myself, and I wondered where my good friend Claudia was; I must go and pay her my respects.

‘Filippo!’

I turned and saw Scipione Moratini standing by his sister, with a number of gentlemen and ladies, most of them known to me.

‘Why are you smiling so contentedly?’ he said. ‘You look as if you had lost a pebble and found a diamond in its place.’

‘Perhaps I have; who knows?’

At that moment I saw Ercole Piacentini enter the room with his wife; I wondered why they were so late. Claudia was at once seized upon by one of her admirers, and, leaving her husband, sauntered off on the proffered arm. Ercole came up the room on his way to the Count. His grim visage was contorted into an expression of amiability, which sat on him with an ill grace.

‘This is indeed a day of rejoicing,’ I said; ‘even the wicked ogre is trying to look pleasant.’

Giulia gave a little silvery laugh. I thought it forced.

‘You have a forgiving spirit, dear friend,’ she said, accenting the last word in recollection of what I had said to her. ‘A truly Christian disposition!’

‘Why?’ I asked, smiling.

‘I admire the way in which you have forgiven Ercole for the insults he has offered you; one does not often find a gentleman who so charitably turns his other cheek to the smiter!’

I laughed within myself; she was trying to be even with me. I was glad to see that my darts had taken good effect. Scipione interposed, for what his sister had said was sufficiently bitter.

‘Nonsense, Giulia!’ he said. ‘You know Filippo is the last man to forgive his enemies until the breath is well out of their bodies; but circumstances—’

Giulia pursed up her lips into an expression of contempt.

‘Circumstances. I was surprised, because I remembered the vigour with which Messer Filippo had vowed to revenge himself.’

‘Oh, but Messer Filippo considers that he has revenged himself very effectively,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘There are more ways of satisfying one’s honour than by cutting a hole in a person’s chest.’

‘What do you mean, Filippo?’ said Scipione.

‘Did you not see as he passed?’

‘Ercole? What?’

‘Did you not see the adornment of his noble head, the elegant pair of horns?’

They looked at me, not quite understanding; then I caught sight of Claudia, who was standing close to us.

‘Ah, I see the diamond I have found in place of the pebble I have lost. I pray you excuse me.’

Then as they saw me walk towards Claudia they understood, and I heard a burst of laughter. I took my lady’s hand, and bowing deeply, kissed it with the greatest fervour. I glanced at Giulia from the corner of my eyes and saw her looking down on the ground, with a deep blush of anger on her face. My heart leapt for joy to think that I had returned something of the agony she had caused me.

The evening grew late and the guests began to go. Checco, as he passed me, asked, —

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes!’ I said, accompanying him to Girolamo and the Countess to take our leave.

‘You are very unkind, Checco,’ said the Countess. ‘You have not come near me the whole evening.’

‘You have been so occupied,’ he answered.

‘But I am not now,’ she replied, smiling.

‘The moment I saw you free I came to you.’

‘To say good-bye.’

‘It is very late.’

‘No, surely; sit down and talk to me.’

Checco did as he was bid, and I, seeing he meant to stay longer, sauntered off again in search of friends. The conversation between Checco and the Countess was rather hindered by the continual leave-takings, as the people began to go away rapidly, in groups. I sat myself down in a window with Matteo, and we began comparing notes of our evening; he told me of a new love to whom he had discovered his passion for the first time.

‘Fair wind, foul wind?’ I asked, laughing.

‘She pretended to be very angry,’ he said, ‘but she allowed me to see that if the worst came to the worst she would not permit me to break my heart.’

I looked out into the room and found that everyone had gone, except Ercole Piacentini, who was talking to the Count in undertones.

‘I am getting so sleepy,’ said Matteo. We went forward to the Countess, who said, as she saw us come, —

‘Go away, Matteo! I will not have you drag Checco away yet; we have been trying to talk to one another for the last half-hour, and now that we have the chance at last I refuse to be disturbed.’

‘I would not for worlds rob Checco of such pleasure,’ said Matteo; adding to me, as we retired to our window, ‘What a nuisance having to wait for one’s cousin while a pretty woman is flirting with him!’

‘You have me to talk to — what more can you want!’

‘I don’t want to talk to you at all,’ he answered, laughing.

Girolamo was still with Ercole. His mobile eyes were moving over the room, hardly ever resting on Ercole’s face, but sometimes on us, more often on Checco. I wondered whether he was jealous.

At last Checco got up and said Good-night. Then Girolamo came forward.

‘You are not going yet,’ he said. ‘I want to speak with you on the subject of those taxes.’

It was the first time he had mentioned them.

‘It is getting so late,’ said Checco, ‘and these good gentlemen are tired.’

‘They can go home. Really, it is very urgent.’

Checco hesitated, and looked at us.

‘We will wait for you,’ said Matteo.

Girolamo’s eyes moved about here and there, never resting a moment, from Checco to me, from me to Matteo, and on to his wife, and then on again, with extraordinary rapidity — it was quite terrifying.

‘One would think you were afraid of leaving Checco in our hands,’ said the Countess, smiling.

‘No,’ returned Matteo; ‘but I look forward to having some of your attention now that Checco is otherwise occupied. Will you let me languish?’

She laughed, and a rapid glance passed between her and the Count.

‘I shall be only too pleased,’ she said, ‘come and sit by me, one on each side.’

The Count turned to Ercole.

‘Well, good-night, my friend,’ he said. ‘Good-night!’

Ercole left us, and Girolamo, taking Checco’s arm, walked up and down the room, speaking. The Countess and Matteo commenced a gay conversation. Although I was close to them I was left alone, and I watched the Count. His eyes fascinated me, moving ceaselessly. What could be behind them? What could be the man’s thoughts that his eyes should never rest? They enveloped the person they looked at — his head, every feature of his face, his body, his clothes; one imagined there was no detail they had not caught; it was as if they ate into the very soul of the man.

The two men tramped up and down, talking earnestly; I wondered what they were saying. At last Girolamo stopped.

‘Ah, well, I must have mercy on you; I shall tire you to death. And you know I do not wish to do anything to harm you.’

Checco smiled.

‘Whatever difficulty there has been between us, Checco, you know that there has never on my part been any ill-feeling towards you. I have always had for you a very sincere and affectionate friendship.’

And as he said the words an extraordinary change came over him. The eyes, the mobile eyes, stopped still at last; for the first time I saw them perfectly steady, motionless, like glass; they looked fixedly into Checco’s eyes, without winking, and their immobility was as strange as their perpetual movement, and to me it was more terrifying. It was as if Girolamo was trying to see his own image in Checco’s soul.

We bade them farewell, and together issued out into the silence of the night; and I felt that behind us the motionless eyes, like glass, were following us into the darkness.

XIX

WE issued out into the silence of the night. There had been a little rain during the day, and the air in consequence was fresh and sweet; the light breeze of the spring made one expand one’s lungs and draw in long breaths. One felt the trees bursting out into green leaves, and the buds on the plants opening their downy mantles and discovering the flower within. Light clouds were wandering lazily along the sky, and between them shone out a few dim stars. Checco and Matteo walked in front, while I lingered enjoying the spring night; it filled me with a sweet sadness, a reaction from the boisterous joy of the evening, and pleasant by the contrast.

When Matteo fell behind and joined me, I received him a little unwillingly, disappointed at the interruption of my reverie.

‘I asked Checco what the Count had said to him of the taxes, but he would not tell me; he said he wanted to think about the conversation.’

I made no answer, and we walked on in silence. We had left the piazza, and were going through the narrow streets bordered by the tall black houses. It was very late, and there was not a soul about; there was no sound but that of our own footsteps, and of Checco walking a few yards in front. Between the roofs of the houses only a little strip of sky could be seen, a single star, and the clouds floating lazily. The warm air blew in my face, and filled me with an intoxication of melancholy. I thought how sweet it would be to fall asleep this night, and never again to wake. I was tired, and I wanted the rest of an endless sleep....

Suddenly I was startled by a cry.

I saw from the shadow of the houses black forms spring out on Checco. An arm was raised, and a glittering instrument flashed in the darkness. He staggered forward.

‘Matteo,’ he cried. ‘Help! Help!’

We rushed forward, drawing our swords. There was a scuffle, three of us against four of them, a flash of swords, a cry from one of the men as he reeled and fell with a wound from Matteo’s sword. Then another rush, a little band of men suddenly appeared round the corner, and Ercole Piacentini’s voice, crying, —

‘What is it? What is it?’

And Matteo’s answer, —

‘Help us, Ercole! I have killed one. Checco is stabbed.’

‘Ah!’ a cry from Ercole, and with his men he rushed into the fray.

A few more cries, still the flash of swords, the fall of heavy bodies on the stones.

‘They are done for!’ said Matteo.

The shouts, the clang of metal woke up the neighbours; lights were seen at the windows, and night-capped women appeared shrieking; doors were thrown open, and men came out in their shirts, sword in hand.

‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Checco, are you hurt?’ asked Matteo.

‘No; my coat of mail!’

‘Thank God you had it on! I saw you stagger.’

‘It was the blow. At first I did not know whether I was hurt or not.’

‘What is it? What is it?’

The neighbours surrounded us.

‘They have tried to murder Checco! Checco d’Orsi!’

‘My God! Is he safe?’

‘Who has done it?’

All eyes were turned to the four men, each one lying heaped up on the ground, with the blood streaming from his wounds.

‘They are dead!’

‘Footpads!’ said Ercole; ‘they wanted to rob you, and did not know you were accompanied.’

‘Footpads! Why should footpads rob me this night?’ said Checco. ‘I wish they were not dead.’

‘Look, look!’ said a bystander, ‘there is one moving.’

The words were hardly out of the man’s mouth before one of Ercole’s soldiers snatched up his dagger and plunged it in the man’s neck, shouting, —

‘Bestia!’

A tremor went through the prostrate body, and then it was quite still.

‘You fool!’ said Matteo, angrily. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘He is a murderer,’ said the soldier.

‘You fool, we wanted him alive, not dead. We could have found out who hired him.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Ercole. ‘They are common robbers.’

‘Here is the guard,’ cried someone.

The guard came, and immediately there was a babel of explanation. The captain stepped forward, and examined the men lying on the ground.

‘They are all dead,’ he said.

‘Take them away,’ said Ercole. ‘Let them be put in a church till morning.’

‘Stop!’ cried Checco. ‘Bring a light, and let us see if we can recognise them.’

‘Not now, it is late. To-morrow you can do what you like.’

‘To-morrow it will be later, Ercole,’ answered Checco. ‘Bring a light.’

Torches were brought, and thrust into the face of each dead man. Everyone eagerly scrutinised the features, drawn up in their last agony.

‘I don’t know him.’

Then to another.

‘No.’

And the other two also were unknown. Checco examined the face of the last, and shook his head. But a man broke out excitedly, —

‘Ah! I know him.’

A cry from us all.

‘Who is it?’

‘I know him. It is a soldier, one of the Count’s guard.’

‘Ah!’ said Matteo and Checco, looking at one another. ‘One of the Count’s guard!’

‘That is a lie,’ said Ercole. ‘I know them all, and I have never seen that face before. It is a footpad, I tell you.’

‘It is not. I know him well. He is a member of the guard.’

‘It is a lie, I tell you.’

‘Ercole is doubtless right,’ said Checco. ‘They are common thieves. Let them be taken away. They have paid a heavy price for their attempt. Good-night, my friends. Good-night, Ercole, and thanks.’

The guard took hold of the dead men by the head and by the feet, and one after another, in single file, they bore them off down the dark street. We three moved on, the crowd gradually melted away, and everything again became dark and silent.

We walked home side by side without speaking. We came to the Palazzo Orsi, entered, walked upstairs, one after the other, into Checco’s study, lights were brought, the door closed carefully, and Checco turned round to us.

‘Well?’

Neither I nor Matteo spoke. Checco clenched his fist, and his eyes flashed as he hissed out, —

‘The cur!’

We all knew the attempt was the Count’s....

‘By God! I am glad you are safe,’ said Matteo.

‘What a fool I was to be taken in by his protestations! I ought to have known that he would never forget the injury I had done him.’

‘He planned it well,’ said Matteo.

‘Except for the soldier,’ I remarked. ‘He should not have chosen anyone who could be recognised.’

‘Probably he was the leader. But how well he managed everything, keeping us after the others, and nearly persuading Filippo and me to go home before you. Caterina was in the plot.’

‘I wonder he did not defer the attempt when he found you would not be alone,’ I said to Checco.

‘He knows I am never alone, and such an opportunity would not easily occur again. Perhaps he thought they could avoid you two, or even murder you as well.’

‘But Ercole and his men?’ I said.

‘Yes, I have been thinking about them. The only explanation I have is that he placed them there to cover their flight if they succeeded, and if they failed or could not escape, to kill them.’

‘As, in fact, they did. I thought I saw Ercole make a sign to the soldier who stabbed the only living one.’

‘Possibly. The idea was evidently to destroy all witnesses and all opportunity for inquiry.’

‘Well,’ said Matteo, ‘it will show others that it is dangerous to do dirty work for the Riario.’

‘It will indeed!’

‘And now, what is to happen?’ said Matteo.

Checco looked at him, but did not reply.

‘Do you still refuse to do to Girolamo as he has tried to do to you?’

Checco answered quietly, —

‘No!’

‘Ah!’ we both cried. ‘Then you consent?’

‘I see no reason now for not taking the law into my own hands.’

‘Assassination?’ whispered Matteo.

And Checco answered boldly, —

‘Assassination!’ Then, after a pause, ‘It is the only way open to me. Do you remember Lorenzo’s words? They have been with me every day, and I have considered them very, very deeply: “Let Checco know that it is only the fool who proposes to himself an end, when he cannot or will not attain it; but the man who deserves the name of man marches straight to the goal with clearness of mind and strength of will. He looks at things as they are, putting aside all vain appearances, and when his intelligence has shown him the means to his end, he is a fool if he refuses them, and he is a wise man if he uses them steadily and unhesitatingly.” I know the end, and I will attain it. I know the means, and I will use them steadily, without hesitation.’

‘I am glad to hear you speak like that at last!’ said Matteo. ‘We shall have plenty to help us. The Moratini will join at once. Jacopo Ronchi and Lodovico Pansecchi are so bitter against the Count they will come with us as soon as they hear you have decided to kill the enemy of us all.’

‘You are blind, Matteo. Do you not see what we must do? You mistake the means for the end.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The death of Girolamo is only a means. The end is further and higher.’

Matteo did not speak.

‘I must keep my hands clean from any base motive. It must not seem that I am influenced by any personal incentive. Nothing must come from me. The idea of assassination must come from outside.’

‘Whom do you—’

‘I think Bartolomeo Moratini must propose it, and I will yield to his instances.’

‘Good! then I will go to him.’

‘That will not do either. Neither you nor I must be concerned in it. Afterwards it must be clear to all minds that the Orsi were influenced solely by the public welfare. Do you see? I will tell you how it must be. Filippo must help us. He must go to Bartolomeo, and from his great affection for us talk of our danger and intreat Bartolomeo to persuade me to the assassination. Do you understand, Filippo?’

‘Perfectly!’

‘Will you do it?’

‘I will go to him to-morrow.’

‘Wait till the news of the attempt has spread.’

I smiled at the completeness with which Checco had arranged everything; he had evidently thought it all out. How had his scruples disappeared?

The blackness of the night was sinking before the dawn when we bade one another good-night.

XX

I SEEMED to have slept a bare half-hour when I was awakened by a great noise downstairs. I got up, and looking out of the window saw a crowd gathered in the street below; they were talking and gesticulating furiously. Then I remembered the occurrence of the night, and I saw that the news had spread and these were citizens come to gather details. I went downstairs and found the courtyard thronged. Immediately I was surrounded by anxious people asking for news. Very contrary reports had circulated; some said that Checco had been killed outright, others that he had escaped, while most asserted that he was wounded. All asked for Checco.

‘If he is unhurt, why does he not show himself?’ they asked.

A servant assured them that he was dressing, and would be with them at once.... Suddenly there was a shout. Checco had appeared at the top of the stairs. They rushed towards him, surrounding him with cries of joy; they seized his hand, they clung to his legs, some of them touched him all over to see that he was indeed unwounded, others kissed the lappets of his coat.... Bartolomeo Moratini entered the court with his sons, and the people shrunk back as he came forward and embraced Checco.

‘Thank God you are saved!’ he said. ‘It will be an evil day for Forli when anything happens to you.’

The people answered in shouts. But at that moment another sound was heard without — a long and heavy murmur. The people surrounding the doorway looked out and turned in astonishment to their neighbours, pointing to the street; the murmur spread. What was it?

‘Make way! Make way!’

A strident voice called out the words, and ushers pushed the people aside. A little troop of men appeared in the entrance, and as they sank back there stepped forward the Count. The Count! Checco started, but immediately recovering himself advanced to meet his visitor. Girolamo walked up to him, and taking him in his arms kissed him on the cheeks, and said, —

‘My Checco! My Checco!’

We who knew and the others who suspected looked on with astonishment.

‘As soon as I heard the terrible news I rushed to find you,’ said the Count. ‘Are you safe — quite safe?’

He embraced him again.

‘You cannot think what agony I suffered when I heard you were wounded. How glad I am it was not true. Oh, God in Heaven, I thank Thee for my Checco!’

‘You are very kind, my lord,’ answered our friend.

‘But it is some consolation that the miscreants have met the end which they deserved. We must take steps to free the town of all such dangerous persons. What will men say of my rule when it is known that the peaceful citizen cannot walk home at night without danger to his life? Oh, Checco, I blame myself bitterly.’

‘You have no cause, my lord, but — would it not be well to examine the men to see if they are known in Forli? Perhaps they have associates.’

‘Certainly; the idea was in my mind. Let them be laid out in the market-place so that all may see them.’

‘Pardon, sir,’ said one of his suite, ‘but they were laid in the Church of San Spirito last night, and this morning they have disappeared.’

Matteo and I looked at one another. Checco kept his eyes fixed on the Count.

‘Disappeared!’ cried the latter, displaying every sign of impatience. ‘Who is responsible for this? Offer a reward for the discovery of their bodies and of any accomplices. I insist on their being discovered!’

Shortly afterwards he took his leave, after repeatedly kissing Checco, and warmly congratulating Matteo and myself on the assistance we had given to our friend. To me he said, —

‘I regret, Messer Filippo, that you are not a Forlivese. I should be proud to have such a citizen.’

Bartolomeo Moratini was still at the Palazzo Orsi, so, seizing my opportunity, I took him by the arm and walked with him to the statue gallery, where we could talk in peace.

‘What do you think of all this?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘It is the beginning of the end. Of course it is clear to all of us that the assassination was ordered by the Count; he will persuade nobody of his innocence by his pretended concern. All the town is whispering his name.

‘Having made a first attempt and failed, he will not hesitate to make a second, for if he could forgive the injury which he has received from Checco, he can never forgive the injury which he himself has done him. And next time he will not fail.’

‘I am terribly concerned,’ I said. ‘You know the great affection I have for both the Orsi.’

He stopped and warmly shook my hand.

‘I cannot let Checco throw away his life in this way,’ I said.

‘What can be done?’

‘Only one thing, and you suggested it.... Girolamo must be killed.’

‘Ah, but Checco will never consent to that.’

‘I am afraid not,’ I said gravely. ‘You know the delicacy of his conscience.’

‘Yes; and though I think it excessive, I admire him for it. In these days it is rare to find a man so honest and upright and conscientious as Checco. But, Messer Filippo, one must yield to the ideas of the age one lives in.’

‘I, too, am convinced of his noble-mindedness, but it will ruin him.’

‘I am afraid so,’ sighed the old man, stroking his beard.

‘But he must be saved in spite of himself. He must be brought to see the necessity of killing the Count.’ I spoke as emphatically as I could.

‘He will never consent.’

‘He must consent; and you are the man to make him do so. He would not listen to anything that Matteo or I said, but for you he has the greatest respect. I am sure if anyone can influence him it is you.’

‘I have some power over him, I believe.’

‘Will you try? Don’t let him suspect that Matteo or I have had anything to do with it, or he will not listen. It must come solely from you.’

‘I will do my best.’

‘Ah, that is good of you. But don’t be discouraged by his refusals; be insistent, for our sake. And one thing more, you know his unselfishness; he would not move his hand to save himself, but if you showed him that it is for the good of others, he could not refuse. Let him think the safety of us all depends on him. He is a man you can only move by his feeling for others.’

‘I believe you,’ he answered. ‘But I will go to him, and I will leave no argument unused.’

‘I am sure that your efforts will be rewarded.’

Here I showed myself a perfectly wise man, for I only prophesied because I knew.

XXI

IN the evening Bartolomeo returned to the Palace and asked for Checco. At his request Matteo and I joined him in Checco’s study, and besides there were his two sons, Scipione and Alessandro. Bartolomeo was graver than ever.

‘I have come to you now, Checco, impelled by a very strong sense of duty, and I wish to talk with you on a matter of the greatest importance.’

He cleared his throat.

‘Firstly, are you convinced that the attempt on your life was plotted by Girolamo Riario?’

‘I am sorry for his sake, but — I am.’

‘So are we all, absolutely. And what do you intend to do now?’

‘What can I do? Nothing!’

‘The answer is not nothing. You have something to do.’

‘And that is?’

‘To kill Girolamo before he has time to kill you.’

Checco started to his feet.

‘They have been talking to you — Matteo and Filippo. It is they who have put this in your head. I knew it would be suggested again.’

‘Nothing has given me the idea but the irresistible force of circumstances.’

‘Never! I will never consent to that.’

‘But he will kill you.’

‘I can die!’

‘It will be the ruin of your family. What will happen to your wife and children if you are dead?’

‘If need be they can die too. No one who bears the name of Orsi fears death.’

‘You cannot sacrifice their lives in cold blood.’

‘I cannot kill a fellow-man in cold blood. Ah, my friend, you don’t know what is in me. I am not religious; I have never meddled with priests; but something in my heart tells me not to do this thing. I don’t know what it is — conscience or honour — but it is speaking clearly within me.’

He had his hand on his heart, and was speaking very earnestly. We followed his eyes and saw them resting on a crucifix.

‘No, Bartolomeo,’ he said, ‘one cannot forget God. He is above us always, always watching us; and what should I say to Him with the blood of that man on my hands? You may say what you like, but, believe me, it is best to be honest and straight-forward, and to the utmost of one’s ability to carry out the doctrines which Christ has left us, and upon which he set the seal with the blood of His hands and feet and the wound in His side.’

Bartolomeo looked at me as if it were hopeless to attempt anything against such sentiments. But I signed him energetically to go on; he hesitated. It would be almost tragic if he gave the matter up before Checco had time to surrender. However, he proceeded, —

‘You are a good man, Checco, and I respect you deeply for what you have said. But if you will not stir to save yourself, think of the others.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Checco, starting as if from a dream.

‘Have you the right to sacrifice your fellowmen? The citizens of Forli depend on you.’

‘Ah, they will easily find another leader. Why, you yourself will be of greater assistance to them than I have ever been. How much better will they be in your strong hands than with me!’

‘No, no! You are the only man who has power here. You could not be replaced.’

‘But what can I do more than I am doing. I do not seek to leave Forli; I will stay here and protect myself as much as I can. I cannot do more.’

‘Oh, Checco, look at their state. It cannot continue. They are ground down now; the Count must impose these taxes, and what will be their condition then? The people are dying in their misery, and the survivors hold happy those who die. How can you look on and see all this? And you, you know Girolamo will kill you; it is a matter of time, and who can tell how short a time? Perhaps even now he is forging the weapon of your death.’

‘My death! My death!’ cried Checco. ‘All that is nothing!’

‘But what will be the lot of the people when you are gone? You are the only curb on Riario’s tyranny. When you are dead, nothing will keep him back. And when once he has eased his path by murder he will not fail to do so again. We shall live under perpetual terror of the knife. Oh, have mercy on your fellow-citizens.’

‘My country!’ said Checco. ‘My country!’

‘You cannot resist this. For the good of your country you must lead us on.’

‘And if my soul—’

‘It is for your country. Ah! Checco, think of us all. Not for ourselves only, but for our wives, our innocent children, we beg you, we implore. Shall we go down on our knees to you?’

‘Oh, my God, what shall I do?’ said Checco, extremely agitated.

‘Listen to my father, Checco!’ said Scipione. ‘He has right on his side.’

‘Oh, not you, too! Do not overwhelm me. I feel you are all against me. God help me! I know it is wrong, but I feel myself wavering.’

‘Do not think of yourself, Checco; it is for others, for our liberty, our lives, our all, that we implore you.’

‘You move me terribly. You know how I love my country, and how can I resist you, appealing on her behalf!’

‘Be brave, Checco!’ said Matteo.

‘It is the highest thing of all that we ask you,’ added Bartolomeo. ‘Man can do nothing greater. We ask you to sacrifice yourself, even your soul, may be, for the good of us all.’

Checco buried his face in his hands and groaned, —

‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’

Then, with a great sigh, he rose and said, —

‘Be it as you will.... For the good of my country!’

‘Ah, thanks, thanks!’

Bartolomeo took him in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks. Then suddenly Checco tore himself away.

‘But listen to this, all of you. I have consented, and now you must let me speak. I swear that in this thing I have no thought of myself. If I alone were concerned I would not move; I would wait for the assassin’s knife calmly. I would even sacrifice my wife and children, and God knows how dearly I love them! I would not stir a finger to save myself. And I swear, by all that is most holy to me, that I am actuated by no base motive, no ambition, no thought of self, no petty revenge. I would willingly forgive Girolamo everything. Believe me, my friends, I am honest. I swear to you that I am only doing this for the welfare of the men I love, for the sake of you all, and — for Liberty.’

They warmly pressed his hands.

‘We know it, Checco, we believe it. You are a great and a good man.’

A little later we began to discuss the ways and means. Everyone had his plan, and to it the others had the most conclusive objections. We all talked together, each one rather annoyed at the unwillingness of the others to listen to him, and thinking how contemptible their ideas were beside his own. Checco sat silent. After a while Checco spoke, —

‘Will you listen to me?’

We held our tongues.

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘we must find out who is with us and who is against us.’

‘Well,’ interrupted Scipione, ‘there are the two soldiers, Jacopo Ronchi and Lodovico Pansecchi; they are furious with the Count, and said to me a long while since that they would willingly kill him.’

‘Our six selves and those two make eight.’

‘Then there are Pietro Albanese, and Paglianino, and Marco Scorsacana.’

They were devoted adherents of the house of Orsi, and could be trusted to follow the head of the family to the bottomless pit.

‘Eleven,’ counted Bartolomeo.

‘And then—’

Each mentioned a name till the total was brought to seventeen.

‘Who else?’ asked Matteo.

‘That is enough,’ said Checco. ‘It is as foolish to have more than necessary as to have less. Now, once more, who are they?’

The names were repeated. They were all known enemies of the Count, and most of them related to the Orsi.

‘We had better go to them separately and talk to them.’

‘It will want care!’ said Bartolomeo.

‘Oh, they will not be backward. The first word will bring their adhesion.’

‘Before that,’ said Checco, ‘we must make all arrangements. Every point of the execution must be arranged, and to them nothing left but the performance.’

‘Well, my idea is—’

‘Have the goodness to listen to me,’ said Checco. ‘You have been talking of committing the deed in church, or when he is out walking. Both of those ways are dangerous, for he is always well surrounded, and in the former, one has to remember the feeling of horror which the people have for sacrilege. Witness Galeazzo in Milan and the Medici in Florence. One is always wise to respect the prejudices of the mob....’

‘What do you propose?’

‘After the mid-day meal the — our friend is in the habit of retiring to a private room while his servants dine. He is then almost alone. I have often thought it would be an excellent opportunity for an assassin; I did not know it would be myself to take the opportunity.’

He paused and smiled at the pleasantness of the irony.

‘Afterwards we shall raise the town, and it is well that as many of our partisans as possible be present. The best day for that is a market-day, when they will come in, and we shall have no need of specially summoning them, and thus giving rise to suspicion.’

Checco looked at us to see what we thought of his idea; then, as if from an after thought, he added, —

‘Of course, this is all on the spur of the moment.’

It was well he said that, for I was thinking how elaborately everything was planned. I wondered how long he had the scheme in his head.

We found nothing to say against it.

‘And who will do the actual deed?’

‘I will!’ answered Checco, quietly.

‘You!’

‘Yes, alone. I will tell you your parts later.’

‘And when?’

‘Next Saturday. That is the first market-day.’

‘So soon.’ We were all surprised; it was only five days off, it gave us very little time to think. It was terribly near. Alessandro voiced our feelings.

‘Does that give us enough time? Why not Saturday week? There are many needful preparations.’

‘There are no needful preparations. You have your swords ready; the others can be warned in a few hours. I wish it were to-morrow.’

‘It is — it is very soon.’

‘There is less danger of our courage failing meanwhile. We have our goal before us, and we must go to it straight, with clearness of mind and strength of will.’

There was nothing more to be said. As we separated, one of the Moratini asked, —

‘About the others, shall we—’

‘You can leave everything to me. I take all on my hands. Will you three come here to play a game of chess on Friday night at ten? Our affairs will occupy us so that we shall not meet in the interval. I recommend you to go about as much as possible, and let yourselves be seen in all assemblies and parties....’

Checco was taking his captaincy in earnest. He would allow no contradiction, and no swerving from the path he had marked out — on the spur of the moment.

We had four days in which to make merry and gather the roses; after that, who knows? We might be dangling from the Palace windows in an even line, suspended by elegant hempen ropes; or our heads might be decorating spear heads and our bodies God knows where. I suggested these thoughts to Matteo, but I found him singularly ungrateful. Still, he agreed with me that we had better make the most of our time, and as it accorded with Checco’s wishes, we were able to go to the devil from a sense of duty. I am sure Claudia never had a lover more ardent than myself during these four days; but, added to my duties towards that beautiful creature, were routs and banquets, drinking-parties, gaming-parties, where I plunged heavily in my uncertainty of the future, and consequently won a fortune. Checco had taken on his own shoulders all preparations, so that Matteo and I had nothing to do but to enjoy ourselves; and that we did. The only sign I had that Checco had been working was a look of intelligence given me by one or two of those whose names had been mentioned in Checco’s study. Jacopo Ronchi, taking leave of me on the Thursday night, said, —

‘We shall meet to-morrow.’

‘You are coming to play chess, I think,’ I said, smiling.

When, at the appointed hour, Matteo and I found ourselves again in Checco’s study, we were both rather anxious and nervous. My heart was beating quite painfully, and I could not restrain my impatience. I wished the others would come. Gradually they made their way in, and we shook hands quietly, rather mysteriously, with an air of schoolboys meeting together in the dark to eat stolen fruit. It might have been comic if our mind’s eye had not presented us with so vivid a picture of a halter.

Checco began to speak in a low voice, slightly trembling; his emotion was real enough this time, and he did all he could to conceal it.

‘My very dear and faithful fellow-citizens,’ he began, ‘it appears that to be born in Forli, and to live in it in our times, is the very greatest misfortune with which one can be born or with which one can live.’

I never heard such silence as that among the listeners. It was awful. Checco’s voice sank lower and lower, but yet every word could be distinctly heard. The tremor was increasing.

‘Is it necessary that birth and life here should be the birth and life of slaves? Our glorious ancestors never submitted to this terrible misfortune. They were free, and in their freedom they found life. But this is a living death....’

He recounted the various acts of tyranny which had made the Count hateful to his subjects, and he insisted on the insecurity in which they lived.

‘You all know the grievous wrongs I have suffered at the hands of the man whom I helped to place on the throne. But these wrongs I freely forgive. I am filled only with devotion to my country and love to my fellowmen. If you others have private grievances, I implore you to put them aside, and think only that you are the liberators from oppression of all those you love and cherish. Gather up to your hearts the spirit of Brutus, when, for the sake of Freedom, he killed the man whom above all others he loved.’

He gave them the details of the plot; told them what he would do himself, and what they should do, and finally dismissed them.

‘Pray to God to-night,’ he said earnestly, ‘that He will look with favour upon the work which we have set ourselves, and implore Him to judge us by the purity of our intentions rather than by the actions which, in the imperfection of our knowledge, seem to us the only means to our end.’

We made the sign of the cross, and retired as silently as we had come.

XXII

MY sleep was troubled, and when I woke the next morning the sun had only just risen.

It was Saturday, the 14th of April 1488.

I went to my window and saw a cloudless sky, brilliantly yellow over in the east, and elsewhere liquid and white, hardening gradually into blue. The rays came dancing into my room, and in them incessantly whirled countless atoms of dust. Through the open window blew the spring wind, laden with the scents of the country, the blossoms of the fruit trees, the primroses and violets. I had never felt so young and strong and healthy. What could one not do on such a day as this! I went into Matteo’s room, and found him sleeping as calmly as if this were an ordinary day like any other.

‘Rise, thou sluggard!’ I cried.

In a few minutes we were both ready, and we went to Checco. We found him seated at a table polishing a dagger.

‘Do you remember in Tacitus,’ he said, smiling pleasantly, ‘how the plot against Nero was discovered by one of the conspirators giving his dagger to his freedman to sharpen? Whereupon the freedman became suspicious, and warned the Emperor.’

‘The philosophers tell us to rise on the mistakes of others,’ I remarked in the same tone.

‘One reason for my affection towards you, Filippo,’ he answered, ‘is that you have nice moral sentiments, and a pleasant moral way of looking at things.’

He held out his dagger and looked at it. The blade was beautifully damaskeened, the hilt bejewelled.

‘Look,’ he said, showing me the excellence of the steel, and pointing out the maker’s name. Then, meditatively, ‘I have been wondering what sort of blow would be most effective if one wanted to kill a man.’

‘You can get most force,’ said Matteo, ‘by bringing the dagger down from above your head — thus.’

‘Yes; but then you may strike the ribs, in which case you would not seriously injure your friend.’

‘You can hit him in the neck.’

‘The space is too small, and the chin may get in the way. On the other hand, a wound in the large vessels of that region is almost immediately fatal.’

‘It is an interesting subject,’ I said. ‘My opinion is that the best of all blows is an underhand one, ripping up the stomach.’

I took the dagger and showed him what I meant.

‘There are no hindrances in the way of bones; it is simple and certainly fatal.’

‘Yes,’ said Checco, ‘but not immediately! My impression is that the best way is between the shoulders. Then you strike from the back, and your victim can see no uplifted hand to warn him, and, if he is very quick, enable him to ward the blow.’

‘It is largely a matter of taste,’ I answered, shrugging my shoulders. ‘In these things a man has to judge for himself according to his own idiosyncrasies.’

After a little more conversation I proposed to Matteo that we should go out to the market-place and see the people.

‘Yes, do!’ said Checco, ‘and I will go and see my father.’

As we walked along, Matteo told me that Checco had tried to persuade his father to go away for a while, but that he had refused, as also had his wife. I had seen old Orso d’Orsi once or twice; he was very weak and decrepit; he never came downstairs, but stayed in his own rooms all day by the fireside, playing with his grand-children. Checco was in the habit of going to see him every day, morning and evening, but to the rest of us it was as if he did not exist. Checco was complete master of everything.

The market-place was full of people. Booths were erected in rows, and on the tables the peasant women had displayed their wares: vegetables and flowers, chickens, ducks and all kinds of domestic fowls, milk, butter, eggs; and other booths with meat and oil and candles. And the sellers were a joyful crew, decked out with red and yellow handkerchiefs, great chains of gold around their necks, and spotless headdresses; they were standing behind their tables, with a scale on one hand and a little basin full of coppers on the other, crying out to one another, bargaining, shouting and joking, laughing, quarrelling. Then there were the purchasers, who walked along looking at the goods, picking up things and pinching them, smelling them, tasting them, examining them from every point of view. And the sellers of tokens and amulets and charms passed through the crowd crying out their wares, elbowing, cursing when someone knocked against them. Gliding in and out, between people’s legs, under the barrow wheels, behind the booths, were countless urchins, chasing one another through the crowd unmindful of kicks and cuffs, pouncing on any booth of which the proprietor had turned his back, seizing the first thing they could lay hands on, and scampering off with all their might. And there was a conjurer with a gaping crowd, a quack extracting teeth, a ballad singer. Everywhere was noise, and bustle, and life.

‘One would not say on the first glance that these people were miserably oppressed slaves,’ I said maliciously.

‘You must look beneath the surface,’ replied Matteo, who had begun to take a very serious view of things in general. I used to tell him that he would have a call some day and end up as a shaven monk.

‘Let us amuse ourselves,’ I said, taking Matteo by the arm, and dragging him along in search of prey. We fixed on a seller of cheap jewellery — a huge woman, with a treble chin and a red face dripping with perspiration. We felt quite sorry for her, and went to console her.

‘It is a very cold day,’ I remarked to her, whereupon she bulged out her cheeks and blew a blast that nearly carried me away.

She took up a necklace of beads and offered it to Matteo for his lady love. We began to bargain, offering her just a little lower than she asked, and then, as she showed signs of coming down, made her a final offer a little lower still. At last she seized a broom and attacked us, so that we had to fly precipitately.

I had never felt in such high spirits. I offered to race Matteo in every way he liked — riding, running and walking — but he refused, brutally telling me that I was frivolous. Then we went home. I found that Checco had just been hearing mass, and he was as solemn and silent as a hangman. I went about lamenting that I could get no one to talk to me, and at last took refuge with the children, who permitted me to join in their games, so that, at ‘hide-and-seek’ and ‘blind man’s buff,’ I thoroughly amused myself till dinner-time. We ate together, and I tried not to be silenced, talking the greatest nonsense I could think of; but the others sat like owls and did not listen, so that I too began to feel depressed....

The frowns of the others infected me, and the dark pictures that were before their eyes appeared to mine; my words failed me and we all three sat gloomily. I had started with an excellent appetite, but again the others influenced me, and I could not eat. We toyed with our food, wishing the dinner over. I moved about restlessly, but Checco was quite still, leaning his face on his hand, occasionally raising his eyes and fixing them on Matteo or me. One of the servants dropped some plates; we all started at the sound, and Checco uttered an oath; I had never heard him swear before. He was so pale I wondered if he were nervous. I asked the time: still two hours before we could start. How long would they take to pass! I had been longing to finish dinner, so that I might get up and go away. I felt an urgent need for walking, but when the meal was over a heaviness came to my legs and I could do nothing but sit and look at the other two. Matteo filled his tankard and emptied it several times, but after awhile, as he reached over for the wine, he saw Checco’s eyes fixed on the flagon, with a frown on his forehead, and the curious raising of one corner of the mouth, which was a sign he was displeased. Matteo withdrew his hand and pushed his mug away; it rolled over and fell on the floor. We heard the church bell strike the hour; it was three o’clock. Would it never be time! We sat on and on. At last Checco rose and began walking up and down the room. He called for his children. They came, and he began talking to them in a husky voice, so that they could scarcely understand him. Then, as if frightened of himself, he took them in his arms, one after the other, and kissed them convulsively, passionately, as one kisses a woman; and he told them to go. He stifled a sob. We sat on and on. I counted the minutes. I had never lived so long before. It was awful....

At last!

It was half-past three; we got up and took our hats.

‘Now, my friends!’ said Checco, drawing a breath of relief, ‘our worst troubles are over.’

We followed him out of the house. I noticed the jewelled hilt of his dagger, and every now and then I saw him put his hand to it to see that it was really there. We passed along the streets, saluted by the people. A beggar stopped us, and Checco threw him a piece of gold.

‘God bless you!’ said the man.

And Checco thanked him fervently.

We walked along the narrow streets in the shade, but as we turned a corner the sun came full on our faces. Checco stopped a moment and opened his arms, as if to receive the sunbeams in his embrace, and, turning to us, with a smile, he said, —

‘A good omen!’

A few more steps brought us to the piazza.

XXIII

AMONG the members of the Count’s household was Fabrizio Tornielli, a cousin of the Orsi on the mother’s side. Checco had told him that he wished to talk with Girolamo about the money he owed him, and thought the best opportunity would be when the Count was alone after the meal which he was in the habit of taking at three. But as he was very anxious to find the Count entirely by himself, he begged his cousin to make him a sign when the time came.... Fabrizio had agreed, and we had arranged to stroll about the piazza till we saw him. We came across our friends; to me they looked different from everyone else. I wondered that people as they passed did not stop them and ask what was disturbing them.

At last, one of the Palace windows was opened, and we saw Fabrizio Tornielli standing in it, looking down on the piazza. Our opportunity has come. My heart beat so violently against my chest that I had to put my hand to it. Besides Matteo and myself, Marco Scorsacana, Lodovico Pansecchi and Scipione Moratini were to accompany Checco into the Palace. Checco took my arm and we walked slowly up the steps while the others followed on our heels. The head of the Orsi had a key of gold, that is to say he was admitted to the ruler’s presence whenever he presented himself, and without formality. The guard at the door saluted as we passed, making no question. We ascended to Girolamo’s private apartments, and were admitted by a servant. We found ourselves in an ante-room, in one wall of which was a large doorway, closed by curtains....

‘Wait for me here,’ said Checco. ‘I will go in to the Count.’

The servant raised the curtain; Checco entered, and the curtain fell back behind him.

Girolamo was alone, leaning against the sill of an open window. He stretched out his hand kindly.

‘Ah, Checco, how goes it?’

‘Well; and you?’

‘Oh, I am always well when I get among my nymphs.’

He waved his hand to the frescoes on the walls. They were the work of a celebrated artist, and represented nymphs sporting, bathing, weaving garlands and offering sacrifice to Pan; the room had been christened the Chamber of the Nymphs.

Girolamo looked round with a contented smile.

‘I am glad everything is finished at last,’ he said. ‘Eight years ago the stones with which the house is built had not been hewn out of the rock, and now every wall is painted, everything is carved and decorated, and I can sit down and say, “It is finished.”’

‘It is indeed a work to be proud of,’ said Checco.

‘You don’t know how I have looked forward to this, Checco. Until now I have always lived in houses which others had built, and decorated, and lived in; but this one has grown up out of my own head; I have watched every detail of its construction, and I feel it mine as I have never felt anything mine before.’

He paused a minute, looking at the room.

‘Sometimes I think I have lost in its completion, for it gave me many pleasant hours to watch the progress. The hammer of the carpenter, the click of the trowel on the brick were music to my ears. There is always a melancholy in everything that is finished; with a house, the moment of its completion is the commencement of its decay. Who knows how long it will be before these pictures have mouldered off the walls, and the very walls themselves are crumbling to dust?’

‘As long as your family reigns in Forli your palace will preserve its splendour.’

‘Yes, and it seems to me that as the family will preserve the house, so the house will preserve the family. I feel myself firmer and more settled in Forli; this seems like a rock to which my fortunes can cling. But I am full of hope. I am still young and strong. I have a good thirty years of life before me, and what can one not do in thirty years? And then, Checco, my children! What a proud day it will be for me when I can take my son by the hand and say to him, “You are a full-grown man, and you are capable of taking up the sceptre when death takes it from my hand.” And it will be a good present I shall leave him. My head is full of plans. Forli shall be rich and strong, and its prince shall not need to fear his neighbours, and the Pope and Florence shall be glad of his friendship.’

He looked into space, as if he saw the future.

‘But, meanwhile, I am going to enjoy life. I have a wife whom I love, a house to be proud of, two faithful cities. What more can I want?’

‘You are a fortunate man,’ said Checco.

There was a short silence. Checco looked at him steadily. The Count turned away, and Checco put his hand to his dagger. He followed him. As he was approaching, the Count turned again with a jewel that he had just taken from the window sill.

‘I was looking at this stone when you came,’ he said. ‘Bonifazio has brought it me from Milan, but I am afraid I cannot afford it. It is very tempting.’

He handed it to Checco to look at.

‘I don’t think it is better than the one you have on your neck,’ he said, pointing to the jewel which was set in a medallion of gold hanging from a heavy chain.

‘Oh yes,’ said Girolamo. ‘It is much finer. Look at the two together.’

Checco approached the stone he held in his hand to the other, and, as he did so, with his other fingers pressed against the Count’s chest. He wanted to see whether by any chance he wore a coat of mail; he did not mean to make the same mistake as the Count.... He thought there was nothing; but he wished to make quite sure.

‘I think you are right,’ he said, ‘but the setting shows off the other, so that at first sight it seems more brilliant. And no wonder, for the chain is a masterpiece.’

He took it up as if to look at it, and as he did so put his hand on the Count’s shoulder. He was certain now.

‘Yes,’ said Girolamo, ‘that was made for me by the best goldsmith in Rome. It is really a work of art.’

‘Here is your stone,’ said Checco, handing it to him, but awkwardly, so that when Girolamo wanted to take it, it fell between their hands. Instinctively he bent down to catch it. In a moment Checco drew his dagger and buried it in the Count’s back. He staggered forward and fell in a heap on his face.

‘Oh God!’ he cried, ‘I am killed.’

It was the first thing we had heard outside. We heard the cry, the heavy fall. The servant rushed to the curtain.

‘They are killing my master,’ he cried.

‘Be quiet, you fool!’ I said, seizing his head from behind and with my hands on his mouth dragging him backwards. At the same moment Matteo drew his dagger and pierced the man’s heart. He gave a convulsive leap into the air, and then as he fell I pushed him so that he rolled to one side.

Immediately afterwards the curtain was lifted and Checco appeared, leaning against the door-post. He was as pale as death, and trembling violently. He stood silent for a moment, open-mouthed, so that I thought he was about to faint; then with an effort he said in a hoarse, broken voice, —

‘Gentlemen, we are free!’

A cry burst from us, —

‘Liberty!’

Lodovico Pansecchi asked, —

‘Is he dead?’

A visible shudder passed through Checco, as if he had been struck by an icy wind. He staggered to a chair and groaned, —

‘Oh God!’

‘I will go and see,’ said Pansecchi, lifting the curtain and entering.

We stood still, waiting for him. We heard a heavy sound, and as he appeared, he said, —

‘There is no doubt now.’

There was blood on his hands. Going up to Checco, he handed him the jewelled dagger.

‘Take this. It will be more use to you than where you left it.’

Checco turned away in disgust.

‘Here, take mine,’ said Matteo. ‘I will take yours. It will bring me good luck.’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a step was heard outside. Scipione looked out cautiously.

‘Andrea Framonti,’ he whispered.

‘Good luck, indeed!’ said Matteo.

It was the captain of the guard. He was in the habit of coming every day about this hour to receive the password from the Count. We had forgotten him. He entered.

‘Good-day to you, gentlemen! Are you waiting to see the Count?’

He caught sight of the corpse lying against the wall.

‘Good God! what is this? What is — ?’

He looked at us, and stopped suddenly. We had surrounded him.

‘Treason!’ he cried. ‘Where is the Count?’

He looked behind him; Scipione and Matteo barred the door.

‘Treason!’ he shouted, drawing his sword.

At the same moment we drew ours and rushed for him. He parried a few of our blows, but we were too many, and he fell pierced with a dozen wounds.

The sight of the fray had a magical effect on Checco. We saw him standing up, drawn to his full height, his cheeks aflame, his eyes flashing.

‘Good, my friends, good! Luck is on our side,’ he said. ‘Now we must look alive and work. Give me my dagger, Matteo; it is sacred now. It has been christened in blood with the name of Liberty. Liberty, my friends, Liberty!’

We flourished our swords and shouted, —

‘Liberty!’

‘Now, you, Filippo, take Lodovico Pansecchi and Marco, and go to the apartment of the Countess; tell her that she and her children are prisoners, and let no one enter or leave. Do this at any cost.... The rest of us will go out and rouse the people. I have twenty servants armed whom I told to wait in the piazza; they will come and guard the Palace and give you any help you need. Come!’

I did not know the way to the Countess’s chamber, but Marco had been a special favourite and knew well the ins and outs of the Palace. He guided me to the door, where we waited. In a few minutes we heard cries in the piazza, and shouts of ‘Liberty.’ There came a tramp of feet up the stairs. It was Checco’s armed servants. Some of them appeared where we were. I sent Marco to lead the others.

‘Clear the Palace of all the servants. Drive them out into the piazza, and if anyone resists, kill him.’

Marco nodded and went off. The door of the Countess’s apartments was opened, and a lady said, —

‘What is this noise?’

But immediately she saw us, she gave a shriek and ran back. Then, leaving two men to guard the door, I entered with Pansecchi and the rest. The Countess came forward.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ she said angrily. ‘Who are you? What are these men?’

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘the Count, your husband, is dead, and I have been sent to take you prisoner.’

The women began to weep and wail, but the Countess did not move a muscle. She appeared indifferent to my intelligence.

‘You,’ I said, pointing to the ladies and women servants, ‘you are to leave the Palace at once. The Countess will be so good as to remain here with her children.’

Then I asked where the children were. The women looked at their mistress, who said shortly, —

‘Bring them!’

I signed to Pansecchi, who accompanied one of the ladies out of the room, and reappeared with the three little children.

‘Now, madam,’ I said, ‘will you dismiss these ladies?’

She looked at me a moment, hesitating. The cries from the piazza were growing greater; it was becoming a roar that mounted to the Palace windows.

‘You can leave me,’ she said.

They broke again into shrieks and cries, and seemed disinclined to obey the order. I had no time to waste.

‘If you do not go at once, I shall have you thrown out!’

The Countess stamped her foot.

‘Go when I tell you! Go!’ she said. ‘I want no crying and screaming.’

They moved to the door like a flock of sheep, trampling on one another, bemoaning their fate. At last I had the room free.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘you must allow two soldiers to remain in the room.’

I locked the two doors of the chamber, mounted a guard outside each, and left her.

XXIV

I WENT out into the piazza. It was full of men, but where was the enthusiasm we had expected, the tumult, the shouts of joy? Was not the tyrant dead? But they stood there dismayed, confounded, like sheep.... And was not the tyrant dead? I saw partisans of Checco rushing through the crowd with cries of ‘Death to all tyrants,’ and ‘Liberty, liberty!’ but the people did not move. Here and there were men mounted on barrows, haranguing the people, throwing out words of fire, but the wind was still and they did not spread.... Some of the younger ones were talking excitedly, but the merchants kept calm, seeming afraid. They asked what was to happen now — what Checco would do? Some suggested that the town should be offered to the Pope; others talked of Lodovico Sforza and the vengeance he would bring from Milan.

I caught sight of Alessandra Moratini.

‘What news? What news?’

‘Oh God, I don’t know!’ he said with an expression of agony. ‘They won’t move. I thought they would rise up and take the work out of our hands. But they are as dull as stones.’

‘And the others?’ I asked.

‘They are going through the town trying to rouse the people. God knows what success they will have!’

At that moment there was a stir at one end of the square, and a crowd of mechanics surged in, headed by a gigantic butcher, flourishing a great meat-axe. They were crying ‘Liberty!’ Matteo went towards them and began to address them, but the butcher interrupted him and shouted coarse words of enthusiasm, at which they all yelled with applause.

Checco came on the scene, accompanied by his servants. A small crowd followed, crying, —

‘Bravo, Checco! bravo!’

As soon as the mechanics saw him, they rushed towards him, surrounding him with cries and cheers.... The square was growing fuller every moment; the shops had been closed, and from all quarters came swarming artisans and apprentices. I made my way to Checco and whispered to him, —

‘The people! Fire them, and the rest will follow.’

‘A leader of rabble!’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Make use of them. Give way to them now, and they will do your will. Give them the body of the Count!’

He looked at me, then nodded and whispered, —

‘Quickly!’

I ran to the Palace and told Marco Scorsacana what I had come for. We went into the Hall of the Nymphs; the body was lying on its face, almost doubled up, and the floor was stained with a horrible stream of blood; in the back were two wounds. Lodovico had indeed made sure that the Count was safe.... We caught hold of the body; it was not yet cold, and dragged it to the window. With difficulty we lifted it on to the sill.

‘Here is your enemy!’ I cried.

Then hoisting him, we pushed him out, and he fell on the stones with a great, dull thud. A mighty shout burst from the mob as they rushed at the body. One man tore the chain off his neck, but as he was running away with it another snatched at it. In the struggle it broke, and one got away with the chain, the other with the jewel. Then, with cries of hate, they set on the corpse. They kicked him and slapped his face and spat on him. The rings were wrenched off his fingers, his coat was torn away; they took his shoes, his hose; in less than a minute everything had been robbed, and he was lying naked, naked as when he was born. They had no mercy those people; they began to laugh and jeer, and make foul jokes about his nakedness.

The piazza was thronged, and every moment people entered; the women of the lower classes had come, joining their shrill cries to the shouts of the men. The noise was stupendous, and above all rang the cries of Liberty and Death.

‘The Countess! The Countess!’

It became the general cry, drowning the others, and from all quarters.

‘Where is the Countess? Bring her out. Death to the Countess!’

A cry went up that she was in the Palace, and the shout became, —

‘To the Palace! To the Palace!’

Checco said to us, —

‘We must save her. If they get hold of her she will be torn to pieces. Let her be taken to my house.’

Matteo and Pansecchi took all the soldiers they could and entered the Palace. In a few minutes they appeared with Caterina and her children; they had surrounded her and were walking with drawn swords.

A yell broke from these thousands of throats, and they surged towards the little band. Checco shouted out to them to let her go in peace, and they held back a little; but as she passed they hissed and cursed and called her foul names. Caterina walked proudly, neither turning to the right nor to the left, no sign of terror on her face, not even a pallid cheek. She might have been traversing the piazza amidst the homage of her people. Suddenly it occurred to a man that she had jewels concealed on her. He pushed through the guards and put his hand to her bosom. She lifted her hand and hit him in the face. A cry of rage broke from the populace, and they made a rush. Matteo and his men stopped, closing together, and he said, —

‘By God! I swear I will kill any man who comes within my reach.’

They shrank back frightened, and taking advantage of this, the little band hurried out of the piazza.

Then the people looked at one another, waiting for something to do, not knowing where to begin. Their eyes were beginning to flame, and their hands to itch for destruction. Checco saw their feeling, and at once pointed to the Palace.

‘There are the fruits of your labours, your money, your jewels, your taxes. Go and take back your own. There is the Palace. We give you the Palace.’

They broke into a cheer, a rush was made, and they struggled in by the great doors, fighting their way up the stairs in search of plunder, dispersing through the splendid rooms....

Checco looked at them disappearing through the gateway.

‘Now, we have them at last.’

In a few minutes the stream at the Palace gates became double, for it consisted of those coming out as well as of those going in. The confusion became greater and greater, and the rival bands elbowed and struggled and fought. The windows were burst open and things thrown out — coverlets, linen, curtains, gorgeous silks, Oriental brocades, satins — and the women stood below to catch them. Sometimes there was a struggle for possession, but the objects were poured out so fast that everyone could be satisfied. Through the doors men could be seen coming with their arms full, their pockets bulging, and handing their plunder to their wives to take home, while they themselves rushed in again. All the little things were taken first, and then it was the turn of the furniture. People came out with chairs or coffers on their heads, bearing them away quickly lest their claim should be disputed. Sometimes the entrance was stopped by two or three men coming out with a heavy chest or with the pieces of a bedstead. Then the shouting and pushing and confusion were worse than ever.... Even the furniture gave out under the keen hands, and looking round they saw that the walls and floors were bare. But there was still something for them. They made for the doors and wrenched them away. From the piazza we saw men tear out the window frames, even the hinges were taken, and they streamed out of the Palace heavily laden, their hands bloody from the work of destruction.

All over the town the bells were ringing, and still people surged into the piazza. Thousands had got nothing from the Palace, and they cried out in anger against their companions, envious at their good luck. Bands had formed themselves with chiefs, and they were going about exciting the others. Checco stood among them, unable to restrain them. Suddenly another cry rose from a thousand throats, —

‘The Treasury!’

And irresistible as the sea, they rushed to the Gabella. In a few minutes the same ruin had overtaken it, and it was lying bare and empty.

Scarcely one of them remained in the piazza. The corpse was lying on the cold stones, naked, the face close to the house in which the living man had taken such pride; and the house itself, with the gaping apertures from the stolen windows, looked like a building which had been burnt with fire, so that only the walls remained. And it was empty but for a few rapacious men, who were wandering about like scavengers to see whether anything had been left unfound.

The body had done its work and it could rest in peace. Checco sent for friars, who placed it on a stretcher, covering its nakedness, and bore it to their church.

Night came, and with it a little peace. The tumult with which the town was filled quietened down; one by one the sounds ceased, and over the city fell a troubled sleep....

XXV

WE were up betimes. The town was ours, except the citadel. Checco had gone to the fortress, which stood above the town, to one side, and had summoned the Castellan to surrender. He had refused, as we expected; but we were not much troubled, for we had Caterina and her children in our power, and by their means thought we could get hold of the castle.

Checco had called a meeting of the Council to decide what should be done with the town. It was purely a measure of politeness, for he had already made up his mind and taken steps in accordance. With the town so troubled, the citadel still in our opponent’s hands, and the armies of Lodovico Moro at Milan, it was hopeless to suggest standing alone; and Checco had decided to offer Forli to the Pope. This would give a protection against external enemies and would not greatly interfere with the internal relations. The real power would belong to the chief citizen, and Checco knew well enough whom that was. Further, the lax grasp of the Pope would soon be loosed by death, and in the confusion of a long conclave and a change of rulers, it would not be impossible to change the state of dependence into real liberty, and for Checco to add the rights and titles of lordship to the power. On the previous night he had sent a messenger to the Protonotary Savello, the papal governor of Cesena, with an account of what had happened and the offer of the town. Checco had requested an immediate reply, and was expecting it every minute.

The Council was called for ten o’clock. At nine Checco received Savello’s secret consent.

The President of the Council was Niccolo Tornielli, and he opened the sitting by reminding his hearers of their object, and calling for their opinions. At first no one would speak. They did not know what was in Checco’s mind, and they had no wish to say anything that might be offensive to him. The Forlivesi are a cautious race! After a while an old man got up and timidly expressed the thanks of the citizens for the freedom which Checco had bestowed upon them, suggesting also that he should speak first. The lead thus given, the worthies rose, one after another, and said the same things with an air of profound originality.

Then Antonio Sassi stood up. It was he who had advised Girolamo to impose the taxes on the town; and he was known to be a deadly enemy of Checco. The others had been sufficiently astonished when they saw him enter the Council chamber, for it was thought that he had left the town, as Ercole Piacentini and others of the Count’s favourites had done. When he prepared to speak, the surprise was universal.

‘Our good friend, Niccolo,’ he said, ‘has called upon us to decide what shall be done with the town.

‘Your thoughts seem to be inclining to one foreign master or another. But my thoughts are inclining to the Liberty, in whose name the town has been won.

‘Let us maintain the Liberty which these men have conquered at the risk of their lives....

‘Why should we doubt our ability to preserve the Liberty of our ancestors? Why should we think that we, who are descended from such fathers, born from their blood, bred in their houses, should have degenerated so far as to be incapable of seizing the opportunity which is presented to us?

‘Let us not fear that the Mighty Monarch, who defends and protects him who walks the path of the Just, will fail to give us spirit and strength to introduce and firmly to implant in this city the blessed state of Liberty.’

At the end of the sentence Antonio Sassi paused to see the effect on his auditors.

He went on, —

‘But as the example of Our Master has shown us that the shepherd is necessary for the preservation of the flock; and as He seems to point out our guardian by the success which He has granted to his arms in the extermination of the Wolf, I propose that we surrender our Liberty to the hands of him who is best able to preserve it — Checco d’Orsi.’

A cry of astonishment burst from the Councillors. Was this Antonio Sassi? They looked at Checco, but he was impassive; not even the shadow of a thought could be read on his face. They asked themselves whether this was pre-arranged, whether Checco had bought his enemy, or whether it was a sudden device of Antonio to make his peace with the victor. One could see the agitation of their minds. They were tortured: they did not know what Checco thought. Should they speak or be silent? There was a look of supplication in their faces which was quite pitiful. Finally, one of them made up his mind, and rose to second Antonio Sassi’s motion. Then others took their courage in both hands and made speeches full of praise for Checco, begging him to accept the sovereignty.

A grave smile appeared on Checco’s face, but it disappeared at once. When he thought there had been sufficient talking he rose to his feet, and, after thanking his predecessors for their eulogies, said, —

‘It is true that we have conquered the city at the risk of our lives; but it was for the city, not for ourselves.... No thought of our own profit entered our minds, but we were possessed by a grave sense of our duty towards our fellowmen. Our watch-words were Liberty and the Commonweal! From the bottom of my heart I thank Antonio Sassi and all of you who have such confidence in me that you are willing to surrender the town to my keeping. In their good opinion I find a sufficient reward for all I have done. But, God knows, I have no desire to rule. I want the love of my fellow-citizens, not the fear of subjects; I look with dismay upon the toils of a ruler. And who would believe in my disinterestedness when he saw me take up the sceptre which the lifeless hand has dropped?

‘Forgive me; I cannot accept your gift.

‘But there is one who can and will. The Church is not wont to close her breast to him who seeks refuge beneath her sacred cloak, and she will pardon us for having shaken from our necks the hard yoke of Tyranny. Let us give ourselves to the Holy Father—’

He was interrupted by the applause of the councillors: they did not want to hear further, but agreed unanimously; and it was forthwith arranged that an embassy should be sent to the Governor of Cesena to make the offer. The meeting was broken up amidst shouts of praise for Checco. If he had been strong before, he was ten times stronger now, for the better classes had been afraid of the mob and angry that he should depend on them; now they were won too.

The people knew that the Council was assembled to consult on the destinies of the town, and they had come together in thousands outside the Council House. The news was made known to them at once, and when Checco appeared at the top of the stairs a mighty shout burst from them, and they closed round him with cries and cheers.

‘Bravo! Bravo!’

He began to walk homewards, and the crowd followed, making the old grey streets ring with their shouts. On each side people were thronging and stood on tiptoe to see him, the men waving their caps and throwing them in the air, the women madly flourishing handkerchiefs; children were hoisted up that they might see the great man pass, and joined their shrill cries to the tumult. Then it occurred to someone to spread his cloak for Checco to walk on, and at once everyone followed his example, and the people pressed and struggled to lay their garments before his feet. And baskets of flowers were obtained and scattered before him, and the heavy scent of the narcissi filled the air. The shouts were of all kinds; but at last one arose, and gathered strength, and replaced the others, till ten thousand throats were shouting, —

‘Pater Patriæ! Pater Patriæ!’

Checco walked along with bare head, his eyes cast down, his face quite white. His triumph was so great — that he was afraid!

The great procession entered the street in which stood the Palazzo Orsi, and at the same moment, from the gates of the palace issued Checco’s wife and his children. They came towards us, followed by a troop of noble ladies. They met and Checco, opening his arms, clasped his wife to his breast and kissed her tenderly; then, with his arm round her waist, the children on each side, he proceeded towards his house. If the enthusiasm had been great before, now it was ten times greater. The people did not know what to do to show their joy; no words could express their emotion; they could only give a huge deafening shout, —

‘Pater Patriæ! Pater Patriæ!’

XXVI

AFTER a while the formal embassy sent to Cesena came back with the message that the Protonotary Savello had been filled with doubts as to whether he should accept the town or no; but seeing the Forlivesi firm in their desire to come under the papal rule, and being convinced that their pious wish had been inspired by the most High Ruler of Kings, he had not ventured to contradict the manifest will of Heaven, and therefore would come and take possession of the city in person.

Checco smiled a little as he heard of the worthy man’s doubts and the arguments used by the ambassadors to persuade him; but he fully agreed with Monsignor Savello’s decision, thinking the reasons very cogent....

The protonotary was received with all due honour. Savello was a middle-sized, stout man, with a great round belly and a fat red face, double-chinned and bull-necked. He had huge ears and tiny eyes, like pig’s eyes, but they were very sharp and shrewd. His eyebrows were pale and thin, so that with the enormous expanse of shaven cheek his face had a look of almost indecent nakedness. His hair was scanty and his crown quite bald and shiny. He was gorgeously dressed in violet. After the greetings and necessary courtesies, he was informed of the state of things in Forli. He was vexed to find the citadel still in the hands of the Castellan, who had been summoned with great courtesy to surrender to the papal envoy, but without any courtesy at all had very stoutly declined. Savello said he would speak to the Countess and make her order the Castellan to open his gates. I was sent forward to inform Caterina of the last occurrences and of the protonotary’s desire for an interview.

The Countess had received apartments in the Orsi Palace, and it was in one of these rooms that the good Savello was ushered.

He stopped on the threshold, and lifting up his arm stretched out two fingers, and in his thick, fat voice, said, —

‘The peace of God be upon you!’

Caterina bowed and crossed herself. He went up to her and took her hand in his.

‘Madam, it has always been my hope that I should some day meet the lady whose fame has reached me as the most talented, most beautiful, and most virtuous of her time. But I did not think that the day of our meeting would be one of such bitterness and woe!’

He expressed himself in measured tones, grave and slow, and very fit to the occasion.

‘Ah, lady, you do not know the grief I felt when I was made acquainted with your terrible loss. I knew your dear husband in Rome, and I always felt for him a most profound affection and esteem.’

‘You are very kind!’ she said.

‘I can understand that you should be overwhelmed with grief, and I trust you do not think my visit importunate. I have come to offer you such consolation as is in my power; for is it not the most blessed work that our Divine Master has imposed upon us, to comfort the afflicted?’

‘I was under the impression that you had come to take over the city on behalf of the Pope.’

‘Ah, lady, I see that you are angry with me for taking the city from you; but do not think I do it of myself. Ah, no; I am a slave, I am but a servant of his Holiness. For my part, I would have acted far otherwise, not only for your own merits, great as they are, but also for the merits of the Duke, your brother.’

His unction was most devout. He clasped his hand to his heart and looked up to Heaven so earnestly that the pupils of his eyes disappeared beneath the lids, and one could only see the whites. In this attitude he was an impressive picture of morality.

‘I beseech you, madam, bravely to bear your evil fortunes. Do we not know that fortune is uncertain? If the city has been taken from you it is the will of God, and as a Christian you must, with resignation, submit yourself to His decrees. Remember that the ways of the Almighty are inscrutable. The soul of the sinner is purified by suffering. We must all pass through the fire. Perhaps these misfortunes will be the means of saving your soul alive. And now that this city has returned to the fold of the Master — for is not the Holy Father the Vicar of Christ — be assured that the loss you have suffered will be made good to you in the love of his Holiness, and that eventually you will receive the reward of the sinner who has repented, and sit amongst the elect singing hymns of praise to the glory of the Master of all things.’

He paused to take breath. I saw Caterina’s fingers convulsively close round the arm of her chair; she was restraining herself with difficulty.

‘But the greatest grief of all is the loss of your husband, Girolamo. Ah, how beautiful is the grief of a widow! But it was the will of God. And what has he to complain of now? Let us think of him clad in robes of light, with a golden harp in his hands. Ah, lady, he is an angel in heaven, and we are miserable sinners upon earth. How greatly to be envied is his lot! He was a humble, pious man, and he has his reward. Ah—’

But she could hold back no longer. She burst forth like a fury.

‘Oh, how can you stand before me, uttering these hypocrisies? How dare you say these things to me, when you are enjoying the fruits of his death and my misfortune? Hypocrite! You are the vulture feeding with the crows, and you come and whine and pray and talk to me of the will of God!’

She clasped her hands and lifted them passionately towards heaven.

‘Oh, I hope that my turn will come, and then I will show you what is the will of God. Let them take care!’

‘You are incensed, dear lady, and you know not what you say. You will regret that you have accepted my consolations with disdain. But I forgive you with a Christian spirit.’

‘I do not want your forgiveness. I despise you.’

She uttered the words like the hiss of a serpent. Savello’s eyes sparkled a little, and his thin lips were drawn rather thinner than before, but he only sighed, and said gently, —

‘You are beside yourself. You should turn to the Consoler of Sorrow. Watch and pray!’

‘What is it you want with me?’ she said, taking no notice of his remark.

Savello hesitated, looking at her. She beat her foot impatiently.

‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Tell me, and let me remain in peace. I am sick of you.’

‘I came to offer you consolation, and to bid you be of good faith.’

‘Do you think I am a fool? If you have no further business with me — go!’

The priest now had some difficulty in containing himself; his eyes betrayed him.

‘I am a man of peace, and I desire to spill no blood. Therefore I wished to propose that you should come with me and summon the Castellan to give up the citadel, which may be the means of avoiding much bloodshed, and also of gaining the thanks of the Holy Father.’

‘I will not help you. Shall I aid you to conquer my own town?’

‘You must remember that you are in our hands, fair lady,’ he answered meekly.

‘Well?’

‘I am a man of peace, but I might not be able to prevent the people from revenging themselves on you for your refusal. It will be impossible to hide from them that you are the cause of the holding back of the citadel.’

‘I can well understand that you would hesitate at nothing.’

‘It is not I, dear lady—’

‘Ah, no; you are the servant of the Pope! It is the will of God!’

‘You would be wise to do as we request.’

There was a look of such ferocity in his face that one saw he would indeed hesitate at nothing. Caterina thought a little....

‘Very well,’ she said, to my intense surprise, ‘I will do my best.’

‘You will gain the gratitude of the Holy Father and my own thanks.’

‘I put an equal value upon both.’

‘And now, madam, I will leave you. Take comfort, and apply yourself to pious exercises. In prayer you will find a consolation for all your woes.’

He raised his hand as before, and, with the outstretched fingers, repeated the blessing.

XXVII

WE went to the fortress in solemn procession, the people, as we passed, mingling shouts of praise for Checco with yells of derision for Caterina. She walked on with her stately indifference, and when the protonotary addressed her, repelled him with disdain.

The Castellan was summoned, and the Countess addressed him in the words which Savello had suggested, —

‘As Heaven has taken the Count from me, and also the city, I beg you, by the confidence I showed in choosing you as Castellan, to surrender this fortress to the ministers of His Holiness the Pope.’

There was a light tinge of irony in her voice, and her lips showed the shadow of a smile.

The Castellan replied gravely, —

‘By the confidence you showed in choosing me as Castellan, I refuse to surrender this fortress to the ministers of his Holiness the Pope. And as Heaven has taken the Count from you, and also the city, it may take the citadel too, but, by God! madam, no power on earth shall.’

Caterina turned to Savello, —

‘What shall I do?’

‘Insist.’

She solemnly repeated her request, and he solemnly made his reply.

‘It is no good,’ she said, ‘I know him too well. He thinks I am speaking under compulsion. He does not know that I am acting of my own will, for the great love I bear the Pope and the Church.’

‘We must have the citadel,’ said Savello, emphatically. ‘If we do not get it, I cannot answer for your safety.’

She looked at him; then an idea seemed to occur to her.

‘Perhaps if I went in and spoke to him he would consent to surrender.’

‘We cannot allow you out of our power,’ said Checco.

‘You would have my children as hostages.’

‘That is true,’ mused Savello; ‘I think we can let her go.’

Checco disapproved, but the priest overruled him, and the Castellan was summoned again, and ordered to admit the Countess. Savello warned her, —

‘Remember that we hold your children, and shall not hesitate to hang them before your eyes if—’

‘I know your Christian spirit, Monsignor,’ she interrupted.

But when she was inside she turned to us, and from the ramparts addressed us with mocking laughter. The fury which had been boiling within her burst out. She hurled at us words of foul abuse, so that one might have thought her a fishwife; she threatened us with death, and every kind of torture, in revenge for the murder of her husband....

We stood looking up at her with open mouths, dumbfounded. A cry of rage broke from the people; Matteo uttered an oath. Checco looked angrily at Savello, but said nothing. The priest was furious; his big red face grew purple, and his eyes glistened like a serpent’s.

‘Bastard!’ he hissed. ‘Bastard!’

Trembling with anger, he ordered the children to be sent for, and he cried out to the Countess, —

‘Do not think that we shall hesitate. Your sons shall be hanged before your very eyes.’

‘I have the means of making more,’ she replied scornfully.

She was lion-hearted. I could not help feeling admiration for the extraordinary woman. Surely she could not sacrifice her children! And I wondered if a man would have had the courage to give that bold answer to Savello’s threats.

Savello’s expression had become fiendish. He turned to his assistants.

‘Let a double scaffold be erected here, at once and quickly.’

The chiefs of the conspiracy retired to a sheltered place, while the mob gathered in the piazza; and soon the buzz of many voices mingled with hammering and the cries of workmen. The Countess stood above looking at the people, watching the gradual erection of the scaffold.

In a little while its completion was announced. Savello and the others came forward, and the priest once more asked her whether she would surrender. She did not deign to answer. The two boys were brought forward — one was nine, the other seven. As the people looked upon their youth a murmur of pity passed through them. My own heart began to beat a little. They looked at the scaffold and could not understand; but Cesare, the younger, seeing the strange folk round him and the angry faces, began to cry. Ottaviano was feeling rather tearful too; but his superior age made him ashamed, and he was making mighty efforts to restrain himself. All at once Cesare caught sight of his mother, and he called to her. Ottaviano joined him, and they both cried out, —

‘Mother! Mother!’

She looked at them, but made not the slightest motion, she might have been of stone.... Oh, it was horrible; she was too hard!

‘Once more, I ask you,’ said Savello, ‘will you surrender the castle?’

‘No — no!’

Her voice was quite steady, ringing clear as a silver bell.

Savello made a sign, and two men approached the boys. Then suddenly they seemed to understand; with a shriek they ran to Checco, and, falling at his feet, clasped his knees. Ottaviano could hold out no longer; he burst into tears, and his brother, at the elder’s weakness, redoubled his own cries.

‘Oh, Checco, don’t let them touch us!’

Checco took no notice of them; he looked straight in front of him. And even when the Count had just fallen under his dagger he had not been so ghastly pale.... The children were sobbing desperately at his knees. The men hesitated; but there was no pity in the man of God; he repeated his sign more decisively than before, and the men advanced. The children clung to Checco’s legs, crying, —

‘Checco, don’t let them touch us!’

He made no sign. He held his eyes straight in front of him, as if he saw nothing, heard nothing. But his face! Never have I seen such agony....

The children were torn from him, their hands bound behind their backs. How could they! My heart was bursting within me, but I dared say nothing. They were led to the scaffold. A sobbing cry came from the people and wailed through the heavy air.

The Countess stood still, looking at her children. She made not the slightest motion; she might have been of stone.

The children cried out, —

‘Checco! Checco!’

It was heartbreaking.

‘Go on!’ said Savello.

A groan burst from Checco, and he swayed to and fro, as if he were going to fall.

‘Go on!’ said Savello.

But Checco could not bear it.

‘Oh, God! Stop! — stop!’

‘What do you mean?’ said Savello, angrily. ‘Go on!’

‘I cannot! Untie them!’

‘You fool! I threatened to hang them, and I will. Go on!’

‘You shall not! Untie them, I tell you!’

‘I am master here. Go on!’

Checco strode towards him with clenched fists.

‘By God, Master Priest, you shall go the way you came, if you thwart me. Untie them!’

In a moment Matteo and I had pushed aside the men who held them, and cut their cords. Checco staggered towards the children, and they with a bound threw themselves into his arms. He clasped them to him passionately, and covered them with kisses. A shout of joy broke from the people, and many burst into tears.

Suddenly we saw a commotion on the castle walls. The Countess had fallen back, and men were pressing round her.

She had fainted.

XXVIII

WE went home rather troubled. Savello was walking alone, very angry, with a heavy frown between his eyes, refusing to speak.... Checco was silent and angry too, half blaming himself for what he had done, half glad, and Bartolomeo Moratini was by his side, talking to him. Matteo and I were behind with the children. Bartolomeo fell back and joined us.

‘I have been trying to persuade Checco to apologise to Savello, but he will not.’

‘Neither would I,’ said Matteo.

‘If they quarrel, it will be the worse for the town.’

‘If I were Checco, I would say that the town might go to the devil, but I would not apologise to that damned priest.’

When we reached the Palazzo Orsi a servant came out to meet us, and told Checco that a messenger was waiting with important news. Checco turned to Savello, and said gloomily, —

‘Will you come? It may need some consultation.’

The protonotary did not answer, but walked sulkily into the house. After a few minutes, Checco came to us, and said, —

‘The Duke of Milan is marching against Forli with five thousand men.’

No one spoke, but the expression on the protonotary’s face grew darker.

‘It is fortunate we have preserved the children,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘They will be more useful to us alive than dead.’

Savello looked at him; and then, as if trying to mend the breach, but rather against his will, said ungraciously, —

‘Perhaps you were right, Checco, in what you did. I did not see at the moment the political wisdom of your act.’

He could not help the sneer. Checco flushed a little, but on a look from Bartolomeo answered, —

‘I am sorry if I was too quick of tongue. The excitement of the moment and my temper made me scarcely responsible.’

Checco looked as if it were a very bitter pill he had been forced to swallow; but the words had a reasonable effect, and the clouds began to clear away. An earnest discussion was commenced on the future movements. The first thing was to send for help against the Duke Lodovico. Savello said he would apply to Rome. Checco counted on Lorenzo de’ Medici, and messengers were forthwith despatched to both. Then it was decided to gather as much victuals as possible into the town, and fortify the walls, so that they might be prepared for a siege. As to the citadel, we knew it was impossible to take it by storm; but it would not be difficult to starve it into surrender, for on the news of the Count’s death the gates had been shut with such precipitation that the garrison could not have food for more than two or three days.

Then Checco sent away his wife and children; he tried to persuade his father to go too, but the Orso said he was too old and would rather die in his own town and palace than rush about the country in search of safety. In the troubled days of his youth he had been exiled many times, and now his only desire was to remain at home in his beloved Forli.

The news of Lodovico’s advance threw consternation into the town, and when cartloads of provisions were brought in, and the fortifications worked at day and night, the brave citizens began to quake and tremble. They were going to have a siege and would have to fight, and it was possible that if they did not sufficiently hide themselves behind the walls, they might be killed. As I walked through the streets, I noticed that the whole populace was distinctly paler.... It was as if a cold wind had blown between their shoulders, and bleached and pinched their faces. I smiled, and said to them, in myself, —

‘You have had the plunder of the Palace and the custom-houses, my friends, and you liked that very well; now you will have to pay for your pleasure.’

I admired Checco’s wisdom in giving them good reasons for being faithful to him. I imagined that, if the beneficent rule of the Countess returned, it would fare ill with those who had taken part in the looting....

Checco had caused his family to leave the town as secretly as possible; the preparations had been made with the greatest care, and the departure effected under cover of night. But it leaked out, and then the care he had taken in concealing the affair made it more talked of. They asked why Checco had sent away his wife and children. Was he afraid of the siege? Did he intend to leave them himself? At the idea of a betrayal, anger mixed itself with their fear, and they cried out against him! And why did he want to do it so secretly? Why should he try to conceal it? A thousand answers were given, and all more or less discreditable to Checco. His wonderful popularity had taken long enough to reach the point when he had walked through the streets amidst showers of narcissi; but it looked as if less days would destroy it than years had built it up. Already he could walk out without being surrounded by the mob and carried about in triumph. The shouts of joy had ceased to be a burden to him; and no one cried ‘Pater Patriæ’ as he passed. Checco pretended to notice no change, but in his heart it tormented him terribly. The change had begun on the day of the fiasco at the fortress; people blamed the leaders for letting the Countess out of their hands, and it was a perpetual terror to them to have the enemy in their very midst. It would have been bearable to stand an ordinary siege, but when they had their own citadel against them, what could they do?

The townspeople knew that help was coming from Rome and Florence, and the general hope was that the friendly armies would arrive before the terrible Duke. Strange stories were circulated about Lodovico. People who had seen him at Milan described his sallow face with the large, hooked nose and the broad, heavy chin. Others told of his cruelty. It was notorious that he had murdered his nephew after keeping him a prisoner for years. They remembered how he had crushed the revolt of a subject town, hanging in the market-place the whole council, young and old, and afterwards hunting up everyone suspected of complicity, and ruthlessly putting them to death, so that a third of the population had perished. The Forlivesi shuddered, and looked anxiously along the roads by which the friendly armies were expected.

Lorenzo de’ Medici refused to help.

There was almost a tumult in the town when the news was told. He said that the position of Florence made it impossible for him to send troops at the present moment, but later he would be able to do whatever we wished. It meant that he intended to wait and see how things turned out, without coming to open war with the Duke unless it was certain that victory would be on our side. Checco was furious, and the people were furious with Checco. He had depended entirely on the help from Florence, and when it failed the citizens murmured openly against him, saying that he had entered into this thing without preparation, without thought of the future. We begged Checco not to show himself in the town that day, but he insisted. The people looked at him as he passed, keeping perfect silence. As yet they neither praised nor blamed, but how long would it be before they refrained from cursing him they had blessed? Checco walked through with set face, very pale. We asked him to turn back, but he refused, slackening his pace to prolong the walk, as if it gave him a certain painful pleasure to drain the cup of bitterness to the dregs. In the piazza we saw two councillors talking together; they crossed over to the other side, pretending not to see us.

Now our only hope was in Rome. The Pope had sent a messenger to say that he was preparing an army, and bidding us keep steadfast and firm. Savello posted the notice up in the market-place, and the crowd that read broke out into praises of the Pope and Savello. And as Checco’s influence diminished Savello’s increased; the protonotary began to take greater authority in the councils, and often he seemed to contradict Checco for the mere pleasure of overbearing and humiliating him. Checco became more taciturn and gloomy every day.

But the high spirits of the townsmen sank when it was announced that Lodovico’s army was within a day’s march, and nothing had been heard from Rome. Messengers were sent urging the Pope to hasten his army, or at least to send a few troops to divert the enemy and encourage the people. The citizens mounted the ramparts and watched the two roads — the road that led from Milan and the road that led to Rome. The Duke was coming nearer and nearer; the peasants began to flock into the town, with their families, their cattle, and such property as they had been able to carry with them. They said the Duke was approaching with a mighty army, and that he had vowed to put all the inhabitants to the sword to revenge the death of his brother. The fear of the fugitives spread to the citizens, and there was a general panic. The gates were closed, and all grown men summoned to arms. Then they began to lament, asking what inexperienced townsmen could do against the trained army of the Duke, and the women wept and implored their husbands not to risk their precious lives; and above all rose the murmur against Checco.

When would the army come from Rome? They asked the country folk, but they had heard of nothing; they looked and looked, but the road was empty.

And suddenly over the hills was seen appearing the vanguard of the Duke’s army. The troops wound down into the plain, and others appeared on the brow of the hills; slowly they marched down and others again appeared, and others and others, and still they appeared on the summit and wound down into the plain. They wondered, horror-stricken, how large the army was — five, ten, twenty thousand men! Would it never end? They were panic-stricken. At last the whole army descended and halted; there was a confusion of commands, a rushing hither and thither, a bustling, a troubling; it looked like a colony of ants furnishing their winter home. The camp was marked out, entrenchments were made, tents erected, and Forli was in a state of siege.

XXIX

THE night fell and was passed without sleep or rest. The citizens were gathered together on the walls, talking anxiously, trying to pierce the darkness to see the rescuing army from Rome. Now and then someone thought he heard the tramp of cavalry or saw a gleam of armour, and then they stood still, holding their breaths, listening. But they heard nothing, saw nothing.... Others were assembled in the piazza, and with them a crowd of women and children; the churches were full of women praying and weeping. The night seemed endless. At last a greater chilliness of the air told them that the dawn was at hand; gradually the darkness seemed to thin away into a cold pallor, and above a bank of cloud in the east appeared a sickly light. More anxiously than ever our eyes turned towards Rome; the mist hid the country from us, but some of the watchers thought they saw a black mass, far away. They pointed it out to the others, and all watched eagerly; but the black mass grew neither larger nor clearer nor nearer; and as great yellow rays shot up above the clouds, and the sun rose slowly, we saw the road stretched out before us, and it was empty, empty, empty.

It was almost a sob that burst from them, and moaningly they asked when help was coming. At that moment a man ascended the ramparts and told us that the protonotary had received a letter from the Pope, in which he informed him that relief was on the way. A cheer broke from us. At last!

The siege began in earnest with a simultaneous attack on the four gates of the town, but they were well defended, and the enemy easily beaten off. But all at once we heard a great sound of firing, and shouts, and shrieks, and we saw flames burst from the roof of a house. In our thought of Lodovico we had forgotten the enemy in our midst, and a terrible panic broke out when it was found that the citadel had opened fire. The Castellan had turned his cannon on the houses surrounding the fortress, and the damage was terrible. The inhabitants hurried out for their lives, taking with them their chattels and fled to safer parts of the town. One house had been set on fire and for a while we feared that others would catch and a general conflagration be added to our woes. People said it was a visitation of God; they talked of Divine vengeance for the murder of the Count, and when Checco hurried to the scene of the fire they did not care to restrain themselves any longer, but broke out into yells and hisses. Afterwards, when the flames had been extinguished and Checco was passing through the piazza, they surrounded him, hooting, and would not let him pass.

‘Curs!’ he hissed, looking at them furiously, with clenched fists. Then, as if unable to contain himself he drew his sword, shouting, —

‘Let me pass!’

They shrank back and he went his way. But immediately he had gone the storm redoubled, and the place rang with their cries.

‘By God,’ said Checco, ‘how willingly I would turn the cannon on them and mow them down like grass!’

They were the first words he had said of the change of feeling....

It was the same with us, when we walked through the streets — Matteo and I and the Moratini — they hissed and groaned at us. And a week before they would have licked our boots and kissed the ground we trod on!

The bombardment continued, outside and in, and it was reported through the town that Lodovico had vowed to sack the place and hang every third citizen. They knew he was the man to keep his word. The murmurs began to grow even louder, and voices were heard suggesting a surrender.... It had occurred to all of them, and when the most timid, driven to boldness by their fear, spoke the word, they looked at one another guiltily. They gathered together in little knots, talking in undertones, suspicious, stopping suddenly if they saw near anyone who was known to be in favour of the party of Liberty. They discussed how to make terms for themselves; some suggested giving up the town unconditionally, others proposed an agreement. At last they spoke of appeasing the Duke by handing over to him the seventeen conspirators who had planned the murder of Girolamo. The thought frightened them at first, but they soon became used to it. They said the Orsi had really had no thought of the common good, but it was for their private ends that they had killed the Count and brought this evil on the town. They railed against Checco for making them suffer for his own ambition; they had lauded him to the skies for refusing the sovereignty, but now they said he had only feigned, and that he intended to seize the city at the first good opportunity. And as to the others, they had helped for greed and petty malice. As they talked they grew more excited, and soon they said it would only be justice to hand over to the Duke the authors of their troubles.

The day passed, and the second night, but there were no signs of the help from Rome.

Another night passed by and still nothing came; the dawn, and the road was as empty as before.

And the fourth night came and went and still there was nothing. Then a great discouragement fell upon the people; the army was on the way, but why did it not arrive? Suddenly here and there people were heard asking about the letter from the Pope. No one had seen the messenger. How had it come? And a horrible suspicion seized the people, so that they rushed to the Palazzo Orsi, asking for Savello. As soon as he appeared they broke out clamorously.

‘Show us the letter!’

Savello refused! They insisted; they asked for the messenger who had brought it. Savello said he had been sent back. None of us had seen letter or messenger; the suspicion seized us too, and Checco asked, —

‘Is there a letter?’

Savello looked at him for a moment, and answered, —

‘No!’

‘Oh God, why did you say there was?’

‘I felt sure the army was on the way. I wanted to give them confidence.’

‘You fool! Now they will believe nothing. You fool, you have muddled everything!’

‘It is you! You told me that the city was firm for the Pope.’

‘So it was till you came with your lies and your treacheries.’

Savello closed his fist, and I thought he was going to strike Checco. A yell burst from the people.

‘The letter! the messenger!’

Checco sprang to the window.

‘There is no letter! The protonotary has lied to you. No help is coming from Rome nor from Florence!’

The people yelled again, and another cry arose, —

‘Surrender! Surrender!’

‘Surrender at your pleasure,’ shouted Checco, ‘but do not think that the Duke will forgive you for stripping the Count and insulting his body and sacking his Palace.’

Savello was standing alone, struck dumb in his rage. Checco turned to him and smiled mockingly.

XXX

NEXT day there was a secret meeting of the council, of which neither Checco nor his friends knew anything. But it leaked out that they had been discussing terms which Lodovico had offered. And the Duke’s proposal was that Riario’s children should be surrendered to him and the town ruled by a commission, appointed partly by him, partly by the Forlivesi. About mid-day a servant came and told us that Niccolo Tornielli and the other members of the council were below, seeking admission. Checco went down, and as soon as he saw him Niccolo said, —

‘Checco, we have decided that it will be better for us to have charge of the children of Count Girolamo; and therefore we have come to summon you to give them into our hands.’

Checco’s answer was short and pointed.

‘If that is all you came for, Niccolo, you can go.’ ...

At this Antonio Sassi broke in, —

‘We shall not go without the children.’

‘I imagine that depends on me; and I intend to keep the children.’

‘Take care, Checco; remember that you are not our master.’

‘And who are you, Antonio, I should like to know?’

‘I am a member of the council of Forli, just as you are; no more, no less.’

‘No,’ said Checco, furiously; ‘I will tell you whom you are. You are the miserable cur who pandered to the tyrant and helped him to oppress the people which I liberated; and the people spat upon you! You are the miserable cur who fawned upon me when I had killed the tyrant, and in your slavish adulation you proposed to make me ruler in his stead; and I spat upon you! And now you are afraid again and you are trying to make peace with the Duke by betraying me, and it is from you that come the propositions to give me up to Lodovico. That is what you are! Look at yourself and be proud!’

Antonio was about to give a heated answer, but Niccolo interrupted him.

‘Be quiet, Antonio! Now, Checco, let us have the children.’

‘I will not, I tell you! I saved their lives, and they are mine by right. They are mine because I killed the Count; because I took them prisoners; because I hold them; and because they are necessary for my safety.’

‘They are necessary for our safety, too, and we, the council of Forli, summon you, Checco d’Orsi, to surrender them.’

‘And I, Checco d’Orsi, refuse!’

‘Then we shall take them by force.’

Niccolo and Antonio stepped forward. Checco whipped out his sword.

‘By God, I swear I will kill the first man who crosses this threshold!’

Gradually the people had collected, till behind the councillors there was a formidable crowd. They watched with eagerness the dispute, hailing with joy the opportunity of humiliating their old hero. They had broken out in mocking laughter while Checco was railing at Antonio, now they shouted, —

‘The children! Surrender the children!’

‘I will not, I tell you!’

They began to hoot and hiss, calling Checco foul names, accusing him of causing all their troubles, naming him tyrant and usurper. Checco stood looking at them, trembling with rage. Niccolo stepped forward once more.

‘Give them up, Checco, or it will be the worse for you.’

‘Advance one step further and I will kill you!’

The people grew suddenly exasperated; a shower of stones fell on us, and one, striking Checco, caused a long streak of blood to flow down his forehead.

‘Give us the children! Give us the children!’

‘We will call the guard,’ said Antonio.

‘The children!’ shouted the mob. ‘He will kill them. Take them from him.’

There was a rush from behind; the councillors and their supporters were driven forward; they were met by our drawn swords; in another moment it would have been too late, and against two hundred we should have been helpless. Suddenly Bartolomeo appeared at the head of the great staircase with the boys.

‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘Here are the children. Stop!’

Checco turned round to him.

‘I will not have them given up. Take them away!’

‘I have never asked you anything before, Checco,’ said Bartolomeo; ‘I have always done as you commanded; but this time I implore you to give way.’

I joined my words to his.

‘You must give way. We shall all be massacred.’

Checco stood for a moment undecided, then, without speaking, he turned into a room looking on the court. We took it for consent, and Bartolomeo handed the frightened children to the councillors. A shout of joy broke from the people and they marched off with their prize in triumph....

I sought Checco and found him alone. As he heard the shouts of the people, a sob came from him in the misery of his humiliation.

But Jacopo Ronchi and the two sons of Bartolomeo were sent out to discover what was going on. We could not think what had driven the council to their step; but we felt sure they must have good reasons for acting so courageously. We felt also that we had lost all power, all hope. The wheel had turned, and now we were at the bottom. After several hours, Alessandro Moratini came back and said, —

‘The council has been meeting again, and it has been receiving messengers; but that is all I know. Everyone looks upon me with an evil eye and becomes silent at my approach. I ask questions and they say they know nothing, have seen nothing, heard nothing.’

‘Brutes!’ said Matteo.

‘And for these people we risked our lives and fortunes!’ said Bartolomeo.

Checco looked at him curiously; and, like him, I thought of our disinterestedness! Alessandro, having given his news, filled a glass with wine and sat down. We all kept silence. The time went on, and the afternoon began to close; the hours seemed interminable. At last Jacopo Ronchi came panting.

‘I have discovered everything,’ he said. ‘The council has resolved to surrender the town to the Duke, who promises, in return for the children, to forgive everything and allow them to rule themselves, with half the council appointed by him.’

We sprang up with a cry.

‘I will not allow it,’ said Checco.

‘If the conspirators make any disturbance, they are to be outlawed and a price set upon their heads.’

‘How far have the negotiations gone?’ I asked.

‘The messengers have been sent to the Duke now.’

‘In that case there is no time to lose,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Checco.

‘We must escape.’

‘Escape!’

‘Or we shall be taken alive; and you know what to expect from Caterina and Lodovico. Do not think of their promises of pardon.’

‘I put no trust in their promises,’ said Checco, bitterly.

‘Filippo is right,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘We must escape.’

‘And quickly!’ I said.

‘I cannot throw up the game,’ said Checco. ‘And without me, what will happen to my supporters?’

‘They may find forgiveness in submission. But you can do no good here. If you are in safety, you may be of some assistance. Anyhow, you will have life.’

Checco buried his face in his hands.

‘I cannot, I cannot.’

The Moratini and I insisted. We adduced every argument. Finally he consented.

‘We must go together,’ I said; ‘we may have to fight our way through.’

‘Yes,’ said Scipione. ‘Let us meet at the gate by the river — at two.’

‘But go there separately. If the people find we are attempting to escape, they will set upon us.’

‘I wish they would,’ said Matteo. ‘It would give me such satisfaction to put my sword into half a score of their fat bellies!’

‘There is no moon.’

‘Very well; at two!’

The night was cloudy, and if there had been a moon, it would have been covered. A thin, cold rain was falling, and it was pitch dark. When I got to the river gate, four or five of them were already there. We felt too cold and miserable to speak; we sat on our horses, waiting. As new arrivals came, we peered into their faces, and then, on recognising them, bent back and sat on silently. We were all there but Checco. We waited for a time. At last Bartolomeo Moratini whispered to Matteo, —

‘Where did you leave Checco?’

‘In the house. He told me to go on, saying he would follow shortly. Two horses were saddled besides mine.’

‘Whom was the second for?’

‘I don’t know!’

We waited on. The rain fell thin and cold. It struck half-past two. Immediately afterwards, we heard the sound of hoofs, and through the mist saw a black form coming towards us.

‘Is it you, Checco?’ we whispered, for the guard of the gate might have heard us. We were standing in a little plot of waste ground, ten yards from the walls.

‘I cannot go with you,’ said Checco.

‘Why?’ we cried.

‘Ssh!’ said Checco. ‘I intended to bring my father, but he will not come.’

None of us had thought of old Orso Orsi.

‘He says he is too old, and will not leave his native town. I did all I could to persuade him, but he bade me go, and said they would not dare to touch him. I cannot leave him; therefore go, all of you, and I will remain.’

‘You must come, Checco; without you we are helpless.’

‘And what of your wife and children?’

‘Your presence will exasperate the tyrants. You can do no good, only harm.’

‘I cannot leave my father unprotected.’

‘I will stay, Checco,’ I said. ‘I am not well known as you are. I will take care of your father, and you can watch over your family and your interests in safety.’

‘No, you must go. It is too dangerous for you.’

‘Not half so dangerous as for you. I will do my best to preserve him. Let me stay.’

‘Yes,’ said the others, ‘let Filippo stay. He may escape detection, but you would have no chance.’

The clock struck three.

‘Come, come; it is getting late. We must be thirty miles away before daybreak.’

We had already arranged to go to Città di Castello, which was my native place, and in case of accident I had given them letters, so that they might be housed and protected for the present.

‘We must have you, Checco, or we will all stay.’

‘You will take care of him?’ said Checco to me at last.

‘I swear it!’

‘Very well! Good-bye, Filippo, and God bless you!’

They advanced to the gate, and Checco summoned the captain.

‘Open the gate,’ he said shortly.

The captain looked at them undecisively. I stood behind in the shade, so that I could not be seen.

‘If you make a sound, we will kill you,’ said Checco.

They drew their swords. He hesitated, and Checco repeated, —

‘Open the gate!’

Then he brought out the heavy keys; the locks were turned, the gate growled on its hinges, and one by one they filed out. Then the gate swung back behind them. I heard a short word of command, and the clatter of horses’ hoofs. I put the spurs to my own, and galloped back into the town.

In half an hour the bells were ringing furiously; and it was announced from house to house that the conspirators had fled and the town was free.

XXXI

IN the morning the council met again and resolved that the town should return to its old obedience, and by surrendering without conditions hoped to receive pardon for its offences. Lodovico Moro entered in triumph, and going to the fortress was received by Caterina, who came forth from the citadel and with him proceeded to the cathedral to hear mass. The good Forlivesi were getting used to ovations; as the Countess passed through the streets they received her with acclamation, thronging the road on each side, blessing her, and her mother, and all her ancestors. She went her way as indifferent as when she had crossed the same streets a few days back amid the execrations of her faithful subjects. The keen observers noticed the firm closing of her mouth, which boded no particular good to the Forlivesi, and consequently redoubled their shouts of joy.

The protonotary Savello had mysteriously disappeared when the news of Checco’s flight had been brought him; but Caterina was soon informed that he had taken refuge in a Dominican monastery. A light smile broke over her lips as she remarked, —

‘One would rather have expected him to take refuge in a convent.’

Then she sent people to him to assure him of her good will and beg him to join her. The good man turned pale at the invitation, but he dared not refuse it. So, comforting himself with the thought that she dared not harm the legate of the Pope, he clothed himself in all his courage and his most gorgeous robes, and proceeded to the cathedral.

When she saw him she lifted up two fingers and said solemnly, —

‘The peace of God be upon you!’

Then, before he could recover himself, she went on, —

‘Sir, it has always been my hope that I should some day meet the gentleman whose fame has reached me as the most talented, most beautiful and most virtuous of his day.’

‘Madam—’ he interrupted.

‘Sir, I beseech you bravely to bear your evil fortunes. Do you not know that fortune is uncertain? If the city has been taken from you, it is the will of God, and as a Christian you must with resignation submit yourself to His decrees.’

It was the beginning of her revenge, and one could see how sweet it was. The courtiers were sniggering at Caterina’s speech, and Savello was the picture of discomfort.

‘Messer Savello,’ she proceeded, ‘on a previous meeting you made me some very excellent admonitions on the will of God; now, notwithstanding your order, I am going to be so bold as to give you some equally excellent lessons on the same subject. If you will take your place by my side, you will have every opportunity of examining the ways of the Almighty, which, as you may remember you remarked, are inscrutable.’

Savello bowed and advanced to the place pointed out to him.

XXXII

THE first thing I had done on returning to the Palazzo Orsi was to strip myself of my purple and fine linen, shave my beard and moustache, cut my hair short, put on the clothes of a serving-man, and look at myself in a mirror. If I had met in the street the image I saw I should have passed on without recognising it. Still I was not dissatisfied with myself, and I smiled as I thought that it would not be too extraordinary if a lady’s wench lost her heart to such a serving-man.

I went to the old Orso’s apartments, and found everything quiet; I lay down on a couch outside the doors and tried to sleep; but my thoughts troubled me. My mind was with the sad horsemen galloping through the night, and I wondered what the morrow had in store for them and me. I knew a price would be set upon my head, and I had to remain here in the midst of my enemies as the only protection of an old man of eighty-five.

In a little while I heard the bells which told the town that the conspirators had fled, and at last I fell into a restless sleep. At six I was awakened by a hurry and bustle in the house.... The servants told one another that Checco had gone, and the Countess would come out of the fortress in a little while; and then God only knew what would happen. They cowered about, whispering, taking no notice of the new serving-man who had appeared in the night. They said that the Palace would be given over to the vengeance of the people, that the servants would suffer instead of the master; and soon one of them gave the signal; he said he would not stay, and since his wages had not been paid he would take them with him. He filled his pockets with such valuables as he could find, and going down a back staircase slid out of a little side door and was lost in the labyrinth of streets. The others were quick to follow his example, and the Palace was subjected to a looting in miniature; the old steward stood by, wringing his hands, but they paid no attention to him, thinking only of their safety and their pockets. Before the sun had had time to clear away the early mists, they had all fled; and besides the old man, the house contained only the white-haired steward, a boy of twenty, his nephew, and myself; and Checco had been such a sweet and gentle master!

We went in to the old Orso. He was seated in a large arm-chair by the fireside, huddled up in a heavy dressing-gown. He had sunk his head down in his collar to keep warm, so that one could only see the dead eyes, the nose, and the sunken, wrinkled cheeks; a velvet cap covered his hair and forehead. He was holding his long, shrivelled hands to the fire, and the flames almost shone through them; they trembled incessantly. He looked up at the sound of our entrance.

‘Ah, Pietro!’ he said to the steward. Then, after a pause, ‘Where is Fabrizio?’

Fabrizio was the servant in whose particular charge the Orso had been put, and the old man had become so fond of him that he would take food only from his hand, and insisted on having him near at every moment of the day. He had been among the first to fill his pockets and decamp.

‘Why does not Fabrizio come?’ he asked querulously. ‘Tell him I want him. I will not be neglected in this way.’

Pietro did not know what to answer. He looked about him in embarrassment.

‘Why does not Fabrizio come? Now that Checco is master here, they neglect me. It is scandalous. I shall talk to Checco about it. Where is Fabrizio? Tell him to come immediately on pain of my displeasure.’

His voice was so thin and weak and trembling it was like that of a little child ill with some fever. I saw that Pietro had nothing to say, and Orso was beginning to moan feebly.

‘Fabrizio has been sent away,’ I said, ‘and I have been put in his place.’

Pietro and his nephew looked at me. They noticed for the first time that my face was new, and they glanced at one another with upraised brows.

‘Fabrizio sent away! Who sent him away? I won’t have him sent away.’

‘Checco sent him away.’

‘Checco had no right to send him away. I am master here. They treat me as if I were a child. It is shameful! Where is Fabrizio? I will not have it, I tell you. It is shameful! I shall speak to Checco about it. Where is Checco?’

None of us answered.

‘Why don’t you answer when I speak to you? Where is Checco?’

He raised himself in his chair and bent forward to look at us, then he fell back.

‘Ah, I remember now,’ he murmured. ‘Checco has gone. He wanted me to go too. But I am too old, too old, too old. I told Checco what it would be. I know the Forlivesi; I have known them for eighty years. They are more fickle and cowardly than any other people in this cesspool which they call God’s earth. I have been an exile fourteen times. Fourteen times I have fled from the city, and fourteen times I have returned. Ah yes, I have lived the life in my time, but I am tired now. I don’t want to go out again; and besides, I am so old. I might die before I returned, and I want to die in my own house.’

He looked at the fire, murmuring his confidences to the smouldering ashes. Then he seemed to repeat his talk with Checco.

‘No, Checco, I will not come. Go alone. They will not touch me. I am Orso Orsi. They will not touch me; they dare not. Go alone, and give my love to Clarice.’

Clarice was Checco’s wife. He kept silence for a while, then he broke out again, —

‘I want Fabrizio.’

‘Will I not do instead?’ I asked.

‘Who are you?’

I repeated patiently, —

‘I am the servant placed here to serve you instead of Fabrizio. My name is Fabio.’

‘Your name is Fabio?’ he asked, looking at me.

‘Yes.’

‘No, it is not! Why do you tell me your name is Fabio? I know your face. You are not a serving-man.’

‘You are mistaken,’ I said.

‘No, no. You are not Fabio. I know your face. Who are you?’

‘I am Fabio.’

‘Who are you?’ he asked again querulously. ‘I cannot remember whom you are. Why don’t you tell me? Can’t you see that I am an old man? Why don’t you tell me?’

His voice broke into the moan, and I thought he would cry. He had only seen me twice, but among his few visitors the faces of those he saw remained with him, and he recognised me partly.

‘I am Filippo Brandolini,’ I said. ‘I have remained here to look after you and see that no harm happens. Checco wished to stay himself, but we insisted on his going.’

‘Oh, you are a gentleman,’ he answered. ‘I am glad of that.’

Then, as if the talk had tired him, he sank deeper down in his chair and fell into a dose.

I sent Andrea, the steward’s nephew, to see what was happening in the town, and Pietro and I sat in the large window talking in undertones. Suddenly Pietro stopped and said, —

‘What is that?’

We both listened. A confused roar in the distance; it resembled the raging of the sea very far away. I opened the window and looked out. The roar became louder, louder, and at last we discovered that it was the sound of many voices.

‘What is it?’ asked Pietro again.

There was a scrambling up the stairs, the noise of running feet. The door was burst violently open, and Andrea rushed in.

‘Save yourselves!’ he cried. ‘Save yourselves!’

‘What is it?’

‘They are coming to sack the Palace. The Countess has given them leave, and the whole populace is up.’

The roar increased, and we could distinctly hear the shouting.

‘Be quick!’ cried Andrea. ‘For God’s sake be quick! They will be here in a moment!’

I looked to the door, and Pietro, seeing my thoughts, said, —

‘Not that way! Here is another door which leads along a passage into a side street.’

He lifted the tapestry and showed a tiny door, which he opened. I ran to old Orso and shook him.

‘Wake up!’ I said; ‘wake up and come with me!’

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Never mind; come with me!’

I took his arm and tried to lift him out of his chair, but he caught hold of the handles and would not stir.

‘I will not move,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘The mob is coming to sack the Palace, and if they find you here they will kill you.’

‘I will not move. I am Orso Orsi. They dare not touch me.’

‘Be quick! be quick!’ screamed Andrea from the window. ‘The first of them have appeared in the street. In a moment they will be here.’

‘Quick! quick!’ cried Pietro.

Now the roar had got so loud that it buzzed in one’s ears, and every instant it grew louder.

‘Be quick! be quick!’

‘You must come,’ I said, and Pietro joined his prayers to my commands, but nothing would move the old man.

‘I tell you I will not fly. I am the head of my house. I am Orso Orsi. I will not fly like a dog before the rabble.’

‘For your son’s sake — for our sake,’ I implored. ‘We shall be killed with you.’

‘You may go. The door is open for you. I will stay alone.’

He seemed to have regained his old spirit. It was as if a last flame were flickering up.

‘We will not leave you,’ I said. ‘I have been put by Checco to protect you, and if you are killed I must be killed too. Our only chance is to fly.’

‘Quick! quick!’ cried Andrea. ‘They are nearly here!’

‘Oh, master, master,’ cried Pietro, ‘accept the means he offers you!’

‘Be quick! be quick!’

‘Would you have me slink down a back passage, like a thief, in my own house? Never!’

‘They have reached the doors,’ cried Andrea.

The noise was deafening below. The gates had been closed, and we heard a thunder of blows; stones were thrown, sticks beaten against the iron; then they seemed to take some great instrument and pound against the locks. Again and again the blows were repeated, but at last there was a crash. A mighty shout broke from the people, and we heard a rush. I sprang to the door of the Orso’s room and locked and bolted it, then, calling the others to help me, I dragged a heavy chest against it. We placed another chest on the first, and dragged the bedstead up, pushing it against the chests.

We were only just in time, for, like water rushing at once through every crevice, the mob surged up and filled every corner of the house. They came to our door and pushed it. To their surprise it did not open. Outside someone cried, —

‘It’s locked!’

The hindrance excited them, and the crowd gathered greater outside.

‘Break it open,’ they cried.

Immediately heavy blows thundered down on the lock and handle.

‘For God’s sake, come,’ I said, turning to Orso. He did not answer. There was no time to lose, and I could not conquer his obstinacy.

‘Then I shall force you,’ I cried, catching hold of both his arms and dragging him from the chair. He held on as tight as he could, but his strength was nothing against mine. I caught hold of him, and was lifting him in my arms when the door was burst open. The rush of people threw down the barricade, and the crowd surged into the room. It was too late. I made a rush for the little door with Orso, but I could not get to it. They crowded round me with a shout.

‘Take him,’ I cried to Pietro, ‘while I defend you.’

I drew my sword, but immediately a bludgeon fell on it and it smashed in two. I gave a shout and rushed at my assailants, but it was hopeless. I felt a crushing blow on my head. I sank down insensible.

XXXIII

WHEN I opened my eyes I found myself on a bed in a darkened room. By my side was sitting a woman. I looked at her, and wondered who she was.

‘Who the devil are you?’ I asked, somewhat impolitely.

At the words someone else stepped forward and bent over me. I recognised Andrea; then I recollected what had occurred.

‘Where is the Orso?’ I asked. ‘Is he safe?’

‘Do you feel better?’ he said.

‘I am all right. Where is the Orso?’ I tried to sit up, but my head swam. I felt horribly sick and sank back.

‘What is the matter?’ I moaned.

‘Only a broken head,’ said Andrea, with a little smile. ‘If you had been a real serving-man, instead of a fine gentleman masquerading, you wouldn’t think twice about it.’

‘Have pity on my infirmities, dear boy,’ I murmured faintly. ‘I don’t pretend that my head is as wooden as yours.’

Then he explained.

‘When you were beaten down they made a rush for the old master and bore him off.’

‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘I promised Checco to look after him. What will he think!’

‘It was not your fault.’ At the same time he renewed the bandages round my head and put cooling lotions on.

‘Good boy!’ I said, as I enjoyed the cold water on my throbbing head.

‘When I saw the blows come down on your head, and you fall like a stone, I thought you were killed. With you soft-headed people one never knows!’

‘It appears to amuse you,’ I said. ‘But what happened afterwards?’

‘In the excitement of their capture they paid no attention to us, and my uncle and I dragged you through the little door, and eventually carried you here. You are a weight!’

‘And where am I?’

‘In my mother’s house, where you are requested to stay as long as it suits your convenience.’

‘And Orso?’

‘My uncle went out to see, and reports that they have put him in prison. As yet no harm has been done him. The palace has been sacked; nothing but the bare walls remain.’

At that moment Pietro came in panting.

‘Two of the conspirators have been taken.’

‘My God, not Checco or Matteo!’

‘No; Pietro Albanese and Marco Scorsacana.’

‘How did the others escape?’

‘I don’t know. All I heard was that the horse of Marco broke down, and Pietro refused to leave him. At a village close to the frontier Pietro was recognised, and they were both arrested and sent here for the sake of the reward.’

‘My God!’

‘They were brought into the town on asses, with their hands tied behind their backs, and the mob yelled with derision, and threw stones and refuse at them.’

‘And now?’

‘They have been taken to the prison, and—’

‘Well?’

‘The execution is to take place to-morrow.’

I groaned. Pietro Albanese and Marco had been like Damon and Pythias. I shuddered as I thought of the fate in store for them. They had been conspicuous in their hatred of the Count, and it was they who had helped to throw the body into the piazza. I knew there would be no forgiveness in Caterina’s heart, and all the night I wondered what vengeance she was meditating.

XXXIV

NEXT day I insisted on getting up. Andrea helped me to dress, and we went out together.

‘No one would mistake you for a gentleman to-day,’ he laughed.

My clothes were shabby enough in the first instance, and in the scuffle of the previous day they had received usage which did not improve them; moreover, I had a two days’ beard, and my head muffled up in bandages, so that I could well imagine that my appearance was not attractive. But I was too sore at heart to smile at his remark, or make retort. I could not help thinking of the terrible scene which awaited us.

We found the piazza crowded. Opposite the Riario Palace was erected a stage on which were seats, but these were empty. The sky was blue, the sun shone merrily on the people, and the air was soft and warm. Nature was full of peace and goodwill; but in men’s hearts was lust of blood.... A flourish of trumpets announced the approach of Caterina and her suite. Amid ringing cheers she entered the square, accompanied by her half-brother, the Duke of Milan, and by the Protonotary Savello. They took their seats on the platform, the Duke on her right, Savello on her left. She turned to the priest and talked most amiably to him; he smiled and bowed, but his agitation was shown by the twitching of his hands fidgeting with the lappet of his cloak.

A beating of drums was heard, followed by a sudden silence. A guard of soldiers entered the piazza, tramping steadily with heavy footsteps; then two steps behind them a single figure, without a doublet, hatless, his shirt all torn, his hands tied behind his back. It was Marco Scorsacana. The foul mob broke out into a yell at the sight of him; he walked slowly, but with his head proudly erect, paying no heed to the hooting and hissing which rang in his ears. On each side walked a barefooted monk, bearing a crucifix.... He was followed by another troop of soldiers, and after them came another bare-headed figure, his hands also tied behind his back; but he kept his head bent over his chest and his eyes fixed on the ground, shrinking at the yells of derision. Poor Pietro! He, too, was accompanied by the solemn monks; the procession was finished by the drummers, beating their drums incessantly, maddeningly.

They advanced to the platform, and there, the soldiers falling back, the prisoners were left standing before their judges.

‘Marco Scorsacana and Pietro Albanese,’ said the Countess, in a clear, calm voice, ‘you have been found guilty of murder and treason; and as it was you who cast the body of my dear husband out of the Palace window on to the hard stones of the piazza, so you are sentenced to be hanged from that same window, and your bodies cast down on to the hard stones of the piazza.’

A murmur of approval came from the populace. Pietro winced, but Marco turned to him and said something which I could not hear; but I saw the glance of deep affection, and the answering smile of Pietro as he seemed to take courage.

The Countess turned to Savello.

‘Do you not agree that the judgment is just?’

‘Most just!’ he whispered.

‘The protonotary says, “Most just!”’ she called aloud, so that all should hear. The man winced.

Marco looked at him scornfully, and said, ‘I would ten times rather be in my place than in yours.’

The Countess smiled at the priest and said, ‘You see, I carry out the will of God in doing unto others as they themselves have done.’

She made a sign, and the two men were led to the Palace and up the stairs. The window of the Hall of Nymphs was thrown open, and a beam thrust out, to which was attached a rope. Pietro appeared at the window, with one end of the rope round his neck.

‘Good-bye, sweet friend,’ he said to Marco.

‘Good-bye, Pietrino,’ and Marco kissed him.

Then two men hurled him from the sill, and he swung in mid-air; a horrible movement passed through his body, and it swayed from side to side. There was a pause; a man stretched out with a sword and cut the rope. From the people came a huge shout, and they caught the body as it fell and tore it to pieces. In a few minutes Marco appeared at the window, but he boldly sprang out into space, needing no help. In a little while he was a hanging corpse, and in a little while more the mob had fallen on him like wolves. I hid my face in my hands. It was awful! Oh, God! Oh, God!

Then another beating of drums broke through the tumult. I looked up, wondering what was coming. A troop of soldiers entered the square, and after them an ass led by a fool with bells and bauble; on the ass was a miserable old man, Orso Orsi.

‘Oh,’ I groaned. ‘What are they going to do to him?’

A shout of laughter burst from the mob, and the clown flourished his bauble and bowed acknowledgments from side to side. A halt was made before the stage, and Caterina spoke again.

‘Orso Orsi. You have been sentenced to see your palace destroyed before your eyes — stone by stone.’

The people shouted, and a rush was made for the Orsi Palace. The old man said nothing and showed no sign of hearing or feeling. I hoped that all sensation had left him. The procession moved on until it came to the old house, which stood already like a wreck, for the pillagers had left nothing which could be moved. Then the work began, and stone by stone the mighty building was torn to pieces. Orso looked on indifferently at the terrible work, for no greater humiliation can be offered to the Italian nobleman than this. The Orso Palace had stood three hundred years, and the most famous architects, craftsmen and artists had worked on it. And now it was gone.

The old man was brought back into the piazza, and once more the cruel woman spoke.

‘You have received punishment for yourself, Orso, and now you are to receive punishment for your son. Make room!’

And the soldiers, repeating her words, cried, —

‘Make room!’

The people were pushed and hustled back till they were crammed against the house walls, leaving in the centre an enormous empty space. Then a flourish of trumpets, and the people made an opening at the end of the square to allow the passage of a horse and man, the horse — a huge black stallion — prancing and plunging, and on each side a man was holding the bridle. On his back sat a big man, dressed all in flaming red, and a red hood covered his head and face, leaving two apertures for the eyes. A horrified whisper ran round the square.

‘The hangman!’

In the centre of the piazza he stopped. Caterina addressed the Orso.

‘Have you anything to say, Orso Orsi?’

At last he seemed to hear, he looked at her and then, with all the strength he had, hurled the word at her, —

‘Bastard!’

She flushed angrily and made a sign. Two men seized the old man and dragged him off the mule; they caught hold of his legs, throwing him to the ground, and with a thick rope tied his ankles together.

At this I understood. I was seized with sudden horror, and I cried out. Obeying a sudden impulse, I started forward; I don’t know what I was going to do; I felt I must protect him or die with him. I started forward, but Andrea threw his arms round me and held me back.

‘Let me go,’ I said, struggling.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ he whispered. ‘What can you do against all these?’

It was no use; I gave way. Oh, God! that I should stand by and see this awful thing and be utterly powerless. I wondered the people could suffer this last atrocity; I thought they must scream and rush to save the wretched man. But they watched — they watched eagerly....

By his feet they dragged him to the horse, and the end of the rope round his ankles they tied to the horse’s tail and about the rider’s waist.

‘Ready?’ cried the hangman.

‘Yes!’ answered the soldiers.

They all sprang back; the hangman dug the spurs into his horse. The people gave a huge shout, and the fiery beast went careering round the square at full tilt. The awful burden dragging behind terrified him, and with head strained forward and starting eyes he galloped madly. The mob urged him on with cries, and his rider dug the spurs in deeply; the pavement was scattered with blood.

God knows how long the wretched man lived. I hope he died at once. At last the brute’s furious career was stopped, the ropes were cut, the corpse fell back, and, the people again making passage, horse and rider disappeared. In the middle of the piazza, in a pool of blood, lay a shapeless mass. It was ordered that it should be left there till nightfall as an example to evildoers.

Andrea wanted to come away, but I insisted on staying to see what happened more. But it was the end, for Caterina turned to Savello and said, —

‘I do not forget that all power comes from God, Monsignor, and I wish solemnly to render thanks to the Divine Majesty, who has saved me, my children and the State. Therefore, I shall order a grand procession which shall march round the town and afterwards hear mass at the cathedral.’

‘It shows, madam,’ replied Savello, ‘that you are a pious and truly Christian woman.’

XXXV

WHEN it was night and the piazza deserted, Andrea and I and the old steward went out and made our way to the place where the horrible corpse was lying. We wrapped it in a long black cloth and took it up silently, bearing it to the church where for generations the Orsi had been buried. A dark-robed monk met us in the nave and led the way to a door, which he opened; then, as if frightened, left us. We found ourselves in the cloisters. We laid the body down under an arch and advanced into the centre, where was a plot of green scattered over with little crosses. We took spades and began to dig; a thin rain drizzled down and the ground was stiff and clayey. It was hard work and I sweated; I took off my coat and allowed the rain to fall on me unprotected; I was soon wet to the skin. Silently Andrea and I turned up the soil, while Pietro, beneath the cloisters, watched by the body and prayed. We were knee deep now, and still we threw up heavy spadefuls of clay. At last I said, —

‘It is enough.’

We climbed out and went to the body. We took it up and bore it to the grave, and reverently we laid it in. Pietro placed a crucifix on the old master’s breast, and then we began to pile in the earth.

And so without priests, without mourning, in the dead of night, and by the drizzling rain, was buried Orso Orsi, the great head of the family. In his time he had been excellent in war and in all the arts of peace. He had been noted for his skill in commerce; in politics he had been the first of his city, and, besides, he had been a great and generous patron of the arts. But he lived too long, and died thus miserably.

Next day I set about thinking what I should do. I could be of no more use to anyone in Forli; indeed, I had never been of use, for I had only stood by and watched while those I loved and honoured were being put to cruel deaths. And now I must see that my presence did not harm my kind hosts. Caterina had thrown into prison some fifty of those who had taken part in the rebellion, notwithstanding her solemn promise of amnesty, and I knew well enough that if I were discovered Pietro and Andrea would suffer as severe a punishment as myself. They gave no sign that my presence was a menace to them, but in the woman’s eyes, Andrea’s mother, I saw an anxious look, and at any unexpected sound she would start and look fearfully at me. I made up my mind to go immediately. When I told Andrea, he insisted on coming with me, and although I painted the danger in lively colours he would not be dissuaded. The next day was market-day, and we resolved to slip out in a cart as soon as the gates were opened. We would be taken for tradesmen, and no one would pay attention to us.

I was anxious to see what was happening in the town and what people were talking of; but I thought it prudent not to venture out, for my disguise might be seen through, and if I were discovered I knew well what to expect. So I sat at home twiddling my thumbs and chattering with Andrea. At last, getting tired of doing nothing, and seeing the good woman about to scrub out her courtyard, I volunteered to do it for her. I got a broom and a pail of water and began sweeping away vigorously, while Andrea stood in the doorway scoffing. For a little while I forgot the terrible scene in the piazza.

There was a knock at the door. We stopped and listened; the knock was repeated, and as no answer was given, the latch was raised and the door opened. A servant-maid walked in and carefully closed it behind her. I recognised her at once; it was Giulia’s maid. I shrank back, and Andrea stood in front of me. His mother went forward.

‘And pray, madam, what can I do for you?’

The maid did not answer, but stepped past her.

‘There is a serving-man here for whom I have a message.’

She came straight towards me, and handed me a piece of paper; then, without another word, slid back to the door and slipped out.

The note contained four words, ‘Come to me to-night,’ and the handwriting was Giulia’s. A strange feeling came over me as I looked at it, and my hand trembled a little.... Then I began pondering. Why did she want me? I could not think, and it occurred to me that perhaps she wished to give me up to the Countess. I knew she hated me, but I could not think her as vile as that; after all, she was her father’s daughter, and Bartolomeo was a gentleman. Andrea looked at me questioningly.

‘It is an invitation from my greatest enemy to put myself in her hands.’

‘But you will not?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is a woman.’

‘But do you think she would betray you?’

‘She might.’

‘And you are going to take the risk?’

‘I think I should be glad to prove her so utterly worthless.’

Andrea looked at me open-mouthed; he could not understand. An idea struck him.

‘Are you in love with her?’

‘No; I was.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, I do not even hate her.’

XXXVI

THE night came, and when everyone had gone to bed and the town was quiet, I said to Andrea, ‘Wait for me here, and if I do not come back in two hours you will know—’

He interrupted me.

‘I am coming with you.’

‘Nonsense!’ I said. ‘I don’t know what danger there may be, and there is no object in your exposing yourself to it.’

‘Where you go I will go too.’

I argued with him, but he was an obstinate youth.

We walked along the dark streets, running like thieves round corners when we heard the heavy footsteps of the watch. The Palazzo Aste was all dark; we waited outside a little while, but no one came, and I dared not knock. Then I remembered the side door. I still had the key, and I took it from my pocket.

‘Wait outside,’ I said to Andrea.

‘No, I am coming with you.’

‘Perhaps there is an ambush.’

‘Two are more likely to escape than one.’

I put the key in the lock, and as I did so my heart beat and my hand trembled, but not with fear. The key turned, and I pushed the door open. We entered and walked up the stairs. Sensations which I had forgotten crowded upon me, and my heart turned sick.... We came to an ante-room dimly lit. I signed Andrea to wait, and myself passed into the room I knew too well. It was that in which I had last seen Giulia — the Giulia I had loved — and nothing was altered in it. The same couch stood in the centre, and on it lay Giulia, sleeping. She started up.

‘Filippo!’

‘At your service, madam.’

‘Lucia recognised you in the street yesterday, and she followed you to the house in which you are staying.’

‘Yes.’

‘My father sent me a message that you were still here, and if I wanted help would give it me.’

‘I will do whatever I can for you.’

What a fool I was to come. My head was in a whirl, my heart was bursting. My God! she was beautiful! I looked at her, and suddenly I knew that all the dreary indifference I had built up had melted away at the first look into her eyes. And I was terrified.... My love was not dead; it was alive, alive! Oh, how I adored that woman! I burned to take her in my arms and cover her soft mouth with kisses.

Oh, why had I come? I was mad. I cursed my weakness.... And, when I saw her standing there, cold and indifferent as ever, I felt so furious a rage within me that I could have killed her. And I felt sick with love....

‘Messer Filippo,’ she said, ‘will you help me now? I have been warned by one of the Countess’s women that the guard have orders to arrest me to-morrow; and I know what the daughter of Bartolomeo Moratini may expect. I must fly to-night — at once.’

‘I will help you,’ I answered.

‘What shall I do?’

‘I can disguise you as a common woman. The mother of my friend Andrea will lend you clothes; and Andrea and I will accompany you. Or, if you prefer, after we have safely passed the gates, he shall accompany you alone wherever you wish to go.’

‘Why will you not come?’

‘I feared my presence would make the journey more tedious to you.’

‘And to you?’

‘To me it would be a matter of complete indifference.’

She looked at me a moment, then she cried, —

‘No, I will not come!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you hate me.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I should have thought my sentiments were of no consequence.’

‘I will not be helped by you. You hate me too much. I will stay in Forli.’

‘You are your own mistress.... Why do you mind?’

‘Why do I mind? Shall I tell you?’ She came close up to me. ‘Because — because I love you.’

My head swam, and I felt myself stagger.... I did not know what was happening.

‘Filippo!’

‘Giulia!’

I opened my arms, and she fell into them, and I held her close to my heart, and I covered her with kisses.... I covered her mouth and eyes and neck with kisses.

‘Giulia! Giulia!’

But I wrenched myself away, and taking hold of her shoulders, said almost savagely.

‘But this time I must have you altogether. Swear that you will—’

She lifted her sweet face and smiled, and nestling close up to me, whispered, —

‘Will you marry me?’

I kissed her.

‘I loved you always,’ I said. ‘I tried to hate you, but I could not.’

‘Do you remember that night at the Palace? You said you had never cared for me.’

‘Ah, yes! but you did not believe me.’

‘I felt it was not true, but I did not know; and it pained me. And then Claudia—’

‘I was so angry with you, I would have done anything to revenge myself; but still I loved you.’

‘But, Claudia — you loved her too?’

‘No,’ I protested, ‘I hated her and despised her; but I tried to forget you; and I wanted you to feel certain that I no longer cared for you.’

‘I hate her.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said.

‘I forgive you everything,’ she answered.

I kissed her passionately; and I did not remember that I too had something to forgive.

The time flew on, and when a ray of light pierced through the windows I started up in surprise.

‘We must make haste,’ I said. I went into the ante-room and found Andrea fast asleep. I shook him.

‘At what time do the gates open?’ I asked.

He rubbed his eyes, and, on a repetition of the question, answered, ‘Five!’

It was half-past four; we had no time to lose. I thought for a minute. Andrea would have to go to his mother’s and find the needful clothes, then come back; it would all take time, and time meant life and death. Then, the sight of a young and beautiful woman might arouse the guard’s attention, and Giulia might be recognised.

An idea struck me.

‘Undress!’ I said to Andrea.

‘What?’

‘Undress! Quickly.’

He looked at me blankly, I signed to him, and as he was not rapid enough I tore off his coat; then he understood and in a minute he was standing in his shirt while I had walked off with his clothes. I handed them to Giulia and came back. Andrea was standing in the middle of the room, the very picture of misery. He looked very ridiculous.

‘Look here, Andrea,’ I said. ‘I have given your clothes to a lady, who is going to accompany me instead of you. Do you see?’

‘Yes, and what am I to do?’

‘You can stay with your mother for the present, and then, if you like, you can join me at my house in Città di Castello.’

‘And now?’

‘Oh, now you can go home.’

He did not answer, but looked at me dubiously, then at his bare legs and his shirt, then again at me. I pretended not to understand.

‘You seem troubled, my dear Andrea. What is the matter?’

He pointed to his shirt.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘It is usual to go about in clothes.’

‘A broad-minded youth like you should be free from such prejudice,’ I answered gravely. ‘On such a morning you will find life much pleasanter without hose and doublet.’

‘Common decency—’

‘My dear boy, are you not aware that our first parents were content with fig-leaves, and are you not satisfied with a whole shirt? Besides, have you not a fine pair of legs and a handsome body; what are you ashamed of?’

‘Everyone will follow me.’

‘All the more reason to have something to show them.’

‘The guard will lock me up.’

‘How will the jailor’s daughter be able to resist you in that costume!’

Then another idea struck me, and I said, —

‘Well, Andrea, I am grieved to find you of so unpoetical a turn of mind; but I will deny you nothing.’ I went to Giulia, and taking the clothes she had just cast off brought them to Andrea.

‘There!’

He gave a cry of delight, but on seizing them, and discovering petticoats and flounces, his face fell. I leant against the wall and laughed till my sides ached.

Then Giulia appeared, a most fascinating serving-boy....

‘Good-bye,’ I cried, and hurried down the stairs. We marched boldly to the city gate, and with beating hearts and innocent countenances, passed through and found ourselves in the open country.

XXXVII

THE Orsi and the Moratini had taken my advice and gone to Città di Castello; so it was to that city we directed our way, and eventually reached it in safety. I did not know where Bartolomeo Moratini was, and I did not wish to take Giulia to my own house, so I placed her in a Benedictine convent, the superior of which, on hearing my name, promised to give her guest every care.

Then I went to the old palace which I had not seen for so many years. I had been too excited to get really home to notice anything of the streets as I passed through them; but as I came in view of the well-remembered walls, I stopped, overcome with strange emotions.... I remembered the day when news had been brought me that the old Vitelli, who was then ruler of Castello, had murmured certain things about me which caused my neck to itch uncomfortably — and upon this I had entrusted my little brother to a relative, who was one of the canons of the cathedral, and the palace to my steward, and mounting my horse, ridden off with all possible haste. I had supposed that a few months would calm the angry Vitelli, but the months had lengthened out into years, and his death had come before his forgiveness. But now I really was back, and I did not mean to go away; my travels had taught me caution, and my intrigues at Forli given me enough excitement for some time. Besides, I was going to marry and rear a family; for, as if Fortune could not give scantily, I had gained a love as well as a home, and everything I wished was granted.

My meditations were interrupted.

‘Corpo di Bacco!’

It was Matteo, and in a moment I was in his arms.

‘I was just asking myself what that fool was staring at this house for, and thinking of telling him it was impolite to stare, when I recognised the house’s owner.’

I laughed, and shook his hand again.

‘Well Filippo, I am sure we shall be very pleased to offer you hospitality.’

‘You are most kind.’

‘We have annexed the whole place, but I daresay you will be able to find room somewhere. But come in.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘if you do not mind.’

I found Checco, Bartolomeo and his two sons sitting together. They jumped up when they saw me.

‘What news? What news?’ they asked.

Then suddenly I remembered the terrible story I had to tell, for in my own happiness I had forgotten everything that went before. I suddenly became grave.

‘Bad news,’ I said. ‘Bad news.’

‘Oh, God! I have been foreboding it. Every night I have dreamed awful things.’

‘Checco,’ I answered. ‘I have done all I could; but, alas! it has been of no avail. You left me as a protector and I have been able to protect no one.’

‘Go on!’

Then I began my story. I told them how the Council had opened the gates, surrendering unconditionally, and how the Countess had sallied forth in triumph. That was nothing. If there had been no worse news for them than that! But Checco clenched his hands as I related the sacking of his palace. And I told him how old Orso had refused to fly and had been seized, while I had lain senseless on the floor.

‘You did your best, Filippo,’ said Checco. ‘You could do nothing more. But afterwards?’

I told them how Marco Scorsacana and Pietro had been taken prisoners, and led into the town like thieves caught in the act; how the crowd had gathered together, and how they had been brought to the square and hanged from the Palace window, and their bodies torn to pieces by the people.

‘Oh, God!’ uttered Checco. ‘And all this is my fault.’

I told them that the old Orso was brought forward and taken to his palace, and before his eyes it was torn down, stone after stone, till only a heap of ruins marked the site.

Checco gave a sob.

‘My palace, my home!’

And then, as if the blow was too great, he bent his head and burst into tears.

‘Do not weep yet, Checco,’ I said. ‘You will have cause for tears presently.’

He looked up.

‘What more?’

‘Your father.’

‘Filippo!’

He started up, and stepping back, stood against the wall, his arms against it, outstretched, with white and haggard face and staring eyes, like a hunted beast at bay.

I told him how they had taken his father and bound him, and thrown him down, and tied him to the savage beast, and how he had been dragged along till his blood spattered on the pavement and his soul left him.

Checco uttered a most awful groan, and, looking up to heaven, as if to call it in witness, cried, —

‘Oh, God!’

Then, sinking into a chair, he buried his face in his hands, and in his agony swayed from side to side. Matteo went up to him and put his hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort him; but he motioned him aside.

‘Let me be.’

He rose from his seat, and we saw that his eyes were tearless, for his grief was too great for weeping. Then, with his hands before him like a blind man, he staggered to the door and left us.

Scipione, the weak man, was crying.

XXXVIII

ONE does not really feel much grief at other people’s sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face — thinking oneself brutal for not caring more, but one cannot; and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people’s tears life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour’s. The explanation of all this is that three days after my return to Città di Castello I was married to Giulia.

Now I remember nothing more. I have a confused idea of great happiness; I lived in an intoxication, half fearing it was all a dream, enchanted when anything occurred to assure me it was true. But the details of our life I have forgotten; I remember I was happy. Is it not a curious irony that we should recall our miseries with such plainness, and that our happiness should pass over us so indistinctly, that when it has gone we can scarcely realise that it ever existed? It is as though Fortune were jealous of the little happiness she has given us, and to revenge herself blots it out of the memory, filling the mind with miseries past.

But some things I recollect about others. I came across Ercole Piacentini and his wife Claudia. Castello being his native place, he had gone there on the death of the Count; and now, although the Riarii were restored to power, he remained, presumably to watch our movements and report them at Forli. I inquired whom he was, and after some difficulty discovered that he was the bastard of a Castello nobleman and the daughter of a tradesman. I saw that he did not lie when he said he had in his veins as good blood as I. Still I did not think him a very desirable acquisition to the town, and as I was in some favour with the new Lord I determined to procure his expulsion. Matteo proposed picking a quarrel with him and killing him, but that was difficult, because the bold man had become singularly retiring, and it was almost impossible to meet him. The change was so noticeable that we could not help thinking he had received special instructions from Forli; and we determined to take care.

I invited the Moratini to live with me; but they preferred to take a house of their own. The old man, when I asked him for his daughter’s hand, told me he wished no better son-in-law, and was very contented to see his daughter again settled under a man’s protection. Scipione and Alessandro were both most pleased, and they redoubled the affection they had felt for me before. It all made me extremely happy; for after my long years of wandering I yearned very much for the love of others, and the various affections that surrounded me soothed and comforted me. From Giulia I could ask for nothing more, and I thought she really loved me — of course, not as I loved her, for that would have been impossible; but I was happy. Sometimes I wondered perplexedly at the incident which had separated us, for I could understand nothing of it; but I put it away from me, I did not want to understand, I wanted only to forget.

Then there were Checco and Matteo. The Orsi family had bought a palace in Castello, and there they could have settled themselves happily enough had they not been driven on by an unextinguishable desire to regain what they had lost. Checco was rich even now, able to live as luxuriously as before, and in a little while he might have gained in Castello as much power as he had lost in Forli, for the young Vitelli had been singularly attracted by him, and was already inclined to give trust to his counsels; but the wretched man was filled with sadness. All day his thoughts were in the town he loved so well, and now his love was increased tenfold.... Sometimes he would think of Forli before the troubles, when he was living a peaceful life surrounded by his friends; and in mind, he wandered through the quiet streets, every house of which he knew. He would go from room to room in his palace, looking at the pictures, the statues, the armour; from the window at night he gazed upon the dark, silent town, with the houses rising like tall phantoms; in the morning a silver mist covered the earth, and as it rose left the air cool and fresh. But when his house appeared before him, a bare heap of ruins, with the rain beating down on the roofless stones, he would bury his face in his hands, and so remain during long hours of misery. Sometimes he would review the stirring events, which began with the attempted assassination of himself and ended with the ride out of the gate by the river in the cold open country beyond; and as they passed before him, he would wonder what he had done wrong, what he might have done differently. But he could alter nothing; he saw no mistake other than of trusting the populace who vowed to follow him to death, and of trusting the friends who promised to send him help. He had done his part, and what had followed was impossible to foresee. Fortune was against him and that was all....

But he did not entirely give himself over to vain regrets; he had opened up communication with Forli, and through his spies had learnt that the Countess had imprisoned and put to death all those who had been in any way connected with the rebellion, and that the town lay cowed, submissive as a whipped dog. And there was no hope for Checco from within, for his open partisans had suffered terrible punishments, and the others were few and timid. Then Checco turned his attention to the rival states; but everywhere he received rebuffs, for the power of Milan overshadowed them all, and they dared nothing while the Duke Lodovico was almighty. ‘Wait,’ they said, ‘till he has roused the jealousy of the greater states of Florence and Venice, then will be your opportunity, and then will we willingly give you our help.’ But Checco could not wait, every lost day seemed to him a year. He grew thin and haggard. Matteo tried to comfort him, but gradually Checco’s troubles weighed on him too; he lost his mirth and became as moody and silent as his cousin. So passed a year, full of anxiety and heartburning for them, full of the sweetest happiness for me.

One day Checco came to me and said, —

‘Filippo, you have been very good to me; now I want you to do me one more favour, and that shall be the last I will ask you.’

‘What is it?’

Then he expounded to me a scheme for interesting the Pope in his affairs. He knew how angry his Holiness had been, not only at the loss of the town, but also at the humiliation he had received through his lieutenant. There was a difficulty at the time between the Duke of Milan and Rome respecting certain rights of the former, and he did not think it unlikely that the Pope would be willing to break off negotiations and recover his advantage by making a sudden attack on Forli. Caterina’s tyranny had become insupportable, and there was no doubt that at the sight of Checco leading the papal army they would open their gates and welcome him as the Pope’s representative.

I did not see of what use I could be, and I was very unwilling to leave my young wife. But Checco was so anxious that I should come, seeming to think I should be of such assistance, that I felt it would be cruel to refuse. Moreover, I reckoned a month would bring me back to Castello, and if the parting was bitter, how sweet would be the return! And I had certain business of my own in Rome, which I had delayed for months because I could not bear the thought of separation from Giulia. So I decided to go.

A few days later we were riding towards Rome. I was sad, for it was the first time I had left my wife since our marriage, and the parting had been even more painful than I expected. A thousand times I had been on the verge of changing my mind and saying I would not go; but I could not, for Checco’s sake. I was also a little sad because I thought Giulia was not so pained as I was, but then I chid myself for my folly. I expected too much. After all, it was only four short weeks, and she was still too great a child to feel very deeply. It is only when one is old or has greatly suffered that one’s emotions are really powerful.

We reached Rome and set about soliciting an audience from the Pope. I cannot remember the countless interviews we had with minor officials, how we were driven from cardinal to cardinal, the hours we spent in ante-rooms waiting for a few words from some great man. I used to get so tired that I could have dropped off to sleep standing, but Checco was so full of eagerness that I had to accompany him from place to place. The month passed, and we had done nothing. I suggested going home, but Checco implored me to stay, assuring me that the business would be finished in a fortnight. I remained, and the negotiations dragged their weary length through weeks and weeks. Now a ray of hope lightened our struggles, and Checco would become excited and cheerful; now the hope would be dashed to the ground, and Checco begin to despair. The month had drawn itself out into three, and I saw clearly enough that nothing would come of our endeavours. The conferences with the Duke were still going on, each party watching the other, trying by means of untruth and deceit and bribery to gain the advantage. The King of Naples was brought in; Florence and Venice began to send ambassadors to and fro, and no one knew what would be the result of it all.

At last one day Checco came to me and threw himself on my bed.

‘It’s no good,’ he said, in a tone of despair. ‘It is all up.’

‘I’m very sorry, Checco.’

‘You had better go home now. You can do nothing here. Why should I drag you after me in my unhappiness?’

‘But you, Checco, if you can do no good, why will not you come too?’

‘I am better here than at Castello. Here I am at the centre of things, and I will take heart. War may break out any day, and then the Pope will be more ready to listen to me.’

I saw it was no use that I should stay, and I saw I could not persuade him to come with me, so I packed up my things, and bidding him good-bye, started on the homeward journey.

XXXIX

WHAT shall I say of the eagerness with which I looked forward to seeing my dear wife, the rapture with which, at last, I clasped her in my arms?

A little later I walked out to find Matteo. He was quite astonished to see me.

‘We did not expect you so soon.’

‘No,’ I answered; ‘I thought I should not arrive till after to-morrow, but I was so impatient to get home that I hurried on without stopping, and here I am.’

I shook his hand heartily, I was so pleased and happy.

‘Er — have you been home?’

‘Of course,’ I answered, smiling; ‘it was the first thing I thought of.’

I was not sure; I thought a look of relief came over Matteo’s face. But why? I could not understand, but I thought it of no consequence, and it passed from my memory. I told Matteo the news I had, and left him. I wished to get back to my wife.

On my way I happened to see Claudia Piacentini coming out of a house. I was very surprised, for I knew that my efforts had succeeded, and Ercole’s banishment decreed. I supposed the order had not yet been issued. I was going to pass the lady without acknowledgment, for since my marriage she had never spoken to me, and I could well understand why she did not want to. To my astonishment she stopped me.

‘Ah, Messer Filippo!’

I bowed profoundly.

‘How is it that now you never speak to me? Are you so angry with me?’

‘No one can be angry with so beautiful a woman.’

She flushed, and I felt I had said a stupid thing, for I had made remarks too similar on another occasion. I added, ‘But I have been away.’

‘I know. Will you not come in?’ She pointed to the house from which she had just issued.

‘But I shall be disturbing you, for you were going out.’

She smiled as she replied. ‘I saw you pass my house a little while ago; I guessed you were going to Matteo d’Orsi, and I waited for you on your return.’

‘You are most kind.’

I wondered why she was so anxious to see me. Perhaps she knew of her husband’s approaching banishment, and the cause of it.

We went in and sat down.

‘Have you been home?’ she asked.

It was the same question as Matteo had asked. I gave the same answer.

‘It was the first thing I thought of.’

‘Your wife must have been — surprised to see you.’

‘And delighted.’

‘Ah!’ She crossed her hands and smiled.

I wondered what she meant.

‘You were not expected for two days, I think.’

‘You know my movements very well. I am pleased to find you take such interest in me.’

‘Oh, it is not I alone. The whole town takes interest in you. You have been a most pleasant topic of conversation.’

‘Really!’ I was getting a little angry. ‘And what has the town to say of me?’

‘Oh, I do not want to trouble your peace of mind.’

‘Will you have the goodness to tell me what you mean?’

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled enigmatically.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘If you insist, I will tell you. They say that you are a complaisant husband.’

‘That is a lie!’

‘You are not polite,’ she answered calmly.

‘How dare you say such things, you impudent woman!’

‘My good sir, it is true, perfectly true. Ask Matteo.’

Suddenly I remembered Matteo’s question, and his look of relief. A sudden fear ran through me. I took hold of Claudia’s wrists and said, —

‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’

‘Leave go; you hurt me!’

‘Answer, I tell you. I know you are dying to tell me. Is this why you lay in wait for me, and brought me here? Tell me.’

A sudden transformation took place in Claudia; rage and hate broke out and contorted her face, so that one would not have recognised it.

‘Do you suppose you can escape the ordinary fate of husbands?’ She broke into a savage laugh.

‘It is a lie. You slander Giulia because you are yourself impure.’

‘You were willing enough to take advantage of that impurity. Do you suppose Giulia’s character has altered because you have married her? She made her first husband a cuckold, and do you suppose that she has suddenly turned virtuous? You fool!’

‘It is a lie. I will not believe a word of it.’

‘The whole town has been ringing with her love for Giorgio dall’ Aste.’

I gave a cry; it was for him that she abandoned me before....

‘Ah, you believe me now!’

‘Listen!’ I said. ‘If this is not true, I swear by all the saints that I will kill you.’

‘Good; if it is not true, kill me. But, by all the saints, I swear it is true, true, true!’ She repeated the words in triumph, and each one fell like the stab of a dagger in my heart.

I left her. As I walked home, I fancied the people were looking at me, and smiling. Once I was on the verge of going up to a man, and asking him why he laughed, but I contained myself. How I was suffering! I remembered that Giulia had not seemed so pleased to see me; at the time I chid myself, and called myself exacting, but was it true? I fancied she turned away her lips when I was imprinting my passionate kisses on them. I told myself I was a fool, but was it true? I remembered a slight movement of withdrawal when I clasped her in my arms. Was it true? Oh God! was it true?

I thought of going to Matteo, but I could not. He knew her before her marriage; he would be willing to accept the worst that was said of her. How could I be so disturbed at the slanders of a wicked, jealous woman? I wished I had never known Claudia, never given her reason to take this revenge on me. Oh, it was cruel! But I would not believe it; I had such trust in Giulia, such love. She could not betray me, when she knew what passionate love was poured down upon her. It would be too ungrateful. And I had done so much for her, but I did not wish to think of that.... All that I had done had been for pure love and pleasure, and I required no thanks. But surely if she had no love, she had at least some tender feeling for me; she would not give her honour to another. Ah no, I would not believe it. But was it true, oh God! was it true?

I found myself at home, and suddenly I remembered the old steward, whom I had left in charge of my house. His name was Fabio; it was from him that I got the name when I presented myself as a serving-man to old Orso. If anything had taken place in the house he must know it; and she, Claudia, said the whole town knew it.

‘Fabio!’

‘My master!’

He came into my room, and I looked at him steadily.

‘Fabio, have you well looked after all I left in your hands when I went to Rome?’

‘Your rents are paid, your harvests taken in, the olives all gathered.’

‘I left in your charge something more precious than cornfields and vineyards.’

‘My lord!’

‘I made you guardian of my honour. What of that?’

He hesitated, and his voice as he answered trembled.

‘Your honour is — intact.’

I took him by the shoulders.

‘Fabio, what is it? I beseech you by your master, my father, to tell me.’

I knew he loved my father’s memory with more than human love. He looked up to heaven and clasped his hands; he could hardly speak.

‘By my dear master, your father, nothing — nothing!’

‘Fabio, you are lying.’ I pressed his wrists which I was holding clenched in my hands.

He sank down on his knees.

‘Oh, master, have mercy on me!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘I cannot tell you.’

‘Speak, man, speak!’

At last, with laments and groans, he uttered the words, —

‘She has — oh God, she has betrayed you!’

‘Oh!’ I staggered back.

‘Forgive me!’

‘Why did you not tell me before?’

‘Ah, how could I? You loved her as I have never seen man love woman.’

‘Did you not think of my honour?’

‘I thought of your happiness. It is better to have happiness without honour, than honour without happiness.’

‘For you,’ I groaned, ‘but not for me.’

‘You are of the same flesh and blood, and you suffer as we do. I could not destroy your happiness.’

‘Oh, Giulia! Giulia!’ Then, after a while, I asked again, ‘But are you sure?’

‘Alas, there is no doubt!’

‘I cannot believe it! Oh God, help me! You don’t know how I loved her! She could not! Let me see it with my own eyes, Fabio.’

We both stood silent; then a horrible thought struck me.

‘Do you know — when they meet?’ I whispered.

He groaned. I asked again.

‘God help me!’

‘You know? I command you to tell me.’

‘They did not know you were coming back till after to-morrow.’

‘He is coming?’

‘To-day.’

‘Oh!’ I seized him by the hand. ‘Take me, and let me see them.’

‘What will you do?’ he asked, horror-stricken.

‘Never mind, take me!’

Trembling, he led me through ante-rooms and passages, till he brought me to a staircase. We mounted the steps and came to a little door. He opened it very quietly, and we found ourselves behind the arras of Giulia’s chamber. I had forgotten the existence of door and steps, and she knew nothing of them. There was an opening in the tapestry to give exit.

No one was in the room. We waited, holding our breath. At last Giulia entered. She walked to the window and looked out, and went back to the door. She sat down, but sprang up restlessly, and again looked out of window. Whom was she expecting?

She walked up and down the room, and her face was full of anxiety. I watched intently. At last a light knock was heard; she opened the door and a man came in. A small, slight, thin man, with a quantity of corn-coloured hair falling over his shoulders, and a pale, fair skin. He had blue eyes, and a little golden moustache. He looked hardly twenty, but I knew he was older.

He sprang forward, seizing her in his arms, and he pressed her to his heart, but she pushed him back.

‘Oh, Giorgio, you must go,’ she cried. ‘He has come back.’

‘Your husband?’

‘I hoped you would not come. Go quickly. If he found you he would kill us both.’

‘Tell me you love me, Giulia.’

‘Oh yes, I love you with all my heart and soul.’

For a moment they stood still in one another’s arms, then she tore herself away.

‘But go, for God’s sake!’

‘I go, my love. Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, beloved!’

He took her in his arms again, and she placed hers around his neck. They kissed one another passionately on the lips; she kissed him as she had never kissed me.

‘Oh!’ I gave a cry of rage, and leaped out of my concealment. In a bound I had reached him. They hardly knew I was there; and I had plunged my dagger in his neck. Giulia gave a piercing shriek as he fell with a groan. The blood spattered over my hand. Then I looked at her. She ran from me with terror-stricken face, her eyes starting from her head. I rushed to her and she shrieked again, but Fabio caught hold of my arm.

‘Not her, not her too!’

I wrenched my hand away from him, and then — then as I saw her pallid face and the look of deathly terror — I stopped. I could not kill her.

‘Lock that door,’ I said to Fabio, pointing to the one from which we had come. Then, looking at her, I screamed, —

‘Harlot!’

I called to Fabio, and we left the room. I locked the door, and she remained shut in with her lover....

I called my servants and bade them follow me, and went out. I walked proudly, surrounded by my retainers, and I came to the house of Bartolomeo Moratini. He had just finished dinner, and was sitting with his sons. They rose as they saw me.

‘Ah, Filippo, you have returned.’ Then, seeing my pale face, they cried, ‘But what is it? What has happened?’

And Bartolomeo broke in.

‘What is that on your hand, Filippo?’

I stretched it out, so that he might see.

‘That — that is the blood of your daughter’s lover.’

‘Oh!’

‘I found them together, and I killed the adulterer.’

Bartolomeo kept silence a moment, then he said, —

‘You have done well, Filippo.’ He turned to his sons. ‘Scipione, give me my sword.’

He girded it on, and then he spoke to me.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I beg you to wait here till I come.’

I bowed.

‘Sir, I am your servant.’

‘Scipione, Alessandro, follow me!’

And accompanied by his sons, he left the room, and I remained alone.

The servants peeped in at the door, looking at me as if I were some strange beast, and fled when I turned round. I walked up and down, up and down; I looked out of window. In the street the people were going to and fro, singing, and talking as if nothing had happened. They did not know that death was flying through the air; they did not know that the happiness of living men had gone for ever.

At last I heard the steps again, and Bartolomeo Moratini entered the room, followed by his sons; and all three were very grave.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the stain on your honour and mine has been effaced.’

I bowed more deeply than before.

‘Sir, I am your very humble servant.’

‘I thank you that you allowed me to do my duty as a father; and I regret that a member of my family should have shown herself unworthy of my name and yours. I will detain you no longer.’

I bowed again, and left them.

XL

I WALKED back to my house. It was very silent, and as I passed up the stairs the servants shrunk back with averted faces, as if they were afraid to look at me.

‘Where is Fabio?’ I asked.

A page whispered timidly, —

‘In the chapel.’

I turned on my heel, and passed through the rooms, one after another, till I came to the chapel door. I pushed it open and entered. A dim light came through the painted windows, and I could hardly see. In the centre were two bodies covered with a cloth, and their heads were lighted by the yellow gleam of candles. At their feet knelt an old man, praying. It was Fabio.

I advanced and drew back the cloth; and I fell on my knees. Giulia looked as if she were sleeping. I had so often leant over her, watching the regular heaving of the breast, and sometimes I had thought her features as calm and relaxed as if she were dead. But now the breast would no more rise and fall, and its wonderful soft whiteness was disfigured by a gaping wound. Her eyes were closed and her lips half parted, and the only difference from life was the fallen jaw. Her face was very pale; the rich waving hair encircled it as with an aureole.

I looked at him, and he, too, was pale, and his fair hair contrasted wonderfully with hers. He looked so young!

Then, as I knelt there, and the hours passed slowly, I thought of all that had happened, and I tried to understand. The dim light from the window gradually failed, and the candles in the darkness burnt out more brightly; each was surrounded by a halo of light, and lit up the dead faces, throwing into deeper night the rest of the chapel.

Little by little I seemed to see into the love of these two which had been so strong, that no ties of honour, faith, or truth had been able to influence it. And this is what I imagined, trying to console myself.

When she was sixteen, I thought, they married her to an old man she had never seen, and she met her husband’s cousin, a boy no older than herself. And the love started and worked its way. But the boy lived on his rich cousin’s charity; from him he had received a home and protection and a thousand kindnesses; he loved against his will, but he loved all the same. And she, I thought, had loved like a woman, passionately, thoughtless of honour and truth. In the sensual violence of her love she had carried him away, and he had yielded. Then with enjoyment had come remorse, and he had torn himself away from the temptress and fled.

I hardly knew what had happened when she was left alone, pining for her lover. Scandal said evil things.... Had she, too, felt remorse and tried to kill her love, and had the attempt failed? And was it then she flung herself into dissipation to drown her trouble? Perhaps he told her he did not love her, and she in despair may have thrown herself in the arms of other lovers. But he loved her too strongly to forget her; at last he could not bear the absence and came back. And again with enjoyment came remorse, and, ashamed, he fled, hating himself, despising her.

The years passed by, and her husband died. Why did he not come back to her? Had he lost his love and was he afraid? I could not understand....

Then she met me. Ah, I wondered what she felt. Did she love me? Perhaps his long absence had made her partly forget him, and she thought he had forgotten her. She fell in love with me, and I — I loved her with all my heart. I knew she loved me then; she must have loved me! But he came back. He may have thought himself cured, he may have said that he could meet her coldly and indifferently. Had I not said the same? But as they saw one another the old love burst out, again it burnt them with consuming fire, and Giulia hated me because I had made her faithless to the lover of her heart.

The candles were burning low, throwing strange lights and shadows on the faces of the dead.

Poor fool! His love was as powerful as ever, but he fought against it with all the strength of his weak will. She was the Evil One to him; she took his youth from him, his manhood, his honour, his strength; he felt that her kisses degraded him, and as he rose from her embrace he felt vile and mean. He vowed never to touch her again, and every time he broke the vow. But her love was the same as ever — passionate, even heartless. She cared not if she consumed him as long as she loved him. For her he might ruin his life, he might lose his soul. She cared for nothing; it was all and all for love.

He fled again, and she turned her eyes on me once more. Perhaps she felt sorry for my pain, perhaps she fancied my love would efface the remembrance of him. And we were married. Ah! now that she was dead I could allow her good intentions. She may have intended to be faithful to me; she may have thought she could truly love and honour me. Perhaps she tried; who knows? But love — love cares not for vows. It was too strong for her, too strong for him. I do not know whether she sent for him, or whether he, in the extremity of his passion, came to her; but what had happened so often happened again. They threw everything to the winds, and gave themselves over to the love that kills....

The long hours passed as I thought of these things, and the candles were burnt to their sockets.

At last I felt a touch on my shoulder, and heard Fabio’s voice.

‘Master, it is nearly morning.’

I stood up, and he added, —

‘They put him in the chapel without asking me. You are not angry?’

‘They did well!’

He hesitated a moment and then asked, —

‘What shall I do?’

I looked at him, not understanding.

‘He cannot remain here, and she — she must be buried.’

‘Take them to the church, and lay them in the tomb my father built — together.’

‘The man too?’ he asked. ‘In your own tomb?’

I sighed and answered sadly, —

‘Perhaps he loved her better than I.’

As I spoke I heard a sob at my feet. A man I had not seen took hold of my hand and kissed it, and I felt it wet with tears.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘He has been here all the night,’ said Fabio.

‘He was my master and I loved him,’ replied the kneeling figure in a broken voice. ‘I thank you that you do not cast him out like a dog.’

I looked at him and felt deep pity for his grief.

‘What will you do now?’ I asked.

‘Alas! now I am a wreck that tosses on the billows without a guide.’

I did not know what to say to him.

‘Will you take me as your servant? I will be very faithful.’

‘Do you ask me that?’ I said. ‘Do you not know—’

‘Ah, yes! you took the life that he was glad to lose. It was almost a kindness; and now you bury him peacefully, and for that I love you. You owe it to me; you have robbed me of a master, give me another.’

‘No, poor friend! I want no servants now. I too am like a wreck that drifts aimlessly across the seas. With me, too, it is finished.’

I looked once more at Giulia, and then I replaced the white cloth, and the faces were covered.

‘Bring me my horse, Fabio.’

In a few minutes it was waiting for me.

‘Will you have no one to accompany you?’ he asked.

‘No one!’

Then, as I mounted and arranged the reins in my hand, he said, —

‘Where are you going?’

And I despairingly answered, —

‘God knows!’

XLI

AND I rode away out of the town into the open country. The day was breaking, and everything was cold and grey. I paid no heed to my course; I rode along, taking the roads as they came, through broad plains, eastwards towards the mountains. In the increasing day I saw the little river wind sinuously through the fields, and the country stretched flat before me, with slender trees marked out against the sky. Now and then a tiny hill was surmounted by a village, and once, as I passed, I heard the tinkling of a bell. I stopped at an inn to water the horse, and then, hating the sight of men, I hurried on. The hours of coolness had passed, and as we tramped along the shapeless roads the horse began to sweat, and the thick white dust rose in clouds behind us.

At last I came to a roadside inn, and it was nearly mid-day. I dismounted, and giving the horse to the ostler’s care, I went inside and sat at a table. The landlord came to me and offered food. I could not eat, I felt it would make me sick; I ordered wine. It was brought; I poured some out and tasted it. Then I put my elbows on the table and held my head with both hands, for it was aching so as almost to drive me mad.

‘Sir!’

I looked up and saw a Franciscan friar standing by my side. On his back he bore a sack; I supposed he was collecting food.

‘Sir, I pray you for alms for the sick and needy.’

I drew out a piece of gold and threw it to him.

‘The roads are hard to-day,’ he said.

I made no answer.

‘You are going far, sir?’

‘When one gives alms to a beggar, it is so that he may not importune one,’ I said.

‘Ah, no; it is for the love of God and charity. But I do not wish to importune you, I thought I might help you.’

‘I want no help.’

‘You look unhappy.’

‘I beg you to leave me in peace.’

‘As you will, my son.’

He left me, and I returned to my old position. I felt as if a sheet of lead were pressing upon my head. A moment later a gruff voice broke in upon me.

‘Ah, Messer Filippo Brandolini!’

I looked up. At the first glance I did not recognise the speaker; but then as I cleared my mind I saw it was Ercole Piacentini. What was he doing here? Then I remembered that it was on the road to Forli. I supposed he had received orders to leave Castello and was on his way to his old haunts. However, I did not want to speak to him; I bent down, and again clasped my head in my hands.

‘That is a civil way of answering,’ he said. ‘Messer Filippo!’

I looked up, rather bored.

‘If I do not answer, it is evidently because I do not wish to speak to you.’

‘And if I wish to speak to you?’

‘Then I must take the liberty of begging you to hold your tongue.’

‘You insolent fellow!’

I felt too miserable to be angry.

‘Have the goodness to leave me,’ I said. ‘You bore me intensely.’

‘I tell you that you are an insolent fellow, and I shall do as I please.’

‘Are you a beggar, that you are so importunate? What do you want?’

‘Do you remember saying in Forli that you would fight me when the opportunity presented itself. It has! And I am ready, for I have to thank you for my banishment from Castello.’

‘When I offered to fight you, sir, I thought you were a gentleman. Now that I know your condition, I must decline.’

‘You coward!’

‘Surely it is not cowardice to refuse a duel with a person like yourself?’

By this time he was wild with rage; but I was cool and collected.

‘Have you so much to boast?’ he asked furiously.

‘Happily I am not a bastard!’

‘Cuckold!’

‘Oh!’

I sprang up and looked at him with a look of horror. He laughed scornfully and repeated, —

‘Cuckold!’

Now it was my turn. The blood rushed to my head and a terrible rage seized me. I picked up the tankard of wine which was on the table and flung it at him with all my might. The wine splashed over his face, and the cup hit him on the forehead and cut him so that the blood trickled down. In a moment he had drawn his sword, and at the same time I wrenched mine from its sheath.

He could fight well.

He could fight well, but against me he was lost. All the rage and agony of the last day gathered themselves together. I was lifted up and cried aloud in the joy of having someone on whom to wreak my vengeance. I felt as if I had against me the whole world and were pouring out my hate at the end of my sword. My fury lent me the strength of a devil. I drove him back, I drove him back, and I fought as I had never fought before. In a minute I had beaten the sword from his hand, and it fell to the floor as if his wrist were broken, clattering down among the cups. He staggered back against the wall, and stood there with his head thrown back and his arms helplessly outspread.

‘Ah, God, I thank thee!’ I cried exultingly. ‘Now I am happy.’

I lifted my sword above my head to cleave his skull, my arm was in the swing — when I stopped. I saw the staring eyes, the white face blanched with terror; he was standing against the wall as he had fallen, shrinking away in his mortal anxiety. I stopped; I could not kill him.

I sheathed my sword and said, —

‘Go! I will not kill you. I despise you too much.’

He did not move, but stood as if he were turned to stone, still terror-stricken and afraid. Then, in my contempt, I took a horn of water and flung it over him.

‘You look pale, my friend,’ I said. ‘Here is water to mix with your wine.’

Then I leant back and burst into a shout of laughter, and I laughed till my sides ached, and I laughed again.

I threw down money to pay for my entertainment, and went out. But as I bestrode my horse and we recommenced our journey along the silent roads I felt my head ache worse than ever. All enjoyment was gone; I could take no pleasure in life. How long would it last? How long? I rode along under the mid-day sun, and it fell scorching on my head; the wretched beast trotted with hanging head, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, parched and dry. The sun beat down with all the power of August, and everything seemed livid with the awful heat. Man and beast had shrunk away from the fiery rays, the country folk were taking the noonday rest, the cattle and the horses sheltered by barns and sheds, the birds were silent, and even the lizards had crept into their holes. Only the horse and I tramped along, miserably — only the horse and I. There was no shade; the walls on either side were too low to give shelter, the road glaring and white and dusty. I might have been riding through a furnace.

Everything was against me. Everything! Even the sun seemed to beat down his hottest rays to increase my misery. What had I done that all this should come to me? I clenched my fist, and in impotent rage cursed God....

At last I saw close to me a little hill covered with dark fir trees; I came nearer, and the sight of the sombre green was like a draught of cool water. I could no longer bear the horror of the heat. From the main road another smaller one led winding up the hill. I turned my horse, and soon we were among the trees, and I took a long breath of delight in the coolness. I dismounted and led him by the bridle; it was enchanting to walk along the path, soft with the fallen needles, and a delicious green smell hovered in the air. We came to a clearing, where was a little pond; I watered the poor beast, and, throwing myself down, drank deeply. Then I tied him to a tree and advanced a few steps alone. I came to a sort of terrace, and going forward found myself at the edge of the hill, looking over the plain. Behind, the tall fir trees gave me shade and coolness; I sat down, looking at the country before me. In the cloudless sky it seemed now singularly beautiful. Far away on one side I could see the walls and towers of some city, and to it in broad curves wound a river; the maze and corn, vines and olive trees, covered the land, and in the distance I saw the soft blue mountains. Why should the world be so beautiful, and I so miserable?

‘It is, indeed, a wonderful scene.’

I looked up and saw the monk whom I had spoken with at the inn. He put down his sack and sat by my side.

‘You do not think me importunate?’ he asked.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I replied, ‘I was not civil to you; you must forgive me. I was not myself.’

‘Do not talk of it. I saw you here, and I came down to you to offer you our hospitality.’

I looked at him questioningly; he pointed over his shoulder, and looking, I saw, perched on the top of the hill, piercing through the trees, a little monastery.

‘How peaceful it looks!’ I said.

‘It is, indeed. St Francis himself used sometimes to come to enjoy the quiet.’

I sighed. Oh, why could not I have done with the life I hated, and also enjoy the quiet? I felt the monk was watching me, and, looking up, I met his glance. He was a tall, thin man, with deeply-sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. And he was pale and worn from prayer and fasting. But his voice was sweet and very gentle.

‘Why do you look at me?’ I said.

‘I was in the tavern when you disarmed the man and gave him his life.’

‘It was not for charity and mercy,’ I said bitterly.

‘I know,’ he answered, ‘it was from despair.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I watched you; and at the end I said, ‘“God pity his unhappiness.”’

I looked with astonishment at the strange man; and then, with a groan, I said, —

‘Oh, you are right. I am so unhappy.’

He took my hands in his, and with the gentleness of the mother of God herself replied, —

‘“Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”’

Then I could suffer my woe no longer. I buried my face in his bosom, and burst into tears.

EPILOGUE

AND now many years have passed, and the noble gentleman, Filippo Brandolini is the poor monk Giuliano; the gorgeous clothes, velvets and satins, have given way to the brown sackcloth of the Seraphic Father; and instead of golden belts my waist is girt with a hempen cord. And in me, what changes have taken place! The brown hair, which women kissed, is a little circlet in sign of the Redeemer’s crown, and it is as white as snow. My eyes are dim and sunken, my cheeks are hollow, and the skin of my youth is ashy and wrinkled; the white teeth of my mouth have gone, but my toothless gums suffice for the monkish fare; and I am old and bent and weak.

One day in the spring I came to the terrace which overlooks the plain, and as I sat down to warm myself in the sunshine, gazing at the broad country which now I knew so well, and the distant hills, the wish came to me to write the history of my life.

And now that, too, is done. I have nothing more to tell except that from the day when I arrived, weary of soul, to the cool shade of the fir trees, I have never gone into the world again. I gave my lands and palaces to my brother in the hope that he would make better use of his life than I, and to him I gave the charge of seeing that heirs were given to the ancient name. I knew I had failed in everything. My life had gone wrong, I know not why; and I had not the courage to adventure further. I withdrew from the battle in my unfitness, and let the world pass on and forget my poor existence.

Checco lived on, scheming and intriguing, wearing away his life in attempts to regain his fatherland, and always he was disappointed, always his hopes frustrated, till at last he despaired. And after six years, worn out with his fruitless efforts, mourning the greatness he had lost, and pining for the country he loved so well, he died of a broken heart, an exile.

Matteo went back to his arms and the reckless life of the soldier of fortune, and was killed bravely fighting against the foreign invader, and died, knowing that his efforts, too, had been in vain, and that the sweet land of Italy lay fallen and enslaved.

And I do not know whether they had not the better lot; for they are at peace, while I — I pursue my lonely pilgrimage through life, and the goal is ever far off. Now it cannot be much longer, my strength is failing, and soon I shall have the peace I wished for. Oh God, I do not ask You for crowns of gold and heavenly raiment, I do not aspire to the bliss which is the portion of the saint, but give me rest. When the great Release comes, give me rest; let me sleep the long sleep without awakening, so that at last I may forget and be at peace. O God, give me rest!

Often, as I trudged along the roads barefooted to gather food and alms, have I wished to lay myself in the ditch by the wayside and die. Sometimes I have heard the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death; but he has taken the strong and the happy, and left me to wander on.

The good man told me I should receive happiness; I have not even received forgetfulness. I go along the roads thinking of my life and the love that ruined me. Ah! how weak I am; but, forgive me, I cannot help myself! Sometimes when I have been able to do good I have felt a strange delight, I have felt the blessed joy of charity. And I love my people, the poor folk of the country round. They come to me in their troubles, and when I can help them I share their pleasure. But that is all I have. Ah! mine has been a useless life, I have wasted it; and if of late I have done a little good to my fellowmen, alas! how little!

I bear my soul in patience, but sometimes I cannot help rising up against fate, and crying out that it is hard that all this should happen to me. Why? What had I done that I should be denied the little happiness of this world? Why should I be more unhappy than others? But then I chide myself, and ask whether I have indeed been less happy. Are they any of them happy? Or are those right who say that the world is misery, and that the only happiness is to die? Who knows?

Ah, Giulia, how I loved thee!

O Ciechi, il tanto affaticar che giova?

Tutti tornate alla gran madre antica,

E’l nome vostro appena si ritrova.

.  .  .  .  .  .

Blind that ye are! How doth this struggle profit you?

Return ye must to the great Antique Mother,

And even your name scarcely remains.

THE END

THE HERO

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

EPILOGUE

Maugham early in his career

“Rule, Britannia!

Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves.”

“Alfred”: a Masque. By James Thomson.

“O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!”

“Sophonisba”: a Tragedy. By the same Author.

TO

MISS JULIA MAUGHAM

I

Colonel Parsons sat by the window in the dining-room to catch the last glimmer of the fading day, looking through his Standard to make sure that he had overlooked no part of it. Finally, with a little sigh, he folded it up, and taking off his spectacles, put them in their case.

“Have you finished the paper?” asked his wife

“Yes, I think I’ve read it all. There’s nothing in it.”

He looked out of window at the well-kept drive that led to the house, and at the trim laurel bushes which separated the front garden from the village green. His eyes rested, with a happy smile, upon the triumphal arch which decorated the gate for the home-coming of his son, expected the next day from South Africa. Mrs. Parsons knitted diligently at a sock for her husband, working with quick and clever fingers. He watched the rapid glint of the needles.

“You’ll try your eyes if you go on much longer with this light, my dear.”

“Oh, I don’t require to see,” replied his wife, with a gentle, affectionate smile. But she stopped, rather tired, and laying the sock on the table, smoothed it out with her hand.

“I shouldn’t mind if you made it a bit higher in the leg than the last pair.”

“How high would you like it?”

She went to the window so that the Colonel might show the exact length he desired; and when he had made up his mind, sat down again quietly on her chair by the fireside, with hands crossed on her lap, waiting placidly for the maid to bring the lamp.

Mrs. Parsons was a tall woman of fifty-five, carrying herself with a certain diffidence, as though a little ashamed of her stature, greater than the Colonel’s; it had seemed to her through life that those extra inches savoured, after a fashion, of disrespect. She knew it was her duty spiritually to look up to her husband, yet physically she was always forced to look down. And eager to prevent even the remotest suspicion of wrong-doing, she had taken care to be so submissive in her behaviour as to leave no doubt that she recognised the obligation of respectful obedience enjoined by the Bible, and confirmed by her own conscience. Mrs. Parsons was the gentlest of creatures, and the most kind-hearted; she looked upon her husband with great and unalterable affection, admiring intensely both his head and his heart. He was her type of the upright man, walking in the ways of the Lord. You saw in the placid, smooth brow of the Colonel’s wife, in her calm eyes, even in the severe arrangement of the hair, parted in the middle and drawn back, that her character was frank, simple, and straightforward. She was a woman to whom evil had never offered the smallest attraction; she was merely aware of its existence theoretically. To her the only way of life had been that which led to God; the others had been non-existent. Duty had one hand only, and only one finger; and that finger had always pointed definitely in one direction. Yet Mrs. Parsons had a firm mouth, and a chin square enough to add another impression. As she sat motionless, hands crossed, watching her husband with loving eyes, you might have divined that, however kind-hearted, she was not indulgent, neither lenient to her own faults nor to those of others; perfectly unassuming, but with a sense of duty, a feeling of the absolute rightness of some deeds and of the absolute wrongness of others, which would be, even to those she loved best in the world, utterly unsparing.

“Here’s a telegraph boy!” said Colonel Parsons suddenly. “Jamie can’t have arrived yet!”

“Oh, Richmond!”

Mrs. Parsons sprang from her chair, and a colour brightened her pale cheeks. Her heart beat painfully, and tears of eager expectation filled her eyes.

“It’s probably only from William, to say the ship is signalled,” said the Colonel, to quieten her; but his own voice trembled with anxiety.

“Nothing can have happened, Richmond, can it?” said Mrs. Parsons, her cheeks blanching again at the idea.

“No, no! Of course not! How silly you are!” The telegram was brought in by the servant. “I can’t see without a light,” said the Colonel.

“Oh, give it me; I can see quite well.”

Mrs. Parsons took it to the window, and with trembling hand tore it open.

“Arriving to-night; 7.25. — Jamie.”

Mrs. Parson looked for one moment at her husband, and then, unable to restrain herself, sank on a chair, and hiding her face with her hands, burst into tears.

“Come, come, Frances,” said the Colonel, trying to smile, but half choked with his own emotion, “don’t cry! You ought to laugh when you know the boy’s coming home.”

He patted her on the shoulder, and she took his hand, holding it for comfort. With the other, the Colonel loudly blew his nose. At last Mrs Parsons dried her eyes.

“Oh, I thank God that it’s all over! He’s coming home. I hope we shall never have to endure again that anxiety. It makes me tremble still when I think how we used to long for the paper to come, and dread it; how we used to look all through the list of casualties, fearing to see the boy’s name.”

“Well, well, it’s all over now,” said the Colonel cheerily, blowing his nose again. “How pleased Mary will be!”

It was characteristic of him that almost his first thought was of the pleasure this earlier arrival would cause to Mary Clibborn, the girl to whom, for five years, his son had been engaged.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Parson, “but she’ll be dreadfully disappointed not to be here; she’s gone to the Polsons in Tunbridge Wells, and she won’t be home till after supper.”

“That is a pity. I’m afraid it’s too late to go and meet him; it’s nearly seven already.”

“Oh, yes; and it’s damp this evening. I don’t think you ought to go out.”

Then Mrs. Parsons roused herself to household matters.

“There’s the supper to think of, Richmond,” she said; “we’ve only the rest of the cold mutton, and there’s not time to cook one of to-morrow’s chickens.”

They had invited three or four friends to dinner on the following day to celebrate the return of their son, and Mrs. Parsons had laid in for the occasion a store of solid things.

“Well, we might try and get some chops. I expect Howe is open still.”

“Yes, I’ll send Betty out. And we can have a blanc-mange for a sweet.”

Mrs. Parsons went to give the necessary orders, and the Colonel walked up to his son’s room to see, for the hundredth time, that everything was in order. They had discussed for days the question whether the young soldier should be given the best spare bedroom or that which he had used from his boyhood. It was wonderful the thought they expended in preparing everything as they fancied he would like it; no detail slipped their memory, and they arranged and rearranged so that he should find nothing altered in his absence. They attempted to satisfy in this manner the eager longing of their hearts; it made them both a little happier to know that they were actually doing something for their son. No pain in love is so hard to bear as that which comes from the impossibility of doing any service for the well-beloved, and no service is so repulsive that love cannot make it delightful and easy. They had not seen him for five years, their only child; for he had gone from Sandhurst straight to India, and thence, on the outbreak of war, to the Cape. No one knew how much the lonely parents had felt the long separation, how eagerly they awaited his letters, how often they read them.

But it was more than parental affection which caused the passionate interest they took in Jamie’s career. They looked to him to restore the good name which his father had lost. Four generations of Parsons had been in the army, and had borne themselves with honour to their family and with credit to themselves. It was a fine record that Colonel Parsons inherited of brave men and good soldiers; and he, the truest, bravest, most honourable of them all, had dragged the name through the dust; had been forced from the service under a storm of obloquy, disgraced, dishonoured, ruined.

Colonel Parsons had done the greater portion of his service creditably enough. He had always put his God before the War Office, but the result had not been objectionable; he looked upon his men with fatherly affection, and the regiment, under his command, was almost a model of propriety and seemliness. His influence was invariably for good, and his subordinates knew that in him they had always a trusty friend; few men had gained more love. He was a mild, even-tempered fellow, and in no circumstance of life forgot to love his neighbour as himself; he never allowed it to slip his memory that even the lowest caste native had an immortal soul, and before God equal rights with him. Colonel Parsons was a man whose piety was so unaggressive, so good-humoured, so simple, that none could resist it; ribaldry and blasphemy were instinctively hushed in his presence, and even the most hardened ruffian was softened by his contact.

But a couple of years before he would naturally have been put on half-pay under the age limit, a little expedition was arranged against some unruly hill-tribes, and Colonel Parsons was given the command. He took the enemy by surprise, finding them at the foot of the hills, and cut off, by means of flanking bodies, their retreat through the two passes behind. He placed his guns on a line of hillocks to the right, and held the tribesmen in the hollow of his hand. He could have massacred them all, but nothing was farther from his thoughts. He summoned them to surrender, and towards evening the headmen came in and agreed to give up their rifles next day; the night was cold, and dark, and stormy. The good Colonel was delighted with the success both of his stratagem and of his humanity. He had not shed a single drop of blood.

“Treat them well,” he said, “and they’ll treat you better.”

He acted like a gentleman and a Christian; but the enemy were neither. He never dreamed that he was being completely overreached, that the natives were using the delay he had unsuspectingly granted to send over the hills urgent messages for help. Through the night armed men had been coming stealthily, silently, from all sides; and in the early morning, before dawn, his flanking parties were attacked. Colonel Parsons, rather astonished, sent them help, and thinking himself still superior in numbers to the rebellious tribesmen, attacked their main body. They wanted nothing better. Falling back slowly, they drew him into the mountain defiles until he found himself entrapped. His little force was surrounded. Five hours were passed in almost blind confusion; men were shot down like flies by an enemy they could not see; and when, by desperate fighting, they managed to cut their way out, fifty were killed and over a hundred more were wounded.

Colonel Parsons escaped with only the remnants of the fine force he had commanded, and they were nerveless, broken, almost panic-stricken. He was obliged to retreat. The Colonel was a brave man; he did what he could to prevent the march from becoming a disorderly rout. He gathered his men together, put courage into them, risked his life a dozen times; but nothing could disguise the fact that his failure was disastrous. It was a small affair and was hushed up, but the consequences were not to be forgotten. The hill-tribes, emboldened by their success, became more venturesome, more unruly. A disturbance which might have been settled without difficulty now required a large force to put it down, and ten times more lives were lost.

Colonel Parsons was required to send in his papers, and left India a broken man.... He came back to England, and settled in his father’s house at Little Primpton. His agony continued, and looking into the future, he saw only hideous despair, unavailing regret. For months he could bear to see no one, imagining always that he was pointed out as the man whose folly had cost so many lives. When he heard people laugh he thought it was in scorn of him; when he saw compassion in their eyes he could scarcely restrain his tears. He was indeed utterly broken. He walked in his garden, away from the eyes of his fellows, up and down, continually turning over in his mind the events of that terrible week. And he could not console himself by thinking that any other course would have led to just as bad results. His error was too plain; he could put his finger exactly on the point of his failure and say, “O God! why did I do it?” And as he walked restlessly, unmindful of heat and cold, the tears ran down his thin cheeks, painful and scalding. He would not take his wife’s comfort.

“You acted for the best, Richmond,” she said.

“Yes, dear; I acted for the best. When I got those fellows hemmed in I could have killed them all. But I’m not a butcher; I couldn’t have them shot down in cold blood. That’s not war; that’s murder. What should I have said to my Maker when He asked me to account for those many souls? I spared them; I imagined they’d understand; but they thought it was weakness. I couldn’t know they were preparing a trap for me. And now my name is shameful. I shall never hold up my head again.”

“You acted rightly in the sight of God, Richmond.”

“I think and trust I acted as a Christian, Frances.”

“If you have pleased God, you need not mind the opinion of man.”

“Oh, it’s not that they called me a fool and a coward — I could have borne that. I did what I thought was right. I thought it my duty to save the lives of my men and to spare the enemy; and the result was that ten times more lives have been lost than if I had struck boldly and mercilessly. There are widows and orphans in England who must curse me because I am the cause that their husbands are dead, and that their fathers are rotting on the hills of India. If I had acted like a savage, like a brute-beast, like a butcher, all those men would have been alive to-day. I was merciful, and I was met with treachery; I was long-suffering, and they thought me weak; I was forgiving, and they laughed at me.”

Mrs. Parsons put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

“You must try to forget it, Richmond,” she said. “It’s over, and it can’t be helped now. You acted like a God-fearing man; your conscience is clear of evil intent. What is the judgment of man beside the judgment of God? If you have received insult and humiliation at the hands of man, God will repay you an hundredfold, for you acted as his servant. And I believe in you, Richmond; and I’m proud of what you did.”

“I have always tried to act like a Christian and a gentleman, Frances.”

At night he would continually dream of those days of confusion and mortal anxiety. He would imagine he was again making that horrible retreat, cheering his men, doing all he could to retrieve the disaster; but aware that ruin only awaited him, conscious that the most ignorant sepoy in his command thought him incapable and mad. He saw the look in the eyes of the officers under him, their bitter contempt, their anger because he forced them to retire before the enemy; and because, instead of honour and glory, they had earned only ridicule. His limbs shook and he sweated with agony as he recalled the interview with his chief: “You’re only fit to be a damned missionary,” and the last contemptuous words, “I shan’t want you any more. You can send in your papers.”

But human sorrow is like water in an earthen pot. Little by little Colonel Parsons forgot his misery; he had turned it over in his mind so often that at last he grew confused. It became then only a deep wound partly healed, scarring over; and he began to take an interest in the affairs of the life surrounding him. He could read his paper without every word stabbing him by some chance association; and there is nothing like the daily and thorough perusal of a newspaper for dulling a man’s brain. He pottered about his garden gossiping with the gardener; made little alterations in the house — bricks and mortar are like an anodyne; he collected stamps; played bezique with his wife; and finally, in his mild, gentle way, found peace of mind.

But when James passed brilliantly out of Sandhurst, the thought seized him that the good name which he valued so highly might be retrieved. Colonel Parsons had shrunk from telling the youth anything of the catastrophe which had driven him from the service; but now he forced himself to give an exact account thereof. His wife sat by, listening with pain in her eyes, for she knew what torture it was to revive that half-forgotten story.

“I thought you had better hear it from me than from a stranger,” the Colonel said when he had finished. “I entered the army with the reputation of my father behind me; my reputation can only harm you. Men will nudge one another and say, ‘There’s the son of old Parsons, who bungled the affair against the Madda Khels.’ You must show them that you’re of good stuff. I acted for the best, and my conscience is at ease. I think I did my duty; but if you can distinguish yourself — if you can make them forget — I think I shall die a little happier.”

The commanding officer of Jamie’s regiment was an old friend of the Colonel’s, and wrote to him after a while to say that he thought well of the boy. He had already distinguished himself in a frontier skirmish, and presently, for gallantry in some other little expedition, his name was mentioned in despatches. Colonel Parsons regained entirely his old cheerfulness; Jamie’s courage and manifest knowledge of his business made him feel that at last he could again look the world frankly in the face. Then came the Boer War; for the parents at Little Primpton and for Mary Clibborn days of fearful anxiety, of gnawing pain — all the greater because each, for the other’s sake, tried to conceal it; and at last the announcement in the paper that James Parsons had been severely wounded while attempting to save the life of a brother officer, and was recommended for the Victoria Cross.

II

The Parsons sat again in their dining-room, counting the minutes which must pass before Jamie’s arrival. The table was laid simply, for all their habits were simple; and the blanc-mange prepared for the morrow’s festivities stood, uncompromising and stiff as a dissenting minister, in the middle of the table. I wish someone would write an invective upon that most detestable of all the national dishes, pallid, chilly, glutinous, unpleasant to look upon, insipid in the mouth. It is a preparation which seems to mark a transition stage in culture; just as the South Sea Islanders, with the advance of civilisation, forsook putrid whale for roast missionary, the great English middle classes complained that tarts and plum-puddings were too substantial, more suited to the robust digestions of a past generation. In the blanc-mange, on the other hand, they found almost an appearance of distinction; its name, at least, suggested French cookery; it was possible to the plainest cook, and it required no mastication.

“I shall have to tell Betty to make a jelly for dinner to-morrow,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“Yes,” replied the Colonel; and after a pause: “Don’t you think we ought to let Mary know that Jamie has come back? She’d like to see him to-night.”

“I’ve sent over already.”

It was understood that James, having got his Company, would marry Mary Clibborn almost at once. His father and mother had been delighted when he announced the engagement. They had ever tried to shield him from all knowledge of evil — no easy matter when a boy has been to a public school and to Sandhurst — holding the approved opinion that ignorance is synonymous with virtue; and they could imagine no better safeguard for his innocence in the multi-coloured life of India than betrothal with a pure, sweet English girl. They looked upon Mary Clibborn already as a daughter, and she, in Jamie’s absence, had been their only solace. They loved her gentleness, her goodness, her simple piety, and congratulated themselves on the fact that with her their son could not fail to lead a happy and a godly life.

Mary, during those five years, had come to see them every day; her own mother and father were rather worldly people, and she felt less happy with them than with Colonel Parsons and his wife. The trio talked continually of the absent soldier, always reading to one another his letters. They laughed together over his jokes, mildly, as befitted persons for whom a sense of humour might conceivably be a Satanic snare, and trembled together at his dangers. Mary’s affection was free from anything so degrading as passion, and she felt no bashfulness in reading Jamie’s love-letters to his parents; she was too frank to suspect that there might be in them anything for her eyes alone, and too candid to feel any delicacy.

But a lumbering fly rolled in at the gate, and the good people, happy at last, sprang to the door.

“Jamie!”

Trembling with joy, they brought him in and sat him down; they knew no words to express their delight, and stood looking at him open-mouthed, smiling.

“Well, here you are! We were surprised to get your telegram. When did you land?”

When they found their tongues, it was only to say commonplace things such as they might have spoken to a casual friend who had come from London for the day. They were so used to controlling themselves, that when their emotion was overpowering they were at a loss to express it.

“Would you like to go upstairs and wash your hands?”

They both accompanied him.

“You see it’s all just as it was. We thought you’d like your old room. If you want anything you can ring the bell.”

They left him, and going downstairs, sat opposite one another by the fire. The dining-room was furnished with a saddle-bag suite; and Colonel Parsons sat in the “gentleman’s chair,” which had arms, while Mrs. Parsons sat in the “lady’s chair,” which had none; nor did either dream, under any circumstances, of using the other’s seat. They were a little overcome.

“How thin he is!” said Mrs. Parsons.

“We must feed him up,” answered the Colonel.

And then, till the soldier came, they remained in silence. Mrs. Parsons rang the bell for the chops as soon as he appeared, and they sat down; but James ate alone. His people were too happy to do anything but watch him.

“I have had tea made,” said Mrs. Parsons, “but you can have some claret, if you prefer it.”

Five years’ absence had not dulled Jamie’s memory of his father’s wine, and he chose the tea.

“I think a strong cup of tea will do you most good,” said his mother, and she poured it out for him as when he was a boy, with plenty of milk and sugar.

His tastes had never been much consulted; things had been done, in the kindest manner possible, solely for his good. James detested sweetness.

“No sugar, please, mother,” he said, as she dived into the sugar-basin.

“Nonsense, Jamie,” answered Mrs. Parsons, with her good-humoured, indulgent smile. “Sugar’s good for you.” And she put in two big lumps.

“You don’t ask after Mary,” said Colonel Parsons.

“How is she?” said James. “Where is she?”

“If you wait a little she’ll be here.”

Then Mrs. Parsons broke in.

“I don’t know what we should have done without her; she’s been so good and kind to us, and such a comfort. We’re simply devoted to her, aren’t we, Richmond?”

“She’s the nicest girl I’ve ever seen.”

“And she’s so good. She works among the poor like a professional nurse. We told you that she lived with us for six months while Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn went abroad. She was never put out at anything, but was always smiling and cheerful. She has the sweetest character.”

The good people thought they were delighting their son by these eulogies. He looked at them gravely.

“I’m glad you like her,” he said.

Supper was finished, and Mrs. Parsons went out of the room for a moment. James took out his case and offered a cigar to his father.

“I don’t smoke, Jamie,” replied the Colonel.

James lit up. The old man looked at him with a start, but said nothing; he withdrew his chair a little and tried to look unconcerned. When Mrs. Parsons returned, the room was full of smoke; she gave a cry of surprise.

“James!” she said, in a tone of reproach. “Your father objects to smoking.”

“It doesn’t matter just this once,” said the Colonel, good-humouredly.

But James threw his cigar into the fire, with a laugh.

“I quite forgot; I’m so sorry.”

“You never told us you’d started smoking,” observed Mrs. Parsons, almost with disapprobation, “Would you like the windows open to let the smell out, Richmond?”

There was a ring at the door, and Mary’s voice was heard.

“Has Captain Parsons arrived?”

“There she is, Jamie!” said the Colonel, “Rush out to her, my boy!”

But James contented himself with rising to his feet; he turned quite pale, and a singular expression came over his grave face.

Mary entered.

“I ran round as soon as I got your note,” she said. “Well, Jamie!”

She stopped, smiling, and a blush brightened her healthy cheeks. Her eyes glistened with happiness, and for a moment, strong as she was, Mary thought she must burst into tears.

“Aren’t you going to kiss her, Jamie?” said the father. “You needn’t be bashful before us.”

James went up to her, and taking her hands, kissed the cheek she offered.

The impression that Mary Clibborn gave was of absolute healthiness, moral and physical. Her appearance was not distinguished, but she was well set up, with strong hands and solid feet; you knew at once that a ten-mile walk invigorated rather than tired her; her arms were muscular and energetic. She was in no way striking; a typical, country-bred girl, with a fine digestion and an excellent conscience; if not very pretty, obviously good. Her face showed a happy mingling of strength and cheerfulness; her blue eyes were guileless and frank; her hair even was rather pretty, arranged in the simplest manner; her skin was tanned by wind and weather. The elements were friendly, and she enjoyed a long walk in a gale, with the rain beating against her cheeks. She was dressed simply and without adornment, as befitted her character.

“I am sorry I wasn’t at home when you arrived, Jamie,” she said; “but the Polsons asked me to go and play golf at Tunbridge Wells. I went round in bogy, Colonel Parsons.”

“Did you, my dear? That’s very good.”

The Colonel and his wife looked at her with affectionate satisfaction.

“I’m going to take off my hat.”

She gave James to put in the hall her sailor hat and her rough tweed cloak. She wore a bicycling skirt and heavy, square-toed boots.

“Say you’re glad to see us, Jamie!” she cried, laughing.

Her voice was rather loud, clear and strong, perhaps wanting variety of inflection. She sat by Jamie’s side, and broke into a cheerful, rather humorous, account of the day’s excursion.

“How silent you are, Jamie!” she cried at last.

“You haven’t given me a chance to get a word in yet,” he said, smiling gravely.

They all laughed, ready to be pleased at the smallest joke, and banter was the only form of humour they knew.

“Are you tired?” asked Mary, her cheerful eyes softening.

“A little.”

“Well, I won’t worry you to-night; but to-morrow you must be put through your paces.”

“Mary will stand no nonsense,” said the Colonel, laughing gently. “We all have to do as she tells us. She’ll turn you round her little finger.”

“Will she?” said James, glancing down at the solid boots, which the short bicycle skirt rather obtrusively exposed to view.

“Don’t frighten him the moment he comes home,” cried Mary. “As a matter of fact, I shan’t be able to come to-morrow morning; I’ve got my district-visiting to do, and I don’t think Jamie is strong enough to go with me yet. Does your wound hurt you still, Jamie?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t use my arm much, though. It’ll be all right soon.”

“You must tell us about the great event to-morrow,” said Mary, referring to the deed which had won him the decoration. “You’ve put us all out by coming sooner than you were expected.”

“Have I? I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t you notice anything when you drove in this evening?”

“No, it was quite dark.”

“Good heavens! Why, we’ve put up a triumphal arch, and there was going to be a great celebration. All the school children were coming to welcome you.”

“I’m very glad I missed it,” said James, laughing. “I should have hated it.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you have missed it yet. We must see.”

Then Mary rose to go.

“Well, at all events, we’re all coming to dinner to-morrow at one.”

They went to the door to let her out, and the elder couple smiled again with pleasure when James and Mary exchanged a brotherly and sisterly kiss.

At last James found himself alone in his room; he gave a sigh of relief — a sigh which was almost a groan of pain. He took out his pipe unconsciously and filled it; but then, remembering where he was, put it down. He knew his father’s sensitiveness of smell. If he began to smoke there would quickly be a knock at the door, and the inquiry: “There’s such a smell of burning in the house; there’s nothing on fire in your room, is there, Jamie?”

He began to walk up and down, and then in exhaustion sank on a chair. He opened the window and looked into the night. He could see nothing. The sky was dark with unmoving clouds, but the fresh air blew gratefully against his face, laden with the scent of the vernal country; a light rain was falling noiselessly, and the earth seemed languid and weary, accepting the moisture with little shuddering gasps of relief.

After an event which has been long expected, there is always something in the nature of reaction. James had looked forward to this meeting, partly with terror, partly with eagerness; and now that it was over, his brain, confused and weary, would not help him to order his thoughts. He clenched his hands, trying to force himself to think clearly; he knew he must decide upon some course at once, and a terrible indecision paralysed his ideas. He loved his people so tenderly, he was so anxious to make them happy, and yet — and yet! If he loved one better than the other it was perhaps his father, because of the pitiful weakness, because of the fragility which seemed to call for a protective gentleness. The old man had altered little in the five years. James could not remember him other than thin and bent and frail, with long wisps of silvery hair brushed over the crown to conceal his baldness, with the cheeks hollow and wrinkled, and a white moustache ineffectually concealing the weak, good-natured mouth. Ever since James could recollect his father had appeared old and worn as now; and there had always been that gentle look in the blue eyes, that manner which was almost painful in its diffidence. Colonel Parsons was a man who made people love him by a modesty which seemed to claim nothing. He was like a child compelling sympathy on account of its utter helplessness, so unsuited to the wear and tear of life that he aroused his fellows’ instincts of protection.

And James knew besides what a bitter humiliation it was to his father that he had been forced to leave the service. He remembered, like a deadly, incurable pain suffered by a friend, the occasion on which the old soldier had told him the cause of his disgrace, a sweat of agony standing on his brow. The scene had eaten into Jamie’s mind alongside of that other when he had first watched a man die, livid with pain, his eyes glazed and sightless. He had grown callous to such events since then.

Colonel Parsons had come to grief on account of the very kindness of heart, on account of the exquisite humanity which endeared him to the most casual acquaintance. James swore that he would do anything to save him from needless suffering. Nor did he forget his mother, for through the harder manner he saw her gentleness and tender love. He knew that he was all in the world to both of them, that in his hands lay their happiness and their misery. Their love made them feel every act of his with a force out of reason to the circumstance. He had seen in their letters, piercing through the assumed cheerfulness, a mortal anxiety when he was in danger, an anguish of mind that seemed hardly bearable. They had gone through so much for his sake; they deprived themselves of luxury, so that, in the various expenses of his regiment, he should not need to economise. All his life they had surrounded him with loving care. And what their hearts were set upon now was that he should marry Mary Clibborn quickly.

James turned from the window and put his head between his hands, swaying to and fro.

“Oh, I can’t,” he groaned; “I can’t!”

III

In the morning, after breakfast, James went for a walk. He wanted to think out clearly what he had better do, feeling that he must make up his mind at once. Hesitation would be fatal, and yet to speak immediately seemed so cruel, so brutally callous.

Wishing to be absolutely alone, he wandered through the garden to a little wood of beech-trees, which in his boyhood had been a favourite haunt. The day was fresh and sweet after the happy rain of April, the sky so clear that it affected one like a very beautiful action.

James stood still when he came into the wood, inhaling the odour of moist soil, the voluptuous scents of our mother, the Earth, gravid with silent life. For a moment he was intoxicated by the paradise of verdure. The beech-trees rose very tall, with their delicate branches singularly black amid the young leaves of the spring, tender and vivid. The eye could not pierce the intricate greenery; it was more delicate than the summer rain, subtler than the mists of the sunset. It was a scene to drive away all thought of the sadness of life, of the bitterness. Its exquisite fresh purity made James feel pure also, and like a little child he wandered over the undulating earth, broken by the tortuous courses of the streamlets of winter.

The ground was soft, covered with brown dead leaves, and he tried to see the rabbit rustling among them, or the hasty springing of a squirrel. The long branches of the briar entangled his feet; and here and there, in sheltered corners, blossomed the primrose and the violet He listened to the chant of the birds, so joyous that it seemed impossible they sang in a world of sorrow. Hidden among the leaves, aloft in the beeches, the linnet sang with full-throated melody, and the blackbird and the thrush. In the distance a cuckoo called its mysterious note, and far away, like an echo, a fellow-bird called back.

All Nature was rejoicing in the delight of the sunshine; all Nature was rejoicing, and his heart alone was heavy as lead. He stood by a fir-tree, which rose far above the others, immensely tall, like the mast of a solitary ship; it was straight as a life without reproach, but cheerless, cold, and silent. His life, too, was without reproach, thought James — without reproach till now.... He had loved Mary Clibborn. But was it love, or was it merely affection, habit, esteem? She was the only girl he knew, and they had grown up together. When he came from school for his holidays, or later from Sandhurst, on leave, Mary was his constant friend, without whom he would have been miserably dull. She was masculine enough to enter into his boyish games, and even their thoughts were common. There were so few people in Little Primpton that those who lived there saw one another continually; and though Tunbridge Wells was only four miles away, the distance effectually prevented very close intimacy with its inhabitants. It was natural, then, that James should only look forward to an existence in which Mary took part; without that pleasant companionship the road seemed long and dreary. When he was appointed to a regiment in India, and his heart softened at the prospect of the first long parting from all he cared for, it was the separation from Mary that seemed hardest to bear.

“I don’t know what I shall do without you, Mary,” he said.

“You will forget all about us when you’ve been in India a month.”

But her lips twitched, and he noticed that she found difficulty in speaking quite firmly. She hesitated a moment, and spoke again.

“It’s different for us,” she said, “Those who go forget, but those who stay — remember. We shall be always doing the same things to remind us of you. Oh, you won’t forget me, Jamie?”

The last words slipped out against the girl’s intention.

“Mary!” he cried.

And then he put his arms round her, and Mary rested her face on his shoulder and began to cry. He kissed her, trying to stop her tears; he pressed her to his heart. He really thought he loved her then with all his strength.

“Mary,” he whispered, “Mary, do you care for me? Will you marry me?”

Then quickly he explained that it would make it so much better for both if they became engaged.

“I shan’t be able to marry you for a long time; but will you wait for me, Mary?”

She began to smile through her tears.

“I would wait for you to the end of my life.”

During the first two years in India the tie had been to James entirely pleasurable; and if, among the manifold experiences of his new life, he bore Mary’s absence with greater equanimity than he had thought possible, he was always glad to receive her letters, with their delicate aroma of the English country; and it pleased him to think that his future was comfortably settled. The engagement was a sort of ballast, and he felt that he could compass his journey without fear and without disturbance. James did not ask himself whether his passion was very ardent, for his whole education had led him to believe that passion was hardly moral. The proper and decent basis of marriage was similarity of station, and the good, solid qualities which might be supposed endurable. From his youth, the wisdom of the world had been instilled into him through many proverbs, showing the advisability of caution, the transitoriness of beauty and desire; and, on the other hand, the lasting merit of honesty, virtue, domesticity, and good temper....

But we all know that Nature is a goddess with no sense of decency, for whom the proprieties are simply non-existent; men and women in her eyes have but one point of interest, and she walks abroad, with her fashioning fingers, setting in order the only work she cares for. All the rest is subsidiary, and she is callous to suffering and to death, indifferent to the Ten Commandments and even to the code of Good Society.

James at last made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace, the wife of a man in a native regiment, a little, dark-hatred person, with an olive skin and big brown eyes — rather common, but excessively pretty. She was the daughter of a riding-master by a Portuguese woman from Goa, and it had been something of a scandal when Pritchard-Wallace, who was an excellent fellow, had married her against the advice of all the regimental ladies. But if those charitable persons had not ceased to look upon her with doubtful eyes, her wit and her good looks for others counterbalanced every disadvantage; and she did not fail to have a little court of subalterns and the like hanging perpetually about her skirts. At first Mrs. Wallace merely amused James. Her absolute frivolity, her cynical tongue, her light-heartedness, were a relief after the rather puritanical atmosphere in which he had passed his youth; he was astonished to hear the gay contempt which she poured upon all the things that he had held most sacred — things like the Tower of London and the British Constitution. Prejudices and cherished beliefs were dissipated before her sharp-tongued raillery; she was a woman with almost a witty way of seeing the world, with a peculiarly feminine gift for putting old things in a new, absurd light. To Mrs. Wallace, James seemed a miracle of ingenuousness, and she laughed at him continually; then she began to like him, and took him about with her, at which he was much flattered.

James had been brought up in the belief that women were fashioned of different clay from men, less gross, less earthly; he thought not only that they were pious, sweet and innocent, ignorant entirely of disagreeable things, but that it was man’s first duty to protect them from all knowledge of the realities of life. To him they were an ethereal blending of milk-and-water with high principles; it had never occurred to him that they were flesh and blood, and sense, and fire and nerves — especially nerves. Most topics, of course, could not be broached in their presence; in fact, almost the only safe subject of conversation was the weather.

But Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace prided herself on frankness, which is less common in pretty women than in plain; and she had no hesitation in discussing with James matters that he had never heard discussed before. She was hugely amused at the embarrassment which made him hesitate and falter, trying to find polite ways of expressing the things which his whole training had taught him to keep rigidly to himself. Then sometimes, from pure devilry, Mrs. Wallace told stories on purpose to shock him; and revelled in his forced, polite smile, and in his strong look of disapproval.

“What a funny boy you are!” she said. “But you must take care, you know; you have all the makings of a perfect prig.”

“D’you think so?”

“You must try to be less moral. The moral young man is rather funny for a change, but he palls after a time.”

“If I bore you, you have only to say so, and I won’t bother you again.”

“And moral young men shouldn’t get cross; it’s very bad manners,” she answered, smiling.

Before he knew what had happened, James found himself madly in love with Mrs. Wallace. But what a different passion was this, resembling not at all that pallid flame which alone he had experienced! How could he recognise the gentle mingling of friendship and of common-sense which he called love in that destroying violence which troubled his days like a fever? He dreamed of the woman at night; he seemed only to live when he was with her. The mention of her name made his heart beat, and meeting her he trembled and turned cold. By her side he found nothing to say; he was like wax in her hands, without will or strength. The touch of her fingers sent the blood rushing through his veins insanely; and understanding his condition, she took pleasure in touching him, to watch the little shiver of desire that convulsed his frame. In a very self-restrained man love works ruinously; and it burnt James now, this invisible, unconscious fire, till he was consumed utterly — till he was mad with passion. And then suddenly, at some chance word, he knew what had happened; he knew that he was in love with the wife of his good friend, Pritchard-Wallace; and he thought of Mary Clibborn.

There was no hesitation now, nor doubt; James had only been in danger because he was unaware of it. He never thought of treachery to his friend or to Mary; he was horror-stricken, hating himself. He looked over the brink of the precipice at the deadly sin, and recoiled, shuddering. He bitterly reproached himself, taking for granted that some error of his had led to the catastrophe. But his duty was obvious; he knew he must kill the sinful love, whatever pain it cost him; he must crush it as he would some noxious vermin.

James made up his mind never to see Mrs. Wallace again; and he thought that God was on his side helping him, since, with her husband, she was leaving in a month for England. He applied for leave. He could get away for a few weeks, and on his return Mrs. Wallace would be gone. He managed to avoid her for several days, but at last she came across him by chance, and he could not escape.

“I didn’t know you were so fond of hide-and-seek,” she said, “I think it’s rather a stupid game.”

“I don’t understand,” replied James, growing pale.

“Why have you been dodging round corners to avoid me as if I were a dun, and inventing the feeblest excuses not to come to me?”

James stood for a moment, not knowing what to answer; his knees trembled, and he sweated with the agony of his love. It was an angry, furious passion, that made him feel he could almost seize the woman by the throat and strangle her.

“Did you know that I am engaged to be married?” he asked at length.

“I’ve never known a sub who wasn’t. It’s the most objectionable of all their vicious habits. What then?” She looked at him, smiling; she knew very well the power of her dark eyes, fringed with long lashes. “Don’t be silly,” she added. “Come and see me, and bring her photograph, and you shall talk to me for two hours about her. Will you come?”

“It’s very kind of you. I don’t think I can.”

“Why not? You’re really very rude.”

“I’m extremely busy.”

“Nonsense! You must come. Don’t look as if I were asking you to do something quite horrible. I shall expect you to tea.”

She bound him by his word, and James was forced to go. When he showed the photograph, Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace looked at it with a curious expression. It was the work of a country photographer, awkward and ungainly, with the head stiffly poised, and the eyes hard and fixed; the general impression was ungraceful and devoid of charm, Mrs. Wallace noticed the country fashion of her clothes.

“It’s extraordinary that subalterns should always get engaged to the same sort of girl.”

James flushed, “It’s not a very good one of her.”

“They always photograph badly,” murmured Mrs. Wallace.

“She’s the best girl in the world. You can’t think how good, and kind, and simple she is; she reminds me always of an English breeze.”

“I don’t like east winds myself,” said Mrs. Wallace. “But I can see she has all sorts of admirable qualities.”

“D’you know why I came to see you to-day?”

“Because I forced you,” said Mrs. Wallace, laughing.

“I came to say good-bye; I’ve got a month’s leave.”

“Oh, but I shall be gone by the time you come back.”

“I know. It is for that reason.”

Mrs. Wallace looked at him quickly, hesitated, then glanced away.

“Is it so bad as that?”

“Oh, don’t you understand?” cried James, breaking suddenly from his reserve. “I must tell you. I shall never see you again, and it can’t matter. I love you with all my heart and soul. I didn’t know what love was till I met you. God help me, it was only friendship I had for Mary! This is so different. Oh, I hate myself! I can’t help it; the mere touch of your hand sends me mad with passion. I daren’t see you again — I’m not a blackguard. I know it’s quite hopeless. And I’ve given my word to Mary.”

The look of her eyes, the sound of her voice, sent half his fine intentions flying before the wind. He lost command over himself — but only for a moment; the old habits were strong.

“I beg your pardon! I oughtn’t to have spoken. Don’t be angry with me for what I’ve said. I couldn’t help it. You thought me a fool because I ran away from you. It was all I could do. I couldn’t help loving you. You understand now, don’t you? I know that you will never wish to see me again, and it’s better for both of us. Good-bye.”

He stretched out his hand.

“I didn’t know it was so bad as that,” she said, looking at him with kindly eyes.

“Didn’t you see me tremble when the hem of your dress touched me by accident? Didn’t you hear that I couldn’t speak; the words were dried up in my throat?” He sank into a chair weakly; but then immediately gathering himself together, sprang up. “Good-bye,” he said. “Let me go quickly.”

She gave him her hand, and then, partly in kindness, partly in malice, bent forward and kissed his lips. James gave a cry, a sob; now he lost command over himself entirely. He took her in his arms roughly, and kissed her mouth, her eyes, her hair — so passionately that Mrs. Wallace was frightened. She tried to free herself; but he only held her closer, madly kissing her lips.

“Take care,” she said. “What are you doing? Let me go!” And she pushed him away.

She was a cautious woman, who never allowed flirtation to go beyond certain decorous lengths, and she was used to a milder form of philandering.

“You’ve disarranged my hair, you silly boy!” She went to the glass to put it in order, and when she turned back found that James had gone. “What an odd creature!” she muttered.

To Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace the affair was but an incident, such as might have been the love of Phædra had she flourished in an age when the art of living consists in not taking things too seriously; but for Hippolitus a tragedy of one sort or another is inevitable. James was not a man of easy affections; he made the acquaintance of people with a feeling of hostility rather than with the more usual sensation of friendly curiosity. He was shy, and even with his best friends could not lessen his reserve. Some persons are able to form close intimacies with admirable facility, but James felt always between himself and his fellows a sort of barrier. He could not realise that deep and sudden sympathy was even possible, and was apt to look with mistrust upon the appearance thereof. He seemed frigid and perhaps supercilious to those with whom he came in contact; he was forced to go his way, hiding from all eyes the emotions he felt. And when at last he fell passionately in love, it meant to him ten times more than to most men; it was a sudden freedom from himself. He was like a prisoner who sees for the first time in his life the trees and the hurrying clouds, and all the various movement of the world. For a little while James had known a wonderful liberty, an ineffable bliss which coloured the whole universe with new, strange colours. But then he learnt that the happiness was only sin, and he returned voluntarily to his cold prison.... Till he tried to crush it, he did not know how strong was this passion; he did not realise that it had made of him a different man; it was the only thing in the world to him, beside which everything else was meaningless. He became ruthless towards himself, undergoing every torture which he fancied might cleanse him of the deadly sin.

And when Mrs. Wallace, against his will, forced herself upon his imagination, he tried to remember her vulgarity, her underbred manners, her excessive use of scent. She had merely played with him, without thinking or caring what the result to him might be. She was bent on as much enjoyment as possible without exposing herself to awkward consequences; common scandal told him that he was not the first callow youth that she had entangled with her provoking glances and her witty tongue. The epithet by which his brother officers qualified her was expressive, though impolite. James repeated these things a hundred times: he said that Mrs. Wallace was not fit to wipe Mary’s boots; he paraded before himself, like a set of unread school-books, all Mary’s excellent qualities. He recalled her simple piety, her good-nature, and kindly heart; she had every attribute that a man could possibly want in his wife. And yet — and yet, when he slept he dreamed he was talking to the other; all day her voice sang in his ears, her gay smile danced before his eyes. He remembered every word she had ever said; he remembered the passionate kisses he had given her. How could he forget that ecstasy? He writhed, trying to expel the importunate image; but nothing served.

Time could not weaken the impression. Since then he had never seen Mrs. Wallace, but the thought of her was still enough to send the blood racing through his veins. He had done everything to kill the mad, hopeless passion; and always, like a rank weed, it had thriven with greater strength. James knew it was his duty to marry Mary Clibborn, and yet he felt he would rather die. As the months passed on, and he knew he must shortly see her, he was never free from a sense of terrible anxiety. Doubt came to him, and he could not drive it away. The recollection of her was dim, cold, formless; his only hope was that when he saw her love might rise up again, and kill that other passion which made him so utterly despise himself. But he had welcomed the war as a respite, and the thought came to him that its chances might easily solve the difficulty. Then followed the months of hardship and of fighting; and during these the image of Mrs. Wallace had been less persistent, so that James fancied he was regaining the freedom he longed for. And when he lay wounded and ill, his absolute weariness made him ardently look forward to seeing his people again. A hotter love sprang up for them; and the hope became stronger that reunion with Mary might awaken the dead emotion. He wished for it with all his heart.

But he had seen Mary, and he felt it hopeless; she left him cold, almost hostile. And with a mocking laugh, James heard Mrs. Wallace’s words:

“Subalterns always get engaged to the same type of girl. They photograph so badly.”

And now he did not know what to do. The long recalling of the past had left James more uncertain than ever. Some devil within him cried, “Wait, wait! Something may happen!” It really seemed better to let things slide a little. Perhaps — who could tell? — in a day or two the old habit might render Mary as dear to him as when last he had wandered with her in that green wood, James sighed, and looked about him.... The birds still sang merrily, the squirrel leaped from tree to tree; even the blades of grass stood with a certain conscious pleasure, as the light breeze rustled through them. In the mid-day sun all things took pleasure in their life; and all Nature appeared full of joy, coloured and various and insouciant. He alone was sad.

IV

When James went home he found that the Vicar of Little Primpton and his wife had already arrived. They were both of them little, dried-up persons, with an earnest manner and no sense of humour, quite excellent in a rather unpleasant way; they resembled one another like peas, but none knew whether the likeness had grown from the propinquity of twenty years, or had been the original attraction. Deeply impressed with their sacred calling — for Mrs. Jackson would never have acknowledged that the Vicar’s wife held a position inferior to the Vicar’s — they argued that the whole world was God’s, and they God’s particular ministrants; so that it was their plain duty to concern themselves with the business of their fellows — and it must be confessed that they never shrank from this duty. They were neither well-educated, nor experienced, nor tactful; but blissfully ignorant of these defects, they shepherded their flock with little moral barks, and gave them, rather self-consciously, a good example in the difficult way to eternal life. They were eminently worthy people, who thought light-heartedness somewhat indecent. They did endless good in the most disagreeable manner possible; and in their fervour not only bore unnecessary crosses themselves, but saddled them on to everyone else, as the only certain passport to the Golden City.

The Reverend Archibald Jackson had been appointed to the living of Little Primpton while James was in India, and consequently had never seen him.

“I was telling your father,” said Mrs. Jackson, on shaking hands, “that I hoped you were properly grateful for all the mercies that have been bestowed upon you.”

James stared at her a little. “Were you?”

He hated the fashion these people had of discussing matters which he himself thought most private.

“Mr. Jackson was asking if you’d like a short prayer offered up next Sunday, James,” said his mother.

“I shouldn’t at all.”

“Why not?” asked the Vicar, “I think it’s your duty to thank your Maker for your safe return, and I think your parents should join in the thanksgiving.”

“We’re probably none of us less grateful,” said James, “because we don’t want to express our feelings before the united congregation.”

Jamie’s parents looked at him with relief, for the same thought filled their minds; but thinking it their duty to submit themselves to the spiritual direction of the Vicar and his wife, they had not thought it quite right to decline the proposal. Mrs. Jackson glanced at her husband with pained astonishment, but further argument was prevented by the arrival of Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn, and Mary.

Colonel Clibborn was a tall man, with oily black hair and fierce eyebrows, both dyed; aggressively military and reminiscent He had been in a cavalry regiment, where he had come to the philosophic conclusion that all men are dust — except cavalry-men; and he was able to look upon Jamie’s prowess — the prowess of an infantryman — from superior heights. He was a great authority upon war, and could tell anyone what were the mistakes in South Africa, and how they might have been avoided; likewise he had known in the service half the peers of the realm, and talked of them by their Christian names. He spent three weeks every season in London, and dined late, at seven o’clock, so he had every qualification for considering himself a man of fashion.

“I don’t know what they’d do in Little Primpton without us,” he said. “It’s only us who keep it alive.”

But Mrs. Clibborn missed society.

“The only people I can speak to are the Parsons,” she told her husband, plaintively. “They’re very good people — but only infantry, Reggie.”

“Of course, they’re only infantry,” agreed Colonel Clibborn.

Mrs. Clibborn was a regimental beauty — of fifty, who had grown stout; but not for that ceased to use the weapons which Nature had given her against the natural enemies of the sex. In her dealings with several generations of adorers, she had acquired such a habit of languishing glances that now she used them unconsciously. Whether ordering meat from the butcher or discussing parochial matters with Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Clibborn’s tone and manner were such that she might have been saying the most tender things. She had been very popular in the service, because she was the type of philandering woman who required no beating about the bush; her neighbour at the dinner-table, even if he had not seen her before, need never have hesitated to tell her with the soup that she was the handsomest creature he had ever seen, and with the entrée that he adored her.

On coming in, Mrs. Clibborn for a moment looked at James, quite speechless, her head on one side and her eyes screwing into the corner of the room.

“Oh, how wonderful!” she said, at last “I suppose I mustn’t call you Jamie now.” She spoke very slowly, and every word sounded like a caress. Then she looked at James again in silent ecstasy. “Colonel Parsons, how proud you must be! And when I think that soon he will be my son! How thin you look, James!”

“And how well you look, dear lady!”

It was understood that everyone must make compliments to Mrs. Clibborn; otherwise she grew cross, and when she was cross she was horrid.

She smiled to show her really beautiful teeth.

“I should like to kiss you, James. May I, Mrs. Parsons?”

“Certainly,” replied Jamie’s mother, who didn’t approve of Mrs. Clibborn at all.

She turned her cheek to James, and assumed a seraphic expression while he lightly touched it with his lips.

“I’m only an old woman,” she murmured to the company in general.

She seldom made more than one remark at a time, and at the end of each assumed an appropriate attitude — coy, Madonna-like, resigned, as the circumstances might require. Mr. Jackson came forward to shake hands, and she turned her languishing glance on him.

“Oh, Mr. Jackson, how beautiful your sermon was!”

They sat down to dinner, and ate their ox-tail soup. It is terrible to think of the subtlety with which the Evil One can insinuate himself among the most pious; for soup at middle-day is one of his most dangerous wiles, and it is precisely with the simple-minded inhabitants of the country and of the suburbs that this vice is most prevalent.

James was sitting next to Mrs. Clibborn, and presently she looked at him with the melancholy smile which had always seemed to her so effective.

“We want you to tell us how you won your Victoria Cross, Jamie.”

The others, eager to hear the story from the hero’s lips, had been, notwithstanding, too tactful to ask; but they were willing to take advantage of Mrs. Clibborn’s lack of that quality.

“We’ve all been looking forward to it,” said the Vicar.

“I don’t think there’s anything to tell,” replied James.

His father and mother were looking at him with happy eyes, and the Colonel nodded to Mary.

“Please, Jamie, tell us,” she said. “We only saw the shortest account in the papers, and you said nothing about it in your letters.”

“D’you think it’s very good form of me to tell you about it?” asked James, smiling gravely.

“We’re all friends here,” said the Vicar.

And Colonel Clibborn added, making sheep’s eyes at his wife:

“You can’t refuse a lady!”

“I’m an old woman,” sighed Mrs. Clibborn, with a doleful glance. “I can’t expect him to do it for me.”

The only clever thing Mrs. Clibborn had done in her life was to acknowledge to old age at thirty, and then she did not mean it. It had been one of her methods in flirtation, covering all excesses under a maternal aspect. She must have told hundreds of young officers that she was old enough to be their mother; and she always said it looking plaintively at the ceiling, when they squeezed her hand.

“It wasn’t a very wonderful thing I did,” said James, at last, “and it was completely useless.”

“No fine deed is useless,” said the Vicar, sententiously.

James looked at him a moment, but proceeded with his story.

“It was only that I tried to save the life of a sub who’d just joined — and didn’t.”

“Would you pass me the salt?” said Mrs. Clibborn.

“Mamma!” cried Mary, with a look as near irritation as her gentle nature permitted.

“Go on, Jamie, there’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Parsons.

And James, seeing his father’s charming, pathetic look of pride, told the story to him alone. The others did not care how much they hurt him so long as they could gape in admiration, but in his father he saw the most touching sympathy.

“It was a chap called Larcher, a boy of eighteen, with fair hair and blue eyes, who looked quite absurdly young. His people live somewhere round here, near Ashford.”

“Larcher, did you say?” asked Mrs. Clibborn, “I’ve never heard the name. It’s not a county family.”

“Go on, Jamie,” said Mary, with some impatience.

“Well, he’d only been with us three or four weeks; but I knew him rather well. Oddly enough, he’d taken a sort of fancy to me. He was such a nice, bright boy, so enthusiastic and simple. I used to tell him that he ought to have been at school, rather than roughing it at the Cape.”

Mrs. Clibborn sat with an idiotic smile on her lips, and a fixed expression of girlish innocence.

“Well, we knew we should be fighting in a day or so; and the evening before the battle young Larcher was talking to me. ‘How d’you feel?’ I said. He didn’t answer quite so quickly as usual. ‘D’you know,’ he said, ‘I’m so awfully afraid that I shall funk it.’ ‘You needn’t mind that,’ I said, and I laughed. ‘The first time we most of us do funk it. For five minutes or so you just have to cling on to your eyelashes to prevent yourself from running away, and then you feel all right, and you think it’s rather sport.’ ‘I’ve got a sort of presentiment that I shall be killed,’ he said. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ I answered. ‘We’ve all got a presentiment that we shall be killed the first time we’re under fire. If all the people were killed who had presentiments, half the army would have gone to kingdom come long ago.’”

“You should have told him to lay his trust in the hands of Him who has power to turn the bullet and to break the sword,” said Mrs. Jackson.

“He wasn’t that sort,” replied James, drily, “I laughed at him, thinking it the better way.... Well, next day we did really fight. We were sent to take an unoccupied hill. Our maxim was that a hill is always unoccupied unless the enemy are actually firing from it. Of course, the place was chock full of Boers; they waited till we had come within easy range for a toy-pistol, and then fired murderously. We did all we could. We tried to storm the place, but we hadn’t a chance. Men tumbled down like nine-pins. I’ve never seen anything like it. The order was given to fire, and there was nothing to fire at but the naked rocks. We had to retire — we couldn’t do anything else; and presently I found that poor Larcher had been wounded. Well, I thought he couldn’t be left where he was, so I went back for him. I asked him if he could move. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I’m hurt in the leg.’ I knelt down and bandaged him up as well as I could. He was simply bleeding like a pig; and meanwhile brother Boer potted at us for all he was worth. ‘How d’you feel?’ I asked. ‘Bit dicky; but comfortable. I didn’t funk it, did I?’ ‘No, of course not, you juggins!’ I said. ‘Can you walk, d’you think?’ ‘I’ll try.’ I lifted him up and put my arm round him, and we got along for a bit; then he became awfully white and groaned, ‘I do feel so bad, Parsons,’ and then he fainted. So I had to carry him; and we went a bit farther, and then — and then I was hit in the arm. ‘I say, I can’t carry you now,’ I said; ‘for God’s sake, buck up.’ He opened his eyes, and I prevented him from falling. ‘I think I can stand,’ he said, and as he spoke a bullet got him in the neck, and his blood splashed over my face. He gave a gasp and died.”

James finished, and his mother and Mary wiped the tears from their eyes. Mrs. Clibborn turned to her husband.

“Reggie, I’m sure the Larchers are not a county family.”

“There was a sapper of that name whom we met at Simla once, my dear,” replied the Colonel.

“I thought I’d heard it before,” said Mrs. Clibborn, with an air of triumph, as though she’d found out a very difficult puzzle. “Had he a red moustache?”

“Have you heard from the young man’s people, Captain Parsons?” asked Mrs. Jackson.

“I had a letter from Mrs. Larcher, the boy’s mother, asking me to go over and see her.”

“She must be very grateful to you, Jamie.”

“Why? She has no reason to be.”

“You did all you could to save him.”

“It would have been better if I’d left him alone. Don’t you see that if he had remained where he was he might have been alive now. He would have been taken prisoner and sent to Pretoria, but that is better than rotting on the veldt. He was killed because I tried to save him.”

“There are worse things than death,” said Colonel Parsons. “I have often thought that those fellows who surrendered did the braver thing. It is easy to stand and be shot down, but to hoist the white flag so as to save the lives of the men under one — that requires courage.”

“It is a sort of courage which seemed not uncommon,” answered James, drily. “And they had a fairly pleasant time in Pretoria. Eventually, I believe, wars will be quite bloodless; rival armies will perambulate, and whenever one side has got into a good position, the other will surrender wholesale. Campaigns will be conducted like manœuvres, and the special correspondents will decide which lot has won.”

“If they were surrounded and couldn’t escape, it would have been wicked not to hoist the white flag,” said Mrs. Jackson.

“I daresay you know more about it than I,” replied James.

But the Vicar’s lady insisted:

“If you were so placed that on one hand was certain death for yourself and all your men, and on the other hand surrender, which would you chose?”

“One can never tell; and in those matters it is wiser not to boast. Certain death is an awful thing, but our fathers preferred it to surrender.”

“War is horrible!” said Mary, shuddering.

“Oh, no!” cried James, shaking himself out of his despondency. “War is the most splendid thing in the world. I shall never forget those few minutes, now and then, when we got on top of the Boers and fought with them, man to man, in the old way. Ah, life seemed worth living then! One day, I remember, they’d been giving it us awfully hot all the morning, and we’d lost frightfully. At last we rushed their position, and, by Jove, we let ’em have it! How we did hate them! You should have heard the Tommies cursing as they killed! I shall never forget the exhilaration of it, the joy of thinking that we were getting our own again. By Gad, it beat cock-fighting!”

Jamie’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone; but he had forgotten where he was, and his father’s voice came to him through a mist of blood and a roar of sound.

“I have fought, too,” said Colonel Parsons, looking at his son with troubled eyes— “I have fought, too, but never with anger in my heart, nor lust of vengeance. I hope I did my duty, but I never forgot that my enemy was a fellow-creature. I never felt joy at killing, but pain and grief. War is inevitable, but it is horrible, horrible! It is only the righteous cause that can excuse it; and then it must be tempered with mercy and forgiveness.”

“Cause? Every cause is righteous. I can think of no war in which right has not been fairly equal on both sides; in every question there is about as much to be said on either part, and in none more than in war. Each country is necessarily convinced of the justice of its own cause.”

“They can’t both be right.”

“Oh, yes, they can. It’s generally six to one and half a dozen of the other.”

“Do you mean to say that you, a military man, think the Boers were justified?” asked Colonel Clibborn, with some indignation.

James laughed.

“You must remember that if any nation but ourselves had been engaged, our sympathies would have been entirely with the sturdy peasants fighting for their independence. The two great powers in the affairs of the world are sentiment and self-interest. The Boers are the smaller, weaker nation, and they have been beaten; it is only natural that sympathy should be with them. It was with the French for the same reason, after the Franco-Prussian War. But we, who were fighting, couldn’t think of sentiment; to us it was really a matter of life and death, I was interested to see how soon the English put aside their ideas of fair play and equal terms when we had had a few reverses. They forgot that one Englishman was equal to ten foreigners, and insisted on sending out as many troops as possible. I fancy you were badly panic-stricken over here.”

James saw that his listeners looked at him with surprise, even with consternation; and he hastened to explain.

“Of course, I don’t blame them. They were quite right to send as many men as possible. The object of war is not to do glorious actions, but to win. Other things being equal, it is obviously better to be ten to one; it is less heroic, but more reasonable.”

“You take from war all the honour and all the chivalry!” cried Mary. “The only excuse for war is that it brings out the noblest qualities of man — self-sacrifice, unselfishness, endurance.”

“But war doesn’t want any excuse,” replied James, smiling gently. “Many people say that war is inhuman and absurd; many people are uncommonly silly. When they think war can be abolished, they show a phenomenal ignorance of the conditions of all development. War in one way and another is at the very root of life. War is not conducted only by fire and sword; it is in all nature, it is the condition of existence for all created things. Even the wild flowers in the meadow wage war, and they wage it more ruthlessly even than man, for with them defeat means extermination. The law of Nature is that the fit should kill the unfit. The Lord is the Lord of Hosts. The lame, and the halt, and the blind must remain behind, while the strong man goes his way rejoicing.”

“How hard you are!” said Mary. “Have you no pity, James?”

“D’you know, I’ve got an idea that there’s too much pity in the world. People seem to be losing their nerve; reality shocks them, and they live slothfully in the shoddy palaces of Sham Ideals. The sentimentalists, the cowards, and the cranks have broken the spirit of mankind. The general in battle now is afraid to strike because men may be killed. Sometimes it is worth while to lose men. When we become soldiers, we know that we cease to be human beings, and are merely the instruments for a certain work; we know that sometimes it may be part of a general’s deliberate plan that we should be killed. I have no confidence in a leader who is tender-hearted. Compassion weakens his brain, and the result, too often, is disaster.”

But as he spoke, James realised with a start how his father would take what he was saying. He could have torn out his tongue, he would have given anything that the words should remain unspoken. His father, in pity and in humanity, had committed just such a fatal mistake, and trying tender-heartedly to save life had brought about death and disaster. He would take the thoughtless words as a deliberate condemnation; the wound, barely closed, was torn open by his very son, and he must feel again the humiliation which had nearly killed him.

Colonel Parsons sat motionless, as though he were stunned, his eyes fixed on James with horror and pain; he looked like some hunted animal, terror-stricken, and yet surprised, wondering that man should be so cruel.

“What can I do?” thought James. “How can I make it good for him?”

The conversation was carried on by the Clibborns and by the Vicar, all happily unconscious that a tragedy was acting under their noses. James looked at his father. He wanted to show how bitterly he regretted the pain he had caused, but knew not what to say; he wanted to give a sign of his eager love, and tortured himself, knowing the impossibility of showing in any way his devotion.

Fortunately, the maid came in to announce that the school children were without, to welcome Captain Parsons; and they all rose from the table.

V

Colonel Parsons and his wife had wished no function to celebrate the home-coming of James; but gave in to the persuasions of Mary and of Mr. Dryland, the curate, who said that a public ceremony would be undoubtedly a stimulus to the moral welfare of Little Primpton. No man could escape from his obligations, and Captain Parsons owed it to his fellow-countrymen of Little Primpton to let them show their appreciation of his great deed.

The Vicar went so far as to assert that a hearty greeting to the hero would be as salutory to the parishioners as a sermon of his own, while it would awaken James, a young man and possibly thoughtless, to a proper sense of his responsibilities. But the sudden arrival of James had disturbed the arrangements, and Mr. Dryland, in some perplexity, went to see Mary.

“What are we to do, Miss Clibborn? The school children will be so disappointed.”

The original plan had been to meet the hero as he drove towards Primpton House from the station, and the curate was unwilling to give it up.

“D’you think Captain Parsons would go into Tunbridge Wells and drive in at two o’clock, as if he were just arriving?”

“I’m afraid he wouldn’t,” replied Mary, doubtfully, “and I think he’d only laugh if I asked him. He seemed glad when he thought he had escaped the celebration.”

“Did he, indeed? How true it is that real courage is always modest! But it would be an eternal disgrace to Little Primpton if we did not welcome our hero, especially now that everything is prepared. It must not be said that Little Primpton neglects to honour him whom the Empire has distinguished.”

After turning over many plans, they decided that the procession should come to Primpton House at the appointed hour, when Captain Parsons would receive it from the triumphal arch at the gate.... When the servant announced that the function was ready to begin, an announcement emphasised by the discordant notes of the brass band, Mary hurriedly explained to James what was expected of him, and they all made for the front door.

Primpton House faced the green, and opposite the little village shops were gay with bunting; at the side, against the highroad that led to Groombridge, the church and the public-house stood together in friendly neighbourhood, decorated with Union Jacks. The whole scene, with its great chestnut-trees, and the stretch of greenery beyond, was pleasantly rural, old-fashioned and very English; and to complete it, the sun shone down comfortably like a good-natured, mild old gentleman. The curate, with a fine sense of order, had arranged on the right the school-boys, nicely scrubbed and redolent of pomatum; and on the left the girls, supported by their teachers. In the middle stood the choir, the brass band, and Mr. Dryland. The village yokels were collected round in open-mouthed admiration. The little party from the house took their places under the triumphal arch, the Clibborns assuming an expression of genteel superciliousness; and as they all wore their Sunday clothes, they made quite an imposing group.

Seeing that they were ready, Mr. Dryland stepped forward, turned his back so as to command the musicians, and coughed significantly. He raised above his head his large, white clerical hand, stretching out the index-finger, and began to beat time. He bellowed aloud, and the choir, a bar or so late, followed lustily. The band joined in with a hearty braying of trumpets.

“See, the conquering Hero comes,

Sound the trumpets; beat the drums.”

But growing excited at the music issuing from his throat, the curate raised the other hand which held his soft felt hat, and beat time energetically with that also.

At the end of the verse the performers took a rapid breath, as though afraid of being left behind, and then galloped on, a little less evenly, until one by one they reached the highly-decorated Amen.

When the last note of the last cornet had died away on the startled air, Mr. Dryland made a sign to the head boy of the school, who thereupon advanced and waved his cap, shouting:

“Three cheers for Capting Parsons, V.C.!”

Then the curate, wiping his heated brow, turned round and cleared his throat.

“Captain Parsons,” he said, in a loud voice, so that none should miss his honeyed words, “we, the inhabitants of Little Primpton, welcome you to your home. I need not say that it is with great pleasure that we have gathered together this day to offer you our congratulations on your safe return to those that love you. I need not remind you that there is no place like home. (“Hear, hear!” from the Vicar.) We are proud to think that our fellow-parishioner should have gained the coveted glory of the Victoria Cross. Little Primpton need not be ashamed now to hold up its head among the proudest cities of the Empire. You have brought honour to yourself, but you have brought honour to us also. You have shown that Englishmen know how to die; you have shown the rival nations of the Continent that the purity and the godliness of Old England still bear fruit. But I will say no more; I wished only to utter a few words to welcome you on behalf of those who cannot, perhaps, express themselves so well as I can. I will say no more. Captain Parsons, we hope that you will live long to enjoy your honour and glory, side by side with her who is to shortly become your wife. I would only assure you that your example has not been lost upon us; we all feel better, nobler, and more truly Christian. And we say to you, now that you have overcome all dangers and tribulation, now that you have returned to the bosom of your beloved family, take her who has also given us an example of resignation, of courage, and of — and of resignation. Take her, we say, and be happy; confident in the respect, esteem, and affection of the people of Little Primpton. James Brown, who has the honour to bear the same Christian name as yourself, and is also the top boy of the Parish School, will now recite a short poem entitled ‘Casabianca.’

Mr. Dryland had wished to compose an ode especially for the occasion. It would evidently have been effective to welcome the hero, to glorify his deed, and to point the moral in a few original verses; but, unhappily, the muse was froward, which was singular, since the élite of Little Primpton had unimpeachable morals, ideals of the most approved character, and principles enough to build a church with; nor was an acquaintance with literature wanting. They all read the daily papers, and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, in addition, read the Church Times. Mary even knew by heart whole chunks of Sir Lewis Morris, and Mr. Dryland recited Tennyson at penny readings. But when inspiration is wanting, a rhyming dictionary, for which the curate sent to London, will not help to any great extent; and finally the unanimous decision was reached to give some well-known poem apposite to the circumstance. It shows in what charming unity of spirit these simple, God-fearing people lived, and how fine was their sense of literary excellence, that without hesitation they voted in chorus for “Casabianca.”

The head boy stepped forward — he had been carefully trained by Mr. Dryland — and with appropriate gestures recited the immortal verses of Felicia Hemans:

“The boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but ‘e ‘ad fled;

The flame that lit the battle’s wreck,

Shone round ‘im o’er the dead.”

When he finished, amid the discreet applause of the little party beneath the archway, Mr. Dryland again advanced.

“Polly Game, the top girl of the Parish School, will now present Miss Clibborn with a bouquet. Step forward, Polly Game.”

This was a surprise arranged by the curate, and he watched with pleasure Mary’s look of delighted astonishment.

Polly Game stepped forward, and made a little speech in the ingenuous words which Mr. Dryland had thought natural to her character and station.

“Please, Miss Clibborn, we, the girls of Little Primpton, wish to present you with this bouquet as a slight token of our esteem. We wish you a long life and a ‘appy marriage with the choice of your ‘eart.”

She then handed a very stiff bunch of flowers, surrounded with frilled paper like the knuckle of a leg of mutton.

“We will now sing hymn number one hundred and thirty-seven,” said Mr. Dryland.

The verses were given vigorously, while Mrs. Clibborn, with a tender smile, murmured to Mrs. Parsons that it was beautiful to see such a nice spirit among the lower classes. The strains of the brass band died away on the summer breeze, and there was a momentary pause. Then the Vicar, with a discreet cough to clear his throat, came forward.

“Captain Parsons, ladies and gentlemen, parishioners of Little Primpton, I wish to take the opportunity to say a few words.”

The Vicar made an admirable speech. The sentiments were hackneyed, the observations self-evident, and the moral obvious. His phrases had the well-known ring which distinguishes the true orator. Mr. Jackson was recognised everywhere to be a fine platform speaker, but his varied excellence could not be appreciated in a summary, and he had a fine verbosity. It is sufficient to say that he concluded by asking for more cheers, which were heartily given.

James found the whole affair distasteful and ridiculous; and indeed scarcely noticed what was going on, for his thoughts were entirely occupied with his father. At first Colonel Parsons seemed too depressed to pay attention to the ceremony, and his eyes travelled every now and again to James, with that startled, unhappy expression which was horribly painful to see. But his age and weakness prevented him from feeling very intensely for more than a short while; time had brought its own good medicine, and the old man’s mind was easily turned. Presently he began to smile, and the look of pride and happiness returned to his face.

But James was not satisfied. He felt he must make active reparation. When the Vicar finished, and he understood that some reply was expected, it occurred to him that he had an opportunity of salving the bitter wound he had caused. The very hatred he felt at making open allusion to his feelings made him think it a just punishment; none knew but himself how painful it was to talk in that strain to stupid, curious people.

“I thank you very much for the welcome you have all given me,” he said.

His voice trembled in his nervousness, so that he could hardly command it, and he reddened. It seemed to James a frightful humiliation to have to say the things he had in mind, it made them all ugly and vulgar; he was troubled also by his inability to express what he felt. He noticed a reporter for the local newspaper rapidly taking notes.

“I have been very much touched by your kindness. Of course, I am extremely proud to have won the Victoria Cross, but I feel it is really more owing to my father than to any deed of mine. You all know my father, and you know what a brave and gallant soldier he was. It was owing to his fine example, and to his teaching, and to his constant, loving care, that I was able to do the little I did. And I should like to say that it is to him and to my mother that I owe everything. It is the thought of his unblemished and exquisite career, of the beautiful spirit which brightly coloured all his actions, that has supported me in times of difficulty. And my earnest desire has always been to prove myself worthy of my father and the name he has handed on to me. You have cheered me very kindly; now I should like to ask you for three cheers for my father.”

Colonel Parsons looked at his son as he began to speak. When he realised Jamie’s meaning, tears filled his eyes and streamed down his cheeks — tears of happiness and gratitude. All recollection of the affront quickly vanished, and he felt an ecstatic joy such as he had never known before. The idea came to him in his weakness: “Now I can die happy!” He was too overcome to be ashamed of his emotion, and taking out his handkerchief, quite unaffectedly wiped his eyes.

The band struck up “Rule, Britannia” and “God Save the Queen”; and in orderly fashion, as Mr. Dryland had arranged, they all marched off. The group under the triumphal arch broke up, and the Jacksons and Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn went their ways.

Mary came into the house. She took Jamie’s hands, her eyes wet with tears.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said, “you are good! It was charming of you to speak as you did of your father. You don’t know how happy you’ve made him.”

“I’m very glad you are pleased,” he said gravely, and bending forward, put his arm round her waist and kissed her.

For a moment she leant her head against his shoulder; but with her emotion was a thing soon vanquished. She wished, above all things, to be manly, as befitted a soldier’s wife. She shook herself, and withdrew from Jamie’s arms.

“But I must be running off, or mamma will be angry with me. Good-bye for the present.”

James went into the dining-room, where his father, exhausted by the varied agitations of the day, was seeking composure in the leading articles of the morning paper. Mrs. Parsons sat on her usual chair, knitting, and she greeted him with a loving smile. James saw that they were both pleased with his few awkward words, which still rang in his own ears as shoddy and sentimental, and he tasted, somewhat ruefully, the delight of making the kind creatures happy.

“Has Mary gone?” asked Mrs. Parsons.

“Yes. She said her mother would be angry if she stayed.”

“I saw that Mrs. Clibborn was put out. I suppose because someone besides herself attracted attention. I do think she is the wickedest woman I’ve ever known.”

“Frances, Frances!” expostulated the Colonel.

“She is, Richmond. She’s a thoroughly bad woman. The way she treats Mary is simply scandalous.”

“Poor girl!” said the Colonel.

“Oh, Jamie, it makes my blood boil when I think of it. Sometimes the poor thing used to come here quite upset, and simply cry as if her heart was breaking.”

“But what does Mrs. Clibborn do?” asked James, surprised.

“Oh, I can’t tell you! She’s dreadfully unkind. She hates Mary because she’s grown up, and because she sometimes attracts attention. She’s always making little cruel remarks. You only see her when she’s on her good behaviour; but when she’s alone with Mary, Mrs. Clibborn is simply horrible. She abuses her; she tells her she’s ugly, and that she dresses badly. How can she dress any better when Mrs. Clibborn spends all the money on herself? I’ve heard her myself say to Mary: ‘How stupid and clumsy you are! I’m ashamed to take you anywhere.’ And Mary’s the very soul of goodness. She teaches in the Sunday School, and she trains the choir-boys, and she visits the poor; and yet Mrs. Clibborn complains that she’s useless. I wanted Richmond to talk to Colonel Clibborn about it.”

“Mary particularly asked me not to,” said Colonel Parsons. “She preferred to bear anything rather than create unhappiness between her father and mother.”

“She’s a perfect angel of goodness!” cried Mrs. Parsons, enthusiastically. “She’s simply a martyr, and all the time she’s as kind and affectionate to her mother as if she were the best woman in the world. She never lets anyone say a word against her.”

“Sometimes,” murmured Colonel Parsons, “she used to say that her only happiness was in the thought of you, Jamie.”

“The thought of me?” said James; and then hesitatingly: “Do you think she is very fond of me, mother?”

“Fond of you?” Mrs Parsons laughed. “She worships the very ground you tread on. You can’t imagine all you are to her.”

“You’ll make the boy vain,” said Colonel Parsons, laughing.

“Often the only way we could comfort her was by saying that you would come back some day and take her away from here.”

“We shall have to be thinking of weddings soon, I suppose?” said Colonel Parsons, looking at James, with a bantering smile.

James turned white. “It’s rather early to think of that just yet.”

“We spoke of June,” said his mother.

“We must see.”

“You’ve waited so long,” said Colonel Parsons; “I’m sure you don’t want to wait any longer.”

“She will make you a good wife, Jamie. You are lucky to have found such a dear, sweet girl. It’s a blessing to us to think that you will be so happy.”

“As I was saying to Mary the other day,” added Colonel Parsons, laughing gently, “‘you must begin thinking of your trousseau, my dear,’ I said, ‘If I know anything of Jamie, he’ll want to get married in a week. These young fellows are always impatient.’”

Mrs Parsons smiled.

“Well, it’s a great secret, and Mary would be dreadfully annoyed if she thought you knew; but when we heard you were coming home, she started to order things. Her father has given her a hundred pounds to begin with.”

They had no mercy, thought James. They were horribly cruel in their loving-kindness, in their affectionate interest for his welfare.

VI

James had been away from England for five years; and in that time a curious change, long silently proceeding, had made itself openly felt — becoming manifest, like an insidious disease, only when every limb and every organ were infected. A new spirit had been in action, eating into the foundations of the national character; it worked through the masses of the great cities, unnerved by the three poisons of drink, the Salvation Army, and popular journalism. A mighty force of hysteria and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population was affected; the current literature of the day flourished upon it; the people of England, neurotic from the stress of the last sixty years, became unstable as water. And with the petty reverses of the beginning of the war, the last barriers of shame were broken down; their arrogance was dissipated, and suddenly the English became timorous as a conquered nation, deprecating, apologetic; like frightened women, they ran to and fro, wringing their hands. Reserve, restraint, self-possession, were swept away ... And now we are frankly emotional; reeds tottering in the wind, our boast is that we are not even reeds that think; we cry out for idols. Who is there that will set up a golden ass that we may fall down and worship? We glory in our shame, in our swelling hearts, in our eyes heavy with tears. We want sympathy at all costs; we run about showing our bleeding vitals, asking one another whether they are not indeed a horrible sight. Englishmen now are proud of being womanish, and nothing is more manly than to weep. To be a man of feeling is better than to be a gentleman — it is certainly much easier. The halt of mind, the maim, the blind of wit, have come by their own; and the poor in spirit have inherited the earth.

James had left England when this emotional state was contemptible. Found chiefly in the dregs of the populace, it was ascribed to ignorance and to the abuse of stimulants. When he returned, it had the public conscience behind it. He could not understand the change. The persons he had known sober, equal-minded, and restrained, now seemed violently hysterical. James still shuddered, remembering the curate’s allusions to his engagement; and he wondered that Mary, far from thinking them impertinent, had been vastly gratified. She seemed to take pleasure in publicly advertising her connection, in giving her private affairs to the inspection of all and sundry. The whole ceremony had been revolting; he loathed the adulation and the fulsome sentiment. His own emotions seemed vulgar now that he had been forced to display them to the gaping crowd.

But the function of the previous day had the effect also of sealing his engagement. Everyone knew of it. Jamie’s name was indissolubly joined with Mary’s; he could not break the tie now without exposing her to the utmost humiliation. And how could he offer her such an affront when she loved him devotedly? It was not vanity that made him think so, his mother had told him outright; and he saw it in every look of Mary’s eyes, in the least inflection of her voice. James asked himself desperately why Mary should care for him. He was not good-looking; he was silent; he was not amusing; he had no particular attraction.

James was sitting in his room, and presently heard Mary’s voice calling from the hall.

“Jamie! Jamie!”

He got up and came downstairs.

“Why, Jamie,” said his father, “you ought to have gone to fetch Mary, instead of waiting here for her to come to you.”

“You certainly ought, Jamie,” said Mary, laughing; and then, looking at him, with sudden feeling: “But how seedy you look!”

James had hardly slept, troubling over his perplexity, and he looked haggard and tired.

“I’m all right,” he said; “I’m not very strong yet, and I was rather exhausted yesterday.”

“Mary thought you would like to go with her this morning, while she does her district visiting.”

“It’s a beautiful morning, Jamie; it will do you good!” cried Mary.

“I should like it very much.”

They started out. Mary wore her every-day costume — a serge gown, a sailor hat, and solid, square-toed boots. She walked fast, with long steps and firm carriage. James set himself to talk, asking her insignificant questions about the people she visited. Mary answered with feeling and at length, but was interrupted by arriving at a cottage.

“You’d better not come in here,” she said, blushing slightly; “although I want to take you in to some of the people. I think it will be a lesson to them.”

“A lesson in what?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you to your face, I don’t want to make you conceited; but you can guess while you’re waiting for me.”

Mary’s patient was about to be confined, and thinking her condition rather indecent, quite rightly, Mary had left James outside. But the good lady, since it was all in the way of nature, was not so ashamed of herself as she should have been, and insisted on coming to the door to show Miss Clibborn out.

“Take care he doesn’t see you!” cried Mary in alarm, pushing her back.

“Well, there’s no harm in it. I’m a married woman. You’ll have to go through it yourself one day, miss.”

Mary rejoined her lover, suffused in blushes, hoping he had seen nothing.

“It’s very difficult to teach these people propriety. Somehow the lower classes seem to have no sense of decency.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing I can tell you,” replied Mary, modestly. Then, to turn the conversation: “She asked after my young man, and was very anxious to see you.”

“Was she? How did she know you had a young man?” asked James, grimly.

“Oh, everyone knows that! You can’t keep secrets in Primpton. And besides, I’m not ashamed of it. Are you?”

“I haven’t got a young man.”

Mary laughed.

They walked on. The morning was crisp and bright, sending a healthy colour through Mary’s cheeks. The blue sky and the bracing air made her feel more self-reliant, better assured than ever of her upright purpose and her candid heart. The road, firm underfoot and delightful to walk upon, stretched before them in a sinuous line. A pleasant odour came from the adjoining fields, from the farm-yards, as they passed them; the larks soared singing with happy heart, while the sparrows chirruped in the hedges. The hawthorn was bursting into leaf, all bright and green, and here and there the wild flowers were showing themselves, the buttercup and the speedwell. But while the charm of Nature made James anxious to linger, to lean on a gate and look for a while at the cows lazily grazing, Mary had too sound a constitution to find in it anything but a stimulus to renewed activity.

“We mustn’t dawdle, you lazy creature!” she cried merrily. “I shall never get through my round before one o’clock if we don’t put our best foot foremost.”

“Can’t you see them some other time?”

The limpid air softened his heart; he thought for a moment that if he could wander aimlessly with Mary, gossiping without purpose, they might end by understanding one another. The sun, the wild flowers, the inconstant breeze, might help to create a new feeling.

But Mary turned to him with grave tenderness.

“You know I’d do anything to please you, Jamie. But even for you I cannot neglect my duty.”

James froze.

“Of course, you’re quite right,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter.”

They came to another cottage, and this time Mary took James in.

“It’s a poor old man,” she said. “I’m so sorry for him; he’s always so grateful for what I do.”

They found him lying in bed, writhing with pain, his head supported by a pillow.

“Oh, how uncomfortable you look!” cried Mary. “You poor thing! Who on earth arranged your pillows like that?”

“My daughter, miss.”

“I must talk to her; she ought to know better.”

Miss Clibborn drew away the pillows very gently, smoothed them out, and replaced them.

“I can’t bear ’em like that, miss. The other is the only way I’m comfortable.”

“Nonsense, John!” cried Mary, brightly. “You couldn’t be comfortable with your head all on one side; you’re much better as you are.”

James saw the look of pain in the man’s face, and ventured to expostulate.

“Don’t you think you’d better put them back in the old way? He seemed much easier.”

“Nonsense, Jamie. You must know that the head ought to be higher than the body.”

“Please, miss, I can’t bear the pillow like this.”

“Oh, yes, you can. You must show more forbearance and fortitude. Remember that God sends you pain in order to try you. Think of Our Lord suffering silently on the Cross.”

“You’re putting him to quite unnecessary torture, Mary,” said James. “He must know best how he’s comfortable.”

“It’s only because he’s obstinate. Those people are always complaining. Really, you must permit me to know more about nursing than you do, Jamie.”

Jamie’s face grew dark and grim, but he made no answer.

“I shall send you some soup, John,” said Mary, as they went out, “You know, one can never get these people to do anything in a rational way,” she added to James. “It’s perfectly heartrending trying to teach them even such a natural thing as making themselves comfortable.”

James was silent.

They walked a few yards farther, and passed a man in a dog-cart Mary turned very red, staring in front of her with the fixed awkwardness of one not adept in the useful art of cutting.

“Oh,” she said, with vexation, “he’s going to John.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Dr. Higgins — a horrid, vulgar man. He’s been dreadfully rude to me, and I make a point of cutting him.”

“Really?”

“Oh, he behaved scandalously. I can’t bear doctors, they’re so dreadfully interfering. And they seem to think no one can know anything about doctoring but themselves! He was attending one of my patients; it was a woman, and of course I knew what she wanted. She was ill and weak, and needed strengthening; so I sent her down a bottle of port. Well, Dr. Higgins came to the house, and asked to see me. He’s not a gentleman, you know, and he was so rude! ‘I’ve come to see you about Mrs. Gandy,’ he said. ‘I particularly ordered her not to take stimulants, and I find you’ve sent her down port.’ ‘I thought she wanted it,’ I said. ‘She told me that you had said she wasn’t to touch anything, but I thought a little port would do her good.’ Then he said, ‘I wish to goodness you wouldn’t interfere with what you know nothing about.’ ‘I should like you to remember that you’re speaking to a gentlewoman,’ I said. ‘I don’t care twopence,’ he answered, in the rudest way. ‘I’m not going to allow you to interfere with my patients. I took the port away, and I wish you to understand that you’re not to send any more.’

“Then I confess I lost my temper. ‘I suppose you took it away to drink yourself?’ I said. Then what d’you think he did? He burst out laughing, and said: ‘A bottle of port that cost two bob at the local grocer’s! The saints preserve us!’”

James repressed a smile.

“‘You impertinent man!’ I said. ‘You ought to be ashamed to talk to a woman like that. I shall at once send Mrs. Gandy another bottle of port, and it’s no business of yours how much it cost.’ ‘If you do,’ he said, ‘and anything happens, by God, I’ll have you up for manslaughter.’ I rang the bell. ‘Leave the house,’ I said, ‘and never dare come here again!’ Now don’t you think I was right, Jamie?”

“My dear Mary, you always are!”

James looked back at the doctor entering the cottage. It was some comfort to think that he would put the old man into a comfortable position.

“When I told papa,” added Mary, “he got in a most fearful rage. He insisted on going out with a horsewhip, and said he meant to thrash Dr. Higgins. He looked for him all the morning, but couldn’t find him; and then your mother and I persuaded him it was better to treat such a vulgar man with silent contempt.”

James had noticed that the doctor was a burly, broad-shouldered fellow, and he could not help thinking Colonel Clibborn’s resolution distinctly wise. How sad it is that in this world right is so often subordinate to brute force!

“But he’s not received anywhere. We all cut him; and I get everyone I can not to employ him.”

“Ah!” murmured James.

Mary’s next patient was feminine, and James was again left to cool his heels in the road; but not alone, for Mr. Dryland came out of the cottage. The curate was a big, stout man, with reddish hair, and a complexion like squashed strawberries and cream; his large, heavy face, hairless except for scanty red eyebrows, gave a disconcerting impression of nakedness. His eyes were blue and his mouth small, with the expression which young ladies, eighty years back, strove to acquire by repeating the words prune and prism. He had a fat, full voice, with unctuous modulations not entirely under his control, so that sometimes, unintentionally, he would utter the most commonplace remark in a tone fitted for a benediction. Mr. Dryland was possessed by the laudable ambition to be all things to all men; and he tried, without conspicuous success, always to suit his conversation to his hearers. With old ladies he was bland; with sportsmen slangy; with yokels he was broadly humorous; and with young people aggressively juvenile. But above all, he wished to be manly, and cultivated a boisterous laugh and a jovial manner.

“I don’t know if you remember me,” he cried, with a ripple of fat laughter, going up to James, “I had the pleasure of addressing a few words to you yesterday in my official capacity. Miss Clibborn told me you were waiting, and I thought I would introduce myself. My name is Dryland.”

“I remember quite well.”

“I’m the Vicar’s bottle-washer, you know,” added the curate, with a guffaw. “Change for you — going round to the sick and needy of the parish — after fighting the good fight. I hear you were wounded.”

“I was, rather badly.”

“I wish I could have gone out and had a smack at the Boers. Nothing I should have liked better. But, of course, I’m only a parson, you know. It wouldn’t have been thought the correct thing.” Mr. Dryland, from his superior height, beamed down on James. “I don’t know whether you remember the few words which I was privileged to address to you yesterday—”

“Perfectly,” put in James.

“Impromptu, you know; but they expressed my feelings. That is one of the best things the war has done for us. It has permitted us to express our emotions more openly. I thought it a beautiful sight to see the noble tears coursing down your father’s furrowed cheeks. Those few words of yours have won all our hearts. I may say that our little endeavours were nothing beside that short, unstudied speech. I hope there will be a full report in the Tunbridge Wells papers.”

“I hope not!” cried James.

“You’re too modest, Captain Parsons. That is what I said to Miss Clibborn yesterday; true courage is always modest. But it is our duty to see that it does not hide its light under a bushel. I hope you won’t think it a liberty, but I myself gave the reporter a few notes.”

“Will Miss Clibborn be long?” asked James, looking at the cottage.

“Ah, what a good woman she is, Captain Parsons. My dear sir, I assure you she’s an angel of mercy.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so.”

“Not at all! It’s a pleasure. The good she does is beyond praise. She’s a wonderful help in the parish. She has at heart the spiritual welfare of the people, and I may say that she is a moral force of the first magnitude.”

“I’m sure that’s a very delightful thing to be.”

“You know I can’t help thinking,” laughed Mr. Dryland fatly, “that she ought to be the wife of a clergyman, rather than of a military man.”

Mary came out.

“I’ve been telling Mrs. Gray that I don’t approve of the things her daughter wears in church,” she said. “I don’t think it’s nice for people of that class to wear such bright colours.”

“I don’t know what we should do in the parish without you,” replied the curate, unctuously. “It’s so rare to find someone who knows what is right, and isn’t afraid of speaking out.”

Mary said that she and James were walking home, and asked Mr. Dryland whether he would not accompany them.

“I shall be delighted, if I’m not de trop.”

He looked with laughing significance from one to the other.

“I wanted to talk to you about my girls,” said Mary.

She had a class of village maidens, to whom she taught sewing, respect for their betters, and other useful things.

“I was just telling Captain Parsons that you were an angel of mercy, Miss Clibborn.”

“I’m afraid I’m not that,” replied Mary, gravely. “But I try to do my duty.”

“Ah!” cried Mr. Dryland, raising his eyes so that he looked exactly like a codfish, “how few of us can say that!”

“I’m seriously distressed about my girls. They live in nasty little cottages, and eat filthy things; they pass their whole lives under the most disgusting conditions, and yet they’re happy. I can’t get them to see that they ought to be utterly miserable.”

“Oh, I know,” sighed the curate; “it makes me sad to think of it.”

“Surely, if they’re happy, you can want nothing better,” said James, rather impatiently.

“But I do. They have no right to be happy under such circumstances. I want to make them feel their wretchedness.”

“What a brutal thing to do!” cried James.

“It’s the only way to improve them. I want them to see things as I see them.”

“And how d’you know that you see them any more correctly than they do?”

“My dear Jamie!” cried Mary; and then as the humour of such a suggestion dawned upon her, she burst into a little shout of laughter.

“What d’you think is the good of making them dissatisfied?” asked James, grimly.

“I want to make them better, nobler, worthier; I want to make their lives more beautiful and holy.”

“If you saw a man happily wearing a tinsel crown, would you go to him and say, ‘My good friend, you’re making a fool of yourself. Your crown isn’t of real gold, and you must throw it away. I haven’t a golden crown to give you instead, but you’re wicked to take pleasure in that sham thing.’ They’re just as comfortable, after their fashion, in a hovel as you in your fine house; they enjoy the snack of fat pork they have on Sunday just as much as you enjoy your boiled chickens and blanc-manges. They’re happy, and that’s the chief thing.”

“Happiness is not the chief thing in this world, James,” said Mary, gravely.

“Isn’t it? I thought it was.”

“Captain Parsons is a cynic,” said Mr. Dryland, with a slightly supercilious smile.

“Because I say it’s idiotic to apply your standards to people who have nothing in common with you? I hate all this interfering. For God’s sake let us go our way; and if we can get a little pleasure out of dross and tinsel, let us keep it.”

“I want to give the poor high ideals,” said Mary.

“I should have thought bread and cheese would be more useful.”

“My dear Jamie,” said Mary, good-naturedly, “I think you’re talking of things you know nothing about.”

“You must remember that Miss Clibborn has worked nobly among the poor for many years.”

“My own conscience tells me I’m right,” pursued Mary, “and you see Mr. Dryland agrees with me. I know you mean well, Jamie; but I don’t think you quite understand the matter, and I fancy we had better change the conversation.”

VII

Next day Mary went into Primpton House. Colonel Parsons nodded to her as she walked up the drive, and took off his spectacles. The front door was neither locked nor bolted in that confiding neighbourhood, and Mary walked straight in.

“Well, my dear?” said the Colonel, smiling with pleasure, for he was as fond of her as of his own son.

“I thought I’d come and see you alone. Jamie’s still out, isn’t he? I saw him pass our house. I was standing at the window, but he didn’t look up.”

“I daresay he was thinking. He’s grown very thoughtful now.”

Mrs. Parsons came in, and her quiet face lit up, too, as she greeted Mary. She kissed her tenderly.

“Jamie’s out, you know.”

“Mary has come to see us,” said the Colonel. “She doesn’t want us to feel neglected now that she has the boy.”

“We shall never dream that you can do anything unkind, dear Mary,” replied Mrs. Parsons, stroking the girl’s hair. “It’s natural that you should think more of him than of us.”

Mary hesitated a moment.

“Don’t you think Jamie has changed?”

Mrs. Parsons looked at her quickly.

“I think he has grown more silent. But he’s been through so much. And then he’s a man now; he was only a boy when we saw him last.”

“D’you think he cares for me any more?” asked Mary, with a rapid tremor in her voice.

“Mary!”

“Of course he does! He talks of you continually,” said Colonel Parsons, “and always as if he were devoted. Doesn’t he, Frances?”

The old man’s deep love for Mary had prevented him from seeing in Jamie’s behaviour anything incongruous with that of a true lover.

“What makes you ask that question, Mary?” said Mrs. Parsons.

Her feminine tact had led her to notice a difference in Jamie’s feeling towards his betrothed; but she had been unwilling to think that it amounted even to coldness. Such a change could be explained in a hundred natural ways, and might, indeed, exist merely in her own imagination.

“Oh, he’s not the same as he was!” cried Mary, “I don’t know what it is, but I feel it in his whole manner. Yesterday evening he barely said a word.”

James had dined with the Clibborns in solemn state.

“I daresay he’s not very well yet. His wound troubles him still.”

“I try to put it down to that,” said Mary, “but he seems to force himself to speak to me. He’s not natural. I’ve got an awful fear that he has ceased to care for me.”

She looked from Colonel Parsons to his wife, who stared at her in dismay.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she said; “I couldn’t talk like this to anyone else, but I know you love me. I look upon you already as my father and mother. I don’t want to be unkind to mamma, but I couldn’t talk of it to her; she would only sneer at me. And I’m afraid it’s making me rather unhappy.”

“Of course, we want you to treat us as your real parents, Mary. We both love you as we love Jamie. We have always looked upon you as our daughter.”

“You’re so good to me!”

“Has your mother said anything to annoy you?”

Mary faltered.

“Last night, when he went away, she said she didn’t think he was devoted to me.”

“Oh, I knew it was your mother who’d put this in your head! She has always been jealous of you. I suppose she thinks he’s in love with her.”

“Mrs. Parsons!” cried Mary, in a tone of entreaty.

“I know you can’t bear anything said against your mother, and it’s wicked of me to vex you; but she has no right to suggest such things.”

“It’s not only that. It’s what I feel.”

“I’m sure Jamie is most fond of you,” said Colonel Parsons, kindly. “You’ve not seen one another for five years, and you find yourselves altered. Even we feel a little strange with Jamie sometimes; don’t we, Frances? What children they are, Frances!” Colonel Parsons laughed in that irresistibly sweet fashion of his. “Why, it was only the day before yesterday that Jamie came to us with a long face and asked if you cared for him.”

“Did he?” asked Mary, with pleased surprise, anxious to believe what the Colonel suggested. “Oh, he must see that I love him! Perhaps he finds me unresponsive.... How could I help caring for him? I think if he ceased to love me, I should die.”

“My dearest Mary,” cried Mrs. Parsons, the tears rising to her eyes, “don’t talk like that! I’m sure he can’t help loving you, either; you’re so good and sweet. You’re both of you fanciful, and he’s not well. Be patient. Jamie is shy and reserved; he hasn’t quite got used to us yet. He doesn’t know how to show his feelings. It will all come right soon.”

“Of course he loves you!” said Colonel Parsons. “Who could help it? Why, if I were a young fellow I should be mad to marry you.”

“And what about me, Richmond?” asked Mrs. Parsons, smiling.

“Well, I think I should have to commit bigamy, and marry you both.”

They laughed at the Colonel’s mild little joke, happy to break through the cloud of doubt which oppressed them.

“You’re a dear thing,” said Mary, kissing the old man, “and I’m a very silly girl. It’s wrong of me to give way to whims and fancies.”

“You must be very brave when you’re the wife of a V.C.,” said the Colonel, patting her hand.

“Oh, it was a beautiful action!” cried Mary. “And he’s as modest about it as though he had done nothing that any man might not do. I think there can be no sight more pleasing to God than that of a brave man risking his life to save a comrade.”

“And that ought to be an assurance to you, Mary, that James will never do anything unkind or dishonourable. Trust him, and forgive his little faults of manner. I’m sure he loves you, and soon you’ll get married and be completely happy.”

Mary’s face darkened once more.

“He’s been here three days, and he’s not said a word about getting married. Oh, I can’t help it; I’m so frightened! I wish he’d say something — just one word to show that he really cares for me. He seems to have forgotten that we’re even engaged.”

Colonel Parsons looked at his wife, begging her by his glance to say something that would comfort Mary. Mrs. Parsons looked down, uncertain, ill at ease.

“You don’t despise me for talking like this, Mrs. Parsons?”

“Despise you, my dear! How can I, when I love you so dearly? Shall I speak to Jamie? I’m sure when he understands that he’s making you unhappy, he’ll be different. He has the kindest heart in the world; I’ve never known him do an unkind thing in his life.”

“No, don’t say anything to him,” replied Mary. “I daresay it’s all nonsense. I don’t want him to be driven into making love to me.”

Meanwhile James wandered thoughtfully. The country was undulating, and little hill rose after little hill, affording spacious views of the fat Kentish fields, encircled by oak trees and by chestnuts. Owned by rich landlords, each generation had done its best, and the fruitful land was tended like a garden. But it had no abandonment, no freedom; the hand of man was obvious, perpetually, in the trimness and in the careful arrangement, so that the landscape, in its formality, reminded one of those set pieces chosen by the classic painters. But the fields were fresh with the tall young grass of the new year, the buttercups flaunted themselves gaily, careless of the pitiless night, rejoicing in the sunshine, as before they had rejoiced in the enlivening rain. The pleasant rain-drops still lingered on the daisies. The feathery ball of the dandelion, carried by the breeze, floated past like a symbol of the life of man — a random thing, resistless to the merest breath, with no mission but to spread its seed upon the fertile earth, so that things like unto it should spring up in the succeeding summer, and flower uncared for, and reproduce themselves, and die.

James decided finally that he must break that very evening his engagement with Mary. He could not put it off. Every day made his difficulty greater, and it was impossible any longer to avoid the discussion of their marriage, nor could he continue to treat Mary with nothing better than friendliness. He realised all her good qualities; she was frank, and honest, and simple; anxious to do right; charitable according to her light; kindness itself. James felt sincerely grateful for the affectionate tenderness which Mary showed to his father and mother. He was thankful for that and for much else, and was prepared to look upon her as a very good friend, even as a sister; but he did not love her. He could not look upon the prospect of marriage without repulsion. Nor did Mary, he said, really love him. He knew what love was — something different entirely from that pallid flame of affection and esteem, of which alone she was capable. Mary loved him for certain qualities of mind, because his station in life was decent, his manners passable, his morals beyond reproach.

“She might as well marry the Ten Commandments!” he cried impatiently.

Mary cared for him from habit, from a sense of decorum, and for the fitness of things; but that was not love. He shrugged his shoulders scornfully, looking for some word to express the mildly pleasant, unagitating emotion. James, who had been devoured by it, who had struggled with it as with a deadly sin, who had killed it finally while, like a serpent of evil, it clung to his throat, drinking his life’s blood, James knew what love was — a fire in the veins, a divine affliction, a passion, a frenzy, a madness. The love he knew was the love of the body of flesh and blood, the love that engenders, the love that kills. At the bottom of it is sex, and sex is not ugly or immoral, for sex is the root of life. The woman is fair because man shall love her body; her lips are red and passionate that he may kiss them; her hair is beautiful that he may take it in his hands — a river of living gold.

James stopped, and the dead love rose again and tore his entrails like a beast of prey. He gasped with agony, with bitter joy. Ah, that was the true love! What did he care that the woman lacked this and that? He loved her because he loved her; he loved her for her faults. And in spite of the poignant anguish, he thanked her from the bottom of his heart, for she had taught him love. She had caused him endless pain, but she had given him the strength to bear it. She had ruined his life, perhaps, but had shown him that life was worth living. What were the agony, the torture, the despair, beside that radiant passion which made him godlike? It is only the lover who lives, and of his life every moment is intense and fervid. James felt that his most precious recollection was that ardent month, during which, at last, he had seen the world in all its dazzling movement, in its manifold colour, singing with his youth and laughing to his joy.

And he did not care that hideous names have been given to that dear passion, to that rich desire. The vulgar call it lust, and blush and hide their faces; in their folly is the shame, in their prurience the disgrace. They do not know that the appetite which shocks them is the very origin of the highest qualities of man. It is they, weaklings afraid to look life in the face, dotards and sentimentalists, who have made the body unclean. They have covered the nakedness of Aphrodite with the rags of their own impurity. They have disembowelled the great lovers of antiquity till Cleopatra serves to adorn a prudish tale and Lancelot to point a moral. Oh, Mother Nature, give us back our freedom, with its strength of sinew and its humour! For lack of it we perish in false shame, and our fig-leaves point our immodesty to all the world. Teach us that love is not a tawdry sentiment, but a fire divine in order to the procreation of children; teach us not to dishonour our bodies, for they are beautiful and pure, and all thy works are sweet. Teach us, again, in thy merciful goodness, that man is made for woman, his body for her body, and that the flesh cannot sin.

Teach us also not to rant too much, even in thy service; and though we do set up for prophets and the like, let us not forget occasionally to laugh at our very august selves.

Then, harking back, Jamie’s thoughts returned to the dinner of the previous evening at the Clibborns. He was the only guest, and when he arrived, found Mary and the Colonel by themselves in the drawing-room. It was an old habit of Mrs. Clibborn’s not to appear till after her visitors, thinking that so she created a greater effect. The Colonel wore a very high collar, which made his head look like some queer flower on a long white stalk; hair and eyebrows were freshly dyed, and glistened like the oiled locks of a young Jewess. He was the perfect dandy, even to his bejewelled fingers and his scented handkerchief. His manner was a happy mixture of cordiality and condescension, by the side of which Mary’s unaffected simplicity contrasted oddly. She seemed less at home in an evening dress than in the walking costume she vastly preferred; her free, rather masculine movements were ungainly in the silk frock, badly made and countrified, while lace and ribbons suited her most awkwardly. She was out of place, too, in that room, decorated with all the abominations of pseudo-fashion, with draperies and tissue-paper, uncomfortable little chairs and rickety tables. In every available place stood photographs of Mrs. Clibborn — Mrs. Clibborn sitting, standing, lying; Mrs. Clibborn full face, three-quarter face, side face; Mrs. Clibborn in this costume or in that costume — grave, gay, thoughtful, or smiling; Mrs. Clibborn showing her beautiful teeth, her rounded arms, her vast shoulders; Mrs. Clibborn dressed to the nines, and Mrs. Clibborn as undressed as she dared.

Finally, the beauty swept in with a great rustle of silk, displaying to the full her very opulent charms. Her hair was lightly powdered, and honestly she looked remarkably handsome.

“Don’t say I’ve kept you waiting,” she murmured. “I could never forgive myself.”

James made some polite reply, and they went down to dinner. The conversation was kept at the high level which one naturally expects from persons fashionable enough to dine late. They discussed Literature, by which they meant the last novel but one; Art, by which they meant the Royal Academy; and Society, by which they meant their friends who kept carriages. Mrs. Clibborn said that, of course, she could not expect James to pay any attention to her, since all his thoughts must be for Mary, and then proceeded entirely to absorb him.

“You must find it very dull here,” she moaned. “I’m afraid you’ll be bored to death.” And she looked at Mary with her most smilingly cruel expression. “Oh, Mary, why did you put on that dreadfully dowdy frock? I’ve asked you over and over again to give it away, but you never pay attention to your poor mother.”

“It’s all right,” said Mary, looking down at it, laughing and blushing a little.

Mrs. Clibborn turned again to James.

“I think it’s such a mistake for women not to dress well. I’m an old woman now, but I always try to look my best. Reggie has never seen me in a dowdy gown. Have you, Reggie?”

“Any dress would become you, my love.”

“Oh, Reggie, don’t say that before James. He looks upon his future mother as an old woman.”

Then at the end of dinner:

“Don’t sit too long over your wine. I shall be so dull with nobody but Mary to amuse me.”

Mrs. Clibborn had been fond enough of Mary when she was a little girl, who could be petted on occasion and sent away when necessary; but as she grew up and exhibited a will of her own, she found her almost an intolerable nuisance. The girl developed a conscience, and refused indignantly to tell the little fibs which her mother occasionally suggested. She put her sense of right and wrong before Mrs. Clibborn’s wishes, which that lady considered undutiful, if not entirely wicked. It seemed nothing short of an impertinence that Mary should disapprove of theatres when there was nothing to which the elder woman was more devoted. And Mrs. Clibborn felt that the girl saw through all her little tricks and artful dodges, often speaking out strongly when her mother proposed to do something particularly underhand. It was another grievance that Mary had inherited no good looks, and the faded beauty, in her vanity, was convinced that the girl spitefully observed every fresh wrinkle that appeared upon her face. But Mrs. Clibborn was also a little afraid of her daughter; such meekness and such good temper were difficult to overcome; and when she snubbed her, it was not only to chasten a proud spirit, but also to reassure herself.

When the ladies had retired, the Colonel handed James an execrable cigar.

“Now, I’m going to give you some very special port I’ve got,” he said.

He poured out a glass with extreme care, and passed it over with evident pride. James remembered Mary’s story of the doctor, and having tasted the wine, entirely sympathised with him. It was no wonder that invalids did not thrive upon it.

“Fine wine, isn’t it?” said Colonel Clibborn. “Had it in my cellar for years.” He shook it so as to inhale the aroma. “I got it from my old friend, the Duke of St. Olphert’s. ‘Reggie, my boy,’ he said— ‘Reggie, do you want some good port?’ ‘Good port, Bill!’ I cried — I always called him Bill, you know; his Christian name was William— ‘I should think I do, Billy, old boy.’ ‘Well,’ said the Duke, ‘I’ve got some I can let you have.’”

“He was a wine-merchant, was he?” asked James.

“Wine-merchant! My dear fellow, he was the Duke of St. Olphert’s. He’d bought up the cellar of an Austrian nobleman, and he had more port than he wanted.”

“And this is some of it?” asked James, gravely, holding the murky fluid to the light.

Then the Colonel stretched his legs and began to talk of the war. James, rather tired of the subject, sought to change the conversation; but Colonel Clibborn was anxious to tell one who had been through it how the thing should have been conducted; so his guest, with a mixture of astonishment and indignation, resigned himself to listen to the most pitiful inanities. He marvelled that a man should have spent his life in the service, and yet apparently be ignorant of the very elements of warfare; but having already learnt to hold his tongue, he let the Colonel talk, and was presently rewarded by a break. Something reminded the gallant cavalryman of a hoary anecdote, and he gave James that dreary round of stories which have dragged their heavy feet for thirty years from garrison to garrison. Then, naturally, he proceeded to the account of his own youthful conquests. The Colonel had evidently been a devil with the ladies, for he knew all about the forgotten ballet-dancers of the seventies, and related with gusto a number of scabrous tales.

“Ah, my boy, in my day we went the pace! I tell you in confidence, I was a deuce of a rake before I got married.”

When they returned to the drawing-room, Mrs. Clibborn was ready with her langorous smile, and made James sit beside her on the sofa. In a few minutes the Colonel, as was his habit, closed his eyes, dropped his chin, and fell comfortably asleep. Mrs. Clibborn slowly turned to Mary.

“Will you try and find me my glasses, darling,” she murmured. “They’re either in my work-basket or on the morning-room table. And if you can’t see them there, perhaps they’re in your father’s study. I want to read Jamie a letter.”

“I’ll go and look, mother.”

Mary went out, and Mrs. Clibborn put her hand on Jamie’s arm.

“Do you dislike me very much, Jamie?” she murmured softly.

“On the contrary!”

“I’m afraid your mother doesn’t care for me.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“Women have never liked me. I don’t know why. I can’t help it if I’m not exactly — plain, I’m as God made me.”

James thought that the Almighty in that case must have an unexpected familiarity with the rouge-pot and the powder-puff.

“Do you know that I did all I could to prevent your engagement to Mary?”

“You!” cried James, thunderstruck. “I never knew that.”

“I thought I had better tell you myself. You mustn’t be angry with me. It was for your own good. If I had had my way you would never have become engaged. I thought you were so much too young.”

“Five years ago, d’you mean — when it first happened?”

“You were only a boy — a very nice boy, Jamie. I always liked you. I don’t approve of long engagements, and I thought you’d change your mind. Most young men are a little wild; it’s right that they should be.”

James looked at her, wondering suddenly whether she knew or divined anything. It was impossible, she was too silly.

“You’re very wise.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” cried Mrs. Clibborn, with a positive groan. “It sounds so middle-aged.... I always thought Mary was too old for you. A woman should be ten years younger than her husband.”

“Tell me all about it,” insisted James.

“They wouldn’t listen to me. They said you had better be engaged. They thought it would benefit your morals. I was very much against it. I think boys are so much nicer when they haven’t got encumbrances — or morals.”

At that moment Mary came in.

“I can’t find your glasses, mamma.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” replied Mrs. Clibborn, smiling softly; “I’ve just remembered that I sent them into Tunbridge Wells yesterday to be mended.”

VIII

James knew he would see Mary at the tea-party which Mrs. Jackson that afternoon was giving at the Vicarage. Society in Little Primpton was exclusive, with the result that the same people met each other day after day, and the only intruders were occasional visitors of irreproachable antecedents from Tunbridge Wells. Respectability is a plant which in that fashionable watering-place has been so assiduously cultivated that it flourishes now in the open air; like the yellow gorse, it is found in every corner, thriving hardily under the most unfavourable conditions; and the keener the wind, the harder the frost, the more proudly does it hold its head. But on this particular day the gathering was confined to the immediate neighbours, and when the Parsons arrived they found, beside their hosts, only the Clibborns and the inevitable curate. There was a prolonged shaking of hands, inquiries concerning the health of all present, and observations suggested by the weather; then they sat down in a circle, and set themselves to discuss the questions of the day.

“Oh, Mr. Dryland,” cried Mary, “thanks so much for that book! I am enjoying it!”

“I thought you’d like it,” replied the curate, smiling blandly. “I know you share my admiration for Miss Corelli.”

“Mr. Dryland has just lent me ‘The Master Christian,’” Mary explained, turning to Mrs. Jackson.

“Oh, I was thinking of putting it on the list for my next book.”

They had formed a club in Little Primpton of twelve persons, each buying a six-shilling book at the beginning of the year, and passing it on in return for another after a certain interval, so that at the end of twelve months all had read a dozen masterpieces of contemporary fiction.

“I thought I’d like to buy it at once,” said Mr. Dryland. “I always think one ought to possess Marie Corelli’s books. She’s the only really great novelist we have in England now.”

Mr. Dryland was a man of taste and authority, so that his literary judgments could always be relied on.

“Of course, I don’t pretend to know much about the matter,” said Mary, modestly. “There are more important things in life than books; but I do think she’s splendid. I can’t help feeling I’m wasting my time when I read most novels, but I never feel that with Marie Corelli.”

“No one would think she was a woman,” said the Vicar.

To which the curate answered: “Le genie n’a pas de sexe.”

The others, being no scholars, did not quite understand the remark, but they looked intelligent.

“I always think it’s so disgraceful the way the newspapers sneer at her,” said Mrs. Jackson. “And, I’m sure, merely because she’s a woman.”

“And because she has genius, my dear,” put in the Vicar. “Some minds are so contemptibly small that they are simply crushed by greatness. It requires an eagle to look at the sun.”

And the excellent people looked at one another with a certain self-satisfaction, for they had the fearless gaze of the king of birds in face of that brilliant orb.

“The critics are willing to do anything for money. Miss Corelli has said herself that there is a vile conspiracy to blacken her, and for my part I am quite prepared to believe it. They’re all afraid of her because she dares to show them up.”

“Besides, most of the critics are unsuccessful novelists,” added Mr. Dryland, “and they are as envious as they can be.”

“It makes one boil with indignation,” cried Mary, “to think that people can be so utterly base. Those who revile her are not worthy to unloose the latchet of her shoes.”

“It does one good to hear such whole-hearted admiration,” replied the curate, beaming. “But you must remember that genius has always been persecuted. Look at Keats and Shelley. The critics abused them just as they abuse Marie Corelli. Even Shakespeare was slandered. But time has vindicated our immortal William; time will vindicate as brightly our gentle Marie.”

“I wonder how many of us here could get through Hamlet without yawning!” meditatively said the Vicar.

“I see your point!” cried Mr. Dryland, opening his eyes. “While we could all read the ‘Sorrows of Satan’ without a break. I’ve read it three times, and each perusal leaves me more astounded. Miss Corelli has her revenge in her own hand; what can she care for the petty snarling of critics when the wreath of immortality is on her brow. I don’t hesitate to say it, I’m not ashamed of my opinion; I consider Miss Corelli every bit as great as William Shakespeare. I’ve gone into the matter carefully, and if I may say so, I’m speaking of what I know something about. My deliberate opinion is that in wit, and humour, and language, she’s every bit his equal.”

“Her language is beautiful,” said Mrs. Jackson. “When I read her I feel just as if I were listening to hymns.”

“And where, I should like to know,” continued the curate, raising his voice, “can you find in a play of Shakespeare’s such a gallery of portraits as in the ‘Master Christian’?”

“And there is one thing you must never forget,” said the Vicar, gravely, “she has a deep, religious feeling which you will find in none of Shakespeare’s plays. Every one of her books has a lofty moral purpose. That is the justification of fiction. The novelist has a high vocation, if he could only see it; he can inculcate submission to authority, hope, charity, obedience — in fact, all the higher virtues; he can become a handmaid of the Church. And now, when irreligion, and immorality, and scepticism are rampant, we must not despise the humblest instruments.”

“How true that is!” said Mrs. Jackson.

“If all novelists were like Marie Corelli, I should willingly hold them out my hand. I think every Christian ought to read ‘Barabbas.’ It gives an entirely new view of Christ. It puts the incidents of the Gospel in a way that one had never dreamed. I was never so impressed in my life.”

“But all her books are the same in that way!” cried Mary. “They all make me feel so much better and nobler, and more truly Christian.”

“I think she’s vulgar and blasphemous,” murmured Mrs. Clibborn quietly, as though she were making the simplest observation.

“Mamma!” cried Mary, deeply shocked; and among the others there was a little movement of indignation and disgust.

Mrs. Clibborn was continually mortifying her daughter by this kind of illiterate gaucherie. But the most painful part of it was that the good lady always remained perfectly unconscious of having said anything incredibly silly, and continued with perfect self-assurance:

“I’ve never been able to finish a book of hers. I began one about electricity, which I couldn’t understand, and then I tried another. I forget what it was, but there was something in it about a bed of roses, and I thought it very improper. I don’t think it was a nice book for Mary to read, but girls seem to read everything now.”

There was a pained hush, such as naturally occurs when someone has made a very horrible faux pas. They all looked at one another awkwardly; while Mary, ashamed at her mother’s want of taste, kept her eyes glued to the carpet But Mrs. Clibborn’s folly was so notorious that presently anger was succeeded by contemptuous amusement, and the curate came to the rescue with a loud guffaw.

“Of course, you know your Marie Corelli by heart, Captain Parsons?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never read one of them.”

“Not?” they all cried in surprise.

“Oh, I’ll send them to you to Primpton House,” said Mr. Dryland. “I have them all. Why, no one’s education is complete till he’s read Marie Corelli.”

This was considered a very good hit at Mrs. Clibborn, and the dear people smiled at one another significantly. Even Mary could scarcely keep a straight face.

The tea then appeared, and was taken more or less silently. With the exception of the fashionable Mrs. Clibborn, they were all more used to making a sit-down meal of it, and the care of holding a cup, with a piece of cake unsteadily balanced in the saucer, prevented them from indulging in very brilliant conversational feats; they found one gymnastic exercise quite sufficient at a time. But when the tea-cups were safely restored to the table, Mrs. Jackson suggested a little music.

“Will you open the proceedings, Mary?”

The curate went up to Miss Clibborn with a bow, gallantly offering his arm to escort her to the piano. Mary had thoughtfully brought her music, and began to play a ‘Song Without Words,’ by Mendelssohn. She was considered a fine pianist in Little Primpton. She attacked the notes with marked resolution, keeping the loud pedal down throughout; her eyes were fixed on the music with an intense, determined air, in which you saw an eagerness to perform a social duty, and her lips moved as conscientiously she counted time. Mary played the whole piece without making a single mistake, and at the end was much applauded.

“There’s nothing like classical music, is there?” cried the curate enthusiastically, as Mary stopped, rather out of breath, for she played, as she did everything else, with energy and thoroughness.

“It’s the only music I really love.”

“And those ‘Songs Without Words’ are beautiful,” said Colonel Parsons, who was standing on Mary’s other side.

“Mendelssohn is my favourite composer,” she replied. “He’s so full of soul.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Mr. Dryland. “His heart seems to throb through all his music. It’s strange that he should have been a Jew.”

“But then Our Lord was a Jew, wasn’t He?” said Mary.

“Yes, one is so apt to forget that.”

Mary turned the leaves, and finding another piece which was familiar to her, set about it. It was a satisfactory thing to listen to her performance. In Mary’s decided touch one felt all the strength of her character, with its simple, unaffected candour and its eminent sense of propriety. In her execution one perceived the high purpose which animated her whole conduct; it was pure and wholesome, and thoroughly English. And her piano-playing served also as a moral lesson, for none could listen without remembering that life was not an affair to be taken lightly, but a strenuous endeavour: the world was a battlefield (this one realised more particularly when Mary forgot for a page or so to take her foot off the pedal); each one of us had a mission to perform, a duty to do, a function to fulfil.

Meanwhile, James was trying to make conversation with Mrs. Clibborn.

“How well Mary plays!”

“D’you think so? I can’t bear amateurs. I wish they wouldn’t play.”

James looked at Mrs. Clibborn quickly. It rather surprised him that she, the very silliest woman he had ever known, should say the only sensible things he had heard that day. Nor could he forget that she had done her best to prevent his engagement.

“I think you’re a very wonderful woman,” he said.

“Oh, Jamie!”

Mrs. Clibborn smiled and sighed, slipping forward her hand for him to take; but James was too preoccupied to notice the movement.

“I’m beginning to think you really like me,” murmured Mrs. Clibborn, cooing like an amorous dove.

Then James was invited to sing, and refused.

“Please do, Jamie!” cried Mary, smiling. “For my sake. You used to sing so nicely!”

He still tried to excuse himself, but finding everyone insistent, went at last, with very bad grace, to the piano. He not only sang badly, but knew it, and was irritated that he should be forced to make a fool of himself. Mr. Dryland sang badly, but perfectly satisfied with himself, needed no pressing when his turn came. He made a speciality of old English songs, and thundered out in his most ecclesiastical manner a jovial ditty entitled, “Down Among the Dead Men.”

The afternoon was concluded by an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should be done. He noticed that she and the curate managed the whole affair between them, arranging partners and advising freely. Mrs. Clibborn alone refused to play, saying frankly it was too idiotic a pastime.

At last the party broke up, and in a group bade their farewells.

“I’ll walk home with you, Mary, if you don’t mind,” said James, “and smoke a pipe.”

Mary suddenly became radiant, and Colonel Parsons gave her a happy little smile and a friendly nod.... At last James had his opportunity. He lingered while Mary gathered together her music, and waited again to light his pipe, so that when they came out of the Vicarage gates the rest of the company were no longer in sight. The day had become overcast and sombre; on the even surface of the sky floated little ragged black clouds, like the fragments cast to the wind of some widowed, ample garment. It had grown cold, and James, accustomed to a warmer air, shivered a little. The country suddenly appeared cramped and circumscribed; in the fading light a dulness of colour came over tree and hedgerow which was singularly depressing. They walked in silence, while James looked for words. All day he had been trying to find some manner to express himself, but his mind, perplexed and weary, refused to help him. The walk to Mary’s house could not take more than five minutes, and he saw the distance slipping away rapidly. If he meant to say anything it must be said at once; and his mouth was dry, he felt almost a physical inability to speak. He did not know how to prepare the way, how to approach the subject; and he was doubly tormented by the absolute necessity of breaking the silence.

But it was Mary who spoke first.

“D’you know, I’ve been worrying a little about you, Jamie.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I hurt your feelings yesterday. Don’t you remember, when we were visiting my patients — I think I spoke rather harshly. I didn’t mean to. I’m very sorry.”

“I had forgotten all about it,” he said, looking at her. “I have no notion what you said to offend me.”

“I’m glad of that,” she answered, smiling, “but it does me good to apologise. Will you think me very silly if I say something to you?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, I want to say that if I ever do anything you don’t like, or don’t approve of, I wish you would tell me.”

After that, how could he say immediately that he no longer loved her, and wished to be released from his engagement?

“I’m afraid you think I’m a very terrifying person,” answered James.

Her words had made his announcement impossible; another day had gone, and weakly he had let it pass.

“What shall I do?” he murmured under his breath. “What a coward I am!”

They came to the door of the Clibborns’ house and Mary turned to say good-bye. She bent forward, smiling and blushing, and he quickly kissed her.

In the evening, James was sitting by the fire in the dining-room, thinking of that one subject which occupied all his thoughts. Colonel Parsons and his wife were at the table, engaged upon the game of backgammon which invariably filled the interval between supper and prayers. The rattle of dice came to James indistinctly, as in a dream, and he imagined fantastically that unseen powers were playing for his life. He sat with his head between his hands, staring at the flames as though to find in them a solution to his difficulty; but mockingly they spoke only of Mrs. Wallace and the caress of her limpid eyes. He turned away with a gesture of impatience. The game was just finished, and Mrs. Parsons, catching the expression on his face, asked:

“What are you thinking of, Jamie?”

“I?” he answered, looking up quickly, as though afraid that his secret had been divined. “Nothing!”

Mrs. Parsons put the backgammon board away, making up her mind to speak, for she too suffered from a shyness which made the subjects she had nearest at heart precisely those that she could least bear to talk about.

“When do you think of getting married, Jamie?”

James started.

“Why, you asked me that yesterday,” He tried to make a joke of it. “Upon my word, you’re very anxious to get rid of me.”

“I wonder if it’s occurred to you that you’re making Mary a little unhappy?”

James stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, his face upon his hand.

“I should be sorry to do that, mother.”

“You’ve been home four days, and you’ve not said a word to show you love her.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very demonstrative.”

“That’s what I said!” cried the Colonel, triumphantly.

“Can’t you try to say a word or two to prove you care for her, Jamie? She is so fond of you,” continued his mother. “I don’t want to interfere with your private concerns, but I think it’s only thoughtlessness on your part; and I’m sure you don’t wish to make Mary miserable. Poor thing, she’s so unhappy at home; she yearns for a little affection.... Won’t you say something to her about your marriage?”

“Has she asked you to speak to me?” inquired James.

“No, dear. You know that she would never do anything of the kind. She would hate to think that I had said anything.”

James paused a moment.

“I will speak to her to-morrow, mother.”

“That’s right!” said the Colonel, cheerfully. “I know she’s going to be in all the morning. Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn are going into Tunbridge Wells.”

“It will be a good opportunity.”

IX

In the morning Mrs. Parsons was in the hall, arranging flowers, when James passed through to get his hat.

“Are you going to see Mary now?”

“Yes, mother.”

“That’s a good boy.”

She did not notice that her son’s usual gravity was intensified, or that his very lips were pallid, and his eyes careworn and lustreless.

It was raining. The young fresh leaves, in the colourless day, had lost their verdure, and the massive shapes of the elm trees were obscured in the mist. The sky had so melancholy a tone that it seemed a work of man — a lifeless hue of infinite sorrow, dreary and cheerless.

James arrived at the Clibborns’ house.

“Miss Mary is in the drawing-room,” he was told by a servant, who smiled on him, the accepted lover, with obtrusive friendliness.

He went in and found her seated at the piano, industriously playing scales. She wore the weather-beaten straw hat without which she never seemed comfortable.

“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “I’m alone in the house, and I was taking the opportunity to have a good practice.” She turned round on the music-stool, and ran one hand chromatically up the piano, smiling the while with pleasure at Jamie’s visit. “Would you like to go for a walk?” she asked. “I don’t mind the rain a bit.”

“I would rather stay here, if you don’t mind.”

James sat down and began playing with a paper-knife. Still he did not know how to express himself. He was torn asunder by rival emotions; he felt absolutely bound to speak, and yet could not bear the thought of the agony he must cause. He was very tender-hearted; he had never in his life consciously given pain to any living creature, and would far rather have inflicted hurt upon himself.

“I’ve been wanting to have a long talk with you alone ever since I came back.”

“Have you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because what I want to say is very difficult, Mary; and I’m afraid it must be very — distressing to both of us.”

“What do you mean?”

Mary suddenly became grave, James glanced at her, and hesitated; but there was no room for hesitation now. Somehow he must get to the end of what he had to say, attempting only to be as gentle as possible. He stood up and leant against the mantelpiece, still toying with the paper-knife; Mary also changed her seat, and took a chair by the table.

“Do you know that we’ve been engaged for over five years now, Mary?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him steadily, and he dropped his eyes.

“I want to thank you for all you’ve done for my sake, Mary. I know how good you have been to my people; it was very kind of you. I cannot think how they would have got along without you.”

“I love them as I love my own father and mother, Jamie. I tried to act towards them as though I was indeed their daughter.”

He was silent for a while.

“We were both very young when we became engaged,” he said at last.

He looked up quickly, but she did not answer. She stared with frightened eyes, as if already she understood. It was harder even than he thought. James asked himself desperately whether he could not stop there, taking back what he had said. The cup was too bitter! But what was the alternative? He could not go on pretending one thing when he felt another; he could not live a constant, horrible lie. He felt there was only one course open to him. Like a man with an ill that must be fatal unless instantly treated, he was bound to undergo everything, however great the torture.

“And it’s a very bad return I’m making you for all your kindness. You have done everything for me, Mary. You’ve waited for me patiently and lovingly; you’ve sacrificed yourself in every way; and I’m afraid I must make you very unhappy — Oh, don’t think I’m not grateful to you; I can never thank you sufficiently.”

He wished Mary would say something to help him, but she kept silent. She merely dropped her eyes, and now her face seemed quite expressionless.

“I have asked myself day and night what I ought to do, and I can see no way clear before me. I’ve tried to say this to you before, but I’ve funked it. You think I’m brave — I’m not; I’m a pitiful coward! Sometimes I can only loathe and despise myself. I want to do my duty, but I can’t tell what my duty is. If I only knew for sure which way I ought to take, I should have strength to take it; but it is all so uncertain.”

James gave Mary a look of supplication, but she did not see it; her glance was still riveted to the ground.

“I think it’s better to tell you the whole truth, Mary; I’m afraid I’m speaking awfully priggishly. I feel I’m acting like a cad, and yet I don’t know how else to act. God help me!”

“I’ve known almost from the beginning that you no longer cared for me,” said Mary quietly, her face showing no expression, her voice hushed till it was only a whisper.

“Forgive me, Mary; I’ve tried to love you. Oh, how humiliating that must sound! I hardly know what I’m saying. Try to understand me. If my words are harsh and ugly, it’s because I don’t know how to express myself. But I must tell you the whole truth. The chief thing is that I should be honest with you. It’s the only return I can make for all you’ve done for me.”

Mary bent her head a little lower, and heavy tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Oh, Mary, don’t cry!” said James, his voice breaking; and he stepped forward, with outstretched arms, as though to comfort her.

“I’m sorry,” she said; “I didn’t mean to.”

She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, trying to smile. Her courageous self-command was like a stab in Jamie’s heart.

“I am an absolute cad!” he said, hoarsely.

Mary made no gesture; she sat perfectly still, rigid, not seeking to hide her emotion, but merely to master it. One could see the effort she made.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mary! Please forgive me — I don’t ask you to release me. All I want to do is to explain exactly what I feel, and then leave you to decide.”

“Are you — are you in love with anyone else?”

“No!”

The smile of Mrs. Wallace flashed scornfully across his mind, but he set his teeth. He hated and despised her; he would not love her.

“Is there anything in me that you don’t like which I might be able to correct?”

Her humility was more than he could bear.

“No, no, no!” he cried. “I can never make you understand. You must think me simply brutal. You have all that a man could wish for. I know how kind you are, and how good you are. I think you have every quality which a good woman should have. I respect you entirely; I can never help feeling for you the most intense gratitude and affection.”

In his own ears the words he spoke rang hollow, awkward, even impertinent. He could say nothing which did not seem hideously supercilious; and yet he wanted to abase himself! He knew that Mary’s humiliation must be very, very bitter.

“I’m afraid that I am distressing you frightfully, and I don’t see how I can make things easier.”

“Oh, I knew you didn’t love me! I felt it. D’you think I could talk to you for five minutes without seeing the constraint in your manner? They told me I was foolish and fanciful, but I knew better.”

“I must have caused you very great unhappiness?”

Mary did not answer, and James looked at her with pity and remorse. At last he broke out passionately:

“I can’t command my love! It’s not a thing I have at my beck and call. If it were, do you think I should give you this pain? Love is outside all calculation. You think love can be tamed, and led about on a chain like a dog. You think it’s a gentle sentiment that one can subject to considerations of propriety and decorum, and God knows what. Oh, you don’t know! Love is a madness that seizes one and shakes one like a leaf in the wind. I can’t counterfeit love; I can’t pretend to have it. I can’t command the nerves of my body.”

“Do you think I don’t know what love is, James? How little you know me.”

James sank on a chair and hid his face.

“We none of us understand one another. We’re all alike, and yet so different. I don’t even know myself. Don’t think I’m a prig when I say that I’ve tried with all my might to love you. I would have given worlds to feel as I felt five years ago. But I can’t. God help me!... Oh, you must hate and despise me, Mary!”

“I, my dear?” she shook her head sadly. “I shall never do that. I want you to speak frankly. It is much better that we should try to understand one another.”

“That is what I felt. I did not think it honest to marry you with a lie in my heart. I don’t know whether we can ever be happy; but our only chance is to speak the whole truth.”

Mary looked helplessly at him, cowed by her grief.

“I knew it was coming. Every day I dreaded it.”

The pain in her eyes was more than James could bear; it was cruel to make her suffer so much. He could not do it. He felt an intense pity, and the idea came to him that there might be a middle way, which would lessen the difficulty. He hesitated a moment, and then, looking down, spoke in a low voice:

“I am anxious to do my duty, Mary. I have promised to marry you. I do not wish to break my word. I don’t ask you to release me. Will you take what I can offer? I will be a good husband to you. I will do all I can to make you happy. I can give you affection and confidence — friendship; but I can’t give you love. It is much better that I should tell you than that you should find out painfully by yourself — perhaps when it is too late.”

“You came to ask me to release you. Why do you hesitate now? Do you think I shall refuse?”

James was silent.

“You cannot think that I will accept a compromise. Do you suppose that because I am a woman I am not made of flesh and blood? You said you wished to be frank.”

“I had not thought of the other way till just now.”

“Do you imagine that it softens the blow? How could I live with you as your wife, and yet not your wife? What are affection and esteem to me without love? You must think me a very poor creature, James, when you want to make me a sort of legal housekeeper.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would look upon it as an impertinence. I didn’t mean to say anything offensive. It struck me as a possible way out of the difficulty. You would, at all events, be happier than you are here.”

“It is you who despise me now!”

“Mary!”

“I can bear pain. It’s not the first humiliation I have suffered. It is very simple, and there’s no reason why we should make a fuss about it. You thought you loved me, and you asked me to marry you. I don’t know whether you ever really loved me; you certainly don’t now, and you wish me to release you. You know that I cannot and will not refuse.”

“I see no way out of it, Mary,” he said, hoarsely. “I wish to God I did! It’s frightfully cruel to you.”

“I can bear it. I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault. God will give me strength.” Mary thought of her mother’s cruel sympathy. Her parents would have to be told that James had cast her aside like a plaything he was tired of. “God will give me strength.”

“I’m so sorry, Mary,” cried James, kneeling by her side. “You’ll have to suffer dreadfully; and I can’t think how to make it any better for you.”

“There is no way. We must tell them the whole truth, and let them say what they will.”

“Would you like me to go away from Primpton?”

“Why?”

“It might make it easier for you.”

“Nothing can make it easier. I can face it out. And I don’t want you to run away and hide yourself as if you had done something to be ashamed of. And your people want you. Oh, Jamie, you will be as gentle with them as you can, won’t you? I’m afraid it will — disappoint them very much.”

“They had set their hearts upon our marriage.”

“I’m afraid they’ll feel it a good deal. But it can’t be helped. Anything is better than a loveless marriage.”

James was profoundly touched that at the time of her own bitter grief, Mary could think of the pain of others.

“I wish I had your courage, Mary. I’ve never seen such strength.”

“It’s well that I have some qualities. I haven’t the power to make you love me, and I deserve something to make up.”

“Oh, Mary, don’t speak like that! I do love you! There’s no one for whom I have a purer, more sincere affection. Why won’t you take me with what I can offer? I promise that you will never regret it. You know exactly what I am now — weak, but anxious to do right. Why shouldn’t we be married? Perhaps things may change. Who can tell what time may bring about?”

“It’s impossible. You ask me to do more than I can. And I know very well that you only make the offer out of charity. Even from you I cannot accept charity.”

“My earnest wish is to make you happy.”

“And I know you would sacrifice yourself willingly for that; but I can sacrifice myself, too. You think that if we got married love might arise; but it wouldn’t. You would feel perpetually that I was a reproach to you; you would hate me.”

“I should never do that.”

“How can you tell? We are the same age now, but each year I should seem older. At forty I should be an old woman, and you would still be a young man. Only the deepest love can make that difference endurable; but the love would be all on my side — if I had any then. I should probably have grown bitter and ill-humoured. Ah, no, Jamie, you know it is utterly impracticable. You know it as well as I do. Let us part altogether. I give you back your word. It is not your fault that you do not love me. I don’t blame you. One gets over everything in this world eventually. All I ask you is not to trouble too much about me; I shan’t die of it.”

She stretched out her hand, and he took it, his eyes all blurred, unable to speak.

“And I thank you,” she continued, “for having come to me frankly and openly, and told me everything. It is still something that you have confidence in me. You need never fear that I shall feel bitter towards you. I can see that you have suffered — perhaps more than you have made me suffer. Good-bye!”

“Is there nothing I can do, Mary?”

“Nothing,” she said, trying to smile, “except not to worry.”

“Good-bye,” he said. “And don’t think too ill of me.”

She could not trust herself to answer. She stood perfectly quiet till he had gone out of the room; then with a moan sank to the floor and hid her face, bursting into tears. She had restrained herself too long; the composure became intolerable. She could have screamed, as though suffering some physical pain that destroyed all self-control. The heavy sobs rent her chest, and she did not attempt to stop them. She was heart-broken.

“Oh, how could he!” she groaned. “How could he!”

Her vision of happiness was utterly gone. In James she had placed the joy of her life; in him had found strength to bear every displeasure. Mary had no thought in which he did not take part; her whole future was inextricably mingled with his. But now the years to come, which had seemed so bright and sunny, turned suddenly grey as the melancholy sky without. She saw her life at Little Primpton, continuing as in the past years, monotonous and dull — a dreary round of little duties, of little vexations, of little pleasures.

“Oh, God help me!” she cried.

And lifting herself painfully to her knees, she prayed for strength to bear the woeful burden, for courage to endure it steadfastly, for resignation to believe that it was God’s will.

X

James felt no relief. He had looked forward to a sensation of freedom such as a man might feel when he had escaped from some tyrannous servitude, and was at liberty again to breathe the buoyant air of heaven. He imagined that his depression would vanish like an evil spirit exorcised so soon as ever he got from Mary his release; but instead it sat more heavily upon him. Unconvinced even yet that he had acted rightly, he went over the conversation word for word. It seemed singularly ineffectual. Wishing to show Mary that he did not break with her from caprice or frivolous reason, but with sorrowful reluctance, and full knowledge of her suffering, he had succeeded only in being futile and commonplace.

He walked slowly towards Primpton House. He had before him the announcement to his mother and father; and he tried to order his thoughts.

Mrs. Parsons, her household work finished, was knitting the inevitable socks; while the Colonel sat at the table, putting new stamps into his album. He chattered delightedly over his treasures, getting up now and then gravely to ask his wife some question or to point out a surcharge; she, good woman, showed interest by appropriate rejoinders.

“There’s no one in Tunbridge Wells who has such a fine collection as I have.”

“General Newsmith showed me his the other day, but it’s not nearly so good as yours, Richmond.”

“I’m glad of that. I suppose his Mauritius are fine?” replied the Colonel, with some envy, for the general had lived several years on the island.

“They’re fair,” said Mrs. Parsons, reassuringly; “but not so good as one would expect.”

“It takes a clever man to get together a good collection of stamps, although I shouldn’t say it.”

They looked up when James entered.

“I’ve just been putting in those Free States you brought me, Jamie. They look very well.”

The Colonel leant back to view them, with the satisfied look with which he might have examined an old master.

“It was very thoughtful of Jamie to bring them,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“Ah, I knew he wouldn’t forget his old father. Don’t you remember, Frances, I said to you, ‘I’ll be bound the boy will bring some stamps with him.’ They’ll be valuable in a year or two. That’s what I always say with regard to postage stamps; you can’t waste your money. Now jewellery, for instance, gets old-fashioned, and china breaks; but you run no risk with stamps. When I buy stamps, I really feel that I’m as good as investing my money in consols.”

“Well, how’s Mary this morning?”

“I’ve been having a long talk with her.”

“Settled the day yet?” asked the Colonel, with a knowing little laugh.

“No!”

“Upon my word, Frances, I think we shall have to settle it for them. Things weren’t like this when we were young. Why, Jamie, your mother and I got married six weeks after I was introduced to her at a croquet party.”

“We were married in haste, Richmond,” said Mrs. Parsons, laughing.

“Well, we’ve taken a long time to repent of it, my dear. It’s over thirty years.”

“I fancy it’s too late now.”

The Colonel took her hand and patted it.

“If you get such a good wife as I have, Jamie, I don’t think you’ll have reason to complain. Will he, my dear?”

“It’s not for me to say, Richmond,” replied Mrs. Parsons, smiling contentedly.

“Do you want me to get married very much, father?”

“Of course I do. I’ve set my heart upon it. I want to see what the new generations of Parsons are like before I die.”

“Listen, Richmond, Jamie has something to tell us.”

Mrs. Parsons had been looking at her son, and was struck at last by the agony of his expression.

“What is it, Jamie?” she asked.

“I’m afraid you’ll be dreadfully disappointed. I’m so sorry — Mary and I are no longer engaged to be married.”

For a minute there was silence in the room. The old Colonel looked helplessly from wife to son.

“What does he mean, Frances?” he said at last.

Mrs. Parsons did not answer, and he turned to James.

“You’re not in earnest, Jamie? You’re joking with us?”

James went over to his father, as the weaker of the two, and put his arm round his shoulders.

“I’m awfully sorry to have to grieve you, father. It’s quite true — worse luck! It was impossible for me to marry Mary.”

“D’you mean that you’ve broken your engagement with her after she’s waited five years for you?” said Mrs. Parsons.

“I couldn’t do anything else. I found I no longer loved her. We should both have been unhappy if we had married.”

The Colonel recovered himself slowly, he turned round and looked at his son.

“Jamie, Jamie, what have you done?”

“Oh, you can say nothing that I’ve not said to myself. D’you think it’s a step I should have taken lightly? I feel nothing towards Mary but friendship. I don’t love her.”

“But—” the Colonel stopped, and then a light shone in his face, and he began to laugh. “Oh, it’s only a lovers’ quarrel, Frances. They’ve had a little tiff, and they say they’ll never speak to one another again. I warrant they’re both heartily sorry already, and before night they’ll be engaged as fast as ever.”

James, by a look, implored his mother to speak. She understood, and shook her head sadly.

“No, Richmond, I’m afraid it’s not that. It’s serious.”

“But Mary loves him, Frances.”

“I know,” said James. “That’s the tragedy of it. If I could only persuade myself that she didn’t care for me, it would be all right.”

Colonel Parsons sank into his chair, suddenly collapsing. He seemed smaller than ever, wizened and frail; the wisp of white hair that concealed his baldness fell forward grotesquely. His face assumed again that expression, which was almost habitual, of anxious fear.

“Oh, father, don’t look like that! I can’t help it! Don’t make it harder for me than possible. You talk to him, mother. Explain that it’s not my fault. There was nothing else I could do.”

Colonel Parsons sat silent, with his head bent down, but Mrs. Parsons asked:

“What did you say to Mary this morning?”

“I told her exactly what I felt.”

“You said you didn’t love her?”

“I had to.”

“Poor thing!”

They all remained for a while without speaking, each one thinking his painful thoughts.

“Richmond,” said Mrs. Parsons at last, “we mustn’t blame the boy. It’s not his fault. He can’t help it if he doesn’t love her.”

“You wouldn’t have me marry her without love, father?”

The question was answered by Mrs. Parsons.

“No; if you don’t love her, you mustn’t marry her. But what’s to be done, I don’t know. Poor thing, poor thing, how unhappy she must be!”

James sat with his face in his hands, utterly wretched, beginning already to see the great circle of confusion that he had caused. Mrs. Parsons looked at him and looked at her husband. Presently she went up to James.

“Jamie, will you leave us for a little? Your father and I would like to talk it over alone.”

“Yes, mother.”

James got up, and putting her hands on his shoulders, she kissed him.

When James had gone, Mrs. Parsons looked compassionately at her husband; he glanced up, and catching her eye, tried to smile. But it was a poor attempt, and it finished with a sigh.

“What’s to be done, Richmond?”

Colonel Parsons shook his head without answering.

“I ought to have warned you that something might happen. I saw there was a difference in Jamie’s feelings, but I fancied it would pass over. I believed it was only strangeness. Mary is so fond of him, I thought he would soon love her as much as ever.”

“But it’s not honourable what he’s done, Frances,” said the old man at last, his voice trembling with emotion. “It’s not honourable.”

“He can’t help it if he doesn’t love her.”

“It’s his duty to marry her. She’s waited five years; she’s given him the best of her youth — and he jilts her. He can’t, Frances; he must behave like a gentleman.”

The tears fell down Mrs. Parsons’ careworn cheeks — the slow, sparse tears of the woman who has endured much sorrow.

“Don’t let us judge him, Richmond. We’re so ignorant of the world. You and I are old-fashioned.”

“There are no fashions in honesty.”

“Let us send for William. Perhaps he’ll be able to advise us.”

William was Major Forsyth, the brother of Mrs. Parsons. He was a bachelor, living in London, and considered by his relatives a typical man of the world.

“He’ll be able to talk to the boy better than we can.”

“Very well, let us send for him.”

They were both overcome by the catastrophe, but as yet hardly grasped the full extent of it. All their hopes had been centred on this marriage; all their plans for the future had been in it so intricately woven that they could not realise the total over-throw. They felt as a man might feel who was crippled by a sudden accident, and yet still pictured his life as though he had free use of his limbs.... Mrs. Parsons wrote a telegram, and gave it to the maid. The servant went out of the room, but as she did so, stepped back and announced:

“Miss Clibborn, ma’am.”

“Mary!”

The girl came in, and lifted the veil which she had put on to hide her pallor and her eyes, red and heavy with weeping.

“I thought I’d better come round and see you quietly,” she said. “I suppose you’ve heard?”

“Mary, Mary!”

Mrs. Parsons took her in her arms, kissing her tenderly. Mary pretended to laugh, and hastily dried the tears which came to her eyes.

“You’ve been crying, Mrs. Parsons. You mustn’t do that.... Let us sit down and talk sensibly.”

She took the Colonel’s hand, and gently pressed it.

“Is it true, Mary?” he asked. “I can’t believe it.”

“Yes, it’s quite true. We’ve decided that we don’t wish to marry one another. I want to ask you not to think badly of Jamie. He’s very — cut up about it. He’s not to blame.”

“We’re thinking of you, my dear.”

“Oh, I shall be all right. I can bear it.”

“It’s not honourable what he’s done, Mary,” said the Colonel.

“Oh, don’t say that, please! That is why I came round to you quickly. I want you to think that Jamie did what he considered right. For my sake, don’t think ill of him. He can’t help it if he doesn’t love me. I’m not very attractive; he must have known in India girls far nicer than I. How could I hope to keep him all these years? I was a fool to expect it.”

“I am so sorry, Mary!” cried Mrs. Parsons. “We’ve looked forward to your marriage with all our hearts. You know Jamie’s been a good son to us; he’s never given us any worry. We did want him to marry you. We’re so fond of you, and we know how really good you are. We felt that whatever happened after that — if we died — Jamie would be safe and happy.”

“It can’t be helped. Things never turn out in this world as one wants them. Don’t be too distressed about it, and, above all things, don’t let Jamie see that you think he hasn’t acted — as he might have done.”

“How can you think of him now, when your heart must be almost breaking?”

“You see, I’ve thought of him for years,” answered Mary, smiling sadly. “I can’t help it now. Oh, I don’t want him to suffer! His worrying can do no good, I should like him to be completely happy.”

Colonel Parsons sighed.

“He’s my son, and he’s behaved dishonourably.”

“Don’t say that. It’s not fair to him. He did not ask me for his release. But I couldn’t marry him when I knew he no longer cared for me.”

“He might have learned to love you, Mary,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“No, no! I could see, as he pressed me to marry him notwithstanding, he was hoping with all his might that I would refuse. He would have hated me. No; it’s the end. We have separated for ever, and I will do my best to get over it.”

They fell into silence, and presently Mary got up. “I must go home now, and tell mamma.”

“She’ll probably have hysterics,” said Mrs. Parsons, with a little sniff of contempt.

“No, she’ll be delighted,” returned Mary. “I know her so well.”

“Oh, how much you will have to suffer, dearest!”

“It’ll do me good. I was too happy.”

“Don’t you think you could wait a little before telling anyone else?” asked the Colonel. “Major Forsyth is coming down. He may be able to arrange it; he’s a man of the world.”

“Can he make Jamie love me? Ah, no, it’s no good waiting. Let me get it over quickly while I have the courage. And it helps me to think I have something to do. It only means a few sneers and a little false sympathy.”

“A great deal of real sympathy.”

“People are always rather glad when some unhappiness befalls their friends! Oh, I didn’t mean that! I don’t want to be bitter. Don’t think badly of me either. I shall be different to-morrow.”

“We can never think of you without the sincerest, fondest love.”

At that moment James, who did not know that Mary was there, came into the room. He started when he saw her and turned red; but Mary, with a woman’s self-possession, braced herself together.

“Oh, Jamie, I’ve just been having a little chat with your people.”

“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” he answered, awkwardly. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“You need not avoid me because we’ve broken off our engagement. At all events, you have no reason to be afraid of me now. Good-bye! I’m just going home.”

She went out, and James looked uncertainly at his parents. His father did not speak, staring at the ground, but Mrs. Parsons said:

“Mary has been asking us not to be angry with you, Jamie. She says it’s not your fault.”

“It’s very kind of her.”

“Oh, how could you? How could you?”

XI

Not till luncheon was nearly finished did Mary brace herself for the further ordeal, and in a steady, unmoved voice tell Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn what had happened. The faded beauty merely smiled, and lifted her eyes to the chandelier with the expression that had melted the hearts of a thousand and one impressionable subalterns.

“I knew it,” she murmured; “I knew it! You can’t deceive a woman and a mother.”

But the Colonel for a moment was speechless. His face grew red, and his dyed eyebrows stood up in a fury of indignation.

“Impossible!” he spluttered at last.

“You’d better drink a little water, Reggie dear,” said his wife. “You look as if you were going to have a fit.”

“I won’t have it,” he shouted, bringing his fist down on the table so that the cheese-plates clattered and the biscuits danced a rapid jig. “I’ll make him marry you. He forgets he has me to deal with! I disapproved of the match from the beginning, didn’t I, Clara? I said I would never allow my daughter to marry beneath her.”

“Papa!”

“Don’t talk to me, Mary! Do you mean to deny that James Parsons is infantry, or that his father was infantry before him? But he shall marry you now. By George! he shall marry you if I have to lead him to the altar by the scruff of his neck!”

Neglecting his cheese, the Colonel sprang to his feet and walked to and fro, vehemently giving his opinion of James, his father, and all his ancestors; of the regiments to which they had belonged, and all else that was theirs. He traced their origin from a pork butcher’s shop, and prophesied their end, ignominiously, in hell. Every now and then he assured Mary that she need have no fear; the rascal should marry her, or die a violent death.

“But there’s nothing more to be said now, papa. We’ve agreed quite amicably to separate. All I want you to do is to treat him as if nothing had happened.”

“I’ll horsewhip him,” said Colonel Clibborn. “He’s insulted you, and I’ll make him beg your pardon on his bended knees. Clara, where’s my horsewhip?”

“Papa, do be reasonable!”

“I am reasonable, Mary,” roared the gallant soldier, becoming a rich purple. “I know my duty, thank God! and I’m going to do it. When a man insults my daughter, it’s my duty, as a gentleman and an officer, to give him a jolly good thrashing. When that twopenny sawbones of a doctor was rude to you, I licked him within an inch of his life. I kicked him till he begged for mercy; and if more men had the courage to take the law into their own hands, there’d be fewer damned blackguards in the world.”

As a matter of fact, the Colonel had neither thrashed nor kicked the doctor, but it pleased him to think he had. Moralists teach us that the intention is praiseworthy, rather than the brutal act; consequently, there could be no objection if the fearless cavalryman took credit for things which he had thought of doing, but, from circumstances beyond his control, had not actually done.

Mary felt no great alarm at her father’s horrid threats, for she knew him well, but still was doubtful about her mother.

“You will treat James as you did before, won’t you, mamma?”

Mrs. Clibborn smiled, a portly seraph.

“My dear, I trust I am a gentlewoman.”

“He shall never darken my doors again!” cried the Colonel. “I tell you, Clara, keep him out of my way. If I meet him I won’t be responsible for my actions; I shall knock him down.”

“Reggie dear, you’ll have such dreadful indigestion if you don’t calm down. You know it always upsets you to get excited immediately after meals.”

“It’s disgraceful! I suppose he forgets all those half-crowns I gave him when he was a boy, and the cigars, and the port wine he’s had since. I opened a special bottle for him only the night before last. I’ll never sit down to dinner with him again — don’t ask me to, Clara.... It’s the confounded impertinence of it which gets over me. But he shall marry you, my dear; or I’ll know the reason why.”

“You can’t have him up for breach of promise, Reggie,” cooed Mrs. Clibborn.

“A gentleman takes the law in his own hands in these matters. Ah, it’s a pity the good old days have gone when they settled such things with cold steel!”

And the Colonel, to emphasise his words, flung himself into the appropriate attitude, throwing his left hand up behind his head, and lunging fiercely with the right.

“Go and look for my pince-nez, my dear,” said Mrs. Clibborn, turning to Mary. “I think they’re in my work-basket or in your father’s study.”

Mary was glad to leave the room, about which the Colonel stamped in an ever-increasing rage, pausing now and then to take a mouthful of bread and cheese. The request for the glasses was Mrs. Clibborn’s usual way of getting rid of Mary, a typical subterfuge of a woman who never, except by chance, put anything straightforwardly.... When the door was closed, the buxom lady clasped her hands, and cried:

“Reginald! Reginald! I have a confession to make.”

“What’s the matter with you?” said the Colonel, stopping short.

“I am to blame for this, Reginald.” Mrs. Clibborn threw her head on one side, and looked at the ceiling as the only substitute for heaven. “James Parsons has jilted Mary — on my account.”

“What the devil have you been doing now?”

“Oh, forgive me, Reginald!” she cried, sliding off the chair and falling heavily on her knees. “It’s not my fault: he loves me.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said her husband angrily, walking on again.

“It isn’t, Reginald. How unjust you are to me!”

The facile tears began to flow down Mrs. Clibborn’s well-powdered cheeks.

“I know he loves me. You can’t deceive a woman and a mother.”

“You’re double his age!”

“These boys always fall in love with women older than themselves; I’ve noticed it so often. And he’s almost told me in so many words, though I’m sure I’ve given him no encouragement.”

“Fiddlesticks, Clara!”

“You wouldn’t believe me when I told you that poor Algy Turner loved me, and he killed himself.”

“Nothing of the kind; he died of cholera.”

“Reginald,” retorted Mrs. Clibborn, with asperity, “his death was most mysterious. None of the doctors understood it. If he didn’t poison himself, he died of a broken heart. And I think you’re very unkind to me.”

With some difficulty, being a heavy woman, she lifted herself from the floor; and by the time she was safely on her feet, Mrs. Clibborn was blowing and puffing like a grampus.

The Colonel, whose mind had wandered to other things, suddenly bethought himself that he had a duty to perform.

“Where’s my horsewhip, Clara? I command you to give it me.”

“Reginald, if you have the smallest remnant of affection for me, you will not hurt this unfortunate young man. Remember that Algy Turner killed himself. You can’t blame him for not wanting to marry poor Mary. My dear, she has absolutely no figure. And men are so susceptible to those things.”

The Colonel stalked out of the room, and Mrs. Clibborn sat down to meditate.

“I thought my day for such things was past,” she murmured. “I knew it all along. The way he looked at me was enough — we women have such quick perceptions! Poor boy, how he must suffer!”

She promised herself that no harsh word of hers should drive James into the early grave where lay the love-lorn Algy Turner. And she sighed, thinking what a curse it was to possess that fatal gift of beauty!

When Little Primpton heard the news, Little Primpton was agitated. Certainly it was distressed, and even virtuously indignant, but at the same time completely unable to divest itself of that little flutter of excitement which was so rare, yet so enchanting, a variation from the monotony of its daily course. The well-informed walked with a lighter step, and held their heads more jauntily, for life had suddenly acquired a novel interest. With something new to talk about, something fresh to think over, with a legitimate object of sympathy and resentment, the torpid blood raced through their veins as might that of statesmen during some crisis in national affairs. Let us thank God, who has made our neighbours frail, and in His infinite mercy caused husband and wife to quarrel; Tom, Dick, and Harry to fall more or less discreditably in love; this dear friend of ours to lose his money, and that her reputation. In all humility, let us be grateful for the scandal which falls at our feet like ripe fruit, for the Divorce Court and for the newspapers that, with a witty semblance of horror, report for us the spicy details. If at certain intervals propriety obliges us to confess that we are miserable sinners, has not the Lord sought to comfort us in the recollection that we are not half so bad as most people?

Mr. Dryland went to the Vicarage to enter certificates in the parish books. The Vicar was in his study, and gave his curate the keys of the iron safe.

“Sophie Bunch came last night to put up her banns,” he said.

“She’s going to marry out of the parish, isn’t she?”

“Yes, a Tunbridge Wells man.”

The curate carefully blotted the entries he had made, and returned the heavy books to their place.

“Will you come into the dining-room, Dryland?” said the Vicar, with a certain solemnity. “Mrs Jackson would like to speak to you.”

“Certainly.”

Mrs. Jackson was reading the Church Times. Her thin, sharp face wore an expression of strong disapproval; her tightly-closed mouth, her sharp nose, even the angular lines of her body, signified clearly that her moral sense was outraged. She put her hand quickly to her massive fringe to see that it was straight, and rose to shake hands with Mr. Dryland. His heavy red face assumed at once a grave look; his moral sense was outraged, too.

“Isn’t this dreadful news, Mr. Dryland?”

“Oh, very sad! Very sad!”

In both their voices, hidden below an intense sobriety, there was discernible a slight ring of exultation.

“The moment I saw him I felt he would give trouble,” said Mrs. Jackson, shaking her head. “I told you, Archibald, that I didn’t like the look of him.”

“I’m bound to say you did,” admitted her lord and master.

“Mary Clibborn is much too good for him,” added Mrs. Jackson, decisively. “She’s a saint.”

“The fact is, that he’s suffering from a swollen head,” remarked the curate, who used slang as a proof of manliness.

“There, Archibald!” cried the lady, triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”

“Mrs. Jackson thought he was conceited.”

“I don’t think it; I’m sure of it. He’s odiously conceited. All the time I was talking to him I felt he considered himself superior to me. No nice-minded man would have refused our offer to say a short prayer on his behalf during morning service.”

“Those army men always have a very good opinion of themselves,” said Mr. Dryland, taking advantage of his seat opposite a looking-glass to arrange his hair.

He spoke in such a round, full voice that his shortest words carried a sort of polysyllabic weight.

“I can’t see what he has done to be so proud of,” said Mrs. Jackson. “Anyone would have done the same in his position. I’m sure it’s no more heroic than what clergymen do every day of their lives, without making the least fuss about it.”

“They say that true courage is always modest,” answered Mr. Dryland.

The remark was not very apposite, but sounded damaging.

“I didn’t like the way he had when he came to tea here — as if he were dreadfully bored. I’m sure he’s not so clever as all that.”

“No clever man would act in an ungentlemanly way,” said the curate, and then smiled, for he thought he had unconsciously made an epigram.

“I couldn’t express in words what I feel with regard to his treatment of Mary!” cried Mrs. Jackson; and then proceeded to do so — and in many, to boot.

They had all been a little oppressed by the greatness which, much against his will, they had thrust upon the unfortunate James. They had set him on a pedestal, and then were disconcerted because he towered above their heads, and the halo with which they had surrounded him dazzled their eyes. They had wished to make a lion of James, and his modest resistance wounded their self-esteem; it was a relief to learn that he was not worth making a lion of. Halo and pedestal were quickly demolished, for the golden idol had feet of clay, and his late adorers were ready to reproach him because he had not accepted with proper humility the gifts he did not want. Their little vanities were comforted by the assurance that, far from being a hero, James was, in fact, distinctly inferior to themselves. For there is no superiority like moral superiority. A man who stands akimbo on the top of the Ten Commandments need bow the knee to no earthly potentate.

Little Primpton was conscious of its virtue, and did not hesitate to condemn.

“He has lowered himself dreadfully.”

“Yes, it’s very sad. It only shows how necessary it is to preserve a meek and contrite spirit in prosperity. Pride always goes before a fall.”

The Jacksons and Mr. Dryland discussed the various accounts which had reached them. Mary and Mrs. Parsons were determinedly silent, but Mrs. Clibborn was loquacious, and it needed little artifice to extract the whole story from Colonel Parsons.

“One thing is unfortunately certain,” said Mrs. Jackson, with a sort of pious vindictiveness, “Captain Parsons has behaved abominably, and it’s our duty to do something.”

“Colonel Clibborn threatens to horsewhip him.”

“It would do him good,” cried Mrs. Jackson; “and I should like to be there to see it!”

They paused a moment to gloat over the imaginary scene of Jamie’s chastisement.

“He’s a wicked man. Fancy throwing the poor girl over when she’s waited five years. I think he ought to be made to marry her.”

“I’m bound to say that no gentleman would have acted like that,” said the Vicar.

“I wanted Archibald to go and speak seriously to Captain Parsons. He ought to know what we think of him, and it’s obviously our duty to tell him.”

“His parents are very much distressed. One can see that, although they say so little.”

“It’s not enough to be distressed. They ought to have the strength of mind to insist upon his marrying Mary Clibborn. But they stick up for everything he does. They think he’s perfect. I’m sure it’s not respectful to God to worship a human being as they do their son.”

“They certainly have a very exaggerated opinion of him,” assented Mr. Dryland.

“And I should like to know why. He’s not good-looking.”

“Very ordinary,” agreed Mr. Dryland, with a rapid glance at the convenient mirror. “I don’t think his appearance is manly.”

Whatever the curate’s defects of person — and he flattered himself that he was modest enough to know his bad points — no one, he fancied, could deny him manliness. It is possible that he was not deceived. Put him in a bowler-hat and a bell-bottomed coat, and few could have distinguished him from a cab-driver.

“I don’t see anything particular in his eyes or hair,” pursued Mrs. Jackson.

“His features are fairly regular. But that always strikes me as insipid in a man.”

“And he’s not a good conversationalist.”

“I’m bound to confess I’ve never heard him say anything clever,” remarked the Vicar.

“No,” smiled the curate; “one could hardly call him a brilliant epigrammatist.”

“I don’t think he’s well informed.”

“Oh, well, you know, one doesn’t expect knowledge from army men,” said the curate, with a contemptuous smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “I must say I was rather amused when he confessed he hadn’t read Marie Corelli.”

“I can hardly believe that. I think it was only pose.”

“I’m sorry to say that my experience of young officers is that there are absolutely no bounds to their ignorance.”

They had satisfactorily stripped James of every quality, mental and physical, which could have made him attractive in Mary’s eyes; and the curate’s next remark was quite natural.

“I’m afraid it sounds a conceited thing to say, but I can’t help asking myself what Miss Clibborn saw in him.”

“Love is blind,” replied Mrs. Jackson. “She could have done much better for herself.”

They paused to consider the vagaries of the tender passion, and the matches which Mary might have made, had she been so inclined.

“Archibald,” said Mrs. Jackson at last, with the decision characteristic of her, “I’ve made up my mind. As vicar of the parish, you must go to Captain Parsons.”

“I, my dear?”

“Yes, Archibald. You must insist upon him fulfilling his engagement with Mary. Say that you are shocked and grieved; and ask him if his own conscience does not tell him that he has done wrong.”

“I’m not sure that he’d listen to reason,” nervously remarked the Vicar.

“It’s your duty to try, Archibald. We’re so afraid of being called busybodies that even when we ought to step in we hesitate. No motives of delicacy should stop one when a wicked action is to be prevented. It’s often the clergy’s duty to interfere with other people’s affairs. For my part, I will never shrink from doing my duty. People may call me a busybody if they like; hard words break no bones.”

“Captain Parsons is very reserved. He might think it an impertinence if I went to him.”

“How could he? Isn’t it our business if he breaks his word with a parishioner of ours? If you don’t talk to him, I shall. So there, Archibald!”

“Why don’t you, Mrs. Jackson?”

“Nothing would please me better, I should thoroughly enjoy giving him a piece of my mind. It would do him good to be told frankly that he’s not quite so great as he thinks himself. I will never shrink from doing my duty.”

“My dear,” remonstrated the Vicar, “if you really think I ought to speak—”

“Perhaps Mrs. Jackson would do better. A women can say many things that a man can’t.”

This was a grateful suggestion to the Vicar, who could not rid himself of the discomforting thought that James, incensed and hot-tempered, might use the strength of his arms — or legs — in lieu of argument. Mr. Jackson would have affronted horrid tortures for his faith, but shrank timidly before the least suspicion of ridicule. His wife was braver, or less imaginative.

“Very well, I’ll go,” she said. “It’s true he might be rude to Archibald, and he couldn’t be rude to a lady. And what’s more, I shall go at once.”

Mrs. Jackson kept her hat on a peg in the hall, and was quickly ready. She put on her black kid gloves; determination sat upon her mouth, and Christian virtue rested between her brows. Setting out with a brisk step, the conviction was obvious in every movement that duty called, and to that clarion note Maria Jackson would never turn a deaf ear. She went like a Hebrew prophet, conscious that the voice of the Lord was in her.

XII

James was wandering in the garden of Primpton House while Mrs. Jackson thither went her way. Since the termination of his engagement with Mary three days back, the subject had not been broached between him and his parents; but he divined their thoughts. He knew that they awaited the arrival of his uncle, Major Forsyth, to set the matter right. They did not seek to reconcile themselves with the idea that the break was final; it seemed too monstrous a thing to be true. James smiled, with bitter amusement, at their simple trust in the man of the world who was due that day.

Major Forsyth was fifty-three, a haunter of military clubs, a busy sluggard, who set his pride in appearing dissipated, and yet led the blameless life of a clergyman’s daughter; preserving a spotless virtue, nothing pleased him more than to be thought a rake. He had been on half-pay for many years, and blamed the War Office on that account rather than his own incompetence. Ever since retiring he had told people that advancement, in these degenerate days, was impossible without influence: he was, indeed, one of those men to whom powerful friends offer the only chance of success; and possessing none, inveighed constantly against the corrupt officialism of those in authority. But to his Jeremiads upon the decay of the public services he added a keen interest in the world of fashion; it is always well that a man should have varied activities; it widens his horizon, and gives him a greater usefulness. If his attention had been limited to red-tape, Major Forsyth, even in his own circle, might have been thought a little one-sided; but his knowledge of etiquette and tailors effectually prevented the reproach. He was pleased to consider himself in society; he read assiduously those papers which give detailed accounts of the goings-on in the “hupper succles,” and could give you with considerable accuracy the whereabouts of titled people. If he had a weakness, it was by his manner of speaking to insinuate that he knew certain noble persons whom, as a matter of fact, he had never set eyes on; he would not have told a direct lie on the subject, but his conscience permitted him a slight equivocation. Major Forsyth was well up in all the gossip of the clubs, and if he could not call himself a man of the world, he had not the least notion who could. But for all that, he had the strictest principles; he was true brother to Mrs. Parsons, and though he concealed the fact like something disreputable, regularly went to church on Sunday mornings. There was also a certain straitness in his income which confined him to the paths shared by the needy and the pure at heart.

Major Forsyth had found no difficulty in imposing upon his sister and her husband.

“Of course, William is rather rackety,” they said. “It’s a pity he hasn’t a wife to steady him; but he has a good heart.”

For them Major Forsyth had the double advantage of a wiliness gained in the turmoil of the world and an upright character. They scarcely knew how in the present juncture he could help, but had no doubt that from the boundless store of his worldly wisdom he would invent a solution to their difficulty.

James had found his uncle out when he was quite a boy, and seeing his absurdity, had treated him ever since with good-natured ridicule.

“I wonder what they think he can say?” he asked himself.

James was profoundly grieved at the unhappiness which bowed his father down. His parents had looked forward with such ecstatic pleasure to his arrival, and what sorrow had he not brought them!

“I wish I’d never come back,” he muttered.

He thought of the flowing, undulating plains of the Orange Country, and the blue sky, with its sense of infinite freedom. In that trim Kentish landscape he felt hemmed in; when the clouds were low it seemed scarcely possible to breathe; and he suffered from the constraint of his father and mother, who treated him formally, as though he had become a stranger. There was always between them and him that painful topic which for the time was carefully shunned. They did not mention Mary’s name, and the care they took to avoid it was more painful than would have been an open reference. They sat silent and sad, trying to appear natural, and dismally failing; their embarrassed manner was such as they might have adopted had he committed some crime, the mention of which for his sake must never be made, but whose recollection perpetually haunted them. In every action was the belief that James must be suffering from remorse, and that it was their duty not to make his burden heavier. James knew that his father was convinced that he had acted dishonourably, and he — what did he himself think?

James asked himself a hundred times a day whether he had acted well or ill; and though he forced himself to answer that he had done the only possible thing, deep down in his heart was a terrible, a perfectly maddening uncertainty. He tried to crush it, and would not listen, for his intelligence told him clearly it was absurd; but it was stronger than intelligence, an incorporeal shape through which passed harmlessly the sword-cuts of his reason. It was a little devil curled up in his heart, muttering to all his arguments, “Are you sure?”

Sometimes he was nearly distracted, and then the demon laughed, so that the mocking shrillness rang in his ears:

“Are you sure, my friend — are you sure? And where, pray, is the honour which only a while ago you thought so much of?”

James walked to and fro restlessly, impatient, angry with himself and with all the world.

But then on the breath of the wind, on the perfume of the roses, yellow and red, came suddenly the irresistible recollection of Mrs. Wallace. Why should he not think of her now? He was free; he could do her no harm; he would never see her again. The thought of her was the only sunshine in his life; he was tired of denying himself every pleasure. Why should he continue the pretence that he no longer loved her? It was, indeed, a consolation to think that the long absence had not dulled his passion; the strength of it was its justification. It was useless to fight against it, for it was part of his very soul; he might as well have fought against the beating of his heart. And if it was torture to remember those old days in India, he delighted in it; it was a pain more exquisite than the suffocating odours of tropical flowers, a voluptuous agony such as might feel the fakir lacerating his flesh in a divine possession.... Every little occurrence was clear, as if it had taken place but a day before.

James repeated to himself the conversations they had had, of no consequence, the idle gossip of a stray half-hour; but each word was opulent in the charming smile, in the caressing glance of her eyes. He was able to imagine Mrs. Wallace quite close to him, wearing the things that he had seen her wear, and with her movements he noticed the excessive scent she used. He wondered whether she had overcome that failing, whether she still affected the artificiality which was so adorable a relief from the primness of manner which he had thought the natural way of women.

If her cheeks were not altogether innocent of rouge or her eyebrows of pencil, what did he care; he delighted in her very faults; he would not have her different in the very slightest detail; everything was part of that complex, elusive fascination. And James thought of the skin which had the even softness of fine velvet, and the little hands. He called himself a fool for his shyness. What could have been the harm if he had taken those hands and kissed them? Now, in imagination, he pressed his lips passionately on the warm palms. He liked the barbaric touch in the many rings which bedecked her fingers.

“Why do you wear so many rings?” he asked. “Your hands are too fine.”

He would never have ventured the question, but now there was no danger. Her answer came with a little, good-humoured laugh; she stretched out her fingers, looking complacently at the brilliant gems.

“I like to be gaudy. I should like to be encrusted with jewels. I want to wear bracelets to my elbow and diamond spangles on my arms; and jewelled belts, and jewels in my hair, and on my neck. I should like to flash from head to foot with exotic stones.”

Then she looked at him with amusement.

“Of course, you think it’s vulgar. What do I care? You all of you think it’s vulgar to be different from other people. I want to be unique.”

“You want everybody to look at you?”

“Of course I do! Is it sinful? Oh, I get so impatient with all of you, with your good taste and your delicacy, and your insupportable dulness. When you admire a woman, you think it impertinent to tell her she’s beautiful; when you have good looks, you carry yourselves as though you were ashamed.”

And in a bold moment he replied:

“Yet you would give your soul to have no drop of foreign blood in your veins!”

“I?” she cried, her eyes flashing with scorn. “I’m proud of my Eastern blood. It’s not blood I have in my veins, it’s fire — a fire of gold. It’s because of it that I have no prejudices, and know how to enjoy my life.”

James smiled, and did not answer.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“No!”

“Well, perhaps I should like to be quite English. I should feel more comfortable in my scorn of these regimental ladies if I thought they could find no reason to look down on me.”

“I don’t think they look down on you.”

“Oh, don’t they? They despise and loathe me.”

“When you were ill, they did all they could for you.”

“Foolish creature! Don’t you know that to do good to your enemy is the very best way of showing your contempt.”

And so James could go on, questioning, replying, putting little jests into her mouth, or half-cynical repartees. Sometimes he spoke aloud, and then Mrs. Wallace’s voice sounded in his ears, clear and rich and passionate, as though she were really standing in the flesh beside him. But always he finished by taking her in his arms and kissing her lips and her closed eyes, the lids transparent like the finest alabaster. He knew no pleasure greater than to place his hands on that lustrous hair. What could it matter now? He was not bound to Mary; he could do no harm to Mrs. Wallace, ten thousand miles away.

But Colonel Parsons broke into the charming dream. Bent and weary, he came across the lawn to find his son. The wan, pathetic figure brought back to James all the present bitterness. He sighed, and advanced to meet him.

“You’re very reckless to come out without a hat, father. I’ll fetch you one, shall I?”

“No, I’m not going to stay.” The Colonel could summon up no answering smile to his boy’s kind words. “I only came to tell you that Mrs. Jackson is in the drawing-room, and would like to see you.”

“What does she want?”

“She’ll explain herself. She has asked to see you alone.”

Jamie’s face darkened, as some notion of Mrs. Jackson’s object dawned upon him.

“I don’t know what she can have to talk to me about alone.”

“Please listen to her, Jamie. She’s a very clever woman, and you can’t fail to benefit by her advice.”

The Colonel never had an unfriendly word to say of anyone, and even for Mrs. Jackson’s unwarrantable interferences could always find a good-natured justification. He was one of those deprecatory men who, in every difference of opinion, are convinced that they are certainly in the wrong. He would have borne with the most cheerful submission any rebuke of his own conduct, and been, indeed, vastly grateful to the Vicar’s wife for pointing out his error.

James found Mrs. Jackson sitting bolt upright on a straight-backed chair, convinced, such was her admirable sense of propriety, that a lounging attitude was incompatible with the performance of a duty. She held her hands on her lap, gently clasped; and her tight lips expressed as plainly as possible her conviction that though the way of righteousness was hard, she, thank God! had strength to walk it.

“How d’you do, Mrs. Jackson?”

“Good morning,” she replied, with a stiff bow.

James, though there was no fire, went over to the mantelpiece and leant against it, waiting for the lady to speak.

“Captain Parsons, I have a very painful duty to perform.”

Those were her words, but it must have been a dense person who failed to perceive that Mrs. Jackson found her duty anything but painful. There was just that hard resonance in her voice that an inquisitor might have in condemning to the stake a Jew to whom he owed much money.

“I suppose you will call me a busybody?”

“Oh, I’m sure you would never interfere with what does not concern you,” replied James, slowly.

“Certainly not!” said Mrs. Jackson. “I come here because my conscience tells me to. What I wish to talk to you about concerns us all.”

“Shall I call my people? I’m sure they’d be interested.”

“I asked to see you alone, Captain Parsons,” answered Mrs. Jackson, frigidly. “And it was for your sake. When one has to tell a person home-truths, he generally prefers that there should be no audience.”

“So you’re going to tell me some home-truths, Mrs. Jackson?” said James, with a laugh. “You must think me very good-natured. How long have I had the pleasure of your acquaintance?”

Mrs. Jackson’s grimness did not relax.

“One learns a good deal about people in a week.”

“D’you think so? I have an idea that ten years is a short time to get to know them. You must be very quick.”

“Actions often speak.”

“Actions are the most lying things in the world. They are due mostly to adventitious circumstances which have nothing to do with the character of the agent. I would never judge a man by his actions.”

“I didn’t come here to discuss abstract things with you, Captain Parsons.”

“Why not? The abstract is so much more entertaining than the concrete. It affords opportunities for generalisation, which is the salt of conversation.”

“I’m a very busy woman,” retorted Mrs. Jackson sharply, thinking that James was not treating her with proper seriousness. He was not so easy to tackle as she had imagined.

“It’s very good of you, then, to spare time to come and have a little chat with me,” said James.

“I did not come for that purpose, Captain Parsons.”

“Oh, I forgot — home-truths, wasn’t it? I was thinking of Shakespeare and the musical glasses!”

“Would you kindly remember that I am a clergyman’s wife, Captain Parsons? I daresay you are not used to the society of such.”

“Pardon me, I even know an archdeacon quite well. He has a great gift of humour; a man wants it when he wears a silk apron.”

“Captain Parsons,” said Mrs. Jackson, sternly, “there are some things over which it is unbecoming to jest. I wish to be as gentle as possible with you, but I may remind you that flippancy is not the best course for you to pursue.”

James looked at her with a good-tempered stare.

“Upon my word,” he said to himself, “I never knew I was so patient.”

“I can’t beat about the bush any longer,” continued the Vicar’s lady; “I have a very painful duty to perform.”

“That quite excuses your hesitation.”

“You must guess why I have asked to see you alone.”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Does your conscience say nothing to you?”

“My conscience is very well-bred. It never says unpleasant things.”

“Then I’m sincerely sorry for you.”

James smiled.

“Oh, my good woman,” he thought, “if you only knew what a troublesome spirit I carry about with me!”

But Mrs. Jackson saw only hardness of heart in the grave face; she never dreamed that behind those quiet eyes was a turmoil of discordant passions, tearing, rending, burning.

“I’m sorry for you,” she repeated. “I think it’s very sad, very sad indeed, that you should stand there and boast of the sluggishness of your conscience. Conscience is the voice of God, Captain Parsons; if it does not speak to you, it behoves others to speak in its place.”

“And supposing I knew what you wanted to say, do you think I should like to hear?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then don’t you think discretion points to silence?”

“No, Captain Parsons. There are some things which one is morally bound to say, however distasteful they may be.”

“The easiest way to get through life is to say pleasant things on all possible occasions.”

“That is not my way, and that is not the right way.”

“I think it rash to conclude that a course is right merely because it is difficult. Likewise an uncivil speech is not necessarily a true one.”

“I repeat that I did not come here to bandy words with you.”

“My dear Mrs. Jackson, I have been wondering why you did not come to the point at once.”

“You have been wilfully interrupting me.”

“I’m so sorry. I thought I had been making a series of rather entertaining observations.”

“Captain Parsons, what does your conscience say to you about Mary Clibborn?”

James looked at Mrs. Jackson very coolly, and she never imagined with what difficulty he was repressing himself.

“I thought you said your subject was of national concern. Upon my word, I thought you proposed to hold a thanksgiving service in Little Primpton Church for the success of the British arms.”

“Well, you know different now,” retorted Mrs. Jackson, with distinct asperity. “I look upon your treatment of Mary Clibborn as a matter which concerns us all.”

“Then, as politely as possible, I must beg to differ from you. I really cannot permit you to discuss my private concerns. You have, doubtless, much evil to say of me; say it behind my back.”

“I presumed that you were a gentleman, Captain Parsons.”

“You certainly presumed.”

“And I should be obliged if you would treat me like a lady.”

James smiled. He saw that it was folly to grow angry.

“We’ll do our best to be civil to one another, Mrs. Jackson. But I don’t think you must talk of what really is not your business.”

“D’you think you can act shamefully and then slink away as soon as you are brought to book? Do you know what you’ve done to Mary Clibborn?”

“Whatever I’ve done, you may be sure that I have not acted rashly. Really, nothing you can say will make the slightest difference. Don’t you think we had better bring our conversation to an end?”

James made a movement towards the door.

“Your father and mother wish me to speak with you, Colonel Parsons,” said Mrs. Jackson. “And they wish you to listen to what I have to say.”

James paused. “Very well.”

He sat down and waited. Mrs. Jackson felt unaccountably nervous; it had never occurred to her that a mere soldier could be so hard to deal with, and it was she who hesitated now. Jamie’s stern eyes made her feel singularly like a culprit; but she cleared her throat and straightened herself.

“It’s very sad,” she said, “to find how much we’ve been mistaken in you, Captain Parsons. When we were making all sorts of preparations to welcome you, we never thought that you would repay us like this. It grieves me to have to tell you that you have done a very wicked thing. I was hoping that your conscience would have something to say to you, but unhappily I was mistaken. You induced Mary to become engaged to you; you kept her waiting for years; you wrote constantly, pretending to love her, deceiving her odiously; you let her waste the best part of her life, and then, without excuse and without reason, you calmly say that you’re sick of her, and won’t marry her. I think it is horrible, and brutal, and most ungentlemanly. Even a common man wouldn’t have behaved in that way. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you, but it means the ruin of Mary’s whole life. How can she get a husband now when she’s wasted her best years? You’ve spoilt all her chances. You’ve thrown a slur upon her which people will never forget. You’re a cruel, wicked man, and however you won the Victoria Cross I don’t know; I’m sure you don’t deserve it.”

Mrs. Jackson stopped.

“Is that all?” asked James, quietly.

“It’s quite enough.”

“Quite! In that case, I think we may finish our little interview.”

“Have you nothing to say?” asked Mrs. Jackson indignantly, realising that she had not triumphed after all.

“I? Nothing.”

Mrs. Jackson was perplexed, and still those disconcerting eyes were fixed upon her; she angrily resented their polite contempt.

“Well, I think it’s disgraceful!” she cried. “You must be utterly shameless!”

“My dear lady, you asked me to listen to you, and I have. If you thought I was going to argue, I’m afraid you were mistaken. But since you have been very frank with me, you can hardly mind if I am equally frank with you. I absolutely object to the way in which not only you, but all the persons who took part in that ridiculous function the other day, talk of my private concerns. I am a perfect stranger to you, and you have no business to speak to me of my engagement with Miss Clibborn or the rupture of it. Finally, I would remark that I consider your particular interference a very gross piece of impertinence. I am sorry to have to speak so directly, but apparently nothing but the very plainest language can have any effect upon you.”

Then Mrs. Jackson lost her temper.

“Captain Parsons, I am considerably older than you, and you have no right to speak to me like that. You forget that I am a lady; and if I didn’t know your father and mother, I should say that you were no gentleman. And you forget also that I come here on the part of God. You are certainly no Christian. You’ve been very rude to me, indeed.”

“I didn’t mean to be,” replied James, smiling.

“If I’d known you would be so rude to a lady, I should have sent Archibald to speak with you.”

“Perhaps it’s fortunate you didn’t. I might have kicked him.”

“Captain Parsons, he’s a minister of the gospel.”

“Surely it is possible to be that without being a malicious busybody.”

“You’re heartless and vain! You’re odiously conceited.”

“I should have thought it a proof of modesty that for half an hour I have listened to you with some respect and with great attention.”

“I must say in my heart I’m glad that Providence has stepped in and prevented Mary from marrying you. You are a bad man. And I leave you now to the mercies of your own conscience; I am a Christian woman, thank Heaven! and I forgive you. But I sincerely hope that God will see fit to punish you for your wickedness.”

Mrs. Jackson bounced to the door, which James very politely opened.

“Oh, don’t trouble!” she said, with a sarcastic shake of the head. “I can find my way out alone, and I shan’t steal the umbrellas.”

XIII

Major Forsyth arrived in time for tea, red-faced, dapper, and immaculate. He wore a check suit, very new and very pronounced, with a beautiful line down each trouser-leg; and his collar and his tie were of the latest mode. His scanty hair was carefully parted in the middle, and his moustache bristled with a martial ardour. He had lately bought a fine set of artificial teeth, which, with pardonable pride, he constantly exhibited to the admiration of all and sundry. Major Forsyth’s consuming desire was to appear juvenile; he affected slang, and carried himself with a youthful jauntiness. He vowed he felt a mere boy, and flattered himself that on his good days, with the light behind him, he might pass for five-and-thirty.

“A woman,” he repeated— “a woman is as old as she looks; but a man is as old as he feels!”

The dandiness which in a crammer’s pup — most overdressed of all the human race — would merely have aroused a smile, looked oddly with the Major’s wrinkled skin and his old eyes. There was something almost uncanny in the exaggerated boyishness; he reminded one of some figure in a dance of death, of a living skeleton, hollow-eyed, strutting gaily by the side of a gallant youth.

It was not difficult to impose upon the Parsons, and Major Forsyth had gained over them a complete ascendancy. They took his opinion on every possible matter, accepting whatever he said with gratified respect. He was a man of the world, and well acquainted with the goings-on of society. They had an idea that he disappointed duchesses to come down to Little Primpton, and always felt that it was a condescension on his part to put up with their simple manners. They altered their hours; luncheon was served at the middle of the day, and dinner in the evening.

Mrs. Parsons put on a Sabbath garment of black silk to receive her brother, and round her neck a lace fichu. When he arrived with Colonel Parsons from the station, she went into the hall to meet him.

“Well, William, have you had a pleasant journey?”

“Oh, yes, yes! I came down with the prettiest woman I’ve seen for many a long day. I made eyes at her all the way, but she wouldn’t look at me.”

“William, William!” expostulated Mr. Parsons, smiling.

“You see he hasn’t improved since we saw him last, Frances,” laughed the Colonel, leading the way into the drawing-room.

“No harm in looking at a pretty woman, you know. I’m a bachelor still, thank the Lord! That reminds me of a funny story I heard at the club.”

“Oh, we’re rather frightened of your stories, William,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“Yes, you’re very risky sometimes,” assented the Colonel, good-humouredly shaking his head.

Major Forsyth was anecdotal, as is only decent in an old bachelor, and he made a speciality of stories which he thought wicked, but which, as a matter of fact, would not have brought a blush to any cheek less innocent than that of Colonel Parsons.

“There’s no harm in a little spice,” said Uncle William. “And you’re a married woman, Frances.”

He told an absolutely pointless story of how a man had helped a young woman across the street, and seen her ankle in the process. He told it with immense gusto, laughing and repeating the point at least six times.

“William, William!” laughed Colonel Parsons, heartily. “You should keep those things for the smoking-room.”

“What d’you think of it, Frances?” asked the gallant Major, still hugely enjoying the joke.

Mrs. Parsons blushed a little, and for decency’s sake prevented herself from smiling; she felt rather wicked.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your tales, William.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed Uncle William, “I knew you’d like it. And that one I told you in the fly, Richmond — you know, about the petticoat.”

“Sh-sh!” said the Colonel, smiling. “You can’t tell that to a lady.”

“P’r’aps I’d better not. But it’s a good story, though.”

They both laughed.

“I think it’s dreadful the things you men talk about as soon as you’re alone,” said Mrs. Parsons.

The two God-fearing old soldiers laughed again, admitting their wickedness.

“One must talk about something,” said Uncle William. “And upon my word, I don’t know anything better to talk about than the fair sex.”

Soon James appeared, and shook hands with his uncle.

“You’re looking younger than ever, Uncle William. You make me feel quite old.”

“Oh, I never age, bless you! Why, I was talking to my old friend, Lady Green, the other day — she was a Miss Lake, you know — and she said to me: ‘Upon my word, Major Forsyth, you’re wonderful. I believe you’ve found the secret of perpetual youth.’ ‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘I never let myself grow old. If you once give way to it, you’re done.’ ‘How do you manage it?’ she said. ‘Madam,’ I answered, ‘it’s the simplest thing in the world. I keep regular hours, and I wear flannel next to my skin.’”

“Come, come, Uncle William,” said James, with a smile. “You didn’t mention your underlinen to a lady!”

“Upon my word, I’m telling you exactly what I said.”

“You’re very free in your conversation.”

“Well, you know, I find the women expect it from me. Of course, I never go beyond the line.”

Then Major Forsyth talked of the fashions, and of his clothes, of the scandal of the day, and the ancestry of the persons concerned, of the war.

“You can say what you like,” he remarked, “but my opinion is that Roberts is vastly overrated. I met at the club the other day a man whose first cousin has served under Roberts in India — his first cousin, mind you, so it’s good authority — and this chap told me, in strict confidence, of course, that his first cousin had no opinion of Roberts. That’s what a man says who has actually served under him.”

“It is certainly conclusive,” said James. “I wonder your friend’s first cousin didn’t go to the War Office and protest against Bobs being sent out.”

“What’s the good of going to the War Office? They’re all corrupt and incompetent there. If I had my way, I’d make a clean sweep of them. Talking of red-tape, I’ll just give you an instance. Now, this is a fact. It was told me by the brother-in-law of the uncle of the man it happened to.”

Major Forsyth told his story at great length, finishing up with the assertion that if the army wasn’t going to the dogs, he didn’t know what going to the dogs meant.

James, meanwhile, catching the glances which passed between his mother and Colonel Parsons, understood that they were thinking of the great subject upon which Uncle William was to be consulted. Half scornfully he gave them their opportunity.

“I’m going for a stroll,” he said, “through Groombridge. I shan’t be back till dinner-time.”

“How lucky!” remarked Colonel Parsons naively, when James had gone. “We wanted to talk with you privately, William. You’re a man of the world.”

“I think there’s not much that I don’t know,” replied the Major, shooting his linen.

“Tell him, Frances.”

Mrs. Parsons, accustomed to the part of spokeswoman, gave her tale, interrupted now and again by a long whistle with which the Major signified his shrewdness, or by an energetic nod which meant that the difficulty was nothing to him.

“You’re quite right,” he said at last; “one has to look upon these things from the point of view of the man of the world.”

“We knew you’d be able to help us,” said Colonel Parsons.

“Of course! I shall settle the whole thing in five minutes. You leave it to me.”

“I told you he would, Frances,” cried the Colonel, with a happy smile. “You think that James ought to marry the girl, don’t you?”

“Certainly. Whatever his feelings are, he must act as a gentleman and an officer. Just you let me talk it over with him. He has great respect for all I say; I’ve noticed that already.”

Mrs. Parsons looked at her brother doubtfully.

“We haven’t known what to do,” she murmured. “We’ve prayed for guidance, haven’t we, Richmond? We’re anxious not to be hard on the boy, but we must be just.”

“Leave it to me,” repeated Uncle William. “I’m a man of the world, and I’m thoroughly at home in matters of this sort.”

According to the little plan which, in his subtlety, Major Forsyth had suggested, Mrs. Parsons, soon after dinner, fetched the backgammon board.

“Shall we have our usual game, Richmond?”

Colonel Parsons looked significantly at his brother-in-law.

“If William doesn’t mind?”

“No, no, of course not! I’ll have a little chat with Jamie.”

The players sat down at the corner of the table, and rather nervously began to set out the men. James stood by the window, silent as ever, looking at the day that was a-dying, with a milk-blue sky and tenuous clouds, copper and gold. Major Forsyth took a chair opposite him, and pulled his moustache.

“Well, Jamie, my boy, what is all this nonsense I hear about you and Mary Clibborn?”

Colonel Parsons started at the expected question, and stole a hurried look at his son. His wife noisily shook the dice-box and threw the dice on the board.

“Nine!” she said.

James turned to look at his uncle, noting a little contemptuously the change of his costume, and its extravagant juvenility.

“A lot of stuff and nonsense, isn’t it?”

“D’you think so?” asked James, wearily. “We’ve been taking it very seriously.”

“You’re a set of old fogies down here. You want a man of the world to set things right.”

“Ah, well, you’re a man of the world, Uncle William,” replied James, smiling.

The dice-box rattled obtrusively as Colonel Parsons and his wife played on with elaborate unconcern of the conversation.

“A gentleman doesn’t jilt a girl when he’s been engaged to her for five years.”

James squared himself to answer Major Forsyth. The interview with Mrs. Jackson in the morning had left him extremely irritated. He was resolved to say now all he had to say and have done with it, hoping that a complete explanation would relieve the tension between his people and himself.

“It is with the greatest sorrow that I broke off my engagement with Mary Clibborn. It seemed to me the only honest thing to do since I no longer loved her. I can imagine nothing in the world so horrible as a loveless marriage.”

“Of course, it’s unfortunate; but the first thing is to keep one’s word.”

“No,” answered James, “that is prejudice. There are many more important things.”

Colonel Parsons stopped the pretence of his game.

“Do you know that Mary is breaking her heart?” he asked in a low voice.

“I’m afraid she’s suffering very much. I don’t see how I can help it.”

“Leave this to me, Richmond,” interrupted the Major, impatiently. “You’ll make a mess of it.”

But Colonel Parsons took no notice.

“She looked forward with all her heart to marrying you. She’s very unhappy at home, and her only consolation was the hope that you would soon take her away.”

“Am I managing this or are you, Richmond? I’m a man of the world.”

“If I married a woman I did not care for because she was rich, you would say I had dishonoured myself. The discredit would not be in her wealth, but in my lack of love.”

“That’s not the same thing,” replied Major Forsyth. “You gave your word, and now you take it back.”

“I promised to do a thing over which I had no control. When I was a boy, before I had seen anything of the world, before I had ever known a woman besides my mother, I promised to love Mary Clibborn all my life. Oh, it was cruel to let me be engaged to her! You blame me; don’t you think all of you are a little to blame as well?”

“What could we have done?”

“Why didn’t you tell me not to be hasty? Why didn’t you say that I was too young to become engaged?”

“We thought it would steady you.”

“But a young man doesn’t want to be steadied. Let him see life and taste all it has to offer. It is wicked to put fetters on his wrists before ever he has seen anything worth taking. What is the virtue that exists only because temptation is impossible!”

“I can’t understand you, Jamie,” said Mrs. Parsons, sadly. “You talk so differently from when you were a boy.”

“Did you expect me to remain all my life an ignorant child. You’ve never given me any freedom. You’ve hemmed me in with every imaginable barrier. You’ve put me on a leading-string, and thanked God that I did not stray.”

“We tried to bring you up like a good man, and a true Christian.”

“If I’m not a hopeless prig, it’s only by miracle.”

“James, that’s not the way to talk to your mother,” said Major Forsyth.

“Oh, mother, I’m sorry; I don’t want to be unkind to you. But we must talk things out freely; we’ve lived in a hot-house too long.”

“I don’t know what you mean. You became engaged to Mary of your own free will; we did nothing to hinder it, nothing to bring it about. But I confess we were heartily thankful, thinking that no influence could be better for you than the love of a pure, sweet English girl.”

“It would have been kinder and wiser if you had forbidden it.”

“We could not have taken the responsibility of crossing your affections.”

“Mrs. Clibborn did.”

“Could you expect us to be guided by her?”

“She was the only one who showed the least common sense.”

“How you have changed, Jamie!”

“I would have obeyed you if you had told me I was too young to become engaged. After all, you are more responsible than I am. I was a child. It was cruel to let me bind myself.”

“I never thought you would speak to us like that.”

“All that’s ancient history,” said Major Forsyth, with what he flattered himself was a very good assumption of jocularity. It was his idea to treat the matter lightly, as a man of the world naturally would. But his interruption was unnoticed.

“We acted for the best. You know that we have always had your interests at heart.”

James did not speak, for his only answer would have been bitter. Throughout, they had been unwilling to let him live his own life, but desirous rather that he should live theirs. They loved him tyrannically, on the condition that he should conform to all their prejudices. Though full of affectionate kindness, they wished him always to dance to their piping — a marionette of which they pulled the strings.

“What would you have me do?”

“Keep your word, James,” answered his father.

“I can’t, I can’t! I don’t understand how you can wish me to marry Mary Clibborn when I don’t love her. That seems to me dishonourable.”

“It would be nothing worse than a mariage de convenance,” said Uncle William. “Many people marry in that sort of way, and are perfectly happy.”

“I couldn’t,” said James. “That seems to me nothing better than prostitution. It is no worse for a street-walker to sell her body to any that care to buy.”

“James, remember your mother is present.”

“For God’s sake, let us speak plainly. You must know what life is. One can do no good by shutting one’s eyes to everything that doesn’t square with a shoddy, false ideal. On one side I must break my word, on the other I must prostitute myself. There is no middle way. You live here surrounded by all sorts of impossible ways of looking at life. How can your outlook be sane when it is founded on a sham morality? You think the body is indecent and ugly, and that the flesh is shameful. Oh, you don’t understand. I’m sick of this prudery which throws its own hideousness over all it sees. The soul and the body are one, indissoluble. Soul is body, and body is soul. Love is the God-like instinct of procreation. You think sexual attraction is something to be ignored, and in its place you put a bloodless sentimentality — the vulgar rhetoric of a penny novelette. If I marry a woman, it is that she may be the mother of children. Passion is the only reason for marriage; unless it exists, marriage is ugly and beastly. It’s worse than beastly; the beasts of the field are clean. Don’t you understand why I can’t marry Mary Clibborn?”

“What you call love, James,” said Colonel Parsons, “is what I call lust.”

“I well believe it,” replied James, bitterly.

“Love is something higher and purer.”

“I know nothing purer than the body, nothing higher than the divine instincts of nature.”

“But that sort of love doesn’t last, my dear,” said Mrs. Parsons, gently. “In a very little while it is exhausted, and then you look for something different in your wife. You look for friendship and companionship, confidence, consolation in your sorrows, sympathy with your success. Beside all that, the sexual love sinks into nothing.”

“It may be. The passion arises for the purposes of nature, and dies away when those purposes are fulfilled. It seems to me that the recollection of it must be the surest and tenderest tie between husband and wife; and there remains for them, then, the fruit of their love, the children whom it is their blessed duty to rear till they are of fit age to go into the world and continue the endless cycle.”

There was a pause, while Major Forsyth racked his brain for some apposite remark; but the conversation had run out of his depth.

Colonel Parsons at last got up and put his hands on Jamie’s shoulders.

“And can’t you bring yourself to marry that poor girl, when you think of the terrible unhappiness she suffers?”

James shook his head.

“You were willing to sacrifice your life for a mere stranger, and cannot you sacrifice yourself for Mary, who has loved you long and tenderly, and unselfishly?”

“I would willingly risk my life if she were in danger. But you ask more.”

Colonel Parsons was silent for a little, looking into his son’s eyes. Then he spoke with trembling voice.

“I think you love me, James. I’ve always tried to be a good father to you; and God knows I’ve done all I could to make you happy. If I did wrong in letting you become engaged, I beg your pardon. No; let me go on.” This he said in answer to Jamie’s movement of affectionate protest. “I don’t say it to reproach you, but your mother and I have denied ourselves in all we could so that you should be happy and comfortable. It’s been a pleasure to us, for we love you with all our hearts. You know what happened to me when I left the army. I told you years ago of the awful disgrace I suffered. I could never have lived except for my trust in God and my trust in you. I looked to you to regain the honour which I had lost. Ah! you don’t know how anxiously I watched you, and the joy with which I said to myself, ‘There is a good and honourable man.’ And now you want to stain that honour. Oh, James, James! I’m old, and I can’t live long. If you love me, if you think you have cause for gratitude to me, do this one little thing I ask you! For my sake, my dear, keep your word to Mary Clibborn.”

“You’re asking me to do something immoral, father.”

Then Colonel Parsons helplessly dropped his hands from Jamie’s shoulders, and turned to the others, his eyes full of tears.

“I don’t understand what he means!” he groaned.

He sank on a chair and hid his face.

XIV

Major Forsyth was not at all discouraged by the issue of his intervention.

“Now I see how the land lies,” he said, “it’s all plain sailing. Reconnoitre first, and then wire in.”

He bravely attacked James next day, when they were smoking in the garden after breakfast. Uncle William smoked nothing but gold-tipped cigarettes, which excited his nephew’s open scorn.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday, James,” he began.

“For Heaven’s sake, Uncle William, don’t talk about it any more. I’m heartily sick of the whole thing. I’ve made up my mind, and I really shall not alter it for anything you may say.”

Major Forsyth changed the conversation with what might have been described as a strategic movement to the rear. He said that Jamie’s answer told him all he wished to know, and he was content now to leave the seeds which he had sown to spring up of their own accord.

“I’m perfectly satisfied,” he told his sister, complacently. “You’ll see that if it’ll all come right now.”

Meanwhile, Mary conducted herself admirably. She neither avoided James nor sought him, but when chance brought them together, was perfectly natural. Her affection had never been demonstrative, and now there was in her manner but little change. She talked frankly, as though nothing had passed between them, with no suspicion of reproach in her tone. She was, indeed, far more at ease than James. He could not hide the effort it was to make conversation, nor the nervous discomfort which in her presence he felt. He watched her furtively, asking himself whether she still suffered. But Mary’s face betrayed few of her emotions; tanned by exposure to all weathers, her robust colour remained unaltered; and it was only in her eyes that James fancied he saw a difference. They had just that perplexed, sorrowful expression which a dog has, unjustly beaten. James, imaginative and conscience-stricken, tortured himself by reading in their brown softness all manner of dreadful anguish. He watched them, unlit by the smile which played upon the lips, looking at him against their will, with a pitiful longing. He exaggerated the pain he saw till it became an obsession, intolerable and ruthless; if Mary desired revenge, she need not have been dissatisfied. But that apparently was the last thing she thought of. He was grateful to hear of her anger with Mrs. Jackson, whose sympathy had expressed itself in round abuse of him. His mother repeated the words.

“I will never listen to a word against Captain Parsons, Mrs. Jackson. Whatever he did, he had a perfect right to do. He’s incapable of acting otherwise than as an honourable gentleman.”

But if Mary’s conduct aroused the admiration of all that knew her, it rendered James still more blameworthy.

The hero-worship was conveniently forgotten, and none strove to conceal the dislike, even the contempt, which he felt for the fallen idol. James had outraged the moral sense of the community; his name could not be mentioned without indignation; everything he did was wrong, even his very real modesty was explained as overweening conceit.

And curiously enough, James was profoundly distressed by the general disapproval. A silent, shy man, he was unreasonably sensitive to the opinion of his fellows; and though he told himself that they were stupid, ignorant, and narrow, their hostility nevertheless made him miserable. Even though he contemned them, he was anxious that they should like him. He refused to pander to their prejudices, and was too proud to be conciliatory; yet felt bitterly wounded when he had excited their aversion. Now he set to tormenting himself because he had despised the adulation of Little Primpton, and could not equally despise its censure.

Sunday came, and the good people of Little Primpton trooped to church. Mrs Clibborn turned round and smiled at James when he took his seat, but the Colonel sat rigid, showing by the stiffness of his backbone that his indignation was supreme.

The service proceeded, and in due course Mr. Jackson mounted the pulpit steps. He delivered his text: “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”

The Vicar of Little Primpton was an earnest man, and he devoted much care to the composition of his sermons. He was used to expound twice a Sunday the more obvious parts of Holy Scripture, making in twenty minutes or half an hour, for the benefit of the vulgar, a number of trite reflections; and it must be confessed that he had great facility for explaining at decorous length texts which were plain to the meanest intelligence.

But having a fair acquaintance with the thought of others, Mr. Jackson flattered himself that he was a thinker; and on suitable occasions attacked from his village pulpit the scarlet weed of heresy, expounding to an intelligent congregation of yokels and small boys the manifold difficulties of the Athanasian Creed. He was at his best in pouring vials of contempt upon the false creed of atheists, Romanists, Dissenters, and men of science. The theory of Evolution excited his bitterest scorn, and he would set up, like a row of nine-pins, the hypotheses of the greatest philosophers of the century, triumphantly to knock them down by the force of his own fearless intellect. His congregation were inattentive, and convinced beyond the need of argument, so they remained pious members of the Church of England.

But this particular sermon, after mature consideration, the Vicar had made up his mind to devote to a matter of more pressing interest. He repeated the text. Mrs. Jackson, who knew what was coming, caught the curate’s eye, and looked significantly at James. The homily, in fact, was directed against him; his were the pride, the arrogancy, and the evil way. He was blissfully unconscious of these faults, and for a minute or two the application missed him; but the Vicar of Little Primpton, intent upon what he honestly thought his duty, meant that there should be no mistake. He crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s, with the scrupulous accuracy of the scandal-monger telling a malicious story about some person whom charitably he does not name, yet wishes everyone to identify.

Colonel Parsons started when suddenly the drift of the sermon dawned upon him, and then bowed his head with shame. His wife looked straight in front of her, two flaming spots upon her pale cheeks. Mary, in the next pew, dared not move, hardly dared breathe; her heart sank with dismay, and she feared she would faint.

“How he must be suffering!” she muttered.

They all felt for James intensely; the form of Mr. Jackson, hooded and surpliced, had acquired a new authority, and his solemn invective was sulphurous with the fires of Hell. They wondered how James could bear it.

“He hasn’t deserved this,” thought Mrs. Parsons.

But the Colonel bent his head still lower, accepting for his son the reproof, taking part of it himself. The humiliation seemed merited, and the only thing to do was to bear it meekly. James alone appeared unconcerned; the rapid glances at him saw no change in his calm, indifferent face. His eyes were closed, and one might have thought him asleep. Mr. Jackson noted the attitude, and attributed it to a wicked obstinacy. For the repentant sinner, acknowledging his fault, he would have had entire forgiveness; but James showed no contrition. Stiff-necked and sin-hardened, he required a further chastisement.

“Courage, what is courage?” asked the preacher. “There is nothing more easy than to do a brave deed when the blood is hot. But to conduct one’s life simply, modestly, with a meek spirit and a Christ-like submission, that is ten times more difficult Courage, unaccompanied by moral worth, is the quality of a brute-beast.”

He showed how much more creditable were the artless virtues of honesty and truthfulness; how better it was to keep one’s word, to be kind-hearted and dutiful. Becoming more pointed, he mentioned the case which had caused them so much sorrow, warning the delinquent against conceit and self-assurance.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” he said. “And he that is mighty shall be abased.”

They walked home silently, Colonel Parsons and his wife with downcast eyes, feeling that everyone was looking at them. Their hearts were too full for them to speak to one another, and they dared say nothing to James. But Major Forsyth had no scruples of delicacy; he attacked his nephew the moment they sat down to dinner.

“Well, James, what did you think of the sermon? Feel a bit sore?”

“Why should I?”

“I fancy it was addressed pretty directly to you.”

“So I imagine,” replied James, good-humouredly smiling. “I thought it singularly impertinent, but otherwise uninteresting.”

“Mr. Jackson doesn’t think much of you,” said Uncle William, with a laugh, ignoring his sister’s look, which implored him to be silent.

“I can bear that with equanimity. I never set up for a very wonderful person.”

“He was wrong to make little of your attempt to save young Larcher,” said Mrs. Parsons, gently.

“Why?” asked James. “He was partly right. Physical courage is more or less accidental. In battle one takes one’s chance. One soon gets used to shells flying about; they’re not so dangerous as they look, and after a while one forgets all about them. Now and then one gets hit, and then it’s too late to be nervous.”

“But you went back — into the very jaws of death — to save that boy.”

“I’ve never been able to understand why. It didn’t occur to me that I might get killed; it seemed the natural thing to do. It wasn’t really brave, because I never realised that there was danger.”

In the afternoon James received a note from Mrs. Clibborn, asking him to call upon her. Mary and her father were out walking, she said, so there would be no one to disturb them, and they could have a pleasant little chat. The invitation was a climax to Jamie’s many vexations, and he laughed grimly at the prospect of that very foolish lady’s indignation. Still, he felt bound to go. It was, after a fashion, a point of honour with him to avoid none of the annoyances which his act had brought upon him. It was partly in order to face every infliction that he insisted on remaining at Little Primpton.

“Why haven’t you been to see me, James?” Mrs. Clibborn murmured, with a surprisingly tender smile.

“I thought you wouldn’t wish me to.”

“James!”

She sighed and cast up her eyes to heaven.

“I always liked you. I shall never feel differently towards you.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so,” replied James, somewhat relieved.

“You must come and see me often. It’ll comfort you.”

“I’m afraid you and Colonel Clibborn must be very angry with me?”

“I could never be angry with you, James.... Poor Reginald, he doesn’t understand! But you can’t deceive a woman.” Mrs. Clibborn put her hand on Jamie’s arm and gazed into his eyes. “I want you to tell me something. Do you love anyone else?”

James looked at her quickly and hesitated.

“If you had asked me the other day, I should have denied it with all my might. But now — I don’t know.”

Mrs. Clibborn smiled.

“I thought so,” she said. “You can tell me, you know.”

She was convinced that James adored her, but wanted to hear him say so. It is notorious that to a handsome woman even the admiration of a crossing-sweeper is welcome.

“Oh, it’s no good any longer trying to conceal it from myself!” cried James, forgetting almost to whom he was speaking. “I’m sorry about Mary; no one knows how much. But I do love someone else, and I love her with all my heart and soul; and I shall never get over it now.”

“I knew it,” sighed Mrs. Clibborn, complacently, “I knew it!” Then looking coyly at him: “Tell me about her.”

“I can’t. I know my love is idiotic and impossible; but I can’t help it. It’s fate.”

“You’re in love with a married woman, James.”

“How d’you know?”

“My poor boy, d’you think you can deceive me! And is it not the wife of an officer?”

“Yes.”

“A very old friend of yours?”

“It’s just that which makes it so terrible.”

“I knew it.”

“Oh, Mrs. Clibborn, I swear you’re the only woman here who’s got two ounces of gumption. If they’d only listened to you five years ago, we might all have been saved this awful wretchedness.”

He could not understand that Mrs. Clibborn, whose affectations were manifest, whose folly was notorious, should alone have guessed his secret. He was tired of perpetually concealing his thoughts.

“I wish I could tell you everything!” he cried.

“Don’t! You’d only regret it. And I know all you can tell me.”

“You can’t think how hard I’ve struggled. When I found I loved her, I nearly killed myself trying to kill my love. But it’s no good. It’s stronger than I am.”

“And nothing can ever come of it, you know,” said Mrs. Clibborn.

“Oh, I know! Of course, I know! I’m not a cad. The only thing is to live on and suffer.”

“I’m so sorry for you.”

Mrs. Clibborn thought that even poor Algy Turner, who had killed himself for love of her, had not been so desperately hit.

“It’s very kind of you to listen to me,” said James. “I have nobody to speak to, and sometimes I feel I shall go mad.”

“You’re such a nice boy, James. What a pity it is you didn’t go into the cavalry!”

James scarcely heard; he stared at the floor, brooding sorrowfully.

“Fate is against me,” he muttered.

“If things had only happened a little differently. Poor Reggie!”

Mrs. Clibborn was thinking that if she were a widow, she could never have resisted the unhappy young man’s pleading.

James got up to go.

“It’s no good,” he said; “talking makes it no better. I must go on trying to crush it. And the worst of it is, I don’t want to crush it; I love my love. Though it embitters my whole life, I would rather die than lose it. Good-bye, Mrs. Clibborn. Thank you for being so kind. You can’t imagine what good it does me to receive a little sympathy.”

“I know. You’re not the first who has told me that he is miserable. I think it’s fate, too.”

James looked at her, perplexed, not understanding what she meant. With her sharp, feminine intuition, Mrs. Clibborn read in his eyes the hopeless yearning of his heart, and for a moment her rigid virtue faltered.

“I can’t be hard on you, Jamie,” she said, with that effective, sad smile of hers. “I don’t want you to go away from here quite wretched.”

“What can you do to ease the bitter aching of my heart?”

Mrs. Clibborn, quickly looking at the window, noticed that she could not possibly be seen by anyone outside. She stretched out her hand.

“Jamie, if you like you may kiss me.”

She offered her powdered cheek, and James, rather astonished, pressed it with his lips.

“I will always be a mother to you. You can depend on me whatever happens.... Now go away, there’s a good boy.”

She watched him as he walked down the garden, and then sighed deeply, wiping away a tear from the corner of her eyes.

“Poor boy!” she murmured.

Mary was surprised, when she came home, to find her mother quite affectionate and tender. Mrs. Clibborn, indeed, intoxicated with her triumph, could afford to be gracious to a fallen rival.

XV

A Few days later Mary was surprised to receive a little note from Mr. Dryland:

“My Dear Miss Clibborn, — With some trepidation I take up my pen to address you on a matter which, to me at least, is of the very greatest importance. We have so many sympathies in common that my meaning will hardly escape you. I daresay you will find my diffidence ridiculous, but, under the circumstances, I think it is not unpardonable. It will be no news to you when I confess that I am an exceptionally shy man, and that must be my excuse in sending you this letter. In short, I wish to ask you to grant me a brief interview; we have so few opportunities of seeing one another in private that I can find no occasion of saying to you what I wish. Indeed, for a long period my duty has made it necessary for me to crush my inclination. Now, however, that things have taken a different turn, I venture, as I said, to ask you to give me a few minutes’ conversation. — I am, my dear Miss Clibborn, your very sincere,

Thomas Dryland.

“P.S. — I open this letter to say that I have just met your father on the Green, who tells me that he and Mrs. Clibborn are going into Tunbridge Wells this afternoon. Unless, therefore, I hear from you to the contrary, I shall (D.V.) present myself at your house at 3 p.m.”

“What can he want to see me about?” exclaimed Mary, the truth occurring to her only to be chased away as a piece of egregious vanity. It was more reasonable to suppose that Mr. Dryland had on hand some charitable scheme in which he desired her to take part.

“Anyhow,” she thought philosophically, “I suppose I shall know when he comes.”

At one and the same moment the church clock struck three, and Mr. Dryland rang the Clibborns’ bell.

He came into the dining-room in his best coat, his honest red face shining with soap, and with a consciousness that he was about to perform an heroic deed.

“This is kind of you, Miss Clibborn! Do you know, I feared the servant was going to say you were ‘not at home.’”

“Oh, I never let her say that when I’m in. Mamma doesn’t think it wrong, but one can’t deny that it’s an untruth.”

“What a beautiful character you have!” cried the curate, with enthusiasm.

“I’m afraid I haven’t really; but I like to be truthful.”

“Were you surprised to receive my letter?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t understand it.”

“I was under the impression that I expressed myself with considerable perspicacity,” remarked the curate, with a genial smile.

“I don’t pretend to be clever.”

“Oh, but you are, Miss Clibborn. There’s no denying it.”

“I wish I thought so.”

“You’re so modest. I have always thought that your mental powers were very considerable indeed. I can assure you it has been a great blessing to me to find someone here who was capable of taking an intelligent interest in Art and Literature. In these little country places one misses intellectual society so much.”

“I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve learnt a lot from you, Mr. Dryland.”

“No, that is impossible. All I lay claim to is that I was fortunate enough to be able to lend you the works of Ruskin and Marie Corelli.”

“That reminds me that I must return you the ‘Master Christian.’”

“Please don’t hurry over it. I think it’s a book worth pondering over; quite unlike the average trashy novel.”

“I haven’t had much time for reading lately.”

“Ah, Miss Clibborn, I understand! I’m afraid you’ve been very much upset. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was; but I felt it would be perhaps indelicate.”

“It is very kind of you to think of me.”

“Besides, I must confess that I cannot bring myself to be very sorry. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, Mr. Dryland.”

“Miss Clibborn, I have come here to-day to converse with you on a matter which I venture to think of some importance. At least, it is to me. I will not beat about the bush. In these matters it is always best, I believe, to come straight to the point.” The curate cleared his throat, and assumed his best clerical manner. “Miss Clibborn, I have the honour to solemnly ask you for your hand.”

“Oh!”

Mary blushed scarlet, and her heart went pit-a-pat in the most alarming fashion.

“I think I should tell you that I am thirty-three years of age. I have some private means, small, but sufficient, with my income and economy, to support a wife. My father was for over a quarter of a century vicar of Easterham.”

Mary by this time had recovered herself.

“I feel very much honoured by your proposal, Mr. Dryland. And no one can be more convinced than I of my unworthiness. But I’m afraid I must refuse.”

“I don’t press for an immediate answer, Miss Clibborn. I know at first blush it must surprise you that I should come forward with an offer so soon after the rupture of your engagement with Captain Parsons. But if you examine the matter closely, you will see that it is less surprising than it seems. While you were engaged to Captain Parsons it was my duty to stifle my feelings; but now I cannot. Indeed, I have not the right to conceal from you that for a long time they have been of the tenderest description.”

“I feel very much flattered.”

“Not at all,” reassuringly answered Mr. Dryland. “I can honestly say that you are deserving of the very highest — er — admiration and esteem. Miss Clibborn, I have loved you in secret almost ever since I came to the parish. The moment I saw you I felt an affinity between us. Our tastes are so similar; we both understand Art and Literature. When you played to me the divine melodies of Mendelssohn, when I read to you the melodious verses of Lord Tennyson, I felt that my happiness in life would be a union with you.”

“I’m afraid I can never be unfaithful to my old love.”

“Perhaps I’m a little previous?”

“No; time can make no possible difference. I’m very grateful to you.”

“You have no need to be. I have always tried to do my duty, and while you were engaged to another, I allowed not even a sigh to escape my lips. But now I venture to think that the circumstances are altered. I know I am not a gallant officer, I have done no doughty deeds, and the Victoria Cross does not adorn my bosom. I am comparatively poor; but I can offer an honest heart and a very sincere and respectful love. Oh, Miss Clibborn, cannot you give me hope that as time wears on you will be able to look upon my suit with favour?”

“I’m afraid my answer must be final.”

“I hope to be soon appointed to a living, and I looked forward ardently to the life of usefulness and of Christian fellowship which we might have lived together. You are an angel of mercy, Miss Clibborn. I cannot help thinking that you are eminently suitable for the position which I make so bold as to offer you.”

“I won’t deny that nothing could attract me more than to be the wife of a clergyman. One has such influence for good, such power of improving one’s fellow-men. But I love Captain Parsons. Even if he has ceased to care for me, I could never look upon him with other feelings.”

“Even though it touches me to the quick, Miss. Clibborn,” said the curate, earnestly, “I respect and admire you for your sentiments. You are wonderful. I wonder if you’d allow me to make a little confession?” The curate hesitated and reddened. “The fact is, I have written a few verses comparing you to Penelope, which, if you will allow me, I should very much like to send you.”

“I should like to see them very much,” said Mary, blushing a little and smiling.

“Of course, I’m not a poet, I’m too busy for that; but they are the outpouring of an honest, loving heart.”

“I’m sure,” said Mary, encouragingly, “that it’s better to be sincere and upright than to be the greatest poet in the world.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so. I should like to ask one question, Miss Clibborn. Have you any objection to me personally?”

“Oh, no!” cried Mary. “How can you suggest such a thing? I have the highest respect and esteem for you, Mr. Dryland. I can never forget the great compliment you have paid me. I shall always think of you as the best friend I have.”

“Can you say nothing more to me than that?” asked the curate, despondently.

Mary stretched out her hand. “I will be a sister to you.”

“Oh, Miss Clibborn, how sad it is to think that your affections should be unrequited. Why am I not Captain Parsons? Miss Clibborn, can you give me no hope?”

“I should not be acting rightly towards you if I did not tell you at once that so long as Captain Parsons lives, my love for him can never alter.”

“I wish I were a soldier!” murmured Mr. Dryland.

“Oh, it’s not that. I think there’s nothing so noble as a clergyman. If it is any consolation to you, I may confess that if I had never known Captain Parsons, things might have gone differently.”

“Well, I suppose I had better go away now. I must try to bear my disappointment.”

Mary gave him her hand, and, bending down with the utmost gallantry, the curate kissed it; then, taking up his low, clerical hat, hurriedly left her.

Mrs. Jackson was a woman of singular penetration, so that it was not strange if she quickly discovered what had happened. Mr. Dryland was taking tea at the Vicarage, whither, with characteristic manliness, he had gone to face his disappointment. Not for him was the solitary moping, nor the privacy of a bedchamber; his robust courage sent him rather into the field of battle, or what was under the circumstances the only equivalent, Mrs. Jackson’s drawing-room.

But even he could not conceal the torments of unsuccessful love. He stirred his tea moodily, and his usual appetite for plum-cake had quite deserted him.

“What’s the matter with you, Mr. Dryland?” asked the Vicar’s wife, with those sharp eyes which could see into the best hidden family secret.

Mr. Dryland started at the question. “Nothing!”

“You’re very funny this afternoon.”

“I’ve had a great disappointment.”

“Oh!” replied Mrs. Jackson, in a tone which half-a-dozen marks of interrogation could inadequately express.

“It’s nothing. Life is not all beer and skittles. Ha! ha!”

“Did you say you’d been calling on Mary Clibborn this afternoon?”

Mr. Dryland blushed, and to cover his confusion filled his mouth with a large piece of cake.

“Yes,” he said, as soon as he could. “I paid her a little call.”

“Mr. Dryland, you can’t deceive me. You’ve proposed to Mary Clibborn.”

He swallowed his food with a gulp. “It’s quite true.”

“And she’s refused you?”

“Yes!”

“Mr. Dryland, it was a noble thing to do. I must tell Archibald.”

“Oh, please don’t, Mrs. Jackson! I don’t want it to get about.”

“Oh, but I shall. We can’t let you hide your light under a bushel. Fancy you proposing to that poor, dear girl! But it’s just what I should have expected of you. That’s what I always say. The clergy are constantly doing the most beautiful actions that no one hears anything about. You ought to receive a moral Victoria Cross. I’m sure you deserve it far more than that wicked and misguided young man.”

“I don’t think I ought to take any credit for what I’ve done,” modestly remonstrated the curate.

“It was a beautiful action. You don’t know how much it means to that poor, jilted girl.”

“It’s true my indignation was aroused at the heartless conduct of Captain Parsons; but I have long loved her, Mrs. Jackson.”

“I knew it; I knew it! When I saw you together I said to Archibald: ‘What a good pair they’d make!’ I’m sure you deserve her far more than that worthless creature.”

“I wish she thought so.”

“I’ll go and speak to her myself. I think she ought to accept you. You’ve behaved like a knight-errant, Mr. Dryland. You’re a true Christian saint.”

“Oh, Mrs. Jackson, you embarrass me!”

The news spread like wild-fire, and with it the opinion that the curate had vastly distinguished himself. Neither pagan hero nor Christian martyr could have acted more becomingly. The consideration which had once been Jamie’s was bodily transferred to Mr. Dryland. He was the man of the hour, and the contemplation of his gallant deed made everyone feel nobler, purer. The curate accepted with quiet satisfaction the homage that was laid at his feet, modestly denying that he had done anything out of the way. With James, all unconscious of what had happened, he was mildly patronising; with Mary, tender, respectful, subdued. If he had been an archbishop, he could not have behaved with greater delicacy, manliness, and decorum.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” cried Mrs. Jackson, “I think he’s worth ten Captain Parsons! He’s so modest and gentlemanly. Why, Captain Parsons simply used to look bored when one told him he was brave.”

“He’s a conceited creature!”

But in Primpton House the proposal was met with consternation.

“Suppose she accepted him?” said Colonel Parsons, anxiously.

“She’d never do that.”

Major Forsyth suggested that James should be told, in the belief that his jealousy would be excited.

“I’ll tell him,” said Mrs. Parsons.

She waited till she was alone with her son, and then, without stopping her needlework, said suddenly:

“James, have you heard that Mr. Dryland has proposed to Mary?”

He looked up nonchalantly. “Has she accepted him?”

“James!” cried his mother, indignantly, “how can you ask such a question? Have you no respect for her? You must know that for nothing in the world would she be faithless to you.”

“I should like her to marry the curate. I think it would be a very suitable match.”

“You need not insult her, James.”

XVI

The tension between James and his parents became not less, but greater. That barrier which, almost from the beginning, they had watched with pain rise up between them now seemed indestructible, and all their efforts only made it more obvious and more stable. It was like some tropical plant which, for being cut down, grew ever with greater luxuriance. And there was a mischievous devil present at all their conversations that made them misunderstand one another as completely as though they spoke in different tongues. Notwithstanding their love, they were like strangers together; they could look at nothing from the same point of view.

The Parsons had lived their whole lives in an artificial state. Ill-educated as most of their contemporaries in that particular class, they had just enough knowledge to render them dogmatic and intolerant. It requires a good deal of information to discover one’s own ignorance, but to the consciousness of this the good people had never arrived. They felt they knew as much as necessary, and naturally on the most debatable questions were most assured. Their standpoint was inconceivably narrow. They had the best intentions in the world of doing their duty, but what their duty was they accepted on trust, frivolously. They walked round and round in a narrow circle, hemmed in by false ideals and by ugly prejudices, putting for the love of God unnecessary obstacles in their path and convinced that theirs was the only possible way, while all others led to damnation. They had never worked out an idea for themselves, never done a single deed on their own account, but invariably acted and thought according to the rule of their caste. They were not living creatures, but dogmatic machines.

James, going into the world, quickly realised that he had been brought up to a state of things which did not exist. He was like a sailor who has put out to sea in an ornamental boat, and finds that his sail is useless, the ropes not made to work, and the rudder immovable. The long, buoyant wind of the world blew away like thistle-down the conventions which had seemed so secure a foundation. But he discovered in himself a wonderful curiosity, an eagerness for adventure which led him boldly to affront every peril; and the unknown lands of the intellect are every bit as dangerously fascinating as are those of sober fact. He read omnivorously, saw many and varied things; the universe was spread out before him like an enthralling play. Knowledge is like the root of a tree, attaching man by its tendrils to the life about him. James found in existence new beauties, new interests, new complexities; and he gained a lighter heart and, above all, an exquisite sense of freedom. At length he looked back with something like horror at that old life in which the fetters of ignorance had weighed so terribly upon him.

On his return to Little Primpton, he found his people as he had left them, doing the same things, repeating at every well-known juncture the same trite observations. Their ingenuousness affected him as a negro, civilised and educated, on visiting after many years his native tribe, might be affected by their nose-rings and yellow ochre. James was astounded that they should ignore matters which he fancied common knowledge, and at the same time accept beliefs that he had thought completely dead. He was willing enough to shrug his shoulders and humour their prejudices, but they had made of them a rule of life which governed every action with an iron tyranny. It was in accordance with all these outworn conventions that they conducted the daily round. And presently James found that his father and mother were striving to draw him back into the prison. Unconsciously, even with the greatest tenderness, they sought to place upon his neck again that irksome yoke which he had so difficultly thrown off.

If James had learnt anything, it was at all hazards to think for himself, accepting nothing on authority, questioning, doubting; it was to look upon life with a critical eye, trying to understand it, and to receive no ready-made explanations. Above all, he had learnt that every question has two sides. Now this was precisely what Colonel Parsons and his wife could never acknowledge; for them one view was certainly right, and the other as certainly wrong. There was no middle way. To doubt what they believed could only be ascribed to arrant folly or to wickedness. Sometimes James was thrown into a blind rage by the complacency with which from the depths of his nescience his father dogmatised. No man could have been more unassuming than he, and yet on just the points which were most uncertain his attitude was almost inconceivably arrogant.

And James was horrified at the pettiness and the prejudice which he found in his home. Reading no books, for they thought it waste of time to read, the minds of his father and mother had sunk into such a narrow sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were occupied by their neighbours and the humdrum details of the life about them. Flattering themselves on their ideals and their high principles, they vegetated in stupid sloth and in a less than animal vacuity. Every topic of conversation above the most commonplace they found dull or incomprehensible. James learned that he had to talk to them almost as if they were children, and the tedium of those endless days was intolerable.

Occasionally he was exasperated that he could not avoid the discussions which his father, with a weak man’s obstinacy, forced upon him. Some unhappy, baneful power seemed to drive Colonel Parsons to widen the rift, the existence of which caused him such exquisite pain; his natural kindliness was obscured by an uncontrollable irritation. One day he was reading the paper.

“I see we’ve had another unfortunate reverse,” he said, looking up.

“Oh!”

“I suppose you’re delighted, Jamie?”

“I’m very sorry. Why should I be otherwise?”

“You always stick up for the enemies of your country.” Turning to his brother-in-law, he explained: “James says that if he’d been a Cape Dutchman he’d have fought against us.”

“Well, he deserves to be court-martialled for saying so! “cried Major Forsyth.

“I don’t think he means to be taken seriously,” said his mother.

“Oh, yes, I do.” It constantly annoyed James that when he said anything that was not quite an obvious truism, they should think he was speaking merely for effect. “Why, my dear mother, if you’d been a Boer woman you’d have potted at us from behind a haystack with the best of them.”

“The Boers are robbers and brigands.”

“That’s just what they say we are.”

“But we’re right.”

“And they’re equally convinced that they are.”

“God can’t be on both sides, James.”

“The odd thing is the certainty with which both sides claim His exclusive protection.”

“I should think it wicked to doubt that God is with us in a righteous war,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“If the Boers weren’t deceived by that old villain Kruger, they’d never have fought us.”

“The Boers are strange people,” replied James. “They actually prefer their independence to all the privileges and advantages of subjection.... The wonderful thing to me is that people should really think Mr. Kruger a hypocrite. A ruler who didn’t honestly believe in himself and in his mission would never have had such influence. If a man wants power he must have self-faith; but then he may be narrow, intolerant, and vicious. His fellows will be like wax in his hands.”

“If Kruger had been honest, he wouldn’t have put up with bribery and corruption.”

“The last thing I expect is consistency in an animal of such contrary instincts as man.”

“Every true Englishman, I’m thankful to say, thinks him a scoundrel and a blackguard.”

“In a hundred years he will probably think him a patriot and a hero. In that time the sentimental view will be the only one of interest; and the sentimental view will put the Transvaal in the same category as Poland.”

“You’re nothing better than a pro-Boer, James.”

“I’m nothing of the kind; but seeing how conflicting was current opinion, I took some trouble to find for myself a justification of the war. I couldn’t help wondering why I went and killed people to whom I was personally quite indifferent.”

“I hope because it was your duty as an officer of Her Majesty the Queen.”

“Not exactly. I came to the conclusion that I killed people because I liked it. The fighting instinct is in my blood, and I’m never so happy as when I’m shooting things. Killing tigers is very good sport, but it’s not in it with killing men. That is my justification, so far as I personally am concerned. As a member of society, I wage war for a different reason. War is the natural instinct of all creatures; not only do progress and civilisation arise from it, but it is the very condition of existence. Men, beasts, and plants are all in the same position: unless they fight incessantly they’re wiped out; there’s no sitting on one side and looking on.... When a state wants a neighbour’s land, it has a perfect right to take it — if it can. Success is its justification. We English wanted the Transvaal for our greater numbers, for our trade, for the continuance of our power; that was our right to take it. The only thing that seems to me undignified is the rather pitiful set of excuses we made up.”

“If those are your ideas, I think they are utterly ignoble.”

“I believe they’re scientific.”

“D’you think men go to war for scientific reasons?”

“No, of course not; they don’t realise them. The great majority are incapable of abstract ideas, but fortunately they’re emotional and sentimental; and the pill can be gilded with high falutin. It’s for them that the Union Jack and the honour of Old England are dragged through every newspaper and brandished in every music hall. It’s for them that all these atrocities are invented — most of them bunkum. Men are only savages with a thin veneer of civilisation, which is rather easily rubbed off, and then they act just like Red Indians; but as a general rule they’re well enough behaved. The Boer isn’t a bad sort, and the Englishman isn’t a bad sort; but there’s not room for both of them on the earth, and one of them has to go.”

“My father fought for duty and honour’s sake, and so fought his father before him.”

“Men have always fought really for the same reasons — for self-protection and gain; but perhaps they have not seen quite so clearly as now the truth behind all their big words. The world and mankind haven’t altered suddenly in the last few years.”

Afterwards, when Colonel Parsons and his wife were alone together, and she saw that he was brooding over his son’s words, she laid her hand on his shoulder, and said:

“Don’t worry, Richmond; it’ll come right in the end, if we trust and pray.”

“I don’t know what to make of him,” he returned, sadly shaking his head. “It’s not our boy, Frances; he couldn’t be callous and unscrupulous, and — dishonourable. God forgive me for saying it!”

“Don’t be hard on him, Richmond. I daresay he doesn’t mean all he says. And remember that he’s been very ill. He’s not himself yet.”

The Colonel sighed bitterly.

“When we looked forward so anxiously to his return, we didn’t know that he would be like this.”

James had gone out. He wandered along the silent roads, taking in large breaths of the fresh air, for his home affected him like a hot-house. The atmosphere was close and heavy, so that he could neither think freely nor see things in any reasonable light. He felt sometimes as though a weight were placed upon his head, that pressed him down, and pressed him down till he seemed almost forced to his knees.

He blamed himself for his lack of moderation. Why, remembering ever his father’s unhappiness and his infirmities, could he not humour him? He was an old man, weak and frail; it should not have been so difficult to use restraint towards him. James knew he had left them in Primpton House distressed and angry; but the only way to please them was to surrender his whole personality, giving up to their bidding all his thoughts and all his actions. They wished to exercise over him the most intolerable of all tyrannies, the tyranny of love. It was a heavy return they demanded for their affection if he must abandon his freedom, body and soul; he earnestly wished to make them happy, but that was too hard a price to pay. And then, with sudden rage, James asked himself why they should be so self-sufficiently certain that they were right. What an outrageous assumption it was that age must be infallible! Their idea of filial duty was that he should accept their authority, not because they were wise, but because they were old. When he was a child they had insisted on the utmost submission, and now they expected the same submission — to their prejudice, intolerance, and lack of knowledge. They had almost ridiculously that calm, quiet, well-satisfied assurance which a king by right divine might have in the certainty that he could do no wrong.

And James, with bitter, painful scorn, thought of that frightful blunder which had forced Colonel Parsons to leave the service. At first his belief in his father had been such that James could not conceive the possibility even that he had acted wrongly; the mere fact that his father had chosen a certain course was proof of its being right and proper, and the shame lay with his chief, who had used him ill. But when he examined the affair and thought over it, the truth became only too clear; it came to him like a blow, and for a while he was overcome with shame. The fact was evident — alas! only too evident — his father was incapable of command. James was simply astounded; he tried not to hear the cruel words that buzzed in his ears, but he could not help it — imbecility, crass idiocy, madness. It was worse than madness, the folly of it was almost criminal; he thought now that his father had escaped very easily.

James hastened his step, trying to rid himself of the irritating thoughts. He walked along the fat and fertile Kentish fields, by the neat iron railing with which they were enclosed. All about him was visible the care of man. Nothing was left wild. The trees were lopped into proper shape, cut down where their presence seemed inelegant, planted to complete the symmetry of a group. Nature herself was under the power of the formal influence, and flourished with a certain rigidity and decorum. After a while the impression became singularly irksome; it seemed to emphasise man’s lack of freedom, reminding one of the iron conventions with which he is inevitably bound. In the sun, the valley, all green and wooded, was pleasantly cool; but when the clouds rolled up from the west heavily, brushing the surrounding hills, the aspect was so circumscribed that James could have cried out as with physical pain. The primness of the scene then was insufferable; the sombre, well-ordered elms, the meadows so carefully kept, seemed the garden of some great voluptuous prison, and the air was close with servitude.

James panted for breath. He thought of the vast distances of South Africa, bush and prairie stretching illimitably, and above, the blue sky, vaster still. There, at least, one could breathe freely, and stretch one’s limbs.

“Why did I ever come back?” he cried.

The blood went thrilling through his veins at the mere thought of those days in which every minute had been intensely worth living. Then, indeed, was no restraint or pettiness; then men were hard and firm and strong. By comparison, people in England appeared so pitifully weak, vain, paltry, insignificant. What were the privations and the hardships beside the sense of mastery, the happy adventure, and the carelessness of life?

But the grey clouds hung over the valley, pregnant with rain. It gave him a singular feeling of discomfort to see them laden with water, and yet painfully holding it up.

“I can’t stay in this place,” he muttered. “I shall go mad.”

A sudden desire for flight seized him. The clouds sank lower and lower, till he imagined he must bend his head to avoid them. If he could only get away for a little, he might regain his calm. At least, absence, he thought bitterly, was the only way to restore the old affection between him and his father.

He went home, and announced that he was going to London.

XVII

After the quiet of Little Primpton, the hurry and the noise of Victoria were a singular relief to James. Waiting for his luggage, he watched the various movements of the scene — the trollies pushed along with warning cries, the porters lifting heavy packages on to the bellied roof of hansoms, the people running to and fro, the crowd of cabs; and driving out, he was exhilarated by the confusion in the station yard, and the intense life, half gay, half sordid, of the Wilton Road. He took a room in Jermyn Street, according to Major Forsyth’s recommendation, and walked to his club. James had been out of London so long that he came back with the emotions of a stranger; common scenes, the glitter of shops, the turmoil of the Circus, affected him with pleased surprise, and with a child’s amusement he paused to stare at the advertisements on a hoarding. He looked forward to seeing old friends, and on his way down Piccadilly even expected to meet one or two of them sauntering along.

As a matter of form, James asked at his club whether there were any letters for him.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said the porter, but turned to the pigeon-holes and took out a bundle. He looked them over, and then handed one to James.

“Hulloa, who’s this from?”

Suddenly something gripped his heart; he felt the blood rush to his cheeks, and a cold tremor ran through all his limbs. He recognised the handwriting of Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace, and there was a penny stamp on the envelope. She was in England. The letter had been posted in London.

He turned away and walked towards a table that stood near the window of the hall. A thousand recollections surged across his memory tumultuously; the paper was scented (how characteristic that was of her, and in what bad taste!); he saw at once her smile and the look of her eyes. He had a mad desire passionately to kiss the letter; a load of weariness fell from his heart; he felt insanely happy, as though angry storm-clouds had been torn asunder, and the sun in its golden majesty shone calmly upon the earth.... Then, with sudden impulse, he tore the unopened letter into a dozen pieces and threw them away. He straightened himself, and walked into the smoking-room.

James looked round and saw nobody he knew, quietly took a magazine from the table, and sat down; but the blood-vessels in his brain throbbed so violently that he thought something horrible would happen to him. He heard the regular, quick beating, like the implacable hammering of gnomes upon some hidden, distant anvil.

“She’s in London,” he repeated.

When had the letter been posted? At least, he might have looked at the mark on the envelope. Was it a year ago? Was it lately? The letter did not look as though it had been lying about the club for many months. Had it not still the odour of those dreadful Parma violets? She must have seen in the paper his return from Africa, wounded and ill. And what did she say? Did she merely write a few cold words of congratulation or — more?

It was terrible that after three years the mere sight of her handwriting should have power to throw him into this state of eager, passionate anguish. He was seized with the old panic, the terrified perception of his surrender, of his utter weakness, which made flight the only possible resistance. That was why he had destroyed the letter unread. When Mrs. Wallace was many thousand miles away there had been no danger in confessing that he loved her; but now it was different. What did she say in the letter? Had she in some feminine, mysterious fashion discovered his secret? Did she ask him to go and see her? James remembered one of their conversations.

“Oh, I love going to London!” she had cried, opening her arms with the charming, exotic gesticulation which distinguished her from all other women. “I enjoy myself awfully.”

“What do you do?”

“Everything. And I write to poor Dick three times a week, and tell him all I haven’t done.”

“I can’t bear the grass-widow,” said James.

“Poor boy, you can’t bear anything that’s amusing! I never knew anyone with such an ideal of woman as you have — a gloomy mixture of frumpishness and angularity.”

James did not answer.

“Don’t you wish we were in London now?” she went on. “You and I together? I really believe I should have to take you about. You’re as innocent as a babe.”

“D’you think so?” said James, rather hurt.

“Now, if we were in town, on our own, what would you do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose make a little party and dine somewhere, and go to the Savoy to see the ‘Mikado.’”

Mrs. Wallace laughed.

“I know. A party of four — yourself and me, and two maiden aunts. And we should be very prim, and talk about the weather, and go in a growler for propriety’s sake. I know that sort of evening. And after the maiden aunts had seen me safety home, I should simply howl from boredom. My dear boy, I’m respectable enough here. When I’m on my own, I want to go on the loose. Now, I’ll tell you what I want to do if ever we are in town together. Will you promise to do it?”

“If I possibly can.”

“All right! Well, you shall fetch me in the fastest hansom you can find, and remember to tell the driver to go as quick as ever he dare. We’ll dine alone, please, at the most expensive restaurant in London! You’ll engage a table in the middle of the room, and you must see that the people all round us are very smart and very shady. It always makes me feel so virtuous to look at disreputable women! Do I shock you?”

“Not more than usual.”

“How absurd you are! Then we’ll go to the Empire. And after that we’ll go somewhere else, and have supper where the people are still smarter and still shadier; and then we’ll go to Covent Garden Ball. Oh, you don’t know how I long to go on the rampage sometimes! I get so tired of propriety.”

“And what will P. W. say to all this?”

“Oh, I’ll write and tell him that I spent the evening with some of his poor relations, and give eight pages of corroborative evidence.”

James thought of Pritchard-Wallace, gentlest and best-humoured of men. He was a great big fellow, with a heavy moustache and kind eyes; always ready to stand by anyone in difficulties, always ready with comfort or with cheery advice; whoever wanted help went to him as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And it was touching to see the dog-like devotion to his wife; he had such confidence in her that he never noticed her numerous flirtations. Pritchard-Wallace thought himself rather a dull stick, and he wanted her to amuse herself. So brilliant a creature could not be expected to find sufficient entertainment in a quiet man of easy-going habits.

“Go your own way, my girl,” he said; “I know you’re all right. And so long as you keep a place for me in the bottom of your heart, you can do whatever you like.”

“Of course, I don’t care two straws for anyone but you, silly old thing!”

And she pulled his moustache and kissed his lips; and he went off on his business, his heart swelling with gratitude, because Providence had given him the enduring love of so beautiful and enchanting a little woman.

“P. W. is worth ten of you,” James told her indignantly one day, when he had been witness to some audacious deception.

“Well, he doesn’t think so. And that’s the chief thing.”

James dared not see her. It was obviously best to have destroyed the letter. After all, it was probably nothing more than a curt, formal congratulation, and its coldness would nearly have broken his heart. He feared also lest in his never-ceasing thought he had crystallised his beloved into something quite different from reality. His imagination was very active, and its constant play upon those few recollections might easily have added many a false delight. To meet Mrs. Wallace would only bring perhaps a painful disillusion; and of that James was terrified, for without this passion which occupied his whole soul he would be now singularly alone in the world. It was a fantastic, charming figure that he had made for himself, and he could worship it without danger and without reproach. Was it not better to preserve his dream from the sullen irruption of fact? But why would that perfume come perpetually entangling itself with his memory? It gave the image new substance; and when he closed his eyes, the woman seemed so near that he could feel against his face the fragrance of her breath.

He dined alone, and spent the hours that followed in reading. By some chance he was able to find no one he knew, and he felt rather bored. He went to bed with a headache, feeling already the dreariness of London without friends.

Next morning James wandered in the Park, fresh and delightful with the rhododendrons; but the people he saw hurt him by their almost aggressive happiness — vivacious, cheerful, and careless, they were all evidently of opinion that no reasonable creature could complain with the best of all possible worlds. The girls that hurried past on ponies, or on bicycles up and down the well-kept road, gave him an impression of light-heartedness which was fascinating, yet made his own solitude more intolerable. Their cheeks glowed with healthiness in the summer air, and their gestures, their laughter, were charmingly animated. He noticed the smile which a slender Amazon gave to a man who raised his hat, and read suddenly in their eyes a happy, successful tenderness. Once, galloping towards him, he saw a woman who resembled Mrs. Wallace, and his heart stood still. He had an intense longing to behold her just once more, unseen of her; but he was mistaken. The rider approached and passed, and it was no one he knew.

Then, tired and sore at heart, James went back to his club. The day passed monotonously, and the day after he was seized by the peculiar discomfort of the lonely sojourner in great cities. The thronging, busy crowd added to his solitariness. When he saw acquaintances address one another in the club, or walk along the streets in conversation, he could hardly bear his own friendlessness; the interests of all these people seemed so fixed and circumscribed, their lives were already so full, that they could only look upon a new-comer with hostility. He would have felt less lonely on a desert island than in the multitudinous city, surrounded by hurrying strangers. He scarcely knew how he managed to drag through the day, tired of the eternal smoking-room, tired of wandering about. The lodgings which Major Forsyth had recommended were like barracks; a tall, narrow house, in which James had a room at the top, looking on to a blank wall. They were dreadfully cheerless. And as James climbed the endless stairs he felt an irritation at the joyous laughter that came from other rooms. Behind those closed, forbidding doors people were happy and light of heart; only he was alone, and must remain perpetually imprisoned within himself. He went to the theatre, but here again, half insanely, he felt a barrier between himself and the rest of the audience. For him the piece offered no illusions; he could only see painted actors strutting affectedly in unnatural costumes; the scenery was mere painted cloth, and the dialogue senseless inanity. With all his might James wished that he were again in Africa, with work to do and danger to encounter. There the solitude was never lonely, and the nights were blue and silent, rich with the countless stars.

He had been in London a week. One day, towards evening, while he walked down Piccadilly, looking aimlessly at the people and asking himself what their inmost thoughts could be, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and a cheery voice called out his name.

“I knew it was you, Parsons! Where the devil have you sprung from?”

He turned round and saw a man he had known in India. Jamie’s solitude and boredom had made him almost effusive.

“By Jove, I am glad to see you!” he said, wringing the fellow’s hand. “Come and have a drink. I’ve seen no one for days, and I’m dying to have some one to talk to.”

“I think I can manage it. I’ve got a train to catch at eight; I’m just off to Scotland.”

Jamie’s face fell.

“I was going to ask you to dine with me.”

“I’m awfully sorry! I’m afraid I can’t.”

They talked of one thing and another, till Jamie’s friend said he must go immediately; they shook hands.

“Oh, by the way,” said the man, suddenly remembering, “I saw a pal of yours the other day, who’s clamouring for you.”

“For me?”

James reddened, knowing at once, instinctively, that it could only be one person.

“D’you remember Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace? She’s in London. I saw her at a party, and she asked me if I knew anything about you. She’s staying in Half Moon Street, at 201. You’d better go and see her. Good-bye! I must simply bolt.”

He left James hurriedly, and did not notice the effect of his few words.... She still thought of him, she asked for him, she wished him to go to her. The gods in their mercy had sent him the address; with beating heart and joyful step, James immediately set out. The throng in his way vanished, and he felt himself walking along some roadway of ethereal fire, straight to his passionate love — a roadway miraculously fashioned for his feet, leading only to her. Every thought left him but that the woman he adored was waiting, waiting, ready to welcome him with that exquisite smile, with the hands which were like the caresses of Aphrodite, turned to visible flesh. But he stopped short.

“What’s the good?” he cried, bitterly.

Before him the sun was setting like a vision of love, colouring with softness and with quiet the manifold life of the city. James looked at it, his heart swelling with sadness; for with it seemed to die his short joy, and the shadows lengthening were like the sad facts of reality which crept into his soul one by one silently.

“I won’t go,” he cried; “I daren’t! Oh, God help me, and give me strength!”

He turned into the Green Park, where lovers sat entwined upon the benches, and in the pleasant warmth the idlers and the weary slept upon the grass. James sank heavily upon a seat, and gave himself over to his wretchedness.

The night fell, and the lamps upon Piccadilly were lit, and in the increasing silence the roar of London sounded more intensely. From the darkness, as if it were the scene of a play, James watched the cabs and ‘buses pass rapidly in the light, the endless procession of people like disembodied souls drifting aimlessly before the wind. It was a comfort and a relief to sit there unseen, under cover of the night. He observed the turmoil with a new, disinterested curiosity, feeling strangely as if he were no longer among the living. He found himself surprised that they thought it worth while to hurry and to trouble. The couples on the benches remained in silent ecstasy; and sometimes a dark figure slouched past, sorrowful and mysterious.

At last James went out, surprised to find it was so late. The theatres had disgorged their crowds, and Piccadilly was thronged, gay, vivacious, and insouciant. For a moment there was a certain luxury about its vice; the harlot gained the pompousness of a Roman courtesan, and the vulgar debauchee had for a little while the rich, corrupt decadence of art and splendour.

James turned into Half Moon Street, which now was all deserted and silent, and walked slowly, with anguish tearing at his heart, towards the house in which lodged Mrs. Wallace. One window was still lit, and he wondered whether it was hers; it would have been an exquisite pleasure if he could but have seen her form pass the drawn blind. Ah, he could not have mistaken it! Presently the light was put out, and the whole house was in darkness. He waited on, for no reason — pleased to be near her. He waited half the night, till he was so tired he could scarcely drag himself home.

In the morning James was ill and tired, and disillusioned; his head ached so that he could hardly bear the pain, and in all his limbs he felt a strange and heavy lassitude. He wondered why he had troubled himself about the woman who cared nothing — nothing whatever for him. He repeated about her the bitter, scornful things he had said so often. He fancied he had suddenly grown indifferent.

“I shall go back to Primpton,” he said; “London is too horrible.”

XVIII

The lassitude and the headache explained themselves, for the day after Jamie’s arrival at Little Primpton he fell ill, and the doctor announced that he had enteric fever. He explained that it was not uncommon for persons to develop the disease after their return from the Cape. In their distress, the first thought of Mrs. Parsons and the Colonel was to send for Mary; they knew her to be quick and resourceful.

“Dr. Radley says we must have a nurse down. Jamie is never to be left alone, and I couldn’t manage by myself.”

Mary hesitated and reddened:

“Oh, I wish Jamie would let me nurse him! You and I could do everything much better than a strange woman. D’you think he’d mind?”

Mrs. Parsons looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s very kind of you, Mary. I’m afraid he’s not treated you so as to deserve that. And it would exhaust you dreadfully.”

“I’m very strong; I should like it so much. Won’t you ask Jamie? He can only refuse.”

“Very well.”

Mrs. Parsons went up to her son, by whom sat the Colonel, looking at him wistfully. James lay on his back, breathing quickly, dull, listless, and apathetic. Every now and then his dark dry lips contracted as the unceasing pain of his head became suddenly almost insufferable.

“Jamie, dear,” said Mrs. Parsons, “Dr. Radley says you must have a second nurse, and we thought of getting one from Tunbridge Wells. Would you mind if Mary came instead?”

James opened his eyes, bright and unnatural, and the dilated pupils gave them a strangely piercing expression.

“Does she want to?”

“It would make her very happy.”

“Does she know that enteric is horrid to nurse?”

“For your sake she will do everything willingly.”

“Then let her.” He smiled faintly. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. That’s what the curate said.”

He had sufficient strength to smile to Mary when she came up, and to stretch out his hand.

“It’s very good of you, Mary.”

“Nonsense!” she said, cheerily. “You mustn’t talk. And you must do whatever I tell you, and let yourself be treated like a little boy.”

For days James remained in the same condition, with aching head, his face livid in its pallor, except for the bright, the terrifying flush of the cheeks; and the lips were dark with the sickly darkness of death. He lay on his back continually, apathetic and listless, his eyes closed. Now and again he opened them, and their vacant brilliancy was almost unearthly. He seemed to see horrible things, impossible to prevent, staring in front of him with the ghastly intensity of the blind.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Parsons and Mary nursed him devotedly. Mary was quite splendid. In her loving quickness she forestalled all Jamie’s wants, so that they were satisfied almost before he had realised them. She was always bright and good-tempered and fresh; she performed with constant cheerfulness the little revolting services which the disease necessitates; nothing was too difficult, or too harassing, or too unpleasant for her to do. She sacrificed herself with delight, taking upon her shoulders the major part of the work, leaving James only when Mrs. Parsons forced her to rest. She sat up night after night uncomplainingly; having sent for her clothes, and, notwithstanding Mrs. Clibborn’s protests, taken up her abode altogether at Primpton House.

Mrs. Clibborn said it was a most improper proceeding; that a trained nurse would be more capable, and the Parsons could well afford it; and also that it was indelicate for Mary to force herself upon James when he was too ill to defend himself.

“I don’t know what we should do without you, Mary,” said Colonel Parsons, with tears in his eyes. “If we save him it will be your doing.”

“Of course we shall save him! All I ask you is to say nothing of what I’ve done. It’s been a pleasure to me to serve him, and I don’t deserve, and I don’t want, gratitude.”

But it became more than doubtful whether it would be possible to save James, weakened by his wound and by the privations of the campaign. The disease grew worse. He was constantly delirious, and his prostration extreme. His cheeks sank in, and he seemed to have lost all power of holding himself together; he lay low down in the bed, as if he had given up trying to save himself. His face became dusky, so that it was terrifying to look upon.

The doctor could no longer conceal his anxiety, and at last Mrs. Parsons, alone with him, insisted upon knowing the truth.

“Is there any chance?” she asked, tremulously. “I would much rather know the worst.”

“I’m afraid very, very little.”

Mrs. Parsons shook hands silently with Dr. Radley and returned to the sick room, where Mary and the Colonel were sitting at the bedside.

“Well?”

Mrs. Parsons bent her head, and the silent tears rolled down her cheeks. The others understood only too well.

“The Lord’s will be done,” whispered the father. “Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

They looked at James with aching hearts. All their bitterness had long gone, and they loved him again with the old devotion of past time.

“D’you think I was hard on him, dear?” said the Colonel.

Mary took his hand and held it affectionately.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’m sure he never felt any bitterness towards you.”

James now was comatose. But sometimes a reflex movement would pass through him, a sort of quiver, which seemed horribly as though the soul were parting from his body; and feebly he clutched at the bed-clothes.

“Was it for this that he was saved from war and pestilence?” muttered the Colonel, hopelessly.

But the Fates love nothing better than to mock the poor little creatures whose destinies ceaselessly they weave, refusing the wretched heart’s desire till long waiting has made it listless, and giving with both hands only when the gift entails destruction.... James did not die; the passionate love of those three persons who watched him day by day and night by night seemed to have exorcised the might of Death. He grew a little better; his vigorous frame battled for life with all the force of that unknown mysterious power which cements into existence the myriad wandering atoms. He was listless, indifferent to the issue; but the will to live fought for him, and he grew better. Quickly he was out of danger.

His father and Mary and Mrs. Parsons looked at one another almost with surprise, hardly daring to believe that they had saved him. They had suffered so much, all three of them, that they hesitated to trust their good fortune, superstitiously fearing that if they congratulated themselves too soon, some dreadful thing would happen to plunge back their beloved into deadly danger. But at last he was able to get up, to sit in the garden, now luxuriant with the ripe foliage of August; and they felt the load of anxiety gradually lift itself from their shoulders. They ventured again to laugh, and to talk of little trivial things, and of the future. They no longer had that panic terror when they looked at him, pale and weak and emaciated.

Then again the old couple thanked Mary for what she had done; and one day, in secret, went off to Tunbridge Wells to buy a little present as a proof of their gratitude. Colonel Parsons suggested a bracelet, but his wife was sure that Mary would prefer something useful; so they brought back with them a very elaborate and expensive writing-case, which with a few shy words they presented to her. Mary, poor thing, was overcome with pleasure.

“It’s awfully good of you,” she said. “I’ve done nothing that I wouldn’t have done for any of the cottagers.”

“We know it was you who saved him. You — you snatched him from the very jaws of Death.”

Mary paused, and held out her hand.

“Will you promise me one thing?”

“What is it?” asked Colonel Parsons, unwilling to give his word rashly.

“Well, promise that you will never tell James that he owes anything to me. I couldn’t bear him to think I had forced myself on him so as to have a sort of claim. Please promise me that.”

“I should never be able to keep it!” cried the Colonel.

“I think she’s right, Richmond. We’ll promise, Mary. Besides, James can’t help knowing.”

The hopes of the dear people were reviving, and they began to look upon Jamie’s illness, piously, as a blessing of Providence in disguise. While Mrs. Parsons was about her household work in the morning, the Colonel would sometimes come in, rubbing his hands gleefully.

“I’ve been watching them from the kitchen garden,” he said.

James lay on a long chair, in a sheltered, shady place, and Mary sat beside him, reading aloud or knitting.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that, Richmond,” said his wife, with an indulgent smile, “it’s very cruel.”

“I couldn’t help it, my dear. They’re sitting there together just like a pair of turtle-doves.”

“Are they talking or reading?”

“She’s reading to him, and he’s looking at her. He never takes his eyes off her.”

Mrs. Parsons sighed with a happy sadness.

“God is very good to us, Richmond.”

James was surprised to find how happily he could spend his days with Mary. He was carried into the garden as soon as he got up, and remained there most of the day. Mary, as ever, was untiring in her devotion, thoughtful, anxious to obey his smallest whim.... He saw very soon the thoughts which were springing up again in the minds of his father and mother, intercepting the little significant glances which passed between them when Mary went away on some errand and he told her not to be long, when they exchanged gentle chaff, or she arranged the cushions under his head. The neighbours had asked to visit him, but this he resolutely declined, and appealed to Mary for protection.

“I’m quite happy alone here with you, and if anyone else comes I swear I’ll fall ill again.”

And with a little flush of pleasure and a smile, Mary answered that she would tell them all he was very grateful for their sympathy, but didn’t feel strong enough to see them.

“I don’t feel a bit grateful, really,” he said.

“Then you ought to.”

Her manner was much gentler now that James was ill, and her rigid moral sense relaxed a little in favour of his weakness. Mary’s common sense became less aggressive, and if she was practical and unimaginative as ever, she was less afraid than before of giving way to him. She became almost tolerant, allowing him little petulances and little evasions — petty weaknesses which in complete health she would have felt it her duty not to compromise with. She treated him like a child, with whom it was possible to be indulgent without a surrender of principle; he could still claim to be spoiled and petted, and made much of.

And James found that he could look forward with something like satisfaction to the condition of things which was evolving. He did not doubt that if he proposed to Mary again, she would accept him, and all their difficulties would be at an end. After all, why not? He was deeply touched by the loving, ceaseless care she had taken of him; indeed, no words from his father were needed to make him realise what she had gone through. She was kindness itself, tender, considerate, cheerful; he felt an utter prig to hesitate. And now that he had got used to her again, James was really very fond of Mary. In his physical weakness, her strength was peculiarly comforting. He could rely upon her entirely, and trust her; he admired her rectitude and her truthfulness. She reminded him of a granite cross standing alone in a desolate Scotch island, steadfast to wind and weather, unyielding even to time, erect and stern, and yet somehow pathetic in its solemn loneliness.

Was it a lot of nonsense that he had thought about the immaculacy of the flesh? The world in general found his theories ridiculous or obscene. The world might be right. After all, the majority is not necessarily wrong. Jamie’s illness interfered like a blank space between his present self and the old one, with its strenuous ideals of a purity of body which vulgar persons knew nothing of. Weak and ill, dependent upon the strength of others, his former opinions seemed singularly uncertain. How much more easy and comfortable was it to fall back upon the ideas of all and sundry? One cannot help being a little conscience-stricken sometimes when one thinks differently from others. That is why society holds together; conscience is its most efficient policeman. But when one shares common opinions, the whole authority of civilisation backs one up, and the reward is an ineffable self-complacency. It is the easiest thing possible to wallow in the prejudices of all the world, and the most eminently satisfactory. For nineteen hundred years we have learnt that the body is shameful, a pitfall and a snare to the soul. It is to be hoped we have one, for our bodies, since we began worrying about our souls, leave much to be desired. The common idea is that the flesh is beastly, the spirit divine; and it sounds reasonable enough. If it means little, one need not care, for the world has turned eternally to one senseless formula after another. All one can be sure about is that in the things of this world there is no absolute certainty.

James, in his prostration, felt only indifference; and his old strenuousness, with its tragic despair, seemed not a little ridiculous. His eagerness to keep clean from what he thought prostitution was melodramatic and silly, his idea of purity mere foolishness. If the body was excrement, as from his youth he had been taught, what could it matter how one used it! Did anything matter, when a few years would see the flesh he had thought divine corrupt and worm-eaten? James was willing now to float along the stream, sociably, with his fellows, and had no doubt that he would soon find a set of high-sounding phrases to justify his degradation. What importance could his actions have, who was an obscure unit in an ephemeral race? It was much better to cease troubling, and let things come as they would. People were obviously right when they said that Mary must be an excellent helpmate. How often had he not told himself that she would be all that a wife should — kind, helpful, trustworthy. Was it not enough?

And his marriage would give such pleasure to his father and mother, such happiness to Mary. If he could make a little return for all her goodness, was he not bound to do so? He smiled with bitter scorn at his dead, lofty ideals. The workaday world was not fit for them; it was much safer and easier to conform oneself to its terrestrial standard. And the amusing part of it was that these new opinions which seemed to him a falling away, to others meant precisely the reverse. They thought it purer and more ethereal that a man should marry because a woman would be a housekeeper of good character than because the divine instincts of Nature irresistibly propelled him.

James shrugged his shoulders, and turned to look at Mary, who was coming towards him with letters in her hand.

“Three letters for you, Jamie!”

“Whom are they from?”

“Look.” She handed him one.

“That’s a bill, I bet,” he said. “Open it and see.”

She opened and read out an account for boots.

“Throw it away.”

Mary opened her eyes.

“It must be paid, Jamie.”

“Of course it must; but not for a long time yet. Let him send it in a few times more. Now the next one.”

He looked at the envelope, and did not recognise the handwriting.

“You can open that, too.”

It was from the Larchers, repeating their invitation to go and see them.

“I wonder if they’re still worrying about the death of their boy?”

“Oh, well, it’s six months ago, isn’t it?” replied Mary.

“I suppose in that time one gets over most griefs. I must go over some day. Now the third.”

He reddened slightly, recognising again the handwriting of Mrs. Wallace. But this time it affected him very little; he was too weak to care, and he felt almost indifferent.

“Shall I open it?” said Mary.

James hesitated.

“No,” he said; “tear it up.” And then in reply to her astonishment, he added, smiling: “It’s all right, I’m not off my head. Tear it up, and don’t ask questions, there’s a dear!”

“Of course, I’ll tear it up if you want me to,” said Mary, looking rather perplexed.

“Now, go to the hedge and throw the pieces in the field.”

She did so, and sat down again.

“Shall I read to you?”

“No, I’m sick of the ‘Antiquary.’ Why the goodness they can’t talk English like rational human beings, Heaven only knows!”

“Well, we must finish it now we’ve begun.”

“D’you think something dreadful will happen to us if we don’t?”

“If one begins a book I think one should finish it, however dull it is. One is sure to get some good out of it.”

“My dear, you’re a perfect monster of conscientiousness.”

“Well, if you don’t want me to read, I shall go on with my knitting.”

“I don’t want you to knit either. I want you to talk to me.”

Mary looked almost charming in the subdued light of the sun as it broke through the leaves, giving a softness of expression and a richness of colour that James had never seen in her before. And the summer frock she wore made her more girlish and irresponsible than usual.

“You’ve been very, very good to me all this time, Mary,” said James, suddenly.

Mary flushed. “I?”

“I can never thank you enough.”

“Nonsense! Your father has been telling you a lot of rubbish, and he promised he wouldn’t.”

“No, he’s said nothing. Did you make him promise? That was very nice, and just like you.”

“I was afraid he’d say more than he ought.”

“D’you think I haven’t been able to see for myself? I owe my life to you.”

“You owe it to God, Jamie.”

He smiled, and took her hand.

“I’m very, very grateful!”

“It’s been a pleasure to nurse you, Jamie. I never knew you’d make such a good patient.”

“And for all you’ve done, I’ve made you wretched and miserable. Can you ever forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive, dear. You know I always think of you as a brother.”

“Ah, that’s what you told the curate!” cried James, laughing.

Mary reddened.

“How d’you know?”

“He told Mrs. Jackson, and she told father.”

“You’re not angry with me?”

“I think you might have made it second cousin,” said James, with a smile.

Mary did not answer, but tried to withdraw her hand. He held it fast.

“Mary, I’ve treated you vilely. If you don’t hate me, it’s only because you’re a perfect angel.”

Mary looked down, blushing deep red.

“I can never hate you,” she whispered.

“Oh, Mary, can you forgive me? Can you forget? It sounds almost impertinent to ask you again — Will you marry me, Mary?”

She withdrew her hand.

“It’s very kind of you, Jamie. You’re only asking me out of gratitude, because I’ve helped a little to look after you. But I want no gratitude; it was all pleasure. And I’m only too glad that you’re getting well.”

“I’m perfectly in earnest, Mary. I wouldn’t ask you merely from gratitude. I know I have humiliated you dreadfully, and I have done my best to kill the love you had for me. But I really honestly love you now — with all my heart. If you still care for me a little, I beseech you not to dismiss me.”

“If I still care for you!” cried Mary, hoarsely. “Oh, my God!”

“Mary, forgive me! I want you to marry me.”

She looked at him distractedly, the fire burning through her heart. He took both her hands and drew her towards him.

“Mary, say yes.”

She sank helplessly to her knees beside him.

“It would make me very happy,” she murmured, with touching humility.

Then he bent forward and kissed her tenderly.

“Let’s go and tell them,” he said. “They’ll be so pleased.”

Mary, smiling and joyful, helped him to his feet, and supporting him as best she could, they went towards the house.

Colonel Parsons was sitting in the dining-room, twirling his old Panama in a great state of excitement; he had interrupted his wife at her accounts, and she was looking at him good-humouredly over her spectacles.

“I’m sure something’s happening,” he said. “I went out to take Jamie his beef-tea, and he was holding Mary’s hand. I coughed as loud as I could, but they took no notice at all. So I thought I’d better not disturb them.”

“Here they come,” said Mrs. Parsons.

“Mother,” said James, “Mary has something to tell you.”

“I haven’t anything of the sort!” cried Mary, blushing and laughing. “Jamie has something to tell you.”

“Well, the fact is, I’ve asked Mary to marry me and she’s said she would.”

XIX

James was vastly relieved. His people’s obvious delight, Mary’s quiet happiness, were very grateful to him, and if he laughed at himself a little for feeling so virtuous, he could not help thoroughly enjoying the pleasure he had given. He was willing to acknowledge now that his conscience had been uneasy after the rupture of his engagement: although he had assured himself so vehemently that reason was upon his side, the common disapproval, and the influence of all his bringing-up, had affected him in his own despite.

“When shall we get married, Mary?” he asked, when the four of them were sitting together in the garden.

“Quickly!” cried Colonel Parsons.

“Well, shall we say in a month, or six weeks?”

“D’you think you’ll be strong enough?” replied Mary, looking affectionately at him. And then, blushing a little: “I can get ready very soon.”

The night before, she had gone home and taken out the trousseau which with tears had been put away. She smoothed out the things, unfolded them, and carefully folded them up. Never in her life had she possessed such dainty linen. Mary cried a while with pleasure to think that she could begin again to collect her little store. No one knew what agony it had been to write to the shops at Tunbridge Wells countermanding her orders, and now she looked forward with quiet delight to buying all that remained to get.

Finally, it was decided that the wedding should take place at the beginning of October. Mrs. Parsons wrote to her brother, who answered that he had expected the event all along, being certain that his conversation with James would eventually bear fruit. He was happy to be able to congratulate himself on the issue of his diplomacy; it was wonderful how easily all difficulties were settled, if one took them from the point of view of a man of the world. Mrs. Jackson likewise flattered herself that the renewed engagement was due to her intervention.

“I saw he was paying attention to what I said,” she told her husband. “I knew all he wanted was a good, straight talking to.”

“I am sorry for poor Dryland,” said the Vicar.

“Yes, I think we ought to do our best to console him. Don’t you think he might go away for a month, Archibald?”

Mr. Dryland came to tea, and the Vicar’s wife surrounded him with little attentions. She put an extra lump of sugar in his tea, and cut him even a larger piece of seed-cake than usual.

“Of course you’ve heard, Mr. Dryland?” she said, solemnly.

“Are you referring to Miss Clibborn’s engagement to Captain Parsons?” he asked, with a gloomy face. “Bad news travels fast.”

“You have all our sympathies. We did everything we could for you.”

“I can’t deny that it’s a great blow to me. I confess I thought that time and patience on my part might induce Miss Clibborn to change her mind. But if she’s happy, I cannot complain. I must bear my misfortune with resignation.”

“But will she be happy?” asked Mrs. Jackson, with foreboding in her voice.

“I sincerely hope so. Anyhow, I think it my duty to go to Captain Parsons and offer him my congratulations.”

“Will you do that, Mr. Dryland?” cried Mrs. Jackson. “That is noble of you!”

“If you’d like to take your holiday now, Dryland,” said the Vicar, “I daresay we can manage it.”

“Oh, no, thanks; I’m not the man to desert from the field of battle.”

Mrs. Jackson sighed.

“Things never come right in this world. That’s what I always say; the clergy are continually doing deeds of heroism which the world never hears anything about.”

The curate went to Primpton House and inquired whether he might see Captain Parsons.

“I’ll go and ask if he’s well enough,” answered the Colonel, with his admirable respect for the cloth.

“Do you think he wants to talk to me about my soul?” asked James, smiling.

“I don’t know; but I think you’d better see him.”

“Very well.”

Mr. Dryland came forward and shook hands with James in an ecclesiastical and suave manner, trying to be dignified, as behoved a rejected lover in the presence of his rival, and at the same time cordial, as befitted a Christian who could bear no malice.

“Captain Parsons, you will not be unaware that I asked Miss Clibborn to be my wife?”

“The fact was fairly generally known in the village,” replied James, trying to restrain a smile.

Mr. Dryland blushed.

“I was annoyed at the publicity which the circumstance obtained. The worst of these little places is that people will talk.”

“It was a very noble deed,” said James gravely, repeating the common opinion.

“Not at all,” answered the curate, with characteristic modesty. “But since it was not to be, since Miss Clibborn’s choice has fallen on you, I think it my duty to inform you of my hearty goodwill. I wish, in short, to offer you again my sincerest congratulations.”

“I’m sure that’s very kind of you.”

Two days, later Mrs. Jackson called on a similar errand.

She tripped up to James and frankly held out her hand, neatly encased as ever in a shining black kid glove.

“Captain Parsons, let us shake hands, and let bygones be bygones. You have taken my advice, and if, in the heat of the moment, we both said things which we regret, after all, we’re only human.”

“Surely, Mrs. Jackson, I was moderation itself? — even when you told me I should infallibly go to Hell.”

“You were extremely irritating,” said the Vicar’s lady, smiling, “but I forgive you. After all, you paid more attention to what I said than I expected you would.”

“It must be very satisfactory for you to think that.”

“You know I have no ill-feeling towards you at all. I gave you a piece of my mind because I thought it was my duty. If you think I stepped over the limits of — moderation, I am willing and ready to apologise.”

“What a funny woman you are!” said James, looking at her with a good-humoured, but rather astonished smile.

“I’m sure I don’t know what makes you think so,” she answered, bridling a little.

“It never occurred to me that you honestly thought you were acting rightly when you came and gave me a piece of your mind, as you call it. I thought your motives were simply malicious and uncharitable.”

“I have a very high ideal of my duties as a clergyman’s wife.”

“The human animal is very odd.”

“I don’t look upon myself as an animal, Captain Parsons.”

James smiled.

“I wonder why we all torture ourselves so unnecessarily. It really seems as if the chief use we made of our reason was to inflict as much pain upon ourselves and upon one another as we possibly could.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Captain Parsons.”

“When you do anything, are you ever tormented by a doubt whether you are doing right or wrong?”

“Never,” she answered, firmly. “There is always a right way and a wrong way, and, I’m thankful to say, God has given me sufficient intelligence to know which is which; and obviously I choose the right way.”

“What a comfortable idea! I can never help thinking that every right way is partly wrong, and every wrong way partly right. There’s always so much to be said on both sides; to me it’s very hard to know which is which.”

“Only a very weak man could think like that.”

“Possibly! I have long since ceased to flatter myself on my strength of mind. I find it is chiefly a characteristic of unintelligent persons.”

It was Mary’s way to take herself seriously. It flattered her to think that she was not blind to Jamie’s faults; she loved him none the less on their account, but determined to correct them. He had an unusual way of looking at things, and an occasional flippancy in his conversation, both of which she hoped in time to eradicate. With patience, gentleness, and dignity a woman can do a great deal with a man.

One of Mary’s friends had a husband with a bad habit of swearing, which was cured in a very simple manner. Whenever he swore, his wife swore too. For instance, he would say: “That’s a damned bad job;” and his wife answered, smiling: “Yes, damned bad.” He was rather surprised, but quickly ceased to employ objectionable words. Story does not relate whether he also got out of the habit of loving his wife; but that, doubtless, is a minor detail. Mary always looked upon her friend as a pattern.

“James is not really cynical,” she told herself. “He says things, not because he means them, but because he likes to startle people.”

It was inconceivable that James should not think on all subjects as she had been brought up to do, and the least originality struck her naturally as a sort of pose. But on account of his illness Mary allowed him a certain latitude, and when he said anything she did not approve of, instead of arguing the point, merely smiled indulgently and changed the subject. There was plenty of time before her, and when James became her husband she would have abundant opportunity of raising him to that exalted level upon which she was so comfortably settled. The influence of a simple Christian woman could not fail to have effect; at bottom James was as good as gold, and she was clever enough to guide him insensibly along the right path.

James, perceiving this, scarcely knew whether to be incensed or amused. Sometimes he could see the humour in Mary’s ingenuous conceit, and in the dogmatic assurance with which she uttered the most astounding opinions; but at others, when she waved aside superciliously a remark that did not square with her prejudices, or complacently denied a statement because she had never heard it before, he was irritated beyond all endurance. And it was nothing very outrageous he said, but merely some commonplace of science which all the world had accepted for twenty years. Mary, however, entrenched herself behind the impenetrable rock of her self-sufficiency.

“I’m not clever enough to argue with you,” she said; “but I know I’m right; and I’m quite satisfied.”

Generally she merely smiled.

“What nonsense you talk, Jamie! You don’t really believe what you say.”

“But, my dear Mary, it’s a solemn fact. There’s no possibility of doubting it. It’s a truism.”

Then with admirable self-command, remembering that James was still an invalid, she would pat his hand and say:

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Of course, you’re much cleverer than I am. It must be almost time for your beef-tea.”

James sank back, baffled. Mary’s ignorance was an impenetrable cuirass; she would not try to understand, she could not even realise that she might possibly be mistaken. Quite seriously she thought that what she ignored could be hardly worth knowing. People talk of the advance of education; there may be a little among the lower classes, but it is inconceivable that the English gentry can ever have been more illiterate than they are now. Throughout the country, in the comfortable villa or in the stately mansion, you will find as much prejudice and superstition in the drawing-room as in the kitchen; and you will find the masters less receptive of new ideas than their servants; and into the bargain, presumptuously satisfied with their own nescience.

James saw that the only way to deal with Mary and with his people was to give in to all their prejudices. He let them talk, and held his tongue. He shut himself off from them, recognising that there was, and could be, no bond between them. They were strangers to him; their ways of looking at every detail of life were different from his; they had not an interest, not a thought, in common.... The preparations for the marriage went on.

One day Mary decided that it was her duty to speak with James about his religion. Some of his remarks had made her a little uneasy, and he was quite strong enough now to be seriously dealt with.

“Tell me, Jamie,” she said, in reply to an observation which she was pleased to consider flippant, “you do believe in God, don’t you?”

But James had learnt his lesson well.

“My dear, that seems to me a private affair of my own.”

“Are you ashamed to say?” she asked, gravely.

“No; but I don’t see the advantage of discussing the matter.”

“I think you ought to tell me as I’m going to be your wife. I shouldn’t like you to be an atheist.”

“Atheism is exploded, Mary. Only very ignorant persons are certain of what they cannot possibly know.”

“Then I don’t see why you should be afraid to tell me.”

“I’m not; only I think you have no right to ask. We both think that in marriage each should leave the other perfect freedom. I used to imagine the ideal was that married folk should not have a thought, nor an idea apart; but that is all rot. The best thing is evidently for each to go his own way, and respect the privacy of the other. Complete trust entails complete liberty.”

“I think that is certainly the noblest way of looking at marriage.”

“You may be quite sure I shall not intrude upon your privacy, Mary.”

“I’m sorry I asked you any question. I suppose it’s no business of mine.”

James returned to his book; he had fallen into the habit again of reading incessantly, finding therein his only release from the daily affairs of life; but when Mary left him, he let his novel drop and began to think. He was bitterly amused at what he had said. The parrot words which he had so often heard on Mary’s lips sounded strangely on his own. He understood now why the view of matrimony had become prevalent that it was an institution in which two casual persons lived together, for the support of one and the material comfort of the other. Without love it was the most natural thing that husband and wife should seek all manner of protection from each other; with love none was needed. It harmonised well with the paradox that a marriage of passion was rather indecent, while lukewarm affection and paltry motives of convenience were elevating and noble.

Poor Mary! James knew that she loved him with all her soul, such as it was (a delicate conscience and a collection of principles are not enough to make a great lover), and again he acknowledged to himself that he could give her only friendship. It had been but an ephemeral tenderness which drew him to her for the second time, due to weakness of body and to gratitude. If he ever thought it was love, he knew by now that he had been mistaken. Still, what did it matter? He supposed they would get along very well — as well as most people; better even than if they adored one another; for passion is not conducive to an even life. Fortunately she was cold and reserved, little given to demonstrative affection; she made few demands upon him, and occupied with her work in the parish and the collection of her trousseau, was content that he should remain with his books.

The day fixed upon for the marriage came nearer.

But at last James was seized with a wild revolt. His father was sitting by him.

“Mary’s wedding-dress is nearly ready,” he said, suddenly.

“So soon?” cried James, his heart sinking.

“She’s afraid that something may happen at the last moment, and it won’t be finished in time.”

“What could happen?”

“Oh, I mean something at the dressmaker’s!”

“Is that all? I imagine there’s little danger.”

There was a pause, broken again by the Colonel.

“I’m so glad you’re going to be happily married, Jamie.”

His son did not answer.

“But man is never satisfied. I used to think that when I got you spliced, I should have nothing else to wish for; but now I’m beginning to want little grandsons to rock upon my knees.”

Jamie’s face grew dark.

“We should never be able to afford children.”

“But they come if one wants them or not, and I shall be able to increase your allowance a little, you know. I don’t want you to go short of anything.”

James said nothing, but he thought: “If I had children by her, I should hate them.” And then with sudden dismay, losing all the artificial indifference of the last week, he rebelled passionately against his fate. “Oh, I hate and loathe her!”

He felt he could no longer continue the pretence he had been making — for it was all pretence. The effort to be loving and affectionate was torture, so that all his nerves seemed to vibrate with exasperation. Sometimes he had to clench his hands in order to keep himself under restraint. He was acting all the time. James asked himself what madness blinded Mary that she did not see? He remembered how easily speech had come in the old days when they were boy and girl together; they could pass hours side by side, without a thought of time, talking of little insignificant things, silent often, and always happy. But now he racked his brain for topics of conversation, and the slightest pause seemed irksome and unnatural. He was sometimes bored to death, savagely, cruelly; so that he was obliged to leave Mary for fear that he would say bitter and horrible things. Without his books he would have gone mad. She must be blind not to see. Then he thought of their married life. How long would it last? The years stretched themselves out endlessly, passing one after another in dreary monotony. Could they possibly be happy? Sooner or later Mary would learn how little he cared for her, and what agony must she suffer then! But it was inevitable. Now, whatever happened, he could not draw back; it was too late for explanations. Would love come? He felt it impossible; he felt, rather, that the physical repulsion which vainly he tried to crush would increase till he abhorred the very sight of his wife.

Passionately he cried out against Fate because he had escaped death so often. The gods played with him as a cat plays with a mouse. He had been through dangers innumerable; twice he had lain on the very threshold of eternal night, and twice he had been snatched back. Far rather would he have died the soldier’s death, gallantly, than live on to this humiliation and despair. A friendly bullet could have saved him many difficulties and much unhappiness. And why had he recovered from the fever? What an irony it was that Mary should claim gratitude for doing him the greatest possible disservice!

“I can’t help it,” he cried; “I loathe her!”

The strain upon him was becoming intolerable. James felt that he could not much longer conceal the anguish which was destroying him. But what was to be done? Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!

James held his head in his hands, cursing his pitiful weakness. Why did he not realise, in his convalescence, that it was but a passing emotion which endeared Mary to him? He had been so anxious to love her, so eager to give happiness to all concerned, that he had welcomed the least sign of affection; but he knew what love was, and there could be no excuse. He should have had the courage to resist his gratitude.

“Why should I sacrifice myself?” he cried. “My life is as valuable as theirs. Why should it be always I from whom sacrifice is demanded?”

But it was no use rebelling. Mary’s claims were too strong, and if he lived he must satisfy them. Yet some respite he could not do without; away from Primpton he might regain his calm. James hated London, but even that would be better than the horrible oppression, the constraint he was forced to put upon himself.

He walked up and down the garden for a few minutes to calm down, and went in to his mother. He spoke as naturally as he could.

“Father tells me that Mary’s wedding-dress is nearly ready.”

“Yes; it’s a little early. But it’s well to be on the safe side.”

“It’s just occurred to me that I can hardly be married in rags. I think I had better go up to town for a few days to get some things.”

“Must you do that?”

“I think so. And there’s a lot I want to do.”

“Oh, well, I daresay Mary won’t mind, if you don’t stay too long. But you must take care not to tire yourself.”

XX

On his second visit to London, James was more fortunate, for immediately he got inside his club he found an old friend, a man named Barker, late adjutant of his regiment. Barker had a great deal to tell James of mutual acquaintance, and the pair dined together, going afterwards to a music-hall. James felt in better spirits than for some time past, and his good humour carried him well into the following day. In the afternoon, while he was reading a paper, Barker came up to him.

“I say, old chap,” he said, “I quite forgot to tell you yesterday. You remember Mrs. Wallace, don’t you — Pritchard, of that ilk? She’s in town, and in a passion with you. She says she’s written to you twice, and you’ve taken no notice.”

“Really? I thought nobody was in town now.”

“She is; I forget why. She told me a long story, but I didn’t listen, as I knew it would be mostly fibs. She’s probably up to some mischief. Let’s go round to her place and have tea, shall we?”

“I hardly think I can,” replied James, reddening. “I’ve got an engagement at four.”

“Rot — come on! She’s just as stunning as ever. By Gad, you should have seen her in her weeds!”

“In her weeds! What the devil do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know? P. W. was bowled over at the beginning of the war — after Colenso, I think.”

“By God! — I didn’t know. I never saw!”

“Oh, well, I didn’t know till I came home.... Let’s stroll along, shall we? She’s looking out for number two; but she wants money, so there’s no danger for us!”

James rose mechanically, and putting on his hat, accompanied Barker, all unwitting of the thunder-blow that his words had been.... Mrs. Wallace was at home. James went upstairs, forgetting everything but that the woman he loved was free — free! His heart beat so that he could scarcely breathe; he was afraid of betraying his agitation, and had to make a deliberate effort to contain himself.

Mrs. Wallace gave a little cry of surprise on seeing James.... She had not changed. The black gown she wore, fashionable, but slightly fantastic, set off the dazzling olive clearness of her skin and the rich colour of her hair. James turned pale with the passion that consumed him; he could hardly speak.

“You wretch!” she cried, her eyes sparkling, “I’ve written to you twice — once to congratulate you, and then to ask you to come and see me — and you took not the least notice.”

“Barker has just told me you wrote. I am so sorry.”

“Oh, well, I thought you might not receive the letters. I’ll forgive you.”

She wore Indian anklets on her wrists and a barbaric chain about her neck, so that even in the London lodging-house she preserved a mysterious Oriental charm. In her movements there was a sinuous feline grace which was delightful, and yet rather terrifying. One fancied that she was not quite human, but some cruel animal turned into the likeness of a woman. Vague stories floated through the mind of Lamia, and the unhappy end of her lovers.

The three of them began to talk, chattering of the old days in India, of the war. Mrs. Wallace bemoaned her fate in having to stay in town when all smart people had left. Barker told stories. James did not know how he joined in the flippant conversation; he wondered at his self-command in saying insignificant things, in laughing heartily, when his whole soul was in a turmoil. At length the adjutant went away, and James was left alone with Mrs. Wallace.

“D’you wish me to go?” he asked. “You can turn me out if you do.”

“Oh, I should — without hesitation,” she retorted, laughing; “but I’m bored to death, and I want you to amuse me.”

Strangely enough, James felt that the long absence had created no barrier between them. Thinking of Mrs. Wallace incessantly, sometimes against his will, sometimes with a fierce delight, holding with her imaginary conversations, he felt, on the contrary, that he knew her far more intimately than he had ever done. There seemed to be a link between them, as though something had passed which prevented them from ever again becoming strangers. James felt he had her confidence, and he was able to talk frankly as before, in his timidity, he had never ventured. He treated her with the loving friendliness with which he had been used to treat the imaginary creature of his dreams.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” he said, looking at her.

“Did you expect me to be haggard and wrinkled? I never let myself grow old. One only needs strength of mind to keep young indefinitely.”

“I’m surprised, because you’re so exactly as I’ve thought of you.”

“Have you thought of me often?”

The fire flashed to Jamie’s eyes, and it was on his lips to break out passionately, telling her how he had lived constantly with her recollection, how she had been meat and drink to him, life, and breath, and soul; but he restrained himself.

“Sometimes,” he answered, smiling.

Mrs. Wallace smiled, too.

“I seem to remember that you vowed once to think of me always.”

“One vows all sorts of things.” He hoped she could not hear the trembling in his voice.

“You’re very cool, friend Jim — and much less shy than you used to be. You were a perfect monster of bashfulness, and your conscience was a most alarming animal. It used to frighten me out of my wits; I hope you keep it now under lock and key, like the beasts in the Zoo.”

James was telling himself that it was folly to remain, that he must go at once and never return. The recollection of Mary came back to him, in the straw hat and the soiled serge dress, sitting in the dining-room with his father and mother; she had brought her knitting so as not to waste a minute; and while they talked of him, her needles clicked rapidly to and fro. Mrs. Wallace was lying in a long chair, coiled up in a serpentine, characteristic attitude; every movement wafted to him the oppressive perfume she wore; the smile on her lips, the caress of her eyes, were maddening. He loved her more even than he had imagined; his love was a fury, blind and destroying. He repeated to himself that he must fly, but the heaviness in his limbs chained him to her side; he had no will, no strength; he was a reed, bending to every word she spoke and to every look. Her fascination was not human, the calm, voluptuous look of her eyes was too cruel; and she was poised like a serpent about to spring.

At last, however, James was obliged to take his leave.

“I’ve stayed an unconscionable time.”

“Have you? I’ve not noticed it.”

Did she care for him? He took her hand to say good-bye, and the pressure sent the blood racing through his veins. He remembered vividly the passionate embrace of their last farewell. He thought then that he should never see her again, and it was Fate which had carried him to her feet. Oh, how he longed now to take her in his arms and to cover her soft mouth with his kisses!

“What are you doing this evening?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Would you like to take me to the Carlton? You remember you promised.”

“Oh, that is good of you! Of course I should like it!”

At last he could not hide the fire in his heart, and the simple words were said so vehemently that Mrs. Wallace looked up in surprise. She withdrew the hand which he was still holding.

“Very well. You may fetch me at a quarter to eight.”

After taking Mrs. Wallace home, James paced the streets for an hour in a turmoil of wild excitement. They had dined at the Carlton expensively, as was her wish, and then, driving to the Empire, James had taken a box. Through the evening he had scarcely known how to maintain his calm, how to prevent himself from telling her all that was in his heart. After the misery he had gone through, he snatched at happiness with eager grasp, determined to enjoy to the full every single moment of it. He threw all scruples to the wind. He was sick and tired of holding himself in; he had checked himself too long, and now, at all hazards, must let himself go. Bridle and curb now were of no avail. He neither could nor would suppress his passion, though it devoured him like a raging fire. He thought his conscientiousness absurd. Why could he not, like other men, take the brief joy of life? Why could he not gather the roses without caring whether they would quickly fade? “Let me eat, drink, and be merry,” he cried, “for to-morrow I die!”

It was Wednesday, and on the Saturday he had promised to return to Little Primpton. But he put aside all thought of that, except as an incentive to make the most of his time. He had wrestled with temptation and been overcome, and he gloried in his defeat. He would make no further effort to stifle his love. His strength had finally deserted him, and he had no will to protect himself; he would give himself over entirely to his passion, and the future might bring what it would.

“I’m a fool to torment myself!” he cried. “After all, what does anything matter but love?”

Mrs. Wallace was engaged for the afternoon of the next day, but she had invited him to dine with her.

“They feed you abominably at my place,” she said, “but I’ll do my best. And we shall be able to talk.”

Until then he would not live; and all sorts of wild, mad thoughts ran through his head.

“Is there a greater fool on earth than the virtuous prig?” he muttered, savagely.

He could not sleep, but tossed from side to side, thinking ever of the soft hands and the red lips that he so ardently wished to kiss. In the morning he sent to Half Moon Street a huge basket of flowers.

“It was good of you,” said Mrs. Wallace, when he arrived, pointing to the roses scattered through the room. She wore three in her hair, trailing behind one ear in an exotic, charming fashion.

“It’s only you who could think of wearing them like that.”

“Do they make me look very barbaric?” She was flattered by the admiration in his eyes. “You certainly have improved since I saw you last.”

“Now, shall we stay here or go somewhere?” she asked after dinner, when they were smoking cigarettes.

“Let us stay here.”

Mrs. Wallace began talking the old nonsense which, in days past, had delighted James; it enchanted him to hear her say, in the tone of voice he knew so well, just those things which he had a thousand times repeated to himself. He looked at her with a happy smile, his eyes fixed upon her, taking in every movement.

“I don’t believe you’re listening to a word I’m saying!” she cried at last. “Why don’t you answer?”

“Go on. I like to see you talk. It’s long since I’ve had the chance.”

“You spoke yesterday as though you hadn’t missed me much.”

“I didn’t mean it. You knew I didn’t mean it.”

She smiled mockingly.

“I thought it doubtful. If it had been true, you could hardly have said anything so impolite.”

“I’ve thought of you always. That’s why I feel I know you so much better now. I don’t change. What I felt once, I feel always.”

“I wonder what you mean by that?”

“I mean that I love you as passionately as when last I saw you. Oh, I love you ten times more!”

“And the girl with the bun and the strenuous look? You were engaged when I knew you last.”

James was silent for a moment.

“I’m going to be married to her on the 10th of October,” he said finally, in an expressionless voice.

“You don’t say that as if you were wildly enthusiastic.”

“Why did you remind me?” cried James. “I was so happy. Oh, I hate her!”

“Then why on earth are you marrying her?”

“I can’t help it; I must. You’ve brought it all back. How could you be so cruel! When I came back from the Cape, I broke the engagement off. I made her utterly miserable, and I took all the pleasure out of my poor father’s life. I knew I’d done right; I knew that unless I loved her it was madness to marry; I felt even that it was unclean. Oh, you don’t know how I’ve argued it all out with myself time after time! I was anxious to do right, and I felt such a cad. I can’t escape from my bringing-up. You can’t imagine what are the chains that bind us in England. We’re wrapped from our infancy in the swaddling-clothes of prejudice, ignorance, and false ideas; and when we grow up, though we know they’re all absurd and horrible, we can’t escape from them; they’ve become part of our very flesh. Then I grew ill — I nearly died; and Mary nursed me devotedly. I don’t know what came over me, I felt so ill and weak. I was grateful to her. The old self seized me again, and I was ashamed of what I’d done. I wanted to make them all happy. I asked her again to marry me, and she said she would. I thought I could love her, but I can’t — I can’t, God help me!”

Jamie’s passion was growing uncontrollable. He walked up and down the room, and then threw himself heavily on a chair.

“Oh, I know it was weakness! I used to pride myself on my strength of mind, but I’m weak. I’m weaker than a woman. I’m a poor reed — vacillating, uncertain, purposeless. I don’t know my own mind. I haven’t the courage to act according to my convictions. I’m afraid to give pain. They all think I’m brave, but I’m simply a pitiful coward....”

“I feel that Mary has entrapped me, and I hate her. I know she has good qualities — heaps of them — but I can’t see them. I only know that the mere touch of her hand curdles my blood. She excites absolute physical repulsion in me; I can’t help it. I know it’s madness to marry her, but I can’t do anything else. I daren’t inflict a second time the humiliation and misery upon her, or the unhappiness upon my people.”

Mrs. Wallace now was serious.

“And do you really care for anyone else?”

He turned savagely upon her.

“You know I do. You know I love you with all my heart and soul. You know I’ve loved you passionately from the first day I saw you. Didn’t you feel, even when we were separated, that my love was inextinguishable? Didn’t you feel it always with you? Oh, my dear, my dear, you must have known that death was too weak to touch my love! I tried to crush it, because neither you nor I was free. Your husband was my friend. I couldn’t do anything blackguardly. I ran away from you. What a fool you must have thought me! And now I know that at last we were both free, I might have made you love me. I had my chance of happiness at last; what I’d longed for, cursing myself for treachery, had come to pass. But I never knew. In my weakness I surrendered my freedom. O God! what shall I do?”

He hid his face in his hands and groaned with agony. Mrs. Wallace was silent for a while.

“I don’t know if it will be any consolation for you,” she said at last; “you’re sure to know sooner or later, and I may as well tell you now. I’m engaged to be married.”

“What!” cried James, springing up. “It’s not true; it’s not true!”

“Why not? Of course it’s true!”

“You can’t — oh, my dearest, be kind to me!”

“Don’t be silly, there’s a good boy! You’re going to be married yourself in a month, and you really can’t expect me to remain single because you fancy you care for me. I shouldn’t have told you, only I thought it would make things easier for you.”

“You never cared two straws for me! I knew that. You needn’t throw it in my face.”

“After all, I was a married woman.”

“I wonder how much you minded when you heard your husband was lying dead on the veldt?”

“My dear boy, he wasn’t; he died of fever at Durban — quite comfortably, in a bed.”

“Were you sorry?”

“Of course I was! He was extremely satisfactory — and not at all exacting.”

James did not know why he asked the questions; they came to his lips unbidden. He was sick at heart, angry, contemptuous.

“I’m going to marry a Mr. Bryant — but, of course, not immediately,” she went on, occupied with her own thoughts, and pleased to talk of them.

“What is he?”

“Nothing! He’s a landed proprietor.” She said this with a certain pride.

James looked at her scornfully; his love all through had been mingled with contrary elements; and trying to subdue it, he had often insisted upon the woman’s vulgarity, and lack of taste, and snobbishness. He thought bitterly now that the daughter of the Portuguese and of the riding-master had done very well for herself.

“Really, I think you’re awfully unreasonable,” she said. “You might make yourself pleasant.”

“I can’t,” he said, gravely. “Let me go away. You don’t know what I’ve felt for you. In my madness, I fancied that you must realise my love; I thought even that you might care for me a little in return.”

“You’re quite the nicest boy I’ve ever known. I like you immensely.”

“But you like the landed proprietor better. You’re very wise. He can marry you. Good-bye!”

“I don’t want you to think I’m horrid,” she said, going up to him and taking his arm. It was an instinct with her to caress people and make them fond of her. “After all, it’s not my fault.”

“Have I blamed you? I’m sorry; I had no right to.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know — I can always shoot myself if things get unendurable. Thank God, there’s always that refuge!”

“Oh, I hope you won’t do anything silly!”

“It would be unlike me,” James murmured, grimly. “I’m so dreadfully prosaic and matter-of-fact. Good-bye!”

Mrs. Wallace was really sorry for James, and she took his hand affectionately. She always thought it cost so little to be amiable.

“We may never meet again,” she said; “but we shall still be friends, Jim.”

“Are you going to say that you’ll be a sister to me, as Mary told the curate?”

“Won’t you kiss me before you go?”

James shook his head, not trusting himself to answer. The light in his life had all gone; the ray of sunshine was hidden; the heavy clouds had closed in, and all the rest was darkness. But he tried to smile at Mrs. Wallace as he touched her hand; he hardly dared look at her again, knowing from old experience how every incident and every detail of her person would rise tormentingly before his recollection. But at last he pulled himself together.

“I’m sorry I’ve made a fool of myself,” he said, quietly. “I hope you’ll be very happy. Please forget all I’ve said to you. It was only nonsense. Good-bye! I’ll send you a bit of my wedding-cake.”

XXI

James was again in Little Primpton, ill at ease and unhappy. The scene with Mrs. Wallace had broken his spirit, and he was listless now, indifferent to what happened; the world had lost its colour and the sun its light. In his quieter moments he had known that it was impossible for her to care anything about him; he understood her character fairly well, and realised that he had been only a toy, a pastime to a woman who needed admiration as the breath of her nostrils. But notwithstanding, some inner voice had whispered constantly that his love could not be altogether in vain; it seemed strong enough to travel the infinite distance to her heart and awaken at least a kindly feeling. He was humble, and wanted very little. Sometimes he had even felt sure that he was loved. The truth rent his heart, and filled it with bitterness; the woman who was his whole being had forgotten him, and the woman who loved him he hated.... He tried to read, striving to forget; but his trouble overpowered him, and he could think of nothing but the future, dreadful and inevitable. The days passed slowly, monotonously; and as each night came he shuddered at the thought that time was flying. He was drifting on without hope, tortured and uncertain.

“Oh, I’m so weak,” he cried; “I’m so weak!”

He knew very well what he should do if he were strong of will. A firm man in his place would cut the knot brutally — a letter to Mary, a letter to his people, and flight. After all, why should he sacrifice his life for the sake of others? The catastrophe was only partly his fault; it was unreasonable that he alone should suffer.

If his Colonel came to hear of the circumstance, and disapproving, questioned him, he could send in his papers. James was bored intensely by the dull routine of regimental life in time of peace; it was a question of performing day after day the same rather unnecessary duties, seeing the same people, listening to the same chatter, the same jokes, the same chaff. And added to the incurable dulness of the mess was the irksome feeling of being merely an overgrown schoolboy at the beck and call of every incompetent and foolish senior. Life was too short to waste in such solemn trifling, masquerading in a ridiculous costume which had to be left at home when any work was to be done. But he was young, with the world before him; there were many careers free to the man who had no fear of death. Africa opened her dusky arms to the adventurer, ruthless and desperate; the world was so large and manifold, there was ample scope for all his longing. If there were difficulties, he could overcome them; perils would add salt to the attempt, freedom would be like strong wine. Ah, that was what he desired, freedom — freedom to feel that he was his own master; that he was not enchained by the love and hate of others, by the ties of convention and of habit. Every bond was tedious. He had nothing to lose, and everything to win. But just those ties which every man may divide of his own free will are the most oppressive; they are unfelt, unseen, till suddenly they burn the wrists like fetters of fire, and the poor wretch who wears them has no power to help himself.

James knew he had not strength for this fearless disregard of others; he dared not face the pain he would cause. He was acting like a fool; his kindness was only cowardly. But to be cruel required more courage than he possessed. If he went away, his anguish would never cease; his vivid imagination would keep before his mind’s eye the humiliation of Mary, the unhappiness of his people. He pictured the consternation and the horror when they discovered what he had done. At first they would refuse to believe that he was capable of acting in so blackguardly a way; they would think it a joke, or that he was mad. And then the shame when they realised the truth! How could he make such a return for all the affection and the gentleness be had received? His father, whom he loved devotedly, would be utterly crushed.

“It would kill him,” muttered James.

And then he thought of his poor mother, affectionate and kind, but capable of hating him if he acted contrary to her code of honour. Her immaculate virtue made her very hard; she exacted the highest from herself, and demanded no less from others. James remembered in his boyhood how she punished his petty crimes by refusing to speak to him, going about in cold and angry silence; he had never forgotten the icy indignation of her face when once she had caught him lying. Oh, these good people, how pitiless they can be!

He would never have courage to confront the unknown dangers of a new life, unloved, unknown, unfriended. He was too merciful; his heart bled at the pain of others, he was constantly afraid of soiling his hands. It required a more unscrupulous man than he to cut all ties, and push out into the world with no weapons but intelligence and a ruthless heart. Above all, he dreaded his remorse. He knew that he would brood over what he had done till it attained the proportions of a monomania; his conscience would never give him peace. So long as he lived, the claims of Mary would call to him, and in the furthermost parts of the earth he would see her silent agony. James knew himself too well.

And the only solution was that which, in a moment of passionate bitterness, had come thoughtlessly to his lips:

“I can always shoot myself.”

“I hope you won’t do anything silly,” Mrs. Wallace had answered.

It would be silly. After all, one has only one life. But sometimes one has to do silly things.

The whim seized James to visit the Larchers, and one day he set out for Ashford, near which they lived.... He was very modest about his attempt to save their boy, and told himself that such courage as it required was purely instinctive. He had gone back without realising in the least that there was any danger. Seeing young Larcher wounded and helpless, it had seemed the obvious thing to get him to a place of safety. In the heat of action fellows were constantly doing reckless things. Everyone had a sort of idea that he, at least, would not be hit; and James, by no means oppressed with his own heroism, knew that courageous deeds without number were performed and passed unseen. It was a mere chance that the incident in which he took part was noticed.

Again, he had from the beginning an absolute conviction that his interference was nothing less than disastrous. Probably the Boer sharpshooters would have let alone the wounded man, and afterwards their doctors would have picked him up and properly attended to him.

James could not forget that it was in his very arms that Larcher had been killed, and he repeated: “If I had minded my own business, he might have been alive to this day.” It occurred to him also that with his experience he was much more useful than the callow, ignorant boy, so that to risk his more valuable life to save the other’s, from the point of view of the general good, was foolish rather than praiseworthy. But it appealed to his sense of irony to receive the honour which he was so little conscious of deserving.

The Larchers had been anxious to meet James, and he was curious to know what they were like. There was at the back of his mind also a desire to see how they conducted themselves, whether they were still prostrate with grief or reconciled to the inevitable. Reggie had been an only son — just as he was. James sent no message, but arrived unexpectedly, and found that they lived some way from the station, in a new, red-brick villa. As he walked to the front door, he saw people playing tennis at the side of the house.

He asked if Mrs. Larcher was at home, and, being shown into the drawing-room the lady came to him from the tennis-lawn. He explained who he was.

“Of course, I know quite well,” she said. “I saw your portrait in the illustrated papers.”

She shook hands cordially, but James fancied she tried to conceal a slight look of annoyance. He saw his visit was inopportune.

“We’re having a little tennis-party,” she said, “It seems a pity to waste the fine weather, doesn’t it?”

A shout of laughter came from the lawn, and a number of voices were heard talking loudly. Mrs. Larcher glanced towards them uneasily; she felt that James would expect them to be deeply mourning for the dead son, and it was a little incongruous that on his first visit he should find the whole family so boisterously gay.

“Shall we go out to them?” said Mrs. Larcher. “We’re just going to have tea, and I’m sure you must be dying for some. If you’d let us know you were coming we should have sent to meet you.”

James had divined that if he came at a fixed hour they would all have tuned their minds to a certain key, and he would see nothing of their natural state.

They went to the lawn, and James was introduced to a pair of buxom, healthy-looking girls, panting a little after their violent exercise. They were dressed in white, in a rather masculine fashion, and the only sign of mourning was the black tie that each wore in a sailor’s knot. They shook hands vigorously (it was a family trait), and then seemed at a loss for conversation; James, as was his way, did not help them, and they plunged at last into a discussion about the weather and the dustiness of the road from Ashford to their house.

Presently a loose-limbed young man strolled up, and was presented to James. He appeared on friendly terms with the two girls, who called him Bobbikins.

“How long have you been back?” he asked. “I was out in the Imperial Yeomanry — only I got fever and had to come home.”

James stiffened himself a little, with the instinctive dislike of the regular for the volunteer.

“Oh, yes! Did you go as a trooper?”

“Yes; and pretty rough it was, I can tell you.”

He began to talk of his experience in a resonant voice, apparently well-pleased with himself, while the red-faced girls looked at him admiringly. James wondered whether the youth intended to marry them both.

The conversation was broken by the appearance of Mr. Larcher, a rosy-cheeked and be-whiskered man, dapper and suave. He had been picking flowers, and handed a bouquet to one of his guests. James fancied he was a prosperous merchant, who had retired and set up as a country gentleman; but if he was the least polished of the family, he was also the most simple. He greeted the visitor very heartily, and offered to take him over his new conservatory.

“My husband takes everyone to the new conservatory,” said Mrs. Larcher, laughing apologetically.

“It’s the biggest round Ashford,” explained the worthy man.

James, thinking he wished to talk of his son, consented, and as they walked away, Mr. Larcher pointed out his fruit trees, his pigeons. He was a fancier, said he, and attended to the birds entirely himself; then in the conservatory, made James admire his orchids and the luxuriance of his maidenhair.

“I suppose these sort of things grow in the open air at the Cape?” he asked.

“I believe everything grows there.”

Of his son he said absolutely nothing, and presently they rejoined the others. The Larchers were evidently estimable persons, healthy-minded and normal, but a little common. James asked himself why they had invited him if they wished to hear nothing of their boy’s tragic death. Could they be so anxious to forget him that every reference was distasteful? He wondered how Reggie had managed to grow up so simple, frank, and charming amid these surroundings. There was a certain pretentiousness about his people which caused them to escape complete vulgarity only by a hair’s-breadth. But they appeared anxious to make much of James, and in his absence had explained who he was to the remaining visitors, and these beheld him now with an awe which the hero found rather comic.

Mrs. Larcher invited him to play tennis, and when he declined seemed hardly to know what to do with him. Once when her younger daughter laughed more loudly than usual at the very pointed chaff of the Imperial Yeoman, she slightly frowned at her, with a scarcely perceptible but significant glance in Jamie’s direction. To her relief, however, the conversation became general, and James found himself talking with Miss Larcher of the cricket week at Canterbury.

After all, he could not be surprised at the family’s general happiness. Six months had passed since Reggie’s death, and they could not remain in perpetual mourning. It was very natural that the living should forget the dead, otherwise life would be too horrible; and it was possibly only the Larchers’ nature to laugh and to talk more loudly than most people. James saw that it was a united, affectionate household, homely and kind, cursed with no particular depth of feeling; and if they had not resigned themselves to the boy’s death, they were doing their best to forget that he had ever lived. It was obviously the best thing, and it would be cruel — too cruel — to expect people never to regain their cheerfulness.

“I think I must be off,” said James, after a while; “the trains run so awkwardly to Tunbridge Wells.”

They made polite efforts to detain him, but James fancied they were not sorry for him to go.

“You must come and see us another day when we’re alone,” said Mrs. Larcher. “We want to have a long talk with you.”

“It’s very kind of you to ask me,” he replied, not committing himself.

Mrs. Larcher accompanied him back to the drawing-room, followed by her husband.

“I thought you might like a photograph of Reggie,” she said.

This was her first mention of the dead son, and her voice neither shook nor had in it any unwonted expression.

“I should like it very much.”

It was on Jamie’s tongue to say how fond he had been of the boy, and how he regretted his sad end; but he restrained himself, thinking if the wounds of grief were closed, it was cruel and unnecessary to reopen them.

Mrs. Larcher found the photograph and gave it to James. Her husband stood by, saying nothing.

“I think that’s the best we have of him.”

She shook hands, and then evidently nerved herself to say something further.

“We’re very grateful to you, Captain Parsons, for what you did. And we’re glad they gave you the Victoria Cross.”

“I suppose you didn’t bring it to-day?” inquired Mr. Larcher.

“I’m afraid not.”

They showed him out of the front door.

“Mind you come and see us again. But let us know beforehand, if you possibly can.”

Shortly afterwards James received from the Larchers a golden cigarette-case, with a Victoria Cross in diamonds on one side and an inscription on the other. It was much too magnificent for use, evidently expensive, and not in very good taste.

“I wonder whether they take that as equal in value to their son?” said James.

Mary was rather dazzled.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” she cried, “Of course, it’s too valuable to use; but it’ll do to put in our drawing-room.”

“Don’t you think it should be kept under a glass case?” asked James, with his grave smile.

“It’ll get so dirty if we leave it out, won’t it?” replied Mary, seriously.

“I wish there were no inscription. It won’t fetch so much if we get hard-up and have to pop our jewels.”

“Oh, James,” cried Mary, shocked, “you surely wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

James was pleased to have seen the Larchers. It satisfied and relieved him to know that human sorrow was not beyond human endurance: as the greatest of their gifts, the gods have vouchsafed to man a happy forgetfulness.

In six months the boy’s family were able to give parties, to laugh and jest as if they had suffered no loss at all; and the thought of this cleared his way a little. If the worst came to the worst — and that desperate step of which he had spoken seemed his only refuge — he could take it with less apprehension. Pain to those he loved was inevitable, but it would not last very long; and his death would trouble them far less than his dishonour.

Time was pressing, and James still hesitated, hoping distractedly for some unforeseen occurrence that would at least delay the marriage. The House of Death was dark and terrible, and he could not walk rashly to its dreadful gates: something would surely happen! He wanted time to think — time to see whether there was really no escape. How horrible it was that one could know nothing for certain! He was torn and rent by his indecision.

Major Forsyth had been put off by several duchesses, and was driven to spend a few economical weeks at Little Primpton; he announced that since Jamie’s wedding was so near he would stay till it was over. Finding also that his nephew had not thought of a best man, he offered himself; he had acted as such many times — at the most genteel functions; and with a pleasant confusion of metaphor, assured James that he knew the ropes right down to the ground.

“Three weeks to-day, my boy!” he said heartily to James one morning, on coming down to breakfast.

“Is it?” replied James.

“Getting excited?”

“Wildly!”

“Upon my word, Jamie, you’re the coolest lover I’ve ever seen. Why, I’ve hardly known how to keep in some of the fellows I’ve been best man to.”

“I’m feeling a bit seedy to-day, Uncle William.”

James thanked his stars that ill-health was deemed sufficient excuse for all his moodiness. Mary spared him the rounds among her sick and needy, whom, notwithstanding the approaching event, she would on no account neglect. She told Uncle William he was not to worry her lover, but leave him quietly with his books; and no one interfered when he took long, solitary walks in the country. Jamie’s reading now was a pretence; his brain was too confused, he was too harassed and uncertain to understand a word; and he spent his time face to face with the eternal problem, trying to see a way out, when before him was an impassable wall, still hoping blindly that something would happen, some catastrophe which should finish at once all his perplexities, and everything else besides.

XXII

In solitary walks James had found his only consolation. He knew even in that populous district unfrequented parts where he could wander without fear of interruption. Among the trees and the flowers, in the broad meadows, he forgot himself; and, his senses sharpened by long absence, he learnt for the first time the exquisite charm of English country. He loved the spring, with its yellow, countless buttercups, spread over the green fields like a cloth of gold, whereon might fitly walk the angels of Messer Perugino. The colours were so delicate that one could not believe it possible for paints and paint-brush to reproduce them; the atmosphere visibly surrounded things, softening their outlines. Sometimes from a hill higher than the rest James looked down at the plain, bathed in golden sunlight. The fields of corn, the fields of clover, the roads and the rivulets, formed themselves in that flood of light into an harmonious pattern, luminous and ethereal. A pleasant reverie filled his mind, unanalysable, a waking dream of half-voluptuous sensation.

On the other side of the common, James knew a wood of tall fir trees, dark and ragged, their sombre green veiled in a silvery mist, as though, like a chill vapour, the hoar-frost of a hundred winters still lingered among their branches. At the edge of the hill, up which they climbed in serried hundreds, stood here and there an oak tree, just bursting into leaf, clothed with its new-born verdure, like the bride of the young god, Spring. And the ever-lasting youth of the oak trees contrasted wonderfully with the undying age of the firs. Then later, in the height of the summer, James found the pine wood cool and silent, fitting his humour. It was like the forest of life, the grey and sombre labyrinth where wandered the poet of Hell and Death. The tall trees rose straight and slender, like the barren masts of sailing ships; the gentle aromatic odour, the light subdued; the purple mist, so faint as to be scarcely discernible, a mere tinge of warmth in the day — all gave him an exquisite sense of rest. Here he could forget his trouble, and give himself over to the love which seemed his real life; here the recollection of Mrs. Wallace gained flesh and blood, seeming so real that he almost stretched out his arms to seize her.... His footfall on the brown needles was noiseless, and the tread was soft and easy; the odours filled him like an Eastern drug with drowsy intoxication.

But all that now was gone. When, unbidden, the well-known laugh rang again in his ears, or he felt on his hands the touch of the slender fingers, James turned away with a gesture of distaste. Now Mrs. Wallace brought him only bitterness, and he tortured himself insanely trying to forget her.... With tenfold force the sensation returned which had so terribly oppressed him before his illness; he felt that Nature had become intolerably monotonous; the circumscribed, prim country was horrible. On every inch of it the hand of man was apparent. It was a prison, and his hands and feet were chained with heavy iron.... The dark, immovable clouds were piled upon one another in giant masses — so distinct and sharply cut, so rounded, that one almost saw the impressure of the fingers of some Titanic sculptor; and they hung low down, overwhelming, so that James could scarcely breathe. The sombre elms were too well-ordered, the meadows too carefully tended. All round, the hills were dark and drear; and that very fertility, that fat Kentish luxuriance, added to the oppression. It was a task impossible to escape from that iron circle. All power of flight abandoned him. Oh! he loathed it!

The past centuries of people, living in a certain way, with certain standards, influenced by certain emotions, were too strong for him. James was like a foolish bird — a bird born in a cage, without power to attain its freedom. His lust for a free life was futile; he acknowledged with cruel self-contempt that he was weaker than a woman — ineffectual. He could not lead the life of his little circle, purposeless and untrue; and yet he had not power to lead a life of his own. Uncertain, vacillating, torn between the old and the new, his reason led him; his conscience drew him back. But the ties of his birth and ancestry were too strong; he had not the energy even of the poor tramp, who carries with him his whole fortune, and leaves in the lap of the gods the uncertain future. James envied with all his heart the beggar boy, wandering homeless and penniless, but free. He, at least, had not these inhuman fetters which it was death to suffer and death to cast off; he, indeed, could make the world his servant. Freedom, freedom! If one were only unconscious of captivity, what would it matter? It is the knowledge that kills. And James walked again by the neat, iron railing which enclosed the fields, his head aching with the rigidity and decorum, wishing vainly for just one piece of barren, unkept land to remind him that all the world was not a prison.

Already the autumn had come. The rich, mouldering colours were like an air melancholy with the approach of inevitable death; but in those passionate tints, in the red and gold of the apples, in the many tones of the first-fallen leaves, there was still something which forbade one to forget that in the death and decay of Nature there was always the beginning of other life. Yet to James the autumn heralded death, with no consoling afterthought. He had nothing to live for since he knew that Mrs. Wallace could never love him. His love for her had borne him up and sustained him; but now it was hateful and despicable. After all, his life was his own to do what he liked with; the love of others had no right to claim his self-respect. If he had duties to them, he had duties to himself also; and more vehemently than ever James felt that such a union as was before him could only be a degradation. He repeated with new emotion that marriage without love was prostitution. If death was the only way in which he could keep clean that body ignorantly despised, why, he was not afraid of death! He had seen it too often for the thought to excite alarm. It was but a common, mechanical process, quickly finished, and not more painful than could be borne. The flesh is all which is certainly immortal; the dissolution of consciousness is the signal of new birth. Out of corruption springs fresh life, like the roses from a Roman tomb; and the body, one with the earth, pursues the eternal round.

But one day James told himself impatiently that all these thoughts were mad and foolish; he could only have them because he was still out of health. Life, after all, was the most precious thing in the world. It was absurd to throw it away like a broken toy. He rebelled against the fate which seemed forcing itself upon him. He determined to make the effort and, come what might, break the hateful bonds. It only required a little courage, a little strength of mind. If others suffered, he had suffered too. The sacrifice they demanded was too great.... But when he returned to Primpton House, the inevitability of it all forced itself once again upon him. He shrugged his shoulders despairingly; it was no good.

The whole atmosphere oppressed him so that he felt powerless; some hidden influence surrounded James, sucking from his blood, as it were, all manliness, dulling his brain. He became a mere puppet, acting in accordance to principles that were not his own, automatic, will-less. His father sat, as ever, in the dining-room by the fire, for only in the warmest weather could he do without artificial heat, and he read the paper, sometimes aloud, making little comments. His mother, at the table, on a stiff-backed chair, was knitting — everlastingly knitting. Outwardly there was in them a placid content, and a gentleness which made them seem pliant as wax; but really they were iron. James knew at last how pitiless was their love, how inhumanly cruel their intolerance; and of the two his father seemed more implacable, more horribly relentless. His mother’s anger was bearable, but the Colonel’s very weakness was a deadly weapon. His despair, his dumb sorrow, his entire dependence on the forbearance of others, were more tyrannical than the most despotic power. James was indeed a bird beating himself against the imprisoning cage; and its bars were loving-kindness and trust, tears, silent distress, bitter disillusion, and old age.

“Where’s Mary?” asked James.

“She’s in the garden, walking with Uncle William.”

“How well they get on together,” said the Colonel, smiling.

James looked at his father, and thought he had never seen him so old and feeble. His hands were almost transparent; his thin white hair, his bowed shoulders, gave an impression of utter weakness.

“Are you very glad the wedding is so near, father?” asked James, placing his hand gently on the old man’s shoulder.

“I should think I was.”

“You want to get rid of me so badly?”

“‘A man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.’ We shall have to do without you.”

“I wonder whether you are fonder of Mary than of me?”

The Colonel did not answer, but Mrs. Parsons laughed.

“My impression is that your father has grown so devoted to Mary that he hardly thinks you worthy of her.”

“Really? And yet you want me to marry her, don’t you, daddy?”

“It’s the wish of my heart.”

“Were you very wretched when our engagement was broken off?”

“Don’t talk of it! Now it’s all settled, Jamie, I can tell you that I’d sooner see you dead at my feet than that you should break your word to Mary.”

James laughed.

“And you, mother?” he asked, lightly.

She did not answer, but looked at him earnestly.

“What, you too? Would you rather see me dead than not married to Mary? What a bloodthirsty pair you are!”

James, laughing, spoke so gaily, it never dawned on them that his words meant more than was obvious; and yet he felt that they, loving but implacable, had signed his death-warrant. With smiling faces they had thrown open the portals of that House, and he, smiling, was ready to enter.

Mary at that moment came in, followed by Uncle William.

“Well, Jamie, there you are!” she cried, in that hard, metallic voice which to James betrayed so obviously the meanness of her spirit and her self-complacency. “Where on earth have you been?”

She stood by the table, straight, uncompromising, self-reliant; by her immaculate virtue, by the strength of her narrow will, she completely domineered the others. She felt herself capable of managing them all, and, in fact, had been giving Uncle William a friendly little lecture upon some action of which she disapproved. Mary had left off her summer things and wore again the plain serge skirt, and because it was rainy, the battered straw hat of the preceding winter. She was using up her old things, and having got all possible wear out of them, intended on the day before her marriage generously to distribute them among the poor.

“Is my face very red?” she asked. “There’s a lot of wind to-day.”

To James she had never seemed more unfeminine; that physical repulsion which at first had terrified him now was grown into an ungovernable hate. Everything Mary did irritated and exasperated him; he wondered she did not see the hatred in his eyes as he looked at her, answering her question.

“Oh, no,” he said to himself, “I would rather shoot myself than marry you!”

His dislike was unreasonable, but he could not help it; and the devotion of his parents made him detest her all the more; he could not imagine what they saw in her. With hostile glance he watched her movements as she took off her hat and arranged her hair, grimly drawn back and excessively neat; she fetched her knitting from Mrs. Parsons’s work-basket and sat down. All her actions had in them an insufferable air of patronage, and she seemed more than usually pleased with herself. James had an insane desire to hurt her, to ruffle that self-satisfaction; and he wanted to say something that should wound her to the quick. And all the time he laughed and jested as though he were in the highest spirits.

“And what were you doing this morning, Mary?” asked Colonel Parsons.

“Oh, I biked in to Tunbridge Wells with Mr. Dryland to play golf. He plays a rattling good game.”

“Did he beat you?”

“Well, no,” she answered, modestly. “It so happened that I beat him. But he took his thrashing remarkably well — some men get so angry when they’re beaten by a girl.”

“The curate has many virtues,” said James.

“He was talking about you, Jamie. He said he thought you disliked him; but I told him I was certain you didn’t. He’s really such a good man, one can’t help liking him. He said he’d like to teach you golf.”

“And is he going to?”

“Certainly not. I mean to do that myself.”

“There are many things you want to teach me, Mary. You’ll have your hands full.”

“Oh, by the way, father told me to remind you and Uncle William that you were shooting with him the day after to-morrow. You’re to fetch him at ten.”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” replied James. “Uncle William, we shall have to clean our guns to-morrow.”

James had come to a decision at last, and meant to waste no time; indeed, there was none to waste. And to remind him how near was the date fixed for the wedding were the preparations almost complete. One or two presents had already arrived. With all his heart he thanked his father and mother for having made the way easier for him. He thought what he was about to do the kindest thing both to them and to Mary. Under no circumstances could he marry her; that would be adding a greater lie to those which he had already been forced into, and the misery was more than he could bear. But his death was the only other way of satisfying her undoubted claims. He had little doubt that in six months he would be as well forgotten as poor Reggie Larcher, and he did not care; he was sick of the whole business, and wanted the quiet of death. His love for Mrs. Wallace would never give him peace upon earth; it was utterly futile, and yet unconquerable.

James saw his opportunity in Colonel Clibborn’s invitation to shoot; he was most anxious to make the affair seem accidental, and that, in cleaning his gun, was easy. He had been wounded before and knew that the pain was not very great. He had, therefore, nothing to fear.

Now at last he regained his spirits. He did not read or walk, but spent the day talking with his father; he wished the last impression he would leave to be as charming as possible, and took great pains to appear at his best.

He slept well that night, and in the morning dressed himself with unusual care. At Primpton House they breakfasted at eight, and afterwards James smoked his pipe, reading the newspaper. He was a little astonished at his calm, for doubt no longer assailed him, and the indecision which paralysed all his faculties had disappeared.

“It is the beginning of my freedom,” he thought. All human interests had abandoned him, except a vague sensation of amusement. He saw the humour of the comedy he was acting, and dispassionately approved himself, because he did not give way to histrionics.

“Well, Uncle William,” he said, at last, “what d’you say to setting to work on our guns?”

“I’m always ready for everything,” said Major Forsyth.

“Come on, then.”

They went into what they called the harness-room, and James began carefully to clean his gun.

“I think I’ll take my coat off,” he said; “I can work better without.”

The gun had not been used for several months, and James had a good deal to do. He leant over and rubbed a little rust off the lock.

“Upon my word,” said Uncle William, “I’ve never seen anyone handle a gun so carelessly as you. D’you call yourself a soldier?”

“I am a bit slack,” replied James, laughing. “People are always telling me that.”

“Well, take care, for goodness’ sake! It may be loaded.”

“Oh, no, there’s no danger. It’s not loaded, and besides, it’s locked.”

“Still, you oughtn’t to hold it like that.”

“It would be rather comic if I killed myself accidentally. I wonder what Mary would say?”

“Well, you’ve escaped death so often by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re pretty safe from everything but old age.”

Presently James turned to his uncle.

“I say, this is rotten oil. I wish we could get some fresh.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Well, you’re a pal of the cook. Go and ask her for some, there’s a good chap.”

“She’ll do anything for me,” said Major Forsyth, with a self-satisfied smile. It was his opinion that no woman, countess or scullery-maid, could resist his fascinations; and taking the cup, he trotted off.

James immediately went to the cupboard and took out a cartridge. He slipped it in, rested the butt on the ground, pointed the barrel to his heart, and — fired!

EPILOGUE

A letter from Mrs. Clibborn to General Sir Charles Clow, K.C.B., 8 Gladhorn Terrace, Bath:

“Dear Charles, — I am so glad to hear you are settled in your new house in Bath, and it is most kind to ask us down. I am devoted to Bath; one meets such nice people there, and all one’s friends whom one knew centuries ago. It is such a comfort to see how fearfully old they’re looking! I don’t know whether we can manage to accept your kind invitation, but I must say I should be glad of a change after the truly awful things that have happened here. I have been dreadfully upset all the winter, and have had several touches of rheumatism, which is a thing I never suffered from before.

“I wrote and told you of the sudden and mysterious death of poor James Parsons, a fortnight before he was going to marry my dear Mary. He shot himself accidentally while cleaning a gun — that is to say, every one thinks it was an accident. But I am certain it was nothing of the kind. Ever since the dreadful thing happened — six months ago — it has been on my conscience, and I assure you that the whole time I have not slept a wink. My sufferings have been horrible! You will be surprised at the change in me; I am beginning to look like an old woman. I tell you this in strict confidence. I believe he committed suicide. He confessed that he loved me, Charles. Of course, I told him I was old enough to be his mother; but love is blind. When I think of the tragic end of poor Algy Turner, who poisoned himself in India for my sake, I don’t know how I shall ever forgive myself. I never gave James the least encouragement, and when he said that he loved me, I was so taken aback that I nearly fainted. I am convinced that he shot himself rather than marry a woman he did not love, and what is more, my daughter. You can imagine my feelings! I have taken care not to breathe a word of this to Reginald, whose gout is making him more irritable every day, or to anyone else. So no one suspects the truth.

“But I shall never get over it. I could not bear to think of poor Algy Turner, and now I have on my head as well the blood of James Parsons. They were dear boys, both of them. I think I am the only one who is really sorry for him. If it had been my son who was killed I should either have gone raving mad or had hysterics for a week; but Mrs. Parsons merely said: ‘The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I cannot help thinking it was rather profane, and most unfeeling. I was dreadfully upset, and Mary had to sit up with me for several nights. I don’t believe Mary really loved him. I hate to say anything against my own daughter, but I feel bound to tell the truth, and my private opinion is that she loved herself better. She loved her constancy and the good opinion of Little Primpton; the fuss the Parsons have made of her I’m sure is very bad for anyone. It can’t be good for a girl to be given way to so much; and I never really liked the Parsons. They’re very good people, of course; but only infantry!

“I am happy to say that poor Jamie’s death was almost instantaneous. When they found him he said: ‘It was an accident; I didn’t know the gun was loaded.’ (Most improbable, I think. It’s wonderful how they’ve all been taken in; but then they didn’t know his secret!) A few minutes later, just before he died, he said: ‘Tell Mary she’s to marry the curate.’

“If my betrothed had died, nothing would have induced me to marry anybody else. I would have remained an old maid. But so few people have any really nice feeling! Mr. Dryland, the curate, had already proposed to Mary, and she had refused him. He is a pleasant-spoken young man, with a rather fine presence — not my ideal at all; but that, of course, doesn’t matter! Well, a month after the funeral, Mary told me that he had asked her again, and she had declined. I think it was very bad taste on his part, but Mary said she thought it most noble.

“It appears that Colonel and Mrs. Parsons both pressed her very much to accept the curate. They said it was Jamie’s dying wish, and that his last thought had been for her happiness. There is no doubt that Mr. Dryland is an excellent young man, but if the Parsons had really loved their son, they would never have advised Mary to get married. I think it was most heartless.

“Well, a few days ago, Mr. Dryland came and told us that he had been appointed vicar of Stone Fairley, in Kent. I went to see Mrs. Jackson, the wife of our Vicar, and she looked it out in the clergy list. The stipend is £300 a year, and I am told that there is a good house. Of course, it’s not very much, but better than nothing. This morning Mr. Dryland called and asked for a private interview with Mary. He said he must, of course, leave Little Primpton, and his vicarage would sadly want a mistress; and finally, for the third time, begged her on his bended knees to marry her. He had previously been to the Parsons, and the Colonel sent for Mary, and told her that he hoped she would not refuse Mr. Dryland for their sake, and that they thought it was her duty to marry. The result is that Mary accepted him, and is to be married very quietly by special license in a month. The widow of the late incumbent of Stone Fairley moves out in six weeks, so this will give them time for a fortnight’s honeymoon before settling down. They think of spending it in Paris.

“I think, on the whole, it is as good a match as poor Mary could expect to make. The stipend is paid by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, which, of course, is much safer than glebe. She is no longer a young girl, and I think it was her last chance. Although she is my own daughter, I cannot help confessing that she is not the sort of girl that wears well; she has always been plain — (no one would think she was my daughter) — and as time goes on, she will grow plainer. When I was eighteen my mother’s maid used to say: ‘Why, miss, there’s many a married woman of thirty who would be proud to have your bust.’ But our poor, dear Mary has no figure. She will do excellently for the wife of a country vicar. She’s so fond of giving people advice, and of looking after the poor, and it won’t matter that she’s dowdy. She has no idea of dressing herself, although I’ve always done my best for her.

“Mr. Dryland is, of course, in the seventh heaven of delight. He has gone into Tunbridge Wells to get a ring, and as an engagement present has just sent round a complete edition of the works of Mr. Hall Caine. He is evidently generous. I think they will suit one another very well, and I am glad to get my only daughter married. She was always rather a tie on Reginald and me. We are so devoted to one another that a third person has often seemed a little in the way. Although you would not believe it, and we have been married for nearly thirty years, nothing gives us more happiness than to sit holding one another’s hands. I have always been sentimental, and I am not ashamed to own it. Reggie is sometimes afraid that I shall get an attack of my rheumatism when we sit out together at night; but I always take care to wrap myself up well, and I invariably make him put a muffler on.

“Give my kindest regards to your wife, and tell her I hope to see her soon. — Yours very sincerely,

“Clara de Tulleville Clibborn.”

THE END

MRS CRADDOCK

This novel was one of several works that Maugham struggled to find a publisher for; in this case, because the author’s growing reputation for depicting risqué themes with gritty realism was making some publishers shy away from him. Having been rejected by Hodder and Stoughton, it was passed to the slightly less cautious Heinemann, who agreed to publish on condition that some of the most explicit scenes were removed. It is little wonder that some publishers would be reluctant to take this on — the themes of adultery, female sexuality, sexual passion, marrying out of one’s class and an older woman having an affair with a teenager were an explosive combination for the times, especially when combined with a frank depiction of a woman disappointed in her physical relationships. The lead female character, Bertha Craddock, has been compared to Madame Bovary (written by Flaubert) with her passions and turbulent love life.

The novel was written in 1900 but not published until the end of 1902; it was not released in America until 1920. In one way the story is an appropriate one to remember the Edwardian era by, with its honest depiction of sexual liberty contrasting with the traditional view of Victorian prudishness, but it may have alienated more conservative readers for whom it consolidated Maugham’s reputation as a no-holds-barred author. Despite all this, Mrs Craddock was another success for Maugham. A restored version of the novel was released in 1938.

Bertha Ley is eighteen years old at the start of the story, an independent young woman who, following the death of her father, who lives with her emotionally repressed spinster aunt. They have settled in Blackstable (a fictional portrait of Whitstable, Kent, that Maugham was to use again in later works) and life has settled into a routine – until Bertha develops an infatuation for local man and a tenant of the Ley estate, Edward Craddock. Although he is her social inferior, Bertha is fascinated and excited by his masculinity and straightforward manner, and in fact, “She had made up her mind firmly that Craddock should lead her to the altar.” On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, Bertha tells Craddock that she is about to inherit her own money, and can marry whomever she chooses – namely, him. Her one desire is to live with him simply and joyfully, as a farmer’s wife.

Bertha’s announcement is received locally with a mixture of hostility, bemusement and indifference. Miss Ley is sanguine; she realises she cannot change her niece’s mind. Bertha concocts all manner of “reasons” for her choice of husband, including the need to bring more vigorous new blood into the Ley family tree, to save it from the genealogical doldrums of intermarriage within the gentry. A very small wedding is followed by a honeymoon in London – Craddock refuses to leave the farm for long enough to warrant the trip to Italy that Bertha desires – and the couple are reluctantly accepted into local “society”, although initially there is derisory gossip behind their backs. In addition, things are not working out as well as Bertha had hoped. She cannot fault her husband as a hard working, dutiful husband, but privately she finds his lack of knowledge of high culture frustrating, and she is disappointed that he is not more attentive towards her. The community, however, comes to revere Craddock for his equable temperament, fairness and hard work, and eventually even the local gentry accept him as one of their own – he “has won golden opinions all round.”

Within the first year of marriage, Bertha becomes pregnant. Her unease about the impending confinement is shrugged off by her husband, but Bertha’s premonition comes to pass — her baby is stillborn. Once Bertha has recovered, what she views as her husband’s indifference towards her becomes intolerable, and she decides to go to her Aunt’s home in London, in order to take stock of her life. Will her marriage survive the crisis that Bertha’s husband is not even aware has happened?

There are some interesting aspects of social context in the novel. Miss Ley tells Bertha that she herself had no need to marry as she had a private income of £500 per annum, reinforcing that in 1900 many women only married for financial security (although following the Married Women’s Property Act of 1883, a woman was entitled to keep her own money on marriage). In fact, Miss Ley is depicted as something of an oddity to her peers for choosing not to marry rather than being a spinster from bereavement or jilting. There is also something of the Victorian “New Woman” (the term for an early feminist) in Miss Ley through her disdain of women that become “mere shadows of their lords”, her determination to live alone and her refusal to be upset about her niece’s relationship - in fact the local doctor, Dr Ramsay, scornfully accuses her of being a feminist. The stifling nature of small minded, small scale gentry life and social circles at the turn of the twentieth century is depicted with a clarity that can make one feel uneasy.

Bertha and Edward Craddock are superbly well presented as characters. She is passionate and sophisticated, but as the story unfolds it is clear that there is a dysfunctional side to her that makes her all the more interesting – but not necessarily any more likeable. Edward is what he is – a well-built, straightforward man, who has no interest in the cultural pursuits that his wife adores, but he is a good farmer, a stolid character, and well-liked. Where Bertha has made her mistake was in romanticising a very ordinary man and making him, in her mind, a person he could never be. It is a strong, gripping narrative, with touches of cynicism that Maugham was so gifted at feeding into a narrative.

The first edition

CONTENTS

EPISTLE DEDICATORY

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Maugham, close to the time of publication

EPISTLE DEDICATORY

Dear Miss Ley, — You will not consider it unflattering if I ask myself when exactly it was that I had the good fortune to make your acquaintance; for, though I am well aware the date is not far distant, I seem to have known you all my life. Was it really during the summer before last, at Naples? (I forget why you go habitually to winter resorts in the middle of August; the reasons you gave were ingenious but inconclusive — surely it is not to avoid your fellow-countrymen?) I was in the Gallery of Masterpieces, looking at the wonderful portrait-statue of Agrippina, when you, sitting beside me, asked some question. We began to talk — by the way, we never inquired if our respective families were desirable; you took my reputability for granted — and since then we have passed a good deal of time together; indeed, you have been seldom absent from my thoughts.

Now that we stand at a parting of ways (the phrase is hackneyed and you would loathe it), you must permit me to tell you what pleasure your regard has given me and how thoroughly I have enjoyed our intercourse, regretting always that inevitable circumstances made it so rare. I confess I stand in awe of you — this you will not believe, for you have often accused me of flippancy (I am not half so flippant as you); but your thin and mocking smile, after some remark of mine, continually makes me feel that I have said a foolish thing, than which in your eyes I know there is no greater crime.... You have told me that when an acquaintance has left a pleasant recollection, one should resist the temptation to renew it; altered time and surroundings create new impressions which cannot rival with the old, doubly idealised by novelty and absence. The maxim is hard, but therefore, perhaps, more likely to be true. Still, I cannot wish that the future may bring us nothing better than forgetfulness. It is certain that our paths are different, I shall be occupied with other work and you will be lost to me in the labyrinth of Italian hotels, wherein it pleases you, perversely, to hide your lights. I see no prospect of reunion (this sounds quite sentimental and you hate effusiveness. My letter is certainly over-full of parentheses); but I wish, notwithstanding and with all my heart, that some day you may consent to risk the experiment. What say you? I am, dear Miss Ley, very truly (don’t laugh at me, I should like to say — affectionately), — Yours,

W. M.

Chapter I

THIS book might be called also The Triumph of Love. Bertha was looking out of window, at the bleakness of the day. The sky was sombre and the clouds heavy and low; the neglected carriage-drive was swept by the bitter wind, and the elm-trees that bordered it were bare of leaf, their naked branches shivering with horror of the cold. It was the end of November, and the day was utterly cheerless. The dying year seemed to have cast over all Nature the terror of death; the imagination would not bring to the wearied mind thoughts of the merciful sunshine, thoughts of the Spring coming as a maiden to scatter from her baskets the flowers and the green leaves.

Bertha turned round and looked at her aunt, cutting the leaves of a new Spectator. Wondering what books to get down from Mudie’s, Miss Ley read the autumn lists and the laudatory expressions which the adroitness of publishers extracts from unfavourable reviews.

“You’re very restless this afternoon, Bertha,” she remarked, in answer to the girl’s steady gaze.

“I think I shall walk down to the gate.”

“You’ve already visited the gate twice in the last hour. Do you find in it something alarmingly novel?”

Bertha did not reply, but turned again to the window: the scene in the last two hours had fixed itself upon her mind with monotonous accuracy.

“What are you thinking about, Aunt Polly?” she asked suddenly, turning back to her aunt and catching the eyes fixed upon her.

“I was thinking that one must be very penetrative to discover a woman’s emotions from the view of her back hair.”

Bertha laughed: “I don’t think I have any emotions to discover. I feel ...” she sought for some way of expressing the sensation— “I feel as if I should like to take my hair down.”

Miss Ley made no rejoinder, but looked again at her paper. She hardly wondered what her niece meant, having long ceased to be astonished at Bertha’s ways and doings; indeed, her only surprise was that they never sufficiently corroborated the common opinion that Bertha was an independent young woman from whom anything might be expected. In the three years they had spent together since the death of Bertha’s father the two women had learned to tolerate one another extremely well. Their mutual affection was mild and perfectly respectable, in every way becoming to fastidious persons bound together by ties of convenience and decorum.... Miss Ley, called to the deathbed of her brother in Italy, made Bertha’s acquaintance over the dead man’s grave, and the girl was then too old and of too independent character to accept a stranger’s authority; nor had Miss Ley the smallest desire to exert authority over any one. She was a very indolent woman, who wished nothing more than to leave people alone and be left alone by them. But if it was obviously her duty to take charge of an orphan niece, it was also an advantage that Bertha was eighteen, and, but for the conventions of decent society, could very well take charge of herself. Miss Ley was not unthankful to a merciful Providence on the discovery that her ward had every intention of going her own way, and none whatever of hanging about the skirts of a maiden aunt who was passionately devoted to her liberty.

They travelled on the Continent, seeing many churches, pictures, and cities, in the examination of which their chief aim appeared to be to conceal from one another the emotions they felt. Like the Red Indian who will suffer the most horrid tortures without wincing, Miss Ley would have thought it highly disgraceful to display feeling at some touching scene. She used polite cynicism as a cloak for sentimentality, laughing that she might not cry — and her want of originality herein, the old repetition of Grimaldi’s doubleness, made her snigger at herself. She felt that tears were unbecoming and foolish.

“Weeping makes a fright even of a good-looking woman,” she said, “but if she is ugly they make her simply repulsive.”

Finally, letting her own flat in London, Miss Ley settled down with Bertha to cultivate rural delights at Court Leys, near Blackstable, in the county of Kent. The two ladies lived together with much harmony, although the demonstrations of their affection did not exceed a single kiss morning and night, given and received with almost equal indifference. Each had considerable respect for the other’s abilities, and particularly for the wit which occasionally exhibited itself in little friendly sarcasms. But they were too clever to get on badly, and since they neither hated nor loved one another excessively, there was really no reason why they should not continue on the best of terms. The general result of their relations was that Bertha’s restlessness on this particular day aroused in Miss Ley no more question than was easily answered by the warmth of her young blood; and her eccentric curiosity in respect of the gate on a very cold and unpleasant winter afternoon did not even cause a shrug of disapproval or an upraising of the eyelids in wonder.

Bertha put on a hat and walked out. The avenue of elm-trees, reaching from the façade of Court Leys in a straight line to the gates, had been once rather an imposing sight, but now announced clearly the ruin of an ancient house. Here and there a tree had died and fallen, leaving an unsightly gap, and one huge trunk still lay upon the ground after a terrific storm of the preceding year, left there to rot in the indifference of bailiffs and of tenants. On either side of the elms was a broad strip of meadow which once had been a well-kept lawn, but now was foul with docks and rank weeds; a few sheep nibbled the grass where a century ago fine ladies in hoops and gentlemen with periwigs had sauntered, discussing the wars and the last volumes of Mr. Richardson. Beyond was an ill-trimmed hedge, and then the broad fields of the Ley estate.... Bertha walked down, looking at the highway beyond the gate. It was a relief to feel no longer Miss Ley’s cold eyes fixed upon her; she had emotions enough in her breast, they beat against one another like birds in a net struggling to get free; but not for worlds would Bertha have bidden any one look in her heart full of expectation, of longings, of a hundred strange desires. She went out on the highroad that led from Blackstable to Tercanbury, she looked up and down with a tremor, and a quick beating of the heart. But the road was empty, swept by the winter wind, and she almost sobbed with disappointment.

She could not return to the house; a roof just then would stifle her, and the walls seemed like a prison: there was a certain pleasure in the biting wind that blew through her clothes and chilled her to the bone. The waiting was terrible. She entered the grounds and looked up the carriage-drive to the big white house which was hers. The very roadway was in need of repair, and the dead leaves that none troubled about rustled hither and thither in the gusts of wind. The house stood in its squareness without relation to any environment: built in the reign of George II., it seemed to have acquired no hold upon the land which bore it. With its plain front and many windows, the Doric portico exactly in the middle, it looked as if it were merely placed upon the ground as a house of cards is built upon the floor, with no foundations. The passing years had given it no beauty, and it stood now as for more than a century it had stood, a blot upon the landscape, vulgar and new. Surrounded by the fields, it had no garden but for a few beds planted about its feet, and in these the flowers, uncared for, had grown wild or withered away.

The day was declining and the lowering clouds seemed to shut out the light. Bertha gave up hope. But she looked once more down the hill and her heart gave a great thud against her chest; she felt herself blushing furiously. Her blood seemed to rush through the vessels with sudden rapidity, and in dismay at her want of composure she had an impulse to turn quickly and fly. She forgot the sickening expectation, the hours she had spent in looking for the figure that tramped up the hill.

Of course it was a man! He came nearer, a tall fellow of twenty-seven, massively set together, big boned, with long arms and legs, and a magnificent breadth of chest. Bertha recognised the costume that always pleased her, the knickerbockers and gaiters, the Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, the white stock and the cap — all redolent of the country which for his sake she was beginning to love, and all vigorously masculine. Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure; their dimensions suggested a certain firmness of character, a masterfulness, which were intensely reassuring. The style of dress fitted perfectly the background of brown road and of ploughed field. Bertha wondered if he knew that he was exceedingly picturesque as he climbed the hill.

“Afternoon, Miss Bertha.”

He showed no sign of pausing, and the girl’s heart sank at the thought that he might go on with only a commonplace word of greeting.

“I thought it was you I saw coming up the hill,” she said, stretching out her hand.

He stopped and shook it; the touch of his big, firm fingers made her tremble. His hand was massive and hard as if it were hewn of stone. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Isn’t it cold?” she said. It is terrible to be desirous of saying all sorts of passionate things, while convention debars you from any but the most commonplace.

“You haven’t been walking at the rate of five miles an hour,” he said, cheerily. “I’ve been into Blackstable to see about buying a nag.”

He was the very picture of health; the winds of November were like summer breezes to him, and his face glowed with the pleasant cold. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes glistened. His vitality was intense, shining out upon others with almost a material warmth.

“Were you going out?” he asked.

“Oh no,” Bertha replied, without strict regard to truth. “I just walked down to the gate and I happened to catch sight of you.”

“I am very glad — I see you so seldom now, Miss Bertha.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Miss Bertha” she cried, “it sounds horrid.” It was worse than that, it sounded almost menial. “When we were boy and girl we used to call each other by our Christian names.”

He blushed a little and his modesty filled Bertha with delight.

“Yes, but when you came back six months ago, you had changed so much — I didn’t dare; and besides, you called me Mr. Craddock.”

“Well, I won’t any more,” she said, laughing; “I’d much sooner call you Edward.”

She did not add that the word seemed to her the most beautiful in the whole list of Christian names, nor that in the past few weeks she had already repeated it to herself a thousand times.

“It’ll be like old days,” he said. “D’you remember what fun we used to have when you were a little girl, before you went abroad with Mr. Ley?”

“I remember that you used to look upon me with great contempt because I was a little girl,” she replied, laughing.

“Well, I was awfully frightened the first time I saw you again — with your hair up and long dresses.”

“I’m not really very terrible.”

For five minutes they had been looking into one another’s eyes, and suddenly, without obvious reason, Craddock blushed. Bertha noticed it, and a strange little thrill went through her; she reddened too, and her dark eyes flashed even more brightly than before.

“I wish I didn’t see you so seldom, Miss Bertha,” he said.

“You have only yourself to blame, fair sir. You perceive the road that leads to my palace, and at the end you will certainly find a door.”

“I’m rather afraid of your aunt.”

It was on the tip of Bertha’s tongue to say that faint heart never won fair lady, but for modesty’s sake she refrained. Her spirits had suddenly gone up and she felt extraordinarily happy.

“Do you want to see me very badly?” she asked, her heart beating at quite an absurd rate.

Craddock blushed again and seemed to have some difficulty in finding a reply; his confusion and his ingenuous air were new enchantments to Bertha.

“If he only knew how I adored him!” she thought; but naturally she could not tell him in so many words.

“You’ve changed so much in these years,” he said, “I don’t understand you.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Of course I want to see you, Bertha,” he said quickly, seeming to take his courage in both hands; “I want to see you always.”

“Well,” she said, with a charming smile, “I sometimes take a walk after dinner to the gate and observe the shadows of night.”

“By Jove, I wish I’d known that before.”

“Foolish creature!” said Bertha to herself with amusement, “he doesn’t gather that this is the first night upon which I shall have done anything of the kind.”

Chapter II

WITH swinging step Bertha returned to the house, and like a swarm of birds a hundred amorets flew about her head; Cupid leapt from tree to tree and shot his arrows into her willing heart; her imagination clothed the naked branches with tender green, and in her happiness the gray sky turned to azure.... It was the first time that Edward Craddock had shown his love in a manner which was unmistakable; if before, much had suggested that he was not indifferent, nothing had been absolutely convincing, and the doubt had caused her every imaginable woe. As for her, she made no effort to conceal it from herself; she was not ashamed, she loved him passionately, she worshipped the ground he trod on; she confessed boldly that he of all men was the one to make her happy; her life she would give into his strong and manly hands. She had made up her mind firmly that Craddock should lead her to the altar.

Times without number already had she fancied herself resting in his arms — in his strong arms — the very thought of which was a protection against all the ills of the world. Oh yes, she wanted him to take her in his arms and kiss her; in imagination she felt his lips upon hers, and the warmth of his breath made her faint with the anguish of love.

She asked herself how she could wait till the evening; how on earth was she to endure the slow passing of the hours? And she must sit opposite her aunt and pretend to read, or talk on this subject and on that. It was insufferable. Then, inconsequently, she asked herself if Edward knew that she loved him; he could not dream how intense was her desire.

“I’m sorry I’m late for tea,” she said, on entering the drawing-room.

“My dear,” said Miss Ley, “the buttered toast is probably horrid, but I don’t see why you should not eat cake.”

“I don’t want anything to eat,” cried Bertha, flinging herself on a chair.

“But you’re dying with thirst,” added Miss Ley, looking at her niece with sharp eyes. “Wouldn’t you like your tea out of a breakfast cup?”

Miss Ley had come to the conclusion that the restlessness and the long absence could only be due to some masculine cause. Mentally she shrugged her shoulders, hardly wondering who the creature was.

“Of course,” she thought, “it’s certain to be some one quite ineligible. I hope they won’t have a long engagement.”

Miss Ley could not have supported for several months the presence of a bashful and love-sick swain. She found lovers invariably ridiculous. She watched Bertha drink six cups of tea: of course those shining eyes, the flushed cheeks and the breathlessness, indicated some amorous excitement; it amused her, but she thought it charitable and wise to pretend that she noticed nothing.

“After all it’s no business of mine,” she thought; “and if Bertha is going to get married at all, it would be much more convenient for her to do it before next quarter-day, when the Browns give up my flat.”

Miss Ley sat on the sofa by the fireside, a woman of middle-size, very slight, with a thin and much wrinkled face. Of her features the mouth was the most noticeable, not large, with lips that were a little too thin; it was always so tightly compressed as to give her an air of great determination, but there was about the corners an expressive mobility, contradicting in rather an unusual manner the inferences which might be drawn from the rest of her person. She had a habit of fixing her cold eyes on people with a steadiness that was not a little embarrassing. They said Miss Ley looked as if she thought them great fools, and as a matter of fact that usually was her precise opinion. Her thin gray hair was very plainly done; and the extreme simplicity of her costume gave a certain primness, so that her favourite method of saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner often disconcerted the casual stranger. She was a woman who, one felt, had never been handsome, but now, in middle-age, was distinctly prepossessing.

Young men thought her somewhat terrifying till they discovered that they were to her a constant source of amusement; while elderly ladies asserted that she was a little queer.

“You know, Aunt Polly,” said Bertha, finishing her tea and getting up, “I think you should have been christened Martha or Matilda. I don’t think Polly suits you.”

“My dear, you need not remind me so pointedly that I’m forty-five and you need not smile in that fashion because you know that I’m really forty-seven. I say forty-five merely as a round number; in another year I shall call myself fifty. A woman never acknowledges such a nondescript age as forty-eight unless she is going to marry a widower with seventeen children.”

“I wonder why you never married, Aunt Polly?” said Bertha, looking away.

Miss Ley smiled almost imperceptibly, finding Bertha’s remark highly significant. “My dear,” she said, “why should I? I had five hundred a year of my own.... Ah yes, I know it’s not what might have been expected; I’m sorry for your sake that I had no hopeless amour. The only excuse for an old maid is, that she has pined thirty years for a lover who is buried under the snow-drops, or has married another.”

Bertha made no answer; she was feeling that the world had turned good, and wanted to hear nothing that could suggest imperfections in human nature: suddenly there had come over the universe a Sunday-school air which appealed to her better self. Going upstairs she sat at the window, gazing towards the farm where lived her heart’s desire. She wondered what Edward was doing! was he awaiting the night as anxiously as she? It gave her quite a pang that a sizeable hill should intervene between herself and him. During dinner she hardly spoke, and Miss Ley was mercifully silent. Bertha could not eat; she crumbled her bread and toyed with the various meats put before her. She looked at the clock a dozen times, and started absurdly when it struck the hour.

She did not trouble to make any excuse to Miss Ley, whom she left to think as she chose. The night was dark and cold; Bertha slipped out of the side-door with a delightful feeling of doing something venturesome. But her legs would scarcely carry her, she had a sensation that was entirely novel; never before had she experienced that utter weakness of the knees so that she feared to fall; her breathing was strangely oppressive, and her heart beat almost painfully. She walked down the carriage-drive scarcely knowing what she did. She had forced herself to wait indoors till the desire to go out became uncontrollable, and she dared not imagine her dismay if there was no one to meet her when she reached the gate. It would mean he did not love her; she stopped with a sob. Ought she not to wait longer? It was still early. But her impatience forced her on.

She gave a little cry. Craddock had suddenly stepped out of the darkness.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I frightened you. I thought you wouldn’t mind my coming this evening. You’re not angry?”

She could not answer; it was an immense load off her heart. She was extremely happy, for then he did love her; and he feared she was angry with him.

“I expected you,” she whispered. What was the good of pretending to be modest and bashful? She loved him and he loved her. Why should she not tell him all she felt?

“It’s so dark,” he said, “I can’t see you.”

She was too deliriously happy to speak, and the only words she could have said were, I love you, I love you. She moved a step nearer so as to touch him. Why did he not open his arms and take her in them, and kiss her as she had dreamt that he would kiss her?

But he took her hand and the contact thrilled her; her knees were giving way, and she almost tottered.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Are you trembling?”

“I’m only a little cold.” She was trying with all her might to speak naturally. Nothing came into her head to say.

“You’ve got nothing on,” he said. “You must wear my coat.” He began to take it off.

“No,” she said, “then you’ll be cold.”

“Oh no, I shan’t.”

What he was doing seemed to her a marvel of unselfish kindness; she was beside herself with gratitude.

“It’s awfully good of you, Edward,” she whispered, almost tearfully.

When he put it round her shoulders, the touch of his hands made her lose the little self-control she had left. A curious spasm passed through her, and she pressed herself closer to him; at the same time his hands sank down, dropping the cloak, and encircled her waist. Then she surrendered herself entirely to his embrace and lifted her face to his. He bent down and kissed her. The kiss was such utter madness that she almost groaned. She could not tell if it was pain or pleasure. She flung her arms round his neck and drew him to her.

“What a fool I am,” she said at last, with something between a sob and a laugh. She drew herself a little away, though not so violently as to make him withdraw the arm which so comfortably encircled her.

But why did he say nothing? Why did he not swear he loved her? Why did he not ask what she was so willing to grant? She rested her head on his shoulder.

“Do you like me at all, Bertha?” he asked. “I’ve been wanting to ask you almost ever since you came home.”

“Can’t you see?” She was reassured; she understood that it was only timidity that clogged his tongue. “You’re so absurdly bashful.”

“You know who I am, Bertha; and — —” he hesitated.

“And what, foolish boy?” she nestled still more closely to him.

“And you’re Miss Ley of Court Leys, while I’m just one of your tenants, with nothing whatever to my back.”

“I’ve got very little,” she said. “And if I had ten thousand a year, my only wish would be to lay it at your feet.”

“Bertha, what d’you mean? Don’t be cruel to me. You know what I want, but — —”

“As far as I can make out,” she said, laughing, “you want me to propose to you.”

“Oh, Bertha, don’t laugh at me. I love you; I want to ask you to marry me. But I haven’t got anything to offer you, and I know I oughtn’t — don’t be angry with me, Bertha.”

“But I love you with all my heart,” she cried. “I want no better husband; you can give me happiness, and I want nothing else in the world.”

Then he caught her again in his arms, quite passionately, and kissed her.

“Didn’t you see that I loved you?” she whispered.

“I thought perhaps you did; but I wasn’t sure, and I was afraid that you wouldn’t think me good enough.”

“Oh yes, I love you with all my heart. I never imagined it possible to love a person as I love you. Oh, Eddie, you don’t know how happy you have made me.”

He kissed her again, and again she flung her arms around his neck.

“Oughtn’t you to be going in,” he said at last; “what will Miss Ley think?”

“Oh no — not yet,” she cried.

“How will you tell her? D’you think she’ll like me? She’ll try and make you give me up.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll love you; besides, what does it matter if she doesn’t? — she isn’t going to marry you.”

“She can take you abroad again and then you may see some one you like better.”

“But I’m twenty-one to-morrow, Edward — didn’t you know? And I shall be my own mistress. I shan’t leave Blackstable till I’m your wife.”

They were walking slowly towards the house, whither he, in his anxiety lest she should stay out too long, had guided her steps. They went arm in arm, and Bertha enjoyed her happiness.

“Dr. Ramsay is coming to luncheon to-morrow,” she said, “and I shall tell them both that I’m going to be married to you.”

“He won’t like it,” said Craddock, rather nervously.

“I’m sure I don’t care. If you like it and I like it, the rest can think as they choose.”

“I leave everything in your hands,” he said.

They had arrived at the portico, and Bertha looked at it doubtfully.

“I suppose I ought to go in,” she said, wishing Edward to persuade her to take one more turn round the garden.

“Yes, do,” he said. “I’m so afraid you’ll catch cold.”

It was charming of him to be so solicitous about her health, and of course he was right. Everything he did and said was right; for the moment Bertha forgot her wayward nature, and wished suddenly to subject herself to his strong guidance. His very strength made her feel curiously weak.

“Good-night, my beloved,” she whispered, passionately.

She could not tear herself away from him; it was utter madness. Their kisses never ended.

“Good-night!”

She watched him at last disappear into the darkness, and finally shut the door behind her.

Chapter III

WITH old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but youth, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not thereby disturbed. Bertha slept without dreams, and awaking, for the moment did not remember the occurrence of the previous day; but quickly it came back to her and she stretched herself with a sigh of great content. She lay in bed to contemplate her well-being. She could hardly realise that she had attained her dearest wish. God was very good, and gave His creatures what they asked; without words, from the fulness of her heart, she offered up thanks. It was quite extraordinary, after the maddening expectation, after the hopes and fears, the lover’s pains which are nearly pleasure, at last to be satisfied. She had now nothing more to desire, for her happiness was complete. Ah yes, indeed, God was very good!

Bertha thought of the two months she had spent at Blackstable.... After the first excitement of getting into the house of her fathers she had settled down to the humdrum of country life; she spent the day wandering about the lanes or on the seashore watching the desolate sea; she read a great deal, and looked forward to the ample time at her disposal to satisfy an immoderate desire for knowledge. She spent long hours in the library which her father had made, for it was only with falling fortunes that the family of Ley had taken to reading books; it had only applied itself to literature when it was too poor for any other pursuit. Bertha looked at the titles of the many volumes, receiving a certain thrill as she read over the great names of the past, and imagined the future delights that they would give her.

One day she was calling at the Vicarage and Edward Craddock happened to be there, lately returned from a short holiday. She had known him in days gone by — his father had been her father’s tenant, and he still farmed the same land — but for eight years they had not seen one another, and now Bertha hardly recognised him. She thought him, however, a good-looking fellow in his knickerbockers and thick stockings, and was not displeased when he came up to speak, asking if she remembered him. He sat down and a certain pleasant odour of the farmyard was wafted over to Bertha, a mingled perfume of strong tobacco, of cattle and horses; she did not understand why it made her heart beat, but she inhaled it voluptuously and her eyes glittered. He began to talk, and his voice sounded like music in her ears; he looked at her and his eyes were large and gray, she found them highly sympathetic; he was clean shaven, and his mouth was very attractive. She blushed and felt herself a fool. Bertha took pains to be as charming as possible; she knew her own dark eyes were beautiful, and fixed them upon his. When at last he bade her good-bye and shook hands, she blushed again; she was extraordinarily troubled, and as, with his rising, the strong masculine odour of the countryside reached her nostrils, her head whirled. She was very glad Miss Ley was not there to see her.

She walked home in the darkness trying to compose herself, for she could think of nothing but Edward Craddock. She recalled the past, trying to bring back to her memory incidents of their old acquaintance. At night she dreamt of him, and she dreamt he kissed her.

She awoke in the morning, thinking of Craddock, and felt it impossible to go through the day without seeing him. She thought of sending an invitation to luncheon or to tea, but hardly dared; and she did not want Miss Ley to see him yet. Then she remembered the farm; she would walk there, was it not hers? He would surely be working upon it. The god of love was propitious, and in a field she saw him, directing some operation. She trembled at the sight, her heart beat very quickly; and when, seeing her, he came forward with a greeting, she turned red and then white in the most compromising fashion. But he was very handsome as, with easy gait, he sauntered to the hedge; above all he was manly, and the pleasing thought passed through Bertha that his strength must be quite herculean. She barely concealed her admiration.

“Oh, I didn’t know this was your farm,” she said, shaking hands. “I was just walking at random.”

“I should like to show you round, Miss Bertha.”

Craddock opened the gate and took her to the sheds where he kept his carts, pointing out a couple of sturdy horses ploughing an adjacent field; he showed her his cattle, and poked the pigs to let her admire their excellent condition; he gave her sugar for his hunter, and took her to the sheep — explaining everything while she listened spell-bound. When, with great pride, Craddock showed her his machines and explained the use of the horse-tosser and the expense of the reaper, she thought that never in her life had she heard anything so enthralling. But above all Bertha wished to see the house in which he lived.

“D’you mind giving me a glass of water?” she said, “I’m so thirsty.”

“Do come in,” he answered, opening the door.

He led her to a little parlour with an oil-cloth on the floor. On the table, which took up most of the room, was a stamped, red cloth; the chairs and the sofa, covered with worn old leather, were arranged with the greatest possible stiffness. On the chimney-piece, along with pipes and tobacco-jars, were bright china vases with rushes in them, and in the middle a marble clock.

“Oh how pretty!” cried Bertha, with enthusiasm. “You must feel very lonely here by yourself.”

“Oh no — I’m always out. Shall I get you some milk? It’ll be better for you than water.”

But Bertha saw a napkin laid on the table, a jug of beer, and some bread and cheese.

“Have I been keeping you from your lunch?” she asked. “I’m so sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter at all. I just have a little snack at eleven.”

“Oh, may I have some too? I love bread and cheese, and I’m perfectly ravenous.”

They sat opposite one another, seeing a great joke in the impromptu meal. The bread, which he cut in a great chunk, was delicious, and the beer, of course, was nectar. But afterwards, Bertha feared that Craddock must be thinking her somewhat odd.

“D’you think it’s very eccentric of me to come and lunch with you in this way?”

“I think it’s awfully good of you. Mr. Ley often used to come and have a snack with my father.”

“Oh, did he?” said Bertha. Of course that made her proceeding quite natural. “But I really must go now. I shall get into awful trouble with Aunt Polly.”

He begged her to take some flowers, and hastily cut a bunch of dahlias. She accepted them with the most embarrassing gratitude; and when they shook hands at parting, her heart went pit-a-pat again ridiculously.

Miss Ley inquired from whom she got her flowers.

“Oh,” said Bertha coolly, “I happened to meet one of the tenants and he gave them to me.”

“Hm,” murmured Miss Ley, “it would be more to the purpose if they paid their rent.”

Miss Ley presently left the room, and Bertha looked at the prim dahlias with a heart full of emotion. She gave a laugh.

“It’s no good trying to hide it from myself,” she murmured, “I’m head over ears in love.”

She kissed the flowers and felt very glad.... She evidently was in that condition, since by the night Bertha had made up her mind to marry Edward Craddock or die. She lost no time, for less than a month had passed and their wedding-day was certainly in sight.

Miss Ley loathed all manifestations of feeling. Christmas, when everybody is supposed to take his neighbour to his bosom and harbour towards him a number of sentimental emotions, caused her such discomfort that she habitually buried herself for the time in some continental city where she knew no one, and could escape the over-brimming of other people’s hearts. Even in summer Miss Ley could not see a holly-tree without a little shiver of disgust; her mind went immediately to the decorations of middle-class houses, the mistletoe hanging from a gas-chandelier, and the foolish old gentlemen who found amusement in kissing stray females. She was glad that Bertha had thought fit to refuse the display of enthusiasm from servants and impoverished tenants, which, on the attainment of her majority, her guardian had wished to arrange. Miss Ley could imagine that the festivities possible on such an occasion, the handshaking, the making of good cheer, and the obtrusive joviality of the country Englishman, might surpass even the tawdry rejoicings of Yule-tide. But Bertha fortunately detested such things as sincerely as did Miss Ley herself, and suggested to the persons concerned that they could not oblige her more than by taking no notice of an event which really did not to her seem very significant.

But Dr. Ramsay’s heartiness could not be entirely restrained; and he had also a fine old English sense of the fitness of things, that passion to act in a certain manner merely because in times past people have always so acted. He insisted on solemnly meeting Bertha to offer congratulations, a blessing, and some statement of his stewardship.

Bertha came downstairs when Miss Ley was already eating breakfast — a very feminine meal, consisting of nothing more substantial than a square inch of bacon and a morsel of dry toast. Miss Ley was really somewhat nervous, she was bothered by the necessity of referring to Bertha’s natal day.

“That is one advantage of women,” she told herself, “after twenty-five they gloss over their birthdays like improprieties. A man is so impressed with his cleverness in having entered the world at all that the anniversary always interests him; and the foolish creature thinks it interests other people as well.”

But Bertha came into the room and kissed her.

“Good morning, dear,” said Miss Ley, and then, pouring out her niece’s coffee, “our estimable cook has burnt the milk in honour of your majority; I trust she will not celebrate the occasion by getting drunk — at all events, till after dinner.”

“I hope Dr. Ramsay won’t enthuse too vigorously,” replied Bertha, understanding Miss Ley’s feeling.

“Oh, my dear, I tremble at the prospect of his jollity. He’s a good man. I should think his principles were excellent, and I don’t suppose he’s more ignorant than most general practitioners; but his friendliness is sometimes painfully aggressive.”

But Bertha’s calm was merely external, her brain was in a whirl, and her heart beat with excitement. She was full of impatience to declare her news. Bertha had some sense of dramatic effect and looked forward a little to the scene when, the keys of her kingdom being handed to her, she made the announcement that she had already chosen a king to rule by her side. She felt also that between herself and Miss Ley alone the necessary explanations would be awkward. Dr. Ramsay’s outspoken bluffness made him easier to deal with; there is always a difficulty in conducting oneself with a person who ostentatiously believes that every one should mind his own business and who, whatever her thoughts, takes more pleasure in the concealment than in the expression thereof. Bertha sent a note to Craddock, telling him to come at three o’clock to be introduced as the future lord and master of Court Leys.

Dr. Ramsay arrived and burst at once into a prodigious stream of congratulation, partly jocose, partly grave and sentimental, but entirely distasteful to the fastidiousness of Miss Ley. Bertha’s guardian was a big, broad-shouldered man, with a mane of fair hair, now turning white; Miss Ley vowed he was the last person upon this earth to wear mutton-chop whiskers. He was very red cheeked, and by his size, joviality, and florid complexion, gave an idea of unalterable health. With his shaven chin and his loud-voiced burliness he looked like a yeoman of the old school, before bad times and the spread of education had made the farmer a sort of cross between the city clerk and the Newmarket trainer. Dr. Ramsay’s frock coat and top hat, notwithstanding the habit of many years, sat uneasily upon him with the air of Sunday clothes upon an agricultural labourer. Miss Ley, who liked to find absurd descriptions of people, or to hit upon an apt comparison, had never been able exactly to suit him; and that somewhat irritated her. In her eyes the only link that connected the doctor with humanity was a certain love of antiquities, which had filled his house with old snuff-boxes, china, and other precious things: humanity, Miss Ley took to be a small circle of persons, mostly feminine, middle-aged, unattached, and of independent means, who travelled on the continent, read good literature and abhorred the vast majority of their fellow-creatures, especially when these shrieked philanthropically, thrust their religion in your face, or cultivated their muscle with aggressive ardour!

Dr. Ramsay ate his luncheon with an appetite that Miss Ley thought must be a great source of satisfaction to his butcher. She asked politely after his wife, to whom she secretly objected for her meek submission to the doctor. Miss Ley made a practice of avoiding those women who had turned themselves into mere shadows of their lords, more especially when their conversation was of household affairs; and Mrs. Ramsay, except on Sundays, when her mind was turned to the clothes of the congregation, thought of nothing beyond her husband’s enormous appetite and the methods of subduing it.

They returned to the drawing-room and Dr. Ramsay began to tell Bertha about the property, who this tenant was and the condition of that farm, winding up with the pitiful state of the times and the impossibility of getting rents.

“And now, Bertha, what are you thinking of doing?” he asked.

This was the opportunity for which Bertha had been looking.

“I?” she said quietly— “Oh, I intend to get married.”

Dr. Ramsay, opening his mouth, threw back his head and laughed immoderately.

“Very good indeed,” he cried. “Ha, ha!”

Miss Ley looked at him with uplifted eyebrows.

“Girls are coming on nowadays,” he said, with much amusement. “Why, in my time, a young woman would have been all blushes and downcast glances. If any one had talked of marriage she would have prayed Heaven to send an earthquake to swallow her up.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Miss Ley.

Bertha was looking at Dr. Ramsay with a smile that she with difficulty repressed, and Miss Ley caught the expression.

“So you intend to be married, Bertha?” said the doctor, again laughing.

“Yes.”

“When?” asked Miss Ley, who did not take Bertha’s remark as merely playful.

Bertha was looking out the window, wondering when Edward would arrive.

“When?” she repeated, turning round. “This day four weeks!”

“What!” cried Dr. Ramsay, jumping up. “You don’t mean to say you’ve found some one! Are you engaged? Oh, I see, I see. You’ve been having a little joke with me. Why didn’t you tell me that Bertha was engaged all the time, Miss Ley?”

“My good doctor,” answered Miss Ley, with great composure, “until this moment I knew nothing whatever about it.... I suppose we ought to offer our congratulations; it’s a blessing to get them all over on one day.”

Dr. Ramsay looked from one to the other with perplexity.

“Well, upon my word,” he said, “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” replied Miss Ley, “but I keep calm.”

“It’s very simple,” said Bertha. “I got engaged last night, and as I say, I mean to be married exactly four weeks from to-day — to Mr. Craddock.”

“What!” cried Dr. Ramsay, jumping up in astonishment and causing the floor to quake in the most dangerous way. “Craddock! What d’you mean? Which Craddock?”

“Edward Craddock,” replied Bertha coolly, “of Bewlie’s Farm.”

“Brrh!!” Dr. Ramsay’s exclamation cannot be transcribed, but it sounded horrid! “The scoundrel! It’s absurd. You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

Bertha looked at him with a gentle smile, but did not trouble to answer.

“You’re very emphatic, dear doctor,” said Miss Ley. “Who is this gentleman?”

“He isn’t a gentleman,” said Dr. Ramsay, purple with vexation.

“He’s going to be my husband, Dr. Ramsay,” said Bertha, compressing her lips in the manner which with Miss Ley had become habitual; and turned to that lady: “I’ve known him all my life, and father was a great friend of his father’s. He’s a gentleman-farmer.”

“The definition of which,” said Dr. Ramsay, “is a man who’s neither a farmer nor a gentleman.”

“I forget what your father was?” said Bertha, who remembered perfectly well.

“My father was a farmer,” replied Dr. Ramsay, with some heat, “and, thank God! he made no pretence of being a gentleman. He worked with his own hands; I’ve seen him often enough with a pitchfork, turning over a heap of manure, when no one else was handy.”

“I see,” said Bertha.

“But my father can have nothing to do with it; you can’t marry him because he’s been dead these thirty years, and you can’t marry me because I’ve got a wife already.”

Miss Ley, amused at the doctor’s bluntness, concealed a smile; but Bertha, getting rather angry, thought him singularly rude.

“And what have you against him?” she asked.

“If you want to make a fool of yourself, he’s got no right to encourage you. He knows he isn’t a fit match for you.”

“Why not, if I love him?”

“Why not!” shouted Dr. Ramsay. “Because he’s the son of a farmer — like I am — and you’re Miss Ley of Court Leys. Because a man in that position without fifty pounds to his back doesn’t make love on the sly to a girl with a fortune.”

“Five thousand acres which pay no rent,” murmured Miss Ley, who was always in opposition.

“You have nothing whatever against him,” retorted Bertha; “you told me yourself that he had the very best reputation.”

“I didn’t know you were asking me with a view to matrimony.”

“I wasn’t. I care nothing for his reputation. If he were drunken and idle and dissolute I’d marry him, because I love him.”

“My dear Bertha,” said Miss Ley, “the doctor will have an apoplectic fit if you say such things.”

“You told me he was one of the best fellows you knew, Dr. Ramsay,” said Bertha.

“I don’t deny it,” cried the doctor, and his red cheeks really had in them a purple tinge that was quite alarming. “He knows his business and he works hard, and he’s straight and steady.”

“Good heavens, Doctor,” cried Miss Ley, “he must be a miracle of rural excellence. Bertha would surely never have fallen in love with him if he were faultless.”

“If Bertha wanted an agent,” Dr. Ramsay proceeded, “I could recommend no one better, but as for marrying him — —”

“Does he pay his rent?” asked Miss Ley.

“He’s one of the best tenants we’ve got,” growled the doctor, somewhat annoyed by Miss Ley’s frivolous interruptions.

“Of course in these bad times,” added Miss Ley, who was determined not to allow Dr. Ramsay to play the heavy father with too much seriousness, “I suppose about the only resource of the respectable farmer is to marry his landlady.”

“Here he is!” interrupted Bertha.

“Good God, is he coming here?” cried her guardian.

“I sent for him. Remember he is going to be my husband.”

“I’m damned if he is!” said Dr. Ramsay.

Chapter IV

BERTHA threw off her troubled looks and the vexation which the argument had caused her. She blushed charmingly as the door opened, and with the entrance of the fairy prince her face was wreathed in smiles. She went towards him and took his hands.

“Aunt Polly,” she said, “this is Mr. Edward Craddock.... Dr. Ramsay you know.”

He shook hands with Miss Ley and looked at the doctor, who promptly turned his back on him. Craddock flushed, and sat down by Miss Ley.

“We were talking about you, dearest,” said Bertha. The pause at his arrival had been disconcerting, and while Craddock was rather nervously thinking of something to say, Miss Ley made no effort to help him. “I have told Aunt Polly and Dr. Ramsay that we intend to be married four weeks from to-day.”

This was the first that Craddock had heard of the date, but he showed no particular astonishment. He was, in fact, trying to recall the speech which he had composed for the occasion.

“I will try to be a good husband to your niece, Miss Ley,” he began.

But that lady interrupted him: she had already come to the conclusion that he was a man likely to say on a given occasion the sort of thing which might be expected; and that, in her eyes, was a hideous crime.

“Oh yes, I have no doubt,” she replied. “Bertha, as you know, is her own mistress, and responsible for her acts to no one.”

Craddock was a little embarrassed; he had meant to express his sense of unworthiness and his desire to do his duty, also to make clear his own position, but Miss Ley’s remark seemed to prohibit further explanation.

“Which is really very convenient,” said Bertha, coming to his rescue, “because I have a mind to manage my life in my own way, without interference from anybody.”

Miss Ley wondered whether the young man looked upon Bertha’s statement as auguring complete tranquillity in the future, but Craddock seemed to see in it nothing ominous; he looked at Bertha with a grateful smile, and the glance which she returned was full of the most passionate devotion.

Since his arrival Miss Ley had been observing Craddock with great minuteness, and, being a woman, could not help finding some pleasure in the knowledge that Bertha was trying with anxiety to discover her judgment. Craddock’s appearance was prepossessing. Miss Ley liked young men generally, and this was a very good-looking member of the species. His eyes were good, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable in the physiognomy — he looked healthy and good-tempered. Miss Ley noticed even that he did not bite his nails, and that his hands were strong and firm. There was really nothing to distinguish him from the common run of healthy young Englishmen, with good morals and fine physique; but the class is pleasant. Miss Ley’s only wonder was that Bertha had chosen him rather than ten thousand others of the same variety, for that Bertha had chosen him somewhat actively there was in Miss Ley’s mind not the shadow of a doubt.

Miss Ley turned to him.

“Has Bertha shown you our chickens?” she asked, calmly.

“No,” he said, surprised at the question; “I hope she will.”

“Oh, no doubt. You know I am quite ignorant of agriculture. Have you ever been abroad?”

“No, I stick to my own country,” he replied; “it’s good enough for me.”

“I dare say it is,” said Miss Ley, looking to the ground. “Bertha must certainly show you our chickens. They interest me because they’re very like human beings — they’re so stupid.”

“I can’t get mine to lay at all at this time of year,” said Craddock.

“Of course I’m not an agriculturist,” repeated Miss Ley, “but chickens amuse me.”

Dr. Ramsay began to smile, and Bertha flushed angrily.

“You have never shown any interest in the chickens before, Aunt Polly.”

“Haven’t I, my dear? Don’t you remember last night I remarked how tough was that one we had for dinner?... How long have you known Bertha, Mr. Craddock?”

“It seems all my life,” he replied. “And I want to know her more.”

This time Bertha smiled, and Miss Ley, though she felt certain the repartee was unintentional, was not displeased with it.

All this time Dr. Ramsay was not saying a word, and his behaviour aroused Bertha’s anger.

“I have never seen you sit for five minutes in silence before, Dr. Ramsay,” she said.

“I think what I have to say would scarcely please you, Miss Bertha.”

Miss Ley was anxious that no altercation should disturb the polite discomfort of the meeting.

“You’re thinking about those rents again, doctor,” she said, and turning to Craddock: “The poor doctor is unhappy because half of our tenants say they cannot pay.”

The poor doctor grunted and sniffed, and Miss Ley thought it was high time for the young man to take his leave. She looked at Bertha, who quickly understood, and getting up, said —

“Let us leave them alone, Eddie; I want to show you the house.”

He rose with alacrity, evidently much relieved at the end of the ordeal. He shook Miss Ley’s hand, and this time could not be restrained from making a little speech.

“I hope you’re not angry with me for taking Bertha away from you. I hope I shall soon get to know you better, and that we shall become great friends.”

Miss Ley was taken aback, but really thought his effort not bad. It might have been worse, and at all events he had kept out of it references to the Almighty and to his duty! Then Craddock turned to Dr. Ramsay, and went up to him with an outstretched hand that could not be refused.

“I should like to see you sometime, Dr. Ramsay,” he said, looking at him steadily. “I fancy you want to have a talk with me, and I should like it too. When can you give me an appointment?”

Bertha flushed with pleasure at his frank words, and Miss Ley was pleased at the courage with which he had attacked the old curmudgeon.

“I think it would be a very good idea,” said the doctor. “I can see you to-night at eight.”

“Good! Good-bye, Miss Ley.”

He went out with Bertha.

Miss Ley was not one of those persons who consider it indiscreet to form an opinion upon small evidence. Before knowing a man for five minutes she made up her mind about him, and liked nothing better than to impart her impression to any that asked her.

“Upon my word, doctor,” she said, as soon as the door was shut, “he’s not so terrible as I expected.”

“I never said he was not good-looking,” pointedly answered Dr. Ramsay, who was convinced that any and every woman was willing to make herself a fool with a handsome man.

Miss Ley smiled. “Good looks, my dear doctor, are three parts of the necessary equipment in the battle of life. You can’t imagine the miserable existence of a really plain girl.”

“Do you approve of Bertha’s ridiculous idea?”

“To tell you the truth, I think it makes very little difference if you and I approve or not; therefore we’d much better take the matter quietly.”

“You can do what you like, Miss Ley,” replied the doctor very bluntly, “but I mean to stop the business.”

“You won’t, my dear doctor,” said Miss Ley, smiling again. “I know Bertha so much better than you. I’ve lived with her for three years, and I’ve found constant entertainment in the study of her character.... Let me tell you how I first knew her. Of course you know that her father and I hadn’t been on speaking terms for years. Having played ducks and drakes with his own money, he wanted to play the same silly game with mine; and as I strongly objected he flew into a violent passion, called me an ungrateful wretch, and nourished the grievance to the end of his days. Well, his health broke down after his wife’s death, and he spent several years with Bertha wandering about the continent. She was educated as best could be, in half-a-dozen countries, and it’s a marvel to me that she is not entirely ignorant or entirely vicious. She’s a brilliant example in favour of the opinion that the human race is inclined to good rather than to evil.”

Miss Ley smiled, for she was herself convinced of precisely the opposite.

“Well, one day,” she proceeded, “I got a telegram, sent through my solicitors: ‘Father dead, please come if convenient. — Bertha Ley.’ It was addressed from Naples and I was in Florence. Of course I rushed down, taking nothing but a bag, a few yards of crape, and some smelling-salts. I was met at the station by Bertha, whom I hadn’t seen for ten years; I saw a tall and handsome young woman, very self-possessed, and admirably gowned in the very latest fashion. I kissed her in a subdued way, proper to the occasion; and as we drove back, inquired when the funeral was to be, holding the smelling-salts in readiness for an outburst of weeping. ‘Oh, it’s all over,’ she said. ‘I didn’t send my wire till everything was settled; I thought it would only upset you. I’ve given notice to the landlord of the villa and to the servants. There was really no need for you to come at all, only the doctor and the English parson seemed to think it rather queer of me to be here alone.’ I used the smelling-salts myself! Imagine my emotion; I expected to find a hobbledehoy of a girl in hysterics, everything topsy-turvy and all sorts of horrid things to do; instead of which I found everything arranged perfectly well and the hobbledehoy rather disposed to manage me if I let her. At luncheon she looked at my travelling dress. ‘I suppose you left Florence in a hurry,’ she remarked. ‘If you want to get anything black, you’d better go to my dressmaker; she’s not bad. I must go there this afternoon myself to try some things on.’”

Miss Ley stopped and looked at the doctor to see the effect of her words. He said nothing.

“And the impression I gained then,” she added, “has only been strengthened since. You’ll be a very clever man if you prevent Bertha from doing a thing upon which she has set her mind.”

“D’you mean to tell me that you’re going to sanction the marriage?”

Miss Ley shrugged her shoulders. “My dear Dr. Ramsay, I tell you it won’t make the least difference whether we bless or curse. And he seems an average sort of young man — let us be thankful that she’s done no worse. He’s not uneducated.”

“No, he’s not that. He spent ten years at Regis School, Tercanbury; so he ought to know something.”

“What was exactly his father?”

“His father was the same as himself — a gentleman-farmer. He’d been educated at Regis School, as his son was. He knew most of the gentry, but he wasn’t quite one of them; he knew all the farmers and he wasn’t quite one of them either. And that’s what they’ve been for generations, neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.”

“It’s those people that the newspapers tell us are the backbone of the country, Dr. Ramsay.”

“Let ’em remain in their proper place then, in the back,” said the doctor. “You can do as you please, Miss Ley; I’m going to put a stop to the business. After all, old Mr. Ley made me the girl’s guardian, and though she is twenty-one I think it’s my duty to see that she doesn’t fall into the hands of the first penniless scamp who asks her to marry him.”

“You can do as you please,” retorted Miss Ley, who was a little bored. “You’ll do no good with Bertha.”

“I’m not going to Bertha; I’m going to Craddock direct, and I mean to give him a piece of my mind.”

Miss Ley shrugged her shoulders. Dr. Ramsay evidently did not see who was the active party in the matter, and she did not feel it her duty to inform him.

“The question is,” she said quietly, “can she marry any one worse? I must say I’m quite relieved that Bertha doesn’t want to marry a creature from Bayswater.”

The doctor took his leave, and in a few minutes Bertha joined Miss Ley. The latter obviously intended to make no efforts to disturb the course of true love.

“You’ll have to be thinking of ordering your trousseau, my dear,” she said, with a dry smile.

“We’re going to be married quite privately,” answered Bertha. “We neither of us want to make a fuss.”

“I think you’re very wise. Of course most people, when they get married, fancy they’re doing a very original thing. It never occurs to them that quite a number of persons have committed matrimony since Adam and Eve.”

“I’ve asked Edward to luncheon to-morrow,” said Bertha.

Chapter V

NEXT day, after luncheon, Miss Ley retired to the drawing-room and unpacked the books which had just arrived from Mudie. She looked through them, and read a page here and there to see what they were like, thinking meanwhile of the meal they had just finished. Edward Craddock had been somewhat nervous, sitting uncomfortably on his chair, too officious, perhaps, in handing things to Miss Ley, salt and pepper and the like, as he saw she wanted them. He evidently wished to make himself amiable. At the same time he was subdued, and not gaily enthusiastic as might be expected from a happy lover. Miss Ley could not help asking herself if he really loved her niece. Bertha was obviously without a doubt on the subject. She had been radiant, keeping her eyes all the while fixed upon the young man as if he were the most delightful and wonderful object she had ever seen. Miss Ley was surprised at the girl’s expansiveness, contrasting with her old reserve. She seemed now not to care a straw if all the world saw her emotions. She was not only happy to be in love, she was proud also. Miss Ley laughed aloud at the doctor’s idea that he could disturb the course of such passion.... But if Miss Ley, well aware that the watering-pots of reason could not put out those raging fires, had no intention of hindering the match, neither had she a desire to witness the preliminaries thereof; and after luncheon, remarking that she felt tired and meant to lie down, went into the drawing-room alone. It pleased her to think she could at the same time suit the lovers’ pleasure and her own convenience.

She chose that book from the bundle which seemed most promising, and began to read. Presently the door was opened by a servant, and Miss Glover was announced. An expression of annoyance passed over Miss Ley’s face, but was immediately succeeded by one of mellifluous amiability.

“Oh, don’t get up, dear Miss Ley,” said the visitor, as her hostess slowly rose from the sofa.

Miss Ley shook hands and began to talk. She said she was delighted to see Miss Glover, thinking meanwhile that this estimable person’s sense of etiquette was very tedious. The Glovers had dined at Court Leys during the previous week, and punctually seven days afterwards Miss Glover was paying a ceremonious call.

Miss Glover was a worthy person, but dull; and that Miss Ley could not forgive. Better ten thousand times, in her opinion, was it to be Becky Sharp and a monster of wickedness than Amelia and a monster of stupidity.

“Pardon me, Madam, it is well known that Thackeray, in Amelia, gave us a type of the pure-hearted, sweet-minded English maiden, whose qualities are the foundation of the greatness of Great Britain, and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.”

“I have no doubt that such was his intention. But why do you think novelists, when they draw the average English girl, should invariably produce an utter fool?”

“Madam, Madam, this is heresy.”

“No, sir, it is merely a question — prompted by a desire for information.”

“It must be their want of skill.”

“I hope so.”

Miss Glover was one of the best natured and most charitable creatures upon the face of the earth, a miracle of abnegation and unselfishness; but a person to be amused by her could have been only an absolute lunatic.

“She’s really a dear kind thing,” said Miss Ley of her, “and she does endless good in the parish — but she’s really too dull: she’s only fit for heaven!”

And the image passed through Miss Ley’s mind, unsobered by advancing years, of Miss Glover, with her colourless hair hanging down her back, wings, and a golden harp, singing hymns in a squeaky voice, morning, noon, and night. Indeed, the general conception of paradisaical costume suited Miss Glover very ill. She was a woman of about eight and twenty, but might have been any age between one score and two; you felt that she had always been the same and that years would have no power over her strength of mind. She had no figure, and her clothes were so stiff and unyielding as to give an impression of armour. She was nearly always dressed in a tight black jacket of ribbed cloth that was evidently most durable, the plainest of skirts, and strong, really strong boots! Her hat was suited for all weathers and she had made it herself! She never wore a veil, and her skin was dry and hard, drawn so tightly over the bones as to give her face extraordinary angularity; over her prominent cheek-bones was a red flush, the colour of which was not uniformly suffused, but with the capillaries standing out distinctly, forming a network. Her nose and mouth were what is politely termed of a determined character, her pale blue eyes slightly protruded. Ten years of East Anglian winds had blown all the softness from her face, and their bitter fury seemed to have bleached even her hair. One could not tell if this was brown and had lost its richness, or gold from which the shimmer had vanished; and the roots sprang from the cranium with a curious apartness, so that Miss Ley always thought how easy in her case it would be for the Recording Angel to number the hairs. But notwithstanding the hard, uncompromising exterior which suggested extreme determination, Miss Glover was so bashful, so absurdly self-conscious, as to blush at every opportunity; and in the presence of a stranger to go through utter misery from inability to think of a single word to say. At the same time she had the tenderest of hearts, sympathetic, compassionate; she overflowed with love and pity for her fellow-creatures. She was also excessively sentimental!

“And how is your brother?” asked Miss Ley.

Mr. Glover was the Vicar of Leanham, which was about a mile from Court Leys on the Tercanbury Road, and for him Miss Glover had kept house since his appointment to the living.

“Oh, he’s very well. Of course he’s rather worried about the dissenters. You know they’re putting up a new chapel in Leanham; it’s perfectly dreadful.”

“Mr. Craddock mentioned the fact at luncheon.”

“Oh, was he lunching with you? I didn’t know you knew him well enough for that.”

“I suppose he’s here now,” said Miss Ley; “he’s not been in to say good-bye.”

Miss Glover looked at her with some want of intelligence. But it was not to be expected that Miss Ley could explain before making the affair a good deal more complicated.

“And how is Bertha?” asked Miss Glover, whose conversation was chiefly concerned with inquiries about mutual acquaintance.

“Oh, of course, she’s in the seventh heaven of delight.”

“Oh!” said Miss Glover, not understanding at all what Miss Ley meant.

She was somewhat afraid of the elder lady. Even though her brother Charles said he feared she was worldly, Miss Glover could not fail to respect a woman who had lived in London and on the continent, who had met Dean Farrar and seen Miss Marie Corelli.

“Of course,” she said, “Bertha is young, and naturally high spirited.”

“Well, I’m sure, I hope she’ll be happy.”

“You must be very anxious about her future, Miss Ley.” Miss Glover found her hostess’s observations simply cryptic, and, feeling foolish, blushed a fiery red.

“Not at all; she’s her own mistress, and as able-bodied and as reasonably-minded as most young women. But, of course, it’s a great risk.”

“I’m very sorry, Miss Ley,” said the vicar’s sister, in such distress as to give her friend certain qualms of conscience, “but I really don’t understand. What is a great risk?”

“Matrimony, my dear.”

“Is Bertha going to be married? Oh, dear Miss Ley, let me congratulate you. How happy and proud you must be!”

“My dear Miss Glover, please keep calm. And if you want to congratulate anybody, congratulate Bertha — not me.”

“But I’m so glad, Miss Ley. To think of dear Bertha getting married; Charles will be so pleased.”

“It’s to Mr. Edward Craddock,” drily said Miss Ley, interrupting these transports.

“Oh!” Miss Glover’s jaw dropped and she changed colour; then, recovering herself: “You don’t say so!”

“You seem surprised, dear Miss Glover,” said the elder lady, with a thin smile.

“I am surprised. I thought they scarcely knew one another; and besides—” Miss Glover stopped, with embarrassment.

“And besides what?” inquired Miss Ley, sharply.

“Well, Miss Ley, of course Mr. Craddock is a very good young man and I like him, but I shouldn’t have thought him a suitable match for Bertha.”

“It depends upon what you mean by a suitable match.”

“I was always hoping Bertha would marry young Mr. Branderton of the Towers.”

“Hm!” said Miss Ley, who did not like the neighboring squire’s mother, “I don’t know what Mr. Branderton has to recommend him beyond the possession of four or five generations of particularly stupid ancestors and two or three thousand acres which he can neither let nor sell.”

“Of course Mr. Craddock is a very worthy young man,” added Miss Glover, who was afraid she had said too much. “If you approve of the match no one else can complain.”

“I don’t approve of the match, Miss Glover, but I’m not such a fool as to oppose it. Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough money of her own to live upon.”

“It’s an institution of the Church, Miss Ley,” replied Miss Glover, rather severely.

“Is it?” retorted Miss Ley. “I always thought it was an arrangement to provide work for the judges in the Divorce Court.”

To this Miss Glover very properly made no answer.

“Do you think they’ll be happy together?”

“I think it very improbable,” said Miss Ley.

“Well, don’t you think it’s your duty — excuse my mentioning it, Miss Ley — to do something?”

“My dear Miss Glover, I don’t think they’ll be more unhappy than most married couples; and one’s greatest duty in this world is to leave people alone.”

“There I cannot agree with you,” said Miss Glover, bridling. “If duty was not more difficult than that there would be no credit in doing it.”

“Ah, my dear, your idea of a happy life is always to do the disagreeable thing: mine is to gather the roses — with gloves on, so that the thorns should not prick me.”

“That’s not the way to win the battle, Miss Ley. We must all fight.”

“My dear Miss Glover!” said Bertha’s aunt.

She fancied it a little impertinent for a woman twenty years younger than herself to exhort her to lead a better life. But the picture of that poor, ill-dressed creature fighting with a devil, cloven-footed, betailed and behorned, was as pitiful as it was comic; and with difficulty Miss Ley repressed an impulse to argue and to startle a little her estimable friend.

But at that moment Dr. Ramsay came in. He shook hands with both ladies.

“I thought I’d look in to see how Bertha was,” he said.

“Poor Mr. Craddock has another adversary,” remarked Miss Ley. “Miss Glover thinks I ought to take the affair seriously.”

“I do, indeed,” said Miss Glover.

“Ever since I was a young girl,” said Miss Ley, “I’ve been trying not to take things seriously, and I’m afraid now I’m hopelessly frivolous.”

The contrast between this assertion and Miss Ley’s prim manner was really funny, but Miss Glover saw only something quite incomprehensible.

“After all,” added Miss Ley, “nine marriages out of ten are more or less unsatisfactory. You say young Branderton would have been more suitable; but really a string of ancestors is no particular assistance to matrimonial felicity, and otherwise I see no marked difference between him and Edward Craddock. Mr. Branderton has been to Eton and Oxford, but he conceals the fact with very great success. Practically he’s just as much a gentleman-farmer as Mr. Craddock; but one family is working itself up and the other is working itself down. The Brandertons represent the past and the Craddocks the future; and though I detest reform and progress, so far as matrimony is concerned I prefer myself the man who founds a family to the man who ends it. But, good Heavens! you’re making me sententious.”

It was curious how opposition was making Miss Ley almost a champion of Edward Craddock.

“Well,” said the doctor, in his heavy way, “I’m in favour of every one sticking to his own class. Nowadays, whoever a man is he wants to be the next thing better; the labourer apes the tradesman, the tradesman apes the professional man.”

“And the professional man is worst of all, dear doctor,” said Miss Ley, “for he apes the noble lord, who seldom affords a very admirable example. And the amusing thing is that each set thinks itself quite as good as those above, while harbouring profound contempt for all below. In fact the only members of society who hold themselves in proper estimation are the servants. I always think that the domestics of gentlemen’s houses in South Kensington are several degrees less odious than their masters.”

This was not a subject which Miss Glover or Dr. Ramsay could discuss, and there was a momentary pause.

“What single point can you bring in favour of this marriage?” asked the doctor, suddenly.

Miss Ley looked at him as if she were thinking, then, with a dry smile: “My dear doctor, Mr. Craddock is so matter of fact — the moon will never rouse him to poetic ecstasies.”

“Miss Ley!” said the parson’s sister, in a tone of entreaty.

Miss Ley glanced from one to the other. “Do you want my serious opinion?” she asked, rather more gravely than usual. “The girl loves him, my dear doctor. Marriage, after all, is such a risk that only passion makes it worth while.”

Miss Glover looked up uneasily at the word passion.

“Yes, I know what you all think in England,” said Miss Ley, catching the glance and its meaning. “You expect people to marry from every reason except the proper, one — and that is the instinct of reproduction.”

“Miss Ley!” exclaimed Miss Glover, blushing.

“Oh, you’re old enough to take a sensible view of the, matter,” answered Miss Ley, somewhat brutally. “Bertha is merely the female attracted to the male, and that is the only decent foundation of marriage — the other way seems to me merely horrid. And what does it matter if the man is not of the same station, the instinct has nothing to do with the walk in life; if I’d ever been in love I shouldn’t have cared if it was a pot-boy, I’d have married him — if he asked me.”

“Well, upon my word!” said the doctor.

But Miss Ley was roused now, and interrupted him: “The particular function of a woman is to propagate her species; and if she’s wise she’ll choose a strong and healthy man to be the father of her children. I have no patience with those women who marry a man because he’s got brains. What is the good of a husband who can make abstruse mathematical calculations? A woman wants a man with strong arms and the digestion of an ox.”

“Miss Ley,” broke in Miss Glover, “I’m not clever enough to argue with you, but I know you’re wrong. I don’t think I am right to listen to you; I’m sure Charles wouldn’t like it.”

“My dear, you’ve been brought up like the majority of English girls — that is, like a fool.”

Poor Miss Glover blushed. “At all events I’ve been brought up to regard marriage as a holy institution. We’re here upon earth to mortify the flesh, not to indulge it. I hope I shall never be tempted to think of such matters in the way you’ve suggested. If ever I marry I know that nothing will be further from me than carnal thoughts. I look upon marriage as a spiritual union in which it is my duty to love, honour, and obey my husband, to assist and sustain him, to live with him such a life that when the end comes we may be prepared for it.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Miss Ley.

“I should have thought you of all people,” said Dr. Ramsay, “would object to Bertha marrying beneath her.”

“They can’t be happy,” said Miss Glover.

“Why not? I used to know in Italy Lady Justitia Shawe, who married her footman. She made him take her name, and they drank like fishes. They lived for forty years in complete felicity, and when he drank himself to death poor Lady Justitia was so grieved that her next attack of delirium tremens carried her off. It was most pathetic.”

“I can’t think you look forward with pleasure to such a fate for your only niece, Miss Ley,” said Miss Glover, who took everything seriously.

“I have another niece, you know,” answered Miss Ley, “My sister, Mrs. Vaudrey, has three children.”

But the doctor broke in: “Well, I don’t think you need trouble yourselves about the matter, for I have authority to announce to you that the marriage of Bertha and young Craddock is broken off.”

“What!” cried Miss Ley. “I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t say so,” ejaculated Miss Glover at the same moment. “Oh, I am relieved.”

Dr. Ramsay rubbed his hands, beaming with delight. “I knew I should stop it,” he said. “What do you think now, Miss Ley?”

He was evidently rejoicing over her discomfiture, and that lady became rather cross.

“How can I think anything till you explain yourself?” she asked.

“He came to see me last night — you remember he asked for an interview of his own accord — and I put the case before him. I talked to him, I told him that the marriage was impossible; and I said the Leanham and Blackstable people would call him a fortune-hunter. I appealed to him for Bertha’s sake. He’s an honest, straightforward fellow — I always said he was. I made him see he wasn’t doing the straight thing, and at last he promised he’d break it off.”

“He won’t keep a promise of that sort,” said Miss Ley.

“Oh, won’t he!” cried the doctor. “I’ve known him all his life, and he’d rather die than break his word.”

“Poor fellow!” said Miss Glover, “it must have pained him terribly.”

“He bore it like a man.”

Miss Ley pursed her lips till they practically disappeared. “And when is he supposed to carry out your ridiculous suggestion, Dr. Ramsay?” she asked.

“He told me he was lunching here to-day, and would take the opportunity to ask Bertha for his release.”

“The man’s a fool!” muttered Miss Ley to herself, but quite audibly.

“I think it’s very noble of him,” said Miss Glover, “and I shall make a point of telling him so.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Craddock,” snapped Miss Ley.

Miss Glover looked at Dr. Ramsay to see how he took the rudeness; but at that moment the door was opened and Bertha walked in. Miss Ley caught her mood at a glance. Bertha was evidently not at all distressed; there were no signs of tears, but her cheeks showed more colour than usual, and her lips were firmly compressed; Miss Ley concluded that her niece was in a very pretty passion. However, she drove away the appearance of anger, and her face was full of smiles as she greeted her visitors.

“Miss Glover, how kind of you to come. How d’you do, Dr. Ramsay?... Oh, by the way, I think I must ask you — er — not to interfere in future with my private concerns.”

“Dearest,” broke in Miss Glover, “it’s all for the best.”

Bertha turned to her and the flush on her face deepened: “Ah, I see you’ve been discussing the matter. How good of you! Edward has been asking me to release him.”

Dr. Ramsay nodded with satisfaction.

“But I refused!”

Dr. Ramsay sprang up, and Miss Glover, lifting her hands, cried: “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” This was one of the rare occasions in her life upon which Miss Ley was known to laugh outright.

Bertha now was simply beaming with happiness. “He pretended that he wanted to break the engagement — but I utterly declined.”

“D’you mean to say you wouldn’t let him go when he asked you?” said the doctor.

“Did you think I was going to let my happiness be destroyed by you?” she asked, contemptuously. “I found out that you had been meddling, Dr. Ramsay. Poor boy, he thought his honour required him not to take advantage of my inexperience; I told him, what I’ve told him a thousand times, that I love him, and that I can’t live without him.... Oh, I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Dr. Ramsay. What d’you mean by coming between me and Edward?”

Bertha said the last words passionately, breathing hard. Dr. Ramsay was taken aback, and Miss Glover, thinking such a manner of speech almost unladylike, looked down. Miss Ley’s sharp eyes played from one to the other.

“Do you think he really loves you?” said Miss Glover, at last. “It seems to me that if he had, he would not have been so ready to give you up.”

Miss Ley smiled; it was certainly curious that a creature of quite angelic goodness should make so Machiavellian a suggestion.

“He offered to give me up because he loved me,” said Bertha, proudly. “I adore him ten thousand times more for the suggestion.”

“I have no patience with you,” cried the doctor, unable to contain himself. “He’s marrying you for your money.”

Bertha gave a little laugh. She was standing by the fire and turned to the glass.... She looked at her hands, resting on the edge of the chimney-piece, small and exquisitely modelled, the fingers tapering, the nails of the softest pink. They were the gentlest hands in the world, made for caresses; and, conscious of their beauty, she wore no rings. With them Bertha was well satisfied. Then, raising her glance, she saw herself in the mirror: for a while she gazed into her dark eyes, flashing sometimes and at others conveying the burning messages of love. She looked at her ears — small, and pink like a shell; they made one feel that no materials were so grateful to the artist’s hands as the materials which make up the body of man. Her hair was dark too, so abundant that she scarcely knew how to wear it, curling; one wanted to pass one’s hands through it, imagining that its touch must be delightful. She put her fingers to one side, to arrange a stray lock: they might say what they liked, she thought, but her hair was good. Bertha wondered why she was so dark; her olive skin suggested, indeed, the south with its burning passion: she had the complexion of the fair women in Umbria, clear and soft beyond description. A painter once had said that her skin had in it all the colour of the setting sun, of the setting sun at its borders where the splendour mingles with the sky; it had an hundred mellow tints, cream and ivory, the palest yellow of the heart of roses and the faintest, the very faintest green, all flushed with radiant light. She looked at her full, red lips, almost passionately sensual. Bertha smiled at herself, and saw the even, glistening teeth; the scrutiny had made her blush, and the colour rendered still more exquisite the pallid, marvellous complexion. She turned slowly and faced the three persons looking at her.

“Do you think it impossible for a man to love me for myself? You are not flattering, dear doctor.”

Miss Ley thought Bertha certainly very bold thus to challenge the criticism of two women, both unmarried; but she silenced it. Miss Ley’s eyes went from the statuesque neck to the arms as finely formed, and to the figure.

“You’re looking your best, my dear,” she said, with a smile.

The doctor uttered an expression of annoyance: “Can you do nothing to hinder this madness, Miss Ley?”

“My dear Dr. Ramsay, I have trouble enough in arranging my own life; do not ask me to interfere with other people’s.”

Chapter VI

BERTHA surrendered herself completely to the enjoyment of her love. Her sanguine temperament never allowed her to do anything half-heartedly, and she took no care now to conceal her feelings; love was a great sea into which she boldly plunged, uncaring whether she would swim or sink.

“I am such a fool,” she told Craddock, “I can’t realise that any one has loved before. I feel that the world is only now beginning.”

She hated any separation from him. In the morning she existed for nothing but her lover’s visit at luncheon time, and the walk back with him to his farm; then the afternoon seemed endless, and she counted the hours that must pass before she saw him again. But what bliss it was when, after his work was over, he arrived, and they sat side by side near the fire, talking; Bertha would have no other light than the fitful flaming of the coals, so that, but for the little space where they sat, the room was dark, and the redness of the fire threw on Edward’s face a glow and weird shadows. She loved to look at him, at his clean-cut features, and into his grey eyes. Then her passion knew no restraint.

“Shut your eyes,” she whispered, and she kissed the closed lids; she passed her lips slowly over his lips, and the soft contact made her shudder and laugh. She buried her face in his clothes, inhaling those masterful scents of the countryside which had always fascinated her.

“What have you been doing to-day, my dearest?”

“Oh, there’s nothing much going on the farm just now. We’ve just been ploughing and root-carting.”

It enchanted her to receive information on agricultural subjects, and she could have listened to him for hours. Every word that Edward spoke was charming and original Bertha never took her eyes off him; she loved to see him speak, and often scarcely listened to what he said, merely watching the play of his expression. It puzzled him sometimes to catch her smile of intense happiness, when he was discussing the bush-drainage, for instance, of some field. However, she really took a deep interest in all his stock, and never failed to inquire after a bullock that was indisposed; it pleased her to think of the strong man among his beasts, and the thought gave a tautness to her own muscles. She determined to learn riding and tennis and golf, so that she might accompany him in his amusements; her own attainments seemed unnecessary and even humiliating. Looking at Edward Craddock she realised that man was indeed the lord of creation. She saw him striding over his fields with long steps, ordering his labourers here and there, able to direct their operations, fearless, brave, and free. It was astonishing how many excellent traits she derived from examination of his profile.

Then, talking of the men he employed, she could imagine no felicity greater than to have such a master.

“I should like to be a milkmaid on your farm,” she said.

“I don’t keep milkmaids,” he replied. “I have a milkman; it’s more useful.”

“You dear old thing,” she cried. “How matter of fact you are!”

She caught hold of his hands and looked at them.

“I’m rather frightened of you, sometimes,” she said, laughing. “You’re so strong. I feel so utterly weak and helpless beside you.”

“Are you afraid I shall beat you?”

She looked up at him and then down at the strong hands.

“I don’t think I should mind if you did. I think I should only love you more.”

He burst out laughing and kissed her.

“I’m not joking,” she said. “I understand now those women who love beasts of men. They say that some wives will stand anything from their husbands; they love them all the more because they’re brutal. I think I’m like that; but I’ve never seen you in a passion, Eddie. What are you like when you’re angry?”

“I never am angry.”

“Miss Glover told me that you had the best temper in the world. I’m terrified at all these perfections.”

“Don’t expect too much from me, Bertha. I’m not a model man, you know.”

Of course she kissed him when he made remarks of such absurd modesty.

“I’m very pleased,” she answered; “I don’t want perfection. Of course you’ve got faults, though I can’t see them yet. But when I do, I know I shall only love you better. When a woman loves an ugly man, they say the ugliness only makes him more attractive and I shall love your faults as I love everything that is yours.”

They sat for a while without speaking, and the silence was even more entrancing than the speech. Bertha wished she could remain thus for ever, resting in his arms. She forgot that soon Craddock would develop a healthy appetite and demolish a substantial dinner.

“Let me look at your hands,” she said.

She loved them too. They were large and roughly made, hard with work and exposure, ten times pleasanter, she thought, than the soft hands of the townsman. She felt them firm and intensely masculine. They reminded her of a hand in an Italian Museum, sculptured in porphyry, but for some reason left unfinished; and the lack of detail gave the same impression of massive strength. His hands, too, might have been those of a demi-god or of an hero. She stretched out the long, strong fingers. Craddock, knowing her very little, looked with wonder and amusement. She caught his glance, and with a smile bent down to kiss the upturned palms. She wanted to abase herself before the strong man, to be low and humble before him. She would have been his handmaiden, and nothing could have satisfied her so much as to perform for him the most menial services. She knew not how to show the immensity of her passion.

It pleased Bertha to walk into Blackstable with her lover and to catch the people’s stares, knowing how much the marriage interested them. What did she care if they were surprised at her choosing Edward Craddock, whom they had known all his life? She was proud of him, proud to be his wife.

One day, when it was very warm for the time of year, she was resting on a stile, while Craddock stood by her side. They did not speak, but looked at one another in ecstatic happiness.

“Look,” said Craddock, suddenly. “There’s Arthur Branderton.”

He glanced at Bertha, then from side to side uneasily, as if he wished to avoid a meeting.

“He’s been away, hasn’t he?” asked Bertha. “I wanted to meet him.” She was quite willing that all the world should see them. “Good afternoon, Arthur!” she called out, as the youth approached.

“Oh! is it you, Bertha? Hulloa, Craddock!” He looked at Edward, wondering what he did there with Miss Ley.

“We’ve just been walking into Leanham, and I was tired.”

“Oh!” Young Branderton thought it queer that Bertha should take walks with Craddock.

Bertha burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t know, Edward! He’s the only person in the county who hasn’t heard the news.”

“What news?” asked Branderton. “I’ve been in Yorkshire for the last week at my brother-in-law’s.”

“Mr. Craddock and I are going to be married.”

“Are you, by Jove!” cried Branderton; he looked at Craddock and then, awkwardly, offered his congratulations. They could not help seeing his astonishment, and Craddock flushed, knowing it due to the fact that Bertha had consented to marry a penniless beggar like himself, a man of no family. “I hope you’ll invite me to the wedding,” said the young man to cover his confusion. “Oh, it’s going to be very quiet — there will only be ourselves, Dr. Ramsay, my aunt, and Edward’s best man.”

“Then mayn’t I come?” asked Branderton.

Bertha looked quickly at Edward; it had caused her some uneasiness to think that he might be supported by a person of no great consequence in the place. After all she was Miss Ley; and she had already discovered that some of her lover’s friends were not too desirable. Chance offered her means of surmounting the difficulty.

“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” she said, in answer to Branderton’s appeal, “unless you can get Edward to offer you the important post of best man.”

She succeeded in making the pair thoroughly uncomfortable. Branderton had no great wish to perform that office for Edward— “of course, Craddock is a very good fellow, and a fine sportsman, but not the sort of chap you’d expect a girl like Bertha Ley to marry.” And Edward, understanding the younger man’s feelings, was silent.

But Branderton had some knowledge of polite society, and broke the momentary pause.

“Who is going to be your best man, Craddock?” he asked; he could do nothing else.

“I don’t know — I haven’t thought of it.”

But Branderton, catching Bertha’s eye, suddenly understood her desire and the reason of it.

“Won’t you have me?” he said quickly. “I dare say you’ll find me intelligent enough to learn the duties.”

“I should like it very much,” answered Craddock. “It’s very good of you.”

Branderton looked at Bertha, and she smiled her thanks; he saw she was pleased.

“Where are you going for your honeymoon?” he asked now, to make conversation.

“I don’t know,” answered Craddock. “We’ve hardly had time to think of it yet.”

“You certainly are very vague in all your plans.”

He shook hands with them, receiving from Bertha a grateful pressure, and went off.

“Have you really not thought of our honeymoon, foolish boy?” asked Bertha.

“No!”

“Well, I have. I’ve made up my mind and settled it all. We’re going to Italy, and I mean to show you Florence and Pisa and Siena. It’ll be simply heavenly. We won’t go to Venice, because it’s too sentimental; self-respecting people can’t make love in gondolas at the end of the nineteenth century.... Oh, I long to be with you in the South, beneath the blue sky and the countless stars of night.”

“I’ve never been abroad before,” he said, without much enthusiasm.

But her fire was quite enough for two. “I know, I shall have the pleasure of unfolding it all to you. I shall enjoy it more than I ever have before; it’ll be so new to you. And we can stay six months if we like.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” he cried. “Think of the farm.”

“Oh, bother the farm. It’s our honeymoon, Sposo mio.”

“I don’t think I could possibly stay away more than a fortnight.”

“What nonsense! We can’t go to Italy for a fortnight. The farm can get on without you.”

“And in January and February too, when all the lambing is coming on.”

He did not want to distress Bertha, but really half his lambs would die if he were not there to superintend their entrance into this wicked world.

“But you must go,” said Bertha. “I’ve set my heart upon it.”

He looked down for a while, rather unhappily.

“Wouldn’t a month do?” he asked. “I’ll do anything you really want, Bertha.”

But his obvious dislike to the suggestion cut Bertha’s heart. She was only inclined to be stubborn when she saw he might resist her; and his first word of surrender made her veer round penitently.

“What a selfish beast I am!” she said. “I don’t want to make you miserable, Eddie. I thought it would please you to go abroad, and I’d planned it all so well.... But we won’t go; I hate Italy. Let’s just go up to town for a fortnight, like two country bumpkins.”

“Oh, but you won’t like that.”

“Of course I shall. I like everything you like. D’you think I care where we go so long as I’m with you?... You’re not angry with me, darling, are you?”

Mr. Craddock was good enough to intimate that he was not.

Miss Ley, much against her will, had been driven by Miss Glover into working for some charitable institution, and was knitting babies’ socks (as the smallest garments she could make) when Bertha told her of the altered plan: she dropped a stitch! Miss Ley was too wise to say anything, but she wondered if the world were coming to an end; Bertha’s schemes were shattered like brittle glass, and she really seemed delighted. A month ago opposition would have made Bertha traverse seas and scale precipices rather than abandon an idea that she had got into her head. Verily, love is a prestidigitator who can change the lion into the lamb as easily as a handkerchief into a flower-pot! Miss Ley began to admire Edward Craddock.

He, on his way home after leaving Bertha, was met by the Vicar of Leanham. Mr. Glover was a tall man, angular, fair, thin and red-cheeked — a somewhat feminine edition of his sister, but smelling in the most remarkable fashion of antiseptics; Miss Ley vowed he peppered his clothes with iodoform, and bathed daily in carbolic acid. He was strenuous and charitable, hated a Dissenter, and was over forty.

“Ah, Craddock, I wanted to see you.”

“Not about the banns, Vicar, is it? We’re going to be married by special license.”

Like many countrymen, Edward saw something funny in the clergy — one should not grudge it them, for it is the only jest in their lives — and he was given to treating the parson with more humour than he used in the other affairs of this world. The Vicar laughed; it is one of the best traits of the country clergy that they are willing to be amused with their parishioners’ jocosity.

“The marriage is all settled then? You’re a very lucky young man.”

Craddock put his arm through Mr. Glover’s with the unconscious friendliness that had gained him an hundred friends. “Yes, I am lucky,” he said. “I know you people think it rather queer that Bertha and I should get married, but we’re very much attached to one another, and I mean to do my best by her. You know I’ve never racketed about, Vicar, don’t you?”

“Yes, my boy,” said the Vicar, touched at Edward’s confidence. “Every one knows you’re steady enough.”

“Of course, she could have found men of much better social position than mine — but I’ll try to make her happy. And I’ve got nothing to hide from her as some men have; I go to her almost as straight as she comes to me.”

“That is a very fortunate thing to be able to say.”

“I have never loved another woman in my life, and as for the rest — well, of course, I’m young and I’ve been up to town sometimes; but I always hated and loathed it. And the country and the hard work keep one pretty clear of anything nasty.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” answered Mr. Glover. “I hope you’ll be happy, and I think you will.”

The Vicar felt a slight pricking of conscience, for at first his sister and himself had called the match a mésalliance (they pronounced the word vilely), and not till they learned it was inevitable did they begin to see that their attitude was a little wanting in charity. The two men shook hands.

“I hope you don’t mind me spitting out these things to you, Vicar. I suppose it’s your business in a sort of way. I’ve wanted to tell Miss Ley something of the kind; but somehow or other I can never get an opportunity.”

Chapter VII

EXACTLY one month after her twenty-first birthday, as Bertha had announced, the marriage took place; and the young couple started off to spend their honeymoon in London. Bertha, knowing she would not read, took with her notwithstanding a book, to wit the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and Edward, thinking that railway journeys were always tedious, bought for the occasion The Mystery of the Six-fingered Woman, the title of which attracted him. He was determined not to be bored, for, not content with his novel, he purchased at the station a Sporting Times.

“Oh,” said Bertha, when the train had started, heaving a great sigh of relief, “I’m so glad to be alone with you at last. Now we shan’t have anybody to worry us, and no one can separate us, and we shall be together for the rest of our lives.”

Craddock put down the newspaper, which, from force of habit, he had opened after settling himself in his seat.

“I’m glad to have the ceremony over too.”

“D’you know,” she said, “I was terrified on the way to church; it occurred to me that you might not be there — that you might have changed your mind and fled.”

He laughed. “Why on earth should I change my mind? That’s a thing I never do.”

“Oh, I can’t sit solemnly opposite you as if we’d been married a century. Make room for me, boy.”

She came over to his side and nestled close to him.

“Tell me you love me,” she whispered.

“I love you very much.”

He bent down and kissed his wife, then putting his arm around her waist drew her nearer to him. He was a little nervous, he would not really have been very sorry if some officious person had disregarded the engaged on the carriage and entered. He felt scarcely at home with Bertha, and was still bewildered by his change of fortune; there was, indeed, a vast difference between Court Leys and Bewlie’s Farm.

“I’m so happy,” said Bertha. “Sometimes I’m afraid.... D’you think it can last, d’you think we shall always be as happy? I’ve got everything I want in the world, and I’m absolutely and completely content.” She was silent for a minute, caressing his hands. “You will always love me, Eddie, won’t you — even when I’m old and horrible?”

“I’m not the sort of chap to alter.”

“Oh, you don’t know how I adore you,” she cried passionately. “My love will never alter, it is too strong. To the end of my days I shall always love you with all my heart. I wish I could tell you what I feel.”

Of late the English language had seemed quite incompetent for the expression of her manifold emotions.

They went to a far more expensive hotel than they could afford. Craddock had prudently suggested something less extravagant, but Bertha would not hear of it; as Miss Ley she had been unused to the second-rate, and she was too proud of her new name to take it to any but the best hotel in London.

The more Bertha saw of her husband’s mind, the more it delighted her. She loved the simplicity and the naturalness of the man; she cast off like a tattered silken cloak the sentiments with which for years she had lived, and robed herself in the sturdy homespun which so well suited her lord and master. It was charming to see his naïve enjoyment of everything. To him all was fresh and novel; he would explode with laughter at the comic papers, and in the dailies continually find observations which struck him for their profound originality. He was the unspoiled child of nature; his mind free from the million perversities of civilisation. To know him was in Bertha’s opinion an education in all the goodness and purity, the strength and virtue of the Englishman!

They went often to the theatre, and it pleased Bertha to watch her husband’s simple enjoyment. The pathetic passages of a melodrama, which made Bertha’s lips curl with semi-amused contempt, moved him to facile tears; and in the darkness he held her hand to comfort her, imagining that his wife enjoyed the same emotions as himself. Ah, she wished she could; she hated the education of foreign countries, which, in the study of pictures and palaces and strange peoples, had released her mind from its prison of darkness, yet had destroyed half her illusions; now she would far rather have retained the plain and unadorned illiteracy, the ingenuous ignorance of the typical and creamy English girl. What is the use of knowledge? Blessed are the poor in spirit: all that a woman really wants is purity and goodness, and perhaps a certain acquaintance with plain cooking.

But the lovers, the injured heroine and the wrongly suspected hero, had bidden one another a heartrending good-bye, and the curtain descended to rapturous applause. Edward cleared his throat and blew his nose.

“Isn’t it splendid?” he said, turning to his wife.

“You dear thing!” she whispered.

It touched her to see how deeply he felt it all. How clean and big and simple and good must be his heart! She loved him ten times more because his emotions were easily aroused. Ah yes, she abhorred the cold cynicism of the worldly-wise who sneer at the burning tears of the simple minded.

The curtain rose on the next act, and in his eagerness to see what was about to happen, Edward immediately ceased to listen to what Bertha was in the middle of saying, and gave himself over to the play. The feelings of the audience having been sufficiently harrowed, the comic relief was turned on. The funny man made jokes about various articles of clothing, tumbling over tables and chairs; and it charmed Bertha again to see her husband’s open-hearted hilarity. It tickled her immensely to hear his peals of unrestrained laughter; he put his head back, and, with his hands to his sides, simply roared.

“He has a charming character,” she thought.

Craddock had the strictest notions of morality, and absolutely refused to take his wife to a music-hall; Bertha had seen abroad many sights, the like of which Edward did not dream, but she respected his innocence. It pleased her to see the firmness with which he upheld his principles, and it somewhat amused her to be treated like a little schoolgirl. They went to all the theatres; Edward, on his rare visits to London, had done his sightseeing economically, and the purchase of stalls, the getting into dress-clothes, were new sensations which caused him great pleasure. Bertha liked to see her husband in evening dress; the black suited his florid style, and the white shirt with a high collar threw up his sunburnt, weather-beaten face. He looked strong above all things, and manly; and he was her husband, never to be parted from her except by death: she adored him.

Craddock’s interest in the stage was unflagging; he always wanted to know what was going to happen, and he was able to follow with the closest attention even the incomprehensible plot of a musical comedy. Nothing bored him. Even the most ingenuous find a little cloying the humours and the harmonies of a Gaiety burlesque; they are like toffee and butterscotch, delicacies for which we cannot understand our youthful craving. Bertha had learnt something of music in lands where it is cultivated as a pleasure rather than as a duty, and the popular melodies with obvious refrains sent cold shivers down her back; but they stirred Craddock to the depths of his soul. He beat time to the swinging, vulgar tunes, and his face was transfigured when the band played a patriotic march with a great braying of brass and beating of drums. He whistled and hummed it for days afterwards. “I love music,” he told Bertha in the entracte. “Don’t you?”

With a tender smile she confessed she did, and for fear of hurting Edward’s feelings did not suggest that the music in question made her almost vomit. What mattered it if his taste in that respect were not beyond reproach; after all there was something to be said for the honest, homely melodies that touched the people’s heart. It is only by a convention that the Pastoral Symphony is thought better art than Tarara-boom-deay. Perhaps, in two or three hundred years, when everything is done by electricity and every one is equal, when we are all happy socialists, with good educations and better morals, Beethoven’s complexity will be like a mass of wickedness, and only the plain, honest homeliness of the comic song will appeal to our simple feelings.

“When we get home,” said Craddock, “I want you to play to me; I’m so fond of it.”

“I shall love to,” she murmured. She thought of the long winter evenings which they would spend at the piano, her husband by her side to turn the leaves, while to his astonished ears she unfolded the manifold riches of the great composers. She was convinced that his taste was really excellent.

“I have lots of music that my mother used to play,” he said. “By Jove, I shall like to hear it again — some of those old tunes I can never hear often enough — The Last Rose of Summer, and Home, Sweet Home, and a lot more like that.”

“By Jove, that show was ripping,” said Craddock, when they were having supper; “I should like to see it again before we go back.”

“We’ll do whatever you like, my dearest.”

“I think an evening like that does you good. It bucks me up; doesn’t it you?”

“It does me good to see you amused,” replied Bertha, diplomatically.

The performance had appeared to her vulgar, but in the face of her husband’s enthusiasm she could only accuse herself of a ridiculous squeamishness. Why should she set herself up as a judge of these things? Was it not somewhat vulgar to find vulgarity in what gave such pleasure to the unsophisticated? She was like the nouveau riche who is distressed at the universal lack of gentility; but she was tired of analysis and subtlety, and all the concomitants of decadent civilisation.

“For goodness’s sake,” she thought, “let us be simple and easily amused.”

She remembered the four young ladies who had appeared in flesh-coloured tights and nothing else worth mentioning, and danced a singularly ungraceful jig, which the audience, in its delight, had insisted on having twice repeated.

With no business to do and no friends to visit, there is some difficulty in knowing how to spend one’s time in London. Bertha would have been content to sit all day with Edward in the private sitting-room, contemplating him and her extreme felicity. But Craddock had the fine energy of the Anglo-Saxon race, that desire to be always doing something which has made the English athletes, and missionaries, and members of Parliament.

After his first mouthful of breakfast he invariably asked, “What shall we do to-day?” And Bertha ransacked her brain and a Baedeker to find sights to visit, for to treat London as a foreign town and systematically to explore it was their only resource. They went to the Tower of London and gaped at the crowns and sceptres, at the insignia of the various orders; to Westminster Abbey and joined the party of Americans and country folk who were being driven hither and thither by a black-robed verger; they visited the tombs of the kings and saw everything which it was their duty to see. Bertha developed a fine enthusiasm for the antiquities of London; she quite enjoyed the sensations of bovine ignorance with which the Cook’s tourist surrenders himself into the hands of a custodian, looking as he is told and swallowing with open mouth the most unreliable information. Feeling herself more stupid, Bertha was conscious of a closer connection with her fellow-men. Edward did not like all things in an equal degree; pictures bored him (they were the only things that really did), and their visit to the National Gallery was not a success. Neither did the British Museum meet with his approval; for one thing, he had great difficulty in directing Bertha’s attention so that her eyes should not wander to various naked statues which are exhibited there with no regard at all for the susceptibilities of modest persons. Once she stopped in front of a group that some shields and swords quite inadequately clothed, and remarked on their beauty. Edward looked about uneasily to see whether any one noticed them, and agreeing briefly that they were fine figures, moved rapidly away to some less questionable object.

“I can’t stand all this rot,” he said, when they stood opposite the three goddesses of the Parthenon; “I wouldn’t give twopence to come to this place again.”

Bertha felt somewhat ashamed that she had a sneaking admiration for the statues in question.

“Now tell me,” he said, “where is the beauty of those creatures without any heads?”

Bertha could not tell him, and he was triumphant. He was a dear, good boy and she loved him with all her heart!

The Natural History Museum, on the other hand, aroused Craddock to great enthusiasm. Here he was quite at home; no improprieties were there from which he must keep his wife, and animals were the sort of things that any man could understand. But they brought back to him strongly the country of East Kent and the life which it pleased him most to lead. London was all very well, but he did not feel at home, and it was beginning to pall upon him. Bertha also began talking of home and of Court Leys; she had always lived more in the future than in the present, and even in this, the time of her greatest happiness, looked forward to the days to come at Leanham, when complete felicity would indeed be hers.

She was contented enough now — it was only the eighth day of her married life, but she ardently wished to settle down and satisfy all her anticipations. They talked of the alterations they must make in the house, Craddock had already plans for putting the park in order, for taking over the Home Farm and working it himself.

“I wish we were home,” said Bertha. “I’m sick of London.”

“I don’t think I should mind much if we’d got to the end of our fortnight,” he replied.

Craddock had arranged with himself to stay in town fourteen days, and he could not alter his mind. It made him uncomfortable to change his plans and think out something new; he prided himself, moreover, on always doing the thing he had determined.

But a letter came from Miss Ley announcing that she had packed her trunks and was starting for the continent.

“Oughtn’t we to ask her to stay on?” said Craddock. “It seems a bit rough to turn her out so quickly.”

“You don’t want to have her live with us, do you?” asked Bertha, in some dismay.

“No, rather not; but I don’t see why you should pack her off like a servant with a month’s notice.”

“Oh, I’ll ask her to stay,” said Bertha, anxious to obey her husband’s smallest wish; and obedience was easy, for she knew that Miss Ley would never dream of accepting the offer.

Bertha wished to see no one just then, least of all her aunt, feeling confusedly that her bliss would be diminished by the intrusion of an actor in her old life. Her emotions also were too intense for concealment, and she would have been ashamed to display them to Miss Ley’s critical instinct. Bertha saw only discomfort in meeting the elder lady, with her calm irony and polite contempt for the things which on her husband’s account Bertha most sincerely cherished.

But Miss Ley’s reply showed perhaps that she guessed her niece’s thoughts better than Bertha had given her credit for.

My dearest Bertha, — I am much obliged to your husband for his politeness in asking me to stay at Court Leys; but I flatter myself you have too high an opinion of me to think me capable of accepting. Newly married people offer much matter for ridicule (which, they say, is the noblest characteristic of man, being the only one that distinguishes him from the brutes); but since I am a peculiarly self-denying creature, I do not avail-myself of the opportunity. Perhaps in a year you will have begun to see one another’s imperfections and then, though less amusing, you will be more interesting. No, I am going to Italy — to hurl myself once more into that sea of pensions and second-rate hotels, wherein it is the fate of single women, with moderate incomes, to spend their lives; and I am taking with me a Baedeker, so that if ever I am inclined to think myself less foolish than the average man I may look upon its red cover and remember that I am but human. By the way, I hope do not show your correspondence to your husband, least of all mine. A man can never understand a woman’s epistolary communications, for he reads them with his own simple alphabet of twenty-six letters, whereas he requires one of at least fifty-two; and even that is little. It is madness for a happy pair to pretend to have no secrets from one another: it leads them into so much deception. If, however, as I suspect, you think it your duty to show Edward this note of mine, he will perhaps find it not unuseful for the elucidation of my character, in the study of which I myself have spent many entertaining years.

I give you no address so that you may not be in want of an excuse to leave this letter unanswered. — Your affectionate Aunt,

Mary Ley.

Bertha impatiently tossed the letter to Edward.

“What does she mean?” he asked, when he had read it.

Bertha shrugged her shoulders. “She believes in nothing but the stupidity of other people.... Poor woman, she has never been in love! But we won’t have any secrets from one another, Eddie. I know that you will never hide anything from me, and I — What can I do that is not at your telling?”

“It’s a funny letter,” he replied, looking at it again.

“But we’re free now, darling,” she said. “The house is ready for us; shall we go at once?”

“But we haven’t been here a fortnight yet,” he objected.

“What does it matter? We’re both sick of London; let us go home and start our life. We’re going to lead it for the rest of our days, so we’d better begin it quickly. Honeymoons are stupid things.”

“Well, I don’t mind. By Jove, fancy if we’d gone to Italy for six weeks.”

“Oh, I didn’t know what a honeymoon was like. I think I imagined something quite different.”

“You see I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Of course you were right,” she answered, flinging her arms round his neck; “you’re always right, my darling.... Ah! you can’t think how I love you.”

Chapter VIII

THE Kentish coast is bleak and grey between Leanham and Blackstable; through the long winter months the winds of the North Sea sweep down upon it, bowing the trees before them; and from the murky waters perpetually arise the clouds, and roll up in heavy banks. It is a country that offers those who live there, what they give: sometimes the sombre colours and the silent sea express only restfulness and peace; sometimes the chill breezes send the blood racing through the veins; but also the solitude can answer the deepest melancholy, or the cheerless sky a misery which is more terrible than death. The moment’s mood seems always reproduced in the surrounding scenes, and in them may be found, as it were, a synthesis of the emotions. Bertha stood upon the high road which ran past Court Leys, and from the height looked down upon the lands which were hers. Close at hand the only habitations were a pair of humble cottages, from which time and rough weather had almost effaced the obtrusiveness of human handiwork. They stood away from the road, among fruit trees — a part of nature and not a blot upon it, as Court Leys had never ceased to be. All around were fields, great stretches of ploughed earth and meadows of coarse herbage. The trees were few, and stood out here and there in the distance, bent before the wind. Beyond was Blackstable, straggling grey houses with a border of new villas built for the Londoners who came in summer; and the sea was dotted with the smacks of the fishing town.

Bertha looked at the scene with sensations that she had never known; the heavy clouds hung above her, shutting out the whole world, and she felt an invisible barrier between herself and all other things. This was the land of her birth out of which she, and her fathers before her, had arisen; they had their day, and one by one returned whence they came and became again united with the earth. She had withdrawn from the pomps and vanities of life to live as her ancestors had lived, ploughing the land, sowing and reaping; but her children, the sons of the future, would belong to a new stock, stronger and fairer than the old. The Leys had gone down into the darkness of death, and her children would bear another name. All these things she gathered out of the brown fields and the grey sea mist. She was a little tired and the physical sensation caused a mental fatigue so that she felt in her suddenly the weariness of a family that had lived too long; she knew she was right to choose new blood to mix with the old blood of the Leys. It needed freshness and youth, the massive strength of her husband, to bring life to the decayed race. Her thoughts wandered to her father, the dilettante who wandered through Italy in search of beautiful things and emotions which his native country could not give him; of Miss Ley, whose attitude towards life was a shrug of the shoulders and a well-bred smile of contempt. Was not she, the last of them, wise? Feeling herself too weak to stand alone, she had taken a mate whose will and vitality would be a pillar of strength to her defaillance: her husband had still in his sinews the might of his mother, the Earth, a barbaric power which knew not the subtleties of weakness; he was the conqueror, and she was his handmaiden. But an umbrella was being waved at Mrs. Craddock from the bottom of the hill, and she smiled, recognising the masculine walk of Miss Glover.

Even from a distance the maiden’s determination and strength of mind were apparent; she approached, her face redder even than usual after the climb, encased in the braided jacket that fitted her as severely as sardines are fitted in their tin.

“I was coming to see you, Bertha,” she cried. “I heard you were back.”

“We’ve been home several days, getting to rights.”

Miss Clover shook Bertha’s hand with much vigour, and together they walked back to the house, along the avenue bordered with leafless trees.

“Now, do tell me all about your honeymoon, I’m so anxious to hear everything.”

But Bertha was not very communicative, she had an instinctive dislike to telling her private affairs, and never had any overpowering desire for sympathy.

“Oh, I don’t think there’s much to tell,” she answered, when they were in the drawing-room and she was pouring out tea for her guest. “I suppose all honeymoons are more or less alike.”

“You funny girl,” said Miss Glover. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” said Bertha, with a smile that was almost ecstatic; then after a little pause: “We had a very good time — we went to all the theatres.”

Miss Glover felt that marriage had caused a difference in Bertha, and it made her nervous to realise the change. She looked uneasily at the married woman and occasionally blushed.

“And are you really happy?” she blurted out suddenly. Bertha smiled, and reddening, looked more charming than ever.

“Yes — I think I’m perfectly happy.”

“Aren’t you sure?” asked Miss Glover, who cultivated precision in every part of life and strongly disapproved of persons who did not know their own minds.

Bertha looked at her for a moment, as if considering the question.

“You know,” she answered, at last, “happiness is never quite what one expected it to be. I hardly hoped for so much; but I didn’t imagine it quite like it is.”

“Ah, well, I think it’s better not to go into these things,” replied Miss Glover, a little severely, thinking the suggestion of analysis scarcely suitable in a young married woman. “We ought to take things as they are, and be thankful.”

“Ought we?” said Bertha lightly, “I never do.... I’m never satisfied with what I have.”

They heard the opening of the front door and Bertha jumped up.

“There’s Edward! I must go and see him. You don’t mind, do you?”

She almost skipped out of the room; marriage, curiously enough, had dissipated the gravity of manner which had made people find so little girlishness about her. She seemed younger, lighter of heart.

“What a funny creature she is!” thought Miss Glover. “When she was a girl she had all the ways of a married woman, and now that she’s really married she might be a schoolgirl.”

The parson’s sister was not certain whether the irresponsibility of Bertha was fit to her responsible position, whether her unusual bursts of laughter were proper to a mystic state demanding gravity.

“I hope she’ll turn out all right,” she sighed.

But Bertha impulsively rushed to her husband and kissed him. She helped him off with his coat.

“I’m so glad to see you again,” she cried, laughing a little at her own eagerness; for it was only after luncheon that he had left her.

“Is any one here?” he asked, noticing Miss Glover’s umbrella. He returned his wife’s embrace somewhat mechanically.

“Come and see,” said Bertha, taking his arm and dragging him along. “You must be dying for tea, you poor thing.”

“Miss Glover!” he said, shaking the lady’s hand as energetically as she shook his. “How good of you to come and see us. I am glad to see you. You see we came home sooner than we expected — there’s no place like the country, is there?”

“You’re right there, Mr. Craddock; I can’t bear London.”

“Oh, you don’t know it,” said Bertha; “for you it’s Aerated Bread shops, Exeter Hall, and Church Congresses.”

“Bertha!” cried Edward, in a tone of surprise; he could not understand frivolity with Miss Glover.

That good creature was far to kind-hearted to take offence at any remark of Bertha’s, and smiled grimly: she could smile in no other way.

“Tell me what you did in London. I can’t get anything out of Bertha.”

Craddock’s mind was communicative, nothing pleased him more than to give people information, and he was always ready to share his knowledge with the world at large. He never picked up a fact without rushing to tell it to somebody else. Some persons when they know a thing immediately lose interest and it bores them to discuss it, but Craddock was not of these. Nor could repetition exhaust his eagerness to enlighten his fellows, he would tell an hundred people the news of the day and be as fresh as ever when it came to the hundred and first. Such a characteristic is undoubtedly a gift, useful in the highest degree to schoolmasters and politicians, but slightly tedious to their hearers. Craddock favoured his guest with a detailed account of all their adventures in London, the plays they had seen, the plots thereof and the actors who played them. He gave the complete list of the museums and churches and public buildings they had visited, while Bertha looked at him, smiling happily at his enthusiasm. She cared little what he spoke of, the mere sound of his voice was music in her ears, and she would have listened delightedly while he read aloud from end to end Whitaker’s Almanack: that was a thing, by the way, which he was quite capable of doing. Edward corresponded far more with Miss Glover’s conception of the newly married man than did Bertha with that of the newly married woman.

“He is a nice fellow,” she said to her brother afterwards, when they were eating their supper of cold mutton, solemnly seated at either end of a long table.

“Yes,” answered the Vicar, in his tired, patient voice, “I think he’ll turn out a good husband.”

Mr. Glover was patience itself, which a little irritated Miss Ley, who liked a man of spirit; and of that Mr. Glover had never a grain. He was resigned to everything; he was resigned to his food being badly cooked, to the perversity of human nature, to the existence of dissenters (almost), to his infinitesimal salary; he was resignation driven to death. Miss Ley said he was like those Spanish donkeys that one sees plodding along in a string, listlessly bearing over-heavy loads — patient, patient, patient. But not so patient as Mr. Glover; the donkey sometimes kicked, the Vicar of Leanham never.

“I do hope it will turn out well, Charles,” said Miss Glover.

“I hope it will,” he answered; then after a pause: “Did you ask them if they were coming to church to-morrow?” He helped himself to mashed potatoes, noticing long-sufferingly that they were burnt again; the potatoes were always burnt, but he made no comment.

“Oh, I quite forgot,” said his sister, answering the question. “But I think they’re sure to. Edward Craddock was always a regular attendant.”

Mr. Glover made no reply, and they kept silence for the rest of the meal. Immediately afterwards the parson went into his study to finish the morrow’s sermon, and Miss Glover took out of her basket her brother’s woollen socks and began to darn them. She worked for more than an hour, thinking meanwhile of the Craddocks; she liked Edward better and better each time she saw him, and she felt he was a man who could be trusted. She upbraided herself a little for her disapproval of the marriage; her action was unchristian, and she asked herself whether it was not her duty to apologise to Bertha or to Craddock; the thought of doing something humiliating to her own self-respect attracted her wonderfully. But Bertha was different from other girls; Miss Glover, thinking of her, grew confused.

But a tick of the clock to announce an hour about to strike made her look up, and she saw it wanted but five minutes to ten.

“I had no idea it was so late.”

She got up and tidily put away her work, then taking from the top of the harmonium the Bible and the big prayer-book which were upon it, placed them at the end of the table. She drew forward a chair for her brother, and sat patiently to await his coming. As the clock struck she heard the study door open, and the Vicar walked in. Without a word he went to the books, and sitting down, found his place in the Bible.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

He looked up one moment over his spectacles. “Yes.”

Miss Glover leant forward and rang the bell — the servant appeared with a basket of eggs, which she placed on the table. Mr. Glover looked at her till she was settled on her chair, and began the lesson. Afterwards the servant lit two candles and bade them good-night. Miss Glover counted the eggs.

“How many are there to-day?” asked the parson.

“Seven,” she answered, dating them one by one, and entering the number in a book kept for the purpose.

“Are you ready?” now asked Mr. Glover.

“Yes, Charles,” she said, taking one of the candles.

He put out the lamp, and with the other candle followed her upstairs. She stopped outside her door and bade him good-night; he kissed her coldly on the forehead and they went into their respective rooms.

There is always a certain flurry in a country-house on Sunday morning. There is in the air a feeling peculiar to the day, a state of alertness and expectation; for even when they are repeated for years, week by week, the preparations for church cannot be taken coolly. The odour of clean linen is unmistakable, every one is highly starched and somewhat ill-at-ease; the members of the household ask one another if they’re ready, they hunt for prayer-books; the ladies are never dressed in time and sally out at last, buttoning their gloves; the men stamp and fume and take out their watches. Edward, of course, wore a tail-coat and a top-hat, which is quite the proper costume for the squire to go to church in, and no one gave more thought to the proprieties than Edward. He held himself very upright, cultivating the slightly self-conscious gravity considered fit to the occasion.

“We shall be late, Bertha,” he said. “It will look so bad — the first time we come to church since our marriage, too.”

“My dear,” said Bertha, “you may be quite certain that even if Mr. Glover is so indiscreet as to start, for the congregation the ceremony will not really begin till we appear.”

They drove up in an old-fashioned brougham used only for going to church and to dinner-parties, and the word was immediately passed by the loungers at the porch to the devout within; there was a rustle of attention as Mr. and Mrs. Craddock walked up the aisle to the front pew which was theirs by right.

“He looks at home, don’t he?” murmured the natives, for the behaviour of Edward interested them more than that of his wife, who was sufficiently above them to be almost a stranger.

Bertha sailed up with a royal unconsciousness of the eyes upon her; she was pleased with her personal appearance, and intensely proud of her good-looking husband. Mrs. Branderton, the mother of Craddock’s best man, fixed her eye-glass upon her and stared as is the custom of great ladies in the suburbs. Mrs. Branderton was a woman who cultivated the mode in the depths of the country, a little, giggling, grey-haired creature who talked stupidly in a high, cracked voice and had her too juvenile bonnets straight from Paris. She was a gentlewoman, and this, of course, is a very fine thing to be. She was proud of it (in quite a nice way), and in the habit of saying that gentlefolk were gentlefolk; which, if you come to think of it, is a most profound remark.

“I mean to go and speak to the Craddocks afterwards,” she whispered to her son. “It will have a good effect on the Leanham people; I wonder if poor Bertha feels it yet.”

Mrs. Branderton had a self-importance which was almost sublime; it never occurred to her that there might be persons sufficiently ill-conditioned as to resent her patronage. She did it all in kindness — she showered advice upon all and sundry, besides soups and jellies upon the poor, to whom when they were ill she even sent her cook to read the Bible. She would have gone herself, only she strongly disapproved of familiarity with the lower classes, which made them independent and often rude. Mrs. Branderton knew without possibility of question that she and her equals were made of different clay from common folk; but, being a gentlewoman, did not throw this fact in the latters’ faces, unless, of course, they gave themselves airs, when she thought a straight talking-to did them good. Without any striking advantages of birth, money, or intelligence, Mrs. Branderton never doubted her right to direct the affairs and fashions, even the modes of thought of her neighbours; and by sheer force of self-esteem had caused them to submit for thirty years to her tyranny, hating her and yet looking upon her invitations to a bad dinner, as something quite desirable.

Mrs. Branderton had debated with herself how she should treat the Craddocks.

“I wonder if it’s my duty to cut them,” she said. “Edward Craddock is not the sort of man a Miss Ley ought to marry. But there are so few gentlefolk in the neighbourhood, and of course people do make marriages which they wouldn’t have dreamed of twenty years ago. Even the best society is very mixed nowadays. Perhaps I’d better err on the side of mercy!”

Mrs. Branderton was a little pleased to think that the Leys required her support — as was proved by the request of her son’s services at the wedding.

“The fact is gentlefolk are gentlefolk, and they must stand by one another in these days of pork-butchers and furniture people.”

After the service, when the parishioners were standing about the churchyard, Mrs. Branderton sailed up to the Craddocks followed by Arthur, and in her high, cracked voice began to talk with Edward. She kept an eye on the Leanham people to see that her action was being duly noticed, speaking to Craddock in the manner a gentlewoman should adopt with a man whose gentility was a little doubtful. Of course he was very much pleased and flattered.

Chapter IX

SOME days later, after the due preliminaries which Mrs. Branderton would on no account have neglected, the Craddocks received an invitation to dinner. Bertha silently passed it to her husband.

“I wonder who she’ll ask to meet us,” he said.

“D’you want to go?” asked Bertha.

“Why, don’t you? We’ve got no engagement, have we?”

“Have you ever dined there before?” said Bertha.

“No. I’ve been to tennis-parties and that sort of thing, but I’ve hardly set foot inside their house.”

“Well, I think it’s an impertinence of her to ask you now.”

Edward opened his mouth wide: “What on earth d’you mean?”

“Oh, don’t you see?” cried his wife, “they’re merely asking you because you’re my husband. It’s humiliating.”

“Nonsense!” replied Edward, laughing. “And if they are, what do I care? — I’m not so thin-skinned as that. Mrs. Branderton was very nice to me the other Sunday; it would be funny if we didn’t accept.”

“Did you think she was nice? Didn’t you see that she was patronising you as if you were a groom. It made me boil with rage. I could hardly hold my tongue.”

Edward laughed again. “I never noticed anything. It’s just your fancy, Bertha.”

“I’m not going to her horrid dinner-party.”

“Then I shall go by myself,” he replied, laughing.

Bertha turned white; it was as if she had received a sudden blow; but he was laughing, of course he did not mean what he said. She hurriedly agreed to all he asked.

“Of course if you want to go, Eddie, I’ll come too.... It was only for your sake that I did not wish to.”

“We must be neighbourly. I want to be friends with everybody.”

She sat on the side of his chair, putting her arm round his neck. Edward patted her hand and she looked at him with eyes full of eager love, she bent down and kissed his hair. How foolish had been her sudden thought that he did not love her!

But Bertha had another reason for not wishing to go to Mrs. Branderton. She knew Edward would be bitterly criticised, and the thought made her wretched; they would talk of his appearance and manner, and wonder how they got on together. Bertha understood well enough the position Edward occupied in Leanham; the Brandertons and their like, knowing him all his life, had treated him as a mere acquaintance: for them he had been a person to whom you are civil, and that is all. This was the first occasion upon which he had been dealt with entirely as an equal; it was his introduction into what Mrs. Branderton was pleased to call the upper ten of Leanham. It did indeed make Bertha’s blood boil; and it cut her to the heart to think that for years he had been used in so infamous a fashion: he did not seem to mind.

“If I were he,” she said, “I’d rather die than go. They’ve ignored him always, and now they take him up as a favour to me.”

But Edward appeared to have no pride; of course his character was charming, and he could bear ill will to no one. He neither resented the former neglect of the Brandertons nor their present impertinence.

“I wish I could make him understand.”

Bertha passed the intervening week in a tremor of anxiety. She divined who the other guests would be. Would they laugh at him? Of course not openly; Mrs. Branderton, the least charitable of them all, prided herself upon her breeding; but Edward was shy, and among strangers awkward. To Bertha this was a charm rather than a defect; his half-bashful candour touched her, and she compared it favourably with the foolish worldliness of the imaginary man-about-town, whose dissipations she always opposed to her husband’s virtues. But she knew that a spiteful tongue would find another name for what she called a delightful naïveté.

When at last the great day arrived, and they trundled off in the old-fashioned brougham, Bertha was thoroughly prepared to take mortal offence at the merest shadow of a slight offered to her husband. The Lord Chief Justice himself could not have been more careful of a company promoter’s fair name than was Mrs. Craddock of her husband’s susceptibilities; Edward, like the financier, treated the affair with indifference.

Mrs. Branderton had routed out the whole countryside for her show of gentlefolk. They had come from Blackstable and Tercanbury and Faversley, and from the seats and mansions which surrounded those places. Mrs. Mayston Ryle was there in a wonderful jete-black wig, and a voluminous dress of violet silk. Lady Wagget was there.

“Merely the widow of a city knight, my dear,” said the hostess to Bertha, “but if she isn’t distinguished, she’s good; so one mustn’t be too hard upon her.”

General Hancock arrived with two fuzzy-haired daughters, who were dreadfully plain, but pretended not to know it. They had walked; and while the soldier toddled in, blowing like a grampus, the girls (whose united ages made the respectable total of sixty-five years) stayed behind to remove their boots and put on the shoes which they had brought in a bag. Then, in a little while, came the Dean, meek and somewhat talkative; Mr. Glover had been invited for his sake, and of course Charles’ sister could not be omitted. She was looking almost festive in very shiny black satin.

“Poor dear,” said Mrs. Branderton to another guest, “it’s her only dinner dress; I’ve seen it for years. I’d willingly give her one of my old ones, only I’m afraid I should offend her by offering it. People in that class are so ridiculously sensitive.”

Mr. Atthill Bacot was announced; he had once contested the seat, and ever after been regarded as an authority upon the nation’s affairs. Mr. James Lycett and Mr. Molson came next, both red-faced squires with dogmatic opinions; they were alike as two peas, and it had been the local joke for thirty years that no one but their wives could tell them apart. Mrs. Lycett was thin and quiet and staid, wearing two little strips of lace on her hair to represent a cap; Mrs. Molson was so insignificant that no one had ever noticed what she was like. It was one of Mrs. Branderton’s representative gatherings; moral excellence was joined to perfect gentility and the result could not fail to edify. She was herself in high spirits and her cracked voice rang high and shrill. She was conscious of a successful costume; she really had much taste, and her frock would have looked charming on a woman half her age. Thinking also that it was part of woman’s duty to be amiable, Mrs. Branderton smiled and ogled at the old gentlemen in a way that quite alarmed them, and Mr. Atthill Bacot really thought she had designs upon his virtue.

The dinner just missed being eatable. Mrs. Branderton was a woman of fashion and disdained the solid fare of a country dinner-party — thick soup, fried soles, mutton cutlets, roast mutton, pheasant, Charlotte russe, and jellies. (The earlier dishes are variable according to season, but the Charlotte russe and the jelly are inevitable.) No, Mrs. Branderton said she must be a little more “distangay” than that, and provided her guests with clear soup, entrees from the Stores, a fluffy sweet which looked pretty and tasted horrid. The feast was extremely elegant, but it was not filling, which is unpleasant to elderly squires with large appetites.

“I never get enough to eat at the Brandertons,” said Mr. Atthill Bacot, indignantly.

“Well, I know the old woman,” replied Mr. Molson. Mrs. Branderton was the same age as himself, but he was rather a dog, and thought himself quite young enough to flirt with the least plain of the two Miss Hancocks. “I know her well, and I make a point of drinking a glass of sherry with a couple of eggs beaten up in it before I come.”

“The wines are positively immoral,” said Mrs. Mayston Ryle, who prided herself on her palate. “I’m always inclined to bring with me a flask with a little good whisky in it.”

But if the food was not heavy the conversation was. It is an axiom of narration that truth should coincide with probability, and the realist is perpetually hampered by the wild exaggeration of actual facts; a verbatim report of the conversation at Mrs. Branderton’s dinner-party would read like a shrieking caricature. The anecdote reigned supreme. Mrs. Mayston Ryle was a specialist in the clerical anecdote; she successively related the story of Bishop Thorold and his white hands, the story of Bishop Wilberforce and the bloody shovel. (This somewhat shocked the ladies, but Mrs. Mayston Ryle could not spoil her point by the omission of a swear word.) The Dean gave an anecdote about himself, to which Mrs. Mayston Ryle retorted with one about the Archbishop of Canterbury and the tedious curate. Mr. Arthill Bacot gave political anecdotes, Mr. Gladstone and the table of the House of Commons, Dizzy and the agricultural labourer. The climax came when General Hancock gave his celebrated stories about the Duke of Wellington. Edward laughed heartily at them all.

Bertha’s eyes were constantly upon her husband. She detested the thoughts that ran through her head, for that they should come to her at all was disparaging to him; but still she was horribly anxious. Was he not perfect, and handsome, and adorable? Why should she tremble before the opinion of a dozen stupid people? But she could not help it. However much she despised her neighbours, she could not prevent herself from being miserably affected by their judgment. And what did Edward feel? Was he as nervous as she? She could not bear the thought that he should suffer pain. It was an immense relief when Mrs. Branderton rose from the table. Bertha looked at Arthur holding open the door; she would have given anything to ask him to look after Edward, but dared not. She was terrified lest, to his humiliation, those old squires should pointedly ignore him.

On reaching the drawing-room Miss Glover found herself by Bertha’s side, a little separated from the others, and the accident seemed designed by higher powers to give her an opportunity for the amends which she felt it her duty to make Mrs. Craddock for her former disparagement of Edward. She had been thinking the matter over, and considered an apology distinctly needful. But Miss Glover suffered terribly from nervousness, and the idea of broaching so delicate a subject caused her indescribable torture; yet the very unpleasantness of it reassured her, if speech was so disagreeable, it must obviously be her duty. But the words stuck in her throat, and she began talking of the weather. She reproached herself for cowardice; she set her teeth and grew scarlet.

“Bertha, I want to beg your pardon,” she blurted out suddenly.

“What on earth for?” Bertha opened her eyes wide and looked at the poor woman with astonishment.

“I feel I’ve been unjust to your husband. I thought he wasn’t a proper match for you, and I said things about him which I shouldn’t even have thought. I’m very sorry. He’s one of the best and kindest men I’ve ever seen, and I’m very glad you married him, and I’m sure you’ll be very happy.”

Tears came to Bertha’s eyes as she laughed; she felt inclined to throw her arms round the grim Miss Glover’s neck, for such a speech at that moment was very comforting.

“Of course I know you didn’t mean what you said.”

“Oh yes, I did, I’m sorry to say,” replied Miss Glover, who could allow no extenuation to her own crime.

“I’d quite forgotten all about it; and I believe you’ll soon be as madly in love with Edward as I am.”

“My dear Bertha,” replied Miss Glover, who never jested, “with your husband? You must be joking.”

But Mrs. Branderton interrupted them with her high voice.

“Bertha, dear, I want to talk to you.” Bertha, smiling, sat down beside her, and Mrs. Branderton proceeded in undertones.

“I must tell you, every one has been saying you’re the handsomest couple in the county, and we all think your husband is so nice.”

“He laughed at all your jokes,” replied Bertha.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Branderton, looking upwards and sideways like a canary, “he has such a merry disposition. But I’ve always liked him, dear. I was telling Mrs. Mayston Ryle that I’ve known him intimately ever since he was born. I thought it would please you to know that we all think your husband is nice.”

“I’m very much pleased. I hope Edward will be equally satisfied with all of you.”

The Craddock’s carriage came early, and Bertha offered to drive the Glovers home.

“I wonder if that lady has swallowed a poker,” said Mr. Molson, as soon as the drawing-room door was closed.

The two Miss Hancocks went into shrieks of laughter at this sally, and even the Dean smiled gently.

“Where did she get her diamonds from?” said the elder Miss Hancock. “I thought they were as poor as church mice.”

“The diamonds and the pictures are the only things they have left,” said Mrs. Branderton; “her family always refused to sell them; though, of course, it’s absurd for people in that position to have such jewels.”

“He’s a remarkably nice fellow,” said Mrs. Mayston Ryle in her deep, authoritative voice; “but I agree with Mr. Molson, she’s distinctly inclined to give herself airs.”

“The Leys for generations have been as proud as turkey-cocks,” added Mrs. Branderton.

“I shouldn’t have thought Mrs. Craddock had much to be proud of now, at all events,” said the elder Miss Hancock; she had no ancestors herself, and thought people who had were snobs.

“Perhaps she was a little nervous,” said Lady Waggett, who, though not distinguished, was good. “I know when I was a bride I used to be all of a tremble when I went to dinner-parties.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Mayston Ryle. “She was extremely self-possessed; I don’t think it looks well for a young woman to have so much assurance. And I think she ought to be told that it’s hardly well bred for a young married woman to leave a house before anybody else as if she were royalty, when there are present women of a certain age and of a position undoubtedly not inferior to her own.”

“Oh, they’re so newly married they like to be alone, poor things,” said Lady Waggett. “I know I used to when I was first married to Sir Samuel.”

“My dear Lady Waggett,” answered Mrs. Mayston Ryle in tones of thunder, “the cases are not similar; Mrs. Craddock was a Miss Ley, and really should know something of the usages of good society.”

“Well, what do you think she said to me?” said Mrs. Branderton, waving her thin arms. “I was telling her that we were all so pleased with her husband — I thought it would comfort her a little, poor thing — and she said she hoped he would be equally satisfied with us.”

Mrs. Mayston Ryle for a moment was stupefied, but soon recovered.

“How very amusing,” she cried, rising from her chair. “Ha! ha! She hopes Mr. Edward Craddock will be satisfied with Mrs. Mayston Ryle.”

The two Miss Hancocks said “Ha! ha!” in chorus. Then, the great lady’s carriage being announced, she bade the assembly good-night, and swept out with a great rustling of her violet silk. The party might now really be looked upon as concluded, and the others obediently flocked off.

When they had put the Glovers down, Bertha nestled close to her husband.

“I’m so glad it’s all over,” she whispered; “I’m only happy when I’m alone with you.”

“It was a jolly evening, wasn’t it,” he said. “I thought they were all ripping.”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed it, dear; I was afraid you’d be bored.”

“Good heavens, that’s the last thing I should be. It does one good to hear conversation like that now and then — it brightens one up.”

Bertha started a little.

“Old Bacot is a very well informed man, isn’t he? I shouldn’t wonder if he was right in thinking that the government would go out at the end of their six years.”

“He always leads one to believe that he’s in the Prime Minister’s confidence,” said Bertha.

“And the General is a funny old chap,” added Edward. “That was a good story he told about the Duke of Wellington.”

Somehow this remark had a curious effect upon Bertha; she could not restrain herself, but burst suddenly into shrieks of hysterical laughter. Her husband, thinking she was laughing at the anecdote, burst also into peal upon peal.

“And the story about the Bishop’s gaiters!” cried Edward, shouting with merriment.

The more he laughed, the more hysterical became Bertha; and as they drove through the silent night they screamed and yelled and shook with uncontrollable mirth.

Chapter X

AND so the Craddocks began their journey along the great road nowhither which is called the Road of Holy Matrimony. The spring came, and with it a hundred new delights; Bertha watched the lengthening days, the coloured crocus spring from the ground, the snowbells; the warm damp days of February brought the primroses and then the violets. February is a month of languors; the world’s heart is heavy, listless of the unrest of April and the vigorous life of May. Throughout nature the seed is germinating and the pulse of all things throbs. The sea mists arose from the North Sea, and covered the Kentish land with a veil of moisture, white and almost transparent, so that through it the leafless trees were seen strangely distorted, their branches like long arms writhing to free themselves from the shackles of winter; the grass was very green in the marshes, and the young lambs frisked and gambolled, bleating to their mothers. Already the thrushes and the blackbirds were singing in the hedge-rows. March roared in boisterously, and the clouds, high above, swept across the sky before the tearing winds, sometimes heaped up in heavy masses and then blown asunder, flying westwards, tripping over one another’s heels in their hurry. Nature was resting; holding her breath, as it were, before the great effort of birth.

Gradually Bertha came to know her husband better. At her marriage she had really known nothing but that she loved him; the senses only had spoken, she and he were merely puppets whom nature had thrown together and made attractive in one another’s eyes, that the race might be continued. Bertha, desire burning within her like a fire, had flung herself into her husband’s arms, loving as the beasts love — and as the gods. He was the man and she was the woman, and the world was a Garden of Eden, conjured up by the power of passion. But greater knowledge brought only greater love. Little by little, reading in Edward’s mind, Bertha discovered to her delight an unexpected purity; it was with a feeling of curious happiness that she recognised his innocence. She saw that he had never loved before, that woman to him was a strange thing, a thing he had scarcely known. She was proud that her husband had come to her unsoiled by foreign embraces, the lips that kissed hers were clean; no speech on the subject had passed between them, and yet she felt certain of his extreme chastity. His soul was truly virginal.

And this being so, how could she fail to adore him! Bertha was only happy in her husband’s company, and it was an exquisite pleasure for her to think that their bonds could not be sundered, that so long as they lived they would be always together, always inseparable. She followed him like a dog, with a subjection that was really touching; her pride had utterly vanished, and she desired to exist only in Edward, to fuse her character with his and be entirely one with him. She wanted him to be her only individuality, likening herself to ivy climbing to the oak tree; for he was an oak tree, a pillar of strength, and she was very weak. In the morning after breakfast she accompanied him on his walk around the farms, and only when her presence was impossible did she stay at home to look after her house. The attempt to read was hopeless, and she had thrown aside her books. Why should she read? Not for entertainment, since her husband was a perpetual occupation; and if she knew how to love, what other knowledge was useful? Often, left alone for a while, she would take up some volume, but her mind quickly wandered and she thought of Edward again, wishing to be with him.

Bertha’s life was an exquisite dream, a dream which need never end; for her happiness was not of that boisterous sort which needs excursions and alarums, but equable and smooth; she dwelt in a paradise of rosy tints, in which were neither violent shadows nor glaring lights. She was in heaven, and the only link attaching her to earth was the weekly service at Leanham. There was a delightful humanity about the bare church with its pitch-pine, highly varnished pews, and the odours of hair-pomade and Reckitt’s Blue. Edward was in his Sabbath garments, the organist made horrid sounds, and the village choir sang out of tune; Mr. Glover’s mechanical delivery of the prayers cleverly extracted all beauty from them, and his sermon was intensely prosaic. Those two hours of church gave Bertha just the touch of earthliness which was necessary to make her realize that life was not entirely spiritual.

Now came April. The elms before Court Leys were beginning to burst into leaf; the green buds covered the branches like a delicate rain, a verdant haze that was visible from a little distance and vanished when one came near. The brown fields also clothed themselves with a summer garment; the clover sprang up green and luxurious, and the crops showed good promise for the future. There were days when the air was almost balmy, when the sun was warm and the heart leapt, certain at last that the spring was at hand. The warm and comfortable rain soaked into the ground; and from the branches continually hung the countless drops, glistening in the succeeding sun. The self-conscious tulip unfolded her petals and carpeted the ground with gaudy colour. The clouds above Leanham were lifted up and the world was stretched out in a greater circle. The birds now sang with no uncertain notes as in March, but from a full throat, filling the air; and in the hawthorn behind Court Leys the first nightingale poured out his richness. And the full scents of the earth rose up, the fragrance of the mould and of the rain, the perfumes of the sun and of the soft breezes.

But sometimes, without ceasing, it rained from morning till night, and then Edward rubbed his hands.

“I wish this would keep on for a week; it’s just what the country wants.”

One such day Bertha was lying on a sofa while Edward stood at the window, looking at the pattering rain. She thought of the November afternoon when she had stood at the same window considering the dreariness of the winter, but her heart full of hope and love.

“Come and sit down beside me, Eddie dear,” she said. “I’ve hardly seen you all day.”

“I’ve got to go out,” he said, without turning round.

“Oh no, you haven’t. Come here and sit down.”

“I’ll come for two minutes, while they’re putting the trap in.”

“Kiss me.”

He kissed her and she laughed. “You funny boy, I don’t believe you care about kissing me a bit.”

He could not answer this, for at that moment the trap came to the door and he sprang up.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m driving over to see old Potts at Herne about some sheep.”

“Is that all? Don’t you think you might stay in for an afternoon when I ask you?”

“Why?” he replied. “There’s nothing to do in here. Nobody is coming, I suppose.”

“I want to be with you, Eddie,” she said, plaintively.

He laughed. “I’m afraid I can’t break an appointment just for that.”

“Shall I come with you then?”

“What on earth for?” he asked, with surprise.

“I want to be with you; I hate being always separated from you.”

“But we’re not always separated. Hang it all, it seems to me that we’re always together.”

“You don’t notice my absence as I notice yours,” said Bertha in a low voice, looking down.

“But it’s raining cats and dogs, and you’ll get wet through, if you come.”

“What do I care about that if I’m with you!”

“Then come by all means if you like.”

“You don’t care if I come or not; it’s nothing to you.”

“Well, I think it would be very silly of you to come in the rain. You bet, I shouldn’t go if I could help it.”

“Then go,” she said. She kept back with difficulty the bitter words which were on the tip of her tongue.

“You’re much better at home,” said her husband, cheerfully. “I shall be in to tea at five. Ta-ta!”

He might have said a thousand things. He might have said that nothing would please him more than that she should accompany him, that the appointment could go to the devil and he would stay with her. But he went off, cheerfully whistling. He didn’t care. Bertha’s cheeks grew red with the humiliation of his refusal.

“He doesn’t love me,” she said, and suddenly burst into tears — the first tears of her married life, the first she had wept since her father’s death; and they made her ashamed. She tried to control them, but could not and wept ungovernably. Edward’s words seemed terribly cruel; she wondered how he could have said them.

“I might have expected it,” she said; “he doesn’t love me.”

She grew angry with him, remembering the little coldnesses which had often pained her. Often he almost pushed her away when she came to caress him — because he had at the moment something else to occupy him; often he had left unanswered her protestations of undying affection. Did he not know that he cut her to the quick? When she said she loved him with all her heart, he wondered if the clock was wound up! Bertha brooded for two hours over her unhappiness, and, ignorant of the time, was surprised to hear the trap again at the door; her first impulse was to run and let Edward in, but she restrained herself. She was very angry. He entered, and shouting to her that he was wet and must change, pounded upstairs. Of course he had not noticed that for the first time since their marriage his wife had not met him in the hall when he came in — he never noticed anything.

Edward entered the room, his face glowing with the fresh air.

“By Jove, I’m glad you didn’t come. The rain simply poured down. How about tea? I’m starving.”

He thought of his tea when Bertha wanted apologies, humble excuses, a plea for pardon. He was as cheerful as usual and quite unconscious that his wife had been crying herself into a towering passion.

“Did you buy your sheep?” she said, in an indignant tone. She was anxious for Edward to notice her discomposure, so that she might reproach him for his sins; but he noticed nothing.

“Not much,” he cried. “I wouldn’t have given a fiver for the lot.”

“You might as well have stayed with me, as I asked you.”

“As far as business goes, I really might. But I dare say the drive across country did me good.” He was a man who always made the best of things.

Bertha took up a book and began reading.

“Where’s the paper?” asked Edward. “I haven’t read the leading articles yet.”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

They sat till dinner, Edward methodically going through the Standard, column after column; Bertha turning over the pages of her book, trying to understand, but occupied the whole time only with her injuries. They ate the meal almost in silence, for Edward was not talkative. He merely remarked that soon they would be having new potatoes and that he had met Dr. Ramsay. Bertha answered in mono-syllables.

“You’re very quiet, Bertha,” he remarked, later in the evening. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing!”

“Got a headache?”

“No!”

He made no more inquiries, satisfied that her silence was due to natural causes. He did not seem to notice that she was in any way different from usual. She held herself in as long as she could, but finally burst out, referring to his remark of an hour before.

“Do you care if I have a headache or not?” It was hardly a question so much as a taunt.

He looked up with surprise. “What’s the matter?”

She looked at him and then, with a gesture of impatience, turned away. But coming to her, he put his arm round her waist.

“Aren’t you well, dear?” he asked, with concern.

She looked at him again, but now her eyes were full of tears and she could not repress a sob.

“Oh, Eddie, be nice to me,” she said, suddenly weakening.

“Do tell me what’s wrong.”

He put his arms round her and kissed her lips. The contact revived the passion which for an hour had lain a-dying, and she burst into tears.

“Don’t be angry with me, Eddie,” she sobbed; it was she who apologised and made excuses. “I’ve been horrid to you; I couldn’t help it. You’re not angry, are you?”

“What on earth for?” he asked, completely mystified.

“I was so hurt this afternoon because you didn’t seem to care about me two straws. You must love me, Eddie; I can’t live without it.”

“You are silly,” he said, laughing.

She dried her tears, smiling. His forgiveness comforted her and she felt now trebly happy.

Chapter XI

BUT Edward was certainly not an ardent lover. Bertha could not tell when first she had noticed his irresponsiveness; at the beginning she had known only that she loved her husband with all her heart, and her ardour had lit up his somewhat pallid attachment till it seemed to glow as fiercely as her own. Yet gradually she began to think that he made very little return for the wealth of affection which she lavished upon him. The causes of her dissatisfaction were scarcely explicable: a slight motion of withdrawal, an indifference to her feelings — little nothings which had seemed almost comic. Bertha at first likened Edward to the Hippolitus of Phædra, he was untamed and wild; the kisses of woman frightened him; his phlegm pleased her disguised as rustic savagery, and she said her passion should thaw the icicles in his heart. But soon she ceased to consider his passiveness amusing, sometimes she upbraided him, and often, when alone, she wept.

“I wonder if you realise what pain you cause me at times,” said Bertha.

“Oh, I don’t think I do anything of the kind.”

“You don’t see it.... When I kiss you, it is the most natural thing in the world for you to push me away, as if — almost as if you couldn’t bear me.”

“Nonsense!”

To himself Edward was the same now as when they were first married.

“Of course after four months of married life you can’t expect a man to be the same as on his honeymoon. One can’t always be making love and canoodling. Everything in its proper time and season,” he added, with the unoriginal man’s fondness for proverbial philosophy.

After the day’s work he liked to read his Standard in peace, so when Bertha came up to him he put her gently aside.

“Leave me alone for a bit, there’s a good girl.”

“Oh, you don’t love me,” she cried then, feeling as if her heart would break.

He did not look up from his paper nor make reply; he was in the middle of a leading article.

“Why don’t you answer?” she cried.

“Because you’re talking nonsense.”

He was the best-humoured of men, and Bertha’s temper never disturbed his equilibrium. He knew that women felt a little irritable at times, but if a man gave ’em plenty of rope, they’d calm down after a bit.

“Women are like chickens,” he told a friend. “Give ’em a good run, properly closed in with stout wire netting, so that they can’t get into mischief, and when they cluck and cackle just sit tight and take no notice.”

Marriage had made no great difference in Edward’s life. He had always been a man of regular habits, and these he continued to cultivate. Of course he was more comfortable.

“There’s no denying it: a fellow wants a woman to look after him,” he told Dr. Ramsay, whom he sometimes met on the latter’s rounds. “Before I was married I used to find my shirts wore out in no time, but now when I see a cuff getting a bit groggy I just give it to the Missis and she makes it as good as new.”

“There’s a good deal of extra work, isn’t there, now you’ve taken on the Home Farm?”

“Oh, bless you, I enjoy it. Fact is, I can’t get enough work to do. And it seems to me that if you want to make farming pay nowadays you must do it on a big scale.”

All day Edward was occupied, if not on the farms, then with business at Blackstable, Tercanbury, and Faversley.

“I don’t approve of idleness,” he said. “They always say the devil finds work for idle hands to do, and upon my word I think there’s a lot of truth in it.”

Miss Glover, to whom this sentiment was addressed, naturally approved, and when Edward immediately afterwards went out, leaving her with Bertha, she said —

“What a good fellow your husband is! You don’t mind my saying so, do you?”

“Not if it pleases you,” said Bertha, drily.

“I hear praise of him from every side. Of course Charles has the highest opinion of him.”

Bertha did not answer, and Miss Glover added, “You can’t think how glad I am that you’re so happy.”

Bertha smiled. “You’ve got such a kind heart, Fanny.”

The conversation dragged, and after five minutes of heavy silence Miss Glover rose to go. When the door was closed upon her, Bertha sank back in her chair, thinking. This was one of her unhappy days — Eddie had walked into Blackstable, and she had wished to accompany him.

“I don’t think you’d better come with me,” he said. “I’m in rather a hurry and I shall walk fast.”

“I can walk fast too,” she said, her face clouding over.

“No, you can’t — I know what you call walking fast. If you like you can come and meet me on the way back.”

“Oh, you do everything you can to hurt me. It looks as if you welcomed an opportunity of being cruel.”

“How unreasonable you are, Bertha. Can’t you see that I’m in a hurry, and I haven’t got time to saunter along and chatter about the buttercups.”

“Well, let’s drive in.”

“That’s impossible. The mare isn’t well, and the pony had a hard day yesterday; he must rest to-day.”

“It’s simply because you don’t want me to come. It’s always the same, day after day. You invent anything to get rid of me.”

She burst into tears, knowing that what she said was unjust, but feeling notwithstanding extremely ill-used. Edward smiled with irritating good temper.

“You’ll be sorry for what you’ve said when you’ve calmed down, and then you’ll want me to forgive you.”

She looked up, flushing. “You think I’m a child and a fool.”

“No, I just think you’re out of sorts to-day.”

Then he went out, whistling, and she heard him give an order to the gardener in his usual manner, as cheerful as if nothing had happened. Bertha knew that he had already forgotten the little scene. Nothing affected his good humour. She might weep, she might tear her heart out (metaphorically), and bang it on the floor, Edward would not be perturbed; he would still be placid, good-tempered, forbearing. Hard words, he said, broke nobody’s bones— “Women are like chickens, when they cluck and cackle sit tight and take no notice!”

On his return Edward appeared not to see that his wife was out of temper. His spirits were always equable, and he was an unobservant person. She answered him in mono-syllables, but he chattered away, delighted at having driven a good bargain with a man in Blackstable. Bertha longed for him to remark upon her condition so that she might burst out with reproaches, but Edward was hopelessly dense — or else he saw and was unwilling to give her an opportunity to speak. Bertha, almost for the first time, was seriously angry with her husband and it frightened her — suddenly Edward seemed an enemy, and she wished to inflict some hurt upon him. She did not understand herself — what was going to happen next? Why wouldn’t he say something so that she might pour forth her woes and then be reconciled! The day wore on and she preserved a sullen silence; her heart was beginning to ache terribly — the night came, and still Edward made no sign; she looked about for a chance of beginning the quarrel, but nothing offered. Bertha pretended to go to sleep and she did not give him the kiss, the never-ending kiss of lovers which they always exchanged. Surely he would notice it, surely he would ask what troubled her, and then she could at last bring him to his knees. But he said nothing; he was dog-tired after a hard day’s work, and without a word went to sleep — in five minutes Bertha heard his heavy, regular breathing.

Then she broke down; she could never sleep without saying good-night to him, without the kiss of his lips.

“He’s stronger than I,” she said, “because he doesn’t love me.”

Bertha wept silently; she could not bear to be angry with her husband. She would submit to anything rather than pass the night in wrath, and the next day as unhappily as this. She was entirely humbled. At last, unable any longer to bear the agony, she woke him.

“Eddie, you’ve not said good-night to me.”

“By Jove, I forgot all about it,” he answered, sleepily. Bertha stifled a sob.

“Hulloa, what’s the matter?” he said. “You’re not crying just because I forgot to kiss you — I was awfully fagged, you know.”

He really had noticed nothing whatever; while she was passing through utter distress he had been as happily self-satisfied as usual. But the momentary recurrence of Bertha’s anger was quickly stilled. She could not afford now to be proud.

“You’re not angry with me?” she said. “I can’t sleep unless you kiss me.”

“Silly girl!” he whispered.

“You do love me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He kissed her as she loved to be kissed, and in the delight of it her anger was quite forgotten.

“I can’t live unless you love me. Oh, I wish I could make you understand how I love you.... We’re friends again now, aren’t we?”

“We haven’t ever been otherwise.”

Bertha gave a sigh of relief, and lay in his arms completely happy. A minute more and Edward’s breathing told her that he had already fallen asleep; she dared not move for fear of waking him.

The summer brought Bertha new pleasures, and she set herself to enjoy the pastoral life which she had imagined. The elms of Court Leys now were dark with leaves; and the heavy, close-fitting verdure gave quite a stately look to the house. The elm is the most respectable of trees, over-pompous if anything, but perfectly well-bred; and the shade it casts is no ordinary shade, but solid and self-assured as befits the estate of a county family. The fallen trunk had been removed, and in the autumn young trees were to be planted in the vacant spaces. Edward had set himself with a will to put the place properly to rights. The spring had seen a new coat of paint on Court Leys, so that it looked spick and span as the suburban villa of a stockbroker. The beds which for years had been neglected, now were trim with the abominations of carpet bedding; squares of red geraniums contrasted with circles of yellow calcellarias; the overgrown boxwood was cut down to a just height; the hawthorn hedge was doomed, and Edward had arranged to enclose the grounds with a wooden pallisade and laurel bushes. The drive was decorated with several loads of gravel, so that it became a thing of pride to the successor of an ancient and lackadaisical race. Craddock had not reigned in their stead a fortnight before the grimy sheep were expelled from the lawns on either side of the avenue, and since then the grass had been industriously mown and rolled. Now a tennis-court had been marked out, which, as Edward said, made things look homely. Finally the iron gates were gorgeous in black and gold as suited the entrance to a gentleman’s mansion, and the renovated lodge proved to all and sundry that Court Leys was in the hands of a man who knew what was what, and delighted in the proprieties.

Though Bertha abhorred all innovations, she had meekly accepted Edward’s improvements: they formed an inexhaustible topic of conversation, and his enthusiasm always pleased her.

“By Jove,” he said, rubbing his hands, “the changes will make your aunt simply jump, won’t they?”

“They will indeed,” said Bertha, smiling.

She shuddered a little at the prospect of Miss Ley’s sarcastic praise.

“She’ll hardly recognise the place; the house looks as good as new, and the grounds might have been laid out only half-a-dozen years ago.... Give me five years more and even you won’t know your old home.”

Miss Ley had at last accepted one of the invitations which Edward insisted should be showered upon her, and wrote to say she was coming down for a week. Edward was of course much pleased; as he said, he wanted to be friends with everybody, and it didn’t seem natural that Bertha’s only relative should make a point of avoiding them.

“It looks as if she didn’t approve of our marriage, and it makes the people talk.”

He met the good lady at the station, and somewhat to her disgust greeted her with effusion.

“Ah, here you are at last!” he bellowed, in his jovial way. “We thought you were never coming. Here, porter!” He raised his voice so that the platform shook and rumbled.

He seized both Miss Ley’s hands, and the terrifying thought flashed through her head that he would kiss her before the assembled multitude.

“He’s cultivating the airs of the country squire,” she thought. “I wish he wouldn’t.”

He took the innumerable bags with which she travelled and scattered them among the attendants. He even tried to induce her to take his arm to the dog-cart, but this honour she stoutly refused.

“Now, will you come round to this side and I’ll help you up. Your luggage will come on afterwards with the pony.”

He was managing everything in a self-confident and masterful fashion; Miss Ley noticed that marriage had dispelled the shyness which had been in him rather an attractive feature. He was becoming bluff and hearty. Also he was filling out. Prosperity and a knowledge of greater importance had broadened his back and straightened his shoulders; he was quite three inches more round the chest than when she had first known him, and his waist had proportionately increased.

“If he goes on developing in this way,” she thought, “the good man will be colossal by the time he’s forty.”

“Of course, Aunt Polly,” he said, boldly dropping the respectful Miss Ley, which hitherto he had invariably used, though his new relative was not a woman whom most men would have ventured to treat familiarly. “Of course it’s all rot about your leaving us in a week; you must stay a couple of months at least.”

“It’s very good of you, dear Edward,” replied Miss Ley drily, “but I have other engagements.”

“Then you must break them; I can’t have people leave my house immediately they come.”

Miss Ley raised her eyebrows and smiled; was it his house already? Dear me!

“My dear Edward,” she answered, “I never stay anywhere longer than two days — the first day I talk to people, the second I let them talk to me, and the third I go.... I stay a week at hotels so as to go en pension, and get my washing properly aired.”

“You’re treating us like a hotel,” said Edward, laughing.

“It’s a great compliment: in private houses one gets so abominably waited on.”

“Ah well, we’ll say no more about it. But I shall have your trunk taken to the box-room and I keep the key of it.”

Miss Ley gave the short, dry laugh which denoted that her interlocutor’s remark had not amused her, but something in her own mind. Presently they arrived at Court Leys.

“D’you see all the differences since you were last here?” asked Edward, jovially.

Miss Ley looked round and pursed her lips.

“It’s charming,” she said.

“I knew it would make you sit up,” he cried, laughing.

Bertha received her aunt in the hall and embraced her with the grave decorum which had always characterised their relations.

“How clever you are, Bertha,” said Miss Ley; “you manage to preserve your beautiful figure.”

Then she set herself solemnly to investigate the connubial bliss of the young couple.

Chapter XII

THE passion to analyse the casual fellow-creature was the most absorbing vice that Miss Ley possessed; and no ties of relationship or affection (the two go not invariably together) prevented her from exercising her talents in that direction. She observed Bertha and Edward during luncheon: Bertha was talkative, chattering with a vivacity that seemed suspicious, about the neighbours — Mrs. Branderton’s new bonnets and new hair, Miss Glover’s good works and Mr. Glover’s visits to London; Edward was silent, except when he pressed Miss Ley to take a second helping. He ate largely, and the maiden lady noticed the enormous mouthfuls he took and the heartiness with which he drank his beer. Of course she drew conclusions; and she drew further conclusions, when, having devoured half a pound of cheese and taken a last drink of ale, he pushed back his chair and with a sort of low roar, reminding one of a beast of prey gorged with food, said —

“Ah, well, I suppose I must set about my work. There’s no rest for the weary.”

He pulled a new briar-wood pipe from his pocket, filled and lit it.

“I feel better now.... Well, so-long; I shall be in to tea.”

Conclusions buzzed about Miss Ley, like midges on a summer’s day. She drew them all the afternoon; she drew them all through dinner. Bertha was effusive too, unusually so; and Miss Ley asked herself a dozen times if this stream of chatter, these peals of laughter, proceeded from a light heart or from a base desire to deceive a middle-aged and inquiring aunt. After dinner, Edward, telling her that of course she was one of the family so he hoped she did not wish him to stand on ceremony, began to read the paper. When Bertha, at Miss Ley’s request, played the piano, good manners made him put it aside, and he yawned a dozen times in a quarter of an hour.

“I mustn’t play any more,” said Bertha, “or Eddie will go to sleep — won’t you, darling?”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” he replied, laughing. “The fact is that the things Bertha plays when we’ve got company give me the fair hump!”

“Edward only consents to listen when I play The Blue Bells of Scotland or Yankee Doodle.”

Bertha made the remark, smiling good-naturedly at her husband, but Miss Ley drew conclusions.

“I don’t mind confessing that I can’t stand all this foreign music. What I say to Bertha is — why can’t you play English stuff?”

“If you must play at all,” interposed his wife.

“After all’s said and done The Blue Bells of Scotland has got a tune about it that a fellow can get his teeth into.”

“You see, there’s the difference,” said Bertha, strumming a few bars of Rule Britannia, “it sets mine on edge.”

“Well, I’m patriotic,” retorted Edward. “I like the good, honest, homely English airs. I like ’em because they’re English. I’m not ashamed to say that for me the best piece of music that’s ever been written is God Save the Queen.”

“Which was written by a German, dear Edward,” said Miss Ley, smiling.

“That’s as it may be,” said Edward, unabashed, “but the sentiment’s English and that’s all I care about.”

“Hear! hear!” cried Bertha. “I believe Edward has aspirations towards a political career. I know I shall finish up as the wife of the local M.P.”

“I’m patriotic,” said Edward, “and I’m not ashamed to confess it.”

“Rule Britannia,” sang Bertha, “Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never shall be slaves. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”

“It’s the same everywhere now,” proceeded the orator. “We’re choke full of foreigners and their goods. I think it’s scandalous. English music isn’t good enough for you — you get it from France and Germany. Where do you get your butter from? Brittany! Where d’you get your meat from? New Zealand!” This he said with great scorn, and Bertha punctuated the observation with a resounding chord. “And as far as the butter goes, it isn’t butter — it’s margarine. Where does your bread come from? America. Your vegetables from Jersey.”

“Your fish from the sea,” interposed Bertha.

“And so it is all along the line — the British farmer hasn’t got a chance!”

To this speech Bertha played a burlesque accompaniment, which would have irritated a more sensitive man than Craddock; but he merely laughed good-naturedly.

“Bertha won’t take these things seriously,” he said, passing his hand affectionately over her hair.

She suddenly stopped playing, and his good-humour, joined with the loving gesture, filled her with remorse. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You are a dear, good thing,” she faltered, “and I’m utterly horrid.”

“Now don’t talk stuff before Aunt Polly. You know she’ll laugh at us.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” said Bertha, smiling happily. She stood up and linked her arm with his. “Eddie’s the best tempered person in the world — he’s perfectly wonderful.”

“He must be, indeed,” said Miss Ley, “if you have preserved your faith in him after six months of marriage.”

But the maiden lady had stored so many observations that she felt an urgent need to retire to the privacy of her bed-chamber, and sort them. She kissed Bertha and held out her hand to Edward.

“Oh, if you kiss Bertha, you must kiss me too,” said he, bending forward with a laugh.

“Upon my word!” said Miss Ley, somewhat taken aback; then as he was evidently insisting she embraced him on the cheek. She positively blushed.

The upshot of Miss Ley’s investigations was that once again the hymeneal path had been found strewn with roses; and the idea crossed her head as she laid it on the pillow, that Dr. Ramsay would certainly come and crow over her: it was not in masculine human nature, she thought, to miss an opportunity of exulting over a vanquished foe.

“He’ll vow that I was the direct cause of the marriage. The dear man, he’ll be so pleased with my discomfiture that I shall never hear the last of it. He’s sure to call to-morrow.”

Indeed the news of Miss Ley’s arrival had been by Edward industriously spread abroad, and promptly Mrs. Ramsay put on her blue velvet calling-dress, and in the doctor’s brougham drove with him to Court Leys. The Ramsays found Miss Glover and the Vicar of Leanham already in possession of the field. Mr. Glover looked thinner and older than when Miss Ley had last seen him; he was more weary, meek and brow-beaten; Miss Glover never altered.

“The parish?” said the parson, in answer to Miss Ley’s polite inquiry, “I’m afraid it’s in a bad way. The dissenters have got a new chapel, you know — and they say the Salvation Army is going to set up ‘barracks’ as they call them. It’s a great pity the government doesn’t step in: after all we are established by law and the law ought to protect us from encroachment.”

“You don’t believe in liberty of conscience?” asked Miss Ley.

“My dear Miss Ley,” said the Vicar, in his tired voice, “everything has its limits. I should have thought there was in the Established Church enough liberty of conscience for any one.”

“Things are becoming dreadful in Leanham,” said Miss Glover. “Practically all the tradesmen go to chapel now, and it makes it so difficult for us.”

“Yes,” replied the Vicar, with a weary sigh; “and as if we hadn’t enough to put up with, I hear that Walker has ceased coming to church.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” said Miss Glover.

“Walker, the baker?” asked Edward.

“Yes; and now the only baker in Leanham who goes to church is Andrews.”

“Well, we can’t possibly deal with him, Charles,” said Miss Glover, “his bread is too bad.”

“My dear, we must,” groaned her brother. “It would be against all my principles to deal with a tradesman who goes to chapel. You must tell Walker to send his book in, unless he will give an assurance that he’ll come to church regularly.”

“But Andrews’s bread always gives you indigestion, Charles,” cried Miss Glover.

“I must put up with it. If none of our martyrdoms were more serious than that, we should have no cause to complain.”

“Well, it’s quite easy to get your bread from Tercanbury,” said Mrs. Ramsay, who was severely practical.

Mr. Glover and his sister threw up their hands in dismay.

“Then Andrews would go to chapel too. The only thing that keeps them at church, I’m sorry to say, is the Vicarage custom, or the hope of getting it.”

Presently Miss Ley found herself alone with the parson’s sister.

“You must be very glad to see Bertha again, Miss Ley.”

“Now she’s going to crow,” thought the good lady. “Of course I am.”

“And it must be such a relief to you to see how well it’s all turned out.”

Miss Ley looked sharply at Miss Glover, but saw no trace of irony.

“Oh, I think it’s beautiful to see a married couple so thoroughly happy. It really makes me feel a better woman when I come here and see how those two worship one another.”

“Of course the poor thing’s a perfect idiot,” thought Miss Ley. “Yes, it’s very satisfactory,” she said, drily.

She glanced round for Dr. Ramsay, looking forward, notwithstanding that she was on the losing side, to the tussle she foresaw. She had the instincts of a good fighter, and, even though defeat was inevitable, never avoided an encounter. The doctor approached.

“Well, Miss Ley. So you have come back to us. We’re all delighted to see you.”

“How cordial these people are,” thought Miss Ley, somewhat crossly, thinking Dr. Ramsay’s remark preliminary to coarse banter or to reproach. “Shall we take a turn in the garden; I’m sure you wish to quarrel with me.”

“There’s nothing I should like better — to walk in the garden, I mean: of course, no one could quarrel with so charming a person as yourself.”

“He would never be so polite if he did not mean afterwards to be very rude,” thought Miss Ley. “I’m glad you like the garden.”

“Craddock has improved it so wonderfully. It’s a perfect pleasure to look at all he’s done.”

This Miss Ley considered a gibe, and searched for a repartee, but finding none was silent: Miss Ley was a wise woman! They walked a few steps without a word, and then Dr. Ramsay suddenly burst out —

“Well, Miss Ley, you were right after all.”

She stopped and looked at the speaker — he seemed quite serious.

“Yes,” he said, “I don’t mind acknowledging it. I was wrong. It’s a great triumph for you, isn’t it?”

He looked at her, and shook with good-tempered laughter.

“Is he making fun of me?” Miss Ley asked herself, with something not very distantly removed from agony. This was the first occasion upon which she had failed to understand not only the good doctor, but his inmost thoughts as well. “So you think the estate has been improved?” she said hurriedly.

“I can’t make out how the man’s done so much in so short a time. Why, just look at it!”

Miss Ley pursed her lips. “Even in its most dilapidated days Court Leys looked gentlemanly: now all this,” she glanced round with upturned nose, “might be the country mansion of a pork-butcher.”

“My dear Miss Ley, you must pardon my saying so, but the place wasn’t even respectable.”

“But it is now; that is my complaint. My dear doctor, in the old days, the passer-by could see that the owners of Court Leys were decent people; that they could not make both ends meet was a detail — it was possibly because they burnt one end too rapidly, which is the sign of a rather delicate mind.” Miss Ley was mixing her metaphors. “And the passer-by moralised accordingly. For a gentleman there are only two decorous states, absolute poverty or overpowering wealth; the middle condition is vulgar. Now the passer-by sees thrift and careful management, the ends meet, but they do it aggressively, as if it were something to be proud about. Pennies are looked at before they are spent; and, good heavens! the Leys serve to point a moral and adorn a tale. The Leys, who gambled and squandered their substance, who bought diamonds when they hadn’t bread, and pawned the diamonds to give the King a garden-party, now form the heading of a copybook and the ideal of a market-gardener.”

Miss Ley had the characteristics of the true phrase-maker, for so long as her period was well rounded, she did not mind how much nonsense it contained. Coming to the end of her tirade, she looked at the doctor for the signs of disapproval which she thought her right, but he merely laughed.

“I see you want to rub it in,” he said.

“What on earth does the creature mean?” Miss Ley asked herself.

“I confess I did believe things would turn out badly,” the doctor proceeded. “And I couldn’t help thinking he’d be tempted to play ducks and drakes with the whole property. Well, I don’t mind frankly acknowledging that Bertha couldn’t have chosen a better husband; he’s a thoroughly good fellow; no one realised what he had in him, and there’s no knowing how far he’ll go.”

A man would have expressed Miss Ley’s feeling with a little whistle, but that lady merely raised her thin eyebrows. Then Dr. Ramsay shared the opinion of Miss Glover?

“And what precisely is the opinion of the county?” she asked. “Of that odious Mrs. Branderton, of Mrs. Ryle (she has no right to the Mayston at all), of the Hancocks, and the rest?”

“Edward Craddock has won golden opinions all round. Every one likes him, and thinks well of him. No, I assure you, although I’m not so fond as all that of confessing I was wrong, he’s the right man in the right place. It’s extraordinary how people took up to him and respect him already.... I give you my word for it, Bertha has reason to congratulate herself — a girl doesn’t pick up a husband like that every day of the week.”

Miss Ley smiled; it was a great relief to find that she really was no more foolish than most people (so she modestly put it), for a doubt on the subject had given her some uneasiness.

“So every one thinks they’re as happy as turtle-doves?”

“Why, so they are,” cried the doctor; “surely you don’t think otherwise?”

Miss Ley never considered it a duty to dispel the error of her fellow-creatures, and whenever she had a little piece of knowledge, vastly preferred keeping it to herself.

“I?” she answered to the doctor’s question. “I make a point of thinking with the majority — it’s the only way to get a reputation for wisdom!” But Miss Ley, after all, was only human. “Which do you think is the predominant partner?” she asked, smiling drily.

“The man, as he should be,” gruffly replied the doctor.

“Do you think he has more brains?”

“Ah, you’re a feminist,” said Dr. Ramsay, with great scorn.

“My dear doctor, my gloves are sixes, and perceive my shoes.” She put out for the old gentleman’s inspection a very pointed, high-heeled shoe, displaying at the same time the elaborate open-work of a silk stocking.

“Do you intend me to take that as an acknowledgment of the superiority of man?”

“Heavens, how argumentative you are!” Miss Ley laughed, for she was getting into her own particular element. “I knew you wished to quarrel with me. Do you really want my opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it seems to me that if you take the very clever woman and set her beside an ordinary man, you prove nothing. That is how women mostly argue. We place George Eliot (who, by the way, had nothing of the woman but petticoats — and those not always) beside plain John Smith, and ask tragically if such a woman can be considered inferior to such a man. But that’s silly! The question I’ve been asking myself for the last five-and-twenty years is, whether the average fool of a woman is a greater fool than the average fool of a man.”

“And the answer?”

“Well, upon my word, I don’t think there’s much to choose between them.”

“Then you haven’t really an opinion on the subject at all?” cried the doctor.

“That is why I give it you.”

“Hm!” grunted Dr. Ramsay. “And how does that apply to the Craddocks?”

“It doesn’t apply to them.... I don’t think Bertha is a fool.”

“She couldn’t be, having had the discretion to be born your niece, eh?”

“Why, doctor, you’re growing quite pert.”

They had finished the tour of the garden and Mrs. Ramsay was seen in the drawing-room, bidding Bertha good-by.

“Now, seriously, Miss Ley,” said the doctor, “they’re quite happy, aren’t they? Every one thinks so.”

“Every one is always right,” said Miss Ley.

“And what is your opinion?”

“Good heavens, what an insistent man it is! Well, Dr. Ramsay, all I would suggest is that — for Bertha, you know, the book of life is written throughout in italics; for Edward it is all in the big round hand of the copybook headings.... Don’t you think it will make the reading of the book somewhat difficult?”

Chapter XIII

WITH the summer Edward began to teach Bertha lawn-tennis; and in the long evenings, when he had finished his work and changed into the flannels which suited him so well, they played innumerable sets. He prided himself upon his skill in this pursuit and naturally found it dull to play with a beginner; but he was very patient, hoping that eventually Bertha would acquire sufficient skill to give him a good game. To be doing something with her husband sufficiently amused Bertha. She liked him to correct her mistakes, to show her this stroke and that; she admired his good nature and his inexhaustible spirits. But her greatest delight was to lie on the long chair by the lawn when they had finished, and enjoy the feeling of exhaustion, gossiping of the little nothings which love made absorbingly interesting.

Miss Ley had been persuaded to prolong her stay. She had vowed to go at the end of her week; but Edward, in his high-handed fashion, had ordered the key of the box-room to be given him, and refused to surrender it.

“Oh no,” he said, “I can’t make people come here, but I can prevent them from going away. In this house every one has to do as I tell them; isn’t that so, Bertha?”

“If you say it, Edward,” replied his wife.

Miss Ley gracefully acceded to her nephew’s desire, which was the more easy, since the house was comfortable, she had really no pressing engagements, and her mind was set upon making further examination into the married life of her relations. It would have been a weakness, unworthy of her, to maintain her intention for consistence’ sake.

Why for days together were Edward and Bertha the happiest lovers, and then suddenly why did Bertha behave almost brutally towards her husband, while he remained invariably good-tempered and amiable? The obvious reason was that some little quarrel had arisen, such as, since Adam and Eve, has troubled every married couple in the world; but the obvious reason was that which Miss Ley was least likely to credit. She never saw anything in the way of a disagreement, Bertha assented to all her husband’s proposals; and with such docility on the one hand, such good-humour on the other, what on earth could form a bone of contention?

Miss Ley had discovered that when the green leaves of life are turning red and golden with approaching autumn, most pleasure can be obtained by a judicious mingling in simplicity of the gifts of nature and the resources of civilisation. She was satisfied to come in the evenings to the tennis-lawn and sit on a comfortable chair shaded by trees, and protected by a red parasol from the rays of the setting sun. She was not a woman to find distraction in needlework, and brought with her, therefore, a volume of Montaigne, her favourite writer. She read a page and then lifted her sharp eyes to the players. Edward was certainly very handsome — he looked so clean, and it was obvious to the most casual observer that he bathed himself daily: he was one of those men who carry the morning tub stamped on every line of their faces. You felt that Pear’s Soap was as essential to him as his belief in the Conservative Party, Derby Day, and the Depression of Agriculture. As Bertha often said, his energy was superabundant. Notwithstanding his increasing size he was most agile, and perpetually did unnecessary feats of strength, such as jumping and hopping over the net, holding chairs with outstretched arm.

“If health and a good digestion are all that is necessary in a husband, Bertha certainly ought to be the most contented woman alive.”

Miss Ley never believed so implicitly in her own theories that she was prevented from laughing at them. She had an impartial mind and saw the two sides of a question clearly enough to find little to choose between them; consequently she was able and willing to argue with equal force from either point of view.

The set was finished, and Bertha threw herself on a chair, panting.

“Find the balls, there’s a dear,” she cried.

Edward went off on the search, and Bertha looked at him with a delightful smile.

“He is such a good-tempered person,” she said to Miss Ley. “Sometimes he makes me feel positively ashamed.”

“He has all the virtues. Dr. Ramsay, the Glovers, even Mrs. Branderton, have been dinning his praise into my ears.”

“Yes, they all like him. Arthur Branderton is always here, asking his advice about something or other. He’s a dear, good thing.”

“Who? Arthur Branderton?”

“No, of course not — Eddie.”

Bertha took off her hat and stretched herself more comfortably on the long chair. Her hair was somewhat disarranged, and the rich locks wandered about her forehead and on the nape of her neck in a way that would have distracted any minor poet under seventy. Miss Ley looked at her niece’s fine profile, and wondered again at the complexion, made up of the softest colours in the setting sun. Her eyes now were liquid with love, languorous with the shade of long lashes; and her full, sensual mouth was half open with a smile.

“Is my hair very untidy?” asked Bertha, catching Miss Ley’s look and its meaning.

“No, I think it suits you when it is not done too severely.”

“Edward hates it; he likes me to be prim.... And of course I don’t care how I look so long as he’s pleased. Don’t you think he’s very good-looking?” Then without waiting for an answer, she asked a second question.

“Do you think me a great fool for being so much in love, Aunt Polly?”

“My dear, it’s surely the proper behaviour with one’s lawful spouse.”

Bertha’s smile became a little sad as she replied —

“Edward seems to think it unusual.” She followed him with her eyes, picking up the balls one by one, hunting among bushes: she was in the mood for confidences that afternoon. “You don’t know how different everything has been since I fell in love. The world is fuller.... It’s the only state worth living in.” Edward advanced with the eight balls on his racket. “Come here and be kissed, Eddie,” she cried.

“Not if I know it,” he replied, laughing. “Bertha’s a perfect terror. She wants me to spend my whole life in kissing her.... Don’t you think it’s unreasonable, Aunt Polly? My motto is: everything in its place and season.”

“One kiss in the morning,” said Bertha, “one kiss at night, will do to keep your wife quiet; and the rest of the time you can attend to your work and read your paper.”

Again Bertha smiled charmingly, but Miss Ley saw no amusement in her eyes.

“Well, one can have too much of a good thing,” said Edward, balancing his racket on the tip of his nose.

“Even of proverbial philosophy,” remarked Bertha.

A few days later, his guest having definitely announced that she must go, Edward proposed a tennis-party as a parting honour. Miss Ley would gladly have escaped an afternoon of small-talk with the notabilities of Leanham, but Edward was determined to pay his aunt every attention, and his inner consciousness assured him that at least a small party was necessary to the occasion. They came, Mr. and Miss Glover, the Brandertons, the Hancocks, Mr. Atthill Bacot, the great politician (of the district). But Mr. Atthill Bacot was more than political, he was gallant, and he devoted himself to the entertainment of Miss Ley. He discussed with her the sins of the government and the incapacity of the army.

“More men, more guns!” he said. “An elementary education in common sense for the officers, and the rudiments of grammar if there’s time!”

“Good heavens, Mr. Bacot, you mustn’t say such things. I thought you were a Conservative.”

“Madam, I stood for the constituency in ‘85. I may say that if a Conservative member could have got in, I should have been elected. But there are limits. Even the staunch Conservative will turn. Now look at General Hancock.”

“Please don’t talk so loud,” said Miss Ley, with alarm, for Mr. Bacot had instinctively adopted his platform manner, and his voice could be heard through the whole garden.

“Look at General Hancock, I say,” he repeated, taking no notice of the interruption. “Is that the sort of man whom you would wish to have the handling of ten thousand of your sons?”

“Oh, but be fair,” cried Miss Ley, laughing. “They’re not all such fools as poor General Hancock.”

“I give you my word, madam, I think they are.... As far as I can make out, when a man has shown himself incapable of doing anything else they make him a general, just to encourage the others. I understand the reason. It’s a great thing, of course, for parents sending their sons into the army to be able to say, ‘Well, he may be a fool, but there’s no reason why he shouldn’t become a general.’”

“You wouldn’t rob us of our generals,” said Miss Ley; “they’re so useful at tea-parties. In my young days the fool of the family was sent into the Church, but now, I suppose, he’s sent into the army.”

Mr. Bacot was about to make a very heated retort when Edward called to him —

“We want you to make up a set at tennis. Will you play with Miss Hancock against my wife and the General? Come on, Bertha.”

“Oh no, I mean to sit out, Eddie,” said Bertha, quickly. She saw that Edward was putting all the bad players into one set, so that they might be got rid of. “I’m not going to play.”

“You must, or you’ll disarrange the next lot. It’s all settled; Miss Glover and I are going to take on Miss Jane Hancock and Arthur Branderton.”

Bertha looked at him with eyes flashing angrily. Of course he did not notice her vexation. He preferred to play with Miss Glover, she told herself; the parson’s sister played well, and for a good game he would never hesitate to sacrifice his wife’s feelings. Besides Bertha, only Miss Glover and young Branderton were within earshot, and in his jovial, pleasant manner, Edward laughingly said —

“Bertha’s such a duffer. Of course she’s only just beginning. You don’t mind playing with the General, do you, dear?”

Arthur Branderton laughed and Bertha smiled at the sally, but she reddened.

“I’m not going to play at all. I must see to the tea; and I dare say more people will be coming in presently.”

“Oh, I forgot that,” said Edward. “No; perhaps you oughtn’t to play.” And then putting his wife out of his thoughts, and linking his arm with young Branderton’s, he sauntered off. “Come along, old chap; we must find some crock to make up the pat-ball set.” Edward had such a charming, frank manner, one could not help liking him.

Bertha watched the two men go and turned very white.

“I must just go into the house a moment,” she said to Miss Glover. “Go and entertain Mrs. Branderton, there’s a dear.” And precipitately she fled.

She ran to her room, and flinging herself on the bed, burst into a flood of tears. The humiliation seemed dreadful. She wondered how Eddie, whom she loved above all else in the world, could treat her so cruelly. What had she done? He knew — ah, yes, he knew well enough the happiness he could cause her — and he went out of his way to be brutal. She wept bitterly, and jealousy of Miss Glover (Miss Glover, of all people!) stabbed her to the heart.

“He doesn’t love me,” she moaned, her tears redoubling.

Presently there was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” she cried.

The handle was turned and Miss Glover came in, red with nervousness.

“Forgive me for coming in, Bertha. But I thought you seemed unwell. Can’t I do something for you?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Bertha, drying her tears, “Only the heat upset me and I’ve got a headache.”

“Shall I send Edward to you?”

“What do I want with Edward?” replied Bertha, petulantly. “I shall be all right in five minutes. I often have attacks like this.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to say anything unkind. He’s kindness itself, I know.”

Bertha flushed. “What on earth do you mean, Fanny? Who didn’t say anything unkind?”

“I thought you were hurt by Edward’s saying you were a duffer and a beginner.”

“Oh, my dear, you must think me a fool.” Bertha laughed hysterically. “It’s quite true that I’m a duffer. I tell you it’s only the weather. Why, if my feelings were hurt each time Eddie said a thing like that I should lead a miserable life.”

“I wish you’d let me send him up to you,” said Miss Glover, unconvinced.

“Good heavens! Why? See, I’m all right now.” She washed her eyes and passed the powder-puff over her face. “My dear, it was only the sun.”

With an effort she braced herself, and burst into a laugh joyful enough almost to deceive the Vicar’s sister.

“Now, we must go down, or Mrs. Branderton will complain more than ever of my bad manners.”

She put her arm round Miss Glover’s waist and ran her down the stairs to the mingled terror and amazement of that good creature. For the rest of the afternoon, though her eyes never rested on Edward, she was perfectly charming — in the highest spirits, chattering incessantly, laughing; every one noticed her good humour and commented upon her obvious felicity.

“It does one good to see a couple like that,” said General Hancock, “just as happy as the day is long.”

But the little scene had not escaped Miss Ley’s sharp eyes, and she noticed with agony that Miss Glover had gone to Bertha. She could not stop her, being at the moment in the toils of Mrs. Branderton.

“Oh, these good people are too officious! Why can’t she leave the girl alone to have it out with herself!”

But the explanation of everything now flashed across Miss Ley.

“What a fool I am!” she thought, and she was able to cogitate quite clearly while exchanging honeyed impertinences with Mrs. Branderton. “I noticed it the first day I saw them together. How could I ever forget it!” She shrugged her shoulders and murmured the maxim of La Rochefoucauld —

“Entre deux amants il-y-a toujours un qui aime, et un qui se laisse aimer.”

And to this she added another, in the same language, which, knowing no original, she ventured to claim as her own; it seemed to summarise the situation.

“Celui qui aime a toujours tort.”

Chapter XIV

BERTHA and Miss Ley passed a troubled night, while Edward, of course, after much exercise and a hearty dinner, slept the sleep of the just and of the pure at heart. Bertha was nursing her wrath; she had with difficulty brought herself to kiss her husband before, according to his habit, he turned his back upon her and began to snore. Miss Ley, with her knowledge of the difficulties in store for the couple, asked herself if she could do anything. But what could she do? They were reading the book of life in their separate ways, one in italics, the other in the big round letters of the copy-book; and how could she help them to find a common character? Of course the first year of married life is difficult, and the weariness of the flesh adds to the inevitable disillusionment. Every marriage has its moments of utter despair. The great danger is in the onlooker, who may pay to them too much attention and, by stepping in, render the difficulty permanent — cutting the knot instead of letting time undo it. Miss Ley’s cogitations brought her not unnaturally to the course which most suited her temperament; she concluded that far and away the best plan was to attempt nothing, and let things right themselves as best they could. She did not postpone her departure, but, according to arrangement, went on the following day.

“Well, you see,” said Edward, bidding her good-bye, “I told you that I should make you stay longer than a week.”

“You’re a wonderful person, Edward,” said Miss Ley, drily. “I have never doubted it for an instant.”

He was pleased seeing no irony in the compliment. Miss Ley took leave of Bertha with a suspicion of awkward tenderness that was quite unusual; she hated to show her feelings, and found it difficult, yet wanted to tell Bertha that if she was ever in difficulties she would always find in her an old friend and a true one. All she said was —

“If you want to do any shopping in London, I can always put you up, you know. And for the matter of that, I don’t see why you shouldn’t come and stay a month or so with me — if Edward can spare you. It will be a change.”

When Miss Ley drove with Edward to the station, Bertha felt suddenly an extreme loneliness. Her aunt had been a barrier between herself and her husband, coming opportunely when, after the first months of mad passion, she was beginning to see herself linked to a man she did not know. A third person in the house had been a restraint. She looked forward already to the future with something like terror; her love for Edward was a bitter heartache. Oh yes, she loved him well, she loved him passionately; but he — he was fond of her, in his placid, calm way; it made her furious to think of it.

The weather was rainy, and for two days there was no question of tennis. On the third, however, the sun came out again, and the lawn was soon dry. Edward had driven over to Tercanbury, but returned towards evening.

“Hulloa!” he said, “you haven’t got your tennis things on. You’d better hurry up.”

This was the opportunity for which Bertha had been looking. She was tired of always giving way, of humbling herself; she wanted an explanation.

“You’re very good,” she said, “but I don’t want to play tennis with you any more.”

“Why on earth not?”

She burst out furiously— “Because I’m sick and tired of being made a convenience by you. I’m too proud to be treated like that. Oh, don’t look as if you didn’t understand. You play with me because you’ve got no one else to play with. Isn’t that so? That is how you are always with me. You prefer the company of the veriest fool in the world to mine. You seem to do everything you can to show your contempt for me.”

“Why, what have I done now?”

“Oh, of course, you forget. You never dream that you are making me frightfully unhappy. Do you think I like to be treated before people as a sort of poor idiot that you can laugh and sneer at?”

Edward had never seen his wife so angry, and this time he was forced to pay her attention. She stood before him, at the end of her speech, with teeth clenched, her cheeks flaming.

“It’s about the other day, I suppose. I saw at the time you were in a passion.”

“And didn’t care two straws.”

“You’re too silly,” he said, with a laugh. “We couldn’t play together when we had people here. They laugh at us as it is for being so devoted to one another.”

“If they only knew how little you cared for me!”

“I might have managed a set with you later on, if you hadn’t sulked and refused to play at all.”

“It would never have occurred to you, I know you better than that. You’re absolutely selfish.”

“Come, come, Bertha,” he cried good-humouredly, “that’s a thing I’ve not been accused of before. No one has ever called me selfish.”

“Oh no, they think you charming. They think because you’re cheerful and even-tempered, because you’re hail-fellow-well-met with every one you know, that you’ve got such a nice character. If they knew you as well as I do, they’d understand it was merely because you’re perfectly indifferent to them. You treat people as if they were your bosom friends, and then, five minutes after they’ve gone, you’ve forgotten all about them.... And the worst of it is, that I’m no more to you than anybody else.”

“Oh, come, I don’t think you can really find such awful things wrong with me.”

“I’ve never known you sacrifice your slightest whim to gratify my most earnest desire.”

“You can’t expect me to do things which I think unreasonable.”

“If you loved me, you’d not always be asking if the things I want are reasonable. I didn’t think of reason when I married you.”

Edward made no answer, which naturally added to Bertha’s irritation. She was arranging flowers for the table, and broke off the stalks savagely. Edward, after a pause, went to the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Since you won’t play, I’m just going to do a few serves for practice.”

“Why don’t you send for Miss Glover to come and play with you?”

A new idea suddenly came to him (they came at sufficiently rare intervals not to spoil his equanimity), but the absurdity of it made him laugh.

“Surely you’re not jealous of her, Bertha?”

“I?” began Bertha, with tremendous scorn, and then changing her mind: “You prefer to play with her than to play with me.”

He wisely ignored part of the charge. “Look at her and look at yourself. Do you think I could prefer her to you?”

“I think you’re fool enough.”

The words slipped out of Bertha’s mouth almost before she knew she had said them, and the bitter, scornful tone added to their violence. They frightened her, and turning very white, she glanced at her husband.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to say that, Eddie.”

Fearing now that she had really wounded him, Bertha was entirely sorry; she would have given anything for the words to be unsaid. Edward was turning over the pages of a book, looking at it listlessly. She went up to him.

“I haven’t offended you, have I, Eddie? I didn’t mean to say that.”

She put her arm in his; he did not answer.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she faltered again, and then breaking down, buried her face in his bosom. “I didn’t mean what I said — I lost command over myself. You don’t know how you humiliated me the other day. I haven’t been able to sleep at night, thinking of it.... Kiss me.”

He turned his face away, but she would not let him go; at last she found his lips.

“Say you’re not angry with me.”

“I’m not angry with you.”

“Oh, I want your love so much, Eddie,” she murmured. “Now more than ever.... I’m going to have a child.”

Then in reply to his astonished exclamation —

“I wasn’t certain till to-day.... Oh, Eddie, I’m so glad. I think it’s what I wanted to make me happy.”

“I’m glad too,” he said.

“But you will be kind to me, Eddie — and not mind if I’m fretful and bad tempered. You know I can’t help it, and I’m always sorry afterwards.”

He kissed her as passionately as his cold nature allowed, and peace returned to Bertha’s tormented heart.

Bertha had intended as long as possible to make a secret of her news; it was a comfort in her distress, and a bulwark against her increasing disillusionment. She was unable to reconcile herself to the discovery, seen as yet dimly, that Edward’s cold temperament could not satisfy her ardent passions: love to her was a burning fire, a flame that absorbed the rest of life; love to him was a convenient and necessary institution of Providence, a matter about which there was as little need for excitement as about the ordering of a suit of clothes. Bertha’s intense devotion for a while had obscured her husband’s coolness, and she would not see that his temperament was to blame. She accused him of not loving her, and asked herself distractedly how to gain his affection; her pride was humiliated because her love was so much greater than his. For six months she had loved him blindly; and now, opening her eyes, she refused to look upon the naked fact, but insisted on seeing only what she wished.

Yet, the truth, elbowing itself through the crowd of her illusions, tormented her. She was afraid that Edward neither loved her nor had ever loved her; and she wavered uncertainly between the old passionate devotion and a new, equally passionate hatred. She told herself that she could not do things by halves; she must love or detest, but in either case, fiercely. And now the child made up for everything. Now it did not matter if Edward loved or not, it no longer pained her to realise how foolish had been her hopes, how quickly her ideal had been shattered. She felt that the infantine hands of her son were already breaking, one by one, the links that bound her to her husband. When she divined her pregnancy, she gave a cry not only of joy and pride, but also of exultation in her approaching freedom.

But when the suspicion was changed into a certainty, her feelings veered round; for her emotions were always unstable as the light winds of April. An extreme weakness made her long for the support and sympathy of her husband; she could not help telling him. In the hateful dispute of that very day, she had forced herself to say bitter things, but all the time she wished him to take her in his arms, saying he loved her. It needed so little to rekindle her dying affection; she wanted his help and she could not live without his love.

The weeks went on and Bertha was touched to see a change in Edward’s behaviour, more noticeable after his past indifference. He looked upon her now as an invalid, and as such entitled to some consideration; he was really very kind-hearted, and during this time did everything for his wife that did not involve a sacrifice of his own convenience. When the doctor suggested some dainty to tempt her appetite, Edward was delighted to ride over to Tercanbury to fetch it; and in her presence he trod more softly and spoke in a gentler voice. After a while he used to insist on carrying Bertha up and down stairs, and though Dr. Ramsay assured them it was a quite unnecessary proceeding, Bertha would not allow Edward to give it up. It amused her to feel a little child in his strong arms, and she loved to nestle against his breast. Then, with winter, when it was too cold to drive out, Bertha would lie for long hours on a sofa by the window, looking at the line of elm-trees, now leafless again and melancholy, watching the heavy clouds that drove over from the sea: her heart was full of peace.

One day of the new year she was sitting as usual at her window when Edward came prancing up the drive on horseback. He stopped in front of her and waved his whip.

“What d’you think of my new horse?” he cried.

At that moment the animal began to cavort, and backed into a flower-bed. “Quiet, old fellow,” cried Edward. “Now then, don’t make a fuss; quiet!” The horse stood on its hind legs and laid its ears back viciously. Presently Edward dismounted and led him towards Bertha. “Isn’t he a stunner? Just look at him.”

He passed his hand down the beast’s forelegs and stroked its sleek coat.

“I only gave thirty-five quid for it,” he remarked. “I must just take him round to the stable and then I’ll come in.”

In a few minutes Edward joined his wife. The riding costume suited him well, and in his top-boots he had more than ever the appearance of the fox-hunting country squire, which had always been his ideal. He was in high spirits over the new purchase.

“It’s the beast that threw Arthur Branderton when we were out last week.... Arthur’s limping about now with a sprained ankle and a broken finger. He says the horse is the greatest devil he’s ever ridden; he’s frightened to use him again.” Edward laughed scornfully.

“But you haven’t bought him?” asked Bertha, with alarm.

“Of course I have,” said Edward. “I couldn’t miss a chance like that. Why, he’s a perfect beauty — only he’s got a temper, like we all have.”

“But is he dangerous?”

“A bit — that’s why I got him cheap. Arthur gave a hundred guineas for him, and he told me I could have him for seventy. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you thirty-five — and take the risk of breaking my neck.’ Well, he just had to accept my offer! the horse has got a bad name in the county, and he wouldn’t get any one to buy it in a hurry. A man has got to get up early if he wants to do me over a gee!”

By this time Bertha was frightened out of her wits.

“But, Eddie, you’re not going to ride it — supposing something should happen. Oh, I wish you hadn’t bought him.”

“He’s all right,” said Craddock. “If any one can ride him, I can — and, by Jove, I’m going to risk it. Why, if I bought him and then didn’t use him, I’d never hear the last of it.”

“To please me, Eddie, don’t! What does it matter what people say? I’m so frightened. And now of all times you might do something to please me. It’s not often I ask you to do me a favour.”

“Well, when you ask for something reasonable, I always try my best to do it — but really, after I’ve paid thirty-five pounds for a horse, I can’t cut him up for cat’s meat.”

“That means you’ll always do anything for me so long as it doesn’t interfere with your own likes and dislikes.”

“Ah, well, we’re all like that, aren’t we?... Come, come, don’t be nasty about it, Bertha.”

He pinched her cheek good-naturedly — women, we all know, would like the moon if they could get it; and the fact that they can’t doesn’t prevent them from persistently asking for it. Edward sat down beside his wife, holding her hand.

“Now, tell us what you’ve been up to to-day. Has any one been?”

Bertha sighed deeply. She had absolutely no influence over her husband. No prayers, no tears would stop him from doing a thing he had set his mind on — however much she argued he always managed to make her seem in the wrong, and then went his way rejoicing. But she had her child now.

“Thank God for that!” she murmured.

Chapter XV

CRADDOCK went out on his new horse and returned triumphantly.

“He was as quiet as a lamb,” he said. “I could ride him with my arms tied behind my back; and as to jumping — he takes a five-barred gate in his stride.”

Bertha was a little angry with him for having caused her such terror, angry with herself also for troubling.

“And it was rather lucky I had him to-day. Old Lord Philip Dirk was there, and he asked Branderton who I was. ‘You tell him,’ says he, ‘that it isn’t often I’ve seen a man ride as well as he does.’ You should see Branderton, he isn’t half glad at having let me take the beast for thirty-five quid. And Mr. Molson came up to me and said, ‘I knew that horse would get into your hands before long, you’re the only man in this part who can ride it — but if it don’t break your neck, you’ll be lucky.’”

He recounted with great satisfaction the compliments paid to him.

“We had a jolly good run to-day.... And how are you, dear, feeling comfy? Oh, I forgot to tell you — you know Rodgers, the huntsman, well, he said to me, ‘That’s a mighty fine hack you’ve got there, sir, but he takes some riding.’— ‘I know he does,’ I said; ‘but I flatter myself I know a thing or two more than most horses.’ They all thought I should get rolled over before the day was out, but I just went slick at everything to show I wasn’t frightened.”

Then he gave details of the affair; and he had as great a passion for the meticulous as a German historian. He was one of those men who take infinite pains over trifles, flattering themselves that they never do things by halves. Bertha had a headache, and her husband bored her; she thought herself a great fool to be so concerned about his safety.

As the months wore on Miss Glover became very solicitous. The parson’s sister looked upon birth as a mysteriously heart-fluttering business, which, however, modesty required decent people to ignore. She treated her friend in an absurdly self-conscious manner, and blushed like a peony when Bertha frankly referred to the coming event. The greatest torment of Miss Glover’s life was that, as lady of the Vicarage, she had to manage the Maternity Bag, an institution to provide the infants of the needy with articles of raiment and their mothers with flannel petticoats. She could never, without much confusion, ask the necessary information of the beneficiaries in her charity; feeling that the whole thing ought not to be discussed at all, she kept her eyes averted, and acted generally so as to cause great indignation.

“Well,” said one good lady, “I’d rather not ‘ave her bag at all than be treated like that. Why, she treats you as if — well, as if you wasn’t married.”

“Yes,” said another, “that’s just what I complain of — I promise you I ‘ad ‘alf a mind to take my marriage lines out of my pocket an’ show ‘er. It ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed about — nice thing it would be after ‘avin’ sixteen, if I was bashful.”

But of course the more unpleasant a duty was, the more zealously did Miss Glover perform it; she felt it right to visit Bertha with frequency, and manfully bore the young wife’s persistence in referring to an unpleasant subject. She carried her heroism to the pitch of knitting socks for the forthcoming baby, although to do so made her heart palpitate uncomfortably; and when she was surprised at the work by her brother, her cheeks burned like two fires.

“Now, Bertha dear,” she said one day, pulling herself together and straightening her back as she always did when she was mortifying the flesh. “Now, Bertha dear, I want to talk to you seriously.”

Bertha smiled. “Oh don’t, Fanny; you know how uncomfortable it makes you.”

“I must,” answered the good creature, gravely. “I know you’ll think me ridiculous, but it’s my duty.”

“I shan’t think anything of the kind,” said Bertha, touched with her friend’s humility.

“Well, you talk a great deal of — of what’s going to happen” — Miss Glover blushed— “but I’m not sure if you are really prepared for it.”

“Oh, is that all?” cried Bertha. “The nurse will be here in a fortnight, and Dr. Ramsay says she’s a most reliable woman.”

“I wasn’t thinking of earthly preparations,” said Miss Glover. “I was thinking of the other. Are you quite sure you’re approaching the — the thing, in the right spirit?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“It isn’t what I want you to do. It’s what you ought to do. I’m nobody. But have you thought at all of the spiritual side of it?”

Bertha gave a sigh that was chiefly voluptuous. “I’ve thought that I’m going to have a son, that’s mine and Eddie’s; and I’m awfully thankful.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to read the Bible to you sometimes?”

“Good heavens, you talk as if I were going to die.”

“One can never tell, dear Bertha,” replied Miss Glover, sombrely; “I think you ought to be prepared.... ‘In the midst of life we are in death’ — one can never tell what may happen.”

Bertha looked at her somewhat anxiously. She had been forcing herself of late to be cheerful, and had found it necessary to stifle a recurring presentiment of evil fortune. The Vicar’s sister never realised that she was doing everything possible to make Bertha thoroughly unhappy.

“I brought my own Bible with me,” she said. “Do you mind if I read you a chapter?”

“I should like it,” said Bertha, and a cold shiver went through her.

“Have you got any preference for some particular part?” asked Miss Glover, extracting the book from a little black bag which she always carried.

On Bertha’s answer that she had no preference, Miss Glover suggested opening the Bible at random, and reading on from the first line that crossed her eyes.

“Charles doesn’t quite approve of it,” she said; “he thinks it smacks of superstition. But I can’t help doing it, and the early Protestants constantly did the same.”

Miss Glover, having opened the book with closed eyes, began to read: “The sons of Pharez! Hezron, and Hamul. And the sons of Zerah; Zimri, and Ethan, and Heman, and Calcol, and Dara; five of them in all.” Miss Glover cleared her throat. “And the sons of Ethan; Azariah. The sons also of Hezron, that were born unto him; Jerahmeel, and Ram, and Chelubai. And Ram begat Amminadab; and Amminadab begat Nahshon, prince of the children of Judah.” She had fallen upon the genealogical table at the beginning of the Book of Chronicles. The chapter was very long, and consisted entirely of names, uncouth and difficult to pronounce; but Miss Glover shirked not one of them. With grave and somewhat high-pitched delivery, modelled on her brother’s, she read out the bewildering list. Bertha looked at her in amazement.

“That’s the end of the chapter,” she said at last; “would you like me to read you another one?”

“Yes, I should like it very much; but I don’t think the part you’ve hit on is quite to the point.”

“My dear, I don’t want to reprove you — that’s not my duty — but all the Bible is to the point.”

And as the time passed, Bertha quite lost her courage and was often seized by a panic fear. Suddenly, without obvious cause, her heart sank and she asked herself frantically how she could possibly get through it. She thought she was going to die, and wondered what would happen if she did. What would Edward do without her? Thinking of his bitter grief the tears came to her eyes, but her lips trembled with self-pity when the suspicion came that he would not be heartbroken: he was not a man to feel either grief or joy very poignantly. He would not weep; at the most his gaiety for a couple of days would be obscured, and then he would go about as before. She imagined him relishing the sympathy of his friends. In six months he would almost have forgotten her, and such memory as remained would not be extraordinarily pleasing. He would marry again; Edward loathed solitude, and next time doubtless he would choose a different sort of woman — one less remote from his ideal. Edward cared nothing for appearance, and Bertha imagined her successor plain as Miss Hancock or dowdy as Miss Glover; and the irony of it lay in the knowledge that either of those two would make a wife more suitable than she to his character, answering better to his conception of a helpmate.

Bertha fancied that Edward would willingly have given her beauty for some solid advantage, such as a knowledge of dressmaking; her taste, her arts and accomplishments, were nothing to him, and her impulsive passion was a positive defect. “Handsome is as handsome does,” said he; he was a plain, simple man and he wanted a simple, plain wife.

She wondered if her death would really cause him much sorrow; Bertha’s will gave him everything of which she was possessed, and he would spend it with a second wife. She was seized with insane jealousy.

“No, I won’t die,” she cried between her teeth, “I won’t!”

But one day, while Edward was hunting, her morbid fancies took another turn. Supposing he should die? The thought was unendurable, but the very horror of it fascinated her; she could not drive away the scenes which, with strange distinctness, her imagination set before her. She was seated at the piano and heard suddenly a horse stop at the front door — Edward was back early: but the bell rang; why should Edward ring? There was a murmur of voices without and Arthur Branderton came in. In her mind’s eye she saw every detail most clearly. He was in his hunting clothes! Something had happened, and knowing what it was, Bertha was yet able to realise her terrified wonder, as one possibility and another rushed through her brain. He was uneasy, he had something to tell, but dared not say it; she looked at him, horror-stricken, and a faintness came over her so that she could hardly stand.

Bertha’s heart beat quickly. She told herself it was absurd to let her imagination run away with her; but, notwithstanding, the pictures vividly proceeded: she seemed to assist at a ghastly play in which she was chief actor.

And what would she do when the fact was finally told her — that Edward was dead? She would faint or cry out.

“There’s been an accident,” said Branderton— “your husband is rather hurt.”

Bertha put her hands to her eyes, the agony was dreadful.

“You mustn’t upset yourself,” he went on, trying to break it to her.

Then, rapidly passing over the intermediate details she found herself with her husband. He was dead, lying on the floor — and she pictured him to herself, she knew exactly how he would look; sometimes he slept so soundly, so quietly, that she was nervous and put her ear to his heart to know if it was beating. Now he was dead. Despair suddenly swept down upon her overpoweringly. Bertha tried again to shake off her fancies, she even went to the piano and played a few notes; but the morbid attraction was too strong for her and the scene went on. Now that he was dead, he could not check her passion, now he was helpless and she kissed him with all her love; she passed her hands through his hair, and stroked his face (he had hated this in life), she kissed his lips and his closed eyes.

The imagined grief was so poignant that Bertha burst into tears. She remained with the body, refusing to be separated from it — Bertha buried her face in the cushions so that nothing might disturb her illusion, she had ceased trying to drive it away. Ah, she loved him passionately, she had always loved him and could not live without him. She knew that she would shortly die — and she had been afraid of death. Ah, now it was welcome! She kissed his hands — he could not prevent her now — and with a little shudder opened his eyes; they were glassy, expressionless, immobile. Clinging to him, she sobbed in love and anguish. She would let none touch him but herself; it was a relief to perform the last offices for him who had been her whole life. She did not know that her love was so great.

She undressed the body and washed it; she washed the limbs one by one and sponged them, then very gently dried them with a towel. The touch of the cold flesh made her shudder voluptuously — she thought of him taking her in his strong arms, kissing her on the mouth. She wrapped him in the white shroud and surrounded him with flowers. They placed him in the coffin, and her heart stood still: she could not leave him. She passed with him all day and all night, looking ever at the quiet, restful face. Dr. Ramsay came and Miss Glover came, urging her to go away, but she refused. What was the care of her own health now, she had only wanted to live for him?

The coffin was closed, and she saw the gestures of the undertakers — she had seen her husband’s face for the last time, her beloved: her heart was like a stone, and she beat her breast in pain.

Hurriedly now the pictures thronged upon her — the drive to the churchyard, the service, the coffin strewn with flowers, and finally the grave-side. They tried to keep her at home. What cared she for the silly, the abominable convention, which sought to prevent her from going to the funeral? Was it not her husband, the only light of her life, whom they were burying? They could not realise the horror of it, the utter despair. And distinctly, by the dimness of the winter day in her drawing-room at Court Leys, Bertha saw the lowering of the coffin, heard the rattle of earth thrown upon it.

What would her life be afterwards? She would try to live, she would surround herself with Edward’s things, so that his memory might be always with her; the loneliness was appalling. Court Leys was empty and bare. She saw the endless succession of grey days; the seasons brought no change, and continually the clouds hung heavily above her; the trees were always leafless, and it was desolate. She could not imagine that travel would bring solace — the whole of life was blank, and what to her now were the pictures and churches, the blue skies of Italy? Her only happiness was to weep.

Then distractedly Bertha thought that she would kill herself, for life was impossible to endure. No life at all, the blankness of the grave, was preferable to the pangs gnawing continually at her heart. It would be easy to finish, with a little morphia to close the book of trouble; despair would give her courage, and the prick of the needle was the only pain. But her vision became dim, and she had to make an effort to retain it: her thoughts grew less coherent, travelling back to previous incidents, to the scene at the grave, to the voluptuous pleasure of washing the body.

It was all so vivid that the entrance of Edward came upon her as a surprise. But the relief was too great for words, it was the awakening from a horrible nightmare. When he came forward to kiss her, she flung her arms round his neck, her eyes moist with past tears, and pressed him passionately to her heart.

“Oh, thank God!” she cried.

“Hulloa, what’s up now?”

“I don’t know what’s been the matter with me.... I’ve been so miserable, Eddie — I thought you were dead!”

“You’ve been crying!”

“It was so awful, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.... Oh, I should die also.”

Bertha could scarcely realise that her husband was by her side in the flesh, alive and well.

“Would you be sorry if I died?” she asked him.

“But you’re not going to do anything of the sort,” he said, cheerily.

“Sometimes I’m so frightened, I don’t believe I’ll get over it.”

He laughed at her, and his joyous tones were peculiarly comforting. She made him sit by her side and held his strong hands, the hands which to her were the visible signs of his powerful manhood. She stroked them and kissed the palms. She was quite broken with the past emotions; her limbs trembled and her eyes glistened with tears.

Chapter XVI

THE nurse arrived, bringing new apprehension. She was an old woman who, for twenty years, had helped the neighbouring gentry into the world; and she had a copious store of ghastly anecdote. In her mouth the terrors of birth were innumerable, and she told her stories with a cumulative art that was appalling. Of course, in her mind, she acted for the best; Bertha was nervous, and the nurse could imagine no better way of reassuring her than to give detailed accounts of patients who for days had been at death’s door, given up by all the doctors, and yet had finally recovered.

Bertha’s quick invention magnified the coming anguish till, for thinking of it, she could hardly sleep. The impossibility even to conceive it rendered it more formidable; she saw before her a long, long agony, and then death. She could not bear Edward to be out of her sight.

“Why, of course you’ll get over it,” he said. “I promise you it’s nothing to make a fuss about.”

He had bred animals for years and was quite used to the process which supplied him with veal, mutton, and beef, for the local butchers. It was a ridiculous fuss that human beings made over a natural and ordinary phenomenon.

“Oh, I’m so afraid of the pain. I feel certain that I shan’t get over it — it’s awful. I wish I hadn’t got to go through it.”

“Good heavens,” cried the doctor, “one would think no one had ever had a baby before you.”

“Oh, don’t laugh at me. Can’t you see how frightened I am! I have a presentiment that I shall die.”

“I never knew a woman yet,” said Dr. Ramsay, “who hadn’t a presentiment that she would die, even if she had nothing worse than a finger-ache the matter with her.”

“Oh, you can laugh,” said Bertha. “I’ve got to go through it.”

Another day passed, and the nurse said the doctor must be immediately sent for. Bertha had made Edward promise to remain with her all the time.

“I think I shall have courage if I can hold your hand,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Dr. Ramsay, when Edward told him this, “I’m not going to have a man meddling about.”

“I thought not,” said Edward, “but I just promised, to keep her quiet.”

“If you’ll keep yourself quiet,” answered the doctor, “that’s all I shall expect.”

“Oh, you needn’t fear about me. I know all about these things — why, my dear doctor, I’ve brought a good sight more living things into the world than you have, I bet.”

Edward, calm, self-possessed, unimaginative, was the ideal person for an emergency.

“There’s no good my knocking about the house all the afternoon,” he said. “I should only mope, and if I’m wanted I can always be sent for.”

He left word that he was going to Bewlie’s Farm to see a sick cow, about which he was very anxious.

“She’s the best milker I’ve ever had. I don’t know what I should do if anything went wrong with her. She gives her so-many pints a day, as regular as possible. She’s brought in over and over again the money I gave for her.”

He walked along with the free and easy step which Bertha so much admired, glancing now and then at the fields which bordered the highway. He stopped to examine the beans of a rival farmer.

“That soil’s no good,” he said, shaking his head. “It don’t pay to grow beans on a patch like that.”

When he arrived at Bewlie’s Farm, Edward called for the labourer in charge of the invalid.

“Well, how’s she going?”

“She ain’t no better, squire.”

“Bad job.... Has Thompson been to see her to-day?” Thompson was the vet.

“’E can’t make nothin’ of it— ’e thinks it’s a habscess she’s got, but I don’t put much faith in Mister Thompson: ’is father was a labourer same as me, only ’e didn’t ‘ave to do with farming, bein’ a bricklayer; and wot ’is son can know about cattle is beyond me altogether.”

“Well, let’s go and look at her,” said Edward.

He strode over to the barn, followed by the labourer. The beast was standing in one corner, even more meditative than is usual with cows, hanging her head and humping her back. She seemed profoundly pessimistic.

“I should have thought Thompson could do something,” said Edward.

“’E says the butcher’s the only thing for ‘er,” said the other, with great contempt.

Edward snorted indignantly. “Butcher indeed! I’d like to butcher him if I got the chance.”

He went into the farmhouse, which for years had been his home; but he was a practical, sensible fellow and it brought him no memories, no particular emotion.

“Well, Mrs. Jones,” he said to the tenant’s wife. “How’s yourself?”

“Middlin’, sir. And ‘ow are you and Mrs. Craddock?”

“I’m all right — the Missus is having a baby, you know.”

He spoke in the jovial, careless way which necessarily endeared him to the whole world.

“Bless my soul, is she indeed, sir — and I knew you when you was a boy! When d’you expect it?”

“I expect it every minute. Why, for all I know, I may be a happy father when I get back to tea.”

“You take it pretty cool, governor,” said Farmer Jones, who had known Edward in the days of his poverty.

“Me?” cried Edward, laughing. “I know all about this sort of thing, you see. Why, look at all the calves I’ve had — and mind you, I’ve not had an accident with a cow above twice, all the time I’ve gone in for breeding.... But I’d better be going to see how the Missus is getting on. Good afternoon to you, Mrs. Jones.”

“Now what I like about the squire,” said Mrs. Jones, “is that there’s no ‘aughtiness in ’im. ’E ain’t too proud to take a cup of tea with you, although ’e is the squire now.”

“‘E’s the best squire we’ve ‘ad for thirty years,” said Farmer Jones, “and, as you say, my dear, there’s not a drop of ‘aughtiness in ’im — which is more than you can say for his missus.”

“Oh well, she’s young-like,” replied his wife. “They do say as ‘ow ‘e’s the master, and I dare say ‘e’ll teach ‘er better.”

“Trust ’im for makin’ ’is wife buckle under; ‘e’s not a man to stand nonsense from anybody.”

Edward swung along the road, whirling his stick round, whistling, and talking to the dogs that accompanied him. He was of a hopeful disposition, and did not think it would be necessary to slaughter his best cow. He did not believe in the vet. half so much as in himself, and his firm opinion was that she would recover. He walked up the avenue of Court Leys, looking at the young elms he had planted to fill the gaps; they were pretty healthy on the whole, and he was pleased with his work.

He went to Bertha’s room and knocked at the door. Dr. Ramsay opened it, but with his burly frame barred the passage.

“Oh, don’t be afraid,” said Edward, “I don’t want to come in. I know when I’m best out of the way.... How is she getting on?”

“Well, I’m afraid it won’t be such an easy job as I thought,” whispered the doctor; “but there’s no reason to get alarmed.”

“I shall be downstairs if you want me for anything.”

“She was asking for you a good deal just now, but nurse told her it would upset you if you were there; so then she said, ‘Don’t let him come; I’ll bear it alone.’”

“Oh, that’s all right. In a time like this the husband is much better out of the way, I think.”

Dr. Ramsay shut the door upon him.

“Sensible chap that,” he said. “I like him better and better. Why, most men would be fussing about and getting hysterical, and Lord knows what.”

“Was that Eddie?” asked Bertha, her voice trembling with recent agony.

“Yes; he came to see how you were.”

“He isn’t very much upset, is he? Don’t tell him I’m very bad — it’ll make him wretched. I’ll bear it alone.”

Edward, downstairs, told himself it was no use getting into a state, which was quite true, and taking the most comfortable chair in the room, settled down to read his paper. Before dinner he went to make more inquiries. Dr. Ramsay came out saying he had given Bertha opium, and for a while she was quiet.

“It’s lucky you did it just at dinner time,” said Edward, with a laugh. “We’ll be able to have a snack together.”

They sat down and began to eat. They rivalled one another in their appetites; and the doctor, liking Edward more and more, said it did him good to see a man who could eat well. But before they had reached the pudding, a message came from the nurse to say that Bertha was awake, and Dr. Ramsay regretfully left the table. Edward went on eating steadfastly. At last, with the happy sigh of the man conscious of virtue and a satisfied stomach, he lit his pipe and again settling himself in the armchair, shortly began to doze. The evening, however, was long, and he felt bored.

“It ought to be all over by now,” he said. “I wonder if I need stay up?”

Dr. Ramsay seemed a little worried when Edward went to him a third time.

“I’m afraid it’s a difficult case,” he said. “It’s most unfortunate. She’s been suffering a good deal, poor thing.”

“Well, is there anything I can do?” asked Edward.

“No, except to keep calm and not make a fuss.”

“Oh, I shan’t do that; you needn’t fear. I will say that for myself, I have got nerve.”

“You’re splendid,” said Dr. Ramsay. “I tell you I like to see a man keep his head so well through a job like this.”

“Well, what I came to ask you was — is there any good in my sitting up? Of course I’ll do it if anything can be done; but if not I may as well go to bed.”

“Yes, I think you’d much better; I’ll call you if you’re wanted. I think you might come in and say a word or two to Bertha; it will encourage her.”

Edward entered. Bertha was lying with staring, terrified eyes — eyes that seemed to have lately seen entirely new things, they shone glassily. Her face was whiter than ever, the blood had fled from her lips, and her cheeks were sunken: she looked as if she were dying. She greeted Edward with the faintest smile.

“How are you, little woman?” he asked.

His presence seemed to call her back to life, and a faint colour lit up her cheeks.

“I’m all right,” she said, making an effort. “You mustn’t worry yourself, dear.”

“Been having a bad time?”

“No,” she said, bravely. “I’ve not really suffered much — there’s nothing for you to upset yourself about.”

He went out, and she called Dr. Ramsay. “You haven’t told him what I’ve gone through, have you? I don’t want him to know.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ve told him to go to bed.”

“Oh, I’m glad. He can’t bear not to get his proper night’s rest.... How long d’you think it will last — already I feel as if I’d been tortured for ever, and it seems endless.”

“Oh, it’ll soon be over now, I hope.”

“I’m sure I’m going to die,” she whispered; “I feel that life is being gradually drawn out of me — I shouldn’t mind if it weren’t for Eddie. He’ll be so cut up.”

“What nonsense!” said the nurse, “you all say you’re going to die.”

Edward — dear, manly, calm, and pure-minded fellow as he was — went to bed quietly and soon was fast asleep. But his slumbers were somewhat troubled: generally he enjoyed the heavy dreamless sleep of the man who has no nerves and plenty of exercise. To-night, however, he dreamt. He dreamt not only that one cow was sick, but that all his cattle had fallen ill — the cows stood about with gloomy eyes and humpbacks, surly and dangerous, evidently with their livers totally deranged; the oxen were “blown,” and lay on their backs with legs kicking feebly in the air.

“You must send them all to the butcher’s,” said the vet.; “there’s nothing to be done with them.”

“Good Lord deliver us,” said Edward; “I shan’t get four bob a stone for them.”

But his dream was disturbed by a knock at the door, and Edward awoke to find Dr. Ramsay shaking him.

“Wake up, man — get up and dress quickly.”

“What’s the matter?” cried Edward, jumping out of bed and seizing his clothes. “What’s the time?”

“It’s half-past four.... I want you to go into Tercanbury for Dr. Spocref; Bertha is very bad.”

“All right, I’ll bring him back with me.” Edward rapidly dressed himself.

“I’ll go round and wake up the man to put the horse in.”

“No, I’ll do that myself; it’ll take me half the time.” He methodically laced his boots.

“Bertha is in no immediate danger. But I must have a consultation. I still hope we shall bring her through it.”

“By Jove,” said Edward, “I didn’t know it was so bad as that.”

“You need not get alarmed yet — the great thing is for you to keep calm and bring Spocref along as quickly as possible. It’s not hopeless yet.”

Edward, with all his wits about him, was soon ready and with equal rapidity set to harnessing the horse; he carefully lit the lamps, as the proverb, more haste, less speed, passed through his mind. In two minutes he was on the main road, and whipped up the horse. He went with a quick, steady trot through the silent night.

Dr. Ramsay, returning to the sick-room, thought what a splendid object was a man who could be relied upon to do anything, who never lost his head nor got excited. His admiration for Edward was growing by leaps and bounds.

Chapter XVII

EDWARD CRADDOCK was a strong man, also unimaginative. Driving through the night to Tercanbury he did not give way to distressing thoughts, but easily kept his anxiety within proper bounds, and gave his whole attention to conducting the horse; he kept his eyes on the road in front of him, and the beast stepped out with swift, regular stride, rapidly passing the milestones. Edward rang Dr. Spocref up and gave him the note he carried. The doctor presently came down, an undersized man with a squeaky voice and a gesticulative manner. He looked upon Edward with suspicion.

“I suppose you’re the husband?” he said, as they clattered down the street. “Would you like me to drive? I dare say you’re rather upset.”

“No — and don’t want to be,” answered Edward, with a laugh. He looked down a little upon people who lived in towns, and never trusted a man who was less than six feet high and burly in proportion!

“I’m rather nervous of anxious husbands who drive me at a breakneck pace in the middle of the night,” said the doctor. “The ditches have an almost irresistible attraction for them.”

“Well, I’m not nervous, doctor, so it doesn’t matter twopence if you are.”

When they reached the open country, Edward set the horse going at its fastest; he was somewhat amused at the doctor’s desire to drive — absurd little man!

“Are you holding on tight?” he asked, with good-natured scorn.

“I see you can drive,” said the doctor.

“It is not the first time I’ve had reins in my hands,” replied Edward, modestly. “Here we are!”

He showed the specialist to the bedroom, and asked whether Dr. Ramsay required him further.

“No, I don’t want you just now; but you’d better stay up to be ready, if anything happens.... I’m afraid Bertha is very bad indeed — you must be prepared for everything.”

Edward retired to the next room and sat down. He was genuinely disturbed, but even now could not realise that Bertha was dying — his mind was sluggish, and he was unable to imagine the future. A more emotional man would have been white with fear, his heart beating painfully and his nerves quivering with a hundred anticipated terrors. He would have been quite useless; while Edward was fit for any emergency — he could have been trusted to drive another ten miles in search of some appliance, and, with perfect steadiness, to help in any necessary operation.

“You know,” he said to Dr. Ramsay, “I don’t want to get in your way; but if I should be any use in the room, you can trust me not to get flurried.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do; the nurse is very trustworthy and capable.”

“Women,” said Edward, “get so excited; they always make fools of themselves if they possibly can.”

But the night air had made Craddock sleepy, and after half-an-hour in the chair, trying to read a book, he dozed off. Presently, however, he awoke, and the first light of day filled the room with a gray coldness. He looked at his watch.

“By Jove, it’s a long job,” he said.

There was a knock at the door, and the nurse came in.

“Will you please come.”

Dr. Ramsay met him in the passage. “Thank God, it’s over. She’s had a terrible time.”

“Is she all right?”

“I think she’s in no danger now — but I’m sorry to say we couldn’t save the child.”

A pang went through Edward’s heart. “Is it dead?”

“It was still-born. I was afraid it was hopeless. You’d better go to Bertha now — she wants you. She doesn’t know about the child.”

Bertha was lying in an attitude of complete exhaustion: she lay on her back, with arms stretched in utter weakness by her sides. Her face was gray with past anguish, her eyes dull and lifeless, half closed; and her jaw hung almost as hangs the jaw of a corpse. She tried to form a smile as she saw Edward, but in her feebleness the lips scarcely moved.

“Don’t try to speak, dear,” said the nurse, seeing that Bertha was attempting words.

Edward bent down and kissed her, the faintest blush coloured her cheeks, and she began to cry; the tears stealthily glided down her cheeks.

“Come nearer to me, Eddie,” she whispered.

He knelt beside her, suddenly touched. He took her hand, and the contact had a vivifying effect; she drew a long breath, and her lips formed a weary, weary smile.

“Thank God, it’s over,” she groaned, half whispering. “Oh, Eddie, darling, you can’t think what I’ve gone through.”

“Well, it’s all over now.”

“And you’ve been worrying too, Eddie. It encouraged me to think that you shared my trouble. You must go to sleep now. It was good of you to drive to Tercanbury for me.”

“You mustn’t talk,” said Dr. Ramsay, coming back into the room, after seeing the specialist sent off.

“I’m better now,” said Bertha, “since I’ve seen Eddie.”

“Well, you must go to sleep.”

“You’ve not told me yet if it’s a boy or a girl; tell me, Eddie, you know.”

Edward looked uneasily at the doctor.

“It’s a boy,” said Dr. Ramsay.

“I knew it would be,” she murmured. An expression of ecstatic pleasure came into her face, chasing away the grayness of death. “I’m so glad. Have you seen it, Eddie?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s our child, isn’t it? It’s worth going through the pain to have a baby. I’m so happy.”

“You must go to sleep now.”

“I’m not a bit sleepy — and I want to see my boy.”

“No, you can’t see him now,” said Dr. Ramsay, “he’s asleep, and you mustn’t disturb him.”

“Oh, I should like to see him, just for one minute. You needn’t wake him.”

“You shall see him after you’ve been asleep,” said the doctor, soothingly. “It’ll excite you too much.”

“Well, you go in and see him, Eddie, and kiss him, and then I’ll go to sleep.”

She seemed so anxious that at least its father should see his child, that the nurse led Edward into the next room. On a chest of drawers was lying something covered with a towel. This the nurse lifted, and Edward saw his child; it was naked and very small, hardly human, repulsive, yet very pitiful. The eyes were closed, the eyes that had never been opened. Edward looked at it for a minute.

“I promised I’d kiss it,” he whispered.

He bent down and touched with his lips the white forehead; the nurse drew the towel over the body, and they went back to Bertha.

“Is he sleeping?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“Yes.”

Bertha smiled. “Fancy your kissing baby before me.”

But Dr. Ramsay’s draught was taking its effect, and almost immediately Bertha fell into a pleasant sleep.

“Let’s take a turn in the garden,” said Dr. Ramsay. “I think I ought to be here when she wakes.”

The air was fresh, scented with the spring flowers and the odour of the earth. Both men inspired it with relief after the close atmosphere of the sick-room. Dr. Ramsay put his arm in Edward’s.

“Cheer up, my boy,” he said. “You’ve borne it all magnificently. I’ve never seen a man go through a night like this better than you; and upon my word, you’re as fresh as paint this morning.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Edward. “What’s to be done about — about the baby?”

“I think she’ll be able to bear it better after she’s had a sleep. I really didn’t dare say it was still-born. The shock would have been too much for her.”

They went in and washed and ate, then waited for Bertha to wake. At last the nurse called them.

“You poor things,” cried Bertha, as they entered the room. “Have you had no sleep at all?... I feel quite well now, and I want my baby. Nurse says it’s sleeping and I can’t have it — but I will. I want it to sleep with me, I want to look at my son.”

Edward and the nurse looked at Dr. Ramsay, who for once was disconcerted.

“I don’t think you’d better have him to-day, Bertha,” he said. “It would upset you.”

“Oh, but I must have my baby. Nurse, bring him to me at once.”

Edward knelt down again by the bedside and took her hands. “Now, Bertha, you musn’t be alarmed, but the baby’s not well, and — —”

“What d’you mean?” Bertha suddenly sprang up in the bed.

“Lie down. Lie down,” cried Dr. Ramsay and the nurse, forcing her back on the pillow.

“What’s the matter with him, doctor,” she cried, in sudden terror.

“It’s as Edward says, he’s not well.”

“Oh, he isn’t going to die — after all I’ve gone through.”

She looked from one to the other. “Oh, tell me; don’t keep me in suspense. I can bear it, whatever it is.”

Dr. Ramsay touched Edward, encouraging him.

“You must prepare yourself for bad news, darling. You know — —”

“He isn’t dead?” she shrieked.

“I’m awfully sorry, dear.... He was still-born.”

“Oh, God!” groaned Bertha, it was a cry of despair. And then she burst into passionate weeping.

Her sobs were terrible, uncontrollable; it was her life that she was weeping away, her hope of happiness, all her desires and dreams. Her heart seemed breaking. She put her hands to her eyes, with a gesture of utter agony.

“Then I went through it all for nothing.... Oh, Eddie, you don’t know the frightful pain of it — all night I thought I should die.... I would have given anything to be put out of my suffering. And it was all useless.”

She sobbed still more irresistibly, quite crushed by the recollection of what she had gone through, and its futility.

“Oh, I wish I could die.”

The tears were in Edward’s eyes, and he kissed her hands.

“Don’t give way, darling,” he said, searching in vain for words to console her. His voice faltered and broke.

“Oh, Eddie,” she said, “you’re suffering just as much as I am. I forgot.... Let me see him now.”

Dr. Ramsay made a sign to the nurse, and she fetched the dead child. She carried it to the bedside and showed it to Bertha.

Bertha said nothing, and at last turned away; the nurse withdrew. Bertha’s tears now had ceased, but her mouth was set into a hopeless woe.

“Oh, I loved him already so much.”

Edward bent over. “Don’t grieve, darling.”

She put her arms round his neck as she had delighted to do. “Oh, Eddie, love me with all your heart. I want your love so badly.”

Chapter XVIII

FOR days Bertha was overwhelmed with grief. She thought always of the dead child that had never lived, and her heart ached. But above all she was tormented by the idea that all her pain had been futile; she had gone through so much, her sleep still was full of the past agony, and it had been utterly, utterly useless. Her body was mutilated so that she wondered it was possible for her to recover; she had lost her old buoyancy, that vitality which had been so enjoyable, and she felt like an old woman. Her sense of weariness was unendurable — she was so tired that it seemed to her impossible to get rest. She lay in bed, day after day, in a posture of hopeless fatigue, on her back, with arms stretched out alongside of her, the pillows supporting her head: all her limbs were singularly powerless.

Recovery was very slow, and Edward suggested sending for Miss Ley, but Bertha refused.

“I don’t want to see anybody,” she said; “I merely want to lie still and be quiet.”

It bored her to speak with people, and even her affections, for the time, were dormant: she looked upon Edward as some one apart from her, his presence and absence gave no particular emotion. She was tired, and desired only to be left alone. All sympathy was unnecessary and useless, she knew that no one could enter into the bitterness of her sorrow, and she preferred to bear it alone.

Little by little, however, Bertha regained strength and consented to see the friends who called, some genuinely sorry, others impelled merely by a sense of duty or by a ghoul-like curiosity. Miss Glover, at this period, was a great trial; the good creature felt for Bertha the sincerest sympathy, but her feelings were one thing, her sense of right and wrong another. She did not think the young wife took her affliction with proper humility. Gradually a rebellious feeling had replaced the extreme prostration of the beginning, and Bertha raged at the injustice of her lot. Miss Glover came every day, bringing flowers and good advice; but Bertha was not docile, and refused to be satisfied with Miss Glover’s pious consolations. When the good creature read the Bible, Bertha listened with a firmer closing of her lips, sullenly.

“Do you like me to read the Bible to you, dear?” asked the parson’s sister once.

And Bertha, driven beyond her patience, could not as usual command her tongue.

“If it amuses you, dear,” she answered, bitterly.

“Oh, Bertha, you’re not taking it in the proper spirit — you’re so rebellious, and it’s wrong, it’s utterly wrong.”

“I can only think of my baby,” said Bertha, hoarsely.

“Why don’t you pray to God, dear — shall I offer a short prayer now, Bertha?”

“No, I don’t want to pray to God — He’s either impotent or cruel.”

“Bertha,” cried Miss Glover. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Oh, pray to God to melt your stubbornness; pray to God to forgive you.”

“I don’t want to be forgiven. I’ve done nothing that needs it. It’s God who needs my forgiveness — not I His.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Bertha,” replied Miss Glover, very gravely and sorrowfully.

Bertha was still so ill that Miss Glover dared not press the subject, but she was grievously troubled. She asked herself whether she should consult her brother, to whom an absurd shyness prevented her from mentioning spiritual matters, unless necessity compelled. But she had immense faith in him, and to her he was a type of all that a Christian clergyman should be. Although her character was so much stronger than his, Mr. Glover always seemed to his sister a pillar of strength; and often in past times, when the flesh was more stubborn, had she found help and consolation in his very mediocre sermons. Finally, however, Miss Glover decided to speak to him, with the result that, for a week she avoided spiritual topics in her daily conversation with the invalid; then, Bertha having grown a little stronger, without previously mentioning the fact, she brought her brother to Court Leys.

Miss Glover went alone to Bertha’s room, in her ardent sense of propriety fearing that Bertha, in bed, might not be costumed decorously enough for the visit of a clerical gentleman.

“Oh,” she said, “Charles is downstairs and would like to see you so much. I thought I’d better come up first to see if you were — er — presentable.”

Bertha was sitting up in bed, with a mass of cushions and pillows behind her — a bright red jacket contrasted with her dark hair and the pallor of her skin. She drew her lips together when she heard that the Vicar was below, and a slight frown darkened her forehead. Miss Glover caught sight of it.

“I don’t think she likes your coming,” said Miss Glover — to encourage him — when she fetched her brother, “but I think it’s your duty.”

“Yes, I think it’s my duty,” replied Mr. Glover, who liked the approaching interview as little as Bertha.

He was an honest man, oppressed by the inroads of dissent; but his ministrations were confined to the services in church, the collecting of subscriptions, and the visiting of the church-going poor. It was something new to be brought before a rebellious gentlewoman, and he did not quite know how to treat her.

Miss Glover opened the bedroom door for her brother and he entered, a cold wind laden with carbolic acid. She solemnly put a chair for him by the bedside and another for herself at a little distance.

“Ring for the tea before you sit down, Fanny,” said Bertha.

“I think, if you don’t mind, Charles would like to speak to you first,” said Miss Glover. “Am I not right, Charles?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I took the liberty of telling him what you said to me the other day, Bertha.”

Mrs. Craddock pursed her lips, but made no reply.

“I hope you’re not angry with me for doing so, but I thought it my duty.... Now, Charles.”

The Vicar of Leanham coughed.

“I can quite understand,” he said, “that you must be most distressed at your affliction. It’s a most unfortunate occurrence. I need not say that Fanny and I sympathise with you from the bottom of our hearts.”

“We do indeed,” said his sister.

Still Bertha did not answer and Miss Glover looked at her uneasily. The Vicar coughed again.

“But I always think that we should be thankful for the cross we have to bear. It is, as it were, a measure of the confidence that God places in us.”

Bertha remained quite silent and Miss Glover saw that no good would come by beating about the bush.

“The fact is, Bertha,” she said, breaking the awkward silence, “that Charles and I are very anxious that you should be churched. You don’t mind our saying so, but we’re both a great deal older than you are, and we think it will do you good. We do hope you’ll consent to it; but, more than that, Charles is here as the clergyman of your parish, to tell you that it is your duty.”

“I hope it won’t be necessary for me to put it in that way, Mrs. Craddock.”

Bertha paused a moment longer, and then asked for a prayer-book. Miss Glover gave a smile which for her was quite radiant.

“I’ve been wanting for a long time to make you a little present, Bertha,” she said, “and it occurred to me that you might like a prayer-book with good large print. I’ve noticed in church that the book you generally use is so small that it must try your eyes, and be a temptation to you not to follow the service. So I’ve brought you one to-day, which it will give me very much pleasure if you will accept.”

She produced a large volume, bound in gloomy black cloth, and redolent of the antiseptic odours which pervaded the Vicarage. The print was indeed large, but, since the society which arranged the publication insisted on the combination of cheapness with utility, the paper was abominable.

“Thank you very much,” said Bertha, holding out her hand for the gift. “It’s awfully kind of you.”

“Shall I find you the Churching of Women?”

Bertha nodded, and presently the Vicar’s sister handed her the book, open. She read a few lines and dropped it.

“I have no wish to ‘give hearty thanks unto God,’” she said, looking almost fiercely at the worthy pair. “I’m very sorry to offend your prejudices, but it seems to me absurd that I should prostrate myself in gratitude to God.”

“Oh, Mrs. Craddock, I trust you don’t mean what you say,” said the Vicar.

“This is what I told you, Charles,” said Miss Glover. “I don’t think Bertha is well, but still this seems to me dreadfully wicked.”

Bertha frowned, finding it difficult to repress the sarcasm which rose to her lips; her forbearance was sorely tried. But Mr. Glover was a little undecided.

“We must be as thankful to God for the afflictions He sends as for the benefits,” he said at last.

“I am not a worm to crawl upon the ground and give thanks to the foot that crushes me.”

“I think that is blasphemous, Bertha,” said Miss Glover.

“Oh, I have no patience with you, Fanny,” said Bertha, raising herself, a flush lighting up her face. “Can you realise what I’ve gone through, the terrible pain of it? Oh, it was too awful. Even now when I think of it I almost scream.”

“It is by suffering that we rise to our higher self,” said Miss Glover. “Suffering is a fire that burns away the grossness of our material natures.”

“What rubbish you talk,” cried Bertha, passionately. “You can say that when you’ve never suffered. People say that suffering ennobles one; it’s a lie, it only makes one brutal.... But I would have borne it — for the sake of my child. It was all useless — utterly useless. Dr. Ramsay told me the child had been dead the whole time. Oh, if God made me suffer like that, it’s infamous. I wonder you’re not ashamed to put it down to God. How can you imagine Him to be so stupid, so cruel! Why, even the vilest beast in the slums wouldn’t cause a woman such frightful and useless agony for the mere pleasure of it.”

Miss Glover sprang to her feet. “Bertha, your illness is no excuse for this. You must either be mad, or utterly depraved and wicked.”

“No, I’m more charitable than you,” cried Bertha. “I know there is no God.”

“Then I, for one, can have nothing more to do with you.” Miss Glover’s cheeks were flaming, and a sudden indignation dispelled her habitual shyness.

“Fanny, Fanny!” cried her brother, “restrain yourself.”

“Oh, this isn’t a time to restrain one’s self, Charles. It’s one’s duty to speak out sometimes. No, Bertha, if you’re an atheist, I can have nothing more to do with you.”

“She spoke in anger,” said the Vicar. “It is not our duty to judge her.”

“It’s our duty to protest when the name of God is taken in vain, Charles. If you think Bertha’s position excuses her blasphemies, Charles, then I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.... But I’m not afraid to speak out. Yes, Bertha, I’ve known for a long time that you were proud and headstrong, but I thought time would change you. I have always had confidence in you, because I thought at the bottom you were good. But if you deny your Maker, Bertha, there can be no hope for you.”

“Fanny, Fanny,” murmured the Vicar.

“Let me speak, Charles; I think you’re a bad and wicked woman — and I can no longer feel sorry for you, because everything that you have suffered I think you have thoroughly deserved. Your heart is absolutely hard, and I know nothing so thoroughly wicked as a hard-hearted woman.”

“My dear Fanny,” said Bertha, smiling, “we’ve both been absurdly melodramatic.”

“I refuse to laugh at the subject. I see nothing ridiculous in it. Come, Charles, let us go, and leave her to her own thoughts.”

But as Miss Glover bounded to the door the handle was turned from the outside and Mrs. Branderton came in. The position was awkward, and her appearance seemed almost providential to the Vicar, who could not fling out of the room like his sister, but also could not make up his mind to shake hands with Bertha, as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Branderton entered, all airs and graces, smirking and ogling, and the gew-gaws on her brand-new bonnet quivered with every movement.

“I told the servant I could find my way up alone, Bertha,” she said. “I wanted so much to see you.”

“Mr. and Miss Glover were just going. How kind of you to come!”

Miss Glover bounced out of the room with a smile at Mrs. Branderton that was almost ghastly; and Mr. Glover, meek, polite, and as antiseptic as ever, shaking hands with Mrs. Branderton, followed his sister.

“What queer people they are!” said Mrs. Branderton, standing at the window to see them come out of the front door. “I really don’t think they’re quite human.... Why, she’s walking on in front — she might wait for him — taking such long steps; and he’s trying to catch her up. I believe they’re having a race. Ha! ha! What ridiculous people! Isn’t it a pity she will wear short skirts — my dear, her feet and ankles are positively awful. I believe they wear one another’s boots indiscriminately.... And how are you, dear? I think you’re looking much better.”

Mrs. Branderton sat in such a position as to have full view of herself in a mirror.

“What nice looking-glasses you have in your room, my love. No woman can dress properly without them. Now, you’ve only got to look at poor Fanny Glover to know that she’s so modest as never even to look at herself in the glass to put her hat on.”

Mrs. Branderton chattered on, thinking that she was doing Bertha good. “A woman doesn’t want one to be solemn when she’s ill. I know when I have anything the matter, I like some one to talk to me about the fashions. I remember in my young days, when I was ill, I used to get old Mr. Crowhurst, the former vicar, to come and read the ladies’ papers to me. He was such a nice old man, not a bit like a clergyman; and he used to say I was his only parishioner whom he really liked visiting.... I’m not tiring you, am I, dear?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Bertha.

“Now I suppose the Glovers have been talking all sorts of stuff to you. Of course one has to put up with it, I suppose, because it sets a good example to the lower orders; but I must say I do think the clergy nowadays sometimes forget their place. I consider it most objectionable when they insist on talking religion with you, as if you were a common person.... But they’re not nearly so nice as they used to be. In my young days the clergy were always gentlemen’s sons — but then they weren’t expected to trouble about the poor. I can quite understand that now a gentleman shouldn’t like to become a clergyman; he has to mix with the lower classes, and they’re growing more familiar every day.”

But suddenly Bertha, without warning, burst into tears. Mrs. Branderton was flabbergasted!

“My dear, what is the matter? Where are your salts? Shall I ring the bell?”

Bertha, sobbing violently, begged Mrs. Branderton to take no notice of her. That fashionable creature had a sentimental heart, and would have been delighted to weep with Bertha; but she had several calls to make, and could not risk a disarrangement of her person. She was also curious, and would have given much to find out the cause of Bertha’s outburst. She comforted herself, however, by giving the Hancocks, whose At Home day it was, a detailed account of the affair; and they, shortly afterwards, recounted it with sundry embellishments to Mrs. Mayston Ryle.

Mrs. Mayston Ryle, magnificently imposing as ever, snorted like a charger eager for battle.

“Mrs. Branderton sends me to sleep frequently,” she said; “But I can quite understand that if the poor thing isn’t well, Mrs. Branderton would make her cry. I never see her myself unless I’m in the most robust health, otherwise I know she’d simply make me howl.”

“But I wonder what was the matter with poor Mrs. Craddock,” said Miss Hancock.

“I don’t know,” answered Mrs. Mayston Ryle in her majestic manner. “But I’ll find out. I dare say she only wants a little good society. I shall go and see her.”

And she did!

Chapter XIX

BUT the apathy with which for weeks Bertha had looked upon all terrestrial concerns was passing away before her increasing strength. It had been due only to an utter physical weakness, of the same order as that merciful indifference to all earthly sympathies which gives ease to the final passage into the Unknown. The prospect of death would be unendurable if one did not know that the enfeebled body brought a like enfeeblement of spirit, dissolving the ties of this world: when the traveller must leave the hostel with the double gate, the wine he loved has lost its savour and the bread turned bitter in his mouth. Like useless gauds, Bertha had let fall the interests of life; her soul lay a-dying. Her soul was a lighted candle in a lantern, flickering in the wind so that its flame was hardly seen and the lantern was useless; but presently the wind of death was stilled, and the light shone out and filled the darkness.

With increasing strength the old passion returned; love came back like a conqueror, and Bertha knew that she had not done with life. In her loneliness she yearned for Edward’s affection; for now he was all she had, and she stretched out her arms to him with a great desire. She blamed herself bitterly for her coldness, she wept at the idea of what he must have suffered. And she was ashamed that the love which she had thought eternal, should have been for a while destroyed. But a change had come over her. She did not now love her husband with the old blind passion, but with a new feeling added to it; for to him was transferred the tenderness which she had lavished on her dead child, and all the mother’s spirit which must now, to her life’s end, go unsatisfied. Her heart was like a house with empty chambers, and the fires of love raged through them triumphantly.

Bertha thought a little painfully of Miss Glover, but dismissed her with a shrug of the shoulders. The good creature had kept her resolve never again to come near Court Leys, and for days nothing had been heard of her.

“What does it matter?” cried Bertha. “So long as Eddie loves me, the rest of the world is nothing.”

But her room gained now the aspect of a prison, so that she felt it impossible much longer to endure its dreadful monotony. Her bed was a bed of torture, and she fancied that so long as she remained stretched upon it, health would not return. She begged Dr. Ramsay to allow her to get up, but was always met with the same refusal, backed up by her husband’s common sense. All she obtained was the dismissal of the nurse to whom she had taken a sudden and violent dislike. From no reasonable cause, Bertha found the mere presence of the poor woman unendurable, and her officious loquacity irritated her beyond measure. If she must remain in bed, Bertha preferred absolute solitude; the turn of her mind was becoming almost misanthropic.

The hours passed endlessly. From her pillow Bertha could see only the sky, now a metallic blue with dazzling clouds swaying heavily across, now gray, darkening the room. The furniture and the wall-paper forced themselves distastefully on her mind. Every detail was impressed on her consciousness as indelibly as the potter’s mark on the clay.

Finally she made up her mind to get up, come what might. It was the Sunday after the quarrel with Miss Glover; Edward would be indoors and doubtless intended to spend most of the afternoon in her room, but she knew he disliked sitting there; the closeness, the odours of medicine, made his head ache. Her appearance in the drawing-room would be a delightful surprise. She would not tell him that she was getting up, but go downstairs and take him unawares. She got out of bed, but as she put her feet to the ground, had to cling to a chair; her legs were so weak that they hardly supported her, and her head reeled. But in a little while she gathered strength and slowly dressed herself, slowly and very difficultly; her weakness was almost pain. She had to sit down, and her hair was so wearisome to do that she was afraid she must give up the attempt and return to bed. But the thought of Edward’s surprise upheld her — he had said how pleased he would be to have her downstairs with him. At last she was ready and went to the door, supporting herself on every object at hand. But what joy it was to be up again, to feel herself once more among the living — away from the grave of her bed!

She came to the top of the stairs and went down, leaning heavily on the banisters; she went one step at a time, as little children do, and laughed at herself. But the laugh changed almost into a groan, as in exhaustion she sank down and felt it impossible to go farther. Then the thought of Edward urged her on. She struggled to her feet, and persevered till she reached the bottom. Now she was outside the drawing-room, she heard Edward whistling within. She crept along, eager to make no sound; noiselessly she turned the handle and flung the door open.

“Eddie!”

He turned round with a cry. “Hulloa, what are you doing here?”

He came towards her, but showed not the great joy which she had expected.

“I wanted to surprise you. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes, of course I am. But you oughtn’t to have come without Dr. Ramsay’s leave. And I didn’t expect you to-day.”

He led her to the sofa, and she lay down.

“I thought you’d be so pleased.”

“Of course I am!”

He placed pillows under her, and covered her with a rug — little attentions which were exquisitely touching.

“You don’t know how I struggled,” she said. “I thought I should never get my things on, and then I almost tumbled down the stairs, I was so weak.... But I knew you must be lonely here, and you hate sitting in the bedroom.”

“You oughtn’t to have risked it. It may throw you back,” he replied, gently. He looked at his watch. “You must only stay half-an-hour, and then I shall carry you up to bed.”

Bertha gave a laugh, intending to permit nothing of the sort. It was so comfortable to lie on the sofa, with Edward by her side. She held his hands.

“I simply couldn’t stay in the room any longer. It was so gloomy, with the rain pattering all day on the windows.”

It was one of those days of late summer when the rain seems never ceasing, and the air is filled with the melancholy of nature, already conscious of the near decay.

“I was meaning to come up to you as soon as I’d finished my pipe.”

Bertha was exhausted, and, keeping silence, pressed Edward’s hand in acknowledgment of his kind intention. Presently he looked at his watch again.

“Your half-hour’s nearly up. In five minutes I’m going to carry you to your room.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” she replied playfully, taking his remark as humorous. “I’m going to stay till dinner.”

“No, you can’t possibly. It will be very bad for you.... To please me go back to bed now.”

“Well, we’ll split the difference and I’ll go after tea.”

“No, you must go now.”

“Why, one would think you wanted to get rid of me!”

“I have to go out,” said Edward.

“Oh no, you haven’t — you’re merely saying that to induce me to go upstairs. You fibber!”

“Let me carry you up now, there’s a good girl.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

“I shall have to leave you alone, Bertha. I didn’t know you meant to get up to-day, and I have an engagement.”

“Oh, but you can’t leave me the first time I get up. What is it? You can write a note and break it.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” he replied. “But I’m afraid I can’t do that. The fact is, I saw the Miss Hancocks after church, and they said they had to walk into Tercanbury this afternoon, and as it was so wet I offered to drive them in. I’ve promised to fetch them at three.”

“You’re joking,” said Bertha; her eyes had suddenly become hard, and she was breathing fast.

Edward looked at her uneasily. “I didn’t know you were going to get up, or I shouldn’t have arranged to go out.”

“Oh well, it doesn’t matter,” said Bertha, throwing off the momentary anger. “You can just write and say you can’t come.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he answered, gravely. “I’ve given my word and I can’t break it.”

“Oh, but it’s infamous.” Her wrath blazed out again. “Even you can’t be so cruel as to leave me at such a time. I deserve some consideration — after all I’ve suffered. For weeks I lay at death’s door, and at last when I’m a little better and come down — thinking to give you pleasure, you’re engaged to drive the Misses Hancock into Tercanbury.”

“Come, Bertha, be reasonable.” Edward condescended to expostulate with his wife, though it was not his habit to humour her extravagances. “You see it’s not my fault. Isn’t it enough for you that I’m very sorry? I shall be back in an hour. Stay here, and then we’ll spend the evening together.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“I haven’t lied: I’m not given to that,” said Edward, with natural satisfaction.

“You pretended it was for my health’s sake that I must go upstairs. Isn’t that a lie?”

“It was for your health’s sake.”

“You lie again. You wanted to get me out of the way, so that you might go to the Miss Hancocks without telling me.”

“You ought to know me better than that by now.”

“Why did you say nothing about them till you found it impossible to avoid.”

Edward shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly. “Because I know how touchy you are.”

“And yet you made them the offer.”

“It came out almost unawares. They were grumbling about the weather, and without thinking, I said, ‘I’ll drive you over if you like.’ And they jumped at it.”

“You’re so good-natured if any one but your wife is concerned.”

“Well, dear, I can’t stay arguing. I shall be late already.”

“You’re not really going?” It had been impossible for Bertha to realise that Edward would carry out his intention.

“I must, my dear; it’s my duty.”

“You have more duty to me than to any one else.... Oh, Eddie, don’t go. You can’t realise all it means to me.”

“I must. I’m not going because I want to. I shall be back in an hour.”

He bent down to kiss her, and she flung her arms round his neck, bursting into tears.

“Oh, please don’t go — if you love me at all, if you’ve ever loved me.... Don’t you see that you’re destroying my love for you?”

“Now, don’t be silly, there’s a good girl.”

He loosened her arms and walked away; but rising from the sofa she followed him and took his arm, beseeching him to stay.

“You see how unhappy I am; and you are all I have in the world now. For God’s sake, stay, Eddie. It means more to me than you know.”

She sank to the floor; she was kneeling before him.

“Come, get on to the sofa. All this is very bad for you.”

He carried her to the couch, and then, to finish the scene, hurriedly left the room.

Bertha sprang up to follow him, but sank back as the door slammed, and burying her face in her hands, surrendered herself to a passion of tears. But humiliation and rage almost drove away her grief. She had knelt before her husband for a favour, and he had not granted it. Suddenly she abhorred him. The love, which had been a tower of brass, fell like a house of cards. She would not try now to conceal from herself the faults that stared her in the face. He cared only for himself: with him it was only self, self, self. Bertha found a bitter fascination in stripping her idol of the finery with which her madness had bedizened him; she saw him more accurately now, and he was utterly selfish. But most unbearable of all was her own extreme humiliation.

The rain poured down, unceasing, and the despair of nature ate into her soul. At last she was exhausted; and losing thought of time, lay half-unconscious, feeling at least no pain, her brain vacant and weary. When a servant came to ask if Miss Glover might see her, she hardly understood.

“Miss Glover doesn’t usually stand on such ceremony,” she said ill-temperedly, forgetting the incident of the previous week. “Ask her to come in.”

The parson’s sister came to the door and hesitated, growing red; the expression in her eyes was pained, and even frightened.

“May I come in, Bertha?”

“Yes.”

She walked straight to the sofa, and fell on her knees.

“Oh, Bertha, please forgive me. I was wrong, and I’ve behaved wickedly to you.”

“My dear Fanny,” murmured Bertha, a smile breaking through her misery.

“I withdraw every word I said to you, Bertha; I can’t understand how I said it. I humbly beg your forgiveness.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“Oh, yes, there is. Good heavens, I know! My conscience has been reproaching me ever since I was here, but I hardened my heart, and would not listen.”

Poor Miss Glover could not really have hardened her heart, however much she tried.

“I knew I ought to come to you and beg your forgiveness, but I wouldn’t. I’ve not slept a wink at night. I was afraid of dying, and if I’d been cut off in the midst of my wickedness, I should have been lost.”

She spoke very quickly, finding it evidently a relief to express her trouble.

“I thought Charles would upbraid me, but he’s never said a word. Oh, I wish he had, it would have been easier to bear than his sorrowful look. I know he’s been worrying dreadfully, and I’m so sorry for him. I kept on saying I’d only done my duty, but in my heart I knew I had done wrong. Oh Bertha, and this morning I dared not take communion, I thought God would strike me for blasphemy. And I was afraid Charles would refuse me in front of the whole congregation.... It’s the first Sunday since I was confirmed, that I’ve missed taking Holy Communion.”

She buried her face in her hands, crying. Bertha heard her, almost listlessly; for her own trouble was overwhelming and she could not think of any other. Miss Glover raised her face, tear-stained and red; it was positively hideous, but notwithstanding, very pathetic.

“Then I couldn’t bear it any longer,” she said. “I thought if I begged your pardon I might be able to forgive myself. Oh, Bertha, please forget what I said, and forgive me. And I fancied that Edward would be here to-day, and the thought of exposing myself before him too was almost more than I could bear. But I knew the humiliation would be good for me. Oh, I was so thankful when Jane said he was out.... What can I do to earn your forgiveness?”

In her heart of hearts, Miss Glover desired some horrible penance which would thoroughly mortify her flesh.

“I have already forgotten all about it,” said Bertha, smiling wearily. “If my forgiveness is worth anything, I forgive you entirely.”

Miss Glover was a little pained at Bertha’s manifest indifference, yet took it as a just punishment.

“And Bertha, let me say that I love you and admire you more than any one after Charles. If you really think what you said the other day, I still love you and hope God will turn your heart. Charles and I will pray for you night and day, and soon I hope the Almighty will send you another child to take the place of the one you lost. Believe me, God is very good and merciful, and He will grant you what you wish.”

Bertha gave a low cry of pain. “I can never have another child.... Dr. Ramsay told me it was impossible.”

“Oh, Bertha, I didn’t know.”

Miss Glover took Bertha protectingly in her arms, crying, and kissed her like a little child.

But Bertha dried her eyes.

“Leave me now, Fanny, please. I’d rather be alone. But come and see me soon, and forgive me if I’m horrid. I’m very unhappy and I shall never be happy again.”

A few minutes later, Edward returned — cheery, jovial, red-faced, and in the best of humours.

“Here we are again!” he shouted, like a clown in a harlequinade. “You see I’ve not been gone long and you haven’t missed me a rap. Now, we’ll have tea.”

He kissed her and put her cushions right.

“By Jove, it does me good to see you down again. You must pour out the tea for me.... Now, confess; weren’t you unreasonable to make such a fuss about my going away? And I couldn’t help it, could I?”

Chapter XX

BUT the love which had taken such despotic possession of Bertha’s nature could not be overthrown by any sudden means. When she recovered her health and was able to resume her habits, it blazed out again like a fire, momentarily subdued, which has gained new strength in its coercion. It dismayed her to think of her extreme loneliness; Edward was now her only mainstay and her only hope. She no longer sought to deny that his love was unlike hers; but his coldness was not always apparent; vehemently wishing to find a response to her ardour, she closed her eyes to all that did not too readily obtrude itself. She had such a consuming desire to find in Edward the lover of her dreams, that for certain periods she was indeed able to live in a fool’s paradise, which was none the less grateful because at the bottom of her heart she had an aching suspicion of its true character.

But it seemed that the more passionately Bertha yearned for her husband’s love, the more frequent became their differences. As time went on the calm between the storms was shorter, and every quarrel left its mark, and made Bertha more susceptible to affront. Realizing, finally, that Edward could not answer her demonstrations of affection, she became ten times more exacting; even the little tendernesses which at the beginning of her married life would have overjoyed her, now too much resembled alms thrown to an importunate beggar, to be received with anything but irritation. Their altercations proved conclusively that it does not require two persons to make a quarrel. Edward was a model of good-temper, and his equanimity was imperturbable. However cross Bertha was, Edward never lost his serenity. He imagined that she was troubling over the loss of her child, and that her health was not entirely restored: it had been his experience, especially with cows, that a difficult confinement frequently gave rise to some temporary change in disposition, so that the most docile animal in the world would suddenly develop an unexpected viciousness. He never tried to understand Bertha’s varied moods; her passionate desire for love was to him as unreasonable as her outbursts of temper and the succeeding contrition. Now, Edward was always the same — contented equally with the universe at large and with himself; there was no shadow of a doubt about the fact that the world he lived in, the particular spot and period, were the very best possible; and that no existence could be more satisfactory than happily to cultivate one’s garden. Not being analytic, he forbore to think about the matter; and if he had, would not have borrowed the phrases of M. de Voltaire, whom he had never heard of, and would have utterly abhorred as a Frenchman, a philosopher, and a wit. But the fact that Edward ate, drank, slept, and ate again, as regularly as the oxen on his farm, sufficiently proved that he enjoyed a happiness equal to theirs — and what more can a decent man want?

Edward had moreover that magnificent faculty of always doing right and of knowing it, which is said to be the most inestimable gift of the true Christian; but if his infallibility pleased himself and edified his neighbours, it did not fail to cause his wife the utmost annoyance. She would clench her hands and from her eyes shoot arrows of fire, when he stood in front of her, smilingly conscious of the justice of his own standpoint and the unreason of hers. And the worst of it was that in her saner moments Bertha had to confess that Edward’s view was invariably right and she completely in the wrong. Her injustice appalled her, and she took upon her own shoulders the blame of all their unhappiness. Always, after a quarrel from which Edward had come with his usual triumph, Bertha’s rage would be succeeded by a passion of remorse; and she could not find sufficient reproaches with which to castigate herself. She asked frantically how her husband could be expected to love her; and in a transport of agony and fear would take the first opportunity of throwing her arms around his neck and making the most abject apology. Then, having eaten the dust before him, having wept and humiliated herself, she would be for a week absurdly happy, under the impression that henceforward nothing short of an earthquake could disturb their blissful equilibrium. Edward was again the golden idol, clothed in the diaphanous garments of true love, his word was law and his deeds were perfect; Bertha was an humble worshipper, offering incense and devoutly grateful to the deity that forbore to crush her. It required very little for her to forget the slights and the coldness of her husband’s affection: her love was like the tide covering a barren rock; the sea breaks into waves and is dispersed in foam, while the rock remains ever unchanged. This simile, by the way, would not have displeased Edward; when he thought at all, he liked to think how firm and steadfast he was.

At night, before going to sleep, it was Bertha’s greatest pleasure to kiss her husband on the lips, and it mortified her to see how mechanically he replied to this embrace. It was always she who had to make the advance, and when, to try him, she omitted to do so, he promptly went off to sleep without even bidding her good-night. Then she told herself that he must utterly despise her.

“Oh, it drives me mad to think of the devotion I waste on you,” she cried. “I’m a fool! You are all in the world to me, and I, to you, am a sort of accident: you might have married any one but me. If I hadn’t come across your path you would infallibly have married somebody else.”

“Well, so would you,” he answered, laughing.

“I? Never! If I had not met you I should have married no one. My love isn’t a bauble that I am willing to give to whomever chance throws in my way. My heart is one and indivisible; it would be impossible for me to love any one but you.... When I think that to you I’m nothing more than any other woman might be, I’m ashamed.”

“You do talk the most awful rot sometimes.”

“Ah, that summarises your whole opinion. To you I’m merely a fool of a woman. I’m a domestic animal, a little more companionable than a dog, but on the whole, not so useful as a cow.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do more than I actually do. You can’t expect me to be kissing and cuddling all the time. The honeymoon is meant for that, and a man who goes on honeymooning all his life, is an ass.”

“Ah yes, with you love is kept out of sight all day, while you are occupied with the serious affairs of life, such as shearing sheep or hunting foxes; and after dinner it arises in your bosom, especially if you’ve had good things to eat, and is indistinguishable from the process of digestion. But for me love is everything, the cause and reason of life. Without love I should be non-existent.”

“Well, you may love me,” said Edward, “but, by Jove, you’ve got a jolly funny way of showing it.... But as far as I’m concerned, if you’ll tell me what you want me to do, I’ll try and do it.”

“Oh, how can I tell you?” she cried, impatiently. “I do everything I can to make you love me and I can’t. If you’re a stock and a stone, how can I teach you to be the passionate lover? I want you to love me as I love you.”

“Well, if you ask me for my opinion I should say it was rather a good job I don’t. Why, the furniture would be smashed up in a week, if I were as violent as you.”

“I shouldn’t mind if you were violent if you loved me,” replied Bertha, taking his remark with vehement seriousness. “I shouldn’t care if you beat me; I should not mind how much you hurt me, if you did it because you loved me.”

“I think a week of it would about sicken you of that sort of love, my dear.”

“Anything would be preferable to your indifference.”

“But God bless my soul, I’m not indifferent. Any one would think I didn’t care for you — or was gone on some other woman.”

“I almost wish you were,” answered Bertha. “If you loved any one at all, I might have some hope of gaining your affection — but you’re incapable of love.”

“I don’t know about that. I can say truly that after God and my honour, I treasure nothing in the world so much as you.”

“You’ve forgotten your hunter,” cried Bertha, scornfully.

“No, I haven’t,” answered Edward, with a certain gravity.

“What do you think I care for a position like that? You acknowledge that I am third — I would as soon be nowhere.”

“I could not love you half so much, loved I not honour more,” misquoted Edward.

“The man was a prig who wrote that. I want to be placed above your God and above your honour. The love I want is the love of the man who will lose everything, even his own soul, for the sake of a woman.”

Edward shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know where you’ll get that. My idea of love is that it’s a very good thing in its place — but there’s a limit to everything. There are other things in life.”

“Oh yes, I know — there’s duty and honour, and the farm, and fox-hunting, and the opinion of one’s neighbours, and the dogs and the cat, and the new brougham, and a million other things.... What do you suppose you’d do if I had committed some crime and were likely to be imprisoned?”

“I don’t want to suppose anything of the sort. You may be sure I’d do my duty.”

“Oh, I’m sick of your duty. You din it into my ears morning, noon, and night. I wish to God you weren’t so virtuous — you might be more human.”

Edward found his wife’s behaviour so extraordinary that he consulted Dr. Ramsay. The medical man had been for thirty years the recipient of marital confidences, and was sceptical as to the value of medicine in the cure of jealousy, talkativeness, incompatibility of temper, and the like diseases. He assured Edward that time was the only remedy by which all differences were reconciled; but after further pressing consented to send Bertha a bottle of harmless tonic, which it was his habit to give to all and sundry for most of the ills to which the flesh is heir. It would doubtless do Bertha no harm, and that is an important consideration to a general practitioner. Dr. Ramsay likewise advised Edward to keep calm and be confident that Bertha would eventually become the dutiful and submissive spouse whom it is every man’s ideal to see by his fireside, when he wakes up from his after-dinner snooze.

Bertha’s moods were certainly trying. No one could tell one day, how she would be the next; and this was peculiarly uncomfortable to a man who was willing to make the best of everything, but on the condition that he had time to get used to it. Sometimes she would be seized with melancholy, in the twilight of winter afternoons, for instance, when the mind is naturally led to a contemplation of the vanity of existence and the futility of all human endeavour. Edward, noticing she was pensive, a state which he detested, asked what were her thoughts; and half dreamily she tried to express them.

“Good Lord deliver us!” he cried cheerily, “what rum things you do get into your little noddle. You must be out of sorts.”

“It isn’t that,” she answered, smiling sadly.

“It’s not natural for a woman to brood in that way. I think you ought to start taking that tonic again — but I dare say you’re only tired and you’ll think quite different in the morning.”

Bertha made no answer. She suffered from the nameless pain of existence and he offered her — Iron and Quinine: when she required sympathy because her heart ached for the woes of her fellow-men, he poured Tincture of Nux Vomica down her throat. He could not understand, it was no use explaining that she found a savour in the tender contemplation of the evils of mankind. But the worst of it was that Edward was quite right — the brute, he always was! When the morning came, the melancholy had vanished, Bertha was left without a care, and the world did not even need rose-coloured spectacles to seem attractive. It was humiliating to find that her most beautiful thoughts, the ennobling emotions which brought home to her the charming fiction that all men are brothers, were due to mere physical exhaustion.

Some people have extraordinarily literal minds, they never allow for the play of imagination: life for them has no beer and skittles, and, far from being an empty dream, is a matter of extreme seriousness. Of such is the man who, when a woman tells him she feels dreadfully old, instead of answering that she looks absurdly young, replies that youth has its drawbacks and age its compensations! And of such was Edward. He could never realise that people did not mean exactly what they said. At first he had always consulted Bertha on the conduct of the estate; but she, pleased to be a nonentity in her own house, had consented to everything he suggested, and even begged him not to ask her. When she informed him that he was absolute lord not only of herself, but of all her worldly goods, it was not surprising that he should at last take her at her word.

“Women know nothing about farming,” he said, “and it’s best that I should have a free hand.”

The result of his stewardship was all that could be desired; the estate was put into apple-pie order, and the farms paid rent for the first time since twenty years. The wandering winds, even the sun and the rain, seemed to conspire in favour of so clever and hard working a man; and fortune for once went hand in hand with virtue. Bertha constantly received congratulations from the surrounding squires on the admirable way in which Edward managed the place, and he, on his side, never failed to recount his triumphs and the compliments they occasioned.

But not only was Edward looked upon as master by his farm-hands and labourers; even the servants of Court Leys treated Bertha as a minor personage whose orders were only to be conditionally obeyed. Long generations of servitude have made the countryman peculiarly subtle in hierarchical distinctions; and there was a marked difference between his manner with Edward, on whom his livelihood depended, and his manner with Bertha, who shone only with a reflected light as the squire’s missus.

At first this had only amused Bertha, but the most brilliant jest, constantly repeated, may lose its savour. More than once she had to speak sharply to a gardener who hesitated to do as he was bid, because his orders were not from the master. Her pride reviving with the decline of love, Bertha began to find the position intolerable; her mind was now very susceptible to affront, and she was desirous of an opportunity to show that after all she was still the mistress of Court Leys.

It soon came. For it chanced that some ancient lover of trees, unpractical as the Leys had ever been, had planted six beeches in a hedgerow, and these in course of time had grown into stately trees, the admiration of all beholders. But one day as Bertha walked along, a hideous gap caught her eye — one of the six beeches had disappeared. There had been no storm, it could not have fallen of itself. She went up, and found it cut down, and the men who had done the deed were already starting on another: a ladder was leaning against it, upon which stood a labourer attaching a line. No sight is more pathetic than an old tree levelled with the ground; and the space which it filled suddenly stands out with an unsightly emptiness. But Bertha was more angry than pained.

“What are you doing, Hodgkins? Who gave you orders to cut down this tree?”

“The squire, mum.”

“Oh, it must be a mistake. Mr. Craddock never meant anything of the sort.”

“’E told us positive to take down this one and them others yonder. You can see his mark, mum.”

“Nonsense. I’ll talk to Mr. Craddock about it. Take that rope off and come down from the ladder. I forbid you to touch another tree.”

The man on the ladder looked at her, but made no attempt to do as he was bid.

“The squire said most particular that we was to cut that tree down to-day.”

“Will you have the goodness to do as I tell you?” said Bertha, reddening with anger. “Tell that man to unfasten the rope and come down. I forbid you to touch the tree.”

The man Hodgkins repeated Bertha’s order in a surly voice, and they all looked at her suspiciously, wishing to disobey but not daring — in case the squire should be angry.

“Well, I’ll take no responsibility for it.”

“Please hold your tongue and do what I tell you as quickly as possible.”

She waited till the men had gathered up their various belongings and trooped off.

Chapter XXI

BERTHA went home, fuming, knowing perfectly well that Edward had really given the orders which she had countermanded, but glad of the chance to have a final settlement of rights. She did not see him for several hours.

“I say, Bertha,” he said, when he came in, “why on earth did you stop those men cutting down the beeches on Carter’s field? You’ve lost a whole half-day’s work. I wanted to set them on something else to-morrow, now I shall have to leave it over till Thursday.”

“I stopped them because I refuse to have the beeches cut down. They’re the only ones in the place. I’m very much annoyed that even one should have gone without my knowing about it. You should have asked me before you did such a thing.”

“My good girl, I can’t come and ask you each time I want a thing done.”

“Is the land mine or yours?”

“It’s yours,” answered Edward, laughing, “but I know better than you what ought to be done, and it’s silly of you to interfere.”

Bertha flushed. “In future, I wish to be consulted.”

“You’ve told me fifty thousand times to do always as I think fit.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind.”

“It’s too late now,” he laughed. “You made me take the reins in my own hands and I’m going to keep them.”

Bertha in her anger hardly restrained herself from telling him she could send him away like a hired servant.

“I want you to understand, Edward, that I’m not going to have those trees cut down. You must tell the men you made a mistake.”

“I shall tell them nothing of the sort. I’m not going to cut them all down — only three. We don’t want them there — for one thing the shade damages the crops, and otherwise Carter’s is one of our best fields. And then I want the wood.”

“I care nothing about the crops, and if you want wood you can buy it. Those trees were planted nearly a hundred years ago, and I would sooner die than cut them down.”

“The man who planted beeches in a hedgerow was about the silliest jackass I’ve ever heard of. Any tree’s bad enough, but a beech of all things — why, it’s drip, drip, drip, all the time, and not a thing will grow under them. That’s the sort of thing that has been done all over the estate for years. It’ll take me a lifetime to repair the blunders of your — of the former owners.”

It is one of the curiosities of sentiment that its most abject slave rarely permits it to interfere with his temporal concerns; it appears as unusual for a man to sentimentalise in his own walk of life as for him to pick his own pocket. Edward, having passed all his days in contact with the earth, might have been expected to cherish a certain love of nature. The pathos of transpontine melodrama made him cough, and blow his nose; and in literature he affected the titled and consumptive heroine, and the soft-hearted, burly hero. But when it came to business, it was another matter — the sort of sentiment which asks a farmer to spare a sylvan glade for æsthetic reasons is absurd. Edward would have willingly allowed advertisement-mongers to put up boards on the most beautiful part of the estate, if thereby he could surreptitiously increase the profits of his farm.

“Whatever you may think of my people,” said Bertha, “you will kindly pay attention to me. The land is mine, and I refuse to let you spoil it.”

“It isn’t spoiling it. It’s the proper thing to do. You’ll soon get used to not seeing the wretched trees — and I tell you I’m only going to take three down. I’ve given orders to cut the others to-morrow.”

“D’you mean to say you’re going to ignore me absolutely?”

“I’m going to do what’s right; and if you don’t approve of it, I’m very sorry, but I shall do it all the same.”

“I shall give the men orders to do nothing of the kind.”

Edward laughed. “Then you’ll make an ass of yourself. You try giving them orders contrary to mine, and see what they do.”

Bertha gave a cry. In her fury she looked round for something to throw; she would have liked to hit him; but he stood there, calm and self-possessed, quite amused.

“I think you must be mad,” she said. “You do all you can to destroy my love for you.”

She was in too great a passion for words. This was the measure of his affection; he must, indeed, utterly despise her; and this was the only result of the love she had humbly laid at his feet. She asked herself what she could do; she could do nothing — but submit. She knew as well as he that her orders would be disobeyed if they did not agree with his; and that he would keep his word she did not for a moment doubt. To do so was his pride. She did not speak for the rest of the day, but next morning when he was going out, asked what was his intention with regard to the trees.

“Oh, I thought you’d forgotten all about them,” he replied. “I mean to do as I said.”

“If you have the trees cut down, I shall leave you; I shall go to Aunt Polly’s.”

“And tell her that you wanted the moon, and I was so unkind as not to give it you?” he replied, smiling. “She’ll laugh at you.”

“You will find me as careful to keep my word as you.”

Before luncheon she went out and walked to Carter’s field. The men were still at work, but a second tree had gone, the third would doubtless fall in the afternoon. The men glanced at Bertha, and she thought they laughed; she stood looking at them for some while so that she might thoroughly digest the humiliation. Then she went home, and wrote to her aunt the following veracious letter: —

My dear Aunt Polly, — I have been so seedy these last few weeks that Edward, poor dear, has been quite alarmed; and has been bothering me to come up to town to see a specialist. He’s as urgent as if he wanted to get me out of the way, and I’m already half-jealous of my new parlour-maid, who has pink cheeks and golden hair — which is just the type that Edward really admires. I also think that Dr. Ramsay hasn’t the ghost of an idea what is the matter with me, and not being particularly desirous to depart this life just yet, I think it will be discreet to see somebody who will at least change my medicine. I have taken gallons of iron and quinine, and I’m frightfully afraid that my teeth will go black. My own opinion, coinciding so exactly with Edward’s (that horrid Mrs. Ryle calls us the humming-birds, meaning the turtledoves, her knowledge of natural history arouses dear Edward’s contempt); I have gracefully acceded to his desire, and if you can put me up, will come at your earliest convenience. — Yours affectionately, B. C.

P.S. — I shall take the opportunity of getting clothes (I am positively in rags), so you will have to keep me some little time.

Edward came in shortly afterwards, looking very much pleased. He glanced slily at Bertha, thinking himself so clever that he could scarcely help laughing: it was his habit to be most particular in his behaviour, or he would undoubtedly have put his tongue in his cheek.

“With women, my dear sir, you must be firm. When you’re putting them to a fence, close your legs and don’t check them; but mind you keep ’em under control or they’ll lose their little heads. A man should always let a woman see that he’s got her well in hand.”

Bertha was silent, able to eat nothing for luncheon; she sat opposite her husband, wondering how he could gorge so disgracefully when she was angry and miserable. But in the afternoon her appetite returned, and, going to the kitchen, she ate so many sandwiches that at dinner she could again touch nothing. She hoped Edward would notice that she refused all food, and be properly alarmed and sorry. But he demolished enough for two, and never saw that his wife fasted.

At night Bertha went to bed and bolted herself in the room. Presently Edward came up and tried the door. Finding it closed, he knocked and cried to her to open. She did not answer. He knocked again more loudly and shook the handle.

“I want to have my room to myself,” she cried out; “I’m ill. Please don’t try to come in.”

“What? Where am I to sleep?”

“Oh, you can sleep in one of the spare rooms.”

“Nonsense!” he cried; and without further ado put his shoulder to the door: he was a strong man; one heave and the old hinges cracked. He entered, laughing.

“If you wanted to keep me out, you ought to have barricaded yourself up with the furniture.”

Bertha was disinclined to treat the matter lightly. “If you come in,” she said, “I shall go out.”

“Oh no, you won’t!” he said, dragging a big chest of drawers in front of the door.

Bertha got up and put on a yellow silk dressing-gown, which was really most becoming.

“I’ll spend the night on the sofa then,” she said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you any more or to make a scene. I have written to Aunt Polly, and the day after to-morrow I shall go to London.”

“I was going to suggest that a change of air would do you good. I think your nerves are a bit groggy.”

“It’s very good of you to take an interest in my nerves,” she replied, with a scornful glance, settling herself on the sofa.

“Are you really going to sleep there?” he said, getting into bed.

“It looks like it.”

“You’ll find it awfully cold. But I dare say you’ll think better of it in an hour. I’m going to turn the light out. Good-night!”

Bertha did not answer, and in a few minutes she was angrily listening to his snores. Could he really be asleep? It was infamous that he slept so calmly.

“Edward,” she called.

There was no answer, but she could not bring herself to believe that he was sleeping. She could never even close her eyes. He must be pretending — to annoy her. She wanted to touch him, but feared that he would burst out laughing. She felt indeed horribly cold, and piled rugs and dresses over her. It required great fortitude not to sneak back to bed. She was unhappy and thirsty. Nothing is so disagreeable as the water in toilet-bottles, with the glass tasting of tooth-wash; but she gulped some down, though it almost made her sick, and then walked about the room, turning over her manifold wrongs. Edward slept on insufferably. She made a noise to wake him, but he did not stir; she knocked down a table with a clatter sufficient to disturb the dead, but her husband was insensible. Then she looked at the bed, wondering whether she dared lie down for an hour, and trust to waking before him. She was so cold that she determined to risk it, feeling certain that she would not sleep long; she walked to the bed.

“Coming to bed after all?” said Edward, in a sleepy voice.

She stopped, and her heart rose to her mouth. “I was coming for my pillow,” she replied indignantly, thanking her stars that he had not spoken a minute later.

She returned to the sofa, and eventually making herself very comfortable, fell asleep. In this blissful condition she continued till the morning, and when she awoke Edward was drawing up the blinds.

“Slept well?” he asked.

“I haven’t slept a wink.”

“Oh, what a crammer. I’ve been looking at you for the last hour!”

“I’ve had my eyes closed for about ten minutes, if that’s what you mean.”

Bertha was quite justly annoyed that her husband should have caught her napping soundly — it robbed her proceeding of half its effect. Moreover, Edward was as fresh as a bird, while she felt old and haggard, and hardly dared look at herself in the glass.

In the middle of the morning came a telegram from Miss Ley, telling Bertha to come whenever she liked — hoping Edward would come too! Bertha left it in a conspicuous place so that he could not fail to see it.

“So you’re really going?” he said.

“I told you I was as able to keep my word as you.”

“Well, I think it’ll do you no end of good. How long will you stay?”

“How do I know! Perhaps for ever.”

“That’s a big word — though it has only two syllables.”

It cut Bertha to the heart that Edward should be so indifferent — he could not care for her at all. He seemed to think it natural that she should leave him, pretending it was good for her health. Oh, what did she care about her health! As she made the needful preparations her courage failed her, and she felt it impossible to go. Tears came as she thought of the difference between their present state and the ardent love of a year before. She would have welcomed the poorest excuse that forced her to stay, and yet saved her self-respect. If Edward would only express grief at the parting, it might not be too late. But her boxes were packed and her train fixed; he told Miss Glover that his wife was going away for a change of air, and regretted that his farm prevented him from accompanying her. The trap was brought to the door, and Edward jumped up, taking his seat. Now there was no hope, and go she must. She wished for courage to tell Edward that she could not leave him, but was afraid. They drove along in silence; Bertha waited for her husband to speak, daring to say nothing herself, lest he should hear the tears in her voice. At last she made an effort.

“Are you sorry I’m going?”

“I think it’s for your good — and I don’t want to stand in the way of that.”

Bertha asked herself what love a man had for his wife, who could bear her out of his sight, no matter what the necessity. She stifled a sigh.

They reached the station and he took her ticket. They waited in silence for the train, and Edward bought Punch and The Sketch from a newspaper boy. The horrible train steamed up; Edward helped her into a carriage, and the tears in her eyes now could not be concealed. She put out her lips.

“Perhaps for the last time,” she whispered.

Chapter XXII

72 Eliot Mansions, Chelsea, S.W.

April 18.

Dear Edward, — I think we were wise to part. We were too unsuited to one another, and our difficulties could only have increased. The knot of marriage between two persons of differing temperaments is so intricate that it can only be cut: you may try to unravel it, and think you are succeeding, but another turn shows you that the tangle is only worse than ever. Even time is powerless. Some things are impossible; you cannot heap water up like stones, you cannot measure one man by another man’s rule. I am certain we were wise to separate. I see that if we had continued to live together our quarrels would have perpetually increased. It is horrible to look back upon those vulgar brawls — we wrangled like fishwives. I cannot understand how my mouth could have uttered such things.

It is very bitter to look back and compare my anticipations with what has really happened. Did I expect too much from life? Ah me, I only expected that my husband would love me. It is because I asked so little that I have received nothing. In this world you must ask much, you must spread your praises abroad, you must trample under-foot those who stand in your path, you must take up all the room you can or you will be elbowed away; you must be irredeemably selfish, or you will be a thing of no account, a frippery that man plays with and flings aside.

Of course I expected the impossible, I was not satisfied with the conventional unity of marriage; I wanted to be really one with you. Oneself is the whole world, and all other people are merely strangers. At first in my vehement desire, I used to despair because I knew you so little; I was heartbroken at the impossibility of really understanding you, of getting right down into your heart of hearts. Never, to the best of my knowledge, have I seen your veritable self; you are nearly as much a stranger to me as if I had known you but an hour. I bared my soul to you, concealing nothing — there is in you a man I do not know and have never seen. We are so absolutely different, I don’t know a single thing that we have in common; often when we have been talking and fallen into silence, our thoughts, starting from the same standpoint, have travelled in contrary directions, and on speaking again, we found how widely they had diverged. I hoped to know you to the bottom of your soul. Oh, I hoped that we should be united, so as to have but one soul between us; and yet on the most commonplace occasion, I can never know your thoughts. Perhaps it might have been different if we had had children; they might have formed between us a truer link, and perhaps in the delight of them I should have forgotten my impracticable dreams. But fate was against us, I come from a rotten stock. It is written in the book that the Leys should depart from the sight of men, and return to their mother the earth, to be incorporated with her; and who knows in the future what may be our lot! I like to think that in the course of ages I may be the wheat on a fertile plain, or the smoke from a fire of brambles on the common. I wish I could be buried in the open fields, rather than in the grim coldness of a churchyard, so that I might anticipate the change, and return more quickly to the life of nature.

Believe me, separation was the only possible outcome. I loved you too passionately to be content with the cold regard which you gave me. Oh, of course I was exacting, and tyrannical, and unkind; I can confess all my faults now; my only excuse is that I was very unhappy. For all the pain I have caused you, I beg you to forgive me. We may as well part friends, and I freely forgive you for all you have made me suffer. Now I can afford also to tell you how near I was to not carrying out my intention. Yesterday and this morning I scarcely held back my tears; the parting seemed too hard, I felt I could not leave you. If you had asked me not to go, if you had even shown the smallest sign of regretting my departure, I think I should have broken down. Yes, I can tell you now, that I would have given anything to stay. Alas! I am so weak. In the train I cried bitterly. It is the first time we have been apart since our marriage, the first time that we have slept under different roofs. But now the worst is over. I have taken the step, and I shall adhere to what I have done. I am sure I have acted for the best. I see no harm in our writing to one another occasionally if it pleases you to receive letters from me. I think I had better not see you, at all events for some time. Perhaps when we are both a good deal older we may, without danger, see one another now and then; but not yet. I should be afraid to see your face.

Aunt Polly has no suspicion. I can assure you it has been an effort to laugh and talk during the evening, and I was glad to get to my room. Now it is past midnight and I am still writing to you. I felt I ought to let you know my thoughts, and I can tell them more easily by letter than by word of mouth. Does it not show how separated in heart we have become, that I should hesitate to say to you what I think — and I had hoped to have my heart always open to you. I fancied that I need never conceal a thing, nor hesitate to show you every emotion and every thought. — Good-bye.

BERTHA.

72 Eliot Mansions, Chelsea, S.W.

April 23.

My poor Edward, — You say you hope I shall soon get better and come back to Court Leys. You misunderstand my meaning so completely that I almost laughed. It is true I was out of spirits and tired when I wrote — but that was not the reason of my letter. Cannot you conceive emotions not entirely due to one’s physical condition? You cannot understand me, you never have; and yet I would not take up the vulgar and hackneyed position of a femme incomprise. There is nothing to understand about me. I am very simple and unmysterious. I only wanted love, and you could not give it me. No, our parting is final and irrevocable. What can you want me back for? You have Court Leys and your farms. Every one likes you in the neighbourhood; I was the only bar to your complete happiness. Court Leys I freely give you for my life; until you came it brought in nothing, and the income now arising from it is entirely due to your efforts; you earn it and I beg you to keep it. For me the small income I have from my mother is sufficient.

Aunt Polly still thinks I am on a visit, and constantly speaks of you. I throw dust in her eyes, but I cannot hope to keep her in ignorance for long. At present I am engaged in periodically seeing the doctor for an imaginary ill, and getting one or two new things.

Shall we write to one another once a week? I know writing is a trouble to you; but I do not wish you to forget me altogether. If you like, I will write to you every Sunday, and you may answer or not as you please.

BERTHA.

P.S. — Please do not think of any rapprochement. I am

sure you will eventually see that we are both much happier

apart.

72 Eliot Mansions, Chelsea, S.W.

May 15.

My dear Eddie, — I was pleased to get your letter. I am a little touched at your wanting to see me. You suggest coming to town — perhaps it is fortunate that I shall be no longer here. If you had expressed such a wish before, much might have gone differently.

Aunt Polly having let her flat to friends, goes to Paris for the rest of the season. She starts to-night, and I have offered to accompany her. I am sick of London. I do not know whether she suspects anything, but I notice that now she never mentions your name. She looked a little sceptical the other day when I explained that I had long wished to go to Paris, and that you were having the inside of Court Leys painted. Fortunately, however, she makes it a practice not to inquire into other people’s business, and I can rest assured that she will never ask me a single question.

Forgive the shortness of this letter, but I am very busy, packing. — Your affectionate wife,

BERTHA.

41 Rue des Ecoliers, Paris,

May 16.

My dearest Eddie, — I have been unkind to you. It is nice of you to want to see me, and my repugnance to it was perhaps unnatural. On thinking it over, I cannot think it will do any harm if we should see one another. Of course, I can never come back to Court Leys — there are some chains that having broken you can never weld together; and no fetters are so intolerable as the fetters of love. But if you want to see me I will put no obstacle in your way; I will not deny that I also should like to see you. I am farther away now, but if you care for me at all you will not hesitate to make the short journey.

We have here a very nice apartment, in the Latin Quarter, away from the rich people and the tourists. I do not know which is more vulgar, the average tripper or the part of Paris which he infests: I must say they become one another to a nicety. I loathe the shoddiness of the boulevards, with their gaudy cafés over-gilt and over-sumptuous, and their crowds of ill-dressed foreigners. But if you come I can show you a different Paris — a restful and old-fashioned Paris, theatres to which tourists do not go; gardens full of pretty children and nursemaids with long ribbons to their caps. I can take you down innumerable gray streets with funny shops, in old churches where you see people actually praying; and it is all very quiet and calming to the nerves. And I can take you to the Louvre at hours when there are few visitors, and show you beautiful pictures and statues that have come from Italy and Greece, where the gods have their home to this day. Come, Eddie. — Your ever loving wife,

BERTHA.

41 Rue des Ecoliers, Paris,

May 25.

My dearest Eddie, — I am disappointed that you will not come. I should have thought, if you wanted to see me, you could have found time to leave the farms for a few days. But perhaps it is really better that we should not meet. I cannot conceal from you that sometimes I long for you dreadfully. I forget all that has happened, and desire with all my heart to be with you once more. What a fool I am! I know that we can never meet again, and you are never absent from my thoughts. I look forward to your letters almost madly, and your handwriting makes my heart beat as if I were a schoolgirl. Oh, you don’t know how your letters disappoint me, they are so cold; you never say what I want you to say. It would be madness if we came together — I can only preserve my love to you by not seeing you. Does that sound horrible? And yet I would give anything to see you once more. I cannot help asking you to come here. It is not so very often I have asked you anything. Do come. I will meet you at the station, and you will have no trouble or bother — everything is perfectly simple, and Cook’s Interpreters are everywhere. I’m sure you would enjoy yourself so much. — If you love me, come.

BERTHA.

Court Leys, Blackstable, Kent,

May 30.

My dearest Bertha, — Sorry I haven’t answered yours of 25th inst. before, but I’ve been up to my eyes in work. You wouldn’t think there could be so much to do on a farm at this time of year, unless you saw it with your own eyes. I can’t possibly get away to Paris, and besides I can’t stomach the French. I don’t want to see their capital, and when I want a holiday, London’s good enough for me. You’d better come back here, people are asking after you, and the place seems all topsy-turvy without you. Love to Aunt P. — In haste, your affectionate husband,

E. CRADDOCK.

41 Rue des Ecoliers, Paris,

June 1.

My dearest, dearest Eddie, — You don’t know how disappointed I was to get your letter and how I longed for it. Whatever you do, don’t keep me waiting so long for an answer. I imagined all sorts of things — that you were ill or dying. I was on the point of wiring. I want you to promise me that if you are ever ill, you will let me know. If you want me urgently I shall be pleased to come. But do not think that I can ever come back to Court Leys for good. Sometimes I feel ill and weak and I long for you, but I know I must not give way. I’m sure, for your good as well as for mine, I must never risk the unhappiness of our old life again. It was too degrading. With firm mind and the utmost resolution I swear that I will never, never return to Court Leys. — Your affectionate and loving wife,

BERTHA.

Telegram

Gare du Nord, 9.50 a.m., June 2.

Craddock, Court Leys, Blackstable.

Arriving 7.25 to-night. — BERTHA.

41 Rue des Ecoliers, Paris.

My dear young Friend, — I am perturbed. Bertha, as you know, has for the last six weeks lived with me, for reasons the naturalness of which aroused my strongest suspicions. No one, I thought, would need so many absolutely conclusive motives to do so very simple a thing. I resisted the temptation to write to Edward (her husband — a nice man, but stupid!) to ask for an explanation, fearing that the reasons given me were the right ones (although I could not believe it); in which case I should have made myself ridiculous. Bertha in London pretended to go to a physician, but never was seen to take medicine, and I am certain no well-established specialist would venture to take two guineas from a malade imaginaire and not administer copious drugs. She accompanied me to Paris, ostensibly to get dresses, but has behaved as if their fit were of no more consequence than a change of ministry. She has taken great pains to conceal her emotions and thereby made them the more conspicuous. I cannot tell you how often she has gone through the various stages from an almost hysterical elation to an equal despondency. She has mused as profoundly as was fashionable for the young ladies of fifty years ago (we were all young ladies then — not girls!); she has played Tristan and Isolde to the distraction of myself; she has snubbed an amorous French artist to the distraction of his wife; finally she has wept, and after weeping over-powdered her eyes, which in a pretty woman is an infallible sign of extreme mental prostration.

This morning when I got up I found at my door the following message: “Don’t think me an utter fool, but I couldn’t stand another day away from Edward. Leaving by the 10 o’clock train. — B.” Now at 10.30 she had an appointment at Paquin’s to try on the most ravishing dinner-dress you could imagine.

I will not insult you by drawing inferences from all these facts: I know you would much sooner draw them yourself, and I have a sufficiently good opinion of you to be certain that they will coincide with mine. — Yours very sincerely,

MARY LEY.

P.S. — I am sending this to await you at Seville. Remember

me to Mrs. J.

Chapter XXIII

BERTHA’S relief was unmistakable when she landed on English soil; at last she was near Edward, and she had been extremely sea-sick. Though it was less than thirty miles from Dover to Blackstable the communications were so bad that it was necessary to wait for hours at the port, or take the boat-train to London and then come sixty miles down again. Bertha was exasperated at the delay, forgetting that she was now (thank Heaven!) in a free country, where the railways were not run for the convenience of passengers, but the passengers necessary evils to create dividends for an ill-managed company. Bertha’s impatience was so great that she felt it impossible to wait at Dover; she preferred to go the extra hundred miles and save herself ten minutes rather than spend the afternoon in the dreary waiting-room, or wandering about the town. The train seemed to crawl; and her restlessness became quite painful as she recognized the Kentish country, the fat meadows with trim hedges, the portly trees, and the general air of prosperity.

Bertha’s thoughts were full of Edward, and he was the whole cause of her impatience. She had hoped, against her knowledge of him, that he would meet her at Dover, and it had been a disappointment not to see him. Then she thought he might have come to London, though not explaining to herself how he could possibly have divined that she would be there. Her heart beat absurdly when she saw a back which might have been Edward’s. Still later, she comforted herself with the idea that he would certainly be at Faversley, which was the next station to Blackstable. When they reached that place she put her head out of window, looking along the platform — but he was nowhere.

“He might have come as far this,” she thought.

Now, the train steaming on, she recognised the country more precisely, the desolate marsh and the sea — the line ran almost at the water’s edge; the tide was out, leaving a broad expanse of shining mud, over which the seagulls flew, screeching. Then the houses were familiar, cottages beaten by wind and weather, the Jolly Sailor, where in the old days many a smuggled keg of brandy had been hidden on its way to the cathedral city of Tercanbury. The coastguard station was passed, a long building, trim and low. Finally they rattled across the bridge over the High Street; and the porters with their Kentish drawl, called out, “Blackstable, Blackstable.”

Bertha’s emotions were always uncontrolled, and so powerful as sometimes to unfit her for action: now she had hardly strength to open the carriage door.

“At last!” she cried, with a gasp of relief.

She had never adored her husband so passionately as then, and her love was a physical sensation that turned her faint. The arrival of the moment so anxiously awaited left her half-frightened; she was of those who eagerly look for an opportunity and then can scarcely seize it.

Bertha’s heart was so full that she was afraid of bursting into tears when she at last she should see Edward walking towards her; she had pictured the scene so often, her husband advancing with his swinging stride, waving his stick, the dogs in front, rushing towards her and barking furiously. The two porters waddled with their seaman’s walk to the van to get out the luggage; people were stepping from the carriages. Next to her a pasty-faced clerk descended, in a dingy black, with a baby in his arms; and he was followed by a haggard wife with another baby and innumerable parcels. A labourer sauntered down the platform, three or four sailors, and a couple of infantry-men. They all surged for the wicket, at which stood the ticket-collector. The porters got out the boxes, and the train steamed off; an irascible city man was swearing volubly because his luggage had gone to Margate. (It’s a free country, thank Heaven!) The station-master, in a decorated hat and a self-satisfied air, strolled up to see what was the matter. Bertha looked along the platform wildly. Edward was not there.

The station-master passed, and nodded patronisingly.

“Have you seen Mr. Craddock?” she asked.

“No, I can’t say I have. But I think there’s a carriage below for you.”

Bertha began to tremble. A porter asked whether he should take her boxes; she nodded, unable to speak. She went down and found the brougham at the station door; the coachman touched his hat and gave her a note.

Dear Bertha, — Awfully sorry I can’t come to meet you. I never expected you, so accepted an invitation of Lord Philip Dirk to a tennis tournament, and a ball afterwards. He’s going to sleep me, so I shan’t be back till to-morrow. Don’t get in a wax. See you in the morning.

E. C.

Bertha got into the carriage and huddled herself into one corner so that none should see her. At first she scarcely understood; she had spent the last hours at such a height of excitement that the disappointment deprived her of the power of thinking. She never took things reasonably, and was now stunned; what had happened seemed impossible. It was so callous that Edward should go to a tennis-tournament when she was coming home — looking forward eagerly to seeing him. And it was no ordinary home-coming; it was the first time she had ever left him; and then she had gone, hating him, as she thought, for good. But her absence having revived her love, she had returned, yearning for reconciliation. And he was not there; he acted as though she had been to town for a day’s shopping.

“Oh, God, what a fool I was to come!”

Suddenly she thought of going away there and then — would it not be easier? She felt she could not see him. But there were no trains: the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway has perhaps saved many an elopement. But he must have known how bitterly disappointed she would be, and the idea flashed through her that he would leave the tournament and come home. Perhaps he was already at Court Leys, waiting; she took fresh courage, and looked at the well-remembered scene. He might be at the gate. Oh, what joy it would be, what a relief! But they came to the gate, and he was not there; they drove to the portico, and he was not there. Bertha went into the house expecting to find him in the hall or in the drawing-room, not having heard the carriage, but he was nowhere to be found. And the servants corroborated his letter.

The house was empty, chill, and inhospitable; the rooms had an uninhabited air, the furniture was primly rearranged, and Edward had caused antimacassars to be placed on the chairs. These Bertha, to the housemaids’ surprise, took off one by one, and, without a word, threw into the empty fireplace. And still she thought it incredible that Edward should stay away. She sat down to dinner, expecting him every moment; she sat up very late, feeling sure that eventually he would come. But still he came not.

“I wish to God I’d stayed away.”

Her thoughts went back to the struggle of the last few weeks. Pride, anger, reason, everything had been on one side, and only love on the other; and love had conquered. The recollection of Edward had been seldom absent from her, and her dreams had been filled with his image. His letters had caused her an indescribable thrill, the mere sight of his handwriting had made her tremble, and she wanted to see him; she woke up at night with his kisses on her lips. She begged him to come, and he would not or could not. At last the yearning grew beyond control; and that very morning, not having received the letter she awaited, she had resolved to throw off all pretence of resentment, and come. What did she care if Miss Ley laughed, or if Edward scored a victory in the struggle — she could not live without him. He still was her life and her love.

“Oh, God, I wish I hadn’t come.”

She remembered how she had prayed that Edward might love her as she wished to be loved, beseeching God to grant her happiness. The passionate rebellion after her child’s death had ceased insensibly, and in her misery, in her loneliness, she had found a new faith. Belief with some comes and goes without reason: with them it is a matter not of conviction, but rather of sensibility; and Bertha found prayer easier in Catholic churches than in the cheerless meeting-houses she had been used to. She could not utter stated words at stated hours in a meaningless chorus; the crowd caused her to shut away her emotions, and her heart could expand only in solitude. In Paris she had found quiet chapels, open at all hours, to which she could go for rest when the sun without was over-dazzling; and in the evening, the dimness, the fragrance of old incense, and the silence, were very restful. Then the only light came from the tapers, burning in gratitude or in hope, throwing a fitful, mysterious glimmer; and Bertha prayed earnestly for Edward and for herself.

But Edward would not let himself be loved, and her efforts all were useless. Her love was a jewel that he valued not at all, that he flung aside and cared not if he lost. But she was too unhappy, too broken in spirit, to be angry. What was the use of anger? She knew that Edward would see nothing extraordinary in what he had done. He would return, confident, well-pleased with himself after a good night’s rest, and entirely unaware that she had been grievously hurt.

“I suppose the injustice is on my side. I am too exacting. I can’t help it.”

She only knew one way to love, and that, it appeared was a foolish way. “Oh, I wish I could go away again now — for ever.”

She got up and ate a solitary breakfast, busying herself afterwards in the house. Edward had left word that he would be in to luncheon, and was it not his pride to keep his word? But all her impatience had gone; Bertha felt now no particular anxiety to see him. She was on the point of going out — the air was warm and balmy — but did not, in case Edward should return and be disappointed at her absence.

“What a fool I am to think of his feelings! If I’m not in, he’ll just go about his work and think nothing more of me till I appear.”

But, notwithstanding, she stayed. He arrived at last, and she did not hurry to meet him; she was putting things away in her bedroom, and continued though she heard his voice below. The difference was curious between her intense and almost painful expectation of the previous day and this present unconcern. She turned as he came in, but did not move towards him.

“So you’ve come back? Did you enjoy yourself?”

“Yes, rather. But I say, it’s ripping to have you home. You weren’t in a wax at my not being here?”

“Oh no,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t mind at all.”

“That’s all right. Of course I’d never been to Lord Philip’s before, and I couldn’t wire the last minute to say that my wife was coming home and I had to meet her.”

“Of course not; it would have made you appear too absurd.”

“But I was jolly sick, I can tell you. If you’d only let me know a week ago that you were coming, I should have refused the invitation.”

“My dear Edward, I’m so unpractical, I never know my own mind, and I’m always doing things on the spur of the moment, to my own inconvenience and other people’s. And I should never have expected you to deny yourself anything for my sake.”

Bertha, perplexed, almost dismayed, looked at her husband with astonishment. She scarcely recognised him. In the three years of their common life Bertha had noticed no change in him, and with her great faculty for idealisation, had carried in her mind always his image, as he appeared when first she saw him, the slender, manly youth of eight-and-twenty. Miss Ley had discerned alterations, and spiteful feminine tongues had said that he was going off dreadfully. But his wife had seen nothing. And the separation had given further opportunities to her fantasy. In absence she had thought of him as the handsomest of men, delighting over his clear features, his fair hair, his inexhaustible youth and strength. The plain facts would have disappointed her even if Edward had retained the looks of his youth, but seeing now as well the other changes, the shock was extreme. It was a different man she saw, almost a stranger. Craddock did not wear well; though but thirty-one, he looked much older. He had broadened and put on flesh, his features had lost their delicacy, and the red of his cheeks was growing coarse. He wore his clothes in a slovenly fashion, and had fallen into a lumbering walk as if his boots were always heavy with clay; and there was in him, besides, the heartiness and intolerant joviality of the prosperous farmer. Edward’s good looks had given Bertha the keenest pleasure, and now, rushing, as was her habit, to the other extreme, she found him almost ugly. This was an exaggeration, for though he was no longer the slim youth of her first acquaintance, he was still, in a heavy, massive way, better looking than the majority of men.

Edward kissed her with marital calm, and the propinquity wafted to Bertha’s nostrils the strong scents of the farmyard, which, no matter what his clothes, hung perpetually about him. She turned away, hardly concealing a little shiver of disgust. Yet they were the same masculine odours as once had made her nearly faint with desire.

Chapter XXIV

BERTHA’S imagination seldom permitted her to see things in anything but a false light; sometimes they were pranked out in the glamour of the ideal, while at others the process was quite reversed. It was astonishing that so short a break should have destroyed the habit of three years; but the fact was plain that Edward had become a stranger, so that she felt it irksome to share the same room with him. She saw him now with jaundiced eyes, and told herself that at last she had discovered his true colours. Poor Edward was paying heavily because the furtive years had robbed him of his locks and given him in exchange a superabundance of fat; because responsibility, the east wind, and good living, had taken the edge off his features and turned his cheeks plethoric.

Bertha’s love, indeed, had finally disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen, and she began seriously to loathe her husband. She had acquired a certain part of Miss Ley’s analytic faculty, which now she employed with destructive effect upon Edward’s character. Her absence had increased the danger to Edward in another way, for the air of Paris had exhilarated her and sharpened her wits so that her alertness to find fault was doubled and her impatience with the commonplace and the stupid, extreme. And Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn. At first his deficiencies had not affected her, and later she consoled herself with the obvious truism that a man may be ignorant of all the arts, and yet have every virtue under the sun. But now she was less charitable. Bertha wondered that because her husband could read and write as well as most board-scholars, he should feel himself competent to judge books — even without reading them. Of course it was most unreasonable to blame the poor man for a foible common to the vast majority of mankind. Every one who can hold a pen is confident of his ability to criticise, and to criticise superciliously. It never occurs to the average citizen that, to speak modestly, almost as much art is needed to write a book as to adulterate a pound of tea; nor that the author has busied himself with style and contrast, characterisation, light and shade, and many other things to which the practice of haberdashery, greengrocery, company-promotion, or pork-butchery, is no great key.

One day, Edward, coming in, caught sight of the yellow paper-cover of a French book that Bertha was reading.

“What, at it again?” said he. “You read too much; it’s not good for people to be always reading.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“My idea is that a woman oughtn’t to stuff her head with books. You’d be much better out in the open air or doing something useful.”

“Is that your opinion?”

“Well, I should like to know why you’re always reading?”

“Sometimes to instruct myself; always to amuse myself.”

“Much instruction you’ll get out of an indecent French novel.”

Bertha without answering handed him the book and showed the title; they were the letters of Madame de Sévigné.

“Well?” he said.

“You’re no wiser, dear Edward?” she asked, with a smile: such a question in such a tone, revenged her for much. “You’re none the wiser? I’m afraid you’re very ignorant. You see I’m not reading a novel, and it is not indecent. They are the letters of a mother to her daughter, models of epistolary style and feminine wisdom.”

Bertha purposely spoke in rather formal and elaborate a manner.

“Oh,” said Edward, somewhat mystified; feeling that he had been confounded, but certain, none the less, that he was in the right. Bertha smiled provokingly.

“Of course,” he said, “I’ve got no objection to your reading if it amuses you.”

“It’s very good of you to say so.”

“I don’t pretend to have any book-learning; I’m a practical man, and it’s not required. In my business you find that the man who reads books, comes a mucker!”

“You seem to think that ignorance is creditable.”

“It’s better to have a good and pure heart, Bertha, and a clean mind, than any amount of learning.”

“It’s better to have a grain of wit than a collection of moral saws.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’m quite content to be as I am, and I don’t want to know a single foreign language. English is quite good enough for me.”

“So long as you’re a good sportsman and wash yourself regularly, you think you’ve performed the whole duty of man.”

“If there’s one chap I can’t stick, it’s a measly bookworm.”

“I prefer him to the hybrid of a professional cricketer and a Turkish-bath man.”

“Does that mean me?”

“You can take it to yourself if you like,” said Bertha, smiling, “or apply it to a whole class.... Do you mind if I go on reading?”

Bertha took up her book; but Edward was the more argumentatively inclined since he saw he had not so far got the better of the contest.

“Well, what I must say is, if you want to read, why can’t you read English books? Surely there are enough. I think English people ought to stick to their own country. I don’t pretend to have read any French books, but I’ve never heard anybody deny, that at all events the great majority are indecent, and not the sort of thing a woman should read.”

“It’s always incautious to judge from common report,” answered Bertha, without looking up.

“And now that the French are always behaving so badly to us, I should like to see every French book in the kingdom put into a huge bonfire. I’m sure it would be all the better for we English people. What we want now is purity and reconstitution of the national life. I’m in favour of English morals, and English homes, English mothers, and English habits.”

“What always astounds me, dear, is that though you invariably read the Standard you always talk like the Family Herald!”

Bertha paid no further attention to Edward, who thereupon began to talk with his dogs. Like most frivolous persons he found silence onerous, and Bertha thought it disconcerted him by rendering evident even to himself, the vacuity of his mind. He talked with every animate thing, with the servants, with his pets, with the cat and the birds; he could not read even a newspaper without making a running commentary upon it.

It was only a substantial meal that could induce even a passing taciturnity. Sometimes his unceasing chatter irritated Bertha so intensely that she was obliged to beg him, for heaven’s sake, to hold his tongue. Then he would look up, with a good-natured laugh.

“Was I making a row? Sorry; I didn’t know it.”

He remained quiet for ten minutes and then began to hum some obvious melody, than which there is no more detestable habit.

Indeed the points of divergence between the pair were innumerable. Edward was a person who had the courage of his opinions, and these he held with a firmness equal to his lack of knowledge. He disliked also whatever was not clear to his somewhat narrow intelligence, and was inclined to think it immoral. Music, for instance, in his opinion was an English art, carried to the highest pitch in certain very simple melodies of his childhood. Bertha played the piano well and sang with a cultivated voice, but Edward objected to her performances because, whether she sang or whether she played, there was never a rollicking tune that a fellow could get his teeth into. It must be confessed that Bertha exaggerated, and that when a dull musical afternoon was given in the neighbourhood, she took a malicious pleasure in playing some long recitative form of a Wagner opera, which no one could make head or tail of.

On such an occasion at the Glovers, the eldest Miss Hancock turned to Edward and remarked upon his wife’s admirable playing. Edward was a little annoyed, because every one had vigorously applauded, and to him the sounds had been quite meaningless.

“Well, I’m a plain man,” he said, “and I don’t mind confessing that I never can understand the stuff Bertha plays.”

“Oh, Mr. Craddock, not even Wagner?” said Miss Hancock, who had been as bored as Edward, but would not for worlds have confessed it; holding the contrary modest opinion, that the only really admirable things are those you can’t understand.

Bertha looked at him, remembering her dream that they should sit at the piano together in the evening and play for hour after hour: as a matter of fact, he had always refused to budge from his chair and had gone to sleep regularly.

“My idea of music is like Dr. Johnson’s,” said Edward, looking round for approval.

“Is Saul also among the prophets?” murmured Bertha.

“When I hear a difficult piece I wish it was impossible.”

“You forget, dear,” said Bertha, smiling sweetly, “that Dr. Johnson was a very ill-mannered old man whom dear Fanny would not have allowed in her drawing-room for one minute.”

“You sing now, Edward,” said Miss Glover; “we’ve not heard you for ever so long.”

“Oh, bless you,” he retorted, “my singing’s too old fashioned. My songs have all got a tune in them and some feeling — they’re only fit for the kitchen.”

“Oh, please give us Ben Bolt,” said Miss Hancock, “we’re all so fond of it.”

Edward’s repertory was limited, and every one knew his songs by heart.

“Anything to oblige,” he said.

He was, as a matter of fact, fond of singing, and applause was always grateful to his ears.

“Shall I accompany you, dear?” said Bertha.

“Oh! don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,

Sweet Alice with hai-air so brow-own;

She wept with delight when you gave her a smile,

And trembled with fe-ar at your frown.”

Once upon a time Bertha had found a subtle charm in these pleasing sentiments and in the honest melody which adorned them; but it was not to be wondered if constant repetition had left her a little callous. Edward sang the ditty with a simple, homely style — which is the same as saying, with no style at all — and he employed therein much pathos. But Bertha’s spirit was not forgiving, she owed him some return for the gratuitous attack on her playing; and the idea came to her to improve upon the accompaniment with little trills and flourishes which amused her immensely, but quite disconcerted her husband. Finally, just when his voice was growing flat with emotion over the gray-haired schoolmaster who had died, she wove in the strains of the Blue Bells of Scotland and God Save the Queen, so that Edward broke down. For once his even temper was disturbed.

“I say, I can’t sing if you go playing the fool. You spoil the whole thing.”

“I’m very sorry,” laughed Bertha. “I forgot what I was doing. Let’s begin all over again.”

“No, I’m not going to sing any more. You spoil the whole thing.”

“Mrs. Craddock has no heart,” said Miss Hancock.

“I don’t think it’s fair to laugh at an old song like this,” said Edward. “After all any one can sneer.... My idea of music is something that stirs one’s heart — I’m not a sentimental chap, but Ben Bolt almost brings the tears to my eyes every time I sing it.”

Bertha with difficulty abstained from retorting that sometimes she also felt inclined to weep — especially when he sang out of tune. Every one looked at her, as if she had behaved very badly, while she calmly smiled at Edward. But she was not amused. On the way home she asked him if he knew why she had spoilt his song.

“I’m sure I don’t know — unless you were in one of your beastly tempers. I suppose you’re sorry now.”

“Not at all,” she answered, laughing. “I thought you were rude to me just before, and I wanted to punish you a little. Sometimes you’re really too supercilious.... And besides that, I object to being found fault with in public. You will have the goodness in future to keep your strictures till we are alone.”

“I should have thought you could stand a bit of good-natured chaff by now.”

“Oh, I can, dear Edward. Only, perhaps, you may have noticed that I am fairly quick at defending myself.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Merely that I can be horrid when I like, and you will be wise not to expose yourself to a public snub.”

Edward had never heard from his wife a threat so calmly administered, and it somewhat impressed him.

But as a general rule, Bertha checked the sarcasm which constantly rose to her tongue. She treasured in her heart the wrath and hatred which her husband occasioned, feeling that it was a satisfaction at last to be free from love of him. Looking back, the fetters which had bound her were intolerably heavy. And it was a sweet revenge, although he knew nothing of it, to strip the idol of his ermine cloak, and of his crown, and the gew-gaws of his sovereignty. In his nakedness he was a pitiable figure.

Edward of all this was totally unconscious. He was like a lunatic reigning in a madhouse over an imaginary kingdom; he did not see the curl of Bertha’s lips upon some foolish remark of his, nor the contempt with which she treated him. And since she was a great deal less exacting, he found himself far happier than before. The ironic philosopher might find some cause for moralising in the fact that it was not till Bertha began to hate Edward that he found marriage entirely satisfactory. He told himself that his wife’s stay abroad had done her no end of good, and made her far more amenable to reason. Mr. Craddock’s principles, of course, were quite right; he had given her plenty of run and ignored her cackle, and now she had come home to roost. There is nothing like a knowledge of farming, and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals, to teach a man how to manage his wife.

Chapter XXV

IF the gods, who scatter wit in sundry unexpected places, so that it is sometimes found beneath the bishop’s mitre and, once in a thousand years, beneath a king’s crown, had given Edward two-pennyworth of that commodity, he would undoubtedly have been a great as well as a good man. Fortune smiled upon him uninterruptedly; he enjoyed the envy of his neighbours; he farmed with profit, and, having tamed the rebellious spirit of his wife, he rejoiced in domestic felicity. And it must be noticed that he was rewarded only according to his deserts. He walked with upright spirit and contented mind along the path which it had pleased a merciful Providence to set before him. He was lighted on the way by a strong Sense of Duty, by the Principles which he had acquired at his Mother’s Knee, and by a Conviction of his own Merit. Finally, a deputation waited on him to propose that he should stand for the County Council election which was shortly to be held. He had been unofficially informed of the project, and received Mr. Atthill Bacot with seven committee men, in his frock-coat and a manner full of responsibility. He told them he could do nothing rashly, must consider the matter, and would inform them of his decision. But Edward had already made up his mind to accept, and having shown the deputation to the door, went to Bertha.

“Things are looking up,” he said, having given her the details. The Blackstable district for which Edward was invited to stand, being composed chiefly of fishermen, was intensely Radical. “Old Bacot said I was the only Moderate candidate who’d have a chance.”

Bertha was too much astonished to reply. She had so poor an opinion of her husband that she could not understand why on earth they should make him such an offer. She turned over in her mind possible reasons.

“It’s a ripping thing for me, isn’t it?”

“But you’re not thinking of accepting?”

“Not? Of course I am. What do you think!” This was not an inquiry, but an exclamation.

“You’ve never gone in for politics; you’ve never made a speech in your life.”

She thought he would make an abject fool of himself, and for her sake, as well as for his, decided to prevent him from standing. “He’s too ignorant!” she thought.

“What! I’ve made speeches at cricket dinners; you set me on my legs and I’ll say something.”

“But this is different — you know nothing about the County Council.”

“All you have to do is to look after steam-rollers and get glandered horses killed. I know all about it.”

There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are not omniscient. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlantry to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.

“I should have thought you’d be glad to see me get a lift in the world,” said Edward, somewhat offended that his wife did not fall down and worship.

“I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself, Edward. You’ve told me often that you don’t go in for book-learning; and it can’t hurt your feelings when I say that you’re utterly ignorant. I don’t think its honest to take a position you’re not competent to fill.”

“Me — not competent?” cried Edward, with surprise. “That’s a good one! Upon my word, I’m not given to boasting, but I must say I think myself competent to do most things.... You just ask old Bacot what he thinks of me, and that’ll open your eyes. The fact is, every one appreciates me but you: but they say a man’s never a hero to his valet.”

“Your proverb is most apt, dear Edward.... But I have no intention of thwarting you in any of your plans. I only thought you did not know what you were going in for, and that I might save you from some humiliation.”

“Humiliation, where? Pooh, you think I shan’t get elected. Well, look here, I bet you any money you like that I shall come out top of the poll.”

Next day Edward wrote to Mr. Bacot expressing pleasure that he was able to fall in with the views of the Conservative Association; and Bertha, who knew that no argument could turn him from his purpose, determined to coach him, so that he should not make too arrant a fool of himself. Her fears were proportionate to her estimate of Edward’s ability! She sent to London for pamphlets and blue-books on the rights and duties of the County Council, and begged Edward to read them. But in his self-confident manner he pooh-poohed her, and laughed when she read them herself so as to be able to teach him.

“I don’t want to know all that rot,” he cried. “All a man wants is gumption. Why, d’you suppose a man who goes in for parliament knows anything about politics? Of course he doesn’t.”

Bertha was indignant that her husband should be so well satisfied in his illiteracy, and that he stoutly refused to learn. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. Edward, knowing so little, was convinced that there was little to know, and consequently felt quite assured that he knew all which was necessary. He might more easily have been persuaded that the moon was made of green cheese than that he lacked the very rudiments of knowledge.

The County Council elections in London were also being held at that time, and Bertha, hoping to give Edward useful hints, diligently read the oratory which they occasioned. But he refused to listen.

“I don’t want to crib other men’s stuff. I’m going to talk on my own.”

“Why don’t you write out a speech and get it by heart?”

Bertha fancied that so she might influence him a little and spare herself and him the humiliation of utter ridicule.

“Old Bacot says when he makes a speech, he always trusts to the spur of the moment. He says that Fox made his best speeches when he was blind drunk.”

“D’you know who Fox was?” asked Bertha.

“Some old buffer or other who made speeches.”

The day arrived when Edward for the first time was to address his constituents, in the Blackstable town-hall; and for a week past placards had been pasted on every wall and displayed in every shop, announcing the glad news. Mr. Bacot came to Court Leys, rubbing his hands.

“We shall have a full house. It’ll be a big success. The hall will hold four hundred people and I think there won’t be standing room. I dare say you’ll have to address an overflow meeting at the Forresters Hall afterwards.”

“I’ll address any number of meetings you like,” replied Edward.

Bertha grew more and more nervous. She anticipated a horrible collapse; they did not know — as she did — how limited was Edward’s intelligence! She wanted to stay at home so as to avoid the ordeal, but Mr. Bacot had reserved for her a prominent seat on the platform.

“Are you nervous, Eddie?” she said, feeling more kindly disposed to him from his approaching trial.

“Me, nervous? What have I got to be nervous about?”

The hall was indeed crammed with the most eager, smelly, enthusiastic crowd Bertha had ever seen. The gas-jets flared noisily, throwing crude lights on the people, sailors, tradesmen, labourers, and boys. On the platform, in a semi-circle like the immortal gods, sat the notabilities of the neighborhood, Conservatives to the backbone. Bertha looked round with apprehension, but tried to calm herself with the thought that they were stupid people and she had no cause to tremble before them.

Presently the Vicar took the chair and in a few well-chosen words introduced Mr. Craddock.

“Mr. Craddock, like good wine, needs no bush. You all know him, and an introduction is superfluous. Still it is customary on such an occasion to say a few words on behalf of the candidate, and I have great pleasure, &c., &c....”

Now Edward rose to his feet, and Bertha’s blood ran cold. She dared not look at the audience. He advanced with his hands in his pockets — he had insisted on dressing himself up in a frock-coat and the most dismal pepper-and-salt trousers.

“Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen — Unaccustomed to public speaking as I am....”

Bertha looked up with a start. Could a man at the end of the nineteenth century, seriously begin an oration with those words! But he was not joking; he went on gravely, and, looking around, Bertha caught not the shadow of a smile. Edward was not in the least nervous, he quickly got into the swing of his speech — and it was terrible! He introduced every hackneyed phrase he knew, he mingled slang incongruously with pompous language; and his silly jokes, chestnuts of great antiquity, made Bertha writhe and shudder. She wondered that he could go on with such self-possession. Did he not see that he was making himself perfectly absurd! She dared not look up for fear of catching the sniggers of Mrs. Branderton and of the Hancocks: “One sees what he was before he married Miss Ley. Of course he’s a quite uneducated man.... I wonder his wife did not prevent him from making such an exhibition of himself. The grammar of it, my dear; and the jokes, and the stories!!!”

Bertha clenched her hands, furious because the flush of shame would not leave her cheeks. The speech was even worse than she had expected. He used the longest words, and, getting entangled in his own verbosity, was obliged to leave his sentence unfinished. He began a period with an elaborate flourish and waddled in confusion to the tamest commonplace: he was like a man who set out to explore the Andes and then, changing his mind, took a stroll in the Burlington Arcade. How long would it be, asked Bertha, before the audience broke into jeers and hisses? She blessed them for their patience. And what would happen afterwards? Would Mr. Bacot ask Edward to withdraw from the candidature? And supposing Edward refused, would it be necessary to tell him that he was really too great a fool? Bertha saw already the covert sneers of her neighbours.

“Oh, I wish he’d finish!” she muttered between her teeth. The agony, the humiliation of it, were unendurable.

But Edward was still talking, and gave no signs of an approaching termination. Bertha thought miserably that he had always been long-winded: if he would only sit down quickly the failure might not be irreparable. He made a vile pun and every one cried, Oh! Oh! Bertha shivered and set her teeth; she must bear it to the end now — why wouldn’t he sit down? Then Edward told an agricultural story, and the audience shouted with laughter. A ray of hope came to Bertha: perhaps his absolute vulgarity might save him with the vulgar people who formed the great body of the audience. But what must the Brandertons, and the Molsons, and the Hancocks, and all the rest of them, be saying? They must utterly despise him.

But worse was to follow. Edward came to his peroration, and a few remarks on current politics (of which he was entirely ignorant) brought him to his Country, England, Home and Beauty. He turned the tap of patriotism full on; it gurgled in a stream. He blew the penny trumpets of English purity, and the tin whistles of the British Empire, and he beat the big drum of the Great Anglo-Saxon Race. He thanked God he was an Englishman, and not as others are. Tommy Atkins, and Jack Tar, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, danced a jig to the strains of the British Grenadiers; and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain executed a pas seul to the air of Yankee Doodle. Lastly, he waved the Union Jack.

The hideous sentimentality, and the bad taste and the commonness made Bertha ashamed: it was horrible to think how ignoble must be the mind of a man who could foul his mouth with the expression of such sentiments.

Finally Edward sat down. For one moment the audience were silent — for the shortest instant; and then with one throat, broke into thunderous applause. It was no perfunctory clapping of hands; they rose as one man, and shouted and yelled with enthusiasm.

“Good old Teddy,” cried a voice. And then the air was filled with: For he’s a jolly good fellow. Mrs. Branderton stood on a chair and waved her handkerchief; Miss Glover clapped her hands as if she were no longer an automaton.

“Wasn’t it perfectly splendid?” she whispered to Bertha.

Every one on the platform was in a frenzy of delight. Mr. Bacot warmly shook Edward’s hand. Mrs. Mayston Ryle fanned herself desperately. The scene may well be described, in the language of journalists, as one of unparalleled enthusiasm. Bertha was dumbfounded.

Mr. Bacot jumped to his feet.

“I must congratulate Mr. Craddock on his excellent speech. I am sure it comes as a surprise to all of us that he should prove such a fluent speaker, with such a fund of humour and — er — and common sense. And what is more valuable than these, his last words have proved to us that his heart — his heart, gentlemen — is in the right place, and that is saying a great deal. In fact I know nothing better to be said of a man than that his heart is in the right place. You know me, ladies and gentlemen, I have made many speeches to you since I had the honour of standing for the constituency in ‘85, but I must confess I couldn’t make a better speech myself than the one you have just heard.”

“You could — you could!” cried Edward, modestly.

“No, Mr. Craddock, no; I assert deliberately, and I mean it, that I could not do better myself. From my shoulders I let fall the mantle, and give it — —”

Here Mr. Bacot was interrupted by the stentorian voice of the landlord of the Pig and Whistle (a rabid Conservative).

“Three cheers for good old Teddie!”

“That’s right, my boys,” repeated Mr. Bacot, for once taking an interruption in good part, “Three cheers for good old Teddy!”

The audience opened its mighty mouth and roared, then burst again into, For he’s a jolly good fellow! Arthur Branderton, when the tumult was subsiding, rose from his chair and called for more cheers. The object of all this enthusiasm sat calmly, with a well-satisfied look on his face, taking it all with his usual modest complacency. At last the meeting broke up, with cheers, and God save the Queen, and He’s a jolly good fellow. The committee and the personal friends of the Craddocks retired to the side-room for light refreshment.

The ladies clustered round Edward, congratulating him. Arthur Branderton came to Bertha.

“Ripping speech, wasn’t it?” he said. “I had no idea he could jaw like that. By Jove, it simply stirred me right through.”

Before Bertha could answer, Mrs. Mayston Ryle sailed in.

“Where’s the man?” she cried, in her loud tones. “Where is he? Show him to me.... My dear Mr. Craddock, your speech was perfect. I say it.”

“And in such good taste,” said Miss Hancock, her eyes glowing. “How proud you must be of your husband, Mrs. Craddock!”

“There’s no chance for the Radicals now,” said the Vicar, rubbing his hands.

“Oh, Mr. Craddock, let me come near you,” cried Mrs. Branderton. “I’ve been trying to get at you for twenty minutes.... You’ve simply extinguished the horrid Radicals; I couldn’t help crying, you were so pathetic.”

“One may say what one likes,” whispered Miss Glover to her brother, “but there’s nothing in the world so beautiful as sentiment. I felt my heart simply bursting.”

“Mr. Craddock,” added Mrs. Mayston Ryle, “you’ve pleased me! Where’s your wife, that I may tell her so?”

“It’s the best speech we’ve ever had down here,” cried Mrs. Branderton.

“That’s the only true thing I’ve heard you say for twenty years, Mrs. Branderton,” replied Mrs. Mayston Ryle, looking very hard at Mr. Atthill Bacot.

Chapter XXVI

WHEN Lord Roseberry makes a speech, even the journals of his own party report him in the first person and at full length; and this is said to be the politician’s supreme ambition. Having reached such distinction, there is nothing left him but an honourable death and a public funeral in Westminster Abbey. Now, the Blackstable Times accorded this honour to Edward’s first effort; it was printed with numberless I’s peppered boldly over it; the grammar was corrected, and the stops inserted, just as for the most important orators. Edward bought a dozen copies and read the speech right through in each, to see that his sentiments were correctly expressed, and that there were no misprints. He gave it to Bertha, and stood over her while she read.

“Looks well, don’t it?” he said.

“Splendid!”

“By the way, is Aunt Polly’s address 72 Eliot Mansions?”

“Yes. Why?”

Her jaw fell as she saw him roll up half-a-dozen copies of the Blackstable Times and address the wrapper.

“I’m sure she’d like to read my speech. And it might hurt her feelings if she heard about it and I’d not sent her the report.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’d like to see it very much. But if you send six copies you’ll have none left — for other people.”

“Oh, I can easily get more. The editor chap told me I could have a thousand if I liked. I’m sending her six, because I dare say she’d like to forward some to her friends.”

By return of post came Miss Ley’s reply.

My dear Edward, — I perused all six copies of your speech with the greatest interest; and I think you will agree with me that it is high proof of its merit that I was able to read it the sixth time with as unflagging attention as the first. The peroration, indeed, I am convinced that no acquaintance could stale. It is so true that “every Englishman has a mother” (supposing, of course, that an untimely death has not robbed him of her). It is curious how one does not realise the truth of some things till they are pointed out; when one’s only surprise is at not having seen them before. I hope it will not offend you if I suggest that Bertha’s handiwork seems to me not invisible in some of the sentiments (especially in that passage about the Union Jack). Did you really write the whole speech yourself? Come, now, confess that Bertha helped you. — Yours very sincerely,

MARY LEY.

Edward read the letter and tossed it, laughing, to Bertha. “What cheek her suggesting that you helped me! I like that.”

“I’ll write at once and tell her that it was all your own.”

Bertha still could hardly believe genuine the admiration which her husband excited. Knowing his extreme incapacity, she was astounded that the rest of the world should think him an uncommonly clever fellow. To her his pretensions were merely ridiculous; she marvelled that he should venture to discuss, with dogmatic glibness, subjects of which he knew nothing; but she marvelled still more that people should be impressed thereby: he had an astonishing faculty of concealing his ignorance.

At last the polling-day arrived, and Bertha waited anxiously at Court Leys for the result. Edward eventually appeared, radiant.

“What did I tell you?” said he.

“I see you’ve got in.”

“Got in isn’t the word for it! What did I tell you, eh? My dear girl, I’ve simply knocked ’em all into a cocked hat. I got double the number of votes that the other chap did, and it’s the biggest poll they’ve ever had.... Aren’t you proud that your hubby should be a County Councillor? I tell you I shall be an M.P. before I die.”

“I congratulate you — with all my heart,” said Bertha drily; but trying to be enthusiastic.

Edward in his excitement did not observe her coolness. He was walking up and down the room concocting schemes — asking himself how long it would be before Miles Campbell, the member, was confronted by the inevitable dilemma of the unopposed M.P., one horn of which is the Kingdom of Heaven, and the other — the House of Lords.

Presently he stopped. “I’m not a vain man,” he remarked, “but I must say I don’t think I’ve done badly.”

Edward, for a while, was somewhat overwhelmed by his own greatness, but the opinion came to his rescue that the rewards were only according to his deserts; and presently he entered energetically into the not very arduous duties of the County Councillor.

Bertha continually expected to hear something to his disadvantage; but, on the contrary, everything seemed to proceed very satisfactorily; and Edward’s aptitude for business, his keenness in making a bargain, his common sense, were heralded abroad in a manner that should have been most gratifying to his wife.

But as a matter of fact these constant praises exceedingly disquieted Bertha. She asked herself uneasily whether she was doing him an injustice. Was he really so clever; had he indeed the virtues which common report ascribed to him? Perhaps she was prejudiced; or perhaps — he was cleverer than she. This thought came like a blow, for she had never doubted that her intellect was superior to Edward’s. Their respective knowledge was not comparable: she occupied herself with ideas that Edward did not conceive; his mind was ever engaged in the utterest trivialities. He never interested himself in abstract things, and his conversation was tedious, as only the absence of speculation could make it. It was extraordinary that every one but herself should so highly estimate his intelligence. Bertha knew that his mind was paltry and his ignorance phenomenal: his pretentiousness made him a charlatan. One day he came to her, his head full of a new idea.

“I say, Bertha, I’ve been thinking it over and it seems a pity that your name should be dropped entirely. And it sounds funny that people called Craddock should live at Court Leys.”

“D’you think so? I don’t know how you can remedy it — unless you think of advertising for tenants with a more suitable name.”

“Well, I was thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and it would have a good effect on the county, if we took your name again.”

He looked at Bertha, who stared at him icily, but answered nothing.

“I’ve talked to old Bacot about it and he thinks it would be just the thing; so I think we’d better do it.”

“I suppose you’re going to consult me on the subject.”

“That’s what I’m doing now.”

“Do you think of calling yourself Ley-Craddock or Craddock-Ley, or dropping the Craddock altogether?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I hadn’t gone so far as that yet.”

Bertha gave a little scornful laugh. “I think the idea is perfectly ridiculous.”

“I don’t see that; I think it would be rather an improvement.”

“Really, Edward, if I was not ashamed to take your name, I don’t think that you need be ashamed to keep it.”

“I say, I think you might be reasonable — you’re always standing in my way.”

“I have no wish to do that. If you think my name will add to your importance, use it by all means.... You may call yourself Tompkins for all I care.”

“What about you?”

“Oh I — I shall continue to call myself Craddock.”

“I do think it’s rough. You never do anything to help me.”

“I am sorry you’re dissatisfied. But you forget that you have impressed one ideal on me for years: you have always given me to understand that your pattern female animal was the common or domestic cow.”

Edward did not understand what Bertha meant, and it occurred to him dimly that it was perhaps not altogether proper.

“You know, Edward, I always regret that you didn’t marry Fanny Glover. You would have suited one another admirably. And I think she would have worshipped you as you desire to be worshipped. I’m sure she would not have objected to your calling yourself Glover.”

“I shouldn’t have wanted to take her name. That’s no better than Craddock. The only thing in Ley is that it’s an old county name, and has belonged to your people.”

“That is why I don’t choose that you should use it.”

Chapter XXVII

TIME passed slowly, slowly. Bertha wrapped her pride about her like a cloak, but sometimes it seemed too heavy to bear and she nearly fainted. The restraint which she imposed upon herself was often intolerable; anger and hatred seethed within her, but she forced herself to preserve the smiling face which people had always seen. She suffered intensely from her loneliness of spirit, she had not a soul to whom she could tell her unhappiness. It is terrible to have no means of expressing oneself, to keep imprisoned always the anguish that gnaws at one’s heart-strings. It is well enough for the writer, he can find solace in his words, he can tell his secret and yet not betray it: but the woman has only silence.

Bertha loathed Edward now with such angry, physical repulsion that she could not bear his touch; and every one she knew, was his admiring friend. How could she tell Fanny Glover that Edward was a fool who bored her to death, when Fanny Glover thought him the best and most virtuous of mankind? She was annoyed that in the universal estimation Edward should have eclipsed her so entirely: once his only importance lay in the fact that he was her husband, but now the positions were reversed. She found it very irksome thus to shine with reflected light, and at the same time despised herself for the petty jealousy. She could not help remembering that Court Leys was hers, and that if she chose she could send Edward away like a hired servant.

At last she felt it impossible longer to endure his company; he made her stupid and vulgar; she was ill and weak, and she utterly despaired. She made up her mind to go away again, this time for ever.

“If I stay, I shall kill myself.”

For two days Edward had been utterly miserable; a favourite dog had died, and he was brought to the verge of tears. Bertha watched him contemptuously.

“You are more affected over the death of a wretched poodle than you have ever been over a pain of mine.”

“Oh, don’t rag me now, there’s a good girl. I can’t bear it.”

“Fool!” muttered Bertha, under her breath.

He went about with hanging head and melancholy face, telling every one the particulars of the beast’s demise, in a voice quivering with emotion.

“Poor fellow!” said Miss Glover. “He has such a good heart.”

Bertha could hardly repress the bitter invective that rose to her lips. If people knew the coldness with which he had met her love, the indifference he had shown to her tears and to her despair! She despised herself when she remembered the utter self-abasement of the past.

“He made me drink the cup of humiliation to the very dregs.”

From the height of her disdain she summed him up for the thousandth time. It was inexplicable that she had been subject to a man so paltry in mind, so despicable in character. It made her blush with shame to think how servile had been her love.

Dr. Ramsay, who was visiting Bertha for some trivial ill, happened to come in when she was engaged with such thoughts.

“Well,” he said, as soon as he had taken breath. “And how is Edward to-day?”

“Good heavens, how should I know?” she cried, beside herself, the words slipping out unawares after the long constraint.

“Hulloa, what’s this? Have the turtle-doves had a tiff at last?”

“Oh, I’m sick of continually hearing Edward’s praises. I’m sick of being treated as an appendage to him.”

“What’s the matter with you, Bertha?” said the doctor, bursting into a shout of laughter. “I always thought nothing pleased you more than to hear how much we all liked your husband.”

“Oh, my good doctor, you must be blind or an utter fool. I thought every one knew by now that I loathe my husband.”

“What?” shouted Dr. Ramsay; then thinking Bertha was unwell: “Come, come, I see you want a little medicine, my dear. You’re out of sorts, and like all women you think the world is consequently coming to an end.”

Bertha sprang from the sofa. “D’you think I should speak like this if I hadn’t good cause? Don’t you think I’d conceal my humiliation if I could? Oh, I’ve hidden it long enough; now I must speak. Oh God, I can hardly help screaming with pain when I think of all I’ve suffered and hidden. I’ve never said a word to any one but you, and now I can’t help it. I tell you I loathe and abhor my husband and I utterly despise him. I can’t live with him any more, and I want to go away.”

Dr. Ramsay opened his mouth and fell back in his chair; he looked at Bertha as if he expected her to have a fit. “You’re not serious?”

Bertha stamped her foot impatiently. “Of course I’m serious. Do you think I’m a fool too? We’ve been miserable for years, and it can’t go on. If you knew what I’ve had to suffer when every one has congratulated me, and said how pleased they were to see me so happy. Sometimes I’ve had to dig my nails in my hands to prevent myself from crying out the truth.”

Bertha walked up and down the room, letting herself go at last. The tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she took no notice of them. She was giving full vent to her passionate hatred.

“Oh, I’ve tried to love him. You know how I loved him once — how I adored him. I would have laid down my life for him with pleasure. I would have done anything he asked me; I used to search for the smallest indication of his wishes so that I might carry them out. It overjoyed me to think that I was his abject slave. But he’s destroyed every vestige of my love, and now I only despise him, I utterly despise him. Oh, I’ve tried to love him, but he’s too great a fool.”

The last words Bertha said with such force that Dr. Ramsay was startled.

“My dear Bertha!”

“Oh, I know you all think him wonderful. I’ve had his praises thrown at me for years. But you don’t know what a man really is till you’ve lived with him, till you’ve seen him in every mood and in every circumstance. I know him through and through, and he’s a fool. You can’t conceive how stupid, how utterly brainless he is.... He bores me to death!”

“Come now, you don’t mean what you say. You’re exaggerating as usual. You must expect to have little quarrels now and then; upon my word, I think it took me twenty years to get used to my wife.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be sententious,” Bertha interrupted, fiercely. “I’ve had enough moralising in these five years. I might have loved Edward better if he hadn’t been so moral. He’s thrown his virtues in my face till I’m sick of them. He’s made every goodness ugly to me, till I sigh for vice just for a change. Oh, you can’t imagine how frightfully dull is a really good man. Now I want to be free, I tell you I can’t stand it any more.”

Bertha again walked up and down the room excitedly.

“Upon my word,” cried Dr. Ramsay, “I can’t make head or tail of it.”

“I didn’t expect you would. I knew you’d only moralise.”

“What d’you want me to do? Shall I speak to him?”

“No! No! I’ve spoken to him endlessly. It’s no good. D’you suppose your speaking to him will make him love me? He’s incapable of it; all he can give me is esteem and affection — good God, what do I want with esteem! It requires a certain intelligence to love, and he hasn’t got it. I tell you he’s a fool. Oh, when I think that I’m shackled to him for the rest of my life, I feel I could kill myself.”

“Come now, he’s not such a fool as all that. Every one agrees that he’s a very smart man of business. And I can’t help saying that I’ve always thought you did uncommonly well when you insisted on marrying him.”

“It was all your fault,” cried Bertha. “If you hadn’t opposed me, I might not have married so quickly. Oh, you don’t know how I’ve regretted it.... I wish I could see him dead at my feet.”

Dr. Ramsay whistled. His mind worked somewhat slowly, and he was becoming confused with the overthrow of his cherished opinions, and the vehemence with which the unpleasant operation was conducted.

“I didn’t know things were like this.”

“Of course you didn’t!” said Bertha, scornfully. “Because I smiled and hid my sorrow, you thought I was happy. When I look back on the wretchedness I’ve gone through, I wonder that I can ever have borne it.”

“I can’t believe that this is very serious. You’ll be of a different mind to-morrow, and wonder that such things ever entered your head. You mustn’t mind an old chap like me telling you that you’re very headstrong and impulsive. After all, Edward is a fine fellow, and I can’t believe that he would willingly hurt your feelings.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t give me more of Edward’s praises.”

“I wonder if you’re a little jealous of the way he’s got on?” asked the doctor, looking at her sharply.

Bertha blushed, for she had asked herself the same question, and much scorn was needed to refute it.

“I? My dear doctor, you forget! Oh, don’t you understand that it isn’t a passing whim? It’s dreadfully serious to me — I’ve borne the misery till I can bear it no longer. You must help me to get away. If you have any of your old affection for me, do what you can. I want to go away; but I don’t want to have any more rows with Edward; I just want to leave him quietly. It’s no good trying to make him understand that we’re incompatible. He thinks that it’s enough for my happiness just to be his wife. He’s of iron, and I am pitifully weak.... I used to think myself so strong!”

“Am I to take it that you’re absolutely serious? Do you want to take the extreme step of separating from your husband?”

“It’s an extreme step that I’ve taken before. Last time I went with a flourish of trumpets, but now I want to go without any fuss at all. I still loved Edward then, but I have even ceased to hate him. Oh, I knew I was a fool to come back, but I couldn’t help it. He asked me to return, and I did.”

“Well, I don’t know what I can do for you. I can’t help thinking that if you wait a little things will get better.”

“I can’t wait any longer. I’ve waited too long. I’m losing my whole life.”

“Why don’t you go away for a few months, and then you can see? Miss Ley is going to Italy for the winter as usual, isn’t she? Upon my word, I think it would do you good to go too.”

“I don’t mind what I do so long as I can get away. I’m suffering too much.”

“Have you thought that Edward will miss you?” asked Dr. Ramsay, gravely.

“No, he won’t. Good heavens, don’t you think I know him by now? I know him through and through. And he’s callous, and selfish, and stupid. And he’s making me like himself.... Oh, Dr. Ramsay, please help me.”

“Does Miss Ley know?” asked the doctor, remembering what she had told him on her visit to Court Leys.

“No, I’m sure she doesn’t. She thinks we adore one another. And I don’t want her to know. I’m such a coward now. Years ago I never cared a straw for what any one in the world thought of me; but my spirit is utterly broken. Oh, get me away from here, Dr. Ramsay, get me away.”

She burst into tears, weeping as she had been long unaccustomed to do; she was utterly exhausted after the outburst of all that for years she had kept hid.

“I’m still so young, and I almost feel an old woman. Sometimes I should like to lie down and die, and have done with it all.”

A month later Bertha was in Rome. But at first she was hardly able to realise the change in her condition. Her life at Court Leys had impressed itself upon her with such ghastly distinctness that she could not imagine its cessation. She was like a prisoner so long immured that freedom dazes him, and he looks for his chains, and cannot understand that he is free.

The relief was so great that Bertha could not believe it true, and she lived in fear that her vision would be disturbed, and that she would find herself again within the prison walls of Court Leys. It was a dream that she wandered in sunlit places, where the air was scented with violets and with roses. The people were unreal, the models lounging on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, the ragged urchins, quaintly costumed and importunate, the silver speech that caressed the air. How could she believe that life was true when it gave blue sky and sunshine, so that the heart thrilled with joy; when it gave rest, and peace, and the most delightful idleness? Real life was gloomy and strenuous; its setting a Georgian mansion, surrounded by desolate, wind-swept fields. In real life every one was very virtuous and very dull; the ten commandments hedged one round with the menace of hell-fire and eternal damnation, a dungeon more terrible because it had not walls, nor bars and bolts.

But beyond these gloomy stones with their harsh Thou shalt not is a land of fragrance and of light, where the sunbeams send the blood running gaily through the veins; where the flowers give their perfume freely to the air, in token that riches must be spent and virtue must be squandered; where the amorets flutter here and there on the spring breezes, unknowing whither they go, uncaring. It is a land of olive trees and of pleasant shade, and the sea kisses the shore gently to show the youths how they must kiss the maidens. There dark eyes flash lambently, telling the traveller he need not fear, since love may be had for the asking. Blood is warm, and hands linger with grateful pressure in hands, and red lips ask for the kisses that are so sweet to give. There the flesh and the spirit walk side by side, and each is well satisfied with the other. Ah, give me the sunshine of this blissful country, and a garden of roses, and the murmur of a pleasant brook; give me a shady bank, and wine, and books, and the coral lips of Amaryllis, and I will live in complete felicity — for at least ten days.

To Bertha the life in Rome seemed like a play. Miss Leys left her much freedom, and she wandered alone in strange places. She went often to the market and spent the morning among the booths, looking at a thousand things she did not want to buy; she fingered rich silks and antique bits of silver, smiling at the compliments of a friendly dealer. The people bustled around her, talking volubly, intensely alive, and yet, in her inability to understand that what she saw was true, they seemed but puppets. She went to the galleries, to the Sistine Chapel or to the Stanze of Raphael; and, lacking the hurry of the tourist and his sense of duty, she would spend a whole morning in front of one picture, or in a corner of some old church, weaving with the sight before her the fantasies of her imagination.

And when she felt the need of her fellow-men, Bertha went to the Pincio and mingled with the throng that listened to the band. But the Franciscan monk in his brown cowl, standing apart, was a figure of some romantic play; and the soldiers in gay uniforms, the Bersaglieri with the bold cock’s feathers in their hats, were the chorus of a comic opera. And there were black-robed priests, some old and fat, taking the sun and smoking cigarettes, at peace with themselves and with the world; others young and restless, the flesh unsubdued shining out of their dark eyes. And every one seemed as happy as the children who romped and scampered with merry cries.

But gradually the shadows of the past fell away and Bertha was able more consciously to appreciate the beauty and the life that surrounded her. And knowing it transitory she set herself to enjoy it as best she could. Care and youth are with difficulty yoked together, and merciful time wraps in oblivion the most gruesome misery. Bertha stretched out her arms to embrace the wonders of the living world, and she put away the dreadful thought that it must end so quickly. In the spring she spent long hours in the gardens that surround the city, where the remains of ancient Rome mingled exotically with the half tropical luxuriance, and called forth new and subtle emotions. The flowers grew in the sarcophagi with a wild exuberance, wantoning, it seemed, in mockery of the tomb from which they sprang. Death is hideous, but life is always triumphant; the rose and the hyacinth arise from man’s decay; and the dissolution of man is but the signal of other birth: and the world goes on, beautiful and ever new, revelling in its vigour.

Bertha went to the Villa Medici and sat where she could watch the light glowing on the mellow façade of the old palace, and Syrinx peeping between the reeds: the students saw her and asked who was the beautiful woman who sat so long and so unconscious of the eyes that looked at her. She went to the Villa Doria-Pamphili, majestic and pompous, the fitting summer-house of princes in gorgeous clothes, of bishops and of cardinals. And the ruins of the Palatine with its cypress trees sent her thought back and back, and she pictured to herself the glory of bygone power.

But the wildest garden of all, the garden of the Mattei, pleased her best. Here were a greater fertility and a greater abandonment; the distance and the difficulty of access kept strangers away, and Bertha could wander through it as if it were her own. She thought she had never enjoyed such exquisite moments as were given her by its solitude and its silence. Sometimes a troop of scarlet seminarists sauntered along the grass-grown avenues, vivid colour against the verdure.

Then she went home, tired and happy, and sat at her open window and watched the dying sun. The sun set over St. Peter’s, and the mighty cathedral was transfigured into a temple of fire and gold; the dome was radiant, formed no longer of solid stones, but of light and sunshine — it was the crown of a palace of Hyperion. Then, as the sun fell to the horizon, St. Peter’s stood out in darkness, stood out in majestic profile against the splendour of heaven.

Chapter XXVIII

BUT after Easter Miss Ley proposed that they should travel slowly back to England. Bertha had dreaded the suggestion, not only because she regretted to leave Rome, but still more because it rendered necessary some explanation. The winter had passed comfortably enough with the excuse of indifferent health, but now some other reason must be found to account for the continued absence from her husband’s side; and Bertha’s racked imagination gave her nothing. She was determined, however, under no circumstances, to return to Court Leys: after such happy freedom the confinement of body and soul would be doubly intolerable.

Edward had been satisfied with the pretext and had let Bertha go without a word. As he said, he was not the man to stand in his wife’s way when her health required her to leave him; and he could peg along all right by himself. Their letters had been fairly frequent, but on Bertha’s side a constant effort. She was always telling herself that the only rational course was to make Edward a final statement of her intentions, and then break off all communication. But the dread of fuss and bother, and of endless explanation, restrained her; and she compromised by writing as seldom as possible and adhering to the merest trivialities. She was surprised once or twice, when she had delayed her answer, to receive from him a second letter, asking with some show of anxiety why she did not write.

Miss Ley had never mentioned Edward’s name and Bertha surmised that she knew much of the truth. But she kept her own counsel: blessed are they who mind their own business and hold their tongues! Miss Ley, indeed, was convinced that some catastrophe had occurred, but true to her habit of allowing people to work out their lives in their own way, without interference, took care to seem unobservant; which was really very noble, for she prided herself on nothing more than on her talent for observation.

“The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do,” she said, “is to pretend to be a foolish one!”

Finally, she guessed Bertha’s present difficulty; and it seemed easily surmountable.

“I wish you’d come back to London with me instead of going to Court Leys,” she said. “You’ve never had a London season, have you? On the whole I think it’s amusing: the opera is very good and sometimes you see people who are quite well dressed.”

Bertha did not answer, and Miss Ley, seeing her wish to accept and at the same time her hesitation, suggested that she should come for a few weeks, well knowing that a woman’s visit is apt to spin itself out for an indeterminate time.

“I’m sorry I shan’t have room for Edward too,” said Miss Ley, smiling drily, “but my flat is very small, you know.”

They had been settled a few days in the flat at Eliot Mansions, when Bertha, coming in to breakfast one morning, found Miss Ley in a great state of suppressed amusement. She was quivering like an uncoiled spring; and she pecked at her toast and at her egg in a birdlike manner, which Bertha knew could only mean that some one had made a fool of himself, to the great entertainment of her aunt. Bertha began to laugh.

“Good Heavens,” she cried, “what has happened?”

“My dear — a terrible catastrophe.” Miss Ley repressed a smile, but her eyes gleamed and danced as though she were a young woman. “You don’t know Gerald Vaudrey, do you? But you know who he is.”

“I believe he’s a cousin of mine.”

Bertha’s father, who made a practice of quarrelling with all his relations, had found in General Vaudrey a brother-in-law as irascible as himself; so that the two families had never been on speaking term.

“I’ve just had a letter from his mother to say that he’s been — er, philandering rather violently with her maid, and they’re all in despair. The maid has been sent away in hysterics, his mother and his sister are in tears, and the General’s in a passion and says he won’t have the boy in his house another day. And the little wretch is only nineteen. Disgraceful, isn’t it?”

“Disgraceful!” said Bertha, smiling. “I wonder what there is in a French maid that small boys should invariably make love to her.”

“Oh, my dear, if you only saw my sister’s maid. She’s forty if she’s a day, and her complexion is like parchment very much the worse for wear.... But the awful part of it is that your Aunt Betty beseeches me to look after the boy. He’s going to Florida in a month, and meanwhile he’s to stay in London. Now, what I want to know, is how am I to keep a dissolute infant out of mischief. Is it the sort of thing that one would expect of me?”

Miss Ley waved her arms with comic desperation.

“Oh, but it’ll be great fun. We’ll reform him together. We’ll lead him on a path where French maids are not to be met at every turn and corner.”

“My dear, you don’t know what he is. He’s an utter young scamp. He was expelled from Rugby. He’s been to half-a-dozen crammers, because they wanted him to go to Sandhurst, but he utterly refused to work; and he’s been ploughed in every exam he’s gone in for — even for the militia. So now his father has given him five hundred pounds and told him to go to the devil.”

“How rude! But why should the poor boy go to Florida?”

“I suggested that. I know some people who’ve got an orange plantation there. And I dare say that the view of several miles of orange blossom will suggest to him that promiscuous flirtation may have unpleasant results.”

“I think I shall like him,” said Bertha.

“I have no doubt you will; he’s an utter scamp and rather pretty.”

Next day, when Bertha was in the drawing-room, reading, Gerald Vaudrey was shown in. She smiled to reassure him and put out her hand in the friendliest manner; she thought he must be a little confused at meeting a stranger instead of Miss Ley, and unhappy in his disgrace.

“You don’t know who I am?” she said.

“Oh yes, I do,” he replied, with a very pleasant smile. “The slavey told me Aunt Polly was out, but that you were here.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go away.”

“I thought I shouldn’t frighten you, you know.”

Bertha opened her eyes. He was certainly not at all shy, though he looked even younger than nineteen. He was a nice boy, very slight and not so tall as Bertha, with a small, quite girlish face. He had a tiny, pretty nose, and a pink and white freckled complexion. His hair was dark and curly, he wore it somewhat long, evidently aware that it was beautiful; and his handsome green eyes had a charming expression. His sensual mouth was always smiling.

“What a nice boy!” thought Bertha. “I’m sure I shall like him.”

He began to talk as if he had known her all his life, and she was entertained by the contrast between his innocent appearance and his disreputable past. He looked about the room with boyish ease and stretched himself comfortably in a big arm-chair.

“Hulloa, that’s new since I was here last!” he said, pointing to an Italian bronze.

“Have you been here often?”

“Rather! I used to come here whenever it got too hot for me at home. It’s no good scrapping with your governor, because he’s got the ooftish — it’s a jolly unfair advantage that fathers have, but they always take it. So when the old chap flew into a passion, I used to say, ‘I won’t argue with you. If you can’t treat me like a gentleman, I shall go away for a week.’ And I used to come here. Aunt Polly always gave me five quid, and said, ‘Don’t tell me how you spend it, because I shouldn’t approve; but come again when you want some more.’ She’s is a ripper, ain’t she!”

“I’m sorry she’s not in.”

“I’m rather glad, because I can have a long talk with you till she comes. I’ve never seen you before, so I have such a lot to say.”

“Have you?” said Bertha, laughing. “That’s rather unusual in young men.”

He looked so absurdly young that Bertha could not help treating him as a schoolboy; and she was amused at his communicativeness. She wanted him to tell her his escapades, but was afraid to ask.

“Are you very hungry?” She thought that boys always had appetites. “Would you like some tea?”

“I’m starving.”

She poured him out a cup, and taking it and three jam sandwiches, he sat on a footstool at her feet. He made himself quite at home.

“You’ve never seen my Vaudrey cousins, have you?” he asked, with his mouth full. “I can’t stick ’em at any price, they’re such frumps. I’ll tell ’em all about you; it’ll make them beastly sick.”

Bertha raised her eyebrows. “And do you object to frumps?”

“I simply loathe them. At the last tutor’s I was at, the old chap’s wife was the most awful old geezer you ever saw. So I wrote and told my mater that I was afraid my morals were being corrupted.”

“And did she take you away?”

“Well, by a curious coincidence, the old chap wrote the very same day, and told the pater if he didn’t remove me he’d give me the shoot. So I sent in my resignation, and told him his cigars were poisonous, and cleared out.”

“Don’t you think you’d better sit on a chair?” said Bertha. “You must be very uncomfortable on that footstool.”

“Oh no, not at all. After a Turkey carpet and a dining-room table, there’s nothing so comfy as a footstool. A chair always makes me feel respectable — and dull.”

Bertha thought Gerald rather a nice name.

“How long are you staying in London?”

“Oh, only a month, worse luck. Then I’ve got to go to the States to make my fortune and reform.”

“I hope you will.”

“Which? One can’t do both at once, you know. You make your money first, and you reform afterwards, if you’ve got time. But whatever happens, it’ll be a good sight better than sweating away at an everlasting crammer’s. If there is one man I can’t stick at any price it’s the army crammer.”

“You have a large experience of them, I understand.”

“I wish you didn’t know all my past history. Now I shan’t have the sport of telling you.”

“I don’t think it would be edifying.”

“Oh yes, it would. It would show you how virtue is downtrodden (that’s me), and how vice is triumphant. I’m awfully unlucky; people sort of conspire together to look at my actions from the wrong point of view. I’ve had jolly rough luck all through. First I was bunked from Rugby. Well, that wasn’t my fault. I was quite willing to stay, and I’m blowed if I was worse than anybody else. The pater blackguarded me for six weeks, and said I was bringing his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. Well, you know, he’s simply awfully bald; so at last I couldn’t help saying that I didn’t know where his grey hairs were going to, but it didn’t much look as if he meant to accompany them. So, after that, he sent me to a crammer who played poker. Well, he skinned me of every shilling I’d got, and then wrote and told the pater I was an immoral young dog, and corrupting his house.”

“I think we’d better change the subject, Gerald,” said Bertha.

“Oh, but you must have the sequel. The next place I went to, I found none of the other fellows knew poker; so of course I thought it a sort of merciful interposition of Providence to help me to recoup myself. I told ’em not to lay up treasures in this world, and walloped in thirty quid in four days; then the old thingamygig (I forget his name, but he was a parson) told me I was making his place into a gambling-hell, and that he wouldn’t have me another day in his house. So off I toddled, and I stayed at home for six months. That gave me the fair hump, I can tell you.”

The conversation was disturbed by the entrance of Miss Ley.

“You see we’ve made friends,” said Bertha.

“Gerald always does that with everybody. He’s the most gregarious person. How are you, Lothario?”

“Flourishing, my Belinda,” he replied, flinging his arms round Miss Ley’s neck to her great delight and pretended indignation.

“You’re irrepressible,” she said. “I expected to find you in sackcloth and ashes, penitent and silent.”

“My dear Aunt Polly, ask me to do anything you like, except to repent and to hold my tongue.”

“You know your mother has asked me to look after you.”

“I like being looked after — and is Bertha going to help?”

“I’ve been thinking it over,” added Miss Ley. “And the only way I can think to keep you out of mischief is to make you spend your evenings with me. So you’d better go home now and dress. I know there’s nothing you like better than changing your clothes.”

Meanwhile Bertha observed with astonishment that Gerald was simply devouring her with his eyes. It was impossible not to see his evident admiration.

“The boy must be mad,” she thought, but could not help feeling a little flattered.

“He’s been telling me some dreadful stories,” she said to Miss Ley, when he had gone. “I hope they’re not true.”

“Oh, I think you must take all Gerald says with a grain of salt. He exaggerates dreadfully, and all boys like to seem Byronic. So do most men, for the matter of that!”

“He looks so young. I can’t believe that he’s really very naughty.”

“Well, my dear, there’s no doubt about his mother’s maid. The evidence is of the — most conclusive order. I know I should be dreadfully angry with him, but every one is so virtuous now-a-days that a change is quite refreshing. And he’s so young, he may reform. Englishmen start galloping to the devil, but as they grow older they nearly always change horses and amble along gently to respectability, a wife, and seventeen children.”

“I like the contrast of his green eyes and his dark hair.”

“My dear, it can’t be denied that he’s made to capture the feminine heart. I never try to resist him myself. He’s so extremely convincing when he tells you some outrageous fib.”

Bertha went to her room and looked at herself in the glass, then put on her most becoming dinner-dress.

“Good gracious,” said Miss Ley. “You’ve not put that on for Gerald? You’ll turn the boy’s head, he’s dreadfully susceptible.”

“It’s the first one I came across,” replied Bertha, innocently.

Chapter XXIX

“You’ve quite captured Gerald’s heart,” said Miss Ley to Bertha a day or two later. “He’s confided to me that he thinks you ‘perfectly stunning.’”

“He’s a very nice boy,” said Bertha, laughing.

The youth’s outspoken admiration could not fail to increase her liking; and she was amused by the stare of his green eyes, which, with a woman’s peculiar sense, she felt even when her back was turned. They followed her; they rested on her hair and on her beautiful hands; when she wore a low dress they burnt themselves on her neck and breast; she felt them travel along her arms, and embrace her figure. They were the most caressing, smiling eyes, but with a certain mystery in their emerald depths. Bertha did not neglect to put herself in positions wherein Gerald could see her to advantage; and when he looked at her hands she could not be expected to withdraw them as though she were ashamed. Few Englishmen see anything in a woman, but her face; and it seldom occurs to them that her hand has the most delicate outlines, all grace and gentleness, with tapering fingers and rosy nails; they never look for the thousand things it has to say.

“Don’t you know it’s very rude to stare like that,” said Bertha, with a smile, turning round suddenly.

“I beg your pardon, I didn’t know you were looking.”

“I wasn’t, but I saw you all the same.”

She smiled at him most engagingly and she saw a sudden flame leap into his eyes. A married woman is always gratified by the capture of a youth’s fickle heart: it is an unsolicited testimonial to her charms, and has the great advantage of being completely free from danger. She tells herself that there is no better training for a boy than to fall in love with a really nice woman a good deal older than himself. It teaches him how to behave and keeps him from getting into mischief: how often have callow youths been know to ruin their lives by falling into the clutches of some horrid adventuress with yellow hair and painted cheeks! Since she is old enough to be his mother, the really nice woman thinks there can be no harm in flirting with the poor boy, and it seems to please him: so she makes him fetch and carry, and dazzles him, and drives him quite distracted, till his youthful fickleness comes to the rescue and he falls passionately enamoured of a barmaid — when, of course, she calls him an ungrateful and low-minded wretch, regrets she was so mistaken in his character, and tells him never to come near her again.

This of course only refers to the women that men fall in love with; it is well known that the others have the strictest views on the subject, and would sooner die than trifle with any one’s affections.

Gerald had the charming gift of becoming intimate with people at the shortest notice, and a cousin is an agreeable relation (especially when she’s pretty), with whom it is easy to get on. The relationship is not so close as to warrant chronic disagreeableness, and close enough to permit personalities, which are the most amusing part of conversation.

Within a week Gerald took to spending his whole day with Bertha, and she found the London season much more amusing than she had expected. She looked back with distaste to her only two visits to town. One had been her honeymoon, and the other the first separation from her husband: it was odd that in retrospect both seem equally dreary. Edward had almost disappeared from her thoughts, and she exulted like a captive free from chains. Her only annoyance was his often-expressed desire to see her. Why could he not leave her alone, as she left him? He was perpetually asking when she would return to Court Leys; and she had to invent excuses to prevent his coming to London. She loathed the idea of seeing him again.

But she put aside these thoughts when Gerald came to fetch her, sometimes for a bicycle ride in Battersea Park, sometimes to spend an hour in one of the museums. It is no wonder that the English are a populous race when one observes how many are the resorts supplied by the munificence of governing bodies for the express purpose of philandering. On a hot day what spot can be more enchanting than the British Museum, cool, silent, and roomy, with harmless statues which tell no tales, and afford matter for conversation to break an awkward pause?

The parks also are eminently suited for those whose fancy turns to thoughts of Platonic love. Hyde Park is the fitting scene for an idyll in which Corydon wears patent-leather boots and a top-hat, while Phyllis has an exquisite frock which suits her perfectly. The well-kept lawns, the artificial water and the trim paths, give a mock rurality which is infinitely amusing to persons who do not wish to take things too seriously. Here, in the summer mornings, Gerald and Bertha spent much time. It pleased her to listen to his chatter, and to look into his green eyes; he was such a very nice boy, and seemed so much attached to her! Besides, he was only in London for a month, and, quite secure in his departure, she could afford to let him fall a little in love.

“Are you sorry you’re going away so soon?” she asked.

“I shall be miserable at leaving you.”

“It’s nice of you to say so.”

Bit by bit she extracted from him his discreditable history. Bertha was possessed by a curiosity to know details, which she elicited artfully, making him confess his iniquities that she might pretend to be angry. It gave her a curious thrill, partly of admiration, to think that he was such a depraved young person, and she looked at him with a sort of amused wonder. He was very different from the virtuous Edward. A childlike innocence shone out of his handsome eyes, and yet he had already tasted the wine of many emotions. Bertha felt somewhat envious of the sex which gave opportunity, and the spirit which gave power, to seize life boldly, and wring from it all it had to offer.

“I ought to refuse to speak to you any more,” she said. “I ought to be ashamed of you.”

“But you’re not. That’s why you’re such a ripper.”

How could she be angry with a boy who adored her? His very perversity fascinated her. Here was a man who would never hesitate to go to the devil for a woman, and Bertha was pleased at the compliment to her sex.

One evening Miss Ley was dining out, and Gerald asked Bertha to come to dinner with him, and then to the opera. She refused, thinking of the expense; but he was so eager, and she really so anxious to go, that finally she consented.

“Poor boy, he’s going away so soon, I may as well be nice to him.”

Gerald arrived in high spirits, looking even more boyish than usual.

“I’m really afraid to go out with you,” said Bertha. “People will think you’re my son. ‘Dear me, who’d have thought she was forty!’”

“What rot!” He looked at her beautiful gown. Like all really nice women, Bertha was extremely careful to be always well dressed. “By Jove, you are a stunner!”

“My dear child, I’m old enough to be your mother.”

They drove off — to a restaurant which Gerald, boylike, had chosen, because common report pronounced it the dearest in London. Bertha was much amused by the bustle, the glitter of women in diamonds, the busy waiters gliding to and fro, the glare of the electric light: and her eyes rested with approval on the handsome boy in front of her. She could not keep in check the recklessness with which he insisted on ordering the most expensive things; and when they arrived at the opera, she found he had a box.

“Oh, you wretch,” she cried. “You must be utterly ruined.”

“Oh, I’ve got five hundred quid,” he replied, laughing. “I must blue some of it.”

“But why on earth did you get a box?”

“I remembered that you hated any other part of the theatre.”

“But you promised to get cheap seats.”

“And I wanted to be alone with you.”

He was by nature a flatterer; and few women could withstand the cajolery of his green eyes, and of his charming smile.

“He must be very fond of me,” thought Bertha, as they drove home, and she put her arm in his to express her thanks and her appreciation.

“It’s very nice of you to have been so good to me. I always thought you were a nice boy.”

“I’d do more than that for you.”

He would have given the rest of his five hundred pounds for one kiss. She knew it, and was pleased, but gave him no encouragement, and for once he was bashful. They separated at her doorstep with the quietest handshake.

“It’s awfully kind of you to have come.”

He appeared immensely grateful to her. Her conscience pricked her now that he had spent so much money; but she liked him all the more.

Gerald’s month was nearly over, and Bertha was astonished that he occupied her thoughts so much. She did not know that she was so fond of him.

“I wish he weren’t going,” she said, and then quickly: “but of course it’s much better that he should!”

At that moment the boy appeared.

“This day week you’ll be on the sea, Gerald,” she said. “Then you’ll be sorry for all your iniquities.”

“No!” he answered, sitting in the position he most affected, at Bertha’s feet.

“No — which?”

“I shan’t be sorry,” he replied, with a smile, “and I’m not going away.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’ve altered my plans. The man I’m going to said I could start at the beginning of the month or a fortnight later.”

“But why?” It was a foolish question, because she knew.

“I had nothing to stay for. Now I have, that’s all.”

Bertha looked at him, and caught his shining eyes fixed intently upon her. She became grave.

“You’re not angry?” he asked, changing his tone. “I thought you wouldn’t mind. I don’t want to leave you.”

He looked at her so earnestly and tears came to his eyes, Bertha could not help being touched.

“I’m very glad that you should stay, dear. I didn’t want you to go so soon. We’ve been such good friends.”

She passed her fingers through his curly hair and over his ears; but he started, and shivered.

“Don’t do that,” he said, pushing her hand away.

“Why not?” she cried, laughing. “Are you frightened of me?”

And caressingly she passed her hand over his ears again.

“Oh, you don’t know what pain that gives me.”

He sprang up, and to her astonishment Bertha saw that he was pale and trembling.

“I feel I shall go mad when you touch me.”

Suddenly she saw the burning passion in his eyes; it was love that made him tremble. Bertha gave a little cry, and a curious sensation pressed her heart. Then without warning, the boy seized her hands and falling on his knees before her, kissed them repeatedly. His hot breath made Bertha tremble too, and the kisses burnt themselves into her flesh. She snatched her hands away.

“I’ve wanted to do that so long,” he whispered.

She was too deeply moved to answer, but stood looking at him.

“You must be mad, Gerald.” She pretended to laugh.

“Bertha!”

They stood very close together; he was about to put his arms round her. And for an instant she had an insane desire to let him do what he would, to let him kiss her lips as he had kissed her hands; and she wanted to kiss his mouth, and the curly hair, and his cheeks soft as a girl’s. But she recovered herself.

“Oh, it’s absurd! Don’t be silly, Gerald.”

He could not speak; he looked at her, his green eyes sparkling with desire.

“I love you.”

“My dear boy, do you want me to succeed your mother’s maid?”

“Oh!” he gave a groan and turned red.

“I’m glad you’re staying on. You’ll be able to see Edward, who’s coming to town. You’ve never met my husband, have you?”

His lips twitched, and he seemed to struggle to compose himself. Then he threw himself on a chair and buried his face in his hands. He seemed so little, so young — and he loved her. Bertha looked at him for a moment, and tears came to her eyes. She called herself brutal, and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Gerald!” He did not look up. “Gerald, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry for what I said.”

She bent down and drew his hands away from his face.

“Are you cross with me?” he asked, almost tearfully.

“No,” she answered, caressingly. “But you mustn’t be silly, dearest. You know I’m old enough to be your mother.”

He did not seem consoled, and she felt still that she had been horrid. She took his face between her hands and kissed his lips. And, as if he were a little child, she kissed away the tear-drops that shone in his eyes.

Chapter XXX

BERTHA still felt on her hands Gerald’s passionate kisses, like little patches of fire; and on her lips was still the touch of his boyish mouth. What magic current had passed from him to her that she should feel this sudden happiness? It was enchanting to think that Gerald loved her; she remembered how his eyes had sparkled, how his voice had grown hoarse so that he could hardly speak: ah, those were the signs of real love, of the love that is mighty and triumphant. Bertha put her hands to her heart with a rippling laugh of pure joy — for she was beloved. The kisses tingled on her fingers so that she looked at them with surprise, she seemed almost to see a mark of burning. She was very grateful to him, she wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss his hair and his boyish eyes and again the soft lips. She told herself that she would be a mother to him.

The day following he had come to her almost shyly, afraid that she would be angry, and the bashfulness contrasting with his usual happy audacity, had charmed her. It flattered her extremely to think that he was her humble slave, to see the pleasure he took in doing as she bade; but she could hardly believe it true that he loved her, and she wished to reassure herself. It gave her a queer thrill to see him turn white when she held his hand, to see him tremble when she leaned on his arm. She stroked his hair and was delighted with the anguish in his eyes.

“Don’t do that,” he cried. “Please. You don’t know how it hurts.”

“I was hardly touching you,” she replied, laughing.

She saw in his eyes glistening tears — they were tears of passion, and she could scarcely restrain a cry of triumph. At last she was loved as she wished, she gloried in her power: here at last was one who would not hesitate to lose his soul for her sake. She was intensely grateful. But her heart grew cold when she thought it was too late, that it was no good: he was only a boy, and she was married and — nearly thirty.

But even then, why should she attempt to stop him? If it was the love she dreamt of, nothing could destroy it. And there was no harm; Gerald said nothing to which she might not listen, and he was so much younger than she, he was going in less than a month and it would all be over. Why should she not enjoy the modest crumbs that the gods let fall from their table — it was little enough, in all conscience! How foolish is he who will not bask in the sun of St. Martin’s summer, because it heralds the winter as surely as the east wind!

They spent the whole day together to Miss Ley’s amusement, who for once did not use her sharp eyes to much effect.

“I’m so thankful to you, Bertha, for looking after the lad. His mother ought to be eternally grateful to you for keeping him out of mischief.”

“I’m very glad if I have,” said Bertha, “he’s such a nice boy, and I’m so fond of him. I should be very sorry if he got into trouble.... I’m rather anxious about him afterwards.”

“My dear, don’t be; because he’s certain to get into scrapes — it’s his nature — but it’s likewise his nature to get out of them. He’ll swear eternal devotion to half-a-dozen fair damsels, and ride away rejoicing, while they are left to weep upon one another’s bosoms. It’s some men’s nature to break women’s hearts.”

“I think he’s only a little wild: he means no harm.”

“These sort of people never do; that’s what makes their wrong-doing so much more fatal.”

“And he’s so affectionate.”

“My dear, I shall really believe that you’re in love with him.”

“I am,” said Bertha. “Madly!”

The plain truth is often the surest way to hoodwink people, more especially when it is told unconsciously. Women of fifty have an irritating habit of treating as contemporaries all persons of their own sex who are over twenty-five, and it never struck Miss Ley that Bertha might look upon Gerald as anything but a little boy.

But Edward could no longer be kept in the country. Bertha was astonished that he should wish to see her, and a little annoyed, for now of all times his presence would be importunate. She did not wish to have her dream disturbed, she knew it was nothing else; it was a mere spring day of happiness in the long winter of life. She looked at Gerald now with a heavy heart and could not bear to think of the future. How empty would existence be without that joyous smile; above all, without that ardent passion! This love was wonderful; it surrounded her like a mystic fire and lifted her up so that she seemed to walk on air. But things always come too late or come by halves. Why should all her passion have been squandered and flung to the winds, so that now when a beautiful youth offered her his virgin heart, she had nothing to give in exchange? Bertha told herself that though she was extremely fond of Gerald, of course she did not love him; he was a mere boy!

She was a little nervous at the meeting between him and Edward; she wondered what they would think of one another, and she watched — Gerald! Edward came in like a country breeze, obstreperously healthy, jovial, large, and somewhat bald. Miss Ley trembled lest he should knock her china over as he went round the room. He kissed her on one cheek, and Bertha on the other.

“Well, how are you all? — And this is my young cousin, eh? How are you? Pleased to meet you.”

He wrung Gerald’s hand, towering over him, beaming good-naturedly; then sat in a chair much too small for him, which creaked and grumbled at his weight. There are few sensations more amusing for a woman than to look at the husband she has once adored and think how very unnecessary he is; but it is apt to make conversation a little difficult. Miss Ley soon carried Gerald off, thinking that husband and wife should enjoy a little of that isolation to which marriage had indissolubly doomed them. Bertha had been awaiting, with great discomfort, the necessary ordeal. She had nothing to tell Edward, and was much afraid that he would be sentimental.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m putting up at the Inns of Court — I always go there.”

“I thought you might care to go to the theatre to-night. I’ve got a box, so that Aunt Polly and Gerald can come too.”

“I’m game for anything you like.”

“You always were the best-tempered man,” said Bertha, smiling gently.

“You don’t seem to care very much for my society, all the same.”

Bertha looked up quickly. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, you’re a precious long time coming back to Court Leys,” he replied, laughing.

Bertha was relieved, for evidently he was not taking the matter seriously. She had not the courage to say that she meant never to return: the endless explanation, his wonder, the impossibility of making him understand, were more than she could bear.

“When are you coming back? We all miss you, like anything.”

“Do you?” she said. “I really don’t know. We’ll see after the season.”

“What? Aren’t you coming for another couple of months?”

“I don’t think Blackstable suits me very well. I’m always ill there.”

“Oh, nonsense. It’s the finest air in England. Deathrate practically nil.”

“D’you think our life was very happy, Edward?”

She looked at him anxiously to see how he would take the tentative remark: but he was only astonished.

“Happy? Yes, rather. Of course we had our little tiffs. All people do. But they were chiefly at first, the road was a bit rough and we hadn’t got our tyres properly blown out. I’m sure I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

“That of course is the chief thing,” said Bertha.

“You look as well as anything now. I don’t see why you shouldn’t come back.”

“Well, we’ll see later. We shall have plenty of time to talk it over.”

She was afraid to speak the words on the tip of her tongue; it would be easier by correspondence.

“I wish you’d give some fixed date — so that I could have things ready, and tell people.”

“It depends upon Aunt Polly; I really can’t say for certain. I’ll write to you.”

They kept silence for a moment and then an idea seized Bertha.

“What d’you say to going to the Natural History Museum? Don’t you remember, we went there on our honeymoon? I’m sure it would amuse you to see it again.”

“Would you like to go?” asked Edward.

“I’m sure it would amuse you,” she replied.

Next day while Bertha was shopping with her husband, Gerald and Miss Ley sat alone.

“Are you very disconsolate without Bertha?” she asked.

“Utterly miserable!”

“That’s very rude to me, dear boy.”

“I’m awfully sorry, but I can never be polite to more than one person at a time: and I’ve been using up all my good manners on — Mr. Craddock.”

“I’m glad you like him,” replied Miss Ley, smiling.

“I don’t!”

“He’s a very worthy man.”

“If I hadn’t seen Bertha for six months, I shouldn’t take her off at once to see bugs.”

“Perhaps it was Bertha’s suggestion.”

“She must find Mr. Craddock precious dull if she prefers blackbeetles and stuffed kangaroos.”

“You shouldn’t draw such rapid conclusions, my friend.”

“D’you think she’s fond of him?”

“My dear Gerald, what a question! Is it not her duty to love, honour, and obey him?”

“If I were a woman I could never honour a man who was bald.”

“His locks are somewhat scanty; but he has a strong sense of duty.”

“I know that,” shouted Gerald. “It oozes out of him whenever he gets hot, just like gum.”

“He’s a County Councillor, and he makes speeches about the Union Jack, and he’s virtuous.”

“I know that too. He simply reeks of the ten commandments: they stick out all over him, like almonds in a tipsy cake.”

“My dear Gerald, Edward is a model; he is the typical Englishman as he flourishes in the country, upright and honest, healthy, dogmatic, moral — rather stupid. I esteem him enormously, and I ought to like him much better than you, who are a disgraceful scamp.”

“I wonder why you don’t.”

“Because I’m a wicked old woman; and I’ve learnt by long experience that people generally keep their vices to themselves, but insist on throwing their virtues in your face. And if you don’t happen to have any of your own, you get the worst of the encounter.”

“I think that’s what is so comfortable in you, Aunt Polly, that you’re not obstreperously good. You’re charity itself.”

“My dear Gerald,” said Miss Ley, putting up an admonishing forefinger, “women are by nature spiteful and intolerant; when you find one who exercises charity, it proves that she wants it very badly herself.”

Miss Ley was glad that Edward could not stay more than two days, for she was always afraid of surprising him. Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most obvious remarks as startling paradoxes; and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument, which is the bad talker’s substitute for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic: they want to modify your tritest observations, and even if you suggest that the day is fine insist on arguing it out.

Bertha, in her husband’s presence, had suffered singular discomfort; it had been such a constraint that she found it an effort to talk with him, and she had to rack her brain for subjects of conversation. Her heart was perceptibly lightened when she returned from Victoria after seeing him off, and it gave her a thrill of pleasure to hear Gerald jump up when she came in. He ran towards her with glowing eyes.

“Oh, I’m so glad. I’ve hardly had a chance of speaking to you these last two days.”

“We have the whole afternoon before us.”

“Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

Bertha agreed, and like two schoolfellows they sallied out. The day was sunny and warm, and they wandered by the river. The banks of the Thames about Chelsea have a pleasing trimness, a levity which is infinitely grateful after the sedateness of the rest of London. The embankments, in spite of their novelty, recall the days when the huge city was a great, straggling village, when the sedan-chair was a means of locomotion, and ladies wore patches and hoops; when epigram was the fashion and propriety was not.

Presently, as they watched the gleaming water, a penny steamboat approached the adjoining stage, and gave Bertha an idea.

“Would you like to take me to Greenwich?” she cried. “Aunt Polly’s dining out; we can have dinner at the Ship and come back by train.”

“By Jove, it will be ripping.”

They bolted down the gangway and took their tickets; the boat started, and Bertha, panting, sank on a seat. She felt a little reckless, pleased with herself, and amused to see Gerald’s unmeasured delight.

“I feel as if we were eloping,” she said, with a laugh; “I’m sure Aunt Polly will be dreadfully shocked.”

The boat went on, stopping every now and then to take in passengers. They came to the tottering wharves of Millbank, and then to the footstool turrets of St. John’s, the eight red blocks of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and the Houses of Parliament. They passed Westminster Bridge, and the massive strength of New Scotland Yard, the hotels and public buildings which line the Victoria Embankment, the Temple Gardens; and opposite this grandeur, on the Surrey side, were the dingy warehouses and factories of Lambeth. At London Bridge Bertha found new interest in the varying scene; she stood in the bows with Gerald by her side, not speaking; they were happy in being near one another. The traffic became denser and the boat more crowded — with artisans, clerks, noisy girls, going eastwards to Rotherhithe and Deptford. Great merchantmen lay by the river-side, or slowly made their way downstream under the Tower Bridge; and then the broad waters were crowded with every imaginable craft, with lazy barges as picturesque with their red sails as the fishing-boats of Venice, with little tugs, puffing and blowing, with ocean tramps, and with huge packets. And as they passed in the penny steamer they had swift pictures of groups of naked boys wallowing in the Thames mud or diving from the side of an anchored coal-barge. A new atmosphere enveloped them now. Gray warehouses which lined the river, and the factories, announced the commerce of a mighty nation; and the spirit of Charles Dickens gave to the passing scenes a fresh delight. How could they be prosaic when the great master had described them? An amiable stranger put names to the various places.

“Look, there’s Wapping Old Stairs.”

And the words thrilled Bertha like poetry. They passed innumerable wharves and docks, London Dock, John Cooper’s wharves, and William Gibbs’s wharves (who are John Cooper and William Gibbs?), Limehouse Basin, and West India Dock. Then with a great turn of the river they entered Limehouse Reach; and soon the noble lines of the hospital, the immortal monument of Inigo Jones, came into view, and they landed at Greenwich Pier.

Chapter XXXI

THEY stood for a while on a terrace overlooking the river by the side of the hospital. Immediately below, a crowd of boys were bathing, animated and noisy, chasing and ducking one another, running to and fro with many cries, and splashing in the mud.

The river was stretched more widely before them. The sun played on its yellow wavelets so that they shone with a glitter of gold. A tug grunted past with a long tail of barges, and a huge East Indiaman glided noiselessly by. In the late afternoon there was over the scene an old-time air of ease and spaciousness. The stately flood carried the mind away, so that the onlooker followed it in thought, and went down, as it broadened, with its crowd of traffic, till presently a sea-smell reached the nostrils, and the river, ever majestic, flowed into the sea. And the ships went east and west and south, bearing their merchandise to the uttermost parts of the earth, to southern, summer lands of palm-trees and dark-skinned peoples, bearing the name and wealth of England. The Thames became an emblem of the power of the mighty empire, and those who watched felt stronger in its strength, and proud of their name and of the undiminished glory of their race.

But Gerald looked sadly.

“In a very little while it must take me away from you, Bertha.”

“But think of the freedom and the vastness. Sometimes in England one seems oppressed by the lack of room; one can hardly breathe.”

“It’s the thought of leaving you.”

She put her hand on his arm caressingly; and then, to take him from his sadness, suggested that they should walk.

Greenwich is half London, half country town; and the unexpected union gives it a peculiar fascination. If the wharves and docks of London still preserve the spirit of Charles Dickens, here it is the happy breeziness of Captain Marryat which fills the imagination. Those tales of a freer life and of the sea-breezes come back amid the gray streets, still peopled with the vivid characters of Poor Jack. In the park, by the side of the labourers, navvies from the neighboring docks, asleep on the grass, or watching the boys play a primitive cricket, may be seen fantastic old persons who would have delighted the grotesque pen of the seaman-novelist.

Bertha and Gerald sat beneath the trees, looking at the people, till it grew late, and then wandered back to the Ship for dinner. It amused them immensely to sit in the old coffee-room and be waited on by a black waiter, who extolled absurdly the various dishes.

“We won’t be economical to-day,” cried Bertha. “I feel utterly reckless.”

“It takes all the fun away if one counts the cost.”

“Well, for once let us be foolish and forget the morrow.”

And they drank champagne, which to women and boys is the acme of dissipation and magnificence. Presently Gerald’s green eyes flashed more brightly, and Bertha reddened before their ardent gaze.

“I shall never forget to-day, Bertha,” said Gerald. “As long as I live I shall look back upon it with regret.”

“Oh, don’t think that it must come to an end, or we shall both be miserable.”

“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Bertha laughed, showing her exquisite teeth, and was glad that her own knowledge told her she looked her best.

“But come on the terrace again and smoke there. We’ll watch the sunset.”

They sat alone, and the sun was already sinking. The heavy western clouds were a rich and vivid red, and over the river the bricks and mortar stood out in ink-black masses. It was a sunset that singularly fitted the scene, combining in audacious colour with the river’s strength. The murky wavelets danced like little flames of fire.

Bertha and the youth sat silently, very happy, but with the regret gnawing at their hearts that their hour of joy would have no morrow. The night fell, and one by one the stars shone out. The river flowed noiselessly, restfully; and around them twinkled the lights of the riverside towns. They did not speak, but Bertha knew the boy thought of her, and desired to hear him say so.

“What are you thinking of, Gerald?”

“What should I be thinking of, but you — and that I must leave you.”

Bertha could not help the exquisite pleasure that his words gave: it was so delicious to be really loved, and she knew his love was real. She turned her face, so that he saw her dark eyes, darker in the night.

“I wish I hadn’t made a fool of myself before,” he whispered. “I feel it was all horrible; you’ve made me so ashamed.”

“Oh, Gerald, you’re not remembering what I said the other day? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ve been so sorry ever since.”

“I wish you loved me. Oh, Bertha, don’t stop me now. I’ve kept it in so long, and I can’t any more. I don’t want to go away without telling you.”

“Oh, my dear Gerald, don’t,” said Bertha, her voice almost breaking. “It’s no good, and we shall both be dreadfully unhappy. My dear, you don’t know how much older I am than you. Even if I wasn’t married, it would be impossible for us to love one another.”

“But I love you with all my heart.”

He seized her hands and pressed them, and she made no effort to resist.

“Don’t you love me at all?” he asked.

Bertha did not answer, and he bent nearer to look into her eyes. Then leaving her hands, he flung his arms about her and pressed her to his heart.

“Bertha, Bertha!” He kissed her passionately. “Oh, Bertha, say you love me. It would make me so happy.”

“My dearest,” she whispered, and taking his head in her hand, she kissed him.

But the kiss that she had received fired her blood and she could not resist now from doing as she had wished. She kissed him on the lips, and on the eyes, and she kissed his curly hair. But at last she tore herself away, and sprang to her feet.

“What fools we are! Let’s go to the station, Gerald; it’s growing late.”

“Oh, Bertha, don’t go yet.”

“We must. I daren’t stay.”

He tried to take her in his arms, begging her eagerly to remain.

“Please don’t, Gerald,” she said. “Don’t ask me, you make me too unhappy. Don’t you see how hopeless it is? What is the use of our loving one another? You’re going away in a week and we shall never meet again. And even if you were staying, I’m married and I’m twenty-six and you’re only nineteen. My dearest, we should only make ourselves ridiculous.”

“But I can’t go away. What do I care if you’re older than I? And it’s nothing if you’re married: you don’t care for your husband and he doesn’t care two straws for you.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I saw it. I felt so sorry for you.”

“You dear boy!” murmured Bertha, almost crying. “I’ve been dreadfully unhappy. It’s true, Edward never loved me — and he didn’t treat me very well. Oh, I can’t understand how I ever cared for him.”

“I’m glad.”

“I would never allow myself to fall in love again. I suffered too much.”

“But I love you with all my heart, Bertha; don’t you see it? Oh, this isn’t like what I’ve felt before; it’s something quite new and different. I can’t live without you, Bertha. Oh, let me stay.”

“It’s impossible. Come away now, dearest; we’ve been here too long.”

“Kiss me again.”

Bertha, half smiling, half in tears, put her arms round his neck and kissed the soft, boyish lips.

“You are good to me,” he whispered.

Then they walked to the station in silence; and eventually reached Chelsea. At the flat-door Bertha held out her hand and Gerald looked at her with a sadness that almost broke her heart, then he just touched her fingers and turned away.

But when Bertha was alone in her room, she threw herself down and burst into tears. For she knew at last that she loved him; Gerald’s kisses still burned on her lips and the touch of his hands was tremulous on her arms. Suddenly she knew that she had deceived herself; it was more than friendship that held her heart as in a vice; it was more than affection; it was eager, vehement love.

For a moment she was overjoyed, but quickly remembered that she was married, that she was years older than he — to a boy nineteen a women of twenty-six must appear almost middle-aged. She seized a glass and looked at herself; she took it to the light so that the test might be more searching, and scrutinised her face for wrinkles and for crow’s feet, the signs of departing youth.

“It’s absurd,” she said. “I’m making an utter fool of myself.”

Gerald only thought he loved her, in a week he would be enamoured of some girl he met on the steamer. But thinking of his love, Bertha could not doubt that now at all events it was real; she knew better than any one what love was. She exulted to think that his was the real love, and compared it with her husband’s pallid flame. Gerald loved her with all his heart, with all his soul; he trembled with desire at her touch and his passion was an agony that blanched his cheek. She could not mistake the eager longing of his eyes. Ah, that was the love she wanted — the love that kills and the love that engenders. How could she regret that he loved her? She stood up, stretching out her arms in triumph, and in the empty room, her lips formed the words —

“Come, my beloved, come — for I love you!”

But the morning brought an intolerable depression. Bertha saw then the utter futility of her love: her marriage, his departure, made it impossible; the disparity of age made it even grotesque. But she could not dull the aching of her heart, she could not stop her tears.

Gerald arrived at midday and found her alone. He approached almost timidly.

“You’ve been crying, Bertha.”

“I’ve been very unhappy,” she said. “Oh, please, Gerald, forget our idiocy of yesterday. Don’t say anything to me that I mustn’t hear.”

“I can’t help loving you.”

“Don’t you see that it’s all utter madness!”

She was angry with herself for loving him, angry with Gerald because he had aroused in her a passion that made her despise herself. It seemed horrible and unnatural that she should be willing to throw herself into the arms of a dissolute boy, and it lowered her in her own estimation. He caught the expression of her eyes, and something of its meaning.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Bertha. You look as if you almost hated me.”

She answered gravely, “I love you with all my heart, Gerald; and I’m ashamed.”

“How can you!” he cried, with such pain in his voice that Bertha could not bear it.

“The whole thing is awful,” she groaned. “For God’s sake let us try to forget it. I’ve only succeeded in making you entirely wretched. The only remedy is to part quickly.”

“I can’t leave you, Bertha. Let me stay.”

“It’s impossible. You must go, now more than ever.”

They were interrupted by the appearance of Miss Ley, who began to talk; but to her surprise neither Bertha nor Gerald showed their usual vivacity.

“What is the matter with you both to-day?” she asked. “You’re unusually attentive to my observations.”

“I’m rather tired,” said Bertha, “and I have a headache.”

Miss Ley looked at Bertha more closely, and fancied that she had been crying; Gerald also seemed profoundly miserable. Surely.... Then the truth dawned upon her, and she could hardly repress her astonishment.

“Good Heavens!” she thought, “I must have been blind. How lucky he’s going in a week!”

Miss Ley now remembered a dozen occurrences which had escaped her notice, and was absolutely confounded.

“Upon my word,” she thought, “I don’t believe you can put a woman of seventy for five minutes in company of a boy of fourteen without their getting into mischief.”

The week to Gerald and to Bertha passed with terrible quickness. They scarcely had a moment alone, for Miss Ley, under pretence of making much of her nephew, arranged little pleasure parties, so that all three might be continually together.

“We must spoil you a little before you go; and the harm it does you will be put right by the rocking of the boat.”

And though Bertha was in a torment, she had strength to avoid any further encounter with Gerald. She dared not see him alone, and was grateful to Miss Ley for putting obstacles in the way. She knew that her love was impossible, but also that it was beyond control. It made her completely despise herself. Bertha had been a little proud of her uprightness, of her liberty from any degrading emotion. And that other love to her husband had been such an intolerable slavery, that when it died away the sense of freedom seemed the most delicious thing in life. She had vowed that never under any circumstance would she expose herself to the suffering that she had once endured. But this new passion had taken her unawares, and before she knew the danger Bertha found herself bound and imprisoned. She tried to reason away the infatuation, but without advantage; Gerald was never absent from her thoughts. Love had come upon her like the sudden madness with which the gods of old afflicted those that had incensed them. It was an insane fire in the blood, irresistible for all the horror it aroused, as that passion which distracted Phædra for Theseus’ son.

The temptation came to bid Gerald stay. If he remained in England they might give rein to their passion and let it die of itself; and that might be the only way to kill it. Yet Bertha dared not. And it was terrible to think that he loved her, and she must continually distress him. She looked into his eyes, fancying she saw there the grief of a breaking heart; and his sorrow was more than she could bear. Then a greater temptation beset her. There is one way in which a woman can bind a man to her for ever, there is one tie that is indissoluble; her very flesh cried out, and she trembled at the thought that she could give Gerald the inestimable gift of her person. Then he might go, but that would have passed between them which could not be undone; they might be separated by ten thousand miles, but they would always be joined together. How else could she prove to him her wonderful love, how else could she show her immeasurable gratitude? The temptation was mighty, incessantly recurring; and she was very weak. It assailed her with all the violence of her fervid imagination. She drove it away with anger, she loathed it with all her heart — but she could not stifle the appalling hope that it might prove too strong.

Chapter XXXII

AT last Gerald had but one day more. A long-standing engagement of Bertha and Miss Ley forced him to take leave of them early, for he started from London at seven in the morning.

“I’m dreadfully sorry that you can’t spend your last evening with us,” said Miss Ley. “But the Trevor-Jones will never forgive us if we don’t go to their dinner-party.”

“Of course it was my fault for not finding out before, when I sailed.”

“What are you going to do with yourself this evening, you wretch?”

“Oh, I’m going to have one last unholy bust.”

“I’m afraid you’re very glad that for one night we can’t look after you.”

In a little while Miss Ley, looking at her watch, told Bertha that it was time to dress. Gerald got up, and kissing Miss Ley, thanked her for her kindness.

“My dear boy, please don’t sentimentalise. And you’re not going for ever. You’re sure to make a mess of things and come back — the Leys always do.”

Then Gerald turned to Bertha and held out his hand.

“You’ve been awfully good to me,” he said, smiling; but there was in his eyes a steadfast look, which seemed trying to make her understand something. “We’ve had some ripping times together.”

“I hope you won’t forget me entirely. We’ve certainly kept you out of mischief.”

Miss Ley watched them, admiring their composure. She thought they took the parting very well.

“I dare say it was nothing but a little flirtation and not very serious. Bertha’s so much older than he and so sensible that she’s most unlikely to have made a fool of herself.”

But she had to fetch the gift which she had prepared for Gerald.

“Wait just one moment, Gerald,” she said. “I want to get something.”

She left the room and immediately the boy bent forward.

“Don’t go out to-night, Bertha. I must see you again.”

Before Bertha could reply, Miss Ley called from the hall.

“Good-bye,” said Gerald, aloud.

“Good-bye, I hope you’ll have a nice journey.”

“Here’s a little present for you, Gerald,” said Miss Ley, when he was outside. “You’re dreadfully extravagant, and as that’s the only virtue you have, I feel I ought to encourage it. And if you want money at any time, I can always scrape together a few guineas, you know.”

She put into his hand two fifty-pound notes and then, as if she were ashamed of herself, bundled him out of doors. She went to her room; and having rather seriously inconvenienced herself for the next six months, for an entirely unworthy object, she began to feel remarkably pleased. In an hour Miss Ley returned to the drawing-room to wait for Bertha, who presently came in, dressed — but ghastly pale.

“Oh, Aunt Polly, I simply can’t come to-night. I’ve got a racking headache; I can scarcely see. You must tell them that I’m sorry, but I’m too ill.”

She sank on a chair and put her hand to her forehead, groaning with pain. Miss Ley lifted her eyebrows; the affair was evidently more serious that she thought. However, the danger now was over; it would ease Bertha to stay at home and cry it out. She thought it brave of her even to have dressed.

“You’ll get no dinner,” she said. “There’s nothing in the place.”

“Oh, I want nothing to eat.”

Miss Ley expressed her concern, and promising to make the excuses, went away. Bertha started up when she heard the door close and went to the window. She looked round for Gerald, fearing he might be already there; he was incautious and eager: but if Miss Ley saw him, it would be fatal. The hansom drove away and Bertha breathed more freely. She could not help it; she too felt that she must see him. If they had to part, it could not be under Miss Ley’s cold eyes.

She waited at the window, but he did not come. Why did he delay? He was wasting their few precious minutes; it was already past eight. She walked up and down the room and looked again, but still he was not in sight. She fancied that while she watched he would not come, and forced herself to read. But how could she! Again she looked out of window; and this time Gerald was there. He stood in the porch of the opposite house, looking up; and immediately he saw her, crossed the street. She went to the door and opened it gently, as he came upstairs.

He slipped in as if he were a thief, and on tiptoe they entered the drawing-room.

“Oh, it’s so good of you,” he said. “I couldn’t leave you like that. I knew you’d stay.”

“Why have you been so long? I thought you were never coming.”

“I dared not risk it before. I was afraid something might happen to stop Aunt Polly.”

“I said I had a headache. I dressed so that she might suspect nothing.”

The night was falling and they sat together in the dimness. Gerald took her hands and kissed them.

“This week has been awful. I’ve never had the chance of saying a word to you. My heart has been breaking.”

“My dearest.”

“I wondered if you were sorry I was going.”

She looked at him and tried to smile; already she could not trust herself to speak.

“Every day I thought you would tell me to stop and you never did — and now it’s too late. Oh, Bertha, if you loved me you wouldn’t send me away.”

“I think I love you too much. Don’t you see it’s better that we should part?”

“I daren’t think of to-morrow.”

“You are so young; in a little while you’ll fall in love with some one else. Don’t you see that I’m old?”

“But I love you. Oh, I wish I could make you believe me. Bertha, Bertha, I can’t leave you. I love you too much.”

“For God’s sake don’t talk like that. It’s hard enough to bear already — don’t make it harder.”

The night had fallen, and through the open window the summer breeze came in, and the softness of the air was like a kiss. They sat side by side in silence, the boy holding Bertha’s hand; they could not speak, for words were powerless to express what was in their hearts. But presently a strange intoxication seized them, and the mystery of passion wrapped them about invisibly. Bertha felt the trembling of Gerald’s hand, and it passed to hers. She shuddered and tried to withdraw, but he would not let it go. The silence now became suddenly intolerable: Bertha tried to speak, but her throat was dry, and she could utter no word.

A weakness came to her limbs and her heart beat painfully. Her eye crossed with Gerald’s, and they both looked instantly aside, as if caught in some crime. Bertha began to breathe more quickly. Gerald’s intense desire burned itself into her soul; she dared not move. She tried to implore God’s help, but she could not. The temptation which all the week had terrified her returned with double force — the temptation which she abhorred, but to which she had a horrible longing not to resist.

And now she asked what it mattered. Her strength was dwindling, and Gerald had but to say a word. And now she wished him to say the word; he loved her, and she loved him passionately. She gave way; she no longer wished to resist. She turned her face to Gerald; she leant towards him with parted lips.

“Bertha,” he whispered, and they were nearly in one another’s arms.

But a fine sound pierced the silence; they started back and listened. They heard a key put into the front-door, and the door was opened.

“Take care,” whispered Bertha, and pushed Gerald away.

“It’s Aunt Polly.”

Bertha pointed to the electric switch, and understanding, Gerald turned on the light. He looked round instinctively for some way of escape, but Bertha, with a woman’s quick invention, sprang to the door and flung it open.

“Is that you, Aunt Polly?” she cried. “How fortunate you came back; Gerald is here to bid us definitely good-bye.”

“He makes as many farewells as a prima donna,” said Miss Ley.

She came in, somewhat breathless, with two spots of red upon her cheeks.

“I thought you wouldn’t mind if I came here to wait till you returned,” said Gerald. “And I found Bertha.”

“How funny that our thoughts should have been identical,” said Miss Ley. “It occurred to me that you might come, and so I hurried home as quickly as I could.”

“You’re quite out of breath,” said Bertha.

Miss Ley sank on a chair, exhausted. As she was eating her fish and talking to a neighbour, it suddenly dawned upon her that Bertha’s indisposition was assumed.

“Oh, what a fool I am! They’ve hoodwinked me as if I were a child.... Good heavens, what are they doing now?”

The dinner seemed interminable, but immediately afterwards she took leave of her astonished hostess and gave the cabman orders to drive furiously. She arrived, inveighing against the deceitfulness of the human race. She had never run up the stairs so quickly.

“How is your headache, Bertha?”

“Thanks, it’s much better. Gerald has driven it away.”

This time Miss Ley’s good-bye to the precocious youth was rather chilly; she was devoutly thankful that his boat sailed next morning.

“I’ll show you out, Gerald,” said Bertha. “Don’t trouble, Aunt Polly — you must be dreadfully tired.”

They went into the hall and Gerald put on his coat. He stretched out his hand to Bertha without speaking, but she, with a glance at the drawing-room, beckoned to him to follow her, and slid out of the front-door. There was no one on the stairs. She flung her arms round his neck and pressed her lips to his. She did not try to hide her passion now; she clasped him to her heart, and their very souls flew to their lips and mingled. Their kiss was rapture, madness; it was an ecstasy beyond description, their senses were powerless to contain their pleasure. Bertha felt herself about to die. In the bliss, in the agony, her spirit failed and she tottered; Gerald pressed her more closely to him.

But there was a sound of some one climbing the stairs. She tore herself away.

“Good-bye, for ever,” she whispered, and slipping in, closed the door between them.

She sank down half fainting, but, in fear, struggled to her feet and dragged herself to her room. Her cheeks were glowing and her limbs trembled, the kiss still thrilled her whole being. Oh, now it was too late for prudence! What did she care for her marriage; what did she care that Gerald was younger that she! She loved him, she loved him insanely; the present was there with its infinite joy, and if the future brought misery, it was worth suffering. She could not let him go; he was hers — she stretched out her arms to take him in her embrace. She would surrender everything. She would bid him stay; she would follow him to the end of the earth. It was too late now for reason.

She walked up and down her room excitedly. She looked at the door; she had a mad desire to go to him now — to abandon everything for his sake. Her honour, her happiness, her station, were only precious because she could sacrifice them for him. He was her life and her love, he was her body and her soul. She listened at the door; Miss Ley would be watching, and she dared not go.

“I’ll wait,” said Bertha.

She tried to sleep, but could not. The thought of Gerald distracted her. She dozed, and his presence became more distinct. He seemed to be in the room and she cried: “At last, my dearest, at last!” She awoke and stretched out her hands to him; she could not realise that she had dreamed, that nothing was there.

Then the day came, dim and gray at first, but brightening with the brilliant summer morning; the sun shone in her window, and the sunbeams danced in the room. Now the moments were very few, she must make up her mind quickly — and the sunbeams spoke of life, and happiness, and the glory of the unknown. Oh, what a fool she was to waste her life, to throw away her chance of happiness — how weak not to grasp the love thrown in her way! She thought of Gerald packing his things, getting off, of the train speeding through the summer country. Her love was irresistible. She sprang up, and bathed, and dressed. It was past six when she slipped out of the room and made her way downstairs. The street was empty as in the night; but the sky was blue and the air fresh and sweet, she took a long breath and felt curiously elated. She walked till she found a cab, and told the driver to go quickly to Euston. The cab crawled along, and she was in an agony of impatience. Supposing she arrived too late? She told the man to hurry.

The Liverpool train was fairly full; but Bertha walking up the crowded platform quickly saw Gerald. He sprang towards her.

“Bertha you’ve come. I felt certain you wouldn’t let me go without seeing you.”

He took her hands and looked at her with eyes full of love.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said at last. “I want — I want to beg your pardon.”

“What do you mean?” whispered Bertha, and suddenly she felt a dreadful fear which gripped her heart with unendurable pain.

“I’ve been thinking of you all night, and I’m dreadfully ashamed of myself. I must tell you how sorry I am that I’ve caused you unhappiness. I was selfish and brutal; I only thought of myself. I forgot how much you had to lose. Please forgive me, Bertha.”

“Oh, Gerald, Gerald.”

“I shall always be grateful to you, Bertha. I know I’ve been a beast, but now I’m going to turn over a new leaf. You see, you have reformed me after all.”

He tried to smile in his old, light-hearted manner; but it was a very poor attempt. Bertha looked at him. She wished to say that she loved him with all her heart, and was ready to accompany him to the world’s end; but the words stuck in her throat.

“I don’t know what has happened to me,” he said, “but I seem to see everything now so differently. Of course it is much better that I’m going away; but it’s dreadfully hard.”

An inspector came to look at the tickets. “Is the lady going?”

“No,” said Gerald; and then, when the man had passed: “You won’t forget me, Bertha, will you? You won’t think badly of me; I lost my head. I didn’t realise till last night that I wanted to do you the most frightful wrong. I didn’t understand that I should have ruined you and your whole life.”

At last Bertha forced herself to speak. The time was flying, and she could not understand what was passing in Gerald’s mind.

“If you only knew how much I love you!” she cried.

He had but to ask her to go and she would go. But he did not ask. Was he repenting already? Was his love already on the wane? Bertha tried to make herself speak again, but could not. Why did he not repeat that he could not live without her!

“Take your seats, please! Take your seats, please!”

A guard ran along the platform. “Jump in, sir. Right behind!”

“Good-bye,” said Gerald. “May I write to you?”

She shook her head. It was too late now.

“Jump in, sir. Jump in.”

Gerald kissed her quickly and got into the carriage.

“Right away!”

The guard blew his whistle and waved a flag, and the train puffed slowly out of the station.

Chapter XXXIII

MISS Ley was much alarmed when she got up and found that Bertha had flown.

“Upon my word, I think that Providence is behaving scandalously. Am I not a harmless middle-aged woman who mind my own business; what have I done to deserve these shocks?”

She suspected that her niece had gone to the station; but the train started at seven, and it was ten o’clock. She positively jumped when it occurred to her that Bertha might have — eloped: and like a swarm of abominable little demons came thoughts of the scenes she must undergo if such were the case, the writing of the news to Edward, his consternation, the comfort which she must administer, the fury of Gerald’s father, the hysterics of his mother.

“She can’t have done anything so stupid,” she cried in distraction. “But if women can make fools of themselves, they always do!”

Miss Ley was extraordinarily relieved when at last she heard Bertha come in and go to her room.

Bertha for a long time had stood motionless on the platform, staring haggardly before her, stupefied. The excitement of the previous hours was followed by utter blankness; Gerald was speeding to Liverpool, and she was still in London. She walked out of the station, and turned towards Chelsea. The streets were endless, and she was already tired; almost fainting, she dragged herself along. She did not know the way, and wandered hopelessly, barely conscious. In Hyde Park she sat down to rest, feeling utterly exhausted; but the weariness of her body relieved the terrible aching of her heart. She walked on after a while; it never occurred to her to take a cab, and eventually she came to Eliot Mansions. The sun had grown hot, and burned the crown of her head with ghastly torture. Bertha crawled upstairs to her room, and throwing herself on the bed, burst into tears of bitter anguish. She wept desperately, and clenched her hands.

“Oh,” she cried at last, “I dare say he was as worthless as the other.”

Miss Ley sent to inquire if she would eat, but Bertha now really had a bad headache, and could touch nothing. All day she spent in agony, hardly able to think — despairing. Sometimes she reproached herself for denying Gerald when he asked her to let him stay, she had wilfully lost the happiness that was within her reach: and then, with a revulsion of feeling, she repeated that he was worthless. The dreary hours passed, and when night came Bertha scarcely had strength to undress; and not till the morning did she get rest. But the early post brought a letter from Edward, repeating his wish that she should return to Court Leys. She read it listlessly.

“Perhaps it’s the best thing to do,” she groaned.

She hated London now and the flat; the rooms must be horribly bare without the joyous presence of Gerald. To return to Court Leys seemed the only course left to her, and there at least she would have quiet and solitude. She thought almost with longing of the desolate shore, the marshes and the dreary sea; she wanted rest and silence. But if she went, she had better go at once; to stay in London was only to prolong her woe.

Bertha rose, and dressed, and went to Miss Ley; her face was deathly pale, and her eyes heavy and red with weeping. In exhaustion she made no attempt to hide her condition.

“I’m going down to Court Leys to-day, Aunt Polly. I think it’s the best thing I can do.”

“Edward will be very pleased to see you.”

“I think he will.”

Miss Ley hesitated, looking at Bertha.

“You know, Bertha,” she said, after a pause, “in this world it’s very difficult to know what to do. One struggles to know good from evil — but really they’re often so very much alike.... I always think those people fortunate who are content to stand, without question, by the ten commandments, knowing exactly how to conduct themselves, and propped up by the hope of Paradise on the one hand, and by the fear of a cloven-footed devil with pincers, on the other.... But we who answer Why to the crude Thou Shalt Not, are like sailors on a wintry sea without a compass. Reason and instinct say one thing, and convention says another. But the worst of it is that one’s conscience has been reared on the Decalogue, and fostered on hell-fire — and one’s conscience has the last word. I dare say it’s cowardly, but it’s certainly discreet, to take it into consideration. It’s like lobster salad; it’s not actually immoral to eat it, but it will very likely give you indigestion.... One has to be very sure of oneself to go against the ordinary view of things; and if one isn’t, perhaps it’s better not to run any risks, but just to walk along the same secure old road as the common herd. It’s not exhilarating, it’s not brave, and it’s rather dull; but it’s eminently safe.”

Bertha sighed, but did not answer.

“You’d better tell Jane to pack your boxes,” said Miss Ley. “Shall I wire to Edward?”

When Bertha had at last started, Miss Ley began to think.

“I wonder if I’ve done right,” she murmured, uncertain as ever.

She was sitting on the piano-stool, and as she meditated, her fingers passed idly over the keys. Presently her ear detected the beginning of a well-known melody, and almost unconsciously she began to play the air of Rigoletto.

La Donna è mobile

Qual piuma al vento.

Miss Ley smiled. “The fact is that few women can be happy with only one husband. I believe that the only solution of the marriage question is legalised polyandry.”

In the train at Victoria, Bertha remembered with relief that the cattle-market was held at Tercanbury that day, and Edward would not come home till the evening. She would have opportunity to settle herself in Court Leys without fuss or bother. Full of her painful thoughts, the journey passed quickly, and Bertha was surprised to find herself at Blackstable. She got out, wondering whether Edward would have sent a trap to meet her — but to her extreme surprise Edward himself was on the platform, and running up, helped her out of the carriage.

“Here you are at last!” he cried.

“I didn’t expect you,” said Bertha. “I thought you’d be at Tercanbury.”

“I got your wire fortunately just as I was starting, so of course I didn’t go.”

“I’m sorry I prevented you.”

“Why? I’m jolly glad. You didn’t think I was going to the cattle-market when my missus was coming home?”

She looked at him with astonishment; his honest, red face glowed with the satisfaction he felt at seeing her.

“By Jove, this is ripping,” he said, as they drove away. “I’m tired of being a grass-widower, I can tell you.”

They came to Corstal Hill and he walked the horse.

“Just look behind you,” he said, in an undertone. “Notice any thing?”

“What?”

“Look at Parke’s hat.” Parke was the footman.

Bertha, looking again, observed a cockade.

“What d’you think of that, eh?” Edward was almost exploding with laughter. “I was elected chairman of the Urban District Council yesterday; that means I’m ex-officio J.P. So, as soon as I heard you were coming, I bolted off and got a cockade.”

When they reached Court Leys, he helped Bertha out of the trap quite tenderly. She was taken aback to find the tea ready, flowers in the drawing-room, and everything possible done to make her comfortable.

“Are you tired?” asked Edward. “Lie down on the sofa and I’ll give you your tea.”

He waited on her and pressed her to eat, and was, in fact, unceasing in his attentions.

“By Jove, I am glad to see you here again.”

His pleasure was obvious, and Bertha was somewhat touched.

“Are you too tired to come for a little walk in the garden? I want to show what I’ve done for you, and just now the place is looking its best.”

He put a shawl round her shoulders, so that the evening air might not hurt her, and insisted on giving her his arm.

“Now, look here; I’ve planted rose-trees outside the drawing-room window; I thought you’d like to see them when you sat in your favourite place, reading.”

He took her farther, to a place which offered a fine prospect of the sea.

“I’ve put a bench here, between those two trees, so that you might sit down sometimes, and look at the view.”

“It’s very kind of you to be so thoughtful. Shall we sit there now?”

“Oh, I think you’d better not. There’s a good deal of dew, and I don’t want you to catch cold.”

For dinner Edward had ordered the dishes which he knew Bertha preferred, and he laughed joyously, as she expressed her pleasure. Afterwards when she lay on the sofa, he arranged the cushions so as to make her quite easy.

“Ah, my dear,” she thought, “if you’d been half as kind three years ago you might have kept my love.”

She wondered whether absence had increased his affection, or whether it was she who had altered. Was he not unchanging as the rocks, and she knew herself unstable as water, mutable as the summer winds. Had he always been kind and considerate; and had she, demanding a passion which it was not in him to feel, been blind to his deep tenderness? Expecting nothing from him now, she was astonished to find he had so much to offer. But she felt sorry if he loved her, for she could give nothing in return but complete indifference; she was even surprised to find herself so utterly callous.

At bedtime she bade him good-night, and kissed his cheek.

“I’ve had the red room arranged for me,” she said.

There was no change in Blackstable. Bertha’s friends still lived, for the death-rate of that fortunate place was their pride, and they could do nothing to increase it. Arthur Branderton had married a pretty, fair-haired girl, nicely bred, and properly insignificant; but the only result of that was to give his mother a new topic of conversation. Bertha, resuming her old habits, had difficulty in realising that she had been long away. She set herself to forget Gerald, and was pleased to find the recollection of him not too importunate. A sentimentalist turned cynic has observed that a woman is only passionately devoted to her first lover, for afterwards it is love itself of which she is enamoured; and certainly the wounds of later attachments heal easily. Bertha was devoutly grateful to Miss Ley for her opportune return on Gerald’s last night, and shuddered to think of what might otherwise have happened.

“It would have been too awful,” she cried.

She could not understand what sudden madness had seized her, and the thought of the danger she had run, made Bertha’s cheeks tingle. Her heart turned sick at the mere remembrance. She was thoroughly ashamed of that insane excursion to Euston, intent upon the most dreadful courses. She felt like a person who from the top of a tower has been so horribly tempted to throw himself down, that only the restraining hand of a bystander has saved him; and then afterwards from below shivers and sweats at the idea of his peril. But worse than the shame was the dread of ridicule; for the whole affair had been excessively undignified: she had run after a hobbledehoy years younger than herself, and had even fallen seriously in love with him. It was too grotesque. Bertha imagined the joy it must cause Miss Ley. She could not forgive Gerald that, on his account, she had made herself absurd. She saw that he was a fickle boy, prepared to philander with every woman he met; and at last told herself scornfully that she had never really cared for him.

But in a little while Bertha received a letter from America, forwarded by Miss Ley. She turned white as she recognised the handwriting: the old emotions came surging back, and she thought of Gerald’s green eyes, and of his boyish lips; and she felt sick with love. She looked at the superscription, at the post mark; and then put the letter down.

“I told him not to write,” she murmured.

A feeling of anger seized her that the sight of a letter from Gerald should bring her such pain. She almost hated him now; and yet with all her heart she wished to kiss the paper and every word that was written upon it. But the sheer violence of her emotions made her set her teeth, as it were, against giving way.

“I won’t read it,” she said.

She wanted to prove to herself that she had strength; and this temptation at least she was determined to resist. Bertha lit a candle and took the letter in her hand to burn it, but then put it down again. That would settle the matter too quickly, and she wanted rather to prolong the trial so as to receive full assurance of her fortitude. With a strange pleasure at the pain she was preparing for herself, Bertha placed the letter on the chimneypiece of her room, prominently, so that whenever she went in or out, she could not fail to see it. Wishing to punish herself, her desire was to make the temptation as distressing as possible.

She watched the unopened envelope for a month and sometimes the craving to open it was almost irresistible; sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night, thinking of Gerald, and told herself she must know what he said. Ah, how well she could imagine it! He vowed he loved her and he spoke of the kiss she had given him on that last day, and he said it was dreadfully hard to be without her. Bertha looked at the letter, clenching her hands so as not to seize it and tear it open; she had to hold herself forcibly back from covering it with kisses. But at last she conquered all desire, she was able to look at the handwriting indifferently; she scrutinised her heart and found no trace of emotion. The trial was complete.

“Now it can go,” she said.

Again she lit a candle, and held the letter to the flame till it was all consumed; and she gathered up the ashes, putting them in her hand, and blew them out of the window. She felt that by that act she had finished with the whole thing, and Gerald was definitely gone out of her life.

But rest did not yet come to Bertha’s troubled soul. At first she found her life fairly tolerable; but she had now no emotions to distract her and the routine of her day was unvarying. The weeks passed and the months; the winter came upon her, more dreary than she had ever known it; the country became insufferably dull. The days were gray and cold, and the clouds so low that she could almost touch them. The broad fields which once had afforded such inspiring thoughts were now merely tedious, and all the rural sights sank into her mind with a pitiless monotony; day after day, month after month, she saw the same things. She was bored to death.

Sometimes Bertha wandered to the seashore and looked across the desolate waste of water; she longed to travel as her eyes and her mind travelled, south, south to the azure skies, to the lands of beauty and of sunshine beyond the grayness. Fortunately she did not know that she was looking almost directly north, and that if she really went on and on as she desired, would reach no southern lands of pleasure, but merely the North Pole!

She walked along the beach, among the countless shells; and not content with present disquietude, tortured herself with anticipation of the future. She could only imagine that it would bring an increase of this frightful ennui, and her head ached as she looked forward to the dull monotony of her life. She went home, and groaned as she entered the house, thinking of the tiresome evening. Invariably after dinner they played piquet. Edward liked to conduct his life on the most mechanical lines, and regularly, as the clock struck nine, he said: “Shall we have a little game?” Bertha fetched the cards while he arranged the chairs. They played six hands. Edward added up the score and chuckled when he won. Bertha put the cards away, her husband replaced the chairs; and so it went on night after night, automatically.

Bertha was seized with the intense restlessness of utter boredom. She would walk up and down her room in a fever of almost physical agony. She would sit at the piano, and cease playing after half-a-dozen bars — music seemed as futile as everything else; she had done everything so often. She tried to read, but could hardly bring herself to begin a new volume, and the very sight of the printed pages was distasteful: the works of information told her things she did not want to know, the novels related deeds of persons in whom she took no interest. She read a few pages and threw down the book in disgust. Then she went out again — anything seemed preferable to what she actually was doing — she walked rapidly, but the motion, the country, the very atmosphere about her, were wearisome; and almost immediately she returned. Bertha was forced to take the same walks day after day; and the deserted roads, the trees, the hedges, the fields, impressed themselves on her mind with a dismal insistency. Then she was driven to go out merely for exercise, and walked a certain number of miles, trying to get them done quickly. The winds of the early year blew that season more persistently than ever, and they impeded her steps, and chilled her to the bone.

Sometimes Bertha paid visits, and the restraint she had to put upon herself relieved her for the moment, but no sooner was the door closed behind her than she felt more desperately bored than ever.

Yearning suddenly for society, she would send out invitations for some function; then felt it inexpressibly irksome to make preparations, and she loathed and abhorred her guests. For a long time she refused to see any one, protesting her feeble health; and sometimes in the solitude she thought she would go mad. She turned to prayer as the only refuge of those who cannot act, but she only half believed, and therefore found no comfort. She accompanied Miss Glover on her district visiting, but she disliked the poor, and their chatter seemed hopelessly inane. The ennui made her head ache, and she put her hand to her temples, pressing them painfully; she felt she could take great wisps of her hair and tear it out.

She threw herself on her bed and wept in the agony of boredom. Edward once found her thus, and asked what was the matter.

“Oh, my head aches, so that I feel I could kill myself.”

He sent for Ramsay, but Bertha knew the doctor’s remedies were absurd and useless. She imagined that there was no remedy for her ill — not even time — no remedy but death.

She knew the terrible distress of waking in the morning with the thought that still another day must be gone through; she knew the relief of bed-time with the thought that she would enjoy a few hours of unconsciousness. She was racked with the imagination of the future’s frightful monotony: night would follow day, and day would follow night, the months passing one by one and the years slowly, slowly.

They say that life is short. To those who look back perhaps it is; but to those who look forward it is long, horribly long — endless. Sometimes Bertha felt it impossible to endure. She prayed that she might fall asleep at night and never awake. How happy must be the lives of those who can look forward to eternity! To Bertha the idea was merely ghastly; she desired nothing but the long rest, the rest of an endless sleep, the dissolution into nothing.

Once in desperation she wished to kill herself, but was afraid. People say that suicide requires no courage. Fools! They cannot realise the horror of the needful preparation, the anticipation of the pain, the terrible fear that one may regret when it is too late, when life is ebbing away. And there is the dread of the unknown. And there is the dread of hell-fire — absurd and revolting, yet so engrained that no effort is able entirely to destroy it. Notwithstanding reason and argument there is still the numbing fear that the ghastly fables of our childhood may after all be true, the fear of a jealous God who will doom His wretched creatures to unending torture.

Chapter XXXIV

BUT if the human soul, or the heart, or the mind — call it what you will — is an instrument upon which countless melodies may be played, it is capable of responding for very long to no single one. Time dulls the most exquisite emotions, softens the most heartrending grief. The story is old of the philosopher who sought to console a woman in distress by the account of tribulations akin to hers, and upon losing his only son was sent by her a list of all kings similarly bereaved. He read it, acknowledged its correctness, but wept none the less. Three months later the philosopher and the lady were surprised to find one another quite gay, and erected a fine monument to Time with the inscription: A celui qui console.

When Bertha vowed that life had lost all savour, that her ennui was unending, she exaggerated as usual, and almost grew angry on discovering that existence could be more supportable than she supposed.

One gets used to all things. It is only very misanthropic persons who pretend that they cannot accustom themselves to the stupidity of their fellows; for, after a while, one gets hardened to the most desperate bores, and monotony even ceases to be quite monotonous. Accommodating herself to circumstances, Bertha found life less tedious; it was a calm river, and presently she came to the conclusion that it ran more easily without the cascades and waterfalls, the eddies, whirlpools and rocks, which had disturbed its course. The man who can still dupe himself with illusions has a future not lacking in brightness.

The summer brought a certain variety, and Bertha found amusement in things which before had never interested her. She went to sheltered parts to see if favourite wild flowers had begun to blow: her love of liberty made her prefer the hedge-roses to the pompous blooms of the garden, the buttercups and daisies of the field to the prim geranium, and the calcellaria. Time fled and she was surprised to find the year pass imperceptibly. She began to read with greater zest, and in her favourite seat, on the sofa by the window, spent long hours of pleasure. She read as fancy prompted her, without a plan, because she wished and not because she ought (how can they say that England is decadent when its young ladies are so strenuous!). She obtained pleasure by contrasting different writers, gaining emotions from the gravity of one and the frivolity of the next. She went from the latest novel to the Orlando Furioso, from the Euphues of John Lyly (most entertaining and whimsical of books!) to the passionate corruption of Verlaine. With a lifetime before her, the length of books was no hindrance, and she started boldly upon the eight volumes of the Decline and Fall, upon the many tomes of St. Simon: and she never hesitated to put them aside after a hundred pages.

Bertha found reality tolerable when it was merely a background, a foil to the fantastic happenings of old books. She looked at the green trees, and the song of birds mingled agreeably with her thoughts still occupied, perhaps, with the Dolorous Knight of La Mancha, with Manon Lescaut, or with the joyous band that wanders through the Decameron. With greater knowledge came greater curiosity, and she forsook the broad highroads of literature for the mountain pathways of some obscure poet, for the bridle-tracks of the Spanish picaroon. She found unexpected satisfaction in the half-forgotten masterpieces of the past, in poets not quite divine whom fashion had left on one side, in the playwrights, and novelists, and essayists, whose remembrance lives only with the bookworm. It is a relief sometimes to look away from the bright sun of perfect achievement; and the writers who appealed to their age and not to posterity, have by contrast a subtle charm. Undazzled by their splendour, one may discern more easily their individualities and the spirit of their time; they have pleasant qualities not always found among their betters, and there is even a certain pathos in their incomplete success.

In music also Bertha developed a taste for the half known, the half archaic. It suited the Georgian drawing-room with its old pictures, with its Chippendale and chintz, to play the simple melodies of Couperin and Rameau; the rondos, the gavottes, the sonatinas in powder and patch, which delighted the rococo lords and ladies of a past century.

Living away from the present, in an artificial paradise, Bertha was almost completely happy. She found indifference to the whole world a trusty armour: life was easy without love or hate, hope or despair, without ambition, desire of change, or tumultuous passion. So bloom the flowers; unconscious, uncaring, the bud bursts from the enclosing leaf, and opens to the sunshine, squanders its perfume to the breeze and there is none to see its beauty — and then it dies.

Bertha found it possible to look back upon the past years with something like amusement. It seemed now melodramatic to have loved the simple Edward with such violence, and she was able even to smile at the contrast between her vivid expectations and the flat reality. Gerald was a pleasantly sentimental memory; she did not wish to see him again, but thought of him often, idealising him till he became unsubstantial as a character in a favourite book. Her winter in Italy also formed the motive of some of her most delightful thoughts, and she determined never to spoil the impression by another visit. She had advanced a good deal in the art of life when she realised that pleasure came by surprise, that happiness was a spirit which descended unawares, and seldom when it was sought.

Edward had fallen into a life of such activity that his time was entirely taken up. He had added largely to the Ley estate, and, with the second-rate man’s belief that you must do a thing yourself to have it well done, kept the farms under his immediate supervision. He was an important member of all the rural bodies: he was on the School Board, on the Board of Guardians, on the County Council; he was chairman of the Urban District Council, president of the Leanham cricket club, president of the Faversley football club; patron of the Blackstable regatta; he was on the committee of the Tercanbury dog-show, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Mid-Kent Agricultural Exhibition. He was a pillar of the Blackstable Conservative Association, a magistrate, and a churchwarden. Finally he was an ardent Freemason, and flew over Kent to attend the meetings of the half-dozen lodges of which he was a member. But the amount of work did not disturb him.

“Lord bless you,” he said, “I love work. You can’t give me too much. If there’s anything to be done, come to me and I’ll do it, and say thank you for giving me the chance.”

Edward had always been even-tempered, but now his good-nature was quite angelic. It became a byword. His success was according to his deserts, and to have him concerned in a matter was an excellent insurance. He was always jovial and gay, contented with himself and with the world at large; he was a model squire, landlord, farmer, conservative, man, Englishman. He did everything thoroughly, and his energy was such that he made a point of putting into every concern twice as much work as it really needed. He was busy from morning till night (as a rule quite unnecessarily), and he gloried in it.

“It shows I’m an excellent woman,” said Bertha to Miss Glover, “to support his virtues with equanimity.”

“My dear, I think you ought to be very proud and happy. He’s an example to the whole county. If he were my husband, I should be grateful to God.”

“I have much to be thankful for,” murmured Bertha.

Since he let her go her own way and she was only too pleased that he should go his, there was really no possibility of difference, and Edward, wise man, came to the conclusion that he had effectually tamed his wife. He thought, with good-humoured scorn, that he had been quite right when he likened women to chickens, animals which, to be happy, required no more than a good run, well fenced in, where they could scratch about to their heart’s content.

“Feed ’em regularly, and let ’em cackle; and there you are!”

It is always satisfactory when experience verifies the hypothesis of your youth.

One year, remembering by accident their wedding-day, Edward gave his wife a bracelet; and feeling benevolent in consequence, and having dined well, he patted her hand and remarked: —

“Time does fly, doesn’t it?”

“I have heard people say so,” she replied, smiling.

“Well, who’d have thought we’d been married eight years! it doesn’t seem above eighteen months to me. And we’ve got on very well, haven’t we?”

“My dear Edward, you are such a model husband. It quite embarrasses me sometimes.”

“Ha, ha! that’s a good one. But I can say this for myself, I do try to do my duty. Of course at first we had our little tiffs — people have to get used to one another, and one can’t expect to have all plain sailing just at once. But for years now — well, ever since you went to Italy, I think, we’ve been as happy as the day is long, haven’t we?”

“Yes, dear.”

“When I look back at the little rumpuses we used to have, upon my word, I wonder what they were all about.”

“So do I.” And this Bertha said quite truthfully.

“I suppose it was just the weather.”

“I dare say.”

“Ah, well — all’s well that ends well.”

“My dear Edward, you’re a philosopher.”

“I don’t know about that — but I think I’m a politician; which reminds me that I’ve not read about the new men-of-war in to-day’s paper. What I’ve been agitating about for years is more ships and more guns — I’m glad to see the Government have taken my advice at last.”

“It’s very satisfactory, isn’t it? It will encourage you to persevere. And, of course, it’s nice to know that the Cabinet read your speeches in the Blackstable Times.”

“I think it would be a good sight better for the country if those in power paid more attention to provincial opinion. It’s men like me who really know the feeling of the nation. You might get me the paper, will you — it’s in the dining-room.”

It seemed quite natural to Edward that Bertha should wait upon him: it was the duty of a wife. She handed him the Standard, and he began to read; he yawned once or twice.

“Lord, I am sleepy.”

Presently he could not keep his eyes open, the paper dropped from his hand, and he sank back in his chair with legs outstretched, his hands resting comfortably on his stomach. His head lolled to one side and his jaw dropped, and he began to snore. Bertha read. After a while he woke with a start.

“Bless me, I do believe I’ve been asleep,” he cried. “Well, I’m dead tired, I think I shall go to bed. I suppose you won’t come up yet?”

“Not just yet.”

“Well, don’t stay up too late, there’s a good girl, it’s not good for you; and put the lights out properly when you come.”

She turned to him her cheek, which he kissed, stifling a yawn; then he rolled upstairs.

“There’s one advantage in Edward,” murmured Bertha. “No one could accuse him of being uxorious.”

Mariage à la mode.

Bertha’s solitary walk was to the sea. The shore between Blackstable and the Medway was extraordinarily wild. At distant intervals were the long, low buildings of the coastguard stations; and the clean, pink walls, the neat railings, the well-kept gravel, contrasted rather surprisingly with the surrounding desolation. One could walk for miles without meeting a soul, and the country spread out from the sea, low and flat and marshy. The beach was of countless shells of every possible variety, which crumbled under foot; while here and there were great banks of seaweed and bits of wood or rope, the jetsam of a thousand tides. In one spot, a few yards out but high and dry at low water, were the remains of an old hulk, whose wooden ribs stood out weirdly like the skeleton of some huge sea-beast. And then all round was the lonely sea, with never a ship nor a fishing-smack in sight. In winter it was as if a spirit of solitude, like a mystic shroud, had descended upon the shore and upon the desert waters.

Then, in the melancholy, in the dreariness, Bertha found a subtle fascination. The sky was a threatening heavy cloud, low down; and the wind tore along shouting, screaming, and whistling: there was panic in the turbulent sea, murky and yellow, and the waves leaped up, one at the other’s heels, and beat down on the beach with an angry roar. It was desolate, desolate; the sea was so merciless that the very sight appalled one: it was a wrathful power, beating forwards, ever wrathfully beating forwards, roaring with pain when the chains that bound it wrenched it back; and after each desperate effort it shrank with a yell of anguish. And the seagulls swayed above the waves in their melancholy flight, rising and falling with the wind.

Bertha loved also the calm of winter, when the sea-mist and the mist of heaven were one; when the sea was silent and heavy, and the solitary gull flew screeching over the gray waters, screeching mournfully. She loved the calm of summer when the sky was cloudless and infinite. Then she spent long hours, lying at the water’s edge, delighted with the solitude and with her absolute peace. The sea, placid as a lake, unmoved by the lightest ripple, was a looking-glass reflecting the glory of heaven; and it turned to fire when the sun sank in the west; it was a sea of molten copper, red, brilliant, so that the eyes were dazzled. A troop of seagulls slept on the water; and there were hundreds of them, motionless and silent; one arose now and then, and flew for a moment with heavy wing, and sank down, and all was still.

Once the coolness was so tempting that Bertha could not resist it. Timidly, rapidly, she slipped off her clothes and looking round to see that there was really no one in sight, stepped in. The wavelets about her feet made her shiver a little, and then with a splash, stretching out her arms, she ran forward, and half fell, half dived into the water. Now it was delightful; she rejoiced in the freedom of her limbs, for it was an unknown pleasure to swim unhampered by costume. It gave a fine sense of power, and the salt water, lapping round her, was wonderfully exhilarating. She wanted to sing aloud in the joy of her heart. Diving below the surface, she came up with a shake of the head and a little cry of delight; then her hair was loosened and with a motion it all came tumbling about her shoulders and trailed out in its ringlets over the water.

She swam out, a fearless swimmer; and it gave her a feeling of strength and independence to have the deep waters all about her, the deep calm sea of summer; she turned on her back and floated, trying to look the sun in the face. The sea glimmered with the sunbeams and the sky was dazzling. Then, returning, Bertha floated again, quite near the shore; it amused her to lie on her back, rocked by the tiny waves, and to sink her ears so that she could hear the shingle rub together curiously with the ebb and flow of the tide. She shook out her long hair and it stretched about her like an aureole.

She exulted in her youth — in her youth? Bertha felt no older than when she was eighteen, and yet — she was thirty. The thought made her wince; for she had never realised the passage of the years, she had never imagined that her youth was waning. Did people think her already old? The sickening fear came to her that she resembled Miss Hancock, attempting by archness and by an assumption of frivolity, to persuade her neighbours that she was juvenile. Bertha asked herself whether she was ridiculous when she rolled in the water like a young girl: you cannot act the mermaid with crow’s feet about your eyes, with wrinkles round your mouth. In a panic she dressed herself, and going home, flew to a looking-glass. She scrutinised her features as she had never done before, searching anxiously for the signs she feared to see; she looked at her neck and at her eyes: her skin was as smooth as ever, her teeth as perfect. She gave a sigh of relief.

“I see no difference.”

Then, doubly to reassure herself, a fantastic idea seized Bertha to dress as though she were going to a great ball; she wished to see herself to all advantage. She chose the most splendid gown she had, and took out her jewels. The Leys had sold every vestige of their old magnificence, but their diamonds, with characteristic obstinacy, they had invariably declined to part with; and they lay aside, year after year unused, the stones in their old settings, dulled with dust and neglect. The moisture still in Bertha’s hair was an excuse to do it capriciously, and she placed in it the beautiful tiara which her grandmother had worn in the Regency. On her shoulders she wore two ornaments exquisitely set in gold-work, purloined by a great-uncle in the Peninsular War from the saint of a Spanish church. She slipped a string of pearls round her neck, bracelets on her arms, and fastened a glistening row of stars to her bosom. Knowing she had beautiful hands, Bertha disdained to wear rings, but now she covered her fingers with diamonds and emeralds and sapphires.

Finally she stood before the looking-glass, and gave a laugh of pleasure. She was not old yet.

But when she sailed into the drawing-room, Edward jumped up in surprise.

“Good Lord!” he cried. “What on earth’s up! Have we got people coming to dinner?”

“My dear, if we had, I should not have dressed like this.”

“You’re got up as if the Prince of Wales were coming. And I’m only in knickerbockers. It’s not our wedding-day?”

“No.”

“Then I should like to know why you’ve dressed yourself up like that.”

“I thought it would please you,” she said, smiling.

“I wish you’d told me — I’d have dressed too. Are you sure no one’s coming?”

“Quite sure.”

“Well, I think I ought to dress. It would look so queer if some one turned up.”

“If any one does, I promise you I’ll fly.”

They went in to dinner, Edward feeling very uncomfortable, and keeping his ear alert for the front-door bell. They ate their soup, and then were set on the table — the remains of a cold leg of mutton and mashed potatoes. Bertha looked for a moment blankly, and then, leaning back, burst into peal upon peal of laughter.

“Good Lord, what is the matter now?” asked Edward.

Nothing is more annoying than to have people violently hilarious over a joke that you cannot see.

Bertha held her sides and tried to speak.

“I’ve just remembered that I told the servants they might go out to-night, there’s a circus at Blackstable; and I said we’d just eat up the odds and ends.”

“I don’t see any joke in that.”

And really there was none, but Bertha laughed again immoderately.

“I suppose there are some pickles,” said Edward.

Bertha repressed her gaiety and began to eat.

“That is my whole life,” she murmured under her breath, “to eat cold mutton and mashed potatoes in a ball-dress and all my diamonds.”

Chapter XXXV

BUT in the winter of that very year Edward, while hunting, had an accident. For years he had made a practice of riding unmanageable horses, and he never heard of a vicious beast without wishing to try it. He knew that he was a fine rider, and since he was never shy of parading his powers, nor loath to taunt others on the score of inferior skill or courage, he preferred difficult animals. It gratified him to see people point to him and say, “There’s a good rider:” and his best joke with some person on a horse that pulled or refused, was to cry: “You don’t seem friends with your gee; would you like to try mine?” And then, touching its sides with his spurs, he set it prancing. He was merciless with the cautious hunters who looked for low parts of a hedge or tried to get through a gate instead of over it; and when any one said a jump was dangerous, Edward with a laugh promptly went for it, shouting as he did so —

“I wouldn’t try it if I were you. You might fall off.”

He had just bought a roan for a mere song, because it jumped uncertainly, and had a trick of swinging a fore-leg as it rose. He took it out on the earliest opportunity, and the first two hedges and a ditch the horse cleared easily. Edward thought that once again he had got for almost nothing a hunter that merely wanted riding properly to behave like a lamb. They rode on, and came to a post and rail fence.

“Now, my beauty, this’ll show what you’re made of.”

He took the horse up in a canter, and pressed his legs; the horse did not rise, but swerved round suddenly.

“No, you don’t,” said Edward, taking him back.

He dug his spurs in, and the horse cantered up, and refused again. This time Edward grew angry. Arthur Branderton came flying by, and having many old scores to pay, laughed loudly.

“Why don’t you get down and walk over?” he shouted, as he passed Edward and took the jump.

“I’ll either get over or break my neck,” said Edward, setting his teeth.

But he did neither. He set the roan at the jump for the fourth time, hitting him with his crop; the beast rose, and then letting the fore-leg swing, came down with a crash.

Edward fell heavily, and for a minute was stunned. When he recovered consciousness, he found some one pouring brandy down his neck.

“Is the horse hurt?” he asked, not thinking of himself.

“No; he’s all right. How d’you feel?”

A young surgeon was in the field, and rode up. “What’s the matter? Any one injured?”

“No,” said Edward, struggling to his feet, somewhat annoyed at the exhibition he thought he was making of himself. “One would think none of you fellows had ever seen a man come down before. I’ve seen most of you come off often enough.”

He walked up to the horse, and put his foot in the stirrup.

“You’d better go home, Craddock,” said the surgeon. “I expect you’re a bit shaken up.”

“Go home be damned. Confound!” As he tried to mount, Edward felt a pain at the top of his chest. “I believe I’ve broken something.”

The surgeon went up and helped him off with his coat. He twisted Edward’s arm.

“Does that hurt?”

“A bit.”

“You’ve broken your collar-bone,” said the surgeon, after a moment’s examination.

“I thought I’d smashed something. How long will it take to mend?”

“Only three weeks. You needn’t be alarmed.”

“I’m not alarmed, but I suppose I shall have to give up hunting for at least a month.”

Edward was driven to Dr. Ramsay, who bandaged him and sent him back to Court Leys. Bertha was surprised to see him in a dogcart. Edward by now had recovered his good temper, and explained the occurrence, laughing.

“It’s nothing to make a fuss about. Only I’m bandaged up so that I feel like a mummy, and I don’t know how I’m going to get a bath. That’s what worries me.”

Next day Arthur Branderton came to see him. “You’ve found your match at last, Craddock.”

“Me? Not much! I shall be all right in a month, and then out I go again.”

“I wouldn’t ride him again, if I were you. It’s not worth it. With that trick of his of swinging his leg, you’ll break your neck.”

“Bah,” said Edward, scornfully. “The horse hasn’t been built that I can’t ride.”

“You’re a good weight now, and your bones aren’t as supple as when you were twenty. The next fall you have will be a bad one.”

“Rot, man! One would think I was eighty; I’ve never funked a horse yet, and I’m not going to begin now.”

Branderton shrugged his shoulders, and said nothing more at the time, but afterwards spoke to Bertha privately.

“You know, I think, if I were you, I’d persuade Edward to get rid of that horse. I don’t think he ought to ride it again. It’s not safe. However well he rides, it won’t save him if the beast has got a bad trick.”

Bertha had in this particular great faith in her husband’s skill. Whatever he could not do, he was certainly one of the finest riders in the county; but she spoke to him notwithstanding.

“Pooh, that’s all rot!” he said. “I tell you what, on the 11th of next month we go over pretty well the same ground; and I’m going out, and I swear he’s going over that post and rail in Coulter’s field.”

“You’re very incautious.”

“No, I’m not. I know exactly what a horse can do. And I know that horse can jump if he wants to, and by George, I’ll make him. Why, if I funked it now I could never ride again. When a chap gets to be near forty and has a bad fall, the only thing is to go for it again at once, or he’ll lose his nerve and never get it back. I’ve seen that over and over again.”

Miss Glover later on, when Edward’s bandages were removed and he was fairly well, begged Bertha to use her influence with him.

“I’ve heard he’s a most dangerous horse, Bertha. I think it would be madness for Edward to ride him.”

“I’ve begged him to sell it, but he merely laughs at me,” said Bertha. “He’s extremely obstinate and I have very little power over him.”

“Aren’t you dreadfully frightened?”

Bertha laughed. “No, I’m really not. You know he always has ridden dangerous horses and he’s never come to any harm. When we were first married I used to go through agonies. Every time he hunted I used to think he’d be brought home dead on a stretcher. But he never was, and I calmed down by degrees.”

“I wonder you could.”

“My dear, no one can keep on being frightfully agitated for ten years. People who live on volcanoes forget all about it; and you’d soon get used to sitting on barrels of gunpowder if you had no armchair.”

“Never!” said Miss Glover, with conviction, seeing a vivid picture of herself in such a position.

Miss Glover was unaltered. Time passed over her head powerlessly; she still looked anything between five-and-twenty and forty, her hair was no more washed-out, her figure in its armour of black cloth was as juvenile as ever; and not a new idea nor a thought had entered her mind. She was like Alice’s queen, who ran at the top of her speed and remained in the same place; but with Miss Glover the process was reversed: the world moved on, apparently faster and faster as the century drew near its end, but she remained fixed — an incarnation of the eighteen-eighties.

The day before the 11th arrived. The hounds were to meet at the Share and Coulter, as when Edward had been thrown. He sent for Dr. Ramsay to assure Bertha that he was quite fit; and after the examination, brought him into the drawing-room.

“Dr. Ramsay says my collar-bone is stronger than ever.”

“But I don’t think he ought to ride the roan notwithstanding. Can’t you persuade Edward not to, Bertha?”

Bertha looked from the doctor to Edward, smiling. “I’ve done my best.”

“Bertha knows better than to bother,” said Edward. “She don’t think much of me as a churchwarden, but when a horse is concerned, she does trust me; don’t you, dear?”

“I really do.”

“There,” said Edward, much pleased, “that’s what I call a good wife.”

Next day the horse was brought round and Bertha filled Edward’s flask.

“You’ll bury me nicely if I break my neck, won’t you?” he said, laughing. “You’ll order a handsome tombstone.”

“My dear, you’ll never come to a violent end. I feel certain you will die in your bed when you’re a hundred and two, with a crowd of descendants weeping round you. You’re just that sort of man.”

“Ha, ha!” he laughed. “I don’t know where the descendants are coming in.”

“I have a presentiment that I am doomed to make way for Fanny Glover. I’m sure there’s a fatality about it. I’ve felt for years that you will eventually marry her, and it’s horrid of me to have kept you waiting so long — especially as she pines for you, poor thing.”

Edward laughed again. “Well, good-bye!”

“Good-bye. Remember me to Mrs. Arthur.”

She stood at the window to see him mount, and as he flourished his crop at her, she waved her hand.

The winter day closed in and Bertha, interested in the novel she was reading, was surprised to hear the clock strike five. She wondered that Edward had not yet come in, and ringing for tea and the lamps, had the curtains drawn. He could not now be long.

“I wonder if he’s had another fall,” she said, with a smile. “He really ought to give up hunting, he’s getting too fat.”

She decided to wait no longer, but poured out her tea and arranged herself so that she could get at the scones and see comfortably to read. Then she heard a carriage drive up. Who could it be?

“What bores these people are to call at this time!”

As the bell was rung, Bertha put down her book to receive the visitor. But no one was shown in; there was a confused sound of voices without. Could something have happened to Edward after all? She sprang to her feet and walked half across the room. She heard an unknown voice in the hall.

“Where shall we take it?”

It. What was it — a corpse? Bertha felt a coldness travel through all her body, she put her hand on a chair, so that she might steady herself if she felt faint. The door was opened slowly by Arthur Branderton, and he closed it quickly behind him.

“I’m awfully sorry, but there’s been an accident. Edward is rather hurt.”

She looked at him, growing pale, but found nothing to answer.

“You must nerve yourself, Bertha. I’m afraid he’s very bad. You’d better sit down.”

He hesitated, and she turned to him with sudden anger.

“If he’s dead, why don’t you tell me?”

“I’m awfully sorry. We did all we could. He fell at the same post and rail fence as the other day. I think he must have lost his nerve. I was close by him, I saw him rush at it blindly, and then pull just as the horse was rising. They came down with a crash.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

Bertha did not feel faint. She was a little horrified at the clearness with which she was able to understand Arthur Branderton. She seemed to feel nothing at all. The young man looked at her as if he expected that she would weep or swoon.

“Would you like me to send my wife to you?”

“No, thanks.”

Bertha understood quite well that her husband was dead, but the news seemed to make no impression upon her. She heard it unmoved, as though it referred to a stranger. She found herself wondering what young Branderton thought of her unconcern.

“Won’t you sit down,” he said, taking her arm and leading her to a chair. “Shall I get you some brandy?”

“I’m all right, thanks. You need not trouble about me — Where is he?”

“I told them to take him upstairs. Shall I send Ramsay’s assistant to you? He’s here.”

“No,” she said, in a low voice. “I want nothing. Have they taken him up already?”

“Yes, but I don’t think you ought to go to him. It will upset you dreadfully.”

“I’ll go to my room. Do you mind if I leave you? I should prefer to be alone.”

Branderton held the door open and Bertha walked out, her face very pale, but showing not the least trace of emotion. Branderton walked to Leanham Vicarage to send Miss Glover to Court Leys, and then home, where he told his wife that the wretched widow was stunned by the shock.

Bertha locked herself in her room. She heard the hum of voices in the house, Dr. Ramsay came to her door, but she refused to open; then all was quite still.

She was aghast at the blankness of her heart, the tranquility was so inhuman that she wondered if she was going mad; she felt no emotion whatever. Bertha repeated to herself that Edward was killed; he was lying quite near at hand, dead — and she felt no grief. She remembered her anguish years before when she thought of his death; and now that it had taken place she did not faint, she did not weep, she was untroubled. Bertha had hidden herself to conceal her tears from strange eyes, and the tears came not. After her sudden suspicion was confirmed, she had experienced no emotion whatever; she was horrified that the tragic death affected her so little. She walked to the window and looked out, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to make herself care; but she was almost indifferent.

“I must be frightfully cruel,” she muttered.

Then the idea came of what her friends would say when they saw her calm self-possession. She tried to weep, but her eyes remained dry.

There was a knock at the door, and Miss Glover’s voice, broken with tears, “Bertha, Bertha, wont you let me in? It’s me — Fanny.”

Bertha sprang to her feet, but did not answer.

Miss Glover called again, and her voice was choked with sobs. Why could Fanny Glover weep for Edward’s death, who was a stranger, when she, Bertha, remained insensible?

“Bertha!”

“Yes.”

“Open the door for me. Oh, I’m so sorry for you. Please let me in.”

Bertha looked wildly at the door, she dared not let Miss Glover come.

“I can see no one now,” she cried, hoarsely. “Don’t ask me.”

“I think I could comfort you.”

“I want to be alone.”

Miss Glover was silent for a minute, crying audibly.

“Shall I wait downstairs? You can ring if you want me. Perhaps you’ll see me later.”

Bertha wished to tell her to go away, but dared not.

“Do as you like,” she said.

There was silence again, an unearthly silence more trying than hideous din. It was a silence that tightened the nerves and made them horribly sensitive: one dared not breathe for fear of breaking it.

And one thought came to Bertha, assailing her like a devil tormenting. She cried out in horror, for this was more odious than anything; it was simply intolerable. She threw herself on her bed and buried her face in her pillow to drive it away. For shame, she put her hands to her ears so as not to hear the invisible fiends that whispered it silently.

She was free.

She quailed before the thought, but could not crush it. “Has it come to this!” she murmured.

And then came back the recollection of the beginnings of her love. She recalled the passion that had thrown her blindly into Edward’s arms, her bitter humiliation when she realised that he could not respond to her ardour; her love was a fire playing ineffectually upon a rock of basalt. She recalled the hatred which followed the disillusion, and finally the indifference. It was the same indifference that chilled her heart now.

Her life seemed all wasted when she compared her mad desire for happiness with the misery she had actually endured. Bertha’s many hopes stood out like phantoms, and she looked at them despairingly. She had expected so much and secured so little. She felt a terrible pain at her heart as she considered all she had gone through. Her strength fell away, and overcome by her own self-pity, she sank to her knees and burst into tears.

“Oh, God!” she cried, “what have I done that I should have been so unhappy?”

She sobbed aloud, not caring to restrain her grief. Miss Glover, good soul, was waiting outside the room in case Bertha wanted her, crying silently. She knocked again when she heard the impetuous sobs within.

“Oh, Bertha, do let me in. You’re tormenting yourself so much more because you won’t see anybody.”

Bertha dragged herself to her feet and undid the door. Miss Glover entered, and throwing off all reserve in her overwhelming sympathy, clasped Bertha to her heart.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, it’s utterly dreadful; I’m so sorry for you. I don’t know what to say. I can only pray.”

Bertha sobbed unrestrainedly — not because Edward was dead.

“All you have now is God,” said Miss Glover.

At last Bertha tore herself away and dried her eyes.

“Don’t try and be too brave, Bertha,” compassionately said the Vicar’s sister. “It will do you good to cry. He was such a good, kind man, and he loved you so devotedly.”

Bertha looked at her in silence.

“I must be horribly cruel,” she thought.

“Do you mind if I stay here to-night, dear,” added Miss Glover. “I’ve sent word to Charles.”

“Oh, no, please don’t. If you care for me, Fanny, let me be alone. I don’t want to be unkind, but I can’t bear to see any one.”

Miss Glover was deeply pained. “I don’t want to be in the way. If you really wish me to go, I’ll go.”

“I feel if I can’t be alone, I shall go mad.”

“Would you like to see Charles?”

“No, dear. Don’t be angry. Don’t think me unkind or ungrateful, but I want nothing but to be left entirely by myself.”

Chapter XXXVI

ALONE in her room once more, memories of the past crowded upon her. The last years fled from her mind and Bertha saw vividly again the first days of her love, the visit to Edward at his farm, the night at the gate of Court Leys when he asked her to marry him. She recalled the rapture with which she had flung herself into his arms. Forgetting the real Edward who had just died, she remembered the tall strong youth who had made her faint with love; and her passion returned, overwhelming. On the chimney-piece stood a photograph of Edward as he was then; it had been before her for years, but she had never noticed it. She took it and pressed it to her heart, and kissed it. A thousand things came back and she saw him again standing before her as he was, manly, strong, so that she felt his love a protection against all the world.

But what was the use now?

“I should be mad if I began to love him again when it is too late.”

Bertha was appalled by the regret which she felt rising within her, a devil that wrung her heart in an iron grip. Oh, she could not risk the possibility of grief, she had suffered too much and she must kill in herself the springs of pain. She dared not leave things which in future years might be the foundations of a new idolatry. Her only chance of peace was to destroy everything that might recall him.

She seized the photograph and without daring to look again, withdrew it from the frame and rapidly tore it in pieces. She looked round the room.

“I musn’t leave anything,” she muttered.

She saw on a table an album containing pictures of Edward at all ages, the child with long curls, the urchin in knickerbockers, the schoolboy, the lover of her heart. She had persuaded him to be photographed in London during their honeymoon, and he was there in half-a-dozen different positions. Bertha thought her heart would break as she destroyed them one by one, and it needed all the strength she had to prevent her from covering them with passionate kisses. Her fingers ached with the tearing, but in a little while they were all in fragments in the fireplace. Then, desperately, she added the letters Edward had written to her; and applied a match. She watched them curl and frizzle and burn; and presently they were ashes.

She sank on a chair, exhausted by the effort, but quickly roused herself. She drank some water, nerving herself for a more terrible ordeal; for she knew that on the next few hours depended her future peace.

By now the night was late, a stormy night with the wind howling through the leafless trees. Bertha started when it beat against the windows with a scream that was nearly human. A fear seized her of what she was about to do, but she was driven by a greater fear. She took a candle, and opening the door, listened. There was no one; the wind roared with its long monotonous voice, and the branches of a tree beating against a window in the passage gave a ghastly tap-tap, as if unseen spirits were near.

The living, in the presence of death, feel that the whole air is full of something new and terrible. A greater sensitiveness perceives an inexplicable feeling of something present, or of some horrible thing happening invisibly. Bertha walked to her husband’s room and for a while dared not enter. At last she opened the door, she lit the candles on the chimney-piece and on the dressing-table, then went to the bed. Edward was lying on his back, with a handkerchief bound round his jaw to hold it up, his hands crossed in front.

Bertha stood in front of the corpse and looked. The impression of the young man passed away, and she saw him as in truth he was, stout, red-faced, with the venules of his cheeks standing out distinctly in a purple network; the sides of his face were prominent as of late years they had become; and he had little side whiskers. His skin was lined already and rough, the hair over the front of his head was scanty, and the scalp was visible, shiny and white. The hands which once had delighted her by their strength, so that she compared them with the porphyry hands of an unfinished statue, now were repellent in their coarseness. For a long time their touch had a little disgusted her. This was the image Bertha wished to impress upon her mind. It was a stranger lying dead before her, a man to whom she was indifferent.

At last turning away, she went out and returned to her own room.

Three days later was the funeral. All the morning wreaths and crosses of beautiful flowers had poured in, and now there was a crowd in the drive in front of Court Leys. The Blackstable Freemasons (Lodge No. 31,899), of which Edward at his death was Worshipful Master, had signified their intention of attending, and lined the road, two and two, in white gloves and aprons. There were likewise representatives of the Tercanbury Lodge (4169), of the Provincial Grand Lodge, the Mark Masons, and the Knights Templars. The Blackstable Unionist Association sent one hundred Conservatives, who walked two and two after the Freemasons. There were a few words as to precedence between Brother G. W. Hancock (P.W.M.), who led the Blackstable Lodge (31,899), and Mr. Atthill Bacot, who marched at the head of the politicians; but it was finally settled in favour of the Lodge, as the older established body. Then came the members of the Local District Council, of which Edward had been chairman, and after these the carriages of the gentry. Mrs. Mayston Ryle sent a landau and pair, but Mrs. Branderton, the Molsons, and the rest, only sent broughams. It needed a prodigious amount of generalship to marshal these forces, and Arthur Branderton lost his temper because the Conservatives would start before they were wanted to.

“Ah,” said Brother A. W. Rogers (the landlord of the Pig and Whistle), “they want Craddock here now. He was the best organiser I’ve ever seen; he’d have got the procession into working order and the funeral over by this time.”

The last carriage disappeared, and Bertha, alone at length, lay down by the window on the sofa. She was devoutly grateful to the old convention which prevented the widow’s attendance at the funeral.

She looked with tired and listless eyes at the long avenue of elm-trees, bare of leaf. The sky was gray and the clouds heavy and low. Bertha now was a pale woman of thirty, still beautiful, with curling, abundant hair; but her dark eyes had under them still darker lines, and their fire was half gone. Between her brows was a little vertical line, and her lips had lost the joyousness of youth, the corners of her mouth turned down with a melancholy expression. The face was thin and extremely pale; but what chiefly struck one was that she seemed so utterly weary. Her features remained singularly immobile, and there was in her eyes an apathy that was very painful. Her eyes said that she had loved and found love wanting, that she had been a mother and that her child had died, and that now she desired nothing very strongly but to be left in peace.

Bertha was indeed tired out, in body and mind, tired of love and hate, tired with friendship and knowledge, tired with the passing years. Her thought wandered to the future and she decided to leave Blackstable, and let Court Leys, so that in no moment of weakness might she be tempted to return. And first she intended to travel, wishing to live in places where she was unknown, so as more easily to forget the past. Bertha’s memory brought back Italy, the land of those who suffer in unfulfilled desire, the lotus land. She would go there and she would go farther, ever towards the sun; for now she had no ties on earth, and at last, at last she was free.

The melancholy day closed in the great clouds hanging overhead darkened with approaching night. Bertha remembered how ready in her girlhood she had been to pour herself out to the world. Feeling intense fellowship with all human beings, she wished to throw herself into their arms, thinking that they would be outstretched to receive her. Her life seemed to overflow into the lives of others, becoming one with theirs as the water of rivers becomes one with the sea. But very soon the power she had felt of doing all this departed; she recognised a barrier between herself and human kind, and felt that they were strangers. Hardly understanding the impossibility of what she desired, she placed all her love, all her faculty of expansion, on one person, on Edward, making a final effort, as it were, to break the barrier of consciousness and unite her soul with his. She drew him towards her with all her might, Edward the man, seeking to know him in the depths of his heart, yearning to lose herself in him. But at last she saw that what she had striven for was unattainable. I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Not even the most devoted lovers know the essentials of one another’s selves. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are always strangers; scarcely more to one another than chance acquaintance.

And when she discovered this, with many tears and after bitter heartache, Bertha retired into herself. But soon she found solace. In her silence she built a world of her own, and kept it from the eyes of every living soul, knowing that none could understand it. And then all ties were irksome, all earthly attachments unnecessary.

Confusedly thinking these things, Bertha’s thoughts reverted to Edward.

“If I had been keeping a diary of my emotions, I should close it to-day, with the words, ‘My husband has broken his neck.’”

But she was pained at her own callousness.

“Poor fellow,” she murmured. “He was honest and kind and forbearing. He did all he could, and tried always to act like a gentleman. He was very useful in the world, and, in his own way, he was fond of me. His only fault was that I loved him — and ceased to love him.”

By her side lay the book she had read while waiting for Edward when he was hunting. Bertha had put it on the table open, face-downwards, when she rose from the sofa to receive the expected visitor; and it had remained as she left it. She was tired of thinking; and taking it now, began to read quietly.

THE END

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

PART II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

ALL her life Miss Elizabeth Dwarris had been a sore trial to her relations. A woman of means, she ruled tyrannously over a large number of impecunious cousins, using her bank-balance like the scorpions of Rehoboam to chastise them, and, like many another pious creature, for their soul’s good making all and sundry excessively miserable. Nurtured in the evangelical ways current in her youth, she insisted that her connections should seek salvation according to her own lights; and, with harsh tongue and with bitter gibe, made it her constant business to persuade them of their extreme unworthiness. She arranged lives as she thought fit, and ventured not only to order the costume and habits, but even the inner thought of those about her: the Last Judgment could have no terrors for any that had faced her searching examination. She invited to stay with her in succession various poor ladies who presumed on a distant tie to call her Aunt Eliza, and they accepted her summons, more imperious than a royal command, with gratitude by no means unmixed with fear, bearing the servitude meekly as a cross which in the future would meet due testamentary reward.

Miss Dwarris loved to feel her power. During these long visits — for, in a way, the old lady was very hospitable — she made it her especial object to break the spirit of her guests; and it entertained her hugely to see the mildness with which were borne her extravagant demands, the humility with which every inclination was crushed. She took a malicious pleasure in publicly affronting persons, ostensibly to bend a sinful pride, or in obliging them to do things which they particularly disliked. With a singular quickness for discovering the points on which they were most sensitive, she attacked every weakness with blind invective till the sufferer writhed before her, raw and bleeding: no defect, physical or mental, was protected from her raillery, and she could pardon as little an excess of avoirdupois as a want of memory. Yet, with all her heart, she despised her victims, she flung in their face insolently their mercenary spirit, vowing that she would never leave a penny to such a pack of weak fools; it delighted her to ask for advice in the distribution of her property among charitable societies, and she heard, with unconcealed hilarity, their unwilling and confused suggestions.

With one of her relations only, Miss Dwarris found it needful to observe a certain restraint, for Miss Ley, perhaps the most distant of her cousins, was as plain-spoken as herself, and had, besides, a far keener wit whereby she could turn rash statements to the utter ridicule of the speaker. Nor did Miss Dwarris precisely dislike this independent spirit; she looked upon her in fact with a certain degree of affection and not a little fear. Miss Ley, seldom lacking a repartee, appeared really to enjoy the verbal contests, from which, by her greater urbanity, readiness, and knowledge, she usually emerged victorious: it confounded, but at the same time almost amused, the elder lady that a woman so much poorer than herself, with no smaller claims than others to the coveted inheritance, should venture not only to be facetious at her expense, but even to carry war into her very camp. Miss Ley, really not grieved to find some one to whom without prickings of conscience she could speak her whole mind, took a grim pleasure in pointing out to her cousin the poor logic of her observations or the foolish unreason of her acts. No cherished opinion of Miss Dwarris was safe from satire — even her evangelicism was laughed at, and the rich old woman, unused to argument, was easily driven into self-contradiction; and then — for the victor took no pains to conceal her triumph — she grew pale and speechless with rage. The quarrels were frequent, but Miss Dwarris, though it was a sharp thorn in her flesh that the first advances must be made by her, in the end always forgave; yet at last it was inevitable that a final breach should occur. The cause thereof, characteristically enough, was very trivial.

Miss Ley, accustomed, when she went abroad in the winter, to let her little flat in Chelsea, had been obliged by unforeseen circumstances to return to England while her tenants were still in possession; and had asked Miss Dwarris whether she might stay with her in Old Queen Street. The old tyrant, much as she hated her relations, hated still more to live alone; she needed some one on whom to vent her temper, and through the illness of a niece, due to spend March and April with her, had been forced to pass a month of solitude; she wrote back, in the peremptory fashion which, even with Miss Ley, she could not refrain from using, that she expected her on such and such a day by such and such a train. It is not clear whether there was in the letter anything to excite in Miss Ley a contradictory spirit, or whether her engagements really prevented it; but, at all events, she answered that her plans made it more convenient to arrive on the day following and by a different train. Miss Dwarris telegraphed that, unless her guest came on the day and at the hour mentioned in her letter, she could not send the carriage to meet her, to which the younger lady replied concisely: “Don’t.”

“She’s as obstinate as a pig,” muttered Miss Dwarris, reading the telegram; and she saw in her mind’s eye the thin smile on her cousin’s mouth when she wrote that one indifferent word. “I suppose she thinks she’s very clever.”

Her hostess greeted Miss Ley, notwithstanding, with a certain grim affability reserved only for her; she was, at all events, the least detestable of her relations, and, though neither docile nor polite, at least was never tedious. Her conversation braced Miss Dwarris so that with her she was usually at her best, and sometimes, forgetting her overbearing habit, showed herself a sensible and entertaining woman, of not altogether unamiable disposition.

“You’re growing old, my dear,” said Miss Dwarris, when they sat down to dinner, looking at her guest with eyes keen to detect wrinkles and crowsfeet.

“You flatter me,” Miss Ley retorted; “antiquity is the only excuse for a woman who has determined on a single life.”

“I suppose, like the rest of them, you would have married if any one had asked you.”

Miss Ley smiled.

“Two months ago an Italian prince offered me his hand and heart, Eliza.”

“A Papist would do anything,” replied Miss Dwarris. “I suppose you told him your income and he found he’d misjudged the strength of his affections.”

“I refused him because he was so virtuous.”

“I shouldn’t have thought at your age you could afford to pick and choose, Polly.”

“Allow me to observe that you have an amiable faculty of thinking of one subject at one time in two diametrically opposed ways.”

Miss Ley was a slender woman of middle size, her hair, very plainly arranged, beginning to turn gray, and her face, already much wrinkled, by its clear precision of feature indicating a comfortable strength of character; her lips, thin but expressive, mobile, added to this appearance of determination. She was by no means handsome, and had certainly never been pretty; but her carriage was not without grace nor her manner without fascination. Her eyes were very bright and so shrewd as sometimes to be almost disconcerting: without words, they could make pretentiousness absurd; and most affectatious, under that searching glance, part contemptuous, part amused, willingly hid themselves. Yet, as Miss Dwarris took care to remind her, she was not without her own especial pose, but it was carried out so admirably, with such a restrained, comely decorum, that few observed it, and such as did found not the heart to condemn: it was the perfect art that concealed itself. To execute this æsthetic gesture, it pleased Miss Ley to dress with the greatest possible simplicity, usually in black, and her only ornament was a renaissance jewel of such exquisite beauty that no museum would have disdained to possess it: this she wore around her neck attached to a long gold chain, and she fingered it with pleasure to show, according to her plain-spoken relative, the undoubted beauty of her hands. Her well-fitting shoes and the elaborate open-work of her silk stockings suggested also a not unreasonable pride in a shapely foot, small and high of instep. Thus attired, when she had visitors, Miss Ley sat in an oak, Italian straight-backed chair, delicately carved, which was placed between two windows against the wall; and she cultivated already a certain primness of manner which made very effective the audacious criticism of life wherewith she was used to entertain her friends.

Two mornings after her arrival in Old Queen Street, Miss Ley announced her intention to go out. She came downstairs with a very fashionable parasol — a purchase on her way through Paris.

“You’re not going out with that thing?” cried Miss Dwarris, scornfully.

“I am indeed.”

“Nonsense; you must take an umbrella. It’s going to rain.”

“I have a new sunshade and an old umbrella, Eliza: I feel certain it will be fine.”

“My dear, you know nothing about the English climate. I tell you it will pour cats and dogs.”

“Fiddlesticks, Eliza.”

“Polly,” answered Miss Dwarris, her temper rising. “I wish you to take an umbrella. The barometer is going down, and I have a tingling in my feet, which is a sure sign of wet. It’s very irreligious of you to presume to say what the weather is going to be.”

“I venture to think that, meteorologically, I am no less acquainted with the ways of Providence than you.”

“That I think is not funny, but blasphemous, Polly. In my house, I expect people to do as I tell them, and I insist on your taking an umbrella.”

“Don’t be absurd, Eliza.”

Miss Dwarris rang the bell and, when the butler appeared, ordered him to fetch her own umbrella for Miss Ley.

“I absolutely refuse to use it,” said the younger lady, smiling.

“Pray remember that you are my guest, Polly.”

“And, therefore, entitled to do exactly as I like.”

Miss Dwarris rose to her feet, a massive old woman of commanding presence, and stretched out a threatening hand.

“If you leave this house without an umbrella, you shall not come into it again. You shall never cross this threshold so long as I am alive.”

Miss Ley cannot have been in the best of humours that morning, for she pursed her lips in the manner already characteristic of her, and looked at her elderly cousin with a cold scorn, most difficult to bear.

“My dear Eliza, you have a singularly exaggerated idea of your importance. Are there no hotels in London? You appear to think I stay with you for pleasure rather than to mortify my flesh. And, really, the cross is growing too heavy for me, for I think you must have quite the worst cook in the metropolis.”

“She’s been with me for five and twenty years,” answered Miss Dwarris, two red spots appearing on her cheeks, “and no one has ventured to complain of the cooking before. If any of my guests had done so, I should have answered that what was good enough for me was a great deal too good for any one else. I know that you’re obstinate, Polly, and quick-tempered, and this impertinence I am willing to overlook. Do you still refuse to do as I wish?”

“Yes.”

Miss Dwarris rang the bell violently.

“Tell Martha to pack Miss Ley’s boxes at once, and call a four-wheeler,” she cried, in tones of thunder.

“Very well, Madam,” answered the butler, used to his mistress’s vagaries.

Then Miss Dwarris turned to her guest, who observed her with irritating good-humour.

“I hope you realise, Polly, that I fully mean what I say.”

“All is over between us,” answered Miss Ley, mockingly, “and shall I return your letters and your photographs?”

Miss Dwarris sat for a while, in silent anger, watching her cousin, who took up the Morning Post, and, with great calmness, read the fashionable intelligence. Presently the butler announced that the four-wheeler was at the door.

“Well, Polly, so you’re really going?”

“I can hardly stay when you’ve had my boxes packed and sent for a cab,” replied Miss Ley, mildly.

“It’s your own doing; I don’t wish you to go. If you’ll confess that you were headstrong and obstinate, and if you’ll take an umbrella, I am willing to let bygones be bygones.”

“Look at the sun,” answered Miss Ley.

And, as if actually to annoy the tyrannous old woman, the shining rays danced into the room and made importunate patterns on the carpet.

“I think I should tell you, Polly, that it was my intention to leave you ten thousand pounds in my will. This intention I shall, of course, not now carry out.”

“You’d far better leave your money to the Dwarris people: upon my word, considering that they’ve been related to you for over sixty years, I think they thoroughly deserve it.”

“I shall leave my money to whom I choose,” cried Miss Dwarris, beside herself; “and if I want to I shall leave every penny of it in charity. You’re very independent because you have a beggarly five hundred a year, but, apparently, it isn’t enough for you to live without letting your flat when you go away. Remember, that no one has any claims upon me, and I can make you a rich woman.”

Miss Ley replied with great deliberation.

“My dear, I have a firm conviction that you will live for another thirty years to plague the human race in general and your relations in particular. It is not worth my while, on the chance of surviving you, to submit to the caprices of a very ignorant old woman, presumptuous and overbearing, dull and pretentious.”

Miss Dwarris gasped and shook with rage, but the other proceeded without mercy.

“You have plenty of poor relations — bully them. Vent your spite and ill-temper on those wretched sycophants, but pray in future spare me the infinite tediousness of your conversation.”

Miss Ley had ever a discreet passion for the rhetorical, and there was a certain grandiloquence about the phrase which entertained her hugely. She felt that it was unanswerable, and, with great dignity, walked out. No communication passed between the two ladies, though Miss Dwarris, peremptory, stern, and evangelical to the end, lived in full possession of her faculties for another twenty years. She died at last in a passion occasioned by some trifling misdemeanour of her maid; and as though a heavy yoke were removed from their shoulders, her family heaved a deep and unanimous sigh of relief.

They attended her funeral with dry eyes, looking still with silent terror at the leaden coffin which contained the remains of that harsh, strong, domineering old woman. Then, nervously expectant, they begged the family solicitor to disclose her will. Written with her own hand, and witnessed by two servants, it was in these terms:

“I, Elizabeth Ann Dwarris, of 79, Old Queen Street, Westminster, Spinster, hereby revoke all former Wills and Testamentary Dispositions, made by me and declare this to be my last Will and Testament. I appoint Mary Ley, of 72, Eliot Mansions, Chelsea, to be the executrix of this my Will, and I give all my real and personal property whatsoever to the said Mary Ley. To my great-nephews and great-nieces, to my cousins near and remote, I give my blessing; and I beseech them to bear in mind the example and advice which for many years I have given them. I recommend them to cultivate in future strength of character and an independent spirit; I venture to remind them that the humble will never inherit this earth, for their reward is to be awaited in the life to come; and I desire them to continue the subscriptions which, at my request, they have so long and generously made to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews and to the Additional Curates Fund.

“In witness whereof, I have set my hand to this my Will the 4th day of April, 1883.

“Elizabeth Ann Dwarris.”

To her amazement, Miss Ley found herself at the age of fifty-seven in possession of nearly three thousand pounds a year, the lease of a pleasant old house in Westminster, and a great quantity of early Victorian furniture. The will was written two days after her quarrel with the eccentric old woman, and the terms of it certainly achieved the three purposes for which it was designed: it occasioned the utmost surprise to all concerned; it heaped coals of fire on Miss Ley’s indifferent head; and caused the bitterest disappointment and vexation to all that bore the name of Dwarris.

PART II

CHAPTER I

MISS LEY returned to England at the end of February. Unlike the most of her compatriots, she did not go abroad to see the friends with whom she spent much time at home; and though Bella and Herbert Field were at Naples, Mrs. Murray in Rome, she took care systematically to avoid them. Rather was it her practice to cultivate chance acquaintance, for she thought the English in foreign lands betrayed their idiosyncrasies with a pleasant and edifying frankness; in Venice, for example, or at Capri, the delectable isle, romance might be seized, as it were, in the act, and all manner of oddities were displayed with a most diverting effrontery: in those places you meet middle-aged pairs, uncertainly related, whose vehement adventures startled the decorum of a previous generation; you discover how queer may be the most conventional, how ordinary the most eccentric. Miss Ley, with her discreet knack for extracting confidence, after her own staid fashion enjoyed herself immensely; she listened to the strange confessions of men who for their souls’ sake had abandoned the greatness of the world, and now spoke of their past zeal with indulgent irony, of women who for love had been willing to break down the very pillars of heaven, and now shrugged their shoulders in amused recollection of passion long since dead.

“Well, what have you fresh to tell me?” asked Frank, having met Miss Ley at Victoria, when he sat down to dinner in Old Queen Street.

“Nothing much. But I’ve noticed that when pleasure has exhausted a man he’s convinced that he has exhausted pleasure; then he tells you gravely that nothing can satisfy the human heart.”

But Frank had more important news than this, for Jenny, a week before, was delivered of a still-born child, and had been so ill that it was thought she could not recover; now, however, the worst was over, and if nothing untoward befell, she might be expected slowly to regain health.

“How does Basil take it?” asked Miss Ley.

“He says very little; he’s grown silent of late, but I’m afraid he’s quite heart-broken. You know how enormously he looked forward to the baby.”

“D’you think he’s fond of his wife?”

“He’s very kind to her. No one could have been gentler than he after the catastrophe. I think she was the more cut up of the two. You see, she looked upon it as the reason of their marriage — and he’s been doing his best to comfort her.”

“I must go down and see them. And now tell me about Mrs. Castillyon.”

“I haven’t set eyes on her for ages.”

Miss Ley observed Frank with deliberation. She wondered if he knew of the affair with Reggie Bassett, but, though eager to discuss it, would not risk to divulge a secret. In point of fact, he was familiar with all the circumstances, but it amused him to counterfeit ignorance that he might see how Miss Ley guided the conversation to the point she wanted. She spoke of the Dean of Tercanbury, of Bella and her husband, then, as though by chance, mentioned Reggie; but the twinkling of Frank’s eyes told her that he was laughing at her stratagem.

“You brute!” she cried, “why didn’t you tell me all about it, instead of letting me discover the thing by accident?”

“My sex suggests to me certain elementary notions of honour, Miss Ley.”

“You needn’t add priggishness to your other detestable vices. How did you know they were carrying on in this way?”

“The amiable youth told me. There are very few men who can refrain from boasting of their conquests, and certainly Reggie isn’t one of them.”

“You don’t know Hugh Kearon, do you? He’s had affairs all over Europe, and the most notorious was with a royal princess who shall be nameless; I think she would have bored him to death if he hadn’t been able to flourish ostentatiously a handkerchief with a royal crown in the corner and a large initial.”

Miss Ley then gave her account of the visit to Rochester, and certainly made of it a very neat and entertaining story.

“And did you think for a moment that this would be the end of the business?” asked Frank, ironically.

“Don’t be spiteful because I hoped for the best.”

“Dear Miss Ley, the bigger blackguard a man is, the more devoted are his lady-loves. It’s only when a man is decent and treats women as if they were human beings that he has a rough time of it.”

“You know nothing about these things, Frank,” retorted Miss Ley. “Pray give me the facts, and the philosophical conclusions I can draw for myself.”

“Well, Reggie has a natural aptitude for dealing with the sex. I heard all about your excursion to Rochester, and went so far as to assure him that you wouldn’t tell his mamma. He perceived that he hadn’t cut a very heroic figure, so he mounted the high horse, and, full of virtuous indignation, for a month took no notice whatever of Mrs. Castillyon. Then she wrote most humbly, begging him to forgive her; and this, I understand, he graciously did. He came to see me, flung the letter on the table, and said: ‘There, my boy, if any one asks you, say that what I don’t know about women ain’t worth knowing.’ Two days later he appeared with a gold cigarette-case!”

“What did you say to him?”

“One of these days you’ll come the very devil of a cropper.”

“You showed wisdom and emphasis. I hope with all my heart, he will.”

“I don’t imagine things are going very smoothly,” proceeded Frank. “Reggie tells me she leads him a deuce of a life, and he’s growing restive; it appears to be no joke to have a woman desperately in love with you. And then he’s never been on such familiar terms with a person of quality, and he’s shocked by her vulgarity; her behaviour seems often to outrage his sense of decorum.”

“Isn’t that like an Englishman! He cultivates propriety even in the immoral.”

Then Miss Ley asked Frank about himself, but they had corresponded with diligence, and he had little to tell; the work at Saint Luke’s went on monotonously, lectures to students three times a week and out-patients on Wednesday and Saturday; people were beginning to come to his consulting-room in Harley Street, and he looked forward, without great enthusiasm, to the future of a fashionable physician.

“And are you in love?”

“You know I shall never permit my affections to wander so long as you remain single,” he answered, laughing.

“Beware I don’t take you at your word and drag you by the hair of your head to the altar. Have I no rival?”

“Well, if you press me, I will confess.”

“Monster! what is her name?”

“Bilharzia Holmatobi.”

“Good heavens!”

“It’s a parasite I’m studying. I think authorities are all wrong about it; they’ve not got its life-history right, and the stuff they believe about the way people catch it is sheer footle.”

“It doesn’t sound frightfully thrilling to me, and I’m under the impression you’re only trumping it up to conceal some scandalous amour with a ballet-girl.”

Miss Ley’s visit to Barnes seemed welcome neither to Jenny nor to Basil, who looked harassed and unhappy, and only with a visible effort assumed a cheerful manner when he addressed his wife. Jenny was still in bed, very weak and ill, but Miss Ley, who had never before seen her, was surprised at her great beauty; her face, whiter than the pillows against which it rested, had a very touching pathos, and, notwithstanding all that had gone before, that winsome, innocent sweetness which has occasioned the comparison of English maidens to the English rose. The observant woman noticed also the painful, questioning anxiety with which Jenny continually glanced at her husband, as though pitifully dreading some unmerited reproach.

“I hope you like my wife,” said Basil, when he accompanied Miss Ley downstairs.

“Poor thing! She seems to me like a lovely bird imprisoned by fate within the four walls of practical life, who should by rights sing careless songs under the open skies. I’m afraid you’ll be very unkind to her.”

“Why?” he asked, not without resentment.

“My dear, you’ll make her live up to your blue china teapot. The world might be so much happier if people wouldn’t insist on acting up to their principles.”

Mrs. Bush had been hurriedly sent for when Jenny’s condition seemed dangerous, but, in her distress and excitement, she had sought solace in Basil’s whiskey-bottle to such an extent that he was obliged to beg her to return to her own home. The scene was not edifying. Surmising an alcoholic tendency, Kent, two or three days after her arrival, locked the side-board and removed the key. But in a little while the servant came to him.

“If you please, sir, Mrs. Bush says, can she ‘ave the whiskey; she’s not feelin’ very well.”

“I’ll go to her.”

Mrs. Bush sat in the dining-room with folded hands, doing her utmost to express on a healthy countenance maternal anxiety, indisposition, and ruffled dignity; she was not vastly pleased to see her son-in-law instead of the expected maid.

“Oh, is that you, Basil?” she said; “I can’t find the sideboard key anywhere, and I’m that upset I must ‘ave a little drop of something.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you, Mrs. Bush. You’re much better without it.”

“Oh, indeed!” she answered, bristling. “P’raps you know more about me inside feelings than I do myself. I’ll just trouble you to give me the key, young man, and look sharp about it. I’m not a woman to be put upon by any one, and I tell you straight.”

“I’m very sorry, but I think you’ve had quite enough to drink. Jenny may want you, and you would be wise to keep sober.”

“D’you mean to insinuate that I’ve ‘ad more than I can carry?”

“I wouldn’t go quite so far as that,” he answered, smiling.

“Thank you for nothing,” cried Mrs. Bush indignantly. “And I should be obliged if you wouldn’t laugh at me, and I must say it’s very ‘eartless with me daughter lying ill in her bedroom. I’m very much upset and I did think you’d treat me like a lady, but you never ‘ave, Mr. Kent — no, not even the first time I come here. Oh, I ‘aven’t forgot, so don’t you think I ‘ave — a sixpenny ‘alfpenny teapot was good enough for me, but when your lady-friend come in out pops the silver, and I don’t believe for a moment it’s real silver. Blood’s all very well, Mr. Kent, but what I say is, give me manners. You’re a nice young feller, you are, to grudge me a little drop of spirits when me poor daughter’s on her death-bed. I wouldn’t stay another minute in this ‘ouse if it wasn’t for ‘er.”

“I was going to suggest it would be better if you returned to your happy home in Crouch End,” answered Basil, when the good woman stopped to take breath.

“Were you, indeed! Well, we’ll just see what Jenny ‘as to say to that. I suppose my daughter is mistress in ‘er own ‘ouse.”

Mrs. Bush started to her feet and made for the door, but Basil stood with his back against it.

“I can’t allow you to go to her now. I don’t think you’re in a fit state.”

“D’you think I’m going to let you prevent me? Get out of my way, young man.”

Basil, more disgusted than out of temper, looked at the angry creature with a cold scorn which was not easy to stomach.

“I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, Mrs. Bush, but I think you’d better leave this house at once. Fanny will put your things together. I’m going to Jenny’s room, and I forbid you to come to it. I expect you to be gone in half an hour.”

He turned on his heel, leaving Mrs. Bush furious but intimidated. She was so used to have her own way that opposition took her aback, and Basil’s manner did not suggest that he would easily suffer contradiction. But she made up her mind, whatever the consequences, to force her way into Jenny’s room, and there set out her grievance. She had not done repeating to herself what she would say when the servant entered to state that, according to her master’s order, she had packed Mrs. Bush’s things. Jenny’s mother started up indignantly, but pride forbade her to let the maid see she was turned out.

“Quite right, Fanny! This isn’t the ‘ouse that a lady would stay in, and I pity you, my dear, for ‘aving a master like my son-in-law. You can tell ‘im with my compliments that ‘e’s no gentleman.”

Jenny, who was asleep, woke at the slamming of the front-door.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Your mother has gone away, dearest. D’you mind?”

She looked at him quickly, divining from knowledge of her parent’s character that some quarrel had occurred and anxious to see that Basil was not annoyed. She gave him her hand.

“No, I’m glad. I want to be alone with you. I don’t want any one to come between us.”

He bent down and kissed her, and she put her arms round his neck.

“You’re not angry with me because the baby died?”

“My darling, how could I be?”

“Say that you don’t regret having married me.”

Jenny, realising by now that Basil had married her only on account of the child, was filled with abject terror; his interests were so different from hers (and she had but gradually come to understand how great was the separation between them) that the longed-for son alone seemed able to preserve to her Basil’s affection. It was the mother he loved, and now he might bitterly repent his haste, for it seemed she had forced marriage upon him by false pretenses. The chief tie that bound them was severed, and though with meek gratitude accepting the attentions suggested by his kindness, she asked herself with aching heart what would happen on her recovery.

Time passed, and Jenny, though ever pale and listless, grew strong enough to leave her room. It was proposed that in a little while she should go with her sister for a month to Brighton; Basil’s work prevented him from leaving London for long, but he promised to run down for the week-end. One afternoon he came home in high spirits, having just received from his publishers a letter to say that his book had found favour and would be issued in the coming spring. It seemed the first step to the renown he sought. He found James Bush, his brother-in-law, seated with Jenny, and, in his elation, greeted him with unusual cordiality; but James lacked his usual facetious flow of conversation, and wore indeed a hang-dog air, which at another time would have excited Basil’s attention. He took his leave at once, and then Basil noticed that Jenny was much disturbed. Though he knew nothing for certain, he had an idea that the family of Bush came to his wife when they were in financial straits, but from the beginning had decided that such inevitable claims must be satisfied; he preferred, however, to ignore the help which Jenny gave, and, when she asked for some small sum beyond her allowance, handed it without question.

“Why was Jimmie here at this hour?” he asked, carelessly, thinking him bound on some such errand. “I thought he didn’t leave his office till six.”

“Oh, Basil, something awful has happened! I don’t know how to tell you; he’s sacked.”

“I hope he doesn’t want us to keep him,” answered Basil, coldly. “I’m very hard up this year, and all the money I have I want for you.”

Jenny braced herself for a painful effort. She looked away and her voice trembled.

“I don’t know what’s to be done. He’s got into trouble. Unless he can find a hundred and fifteen pounds in a week, his firm are going to prosecute.”

“What on earth d’you mean, Jenny?”

“Oh, Basil, don’t be angry! I was so ashamed to tell you, I’ve been hiding it for a month; but now I can’t any more. Something went wrong with his accounts.”

“D’you mean to say he’s been stealing?” asked Basil, sternly; and a feeling of utter horror and disgust came over him.

“For God’s sake, don’t look at me like that!” she cried, for his eyes, his firm-set mouth, made her feel a culprit confessing on her own account some despicable crime. “He didn’t mean to be dishonest. I don’t exactly understand, but he can tell you how it all was. Oh, Basil, you won’t let him be sent to prison! Couldn’t he have the money instead of my going away?”

Basil sat down at his desk to think out the matter, and, resting his face thoughtfully on his hands, sought to avoid Jenny’s fixed, appealing gaze; he did not want her to see the consternation, the abject shame, with which her news oppressed him. But all the same she saw.

“What are you thinking about, Basil?”

“Nothing particular. I was wondering how to raise the money.”

“You don’t think because he’s my brother I must be tarred with the same brush?”

He looked at her without answering; it was certainly unfortunate that his wife’s mother should drink more than was seemly and her brother have but primitive ideas about property.

“It’s not my fault,” she cried, with bitter pain, interrupting his silence. “Don’t think too hardly of me.”

“No, it’s not your fault,” he answered, with involuntary coldness. “You must go away to Brighton all the same, but I’m afraid it means no holiday in the summer.”

He wrote a cheque and then a letter to his bank begging them to advance a hundred pounds on securities they held.

“There he is,” cried Jenny, hearing a ring. “I told him to come back in half an hour.”

Basil got up.

“You’d better give the cheque to your brother at once. Say that I don’t wish to see him.”

“Isn’t he to come here any more, Basil?”

“That is as you like, Jenny. If you wish, we’ll pretend he was unfortunate rather than — dishonest; but I’d rather he didn’t refer to the matter. I want neither his thanks nor his excuses.”

Without answering, Jenny took the cheque. She would have given a great deal to fling her arms gratefully round Basil’s neck, begging him to forgive, but there was a hardness in his manner which frightened her. All the evening he sat in moody silence, and Jenny dare not speak; his kiss when he bade her good-night had never been so frigid, and, unable to sleep, she cried bitterly. She could not understand the profound abhorrence with which he looked upon the incident; to her mind, it was little more than a mischance occasioned by Jimmie’s excessive sharpness, and she was disposed to agree with her brother that only luck had been against him. She somewhat resented Basil’s refusal to hear any defence and his complete certainty that the very worst must be true.

A few days later, coming unexpectedly, Kent found Jenny in earnest conversation with her brother, who had quite regained his jaunty air and betrayed no false shame at Basil’s knowledge of his escapade.

“Well met, ‘Oratio!” he cried, holding out his hand. “I just come in on the chance of seeing you. I wanted to thank you for that loan.”

“I’d rather you didn’t speak of it.”

“Why, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I ‘ad a bit of bad luck, that’s all. I’ll pay you back, you know; you needn’t fear about that.”

He gave a voluble account of the affair, proving how misfortune may befall the deserving, and what a criminal complexion the most innocent acts may wear. Basil, against his will admiring the fellow’s jocose effrontery, listened with chilling silence.

“You need not excuse yourself,” he said, at length. “My reasons for helping you were purely selfish. Except for Jenny, it would have been a matter of complete indifference to me if you had been sent to prison or not.”

“Oh, that was all kid! They wouldn’t have prosecuted. Don’t I tell you they had no case. You believe me, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What d’you mean by that?” asked James, angrily.

“We won’t discuss it.”

The other did not answer, but shot at Basil a glance of singular malevolence.

“You can whistle for your money, young feller,” he muttered, under his breath. “You won’t get much out of me.”

He had but small intention of paying back the rather large sum, but now abandoned even that. During the six months since Jenny’s marriage he had never been able to surmount the freezing politeness with which Basil used him; he hated him for his supercilious air, but, needing his help, took care, though sometimes he could scarcely keep his temper, to preserve a familiar cordiality. He knew his brother-in-law would welcome an opportunity to forbid him the house, and this, especially now that he was out of work, he determined to avoid; he stomached the affront as best he could, but solaced his pride with the determination sooner or later to revenge himself.

“Well, so long,” he cried, with undiminished serenity, “I’ll be toddling.”

Jenny watched this scene with some alarm, but with more irritation, since Basil’s frigid contempt for her brother seemed a reflection on himself.

“You might at least be polite to him,” she said, when Jimmie was gone.

“I’m afraid I’ve pretty well used up all my politeness.”

“After all, he is my brother.”

“That is a fact I deplore with all my heart,” he answered.

“You needn’t be so hard on him now he’s down. He’s no worse than plenty more.”

Basil turned to her with flaming eyes.

“Good God, don’t you realise the man’s a thief! Doesn’t it mean anything to you that he’s dishonest? Don’t you see how awful it is that a man—”

He broke off with a gesture of disgust. It was the first quarrel they ever had, and a shrewish look came to Jenny’s face, her pallor gave way to an angry flush. But quickly Basil recovered himself; recollecting his wife’s illness and her bitter disappointment at the poor babe’s death, he keenly regretted the outburst.

“I beg your pardon, Jenny. I didn’t mean to say that. I should have remembered you were fond of him.”

But, since she did not answer, looking away somewhat sulkily, he sat down on the arm of her chair and stroked her wonderful, rich tresses.

“Don’t be cross, darling. We won’t quarrel, will we?”

Unable to resist his tenderness, tears came to her eyes, and passionately she kissed his caressing hands.

“No, no,” she cried. “I love you too much. Don’t ever speak angrily to me; it hurts so awfully.”

The momentary cloud passed, and they spoke of the approaching visit to Brighton. Jenny was to take lodgings, and she made him promise faithfully that he would come every Saturday. Frank had offered a room in Harley Street, and while she was away Basil meant to stay with him.

“You won’t forget me, Basil?”

“Of course not! But you must hurry up and get well and come back.”

When at length she set off, and Basil found himself Frank’s guest, he could not suppress a slight sigh of relief; it was very delightful to live again in a bachelor’s rooms, and he loved the smell of smoke, the untidy litter of books, the lack of responsibility: there was no need to do anything he did not like, and, for the first time since his marriage, he felt entirely comfortable. Recalling his pleasant rooms in the Temple — and there was about them an old-world air which amiably fitted his humour — he thought of the long conversations of those days, the hours of reverie, the undisturbed ease with which he could read books; and he shuddered at the pokey villa which was now his home, the worries of housekeeping, and the want of privacy. He had meant his life to be so beautiful, and it was merely sordid.

“There are advantages in single blessedness,” laughed the Doctor, when he saw Basil after breakfast light his pipe and, putting his feet on the chimney-piece, lean back with a sigh of content.

But he regretted his words when he saw on the other’s mobile face a look of singular wistfulness: it was his first indication that things were not going very well with the young couple.

“By the way,” Frank suggested, presently, “would you care to come to a party to-night? Lady Edward Stringer is giving some sort of function, and there’ll be a lot of people you know.”

“I’ve been nowhere since my marriage,” Basil answered, irresolutely.

“I shall be seeing the old thing to-day. Shall I ask if I can bring you?”

“It would be awfully good of you. By Jove, I should enjoy it.” He gave a laugh. “I’ve not had evening clothes on for six months.”

CHAPTER II

SIX months went by, and again the gracious airs of summer blew into Miss Ley’s dining-room in Old Queen Street. She sat at luncheon with Mrs. Castillyon wonderfully rejuvenated by a winter in the East; for Paul, characteristically anxious to combine self-improvement with pleasure, had suggested that they should mark their reconciliation by a journey to India, where they might enjoy a second, pleasanter honeymoon, and he at the same time study various questions which would be to him of much political value. Mrs. Castillyon, in a summer frock, had all her old daintiness of a figurine in Dresden china, and her former vivacity was more charming by reason of an added tenderness; she emphasised her change of mind by allowing her hair to regain its natural colour.

“D’you like it, Mary?” she asked. “Paul says it makes me look ten years younger. And I’ve stopped slapping up.”

“Entirely?” asked Miss Ley, with a smile.

“Of course, I powder a little, but that doesn’t count; and you know, I never use a puff now — only a leather. You can’t think how we enjoyed ourselves in India, and Paul’s a perfect duck. He’s been quite awfully good to me, I’m simply devoted to him, and I think we shall get a baronetcy at the next birthday honours.”

“The reward of virtue.”

Mrs. Castillyon coloured and laughed.

“You know, I’m afraid I shall become a most awful prig, but the fact is it’s so comfortable to be good and to have nothing to reproach one’s self with.... Now tell me about every one. Where did you pass the winter?”

“I went to Italy as usual; and my cousin Algernon, with his daughter, spent a month with me, at Christmas.”

“Was she awfully cut up at the death of her husband?”

There was really a note of genuine sympathy in Mrs. Castillyon’s voice, so that Miss Ley realised how sincere was the change in her.

“She bore it very wonderfully, and I think she’s curiously happy; she tells me that she feels constantly the presence of Herbert.” Miss Ley paused. “Bella has collected her husband’s verses, and wishes to publish them, and she’s written a very touching account of his life and death by way of preface.”

“Are they any good?”

“No; that’s just the tragedy of the whole thing. I never knew a man whose nature was so entirely poetical, and yet he never wrote a line which is other than mediocre. If he’d only written his own feelings, his little hopes and disappointments, he might have done something good; but he’s only produced pale imitations of Swinburne and Tennyson and Shelley. I can’t understand how Herbert Field, who was so simple and upright, should never have turned out a single stanza which wasn’t stilted and forced. I think in his heart he felt that he hadn’t the gift of literary expression, which has nothing to do with high ideals, personal sincerity, or the seven deadly virtues, for he was not sorry to die. He only lived to be a great poet, and before the end realised that he would never have become one.”

Miss Ley saw already the pretty little book which Bella would publish at her own expense, the neat type and wide margin, the dainty binding; she saw the scornful neglect of reviewers, and the pile of copies which eventually Bella would take back and give one by one as presents to her friends, who would thank her warmly, but never trouble to read ten lines.

“And what has happened to Reggie Bassett?” asked Grace, suddenly.

Miss Ley gave her a quick glance, but the steadiness of Mrs. Castillyon’s eyes told her that she asked the question indifferently, perhaps to show how entirely her infatuation was overcome.

“You heard that he married?”

“I saw it in the Morning Post.”

“His mother was very indignant, and for three months refused to speak to him. But at last I was able to tell her that an heir was expected; so she made up her mind to swallow her pride, and became reconciled with her daughter-in-law, who is a very nice, sensible woman.”

“Pretty?” asked Grace.

“Not at all, but eminently capable. Already she has made Reggie into quite a decent member of society. Mrs. Bassett has now gone down to Bournemouth, where the young folks have taken a house, to be at hand when the baby appears.”

“It’s reassuring to think that the ancient race of the Barlow-Bassetts will not be extinguished,” murmured Grace, ironically. “I gathered that your young friend was settling down because one day he returned every penny I had — lent him.”

“And what did you do with it?” asked Miss Ley.

Grace flushed and smiled whimsically.

“Well, it happened to reach me just before our wedding-day so I spent it all in a gorgeous pearl pin for Paul. He was simply delighted.”

Mrs. Castillyon got up, and, when she was gone, Miss Ley took a letter that had come before luncheon, but which her guest’s arrival had prevented her from opening. It was from Basil, who had spent the whole winter on Miss Ley’s recommendation in Seville; she opened it curiously, for it was the first time he had written to her since, after the inquest, he left England.

“My Dear Miss Ley: Don’t think me ungrateful if I have left you without news of me, but at first I felt I could not write to people in England; whenever I thought of them everything came back, and it was only by a desperate effort that I could forget. For some time it seemed to me that I could never face the world again, and I was tormented by self-reproach; I vowed to give up my whole life to the expression of my deep regret, and fancied I could never again have a peaceful moment or anything approaching happiness. But presently I was ashamed to find that I began to regain my old temper; I caught myself at times laughing contentedly, amused and full of spirits; and I upbraided myself bitterly because, only a few weeks after the poor girl’s death, I could actually be entertained by trivial things. And then I don’t know what came over me, for I could not help the thought that my prison door was opened; though I called myself brutal and callous, deep down in my soul arose the idea that the fates had given me another chance. The slate was wiped clean, and I could start fresh. I pretended even to myself that I wanted to die, but it was sheer hypocrisy — I wanted to live and to take life by both hands and enjoy it. I have such a desire for happiness, such an eager yearning for life in its fulness and glory. I made a ghastly mistake, and I suffered for it; heaven knows how terribly I suffered and how hard I tried to make the best of it. And perhaps it wasn’t all my fault — even to you I feel ashamed of saying this; I ought to go on posing decently to the end — in this world, we’re made to act and think things because others have thought them good; we never have a chance of going our own way; we’re bound down by the prejudices and the morals of all and sundry. For God’s sake, let us be free. Let us do this and that because we want to and because we must, not because other people think we ought. And d’you know the worst of the whole thing? If I’d acted like a blackguard and let Jenny go to the dogs, I should have remained happy and contented and prosperous; and she, I daresay, wouldn’t have died. It’s because I tried to do my duty that all this misery came about. The world held up an ideal, and I thought they meant one to act up to it: it never occurred to me that they would only sneer.

“Don’t think too badly of me because I say these things; they have come to me here, and it was you who sent me to Seville; you must have known what effect it would have on my mind, tortured and sick. It is a land of freedom, and at last I have become conscious of my youth. How can I forget the delight of wandering in the Sierpes, released from all imprisoning ties, watching the various movements as though it were a stage-play, yet half afraid that a falling curtain would bring back the unendurable reality. The songs, the dances, the happy idleness of orange-gardens by the Guadalquivir, the gay turbulence of Seville by night: I could not long resist it, and at last forgot everything but that time was short and the world was to the living.

“By the time you get this letter I shall be on my way home.

“Yours ever,

“Basil Kent.”

Miss Ley read this letter with a smile and gave a little sigh.

“I suppose at that age one can afford to have no very conspicuous sense of humour,” she murmured.

But she sent Basil a telegram asking him to stay, with the result that three days later the young man arrived, very brown after his winter in the sunshine, healthy, and better-looking than ever. Miss Ley had invited Frank to meet him at dinner, and the pair of them, with the cold unconcern of anatomists, observed what changes the intervening time had wrought on the impressionable nature. Basil was in high spirits, delighted to come back to his friends; but a discreet soberness, underlying his vivacity, suggested a more composed temperament: what he had gone through had given him perhaps a solid store of experience on which he could rest himself; he was less emotional and more mature. Miss Ley summed up her impressions next time she was alone with Frank.

“Every Englishman has a churchwarden shut away in his bosom — an old man of the sea whom it is next to impossible to shake off: sometimes you think he’s asleep or dead, but he’s wonderfully tenacious of life, and, sooner or later, you find him enthroned in full possession of the soul.”

“I don’t know what you mean by the word soul,” interrupted Frank, “but if you do, pray go on.”

“The churchwarden is waking up in Basil, and I feel sure he will have a very successful career. But I shall warn him not to let that ecclesiastical functionary get the upper hand.”

Miss Ley waited for Basil to speak of Mrs. Murray, but after two days her patience was exhausted and she attacked him point blank. At the mention of the name his cheeks flamed.

“I daren’t go and see her. After what happened, I can never see her again. I am steeling myself to forget.”

“And are you succeeding?” she asked, drily.

“No, no; I shall never succeed. I’m more desperately in love with her than ever I was. But I couldn’t marry her now — the recollection of poor Jenny would be continually between us, for it was we, Hilda and I, who drove her to her death.”

“Don’t be a melodramatic idiot,” answered Miss Ley, sharply. “You talk like the persecuted hero of a penny novelette. Hilda’s very fond of you, and she has the feminine common sense which alone counterbalances in the world the romantic folly of men. What on earth do you imagine is the use of making yourselves wretched so that you may cut a picturesque figure? I should have thought you were cured of heroics. You wrote and told me that the world was for the living — an idea which has truth rather than novelty to recommend it — and do you think there is any sense in posturing absurdly to impress an inattentive gallery?”

“How do I know that Hilda cares for me still? She may hate me because I brought on her shame and humiliation.”

“If I were you, I’d go and ask her,” laughed Miss Ley. “And go with good heart, for she cared for you for your physical attractiveness rather than for your character. And that, I may tell you, whatever moralists say, is infinitely more reliable; since you may easily be mistaken in a person’s character, but his good looks are obvious and visible. You’re handsomer than ever you were.”

When Basil set out to call on Mrs. Murray, Miss Ley amused herself with conjecturing ironically the scene of their meeting: with curling lips she noted in her mind’s eye the embarrassed handshake, the trivial conversation, the disconcerting silence, and without sympathy imagined the gradual warmth and the passionate declaration that followed. She moralised.

“A common mistake of writers is to make their characters, in moments of great emotion, express themselves with good taste: nothing could be more false, for, at such times, people, however refined, use precisely the terms of the Family Herald. The utterance of violent passion is never artistic, but trite, ridiculous, and grotesque, vulgar often, and silly.” Miss Ley smiled. “Probably novelists alone make love in a truly romantic manner; but then it’s ten to one they’re quoting from some unpublished work, or are listening intently to themselves in admiration of their glowing and polished phraseology.”

At all events, the interview between Hilda and Basil was eminently satisfactory, as may be seen by the following letter which some days later the young man received.

“Mon cher enfant: It is with the greatest surprise and delight that I read in this morning’s Post of your engagement to Mrs. Murray. You have fallen on your feet, mon ami, and I congratulate you. Don’t you remember that Becky Sharp said she could be very good on five thousand a year, and the longer I live the more convinced I am that this is a vraie vérité: with a house in Charles Street and le reste, you will find the world a very different place to live in; you will grow more human, dress better, and be less censorious. Do come to luncheon to-morrow, and bring Mrs. Murray; there will be a few people, and I hope it will be amusing — one o’clock. I’m afraid it’s an extraordinary hour to lunch, but I’m going to be received into the Catholic Church in the morning, and we’er all coming on here afterward. I mean to assume the names of the two saints whose example has most assisted me in my conversion, and henceforth shall sign myself,

“Your affectionate mother,

“Marguérite Elizabeth Claire Vizard.

“P. S. — The Duke of St. Olpherts is going to be my sponsor.”

A month late, Hilda Murray and Basil were married in All Souls by the Rev. Collinson Farley; Miss Ley gave away the bride, and in the church, besides, were only the verger and Frank Hurrell. Afterward, in the vestry, Miss Ley shook the Vicar’s hand.

“I think it went off very nicely. It was charming of you to offer to marry them.”

“The bride is a very dear friend of mine; I was anxious to give her this proof of my goodwill at the beginning of her new life.” He paused and smiled benignly, so that Miss Ley, who knew something of his old attachment to Hilda, wondered at his good spirits; she had never seen him more trim and imposing — he looked already every inch a bishop. “Shall I tell you a great secret?” he added blandly. “I am about to contract an alliance with Florence, Lady Newhaven. We shall be married at the end of the season.”

“My dear Mr. Farley, I congratulate you with all my heart. I see already these shapely calves encased in the gaiters episcopal.”

Mr. Farley smiled pleasantly, for he made a practice of appreciating the jests of elderly maiden ladies with ample means, and he could boast that to his sense of humour was due the luxurious appointing of his church; for no place of worship in the West End had more beautiful altar-cloths, handsomer ornaments; nowhere could be seen smarter hassocks for the knees of the devout, or hymn-books in a more excellent state of preservation.

The newly married couple meant to spend their honeymoon on the river, and, having lunched in Charles Street, started immediately.

“I’m thankful they don’t want us to see them off at Paddington,” said Frank, when he walked with Miss Ley toward the park.

“Why are you in such an abominable temper?” she asked, smiling. “During luncheon, I was twice on the point of reminding you that marriage is an event at which a certain degree of hilarity is not indecorous.”

Frank did not answer, and now they turned into one of the park gates: in that gay June weather, the place was crowded; though the hour was early still, motors tore along with hurried panting, carriages passed tranquil and dignified; the well-dressed London throng sat about idly on chairs or lounged up and down looking at their neighbours, talking light-heartedly of the topics of the hour. Frank’s eyes travelled over them slowly, and shuddering a little, his brow grew strangely dark.

“During that ceremony and afterward I could think of nothing but Jenny. It’s only eighteen months since I signed my name for Basil’s first marriage in a dingy registry office. You don’t know how beautiful the girl was on that day — full of love and gratitude and happiness; she looked forward to the future with such eager longing! And now she’s rotting underground, and the woman she hated and the man she adored are married, and they haven’t a thought for all her misery. I hated Basil in his new frock coat, and Hilda Murray, and you: I can’t imagine why a sensible woman like you should overdress ridiculously for such a function.”

Miss Ley, conscious of the entire success of her costume, could afford to smile at this.

“I have observed that, whenever you’re out of humour with yourself, you insult me,” she murmured.

Frank went on, his face hard and set, his dark eyes glowering fiercely.

“It all seemed so useless. It seemed that the wretched girl had to undergo such frightful torture merely to bring these two commonplace creatures together. They must have no imagination, or no shame — how could they marry with that unhappy death between them? For, after all, it was they who killed her. And d’you think Basil is grateful because Jenny gave him her youth and her love, her wonderful beauty and at last her life? He doesn’t think of her. And you, too, because she was a barmaid, are convined that it’s a very good thing she’s out of the way. The only excuse I can see for them is that they’re blind instruments of fate: nature was working through them, obscurely — working to join them together for her own purposes, and, because Jenny came between, she crushed her ruthlessly.”

“I can find a better excuse for them than that,” answered Miss Ley, looking gravely at Frank; “I forgive them because they’re human and weak. The longer I live, the more I am overwhelmed by the utter, utter weakness of men; they do try to do their duty, they do their best honestly, they seek straight ways — but they’re dreadfully weak. And so I think one ought to be sorry for them and make all possible allowances — I’m afraid it sounds rather idiotic, but I find the words now most frequently on my lips are: forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

They walked silently, and after a while Frank stopped on a sudden and faced Miss Ley. He pulled out his watch.

“It’s quite early yet, and we have the afternoon before us. Will you come with me to the cemetery where Jenny is buried?”

“Why not let the dead lie? Let us think of life, rather than of death.”

Frank shook his head.

“I must go. I couldn’t rest otherwise. I can’t bear that, on this day, she should be entirely forgotten.”

“Very well. I will come with you.”

They turned round and came out of the park; Frank hailed a cab, and they started. They passed the pompous mansions of the great, sedate, and magnificent, and, driving north, traversed long streets of smaller dwellings, dingy and gray notwithstanding the brightness of the sky; they went on, it seemed, interminably, and each street strangely, awfully, resembled its predecessor; they came to roads where each house was separate and had its garden, and there were trees and flowers — they were the habitations of merchants and stock-brokers, and had a trim, respectable look, self-satisfied and smug; but these they left behind for more crowded parts; and now it seemed a different London, more vivacious, more noisy; the way was thronged with trams and ‘buses, and there were coster-barrows along the pavements; the shops were gaudy and cheap, and the houses mean; they drove through slums, with children playing merrily on the curb and women in dirty aprons, blousy and dishevelled, lounging about their doorsteps. At length they reached a broad, straight road, white and dusty and unshaded, and knew their destination was at hand, for occasionally they passed a shop where grave-stones were made; and an empty hearse trundled by, the mutes huddled on the box, laughing loudly, smoking after the fatigue of their accustomed work. The cemetery came in sight, and they stopped at iron gates and walked in: it was a vast place, crowded with every imaginable kind of funeral ornament which glistened white and cold in the sun; it was hideous, vulgar, and sordid, and one shuddered to think of the rude material minds of those who could bury folk they loved in that restless ground wherein was neither peace nor silence; they might prate of the soul’s immortality, but surely in their hearts they looked upon the dead as common clay, or they would never have borne that they should lie till the Day of Judgment in that unhallowed spot. There was about it a gross, businesslike air that was infinitely depressing. Frank and Miss Ley walked through, passing a knot of persons, black-robed, about an open grave, where a curate uttered hastily, with the boredom of long habit, the most solemn words that man has ever penned:

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

Miss Ley, pale of face, took Frank’s arm and hurried on. Here and there dead flowers were piled upon new graves; here and there the earth was but freshly turned. They came at last to where Jenny lay — an oblong stone of granite whereon was cut a simple cross; and Frank gave a sudden cry, for it was covered at that moment, so that only the cross was outlined, with red roses. For a while they stared in silence, amazed.

“They’re quite fresh,” said Miss Ley; “they were put here this morning.” She turned to Frank and looked at him slowly. “You said they’d forgotten — and they came on their wedding day and laid roses on her grave.”

“D’you think she came, too?”

“I’m sure of it. Ah, Frank, I think one should forgive them a good deal for that! I told you that they did strive to do right, and if they fell it was only because they were human and very weak. Don’t you think it’s better for us to be charitable? I wonder if we should have surmounted any better than they did their great difficulties and their great temptations.”

Frank made no reply, and for a long time they contemplated those rich red roses and thought of Hilda’s tender hands laying them gently on the poor woman’s cold grave-stone.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I can forgive them a good deal because they had this thought. I hope they will be very happy.”

“I think it’s a good omen.” She laid her hand on Frank’s arm. “And now let us go away — for we are living, and the dead have nothing to say to us. You brought me here, and now I want to take you on farther — to show you something more.”

He did not understand, but followed obediently till they came to the cab; Miss Ley told the driver to go straight on, away from London, till she bade him stop. And then, leaving behind them that sad place of death, they came suddenly into the open; the highway had the pleasant brown hardness of a country road, and it was bordered by a hawthorn hedge; green fields stretched widely on either side, and they might have been a hundred miles from London town. Miss Ley stopped the cab, and told the man to wait whilst she and her friend walked on.

“Don’t look back,” she said to Frank, “only look forward. Look at the trees and the meadows.”

The sky was singularly blue, and the dulcet breeze bore gracious savours of the country; there was a suave limpidity of the air which chased away all ugly thoughts. Both of them, walking quickly, breathed with wide lungs, inspiring eagerly the radiance of that summer afternoon. On a turn of the road Miss Ley gave a quick cry of delight, for she saw the hedge suddenly ablaze with wild roses.

“Have you a knife?” she said. “Do cut some.”

And she stood while he gathered a great bunch of the simple fresh flowers; he gave them to her, and she held them with both hands.

“I love them because they’re the same roses as grow in Rome from the sarcophagi in the gardens; they grow out of those old coffins to show us that life always triumphs over death. What do I care for illness and old age and disease! The world may be full of misery and disillusion, it may not give a tithe of what we ask; it may offer hatred instead of love — disappointment, wretchedness, triviality, and heaven knows what. But there is one thing that compensates for all the rest, that takes away the merry-go-round from a sordid show, and gives it a meaning, a solemnity, and a magnificence which make it worth while to live. And for that one thing, all we suffer is richly overpaid.”

“And what the Dickens is that?” asked Frank, smiling.

Miss Ley looked at him with laughing eyes, holding out the roses, her cheeks flushed.

“Why, beauty, you dolt,” she cried gaily. “Beauty.”

THE END

THE BISHOP’S APRON

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

I

THE world takes people very willingly at the estimate in which they hold themselves. With a fashionable bias for expression in a foreign tongue it calls modesty mauvaise honte; and the impudent are thought merely to have a proper opinion of their merit. But Ponsonby was really an imposing personage. His movements were measured and noiseless; and he wore the sombre garb of a gentleman’s butler with impressive dignity. He was a large man, flabby and corpulent, with a loose, smooth skin. His face, undisturbed by the rapid play of expression, which he would have thought indecorous, had a look of placid respectability; his eyes, with their puffy lower lids, rested on surrounding objects heavily; and his earnest, obsequious voice gave an impression of such overwhelming piety that your glance, involuntarily, fell to his rotund calves for the gaiters episcopal.

He looked gravely at the table set out for luncheon, while Alfred, the footman, walked round it, placing bread in each napkin.

“Is Tommy Tiddler coming to-day, Mr. Ponsonby?” he asked.

“His lordship is expected,” returned the butler, with a frigid stare.

He emphasised the aspirate to mark his disapproval of the flippancy wherewith his colleague referred to a person who was not only the brother of his master, but a member of the aristocracy.

“Here he is!” said Alfred, unabashed, looking out of the window. “He’s just drove up in a cab.”

Lord Spratte walked up the steps and rang the bell. Though Ponsonby had seen him two or three times a week for ten years, he gave no sign of recognition.

“Am I expected to luncheon to-day, Ponsonby?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Lord Spratte was middle-aged, of fresh complexion notwithstanding his grey hair; and his manner was quick and breezy. He carried his years and the increasing girth which accompanied them, with a graceful light-heartedness; and was apt to flatter himself that with the light behind he might still pass for five-and-thirty. He had neither the wish nor the intention to grow old. But the man of fifty, seeking to make the most of himself, must use many careful adjustments. Not for him are the loose, ill-fitting clothes that become a stripling of eighteen; his tailor needs a world of skill to counteract the slackening of muscle and to minimize the excess of avoirdupois. On his toilet-table are numerous pots and jars and bottles, and each is a device to persuade himself that the troublesome years are not marching on. He takes more care of his hands than a professional beauty. Above all, his hair is a source of anxiety. Lord Spratte by many experiments had learnt exactly how to dress it so that no unbecoming baldness was displayed; but he never seized a brush and comb without thinking, like Achilles stalking melancholy through the fields of death, that he would much sooner be a crossing-sweeper of fifteen than a peer of the realm at fifty.

“Do you insist on leading me upstairs like a ewe-lamb, Ponsonby?” he asked.

The butler’s face outlined the merest shadow of a smile as, silently, he preceded Lord Spratte to the drawing-room. For nothing in the world would he have omitted the customary ceremonies of polite society.

“Lord Spratte,” he announced.

The guest advanced and saw his sister Sophia, his brother Theodore, his nephew and his niece. Lady Sophia, a handsome and self-assured woman of five-and-fifty, the eldest of the family, put aside her book and rose to kiss him. Canon Spratte extended two fingers.

“Good heavens, have you invited me to a family party!”

“Than which, I venture to think, there can be nothing more charming, nothing more beautiful, and nothing more entertaining,” replied the Canon, gaily.

“Theodore is cultivating domesticity,” retorted the peer, with a look at his younger brother. “I believe he wants to be made a bishop.”

“You take nothing seriously, Thomas. It is a failing of which I cannot but recommend you to correct yourself.”

“Stow it, Theodore,” replied the other, unmoved.

Theodore Spratte, Vicar of St. Gregory’s, South Kensington, and Canon of Tercanbury, was the youngest son of the first Earl Spratte, Lord Chancellor of England. He was a handsome man, tall and erect; and his presence was commanding. His comely looks had been to him through life a source of abiding pleasure. He preserved the slenderness, the brisk carriage of youth; and though but little younger than his brother, his fair hair, turning now to grey, remained profuse and curling. His fine blue eyes looked out upon the world with a happy self-confidence, and his mobile, shapely mouth was ever ready to break into a smile. The heartiness of his laughter sufficed to make all and sundry his particular friends. It was pleasant to meet a man who was so clean and fresh, always so admirably dressed, and whose appearance was so prepossessing. But he was nowhere more imposing than in the pulpit; for he wore his cassock and surplice, his scarlet hood, with a reassuring dash which convinced you that here was a pilot in whom you need not hesitate to set your trust. He had a certain gift for oratory. His voice was resonant and well modulated. The charm of his active personality was such that though, in those flowing periods and that wealth of metaphor, amid these sounding, forcible adjectives, the matter of his discourse often escaped you, you felt notwithstanding exhilarated and content. If his sermons redounded to his own honour rather than to the honour of God, it was not Canon Spratte who suffered.

When he was left a widower with two young children, his sister Sophia, who had remained unmarried, came to live with him. In course of time Lionel, his son, grew up, entered the Church, and became his curate. His daughter Winnie was twenty-one, and in her fragile, delicate way as pretty as a shepherdess of Dresden china. She had all the charm of innocence, and such knowledge of the world as three seasons in London and the daily example of her father could give her.

“By the way, Lionel, I suppose you took that wedding at 2.30 yesterday?”

“Yes,” answered the curate.

But the curtness of his reply was almost injurious contrasted with his father’s florid delivery; it seemed barely decent to treat in monosyllables with the Vicar of St. Gregory’s. His lightest observations were coloured by that rich baritone so that they gained a power and a significance which other men, less happily gifted, have only in treating of grave affairs.

“I often wonder it’s worth your while to marry quite poor people,” suggested Lord Spratte. “Why don’t you send them down to the East End?”

“Our duty, my dear Thomas, we have to do our duty,” replied Canon Spratte.

Ponsonby, entering the room to intimate that luncheon was ready, looked significantly at Lady Sophia, without speaking, and silently withdrew.

“I see that the Bishop of Barchester is dangerously ill,” said Lionel, when they were seated.

Lionel was as tall and fair as his father, but lacked his energy and his force of character. He was dressed as little like a clergyman as possible.

“I’m told he’s dying,” answered the Canon, gravely. “He’s been out of health for a long time, and I cannot help thinking that when the end comes it will be a happy release.”

“I met him once and thought him a very brilliant man,” remarked Lady Sophia.

“Andover?” cried the Canon, with surprise, throwing himself back in his chair. “My dear Sophia! I know he had a certain reputation for learning, but I never had any great opinion of it.”

Lady Sophia for all reply pursed her lips. She exchanged a glance with Lord Spratte.

“Of course I am the last person to say anything against a man who stands on the threshold of eternity,” added the Canon. “But between ourselves, if the truth must be told — he was nothing more than a doddering old idiot. And a man of no family.”

Than this, in Theodore Spratte’s judgment, nothing could be said more utterly disparaging.

“I wonder who’ll succeed him,” said Lionel, thoughtfully.

“I really don’t know who there is with any great claim upon the Government.” He met his brother’s bantering smile, and quick to catch its meaning, answered without hesitation. “To tell you the truth, Thomas, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Lord Stonehenge offered the bishopric to me.”

“You’d look rather a toff in leggings,” observed the other. “Wouldn’t he, Sophia?”

Lady Sophia gave the Canon an inquiring stare.

“My dear Tommy, I’ve not seen his legs for forty years.”

“I think this is hardly a matter upon which you should exercise your humour, my dear,” retorted the Canon, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, I hope you will accept no bishopric until you’ve made quite sure that the golf-links are beyond reproach,” said Lord Spratte.

“I’ll tell Lord Stonehenge that an eighteen-hole course is a sine qua non of my elevation to the Episcopacy,” retorted the Canon, ironically.

Between Lord Spratte and his sister on the one hand and Theodore on the other, was an unceasing duel, in which the parson fought for the respect due to his place and dignity, while the others were determined to suffer no nonsense. They attacked his pretension with flouting and battered his pomposity with ridicule. To anything in the nature of rhodomontade they were merciless, and in their presence he found it needful to observe a certain measure. He knew that no society was august enough to abash them into silence, and so took care not to expose himself under very public circumstances to the irony of the one or to the brutal mocking of the other. But the struggle was not altogether unpleasant. He could hit back with a good deal of vigour, and never hesitated to make plain statements in plain language. His position gave him the advantage that he could marshal on his side the forces of morality and religion; and when they had dealt so good a blow that he could not conceal his discomfiture, he was able to regain his self-esteem by calling them blasphemous or vulgar.

The Canon turned to his daughter with an affectionate smile.

“And what have you been doing this morning, Winnie?”

“I went to see the model dwellings that Mr. Railing is interested in.”

“By Jove, you’re not goin’ in for district visitin’, Winnie?” cried her uncle, putting up his eye-glass. “I hope you won’t catch anything.”

Winnie blushed a little under his stare.

“The condition of the poor is awfully bad. I think one ought to do something.”

“Who is Mr. Railing?” inquired Lionel. “One of the Worcestershire Railings?”

“No, just a common or garden Railing,” said the Canon.

He rubbed his hands and looked round the table for appreciation of this mild jest, but only his curate was civil enough to smile.

“He’s a mighty clever young man, and I think he’ll be very useful to me,” he added.

“I notice that your actions are always governed by unselfish motives,” murmured Lady Sophia.

“God helps those who help themselves. Mr. Railing is a Christian Socialist and writes for the Radical papers. I think he has a future, and I feel it my duty to give him some encouragement.” His voice assumed those rolling, grandiloquent tones which rang so effectively in St. Gregory’s Church. “Now-a-days, when Socialism is rapidly becoming a power in the land, when it is spreading branches into every stratum of society, it behoves us to rally it to the Church. Christianity is Socialism.”

Lady Sophia gave a deprecating smile: “My dear Theodore, remember that only your family is present.”

But it was not easy to stem the flood of Canon Spratte’s eloquence. He threw back his handsome head and looked at the full-length portrait of his father, in robes of office, which adorned the wall.

“I pride myself above all things upon being abreast of the times. Every movement that savours of advance will find in me an enthusiastic supporter. My father, the late Lord Chancellor, was one of the first to perceive the coming strength of the people. And I am proud to know that my family has always identified itself with the future. Advance,” again the thrilling voice rang out. “Advance has always been our watchword, advance and progress.”

Lord Spratte gave a low chuckle, for his brother was delivered into his hand.

“You speak as if we’d come over with the Conquest, Theodore.”

Canon Spratte turned to him coolly.

“Have you never looked out the name of Spratte in Debrett?”

“Frequently. I find the peerage excellent readin’ to fall back on when there’s nothin’ in the sportin’ papers. But it’s no bloomin’ good, Theodore; the family tree’s all bogus. A man with the name of Spratte didn’t have ancestors at the battle of Hastings.”

“I wish to goodness you would express yourself in grammatical English,” answered the Canon, irritably. “I detest slang, and I deplore this habit of yours of omitting the terminal letter of certain words.”

“You digress, my dear Theodore.”

“Not at all! I don’t deny that the family has had its vicissitudes; you will find it difficult to discover one in the peerage that has not. At all events my father implicitly believed in the family tree.”

“Well, he must have been a pretty innocent old buffer to do that. I never found any one else who would. Upon my word, I don’t see why a man called Spratte should have ancestors called Montmorency.”

“I should have thought that even in your brief stay at Oxford you learnt enough natural history to know that every man must have a father,” retorted the Canon, ironically.

Lord Spratte had been sent down from the ‘Varsity for some escapade of his early youth, and for thirty years his brother had never hesitated to remind him of it.

“All I can say is that if a man called Spratte had a father called Montmorency, the less said about it the better,” he answered. “I may be particular, but it don’t sound moral to me.”

“Your facetiousness is misplaced, Thomas, and considering that Winnie is present, the taste of it is more than doubtful. The connection at which you are pleased to sneer is perfectly clear and perfectly honourable. In 1631, Aubrey de Montmorency married....”

But Lady Sophia, in tones of entreaty, interrupted: “Oh, Theodore, Theodore, not again!”

He gave her a glance of some vexation, but held his tongue.

“The first millionaire I meet who’s lookin’ out for a family tree, I’ll sell him mine for fifty quid,” said Lord Spratte. “And I’m blowed if it wouldn’t be cheap at the price, considerin’ that it’s chock full of Howards and Talbots and de Veres — to say nothin’ of a whole string of Montmorencys.”

“You don’t know Sir John Durant, the brewer, do you, father?” asked Lionel. “He told me that since they gave him a baronetcy people have been regularly sending him a new and original family tree once a week.”

“He must have quite a forest by now,” answered Lord Spratte. “What does he use ’em for — hop-poles?”

“I should have thought they would make admirable Christmas presents for his poor relations,” suggested the Canon, who could not resist his little joke even on subjects dear to him. He turned again to his daughter. “By the way, Winnie, I find I shall be unable to go to Mr. Railing’s meeting to-morrow.”

“He’ll be awfully disappointed. He was expecting you to make a speech.”

“I’ve promised Lady Vizard to lunch with her to meet the Princess of Wartburg-Hochstein. I shouldn’t be able to get away early enough. A clergyman’s time is really never his own, and the Princess wishes particularly to meet me.”

“People so often forget that even Royal Personages have spiritual difficulties,” murmured Lady Sophia.

“I shall write a little note to Mr. Railing wishing him luck, and with your permission, Sophia, I’ll ask him to tea afterwards.”

“Is he presentable?”

“He’s a gentleman, Aunt Sophia,” cried Winnie. “And he’s as beautiful as a Greek god.”

Winnie flushed as she said this, and dropped her eyes. They were pleasant and blue like her father’s, but instead of his bold friendliness had a plaintiveness of expression which was rather charming. They seemed to appeal for confidence and for affection.

“Shall I come and address your meeting, Winnie?” asked Lord Spratte, amused at her enthusiasm. “What is it about?”

“Teetotalism!” she smiled.

“Most of the London clergy go in for that now, don’t they?” remarked Lionel. “The bishop asked me the other day whether I was an abstainer.”

“The bishop is a man of no family, Lionel,” retorted his father. “Personally I make no secret of the fact that I do not approve of teetotalism. Temperance, yes! But how can you be temperate if you abstain entirely? Corn and wine, the wheat, the barley, the vine, are ubiquitous; the corn strengthens, the wine gladdens man’s heart, as at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee.”

Lord Spratte opened his mouth to speak.

“I wish you wouldn’t continually interrupt me, Thomas,” cried the Canon, before his brother could utter a word. “He who has solemnly pledged himself to total abstinence has surrendered to a society of human and modern institution his liberty to choose. Now what is it you wished to say, Thomas?”

“I merely wanted to ask Ponsonby for more potatoes.”

“I knew it was some flippant observation,” retorted the Canon.

“The bishop suggested that total abstinence in the clergy served as an example,” said Lionel, mildly.

“As an example it has been a dismal failure. For many years I have searched for some successful results, for one man who would prove to me that, being a drunkard, he was so much impressed by the example of his clergyman, who for his sake and imitation ceased to drink his glass of beer at luncheon, his glass of port at dinner, or his glass of whisky and water at night, that he broke away from his vicious indulgence and became a sober man.”

Ponsonby stood at the Canon’s elbow, patiently waiting for the end of this harangue.

“Hock, sir?” said he, in sepulchral tones.

“Certainly, Ponsonby, certainly!” replied the Canon, so vigorously that the butler was not a little disconcerted. “What do you think of this hock, Thomas? Not bad, I flatter myself.”

He raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the pleasant odour. He drank his wine and smiled. An expression of placid satisfaction came over his face. He favoured the company with a Latin quotation:

“O quam bonum est,

O quam jucundum est,

Poculis fraternis gaudere.”

II

IT was one of Canon Spratte’s peculiarities that he liked to read his Times before any other member of his family. He found a peculiar delight in opening it himself, and likened the perusal of a newspaper which some one else had read, to the drinking of milk from which a dishonest dairyman had skimmed the cream. Next morning, running his eye down the list of contents, he discovered that the Bishop of Barchester was dead.

“Poor Andover is no more, Sophia,” he remarked, with a decent solemnity.

He ate his kidney absently, and it was not till he passed his coffee-cup to Lady Sophia to be refilled that he made any observation.

“It’s really almost providential that the poor old man should depart this life on the very day I am to meet Lord Stonehenge at dinner. I’d better have the pair to-night, Sophia.”

“Where are you dining?”

“At the Hollingtons,” he answered. “Last time a bishopric was vacant, the Prime Minister practically assured me that I should have the next.”

“He’s probably done the same to half the school-masters in England.”

“Nonsense! Who is there that could take it? They’ve none of them half the claims that I have.”

Theodore Spratte never concealed from the world that he rated himself highly. He esteemed bashfulness a sign of bad manners, and was used to say that a man who pretended not to know his own value was a possing fool.

“It’s a ridiculous system altogether to give a bishopric to Tom Noddy because he’s taught Latin verses to a parcel of stupid school-boys. And besides, as the youngest son of the late Lord Chancellor, I think I may expect something from my country.”

“Pray pass me the toast,” said Lady Sophia.

“I’m not a vain man, but I honestly think I have the right to some recognition. As my father, the late Lord Chancellor of England, often said....”

“I wish to goodness you wouldn’t talk of him as if he were your father only, Theodore,” interrupted Lady Sophia, not without irritation. “I have just as much right to him as you.”

“I think you asked for the toast, my dear.”

Presently Canon Spratte, taking the paper with him, retired to his study. He was a man of regular habits, knowing that to acquire such is the first step to greatness, episcopal and otherwise; and after breakfast he was used to smoke his pipe, meditate, and read the Times. But this morning, somewhat agitated by the news of Bishop Andover’s demise, he took from the shelves that book which at present was his only contribution to the great literature of England. On the death of his father, laden with years and with honours, Canon Spratte had begun immediately to gather materials for a biography. This was eventually published under the title: Life and Letters of Josiah Spratte, Lord Chancellor of England. It was in two volumes, magnificently bound in calf, with the family arms, a blaze of gold, on the side.

When the Canon set about this great work he went to his sister and begged her to make notes of her recollections.

“You can help me a great deal, Sophia,” he said. “With your woman’s intelligence, you will have noticed a good many points which have escaped me. The masculine intellect takes in the important main lines, whereas women observe only the frivolous details. But I recognize that it is just these frivolous details, properly sorted, which will give life and variety to that grand career absorbed by affairs of State and the advantage of the nation.”

Lady Sophia, accustomed to these tirades, smiled dryly and said: “Shall I tell you the very first thing I remember, Theodore? I can’t have been more than six years old, but I have never forgotten it.”

“That is very interesting. Let me put it down at once.”

He took from his pocket the little book, which he carried with him always to jot down the thoughts that periodically occurred to him.

“Now, Sophia.”

“Father and mother were having a conversation, and suddenly father beat his fist on the table so that the whole room shook.”

“Yes, he had that energetic, effective way of expressing himself,” said the Canon. “He was a man of really forceful character. That is a point upon which I mean to lay great stress.”

“He beat his fist on the table and he roared out at the top of his voice: ‘Your father’s a damned fool, Maria; and your mother’s a damned fool, Maria; but, by gad, you’re a bigger damned fool than both of them put together.’”

The Canon sprang up and throwing back his head with a gesture habitual to him, drew to his full, imposing height.

“You shock and surprise me, Sophia. If these are your recollections, I advise you to forget them as quickly as you possibly can.”

Nor had he better success with his brother.

“I wonder whether you can give me no anecdotes, no interesting side-lights on our father’s character? I am determined to make my biography as complete as possible.”

“I’ll give you an anecdote by all means,” said Lord Spratte. “You remember that the old ‘un very much objected to potatoes baked in their skins.”

“A very pardonable and interesting idiosyncrasy of genius,” interposed the biographer.

“Well, one Sunday night when we had people to supper, by some accident they were brought in. The servant handed the dish to father. Father looked at him and slowly rose to his feet. ‘Don’t you know, you idiot,’ he bellowed, ‘that I don’t like potatoes baked in their skins?’ He took them out of the dish, one by one, while the servant stood petrified, and threw them with all his might at the pictures on the walls. Each picture had its potato till the dish was empty. Then he sat down again calmly and began to eat his supper.”

“I shall certainly put down nothing in my biography which tends to cast ridicule or odium on the memory of a great man,” said Canon Spratte, frigidly. “My motto is: De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

On this principle the Life and Letters was written. To testify to filial admiration there were in St. Gregory’s Vicarage no less than three portraits of the first Earl Spratte, but the most characteristic was a copy of that which the Chancellor himself, with due regard to his fame and importance, had bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery. It showed the great man seated, his hands grasping the arms of his chair with the savage vigour that was customary with him. They were strong, large hands, and the tendons stood out from the brutal force wherewith he held them. He looked the spectator full in the face, sitting very squarely, bent forward in the despotic attitude which all who had appeared before him knew so well. He wore the full-bottomed wig of his office and the gorgeous robes, edged with gold. His head was thrust out and he stared from under his shaggy brows with an expression of ruthless violence; his strong features were set in a villainous scowl; his hard, cruel mouth was clenched as though he were determined that nothing should affect his will. And the idea which the fine portrait gave, was borne out by the memoirs of the time.

Springing, notwithstanding the Canon’s grandiloquence, from the dregs of commercial life, Josiah Spratte had fought his way to the greatest prize of his calling by an indomitable will and a truculent savagery that spared neither enemies nor friends. Though endowed by nature with no great subtlety of mind, he had a gift of fluent speech, an imperturbable self-confidence, and a physique of extraordinary vigour. He was unhampered by any thought for the susceptibilities of others, and he was regardless of good manners. He bullied his way to the Woolsack by the weight of his personality and the harsh roar of his voice. From the outset of his career, as a junior, he treated his leaders with unhidden contempt. He used the solicitors who gave him briefs like vermin, dealing with them as might a harsh master with a set of ignorant and rebellious school-boys. They hated him, but were impressed withal, and quickly brought him more work than he could do. Then, beginning to feel his power, he browbeat the court so that weak judges were like wax in his hands and juries trembled at his ferocious glance. He went into Parliament and trampled impartially upon his associates and his opponents. He excited more hatred than any one of his generation, for he was insolent, overbearing, and impatient of contradiction; but in a short while the Government was forced to make him Attorney-General. From the beginning his mind had been set on the ultimate goal, and he waited till the Chancellor of that time died. This was the most critical point of his life, for all concerned understood perfectly at what Josiah Spratte aimed; but now all the bitterness, anger, and loathing he had so wilfully aroused, were banded against him; and he had to fight as well against the rivalry of some and the bitterness of others. But like a lion at bay, with magnificent self-confidence, he squared himself to bear down all obstacles. The Government was undecided. A certain eminent lawyer, Sir Robert Parkleigh, had claims upon it which were undeniable. Having held office in a previous administration he had waived his right to promotion on the understanding that his reward should be great thereafter: he was a man of vigorous understanding, learned, urbane and of great family. The appointment would be very popular. But the Attorney-General was not a man to be trifled with, and a go-between was sent unofficially to learn his views.

“I suppose Parkleigh will get the Chancellorship,” said this person, in the course of an amiable conversation.

“You suppose nothing of the sort,” shouted Josiah Spratte. His face grew red with passion and his scowl deepened as the veins of his forehead stood out like knotted cords. He fixed on the man those piercing eyes which seemed to read into the soul, discovering shameful secrets. “You’ve been sent to find out what I thought about the Chancellorship? It’s what I suspected. Don’t deny it!”

Beads of sweat stood on the other’s brow as the Attorney-General towered over him, threatening and peremptory. He vowed he had received no such mission.

“Don’t deny it, I tell you,” cried Josiah Spratte. Then, furiously, he walked up and down the room. “Tell them,” he hissed at length, with undescribable venom, “Tell them that if Parkleigh is made Chancellor, I’ll kick the Government out. By God, they shan’t stay in a month!”

While the appointment was pending, a great lady, suffering under some brutal affront, sought to beard the lion.

“Do you know what people are saying about you, Mr. Attorney? They’re wondering who this sprat is that we are asked to swallow.”

Sir Josiah looked at her.

“Tell your friends, Madam, to be thankful the sprat is not a whale, because even if he were, by God they’d have to swallow him. And what’s more, they’d have to pretend they liked him!”

Shortly afterwards the Prime Minister wrote a very civil note to his subordinate offering him the much-coveted place. Josiah Spratte was raised to the Peerage. A second term of office was rewarded by new honour, and he became Earl Spratte of Beachcombe and Viscount Rallington.

But the great lawyer carried also into private life the tones with which he cowed juries and sent witnesses fainting from the box. He never spoke but to command and gave no order without a string of oaths. When he fell into a temper, which happened several times a day, he could be heard from top to bottom of the house. His wife, his servants, trembled before him; his children in his presence spoke in whispers, and he took pleasure in humiliating them with brutal raillery. He met his match but twice. The first time was at his club when he was playing whist. This was his favourite relaxation, and he was always to be found in the card-room about six o’clock waiting for a rubber. One day by chance a fourth could not be found, and the Chancellor himself went into the smoking-room to look for a player. It was a sunny afternoon in July, and the place was deserted, except for a young guardsman who sat comfortably sleeping in an arm-chair. Without hesitation Lord Spratte shook him violently till he was wide awake, and asked if he knew the game. He answered that he played very badly and would much sooner resume his nap; but Lord Spratte declined to hear excuses, and dragged him by sheer force into the card-room. The soldier had only spoken the truth when he described himself as a bad player, and since he was the Chancellor’s partner, things did not go very smoothly. The elder man took no trouble to hide his annoyance when the other made a mistake, and expressed his opinion of the subaltern’s intelligence with more bluntness than civility.

“Oh, confound you, shut up!” cried the guardsman at last. “How d’you expect a fellow to play if you go on ragging him like a fish-wife?”

“I don’t think you know who I am, sir,” answered the Chancellor, with frowning brows.

“Oh yes, I do! You’re the Lord Chancellor, aren’t you? But you might mind your manners for all that. You’re not in your dirty police-court now.”

For the rest of that rubber the distinguished lawyer never opened his mouth.

But next time he was worsted in debate the results were more serious. Lord Spratte, still restless after the attainment of his ambition, was seized with the desire to found a great family; and on this account wished his eldest son, who had assumed the title of Viscount Rallington, to marry a certain heiress of important connections. The lady was not unwilling, but Rallington stubbornly refused. At first, white with rage, Lord Spratte asked how he dared to cross him; and he showered upon his son that abundant vituperation of which he was the finest master in England. But without effect. The Chancellor was so astounded at this display of spirit that for once in his life he condescended to argue. His son stood firm. Then the old man burst out again with violent temper.

“And who the devil are you?” he cried. “Haven’t I raised you from the gutter? What would you be without me? By God, you shall do whatever I tell you.”

Rallington lost all patience. He put off the timidity with which for years he had endured so much and went up to his father.

“Look here, don’t talk to me like that. I’ll marry a barmaid if I choose, and be damned to you!”

The Chancellor’s hair stood on end with wrath, and he gasped for breath. His passion was such that for a minute he could not speak. Then his son, driven at length to open rebellion, poured out the hatred which had so long accumulated. He reminded him of the tyranny with which he had used his whole family, and the terror in which he had held them. He had robbed them of all freedom, so that they were slaves to his every whim. To his angry violence and to his selfishness all their happiness had been sacrificed.

“You’ve been a bullying ruffian all your life, and no one has had the pluck to stand up to you. I’m sick of it, and I won’t stand it any more. D’you hear?”

At last the Chancellor found words, and beset his son with a torrent of blasphemy, and with foul-mouthed abuse.

“Be quiet!” said the other, standing up to him. “How dare you speak to me like that! It’s no good trying to bully me now.”

“By God, I’ll knock you down.”

Rallington thrust his face close to his father’s, and for a moment fear seized the old man. Here at length was some one whom he could not cow, and he hated his son.

“You’d better not touch me. You can’t thrash me now as you could when I was a boy. I recommend you to take great care.”

Lord Spratte raised his hands, but a trembling came suddenly upon him, so that he could not move.

“Get out of my house,” he screamed. “Get out of my house.”

“I’m only too glad to go.”

The arteries beat in the old man’s head so that he thought some horrible thing would happen to him. He poured out brandy and drank it, but it tasted like water. He sat for hours with clenched fists and scowling brow; and at last with a savage laugh he took his will and with his own hand wrote a codicil in which he deprived his eldest son of every penny he could. This relieved him and he breathed more freely. Presently he called his family together and told them without a word of explanation that Rallington was his son no longer.

“If any of you mention his name, or if I hear that you have had any communication with him, you shall go as he went.”

The pair never met again, for Rallington went abroad and died, unmarried, one month before his father. Thomas, the next son, who had been known all his life as Tommy Tiddler, succeeded the Chancellor as second Earl Spratte of Beachcombe.

But the excellent Theodore, with proper devotion, took care in his biography not even to hint at this characteristic violence. He wrote with a flowing, somewhat pompous style; and the moral pointed by these two handsome volumes was that with uprightness, sobriety, and due allegiance to the Church by law established, it was possible to reach the highest honours. The learned Canon traced the ancestry of his family to very remote periods. He had no difficulty in convincing himself that the plebeian surname was but a vulgar error for des Prats; and to the outspoken ridicule of his elder brother, was able after much study to announce that a member of the English branch of the Montmorencys had assumed the name in the seventeenth century upon his marriage with a French heiress. With these distinguished antecedents it was no wonder that Josiah Spratte should appear a benevolent old gentleman of mild temper and pious disposition, apt to express himself in well-balanced periods. He would have made an excellent churchwarden or a secretary to charitable institutions, but why precisely he should have become Lord Chancellor of England nowhere appeared. In short, the eloquent divine, with the best intentions in the world, wrote a life of his father which was not only perfectly untrue, but also exceedingly tedious.

The book had a certain success with old ladies, who put it beside their works of devotion and had it read to them in hours of mental distress. Sometimes, when they were persons of uncommon importance, the Canon himself consented to read to them; and then, so spirited was his delivery, so well-modulated his voice, it seemed as improving as one of his own sermons. But the Life and Letters certainly had no more assiduous nor enthusiastic reader than the author thereof.

“I don’t think I’m a vain man,” he remarked, “but I can’t help feeling this is exactly how a biography ought to be written.”

There was a knock at the door, and the Canon, replacing the volume at which he had glanced, took out in its stead the first book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. He had far too keen a sense of decorum to appear one man to the world and to his immediate relatives another. No unforeseen accident had ever found him other than self-contained, oratorical, and didactic. Not even his family was privileged to see him en robe de chambre.

It was his son who knocked. Lionel had been taking an early service at St. Gregory’s, and had not yet seen his father.

“Come in, come in,” said the Canon. “Good morning, Lionel.”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, father. I want to book some certificates.”

“You can never disturb me when you are fulfilling the duties of your office, my boy. Pray sit down.”

He put the Ecclesiastical Polity open on the desk.

“Hulloa, are you reading this?” asked the curate. “I’ve not looked at it since I was at Oxford.”

“Then you make a mistake, Lionel. Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity is not only a monument of the English Church, but also a masterwork of the English language. That is my complaint with the clergy of the present day, that they neglect the great productions of their fathers. Stevenson you read, and you read Renan, atheist though he is; but Hooker you have not looked at since you were at Oxford.”

“I see that Andover is dead, father,” said Lionel, to change the conversation.

“I look upon it as an uncommon happy release.”

“I wonder if they really will offer you the bishopric?”

“My dear boy, that is not a subject upon which I allow my thoughts to dwell. I will not conceal from you that, as the youngest surviving son of the late Lord Chancellor, I think I have some claims upon my country. And I have duties towards it as well, so that if the bishopric is offered to me I shall not hesitate to accept. You remember St. Paul’s words to Timothy? This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop he desireth a good work. But in these matters there is so much ignoble wire-pulling, so much backstairs influence to which my character is not suited and to which I could not bring myself to descend.”

Presently, however, when Canon Spratte strolled along Piccadilly on the way to his club, it occurred to him that the day before he had given his tailor an order for two pairs of trousers. His circumstances had taught him neither to spend money recklessly, nor to despise a certain well-bred economy; and it was by no means impossible that he would have no use for those particular articles of clothing. He walked up Savile Row.

“Mr. Marsden, will you inquire whether those garments I ordered yesterday have been cut yet?”

The tailor passed the question down his speaking-tube.

“No, sir,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Then will you delay them till further notice?”

“Certainly, sir.”

Canon Spratte was going out of the shop when he noticed on a fashion plate the costume of a bishop.

“Ah, do you make gaiters, Mr. Marsden?” said he, stopping.

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re very difficult things to cut. So many of my friends wear very ill-fitting gaiters. Fine day, isn’t it? Good-morning.”

III

WHEN Canon Spratte reached the Athenæum he found a note waiting for him.

My Dear Canon,

I should very much like to have a little talk with you. I find it difficult to say in so many words upon what topic, but perhaps you will guess. I think it better to see you before I do anything further, and therefore should be grateful if you could give me five minutes as soon as possible.

Yours ever faithfully,

Wroxham.

He read it, and a smile of self-satisfaction played quickly on his lips. He divined at once that the writer wished to ask Winnie to marry him.

“I foresaw it when the boy was fourteen,” he exclaimed.

His own wife had died ten years before. She was a pale, mild creature, and had been somewhat overwhelmed by her husband’s greatness. When he was still a curate, handsome and debonair, the Canon had fallen in love with the youngest daughter of Lord Frampstone. It was an alliance, (Theodore Spratte would never have condescended to a marriage,) of which the Chancellor thoroughly approved; and the girl, dazzled by her suitor’s courtly brilliance, had succumbed at once to his fascinations. She remained dazzled to the end of her life. He never unbent. He treated her always as though she were a congregation. Even in the privacies of domestic life he was talking to a multitude; and his wife, if sometimes she wished he would descend to her level and vouchsafe to be familiar, never ceased blindly to admire him. She sighed for a little simple love, but the Canon could not forget that he was a son of a great Lord Chancellor and she the daughter of a noble house. She was confused by his oratorical outbursts, his wit, his grandiose ways; and gradually, unnoticed in the white brilliance of her husband’s glory, she vanished out of existence. The Canon’s only complaint was that his wife had never lived up to the position which was hers by right. She cared nothing for social success, and was happiest in the bosom of her family.

“Upon my word, my dear, you might as well be the wife of a dissenting minister,” he exclaimed often.

But her death gave him an opportunity to prove his own regard and to make up for her previous shortcomings. He ordered a funeral of the utmost magnificence; and the gentle lady, who had longed only for peace, was buried with as great parade as if she had been a princess of the blood. On a large brass tablet, emblazoned with his own arms and with those of her family, the lamenting husband, who prided himself not a little on his skilful Latinity, placed a Ciceronian epitaph which caused amazement and admiration in all beholders.

The recollection of his wife flashed at this moment through the Canon’s mind, and putting his own sentiments into her meek breast, he flourished the letter and chuckled to himself.

“I wish she were alive to see this day.”

Lord Wroxham, left fatherless in early boyhood, was head of a family than which there was none in England more ancient and more distinguished. Canon Spratte called a servant.

“Will you ask the porter if Lord Wroxham is in the club?”

“Yes, sir. I saw him come in half-an-hour ago.”

“Ha!”

Canon Spratte put a cigarette between his lips and jauntily went to the smoking-room. He caught sight at once of his prospective son-in-law, but made no sign that he observed him. He strolled across the room.

“Canon Spratte!” said the young man, rising and turning very red.

“Ah, my dear boy,” said the Canon, cordially holding out his hand. “Are you here? I’m delighted to see you. I was just going to write you a note.”

Wroxham was a young man of five-and-twenty, slender and of moderate height, with short crisp hair and a small moustache. His eyes were prominent and short-sighted, and he wore gold-rimmed pince-nez. His appearance was a little insignificant, but his pleasant, earnest face, if not handsome, was very kindly. He was nervous, and had evidently no great facility in expressing himself.

Canon Spratte, aware of his confusion, took his arm and led him to a more secluded place.

“Come and sit in the window, dear boy, and tell me what it is you wish to say.”

When the Canon desired to be charming, none could excel him. There was such a sympathetic warmth in his manner that, if you were not irritated by a slightly patronizing air, your heart never failed to go out to him.

“Have a cigarette,” he said, producing a golden case of considerable value. “Give me a match, there’s a good fellow.”

He beamed on the youth, but still Wroxham hesitated.

“You got my note, Canon?”

“Yes, yes. So charming of you to write to me. I’ve known you so long, dear boy — if there’s anything I can do for you, command me.”

Wroxham had often come with Lionel from Eton to spend part of his holidays in the Canon’s hospitable house.

“Well, the fact is — I want to ask Winnie to marry me, with your permission.”

Canon Spratte restrained the smile of triumph which struggled to gain possession of his mouth. When he answered, his manner was perfectly sympathetic, but somewhat grave as befitted the occasion.

“My dear Harry, I will not conceal from you that your sentiments have not been altogether hidden from me. And you will understand that if I had not approved of them I should scarcely have allowed you to come so frequently to my house.”

Wroxham smiled, but found nothing very apposite to say.

“I have had for years the very greatest affection for you; and of late, since you took your seat in the House of Lords, I have had also esteem and admiration. It is an excellent sign when a young man of your position throws himself so earnestly into affairs of State. I think you have a great future before you.”

He put up his hand to request silence, as he saw the other wished to make some remark. Canon Spratte did not suffer interruption kindly.

“But in these matters one is a father first and last. I have reason to believe that you are a steady young man, without vices, and I think you have an excellent temper, than which nothing is more necessary in married life. But you must allow me to inquire a little into your circumstances.”

The young man very simply explained that he possessed three houses, a great many acres of land, and an income of twenty thousand a year. Canon Spratte listened gravely.

“I should like to leave all the affairs about settlements in your hands, Canon. I’ll do whatever you think fit.”

“All that sounds very satisfactory,” answered the Canon, at last. “I am not the man to go into pecuniary details. Thank God, I can honestly say I’m not mercenary, and I think we can leave all business details to our respective lawyers. My dear boy, I give you full permission to pay your addresses to Winnie.”

Wroxham flushed, and taking off his glasses, rubbed them with a handkerchief.

“Do you think she cares for me?”

The Canon took both his hands.

“My dear fellow, you need have no fear on that point. Of course, I leave my children complete liberty of action, but I don’t think I am indiscreet in assuring you that Winnie is — well, very fond of you.”

“I’m so glad,” said Wroxham, a happy smile breaking on his lips.

“Come to luncheon to-morrow and have a talk with my little girl afterwards. I’ll arrange it so that you shall be undisturbed.”

“It’s awfully good of you.”

“Not at all! Not at all! But now I really must be running off. I’m lunching with Lady Vizard, to meet the Princess of Wartburg-Hochstein.”

IV

WINNIE went to Mr. Railing’s temperance meeting by herself. When she was setting out to go home, with somewhat marked deliberation, the Socialist joined her.

“Your father has asked me to come to tea.”

“I know,” she answered. “Shall we walk back together?”

Bertram Railing was three-and-twenty, and Winnie had not exaggerated too grossly when she vowed he was as beautiful as a Greek god. He was very dark, but his skin, smoother than polished ivory, had the glowing colour of Titian’s young Adonis; and his hair, worn long and admirably curling, his fine sincere eyes, were dark too. With his broad forehead, his straight nose, his well-shaped, sensual mouth, he was indeed very handsome; and there was a squareness about his jaw which suggested besides much strength of character. His expression was sombre; but when, fired with enthusiasm, he spoke of any subject that deeply interested him, his face grew very mobile. He wore a blue serge suit, a red tie, and a low collar which showed his powerful, statuesque neck. If he could not be altogether unconscious of his good looks, he was certainly indifferent to them. His whole life was given up to a passionate striving for reform, and his absorbing interest in the improvement of the people allowed no room for trifling, unworthy thoughts. The strenuous pursuit of the ideal gave him a fascination far greater than that of his wonderful face.

“Did you like my lecture?” he asked, as they walked side by side.

Winnie looked at him, her eyes filled suddenly with tears.

“Yes.”

It was all she could say, but Railing smiled with pleasure. In this one word was so much feeling that it pleased him more than all the applause he had received.

“You can’t imagine what I felt while I was listening to you,” she said at last.

“If I spoke well it was because I knew your eyes were upon me.”

“I felt perfectly hysterical. I had to bite my lips to prevent myself from crying.”

They walked in silence, each occupied with tumultuous thoughts. His presence was enchanting to Winnie, and yet the joy of it was almost painful. A marvellous change had come upon her during the last few days, and life was altogether new. The world seemed strangely full of emotion, and the parts of the earth, in the spring sunshine, sang to one another joyful songs.

“You’ve done so much for me,” she murmured, happy to confess her inmost thoughts. “Until I knew you I was so selfish and stupid. But now everything is different. I want to help you in your work. I want to work too.”

For a moment, finding nothing to say, he gazed at her. His brown eyes, so strong and full of meaning, looked into hers gravely; and hers were blue and tender. But the silence grew unendurable, and flushing, the girl looked down.

“Why don’t you speak?”

“I think I’m afraid,” he answered, and there was a tremor in his voice.

She felt that his heart was beating as quickly as her own.

“Who am I that you should be afraid?” she whispered.

He gave a sigh that was half joy, half sorrow; and clenched his hands in the effort to master himself. But the girl’s sweet freshness rose to his nostrils like the scent of the earth in the morning after the rain, and his poor wits were all aflame.

“If I’ve done anything for you,” he said at last, “you’ve done a thousand times more for me. When first I met you I was utterly discouraged. The way seemed so hard. It was so difficult to make any progress. And then you filled me with hope.”

He began to speak hurriedly, and Winnie listened to his words as though they were some new evangel. He told her of his plans and of his enthusiastic ambition to get the people the power that was theirs by right. When he spoke of wages and of labour, of Co-operative Associations and of Trades Unions, it sounded like music in her ears. He told her of Lassalle’s fevered life, of Marx’ ceaseless struggle, of the pitying anguish of Carl Marlo. He spoke so earnestly, with such a vehemence of phrase, that Winnie, used to the sonorous platitudes of her father, was carried out as it were into the bottomless sea of life. After the artificiality wherein she had lived, these new doctrines, so boldly regardless of consequence, eager only for justice, were like the fresh air of heaven: her pulse beat more rapidly, and she knew that beyond her narrow sphere was a freer world. Railing spoke of the people; and the human beings whom she had classed disdainfully as the lower orders, gained flesh and blood in her imagination. He spoke of their passions and their misery, of their strength, their vice and squalor. The many-headed crowd grew picturesque and coloured. Winnie was seized on a sudden with the desire to go into their midst; and gaining a new strength of purpose, she felt already a greater self-reliance. Then more slowly, as though her presence were almost forgotten, but with the same intense conviction, the young Socialist spoke of the Nazarene who was the friend of the poor, the outcast, and the leper. Winnie had known Him only as the mainstay of an opulent and established Church. In her mind He was strangely connected with pews of pitch-pine, a fashionable congregation in Sabbath garments, and the imposing presence of her father. She learned now, as though it were a new thing, that the Christ was a ragged labourer, one with the carpenter who worked at St. Gregory’s Vicarage, the mason carrying a hod, and the scavenger who swept the streets. In these simple words she found a reality that had never appeared in her father’s rhetoric.

“And that’s why I call myself a Christian Socialist,” he said, “because I believe that to these two belong the future — to Christ and to the people.”

Winnie did not answer, and they walked again in silence.

“Do you despise me?” she cried at length. “Do you think I’m vain and foolish? I’m so ashamed of myself.”

He looked at her with those passionate eyes of his, and his whole heart yearned for her.

“You know what I think of you,” he said.

They were approaching the Vicarage and time was very short. Winnie threw off all reserve.

“I want to help you, I want to work with you, I hate the life I lead at home. I’m not a woman, I’m only a foolish doll. Take me away from it.”

The blood rushed to his face and the flame of an ecstatic happiness lit up his eyes. He could scarcely believe that he had heard aright.

“Do you mean that?” he cried, hastily. “Oh, don’t play with me. Don’t you know that I love you? I love you with all the strength I’ve got. When I’m away from you it’s madness; I can think of nothing but you all day, all night.”

Winnie sighed.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that.”

“Do you care for me at all?” he insisted, doubting still.

“Yes, I love you with my whole soul.”

When they reached St. Gregory’s Vicarage, the Canon greeted Railing with effusion.

“My dear Mr. Railing, it’s so kind of you to come. Permit me to introduce you to my sister. Mr. Railing is the author of that admirable and much-discussed book, The Future of Socialism.”

“And what is the future of Socialism?” asked Lady Sophia, politely.

“It took me three hundred pages to answer that question,” he replied, with a smile.

“Then you must allow me to give you some tea at once.”

Winnie went up to her uncle, who had been lunching quietly with his sister, but he put out a deprecating hand.

“You’d better not kiss me after being at a temperance meeting,” he said. “I’m awfully afraid of catchin’ things. I always think it’s such a mercy there are no poor people at St. Gregory’s.”

“D’you think they’re all infectious?” smiled Railing.

“One can never tell, you know. I always recommend Theodore to sprinkle himself with Keating’s Powder when he’s been marrying the lower classes.”

Railing tightened his lips at the flippant remark, and Winnie, watching him, was ashamed of the frivolous atmosphere into which she had brought him. It seemed to her suddenly that these people among whom till now she had lived contentedly, were but play-actors repeating carelessly the words they had learnt by rote. That drawing-room, with its smart chintzes and fashionable Sheraton, was a stuffy prison in which she could not breathe. She knew a hundred parlours which differed from this one hardly at all: the same flowers were on the same tables, arranged in the same way, the same books lay here and there, the same periodicals. In one and all the same life was led; and it was artificial, conventional, untrue. She and her friends were performing an elaborate but trivial play, some of the scenes whereof took place in a dining-room, some in a ball-room, others in the park, and some in fashionable shops. But round this vast theatre was a great stone wall, and outside it men and women and children swarmed in vast numbers, and lived and loved and starved and worked and died.

Bertram turned to Canon Spratte.

“I see that one of our most ardent champions in the cause of temperance has just died,” he said.

“Bishop Andover?” exclaimed the Canon. “Very sad, very sad! I knew him well. Sophia is of opinion that he was the most learned of our bishops.”

“He’ll be a great loss.”

“Oh, a great loss!” cried the Canon, with conviction. “I was terribly distressed when I heard of the sad event.”

“Are there any golf-links at Barchester?” asked Lord Spratte, with a glance at his brother.

Railing looked at him with surprise, naturally not catching the purport of this question.

“I really don’t know.” Then he gave Canon Spratte a smile. “I hear it’s being suggested that you may go there.”

Canon Spratte received the suggestion without embarrassment.

“It would require a great deal to tear me away from St. Gregory’s,” he answered, gravely. “I’m thoroughly attached to the parish.”

“I don’t know what they would do without you here.”

“Of course no man is indispensable in this world; but I don’t know that I should consider myself fit to take so large and important a See as that of Barchester.”

Winnie took her uncle some tea and sat down beside him.

“What d’you think of Mr. Railing?” she asked, abruptly.

“Smells of public spirit, don’t he? He’s the sort of chap that has statistics scribbled all over his shirt-cuffs.” His jaw dropped. “And his shirt-cuffs take off.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” asked Winnie, flushing.

“My dear, there’s no reason at all. Nor have I ever been able to discover why you shouldn’t eat peas with a knife or assassinate your grandmother. But I notice there is a prejudice against these things.”

“I think he’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Do you, by Jove!” cried Lord Spratte. “Have you told your father?”

Winnie gave him a defiant look.

“No, but I mean to. You all think I’m still a child. You none of you understand that I’m a woman.”

“I notice your sex generally claims to be misunderstood when it has a mind to do something particularly foolish.”

“I wish you had heard him speak. I could hardly control myself.”

“Because he dropped his aitches?”

“Of course not. Can’t you see he’s a gentleman?”

“I’m so short-sighted,” replied Lord Spratte, dryly. “And I haven’t my opera-glasses with me.”

Winnie rose impatiently and walked over to her father.

Lord Spratte watched her with some curiosity, and he caught Railing’s glance as she came up. His lips formed themselves into a whistle. He chuckled as he thought of Theodore’s consternation if what he suspected proved true.

“I’m so sorry that a perfectly unavoidable engagement prevented me from coming to hear you speak,” the Canon said, in his politest way.

“It was splendid,” cried Winnie, enthusiastically, forgetting already her uncle’s sneer. “I’m never going to touch alcohol again.”

Railing looked at her gratefully, and his eyes were full of passionate admiration.

“Capital, capital!” burst out the Canon, patting his friend on the back. “You’re an orator, Railing.”

“You should have seen the audience,” said Winnie. “While Mr. Railing spoke you could have heard a pin drop. And when he finished they broke into such a storm of applause that I thought the roof was coming down.”

“They were all very kind and very appreciative,” said Railing, modestly.

Lady Sophia, raising her eyebrows, looked with astonishment at her niece, than whom generally no one could be more composed. Winnie was very apt to think enthusiasm a mark of ill-breeding, and the display of genuine feeling proof of the worst possible taste. But now she was too happy to care what her aunt thought, and seeing the look, answered it boldly.

“You should have seen the people, Aunt Sophia. They crowded round him and wouldn’t let him go. Every one wanted to shake hands with him.”

“It’s wonderful how people are carried away by real eloquence,” said the Canon, in his impressive fashion. “You must really come and hear me preach, Mr. Railing. Of course I don’t pretend to have any gifts comparable to yours, but I’m preparing a course of sermons on Christian Socialism which may conceivably interest you.”

“I should like to hear you,” answered the other, putting as usual his whole soul into the casual conversation. To Lady Sophia his strenuous way rang out of tune with the rest of the company, but Winnie thought him the only real man she had ever known. “The clergy ought to be in the forefront of every movement.”

“Yes,” said the Canon, with that glance at the ancestral portrait which so often preluded a flourish of oratory. “Advance and progress have ever been my watchwords. I think I can truthfully say that my family has always been in the vanguard of any movement for the advantage of the working-classes.”

“From the days of the Montmorencys down to our father, the late Lord Chancellor of England,” put in Lord Spratte, gravely.

Theodore gave the head of his house a look of some vexation, but drew himself to his full height.

“As my brother amiably reminds me, my ancestor, Aubrey de Montmorency, was killed while fighting for the freedom of the people, in the year 1642. And his second son, from whom we are directly descended....” Lady Sophia gave a significant cough, but the Canon went on firmly, “was beheaded by James II for resisting the tyranny of that Popish and despotic sovereign.”

None could deny that the sentence was rhythmical. The delivery was perfect.

Presently Railing got up.

“What, must you go already?” cried the Canon. “Well, well, I daresay you’re busy. You must come and see us again, soon; I want to have a long talk with you. And don’t forget to come and hear me preach.”

When Railing took Winnie’s hand, she felt it almost impossible to command herself.

“I shall see you again to-morrow?” she whispered.

“I shan’t think of anything else till then,” he said.

His dark eyes, so passionately tender, burnt like fire in her heart. Railing went out.

“Intelligent fellow!” said Canon Spratte, as the door closed behind him. “I like him very much. Remarkably brilliant, isn’t he, Sophia?”

“My dear Theodore, how could I judge?” she answered, somewhat irritably. “You never let him get a word in. He seemed an intelligent listener.”

“My dear Sophia, I may have faults,” laughed the Canon. “We all have faults — even you, my dear. But no one has ever accused me of usurping more than my fair share of the conversation. I daresay he was a little shy.”

“I daresay!” said Lady Sophia, dryly.

V

THE same evening, before going to his room to dress for dinner at the Hollingtons, Canon Spratte wrote to an acquaintance who was clerical correspondent for an important paper.

My Dear Mr. Wilson,

I wish you would announce in your admirable Journal that there is no truth whatever in the rumour that I have been offered the vacant bishopric of Barchester. This, however, gives me an opportunity to say how thoroughly I condemn the modern practice of assigning this and that post, in the wildest, most improbable fashion, to all sorts and conditions of men. In these days of self-advertisement, I suppose it is too much to ask that people should keep silent on the positions to which they expect themselves or their friends to be elevated, but I cannot help thinking such a proceeding would be at once more decorous and more discreet.

Yours most faithfully,

Theodore Spratte.

While changing, he remembered that flippant, disparaging remark which Lady Sophia had made the day before about his calves. He looked at himself in the glass and smiled with good-humoured scorn.

“They think I couldn’t wear gaiters,” he murmured. “I fancy there are few bishops who’ve got better legs than I have.”

They were indeed well-shaped and muscular, for Canon Spratte, wisely, took abundant exercise.

“I think it’s rather chilly to-night, Ponsonby,” he said. “Will you bring me my fur coat.”

He put it on, and holding himself with a sort of dashing serenity, looked again in the glass. It would have been absurd not to recognize that he was a person of handsome and attractive presence. Few men can wear very elaborate garments without being ridiculous, but Canon Spratte was made for pompous, magnificent habiliments.

“A man in a fur coat is a noble animal,” he said, with deep conviction. “Is the carriage there?”

Canon Spratte was at his best in feminine society. He used women with a charming urbanity which reminded you of a past age when good manners were still cultivated by the great ones of the earth. There was a polite suppleness about his backbone, a caressing intonation of his voice, which captivated the least susceptible. He was an ornament to any party, for he never failed to say a clever thing at the necessary moment. He could flatter the young by his courtliness and amuse the old by his repartee. The triumphant air with which he entered the Hollingtons’ drawing-room sufficed to impress you with his powers. It was certainly an odd contrast between the flamboyant style of the Canon of Tercanbury and the clumsy shuffling of Lord Stonehenge, ill-dressed and untidy, who immediately followed.

To his great good fortune Canon Spratte found he was to take down to dinner Lady Patricia, the Prime Minister’s daughter. He could be brilliant and talkative, but on occasion he could be also a witty listener; and this useful art he employed now to the best advantage. None knew what self-restraint it needed for Canon Spratte to seem a little dull, but he was aware that Lady Patricia shared her father’s predilection for undangerous mediocrity. He heard what she said with grave interest. He asked intelligent questions. He went so far as to demand her advice on a matter wherein he had no intention of following any opinion but his own. Lady Patricia gained the impression that there was no one in the world at that moment whom he wanted to see more than herself, and she talked with a fluency that was as unusual as it was pleasing. She was a woman who found topics of conversation with difficulty, and so felt uncommonly pleased with herself. She could not help thinking the Canon a man of considerable ability. And the contrast between him and her other neighbour was altogether to Canon Spratte’s advantage. Lady Hollington had the fashionable craze for asking literary and artistic persons to her parties. They take the place in a democratic age of the buffoons whom princes formerly kept in their houses, and are a luxury which the most economical can afford. But the novelist who now claimed Lady Patricia’s attention, entertained her with his theories upon art and literature; and since she knew nothing of either, and cared less, the poor lady was immoderately bored.

The Canon was delighted to find on his left an old friend of his. Mrs. Fitzherbert was a handsome widow of five-and-forty, with singularly fine teeth, and these a charming smile gave her an opportunity of displaying with some frequency. None knew whether her keen sense of humour was due to the excellence of her teeth, or whether her teeth were so noticeable on account of this acute perception of the ridiculous.

“I’m doubly favoured by the gods this evening,” said Canon Spratte. “If I were a Papist I would offer a candle of gratitude to my patron saint. I didn’t know I should be so fortunate as to meet you nor so lucky as to sit by your side.”

“It’s taken you some time to avail yourself of the privilege of speaking to me,” she answered, glancing at the menu.

“I wanted to appease the pangs of my hunger first, so that I could devote myself to the pleasure of your conversation with an undistracted mind.”

“Then you agree with me, that a man is only quite human when he’s eaten his dinner?” she smiled.

“My thoughts are never so ethereal as when my body is occupied with the process of digestion,” the Canon replied, ironically.

He thought that Mrs. Fitzherbert wore uncommonly well. She had always been a fine creature, but he had never guessed that the girl of somewhat overwhelming physique whom he had known a quarter of a century before, would turn into this stately woman. The years only increased her attractiveness, and she had reason to look upon the common foes of mankind as her particular friends. She held herself with the assurance of a woman who has enjoyed masculine admiration. The Canon’s eyes rested with approval on the gown which displayed to advantage her beautiful figure.

These flattering reflections were, perhaps, obvious on his face, for the lady smiled.

“You may make it,” she said, with a flash of her exquisite teeth.

“What?” asked the Canon, innocently opening his eyes.

“The compliment that’s on the tip of your tongue.”

“I think you grow handsomer every day,” he answered, without hesitation.

“Thank you. And now tell me about Sophia and the children.”

“I’d much sooner talk about you,” said the Canon, gallantly.

“My dear friend, we’ve known one another too long. For flattery to be pleasing one must be convinced, at least for a moment, that it’s sincere, and you know I’ve never concealed from you my belief that you’re the most desperate humbug I’ve ever known.”

“You put me at my ease at once,” he retorted, smiling and not in the least disconcerted. “But I’m sorry you’re so vain.”

“Do you think I’m that?”

“Certainly. It’s only because your inner consciousness tells you such agreeable things that you won’t listen to my timid observations.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert looked at him quickly and wondered if his memory was as bad as he pretended. She did not feel it necessary to recall exactly how many years it was since first they met, but she was a girl then, and Theodore the handsomest man she had ever seen. Her maiden fancy was speedily captured, and for a season they danced together, philandered, and sauntered in the park. Unwisely, she took him with all seriousness. She remembered still a certain afternoon in July when they met in Kensington Gardens; the sunshine and the careful trees, the dainty flowers, gave the scene all the graceful elegance of a picture by the adorable Watteau. She was going into the country next day, and her young heart beat in the most romantic fashion because she thought Theodore would seize the opportunity to declare his passion. But instead, he asked if she could keep a secret, and told her he had just become engaged to Dorothy Frampstone. She had not forgotten the smile with which she congratulated him and the lightness wherewith she hid the terrible anguish that consumed her. For six weeks she saw the world through a mist of tears, but pride forbade her to refuse Dorothy’s invitation to be bridesmaid at the wedding, and here she met Captain Fitzherbert. He fell in love with her at first sight and she married him out of pique, only to discover that he was a perfectly charming fellow. She soon grew devoted to him and never ceased to thank Heaven for her escape from Theodore. The only emotion that touched her then was curiosity. She would have given much to learn the reason of his behaviour. But she never knew whether the handsome curate had really cared, and thrown her over only because a more eligible bride presented herself; or whether, blinded by her own devotion, she had mistaken for love attentions which were due merely to a vivacious temperament. She did not meet Theodore Spratte again till she had been for some time a widow. Captain Fitzherbert was stationed in various parts of the world, and his wife came rarely to England. Then he fell ill, and for several years she nursed him on the Riviera and in Italy. But when at last his death released her, Mrs. Fitzherbert sought to regain her calmness of mind after the long exhaustion of his illness, by distant journeys to those places where she had spent her happy married life. It was not till she took a house in London, three years before this, that she ran against Canon Spratte casually at a dinner-party. She was pleased to see him, but noted with amusement that the sight did not agitate her in the smallest degree. She could scarcely believe that once his appearance in a room sufficed to make her pulse beat at double its normal rate, while the touch of his hand sent the blood rushing to her cheeks.

Mrs. Fitzherbert had acquired a certain taste for original sensations, and it diverted her to meet again in this fashion the lover of her youth. She wanted to know how he had fared and what sort of man he was become. Outwardly he had altered but little; he was as tall and as handsome, and had still the curly hair which she had so desperately adored. The years had dealt amiably with him, and she was delighted that on her side the change was all for the better. She could not deny now that at eighteen she must have been a lumbersome, awkward girl; and a young man could not guess that time and a discreet skill in the artifices of the toilet would transform her into a striking woman whom men turned round in the street to admire. At the end of their first conversation Canon Spratte asked if he might call upon her, and two days later had tea at the new house in Norfolk Street. From these beginnings a somewhat intimate acquaintance had arisen, and now Mrs. Fitzherbert was on the best of terms with all his family. The winter before she had asked Winnie to come to the Riviera with her, and the affectionate father had agreed that no better companion for his daughter could possibly be chosen. He disclosed to her now the great news of Wroxham’s proposal.

“You must be very proud and pleased,” said Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“Of course it’s always satisfactory for a father to see his daughter happily married. He’s an excellent fellow and quite comfortably off.”

“So I’ve always understood,” she answered with a smile, amused because the Canon would not acknowledge that Wroxham was far and away the best parti of the season.

Mrs. Fitzherbert had quickly taken Theodore’s measure, and it was a curious satisfaction, sweet and bitter at the same time, to find defects of character in the man who had once appeared so romantic a hero. She looked upon him with oddly mingled feelings. Her sense of humour caused her vastly to enjoy the rich comedy of his behaviour, but she preserved for him, almost against her will, a certain tenderness. He had made her suffer so much. She saw that he was often absurd, but liked him none the less. Though she discovered the feet of clay, she could not forget that once he had seemed a golden idol. She was willing to forgive the faults she now saw clearly, rather than think she had loved quite foolishly. The Canon felt her sympathy and opened his heart as to an old friend with a frankness he showed to no one else. The smile in her handsome eyes never warned him that she tore him to shreds, not unkindly but with deliberation, piece by piece.

Mrs. Fitzherbert asked how long Winnie had been engaged, and was somewhat astounded at his answer.

“He hasn’t spoken to her yet, but we’ve talked it over between us, he and I, and he’s to come to luncheon to-morrow to make his declaration.”

“Then Winnie hasn’t been consulted?” she exclaimed.

“My dear lady, do you imagine for a moment she’ll refuse?”

Mrs. Fitzherbert laughed.

“No, I frankly don’t. She’s not her father’s child for nothing.”

“I look upon it as completely settled, and then I shall have only Lionel to dispose of. Of course I’m far more anxious about him. In all probability he will succeed to the title, and it’s important that he should marry a suitable person.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He looked at her and smiled.

“Well, you know, the Sprattes are poor, and if Lionel has no children the peerage will be extinct. I can allow him to marry no one who hasn’t considerable means and every appearance of promising a healthy family.”

“Would it surprise you very much to know that the matter is already somewhat out of your hands? Unless I’m very much mistaken, Lionel is making up his mind to propose to Gwendolen Durant; and unless I’m equally mistaken, Gwendolen Durant is making up her mind to accept him.”

“You amaze me,” cried the Canon. “I’ve never even heard of this person.”

“Oh, yes, you have; she’s the only daughter of Sir John Durant, the brewer.”

“Monstrous! I will never allow Lionel to marry any one of the sort.”

“I believe he’s rather in love with her.”

“Good heavens, it’s just as easy for him to fall in love with a girl of good family. I did, and upon my word I can’t see why he shouldn’t follow his father’s example.”

“The Durants are very nice people, and — prolific,” smiled Mrs. Fitzherbert. “Gwendolen had six brothers, three of whom are still alive, and her father was one of ten children.”

“Sir John is only a Jubilee baronet. I would as soon he were a city knight.”

“On the other hand, he proposes to give his daughter one hundred and fifty thousand pounds as her marriage portion.”

Theodore Spratte turned right round and stared at Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“That’s a very large sum,” he smiled.

“It certainly may help the course of true love to run smoothly.”

“No wonder that Lionel was disinclined to accept the Bishop’s advice to become a total abstainer,” the Canon chuckled. “It would really be rather uncivil if he has matrimonial designs on a brewer’s daughter.”

He thoughtfully sipped his wine and allowed this information to settle. Mrs. Fitzherbert turned to somebody else, and the Canon was left for a couple of moments to his own reflections. Presently she smiled at him again.

“Well?”

“I’ll tell you what I wish you would do. I understand you are deputed to find out my views upon the subject.”

“Nothing of the sort,” she interrupted. “Sir John cares nothing for your views. He is a merchant of the old school, and looks upon himself as every man’s equal. I don’t know whether he has thought for a moment of Gwendolen’s future, but you may be quite sure he won’t consider it a very signal honour that she should marry Lionel.”

“You express yourself with singular bluntness,” answered the Canon, mildly.

“Nor do I know that the young things have settled anything. I merely tell you what my eyes have suggested to me. If you like, I’ll ask the Durants to luncheon, and you can see them for yourself.”

“But tell me, does she lead one to imagine that she’ll — —” he hesitated for a moment, but made a dash for it, “breed well?”

“My dear Canon, I never considered her from that point of view,” laughed Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Canon Spratte smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“One must be practical. Of course a great change has come over the opinion of society with regard to the position of merchants, and one mustn’t lag behind the times.”

“A Conservative member of Parliament is still an object of admiration to many,” murmured Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“Well, well, I’m not the man to stand in the way of my children’s happiness, and if I find that Lionel loves the girl, I promise you to put no obstacle in his way.”

Lady Hollington rose from her chair, and with a rustling sweep of silk skirts, with a quick gleam of diamonds, the ladies followed one another from the dining-room. Their host took his glass and moved round the table to sit by his most distinguished guest. But Canon Spratte, like a wise man, had already seized the opportunity. He drew his chair near that of Lord Stonehenge. The Prime Minister, obese and somnolent, turned upon him for a moment his dull, suspicious eyes, and then sunk his head strangely into his vast corpulence.

“I’m sorry to see that poor Andover is dead,” said the Canon, blandly.

His neighbour, meditative as a cow chewing the cud, made no sign that he heard the observation; but Canon Spratte was by no means disconcerted.

“He’ll be a great loss and most difficult to replace,” he continued. “They say he was the most learned of our bishops. I was excessively distressed when I heard of the sad event.”

“What did he die of?” asked the Prime Minister, indifferently.

“Oh, he was a very old man,” promptly replied the other, who had no idea to what fell disease the late Bishop of Barchester had succumbed. “My own conviction is that bishops ought to retire like ambassadors. A bishop should be a man of restless strength, active and versatile; he should be ready to put his hand to anything. To be a bishop you want as much energy and resource as if you were manager of the Army and Navy Stores.”

“Who is the manager of the Army and Navy Stores?” asked Lord Stonehenge.

Theodore Spratte smiled politely, but thought none the less that the Prime Minister was growing very stupid.

“Thank heaven, I shall never be as fat as that,” he said to himself, and added aloud: “I believe Andover was appointed by Mr. Gladstone.”

“How very large these grapes are!” said Lord Stonehenge, looking heavily at the dish of fruit in front of him.

“Yes,” said the Canon undisturbed, “my father, the Chancellor, used to grow very fine grapes at Beachcombe. You know, of course, that he held very decided views about the political opinions of the bishops.”

A slight movement went through the Prime Minister’s colossal frame, like a peristaltic wave passing along the coiled length of a boa-constrictor. Canon Spratte seemed to him like an agile fly that settled on every exposed place, and alit elsewhere as soon as it was brushed away. Just as all roads lead to Rome, every comment that Lord Stonehenge made appeared to bear directly upon the vacant See.

“And I cannot help thoroughly agreeing with him,” proceeded the Canon. “My view is that the bishops should be imbued with Conservative principles. The episcopal bench, I always think, should be a stronghold of Tory tradition, and if you come to think of it, the very nature of things accords with my conviction.”

Lord Stonehenge gave no sign of disagreement, which was sufficient excuse for Canon Spratte to state at length his laudable opinions. Presently, however, Lord Hollington proposed that they should go upstairs, and on their way the Canon shot his last bolt.

“By the bye, I was just talking to Lady Patricia about addressing a great Primrose Meeting this month.”

He was able, consequently, to flatter himself that he had not left a single thing unsaid which it behoved the Prime Minister to know.

Canon Spratte and Lord Stonehenge went away together. When the Canon had driven off behind a fine pair of bays, in a new and splendid brougham of the latest pattern, Lord Stonehenge lumbered into a carriage, which was both small and shabby. It was drawn by one horse only, and this was somewhat long in the tooth. There was no footman, and the coachman, in a uniform much the worse for wear, sat on his box in a slovenly, humped-up fashion. The Prime Minister and Lady Patricia drove for a while in silence; then from the depths of his beard, Lord Stonehenge summed up the party.

“They were very dull, but the dinner was eatable.”

“I hope you took no ice, papa,” said Lady Patricia.

“I merely tasted it,” he confessed, in apologetic tones. “I wonder why we can’t have ices like that. Ours are too cold.”

“Lady Eastney was there, so I suppose it’s not true about Sir Archibald. The Hollingtons are so careful.”

“Who was she? The woman with the fat neck?”

“She sat immediately opposite Canon Spratte,” answered Lady Patricia.

“Theodore Spratte wants me to make him a bishop,” said Lord Stonehenge, with a slow smile.

“Well, he’ll keep his clergy in order,” said Lady Patricia. “He’s very energetic and clever.”

“I prefer them stupid,” retorted the Prime Minister.

There was another pause, and presently Lord Stonehenge remembered an observation of his secretary.

“Vanhatton says I promised to do something for Spratte before the last election. I never thought we’d get in. His father was the most disagreeable man I ever saw.”

“I wonder what Mr. Highbury will say to him.”

“It’s no business of his,” retorted Lord Stonehenge, with considerable irritation.

“No, but you know what he is,” answered Lady Patricia, doubtfully.

The Prime Minister meditated for some time upon the officiousness of his colleague.

“I like my bishops tedious and rather old,” he said, at last. “Then their clergy give them plenty to do, and they don’t meddle with the Government.”

“Canon Spratte is such a staunch Conservative. He even speaks at Primrose Meetings.”

“He’ll only work for us as long as it pays him,” said Lord Stonehenge, reflectively.

“Oh, papa, he’d never become a Radical. He’s too anxious to be a gentleman.”

“I prefer a Radical to a Liberal Unionist,” replied the Prime Minister, with some bitterness. “I must ask Vanhatton whether I definitely committed myself.”

VI

NEXT morning Canon Spratte awoke in the best of humours, and determined to chaff Lionel good-naturedly about this attachment of which he had become cognisant. He felt relieved, on the whole, that his only son had done no worse. It was much against his father’s wish that the prospective heir to the peerage went into the Church, which none knew better than the Canon was no longer an eligible profession. Considering the position Lionel must one day occupy, Canon Spratte suggested that he should enter the diplomatic service or the Guards, but the boy had inherited his mother’s lack of ambition rather than his father’s spirit. For years the Canon had noted with irritation this timid and retiring temper. He could never understand why a man should sidle down a secluded alley when he might saunter along the sunny side of Piccadilly, and he could not help looking upon his son as something of a milksop. It would not have surprised him if Lionel had announced his desire to marry the daughter of a country clergyman. But money was more necessary than anything else to the Sprattes. The second earl had inherited all the Chancellor had to leave, and was understood never to have practised rigid economy. Theodore, finding a considerable expenditure necessary to his importance, had never been able to save a penny.

“Well, my boy, I hear that in spring a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love,” he said, when Lionel bade him good-morning.

The curate looked at him with a start and reddened. Canon Spratte burst out laughing.

“A little bird has whispered to me that Master Cupid has been busy with you, Lionel. Come, come, you must have no secrets from your old father. Why have you never brought the girl to see Sophia?”

“I really don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you going to deny that you have cast a favourable eye upon Miss Gwendolen Durant?”

The renewal of colour upon Lionel’s fair cheek assured the Canon that Mrs. Fitzherbert’s surmise was eminently correct.

“I like her very much, father,” admitted Lionel, after some hesitation, “but I’ve not said anything to her. I have no reason to believe that she cares for me at all.”

“Good heavens, that’s not the way to make love, my boy. Why, when I was your age I never asked if there were reasons why a young woman should care for me. It’s a foolish lover who prates of his own unworthiness. If it’s a fact let the lady find it out for herself after marriage.”

“Would you approve of my asking Miss Durant to marry me?”

“Well, my dear Lionel, I will not conceal from you that I dislike her connection with trade, but still we live in a different world from that of my boyhood. Every one has a finger in some commercial enterprise now-a-days, and after all the Sprattes are well enough born to put up with a trifling mésalliance. I don’t want you to think me cynical, but a hundred and fifty thousand pounds will gild a more tarnished scutcheon than the Durants’.”

“But I’ve not altogether made up my mind,” said Lionel, who had not bargained for being rushed into the affair.

“Well, then, make it up, my boy, for it’s high time you were married. Don’t forget that an old and honoured name depends on you. Your duty is to provide a male child to inherit the title, and I’m assured that the Durants run to boys.”

“I’m not quite certain if I love her enough to marry her, father. I’m trying to make up my mind.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense, Lionel. If you don’t look sharp about it, upon my soul I’ll cut you out and marry her myself.”

The Canon rubbed his hands and laughed heartily.

It was no wonder that his humour was jovial, for he was enjoying already his relatives’ astonishment when they heard that Wroxham, most desirable of young men, wished to marry Winnie. He sent a note to his brother asking him very particularly to luncheon, but his sense of dramatic effect was far too keen to permit him even to hint that it was an occasion of peculiar solemnity.

“I shall point out to Sophia that she hasn’t used her sharp eyes to very good effect,” he muttered. “And if I’d depended on her to see Winnie happily married, I should have depended on a broken reed.”

Had he not foreseen it since the lad was fourteen, and nourished the scheme assiduously in his paternal heart? It was a triumph for a happy father. The thought of the world’s envy served nothing to decrease his complacency. The gay sunshine of May seemed to indicate that the universe at large shared and approved his self-satisfaction.

“Well, Sophia, did you see the notice about me in this morning’s paper?” he cried, as he went into the drawing-room to await Wroxham’s arrival.

“I’ve not had time to read it.”

“I wish you took more interest in me!” exclaimed the Canon, not without vexation. “It’s extraordinary that when there’s anything in the paper, every one sees it but my own family.”

“Please tell me what it is.”

He took up the newspaper and with due emphasis read:

“There is no truth in the rumour that Canon Spratte, Vicar of St. Gregory’s, South Kensington, has been appointed to the vacant bishopric of Barchester.”

“Did you send the communication yourself, Theodore?” asked Lady Sophia, with raised eyebrows. “Surely I recognize your incisive style.”

“My dear Sophia,” he cried, indignantly.

But he met her calm eyes; and her dry smile of amusement called up on his own lips a smile of confession. He looked at the paragraph thoughtfully.

“I think it reads very well. It’s brief, pointed, I might almost say epigrammatic; and it will certainly prevent misconception.”

“Also it will remind those in power that there is no more excellent candidate than the Vicar of St. Gregory’s.”

“My dear Sophia, I honestly don’t think any one would call me a vain man, but I cannot think myself unsuitable for the position. I’m sure you will be the last to deny that my parentage gives me certain claims upon my country.”

“Which I suppose you took care to point out to Lord Stonehenge last night?”

“On the contrary, I flatter myself I was tactful enough to discuss the most indifferent matters with him. We talked of grapes and the Manager of the Army and Navy Stores. I merely remarked how sad it was that poor Andover was dead.”

“Ha!”

“He agreed with me that it was very sad. For his years I thought him pleasant and intelligent. And then he talked about the General Election. I ventured to explain how important it was that the bishops should be imbued with Conservative principles.”

“And d’you think he swallowed the bait?” asked Lady Sophia.

“My dear, I wish you would not express yourself quite so brutally.”

“I often wonder if you humbug yourself as much as you humbug other people,” she replied, with a meditative smile.

Canon Spratte stared at her with astonishment, and answered with dignity.

“Upon my soul, I don’t know what you mean. I have always done my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Providence to place me. And if I may say so without vanity, I have done it with pleasure to myself and with profit to mankind.”

“Ah, yes, you’re one of those men for whom the path of duty is always strewn with roses.”

“It’s my strength of character that makes it so,” said the Canon, blandly.

“It never seems odd to you that when there are two courses open, the right one should invariably be that which redounds to your personal advantage.”

“Some men, Sophia, are born to greatness; some men achieve greatness; others have greatness thrust upon them. It would be immodest in me to say which of these three more particularly applies to myself.”

The answer perhaps was not very apt to the occasion, but the observation was a favourite with Canon Spratte; and he made it with such a triumphant assurance that it sounded like a very crushing retort.

“Do you remember our old nurse, Theodore?” asked Lady Sophia, smiling.

“Old Anne Ramsay?” cried Canon Spratte, in his hearty way. “To be sure I do! I shall never forget her. She was a dear old soul.”

It was characteristic of him that in after years, when the nurse lived in the country on a pension, the Canon visited her with the utmost regularity. He never allowed Christmas or her birthday to pass without sending her a present. When she was attacked by a fatal illness he took a long journey to see her, by his cheerful, breezy manner did all that was possible to comfort her, and saw that she wanted nothing to make her final days easy and untroubled.

“Her affection is one of the most charming recollections of my childhood,” he added.

“I always think she must have been an excellent judge of character,” murmured Lady Sophia, in the even, indifferent tones she assumed when she was most sarcastic; “I remember how frequently she used to say: ‘Master Theodore, self-praise is no recommendation.’”

“You certainly have the oddest memories, my dear,” cried the Canon, with a scornful smile. “Now I remember how frequently she used to say: ‘Miss Sophia, your nose wants blowing.’”

It was a very good hit, and Lady Sophia, bridling, answered coldly: “She was a woman of no education, Theodore.”

“That is precisely what your reminiscence led me to believe,” he replied, with an ironical bow.

“Humph!”

The Canon, elated by this verbal triumph, looked at her mockingly, but before Lady Sophia could find an adequate rejoinder Lord Spratte and Wroxham were shown in together. Somewhat irritated by her defeat she greeted them with relief.

To the unfortunate Wroxham, ill-at-ease and full of misgiving, luncheon seemed endless. He cursed the ingenuity of Theodore’s cook, who prolonged his torture by the diversity and number of her courses. Considering with anxiety the ordeal that was before him, he found it quite impossible to join intelligently in the conversation, and feared that Winnie must think him very stupid. But Canon Spratte, tactfully realizing his condition, was as good as a band; he spoke without pause, and carried on with his brother a very lively exchange of banter. It was rarely that his family was privileged to hear so many sallies of his wit. Later, when Lady Sophia and Winnie, leaving the men to smoke, went into the drawing-room, Wroxham’s nervousness became sheer agony. The affair grew intolerably grotesque when he was set at a pre-arranged hour solemnly to offer his hand and heart. Though his mind was very practical, he could not fail to see that the proceeding was excessively unromantic. He wished heartily that he had waited till he found himself by chance alone with Winnie, and could bring the conversation round by Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses to the hazardous topic of matrimony. But Canon Spratte, asking his brother and Lionel to go upstairs, led Wroxham to the study.

“I feel most awfully nervous,” said the young man, doing his best to smile.

“Nonsense, my dear boy,” cried the Canon, very cheerily. “There’s nothing whatever to be nervous about. You have my complete assurance that Winnie undoubtedly cares for you. Now sit down quietly like a good fellow, and I’ll send my little girl down to you. Bless my soul, it reminds me of the day when I asked my own dear wife to marry me.”

Wroxham began to walk up and down the room, turning over in his mind what he should say. The Canon, with deliberate steps, marched to the drawing-room.

“Has Harry gone?” asked Lady Sophia.

“No, he’s in my study,” answered the Canon, looking down gravely.

This was the moment for which he had waited, and he paused to consider the success of his worldly wisdom.

“Dear me, how stupid I am!” he cried. “I meant to bring the paper up with me. Winnie, my love, will you fetch it for me?”

Winnie got up, but caught her father’s pleased expression, and puzzled, stopped still, looking at him.

“Pray go, my dear,” he added, smiling. “I left it in the study.”

“But Harry is there,” she said.

“I’m under the impression, my love, that he would not be sorry to have a few moments alone with you. I think he has something to say to you.”

“To me, papa?” exclaimed Winnie, a little startled. “What on earth can he want?”

The Canon put his arm affectionately round her waist.

“He will tell you that himself, my love.”

Winnie understood now what her father meant, and a deep blush came over her face. Then a coldness rose in her heart and travelled through every limb of her body. She was afraid and confused.

“But I can’t see him, I don’t want to.”

She shrank away from her father; but he, somewhat amused at this resistance, led her towards the door.

“My dear, you must. I can quite understand that you should feel a certain bashfulness. But he has my full approval.”

“There’s something I must say to you at once, father. I want to explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain, my darling.”

She was growing almost distracted. Her father, good-humoured and affectionate, seemed to hold her in the hollow of his hand, taking from her all strength of will.

“Father, let me speak. You don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand, my dear. I know all about it, and you really need not be nervous. You go with my very best wishes.”

“I can’t go. I must speak to you first,” she cried desperately.

“Come, come, my dear, you must pluck up courage. It’s nothing very terrible. Go downstairs like a good girl, and I daresay you’ll bring Harry up with you.”

He treated her as he would a child, frightened at some imaginary danger, who must be coaxed into boldness. He opened the door, and Winnie, all unwilling, yielded to his stronger mind. With a hearty laugh he came back, rubbing his hands.

“A little maidenly modesty! Very charming, very pretty! It’s a lovely sight, my dear Sophia, that of the typical creamy English girl suffused in the blushes of virginal innocence.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Lady Sophia.

“You’re a cynic, my dear,” laughed the Canon. “It’s a grave fault of which I recommend you to correct yourself.”

“I beg you not to preach to me, Theodore,” she answered, bridling.

“No man is a prophet in his own country,” said he, with a shrug of the shoulders. Then he turned to his brother: “But you will wonder why I sent you that urgent note, asking you to luncheon.”

“Not at all. I can quite understand that the pleasure of my company was worth a special messenger.”

But Canon Spratte interrupted: “I asked you to come in your official capacity, if I may so call it — as the head of the family.”

“My dear Theodore, merely by courtesy: I am unworthy.”

“The fact is sufficiently patent without your recalling it,” retorted the Canon, promptly. “But I should be obliged if at this moment, when the affairs of our house are at stake, you would adopt such sobriety and decorum as you are capable of.”

“I wish I’d got my coronation robes on now,” sighed Lord Spratte.

“Go on, Theodore,” suggested their sister.

“Well, you will all of you be gratified to hear that Lord Wroxham has asked my permission to pay his addresses to Winnie.”

“In my young days when a man wanted to marry he asked the girl before he asked her father,” said Lady Sophia.

“I think it was a very proper proceeding; I am so old-fashioned as to consider a father the best judge of his daughter’s welfare. And I think that in this case I am certainly the first person to be consulted. Wroxham is a young man of the very highest principles, and he naturally chose the correct course.”

“And you fell upon him and said: ‘What ho!’ “ cried Lord Spratte.

The Canon gave him a cold stare of surprise and of injured dignity.

“I informed him that I had no objection to him as a son-in-law, and I made the usual inquiries into his circumstances.”

“What bloomin’ cheek, when every one knows he has twenty thousand a year!”

“And finally I imparted to him my conviction that Winnie looked upon him with sincere regard.”

“You are a downy old bird, Theodore,” said Lord Spratte, laughing. “There’s many a London matron has set her net to catch that fish.”

“I did not expect that you would treat the matter with decorum, Thomas, and it was only from a strong sense of duty towards you as the head of my house, that I requested your presence.”

But his elder brother was completely unabashed.

“Shut it, Theodore. You know very well that Wroxham can just about wipe his boots with the likes of us.”

“I don’t in the least understand what you mean,” replied the Canon, frigidly. “We are his equals in the best sense; and if you wish to go into details, our rank in the peerage is — higher than his.”

“Rank in the peerage be hanged! There’s a deuce of a difference between the twenty-first Lord Wroxham with half a county to his back and the second Earl Spratte with a nasty pretentious stucco house and about ten acres of sooty land. Earls like us are as thick as flies.”

Lady Sophia’s mind, like her brother’s, turned to the house which the founder of their family, on acquiring wealth, had purchased to gain the standing of a country gentleman. The Chancellor loved to get full value for his money, and its small price as well as its grandeur attracted him. Beachcombe was built by a retired ironmonger in the first years of Queen Victoria, when romance and Gothic architecture were the fashion; and it had all the appearance of a mediæval castle. With parapets, ogival windows, pointed arches, machicolations, a draw-bridge, and the other playthings of that amusing era, the grey stucco of its walls made it seem more artificial than the canvas palace of a drop-scene. The imposing hall was panelled with deal stained to resemble oak; and the walls, emblazoned with armorial bearings, gave it the gaudiness of a German beer cellar. The ceilings were coloured alternately blue and red, and decorated in gold with fleurs-de-lis and with heraldic lions. The furniture was elaborately carved, and there were settles, oak chests, and huge cabinets, on every available space of which might be seen the arms of the family of Spratte. With the best will in the world it was impossible to accept the inferior pictures, bought wholesale at an auction, as family portraits. After sixty years all this magnificence was become somewhat tawdry, and the rooms, little inhabited by their present owner, had the dismal look of a stage-set seen by daylight. The classic statues, the terraces and steps, which strove to give importance to the garden, had withstood the weather so ill that their plaster in spots was worn off and exhibited in shameful nakedness the yellow brick of which they were manufactured. The romantic grottoes were so dilapidated that they resembled kitchens burnt out and abandoned. The whole place put visibly the healthy paradox that the idealism of one age is but the vulgarity of the next.

The Canon was outraged but still dignified.

“I should like you to understand once for all, Thomas, that I very much object to the sneering manner which you are pleased to affect with regard to our family. I, for one, am proud of its origin. I am proud to be the son of the late Lord Chancellor and the grandson of a distinguished banker.”

“Fiddlesticks, Theodore!” answered Lady Sophia, scornfully. “You know very well that our grandfather was a bill-broker, and rather a seedy one at that.”

“He was nothing of the sort, my dear; I recollect Josiah Spratte, the elder, very well. He was a most polished and accomplished gentleman.”

“My dear Theodore, you were only seven when he died. I remember only a little shabby old man who used to call my mother mam. He was always invited to dinner the day after a party to eat up the scraps, and I’m sure it never occurred to any one that he was a distinguished banker till he was safely dead and buried.”

“Remember that he was my grandfather, so I should presumably know what profession he followed.”

To Lady Sophia it was one of her brother’s most irritating habits to assume an exclusive right to their common progenitors. Even though she was not overwhelmed by the contemplation of their greatness, she felt it hard to be altogether cut off from them.

“It’s carried for bill-broking,” said Lord Spratte, with a contented air. “And my belief is that the old chap did a bit of usury as well. It’s no good stuffin’ people, Theodore, they don’t believe us.”

“And what about the bill-broker’s papa?” asked Lady Sophia.

“I don’t believe the bill-broker had a parent at all,” put in Lord Spratte. “That’s where the Montmorencys come in.”

“I confess I don’t know what my great-grandfather was,” answered Theodore, hesitating a little, “but I know he was a gentleman.”

“I very much doubt it,” said Lady Sophia, shaking her head. “I can’t help thinking he was a green-grocer.”

“Ah, that beats the Montmorencys, by Jove,” cried Lord Spratte. “The ancestral green-grocer — goin’ out to wait at dinner-parties in Bedford Square, and havin’ a sly drink at the old sherry when no one was lookin’!”

Lady Sophia began to laugh, but the Canon looked his brother up and down, with a contemptuous twirl of his lips.

“Is this your idea of humour, Thomas?” he asked gravely, as though demanding information.

“Oh, you don’t know what a load it is off my mind! Here have I been goin’ about all these years with that ghastly string of Montmorencys hangin’ round my neck just like the albatross and the ancient mariner, tryin’ to hide from the world that I knew the family tree was bogus just as well as they did, tryin’ to pretend I didn’t feel ashamed of sneakin’ somebody else’s coat of arms. Why, I can’t look at Burke without getting as red as the binding. But, by Jove, Theodore, I can live up to the ancestral green-grocer.”

“I hope you will have the good sense to keep these observations from Wroxham,” returned the Canon, shrugging his shoulders. “Remember that he is about to enter into an alliance with our family, and he’s extremely sensitive in these matters.”

“You mean he’s a bit of a prig. Oh, well, he’s only just come down from Oxford. He’ll get over that.”

“I mean nothing of the sort. I look upon him as a very excellent young man, and with his opportunities I’m convinced that he’ll end up as Prime Minister.”

“And suppose Winnie refuses him?” said Lord Spratte.

“What!” cried the Canon, with a jump, for such a possibility had never occurred to him. But he put it aside quickly as beyond the bounds of reason. “Nonsense! Why should she? He’s a very eligible young man, and he has my full approval.”

Lord Spratte shrugged his shoulders.

“Supposin’ she should take it into her head to marry that Socialist Johnny? D’you know, she told me he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen in her life.”

The Canon burst into a shout of laughter.

“Young Railing? Absurd! My daughter knows what is due to herself and to her family. She may be young, but she has a sense of dignity which I should be pleased to see in you, Thomas. Remember our motto: Malo mori quam fœdari, I would sooner die than be disgraced.”

“I always think we were overcharged for that,” murmured Lord Spratte.

“Of course a fine sentiment merely excites your ribaldry!”

“My dear Theodore, I have the receipt among the family papers.”

At that moment Winnie, unhappy and pale, came quickly into the room. She gave her father a rapid look of apprehension, then, as if seeking protection, glanced appealingly at the others. But the Canon, full of complacent affection, went towards her and took her in his arms.

“My dear child!” He looked round, and with sportive tenderness gazed into his daughter’s eyes. “But where is the young man? Why haven’t you brought him upstairs with you, darling?”

Winnie, an expression of pain settling about her mouth, disengaged herself from the parental embrace.

“Papa, Harry has asked me to marry him.”

“I know, I know. He did it with my full approval.”

“I hope you won’t be angry,” she said, taking her father’s hand, with a look of entreaty. “You wouldn’t want me to do anything I didn’t like, father.”

“What on earth d’you mean?” he cried, surprised and uncertain.

“I had to say — that I couldn’t.”

The Canon started as though he were shot. “What! You’re joking. Oh, it’s a mistake! I won’t have it. Where is he?”

He went rapidly to the door as if he meant to call back the rejected lover.

“Papa, what are you doing?” cried Winnie, distracted. “He’s gone!”

The Canon stopped and came back grimly.

“I suppose you’re joking, Winnie? I’m quite bewildered with all this humour.”

“I don’t love him, father,” she said, with tearful eyes.

Canon Spratte, quite unable to comprehend, stared at her helplessly.

“The girl’s mad,” he cried, looking at Lady Sophia.

But Winnie felt it was no longer possible to hold back the truth. She braced herself for the contest and looked firmly into her father’s eyes.

“I’m already engaged to be married, papa.”

“You? And to whom, pray?”

“I’m engaged to Bertram Railing.”

“Good God!”

Lady Sophia also uttered a cry of dismay, and even her uncle, though he had maliciously suggested the possibility, was no less dumfounded. In his heart he had been convinced that Winnie was far too worldly-wise to commit herself to a doubtful marriage, and he would have sworn she was incapable of a daring act. Then, against his will, the humour of the situation occurred to him, and he smothered a little laugh. But Canon Spratte, infuriated, with all his senses on the alert, divined rather than noticed this offensive merriment. He turned upon his brother angrily.

“I think we shall proceed in this matter better without your presence, Thomas,” he said roughly, putting aside in his uncontrollable anger the studied urbanity upon which he prided himself. “I regret that I cannot expect from you either assistance or sympathy, or any of the feelings to be awaited in a nobleman and a gentleman. I shall be grateful if you will take your departure.”

Lord Spratte smiled very good-humouredly.

“My dear Theodore, I don’t want you to wash your dirty linen before me. Good-bye, Sophia.”

He kissed his sister, and held out his hand to the Canon, who turned away ill-temperedly, muttering indignant things. Lord Spratte, by no means disconcerted, smiled and went up to Winnie. She was looking down, listlessly turning over the pages of a book. He put his hand kindly on her shoulder.

“Never mind, Winnie, old girl,” he said, in his flippant, careless way, “you marry the man you want to, and don’t be jockeyed into takin’ any one else. I’ll always back you up in anything unreasonable.”

Winnie neither moved nor answered, but heavy tears rolled down her cheeks on to the open book.

“Well, I hope you’ll all have a very nice time,” said Lord Spratte. “I have the honour to wish you good-afternoon.”

No one stirred till he had gone. Canon Spratte waited till the door was closed; waited, looking at his daughter, till the silence seemed intolerable.

“Now, what does all this mean, Winnie?” he asked at last.

She did not speak, and Canon Spratte tightened his lips as he watched her. You saw now for the first time the square strength of his jaw. When angry he was not a man to be trifled with, and Lady Sophia thought there was more in him at this moment of the ruthless Chancellor than she had ever known.

“Am I to understand that you are serious?”

Winnie, still looking down, nodded. The Canon stared at her for one instant, then burst out angrily with harsh tones. None would have imagined that the sonorous, sweet voice was capable of such biting inflections. But Lady Sophia could not help thinking him rather fine in his wrath.

“Oh, but you must be mad,” he cried. “The child’s stark, staring mad, Sophia. The whole thing is preposterous. I never heard anything like it. Do you mean seriously to tell me that you’re engaged to that penniless, unknown scribbler — a man whom no one knows anything about, a rogue and a vagabond?”

But Winnie could not suffer to hear Railing ill-spoken of. The contemptuous words roused her as would have done no violence towards herself, and throwing back her head, she looked fearlessly at her father.

“You said he was a man of great intellect, papa. You said you greatly admired him.”

“That proves only that I have good manners,” he retorted, with a disdainful toss of his head. “When a mother shows me her baby, I say it’s a beautiful child. I don’t think it’s a beautiful child, I think it’s a very ugly child. I can’t tell one baby from another, but I assure her it’s the very image of its father. That’s just common politeness.... How long has this absurd business been going on?”

“I became engaged to him yesterday.”

Winnie, though her heart beat almost painfully, was regaining courage. The thought of Bertram strengthened her, and she was glad to fight the first battle on his behalf.

“You perceive, Sophia, that I was not consulted in this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Theodore.”

Winnie took her father’s hand, trying to persuade him. She felt that if it was only possible to make him comprehend how enormously the whole thing mattered to her, he would surely withdraw his opposition. He was angry because he could not see that to her it was an affair of life and death.

“Oh, don’t you understand, father? You can’t imagine what he’s done for me. He’s taught me everything I know, he’s made me what I am.”

“How long have you enjoyed the privilege of his acquaintance?” asked the Canon, satirically. “Six weeks?”

“I was a fool,” said Winnie, speaking very quickly, with flushed cheeks. “I was just the same as any other girl, vain and empty-headed. I was happy for a week if I got a hat that became me. And then I met him and everything was changed. He found me a foolish doll, and he’s made me into a woman. I’m ashamed of what I was. I’m proud now, and so grateful to him. He’s the first real man I’ve ever known.”

Canon Spratte shook his head contemptuously.

“I should like to know what you find in him that you cannot find in Wroxham or in — or in your father.”

“I don’t love Harry Wroxham.”

“Fiddlededee! A girl of your age doesn’t know what love is.”

“Harry doesn’t know me. He talks nonsense to me. He thinks I’m too stupid to be spoken to of serious things. To him I’m just the same as any other girl he meets at parties. For wife he wants a slave, a plaything when he’s tired or bored. I want to be a man’s companion. I want to work with my husband.”

“I’m surprised and shocked to hear you have such ideas,” answered the Canon, emphatically. “I thought you were more modest.”

“You don’t understand, father,” cried Winnie, with despair in her voice. “Don’t you see that I have a life of my own, and I must live it in my own way?”

“Rubbish! The new woman business was exploded ten years ago; you’re hopelessly behind the times, my poor girl. A woman’s place is in her own house. You’re full of ideas which are not only silly but middle-class. They fill me with disgust. You’re ridiculous, Winnie.”

Canon Spratte, who only spoke the truth when he said the whole matter appeared to him suburban and vulgar, walked up and down impatiently. He sought for acid expressions of his disdain.

“You’re making me dreadfully unhappy, papa,” said Winnie. “You’ve never been unkind to me before. Think that all my happiness depends on this. You don’t wish to ruin my whole life.”

“Don’t be absurd,” cried Canon Spratte, unmoved by this entreaty. “I refuse to hear anything about it. I cannot make you marry Lord Wroxham. Far be it from me to attempt to force your affections. I confess it’s a great disappointment; however, I accept it as the will of Providence and I shall do my best to bear it. But I’m quite sure it’s not the will of Providence that you should marry Mr. Bertram Railing, and I utterly refuse my consent to his shameful, grotesque proposal. The man’s a scoundrel; he’s nothing better than a fortune-hunter.”

“That’s not true, father,” said Winnie, flushing with anger.

“Winnie, how dare you say that!”

“You’ve got no right to abuse the man I love better than the whole world. Nothing you can say will make me change my mind.”

“You’re talking nonsense, and I think you’re a very disobedient and unaffectionate girl.”

“After all, it’s my business alone. It’s my happiness that is concerned.”

“How selfish you are! You don’t consider my happiness.”

“I’ve made up my mind to marry Bertram Railing. I’ve given him my solemn promise.”

“Women’s promises are made of pie-crust,” cried Canon Spratte, contemptuously.

Lady Sophia raised her eyebrows, but did not speak.

“I’m over twenty-one,” retorted Winnie defiantly, for she was not without some temper of her own. “And I’m my own mistress.”

“What do you mean by that, Winnie?”

“If you won’t give me your consent, I shall marry without.”

Canon Spratte was thunderstruck. This was rebellion, and instinctively he felt that nothing could be done with Winnie by direct contradiction. But he was too angry to devise any better way. He walked up and down indignantly.

“And this is the return I get for all the affection I have lavished upon my children,” he said, speaking to no one in particular. “I’ve sacrificed myself to their every whim for years — and this is my reward.”

Half afraid that he was beaten, Canon Spratte flung himself petulantly in a chair. As with his father before him, outspoken opposition dismayed and perhaps intimidated him; he was unused to it, and when thwarted, could not for a while think how to conduct himself. Through the conservation Lady Sophia had kept very quiet, and her calmness added to the Canon’s irritation. He gave her one or two angry glances, but could hit upon nothing wherewith to vent on her his increasing choler.

“And do you know anything about this young man, Winnie?” she asked now. “Has he anything to live on?”

Winnie turned to her for comfort, thinking the worst of the struggle was over.

“We shall work hard, both of us,” she said. “With what he earns and the little I have from my mother we can live like kings.”

“In a flat at West Kensington, I suppose, or in a villa at Hornsey Rise,” said Canon Spratte, with an angry laugh.

“With the man I love I’d live in a hovel,” said Winnie, proudly.

Lady Sophia quietly smiled.

“Of course, it’s a delicate question with that kind of person,” she murmured. “But had he a father, or did he just grow?”

Winnie faced her wrathful parent, looking at him defiantly.

“His father is not alive. He was first-mate on a collier trading from Newcastle.”

“That, I should imagine, as a profession, was neither lucrative nor clean,” said Lady Sophia, in her placid way.

Canon Spratte gave a savage laugh.

“At least it’s something to be thankful for that his relations are dead.”

“He has a mother and a sister,” said Winnie.

“And who are they, I should like to know?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. He has told me already that his mother is not a very highly-educated woman.”

“So I should suppose. Where do they live?”

Winnie hesitated for the very shortest moment.

“Bertram says they have a little house in — Peckham.”

Canon Spratte jumped up, and an expression of real disgust passed over his face.

“Revolting!” he cried, “I wish to hear nothing more about it.”

He walked towards the door, but Winnie stopped him.

“Papa, don’t go. Don’t be angry with me. You do love me; and I love you, next to Bertram, better than any one in the world.”

Canon Spratte put aside her appealing hands.

“If you love me, Winnie, I don’t know how you can cause me such pain. Sophia and I will leave you to your own reflections. I can’t send you to your room as if you were a little girl, but this I must say: I think you ungrateful, disobedient, and unkind. It’s only from regard to your sex, and out of respect to the memory of your dead mother, that I don’t say, as well, that I consider you stupid and vulgar.”

Like a martyr, for none could assume more effectively than Theodore Spratte the appearance of outraged virtue, he stalked majestically from the room.

VII

A WEEK later Canon Spratte lunched with Mrs. Fitzherbert to meet Sir John Durant and his daughter. The eminent brewer was a stout gentleman of fifty, rubicund and good-humoured, with a gold watch-chain spread widely over his capacious paunch. The few hairs that remained to him were arranged at judicious intervals over a shining pate. His face was broad and merry. His little eyes were bright with hilarity, and when anything diverted him, he laughed all over his body. He was not tall, and his legs were disproportionately short, so that the slim, elegant Canon towered over him in a way that gratified the one without mortifying the other. Sir John’s appearance betokened great prosperity and a thorough satisfaction with the world at large. He knew that he made the best beer in England, and the British people knew it too, so he had good reason to be pleased with the state of things. He was a business man from top to toe, shrewd, blunt and outspoken, and he had no idea that there was anything disgraceful in his connection with trade.

When they sat down to luncheon and the butler asked if he would drink hock or claret, the brewer turned to him and in a loud, brusque voice inquired whether there was no beer.

“I always drink it to show I have confidence,” he explained to the company in general. “It makes me fat, but I shouldn’t be worth my salt if I hesitated at a few more pounds avoirdupois at the call of duty. I’ve told the British public on fifty thousand hoardings to drink Durant’s Half-Crown Family Ale, and the British public do. The least they can expect of me is to follow their example.”

The Canon was somewhat taken aback by the frankness with which Sir John referred to the source of his large income, but he was a man of tact, and with a laugh insisted on trying that foaming beverage.

“What d’you think of it?” asked the brewer, when Canon Spratte at one draught had emptied his glass.

“Capital, capital!”

“I’ll send you some to-morrow. It’s good stuff, my dear Canon — as pure as mother’s milk, and it wouldn’t hurt a child. I’ve no patience with those brewers who are ashamed of the beer they make. Why, do you know, Lord Carbis won’t have it in his house, and when I stayed with him, I had to drink wine. The old fool doesn’t know that people only laugh at him. However many airs he puts on, he’ll never make them forget that he owes his title to stout and bitter. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t mind who knows that I started as a van boy. If I’ve built up the biggest connection in the trade, it’s to my own brains I owe it.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert laughed to herself when she saw the expression with which the Canon received this statement. His idea had been that Sir John belonged to the aristocracy of beerdom, with two or even three generations of gentlemen behind him who had prepared themselves for the manufacture of fermented liquors by a career at Eton and at Oxford. It was fortunate that his cursory inspection of the brewer’s daughter had been satisfactory. She was quite pretty, with a complexion whose robust colouring suggested the best of health; and her brown hair, rather abundant and waving naturally, grew low on the forehead in a way that Canon Spratte thought singularly attractive. He knew something about feminine costume, (there were few subjects of which the Canon was entirely ignorant,) and he observed with satisfaction that she was clothed with taste and fashion. He had no patience with the women who dressed in a mode they thought artistic, and he abhorred the garb which is termed rational. In a moment of expansion he had once told his daughter there were two things a woman should avoid like the seven deadly sins: she should never take her hair down and never wear a short skirt.

“A woman, like a cat, should always end in a tail,” said he.

Lastly, the Canon noticed that Gwendolen Durant’s handsome figure suggested that heirs would not be wanting to a union between herself and his son. This somewhat astonished him, for he would never have expected Lionel to set his affections on such a charming, but buxom, young person. He could not for the life of him imagine why she should care for Lionel.

“She’s worth six of him, any day,” he muttered, “though I’m his father and shouldn’t think it.”

But there was no accounting for taste; and if a strapping girl, with a dowry of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, chose to make an alliance with his family, he was willing to overlook a parent who would not let an indulgent world forget his indecent connection with honest labour. Canon Spratte had that peculiar charm of manner which led people, after ten minutes’ conversation, to feel they had known him all their lives; and freeing himself from the dowager, who had hitherto absorbed his attention, he turned to Miss Durant. He laid himself out to fascinate her, and they made great friends in the hour they sat side by side.

When the remaining guests had gone their ways, the Canon asked Mrs. Fitzherbert if he might stay a little longer.

“Of course,” she said. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable. You may smoke a cigarette.”

The day was warm and the sun shone brightly. Pale blinds kept out the brilliancy, and delicately softened the light in Mrs. Fitzherbert’s drawing-room. It looked singularly restful to Canon Spratte with its gay chintzes and masses of summer flowers. It formed a fit and elegant frame for Mrs. Fitzherbert, who looked handsomer than ever in an exquisite gown, all flounces and furbelows. Its airy grace filled him with content, and he thought that feminine society was really very delightful. The world was a good place when you could sit in a pleasant drawing-room, away from the bustle of ecclesiastical labours, on a summer afternoon, and talk to an old friend who was also a fascinating woman. Yet at home there was much to make him irritable. For one thing he expected hourly a communication from the Prime Minister, offering the vacant See; and every time the bell of the street-door rang loudly, his heart leaped to his mouth. Almost unconsciously he assumed an attitude of dignified indifference, such as Cincinnatus at his plough might have used when the officers of the Republic came towards him. But Lord Stonehenge, dilatory as ever, hesitated to make an appointment. Winnie was an even greater source of annoyance. She made no sign of yielding to his wishes. She went out at all hours and none knew whither. She seemed to flaunt her legal independence in her father’s indignant face. At home she was silent, frightened and sullen. Canon Spratte pointedly ignored her. He had the useful, humiliating art of looking at people without seeing them, and was able to stare at his daughter blankly as though the space she occupied were empty.

He told Mrs. Fitzherbert now the misfortune that had befallen his house, and it was a bitter confession that he had been too quick in his calculations. Mrs. Fitzherbert could not conceal a smile.

“It’s really very romantic, you know. It reminds me of that poem of dear Lord Tennyson’s.”

“Dear Lord Tennyson hadn’t a marriageable daughter,” retorted the Canon, with some asperity.

“Love is so rare in this world,” she hazarded, “When two young things are fond of one another, don’t you think it’s best to let them marry, whatever the disadvantages?”

“My dear lady, the man isn’t even a gentleman.”

“But we have it dinned into our ears that kind hearts are more than coronets.”

“Yes, but we know very well that they’re nothing of the sort,” he retorted, with a laugh. “Heaven knows I’m not in the least mercenary, but I don’t think any man can make my daughter happy on a penny less than two thousand a year. It’s not love in a cottage, it’s not love in a palace, it’s just matrimony in Onslow Gardens.”

He meditated for a moment or two, and slapped his knee.

“I promise you that Winnie shall break her foolish engagement with this ridiculous counter-jumper, and what’s more, she shall marry Wroxham. People must get up early in the morning if they want to get the better of Theodore Spratte.”

“Well, you’ll need some very skilful diplomacy to achieve all that,” smiled Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“The worst of it is, that though I rack my brains I can’t think of any scheme that seems to promise the least measure of success.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert looked at him, and her common-sense suggested to her certain obvious facts. She smiled again.

“Has Winnie seen the young man’s relations yet?” she asked.

“I think not. Sophia tells me she’s going down to Peckham to-morrow.”

“Didn’t you say that Mr. Railing’s mother was the widow of a coal-heaver? I wonder what she’s like.”

“His sister teaches in a Board School.”

“She must be an exemplary young person,” answered Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“Well?”

“They must be awful. I wonder if Winnie has thought of that.”

“By Jove!” cried the Canon.

The expression was not very clerical, but in his excitement he forgot the propriety of which he was usually careful. His mind was excessively alert, and Mrs. Fitzherbert’s reflections, spoken almost at haphazard, gave him in a flash the plan of action he wanted. In such a manner, though with vastly less rapidity, Sir Isaac Newton is said to have discovered the theory of gravitation. The Canon’s scheme was so bold that it surprised him. When he turned it over, and saw how dangerous it was, how unexpected, above all how ingeniously dramatic, he could not restrain his enthusiasm. The subtlety caught his sense of humour, and at the same time flattered his love for power. Apparently he would withdraw from the struggle, but all the time the various actors would work his will. It was well worth the risk, and he felt certain of ultimate victory. He laughed aloud, and jumping up, seized Mrs. Fitzherbert’s hands.

“What a wonderful woman you are! You’ve saved the whole situation.”

He looked at her with flaming eyes, and as she smiled upon him, he had never found her handsomer. He still held her hands.

“You know, you grow better looking each year you grow older. Upon my soul, it’s not fair to the rest of us.”

“Don’t be so foolish,” she laughed, trying to withdraw from his grasp.

“Why shouldn’t I hold them?” he cried gaily. “We’re old friends. Heaven knows how many years it is since first we met.”

“That’s just it, Heaven does know we’re both of us perilously nearly fifty, and really ought to have learned how to behave by now.”

“Nonsense, I won’t believe a word of it. Every one knows that there is nothing so untruthful as Anno Domini, and I’m convinced that neither of us is a day more than thirty. You don’t look it, and I’m sure I don’t feel it.”

“You really must not press my hands so hard. I tell you it’s ridiculous.”

She positively blushed, and the Canon’s blue eyes were brighter than ever, as he noticed this sign of confusion.

“Do you remember how once we walked together in Kensington Gardens? We didn’t think ourselves ridiculous then.”

It was a tactless thing to say, but perhaps Theodore did not remember the exact circumstances so well as Mrs. Fitzherbert. She tightened her lips as she recalled that last scene, and there was no doubt now that she wanted him to leave her hands.

“You’re hurting me,” she said. “My rings.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” He looked at her face. “But what have I said to annoy you?”

“Nothing,” she replied, with a smile, recovering herself quickly. “But my carriage has been waiting for an hour, and I really must go out.”

“Fool that I am! Why didn’t you send me away before?”

He bent down and gallantly kissed her fingers. It is a gesture which does not come very easily to an Englishman, but Theodore Spratte carried it off with peculiar grace, and afterwards was able to leave the room without awkwardness. He was not the man to omit any of the courtesies due to the fair sex, and turned his steps immediately to a fashionable florist’s, where he ordered a large bunch of red roses to be sent at once to Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“Red roses,” he wrote on his card, “because they are lovely, ephemeral, and sweet smelling!”

On the way home Canon Spratte meditated upon the bold, decisive step which alone seemed capable of bringing about the ends he had in view. It was easy enough to prevent Winnie from marrying Bertram Railing; her infatuation would pass away as soon as she realized all that it entailed. But this was not enough. He knew that women may be often taken on the rebound, (perhaps his opinion of the sex was none too high,) and if he could excite a repulsion from Railing, he fancied it would lead her into the open arms of the eligible Wroxham. The Canon’s classical knowledge was somewhat rusty, but he believed vaguely there was a quotation which offered apt authority for the circumstances. He could not for the moment recall it.

“Dear me!” he said, rather testily, as he put the latchkey into his front door, “my memory is certainly failing,” and ironically: “It’s quite time they made me a bishop.”

The Canon wished to lose no time, and consequently was much pleased to find Winnie and Lady Sophia sitting by themselves in the drawing-room. It would have been inhuman to expect him to play the neat little scene without the presence of his sister. The thought of her astonishment was almost a sufficient motive for his audacious step.

“You’re very pale, my dear child,” he said to Winnie, “I hope you’re not unwell?”

“No, father,” she answered, without a smile.

“Then what is troubling you, my love? You’re not yourself.”

None could put into his manner such affectionate solicitude as Canon Spratte, and his voice gained such tender accents as to draw confidences from the most unwilling. Winnie sighed, but made no reply. He stroked her hair and pressed her hand.

“Come, come, my darling, you mustn’t be unhappy. Nothing shall stand between you and my great affection. The only wish I have is for your welfare. Tell me frankly, is your heart still set on marrying this young man?”

Winnie looked up gravely and nodded.

“Well, well, I’m not a hard father.” He smiled good-naturedly and opened his arms. “What would you say if I offered to withdraw my opposition?”

Winnie, astonished, scarcely believing her ears, sprang to her feet.

“Papa, do you mean that?”

She flung her arms round his neck and burst into tears. The Canon, pressing her to his bosom, kissed her fair hair. But Lady Sophia was dumfounded.

“Now, my dear, go to your room and wash those tears away,” said he, with laughing tenderness. “You mustn’t have red eyes, or people will think I’m a perfect tyrant. But mind,” he shook his finger playfully as she smiled through her tears, “mind you don’t put too much powder on your nose.”

When Winnie was gone, Canon Spratte turned to his sister with a hearty laugh.

“The dear girl! Our children, Sophia, are often a sore trial to us, but we must take the rough with the smooth; at times also they give us a great deal of self-satisfaction.”

“Did my ears deceive me?” asked Lady Sophia. “Or did you in fact consent to Winnie’s preposterous engagement?”

“You’re surprised, Sophia? You don’t know me; you can’t understand that I should sacrifice my most cherished ideas to gratify the whim of a silly school-girl. You’re a clever woman, Sophia — but you’re not quite so clever as your humble servant.”

Lady Sophia, trying to discover what was in his mind, leaned back in her arm-chair and looked at him with keen and meditative eyes. She did not for one moment suppose that he had honestly surrendered to Winnie’s obstinacy. It was her impression that Theodore was never more dangerous than when he appeared to be defeated.

“I don’t understand,” she confessed.

“I should have thought it was a match after your own heart,” he answered, with a mocking smile. “You have always affected to look down upon our family. Surely you ought to be pleased that the descendant of your ancestral green-grocer should marry the near connection of a coal-heaver. They pair like chalk and cheese.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Theodore!”

“I wonder if she calls him Bertie,” murmured the Canon, thoughtfully.

“I wish to goodness you wouldn’t be so irritating,” said Lady Sophia, sharply. “Do you really intend Winnie to marry him?”

“Of course not, my dear. I intend Winnie to marry young Wroxham.”

“And do you think the best way to bring that about is to let her be engaged to somebody else?”

“My dear Sophia, have you ever known me make a mistake yet?”

“Frequently! Though I’m bound to say I’ve never known you acknowledge it.”

Canon Spratte laughed heartily.

“It comes to the same thing. Like the typical Englishman, I never know when I’m beaten.”

“Good heavens, what a man it is!” she cried. “One can’t even remark that it’s a fine day without your extracting a compliment from it. Master Theodore, self-praise is no recommendation.”

“Miss Sophia, your nose wants blowing,” he retorted promptly.

“That I think is rather vulgar, Theodore.”

Canon Spratte laughed again.

“That’s just like a woman; she hits you when you’re not looking, and when you defend yourself, she cries: ‘Foul play!’”

“Fiddlesticks!”

There was a pause, during which Lady Sophia, knowing how anxious the Canon was to tell her about Winnie, waited for him to speak; while he, equally aware of her curiosity, determined to utter no word till she gave him the satisfaction of asking. The lady lost patience first.

“Why, then, did you consent to Winnie’s engagement with the coal-heaver?” she asked, abruptly.

“Because I thought it the only way to induce her to marry Wroxham.”

“Upon my word, Theodore, you’re a very extraordinary man.”

“That, my dear, is a fact which has not entirely escaped my observation,” retorted Canon Spratte, rubbing his hands. “I’ve brought you to your knees, Sophia. Confess that this time your intelligence is at fault.”

“Nothing of the sort!”

“Well, well, I flatter myself — —” he began.

“You frequently do,” interrupted his sister.

“I flatter myself that I know my daughter’s character. Now, I am convinced that if I had put my foot down, Winnie would have gone off and married the man there and then. But I know the Spratte character inside and out. We are a family of marked idiosyncrasies.”

“Inherited from the Montmorencys, I suppose,” suggested Lady Sophia, ironically.

“I have no doubt. You will remember in our father the firmness and decision of which I speak.”

“I remember that he was as obstinate as a pig.”

“My dear, I do not want to rebuke you, but I really must ask you not to make these unseemly remarks. If you are incapable of recognizing the respect due to your father, I would have you recollect that he was also Lord Chancellor of England.”

“Do you ever give me the chance to forget it?” murmured Lady Sophia. “But what has that to do with Winnie?”

“I was about to observe that whatever my faults, when I make up my mind that a thing is right, no power on earth can prevent me from doing it. Now, I do not wish to be offensive, but I cannot help perceiving that the firmness, which, if I may say it without vanity, is so marked a characteristic in me, is apt in other members of our family to degenerate into something which the uncharitable may well call obstinacy.”

“Upon my word, Theodore, it’s fortunate you told me you had no wish to be offensive.”

“Please don’t interrupt,” pursued the Canon, with a wave of the hand. “Now, I am dealing with Winnie as the Irishman deals with the pig he is taking to market. He pulls the way he doesn’t want to go, and the pig quite happily goes the other.”

“I wish you’d say plainly what you’re driving at.”

“My dear, when Winnie said she would marry Mr. Railing, she didn’t reckon on Mr. Railing’s mamma and she didn’t reckon on Mr. Railing’s sister who teaches in the Board School. In such cases the man has often educated himself into something that passes muster, and your sex has no great skill in discerning a gentleman from the spurious article. But the women! My dear Sophia, I tell you Winnie won’t like them at all.”

“The more repulsive his relations are, the more her pride will force Winnie to keep her promise.”

“We shall see.”

Lady Sophia, pursing her lips, thought over the wily device which the Canon had complacently unfolded, then she glanced at him sharply.

“Are you quite sure it’s honest, Theodore?”

“My dear Sophia, what do you mean?” cried he, much astonished.

“Isn’t it a little underhand?”

Canon Spratte drew himself up and looked at his sister with some sternness.

“My dear, I do not wish to remind you that I am a clergyman, though occasionally you seem strangely oblivious of the fact. But I should like to point out to you that it’s unlikely, to say the least of it, that a man of my position in the Church should do anything dishonest or underhand.”

Lady Sophia, raising her eyebrows, smiled thinly.

“My dear brother, if as Vicar of St. Gregory’s and Canon of Tercanbury, and prospective Bishop of Barchester, you assure me that you are acting like a Christian and a gentleman — of course I haven’t the temerity to say anything further.”

“You may set your mind at rest,” he answered, with a little laugh of scorn, “you can be quite sure that whatever I do is right.”

VIII

TWO days after this Lady Sophia was sitting alone in the drawing-room when Mrs. Fitzherbert was shown in. At her heels walked Lord Spratte.

“I found him on a chair in the Park, and I brought him here to keep him out of mischief,” she said, shaking hands with Lady Sophia.

“I’ve reached an age when I can only get into mischief with an infinite deal of trouble,” answered Lord Spratte, “and when I’ve succeeded, I find the game was hardly worth the candle.”

“I’ve not seen you since Theodore turned you out of the house — somewhat unceremoniously,” laughed Lady Sophia; “I hope you bear no malice.”

“Not in the least; Theodore’s cook is far too good.”

They both talked very frankly before Mrs. Fitzherbert, whom they liked equally; but the Canon would not perhaps have been much pleased if he knew how thoroughly they discussed him in her presence. Lord Spratte asked whether there was any news of the bishopric.

“Nothing has been heard yet, but Theodore is convinced he’ll get it,” replied Lady Sophia.

“He’ll be quite unbearable if he does.”

“Quite!” she agreed. “I shall shave my head and go into a convent.”

“You laugh at the Canon and you tease him, but he’s a clever man for all that,” said Mrs. Fitzherbert. “Of course he’s rather vain and grandiloquent, but not very much more than most men. I have an idea that he’ll make a first-rate bishop.”

“Theodore?”

Lady Sophia considered the matter for a moment.

“It really hadn’t occurred to me, but I daresay you’re right,” she said. “Of course he’s not a saint, but one doesn’t want bishops to be too pious. Curates may be saintly, and it’s very proper that they should; but it’s equally proper of their betters to leave them hidden away in obscure parishes where their peculiarities cannot be a stumbling-block to the faithful. The religion of a man who belongs to the Church of England is closely connected with consols, and he looks with grave distrust on the parson who tells him seriously to lay up treasure in heaven.”

“A bishop must be a man who can wear his gaiters with dignity,” smiled Mrs, Fitzherbert.

“But has Theodore the legs?”

“If not, he can pad,” replied Lady Sophia. “Most of them do, and those that don’t certainly should. A bishop must evidently be a man who can wear lawn sleeves without feeling dressed up. He’s a Prince of the Church, and he should carry himself becomingly. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but few of them can help purring with gratification when they hear themselves addressed by obsequious clergy as, my lord. Theodore at least will carry his honours with a dash. We may be parvenus....”

“We certainly are, Sophia,” cried Lord Spratte.

“But Theodore is clever enough to forget it. He honestly feels that his ancestors fought in coats-of-mail at Agincourt and Crecy.”

“Heaven save me from the candid criticism of relations,” exclaimed Mrs. Fitzherbert. “They’re like a bad looking-glass which gives you an atrocious squint and a crooked nose.”

“We shall have to eat the dust, Sophia,” muttered Lord Spratte.

“The whole diocese will have to eat the dust,” she answered, smiling. “Theodore will stand no nonsense from his clergy; they’ll have to do as he tells them or there’ll be ructions. Theodore is not soft-handed, and he’ll get his own way by hook or by crook. You’ll see, in five years it’ll be the best-managed bishopric in England, and an invitation to dinner at the Palace will be considered by every one a sufficient reward for the labours of Hercules.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert laughed, and at that moment the subject of the conversation appeared. He greeted Mrs. Fitzherbert with extreme cordiality, but to his brother, not forgetful of the terms upon which they had parted, he held out a very frigid hand.

“I must congratulate you on Winnie’s engagement,” said Lord Spratte.

Canon Spratte looked at him coolly and passed his handsome hand through his hair.

“I’m sorry to see that your levity grows more marked every day, Thomas. It seems that increasing years bring you no sense of your responsibilities. I used to hope that your flippancy was due chiefly to the exuberance of youth.”

“It shows what a charmin’ character I have to stand bein’ ragged by my younger brother,” murmured Lord Spratte, calmly. He turned to Mrs. Fitzherbert. “I hate far more the relations who think it their duty to say unpleasant things to your very face.”

“You forget that it’s my name as well as yours that you drag through the dust.”

“The name of Spratte?”

“It was held by the late Lord Chancellor of England,” retorted the Canon, icily.

“Oh, Theodore, don’t bring him in again. I’m just about sick of him. It’s been the curse of my life to be the son of an eminent man. After all it was a beastly job that they stuck him on that silly Woolsack.”

“Have you never heard the saying: ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’?”

“That means: don’t pull an old buffer’s leg when he’s kicked the bucket,” explained Lord Spratte to the two ladies.

The Canon shrugged his shoulders.

“You have no sense of decorum, no seemliness, no dignity.”

“Good heavens, what can you expect? I don’t feel important enough to strike attitudes. I’m just Tommy Tiddler, and I can’t forget it. I might have done something if I’d had any name but Spratte. If it had been just Sprat it would have been vulgar, but those two last letters make it pretentious as well. And that’s what our honours are — vulgar and pretentious! I can’t make out why the old buffer stuck to that beastly monosyllable.”

“I always wish we could change with our butler, Theodore,” said Lady Sophia. “Don’t you think it’s very hard that he should be called Ponsonby, and we — Spratte?”

“I’m not ashamed of it,” said the Canon.

“You’re ashamed of nothing, Theodore,” retorted his brother. “Now, I’m different; I’m a modest sort of chap, and I can’t stand all these gewgaws. I don’t want the silly title with its sham coat-of-arms, and it’s bogus pedigree. And those ridiculous ermine robes! The very thought of them makes my flesh creep. I should have been right enough if I’d just been plain Tom Sprat. I might have made a fairly good horse-dealer, and if I hadn’t brains enough for that I could always have gone into Parliament. I’d have been a capital First Lord of the Admiralty, because I can’t tell a man-o’-war from a coal barge, and the mere sight of the briny ocean makes me feel sick.”

“It’s such as you who bring the Upper House into discredit,” exclaimed Theodore.

“Such as I, my dear brother? Why, I’m the saving of the place, because I have a sense of humour. I know we’re no good. No one cares two straws about us. And they just leave us there because we do no harm and they’ve forgotten all about us.”

“I should like you to compare yourself with Harry Wroxham,” said Canon Spratte. “Though he’s quite a young man, he has acquired a respected and assured position in the House of Lords.”

“Yes, I know,” replied the peer, with much scorn. “He fusses about, and he’s a County Councillor, and he speaks at Church Congresses.”

“It’s greatly to his credit that he’s a steadfast champion of the Church of England.”

“I daresay. All I know is that if there were a hundred fellows in the House of Lords as enthusiastic as he is, the House of Lords would tumble down. The British public leaves us there as long as we don’t interfere with it, but if ever we put on airs and try to stand on our hind legs, the British public will just take us by the scruff of the neck and out we shall go. If we all took ourselves in earnest like Wroxham, we should just get the hoof, brother Theodore.”

“And do you ever go to the House of Lords, which you support by your sense of ridicule?” asked Mrs. Fitzherbert, her lips trembling into laughter.

“Certainly; I was there the other day.”

“Dear me!”

“Oh, it was quite accidental,” he hastened to explain, apologetically. “I had to go to Westminster on business.”

“On business!” repeated the Canon, full of contempt.

“Yes, to see a terrier that a man wanted to sell. Well, I had a new topper and no umbrella, an’ of course it began to rain. ‘By Jove,’ I said, ‘I’m hanged if I won’t go and legislate for ten minutes.’ I saw it was only a shower. Well, I walked in and somebody asked who the dickens I was. Upon my word, I was almost ashamed to say; I look too bogus, Theodore.”

“It’s not the name that makes the man,” said the Canon, sententiously. “A rose by any other appellation would smell as sweet.”

“There you’re wrong, but I won’t argue it out. Well, I went in and found twenty old buffers lying about on red benches. Half of them were asleep, and one was mumblin’ away in his beard. ‘Good Lord,’ I said, ‘who are their tailors?’ Then I said to myself: ‘Shall I stay here and listen to their twaddle or shall I get my hat wet?’ Suddenly I had an inspiration. ‘By Jove,’ I thought, ‘I’ll take a cab.’”

“And that, Sophia, is the head of our house!” said the Canon, in icy tones. “Thomas, second Earl Spratte of Beachcombe.”

But these words were hardly out of his mouth, when there was a noisy ring at the bell of the front-door.

Canon Spratte started nervously. He collected himself to receive the expected messenger. Then came the sound of voices in the hall, and the Canon put up his hand to request silence.

“Who can that be?” he asked.

Some one was heard running up the stairs and the door was burst open by Lionel, for once in his life hurried and disturbed.

“Oh, it’s only you!” said Canon Spratte, unable to conceal his disappointment. “I don’t know why on earth you ring the bell as though the house were on fire.”

But Lionel waited to make no excuses.

“I say, father, is it true about Barchester?”

“Is what true?” he asked, uncertain whether to be triumphant or dismayed.

“It’s announced that Dr. Gray, the headmaster of Harbin, has been appointed.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed the Canon, incredulously. “A trumpery headmaster who teaches ignorant school-boys their A B C.”

“It’s in the evening paper.”

“Oh, it’s ridiculous; it can’t be true. I make the best of my fellow men, and I cannot bring myself to believe that Lord Stonehenge can be so foolish and wicked.”

“The Westminster Gazette says it’s a capital appointment.”

“The Westminster is a Radical paper, Lionel, and will say anything. For all I know Gray may be a Radical too. I tell you it’s preposterous. He’s little better than an imbecile and a man of no family. A fool, a school-master! I know innumerable things against him but nothing in his favour — except that he was once tutor to one of Stonehenge’s ill-mannered brats. I cannot think the Government could be so grossly idiotic as to give an important bishopric to a man of Gray’s powers. Powers? They’re not powers; he’s the most ordinary and stupid man I’ve ever known. He’s stupider than a churchwarden.”

“I confess I think it rather bad taste of Lord Stonehenge, considering that you dined with him only the other day,” murmured Lady Sophia.

“I thank Heaven that I’m not a vain man,” said the Canon, somewhat oratorically. “I may have faults; we all have faults. But I don’t think any one has ever accused me of vanity. When it was suggested that I should be offered the bishopric of Barchester, the thought came upon me as a surprise; but this I will confess, I don’t think I should have been out of place in that position. I have been mixed up with public affairs all my life, and I am used to authority. Nor can I help thinking that I deserve something of my country.”

At this moment Ponsonby passed through the drawing-room to the little terrace outside the window. He bore on a silver tray of imposing dimensions a kettle and a tea-pot.

“I told them to put tea outside,” said Lady Sophia. “I thought it would be pleasanter.”

Lord Spratte and Lionel got up and with Lady Sophia passed through the large French window; but Mrs, Fitzherbert, seeing that the Canon made no sign of following, stopped at the threshold.

“Won’t you come and have tea, Canon?” she asked.

“Ah, my dear lady, at this moment I cannot think of tea. I could almost say that I shall never drink tea again.”

“Poor Canon Spratte, I feel so sorry for you,” she smiled, half amused at his vexation, half tender because he was so like a spoiled child.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s not for myself that I feel sorry, it’s for the people who have done this thing. It’s charming of you to sympathise with me.” He took her hand and pressed it. “I’ve often felt that you really understand me. It’s a dreadful thing to live surrounded by persons who don’t appreciate you. They say that no man is a prophet in his own country, and I have experienced that too. I’m glad you were here this afternoon, for you’ve seen how I’m surrounded by cynical laughter and by flippant vulgarity. They don’t understand me.” He sighed and smiled and patted the hand he held. “I don’t want to say anything against Sophia. I daresay she does her best, and in this world we must be thankful for small mercies, but she hasn’t the delicacy of sentiment necessary to understand a character like mine. Do you remember my wife, Mrs. Fitzherbert? She was an angel, wasn’t she? Loving, obedient, respectful, self-effacing! She was all that a wife should be. But she was taken from me. I shall never quite get over it.”

“Now come and have tea,” said Mrs. Fitzherbert, disengaging her hand. “I know it’ll pull you together.”

“Oh, I could touch nothing,” he cried, with a gesture of distaste. “I wouldn’t venture to say it to any one else, but to you who really understand me, I can say that if any man was fitted to be Bishop of Barchester I am he. Any one who knows me must be quite sure that it’s not for my own sake that I wanted it; but think of the wonderful opportunities for doing good that such a position affords! And they’ve given it to Gray!”

He ended with a wrathful shrug of the shoulders. When he spoke again there was a tremor in his voice, partly of righteous indignation, partly of despair at the folly of mankind.

“I speak entirely without prejudice, but honestly, do you think Dr. Gray fitted for such responsibilities?”

“I certainly don’t,” replied Mrs. Fitzherbert, who till that day had never even heard of the distinguished pedagogue.

“I can’t see that he has any claim at all. He’s not a man of influence, he’s not even a man of birth. Nobody ever heard of his father, while mine will be celebrated as long as English history is read.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry and disappointed I am.”

Canon Spratte paused in his indignant promenade and waved his hand picturesquely towards the open window.

“Ah, my dear friend, don’t trouble yourself with my small annoyances. Go and have tea now; it will be bad for you if you keep it standing.”

“And you, dear Canon?”

“I will face the disappointment in the privacy of my own apartment.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert left him, and with a despondent sigh he turned to go into his study. His glance fell on his father’s portrait, and a thought came to him which in a layman might have expressed itself in the words:

“By Jove, if he were alive, he’d make ’em skip.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and passing a looking-glass, paused to observe himself. Meditatively he ran his fingers through his curly, abundant hair; and then, almost without thinking what he was about, took from his pocket a little comb and passed it through the disarranged locks.

“I suppose I must go to Savile Row to-morrow, and tell them they can set to work on those trousers,” he muttered.

IX

IT was almost with a sense of disillusion that Winnie realized the fight was won. Feeling very truly that opposition would only have increased her determination to marry Bertram Railing, she would have been pleased, in heroic mood, to do more desperate battle for her love. She was like a man who puts out all his strength to lift an iron weight and finds it of cardboard, light and hollow, so that he is sent sprawling on the ground. Winnie had braced herself to strenuous efforts, and since they were unneeded, the affair gained somewhat the look of a tragedy turned to farce. The conditions which the Canon had set were precise, but easy; he gave no sanction to the engagement but offered no hostility. Only, for a year nothing must be said about it to any one.

Railing was invited to luncheon at St. Gregory’s Vicarage. Canon Spratte, though making no more than a passing, facetious reference to the connection with Winnie, behaved very politely. He was friendly and even cordial. The girl knew that both he and Lady Sophia examined her lover critically, and though she thought herself detestable, she could not help watching him also, nervously, in case he committed a solecism. But he was so frank, so natural, that everything he did gained a peculiar charm, and his good looks made Winnie love him each moment more devotedly. She was curious to know her aunt’s opinion; but that the elderly lady took care neither by word nor manner to give, till she was asked outright.

“My dear, if you love him, and your father approves, I don’t think there’s anything more to be said,” she smiled. “I suppose he’ll go into Parliament when you’re married, and I dare say it’s not a bad thing that he’s a Radical. The Liberals want clever young men with good connections, and doubtless your father will be able to get him made something or other.”

“He wouldn’t consent to be made anything,” said Winnie, with scornful pride.

“After he’s been married a few years he’ll no doubt take anything he can get,” answered Lady Sophia, mildly.

“Ah, but you don’t understand, we don’t want to think of ourselves, we want to think of others.”

“Have you ever faced the fact that people will ask you to their parties, but won’t dream of asking him?”

“D’you think I should go anywhere without my husband?”

“I’m afraid you’ll be rather bored,” suggested Lady Sophia.

Winnie reflected over this for a moment; then, chasing away a frown of indecision from her face, glanced happily at her aunt.

“At all events, you’ll allow that he’s very handsome.”

“Certainly,” said Lady Sophia. “I have only one fault to find with him. Aren’t his legs a little short? I wonder if he can wear a frock-coat without looking stumpy.”

“Fortunately, he’s absolutely indifferent to what he wears,” laughed Winnie.

“Yes, I’ve noticed that; his clothes look as if they were bought ready-made. You must really take him to a good tailor.”

Canon Spratte would much have liked to inspect Mrs. Railing and her daughter, but feared to excite Winnie’s suspicion. He contented himself with urging Bertram to take her to Peckham; and when he made the suggestion, watched the youth keenly for signs of disinclination to produce his people. He saw nothing.

“I can’t make out if the boy is simple or crafty,” he said to himself irritably.

It never struck him that Railing could have so great an affection for his mother as to be indifferent to her defects.

“She’s done everything for me,” he told Winnie, when they were in the train, on their way to visit her. “My father died when I was a lad, and it’s only by her strength of will and sheer hard work that I’ve done anything at all.”

Winnie, overflowing with love for the handsome fellow, was prepared to look upon his mother with favourable eyes. Her imagination presented to her a Roman matron, toiling with silent patience to fit her son for a great work. There was something heroic in the thought of this unassuming person, educated in the hard school of poverty, preparing with inflexible courage the instrument for the regeneration of a people. She expected to find a powerful, stern woman whom, if it was impossible to love, she might at least admire. Winnie was sure that Mrs. Railing had a thousand interesting things to say about Bertram.

“I want to know what you were like when you were a boy,” she said, in her pretty, enthusiastic way. “I want her to tell me so much.”

He kissed her fingers, in the well-made gloves, and looked at her with happy pride.

“Do you care for me really?” he asked. “Sometimes I can’t believe it. It seems too good to be true.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“I feel so insignificant and so contemptible. I wish you knew how grateful I am to you for loving me.”

From the train they had a glimpse of the Thames glistening vaguely in the sunny mist. But they came soon to long rows of little grey houses, which displayed with callous effrontery the details of their poverty. In the grimy backyards clothes were hung out to dry on lines. Winnie, anxious to see only the more cheerful side of things, turned away to occupy herself entirely with Bertram’s dark comeliness.

On reaching Peckham she looked for a cab, but her lover, to whom the idea of such luxury did not occur, set out to walk; and she, remembering that in future she must resist extravagance, dutifully followed.

“It’s only about a mile and a bit,” he said, stepping out briskly.

At first glance Winnie was not displeased with the bustle of the street. There was a welcome freshness in the air. The pavements were thronged, the roadway noisy with the rumble of ‘buses and the clatter of tradesmen’s carts; the shops were gay with all their crowded wares. After the dull respectability of South Kensington, the vivacity and the busy, strenuous eagerness were very exhilarating. The girl felt herself more in touch with humanity, and the surrounding life made her blood tingle pleasantly. She felt a singular glow as she realized what a manifold excitement there was merely in living.

“I don’t think I should mind a house in the suburbs at all,” she said.

But at last, turning out of the main road, they came into a street which seemed interminable. There were little brick villas on either side in a long straight row; and each house, with its bow window, its prim door and slate roof, was exactly like its fellow. Each had a tiny plot of lawn in front of it, about four feet square. The sky was grey, for the fitful sun had vanished, and the wind blew bitterly. The street, empty and cheerless, seemed very dreary. Winnie shuddered a little, feeling a sudden strange enmity towards the inhabitants of these dull places. She soon grew tired, for she was unused to walking, and asked whether they had still far to go.

“It’s only just round the corner,” he said.

They turned, and another long row of little houses appeared, differing not at all from the first; and the likeness between each of these made her dizzy.

“It’s worse than Bayswater,” she murmured, with something like a groan of dismay.

The exhilaration which at first she had felt was fast vanishing under fatigue, and the east wind, and the dull solitariness. Finally they came to a tiny villa, cheek by jowl with its neighbours, that appeared primmer, more sordid and grossly matter-of-fact than them all. Yet the name, let into the fanlight above the door, in gold letters, was its only dissimilarity. It was called Balmoral. In the windows were cheap lace curtains.

“Here we are,” said Bertram, producing a latchkey.

He led her into a narrow passage, the floor of which was covered with malodorous linoleum, and then into the parlour. It was a very small room, formal, notwithstanding Bertram’s books neatly arranged on shelves. There was a close smell as though it were rarely used and the windows seldom opened. A table took up most of the floor; it was hidden by a large red cloth, stamped with a black pattern, but Winnie guessed at once that its top was of deal and the legs elaborately carved in imitation mahogany. Against the wall was a piano, and all round a set of chairs covered with red velvet. On each side of the fire-place were arm-chairs of the same sort. Winnie’s quick eye took in also the elaborate gilded clock with a shepherd kneeling to a shepherdess, under a glass case; and this was flanked by candlesticks to match similarly protected. The chimney-piece was swathed in pale green draperies. Opposite the looking-glass was a painting in oils of the brig Mary Ann, on which Thomas Railing had sailed many an adventurous journey; and next to this was a portrait of the seaman himself, no less wooden than the ship. He wore black broadcloth of a funereal type, and side-whiskers of great luxuriance.

“Mother,” cried Bertram, “mother!”

“Coming!”

It was a fat, good-natured voice, but even in that one word the cockney accent was aggressive and unmistakable. Mrs. Railing appeared, smoothing the sleeves of the Sunday dress which she had just put on. She was a short, stout woman, of an appearance politely termed comfortable; her red face, indistinct of feature, shone with good-humour and with soap, the odour of which proceeded from her with undue distinctness; her hair was excessively black. There was certainly nothing in her to remind one of Bertram’s sensitive, beautiful face. Smiling pleasantly, she shook hands with Winnie.

“Louie ‘asn’t come in yet, Bertie,” she said, and the lacking aspirate sent a blush to Winnie’s cheek. “Fine day, isn’t it?” she added, by way of beginning the conversation.

Winnie agreed that it was, and Bertram suggested that they should have tea at once.

“It’s all ready,” said his mother.

She looked somewhat uncertainly at the bell, as though not sure whether it would be discreet to ring, and gave her son a questioning glance. Then, making up her mind, she pulled it.

The shrill sound was heard easily in the parlour, and Mrs. Railing remarked complacently: “It ‘as rung.”

But there was no other answer than the sound of voices in the kitchen.

“Is any one here?” asked Bertram.

“Mrs. Cooper popped in to see me, and she’s been ‘elpin’ me get the tea ready.”

Bertram’s face darkened, and his mother turned to Winnie with an explanation.

“Bertie can’t abide Mrs. Cooper, somehow,” she said, in her voluble, good-tempered way. “You don’t know Mrs. Cooper, do you? She lives in Shepherd’s Bush. Such a nice woman, and a thorough lady!”

“Oh, yes,” said Winnie, politely.

“But Bertie can’t abide ‘er. I don’t deny that she does take a little drop more than’s good for ‘er; but she’s ‘ad a rare lot of trouble.”

Bertram said nothing, and in an awkward pause they waited for the tea.

“I think I’d better go an’ see if anything ‘as ‘appened,” said Mrs. Railing. “We don’t generally ‘ave tea in here, except when we ‘ave company. And that girl of mine can’t be trusted to do anything unless I’m watchin’ of her all the time.”

But Railing rang the bell again impatiently. After a further sound of voices raised in acrimonious dispute, the door was opened about six inches, and the dishevelled head of a frowsy girl was thrust in.

“D’you want anything?”

“Do I want anything!” cried Mrs. Railing, indignantly, “I suppose you think I ring the bell for me ‘ealth! I suppose I’ve got nothing better to do than to ring the bell all day long. Didn’t I tell you to bring the tea the moment that Bertie come in?”

“Well, I’m bringing it,” came from the head, crossly, and the door was closed with a bang.

“Oh, them girls!” said Mrs. Railing. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth, and that’s the truth. The number of girls I’ve ‘ad — well, I couldn’t count ’em. They eat you out of ‘ouse and ‘ome, and they’re always grumbling, and you ‘ave to pay ’em five shillings now — they won’t come for less — and they’re not worth it. I ‘ave to do all the work meself. And they’re that particular in their eating, I never see anything like it. They must ‘ave the best of everything, just the same as we ‘ave, if you please.”

Mrs. Railing’s red face grew redder still as she described the tribulations which attend the mistress of servants.

“She broke another plate to-day, Bertie,” she said. “I shall give ‘er notice this week. If she stays ‘ere much longer I shan’t ‘ave a plate in the ‘ouse.”

There was a knock at the door, with a clatter of cups, and Mrs. Railing opened it. A tall gaunt woman carefully brought in the tray with the tea things. She wore a bonnet and a shabby cloak, decorated with black beads.

“Oh, you’ve not brought it yourself, Mrs. Cooper!” cried Mrs. Railing, hastily taking the tray from her. “Why didn’t you let the girl bring it? What’s she here for? And I pay ‘er five shillings a week.”

“Oh, I thought she’d break something.”

Mrs. Cooper gave Winnie an inquisitive look and turned to go.

“Now you’re not going, Mrs. Cooper?”

“I know where I’m not wanted, Mrs. Railing,” replied the other, with a sour glance at Bertram.

“Now don’t say that, Mrs. Cooper. You don’t want ‘er to go, Bertie, do you?”

“I should be pleased if you’d stay and have tea, Mrs. Cooper,” said Bertram, driven into a corner.

“I’ve ‘ad ‘im in me arms many a time when ‘e was a baby,” said Mrs. Cooper, with a defiant glare at Bertram. “An’ I’ve bath’d ‘im.”

Mrs. Railing stirred the tea, put milk in each cup, and poured out.

“I ‘ope you won’t mind if it’s not very grand,” said she to Winnie, apologetically.

“Not the Queen of England could make a better cup of tea than you, Mrs. Railing,” replied Mrs. Cooper, sitting down with a certain aggressiveness.

“Well, I ‘ave got a silver tea-pot,” said Mrs. Railing, smiling proudly. “Bertie and Louie gave it me only last week for me birthday.”

Mrs. Cooper sniffed and pursed her lips.

“I don’t know why you call it silver, when it’s not ‘all-marked, Mrs. Railing,” she said.

“And I know it’s not that because I’ve looked.”

“It’s electro-plate, but we call it silver by courtesy,” laughed Bertram.

“I’m a woman as calls a spade a spade,” answered Mrs. Cooper, with sombre dignity.

The bread was cut with the best intentions, but it was thick and plastered with slabs of butter. The tea, by way of showing hospitality, was so strong that no amount of sugar could remove the bitterness.

“I say, what a beautiful cake!” cried Bertram.

“I made it with my own ‘ands,” said Mrs. Railing, much gratified.

“There’s no one like mother for making cakes,” said Bertram, regaining his spirits, which had been damped by the appearance of Mrs. Cooper.

But this remark was taken by that lady as a deliberate slight to herself.

“You’ve got no cause to say that, Bertie,” she remarked, bitterly. “Many’s the cake you’ve eaten of my making in my ‘ouse at Shepherd’s Bush. And they was quite good enough for you then.”

“You make excellent cakes too, Mrs. Cooper,” he answered.

But she was not to be so easily appeased.

“I take it very ‘ard that you should treat me like this, Bertie,” she added, in a lachrymose way. “And you wouldn’t ‘ave been alive to-day if it ‘adn’t been for me.”

“No, that you wouldn’t, Bertie!” acknowledged his mother.

“I’ll tell you ‘ow it was,” said Mrs. Cooper, turning to Winnie. “I just popped in ‘ere to ‘ave a little chat with Mrs. Railing, and there was Bertie in such a state — I never see anything like it. He ‘ad convulsions and he was blue all over, and stiff. Oh, he was a sight, I can tell you. Well, ‘e was only four months old and Mrs. Railing was in a rare state. You see, ‘e was ‘er first and she didn’t know what to do no more than a cat would. And I said: ‘It’s no good sending for the doctor, Mrs. Railing,’ I said, ‘he’ll be dead before the doctor comes. You put ‘im in a ‘ot bath,’ I said, ‘with a pinch of mustard in it.’ And it saved ‘is little life.”

“I will say that for you, Mrs. Cooper, you do know what to do with babies,” said Mrs. Railing.

“And I take it very ‘ard that ‘e should call me a drunken old woman,” added Mrs. Cooper, putting a handkerchief to her eyes. “I’ve known you for thirty years, Mrs. Railing, and I ask you, ‘ave you ever seen me with more than I can carry?”

“That I ‘aven’t, Mrs. Cooper, and you mustn’t mind what Bertie says. He didn’t mean to speak sharply to you.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Railing, and I never thought I should live to ‘ear Bertie say such things to me. Last time I come ‘ere, he said: ‘Don’t you come to my ‘ouse again, Mrs. Cooper. You’re a drunken old woman.’”

The tears coursed down her cheeks and she blew her nose loudly.

“And I’ve ‘ad ‘im to stay in my ‘ouse at Shepherd’s Bush over and over again. And I used to wash ‘im meself, and comb his ‘air, and I made a rare lot of ‘im. I take it very ‘ard that he should say I’m not to pop in and ‘ave a chat with an old friend when I’m in the neighbourhood.”

Bertram looked at her anxiously, afraid to speak in case there was a scene. But this apparently was just what Mrs. Cooper wanted.

“I’ve ‘ad a very ‘ard life,” she said, with maudlin tears, “I’ve ‘ad a lot of trouble with my ‘usband, and I’ve brought up seven children — and brought them all up to earn their own living. And if I do take a little drop now and then it’s because I want it. And I don’t take gin like some people do.”

This was obviously a home thrust, for Mrs. Railing, with a gasp, drew herself together like a war-horse panting for the fray.

“I don’t know what you mean by that, Mrs. Cooper. But no one can call me a drunken old woman.”

“I know all about you, Mrs. Railing. And I know a great deal more than Bertie does, and if he wants to know I’ll tell him.”

Mrs. Railing turned so purple that it was quite alarming.

“Oh, you’re a wicked woman, Mrs. Cooper, and what your ‘usband said to me only the week before last is quite true. Your ‘usband ‘ad something to put up with, I lay, and ‘e’s told me over and over again what sort of a lady you are.”

“Now then, mother, for Heaven’s sake don’t quarrel with her now,” cried Bertram.

“And what did my ‘usband say to you, Mrs. Railing?”

“Never you mind, Mrs. Cooper; I’m not one to go and repeat what’s been said to me privately.”

Winnie had watched them with increasing alarm, and now, growing terrified, as there seemed every prospect of a battle royal, stood up.

“Bertram, it’s time for me to go away.”

“I’ll take you to the station,” he said, pale with anger.

Winnie shook hands with Bertram’s mother, ruffled and hot; but pointedly ignored Mrs. Cooper. She walked past her as though no one was in the way.

When they were in the street Bertram turned to her with pleading eyes.

“I’m so sorry this has happened, darling. I had no idea that awful person would be here. My mother’s the best creature in the world, but she’s had a very hard time, and, like many women of that age, is inclined sometimes to drink a little more than is good for her. My sister and I are trying to get her to become a teetotaller. And Mrs. Cooper leads her on. I’ve told her never to come to the house, but my mother doesn’t like to hurt her feelings. She made that horrible scene just to spite me, because you were here.”

“It doesn’t much matter, does it?” said Winnie, very wearily. “I’m not going to marry your relations.”

“You’re not angry with me, dearest?”

“Not at all,” said Winnie, forcing a smile to her lips. “Please get me a cab; I’ll drive home.”

“It’s too far, dearest; you must go by train. A cab would cost you a fortune.”

“Well, what does it matter?” she answered, irritably. “I can afford to pay for it.”

“I’m afraid there won’t be one here. You see, it’s so out of the world.”

“Must I walk all the way along those dreary roads to the station?”

“It’s not far.”

They went in silence, both of them very unhappy, and Winnie angry as well, angry with herself and with all the world.

And when at length they came again to the High Street, the scene in Winnie’s eye had changed its hue. The din of the traffic was insufferable to her ears, and the press of people, making it difficult to thread one’s way, irritated her insanely. In their faces she saw now only a stupid mediocrity; and the petty cares which occupied them stamped their features with commonness. The gay shops were become sordid and mean. Jewellers showed silver bangles and silver brooches, low-priced and tawdry, red and green glass which masqueraded impudently under the beautiful names of emerald and ruby. Milliners offered the purchaser hats and bonnets in loud colours, imitating inexpensively what they thought the fashion of Paris. Other shops exposed the hideous details of commonplace existence, pots and pans, mangles, crockery, brushes and brooms. All things which artists had touched with their fashioning fingers, carpets, and furniture, pictures and statuettes, were cheaply parodied. Nowhere could be found restraint or modesty, but everything was flaunting and pretentious, gaudy, cheap and vulgar.

Winnie bit her lip to prevent herself from speaking, but what she wished to say was this:

“How can you talk of ideals with these people who only want to make a show, whose needs are so ignoble and paltry? Their very faces tell you how little they care for beauty, and grace, and virtue.”

At the station Bertram asked uncertainly whether she would not like him to accompany her to South Kensington.

“Please not!” she answered. “I can get home quite well alone. Will you excess my ticket?”

They had come third class, but now she wished to be in a carriage by herself. He put her in when the train came, and wistfully leaned forward.

“Won’t you kiss me, dearest?”

Listlessly, with unsmiling mouth, she offered her lips. He kissed them, with eyes painfully yearning; but she, for the moment the train still lingered, kept hers averted.

“I’m so dreadfully tired,” she said by way of excuse.

Quickly the guard whistled, and the train steamed away. Winnie, thankful at last to be alone, huddled into the corner as though to hide herself. She burst out weeping, passionately, hopelessly.

X

CANON SPRATTE was dispirited. Certain words which Lady Sophia had used in a discussion upon Winnie’s engagement dwelt in his mind with discomforting persistence. The deliberate fashion with which she spoke gave a peculiar authority to her sayings; and though he roundly scoffed at them, the Canon could not help the feeling of uneasiness they left behind.

“After all, you can say what you like, Theodore, but in point of fact we belong to just the same class as Bertram Railing. Are you sure that Winnie is not merely sinking to our proper level? It’s a tendency with families like ours, that have come up in the world; and with most of us, to keep up our nobility is just swimming against the stream.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors, Sophia, and I haven’t an idea what you mean.”

“Well, in our heart of hearts we’re bourgeois, we’re desperately bourgeois. But I suspect it’s just the same with others as it is with us. In the last fifty years so many tinkers, tailors, and spectacle-makers have pitchforked themselves into the upper classes; and very few of them are quite at home. Some are continually on the alert to uphold their dignity, trying to hide by the stupid pretentiousness of a bogus genealogy in Burke, the grandfather who was a country attorney, or a plate-layer, or a groom. Some, with the energy still in them of all those ancestors who were honest shopkeepers or artisans, throw themselves from sheer boredom into every kind of dissipation.”

“You talk like a Radical tub-thumper,” said Canon Spratte, with disdain.

Lady Sophia shrugged her shoulders.

“And after all, however much they struggle, the majority, sooner or later, sink back into the ranks of the middle classes. And, once there, with what a comfortable ease they wallow!”

“Facilis descensus Averni,” he murmured.

“Lord Stonehenge can make earldoms and baronies galore, but what’s the good when the instincts of these new noblemen, their habits and virtues and vices, are bourgeois to the very marrow!”

Lady Sophia looked at her brother for an indignant denial of these statements, but to her surprise he answered nothing. He was very thoughtful.

“Don’t you know shoals of them?” she said. “Young men who would make quite passable doctors or fairly honest lawyers, and who wear their hereditary honours like clothes several sizes too large for them? They meander through life aimlessly, like fish out of water. Look at Sir Peter Mason, whose father was President of some medical body at the Jubilee, and managed with difficulty to scrape up the needful thirty thousand pounds to accept a baronetcy. Peter was then a medical student whose ambition it was to buy a little practice in the country and marry his cousin Bertha. Well, now he’s a baronet and Bertha thinks it bad form that he should drive about in a dog-cart to see patients at five shillings a visit. So they live in Essex because it’s cheap, and try to keep up their dignity on a thousand a year, and they’re desperately bored. Have you never met rather dowdy girls who’ve spent their lives in Bayswater or in some small dull terrace at South Kensington, till their father in the see-saw of politics was made a peer? How clumsily they bear their twopenny titles, how self-consciously! And with what relief they marry some obscure young man in the City!”

Canon Spratte looked at his sister for a moment, and when he answered, it was only by a visible effort that his voice remained firm.

“Sophia, if Winnie marries beneath her it will break my heart.”

“Yes, you’re the other sort of nouvelle noblesse, Theodore: you’re the sort that’s always struggling to get on equal terms with the old.”

“Sophia, Sophia!”

“What do you suppose Lady Wroxham said when Harry told her he wanted to marry Winnie?”

“She’s a charming woman and she has a deeply religious spirit, Sophia.”

“Yes, but all the same I have an idea that she raised those thin eyebrows of hers and in that quiet, meek voice, asked: ‘Winnie Spratte, Harry? Do you think the Sprattes are quite up to your form?’”

“I should think it extremely snobbish if she said anything of the sort,” retorted the Canon, with all his old fire.

The conversation dropped, but he could not help it if some of these observations rankled. Lionel, on whom depended the future of the stock, proposed to marry a brewer’s daughter, and Winnie was positively engaged to a man of no family. It looked indeed as though his children were sinking back into the ranks whence with so much trouble his father had emerged. Nor did the second Earl conceal his scorn for the family honours. His coronet, with the strawberry leaves and the lifted pearls, he kicked hither and thither, verbally, like a football; and the ermine cloak was a scarlet rag which never ceased to excite his derision.

“I’m the only member of the family who has a proper sense of his dignity,” sighed the Canon.

But when he heard that Winnie, on her return from Peckham Rye, had gone to her room with a headache, he chased away these gloomy thoughts. Even paternal affection could not prevent him from rubbing his hands with satisfaction.

“I thought she wouldn’t be very well after a visit to Mr. Railing’s mamma,” he said.

When she entered the drawing-room he went towards her with outstretched hands.

“Ah, my love, I see you’ve returned safely from the wilds of Peckham. I hope you encountered no savage beasts in those unfrequented parts.”

Winnie, with a little groan of exhaustion, sank into a chair. Her head was aching still and her eyes were red with many tears. Canon Spratte assumed his most affable manner. His voice was a marvel of kindly solicitude, and only in a note here and there was perceptible a suspicion of banter.

“I hope you enjoyed yourself, my pet. You know the only wish I have in the world is to make you happy. And did your prospective mother-in-law take you to her capacious bosom?”

“She was very kind, father.”

“I imagine that she was not exactly polished?”

“I didn’t expect her to be,” answered Winnie, in so dejected a tone that it would have melted the heart of any one less inflexible than Theodore Spratte.

“But I suppose you didn’t really mind that much, did you? True disinterestedness is such a beautiful thing, and in this world, alas! so rare.”

A sullen, defiant look came into Winnie’s face.

“I mean to marry Bertram in spite of everything, papa.”

“My darling, whoever suggested that you shouldn’t? By the way, do they call him Bertie?”

“Yes, they call him Bertie.”

“I thought they would,” answered the Canon, with the triumphant air of a man who has found some important hypothesis verified by fact. “And Mrs. Railing’s husband I think you said was connected with the sea?”

“He was first mate on a collier.”

“Oh, yes. And does she smack of the briny or does she smack of Peckham Rye?”

The Canon burst into song, facetiously, with a seaman’s roll, hoisting his slacks. His singing voice was melodious and full of spirit.

“For I’m no sailor bold,

And I’ve never been upon the sea;

And if I fall therein, it’s a fact I couldn’t swim,

And quickly at the bottom I should be.”

He threw back his head gaily.

“My dear, how uncommunicative you are, and I’m dying with curiosity. Tell me all about Mrs. Railing. Aitchless, I presume?”

“Oh, papa, how can you, how can you!” cried Winnie, hardly keeping back the tears.

“My dear, I have no doubt they are rough diamonds, but you mustn’t be discouraged at that. You must make the best of things. Remember that externals are not everything — even in this world. I’m sure the Railings are thoroughly worthy people. It is doubtless possible to eat peas with a knife, and yet to have an excellent heart. One of the most saintly women I ever knew, the old Marquise de Surennes, used invariably to wipe her knife and fork with a table-napkin before eating.”

His words, notwithstanding the tone of great tenderness, were bitter stabs; and Canon Spratte, as he spoke, really could not help admiring his own cleverness.

“I should imagine that your fiancé was devoted to his mother and sister. People of that class always are. You will naturally be a good deal together. In fact, I think it probable that they will make you long and frequent visits. One’s less desirable relations are such patterns of affection; they’re always talking of the beauty of a united family. But I’m quite sure that you’ll soon accustom yourself to their slight eccentricities of diction, to their little vulgarities of manner. Remember always that ‘kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith than Norman blood.’”

But Winnie could hold herself in no longer.

“Oh, they were awful,” she cried, putting her hands to her eyes. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

Canon Spratte, still in the swing of his rhetoric, stood in front of her. A faint smile was outlined on his lips. Was this the critical moment when the final blow might be effectively delivered? Should he suggest that it was the easiest thing in the world to break off the engagement with Bertram? He hesitated. After all, there was no need to take things hurriedly, and Providence notoriously sided with discretion and the large battalions. If Winnie suffered, it was for her good, and it was a cherished maxim with Canon Spratte that suffering was salutary. He had said in the pulpit frequently, (he was too clever a man to hesitate to repeat himself,) that the human soul was brought to its highest perfection only through distress, mental or bodily.

“Man is ennobled by pain,” he said, looking so handsome that it must have been a cynic indeed who doubted that he spoke sense. “Our character is refined to pure gold. The gross lusts of the flesh, the commonness which is in all of us, the pettiness of spirit, disappear in these profitable afflictions. From a bed of sickness may spring the most delicate flowers of unselfishness, of devotion, and of true saintliness. Do not seek to avoid pain, but accept it as the surest guide to all that is in you of beauty, of heavenliness, and of truth.”

For his own part, when forced to visit his dentist for the extraction of a tooth, he took good care to have gas properly administered.

In the present instance he looked upon himself as a surgeon who applies irritation that the ragged edges of an ulcer may inflame and heal. Possibly there was also in his determination to strike no sudden blow, a certain human weakness from which Canon Spratte often confessed he was not exempt. He had not the heart to interrupt the scheme which he had so ingeniously devised. He was like a debater who has convinced his adversary by the first section of an argument, but for his own pleasure, and in the interests of truth, duly exposes the rest of his contention.

He sat down at the little writing-table which was in the drawing-room and scribbled a note. He took out an envelope.

“By the way, my love, what is the address of dear Mrs. Railing?”

Winnie looked up with astonishment.

“What do you want it for?”

“Come, my darling, it’s nothing improper, I hope.”

“Balmoral, Rosebery Gardens, Gladstone Road.”

“It sounds quite aristocratic,” he said, suavely. “Their Liberalism is evidently a family tradition.”

He fastened the envelope, and, blotting it, rose from the desk.

“I consider it my duty to be as cordial as possible to your future relations, Winnie, and I have a natural curiosity to make their acquaintance. I have asked Mrs. Railing to bring her daughter to tea, and I shall ask your uncle to meet them.”

“Oh, father, you don’t know what they’re like!”

“My dear, I don’t expect to find them highly educated. I take it they are rough diamonds with hearts of gold. I’m prepared to like Mrs. Railing.”

“Papa, don’t ask any one else — she drinks.”

“Well, well, we all have our little failings in this world,” returned the Canon, blandly.

He had gone too far. Winnie gave him a long, keen look, and the old note of defiance came back to her face.

“I hope you don’t think I can ever break my engagement with Bertram. Nothing on earth shall induce me to do that. I’ve given him my solemn promise and I’d sooner die than break it.”

The Canon raised his eyebrows in a very good imitation of complete amazement.

“My dear, I have not the least intention of thwarting you in any way. I think it wrong and even wicked for a father to attempt to influence his children’s matrimonial choice. Their youth and inexperience naturally make them so much more capable of judging for themselves.”

XI

ONE evening, to his sister’s amazement, Canon Spratte volunteered to accompany Winnie to a party. The Vicar of St. Gregory’s was at his best in smaller gatherings, where his personality could more easily make itself felt. He liked an attentive audience; and even one careless pair, more anxious to talk with one another than to hear his sage words, was apt to disconcert him. When he found himself in a crowd, jostled and pushed, able to speak with but one person at a time, and reduced even then to social commonplace, he quickly grew bored. He could only suffer a multitude when from the safe eminence of the pulpit, the first in place as well as in dignity of oratorial machines, he was lifted above the press of mankind. He was assured then of their attentiveness and protected from their interruption.

Winnie was very simply dressed. Her pallor was unusual, but in the soft light of shaded electricity she gained thereby a peculiar delicacy. The pose of her head was a little wearied. The blue eyes were filled with melancholy. The Canon thought her frail beauty had never been seen to greater advantage; and when, alert for all that was proceeding, he saw Wroxham coming towards them, he quickly vanished from her side. He smiled as he noticed the singular way in which the young man held his nose in the air. Wroxham was very short-sighted, and his prominent blue eyes had an odd helplessness of expression. Winnie did not see him. She was watching the throng of dancers, taking a new delight in the gaiety of those many people gathered there in lightness of heart to enjoy the fleeting moments. Never before had she found such satisfaction in the magnificence of the ball-room, hung with red roses, nor in the charming dresses of the women. She could not crush a pang that entered her breast when she thought that all this must be given up, and in sudden contrast she saw the little sordid parlour in Rosebery Gardens. Before her eyes arose the High Street at Peckham with its gaudy shops. It was hideous, hideous, and she shuddered.

Suddenly she heard in her ear a well-known voice.

“Winnie!”

Her pallor gave way before a blush that made her ten times prettier. She did not answer, but looked at Harry. In his eyes, herself quickened by suffering, she thought there was a new sadness, and a great sympathy filled her. If he lacked good looks he had at all events the kindly face of an old friend. And he was admirably dressed. Discovering for the first time that his clothes had never before attracted her attention, she observed now with what an incomparable ease he bore them. The cruel advice of Lady Sophia to get Bertram a good tailor recurred to her, and she remembered the suggestion that he could not wear a frock coat becomingly.

“I wonder if he knows it,” passed through her mind. “Perhaps that’s why he always wears a jacket.”

It was an unwelcome thought that Bertram could be influenced by vain notions, and she upbraided herself for the pettiness of the suspicion. Wroxham, without fear of ridicule and with simplicity, could wear any clothes he chose.

“I knew I should find you here,” he was saying. “You’re not angry with me for coming? I wanted to see you so badly.”

“Good heavens, why should I be angry?” smiled Winnie. “You have just as much right to come as I.”

She could not help being flattered by the passionate love which coloured every word he spoke, and her own voice gained a sweeter tenderness.

“I can’t keep away from you, Winnie. I didn’t know I loved you so much.”

“Oh, don’t, please,” she murmured, “we’ve been friends for ages. It would be absurd if we never saw one another again because — because of the other day. You know I’m always glad to see you.”

“I couldn’t take your answer as final. Oh, I don’t want to bother you and make you miserable, but don’t you care for me at all? Don’t you think that after a time you may get to like me?”

His humility touched Winnie so much that it made her answer very difficult.

“I told you the other day it was impossible.”

“Oh, I know. But then I couldn’t say what I wanted. I couldn’t understand. Like a fool, I thought you cared for me. I loved you so passionately that it seemed impossible I should be nothing to you at all.”

“Please don’t say anything more, Harry,” she said, very gently. “It’s awfully kind of you, and I don’t know how to thank you. But I can’t marry you.”

Wroxham, with a little instinctive motion, set the glasses more firmly on his nose, and looked at her sadly. She smiled.

“Won’t you dance with me?” she said.

His face lit up as he placed his arm round her waist and they began to waltz. The rhythm of the haunting melody carried Winnie’s soul away. She knew that she was giving great happiness, and it filled her with pleasure. The music stopped, and with a sigh of delight she sank into a chair.

“I want to tell you something,” he said presently, with much seriousness. “If ever you change your mind I shall be waiting for you. I can never love any one else. I don’t want you to make any promise or to give me any encouragement. But I shall wait for you. And if ever the time comes that you think you can care for me, you will find me ready and eager to be — your very humble servant.”

“I didn’t know you were so kind,” said she, with tears in her eyes. “I misjudged you, I thought you treated me like a fool. I’m sorry, I want you to be happy. But don’t be wretched because I can’t marry you; I’m not worth troubling about.”

He looked at her fixedly, divining from her tone that something was troubling her.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked.

“No, what should be?” she answered, trying to smile, but blushing to the roots of her hair.

“You’ve been crying.”

“I had a headache. There’s really nothing else.”

It was very hard to resist her impulse to confess that she was already engaged. She wished him to know why she had refused him, and wanted his loving sympathy. But at this moment a partner claimed her for the dance that was just beginning.

“Good-bye,” she whispered, as she left him. “I shall never forget your kindness.”

Wroxham followed her with his eyes, then, puzzled and uncertain, walked towards the door. Canon Spratte did not believe in trusting the affairs of this world to the blind hazard of chance, and it was by no accident that he found himself at this very moment in the young man’s way.

“Ah, my dear fellow, I’m delighted to see you,” he said. “What a crowd, isn’t there? I’ve been dying to find some one to smoke a quiet cigarette with me.”

Wroxham gave him a smile. He felt at once that cordial glow which Canon Spratte invariably suffused on all with whom he came in contact. They went to the smoking-room. Even if Wroxham had been unwilling he would have found it hard to resist the breezy authoritativeness with which the Canon, waiting for no answer, led the way.

“Now let us make ourselves at home.”

He seated himself in the most comfortable arm-chair, and, for all the world as if he were in his own house, pointed Wroxham to another. In his gracious way he offered the young man a cigarette from their host’s box, and having lit his own, smoked for a while in silence. He was willing to let things take their time, and waited contentedly for Wroxham to speak. He set his mind to making a number of admirable smoke rings.

“I’ve been talking to Winnie,” said the other at last, gravely.

“Well? Well?”

“I don’t understand her.”

Canon Spratte put his hand impressively on Wroxham’s knee.

“My dear fellow, there’s nothing to understand. They say that women are incomprehensible. They’re nothing of the sort. I’ve never met a woman that I couldn’t understand at a glance.”

“I fancied she’d been crying,” said Wroxham, shyly.

“All women cry when they have nothing better to do. It’s the only inexpensive form of amusement they have.”

Wroxham knocked the ash off his cigarette with peculiar care.

“I asked her to marry me, Canon Spratte.”

“And of course she refused. That was to be expected. No nice girl accepts a man the first time he proposes to her. My dear Harry, the way with women is to insist. Stand no nonsense from them. Treat them kindly, but firmly. Remember that the majority never know their own minds, and between you and me I think the majority haven’t much to know.”

The Canon was no feminist. It was one of his cherished convictions that women should be kept in their place, which, with regard to the lords of creation, was chiefly the background. He felt that the attitude which best became them was one of submission. Like the natural savage, unspoiled by the vice of civilization, he considered that man should hunt, fight, and be handsome, while the weaker sex toiled for the privilege of contemplating his greatness. He had never imparted these theories to Lady Sophia.

“When you want something from a woman insist upon having it,” he added. “Hammer away and in the long run you’ll get it.”

“But Winnie is so different from other girls,” replied Wroxham, unconvinced.

“Nonsense! Every man thinks the girl he wants to marry different from every other. But she’s nothing of the kind. Women are very much of a muchness, especially the pretty ones. I have no patience with this ranting about the equality of the sexes. It is not only irreligious but vulgar. I lay my faith on the Bible, which tells us that women shall be subject unto man. I’ve never met the woman that I couldn’t turn round my little finger.”

He looked at that particular digit. It was adorned with a handsome ring, on which in all their monstrous fraudulence were the arms of his family. His voice rang with manly scorn.

“No, my dear Harry, you have my full approval. And you have my assurance that Winnie undoubtedly cares for you. What more can you want? Hammer away, my dear sir, hammer away. The proper fashion to deal with a woman is to ask her in season and out of season. Propose to her morning, noon, and night. Worry her as a terrier worries a bone. Insist on marrying her. Sooner or later she’ll say yes, and think herself a prodigious fool for not having done so before.”

“You’re very encouraging,” said the lover, smiling.

Canon Spratte’s cheery vigour was irresistible, and the force of his rhetoric seemed to overcome even material obstacles. But when Wroxham considered the affair he was puzzled. He was a youth of only common intelligence. This the Canon had observed with satisfaction, for he knew that nothing is so prejudicial in the world of politics as to excel the average. It did not appear natural that Winnie should refuse him out of mere virginal coyness, as the hen-bird flies from the nightingale till he has sung his most amorous lays. Her melancholy pointed to something more complex.

“You’re very encouraging,” he repeated, but this time with a sigh.

“There are few men who have more experience in the management of the sex than I,” returned Canon Spratte, with the air of a Sultan who has conducted with unexampled success a seraglio of more than common dimensions. “Now what do you propose to do?”

“I don’t know,” answered Wroxham, somewhat helplessly.

“My dear fellow, God helps those who help themselves,” said the Canon, with sharpness. “You want to marry my little girl and I want you to marry her. I know no one to whom I would sooner entrust her, and when a father says that, I can assure you it means a good deal.”

“But what can I do?”

“Well, well, I see I must help you a little. Come and see us again in a day or two. I’ll drop you a line.”

“I don’t want to be a bore,” said Wroxham.

“I have reason to believe that you’ll find Winnie in a different state of mind. Keep yourself free to come any day I fix. And now go home and have a good night’s sleep.”

Wroxham got up and shook hands. He left the Canon in the smoking-room. The clerical gentleman put down his cigarette and smiled to himself with much self-satisfaction. He sang again softly:

“For I’m no sailor bold,

And I’ve never been upon the sea;

And if I fall therein, its a fact I couldn’t swim,

And quickly at the bottom I should be.”

He returned to the ball-room jauntily, and on his way was so fortunate as to meet Mr. Wilson. This was the journalist of much influence in ecclesiastical circles whose good offices with the press he had already made use of.

“Ah, my dear Wilson, it was charming of you to put that little announcement in the paper for me,” he said. “I’m rejoiced to see that Dr. Gray has been given the bishopric.”

“I’m afraid the news is entirely premature,” answered the other. “No appointment has been made at all.”

“Indeed! You surprise me. It was announced so confidently in the Westminster Gazette.”

“Even the newspapers are not infallible,” smiled Mr. Wilson, who knew. “In point of fact, I very much doubt if Gray would accept. He’s fond of the work at Harbin, and I don’t think he much wants to bury himself at Barchester.”

“Of course, in this world everything has its drawbacks,” replied the Vicar of St. Gregory’s. “And for my part, when a man is still young and vigorous, I can imagine no position with greater opportunities for good than the headmastership of a great public school.”

He passed on. His name had been somewhat freely mentioned with regard to Barchester, and Canon Spratte could not bear that any one should think him disappointed or envious. He had shown Mr. Wilson that he was neither. But he could not regret that the newspapers had anticipated things; and hope, which is known to spring eternally in human breasts, cast at once a rosy hue upon the world in general. So long as no definite appointment was made, the Canon felt it only right to trust in the victory of good over evil. The various influences which he had brought to bear might still cause in Lord Stonehenge a state of mind that would raise merit to the episcopal bench.

Canon Spratte looked round the ball-room and caught sight of Gwendolen Durant. He went up to her at once. She looked uncommonly well in her low-necked dress; and the single string of pearls she wore not only showed off the youthful beauty of her neck, but reminded the world at large that she had a very opulent father.

“How is it the young men are so ungallant as to leave you sitting out?” he asked, gaily.

“I’m engaged to your son for this dance; I can’t make out where he is.”

“Lionel is a donkey,” laughed the Canon. “Give it to me instead.”

He would not listen to her amused objections, and in a moment they were among the dancers. Lionel came up just as Canon Spratte had borne off the prize triumphantly. He was filled with amazement, for to the best of his belief his father had not danced for twenty years. The Canon saw him, and laughing at his disconsolate look, pointed him out to Gwendolen. She laughed also.

“I’ve cut you out, dear boy,” cried the Canon as they passed, with a roguish look. “I’ve cut you out.”

“You’re very unkind,” smiled Gwendolen.

“Nonsense. It’ll teach him to be more punctual. Do you think if I’d been engaged to the belle of the evening I should have kept her waiting one single moment?”

He was so good looking, and there was about him such a buoyant charm of manner that Gwendolen was somewhat dazzled. The Canon had a great sense of rhythm, and their waltz went exceedingly well.

“You dance better than Lionel,” she said, smiling.

He pressed her hand slightly in acknowledgment of the flattering remark, and his glance positively made her heart beat a little.

“You mustn’t think because my hair is nearly white that I’m quite an old fossil.”

Gwendolen looked at his hair and thought it very handsome. She was pleased with the admiration that filled his eyes when they caught hers. She blushed, and they danced for a while in silence.

“I enjoyed that more than any dance this evening,” she sighed, when the music ceased.

“Then you must give me another. I owe you a debt of gratitude. You’ve made me feel four-and-twenty.”

“I don’t believe you’re a day more,” she answered, reddening at her boldness.

Like many young persons before her Gwendolen felt that a week’s acquaintance with Theodore Spratte had turned him into an old friend. She would have confided to him her most treasured secrets without hesitation. He took her to have an ice, and she observed with pleasure the courtliness with which he used her. It seemed more than politeness which made him so anxious for her comfort. Her wants really seemed to matter to him.

“How charmingly you wait on me,” she said, half laughing.

“I belong to the old school which put lovely women on a gilded pedestal and worshipped them. Besides, I have to take pains to make you forget my age.”

“How can you be so absurd!” she cried. “I think you’re the youngest man I’ve ever known.”

He was delighted, for he saw that Gwendolen meant precisely what she said.

“Ah, why don’t we live in the eighteenth century so that I might fall on my knee and kiss your hand in gratitude for that pretty speech!”

The band struck up again, and the Canon, offering his arm, led her back to the ball-room. She was claimed by a young guardsman; and as she swung into the throng the Canon could not help feeling that neither in appearance, height, nor gallantry, had he anything to fear from the comparison.

“Upon my soul, I can’t make out why I don’t come to balls oftener,” he murmured. “I had no idea they were so amusing.”

Lionel was standing just in front of him, and he slapped him on the back.

“Well, my boy, are you enjoying yourself? I hope you bear me no malice because I robbed you of your partner.”

“Not at all. I’m not really very fond of dancing.”

“Ah, you young men of the present day are so superior. It’s a monstrous thing that when a girl’s pretty feet itch for a varnished floor she should be forced to throw herself into the arms of an old fogey like myself.”

“It didn’t look as if Miss Durant needed much compulsion,” returned Lionel, dryly.

The Canon laughed boisterously.

“Have you declared yourself yet? She’s a very nice girl indeed, and you have my paternal blessing. I think we shall get on capitally together.”

“No; I haven’t said anything.”

“Well, my boy, why don’t you? It’s your duty to marry and it’s your duty to marry money. You must have a son and you must have something to keep him on. I think you’ll have to hunt a long time before you find any one so likely to provide all that’s necessary as Gwendolen Durant.”

“I like her very much,” allowed Lionel, somewhat uncertainly.

“Then why don’t you propose to-night? There’s nothing like a dance for that sort of thing. The music and the flowers and the gaiety — it all attunes the mind to amorous affairs.”

“That’s all very well, but she makes one rather nervous,” laughed Lionel.

“Fiddlesticks! Take her into the conservatory and play with her fan. That will lead you to take her hand. Then put your arm boldly round her waist; and the rest will follow of itself, or you’re no son of mine.”

Lionel shrugged his shoulders and smiled without enthusiasm.

“I see that Mrs. Fitzherbert is here,” he said, inconsequently.

“Is she? I must go and find her. Take my advice, my boy; propose to Gwendolen to-night, and perhaps I’ll pay a bill or two for you in the morning.”

He waved his hand familiarly and disappeared in search of the handsome widow. He found her very comfortably seated in an armchair, looking at the dancers with tolerant disdain. She smiled in sympathy as she caught the happy eyes of a girl going round the room in an ecstasy of delight. She nodded with satisfaction when a handsome man passed by. She sought idly to get some notion of character as one physiognomy or another attracted her attention. But what most pleased her was the thought that she herself was merely a spectator. The delights of middle age were by no means to be despised; she was free to go where she would, sufficiently rich, indifferent to the opinion of her fellows. Twenty years ago she nearly broke her heart at a ball because she was obliged to sit out five dances running without a partner, but now her chief wish was that no one should interrupt her enjoyment of that varied scene.

Yet when Canon Spratte approached she rose to greet him with every appearance of cordiality. She wore all her diamonds and a gown whose handsome lines showed off the magnificence of her figure. He thought she had never seemed more stately.

“May I have the pleasure of a dance?” he asked, smiling, but in the most formal way.

Mrs. Fitzherbert opened her eyes wide and stared at him.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I don’t know how I can express myself more plainly,” he laughed.

“My dear Canon, I haven’t danced for fifteen years.”

“Come,” he said gaily, “I never take a refusal. I know you dance divinely.”

“Don’t be so absurd! We should make ourselves perfectly ridiculous. People would roar with laughter and say: ‘Look at those two old fogies doddering round together.’”

“Nothing of the sort! They’d say: ‘Look at Theodore Spratte, he’s dancing with the belle of the evening. Isn’t that like him?’”

He put his arm round her waist, and notwithstanding a laughing remonstrance bore her into the middle of the room. It was true that he danced well, and for five minutes Mrs. Fitzherbert forgot that she was hard upon fifty. He talked the most charming nonsense. Her eyes began to flash as brightly as his, and she surrendered herself entirely to the pleasure of the waltz. It gave her a curious thrill to feel the strong hand that rested like a caress on her waist. Presently he led her into a little nook, all gay with roses, which had been arranged in an alcove on the stairs.

“You detestable creature!” she cried, sinking into a chair. “I was congratulating myself on being out of the turmoil of life, and you’ve made me regret it so that I could almost burst into tears.”

“But acknowledge that you enjoyed it. And you know just as well as I do that you were the most beautiful woman in the room.”

“How many virtuous matrons have you already assured of that fact to-night?” she asked, with a laugh.

“Ah, you think I’m joking, but I’m deadly serious,” he answered.

“Then there’s no possible excuse for you.”

“You can’t subdue me so easily as that. Does it mean nothing to you that the band is playing the most sentimental tunes and that all these roses have turned the place into a garden?”

“You see, I’m never so foolish as to forget that I’m long past forty.”

“I never think of your age,” he answered, and for the life of her she could not tell if he was in earnest. “To me you are a lovely woman, kind and witty and delightful.”

She looked at him calmly.

“What do you think Lionel would say if he heard you talk such rubbish?”

“Lionel is wisely occupied with his own affairs. I’ve sent him to propose to Gwendolen Durant. He was shy, but I told him it was the simplest thing in the world. I told him to look at her fan.” The Canon opened his partner’s and smiled into her eyes. “And that I told him would lead him naturally to take her hand.”

He audaciously seized Mrs. Fitzherbert’s, but she, with a laugh, withdrew it.

“I gather your meaning without your actually giving an example,” she said.

The Canon’s blue eyes sparkled with all the fire of youth. Another dance had begun and they were left alone in their alcove.

“Look here, why don’t you marry me?” he asked, suddenly.

Mrs. Fitzherbert was taken completely aback. It had never dawned on her that his bantering speeches could tend to any such end.

“My dear man, have you taken leave of your senses?”

“My children are making their own homes, and I shall be left alone. Whatever you say, we’re neither of us old yet. Why shouldn’t we join forces?”

“It’s too absurd,” she said.

“That I should want to marry you? Look in your glass, dear friend, and it will tell you there are a hundred good reasons.”

He put his arm round her, and before she realized what he was about, kissed her lips.

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“But I haven’t accepted,” she cried.

“I told you I never took a refusal; I shall inform Sophia that you’ve promised to marry me.”

Giving her no time to reply, he jumped up, pressed her hand lightly, and disappeared. Mrs. Fitzherbert did not know whether to be amused or angry. The affair seemed like a joke that had been carried too far, and she really could not believe that the Canon meant what he said. Suddenly an idea struck her. A smile came to her lips and she began to laugh. The idea gained shape. She threw back her head and laughed till the tears positively ran down her cheeks.

But the Canon returned to the ball-room feeling not a day more than twenty-five. Winnie came up to him.

“I’m ready to go home when you like, papa. I’m rather tired.”

He looked at his watch.

“Nonsense! One’s not tired at two in the morning at your age. Why, I feel as fit as a fiddle. Come.”

He seized her, and before she knew where she was, whirled her into the middle of the room. He would not let her expostulate, but danced as though he would never tire. His spirits were so high that he could have shouted at the top of his voice.

When they were all three in the carriage on their way home, Canon Spratte turned to his son.

“Well, did you take my advice?” he asked.

“I didn’t have a chance,” said Lionel, discontentedly.

“Good Lord! You’re not half the man your father is.”

The Canon chuckled and rubbed his hands. He asked Winnie’s permission to light a cigar, and put up his feet comfortably on the opposite seat.

“I’ve had a very charming evening. Upon my soul, it’s wonderful what good it does a hard-working man to have a little innocent enjoyment.”

XII

MRS. RAILING accepted Canon Spratte’s invitation to bring her daughter to tea. On the day appointed he sat like a Hebrew patriarch surrounded by his family and waited for her to come. He addressed Lionel, his son.

“You’ll remember that there are two funerals to-morrow morning, won’t you?” he said.

“Good gracious, I had completely forgotten all about them.”

“I daresay they were persons of no consequence,” remarked Lord Spratte.

“As a matter of fact, I believe one of them, poor fellow! was our own fish-monger,” said the Canon, smiling.

“I thought the fish had been very inferior these last few days,” murmured Lady Sophia.

Ponsonby opened the door stealthily and announced the guests in his most impressive tones.

“Mrs. and Miss Railing.”

Mrs. Railing, a woman of simple tastes, was unaccustomed to give time or thought to the adornment of her person. She was an excellent creature who had arrived at the sensible conclusion that comfort was more important than appearance; and when she had grown used to a garment, only the repeated persuasion of her children could induce her to give it up. Widowhood with her was a question of pride and a passport to respectability. She wore, somewhat on one side, a shabby crape bonnet, a black old-fashioned cloak, and loose cotton gloves. She carried with affectionate care, as though it were a jewel of vast price, a gloomy and masculine umbrella. It had a bow on the handle.

Canon Spratte advanced very cordially and shook hands with her.

“How d’you do. How d’you do, Mrs. Railing.”

“Nicely, thank you.” She turned and gave a little wave of the hand toward her offspring. “This is my daughter, Miss Railing.”

Miss Railing wore a strenuous look and pince-nez, a sailor hat, a white blouse, and a leather belt.

“How d’you do,” said Canon Spratte.

“Quite well, thank you.”

Winnie, having passed the time of day with Mrs. Railing, looked shyly at Bertram’s sister.

“You weren’t in the other day when I came to Peckham with your brother.”

“I didn’t get home till late.”

Miss Railing, suffering from no false shame, looked at Winnie with a somewhat disparaging curiosity. She was highly educated and took care to speak the King’s English correctly. She dropped her aitches but seldom. Sometimes she hesitated whether or no to insert the troublesome letter, but when she used it her emphasis fully made up for an occasional lapse. She was, perhaps, a little self-assertive; and came to St. Gregory’s Vicarage as to an enemy’s camp, bristling to take offence. She was determined to show that she was a person of culture.

“Let me introduce you to my sister, Lady Sophia Spratte,” said the Canon to Mrs. Railing. “Miss Railing, my sister.”

“I’m really Miss Louise Railing, you know,” said that young lady, in a slightly injured tone.

“I ‘ave two daughters, my lord,” explained Mrs. Railing, who felt that some ceremony was needed to address the member of a noble family, “but the elder one, Florrie, ain’t quite right in ‘er ‘ead. And we ‘ad to shut ‘er up in an asylum.”

The Canon observed her for one moment and shot a rapid glance at Winnie.

“It’s so fortunate that you were able to come,” he said. “In the Season one has so many engagements.”

But at the harmless remark Miss Railing bridled.

“I thought you people in the West End never did anything?”

Canon Spratte laughed heartily.

“The West End has a bad reputation — in Peckham Rye.”

“Well, I don’t know that I can say extra much for the people of Peckham Rye either. There’s no public spirit among them. And yet we do all we can; the Radical Association tries to stir them up. We give meetings every week — but they won’t come to them.”

“I wonder at that,” replied the Canon, blandly. “And do you share your brother’s talent for oratory?”

“Oh, I say a few words now and then,” said Miss Railing, modestly.

“You should hear ‘er talk,” interposed Mrs. Railing, with a significant nod.

“Well, I hold with women taking part in everything. I’m a Radical from top to toe.” Miss Railing stared hard at Lady Sophia, who was watching her with polite attention. “I can’t stand the sort of woman who sits at home and does nothing but read novels and go to balls. There’s an immense field for women’s activities. And who thinks now that women are inferior to men?”

“Ain’t she wonderful!” ejaculated Mrs. Railing, with unconcealed admiration.

“Ma!” protested her daughter.

“She says I always praise ‘er in front of people,” Mrs. Railing laughed good-humouredly. “But I can’t ‘elp it. You should see all the prizes and certificates she’s got. Oh, I am proud of ‘er, I can tell you.”

“Ma, don’t go on like that always. It makes people think I’m a child.”

“Well, Louie, I can’t ‘elp it. You’re a marvel and there’s no denying it. Tell ’em about the gold medal you won.”

“I wish you would,” said Lord Spratte. “I always respect people with gold medals.”

“Go on with you,” cried Miss Railing.

“Well, Louie, you are obstinate,” said her mother; and turning to Lady Sophia she added confidentially: “She ‘as been — ever since she was a child.”

But the appearance of the stately Ponsonby with tea-things changed the conversation. Mrs. Railing looked round the room, and the Canon saw that her eyes rested on the magnificent portrait of the first Lord Spratte.

“That is my father, the late Lord Chancellor of England. It is a most admirable likeness.”

“It’s a very ‘andsome frame,” said Mrs. Railing, anxious to be polite.

Lord Spratte burst out laughing.

“He is plain, isn’t he?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” answered Mrs. Railing, with confusion, “I would never take such a liberty.”

“Now, you can’t honestly say he was a beauty, Mrs. Railing.”

“Thomas, remember he was my father,” inserted the Canon.

But Mrs. Railing feared she had wounded her host’s feelings.

“Now I come to look at ‘im, I don’t think ‘e’s so bad looking after all,” she said.

His elder son cast a rapid glance at the Lord Chancellor’s sardonic smile.

“In the family we think he’s the very image of my brother Theodore.”

“Well, now you mention it, I do see a likeness,” replied Mrs. Railing, innocently looking from the portrait to Canon Spratte.

The Canon shook his head at his brother with smiling menace, and handed the good lady a cup of tea. While she stirred it, she addressed herself amiably to Lady Sophia.

“Nice neighbourhood this!” she said.

“South Kensington?” answered Lady Sophia. “It’s the least unpleasant of all the suburbs.”

“My dear, I cannot allow South Kensington to be called a suburb,” cried the Canon. “It’s the very centre of London.”

Lady Sophia smiled coldly.

“It always reminds me of the Hamlet who was funny without being vulgar: South Kensington is Bayswater without being funny.”

“Peckham’s a nice neighbourhood,” said Mrs. Railing, trying to balance a piece of cake in her saucer. “You get such a nice class of people there.”

“So I should think,” replied Lady Sophia.

“We’ve got such a pretty little ‘ouse near the Gladstone Road. Of course, we ‘aven’t got electric light, but we’ve got a lovely bath-room. And Bertie takes a bath every morning.”

“Does he, indeed!” exclaimed the Canon.

“Yes, and ‘e says he can’t do without it: if ‘e doesn’t ‘ave it, ‘e’s uncomfortable all day. Things ‘ave changed since I was a girl. Why, nobody thought of ‘aving all these baths then. Now, only the other day I was talking to Mr. Smithers, the builder, an’ he said to me: ‘Lor, Mrs. Railing,’ says he, ‘people are getting that fussy, if you build ’em a house without a bath-room they won’t look at it.’ Why, even Louie takes a bath every Saturday night regular.”

“They say that cleanliness is next to godliness,” returned Canon Spratte, sententiously.

“There’s no denying that, but one ‘as to be careful,” said Mrs. Railing. “I’ve known a lot of people who’ve took their death of cold all through ‘aving a bath when they wasn’t feeling very well.”

Lord Spratte, giving Miss Railing a cup of tea, offered her the sugar.

“Thanks,” she said. “No sugar; I think it’s weak.”

“What, the tea?” cried the Canon. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, to take sugar. I don’t approve of hydrocarbons.”

“Rough on the hydrocarbons, ain’t it?” murmured Lord Spratte.

The Canon with a smile addressed himself again to Mrs. Railing.

“And how do you take your tea, dear lady?”

“Oh, I don’t pay no attention to all this stuff of Louie’s and Bertie’s,” that good creature replied, a broad fat smile sending her red face into a pucker of little wrinkles. “Sometimes they just about give me the ‘ump, I can tell you.”

“Ma, do mind what you’re saying,” cried Miss Railing, much shocked at this manner of speaking.

“Well, you do, Louie — that is Louise. She don’t like me to call her Louie. She says it’s so common. You know, my lord, my children was christened Bertram and Louise. But we’ve always called ’em Bertie and Louie, and I can’t get out of the ‘abit of it now. But, lor’, when your children grow up and get on in the world they want to turn everything upside down. Now what do you think Bertie wants me to do?”

“I can’t imagine,” said the Canon.

“Well, would you believe it, he wants me to take the pledge.”

“Ma!” cried Miss Railing, with whole volumes of reproach in her tone.

“Well, look ‘ere, my lord,” continued her mother, confidentially. “What I say is, I’m an ‘ard-working woman, and what with the work I do, I want my little drop of beer now and then. The Captain — my ‘usband, that is— ‘ad a little bit put by, but I ‘ad to work to make both ends meet when I was left a widow, I can tell you. And I’ve given my children a thorough good education.”

“You have reason to be proud of them,” replied the Canon, with conviction. “I don’t suppose my little girl has half the knowledge of Miss Louise.”

“That’s your fault; that’s because you’ve not educated her properly,” cried Miss Railing, attacking him at once. “I hold with the higher education of women. But there’s no education in the West End. Now, if I had charge of your daughter for six months I could make a different woman of her.”

“Ain’t she wonderful!” said Mrs. Railing. “I can listen to ‘er talking for hours at a time.”

“Except on the subject of teetotalism?” cried the Canon, rubbing his hands jovially.

Mrs. Railing threw back her head and shook with laughter.

“You’re right there, my lord. What I say is, I’m an ‘ard-working woman.”

“And you want your little drop of beer, I know, I know,” hastily interrupted the Canon. “I was discussing the matter the other day with the lady who does me the honour to clean out my church, and she expressed herself in the same manner; but she rather favoured spirits, I understand.”

“Oh, I never take spirits,” said Mrs. Railing, shaking her head.

“What, never?” cried the Canon, with immense gusto.

“Well, ‘ardly ever,” she answered, beaming.

“Capital! Capital!”

“Now don’t you laugh at me. The fact is, I sometimes ‘ave a little drop in my tea.”

“Bless me, why didn’t you say so? Winnie, you really ought to have told me. Ring the bell.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, my lord,” said Mrs. Railing, who feared she had expressed too decided a hint.

“My dear lady!” cried the Canon, as though he had only just escaped a serious breach of hospitality. “What is it you take? Rum?”

“Oh, I can’t bear it!” cried Mrs. Railing, throwing up both her hands and making a face.

“Whiskey?”

“Oh, no, my lord. I wouldn’t touch it if I was paid.”

“Gin?”

She smiled broadly and in a voice that was almost caressing, answered: “Call it white satin, my lord.”

“White satin?”

“It’s a funny thing now, but rum never ‘as agreed with me; an’ it’s wholesome stuff, you know.”

“I have no doubt,” said Theodore, politely.

“The last time I ‘ad a little drop — oh, I was queer. Now, my friend, Mrs. Cooper, can’t touch anything else.”

“Come, come, that’s very strange.”

“You don’t know Mrs. Cooper, do you? Oh, she’s such a nice woman. And she’s got such a dear little ‘ouse in Shepherd’s Bush.”

“A salubrious neighbourhood, I believe,” said Canon Spratte, with a courteous bow.

“Oh, yes, the tube ‘as made a great difference to it. You ought to know Mrs. Cooper. Oh, she’s a nice woman and a thorough lady. No one can say a word against ‘er, I don’t care who it is!”

“Ma!” said Louise.

“Well, they do say she takes a little drop too much now and then,” returned the good lady, qualifying her statement. “But I’ve never seen ‘er with more than she could carry.”

“Really!” said Canon Spratte.

“Oh, I don’t approve of taking more than you can ‘old. My motto is strict moderation. But as Mrs. Cooper was saying to me only the other day: ‘Mrs. Railing,’ she said, ‘with all the trouble I’ve gone through, I tell you, speaking as one lady to another, I don’t know what I should do without a little drop of rum.’ And she ‘as ‘ad a rare lot of trouble. There’s no denying it.”

“Poor soul, poor soul!” said the Canon.

“Oh, a rare lot of trouble. Now, you know, it’s funny ‘ow people differ. Mrs. Cooper said to me, ‘Mrs. Railing,’ she said, ‘I give you my word of honour, I can’t touch white satin. It ‘as such an effect on me that I don’t know what I’m talking about.’ So I said to ‘er: ‘Mrs. Cooper,’ I said, ‘you’re quite right not to touch it.’ Now wasn’t I right, my lord?”

“Oh, perfectly! I think you gave her the soundest possible advice.”

At this moment Ponsonby entered the room in answer to the bell. There was in his face such an impressive solemnity that you felt it would be almost sacrilege to address him flippantly. Canon Spratte rose and stepped forward, taking, according to his habit on important occasions, as it were the centre of the stage.

“Ponsonby, have we any — white satin in the house?”

“I ‘ave ‘eard it called satinette,” murmured Mrs. Railing, good-humouredly.

Ponsonby’s fish-like eyes travelled slowly from the Canon to the stout lady, and he positively blinked when he saw the rakish cock of her crape bonnet. Otherwise his massive face expressed no emotion.

“White satin, sir?” he repeated, slowly. “I’ll inquire.”

“Or satinette,” added Canon Spratte, unmoved.

Ponsonby did not immediately leave the room, but looked at the Canon with a mystified expression. His master smiled quietly.

“Perhaps Ponsonby does not quite understand. I mean, have we any gin in the house, Ponsonby?”

The emotions of horror and surprise made their way deliberately from feature to feature of Ponsonby’s fleshy, immobile face.

“Gin, sir? No, sir.”

“Is there none in the servants’ hall?”

“Oh no, sir!” answered Ponsonby, scandalized into some energy of expression.

“How careless of me!” cried the Canon, with every appearance of vexation. “You ought to have reminded me that there was no gin in the house, Sophia. Well, Ponsonby, will you go and get sixpennyworth at the nearest public-house.”

“Oh no, don’t send out for it,” said Mrs. Railing, in tones of entreaty, “I could never forgive myself.”

“But I assure you it’s no trouble at all. And I should very much like to taste it.”

“Well, then, threepennyworth is ample,” answered Mrs. Railing, with a nervous glance at her daughter.

“You’re much better without it, ma,” said she.

“Come, come, you mustn’t grudge your mother a little treat now and then,” cried their host.

“And it’s a real treat for me, I can tell you,” Mrs. Railing assured him.

Canon Spratte stretched out his arm, and with a dramatic gesture pointed to the door.

“Threepennyworth of gin, Ponsonby.”

“Yes, sir.”

With noiseless feet Ponsonby vanished from the room. Mrs. Railing turned amiably to Lady Sophia.

“That’s what I like about London, there always is a public-house round the corner.”

“Ma, do mind what you’re saying.”

Mrs. Railing did not like these frequent interruptions, and was about to make a somewhat heated rejoinder, when Lord Spratte joined in the conversation.

“I quite agree with Mrs. Railing, I think it’s most convenient.”

“Oh, do you?” said Louise, aggressively. “And may I ask if you have ever studied the teetotal question?”

“Not I!”

“And you’re a hereditary legislator,” she answered, looking him up and down with disdain. She fixed the peer with an argumentative eye. “I should just like to have a few words with you about the House of Lords. I’m a Radical and a Home Ruler. The House of Lords must go.”

“Bless you, I’ll part from it without a tear.”

“Now, what I want to know is what moral right have you to rule over me?”

“My dear lady, if I rule over you it is entirely unawares,” replied Lord Spratte, in the most deprecating way.

Miss Railing tossed her head with an impatient gesture.

“I’m not concerned with you personally. To you as an individual I am absolutely indifferent.”

“Don’t say that. Why should you ruthlessly crush my self-esteem?”

“I wish to discuss the matter with you as a member of a privileged class,” rejoined Miss Railing, with flashing eye, digging the ferule of her umbrella emphatically into the carpet. “Now, so far as I can see you are utterly ignorant of all the great social questions of the day.”

“Utterly!” he agreed.

“What do you know about the Housing of the Working Classes?”

“Nothing!”

“What do you know about Secondary Education?”

“Nothing!”

“What do you know about the Taxation of Ground Rents?”

“Nothing!” answered Lord Spratte for the third time. “And what’s more, I’m hanged if I want to.”

Miss Railing sprang to her feet, waving her umbrella as though herself about to lead an attack on the Houses of Parliament.

“And yet you are a member of the Upper Chamber. Just because you’re a lord, you have power to legislate over millions of people with ten times more knowledge, more ability, and more education than yourself.”

“Capital! Capital!” cried Canon Spratte, vastly amused. “You rub it in. A good straight talking-to is just what he wants!”

“And how do you spend your time, I should like to know. Do you study the questions of the hour? Do you attempt to fit yourself for the task entrusted to you by the anachronism of a past age?”

“I wish you’d put that umbrella down,” answered Lord Spratte. “It makes me quite nervous.”

Miss Railing angrily threw that instrument of menace on a chair.

“I’ll be bound you spend your days in every form of degrading pursuit. At race-meetings, and billiards, and gambling.”

“Capital! Capital!” cried the Canon.

Then Ponsonby returned bearing on a silver tray, engraved magnificently with the arms and supporters of the Sprattes, a liqueur bottle.

“Ah, here is the gin!”

But Mrs. Railing had an affection for synonyms and a passion for respectability. A spasm of outraged sensibility passed over her honest face.

“Oh, my lord, don’t call it gin. It sounds so vulgar. When my poor ‘usband was alive I used to say to ‘im: ‘Captain, I won’t have it called gin in my ‘ouse.’ I always used to call my ‘usband the captain, although he was only first mate. I wish you could ‘ave seen him. If any one ‘ad said to me: ‘Mrs. Railing, put your ‘and on a fine, ‘andsome, ‘ealthy man,’ I should ‘ave put my ‘and on James Samuel Railing. And would you believe it, before he was thirty-five he was no more.”

“Very sad!” said the Canon.

“Oh, and ‘e was a dreadful sight before ‘e died. You should have seen his legs.”

“Ma!”

“Leave me alone, Louie,” answered Mrs. Railing, somewhat incensed. “Do you think I’ve never been in a gentleman’s house before? You’re always naggin’.”

“No, I’m not, ma.”

“Don’t contradict, Louie. I won’t ‘ave it.”

But Canon Spratte interposed with soft words.

“Won’t you have a little more — white satin?”

“No, thank you, my lord, I don’t think I could stand it,” said Mrs. Railing, quickly regaining her composure. “You made the first dose rather strong, and we’ve got to get ‘ome, you know.”

“I think we ought to be trotting, ma,” said her daughter.

“P’raps we ought. We’ve got a long way to go.”

“We’d better take the train, ma.”

“Oh, let’s go in a ‘bus, my dear,” answered Mrs. Railing. “I like riding in ‘buses, the conductors are so good-looking, and such gentlemen. Why, the other day I got into conversation with the conductor, and would you believe it, he made me drink a drop of beer with ‘im at the end of the journey. Oh, he was a nice young man!”

“Ma!”

“Well, my dear, so ‘e was. And ‘e’s none the worse for being a ‘bus conductor. They earn very good money, and ‘e told me ‘e was a married man, so I don’t see no ‘arm in it.”

“Come on, ma, or we shall never get off,” said Miss Railing.

“Well, good-bye, my lord. And thank you.”

Canon Spratte shook hands with them both very warmly.

“So kind of you to come all this way. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed your visit.”

But when the door was closed behind the visitors utter silence fell upon every one in the room. Winnie looked silently in front of her, and silently Lord Spratte and Lady Sophia watched her. The Canon went to a window and glanced at the retreating figure of Mrs. Railing. He drummed on the panes and softly hummed to himself:

“For I’m no sailor bold,

And I’ve never been upon the sea;

And if I fell therein, it’s a fact I couldn’t swim,

And quickly at the bottom I should be.”

Winnie got up suddenly, and without a word left the room. The Canon smiled quietly. He sat down and wrote a note to Wroxham asking him to tea on the following afternoon.

XIII

THE fates always behaved handsomely to Theodore Spratte. He was not surprised when Lady Sophia announced at luncheon next day that she meant to spend the afternoon at the Academy. The Canon expressed his regret that he would not enjoy the privilege of her society at tea, but proposed that he and Winnie should have it quite cosily by themselves. Ponsonby received private instructions that no one but Lord Wroxham should be admitted.

“And after his lordship has been here about five minutes, Ponsonby, I wish you to call me away.”

When Canon Spratte gave this order he looked straight into the butler’s eyes to frown down any expression of surprise; but Ponsonby replied without moving a muscle.

“Very well, sir.”

He turned to leave the room, and as he did so, thinking the Canon could not see, solemnly winked at the portrait of Josiah, Lord Chancellor of England. For a moment Canon Spratte thought it must be an optical delusion, for that vast, heavy face remained impassive. Yet he would have sworn that Ponsonby’s right lid descended slowly with a smooth and wary stealthiness. The Canon said no word, and when the butler at last disappeared smiled quietly to himself.

“Ponsonby is really a very remarkable character.”

It was not often that Canon Spratte exerted himself when there was none but his family to admire his conversation, but on this occasion he took the greatest pains. No human being is more difficult to entertain than a young girl, and it was a clear proof of his talent that he could charm his own daughter. Winnie was listless and depressed. She shuddered still when she thought of the Railings. Their visit had precisely the effect which the Canon intended, and she was ashamed. She had seen Bertram that morning; and, perhaps owing to the sleepless night she had passed, his conversation had seemed less inspiring than usual. He was much interested in a strike which was then proceeding in Germany, and he bored her a little. One or two of his Radical theories sounded preposterous in her ears, and they had a short argument in which he proved to her that her ideas were silly and prejudiced. Once or twice Winnie had caught in his voice almost the same dictatorial manner which his sister Louise had assumed when she rated Lord Spratte. Winnie left him with a certain feeling of irritation.

But the Canon, though he knew nothing of this, took care not to refer to Railing. He drew her into a conversation on the subjects which he knew most interested her. He used every art to flatter and amuse. He told her new stories. He ridiculed comically the people he had dined with on the previous evening, and such was his gift of mimicry she could not help but laugh. His urbanity and worldly wisdom were notorious, and he had been invited to adjust some social difficulty. He now asked her advice on the point, and holding apparently an opinion contrary to hers, allowed her to convince him.

“I think there’s a great deal in what you say, Winnie. It’s extraordinary that the most experienced man never catches the point of such matters so accurately as a woman.”

Winnie smiled with pleasure, for her father’s commendation was rare enough to be valuable. Forgetting her own troubles, she enlarged upon the topic; and he, making now and then some apposite remark, listened with gratifying attention.

“Upon my word, I think you’re quite right,” he said at last, as though completely persuaded. “I shall do exactly as you suggest.”

It was not wonderful that Winnie thought him the most remarkable of men. Then he turned to other things. He talked of his own plans and his ambitions. He knew very well that nothing compliments a young woman more than for a man of middle age to discuss with her his dearest aspirations; and Winnie felt that she had entered for the first time thoroughly into her father’s life.

At length Ponsonby announced the expected visitor.

“Ah, my dear boy, I’m so pleased to see you,” cried the Canon, springing to his feet with agility.

Wroxham, shyly, hesitating a little, offered his hand to Winnie.

“You must think me a dreadful bore,” he said, blushing pleasantly, “I’m always coming.”

“Nonsense!” interrupted his host, with great heartiness. “We’re always delighted to see you. I want you to look upon the Vicarage as your second home.”

Shortly afterwards, according to his orders, Ponsonby appeared again. He spoke in an undertone to the Canon, who at once got up.

“I must ask you to excuse me for a few minutes,” he said, turning to Wroxham. “I have a parishioner waiting to see me — a very sad case. A poor woman who lost her husband a little while ago; and she’s looking out for number two, and can’t find him. A clergyman’s time is never his own.”

“Oh, pray don’t mind me,” said Wroxham.

“I shall be back in five minutes. Don’t go before I see you. Winnie will do her best not to bore you.”

He went out. Wroxham stepped forward to Winnie, who was pretending to alter the arrangement of flowers in a vase.

“I’m glad your father has left us alone, Winnie,” he said, fixing his pince-nez more firmly. “I so seldom get a chance of speaking to you.”

Winnie did not reply but pulled to pieces a marguerite.

“What does it come to?” he asked.

For a moment, not thinking of the old fancy, she made no answer; but then, remembering, held out the stalk with one remaining petal, and smiled.

“He loves me not.”

“It’s not true. He loves you passionately. He always will.”

With a sigh Winnie threw away the flower.

“Won’t you speak to me, Winnie?”

“What do you want me to say?”

He took her hand kindly, and looked into her eyes, trying to discover her thoughts, trying from sheer force of his own love, to make her tender.

“Oh, Harry, I’m so unhappy,” she murmured at last. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Can’t you love me, Winnie?” he asked, drawing her towards him. “Did you mean it when you told me never to hope?”

“I said that only a week ago, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t mean it?”

She tore herself from him almost violently.

“Oh, I utterly despise myself.”

“But why? Why?”

She looked for a long while into his pleasant clear blue eyes, as though she sought to read his very heart.

“I wonder if you really care for me?”

“I love you with all my being,” he cried, eagerly, finding in his ardent love a new eloquence. “You are all I care for in the world. You’re my very life. Ah, yes, I love you with all my heart and soul.”

Winnie did not answer immediately, but smiled happily. When she spoke there was in her voice the tremor of tears.

“I think I like to hear you say that.”

“Ah, Winnie.”

He held out his hands appealingly.

“I’m so miserable,” she sighed, remembering again the events of the previous days. “I want some one so badly to care for me.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter? I may be able to do something.”

“It is kind of you to be nice to me,” she smiled, almost tenderly. “You’re far nicer than I ever thought you.”

“Why do you torture me like this?” he cried, passionately. “Winnie, say you love me.”

There was a silence. Then with a blush Winnie put her hand on his arm. A new soft look came into her eyes.

“Do you remember when I first saw you? You came here with Lionel from Eton. And you were dreadfully shy.”

“But we became great friends, didn’t we?”

“How angry you used to get when I beat you at tennis.”

“Oh, you never did — except when I let you.”

“That’s what you always said, but I never believed it.”

Wroxham laughed boyishly, feeling on a sudden absurdly happy. He saw that Winnie was yielding, and yet he hardly dared to think his good fortune true.

“And do you remember how I used to punt you up and down the river in the holidays?” he said.

“How frightened I was when you fell in!”

“Oh, you fibber!” he cried, with a joyful smile. “You shrieked and roared with laughter!”

Winnie, with a little laugh, turned to the sofa. Raising her eyelashes, she looked at Wroxham with the glance that she well knew set him all aflame.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured.

She sat down, and he, sitting beside her, took her hand. She made no effort to withdraw it.

“What lovely days those were!” she said. “But we used to quarrel dreadfully, usen’t we?”

“Only for the pleasure of making it up.”

“Do you think so? You used to make me jealous by talking to other little girls.”

“Oh, never!” he cried, shaking his head, firmly. “It was always you. You were so awfully flirtatious.”

Winnie smiled and looked down at his hand. It held hers as though it would never again let it go.

“I wonder when you first began to like me?” she asked.

“I’ve never liked you. I’ve always loved you, passionately.”

“Always? Even when I wore a pig-tail and square-toed boots?”

“Always! And I always shall,” he cried, boldly putting his arm round her waist. She leaned against it as though it were a comforting support. “And I can’t live without you.”

“Are you sure?”

“You didn’t mean it when you said you couldn’t love me?” he murmured, vehemently.

She looked straight into his eyes for a moment, smiling, and slightly bent towards him.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“My dearest!”

Quickly, eagerly, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips.

“Say you’ll marry me, Winnie?”

“I’ll do anything to make you happy.”

“Kiss me. I love you.”

Blushing, she put her lips to his, and the soft pressure made him tremble with delight. He seized her hands and kissed them in passionate gratitude, repeatedly. For a while they sat in silence. Winnie, all confused, was trying to realize what she had done; but Wroxham was overwhelmed with joy.

Then the Canon’s voice was heard on the stairs, singing to himself; and Winnie quickly tore herself from her lover.

“La donna è mobile,” sang the Canon, coming in; “Tra-la-la-la-la Tra-la-la-la-la.” He started when he saw the young couple sitting self-consciously in opposite corners of the sofa. “Hulloa, I thought you must have gone! I was detained longer than I expected.”

“May I tell him?” asked Wroxham.

“Yes!”

“Canon Spratte, I want to tell you that Winnie has just promised to be my wife.”

“What!” cried the Canon. “Capital! Capital! My dear fellow, I’m delighted to hear it. You know I couldn’t have wanted a better son-in-law. My dear child!”

He opened his arms and Winnie hid her face on his bosom. He kissed her affectionately, and then with sincere warmth shook hands with Wroxham.

“All’s well that ends well,” he cried. “I knew she was devoted to you, my boy. Trust me for knowing a woman’s character.”

“Papa’s wonderful,” said Winnie, with a laugh, stretching out her hand to Wroxham.

“You’ve made me very happy,” he said.

They discussed the situation for some time, and Canon Spratte was very bland. His wildest hopes had never led him to expect that Winnie would throw herself there and then into Wroxham’s eligible arms; but an occasional glance, partly of amusement, was his only sign of surprise. The young man, promising to return for dinner, went away at last, and Theodore looked at his daughter for an explanation. She stood near a table, and began nervously to turn over the pages of a book. A smile broke on the Canon’s lips, for her embarrassment told him all he wished to know.

“Would it be indiscreet to inquire when you broke off your engagement with Mr. Railing?” he asked.

Winnie looked up.

“I haven’t broken it off.”

“And do you intend to marry them both?”

She quickly closed the book and went up to him.

“Oh, papa, you must help me,” she cried. “I’m simply distracted and I don’t know what to do.”

“But which of them do you propose to marry?”

“Oh, don’t be unkind, father. Except for you I should never have met that man. I hate him. I’m ashamed that he ever kissed me.”

“Which, my love?” he asked, as though quite perplexed. “I have every reason to believe that both embraced you.”

“Papa!”

There was a pause. The Canon felt that he would be wanting in his paternal duties if he took again to his bosom a prodigal daughter without pointing out clearly the nature of her misdeeds. Some reproof, tender but dignified, gentle but explicit, was surely needed. The child had flatly disobeyed his commands.

“Do I understand that the fact that Mrs. Railing drops her aitches and drinks gin, while her daughter is bumptious and vulgar, has had any effect upon your attachment to Mr. Bertram Railing?”

“You asked them to come here, you knew what would happen,” answered Winnie, flushing. “Oh, father, don’t be cruel. I made a fool of myself. He took me unawares and I thought for a moment that I could live his life. But I’m frightened of him.”

He said, gravely: “Which do you honestly prefer?”

For a moment she hesitated, then with a little sob replied:

“I love them both.”

“I beg your pardon!” exclaimed her father, who did not in the least await such an answer.

“When I’m with one I think he’s so much nicer than the other.”

“Really, Winnie, you can’t shilly-shally in this way,” he said, considerably annoyed. “You’ve just told me you couldn’t bear young Railing.”

“I can’t help it, father. When I see him I’m simply carried away. Bertram’s a hero.”

“Fiddlededee! He’s a journalist.”

“When I’m with him I’m filled with high and noble thoughts. My heart seems to grow larger so that I could throw myself at his feet. I’m not fit to be his handmaid. But I can’t live up to his ideal. I have to pose all the time, and I say things I don’t mean so that he may think well of me. Sometimes I’m afraid of him; I wonder what he’d say if he knew what I honestly was. He doesn’t really love me, he thinks I’m full of faults. He loves his ideal and the woman I may become. He makes me feel so insignificant and so unworthy.”

“And Wroxham?”

Winnie smiled happily.

“Oh, Harry’s different; he loves me for myself. I can be quite natural with him, and I needn’t pretend to be any better than I am. He doesn’t think I have any faults and he doesn’t want me any different from what I am. With Bertram I have to walk on stilts, but with Harry I can just dawdle along at my own pace, and he’ll be only too glad to wait for me.”

“Really, Winnie, I don’t think it’s quite nice for a girl of your age to analyze her feelings in this way,” said the Canon, irritably. “I hate people who can’t make up their minds. That is one of the few things upon which I feel justified in priding myself, that I do know my own mind.”

“You will get me out of the scrape, father?”

The Canon quickly drove away all appearance of vexation, for it was evident that his daughter still required very careful handling. He took her hand and patted it affectionately.

“You see, your poor old father is still some use after all. What do you wish me to do, my child?”

“Bertram is coming here the day after to-morrow. I want you to tell him it’s all a mistake and I can’t marry him.”

“He won’t take it from me.”

“Oh, he must. I daren’t see him again, I should be too ashamed. But be kind to him, father. I don’t want him to be unhappy.”

“You need not worry yourself about that, my darling. If there’s any man who can deal diplomatically with such matters I may say, without vanity, that it is I.” He paused and looked at Winnie sharply. “But mind, there must be no drawing back this time, or else I leave you to get out of the muddle as best you can. Have I your full authority to tell Sophia that you’re going to marry Wroxham?”

“Yes.”

The Canon took her in his arms.

“Kiss me, my darling. I feel sure that you will be a credit to your father and an honour to your family.”

XIV

LORD SPRATTE went to St. Gregory’s Vicarage next day. His sister told him with an acid smile that he would find Theodore in the best of spirits.

“By Jove, I wonder if he’d lend me some money!” cried the head of the family. “Who’s he been doin’ now?”

Lady Sophia had scarcely explained when they heard the Canon come into the house. He had been out for ten minutes on some errand. This was an occasion upon which Canon Spratte felt that his fellow-creatures were very amiable. The world was an excellent place where a combination of uprightness and of pious ingenuity made the way of the virtuous not unduly hard.

On his way past the dining-room he looked in to glance at his portrait, which Orchardson had painted some fifteen years before. It was an extravagance, but when he had the chance to gratify others the Canon did not count his pence. He had been able to think of no more pleasing surprise for his wife, on the tenth anniversary of their wedding-day, than to give her a not unflattering picture of himself. He observed with satisfaction the strong lines of the hands, the open look of his blue eyes, and the bold expression of his mouth. It was a man in whose veins ran a vivacious spirit. His whole appearance was so happily self-reliant that even from the painted canvas spectators gained a feeling of exhilaration. Canon Spratte noted how well his shapely head, with the abundant fair hair, stood out against the purple background. Above, in the corner, according to his own suggestion, were the arms and the motto of his family: Malo mori quam fœdari.

“Yes, I think he did me justice,” thought the Canon. “I sometimes fancy the hands are a little too large, but that may be only the perspective.” He smiled to his own smiling eyes. “If I’m ever made a bishop I shall be painted again. I think it’s a duty one owes one’s children. I shall be painted by Sargent, in full canonicals, and I shall have an amethyst ring. It’s absurd that we should habitually leave what is indeed part of the insignia of our office to a foreign Church. The English bishops have just as much right to the ring of amethyst as the bishops of the Pope. I shall have the arms of the See on the right-hand side and my own arms on the left.”

He had a vivid imagination, and already saw this portrait in the Academy, on the line. It was surrounded by a crowd. Evidently it would be the picture of the year, for he felt himself capable of inspiring the painter with his own vigorous personality. He saw the country cousins and the strenuous inhabitants of Suburbia turn to their catalogues, and read: The Right Reverend the Bishop of Barchester. At the private view he saw people, recognizing him from the excellent portrait, point him out to one another. He saw his own little smile of amusement when he stood perchance for a moment in front of it, and the onlookers with rapid glance compared the original with the counterfeit. Already he marked the dashing brushwork and he fancied the painter’s style suited admirably with his peculiar characteristics. He liked the shining, stiff folds of black satin, the lawn sleeves, and the delicate lace of the ruffles, the rich scarlet of his hood. He imagined the attitude of proud command which befitted a Prince of the Church, the fearless poise of the head, the firm face and the eagle eye. He would look every inch a bishop.

“How true it is that some are born to greatness!” he muttered. “I shall leave it to the National Portrait Gallery in my will.”

And then, if he survived his brother, he thought with a vainglorious tremor of the describing tablet: “Theodore, 3rd Earl Spratte of Beachcombe, and Lord Bishop of Barchester.”

His cheeks were flushed and his eyes sparkled, for verily he was drunk with pride. His heart beat so that it was almost painful.

With swinging step he sprang up the stairs and danced into the drawing-room like a merry West Wind. The second Earl Spratte, however, was still in the best of health.

“Ah, my dear brother, I’m delighted to see you,” cried the Canon, and his voice rang like a joyous bell.

“For once in a way, Theodore. I was about to ask Sophia if you’d arranged about paddin’ the gaiters yet?”

“Ha, ha, you will have your little joke, Tom.” He had not used this diminutive since his brother succeeded to the title, and Lady Sophia stared at him with astonishment. “We Sprattes have always had a keen sense of humour. And what does the head of my house think of all these matrimonial schemes?”

“I’ve really half a mind to follow suit.”

“Who is the charmer now, Thomas? Does she tread the light fantastic toe in the ballet at the Empire, or does she carol in a Gaiety chorus?”

“I have an idea that your brother Theodore is mildly facetious to-day,” said the other gravely to Lady Sophia.

The Canon burst out laughing and jovially rubbed his hands.

“You must marry money, my boy.”

“I would like a shot if I could. What I object to is marryin’ a wife.”

“One can never get money in this world without some drawback.”

Lord Spratte looked at his brother with a dry smile.

“How green and yellow you’d turn, Theodore, if I did marry!”

“My dear Thomas, there’s nothing that would please me more. You will do me the justice to acknowledge that I have frequently impressed upon you the desirability of marriage. I look upon it as a duty you owe to your family.”

“And has the heir presumptive never in imagination fitted on his handsome head the coronet, nor draped about himself picturesquely the ermine robes? Oh, what a humbug you are, Theodore!”

“Thomas,” retorted the Canon, “Thomas, how can you say such things! I can honestly say that I have never envied you. I have never allowed my mind to dwell on the possibility of surviving you.”

Lord Spratte gave his brother a sharp look.

“I have led a racketty life, Theodore, and you have taken great care of yourself. There’s every chance that you’ll survive me. By Jupiter, you’ll make things hum then!”

“I do not look upon this as a suitable matter for jesting,” retorted the Canon, with suave dignity. “If Providence vouchsafes to me a longer life, you may be sure I will fulfil the duties of my rank earnestly and to the best of my ability.”

“And what about the bishopric?” asked Lady Sophia.

“Who knows? Who knows?” he cried, walking about the room excitedly. “I have a presentiment that it will be offered to me.”

“In that case I have a presentiment that you will accept,” interrupted his brother. “You’re the most ambitious man I’ve ever known.”

“And if I am!” cried the Canon. “Ambition, says the Swan of Avon, is the last infirmity of noble minds. But what is the use of ambition now, when the Church has been wrongfully shorn of its power, and the clergy exist hazardously by sufferance of the vulgar? I should have lived four centuries ago, when the Church was a power in the land. Now it offers no scope for a man of energy. When the Tudors were kings of England a bishop might rule the country. He might be a great minister of state, holding the destinies of Europe in the hollow of his hand. I’ve come into the world too late. You may laugh at me, Thomas, but I tell you I feel in me the power to do great things. Sometimes I sit in my chair and I can hardly bear my inaction. Good heavens, what is there for me to do — to preach sermons to a fashionable crowd, to preside on committees, to go to dinner-parties in Mayfair. With your opportunities, Tom, I should have been Prime Minister by now, and I’d have made you Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Lady Sophia looked at him, smiling. She admired the mobile mouth and the flashing eyes, as with vehement gesture he flung out his words to the indifferent air. His voice rang clear and strong.

“I tell you that I am born with the heart of a crusader,” he exclaimed, striding about the room as though it were a field of battle. “In happier times I would have led the hosts of the Lord to Jerusalem. Bishops then wore coats of steel and they fought with halberd and with sword to gain the Sepulchre of the Lord their Saviour. I tell you that I cannot look at the portrait of Julius the Pope without thinking that I too have it in me to ride into action on my charger and crush the enemies of the Church. I’ve come into the world too late.”

Lord Spratte, mildly cynical, shrugged his shoulders.

“Meanwhile you’ve succeeded in capturing for Winnie the best parti of the season. Talk of match-makin’ mammas! They’re nowhere when my brother Theodore takes the field.”

“When I make up my mind to do a thing I do it.”

“And what about the Socialist?”

“Oh, I think I’ve settled him,” said the Canon, with a laugh of disdain. “What did I tell you, Sophia?”

“My dear Theodore, I have always thought you a clever man,” she answered, calmly.

“I’ve brought you to your knees; I’ve humbled your pride at last. Winnie is going to marry Harry Wroxham and Lionel is nearly engaged to Gwendolen Durant. What would you say if I told you that I was going to be married too?”

They both stared at him with amazement, and he chuckled as he watched their faces.

“Are you joking, Theodore?”

“Not in the least. But I’m not going to tell you who it is yet.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if it were Gwendolen,” mused Lady Sophia. “Unless I’m much mistaken she’s a good deal more in love with you than she is with Lionel.”

“Of course one never knows, does one?” laughed the Canon. “On the other hand, it might be Mrs. Fitzherbert.”

“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” replied Lady Sophia, with decision.

“Why?”

“Because she’s a sensible woman and she’d never be such a fool as to have you.”

“Wait and see, then. Wait and see.”

He laughed himself out of the room, and went to his study. Here he laughed again. He had not seen Mrs. Fitzherbert since the ball, for on the following morning she had wired to say that the grave illness of a friend obliged her to go immediately into the country. The Canon had hesitated whether to write a letter; but he was prevented by his dread of ridicule from making protestations of undying affection, and knew not what else to say. He contented himself with sending a telegram:

I await your return with impatience. — Theodore.

He was dining with her that evening to meet certain persons of note. Since she had not written to postpone the party, Mrs. Fitzherbert presumably intended to return to London in the course of the day. He looked forward to the meeting with pleasurable excitement.

Canon Spratte was proud of himself. He had succeeded in all his efforts, and he felt, as men at certain times do, that he was in luck’s way. He did not look upon this success as due to any fortuitous concurrence of things, but rather as a testimony to his own merit. He was vastly encouraged, and only spoke the truth when he said his presentiment was vivid, that Lord Stonehenge would offer him the Bishopric of Barchester. He was on the top of a wave, swimming bravely; and the very forces of the universe conspired to land him on an episcopal throne.

“That is how you tell what stuff a man is made of,” he thought, as he tried in vain to read. “The good man has self-reliance.”

He remembered with satisfaction that as soon as he heard of Bishop Andover’s death, he went boldly to the tailor and countermanded the trousers he had ordered. It was a small thing, no doubt, but after all it was a clear indication of character.

St. Gregory’s Vicarage stood at the corner of a square. From the study Canon Spratte could see the well-kept lawn of the garden, and the trees, dusty already in the London summer. But they seemed fresh and vernal to his enthusiastic eyes. The air blowing through the open window was very suave. Above, in the blue sky, little white clouds scampered hurriedly past, westward; and their free motion corresponded with his light, confident spirit. They too had the happy power which thrilled through every nerve of his body, and like theirs was the vigorous strength of the blood that hustled through his veins. To the careless, who believe in grim chance, it might have seemed an accident that these clouds were travelling straight to Barchester; but Canon Spratte thought that nothing in the world was purposeless. In their direction he saw an obvious and agreeable omen.

“How good life is!” he murmured. “After all, if we haven’t the scope that our predecessors had, we have a great deal. The earth is always fresh and young, full of opportunity to the man who has the courage to take it.”

He saw in fancy the towers and the dark roofs of Barchester. It was an old city seated in a fertile plain, surrounded by rich pasture lands and watered by smiling rivulets. He knew the pompous trees which adorned its fields and the meadows bright with buttercups. He loved the quiet streets and the gabled houses. The repose was broken only by the gay hurry of market day, when the farmers led in their cattle and their sheep: already he saw the string of horses brought in for sale, with straw plaited in their tails, and the crowd of loungers at the Corn Exchange. Above all, his fancy lingered among the grey stones of the cathedral, with its lofty nave; and in the close with the ancient elms and the careful, sweet-smelling lawns. He thought of the rich service, the imposing procession of the clergy, and the magnificent throne carved by sculptors long forgotten, in which himself would sit so proudly.

“Oh, yes, the world is very good!” he cried.

He was so immersed in thought that he did not hear Ponsonby come into the room, and started violently when he heard a voice behind him.

“This letter has just come for you, sir.”

He knew at once that it was from Lord Stonehenge. The certainty came to him with the force of an inspiration, and his heart beat violently.

“Very well,” he said. “Put it on my desk.”

He turned pale, but did not move till the servant was gone. He took it with shaking hands. He was right, for he recognized the official paper. At last! For some time he looked at the envelope, but trembled so much that he could not open it. He grew sick with expectation and his brain throbbed as if he would faint. A feeling of thankfulness came into his heart. Now the cup of his desire was filled. He held his head for a moment and breathed deeply, then slowly cut open the envelope. With habitual neatness he used a paper-knife.

Dear Canon Spratte,

It is my desire, if it meet your own wishes, to recommend His Majesty to appoint you to the Deanery of St. Olphert’s, vacant through the impending retirement from illness of Dr. Tanner. In so doing, I can assure you I feel great pleasure in being able to mark my appreciation of your learning and sound divinity by offering you a position of greater dignity and less work. The duties, I need not tell you, are commanding in their nature; and I feel sure you would be able to perform them with great advantage to the interests of the Church, to which I think the course I am taking will be most beneficial, especially at this critical moment in its history.

I have the honour to be, dear Canon Spratte,

Yours faithfully,

Stonehenge.

The Hon. and Rev. Canon Spratte,

St. Gregory’s Vicarage.

The Prime Minister offered him an obscure, insignificant deanery in the north of Wales. For an instant Canon Spratte could not understand. It seemed impossible, it seemed preposterous. He thought it must be a mistake, and carefully read the letter again. The overthrow of all his hopes came upon him at the moment of his greatest exultation, and the blow was greater than he could bear; two scalding tears rose in his eyes, and heavily, painfully, rolled down his cheeks. They fell on the letter and made two little wet smudges.

The disappointment was so great that he could not be angry. He was utterly crushed. And then, in the revulsion from his high spirits, he was overwhelmed with despair. He asked pitifully whether he had all along misjudged himself. The Prime Minister did not think him fit for important office but sought to satisfy his claims by an empty honour, such as he might give to a man who, perhaps, had deserved well, but whose powers were now decrepit. That post of dignity was but a decent grave.

Suddenly, with the vain man’s utter self-abasement, Canon Spratte saw himself as he thought others might see him: mediocre, pompous, self-assertive, verbose. He heard the mocking words of the envious:

“Theodore Spratte is shelved. At all events he’ll be out of harm’s way at St. Olphert’s, and it’s just the sort of thing that’ll suit him — to tyrannize over provincial old ladies.”

And others would be astonished and say:

“One would have thought that pushing man would have pushed himself into something better than that!”

Again the Canon thought of all he might have done: and the pictures of the future, like scoffing devils, came once more before his mind. He could not help the tears. For a while, leaning over his desk, with his hands pressed to his burning eyes, he surrendered unresisting to his weakness. The tall spires and the sombre roofs of Barchester returned to his vivid fancy, and all that he had lost seemed twice as beautiful. The humiliation was unbearable. He hated and despised himself; he was petty and mean; and his pride, his boastfulness, his overbearing spirit, uprose against him in reproach. Who was he thus to have contemned his fellows? He had imagined himself clever, wise, and brilliant; and the world had laughed in its sleeve at his presumption. He blushed now, blushed so that he felt his face burn, at the thought that all this time people had despised him. He had lived in a fool’s paradise, rejoicing in the admiration of his fellows; and he had been an object of derision. It had been self-admiration only; and the world had taken him, as did Lord Stonehenge, for the mediocre son of a clever father. Even his brother had told him repeatedly that he was pretentious and vulgar, and he thought it only the sneer of a man who could not appreciate great qualities. A thousand imps danced in his brain, with mockery and with malicious gibes: in every key from shrill to hoarse, he heard their scornful laughter.

“I won’t take it,” he cried, jumping up suddenly. “I’ll remain where I am. I’m strong and young still; I feel as vigorous as if I were twenty. I don’t want their honours.”

But then he hesitated, and sank again, helplessly, into his chair. Was it not his duty to accept the promotion which was offered him? Had he a right to refuse? What was he but a servant of God, and might it not be His will that he should go to this deanery? He hated the idea, and feared the cold dulness of St. Olphert’s; but yet, with something in him of English puritanism, the very fact that it was so distasteful, seemed an argument in its favour.

“Am I fit to hold a great London parish?” he asked, despairingly. “I’m growing old. Each year I shall be less active and less versatile. Ought I not to make way for younger, better men?”

He strove to drive away the thought, but could not. Some voice, the voice of conscience perhaps, told him it was his duty to accept this offer.

“O God, help me,” he cried, broken at length and submissive. “I know not what to do. Guide me and teach me to do Thy will.”

Presently he fell on his knees humbly and prayed. Now there was nothing in him of the confident priest or of the proud and self-assertive man; he was but an abject penitent, confessing in broken words, tremulous and halting, his utter weakness.

“O Lord, give me a holy contented frame,” he cried. “Make me to desire nothing but how best to fulfil Thy holy will. Save me from worldly ambitious thoughts. I am weak and cowardly, and my sins have been very great, and I know that I am unfitted for a great position.”

When he rose to his feet, with a sigh he read Stonehenge’s letter for the third time. He took it in his hand and went to Lady Sophia. He felt that from her he would gain help. He was so crushed, so changed, that he needed another’s guidance. For once in his life he could not make up his mind.

But when she saw him, Lady Sophia was seized with astonishment. His spirited face seemed wan and lifeless; the lines stood out, and his eyes were very tired. He appeared on a sudden to be an old man. His upright carriage was gone and he walked listlessly, with stooping shoulders.

“Theodore, what on earth’s the matter?” she cried.

He handed her the letter and, in a voice still broken with emotion, said:

“Stonehenge doesn’t think I’m fit to be a bishop. He’s offered me a Welsh deanery.”

“But you won’t accept it?”

He bowed his head, looking at her with an appeal that was almost childlike.

“I’m not sure whether I have the right to refuse.”

“What does he mean by saying that the duties are commanding in their nature?”

“He means nothing,” answered the Canon, shrugging his shoulders scornfully. “He’s merely gilding the pill with fine phrases. Oh, Sophia, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to bury myself in that inglorious idleness. I feel in me the power to do so much more, and St. Olphert’s offers me nothing. It’s a sleepy, sordid place. I might as well be buried alive. I don’t want to leave London.”

His voice was so pitiful that Lady Sophia was touched. She saw that he wanted her to persuade him to stay in town, and yet his conscience troubled him.

“I’m only a servant of the Church,” he said. “I don’t know that I have the right to refuse to go where I am sent. Perhaps he’s not far wrong in thinking that it’s all I’m good for. Oh, Sophia, I’m so unhappy!”

She realized how much it meant for that bold spirit thus to humble itself. He paid a heavy price for his vanity. He was like a child in her hands, needing consolation and support. She began to speak to him gently. She suggested that the offer of this deanery signified only that Lord Stonehenge, feeling he owed something to the son of the late Lord Chancellor, had been unable on account of other claims to give him the bishopric. From the observation of long years she had learnt on what points Theodore most prided himself, (in the past this knowledge had been used to give little admonishing stabs,) and now she took them one by one. She appealed skilfully to his prepossessions. With well-directed flattery, calling to his mind past triumphs, and compliments paid him by the great ones of the earth, she caused him little by little to gather courage. Presently she saw the hopeless expression of the mouth give way to a smile of pleasure, and a new confidence came into his eyes. His very back was straightened. In the new uprightness with which he held himself, she perceived that her subtle words were taking due effect. At last she reminded him of his work at St. Gregory’s.

“After all, you’re a figure in London,” she said. “You have power and influence. For my part I have wondered that you contemplated leaving it for an obscure country town like Barchester. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised if you’d refused the bishopric.”

He breathed more freely, and with his quick and happy optimism began already to see things more genially.

“Besides, we Sprattes are somebody in the world,” concluded Lady Sophia, with a smile, the faint irony of which he did not see. “I don’t think you would show a proper spirit if you allowed yourself to be trampled on.”

“Ah, Sophia, I knew that at the bottom of your heart you were as proud of your stock as I. You’re quite right. I owe it to my family as well as to myself not to allow them to thrust me into obscurity. I shall refuse the deanery, Sophia; and Lord Stonehenge — —”

“Can go to the devil,” she added, quietly.

Canon Spratte smiled with all his old vivacity.

“Sophia, I thank you. It is not right that I should say such things, but you have entirely expressed my sentiments.”

“Why don’t you sit down and write the letter at once?”

Without answering, the Canon seated himself, and presently showed to Lady Sophia, for her approval, the following reply.

Dear Lord Stonehenge,

I have weighed your very considerate proposal most anxiously and have given full weight to what you urge. I fully appreciate the kind motive which offered me the opportunity of removing to a position both of leisure and of dignity. I am sure you will not think that I have lightly set aside the offer made me; but I am doubtful whether my health would stand the asperities of a Welsh climate. And I have to consider that a very great assistance to me in the performance of my present duties is derived from the complete knowledge of my work in London. I fear that I might find the distant and untried labours of St. Olphert’s less congenial. And I feel that without some very strong counter-balancing reason, it is not desirable that I should leave plans which I have begun, but scarcely matured, in the Metropolis.

Believe me to be, with very grateful thanks, dear Lord Stonehenge,

Your faithful and obedient servant,

Theodore Spratte

Lady Sophia smiled when she read that last sentence in which he wisely left himself an escape, whereby he might with dignity abandon London, if a bishopric in the future were offered to him. Obviously the comfortable hope had returned that in the end his merits would receive their just reward. She gave back the letter.

“I think it will do capitally,” she said. “Now, if I were you, I’d go out for a stroll.”

“So I will, Sophia,” he replied. “I shall never forget your encouragement. I confess I was very much cast down.”

Much to her surprise he kissed her affectionately, and then said:

“As I have nowhere particular to go, I shall just walk along to Savile Row, and order two pairs of trousers.”

XV

MRS. FITZHERBERT had fixed half-past eight for the hour of dinner, but Canon Spratte, anxious for a few words before any one arrived, came early. He found her ready to receive him. When he entered the drawing-room she was at the window, looking at the dusk which clothed the London street in a certain atmosphere of charming mystery.

“Well?” he said, looking at her and taking both her hands.

“I’m glad you came before the others, I wanted to have a chat with you.”

“It was cruel of you to leave London so suddenly. You can’t imagine how eagerly I’ve wished to see you.”

“I’m afraid it was inevitable,” she answered. “My friend is still very ill, and I only came up this evening because I didn’t want to put my party off.”

“I was hoping you’d come up to see me,” he smiled.

“In point of fact it was only to see you,” she laughed. “I would have postponed the rest of them gaily, but I think we have a good deal to say to one another.”

“I feel immensely flattered,” he replied.

The evening papers contained an official announcement that Dr. Gray was appointed to the bishopric of Barchester; but Canon Spratte determined that none should see his bitter disappointment. He had not yet fought down the sense of humiliation with which Lord Stonehenge’s offer overwhelmed him, nor was he reconciled to remaining a London vicar. But he refused to think of his frustrated hopes. He flattered himself on his strength of character, and the world should imagine that he was in the best of spirits. He meant to keep himself well in hand, and in the decided effort to let no one see that he cared, began really to regain his self-esteem.

“I think we really ought to talk seriously,” said Mrs. Fitzherbert after a pause, fixing her quiet eyes upon him. “I wonder if you meant all that you said to me the other night?”

“Of course I meant it, every word of it, with all my heart,” he cried, emphatically. “Do you think I’m a boy not to know my own mind?”

“And you really look upon yourself as solemnly engaged to me?”

“I do indeed, and before many weeks are up I mean to lead you to the altar. We’ll have the bishop to marry us, and Tom shall lend us Beachcombe for our honeymoon. Or would you prefer Homburg and the Italian Lakes?”

“You know, I shouldn’t be at all annoyed if you told me you were carried away the other night and said more than you intended. You’re a susceptible man and there’s something about a dance that rushes the least emotional off their feet. I think half the unhappy marriages are caused by the proposing of young men when they’ve come to the end of their small talk; and their cowardice next day which prevents them from writing to say they made a mistake.”

“But it was no sudden whim on my part,” he exclaimed. “The idea had been growing in my mind for months. Ah, why can’t I make you believe that love may spring up in a man’s heart even though his hair is strewn with silver? I tell you I’m passionately devoted to you, and I insist on marrying you.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert smiled and looked at him strangely. He was very gallant and very eager. She wondered if there were ever a word of sincerity in anything he said.

“Then let us talk business,” she answered.

He threw up his hands in a gesture of disdain.

“Why should we? You know I’m not mercenary; let us pretend that no tiresome matters have to be discussed. We can leave it all to our solicitors.”

“But it’s very important.”

“Nonsense! Nothing’s important except that you’re the most charming woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m a lucky dog to have got hold of you. We’ll never grow any older than we are now; we’ll only grow younger year by year. When will you make me the happiest man in London?”

“You go so quickly,” she smiled.

He put his arm round her waist and seized her hand.

“Come, give me a kiss.” She positively blushed when he took it without more ado. “Upon my soul, you make me feel a perfect stripling. Shall we say in six weeks? That will bring us to the end of the season, and I can safely leave Lionel to preach to a regiment of empty pews.”

“For heaven’s sake sit down quietly, and let me get a word in.”

“Not till you’ve agreed. I won’t let you go till you’ve fixed the day.”

“You shall fix the day yourself,” she cried, extricating herself from his embrace.

Canon Spratte, with a laugh of triumph, threw himself into a comfortable chair. He was excited and restless. He knew he had never looked handsomer than at this moment, and he would not have changed places with a guardsman of twenty-five.

“What I wanted to tell you is that I have an income of five thousand a year,” said Mrs. Fitzherbert.

“I cannot bear these gross and sordid details,” he answered, with a wave of the hand. “Of course it shall be settled absolutely upon you. What more is there to be said?”

“Only that it ceases on the day I marry again.”

Canon Spratte started and for a moment his face fell.

“All of it?” he asked.

“Every penny. My husband was a very generous man, but he had apparently no desire to provide for the wants of his successor. On my second marriage everything I have, the very furniture of this house, goes to a distant cousin of his.”

She watched the Canon for the effect of this blow, and she could not deny that he took it admirably.

“I’m very glad,” he said. “I much prefer to provide for your wants myself. I shouldn’t like to think you were living on another man’s income.”

“Do you realize that I shall be so penniless, you will even have to provide the clothes for my back and my very fare when I take the tube?”

“It will only make you more precious to me.”

The doors were swung open and the butler announced the first arrivals, Mrs. Fitzherbert stepped forward to greet them. Ten minutes later the whole party was seated round the dinner-table.

Canon Spratte was filled with consternation. It was true that he had not sought to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert for her money, but on the other hand the idea would never have come to him except that he knew she had a handsome income. It had never entered his head that she might hold it on such preposterous terms, and the blow was terrible. The Lord Chancellor had been able to leave him nothing. The bulk of his fortune went of necessity to his successor in the title and the rest to Lady Sophia, who announced her determination to lead a single life. St. Gregory’s was worth a certain amount and the canonry something more, but this from the depreciation of land was slowly diminishing. He had always spent every penny he earned. His children had three hundred a year each, but they were to be married and would naturally take the money with them. Lionel was paid nothing for acting as his father’s curate, but he might soon get a living and another expense would ensue. Lady Sophia had contributed a good deal to the household cost of the vicarage, but would of course make her home elsewhere when the Canon brought home a legitimate mistress. He did not see how on earth he could make both ends meet. Mrs. Fitzherbert, far from making up richly for all he lost, would be a source of vast expenditure. It would be necessary to give up the carriage and the horses of which he was so proud. Every cab that his wife took would be a shilling out of his pocket. A little while before Canon Spratte had ventured on a small flutter in the Stock Exchange, and the shares were not rising with the rapidity his broker had promised. This had seemed a bagatelle, but now grew suddenly into a matter of importance. The Canon’s heart sank. He looked at Mrs. Fitzherbert; and the gown which he had admired on his entrance appeared very expensive. She had none of the airs of an economical woman, and it would be needful to economize. He loathed the idea of counting each sovereign as he spent it. He liked the large gesture of generosity, and had the reputation of a man who spent his money well. Now he must be niggardly.

But above all he felt sold. It had been his consolation in the loss of the bishopric that the widow’s large means, added to his own, would enable him to cut a figure in London. He proposed to entertain lavishly. He wanted to make St. Gregory’s Vicarage a centre of fashion and intelligence, so that his name should go down to posterity like Sydney Smith’s as the most brilliant parson of his day. Instead he was saddled with a penniless wife.

But not one of these distressing emotions was visible on the Canon’s face during dinner. He had never needed his self-control more. Perhaps he showed his strength no less admirably than he could have done if, according to his ardent wish, he had been in happier days a great minister of state. The party consisted of eight, which he thought precisely the right number. It was neither so large that the conversation ceased to be general nor so small as to give a good talker an insufficient audience. Mrs. Fitzherbert noticed with admiration that he had never seemed in better spirits, and took a vow that whatever happened she would certainly remain friendly with him. He was invaluable at a dinner-party. It was only from an occasional look of weariness, quickly driven away, from a metallic, unusual ring in his laughter, that she suspected how great was his effort. He made himself the centre of the table, and he was so vivacious that none wished to question his supremacy. His stories had never been better, and he told them with a gusto that added vastly to their humour. He was never at a loss for a repartee; his sallies and quaint turns kept the party so well entertained that Mrs. Fitzherbert was radiant. She had never given a more successful dinner, and had the satisfaction of knowing that her guests thoroughly enjoyed themselves. When they thanked her on leaving, it was with a sincerity which she knew was unusual on similar occasions. She felt grateful to Canon Spratte.

“And now that every one has gone you must sit down and smoke a cigarette, and we’ll have a quiet chat.”

“That’s just what I should like. I’ve got something to say to you.”

“Have you? That’s very odd, because I have too.”

He seated himself, and she noticed that for the first time in their acquaintance, he was embarrassed. She looked at him with smiling eyes, but to him they seemed disconcertingly ironic.

“I think we should go back to the conversation we had before dinner,” he said. “Would you think it very odd if I made a suggestion?”

He waited for a reply, but she gave none, and he was forced to proceed. There was no doubt about it, he was growing exceedingly nervous.

“Well, I suggested then that we should be married in six weeks. I’m afraid it sounds very ungallant if I propose now that we should wait a little.”

“How long?” she asked quietly.

“Oh, I don’t know — perhaps a year, two at the utmost. You see, I’m not exactly hard up, but — —” He hesitated again, for once in his life at a loss for words. “The fact is I don’t see how we can possibly marry till I get a bishopric. I’m practically certain to get one soon — there’s no one with half the claims I have, and I think I can boast of a certain amount of influence.”

“Two years is a long time at our age,” she smiled. “Especially for a woman. You know, even now, you’re ever so much younger in spirit than I am; I’m afraid that each day will increase the difference between us.”

He paused for the very shortest space of time.

“Of course, if you’d rather marry at once, I shall be only too charmed. It will make me the happiest of men. It was only on your account that I hesitated. I’m afraid that you’ll have to do without a good many of the luxuries that you’re used to.”

“It’s very thoughtful of you,” she murmured.

“I’m afraid we shan’t be able to have a carriage.”

“You know, I adore riding on ‘buses,” she answered, with twinkling eyes. “One sits on the front seat and talks to the driver.”

“And then I’m afraid there’ll be no more little trips to Homburg in the summer or to the Riviera in the winter.”

“When all’s said and done is there any place in the world so comfortable as London?”

“It’s charming to think that you’re so easily satisfied.”

She watched him thoughtfully, while he sought to conceal behind a gallant smile a considerable feeling of dismay.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather break off altogether our short engagement?” she asked, suddenly.

“Nothing would induce me,” he cried, with the utmost emphasis. “Do you imagine that anything you have said makes you less precious to me? You cannot think so badly of me as to suppose that I no longer wish to marry you, because you are not rich.”

“You’re an ambitious man, and an opulent wife might have been of great use to you: a poor one can only be a drawback.”

“You pain me very much,” he answered. “I confess I think it would be wise to delay our union, but it would break my heart to put aside all thought of it.”

“Oh, I don’t think your heart is such a fragile organ as that. Let us be frank with one another. I venture to flatter myself that you did not want to marry me because of my money, but it’s obvious that a well-regulated passion is not diminished because an attractive widow has five thousand a year. It’s very comprehensible that you shouldn’t wish to marry a pauper.”

“I flatter myself on the other hand that I’m by way of being a gentleman.”

“Shall we say no more about it? Shall we forget that you murmured various things the other night which you didn’t quite mean?”

Mrs. Fitzherbert knew that she was very cruel. It was plain that he wished with all his might to accept his release. He suffered the torture of Tantalus, for escape lay within his easy reach, and he had not the effrontery to take it. He was a man who lived for the noble gesture, and he could not bring himself to make one that was uncommonly prosaic.

“I assure you no one shall know anything about it,” she added. “I promise you I will be as silent as the grave.”

He looked at her with an indecision that was almost pitiful.

“If I accepted your suggestion you’d despise me all your life,” he said.

There was something in his tone that made Mrs. Fitzherbert think she had gone far enough. He was really suffering this time, and she could not bear to see it. She went up to him quickly, and smiling, put her hands on his shoulders.

“My dear man, do you suppose for a moment that I had any intention of marrying you? Nothing would have induced me to do it.”

“What do you mean?” he cried.

“I’ve reached an age when I can’t imagine that it would be worth while sacrificing five thousand a year for any man. Besides, you’re charming as a friend, but as a husband you’d be quite insufferable. I wouldn’t marry you if I were starving and you had all the wealth of Golconda.”

“D’you mean to say you’ve been playing with me all the time?”

“I’m afraid that is precisely what it comes to.”

He drew away from her, and his face took that rather peevish expression of a spoilt child which it sometimes had.

“I think it’s very cruel of you,” he said.

“Let us forget all about it. You’re perfectly free and there’s no need whatever for you to marry me. Let us be friends. And don’t flirt any more with widow-ladies; they’re dreadfully dangerous.”

“I daresay it’s a very good joke to you, but you’ve exposed me to the most awful humiliation. You ask me to be friends, but I shall never be able to look you in the face again.”

Mrs. Fitzherbert ceased to smile and her eyes became quite grave.

“Shall I tell you a secret that I’ve never divulged to any living soul?” she said. “Perhaps you’ll understand why I couldn’t resist the chance you gave me. I daresay you’ve forgotten that five-and-twenty years ago we used to see a great deal of one another. Perhaps you never knew that I was so desperately in love with you then that I would have married you if you hadn’t a penny in the world, and I would have been glad to scrub the floors you walked on.”

The Canon started and was about to speak. But with a little laugh she stopped him.

“Oh, please don’t make any observation yet. Even now it makes me feel rather silly to speak about it. I daresay you flirted with a good many other girls as much as you did with me, but I was foolish enough to think you cared for me. And I thought you meant to ask me to marry you. Then you met Dorothy Frampstone, and you married her instead. Well, it’s very possible that she was much nicer than I, but you mustn’t be surprised if my vanity leads me to think there were much more solid reasons. I have an idea you transferred your affections to her chiefly because she had six hundred a year while I was penniless, and she was the daughter of a peer of the realm while I was nobody in particular.”

“You do me an injustice,” he murmured.

“Anyhow it doesn’t matter, it’s all very long ago. The important thing is that I did love you then really, so if I’ve made you feel a little ridiculous now, it’s only tit for tat.”

She held out her hand, smiling, and he warmly grasped it.

“You’re a wonderful woman, and I was a fool five-and-twenty years ago. The fates have been against me all along.”

“And now good-night,” she laughed. “It’s growing late, and it’s really very compromising for a lone, lorn widow to remain so long en tête-à-tête with a fascinating person like yourself.”

“Good-night, then.”

He bent down, and with the utmost grace kissed her hand. When he left her Mrs. Fitzherbert quietly smiled.

“I thank my stars I am a lone, lorn woman, and unless I become a perfect lunatic I’ll take care to remain one.”

XVI

THE Canon passed an unquiet night; and next morning, feeling in need of fresh air, took a stroll in the Park. The day was very fine, and there was a charming freshness in the air which soon brought back his serenity. He sauntered up the Row looking at the people who were out already to enjoy the earliness of the day after a late night at some gay party. He stopped now and then to observe the flowers, in which he took the horticulturist’s delight: Canon Spratte had an amiable weakness for putting Latin names to the daintiest blossoms of the way-side. He nodded to one or two friends and passed the time of day with a famous politician. The scene had an air of luxury and of fashionable indifference to the cares of life which filled him with satisfaction.

Presently he saw Gwendolen Durant ride towards him.

She looked so well on horseback that he wondered more than ever why Lionel could not make up his mind to marry. She stopped and spoke to him. They exchanged the simple banter which serves for wit among the easily pleased, and the Canon expressed his admiration of her seat. She nodded a farewell and put her heel to the horse’s side. But at that moment a motor-car rushed by at a terrific speed and gave a series of loud explosions. Gwendolen’s horse turned round with a sudden leap that almost unseated her, and was on the point of bolting, when the Canon jumped forward and seized the bridle. It was not a very dangerous action, but it required some presence of mind, and he performed it with a breadth of gesture that made it look almost heroic.

“Thanks, so much,” said Gwendolen, a little out of breath and startled. “If you hadn’t been there he’d have bolted. He’s got a mouth like iron and he simply pulls my arms out.”

“Are you quite sure you’re safe now?” asked Canon Spratte, anxiously.

The horse was still nervous and refused to stand still.

“He’ll probably bolt with me, but I must risk it,” she laughed, trying to show no concern.

“Let me tighten the curb a little, and then you’ll be as safe as a house.” With deft fingers he undid the chain and altered it. “You know, you really ought not to ride alone.”

“A groom bores me, and there’s no one else to come.”

“I shall ride with you to-morrow,” he answered. “I don’t think you should be left to your own devices. Now I think you’re in no danger.”

She thanked him effusively and trotted quickly off. The Canon resumed his promenade somewhat pleased with the action: he was grateful for the smallest incident that served to restore his diminished self-esteem. He was turning round to go home when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Sir John Durant.

“I’ve just seen Gwendolen. She tells me you saved her from a nasty accident.”

“Oh, it was nothing. I happened to be near.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“If you’ll allow me to say it, I think it’s somewhat incautious to let her ride alone. I’ve offered to accompany her to-morrow.”

“Oh, that’s very good of you,” said the brewer. “I’m afraid you’ll find it a great bore.”

“Not at all; I assure you it will be a great pleasure. My doctor has advised me to take horse-exercise, and I shall be only too glad to have some one to ride with.” The Canon put his arm through the brewer’s in his most friendly fashion. “And how are you, my dear fellow? I trust that your affairs are flourishing.”

“Well, in point of fact they’re not,” cried the other, suddenly growing serious. “That confounded Government wants to give the local justices power to close a certain proportion of public-houses in their districts.”

“Ah, yes, I saw something about that in the papers, but I understood it would have no influence on the consumption of liquor. Stonehenge’s idea is that the remaining houses will profit.”

“Don’t you believe it,” cried Sir John, with much vigour. “Nine times out of ten a man doesn’t drink a glass of beer because he’s thirsty, but because there’s a public-house at his elbow. Each one they shut up will take a good round sum out of our pockets.”

“The Government seems very strong on the point. I suppose they’ve been got hold of by the faddists.”

Sir John stopped still and significantly tapped Canon Spratte on the chest. His utterance was full of weight.

“Mark my words. The Government doesn’t know how strong we are. If they try to interfere with the liquor interest it’ll be a bad day for the Conservative party. I’ll fight them tooth and nail, and I shall carry the whole trade with me. I’m not a boasting fool, but I tell you this: the Government’s in a damned wobbly state, and if they put my back up I don’t answer for the consequences.”

Canon Spratte looked at his red-faced friend with the utmost attention. He knew that Sir John Durant was a rich man, but had not realized till this moment that he was a powerful man as well. Events might take such a turn that any one who had the brewer’s ear would command vast influence. He looked at his watch. It was time for him to keep an appointment, and he wanted to think quietly over the consequences of this discovery.

“Why don’t you come and lunch with me at the club one day?” he asked. “I’m afraid I mayn’t take you to the Athenæum, but they give you capital wine at the Carlton.”

Sir John accepted with pleasure, and so they parted. He was very thoughtful during the remainder of that morning, but at luncheon announced to his family that he proposed to ride every morning after breakfast. His doctor had recommended exercise, and he knew of no other which combined in such just proportions entertainment with utility.

“And what about this marriage of yours, Theodore?” asked Lady Sophia. “You forget that we are all on tenterhooks.”

He stared at her for a moment with a very natural show of amazement, and burst into a shout of laughter.

“It was only a little joke of mine, Sophia. You don’t imagine it’s likely that I should marry at my age.”

“As you say, we Sprattes have a remarkable sense of humour,” she replied, dryly.

“I can’t help poking fun at you sometimes, my dear. But, as you rightly observed, no one would be such a fool as to marry an old fossil like your humble servant.”

But her remarks had brought back to his mind an incident which he would willingly have forgotten. He was still very sore, and the more he thought of it the more foolish he felt himself. It was in no amiable mood, therefore, that he waited for Bertram Railing, who was expected to call that afternoon. Nor was the Canon much pleased with his daughter, and he had mentioned two or three times his annoyance that her wilful disobedience had placed him in an awkward position. Railing was not an easy person to deal with. His plainness and outspoken candour rendered possible a very undignified altercation.

But when the young man arrived nothing was visible on the Canon’s face save complete friendliness. They shook hands.

“Ah, how good of you to come, dear Railing. So glad to see you.”

“Winnie told me she’d be at home this afternoon.”

“Of course I didn’t flatter myself that you’d come to see me,” laughed the Canon. “But in point of fact I’ve been wanting to have a little talk with you. It’s a very serious step that you young folks are taking.”

“Then we’re wise to take it with a light heart,” cried Railing, gaily.

“Ha, ha, capital! Now I should have thought you were both very young to be married.”

“I am twenty-eight, sir, and Winnie is twenty-one.”

“You neither of you look it,” murmured the Canon, with an amiable bow.

“Possibly!”

Canon Spratte pulled out the splendid cigarette-case in gold, with initials of diamonds, which a fond admirer had presented to him. He offered it to Railing.

“No, thank you. I never smoke.”

“I see you have no vices.” The Canon became so bland that it was overwhelming. “Now, my dear fellow, let us discuss this matter in the most cordial way. I need not tell you that I have the very highest esteem for you personally, and the sincerest admiration for your talents. But we live in an age when talent is not always rewarded according to its merits, and I am curious to know upon what you propose to live.”

“My income is about a hundred and fifty a year and Winnie has three hundred from her mother.”

“You are very well informed,” smiled the Canon, good-naturedly.

“Winnie told me,” said Bertram, flushing.

“Obviously! I didn’t suppose for a moment that you had examined the will at Somerset House. And do you imagine that Winnie will be content to live on four hundred and fifty pounds a year?”

“It’s three times as much as my mother ever had.”

“Possibly, but your mother — a most excellent person, Mr. Railing — has moved in rather a different stratum of society from my daughter.”

“Do you think your daughter cares two straws for the gewgaws and the tawdry trappings of Society?” asked Bertram, scornfully.

The Canon shrugged his shoulders.

“I think my daughter is human, Mr. Railing; and although it may surprise you, I will confess that I think a carriage and pair absolutely essential to her happiness.”

“I know Winnie, and I love her. You think she’s a doll and a fool. She was. But I have made her into a woman of flesh and blood. She’s a real woman now and she loathes all the shams and the shallowness of Society.”

“She told you that, did she?” answered the Canon. “Upon my word, we Sprattes have a keen sense of humour.”

Bertram sprang to his feet and crossed over to the Canon.

“You think she cares for carriages and fine clothes. Her life was a mockery. She didn’t know what life was. She had no aspirations, no ideals. Of course she wasted herself on the frivolities of a foolish world. Thank God, she knows now how narrow this little circle is of idle, selfish people. She wants to work, she wants to labour with her fellow-men, shoulder to shoulder, fighting the good fight.”

“And do you think, my dear young man, that it would ever have occurred to Winnie that the world was hollow and foolish, if you had a wart on the tip of your nose, or a squint in your eye? Upon my soul, you’re very unsophisticated.”

“You believe that all people are bad.”

“On the contrary, I’m so charitable as to think them merely foolish,” said Canon Spratte, with an acid smile of amusement.

“Have you only sneers for the new life that fills your daughter’s eyes? She’s a different creature now. Oh, I believe in her, thank God, as she believes in me! She’s ready to take the journey with me only by her side. Ah, I know she loves me. You think I’m only a fortune-hunter; we don’t want your money, we shouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“And you’re quite content that for you she should sacrifice everything?”

“She flings away painted husks, dross, tinsel,” cried Bertram, vehemently. “She gains the whole world.”

“Which means you and a villa in Peckham Rye. Upon my soul, you’re very modest.”

Bertram looked at him steadily, thrusting forward his head with a searching air. He turned over in his mind all that the other had said.

“What are you driving at?” he asked, at length. “Why don’t you say it out like a man, instead of beating about the bush?”

“My dear Mr. Railing, I must beg you to observe the conventions of polite society. It is clearly my duty to inquire into the circumstances of any young man who proposes to marry my daughter.”

Bertram gave a little hoarse laugh.

“I distrusted you when you first agreed to our engagement. I knew you despised me. I knew that all your flattery was humbug. Say it straight out like a man.”

Canon Spratte shrugged his shoulders, and spoke slowly and gravely.

“Mr. Railing, I solemnly ask you to give up my daughter. After mature reflection I have come to the conclusion that the marriage is impossible, and I will never give my consent to it.”

“We will do without it; we’re free, both of us, and we don’t care a button for you. Winnie has promised to marry me, and, by God, she shall.”

“Do you absolutely disregard my express wishes?”

“The matter concerns us alone, and no one else in the whole world.”

Canon Spratte thoughtfully examined his finger-nails.

On a sudden he had an inspiration. He had learned a fact from Mrs. Railing, which he thought at the time might prove useful, and here was the opportunity.

“Well, Mr. Railing, it’s very painful to me to have to talk to you in this manner. It is true that some time ago I gave a provisional sanction to your engagement with Winnie, and I can perfectly understand that it should seem strange if I now resolutely forbid it. I have no doubt this is a great disappointment to you, and for that reason I excuse your heated language, which has been certainly wanting in courtesy. I am sure that when you are calmer you will regret some of the expressions you have seen fit to use. But I will tell you at once that I bear you on this account absolutely no ill-will.”

“I’m much obliged to you, but I’m not aware that I’ve used any expression which I’m in the least likely to regret,” said Bertram, sharply.

“Then, if I may say so, as a man much older than yourself, and as a clergyman, you show both your want of Christian charity and your ignorance of social amenities.... I beg you not to interrupt me,” he added, when he saw that Railing was about to make a rejoinder. “You will understand that I am not the man to wrangle like a fishwife.”

“Will you tell me shortly what new objection you have to me, Canon Spratte?”

“That is what I am about to do. It has come to my knowledge that your eldest sister is unfortunately in a lunatic asylum. I need not tell you that I regret this misfortune, but my views on the subject are very decided. With insanity among your relations, I feel that an alliance between your family and mine is out of the question.”

“That’s absurd!” cried Railing. “Florrie had an accident when she was a child. She fell downstairs, and since then she’s been — —”

“Not quite right in her head, as your mother expressed it, Mr. Railing. I should like you to observe, however, that every child falls downstairs, and the entire human race is not so imbecile as to need the restraint of a lunatic asylum.”

Bertram’s eyes were fixed steadily on Canon Spratte. He tried to discover what lay at the back of the man’s mind, but could not. He saw only that behind that calm face, amid this resonance of polished phrase, something was being hidden from him.

“I don’t believe a word you say. I’m not a child. I assure you it’s no good trying to hoodwink me. Tell me the simple truth.”

The Canon flushed at this appeal and was nearly put out of countenance. He wondered if he should fly into a passion and order Railing out of the house. But it was doubtful whether the Socialist would go. He was a little disconcerted, too, by the steadfastness with which Bertram had resisted him, and the scorn wherewith he brushed aside his specious reasons. Canon Spratte was hot with anger. The taunts to which he had calmly listened, rankled in his heart, and he would have been pleased to show that none could thus treat him with impunity. But he seldom lost his temper unadvisedly, and he realized now that calmness gave him a decided advantage over the angry and excited suitor.

“Are you quite sure that Winnie cares for you?” he asked, mildly.

“As sure as I am of my own name and of my own life.”

There was a pause. The Canon for a minute walked up and down the room; and then, holding himself very erect, stood still in front of Bertram. His voice was full of authority.

“Well, it is my painful duty to inform you that you are mistaken. Winnie recognizes that she misjudged the strength of her affection.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Railing, full of scorn.

“My patience must be inexhaustible. I am much tempted to kick you downstairs, Mr. Railing.”

“You forget that I’m a working-man and horny-handed, so it’s safer not to try.”

“It evidently hasn’t occurred to you that the manners of Peckham Rye are not altogether suitable to South Kensington,” smiled the Canon, blandly.

“Well?”

“Winnie has requested me to tell you that she finds she does not care for you enough to marry you. She regrets the inconvenience and unhappiness that she has caused, and desires you to release her.”

Bertram grew white and he gathered himself together as a wild beast might, driven to bay.

“It’s a lie!” he cried, furiously. “It’s a lie!”

The Canon replied with the utmost calm.

“You will have the goodness to remember that I am a minister of the Church and a son of the late Lord Chancellor of England.”

“If it’s true, you’ve forced her to give me up. I know she loves me.”

“You may think what you choose, Mr. Railing. The fact remains that she wishes to break off her engagement with you. As a man of honour there is obviously but one course open to you.”

“You tell me I’m a man of honour and you treat me like a lackey. Do you think you can dismiss me like a servant? Don’t you know that my whole life’s happiness is at stake? She can’t send me away like that. It’s not true, it’s not true.”

“On my honour as a gentleman, I have told you the exact truth,” replied Canon Spratte, gravely. Bertram seized the Canon’s arm.

“Let her tell me herself. I must see her. Where is she?”

“She’s gone out.”

“But she knew I was coming here to-day. She expected me.”

“Doesn’t that show you that what I have said is the simple truth? I wished to spare you both a painful scene.”

Bertram hesitated. He could not tell whether Winnie was really out, but it seemed impossible to verify the statement. For a moment he looked straight into the Canon’s eyes, then without a word turned on his heel. Canon Spratte gave a sigh of relief.

“What an escape!” he muttered. “Good Lord, what an escape!”

XVII

NEXT morning, when Winnie came down to breakfast, she found a letter from Bertram. She opened it with trembling hands. It began abruptly and consisted only of two lines.

I shall wait for you to-day in Kensington Gardens at ten o’clock. I beg you to come.

In the early days of their engagement, when Canon Spratte refused to hear Railing’s name mentioned, they had been used to walk together every morning. They met always at a particular spot. There were shady alleys, the scene of many pleasant conversations, which Winnie could not help remembering with delight. She dreaded the meeting he asked for, but felt that it was not in her to refuse. She had thought all night over the brief account her father had given of his interview with Bertram, and wished with all her heart now to explain personally why she had taken this step. She could not bear that he should think too hardly of her. The wounds she made seemed inevitable, but perhaps she could do something to make him see how impossible it was for her to act otherwise.

Without saying a word to her father, Winnie went out immediately after breakfast, and when she arrived at the appointed place, found Bertram already there. He greeted her without a smile. He was very pale and she felt her own face burn with shame under his sad, questioning eyes. For a few minutes they talked of indifferent things, as though they could not bring themselves to attack the subject that filled their hearts. They sat down and for a while were silent. At last he turned round and looked at her gravely.

“It’s true, then?” he said.

“I’m very sorry,” she murmured, turning her face away.

“When your father spoke to me I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. The whole thing seemed too horrible. Even now, I can’t convince myself that you really want me to give you up. I’ve not had it from your own lips yet.”

“I want you to release me, Bertram. I can’t marry you.”

“But why, why? The other day you said you loved me better than any one in the whole world. What have they done to turn you against me? Oh, I thought better of you than that, Winnie; I trusted you.”

“I was mistaken when I thought I loved you,” she whispered.

“They’re forcing you to give me up?”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head. “No one has done anything to influence me.”

“And yet, suddenly, with nothing to explain it, you send your father to say you’ve made a mistake; and don’t want to marry me. Oh, it’s shameful, it’s too cruel.”

“Oh, Bertram, don’t speak like that,” she cried, looking at him at last.

The unhappiness of his voice was very hard to bear and she could hardly restrain a sob. He looked at her with puzzled eyes. He was so wretched that his brain was all confused.

“You loved me the other day,” he cried. “Oh, don’t be so cold. Tell me what there is to tell, Winnie. I love you so passionately. I can’t live without you.”

“Forgive me. I’m awfully sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you.”

“Are you afraid because I’m poor and of mean birth? But you knew that before. Oh, I don’t understand; it seems impossible. I never dreamed you’d do this. I trusted you ten times more than I trusted myself.”

“I’m not fit to be your wife,” she sobbed.

“How can you sacrifice all that we planned so joyfully, the life of labour shoulder to shoulder and the fine struggle for our fellows?”

“I should hate it,” she answered, hoarsely.

He stared at her with surprise. He caught the immense vehemence of her expression and the little shiver of disgust that crossed her shoulders. They were silent again.

“Oh, Bertram, try to understand,” said Winnie, at last. “I don’t want you to be unhappy, I want you to see that we’ve made a dreadful mistake. I thank God that we’ve discovered it before it was too late. I’m not made for the life you want me to lead. I should be utterly out of it. And all those meetings, and the agitations for things I don’t care two straws about! Oh, I loathe the very thought of it.”

He looked before him as though the very foundations of the world were sinking. Winnie put her hand on his arm gently.

“Don’t trouble about me, Bertram. I’m not worth it. You thought me different from what I am. You’ve never known me; you put another soul into my body, and you loved that. If you really knew me, you’d only despise me. You thought I could do heroic things, but I can’t. When I was enthusiastic about labour and temperance and all the rest, it was merely pose. I wanted you to think me clever and original. I was flattered because you spoke to me as if you thought my opinion worth having. But honestly I don’t like poor people; I hate grime and dirt; I can’t look upon them as my fellows; I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I dare say poverty and crime are very dreadful, and the misery of the slums is heart-rending, but I don’t want to see it. I want to shut my eyes and forget all about it. Can’t you see how awful it would be if we married? I should only hamper you, and we’d both be utterly wretched.”

“Your father said a carriage and pair was essential to your happiness. I told him I would stake my life on you. I told him that you despised the sham and the shallowness of Society.”

“I suppose papa knows me,” said Winnie.

“Oh, dearest, it can’t be true,” he cried, taking her hand. “You can’t mind whether you go on foot or in a gaudy carriage. Life is so full and there’s so much work to do. What can it matter so long as we do our duty?”

“I know I’m a cad, but I must have decent things, and servants, and nice clothes. It’s vulgar and hateful and petty, but I can’t help it. I want to live as all my friends live. I haven’t the courage to give up all that makes life beautiful. It’s not just one act of heroism that it needs; it’s strength to be heroic day after day in a sort of dull, sordid fashion. And there can never be any escape from it; one has to make up one’s mind that it will last for ever. I see myself living in a shabby house in a horrid pokey street, with two dirty little maids, and I could almost scream. Oh, I couldn’t, Bertram.”

“I thought you cared for me.”

She did not answer.

“It’s different for you,” she pleaded. “You’ve been brought up without all these things, and you don’t miss them. I daresay it’s utterly snobbish, but I can’t help it. I’ve been used to luxuries all my life; it’s just as impossible for me to go without them as it would be for you to go without a coat in winter. You think it’s very easy for me to do housework and to mend linen as your mother does, but d’you think it’s any easier than it would be for you who’ve worked with your brains, to mend roads from morning till night? I know girls who’ve done that sort of thing. I’ve seen the shifts with which they keep up appearances and the awful struggle to make both ends meet. I’ve seen their faces pinched with anxiety, and I’ve seen the wrench it causes when they must spend a shilling. I couldn’t stand it, Bertram. You’re quite right; I am afraid.”

“But I love you, Winnie,” he said. “You’re the whole world to me. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll try to do it. I can’t lose you.”

“What can you do? How can you change yourself? Don’t you see that it’s impossible, and that we’re utterly unsuited to one another? Really we’ve not got a single thought or aim or idea in common. You can’t want to make me so unhappy as to wish to marry me.”

“Then it’s good-bye?” he asked.

Winnie looked up. To her surprise she saw her father ride past with Gwendolen Durant. Instinctively she drew back, seeking to hide herself; but they were too deeply engrossed in conversation to notice her.

Railing’s eyes met hers sadly.

“I don’t know how I shall live without you,” he said.

“You must try and forgive me for all the wretchedness I’ve caused you. And soon I hope that you’ll forget all about me.”

“Is there no chance that you’ll ever change your mind?” he asked, brokenly.

She hesitated, for there was something on her heart which she felt strangely impelled to confess. It seemed that she owed it to him.

“I think I ought to tell you that Lord Wroxham has asked me to marry him.”

“And are you going to?” he gasped.

“I’ve known him ever since I was a child, and I’m very fond of him. I’m frightened. I wanted you to know from my own lips rather than from a newspaper. You probably can’t despise me more than you do already.”

“What do you mean by saying you’re frightened? Are you frightened of me?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is good-bye indeed,” he answered, after a long silence.

He stood up and without another word left her. Winnie began to cry silently. In that pleasure garden, fit scene for the careless trifling of fair ladies in hoops and of gentlemen in periwigs, every one else seemed happy and unconcerned. Children in their bright dresses played with merry shouts and their nurses idly gossiped. A tremor passed through Winnie’s body as she struggled in vain to restrain her sobbing.

In the afternoon Winnie told her father that she had seen Bertram. She felt still as though her heart were breaking.

“Oh, father, I feel so ashamed,” she moaned.

Canon Spratte pursed his lips and nodded once or twice gravely. He did not approve of this stolen interview, but presumed it would be the last. He addressed her in grave, sonorous tones.

“You do well to feel ashamed, my child. I hope this will be a warning and a lesson to you. You see what comes of disobeying your father, and setting yourself obstinately and irreligiously against his better judgment. In future I trust you will be more dutiful. Believe me, it is always best to honour your parents; and if you don’t you’re sure to be punished for it.”

“Oughtn’t I to tell Harry?” she asked.

“Tell him what?” cried the Canon, perfectly aghast.

“I think he ought to know that I was engaged to Bertram.”

“Certainly not,” he answered, with the utmost decision. “I entirely forbid you to do anything of the sort, and I hope you’ve been sufficiently punished for your wilful disobedience to obey me now. Wroxham is very susceptible, and it’s your duty to give him no anxiety. And whatever you do, don’t begin your married life by confessing everything to your husband. It will only bore him to death. Besides, one never can tell the whole truth, and it leads inevitably to deception and subterfuge.”

“But suppose he finds out?”

Canon Spratte gave a sigh of genuine relief, for after all the fear of discovery is the easiest form of conscience to deal with.

“Is that all you’re frightened of, my darling?” he said. “Leave it to me. I’ll tell him all that’s necessary.”

And the next time he found himself alone with Wroxham, he took the opportunity to set the matter right.

“By the way, Harry, Winnie wants me to tell you something that’s rather worrying her. You know what girls are. They often have a sensitiveness of conscience which is very charming but at the same time rather ridiculous. I don’t suppose you ever heard of a young man called Railing?’”

“You mean the Socialist? Winnie gave me his book to read.”

“I may say I was among the first to discover its striking merit. I thought it my duty to encourage him, and I asked him to come and see us. His father, it appears, was a coal-heaver, and I thought him a very remarkable fellow. But he repaid my kindness by falling in love with Winnie and asking her to marry him.”

“Why didn’t you kick him down-stairs?” laughed Wroxham, lightly.

“Upon my word, I had half a mind to. I will never befriend the lower orders again; they always take liberties with you.”

At this juncture Winnie came into the room. Canon Spratte told her that he had informed Wroxham of the unfortunate incident. She gave her devoted lover an appealing glance; and the thought that she was so fearful to offend him, increased a thousandfold his passionate tenderness.

“You’re not angry with me, dear?”

“Because a madman wants to marry you? Why, I want to do that myself.”

“Capital! Capital!” laughed the Canon. “But seriously I don’t think he’s quite right in his head. His sister is in a lunatic asylum, you know. I hope you won’t receive any nonsensical letter from him.”

Wroxham was all eyes for Winnie, and scarcely listened to the trivial topic.

“If I do, it shall go straight into the waste-paper basket,” he answered, lightly.

“Quite right,” said the Canon. “Quite right!”

He tactfully left the lovers to themselves.

XVIII

SOME days later Lord Spratte found himself dressed half-an-hour too early for the dinner-party to which he was going. He made up his mind to walk down Piccadilly. The evening was delightful, and he looked with amiable eyes upon the populous street. The closing day flooded the scene with gold that seemed flung from divine hands with a gesture large and free. The crowd, sweeping along the pavements, the gay ‘buses and the carriages, were bathed in opulent splendour. They looked like magic things, all light and movement, seen by a painter who could work miracles. Lord Spratte congratulated himself that his fellow-men were all very well-to-do and had obviously no concern with sordid details. He braced himself to enjoy the charming world in general, and the festivity before him in particular.

“I’m feelin’ younger every day,” he murmured. “By Jupiter, if Theodore don’t mind his p’s and q’s I’ll marry and do him out of the title yet.”

So may the fancy of middle age in June turn lightly to amorous undertakings.

Suddenly he recognized Bertram Railing, who was walking quickly towards him. They met, and the Socialist, seeing him for the first time, flushed; then he fixed his eyes firmly on Lord Spratte and with much deliberation cut him. The elder man smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He wanted to speak with Bertram, and was entirely indifferent to his obvious disinclination. He turned round and with some trouble caught him up.

“Why the dickens do you walk at that rate?” he panted, somewhat out of breath.

He took Bertram’s arm familiarly. But the young man stopped and abruptly released himself.

“What do you want?”

“Merely to have a little chat. Let us stroll in the Park for five minutes.”

“I’m sorry, that’s impossible. I have an urgent engagement.”

“Nonsense!”

Lord Spratte again seized the unwilling arm, and in the most determined way made for the Park gates.

“I want to talk to you about your engagement with Winnie. I’m afraid you’ve been very unhappy.”

Bertram did not answer, but with firm-set jaws looked straight in front of him.

“You know, if I were you I would try not to take it too much to heart,” he went on. “In a little while you’ll understand that both you and Winnie would have been quite unnecessarily wretched.”

He paused and looked at Bertram sharply.

“Will you promise not to turn round and bolt if I stop to light a cigarette?”

“Yes,” said Bertram, smiling in spite of himself.

“You think she’s a very remarkable young woman, but she’s quite an average girl. Perhaps she’s a little prettier than most. I know very few young women of her particular station who wouldn’t have acted as she has.”

“Then Heaven help her particular station,” cried Bertram.

“I don’t suppose it’s struck you that it’s a very awkward one,” replied Lord Spratte, mildly. “A great family might have lived down a match of this sort, (I don’t want to hurt your feelings,) but we’re such very small fry. You think us snobs, and so we are. You can’t expect anythin’ else from people who’ve only just emerged from the middle-classes. You know, I have an impression that your grandfather and mine were great pals. I’m sure they used to hobnob and drink brandy and water together in seedy public-houses. Do you remember the Egyptian usurper who made a wine-cup into the image of a god, for the edification of his former boon-fellows? Well, we’re somethin’ like that astute monarch; we have to use all sorts of stratagems to persuade the world of our gentility. If this affair between you and Winnie had come to anything, do you know what she would have done? She would have tried all her life to live up to Mayfair, and it would have meant either that you were dragged away from your proper work, or that she would have been eternally dissatisfied. My dear boy, she would have reproached you every day for marrying her.”

He stopped, feeling that the words were not coming as he wished. He wanted to be kind, and there were a few useful things he thought Bertram ought to know. But he could not properly order what was in his mind. Bertram felt the intention and presently answered less bitterly:

“Why do you take the trouble to say all this?”

“I wish I had my brother Theodore’s eloquence. He’d say what I want to in the most beautiful language. He’s not a bad chap, although you probably don’t set much store on him. He’s so fortunate as to feel himself a person of importance; I don’t. I always wish I’d been the son of nobody in particular. It bores me to death to go about under the shadow of my father’s name. I can’t think why it is, but I go through life feeling as if I were perpetually wearin’ fancy-dress. I haven’t read your book. I believe it’s very instructive, and at my time of life I avoid instruction. But when Winnie said she was going to marry you, I went one day to hear you speak at a meetin’ in Holborn. I was never so surprised in my life.”

“Why?”

“I discovered that you were sincere. By Jupiter, how you would have bored Winnie if things had gone on much longer! Most of those worthy folk who advocate reform and lord knows what, have their own axes to grind. My brother Theodore, for instance, wants a bishopric, others want a seat in the Cabinet or a sinecure. Even now I believe there are some who want a peerage, though for the life of me I can’t see what good they think it’ll do them.”

Lord Spratte laughed a little and threw away his cigarette.

“They make a great fuss about redressin’ the people’s wrongs, but in their heart of hearts I believe they’re precious indifferent to them. They want the power which they can cozen out of the mob, or they think the Government will stop their mouths with a fat billet. At first I had an idea you were an impostor like the rest of them, but when you stood up on your hind legs I found out you were nothin’ of the kind. You were the only speaker among all those M.P.’s and clerics and millionaires who seemed to mean a word you said. Your speech was quite out of the picture, but it was interesting. Personally I loathe democracy and socialism and all the rest of it, but honest conviction amuses me. To see it on a platform is quite a new sensation.”

It made Lord Spratte uncommonly nervous to play the heavy father, and he feared that he was very ridiculous. He waited for Bertram to make an observation.

“I want to do something for my fellows in the few years of my life,” said the other, at last.

“You’ll find they’re much better left alone, and your reward will probably be the most virulent abuse. The human race loves a martyr; it will crucify a man with the greatest zest in order to have another God to worship as soon as the breath is out of his body.”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” smiled Railing.

“Then in Heaven’s name don’t hamper yourself by marriage. If you marry out of your own station you’ll be nobbled. My boy, before you’d been Winnie’s husband twelve months they’d have set you up as a Tory Member of Parliament. On the other hand, if you marry a pauper, you’ll have to think of all sorts of shifts to earn bread. You’ll have to hold your tongue when you ought to speak, because you daren’t risk your means of livelihood.”

“I loved Winnie with all my heart and soul.”

“I daresay, but you’ll get over it. One thinks one’s heart is broken and the world is suddenly hollow and empty, but a disappointment in love is like an attack of the gout. It’s the very devil while it lasts, but one feels all the better for it afterwards. My dear fellow, I was jilted once. I loved a lady in the Gaiety chorus, and I loved her dearly. But I promise you, not a day passes without my huggin’ myself to think I’m still a bachelor.”

He gave Bertram his hand, asked him to call soon at his chambers, and jumped into a cab. He was sorry that these efforts at consolation had not been successful, but presently he shrugged his shoulders.

“He’ll write a series of articles for a Radical paper on the wickedness of the aristocracy, and that’ll soothe him a good sight better than I could.”

XIX

CANON SPRATTE was a man of buoyant temper, and did not grieve long over his frustrated hopes. After all there were richer Sees than Barchester. With youth and strength still on his side he need not resign himself yet to insignificance. Importance lay in the position which a man had the ability to make for himself, and the Vicar of St. Gregory’s might wield greater power than the bishop of an obscure diocese in the Western provinces. Reconsidering his opinions, he came to the conclusion that Barchester was a dull place, unhealthy, moribund, and tedious. He had always disliked a clay soil. And very soon he sincerely made up his mind that even if it had been offered to him, he would have refused. Like Wilhelm Meister he cried that America was here and now; London offered the only opportunity for such a vigorous character as his. And what were earthly honours to a person of quality?

He consoled himself for everything with the thought that he had steered Winnie successfully through the shoals of her amorous entanglements. She was now staying in the country with Lady Wroxham, and on her return the pleasing news of her engagement would be delivered to an envious world. The Canon flattered himself that her foolish passion for Bertram Railing was definitely extinguished. Her letters to Lady Sophia proved that this facile heart was now given in the properest way to Harry Wroxham. She wrote of him freely, with increasing affection, and her enthusiasm found daily new qualities to admire.

Meanwhile the fine weather gave admirable opportunity for the Canon’s matutinal rides with Gwendolen Durant. The effect upon his health was all that could be desired. He found her a more delightful girl than he had ever guessed; and his happy charm quickly brought their acquaintance to such a degree of intimacy that they might have known one another for ten years. It flattered him to see her flashing glance of pleasure when they met each morning, and he exerted himself to entertain her. Sir John also had taken such a fancy to him that much of the Canon’s time was spent at the brewer’s gorgeous mansion in Park Lane. His urbanity had never been more suave nor the scintillations of his wit more brilliant. Gwendolen hung upon his lips.

But when Canon Spratte thought of Lionel he was a little disconcerted.

On the day Winnie was to come back to London, when he opened his Times at breakfast, the Canon uttered an exclamation. Lady Sophia and Lionel looked up with alarm.

“A dreadful thing has happened,” he said, solemnly. “Dr. Gray has had an apoplectic stroke and died last night.”

“Poor man,” cried Lady Sophia. “He hasn’t enjoyed his bishopric long.”

“I look upon it as a judgment of Providence,” replied her brother, very gravely.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I said at the time he was not fit to go to Barchester. I have no doubt the excitement and the strain of altering all his plans proved too much for him. You see, I was right. When will men learn to put a rein upon their ambition?”

Canon Spratte read the details carefully, shaking his head, and then turned up the leading articles to see if by chance some reference was made to the sad event. But here a new surprise awaited him. He gave a start and smothered another cry. He ran his eyes down the column quickly to gather its gist, and then perused it with concentrated attention. He forgot entirely that the Church of England had sustained a grievous loss, and that two lamb cutlets on the plate before him sought to tempt his appetite. The news he examined was of vital importance. The brewers, driven beyond endurance, were in full revolt against the Government. On the previous night Sir John Durant, joining in the debate upon the bill to close certain public-houses, had made a violent speech in the House of Commons. The Government’s position was insecure already, and if the liquor interest withdrew its support, a dissolution was inevitable. Sir John Durant became suddenly a person of vast importance. The determination he took might throw the money-markets into confusion; it might alter the political balance of Europe and have far-reaching effects in the uttermost parts of the earth. He had paramount influence with the trade and the other members in the House would follow his lead. He could command a large enough number of votes to make Lord Stonehenge’s tenure of office impossible. It was certain that the country would not return the Conservative party again. Canon Spratte’s heart beat as though he were reading intelligence of the most sensational kind. He threw the paper down and his breath came very fast. For some time he stared straight in front of him and reviewed the situation from every side. He jumped up, and unmindful of his breakfast walked backwards and forwards.

“Aren’t you going to eat your chop?” asked Lady Sophia.

“Hang my chop,” he cried, impatiently.

She raised her eyebrows.

“How is it possible that the news of Dr. Gray’s death can have such an effect on you, Theodore?”

“For goodness’ sake be quiet, and let me think,” he answered, without his usual politeness.

He had discussed the matter a dozen times with Sir John, and knew with what angry vehemence the brewer regarded this new power wherewith it was proposed to invest the Justices of the Peace. He was a stubborn, obstinate man, and had persuaded himself that it was an interference with the liberty of trade. On the other hand, he was an enthusiastic Conservative, and had no wish to put a Liberal Government in power, which would probably bring in temperance legislation of a much more drastic order. He was filled with the Imperialistic sentiment and dreaded the Radical indifference to his ideal of world supremacy. If Sir John could be induced to hear reason, it was probable that he would not insist on the withdrawal of the bill which public opinion had forced the Government to bring. But if left to himself, he might in a fit of temper throw all his influence with the Opposition. Whoever had Durant’s ear on this occasion was for the moment the most powerful man in England. A smile broke on the Canon’s lips. He drew a long breath.

“Sophia, I should like to speak a few words to Lionel.”

“I’ve just finished,” she said.

She did not hurry herself, but when it pleased her left the room. Canon Spratte turned eagerly to his son.

“Now, Lionel, I think you’ve shilly-shallied long enough. I want to know for good and all what you propose to do with regard to Gwendolen.”

“What do you mean, father?”

“Good lord, man, you’re not a perfect fool, are you? We’ve discussed your marriage ad nauseam. I want to know what your intentions are. It’s not fair to the girl to keep her dangling in this fashion. Are you going to marry her or not?”

“Well, father, there’s no hurry about it?”

“On the contrary there’s the greatest possible hurry.”

“Why?”

“I have every reason to believe that some one else is thinking of proposing to her.”

“Well, I don’t think she cares twopence about me,” answered Lionel, rather sulkily. “Lately when I’ve seen her she’s talked of nothing but you.”

“There are less diverting topics of conversation, Lionel,” retorted the Canon, with a smile.

“One can have too much of a good thing.”

“If you don’t look sharp some one else will step in and cut you out. I warn you candidly.”

“I shan’t break my heart, father.”

Canon Spratte shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know what the young men of the present day are coming to; they have no spirit and no enterprise. Anyhow, I’ve done my duty and you mustn’t be surprised whatever happens.”

“I wonder you don’t marry her yourself,” said Lionel, ironically.

“And would you have anything to say against my doing so?” retorted the Canon, not without a suspicion of temper. “Let me tell you that a man of fifty is in the very flower of his age. I flatter myself there are few men of your years who have half the vigour and energy that I have.”

He flung out of the room in a huff. His horse had been waiting for half-an-hour, and it was later than usual when he joined Gwendolen in the Park. Her face lit up, and from his own all sign of vexation had vanished.

“I’d given you up,” she said. “I thought you weren’t able to come.”

“Would you have been disappointed if I hadn’t?”

“Awfully!”

“You make me regret more than ever that I’m not twenty-five,” he said, without any beating about the bush.

“Why?”

“Because if I were I should promptly ask you to marry me.”

“If you were I should probably refuse you,” she smiled.

“I wonder what you mean by that?”

They walked their horses side by side, and the Canon was seized with an unaccountable shyness. It was by a real effort of will that at last he forced himself to speak.

“I suppose it never struck you that I took more than common pleasure in our conversations. But when I left you I was always seized with despair. I realized that my heart had remained as young as ever it was, but you never ceased to see in me a man old enough to be your father. Do you know that I’m fifty?”

“I never asked myself what your age was. I never felt that you were any older than I.”

She answered nervously, looking straight in front of her. The Canon shot a sidelong glance in her direction and saw that her cheeks were flaming. He recovered his courage at once. Faint heart, he knew, never won fair lady.

“Gwendolen, I sometimes think that you have worked a miracle, for by your side I feel as young as the summer morning. What can the years matter when I have the spirit and the strength of a youth! I admire you and I love you. Do you think me very ridiculous?”

She shook her head, but did not speak. He put his hand lightly on hers.

“Gwendolen, will you be my wife?”

She looked up with a little laugh that was almost hysterical. She did not answer directly.

“I’ll race you to the end,” she said.

Without a word, smiling, the Canon put the spurs to his horse; and they galloped up the Row at a speed which was altogether beyond reason. The policeman on his beat watched with gaping mouth the strange spectacle of a comely young woman and an ecclesiastical dignitary, no longer in his first youth but handsome too, peltering towards the Achilles Statue as fast as they could go. Gwendolen’s horse kept somewhat ahead, but the Canon would not give way. Again he clapped his spurs to the straining flanks. It seemed to him, romantically, that he rode for a great prize, and in his excitement he could have shouted at the top of his voice. They reached the end neck and neck, and when they stopped, panting, the horses were white with lather. There was no longer a shadow of humility in the Canon’s breezy manner.

“And now for my answer,” he cried, gaily.

“What about Lionel?” she smiled, blushing.

“Oh, Lionel can go to the dickens.”

Canon Spratte frequently said that he was unaccustomed to let grass grow under his feet. Having left Gwendolen at the door, he returned to the Vicarage, changed his clothes, and promptly took a cab back to Park Lane. But he found that she had been before him, and Sir John Durant was already in possession of the happy news.

“Upon my soul, I don’t know what you’ve done to the girl,” he said, in his hearty, boisterous tone. “She’s quite infatuated.”

The Canon laughed and rubbed his hands.

“She’s made me the happiest of men.”

Sir John was a man of affairs, whose pride it was that he went straight to the point; and notwithstanding Canon Spratte’s remonstrance, who sought to waive the matter airily aside, he insisted on discussing at once the business part of the projected union. It required all the fortunate lover’s self-control to prevent a little gasp of pleased surprise when the brewer in a casual way mentioned the sum he proposed to settle on his only daughter. It was larger even than he had expected.

“My dear Durant, your generosity overwhelms me,” he cried. “I promise you I will do my best to make her happy, and I think it’s unlikely that either my brother or Lionel will ever marry. In all probability Gwendolen’s eldest son will inherit the title.”

This settled, he turned deftly to the political situation, and discovered that the brewer was somewhat taken aback by the responsibility which appeared to have fallen on him. He was anxious to do his duty by his party, but at the same time could not bear to sacrifice the interests of his trade. He had come to no decision whatever, and showed himself only too pleased to discuss his predicament with a man whose experience was so large, and whose mind so lucid. He insisted that his prospective son-in-law should stay to luncheon. During this meal Canon Spratte proved very neatly his skill in social intercourse, for he was able to show himself gallant and tender towards Gwendolen, while at the same time he displayed keen sympathy with the brewer’s perplexity. But no sooner was the meal over than he jumped to his feet.

“You’re not going already?” cried Sir John.

“My dear fellow, I must. I have a very busy day before me.” He smiled tenderly at Gwendolen. “You can imagine that it is not without weighty reasons that I tear myself away.”

“Then you must come back to dinner. You know, it’s private members’ night and I’m not going to the House.”

“Impossible also! Winnie is returning from the country to-day, and it would be unkind if I did not dine at home. Besides, I have asked my brother. A Christian family is one of the most beautiful as it is one of the most characteristic sights of our English life. I like to allow its mellowing influence to be exerted as often as possible on my rather harum-scarum relative.”

“Then when shall we see you again?” asked the brewer, firmly grasping his hand.

“If it won’t disturb you I should like to come in for half-an-hour about ten o’clock.”

As soon as the door was closed behind him, he hailed a passing cab.

“I’ll give you a florin if you can get to the Athenæum in three minutes,” he cried to the driver. He looked at his watch. “I think I shall just catch him.”

He knew that Lord Stonehenge was in the habit of passing an hour at the Athenæum after luncheon. He sat always in a certain chair, near the window, which by common consent was invariably left vacant for him. No one ventured to disturb him. He went in and out of the club, indifferent to his fellow-members, as if he did not notice that a soul was there. But Canon Spratte was an audacious man and did not fear to be importunate. He smiled with satisfaction when he saw Lord Stonehenge, heavily seated in his accustomed place. That vast mass of flesh had a ponderous immobility which suggested that it would be difficult for the Prime Minister to escape from his agile hands. He was turning over the pages of a review, but his mind appeared busy with other things.

Canon Spratte walked up jauntily with the Westminster Gazette in his hand. It contained a very amusing cartoon in which Sir John Durant, as a Turkish pasha, was seated on a beer-barrel, while the Prime Minister, in the garb of an odalisque, knelt humbly before him with uplifted hands. In the background were two satellites, one with a bow-string and the other with a scimitar.

“Have you seen this?” said the Canon, sitting down coolly and handing the paper. “Capital, isn’t it?”

The Prime Minister turned his listless eyes on the intruder and for a moment wondered who on earth he was.

“I’ve just been lunching with Durant. He’s rather sore about it. Ticklish situation, isn’t it?”

“Are you Theodore Spratte?” asked Lord Stonehenge.

“I am,” laughed the Canon. “I hope Durant won’t do anything rash. I have a good deal of influence with him, and of course I’m doing my best to persuade him not to kick over the traces.”

A sudden light flashed in the Prime Minister’s eyes, and he saw that Canon Spratte had an object in thus speaking to him. He dived into the abysses of his memory, and recalled that he had offered him a deanery, which the Canon had refused. The man evidently wanted a bishopric or nothing. He remembered also something that his daughter had told him; he wondered what power the suave parson actually had with Sir John.

“I hear that your son is going to marry Durant’s daughter,” he said, slowly.

“You’ve been misinformed,” answered the Canon, with a smile that was somewhat ironical. “I am going to marry her.”

“You!”

They looked at one another like two fencers, seeking to discover their strength in each other’s face. The Prime Minister’s eyes had a peculiar force which suggested the reason of his long-continued power; they lacked brilliancy, but there was in them a curious intensity of vision which seemed to absorb the thoughts of other men’s minds. The silence lasted interminably. Canon Spratte bore the great man’s gaze with perfect steadfastness, and presently Lord Stonehenge looked away. He stared out of the window, into space, and the Canon thought he had entirely forgotten the subject in hand.

“I need not tell you that I will do everything I can to bring Durant to a reasonable state of mind. At present he’s wavering. You probably know the facts better than I do, but he tells me the liquor party will follow him. I understand if they go against you the result will be — awkward.”

Lord Stonehenge apparently did not hear. His eyes still rested heavily on the trees in the park. Canon Spratte began to grow a little irritated, but still he waited patiently. At last the Prime Minister spoke.

“I suppose you’ve heard that Gray is dead?”

“I have.”

“Would you like to go to Barchester?”

Although he seemed desperately stupid Lord Stonehenge had understood. The Canon’s heart gave a leap and he caught his breath. He forgot that Barchester stood on a clay soil, and it no longer seemed a tedious place. At last! But he showed no eagerness to accept. He knew as well as the Prime Minister that the Government was in the hollow of his hand.

At that moment a bishop came up to Lord Stonehenge with a telegram in his hand. Canon Spratte gave him an impatient frown.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I think you ought to see this,” said the newcomer.

He handed the telegram to Lord Stonehenge, who glanced at it irritably. The bishop knew Canon Spratte and nodded to him.

“It’s to tell me that the Bishop of Sheffield died in his sleep early this morning. He’s been ailing for some time.”

“Thank you,” said the Prime Minister.

He returned the telegram, and the bishop withdrew. Canon Spratte and Lord Stonehenge looked at one another once more. A new factor had come into the game which they were playing. Beside Sheffield the diocese of Barchester was quite insignificant; it was small and poor, and from the city itself all prosperity had long since vanished. The bishop of such a place might be a great man in his own neighbourhood, but he had no chance of activity outside it. Sheffield, on the other hand, possessed two suffragans and patronage of vast importance. It was the centre of religious life in the Midlands. Year by year the town was growing in consequence; and its bishop, if a man of resource, might wield great power. By help of the rich manufacturers in his district he could raise huge sums for any purpose he pleased, and his influence need be second only to that of the archbishop. If it was possible to have Sheffield, Barchester was but a poor reward for such services as Theodore Spratte could render to his country. But he had no time to think it over. It was necessary to make his decision there and then. He was a bold man and did not hesitate.

Lord Stonehenge still waited for his answer.

“It’s very good of you to make me such an offer, and I need not say I am grateful for the honour, but — if I may put it frankly — I don’t think I feel inclined to go to such a dead and alive town as Barchester. I have a passion for work, and I can’t live without plenty to do. If I leave London at all it must be for a place that offers ample scope for a man of energy, a place where there’s a vigorous civic life, and where you may feel yourself, as it were, at the centre of this busy modern world of ours. Advance and progress are my watchwords.”

Conversation with Lord Stonehenge was difficult, for he seldom opened his mouth. When you had said what you wanted, he merely waited for you to begin again; and unless possessed of much effrontery, you were utterly disconcerted. In the present case, however, there was but one word he needed to utter, and that word was Sheffield. It remained unspoken. Canon Spratte, content to let things take their time, got up.

“But it’s too bad of me to take up the only moment in the day you have for recreation. I shall be seeing Durant again after dinner.”

With a nod and a smile he left the Prime Minister to his own reflections.

Theodore’s day had been somewhat exhausting. It is given to few, however eagerly they pursue the art of life, within twelve hours to win a wife and to refuse a bishopric. He had thoroughly earned the bath he took before dinner. He wondered how many people knew that he, Theodore Spratte, then pleasantly wallowing in cold water, mother naked, held as in a balance the destinies of the British Empire. Sir John Durant would do as he suggested, and the next few hours might see determined the fall of an administration. He rubbed himself joyously with rough towels.

“When the Clergy and the Licensed Victualers stand shoulder to shoulder, not all the powers of Satan can avail against them,” he cried.

He dressed with unusual care and shaved a second time; he brushed his hair with feminine nicety. He put two rings on his little finger, and with a sigh of complete satisfaction, looked at himself in the glass. He felt very well and young and happy. His appetite was good and he was prepared to enjoy an excellent dinner.

When he reached the drawing-room he found that Lord Spratte was already arrived. Winnie, whom he had not seen since her return, came up to kiss him.

“Well, my dear, I hope you enjoyed yourself. You look positively radiant.”

“I’m so happy, father. You don’t know what a dear Harry is. I’m awfully grateful to you.”

“Your father’s a wise man, darling,” he laughed.

Lionel came in, hat in hand, to see Winnie, who had arrived but half-an-hour before and gone straight to her room. He expressed his regret that a choir-practice, which he must attend, forced him to go out.

“Well, my boy, I’m sorry you can’t dine with us,” said the Canon. “I should have liked to see my family united round my table on this night of all others, but since your duty calls I have no more to say.”

At this moment Ponsonby announced that dinner was served, and at the same time handed a telegram to his master.

“Hulloa, what’s this?”

He opened it and gave a cry. His heart beat so violently that he was obliged to sit down.

“Papa, what’s the matter?” cried Winnie.

“It’s so stupid of me, I’m quite upset. Get me a glass of sherry, Ponsonby.”

“What is it, Theodore?” asked Lady Sophia, anxiously.

He waved his family aside and would not speak till Ponsonby brought the wine. He drank a glass of sherry. A sigh of relief issued from his lips. He waited till Ponsonby had left the room, and then slowly rose to his feet.

“Sophia, you will be gratified to learn that the Government has offered me the vacant bishopric of Sheffield.”

“Oh, papa, I’m so glad,” said Winnie.

Lionel seized his father’s hand and wrung it warmly.

“Well, Sophia, what do you say?”

“Presumably you don’t want me to persuade you to take it.”

“No, I shall accept as it is offered me, frankly — and by telegram.”

He looked upon the members of his family and took no pains to hide his intense satisfaction.

“But I’m keeping you from your duties, Lionel. You mustn’t wait a moment longer.” His son went to the door, but the Canon called him back. “One moment, I was forgetting. I think the time has now arrived to announce Winnie’s betrothal publicly. Just sit down and write out a notice; you can leave it at the News Agency as you pass.”

Lionel obediently went to the desk and took a pen. The Canon cleared his throat.

“We are authorized to announce that a marriage has been arranged between Lord Wroxham, of Castle Tanker, and Winifred, only daughter of the Honourable, (write that in full, Lionel,) of the Honourable and Reverend Canon Theodore Spratte, bishop elect of Sheffield; better known as the — —”

“Better known as the — yes?”

“You’re very dull, Lionel,” exclaimed the Canon, with a laugh that was somewhat irritable. “Better known as the popular and brilliant Vicar of St. Gregory’s, South Kensington.”

When Lionel had departed with this, Canon Spratte turned jovially to his brother.

“Well, Thomas, you see that virtue is sometimes rewarded even in this world. It is a great blessing to me to think that everything I desired has come about. Winnie is to marry a man who will make her an excellent husband, and she will occupy a position which she cannot fail to adorn. While as for myself I am removing to a sphere where such poor abilities as Providence has endowed me with, will have a fuller scope. I confess that I am gratified, not only for myself, but for the honour which has befallen our house. I cannot help regretting that my dear father is not alive to see this day. I need not say, Thomas, that I shall always be pleased to see you at Sheffield. I am convinced that the golf-links are excellent, and the poor hospitality of the Palace will ever be at the command of the head of my family.”

“Theodore, I shouldn’t like to be a rebellious parson in your diocese,” said Lord Spratte, gravely. “You’ll make it very hot for any one who don’t act accordin’ to your lights.”

“I shall not forget the watchwords of our house, which have ever been Advance and Progress. To these I shall now add: ‘Discipline.’ But really we should go down to dinner.”

Lady Sophia thought it high time, for she had a healthy appetite. But at that instant came another interruption. Ponsonby entered the room.

“A gentleman wishes to see you, sir,” he said, handing a card to the Canon.

“Oh, I can see no one at this hour. I can’t keep dinner waiting a moment longer.”

“I told him you could see nobody, sir,” answered Ponsonby, “but the gentleman said he came from the Daily Mail.”

“That certainly makes a difference,” said the Canon, taking the card.

“That’s what I thought, sir. He said he would be very much obliged if you could grant him a short interview.”

“Say I shall be very happy, Ponsonby, and show him into my study.”

“Theodore, are we to have no dinner?” cried Lady Sophia, when Ponsonby was gone.

“Dinner, dinner!” exclaimed Canon Spratte, scornfully. “How can I think of dinner now, Sophia? I have a duty to perform. You forgot that my position is radically altered.”

“I knew you’d remind us of it in less than five minutes,” said Lady Sophia, who felt that firmness now was needed or the future would be unbearable.

“I and my family have always been in the vanguard of progress,” replied the bishop elect, with a glance at the Lord Chancellor’s portrait.

“I know, but even your family wants its dinner sometimes.”

“Sophia, I shall be obliged if you will not interrupt me. I cannot say I think it kind of you to insist in this vulgar way on the satisfaction of a gross and sensual appetite. I should have thought on such an occasion worthier thoughts would occupy your mind. But if your flesh is weak I am willing that you should begin. I am not a selfish man, and Heaven forbid that I should ask as a right what an affectionate and Christian disposition should grant as a pleasure.”

“Fiddlesticks!”

Canon Spratte looked his sister up and down. He held himself very erect.

“Sophia, I have long felt that you do not treat me with the respect I venture to consider my due. I must really beg you not to act towards me any longer with this mixture of indecent frivolity and vulgar cynicism. I do not wish to remind you that there is a change in my position.”

“You have done so twice in five minutes,” said Lady Sophia, acidly.

“It appears to be necessary. Once for all, however, let me inform you that henceforth I expect to be treated in a different fashion. If you have not the affection to respect your brother Theodore, if you have not the delicacy of sentiment to respect the son of the late Lord Chancellor — you will at least respect the Bishop of Sheffield.”

He stood for a moment to allow the effect of his words to be duly felt, and then marched to the door. Here he stopped and turned round.

“It may also interest you to learn that on the thirty-first of July I am going to be married to Gwendolen Durant.”

He went out and slammed the door behind him. Lady Sophia stared at her eldest brother with helpless astonishment; but with a little smile, Lord Spratte shrugged his shoulders.

“He always has had the last word, Sophia.”

XX

The Times of the third of May in the following year contained the subjoined announcement:

SPRATTE. On the 1st instant, at the Palace, the wife of the Right Revd. the Bishop of Sheffield, (the Honourable Theodore Spratte,) of a son.

THE EXPLORER

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

I

The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbled under the feet that trod them. The breakwaters, which sought to prevent the unceasing encroachment of the waves, were rotten with age and green with the sea-slime. It was a desolate scene, but there was a restfulness in its melancholy; and the great silence, the suave monotony of colour, might have given peace to a heart that was troubled. They could not assuage the torment of the woman who stood alone upon that spot. She did not stir; and, though her gaze was steadfast, she saw nothing. Nature has neither love nor hate, and with indifference smiles upon the light at heart and to the heavy brings a deeper sorrow. It is a great irony that the old Greek, so wise and prudent, who fancied that the gods lived utterly apart from human passions, divinely unconscious in their high palaces of the grief and joy, the hope and despair, of the turbulent crowd of men, should have gone down to posterity as the apostle of brutish pleasure.

But the silent woman did not look for solace. She had a vehement pride which caused her to seek comfort only in her own heart; and when, against her will, heavy tears rolled down her cheeks, she shook her head impatiently. She drew a long breath and set herself resolutely to change her thoughts.

But they were too compelling, and she could not drive from her mind the memories that absorbed it. Her fancy, like a homing bird, hovered with light wings about another coast; and the sea she looked upon reminded her of another sea. The Solent. From her earliest years that sheet of water had seemed an essential part of her life, and the calmness at her feet brought back to her irresistibly the scenes she knew so well. But the rippling waves washed the shores of Hampshire with a persuasive charm that they had not elsewhere, and the broad expanse of it, lacking the illimitable majesty of the open sea, could be loved like a familiar thing. Yet there was in it, too, something of the salt freshness of the ocean, and, as the eye followed its course, the heart could exult with a sense of freedom. Sometimes, in the dusk of a winter afternoon, she remembered the Solent as desolate as the Kentish sea before her; but her imagination presented it to her more often with the ships, outward bound or homeward bound, that passed continually. She loved them all. She loved the great liners that sped across the ocean, unmindful of wind or weather, with their freight of passengers; and at night, when she recognised them only by the long row of lights, they fascinated her by the mystery of their thousand souls going out strangely into the unknown. She loved the little panting ferries that carried the good folk of the neighbourhood across the water to buy their goods in Southampton, or to sell the produce of their farms; she was intimate with their sturdy skippers, and she delighted in their airs of self-importance. She loved the fishing boats that went out in all weathers, and the neat yachts that fled across the bay with such a dainty grace. She loved the great barques and the brigantines that came in with a majestic ease, all their sails set to catch the remainder of the breeze; they were like wonderful, stately birds, and her soul rejoiced at the sight of them. But best of all she loved the tramps that plodded with a faithful, grim tenacity from port to port; often they were squat and ugly, battered by the tempest, dingy and ill-painted; but her heart went out to them. They touched her because their fate seemed so inglorious. No skipper, new to his craft, could ever admire the beauty of their lines, nor look up at the swelling canvas and exult he knew not why; no passengers would boast of their speed or praise their elegance. They were honest merchantmen, laborious, trustworthy, and of good courage, who took foul weather and peril in the day’s journey and made no outcry. And with a sure instinct she saw the romance in the humble course of their existence and the beauty of an unboasting performance of their duty; and often, as she watched them, her fancy glowed with the thought of the varied merchandise they carried, and their long sojourning in foreign parts. There was a subtle charm in them because they went to Southern seas and white cities with tortuous streets, silent under the blue sky.

Striving still to free herself of a passionate regret, the lonely woman turned away and took a path that led across the marshes. But her heart sank, for she seemed to recognise the flats, the shallow dykes, the coastguard station, which she had known all her life. Sheep were grazing here and there, and two horses, put out to grass, looked at her listlessly as she passed. A cow heavily whisked its tail. To the indifferent, that line of Kentish coast, so level and monotonous, might be merely dull, but to her it was beautiful. It reminded her of the home she would never see again.

And then her thoughts, which had wandered around the house in which she was born, ever touching the fringe as it were, but never quite settling with the full surrender of attention, gave themselves over to it entirely.

Hamlyn’s Purlieu had belonged to the Allertons for three hundred years, and the recumbent effigy, in stone, of the founder of the family’s fortunes, with his two wives in ruffs and stiff martingales, was to be seen in the chancel of the parish church. It was the work of an Italian sculptor, lured to England in company of the craftsmen who made the lady-chapel of Westminster Abbey; and the renaissance delicacy of its work was very grateful in the homely English church. And for three hundred years the Allertons had been men of prudence, courage, and worth, so that the walls of the church by now were filled with the lists of their virtues and their achievements. They had intermarried with the great families of the neighbourhood, and with the help of these marble tablets you might have made out a roll of all that was distinguished in Hampshire. The Maddens of Brise, the Fletchers of Horton Park, the Daunceys of Maiden Hall, the Garrods of Penda, had all, in the course of time, given daughters to the Allertons of Hamlyn’s Purlieu; and the Allertons of Hamlyn’s Purlieu had given in exchange richly dowered maidens to the Garrods of Penda, the Daunceys of Maiden Hall, the Fletchers of Horton Park, and the Maddens of Brise.

And with each generation the Allertons grew prouder. The peculiar situation of their lands distinguished them a little from their neighbours; for, whereas the Garrods, the Daunceys, and the Fletchers lived within walking distance of each other, and Madden of Brise, because of his rank and opulence the most distinguished person in the county, within six or seven miles, Hamlyn’s Purlieu was near the sea and separated by forest land from other places. The seclusion in which its owners were thus forced to dwell differentiated their characters from those of the neighbouring gentlemen. They found much cause for self-esteem in the number of their acres, and, though many of these consisted of salt marshes, and more of wild heath, others were as good as any in Hampshire; and the grand total made a formidable array in works of reference. But they found greater reason still for self-congratulation in their culture. No pride is so great as the pride of intellect, and the Allertons never doubted that their neighbours were boors beside them. Whether it was due to the peculiar lie of the land on which they were born and bred, that led them to introspection, or whether it was due to some accident of inheritance, the Allertons had all an interest in the things of the mind, which had never troubled the Fletchers or the Garrods of Penda, the Daunceys or my lords Madden of Brise. They were as good sportsmen as the others, and hunted or shot with the best of them, but they read books as well, and had a subtlety of intelligence which was no less unexpected than pleasing. The fat squires of the county looked up to them as miracles of learning, and congratulated themselves over their port on possessing in their midst persons who combined, in such excellent proportions, gentle birth and a good seat in the saddle with adequate means and an encyclopedic knowledge. Everything conspired to give the Allertons a good opinion of themselves. They not only looked down from superior heights on the persons with whom they habitually came in contact — that is common enough — but these very persons without question looked up to them.

The Allertons made the grand tour in a style befitting their dignity; and the letters which each son of the house wrote in turn, describing Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, and Rome, with the persons of consequence who entertained him, were preserved with scrupulous care among the family papers. They testified to an agreeable interest in the arts; and each of them had made a point of bringing back with him, according to the fashion of his day, beautiful things which he had purchased on his journey. Hamlyn’s Purlieu, a fine stone house goodly to look upon, was thus filled with Italian pictures, French cabinets of delicate workmanship, bronzes of all kinds, tapestries, and old Eastern carpets. The gardens had been tended with a loving care, and there grew in them trees and flowers which were unknown to other parts of England. Each Allerton in his time cherished the place with a passionate pride, looking upon it as his greatest privilege that he could add a little to its beauty and hand on to his successor a more magnificent heritage.

But at length Hamlyn’s Purlieu came into the hands of Fred Allerton; and the gods, blind for so long to the prosperity of this house, determined now, it seemed, to wreak their malice. Fred Allerton had many of the characteristics of his race, but in him they took a sudden turn which bore him swiftly to destruction. They had been marked always by good looks, a persuasive manner, and a singular liberality of mind; and he was perhaps the handsomest, and certainly the most charming of them all. But the freedom from prejudice which had prevented the others from giving way too much to their pride had in him degenerated into a singular unscrupulousness. His parents died when he was twenty, and a year later he found himself master of a great estate. The times were hard then for those who depended upon their land, and Fred Allerton was not so rich as his forebears. But he flung himself extravagantly into the pursuit of pleasure. He was the only member of his family who had failed to reside habitually at Hamlyn’s Purlieu. He seemed to take no interest in it, and except now and then to shoot, never came near his native county. He lived much in Paris, which in the early years of the third republic had still something of the wanton gaiety of the Empire; and here he soon grew notorious for his prodigality and his adventures. He was an unlucky man, and everything he did led to disaster. But this never impaired his cheerfulness. He boasted that he had lost money in every gambling hell in Europe, and vowed that he would give up racing in disgust if ever a horse of his won a race. His charm of manner was irresistible, and no one had more friends than he. His generosity was great, and he was willing to lend money to everyone who asked. But it is even more expensive to be a man whom everyone likes than to keep a stud, and Fred Allerton found himself in due course much in need of ready money. He did not hesitate to mortgage his lands, and till he came to the end of these resources also, continued gaily to lead a life of splendour.

At length he had raised on Hamlyn’s Purlieu every penny that he could, and was crippled with debt besides; but he still rode a fine horse, lived in expensive chambers, dressed better than any man in London, and gave admirable dinners to all and sundry. He realised then that he could only retrieve his fortunes by a rich marriage. Fred Allerton was still a handsome man, and he knew from long experience how easy it was to say pleasant things to a woman. There was a peculiar light in his blue eyes which persuaded everyone of the goodness of his heart. He was amusing and full of spirits. He fixed upon a Miss Boulger, one of the two daughters of a Liverpool manufacturer, and succeeded after a surprisingly short time in assuring her of his passion. There was a convincing air of truth in all he said, and she returned his flame with readiness. It was clear to him that her sister was equally prepared to fall in love with him, and he regretted with diverting frankness to his more intimate friends that the laws of the land prevented him from marrying them both and acquiring two fortunes instead of one. He married the younger Miss Boulger, and on her dowry paid off the mortgages on Hamlyn’s Purlieu, his own debts, and succeeded for several years in having an excellent time. The poor woman, happily blind to his defects, adored him with all her soul. She trusted him entirely with the management of her money and only regretted that the affairs connected with it kept him so much in town. With marriage and his new connection with commerce Fred Allerton had come to the conclusion that he had business abilities, and he occupied himself thenceforward with all manner of financial schemes. With unwearied enthusiasm he entered upon some new affair which was going to bring him untold wealth as soon as the last had finally sunk into the abyss of bankruptcy. Hamlyn’s Purlieu had never known such gaieties as during the fifteen years of Mrs. Allerton’s married life. All kinds of people were brought down by Fred; and the dignified dining-room, which for centuries had witnessed discussions, learned or flippant, on the merits of Greek and Latin authors, or the excellencies of Italian masters, now heard strange talk of stocks and shares, companies, syndicates, options and holdings. When Mrs. Allerton died suddenly she was entirely unconscious that her husband had squandered every penny of the money which had been settled on her children, had mortgaged once more the broad fields of his ancestors, and was head over ears in debt. She expired with his name upon her lips, and blessed the day on which she had first seen him. She had one son and one daughter. Lucy was a girl of fifteen when her mother died, and George, the boy, was ten.

It was Lucy, now a woman of twenty-five, who turned her back upon the Kentish sea and slowly walked across the marsh. And as she walked, the recollection of the ten years that had passed since then was placed before her as it were in a single Sash.

At first her father had seemed the most wonderful being in the world, and she had worshipped him with all her childish heart. The love that bound her to her mother was pale in comparison, for Lucy could not divide her affections, giving part here, part there; her father, with his wonderful gift of sympathy, his indescribable charm, conquered her entirely. It was her greatest delight to be with him. She was entertained and exhilarated by his society, and she hated the men of business who absorbed so much of his time.

When Mrs. Allerton died George was sent to school, but Lucy, in charge of a governess, remained year in, year out, at Hamlyn’s Purlieu with her books, her dogs, and her horses. And gradually, she knew not how, it was borne in upon her that the father who had seemed such a paragon of chivalry, was weak, unreliable, and shifty. She fought against the suspicions that poisoned her mind, charging herself bitterly with meanness of spirit, but one small incident after another brought the truth home to her. She recognised with a shiver of anguish that his standard of veracity was utterly different from hers. He was not very careful to keep his word. He was not scrupulous in money matters. With her, honesty, truthfulness, exactness in all affairs, were not only instinctive, but deliberate; for the pride of her birth was so great that she felt it incumbent upon her to be ten times more careful in these things than the ordinary run of men.

And then, from a word here and a word there, by horrified guesses and by a kind of instinctive surmise, she realised presently the whole truth of her father’s life. She found out that Hamlyn’s Purlieu was mortgaged for every penny it was worth, she found out that there was a bill of sale on the furniture, that money had been raised on the pictures; and, at last, that her mother’s money, left in her father’s trust to her and George, had been spent. And still Fred Allerton lived with prodigal magnificence.

It was only very gradually that Lucy discovered these things. There was no one whom she could consult, and she had to devise some mode of conduct by herself. It was all a matter of supposition, and she knew almost nothing for certain. She made up her mind that she would probe no deeper. But since such knowledge as she had came to her only by degrees, she was able the better to adapt her behaviour to it. The pride which for so long had been a characteristic of the Allertons, but had unaccountably missed Fred, in her enjoyed all its force; and what she knew now served only to augment it. In the ruin of her ideals she had nothing but that to cling to, and she cherished it with an unreasoning passion. She had a cult for the ancestors whose portraits looked down upon her in one room after another of Hamlyn’s Purlieu, and from their names and the look of them, which was all that remained, she made them in her fancy into personalities whose influence might somehow counteract the weakness of her father. In them there was so much uprightness, strength, and simple goodness; the sum total of it must prevail in the long run against the unruly instincts of one man. And she loved her old home, with all its exquisite contents, with its rich gardens, its broad, fertile fields, above all with its wild heath and flat sea-marshes, she loved it with a hungry devotion, saddened and yet more vehement because her hold on it was jeopardised. She set the whole strength of her will on preserving the place for her brother. Her greatest desire was to fill him with the determination to reclaim it from the foreign hands that had some hold upon it, and to restore it to its ancient freedom.

Upon George were set all Lucy’s hopes. He could restore the fallen fortunes of their race, and her part must be to train him to the glorious task. He was growing up, and she made up her mind to keep from him all knowledge of her father’s weakness. To George he must seem to the last an honest gentleman.

Lucy transferred to her brother all the love which she had lavished on her father. She watched his growth fondly, interesting herself in his affairs, and seeking to be to him not only a sister, but the mother he had lost and the father who was unworthy. When he was of a fit age she saw that he was sent to Winchester. She followed his career with passion and entered eagerly into all his interests.

But if Lucy had lost her old love for her father, its place had been taken by a pitying tenderness; and she did all she could to conceal from him the change in her feelings. It was easy when she was with him, for then it was impossible to resist his charm; and it was only afterwards, when he was no longer there to explain things away, that she could not crush the horror and resentment with which she regarded him. But of this no one knew anything; and she set herself deliberately not only to make such headway as she could in the tangle of their circumstances, but to conceal from everyone the actual state of things.

For presently Fred Allerton seemed no longer to have an inexhaustible supply of ready money, and Lucy had to resort to a very careful economy. She reduced expenses in every way she could, and when left alone in the house, lived with the utmost frugality. She hated to ask her father for money, and since often he did not pay the allowance that was due to her, she was obliged to exercise a good deal of self-denial. As soon as she was old enough, Lucy had taken the household affairs into her own hands and had learned to conduct them in such a way as to hide from the world how difficult it was to make both ends meet. Now, feeling that things were approaching a crisis, she sold the horses and dismissed most of the servants. A great fear seized her that it would be impossible to keep Hamlyn’s Purlieu, and she was stricken with panic. She was willing to make every sacrifice but that, and if she were only allowed to remain there, did not care how penuriously she lived.

But the struggle was growing harder. None knew what she had endured in her endeavour to keep their heads above water. And she had borne everything with perfect cheerfulness. Though she saw a good deal of the neighbouring gentry, connected with her by blood or long friendship, not one of them divined her great anxiety. She felt vaguely that they knew how things were going, but she held her head high and gave no one an opportunity to pity her. Her father was now absent from home more frequently and seemed to avoid being alone with her. They had never discussed the state of their affairs, for he assumed with Lucy a determined flippancy which prevented any serious conversation. On her twenty-first birthday he had made some facetious observation about the money of which she was now mistress, but had treated the matter with such an airy charm that she had felt unable to proceed with it. Nor did she wish to, for if he had spent her money nothing could be done, and it was better not to know for certain. Notwithstanding settlements and wills, she felt that it was really his to do what he liked with, and she made up her mind that nothing in her behaviour should be construed as a reproach.

At length the crash came.

She received a telegram one day — she was nearly twenty-three then — from Richard Lomas, an old friend of her mother’s, to say that he was coming down for luncheon. She walked to the station to meet him. She was very fond of him, not only for his own sake, but because her mother had been fond of him, too; and the affection which had existed between them, drew her nearer to the mother whom she felt now she had a little neglected. Dick Lomas was a barrister, who, after contesting two seats unsuccessfully, had got into Parliament at the last general election and had made already a certain name for himself by the wittiness of his speeches and the bluntness of his common sense. He had neither the portentous gravity nor the dogmatic airs which afflicted most of his legal colleagues in the house. He was a man who had solved the difficulty of being sensible without tediousness and pointed without impertinence. He was wise enough not to speak too often, and if only he had not possessed a sense of humour — which his countrymen always regard with suspicion in an English politician — he might have looked forward to a brilliant future. He was a wiry little man, with a sharp, good-humoured face and sparkling eyes. He carried his seven and thirty years with gaiety.

But on this occasion he was unusually grave. Lucy, already surprised at his sudden visit, divined at once from the uneasiness of his pleasant, grey eyes that something was amiss. Her heart began to beat more quickly. He forced himself to smile as he took her hand, congratulating her on the healthiness of her appearance; and they walked slowly from the station. Dick spoke of indifferent things, while Lucy distractedly turned over in her mind all that could have happened. Luncheon was ready for them, and Dick sat down with apparent gusto, praising emphatically the good things she set before him; but he ate as little as she did. He seemed impatient for the meal to end, but unwilling to enter upon the subject which oppressed him. They drank their coffee.

‘Shall we go for a turn in the garden?’ he suggested.

‘Certainly.’

After his last visit, Dick had sent down an old sundial which he had picked up in a shop in Westminster, and Lucy took him to the place which they had before decided needed just such an ornament. They discussed it at some length, but then silence fell suddenly upon them, and they walked side by side without a word. Dick slipped his arm through hers with a caressing motion, and Lucy, unused to any tenderness, felt a sob rise to her throat. They went in once more and stood in the drawing-room. From the walls looked down the treasures of the house. There was a portrait by Reynolds, and another by Hoppner, and there was a beautiful picture of the Grand Canal by Guardi, and there was a portrait by Goya of a General Allerton who had fought in the Peninsular War. Dick gave them a glance, and his blood tingled with admiration. He leaned against the fireplace.

‘Your father asked me to come down and see you, Lucy. He was too worried to come himself.’

Lucy looked at him with grave eyes, but made no reply.

‘He’s had some very bad luck lately. Your father is a man who prides himself on his business ability, but he has no more knowledge of such matters than a child. He’s an imaginative man, and when some scheme appeals to his feeling for romance, he loses all sense of proportion.’

Dick paused again. It was impossible to soften the blow, and he could only put it bluntly.

‘He’s been gambling on the Stock Exchange, and he’s been badly let down. He was bulling a number of South American railways, and there’s been a panic in the market. He’s lost enormously. I don’t know if any settlement can be made with his creditors, but if not he must go bankrupt. In any case, I’m afraid Hamlyn’s Purlieu must be sold.’

Lucy walked to the window and looked out. But she could see nothing. Her eyes were blurred with tears. She breathed quickly, trying to control herself.

‘I’ve been expecting it for a long time,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve refused to face it, and I put the thought away from me, but I knew really that it must come to that.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Dick helplessly.

She turned on him fiercely, and the colour rose to her cheeks. But she restrained herself and left unsaid the bitter words that had come to her tongue. She made a pitiful gesture of despair. He felt how poor were his words of consolation, and how inadequate to her great grief, and he was silent.

‘And what about George?’ she asked.

George was then eighteen, and on the point of leaving Winchester. It had been arranged that he should go to Oxford at the beginning of the next term.

‘Lady Kelsey has offered to pay his expenses at the ‘Varsity,’ answered Dick, ‘and she wants you to go and stay with her for the present.’

‘Do you mean to say we’re penniless?’ asked Lucy, desperately.

‘I think you cannot depend on your father for much regular assistance.’

Lucy was silent again.

Lady Kelsey was the elder sister of Mrs. Allerton, and some time after that lady’s marriage had accepted a worthy merchant whose father had been in partnership with hers; and he, after a prosperous career crowned by surrendering his seat in Parliament to a defeated cabinet-minister — a patriotic act for which he was rewarded with a knighthood — had died, leaving her well off and childless. She had but one other nephew, Robert Boulger, her brother’s only son, but he was rich with all the inherited wealth of the firm of Boulger & Kelsey; and her affections were placed chiefly upon the children of the man whom she had loved devotedly and who had married her sister.

‘I was hoping you would come up to town with me now,’ said Dick. ‘Lady Kelsey is expecting you, and I cannot bear to think of you by yourself here.’

‘I shall stay till the last moment.’

Dick hesitated again. He had wished to keep back the full brutality of the blow, but sooner or later it must be given.

‘The place is already sold. Your father accepted an offer from Jarrett — you remember him, he has been down here; he is your father’s broker and chief creditor — and everything else is to go to Christy’s at once.’

‘Then there is no more to be said.’

She gave Dick her hand.

‘You won’t mind if I don’t come to the station with you?’

‘Won’t you come up to London?’ he asked again.

She shook her head.

‘I want to be alone. Forgive me if I make you go so abruptly.’

‘My dear girl, it’s very good of you to make sure that I don’t miss my train,’ he smiled drily.

‘Good-bye and thank you.’

II

While Lucy wandered by the seashore, occupied with painful memories, her old friend Dick, too lazy to walk with her, sat in the drawing-room of Court Leys, talking to his hostess.

Mrs. Crowley was an American woman, who had married an Englishman, and on being left a widow, had continued to live in England. She was a person who thoroughly enjoyed life; and indeed there was every reason that she should do so, since she was young, pretty, and rich; she had a quick mind and an alert tongue. She was of diminutive size, so small that Dick Lomas, by no means a tall man, felt quite large by the side of her. Her figure was exquisite, and she had the smallest hands in the world. Her features were so good, regular and well-formed, her complexion so perfect, her agile grace so enchanting, that she did not seem a real person at all. She was too delicate for the hurly-burly of life, and it seemed improbable that she could be made of the ordinary clay from which human beings are manufactured. She had the artificial grace of those dainty, exquisite ladies in the Embarquement pour Cithère of the charming Watteau; and you felt that she was fit to saunter on that sunny strand, habited in satin of delicate colours, with a witty, decadent cavalier by her side. It was preposterous to talk to her of serious things, and nothing but an airy badinage seemed possible in her company.

Mrs. Crowley had asked Lucy and Dick Lomas to stay with her in the house she had just taken for a term of years. She had spent a week by herself to arrange things to her liking, and insisted that Dick should admire all she had done. After a walk round the park he vowed that he was exhausted and must rest till tea-time.

‘Now tell me what made you take it. It’s so far from anywhere.’

‘I met the owner in Rome last winter. It belongs to a Mrs. Craddock, and when I told her I was looking out for a house, she suggested that I should come and see this.’

‘Why doesn’t she live in it herself?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It appears that she was passionately devoted to her husband, and he broke his neck in the hunting-field, so she couldn’t bear to live here any more.’

Mrs. Crowley looked round the drawing-room with satisfaction. At first it had borne the cheerless look of a house uninhabited, but she had quickly made it pleasant with flowers, photographs, and silver ornaments. The Sheraton furniture and the chintzes suited the style of her beauty. She felt that she looked in place in that comfortable room, and was conscious that her frock fitted her and the circumstances perfectly. Dick’s eye wandered to the books that were scattered here and there.

‘And have you put out these portentous works in order to improve your mind, or with the laudable desire of impressing me with the serious turn of your intellect?’

‘You don’t think I’m such a perfect fool as to try and impress an entirely flippant person like yourself?’

On the table at his elbow were a copy of the Revue des Deux Mondes and one of the Fortnightly Review. He took up two books, and saw that one was the Fröhliche Wissenschaft of Nietzsche, who was then beginning to be read in England by the fashionable world and was on the eve of being discovered by men of letters, while the other was a volume of Mrs. Crowley’s compatriot, William James.

‘American women amaze me,’ said Dick, as he put them down. ‘They buy their linen at Doucet’s and read Herbert Spencer with avidity. And what’s more, they seem to like him. An Englishwoman can seldom read a serious book without feeling a prig, and as soon as she feels a prig she leaves off her corsets.’

‘I feel vaguely that you’re paying me a compliment,’ returned Mrs. Crowley, ‘but it’s so elusive that I can’t quite catch it.’

‘The best compliments are those that flutter about your head like butterflies around a flower.’

‘I much prefer to fix them down on a board with a pin through their insides and a narrow strip of paper to hold down each wing.’

It was October, but the autumn, late that year, had scarcely coloured the leaves, and the day was warm. Mrs. Crowley, however, was a chilly being, and a fire burned in the grate. She put another log on it and watched the merry crackle of the flames.

‘It was very good of you to ask Lucy down here,’ said Dick, suddenly.

‘I don’t know why. I like her so much. And I felt sure she would fit the place. She looks a little like a Gainsborough portrait, doesn’t she? And I like to see her in this Georgian house.’

‘She’s not had much of a time since they sold the family place. It was a great grief to her.’

‘I feel such a pig to have here the things I bought at the sale.’

When the contents of Hamlyn’s Purlieu were sent to Christy’s, Mrs. Crowley, recently widowed and without a home, had bought one or two pictures and some old chairs. She had brought these down to Court Leys, and was much tormented at the thought of causing Lucy a new grief.

‘Perhaps she didn’t recognise them,’ said Dick.

‘Don’t be so idiotic. Of course she recognised them. I saw her eyes fall on the Reynolds the very moment she came into the room.’

‘I’m sure she would rather you had them than any stranger.’

‘She’s said nothing about them. You know, I’m very fond of her, and I admire her extremely, but she would be easier to get on with if she were less reserved. I never shall get into this English way of bottling up my feelings and sitting on them.’

‘It sounds a less comfortable way of reposing oneself than sitting in an armchair.’

‘I would offer to give Lucy back all the things I bought, only I’m sure she’d snub me.’

‘She doesn’t mean to be unkind, but she’s had a very hard life, and it’s had its effect on her character. I don’t think anyone knows what she’s gone through during these ten years. She’s borne the responsibilities of her whole family since she was fifteen, and if the crash didn’t come sooner, it was owing to her. She’s never been a girl, poor thing; she was a child, and then suddenly she was a woman.’

‘But has she never had any lovers?’

‘I fancy that she’s rather a difficult person to make love to. It would be a bold young man who whispered sweet nothings into her ear; they’d sound so very foolish.’

‘At all events there’s Bobbie Boulger. I’m sure he’s asked her to marry him scores of times.’

Sir Robert Boulger had succeeded his father, the manufacturer, as second baronet; and had promptly placed his wealth and his personal advantages at Lucy’s feet. His devotion to her was well known to his friends. They had all listened to the protestations of undying passion, which Lucy, with gentle humour, put smilingly aside. Lady Kelsey, his aunt and Lucy’s, had done all she could to bring the pair together; and it was evident that from every point of view a marriage between them was desirable. He was not unattractive in appearance, his fortune was considerable, and his manners were good. He was a good-natured, pleasant fellow, with no great strength of character perhaps, but Lucy had enough of that for two; and with her to steady him, he had enough brains to make some figure in the world.

‘I’ve never seen Mr. Allerton,’ remarked Mrs. Crowley, presently. ‘He must be a horrid man.’

‘On the contrary, he’s the most charming creature I ever met, and I don’t believe there’s a man in London who can borrow a hundred pounds of you with a greater air of doing you a service. If you met him you’d fall in love with him before you’d got well into your favourite conversation on bimetallism.’

‘I’ve never discussed bimetallism in my life,’ protested Mrs. Crowley.

‘All women do.’

‘What?’

‘Fall in love with him. He knows exactly what to talk to them about, and he has the most persuasive voice you ever heard. I believe Lady Kelsey has been in love with him for five and twenty years. It’s lucky they’ve not yet passed the deceased wife’s sister’s bill, or he would have married her and run through her money as he did his first wife’s. He’s still very good-looking, and there’s such a transparent honesty about him that I promise you he’s irresistible.’

‘And what has happened to him since the catastrophe?’

‘Well, the position of an undischarged bankrupt is never particularly easy, though I’ve known men who’ve cavorted about in motors and given dinners at the Carlton when they were in that state, and seemed perfectly at peace with the world in general. But with Fred Allerton the proceedings before the Official Receiver seem to have broken down the last remnants of his self-respect. He was glad to get rid of his children, and Lady Kelsey was only too happy to provide for them. Heaven only knows how he’s lived during the last two years. He’s still occupied with a variety of crack-brained schemes, and he’s been to me more than once for money to finance them with.’

‘I hope you weren’t such a fool as to give it.’

‘I wasn’t. I flatter myself that I combined frankness with good-nature in the right proportion, and in the end he was always satisfied with the nimble fiver. But I’m afraid things are going harder with him. He has lost his old alert gaiety, and he’s a little down at heel in character as well as in person. There’s a furtive look about him, as though he were ready for undertakings that were not quite above board, and there’s a shiftiness in his eye which makes his company a little disagreeable.’

‘You don’t think he’d do anything dishonest?’ asked Mrs. Crowley quickly.

‘Oh, no. I don’t believe he has the nerve to sail closer to the wind than the law allows, and really, at bottom, notwithstanding all I know of him, I think he’s an honest man. It’s only behind his back that I have any doubts about him; when he’s there face to face with me I succumb to his charm. I can believe nothing to his discredit.’

At that moment they saw Lucy walking towards them. Dick Lomas got up and stood at the window. Mrs. Crowley, motionless, watched her from her chair. They were both silent. A smile of sympathy played on Mrs. Crowley’s lips, and her heart went out to the girl who had undergone so much. A vague memory came back to her, and for a moment she was puzzled; but then she hit upon the idea that had hovered about her mind, and she remembered distinctly the admirable picture by John Furse at Millbank, which is called Diana of the Uplands. It had pleased her always, not only because of its beauty and the fine power of the painter, but because it seemed to her as it were a synthesis of the English spirit. Her nationality gave her an interest in the observation of this, and her wide, systematic reading the power to compare and analyse. This portrait of a young woman holding two hounds in leash, the wind of the northern moor on which she stands, blowing her skirts and outlining her lithe figure, seemed to Mrs. Crowley admirably to follow in the tradition of the eighteenth century. And as Reynolds and Gainsborough, with their elegant ladies in powdered hair and high-waisted gowns, standing in leafy, woodland scenes, had given a picture of England in the age of Reason, well-bred and beautiful, artificial and a little airless, so had Furse in this represented the England of to-day. It was an England that valued cleanliness above all things, of the body and of the spirit, an England that loved the open air and feared not the wildness of nature nor the violence of the elements. And Mrs. Crowley had lived long enough in the land of her fathers to know that this was a true England, simple and honest; narrow perhaps, and prejudiced, but strong, brave, and of great ideals. The girl who stood on that upland, looking so candidly out of her blue eyes, was a true descendant of the ladies that Sir Joshua painted, but she had a bath every morning, loved her dogs, and wore a short, serviceable skirt. With an inward smile, Mrs. Crowley acknowledged that she was probably bored by Emerson and ignorant of English literature; but for the moment she was willing to pardon these failings in her admiration for the character and all it typified.

Lucy came in, and Mrs. Crowley gave her a nod of welcome. She was fond of her fantasies and would not easily interrupt them. She noted that Lucy had just that frank look of Diana of the Uplands, and the delicate, sensitive face, refined with the good-breeding of centuries, but strengthened by an athletic life. Her skin was very clear. It had gained a peculiar freshness by exposure to all manner of weather. Her bright, fair hair was a little disarranged after her walk, and she went to the glass to set it right. Mrs. Crowley observed with delight the straightness of her nose and the delicate curve of her lips. She was tall and strong, but her figure was very slight; and there was a charming litheness about her which suggested the good horse-woman.

But what struck Mrs. Crowley most was that only the keenest observer could have told that she had endured more than other women of her age. A stranger would have delighted in her frank smile and the kindly sympathy of her eyes; and it was only if you knew the troubles she had suffered that you saw how much more womanly she was than girlish. There was a self-possession about her which came from the responsibilities she had borne so long, and an unusual reserve, unconsciously masked by a great charm of manner, which only intimate friends discerned, but which even to them was impenetrable. Mrs. Crowley, with her American impulsiveness, had tried in all kindliness to get through the barrier, but she had never succeeded. All Lucy’s struggles, her heart-burnings and griefs, her sudden despairs and eager hopes, her tempestuous angers, took place in the bottom of her heart. She would have been as dismayed at the thought of others seeing them as she would have been at the thought of being discovered unclothed. Shyness and pride combined to make her hide her innermost feelings so that no one should venture to offer sympathy or commiseration.

‘Do ring the bell for tea,’ said Mrs. Crowley to Lucy, as she turned away from the glass. ‘I can’t get Mr. Lomas to amuse me till he’s had some stimulating refreshment.’

‘I hope you like the tea I sent you,’ said Dick.

‘Very much. Though I’m inclined to look upon it as a slight that you should send me down only just enough to last over your visit.’

‘I always herald my arrival in a country house by a little present of tea,’ said Dick. ‘The fact is it’s the only good tea in the world. I sent my father to China for seven years to find it, and I’m sure you will agree that my father has not lived an ill-spent life.’

The tea was brought and duly drunk. Mrs. Crowley asked Lucy how her brother was. He had been at Oxford for the last two years.

‘I had a letter from him yesterday,’ the girl answered. ‘I think he’s getting on very well. I hope he’ll take his degree next year.’

A happy brightness came into her eyes as she talked of him. She apologised, blushing, for her eagerness.

‘You know, I’ve looked after George ever since he was ten, and I feel like a mother to him. It’s only with the greatest difficulty I can prevent myself from telling you how he got through the measles, and how well he bore vaccination.’

Lucy was very proud of her brother. She found a constant satisfaction in his good looks, and she loved the openness of his smile. She had striven with all her might to keep away from him the troubles that oppressed her, and had determined that nothing, if she could help it, should disturb his radiant satisfaction with the world. She knew that he was apt to lean on her, but though she chid herself sometimes for fostering the tendency, she could not really prevent the intense pleasure it gave her. He was young yet, and would soon enough grow into manly ways; it could not matter if now he depended upon her for everything. She rejoiced in the ardent affection which he gave her; and the implicit trust he placed in her, the complete reliance on her judgment, filled her with a proud humility. It made her feel stronger and better capable of affronting the difficulties of life. And Lucy, living much in the future, was pleased to see how beloved George was of all his friends. Everyone seemed willing to help him, and this seemed of good omen for the career which she had mapped out for him.

The recollection of him came to Lucy now as she had last seen him. They had been spending part of the summer with Lady Kelsey at her house on the Thames. George was going to Scotland to stay with friends, and Lucy, bound elsewhere, was leaving earlier in the afternoon. He came to see her off. She was touched, in her own sorrow at leaving him, by his obvious emotion. The tears were in his eyes as he kissed her on the platform. She saw him waving to her as the train sped towards London, slender and handsome, looking more boyish than ever in his whites; and she felt a thrill of gratitude because, with all her sorrows and regrets, she at least had him.

‘I hope he’s a good shot,’ she said inconsequently, as Mrs. Crowley handed her a cap of tea. ‘Of course it’s in the family.’

‘Marvellous family!’ said Dick, ironically. ‘You would be wiser to wish he had a good head for figures.’

‘But I hope he has that, too,’ she answered.

It had been arranged that George should go into the business in which Lady Kelsey still had a large interest. Lucy wanted him to make great sums of money, so that he might pay his father’s debts, and perhaps buy back the house which her family had owned so long.

‘I want him to be a clever man of business — since business is the only thing open to him now — and an excellent sportsman.’

She was too shy to describe her ambition, but her fancy had already cast a glow over the calling which George was to adopt. There was in the family an innate tendency toward the more exquisite things of life, and this would colour his career. She hoped he would become a merchant prince after the pattern of those Florentines who have left an ideal for succeeding ages of the way in which commerce may be ennobled by a liberal view of life. Like them he could drive hard bargains and amass riches — she recognised that riches now were the surest means of power — but like them also he could love music and art and literature, cherishing the things of the soul with a careful taste, and at the same time excel in all sports of the field. Life then would be as full as a man’s heart could wish; and this intermingling of interests might so colour it that he would lead the whole with a certain beauty and grandeur.

‘I wish I were a man,’ she cried, with a bright smile. ‘It’s so hard that I can do nothing but sit at home and spur others on. I want to do things myself.’

Mrs. Crowley leaned back in her chair. She gave her skirt a little twist so that the line of her form should be more graceful.

‘I’m so glad I’m a woman,’ she murmured. ‘I want none of the privileges of the sex which I’m delighted to call stronger. I want men to be noble and heroic and self-sacrificing; then they can protect me from a troublesome world, and look after me, and wait upon me. I’m an irresponsible creature with whom they can never be annoyed however exacting I am — it’s only pretty thoughtlessness on my part — and they must never lose their tempers however I annoy — it’s only nerves. Oh, no, I like to be a poor, weak woman.’

‘You’re a monster of cynicism,’ cried Dick. ‘You use an imaginary helplessness with the brutality of a buccaneer, and your ingenuousness is a pistol you put to one’s head, crying: your money or your life.’

‘You look very comfortable, dear Mr. Lomas,’ she retorted. ‘Would you mind very much if I asked you to put my footstool right for me?’

‘I should mind immensely,’ he smiled, without moving.

‘Oh, please do,’ she said, with a piteous little expression of appeal. ‘I’m so uncomfortable, and my foot’s going to sleep. And you needn’t be horrid to me.’

‘I didn’t know you really meant it,’ he said, getting up obediently and doing what was required of him.

‘I didn’t,’ she answered, as soon as he had finished. ‘But I know you’re a lazy creature, and I merely wanted to see if I could make you move when I’d warned you immediately before that — I was a womanly woman.’

‘I wonder if you’d make Alec MacKenzie do that?’ laughed Dick, good-naturedly.

‘Good heavens, I’d never try. Haven’t you discovered that women know by instinct what men they can make fools of, and they only try their arts on them? They’ve gained their reputation for omnipotence only on account of their robust common-sense, which leads them only to attack fortresses which are already half demolished.’

‘That suggests to my mind that every woman is a Potiphar’s wife, though every man isn’t a Joseph,’ said Dick.

‘Your remark is too blunt to be witty,’ returned Mrs. Crowley, ‘but it’s not without its grain of truth.’

Lucy, smiling, listened to the nonsense they talked. In their company she lost all sense of reality; Mrs. Crowley was so fragile, and Dick had such a whimsical gaiety, that she could not treat them as real persons. She felt herself a grown-up being assisting at some childish game in which preposterous ideas were bandied to and fro like answers in the game of consequences.

‘I never saw people wander from the subject as you do,’ she protested. ‘I can’t imagine what connection there is between whether Mr. MacKenzie would arrange Julia’s footstool, and the profligacy of the female sex.’

‘Don’t be hard on us,’ said Mrs. Crowley. ‘I must work off my flippancy before he arrives, and then I shall be ready to talk imperially.’

‘When does Alec come?’ asked Dick.

‘Now, this very minute. I’ve sent a carriage to meet him at the station. You won’t let him depress me, will you?’

‘Why did you ask him if he affects you in that way?’ asked Lucy, laughing.

‘But I like him — at least I think I do — and in any case, I admire him, and I’m sure he’s good for me. And Mr. Lomas wanted me to ask him, and he plays bridge extraordinarily well. And I thought he would be interesting. The only thing I have against him is that he never laughs when I say a clever thing, and looks so uncomfortably at me when I say a foolish one.’

‘I’m glad I laugh when you say a clever thing,’ said Dick.

‘You don’t. But you roar so heartily at your own jokes that if I hurry up and slip one in before you’ve done, I can often persuade myself that you’re laughing at mine.’

‘And do you like Alec MacKenzie, Lucy?’ asked Dick.

She paused for a moment before she answered, and hesitated.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think I rather dislike him. But I’m like Julia, I certainly admire him.’

‘I suppose he is rather alarming,’ said Dick. ‘He’s difficult to know, and he’s obviously impatient with other people’s affectations. There’s a certain grimness about him which disturbs you unless you know him intimately.’

‘He’s your greatest friend, isn’t he?’

‘He is.’

Dick paused for a little while.

‘I’ve known him for twenty years now, and I look upon him as the greatest man I’ve ever set eyes on. I think it’s an inestimable privilege to have been his friend.’

‘I’ve not noticed that you treated him with especial awe,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘Heaven save us!’ cried Dick. ‘I can only hold my own by laughing at him persistently.’

‘He bears it with unexampled good-nature.’

‘Have I ever told you how I made his acquaintance? It was in about fifty fathoms of water, and at least a thousand miles from land.’

‘What an inconvenient place for an introduction!’

‘We were both very wet. I was a young fool in those days, and I was playing the giddy goat — I was just going up to Oxford, and my wise father had sent me to America on a visit to enlarge my mind — I fell over-board, and was proceeding to drown, when Alec jumped in after me and held me up by the hair of my head.’

‘He’d have some difficulty in doing that now, wouldn’t he?’ suggested Mrs. Crowley, with a glance at Dick’s thinning locks.

‘And the odd thing is that he was absurdly grateful to me for letting myself be saved. He seemed to think I had done him an intentional service, and fallen into the Atlantic for the sole purpose of letting him pull me out.’

Dick had scarcely said these words when they heard the carriage drive up to the door of Court Leys.

‘There he is,’ cried Dick eagerly.

Mrs. Crowley’s butler opened the door and announced the man they had been discussing. Alexander MacKenzie came in.

He was just under six feet high, spare and well-made. He did not at the first glance give you the impression of particular strength, but his limbs were well-knit, there was no superfluous flesh about him, and you felt immediately that he had great powers of endurance. His hair was dark and cut very close. His short beard and his moustache were red. They concealed the squareness of his chin and the determination of his mouth. His eyes were not large, but they rested on the object that attracted his attention with a peculiar fixity. When he talked to you he did not glance this way or that, but looked straight at you with a deliberate steadiness that was a little disconcerting. He walked with an easy swing, like a man in the habit of covering a vast number of miles each day, and there was in his manner a self-assurance which suggested that he was used to command. His skin was tanned by exposure to tropical suns.

Mrs. Crowley and Dick chattered light-heartedly, but it was clear that he had no power of small-talk, and after the first greetings he fell into silence; he refused tea, but Mrs. Crowley poured out a cup and handed it to him.

‘You need not drink it, but I insist on your holding it in your hand. I hate people who habitually deny themselves things, and I can’t allow you to mortify the flesh in my house.’

Alec smiled gravely.

‘Of course I will drink it if it pleases you,’ he answered. ‘I got in the habit in Africa of eating only two meals a day, and I can’t get out of it now. But I’m afraid it’s very inconvenient for my friends.’ He looked at Lomas, and though his mouth did not smile, a look came into his eyes, partly of tenderness, partly of amusement. ‘Dick, of course, eats far too much.’

‘Good heavens, I’m nearly the only person left in London who is completely normal. I eat my three square meals a day regularly, and I always have a comfortable tea into the bargain. I don’t suffer from any disease. I’m in the best of health. I have no fads. I neither nibble nuts like a squirrel, nor grapes like a bird — I care nothing for all this jargon about pepsins and proteids and all the rest of it. I’m not a vegetarian, but a carnivorous animal; I drink when I’m thirsty, and I decidedly prefer my beverages to be alcoholic.’

‘I was thinking at luncheon to-day,’ said Mrs. Crowley, ‘that the pleasure you took in roast-beef and ale showed a singularly gross and unemotional nature.’

‘I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am able to look upon the future with equanimity.’

‘Why?’ asked Alec.

‘Because a love for good food is the only thing that remains with man when he grows old. Love? What is love when you are five and fifty and can no longer hide the disgraceful baldness of your pate. Ambition? What is ambition when you have discovered that honours are to the pushing and glory to the vulgar. Finally we must all reach an age when every passion seems vain, every desire not worth the trouble of achieving it; but then there still remain to the man with a good appetite three pleasures each day, his breakfast, his luncheon, and his dinner.’

Alec’s eyes rested on him quietly. He had never got out of the habit of looking upon Dick as a scatter-brained boy who talked nonsense for the fun of it; and his expression wore the amused disdain which one might have seen on a Saint Bernard when a toy-terrier was going through its tricks.

‘Please say something,’ cried Dick, half-irritably.

‘I suppose you say those things in order that I may contradict you. Why should I? They’re perfectly untrue, and I don’t agree with a single word you say. But if it amuses you to talk nonsense, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘My dear Alec, I wish you wouldn’t use the mailed fist in your conversation. It’s so very difficult to play a game with a spillikin on one side and a sledge-hammer on the other.’

Lucy, sitting back in her chair, quietly, was observing the new arrival. Dick had asked her and Mrs. Crowley to meet him at luncheon immediately after his arrival from Mombassa. This was two months ago now, and since then she had seen much of him. But she felt that she knew him little more than on that first day, and still she could not make up her mind whether she liked him or not. She was glad that they were staying together at Court Leys; it would give her an opportunity of really becoming acquainted with him, and there was no doubt that he was worth the trouble. The fire lit up his face, casting grim shadows upon it, so that it looked more than ever masterful and determined. He was unconscious that her eyes rested upon him. He was always unconscious of the attention he aroused.

Lucy hoped that she would induce him to talk of the work he had done, and the work upon which he was engaged. With her mind fixed always on great endeavours, his career interested her enormously; and it gained something mysterious as well because there were gaps in her knowledge of him which no one seemed able to fill. He knew few people in London, but was known in one way or another of many; and all who had come in contact with him were unanimous in their opinion. He was supposed to know Africa as no other man knew it. During fifteen years he had been through every part of it, and had traversed districts which the white man had left untouched. But he had never written of his experiences, partly from indifference to chronicle the results of his undertakings, partly from a natural secrecy which made him hate to recount his deeds to all and sundry. It seemed that reserve was a deep-rooted instinct with him, and he was inclined to keep to himself all that he discovered. But if on this account he was unknown to the great public, his work was appreciated very highly by specialists. He had read papers before the Geographical Society, (though it had been necessary to exercise much pressure to induce him to do so), which had excited profound interest; and occasionally letters appeared from him in Nature, or in one of the ethnographical publications, stating briefly some discovery he had made, or some observation which he thought necessary to record. He had been asked now and again to make reports to the Foreign Office upon matters pertaining to the countries he knew; and Lucy had heard his perspicacity praised in no measured terms by those in power.

She put together such facts as she knew of his career.

Alec MacKenzie was a man of considerable means. He belonged to an old Scotch family, and had a fine place in the Highlands, but his income depended chiefly upon a colliery in Lancashire. His parents died during his childhood, and his wealth was much increased by a long minority. Having inherited from an uncle a ranch in the West, his desire to see this occasioned his first voyage from England in the interval between leaving Eton and going up to Oxford; and it was then he made acquaintance with Richard Lomas, who had remained his most intimate friend. The unlikeness of the two men caused perhaps the strength of the tie between them, the strenuous vehemence of the one finding a relief in the gaiety of the other. Soon after leaving Oxford, MacKenzie made a brief expedition into Algeria to shoot, and the mystery of the great continent seized him. As sometimes a man comes upon a new place which seems extraordinarily familiar, so that he is almost convinced that in a past state he has known it intimately, Alec suddenly found himself at home in the immense distances of Africa. He felt a singular exhilaration when the desert was spread out before his eyes, and capacities which he had not suspected in himself awoke in him. He had never thought himself an ambitious man, but ambition seized him. He had never imagined himself subject to poetic emotion, but all at once a feeling of the poetry of an adventurous life welled up within him. And though he had looked upon romance with the scorn of his Scottish common sense, an irresistible desire of the romantic surged upon him, like the waves of some unknown, mystical sea.

When he returned to England a peculiar restlessness took hold of him. He was indifferent to the magnificence of the bag, which was the pride of his companions. He felt himself cribbed and confined. He could not breathe the air of cities.

He began to read the marvellous records of African exploration, and his blood tingled at the magic of those pages. Mungo Park, a Scot like himself, had started the roll. His aim had been to find the source and trace the seaward course of the Niger. He took his life in his hands, facing boldly the perils of climate, savage pagans, and jealous Mohammedans, and discovered the upper portions of that great river. On a second expedition he undertook to follow it to the sea. Of his party some died of disease, and some were slain by the natives. Not one returned; and the only trace of Mungo Park was a book, known to have been in his possession, found by British explorers in the hut of a native chief.

Then Alec MacKenzie read of the efforts to reach Timbuktu, which was the great object of ambition to the explorers of the nineteenth century. It exercised the same fascination over their minds as did El Dorado, with its golden city of Monoa, to the adventurers in the days of Queen Elizabeth. It was thought to be the capital of a powerful and wealthy state; and those ardent minds promised themselves all kinds of wonders when they should at last come upon it. But it was not the desire for gold that urged them on, rather an irresistible curiosity, and a pride in their own courage. One after another desperate attempts were made, and it was reached at last by another Scot, Alexander Gordon Laing. And his success was a symbol of all earthly endeavours, for the golden city of his dreams was no more than a poverty-stricken village.

One by one Alec studied the careers of these great men; and he saw that the best of them had not gone with half an army at their backs, but almost alone, sometimes with not a single companion, and had depended for their success not upon the strength of their arms, but upon the strength of their character. Major Durham, an old Peninsular officer, was the first European to cross the Sahara. Captain Clapperton, with his servant, Richard Lander, was the first who traversed Africa from the Mediterranean to the Guinea Coast. And he died at his journey’s end. And there was something fine in the devotion of Richard Lander, the faithful servant, who went on with his master’s work and cleared up at last the great mystery of the Niger. And he, too, had no sooner done his work than he died, near the mouth of the river he had so long travelled on, of wounds inflicted by the natives. There was not one of those early voyagers who escaped with his life. It was the work of desperate men that they undertook, but there was no recklessness in them. They counted the cost and took the risk; the fascination of the unknown was too great for them, and they reckoned death as nothing if they could accomplish that on which they had set out.

Two men above all attracted Alec Mackenzie’s interest. One was Richard Burton, that mighty, enigmatic man, more admirable for what he was than for what he did; and the other was Livingstone, the greatest of African explorers. There was something very touching in the character of that gentle Scot. MacKenzie’s enthusiasm was seldom very strong, but here was a man whom he would willingly have known; and he was strangely affected by the thought of his lonely death, and his grave in the midst of the Dark Continent he loved so well. On that, too, might have been written the epitaph which is on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren.

Finally he studied the works of Henry M. Stanley. Here the man excited neither admiration nor affection, but a cold respect. No one could help recognising the greatness of his powers. He was a man of Napoleonic instinct, who suited his means to his end, and ruthlessly fought his way until he had achieved it. His books were full of interest, and they were practical. From them much could be learned, and Alec studied them with a thoroughness which was in his nature.

When he arose from this long perusal, his mind was made up. He had found his vocation.

He did not disclose his plans to any of his friends till they were mature, and meanwhile set about seeing the people who could give him information. At last he sailed for Zanzibar, and started on a journey which was to try his powers. In a month he fell ill, and it was thought at the mission to which his bearers brought him that he could not live. For ten weeks he was at death’s door, but he would not give in to the enemy. He insisted in the end on being taken back to the coast, and here, as if by a personal effort of will, he recovered. The season had passed for his expedition, and he was obliged to return to England. Most men would have been utterly discouraged, but Alec was only strengthened in his determination. He personified in a way that deadly climate and would not allow himself to be beaten by it. His short experience had shown him what he needed, and as soon as he was back in England he proceeded to acquire a smattering of medical knowledge, and some acquaintance with the sciences which were wanted by a traveller. He had immense powers of concentration, and in a year of tremendous labour acquired a working knowledge of botany and geology, and the elements of surveying; he learnt how to treat the maladies which were likely to attack people in tropical districts, and enough surgery to set a broken limb or to conduct a simple operation. He felt himself ready now for a considerable undertaking; but this time he meant to start from Mombassa.

So far Lucy was able to go, partly from her own imaginings, and partly from what Dick had told her. He had given her the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, and here she found Alec MacKenzie’s account of his wanderings during the five years that followed. The countries which he explored then, became afterwards British East Africa.

But the bell rang for dinner, and so interrupted her meditations.

III

They played bridge immediately afterwards. Mrs. Crowley looked upon conversation as a fine art, which could not be pursued while the body was engaged in the process of digestion; and she was of opinion that a game of cards agreeably diverted the mind and prepared the intellect for the quips and cranks which might follow when the claims of the body were satisfied. Lucy drew Alec MacKenzie as her partner, and so was able to watch his play when her cards were on the table. He did not play lightly as did Dick, who kept up a running commentary the whole time, but threw his whole soul into the game and never for a moment relaxed his attention. He took no notice of Dick’s facetious observations. Presently Lucy grew more interested in his playing than in the game; she was struck, not only by his great gift of concentration, but by his boldness. He had a curious faculty for knowing almost from the beginning of a hand where each card lay. She saw, also, that he was plainly most absorbed when he was playing both hands himself; he was a man who liked to take everything on his own shoulders, and the division of responsibility irritated him.

At the end of the rubber Dick flung himself back in his chair irritably.

‘I can’t make it out,’ he cried. ‘I play much better than you, and I hold better hands, and yet you get the tricks.’

Dick was known to be an excellent player, and his annoyance was excusable.

‘We didn’t make a single mistake,’ he assured his partner, ‘and we actually had the odd in our hands, but not one of our finesses came off, and all his did.’ He turned to Alec. ‘How the dickens did you guess I had those two queens?’

‘Because I’ve known you for twenty years,’ answered Alec, smiling. ‘I know that, though you’re impulsive and emotional, you’re not without shrewdness; I know that your brain acts very quickly and sees all kinds of remote contingencies; then you’re so pleased at having noticed them that you act as if they were certain to occur. Given these data, I can tell pretty well what cards you have, after they’ve gone round two or three times.’

‘The knowledge you have of your opponents’ cards is too uncanny,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘I can tell a good deal from people’s faces. You see, in Africa I have had a lot of experience; it’s apparently so much easier for the native to lie than to tell the truth that you get into the habit of paying no attention to what he says, and a great deal to the way he looks.’

While Mrs. Crowley made herself comfortable in the chair, which she had already chosen as her favourite, Dick went over to the fire and stood in front of it in such a way as effectually to prevent the others from getting any of its heat.

‘What made you first take to exploration?’ asked Mrs. Crowley suddenly.

Alec gave her that slow, scrutinising look of his, and answered, with a smile:

‘I don’t know. I had nothing to do and plenty of money.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ interrupted Dick. ‘A lunatic wanted to find out about some district that people had never been to, and it wouldn’t have been any use to them if they had, because, if the natives didn’t kill you, the climate made no bones about it. He came back crippled with fever, having failed in his attempt, and, after asserting that no one could get into the heart of Rofa’s country and return alive, promptly gave up the ghost. So Alec immediately packed up his traps and made for the place.’

‘I proved the man was wrong,’ said Alec quietly. ‘I became great friends with Rofa, and he wanted to marry my sister, only I hadn’t one.’

‘And if anyone said it was impossible to hop through Asia on one foot, you’d go and do it just to show it could be done,’ retorted Dick ‘You have a passion for doing things because they’re difficult or dangerous, and, if they’re downright impossible, you chortle with joy.’

‘You make me really too melodramatic,’ smiled Alec.

‘But that’s just what you are. You’re the most transpontine person I ever saw in my life.’ Dick turned to Lucy and Mrs. Crowley with a wave of the hand. ‘I call you to witness. When he was at Oxford, Alec was a regular dab at classics; he had a gift for writing verses in languages that no one except dons wanted to read, and everyone thought that he was going to be the most brilliant scholar of his day.’

‘This is one of Dick’s favourite stories,’ said Alec. ‘It would be quite amusing if there were any truth in it.’

But Dick would not allow himself to be interrupted.

‘At mathematics, on the other hand, he was a perfect ass. You know, some people seem to have that part of their brains wanting that deals with figures, and Alec couldn’t add two and two together without making a hexameter out of it. One day his tutor got in a passion with him and said he’d rather teach arithmetic to a brick wall. I happened to be present, and he was certainly very rude. He was a man who had a precious gift for making people feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Alec didn’t say anything, but he looked at him; and, when he flies into a temper, he doesn’t get red and throw things about like a pleasant, normal person — he merely becomes a little paler and stares at you.’

‘I beg you not to believe a single word he says,’ remonstrated Alec.

‘Well, Alec threw over his classics. Everyone concerned reasoned with him; they appealed to his common sense; they were appealing to the most obstinate fool in Christendom. Alec had made up his mind to be a mathematician. For more than two years he worked ten hours a day at a subject he loathed; he threw his whole might into it and forced out of nature the gifts she had denied him, with the result that he got a first class. And much good it’s done him.’

Alec shrugged his shoulders.

‘It wasn’t that I cared for mathematics, but it taught me to conquer the one inconvenient word in the English language.’

‘And what the deuce is that?’

‘I’m afraid it sounds very priggish,’ laughed Alec. ‘The word impossible.’

Dick gave a little snort of comic rage.

‘And it also gave you a ghastly pleasure in doing things that hurt you. Oh, if you’d only been born in the Middle Ages, what a fiendish joy you would have taken in mortifying your flesh, and in denying yourself everything that makes life so good to live! You’re never thoroughly happy unless you’re making yourself thoroughly miserable.’

‘Each time I come back to England I find that you talk more and greater nonsense, Dick,’ returned Alec drily.

‘I’m one of the few persons now alive who can talk nonsense,’ answered his friend, laughing. ‘That’s why I’m so charming. Everyone else is so deadly earnest.’

He settled himself down to make a deliberate speech.

‘I deplore the strenuousness of the world in general. There is an idea abroad that it is praiseworthy to do things, and what they are is of no consequence so long as you do them. I hate the mad hurry of the present day to occupy itself. I wish I could persuade people of the excellence of leisure.’

‘One could scarcely accuse you of cultivating it yourself,’ said Lucy, smiling.

Dick looked at her for a moment thoughtfully.

‘Do you know that I’m hard upon forty?’

‘With the light behind, you might still pass for thirty-two,’ interrupted Mrs. Crowley.

He turned to her seriously.

‘I haven’t a grey hair on my head.’

‘I suppose your servant plucks them out every morning?’

‘Oh, no, very rarely; one a month at the outside.’

‘I think I see one just beside the left temple.’

He turned quickly to the glass.

‘Dear me, how careless of Charles! I shall have to give him a piece of my mind.’

‘Come here, and let me take it out,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘I will let you do nothing of the sort I should consider it most familiar.’

‘You were giving us the gratuitous piece of information that you were nearly forty,’ said Alec.

‘The thought came to me the other day with something of a shock, and I set about a scrutiny of the life I was leading. I’ve worked at the bar pretty hard for fifteen years now, and I’ve been in the House since the general election. I’ve been earning two thousand a year, I’ve got nearly four thousand of my own, and I’ve never spent much more than half my income. I wondered if it was worth while to spend eight hours a day settling the sordid quarrels of foolish people, and another eight hours in the farce of governing the nation.’

‘Why do you call it that?’

Dick Lomas shrugged his shoulders scornfully.

‘Because it is. A few big-wigs rule the roost, and the rest of us are only there to delude the British people into the idea that they’re a self-governing community.’

‘What is wrong with you is that you have no absorbing aim in politics,’ said Alec gravely.

‘Pardon me, I am a suffragist of the most vehement type,’ answered Dick, with a thin smile.

‘That’s the last thing I should have expected you to be,’ said Mrs. Crowley, who dressed with admirable taste. ‘Why on earth have you taken to that?’

Dick shrugged his shoulders.

‘No one can have been through a parliamentary election without discovering how unworthy, sordid, and narrow are the reasons for which men vote. There are very few who are alive to the responsibilities that have been thrust upon them. They are indifferent to the importance of the stakes at issue, but make their vote a matter of ignoble barter. The parliamentary candidate is at the mercy of faddists and cranks. Now, I think that women, when they have votes, will be a trifle more narrow, and they will give them for motives that are a little more sordid and a little more unworthy. It will reduce universal suffrage to the absurd, and then it may be possible to try something else.’

Dick had spoken with a vehemence that was unusual to him. Alec watched him with a certain interest.

‘And what conclusions have you come to?’

For a moment he did not answer, then he gave a deprecating smile.

‘I feel that the step I want to take is momentous for me, though I am conscious that it can matter to nobody else whatever. There will be a general election in a few months, and I have made up my mind to inform the whips that I shall not stand again. I shall give up my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, put up the shutters, so to speak, and Mr. Richard Lomas will retire from active life.’

‘You wouldn’t really do that?’ cried Mrs. Crowley.

‘Why not?’

‘In a month complete idleness will simply bore you to death.’

‘I doubt it. Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they’re obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture of Christian times is the sanctification of labour. You see, the early Christians were slaves, and it was necessary to show them that their obligatory toil was noble and virtuous. But when all is said and done, a man works to earn his bread and to keep his wife and children; it is a painful necessity, but there is nothing heroic in it. If people choose to put a higher value on the means than on the end, I can only pass with a shrug of the shoulders, and regret the paucity of their intelligence.’

‘It’s really unfair to talk so much all at once,’ said Mrs. Crowley, throwing up her pretty hands.

But Dick would not be stopped.

‘For my part I have neither wife nor child, and I have an income that is more than adequate. Why should I take the bread out of somebody else’s mouth? And it’s not on my own merit that I get briefs — men seldom do — I only get them because I happen to have at the back of me a very large firm of solicitors. And I can find nothing worthy in attending to these foolish disputes. In most cases it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, and each side is very unjust and pig-headed. No, the bar is a fair way of earning your living like another, but it’s no more than that; and, if you can exist without, I see no reason why Quixotic motives of the dignity of human toil should keep you to it. I’ve already told you why I mean to give up my seat in Parliament.’

‘Have you realised that you are throwing over a career that may be very brilliant? You should get an under-secretaryship in the next government.’

‘That would only mean licking the boots of a few more men whom I despise.’

‘It’s a very dangerous experiment that you’re making.’

Dick looked straight into Alec MacKenzie’s eyes.

‘And is it you who counsel me not to make it on that account?’ he said, smiling. ‘Surely experiments are only amusing if they’re dangerous.’

‘And to what is it precisely that you mean to devote your time?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.

‘I should like to make idleness a fine art,’ he laughed. ‘People, now-a-days, turn up their noses at the dilettante. Well, I mean to be a dilettante. I want to devote myself to the graces of life. I’m forty, and for all I know I haven’t so very many years before me: in the time that remains, I want to become acquainted with the world and all the graceful, charming things it contains.’

Alec, fallen into deep thought, stared into the fire. Presently he took a long breath, rose from his chair, and drew himself to his full height.

‘I suppose it’s a life like another, and there is no one to say which is better and which is worse. But, for my part, I would rather go on till I dropped. There are ten thousand things I want to do. If I had ten lives I couldn’t get through a tithe of what, to my mind, so urgently needs doing.’

‘And what do you suppose will be the end of it?’ asked Dick.

‘For me?’

Dick nodded, but did not otherwise reply. Alec smiled faintly.

‘Well, I suppose the end of it will be death in some swamp, obscurely, worn out with disease and exposure; and my bearers will make off with my guns and my stores, and the jackals will do the rest.’

‘I think it’s horrible,’ said Mrs. Crowley, with a shudder.

‘I’m a fatalist. I’ve lived too long among people with whom it is the deepest rooted article of their faith, to be anything else. When my time comes, I cannot escape it.’ He smiled whimsically. ‘But I believe in quinine, too, and I think that the daily use of that admirable drug will make the thread harder to cut.’

To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.

‘And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred years,’ said Dick. ‘We shall both be forgotten long before then, you with your strenuousness, and I with my folly.’

‘And what conclusion do you draw from that?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.

‘Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda.’

IV

There was some rough shooting on the estate which Mrs. Crowley had rented, and next day Dick went out to see what he could find. Alec refused to accompany him.

‘I think shooting in England bores me a little,’ he said. ‘I have a prejudice against killing things unless I want to eat them, and these English birds are so tame that it seems to me rather like shooting chickens.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Dick, as he set out. ‘The fact is that you can’t hit anything smaller than a hippopotamus, and you know that there is nothing here to suit you except Mrs. Crowley’s cows.’

After luncheon Alec MacKenzie asked Lucy if she would take a stroll with him. She was much pleased.

‘Where would you like to go?’ she asked.

‘Let us walk by the sea.’

She took him along a road called Joy Lane, which ran from the fishing town of Blackstable to a village called Waveney. The sea there had a peculiar vastness, and the salt smell of the breeze was pleasant to the senses. The flatness of the marsh seemed to increase the distances that surrounded them, and unconsciously Alec fell into a more rapid swing. It did not look as if he walked fast, but he covered the ground with the steady method of a man who has been used to long journeys, and it was good for Lucy that she was accustomed to much walking. At first they spoke of trivial things, but presently silence fell upon them. Lucy saw that he was immersed in thought, and she did not interrupt him. It amused her that, after asking her to walk with him, this odd man should take no pains to entertain her. Now and then he threw back his head with a strange, proud motion, and looked out to sea. The gulls, with their melancholy flight, were skimming upon the surface of the water. The desolation of that scene — it was the same which, a few days before, had rent poor Lucy’s heart — appeared to enter his soul; but, strangely enough, it uplifted him, filling him with exulting thoughts. He quickened his pace, and Lucy, without a word, kept step with him. He seemed not to notice where they walked, and presently she led him away from the sea. They tramped along a winding road, between trim hedges and fertile fields; and the country had all the sweet air of Kent, with its easy grace and its comfortable beauty. They passed a caravan, with a shaggy horse browsing at the wayside, and a family of dinglers sitting around a fire of sticks. The sight curiously affected Lucy. The wandering life of those people, with no ties but to the ramshackle carriage which was their only home, their familiarity with the fields and with strange hidden places, filled her with a wild desire for freedom and for vast horizons. At last they came to the massive gates of Court Leys. An avenue of elms led to the house.

‘Here we are,’ said Lucy, breaking the long silence.

‘Already?’ He seemed to shake himself. ‘I have to thank you for a pleasant stroll, and we’ve had a good talk, haven’t we?’

‘Have we?’ she laughed. She saw his look of surprise. ‘For two hours you’ve not vouchsafed to make an observation.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, reddening under his tan. ‘How rude you must have thought me! I’ve been alone so much that I’ve got out of the way of behaving properly.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ she smiled. ‘You must talk to me another time.’

She was subtly flattered. She felt that, for him, it was a queer kind-of compliment that he had paid her. Their silent walk, she did not know why, seemed to have created a bond between them; and it appeared that he felt it, too, for afterwards he treated her with a certain intimacy. He seemed to look upon her no longer as an acquaintance, but as a friend.

A day or two later, Mrs. Crowley having suggested that they should drive into Tercanbury to see the cathedral, MacKenzie asked her if she would allow him to walk.

He turned to Lucy.

‘I hardly dare to ask if you will come with me,’ he said.

‘It would please me immensely.’

‘I will try to behave better than last time.’

‘You need not,’ she smiled.

Dick, who had an objection to walking when it was possible to drive, set out with Mrs. Crowley in a trap. Alec waited for Lucy. She went round to the stable to fetch a dog to accompany them, and, as she came towards him, he looked at her. Alec was a man to whom most of his fellows were abstractions. He saw them and talked to them, noting their peculiarities, but they were seldom living persons to him. They were shadows, as it were, that had to be reckoned with, but they never became part of himself. And it came upon him now with a certain shock of surprise to notice Lucy. He felt suddenly a new interest in her. He seemed to see her for the first time, and her rare beauty strangely moved him. In her serge dress and her gauntlets, with a motor cap and a flowing veil, a stick in her hand, she seemed on a sudden to express the country through which for the last two or three days he had wandered. He felt an unexpected pleasure in her slim erectness and in her buoyant step. There was something very charming in her blue eyes.

He was seized with a great desire to talk. And, without thinking for an instant that what concerned him so intensely might be of no moment to her, he began forthwith upon the subject which was ever at his heart. But he spoke as his interest prompted, of each topic as it most absorbed him, starting with what he was now about and going back to what had first attracted his attention to that business; then telling his plans for the future, and to make them clear, finishing with the events that had led up to his determination. Lucy listened attentively, now and then asking a question; and presently the whole matter sorted itself in her mind, so that she was able to make a connected narrative of his life since the details of it had escaped from Dick’s personal observation.

For some years Alec MacKenzie had travelled in Africa with no object beyond a great curiosity, and no ambition but that of the unknown. His first important expedition had been, indeed, occasioned by the failure of a fellow-explorer. He had undergone the common vicissitudes of African travel, illness and hunger, incredible difficulties of transit through swamps that seemed never ending, and tropical forest through which it was impossible to advance at the rate of more than one mile a day; he had suffered from the desertion of his bearers and the perfidy of native tribes. But at last he reached the country which had been the aim of his journey. He had to encounter then a savage king’s determined hostility to the white man, and he had to keep a sharp eye on his followers who, in abject terror of the tribe he meant to visit, took every opportunity to escape into the bush. The barbarian chief sent him a warning that he would have him killed if he attempted to enter his capital. The rest of the story Alec told with an apologetic air, as if he were ashamed of himself, and he treated it with a deprecating humour that sought to minimise both the danger he had run and the courage he had displayed. On receiving the king’s message, Alec MacKenzie took up a high tone, and returned the answer that he would come to the royal kraal before midday. He wanted to give the king no time to recover from his astonishment, and the messengers had scarcely delivered the reply before he presented himself, unarmed and unattended.

‘What did you say to him?’ asked Lucy.

‘I asked him what the devil he meant by sending me such an impudent message,’ smiled Alec.

‘Weren’t you frightened?’ said Lucy.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

He paused for a moment, and, as though unconsciously he were calling back the mood which had then seized him, he began to walk more slowly.

‘You see, it was the only thing to do. We’d about come to the end of our food, and we were bound to get some by hook or by crook. If we’d shown the white feather they would probably have set upon us without more ado. My own people were too frightened to make a fight of it, and we should have been wiped out like sheep. Then I had a kind of instinctive feeling that it would be all right. I didn’t feel as if my time had come.’

But, notwithstanding, for three hours his life had hung in the balance; and Lucy understood that it was only his masterful courage which had won the day and turned a sullen, suspicious foe into a warm ally.

He achieved the object of his expedition, discovered a new species of antelope of which he was able to bring back to the Natural History Museum a complete skeleton and two hides; took some geographical observations which corrected current errors, and made a careful examination of the country. When he had learnt all that was possible, still on the most friendly terms with the ferocious ruler, he set out for Mombassa. He reached it in one month more than five years after he had left it.

The results of this journey had been small enough, but Alec looked upon it as his apprenticeship. He had found his legs, and believed himself fit for much greater undertakings. He had learnt how to deal with natives, and was aware that he had a natural influence over them. He had confidence in himself. He had surmounted the difficulties of the climate, and felt himself more or less proof against fever and heat. He returned to the coast stronger than he had ever been in his life, and his enthusiasm for African travel increased tenfold. The siren had taken hold of him, and no escape now was possible.

He spent a year in England, and then went back to Africa. He had determined now to explore certain districts to the northeast of the great lakes. They were in the hinterland of British East Africa, and England had a vague claim over them; but no actual occupation had taken place, and they formed a series of independent states under Arab emirs. He went this time with a roving commission from the government, and authority to make treaties with the local chieftains. Spending six years in these districts, he made a methodical survey of the country, and was able to prepare valuable maps. He collected an immense amount of scientific material. He studied the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and made careful observations on the political state. He found the whole land distracted with incessant warfare, and broad tracts of country, fertile and apt for the occupation of white men, given over to desolation. It was then that he realised the curse of slave-raiding, the abolition of which was to become the great object of his future activity. His strength was small, and, anxious not to arouse at once the enmity of the Arab slavers, he had to use much diplomacy in order to establish himself in the country. He knew himself to be an object of intense suspicion, and he could not trust even the petty rulers who were bound to him by ties of gratitude and friendship. For some time the sultan of the most powerful state kept him in a condition bordering on captivity, and at one period his life was for a year in the greatest danger. He never knew from day to day whether he would see the setting of the sun. The Arab, though he treated him with honour, would not let him go; and, at last, Alec, seizing an opportunity when the sultan was engaged in battle with a brother who sought to usurp his sovereignty, fled for his life, abandoning his property, and saving only his notes, his specimens, and his guns.

When MacKenzie reached England, he laid before the Foreign Office the result of his studies. He pointed out the state of anarchy to which the constant slave-raiding had reduced this wealthy country, and implored those in authority, not only for the sake of humanity, but for the prestige of the country, to send an expedition which should stamp out the murderous traffic. He offered to accompany this in any capacity; and, so long as he had the chance of assisting in a righteous war, agreed to serve under any leader they chose. His knowledge of the country and his influence over its inhabitants were indispensable. He guaranteed that, if they gave him a certain number of guns with three British officers, the whole affair could be settled in a year.

But the government was crippled by the Boer War; and though, appreciating the strength of his arguments, it realised the necessity of intervention, was disinclined to enter upon fresh enterprises. These little expeditions in Africa had a way of developing into much more important affairs than first appeared. They had been taught bitter lessons before now, and could not risk, in the present state of things, even an insignificant rebuff. If they sent out a small party, which was defeated, it would be a great blow to the prestige of the country through Africa — the Arabs would carry the news to India — and it would be necessary, then, to despatch such a force that failure was impossible. To supply this there was neither money nor men.

Alec was put off with one excuse after another. To him it seemed that hindrances were deliberately set in his way, and in fact the relations of England with the rest of Europe made his small schemes appear an intolerable nuisance. At length he was met with a flat refusal.

But Alec MacKenzie could not rest with this, and opposition only made him more determined to carry his business through. He understood that it was hard at second hand to make men realise the state of things in that distant land. But he had seen horrors beyond description. He knew the ruthless cruelty of the slave-raiders, and in his ears rang, still, the cries of agony when a village was set on fire and attacked by the Arabs. Not once, nor twice, but many times he had left some tiny kraal nestling sweetly among its fields of maize, an odd, savage counterpart to the country hamlet described in prim, melodious numbers by the gentle Goldsmith: the little naked children were playing merrily; the women sat in groups grinding their corn and chattering; the men worked in the fields or lounged idly about the hut doors. It was a charming scene. You felt that here, perhaps, one great mystery of life had been solved; for happiness was on every face, and the mere joy of living was a sufficient reason for existence. And, when he returned, the village was a pile of cinders, smoking still; here and there were lying the dead and wounded; on one side he recognised a chubby boy with a great spear wound in his body; on another was a woman with her face blown away by some clumsy gun; and there a man in the agony of death, streaming with blood, lay heaped upon the ground in horrible disorder. And the rest of the inhabitants had been hurried away pellmell on the cruel journey across country, brutally treated and half starved, till they could be delivered into the hands of the slave merchant.

Alec MacKenzie went to the Foreign Office once more. He was willing to take the whole business on himself, and asked only for a commission to raise troops at his own expense. Timorous secretaries did not know into what difficulties this determined man might lead them, and if he went with the authority of an official, but none of his responsibilities, he might land them in grave complications. The spheres of influence of the continental powers must be respected, and at this time of all others it was necessary to be very careful of national jealousies. Alec MacKenzie was told that if he went he must go as a private person. No help could be given him, and the British Government would not concern itself, even indirectly, with his enterprise. Alec had expected the reply and was not dissatisfied. If the government would not undertake the matter itself, he preferred to manage it without the hindrance of official restraints. And so this solitary man made up his mind, single handed, to crush the slave traffic in a district larger than England, and to wage war, unassisted, with a dozen local chieftains and against twenty thousand fighting men The attempt seemed Quixotic, but Alec had examined the risks and was willing to take them. He had on his side a thorough knowledge of the country, a natural power over the natives, and some skill in managing them. He was accustomed now to the diplomacy which was needful, and he was well acquainted with the local politics.

He did not think it would be hard to collect a force on the coast, and there were plenty of hardy, adventurous fellows who would volunteer to officer the native levies, if he had money to pay them. Ready money was essential, so he crossed the Atlantic and sold his estate in Texas; he made arrangements to raise a further sum, if necessary, on the income which his colliery in Lancashire brought him. He engaged a surgeon, whom he had known for some years, and could trust in an emergency, and then sailed for Zanzibar, where he expected to find white men willing to take service under him. At Mombassa he collected the bearers who had been with him during his previous expeditions, and, his fame among the natives being widely spread, he was able to take his pick of those best suited for his purpose. His party consisted altogether of over three hundred.

When he arrived upon the scene of his operations, everything for a time went well. He showed great skill in dividing his enemies. The petty rulers were filled with jealousy of one another and eager always to fall upon their friends, when slave-raiding for a season was unsuccessful. Alec’s plan was to join two or three smaller states in an attack upon the most powerful of them all, to crush this completely, and then to take his old allies one by one, if they would not guarantee to give up their raids on peaceful tribes. His influence with the natives was such that he felt certain it was possible to lead them into action against their dreaded foes, the Arabs, if he was once able to give them confidence. Everything turned out as he had hoped.

The great state which had aimed at the hegemony of the whole district was defeated; and Alec, with the method habitual to him, set about organising each strip of territory which was reclaimed from barbarism. He was able to hold in check the emirs who had fought with him, and a sharp lesson given to one who had broken faith with him, struck terror in the others. The land was regaining its old security. Alec trusted that in five years a man would be able to travel from end to end of it as safely as in England. But suddenly everything he had achieved was undone. As sometimes happens in countries of small civilisation, a leader arose from among the Arabs. None knew from where he sprang, and it was said that he had been a camel driver. He was called Mohammed the Lame, because a leg badly set after a fracture had left him halting, and he was a shrewd man, far-seeing, ruthless, and ambitious. With a few companions as desperate as himself, he attacked the capital of a small state in the North which was distracted by the death of its ruler, seized it, and proclaimed himself king.

In a year he had brought under his sway all those shadowy lands which border upon Abyssinia, and was leading a great rabble, mad with the lust of conquest, fanatic with hatred of the Christian, upon the South. Consternation reigned among the tribes to whom MacKenzie was the only hope of salvation. He pointed out to the Arabs who had accepted his influence, that their safety, as well as his, lay in resistance to the Lame One; but the war cry of the Prophet prevailed against the call of reason, and he found that they were against him to a man. His native allies were faithful, with the fidelity of despair, and these he brought up against the enemy. A pitched battle was fought, but the issue was undecided. The losses were great on both sides, and Alec was himself badly wounded.

Fortunately the wet season was approaching, and Mohammed the Lame, with a wholesome respect for the white man who for the moment, at least, had checked his onward course, withdrew to the Northern regions where his power was more secure. Alec knew that he would resume the attack at the first opportunity, and he knew also that he had not the means to withstand a foe who was astute and capable. His only chance was to get back to the coast, return to England, and try again to interest the government in the undertaking; if they still refused help he determined to go out once more himself, taking this time Maxim guns and men capable of handling them. He knew that his departure would seem like flight, but he could not help that. He was obliged to go. His wound prevented him from walking, but he caused himself to be carried; and, firing his caravan with his own indomitable spirit, he reached the coast by forced marches.

His brief visit to England was already drawing to its close, and, in less than a month now, he proposed to set out for Africa once more. This time he meant to finish the work. If only his life were spared, he would crush for ever the infamous trade which turned a paradise into a wilderness.

Alec stopped speaking as they entered the cathedral close, and they paused for a moment to look at the stately pile. The trim lawns that surrounded it, in a manner enhanced its serene majesty. They entered the nave. There was a vast and solemn stillness. And there was something subtly impressive in the naked space; it uplifted the heart, and one felt a kind of scorn for all that was mean and low. The soaring of the Gothic columns, with their straight simplicity, raised the thoughts to a nobler standard. And, though that place had been given for three hundred years to colder rites, the atmosphere of an earlier, more splendid faith seemed still to cling to it. A vague odour of a spectral incense hung about the pillars, a sweet, sad smell, and the shadows of ghostly priests in vestments of gold, and with embroidered copes, wound in a long procession through the empty aisles.

Lucy was glad that they had come there, and the restful grandeur of the place fitted in with the emotions that had filled her mind during the walk from Blackstable. Her spirit was enlarged, and she felt that her own small worries were petty. The consciousness came to her that the man with whom she had been speaking was making history, and she was fascinated by the fulness of his life and the greatness of his undertakings. Her eyes were dazzled with the torrid African sun which had shone through his words, and she felt the horror of the primeval forest and the misery of the unending swamps. And she was proud because his outlook was so clear, because he bore his responsibilities so easily, because his plans were so vast. She looked at him. He was standing by her side, and his eyes were upon her. She felt the colour rise to her cheeks, she knew not why, and in embarrassment looked down.

By some chance they missed Dick Lomas and Mrs. Crowley. Neither was sorry. When they left the cathedral and started for home, they spoke for a while of indifferent things. It seemed that Alec’s tongue was loosened, and he was glad of it. Lucy knew instinctively that he had never talked to anyone as he talked to her, and she was curiously flattered.

But it seemed to both of them that the conversation could not proceed on the strenuous level on which it had been during the walk into Tercanbury, and they fell upon a gay discussion of their common acquaintance. Alec was a man of strong passions, hating fools fiercely, and he had a sardonic manner of gibing at persons he despised, which caused Lucy much amusement.

He described interviews with the great ones of the land in a broadly comic spirit; and, when telling an amusing story, he had a way of assuming a Scottish drawl that added vastly to its humour.

Presently they began to speak of books. Being strictly limited as to number, he was obliged to choose for his expeditions works which could stand reading an indefinite number of times.

‘I’m like a convict,’ he said. ‘I know Shakespeare by heart, and I’ve read Boswell’s Johnson till I think you couldn’t quote a line which I couldn’t cap with the next.’

But Lucy was surprised to hear that he read the Greek classics with enthusiasm. She had vaguely imagined that people recognised their splendour, but did not read them unless they were dons or schoolmasters, and it was strange to find anyone for whom they were living works. To Alec they were a deliberate inspiration. They strengthened his purpose and helped him to see life from the heroic point of view. He was not a man who cared much for music or for painting; his whole æsthetic desires were centred in the Greek poets and the historians. To him Thucydides was a true support, and he felt in himself something of the spirit which had animated the great Athenian. His blood ran faster as he spoke of him, and his cheeks flushed. He felt that one who lived constantly in such company could do nothing base. But he found all he needed, put together with a power that seemed almost divine, within the two covers that bound his Sophocles. The mere look of the Greek letters filled him with exultation. Here was all he wanted, strength and simplicity, and the greatness of life, and beauty.

He forgot that Lucy did not know that dead language and could not share his enthusiasm. He broke suddenly into a chorus from the Antigone; the sonorous, lovely words issued from his lips, and Lucy, not understanding, but feeling vaguely the beauty of the sounds, thought that his voice had never been more fascinating. It gained now a peculiar and entrancing softness. She had never dreamed that it was capable of such tenderness.

At last they reached Court Leys and walked up the avenue that led to the house. They saw Dick hurrying towards them. They waved their hands, but he did not reply, and, when he approached, they saw that his face was white and anxious.

‘Thank God, you’ve come at last! I couldn’t make out what had come to you.’

‘What’s the matter?’

The barrister, all his flippancy gone, turned to Lucy.

‘Bobbie Boulger has come down. He wants to see you. Please come at once.’

Lucy looked at him quickly. Sick with fear, she followed him into the drawing-room.

V

Mrs. Crowley and Robert Boulger were standing by the fire, and there was a peculiar agitation about them. They were silent, but it seemed to Lucy that they had been speaking of her. Mrs. Crowley impulsively seized her hands and kissed her. Lucy’s first thought was that something had happened to her brother. Lady Kelsey’s generous allowance had made it possible for him to hunt, and the thought flashed through her that some terrible accident had happened.

‘Is anything the matter with George?’ she asked, with a gasp of terror.

‘No,’ answered Boulger.

The colour came to Lucy’s cheeks as she felt a sudden glow of relief.

‘Thank God,’ she murmured. ‘I was so frightened.’

She gave him, now, a smile of welcome as she shook hands with him. It could be nothing so very dreadful after all.

Lucy’s uncle, Sir George Boulger, had been for many years senior partner in the great firm of Boulger & Kelsey. After sitting in Parliament for the quarter of a century and voting assiduously for his party, he had been given a baronetcy on the celebration of Queen Victoria’s second Jubilee, and had finished a prosperous life by dying of apoplexy at the opening of a park, which he was presenting to the nation. He had been a fine type of the wealthy merchant, far-sighted in business affairs and proud to serve his native city in every way open to him. His son, Robert, now reigned in his stead, but the firm had been made into a company, and the responsibility that he undertook, notwithstanding that the greater number of shares were in his hands, was much less. The partner who had been taken into the house on Sir Alfred Kelsey’s death now managed the more important part of the business in Manchester, while Robert, brought up by his father to be a man of affairs, had taken charge of the London branch. Commerce was in his blood, and he settled down to work with praiseworthy energy. He had considerable shrewdness, and it was plain that he would eventually become as good a merchant as his father. He was little older than Lucy, but his fair hair and his clean-shaven face gave him a more youthful look. With his spruce air and well-made clothes, his conversation about hunting and golf, few would have imagined that he arrived regularly at his office at ten in the morning, and was as keen to make a good bargain as any of the men he came in contact with.

Lucy, though very fond of him, was mildly scornful of his Philistine outlook. He cared nothing for books, and the only form of art that appealed to him was the musical comedy. She treated him as a rule with pleasant banter and refused to take him seriously. It required a good deal of energy to keep their friendship on a light footing, for she knew that he had been in love with her since he was eighteen. She could not help feeling flattered, though on her side there was no more than the cousinly affection due to their having been thrown together all their lives, and she was aware that they were little suited to one another. He had proposed to her a dozen times, and she was obliged to use many devices to protect herself from his assiduity. It availed nothing to tell him that she did not love him. He was only too willing to marry her on whatever conditions she chose to make. Her friends and her relations were anxious that she should accept him. Lady Kelsey had reasoned with her. Here was a man whom she had known always and could trust utterly; he had ten thousand a year, an honest heart, and a kindly disposition. Her father, seeing in the match a resource in his constant difficulties, was eager that she should take the boy, and George, who was devoted to him, had put in his word, too. Bobbie had asked her to marry him when he was twenty-one, and again when she was twenty-one, when George went to Oxford, when her father went into bankruptcy, and when Hamlyn’s Purlieu was sold. He had urged his own father to buy it, when it was known that a sale was inevitable, hoping that the possession of it would incline Lucy’s heart towards him; but the first baronet was too keen a man of business to make an unprofitable investment for sentimental reasons. Bobbie had proposed for the last time when he succeeded to the baronetcy and a large fortune. Lucy recognised his goodness and the advantages of the match, but she did not care for him. She felt, too, that she needed a free hand to watch over her father and George. Even Mrs. Crowley’s suggestion that with her guidance Robert Boulger might become a man of consequence, did not move her. Bobbie, on the other hand, had set all his heart on marrying his cousin. It was the supreme interest of his life, and he hoped that his patience would eventually triumph over every obstacle. He was willing to wait.

When Lucy’s first alarm was stayed, it occurred to her that Bobbie had come once more to ask her the eternal question, but the anxious look in his eyes drove the idea away. His pleasant, boyish expression was overcast with gravity; Mrs. Crowley flung herself in a chair and turned her face away.

‘I have something to tell you which is very terrible, Lucy,’ he said.

The effort he made to speak was noticeable. His voice was strained by the force with which he kept it steady.

‘Would you like me to leave you?’ asked Alec, who had accompanied Lucy into the drawing-room.

She gave him a glance. It seemed to her that whatever it was, his presence would help her to bear it.

‘Do you wish to see me alone, Bobbie?’

‘I’ve already told Dick and Mrs. Crowley.’

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Bobbie gave Dick an appealing look. It seemed too hard that he should have to break the awful news to her. He had not the heart to give her so much pain. And yet he had hurried down to the country so that he might soften the blow by his words: he would not trust to the callous cruelty of a telegram. Dick saw the agitation which made his good-humoured mouth twitch with pain, and stepped forward.

‘Your father has been arrested for fraud,’ he said gravely.

For a moment no one spoke. The silence was intolerable to Mrs. Crowley, and she inveighed inwardly against the British stolidity. She could not look at Lucy, but the others, full of sympathy, kept their eyes upon her. Mrs. Crowley wondered why she did not faint. It seemed to Lucy that an icy hand clutched her heart so that the blood was squeezed out of it. She made a determined effort to keep her clearness of mind.

‘It’s impossible,’ she said at last, quietly.

‘He was arrested last night, and brought up at Bow Street Police Court this morning. He was remanded for a week.’

Lucy felt the tears well up to her eyes, but with all her strength she forced them back. She collected her thoughts.

‘It was very good of you to come down and tell me,’ she said to Boulger gently.

‘The magistrate agreed to accept bail in five thousand pounds. Aunt Alice and I have managed it between us.’

‘Is he staying with Aunt Alice now?’

‘No, he wouldn’t do that. He’s gone to his flat in Shaftesbury Avenue.’

Lucy’s thoughts went to the lad who was dearest to her in the world, and her heart sank.

‘Does George know?’

‘Not yet.’

Dick saw the relief that came into her face, and thought he divined what was in her mind.

‘But he must be told at once,’ he said. ‘He’s sure to see something about it in the papers. We had better wire to him to come to London immediately.’

‘Surely father could have shown in two minutes that the whole thing was a mistake.’

Bobbie made a hopeless gesture. He saw the sternness of her eyes, and he had not the heart to tell her the truth. Mrs. Crowley began to cry.

‘You don’t understand, Lucy,’ said Dick. ‘I’m afraid it’s a very serious charge. Your father will be committed for trial.’

‘You know just as well as I do that father can’t have done anything illegal. He’s weak and rash, but he’s no more than that. He would as soon think of doing anything wrong as of flying to the moon. If in his ignorance of business he’s committed some technical offence, he can easily show that it was unintentional.’

‘Whatever it is, he’ll have to stand his trial at the Old Bailey,’ answered Dick gravely.

He saw that Lucy did not for a moment appreciate the gravity of her father’s position. After the first shock of dismay she was disposed to think that there could be nothing in it. Robert Boulger saw there was nothing for it but to tell her everything.

‘Your father and a man called Saunders have been running a bucketshop under the name of Vernon and Lawford. They were obliged to trade under different names, because Uncle Fred is an undischarged bankrupt, and Saunders is the sort of man who only uses his own name on the charge sheet of a police court.’

‘Do you know what a bucketshop is, Lucy?’ asked Dick.

He did not wait for a reply, but explained that it was a term used to describe a firm of outside brokers whose dealings were more or less dishonest.

‘The action is brought against the pair of them by a Mrs. Sabidon, who accuses them of putting to their own uses various sums amounting altogether to more than eight thousand pounds, which she intrusted to them to invest.’

Now that the truth was out, Lucy quailed before it. The intense seriousness on the faces of Alec and Dick Lomas, the piteous anxiety of her cousin, terrified her.

‘You don’t think there’s anything in it?’ she asked quickly.

Robert did not know what to answer. Dick interrupted with wise advice.

‘We’ll hope for the best. The only thing to do is to go up to London at once and get the best legal advice.’

But Lucy would not allow herself, even for a moment, to doubt her father. Now that she thought of the matter, she saw that it was absurd. She forced herself to give a laugh.

‘I’m quite reassured. You don’t think for a moment that father would deliberately steal somebody else’s money. And it’s nothing short of theft.’

‘At all events it’s something that we’ve been able to get him released on bail. It will make it so much easier to arrange the defence.’

A couple of hours later Lucy, accompanied by Dick Lomas and Bobbie, was on her way to London. Alec, thinking his presence would be a nuisance to them, arranged with Mrs. Crowley to leave by a later train; and, when the time came for him to start, his hostess suddenly announced that she would go with him. With her party thus broken up and her house empty, she could not bear to remain at Court Leys. She was anxious about Lucy and eager to be at hand if her help were needed.

A telegram had been sent to George, and it was supposed that he would arrive at Lady Kelsey’s during the evening. Lucy wanted to tell him herself what had happened. But she could not wait till then to see her father, and persuaded Dick to drive with her from the station to Shaftesbury Avenue. Fred Allerton was not in. Lucy wanted to go into the flat and stay there till he came, but the porter had no key and did not know when he would return. Dick was much relieved. He was afraid that the excitement and the anxiety from which Fred Allerton had suffered, would have caused him to drink heavily; and he could not let Lucy see him the worse for liquor. He induced her, after leaving a note to say that she would call early next morning, to go quietly home. When they arrived at Charles Street, where was Lady Kelsey’s house, they found a wire from George to say he could not get up to town till the following day.

To Lucy this had, at least, the advantage that she could see her father alone, and at the appointed hour she made her way once more to his flat. He took her in his arms and kissed her warmly. She succumbed at once to the cheeriness of his manner.

‘I can only give you two minutes, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m full of business, and I have an appointment with my solicitor at eleven.’

Lucy could not speak. She clung to her father, looking at him with anxious, sombre eyes; but he laughed and patted her hand.

‘You mustn’t make too much of all this, my love,’ he said brightly. ‘These little things are always liable to happen to a man of business; they are the perils of the profession, and we have to put up with them, just as kings and queens have to put up with bomb-shells.’

‘There’s no truth in it, father?’

She did not want to ask that wounding question, but the words slipped from her lips against her will. He broke away from her.

‘Truth? My dear child, what do you mean? You don’t suppose I’m the man to rob the widow and the orphan? Of course, there’s no truth in it.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad to hear that,’ she exclaimed, with a deep sigh of relief.

‘Have they been frightening you?’

Lucy flushed under his frank look of amusement. She felt that there was a barrier between herself and him, the barrier that had existed for years, and there was something in his manner which filled her with unaccountable anxiety. She would not analyse that vague emotion. It was a dread to see what was so carefully hidden by that breezy reserve. She forced herself to go on.

‘I know that you’re often carried away by your fancies, and I thought you might have got into an ambiguous position.’

‘I can honestly say that no one can bring anything up against me,’ he answered. ‘But I do blame myself for getting mixed up with that man Saunders. I’m afraid there’s no doubt that he’s a wrong ‘un — and heaven only knows what he’s been up to — but for my own part I give you my solemn word of honour that I’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing, that I have the least reason to be ashamed of.’

Lucy took his hand, and a charming smile lit up her face.

‘Oh, father, you’ve made me so happy by saying that. Now I shall be able to tell George that there’s nothing to worry about.’

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Dick. Fred Allerton greeted him heartily.

‘You’ve just come in time to take Lucy home. I’ve got to go out. But look here, George is coming up, isn’t he? Let us all lunch at the Carlton at two, and get Alice to come. We’ll have a jolly little meal together.’

Dick was astounded to see the lightness with which Allerton took the affair. He seemed unconscious of the gravity of his position and unmindful of the charge which was hanging over him. Dick was not anxious to accept the invitation, but Allerton would hear of no excuses. He wanted to have his friends gathered around him, and he needed relaxation after the boredom of spending a morning in his lawyer’s office.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait another minute.’

He opened the door, and Lucy walked out. It seemed to Dick that Allerton was avoiding any chance of conversation with him. But no man likes to meet his creditor within four walls, and this disinclination might be due merely to the fact that Allerton owed him a couple of hundred pounds. But he meant to get in one or two words.

‘Are you fixed up with a solicitor?’ he asked.

‘Do you think I’m a child, Dick?’ answered the other. ‘Why, I’ve got the smartest man in the whole profession, Teddie Blakeley — you know him, don’t you?’

‘Only by reputation,’ answered Dick drily. ‘I should think that was enough for most people.’

Fred Allerton gave that peculiarly honest laugh of his, which was so attractive. Dick knew that the solicitor he mentioned was a man of evil odour, who had made a specialty of dealing with the most doubtful sort of commercial work, and his name had been prominent in every scandal for the last fifteen years. It was surprising that he had never followed any of his clients to the jail he richly deserved.

‘I thought it no good going to one of the old crusted family solicitors. I wanted a man who knew the tricks of the trade.’

They were walking down the stairs, while Lucy waited at the bottom. Dick stopped and turned round. He looked at Allerton keenly.

‘You’re not going to do a bolt, are you?’

Allerton’s face lit up with amusement. He put his hands on Dick’s shoulders.

‘My dear old Dick, don’t be such an ass. I don’t know about Saunders — he’s a fishy sort of customer — but I shall come out of all this with flying colours. The prosecution hasn’t a leg to stand on.’

Allerton, reminding them that they were to lunch together, jumped into a cab. Lucy and Dick walked slowly back to Charles Street. Dick was very silent. He had not seen Fred Allerton for some time and was surprised to see that he had regained his old smartness. The flat had pretty things in it which testified to the lessee’s taste and to his means, and the clothes he wore were new and well-cut. The invitation to the Carlton showed that he was in no want of ready money, and there was a general air of prosperity about him which gave Dick much to think of.

Lucy did not ask him to come in, since George, by now, must have arrived, and she wished to see him alone. They agreed to meet again at two. As she shook hands with Dick, Lucy told him what her father had said.

‘I had a sleepless night,’ she said. ‘It was so stupid of me; I couldn’t get it out of my head that father, unintentionally, had done something rash or foolish; but I’ve got his word of honour that nothing is the matter, and I feel as if a whole world of anxiety were suddenly lifted from my shoulders.’

The party at the Carlton was very gay. Fred Allerton seemed in the best of spirits, and his good-humour was infectious. He was full of merry quips. Lucy had made as little of the affair as possible to George. Her eyes rested on him, as he sat opposite to her, and she felt happy and proud. Now and then he looked at her, and an affectionate smile came to his lips. She was delighted with his slim handsomeness. There was a guileless look in his blue eyes which was infinitely attractive. His mouth was beautifully modelled. She took an immense pride in the candour of soul which shone with so clear a light on his face, and she was affected as a stranger might have been by the exquisite charm of manner which he had inherited from his father. She wanted to have him to herself that evening and suggested that they should go to a play together. He accepted the idea eagerly, for he admired his sister with all his heart; he felt in himself a need for protection, and she was able to minister to this. He was never so happy as when he was by her side. He liked to tell her all he did, and, when she fired him with noble ambitions, he felt capable of anything.

They were absurdly light-hearted, as they started on their little jaunt. Lady Kelsey had slipped a couple of banknotes into George’s hand and told them to have a good time. They dined at the Carlton, went to a musical comedy, which amused Lucy because her brother laughed so heartily — she was fascinated by his keen power of enjoyment — and finished by going to the Savoy for supper. For the moment all her anxieties seemed to fall from her, and the years of trouble were forgotten. She was as merry and as irresponsible as George. He was enchanted. He had never seen Lucy so tender and so gay; there was a new brilliancy in her eyes; and, without quite knowing what it was that differed, he found a soft mellowness in her laughter which filled him with an uncomprehended delight. Neither did Lucy know why the world on a sudden seemed fuller than it had ever done before, nor why the future smiled so kindly: it never occurred to her that she was in love.

When Lucy, exhausted but content, found herself at length in her room, she thanked God for the happiness of the evening. It was the last time she could do that for many weary years.

A few days later Allerton appeared again at the police court, and the magistrate, committing him for trial, declined to renew his bail. The prisoner was removed in custody.

VI

During the fortnight that followed, Alec spent much time with Lucy. Together, in order to cheat the hours that hung so heavily on her hands, they took long walks in Hyde Park, and, when Alec’s business permitted, they went to the National Gallery. Then he took her to the Natural History Museum, and his conversation, in face of the furred and feathered things from Africa, made the whole country vivid to her. Lucy was very grateful to him because he drew her mind away from the topic that constantly absorbed it. Though he never expressed his sympathy in so many words, she felt it in every inflection of his voice. His patience was admirable.

At last came the day fixed for the trial.

Fred Allerton insisted that neither Lucy nor George should come to the Old Bailey, and they were to await the verdict at Lady Kelsey’s. Dick and Robert Boulger were subpoenaed as witnesses. In order that she might be put out of her suspense quickly, Lucy asked Alec MacKenzie to go into court and bring her the result as soon as it was known.

The morning passed with leaden feet.

After luncheon Mrs. Crowley came to sit with Lady Kelsey, and together they watched the minute hand go round the clock. Now the verdict might be expected at any moment. After some time Canon Spratte, the vicar of the church which Lady Kelsey attended, sent up to ask if he might see her; and Mrs. Crowley, thinking to distract her, asked him to come in. The Canon’s breezy courtliness as a rule soothed Lady Kelsey’s gravest troubles, but now she would not be comforted.

‘I shall never get over it,’ she said, with a handkerchief to her eyes. ‘I shall never cease blaming myself. Nothing of all this would have happened, if it hadn’t been for me.’

Canon Spratte and Mrs. Crowley watched her without answering. She was a stout, amiable woman, who had clothed herself in black because the occasion was tragic. Grief had made her garrulous.

‘Poor Fred came to me one day and said he must have eight thousand pounds at once. He told me his partner had cheated him, and it was a matter of life and death. But it was such a large sum, and I’ve given him so much already. After all, I’ve got to think of Lucy and George. They only have me to depend on, and I refused to give it. Oh, I’d have given every penny I own rather than have this horrible shame.’

‘You mustn’t take it too much to heart, Lady Kelsey,’ said Mrs. Crowley. ‘It will soon be all over.’

‘Our ways have parted for some time now,’ said Canon Spratte, ‘but at one period I used to see a good deal of Fred Allerton. I can’t tell you how distressed I was to hear of this terrible misfortune.’

‘He’s always been unlucky,’ returned Lady Kelsey. ‘I only hope this will be a lesson to him. He’s like a child in business matters. Oh, it’s awful to think of my poor sister’s husband standing in the felon’s dock!’

‘You must try not to think of it. I’m sure everything will turn out quite well. In another hour you’ll have him with you again.’

The Canon got up and shook hands with Lady Kelsey.

‘It was so good of you to come,’ she said.

He turned to Mrs. Crowley, whom he liked because she was American, rich, and a widow.

‘I’m grateful, too,’ she murmured, as she bade him farewell. ‘A clergyman always helps one so much to bear other people’s misfortunes.’

Canon Spratte smiled and made a mental note of the remark, which he thought would do very well from his own lips.

‘Where is Lucy?’ asked Mrs. Crowley, when he had gone.

Lady Kelsey threw up her hands with the feeling, half of amazement, half of annoyance, which a very emotional person has always for one who is self-restrained.

‘She’s sitting in her room, reading. She’s been reading all day. Heaven only knows how she can do it. I tried, and all the letters swam before my eyes. It drives me mad to see how calm she is.’

They began to talk of the immediate future. Lady Kelsey had put a large sum at Lucy’s disposal, and it was arranged that the two children should take their father to some place in the south of France where he could rest after the terrible ordeal.

‘I don’t know what they would all have done without you,’ said Mrs. Crowley. ‘You have been a perfect angel.’

‘Nonsense,’ smiled Lady Kelsey. ‘They’re my only relations in the world, except Bobbie, who’s very much too rich as it is, and I love Lucy and George as if they were my own children. What is the good of my money except to make them happy and comfortable?’

Mrs. Crowley remembered Dick’s surmise that Lady Kelsey had loved Fred Allerton, and she wondered how much of the old feeling still remained. She felt a great pity for the kind, unselfish creature. Lady Kelsey started as she heard the street door slam. But it was only George who entered.

‘Oh, George, where have you been? Why didn’t you come in to luncheon?’

He looked pale and haggard. The strain of the last fortnight had told on him enormously, and it was plain that his excitement was almost unbearable.

‘I couldn’t eat anything. I’ve been walking about, waiting for the damned hours to pass. I wish I hadn’t promised father not to go into court. Anything would have been better than this awful suspense. I saw the man who’s defending him when they adjourned for luncheon, and he told me it was all right.’

‘Of course it’s all right. You didn’t imagine that your father would be found guilty.’

‘Oh, I knew he wouldn’t have done a thing like that,’ said George impatiently. ‘But I can’t help being frightfully anxious. The papers are awful. They’ve got huge placards out: County gentleman at the Old Bailey. Society in a Bucket Shop.’

George shivered with horror.

‘Oh, it’s awful!’ he cried.

Lady Kelsey began to cry again, and Mrs. Crowley sat in silence, not knowing what to say. George walked about in agitation.

‘But I know he’s not guilty,’ moaned Lady Kelsey.

‘If he’s guilty or not he’s ruined me,’ said George. ‘I can’t go up to Oxford again after this. I don’t know what the devil’s to become of me. We’re all utterly disgraced. Oh, how could he! How could he!’

‘Oh, George, don’t,’ said Lady Kelsey.

But George, with a weak man’s petulance, could not keep back the bitter words that he had turned over in his heart so often since the brutal truth was told him.

‘Wasn’t it enough that he fooled away every penny he had, so that we’re simply beggars, both of us, and we have to live on your charity? I should have thought that would have satisfied him, without getting locked up for being connected in a beastly bucketshop swindle.’

‘George, how can you talk of your father like that!’

He gave a sort of sob and looked at her with wild eyes. But at that moment a cab drove up, and, he sprang on to the balcony.

‘It’s Dick Lomas and Bobbie. They’ve come to tell us.’

He ran to the door and opened it. They walked up the stairs.

‘Well?’ he cried. ‘Well?’

‘It’s not over yet. We left just as the judge was summing up.’

‘Damn you!’ cried George, with an explosion of sudden fury.

‘Steady, old man,’ said Dick.

‘Why didn’t you stay?’ moaned Lady Kelsey.

‘I couldn’t,’ said Dick. ‘It was too awful.’

‘How was it going?’

‘I couldn’t make head or tail of it. My mind was in a whirl. I’m an hysterical old fool.’

Mrs. Crowley went up to Lady Kelsey and kissed her.

‘Why don’t you go and lie down for a little while, dear,’ she said. ‘You look positively exhausted.’

‘I have a racking headache,’ groaned Lady Kelsey.

‘Alec MacKenzie has promised to come here as soon as its over. But you mustn’t expect him for another hour.’

‘Yes, I’ll go and lie down,’ said Lady Kelsey.

George, unable to master his impatience, flung open the window and stood on the balcony, watching for the cab that would bring the news.

‘Go and talk to him, there’s a good fellow,’ said Dick to Robert Boulger. ‘Cheer him up a bit.’

‘Yes, of course I will. It’s rot to make a fuss now that it’s nearly over. Uncle Fred will be here himself in an hour.’

Dick looked at him without answering. When Robert had gone on to the balcony, he flung himself wearily in a chair.

‘I couldn’t stand it any longer,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine how awful it was to see that wretched man in the dock. He looked like a hunted beast, his face was all grey with fright, and once I caught his eyes. I shall never forget the look that was in them.’

‘But I thought he was bearing it so well,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘You know, he’s a man who’s never looked the truth in the face. He never seemed to realise the gravity of the charges that were brought against him, and even when the magistrate refused to renew his bail, his confidence never deserted him. It was only to-day, when the whole thing was unrolled before him, that he appeared to understand. Oh, if you’d heard the evidence that was given! And then the pitiful spectacle of those two men trying to throw the blame on one another!’

A look of terror came into Mrs. Crowley’s face.

‘You don’t think he’s guilty?’ she gasped.

Dick looked at her steadily, but did not answer.

‘But Lucy’s convinced that he’ll be acquitted.’

‘I wonder.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

Dick shrugged his shoulders.

‘But he can’t be guilty,’ cried Mrs. Crowley. ‘It’s impossible.’

Dick made an effort to drive away from his mind the dreadful fears that filled it.

‘Yes, that’s what I feel, too,’ he said. ‘With all his faults Fred Allerton can’t have committed such a despicable crime. You’ve never met him, you don’t know him; but I’ve known him intimately for twenty years. He couldn’t have swindled that wretched woman out of every penny she had, knowing that it meant starvation to her. He couldn’t have been so brutally cruel.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that’

Silence fell upon them for a while, and they waited. From the balcony they heard George talking rapidly, but they could not distinguish his words.

‘I felt ashamed to stay in court and watch the torture of that unhappy man. I’ve dined with him times out of number; I’ve stayed at his house; I’ve ridden his horses. Oh, it was too awful.’

He got up impatiently and walked up and down the room.

‘It must be over by now. Why doesn’t Alec come? He swore he’d bolt round the very moment the verdict was given.’

‘The suspense is dreadful,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

Dick stood still. He looked at the little American, but his eyes did not see her.

‘There are some people who are born without a moral sense. They are as unable to distinguish between right and wrong as a man who is colour blind, between red and green.’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.

He did not answer. She went up to him anxiously.

‘Mr. Lomas, I can’t bear it. You must tell me. Do you think he’s guilty?’

He passed his hands over his eyes.

‘The evidence was damnable.’

At that moment George sprang into the room.

‘There’s Alec. He’s just driving along in a cab.’

‘Thank God, thank God!’ cried Mrs. Crowley. ‘If it had lasted longer I should have gone mad.’

George went to the door.

‘I must tell Miller. He has orders to let no one up.’

He leaned over the banisters, as the bell of the front door was rung.

‘Miller, Miller, let Mr. MacKenzie in.’

‘Very good, sir,’ answered the butler.

Lucy had heard the cab drive up, and she came into the drawing-room with Lady Kelsey. The elder woman had broken down altogether and was sobbing distractedly. Lucy was very white, but otherwise quite composed. She shook hands with Dick and Mrs. Crowley.

‘It was kind of you to come,’ she said.

‘Oh, my poor Lucy,’ said Mrs. Crowley, with a sob in her voice.

Lucy smiled bravely.

‘It’s all over now.’

Alec came in, and she walked eagerly towards him.

‘Well? I was hoping you’d bring father with you. When is he coming?’

She stopped. She gave a gasp as she saw Alec’s face. Though her cheeks were pale before, now their pallor was deathly.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Isn’t it all right?’ cried George.

Lucy put her hand on his arm to quieten him. It seemed that Alec could not find words. There was a horrible silence, but they all knew what he had to tell them.

‘I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for a great unhappiness,’ he said.

‘Where’s father?’ cried Lucy. ‘Where’s father? Why didn’t you bring him with you?’

With the horrible truth dawning upon her, she was losing her self-control. She made an effort. Alec would not speak, and she was obliged to question him. When the words came, her voice was hoarse and low.

‘You’ve not told us what the verdict was.’

‘Guilty,’ he answered.

Then the colour flew back to her cheeks, and her eyes flashed with anger.

‘But it’s impossible. He was innocent. He swore that he hadn’t done it. There must be some horrible mistake.’

‘I wish to God there were,’ said Alec.

‘You don’t think he’s guilty?’ she cried.

He did not answer, and for a moment they looked at one another steadily.

‘What was the sentence?’ she asked.

‘The judge was dead against him. He made some very violent remarks as he passed it.’

‘Tell me what he said.’

‘Why should you wish to torture yourself?’

‘I want to know.’

‘He seemed to think the fact that your father was a gentleman made the crime more odious, and the way in which he had induced that woman to part with her money made no punishment too severe. He sentenced him to seven years penal servitude.’

George gave a cry and sinking into a chair, burst into tears. Lucy put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t, George,’ she said. ‘You must bear up. Now we want all our courage, now more than ever.’

‘Oh, I can’t bear it,’ he moaned.

She bent down and kissed him tenderly.

‘Be brave, my dearest, be brave for my sake.’

But he sobbed uncontrollably. It was a horribly painful sight. Dick took him by the arm and led him away. Lucy turned to Alec, who was standing where first he had stopped.

‘I want to ask you a question. Will you answer me quite truthfully, whatever the pain you think it will cause me?’

‘I will.’

‘You followed the trial from the beginning, you know all the details of it. Do you think my father is guilty?’

‘What can it matter what I think?’

‘I beg you to tell me.’

Alec hesitated for a moment. His voice was very low.

‘If I had been on the jury I’m afraid I should have had no alternative but to decide as they did.’

Lucy bent her head, and heavy tears rolled down her cheeks.

VII

Next morning Lucy received a note from Alec MacKenzie, asking if he might see her that day; he suggested calling upon her early in the afternoon and expressed the hope that he might find her alone. She sat in the library at Lady Kelsey’s and waited for him. She held a book in her hands, but she could not read. And presently she began to weep. Ever since the dreadful news had reached her, Lucy had done her utmost to preserve her self-control, and all night she had lain with clenched hands to prevent herself from giving way. For George’s sake and for her father’s, she felt that she must keep her strength. But now the strain was too great for her; she was alone; the tears began to flow helplessly, and she made no effort to restrain them.

She had been allowed to see her father. Lucy and George had gone to the prison, and she recalled now the details of the brief interview. The whole thing was horrible. She felt that her heart would break.

In the night indignation had seized Lucy. After reading accounts of the case in half a dozen papers she could not doubt that her father was justly condemned, and she was horrified at the baseness of the crime. His letters to the poor woman he had robbed, were read in court, and Lucy flushed as she thought of them. They were a tissue of lies, hypocritical and shameless. Lucy remembered the question she had put to Alec and his answer.

But neither the newspapers nor Alec’s words were needed to convince her of her father’s guilt; in the very depths of her being, notwithstanding the passion with which she reproached herself, she had been convinced of it. She would not acknowledge even to herself that she doubted him; and all her words, all her thoughts even, expressed a firm belief in his innocence; but a ghastly terror had lurked in some hidden recess of her consciousness. It haunted her soul like a mysterious shadow which there was no bodily shape to explain. The fear had caught her, as though with material hands, when first the news of his arrest was brought to Court Leys by Robert Boulger, and again at her father’s flat in Shaftesbury Avenue, when she saw a secret shame cowering behind the good-humoured flippancy of his smile. Notwithstanding his charm of manner and the tenderness of his affection for his children, she had known that he was a liar and a rascal. She hated him.

But when Lucy saw him, still with the hunted look that Dick had noticed at the trial, so changed from when last they had met, her anger melted away, and she felt only pity. She reproached herself bitterly. How could she be so heartless when he was suffering? At first he could not speak. He looked from one to the other of his children silently, with appealing eyes; and he saw the utter wretchedness which was on George’s face. George was ashamed to look at him and kept his eyes averted. Fred Allerton was suddenly grown old and bent; his poor face was sunken, and the skin had an ashy look like that of a dying man. He had already a cringing air, as if he must shrink away from his fellows. It was horrible to Lucy that she was not allowed to take him in her arms. He broke down utterly and sobbed.

‘Oh, Lucy, you don’t hate me?’ he whispered.

‘No, I’ve never loved you more than I love you now,’ she said.

And she said it truthfully. Her conscience smote her, and she wondered bitterly what she had left undone that might have averted this calamity.

‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ he said, brokenly.

Lucy looked at his poor, wearied eyes. It seemed very cruel that she might not kiss them.

‘I’d have paid her everything if she’d only have given me time. Luck was against me all through. I’ve been a bad father to both of you.’

Lucy was able to tell him that Lady Kelsey would pay the eight thousand pounds the woman had lost. The good creature had thought of it even before Lucy made the suggestion. At all events none of them need have on his conscience the beggary of that unfortunate person.

‘Alice was always a good soul,’ said Allerton. He clung to Lucy as though she were his only hope. ‘You won’t forget me while I’m away, Lucy?’

‘I’ll come and see you whenever I’m allowed to.’

‘It won’t be very long. I hope I shall die quickly.’

‘You mustn’t do that. You must keep well and strong for my sake and George’s. We shall never cease to love you, father.’

‘What’s going to happen to George now?’ he asked.

‘We shall find something for him. You need not worry about him.’

George flushed. He could find nothing to say. He was ashamed and angry. He wanted to get away quickly from that place of horror, and he was relieved when the warder told them it was time to go.

‘Good-bye, George,’ said Fred Allerton.

‘Good-bye.’

He kept his eyes sullenly fixed on the ground. The look of despair in Allerton’s face grew more intense. He saw that his son hated him. And it had been on him that all his light affection was placed. He had been very proud of the handsome boy. And now his son merely wanted to be rid of him. Bitter words rose to his lips, but his heart was too heavy to utter them, and they expressed themselves only in a sob.

‘Forgive me for all I’ve done against you, Lucy.’

‘Have courage, father, we will never love you less.’

He forced a sad smile to his lips. She included George in what she said, but he knew that she spoke only for herself. They went. And he turned away into the darkness.

Lucy’s tears relieved her a little. They exhausted her, and so made her agony more easy to bear. It was necessary now to think of the future. Alec MacKenzie must be there soon. She wondered why he had written, and what he could have to say that mattered. She could only think of her father, and above all of George. She dried her eyes, and with a deep sigh set herself methodically to consider the difficult problem.

When Alec came she rose gravely to receive him. For a moment he was overcome by her loveliness, and he gazed at her in silence. Lucy was a woman who was at her best in the tragic situations of life; her beauty was heightened by the travail of her soul, and the heaviness of her eyes gave a pathetic grandeur to her wan face. She advanced to meet sorrow with an unquailing glance, and Alec, who knew something of heroism, recognised the greatness of her heart. Of late he had been more than once to see that portrait of Diana of the Uplands, in which he, too, found the gracious healthiness of Lucy Allerton; but now she seemed like some sad queen, English to the very bones, who bore with a royal dignity an intolerable grief, and yet by the magnificence of her spirit turned into something wholly beautiful.

‘You must forgive me for forcing myself upon you to-day,’ he said slowly. ‘But my time is very short, and I wanted to speak to you at once.’

‘It is very good of you to come.’ She was embarrassed, and did not know what exactly to say. ‘I am always very glad to see you.’

He looked at her steadily, as though he were turning over in his mind her commonplace words. She smiled.

‘I wanted to thank you for your great kindness to me during these two or three weeks. You’ve been very good to me, and you’ve helped me to bear all that — I’ve had to bear.’

‘I would do far more for you than that,’ he answered. Suddenly it flashed through her mind why he had come. Her heart gave a great beat against her chest. The thought had never entered her head. She sat down and waited for him to speak. He did not move. There was a singular immobility about him when something absorbed his mind.

‘I wrote and asked if I might see you alone, because I had something that I wanted to say to you. I’ve wanted to say it ever since we were at Court Leys together, but I was going away — heaven only knows when I shall come back, and perhaps something may happen to me — and I thought it was unfair to you to speak.’

He paused. His eyes were fixed upon hers. She waited for him to go on.

‘I wanted to ask you if you would marry me.’

She drew a long breath. Her face kept its expression of intense gravity.

‘It’s very kind and chivalrous of you to suggest it. You mustn’t think me ungrateful if I tell you I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ he asked quietly.

‘I must look after my father. If it is any use I shall go and live near the prison.’

‘There is no reason why you should not do that if you married me.’

She shook her head.

‘No, I must be free. As soon as my father is released I must be ready to live with him. And I can’t take an honest man’s name. It looks as if I were running away from my own and taking shelter elsewhere.’

She hesitated for a while, since it made her very shy to say what she had in mind. When she spoke it was in a low and trembling voice.

‘You don’t know how proud I was of my name and my family. For centuries they’ve been honest, decent people, and I felt that we’d had a part in the making of England. And now I feel utterly ashamed. Dick Lomas laughed at me because I was so proud of my family. I daresay I was stupid. I never paid much attention to rank and that kind of thing, but it did seem to me that family was different. I’ve seen my father, and he simply doesn’t realise for a moment that he’s done something horribly mean and shameful. There must be some taint in our nature. I couldn’t marry you; I should be afraid that my children would inherit the rottenness of my blood.’

He listened to what she said. Then he went up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. His calmness, and the steadiness of his voice seemed to quieten her.

‘I think you will be able to help your father and George better if you are my wife. I’m afraid your position will be very difficult. Won’t you give me the great happiness of helping you?’

‘We must stand on our own feet. I’m very grateful, but you can do nothing for us.’

‘I’m very awkward and stupid, I don’t know how to say what I want to. I think I loved you from that first day at Court Leys. I did not understand then what had happened; I suddenly felt that something new and strange had come into my life. And day by day I loved you more, and then it took up my whole soul. I’ve never loved anyone but you. I never can love anyone but you. I’ve been looking for you all my life.’

She could not stand the look of his eyes, and she cast hers down. He saw the exquisite shadow of her eyelashes on her cheek.

‘But I didn’t dare say anything to you then. Even if you had cared for me, it seemed unfair to bind you to me when I was starting on this expedition. But now I must speak. I go in a week. It would give me so much strength and courage if I knew that I had your love. I love you with all my heart.’

She looked up at him now, and her eyes were shining with tears, but they were not the tears of a hopeless pain.

‘I can’t marry you now. It would be unfair to you. I owe myself entirely to my father.’

He dropped his hands from her shoulders and stepped back.

‘It must be as you will.’

‘But don’t think I’m ungrateful,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud that I have your love. It seems to lift me up from the depths. You don’t know how much good you have done me.’

‘I wanted to help you, and you will let me do nothing for you.’

On a sudden a thought flashed through her. She gave a little cry of amazement, for here was the solution of her greatest difficulty.

‘Yes, you can do something for me. Will you take George with you?’

‘George?’

He remained silent for a moment, while he considered the proposition.

‘I can trust him in your hands. You will make a good and a strong man of him. Oh, won’t you give him this chance of washing out the stain that is on our name?’

‘Do you know that he will have to undergo hunger and thirst and every kind of hardship? It’s not a picnic that I’m going on.’

‘I’m willing that he should undergo everything. The cause is splendid. His self-respect is wavering in the balance. If he gets to noble work he will feel himself a man.’

‘There will be a good deal of fighting. It has seemed foolish to dwell on the dangers that await me, but I do realise that they are greater than I have ever faced before. This time it is win or die.’

‘The dangers can be no greater than those his ancestors have taken cheerfully.’

‘He may be wounded or killed.’

Lucy hesitated for an instant. The words she uttered came from unmoving lips.

‘If he dies a brave man’s death I can ask for nothing more.’

Alec smiled at her infinite courage. He was immensely proud of her.

‘Then tell him that I shall be glad to take him.’

‘May I call him now?’

Alec nodded. She rang the bell and told the servant who came that she wished to see her brother. George came in. The strain of the last fortnight, the horrible shock of his father’s conviction, had told on him far more than on Lucy. He looked worn and ill. He was broken down with shame. The corners of his mouth drooped querulously, and his handsome face bore an expression of utter misery. Alec looked at him steadily. He felt infinite pity for his youth, and there was a charm of manner about him, a way of appealing for sympathy, which touched the strong man. He wondered what character the boy had. His heart went out to him, and he loved him already because he was Lucy’s brother.

‘George, Mr. MacKenzie has offered to take you with him to Africa,’ she said eagerly. ‘Will you go?’

‘I’ll go anywhere so long as I can get out of this beastly country,’ he answered wearily. ‘I feel people are looking at me in the street when I go out, and they’re saying to one another: there’s the son of that swindling rotter who was sentenced to seven years.’

He wiped the palms of his hands with his handkerchief.

‘I don’t mind what I do. I can’t go back to Oxford; no one would speak to me. There’s nothing I can do in England at all. I wish to God I were dead.’

‘George, don’t say that.’

‘It’s all very well for you. You’re a girl, and it doesn’t matter. Do you suppose anyone would trust me with sixpence now? Oh, how could he? How could he?’

‘You must try and forget it, George,’ said Lucy, gently.

The boy pulled himself together and gave Alec a charming smile.

‘It’s awfully ripping of you to take pity on me.’

‘I want you to know before you decide that you’ll have to rough it all the time. It’ll be hard and dangerous work.’

‘Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s Hobson’s choice, isn’t it?’ he answered, bitterly.

Alec held out his hand, with one of his rare, quiet smiles.

‘I hope we shall pull well together and be good friends.’

‘And when you come back, George, everything will be over. I wish I were a man so that I might go with you. I wish I had your chance. You’ve got everything before you, George. I think no man has ever had such an opportunity. All our hope is in you. I want to be proud of you. All my self-respect depends on you. I want you to distinguish yourself, so that I may feel once more honest and strong and clean.’

Her voice was trembling with a deep emotion, and George, quick to respond, flushed.

‘I am a selfish beast,’ he cried. ‘I’ve been thinking of myself all the time. I’ve never given a thought to you.’

‘I don’t want you to: I only want you to be brave and honest and steadfast.’

The tears came to his eyes, and he put his arms around her neck. He nestled against her heart as a child might have done.

‘It’ll be awfully hard to leave you, Lucy.’

‘It’ll be harder for me, dear, because you will be doing great and heroic things, while I shall be able only to wait and watch. But I want you to go.’ Her voice broke, and she spoke almost in a whisper. ‘And don’t forget that you’re going for my sake as well as for your own. If you did anything wrong or disgraceful it would break my heart.’

‘I swear to you that you’ll never be ashamed of me, Lucy,’ he said.

She kissed him and smiled. Alec had watched them silently. His heart was very full.

‘But we mustn’t be silly and sentimental, or Mr. MacKenzie will think us a pair of fools.’ She looked at him gaily. ‘We’re both very grateful to you.’

‘I’m afraid I’m starting almost at once,’ he said. ‘George must be ready in a week.’

‘George can be ready in twenty-four hours if need be,’ she answered.

The boy walked towards the window and lit a cigarette. He wanted to steady his nerves.

‘I’m afraid I shall be able to see little of you during the next few days,’ said Alec. ‘I have a great deal to do, and I must run up to Lancashire for the week-end.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Won’t you change your mind?’

She shook her head.

‘No, I can’t do that. I must have complete freedom.’

‘And when I come back?’

She smiled delightfully.

‘When you come back, if you still care, ask me again.’

‘And the answer?’

‘The answer perhaps will be different.’

VIII

A week later Alec MacKenzie and George Allerton started from Charing Cross. They were to go by P. & O. from Marseilles to Aden, and there catch a German boat which would take them to Mombassa. Lady Kelsey was far too distressed to see her nephew off; and Lucy was glad, since it gave her the chance of driving to the station alone with George. She found Dick Lomas and Mrs. Crowley already there. When the train steamed away, Lucy was standing a little apart from the others. She was quite still. She did not even wave her hand, and there was little expression on her face. Mrs. Crowley was crying cheerfully, and she dried her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. Lucy turned to her and thanked her for coming.

‘Shall I drive you back in the carriage?’ sobbed Mrs. Crowley.

‘I think I’ll take a cab, if you don’t mind,’ Lucy answered quietly. ‘Perhaps you’ll take Dick.’

She did not bid them good-bye, but walked slowly away.

‘How exasperating you people are!’ cried Mrs. Crowley. ‘I wanted to throw myself in her arms and have a good cry on the platform. You have no heart.’

Dick walked along by her side, and they got into Mrs. Crowley’s carriage. She soliloquised.

‘I thank God that I have emotions, and I don’t mind if I do show them. I was the only person who cried. I knew I should cry, and I brought three handkerchiefs on purpose. Look at them.’ She pulled them out of her bag and thrust them into Dick’s hand. ‘They’re soaking.’

‘You say it with triumph,’ he smiled.

‘I think you’re all perfectly heartless. Those two boys were going away for heaven knows how long on a dangerous journey, and they may never come back, and you and Lucy said good-bye to them just as if they were going off for a day’s golf. I was the only one who said I was sorry, and that we should miss them dreadfully. I hate this English coldness. When I go to America, it’s ten to one nobody comes to see me off, and if anyone does he just nods and says “Good-bye, I hope you’ll have a jolly time.”’

‘Next time you go I will come and hurl myself on the ground, and gnash my teeth and shriek at the top of my voice.’

‘Oh, yes, do. And then I’ll cry all the way to Liverpool, and I shall have a racking headache and feel quite miserable and happy.’

Dick meditated for a moment.

‘You see, we have an instinctive horror of exhibiting our emotion. I don’t know why it is, I suppose training or the inheritance of our sturdy fathers, but we’re ashamed to let people see what we feel. But I don’t know whether on that account our feelings are any the less keen. Don’t you think there’s a certain beauty in a grief that forbids itself all expression? You know, I admire Lucy tremendously, and as she came towards us on the platform I thought there was something very fine in her calmness.’

‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Mrs. Crowley, sharply. ‘I should have liked her much better if she had clung to her brother and sobbed and had to be torn away.’

‘Did you notice that she left us without even shaking hands? It was a very small omission, but it meant that she was quite absorbed in her grief.’

They reached Mrs. Crowley’s tiny house in Norfolk Street, and she asked Dick to come in.

‘Sit down and read the paper,’ she said, ‘while I go and powder my nose.’

Dick made himself comfortable. He blessed the charming woman when a butler of imposing dimensions brought in all that was necessary to make a cocktail. Mrs. Crowley cultivated England like a museum specimen. She had furnished her drawing-room with Chippendale furniture of an exquisite pattern. No chintzes were so smartly calendered as hers, and on the walls were mezzotints of the ladies whom Sir Joshua had painted. The chimney-piece was adorned with Lowestoft china, and on the silver table was a collection of old English spoons. She had chosen her butler because he went so well with the house. His respectability was portentous, his gravity was never disturbed by the shadow of a smile; and Mrs. Crowley treated him as though he were a piece of decoration, with an impertinence that fascinated him. He looked upon her as an outlandish freak, but his heavy British heart was surrendered to her entirely, and he watched over her with a solicitude that amused and touched her.

Dick thought that the little drawing-room was very comfortable, and when Mrs. Crowley returned, after an unconscionable time at the toilet-table, he was in the happiest mood. She gave a rapid glance at the glasses.

‘You’re a perfect hero,’ she said. ‘You’ve waited till I came down to have your cocktail.’

‘Richard Lomas, madam, is the soul of courtesy,’ he replied, with a flourish. ‘Besides, base is the soul that drinks in the morning by himself. At night, in your slippers and without a collar, with a pipe in your mouth and a good book in your hand, a solitary glass of whisky and soda is eminently desirable; but the anteprandial cocktail needs the sparkle of conversation.’

‘You seem to be in excellent health,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘I am. Why?’

‘I saw in yesterday’s paper that your doctor had ordered you to go abroad for the rest of the winter.’

‘My doctor received the two guineas, and I wrote the prescription,’ returned Dick. ‘Do you remember that I explained to you the other day at length my intention of retiring into private life?’

‘I do. I strongly disapprove of it.’

‘Well, I was convinced that if I relinquished my duties without any excuse people would say I was mad and shut me up in a lunatic asylum. I invented a breakdown in my health, and everything is plain sailing. I’ve got a pair for the rest of the session, and at the general election the excellent Robert Boulger will step into my unworthy shoes.’

‘And supposing you regret the step you’ve taken?’

‘In my youth I imagined, with the romantic fervour of my age, that in life everything was irreparable. That is a delusion. One of the greatest advantages of life is that hardly anything is. One can make ever so many fresh starts. The average man lives long enough for a good many experiments, and it’s they that give life its savour.’

‘I don’t approve of this flippant way you talk of life,’ said Mrs. Crowley severely. ‘It seems to me something infinitely serious and complicated.’

‘That is an illusion of moralists. As a matter of fact, it’s merely what you make it. Mine is quite light and simple.’

Mrs. Crowley looked at Dick reflectively.

‘I wonder why you never married,’ she said.

‘I can tell you easily. Because I have a considerable gift for repartee. I discovered in my early youth that men propose not because they want to marry, but because on certain occasions they are entirely at a loss for topics of conversation.’

‘It was a momentous discovery,’ she smiled.

‘No sooner had I made it than I began to cultivate my powers of small talk. I felt that my only chance was to be ready with appropriate subjects at the smallest notice, and I spent a considerable part of my last year at Oxford in studying the best masters.’

‘I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant,’ murmured Mrs. Crowley, raising her eyebrows.

‘I never played for brilliancy, I played for safety. I flatter myself that when prattle was needed, I have never been found wanting. I have met the ingenuousness of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy.’

‘When people talk higher philosophy to me I make it a definite rule to blush,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘The skittish widow of uncertain age has retired in disorder before a complete acquaintance with the Restoration dramatists, and I have frequently routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my remarkable knowledge of the results of missionary endeavour in Central Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at her astonished head an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An American divorcée swooned when I poured into her shell-like ear a few facts about the McKinley Tariff. These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an epigram, or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation from the poets.’

‘I don’t believe a word you say,’ retorted Mrs. Crowley. ‘I believe you never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you.’

‘Do me the justice to acknowledge that I’m the only man who’s known you for ten days without being tempted by those coal-mines of yours in Pennsylvania to offer you his hand and heart.’

‘I don’t believe the coal has anything to do with it,’ answered Mrs. Crowley. ‘I put it down entirely to my very considerable personal attractions.’

Dick looked at the time and found that the cocktail had given him an appetite. He asked Mrs. Crowley if she would lunch with him, and gaily they set out for a fashionable restaurant. Neither of them gave a thought to Alec and George speeding towards the unknown, nor to Lucy shut up in her room, given over to utter misery.

For Lucy it was the first of many dreary days. Dick went to Naples, and enjoying his new-won idleness, did not even write to her. Mrs. Crowley, after deciding on a trip to Egypt, was called to America by the illness of a sister; and Lady Kelsey, unable to stand the rigour of a Northern winter, set out for Nice. Lucy refused to accompany her. Though she knew it would be impossible to see her father, she could not bear to leave England; she could not face the gay people who thronged the Riviera, while he was bound to degrading tasks. The luxury of her own life horrified her when she compared it with his hard fare; and she could not look upon the comfortable rooms she lived in, with their delicate refinements, without thinking of the bare cell to which he was confined. Lucy was glad to be alone.

She went nowhere, but passed her days in solitude, striving to acquire peace of mind; she took long walks in the parks with her dogs, and spent much time in the picture galleries. Without realising the effect they had upon her, she felt vaguely the calming influence of beautiful things; often she would sit in the National Gallery before some royal picture, and the joy of it would fill her soul with quiet relief. Sometimes she would go to those majestic statues that decorated the pediment of the Parthenon, and the tears welled up in her clear eyes as she thanked the gods for the graciousness of their peace. She did not often listen to music, for then she could remain no longer mistress of her emotions; the tumultuous sounds of a symphony, the final anguish of Tristan, made vain all her efforts at self-control; and when she got home, she could only throw herself on her bed and weep passionately.

In reading she found her greatest solace. Many things that Alec had said returned dimly to her memory; and she began to read the Greek writers who had so profoundly affected him. She found a translation of Euripides which gave her some impression of the original, and her constant mood was answered by those old, exquisite tragedies. The complexity of that great poet, his doubt, despair, and his love of beauty, spoke to her heart as no modern writer could; and in the study of those sad deeds, in which men seemed always playthings of the fates, she found a relief to her own keen sorrow. She did not reason it out with herself, but almost unconsciously the thought came to her that the slings and arrows of the gods could be transformed into beauty by resignation and courage. Nothing was irreparable but a man’s own weakness, and even in shame, disaster, and poverty, it was possible to lead a life that was not without grandeur. The man who was beaten to the ground by an outrageous fortune might be a finer thing than the unseeing, cruel powers that conquered him.

It was in this wise that Lucy battled with the intolerable shame that oppressed her. In that quiet corner of Hampshire in which her early years had been spent, among the memories of her dead kindred, the pride of her race had grown to unreasonable proportions; and now in the reaction she was terrified lest its decadence was in her, too, and in George. She could do nothing but suffer whatever pain it pleased the gods to send; but George was a man. In him were placed all her hopes. But now and again wild panic seized her. Then the agony was too great to bear, and she pressed her hands to her eyes in order to drive away the hateful thought: what if George failed her? She knew well enough that he had his father’s engaging ways and his father’s handsome face; but his father had had a smile as frank and a charm as great. What if with the son, too, they betokened only insincerity and weakness? A malicious devil whispered in her ear that now and again she had averted her eyes in order not to see George do things she hated. But it was youth that drove him. She had taken care to keep from him knowledge of the sordid struggles that occupied her, and how could she wonder if he was reckless and uncaring? She would not doubt him, she could not doubt him, for if anything went wrong with him there was no hope left. She could only cease to believe in herself.

When Lucy was allowed to write to her father, she set herself to cheer him. The thought that over five years must elapse before she would have him by her side once more, paralysed her pen; but she would not allow herself to be discouraged. And she sought to give courage to him. She wanted him to see that her love was undiminished, and that he could count on it. Presently she received a letter from him. After a few weeks, the unaccustomed food, the change of life, had told upon him; and a general breakdown in his health had driven him into the infirmary. Lucy was thankful for the respite which his illness afforded. It must be a little less dreary in a prison hospital than in a prison cell.

A letter came from George, and another from Alec. Alec’s was brief, telling of their journey down the Red Sea and their arrival at Mombassa; it was abrupt and awkward, making no reference to his love, or to the engagement which she had almost promised to make when he returned. He began and ended quite formally. George, apparently in the best of spirits, wrote as he always did, in a boyish, inconsequent fashion. His letter was filled with slang and gave no news. There was little to show that it was written from Mombassa, on the verge of a dangerous expedition into the interior, rather than from Oxford on the eve of a football match. But she read them over and over again. They were very matter of fact, and she smiled as she thought of Julia Crowley’s indignation if she had seen them.

From her recollection of Alec’s words, Lucy tried to make out the scene that first met her brother’s eyes. She seemed to stand by his side, leaning over the rail, as the ship approached the harbour. The sea was blue with a blue she had never seen, and the sky was like an inverted bowl of copper. The low shore, covered with bush, stretched away in the distance; a line of waves was breaking on the reef. They came in sight of the island of Mombassa, with the overgrown ruins of a battery that had once commanded the entrance; and there were white-roofed houses, with deep verandas, which stood in little clearings with coral cliffs below them. On the opposite shore thick groves of palm-trees rose with their singular, melancholy beauty. Then as the channel narrowed, they passed an old Portuguese fort which carried the mind back to the bold adventurers who had first sailed those distant seas, and directly afterwards a mass of white buildings that reached to the edge of the lapping waves. They saw the huts of the native town, wattled and thatched, nestling close together; and below them was a fleet of native craft. On the jetty was the African crowd, shouting and jostling, some half-naked, and some strangely clad, Arabs from across the sea, Swahilis, and here and there a native from the interior.

In course of time other letters came from George, but Alec wrote no more. The days passed slowly. Lady Kelsey returned from the Riviera. Dick came back from Naples to enjoy the pleasures of the London season. He appeared thoroughly to enjoy his idleness, signally falsifying the predictions of those who had told him that it was impossible to be happy without regular work. Mrs. Crowley settled down once more in her house in Norfolk Street. During her absence she had written reams by every post to Lucy, and Lucy had looked forward very much to seeing her again. The little American was almost the only one of her friends with whom she did not feel shy. The apartness which her nationality gave her, made Mrs. Crowley more easy to talk to. She was too fond of Lucy to pity her. The general election came before it was expected, and Robert Boulger succeeded to the seat which Dick Lomas was only too glad to vacate. Bobbie was very charming. He surrounded Lucy with a protecting care, and she could not fail to be touched by his entire devotion. When he thought she had recovered somewhat from the first blow of her father’s sentence, he sent her a letter in which once more he besought her to marry him. She was grateful to him for having chosen that method of expressing himself, for it seemed possible in writing to tell him with greater tenderness that if she could not accept his love she deeply valued his affection.

It seemed to Lucy that the life she led in London, or at Lady Kelsey’s house on the river, was no more than a dream. She was but a figure in the procession of shadow pictures cast on a sheet in a fair, and nothing that she did signified. Her spirit was away in the heart of Africa, and by a vehement effort of her fancy she sought to see what each day her friend and her brother were doing.

Now they had long left the railway and such civilisation as was to be found in the lands where white men had already made their mark. She knew the exultation which Alec felt, and the thrill of independence, when he left behind him all traces of it. He held himself more proudly because he knew that thenceforward he must rely on his own resources, and success or failure depended only on himself.

Often as she lay awake and saw the ghostly dawn steal across the sky, she seemed borne to the African camp, where the break of day, like a gust of wind in a field of ripe corn, brought a sudden stir among the sleepers. Alec had described to her so minutely the changing scene that she was able to bring it vividly before her eyes. She saw him come out of his tent, in heavy boots, buckling on his belt. He wore knee-breeches and a pith helmet, and he was more bronzed than when she had bidden him farewell. He gave the order to the headman of the caravan to take up the loads. At the word there was a rush from all parts of the camp; each porter seized his load, carrying it off to lash on his mat and his cooking-pot, and then, sitting upon it, ate a few grains of roasted maize or the remains of last night’s game. And as the sun appeared above the horizon, Alec, as was his custom, led the way, followed by a few askari. A band of natives struck up a strange and musical chant, and the camp, but now a scene of busy life, was deserted. The smouldering fires died out with the rising sun, and the silent life of the forest replaced the chatter and the hum of human kind. Giant beetles came from every quarter and carried away pieces of offal; small shy beasts stole out to gnaw the white bones upon which savage teeth had left but little; a gaunt hyena, with suspicious looks, snatched at a bone and dashed back into the jungle. Vultures settled down heavily, and with deliberate air sought out the foulest refuse.

Then Lucy followed Alec upon his march, with his fighting men and his long string of porters. They went along a narrow track, pushing their way through bushes and thorns, or tall rank grass, sometimes with difficulty forcing through elephant reeds which closed over their heads and showered the cold dew down on their faces. Sometimes they passed through villages, with rich soil and extensive population; sometimes they plunged into heavy forests of gigantic trees, festooned with creepers, where the silence was unbroken even by the footfall of the traveller on the bottomless carpet of leaves; sometimes they traversed vast swamps, hurrying to avoid the deadly fever, and sometimes scrub jungles, in which as far as the eye could reach was a forest of cactus and thorn bush. Sometimes they made their way through grassy uplands with trees as splendid as those of an English park, and sometimes they toiled painfully along a game-track that ran by the bank of a swift-rushing river.

At midday a halt was called. The caravan had opened out by then; men who were sick or had stopped to adjust a load, others who were weak or lazy, had lagged behind; but at last they were all there; and the rear guard, perhaps with George in charge of it, whose orders were on no account to allow a single man to remain behind them, reported that no one was missing. During the heat of noon they made fires and cooked food. Presently they set off once more and marched till sundown.

When they reached the place which had been fixed on for camping, a couple of shots were fired as signals; and soon the natives, men and women, began to stream in with little baskets of grain or flour, with potatoes and chickens, and perhaps a pot or two of honey. Very quickly the tents were pitched, the bed gear arranged, the loads counted and stacked. The party whose duty it was to construct the zeriba cut down boughs and dragged them in to form a fence. Each little band of men selected the site for their bivouac; one went off to collect materials to build the huts, another to draw water, a third for firewood and stones, on which to place the cooking-pot. At sunset the headman blew his whistle and asked if all were present. A lusty chorus replied. He reported to his chief and received the orders for the next day’s march.

Alec had told Lucy that from the cry that goes up in answer to the headman’s whistle, you could always gauge the spirit of the men. If game had been shot, or from scarcity the caravan had come to a land of plenty, there was a perfect babel of voices. But if the march had been long and hard, or if food had been issued for a number of days, of which this was the last, isolated voices replied; and perhaps one, bolder than the rest, cried out: I am hungry.

Then Alec and George, and the others sat down to their evening meal, while the porters, in little parties, were grouped around their huge pots of porridge. A little chat, a smoke, an exchange of sporting anecdotes, and the white men turned in. And Alec, gazing on the embers of his camp fire was alone with his thoughts: the silence of the night was upon him, and he looked up at the stars that shone in their countless myriads in the blue African sky. Lucy got up and stood at her open window. She, too, looked up at the sky, and she thought that she saw the same stars as he did. Now in that last half hour, free from the burden of the day, with everyone at rest, he could give himself over to his thoughts, and his thoughts surely were of her.

During the months that had passed since Alec left England, Lucy’s love had grown. In her solitude there was nothing else to give brightness to her life, and little by little it filled her heart. Her nature was so strong that she could do nothing by half measures, and it was with a feeling of extreme relief that she surrendered herself to this overwhelming passion. It seemed to her that she was growing in a different direction. The yearning of her soul for someone on whom to lean was satisfied at last. Hitherto the only instincts that had been fostered in her were those that had been useful to her father and George; they had needed her courage and her self-reliance. It was very comfortable to depend entirely upon Alec’s love. Here she could be weak, here she could find a greater strength which made her own seem puny. Lucy’s thoughts were absorbed in the man whom really she knew so little. She exulted in his unselfish striving and in his firmness of purpose, and when she compared herself with him she felt unworthy. She treasured every recollection she had of him. She went over in her mind all that she had heard him say, and reconstructed the conversations they had had together. She walked where they had walked, remembering how the sky had looked on those days and what flowers then bloomed in the parks; she visited the galleries they had seen in one another’s company, and stood before the pictures which he had lingered at. And notwithstanding all there was to torment and humiliate her, she was happy. Something had come into her life which made all else tolerable. It was easy to bear the extremity of grief when he loved her.

After a long time Dick received a letter from Alec. MacKenzie was not a good letter-writer. He had no gift of self-expression, and when he had a pen in his hand seemed to be seized with an invincible shyness. The letter was dry and wooden. It was dated from the last trading-station before he set out into the wild country which was to be the scene of his operations. It said that hitherto everything had gone well with him, and the white men, but for fever occasionally, were bearing the climate well. One, named Macinnery, had made a nuisance of himself, and had been sent back to the coast. Alec gave no reasons for this step. He had been busy making the final arrangements. A company had been formed, the North East Africa Trading Company, to exploit the commercial possibilities of these unworked districts, and a charter had been given them; but the unsettled state of the land had so hampered them that the directors had gladly accepted Alec’s offer to join their forces with his, and the traders at their stations had been instructed to take service under him. This increased the white men under his command to sixteen. He had drilled the Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, and given them guns, so that he had now an armed force of four hundred men. He was collecting levies from the native tribes, and he gave the outlandish names of the chiefs, armed with spears, who were to accompany him. The power of Mohammed the Lame was on the wane; for, during the three months which Alec had spent in England, an illness had seized him, which the natives asserted was a magic spell cast on him by one of his wives; and a son of his, taking advantage of this, had revolted and fortified himself in a stockade. The dying Sultan had taken the field against him, and this division of forces made Alec’s position immeasurably stronger.

Dick handed Lucy the letter, and watched her while she read it.

‘He says nothing about George,’ he said.

‘He’s evidently quite well.’

Though it seemed strange that Alec made no mention of the boy, Dick said no more. Lucy appeared to be satisfied, and that was the chief thing. But he could not rid his mind of a certain uneasiness. He had received with misgiving Lucy’s plan that George should accompany Alec. He could not help wondering whether those frank blue eyes and that facile smile did not conceal a nature as shallow as Fred Allerton’s. But, after all, it was the boy’s only chance, and he must take it.

Then an immense silence followed. Alec disappeared into those unknown countries as a man disappears into the night, and no more was heard of him. None knew how he fared. Not even a rumour reached the coast of success or failure. When he had crossed the mountains that divided the British protectorate from the lands that were to all intents independent, he vanished with his followers from human ken. The months passed, and there was nothing. It was a year now since he had arrived at Mombassa, then it was a year since the last letter had come from him. It was only possible to guess that behind those gaunt rocks fierce battles were fought, new lands explored, and the slavers beaten back foot by foot. Dick sought to persuade himself that the silence was encouraging, for it seemed to him that if the expedition had been cut to pieces the rejoicing of the Arabs would have spread itself abroad, and some news of a disaster would have travelled through Somaliland to the coast, or been carried by traders to Zanzibar. He made frequent inquiries at the Foreign Office, but there, too, nothing was known. The darkness had fallen upon them.

But Lucy suffered neither from anxiety nor fear. She had an immense confidence in Alec, and she believed in his strength, his courage, and his star. He had told her that he would not return till he had accomplished his task, and she expected to hear nothing till he had brought it to a triumphant conclusion. She did her little to help him. For at length the directors of the North East Africa Trading Company, growing anxious, proposed to get a question asked in Parliament, or to start an outcry in the newspapers which should oblige the government to send out a force to relieve Alec if he were in difficulties, or avenge him if he were dead. But Lucy knew that there was nothing Alec dreaded more than official interference. He was convinced that if this work could be done at all, he alone could do it; and she influenced Robert Boulger and Dick Lomas to use such means as they could to prevent anything from being done. She was certain that all Alec needed was time and a free hand.

IX

But the monotonous round of Lucy’s life, with its dreams and its fond imaginings, was interrupted by news of a different character. An official letter came to her from Parkhurst to say that the grave state of her father’s health had decided the authorities to remit the rest of his sentence, and he would be set free the next day but one at eight o’clock in the morning. She knew not whether to feel relief or sorrow; for if she was thankful that the wretched man’s long torture was ended, she could not but realise that his liberty was given him only because he was dying. Mercy had been shown him, and Fred Allerton, in sight of a freedom from which no human laws could bar him, was given up to die among those who loved him.

Lucy went down immediately to the Isle of Wight, and there engaged rooms in the house of a woman who had formerly served her at Hamlyn’s Purlieu.

It was midwinter, and a cold drizzle was falling when she waited for him at the prison gates. Three years had passed since they had parted. She took him in her arms and kissed him silently. Her heart was too full for words. A carriage was waiting for them, and she drove to the lodging-house; breakfast was ready, and Lucy had seen that good things which he liked should be ready for him to eat. Fred Allerton looked wistfully at the clean table-cloth, and at the flowers and the dainty scones; but he shook his head. He did not speak, and the tears ran slowly down his cheeks. He sank wearily into a chair. Lucy tried to induce him to eat; she brought him a cup of tea, but he put it away. He looked at her with haggard, bloodshot eyes.

‘Give me the flowers,’ he muttered.

They were his first words. There was a large bowl of daffodils in the middle of the table, and she took them out of the water, deftly dried their stalks, and gave them to him. He took them with trembling hands and pressed them to his heart, then he buried his face in them, and the tears ran afresh, bedewing the yellow flowers.

Lucy put her arm around her father’s neck and placed her cheek against his.

‘Don’t, father,’ she whispered. ‘You must try and forget.’

He leaned back, exhausted, and the pretty flowers fell at his feet.

‘You know why they’ve let me out?’ he said.

She kissed him, but did not answer.

‘I’m so glad that we’re together again,’ she murmured.

‘It’s because I’m going to die.’

‘No, you mustn’t die. In a little while you’ll get strong again. You have many years before you, and you’ll be very happy.’

He gave her a long, searching look; and when he spoke, his voice had a hollowness in it that was strangely terrifying.

‘Do you think I want to live?’

The pain seemed almost greater than Lucy could bear, and for a moment she had to remain silent so that her voice might grow steady.

‘You must live for my sake.’

‘Don’t you hate me?’ he asked.

‘No, I love you more than I ever did. I shall never cease to love you.’

‘I suppose no one would marry you while I was in prison.’

His remark was so inconsequent that Lucy found nothing to say. He gave a bitter, short laugh.

‘I ought to have shot myself. Then people would have forgotten all about it, and you might have had a chance. Why didn’t you marry Bobbie?’

‘I haven’t wanted to marry.’

He was so tired that he could only speak a little at a time, and now he closed his eyes. Lucy thought that he was dozing, and began to pick up the fallen flowers. But he noticed what she was doing.

‘Let me hold them,’ he moaned, with the pleading quaver of a sick child.

As she gave them to him once more, he took her hands and began to caress them.

‘The only thing for me is to hurry up and finish with life. I’m in the way. Nobody wants me, and I shall only be a burden. I didn’t want them to let me go. I wanted to die there quietly.’

Lucy sighed deeply. She hardly recognised her father in the bent, broken man who was sitting beside her. He had aged very much and seemed now to be an old man, but it was a premature aging, and there was a horror in it as of a process contrary to nature. He was very thin, and his hands trembled constantly. Most of his teeth had gone; his cheeks were sunken, and he mumbled his words so that it was difficult to distinguish them. There was no light in his eyes, and his short hair was quite white. Now and again he was shaken with a racking cough, and this was followed by an attack of such pain in his heart that it was anguish even to watch it. The room was warm, but he shivered with cold and cowered over the roaring fire.

When the doctor whom Lucy had sent for, saw him, he could only shrug his shoulders.

‘I’m afraid nothing can be done,’ he said. ‘His heart is all wrong, and he’s thoroughly broken up.’

‘Is there no chance of recovery?’

‘I’m afraid all we can do is to alleviate the pain.’

‘And how long can he live?’

‘It’s impossible to say. He may die to-morrow, he may last six months.’

The doctor was an old man, and his heart was touched by the sight of Lucy’s grief. He had seen more cases than one of this kind.

‘He doesn’t want to live. It will be a mercy when death releases him.’

Lucy did not answer. When she returned to her father, she could not speak. He was apathetic and did not ask what the doctor had said. Lady Kelsey, hating the thought of Lucy and her father living amid the discomfort of furnished lodgings, had written to offer the use of her house in Charles Street; and Mrs. Crowley, in case they wanted complete solitude, had put Court Leys at their disposal. Lucy waited a few days to see whether her father grew stronger, but no change was apparent in him, and it seemed necessary at last to make some decision. She put before him the alternative plans, but he would have none of them.

‘Then would you rather stay here?’ she said.

He looked at the fire and did not answer. Lucy thought the sense of her question had escaped him, for often it appeared to her that his mind wandered. She was on the point of repeating it when he spoke.

‘I want to go back to the Purlieu.’

Lucy stifled a gasp of dismay. She stared at the wretched man. Had he forgotten? He thought that the house of his fathers was his still; and all that had parted him from it was gone from his memory. How could she tell him?

‘I want to die in my own home,’ he faltered.

Lucy was in a turmoil of anxiety. She must make some reply. What he asked was impossible, and yet it was cruel to tell him the whole truth.

‘There are people living there,’ she answered.

‘Are there?’ he said, indifferently.

He looked at the fire still. The silence was dreadful.

‘When can we go?’ he said at last. ‘I want to get there quickly.’

Lucy hesitated.

‘We shall have to go into rooms.’

‘I don’t mind.’

He seemed to take everything as a matter of course. It was clear that he had forgotten the catastrophe that had parted him from Hamlyn’s Purlieu, and yet, strangely, he asked no questions. Lucy was tortured by the thought of revisiting the place she loved so well. She had been able to deaden her passionate regret only by keeping her mind steadfastly averted from all thoughts of it, and now she must actually go there. The old wounds would be opened. But it was impossible to refuse, and she set about making the necessary arrangements. The rector, who had been given the living by Fred Allerton, was an old friend, and Lucy knew that she could trust in his affection. She wrote and told him that her father was dying and had set his heart on seeing once more his old home. She asked him to find rooms in one of the cottages. She did not mind how small nor how humble they were. The rector answered by telegram. He begged Lucy to bring her father to stay with him. She would be more comfortable than in lodgings, and, since he was a bachelor, there was plenty of room in the large rectory. Lucy, immensely touched by his kindness, gratefully accepted the invitation.

Next day they took the short journey across the Solent.

The rector had been a don, and Fred Allerton had offered him the living in accordance with the family tradition that required a man of attainments to live in the neighbouring rectory. He had been there now for many years, a spare, grey-haired, gentle creature, who lived the life of a recluse in that distant village, doing his duty exactly, but given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, and his wants were few.

In this house, in rooms lined from floor to ceiling with old books, Lucy and her father took up their abode. It seemed that Fred Allerton had been kept up only by the desire to get back to his native place, for he had no sooner arrived than he grew much worse. Lucy was busily occupied with nursing him and could give no time to the regrets which she had imagined would assail her. She spent long hours in her father’s room; and while he dozed, half-comatose, the kindly parson sat by the window and read to her in a low voice from queer, forgotten works.

One day Allerton appeared to be far better. For a week he had wandered much in his mind, and more than once Lucy had suspected that the end was near; but now he was singularly lucid. He wanted to get up, and Lucy felt it would be brutal to balk any wish he had. He asked if he might go out. The day was fine and warm. It was February, and there was a feeling in the air as if the spring were at hand. In sheltered places the snowdrops and the crocuses gave the garden the blitheness of an Italian picture; and you felt that on that multi-coloured floor might fitly trip the delicate angels of Messer Perugino. The rector had an old pony-chaise, in which he was used to visit his parishioners, and in this all three drove out.

‘Let us go down to the marshes,’ said Allerton.

They drove slowly along the winding road till they came to the broad salt marshes. Beyond glittered the placid sea. There was no wind. Near them a cow looked up from her grazing and lazily whisked her tail. Lucy’s heart began to beat more quickly. She felt that her father, too, looked upon that scene as the most typical of his home. Other places had broad acres and fine trees, other places had forest land and purple heather, but there was something in those green flats that made them seem peculiarly their own. She took her father’s hand, and silently their eyes looked onwards. A more peaceful look came into Fred Allerton’s worn face, and the sigh that broke from him was not altogether of pain. Lucy prayed that it might still remain hidden from him that those fair, broad fields were his no longer.

That night, she had an intuition that death was at hand. Fred Allerton was very silent. Since his release from prison he had spoken barely a dozen sentences a day, and nothing served to wake him from his lethargy. But there was a curious restlessness about him now, and he would not go to bed. He sat in an armchair, and begged them to draw it near the window. The sky was cloudless, and the moon shone brightly. Fred Allerton could see the great old elms that surrounded Hamlyn’s Purlieu; and his eyes were fixed steadily upon them. Lucy saw them, too, and she thought sadly of the garden which she had loved so well, and of the dear trees which old masters of the place had tended so lovingly. Her heart filled when she thought of the grey stone house and its happy, spacious rooms.

Suddenly there was a sound, and she looked up quickly. Her father’s head had fallen back, and he was breathing with a strange noisiness. She called her friend.

‘I think the end has come at last,’ she said.

‘Would you like me to fetch the doctor?’

‘It will be useless.’

The rector looked at the man’s wan face, lit dimly by the light of the shaded lamp, and falling on his knees, began to recite the prayers for the dying. A shiver passed through Lucy. In the farmyard a cock crew, and in the distance another cock answered cheerily. Lucy put her hand on the good rector’s shoulder.

‘It’s all over,’ she whispered.

She bent down and kissed her father’s eyes.

A week later Lucy took a walk by the seashore. They had buried Fred Allerton three days before among the ancestors whom he had dishonoured. It was a lonely funeral, for Lucy had asked Robert Boulger, her only friend then in England, not to come; and she was the solitary mourner. The coffin was lowered into the grave, and the rector read the sad, beautiful words of the burial service. She could not grieve. Her father was at peace. She could only hope that his errors and his crimes would be soon forgotten; and perhaps those who had known him would remember then that he had been a charming friend, and a clever, sympathetic companion. It was little enough in all conscience that Lucy asked.

On the morrow she was leaving the roof of the hospitable parson. Surmising her wish to walk alone once more through the country which was so dear to her, he had not offered his company. Lucy’s heart was full of sadness, but there was a certain peace in it, too; the peace of her father’s death had entered into her, and she experienced a new feeling, the feeling of resignation.

Now her mind was set upon the future, and she was filled with hope. She stood by the water’s edge, looking upon the sea as three years before, when she was staying at Court Leys, she had looked upon the sea that washed the shores of Kent. Many things had passed since then, and many griefs had fallen upon her; but for all that she was happier than then; since on that distant day — and it seemed ages ago — there had been scarcely a ray of brightness in her life, and now she had a great love which made every burden light.

Low clouds hung upon the sky, and on the horizon the greyness of the heavens mingled with the greyness of the sea. She looked into the distance with longing eyes. Now all her life was set upon that far-off corner of unknown Africa, where Alec and George were doing great deeds. She wondered what was the meaning of the silence which had covered them so long.

‘Oh, if I could only see,’ she murmured.

She sent her spirit upon that vast journey, trying to pierce the realms of space, but her spirit came back baffled. She could not know what they were at.

If Lucy’s love had been able to bridge the abyss that parted them, if in some miraculous way she had been able to see what actions they did at that time, she would have witnessed a greater tragedy than any which she had yet seen.

X

The night was stormy and dark. The rain was falling, and the ground in Alec’s camp was heavy with mud. The faithful Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, chattered with cold around their fires; and the sentries shivered at their posts. It was a night that took the spirit out of a man and made all that he longed for seem vain and trifling. In Alec’s tent the water was streaming. Great rats ran about boldly. The stout canvas bellied before each gust of wind, and the cordage creaked, so that one might have thought the whole thing would be blown clean away. The tent was unusually crowded, though there was in it nothing but Alec’s bed, covered with a mosquito-curtain, a folding table, with a couple of garden chairs, and the cases which contained his more precious belongings. A small tarpaulin on the floor squelched as one walked on it.

On one of the chairs a man sat, asleep, with his face resting on his arms. His gun was on the table in front of him. It was Walker, a young man who had been freshly sent out to take charge of the North East Africa Company’s most northerly station, and had joined Alec’s expedition a year before, taking the place of an older man who had gone home on leave. He was a funny, fat person with a round face and a comic manner, the most unexpected sort of fellow to find in the wildest of African districts; and he was eminently unsuited for the life he led. He had come into a little money on attaining his majority, and this he had set himself resolutely to squander in every unprofitable way that occurred to him. When his last penny was spent he had been offered a post by a friend of his family’s, who happened to be a director of the company, and had accepted it as his only refuge from starvation. Adversity had not been able to affect his happy nature. He was always cheerful no matter what difficulties he was in, and neither regretted the follies of his past nor repined over the hardships which had followed them. Alec had taken a great liking to him. A silent man himself, he found a certain relaxation in people like Dick Lomas and Walker who talked incessantly; and the young man’s simplicity, his constant surprise at the difference between Africa and Mayfair, never ceased to divert him.

Presently Adamson came into the tent. He was the Scotch doctor who had already been Alec’s companion on two of his expeditions; and there was a firm friendship between them. He was an Edinburgh man, with a slow drawl and a pawky humour, a great big fellow, far and away the largest of any of the whites; and his movements were no less deliberate than his conversation.

‘Hulloa, there,’ he called out, as he came in.

Walker started to his feet as if he were shot and instinctively seized his gun.

‘All right!’ laughed the doctor, putting up his hand. ‘Don’t shoot. It’s only me.’

Walker put down the gun and looked at the doctor with a blank face.

‘Nerves are a bit groggy, aren’t they?’

The fat, cheerful man recovered his wits and gave a short laugh.

‘Why the dickens did you wake me up? I was dreaming — dreaming of a high-heeled boot and a neat ankle and the swirl of a white lace petticoat.’

‘Were you indeed?’ said the doctor, with a slow smile. ‘Then it’s as well I woke ye up in the middle of it before ye made a fool of yourself. I thought I’d better have a look at your arm.’

‘It’s one of the most æsthetic sights I know.’

‘Your arm?’ asked the doctor, drily.

‘No,’ answered Walker. ‘A pretty woman crossing Piccadilly at Swan & Edgar’s. You are a savage, my good doctor, and a barbarian; you don’t know the care and forethought, the hours of anxious meditation, it has needed to hold up that well-made skirt with the elegant grace that enchants you.’

‘I’m afraid you’re a very immoral man, Walker,’ answered Adamson with his long drawl, smiling.

‘Under the present circumstances I have to content myself with condemning the behaviour of the pampered and idle. Just now a camp-bed in a stuffy tent, with mosquitoes buzzing all around me, has allurements greater than those of youth and beauty. And I would not sacrifice my dinner to philander with Helen of Troy herself.’

‘You remind me considerably of the fox who said the grapes were sour.’

Walker flung a tin plate at a rat that sat up on its hind legs and looked at him impudently.

‘Nonsense. Give me a comfortable bed to sleep in, plenty to eat, tobacco to smoke; and Amaryllis may go hang.’

Dr. Adamson smiled quietly. He found a certain grim humour in the contrast between the difficulties of their situation and Walker’s flippant talk.

‘Well, let us look at this wound of yours,’ he said, getting back to his business. ‘Has it been throbbing?’

‘Oh, it’s not worth bothering about. It’ll be as right as rain to-morrow.’

‘I’d better dress it all the same.’

Walker took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor removed the bandages and looked at the broad flesh wound. He put a fresh dressing on it.

‘It looks as healthy as one can expect,’ he murmured. ‘It’s odd what good recoveries men make here when you’d think that everything was against them.’

‘You must be pretty well done up, aren’t you?’ asked Walker, as he watched the doctor neatly cut the lint.

‘Just about dropping. But I’ve a devil of a lot more work to do before I turn in.’

‘The thing that amuses me is to think that I came to Africa thinking I was going to have a rattling good time, plenty of shooting and practically nothing to do.’

‘You couldn’t exactly describe it as a picnic, could you?’ answered the doctor. ‘But I don’t suppose any of us knew it would be such a tough job as it’s turned out.’

Walker put his disengaged hand on the doctor’s arm.

‘My friend, if ever I return to my native land I will never be such a crass and blithering idiot as to give way again to a spirit of adventure. I shall look out for something safe and quiet, and end my days as a wine-merchant’s tout or an insurance agent.’

‘Ah, that’s what we all say when we’re out here. But when we’re once home again, the recollection of the forest and the plains and the roasting sun and the mosquitoes themselves, come haunting us, and before we know what’s up we’ve booked our passage back to this God-forsaken continent.’

The doctor’s words were followed by a silence, which was broken by Walker inconsequently.

‘Do you ever think of rumpsteaks?’ he asked.

The doctor stared at him blankly, and Walker went on, smiling.

‘Sometimes, when we’re marching under a sun that just about takes the roof of your head off, and we’ve had the scantiest and most uncomfortable breakfast possible, I have a vision.’

‘I would be able to bandage you better if you only gesticulated with one arm,’ said Adamson.

‘I see the dining-room of my club, and myself seated at a little table by the window looking out on Piccadilly. And there’s a spotless table-cloth, and all the accessories are spick and span. An obsequious menial brings me a rumpsteak, grilled to perfection, and so tender that it melts in the mouth. And he puts by my side a plate of crisp fried potatoes. Can’t you smell them? And then a liveried flunky brings me a pewter tankard, and into it he pours a bottle, a large bottle, mind you, of foaming ale.’

‘You’ve certainly added considerably to our cheerfulness, my friend,’ said Adamson.

Walker gaily shrugged his fat shoulders.

‘I’ve often been driven to appease the pangs of raging hunger with a careless epigram, and by the laborious composition of a limerick I have sought to deceive a most unholy thirst.’

He liked that sentence and made up his mind to remember it for future use. The doctor paused for a moment, and then he looked gravely at Walker.

‘Last night I thought that you’d made your last joke, old man; and that I had given my last dose of quinine.’

‘We were in rather a tight corner, weren’t we?’

‘This is the third expedition I’ve been with MacKenzie, and I assure you I’ve never been so certain that all was over with us.’

Walker permitted himself a philosophical reflection.

‘Funny thing death is, you know! When you think of it beforehand, it makes you squirm in your shoes, but when you’ve just got it face to face it seems so obvious that you forget to be afraid.’

Indeed it was only by a miracle that any of them was alive, and they had all a curious, light-headed feeling from the narrowness of the escape. They had been fighting, with their backs to the wall, and each one had shown what he was made of. A few hours before things had been so serious that now, in the first moment of relief, they sought refuge instinctively in banter. But Dr. Adamson was a solid man, and he wanted to talk the matter out.

‘If the Arabs hadn’t hesitated to attack us just those ten minutes, we would have been simply wiped out.’

‘MacKenzie was all there, wasn’t he?’

Walker had the shyness of his nationality in the exhibition of enthusiasm, and he could only express his admiration for the commander of the party in terms of slang.

‘He was, my son,’ answered Adamson, drily. ‘My own impression is, he thought we were done for.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well, you see, I know him pretty well. When things are going smoothly and everything’s flourishing, he’s apt to be a bit irritable. He keeps rather to himself, and he doesn’t say much unless you do something he don’t approve of.’

‘And then, by Jove, he comes down on you like a thousand of bricks,’ Walker agreed heartily. He remembered observations which Alec on more than one occasion had made to recall him to a sense of his great insignificance. ‘It’s not for nothing the natives call him Thunder and Lightning.’

‘But when things look black, his spirits go up like one o’clock,’ proceeded the doctor. ‘And the worse they are the more cheerful he is.’

‘I know. When you’re starving with hunger, dead tired and soaked to the skin, and wish you could just lie down and die, MacKenzie simply bubbles over with good humour. It’s a hateful characteristic. When I’m in a bad temper, I much prefer everyone else to be in a bad temper, too.’

‘These last three days he’s been positively hilarious. Yesterday he was cracking jokes with the natives.’

‘Scotch jokes,’ said Walker. ‘I daresay they sound funny in an African dialect.’

‘I’ve never seen him more cheerful,’ continued the other, sturdily ignoring the gibe. ‘By the Lord Harry, said I to myself, the chief thinks we’re in a devil of a bad way.’

Walker stood up and stretched himself lazily.

‘Thank heavens, it’s all over now. We’ve none of us had any sleep for three days, and when I once get off I don’t mean to wake up for a week.’

‘I must go and see the rest of my patients. Perkins has got a bad dose of fever this time. He was quite delirious a little while ago.’

‘By Jove, I’d almost forgotten.’

People changed in Africa. Walker was inclined to be surprised that he was fairly happy, inclined to make a little jest when it occurred to him; and it had nearly slipped his memory that one of the whites had been killed the day before, while another was lying unconscious with a bullet in his skull. A score of natives were dead, and the rest of them had escaped by the skin of their teeth.

‘Poor Richardson,’ he said.

‘We couldn’t spare him,’ answered the doctor slowly. ‘The fates never choose the right man.’

Walker looked at the brawny doctor, and his placid face was clouded. He knew to what the Scot referred and shrugged his shoulders. But the doctor went on.

‘If we had to lose someone it would have been a damned sight better if that young cub Allerton had got the bullet which killed poor Richardson.’

‘He wouldn’t have been much loss, would he?’ said Walker, after a silence.

‘MacKenzie has been very patient with him. If I’d been in his shoes I’d have sent him back to the coast when he sacked Macinnery.’

Walker did not answer, and the doctor proceeded to moralise.

‘It seems to me that some men have natures so crooked that with every chance in the world to go straight, they can’t manage it. The only thing is to let them go to the devil as best they may.’

At that moment Alec MacKenzie came in. He was dripping with rain and threw off his macintosh. His face lit up when he saw Walker and the doctor. Adamson was an old and trusted friend, and he knew that on him he could rely always.

‘I’ve been going the round of the outlying sentries,’ he said.

It was unlike him to volunteer even so trivial a piece of information, and Adamson looked up at him.

‘All serene?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Alec’s eyes rested on the doctor as though he were considering something strange about him. The doctor knew him well enough to suspect that something very grave had happened, but also he knew him too well to hazard an inquiry. Presently Alec spoke again.

‘I’ve just seen a native messenger that Mindabi sent me.’

‘Anything important?’

‘Yes.’

Alec’s answer was so curt that it was impossible to question him further. He turned to Walker.

‘How’s the arm?’

‘Oh, that’s nothing. It’s only a scratch.’

‘You’d better not make too light of it. The smallest wound has a way of being troublesome in this country.’

‘He’ll be all right in a day or two,’ said the doctor.

Alec sat down. For a minute he did not speak, but seemed plunged in thought. He passed his fingers through his beard, ragged now and longer than when he was in England.

‘How are the others?’ he asked suddenly, looking at Adamson.

‘I don’t think Thompson can last till the morning.’

‘I’ve just been in to see him.’

Thompson was the man who had been shot through the head and had lain unconscious since the day before. He was an old gold-prospector, who had thrown in his lot with the expedition against the slavers.

‘Perkins of course will be down for several days longer. And some of the natives are rather badly hurt. Those devils have got explosive bullets.’

‘Is there anyone in great danger?’

‘No, I don’t think so. There are two men who are in a bad way, but I think they’ll pull through with rest.’

‘I see,’ said Alec, laconically.

He stared intently at the table, absently passing his hand across the gun which Walker had left there.

‘I say, have you had anything to eat lately?’ asked Walker, presently.

Alec shook himself out of his meditation and gave the young man one of his rare, bright smiles. It was plain that he made an effort to be gay.

‘Good Lord, I quite forgot; I wonder when the dickens I had some food last. These Arabs have been keeping us so confoundedly busy.’

‘I don’t believe you’ve had anything to-day. You must be devilish hungry.’

‘Now you mention it, I think I am,’ answered Alec, cheerfully. ‘And thirsty, by Jove! I wouldn’t give my thirst for an elephant tusk.’

‘And to think there’s nothing but tepid water to drink!’ Walker exclaimed with a laugh.

‘I’ll go and tell the boy to bring you some food,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a rotten game to play tricks with your digestion like that.’

‘Stern man, the doctor, isn’t he?’ said Alec, with twinkling eyes. ‘It won’t hurt me once in a way, and I shall enjoy it all the more now.’

But when Adamson went to call the boy, Alec stopped him.

‘Don’t trouble. The poor devil’s half dead with exhaustion. I told him he might sleep till I called him. I don’t want much, and I can easily get it myself.’

Alec looked about and presently found a tin of meat and some ship biscuits. During the fighting it had been impossible to go out on the search for game, and there was neither variety nor plenty about their larder. Alec placed the food before him, sat down, and began to eat. Walker looked at him.

‘Appetising, isn’t it?’ he said ironically.

‘Splendid!’

‘No wonder you get on so well with the natives. You have all the instincts of the primeval savage. You take food for the gross and bestial purpose of appeasing your hunger, and I don’t believe you have the least appreciation for the delicacies of eating as a fine art.’

‘The meat’s getting rather mouldy,’ answered Alec.

He ate notwithstanding with a good appetite. His thoughts went suddenly to Dick who at the hour which corresponded with that which now passed in Africa, was getting ready for one of the pleasant little dinners at the Carlton upon which he prided himself. And then he thought of the noisy bustle of Piccadilly at night, the carriages and ‘buses that streamed to and fro, the crowded pavements, the gaiety of the lights.

‘I don’t know how we’re going to feed everyone to-morrow,’ said Walker. ‘Things will be going pretty bad if we can’t get some grain in from somewhere.’

Alec pushed back his plate.

‘I wouldn’t worry about to-morrow’s dinner if I were you,’ he said, with a low laugh.

‘Why?’ asked Walker.

‘Because I think it’s ten to one that we shall be as dead as doornails before sunrise.’

The two men stared at him silently. Outside, the wind howled grimly, and the rain swept against the side of the tent.

‘Is this one of your little jokes, MacKenzie?’ said Walker at last.

‘You have often observed that I joke with difficulty.’

‘But what’s wrong now?’ asked the doctor quickly.

Alec looked at him and chuckled quietly.

‘You’ll neither of you sleep in your beds to-night. Another sell for the mosquitoes, isn’t it? I propose to break up the camp and start marching in an hour.’

‘I say, it’s a bit thick after a day like this,’ said Walker. ‘We’re all so done up that we shan’t be able to go a mile.’

‘You will have had two hours rest.’

Adamson rose heavily to his feet. He meditated for an appreciable time.

‘Some of those fellows who are wounded can’t possibly be moved,’ he said.

‘They must.’

‘I won’t answer for their lives.’

‘We must take the risk. Our only chance is to make a bold dash for it, and we can’t leave the wounded here.’

‘I suppose there’s going to be a deuce of a row,’ said Walker.

‘There is.’

‘Your companions seldom have a chance to complain of the monotony of their existence,’ said Walker, grimly. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘At this moment I’m going to fill my pipe.’

With a whimsical smile, Alec took his pipe from his pocket, knocked it out on his heel, filled and lit it. The doctor and Walker digested the information he had given them. It was Walker who spoke first.

‘I gather from the general amiability of your demeanour that we’re in rather a tight place.’

‘Tighter than any of your patent-leather boots, my friend.’

Walker moved uncomfortably in his chair. He no longer felt sleepy. A cold shiver ran down his spine.

‘Have we any chance of getting through?’ he asked gravely.

It seemed to him that Alec paused an unconscionable time before he answered.

‘There’s always a chance,’ he said.

‘I suppose we’re going to do a bit more fighting?’

‘We are.’

Walker yawned loudly.

‘Well, at all events there’s some comfort in that. If I am going to be done out of my night’s rest, I should like to take it out of someone.’

Alec looked at him with approval. That was the frame of mind that pleased him. When he spoke again there was in his voice a peculiar charm that perhaps in part accounted for the power he had over his fellows. It inspired an extraordinary belief in him, so that anyone would have followed him cheerfully to certain death. And though his words were few and bald, he was so unaccustomed to take others into his confidence, that when he did so, ever so little, and in that tone, it seemed that he was putting his hearers under a singular obligation.

‘If things turn out all right, we shall come near finishing the job, and there won’t be much more slave-trading in this part of Africa.’

‘And if things don’t turn out all right?’

‘Why then, I’m afraid the tea tables of Mayfair will be deprived of your scintillating repartee for ever.’

Walker looked down at the ground. Strange thoughts ran through his head, and when he looked up again, with a shrug of the shoulders, there was a queer look in his eyes.

‘Well, I’ve not had a bad time in my life,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve loved a little, and I’ve worked and played. I’ve heard some decent music, I’ve looked at nice pictures, and I’ve read some thundering fine books. If I can only account for a few more of those damned scoundrels before I die, I shouldn’t think I had much to complain of.’

Alec smiled, but did not answer. A silence fell upon them. Walker’s words brought to Alec the recollection of what had caused the trouble which now threatened them, and his lips tightened. A dark frown settled between his eyes.

‘Well, I suppose I’d better go and get things straight,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll do what I can with those fellows and trust to Providence that they’ll stand the jolting.’

‘What about Perkins?’ asked Alec.

‘Lord knows! I’ll try and keep him quiet with choral.’

‘You needn’t say anything about our striking camp. I don’t propose that anyone should know till a quarter of an hour before we start.’

‘But that won’t give them time.’

‘I’ve trained them often enough to get on the march quickly,’ answered Alec, with a curtness that allowed no rejoinder.

The doctor turned to go, and at the same moment George Allerton appeared.

XI

George Allerton had changed since he left England. The flesh had fallen away from his bones, and his face was sallow. He had not stood the climate well. His expression had changed too, for there was a singular querulousness about his mouth, and his eyes were shifty and cunning. He had lost his good looks.

‘Can I come in?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ answered Alec, and then turning to the doctor: ‘You might stay a moment, will you?’

‘Certainly.’

Adamson stood where he was, with his back to the flap that closed the tent. Alec looked up quickly.

‘Didn’t Selim tell you I wanted to speak to you?’

‘That’s why I’ve come,’ answered George.

‘You’ve taken your time about it.’

‘I say, could you give me a drink of brandy? I’m awfully done up.’

‘There’s no brandy left,’ answered Alec.

‘Hasn’t the doctor got some?’

‘No.’

There was a long pause. Adamson and Walker did not know what was the matter; but they saw that there was something serious. They had never seen Alec so cold, and the doctor, who knew him well, saw that he was very angry. Alec lifted his eyes again and looked at George slowly.

‘Do you know anything about the death of that Turkana woman?’ he asked abruptly.

George did not answer immediately.

‘No. How should I?’ he said presently.

‘Come now, you must know something about it. Last Tuesday you came into camp and said the Turkana were very much excited.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ answered George, unwillingly

‘Well?’

‘I’m not very clear about it. The woman had been shot, hadn’t she? One of the station boys had been playing the fool with her, and he seems to have shot her.’

‘Have you made no attempt to find out which of the station boys it was?’

‘I haven’t had time,’ said George, in a surly way. ‘We’ve all been worked off our legs during the last three days.’

‘Do you suspect no one?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Think a moment.’

‘The only man who might have done it is that big scoundrel we got on the coast, the Swahili beggar with one ear.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘He’s been making an awful nuisance of himself, and I know he’s been running after the women.’

Alec did not take his eyes off George. Walker saw what was coming and looked down at the ground.

‘You’ll be surprised to hear that when the woman was found she wasn’t dead.’

George did not move, but his cheeks became if possible more haggard. He was horribly frightened.

‘She didn’t die for nearly an hour.’

There was a very short silence. It seemed to George that they must hear the furious beating of his heart.

‘Was she able to say anything?’

‘She said you’d shot her,’

‘What a damned lie!’

‘It appears that you were — playing the fool with her. I don’t know why you quarrelled. You took out your revolver and fired point blank.’

George laughed.

‘It’s just like these beastly niggers to tell a stupid lie like that. You wouldn’t believe them rather than me, would you? After all, my word’s worth more than theirs.’

Alec quietly took from his pocket the case of an exploded cartridge. It could only have fitted a revolver.

‘This was found about two yards from the body and was brought to me this evening.’

‘I don’t know what that proves.’

‘You know just as well as I do that none of the natives has a revolver. Beside ourselves only one or two of the servants have them.’

George took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. His throat was horribly dry, and he could hardly breathe.

‘Will you give me your revolver,’ said Alec, quietly.

‘I haven’t got it. I lost it this afternoon when we made that sortie. I didn’t tell you as I thought you’d get in a wax about it.’

‘I saw you cleaning it less than an hour ago,’ said Alec, gravely.

George shrugged his shoulders pettishly.

‘Perhaps it’s in my tent. I’ll go and see.’

‘Stop here,’ said Alec sharply.

‘Look here, I’m not going to be ordered about like a dog. You’ve got no right to talk to me like that. I came out here of my own free will, and I won’t let you treat me like a damned nigger.’

‘If you put your hand to your hip-pocket I think you’ll find your revolver there.’

‘I’m not going to give it you,’ said George, his lips white with fear.

‘Do you want me to come and take if from you myself?’

The two men stared at one another for a moment. Then George slowly put his hand to his pocket and took out the revolver. But a sudden impulse seized him. He raised it, quickly aimed at Alec, and fired. Walker was standing near him, and seeing the movement, instinctively beat up the boy’s hand as pulled the trigger. In a moment the doctor had sprung forward and seizing him round the waist, thrown him backwards. The revolver fell from his hand. Alec had not moved.

‘Let me go, damn you!’ cried George, his voice shrill with rage.

‘You need not hold him,’ said Alec.

It was second nature with them all to perform Alec’s commands, and without thinking twice they dropped their hands. George sank cowering into a chair. Walker, bending down, picked up the revolver and gave it to Alec, who silently fitted into an empty chamber the cartridge that had been brought to him.

‘You see that it fits,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you better make a clean breast of it?’

George was utterly cowed. A sob broke from him.

‘Yes, I shot her,’ he said brokenly. ‘She made a row and the devil got into me. I didn’t know what I’d done till she screamed and I saw the blood.’

He cursed himself for being such a fool as to throw the cartridge away. His first thought had been to have all the chambers filled.

‘Do you remember that two months ago I hanged a man to the nearest tree because he’d murdered one of the natives?’

George sprang up in terror, and he began to tremble.

‘You wouldn’t do that to me.’

A wild prayer went up in his heart that mercy might be shown him, and then bitter anger seized him because he had ever come out to that country.

‘You need not be afraid,’ answered Alec coldly. ‘In any case I must preserve the native respect for the white man.’

‘I was half drunk when I saw the woman. I wasn’t responsible for my actions.’

‘In any case the result is that the whole tribe has turned against us.’

The chief was Alec’s friend, and it was he who had sent him the exploded cartridge. The news came to Alec like a thunderclap, for the Turkana were the best part of his fighting force, and he had always placed the utmost reliance on their fidelity. The chief said that he could not hold in his young men, and not only must Alec cease to count upon them, but they would probably insist on attacking him openly. They had stirred up the neighbouring tribes against him and entered into communication with the Arabs. He had been just at the turning point and on the verge of a great success, but now all that had been done during three years was frustrated. The Arabs had seized the opportunity and suddenly assumed the offensive. The unexpectedness of their attack had nearly proved fatal to Alec’s party, and since then they had all had to fight for bare life.

George watched Alec as he stared at the ground.

‘I suppose the whole damned thing’s my fault,’ he muttered.

Alec did not answer directly.

‘I think we may take it for certain that the natives will go over to the slavers to-morrow, and then we shall be attacked on all sides. We can’t hold out against God knows how many thousands. I’ve sent Rogers and Deacon to bring in all the Latukas, but heaven knows if they can arrive in time.’

‘And if they don’t?’

Alec shrugged his shoulders, but did not speak. George’s breathing came hurriedly, and a sob rose to his throat.

‘What are you going to do to me, Alec?’

MacKenzie walked up and down, thinking of the gravity of their position. In a moment he stopped and looked at Walker.

‘I daresay you have some preparations to make,’ he said.

Walker got up.

‘I’ll be off,’ he answered, with a slight smile.

He was glad to go, for it made him ashamed to watch the boy’s humiliation. His own nature was so honest, his loyalty so unbending, that the sight of viciousness affected him with a physical repulsion, and he turned away from it as he would have done from the sight of some hideous ulcer. The doctor surmised that his presence too was undesired. Murmuring that he had no time to lose if he wanted to get his patients ready for a night march, he followed Walker out of the tent. George breathed more freely when he was alone with Alec.

‘I’m sorry I did that silly thing just now,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t hit you.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ smiled Alec. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘I lost my head. I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘You need not trouble about that. In Africa even the strongest of us are apt to lose our balance.’

Alec filled his pipe again, and lighting it, blew heavy clouds of smoke into the damp air. His voice was softer when he spoke.

‘Did you ever know that before we came away I asked Lucy to marry me?’

George did not answer. He stifled a sob, for the recollection of Lucy, the centre of his love and the mainspring of all that was decent in him, transfixed his heart with pain.

‘She asked me to bring you here in the hope that you’d,’ — Alec had some difficulty in expressing himself— ‘do something that would make people forget what happened to your father. She’s very proud of her family. She feels that your good name is — besmirched, and she wanted you to give it a new lustre. I think that is the object she has most at heart in the world. It is as great as her love for you. The plan hasn’t been much of a success, has it?’

‘She ought to have known that I wasn’t suited for this sort of life,’ answered George, bitterly.

‘I saw very soon that you were weak and irresolute, but I thought I could put some backbone into you. I hoped for her sake to make something of you after all. Your intentions seemed good enough, but you never had the strength to carry them out.’ Alec had been watching the smoke that rose from his pipe, but now he looked at George. ‘I’m sorry if I seem to be preaching at you.’

‘Oh, do you think I care what anyone says to me now?’

Alec went on very gravely, but not unkindly.

‘Then I found you were drinking. I told you that no man could stand liquor in this country, and you gave me your word of honour that you wouldn’t touch it again.’

‘Yes, I broke it. I couldn’t help myself. The temptation was too strong.’

‘When we came to the station at Munias, and I was laid up with fever, you and Macinnery took the opportunity to get into an ugly scrape with some native women. You knew that that was the one thing I would not stand. I have nothing to do with morality — everyone is free in these things to do as he chooses — but I do know that nothing causes more trouble with the natives, and I’ve made definite rules on the subject. If the culprits are Swahilis I flog them, and if they’re whites I send them back to the coast. That’s what I ought to have done with you, but it would have broken Lucy’s heart.’

‘It was Macinnery’s fault.’

‘It’s because I thought Macinnery was chiefly to blame that I sent him back alone. I determined to give you another chance. It struck me that the feeling of authority might have some influence on you, and so, when I had to build a boma to guard the road down to the coast, I put the chief part of the stores in your care and left you in command. I need not remind you what happened there.’

George looked down at the floor sulkily, and in default of excuses, kept silent. He felt a sullen resentment as he remembered Alec’s anger. He had never seen him give way before or since to such a furious wrath, and he had seen Alec hold himself with all his strength so that he might not thrash him. Alec remembered too, and his voice once more grew hard and cold.

‘I came to the conclusion that it was hopeless. You seemed to me rotten through and through.’

‘Like my father before me,’ sneered George, with a little laugh.

‘I couldn’t believe a word you said. You were idle and selfish. Above all you were loathsomely, wantonly cruel. I was aghast when I heard of the fiendish cruelty with which you’d used the wretched men whom I left with you. If I hadn’t returned in the nick of time, they’d have killed you and looted all the stores.’

‘It would have upset you to lose the stores, wouldn’t it?’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘You always believed their stories rather than mine.’

‘It was difficult not to believe when a man showed me his back all torn and bleeding, and said you’d had him flogged because he didn’t cook your food to your satisfaction.’

‘I did it in a moment of temper. A man’s not responsible for what he does when he’s got fever.’

‘It was too late to send you to the coast then, and I was obliged to take you on. And now the end has come. Your murder of that woman has put us all in deadly peril. Already to your charge lie the deaths of Richardson and Thompson and about twenty natives. We’re as near destruction as we can possibly be; and if we’re killed, to-morrow the one tribe that has remained friendly will be attacked and their villages burnt. Men, women and children, will be put to the sword or sold into slavery.’

George seemed at last to see the abyss into which he was plunged, and his resentment gave way to despair.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘We’re far away from the coast, and I must take the law into my own hands.’

‘You’re not going to kill me?’ gasped George.

‘No,’ said Alec scornfully.

Alec sat on the little camp table so that he might be quite near George.

‘Are you fond of Lucy?’ he asked gently.

George broke into a sob.

‘O God, you know I am,’ he cried piteously. ‘Why do you remind me of her? I’ve made a rotten mess of everything, and I’m better out of the way. But think of the disgrace of it. It’ll kill Lucy. And she was hoping I’d do so much.’

He hid his face in his hands and sobbed broken-heartedly. Alec, strangely touched, put his hand on his shoulder.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent Deacon and Rogers to bring up as many Latukas as they can. If we can tide over to-morrow we may be able to inflict a crushing blow on the Arabs; but we must seize the ford over the river. The Arabs are holding it and our only chance is to make a sudden attack on them to-night before the natives join them. We shall be enormously outnumbered, but we may do some damage if we take them by surprise, and if we can capture the ford, Rogers and Deacon will be able to get across to us. We’ve lost Richardson and Thompson. Perkins is down with fever. That reduces the whites to Walker, and the doctor, Condamine, Mason, you and myself. I can trust the Swahilis, but they’re the only natives I can trust. Now, I’m going to start marching straight for the ford. The Arabs will come out of their stockade in order to cut us off. In the darkness I mean to slip away with the rest of the white men and the Swahilis, I’ve found a short cut by which I can take them in the rear. They’ll attack just as the ford is reached, and I shall fall upon them. Do you see?’

George nodded, but he did not understand at what Alec was driving. The words reached his ears vaguely, as though they came from a long way off.

‘I want one white man to lead the Turkana, and that man will run the greatest possible danger. I’d go myself only the Swahilis won’t fight unless I lead them.... Will you take that post?’

The blood rushed to George’s head, and he felt his ears singing.

‘I?’

‘I could order you to go, but the job’s too dangerous for me to force it on anyone. If you refuse I shall call the others together and ask someone to volunteer.’

George did not answer.

‘I won’t hide from you that it means almost certain death. But there’s no other way of saving ourselves. On the other hand, if you show perfect courage at the moment the Arabs attack and the Turkana find we’ve given them the slip, you may escape. If you do, I promise you that nothing shall be said of all that has happened here.’

George sprang to his feet, and once more on his lips flashed the old, frank smile.

‘All right! I’ll do that. And I thank you with all my heart for giving me the chance.’

Alec held out his hand, and he gave a sigh of relief.

‘I’m glad you’ve accepted. Whatever happens you’ll have done one brave action in your life.’

George flushed. He wanted to speak, but hesitated.

‘I should like to ask you a great favour,’ he said at last.

Alec waited for him to go on.

‘You won’t let Lucy know the mess I’ve made of things, will you? Let her think I’ve done all she wanted me to do.’

‘Very well,’ answered Alec gently.

‘Will you give me your word of honour that if I’m killed you won’t say anything that will lead anyone to suspect how I came by my death.’

Alec looked at him silently. It flashed across his mind that it might be necessary under certain circumstances to tell the whole truth. George was greatly moved. He seemed to divine the reason of Alec’s hesitation.

‘I have no right to ask anything of you. Already you’ve done far more for me than I deserved. But it’s for Lucy’s sake that I implore you not to give me away.’

Alec, standing entirely still, uttered the words slowly.

‘I give you my word of honour that whatever happens and in whatever circumstances I find myself placed, not a word shall escape me that could lead Lucy to suppose that you hadn’t been always and in every way upright, brave, and honourable. I will take all the responsibility of your present action.’

‘I’m awfully grateful to you.’

Alec moved at last. The strain of their conversation was become almost intolerable. Alec’s voice became cheerful and brisk.

‘I think there’s nothing more to be said. You must be ready to start in half an hour. Here’s your revolver.’ There was a twinkle in his eyes as he continued: ‘Remember that you’ve discharged one chamber. You’d better put in another cartridge.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’

George nodded and went out. Alec’s face at once lost the lightness which it had assumed a moment before. He knew that he had just done something which might separate him from Lucy for ever. His love for her was now the only thing in the world to him, and he had jeopardised it for that worthless boy. He saw that all sorts of interpretations might be put upon his action, and he should have been free to speak the truth. But even if George had not exacted from him the promise of silence, he could never have spoken a word. He loved Lucy far too deeply to cause her such bitter pain. Whatever happened, she must think that George was a brave man, and had died in the performance of his duty. He knew her well enough to be sure that if death were dreadful, it was more tolerable than dishonour. He knew how keenly she had felt her disgrace, how it affected her like a personal uncleanness, and he knew that she had placed all her hopes in George. Her brother was rotten to the core, as rotten as her father. How could he tell her that? He was willing to make any sacrifice rather than allow her to have such knowledge. But if ever she knew that he had sent George to his death she would hate him. And if he lost her love he lost everything. He had thought of that before he answered: Lucy could do without love better than without self-respect.

But he had told George that if he had pluck he might get through. Would he show that last virtue of a blackguard — courage?

XII

It was not till six months later that news of Alec MacKenzie’s expedition reached the outer world, and at the same time Lucy received a letter from him in which he told her that her brother was dead. That stormy night had been fatal to the light-hearted Walker and to George Allerton, but success had rewarded Alec’s desperate boldness, and a blow had been inflicted on the slavers which subsequent events proved to be crushing. Alec’s letter was grave and tender. He knew the extreme grief he must inflict upon Lucy, and he knew that words could not assuage it. It seemed to him that the only consolation he could offer was that the life which was so precious to her had been given for a worthy cause. Now that George had made up in the only way possible for the misfortune his criminal folly had brought upon them, Alec was determined to put out of his mind all that had gone before. It was right that the weakness which had ruined him should be forgotten, and Alec could dwell honestly on the boy’s charm of manner, and on his passionate love for his sister.

The months followed one another, the dry season gave place to the wet, and at length Alec was able to say that the result he had striven for was achieved. Success rewarded his long efforts, and it was worth the time, the money, and the lives that it had cost. The slavers were driven out of a territory larger than the United Kingdom, treaties were signed with chiefs who had hitherto been independent, by which they accepted the suzerainty of Great Britain; and only one step remained, that the government should take over the rights of the company which had been given powers to open up the country, and annex the conquered district to the empire. It was to this that MacKenzie now set himself; and he entered into communication with the directors of the company and with the commissioner at Nairobi.

But it seemed as if the fates would snatch from him all enjoyment of the laurels he had won, for on their way towards Nairobi, Alec and Dr. Adamson were attacked by blackwater fever. For weeks Alec lay at the point of death. His fine constitution seemed to break at last, and he himself thought that the end was come. Condamine, one of the company’s agents, took command of the party and received Alec’s final instructions. Alec lay in his camp bed, with his faithful Swahili boy by his side to brush away the flies, waiting for the end. He would have given much to live till all his designs were accomplished, but that apparently was not to be. There was only one thing that troubled him. Would the government let the splendid gift he offered slip through their fingers? Now was the time to take formal possession of the territories which he had pacified: the prestige of the whites was at its height, and there were no difficulties to be surmounted. He impressed upon Condamine, whom he wished to be appointed sub-commissioner under a chief at Nairobi, the importance of making all this clear to the authorities. The post he suggested would have been pressed upon himself, but he had no taste for official restrictions, and his part of the work was done. So far as this went, his death was of little consequence.

And then he thought of Lucy. He wondered if she would understand what he had done. He could acknowledge now that she had cause to be proud of him. She would be sorry for his death. He did not think that she loved him, he did not expect it; but he was glad to have loved her, and he wished he could have told her how much the thought of her had been to him during these years of difficulty. It was very hard that he might not see her once more in order to thank her for all she had been to him. She had given his life a beauty it could never have had, and for this he was very grateful. But the secret of George’s death would die with him; for Walker was dead, and Adamson, the only man left who could throw light upon it, might be relied on to hold his tongue. And Alec, losing strength each day, thought that perhaps it were well if he died.

But Condamine could not bear to see his chief thus perish. For four years that man had led them, and only his companions knew his worth. To his acquaintance he might seem hard and unsympathetic, he might repel by his taciturnity and anger by his sternness; but his comrades knew how eminent were his qualities. It was impossible for anyone to live with him continually without being conquered by his greatness. If his power with the natives was unparalleled, it was because they had taken his measure and found him sterling. And he had bound the whites to him by ties from which they could not escape. He asked no one to do anything which he was not willing to do himself. If any plan of his failed he took the failure upon himself; if it succeeded he attributed the success to those who had carried out his orders. If he demanded courage and endurance from others it was easy, since he showed them the way by his own example to be strong and brave. His honesty, justice, and forbearance made all who came in contact with him ashamed of their own weakness. They knew the unselfishness which considered the comfort of the meanest porter before his own; and his tenderness to those who were ill knew no bounds.

The Swahilis assumed an unaccustomed silence, and the busy, noisy camp was like a death chamber. When Alec’s boy told them that his master grew each day weaker, they went about with tears running down their cheeks, and they would have wailed aloud, but that they knew he must not be disturbed. It seemed to Condamine that there was but one chance, and that was to hurry down, with forced marches, to the nearest station. There they would find a medical missionary to look after him and the comforts of civilisation which in the forest they so woefully lacked.

Alec was delirious when they moved him. It was fortunate that he could not be told of Adamson’s death, which had taken place three days before. The good, strong Scotchman had succumbed at last to the African climate; and on this, his third journey, having surmounted all the perils that had surrounded him for so long, almost on the threshold of home, he had sunk and died. He was buried at the foot of a great tree, far down so that the jackals might not find him, and Condamine with a shaking voice read over him the burial service from an English prayerbook.

It seemed a miracle that Alec survived the exhaustion of the long tramp. He was jolted along elephant paths that led through dense bush, up stony hills and down again to the beds of dried-up rivers. Each time Condamine looked at the pale, wan man who lay in the litter, it was with a horrible fear that he would be dead. They began marching before sunrise, swiftly, to cover as much distance as was possible before the sun grew hot; they marched again towards sunset when a grateful coolness refreshed the weary patient. They passed through interminable forests, where the majestic trees sheltered under their foliage a wealth of graceful, tender plants: from trunk and branch swung all manner of creepers, which bound the forest giants in fantastic bonds. They forded broad streams, with exquisite care lest the sick man should come to hurt; they tramped through desolate marshes where the ground sunk under their feet. And at last they reached the station. Alec was still alive.

For weeks the tender skill of the medical missionary and the loving kindness of his wife wrestled with death, and at length Alec was out of danger. His convalescence was very slow, and it looked often as though he would never entirely get back his health. But as soon as his mind regained its old activity, he resumed direction of the affairs which were so near his heart; and no sooner was his strength equal to it than he insisted on being moved to Nairobi, where he was in touch with civilisation, and, through the commissioner, could influence a supine government to accept the precious gift he offered. All this took many months, months of anxious waiting, months of bitter disappointment; but at length everything was done: the worthy Condamine was given the appointment that Alec had desired and set out once more for the interior; Great Britain took possession of the broad lands which Alec, by his skill, tact, perseverance and strength, had wrested from barbarism. His work was finished, and he could return to England.

Public attention had been called at last to the greatness of his achievement, to the dangers he had run and the difficulties he had encountered; and before he sailed, he learned that the papers were ringing with his praise. A batch of cablegrams reached him, including one from Dick Lomas and one from Robert Boulger, congratulating him on his success. Two foreign potentates, through their consuls at Mombassa, bestowed decorations upon him; scientific bodies of all countries conferred on him the distinctions which were in their power to give; chambers of commerce passed resolutions expressing their appreciation of his services; publishers telegraphed offers for the book which they surmised he would write; newspaper correspondents came to him for a preliminary account of his travels. Alec smiled grimly when he read that an Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs had referred to him in a debate with honeyed words. No such enthusiasm had been aroused in England since Stanley returned from the journey which he afterwards described in Darkest Africa. When he left Mombassa the residents gave a dinner in his honour, and everyone who had the chance jumped up on his legs and made a speech. In short, after many years during which Alec’s endeavours had been coldly regarded, when the government had been inclined to look upon him as a busybody, the tide turned; and he was in process of being made a national hero.

Alec made up his mind to come home the whole way by sea, thinking that the rest of the voyage would give his constitution a chance to get the better of the ills which still troubled him; and at Gibraltar he received a letter from Dick. One had reached him at Suez; but that was mainly occupied with congratulations, and there was a tenderness due to the fear that Alec had hardly yet recovered from his dangerous illness, which made it, though touching to Alec, not so characteristic as the second.

My Dear Alec:

I am delighted that you will return in the nick of time for the London season. You will put the noses of the Christian Scientists out of joint, and the New Theologians will argue no more in the columns of the halfpenny papers. For you are going to be the lion of the season. Comb your mane and have it neatly curled and scented, for we do not like our lions unkempt; and learn how to flap your tail; be sure you cultivate a proper roar because we expect to shiver delightfully in our shoes at the sight of you, and young ladies are already practising how to swoon with awe in your presence. We have come to the conclusion that you are a hero, and I, your humble servant, shine already with reflected glory because for twenty years I have had the privilege of your acquaintance. Duchesses, my dear boy, duchesses with strawberry leaves around their snowy brows, (like the French grocer, I make a point of never believing a duchess is more than thirty,) ask me to tea so that they may hear me prattle of your childhood’s happy days, and I have promised to bring you to lunch with them, Tompkinson, whom you once kicked at Eton, has written an article in Blackwood on the beauty of your character; by which I take it that the hardness of your boot has been a lasting, memory to him. All your friends are proud of you, and we go about giving the uninitiated to understand that nothing of all this would have happened except for our encouragement. You will be surprised to learn how many people are anxious to reward you for your services to the empire by asking you to dinner. So far as I am concerned, I am smiling in my sleeve; for I alone know what an exceedingly disagreeable person you are. You are not a hero in the least, but a pig-headed beast who conquers kingdoms to annoy quiet, self-respecting persons like myself who make a point of minding their own business.

Yours ever affectionately,

Richard Lomas.

Alec smiled when he read the letter. It had struck him that there would be some attempt on his return to make a figure of him, and he much feared that his arrival in Southampton would be followed by an attack of interviewers. He was coming in a slow German ship, and at that moment a P. and O., homeward bound, put in at Gibraltar. By taking it he could reach England one day earlier and give everyone who came to meet him the slip. Leaving his heavy luggage, he got a steward to pack up the things he used on the journey, and in a couple of hours, after an excursion on shore to the offices of the company, found himself installed on the English boat.

But when the great ship entered the English Channel, Alec could scarcely bear his impatience. It would have astonished those who thought him unhuman if they had known the tumultuous emotions that rent his soul. His fellow-passengers never suspected that the bronzed, silent man who sought to make no acquaintance, was the explorer with whose name all Europe was ringing; and it never occurred to them that as he stood in the bow of the ship, straining his eyes for the first sight of England, his heart was so full that he would not have dared to speak. Each absence had intensified his love for that sea-girt land, and his eyes filled with tears of longing as he thought that soon now he would see it once more. He loved the murky waters of the English Channel because they bathed its shores, and he loved the strong west wind. The west wind seemed to him the English wind; it was the trusty wind of seafaring men, and he lifted his face to taste its salt buoyancy. He could not think of the white cliffs of England without a deep emotion; and when they passed the English ships, tramps outward bound or stout brigantines driving before the wind with their spreading sails, he saw the three-deckers of Trafalgar and the proud galleons of the Elizabethans. He felt a personal pride in those dead adventurers who were spiritual ancestors of his, and he was proud to be an Englishman because Frobisher and Effingham were English, and Drake and Raleigh and the glorious Nelson.

And then his pride in the great empire which had sprung from that small island, a greater Rome in a greater world, dissolved into love as his wandering thoughts took him to green meadows and rippling streams. Now at last he need no longer keep so tight a rein upon his fancy, but could allow it to wander at will; and he thought of the green hedgerows and the pompous elm trees; he thought of the lovely wayside cottages with their simple flowers and of the winding roads that were so good to walk on. He was breathing the English air now, and his spirit was uplifted. He loved the grey soft mists of low-lying country, and he loved the smell of the heather as he stalked across the moorland. There was no river he knew that equalled the kindly Thames, with the fair trees of its banks and its quiet backwaters, where white swans gently moved amid the waterlilies. His thoughts went to Oxford, with its spires, bathed in a violet haze, and in imagination he sat in the old garden of his college, so carefully tended, so great with memories of the past. And he thought of London. There was a subtle beauty in its hurrying crowds, and there was beauty in the thronged traffic of its river: the streets had that indefinable hue which is the colour of London, and the sky had the gold and the purple of an Italian brocade. Now in Piccadilly Circus, around the fountain sat the women who sold flowers; and the gaiety of their baskets, rich with roses and daffodils and tulips, yellow and red, mingled with the sombre tones of the houses, the dingy gaudiness of ‘buses and the sunny greyness of the sky.

At last his thoughts went back to the outward voyage. George Allerton was with him then, and now he was alone. He had received no letter from Lucy since he wrote to tell her that George was dead. He understood her silence. But when he thought of George, his heart was bitter against fate because that young life had been so pitifully wasted. He remembered so well the eagerness with which he had sought to bind George to him, his desire to gain the boy’s affection; and he remembered the dismay with which he learned that he was worthless. The frank smile, the open countenance, the engaging eyes, meant nothing; the boy was truthless, crooked of nature, weak. Alec remembered how, refusing to acknowledge the faults that were so plain, he blamed the difficulty of his own nature; and, when it was impossible to overlook them, his earnest efforts to get the better of them. But the effect of Africa was too strong. Alec had seen many men lose their heads under the influence of that climate. The feeling of an authority that seemed so little limited, over a race that was manifestly inferior, the subtle magic of the hot sunshine, the vastness, the remoteness from civilisation, were very apt to throw a man off his balance. The French had coined a name for the distemper and called it folie d’Afrique. Men seemed to go mad from a sense of power, to lose all the restraints which had kept them in the way of righteousness. It needed a strong head or a strong morality to avoid the danger, and George had neither. He succumbed. He lost all sense of shame, and there was no power to hold him. And it was more hopeless because nothing could keep him from drinking. When Macinnery had been dismissed for breaking Alec’s most stringent law, things, notwithstanding George’s promise of amendment, had only gone from bad to worse. Alec remembered how he had come back to the camp in which he had left George, to find the men mutinous, most of them on the point of deserting, and George drunk. He had flown then into such a rage that he could not control himself. He was ashamed to think of it. He had seized George by the shoulders and shaken him, shaken him as though he were a rat; and it was with difficulty that he prevented himself from thrashing him with his own hands.

And at last had come the final madness and the brutal murder. Alec set his mind to consider once more those hazardous days during which by George’s folly they had been on the brink of destruction. George had met his death on that desperate march to the ford, and lacking courage, had died miserably. Alec threw back his head with a curious movement.

‘I was right in all I did,’ he muttered.

George deserved to die, and he was unworthy to be lamented. And yet, at that moment, when he was approaching the shores which George, too, perhaps, had loved, Alec’s heart was softened. He sighed deeply. It was fate. If George had inherited the wealth which he might have counted on, if his father had escaped that cruel end, he might have gone through life happily enough. He would have done no differently from his fellows. With the safeguards about him of a civilised state, his irresolution would have prevented him from going astray; and he would have been a decent country gentleman — selfish, weak, and insignificant perhaps, but not remarkably worse than his fellows — and when he died he might have been mourned by a loving wife and fond children.

Now he lay on the borders of an African swamp, unsepulchred, unwept; and Alec had to face Lucy, with the story in his heart that he had sworn on his honour not to tell.

XIII

Alec’s first visit was to Lucy. No one knew that he had arrived, and after changing his clothes at the rooms in Pall Mall that he had taken for the summer, he walked to Charles Street. His heart leaped as he strolled up the hill of St. James Street, bright by a fortunate chance with the sunshine of a summer day; and he rejoiced in the gaiety of the well-dressed youths who sauntered down, bound for one or other of the clubs, taking off their hats with a rapid smile of recognition to charming women who sat in victorias or in electric cars. There was an air of opulence in the broad street, of a civilisation refined without brutality, which was very grateful to his eyes accustomed for so long to the wilderness of Africa.

The gods were favourable to his wishes that day, for Lucy was at home; she sat in the drawing-room, by the window, reading a novel. At her side were masses of flowers, and his first glimpse of her was against a great bowl of roses. The servant announced his name, and she sprang up with a cry. She flushed with excitement, and then the blood fled from her cheeks, and she became extraordinarily pale. Alec noticed that she was whiter and thinner than when last he had seen her; but she was more beautiful.

‘I didn’t expect you so soon,’ she faltered.

And then unaccountably tears came to her eyes. Falling back into her chair, she hid her face. Her heart began to beat painfully.

‘You must forgive me,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I can’t help being very silly.’

For days Lucy had lived in an agony of terror, fearing this meeting, and now it had come upon her unexpectedly. More than four years had passed since last they had seen one another, and they had been years of anxiety and distress. She was certain that she had changed, and looking with pitiful dread in the glass, she told herself that she was pale and dull. She was nearly thirty. There were lines about her eyes, and her mouth had a bitter droop. She had no mercy on herself. She would not minimise the ravages of time, and with a brutal frankness insisted on seeing herself as she might be in ten years, when an increasing leanness, emphasising the lines and increasing the prominence of her features, made her still more haggard. She was seized with utter dismay. He might have ceased to love her. His life had been so full, occupied with strenuous adventures, while hers had been used up in waiting, only in waiting. It was natural enough that the strength of her passion should only have increased, but it was natural too that his should have vanished before a more urgent preoccupation. And what had she to offer him now? She turned away from the glass because her tears blurred the image it presented; and if she looked forward to the first meeting with vehement eagerness, it was also with sickening dread.

And now she was so troubled that she could not adopt the attitude of civil friendliness which she had intended in order to show him that she made no claim upon him. She wanted to seem quite collected so that her behaviour should not lead him to think her heart at all affected, but she could only watch his eyes hungrily. She braced herself to restrain a wail of sorrow if she saw his disillusionment. He talked in order to give time for her to master her agitation.

‘I was afraid there would be interviewers and boring people generally to meet me if I came by the boat by which I was expected, so I got into another, and I’ve arrived a day before my time.’

She was calmer now, and though she did not speak, she looked at him with strained attention, hanging on his words.

He was very bronzed, thin after his recent illness, but he looked well and strong. His manner had the noble self-confidence which had delighted her of old, and he spoke with the quiet deliberation she loved. Now and then a faint inflection betrayed his Scottish birth.

‘I felt that I owed my first visit to you. Can you ever forgive me that I have not brought George home to you?’

Lucy gave a sudden gasp. And with bitter self-reproach she realised that in the cruel joy of seeing Alec once more she had forgotten her brother. She was ashamed. It was but eighteen months since he had died, but twelve since the cruel news had reached her, and now, at this moment of all others, she was so absorbed in her love that no other feeling could enter her heart.

She looked down at her dress. Its half-mourning still betokened that she had lost one who was very dear to her, but the black and white was a mockery. She remembered in a flash the stunning grief which Alec’s letter had brought her. It seemed at first that there must be a mistake and that her tears were but part of a hateful dream. It was too monstrously unjust that the fates should have hit upon George. She had already suffered too much. And George was so young. It was very hard that a mere boy should be robbed of the precious jewel which is life. And when she realised that it was really true, her grief knew no bounds. All that she had hoped was come to nought, and now she could only despair. She bitterly regretted that she had ever allowed the boy to go on that fatal expedition, and she blamed herself because it was she who had arranged it. He must have died accusing her of his death. Her father was dead, and George was dead, and she was alone. Now she had only Alec; and then, like some poor stricken beast, her heart went out to him, crying for love, crying for protection. All her strength, the strength on which she had prided herself, was gone; and she felt utterly weak and utterly helpless. And her heart yearned for Alec, and the love which had hitherto been like a strong enduring light, now was a consuming fire.

But Alec’s words brought the recollection of George back to her reproachful heart, and she saw the boy as she was always pleased to remember him, in his flannels, the open shirt displaying his fine white neck, with the Panama hat that suited him so well; and she saw again his pleasant blue eyes and his engaging smile. He was a picture of honest English manhood. There was a sob in her throat, and her voice trembled when she spoke.

‘I told you that if he died a brave man’s death I could ask no more.’

She spoke in so low a tone that Alec could scarcely hear, but his pulse throbbed with pride at her courage. She went on, almost in a whisper.

‘I suppose it was predestined that our family should come to an end in this way. I’m thankful that George so died that his ancestors need have felt no shame for him.’

‘You are very brave.’

She shook her head slowly.

‘No, it’s not courage; it’s despair. Sometimes, when I think what his father was, I’m thankful that George is dead. For at least his end was heroic. He died in a noble cause, in the performance of his duty. Life would have been too hard for him to allow me to regret his end.’

Alec watched her. He foresaw the words that she would say, and he waited for them.

‘I want to thank you for all you did for him,’ she said, steadying her voice.

‘You need not do that,’ he answered, gravely.

She was silent for a moment. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him steadily. Her voice now had regained its usual calmness.

‘I want you to tell me that he did all I could have wished him to do.’

To Alec it seemed that she must notice the delay of his answer. He had not expected that the question would be put to him so abruptly. He had no moral scruples about telling a deliberate lie, but it affected him with a physical distaste. It sickened him like nauseous water.

‘Yes, I think he did.’

‘It’s my only consolation that in the short time there was given to him, he did nothing that was small or mean, and that in everything he was honourable, upright, and just dealing.’

‘Yes, he was all that.’

‘And in his death?’

It seemed to Alec that something caught at his throat. The ordeal was more terrible than he expected.

‘In his death he was without fear.’

Lucy drew a deep breath of relief.

‘Oh, thank God! Thank God! You don’t know how much it means to me to hear all that from your own lips. I feel that in a manner his courage, above all his death, have redeemed my father’s fault. It shows that we’re not rotten to the core, and it gives me back my self-respect. I feel I can look the world in the face once more. I’m infinitely grateful to George. He’s repaid me ten thousand times for all my love, and my care, and my anxiety.’

‘I’m very glad that it is not only grief I have brought you. I was afraid you would hate me.’

Lucy blushed, and there was a new light in her eyes. It seemed that on a sudden she had cast away the load of her unhappiness.

‘No, I could never do that.’

At that moment they heard the sound of a carriage stopping at the door.

‘There’s Aunt Alice,’ said Lucy. ‘She’s been lunching out.’

‘Then let me go,’ said Alec. ‘You must forgive me, but I feel that I want to see no one else to-day.’

He rose, and she gave him her hand. He held it firmly.

‘You haven’t changed?’

‘Don’t,’ she cried.

She looked away, for once more the tears were coming to her eyes. She tried to laugh.

‘I’m frightfully weak and emotional now. You’ll utterly despise me.’

‘I want to see you again very soon,’ he said.

The words of Ruth came to her mind: Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldst take knowledge of me, and her heart was very full. She smiled in her old charming way.

When he was gone she drew a long breath. It seemed that a new joy was come into her life, and on a sudden she felt a keen pleasure in all the beauty of the world. She turned to the great bowl of flowers which stood on a table by the chair in which she had been sitting, and burying her face in them, voluptuously inhaled their fragrance. She knew that he loved her still.

XIV

The fickle English weather for once belied its reputation, and the whole month of May was warm and fine. It seemed that the springtime brought back Lucy’s youth to her; and, surrendering herself with all her heart to her new happiness, she took a girlish pleasure in the gaieties of the season. Alec had said nothing yet, but she was assured of his love, and she gave herself up to him with all the tender strength of her nature. She was a little overwhelmed at the importance which he seemed to have acquired, but she was very proud as well. The great ones of the earth were eager to do him honour. Papers were full of his praise. And it delighted her because he came to her for protection from lionising friends. She began to go out much more; and with Alec, Dick Lomas, and Mrs. Crowley, went much to the opera and often to the play. They had charming little dinner parties at the Carlton and amusing suppers at the Savoy. Alec did not speak much on these occasions. It pleased him to sit by and listen, with a placid face but smiling eyes, to the nonsense that Dick Lomas and the pretty American talked incessantly. And Lucy watched him. Every day she found something new to interest her in the strong, sunburned face; and sometimes their eyes met: then they smiled quietly. They were very happy.

One evening Dick asked the others to sup with him; and since Alec had a public dinner to attend, and Lucy was going to the play with Lady Kelsey, he took Julia Crowley to the opera. To make an even number he invited Robert Boulger to join them at the Savoy. After brushing his hair with the scrupulous thought his thinning locks compelled, Dick waited in the vestibule for Mrs. Crowley. Presently she came, looking very pretty in a gown of flowered brocade which made her vaguely resemble a shepherdess in an old French picture. With her diamond necklace and a tiara in her dark hair, she looked like a dainty princess playing fantastically at the simple life.

‘I think people are too stupid,’ she broke out, as she joined Dick. ‘I’ve just met a woman who said to me: “Oh, I hear you’re going to America. Do go and call on my sister. She’ll be so glad to see you.” “I shall be delighted,” I said, “but where does your sister live?” “Jonesville, Ohio,” “Good heavens,” I said, “I live in New York, and what should I be doing in Jonesville, Ohio?”’

‘Keep perfectly calm,’ said Dick.

‘I shall not keep calm,’ she answered. ‘I hate to be obviously thought next door to a red Indian by a woman who’s slab-sided and round-shouldered. And I’m sure she has dirty petticoats.’

‘Why?’

‘English women do.’

‘What a monstrous libel!’ cried Dick.

At that moment they saw Lady Kelsey come in with Lucy, and a moment later Alec and Robert Boulger joined them. They went in to supper and sat down.

‘I hate Amelia,’ said Mrs. Crowley emphatically, as she laid her long white gloves by the side of her.

‘I deplore the prejudice with which you regard a very jolly sort of a girl,’ answered Dick.

‘Amelia has everything that I thoroughly object to in a woman. She has no figure, and her legs are much too long, and she doesn’t wear corsets. In the daytime she has a weakness for picture hats, and she can’t say boo to a goose.’

‘Who is Amelia?’ asked Boulger.

‘Amelia is Mr. Lomas’ affianced wife,’ answered the lady, with a provoking glance at him.

‘I didn’t know you were going to be married, Dick,’ said Lady Kelsey, inclined to be a little hurt because nothing had been said to her of this.

‘I’m not,’ he answered. ‘And I’ve never set eyes on Amelia yet. She is an imaginary character that Mrs. Crowley has invented as the sort of woman whom I would marry.’

‘I know Amelia,’ Mrs. Crowley went on. ‘She wears quantities of false hair, and she’ll adore you. She’s so meek and so quiet, and she thinks you such a marvel. But don’t ask me to be nice to Amelia.’

‘My dear lady, Amelia wouldn’t approve of you. She’d think you much too outspoken, and she wouldn’t like your American accent. You must never forget that Amelia is the granddaughter of a baronet.’

‘I shall hold her up to Fleming as an awful warning of the woman whom I won’t let him marry at any price. “If you marry a woman like that, Fleming,” I shall say to him, “I shan’t leave you a penny. It shall all go the University of Pennsylvania.”’

‘If ever it is my good fortune to meet Fleming, I shall have great pleasure in kicking him hard,’ said Dick. ‘I think he’s a most objectionable little beast.’

‘How can you be so absurd? Why, my dear Mr. Lomas, Fleming could take you up in one hand and throw you over a ten-foot wall.’

‘Fleming must be a sportsman,’ said Bobbie, who did not in the least know whom they were talking about.

‘He is,’ answered Mrs. Crowley. ‘He’s been used to the saddle since he was three years old, and I’ve never seen the fence that would make him lift a hair. And he’s the best swimmer at Harvard, and he’s a wonderful shot — I wish you could see him shoot, Mr. MacKenzie — and he’s a dear.’

‘Fleming’s a prig,’ said Dick.

‘I’m afraid you’re too old for Fleming,’ said Mrs. Crowley, looking at Lucy. ‘If it weren’t for that, I’d make him marry you.’

‘Is Fleming your brother, Mrs. Crowley?’ asked Lady Kelsey.

‘No, Fleming’s my son.’

‘But you haven’t got a son,’ retorted the elder lady, much mystified.

‘No, I know I haven’t; but Fleming would have been my son if I’d had one.’

‘You mustn’t mind them, Aunt Alice,’ smiled Lucy gaily. ‘They argue by the hour about Amelia and Fleming, and neither of them exists; but sometimes they go into such details and grow so excited that I really begin to believe in them myself.’

But Mrs. Crowley, though she appeared a light-hearted and thoughtless little person, had much common sense; and when their party was ended and she was giving Dick a lift in her carriage, she showed that, notwithstanding her incessant chatter, her eyes throughout the evening had been well occupied.

‘Did you owe Bobbie a grudge that you asked him to supper?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Good heavens, no. Why?’

‘I hope Fleming won’t be such a donkey as you are when he’s your age.’

‘I’m sure Amelia will be much more polite than you to the amiable, middle-aged gentleman who has the good fortune to be her husband.’

‘You might have noticed that the poor boy was eating his heart out with jealousy and mortification, and Lucy was too much absorbed in Alec to pay the very smallest attention to him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Mrs. Crowley gave him a glance of amused disdain.

‘Haven’t you noticed that Lucy is desperately in love with Mr. MacKenzie, and it doesn’t move her in the least that poor Bobbie has fetched and carried for her for ten years, done everything she deigned to ask, and been generally nice and devoted and charming?’

‘You amaze me,’ said Dick. ‘It never struck me that Lucy was the kind of girl to fall in love with anyone. Poor thing. I’m so sorry.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Alec wouldn’t dream of marrying. He’s not that sort of man.’

‘Nonsense. Every man is a marrying man if a woman really makes up her mind to it.’

‘Don’t say that. You terrify me.’

‘You need not be in the least alarmed,’ answered Mrs. Crowley, coolly, ‘because I shall refuse you.’

‘It’s very kind of you to reassure me,’ he answered, smiling. ‘But all the same I don’t think I’ll risk a proposal.’

‘My dear friend, your only safety is in immediate flight.’

‘Why?’

‘It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence that you’ve been on the verge of proposing to me for the last four years.’

‘Nothing will induce me to be false to Amelia.’

‘I don’t believe that Amelia really loves you.’

‘I never said she did; but I’m sure she’s quite willing to marry me.’

‘I think that’s detestably vain.’

‘Not at all. However old, ugly, and generally undesirable a man is, he’ll find a heap of charming girls who are willing to marry him. Marriage is still the only decent means of livelihood for a really nice woman.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about Amelia; let’s talk about me,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘I don’t think you’re half so interesting.’

‘Then you’d better take Amelia to the play to-morrow night instead of me.’

‘I’m afraid she’s already engaged.’

‘Nothing will induce me to play second fiddle to Amelia.’

‘I’ve taken the seats and ordered an exquisite dinner at the Carlton.’

‘What have you ordered?’

‘Potage bisque.’

Mrs. Crowley made a little face.

‘Sole Normande.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Wild duck.’

‘With an orange salad?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t positively dislike that.’

‘And I’ve ordered a souffle with an ice in the middle of it.’

‘I shan’t come.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re not being really nice to me.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought you kept very well abreast of dramatic art if you insist on marrying everyone who takes you to a theatre,’ he said.

‘I was very nicely brought up,’ she answered demurely, as the carriage stopped at Dick’s door.

She gave him a ravishing smile as he took leave of her. She knew that he was quite prepared to marry her, and she had come to the conclusion that she was willing to have him. Neither much wished to hurry the affair, and each was determined that he would only yield to save the other from a fancied desperation. Their love-making was pursued with a light heart.

At Whitsuntide the friends separated. Alec went up to Scotland to see his house and proposed afterwards to spend a week in Lancashire. He had always taken a keen interest in the colliery which brought him so large an income, and he wanted to examine into certain matters that required his attention. Mrs. Crowley went to Blackstable, where she still had Court Leys, and Dick, in order to satisfy himself that he was not really a day older, set out for Paris. But they all arranged to meet again on the day, immediately after the holidays, which Lady Kelsey, having persuaded Lucy definitely to renounce her life of comparative retirement, had fixed for a dance. It was the first ball she had given for many years, and she meant it to be brilliant. Lady Kelsey had an amiable weakness for good society, and Alec’s presence would add lustre to the occasion. Meanwhile she went with Lucy to her little place on the river, and did not return till two days before the party. They were spent in a turmoil of agitation. Lady Kelsey passed sleepless nights, fearing at one moment that not a soul would appear, and at another that people would come in such numbers that there would not be enough for them to eat. The day arrived.

But then happened an event which none but Alec could in the least have expected; and he, since his return from Africa, had been so taken up with his love for Lucy, that the possibility of it had slipped his memory.

Fergus Macinnery, the man whom three years before he had dismissed ignominiously from his service, found a way to pay off an old score.

Of the people most nearly concerned in the matter, it was Lady Kelsey who had first news of it. The morning papers were brought into her boudoir with her breakfast, and as she poured out her coffee, she ran her eyes lazily down the paragraphs of the Morning Post in which are announced the comings and goings of society. Then she turned to the Daily Mail. Her attention was suddenly arrested. Staring at her, in the most prominent part of the page, was a column of printed matter headed: The Death of Mr. George Allerton. It was a letter, a column long, signed by Fergus Macinnery. Lady Kelsey read it with amazement and dismay. At first she could not follow it, and she read it again; now its sense was clear to her, and she was overcome with horror. In set words, mincing no terms, it accused Alec MacKenzie of sending George Allerton to his death in order to save himself. The words treachery and cowardice were used boldly. The dates were given, and the testimony of natives was adduced.

The letter adverted with scathing sarcasm to the rewards and congratulations which had fallen to MacKenzie as a result of his labours; and ended with a challenge to him to bring an action for criminal libel against the writer. At first the whole thing seemed monstrous to Lady Kelsey, it was shameful, shameful; but in a moment she found there was a leading article on the subject, and then she did not know what to believe. It referred to the letter in no measured terms: the writer observed that prima facie the case was very strong and called upon Alec to reply without delay. Big words were used, and there was much talk of a national scandal. An instant refutation was demanded. Lady Kelsey did not know what on earth to do, and her thoughts flew to the dance, the success of which would certainly be imperilled by these revelations. She must have help at once. This business, if it concerned the world in general, certainly concerned Lucy more than anyone. Ringing for her maid, she told her to get Dick Lomas on the telephone and ask him to come at once. While she was waiting, she heard Lucy come downstairs and knew that she meant to wish her good-morning. She hid the paper hurriedly.

When Lucy came in and kissed her, she said:

‘What is the news this morning?’

‘I don’t think there is any,’ said Lady Kelsey, uneasily. ‘Only the Post has come; we shall really have to change our newsagent.’

She waited with beating heart for Lucy to pursue the subject, but naturally enough the younger woman did not trouble herself. She talked to her aunt of the preparations for the party that evening, and then, saying that she had much to do, left her. She had no sooner gone than Lady Kelsey’s maid came back to say that Lomas was out of town and not expected back till the evening. Distractedly Lady Kelsey sent messages to her nephew and to Mrs. Crowley. She still looked upon Bobbie as Lucy’s future husband, and the little American was Lucy’s greatest friend. They were both found. Boulger had gone down as usual to the city, but in consideration of Lady Kelsey’s urgent request, set out at once to see her.

He had changed little during the last four years, and had still a boyish look on his round, honest face. To Mrs. Crowley he seemed always an embodiment of British philistinism; and if she liked him for his devotion to Lucy, she laughed at him for his stolidity. When he arrived, Mrs. Crowley was already with Lady Kelsey. She had known nothing of the terrible letter, and Lady Kelsey, thinking that perhaps it had escaped him too, went up to him with the Daily Mail in her hand.

‘Have you seen the paper, Bobbie?’ she asked excitedly. ‘What on earth are we to do?’

He nodded.

‘What does Lucy say?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I’ve not let her see it. I told a horrid fib and said the newsagent had forgotten to leave it.’

‘But she must know,’ he answered gravely.

‘Not to-day,’ protested Lady Kelsey. ‘Oh, it’s too dreadful that this should happen to-day of all days. Why couldn’t they wait till to-morrow? After all Lucy’s troubles it seemed as if a little happiness was coming back into her life, and now this dreadful thing happens.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bobbie.

‘What can I do?’ said Lady Kelsey desperately. ‘I can’t put the dance off. I wish I had the courage to write and ask Mr. MacKenzie not to come.’

Bobbie made a slight gesture of impatience. It irritated him that his aunt should harp continually on the subject of this wretched dance. But for all that he tried to reassure her.

‘I don’t think you need be afraid of MacKenzie. He’ll never venture to show his face.’

‘You don’t mean to say you think there’s any truth in the letter?’ exclaimed Mrs. Crowley.

He turned and faced her.

‘I’ve never read anything more convincing in my life.’

Mrs. Crowley looked at him, and he returned her glance steadily.

Of those three it was only Lady Kelsey who did not know that Lucy was deeply in love with Alec MacKenzie.

‘Perhaps you’re inclined to be unjust to him,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

‘We shall see if he has any answer to make,’ he answered coldly. ‘The evening papers are sure to get something out of him. The city is ringing with the story, and he must say something at once.’

‘It’s quite impossible that there should be anything in it,’ said Mrs. Crowley. ‘We all know the circumstances under which George went out with him. It’s inconceivable that he should have sacrificed him as callously as this man’s letter makes out.’

‘We shall see.’

‘You never liked him, Bobbie,’ said Lady Kelsey.

‘I didn’t,’ he answered briefly.

‘I wish I’d never thought of giving this horrid dance,’ she moaned.

Presently, however, they succeeded in calming Lady Kelsey. Though both thought it unwise, they deferred to her wish that everything should be hidden from Lucy till the morrow. Dick Lomas was arriving from Paris that evening, and it would be possible then to take his advice. When at last Mrs. Crowley left the elder woman to her own devices, her thoughts went to Alec. She wondered where he was, and if he already knew that his name was more prominently than ever before the public.

MacKenzie was travelling down from Lancashire. He was not a man who habitually read papers, and it was in fact only by chance that he saw a copy of the Daily Mail. A fellow traveller had with him a number of papers, and offered one of them to Alec. He took it out of mere politeness. His thoughts were otherwise occupied, and he scanned it carelessly. Suddenly he saw the heading which had attracted Lady Kelsey’s attention. He read the letter, and he read the leading article. No one who watched him could have guessed that what he read concerned him so nearly. His face remained impassive. Then, letting the paper fall to the ground, he began to think. Presently he turned to the amiable stranger who had given him the paper, and asked him if he had seen the letter.

‘Awful thing, isn’t it?’ the man said.

Alec fixed upon him his dark, firm eyes. The man seemed an average sort of person, not without intelligence.

‘What do you think of it?’

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘I thought MacKenzie was a great man. I don’t know what he can do now but shoot himself.’

‘Do you think there’s any truth in it?’

‘The letter’s perfectly damning.’

Alec did not answer. In order to break off the conversation he got up and walked into the corridor. He lit a cigar and watched the green fields that fled past them. For two hours he stood motionless. At last he took his seat again, with a shrug of the shoulders, and a scornful smile on his lips.

The stranger was asleep, with his head thrown back and his mouth slightly open. Alec wondered whether his opinion of the affair would be that of the majority. He thought Alec should shoot himself?

‘I can see myself doing it,’ Alec muttered.

XV

A few hours later Lady Kelsey’s dance was in full swing, and to all appearances it was a great success. Many people were there, and everyone seemed to enjoy himself. On the surface, at all events, there was nothing to show that anything had occurred to disturb the evening’s pleasure, and for most of the party the letter in the Daily Mail was no more than a welcome topic of conversation.

Presently Canon Spratte went into the smoking-room. He had on his arm, as was his amiable habit, the prettiest girl at the dance, Grace Vizard, a niece of that Lady Vizard who was a pattern of all the proprieties and a devout member of the Church of Rome. He found that Mrs. Crowley and Robert Boulger were already sitting there, and he greeted them courteously.

‘I really must have a cigarette,’ he said, going up to the table on which were all the necessary things for refreshment.

‘If you press me dreadfully I’ll have one, too,’ said Mrs. Crowley, with a flash of her beautiful teeth.

‘Don’t press her,’ said Bobbie. ‘She’s had six already, and in a moment she’ll be seriously unwell.’

‘Well, I’ll forego the pressing, but not the cigarette.’

Canon Spratte gallantly handed her the box, and gave her a light.

‘It’s against all my principles, you know,’ he smiled.

‘What is the use of principles except to give one an agreeable sensation of wickedness when one doesn’t act up to them?’

The words were hardly out of her mouth when Dick and Lady Kelsey appeared.

‘Dear Mrs. Crowley, you’re as epigrammatic as a dramatist,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you say such things from choice or necessity?’

He had arrived late, and this was the first time she had seen him since they had all gone their ways before Whitsun. He mixed himself a whisky and soda.

‘After all, is there anything you know so thoroughly insufferable as a ball?’ he said, reflectively, as he sipped it with great content.

‘Nothing, if you ask me pointblank,’ said Lady Kelsey, smiling with relief because he took so flippantly the news she had lately poured into his ear. ‘But it’s excessively rude of you to say so.’

‘I don’t mind yours, Lady Kelsey, because I can smoke as much as I please, and keep away from the sex which is technically known as fair.’

Mrs. Crowley felt the remark was directed to her.

‘I’m sure you think us a vastly overrated institution, Mr. Lomas,’ she murmured.

‘I venture to think the world was not created merely to give women an opportunity to wear Paris frocks.’

‘I’m rather pleased to hear you say that.’

‘Why?’ asked Dick, on his guard.

‘We’re all so dreadfully tired of being goddesses. For centuries foolish men have set us up on a pedestal and vowed they were unworthy to touch the hem of our garments. And it is so dull.’

‘What a clever woman you are, Mrs. Crowley. You always say what you don’t mean.’

‘You’re really very rude.’

‘Now that impropriety is out of fashion, rudeness is the only short cut to a reputation for wit.’

Canon Spratte did not like Dick. He thought he talked too much. It was fortunately easy to change the conversation.

‘Unlike Mr. Lomas, I thoroughly enjoy a dance,’ he said, turning to Lady Kelsey. ‘My tastes are ingenuous, and I can only hope you’ve enjoyed your evening as much as your guests.’

‘I?’ cried Lady Kelsey. ‘I’ve been suffering agonies.’ They all knew to what she referred, and the remark gave Boulger an opportunity to speak to Dick Lomas.

‘I suppose you saw the Mail this morning?’ he asked.

‘I never read the papers except in August,’ answered Dick drily.

‘When there’s nothing in them?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.

‘Pardon me, I am an eager student of the sea-serpent and of the giant gooseberry.’

‘I should like to kick that man,’ said Bobbie, indignantly.

Dick smiled.

‘My dear chap, Alec is a hardy Scot and bigger than you; I really shouldn’t advise you to try.’

‘Of course you’ve heard all about this business?’ said Canon Spratte.

‘I’ve only just arrived from Paris. I knew nothing of it till Lady Kelsey told me.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think at all; I know there’s not a word of truth in it. Since Alec arrived at Mombassa, he’s been acclaimed by everyone, private and public, who had any right to an opinion. Of course it couldn’t last. There was bound to be a reaction.’

‘Do you know anything of this man Macinnery?’ asked Boulger.

‘It so happens that I do. Alec found him half starving at Mombassa, and took him solely out of charity. But he was a worthless rascal and had to be sent back.’

‘He seems to me to give ample proof for every word he says,’ retorted Bobbie.

Dick shrugged his shoulders scornfully.

‘As I’ve already explained to Lady Kelsey, whenever an explorer comes home there’s someone to tell nasty stories about him. People forget that kid gloves are not much use in a tropical forest, and they grow very indignant when they hear that a man has used a little brute force to make himself respected.’

‘All that’s beside the point,’ said Boulger, impatiently. ‘MacKenzie sent poor George into a confounded trap to save his own dirty skin.’

‘Poor Lucy!’ moaned Lady Kelsey. ‘First her father died....’

‘You’re not going to count that as an overwhelming misfortune?’ Dick interrupted. ‘We were unanimous in describing that gentleman’s demise as an uncommon happy release.’

‘I was engaged to dine with him this evening,’ said Bobbie, pursuing his own bitter reflections. ‘I wired to say I had a headache and couldn’t come.’

‘What will he think if he sees you here?’ cried Lady Kelsey.

‘He can think what he likes.’

Canon Spratte felt that it was needful now to put in the decisive word which he always expected from himself. He rubbed his hands blandly.

‘In this matter I must say I agree entirely with our friend Bobbie. I read the letter with the utmost care, and I could see no loophole of escape. Until Mr. MacKenzie gives a definite answer I can hardly help looking upon him as nothing less than a murderer. In these things I feel that one should have the courage of one’s opinions. I saw him in Piccadilly this evening, and I cut him dead. Nothing will induce me to shake hands with a man on whom rests so serious an accusation.’

‘I hope to goodness he doesn’t come,’ said Lady Kelsey.

Canon Spratte looked at his watch and gave her a reassuring smile.

‘I think you may feel quite safe. It’s really growing very late.’

‘You say that Lucy doesn’t know anything about this?’ asked Dick.

‘No,’ said Lady Kelsey. ‘I wanted to give her this evening’s enjoyment unalloyed.’

Dick shrugged his shoulders again. He did not understand how Lady Kelsey expected no suggestion to reach Lucy of a matter which seemed a common topic of conversation. The pause which followed Lady Kelsey’s words was not broken when Lucy herself appeared. She was accompanied by a spruce young man, to whom she turned with a smile.

‘I thought we should find your partner here.’

He went to Grace Vizard, and claiming her for the dance that was about to begin, took her away. Lucy went up to Lady Kelsey and leaned over the chair in which she sat.

‘Are you growing very tired, my aunt?’ she asked kindly.

‘I can rest myself till supper time. I don’t think anyone else will come now.’

‘Have you forgotten Mr. MacKenzie?’

Lady Kelsey looked up quickly, but did not reply. Lucy put her hand gently on her aunt’s shoulder.

‘My dear, it was charming of you to hide the paper from me this morning. But it wasn’t very wise.’

‘Did you see that letter?’ cried Lady Kelsey. ‘I so wanted you not to till to-morrow.’

‘Mr. MacKenzie very rightly thought I should know at once what was said about him and my brother. He sent me the paper himself this evening.’

‘Did he write to you?’ asked Dick.

‘No, he merely scribbled on a card: I think you should read this.’

No one answered. Lucy turned and faced them; her cheeks were pale, but she was very calm. She looked gravely at Robert Boulger, waiting for him to say what she knew was in his mind, so that she might express at once her utter disbelief in the charges that were brought against Alec. But he did not speak, and she was obliged to utter her defiant words without provocation.

‘He thought it unnecessary to assure me that he hadn’t betrayed the trust I put in him.’

‘Do you mean to say the letter left any doubt in your mind?’ said Boulger.

‘Why on earth should I believe the unsupported words of a subordinate who was dismissed for misbehaviour?’

‘For my part, I can only say that I never read anything more convincing in my life.’

‘I could hardly believe him guilty of such a crime if he confessed it with his own lips.’

Bobbie shrugged his shoulders. It was only with difficulty that he held back the cruel words that were on his lips. But as if Lucy read his thoughts, her cheeks flushed.

‘I think it’s infamous that you should all be ready to believe the worst,’ she said hotly, in a low voice that trembled with indignant anger. ‘You’re all of you so petty, so mean, that you welcome the chance of spattering with mud a man who is so infinitely above you. You’ve not given him a chance to defend himself.’

Bobbie turned very pale. Lucy had never spoken to him in such a way before, and wrath flamed up in his heart, wrath mixed with hopeless love. He paused for a moment to command himself.

‘You don’t know apparently that interviewers went to him from the evening papers, and he refused to speak.’

‘He has never consented to be interviewed. Why should you expect him now to break his rule?’

Bobbie was about to answer, when a sudden look of dismay on Lady Kelsey’s face stopped him. He turned round and saw MacKenzie standing at the door. He came forward with a smile, holding out his hand, and addressed himself to Lady Kelsey.

‘I thought I should find you here,’ he said.

He was perfectly collected. He glanced around the room with a smile of quiet amusement. A certain embarrassment seized the little party, and Lady Kelsey, as she shook hands with him, was at a loss for words.

‘How do you do?’ she faltered. ‘We’ve just been talking of you.’

‘Really?’

The twinkle in his eyes caused her to lose the remainder of her self-possession, and she turned scarlet.

‘It’s so late, we were afraid you wouldn’t come. I should have been dreadfully disappointed.’

‘It’s very kind of you to say so. I’ve been at the Travellers, reading various appreciations of my character.’

A hurried look of alarm crossed Lady Kelsey’s good-tempered face.

‘Oh, I heard there was something about you in the papers,’ she answered.

‘There’s a good deal. I really had no idea the world was so interested in me.’

‘It’s charming of you to come here to-night,’ the good lady smiled, beginning to feel more at ease. ‘I’m sure you hate dances.’

‘Oh, no, they interest me enormously. I remember, an African king once gave a dance in my honour. Four thousand warriors in war-paint. I assure you it was a most impressive sight.’

‘My dear fellow,’ Dick chuckled, ‘if paint is the attraction, you really need not go much further than Mayfair.’

The scene amused him. He was deeply interested in Alec’s attitude, for he knew him well enough to be convinced that his discreet gaiety was entirely assumed. It was impossible to tell by it what course he meant to adopt; and at the same time there was about him a greater unapproachableness, which warned all and sundry that it would be wiser to attempt no advance. But for his own part he did not care; he meant to have a word with Alec at the first opportunity.

Alec’s quiet eyes now rested on Robert Boulger.

‘Ah, there’s my little friend Bobbikins. I thought you had a headache?’

Lady Kelsey remembered her nephew’s broken engagement and interposed quickly.

‘I’m afraid Bobbie is dreadfully dissipated. He’s not looking at all well.’

‘You shouldn’t keep such late hours,’ said Alec, good-humouredly. ‘At your age one needs one’s beauty sleep.’

‘It’s very kind of you to take an interest in me,’ said Boulger, flushing with annoyance. ‘My headache has passed off.’

‘I’m very glad. What do you use — phenacetin?’

‘It went away of its own accord after dinner,’ returned Bobbie frigidly, conscious that he was being laughed at, but unable to extricate himself.

‘So you resolved to give the girls a treat by coming to Lady Kelsey’s dance? How nice of you not to disappoint them!’

Alec turned to Lucy, and they looked into one another’s eyes.

‘I sent you a paper this evening,’ he said gravely.

‘It was very good of you.’

There was a silence. All who were present felt that the moment was impressive, and it needed Canon Spratte’s determination to allow none but himself to monopolise attention, to bring to an end a situation which might have proved awkward. He came forward and offered his arm to Lucy.

‘I think this is my dance. May I take you in?’

He was trying to repeat the direct cut which he had given Alec earlier in the day. Alec looked at him.

‘I saw you in Piccadilly this evening. You were dashing about like a young gazelle.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ said the Canon, frigidly.

‘I observed that you were deeply engrossed in the shop windows as I passed. How are you?’

He held out his hand. For a moment the Canon hesitated to take it, but Alec’s gaze compelled him.

‘How do you do?’ he said.

He felt, rather than heard, Dick’s chuckle, and reddening, offered his arm to Lucy.

‘Won’t you come, Mr. MacKenzie?’ said Lady Kelsey, making the best of her difficulty.

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll stay and smoke a cigarette with Dick Lomas. You know, I’m not a dancing man.’

It seemed that Alec was giving Dick the opportunity he sought, and as soon as they found themselves alone, the sprightly little man attacked him.

‘I suppose you know we were all beseeching Providence you’d have the grace to stay away to-night?’ he said.

‘I confess that I suspected it,’ smiled Alec. ‘I shouldn’t have come, only I wanted to see Miss Allerton.’

‘This fellow Macinnery proposes to make things rather uncomfortable, I imagine.’

‘I made a mistake, didn’t I?’ said Alec, with a thin smile. ‘I should have dropped him in the river when I had no further use for him.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing.’

Dick stared at him.

‘Do you mean to say you’re going to sit still and let them throw mud at you?’

‘If they want to.’

‘But look here, Alec, what the deuce is the meaning of the whole thing?’

Alec looked at him quietly.

‘If I had intended to take the world in general into my confidence, I wouldn’t have refused to see the interviewers who came to me this evening.’

‘We’ve known one another for twenty years, Alec,’ said Dick.

‘Then you may be quite sure that if I refuse to discuss this matter with you, it must be for excellent reasons.’

Dick sprang up excitedly.

‘But, good God! you must explain. You can’t let a charge like this rest on you. After all, it’s not Tom, Dick, or Harry that’s concerned; it’s Lucy’s brother. You must speak.’

‘I’ve never yet discovered that I must do anything that I don’t choose,’ answered Alec.

Dick flung himself into a chair. He knew that when Alec spoke in that fashion no power on earth could move him. The whole thing was entirely unexpected, and he was at a loss for words. He had not read the letter which was causing all the bother, and knew only what Lady Kelsey had told him. He had some hope that on a close examination various things would appear which must explain Alec’s attitude; but at present it was incomprehensible.

‘Has it occurred to you that Lucy is very much in love with you, Alec?’ he said at last.

Alec did not answer. He made no movement.

‘What will you do if this loses you her love?’

‘I have counted the cost,’ said Alec, coldly.

He got up from his chair, and Dick saw that he did not wish to continue the discussion. There was a moment of silence, and then Lucy came in.

‘I’ve given my partner away to a wall-flower,’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘I felt I must have a few words alone with you.’

‘I will make myself scarce,’ said Dick.

They waited till he was gone. Then Lucy turned feverishly to Alec.

‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come. I wanted so much to see you.’

‘I’m afraid people have been telling you horrible things about me.’

‘They wanted to hide it from me.’

‘It never occurred to me that people could say such shameful things,’ he said gravely.

It tormented him a little because it had been so easy to care nothing for the world’s adulation, and it was so hard to care as little for its censure. He felt very bitter.

He took Lucy’s hand and made her sit on the sofa by his side.

‘There’s something I must tell you at once.’

She looked at him without answering.

‘I’ve made up my mind to give no answer to the charges that are brought against me.’

Lucy looked up quickly, and their eyes met.

‘I give you my word of honour that I’ve done nothing which I regret. I swear to you that what I did was right with regard to George, and if it were all to come again I would do exactly as I did before.’

She did not answer for a long time.

‘I never doubted you for a single moment,’ she said at last.

‘That is all I care about.’ He looked down, and there was a certain shyness in his voice when he spoke again. ‘To-day is the first time I’ve wanted to be assured that I was trusted; and yet I’m ashamed to want it.’

‘Don’t be too hard upon yourself,’ she said gently. ‘You’re so afraid of letting your tenderness appear.’

He seemed to give earnest thought to what she said. Lucy had never seen him more grave.

‘The only way to be strong is never to surrender to one’s weakness. Strength is merely a habit. I want you to be strong, too. I want you never to doubt me whatever you hear said.’

‘I gave my brother into your hands, and I said that if he died a brave man’s death, I could ask for no more. You told me that such a death was his.’

‘I thought of you always, and everything I did was for your sake. Every single act of mine during these four years in Africa has been done because I loved you.’

It was the first time since his return that he had spoken of love. Lucy bent her head still lower.

‘Do you remember, I asked you a question before I went away? You refused to marry me then, but you told me that if I asked again when I came back, the answer might be different.’

‘Yes.’

‘The hope bore me up in every difficulty and in every danger. And when I came back I dared not ask you at once; I was so afraid that you would refuse once more. And I didn’t wish you to think yourself bound by a vague promise. But each day I loved you more passionately.’

‘I knew, and I was very grateful for your love.’

‘Yesterday I could have offered you a certain name. I only cared for the honours they gave me so that I might put them at your feet. But what can I offer you now?’

‘You must love me always, Alec, for now I have only you.’

‘Are you sure that you will never believe that I am guilty of this crime?’

‘Why can you say nothing in self-defence?’

‘That I can’t tell you either.’

There was a silence between them. At last Alec spoke again.

‘But perhaps it will be easier for you to believe in me than for others, because you know that I loved you, and I can’t have done the odious thing of which that man accuses me.’

‘I will never believe it. I do not know what your reasons are for keeping all this to yourself, but I trust you, and I know that they are good. If you cannot speak, it is because greater interests hold you back. I love you, Alec, with all my heart, and if you wish me to be your wife I shall be proud and honoured.’

He took her in his arms, and as he kissed her, she wept tears of happiness. She did not want to think. She wanted merely to surrender herself to his strength.

XVI

Lady Kelsey’s devout hope that her party would finish without unpleasantness was singularly frustrated. Robert Boulger was irritated beyond endurance by the things Lucy had said to him; and Lucy besides, as if to drive him to distraction, had committed a peculiar indiscretion. In her determination to show the world in general, represented then by the two hundred people who were enjoying Lady Kelsey’s hospitality, that she, the person most interested, did not for an instant believe what was said about Alec, Lucy had insisted on dancing with him. Alec thought it unwise thus to outrage conventional opinion, but he could not withstand her fiery spirit. Dick and Mrs. Crowley were partners at the time, and the disapproval which Lucy saw in their eyes, made her more vehement in her defiance. She had caught Bobbie’s glance, too, and she flung back her head a little as she saw his livid anger.

Little by little Lady Kelsey’s guests bade her farewell, and at three o’clock few were left. Lucy had asked Alec to remain till the end, and he and Dick had taken refuge in the smoking-room. Presently Boulger came in with two men, named Mallins and Carbery, whom Alec knew slightly. He glanced at Alec, and went up to the table on which were cigarettes and various things to drink. His companions had no idea that he was bent upon an explanation and had asked them of set purpose to come into that room.

‘May we smoke here, Bobbie?’ asked one of them, a little embarrassed at seeing Alec, but anxious to carry things off pleasantly.

‘Certainly. Dick insisted that this room should be particularly reserved for that purpose.’

‘Lady Kelsey is the most admirable of all hostesses,’ said Dick lightly.

He took out his case and offered a cigarette to Alec. Alec took it.

‘Give me a match, Bobbikins, there’s a good boy,’ he said carelessly.

Boulger, with his back turned to Alec, took no notice of the request. He poured himself out some whisky, and raising the glass, deliberately examined how much there was in it. Alec smiled faintly.

‘Bobbie, throw me over the matches,’ he repeated.

At that moment Lady Kelsey’s butler came into the room with a salver, upon which he put the dirty glasses. Bobbie, his back still turned, looked up at the servant.

‘Miller.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mr. MacKenzie is asking for something.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You might give me a match, will you?’ said Alec.

‘Yes, sir.’

The butler put the matches on his salver and took them over to Alec, who lit his cigarette.

‘Thank you.’

No one spoke till the butler left the room. Alec occupied himself idly in making smoke rings, and he watched them rise into the air. When they were alone he turned slowly to Boulger.

‘I perceive that during my absence you have not added good manners to your other accomplishments,’ he said.

Boulger wheeled round and faced him.

‘If you want things you can ask servants for them.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ smiled Alec, good-humouredly.

Alec’s contemptuous manner robbed Boulger of his remaining self-control. He strode angrily to Alec.

‘If you talk to me like that I’ll knock you down.’

Alec was lying stretched out on the sofa, and did not stir. He seemed completely unconcerned.

‘You could hardly do that when I’m already lying on my back,’ he murmured.

Boulger clenched his fists. He gasped in the fury of his anger.

‘Look here, MacKenzie, I’m not going to let you play the fool with me. I want to know what answer you have to make to Macinnery’s accusation.’

‘Might I suggest that only Miss Allerton has the least right to receive answers to her questions? And she hasn’t questioned me.’

‘I’ve given up trying to understand her attitude. If I were she, it would make me sick with horror to look at you. But after all I have the right to know something. George Allerton was my cousin.’

Alec rose slowly from the sofa. He faced Boulger with an indifference which was peculiarly irritating.

‘That is a fact upon which he did not vastly pride himself.’

‘Since this morning you’ve rested under a perfectly direct charge of causing his death in a dastardly manner. And you’ve said nothing in self-defence.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘You’ve been given an opportunity of explaining yourself, and you haven’t taken it.’

‘Quite true.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Alec had already been asked that question by Dick, and he returned the same answer.

‘Nothing.’

Bobbie looked at him for an instant. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

‘In that case I can draw only one conclusion. There appears to be no means of bringing you to justice, but at least I can tell you what an indescribable blackguard I think you.’

‘All is over between us,’ smiled Alec, faintly amused at the young man’s violence. ‘And shall I return your letters and your photographs?’

‘I assure you that I’m not joking,’ answered Bobbie grimly.

‘I have observed that you joke with difficulty. It’s singular that though I’m Scotch and you are English, I should be able to see how ridiculous you are, while you’re quite blind to your own absurdity.’

‘Come, Alec, remember he’s only a boy,’ remonstrated Dick, who till now had been unable to interpose.

Boulger turned upon him angrily.

‘I’m perfectly able to look after myself, Dick, and I’ll thank you not to interfere.’ He looked again at Alec: ‘If Lucy’s so indifferent to her brother’s death that she’s willing to keep up with you, that’s her own affair.’

Dick interrupted once more.

‘For heaven’s sake don’t make a scene, Bobbie. How can you make such a fool of yourself?’

‘Leave me alone, confound you!’

‘Do you think this is quite the best place for an altercation?’ asked Alec quietly. ‘Wouldn’t you gain more notoriety if you attacked me in my club or at Church Parade on Sunday?’

‘It’s mere shameless impudence that you should come here to-night,’ cried Bobbie, his voice hoarse with passion. ‘You’re using these wretched women as a shield, because you know that as long as Lucy sticks to you, there are people who won’t believe the story.’

‘I came for the same reason as yourself, dear boy. Because I was invited.’

‘You acknowledge that you have no defence.’

‘Pardon me, I acknowledge nothing and deny nothing.’

‘That won’t do for me,’ said Boulger. ‘I want the truth, and I’m going to get it. I’ve got a right to know.’

‘Don’t make such an ass of yourself,’ cried Alec, shortly.

‘By God, I’ll make you answer.’

He went up to Alec furiously, as if he meant to seize him by the throat, but Alec, with a twist of the arm, hurled him backwards.

‘I could break your back, you silly boy,’ he cried, in a voice low with anger.

With a cry of rage Bobbie was about to spring at Alec when Dick got in his way.

‘For God’s sake, let us have no scenes here. And you’ll only get the worst of it, Bobbie. Alec could just crumple you up.’ He turned to the two men who stood behind, startled by the unexpectedness of the quarrel. ‘Take him away, Mallins, there’s a good chap.’

‘Let me alone, you fool!’ cried Bobbie.

‘Come along, old man,’ said Mallins, recovering himself.

When his two friends had got Bobbie out of the room, Dick heaved a great sigh of relief.

‘Poor Lady Kelsey!’ he laughed, beginning to see the humour of the situation. ‘To-morrow half London will be saying that you and Bobbie had a stand-up fight in her drawing-room.’

Alec looked at him angrily. He was not a man of easy temper, and the effort he had put upon himself was beginning to tell.

‘You really needn’t have gone out of your way to infuriate the boy,’ said Dick.

Alec wheeled round wrathfully.

‘The damned cubs,’ he said. ‘I should like to break their silly necks.’

‘You have an amiable character, Alec,’ retorted Dick.

Alec began to walk up and down excitedly. Dick had never seen him before in such a state.

‘The position is growing confoundedly awkward,’ he said drily.

Then Alec burst out.

‘They lick my boots till I loathe them, and then they turn against me like a pack of curs. Oh, I despise them, these silly boys who stay at home wallowing in their ease, while men work — work and conquer. Thank God, I’ve done with them now. They think one can fight one’s way through Africa as easily as walk down Piccadilly. They think one goes through hardship and danger, illness and starvation, to be the lion of a dinner-party in Mayfair.’

‘I think you’re unfair to them,’ answered Dick. ‘Can’t you see the other side of the picture? You’re accused of a particularly low act of treachery. Your friends were hoping that you’d be able to prove at once that it was an abominable lie, and for some reason which no one can make out, you refuse even to notice it.’

‘My whole life is proof that it’s a lie.’

‘Don’t you think you’d better change your mind and make a statement that can be sent to the papers?’

‘No, damn you!’

Dick’s good nature was imperturbable, and he was not in the least annoyed by Alec’s vivacity.

‘My dear chap, do calm down,’ he laughed.

Alec started at the sound of his mocking. He seemed again to become aware of himself. It was interesting to observe the quite visible effort he made to regain his self-control. In a moment he had mastered his excitement, and he turned to Dick with studied nonchalance.

‘Do you think I look wildly excited?’ he asked blandly.

Dick smiled.

‘If you will permit me to say so, I think butter would have no difficulty in melting in your mouth,’ he replied.

‘I never felt cooler in my life.’

‘Lucky man, with the thermometer at a hundred and two!’

Alec laughed and put his arm through Dick’s.

‘Perhaps we had better go home,’ he said.

‘Your common sense is no less remarkable than your personal appearance,’ answered Dick gravely.

They had already bidden their hostess good-night, and getting their things, they set out to walk their different ways. When Dick got home he did not go to bed. He sat in an armchair, considering the events of the evening, and trying to find some way out of the complexity of his thoughts. He was surprised when the morning sun sent a bright ray of light into his room.

But Lady Kelsey was not yet at the end of her troubles. Bobbie, having got rid of his friends, went to her and asked if she would not come downstairs and drink a cup of soup. The poor lady, quite exhausted, thought him very considerate. One or two persons, with their coats on, were still in the room, waiting for their womenkind; and in the hall there was a little group of belated guests huddled around the door, while cabs and carriages were being brought up for them. There was about everyone the lassitude which follows the gaiety of a dance. The waiters behind the tables were heavy-eyed. Lucy was bidding good-bye to one or two more intimate friends.

Lady Kelsey drank the hot soup with relief.

‘My poor legs are dropping,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’m far too tired to go to sleep.’

‘I want to talk to Lucy before I go,’ said Bobbie, abruptly.

‘To-night?’ she asked in dismay.

‘Yes, I want you to send her a message that you wish to see her in your boudoir.’

‘Why, what on earth’s the matter?’

‘She can’t go on in this way. It’s perfectly monstrous. Something must be done immediately.’

Lady Kelsey understood what he was driving at. She knew how great was his love, and she, too, had seen his anger when Lucy danced with Alec MacKenzie. But the whole affair perplexed her utterly. She put down her cup.

‘Can’t you wait till to-morrow?’ she asked nervously.

‘I feel it ought to be settled at once.’

‘I think you’re dreadfully foolish. You know how Lucy resents any interference with her actions.’

‘I shall bear her resentment with fortitude,’ he said, with great bitterness.

Lady Kelsey looked at him helplessly.

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

‘I want you to be present at our interview.’

He turned to a servant and told him to ask Miss Allerton from Lady Kelsey if she would kindly come to the boudoir. He gave his arm to Lady Kelsey, and they went upstairs. In a moment Lucy appeared.

‘Did you send for me, my aunt? I’m told you want to speak to me here.’

‘I asked Aunt Alice to beg you to come here,’ said Boulger. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t if I asked you.’

Lucy looked at him with raised eyebrows and answered lightly.

‘What nonsense! I’m always delighted to enjoy your society.’

‘I wanted to speak to you about something, and I thought Aunt Alice should be present.’

Lucy gave him a quick glance. He met it coolly.

‘Is it so important that it can’t wait till to-morrow?’

‘I venture to think it’s very important. And by now everybody has gone.’

‘I’m all attention,’ she smiled.

Boulger hesitated for a moment, then braced himself for the ordeal.

‘I’ve told you often, Lucy, that I’ve been desperately in love with you for more years than I can remember,’ he said, flushing with nervousness.

‘Surely you’ve not snatched me from my last chance of a cup of soup in order to make me a proposal of marriage?’

‘I’m perfectly serious, Lucy.’

‘I assure you it doesn’t suit you at all,’ she smiled.

‘The other day I asked you again to marry me, just before Alec MacKenzie came back.’

A softer light came into Lucy’s eyes, and the bantering tones fell away from her voice.

‘It was very charming of you,’ she said gravely. ‘You mustn’t think that because I laugh at you a little, I’m not very grateful for your affection.’

‘You know how long he’s cared for you, Lucy,’ said Lady Kelsey.

Lucy went up to him and very tenderly placed her hand on his arm.

‘I’m immensely touched by your great devotion, Bobbie, and I know that I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I’m very sorry that I can’t give you anything in return. One’s not mistress of one’s love. I can only hope — with all my heart — that you’ll fall in love with some girl who cares for you. You don’t know how much I want you to be happy.’

Boulger drew back coldly. He would not allow himself to be touched, though the sweetness of her voice tore his heart-strings.

‘Just now it’s not my happiness that’s concerned,’ he said. ‘When Alec MacKenzie came back I thought I saw why nothing that I could do, had the power to change the utter indifference with which you looked at me.’

He paused a moment and coughed uneasily.

‘I don’t know why you think it necessary to say all this,’ said Lucy, in a low voice.

‘I tried to resign myself. You’ve always worshipped strength, and I understood that you must think Alec MacKenzie very wonderful. I had little enough to offer you when I compared myself with him. I hoped against hope that you weren’t in love with him.’

‘Well?’

‘Except for that letter in this morning’s paper I should never have dared to say anything to you again. But that changes everything.’

He paused once more. Though he tried to seem so calm, his heart was beating furiously. He really loved Lucy with all his soul, and he was doing what seemed to him a plain duty.

‘I ask you again if you’ll be my wife.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said slowly.

‘You can’t marry Alec MacKenzie now.’

Lucy flung back her head. She grew very pale.

‘You have no right to talk to me like this,’ she said. ‘You really presume too much upon my good nature.’

‘I think I have some right. I’m the only man who’s related to you at all, and I love you.’

They saw that Lady Kelsey wanted to speak, and Lucy turned round to her.

‘I think you should listen to him, Lucy. I’m growing old, and soon you’ll be quite alone in the world.’

The simple kindness of her words calmed the passions of the other two, and brought down the conversation to a gentler level.

‘I’ll try my best to make you a good husband, Lucy,’ said Bobbie, very earnestly. ‘I don’t ask you to care for me; I only want to serve you.’

‘I can only repeat that I’m very grateful to you. But I can’t marry you, and I shall never marry you.’

Boulger’s face grew darker, and he was silent.

‘Are you going to continue to know Alec MacKenzie?’ he asked at length.

‘You have no right to ask me such a question.’

‘If you’ll take the advice of any unprejudiced person about that letter, you’ll find that he’ll say the same as I. There can be no shadow of a doubt that the man is guilty of a monstrous crime.’

‘I don’t care what the evidence is,’ said Lucy. ‘I know he can’t have done a shameful thing.’

‘But, good God, have you forgotten that it’s your own brother whom he killed!’ he cried hotly. ‘The whole country is up in arms against him, and you are quite indifferent.’

‘Oh, Bobbie, how can you say that?’ she wailed, suddenly moved to the very depths of her being. ‘How can you be so cruel?’

He went up to her, and they stood face to face. He spoke very quickly, flinging the words at her with indignant anger.

‘If you cared for George at all, you must wish to punish the man who caused his death. At least you can’t continue to be his’ — he stopped as he saw the agony in her eyes, and changed his words— ‘his greatest friend. It was your doing that George went to Africa at all. The least thing you can do is to take some interest in his death.’

She put up her hands to her eyes, as though to drive away the sight of hateful things.

‘Oh, why do you torment me?’ she cried pitifully. ‘I tell you he isn’t guilty.’

‘He’s refused to answer anyone. I tried to get something out of him, but I couldn’t, and I lost my temper. He might give you the truth if you asked him pointblank.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s very strange that he should insist on this silence,’ said Lady Kelsey. ‘One would have thought if he had nothing to be ashamed of, he’d have nothing to hide.’

‘Do you believe that story, too?’ asked Lucy.

‘I don’t know what to believe. It’s so extraordinary. Dick says he knows nothing about it. If the man’s innocent, why on earth doesn’t he speak?’

‘He knows I trust him,’ said Lucy. ‘He knows I’m proud to trust him. Do you think I would cause him the great pain of asking him questions?’

‘Are you afraid he couldn’t answer them?’ asked Boulger.

‘No, no, no.’

‘Well, just try. After all you owe as much as that to the memory of George. Try.’

‘But don’t you see that if he won’t say anything, it’s because there are good reasons,’ she cried distractedly. ‘How do I know what interests are concerned in the matter, beside which the death of George is insignificant....’

‘Do you look upon it so lightly as that?’

She turned away, bursting into tears. She was like a hunted beast. There seemed no escape from the taunting questions.

‘I must show my faith in him,’ she sobbed.

‘I think you’re a little nervous to go into the matter too closely.’

‘I believe in him implicitly. I believe in him with all the strength I’ve got.’

‘Then surely it can make no difference if you ask him. There can be no reason for him not to trust you.’

‘Oh, why don’t you leave me alone?’ she wailed.

‘I do think it’s very unreasonable, Lucy,’ said Lady Kelsey. ‘He knows you’re his friend. He can surely count on your discretion.’

‘If he refused to answer me it would mean nothing. You don’t know him as I do. He’s a man of extraordinary character. If he has made up his mind that for certain reasons which we don’t know, he must preserve an entire silence, nothing whatever will move him. Why should he answer? I believe in him absolutely. I think he’s the greatest and most honourable man I’ve ever known. I should feel happy and grateful to be allowed to wait on him.’

‘Lucy, what do you mean?’ cried Lady Kelsey.

But now Lucy had cast off all reserve. She did not mind what she said.

‘I mean that I care more for his little finger than for the whole world. I love him with all my heart. And that’s why he can’t be guilty of this horrible thing, because I’ve loved him for years, and he’s known it. And he loves me, and he’s loved me always.’

She sank exhausted into a chair, gasping for breath. Boulger looked at her for a moment, and he turned sick with anguish. What he had only suspected before, he knew now from her own lips; and it was harder than ever to bear. Now everything seemed ended.

‘Are you going to marry him?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘In spite of everything?’

‘In spite of everything,’ she answered defiantly.

Bobbie choked down the groan of despairing rage that forced its way to his throat. He watched her for a moment.

‘Good God,’ he said at last, ‘what is there in the man that he should have made you forget love and honour and common decency!’

Lucy made no reply. But she buried her face in her hands and wept. She rocked to and fro with the violence of her tears.

Without another word Bobbie turned round and left them. Lady Kelsey heard the door slam as he went out into the silent street.

XVII

Next day Alec was called up to Lancashire.

When he went out in the morning, he saw on the placards of the evening papers that there had been a colliery explosion, but, his mind absorbed in other things, he paid no attention to it; and it was with a shock that, on opening a telegram which waited for him at his club, he found that the accident had occurred in his own mine. Thirty miners were entombed, and it was feared that they could not be saved. Immediately all thought of his own concerns fled from him, and sending for a time-table, he looked out a train. He found one that he could just catch. He took a couple of telegram forms in the cab with him, and on one scribbled instructions to his servant to follow him at once with clothes; the other he wrote to Lucy.

He just caught the train and in the afternoon found himself at the mouth of the pit. There was a little crowd around it of weeping women. All efforts to save the wretched men appeared to be useless. Many had been injured, and the manager’s house had been converted into a hospital. Alec found everyone stunned by the disaster, and the attempts at rescue had been carried on feebly. He set himself to work at once. He put heart into the despairing women. He brought up everyone who could be of the least use and inspired them with his own resourceful courage. The day was drawing to a close, but no time could be lost; and all night they toiled. Alec, in his shirt sleeves, laboured as heartily as the strongest miner; he seemed to want neither rest nor food. With clenched teeth, silently, he fought a battle with death, and the prize was thirty living men. In the morning he refreshed himself with a bath, paid a hurried visit to the injured, and returned to the pit mouth.

He had no time to think of other things. He did not know that on this very morning another letter appeared in the Daily Mail, filling in the details of the case against him, adding one damning piece of evidence to another; he did not know that the papers, amazed and indignant at his silence, now were unanimous in their condemnation. It was made a party matter, and the radical organs used the scandal as a stick to beat the dying donkey which was then in power. A question was put down to be asked in the House.

Alec waged his good fight and neither knew nor cared that the bubble of his glory was pricked. Still the miners lived in the tomb, and forty-eight hours passed. Hope was failing in the stout hearts of those who laboured by his side, but Alec urged them to greater endeavours. And now nothing was needed but a dogged perseverance. His tremendous strength stood him in good stead, and he was able to work twenty hours on end. He did not spare himself. And he seemed able to call prodigies of endurance out of those who helped him; with that example it seemed easier to endure. And still they toiled unrestingly. But their hope was growing faint. Behind that wall thirty men were lying, hopeless, starving; and some perhaps were dead already. And it was terrible to think of the horrors that assailed them, the horror of rising water, the horror of darkness, and the gnawing pangs of hunger. Among them was a boy of fourteen. Alec had spoken to him by chance on one of the days he had recently spent there, and had been amused by his cheeky brightness. He was a blue-eyed lad with a laughing mouth. It was pitiful to think that all that joy of life should have been crushed by a blind, stupid disaster. His father had been killed, and his body, charred and disfigured, lay in the mortuary. The boy was imprisoned with his brother, a man older than himself, married, and the father of children. With angry vehemence Alec set to again. He would not be beaten.

At last they heard sounds, faint and muffled, but unmistakable. At all events some of them were still alive. The rescuers increased their efforts. Now it was only a question of hours. They were so near that it renewed their strength; all fatigue fell from them; it needed but a little courage.

At last!

With a groan of relief which tried hard to be a cheer, the last barrier was broken, and the prisoners were saved. They were brought out one by one, haggard, with sunken eyes that blinked feebly in the sun-light; their faces were pale with the shadow of death, and they could not stand on their feet. The bright-eyed boy was carried out in Alec’s strong arms, and he tried to make a jest of it; but the smile on his lips was changed into a sob, and hiding his face in Alec’s breast, he cried from utter weakness. They carried out his brother, and he was dead. His wife was waiting for him at the pit’s mouth, with her children by her side.

This commonplace incident, briefly referred to in the corner of a morning paper, made his own affairs strangely unimportant to Alec. Face to face with the bitter tragedy of women left husbandless, of orphaned children, and the grim horror of men cut off in the prime of their manhood, the agitation which his own conduct was causing fell out of view. He was harassed and anxious. Much business had to be done which would allow of no delay. It was necessary to make every effort to get the mine once more into working order; it was necessary to provide for those who had lost the breadwinner. Alec found himself assailed on all sides with matters of urgent importance, and he had not a moment to devote to his own affairs. When at length it was possible for him to consider himself at all, he felt that the accident had raised him out of the narrow pettiness which threatened to submerge his soul; he was at close quarters with malignant fate, and he had waged a desperate battle with the cruel blindness of chance. He could only feel an utter scorn for the people who bespattered him with base charges. For, after all, his conscience was free.

When he wrote to Lucy, it never struck him that it was needful to refer to the events that had preceded his departure from London, and his letter was full of the strenuous agony of the past days. He told her how they had fought hand to hand with death and had snatched the prey from his grasp. In a second letter he told her what steps he was taking to repair the damage that had been caused, and what he was doing for those who were in immediate need. He would have given much to be able to write down the feelings of passionate devotion with which Lucy filled him, but with the peculiar shyness which was natural to him, he could not bring himself to it. Of the accusation with which, the world was ringing, he said never a word.

Lucy read his letters over and over again. She could not understand them, and they seemed strangely indifferent. At that distance from the scene of the disaster she could not realise its absorbing anxiety, and she was bitterly disappointed at Alec’s absence. She wanted his presence so badly, and she had to bear alone, on her own shoulders, the full weight of her trouble. When Macinnery’s second letter appeared, Lady Kelsey gave it to her without a word. It was awful. The whole thing was preposterous, but it hung together in a way that was maddening, and there was an air of truth about it which terrified her. And why should Alec insist on this impenetrable silence? She had offered herself the suggestion that political exigencies with regard to the states whose spheres of influence bordered upon the territory which Alec had conquered, demanded the strictest reserve; but this explanation soon appeared fantastic. She read all that was said in the papers and found that opinion was dead against Alec. Now that it was become a party matter, his own side defended him; but in a half-hearted way, which showed how poor the case was. And since all that could be urged in his favour, Lucy had already repeated to herself a thousand times, what was said against him seemed infinitely more conclusive than what was said for him. And then her conscience smote her. Those cruel words of Bobbie’s came back to her, and she was overwhelmed with self-reproach when she considered that it was her own brother of whom was all this to-do. She must be utterly heartless or utterly depraved. And then with a despairing energy she cried out that she believed in Alec; he was incapable of a treacherous act.

At last she could bear it no longer, and she wired to him: For God’s sake come quickly.

She felt that she could not endure another day of this misery. She waited for him, given over to the wildest fears; she was ashamed and humiliated. She counted the hours which must pass before he could arrive; surely he would not delay. All her self-possession had vanished, and she was like a child longing for the protecting arms that should enfold it

At last he came. Lucy was waiting in the same room in which she had sat on their first meeting after his return to England. She sprang up, pale and eager, and flung herself passionately into his arms.

‘Thank God, you’ve come,’ she said. ‘I thought the hours would never end.’

He did not know what so vehemently disturbed her, but he kissed her tenderly, and on a sudden she felt strangely comforted. There was an extraordinary honesty about him which strengthened and consoled her. For a while she could not speak, but clung to him, sobbing.

‘What is it?’ he asked at length. ‘Why did you send for me?’

‘I want your love. I want your love so badly.’

It was inconceivable, the exquisite tenderness with which he caressed her. No one would have thought that dour man capable of such gentleness.

‘I felt I must see you,’ she sobbed. ‘You don’t know what tortures I’ve endured.’

‘Poor child.’

He kissed her hair and her white, pained forehead.

‘Why did you go away? You knew I wanted you.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘I’ve been horribly wretched. I didn’t know I could suffer so much.’

‘Come and sit down and tell me all about it.’

He led her to the sofa and made her sit beside him. His arms were around her, and she nestled close to him. For a moment she remained silent, enjoying the feeling of great relief after the long days of agony. She smiled lightly through her tears.

‘The moment I’m with you I feel so confident and happy.’

‘Only when you’re with me?’

He asked the question caressingly, in a low passionate voice that she had never heard from his lips before. She did not answer, but clung more closely to him. Smiling, he repeated the question.

‘Only when you’re with me, darling?’

‘I’ve told Bobbie and my aunt that we’re going to be married. They made me suffer so dreadfully. I had to tell them. I couldn’t keep it back, they said such horrible things about you.’

He did not answer for a moment.

‘It’s very natural.’

‘It’s nothing to you,’ she cried desperately. ‘ But to me.... Oh, you don’t know what agony I had to endure.’

‘I’m glad you told them.’

‘Bobby said I must be heartless and cruel. And it’s true: George is nothing to me now when I think of you. My heart is so filled with my love for you that I haven’t room for anything else.’

‘I hope my love will make up for all that you have lost. I want you to be happy.’

She withdrew from his arms and leaned back, against the corner of the sofa. It was absolutely necessary to say what was gnawing at her heart-strings, but she felt ashamed and could not look at him.

‘That wasn’t the only reason I told them. I’m such a coward. I thought I was much braver.’

‘Why?’

Lucy felt on a sudden sick at heart. She began to tremble a little, and it was only by great strength of will that she forced herself to go on. She was horribly frightened. Her mouth was dry, and when at last the words came, her voice sounded unnatural.

‘I wanted to burn my ships behind me. I wanted to reassure myself.’

This time it was Alec who did not answer, for he understood now what was on her mind. His heart sank, since he saw already that he must lose her. But he had faced that possibility long ago in the heavy forests of Africa, and he had made up his mind that Lucy could do without love better than without self-respect.

He made a movement to get up, but quickly Lucy put out her hand. And then suddenly a fire seized him, and a vehement determination not to give way till the end.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said quietly.

‘Forgive me, dear,’ she said.

She held his hand in hers, and she spoke quickly.

‘You don’t know how terrible it is. I stand so dreadfully alone. Everyone is so bitter against you, and not a soul has a good word to say for you. It’s all so extraordinary and so inexplicable. It seems as if I am the only person who isn’t convinced that you caused poor George’s death. Oh, how callous and utterly heartless people must think me!’

‘Does it matter very much what people think?’ he said gravely.

‘I’m so ashamed of myself. I try to put the thoughts out of my head, but I can’t. I simply can’t. I’ve tried to be brave. I’ve refused to discuss the possibility of there being anything in those horrible charges. I wanted to talk to Dick — I knew he was fond of you — but I didn’t dare. It seemed treacherous to you, and I wouldn’t let anyone see that it meant anything to me. The first letter wasn’t so bad, but the second — oh, it looks so dreadfully true.’

Alec gave her a rapid glance. This was the first he had heard of another communication to the paper. During the frenzied anxiety of those days at the colliery, he had had time to attend to nothing but the pressing work of rescue. But he made no reply.

‘I’ve read it over and over again, and I can’t understand. When Bobbie says it’s conclusive, I tell him it means nothing — but — don’t you see what I mean? The uncertainty is more than I can bear.’

She stopped suddenly, and now she looked at him. There was a pitiful appeal in her eyes.

‘At the first moment I felt so absolutely sure of you.’

‘And now you don’t?’ he asked quietly.

She cast down her eyes once more, and a sob caught her breath.

‘I trust you just as much as ever. I know it’s impossible that you should have done a shameful deed. But there it stands in black and white, and you have nothing to say in answer.’

‘I know it’s very difficult. That’s why I asked you to believe in me.’

‘I do, Alec,’ she cried vehemently. ‘With all my soul. But have mercy on me. I’m not as strong as I thought. It’s easy for you to stand alone. You’re iron. You’re a mountain of granite. But I’m a weak woman, pitifully weak.’

He shook his head.

‘Oh, no, you’re not like other women.’

‘It was easy to be brave where my father was concerned, or George, but now it’s so different. Love has changed me. I haven’t the courage any more to withstand the opinion of all my fellows.’

Alec got up and walked once or twice across the room. He seemed to be thinking deeply. Lucy fancied that he must hear the beating of her heart. He stopped in front of her. Her heart was wrung by the great pain that was in his voice.

‘Don’t you remember that only a few days ago I told you that I’d done nothing which I wouldn’t do again? I gave you my word of honour that I could reproach myself for nothing.’

‘Oh, I know,’ she cried. ‘I’m so utterly ashamed of myself. But I can’t bear the doubt.’

‘Doubt. You’ve said the word at last.’

‘I tell myself that I don’t believe a word of these horrible charges. I repeat to myself: I’m certain, I’m certain that he’s innocent.’

She gathered strength in the desperation of her love, and now at the crucial moment she had all the courage she needed.

‘And yet at the bottom of my heart there’s the doubt. And I can’t crush it.’

She waited for him to answer, but he did not speak.

‘I wanted to kill that bitter pain of suspicion. I thought if I stood up before them and cried out that my trust in you was so great, I was willing to marry you notwithstanding everything — I should at last have peace in my heart.’

Alec went to the window and looked out. The westering sun slanted across the street. Carriages and motors were waiting at the door of the house opposite, and a little crowd of footmen clustered about the steps. They were giving a party, and through the open windows Alec could see a throng of women. The sky was very blue. He turned back to Lucy.

‘Will you show me the second letter of which you speak?’

‘Haven’t you seen it?’ she asked in astonishment.

‘I was so busy, I had no time to look at the papers. I suppose no one thought it his business to draw my attention to it.’

Lucy went into the second drawing-room, divided from that in which they sat by an archway, and brought him the copy of the Daily Mail for which he asked. She gave it, and he took it silently. He sat down and with attention read the letter through. He observed with bitter scorn the thoroughness with which Macinnery had set out the case against him. In this letter he filled up the gaps which had been left in the first, adding here and there details which gave a greater coherency to the whole; and his evidence had an air of truth, since he quoted the very words of porters and askari who had been on the expedition. It was wonderful what power had that small admixture of falsehood joined with what was admittedly true, to change the whole aspect of the case. Alec was obliged to confess that Lucy had good grounds for her suspicion. There was a specious look about the story, which would have made him credit it himself if some other man had been concerned. The facts were given with sufficient exactness, and the untruth lay only in the motives that were ascribed to him; but who could tell what another’s motives were? Alec put the paper on the table, and leaning back, his face resting in his hand, thought deeply. He saw again that scene in his tent when the wind was howling outside and the rain falling, falling; he recalled George’s white face, the madness that came over him when he fired at Alec, the humility of his submission. The earth covered the boy, his crime, and his weakness. It was not easy to save one’s self at a dead man’s expense. And he knew that George’s strength and courage had meant more than her life to Lucy. How could he cause her the bitter pain? How could he tell her that her brother died because he was a coward and a rogue? How could he tell her the pitiful story of the boy’s failure to redeem the good name that was so dear to her? And what proof could he offer of anything he said? Walker had been killed on the same night as George, poor Walker with his cheerfulness in difficulties and his buoyant spirits: his death too must be laid to the charge of George Allerton; Adamson had died of fever. Those two alone had any inkling of the truth; they could have told a story that would at least have thrown grave doubts upon Macinnery’s. But Alec set his teeth; he did not want their testimony. Finally there was the promise. He had given his solemn oath, and the place and the moment made it seem more binding, that he would utter no word that should lead Lucy to suspect even for an instant that her brother had been untrue to the trust she had laid upon him. Alec was a man of scrupulous truthfulness, not from deliberately moral motives but from mere taste, and he could not have broken his promise for the great discomfort it would have caused him. But it was the least of the motives which influenced him. Even if George had exacted nothing, he would have kept silence. And then, at the bottom of his heart, was a fierce pride. He was conscious of the honesty of his motives, and he expected that Lucy should share his consciousness. She must believe what he said to her because he said it. He could not suffer the humiliation of defending himself, and he felt that her love could not be very great if she could really doubt him. And because he was very proud perhaps he was unjust. He did not know that he was putting upon her a trial which he should have asked no one to bear.

He stood up and faced Lucy.

‘What is it precisely you want me to do?’ he asked.

‘I want you to have mercy on me because I love you. Don’t tell the world if you choose not to. But tell me the truth. I know you’re incapable of lying. If I only have it from your own lips I shall believe. I want to be certain, certain.’

‘Don’t you realise that I would never have asked you to marry me if my conscience hadn’t been quite clear?’ he said slowly. ‘Don’t you see that the reasons I have for holding my tongue must be overwhelming, or I wouldn’t stand by calmly while my good name was torn from me shred by shred?’

‘But I’m going to be your wife, and I love you, and I know you love me.’

‘I implore you not to insist, Lucy. Let us remember only that the past is gone and that we love one another. It is impossible for me to tell you anything.’

‘Oh, but you must now,’ she implored. ‘If anything has happened, if any part of the story is true, you must give me a chance of judging for myself.’

‘I’m very sorry. I can’t.’

‘But you’ll kill my love for you.’

She sprang to her feet and pressed both hands to her heart.

‘The doubt that lurked at the bottom of my soul, now fills me. How can you let me suffer such maddening torture?’

An expression of anguish passed across his calm eyes. He made a gesture of despair.

‘I thought you trusted me.’

‘I’ll be satisfied if you’ll only tell me one thing.’ She put her hands to her head with a rapid, aimless movement that showed the extremity of her agitation. ‘Oh, what has love done with me?’ she cried desperately. ‘I was so proud of my brother and so utterly devoted to him. But I loved you so much that there wasn’t any room in my heart for the past. I forgot all my unhappiness and all my loss. And even now they seem so little to me beside your love that it’s you I think of first. I want to know that I can love you freely. I’ll be satisfied if you’ll only tell me that when you sent George out that night, you didn’t know he’d be killed.’

Alec looked at her steadily. And once more he saw himself in the African tent amid the rain and the boisterous wind. At the time he sought to persuade himself that George had a chance of escape. He told him with his own lips that if he showed perfect self-confidence at the moment of danger he might save himself alive; but at the bottom of his heart he knew, he had known all along, that it was indeed death he was sending him to, for George had not the last virtue of a scoundrel, courage.

‘Only say that, Alec,’ she repeated. ‘Say that’s not true, and I’ll believe you.’

There was a silence. Lucy’s heart beat against her breast like a caged bird. She waited in horrible suspense.

‘But it is true,’ he said, very quietly.

Lucy did not answer. She stared at him with terrified eyes. Her brain reeled, and she feared that she was going to faint. She had to put forth all her strength to drive back the enveloping night that seemed to crowd upon her.

‘It is true,’ he repeated.

She gave a gasp of pain.

‘I don’t understand. Oh, my dearest, don’t treat me as a child. Have mercy on me. You must be serious now. It’s a matter of life and death to both of us.’

‘I’m perfectly serious.’

A frightful coldness appeared to seize her, and the tips of her fingers were strangely numbed.

‘You knew that you were sending George into a death-trap? You knew that he could not escape alive?’

‘Except by a miracle.’

‘And you don’t believe in miracles?’

Alec made no answer. She looked at him with increasing horror. Her eyes were staring wildly. She repeated the question.

‘And you don’t believe in miracles?’

‘No.’

She was seized with all manner of conflicting emotions. They seemed to wage a tumultuous battle in the depths of her heart. She was filled with horror and dismay, bitter anger, remorse for her callous indifference to George’s death; and at the same time she felt an overwhelming love for Alec. And how could she love him now?

‘Oh, it can’t be true,’ she cried. ‘It’s infamous. Oh, Alec, Alec, Alec... O God, what shall I do.’

Alec held himself upright. He set his teeth, and his heavy jaw seemed squarer than ever. There was a great sternness in his voice.

‘I tell you that whatever I did was inevitable.’

Lucy flushed at the sound of his voice, and anger and sudden hatred took the place of all other feelings.

‘Then if that’s true, the rest must be true. Why don’t you acknowledge as well that you sacrificed my brother’s life in order to save your own?’

But the mood passed quickly, and in a moment she was seized with dismay.

‘Oh, it’s awful. I can’t realise it.’ She turned to him with a desperate appeal. ‘Haven’t you anything to say at all? You know how much I loved my brother. You know how much it meant to me that he should live to wipe out all memory of my father’s crime. All the future was centred upon him. You can’t have sacrificed him callously.’

Alec hesitated for an instant.

‘I think I might tell you this,’ he said. ‘We were entrapped by the Arabs, and our only chance of escape entailed the death of one of us.’

‘So you chose my brother because you loved me.’

Alec looked at her. There was an extraordinary sadness in his eyes, but she did not see it. He answered very gravely.

‘You see, the fault was his. He had committed a grave error. It was not unjust that he should suffer for the catastrophe that he had brought about.’

‘At those times one doesn’t think of justice. He was so young, so frank and honest. Wouldn’t it have been nobler to give your life for his?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ he answered, with all the gentleness that was in him, ‘you don’t know how easy it is to give one’s life, how much more difficult it is to be just than generous. How little you know me! Do you think I should have hesitated if the difficulty had been one that my death could solve? It was necessary that I should live. I had my work to do. I was bound by solemn treaties to the surrounding tribes. Even if that had been all, it would have been cowardly for me to die.’

‘It is easy to find excuses for not acting like a brave man.’ She flung the words at him with indignant scorn.

‘I was indispensable,’ he answered. ‘The whites I took with me I chose as instruments, not as leaders. If I had died the expedition would have broken in pieces. It was my influence that held together such of the native tribes as remained faithful to us. I had given my word that I would not desert them till I had exterminated the slave-raiders. Two days after my death my force would have melted away, and the whites would have been helpless. Not one of them would have escaped. And then the country would have been given up, defenceless, to those cursed Arabs. Fire and sword would have come instead of the peace I promised; and the whole country would have been rendered desolate. I tell you that it was my duty to live till I had carried out my work.’

Lucy drew herself up a little. She looked at him firmly, and said very quietly and steadily:

‘You coward! You coward!’

‘I knew at the time that what I did might cost me your love, and though you won’t believe this, I did it for your sake.’

‘I wish I had a whip in my hand that I might slash you across the face.’

For a moment he did not say anything. She was quivering with indignation and with contempt.

‘You see, it has cost me your love,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was inevitable.’

‘I am ashamed that I ever loved you.’

‘Good-bye.’

He turned round and walked slowly to the door. He held his head erect, and there was no sign of emotion on his face. But as soon as he was gone Lucy could keep her self-control no longer. She sank into a chair, and hiding her face, began to sob as though her poor tortured heart would break.

XVIII

Alec went back to Lancashire next day. Much was still required before the colliery could be put once more in proper order, and he was overwhelmed with work. Lucy was not so fortunate. She had nothing to do but to turn over in her mind the conversation they had had. She passed one sleepless night after another. She felt ill and wretched. She told Lady Kelsey that her engagement with MacKenzie was broken off, but gave no reason; and Lady Kelsey, seeing her white, tortured face, had not the heart to question her. The good lady knew that her niece was desperately unhappy, but she did not know how to help her. Lucy never sought for the sympathy of others and chose rather to bear her troubles alone. The season was drawing to a close, and Lady Kelsey suggested that they should advance by a week or two the date of their departure for the country; but Lucy would do nothing to run away from her suffering.

‘I don’t know why you should alter your plans,’ she said quietly.

Lady Kelsey looked at her compassionately, but did not insist. She felt somehow that Lucy was of different clay from herself, and for all her exquisite gentleness, her equanimity and pleasant temper, she had never been able to get entirely at close quarters with her. She would have given much to see Lucy give way openly to her grief; and her arms would have been open to receive her, if her niece had only flung herself simply into them. But Lucy’s spirit was broken. With the extreme reserve that was part of her nature, she put all her strength into the effort to behave in the world with decency; and dreading any attempt at commiseration, she forced herself to be no less cheerful than usual. The strain was hardly tolerable. She had set all her hopes of happiness upon Alec, and he had failed her. She thought more of her brother and her father than she had done of late, and she mourned for them both as though the loss she had sustained were quite recent. It seemed to her that the only thing now was to prevent herself from thinking of Alec, and with angry determination she changed her thoughts as soon as he came into them.

Presently something else occurred to her. She felt that she owed some reparation to Bobbie: he had seen the truth at once, and because he had pointed it out to her, as surely it was his duty to do, she had answered him with bitter words. He had shown himself extraordinarily kind, and she had been harsh and cruel. Perhaps he knew that she was no longer engaged to marry Alec MacKenzie, and he must guess the reason; but since the night of the dance he had not been near them. She looked upon what Alec had told her as addressed to her only, and she could not repeat it to all and sundry. When acquaintances had referred to the affair, her manner had shown them quickly that she did not intend to discuss it. But Robert Boulger was different. It seemed necessary, in consideration of all that had passed, that he should be told the little she knew; and then she thought also, seized on a sudden with a desire for self-sacrifice, that it was her duty perhaps to reward him for his long devotion. She might at least try to make him a good wife; and she could explain exactly how she felt towards him. There would be no deceit. Her life had no value now, and if it really meant so much to him to marry her, it was right that she should consent. And there was another thing: it would put an irrevocable barrier between herself and Alec.

Lady Kelsey was accustomed to ask a few people to luncheon every Tuesday, and Lucy suggested that they should invite Bobbie on one of these occasions. Lady Kelsey was much pleased, for she was fond of her nephew, and it had pained her that she had not seen him. She had sent a line to tell him that Lucy was no longer engaged, but he had not answered. Lucy wrote the invitation herself.

My Dear Bobbie:

Aunt Alice will be very glad if you can lunch with us on Tuesday at two. We are asking Dick, Julia Crowley, and Canon Spratte. If you can come, and I hope you will, it would be very kind of you to arrive a good deal earlier than the others; I want to talk to you about something.

Yours affectionately,

Lucy.

He answered at once.

My Dear Lucy:

I will come with pleasure. I hope half-past one will suit you.

Your affectionate cousin,

Robert Boulger.

‘Why haven’t you been to see us?’ she said, holding his hand, when at the appointed time he appeared.

‘I thought you didn’t much want to see me.’

‘I’m afraid I was very cruel and unkind to you last time you were here,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ he said gently.

‘I think I should tell you that I did as you suggested to me. I asked Alec MacKenzie pointblank, and he confessed that he was guilty of George’s death.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Bobbie.

‘Why?’ she asked, looking up at him with tear-laden eyes.

‘Because I know that you were very much in love with him,’ he answered.

Lucy flushed. But she had much more to say.

‘I was very unjust to you on the night of that dance. You were right to speak to me as you did, and I was very foolish. I regret what I said, and I beg you to forgive me.’

‘There’s nothing to forgive, Lucy,’ he said warmly. ‘What does it matter what you said? You know I love you.’

‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such love,’ she said. ‘You make me dreadfully ashamed of myself.’

He took her hand, and she did not attempt to withdraw it.

‘Won’t you change your mind, Lucy?’ he said earnestly.

‘Oh, my dear, I don’t love you. I wish I did. But I don’t and I’m afraid I never can.’

‘Won’t you marry me all the same?’

‘Do you care for me so much as that?’ she cried painfully.

‘Perhaps you will learn to love me in time.’

‘Don’t be so humble; you make me still more ashamed. Bobbie, I should like to make you happy if I thought I could. It seems very wonderful to me that you should want to have me. But I must be honest with you. I know that if I pretend I’m willing to marry you merely for your sake I’m deceiving myself. I want to marry you because I’m afraid. I want to crush my love for Alec. I want to make it impossible for me ever to weaken in my resolve. You see, I’m horrid and calculating, and it’s very little I can offer you.’

‘I don’t care why you’re marrying me,’ he said. ‘I want you so badly.’

‘Oh, no, don’t take me like that. Let me say first that if you really think me worth having, I will do my duty gladly. And if I have no love to give, I have a great deal of affection and a great deal of gratitude. I want you to be happy.’

He went down on his knees and kissed her hands passionately.

‘I’m so thankful,’ he murmured. ‘I’m so thankful.’

Lucy bent down and gently kissed his hair. Two tears rolled heavily down her cheeks.

Five minutes later Lady Kelsey came in. She was delighted to see that her nephew and her niece were apparently once more on friendly terms; but she had no time to find out what had happened, for Canon Spratte was immediately announced. Lady Kelsey had heard that he was to be offered a vacant bishopric, and she mourned over his disappearance from London. He was a spiritual mentor who exactly suited her, handsome, urbane, attentive notwithstanding her mature age, and well-connected. He was just the man to be a bishop. Then Mrs. Crowley appeared. They waited a little, and presently Dick was announced. He sauntered in jauntily, unaware that he had kept the others waiting a full quarter of an hour; and the party was complete.

No gathering could be tedious when Canon Spratte was present, and the conversation proceeded merrily. Mrs. Crowley looked ravishing in a summer frock, and since she addressed herself exclusively to the handsome parson it was no wonder that he was in a good humour. She laughed appreciatively at his facile jests and gave him provoking glances of her bright eyes. He did not attempt to conceal from her that he thought American women the most delightful creatures in the world, and she made no secret of her opinion that ecclesiastical dignitaries were often fascinating. They paid one another outrageous compliments. It never struck the good man that these charms and graces were displayed only for the purpose of vexing a gentleman of forty, who was eating his luncheon irritably on the other side of her. She managed to avoid talking to Dick Lomas afterwards, but when she bade Lady Kelsey farewell, he rose also.

‘Shall I drive you home?’ he asked.

‘I’m not going home, but if you like to drive me to Victoria Street, you may. I have an appointment there at four.’

They went out, stepped into a cab, and quite coolly Dick told the driver to go to Hammersmith. He sat himself down by her side, with a smile of self-satisfaction.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she cried.

‘I want to have a talk to you.’

‘I’m sure that’s charming of you,’ she answered, ‘but I shall miss my appointment.’

‘That’s a matter of complete indifference to me.’

‘Don’t bother about my feelings, will you?’ she replied, satirically.

‘I have no intention of doing so,’ he smiled.

Mrs. Crowley was obliged to laugh at the neatness with which he had entrapped her. Or had he fallen into the trap which she had set for him? She really did not quite know.

‘If your object in thus abducting me was to talk, hadn’t you better do so?’ she asked. ‘I hope you will endeavour to be not only amusing but instructive.’

‘I wanted to point out to you that it is not civil pointedly to ignore a man who is sitting next to you at luncheon.’

‘Did I do that? I’m so sorry. But I know you’re greedy, and I thought you’d be absorbed in the lobster mayonnaise.’

‘I’m beginning to think I dislike you rather than otherwise,’ he murmured reflectively.

‘Ah, I suppose that is why you haven’t been in to see me for so long.’

‘May I venture to remind you that I’ve called upon you three times during the last week.’

‘I’ve been out so much lately,’ she answered, with a little wave of her hand.

‘Nonsense. Once I heard you playing scales in the drawing-room, and once I positively saw you peeping at me through the curtains.’

‘Why didn’t you make a face at me?’ she asked.

‘You’re not going to trouble to deny it?’

‘It’s perfectly true.’

Dick could not help giving a little laugh. He didn’t quite know whether he wanted to kiss Julia Crowley or to shake her.

‘And may I ask why you’ve treated me in this abominable fashion?’ he asked blandly.

She looked at him sideways from beneath her long eyelashes. Dick was a man who appreciated the artifices of civilisation in the fair sex, and he was pleased with her pretty hat and with the flounces of her muslin frock.

‘Because I chose,’ she smiled.

He shrugged his shoulders and put on an air of resignation.

‘Of course if you’re going to make yourself systematically disagreeable unless I marry you, I suppose I must bow to the inevitable.’

‘I don’t know if you have the least idea what you’re talking about,’ she answered, raising her eyebrows. ‘I’m sure I haven’t.’

‘I was merely asking you in a rather well-turned phrase to name the day. The lamb shall be ready for the slaughter.’

‘Is that a proposal of marriage?’ she asked gaily.

‘If not it must be its twin brother,’ he returned.

‘I’m so glad you’ve told me, because if I’d met it in the street I should never have recognised it, and I should simply have cut it dead.’

‘You show as little inclination to answer a question as a cabinet minister in the House of Commons.’

‘Couldn’t you infuse a little romance into it? You see, I’m American, and I have a certain taste for sentiment in affairs of the heart.’

‘I should be charmed, only you must remember that I have no experience in these matters.’

‘That is visible to the naked eye,’ she retorted. ‘But I would suggest that it is only decent to go down on your bended knees.’

‘That sounds a perilous feat to perform in a hansom cab, and it would certainly attract an amount of attention from passing bus-drivers which would be embarrassing.’

‘You could never convince me of the sincerity of your passion unless you did something of the kind,’ she replied.

‘I assure you that it is quite out of fashion. Lovers now-a-days are much too middle-aged, and their joints are creaky. Besides it ruins the trousers.’

‘I admit your last reason is overwhelming. No nice woman should ask a man to make his trousers baggy at the knees.’

‘How could she love him if they were!’ exclaimed Dick.

‘But at all events there can be no excuse for your not saying that you know you are utterly unworthy of me.’

‘Wild horses wouldn’t induce me to make a statement which is so remote from the truth,’ he replied coolly. ‘I did it with my little hatchet.’

‘And of course you must threaten to commit suicide if I don’t consent. That is only decent.’

‘Women are such sticklers for routine,’ he sighed. ‘They have no originality. They have a passion for commonplace, and in moments of emotion they fly with unerring instinct into the flamboyance of melodrama.’

‘I like to hear you use long words. It makes me feel so grown up.’

‘By the way, how old are you?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Twenty-nine,’ she answered promptly.

‘Nonsense. There is no such age.’

‘Pardon me,’ she protested gravely. ‘Upper parlour maids are always twenty-nine. But I deplore your tendency to digress.’

‘Am I digressing? I’m so sorry. What were we talking about?’

Julia giggled. She did not know where the cab was going, and she certainly did not care. She was thoroughly enjoying herself.

‘You were taking advantage of my vast experience in such matters to learn how a man proposes to an eligible widow of great personal attractions.’

‘Your advice can’t be very valuable, since you always refused the others.’

‘I didn’t indeed,’ she replied promptly. ‘I made a point of accepting them all.’

‘That at all events is encouraging.’

‘Of course you may do it in your own way if you choose. But I must have a proposal in due form.’

‘My intelligence may be limited, but it seems to me that only four words are needed.’ He counted them out deliberately on his fingers. ‘Will — you — marry — me?’

‘That is both clear and simple.’ She pressed back the thumb which he had left untouched. ‘I reply in one: no.’

He looked at her with every sign of astonishment.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

‘You heard quite correctly,’ she smiled. ‘The reply is in the negative.’

She resisted a mad, but inconvenient, temptation to dance a breakdown on the floor of the hansom.

‘You’re joking,’ said Dick calmly. ‘You’re certainly joking.’

‘I will be a sister to you.’

Dick reflected for a moment, and he rubbed his chin.

‘The chance will never recur, you know,’ he remarked.

‘I will bear the threat that is implied in that with fortitude.’

He turned round and taking her hand, raised it to his lips.

‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart,’ he said earnestly.

This puzzled her.

‘The man’s mad,’ she murmured to a constable who stood on the curb as they passed. ‘The man’s nothing short of a raving lunatic.’

‘It is one of my most cherished convictions that a really nice woman is never so cruel as to marry a man she cares for. You have given me proof of esteem which I promise I will never forget.’

Mrs. Crowley could not help laughing.

‘You’re much too flippant to marry anybody, and you’re perfectly odious into the bargain.’

‘I will be a brother to you, Mrs. Crowley.’

He opened the trap and told the cabman to drive back to Victoria Street, but at Hyde Park Corner he suggested that Mrs. Crowley might drop him so that he could take a stroll in the park. When he got out and closed the doors behind him, Julia leaned forward.

‘Would you like some letters of introduction before you go?’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘It is evident that unless your soul is dead to all the finer feelings, you will seek to assuage your sorrow by shooting grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains. I thought a few letters to my friends in New York might be useful to you.’

‘I’m sure that’s very considerate of you, but I fancy it’s scarcely the proper season. I was thinking of a week in Paris.’

‘Then pray send me a dozen pairs of black suède gloves,’ she retorted coolly. ‘Sixes.’

‘Is that your last word?’ he asked lightly.

‘Yes, why?’

‘I thought you might mean six and a half.’

He lifted his hat and was gone.

XIX

A few days later, Lady Kelsey and Lucy having gone on the river, Julia Crowley went to Court Leys. When she came down to breakfast the day after her arrival, she found waiting for her six pairs of long suède gloves. She examined their size and their quality, smiled with amusement, and felt a little annoyed. She really had every intention of accepting Dick when he proposed to her, and she did not in the least know why she had refused him. The conversation had carried her away in her own despite. She loved a repartee and notwithstanding the consequences could never resist making any that occurred to her. It was very stupid of Dick to take her so seriously, and she was inclined to be cross with him. Of course he had only gone to Paris to tease, and in a week he would be back again. She knew that he was just as much in love with her as she was with him, and it was absurd of him to put on airs. She awaited the post each day impatiently, for she constantly expected a letter from him to say he was coming down to luncheon. She made up her mind about the menu of the pleasant little meal she would set before him, and in imagination rehearsed the scene in which she would at length succumb to his passionate entreaties. It was evidently discreet not to surrender with unbecoming eagerness. But no letter came. A week went by. She began to think that Dick had no sense of humour. A second week passed, and then a third. Perhaps it was because she had nothing to do that Master Dick absorbed a quite unmerited degree of her attention. It was very inconvenient and very absurd. She tormented herself with all sorts of reasons to explain his absence, and once or twice, like the spoiled child she was, she cried. But Mrs. Crowley was a sensible woman and soon made up her mind that if she could not live without the man — though heaven only knew why she wanted him — she had better take steps to secure his presence. It was the end of August now, and she was bored and lonely. She sent him a very untruthful telegram.

I have to be in town on Friday to see my lawyer. May I come to tea at five?

Julia.

His answer did not arrive for twenty-four hours, and then it was addressed from Homburg.

Regret immensely, but shall be away.

Richard Lomas.

Julia stamped her tiny foot with indignation and laughed with amusement at her own anger. It was monstrous that while she was leading the dullest existence imaginable, he should be enjoying the gaieties of a fashionable watering-place. She telegraphed once more.

Thanks very much. Shall expect to see you on Friday.

Julia.

She travelled up to town on the appointed day and went to her house in Norfolk Street to see that the journey had left no traces on her appearance. Mayfair seemed quite deserted, and half the windows were covered with newspapers to keep out the dust. It was very hot, and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky. The pavements were white and dazzling. Julia realised with pleasure that she was the only cool person in London, and the lassitude she saw in the passers-by added to her own self-satisfaction. The month at the seaside had given an added freshness to her perfection, and her charming gown had a breezy lightness that must be very grateful to a gentleman of forty lately returned from foreign parts. As she looked at herself in the glass, Mrs. Crowley reflected that she did not know anyone who had a figure half so good as hers.

When she drove up to Dick’s house, she noticed that there were fresh flowers in the window boxes, and when she was shown into his drawing-room, the first thing that struck her was the scent of red roses which were in masses everywhere. The blinds were down, and after the baking street the dark coolness of the room was very pleasant. The tea was on a little table, waiting to be poured out. Dick of course was there to receive her. As she shook hands with him, she smothered a little titter of wild excitement.

‘So you’ve come back,’ she said.

‘I was just passing through town,’ he answered, with an airy wave of the hand.

‘From where to where?’

‘From Homburg to the Italian Lakes.’

‘Rather out of your way, isn’t it?’ she smiled.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘If I were going from Manchester to Liverpool, I should break the journey in London. That’s one of my hobbies.’

Julia laughed gaily, and as they both made a capital tea, they talked of all manner of trivial things. They were absurdly glad to see one another again, and each was ready to be amused at everything the other said. But the conversation would have been unintelligible to a listener, since they mostly talked together, and every now and then made a little scene when one insisted that the other should listen to what he was saying.

Suddenly Mrs. Crowley threw up her hands with a gesture of dismay.

‘Oh, how stupid of me!’ she cried. ‘I quite forgot to tell you why I telegraphed to you the other day.’

‘I know,’ he retorted.

‘Do you? Why?’

‘Because you’re the most disgraceful flirt I ever saw in my life,’ he answered promptly.

She opened her eyes wide with a very good imitation of complete amazement.

‘My dear Mr. Lomas, have you never contemplated yourself in a looking-glass?’

‘You’re not a bit repentant of the havoc you have wrought,’ he cried dramatically.

She did not answer, but looked at him with a smile so entirely delightful that he cried out irritably:

‘I wish you wouldn’t look like that.’

‘How am I looking?’ she smiled.

‘To my innocent and inexperienced gaze very much as if you wanted to be kissed.’

‘You brute!’ she cried. ‘I’ll never speak to you again.’

‘Why do you make such rash statements? You know you couldn’t hold you tongue for two minutes together.’

‘What a libel! I never can get a word in edgeways when I’m with you,’ she returned. ‘You’re such a chatterbox.’

‘I don’t know why you put on that aggrieved air. You seem to forget that it’s I who ought to be furious.’

‘On the contrary, you behaved very unkindly to me a month ago, and I’m only here to-day because I have a Christian disposition.’

‘You forget that for the last four weeks I’ve been laboriously piecing together the fragments of a broken heart,’ he answered.

‘It was entirely your fault,’ she laughed. ‘If you hadn’t been so certain I was going to accept you, I should never have refused. I couldn’t resist the temptation of saying no, just to see how you took it.’

‘I flatter myself I took it very well.’

‘You didn’t,’ she answered. ‘You showed an entire lack of humour. You might have known that a nice woman doesn’t accept a man the first time he asks her. It was very silly of you to go to Homburg as if you didn’t care. How was I to know that you meant to wait a month before asking me again?’

He looked at her for a moment calmly.

‘I haven’t the least intention of asking you again.’

But it required much more than this to put Julia Crowley out of countenance.

‘Then why on earth did you invite me to tea?’

‘May I respectfully remind you that you invited yourself?’ he protested.

‘That’s just like a man. He will go into irrelevant details,’ she answered.

‘Now, don’t be cross,’ he smiled.

‘I shall be cross if I want to,’ she exclaimed, with a little stamp of her foot. ‘You’re not being at all nice to me.’

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and his eyes twinkled.

‘Do you know what I’d do if I were you?’

‘No, what?’

‘Well, I can’t suffer the humiliation of another refusal. Why don’t you propose to me?’

‘What cheek!’ she cried.

Their eyes met, and she smiled.

‘What will you say if I do?’

‘That entirely depends on how you do it.’

‘I don’t know how,’ she murmured plaintively.

‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted. ‘You gave me an admirable lesson. First you go on your bended knees, and then you say you’re quite unworthy of me.’

‘You are the most spiteful creature I’ve ever known,’ she laughed. ‘You’re just the sort of man who’d beat his wife.’

‘Every Saturday night regularly,’ he agreed.

She hesitated, looking at him.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I shan’t,’ she answered.

‘Then I shall continue to be a brother to you.’

She got up and curtsied.

‘Mr. Lomas, I am a widow, twenty-nine years of age, and extremely eligible. My maid is a treasure, and my dressmaker is charming. I’m clever enough to laugh at your jokes and not so learned as to know where they come from.’

‘Really you’re very long winded. I said it all in four words.’

‘You evidently put it too briefly, since you were refused,’ she smiled.

She stretched out her hands, and he took them.

‘I think I’ll do it by post,’ she said. ‘It’ll sound so much more becoming.’

‘You’d better get it over now.’

‘You know, I don’t really want to marry you a bit. I’m only doing it to please you.’

‘I admire your unselfishness.’

‘You will say yes if I ask you?’

‘I refuse to commit myself.’

‘Obstinate beast,’ she cried.

She curtsied once more, as well as she could since he was firmly holding her hands.

‘Sir, I have the honour to demand your hand in marriage.’

He bowed elaborately.

‘Madam, I have much pleasure in acceding to your request.’

Then he drew her towards him and put his arms around her.

‘I never saw anyone make such a fuss about so insignificant a detail as marriage,’ she murmured.

‘You have the softest lips I ever kissed,’ he said.

‘I wish to goodness you’d be serious,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve got something very important to say to you.’

‘You’re not going to tell me the story of your past life,’ he cried.

‘No, I was thinking of my engagement ring. I make a point of having a cabochon emerald: I collect them.’

‘No sooner said than done,’ he cried.

He took a ring from his pocket and slipped it on her finger. She looked from it to him.

‘You see, I know that you made a specialty of emeralds.’

‘Then you meant to ask me all the time?’

‘I confess it to my shame: I did,’ he laughed.

‘Oh, I wish I’d known that before.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘I’d have refused you again, you silly.’

Dick Lomas and Mrs. Crowley said nothing about their engagement to anyone, since it seemed to both that the marriage of a middle-aged gentleman and a widow of uncertain years could concern no one but themselves. The ceremony was duly performed in a deserted church on a warm September day, when there was not a soul in London. Mrs. Crowley was given away by her solicitor, and the verger signed the book. The happy pair went to Court Leys for a fortnight’s honeymoon and at the beginning of October returned to London; they made up their minds that they would go to America later in the autumn.

‘I want to show you off to all my friends in New York,’ said Julia, gaily.

‘Do you think they’ll like me?’ asked Dick.

‘Not at all. They’ll say: That silly little fool Julia Crowley has married another beastly Britisher.’

‘That is more alliterative than polite,’ he retorted.

‘On the other hand my friends and relations are already saying: What on earth has poor Dick Lomas married an American for? We always thought he was very well-to-do.’

They went into roars of laughter, for they were in that state of happiness when the whole world seemed the best of jokes, and they spent their days in laughing at one another and at things in general. Life was a pleasant thing, and they could not imagine why others should not take it as easily as themselves.

They had engaged rooms at the Carlton while they were furnishing a new house. Each had one already, but neither would live in the other’s, and so it had seemed necessary to look out for a third. Julia vowed that there was an air of bachelordom about Dick’s house which made it impossible for a married woman to inhabit; and Dick, on his side, refused to move into Julia’s establishment in Norfolk Street, since it gave him the sensation of being a fortune-hunter living on his wife’s income. Besides, a new house gave an opportunity for extravagance which delighted both of them since they realised perfectly that the only advantage of having plenty of money was to spend it in unnecessary ways. They were a pair of light-hearted children, who refused firmly to consider the fact that they were more than twenty-five.

Lady Kelsey and Lucy had gone from the River to Spa, for the elder woman’s health, and on their return Julia went to see them in order to receive their congratulations and display her extreme happiness. She came back thoughtfully. When she sat down to luncheon with Dick in their sitting-room at the hotel, he saw that she was disturbed. He asked her what was the matter.

‘Lucy has broken off her engagement with Robert Boulger,’ she said.

‘That young woman seems to make a speciality of breaking her engagements,’ he answered drily.

‘I’m afraid she’s still in love with Alec MacKenzie.’

‘Then why on earth did she accept Bobbie?’

‘My dear boy, she only took him in a fit of temper. When that had cooled down she very wisely thought better of it.’

‘I can never sufficiently admire the reasonableness of your sex,’ said Dick, ironically.

Julia shrugged her pretty shoulders.

‘Half the women I know merely married their husbands to spite somebody else. I assure you it’s one of the commonest causes of matrimony.’

‘Then heaven save me from matrimony,’ cried Dick.

‘It hasn’t,’ she laughed.

But immediately she grew serious once more.

‘Mr. MacKenzie was in Brussels while they were in Spa.’

‘I had a letter from him this morning.’

‘Lady Kelsey says that according to the papers he’s going to Africa again. I think it’s that which has upset Lucy. They made a great fuss about him in Brussels.’

‘Yes, he tells me that everything is fixed up, and he proposes to start quite shortly. He’s going to do some work in the Congo Free State. They want to find a new waterway, and the King of the Belgians has given him a free hand.’

‘I suppose the King of the Belgians looks upon one atrocity more or less with equanimity,’ said Julia.

They were silent for a minute or two, while each was occupied with his own thoughts.

‘You saw him after Lucy broke off the engagement,’ said Julia, presently. ‘Was he very wretched?’

‘He never said a word. I wanted to comfort him, but he never gave me a chance. He never even mentioned Lucy’s name.’

‘Did he seem unhappy?’

‘No. He was just the same as ever, impassive and collected.’

‘Really, he’s inhuman,’ exclaimed Julia impatiently.

‘He’s an anomaly in this juvenile century,’ Dick agreed. ‘He’s an ancient Roman who buys his clothes in Savile Row.’

‘Then he’s very much in the way in England, and it’s much better that he should go back to Africa.’

‘I suppose it is. Here he reminds one of an eagle caged with a colony of canaries.’

Julia looked at her husband reflectively.

‘I think you’re the only friend who has stuck to him,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t put it in that way. After all, I’m the only friend he ever had. It was not unnatural that a number of acquaintances should drop him when he got into hot water.’

‘It must have been a great help to find someone who believed in him notwithstanding everything.’

‘I’m afraid it sounds very immoral, but whatever his crimes were, I should never like Alec less. You see, he’s been so awfully good and kind to me, I can look on with fortitude while he plays football with the Ten Commandments.’

Julia’s emotions were always sudden, and the tears came to her eyes as she answered.

‘I’m really beginning to think you a perfect angel, Dick.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he retorted quickly. ‘It makes me feel so middle-aged. I’d much sooner be a young sinner than an elderly cherub.’

Smiling, she stretched out her hand, and he held it for a moment.

‘You know, though I can’t help liking you, I don’t in the least approve of you.’

‘Good heavens, why not?’ he cried.

‘Well, I was brought up to believe that a man should work, and you’re disgracefully idle.’

‘Good heavens, to marry an American wife is the most arduous profession in the world,’ he cried. ‘One has to combine the energy of the Universal Provider with the patience of an ambassador at the Sublime Porte.’

‘You foolish creature,’ she laughed.

But her thoughts immediately reverted to Lucy. Her pallid, melancholy face still lingered in Julia’s memory, and her heart was touched by the hopeless woe that dwelt in her beautiful eyes.

‘I suppose there’s no doubt that those stories about Alec MacKenzie were true?’ she said, thoughtfully.

Dick gave her a quick glance. He wondered what was in her mind.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Anyone who knows Alec as well as I do must be convinced that he did nothing from motives that were mean and paltry. To accuse him of cowardice is absurd — he’s the bravest man I’ve ever known — and it’s equally absurd to accuse him of weakness. But what I do think is this: Alec is not the man to stick at half measures, and he’s taken desperately to heart the maxim which says that he who desires an end desires the means also. I think he might be very ruthless, and on occasion he might be stern to the verge of brutality. Reading between the lines of those letters that Macinnery sent to the Daily Mail, I have wondered if Alec, finding that someone must be sacrificed, didn’t deliberately choose George Allerton because he was the least useful to him and could be best spared. Even in small undertakings like that there must be some men who are only food for powder. If Alec had found George worthless to him, no consideration for Lucy would have prevented him from sacrificing him.’

‘If that were so why didn’t he say it outright?’

‘Do you think it would have made things any better? The British public is sentimental; they will not understand that in warfare it is necessary sometimes to be inhuman. And how would it have served him with Lucy if he had confessed that he had used George callously as a pawn in his game that must be sacrificed to win some greater advantage?’

‘It’s all very horrible,’ shuddered Julia.

‘And so far as the public goes, events have shown that he was right to keep silence. The agitation against him died down for want of matter, and though he is vaguely discredited, nothing is proved definitely against him. Public opinion is very fickle, and already people are beginning to forget, and as they forget they will think they have misjudged him. When it is announced that he has given his services to the King of the Belgians, ten to one there will be a reaction in his favour.’

They got up from luncheon, and coffee was served to them. They lit their cigarettes. For some time they were silent.

‘Lucy wants to see him before he goes,’ said Julia suddenly.

Dick looked at her and gave an impatient shrug of the shoulders.

‘I suppose she wants to indulge a truly feminine passion for making scenes. She’s made Alec quite wretched enough already.’

‘Don’t be unkind to her, Dick,’ said Julia, tears welling up in her bright eyes. ‘You don’t know how desperately unhappy she is. My heart bled to see her this morning.’

‘Darling, I’ll do whatever you want me to,’ he said, leaning over her.

Julia’s sense of the ridiculous was always next door to her sense of the pathetic.

‘I don’t know why you should kiss me because Lucy’s utterly miserable,’ she said, with a little laugh.

And then, gravely, as she nestled in his encircling arm:

‘Will you try and manage it? She hesitates to write to him.’

‘I’m not sure if I had not better leave you to impart the pleasing information yourself,’ he replied. ‘I’ve asked Alec to come here this afternoon.’

‘You’re a selfish beast,’ she answered. ‘But in that case you must leave me alone with him, because I shall probably weep gallons of tears, and you’ll only snigger at me.’

‘Bless your little heart! Let us put handkerchiefs in every conceivable place.’

‘On occasions like this I carry a bagful about with me.’

XX

In the afternoon Alec arrived. Julia’s tender heart was touched by the change wrought in him during the three months of his absence from town. At the first glance there was little difference in him. He was still cool and collected, with that air of expecting people to do his bidding which had always impressed her; and there was still about him a sensation of strength, which was very comfortable to weaker vessels. But her sharp eyes saw that he held himself together by an effort of will, and it was singularly painful to the onlooker. The strain had told on him, and there was in his haggard eyes, in the deliberate firmness of his mouth, a tension which suggested that he was almost at the end of his tether. He was sterner than before and more silent. Julia could see how deeply he had suffered, and his suffering had been greater because of his determination to conquer it at all costs. She longed to go to him and beg him not to be too hard upon himself. Things would have gone more easily with him, if he had allowed himself a little weakness. But he was softer too, and she no longer felt the slight awe which to her till then had often made intercourse difficult. His first words were full of an unexpected kindness.

‘I’m so glad to be able to congratulate you,’ he said, holding her hand and smiling with that rare, sweet smile of his. ‘I was a little unhappy at leaving Dick; but now I leave him in your hands I’m perfectly content. He’s the dearest, kindest old chap I’ve ever known.’

‘Shut up, Alec,’ cried Dick promptly. ‘Don’t play the heavy father, or Julia will burst into tears. She loves having a good cry.’

But Alec ignored the interruption.

‘He’ll be an admirable husband because he’s been an admirable friend.’

For the first time Julia thought Alec altogether wise and charming.

‘I know he will,’ she answered happily. ‘And I’m only prevented from saying all I think of him by the fear that he’ll become perfectly unmanageable.’

‘Spare me the chaste blushes which mantle my youthful brow, and pour out the tea, Julia,’ said Dick.

She laughed and proceeded to do as he requested.

‘And are you really starting for Africa so soon?’ Julia asked, when they were settled around the tea-table.

Alec threw back his head, and his face lit up.

‘I am. Everything is fixed up; the bother of collecting supplies and getting porters has been taken off my shoulders, and all I have to do is to get along as quickly as possible.’

‘I wish to goodness you’d give up these horrible explorations,’ cried Dick. ‘They make the rest of us feel so abominably unadventurous.’

‘But they’re the very breath of my nostrils,’ answered Alec. ‘You don’t know the exhilaration of the daily dangers, the joy of treading where only the wild beasts have trodden before.’

‘I freely confess that I don’t want to,’ said Dick.

Alec sprang up and stretched his legs. As he spoke all signs of lassitude disappeared, and he was seized with an excitement that was rarely seen in him.

‘Already I can hardly bear my impatience when I think of the boundless country and the enchanting freedom. Here one grows so small, so mean; but in Africa everything is built to a nobler standard. There the man is really a man. There one knows what are will and strength and courage. You don’t know what it is to stand on the edge of some great plain and breathe the pure keen air after the terrors of the forest.’

‘The boundless plain of Hyde Park is enough for me,’ said Dick. ‘And the aspect of Piccadilly on a fine day in June gives me quite as many emotions as I want.’

But Julia was moved by Alec’s unaccustomed rhetoric, and she looked at him earnestly.

‘But what will you gain by it now that your work is over — by all the danger and all the hardships?’

He turned his dark, solemn eyes upon her.

‘Nothing. I want to gain nothing. Perhaps I shall discover some new species of antelope or some unknown plant. I may be fortunate enough to find a new waterway. That is all the reward I want. I love the sense of power and the mastery. What do you think I care for the tinsel rewards of kings and peoples!’

‘I always said you were melodramatic,’ said Dick. ‘I never heard anything so transpontine.’

‘And the end of it?’ asked Julia, almost in a whisper. ‘What will be the end?’

A faint smile played for an instant upon Alec’s lips. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘The end is death. But I shall die standing up. I shall go the last journey as I have gone every other.’

He stopped, for he would not add the last two words. Julia said them for him.

‘Without fear.’

‘For all the world like the wicked baronet,’ cried the mocking Dick. ‘Once aboard the lugger, and the gurl is mine.’

Julia reflected for a little while. She did not want to resist the admiration with which Alec filled her. But she shuddered. He did not seem to fit in with the generality of men.

‘Don’t you want people to remember you?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps they will,’ he answered slowly. ‘Perhaps in a hundred years, in some flourishing town where I discovered nothing but wilderness, they will commission a second-rate sculptor to make a fancy statue of me. And I shall stand in front of the Stock Exchange, a convenient perch for birds, to look eternally upon the shabby deeds of human kind.’

He gave a short, abrupt laugh, and his words were followed by silence. Julia gave Dick a glance which he took to be a signal that she wished to be alone with Alec.

‘Forgive me if I leave you for one minute,’ he said.

He got up and left the room. The silence still continued, and Alec seemed immersed in thought. At last Julia answered him.

‘And is that really all? I can’t help thinking that at the bottom of your heart there is something that you’ve never told to a living soul.’

He looked at her, and their eyes met. He felt suddenly her extraordinary sympathy and her passionate desire to help him. And as though the bonds of the flesh were loosened, it seemed to him that their very souls faced one another. The reserve which was his dearest habit fell away from him, and he felt an urgent desire to say that which a curious delicacy had prevented him from every betraying to callous ears.

‘I daresay I shall never see you again, and perhaps it doesn’t much matter what I say to you. You’ll think me very silly, but I’m afraid I’m rather — patriotic. It’s only we who live away from England who really love it. I’m so proud of my country, and I wanted so much to do something for it. Often in Africa I’ve thought of this dear England and longed not to die till I had done my work.’

His voice shook a little, and he paused. It seemed to Julia that she saw the man for the first time, and she wished passionately that Lucy could hear those words of his which he spoke so shyly, and yet with such a passionate earnestness.

‘Behind all the soldiers and the statesmen whose fame is imperishable there is a long line of men who’ve built up the empire piece by piece. Their names are forgotten, and only students know their history, but each one of them gave a province to his country. And I too have my place among them. Year after year I toiled, night and day, and at last I was able to hand over to the commissioner a broad tract of land, rich and fertile. After my death England will forget my faults and my mistakes; and I care nothing for the flouts and gibes with which she has repaid all my pain, for I have added another fair jewel to her crown. I don’t want rewards; I only want the honour of serving this dear land of ours.’

Julia went up to him and laid her hand gently on his arm.

‘Why is it, when you’re so nice really, that you do all you can to make people think you utterly horrid?’

‘Don’t laugh at me because you’ve found out that at bottom I’m nothing more than a sentimental old woman.’

‘I don’t want to laugh at you. But if I didn’t think it would embarrass you so dreadfully, I should certainly kiss you.’

He smiled and lifting her hand to his lips, lightly kissed it.

‘I shall begin to think I’m a very wonderful woman if I’ve taught you to do such pretty things as that.’

She made him sit down, and then she sat by his side.

‘I’m very glad you came to-day. I wanted to talk to you. Will you be very angry if I say something to you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he smiled.

‘I want to speak to you about Lucy.’

He drew himself suddenly together, and the expansion of his mood disappeared. He was once more the cold, reserved man of their habitual intercourse.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said briefly.

But Julia was not to be so easily put off.

‘What would you do if she came here to-day?’ she asked.

He turned round and looked at her sharply, then answered with great deliberation.

‘I have always lived in polite society. I should never dream of outraging its conventions. If Lucy happened to come, you may be sure that I should be scrupulously polite.’

‘Is that all?’ she cried.

He did not answer, and into his face came a wild fierceness that appalled her. She saw the effort he was making at self-control. She wished with all her heart that he would be less brave.

‘I think you might not be so hard if you knew how desperately Lucy has suffered.’

He looked at her again, and his eyes were filled with bitterness, with angry passion at the injustice of fate. Did she think that he had not suffered? Because he did not whine his misery to all and sundry, did she think he did not care? He sprang up and walked to the other end of the room. He did not want that woman, for all her kindness, to see his face. He was not the man to fall in and out of love with every pretty girl he met. All his life he had kept an ideal before his eyes. He turned to Julia savagely.

‘You don’t know what it meant to me to fall in love. I felt that I had lived all my life in a prison, and at last Lucy came and took me by the hand, and led me out. And for the first time I breathed the free air of heaven.’

He stopped abruptly, clenching his jaws. He would not tell her how bitterly he had suffered for it, he would not tell her of his angry rebelliousness because all that pain should have come to him. He wanted nobody to know the depths of his agony and of his despair. But he would not give way. He felt that, if he did not keep a tight hold on himself, he would break down and shake with passionate sobbing. He felt a sudden flash of hatred for Julia because she sat there and watched his weakness. But as though she saw at what a crisis of emotion he was, Julia turned her eyes from him and looked down at the ground. She did not speak. She felt the effort he was making to master himself, and she was infinitely disturbed. She wanted to go to him and comfort him, but she knew he would repel her. He wanted to fight his battle unaided.

At last he conquered, but when he spoke again, his voice was singularly broken. It was hoarse and low.

‘My love was the last human weakness I had. It was right that I should drink that bitter cup. And I’ve drunk its very dregs. I should have known that I wasn’t meant for happiness and a life of ease. I have other work to do in the world.’

He paused for a moment, and his calmness was restored to him.

‘And now that I’ve overcome this last temptation I am ready to do it.’

‘But haven’t you any pity for yourself? Haven’t you any thought for Lucy?’

‘Must I tell you, too, that everything I did was for Lucy’s sake? And still I love her with all my heart and soul.’

There was no bitterness in his tone now; it was gentle and resigned. He had, indeed, won the battle. Julia’s eyes were filled with tears, and she could not answer. He came forward and shook hands with her.

‘You mustn’t cry,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re one of those persons whose part it is to bring sunshine into the lives of those with less fortunate dispositions. You must always be happy and childlike.’

‘I’ve got lots of handkerchiefs, thanks,’ she sobbed, laughing the while.

‘You must forget all the nonsense I’ve talked to you,’ he said.

He smiled once more and was gone.

Dick was sitting in his bedroom, reading an evening paper, and she flung herself sobbing into his arms.

‘Oh, Dick, I’ve had such a lovely cry, and I’m so happy and so utterly wretched. And I’m sure I shall have a red nose.’

‘Darling, I’ve long discovered that you only weep because you’re the only person in the world to whom it’s thoroughly becoming.’

‘Don’t be horrid and unsympathetic. I think Alec MacKenzie’s a perfect dear. I wanted to kiss him, only I was afraid it would frighten him to death.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t. He would have thought you a forward hussy.’

‘I wish I could have married him, too,’ cried Julia, ‘I’m sure he’d make a nice husband.’

XXI

The days went by, spent by Alec in making necessary preparations for his journey, spent by Lucy in sickening anxiety. The last two months had been passed by her in a conflict of emotions. Love had planted itself in her heart like a great forest tree, and none of the storms that had assailed it seemed to have power to shake its stubborn roots. Season, common decency, shame, had lost their power. She had prayed God that a merciful death might free her from the dreadful uncertainty. She was spiritless and cowed. She despised herself for her weakness. And sometimes she rebelled against the fate that crushed her with such misfortunes; she had tried to do her duty always, acting humbly according to her lights, and yet everything she was concerned in crumbled away to powder at her touch. She, too, began to think that she was not meant for happiness. She knew that she ought to hate Alec, but she could not. She knew that his action should fill her with nameless horror, but against her will she could not believe that he was false and wicked. One thing she was determined on, and that was to keep her word to Robert Boulger; but he himself gave her back her freedom.

He came to her one day, and after a little casual conversation broke suddenly into the middle of things.

‘Lucy, I want to ask you to release me from my engagement to you,’ he said.

Her heart gave a great leap against her breast, and she began to tremble. He went on.

‘I’m ashamed to have to say it; I find that I don’t love you enough to marry you.’

She looked at him silently, and her eyes filled with tears. The brutality with which he spoke was so unnatural that it betrayed the mercifulness of his intention.

‘If you think that, there is nothing more to be said,’ she answered.

He gave her a look of such bitterness that she felt it impossible to continue a pretence which deceived neither of them.

‘I’m unworthy of your love,’ she cried. ‘I’ve made you desperately wretched.’

‘It doesn’t matter about me,’ he said. ‘But there’s no reason for you to be wretched, too.’

‘I’m willing to do whatever you wish, Bobbie.’

‘I can’t marry you simply because you’re sorry for me. I thought I could, but — it’s asking too much of you. We had better say no more about it.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ she whispered.

‘You see, you’re still in love with Alec MacKenzie.’

He said it, vainly longing for a denial; but he knew in his heart that no denial would come.

‘I always shall be, notwithstanding everything. I can’t help myself.’

‘No, it’s fate.’

She sprang to her feet with vehement passion.

‘Oh, Bobbie, don’t you think there’s some chance that everything may be explained?’

He hesitated for a moment. It was very difficult to answer.

‘It’s only fair to tell you that now things have calmed down, there are a great many people who don’t believe Macinnery’s story. It appears that the man’s a thorough blackguard, whom MacKenzie loaded with benefits.’

‘Do you still believe that Alec caused George’s death?’

‘Yes.’

Lucy leaned back in her chair, resting her face on her hand. She seemed to reflect deeply.

‘And you?’ said Bobbie.

She gave him a long, earnest look. The colour came to her cheeks.

‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I have no reason except that I love him.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

Bobbie got up, kissed her gently, and went out. She did not see him again, and in a day or two she heard that he had gone away.

Lucy made up her mind that she must see Alec before he went, but a secret bashfulness prevented her from writing to him. She was afraid that he would refuse, and she could not force herself upon him if she knew definitely that he did not want to see her. But with all her heart she wanted to ask his pardon. It would not be so hard to continue with the dreary burden which was her life if she knew that he had a little pity for her. He could not fail to forgive her when he saw how broken she was.

But the days followed one another, and the date which Julia, radiant with her own happiness, had given her as that of his departure, was approaching.

Julia, too, was exercised in mind. After her conversation with Alec she could not ask him to see Lucy, for she knew what his answer would be. No arguments, would move him. He did not want to give either Lucy or himself the pain which he foresaw an interview would cause, and his wounds were too newly-healed for him to run any risks. Julia resolved to take the matter into her own hands. Alec was starting next day, and he had promised to look in towards the evening to bid them good-bye. Julia wrote a note to Lucy, asking her to come also.

When she told Dick, he was aghast.

‘But it’s a monstrous thing to do,’ he cried. ‘You can’t entrap the man in that way.’

‘I know it’s monstrous,’ she answered. ‘But that’s the only advantage of being an American in England, that one can do monstrous things. You look upon us as first cousins to the red Indians, and you expect anything from us. In America I have to mind my p’s and q’s. I mayn’t smoke in public, I shouldn’t dream of lunching in a restaurant alone with a man, and I’m the most conventional person in the most conventional society in the world; but here, because the English are under the delusion that New York society is free and easy, and that American women have no restraint, I can kick over the traces, and no one will think it even odd.’

‘But, my dear, it’s a mere matter of common decency.’

‘There are times when common decency is out of place,’ she replied.

‘Alec will never forgive you.’

‘I don’t care. I think he ought to see Lucy, and since he’d refuse if I asked him, I’m not going to give him the chance.’

‘What will you do if he just bows and walks off?’

‘I have his assurance that he’ll behave like a civilised man,’ she answered.

‘I wash my hands of it,’ said Dick. ‘I think it’s perfectly indefensible.’

‘I never said it wasn’t,’ she agreed. ‘But you see, I’m only a poor, weak woman, and I’m not supposed to have any sense of honour or propriety. You must let me take what advantage I can of the disabilities of the weaker sex.’

Dick smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Your blood be upon your own head,’ he answered.

‘If I perish, I perish.’

And so it came about that when Alec had been ten minutes in Julia’s cosy sitting-room, Lucy was announced. Julia went up to her, greeting her effusively to cover the awkwardness of the moment. Alec grew very pale, but made no sign that he was disconcerted. Only Dick was troubled. He was obviously at a loss for words, and it was plain to see that he was out of temper.

‘I’m so glad you were able to come,’ said Julia, in order to show Alec that she had been expecting Lucy.

Lucy gave him a rapid glance, and the colour flew to her cheeks. He was standing up and came forward with outstretched hand.

‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘How is Lady Kelsey?’

‘She’s much better, thanks. We’ve been to Spa, you know, for her health.’

Julia’s heart beat quickly. She was much excited at this meeting; and it seemed to her strangely romantic, a sign of the civilisation of the times, that these two people with raging passions afire in their hearts, should exchange the commonplaces of polite society, Alec, having recovered from his momentary confusion was extremely urbane.

‘Somebody told me you’d gone abroad,’ he said. ‘Was it you, Dick? Dick is an admirable person, a sort of gazetteer for the world of fashion.’

Dick fussily brought forward a chair for Lucy to sit in, and offered to disembarrass her of the jacket she was wearing.

‘You must make my excuses for not leaving a card on Lady Kelsey before going away,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve been excessively busy.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ Lucy answered.

Julia glanced at him. She saw that he was determined to keep the conversation on the indifferent level which it might have occupied if Lucy had been nothing more than an acquaintance. There was a bantering tone in his voice which was an effective barrier to all feeling. For a moment she was nonplussed.

‘London is an excellent place for showing one of how little importance one is in the world. One makes a certain figure, and perhaps is tempted to think oneself of some consequence. Then one goes away, and on returning is surprised to discover that nobody has ever noticed one’s absence.’

Lucy smiled faintly. Dick, recovering his good-humour, came at once to the rescue.

‘You’re overmodest, Alec. If you weren’t, you might be a great man. Now, I make a point of telling my friends that I’m indispensable, and they take me at my word.’

‘You are a leaven of flippancy in the heavy dough of British righteousness,’ smiled Alec.

‘It is true that the wise man only takes the unimportant quite seriously.’

‘For it is obvious that one needs more brains to do nothing with elegance than to be a cabinet minister,’ said Alec.

‘You pay me a great compliment, Alec,’ cried Dick. ‘You repeat to my very face one of my favourite observations.’

Julia looked at him steadily.

‘Haven’t I heard you say that only the impossible is worth doing?’

‘Good heavens,’ he cried. ‘I must have been quoting the headings of a copy-book.’

Lucy felt that she must say something. She had been watching Alec, and her heart was nearly breaking. She turned to Dick.

‘Are you going down to Southampton?’ she asked.

‘I am, indeed,’ he answered. ‘I shall hide my face on Alec’s shoulder and weep salt tears. It will be most affecting, because in moments of emotion I always burst into epigram.’

Alec sprang to his feet. There was a bitterness in his face which was in odd contrast with Dick’s light words.

‘I loathe all solemn leave-takings,’ he said. ‘I prefer to part from people with a nod or a smile, whether I’m going for ever or for a day to Brighton.’

‘I’ve always assured you that you’re a monster of inhumanity,’ said Mrs. Lomas, laughing difficultly.

He turned to her with a grim smile.

‘Dick has been imploring me for twenty years to take life flippantly. I have learnt at last that things are only grave if you take them gravely, and that is desperately stupid. It’s so hard to be serious without being absurd. That is the chief power of women, that life and death for them are merely occasions for a change of costume, marriage a creation in white, and the worship of God an opportunity for a Paris bonnet.’

Julia saw that he was determined to keep the conversation on a level of amiable persiflage, and with her lively sense of the ridiculous she could hardly repress a smile at the heaviness of his hand. Through all that he said pierced the bitterness of his heart, and his every word was contradicted by the vehemence of his tortured voice. She was determined, too, that the interview which she had brought about, uncomfortable as it had been to all of them, should not be brought to nothing; characteristically she went straight to the point. She stood up.

‘I’m sure you two have things to say to one another that you would like to say alone.’

She saw Alec’s eyes grow darker as he saw himself cornered, but she was implacable.

‘I have some letters to send off by the American mail, and I want Dick to look over them to see that I’ve spelt honour with a u and traveller with a double l.’

Neither Alec nor Lucy answered, and the determined little woman took her husband firmly away. When they were left alone, neither spoke for a while.

‘I’ve just realised that you didn’t know I was coming to-day,’ said Lucy at last. ‘I had no idea that you were being entrapped. I would never have consented to that.’

‘I’m very glad to have an opportunity of saying good-bye to you,’ he answered.

He preserved the conversational manner of polite society, and it seemed to Lucy that she would never have the strength to get beyond.

‘I’m so glad that Dick and Julia are happily married. They’re very much in love with one another.’

‘I should have thought love was the worst possible foundation for marriage,’ he answered. ‘Love creates illusions, and marriage destroys them. True lovers should never marry.’

Again silence fell upon them, and again Lucy broke it.

‘You’re going away to-morrow?’

‘I am.’

She looked at him, but he would not meet her eyes. He went over to the window and looked out upon the busy street.

‘Are you very glad to go?’

‘You can’t think what a joy it is to look upon London for the last time. I long for the infinite surface of the clean and comfortable sea.’

Lucy gave a stifled sob. Alec started a little, but he did not move. He still looked down upon the stream of cabs and ‘buses, lit by the misty autumn sun.

‘Is there no one you regret to leave, Alec?’

It tore his heart that she should use his name. To hear her say it had always been like a caress, and the word on her lips brought back once more the whole agony of his distress; but he would not allow his emotion to be seen. He turned round and faced her gravely. Now, for the first time, he did not hesitate to look at her. And while he spoke the words he set himself to speak, he noticed the exquisite oval of her face, her charming, soft hair, and her unhappy eyes.

‘You see, Dick is married, and so I’m much best out of the way. When a man takes a wife, his bachelor friends are wise to depart from his life, gracefully, before he shows them that he needs their company no longer.’

‘And besides Dick?’

‘I have few friends and no relations. I can’t flatter myself that anyone will be much distressed at my departure.’

‘You must have no heart at all,’ she said, in a low, hoarse voice.

He clenched his teeth. He was bitterly angry with Julia because she had exposed him to this unspeakable torture.

‘If I had I certainly should not bring it to the Carlton Hotel. That sentimental organ would be surely out of place in such a neighbourhood.’

Lucy sprang to her feet.

‘Oh, why do you treat me as if we were strangers? How can you be so cruel?’

‘Flippancy is often the only refuge from an uncomfortable position,’ he answered gravely. ‘We should really be much wiser merely to discuss the weather.’

‘Are you angry because I came?’

‘That would be very ungracious on my part. Perhaps it wasn’t quite necessary that we should meet again.’

‘You’ve been acting all the time I’ve been here. Do you think I didn’t see it was unreal, when you talked with such cynical indifference? I know you well enough to tell when you’re hiding your real self behind a mask.’

‘If that is so, the inference is obvious that I wish my real self to be hidden.’

‘I would rather you cursed me than treat me with such cold politeness.’

‘I’m afraid you’re rather difficult to please,’ he said.

Lucy went up to him passionately, but he drew back so that she might not touch him. Her outstretched hands dropped powerless to her side.

‘Oh, you’re of iron,’ she cried pitifully. ‘Alec, Alec, I couldn’t let you go without seeing you once more. Even you would be satisfied if you knew what bitter anguish I’ve suffered. Even you would pity me. I don’t want you to think too badly of me.’

‘Does it much matter what I think? We shall be five thousand miles apart.’

‘You must utterly despise me.’

He shook his head. And now his manner lost that affected calmness which had been so cruelly wounding. He could not now attempt to hide the pain that he was suffering. His voice trembled a little with his great emotion.

‘I loved you far too much to do that. Believe me, with all my heart I wish you well. Now that the first bitterness is past I see that you did the only possible thing. I hope that you’ll be very happy. Robert Boulger is an excellent fellow, and I’m sure he’ll make you a much better husband than I should ever have done.’

Lucy blushed to the roots of her hair. Her heart sank, and she did not seek to conceal her agitation.

‘Did they tell you I was going to marry Robert Boulger?’

‘Isn’t it true?’

‘Oh, how cruel of them, how frightfully cruel! I became engaged to him, but he gave me my release. He knew that notwithstanding everything, I loved you better than my life.’

Alec looked down, but he did not say anything. He did not move.

‘Oh, Alec, don’t be utterly pitiless,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t leave me without a single word of kindness.’

‘Nothing is changed, Lucy. You sent me away because I caused your brother’s death.’

She stood before him, her hands behind her back, and they looked into one another’s eyes. Her words were steady and quiet. It seemed to give her an infinite relief to say them.

‘I hated you then, and yet I couldn’t crush the love that was in my heart. And it’s because I was frightened of myself that I told Bobbie I’d marry him. But I couldn’t. I was horrified because I cared for you still. It seemed such odious treachery to George, and yet love burnt up my heart. I used to try and drive you away from my thoughts, but every word you had ever said came back to me. Don’t you remember, you told me that everything you did was for my sake? Those words hammered away on my heart as though it were an anvil. I struggled not to believe them, I said to myself that you had sacrificed George, coldly, callously, prudently, but my love told me it wasn’t true. Your whole life stood on one side and only this hateful story on the other. You couldn’t have grown into a different man in one single instant. I’ve learnt to know you better during these three months of utter misery, and I’m ashamed of what I did.’

‘Ashamed?’

‘I came here to-day to tell you that I don’t understand the reason of what you did; but I don’t want to understand. I believe in you now with all my strength. I believe in you as better women than I believe in God. I know that whatever you did was right and just — because you did it.’

Alec looked at her for a moment Then he held out his hand.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I’m so grateful to you.’

‘Have you nothing more to say to me than that?’

‘You see, its come too late. Nothing much matters now, for to-morrow I go away for ever.’

‘But you’ll come back.’

He gave a short, scornful laugh.

‘They were so glad to give me that job on the Congo because no one else would take it. I’m going to a part of Africa from which Europeans seldom return.’

‘Oh, that’s too horrible,’ she cried. ‘Don’t go, dearest; I can’t bear it.’

‘I must now. Everything is settled, and there can be no drawing back.’

She let go hopelessly of his hand.

‘Don’t you care for me any more?’ she whispered.

He looked at her, but he did not answer. She turned away, and sinking into a chair, began to cry.

‘Don’t, Lucy,’ he said, his voice breaking suddenly. ‘Don’t make it harder.’

‘Oh, Alec, Alec, don’t you see how much I love you.’

He leaned over her and gently stroked her hair.

‘Be brave, darling,’ he whispered.

She looked up passionately, seizing both his hands.

‘I can’t live without you. I’ve suffered too much. If you cared for me at all, you’d stay.’

‘Though I love you with all my soul, I can’t do otherwise now than go.’

‘Then take me with you,’ she cried eagerly. ‘Let me come too.’

‘You!’

‘You don’t know what I can do. With you to help me I can be very brave. Let me come, Alec.’

‘It’s impossible. You don’t know what you ask.’

‘Then let me wait for you. Let me wait till you come back.’

‘And if I never come back?’

‘I will wait for you still.’

He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes, as though he were striving to see into the depths of her soul. She felt very weak. She could scarcely see him through her tears, but she tried to smile. Then without a word he slipped his arms around her. Sobbing in the ecstasy of her happiness, she let her head fall on his shoulder.

‘You will have the courage to wait?’ he said.

‘I know you love me, and I trust you.’

‘Then have no fear; I will come back. My journey was only dangerous because I wanted to die. I want to live now, and I shall live.’

‘Oh, Alec, Alec, I’m so glad you love me.’

Outside in the street the bells of the motor ‘buses tinkled noisily, and there was an incessant roar of the traffic that rumbled heavily over the wooden pavements. There was a clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the blowing of horns; the electric broughams whizzed past with an odd, metallic whirr.

THE END

THE MAGICIAN

There was financial pressure on Maugham when he wrote The Magician, as he had had an unproductive year in 1906 when it came to his writing and was extremely short of money. The main character is based on Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), an occultist and magician that attained notoriety through his highly unconventional lifestyle and beliefs, becoming associated with Satanism by using the alias “The Beast 666”. Maugham’s agent, James Brand Pinker, struggled to place the novel with a publisher due to its shocking content, but it was finally taken on by Methuen as the first of a three book deal – and then cancelled at the very last minute when the head of Methuen realised what sort of story he was about to launch upon the public. The author cannot have been surprised, as Maugham was fully aware of the horrific tone of the story as a self-confessed fan of the French horror writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.

The novel was published in 1908 and was not universally liked. Crowley himself, as a keen self publicist, was flattered by the attention Maugham had shown him, but he also accused the author of plagiarism from Crowley’s esoteric works and of shamelessly borrowing events from Crowley’s life without seeking permission. The novel was also criticised for the large sections of text lifted directly from various alternative spiritual works, which the reader must either endure or skim over to move on with the plot.

Readers who are also keen followers of art history will be interested in the descriptions of the Chien Noir, which is based very closely on Le Chat Blanc in Paris, a popular venue for artists and bohemians of all kinds. Portraits of artists also feature, such as the character O’Brien, which is a description of the painter Roderic O’Conor.

This novel actually begins with A Fragment of Autobiography, Maugham’s summary of his writing life up to the point of publishing The Magician. He describes the development of his career as a writer, from his first novel, through a dip in his fortunes and then on to his success, and his sojourn in Paris, which is when he made the acquaintance of Le Chat Blanc, the venue frequented by a regular clientele of artists. It was here that Maugham also met less frequent visitors, such as Arnold Bennett – and Aleister Crowley. He claims to have taken an immediate dislike to Crowley, so it is no surprise that Oliver Haddo, the character modelled on him is thoroughly unpleasant! However, Maugham does admit that he made Haddo a much worse person than Crowley was in reality and he praises Crowley’s poetry and is magnanimous about the scathing attack on himself written by Crowley after The Magician was published.

Maugham finishes off this introduction by claiming he cannot remember what reception the book had when published — a typically dismissive comment. He also states unequivocally here that he cares not whether people like his books — a rare comment for any writer to make.

The narrative opens with Arthur Burdon, a well regarded young surgeon, who travels to Paris to meet colleagues and also to visit his fiancée, Margaret, an art student living in the city. He is a decent and hard working doctor, who dotes on his wife to be, and during this trip hopes to settle on a date for their wedding. Early in the visit he comes across Oliver Haddo, who shares an interest in the esoteric and in magic with Burdon’s mentor, Dr Porhoet. Porhoet tells an incredulous Burdon that Haddo truly believes he is a magician. Burdon, Porhoet, Margaret and Susie (Margaret’s companion) go to the Chien Noir, the local restaurant frequented by artists, and there they meet Haddo again. Haddo (‘Brother of the Shadow’ as he likes to be known) cuts a figure of ridicule; a large man of theatrical gestures and clumsily poetic language; in short, “He had the look of a very wicked, sensual priest” and “His presence cast an unusual chill upon the party”. Haddo follows Burdon’s group to a fairground and demonstrates his occult skills with a cruel and unsettling trick, although almost against her better judgement, Susie is inexplicably drawn to Haddo.

Haddo is clearly insinuating himself into the group and Burden takes the precaution of asking a mutual friend about him. The verdict comes back that the strange man is “treacherous and insincere”. However, Haddo had already been invited to a tea party which had to go ahead – it is a disaster and ends with Haddo brutally hurting Margaret’s little dog. Burden loses his temper and thrashes Haddo; the party ends in disaster, with much bad feeling, but Haddo is overly penitent. Susie disbelieves his sentiments, and is right to do so, because as an act of revenge Haddo bewitches Margaret into an infatuation for him. She cannot help her feelings despite being repulsed by the obscene visions Haddo invokes in her mind. The future that Margaret and Burdon had planned for themselves seems to be falling apart, as Haddo wreaks havoc on the lives of Burdon, Margaret, and even Susie…

The Magician is a strong story and the dominant character, Haddo, is vividly depicted and genuinely repellent. Margaret is somewhat two-dimensional as the virginal and sweet natured bride to be, but there are some evocative descriptions of Paris at the time, especially at the beginning of the story. The novel will be a particular worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in Paris or in personalities connected with the occult in the early twentieth century.

The first edition

CONTENTS

A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)

A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In 1897, after spending five years at St Thomas’s Hospital I passed the examinations which enabled me to practise medicine. While still a medical student I had published a novel called Liza of Lambeth which caused a mild sensation, and on the strength of that I rashly decided to abandon doctoring and earn my living as a writer; so, as soon as I was ‘qualified’, I set out for Spain and spent the best part of a year in Seville. I amused myself hugely and wrote a bad novel. Then I returned to London and, with a friend of my own age, took and furnished a small flat near Victoria Station. A maid of all work cooked for us and kept the flat neat and tidy. My friend was at the Bar, and so I had the day (and the flat) to myself and my work. During the next six years I wrote several novels and a number of plays. Only one of these novels had any success, but even that failed to make the stir that my first one had made. I could get no manager to take my plays. At last, in desperation, I sent one, which I called A Man of Honour, to the Stage Society, which gave two performances, one on Sunday night, another on Monday afternoon, of plays which, unsuitable for the commercial theatre, were considered of sufficient merit to please an intellectual audience. As every one knows, it was the Stage Society that produced the early plays of Bernard Shaw. The committee accepted A Man of Honour, and W.L. Courtney, who was a member of it, thought well enough of my crude play to publish it in The Fortnightly Review, of which he was then editor. It was a feather in my cap.

Though these efforts of mine brought me very little money, they attracted not a little attention, and I made friends. I was looked upon as a promising young writer and, I think I may say it without vanity, was accepted as a member of the intelligentsia, an honourable condition which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light comedies, I lost; and have never since regained. I was invited to literary parties and to parties given by women of rank and fashion who thought it behoved them to patronise the arts. An unattached and fairly presentable young man is always in demand. I lunched out and dined out. Since I could not afford to take cabs, when I dined out, in tails and a white tie, as was then the custom, I went and came back by bus. I was asked to spend week-ends in the country. They were something of a trial on account of the tips you had to give to the butler and to the footman who brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your gladstone bag, and you were uneasily aware that your well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet articles had made an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that, I found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There seemed no reason why I should not go on indefinitely in the same way, bringing out a novel once a year (which seldom earned more than the small advance the publisher had given me but which was on the whole respectably reviewed), going to more and more parties, making more and more friends. It was all very nice, but I couldn’t see that it was leading me anywhere. I was thirty. I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me long to make up my mind. I told the friend with whom I shared the flat that I wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself, but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished to install his mistress in it, and was prepared to take it off our hands. We sold the furniture for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on my way to Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank.

A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Première. His name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a painter, for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly talented, abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort. It had two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such furniture and household utensils as were essential, and the concierge told me of a woman who would come in for half a day and make my café au lait in the morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set to work on still another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d’Odessa, near the Gare Montparnasse, where a number of artists were in the habit of dining; and from then on I dined there every night. I have described the place elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these pages are meant to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it. As a rule, the same people came in every night, but now and then others came, perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times. We were apt to look upon them as interlopers, and I don’t think we made them particularly welcome. It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell. One of these casual visitors was Aleister Crowley. He was spending the winter in Paris. I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was esteemed the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he had made an ascent of K2 in the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India, and he made it without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of oxygen and so forth, which render the endeavours of the mountaineers of the present day more likely to succeed. He did not reach the top, but got nearer to it than anyone had done before.

Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by Swinburne and Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not unintelligently, imitative. As you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne’s, you would accept without question as the work of the master. ‘It’s rather hard, isn’t it, Sir, to make sense of it?’ If you were shown this line and asked what poet had written it, I think you would be inclined to say, Robert Browning. You would be wrong. It was written by Aleister Crowley.

At the time I knew him he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the occult. There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken in a book of Huysmans’s, Là Bas. Crowley told fantastic stories of his experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the truth or merely pulling your leg. During that winter I saw him several times, but never after I left Paris to return to London. Once, long afterwards, I received a telegram from him which ran as follows: ‘Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.’ I did not do so, and he lived on for many disgraceful years.

I was glad to get back to London. My old friend had by then rooms in Pall Mall, and I was able to take a bedroom in the same building and use his sitting-room to work in. The Magician was published in 1908, so I suppose it was written during the first six months of 1907. I do not remember how I came to think that Aleister Crowley might serve as the model for the character whom I called Oliver Haddo; nor, indeed, how I came to think of writing that particular novel at all. When, a little while ago, my publisher expressed a wish to reissue it, I felt that, before consenting to this, I really should read it again. Nearly fifty years had passed since I had done so, and I had completely forgotten it. Some authors enjoy reading their old works; some cannot bear to. Of these I am. When I have corrected the proofs of a book, I have finished with it for good and all. I am impatient when people insist on talking to me about it; I am glad if they like it, but do not much care if they don’t. I am no more interested in it than in a worn-out suit of clothes that I have given away. It was thus with disinclination that I began to read The Magician. It held my interest, as two of my early novels, which for the same reason I have been obliged to read, did not. One, indeed, I simply could not get through. Another had to my mind some good dramatic scenes, but the humour filled me with mortification, and I should have been ashamed to see it republished. As I read The Magician, I wondered how on earth I could have come by all the material concerning the black arts which I wrote of. I must have spent days and days reading in the library of the British Museum. The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the écriture artiste which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned, and unwisely sought to imitate them.

Though Aleister Crowley served, as I have said, as the model for Oliver Haddo, it is by no means a portrait of him. I made my character more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed them, certainly never possessed. Crowley, however, recognized himself in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review of the novel in Vanity Fair, which he signed ‘Oliver Haddo’. I did not read it, and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.

I do not remember what success, if any, my novel had when it was published, and I did not bother about it much, for by then a great change had come into my life. The manager of the Court Theatre, one Otho Stuart, had brought out a play which failed to please, and he could not immediately get the cast he wanted for the next play he had in mind to produce. He had read one of mine, and formed a very poor opinion of it; but he was in a quandary, and it occurred to him that it might just serve to keep his theatre open for a few weeks, by the end of which the actors he wanted for the play he had been obliged to postpone would be at liberty. He put mine on. It was an immediate success. The result of this was that in a very little while other managers accepted the plays they had consistently refused, and I had four running in London at the same time. I, who for ten years had earned an average of one hundred pounds a year, found myself earning several hundred pounds a week. I made up my mind to abandon the writing of novels for the rest of my life. I did not know that this was something out of my control and that when the urge to write a novel seized me, I should be able to do nothing but submit. Five years later, the urge came and, refusing to write any more plays for the time, I started upon the longest of all my novels. I called it Of Human Bondage.

The Magician

1

Arthur Burdon and Dr Porhoët walked in silence. They had lunched at a restaurant in the Boulevard Saint Michel, and were sauntering now in the gardens of the Luxembourg. Dr Porhoët walked with stooping shoulders, his hands behind him. He beheld the scene with the eyes of the many painters who have sought by means of the most charming garden in Paris to express their sense of beauty. The grass was scattered with the fallen leaves, but their wan decay little served to give a touch of nature to the artifice of all besides. The trees were neatly surrounded by bushes, and the bushes by trim beds of flowers. But the trees grew without abandonment, as though conscious of the decorative scheme they helped to form. It was autumn, and some were leafless already. Many of the flowers were withered. The formal garden reminded one of a light woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and paint, to make a brave show of despair. It had those false, difficult smiles of uneasy gaiety, and the pitiful graces which attempt a fascination that the hurrying years have rendered vain.

Dr Porhoët drew more closely round his fragile body the heavy cloak which even in summer he could not persuade himself to discard. The best part of his life had been spent in Egypt, in the practice of medicine, and the frigid summers of Europe scarcely warmed his blood. His memory flashed for an instant upon those multi-coloured streets of Alexandria; and then, like a homing bird, it flew to the green woods and the storm-beaten coasts of his native Brittany. His brown eyes were veiled with sudden melancholy.

‘Let us wait here for a moment,’ he said.

They took two straw-bottomed chairs and sat near the octagonal water which completes with its fountain of Cupids the enchanting artificiality of the Luxembourg. The sun shone more kindly now, and the trees which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A balustrade of stone gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, freshly bedded, were very gay. In one corner they could see the squat, quaint towers of Saint Sulpice, and on the other side the uneven roofs of the Boulevard Saint Michel.

The palace was grey and solid. Nurses, some in the white caps of their native province, others with the satin streamers of the nounou, marched sedately two by two, wheeling perambulators and talking. Brightly dressed children trundled hoops or whipped a stubborn top. As he watched them, Dr Porhoët’s lips broke into a smile, and it was so tender that his thin face, sallow from long exposure to subtropical suns, was transfigured. He no longer struck you merely as an insignificant little man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey beard; for the weariness of expression which was habitual to him vanished before the charming sympathy of his smile. His sunken eyes glittered with a kindly but ironic good-humour. Now passed a guard in the romantic cloak of a brigand in comic opera and a peaked cap like that of an alguacil. A group of telegraph boys in blue stood round a painter, who was making a sketch — notwithstanding half-frozen fingers. Here and there, in baggy corduroys, tight jackets, and wide-brimmed hats, strolled students who might have stepped from the page of Murger’s immortal romance. But the students now are uneasy with the fear of ridicule, and more often they walk in bowler hats and the neat coats of the boulevardier.

Dr Porhoët spoke English fluently, with scarcely a trace of foreign accent, but with an elaboration which suggested that he had learned the language as much from study of the English classics as from conversation.

‘And how is Miss Dauncey?’ he asked, turning to his friend.

Arthur Burdon smiled.

‘Oh, I expect she’s all right. I’ve not seen her today, but I’m going to tea at the studio this afternoon, and we want you to dine with us at the Chien Noir.’

‘I shall be much pleased. But do you not wish to be by yourselves?’

‘She met me at the station yesterday, and we dined together. We talked steadily from half past six till midnight.’

‘Or, rather, she talked and you listened with the delighted attention of a happy lover.’

Arthur Burdon had just arrived in Paris. He was a surgeon on the staff of St Luke’s, and had come ostensibly to study the methods of the French operators; but his real object was certainly to see Margaret Dauncey. He was furnished with introductions from London surgeons of repute, and had already spent a morning at the Hôtel Dieu, where the operator, warned that his visitor was a bold and skilful surgeon, whose reputation in England was already considerable, had sought to dazzle him by feats that savoured almost of legerdemain. Though the hint of charlatanry in the Frenchman’s methods had not escaped Arthur Burdon’s shrewd eyes, the audacious sureness of his hand had excited his enthusiasm. During luncheon he talked of nothing else, and Dr Porhoët, drawing upon his memory, recounted the more extraordinary operations that he had witnessed in Egypt.

He had known Arthur Burdon ever since he was born, and indeed had missed being present at his birth only because the Khedive Ismaïl had summoned him unexpectedly to Cairo. But the Levantine merchant who was Arthur’s father had been his most intimate friend, and it was with singular pleasure that Dr Porhoët saw the young man, on his advice, enter his own profession and achieve a distinction which himself had never won.

Though too much interested in the characters of the persons whom chance threw in his path to have much ambition on his own behalf, it pleased him to see it in others. He observed with satisfaction the pride which Arthur took in his calling and the determination, backed by his confidence and talent, to become a master of his art. Dr Porhoët knew that a diversity of interests, though it adds charm to a man’s personality, tends to weaken him. To excel one’s fellows it is needful to be circumscribed. He did not regret, therefore, that Arthur in many ways was narrow. Letters and the arts meant little to him. Nor would he trouble himself with the graceful trivialities which make a man a good talker. In mixed company he was content to listen silently to others, and only something very definite to say could tempt him to join in the general conversation. He worked very hard, operating, dissecting, or lecturing at his hospital, and took pains to read every word, not only in English, but in French and German, which was published concerning his profession. Whenever he could snatch a free day he spent it on the golf-links of Sunningdale, for he was an eager and a fine player.

But at the operating-table Arthur was different. He was no longer the awkward man of social intercourse, who was sufficiently conscious of his limitations not to talk of what he did not understand, and sincere enough not to express admiration for what he did not like. Then, on the other hand, a singular exhilaration filled him; he was conscious of his power, and he rejoiced in it. No unforeseen accident was able to confuse him. He seemed to have a positive instinct for operating, and his hand and his brain worked in a manner that appeared almost automatic. He never hesitated, and he had no fear of failure. His success had been no less than his courage, and it was plain that soon his reputation with the public would equal that which he had already won with the profession.

Dr Porhoët had been making listless patterns with his stick upon the gravel, and now, with that charming smile of his, turned to Arthur.

‘I never cease to be astonished at the unexpectedness of human nature,’ he remarked. ‘It is really very surprising that a man like you should fall so deeply in love with a girl like Margaret Dauncey.’

Arthur made no reply, and Dr Porhoët, fearing that his words might offend, hastened to explain.

‘You know as well as I do that I think her a very charming young person. She has beauty and grace and sympathy. But your characters are more different than chalk and cheese. Notwithstanding your birth in the East and your boyhood spent amid the very scenes of the Thousand and One Nights, you are the most matter-of-fact creature I have ever come across.’

‘I see no harm in your saying insular,’ smiled Arthur. ‘I confess that I have no imagination and no sense of humour. I am a plain, practical man, but I can see to the end of my nose with extreme clearness. Fortunately it is rather a long one.’

‘One of my cherished ideas is that it is impossible to love without imagination.’

Again Arthur Burdon made no reply, but a curious look came into his eyes as he gazed in front of him. It was the look which might fill the passionate eyes of a mystic when he saw in ecstasy the Divine Lady of his constant prayers.

‘But Miss Dauncey has none of that narrowness of outlook which, if you forgive my saying so, is perhaps the secret of your strength. She has a delightful enthusiasm for every form of art. Beauty really means as much to her as bread and butter to the more soberly-minded. And she takes a passionate interest in the variety of life.’

‘It is right that Margaret should care for beauty, since there is beauty in every inch of her,’ answered Arthur.

He was too reticent to proceed to any analysis of his feelings; but he knew that he had cared for her first on account of the physical perfection which contrasted so astonishingly with the countless deformities in the study of which his life was spent. But one phrase escaped him almost against his will.

‘The first time I saw her I felt as though a new world had opened to my ken.’

The divine music of Keats’s lines rang through Arthur’s remark, and to the Frenchman’s mind gave his passion a romantic note that foreboded future tragedy. He sought to dispel the cloud which his fancy had cast upon the most satisfactory of love affairs.

‘You are very lucky, my friend. Miss Margaret admires you as much as you adore her. She is never tired of listening to my prosy stories of your childhood in Alexandria, and I’m quite sure that she will make you the most admirable of wives.’

‘You can’t be more sure than I am,’ laughed Arthur.

He looked upon himself as a happy man. He loved Margaret with all his heart, and he was confident in her great affection for him. It was impossible that anything should arise to disturb the pleasant life which they had planned together. His love cast a glamour upon his work, and his work, by contrast, made love the more entrancing.

‘We’re going to fix the date of our marriage now,’ he said. ‘I’m buying furniture already.’

‘I think only English people could have behaved so oddly as you, in postponing your marriage without reason for two mortal years.’

‘You see, Margaret was ten when I first saw her, and only seventeen when I asked her to marry me. She thought she had reason to be grateful to me and would have married me there and then. But I knew she hankered after these two years in Paris, and I didn’t feel it was fair to bind her to me till she had seen at least something of the world. And she seemed hardly ready for marriage, she was growing still.’

‘Did I not say that you were a matter-of-fact young man?’ smiled Dr

Porhoët.

‘And it’s not as if there had been any doubt about our knowing our minds. We both cared, and we had a long time before us. We could afford to wait.’

At that moment a man strolled past them, a big stout fellow, showily dressed in a check suit; and he gravely took off his hat to Dr Porhoët. The doctor smiled and returned the salute.

‘Who is your fat friend?’ asked Arthur.

‘That is a compatriot of yours. His name is Oliver Haddo.’

‘Art-student?’ inquired Arthur, with the scornful tone he used when referring to those whose walk in life was not so practical as his own.

‘Not exactly. I met him a little while ago by chance. When I was getting together the material for my little book on the old alchemists I read a great deal at the library of the Arsenal, which, you may have heard, is singularly rich in all works dealing with the occult sciences.’

Burden’s face assumed an expression of amused disdain. He could not understand why Dr Porhoët occupied his leisure with studies so profitless. He had read his book, recently published, on the more famous of the alchemists; and, though forced to admire the profound knowledge upon which it was based, he could not forgive the waste of time which his friend might have expended more usefully on topics of pressing moment.

‘Not many people study in that library,’ pursued the doctor, ‘and I soon knew by sight those who were frequently there. I saw this gentleman every day. He was immersed in strange old books when I arrived early in the morning, and he was reading them still when I left, exhausted. Sometimes it happened that he had the volumes I asked for, and I discovered that he was studying the same subjects as myself. His appearance was extraordinary, but scarcely sympathetic; so, though I fancied that he gave me opportunities to address him, I did not avail myself of them. One day, however, curiously enough, I was looking up some point upon which it seemed impossible to find authorities. The librarian could not help me, and I had given up the search, when this person brought me the very book I needed. I surmised that the librarian had told him of my difficulty. I was very grateful to the stranger. We left together that afternoon, and our kindred studies gave us a common topic of conversation. I found that his reading was extraordinarily wide, and he was able to give me information about works which I had never even heard of. He had the advantage over me that he could apparently read, Hebrew as well as Arabic, and he had studied the Kabbalah in the original.’

‘And much good it did him, I have no doubt,’ said Arthur. ‘And what is he by profession?’

Dr Porhoët gave a deprecating smile.

‘My dear fellow, I hardly like to tell you. I tremble in every limb at the thought of your unmitigated scorn.’

‘Well?’

‘You know, Paris is full of queer people. It is the chosen home of every kind of eccentricity. It sounds incredible in this year of grace, but my friend Oliver Haddo claims to be a magician. I think he is quite serious.’

‘Silly ass!’ answered Arthur with emphasis.

2

Margaret Dauncey shared a flat near the Boulevard du Montparnasse with Susie Boyd; and it was to meet her that Arthur had arranged to come to tea that afternoon. The young women waited for him in the studio. The kettle was boiling on the stove; cups and petits fours stood in readiness on a model stand. Susie looked forward to the meeting with interest. She had heard a good deal of the young man, and knew that the connexion between him and Margaret was not lacking in romance. For years Susie had led the monotonous life of a mistress in a school for young ladies, and had resigned herself to its dreariness for the rest of her life, when a legacy from a distant relation gave her sufficient income to live modestly upon her means. When Margaret, who had been her pupil, came, soon after this, to announce her intention of spending a couple of years in Paris to study art, Susie willingly agreed to accompany her. Since then she had worked industriously at Colarossi’s Academy, by no means under the delusion that she had talent, but merely to amuse herself. She refused to surrender the pleasing notion that her environment was slightly wicked. After the toil of many years it relieved her to be earnest in nothing; and she found infinite satisfaction in watching the lives of those around her.

She had a great affection for Margaret, and though her own stock of enthusiasms was run low, she could enjoy thoroughly Margaret’s young enchantment in all that was exquisite. She was a plain woman; but there was no envy in her, and she took the keenest pleasure in Margaret’s comeliness. It was almost with maternal pride that she watched each year add a new grace to that exceeding beauty. But her common sense was sound, and she took care by good-natured banter to temper the praises which extravagant admirers at the drawing-class lavished upon the handsome girl both for her looks and for her talent. She was proud to think that she would hand over to Arthur Burdon a woman whose character she had helped to form, and whose loveliness she had cultivated with a delicate care.

Susie knew, partly from fragments of letters which Margaret read to her, partly from her conversation, how passionately he adored his bride; and it pleased her to see that Margaret loved him in return with a grateful devotion. The story of this visit to Paris touched her imagination. Margaret was the daughter of a country barrister, with whom Arthur had been in the habit of staying; and when he died, many years after his wife, Arthur found himself the girl’s guardian and executor. He sent her to school; saw that she had everything she could possibly want; and when, at seventeen, she told him of her wish to go to Paris and learn drawing, he at once consented. But though he never sought to assume authority over her, he suggested that she should not live alone, and it was on this account that she went to Susie. The preparations for the journey were scarcely made when Margaret discovered by chance that her father had died penniless and she had lived ever since at Arthur’s entire expense. When she went to see him with tears in her eyes, and told him what she knew, Arthur was so embarrassed that it was quite absurd.

‘But why did you do it?’ she asked him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t think it fair to put you under any obligation to me, and I wanted you to feel quite free.’

She cried. She couldn’t help it.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ he laughed. ‘You owe me nothing at all. I’ve done very little for you, and what I have done has given me a great deal of pleasure.’

‘I don’t know how I can ever repay you.’

‘Oh, don’t say that,’ he cried. ‘It makes it so much harder for me to say what I want to.’

She looked at him quickly and reddened. Her deep blue eyes were veiled with tears.

‘Don’t you know that I’d do anything in the world for you?’ she cried.

‘I don’t want you to be grateful to me, because I was hoping — I might ask you to marry me some day.’

Margaret laughed charmingly as she held out her hands.

‘You must know that I’ve been wanting you to do that ever since I was ten.’

She was quite willing to give up her idea of Paris and be married without delay, but Arthur pressed her not to change her plans. At first Margaret vowed it was impossible to go, for she knew now that she had no money, and she could not let her lover pay.

‘But what does it matter?’ he said. ‘It’ll give me such pleasure to go on with the small allowance I’ve been making you. After all, I’m pretty well-to-do. My father left me a moderate income, and I’m making a good deal already by operating.’

‘Yes, but it’s different now. I didn’t know before. I thought I was spending my own money.’

‘If I died tomorrow, every penny I have would be yours. We shall be married in two years, and we’ve known one another much too long to change our minds. I think that our lives are quite irrevocably united.’

Margaret wished very much to spend this time in Paris, and Arthur had made up his mind that in fairness to her they could not marry till she was nineteen. She consulted Susie Boyd, whose common sense prevented her from paying much heed to romantic notions of false delicacy.

‘My dear, you’d take his money without scruple if you’d signed your names in a church vestry, and as there’s not the least doubt that you’ll marry, I don’t see why you shouldn’t now. Besides, you’ve got nothing whatever to live on, and you’re equally unfitted to be a governess or a typewriter. So it’s Hobson’s choice, and you’d better put your exquisite sentiments in your pocket.’

Miss Boyd, by one accident after another, had never seen Arthur, but she had heard so much that she looked upon him already as an old friend. She admired him for his talent and strength of character as much as for his loving tenderness to Margaret. She had seen portraits of him, but Margaret said he did not photograph well. She had asked if he was good-looking.

‘No, I don’t think he is,’ answered Margaret, ‘but he’s very paintable.’

‘That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,’ smiled Susie.

She believed privately that Margaret’s passion for the arts was a not unamiable pose which would disappear when she was happily married. To have half a dozen children was in her mind much more important than to paint pictures. Margaret’s gift was by no means despicable, but Susie was not convinced that callous masters would have been so enthusiastic if Margaret had been as plain and old as herself.

Miss Boyd was thirty. Her busy life had not caused the years to pass easily, and she looked older. But she was one of those plain women whose plainness does not matter. A gallant Frenchman had to her face called her a belle laide, and, far from denying the justness of his observation, she had been almost flattered. Her mouth was large, and she had little round bright eyes. Her skin was colourless and much disfigured by freckles. Her nose was long and thin. But her face was so kindly, her vivacity so attractive, that no one after ten minutes thought of her ugliness. You noticed then that her hair, though sprinkled with white, was pretty, and that her figure was exceedingly neat. She had good hands, very white and admirably formed, which she waved continually in the fervour of her gesticulation. Now that her means were adequate she took great pains with her dress, and her clothes, though they cost much more than she could afford, were always beautiful. Her taste was so great, her tact so sure, that she was able to make the most of herself. She was determined that if people called her ugly they should be forced in the same breath to confess that she was perfectly gowned. Susie’s talent for dress was remarkable, and it was due to her influence that Margaret was arrayed always in the latest mode. The girl’s taste inclined to be artistic, and her sense of colour was apt to run away with her discretion. Except for the display of Susie’s firmness, she would scarcely have resisted her desire to wear nondescript garments of violent hue. But the older woman expressed herself with decision.

‘My dear, you won’t draw any the worse for wearing a well-made corset, and to surround your body with bands of grey flannel will certainly not increase your talent.’

‘But the fashion is so hideous,’ smiled Margaret.

‘Fiddlesticks! The fashion is always beautiful. Last year it was beautiful to wear a hat like a pork-pie tipped over your nose; and next year, for all I know, it will be beautiful to wear a bonnet like a sitz-bath at the back of your head. Art has nothing to do with a smart frock, and whether a high-heeled pointed shoe commends itself or not to the painters in the quarter, it’s the only thing in which a woman’s foot looks really nice.’

Susie Boyd vowed that she would not live with Margaret at all unless she let her see to the buying of her things.

‘And when you’re married, for heaven’s sake ask me to stay with you four times a year, so that I can see after your clothes. You’ll never keep your husband’s affection if you trust to your own judgment.’

Miss Boyd’s reward had come the night before, when Margaret, coming home from dinner with Arthur, had repeated an observation of his.

‘How beautifully you’re dressed!’ he had said. ‘I was rather afraid you’d be wearing art-serges.’

‘Of course you didn’t tell him that I insisted on buying every stitch you’d got on,’ cried Susie.

‘Yes, I did,’ answered Margaret simply. ‘I told him I had no taste at all, but that you were responsible for everything.’

‘That was the least you could do,’ answered Miss Boyd.

But her heart went out to Margaret, for the trivial incident showed once more how frank the girl was. She knew quite well that few of her friends, though many took advantage of her matchless taste, would have made such an admission to the lover who congratulated them on the success of their costume.

There was a knock at the door, and Arthur came in.

‘This is the fairy prince,’ said Margaret, bringing him to her friend.

‘I’m glad to see you in order to thank you for all you’ve done for

Margaret,’ he smiled, taking the proffered hand.

Susie remarked that he looked upon her with friendliness, but with a certain vacancy, as though too much engrossed in his beloved really to notice anyone else; and she wondered how to make conversation with a man who was so manifestly absorbed. While Margaret busied herself with the preparations for tea, his eyes followed her movements with a doglike, touching devotion. They travelled from her smiling mouth to her deft hands. It seemed that he had never seen anything so ravishing as the way in which she bent over the kettle. Margaret felt that he was looking at her, and turned round. Their eyes met, and they stood for an appreciable time gazing at one another silently.

‘Don’t be a pair of perfect idiots,’ cried Susie gaily. ‘I’m dying for my tea.’

The lovers laughed and reddened. It struck Arthur that he should say something polite.

‘I hope you’ll show me your sketches afterwards, Miss Boyd. Margaret says they’re awfully good.’

‘You really needn’t think it in the least necessary to show any interest in me,’ she replied bluntly.

‘She draws the most delightful caricatures,’ said Margaret. ‘I’ll bring you a horror of yourself, which she’ll do the moment you leave us.’

‘Don’t be so spiteful, Margaret.’

Miss Boyd could not help thinking all the same that Arthur Burdon would caricature very well. Margaret was right when she said that he was not handsome, but his clean-shaven face was full of interest to so passionate an observer of her kind. The lovers were silent, and Susie had the conversation to herself. She chattered without pause and had the satisfaction presently of capturing their attention. Arthur seemed to become aware of her presence, and laughed heartily at her burlesque account of their fellow-students at Colarossi’s. Meanwhile Susie examined him. He was very tall and very thin. His frame had a Yorkshireman’s solidity, and his bones were massive. He missed being ungainly only through the serenity of his self-reliance. He had high cheek-bones and a long, lean face. His nose and mouth were large, and his skin was sallow. But there were two characteristics which fascinated her, an imposing strength of purpose and a singular capacity for suffering. This was a man who knew his mind and was determined to achieve his desire; it refreshed her vastly after the extreme weakness of the young painters with whom of late she had mostly consorted. But those quick dark eyes were able to express an anguish that was hardly tolerable, and the mobile mouth had a nervous intensity which suggested that he might easily suffer the very agonies of woe.

Tea was ready, and Arthur stood up to receive his cup.

‘Sit down,’ said Margaret. ‘I’ll bring you everything you want, and I know exactly how much sugar to put in. It pleases me to wait on you.’

With the grace that marked all her movements she walked cross the studio, the filled cup in one hand and the plate of cakes in the other. To Susie it seemed that he was overwhelmed with gratitude by Margaret’s condescension. His eyes were soft with indescribable tenderness as he took the sweetmeats she gave him. Margaret smiled with happy pride. For all her good-nature, Susie could not prevent the pang that wrung her heart; for she too was capable of love. There was in her a wealth of passionate affection that none had sought to find. None had ever whispered in her ears the charming nonsense that she read in books. She recognised that she had no beauty to help her, but once she had at least the charm of vivacious youth. That was gone now, and the freedom to go into the world had come too late; yet her instinct told her that she was made to be a decent man’s wife and the mother of children. She stopped in the middle of her bright chatter, fearing to trust her voice, but Margaret and Arthur were too much occupied to notice that she had ceased to speak. They sat side by side and enjoyed the happiness of one another’s company.

‘What a fool I am!’ thought Susie.

She had learnt long ago that common sense, intelligence, good-nature, and strength of character were unimportant in comparison with a pretty face. She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t know if you young things realise that it’s growing late. If you want us to dine at the Chien Noir, you must leave us now, so that we can make ourselves tidy.’

‘Very well,’ said Arthur, getting up. ‘I’ll go back to my hotel and have a wash. We’ll meet at half-past seven.’

When Margaret had closed the door on him, she turned to her friend.

‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked, smiling.

‘You can’t expect me to form a definite opinion of a man whom I’ve seen for so short a time.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Margaret.

Susie hesitated for a moment.

‘I think he has an extraordinarily good face,’ she said at last gravely. ‘I’ve never seen a man whose honesty of purpose was so transparent.’

Susie Boyd was so lazy that she could never be induced to occupy herself with household matters and, while Margaret put the tea things away, she began to draw the caricature which every new face suggested to her. She made a little sketch of Arthur, abnormally lanky, with a colossal nose, with the wings and the bow and arrow of the God of Love, but it was not half done before she thought it silly. She tore it up with impatience. When Margaret came back, she turned round and looked at her steadily.

‘Well?’ said the girl, smiling under the scrutiny.

She stood in the middle of the lofty studio. Half-finished canvases leaned with their faces against the wall; pieces of stuff were hung here and there, and photographs of well-known pictures. She had fallen unconsciously into a wonderful pose, and her beauty gave her, notwithstanding her youth, a rare dignity. Susie smiled mockingly.

‘You look like a Greek goddess in a Paris frock,’ she said.

‘What have you to say to me?’ asked Margaret, divining from the searching look that something was in her friend’s mind.

Susie stood up and went to her.

‘You know, before I’d seen him I hoped with all my heart that he’d make you happy. Notwithstanding all you’d told me of him, I was afraid. I knew he was much older than you. He was the first man you’d ever known. I could scarcely bear to entrust you to him in case you were miserable.’

‘I don’t think you need have any fear.’

‘But now I hope with all my heart that you’ll make him happy. It’s not you I’m frightened for now, but him.’

Margaret did not answer; she could not understand what Susie meant.

‘I’ve never seen anyone with such a capacity for wretchedness as that man has. I don’t think you can conceive how desperately he might suffer. Be very careful, Margaret, and be very good to him, for you have the power to make him more unhappy than any human being should be.’

‘Oh, but I want him to be happy,’ cried Margaret vehemently. ‘You know that I owe everything to him. I’d do all I could to make him happy, even if I had to sacrifice myself. But I can’t sacrifice myself, because I love him so much that all I do is pure delight.’

Her eyes filled with tears and her voice broke. Susie, with a little laugh that was half hysterical, kissed her.

‘My dear, for heaven’s sake don’t cry! You know I can’t bear people who weep, and if he sees your eyes red, he’ll never forgive me.’

3

The Chien Noir, where Susie Boyd and Margaret generally dined, was the most charming restaurant in the quarter. Downstairs was a public room, where all and sundry devoured their food, for the little place had a reputation for good cooking combined with cheapness; and the patron, a retired horse-dealer who had taken to victualling in order to build up a business for his son, was a cheery soul whose loud-voiced friendliness attracted custom. But on the first floor was a narrow room, with three tables arranged in a horse-shoe, which was reserved for a small party of English or American painters and a few Frenchmen with their wives. At least, they were so nearly wives, and their manner had such a matrimonial respectability, that Susie, when first she and Margaret were introduced into this society, judged it would be vulgar to turn up her nose. She held that it was prudish to insist upon the conventions of Notting Hill in the Boulevard de Montparnasse. The young women who had thrown in their lives with these painters were modest in demeanour and quiet in dress. They were model housewives, who had preserved their self-respect notwithstanding a difficult position, and did not look upon their relation with less seriousness because they had not muttered a few words before Monsieur le Maire.

The room was full when Arthur Burdon entered, but Margaret had kept him an empty seat between herself and Miss Boyd. Everyone was speaking at once, in French, at the top of his voice, and a furious argument was proceeding on the merit of the later Impressionists. Arthur sat down, and was hurriedly introduced to a lanky youth, who sat on the other side of Margaret. He was very tall, very thin, very fair. He wore a very high collar and very long hair, and held himself like an exhausted lily.

‘He always reminds me of an Aubrey Beardsley that’s been dreadfully smudged,’ said Susie in an undertone. ‘He’s a nice, kind creature, but his name is Jagson. He has virtue and industry. I haven’t seen any of his work, but he has absolutely no talent.’

‘How do you know, if you’ve not seen his pictures?’ asked Arthur.

‘Oh, it’s one of our conventions here that nobody has talent,’ laughed Susie. ‘We suffer one another personally, but we have no illusions about the value of our neighbour’s work.’

‘Tell me who everyone is.’

‘Well, look at that little bald man in the corner. That is Warren.’

Arthur looked at the man she pointed out. He was a small person, with a pate as shining as a billiard-ball, and a pointed beard. He had protruding, brilliant eyes.

‘Hasn’t he had too much to drink?’ asked Arthur frigidly.

‘Much,’ answered Susie promptly, ‘but he’s always in that condition, and the further he gets from sobriety the more charming he is. He’s the only man in this room of whom you’ll never hear a word of evil. The strange thing is that he’s very nearly a great painter. He has the most fascinating sense of colour in the world, and the more intoxicated he is, the more delicate and beautiful is his painting. Sometimes, after more than the usual number of apéritifs, he will sit down in a café to do a sketch, with his hand so shaky that he can hardly hold a brush; he has to wait for a favourable moment, and then he makes a jab at the panel. And the immoral thing is that each of these little jabs is lovely. He’s the most delightful interpreter of Paris I know, and when you’ve seen his sketches — he’s done hundreds, of unimaginable grace and feeling and distinction — you can never see Paris in the same way again.’

The little maid who looked busily after the varied wants of the customers stood in front of them to receive Arthur’s order. She was a hard-visaged creature of mature age, but she looked neat in her black dress and white cap; and she had a motherly way of attending to these people, with a capacious smile of her large mouth which was full of charm.

‘I don’t mind what I eat,’ said Arthur. ‘Let Margaret order my dinner for me.’

‘It would have been just as good if I had ordered it,’ laughed Susie.

They began a lively discussion with Marie as to the merits of the various dishes, and it was only interrupted by Warren’s hilarious expostulations.

‘Marie, I precipitate myself at your feet, and beg you to bring me a poule au riz.’

‘Oh, but give me one moment, monsieur,’ said the maid.

‘Do not pay any attention to that gentleman. His morals are detestable, and he only seeks to lead you from the narrow path of virtue.’

Arthur protested that on the contrary the passion of hunger occupied at that moment his heart to the exclusion of all others.

‘Marie, you no longer love me,’ cried Warren. ‘There was a time when you did not look so coldly upon me when I ordered a bottle of white wine.’

The rest of the party took up his complaint, and all besought her not to show too hard a heart to the bald and rubicund painter.

‘Mais si, je vous aime, Monsieur Warren,’ she cried, laughing, ‘Je vous aime tous, tous.’

She ran downstairs, amid the shouts of men and women, to give her orders.

‘The other day the Chien Noir was the scene of a tragedy,’ said Susie. ‘Marie broke off relations with her lover, who is a waiter at Lavenue’s, and would have no reconciliation. He waited till he had a free evening, and then came to the room downstairs and ordered dinner. Of course, she was obliged to wait on him, and as she brought him each dish he expostulated with her, and they mingled their tears.’

‘She wept in floods,’ interrupted a youth with neatly brushed hair and fat nose. ‘She wept all over our food, and we ate it salt with tears. We besought her not to yield; except for our encouragement she would have gone back to him; and he beats her.’

Marie appeared again, with no signs now that so short a while ago romance had played a game with her, and brought the dishes that had been ordered. Susie seized once more upon Arthur Burdon’s attention.

‘Now please look at the man who is sitting next to Mr Warren.’

Arthur saw a tall, dark fellow with strongly-marked features, untidy hair, and a ragged black moustache.

‘That is Mr O’Brien, who is an example of the fact that strength of will and an earnest purpose cannot make a painter. He’s a failure, and he knows it, and the bitterness has warped his soul. If you listen to him, you’ll hear every painter of eminence come under his lash. He can forgive nobody who’s successful, and he never acknowledges merit in anyone till he’s safely dead and buried.’

‘He must be a cheerful companion,’ answered Arthur. ‘And who is the stout old lady by his side, with the flaunting hat?’

‘That is the mother of Madame Rouge, the little palefaced woman sitting next to her. She is the mistress of Rouge, who does all the illustrations for La Semaine. At first it rather tickled me that the old lady should call him mon gendre, my son-in-law, and take the irregular union of her daughter with such a noble unconcern for propriety; but now it seems quite natural.’

The mother of Madame Rouge had the remains of beauty, and she sat bolt upright, picking the leg of a chicken with a dignified gesture. Arthur looked away quickly, for, catching his eye, she gave him an amorous glance. Rouge had more the appearance of a prosperous tradesman than of an artist; but he carried on with O’Brien, whose French was perfect, an argument on the merits of Cézanne. To one he was a great master and to the other an impudent charlatan. Each hotly repeated his opinion, as though the mere fact of saying the same thing several times made it more convincing.

‘Next to me is Madame Meyer,’ proceeded Susie. ‘She was a governess in Poland, but she was much too pretty to remain one, and now she lives with the landscape painter who is by her side.’

Arthur’s eyes followed her words and rested on a cleanshaven man with a large quantity of grey, curling hair. He had a handsome face of a deliberately aesthetic type and was very elegantly dressed. His manner and his conversation had the flamboyance of the romantic thirties. He talked in flowing periods with an air of finality, and what he said was no less just than obvious. The gay little lady who shared his fortunes listened to his wisdom with an admiration that plainly flattered him.

Miss Boyd had described everyone to Arthur except young Raggles, who painted still life with a certain amount of skill, and Clayson, the American sculptor. Raggles stood for rank and fashion at the Chien Noir. He was very smartly dressed in a horsey way, and he walked with bowlegs, as though he spent most of his time in the saddle. He alone used scented pomade upon his neat smooth hair. His chief distinction was a greatcoat he wore, with a scarlet lining; and Warren, whose memory for names was defective, could only recall him by that peculiarity. But it was understood that he knew duchesses in fashionable streets, and occasionally dined with them in solemn splendour.

Clayson had a vinous nose and a tedious habit of saying brilliant things.

With his twinkling eyes, red cheeks, and fair, pointed beard, he looked

exactly like a Franz Hals; but he was dressed like the caricature of a

Frenchman in a comic paper. He spoke English with a Parisian accent.

Miss Boyd was beginning to tear him gaily limb from limb, when the door was flung open, and a large person entered. He threw off his cloak with a dramatic gesture.

‘Marie, disembarrass me of this coat of frieze. Hang my sombrero upon a convenient peg.’

He spoke execrable French, but there was a grandiloquence about his vocabulary which set everyone laughing.

‘Here is somebody I don’t know,’ said Susie.

‘But I do, at least, by sight,’ answered Burdon. He leaned over to Dr Porhoët who was sitting opposite, quietly eating his dinner and enjoying the nonsense which everyone talked. ‘Is not that your magician?’

‘Oliver Haddo,’ said Dr Porhoët, with a little nod of amusement.

The new arrival stood at the end of the room with all eyes upon him. He threw himself into an attitude of command and remained for a moment perfectly still.

‘You look as if you were posing, Haddo,’ said Warren huskily.

‘He couldn’t help doing that if he tried,’ laughed Clayson.

Oliver Haddo slowly turned his glance to the painter.

‘I grieve to see, O most excellent Warren, that the ripe juice of the aperitif has glazed your sparkling eye.’

‘Do you mean to say I’m drunk, sir?’

‘In one gross, but expressive, word, drunk.’

The painter grotesquely flung himself back in his chair as though he had been struck a blow, and Haddo looked steadily at Clayson.

‘How often have I explained to you, O Clayson, that your deplorable lack of education precludes you from the brilliancy to which you aspire?’

For an instant Oliver Haddo resumed his effective pose; and Susie, smiling, looked at him. He was a man of great size, two or three inches more than six feet high; but the most noticeable thing about him was a vast obesity. His paunch was of imposing dimensions. His face was large and fleshy. He had thrown himself into the arrogant attitude of Velasquez’s portrait of Del Borro in the Museum of Berlin; and his countenance bore of set purpose the same contemptuous smile. He advanced and shook hands with Dr Porhoët.

‘Hail, brother wizard! I greet in you, if not a master, at least a student not unworthy my esteem.’

Susie was convulsed with laughter at his pompousness, and he turned to her with the utmost gravity.

‘Madam, your laughter is more soft in mine ears than the singing of

Bulbul in a Persian garden.’

Dr Porhoët interposed with introductions. The magician bowed solemnly as he was in turn made known to Susie Boyd, and Margaret, and Arthur Burdon. He held out his hand to the grim Irish painter.

‘Well, my O’Brien, have you been mixing as usual the waters of bitterness with the thin claret of Bordeaux?’

‘Why don’t you sit down and eat your dinner?’ returned the other, gruffly.

‘Ah, my dear fellow, I wish I could drive the fact into this head of yours that rudeness is not synonymous with wit. I shall not have lived in vain if I teach you in time to realize that the rapier of irony is more effective an instrument than the bludgeon of insolence.’

O’Brien reddened with anger, but could not at once find a retort, and

Haddo passed on to that faded, harmless youth who sat next to Margaret.

‘Do my eyes deceive me, or is this the Jagson whose name in its inanity is so appropriate to the bearer? I am eager to know if you still devote upon the ungrateful arts talents which were more profitably employed upon haberdashery.’

The unlucky creature, thus brutally attacked, blushed feebly without answering, and Haddo went on to the Frenchman, Meyer as more worthy of his mocking.

‘I’m afraid my entrance interrupted you in a discourse. Was it the celebrated harangue on the greatness of Michelangelo, or was it the searching analysis of the art of Wagner?’

‘We were just going,’ said Meyer, getting up with a frown.

‘I am desolated to lose the pearls of wisdom that habitually fall from your cultivated lips,’ returned Haddo, as he politely withdrew Madame Meyer’s chair.

He sat down with a smile.

‘I saw the place was crowded, and with Napoleonic instinct decided that I could only make room by insulting somebody. It is cause for congratulation that my gibes, which Raggles, a foolish youth, mistakes for wit, have caused the disappearance of a person who lives in open sin; thereby vacating two seats, and allowing me to eat a humble meal with ample room for my elbows.’

Marie brought him the bill of fare, and he looked at it gravely.

‘I will have a vanilla ice, O well-beloved, and a wing of a tender chicken, a fried sole, and some excellent pea-soup.’

‘Bien, un potage, une sole, one chicken, and an ice.’

‘But why should you serve them in that order rather than in the order I gave you?’

Marie and the two Frenchwomen who were still in the room broke into exclamations at this extravagance, but Oliver Haddo waved his fat hand.

‘I shall start with the ice, O Marie, to cool the passion with which your eyes inflame me, and then without hesitation I will devour the wing of a chicken in order to sustain myself against your smile. I shall then proceed to a fresh sole, and with the pea-soup I will finish a not unsustaining meal.’

Having succeeded in capturing the attention of everyone in the room, Oliver Haddo proceeded to eat these dishes in the order he had named. Margaret and Burdon watched him with scornful eyes, but Susie, who was not revolted by the vanity which sought to attract notice, looked at him curiously. He was clearly not old, though his corpulence added to his apparent age. His features were good, his ears small, and his nose delicately shaped. He had big teeth, but they were white and even. His mouth was large, with heavy moist lips. He had the neck of a bullock. His dark, curling hair had retreated from the forehead and temples in such a way as to give his clean-shaven face a disconcerting nudity. The baldness of his crown was vaguely like a tonsure. He had the look of a very wicked, sensual priest. Margaret, stealing a glance at him as he ate, on a sudden violently shuddered; he affected her with an uncontrollable dislike. He lifted his eyes slowly, and she looked away, blushing as though she had been taken in some indiscretion. These eyes were the most curious thing about him. They were not large, but an exceedingly pale blue, and they looked at you in a way that was singularly embarrassing. At first Susie could not discover in what precisely their peculiarity lay, but in a moment she found out: the eyes of most persons converge when they look at you, but Oliver Haddo’s, naturally or by a habit he had acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave the impression that he looked straight through you and saw the wall beyond. It was uncanny. But another strange thing about him was the impossibility of telling whether he was serious. There was a mockery in that queer glance, a sardonic smile upon the mouth, which made you hesitate how to take his outrageous utterances. It was irritating to be uncertain whether, while you were laughing at him, he was not really enjoying an elaborate joke at your expense.

His presence cast an unusual chill upon the party. The French members got up and left. Warren reeled out with O’Brien, whose uncouth sarcasms were no match for Haddo’s bitter gibes. Raggles put on his coat with the scarlet lining and went out with the tall Jagson, who smarted still under Haddo’s insolence. The American sculptor paid his bill silently. When he was at the door, Haddo stopped him.

‘You have modelled lions at the Jardin des Plantes, my dear Clayson. Have you ever hunted them on their native plains?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

Clayson did not know why Haddo asked the question, but he bristled with incipient wrath.

‘Then you have not seen the jackal, gnawing at a dead antelope, scamper away in terror when the King of Beasts stalked down to make his meal.’

Clayson slammed the door behind him. Haddo was left with Margaret, and

Arthur Burdon, Dr Porhoët, and Susie. He smiled quietly.

‘By the way, are you a lion-hunter?’ asked Susie flippantly.

He turned on her his straight uncanny glance.

‘I have no equal with big game. I have shot more lions than any man alive. I think Jules Gérard, whom the French of the nineteenth century called Le Tueur de Lions, may have been fit to compare with me, but I can call to mind no other.’

This statement, made with the greatest calm, caused a moment of silence.

Margaret stared at him with amazement.

‘You suffer from no false modesty,’ said Arthur Burdon.

‘False modesty is a sign of ill-breeding, from which my birth amply protects me.’

Dr Porhoët looked up with a smile of irony.

‘I wish Mr Haddo would take this opportunity to disclose to us the mystery of his birth and family. I have a suspicion that, like the immortal Cagliostro, he was born of unknown but noble parents, and educated secretly in Eastern palaces.’

‘In my origin I am more to be compared with Denis Zachaire or with Raymond Lully. My ancestor, George Haddo, came to Scotland in the suite of Anne of Denmark, and when James I, her consort, ascended the English throne, he was granted the estates in Staffordshire which I still possess. My family has formed alliances with the most noble blood of England, and the Merestons, the Parnabys, the Hollingtons, have been proud to give their daughters to my house.’

‘Those are facts which can be verified in works of reference,’ said

Arthur dryly.

‘They can,’ said Oliver.

‘And the Eastern palaces in which your youth was spent, and the black slaves who waited on you, and the bearded sheikhs who imparted to you secret knowledge?’ cried Dr Porhoët.

‘I was educated at Eton, and I left Oxford in 1896.’

‘Would you mind telling me at what college you were?’ said Arthur.

‘I was at the House.’

‘Then you must have been there with Frank Hurrell.’

‘Now assistant physician at St Luke’s Hospital. He was one of my most intimate friends.’

‘I’ll write and ask him about you.’

‘I’m dying to know what you did with all the lions you slaughtered,’ said

Susie Boyd.

The man’s effrontery did not exasperate her as it obviously exasperated

Margaret and Arthur. He amused her, and she was anxious to make him talk.

‘They decorate the floors of Skene, which is the name of my place in Staffordshire.’ He paused for a moment to light a cigar. ‘I am the only man alive who has killed three lions with three successive shots.’

‘I should have thought you could have demolished them by the effects of your oratory,’ said Arthur.

Oliver leaned back and placed his two large hands on the table.

‘Burkhardt, a German with whom I was shooting, was down with fever and could not stir from his bed. I was awakened one night by the uneasiness of my oxen, and I heard the roaring of lions close at hand. I took my carbine and came out of my tent. There was only the meagre light of the moon. I walked alone, for I knew natives could be of no use to me. Presently I came upon the carcass of an antelope, half-consumed, and I made up my mind to wait for the return of the lions. I hid myself among the boulders twenty paces from the prey. All about me was the immensity of Africa and the silence. I waited, motionless, hour after hour, till the dawn was nearly at hand. At last three lions appeared over a rock. I had noticed, the day before, spoor of a lion and two females.’

‘May I ask how you could distinguish the sex?’ asked Arthur, incredulously.

‘The prints of a lion’s fore feet are disproportionately larger than those of the hind feet. The fore feet and hind feet of the lioness are nearly the same size.’

‘Pray go on,’ said Susie.

‘They came into full view, and in the dim light, as they stood chest on, they appeared as huge as the strange beasts of the Arabian tales. I aimed at the lioness which stood nearest to me and fired. Without a sound, like a bullock felled at one blow, she dropped. The lion gave vent to a sonorous roar. Hastily I slipped another cartridge in my rifle. Then I became conscious that he had seen me. He lowered his head, and his crest was erect. His lifted tail was twitching, his lips were drawn back from the red gums, and I saw his great white fangs. Living fire flashed from his eyes, and he growled incessantly. Then he advanced a few steps, his head held low; and his eyes were fixed on mine with a look of rage. Suddenly he jerked up his tail, and when a lion does this he charges. I got a quick sight on his chest and fired. He reared up on his hind legs, roaring loudly and clawing at the air, and fell back dead. One lioness remained, and through the smoke I saw her spring to her feet and rush towards me. Escape was impossible, for behind me were high boulders that I could not climb. She came on with hoarse, coughing grunts, and with desperate courage I fired my remaining barrel. I missed her clean. I took one step backwards in the hope of getting a cartridge into my rifle, and fell, scarcely two lengths in front of the furious beast. She missed me. I owed my safety to that fall. And then suddenly I found that she had collapsed. I had hit her after all. My bullet went clean through her heart, but the spring had carried her forwards. When I scrambled to my feet I found that she was dying. I walked back to my camp and ate a capital breakfast.’

Oliver Haddo’s story was received with astonished silence. No one could assert that it was untrue, but he told it with a grandiloquence that carried no conviction. Arthur would have wagered a considerable sum that there was no word of truth in it. He had never met a person of this kind before, and could not understand what pleasure there might be in the elaborate invention of improbable adventures.

‘You are evidently very brave,’ he said.

‘To follow a wounded lion into thick cover is probably the most dangerous proceeding in the world,’ said Haddo calmly. ‘It calls for the utmost coolness and for iron nerve.’

The answer had an odd effect on Arthur. He gave Haddo a rapid glance, and was seized suddenly with uncontrollable laughter. He leaned back in his chair and roared. His hilarity affected the others, and they broke into peal upon peal of laughter. Oliver watched them gravely. He seemed neither disconcerted nor surprised. When Arthur recovered himself, he found Haddo’s singular eyes fixed on him.

‘Your laughter reminds me of the crackling of thorns under a pot,’ he said.

Haddo looked round at the others. Though his gaze preserved its fixity, his lips broke into a queer, sardonic smile.

‘It must be plain even to the feeblest intelligence that a man can only command the elementary spirits if he is without fear. A capricious mind can never rule the sylphs, nor a fickle disposition the undines.’

Arthur stared at him with amazement. He did not know what on earth the man was talking about. Haddo paid no heed.

‘But if the adept is active, pliant, and strong, the whole world will be at his command. He will pass through the storm and no rain shall fall upon his head. The wind will not displace a single fold of his garment. He will go through fire and not be burned.’

Dr Porhoët ventured upon an explanation of these cryptic utterances.

‘These ladies are unacquainted with the mysterious beings of whom you speak, cher ami. They should know that during the Middle Ages imagination peopled the four elements with intelligences, normally unseen, some of which were friendly to man and others hostile. They were thought to be powerful and conscious of their power, though at the same time they were profoundly aware that they possessed no soul. Their life depended upon the continuance of some natural object, and hence for them there could be no immortality. They must return eventually to the abyss of unending night, and the darkness of death afflicted them always. But it was thought that in the same manner as man by his union with God had won a spark of divinity, so might the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders by an alliance with man partake of his immortality. And many of their women, whose beauty was more than human, gained a human soul by loving one of the race of men. But the reverse occurred also, and often a love-sick youth lost his immortality because he left the haunts of his kind to dwell with the fair, soulless denizens of the running streams or of the forest airs.’

‘I didn’t know that you spoke figuratively,’ said Arthur to Oliver Haddo.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

‘What else is the world than a figure? Life itself is but a symbol. You must be a wise man if you can tell us what is reality.’

‘When you begin to talk of magic and mysticism I confess that I am out of my depth.’

‘Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.’

‘Will you tell us what the powers are that the adept possesses?’

‘They are enumerated in a Hebrew manuscript of the sixteenth century, which is in my possession. The privileges of him who holds in his right hand the Keys of Solomon and in his left the Branch of the Blossoming Almond are twenty-one. He beholds God face to face without dying, and converses intimately with the Seven Genii who command the celestial army. He is superior to every affliction and to every fear. He reigns with all heaven and is served by all hell. He holds the secret of the resurrection of the dead, and the key of immortality.’

‘If you possess even these you have evidently the most varied attainments,’ said Arthur ironically.

‘Everyone can make game of the unknown,’ retorted Haddo, with a shrug of his massive shoulders.

Arthur did not answer. He looked at Haddo curiously. He asked himself whether he believed seriously these preposterous things, or whether he was amusing himself in an elephantine way at their expense. His mariner was earnest, but there was an odd expression about the mouth, a hard twinkle of the eyes, which seemed to belie it. Susie was vastly entertained. It diverted her enormously to hear occult matters discussed with apparent gravity in this prosaic tavern. Dr Porhoët broke the silence.

‘Arago, after whom has been named a neighbouring boulevard, declared that doubt was a proof of modesty, which has rarely interfered with the progress of science. But one cannot say the same of incredulity, and he that uses the word impossible outside of pure mathematics is lacking in prudence. It should be remembered that Lactantius proclaimed belief in the existence of antipodes inane, and Saint Augustine of Hippo added that in any case there could be no question of inhabited lands.’

‘That sounds as if you were not quite sceptical, dear doctor,’ said Miss

Boyd.

‘In my youth I believed nothing, for science had taught me to distrust even the evidence of my five senses,’ he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘But I have seen many things in the East which are inexplicable by the known processes of science. Mr Haddo has given you one definition of magic, and I will give you another. It may be described merely as the intelligent utilization of forces which are unknown, contemned, or misunderstood of the vulgar. The young man who settles in the East sneers at the ideas of magic which surround him, but I know not what there is in the atmosphere that saps his unbelief. When he has sojourned for some years among Orientals, he comes insensibly to share the opinion of many sensible men that perhaps there is something in it after all.’

Arthur Burdon made a gesture of impatience.

‘I cannot imagine that, however much I lived in Eastern countries, I could believe anything that had the whole weight of science against it. If there were a word of truth in anything Haddo says, we should be unable to form any reasonable theory of the universe.’

‘For a scientific man you argue with singular fatuity,’ said Haddo icily, and his manner had an offensiveness which was intensely irritating. ‘You should be aware that science, dealing only with the general, leaves out of consideration the individual cases that contradict the enormous majority. Occasionally the heart is on the right side of the body, but you would not on that account ever put your stethoscope in any other than the usual spot. It is possible that under certain conditions the law of gravity does not apply, yet you will conduct your life under the conviction that it does so invariably. Now, there are some of us who choose to deal only with these exceptions to the common run. The dull man who plays at Monte Carlo puts his money on the colours, and generally black or red turns up; but now and then zero appears, and he loses. But we, who have backed zero all the time, win many times our stake. Here and there you will find men whose imagination raises them above the humdrum of mankind. They are willing to lose their all if only they have chance of a great prize. Is it nothing not only to know the future, as did the prophets of old, but by making it to force the very gates of the unknown?’

Suddenly the bantering gravity with which he spoke fell away from him. A singular light came into his eyes, and his voice was hoarse. Now at last they saw that he was serious.

‘What should you know of that lust for great secrets which consumes me to the bottom of my soul!’

‘Anyhow, I’m perfectly delighted to meet a magician,’ cried Susie gaily.

‘Ah, call me not that,’ he said, with a flourish of his fat hands, regaining immediately his portentous flippancy. ‘I would be known rather as the Brother of the Shadow.’

‘I should have thought you could be only a very distant relation of anything so unsubstantial,’ said Arthur, with a laugh.

Oliver’s face turned red with furious anger. His strange blue eyes grew cold with hatred, and he thrust out his scarlet lips till he had the ruthless expression of a Nero. The gibe at his obesity had caught him on the raw. Susie feared that he would make so insulting a reply that a quarrel must ensure.

‘Well, really, if we want to go to the fair we must start,’ she said quickly. ‘And Marie is dying to be rid of us.’

They got up, and clattered down the stairs into the street.

4

They came down to the busy, narrow street which led into the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Electric trams passed through it with harsh ringing of bells, and people surged along the pavements.

The fair to which they were going was held at the Lion de Belfort, not more than a mile away, and Arthur hailed a cab. Susie told the driver where they wanted to be set down. She noticed that Haddo, who was waiting for them to start, put his hand on the horse’s neck. On a sudden, for no apparent reason, it began to tremble. The trembling passed through the body and down its limbs till it shook from head to foot as though it had the staggers. The coachman jumped off his box and held the wretched creature’s head. Margaret and Susie got out. It was a horribly painful sight. The horse seemed not to suffer from actual pain, but from an extraordinary fear. Though she knew not why, an idea came to Susie.

‘Take your hand away, Mr Haddo,’ she said sharply.

He smiled, and did as she bade him. At the same moment the trembling began to decrease, and in a moment the poor old cab-horse was in its usual state. It seemed a little frightened still, but otherwise recovered.

‘I wonder what the deuce was the matter with it,’ said Arthur.

Oliver Haddo looked at him with the blue eyes that seemed to see right through people, and then, lifting his hat, walked away. Susie turned suddenly to Dr Porhoët.

‘Do you think he could have made the horse do that? It came immediately he put his hand on its neck, and it stopped as soon as he took it away.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Arthur.

‘It occurred to me that he was playing some trick,’ said Dr Porhoët gravely. ‘An odd thing happened once when he came to see me. I have two Persian cats, which are the most properly conducted of all their tribe. They spend their days in front of my fire, meditating on the problems of metaphysics. But as soon as he came in they started up, and their fur stood right on end. Then they began to run madly round and round the room, as though the victims of uncontrollable terror. I opened the door, and they bolted out. I have never been able to understand exactly what took place.’

Margaret shuddered.

‘I’ve never met a man who filled me with such loathing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what there is about him that frightens me. Even now I feel his eyes fixed strangely upon me. I hope I shall never see him again.’

Arthur gave a little laugh and pressed her hand. She would not let his go, and he felt that she was trembling. Personally, he had no doubt about the matter. He would have no trifling with credibility. Either Haddo believed things that none but a lunatic could, or else he was a charlatan who sought to attract attention by his extravagances. In any case he was contemptible. It was certain, at all events, that neither he nor anyone else could work miracles.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ said Arthur. ‘If he really knows Frank Hurrell I’ll find out all about him. I’ll drop a note to Hurrell tonight and ask him to tell me anything he can.’

‘I wish you would,’ answered Susie, ‘because he interests me enormously. There’s no place like Paris for meeting queer folk. Sooner or later you run across persons who believe in everything. There’s no form of religion, there’s no eccentricity or enormity, that hasn’t its votaries. Just think what a privilege it is to come upon a man in the twentieth century who honestly believes in the occult.’

‘Since I have been occupied with these matters, I have come across strange people,’ said Dr Porhoët quietly, ‘but I agree with Miss Boyd that Oliver Haddo is the most extraordinary. For one thing, it is impossible to know how much he really believes what he says. Is he an impostor or a madman? Does he deceive himself, or is he laughing up his sleeve at the folly of those who take him seriously? I cannot tell. All I know is that he has travelled widely and is acquainted with many tongues. He has a minute knowledge of alchemical literature, and there is no book I have heard of, dealing with the black arts, which he does not seem to know.’ Dr Porhoët shook his head slowly. ‘I should not care to dogmatize about this man. I know I shall outrage the feelings of my friend Arthur, but I am bound to confess it would not surprise me to learn that he possessed powers by which he was able to do things seemingly miraculous.’

Arthur was prevented from answering by their arrival at the Lion de

Belfort.

The fair was in full swing. The noise was deafening. Steam bands thundered out the popular tunes of the moment, and to their din merry-go-rounds were turning. At the door of booths men vociferously importuned the passers-by to enter. From the shooting saloons came a continual spatter of toy rifles. Linking up these sounds, were the voices of the serried crowd that surged along the central avenue, and the shuffle of their myriad feet. The night was lurid with acetylene torches, which flamed with a dull unceasing roar. It was a curious sight, half gay, half sordid. The throng seemed bent with a kind of savagery upon amusement, as though, resentful of the weary round of daily labour, it sought by a desperate effort to be merry.

The English party with Dr Porhoët, mildly ironic, had scarcely entered before they were joined by Oliver Haddo. He was indifferent to the plain fact that they did not want his company. He attracted attention, for his appearance and his manner were remarkable, and Susie noticed that he was pleased to see people point him out to one another. He wore a Spanish cloak, the capa, and he flung the red and green velvet of its lining gaudily over his shoulder. He had a large soft hat. His height was great, though less noticeable on account of his obesity, and he towered over the puny multitude.

They looked idly at the various shows, resisting the melodramas, the circuses, the exhibitions of eccentricity, which loudly clamoured for their custom. Presently they came to a man who was cutting silhouettes in black paper, and Haddo insisted on posing for him. A little crowd collected and did not spare their jokes at his singular appearance. He threw himself into his favourite attitude of proud command. Margaret wished to take the opportunity of leaving him, but Miss Boyd insisted on staying.

‘He’s the most ridiculous creature I’ve ever seen in my life,’ she whispered. ‘I wouldn’t let him out of my sight for worlds.’

When the silhouette was done, he presented it with a low bow to Margaret.

‘I implore your acceptance of the only portrait now in existence of

Oliver Haddo,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she answered frigidly.

She was unwilling to take it, but had not the presence of mind to put him off by a jest, and would not be frankly rude. As though certain she set much store on it, he placed it carefully in an envelope. They walked on and suddenly came to a canvas booth on which was an Eastern name. Roughly painted on sail-cloth was a picture of an Arab charming snakes, and above were certain words in Arabic. At the entrance, a native sat cross-legged, listlessly beating a drum. When he saw them stop, he addressed them in bad French.

‘Does not this remind you of the turbid Nile, Dr Porhoët?’ said Haddo.

‘Let us go in and see what the fellow has to show.’

Dr Porhoët stepped forward and addressed the charmer, who brightened on hearing the language of his own country.

‘He is an Egyptian from Assiut,’ said the doctor.

‘I will buy tickets for you all,’ said Haddo.

He held up the flap that gave access to the booth, and Susie went in. Margaret and Arthur Burdon, somewhat against their will, were obliged to follow. The native closed the opening behind them. They found themselves in a dirty little tent, ill-lit by two smoking lamps; a dozen stools were placed in a circle on the bare ground. In one corner sat a fellah woman, motionless, in ample robes of dingy black. Her face was hidden by a long veil, which was held in place by a queer ornament of brass in the middle of the forehead, between the eyes. These alone were visible, large and sombre, and the lashes were darkened with kohl: her fingers were brightly stained with henna. She moved slightly as the visitors entered, and the man gave her his drum. She began to rub it with her hands, curiously, and made a droning sound, which was odd and mysterious. There was a peculiar odour in the place, so that Dr Porhoët was for a moment transported to the evil-smelling streets of Cairo. It was an acrid mixture of incense, of attar of roses, with every imaginable putrescence. It choked the two women, and Susie asked for a cigarette. The native grinned when he heard the English tongue. He showed a row of sparkling and beautiful teeth.

‘My name Mohammed,’ he said. ‘Me show serpents to Sirdar Lord Kitchener.

Wait and see. Serpents very poisonous.’

He was dressed in a long blue gabardine, more suited to the sunny banks of the Nile than to a fair in Paris, and its colour could hardly be seen for dirt. On his head was the national tarboosh.

A rug lay at one side of the tent, and from under it he took a goatskin sack. He placed it on the ground in the middle of the circle formed by the seats and crouched down on his haunches. Margaret shuddered, for the uneven surface of the sack moved strangely. He opened the mouth of it. The woman in the corner listlessly droned away on the drum, and occasionally uttered a barbaric cry. With a leer and a flash of his bright teeth, the Arab thrust his hand into the sack and rummaged as a man would rummage in a sack of corn. He drew out a long, writhing snake. He placed it on the ground and for a moment waited, then he passed his hand over it: it became immediately as rigid as a bar of iron. Except that the eyes, the cruel eyes, were open still, there might have been no life in it.

‘Look,’ said Haddo. ‘That is the miracle which Moses did before Pharaoh.’

Then the Arab took a reed instrument, not unlike the pipe which Pan in the hills of Greece played to the dryads, and he piped a weird, monotonous tune. The stiffness broke away from the snake suddenly, and it lifted its head and raised its long body till it stood almost on the tip of its tail, and it swayed slowly to and fro.

Oliver Haddo seemed extraordinarily fascinated. He leaned forward with eager face, and his unnatural eyes were fixed on the charmer with an indescribable expression. Margaret drew back in terror.

‘You need not be frightened,’ said Arthur. ‘These people only work with animals whose fangs have been extracted.’

Oliver Haddo looked at him before answering. He seemed to consider each time what sort of man this was to whom he spoke.

‘A man is only a snake-charmer because, without recourse to medicine, he is proof against the fangs of the most venomous serpents.’

‘Do you think so?’ said Arthur.

‘I saw the most noted charmer of Madras die two hours after he had been bitten by a cobra,’ said Haddo. I had heard many tales of his prowess, and one evening asked a friend to take me to him. He was out when we arrived, but we waited, and presently, accompanied by some friends, he came. We told him what we wanted. He had been at a marriage-feast and was drunk. But he sent for his snakes, and forthwith showed us marvels which this man has never heard of. At last he took a great cobra from his sack and began to handle it. Suddenly it darted at his chin and bit him. It made two marks like pin-points. The juggler started back.

‘“I am a dead man,” he said.

‘Those about him would have killed the cobra, but he prevented them.

‘“Let the creature live,” he said. “It may be of service to others of my trade. To me it can be of no other use. Nothing can save me.”

‘His friends and the jugglers, his fellows, gathered round him and placed him in a chair. In two hours he was dead. In his drunkenness he had forgotten a portion of the spell which protected him, and so he died.’

‘You have a marvellous collection of tall stories,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m afraid I should want better proof that these particular snakes are poisonous.’

Oliver turned to the charmer and spoke to him in Arabic. Then he answered

Arthur.

‘The man has a horned viper, cerastes is the name under which you gentlemen of science know it, and it is the most deadly of all Egyptian snakes. It is commonly known as Cleopatra’s Asp, for that is the serpent which was brought in a basket of figs to the paramour of Caesar in order that she might not endure the triumph of Augustus.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Susie.

He smiled but did not answer. He stepped forward to the centre of the tent and fell on his knees. He uttered Arabic words, which Dr. Porhoët translated to the others.

‘O viper, I adjure you, by the great God who is all-powerful, to come forth. You are but a snake, and God is greater than all snakes. Obey my call and come.’

A tremor went through the goatskin bag, and in a moment a head was protruded. A lithe body wriggled out. It was a snake of light grey colour, and over each eye was a horn. It lay slightly curled.

‘Do you recognize it?’ said Oliver in a low voice to the doctor.

‘I do.’

The charmer sat motionless, and the woman in the dim background ceased her weird rubbing of the drum. Haddo seized the snake and opened its mouth. Immediately it fastened on his hand, and the reptile teeth went deep into his flesh. Arthur watched him for signs of pain, but he did not wince. The writhing snake dangled from his hand. He repeated a sentence in Arabic, and, with the peculiar suddenness of a drop of water falling from a roof, the snake fell to the ground. The blood flowed freely. Haddo spat upon the bleeding place three times, muttering words they could not hear, and three times he rubbed the wound with his fingers. The bleeding stopped. He stretched out his hand for Arthur to look at.

‘That surely is what a surgeon would call healing by first intention,’ he said.

Burdon was astonished, but he was irritated, too, and would not allow that there was anything strange in the cessation of the flowing blood.

‘You haven’t yet shown that the snake was poisonous.’

‘I have not finished yet,’ smiled Haddo.

He spoke again to the Egyptian, who gave an order to his wife. Without a word she rose to her feet and from a box took a white rabbit. She lifted it up by the ears, and it struggled with its four quaint legs. Haddo put it in front of the horned viper. Before anyone could have moved, the snake darted forward, and like a flash of lightning struck the rabbit. The wretched little beast gave a slight scream, a shudder went through it, and it fell dead.

Margaret sprang up with a cry.

‘Oh, how cruel! How hatefully cruel!’

‘Are you convinced now?’ asked Haddo coolly.

The two women hurried to the doorway. They were frightened and disgusted.

Oliver Haddo was left alone with the snake-charmer.

5

Dr Porhoët had asked Arthur to bring Margaret and Miss Boyd to see him on Sunday at his apartment in the Île Saint Louis; and the lovers arranged to spend an hour on their way at the Louvre. Susie, invited to accompany them, preferred independence and her own reflections.

To avoid the crowd which throngs the picture galleries on holidays, they went to that part of the museum where ancient sculpture is kept. It was comparatively empty, and the long halls had the singular restfulness of places where works of art are gathered together. Margaret was filled with a genuine emotion; and though she could not analyse it, as Susie, who loved to dissect her state of mind, would have done, it strangely exhilarated her. Her heart was uplifted from the sordidness of earth, and she had a sensation of freedom which was as delightful as it was indescribable. Arthur had never troubled himself with art till Margaret’s enthusiasm taught him that there was a side of life he did not realize. Though beauty meant little to his practical nature, he sought, in his great love for Margaret, to appreciate the works which excited her to such charming ecstasy. He walked by her side with docility and listened, not without deference, to her outbursts. He admired the correctness of Greek anatomy, and there was one statue of an athlete which attracted his prolonged attention, because the muscles were indicated with the precision of a plate in a surgical textbook. When Margaret talked of the Greeks’ divine repose and of their blitheness, he thought it very clever because she said it; but in a man it would have aroused his impatience.

Yet there was one piece, the charming statue known as La Diane de Gabies, which moved him differently, and to this presently he insisted on going. With a laugh Margaret remonstrated, but secretly she was not displeased. She was aware that his passion for this figure was due, not to its intrinsic beauty, but to a likeness he had discovered in it to herself.

It stood in that fair wide gallery where is the mocking faun, with his inhuman savour of fellowship with the earth which is divine, and the sightless Homer. The goddess had not the arrogance of the huntress who loved Endymion, nor the majesty of the cold mistress of the skies. She was in the likeness of a young girl, and with collected gesture fastened her cloak. There was nothing divine in her save a sweet strange spirit of virginity. A lover in ancient Greece, who offered sacrifice before this fair image, might forget easily that it was a goddess to whom he knelt, and see only an earthly maid fresh with youth and chastity and loveliness. In Arthur’s eyes Margaret had all the exquisite grace of the statue, and the same unconscious composure; and in her also breathed the spring odours of ineffable purity. Her features were chiselled with the clear and divine perfection of this Greek girl’s; her ears were as delicate and as finely wrought. The colour of her skin was so tender that it reminded you vaguely of all beautiful soft things, the radiance of sunset and the darkness of the night, the heart of roses and the depth of running water. The goddess’s hand was raised to her right shoulder, and Margaret’s hand was as small, as dainty, and as white.

‘Don’t be so foolish,’ said she, as Arthur looked silently at the statue.

He turned his eyes slowly, and they rested upon her. She saw that they were veiled with tears.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’

‘I wish you weren’t so beautiful,’ he answered, awkwardly, as though he could scarcely bring himself to say such foolish things. ‘I’m so afraid that something will happen to prevent us from being happy. It seems too much to expect that I should enjoy such extraordinarily good luck.’

She had the imagination to see that it meant much for the practical man so to express himself. Love of her drew him out of his character, and, though he could not resist, he resented the effect it had on him. She found nothing to reply, but she took his hand.

‘Everything has gone pretty well with me so far,’ he said, speaking almost to himself. ‘Whenever I’ve really wanted anything, I’ve managed to get it. I don’t see why things should go against me now.’

He was trying to reassure himself against an instinctive suspicion of the malice of circumstances. But he shook himself and straightened his back.

‘It’s stupid to be so morbid as that,’ he muttered.

Margaret laughed. They walked out of the gallery and turned to the quay. By crossing the bridge and following the river, they must come eventually to Dr. Porhoët’s house.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Susie wandered down the Boulevard Saint Michel, alert with the Sunday crowd, to that part of Paris which was dearest to her heart. L’Île Saint Louis to her mind offered a synthesis of the French spirit, and it pleased her far more than the garish boulevards in which the English as a rule seek for the country’s fascination. Its position on an island in the Seine gave it a compact charm. The narrow streets, with their array of dainty comestibles, had the look of streets in a provincial town. They had a quaintness which appealed to the fancy, and they were very restful. The names of the streets recalled the monarchy that passed away in bloodshed, and in poudre de riz. The very plane trees had a greater sobriety than elsewhere, as though conscious they stood in a Paris where progress was not. In front was the turbid Seine, and below, the twin towers of Notre Dame. Susie could have kissed the hard paving stones of the quay. Her good-natured, plain face lit up as she realized the delight of the scene upon which her eyes rested; and it was with a little pang, her mind aglow with characters and events from history and from fiction, that she turned away to enter Dr Porhoët’s house.

She was pleased that the approach did not clash with her fantasies. She mounted a broad staircase, dark but roomy, and, at the command of the concierge, rang a tinkling bell at one of the doorways that faced her. Dr Porhoët opened in person..

‘Arthur and Mademoiselle are already here,’ he said, as he led her in.

They went through a prim French dining-room, with much woodwork and heavy scarlet hangings, to the library. This was a large room, but the bookcases that lined the walls, and a large writing-table heaped up with books, much diminished its size. There were books everywhere. They were stacked on the floor and piled on every chair. There was hardly space to move. Susie gave a cry of delight.

‘Now you mustn’t talk to me. I want to look at all your books.’

‘You could not please me more,’ said Dr Porhoët, ‘but I am afraid they will disappoint you. They are of many sorts, but I fear there are few that will interest an English young lady.’

He looked about his writing-table till he found a packet of cigarettes. He gravely offered one to each of his guests. Susie was enchanted with the strange musty smell of the old books, and she took a first glance at them in general. For the most part they were in paper bindings, some of them neat enough, but more with broken backs and dingy edges; they were set along the shelves in serried rows, untidily, without method or plan. There were many older ones also in bindings of calf and pigskin, treasure from half the bookshops in Europe; and there were huge folios like Prussian grenadiers; and tiny Elzevirs, which had been read by patrician ladies in Venice. Just as Arthur was a different man in the operating theatre, Dr Porhoët was changed among his books. Though he preserved the amiable serenity which made him always so attractive, he had there a diverting brusqueness of demeanour which contrasted quaintly with his usual calm.

‘I was telling these young people, when you came in, of an ancient Korân which I was given in Alexandria by a learned man whom I operated upon for cataract.’ He showed her a beautifully-written Arabic work, with wonderful capitals and headlines in gold. ‘You know that it is almost impossible for an infidel to acquire the holy book, and this is a particularly rare copy, for it was written by Kaït Bey, the greatest of the Mameluke Sultans.’

He handled the delicate pages as a lover of flowers would handle rose-leaves.

‘And have you much literature on the occult sciences?’ asked Susie.

Dr Porhoët smiled.

‘I venture to think that no private library contains so complete a collection, but I dare not show it to you in the presence of our friend Arthur. He is too polite to accuse me of foolishness, but his sarcastic smile would betray him.’

Susie went to the shelves to which he vaguely waved, and looked with a peculiar excitement at the mysterious array. She ran her eyes along the names. It seemed to her that she was entering upon an unknown region of romance. She felt like an adventurous princess who rode on her palfrey into a forest of great bare trees and mystic silences, where wan, unearthly shapes pressed upon her way.

‘I thought once of writing a life of that fantastic and grandiloquent creature, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast von Hohenheim,’ said Dr Porhoët, ‘and I have collected many of his books.’

He took down a slim volume in duodecimo, printed in the seventeenth century, with queer plates, on which were all manner of cabbalistic signs. The pages had a peculiar, musty odour. They were stained with iron-mould.

‘Here is one of the most interesting works concerning the black art. It is the Grimoire of Honorius, and is the principal text-book of all those who deal in the darkest ways of the science.’

Then he pointed out the Hexameron of Torquemada and the Tableau de l’Inconstance des Démons, by Delancre; he drew his finger down the leather back of Delrio’s Disquisitiones Magicae and set upright the Pseudomonarchia Daemonorum of Wierus; his eyes rested for an instant on Hauber’s Acta et Scripta Magica, and he blew the dust carefully off the most famous, the most infamous, of them all, Sprenger’s Malleus Malefikorum.

‘Here is one of my greatest treasures. It is the Clavicula Salomonis; and I have much reason to believe that it is the identical copy which belonged to the greatest adventurer of the eighteenth century, Jacques Casanova. You will see that the owner’s name had been cut out, but enough remains to indicate the bottom of the letters; and these correspond exactly with the signature of Casanova which I have found at the Bibliothéque Nationale. He relates in his memoirs that a copy of this book was seized among his effects when he was arrested in Venice for traffic in the black arts; and it was there, on one of my journeys from Alexandria, that I picked it up.’

He replaced the precious work, and his eye fell on a stout volume bound in vellum.

‘I had almost forgotten the most wonderful, the most mysterious, of all the books that treat of occult science. You have heard of the Kabbalah, but I doubt if it is more than a name to you.’

‘I know nothing about it at all,’ laughed Susie, ‘except that it’s all very romantic and extraordinary and ridiculous.’

‘This, then, is its history. Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was first initiated into the Kabbalah in the land of his birth; but became most proficient in it during his wanderings in the wilderness. Here he not only devoted the leisure hours of forty years to this mysterious science, but received lessons in it from an obliging angel. By aid of it he was able to solve the difficulties which arose during his management of the Israelites, notwithstanding the pilgrimages, wars, and miseries of that most unruly nation. He covertly laid down the principles of the doctrine in the first four books of the Pentateuch, but withheld them from Deuteronomy. Moses also initiated the Seventy Elders into these secrets, and they in turn transmitted them from hand to hand. Of all who formed the unbroken line of tradition, David and Solomon were the most deeply learned in the Kabbalah. No one, however, dared to write it down till Schimeon ben Jochai, who lived in the time of the destruction of Jerusalem; and after his death the Rabbi Eleazar, his son, and the Rabbi Abba, his secretary, collected his manuscripts and from them composed the celebrated treatise called Zohar.’

‘And how much do you believe of this marvellous story?’ asked Arthur

Burdon.

‘Not a word,’ answered Dr Porhoët, with a smile. ‘Criticism has shown that Zohar is of modern origin. With singular effrontery, it cites an author who is known to have lived during the eleventh century, mentions the Crusades, and records events which occurred in the year of Our Lord 1264. It was some time before 1291 that copies of Zohar began to be circulated by a Spanish Jew named Moses de Leon, who claimed to possess an autograph manuscript by the reputed author Schimeon ben Jochai. But when Moses de Leon was gathered to the bosom of his father Abraham, a wealthy Hebrew, Joseph de Avila, promised the scribe’s widow, who had been left destitute, that his son should marry her daughter, to whom he would pay a handsome dowry, if she would give him the original manuscript from which these copies were made. But the widow (one can imagine with what gnashing of teeth) was obliged to confess that she had no such manuscript, for Moses de Leon had composed Zohar out of his own head, and written it with his own right hand.’

Arthur got up to stretch his legs. He gave a laugh.

‘I never know how much you really believe of all these things you tell us. You speak with such gravity that we are all taken in, and then it turns out that you’ve been laughing at us.’

‘My dear friend, I never know myself how much I believe,’ returned Dr

Porhoët.

‘I wonder if it is for the same reason that Mr Haddo puzzles us so much,’ said Susie.

‘Ah, there you have a case that is really interesting,’ replied the doctor. ‘I assure you that, though I know him fairly intimately, I have never been able to make up my mind whether he is an elaborate practical joker, or whether he is really convinced he has the wonderful powers to which he lays claim.’

‘We certainly saw things last night that were not quite normal,’ said Susie. ‘Why had that serpent no effect on him though it was able to kill the rabbit instantaneously? And how are you going to explain the violent trembling of that horse, Mr. Burdon?’

‘I can’t explain it,’ answered Arthur, irritably, ‘but I’m not inclined to attribute to the supernatural everything that I can’t immediately understand.’

‘I don’t know what there is about him that excites in me a sort of horror,’ said Margaret. ‘I’ve never taken such a sudden dislike to anyone.’

She was too reticent to say all she felt, but she had been strangely affected last night by the recollection of Haddo’s words and of his acts. She had awakened more than once from a nightmare in which he assumed fantastic and ghastly shapes. His mocking voice rang in her ears, and she seemed still to see that vast bulk and the savage, sensual face. It was like a spirit of evil in her path, and she was curiously alarmed. Only her reliance on Arthur’s common sense prevented her from giving way to ridiculous terrors.

‘I’ve written to Frank Hurrell and asked him to tell me all he knows about him,’ said Arthur. ‘I should get an answer very soon.’

‘I wish we’d never come across him,’ cried Margaret vehemently. ‘I feel that he will bring us misfortune.’

‘You’re all of you absurdly prejudiced,’ answered Susie gaily. ‘He interests me enormously, and I mean to ask him to tea at the studio.’

‘I’m sure I shall be delighted to come.’

Margaret cried out, for she recognized Oliver Haddo’s deep bantering tones; and she turned round quickly. They were all so taken aback that for a moment no one spoke. They were gathered round the window and had not heard him come in. They wondered guiltily how long he had been there and how much he had heard.

‘How on earth did you get here?’ cried Susie lightly, recovering herself first.

‘No well-bred sorcerer is so dead to the finer feelings as to enter a room by the door,’ he answered, with his puzzling smile. ‘You were standing round the window, and I thought it would startle you if I chose that mode of ingress, so I descended with incredible skill down the chimney.’

‘I see a little soot on your left elbow,’ returned Susie. ‘I hope you weren’t at all burned.’

‘Not at all, thanks,’ he answered, gravely brushing his coat.

‘In whatever way you came, you are very welcome,’ said Dr Porhoët, genially holding out his hand.

But Arthur impatiently turned to his host.

‘I wish I knew what made you engage upon these studies,’ he said. ‘I should have thought your medical profession protected you from any tenderness towards superstition.’

Dr Porhoët shrugged his shoulders.

‘I have always been interested in the oddities of mankind. At one time I read a good deal of philosophy and a good deal of science, and I learned in that way that nothing was certain. Some people, by the pursuit of science, are impressed with the dignity of man, but I was only made conscious of his insignificance. The greatest questions of all have been threshed out since he acquired the beginnings of civilization and he is as far from a solution as ever. Man can know nothing, for his senses are his only means of knowledge, and they can give no certainty. There is only one subject upon which the individual can speak with authority, and that is his own mind, but even here he is surrounded with darkness. I believe that we shall always be ignorant of the matters which it most behoves us to know, and therefore I cannot occupy myself with them. I prefer to set them all aside, and, since knowledge is unattainable, to occupy myself only with folly.’

‘It is a point of view I do not sympathize with,’ said Arthur.

‘Yet I cannot be sure that it is all folly,’ pursued the Frenchman reflectively. He looked at Arthur with a certain ironic gravity. ‘Do you believe that I should lie to you when I promised to speak the truth?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I should like to tell you of an experience that I once had in Alexandria. So far as I can see, it can be explained by none of the principles known to science. I ask you only to believe that I am not consciously deceiving you.’

He spoke with a seriousness which gave authority to his words. It was plain, even to Arthur, that he narrated the event exactly as it occurred.

‘I had heard frequently of a certain shiekh who was able by means of a magic mirror to show the inquirer persons who were absent or dead, and a native friend of mine had often begged me to see him. I had never thought it worth while, but at last a time came when I was greatly troubled in my mind. My poor mother was an old woman, a widow, and I had received no news of her for many weeks. Though I wrote repeatedly, no answer reached me. I was very anxious and very unhappy. I thought no harm could come if I sent for the sorcerer, and perhaps after all he had the power which was attributed to him. My friend, who was interpreter to the French Consulate, brought him to me one evening. He was a fine man, tall and stout, of a fair complexion, but with a dark brown beard. He was shabbily dressed, and, being a descendant of the Prophet, wore a green turban. In his conversation he was affable and unaffected. I asked him what persons could see in the magic mirror, and he said they were a boy not arrived at puberty, a virgin, a black female slave, and a pregnant woman. In order to make sure that there was no collusion, I despatched my servant to an intimate friend and asked him to send me his son. While we waited, I prepared by the magician’s direction frankincense and coriander-seed, and a chafing-dish with live charcoal. Meanwhile, he wrote forms of invocation on six strips of paper. When the boy arrived, the sorcerer threw incense and one of the paper strips into the chafing-dish, then took the boy’s right hand and drew a square and certain mystical marks on the palm. In the centre of the square he poured a little ink. This formed the magic mirror. He desired the boy to look steadily into it without raising his head. The fumes of the incense filled the room with smoke. The sorcerer muttered Arabic words, indistinctly, and this he continued to do all the time except when he asked the boy a question.

‘“Do you see anything in the ink?” he said.

‘“No,” the boy answered.

‘But a minute later, he began to tremble and seemed very much frightened.

‘“I see a man sweeping the ground,” he said.

‘“When he has done sweeping, tell me,” said the sheikh.

‘“He has done,” said the boy.

‘The sorcerer turned to me and asked who it was that I wished the boy should see.

‘“I desire to see the widow Jeanne-Marie Porhoët.”

‘The magician put the second and third of the small strips of paper into the chafing-dish, and fresh frankincense was added. The fumes were painful to my eyes. The boy began to speak.

‘“I see an old woman lying on a bed. She has a black dress, and on her head is a little white cap. She has a wrinkled face and her eyes are closed. There is a band tied round her chin. The bed is in a sort of hole, in the wall, and there are shutters to it.”

The boy was describing a Breton bed, and the white cap was the coiffe that my mother wore. And if she lay there in her black dress, with a band about her chin, I knew that it could mean but one thing.

‘“What else does he see?” I asked the sorcerer.

‘He repeated my question, and presently the boy spoke again.

‘“I see four men come in with a long box. And there are women crying. They all wear little white caps and black dresses. And I see a man in a white surplice, with a large cross in his hands, and a little boy in a long red gown. And the men take off their hats. And now everyone is kneeling down.”

‘“I will hear no more,” I said. “It is enough.”

‘I knew that my mother was dead.

‘In a little while, I received a letter from the priest of the village in which she lived. They had buried her on the very day upon which the boy had seen this sight in the mirror of ink.’

Dr Porhoët passed his hand across his eyes, and for a little while there was silence.

‘What have you to say to that?’ asked Oliver Haddo, at last.

‘Nothing,’ answered Arthur.

Haddo looked at him for a minute with those queer eyes of his which seemed to stare at the wall behind.

‘Have you ever heard of Eliphas Levi?’ he inquired. ‘He is the most celebrated occultist of recent years. He is thought to have known more of the mysteries than any adept since the divine Paracelsus.’

‘I met him once,’ interrupted Dr Porhoët. ‘You never saw a man who looked less like a magician. His face beamed with good-nature, and he wore a long grey beard, which covered nearly the whole of his breast. He was of a short and very corpulent figure.’

‘The practice of black arts evidently disposes to obesity,’ said Arthur, icily.

Susie noticed that this time Oliver Haddo made no sign that the taunt moved him. His unwinking, straight eyes remained upon Arthur without expression.

‘Levi’s real name was Alphonse-Louis Constant, but he adopted that under which he is generally known for reasons that are plain to the romantic mind. His father was a bootmaker. He was destined for the priesthood, but fell in love with a damsel fair and married her. The union was unhappy. A fate befell him which has been the lot of greater men than he, and his wife presently abandoned the marital roof with her lover. To console himself he began to make serious researches in the occult, and in due course published a vast number of mystical works dealing with magic in all its branches.’

‘I’m sure Mr Haddo was going to tell us something very interesting about him,’ said Susie.

‘I wished merely to give you his account of how he raised the spirit of

Apollonius of Tyana in London.’

Susie settled herself more comfortably in her chair and lit a cigarette.

‘He went there in the spring of 1856 to escape from internal disquietude and to devote himself without distraction to his studies. He had letters of introduction to various persons of distinction who concerned themselves with the supernatural, but, finding them trivial and indifferent, he immersed himself in the study of the supreme Kabbalah. One day, on returning to his hotel, he found a note in his room. It contained half a card, transversely divided, on which he at once recognized the character of Solomon’s Seal, and a tiny slip of paper on which was written in pencil: The other half of this card will be given you at three o’clock tomorrow in front of Westminster Abbey. Next day, going to the appointed spot, with his portion of the card in his hand, he found a baronial equipage waiting for him. A footman approached, and, making a sign to him, opened the carriage door. Within was a lady in black satin, whose face was concealed by a thick veil. She motioned him to a seat beside her, and at the same time displayed the other part of the card he had received. The door was shut, and the carriage rolled away. When the lady raised her veil, Eliphas Levi saw that she was of mature age; and beneath her grey eyebrows were bright black eyes of preternatural fixity.’

Susie Boyd clapped her hands with delight.

‘I think it’s delicious, and I’m sure every word of it is true,’ she cried. ‘I’m enchanted with the mysterious meeting at Westminster Abbey in the Mid-Victorian era. Can’t you see the elderly lady in a huge crinoline and a black poke bonnet, and the wizard in a ridiculous hat, a bottle-green frock-coat, and a flowing tie of black silk?’

‘Eliphas remarks that the lady spoke French with a marked English accent,’ pursued Haddo imperturbably. ‘She addressed him as follows: “Sir, I am aware that the law of secrecy is rigorous among adepts; and I know that you have been asked for phenomena, but have declined to gratify a frivolous curiosity. It is possible that you do not possess the necessary materials. I can show you a complete magical cabinet, but I must require of you first the most inviolable silence. If you do not guarantee this on your honour, I will give the order for you to be driven home.”’

Oliver Haddo told his story not ineffectively, but with a comic gravity that prevented one from knowing exactly how to take it.

‘Having given the required promise Eliphas Levi was shown a collection of vestments and of magical instruments. The lady lent him certain books of which he was in need; and at last, as a result of many conversations, determined him to attempt at her house the experience of a complete evocation. He prepared himself for twenty-one days, scrupulously observing the rules laid down by the Ritual. At length everything was ready. It was proposed to call forth the phantom of the divine Apollonius, and to question it upon two matters, one of which concerned Eliphas Levi and the other, the lady of the crinoline. She had at first counted on assisting at the evocation with a trustworthy person, but at the last moment her friend drew back; and as the triad or unity is rigorously prescribed in magical rites, Eliphas was left alone. The cabinet prepared for the experiment was situated in a turret. Four concave mirrors were hung within it, and there was an altar of white marble, surrounded by a chain of magnetic iron. On it was engraved the sign of the Pentagram, and this symbol was drawn on the new, white sheepskin which was stretched beneath. A copper brazier stood on the altar, with charcoal of alder and of laurel wood, and in front a second brazier was placed upon a tripod. Eliphas Levi was clothed in a white robe, longer and more ample than the surplice of a priest, and he wore upon his head a chaplet of vervain leaves entwined about a golden chain. In one hand he held a new sword and in the other the Ritual.’

Susie’s passion for caricature at once asserted itself, and she laughed as she saw in fancy the portly little Frenchman, with his round, red face, thus wonderfully attired.

‘He set alight the two fires with the prepared materials, and began, at first in a low voice, but rising by degrees, the invocations of the Ritual. The flames invested every object with a wavering light. Presently they went out. He set more twigs and perfumes on the brazier, and when the flame started up once more, he saw distinctly before the altar a human figure larger than life, which dissolved and disappeared. He began the invocations again and placed himself in a circle, which he had already traced between the altar and the tripod. Then the depth of the mirror which was in front of him grew brighter by degrees, and a pale form arose, and it seemed gradually to approach. He closed his eyes, and called three times upon Apollonius. When he opened them, a man stood before him, wholly enveloped in a winding sheet, which seemed more grey than black. His form was lean, melancholy, and beardless. Eliphas felt an intense cold, and when he sought to ask his questions found it impossible to speak. Thereupon, he placed his hand on the Pentagram, and directed the point of his sword toward the figure, adjuring it mentally by that sign not to terrify, but to obey him. The form suddenly grew indistinct and soon it strangely vanished. He commanded it to return, and then felt, as it were, an air pass by him; and, something having touched the hand which held the sword, his arm was immediately benumbed as far as the shoulder. He supposed that the weapon displeased the spirit, and set it down within the circle. The human figure at once reappeared, but Eliphas experienced such a sudden exhaustion in all his limbs that he was obliged to sit down. He fell into a deep coma, and dreamed strange dreams. But of these, when he recovered, only a vague memory remained to him. His arm continued for several days to be numb and painful. The figure had not spoken, but it seemed to Eliphas Levi that the questions were answered in his own mind. For to each an inner voice replied with one grim word: dead.’

‘Your friend seems to have had as little fear of spooks as you have of lions,’ said Burdon. ‘To my thinking it is plain that all these preparations, and the perfumes, the mirrors, the pentagrams, must have the greatest effect on the imagination. My only surprise is that your magician saw no more.’

‘Eliphas Levi talked to me himself of this evocation,’ said Dr Porhoët. ‘He told me that its influence on him was very great. He was no longer the same man, for it seemed to him that something from the world beyond had passed into his soul.’

‘I am astonished that you should never have tried such an interesting experiment yourself,’ said Arthur to Oliver Haddo.

‘I have,’ answered the other calmly. ‘My father lost his power of speech shortly before he died, and it was plain that he sought with all his might to tell me something. A year after his death, I called up his phantom from the grave so that I might learn what I took to be a dying wish. The circumstances of the apparition are so similar to those I have just told you that it would only bore you if I repeated them. The only difference was that my father actually spoke.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Susie.

‘He said solemnly: “Buy Ashantis, they are bound to go up.”

‘I did as he told me; but my father was always unlucky in speculation, and they went down steadily. I sold out at considerable loss, and concluded that in the world beyond they are as ignorant of the tendency of the Stock Exchange as we are in this vale of sorrow.’

Susie could not help laughing. But Arthur shrugged his shoulders impatiently. It disturbed his practical mind never to be certain if Haddo was serious, or if, as now, he was plainly making game of them.

6

Two days later, Arthur received Frank Hurrell’s answer to his letter. It was characteristic of Frank that he should take such pains to reply at length to the inquiry, and it was clear that he had lost none of his old interest in odd personalities. He analysed Oliver Haddo’s character with the patience of a scientific man studying a new species in which he is passionately concerned.

My dear Burdon:

It is singular that you should write just now to ask what I know of Oliver Haddo, since by chance I met the other night at dinner at Queen Anne’s Gate a man who had much to tell me of him. I am curious to know why he excites your interest, for I am sure his peculiarities make him repugnant to a person of your robust common sense. I can with difficulty imagine two men less capable of getting on together. Though I have not seen Haddo now for years, I can tell you, in one way and another, a good deal about him. He erred when he described me as his intimate friend. It is true that at one time I saw much of him, but I never ceased cordially to dislike him. He came up to Oxford from Eton with a reputation for athletics and eccentricity. But you know that there is nothing that arouses the ill-will of boys more than the latter, and he achieved an unpopularity which was remarkable. It turned out that he played football admirably, and except for his rather scornful indolence he might easily have got his blue. He sneered at the popular enthusiasm for games, and was used to say that cricket was all very well for boys but not fit for the pastime of men. (He was then eighteen!) He talked grandiloquently of big-game shooting and of mountain climbing as sports which demanded courage and self-reliance. He seemed, indeed, to like football, but he played it with a brutal savagery which the other persons concerned naturally resented. It became current opinion in other pursuits that he did not play the game. He did nothing that was manifestly unfair, but was capable of taking advantages which most people would have thought mean; and he made defeat more hard to bear because he exulted over the vanquished with the coarse banter that youths find so difficult to endure.

What you would hardly believe is that, when he first came up, he was a person of great physical attractions. He is now grown fat, but in those days was extremely handsome. He reminded one of those colossal statues of Apollo in which the god is represented with a feminine roundness and delicacy. He was very tall and had a magnificent figure. It was so well-formed for his age that one might have foretold his precious corpulence. He held himself with a dashing erectness. Many called it an insolent swagger. His features were regular and fine. He had a great quantity of curling hair, which was worn long, with a sort of poetic grace: I am told that now he is very bald; and I can imagine that this must be a great blow to him, for he was always exceedingly vain. I remember a peculiarity of his eyes, which could scarcely have been natural, but how it was acquired I do not know. The eyes of most people converge upon the object at which they look, but his remained parallel. It gave them a singular expression, as though he were scrutinising the inmost thought of the person with whom he talked. He was notorious also for the extravagance of his costume, but, unlike the aesthetes of that day, who clothed themselves with artistic carelessness, he had a taste for outrageous colours. Sometimes, by a queer freak, he dressed himself at unseasonable moments with excessive formality. He is the only undergraduate I have ever seen walk down the High in a tall hat and a closely-buttoned frock-coat.

I have told you he was very unpopular, but it was not an unpopularity of the sort which ignores a man and leaves him chiefly to his own society. Haddo knew everybody and was to be found in the most unlikely places. Though people disliked him, they showed a curious pleasure in his company, and he was probably entertained more than any man in Oxford. I never saw him but he was surrounded by a little crowd, who abused him behind his back, but could not resist his fascination.

I often tried to analyse this, for I felt it as much as anyone, and though I honestly could not bear him, I could never resist going to see him whenever opportunity arose. I suppose he offered the charm of the unexpected to that mass of undergraduates who, for all their matter-of-fact breeziness, are curiously alive to the romantic. It was impossible to tell what he would do or say next, and you were kept perpetually on the alert. He was certainly not witty, but he had a coarse humour which excited the rather gross sense of the ludicrous possessed by the young. He had a gift for caricature which was really diverting, and an imperturbable assurance. He had also an ingenious talent for profanity, and his inventiveness in this particular was a power among youths whose imaginations stopped at the commoner sorts of bad language. I have heard him preach a sermon of the most blasphemous sort in the very accents of the late Dean of Christ Church, which outraged and at the same time irresistibly amused everyone who heard it. He had a more varied knowledge than the greater part of undergraduates, and, having at the same time a retentive memory and considerable quickness, he was able to assume an attitude of omniscience which was as impressive as it was irritating. I have never heard him confess that he had not read a book. Often, when I tried to catch him, he confounded me by quoting the identical words of a passage in some work which I could have sworn he had never set eyes on. I daresay it was due only to some juggling, like the conjuror’s sleight of hand that apparently lets you choose a card, but in fact forces one on you; and he brought the conversation round cleverly to a point when it was obvious I should mention a definite book. He talked very well, with an entertaining flow of rather pompous language which made the amusing things he said particularly funny. His passion for euphuism contrasted strikingly with the simple speech of those with whom he consorted. It certainly added authority to what he said. He was proud of his family and never hesitated to tell the curious of his distinguished descent. Unless he has much altered, you will already have heard of his relationship with various noble houses. He is, in fact, nearly connected with persons of importance, and his ancestry is no less distinguished than he asserts. His father is dead, and he owns a place in Staffordshire which is almost historic. I have seen photographs of it, and it is certainly very fine. His forebears have been noted in the history of England since the days of the courtier who accompanied Anne of Denmark to Scotland, and, if he is proud of his stock, it is not without cause. So he passed his time at Oxford, cordially disliked, at the same time respected and mistrusted; he had the reputation of a liar and a rogue, but it could not be denied that he had considerable influence over others. He amused, angered, irritated, and interested everyone with whom he came in contact. There was always something mysterious about him, and he loved to wrap himself in a romantic impenetrability. Though he knew so many people, no one knew him, and to the end he remained a stranger in our midst. A legend grew up around him, which he fostered sedulously, and it was reported that he had secret vices which could only be whispered with bated breath. He was said to intoxicate himself with Oriental drugs, and to haunt the vilest opium-dens in the East of London. He kept the greatest surprise for the last, since, though he was never seen to work, he managed, to the universal surprise, to get a first. He went down, and to the best of my belief was never seen in Oxford again.

I have heard vaguely that he was travelling over the world, and, when I met in town now and then some of the fellows who had known him at the ‘Varsity, weird rumours reached me. One told me that he was tramping across America, earning his living as he went; another asserted that he had been seen in a monastry in India; a third assured me that he had married a ballet-girl in Milan; and someone else was positive that he had taken to drink. One opinion, however, was common to all my informants, and this was that he did something out of the common. It was clear that he was not the man to settle down to the tame life of a country gentleman which his position and fortune indicated. At last I met him one day in Piccadilly, and we dined together at the Savoy. I hardly recognized him, for he was become enormously stout, and his hair had already grown thin. Though he could not have been more than twenty-five, he looked considerably older. I tried to find out what he had been up to, but, with the air of mystery he affects, he would go into no details. He gave me to understand that he had sojourned in lands where the white man had never been before, and had learnt esoteric secrets which overthrew the foundations of modern science. It seemed to me that he had coarsened in mind as well as in appearance. I do not know if it was due to my own development since the old days at Oxford, and to my greater knowledge of the world, but he did not seem to me so brilliant as I remembered. His facile banter was rather stupid. In fact he bored me. The pose which had seemed amusing in a lad fresh from Eton now was intolerable, and I was glad to leave him. It was characteristic that, after asking me to dinner, he left me in a lordly way to pay the bill.

Then I heard nothing of him till the other day, when our friend Miss Ley asked me to meet at dinner the German explorer Burkhardt. I dare say you remember that Burkhardt brought out a book a little while ago on his adventures in Central Asia. I knew that Oliver Haddo was his companion in that journey and had meant to read it on this account, but, having been excessively busy, had omitted to do so. I took the opportunity to ask the German about our common acquaintance, and we had a long talk. Burkhardt had met him by chance at Mombasa in East Africa, where he was arranging an expedition after big game, and they agreed to go together. He told me that Haddo was a marvellous shot and a hunter of exceptional ability. Burkhardt had been rather suspicious of a man who boasted so much of his attainments, but was obliged soon to confess that he boasted of nothing unjustly. Haddo has had an extraordinary experience, the truth of which Burkhardt can vouch for. He went out alone one night on the trail of three lions and killed them all before morning with one shot each. I know nothing of these things, but from the way in which Burkhardt spoke, I judge it must be a unique occurrence. But, characteristically enough, no one was more conscious than Haddo of the singularity of his feat, and he made life almost insufferable for his fellow-traveller in consequence. Burkhardt assures me that Haddo is really remarkable in pursuit of big game. He has a sort of instinct which leads him to the most unlikely places, and a wonderful feeling for country, whereby he can cut across, and head off animals whose spoor he has noticed. His courage is very great. To follow a wounded lion into thick cover is the most dangerous proceeding in the world, and demands the utmost coolness. The animal invariably sees the sportsman before he sees it, and in most cases charges. But Haddo never hesitated on these occasions, and Burkhardt could only express entire admiration for his pluck. It appears that he is not what is called a good sportsman. He kills wantonly, when there can be no possible excuse, for the mere pleasure of it; and to Burkhardt’s indignation frequently shot beasts whose skins and horns they did not even trouble to take. When antelope were so far off that it was impossible to kill them, and the approach of night made it useless to follow, he would often shoot, and leave a wretched wounded beast to die by inches. His selfishness was extreme, and he never shared any information with his friend that might rob him of an uninterrupted pursuit of game. But notwithstanding all this, Burkhardt had so high an opinion of Haddo’s general capacity and of his resourcefulness that, when he was arranging his journey in Asia, he asked him to come also. Haddo consented, and it appears that Burkhardt’s book gives further proof, if it is needed, of the man’s extraordinary qualities. The German confessed that on more than one occasion he owed his life to Haddo’s rare power of seizing opportunities. But they quarrelled at last through Haddo’s over-bearing treatment of the natives. Burkhardt had vaguely suspected him of cruelty, but at length it was clear that he used them in a manner which could not be defended. Finally he had a desperate quarrel with one of the camp servants, as a result of which the man was shot dead. Haddo swore that he fired in self-defence, but his action caused a general desertion, and the travellers found themselves in a very dangerous predicament. Burkhardt thought that Haddo was clearly to blame and refused to have anything more to do with him. They separated. Burkhardt returned to England; and Haddo, pursued by the friends of the murdered man, had great difficulty in escaping with his life. Nothing has been heard of him since till I got your letter.

Altogether, an extraordinary man. I confess that I can make nothing of him. I shall never be surprised to hear anything in connexion with him. I recommend you to avoid him like the plague. He can be no one’s friend. As an acquaintance he is treacherous and insincere; as an enemy, I can well imagine that he would be as merciless as he is unscrupulous.

An immensely long letter!

Goodbye, my son. I hope that your studies in French methods of surgery will have added to your wisdom. Your industry edifies me, and I am sure that you will eventually be a baronet and the President of the Royal College of Surgeons; and you shall relieve royal persons of their, vermiform appendix.

Yours ever,

FRANK HURRELL

Arthur, having read this letter twice, put it in an envelope and left it without comment for Miss Boyd. Her answer came within a couple of hours: ‘I’ve asked him to tea on Wednesday, and I can’t put him off. You must come and help us; but please be as polite to him as if, like most of us, he had only taken mental liberties with the Ten Commandments.’

7

On the morning of the day upon which they had asked him to tea, Oliver Haddo left at Margaret’s door vast masses of chrysanthemums. There were so many that the austere studio was changed in aspect. It gained an ephemeral brightness that Margaret, notwithstanding pieces of silk hung here and there on the walls, had never been able to give it. When Arthur arrived, he was dismayed that the thought had not occurred to him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘You must think me very inconsiderate.’

Margaret smiled and held his hand.

‘I think I like you because you don’t trouble about the common little attentions of lovers.’

‘Margaret’s a wise girl,’ smiled Susie. ‘She knows that when a man sends flowers it is a sign that he has admired more women than one.’

‘I don’t suppose that these were sent particularly to me.’

Arthur Burdon sat down and observed with pleasure the cheerful fire. The drawn curtains and the lamps gave the place a nice cosiness, and there was the peculiar air of romance which is always in a studio. There is a sense of freedom about it that disposes the mind to diverting speculations. In such an atmosphere it is possible to be serious without pompousness and flippant without inanity.

In the few days of their acquaintance Arthur and Susie had arrived at terms of pleasant familiarity. Susie, from her superior standpoint of an unmarried woman no longer young, used him with the good-natured banter which she affected. To her, he was a foolish young thing in love, and she marvelled that even the cleverest man in that condition could behave like a perfect idiot. But Margaret knew that, if her friend chaffed him, it was because she completely approved of him. As their intimacy increased, Susie learnt to appreciate his solid character. She admired his capacity in dealing with matters that were in his province, and the simplicity with which he left alone those of which he was ignorant. There was no pose in him. She was touched also by an ingenuous candour which gave a persuasive charm to his abruptness. And, though she set a plain woman’s value on good looks, his appearance, rough hewn like a statue in porphyry, pleased her singularly. It was an index of his character. The look of him gave you the whole man, strong yet gentle, honest and simple, neither very imaginative nor very brilliant, but immensely reliable and trustworthy to the bottom of his soul. He was seated now with Margaret’s terrier on his knees, stroking its ears, and Susie, looking at him, wondered with a little pang why no man like that had even cared for her. It was evident that he would make a perfect companion, and his love, once won, was of the sort that did not alter.

Dr Porhoët came in and sat down with the modest quietness which was one of his charms. He was not a great talker and loved most to listen in silence to the chatter of young people. The dog jumped down from Arthur’s knee, went up to the doctor, and rubbed itself in friendly fashion against his legs. They began to talk in the soft light and had forgotten almost that another guest was expected. Margaret hoped fervently that he would not come. She had never looked more lovely than on this afternoon, and she busied herself with the preparations for tea with a housewifely grace that added a peculiar delicacy to her comeliness. The dignity which encompassed the perfection of her beauty was delightfully softened, so that you were reminded of those sweet domestic saints who lighten here and there the passionate records of the Golden Book.

‘C’est tellement intime ici,’ smiled Dr Porhoët, breaking into French in the impossibility of expressing in English the exact feeling which that scene gave him.

It might have been a picture by some master of genre. It seemed hardly by chance that the colours arranged themselves in such agreeable tones, or that the lines of the wall and the seated persons achieved such a graceful decoration. The atmosphere was extraordinarily peaceful.

There was a knock at the door, and Arthur got up to open. The terrier followed at his heels. Oliver Haddo entered. Susie watched to see what the dog would do and was by this time not surprised to see a change come over it. With its tail between its legs, the friendly little beast slunk along the wall to the furthermost corner. It turned a suspicious, frightened eye upon Haddo and then hid its head. The visitor, intent upon his greetings, had not noticed even that there was an animal in the room. He accepted with a simple courtesy they hardly expected from him the young woman’s thanks for his flowers. His behaviour surprised them. He put aside his poses. He seemed genuinely to admire the cosy little studio. He asked Margaret to show him her sketches and looked at them with unassumed interest. His observations were pointed and showed a certain knowledge of what he spoke about. He described himself as an amateur, that object of a painter’s derision: the man ‘who knows what he likes’; but his criticism, though generous, showed that he was no fool. The two women were impressed. Putting the sketches aside, he began to talk, of the many places he had seen. It was evident that he sought to please. Susie began to understand how it was that, notwithstanding his affectations, he had acquired so great an influence over the undergraduates of Oxford. There was romance and laughter in his conversation; and though, as Frank Hurrell had said, lacking in wit, he made up for it with a diverting pleasantry that might very well have passed for humour. But Susie, though amused, felt that this was not the purpose for which she had asked him to come. Dr Porhoët had lent her his entertaining work on the old alchemists, and this gave her a chance to bring their conversation to matters on which Haddo was expert. She had read the book with delight and, her mind all aflame with those strange histories wherein fact and fancy were so wonderfully mingled, she was eager to know more. The long toil in which so many had engaged, always to lose their fortunes, often to suffer persecution and torture, interested her no less than the accounts, almost authenticated, of those who had succeeded in their extraordinary quest.

She turned to Dr Porhoët.

‘You are a bold man to assert that now and then the old alchemists actually did make gold,’ she said.

‘I have not gone quite so far as that,’ he smiled. ‘I assert merely that, if evidence as conclusive were offered of any other historical event, it would be credited beyond doubt. We can disbelieve these circumstantial details only by coming to the conclusion beforehand that it is impossible they should be true.’

‘I wish you would write that life of Paracelsus which you suggest in your preface.’

Dr Porhoët, smiling shook his head.

‘I don’t think I shall ever do that now,’ he said. ‘Yet he is the most interesting of all the alchemists, for he offers the fascinating problem of an immensely complex character. It is impossible to know to what extent he was a charlatan and to what a man of serious science.’

Susie glanced at Oliver Haddo, who sat in silence, his heavy face in shadow, his eyes fixed steadily on the speaker. The immobility of that vast bulk was peculiar.

‘His name is not so ridiculous as later associations have made it seem,’ proceeded the doctor, ‘for he belonged to the celebrated family of Bombast, and they were called Hohenheim after their ancient residence, which was a castle near Stuttgart in Würtemberg. The most interesting part of his life is that which the absence of documents makes it impossible accurately to describe. He travelled in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, in Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. He went even to India. He was taken prisoner by the Tartars, and brought to the Great Khan, whose son he afterwards accompanied to Constantinople. The mind must be dull indeed that is not thrilled by the thought of this wandering genius traversing the lands of the earth at the most eventful date of the world’s history. It was at Constantinople that, according to a certain aureum vellus printed at Rorschach in the sixteenth century, he received the philosopher’s stone from Solomon Trismosinus. This person possessed also the Universal Panacea, and it is asserted that he was seen still alive by a French traveller at the end of the seventeenth century. Paracelsus then passed through the countries that border the Danube, and so reached Italy, where he served as a surgeon in the imperial army. I see no reason why he should not have been present at the battle of Pavia. He collected information from physicians, surgeons and alchemists; from executioners, barbers, shepherds, Jews, gipsies, midwives, and fortune-tellers; from high and low, from learned and vulgar. In the sketch I have given of his career in that volume you hold, I have copied out a few words of his upon the acquirement of knowledge which affect me with a singular emotion.’

Dr Porhoët took his book from Miss Boyd and opened it thoughtfully. He read out the fine passage from the preface of the Paragranum:

‘I went in search of my art, often incurring danger of life. I have not been ashamed to learn that which seemed useful to me even from vagabonds, hangmen, and barbers. We know that a lover will go far to meet the woman he adores; how much more will the lover of Wisdom be tempted to go in search of his divine mistress.’

He turned the page to find a few more lines further on:

‘We should look for knowledge where we may expect to find it, and why should a man be despised who goes in search of it? Those who remain at home may grow richer and live more comfortably than those who wander; but I desire neither to live comfortably nor to grow rich.’

‘By Jove, those are fine words,’ said Arthur, rising to his feet.

Their brave simplicity moved him as no rhetoric could have done, and they made him more eager still to devote his own life to the difficult acquisition of knowledge. Dr Porhoët gave him his ironic smile.

‘Yet the man who could write that was in many ways a mere buffoon, who praised his wares with the vulgar glibness of a quack. He was vain and ostentatious, intemperate and boastful. Listen:

‘After me, O Avicenna, Galen, Rhases and Montagnana! After me, not I after you, ye men of Paris, Montpellier, Meissen, and Cologne; all you that come from the countries along the Danube and the Rhine, and you that come from the islands of the sea. It is not for me to follow you, because mine is the lordship. The time will come when none of you shall remain in his dark corner who will not be an object of contempt to the world, because I shall be the King, and the Monarchy will be mine.’

Dr Porhoët closed the book.

‘Did you ever hear such gibberish in your life? Yet he did a bold thing. He wrote in German instead of in Latin, and so, by weakening the old belief in authority, brought about the beginning of free thought in science. He continued to travel from place to place, followed by a crowd of disciples, some times attracted to a wealthy city by hope of gain, sometimes journeying to a petty court at the invitation of a prince. His folly and the malice of his rivals prevented him from remaining anywhere for long. He wrought many wonderful cures. The physicians of Nuremberg denounced him as a quack, a charlatan, and an impostor. To refute them he asked the city council to put under his care patients that had been pronounced incurable. They sent him several cases of elephantiasis, and he cured them: testimonials to that effect may still be found in the archives of Nuremberg. He died as the result of a tavern brawl and was buried at Salzburg. Tradition says that, his astral body having already during physical existence become self-conscious, he is now a living adept, residing with others of his sort in a certain place in Asia. From there he still influences the minds of his followers and at times even appears to them in visible and tangible substance.’

‘But look here,’ said Arthur, ‘didn’t Paracelsus, like most of these old fellows, in the course of his researches make any practical discoveries?’

‘I prefer those which were not practical,’ confessed the doctor, with a smile. ‘Consider for example the Tinctura Physicorum, which neither Pope nor Emperor could buy with all his wealth. It was one of the greatest alchemical mysteries, and, though mentioned under the name of The Red Lion in many occult works, was actually known to few before Paracelsus, except Hermes Trismegistus and Albertus Magnus. Its preparation was extremely difficult, for the presence was needed of two perfectly harmonious persons whose skill was equal. It was said to be a red ethereal fluid. The least wonderful of its many properties was its power to transmute all inferior metals into gold. There is an old church in the south of Bavaria where the tincture is said to be still buried in the ground. In the year 1698 some of it penetrated through the soil, and the phenomenon was witnessed by many people, who believed it to be a miracle. The church which was thereupon erected is still a well-known place for pilgrimage. Paracelsus concludes his directions for its manufacture with the words: But if this be incomprehensible to you, remember that only he who desires with his whole heart will find, and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.’

‘I shall never try to make it,’ smiled Arthur.

‘Then there was the Electrum Magicum, of which the wise made mirrors wherein they were able to see not only the events of the past and of the present, but the doings of men in daytime and at night. They might see anything that had been written or spoken, and the person who said it, and the causes that made him say it. But I like best the Primum Ens Melissae. An elaborate prescription is given for its manufacture. It was a remedy to prolong life, and not only Paracelsus, but his predecessors Galen, Arnold of Villanova, and Raymond Lulli, had laboured studiously to discover it.’

‘Will it make me eighteen again?’ cried Susie.

‘It is guaranteed to do so,’ answered Dr Porhoët gravely. ‘Lesebren, a physician to Louis XIV, gives an account of certain experiments witnessed by himself. It appears that one of his friends prepared the remedy, and his curiosity would not let him rest until he had seen with his own eyes the effect of it.’

‘That is the true scientific attitude,’ laughed Arthur.

‘He took every morning at sunrise a glass of white wine tinctured with this preparation; and after using it for fourteen days his nails began to fall out, without, however, causing him any pain. His courage failed him at this point, and he gave the same dose to an old female servant. She regained at least one of the characteristics of youth, much to her astonishment, for she did not know that she had been taking a medicine, and, becoming frightened, refused to continue. The experimenter then took some grain, soaked it in the tincture, and gave it to an aged hen. On the sixth day the bird began to lose its feathers, and kept on losing them till it was naked as a newborn babe; but before two weeks had passed other feathers grew, and these were more beautifully coloured than any that fortunate hen had possessed in her youth. Her comb stood up, and she began again to lay eggs.’

Arthur laughed heartily.

‘I confess I like that story much better than the others. The Primum Ens Melissae at least offers a less puerile benefit than most magical secrets.’

‘Do you call the search for gold puerile?’ asked Haddo, who had been sitting for a long time in complete silence.

‘I venture to call it sordid.’

‘You are very superior.’

‘Because I think the aims of mystical persons invariably gross or trivial? To my plain mind, it is inane to raise the dead in order to hear from their phantom lips nothing but commonplaces. And I really cannot see that the alchemist who spent his life in the attempted manufacture of gold was a more respectable object than the outside jobber of modern civilization.’

‘But if he sought for gold it was for the power it gave him, and it was power he aimed at when he brooded night and day over dim secrets. Power was the subject of all his dreams, but not a paltry, limited dominion over this or that; power over the whole world, power over all created things, power over the very elements, power over God Himself. His lust was so vast that he could not rest till the stars in their courses were obedient to his will.’

For once Haddo lost his enigmatic manner. It was plain now that his words intoxicated him, and his face assumed a new, a strange, expression. A peculiar arrogance flashed in his shining eyes.

‘And what else is it that men seek in life but power? If they want money, it is but for the power that attends it, and it is power again that they strive for in all the knowledge they acquire. Fools and sots aim at happiness, but men aim only at power. The magus, the sorcerer, the alchemist, are seized with fascination of the unknown; and they desire a greatness that is inaccessible to mankind. They think by the science they study so patiently, but endurance and strength, by force of will and by imagination, for these are the great weapons of the magician, they may achieve at last a power with which they can face the God of Heaven Himself.’

Oliver Haddo lifted his huge bulk from the low chair in which he had been sitting. He began to walk up and down the studio. It was curious to see this heavy man, whose seriousness was always problematical, caught up by a curious excitement.

‘You’ve been talking of Paracelsus,’ he said. ‘There is one of his experiments which the doctor has withheld from you. You will find it neither mean nor mercenary, but it is very terrible. I do not know whether the account of it is true, but it would be of extraordinary interest to test it for oneself.’

He looked round at the four persons who watched him intently. There was a singular agitation in his manner, as though the thing of which he spoke was very near his heart.

‘The old alchemists believed in the possibility of spontaneous generation. By the combination of psychical powers and of strange essences, they claim to have created forms in which life became manifest. Of these, the most marvellous were those strange beings, male and female, which were called homunculi. The old philosophers doubted the possibility of this operation, but Paracelsus asserts positively that it can be done. I picked up once for a song on a barrow at London Bridge a little book in German. It was dirty and thumbed, many of the pages were torn, and the binding scarcely held the leaves together. It was called Die Sphinx and was edited by a certain Dr Emil Besetzny. It contained the most extraordinary account I have ever read of certain spirits generated by Johann-Ferdinand, Count von Küffstein, in the Tyrol, in 1775. The sources from which this account is taken consist of masonic manuscripts, but more especially of a diary kept by a certain James Kammerer, who acted in the capacity of butler and famulus to the Count. The evidence is ten times stronger than any upon which men believe the articles of their religion. If it related to less wonderful subjects, you would not hesitate to believe implicitly every word you read. There were ten homunculi — James Kammerer calls them prophesying spirits — kept in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and these were filled with water. They were made in five weeks, by the Count von Küffstein and an Italian mystic and rosicrucian, the Abbé Geloni. The bottles were closed with a magic seal. The spirits were about a span long, and the Count was anxious that they should grow. They were therefore buried under two cartloads of manure, and the pile daily sprinkled with a certain liquor prepared with great trouble by the adepts. The pile after such sprinklings began to ferment and steam, as if heated by a subterranean fire. When the bottles were removed, it was found that the spirits had grown to about a span and a half each; the male homunculi were come into possession of heavy beards, and the nails of the fingers had grown. In two of the bottles there was nothing to be seen save clear water, but when the Abbé knocked thrice at the seal upon the mouth, uttering at the same time certain Hebrew words, the water turned a mysterious colour, and the spirits showed their faces, very small at first, but growing in size till they attained that of a human countenance. And this countenance was horrible and fiendish.’

Haddo spoke in a low voice that was hardly steady, and it was plain that he was much moved. It appeared as if his story affected him so that he could scarcely preserve his composure. He went on.

‘These beings were fed every three days by the Count with a rose-coloured substance which was kept in a silver box. Once a week the bottles were emptied and filled again with pure rain-water. The change had to be made rapidly, because while the homunculi were exposed to the air they closed their eyes and seemed to grow weak and unconscious, as though they were about to die. But with the spirits that were invisible, at certain intervals blood was poured into the water; and it disappeared at once, inexplicably, without colouring or troubling it. By some accident one of the bottles fell one day and was broken. The homunculus within died after a few painful respirations in spite of all efforts to save him, and the body was buried in the garden. An attempt to generate another, made by the Count without the assistance of the Abbé, who had left, failed; it produced only a small thing like a leech, which had little vitality and soon died.’

Haddo ceased speaking, and Arthur looked at him with amazement. ‘But taking for granted that the thing is possible, what on earth is the use of manufacturing these strange beasts?’ he exclaimed.

‘Use!’ cried Haddo passionately. ‘What do you think would be man’s sensations when he had solved the great mystery of existence, when he saw living before him the substance which was dead? These homunculi were seen by historical persons, by Count Max Lemberg, by Count Franz-Josef von Thun, and by many others. I have no doubt that they were actually generated. But with our modern appliances, with our greater skill, what might it not be possible to do now if we had the courage? There are chemists toiling away in their laboratories to create the primitive protoplasm from matter which is dead, the organic from the inorganic. I have studied their experiments. I know all that they know. Why shouldn’t one work on a larger scale, joining to the knowledge of the old adepts the scientific discovery of the moderns? I don’t know what would be the result. It might be very strange and very wonderful. Sometimes my mind is verily haunted by the desire to see a lifeless substance move under my spells, by the desire to be as God.’

He gave a low weird laugh, half cruel, half voluptuous. It made Margaret shudder with sudden fright. He had thrown himself down in the chair, and he sat in complete shadow. By a singular effect his eyes appeared blood-red, and they stared into space, strangely parallel, with an intensity that was terrifying. Arthur started a little and gave him a searching glance. The laugh and that uncanny glance, the unaccountable emotion, were extraordinarily significant. The whole thing was explained if Oliver Haddo was mad.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Haddo’s words were out of tune with the rest of the conversation. Dr Porhoët had spoken of magical things with a sceptical irony that gave a certain humour to the subject, and Susie was resolutely flippant. But Haddo’s vehemence put these incredulous people out of countenance. Dr Porhoët got up to go. He shook hands with Susie and with Margaret. Arthur opened the door for him. The kindly scholar looked round for Margaret’s terrier…

‘I must bid my farewells to your little dog.’

He had been so quiet that they had forgotten his presence.

‘Come here, Copper,’ said Margaret.

The dog slowly slunk up to them, and with a terrified expression crouched at Margaret’s feet.

‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ she asked.

‘He’s frightened of me,’ said Haddo, with that harsh laugh of his, which gave such an unpleasant impression.

‘Nonsense!’

Dr Porhoët bent down, stroked the dog’s back, and shook its paw. Margaret lifted it up and set it on a table.

‘Now, be good,’ she said, with lifted finger.

Dr Porhoët with a smile went out, and Arthur shut the door behind him. Suddenly, as though evil had entered into it, the terrier sprang at Oliver Haddo and fixed its teeth in his hand. Haddo uttered a cry, and, shaking it off, gave it a savage kick. The dog rolled over with a loud bark that was almost a scream of pain, and lay still for a moment as if it were desperately hurt. Margaret cried out with horror and indignation. A fierce rage on a sudden seized Arthur so that he scarcely knew what he was about. The wretched brute’s suffering, Margaret’s terror, his own instinctive hatred of the man, were joined together in frenzied passion.

‘You brute,’ he muttered.

He hit Haddo in the face with his clenched fist. The man collapsed bulkily to the floor, and Arthur, furiously seizing his collar, began to kick him with all his might. He shook him as a dog would shake a rat and then violently flung him down. For some reason Haddo made no resistance. He remained where he fell in utter helplessness. Arthur turned to Margaret. She was holding the poor hurt dog in her hands, crying over it, and trying to comfort it in its pain. Very gently he examined it to see if Haddo’s brutal kick had broken a bone. They sat down beside the fire. Susie, to steady her nerves, lit a cigarette. She was horribly, acutely conscious of that man who lay in a mass on the floor behind them. She wondered what he would do. She wondered why he did not go. And she was ashamed of his humiliation. Then her heart stood still; for she realized that he was raising himself to his feet, slowly, with the difficulty of a very fat person. He leaned against the wall and stared at them. He remained there quite motionless. His stillness got on her nerves, and she could have screamed as she felt him look at them, look with those unnatural eyes, whose expression now she dared not even imagine.

At last she could no longer resist the temptation to turn round just enough to see him. Haddo’s eyes were fixed upon Margaret so intently that he did not see he was himself observed. His face, distorted by passion, was horrible to look upon. That vast mass of flesh had a malignancy that was inhuman, and it was terrible to see the satanic hatred which hideously deformed it. But it changed. The redness gave way to a ghastly pallor. The revengeful scowl disappeared; and a torpid smile spread over the features, a smile that was even more terrifying than the frown of malice. What did it mean? Susie could have cried out, but her tongue cleaved to her throat. The smile passed away, and the face became once more impassive. It seemed that Margaret and Arthur realized at last the power of those inhuman eyes, and they became quite still. The dog ceased its sobbing. The silence was so great that each one heard the beating of his heart. It was intolerable.

Then Oliver Haddo moved. He came forward slowly.

‘I want to ask you to forgive me for what I did,’ he said.

‘The pain of the dog’s bite was so keen that I lost my temper. I deeply regret that I kicked it. Mr Burdon was very right to thrash me. I feel that I deserved no less.’

He spoke in a low voice, but with great distinctness. Susie was astounded. An abject apology was the last thing she expected.

He paused for Margaret’s answer. But she could not bear to look at him. When she spoke, her words were scarcely audible. She did not know why his request to be forgiven made him seem more detestable.

‘I think, if you don’t mind, you had better go away.’

Haddo bowed slightly. He looked at Burdon.

‘I wish to tell you that I bear no malice for what you did. I recognize the justice of your anger.’

Arthur did not answer at all. Haddo hesitated a moment, while his eyes rested on them quietly. To Susie it seemed that they flickered with the shadow of a smile. She watched him with bewildered astonishment.

He reached for his hat, bowed again, and went.

8

Susie could not persuade herself that Haddo’s regret was sincere. The humility of it aroused her suspicion. She could not get out of her mind the ugly slyness of that smile which succeeded on his face the first passionate look of deadly hatred. Her fancy suggested various dark means whereby Oliver Haddo might take vengeance on his enemy, and she was at pains to warn Arthur. But he only laughed.

‘The man’s a funk,’ he said. ‘Do you think if he’d had anything in him at all he would have let me kick him without trying to defend himself?’

Haddo’s cowardice increased the disgust with which Arthur regarded him.

He was amused by Susie’s trepidation.

‘What on earth do you suppose he can do? He can’t drop a brickbat on my head. If he shoots me he’ll get his head cut off, and he won’t be such an ass as to risk that!’

Margaret was glad that the incident had relieved them of Oliver’s society. She met him in the street a couple of days later, and since he took off his hat in the French fashion without waiting for her to acknowledge him, she was able to make her cut more pointed.

She began to discuss with Arthur the date of their marriage. It seemed to her that she had got out of Paris all it could give her, and she wished to begin a new life. Her love for Arthur appeared on a sudden more urgent, and she was filled with delight at the thought of the happiness she would give him.

A day or two later Susie received a telegram. It ran as follows:

Please meet me at the Gare du Nord, 2:40.

Nancy Clerk

It was an old friend, who was apparently arriving in Paris that afternoon. A photograph of her, with a bold signature, stood on the chimney-piece, and Susie gave it an inquisitive glance. She had not seen Nancy for so long that it surprised her to receive this urgent message.

‘What a bore it is!’ she said. ‘I suppose I must go.’

They meant to have tea on the other side of the river, but the journey to the station was so long that it would not be worth Susie’s while to come back in the interval; and they arranged therefore to meet at the house to which they were invited. Susie started a little before two.

Margaret had a class that afternoon and set out two or three minutes later. As she walked through the courtyard she started nervously, for Oliver Haddo passed slowly by. He did not seem to see her. Suddenly he stopped, put his hand to his heart, and fell heavily to the ground. The concierge, the only person at hand, ran forward with a cry. She knelt down and, looking round with terror, caught sight of Margaret.

‘Oh, mademoiselle, venez vite!’ she cried.

Margaret was obliged to go. Her heart beat horribly. She looked down at

Oliver, and he seemed to be dead. She forgot that she loathed him.

Instinctively she knelt down by his side and loosened his collar. He

opened his eyes. An expression of terrible anguish came into his face.

‘For the love of God, take me in for one moment,’ he sobbed. ‘I shall die in the street.’

Her heart was moved towards him. He could not go into the poky den, evil-smelling and airless, of the concierge. But with her help Margaret raised him to his feet, and together they brought him to the studio. He sank painfully into a chair.

‘Shall I fetch you some water?’ asked Margaret.

‘Can you get a pastille out of my pocket?’

He swallowed a white tabloid, which she took out of a case attached to his watch-chain.

‘I’m very sorry to cause you this trouble,’ he gasped. ‘I suffer from a disease of the heart, and sometimes I am very near death.’

‘I’m glad that I was able to help you,’ she said.

He seemed able to breathe more easily. She left him to himself for a while, so that he might regain his strength. She took up a book and began to read. Presently, without moving from his chair, he spoke.

‘You must hate me for intruding on you.’

His voice was stronger, and her pity waned as he seemed to recover. She answered with freezing indifference.

‘I couldn’t do any less for you than I did. I would have brought a dog into my room if it seemed hurt.’

‘I see that you wish me to go.’

He got up and moved towards the door, but he staggered and with a groan tumbled to his knees. Margaret sprang forward to help him. She reproached herself bitterly for those scornful words. The man had barely escaped death, and she was merciless.

‘Oh, please stay as long as you like,’ she cried. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

He dragged himself with difficulty back to the chair, and she, conscience-stricken, stood over him helplessly. She poured out a glass of water, but he motioned it away as though he would not be beholden to her even for that.

‘Is there nothing I can do for you at all?’ she exclaimed, painfully.

‘Nothing, except allow me to sit in this chair,’ he gasped.

‘I hope you’ll remain as long as you choose.’

He did not reply. She sat down again and pretended to read. In a little while he began to speak. His voice reached her as if from a long way off.

‘Will you never forgive me for what I did the other day?’

She answered without looking at him, her back still turned.

‘Can it matter to you if I forgive or not?’

‘You have not pity. I told you then how sorry I was that a sudden uncontrollable pain drove me to do a thing which immediately I bitterly regretted. Don’t you think it must have been hard for me, under the actual circumstances, to confess my fault?’

‘I wish you not to speak of it. I don’t want to think of that horrible scene.’

‘If you knew how lonely I was and how unhappy, you would have a little mercy.’

His voice was strangely moved. She could not doubt now that he was sincere.

‘You think me a charlatan because I aim at things that are unknown to you. You won’t try to understand. You won’t give me any credit for striving with all my soul to a very great end.’

She made no reply, and for a time there was silence. His voice was different now and curiously seductive.

‘You look upon me with disgust and scorn. You almost persuaded yourself to let me die in the street rather than stretch out to me a helping hand. And if you hadn’t been merciful then, almost against your will, I should have died.’

‘It can make no difference to you how I regard you,’ she whispered.

She did not know why his soft, low tones mysteriously wrung her heartstrings. Her pulse began to beat more quickly.

‘It makes all the difference in the world. It is horrible to think of your contempt. I feel your goodness and your purity. I can hardly bear my own unworthiness. You turn your eyes away from me as though I were unclean.’

She turned her chair a little and looked at him. She was astonished at the change in his appearance. His hideous obesity seemed no longer repellent, for his eyes wore a new expression; they were incredibly tender now, and they were moist with tears. His mouth was tortured by a passionate distress. Margaret had never seen so much unhappiness on a man’s face, and an overwhelming remorse seized her.

‘I don’t want to be unkind to you,’ she said.

‘I will go. That is how I can best repay you for what you have done.’

The words were so bitter, so humiliated, that the colour rose to her cheeks.

‘I ask you to stay. But let us talk of other things.’

For a moment he kept silence. He seemed no longer to see Margaret, and she watched him thoughtfully. His eyes rested on a print of La Gioconda which hung on the wall. Suddenly he began to speak. He recited the honeyed words with which Walter Pater expressed his admiration for that consummate picture.

‘Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.’

His voice, poignant and musical, blended with the suave music of the words so that Margaret felt she had never before known their divine significance. She was intoxicated with their beauty. She wished him to continue, but had not the strength to speak. As if he guessed her thought, he went on, and now his voice had a richness in it as of an organ heard afar off. It was like an overwhelming fragrance and she could hardly bear it.

‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange evils with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.’

Oliver Haddo began then to speak of Leonardo da Vinci, mingling with his own fantasies the perfect words of that essay which, so wonderful was his memory, he seemed to know by heart. He found exotic fancies in the likeness between Saint John the Baptist, with his soft flesh and waving hair, and Bacchus, with his ambiguous smile. Seen through his eyes, the seashore in the Saint Anne had the airless lethargy of some damasked chapel in a Spanish nunnery, and over the landscapes brooded a wan spirit of evil that was very troubling. He loved the mysterious pictures in which the painter had sought to express something beyond the limits of painting, something of unsatisfied desire and of longing for unhuman passions. Oliver Haddo found this quality in unlikely places, and his words gave a new meaning to paintings that Margaret had passed thoughtlessly by. There was the portrait of a statuary by Bronzino in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. The features were rather large, the face rather broad. The expression was sombre, almost surly in the repose of the painted canvas, and the eyes were brown, almond-shaped like those of an Oriental; the red lips were exquisitely modelled, and the sensuality was curiously disturbing; the dark, chestnut hair, cut short, curled over the head with an infinite grace. The skin was like ivory softened with a delicate carmine. There was in that beautiful countenance more than beauty, for what most fascinated the observer was a supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion of others. It was a vicious face, except that beauty could never be quite vicious; it was a cruel face, except that indolence could never be quite cruel. It was a face that haunted you, and yet your admiration was alloyed with an unreasoning terror. The hands were nervous and adroit, with long fashioning fingers; and you felt that at their touch the clay almost moulded itself into gracious forms. With Haddo’s subtle words the character of that man rose before her, cruel yet indifferent, indolent and passionate, cold yet sensual; unnatural secrets dwelt in his mind, and mysterious crimes, and a lust for the knowledge that was arcane. Oliver Haddo was attracted by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality. He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera’s ghoulish dwarfs, with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their malice: he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their malformations, the humped backs, the club feet, the hydrocephalic heads. He described the picture by Valdes Leal, in a certain place at Seville, which represents a priest at the altar; and the altar is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight was more than he could bear; and in the meagre trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying. He seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him and the high heavens were empty of their solace. All the beauty of life appears forgotten, and there is nothing in the world but decay. A ghastly putrefaction has attacked already the living man; the worms of the grave, the piteous horror of mortality, and the darkness before him offer naught but fear. Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of life whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart.

Then, as if in pursuance of a definite plan, he analysed with a searching, vehement intensity the curious talent of the modern Frenchman, Gustave Moreau. Margaret had lately visited the Luxembourg, and his pictures were fresh in her memory. She had found in them little save a decorative arrangement marred by faulty drawing; but Oliver Haddo gave them at once a new, esoteric import. Those effects as of a Florentine jewel, the clustered colours, emerald and ruby, the deep blue of sapphires, the atmosphere of scented chambers, the mystic persons who seem ever about secret, religious rites, combined in his cunning phrases to create, as it were, a pattern on her soul of morbid and mysterious intricacy. Those pictures were filled with a strange sense of sin, and the mind that contemplated them was burdened with the decadence of Rome and with the passionate vice of the Renaissance; and it was tortured, too, by all the introspection of this later day.

Margaret listened, rather breathlessly, with the excitement of an explorer before whom is spread the plain of an undiscovered continent. The painters she knew spoke of their art technically, and this imaginative appreciation was new to her. She was horribly fascinated by the personality that imbued these elaborate sentences. Haddo’s eyes were fixed upon hers, and she responded to his words like a delicate instrument made for recording the beatings of the heart. She felt an extraordinary languor. At last he stopped. Margaret neither moved nor spoke. She might have been under a spell. It seemed to her that she had no power in her limbs.

‘I want to do something for you in return for what you have done for me,’ he said.

He stood up and went to the piano.

‘Sit in this chair,’ he said.

She did not dream of disobeying. He began to play. Margaret was hardly surprised that he played marvellously. Yet it was almost incredible that those fat, large hands should have such a tenderness of touch. His fingers caressed the notes with a peculiar suavity, and he drew out of the piano effects which she had scarcely thought possible. He seemed to put into the notes a troubling, ambiguous passion, and the instrument had the tremulous emotion of a human being. It was strange and terrifying. She was vaguely familiar with the music to which she listened; but there was in it, under his fingers, an exotic savour that made it harmonious with all that he had said that afternoon. His memory was indeed astonishing. He had an infinite tact to know the feeling that occupied Margaret’s heart, and what he chose seemed to be exactly that which at the moment she imperatively needed. Then he began to play things she did not know. It was music the like of which she had never heard, barbaric, with a plaintive weirdness that brought to her fancy the moonlit nights of desert places, with palm trees mute in the windless air, and tawny distances. She seemed to know tortuous narrow streets, white houses of silence with strange moon-shadows, and the glow of yellow light within, and the tinkling of uncouth instruments, and the acrid scents of Eastern perfumes. It was like a procession passing through her mind of persons who were not human, yet existed mysteriously, with a life of vampires. Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist, Bacchus and the mother of Mary, went with enigmatic motions. But the daughter of Herodias raised her hands as though, engaged for ever in a mystic rite, to invoke outlandish gods. Her face was very pale, and her dark eyes were sleepless; the jewels of her girdle gleamed with sombre fires; and her dress was of colours that have long been lost. The smile, in which was all the sorrow of the world and all its wickedness, beheld the wan head of the Saint, and with a voice that was cold with the coldness of death she murmured the words of the poet:

‘I am amorous of thy body, Iokanaan! Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judea, and come down into the valleys. The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body. Neither the roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia, the garden of spices of the Queen of Arabia, nor the feet of the dawn when they light on the leaves, nor the breast of the moon when she lies on the breast of the sea… There is nothing in the world so white as thy body. Suffer me to touch thy body.’

Oliver Haddo ceased to play. Neither of them stirred. At last Margaret sought by an effort to regain her self-control.

‘I shall begin to think that you really are a magician,’ she said, lightly.

‘I could show you strange things if you cared to see them,’ he answered, again raising his eyes to hers.

‘I don’t think you will ever get me to believe in occult philosophy,’ she laughed.

‘Yet it reigned in Persia with the magi, it endowed India with wonderful traditions, it civilised Greece to the sounds of Orpheus’s lyre.’

He stood before Margaret, towering over her in his huge bulk; and there was a singular fascination in his gaze. It seemed that he spoke only to conceal from her that he was putting forth now all the power that was in him.

‘It concealed the first principles of science in the calculations of Pythagoras. It established empires by its oracles, and at its voice tyrants grew pale upon their thrones. It governed the minds of some by curiosity, and others it ruled by fear.’

His voice grew very low, and it was so seductive that Margaret’s brain reeled. The sound of it was overpowering like too sweet a fragrance.

I tell you that for this art nothing is impossible. It commands the elements, and knows the language of the stars, and directs the planets in their courses. The moon at its bidding falls blood-red from the sky. The dead rise up and form into ominous words the night wind that moans through their skulls. Heaven and Hell are in its province; and all forms, lovely and hideous; and love and hate. With Circe’s wand it can change men into beasts of the field, and to them it can give a monstrous humanity. Life and death are in the right hand and in the left of him who knows its secrets. It confers wealth by the transmutation of metals and immortality by its quintessence.’

Margaret could not hear what he said. A gradual lethargy seized her under his baleful glance, and she had not even the strength to wish to free herself. She seemed bound to him already by hidden chains.

‘If you have powers, show them,’ she whispered, hardly conscious that she spoke.

Suddenly he released the enormous tension with which he held her. Like a man who has exerted all his strength to some end, the victory won, he loosened his muscles, with a faint sigh of exhaustion. Margaret did not speak, but she knew that something horrible was about to happen. Her heart beat like a prisoned bird, with helpless flutterings, but it seemed too late now to draw back. Her words by a mystic influence had settled something beyond possibility of recall.

On the stove was a small bowl of polished brass in which water was kept in order to give a certain moisture to the air. Oliver Haddo put his hand in his pocket and drew out a little silver box. He tapped it, with a smile, as a man taps a snuff-box, and it opened. He took an infinitesimal quantity of a blue powder that it contained and threw it on the water in the brass bowl. Immediately a bright flame sprang up, and Margaret gave a cry of alarm. Oliver looked at her quickly and motioned her to remain still. She saw that the water was on fire. It was burning as brilliantly, as hotly, as if it were common gas; and it burned with the same dry, hoarse roar. Suddenly it was extinguished. She leaned forward and saw that the bowl was empty.

The water had been consumed, as though it were straw, and not a drop remained. She passed her hand absently across her forehead.

‘But water cannot burn,’ she muttered to herself.

It seemed that Haddo knew what she thought, for he smiled strangely.

‘Do you know that nothing more destructive can be invented than this blue powder, and I have enough to burn up all the water in Paris? Who dreamt that water might burn like chaff?’

He paused, seeming to forget her presence. He looked thoughtfully at the little silver box.

‘But it can be made only in trivial quantities, at enormous expense and with exceeding labour; it is so volatile that you cannot keep it for three days. I have sometimes thought that with a little ingenuity I might make it more stable, I might so modify it that, like radium, it lost no strength as it burned; and then I should possess the greatest secret that has ever been in the mind of man. For there would be no end of it. It would continue to burn while there was a drop of water on the earth, and the whole world would be consumed. But it would be a frightful thing to have in one’s hands; for once it were cast upon the waters, the doom of all that existed would be sealed beyond repeal.’

He took a long breath, and his eyes glittered with a devilish ardour. His voice was hoarse with overwhelming emotion.

‘Sometimes I am haunted by the wild desire to have seen the great and final scene when the irrevocable flames poured down the river, hurrying along the streams of the earth, searching out the moisture in all growing things, tearing it even from the eternal rocks; when the flames poured down like the rushing of the wind, and all that lived fled from before them till they came to the sea; and the sea itself was consumed in vehement fire.’

Margaret shuddered, but she did not think the man was mad. She had ceased to judge him. He took one more particle of that atrocious powder and put it in the bowl. Again he thrust his hand in his pocket and brought out a handful of some crumbling substance that might have been dried leaves, leaves of different sorts, broken and powdery. There was a trace of moisture in them still, for a low flame sprang up immediately at the bottom of the dish, and a thick vapour filled the room. It had a singular and pungent odour that Margaret did not know. It was difficult to breathe, and she coughed. She wanted to beg Oliver to stop, but could not. He took the bowl in his hands and brought it to her.

‘Look,’ he commanded.

She bent forward, and at the bottom saw a blue fire, of a peculiar solidity, as though it consisted of molten metal. It was not still, but writhed strangely, like serpents of fire tortured by their own unearthly ardour.

‘Breathe very deeply.’

She did as he told her. A sudden trembling came over her, and darkness fell across her eyes. She tried to cry out, but could utter no sound. Her brain reeled. It seemed to her that Haddo bade her cover her face. She gasped for breath, and it was as if the earth spun under her feet. She appeared to travel at an immeasurable speed. She made a slight movement, and Haddo told her not to look round. An immense terror seized her. She did not know whither she was borne, and still they went quickly, quickly; and the hurricane itself would have lagged behind them. At last their motion ceased; and Oliver was holding her arm.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘Open your eyes and stand up.’

The night had fallen; but it was not the comfortable night that soothes the troubled minds of mortal men; it was a night that agitated the soul mysteriously so that each nerve in the body tingled. There was a lurid darkness which displayed and yet distorted the objects that surrounded them. No moon shone in the sky, but small stars appeared to dance on the heather, vague night-fires like spirits of the damned. They stood in a vast and troubled waste, with huge stony boulders and leafless trees, rugged and gnarled like tortured souls in pain. It was as if there had been a devastating storm, and the country reposed after the flood of rain and the tempestuous wind and the lightning. All things about them appeared dumbly to suffer, like a man racked by torments who has not the strength even to realize that his agony has ceased. Margaret heard the flight of monstrous birds, and they seemed to whisper strange things on their passage. Oliver took her hand. He led her steadily to a cross-road, and she did not know if they walked amid rocks or tombs.

She heard the sound of a trumpet, and from all parts, strangely appearing where before was nothing, a turbulent assembly surged about her. That vast empty space was suddenly filled by shadowy forms, and they swept along like the waves of the sea, crowding upon one another’s heels. And it seemed that all the mighty dead appeared before her; and she saw grim tyrants, and painted courtesans, and Roman emperors in their purple, and sultans of the East. All those fierce evil women of olden time passed by her side, and now it was Mona Lisa and now the subtle daughter of Herodias. And Jezebel looked out upon her from beneath her painted brows, and Cleopatra turned away a wan, lewd face; and she saw the insatiable mouth and the wanton eyes of Messalina, and Fustine was haggard with the eternal fires of lust. She saw cardinals in their scarlet, and warriors in their steel, gay gentlemen in periwigs, and ladies in powder and patch. And on a sudden, like leaves by the wind, all these were driven before the silent throngs of the oppressed; and they were innumerable as the sands of the sea. Their thin faces were earthy with want and cavernous from disease, and their eyes were dull with despair. They passed in their tattered motley, some in the fantastic rags of the beggars of Albrecht Dürer and some in the grey cerecloths of Le Nain; many wore the blouses and the caps of the rabble in France, and many the dingy, smoke-grimed weeds of English poor. And they surged onward like a riotous crowd in narrow streets flying in terror before the mounted troops. It seemed as though all the world were gathered there in strange confusion.

Then all again was void; and Margaret’s gaze was riveted upon a great, ruined tree that stood in that waste place, alone, in ghastly desolation; and though a dead thing, it seemed to suffer a more than human pain. The lightning had torn it asunder, but the wind of centuries had sought in vain to drag up its roots. The tortured branches, bare of any twig, were like a Titan’s arms, convulsed with intolerable anguish. And in a moment she grew sick with fear, for a change came into the tree, and the tremulousness of life was in it; the rough bark was changed into brutish flesh and the twisted branches into human arms. It became a monstrous, goat-legged thing, more vast than the creatures of nightmare. She saw the horns and the long beard, the great hairy legs with their hoofs, and the man’s rapacious hands. The face was horrible with lust and cruelty, and yet it was divine. It was Pan, playing on his pipes, and the lecherous eyes caressed her with a hideous tenderness. But even while she looked, as the mist of early day, rising, discloses a fair country, the animal part of that ghoulish creature seemed to fall away, and she saw a lovely youth, titanic but sublime, leaning against a massive rock. He was more beautiful than the Adam of Michelangelo who wakes into life at the call of the Almighty; and, like him freshly created, he had the adorable languor of one who feels still in his limbs the soft rain on the loose brown earth. Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning; and she dared not look upon his face, for she knew it was impossible to bear the undying pain that darkened it with ruthless shadows. Impelled by a great curiosity, she sought to come nearer, but the vast figure seemed strangely to dissolve into a cloud; and immediately she felt herself again surrounded by a hurrying throng. Then came all legendary monsters and foul beasts of a madman’s fancy; in the darkness she saw enormous toads, with paws pressed to their flanks, and huge limping scarabs, shelled creatures the like of which she had never seen, and noisome brutes with horny scales and round crabs’ eyes, uncouth primeval things, and winged serpents, and creeping animals begotten of the slime. She heard shrill cries and peals of laughter and the terrifying rattle of men at the point of death. Haggard women, dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood. And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins, and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place, and suddenly she knew all that was obscene. She took part in some festival of hideous lust, and the wickedness of the world was patent to her eyes. She saw things so vile that she screamed in terror, and she heard Oliver laugh in derision by her side. It was a scene of indescribable horror, and she put her hands to her eyes so that she might not see.

She felt Oliver Haddo take her hands. She would not let him drag them away. Then she heard him speak.

‘You need not be afraid.’

His voice was quite natural once more, and she realized with a start that she was sitting quietly in the studio. She looked around her with frightened eyes. Everything was exactly as it had been. The early night of autumn was fallen, and the only light in the room came from the fire. There was still that vague, acrid scent of the substance which Haddo had burned.

‘Shall I light the candles?’ he said.

He struck a match and lit those which were on the piano. They threw a strange light. Then Margaret suddenly remembered all that she had seen, and she remembered that Haddo had stood by her side. Shame seized her, intolerable shame, so that the colour, rising to her cheeks, seemed actually to burn them. She hid her face in her hands and burst into tears.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, go.’

He looked at her for a moment; and the smile came to his lips which Susie had seen after his tussle with Arthur, when last he was in the studio.

‘When you want me you will find me in the Rue de Vaugiraud, number 209,’ he said. ‘Knock at the second door on the left, on the third floor.’

She did not answer. She could only think of her appalling shame.

‘I’ll write it down for you in case you forget.’

He scribbled the address on a sheet of paper that he found on the table. Margaret took no notice, but sobbed as though her heart would break. Suddenly, looking up with a start, she saw that he was gone. She had not heard him open the door or close it. She sank down on her knees and prayed desperately, as though some terrible danger threatened her.

But when she heard Susie’s key in the door, Margaret sprang to her feet. She stood with her back to the fireplace, her hands behind her, in the attitude of a prisoner protesting his innocence. Susie was too much annoyed to observe this agitation.

‘Why on earth didn’t you come to tea?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t make out what had become of you.’

‘I had a dreadful headache,’ answered Margaret, trying to control herself.

Susie flung herself down wearily in a chair. Margaret forced herself to speak.

‘Had Nancy anything particular to say to you?’ she asked.

‘She never turned up,’ answered Susie irritably. ‘I can’t understand it. I waited till the train came in, but there was no sign of her. Then I thought she might have hit upon that time by chance and was not coming from England, so I walked about the station for half an hour.’

She went to the chimneypiece, on which had been left the telegram that summoned her to the Gare du Nord, and read it again. She gave a little cry of surprise.

‘How stupid of me! I never noticed the postmark. It was sent from the Rue

Littré.’

This was less than ten minutes’ walk from the studio. Susie looked at the message with perplexity.

‘I wonder if someone has been playing a silly practical joke on me.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘But it’s too foolish. If I were a suspicious woman,’ she smiled, ‘I should think you had sent it yourself to get me out of the way.’

The idea flashed through Margaret that Oliver Haddo was the author of it. He might easily have seen Nancy’s name on the photograph during his first visit to the studio. She had no time to think before she answered lightly.

‘If I wanted to get rid of you, I should have no hesitation in saying so.’

‘I suppose no one has been here?’ asked Susie.

‘No one.’

The lie slipped from Margaret’s lips before she had made up her mind to tell it. Her heart gave a great beat against her chest. She felt herself redden.

Susie got up to light a cigarette. She wished to rest her nerves. The box was on the table and, as she helped herself, her eyes fell carelessly on the address that Haddo had left. She picked it up and read it aloud.

‘Who on earth lives there?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know at all,’ answered Margaret.

She braced herself for further questions, but Susie, without interest, put down the sheet of paper and struck a match.

Margaret was ashamed. Her nature was singularly truthful, and it troubled her extraordinarily that she had lied to her greatest friend. Something stronger than herself seemed to impel her. She would have given much to confess her two falsehoods, but had not the courage. She could not bear that Susie’s implicit trust in her straightforwardness should be destroyed; and the admission that Oliver Haddo had been there would entail a further acknowledgment of the nameless horrors she had witnessed. Susie would think her mad.

There was a knock at the door; and Margaret, her nerves shattered by all that she had endured, could hardly restrain a cry of terror. She feared that Haddo had returned. But it was Arthur Burdon. She greeted him with a passionate relief that was unusual, for she was by nature a woman of great self-possession. She felt excessively weak, physically exhausted as though she had gone a long journey, and her mind was highly wrought. Margaret remembered that her state had been the same on her first arrival in Paris, when, in her eagerness to get a preliminary glimpse of its marvels, she had hurried till her bones ached from one celebrated monument to another. They began to speak of trivial things. Margaret tried to join calmly in the conversation, but her voice sounded unnatural, and she fancied that more than once Arthur gave her a curious look. At length she could control herself no longer and burst into a sudden flood of tears. In a moment, uncomprehending but affectionate, he caught her in his arms. He asked tenderly what was the matter. He sought to comfort her. She wept ungovernably, clinging to him for protection.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t know what is the matter with me.

I’m only nervous and frightened.’

Arthur had an idea that women were often afflicted with what he described by the old-fashioned name of vapours, and was not disposed to pay much attention to this vehement distress. He soothed her as he would have done a child.

‘Oh, take care of me, Arthur. I’m so afraid that some dreadful thing will happen to me. I want all your strength. Promise that you’ll never forsake me.’

He laughed, as he kissed away her tears, and she tried to smile.

‘Why can’t we be married at once?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to wait any longer. I shan’t feel safe till I’m actually your wife.’

He reasoned with her very gently. After all, they were to be married in a few weeks. They could not easily hasten matters, for their house was not yet ready, and she needed time to get her clothes. The date had been fixed by her. She listened sullenly to his words. Their wisdom was plain, and she did not see how she could possibly insist. Even if she told him all that had passed he would not believe her; he would think she was suffering from some trick of her morbid fancy.

‘If anything happens to me,’ she answered, with the dark, anguished eyes of a hunted beast, ‘you will be to blame.’

‘I promise you that nothing will happen.’

9

Margaret’s night was disturbed, and next day she was unable to go about her work with her usual tranquillity. She tried to reason herself into a natural explanation of the events that had happened. The telegram that Susie had received pointed to a definite scheme on Haddo’s part, and suggested that his sudden illness was but a device to get into the studio. Once there, he had used her natural sympathy as a means whereby to exercise his hypnotic power, and all she had seen was merely the creation of his own libidinous fancy. But though she sought to persuade herself that, in playing a vile trick on her, he had taken a shameful advantage of her pity, she could not look upon him with anger. Her contempt for him, her utter loathing, were alloyed with a feeling that aroused in her horror and dismay. She could not get the man out of her thoughts. All that he had said, all that she had seen, seemed, as though it possessed a power of material growth, unaccountably to absorb her. It was as if a rank weed were planted in her heart and slid long poisonous tentacles down every artery, so that each part of her body was enmeshed. Work could not distract her, conversation, exercise, art, left her listless; and between her and all the actions of life stood the flamboyant, bulky form of Oliver Haddo. She was terrified of him now as never before, but curiously had no longer the physical repulsion which hitherto had mastered all other feelings. Although she repeated to herself that she wanted never to see him again, Margaret could scarcely resist an overwhelming desire to go to him. Her will had been taken from her, and she was an automaton. She struggled, like a bird in the fowler’s net with useless beating of the wings; but at the bottom of her heart she was dimly conscious that she did not want to resist. If he had given her that address, it was because he knew she would use it. She did not know why she wanted to go to him; she had nothing to say to him; she knew only that it was necessary to go. But a few days before she had seen the Phèdre of Racine, and she felt on a sudden all the torments that wrung the heart of that unhappy queen; she, too, struggled aimlessly to escape from the poison that the immortal gods poured in her veins. She asked herself frantically whether a spell had been cast over her, for now she was willing to believe that Haddo’s power was all-embracing. Margaret knew that if she yielded to the horrible temptation nothing could save her from destruction. She would have cried for help to Arthur or to Susie, but something, she knew not what, prevented her. At length, driven almost to distraction, she thought that Dr Porhoët might do something for her. He, at least, would understand her misery. There seemed not a moment to lose, and she hastened to his house. They told her he was out. Her heart sank, for it seemed that her last hope was gone. She was like a person drowning, who clings to a rock; and the waves dash against him, and beat upon his bleeding hands with a malice all too human, as if to tear them from their refuge.

Instead of going to the sketch-class, which was held at six in the evening, she hurried to the address that Oliver Haddo had given her. She went along the crowded street stealthily, as though afraid that someone would see her, and her heart was in a turmoil. She desired with all her might not to go, and sought vehemently to prevent herself, and yet withal she went. She ran up the stairs and knocked at the door. She remembered his directions distinctly. In a moment Oliver Haddo stood before her. He did not seem astonished that she was there. As she stood on the landing, it occurred to her suddenly that she had no reason to offer for her visit, but his words saved her from any need for explanation.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.

Haddo led her into a sitting-room. He had an apartment in a maison meublée, and heavy hangings, the solid furniture of that sort of house in Paris, was unexpected in connexion with him. The surroundings were so commonplace that they seemed to emphasise his singularity. There was a peculiar lack of comfort, which suggested that he was indifferent to material things. The room was large, but so cumbered that it gave a cramped impression. Haddo dwelt there as if he were apart from any habitation that might be his. He moved cautiously among the heavy furniture, and his great obesity was somehow more remarkable. There was the acrid perfume which Margaret remembered a few days before in her vision of an Eastern city.

Asking her to sit down, he began to talk as if they were old acquaintances between whom nothing of moment had occurred. At last she took her courage in both hands.

‘Why did you make me come here?’ she asked suddenly,

‘You give me credit now for very marvellous powers,’ he smiled.

‘You knew I should come.’

‘I knew.’

‘What have I done to you that you should make me so unhappy? I want you to leave me alone.’

‘I shall not prevent you from going out if you choose to go. No harm has come to you. The door is open.’

Her heart beat quickly, painfully almost, and she remained silent. She knew that she did not want to go. There was something that drew her strangely to him, and she was ceasing to resist. A strange feeling began to take hold of her, creeping stealthily through her limbs; and she was terrified, but unaccountably elated.

He began to talk with that low voice of his that thrilled her with a curious magic. He spoke not of pictures now, nor of books, but of life. He told her of strange Eastern places where no infidel had been, and her sensitive fancy was aflame with the honeyed fervour of his phrase. He spoke of the dawn upon sleeping desolate cities, and the moonlit nights of the desert, of the sunsets with their splendour, and of the crowded streets at noon. The beauty of the East rose before her. He told her of many-coloured webs and of silken carpets, the glittering steel of armour damascened, and of barbaric, priceless gems. The splendour of the East blinded her eyes. He spoke of frankincense and myrrh and aloes, of heavy perfumes of the scent-merchants, and drowsy odours of the Syrian gardens. The fragrance of the East filled her nostrils. And all these things were transformed by the power of his words till life itself seemed offered to her, a life of infinite vivacity, a life of freedom, a life of supernatural knowledge. It seemed to her that a comparison was drawn for her attention between the narrow round which awaited her as Arthur’s wife and this fair, full existence. She shuddered to think of the dull house in Harley Street and the insignificance of its humdrum duties. But it was possible for her also to enjoy the wonder of the world. Her soul yearned for a beauty that the commonalty of men did not know. And what devil suggested, a warp as it were in the woof of Oliver’s speech, that her exquisite loveliness gave her the right to devote herself to the great art of living? She felt a sudden desire for perilous adventures. As though fire passed through her, she sprang to her feet and stood with panting bosom, her flashing eyes bright with the multi-coloured pictures that his magic presented.

Oliver Haddo stood too, and they faced one another. Then, on a sudden, she knew what the passion was that consumed her. With a quick movement, his eyes more than ever strangely staring, he took her in his arms, and he kissed her lips. She surrendered herself to him voluptuously. Her whole body burned with the ecstasy of his embrace.

‘I think I love you,’ she said, hoarsely.

She looked at him. She did not feel ashamed.

‘Now you must go,’ he said.

He opened the door, and, without another word, she went. She walked through the streets as if nothing at all had happened. She felt neither remorse nor revulsion.

Then Margaret felt every day that uncontrollable desire to go to him; and, though she tried to persuade herself not to yield, she knew that her effort was only a pretence: she did not want anything to prevent her. When it seemed that some accident would do so, she could scarcely control her irritation. There was always that violent hunger of the soul which called her to him, and the only happy hours she had were those spent in his company. Day after day she felt that complete ecstasy when he took her in his huge arms, and kissed her with his heavy, sensual lips. But the ecstasy was extraordinarily mingled with loathing, and her physical attraction was allied with physical abhorrence.

Yet when he looked at her with those pale blue eyes, and threw into his voice those troubling accents, she forgot everything. He spoke of unhallowed things. Sometimes, as it were, he lifted a corner of the veil, and she caught a glimpse of terrible secrets. She understood how men had bartered their souls for infinite knowledge. She seemed to stand upon a pinnacle of the temple, and spiritual kingdoms of darkness, principalities of the unknown, were spread before her eyes to lure her to destruction. But of Haddo himself she learned nothing. She did not know if he loved her. She did not know if he had ever loved. He appeared to stand apart from human kind. Margaret discovered by chance that his mother lived, but he would not speak of her.

‘Some day you shall see her,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Very soon.’

Meanwhile her life proceeded with all outward regularity. She found it easy to deceive her friends, because it occurred to neither that her frequent absence was not due to the plausible reasons she gave. The lies which at first seemed intolerable now tripped glibly off her tongue. But though they were so natural, she was seized often with a panic of fear lest they should be discovered; and sometimes, suffering agonies of remorse, she would lie in bed at night and think with utter shame of the way she was using Arthur. But things had gone too far now, and she must let them take their course. She scarcely knew why her feelings towards him had so completely changed. Oliver Haddo had scarcely mentioned his name and yet had poisoned her mind. The comparison between the two was to Arthur’s disadvantage. She thought him a little dull now, and his commonplace way of looking at life contrasted with Haddo’s fascinating boldness. She reproached Arthur in her heart because he had never understood what was in her. He narrowed her mind. And gradually she began to hate him because her debt of gratitude was so great. It seemed unfair that he should have done so much for her. He forced her to marry him by his beneficence. Yet Margaret continued to discuss with him the arrangement of their house in Harley Street. It had been her wish to furnish the drawing-room in the style of Louis XV; and together they made long excursions to buy chairs or old pieces of silk with which to cover them. Everything should be perfect in its kind. The date of their marriage was fixed, and all the details were settled. Arthur was ridiculously happy. Margaret made no sign. She did not think of the future, and she spoke of it only to ward off suspicion. She was inwardly convinced now that the marriage would never take place, but what was to prevent it she did not know. She watched Susie and Arthur cunningly. But though she watched in order to conceal her own secret, it was another’s that she discovered. Suddenly Margaret became aware that Susie was deeply in love with Arthur Burdon. The discovery was so astounding that at first it seemed absurd.

‘You’ve never done that caricature of Arthur for me that you promised,’ she said, suddenly.

‘I’ve tried, but he doesn’t lend himself to it,’ laughed Susie.

‘With that long nose and the gaunt figure I should have thought you could make something screamingly funny.’

‘How oddly you talk of him! Somehow I can only see his beautiful, kind eyes and his tender mouth. I would as soon do a caricature of him as write a parody on a poem I loved.’

Margaret took the portfolio in which Susie kept her sketches. She caught the look of alarm that crossed her friend’s face, but Susie had not the courage to prevent her from looking. She turned the drawings carelessly and presently came to a sheet upon which, in a more or less finished state, were half a dozen heads of Arthur. Pretending not to see it, she went on to the end. When she closed the portfolio Susie gave a sigh of relief.

‘I wish you worked harder,’ said Margaret, as she put the sketches down.

‘I wonder you don’t do a head of Arthur as you can’t do a caricature.’

‘My dear, you mustn’t expect everyone to take such an overpowering interest in that young man as you do.’

The answer added a last certainty to Margaret’s suspicion. She told herself bitterly that Susie was no less a liar than she. Next day, when the other was out, Margaret looked through the portfolio once more, but the sketches of Arthur had disappeared. She was seized on a sudden with anger because Susie dared to love the man who loved her.

The web in which Oliver Haddo enmeshed her was woven with skilful intricacy. He took each part of her character separately and fortified with consummate art his influence over her. There was something satanic in his deliberation, yet in actual time it was almost incredible that he could have changed the old abhorrence with which she regarded him into that hungry passion. Margaret could not now realize her life apart from his. At length he thought the time was ripe for the final step.

‘It may interest you to know that I’m leaving Paris on Thursday,’ he said casually, one afternoon.

She started to her feet and stared at him with bewildered eyes.

‘But what is to become of me?’

‘You will marry the excellent Mr Burdon.’

‘You know I cannot live without you. How can you be so cruel?’

‘Then the only alternative is that you should accompany me.’

Her blood ran cold, and her heart seemed pressed in an iron vice.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There is no need to be agitated. I am making you an eminently desirable offer of marriage.’

She sank helplessly into her chair. Because she had refused to think of the future, it had never struck her that the time must come when it would be necessary to leave Haddo or to throw in her lot with his definitely. She was seized with revulsion. Margaret realized that, though an odious attraction bound her to the man, she loathed and feared him. The scales fell from her eyes. She remembered on a sudden Arthur’s great love and all that he had done for her sake. She hated herself. Like a bird at its last gasp beating frantically against the bars of a cage, Margaret made a desperate effort to regain her freedom. She sprang up.

‘Let me go from here. I wish I’d never seen you. I don’t know what you’ve done with me.’

‘Go by all means if you choose,’ he answered.

He opened the door, so that she might see he used no compulsion, and stood lazily at the threshold, with a hateful smile on his face. There was something terrible in his excessive bulk. Rolls of fat descended from his chin and concealed his neck. His cheeks were huge, and the lack of beard added to the hideous nakedness of his face. Margaret stopped as she passed him, horribly repelled yet horribly fascinated. She had an immense desire that he should take her again in his arms and press her lips with that red voluptuous mouth. It was as though fiends of hell were taking revenge upon her loveliness by inspiring in her a passion for this monstrous creature. She trembled with the intensity of her desire. His eyes were hard and cruel.

‘Go,’ he said.

She bent her head and fled from before him. To get home she passed through the gardens of the Luxembourg, but her legs failed her, and in exhaustion she sank upon a bench. The day was sultry. She tried to collect herself. Margaret knew well the part in which she sat, for in the enthusiastic days that seemed so long gone by she was accustomed to come there for the sake of a certain tree upon which her eyes now rested. It had all the slim delicacy of a Japanese print. The leaves were slender and fragile, half gold with autumn, half green, but so tenuous that the dark branches made a pattern of subtle beauty against the sky. The hand of a draughtsman could not have fashioned it with a more excellent skill. But now Margaret could take no pleasure in its grace. She felt a heartrending pang to think that thenceforward the consummate things of art would have no meaning for her. She had seen Arthur the evening before, and remembered with an agony of shame the lies to which she had been forced in order to explain why she could not see him till late that day. He had proposed that they should go to Versailles, and was bitterly disappointed when she told him they could not, as usual on Sundays, spend the whole day together. He accepted her excuse that she had to visit a sick friend. It would not have been so intolerable if he had suspected her of deceit, and his reproaches would have hardened her heart. It was his entire confidence which was so difficult to bear.

‘Oh, if I could only make a clean breast of it all,’ she cried.

The bell of Saint Sulpice was ringing for vespers. Margaret walked slowly to the church, and sat down in the seats reserved in the transept for the needy. She hoped that the music she must hear there would rest her soul, and perhaps she might be able to pray. Of late she had not dared. There was a pleasant darkness in the place, and its large simplicity was soothing. In her exhaustion, she watched listlessly the people go to and fro. Behind her was a priest in the confessional. A little peasant girl, in a Breton coiffe, perhaps a maid-servant lately come from her native village to the great capital, passed in and knelt down. Margaret could hear her muttered words, and at intervals the deep voice of the priest. In three minutes she tripped neatly away. She looked so fresh in her plain black dress, so healthy and innocent, that Margaret could not restrain a sob of envy. The child had so little to confess, a few puny errors which must excite a smile on the lips of the gentle priest, and her candid spirit was like snow. Margaret would have given anything to kneel down and whisper in those passionless ears all that she suffered, but the priest’s faith and hers were not the same. They spoke a different tongue, not of the lips only but of the soul, and he would not listen to the words of an heretic.

A long procession of seminarists came in from the college which is under the shadow of that great church, two by two, in black cassocks and short white surplices. Many were tonsured already. Some were quite young. Margaret watched their faces, wondering if they were tormented by such agony as she. But they had a living faith to sustain them, and if some, as was plain, were narrow and obtuse, they had at least a fixed rule which prevented them from swerving into treacherous byways. One of two had a wan ascetic look, such as the saints may have had when the terror of life was known to them only in the imaginings of the cloister. The canons of the church followed in their more gorgeous vestments, and finally the officiating clergy.

The music was beautiful. There was about it a staid, sad dignity; and it seemed to Margaret fit thus to adore God. But it did not move her. She could not understand the words that the priests chanted; their gestures, their movements to and fro, were strange to her. For her that stately service had no meaning. And with a great cry in her heart she said that God had forsaken her. She was alone in an alien land. Evil was all about her, and in those ceremonies she could find no comfort. What could she expect when the God of her fathers left her to her fate? So that she might not weep in front of all those people, Margaret with down-turned face walked to the door. She felt utterly lost. As she walked along the interminable street that led to her own house, she was shaken with sobs.

‘God has forsaken me,’ she repeated. ‘God has foresaken me.’

Next day, her eyes red with weeping, she dragged herself to Haddo’s door. When he opened it, she went in without a word. She sat down, and he watched her in silence.

‘I am willing to marry you whenever you choose,’ she said at last.

‘I have made all the necessary arrangements.’

‘You have spoken to me of your mother. Will you take me to her at once.’

The shadow of a smile crossed his lips.

‘If you wish it.’

Haddo told her that they could be married before the Consul early enough on the Thursday morning to catch a train for England. She left everything in his hands.

‘I’m desperately unhappy,’ she said dully.

Oliver laid his hands upon her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

‘Go home, and you will forget your tears. I command you to be happy.’

Then it seemed that the bitter struggle between the good and the evil in her was done, and the evil had conquered. She felt on a sudden curiously elated. It seemed no longer to matter that she deceived her faithful friends. She gave a bitter laugh, as she thought how easy it was to hoodwink them.

* * * * *

Wednesday happened to be Arthur’s birthday, and he asked her to dine with him alone.

‘We’ll do ourselves proud, and hang the expense,’ he said.

They had arranged to eat at a fashionable restaurant on the other side of the river, and soon after seven he fetched her. Margaret was dressed with exceeding care. She stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Arthur’s arrival, and surveyed herself in the glass. Susie thought she had never been more beautiful.

‘I think you’ve grown more pleasing to look upon than you ever were,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is that has come over you of late, but there’s a depth in your eyes that is quite new. It gives you an odd mysteriousness which is very attractive.’

Knowing Susie’s love for Arthur, she wondered whether her friend was not heartbroken as she compared her own plainness with the radiant beauty that was before her. Arthur came in, and Margaret did not move. He stopped at the door to look at her. Their eyes met. His heart beat quickly, and yet he was seized with awe. His good fortune was too great to bear, when he thought that this priceless treasure was his. He could have knelt down and worshipped as though a goddess of old Greece stood before him. And to him also her eyes had changed. They had acquired a burning passion which disturbed and yet enchanted him. It seemed that the lovely girl was changed already into a lovely woman. An enigmatic smile came to her lips.

‘Are you pleased?’ she asked.

Arthur came forward and Margaret put her hands on his shoulders.

‘You have scent on,’ he said.

He was surprised, for she had never used it before. It was a faint, almost acrid perfume that he did not know. It reminded him vaguely of those odours which he remembered in his childhood in the East. It was remote and strange. It gave Margaret a new and troubling charm. There had ever been something cold in her statuesque beauty, but this touch somehow curiously emphasized her sex. Arthur’s lips twitched, and his gaunt face grew pale with passion. His emotion was so great that it was nearly pain. He was puzzled, for her eyes expressed things that he had never seen in them before.

‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she said.

She did not see Susie, but knew that a quick look of anguish crossed her face. Margaret drew Arthur towards her. His hands began to tremble. He had never ventured to express the passion that consumed him, and when he kissed her it was with a restraint that was almost brotherly. Now their lips met. Forgetting that anyone else was in the room, he flung his arms around Margaret. She had never kissed him in that way before, and the rapture was intolerable. Her lips were like living fire. He could not take his own away. He forgot everything. All his strength, all his self-control, deserted him. It crossed his mind that at this moment he would willingly die. But the delight of it was so great that he could scarcely withhold a cry of agony. At length Susie’s voice reminded him of the world.

‘You’d far better go out to dinner instead of behaving like a pair of complete idiots.’

She tried to make her tone as flippant as the words, but her voice was cut by a pang of agony. With a little laugh, Margaret withdrew from Arthur’s embrace and lightly looked at her friend. Susie’s brave smile died away as she caught this glance, for there was in it a malicious hatred that startled her. It was so unexpected that she was terrified. What had she done? She was afraid, dreadfully afraid, that Margaret had guessed her secret. Arthur stood as if his senses had left him, quivering still with the extremity of passion.

‘Susie says we must go,’ smiled Margaret.

He could not speak. He could not regain the conventional manner of polite society. Very pale, like a man suddenly awaked from deep sleep, he went out at Margaret’s side. They walked along the passage. Though the door was closed behind them and they were out of earshot, Margaret seemed not withstanding to hear Susie’s passionate sobbing. It gave her a horrible delight. The tavern to which they went was on the Boulevard des Italiens, and at this date the most frequented in Paris. It was crowded, but Arthur had reserved a table in the middle of the room. Her radiant loveliness made people stare at Margaret as she passed, and her consciousness of the admiration she excited increased her beauty. She was satisfied that amid that throng of the best-dressed women in the world she had cause to envy no one. The gaiety was charming. Shaded lights gave an opulent cosiness to the scene, and there were flowers everywhere. Innumerable mirrors reflected women of the world, admirably gowned, actresses of renown, and fashionable courtesans. The noise was very great. A Hungarian band played in a distant corner, but the music was drowned by the loud talking of excited men and the boisterous laughter of women. It was plain that people had come to spend their money with a lavish hand. The vivacious crowd was given over with all its heart to the pleasure of the fleeting moment. Everyone had put aside grave thoughts and sorrow.

Margaret had never been in better spirits. The champagne went quickly to her head, and she talked all manner of charming nonsense. Arthur was enchanted. He was very proud, very pleased, and very happy. They talked of all the things they would do when they were married. They talked of the places they must go to, of their home and of the beautiful things with which they would fill it. Margaret’s animation was extraordinary. Arthur was amused at her delight with the brightness of the place, with the good things they ate, and with the wine. Her laughter was like a rippling brook. Everything tended to take him out of his usual reserve. Life was very pleasing, at that moment, and he felt singularly joyful.

‘Let us drink to the happiness of our life,’ he said.

They touched glasses. He could not take his eyes away from her.

‘You’re simply wonderful tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m almost afraid of my good fortune.’

‘What is there to be afraid of?’ she cried.

‘I should like to lose something I valued in order to propitiate the fates. I am too happy now. Everything goes too well with me.’

She gave a soft, low laugh and stretched out her hand on the table. No sculptor could have modelled its exquisite delicacy. She wore only one ring, a large emerald which Arthur had given her on their engagement. He could not resist taking her hand.

‘Would you like to go on anywhere?’ he said, when they had finished dinner and were drinking their coffee.

‘No, let us stay here. I must go to bed early, as I have a tiring day before me tomorrow.’

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Nothing of any importance,’ she laughed.

Presently the diners began to go in little groups, and Margaret suggested that they should saunter towards the Madeleine. The night was fine, but rather cold, and the broad avenue was crowded. Margaret watched the people. It was no less amusing than a play. In a little while, they took a cab and drove through the streets, silent already, that led to the quarter of the Montparnasse. They sat in silence, and Margaret nestled close to Arthur. He put his arm around her waist. In the shut cab that faint, oriental odour rose again to his nostrils, and his head reeled as it had before dinner.

‘You’ve made me very happy, Margaret,’ he whispered. ‘I feel that, however long I live, I shall never have a happier day than this.’

‘Do you love me very much?’ she asked, lightly.

He did not answer, but took her face in his hands and kissed her passionately. They arrived at Margaret’s house, and she tripped up to the door. She held out her hand to him, smiling.

‘Goodnight.’

‘It’s dreadful to think that I must spend a dozen hours without seeing you. When may I come?’

‘Not in the morning, because I shall be too busy. Come at twelve.’

She remembered that her train started exactly at that hour. The door was opened, and with a little wave of the hand she disappeared.

10

Susie stared without comprehension at the note that announced Margaret’s marriage. It was a petit bleu sent off from the Gare du Nord, and ran as follows:

When you receive this I shall be on my way to London. I was married to Oliver Haddo this morning. I love him as I never loved Arthur. I have acted in this manner because I thought I had gone too far with Arthur to make an explanation possible. Please tell him.

MARGARET

Susie was filled with dismay. She did not know what to do nor what to think. There was a knock at the door, and she knew it must be Arthur, for he was expected at midday. She decided quickly that it was impossible to break the news to him then and there. It was needful first to find out all manner of things, and besides, it was incredible. Making up her mind, she opened the door.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry Margaret isn’t here,’ she said. ‘A friend of hers is ill and sent for her suddenly.’

‘What a bore!’ answered Arthur. ‘Mrs Bloomfield as usual, I suppose?’

‘Oh, you know she’s been ill?’

‘Margaret has spent nearly every afternoon with her for some days.’

Susie did not answer. This was the first she had heard of Mrs Bloomfield’s illness, and it was news that Margaret was in the habit of visiting her. But her chief object at this moment was to get rid of Arthur.

‘Won’t you come back at five o’clock?’ she said.

‘But, look here, why shouldn’t we lunch together, you and I?’

‘I’m very sorry, but I’m expecting somebody in.’

‘Oh, all right. Then I’ll come back at five.’

He nodded and went out. Susie read the brief note once more, and asked herself if it could possibly be true. The callousness of it was appalling. She went to Margaret’s room and saw that everything was in its place. It did not look as if the owner had gone on a journey. But then she noticed that a number of letters had been destroyed. She opened a drawer and found that Margaret’s trinkets were gone. An idea struck her. Margaret had bought lately a number of clothes, and these she had insisted should be sent to her dressmaker, saying that it was needless to cumber their little apartment with them. They could stay there till she returned to England a few weeks later for her marriage, and it would be simpler to despatch them all from one place. Susie went out. At the door it occurred to her to ask the concierge if she knew where Margaret had gone that morning.

‘Parfaitement, Mademoiselle,’ answered the old woman. ‘I heard her tell the coachman to go to the British Consulate.’

The last doubt was leaving Susie. She went to the dressmaker and there discovered that by Margaret’s order the boxes containing her things had gone on the previous day to the luggage office of the Gare du Nord.

‘I hope you didn’t let them go till your bill was paid,’ said Susie lightly, as though in jest.

The dressmaker laughed.

‘Mademoiselle paid for everything two or three days ago.’

With indignation, Susie realised that Margaret had not only taken away the trousseau bought for her marriage with Arthur; but, since she was herself penniless, had paid for it with the money which he had generously given her. Susie drove then to Mrs Bloomfield, who at once reproached her for not coming to see her.

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve been exceedingly busy, and I knew that Margaret was looking after you.’

‘I’ve not seen Margaret for three weeks,’ said the invalid.

‘Haven’t you? I thought she dropped in quite often.’

Susie spoke as though the matter were of no importance. She asked herself now where Margaret could have spent those afternoons. By a great effort she forced herself to speak of casual things with the garrulous old lady long enough to make her visit seem natural. On leaving her, she went to the Consulate, and her last doubt was dissipated. Then nothing remained but to go home and wait for Arthur. Her first impulse had been to see Dr Porhoët and ask for his advice; but, even if he offered to come back with her to the studio, his presence would be useless. She must see Arthur by himself. Her heart was wrung as she thought of the man’s agony when he knew the truth. She had confessed to herself long before that she loved him passionately, and it seemed intolerable that she of all persons must bear him this great blow.

She sat in the studio, counting the minutes, and thought with a bitter smile that his eagerness to see Margaret would make him punctual. She had eaten nothing since the petit déjeuner of the morning, and she was faint with hunger. But she had not the heart to make herself tea. At last he came. He entered joyfully and looked around.

‘Is Margaret not here yet?’ he asked, with surprise.

‘Won’t you sit down?’

He did not notice that her voice was strange, nor that she kept her eyes averted.

‘How lazy you are,’ he cried. ‘You haven’t got the tea.’

‘Mr Burdon, I have something to say to you. It will cause you very great pain.’

He observed now the hoarseness of her tone. He sprang to his feet, and a thousand fancies flashed across his brain. Something horrible had happened to Margaret. She was ill. His terror was so great that he could not speak. He put out his hands as does a blind man. Susie had to make an effort to go on. But she could not. Her voice was choked, and she began to cry. Arthur trembled as though he were seized with ague. She gave him the letter.

‘What does it mean?’

He looked at her vacantly. Then she told him all that she had done that day and the places to which she had been.

‘When you thought she was spending every afternoon with Mrs Bloomfield, she was with that man. She made all the arrangements with the utmost care. It was quite premeditated.’

Arthur sat down and leaned his head on his hand. He turned his back to her, so that she should not see his face. They remained in perfect silence. And it was so terrible that Susie began to cry quietly. She knew that the man she loved was suffering an agony greater than the agony of death, and she could not help him. Rage flared up in her heart, and hatred for Margaret.

‘Oh, it’s infamous!’ she cried suddenly. ‘She’s lied to you, she’s been odiously deceitful. She must be vile and heartless. She must be rotten to the very soul.’

He turned round sharply, and his voice was hard.

‘I forbid you to say anything against her.’

Susie gave a little gasp. He had never spoken to her before in anger. She flashed out bitterly.

‘Can you love her still, when she’s shown herself capable of such vile treachery? For nearly a month this man must have been making love to her, and she’s listened to all we said of him. She’s pretended to hate the sight of him, I’ve seen her cut him in the street. She’s gone on with all the preparations for your marriage. She must have lived in a world of lies, and you never suspected anything because you had an unalterable belief in her love and truthfulness. She owes everything to you. For four years she’s lived on your charity. She was only able to be here because you gave her money to carry out a foolish whim, and the very clothes on her back were paid for by you.’

‘I can’t help it if she didn’t love me,’ he cried desperately.

‘You know just as well as I do that she pretended to love you. Oh, she’s behaved shamefully. There can be no excuse for her.’

He looked at Susie with haggard, miserable eyes.

‘How can you be so cruel? For God’s sake don’t make it harder.’

There was an indescribable agony in his voice. And as if his own words of pain overcame the last barrier of his self-control, he broke down. He hid his face in his hands and sobbed. Susie was horribly conscience-stricken.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to say such hateful things. I didn’t mean to be unkind. I ought to have remembered how passionately you love her.’

It was very painful to see the effort he made to regain his self-command. Susie suffered as much as he did. Her impulse was to throw herself on her knees, and kiss his hands, and comfort him; but she knew that he was interested in her only because she was Margaret’s friend. At last he got up and, taking his pipe from his pocket, filled it silently. She was terrified at the look on his face. The first time she had ever seen him, Susie wondered at the possibility of self-torture which was in that rough-hewn countenance; but she had never dreamed that it could express such unutterable suffering. Its lines were suddenly changed, and it was terrible to look upon.

‘I can’t believe it’s true,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t believe it.’

There was a knock at the door, and Arthur gave a startled cry.

‘Perhaps she’s come back.’

He opened it hurriedly, his face suddenly lit up by expectation; but it was Dr Porhoët.

‘How do you do?’ said the Frenchman. ‘What is happening?’

He looked round and caught the dismay that was on the faces of Arthur and

Susie.

‘Where is Miss Margaret? I thought you must be giving a party.’

There was something in his manner that made Susie ask why.

‘I received a telegram from Mr Haddo this morning.’

He took it from his pocket and handed it to Susie. She read it and passed it to Arthur. It said:

Come to the studio at five. High jinks.

Oliver Haddo

‘Margaret was married to Mr Haddo this morning,’ said Arthur, quietly. ‘I understand they have gone to England.’

Susie quickly told the doctor the few facts they knew. He was as surprised, as distressed, as they.

‘But what is the explanation of it all?’ he asked.

Arthur shrugged his shoulders wearily.

‘She cared for Haddo more than she cared for me, I suppose. It is natural enough that she should go away in this fashion rather than offer explanations. I suppose she wanted to save herself a scene she thought might be rather painful.’

‘When did you see her last?’

‘We spent yesterday evening together.’

‘And did she not show in any way that she contemplated such a step?’

Arthur shook his head.

‘You had no quarrel?’

‘We’ve never quarrelled. She was in the best of spirits. I’ve never seen her more gay. She talked the whole time of our house in London, and of the places we must visit when we were married.’

Another contraction of pain passed over his face as he remembered that she had been more affectionate than she had ever been before. The fire of her kisses still burnt upon his lips. He had spent a night of almost sleepless ecstasy because he had been certain for the first time that the passion which consumed him burnt in her heart too. Words were dragged out of him against his will.

‘Oh, I’m sure she loved me.’

Meanwhile Susie’s eyes were fixed on Haddo’s cruel telegram. She seemed to hear his mocking laughter.

‘Margaret loathed Oliver Haddo with a hatred that was almost unnatural. It was a physical repulsion like that which people sometimes have for certain animals. What can have happened to change it into so great a love that it has made her capable of such villainous acts?’

‘We mustn’t be unfair to him,’ said Arthur. ‘He put our backs up, and we were probably unjust. He has done some very remarkable things in his day, and he’s no fool. It’s possible that some people wouldn’t mind the eccentricities which irritated us. He’s certainly of very good family and he’s rich. In many ways it’s an excellent match for Margaret.’

He was trying with all his might to find excuses for her. It would not make her treachery so intolerable if he could persuade himself that Haddo had qualities which might explain her infatuation. But as his enemy stood before his fancy, monstrously obese, vulgar, and overbearing, a shudder passed through him. The thought of Margaret in that man’s arms tortured him as though his flesh were torn with iron hooks.

‘Perhaps it’s not true. Perhaps she’ll return,’ he cried.

‘Would you take her back if she came to you?’ asked Susie.

‘Do you think anything she can do has the power to make me love her less? There must be reasons of which we know nothing that caused her to do all she has done. I daresay it was inevitable from the beginning.’

Dr Porhoët got up and walked across the room.

‘If a woman had done me such an injury that I wanted to take some horrible vengeance, I think I could devise nothing more subtly cruel than to let her be married to Oliver Haddo.’

‘Ah, poor thing, poor thing!’ said Arthur. ‘If I could only suppose she would be happy! The future terrifies me.’

‘I wonder if she knew that Haddo had sent that telegram,’ said Susie.

‘What can it matter?’

She turned to Arthur gravely.

‘Do you remember that day, in this studio, when he kicked Margaret’s dog, and you thrashed him? Well, afterwards, when he thought no one saw him, I happened to catch sight of his face. I never saw in my life such malignant hatred. It was the face of a fiend of wickedness. And when he tried to excuse himself, there was a cruel gleam in his eyes which terrified me. I warned you; I told you that he had made up his mind to revenge himself, but you laughed at me. And then he seemed to go out of our lives and I thought no more about it. I wonder why he sent Dr Porhoët here today. He must have known that the doctor would hear of his humiliation, and he may have wished that he should be present at his triumph. I think that very moment he made up his mind to be even with you, and he devised this odious scheme.’

‘How could he know that it was possible to carry out such a horrible thing?’ said Arthur.

‘I wonder if Miss Boyd is right,’ murmured the doctor. ‘After all, if you come to think of it, he must have thought that he couldn’t hurt you more. The whole thing is fiendish. He took away from you all your happiness. He must have known that you wanted nothing in the world more than to make Margaret your wife, and he has not only prevented that, but he has married her himself. And he can only have done it by poisoning her mind, by warping her very character. Her soul must be horribly besmirched; he must have entirely changed her personality.’

‘Ah, I feel that,’ cried Arthur. ‘If Margaret has broken her word to me, if she’s gone to him so callously, it’s because it’s not the Margaret I know. Some devil must have taken possession of her body.’

‘You use a figure of speech. I wonder if it can possibly be a reality.’

Arthur and Dr Porhoët looked at Susie with astonishment.

‘I can’t believe that Margaret could have done such a thing,’ she went on. ‘The more I think of it, the more incredible it seems. I’ve known Margaret for years, and she was incapable of deceit. She was very kind-hearted. She was honest and truthful. In the first moment of horror, I was only indignant, but I don’t want to think too badly of her. There is only one way to excuse her, and that is by supposing she acted under some strange compulsion.’

Arthur clenched his hands.

‘I’m not sure if that doesn’t make it more awful than before. If he’s married her, not because he cares, but in order to hurt me, what life will she lead with him? We know how heartless he is, how vindictive, how horribly cruel.’

‘Dr Porhoët knows more about these things than we do,’ said Susie. ‘Is it possible that Haddo can have cast some spell upon her that would make her unable to resist his will? Is it possible that he can have got such an influence over her that her whole character was changed?’

‘How can I tell?’ cried the doctor helplessly. ‘I have heard that such things may happen. I have read of them, but I have no proof. In these matters all is obscurity. The adepts in magic make strange claims. Arthur is a man of science, and he knows what the limits of hypnotism are.’

‘We know that Haddo had powers that other men have not,’ answered Susie. ‘Perhaps there was enough truth in his extravagant pretensions to enable him to do something that we can hardly imagine.’

Arthur passed his hands wearily over his face.

‘I’m so broken, so confused, that I cannot think sanely. At this moment everything seems possible. My faith in all the truths that have supported me is tottering.’

For a while they remained silent. Arthur’s eyes rested on the chair in which Margaret had so often sat. An unfinished canvas still stood upon the easel. It was Dr Porhoët who spoke at last.

‘But even if there were some truth in Miss Boyd’s suppositions, I don’t see how it can help you. You cannot do anything. You have no remedy, legal or otherwise. Margaret is apparently a free agent, and she has married this man. It is plain that many people will think she has done much better in marrying a country gentleman than in marrying a young surgeon. Her letter is perfectly lucid. There is no trace of compulsion. To all intents and purposes she has married him of her own free-will, and there is nothing to show that she desires to be released from him or from the passion which we may suppose enslaves her.’

What he said was obviously true, and no reply was possible.

‘The only thing is to grin and bear it,’ said Arthur, rising.

‘Where are you going?’ said Susie.

‘I think I want to get away from Paris. Here everything will remind me of what I have lost. I must get back to my work.’

He had regained command over himself, and except for the hopeless woe of his face, which he could not prevent from being visible, he was as calm as ever. He held out his hand to Susie.

‘I can only hope that you’ll forget,’ she said.

‘I don’t wish to forget,’ he answered, shaking his head. ‘It’s possible that you will hear from Margaret. She’ll want the things that she has left here, and I daresay will write to you. I should like you to tell her that I bear her no ill-will for anything she has done, and I will never venture to reproach her. I don’t know if I shall be able to do anything for her, but I wish her to know that in any case and always I will do everything that she wants.’

‘If she writes to me, I will see that she is told,’ answered Susie gravely.

‘And now goodbye.’

‘You can’t go to London till tomorrow. Shan’t I see you in the morning?’

‘I think if you don’t mind, I won’t come here again. The sight of all this rather disturbs me.’

Again a contraction of pain passed across his eyes, and Susie saw that he was using a superhuman effort to preserve the appearance of composure. She hesitated a moment.

‘Shall I never see you again?’ she said. ‘I should be sorry to lose sight of you entirely.’

‘I should be sorry, too,’ he answered. ‘I have learned how good and kind you are, and I shall never forget that you are Margaret’s friend. When you come to London, I hope that you will let me know.’

He went out. Dr Porhoët, his hands behind his back, began to walk up and down the room. At last he turned to Susie.

‘There is one thing that puzzles me,’ he said. ‘Why did he marry her?’

‘You heard what Arthur said,’ answered Susie bitterly. ‘Whatever happened, he would have taken her back. The other man knew that he could only bind her to him securely by going through the ceremonies of marriage.’

Dr Porhoët shrugged his shoulders, and presently he left her. When Susie was alone she began to weep broken-heartedly, not for herself, but because Arthur suffered an agony that was hardly endurable.

11

Arthur went back to London next day.

Susie felt it impossible any longer to stay in the deserted studio, and accepted a friend’s invitation to spend the winter in Italy. The good Dr Porhoët remained in Paris with his books and his occult studies.

Susie travelled slowly through Tuscany and Umbria. Margaret had not written to her, and Susie, on leaving Paris, had sent her friend’s belongings to an address from which she knew they would eventually be forwarded. She could not bring herself to write. In answer to a note announcing her change of plans, Arthur wrote briefly that he had much work to do and was delivering a new course of lectures at St. Luke’s; he had lately been appointed visiting surgeon to another hospital, and his private practice was increasing. He did not mention Margaret. His letter was abrupt, formal, and constrained. Susie, reading it for the tenth time, could make little of it. She saw that he wrote only from civility, without interest; and there was nothing to indicate his state of mind. Susie and her companion had made up their minds to pass some weeks in Rome; and here, to her astonishment, Susie had news of Haddo and his wife. It appeared that they had spent some time there, and the little English circle was talking still of their eccentricities. They travelled in some state, with a courier and a suite of servants; they had taken a carriage and were in the habit of driving every afternoon on the Pincio. Haddo had excited attention by the extravagance of his costume, and Margaret by her beauty; she was to be seen in her box at the opera every night, and her diamonds were the envy of all beholders. Though people had laughed a good deal at Haddo’s pretentiousness, and been exasperated by his arrogance, they could not fail to be impressed by his obvious wealth. But finally the pair had disappeared suddenly without saying a word to anybody. A good many bills remained unpaid, but these, Susie learnt, had been settled later. It was reported that they were now in Monte Carlo.

‘Did they seem happy?’ Susie asked the gossiping friend who gave her this scanty information.

‘I think so. After all, Mrs Haddo has almost everything that a woman can want, riches, beauty, nice clothes, jewels. She would be very unreasonable not to be happy.’

Susie had meant to pass the later spring on the Riviera, but when she heard that the Haddos were there, she hesitated. She did not want to run the risk of seeing them, and yet she had a keen desire to find out exactly how things were going. Curiosity and distaste struggled in her mind, but curiosity won; and she persuaded her friend to go to Monte Carlo instead of to Beaulieu. At first Susie did not see the Haddos; but rumour was already much occupied with them, and she had only to keep her ears open. In that strange place, where all that is extravagant and evil, all that is morbid, insane, and fantastic, is gathered together, the Haddos were in fit company. They were notorious for their assiduity at the tables and for their luck, for the dinners and suppers they gave at places frequented by the very opulent, and for their eccentric appearance. It was a complex picture that Susie put together from the scraps of information she collected. After two or three days she saw them at the tables, but they were so absorbed in their game that she felt quite safe from discovery. Margaret was playing, but Haddo stood behind her and directed her movements. Their faces were extraordinarily intent. Susie fixed her attention on Margaret, for in what she had heard of her she had been quite unable to recognize the girl who had been her friend. And what struck her most now was that there was in Margaret’s expression a singular likeness to Haddo’s. Notwithstanding her exquisite beauty, she had a curiously vicious look, which suggested that somehow she saw literally with Oliver’s eyes. They had won great sums that evening, and many persons watched them. It appeared that they played always in this fashion, Margaret putting on the stakes and Haddo telling her what to do and when to stop. Susie heard two Frenchmen talking of them. She listened with all her ears. She flushed as she heard one of them make an observation about Margaret which was more than coarse. The other laughed.

‘It is incredible,’ he said.

‘I assure you it’s true. They have been married six months, and she is still only his wife in name. The superstitious through all the ages have believed in the power of virginity, and the Church has made use of the idea for its own ends. The man uses her simply as a mascot.’

The men laughed, and their conversation proceeded so grossly that Susie’s cheeks burned. But what she had heard made her look at Margaret more closely still. She was radiant. Susie could not deny that something had come to her that gave a new, enigmatic savour to her beauty. She was dressed more gorgeously than Susie’s fastidious taste would have permitted; and her diamonds, splendid in themselves, were too magnificent for the occasion. At last, sweeping up the money, Haddo touched her on the shoulder, and she rose. Behind her was standing a painted woman of notorious disreputability. Susie was astonished to see Margaret smile and nod as she passed her.

Susie learnt that the Haddos had a suite of rooms at the most expensive of the hotels. They lived in a whirl of gaiety. They knew few English except those whose reputations were damaged, but seemed to prefer the society of those foreigners whose wealth and eccentricities made them the cynosure of that little world. Afterwards, she often saw them, in company of Russian Grand-Dukes and their mistresses, of South American women with prodigious diamonds, of noble gamblers and great ladies of doubtful fame, of strange men overdressed and scented. Rumour was increasingly busy with them. Margaret moved among all those queer people with a cold mysteriousness that excited the curiosity of the sated idlers. The suggestion which Susie overheard was repeated more circumstantially. But to this was joined presently the report of orgies that were enacted in the darkened sitting-room of the hotel, when all that was noble and vicious in Monte Carlo was present. Oliver’s eccentric imagination invented whimsical festivities. He had a passion for disguise, and he gave a fancy-dress party of which fabulous stories were told. He sought to revive the mystical ceremonies of old religions, and it was reported that horrible rites had been performed in the garden of the villa, under the shining moon, in imitation of those he had seen in Eastern places. It was said that Haddo had magical powers of extraordinary character, and the tired imagination of those pleasure-seekers was tickled by his talk of black art. Some even asserted that the blasphemous ceremonies of the Black Mass had been celebrated in the house of a Polish Prince. People babbled of satanism and of necromancy. Haddo was thought to be immersed in occult studies for the performance of a magical operation; and some said that he was occupied with the Magnum Opus, the greatest and most fantastic of alchemical experiments. Gradually these stories were narrowed down to the monstrous assertion that he was attempting to create living beings. He had explained at length to somebody that magical receipts existed for the manufacture of homunculi.

Haddo was known generally by the name he was pleased to give himself. The Brother of the Shadow; but most people used it in derision, for it contrasted absurdly with his astonishing bulk. They were amused or outraged by his vanity, but they could not help talking about him, and Susie knew well enough by now that nothing pleased him more. His exploits as a lion-hunter were well known, and it was reported that human blood was on his hands. It was soon discovered that he had a queer power over animals, so that in his presence they were seized with unaccountable terror. He succeeded in surrounding himself with an atmosphere of the fabulous, and nothing that was told of him was too extravagant for belief. But unpleasant stories were circulated also, and someone related that he had been turned out of a club in Vienna for cheating at cards. He played many games, but here, as at Oxford, it was found that he was an unscrupulous opponent. And those old rumours followed him that he took strange drugs. He was supposed to have odious vices, and people whispered to one another of scandals that had been with difficulty suppressed. No one quite understood on what terms he was with his wife, and it was vaguely asserted that he was at times brutally cruel to her. Susie’s heart sank when she heard this; but on the few occasions upon which she caught sight of Margaret, she seemed in the highest spirits. One story inexpressibly shocked her. After lunching at some restaurant, Haddo gave a bad louis among the money with which he paid the bill, and there was a disgraceful altercation with the waiter. He refused to change the coin till a policeman was brought in. His guests were furious, and several took the first opportunity to cut him dead. One of those present narrated the scene to Susie, and she was told that Margaret laughed unconcernedly with her neighbour while the sordid quarrel was proceeding. The man’s blood was as good as his fortune was substantial, but it seemed to please him to behave like an adventurer. The incident was soon common property, and gradually the Haddos found themselves cold-shouldered. The persons with whom they mostly consorted had reputations too delicate to stand the glare of publicity which shone upon all who were connected with him, and the suggestion of police had thrown a shudder down many a spine. What had happened in Rome happened here again: they suddenly disappeared.

Susie had not been in London for some time, and as the spring advanced she remembered that her friends would be glad to see her. It would be charming to spend a few weeks there with an adequate income; for its pleasures had hitherto been closed to her, and she looked forward to her visit as if it were to a foreign city. But though she would not confess it to herself, her desire to see Arthur was the strongest of her motives. Time and absence had deadened a little the intensity of her feelings, and she could afford to acknowledge that she regarded him with very great affection. She knew that he would never care for her, but she was content to be his friend. She could think of him without pain.

Susie stayed in Paris for three weeks to buy some of the clothes which she asserted were now her only pleasure in life, and then went to London.

She wrote to Arthur, and he invited her at once to lunch with him at a restaurant. She was vexed, for she felt they could have spoken more freely in his own house; but as soon as she saw him, she realized that he had chosen their meeting-place deliberately. The crowd of people that surrounded them, the gaiety, the playing of the band, prevented any intimacy of conversation. They were forced to talk of commonplaces. Susie was positively terrified at the change that had taken place in him. He looked ten years older; he had lost flesh, and his hair was sprinkled with white. His face was extraordinarily drawn, and his eyes were weary from lack of sleep. But what most struck her was the change in his expression. The look of pain which she had seen on his face that last evening in the studio was now become settled, so that it altered the lines of his countenance. It was harrowing to look at him. He was more silent than ever, and when he spoke it was in a strange low voice that seemed to come from a long way off. To be with him made Susie curiously uneasy, for there was a strenuousness in him which deprived his manner of all repose. One of the things that had pleased her in him formerly was the tranquillity which gave one the impression that here was a man who could be relied on in difficulties. At first she could not understand exactly what had happened, but in a moment saw that he was making an unceasing effort at self-control. He was never free from suffering and he was constantly on the alert to prevent anyone from seeing it. The strain gave him a peculiar restlessness.

But he was gentler than he had ever been before. He seemed genuinely glad to see her and asked about her travels with interest. Susie led him to talk of himself, and he spoke willingly enough of his daily round. He was earning a good deal of money, and his professional reputation was making steady progress. He worked hard. Besides his duties at the two hospitals with which he was now connected, his teaching, and his private practice, he had read of late one or two papers before scientific bodies, and was editing a large work on surgery.

‘How on earth can you find time to do so much?’ asked Susie.

‘I can do with less sleep than I used,’ he answered. ‘It almost doubles my working-day.’

He stopped abruptly and looked down. His remark had given accidentally some hint at the inner life which he was striving to conceal. Susie knew that her suspicion was well-founded. She thought of the long hours he lay awake, trying in vain to drive from his mind the agony that tortured him, and the short intervals of troubled sleep. She knew that he delayed as long as possible the fatal moment of going to bed, and welcomed the first light of day, which gave him an excuse for getting up. And because he knew that he had divulged the truth he was embarrassed. They sat in awkward silence. To Susie, the tragic figure in front of her was singularly impressive amid that lighthearted throng: all about them happy persons were enjoying the good things of life, talking, laughing, and making merry. She wondered what refinement of self-torture had driven him to choose that place to come to. He must hate it.

When they finished luncheon, Susie took her courage in both hands.

‘Won’t you come back to my rooms for half an hour? We can’t talk here.’

He made an instinctive motion of withdrawal, as though he sought to escape. He did not answer immediately, and she insisted.

‘You have nothing to do for an hour, and there are many things I want to speak to you about’

‘The only way to be strong is never to surrender to one’s weakness,’ he said, almost in a whisper, as though ashamed to talk so intimately.

‘Then you won’t come?’

‘No.’

It was not necessary to specify the matter which it was proposed to discuss. Arthur knew perfectly that Susie wished to talk of Margaret, and he was too straightforward to pretend otherwise. Susie paused for one moment.

‘I was never able to give Margaret your message. She did not write to me.’

A certain wildness came into his eyes, as if the effort he made was almost too much for him.

‘I saw her in Monte Carlo,’ said Susie. ‘I thought you might like to hear about her.’

‘I don’t see that it can do any good,’ he answered.

Susie made a little hopeless gesture. She was beaten.

‘Shall we go?’ she said.

‘You are not angry with me?’ he asked. ‘I know you mean to be kind. I’m very grateful to you.’

‘I shall never be angry with you,’ she smiled.

Arthur paid the bill, and they threaded their way among the tables. At the door she held out her hand.

‘I think you do wrong in shutting yourself away from all human comradeship,’ she said, with that good-humoured smile of hers. ‘You must know that you will only grow absurdly morbid.’

‘I go out a great deal,’ he answered patiently, as though he reasoned with a child. ‘I make a point of offering myself distractions from my work. I go to the opera two or three times a week.’

‘I thought you didn’t care for music.’

‘I don’t think I did,’ he answered. ‘But I find it rests me.’

He spoke with a weariness that was appalling. Susie had never beheld so plainly the torment of a soul in pain.

‘Won’t you let me come to the opera with you one night?’ she asked. ‘Or does it bore you to see me?’

‘I should like it above all things,’ he smiled, quite brightly. ‘You’re like a wonderful tonic. They’re giving Tristan on Thursday. Shall we go together?’

‘I should enjoy it enormously.’

She shook hands with him and jumped into a cab.

‘Oh, poor thing!’ she murmured. ‘Poor thing! What can I do for him?’

She clenched, her hands when she thought of Margaret. It was monstrous that she should have caused such havoc in that good, strong man.

‘Oh, I hope she’ll suffer for it,’ she whispered vindictively. ‘I hope she’ll suffer all the agony that he has suffered.’

Susie dressed herself for Covent Garden as only she could do. Her gown pleased her exceedingly, not only because it was admirably made, but because it had cost far more than she could afford. To dress well was her only extravagance. It was of taffeta silk, in that exquisite green which the learned in such matters call Eau de Nil; and its beauty was enhanced by the old lace which had formed not the least treasured part of her inheritance. In her hair she wore an ornament of Spanish paste, of exquisite workmanship, and round her neck a chain which had once adorned that of a madonna in an Andalusian church. Her individuality made even her plainness attractive. She smiled at herself in the glass ruefully, because Arthur would never notice that she was perfectly dressed.

When she tripped down the stairs and across the pavement to the cab with which he fetched her, Susie held up her skirt with a grace she flattered herself was quite Parisian. As they drove along, she flirted a little with her Spanish fan and stole a glance at herself in the glass. Her gloves were so long and so new and so expensive that she was really indifferent to Arthur’s inattention.

Her joyous temperament expanded like a spring flower when she found herself in the Opera House. She put up her glasses and examined the women as they came into the boxes of the Grand Tier. Arthur pointed out a number of persons whose names were familiar to her, but she felt the effort he was making to be amiable. The weariness of his mouth that evening was more noticeable because of the careless throng. But when the music began he seemed to forget that any eye was upon him; he relaxed the constant tension in which he held himself; and Susie, watching him surreptitiously, saw the emotions chase one another across his face. It was now very mobile. The passionate sounds ate into his soul, mingling with his own love and his own sorrow, till he was taken out of himself; and sometimes he panted strangely. Through the interval he remained absorbed in his emotion. He sat as quietly as before and did not speak a word. Susie understood why Arthur, notwithstanding his old indifference, now showed such eager appreciation of music; it eased the pain he suffered by transferring it to an ideal world, and his own grievous sorrow made the music so real that it gave him an enjoyment of extraordinary vehemence. When it was all over and Isolde had given her last wail of sorrow, Arthur was so exhausted that he could hardly stir.

But they went out with the crowd, and while they were waiting in the vestibule for space to move in, a common friend came up to them. This was Arbuthnot, an eye-specialist, whom Susie had met on the Riviera and who, she presently discovered, was a colleague of Arthur’s at St Luke’s. He was a prosperous bachelor with grey hair and a red, contented face, well-to-do, for his practice was large, and lavish with his money. He had taken Susie out to luncheon once or twice in Monte Carlo; for he liked women, pretty or plain, and she attracted him by her good-humour. He rushed up to them now and wrung their hands. He spoke in a jovial voice.

‘The very people I wanted to see! Why haven’t you been to see me, you wicked woman? I’m sure your eyes are in a deplorable condition.’

‘Do you think I would let a bold, bad man like you stare into them with an ophthalmoscope?’ laughed Susie.

‘Now look here, I want you both to do me a great favour. I’m giving a supper party at the Savoy, and two of my people have suddenly failed me. The table is ordered for eight, and you must come and take their places.’

‘I’m afraid I must get home,’ said Arthur. ‘I have a deuce of a lot of work to do.’

‘Nonsense,’ answered Arbuthnot. ‘You work much too hard, and a little relaxation will do you good.’ He turned to Susie: ‘I know you like curiosities in human nature; I’m having a man and his wife who will positively thrill you, they’re so queer, and a lovely actress, and an awfully jolly American girl.’

‘I should love to come,’ said Susie, with an appealing look at Arthur, ‘if only to show you how much more amusing I am than lovely actresses.’

Arthur, forcing himself to smile, accepted the invitation. The specialist patted him cheerily on the back, and they agreed to meet at the Savoy.

‘It’s awfully good of you to come,’ said Susie, as they drove along. ‘Do you know, I’ve never been there in my life, and I’m palpitating with excitement.’

‘What a selfish brute I was to refuse!’ he answered.

When Susie came out of the dressing-room, she found Arthur waiting for her. She was in the best of spirits.

‘Now you must say you like my frock. I’ve seen six women turn green with envy at the sight of it. They think I must be French, and they’re sure I’m not respectable.’

‘That is evidently a great compliment,’ he smiled.

At that moment Arbuthnot came up to them in his eager way and seized their arms.

‘Come along. We’re waiting for you. I’ll just introduce you all round, and then we’ll go in to supper.’

They walked down the steps into the foyer, and he led them to a group of people. They found themselves face to face with Oliver Haddo and Margaret.

‘Mr Arthur Burdon — Mrs Haddo. Mr Burdon is a colleague of mine at St Luke’s; and he will cut out your appendix in a shorter time than any man alive.’

Arbuthnot rattled on. He did not notice that Arthur had grown ghastly pale and that Margaret was blank with consternation. Haddo, his heavy face wreathed with smiles, stepped forward heartily. He seemed thoroughly to enjoy the situation.

‘Mr Burdon is an old friend of ours,’ he said. ‘In fact, it was he who introduced me to my wife. And Miss Boyd and I have discussed Art and the Immortality of the Soul with the gravity due to such topics.’

He held out his hand, and Susie took it. She had a horror of scenes, and, though this encounter was as unexpected as it was disagreeable, she felt it needful to behave naturally. She shook hands with Margaret.

‘How disappointing!’ cried their host. ‘I was hoping to give Miss Boyd something quite new in the way of magicians, and behold! she knows all about him.’

‘If she did, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t speak to me,’ said Oliver, with a bantering smile.

They went into the supper-room.

‘Now, how shall we sit?’ said Arbuthnot, glancing round the table.

Oliver looked at Arthur, and his eyes twinkled.

‘You must really let my wife and Mr Burdon be together. They haven’t seen one another for so long that I’m sure they have no end of things to talk about.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘And pray give me Miss Boyd, so that she can abuse me to her heart’s content.’

This arrangement thoroughly suited the gay specialist, for he was able to put the beautiful actress on one side of him and the charming American on the other. He rubbed his hands.

‘I feel that we’re going to have a delightful supper.’

Oliver laughed boisterously. He took, as was his habit, the whole conversation upon himself, and Susie was obliged to confess that he was at his best. There was a grotesque drollery about him that was very diverting, and it was almost impossible to resist him. He ate and drank with tremendous appetite. Susie thanked her stars at that moment that she was a woman who knew by long practice how to conceal her feelings, for Arthur, overcome with dismay at the meeting, sat in stony silence. But she talked gaily. She chaffed Oliver as though he were an old friend, and laughed vivaciously. She noticed meanwhile that Haddo, more extravagantly dressed than usual, had managed to get an odd fantasy into his evening clothes: he wore knee-breeches, which in itself was enough to excite attention; but his frilled shirt, his velvet collar, and oddly-cut satin waistcoat gave him the appearance of a comic Frenchman. Now that she was able to examine him more closely, she saw that in the last six months he was grown much balder; and the shiny whiteness of his naked crown contrasted oddly with the redness of his face. He was stouter, too, and the fat hung in heavy folds under his chin; his paunch was preposterous. The vivacity of his movements made his huge corpulence subtly alarming. He was growing indeed strangely terrible in appearance. His eyes had still that fixed, parallel look, but there was in them now at times a ferocious gleam. Margaret was as beautiful as ever, but Susie noticed that his influence was apparent in her dress; for there could be no doubt that it had crossed the line of individuality and had degenerated into the eccentric. Her gown was much too gorgeous. It told against the classical character of her beauty. Susie shuddered a little, for it reminded her of a courtesan’s.

Margaret talked and laughed as much as her husband, but Susie could not tell whether this animation was affected or due to an utter callousness. Her voice seemed natural enough, yet it was inconceivable that she should be so lighthearted. Perhaps she was trying to show that she was happy. The supper proceeded, and the lights, the surrounding gaiety, the champagne, made everyone more lively. Their host was in uproarious spirits. He told a story or two at which everyone laughed. Oliver Haddo had an amusing anecdote handy. It was a little risky, but it was so funnily narrated that everyone roared but Arthur, who remained in perfect silence. Margaret had been drinking glass after glass of wine, and no sooner had her husband finished than she capped his story with another. But whereas his was wittily immoral, hers was simply gross. At first the other women could not understand to what she was tending, but when they saw, they looked down awkwardly at their plates. Arbuthnot, Haddo, and the other man who was there laughed very heartily; but Arthur flushed to the roots of his hair. He felt horribly uncomfortable. He was ashamed. He dared not look at Margaret. It was inconceivable that from her exquisite mouth such indecency should issue. Margaret, apparently quite unconscious of the effect she had produced, went on talking and laughing.

Soon the lights were put out, and Arthur’s agony was ended. He wanted to rush away, to hide his face, to forget the sight of her and her gaiety, above all to forget that story. It was horrible, horrible.

She shook hands with him quite lightly.

‘You must come and see us one day. We’ve got rooms at the Carlton.’

He bowed and did not answer. Susie had gone to the dressing-room to get her cloak. She stood at the door when Margaret came out.

‘Can we drop you anywhere?’ said Margaret. ‘You must come and see us when you have nothing better to do.’

Susie threw back her head. Arthur was standing just in front of them looking down at the ground in complete abstraction.

‘Do you see him?’ she said, in a low voice quivering with indignation.

‘That is what you have made him.’

He looked up at that moment and turned upon them his sunken, tormented eyes. They saw his wan, pallid face with its look of hopeless woe.

‘Do you know that he’s killing himself on your account? He can’t sleep at night. He’s suffered the tortures of the damned. Oh, I hope you’ll suffer as he’s suffered!’

‘I wonder that you blame me,’ said Margaret. ‘You ought to be rather grateful.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re not going to deny that you’ve loved him passionately from the first day you saw him? Do you think I didn’t see that you cared for him in Paris? You care for him now more than ever.’

Susie felt suddenly sick at heart. She had never dreamt that her secret was discovered. Margaret gave a bitter little laugh and walked past her.

12

Arthur Burdon spent two or three days in a state of utter uncertainty, but at last the idea he had in mind grew so compelling as to overcome all objections. He went to the Carlton and asked for Margaret. He had learnt from the porter that Haddo was gone out and so counted on finding her alone. A simple device enabled him to avoid sending up his name. When he was shown into her private room Margaret was sitting down. She neither read nor worked.

‘You told me I might call upon you,’ said Arthur.

She stood up without answering, and turned deathly pale.

‘May I sit down?’ he asked.

She bowed her head. For a moment they looked at one another in silence. Arthur suddenly forgot all he had prepared to say. His intrusion seemed intolerable.

‘Why have you come?’ she said hoarsely.

They both felt that it was useless to attempt the conventionality of society. It was impossible to deal with the polite commonplaces that ease an awkward situation.

‘I thought that I might be able to help you,’ he answered gravely.

‘I want no help. I’m perfectly happy. I have nothing to say to you.’

She spoke hurriedly, with a certain nervousness, and her eyes were fixed anxiously on the door as though she feared that someone would come in.

‘I feel that we have much to say to one another,’ he insisted. ‘If it is inconvenient for us to talk here, will you not come and see me?’

‘He’d know,’ she cried suddenly, as if the words were dragged out of her.

‘D’you think anything can be hidden from him?’

Arthur glanced at her. He was horrified by the terror that was in her eyes. In the full light of day a change was plain in her expression. Her face was strangely drawn, and pinched, and there was in it a constant look as of a person cowed. Arthur turned away.

‘I want you to know that I do not blame you in the least for anything you did. No action of yours can ever lessen my affection for you.’

‘Oh, why did you come here? Why do you torture me by saying such things?’

She burst on a sudden into a flood of tears, and walked excitedly up and down the room.

‘Oh, if you wanted me to be punished for the pain I’ve caused you, you can triumph now. Susie said she hoped I’d suffer all the agony that I’ve made you suffer. If she only knew!’

Margaret gave a hysterical laugh. She flung herself on her knees by

Arthur’s side and seized his hands.

‘Did you think I didn’t see? My heart bled when I looked at your poor wan face and your tortured eyes. Oh, you’ve changed. I could never have believed that a man could change so much in so few months, and it’s I who’ve caused it all. Oh, Arthur, Arthur, you must forgive me. And you must pity me.’

‘But there’s nothing to forgive, darling,’ he cried.

She looked at him steadily. Her eyes now were shining with a hard brightness.

‘You say that, but you don’t really think it. And yet if you only knew, all that I have endured is on your account.’

She made a great effort to be calm.

‘What do you mean?’ said Arthur.

‘He never loved me, he would never have thought of me if he hadn’t wanted to wound you in what you treasured most. He hated you, and he’s made me what I am so that you might suffer. It isn’t I who did all this, but a devil within me; it isn’t I who lied to you and left you and caused you all this unhappiness.’

She rose to her feet and sighed deeply.

‘Once, I thought he was dying, and I helped him. I took him into the studio and gave him water. And he gained some dreadful power over me so that I’ve been like wax in his hands. All my will has disappeared, and I have to do his bidding. And if I try to resist …’

Her face twitched with pain and fear.

‘I’ve found out everything since. I know that on that day when he seemed to be at the point of death, he was merely playing a trick on me, and he got Susie out of the way by sending a telegram from a girl whose name he had seen on a photograph. I’ve heard him roar with laughter at his cleverness.’

She stopped suddenly, and a look of frightful agony crossed her face.

‘And at this very minute, for all I know, it may be by his influence that I say this to you, so that he may cause you still greater suffering by allowing me to tell you that he never cared for me. You know now that my life is hell, and his vengeance is complete.’

‘Vengeance for what?’

‘Don’t you remember that you hit him once, and kicked him unmercifully? I know him well now. He could have killed you, but he hated you too much. It pleased him a thousand times more to devise this torture for you and me.’

Margaret’s agitation was terrible to behold. This was the first time that she had ever spoken to a soul of all these things, and now the long restraint had burst as burst the waters of a dam. Arthur sought to calm her.

‘You’re ill and overwrought. You must try to compose yourself. After all,

Haddo is a human being like the rest of us.’

‘Yes, you always laughed at his claims. You wouldn’t listen to the things he said. But I know. Oh, I can’t explain it; I daresay common sense and probability are all against it, but I’ve seen things with my own eyes that pass all comprehension. I tell you, he has powers of the most awful kind. That first day when I was alone with him, he seemed to take me to some kind of sabbath. I don’t know what it was, but I saw horrors, vile horrors, that rankled for ever after like poison in my mind; and when we went up to his house in Staffordshire, I recognized the scene; I recognized the arid rocks, and the trees, and the lie of the land. I knew I’d been there before on that fatal afternoon. Oh, you must believe me! Sometimes I think I shall go mad with the terror of it all.’

Arthur did not speak. Her words caused a ghastly suspicion to flash through his mind, and he could hardly contain himself. He thought that some dreadful shock had turned her brain. She buried her face in her hands.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you must come away at once. You can’t continue to live with him. You must never go back to Skene.’

‘I can’t leave him. We’re bound together inseparably.’

‘But it’s monstrous. There can be nothing to keep you to him. Come back to Susie. She’ll be very kind to you; she’ll help you to forget all you’ve endured.’

‘It’s no use. You can do nothing for me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, notwithstanding, I love him with all my soul.’

‘Margaret!’

‘I hate him. He fills me with repulsion. And yet I do not know what there is in my blood that draws me to him against my will. My flesh cries out for him.’

Arthur looked away in embarrassment. He could not help a slight, instinctive movement of withdrawal.

‘Do I disgust you?’ she said.

He flushed slightly, but scarcely knew how to answer. He made a vague gesture of denial.

‘If you only knew,’ she said.

There was something so extraordinary in her tone that he gave her a quick glance of surprise. He saw that her cheeks were flaming. Her bosom was panting as though she were again on the point of breaking into a passion of tears.

‘For God’s sake, don’t look at me!’ she cried.

She turned away and hid her face. The words she uttered were in a shamed, unnatural voice.

‘If you’d been at Monte Carlo, you’d have heard them say, God knows how they knew it, that it was only through me he had his luck at the tables. He’s contented himself with filling my soul with vice. I have no purity in me. I’m sullied through and through. He has made me into a sink of iniquity, and I loathe myself. I cannot look at myself without a shudder of disgust.’

A cold sweat came over Arthur, and he grew more pale than ever. He realized now he was in the presence of a mystery that he could not unravel. She went on feverishly.

‘The other night, at supper, I told a story, and I saw you wince with shame. It wasn’t I that told it. The impulse came from him, and I knew it was vile, and yet I told it with gusto. I enjoyed the telling of it; I enjoyed the pain I gave you, and the dismay of those women. There seem to be two persons in me, and my real self, the old one that you knew and loved, is growing weaker day by day, and soon she will be dead entirely. And there will remain only the wanton soul in the virgin body.’

Arthur tried to gather his wits together. He felt it an occasion on which it was essential to hold on to the normal view of things.

‘But for God’s sake leave him. What you’ve told me gives you every ground for divorce. It’s all monstrous. The man must be so mad that he ought to be put in a lunatic asylum.’

‘You can do nothing for me,’ she said.

‘But if he doesn’t love you, what does he want you for?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m beginning to suspect.’

She looked at Arthur steadily. She was now quite calm.

‘I think he wishes to use me for a magical operation. I don’t know if he’s mad or not. But I think he means to try some horrible experiment, and I am needful for its success. That is my safeguard.’

‘Your safeguard?’

‘He won’t kill me because he needs me for that. Perhaps in the process I shall regain my freedom.’

Arthur was shocked at the callousness with which she spoke. He went up to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

‘Look here, you must pull yourself together, Margaret. This isn’t sane. If you don’t take care, your mind will give way altogether. You must come with me now. When you’re out of his hands, you’ll soon regain your calmness of mind. You need never see him again. If you’re afraid, you shall be hidden from him, and lawyers shall arrange everything between you.’

‘I daren’t.’

‘But I promise you that you can come to no harm. Be reasonable. We’re in London now, surrounded by people on every side. How do you think he can touch you while we drive through the crowded streets? I’ll take you straight to Susie. In a week you’ll laugh at the idle fears you had.’

‘How do you know that he is not in the room at this moment, listening to all you say?’

The question was so sudden, so unexpected, that Arthur was startled. He looked round quickly.

‘You must be mad. You see that the room is empty.’

‘I tell you that you don’t know what powers he has. Have you ever heard those old legends with which nurses used to frighten our childhood, of men who could turn themselves into wolves, and who scoured the country at night?’ She looked at him with staring eyes. ‘Sometimes, when he’s come in at Skene in the morning, with bloodshot eyes, exhausted with fatigue and strangely discomposed, I’ve imagined that he too …’ She stopped and threw back her head. ‘You’re right, Arthur, I think I shall go mad.’

He watched her helplessly. He did not know what to do. Margaret went on, her voice quivering with anguish.

‘When we were married, I reminded him that he’d promised to take me to his mother. He would never speak of her, but I felt I must see her. And one day, suddenly, he told me to get ready for a journey, and we went a long way, to a place I did not know, and we drove into the country. We seemed to go miles and miles, and we reached at last a large house, surrounded by a high wall, and the windows were heavily barred. We were shown into a great empty room. It was dismal and cold like the waiting-room at a station. A man came in to us, a tall man, in a frock-coat and gold spectacles. He was introduced to me as Dr Taylor, and then, suddenly, I understood.’

Margaret spoke in hurried gasps, and her eyes were staring wide, as though she saw still the scene which at the time had seemed the crowning horror of her experience.

‘I knew it was an asylum, and Oliver hadn’t told me a word. He took us up a broad flight of stairs, through a large dormitory — oh, if you only knew what I saw there! I was so horribly frightened, I’d never been in such a place before — to a cell. And the walls and the floor were padded.’

Margaret passed her hand across her forehead to chase away the recollection of that awful sight.

‘Oh, I see it still. I can never get it out of my mind.’

She remembered with a morbid vividness the vast misshapen mass which she had seen heaped strangely in one corner. There was a slight movement in it as they entered, and she perceived that it was a human being. It was a woman, dressed in shapeless brown flannel; a woman of great stature and of a revolting, excessive corpulence. She turned upon them a huge, impassive face; and its unwrinkled smoothness gave it an appearance of aborted childishness. The hair was dishevelled, grey, and scanty. But what most terrified Margaret was that she saw in this creature an appalling likeness to Oliver.

‘He told me it was his mother, and she’d been there for five-and-twenty years.’

Arthur could hardly bear the terror that was in Margaret’s eyes. He did not know what to say to her. In a little while she began to speak again, in a low voice and rapidly, as though to herself, and she wrung her hands.

‘Oh, you don’t know what I’ve endured! He used to spend long periods away from me, and I remained alone at Skene from morning till night, alone with my abject fear. Sometimes, it seemed that he was seized with a devouring lust for the gutter, and he would go to Liverpool or Manchester and throw himself among the very dregs of the people. He used to pass long days, drinking in filthy pot-houses. While the bout lasted, nothing was too depraved for him. He loved the company of all that was criminal and low. He used to smoke opium in foetid dens — oh, you have no conception of his passion to degrade himself — and at last he would come back, dirty, with torn clothes, begrimed, sodden still with his long debauch; and his mouth was hot with the kisses of the vile women of the docks. Oh, he’s so cruel when the fit takes him that I think he has a fiendish pleasure in the sight of suffering!’

It was more than Arthur could stand. His mind was made up to try a bold course. He saw on the table a whisky bottle and glasses. He poured some neat spirit into a tumbler and gave it to Margaret.

‘Drink this,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Never mind! Drink it at once.’

Obediently she put it to her lips. He stood over her as she emptied the glass. A sudden glow filled her.

‘Now come with me.’

He took her arm and led her down the stairs. He passed through the hall quickly. There was a cab just drawn up at the door, and he told her to get in. One or two persons stared at seeing a woman come out of that hotel in a teagown and without a hat. He directed the driver to the house in which Susie lived and looked round at Margaret. She had fainted immediately she got into the cab.

When they arrived, he carried Margaret upstairs and laid her on a sofa. He told Susie what had happened and what he wanted of her. The dear woman forgot everything except that Margaret was very ill, and promised willingly to do all he wished.

* * * * *

For a week Margaret could not be moved. Arthur hired a little cottage in Hampshire, opposite the Isle of Wight, hoping that amid the most charming, restful scenery in England she would quickly regain her strength; and as soon as it was possible Susie took her down. But she was much altered. Her gaiety had disappeared and with it her determination. Although her illness had been neither long nor serious, she seemed as exhausted, physically and mentally, as if she had been for months at the point of death. She took no interest in her surroundings, and was indifferent to the shady lanes through which they drove and to the gracious trees and the meadows. Her old passion for beauty was gone, and she cared neither for the flowers which filled their little garden nor for the birds that sang continually. But at last it seemed necessary to discuss the future. Margaret acquiesced in all that was suggested to her, and agreed willingly that the needful steps should be taken to procure her release from Oliver Haddo. He made apparently no effort to trace her, and nothing had been heard of him. He did not know where Margaret was, but he might have guessed that Arthur was responsible for her flight, and Arthur was easily to be found. It made Susie vaguely uneasy that there was no sign of his existence. She wished that Arthur were not kept by his work in London.

At last a suit for divorce was instituted.

Two days after this, when Arthur was in his consultingroom, Haddo’s card was brought to him. Arthur’s jaw set more firmly.

‘Show the gentleman in,’ he ordered.

When Haddo entered, Arthur, standing with his back to the fireplace, motioned him to sit down.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked coldly.

‘I have not come to avail myself of your surgical skill, my dear Burdon,’ smiled Haddo, as he fell ponderously into an armchair.

‘So I imagined.’

‘You perspicacity amazes me. I surmise that it is to you I owe this amusing citation which was served on me yesterday.’

‘I allowed you to come in so that I might tell you I will have no communication with you except through my solicitors.’

‘My dear fellow, why do you treat me with such discourtesy? It is true that you have deprived me of the wife of my bosom, but you might at least so far respect my marital rights as to use me civilly.’

‘My patience is not as good as it was,’ answered Arthur, ‘I venture to remind you that once before I lost my temper with you, and the result you must have found unpleasant.’

‘I should have thought you regretted that incident by now, O Burdon,’ answered Haddo, entirely unabashed.

‘My time is very short,’ said Arthur.

‘Then I will get to my business without delay. I thought it might interest you to know that I propose to bring a counter-petition against my wife, and I shall make you co-respondent.’

‘You infamous blackguard!’ cried Arthur furiously. ‘You know as well as I do that your wife is above suspicion.’

‘I know that she left my hotel in your company, and has been living since under your protection.’

Arthur grew livid with rage. He could hardly restrain himself from knocking the man down. He gave a short laugh.

‘You can do what you like. I’m really not frightened.’

‘The innocent are so very incautious. I assure you that I can make a good enough story to ruin your career and force you to resign your appointments at the various hospitals you honour with your attention.’

‘You forget that the case will not be tried in open court,’ said Arthur.

Haddo looked at him steadily. He did not answer for a moment.

‘You’re quite right,’ he said at last, with a little smile. ‘I had forgotten that.’

‘Then I need not detain you longer.’

Oliver Haddo got up. He passed his hand reflectively over his huge face. Arthur watched him with scornful eyes. He touched a bell, and the servant at once appeared.

‘Show this gentleman out.’

Not in the least disconcerted, Haddo strolled calmly to the door.

Arthur gave a sigh of relief, for he concluded that Haddo would not show fight. His solicitor indeed had already assured him that Oliver would not venture to defend the case.

Margaret seemed gradually to take more interest in the proceedings, and she was full of eagerness to be set free. She did not shrink from the unpleasant ordeal of a trial. She could talk of Haddo with composure. Her friends were able to persuade themselves that in a little while she would be her old self again, for she was growing stronger and more cheerful; her charming laughter rang through the little house as it had been used to do in the Paris studio. The case was to come on at the end of July, before the long vacation, and Susie had agreed to take Margaret abroad as soon as it was done.

But presently a change came over her. As the day of the trial drew nearer, Margaret became excited and disturbed; her gaiety deserted her, and she fell into long, moody silences. To some extent this was comprehensible, for she would have to disclose to callous ears the most intimate details of her married life; but at last her nervousness grew so marked that Susie could no longer ascribe it to natural causes. She thought it necessary to write to Arthur about it.

My Dear Arthur:

I don’t know what to make of Margaret, and I wish you would come down and see her. The good-humour which I have noticed in her of late has given way to a curious irritability. She is so restless that she cannot keep still for a moment. Even when she is sitting down her body moves in a manner that is almost convulsive. I am beginning to think that the strain from which she suffered is bringing on some nervous disease, and I am really alarmed. She walks about the house in a peculiarly aimless manner, up and down the stairs, in and out of the garden. She has grown suddenly much more silent, and the look has come back to her eyes which they had when first we brought her down here. When I beg her to tell me what is troubling her, she says: ‘I’m afraid that something is going to happen.’ She will not or cannot explain what she means. The last few weeks have set my own nerves on edge, so that I do not know how much of what I observe is real, and how much is due to my fancy; but I wish you would come and put a little courage into me. The oddness of it all is making me uneasy, and I am seized with preposterous terrors. I don’t know what there is in Haddo that inspires me with this unaccountable dread. He is always present to my thoughts. I seem to see his dreadful eyes and his cold, sensual smile. I wake up at night, my heart beating furiously, with the consciousness that something quite awful has happened.

Oh, I wish the trial were over, and that we were happy in Germany.

Yours ever

SUSAN BOYD

Susie took a certain pride in her common sense, and it was humiliating to find that her nerves could be so distraught. She was worried and unhappy. It had not been easy to take Margaret back to her bosom as if nothing had happened. Susie was human; and, though she did ten times more than could be expected of her, she could not resist a feeling of irritation that Arthur sacrificed her so calmly. He had no room for other thoughts, and it seemed quite natural to him that she should devote herself entirely to Margaret’s welfare.

Susie walked some way along the road to post this letter and then went to her room. It was a wonderful night, starry and calm, and the silence was like balm to her troubles. She sat at the window for a long time, and at last, feeling more tranquil, went to bed. She slept more soundly than she had done for many days. When she awoke the sun was streaming into her room, and she gave a deep sigh of delight. She could see trees from her bed, and blue sky. All her troubles seemed easy to bear when the world was so beautiful, and she was ready to laugh at the fears that had so affected her.

She got up, put on a dressing-gown, and went to Margaret’s room. It was empty. The bed had not been slept in. On the pillow was a note.

It’s no good; I can’t help myself. I’ve gone back to him. Don’t trouble about me any more. It’s quite hopeless and useless.

“M”

Susie gave a little gasp. Her first thought was for Arthur, and she uttered a wail of sorrow because he must be cast again into the agony of desolation. Once more she had to break the dreadful news. She dressed hurriedly and ate some breakfast. There was no train till nearly eleven, and she had to bear her impatience as best she could. At last it was time to start, and she put on her gloves. At that moment the door was opened, and Arthur came in.

She gave a cry of terror and turned pale.

‘I was just coming to London to see you,’ she faltered. ‘How did you find out?’

‘Haddo sent me a box of chocolates early this morning with a card on which was written: I think the odd trick is mine.’

This cruel vindictiveness, joined with a schoolboy love of taunting the vanquished foe, was very characteristic. Susie gave Arthur Burdon the note which she had found in Margaret’s room. He read it and then thought for a long time.

‘I’m afraid she’s right,’ he said at length. ‘It seems quite hopeless.

The man has some power over her which we can’t counteract.’

Susie wondered whether his strong scepticism was failing at last. She could not withstand her own feeling that there was something preternatural about the hold that Oliver had over Margaret. She had no shadow of a doubt that he was able to affect his wife even at a distance, and was convinced now that the restlessness of the last few days was due to this mysterious power. He had been at work in some strange way, and Margaret had been aware of it. At length she could not resist and had gone to him instinctively: her will was as little concerned as when a chip of steel flies to a magnet.

‘I cannot find it in my heart now to blame her for anything she has done,’ said Susie. ‘I think she is the victim of a most lamentable fate. I can’t help it. I must believe that he was able to cast a spell on her; and to that is due all that has happened. I have only pity for her great misfortunes.’

‘Has it occurred to you what will happen when she is back in Haddo’s hands?’ cried Arthur. ‘You know as well as I do how revengeful he is and how hatefully cruel. My heart bleeds when I think of the tortures, sheer physical tortures, which she may suffer.’

He walked up and down in desperation.

‘And yet there’s nothing whatever that one can do. One can’t go to the police and say that a man has cast a magic spell on his wife.’

‘Then you believe it too?’ said Susie.

‘I don’t know what I believe now,’ he cried. ‘After all, we can’t do anything if she chooses to go back to her husband. She’s apparently her own mistress.’ He wrung his hands. ‘And I’m imprisoned in London! I can’t leave it for a day. I ought not to be here now, and I must get back in a couple of hours. I can do nothing, and yet I’m convinced that Margaret is utterly wretched.’

Susie paused for a minute or two. She wondered how he would accept the suggestion that was in her mind.

‘Do you know, it seems to me that common methods are useless. The only chance is to fight him with his own weapons. Would you mind if I went over to Paris to consult Dr Porhoët? You know that he is learned in every branch of the occult, and perhaps he might help us.’

But Arthur pulled himself together.

‘It’s absurd. We mustn’t give way to superstition. Haddo is merely a scoundrel and a charlatan. He’s worked on our nerves as he’s worked on poor Margaret’s. It’s impossible to suppose that he has any powers greater than the common run of mankind.’

‘Even after all you’ve seen with your own eyes?’

‘If my eyes show me what all my training assures me is impossible, I can only conclude that my eyes deceive me.’

‘Well, I shall run over to Paris.’

13

Some weeks later Dr Porhoët was sitting among his books in the quiet, low room that overlooked the Seine. He had given himself over to a pleasing melancholy. The heat beat down upon the noisy streets of Paris, and the din of the great city penetrated even to his fastness in the Île Saint Louis. He remembered the cloud-laden sky of the country where he was born, and the south-west wind that blew with a salt freshness. The long streets of Brest, present to his fancy always in a drizzle of rain, with the lights of cafés reflected on the wet pavements, had a familiar charm. Even in foul weather the sailor-men who trudged along them gave one a curious sense of comfort. There was delight in the smell of the sea and in the freedom of the great Atlantic. And then he thought of the green lanes and of the waste places with their scented heather, the fair broad roads that led from one old sweet town to another, of the Pardons and their gentle, sad crowds. Dr Porhoët gave a sigh.

‘It is good to be born in the land of Brittany,’ he smiled.

But his bonne showed Susie in, and he rose with a smile to greet her. She had been in Paris for some time, and they had seen much of one another. He basked in the gentle sympathy with which she interested herself in all the abstruse, quaint matters on which he spent his time; and, divining her love for Arthur, he admired the courage with which she effaced herself. They had got into the habit of eating many of their meals together in a quiet house opposite the Cluny called La Reine Blanche, and here they had talked of so many things that their acquaintance was grown into a charming friendship.

‘I’m ashamed to come here so often,’ said Susie, as she entered. ‘Matilde is beginning to look at me with a suspicious eye.’

‘It is very good of you to entertain a tiresome old man,’ he smiled, as he held her hand. ‘But I should have been disappointed if you had forgotten your promise to come this afternoon, for I have much to tell you.’

‘Tell me at once,’ she said, sitting down.

‘I have discovered an MS. at the library of the Arsenal this morning that no one knew anything about.’

He said this with an air of triumph, as though the achievement were of national importance. Susie had a tenderness for his innocent mania; and, though she knew the work in question was occult and incomprehensible, congratulated him heartily.

‘It is the original version of a book by Paracelsus. I have not read it yet, for the writing is most difficult to decipher, but one point caught my eye on turning over the pages. That is the gruesome fact that Paracelsus fed the homunculi he manufactured on human blood. One wonders how he came by it.’

Susie gave a little start, which Dr Porhoët noticed.

‘What is the matter with you?’

‘Nothing,’ she said quickly.

He looked at her for a moment, then proceeded with the subject that strangely fascinated him.

‘You must let me take you one day to the library of the Arsenal. There is no richer collection in the world of books dealing with the occult sciences. And of course you know that it was at the Arsenal that the tribunal sat, under the suggestive name of chambre ardente, to deal with cases of sorcery and magic?’

‘I didn’t,’ smiled Susie.

‘I always think that these manuscripts and queer old books, which are the pride of our library, served in many an old trial. There are volumes there of innocent appearance that have hanged wretched men and sent others to the stake. You would not believe how many persons of fortune, rank, and intelligence, during the great reign of Louis XIV, immersed themselves in these satanic undertakings.’

Susie did not answer. She could not now deal with these matters in an indifferent spirit. Everything she heard might have some bearing on the circumstances which she had discussed with Dr Porhoët times out of number. She had never been able to pin him down to an affirmation of faith. Certain strange things had manifestly happened, but what the explanation of them was, no man could say. He offered analogies from his well-stored memory. He gave her books to read till she was saturated with occult science. At one moment, she was inclined to throw them all aside impatiently, and, at another, was ready to believe that everything was possible.

Dr Porhoët stood up and stretched out a meditative finger. He spoke in that agreeably academic manner which, at the beginning of their acquaintance, had always entertained Susie, because it contrasted so absurdly with his fantastic utterances.

‘It was a strange dream that these wizards cherished. They sought to make themselves beloved of those they cared for and to revenge themselves on those they hated; but, above all, they sought to become greater than the common run of men and to wield the power of the gods. They hesitated at nothing to gain their ends. But Nature with difficulty allows her secrets to be wrested from her. In vain they lit their furnaces, and in vain they studied their crabbed books, called up the dead, and conjured ghastly spirits. Their reward was disappointment and wretchedness, poverty, the scorn of men, torture, imprisonment, and shameful death. And yet, perhaps after all, there may be some particle of truth hidden away in these dark places.’

‘You never go further than the cautious perhaps,’ said Susie. ‘You never give me any definite opinion.’

‘In these matters it is discreet to have no definite opinion,’ he smiled, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘If a wise man studies the science of the occult, his duty is not to laugh at everything, but to seek patiently, slowly, perseveringly, the truth that may be concealed in the night of these illusions.’

The words were hardly spoken when Matilde, the ancient bonne, opened the door to let a visitor come in. It was Arthur Burdon. Susie gave a cry of surprise, for she had received a brief note from him two days before, and he had said nothing of crossing the Channel.

‘I’m glad to find you both here,’ said Arthur, as he shook hands with them.

‘Has anything happened?’ cried Susie.

His manner was curiously distressing, and there was a nervousness about his movements that was very unexpected in so restrained a person.

‘I’ve seen Margaret again,’ he said.

‘Well?’

He seemed unable to go on, and yet both knew that he had something important to tell them. He looked at them vacantly, as though all he had to say was suddenly gone out of his mind.

‘I’ve come straight here,’ he said, in a dull, bewildered fashion. ‘I went to your hotel, Susie, in the hope of finding you; but when they told me you were out, I felt certain you would be here.’

‘You seem worn out, cher ami,’ said Dr Porhoët, looking at him. ‘Will you let Matilde make you a cup of coffee?’

‘I should like something,’ he answered, with a look of utter weariness.

‘Sit still for a minute or two, and you shall tell us what you want to when you are a little rested.’

Dr Porhoët had not seen Arthur since that afternoon in the previous year when, in answer to Haddo’s telegram, he had gone to the studio in the Rue Campagne Première. He watched him anxiously while Arthur drank his coffee. The change in him was extraordinary; there was a cadaverous exhaustion about his face, and his eyes were sunken in their sockets. But what alarmed the good doctor most was that Arthur’s personality seemed thoroughly thrown out of gear. All that he had endured during these nine months had robbed him of the strength of purpose, the matter-of-fact sureness, which had distinguished him. He was now unbalanced and neurotic.

Arthur did not speak. With his eyes fixed moodily on the ground, he wondered how much he could bring himself to tell them. It revolted him to disclose his inmost thoughts, yet he was come to the end of his tether and needed the doctor’s advice. He found himself obliged to deal with circumstances that might have existed in a world of nightmare, and he was driven at last to take advantage of his friend’s peculiar knowledge.

Returning to London after Margaret’s flight, Arthur Burdon had thrown himself again into the work which for so long had been his only solace. It had lost its savour; but he would not take this into account, and he slaved away mechanically, by perpetual toil seeking to deaden his anguish. But as the time passed he was seized on a sudden with a curious feeling of foreboding, which he could in no way resist; it grew in strength till it had all the power of an obsession, and he could not reason himself out of it. He was sure that a great danger threatened Margaret. He could not tell what it was, nor why the fear of it was so persistent, but the idea was there always, night and day; it haunted him like a shadow and pursued him like remorse. His anxiety increased continually, and the vagueness of his terror made it more tormenting. He felt quite certain that Margaret was in imminent peril, but he did not know how to help her. Arthur supposed that Haddo had taken her back to Skene; but, even if he went there, he had no chance of seeing her. What made it more difficult still, was that his chief at St Luke’s was away, and he was obliged to be in London in case he should be suddenly called upon to do some operation. But he could think of nothing else. He felt it urgently needful to see Margaret. Night after night he dreamed that she was at the point of death, and heavy fetters prevented him from stretching out a hand to help her. At last he could stand it no more. He told a brother surgeon that private business forced him to leave London, and put the work into his hands. With no plan in his head, merely urged by an obscure impulse, he set out for the village of Venning, which was about three miles from Skene.

It was a tiny place, with one public-house serving as a hotel to the rare travellers who found it needful to stop there, and Arthur felt that some explanation of his presence was necessary. Having seen at the station an advertisement of a large farm to let, he told the inquisitive landlady that he had come to see it. He arrived late at night. Nothing could be done then, so he occupied the time by trying to find out something about the Haddos.

Oliver was the local magnate, and his wealth would have made him an easy topic of conversation even without his eccentricity. The landlady roundly called him insane, and as an instance of his queerness told Arthur, to his great dismay, that Haddo would have no servants to sleep in the house: after dinner everyone was sent away to the various cottages in the park, and he remained alone with his wife. It was an awful thought that Margaret might be in the hands of a raving madman, with not a soul to protect her. But if he learnt no more than this of solid fact, Arthur heard much that was significant. To his amazement the old fear of the wizard had grown up again in that lonely place, and the garrulous woman gravely told him of Haddo’s evil influence on the crops and cattle of farmers who had aroused his anger. He had had an altercation with his bailiff, and the man had died within a year. A small freeholder in the neighbourhood had refused to sell the land which would have rounded off the estate of Skene, and a disease had attacked every animal on his farm so that he was ruined. Arthur was impressed because, though she reported these rumours with mock scepticism as the stories of ignorant yokels and old women, the innkeeper had evidently a terrified belief in their truth. No one could deny that Haddo had got possession of the land he wanted; for, when it was put up to auction, no one would bid against him, and he bought it for a song.

As soon as he could do so naturally, Arthur asked after Margaret. The woman shrugged her shoulders. No one knew anything about her. She never came out of the park gates, but sometimes you could see her wandering about inside by herself. She saw no one. Haddo had long since quarrelled with the surrounding gentry; and though one old lady, the mother of a neighbouring landowner, had called when Margaret first came, she had not been admitted, and the visit was never returned.

‘She’ll come to no good, poor lady,’ said the hostess of the inn. ‘And they do say she’s a perfect picture to look at.’

Arthur went to his room. He longed for the day to come. There was no certain means of seeing Margaret. It was useless to go to the park gates, since even the tradesmen were obliged to leave their goods at the lodge; but it appeared that she walked alone, morning and afternoon, and it might be possible to see her then. He decided to climb into the park and wait till he came upon her in some spot where they were not likely to be observed.

Next day the great heat of the last week was gone, and the melancholy sky was dark with lowering clouds. Arthur inquired for the road which led to Skene, and set out to walk the three miles which separated him from it. The country was grey and barren. There was a broad waste of heath, with gigantic boulders strewn as though in pre-historic times Titans had waged there a mighty battle. Here and there were trees, but they seemed hardly to withstand the fierce winds of winter; they were old and bowed before the storm. One of them attracted his attention. It had been struck by lightning and was riven asunder, leafless; but the maimed branches were curiously set on the trunk so that they gave it the appearance of a human being writhing in the torture of infernal agony. The wind whistled strangely. Arthur’s heart sank as he walked on. He had never seen a country so desolate.

He came to the park gates at last and stood for some time in front of them. At the end of a long avenue, among the trees, he could see part of a splendid house. He walked along the wooden palisade that surrounded the park. Suddenly he came to a spot where a board had been broken down. He looked up and down the road. No one was in sight. He climbed up the low, steep bank, wrenched down a piece more of the fence, and slipped in.

He found himself in a dense wood. There was no sign of a path, and he advanced cautiously. The bracken was so thick and high that it easily concealed him. Dead owners had plainly spent much care upon the place, for here alone in the neighbourhood were trees in abundance; but of late it had been utterly neglected. It had run so wild that there were no traces now of its early formal arrangement; and it was so hard to make one’s way, the vegetation was so thick, that it might almost have been some remnant of primeval forest. But at last he came to a grassy path and walked along it slowly. He stopped on a sudden, for he heard a sound. But it was only a pheasant that flew heavily through the low trees. He wondered what he should do if he came face to face with Oliver. The innkeeper had assured him that the squire seldom came out, but spent his days locked in the great attics at the top of the house. Smoke came from the chimneys of them, even in the hottest days of summer, and weird tales were told of the devilries there committed.

Arthur went on, hoping in the end to catch sight of Margaret, but he saw no one. In that grey, chilly day the woods, notwithstanding their greenery, were desolate and sad. A sombre mystery seemed to hang over them. At last he came to a stone bench at a cross-way among the trees, and, since it was the only resting-place he had seen, it struck him that Margaret might come there to sit down. He hid himself in the bracken. He had forgotten his watch and did not know how the time passed; he seemed to be there for hours.

But at length his heart gave a great beat against his ribs, for all at once, so silently that he had not heard her approach, Margaret came into view. She sat on the stone bench. For a moment he dared not move in case the sound frightened her. He could not tell how to make his presence known. But it was necessary to do something to attract her attention, and he could only hope that she would not cry out.

‘Margaret,’ he called softly.

She did not move, and he repeated her name more loudly. But still she made no sign that she had heard. He came forward and stood in front of her.

‘Margaret.’

She looked at him quietly. He might have been someone she had never set eyes on, and yet from her composure she might have expected him to be standing there.

‘Margaret, don’t you know me?’

‘What do you want?’ she answered placidly.

He was so taken aback that he did not know what to say. She kept gazing at him steadfastly. On a sudden her calmness vanished, and she sprang to her feet.

‘Is it you really?’ she cried, terribly agitated. ‘I thought it was only a shape that mimicked you.’

‘Margaret, what do you mean? What has come over you?’

She stretched out her hand and touched him.

‘I’m flesh and blood all right,’ he said, trying to smile.

She shut her eyes for a moment, as though in an effort to collect herself.

‘I’ve had hallucinations lately,’ she muttered. ‘I thought it was some trick played upon me.’

Suddenly she shook herself.

‘But what are you doing here? You must go. How did you come? Oh, why won’t you leave me alone?’

‘I’ve been haunted by a feeling that something horrible was going to happen to you. I was obliged to come.’

‘For God’s sake, go. You can do me no good. If he finds out you’ve been here—’

She stopped, and her eyes were dilated with terror. Arthur seized her hands.

‘Margaret, I can’t go — I can’t leave you like this. For Heaven’s sake, tell me what is the matter. I’m so dreadfully frightened.’

He was aghast at the difference wrought in her during the two months since he had seen her last. Her colour was gone, and her face had the greyness of the dead. There were strange lines on her forehead, and her eyes had an unnatural glitter. Her youth had suddenly left her. She looked as if she were struck down by mortal illness.

‘What is that matter with you?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ She looked about her anxiously. ‘Oh, why don’t you go? How can you be so cruel?’

‘I must do something for you,’ he insisted.

She shook her head.

‘It’s too late. Nothing can help me now.’ She paused; and when she spoke again it was with a voice so ghastly that it might have come from the lips of a corpse. ‘I’ve found out at last what he’s going to do with me He wants me for his great experiment, and the time is growing shorter.’

‘What do you mean by saying he wants you?’

‘He wants — my life.’

Arthur gave a cry of dismay, but she put up her hand.

‘It’s no use resisting. It can’t do any good — I think I shall be glad when the moment comes. I shall at least cease to suffer.’

‘But you must be mad.’

‘I don’t know. I know that he is.’

‘But if your life is in danger, come away for God’s sake. After all, you’re free. He can’t stop you.’

‘I should have to go back to him, as I did last time,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘I thought I was free then, but gradually I knew that he was calling me. I tried to resist, but I couldn’t. I simply had to go to him.’

‘But it’s awful to think that you are alone with a man who’s practically raving mad.’

‘I’m safe for today,’ she said quietly. ‘It can only be done in the very hot weather. If there’s no more this year, I shall live till next summer.’

‘Oh, Margaret, for God’s sake don’t talk like that. I love you — I want to have you with me always. Won’t you come away with me and let me take care of you? I promise you that no harm shall come to you.’

‘You don’t love me any more; you’re only sorry for me now.’

‘It’s not true.’

‘Oh yes it is. I saw it when we were in the country. Oh, I don’t blame you. I’m a different woman from the one you loved. I’m not the Margaret you knew.’

‘I can never care for anyone but you.’

She put her hand on his arm.

‘If you loved me, I implore you to go. You don’t know what you expose me to. And when I’m dead you must marry Susie. She loves you with all her heart, and she deserves your love.’

‘Margaret, don’t go. Come with me.’

‘And take care. He will never forgive you for what you did. If he can, he will kill you.’

She started violently, as though she heard a sound. Her face was convulsed with sudden fear.

‘For God’s sake go, go!’

She turned from him quickly, and, before he could prevent her, had vanished. With heavy heart he plunged again into the bracken.

When Arthur had given his friends some account of this meeting, he stopped and looked at Dr Porhoët. The doctor went thoughtfully to his bookcase.

‘What is it you want me to tell you?’ he asked.

‘I think the man is mad,’ said Arthur. ‘I found out at what asylum his mother was, and by good luck was able to see the superintendent on my way through London. He told me that he had grave doubts about Haddo’s sanity, but it was impossible at present to take any steps. I came straight here because I wanted your advice. Granting that the man is out of his mind, is it possible that he may be trying some experiment that entails a sacrifice of human life?’

‘Nothing is more probable,’ said Dr Porhoët gravely.

Susie shuddered. She remembered the rumour that had reached her ears in

Monte Carlo.

‘They said there that he was attempting to make living creatures by a magical operation.’ She glanced at the doctor, but spoke to Arthur. ‘Just before you came in, our friend was talking of that book of Paracelsus in which he speaks of feeding the monsters he has made on human blood.’

Arthur gave a horrified cry.

‘The most significant thing to my mind is that fact about Margaret which we are certain of,’ said Dr Porhoët. ‘All works that deal with the Black Arts are unanimous upon the supreme efficacy of the virginal condition.’

‘But what is to be done?’ asked Arthur is desperation. ‘We can’t leave her in the hands of a raving madman.’ He turned on a sudden deathly white. ‘For all we know she may be dead now.’

‘Have you ever heard of Gilles de Rais?’ said Dr Porhoët, continuing his reflections. ‘That is the classic instance of human sacrifice. I know the country in which he lived; and the peasants to this day dare not pass at night in the neighbourhood of the ruined castle which was the scene of his horrible crimes.’

‘It’s awful to know that this dreadful danger hangs over her, and to be able to do nothing.’

‘We can only wait,’ said Dr Porhoët.

‘And if we wait too long, we may be faced by a terrible catastrophe.’

‘Fortunately we live in a civilized age. Haddo has a great care of his neck. I hope we are frightened unduly.’

It seemed to Susie that the chief thing was to distract Arthur, and she turned over in her mind some means of directing his attention to other matters.

‘I was thinking of going down to Chartres for two days with Mrs Bloomfield,’ she said. ‘Won’t you come with me? It is the most lovely cathedral in the world, and I think you will find it restful to wander about it for a little while. You can do no good, here or in London. Perhaps when you are calm, you will be able to think of something practical.’

Dr Porhoët saw what her plan was, and joined his entreaties to hers that Arthur should spend a day or two in a place that had no associations for him. Arthur was too exhausted to argue, and from sheer weariness consented. Next day Susie took him to Chartres. Mrs Bloomfield was no trouble to them, and Susie induced him to linger for a week in that pleasant, quiet town. They passed many hours in the stately cathedral, and they wandered about the surrounding country. Arthur was obliged to confess that the change had done him good, and a certain apathy succeeded the agitation from which he had suffered so long. Finally Susie persuaded him to spend three or four weeks in Brittany with Dr Porhoët, who was proposing to revisit the scenes of his childhood. They returned to Paris. When Arthur left her at the station, promising to meet her again in an hour at the restaurant where they were going to dine with Dr Porhoët, he thanked her for all she had done.

‘I was in an absurdly hysterical condition,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘You’ve been quite angelic. I knew that nothing could be done, and yet I was tormented with the desire to do something. Now I’ve got myself in hand once more. I think my common sense was deserting me, and I was on the point of believing in the farrago of nonsense which they call magic. After all, it’s absurd to think that Haddo is going to do any harm to Margaret. As soon at I get back to London, I’ll see my lawyers, and I daresay something can be done. If he’s really mad, we’ll have to put him under restraint, and Margaret will be free. I shall never forget your kindness.’

Susie smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

She was convinced that he would forget everything if Margaret came back to him. But she chid herself for the bitterness of the thought. She loved him, and she was glad to be able to do anything for him.

She returned to the hotel, changed her frock, and walked slowly to the Chien Noir. It always exhilarated her to come back to Paris; and she looked with happy, affectionate eyes at the plane trees, the yellow trams that rumbled along incessantly, and the lounging people. When she arrived, Dr Porhoët was waiting, and his delight at seeing her again was flattering and pleasant. They talked of Arthur. They wondered why he was late.

In a moment he came in. They saw at once that something quite extraordinary had taken place.

‘Thank God, I’ve found you at last!’ he cried.

His face was moving strangely. They had never seen him so discomposed.

‘I’ve been round to your hotel, but I just missed you. Oh, why did you insist on my going away?’

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ cried Susie.

‘Something awful has happened to Margaret.’

Susie started to her feet with a sudden cry of dismay.

‘How do you know?’ she asked quickly.

He looked at them for a moment and flushed. He kept his eyes upon them, as though actually to force his listeners into believing what he was about to say.

‘I feel it,’ he answered hoarsely.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It came upon me quite suddenly, I can’t explain why or how. I only know that something has happened.’

He began again to walk up and down, prey to an agitation that was frightful to behold. Susie and Dr Porhoët stared at him helplessly. They tried to think of something to say that would calm him.

‘Surely if anything had occurred, we should have been informed.’

He turned to Susie angrily.

‘How do you suppose we could know anything? She was quite helpless. She was imprisoned like a rat in a trap.’

‘But, my dear friend, you mustn’t give way in this fashion,’ said the doctor. ‘What would you say of a patient who came to you with such a story?’

Arthur answered the question with a shrug of the shoulders.

‘I should say he was absurdly hysterical.’

‘Well?’

‘I can’t help it, the feeling’s there. If you try all night you’ll never be able to argue me out of it. I feel it in every bone of my body. I couldn’t be more certain if I saw Margaret lying dead in front of me.’

Susie saw that it was indeed useless to reason with him. The only course was to accept his conviction and make the best of it.

‘What do you want us to do?’ she asked.

‘I want you both to come to England with me at once. If we start now we can catch the evening train.’

Susie did not answer, but she got up. She touched the doctor on the arm.

‘Please come,’ she whispered.

He nodded and untucked the napkin he had already arranged over his waistcoat.

‘I’ve got a cab at the door,’ said Arthur.

‘And what about clothes for Miss Susie?’ said the doctor.

‘Oh, we can’t wait for that,’ cried Arthur. ‘For God’s sake, come quickly.’

Susie knew that there was plenty of time to fetch a few necessary things before the train started, but Arthur’s impatience was too great to be withstood.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I can get all I want in England.’

He hurried them to the door and told the cabman to drive to the station as quickly as ever he could.

‘For Heaven’s sake, calm down a little,’ said Susie. ‘You’ll be no good to anyone in that state.’

‘I feel certain we’re too late.’

‘Nonsense! I’m convinced that you’ll find Margaret safe and sound.’

He did not answer. He gave a sigh of relief as they drove into the courtyard of the station.

14

Susie never forgot the horror of that journey to England. They arrived in London early in the morning and, without stopping, drove to Euston. For three or four days there had been unusual heat, and even at that hour the streets were sultry and airless. The train north was crowded, and it seemed impossible to get a breath of air. Her head ached, but she was obliged to keep a cheerful demeanour in the effort to allay Arthur’s increasing anxiety. Dr Porhoët sat in front of her. After the sleepless night his eyes were heavy and his face deeply lined. He was exhausted. At length, after much tiresome changing, they reached Venning. She had expected a greater coolness in that northern country; but there was a hot blight over the place, and, as they walked to the inn from the little station, they could hardly drag their limbs along.

Arthur had telegraphed from London that they must have rooms ready, and the landlady expected them. She recognized Arthur. He passionately desired to ask her whether anything had happened since he went away, but forced himself to be silent for a while. He greeted her with cheerfulness.

‘Well, Mrs Smithers, what has been going on since I left you?’ he cried.

‘Of course you wouldn’t have heard, sir,’ she answered gravely.

He began to tremble, but with an almost superhuman effort controlled his voice.

‘Has the squire hanged himself?’ he asked lightly.

‘No sir — but the poor lady’s dead.’

He did not answer. He seemed turned to stone. He stared with ghastly eyes.

‘Poor thing!’ said Susie, forcing herself to speak. ‘Was it — very sudden?’

The woman turned to Susie, glad to have someone with whom to discuss the event. She took no notice of Arthur’s agony.

‘Yes, mum; no one expected it. She died quite sudden like. She was only buried this morning.’

‘What did she die of?’ asked Susie, her eyes on Arthur.

She feared that he would faint. She wanted enormously to get him away, but did not know how to manage it.

‘They say it was heart disease,’ answered the landlady. ‘Poor thing! It’s a happy release for her.’

‘Won’t you get us some tea, Mrs Smithers? We’re very tired, and we should like something immediately.’

‘Yes, miss. I’ll get it at once.’

The good woman bustled away. Susie quickly locked the door. She seized

Arthur’s arm.

‘Arthur, Arthur.’

She expected him to break down. She looked with agony at Dr Porhoët, who stood helplessly by.

‘You couldn’t have done anything if you’d been here. You heard what the woman said. If Margaret died of heart disease, your suspicions were quite without ground.’

He shook her away, almost violently.

‘For God’s sake, speak to us,’ cried Susie.

His silence terrified her more than would have done any outburst of grief. Dr Porhoët went up to him gently.

‘Don’t try to be brave, my friend. You will not suffer as much if you allow yourself a little weakness.’

‘For Heaven’s sake leave me alone!’ said Arthur, hoarsely.

They drew back and watched him silently. Susie heard their hostess come along to the sitting-room with tea, and she unlocked the door. The landlady brought in the things. She was on the point of leaving them when Arthur stopped her.

‘How do you know that Mrs Haddo died of heart disease?’ he asked suddenly.

His voice was hard and stern. He spoke with a peculiar abruptness that made the poor woman look at him in amazement.

‘Dr Richardson told me so.’

‘Had he been attending her?’

‘Yes, sir. Mr Haddo had called him in several times to see his lady.’

‘Where does Dr Richardson live?’

‘Why, sir, he lives at the white house near the station.’

She could not make out why Arthur asked these questions.

‘Did Mr Haddo go to the funeral?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I’ve never seen anyone so upset.’

‘That’ll do. You can go.’

Susie poured out the tea and handed a cup to Arthur. To her surprise, he drank the tea and ate some bread and butter. She could not understand him. The expression of strain, and the restlessness which had been so painful, were both gone from his face, and it was set now to a look of grim determination. At last he spoke to them.

‘I’m going to see this doctor. Margaret’s heart was as sound as mine.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Do?’

He turned on her with a peculiar fierceness.

‘I’m going to put a rope round that man’s neck, and if the law won’t help me, by God, I’ll kill him myself.’

‘Mais, mon ami, vous êtes fou,’ cried Dr Porhoët, springing up.

Arthur put out his hand angrily, as though to keep him back. The frown on his face grew darker.

‘You must leave me alone. Good Heavens, the time has gone by for tears and lamentation. After all I’ve gone through for months, I can’t weep because Margaret is dead. My heart is dried up. But I know that she didn’t die naturally, and I’ll never rest so long as that fellow lives.’

He stretched out his hands and with clenched jaws prayed that one day he might hold the man’s neck between them, and see his face turn livid and purple as he died.

‘I am going to this fool of a doctor, and then I shall go to Skene.’

‘You must let us come with you,’ said Susie.

‘You need not be frightened,’ he answered. ‘I shall not take any steps of my own till I find the law is powerless.’

‘I want to come with you all the same.’

‘As you like.’

Susie went out and ordered a trap to be got ready. But since Arthur would not wait, she arranged that it should be sent for them to the doctor’s door. They went there at once, on foot.

Dr Richardson was a little man of five-and-fifty, with a fair beard that was now nearly white, and prominent blue eyes. He spoke with a broad Staffordshire accent. There was in him something of the farmer, something of the well-to-do tradesman, and at the first glance his intelligence did not impress one.

Arthur was shewn with his two friends into the consulting-room, and after a short interval the doctor came in. He was dressed in flannels and had an old-fashioned racket in his hand.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but Mrs Richardson has got a few lady-friends to tea, and I was just in the middle of a set.’

His effusiveness jarred upon Arthur, whose manner by contrast became more than usually abrupt.

‘I have just learnt of the death of Mrs Haddo. I was her guardian and her oldest friend. I came to you in the hope that you would be able to tell me something about it.’

Dr Richardson gave him at once, the suspicious glance of a stupid man.

‘I don’t know why you come to me instead of to her husband. He will be able to tell you all that you wish to know.’

‘I came to you as a fellow-practitioner,’ answered Arthur. ‘I am at St

Luke’s Hospital.’ He pointed to his card, which Dr Richardson still held.

‘And my friend is Dr Porhoët, whose name will be familiar to you with

respect to his studies in Malta Fever.’

‘I think I read an article of yours in the B.M.J.’ said the country doctor.

His manner assumed a singular hostility. He had no sympathy with London specialists, whose attitude towards the general practitioner he resented. He was pleased to sneer at their pretensions to omniscience, and quite willing to pit himself against them.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Burdon?’

‘I should be very much obliged if you would tell me as exactly as possible how Mrs Haddo died.’

‘It was a very simple case of endocarditis.’

‘May I ask how long before death you were called in?’

The doctor hesitated. He reddened a little.

‘I’m not inclined to be cross-examined,’ he burst out, suddenly making up his mind to be angry. ‘As a surgeon I daresay your knowledge of cardiac diseases is neither extensive nor peculiar. But this was a very simple case, and everything was done that was possible. I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you.’

Arthur took no notice of the outburst.

‘How many times did you see her?’

‘Really, sir, I don’t understand your attitude. I can’t see that you have any right to question me.’

‘Did you have a post-mortem?’

‘Certainly not. In the first place there was no need, as the cause of death was perfectly clear, and secondly you must know as well as I do that the relatives are very averse to anything of the sort. You gentlemen in Harley Street don’t understand the conditions of private practice. We haven’t the time to do post-mortems to gratify a needless curiosity.’

Arthur was silent for a moment. The little man was evidently convinced that there was nothing odd about Margaret’s death, but his foolishness was as great as his obstinacy. It was clear that several motives would induce him to put every obstacle in Arthur’s way, and chief of these was the harm it would do him if it were discovered that he had given a certificate of death carelessly. He would naturally do anything to avoid social scandal. Still Arthur was obliged to speak.

‘I think I’d better tell you frankly that I’m not satisfied, Dr Richardson. I can’t persuade myself that this lady’s death was due to natural causes.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ cried the other angrily. ‘I’ve been in practice for hard upon thirty-five years, and I’m willing to stake my professional reputation on it.’

‘I have reason to think you are mistaken.’

‘And to what do you ascribe death, pray?’ asked the doctor.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Upon my soul, I think you must be out of your senses. Really, sir, your behaviour is childish. You tell me that you are a surgeon of some eminence …’

‘I surely told you nothing of the sort.’

‘Anyhow, you read papers before learned bodies and have them printed. And you come with as silly a story as a Staffordshire peasant who thinks someone has been trying to poison him because he’s got a stomach-ache. You may be a very admirable surgeon, but I venture to think I am more capable than you of judging in a case which I attended and you know nothing about.’

‘I mean to take the steps necessary to get an order for exhumation, Dr Richardson, and I cannot help thinking it will be worth your while to assist me in every possible way.’

‘I shall do nothing of the kind. I think you very impertinent, sir. There is no need for exhumation, and I shall do everything in my power to prevent it. And I tell you as chairman of the board of magistrates, my opinion will have as great value as any specialist’s in Harley Street.’

He flounced to the door and held it open. Susie and Dr Porhoët walked out; and Arthur, looking down thoughtfully, followed on their heels. Dr Richardson slammed the street-door angrily.

Dr Porhoët slipped his arm in Arthur’s.

‘You must be reasonable, my friend,’ he said. ‘From his own point of view this doctor has all the rights on his side. You have nothing to justify your demands. It is monstrous to expect that for a vague suspicion you will be able to get an order for exhumation.’

Arthur did not answer. The trap was waiting for them.

‘Why do you want to see Haddo?’ insisted the doctor. ‘You will do no more good than you have with Dr Richardson.’

‘I have made up my mind to see him,’ answered Arthur shortly. ‘But there is no need that either of you should accompany me.’

‘If you go, we will come with you,’ said Susie.

Without a word Arthur jumped into the dog-cart, and Susie took a seat by his side. Dr Porhoët, with a shrug of the shoulders, mounted behind. Arthur whipped up the pony, and at a smart trot they traversed the three miles across the barren heath that lay between Venning and Skene.

When they reached the park gates, the lodgekeeper, as luck would have it, was standing just inside, and she held one of them open for her little boy to come in. He was playing in the road and showed no inclination to do so. Arthur jumped down.

‘I want to see Mr Haddo,’ he said.

‘Mr Haddo’s not in,’ she answered roughly.

She tried to close the gate, but Arthur quickly put his foot inside.

‘Nonsense! I have to see him on a matter of great importance.’

‘Mr Haddo’s orders are that no one is to be admitted.’

‘I can’t help that, I’m proposing to come in, all the same.’

Susie and Dr Porhoët came forward. They promised the small boy a shilling to hold their horse.

‘Now then, get out of here,’ cried the woman. ‘You’re not coming in, whatever you say.’

She tried to push the gate to, but Arthur’s foot prevented her. Paying no heed to her angry expostulations, he forced his way in. He walked quickly up the drive. The lodge-keeper accompanied him, with shrill abuse. The gate was left unguarded, and the others were able to follow without difficulty.

‘You can go to the door, but you won’t see Mr Haddo,’ the woman cried angrily. ‘You’ll get me sacked for letting you come.’

Susie saw the house. It was a fine old building in the Elizabethan style, but much in need of repair; and it had the desolate look of a place that has been uninhabited. The garden that surrounded it had been allowed to run wild, and the avenue up which they walked was green with rank weeds. Here and there a fallen tree, which none had troubled to remove, marked the owner’s negligence. Arthur went to the door and rang a bell. They heard it clang through the house as though not a soul lived there. A man came to the door, and as soon as he opened it, Arthur, expecting to be refused admission, pushed in. The fellow was as angry as the virago, his wife, who explained noisily how the three strangers had got into the park.

‘You can’t see the squire, so you’d better be off. He’s up in the attics, and no one’s allowed to go to him.’

The man tried to push Arthur away.

‘Be off with you, or I’ll send for the police.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Arthur. ‘I mean to find Mr Haddo.’

The housekeeper and his wife broke out with abuse, to which Arthur listened in silence. Susie and Dr Porhoët stood by anxiously. They did not know what to do. Suddenly a voice at their elbows made them start, and the two servants were immediately silent.

‘What can I do for you?’

Oliver Haddo was standing motionless behind them. It startled Susie that he should have come upon them so suddenly, without a sound. Dr Porhoët, who had not seen him for some time, was astounded at the change which had taken place in him. The corpulence which had been his before was become now a positive disease. He was enormous. His chin was a mass of heavy folds distended with fat, and his cheeks were puffed up so that his eyes were preternaturally small. He peered at you from between the swollen lids. All his features had sunk into that hideous obesity. His ears were horribly bloated, and the lobes were large and swelled. He had apparently a difficulty in breathing, for his large mouth, with its scarlet, shining lips, was constantly open. He had grown much balder and now there was only a crescent of long hair stretching across the back of his head from ear to ear. There was something terrible about that great shining scalp. His paunch was huge; he was a very tall man and held himself erect, so that it protruded like a vast barrel. His hands were infinitely repulsive; they were red and soft and moist. He was sweating freely, and beads of perspiration stood on his forehead and on his shaven lip.

For a moment they all looked at one another in silence. Then Haddo turned to his servants.

‘Go,’ he said.

As though frightened out of their wits, they made for the door and with a bustling hurry flung themselves out. A torpid smile crossed his face as he watched them go. Then he moved a step nearer his visitors. His manner had still the insolent urbanity which was customary to him.

‘And now, my friends, will you tell me how I can be of service to you?’

‘I have come about Margaret’s death,’ said Arthur.

Haddo, as was his habit, did not immediately answer. He looked slowly from Arthur to Dr Porhoët, and from Dr Porhoët to Susie. His eyes rested on her hat, and she felt uncomfortably that he was inventing some gibe about it.

‘I should have thought this hardly the moment to intrude upon my sorrow,’ he said at last. ‘If you have condolences to offer, I venture to suggest that you might conveniently send them by means of the penny post.’

Arthur frowned.

‘Why did you not let me know that she was ill?’ he asked.

‘Strange as it may seem to you, my worthy friend, it never occurred to me that my wife’s health could be any business of yours.’

A faint smile flickered once more on Haddo’s lips, but his eyes had still the peculiar hardness which was so uncanny. Arthur looked at him steadily.

‘I have every reason to believe that you killed her,’ he said.

Haddo’s face did not for an instant change its expression.

‘And have you communicated your suspicions to the police?’

‘I propose to.’

‘And, if I am not indiscreet, may I inquire upon what you base them?’

‘I saw Margaret three weeks ago, and she told me that she went in terror of her life.’

‘Poor Margaret! She had always the romantic temperament. I think it was that which first brought us together.’

‘You damned scoundrel!’ cried Arthur.

‘My dear fellow, pray moderate your language. This is surely not an occasion when you should give way to your lamentable taste for abuse. You outrage all Miss Boyd’s susceptibilities.’ He turned to her with an airy wave of his fat hand. ‘You must forgive me if I do not offer you the hospitality of Skene, but the loss I have so lately sustained does not permit me to indulge in the levity of entertaining.’

He gave her an ironical, low bow; then looked once more at Arthur.

‘If I can be of no further use to you, perhaps you would leave me to my own reflections. The lodgekeeper will give you the exact address of the village constable.’

Arthur did not answer. He stared into vacancy, as if he were turning over things in his mind. Then he turned sharply on his heel and walked towards the gate. Susie and Dr Porhoët, taken completely aback, did not know what to do; and Haddo’s little eyes twinkled as he watched their discomfiture.

‘I always thought that your friend had deplorable manners,’ he murmured.

Susie, feeling very ridiculous, flushed, and Dr Porhoët awkwardly took off his hat. As they walked away, they felt Haddo’s mocking gaze fixed upon them, and they were heartily thankful to reach the gate. They found Arthur waiting for them.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I forgot that I was not alone.’

The three of them drove slowly back to the inn.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Susie.

For a long time Arthur made no reply, and Susie thought he could not have heard her. At last he broke the silence.

‘I see that I can do nothing by ordinary methods. I realize that it is useless to make a public outcry. There is only my own conviction that Margaret came to a violent end, and I cannot expect anyone to pay heed to that.’

‘After all, it’s just possible that she really died of heart disease.’

Arthur gave Susie a long look. He seemed to consider her words deliberately.

‘Perhaps there are means to decide that conclusively,’ he replied at length, thoughtfully, as though he were talking to himself.

‘What are they?’

Arthur did not answer. When they came to the door of the inn, he stopped.

‘Will you go in? I wish to take a walk by myself,’ he said.

Susie looked at him anxiously.

‘You’re not going to do anything rash?’

‘I will do nothing till I have made quite sure that Margaret was foully murdered.’

He turned on his heel and walked quickly away. It was late now, and they found a frugal meal waiting for them in the little sitting-room. It seemed no use to delay it till Arthur came back, and silently, sorrowfully, they ate. Afterwards, the doctor smoked cigarettes, while Susie sat at the open window and looked at the stars. She thought of Margaret, of her beauty and her charming frankness, of her fall and of her miserable end; and she began to cry quietly. She knew enough of the facts now to be aware that the wretched girl was not to blame for anything that had happened. A cruel fate had fallen upon her, and she had been as powerless as in the old tales Phaedra, the daughter of Minos, or Myrrha of the beautiful hair. The hours passed, and still Arthur did not return. Susie thought now only of him, and she was frightfully anxious.

But at last he came in. The night was far advanced. He put down his hat and sat down. For a long while he looked silently at Dr. Porhoët.

‘What is it, my friend?’ asked the good doctor at length.

‘Do you remember that you told us once of an experiment you made in

Alexandria?’ he said, after some hesitation.

He spoke in a curious voice.

‘You told us that you took a boy, and when he looked in a magic mirror, he saw things which he could not possibly have known.’

‘I remember very well,’ said the doctor.

‘I was much inclined to laugh at you at the time. I was convinced that the boy was a knave who deceived you.’

‘Yes?’

‘Of late I’ve thought of that story often. Some hidden recess of my memory has been opened, and I seem to remember strange things. Was I the boy who looked in the ink?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor quietly.

Arthur did not say anything. A profound silence fell upon them, while Susie and the doctor watched him intently. They wondered what was in his mind.

‘There is a side of my character which I did not know till lately,’ Arthur said at last. ‘When first it dawned upon me, I fought against it. I said to myself that deep down in all of us, a relic from the long past, is the remains of the superstition that blinded our fathers; and it is needful for the man of science to fight against it with all his might. And yet it was stronger than I. Perhaps my birth, my early years, in those Eastern lands where everyone believes in the supernatural, affected me although I did not know it. I began to remember vague, mysterious things, which I never knew had been part of my knowledge. And at last one day it seemed that a new window was opened on to my soul, and I saw with extraordinary clearness the incident which you had described. I knew suddenly it was part of my own experience. I saw you take me by the hand and pour the ink on my palm and bid me look at it. I felt again the strange glow that thrilled me, and with an indescribable bitterness I saw things in the mirror which were not there before. I saw people whom I had never seen. I saw them perform certain actions. And some force I knew not, obliged me to speak. And at length everything grew dim, and I was as exhausted as if I had not eaten all day.’

He went over to the open window and looked out. Neither of the others spoke. The look on Arthur’s face, curiously outlined by the light of the lamp, was very stern. He seemed to undergo some mental struggle of extraordinary violence. He breath came quickly. At last he turned and faced them. He spoke hoarsely, quickly.

‘I must see Margaret again.’

‘Arthur, you’re mad!’ cried Susie.

He went up to Dr Porhoët and, putting his hands on his shoulders, looked fixedly into his eyes.

‘You have studied this science. You know all that can be known of it. I want you to show her to me.’

The doctor gave an exclamation of alarm.

‘My dear fellow, how can I? I have read many books, but I have never practised anything. I have only studied these matters for my amusement.’

‘Do you believe it can be done?’

‘I don’t understand what you want.’

‘I want you to bring her to me so that I may speak with her, so that I may find out the truth.’

‘Do you think I am God that I can raise men from the dead?’

Arthur’s hands pressed him down in the chair from which he sought to rise. His fingers were clenched on the old man’s shoulders so that he could hardly bear the pain.

‘You told us how once Eliphas Levi raised a spirit. Do you believe that was true?’

‘I don’t know. I have always kept an open mind. There was much to be said on both sides.’

‘Well, now you must believe. You must do what he did.’

‘You must be mad, Arthur.’

‘I want you to come to that spot where I saw her last. If her spirit can be brought back anywhere, it must be in that place where she sat and wept. You know all the ceremonies and all the words that are necessary.’

But Susie came forward and laid her hand on his arm. He looked at her with a frown.

‘Arthur, you know in your heart that nothing can come of it. You’re only increasing your unhappiness. And even if you could bring her from the grave for a moment, why can you not let her troubled soul rest in peace?’

‘If she died a natural death we shall have no power over her, but if her death was violent perhaps her spirit is earthbound still. I tell you I must be certain. I want to see her once more, and afterwards I shall know what to do.’

‘I cannot, I cannot,’ said the doctor.

‘Give me the books and I will do it alone.’

‘You know that I have nothing here.’

‘Then you must help me,’ said Arthur. ‘After all, why should you mind? We perform a certain operation, and if nothing happens we are no worse off then before. On the other hand, if we succeed…. Oh, for God’s sake, help me! If you have any care for my happiness do this one thing for me.’

He stepped back and looked at the doctor. The Frenchman’s eyes were fixed upon the ground.

‘It’s madness,’ he muttered.

He was intensely moved by Arthur’s appeal. At last he shrugged his shoulders.

‘After all, if it is but a foolish mummery it can do no harm.’

‘You will help me?’ cried Arthur.

‘If it can give you any peace or any satisfaction, I am willing to do what I can. But I warn you to be prepared for a great disappointment.’

15

Arthur wished to set about the invocation then and there, but Dr Porhoët said it was impossible. They were all exhausted after the long journey, and it was necessary to get certain things together without which nothing could be done. In his heart he thought that a night’s rest would bring Arthur to a more reasonable mind. When the light of day shone upon the earth he would be ashamed of the desire which ran counter to all his prepossessions. But Arthur remembered that on the next day it would be exactly a week since Margaret’s death, and it seemed to him that then their spells might have a greater efficacy.

When they came down in the morning and greeted one another, it was plain that none of them had slept.

‘Are you still of the same purpose as last night?’ asked Dr Porhoët gravely.

‘I am.’

The doctor hesitated nervously.

‘It will be necessary, if you wish to follow out the rules of the old necromancers, to fast through the whole day.’

‘I am ready to do anything.’

‘It will be no hardship to me,’ said Susie, with a little hysterical laugh. ‘I feel I couldn’t eat a thing if I tried.’

‘I think the whole affair is sheer folly,’ said Dr Porhoët.

‘You promised me you would try.’

The day, the long summer day, passed slowly. There was a hard brilliancy in the sky that reminded the Frenchman of those Egyptian heavens when the earth seemed crushed beneath a bowl of molten fire. Arthur was too restless to remain indoors and left the others to their own devices. He walked without aim, as fast as he could go; he felt no weariness. The burning sun beat down upon him, but he did not know it. The hours passed with lagging feet. Susie lay on her bed and tried to read. Her nerves were so taut that, when there was a sound in the courtyard of a pail falling on the cobbles, she cried out in terror. The sun rose, and presently her window was flooded with quivering rays of gold. It was midday. The day passed, and it was afternoon. The evening came, but it brought no freshness. Meanwhile Dr Porhoët sat in the little parlour, with his head between his hands, trying by a great mental effort to bring back to his memory all that he had read. His heart began to beat more quickly. Then the night fell, and one by one the stars shone out. There was no wind. The air was heavy. Susie came downstairs and began to talk with Dr Porhoët. But they spoke in a low tone, as if they were afraid that someone would overhear. They were faint now with want of food. The hours went one by one, and the striking of a clock filled them each time with a mysterious apprehension. The lights in the village were put out little by little, and everybody slept. Susie had lighted the lamp, and they watched beside it. A cold shiver passed through her.

‘I feel as though someone were lying dead in the room,’ she said.

‘Why does not Arthur come?’

They spoke inconsequently, and neither heeded what the other said. The window was wide open, but the air was difficult to breathe. And now the silence was so unusual that Susie grew strangely nervous. She tried to think of the noisy streets in Paris, the constant roar of traffic, and the shuffling of the crowds toward evening as the work people returned to their homes. She stood up.

‘There’s no air tonight. Look at the trees. Not a leaf is moving.’

‘Why does not Arthur come?’ repeated the doctor.

‘There’s no moon tonight. It will be very dark at Skene.’

‘He’s walked all day. He should be here by now.’

Susie felt an extraordinary oppression, and she panted for breath. At last they heard a step on the road outside, and Arthur stood at the window.

‘Are you ready to come?’ he said.

‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

They joined him, bringing the few things that Dr Porhoët had said were necessary, and they walked along the solitary road that led to Skene. On each side the heather stretched into the dark night, and there was a blackness about it that was ominous. There was no sound save that of their own steps. Dimly, under the stars, they saw the desolation with which they were surrounded. The way seemed very long. They were utterly exhausted, and they could hardly drag one foot after the other.

‘You must let me rest for a minute,’ said Susie.

They did not answer, but stopped, and she sat on a boulder by the wayside. They stood motionless in front of her, waiting patiently till she was ready. After a little while she forced herself to get up.

‘Now I can go,’ she said.

Still they did not speak, but walked on. They moved like figures in a dream, with a stealthy directness, as though they acted under the influence of another’s will. Suddenly the road stopped, and they found themselves at the gates of Skene.

‘Follow me very closely,’ said Arthur.

He turned on one side, and they followed a paling. Susie could feel that they walked along a narrow path. She could see hardly two steps in front of her. At last he stood still.

‘I came here earlier in the night and made the opening easier to get through.’

He turned back a broken piece of railing and slipped in. Susie followed, and Dr Porhoët entered after her.

‘I can see nothing,’ said Susie.

‘Give my your hand, and I will lead you.’

They walked with difficulty through the tangled bracken, among closely planted trees. They stumbled, and once Dr Porhoët fell. It seemed that they went a long way. Susie’s heart beat fast with anxiety. All her weariness was forgotten.

Then Arthur stopped them, and he pointed in front of him. Through an opening in the trees, they saw the house. All the windows were dark except those just under the roof, and from them came bright lights.

‘Those are the attics which he uses as a laboratory. You see, he is working now. There is no one else in the house.’

Susie was curiously fascinated by the flaming lights. There was an awful mystery in those unknown labours which absorbed Oliver Haddo night after night till the sun rose. What horrible things were done there, hidden from the eyes of men? By himself in that vast house the madman performed ghastly experiments; and who could tell what dark secrets he trafficked in?

‘There is no danger that he will come out,’ said Arthur. ‘He remains there till the break of day.’

He took her hand again and led her on. Back they went among the trees, and presently they were on a pathway. They walked along with greater safety.

‘Are you all right, Porhoët?’ asked Arthur.

‘Yes.’

But the trees grew thicker and the night more sombre. Now the stars were shut out, and they could hardly see in front of them.

‘Here we are,’ said Arthur.

They stopped, and found that there was in front of them a green space formed by four cross-ways. In the middle a stone bench gleamed vaguely against the darkness.

‘This is where Margaret sat when last I saw her.’

‘I can see to do nothing here,’ said the doctor.

They had brought two flat bowls of brass to serve as censers, and these Arthur gave to Dr Porhoët. He stood by Susie’s side while the doctor busied himself with his preparations. They saw him move to and fro. They saw him bend to the ground. Presently there was a crackling of wood, and from the brazen bowls red flames shot up. They did not know what he burnt, but there were heavy clouds of smoke, and a strong, aromatic odour filled the air. Now and again the doctor was sharply silhouetted against the light. His slight, bowed figure was singularly mysterious. When Susie caught sight of his face, she saw that it was touched with a strong emotion. The work he was at affected him so that his doubts, his fears, had vanished. He looked like some old alchemist busied with unnatural things. Susie’s heart began to beat painfully. She was growing desperately frightened and stretched out her hand so that she might touch Arthur. Silently he put his arm through hers. And now the doctor was tracing strange signs upon the ground. The flames died down and only a glow remained, but he seemed to have no difficulty in seeing what he was about. Susie could not discern what figures he drew. Then he put more twigs upon the braziers, and the flames sprang up once more, cutting the darkness sharply as with a sword.

‘Now come,’ he said.

But, inexplicably, a sudden terror seized Susie. She felt that the hairs of her head stood up, and a cold sweat broke out on her body. Her limbs had grown on an instant inconceivably heavy so that she could not move. A panic such as she had never known came upon her, and, except that her legs would not carry her, she would have fled blindly. She began to tremble. She tried to speak, but her tongue clave to her throat.

‘I can’t, I’m afraid,’ she muttered hoarsely.

‘You must. Without you we can do nothing,’ said Arthur.

She could not reason with herself. She had forgotten everything except that she was frightened to death. Her heart was beating so quickly that she almost fainted. And now Arthur held her, so firmly that she winced.

‘Let me go,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t help you. I’m afraid.’

‘You must,’ he said. ‘You must.’

‘No.’

‘I tell you, you must come.’

‘Why?’

Her deadly fear expressed itself in a passion of sudden anger.

‘Because you love me, and it’s the only way to give me peace.’

She uttered a low wail of pain, and her terror gave way to shame. She blushed to the roots of her hair because he too knew her secret. And then she was seized again with anger because he had the cruelty to taunt her with it. She had recovered her courage now, and she stepped forward. Dr. Porhoët told her where to stand. Arthur took his place in front of her.

‘You must not move till I give you leave. If you go outside the figure I have drawn, I cannot protect you.’

For a moment Dr Porhoët stood in perfect silence. Then he began to recite strange words in Latin. Susie heard him but vaguely. She did not know the sense, and his voice was so low that she could not have distinguished the words. But his intonation had lost that gentle irony which was habitual to him, and he spoke with a trembling gravity that was extraordinarily impressive. Arthur stood immobile as a rock. The flames died away, and they saw one another only by the glow of the ashes, dimly, like persons in a vision of death. There was silence. Then the necromancer spoke again, and now his voice was louder. He seemed to utter weird invocations, but they were in a tongue that the others knew not. And while he spoke the light from the burning cinders on a sudden went out.

It did not die, but was sharply extinguished, as though by invisible hands. And now the darkness was more sombre than that of the blackest night. The trees that surrounded them were hidden from their eyes, and the whiteness of the stone bench was seen no longer. They stood but a little way one from the other, but each might have stood alone. Susie strained her eyes, but she could see nothing. She looked up quickly; the stars were gone out, and she could see no further over her head than round about. The darkness was terrifying. And from it, Dr Porhoët’s voice had a ghastly effect. It seemed to come, wonderfully changed, from the void of bottomless chaos. Susie clenched her hands so that she might not faint.

All at once she started, for the old man’s voice was cut by a sudden gust of wind. A moment before, the utter silence had been almost intolerable, and now a storm seemed to have fallen upon them. The trees all around them rocked in the wind; they heard the branches creak; and they heard the hissing of the leaves. They were in the midst of a hurricane. And they felt the earth sway as it resisted the straining roots of great trees, which seemed to be dragged up by the force of the furious gale. Whistling and roaring, the wind stormed all about them, and the doctor, raising his voice, tried in vain to command it. But the strangest thing of all was that, where they stood, there was no sign of the raging blast. The air immediately about them was as still as it had been before, and not a hair on Susie’s head was moved. And it was terrible to hear the tumult, and yet to be in a calm that was almost unnatural.

On a sudden, Dr Porhoët raised his voice, and with a sternness they had never heard in it before, cried out in that unknown language. Then he called upon Margaret. He called her name three times. In the uproar Susie could scarcely hear. Terror had seized her again, but in her confusion she remembered his command, and she dared not move.

‘Margaret, Margaret, Margaret.’

Without a pause between, as quickly as a stone falls to the ground, the din which was all about them ceased. There was no gradual diminution. But at one moment there was a roaring hurricane and at the next a silence so complete that it might have been the silence of death.

And then, seeming to come out of nothingness, extraordinarily, they heard with a curious distinctness the sound of a woman weeping. Susie’s heart stood still. They heard the sound of a woman weeping, and they recognized the voice of Margaret. A groan of anguish burst from Arthur’s lips, and he was on the point of starting forward. But quickly Dr Porhoët put out his hand to prevent him. The sound was heartrending, the sobbing of a woman who had lost all hope, the sobbing of a woman terrified. If Susie had been able to stir, she would have put her hands to her ears to shut out the ghastly agony of it.

And in a moment, notwithstanding the heavy darkness of the starless night, Arthur saw her. She was seated on the stone bench as when last he had spoken with her. In her anguish she sought not to hide her face. She looked at the ground, and the tears fell down her cheeks. Her bosom heaved with the pain of her weeping.

Then Arthur knew that all his suspicions were justified.

16

Arthur would not leave the little village of Venning. Neither Susie nor the doctor could get him to make any decision. None of them spoke of the night which they had spent in the woods of Skene; but it coloured all their thoughts, and they were not free for a single moment from the ghastly memory of it. They seemed still to hear the sound of that passionate weeping. Arthur was moody. When he was with them, he spoke little; he opposed a stubborn resistance to their efforts at diverting his mind. He spent long hours by himself, in the country, and they had no idea what he did. Susie was terribly anxious. He had lost his balance so completely that she was prepared for any rashness. She divined that his hatred of Haddo was no longer within the bounds of reason. The desire for vengeance filled him entirely, so that he was capable of any violence.

Several days went by.

At last, in concert with Dr Porhoët, she determined to make one more attempt. It was late at night, and they sat with open windows in the sitting-room of the inn. There was a singular oppressiveness in the air which suggested that a thunderstorm was at hand. Susie prayed for it; for she ascribed to the peculiar heat of the last few days much of Arthur’s sullen irritability.

‘Arthur, you must tell us what you are going to do,’ she said. ‘It is useless to stay here. We are all so ill and nervous that we cannot consider anything rationally. We want you to come away with us tomorrow.’

‘You can go if you choose,’ he said. ‘I shall remain till that man is dead.’

‘It is madness to talk like that. You can do nothing. You are only making yourself worse by staying here.’

‘I have quite made up my mind.’

‘The law can offer you no help, and what else can you do?’

She asked the question, meaning if possible to get from him some hint of his intentions; but the grimness of his answer, though it only confirmed her vague suspicions, startled her.

‘If I can do nothing else, I shall shoot him like a dog.’

She could think of nothing to say, and for a while they remained in silence. Then he got up.

‘I think I should prefer it if you went,’ he said. ‘You can only hamper me.’

‘I shall stay here as long as you do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if you do anything, I shall be compromised. I may be arrested. I think the fear of that may restrain you.’

He looked at her steadily. She met his eyes with a calmness which showed that she meant exactly what she said, and he turned uneasily away. A silence even greater than before fell upon them. They did not move. It was so still in the room that it might have been empty. The breathlessness of the air increased, so that it was horribly oppressive. Suddenly there was a loud rattle of thunder, and a flash of lightning tore across the heavy clouds. Susie thanked Heaven for the storm which would give presently a welcome freshness. She felt excessively ill at ease, and it was a relief to ascribe her sensation to a state of the atmosphere. Again the thunder rolled. It was so loud that it seemed to be immediately above their heads. And the wind rose suddenly and swept with a long moan through the trees that surrounded the house. It was a sound so human that it might have come from the souls of dead men suffering hopeless torments of regret.

The lamp went out, so suddenly that Susie was vaguely frightened. It gave one flicker, and they were in total darkness. It seemed as though someone had leaned over the chimney and blown it out. The night was very black, and they could not see the window which opened on to the country. The darkness was so peculiar that for a moment no one stirred.

Then Susie heard Dr Porhoët slip his hand across the table to find matches, but it seemed that they were not there. Again a loud peal of thunder startled them, but the rain would not fall. They panted for fresh air. On a sudden Susie’s heart gave a bound, and she sprang up.

‘There’s someone in the room.’

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she heard Arthur fling himself upon the intruder. She knew at once, with the certainty of an intuition, that it was Haddo. But how had he come in? What did he want? She tried to cry out, but no sound came from her throat. Dr Porhoët seemed bound to his chair. He did not move. He made no sound. She knew that an awful struggle was proceeding. It was a struggle to the death between two men who hated one another, but the most terrible part of it was that nothing was heard. They were perfectly noiseless. She tried to do something, but she could not stir. And Arthur’s heart exulted, for his enemy was in his grasp, under his hands, and he would not let him go while life was in him. He clenched his teeth and tightened his straining muscles. Susie heard his laboured breathing, but she only heard the breathing of one man. She wondered in abject terror what that could mean. They struggled silently, hand to hand, and Arthur knew that his strength was greater. He had made up his mind what to do and directed all his energy to a definite end. His enemy was extraordinarily powerful, but Arthur appeared to create some strength from the sheer force of his will. It seemed for hours that they struggled. He could not bear him down.

Suddenly, he knew that the other was frightened and sought to escape from him. Arthur tightened his grasp; for nothing in the world now would he ever loosen his hold. He took a deep, quick breath, and then put out all his strength in a tremendous effort. They swayed from side to side. Arthur felt as if his muscles were being torn from the bones, he could not continue for more than a moment longer; but the agony that flashed across his mind at the thought of failure braced him to a sudden angry jerk. All at once Haddo collapsed, and they fell heavily to the ground. Arthur was breathing more quickly now. He thought that if he could keep on for one instant longer, he would be safe. He threw all his weight on the form that rolled beneath him, and bore down furiously on the man’s arm. He twisted it sharply, with all his might, and felt it give way. He gave a low cry of triumph; the arm was broken. And now his enemy was seized with panic; he struggled madly, he wanted only to get away from those long hands that were killing him. They seemed to be of iron. Arthur seized the huge bullock throat and dug his fingers into it, and they sunk into the heavy rolls of fat; and he flung the whole weight of his body into them. He exulted, for he knew that his enemy was in his power at last; he was strangling him, strangling the life out of him. He wanted light so that he might see the horror of that vast face, and the deadly fear, and the staring eyes. And still he pressed with those iron hands. And now the movements were strangely convulsive. His victim writhed in the agony of death. His struggles were desperate, but the avenging hands held him as in a vice. And then the movements grew spasmodic, and then they grew weaker. Still the hands pressed upon the gigantic throat, and Arthur forgot everything. He was mad with rage and fury and hate and sorrow. He thought of Margaret’s anguish and of her fiendish torture, and he wished the man had ten lives so that he might take them one by one. And at last all was still, and that vast mass of flesh was motionless, and he knew that his enemy was dead. He loosened his grasp and slipped one hand over the heart. It would never beat again. The man was stone dead. Arthur got up and straightened himself. The darkness was intense still, and he could see nothing. Susie heard him, and at length she was able to speak.

‘Arthur what have you done?’

‘I’ve killed him,’ he said hoarsely.

‘O God, what shall we do?’

Arthur began to laugh aloud, hysterically, and in the darkness his hilarity was terrifying.

‘For God’s sake let us have some light.’

‘I’ve found the matches,’ said Dr Porhoët.

He seemed to awake suddenly from his long stupor. He struck one, and it would not light. He struck another, and Susie took off the globe and the chimney as he kindled the wick. Then he held up the lamp, and they saw Arthur looking at them. His face was ghastly. The sweat ran off his forehead in great beads, and his eyes were bloodshot. He trembled in every limb. Then Dr Porhoët advanced with the lamp and held it forward. They looked down on the floor for the man who lay there dead. Susie gave a sudden cry of horror.

There was no one there.

Arthur stepped back in terrified surprise. There was no one in the room, living or dead, but the three friends. The ground sank under Susie’s feet, she felt horribly ill, and she fainted. When she awoke, seeming difficultly to emerge from an eternal night, Arthur was holding down her head.

‘Bend down,’ he said. ‘Bend down.’

All that had happened came back to her, and she burst into tears. Her self-control deserted her, and, clinging to him for protection, she sobbed as though her heart would break. She was shaking from head to foot. The strangeness of this last horror had overcome her, and she could have shrieked with fright.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You need not be afraid.’

‘Oh, what does it mean?’

‘You must pluck up courage. We’re going now to Skene.’

She sprang to her feet, as though to get away from him; her heart beat wildly.

‘No, I can’t; I’m frightened.’

‘We must see what it means. We have no time to lose, or the morning will be upon us before we get back.’

Then she sought to prevent him.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t go, Arthur. Something awful may await you there. Don’t risk your life.’

‘There is no danger. I tell you the man is dead.’

‘If anything happened to you …’

She stopped, trying to restrain her sobs; she dared not go on. But he seemed to know what was in her mind.

‘I will take no risks, because of you. I know that whether I live or die is not a — matter of indifference to you.’

She looked up and saw that his eyes were fixed upon her gravely. She reddened. A curious feeling came into her heart.

‘I will go with you wherever you choose,’ she said humbly.

‘Come, then.’

They stepped out into the night. And now, without rain, the storm had passed away, and the stars were shining. They walked quickly. Arthur went in front of them. Dr Porhoët and Susie followed him, side by side, and they had to hasten their steps in order not to be left behind. It seemed to them that the horror of the night was passed, and there was a fragrancy in the air which was wonderfully refreshing. The sky was beautiful. And at last they came to Skene. Arthur led them again to the opening in the palisade, and he took Susie’s hand. Presently they stood in the place from which a few days before they had seen the house. As then, it stood in massive blackness against the night and, as then, the attic windows shone out with brilliant lights. Susie started, for she had expected that the whole place would be in darkness.

‘There is no danger, I promise you,’ said Arthur gently. ‘We are going to find out the meaning of all this mystery.’

He began to walk towards the house.

‘Have you a weapon of some sort?’ asked the doctor.

Arthur handed him a revolver.

‘Take this. It will reassure you, but you will have no need of it. I bought it the other day when — I had other plans.’

Susie gave a little shudder. They reached the drive and walked to the great portico which adorned the facade of the house. Arthur tried the handle, but it would not open.

‘Will you wait here?’ he said. ‘I can get through one of the windows, and

I will let you in.’

He left them. They stood quietly there, with anxious hearts; they could not guess what they would see. They were afraid that something would happen to Arthur, and Susie regretted that she had not insisted on going with him. Suddenly she remembered that awful moment when the light of the lamp had been thrown where all expected to see a body, and there was nothing.

‘What do you think it meant?’ she cried suddenly. ‘What is the explanation?’

‘Perhaps we shall see now,’ answered the doctor.

Arthur still lingered, and she could not imagine what had become of him. All sorts of horrible fancies passed through her mind, and she dreaded she knew not what. At last they heard a footstep inside the house, and the door was opened.

‘I was convinced that nobody slept here, but I was obliged to make sure.

I had some difficulty in getting in.’

Susie hesitated to enter. She did not know what horrors awaited her, and the darkness was terrifying.

‘I cannot see,’ she said.

‘I’ve brought a torch,’ said Arthur.

He pressed a button, and a narrow ray of bright light was cast upon the floor. Dr Porhoët and Susie went in. Arthur carefully closed the door, and flashed the light of his torch all round them. They stood in a large hall, the floor of which was scattered with the skins of lions that Haddo on his celebrated expedition had killed in Africa. There were perhaps a dozen, and their number gave a wild, barbaric note. A great oak staircase led to the upper floors.

‘We must go through all the rooms,’ said Arthur.

He did not expect to find Haddo till they came to the lighted attics, but it seemed needful nevertheless to pass right through the house on their way. A flash of his torch had shown him that the walls of the hall were decorated with all manner of armour, ancient swords of Eastern handiwork, barbaric weapons from central Africa, savage implements of medieval warfare; and an idea came to him. He took down a huge battle-axe and swung it in his hand.

‘Now come.’

Silently, holding their breath as though they feared to wake the dead, they went into the first room. They saw it difficultly with their scant light, since the thin shaft of brilliancy, emphasising acutely the surrounding darkness, revealed it only piece by piece. It was a large room, evidently unused, for the furniture was covered with holland, and there was a mustiness about it which suggested that the windows were seldom opened. As in many old houses, the rooms led not from a passage but into one another, and they walked through many till they came back into the hall. They had all a desolate, uninhabited air. Their sombreness was increased by the oak with which they were panelled. There was panelling in the hall too, and on the stairs that led broadly to the top of the house. As they ascended, Arthur stopped for one moment and passed his hand over the polished wood.

‘It would burn like tinder,’ he said.

They went through the rooms on the first floor, and they were as empty and as cheerless. Presently they came to that which had been Margaret’s. In a bowl were dead flowers. Her brushes were still on the toilet table. But it was a gloomy chamber, with its dark oak, and, so comfortless that Susie shuddered. Arthur stood for a time and looked at it, but he said nothing. They found themselves again on the stairs and they went to the second storey. But here they seemed to be at the top of the house.

‘How does one get up to the attics?’ said Arthur, looking about him with surprise.

He paused for a while to think. Then he nodded his head.

‘There must be some steps leading out of one of the rooms.’

They went on. And now the ceilings were much lower, with heavy beams, and there was no furniture at all. The emptiness seemed to make everything more terrifying. They felt that they were on the threshold of a great mystery, and Susie’s heart began to beat fast. Arthur conducted his examination with the greatest method; he walked round each room carefully, looking for a door that might lead to a staircase; but there was no sign of one.

‘What will you do if you can’t find the way up?’ asked Susie.

‘I shall find the way up,’ he answered.

They came to the staircase once more and had discovered nothing. They looked at one another helplessly.

‘It’s quite clear there is a way,’ said Arthur, with impatience. ‘There must be something in the nature of a hidden door somewhere or other.’

He leaned against the balustrade and meditated. The light of his lantern threw a narrow ray upon the opposite wall.

‘I feel certain it must be in one of the rooms at the end of the house. That seems the most natural place to put a means of ascent to the attics.’

They went back, and again he examined the panelling of a small room that had outside walls on three sides of it. It was the only room that did not lead into another.

‘It must be here,’ he said.

Presently he gave a little laugh, for he saw that a small door was concealed by the woodwork. He pressed it where he thought there might be a spring, and it flew open. Their torch showed them a narrow wooden staircase. They walked up and found themselves in front of a door. Arthur tried it, but it was locked. He smiled grimly.

‘Will you get back a little,’ he said.

He lifted his axe and swung it down upon the latch. The handle was shattered, but the lock did not yield. He shook his head. As he paused for a moment, an there was a complete silence, Susie distinctly heard a slight noise. She put her hand on Arthur’s arm to call his attention to it, and with strained ears they listened. There was something alive on the other side of the door. They heard its curious sound: it was not that of a human voice, it was not the crying of an animal, it was extraordinary.

It was the sort of gibber, hoarse and rapid, and it filled them with an icy terror because it was so weird and so unnatural.

‘Come away, Arthur,’ said Susie. ‘Come away.’

‘There’s some living thing in there,’ he answered.

He did not know why the sound horrified him. The sweat broke out on his forehead.

‘Something awful will happen to us,’ whispered Susie, shaking with uncontrollable fear.

‘The only thing is to break the door down.’

The horrid gibbering was drowned by the noise he made. Quickly, without pausing, he began to hack at the oak door with all his might. In rapid succession his heavy blows rained down, and the sound echoed through the empty house. There was a crash, and the door swung back. They had been so long in almost total darkness that they were blinded for an instant by the dazzling light. And then instinctively they started back, for, as the door opened, a wave of heat came out upon them so that they could hardly breathe. The place was like an oven.

They entered. It was lit by enormous lamps, the light of which was increased by reflectors, and warmed by a great furnace. They could not understand why so intense a heat was necessary. The narrow windows were closed. Dr Porhoët caught sight of a thermometer and was astounded at the temperature it indicated. The room was used evidently as a laboratory. On broad tables were test-tubes, basins and baths of white porcelain, measuring-glasses, and utensils of all sorts; but the surprising thing was the great scale upon which everything was. Neither Arthur nor Dr Porhoët had ever seen such gigantic measures nor such large test-tubes. There were rows of bottles, like those in the dispensary of a hospital, each containing great quantities of a different chemical. The three friends stood in silence. The emptiness of the room contrasted so oddly with its appearance of being in immediate use that it was uncanny. Susie felt that he who worked there was in the midst of his labours, and might return at any moment; he could have only gone for an instant into another chamber in order to see the progress of some experiment. It was quite silent. Whatever had made those vague, unearthly noises was hushed by their approach.

The door was closed between this room and the next. Arthur opened it, and they found themselves in a long, low attic, ceiled with great rafters, as brilliantly lit and as hot as the first. Here too were broad tables laden with retorts, instruments for heating, huge test-tubes, and all manner of vessels. The furnace that warmed it gave a steady heat. Arthur’s gaze travelled slowly from table to table, and he wondered what Haddo’s experiments had really been. The air was heavy with an extraordinary odour: it was not musty, like that of the closed rooms through which they had passed, but singularly pungent, disagreeable and sickly. He asked himself what it could spring from. Then his eyes fell upon a huge receptacle that stood on the table nearest to the furnace. It was covered with a white cloth. He took it off. The vessel was about four feet high, round, and shaped somewhat like a washing tub, but it was made of glass more than an inch thick. In it a spherical mass, a little larger than a football, of a peculiar, livid colour. The surface was smooth, but rather coarsely grained, and over it ran a dense system of blood-vessels. It reminded the two medical men of those huge tumours which are preserved in spirit in hospital museums. Susie looked at it with an incomprehensible disgust. Suddenly she gave a cry.

‘Good God, it’s moving!’

Arthur put his hand on her arm quickly to quieten her and bent down with irresistible curiosity. They saw that it was a mass of flesh unlike that of any human being; and it pulsated regularly. The movement was quite distinct, up and down, like the delicate heaving of a woman’s breast when she is asleep. Arthur touched the thing with one finger and it shrank slightly.

‘Its quite warm,’ he said.

He turned it over, and it remained in the position in which he had placed it, as if there were neither top nor bottom to it. But they could see now, irregularly placed on one side, a few short hairs. They were just like human hairs.

‘Is it alive?’ whispered Susie, struck with horror and amazement.

‘Yes!’

Arthur seemed fascinated. He could not take his eyes off the loathsome thing. He watched it slowly heave with even motion.

‘What can it mean?’ he asked.

He looked at Dr Porhoët with pale startled face. A thought was coming to him, but a thought so unnatural, extravagant, and terrible that he pushed it from him with a movement of both hands, as though it were a material thing. Then all three turned around abruptly with a start, for they heard again the wild gibbering which had first shocked their ears. In the wonder of this revolting object they had forgotten all the rest. The sound seemed extraordinarily near, and Susie drew back instinctively, for it appeared to come from her very side.

‘There’s nothing here,’ said Arthur. ‘It must be in the next room.’

‘Oh, Arthur, let us go,’ cried Susie. ‘I’m afraid to see what may be in store for us. It is nothing to us; and what we see may poison our sleep for ever.’

She looked appealingly at Dr Porhoët. He was white and anxious. The heat of that place had made the sweat break out on his forehead.

‘I have seen enough. I want to see no more,’ he said.

‘Then you may go, both of you,’ answered Arthur. ‘I do not wish to force you to see anything. But I shall go on. Whatever it is, I wish to find out.’

‘But Haddo? Supposing he is there, waiting? Perhaps you are only walking into a trap that he has set for you.’

‘I am convinced that Haddo is dead.’

Again that unintelligible jargon, unhuman and shrill, fell upon their ears, and Arthur stepped forward. Susie did not hesitate. She was prepared to follow him anywhere. He opened the door, and there was a sudden quiet. Whatever made those sounds was there. It was a larger room than any on the others and much higher, for it ran along the whole front of the house. The powerful lamps showed every corner of it at once, but, above, the beams of the open ceiling were dark with shadow. And here the nauseous odour, which had struck them before, was so overpowering that for a while they could not go in. It was indescribably foul. Even Arthur thought it would make him sick, and he looked at the windows to see if it was possible to open them; but it seemed they were hermetically closed. The extreme warmth made the air more overpowering. There were four furnaces here, and they were all alight. In order to give out more heat and to burn slowly, the fronts of them were open, and one could see that they were filled with glowing coke.

The room was furnished no differently from the others, but to the various instruments for chemical operations on a large scale were added all manner of electrical appliances. Several books were lying about, and one had been left open face downwards on the edge of a table. But what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels like that which they had seen in the adjoining room. Each was covered with a white cloth. They hesitated a moment, for they knew that here they were face to face with the great enigma. At last Arthur pulled away the cloth from one. None of them spoke. They stared with astonished eyes. For here, too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human. It was shaped vaguely like an infant, but the legs were joined together so that it looked like a mummy rolled up in its coverings. There were neither feet nor knees. The trunk was formless, but there was a curious thickening on each side; it was as if a modeller had meant to make a figure with the arms loosely bent, but had left the work unfinished so that they were still one with the body. There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth. The colour was a kind of sickly pink, and it was almost transparent. There was a very slight movement in it, rhythmical and slow. It was living too.

Then quickly Arthur removed the covering from all the other jars but one; and in a flash of the eyes they saw abominations so awful that Susie had to clench her fists in order not to scream. There was one monstrous thing in which the limbs approached nearly to the human. It was extraordinarily heaped up, with fat tiny arms, little bloated legs, and an absurd squat body, so that it looked like a Chinese mandarin in porcelain. In another the trunk was almost like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey. But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features. The features were a caricature of humanity so shameful that one could hardly bear to look. And as the light fell on it, the eyes of each head opened slowly. They had no pigment in them, but were pink, like the eyes of white rabbits; and they stared for a moment with an odd, unseeing glance. Then they were shut again, and what was curiously terrifying was that the movements were not quite simultaneous; the eyelids of one head fell slowly just before those of the other. And in another place was a ghastly monster in which it seemed that two bodies had been dreadfully entangled with one another. It was a creature of nightmare, with four arms and four legs, and this one actually moved. With a peculiar motion it crawled along the bottom of the great receptacle in which it was kept, towards the three persons who looked at it. It seemed to wonder what they did. Susie started back with fright, as it raised itself on its four legs and tried to reach up to them.

Susie turned away and hid her face. She could not look at those ghastly counterfeits of humanity. She was terrified and ashamed.

‘Do you understand what this means?’ said Dr Porhoët to Arthur, in an awed voice. ‘It means that he has discovered the secret of life.’

‘Was it for these vile monstrosities that Margaret was sacrificed in all her loveliness?’

The two men looked at one another with sad, wondering eyes.

‘Don’t you remember that he talked of the manufacture of human beings? It’s these misshapen things that he’s succeeding in producing,’ said the doctor.

‘There is one more that we haven’t seen,’ said Arthur.

He pointed to the covering which still hid the largest of the vases. He had a feeling that it contained the most fearful of all these monsters; and it was not without an effort that he drew the cloth away. But no sooner had he done this than something sprang up, so that instinctively he started back, and it began to gibber in piercing tones. These were the unearthly sounds that they had heard. It was not a voice, it was a kind of raucous crying, hoarse yet shrill, uneven like the barking of a dog, and appalling. The sounds came forth in rapid succession, angrily, as though the being that uttered them sought to express itself in furious words. It was mad with passion and beat against the glass walls of its prison with clenched fists. For the hands were human hands, and the body, though much larger, was of the shape of a new-born child. The creature must have stood about four feet high. The head was horribly misshapen. The skull was enormous, smooth and distended like that of a hydrocephalic, and the forehead protruded over the face hideously. The features were almost unformed, preternaturally small under the great, overhanging brow; and they had an expression of fiendish malignity.

The tiny, misshapen countenance writhed with convulsive fury, and from the mouth poured out a foaming spume. It raised its voice higher and higher, shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them. The toothless gums moved spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had come to the human form.

‘Come away,’ said Arthur. ‘We must not look at this.’

He quickly flung the covering over the jar.

‘Yes, for God’s sake let us go,’ said Susie.

‘We haven’t done yet,’ answered Arthur. ‘We haven’t found the author of all this.’

He looked at the room in which they were, but there was no door except that by which they had entered. Then he uttered a startled cry, and stepping forward fell on his knee.

On the other side of the long tables heaped up with instruments, hidden so that at first they had not seen him, Oliver Haddo lay on the floor, dead. His blue eyes were staring wide, and they seemed larger than they had ever been. They kept still the expression of terror which they had worn in the moment of his agony, and his heavy face was distorted with deadly fear. It was purple and dark, and the eyes were injected with blood.

‘He died of suffocation,’ whispered Dr Porhoët.

Arthur pointed to the neck. There could be seen on it distinctly the marks of the avenging fingers that had strangled the life out of him. It was impossible to hesitate.

‘I told you that I had killed him,’ said Arthur.

Then he remembered something more. He took hold of the right arm. He was convinced that it had been broken during that desperate struggle in the darkness. He felt it carefully and listened. He heard plainly the two parts of the bone rub against one another. The dead man’s arm was broken just in the place where he had broken it. Arthur stood up. He took one last look at his enemy. That vast mass of flesh lay heaped up on the floor in horrible disorder.

‘Now that you have seen, will you come away?’ said Susie, interrupting him.

The words seemed to bring him suddenly to himself.

‘Yes, we must go quickly.’

They turned away and with hurried steps walked through those bright attics till they came to the stairs.

‘Now go down and wait for me at the door,’ said Arthur. ‘I will follow you immediately.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Susie.

‘Never mind. Do as I tell you. I have not finished here yet.’

They went down the great oak staircase and waited in the hall. They wondered what Arthur was about. Presently he came running down.

‘Be quick!’ he cried. ‘We have no time to lose.’

‘What have you done, Arthur?’

There’s no time to tell you now.’

He hurried them out and slammed the door behind him. He took Susie’s hand.

‘Now we must run. Come.’

She did not know what his haste signified, but her heart beat furiously. He dragged her along. Dr Porhoët hurried on behind them. Arthur plunged into the wood. He would not leave them time to breathe.

‘You must be quick,’ he said.

At last they came to the opening in the fence, and he helped them to get through. Then he carefully replaced the wooden paling and, taking Susie’s arm began to walk rapidly towards their inn.

‘I’m frightfully tired,’ she said. ‘I simply can’t go so fast.’

‘You must. Presently you can rest as long as you like.’

They walked very quickly for a while. Now and then Arthur looked back.

The night was still quite dark, and the stars shone out in their myriads.

At last he slackened their pace.

‘Now you can go more slowly,’ he said.

Susie saw the smiling glance that he gave her. His eyes were full of tenderness. He put his arm affectionately round her shoulders to support her.

‘I’m afraid you’re quite exhausted, poor thing,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have had to hustle you so much.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

She leaned against him comfortably. With that protecting arm about her, she felt capable of any fatigue. Dr Porhoët stopped.

‘You must really let me roll myself a cigarette,’ he said.

‘You may do whatever you like,’ answered Arthur.

There was a different ring in his voice now, and it was soft with a good-humour that they had not heard in it for many months. He appeared singularly relieved. Susie was ready to forget the terrible past and give herself over to the happiness that seemed at last in store for her. They began to saunter slowly on. And now they could take pleasure in the exquisite night. The air was very suave, odorous with the heather that was all about them, and there was an enchanting peace in that scene which wonderfully soothed their weariness. It was dark still, but they knew the dawn was at hand, and Susie rejoiced in the approaching day. In the east the azure of the night began to thin away into pale amethyst, and the trees seemed gradually to stand out from the darkness in a ghostly beauty. Suddenly birds began to sing all around them in a splendid chorus. From their feet a lark sprang up with a rustle of wings and, mounting proudly upon the air, chanted blithe canticles to greet the morning. They stood upon a little hill.

‘Let us wait here and see the sun rise,’ said Susie.

‘As you will.’

They stood all three of them, and Susie took in deep, joyful breaths of the sweet air of dawn. The whole land, spread at her feet, was clothed in the purple dimness that heralds day, and she exulted in its beauty. But she noticed that Arthur, unlike herself and Dr Porhoët, did not look toward the east. His eyes were fixed steadily upon the place from which they had come. What did he look for in the darkness of the west? She turned round, and a cry broke from her lips, for the shadows there were lurid with a deep red glow.

‘It looks like a fire,’ she said.

‘It is. Skene is burning like tinder.’

And as he spoke it seemed that the roof fell in, for suddenly vast flames sprang up, rising high into the still night air; and they saw that the house they had just left was blazing furiously. It was a magnificent sight from the distant hill on which they stood to watch the fire as it soared and sank, as it shot scarlet tongues along like strange Titanic monsters, as it raged from room to room. Skene was burning. It was beyond the reach of human help. In a little while there would be no trace of all those crimes and all those horrors. Now it was one mass of flame. It looked like some primeval furnace, where the gods might work unheard-of miracles.

‘Arthur, what have you done?’ asked Susie, in a tone that was hardly audible.

He did not answer directly. He put his arm about her shoulder again, so that she was obliged to turn round.

‘Look, the sun is rising.’

In the east, a long ray of light climbed up the sky, and the sun, yellow and round, appeared upon the face of the earth.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

The title for this story comes from the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, who gave Part IV of his work Ethics the title Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions. Spinoza makes the point that humans are held hostage by their emotions and that to free oneself from this captivity, one has to know one’s aims in life and follow them. It is an apt title, as the novel is centred on the unconscious search of the main character, Philip Carey, for his path in life and the tribulations he faces in trying to find peace.

Of Human Bondage is rightly cited as Maugham’s longest and most famous novel and the author freely admitted that it was strongly autobiographical in places. This is not a story of an idyllic childhood and a charmed life, and Maugham found the writing of it a cathartic experience. Having taken four years to write, it was finally published in both Britain (by Heinemann) and America (by Doran) in August 1915, when the author was in his late thirties. Of Human Bondage was one of many titles tried for the novel pre-publication, as Maugham, having a sense that this was to be a key work of his, was pedantic about what was chosen. It was slow to receive accolade, due to its subdued, even tragic themes, which did not sit well with a public at war and needing morale boosters; however, in the 1920’s it finally achieved the status it deserved, following the success of Maugham’s later work The Moon and Sixpence. In 1934, Of Human Bondage was made into a film starring Bette Davis and Leslie Howard, with Davis giving such a superb performance as a slatternly and cruel Mildred that it revived her faltering acting career and enabled her to move on to real star status – such is the depth of the multi-faceted character that had Maugham created. It has been suggested by one of Maugham’s biographers, Robert Calder, that Mildred was actually based on a boy at Maugham’s school, for whom he held a fascination.

The story begins on a note of deep sadness; the illness and death of the widowed mother of a little boy, Philip Carey. An only child, he loses both his mother and his newborn sibling virtually at the same time, and he is sent from London to Kent to live with his childless, stuffy and deeply religious aunt and uncle. Uncle William is the local vicar in a small seaside town, and is a social snob – Philip is severely restricted in whom he is allowed to play with, and even middle class children on holiday there are rejected because they are Londoners and a potential bad influence. Philip has a club foot and cannot easily explore the area alone, and so his playground is the beautifully described vicarage and garden. After a lonely time in which Philip finds solace only in voracious reading, he is sent to boarding school. The descriptions of his school life are taken from Maugham’s own experiences at King’s School, Canterbury, and they do not flatter his alma mater (indeed, Maugham had to make his peace with the school in later years). Archetypal stories of ragging, fagging, dysfunctional and ill informed teachers and extreme snobbery abound, and it is little wonder that although Philip is a gifted scholar, he cannot wait to leave school early aged seventeen, foregoing a scholarship to Oxford University in order to study languages in Germany.

Philip’s time in Germany as a student, lodging in a house with other scholars, is a happy and liberating time, but his aunt and uncle want him home and he has to take a job in London. This eventually leads to another spell abroad, this time studying art in France. This sojourn is compromised by Philip’s lack of real artistic ability and by a doomed friendship with a young woman, Fanny, who dies. Yet again he returns to England, this time to study medicine and follow in the professional footsteps of his late father. However, once again, Philip is restless and unfulfilled, and his studies are a trial to him. In this frame of mind, he comes across a young waitress, Mildred, in a tea shop:

“She had the small regular features... blue eyes, and… broad low brow… She seemed to have a great deal of hair... She was very anaemic. Her thin lips were pale, and her skin was delicate, of a faint green colour, without a touch of red even in the cheeks... She took great pains to prevent her work from spoiling her hands [and] she went about her duties with a bored look.”

At first, Philip finds nothing attractive or of value in her. However, against his better judgement he finds himself falling for this insolent, rather plain, grandiose young woman, and becomes completely besotted. Mildred appears to give him no encouragement, receiving his treats and attentions with studied indifference: “he hated himself for loving her. She seemed to be constantly humiliating him, and for each snub that he endured he owed her a grudge.” His masochistic devotion to her only seems to heighten her contempt for him. The affair continues with Philip helpless to contain his jealous passion for Mildred, and the reader shares his discomfort – it is easy to find oneself willing him to lose his temper with the terrible way she treats him, and have done with Mildred once and for all. The inevitable happens; Mildred rejects Philip and announces she is to marry a man with better prospects, and the “romance” is abruptly ended. A distraction comes along in the form of Norah Nesbit, a young woman separated from her husband, working as a minor actress and a writer of romances. Norah is kindly, amusing and loving, and before long Philip and Norah are having an affair and the ghastly experience of Mildred is fading into the past.

However, not too long after Philip has settled into this contented relationship, Mildred comes back into his life. The man that promised to marry her already has a wife, and has deserted her because he is tired of her and she is pregnant. Who else would Mildred turn to but the ever-loyal Philip? His dog-like devotion to her is resurrected and Norah is pushed aside. Philip lavishes time and money on Mildred, and supports her until and after she has her baby. Mildred still treats him with disdain however, and her final insult is to fall for his friend, Griffiths, and run away with him. Philip is devastated, but surely this sociopathic woman is now out of his life forever?

This is a powerfully written story with strong autobiographical elements. The scenes describing the last illness of Philip’s mother, and her subsequent death, are deeply poignant; Maugham was deeply attached to his mother and by his own admittance never got over her death when he was only eight years old. Maugham’s next few years are transposed to the novel with unremitting gloom, and the reader is left in no doubt of the misery that both the character Philip and Maugham in real life, endured. It is a depressing thought that any child, whether Victorian or present day, could be subjected to such an emotionally repressive and socially stifling life. More personal memories must have dictated Maugham’s descriptions of the medical school, such as the banter and black humour of the dissection room, and the realistic descriptions of the poor, working class patients that presented themselves at the hospital clinics for treatment. There is a real density to the prose in this novel; no word is wasted or irrelevant, no scene that does not reveal something of plot or character, and they come one after the other with almost unrelenting speed. Of Human Bondage is certainly no light read, but more one to savour and take your time over.

The first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

LXXXI

LXXXII

LXXXIII

LXXXIV

LXXXV

LXXXVI

LXXXVII

LXXXVIII

LXXXIX

XC

XCI

XCII

XCIII

XCIV

XCV

XCVI

XCVII

XCVIII

XCIX

C

CI

CII

CIII

CIV

CV

CVI

CVII

CVIII

CIX

CX

CXI

CXII

CXIII

CXIV

CXV

CXVI

CXVII

CXVIII

CXIX

CXX

CXXI

CXXII

The first edition’s title page

The 1934 film adaptation

I

The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child’s bed.

“Wake up, Philip,” she said.

She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.

“Your mother wants you,” she said.

She opened the door of a room on the floor below and took the child over to a bed in which a woman was lying. It was his mother. She stretched out her arms, and the child nestled by her side. He did not ask why he had been awakened. The woman kissed his eyes, and with thin, small hands felt the warm body through his white flannel nightgown. She pressed him closer to herself.

“Are you sleepy, darling?” she said.

Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms about him. He tried to make himself smaller still as he cuddled up against his mother, and he kissed her sleepily. In a moment he closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The doctor came forwards and stood by the bed-side.

“Oh, don’t take him away yet,” she moaned.

The doctor, without answering, looked at her gravely. Knowing she would not be allowed to keep the child much longer, the woman kissed him again; and she passed her hand down his body till she came to his feet; she held the right foot in her hand and felt the five small toes; and then slowly passed her hand over the left one. She gave a sob.

“What’s the matter?” said the doctor. “You’re tired.”

She shook her head, unable to speak, and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

The doctor bent down.

“Let me take him.”

She was too weak to resist his wish, and she gave the child up. The doctor handed him back to his nurse.

“You’d better put him back in his own bed.”

“Very well, sir.” The little boy, still sleeping, was taken away. His mother sobbed now broken-heartedly.

“What will happen to him, poor child?”

The monthly nurse tried to quiet her, and presently, from exhaustion, the crying ceased. The doctor walked to a table on the other side of the room, upon which, under a towel, lay the body of a still-born child. He lifted the towel and looked. He was hidden from the bed by a screen, but the woman guessed what he was doing.

“Was it a girl or a boy?” she whispered to the nurse.

“Another boy.”

The woman did not answer. In a moment the child’s nurse came back. She approached the bed.

“Master Philip never woke up,” she said. There was a pause. Then the doctor felt his patient’s pulse once more.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do just now,” he said. “I’ll call again after breakfast.”

“I’ll show you out, sir,” said the child’s nurse.

They walked downstairs in silence. In the hall the doctor stopped.

“You’ve sent for Mrs. Carey’s brother-in-law, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“D’you know at what time he’ll be here?”

“No, sir, I’m expecting a telegram.”

“What about the little boy? I should think he’d be better out of the way.”

“Miss Watkin said she’d take him, sir.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s his godmother, sir. D’you think Mrs. Carey will get over it, sir?”

The doctor shook his head.

II

It was a week later. Philip was sitting on the floor in the drawing-room at Miss Watkin’s house in Onslow gardens. He was an only child and used to amusing himself. The room was filled with massive furniture, and on each of the sofas were three big cushions. There was a cushion too in each arm-chair. All these he had taken and, with the help of the gilt rout chairs, light and easy to move, had made an elaborate cave in which he could hide himself from the Red Indians who were lurking behind the curtains. He put his ear to the floor and listened to the herd of buffaloes that raced across the prairie. Presently, hearing the door open, he held his breath so that he might not be discovered; but a violent hand pulled away a chair and the cushions fell down.

“You naughty boy, Miss Watkin WILL be cross with you.”

“Hulloa, Emma!” he said.

The nurse bent down and kissed him, then began to shake out the cushions, and put them back in their places.

“Am I to come home?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve come to fetch you.”

“You’ve got a new dress on.”

It was in eighteen-eighty-five, and she wore a bustle. Her gown was of black velvet, with tight sleeves and sloping shoulders, and the skirt had three large flounces. She wore a black bonnet with velvet strings. She hesitated. The question she had expected did not come, and so she could not give the answer she had prepared.

“Aren’t you going to ask how your mamma is?” she said at length.

“Oh, I forgot. How is mamma?”

Now she was ready.

“Your mamma is quite well and happy.”

“Oh, I am glad.”

“Your mamma’s gone away. You won’t ever see her any more.” Philip did not know what she meant.

“Why not?”

“Your mamma’s in heaven.”

She began to cry, and Philip, though he did not quite understand, cried too. Emma was a tall, big-boned woman, with fair hair and large features. She came from Devonshire and, notwithstanding her many years of service in London, had never lost the breadth of her accent. Her tears increased her emotion, and she pressed the little boy to her heart. She felt vaguely the pity of that child deprived of the only love in the world that is quite unselfish. It seemed dreadful that he must be handed over to strangers. But in a little while she pulled herself together.

“Your Uncle William is waiting in to see you,” she said. “Go and say good-bye to Miss Watkin, and we’ll go home.”

“I don’t want to say good-bye,” he answered, instinctively anxious to hide his tears.

“Very well, run upstairs and get your hat.”

He fetched it, and when he came down Emma was waiting for him in the hall. He heard the sound of voices in the study behind the dining-room. He paused. He knew that Miss Watkin and her sister were talking to friends, and it seemed to him — he was nine years old — that if he went in they would be sorry for him.

“I think I’ll go and say good-bye to Miss Watkin.”

“I think you’d better,” said Emma.

“Go in and tell them I’m coming,” he said.

He wished to make the most of his opportunity. Emma knocked at the door and walked in. He heard her speak.

“Master Philip wants to say good-bye to you, miss.”

There was a sudden hush of the conversation, and Philip limped in. Henrietta Watkin was a stout woman, with a red face and dyed hair. In those days to dye the hair excited comment, and Philip had heard much gossip at home when his godmother’s changed colour. She lived with an elder sister, who had resigned herself contentedly to old age. Two ladies, whom Philip did not know, were calling, and they looked at him curiously.

“My poor child,” said Miss Watkin, opening her arms.

She began to cry. Philip understood now why she had not been in to luncheon and why she wore a black dress. She could not speak.

“I’ve got to go home,” said Philip, at last.

He disengaged himself from Miss Watkin’s arms, and she kissed him again. Then he went to her sister and bade her good-bye too. One of the strange ladies asked if she might kiss him, and he gravely gave her permission. Though crying, he keenly enjoyed the sensation he was causing; he would have been glad to stay a little longer to be made much of, but felt they expected him to go, so he said that Emma was waiting for him. He went out of the room. Emma had gone downstairs to speak with a friend in the basement, and he waited for her on the landing. He heard Henrietta Watkin’s voice.

“His mother was my greatest friend. I can’t bear to think that she’s dead.”

“You oughtn’t to have gone to the funeral, Henrietta,” said her sister. “I knew it would upset you.”

Then one of the strangers spoke.

“Poor little boy, it’s dreadful to think of him quite alone in the world.

I see he limps.”

“Yes, he’s got a club-foot. It was such a grief to his mother.”

Then Emma came back. They called a hansom, and she told the driver where to go.

III

When they reached the house Mrs. Carey had died in — it was in a dreary, respectable street between Notting Hill Gate and High Street, Kensington — Emma led Philip into the drawing-room. His uncle was writing letters of thanks for the wreaths which had been sent. One of them, which had arrived too late for the funeral, lay in its cardboard box on the hall-table.

“Here’s Master Philip,” said Emma.

Mr. Carey stood up slowly and shook hands with the little boy. Then on second thoughts he bent down and kissed his forehead. He was a man of somewhat less than average height, inclined to corpulence, with his hair, worn long, arranged over the scalp so as to conceal his baldness. He was clean-shaven. His features were regular, and it was possible to imagine that in his youth he had been good-looking. On his watch-chain he wore a gold cross.

“You’re going to live with me now, Philip,” said Mr. Carey. “Shall you like that?”

Two years before Philip had been sent down to stay at the vicarage after an attack of chicken-pox; but there remained with him a recollection of an attic and a large garden rather than of his uncle and aunt.

“Yes.”

“You must look upon me and your Aunt Louisa as your father and mother.”

The child’s mouth trembled a little, he reddened, but did not answer.

“Your dear mother left you in my charge.”

Mr. Carey had no great ease in expressing himself. When the news came that his sister-in-law was dying, he set off at once for London, but on the way thought of nothing but the disturbance in his life that would be caused if her death forced him to undertake the care of her son. He was well over fifty, and his wife, to whom he had been married for thirty years, was childless; he did not look forward with any pleasure to the presence of a small boy who might be noisy and rough. He had never much liked his sister-in-law.

“I’m going to take you down to Blackstable tomorrow,” he said.

“With Emma?”

The child put his hand in hers, and she pressed it.

“I’m afraid Emma must go away,” said Mr. Carey.

“But I want Emma to come with me.”

Philip began to cry, and the nurse could not help crying too. Mr. Carey looked at them helplessly.

“I think you’d better leave me alone with Master Philip for a moment.”

“Very good, sir.”

Though Philip clung to her, she released herself gently. Mr. Carey took the boy on his knee and put his arm round him.

“You mustn’t cry,” he said. “You’re too old to have a nurse now. We must see about sending you to school.”

“I want Emma to come with me,” the child repeated.

“It costs too much money, Philip. Your father didn’t leave very much, and

I don’t know what’s become of it. You must look at every penny you spend.”

Mr. Carey had called the day before on the family solicitor. Philip’s father was a surgeon in good practice, and his hospital appointments suggested an established position; so that it was a surprise on his sudden death from blood-poisoning to find that he had left his widow little more than his life insurance and what could be got for the lease of their house in Bruton Street. This was six months ago; and Mrs. Carey, already in delicate health, finding herself with child, had lost her head and accepted for the lease the first offer that was made. She stored her furniture, and, at a rent which the parson thought outrageous, took a furnished house for a year, so that she might suffer from no inconvenience till her child was born. But she had never been used to the management of money, and was unable to adapt her expenditure to her altered circumstances. The little she had slipped through her fingers in one way and another, so that now, when all expenses were paid, not much more than two thousand pounds remained to support the boy till he was able to earn his own living. It was impossible to explain all this to Philip and he was sobbing still.

“You’d better go to Emma,” Mr. Carey said, feeling that she could console the child better than anyone.

Without a word Philip slipped off his uncle’s knee, but Mr. Carey stopped him.

“We must go tomorrow, because on Saturday I’ve got to prepare my sermon, and you must tell Emma to get your things ready today. You can bring all your toys. And if you want anything to remember your father and mother by you can take one thing for each of them. Everything else is going to be sold.”

The boy slipped out of the room. Mr. Carey was unused to work, and he turned to his correspondence with resentment. On one side of the desk was a bundle of bills, and these filled him with irritation. One especially seemed preposterous. Immediately after Mrs. Carey’s death Emma had ordered from the florist masses of white flowers for the room in which the dead woman lay. It was sheer waste of money. Emma took far too much upon herself. Even if there had been no financial necessity, he would have dismissed her.

But Philip went to her, and hid his face in her bosom, and wept as though his heart would break. And she, feeling that he was almost her own son — she had taken him when he was a month old — consoled him with soft words. She promised that she would come and see him sometimes, and that she would never forget him; and she told him about the country he was going to and about her own home in Devonshire — her father kept a turnpike on the high-road that led to Exeter, and there were pigs in the sty, and there was a cow, and the cow had just had a calf — till Philip forgot his tears and grew excited at the thought of his approaching journey. Presently she put him down, for there was much to be done, and he helped her to lay out his clothes on the bed. She sent him into the nursery to gather up his toys, and in a little while he was playing happily.

But at last he grew tired of being alone and went back to the bed-room, in which Emma was now putting his things into a big tin box; he remembered then that his uncle had said he might take something to remember his father and mother by. He told Emma and asked her what he should take.

“You’d better go into the drawing-room and see what you fancy.”

“Uncle William’s there.”

“Never mind that. They’re your own things now.”

Philip went downstairs slowly and found the door open. Mr. Carey had left the room. Philip walked slowly round. They had been in the house so short a time that there was little in it that had a particular interest to him. It was a stranger’s room, and Philip saw nothing that struck his fancy. But he knew which were his mother’s things and which belonged to the landlord, and presently fixed on a little clock that he had once heard his mother say she liked. With this he walked again rather disconsolately upstairs. Outside the door of his mother’s bed-room he stopped and listened. Though no one had told him not to go in, he had a feeling that it would be wrong to do so; he was a little frightened, and his heart beat uncomfortably; but at the same time something impelled him to turn the handle. He turned it very gently, as if to prevent anyone within from hearing, and then slowly pushed the door open. He stood on the threshold for a moment before he had the courage to enter. He was not frightened now, but it seemed strange. He closed the door behind him. The blinds were drawn, and the room, in the cold light of a January afternoon, was dark. On the dressing-table were Mrs. Carey’s brushes and the hand mirror. In a little tray were hairpins. There was a photograph of himself on the chimney-piece and one of his father. He had often been in the room when his mother was not in it, but now it seemed different. There was something curious in the look of the chairs. The bed was made as though someone were going to sleep in it that night, and in a case on the pillow was a night-dress.

Philip opened a large cupboard filled with dresses and, stepping in, took as many of them as he could in his arms and buried his face in them. They smelt of the scent his mother used. Then he pulled open the drawers, filled with his mother’s things, and looked at them: there were lavender bags among the linen, and their scent was fresh and pleasant. The strangeness of the room left it, and it seemed to him that his mother had just gone out for a walk. She would be in presently and would come upstairs to have nursery tea with him. And he seemed to feel her kiss on his lips.

It was not true that he would never see her again. It was not true simply because it was impossible. He climbed up on the bed and put his head on the pillow. He lay there quite still.

IV

Philip parted from Emma with tears, but the journey to Blackstable amused him, and, when they arrived, he was resigned and cheerful. Blackstable was sixty miles from London. Giving their luggage to a porter, Mr. Carey set out to walk with Philip to the vicarage; it took them little more than five minutes, and, when they reached it, Philip suddenly remembered the gate. It was red and five-barred: it swung both ways on easy hinges; and it was possible, though forbidden, to swing backwards and forwards on it. They walked through the garden to the front-door. This was only used by visitors and on Sundays, and on special occasions, as when the Vicar went up to London or came back. The traffic of the house took place through a side-door, and there was a back door as well for the gardener and for beggars and tramps. It was a fairly large house of yellow brick, with a red roof, built about five and twenty years before in an ecclesiastical style. The front-door was like a church porch, and the drawing-room windows were gothic.

Mrs. Carey, knowing by what train they were coming, waited in the drawing-room and listened for the click of the gate. When she heard it she went to the door.

“There’s Aunt Louisa,” said Mr. Carey, when he saw her. “Run and give her a kiss.”

Philip started to run, awkwardly, trailing his club-foot, and then stopped. Mrs. Carey was a little, shrivelled woman of the same age as her husband, with a face extraordinarily filled with deep wrinkles, and pale blue eyes. Her gray hair was arranged in ringlets according to the fashion of her youth. She wore a black dress, and her only ornament was a gold chain, from which hung a cross. She had a shy manner and a gentle voice.

“Did you walk, William?” she said, almost reproachfully, as she kissed her husband.

“I didn’t think of it,” he answered, with a glance at his nephew.

“It didn’t hurt you to walk, Philip, did it?” she asked the child.

“No. I always walk.”

He was a little surprised at their conversation. Aunt Louisa told him to come in, and they entered the hall. It was paved with red and yellow tiles, on which alternately were a Greek Cross and the Lamb of God. An imposing staircase led out of the hall. It was of polished pine, with a peculiar smell, and had been put in because fortunately, when the church was reseated, enough wood remained over. The balusters were decorated with emblems of the Four Evangelists.

“I’ve had the stove lighted as I thought you’d be cold after your journey,” said Mrs. Carey.

It was a large black stove that stood in the hall and was only lighted if the weather was very bad and the Vicar had a cold. It was not lighted if Mrs. Carey had a cold. Coal was expensive. Besides, Mary Ann, the maid, didn’t like fires all over the place. If they wanted all them fires they must keep a second girl. In the winter Mr. and Mrs. Carey lived in the dining-room so that one fire should do, and in the summer they could not get out of the habit, so the drawing-room was used only by Mr. Carey on Sunday afternoons for his nap. But every Saturday he had a fire in the study so that he could write his sermon.

Aunt Louisa took Philip upstairs and showed him into a tiny bed-room that looked out on the drive. Immediately in front of the window was a large tree, which Philip remembered now because the branches were so low that it was possible to climb quite high up it.

“A small room for a small boy,” said Mrs. Carey. “You won’t be frightened at sleeping alone?”

“Oh, no.”

On his first visit to the vicarage he had come with his nurse, and Mrs. Carey had had little to do with him. She looked at him now with some uncertainty.

“Can you wash your own hands, or shall I wash them for you?”

“I can wash myself,” he answered firmly.

“Well, I shall look at them when you come down to tea,” said Mrs. Carey.

She knew nothing about children. After it was settled that Philip should come down to Blackstable, Mrs. Carey had thought much how she should treat him; she was anxious to do her duty; but now he was there she found herself just as shy of him as he was of her. She hoped he would not be noisy and rough, because her husband did not like rough and noisy boys. Mrs. Carey made an excuse to leave Philip alone, but in a moment came back and knocked at the door; she asked him, without coming in, if he could pour out the water himself. Then she went downstairs and rang the bell for tea.

The dining-room, large and well-proportioned, had windows on two sides of it, with heavy curtains of red rep; there was a big table in the middle; and at one end an imposing mahogany sideboard with a looking-glass in it. In one corner stood a harmonium. On each side of the fireplace were chairs covered in stamped leather, each with an antimacassar; one had arms and was called the husband, and the other had none and was called the wife. Mrs. Carey never sat in the arm-chair: she said she preferred a chair that was not too comfortable; there was always a lot to do, and if her chair had had arms she might not be so ready to leave it.

Mr. Carey was making up the fire when Philip came in, and he pointed out to his nephew that there were two pokers. One was large and bright and polished and unused, and was called the Vicar; and the other, which was much smaller and had evidently passed through many fires, was called the Curate.

“What are we waiting for?” said Mr. Carey.

“I told Mary Ann to make you an egg. I thought you’d be hungry after your journey.”

Mrs. Carey thought the journey from London to Blackstable very tiring. She seldom travelled herself, for the living was only three hundred a year, and, when her husband wanted a holiday, since there was not money for two, he went by himself. He was very fond of Church Congresses and usually managed to go up to London once a year; and once he had been to Paris for the exhibition, and two or three times to Switzerland. Mary Ann brought in the egg, and they sat down. The chair was much too low for Philip, and for a moment neither Mr. Carey nor his wife knew what to do.

“I’ll put some books under him,” said Mary Ann.

She took from the top of the harmonium the large Bible and the prayer-book from which the Vicar was accustomed to read prayers, and put them on Philip’s chair.

“Oh, William, he can’t sit on the Bible,” said Mrs. Carey, in a shocked tone. “Couldn’t you get him some books out of the study?”

Mr. Carey considered the question for an instant.

“I don’t think it matters this once if you put the prayer-book on the top, Mary Ann,” he said. “The book of Common Prayer is the composition of men like ourselves. It has no claim to divine authorship.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, William,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip perched himself on the books, and the Vicar, having said grace, cut the top off his egg.

“There,” he said, handing it to Philip, “you can eat my top if you like.”

Philip would have liked an egg to himself, but he was not offered one, so took what he could.

“How have the chickens been laying since I went away?” asked the Vicar.

“Oh, they’ve been dreadful, only one or two a day.”

“How did you like that top, Philip?” asked his uncle.

“Very much, thank you.”

“You shall have another one on Sunday afternoon.”

Mr. Carey always had a boiled egg at tea on Sunday, so that he might be fortified for the evening service.

V

Philip came gradually to know the people he was to live with, and by fragments of conversation, some of it not meant for his ears, learned a good deal both about himself and about his dead parents. Philip’s father had been much younger than the Vicar of Blackstable. After a brilliant career at St. Luke’s Hospital he was put on the staff, and presently began to earn money in considerable sums. He spent it freely. When the parson set about restoring his church and asked his brother for a subscription, he was surprised by receiving a couple of hundred pounds: Mr. Carey, thrifty by inclination and economical by necessity, accepted it with mingled feelings; he was envious of his brother because he could afford to give so much, pleased for the sake of his church, and vaguely irritated by a generosity which seemed almost ostentatious. Then Henry Carey married a patient, a beautiful girl but penniless, an orphan with no near relations, but of good family; and there was an array of fine friends at the wedding. The parson, on his visits to her when he came to London, held himself with reserve. He felt shy with her and in his heart he resented her great beauty: she dressed more magnificently than became the wife of a hardworking surgeon; and the charming furniture of her house, the flowers among which she lived even in winter, suggested an extravagance which he deplored. He heard her talk of entertainments she was going to; and, as he told his wife on getting home again, it was impossible to accept hospitality without making some return. He had seen grapes in the dining-room that must have cost at least eight shillings a pound; and at luncheon he had been given asparagus two months before it was ready in the vicarage garden. Now all he had anticipated was come to pass: the Vicar felt the satisfaction of the prophet who saw fire and brimstone consume the city which would not mend its way to his warning. Poor Philip was practically penniless, and what was the good of his mother’s fine friends now? He heard that his father’s extravagance was really criminal, and it was a mercy that Providence had seen fit to take his dear mother to itself: she had no more idea of money than a child.

When Philip had been a week at Blackstable an incident happened which seemed to irritate his uncle very much. One morning he found on the breakfast table a small packet which had been sent on by post from the late Mrs. Carey’s house in London. It was addressed to her. When the parson opened it he found a dozen photographs of Mrs. Carey. They showed the head and shoulders only, and her hair was more plainly done than usual, low on the forehead, which gave her an unusual look; the face was thin and worn, but no illness could impair the beauty of her features. There was in the large dark eyes a sadness which Philip did not remember. The first sight of the dead woman gave Mr. Carey a little shock, but this was quickly followed by perplexity. The photographs seemed quite recent, and he could not imagine who had ordered them.

“D’you know anything about these, Philip?” he asked.

“I remember mamma said she’d been taken,” he answered. “Miss Watkin scolded her…. She said: I wanted the boy to have something to remember me by when he grows up.”

Mr. Carey looked at Philip for an instant. The child spoke in a clear treble. He recalled the words, but they meant nothing to him.

“You’d better take one of the photographs and keep it in your room,” said

Mr. Carey. “I’ll put the others away.”

He sent one to Miss Watkin, and she wrote and explained how they came to be taken.

One day Mrs. Carey was lying in bed, but she was feeling a little better than usual, and the doctor in the morning had seemed hopeful; Emma had taken the child out, and the maids were downstairs in the basement: suddenly Mrs. Carey felt desperately alone in the world. A great fear seized her that she would not recover from the confinement which she was expecting in a fortnight. Her son was nine years old. How could he be expected to remember her? She could not bear to think that he would grow up and forget, forget her utterly; and she had loved him so passionately, because he was weakly and deformed, and because he was her child. She had no photographs of herself taken since her marriage, and that was ten years before. She wanted her son to know what she looked like at the end. He could not forget her then, not forget utterly. She knew that if she called her maid and told her she wanted to get up, the maid would prevent her, and perhaps send for the doctor, and she had not the strength now to struggle or argue. She got out of bed and began to dress herself. She had been on her back so long that her legs gave way beneath her, and then the soles of her feet tingled so that she could hardly bear to put them to the ground. But she went on. She was unused to doing her own hair and, when she raised her arms and began to brush it, she felt faint. She could never do it as her maid did. It was beautiful hair, very fine, and of a deep rich gold. Her eyebrows were straight and dark. She put on a black skirt, but chose the bodice of the evening dress which she liked best: it was of a white damask which was fashionable in those days. She looked at herself in the glass. Her face was very pale, but her skin was clear: she had never had much colour, and this had always made the redness of her beautiful mouth emphatic. She could not restrain a sob. But she could not afford to be sorry for herself; she was feeling already desperately tired; and she put on the furs which Henry had given her the Christmas before — she had been so proud of them and so happy then — and slipped downstairs with beating heart. She got safely out of the house and drove to a photographer. She paid for a dozen photographs. She was obliged to ask for a glass of water in the middle of the sitting; and the assistant, seeing she was ill, suggested that she should come another day, but she insisted on staying till the end. At last it was finished, and she drove back again to the dingy little house in Kensington which she hated with all her heart. It was a horrible house to die in.

She found the front door open, and when she drove up the maid and Emma ran down the steps to help her. They had been frightened when they found her room empty. At first they thought she must have gone to Miss Watkin, and the cook was sent round. Miss Watkin came back with her and was waiting anxiously in the drawing-room. She came downstairs now full of anxiety and reproaches; but the exertion had been more than Mrs. Carey was fit for, and when the occasion for firmness no longer existed she gave way. She fell heavily into Emma’s arms and was carried upstairs. She remained unconscious for a time that seemed incredibly long to those that watched her, and the doctor, hurriedly sent for, did not come. It was next day, when she was a little better, that Miss Watkin got some explanation out of her. Philip was playing on the floor of his mother’s bed-room, and neither of the ladies paid attention to him. He only understood vaguely what they were talking about, and he could not have said why those words remained in his memory.

“I wanted the boy to have something to remember me by when he grows up.”

“I can’t make out why she ordered a dozen,” said Mr. Carey. “Two would have done.”

VI

One day was very like another at the vicarage.

Soon after breakfast Mary Ann brought in The Times. Mr. Carey shared it with two neighbours. He had it from ten till one, when the gardener took it over to Mr. Ellis at the Limes, with whom it remained till seven; then it was taken to Miss Brooks at the Manor House, who, since she got it late, had the advantage of keeping it. In summer Mrs. Carey, when she was making jam, often asked her for a copy to cover the pots with. When the Vicar settled down to his paper his wife put on her bonnet and went out to do the shopping. Philip accompanied her. Blackstable was a fishing village. It consisted of a high street in which were the shops, the bank, the doctor’s house, and the houses of two or three coalship owners; round the little harbor were shabby streets in which lived fishermen and poor people; but since they went to chapel they were of no account. When Mrs. Carey passed the dissenting ministers in the street she stepped over to the other side to avoid meeting them, but if there was not time for this fixed her eyes on the pavement. It was a scandal to which the Vicar had never resigned himself that there were three chapels in the High Street: he could not help feeling that the law should have stepped in to prevent their erection. Shopping in Blackstable was not a simple matter; for dissent, helped by the fact that the parish church was two miles from the town, was very common; and it was necessary to deal only with churchgoers; Mrs. Carey knew perfectly that the vicarage custom might make all the difference to a tradesman’s faith. There were two butchers who went to church, and they would not understand that the Vicar could not deal with both of them at once; nor were they satisfied with his simple plan of going for six months to one and for six months to the other. The butcher who was not sending meat to the vicarage constantly threatened not to come to church, and the Vicar was sometimes obliged to make a threat: it was very wrong of him not to come to church, but if he carried iniquity further and actually went to chapel, then of course, excellent as his meat was, Mr. Carey would be forced to leave him for ever. Mrs. Carey often stopped at the bank to deliver a message to Josiah Graves, the manager, who was choir-master, treasurer, and churchwarden. He was a tall, thin man with a sallow face and a long nose; his hair was very white, and to Philip he seemed extremely old. He kept the parish accounts, arranged the treats for the choir and the schools; though there was no organ in the parish church, it was generally considered (in Blackstable) that the choir he led was the best in Kent; and when there was any ceremony, such as a visit from the Bishop for confirmation or from the Rural Dean to preach at the Harvest Thanksgiving, he made the necessary preparations. But he had no hesitation in doing all manner of things without more than a perfunctory consultation with the Vicar, and the Vicar, though always ready to be saved trouble, much resented the churchwarden’s managing ways. He really seemed to look upon himself as the most important person in the parish. Mr. Carey constantly told his wife that if Josiah Graves did not take care he would give him a good rap over the knuckles one day; but Mrs. Carey advised him to bear with Josiah Graves: he meant well, and it was not his fault if he was not quite a gentleman. The Vicar, finding his comfort in the practice of a Christian virtue, exercised forbearance; but he revenged himself by calling the churchwarden Bismarck behind his back.

Once there had been a serious quarrel between the pair, and Mrs. Carey still thought of that anxious time with dismay. The Conservative candidate had announced his intention of addressing a meeting at Blackstable; and Josiah Graves, having arranged that it should take place in the Mission Hall, went to Mr. Carey and told him that he hoped he would say a few words. It appeared that the candidate had asked Josiah Graves to take the chair. This was more than Mr. Carey could put up with. He had firm views upon the respect which was due to the cloth, and it was ridiculous for a churchwarden to take the chair at a meeting when the Vicar was there. He reminded Josiah Graves that parson meant person, that is, the vicar was the person of the parish. Josiah Graves answered that he was the first to recognise the dignity of the church, but this was a matter of politics, and in his turn he reminded the Vicar that their Blessed Saviour had enjoined upon them to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. To this Mr. Carey replied that the devil could quote scripture to his purpose, himself had sole authority over the Mission Hall, and if he were not asked to be chairman he would refuse the use of it for a political meeting. Josiah Graves told Mr. Carey that he might do as he chose, and for his part he thought the Wesleyan Chapel would be an equally suitable place. Then Mr. Carey said that if Josiah Graves set foot in what was little better than a heathen temple he was not fit to be churchwarden in a Christian parish. Josiah Graves thereupon resigned all his offices, and that very evening sent to the church for his cassock and surplice. His sister, Miss Graves, who kept house for him, gave up her secretaryship of the Maternity Club, which provided the pregnant poor with flannel, baby linen, coals, and five shillings. Mr. Carey said he was at last master in his own house. But soon he found that he was obliged to see to all sorts of things that he knew nothing about; and Josiah Graves, after the first moment of irritation, discovered that he had lost his chief interest in life. Mrs. Carey and Miss Graves were much distressed by the quarrel; they met after a discreet exchange of letters, and made up their minds to put the matter right: they talked, one to her husband, the other to her brother, from morning till night; and since they were persuading these gentlemen to do what in their hearts they wanted, after three weeks of anxiety a reconciliation was effected. It was to both their interests, but they ascribed it to a common love for their Redeemer. The meeting was held at the Mission Hall, and the doctor was asked to be chairman. Mr. Carey and Josiah Graves both made speeches.

When Mrs. Carey had finished her business with the banker, she generally went upstairs to have a little chat with his sister; and while the ladies talked of parish matters, the curate or the new bonnet of Mrs. Wilson — Mr. Wilson was the richest man in Blackstable, he was thought to have at least five hundred a year, and he had married his cook — Philip sat demurely in the stiff parlour, used only to receive visitors, and busied himself with the restless movements of goldfish in a bowl. The windows were never opened except to air the room for a few minutes in the morning, and it had a stuffy smell which seemed to Philip to have a mysterious connection with banking.

Then Mrs. Carey remembered that she had to go to the grocer, and they continued their way. When the shopping was done they often went down a side street of little houses, mostly of wood, in which fishermen dwelt (and here and there a fisherman sat on his doorstep mending his nets, and nets hung to dry upon the doors), till they came to a small beach, shut in on each side by warehouses, but with a view of the sea. Mrs. Carey stood for a few minutes and looked at it, it was turbid and yellow, [and who knows what thoughts passed through her mind?] while Philip searched for flat stones to play ducks and drakes. Then they walked slowly back. They looked into the post office to get the right time, nodded to Mrs. Wigram the doctor’s wife, who sat at her window sewing, and so got home.

Dinner was at one o’clock; and on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday it consisted of beef, roast, hashed, and minced, and on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of mutton. On Sunday they ate one of their own chickens. In the afternoon Philip did his lessons, He was taught Latin and mathematics by his uncle who knew neither, and French and the piano by his aunt. Of French she was ignorant, but she knew the piano well enough to accompany the old-fashioned songs she had sung for thirty years. Uncle William used to tell Philip that when he was a curate his wife had known twelve songs by heart, which she could sing at a moment’s notice whenever she was asked. She often sang still when there was a tea-party at the vicarage. There were few people whom the Careys cared to ask there, and their parties consisted always of the curate, Josiah Graves with his sister, Dr. Wigram and his wife. After tea Miss Graves played one or two of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, and Mrs. Carey sang When the Swallows Homeward Fly, or Trot, Trot, My Pony.

But the Careys did not give tea-parties often; the preparations upset them, and when their guests were gone they felt themselves exhausted. They preferred to have tea by themselves, and after tea they played backgammon. Mrs. Carey arranged that her husband should win, because he did not like losing. They had cold supper at eight. It was a scrappy meal because Mary Ann resented getting anything ready after tea, and Mrs. Carey helped to clear away. Mrs. Carey seldom ate more than bread and butter, with a little stewed fruit to follow, but the Vicar had a slice of cold meat. Immediately after supper Mrs. Carey rang the bell for prayers, and then Philip went to bed. He rebelled against being undressed by Mary Ann and after a while succeeded in establishing his right to dress and undress himself. At nine o’clock Mary Ann brought in the eggs and the plate. Mrs. Carey wrote the date on each egg and put the number down in a book. She then took the plate-basket on her arm and went upstairs. Mr. Carey continued to read one of his old books, but as the clock struck ten he got up, put out the lamps, and followed his wife to bed.

When Philip arrived there was some difficulty in deciding on which evening he should have his bath. It was never easy to get plenty of hot water, since the kitchen boiler did not work, and it was impossible for two persons to have a bath on the same day. The only man who had a bathroom in Blackstable was Mr. Wilson, and it was thought ostentatious of him. Mary Ann had her bath in the kitchen on Monday night, because she liked to begin the week clean. Uncle William could not have his on Saturday, because he had a heavy day before him and he was always a little tired after a bath, so he had it on Friday. Mrs. Carey had hers on Thursday for the same reason. It looked as though Saturday were naturally indicated for Philip, but Mary Ann said she couldn’t keep the fire up on Saturday night: what with all the cooking on Sunday, having to make pastry and she didn’t know what all, she did not feel up to giving the boy his bath on Saturday night; and it was quite clear that he could not bath himself. Mrs. Carey was shy about bathing a boy, and of course the Vicar had his sermon. But the Vicar insisted that Philip should be clean and sweet for the lord’s Day. Mary Ann said she would rather go than be put upon — and after eighteen years she didn’t expect to have more work given her, and they might show some consideration — and Philip said he didn’t want anyone to bath him, but could very well bath himself. This settled it. Mary Ann said she was quite sure he wouldn’t bath himself properly, and rather than he should go dirty — and not because he was going into the presence of the Lord, but because she couldn’t abide a boy who wasn’t properly washed — she’d work herself to the bone even if it was Saturday night.

VII

Sunday was a day crowded with incident. Mr. Carey was accustomed to say that he was the only man in his parish who worked seven days a week.

The household got up half an hour earlier than usual. No lying abed for a poor parson on the day of rest, Mr. Carey remarked as Mary Ann knocked at the door punctually at eight. It took Mrs. Carey longer to dress, and she got down to breakfast at nine, a little breathless, only just before her husband. Mr. Carey’s boots stood in front of the fire to warm. Prayers were longer than usual, and the breakfast more substantial. After breakfast the Vicar cut thin slices of bread for the communion, and Philip was privileged to cut off the crust. He was sent to the study to fetch a marble paperweight, with which Mr. Carey pressed the bread till it was thin and pulpy, and then it was cut into small squares. The amount was regulated by the weather. On a very bad day few people came to church, and on a very fine one, though many came, few stayed for communion. There were most when it was dry enough to make the walk to church pleasant, but not so fine that people wanted to hurry away.

Then Mrs. Carey brought the communion plate out of the safe, which stood in the pantry, and the Vicar polished it with a chamois leather. At ten the fly drove up, and Mr. Carey got into his boots. Mrs. Carey took several minutes to put on her bonnet, during which the Vicar, in a voluminous cloak, stood in the hall with just such an expression on his face as would have become an early Christian about to be led into the arena. It was extraordinary that after thirty years of marriage his wife could not be ready in time on Sunday morning. At last she came, in black satin; the Vicar did not like colours in a clergyman’s wife at any time, but on Sundays he was determined that she should wear black; now and then, in conspiracy with Miss Graves, she ventured a white feather or a pink rose in her bonnet, but the Vicar insisted that it should disappear; he said he would not go to church with the scarlet woman: Mrs. Carey sighed as a woman but obeyed as a wife. They were about to step into the carriage when the Vicar remembered that no one had given him his egg. They knew that he must have an egg for his voice, there were two women in the house, and no one had the least regard for his comfort. Mrs. Carey scolded Mary Ann, and Mary Ann answered that she could not think of everything. She hurried away to fetch an egg, and Mrs. Carey beat it up in a glass of sherry. The Vicar swallowed it at a gulp. The communion plate was stowed in the carriage, and they set off.

The fly came from The Red Lion and had a peculiar smell of stale straw. They drove with both windows closed so that the Vicar should not catch cold. The sexton was waiting at the porch to take the communion plate, and while the Vicar went to the vestry Mrs. Carey and Philip settled themselves in the vicarage pew. Mrs. Carey placed in front of her the sixpenny bit she was accustomed to put in the plate, and gave Philip threepence for the same purpose. The church filled up gradually and the service began.

Philip grew bored during the sermon, but if he fidgetted Mrs. Carey put a gentle hand on his arm and looked at him reproachfully. He regained interest when the final hymn was sung and Mr. Graves passed round with the plate.

When everyone had gone Mrs. Carey went into Miss Graves’ pew to have a few words with her while they were waiting for the gentlemen, and Philip went to the vestry. His uncle, the curate, and Mr. Graves were still in their surplices. Mr. Carey gave him the remains of the consecrated bread and told him he might eat it. He had been accustomed to eat it himself, as it seemed blasphemous to throw it away, but Philip’s keen appetite relieved him from the duty. Then they counted the money. It consisted of pennies, sixpences and threepenny bits. There were always two single shillings, one put in the plate by the Vicar and the other by Mr. Graves; and sometimes there was a florin. Mr. Graves told the Vicar who had given this. It was always a stranger to Blackstable, and Mr. Carey wondered who he was. But Miss Graves had observed the rash act and was able to tell Mrs. Carey that the stranger came from London, was married and had children. During the drive home Mrs. Carey passed the information on, and the Vicar made up his mind to call on him and ask for a subscription to the Additional Curates Society. Mr. Carey asked if Philip had behaved properly; and Mrs. Carey remarked that Mrs. Wigram had a new mantle, Mr. Cox was not in church, and somebody thought that Miss Phillips was engaged. When they reached the vicarage they all felt that they deserved a substantial dinner.

When this was over Mrs. Carey went to her room to rest, and Mr. Carey lay down on the sofa in the drawing-room for forty winks.

They had tea at five, and the Vicar ate an egg to support himself for evensong. Mrs. Carey did not go to this so that Mary Ann might, but she read the service through and the hymns. Mr. Carey walked to church in the evening, and Philip limped along by his side. The walk through the darkness along the country road strangely impressed him, and the church with all its lights in the distance, coming gradually nearer, seemed very friendly. At first he was shy with his uncle, but little by little grew used to him, and he would slip his hand in his uncle’s and walk more easily for the feeling of protection.

They had supper when they got home. Mr. Carey’s slippers were waiting for him on a footstool in front of the fire and by their side Philip’s, one the shoe of a small boy, the other misshapen and odd. He was dreadfully tired when he went up to bed, and he did not resist when Mary Ann undressed him. She kissed him after she tucked him up, and he began to love her.

VIII

Philip had led always the solitary life of an only child, and his loneliness at the vicarage was no greater than it had been when his mother lived. He made friends with Mary Ann. She was a chubby little person of thirty-five, the daughter of a fisherman, and had come to the vicarage at eighteen; it was her first place and she had no intention of leaving it; but she held a possible marriage as a rod over the timid heads of her master and mistress. Her father and mother lived in a little house off Harbour Street, and she went to see them on her evenings out. Her stories of the sea touched Philip’s imagination, and the narrow alleys round the harbour grew rich with the romance which his young fancy lent them. One evening he asked whether he might go home with her; but his aunt was afraid that he might catch something, and his uncle said that evil communications corrupted good manners. He disliked the fisher folk, who were rough, uncouth, and went to chapel. But Philip was more comfortable in the kitchen than in the dining-room, and, whenever he could, he took his toys and played there. His aunt was not sorry. She did not like disorder, and though she recognised that boys must be expected to be untidy she preferred that he should make a mess in the kitchen. If he fidgeted his uncle was apt to grow restless and say it was high time he went to school. Mrs. Carey thought Philip very young for this, and her heart went out to the motherless child; but her attempts to gain his affection were awkward, and the boy, feeling shy, received her demonstrations with so much sullenness that she was mortified. Sometimes she heard his shrill voice raised in laughter in the kitchen, but when she went in, he grew suddenly silent, and he flushed darkly when Mary Ann explained the joke. Mrs. Carey could not see anything amusing in what she heard, and she smiled with constraint.

“He seems happier with Mary Ann than with us, William,” she said, when she returned to her sewing.

“One can see he’s been very badly brought up. He wants licking into shape.”

On the second Sunday after Philip arrived an unlucky incident occurred. Mr. Carey had retired as usual after dinner for a little snooze in the drawing-room, but he was in an irritable mood and could not sleep. Josiah Graves that morning had objected strongly to some candlesticks with which the Vicar had adorned the altar. He had bought them second-hand in Tercanbury, and he thought they looked very well. But Josiah Graves said they were popish. This was a taunt that always aroused the Vicar. He had been at Oxford during the movement which ended in the secession from the Established Church of Edward Manning, and he felt a certain sympathy for the Church of Rome. He would willingly have made the service more ornate than had been usual in the low-church parish of Blackstable, and in his secret soul he yearned for processions and lighted candles. He drew the line at incense. He hated the word protestant. He called himself a Catholic. He was accustomed to say that Papists required an epithet, they were Roman Catholic; but the Church of England was Catholic in the best, the fullest, and the noblest sense of the term. He was pleased to think that his shaven face gave him the look of a priest, and in his youth he had possessed an ascetic air which added to the impression. He often related that on one of his holidays in Boulogne, one of those holidays upon which his wife for economy’s sake did not accompany him, when he was sitting in a church, the cure had come up to him and invited him to preach a sermon. He dismissed his curates when they married, having decided views on the celibacy of the unbeneficed clergy. But when at an election the Liberals had written on his garden fence in large blue letters: This way to Rome, he had been very angry, and threatened to prosecute the leaders of the Liberal party in Blackstable. He made up his mind now that nothing Josiah Graves said would induce him to remove the candlesticks from the altar, and he muttered Bismarck to himself once or twice irritably.

Suddenly he heard an unexpected noise. He pulled the handkerchief off his face, got up from the sofa on which he was lying, and went into the dining-room. Philip was seated on the table with all his bricks around him. He had built a monstrous castle, and some defect in the foundation had just brought the structure down in noisy ruin.

“What are you doing with those bricks, Philip? You know you’re not allowed to play games on Sunday.”

Philip stared at him for a moment with frightened eyes, and, as his habit was, flushed deeply.

“I always used to play at home,” he answered.

“I’m sure your dear mamma never allowed you to do such a wicked thing as that.”

Philip did not know it was wicked; but if it was, he did not wish it to be supposed that his mother had consented to it. He hung his head and did not answer.

“Don’t you know it’s very, very wicked to play on Sunday? What d’you suppose it’s called the day of rest for? You’re going to church tonight, and how can you face your Maker when you’ve been breaking one of His laws in the afternoon?”

Mr. Carey told him to put the bricks away at once, and stood over him while Philip did so.

“You’re a very naughty boy,” he repeated. “Think of the grief you’re causing your poor mother in heaven.”

Philip felt inclined to cry, but he had an instinctive disinclination to letting other people see his tears, and he clenched his teeth to prevent the sobs from escaping. Mr. Carey sat down in his arm-chair and began to turn over the pages of a book. Philip stood at the window. The vicarage was set back from the highroad to Tercanbury, and from the dining-room one saw a semicircular strip of lawn and then as far as the horizon green fields. Sheep were grazing in them. The sky was forlorn and gray. Philip felt infinitely unhappy.

Presently Mary Ann came in to lay the tea, and Aunt Louisa descended the stairs.

“Have you had a nice little nap, William?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. “Philip made so much noise that I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

This was not quite accurate, for he had been kept awake by his own thoughts; and Philip, listening sullenly, reflected that he had only made a noise once, and there was no reason why his uncle should not have slept before or after. When Mrs. Carey asked for an explanation the Vicar narrated the facts.

“He hasn’t even said he was sorry,” he finished.

“Oh, Philip, I’m sure you’re sorry,” said Mrs. Carey, anxious that the child should not seem wickeder to his uncle than need be.

Philip did not reply. He went on munching his bread and butter. He did not know what power it was in him that prevented him from making any expression of regret. He felt his ears tingling, he was a little inclined to cry, but no word would issue from his lips.

“You needn’t make it worse by sulking,” said Mr. Carey.

Tea was finished in silence. Mrs. Carey looked at Philip surreptitiously now and then, but the Vicar elaborately ignored him. When Philip saw his uncle go upstairs to get ready for church he went into the hall and got his hat and coat, but when the Vicar came downstairs and saw him, he said:

“I don’t wish you to go to church tonight, Philip. I don’t think you’re in a proper frame of mind to enter the House of God.”

Philip did not say a word. He felt it was a deep humiliation that was placed upon him, and his cheeks reddened. He stood silently watching his uncle put on his broad hat and his voluminous cloak. Mrs. Carey as usual went to the door to see him off. Then she turned to Philip.

“Never mind, Philip, you won’t be a naughty boy next Sunday, will you, and then your uncle will take you to church with him in the evening.”

She took off his hat and coat, and led him into the dining-room.

“Shall you and I read the service together, Philip, and we’ll sing the hymns at the harmonium. Would you like that?”

Philip shook his head decidedly. Mrs. Carey was taken aback. If he would not read the evening service with her she did not know what to do with him.

“Then what would you like to do until your uncle comes back?” she asked helplessly.

Philip broke his silence at last.

“I want to be left alone,” he said.

“Philip, how can you say anything so unkind? Don’t you know that your uncle and I only want your good? Don’t you love me at all?”

“I hate you. I wish you was dead.”

Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat down in her husband’s chair; and as she thought of her desire to love the friendless, crippled boy and her eager wish that he should love her — she was a barren woman and, even though it was clearly God’s will that she should be childless, she could scarcely bear to look at little children sometimes, her heart ached so — the tears rose to her eyes and one by one, slowly, rolled down her cheeks. Philip watched her in amazement. She took out her handkerchief, and now she cried without restraint. Suddenly Philip realised that she was crying because of what he had said, and he was sorry. He went up to her silently and kissed her. It was the first kiss he had ever given her without being asked. And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

IX

On the following Sunday, when the Vicar was making his preparations to go into the drawing-room for his nap — all the actions of his life were conducted with ceremony — and Mrs. Carey was about to go upstairs, Philip asked:

“What shall I do if I’m not allowed to play?”

“Can’t you sit still for once and be quiet?”

“I can’t sit still till tea-time.”

Mr. Carey looked out of the window, but it was cold and raw, and he could not suggest that Philip should go into the garden.

“I know what you can do. You can learn by heart the collect for the day.”

He took the prayer-book which was used for prayers from the harmonium, and turned the pages till he came to the place he wanted.

“It’s not a long one. If you can say it without a mistake when I come in to tea you shall have the top of my egg.”

Mrs. Carey drew up Philip’s chair to the dining-room table — they had bought him a high chair by now — and placed the book in front of him.

“The devil finds work for idle hands to do,” said Mr. Carey.

He put some more coals on the fire so that there should be a cheerful blaze when he came in to tea, and went into the drawing-room. He loosened his collar, arranged the cushions, and settled himself comfortably on the sofa. But thinking the drawing-room a little chilly, Mrs. Carey brought him a rug from the hall; she put it over his legs and tucked it round his feet. She drew the blinds so that the light should not offend his eyes, and since he had closed them already went out of the room on tiptoe. The Vicar was at peace with himself today, and in ten minutes he was asleep. He snored softly.

It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the collect began with the words: O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of Eternal life. Philip read it through. He could make no sense of it. He began saying the words aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown to him, and the construction of the sentence was strange. He could not get more than two lines in his head. And his attention was constantly wandering: there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the vicarage, and a long twig beat now and then against the windowpane; sheep grazed stolidly in the field beyond the garden. It seemed as though there were knots inside his brain. Then panic seized him that he would not know the words by tea-time, and he kept on whispering them to himself quickly; he did not try to understand, but merely to get them parrot-like into his memory.

Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by four o’clock she was so wide awake that she came downstairs. She thought she would hear Philip his collect so that he should make no mistakes when he said it to his uncle. His uncle then would be pleased; he would see that the boy’s heart was in the right place. But when Mrs. Carey came to the dining-room and was about to go in, she heard a sound that made her stop suddenly. Her heart gave a little jump. She turned away and quietly slipped out of the front-door. She walked round the house till she came to the dining-room window and then cautiously looked in. Philip was still sitting on the chair she had put him in, but his head was on the table buried in his arms, and he was sobbing desperately. She saw the convulsive movement of his shoulders. Mrs. Carey was frightened. A thing that had always struck her about the child was that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his feelings: he hid himself to weep.

Without thinking that her husband disliked being wakened suddenly, she burst into the drawing-room.

“William, William,” she said. “The boy’s crying as though his heart would break.”

Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the rug about his legs.

“What’s he got to cry about?”

“I don’t know…. Oh, William, we can’t let the boy be unhappy. D’you think it’s our fault? If we’d had children we’d have known what to do.”

Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity. He felt extraordinarily helpless.

“He can’t be crying because I gave him the collect to learn. It’s not more than ten lines.”

“Don’t you think I might take him some picture books to look at, William? There are some of the Holy Land. There couldn’t be anything wrong in that.”

“Very well, I don’t mind.”

Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was Mr. Carey’s only passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without spending an hour or two in the second-hand shop; he always brought back four or five musty volumes. He never read them, for he had long lost the habit of reading, but he liked to turn the pages, look at the illustrations if they were illustrated, and mend the bindings. He welcomed wet days because on them he could stay at home without pangs of conscience and spend the afternoon with white of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia leather of some battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels, with steel engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described Palestine. She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip should have time to compose himself, she felt that he would be humiliated if she came upon him in the midst of his tears, then she rattled the door handle. When she went in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding his eyes with his hands so that she might not see he had been crying.

“Do you know the collect yet?” she said.

He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his voice. She was oddly embarrassed.

“I can’t learn it by heart,” he said at last, with a gasp.

“Oh, well, never mind,” she said. “You needn’t. I’ve got some picture books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we’ll look at them together.”

Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him.

“Look,” she said, “that’s the place where our blessed Lord was born.”

She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the picture as if he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of the nomads.

“Read what it says,” he asked.

Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip interrupted her.

“I want to see another picture.”

When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth. Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put the book down for tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get the collect by heart; he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was raining, and he asked for the book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him joyfully. Talking over his future with her husband she had found that both desired him to take orders, and this eagerness for the book which described places hallowed by the presence of Jesus seemed a good sign. It looked as though the boy’s mind addressed itself naturally to holy things. But in a day or two he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him into his study, showed him the shelf in which he kept illustrated works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to read the page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it was about, and soon he lost all interest in his toys.

Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town, he found his chief amusement in those which described the Levant. His heart beat with excitement at the pictures of mosques and rich palaces; but there was one, in a book on Constantinople, which peculiarly stirred his imagination. It was called the Hall of the Thousand Columns. It was a Byzantine cistern, which the popular fancy had endowed with fantastic vastness; and the legend which he read told that a boat was always moored at the entrance to tempt the unwary, but no traveller venturing into the darkness had ever been seen again. And Philip wondered whether the boat went on for ever through one pillared alley after another or came at last to some strange mansion.

One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane’s translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories that dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read again and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment. Presently he began to read other things. His brain was precocious. His uncle and aunt, seeing that he occupied himself and neither worried nor made a noise, ceased to trouble themselves about him. Mr. Carey had so many books that he did not know them, and as he read little he forgot the odd lots he had bought at one time and another because they were cheap. Haphazard among the sermons and homilies, the travels, the lives of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were old-fashioned novels; and these Philip at last discovered. He chose them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lancashire Witches, and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then many more. Whenever he started a book with two solitary travellers riding along the brink of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.

The summer was come now, and the gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately. Time passed and it was July; August came: on Sundays the church was crowded with strangers, and the collection at the offertory often amounted to two pounds. Neither the Vicar nor Mrs. Carey went out of the garden much during this period; for they disliked strange faces, and they looked upon the visitors from London with aversion. The house opposite was taken for six weeks by a gentleman who had two little boys, and he sent in to ask if Philip would like to go and play with them; but Mrs. Carey returned a polite refusal. She was afraid that Philip would be corrupted by little boys from London. He was going to be a clergyman, and it was necessary that he should be preserved from contamination. She liked to see in him an infant Samuel.

X

The Careys made up their minds to send Philip to King’s School at Tercanbury. The neighbouring clergy sent their sons there. It was united by long tradition to the Cathedral: its headmaster was an honorary Canon, and a past headmaster was the Archdeacon. Boys were encouraged there to aspire to Holy Orders, and the education was such as might prepare an honest lad to spend his life in God’s service. A preparatory school was attached to it, and to this it was arranged that Philip should go. Mr. Carey took him into Tercanbury one Thursday afternoon towards the end of September. All day Philip had been excited and rather frightened. He knew little of school life but what he had read in the stories of The Boy’s Own Paper. He had also read Eric, or Little by Little.

When they got out of the train at Tercanbury, Philip felt sick with apprehension, and during the drive in to the town sat pale and silent. The high brick wall in front of the school gave it the look of a prison. There was a little door in it, which opened on their ringing; and a clumsy, untidy man came out and fetched Philip’s tin trunk and his play-box. They were shown into the drawing-room; it was filled with massive, ugly furniture, and the chairs of the suite were placed round the walls with a forbidding rigidity. They waited for the headmaster.

“What’s Mr. Watson like?” asked Philip, after a while.

“You’ll see for yourself.”

There was another pause. Mr. Carey wondered why the headmaster did not come. Presently Philip made an effort and spoke again.

“Tell him I’ve got a club-foot,” he said.

Before Mr. Carey could speak the door burst open and Mr. Watson swept into the room. To Philip he seemed gigantic. He was a man of over six feet high, and broad, with enormous hands and a great red beard; he talked loudly in a jovial manner; but his aggressive cheerfulness struck terror in Philip’s heart. He shook hands with Mr. Carey, and then took Philip’s small hand in his.

“Well, young fellow, are you glad to come to school?” he shouted.

Philip reddened and found no word to answer.

“How old are you?”

“Nine,” said Philip.

“You must say sir,” said his uncle.

“I expect you’ve got a good lot to learn,” the headmaster bellowed cheerily.

To give the boy confidence he began to tickle him with rough fingers.

Philip, feeling shy and uncomfortable, squirmed under his touch.

“I’ve put him in the small dormitory for the present…. You’ll like that, won’t you?” he added to Philip. “Only eight of you in there. You won’t feel so strange.”

Then the door opened, and Mrs. Watson came in. She was a dark woman with black hair, neatly parted in the middle. She had curiously thick lips and a small round nose. Her eyes were large and black. There was a singular coldness in her appearance. She seldom spoke and smiled more seldom still. Her husband introduced Mr. Carey to her, and then gave Philip a friendly push towards her.

“This is a new boy, Helen, His name’s Carey.”

Without a word she shook hands with Philip and then sat down, not speaking, while the headmaster asked Mr. Carey how much Philip knew and what books he had been working with. The Vicar of Blackstable was a little embarrassed by Mr. Watson’s boisterous heartiness, and in a moment or two got up.

“I think I’d better leave Philip with you now.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Watson. “He’ll be safe with me. He’ll get on like a house on fire. Won’t you, young fellow?”

Without waiting for an answer from Philip the big man burst into a great bellow of laughter. Mr. Carey kissed Philip on the forehead and went away.

“Come along, young fellow,” shouted Mr. Watson. “I’ll show you the school-room.”

He swept out of the drawing-room with giant strides, and Philip hurriedly limped behind him. He was taken into a long, bare room with two tables that ran along its whole length; on each side of them were wooden forms.

“Nobody much here yet,” said Mr. Watson. “I’ll just show you the playground, and then I’ll leave you to shift for yourself.”

Mr. Watson led the way. Philip found himself in a large play-ground with high brick walls on three sides of it. On the fourth side was an iron railing through which you saw a vast lawn and beyond this some of the buildings of King’s School. One small boy was wandering disconsolately, kicking up the gravel as he walked.

“Hulloa, Venning,” shouted Mr. Watson. “When did you turn up?”

The small boy came forward and shook hands.

“Here’s a new boy. He’s older and bigger than you, so don’t you bully him.”

The headmaster glared amicably at the two children, filling them with fear by the roar of his voice, and then with a guffaw left them.

“What’s your name?”

“Carey.”

“What’s your father?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh! Does your mother wash?”

“My mother’s dead, too.”

Philip thought this answer would cause the boy a certain awkwardness, but

Venning was not to be turned from his facetiousness for so little.

“Well, did she wash?” he went on.

“Yes,” said Philip indignantly.

“She was a washerwoman then?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Then she didn’t wash.”

The little boy crowed with delight at the success of his dialectic. Then he caught sight of Philip’s feet.

“What’s the matter with your foot?”

Philip instinctively tried to withdraw it from sight. He hid it behind the one which was whole.

“I’ve got a club-foot,” he answered.

“How did you get it?”

“I’ve always had it.”

“Let’s have a look.”

“No.”

“Don’t then.”

The little boy accompanied the words with a sharp kick on Philip’s shin, which Philip did not expect and thus could not guard against. The pain was so great that it made him gasp, but greater than the pain was the surprise. He did not know why Venning kicked him. He had not the presence of mind to give him a black eye. Besides, the boy was smaller than he, and he had read in The Boy’s Own Paper that it was a mean thing to hit anyone smaller than yourself. While Philip was nursing his shin a third boy appeared, and his tormentor left him. In a little while he noticed that the pair were talking about him, and he felt they were looking at his feet. He grew hot and uncomfortable.

But others arrived, a dozen together, and then more, and they began to talk about their doings during the holidays, where they had been, and what wonderful cricket they had played. A few new boys appeared, and with these presently Philip found himself talking. He was shy and nervous. He was anxious to make himself pleasant, but he could not think of anything to say. He was asked a great many questions and answered them all quite willingly. One boy asked him whether he could play cricket.

“No,” answered Philip. “I’ve got a club-foot.”

The boy looked down quickly and reddened. Philip saw that he felt he had asked an unseemly question. He was too shy to apologise and looked at Philip awkwardly.

XI

Next morning when the clanging of a bell awoke Philip he looked round his cubicle in astonishment. Then a voice sang out, and he remembered where he was.

“Are you awake, Singer?”

The partitions of the cubicle were of polished pitch-pine, and there was a green curtain in front. In those days there was little thought of ventilation, and the windows were closed except when the dormitory was aired in the morning.

Philip got up and knelt down to say his prayers. It was a cold morning, and he shivered a little; but he had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realise that he was the creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshippers. Then he washed. There were two baths for the fifty boarders, and each boy had a bath once a week. The rest of his washing was done in a small basin on a wash-stand, which with the bed and a chair, made up the furniture of each cubicle. The boys chatted gaily while they dressed. Philip was all ears. Then another bell sounded, and they ran downstairs. They took their seats on the forms on each side of the two long tables in the school-room; and Mr. Watson, followed by his wife and the servants, came in and sat down. Mr. Watson read prayers in an impressive manner, and the supplications thundered out in his loud voice as though they were threats personally addressed to each boy. Philip listened with anxiety. Then Mr. Watson read a chapter from the Bible, and the servants trooped out. In a moment the untidy youth brought in two large pots of tea and on a second journey immense dishes of bread and butter.

Philip had a squeamish appetite, and the thick slabs of poor butter on the bread turned his stomach, but he saw other boys scraping it off and followed their example. They all had potted meats and such like, which they had brought in their play-boxes; and some had ‘extras,’ eggs or bacon, upon which Mr. Watson made a profit. When he had asked Mr. Carey whether Philip was to have these, Mr. Carey replied that he did not think boys should be spoilt. Mr. Watson quite agreed with him — he considered nothing was better than bread and butter for growing lads — but some parents, unduly pampering their offspring, insisted on it.

Philip noticed that ‘extras’ gave boys a certain consideration and made up his mind, when he wrote to Aunt Louisa, to ask for them.

After breakfast the boys wandered out into the play-ground. Here the day-boys were gradually assembling. They were sons of the local clergy, of the officers at the Depot, and of such manufacturers or men of business as the old town possessed. Presently a bell rang, and they all trooped into school. This consisted of a large, long room at opposite ends of which two under-masters conducted the second and third forms, and of a smaller one, leading out of it, used by Mr. Watson, who taught the first form. To attach the preparatory to the senior school these three classes were known officially, on speech days and in reports, as upper, middle, and lower second. Philip was put in the last. The master, a red-faced man with a pleasant voice, was called Rice; he had a jolly manner with boys, and the time passed quickly. Philip was surprised when it was a quarter to eleven and they were let out for ten minutes’ rest.

The whole school rushed noisily into the play-ground. The new boys were told to go into the middle, while the others stationed themselves along opposite walls. They began to play Pig in the Middle. The old boys ran from wall to wall while the new boys tried to catch them: when one was seized and the mystic words said — one, two, three, and a pig for me — he became a prisoner and, turning sides, helped to catch those who were still free. Philip saw a boy running past and tried to catch him, but his limp gave him no chance; and the runners, taking their opportunity, made straight for the ground he covered. Then one of them had the brilliant idea of imitating Philip’s clumsy run. Other boys saw it and began to laugh; then they all copied the first; and they ran round Philip, limping grotesquely, screaming in their treble voices with shrill laughter. They lost their heads with the delight of their new amusement, and choked with helpless merriment. One of them tripped Philip up and he fell, heavily as he always fell, and cut his knee. They laughed all the louder when he got up. A boy pushed him from behind, and he would have fallen again if another had not caught him. The game was forgotten in the entertainment of Philip’s deformity. One of them invented an odd, rolling limp that struck the rest as supremely ridiculous, and several of the boys lay down on the ground and rolled about in laughter: Philip was completely scared. He could not make out why they were laughing at him. His heart beat so that he could hardly breathe, and he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. He stood still stupidly while the boys ran round him, mimicking and laughing; they shouted to him to try and catch them; but he did not move. He did not want them to see him run any more. He was using all his strength to prevent himself from crying.

Suddenly the bell rang, and they all trooped back to school. Philip’s knee was bleeding, and he was dusty and dishevelled. For some minutes Mr. Rice could not control his form. They were excited still by the strange novelty, and Philip saw one or two of them furtively looking down at his feet. He tucked them under the bench.

In the afternoon they went up to play football, but Mr. Watson stopped

Philip on the way out after dinner.

“I suppose you can’t play football, Carey?” he asked him.

Philip blushed self-consciously.

“No, sir.”

“Very well. You’d better go up to the field. You can walk as far as that, can’t you?”

Philip had no idea where the field was, but he answered all the same.

“Yes, sir.”

The boys went in charge of Mr. Rice, who glanced at Philip and seeing he had not changed, asked why he was not going to play.

“Mr. Watson said I needn’t, sir,” said Philip.

“Why?”

There were boys all round him, looking at him curiously, and a feeling of shame came over Philip. He looked down without answering. Others gave the reply.

“He’s got a club-foot, sir.”

“Oh, I see.”

Mr. Rice was quite young; he had only taken his degree a year before; and he was suddenly embarrassed. His instinct was to beg the boy’s pardon, but he was too shy to do so. He made his voice gruff and loud.

“Now then, you boys, what are you waiting about for? Get on with you.”

Some of them had already started and those that were left now set off, in groups of two or three.

“You’d better come along with me, Carey,” said the master “You don’t know the way, do you?”

Philip guessed the kindness, and a sob came to his throat.

“I can’t go very fast, sir.”

“Then I’ll go very slow,” said the master, with a smile.

Philip’s heart went out to the red-faced, commonplace young man who said a gentle word to him. He suddenly felt less unhappy.

But at night when they went up to bed and were undressing, the boy who was called Singer came out of his cubicle and put his head in Philip’s.

“I say, let’s look at your foot,” he said.

“No,” answered Philip.

He jumped into bed quickly.

“Don’t say no to me,” said Singer. “Come on, Mason.”

The boy in the next cubicle was looking round the corner, and at the words he slipped in. They made for Philip and tried to tear the bed-clothes off him, but he held them tightly.

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” he cried.

Singer seized a brush and with the back of it beat Philip’s hands clenched on the blanket. Philip cried out.

“Why don’t you show us your foot quietly?”

“I won’t.”

In desperation Philip clenched his fist and hit the boy who tormented him, but he was at a disadvantage, and the boy seized his arm. He began to turn it.

“Oh, don’t, don’t,” said Philip. “You’ll break my arm.”

“Stop still then and put out your foot.”

Philip gave a sob and a gasp. The boy gave the arm another wrench. The pain was unendurable.

“All right. I’ll do it,” said Philip.

He put out his foot. Singer still kept his hand on Philip’s wrist. He looked curiously at the deformity.

“Isn’t it beastly?” said Mason.

Another came in and looked too.

“Ugh,” he said, in disgust.

“My word, it is rum,” said Singer, making a face. “Is it hard?”

He touched it with the tip of his forefinger, cautiously, as though it were something that had a life of its own. Suddenly they heard Mr. Watson’s heavy tread on the stairs. They threw the clothes back on Philip and dashed like rabbits into their cubicles. Mr. Watson came into the dormitory. Raising himself on tiptoe he could see over the rod that bore the green curtain, and he looked into two or three of the cubicles. The little boys were safely in bed. He put out the light and went out.

Singer called out to Philip, but he did not answer. He had got his teeth in the pillow so that his sobbing should be inaudible. He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord.

And then he felt the misery of his life. It seemed to his childish mind that this unhappiness must go on for ever. For no particular reason he remembered that cold morning when Emma had taken him out of bed and put him beside his mother. He had not thought of it once since it happened, but now he seemed to feel the warmth of his mother’s body against his and her arms around him. Suddenly it seemed to him that his life was a dream, his mother’s death, and the life at the vicarage, and these two wretched days at school, and he would awake in the morning and be back again at home. His tears dried as he thought of it. He was too unhappy, it must be nothing but a dream, and his mother was alive, and Emma would come up presently and go to bed. He fell asleep.

But when he awoke next morning it was to the clanging of a bell, and the first thing his eyes saw was the green curtain of his cubicle.

XII

As time went on Philip’s deformity ceased to interest. It was accepted like one boy’s red hair and another’s unreasonable corpulence. But meanwhile he had grown horribly sensitive. He never ran if he could help it, because he knew it made his limp more conspicuous, and he adopted a peculiar walk. He stood still as much as he could, with his club-foot behind the other, so that it should not attract notice, and he was constantly on the look out for any reference to it. Because he could not join in the games which other boys played, their life remained strange to him; he only interested himself from the outside in their doings; and it seemed to him that there was a barrier between them and him. Sometimes they seemed to think that it was his fault if he could not play football, and he was unable to make them understand. He was left a good deal to himself. He had been inclined to talkativeness, but gradually he became silent. He began to think of the difference between himself and others.

The biggest boy in his dormitory, Singer, took a dislike to him, and Philip, small for his age, had to put up with a good deal of hard treatment. About half-way through the term a mania ran through the school for a game called Nibs. It was a game for two, played on a table or a form with steel pens. You had to push your nib with the finger-nail so as to get the point of it over your opponent’s, while he manoeuvred to prevent this and to get the point of his nib over the back of yours; when this result was achieved you breathed on the ball of your thumb, pressed it hard on the two nibs, and if you were able then to lift them without dropping either, both nibs became yours. Soon nothing was seen but boys playing this game, and the more skilful acquired vast stores of nibs. But in a little while Mr. Watson made up his mind that it was a form of gambling, forbade the game, and confiscated all the nibs in the boys’ possession. Philip had been very adroit, and it was with a heavy heart that he gave up his winning; but his fingers itched to play still, and a few days later, on his way to the football field, he went into a shop and bought a pennyworth of J pens. He carried them loose in his pocket and enjoyed feeling them. Presently Singer found out that he had them. Singer had given up his nibs too, but he had kept back a very large one, called a Jumbo, which was almost unconquerable, and he could not resist the opportunity of getting Philip’s Js out of him. Though Philip knew that he was at a disadvantage with his small nibs, he had an adventurous disposition and was willing to take the risk; besides, he was aware that Singer would not allow him to refuse. He had not played for a week and sat down to the game now with a thrill of excitement. He lost two of his small nibs quickly, and Singer was jubilant, but the third time by some chance the Jumbo slipped round and Philip was able to push his J across it. He crowed with triumph. At that moment Mr. Watson came in.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

He looked from Singer to Philip, but neither answered.

“Don’t you know that I’ve forbidden you to play that idiotic game?”

Philip’s heart beat fast. He knew what was coming and was dreadfully frightened, but in his fright there was a certain exultation. He had never been swished. Of course it would hurt, but it was something to boast about afterwards.

“Come into my study.”

The headmaster turned, and they followed him side by side Singer whispered to Philip:

“We’re in for it.”

Mr. Watson pointed to Singer.

“Bend over,” he said.

Philip, very white, saw the boy quiver at each stroke, and after the third he heard him cry out. Three more followed.

“That’ll do. Get up.”

Singer stood up. The tears were streaming down his face. Philip stepped forward. Mr. Watson looked at him for a moment.

“I’m not going to cane you. You’re a new boy. And I can’t hit a cripple.

Go away, both of you, and don’t be naughty again.”

When they got back into the school-room a group of boys, who had learned in some mysterious way what was happening, were waiting for them. They set upon Singer at once with eager questions. Singer faced them, his face red with the pain and marks of tears still on his cheeks. He pointed with his head at Philip, who was standing a little behind him.

“He got off because he’s a cripple,” he said angrily.

Philip stood silent and flushed. He felt that they looked at him with contempt.

“How many did you get?” one boy asked Singer.

But he did not answer. He was angry because he had been hurt

“Don’t ask me to play Nibs with you again,” he said to Philip. “It’s jolly nice for you. You don’t risk anything.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“Didn’t you!”

He quickly put out his foot and tripped Philip up. Philip was always rather unsteady on his feet, and he fell heavily to the ground.

“Cripple,” said Singer.

For the rest of the term he tormented Philip cruelly, and, though Philip tried to keep out of his way, the school was so small that it was impossible; he tried being friendly and jolly with him; he abased himself, so far as to buy him a knife; but though Singer took the knife he was not placated. Once or twice, driven beyond endurance, he hit and kicked the bigger boy, but Singer was so much stronger that Philip was helpless, and he was always forced after more or less torture to beg his pardon. It was that which rankled with Philip: he could not bear the humiliation of apologies, which were wrung from him by pain greater than he could bear. And what made it worse was that there seemed no end to his wretchedness; Singer was only eleven and would not go to the upper school till he was thirteen. Philip realised that he must live two years with a tormentor from whom there was no escape. He was only happy while he was working and when he got into bed. And often there recurred to him then that queer feeling that his life with all its misery was nothing but a dream, and that he would awake in the morning in his own little bed in London.

XIII

Two years passed, and Philip was nearly twelve. He was in the first form, within two or three places of the top, and after Christmas when several boys would be leaving for the senior school he would be head boy. He had already quite a collection of prizes, worthless books on bad paper, but in gorgeous bindings decorated with the arms of the school: his position had freed him from bullying, and he was not unhappy. His fellows forgave him his success because of his deformity.

“After all, it’s jolly easy for him to get prizes,” they said, “there’s nothing he CAN do but swat.”

He had lost his early terror of Mr. Watson. He had grown used to the loud voice, and when the headmaster’s heavy hand was laid on his shoulder Philip discerned vaguely the intention of a caress. He had the good memory which is more useful for scholastic achievements than mental power, and he knew Mr. Watson expected him to leave the preparatory school with a scholarship.

But he had grown very self-conscious. The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality. The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are the lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common; you will see them on Whit-Monday dancing on Hampstead Heath, shouting at a football match, or from club windows in Pall Mall cheering a royal procession. It is because of them that man has been called a social animal.

Philip passed from the innocence of childhood to bitter consciousness of himself by the ridicule which his club-foot had excited. The circumstances of his case were so peculiar that he could not apply to them the ready-made rules which acted well enough in ordinary affairs, and he was forced to think for himself. The many books he had read filled his mind with ideas which, because he only half understood them, gave more scope to his imagination. Beneath his painful shyness something was growing up within him, and obscurely he realised his personality. But at times it gave him odd surprises; he did things, he knew not why, and afterwards when he thought of them found himself all at sea.

There was a boy called Luard between whom and Philip a friendship had arisen, and one day, when they were playing together in the school-room, Luard began to perform some trick with an ebony pen-holder of Philip’s.

“Don’t play the giddy ox,” said Philip. “You’ll only break it.”

“I shan’t.”

But no sooner were the words out of the boy’s mouth than the pen-holder snapped in two. Luard looked at Philip with dismay.

“Oh, I say, I’m awfully sorry.”

The tears rolled down Philip’s cheeks, but he did not answer.

“I say, what’s the matter?” said Luard, with surprise. “I’ll get you another one exactly the same.”

“It’s not about the pen-holder I care,” said Philip, in a trembling voice, “only it was given me by my mater, just before she died.”

“I say, I’m awfully sorry, Carey.”

“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t your fault.”

Philip took the two pieces of the pen-holder and looked at them. He tried to restrain his sobs. He felt utterly miserable. And yet he could not tell why, for he knew quite well that he had bought the pen-holder during his last holidays at Blackstable for one and twopence. He did not know in the least what had made him invent that pathetic story, but he was quite as unhappy as though it had been true. The pious atmosphere of the vicarage and the religious tone of the school had made Philip’s conscience very sensitive; he absorbed insensibly the feeling about him that the Tempter was ever on the watch to gain his immortal soul; and though he was not more truthful than most boys he never told a lie without suffering from remorse. When he thought over this incident he was very much distressed, and made up his mind that he must go to Luard and tell him that the story was an invention. Though he dreaded humiliation more than anything in the world, he hugged himself for two or three days at the thought of the agonising joy of humiliating himself to the Glory of God. But he never got any further. He satisfied his conscience by the more comfortable method of expressing his repentance only to the Almighty. But he could not understand why he should have been so genuinely affected by the story he was making up. The tears that flowed down his grubby cheeks were real tears. Then by some accident of association there occurred to him that scene when Emma had told him of his mother’s death, and, though he could not speak for crying, he had insisted on going in to say good-bye to the Misses Watkin so that they might see his grief and pity him.

XIV

Then a wave of religiosity passed through the school. Bad language was no longer heard, and the little nastinesses of small boys were looked upon with hostility; the bigger boys, like the lords temporal of the Middle Ages, used the strength of their arms to persuade those weaker than themselves to virtuous courses.

Philip, his restless mind avid for new things, became very devout. He heard soon that it was possible to join a Bible League, and wrote to London for particulars. These consisted in a form to be filled up with the applicant’s name, age, and school; a solemn declaration to be signed that he would read a set portion of Holy Scripture every night for a year; and a request for half a crown; this, it was explained, was demanded partly to prove the earnestness of the applicant’s desire to become a member of the League, and partly to cover clerical expenses. Philip duly sent the papers and the money, and in return received a calendar worth about a penny, on which was set down the appointed passage to be read each day, and a sheet of paper on one side of which was a picture of the Good Shepherd and a lamb, and on the other, decoratively framed in red lines, a short prayer which had to be said before beginning to read.

Every evening he undressed as quickly as possible in order to have time for his task before the gas was put out. He read industriously, as he read always, without criticism, stories of cruelty, deceit, ingratitude, dishonesty, and low cunning. Actions which would have excited his horror in the life about him, in the reading passed through his mind without comment, because they were committed under the direct inspiration of God. The method of the League was to alternate a book of the Old Testament with a book of the New, and one night Philip came across these words of Jesus Christ:

If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig-tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.

And all this, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

They made no particular impression on him, but it happened that two or three days later, being Sunday, the Canon in residence chose them for the text of his sermon. Even if Philip had wanted to hear this it would have been impossible, for the boys of King’s School sit in the choir, and the pulpit stands at the corner of the transept so that the preacher’s back is almost turned to them. The distance also is so great that it needs a man with a fine voice and a knowledge of elocution to make himself heard in the choir; and according to long usage the Canons of Tercanbury are chosen for their learning rather than for any qualities which might be of use in a cathedral church. But the words of the text, perhaps because he had read them so short a while before, came clearly enough to Philip’s ears, and they seemed on a sudden to have a personal application. He thought about them through most of the sermon, and that night, on getting into bed, he turned over the pages of the Gospel and found once more the passage. Though he believed implicitly everything he saw in print, he had learned already that in the Bible things that said one thing quite clearly often mysteriously meant another. There was no one he liked to ask at school, so he kept the question he had in mind till the Christmas holidays, and then one day he made an opportunity. It was after supper and prayers were just finished. Mrs. Carey was counting the eggs that Mary Ann had brought in as usual and writing on each one the date. Philip stood at the table and pretended to turn listlessly the pages of the Bible.

“I say, Uncle William, this passage here, does it really mean that?”

He put his finger against it as though he had come across it accidentally.

Mr. Carey looked up over his spectacles. He was holding The Blackstable Times in front of the fire. It had come in that evening damp from the press, and the Vicar always aired it for ten minutes before he began to read.

“What passage is that?” he asked.

“Why, this about if you have faith you can remove mountains.”

“If it says so in the Bible it is so, Philip,” said Mrs. Carey gently, taking up the plate-basket.

Philip looked at his uncle for an answer.

“It’s a matter of faith.”

“D’you mean to say that if you really believed you could move mountains you could?”

“By the grace of God,” said the Vicar.

“Now, say good-night to your uncle, Philip,” said Aunt Louisa. “You’re not wanting to move a mountain tonight, are you?”

Philip allowed himself to be kissed on the forehead by his uncle and preceded Mrs. Carey upstairs. He had got the information he wanted. His little room was icy, and he shivered when he put on his nightshirt. But he always felt that his prayers were more pleasing to God when he said them under conditions of discomfort. The coldness of his hands and feet were an offering to the Almighty. And tonight he sank on his knees; buried his face in his hands, and prayed to God with all his might that He would make his club-foot whole. It was a very small thing beside the moving of mountains. He knew that God could do it if He wished, and his own faith was complete. Next morning, finishing his prayers with the same request, he fixed a date for the miracle.

“Oh, God, in Thy loving mercy and goodness, if it be Thy will, please make my foot all right on the night before I go back to school.”

He was glad to get his petition into a formula, and he repeated it later in the dining-room during the short pause which the Vicar always made after prayers, before he rose from his knees. He said it again in the evening and again, shivering in his nightshirt, before he got into bed. And he believed. For once he looked forward with eagerness to the end of the holidays. He laughed to himself as he thought of his uncle’s astonishment when he ran down the stairs three at a time; and after breakfast he and Aunt Louisa would have to hurry out and buy a new pair of boots. At school they would be astounded.

“Hulloa, Carey, what have you done with your foot?”

“Oh, it’s all right now,” he would answer casually, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

He would be able to play football. His heart leaped as he saw himself running, running, faster than any of the other boys. At the end of the Easter term there were the sports, and he would be able to go in for the races; he rather fancied himself over the hurdles. It would be splendid to be like everyone else, not to be stared at curiously by new boys who did not know about his deformity, nor at the baths in summer to need incredible precautions, while he was undressing, before he could hide his foot in the water.

He prayed with all the power of his soul. No doubts assailed him. He was confident in the word of God. And the night before he was to go back to school he went up to bed tremulous with excitement. There was snow on the ground, and Aunt Louisa had allowed herself the unaccustomed luxury of a fire in her bed-room; but in Philip’s little room it was so cold that his fingers were numb, and he had great difficulty in undoing his collar. His teeth chattered. The idea came to him that he must do something more than usual to attract the attention of God, and he turned back the rug which was in front of his bed so that he could kneel on the bare boards; and then it struck him that his nightshirt was a softness that might displease his Maker, so he took it off and said his prayers naked. When he got into bed he was so cold that for some time he could not sleep, but when he did, it was so soundly that Mary Ann had to shake him when she brought in his hot water next morning. She talked to him while she drew the curtains, but he did not answer; he had remembered at once that this was the morning for the miracle. His heart was filled with joy and gratitude. His first instinct was to put down his hand and feel the foot which was whole now, but to do this seemed to doubt the goodness of God. He knew that his foot was well. But at last he made up his mind, and with the toes of his right foot he just touched his left. Then he passed his hand over it.

He limped downstairs just as Mary Ann was going into the dining-room for prayers, and then he sat down to breakfast.

“You’re very quiet this morning, Philip,” said Aunt Louisa presently.

“He’s thinking of the good breakfast he’ll have at school to-morrow,” said the Vicar.

When Philip answered, it was in a way that always irritated his uncle, with something that had nothing to do with the matter in hand. He called it a bad habit of wool-gathering.

“Supposing you’d asked God to do something,” said Philip, “and really believed it was going to happen, like moving a mountain, I mean, and you had faith, and it didn’t happen, what would it mean?”

“What a funny boy you are!” said Aunt Louisa. “You asked about moving mountains two or three weeks ago.”

“It would just mean that you hadn’t got faith,” answered Uncle William.

Philip accepted the explanation. If God had not cured him, it was because he did not really believe. And yet he did not see how he could believe more than he did. But perhaps he had not given God enough time. He had only asked Him for nineteen days. In a day or two he began his prayer again, and this time he fixed upon Easter. That was the day of His Son’s glorious resurrection, and God in His happiness might be mercifully inclined. But now Philip added other means of attaining his desire: he began to wish, when he saw a new moon or a dappled horse, and he looked out for shooting stars; during exeat they had a chicken at the vicarage, and he broke the lucky bone with Aunt Louisa and wished again, each time that his foot might be made whole. He was appealing unconsciously to gods older to his race than the God of Israel. And he bombarded the Almighty with his prayer, at odd times of the day, whenever it occurred to him, in identical words always, for it seemed to him important to make his request in the same terms. But presently the feeling came to him that this time also his faith would not be great enough. He could not resist the doubt that assailed him. He made his own experience into a general rule.

“I suppose no one ever has faith enough,” he said.

It was like the salt which his nurse used to tell him about: you could catch any bird by putting salt on his tail; and once he had taken a little bag of it into Kensington Gardens. But he could never get near enough to put the salt on a bird’s tail. Before Easter he had given up the struggle. He felt a dull resentment against his uncle for taking him in. The text which spoke of the moving of mountains was just one of those that said one thing and meant another. He thought his uncle had been playing a practical joke on him.

XV

The King’s School at Tercanbury, to which Philip went when he was thirteen, prided itself on its antiquity. It traced its origin to an abbey school, founded before the Conquest, where the rudiments of learning were taught by Augustine monks; and, like many another establishment of this sort, on the destruction of the monasteries it had been reorganised by the officers of King Henry VIII and thus acquired its name. Since then, pursuing its modest course, it had given to the sons of the local gentry and of the professional people of Kent an education sufficient to their needs. One or two men of letters, beginning with a poet, than whom only Shakespeare had a more splendid genius, and ending with a writer of prose whose view of life has affected profoundly the generation of which Philip was a member, had gone forth from its gates to achieve fame; it had produced one or two eminent lawyers, but eminent lawyers are common, and one or two soldiers of distinction; but during the three centuries since its separation from the monastic order it had trained especially men of the church, bishops, deans, canons, and above all country clergymen: there were boys in the school whose fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, had been educated there and had all been rectors of parishes in the diocese of Tercanbury; and they came to it with their minds made up already to be ordained. But there were signs notwithstanding that even there changes were coming; for a few, repeating what they had heard at home, said that the Church was no longer what it used to be. It wasn’t so much the money; but the class of people who went in for it weren’t the same; and two or three boys knew curates whose fathers were tradesmen: they’d rather go out to the Colonies (in those days the Colonies were still the last hope of those who could get nothing to do in England) than be a curate under some chap who wasn’t a gentleman. At King’s School, as at Blackstable Vicarage, a tradesman was anyone who was not lucky enough to own land (and here a fine distinction was made between the gentleman farmer and the landowner), or did not follow one of the four professions to which it was possible for a gentleman to belong. Among the day-boys, of whom there were about a hundred and fifty, sons of the local gentry and of the men stationed at the depot, those whose fathers were engaged in business were made to feel the degradation of their state.

The masters had no patience with modern ideas of education, which they read of sometimes in The Times or The Guardian, and hoped fervently that King’s School would remain true to its old traditions. The dead languages were taught with such thoroughness that an old boy seldom thought of Homer or Virgil in after life without a qualm of boredom; and though in the common room at dinner one or two bolder spirits suggested that mathematics were of increasing importance, the general feeling was that they were a less noble study than the classics. Neither German nor chemistry was taught, and French only by the form-masters; they could keep order better than a foreigner, and, since they knew the grammar as well as any Frenchman, it seemed unimportant that none of them could have got a cup of coffee in the restaurant at Boulogne unless the waiter had known a little English. Geography was taught chiefly by making boys draw maps, and this was a favourite occupation, especially when the country dealt with was mountainous: it was possible to waste a great deal of time in drawing the Andes or the Apennines. The masters, graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, were ordained and unmarried; if by chance they wished to marry they could only do so by accepting one of the smaller livings at the disposal of the Chapter; but for many years none of them had cared to leave the refined society of Tercanbury, which owing to the cavalry depot had a martial as well as an ecclesiastical tone, for the monotony of life in a country rectory; and they were now all men of middle age.

The headmaster, on the other hand, was obliged to be married and he conducted the school till age began to tell upon him. When he retired he was rewarded with a much better living than any of the under-masters could hope for, and an honorary Canonry.

But a year before Philip entered the school a great change had come over it. It had been obvious for some time that Dr. Fleming, who had been headmaster for the quarter of a century, was become too deaf to continue his work to the greater glory of God; and when one of the livings on the outskirts of the city fell vacant, with a stipend of six hundred a year, the Chapter offered it to him in such a manner as to imply that they thought it high time for him to retire. He could nurse his ailments comfortably on such an income. Two or three curates who had hoped for preferment told their wives it was scandalous to give a parish that needed a young, strong, and energetic man to an old fellow who knew nothing of parochial work, and had feathered his nest already; but the mutterings of the unbeneficed clergy do not reach the ears of a cathedral Chapter. And as for the parishioners they had nothing to say in the matter, and therefore nobody asked for their opinion. The Wesleyans and the Baptists both had chapels in the village.

When Dr. Fleming was thus disposed of it became necessary to find a successor. It was contrary to the traditions of the school that one of the lower-masters should be chosen. The common-room was unanimous in desiring the election of Mr. Watson, headmaster of the preparatory school; he could hardly be described as already a master of King’s School, they had all known him for twenty years, and there was no danger that he would make a nuisance of himself. But the Chapter sprang a surprise on them. It chose a man called Perkins. At first nobody knew who Perkins was, and the name favourably impressed no one; but before the shock of it had passed away, it was realised that Perkins was the son of Perkins the linendraper. Dr. Fleming informed the masters just before dinner, and his manner showed his consternation. Such of them as were dining in, ate their meal almost in silence, and no reference was made to the matter till the servants had left the room. Then they set to. The names of those present on this occasion are unimportant, but they had been known to generations of school-boys as Sighs, Tar, Winks, Squirts, and Pat.

They all knew Tom Perkins. The first thing about him was that he was not a gentleman. They remembered him quite well. He was a small, dark boy, with untidy black hair and large eyes. He looked like a gipsy. He had come to the school as a day-boy, with the best scholarship on their endowment, so that his education had cost him nothing. Of course he was brilliant. At every Speech-Day he was loaded with prizes. He was their show-boy, and they remembered now bitterly their fear that he would try to get some scholarship at one of the larger public schools and so pass out of their hands. Dr. Fleming had gone to the linendraper his father — they all remembered the shop, Perkins and Cooper, in St. Catherine’s Street — and said he hoped Tom would remain with them till he went to Oxford. The school was Perkins and Cooper’s best customer, and Mr. Perkins was only too glad to give the required assurance. Tom Perkins continued to triumph, he was the finest classical scholar that Dr. Fleming remembered, and on leaving the school took with him the most valuable scholarship they had to offer. He got another at Magdalen and settled down to a brilliant career at the University. The school magazine recorded the distinctions he achieved year after year, and when he got his double first Dr. Fleming himself wrote a few words of eulogy on the front page. It was with greater satisfaction that they welcomed his success, since Perkins and Cooper had fallen upon evil days: Cooper drank like a fish, and just before Tom Perkins took his degree the linendrapers filed their petition in bankruptcy.

In due course Tom Perkins took Holy Orders and entered upon the profession for which he was so admirably suited. He had been an assistant master at Wellington and then at Rugby.

But there was quite a difference between welcoming his success at other schools and serving under his leadership in their own. Tar had frequently given him lines, and Squirts had boxed his ears. They could not imagine how the Chapter had made such a mistake. No one could be expected to forget that he was the son of a bankrupt linendraper, and the alcoholism of Cooper seemed to increase the disgrace. It was understood that the Dean had supported his candidature with zeal, so the Dean would probably ask him to dinner; but would the pleasant little dinners in the precincts ever be the same when Tom Perkins sat at the table? And what about the depot? He really could not expect officers and gentlemen to receive him as one of themselves. It would do the school incalculable harm. Parents would be dissatisfied, and no one could be surprised if there were wholesale withdrawals. And then the indignity of calling him Mr. Perkins! The masters thought by way of protest of sending in their resignations in a body, but the uneasy fear that they would be accepted with equanimity restrained them.

“The only thing is to prepare ourselves for changes,” said Sighs, who had conducted the fifth form for five and twenty years with unparalleled incompetence.

And when they saw him they were not reassured. Dr. Fleming invited them to meet him at luncheon. He was now a man of thirty-two, tall and lean, but with the same wild and unkempt look they remembered on him as a boy. His clothes, ill-made and shabby, were put on untidily. His hair was as black and as long as ever, and he had plainly never learned to brush it; it fell over his forehead with every gesture, and he had a quick movement of the hand with which he pushed it back from his eyes. He had a black moustache and a beard which came high up on his face almost to the cheek-bones, He talked to the masters quite easily, as though he had parted from them a week or two before; he was evidently delighted to see them. He seemed unconscious of the strangeness of the position and appeared not to notice any oddness in being addressed as Mr. Perkins.

When he bade them good-bye, one of the masters, for something to say, remarked that he was allowing himself plenty of time to catch his train.

“I want to go round and have a look at the shop,” he answered cheerfully.

There was a distinct embarrassment. They wondered that he could be so tactless, and to make it worse Dr. Fleming had not heard what he said. His wife shouted it in his ear.

“He wants to go round and look at his father’s old shop.”

Only Tom Perkins was unconscious of the humiliation which the whole party felt. He turned to Mrs. Fleming.

“Who’s got it now, d’you know?”

She could hardly answer. She was very angry.

“It’s still a linendraper’s,” she said bitterly. “Grove is the name. We don’t deal there any more.”

“I wonder if he’d let me go over the house.”

“I expect he would if you explain who you are.”

It was not till the end of dinner that evening that any reference was made in the common-room to the subject that was in all their minds. Then it was Sighs who asked:

“Well, what did you think of our new head?” They thought of the conversation at luncheon. It was hardly a conversation; it was a monologue. Perkins had talked incessantly. He talked very quickly, with a flow of easy words and in a deep, resonant voice. He had a short, odd little laugh which showed his white teeth. They had followed him with difficulty, for his mind darted from subject to subject with a connection they did not always catch. He talked of pedagogics, and this was natural enough; but he had much to say of modern theories in Germany which they had never heard of and received with misgiving. He talked of the classics, but he had been to Greece, and he discoursed of archaeology; he had once spent a winter digging; they could not see how that helped a man to teach boys to pass examinations, He talked of politics. It sounded odd to them to hear him compare Lord Beaconsfield with Alcibiades. He talked of Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule. They realised that he was a Liberal. Their hearts sank. He talked of German philosophy and of French fiction. They could not think a man profound whose interests were so diverse.

It was Winks who summed up the general impression and put it into a form they all felt conclusively damning. Winks was the master of the upper third, a weak-kneed man with drooping eye-lids, He was too tall for his strength, and his movements were slow and languid. He gave an impression of lassitude, and his nickname was eminently appropriate.

“He’s very enthusiastic,” said Winks.

Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly. They thought of the Salvation Army with its braying trumpets and its drums. Enthusiasm meant change. They had goose-flesh when they thought of all the pleasant old habits which stood in imminent danger. They hardly dared to look forward to the future.

“He looks more of a gipsy than ever,” said one, after a pause.

“I wonder if the Dean and Chapter knew that he was a Radical when they elected him,” another observed bitterly.

But conversation halted. They were too much disturbed for words.

When Tar and Sighs were walking together to the Chapter House on Speech-Day a week later, Tar, who had a bitter tongue, remarked to his colleague:

“Well, we’ve seen a good many Speech-Days here, haven’t we? I wonder if we shall see another.”

Sighs was more melancholy even than usual.

“If anything worth having comes along in the way of a living I don’t mind when I retire.”

XVI

A year passed, and when Philip came to the school the old masters were all in their places; but a good many changes had taken place notwithstanding their stubborn resistance, none the less formidable because it was concealed under an apparent desire to fall in with the new head’s ideas. Though the form-masters still taught French to the lower school, another master had come, with a degree of doctor of philology from the University of Heidelberg and a record of three years spent in a French lycee, to teach French to the upper forms and German to anyone who cared to take it up instead of Greek. Another master was engaged to teach mathematics more systematically than had been found necessary hitherto. Neither of these was ordained. This was a real revolution, and when the pair arrived the older masters received them with distrust. A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his. The school was small as public schools go, there were not more than two hundred boarders; and it was difficult for it to grow larger, for it was huddled up against the Cathedral; the precincts, with the exception of a house in which some of the masters lodged, were occupied by the cathedral clergy; and there was no more room for building. But Mr. Perkins devised an elaborate scheme by which he might obtain sufficient space to make the school double its present size. He wanted to attract boys from London. He thought it would be good for them to be thrown in contact with the Kentish lads, and it would sharpen the country wits of these.

“It’s against all our traditions,” said Sighs, when Mr. Perkins made the suggestion to him. “We’ve rather gone out of our way to avoid the contamination of boys from London.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” said Mr. Perkins.

No one had ever told the form-master before that he talked nonsense, and he was meditating an acid reply, in which perhaps he might insert a veiled reference to hosiery, when Mr. Perkins in his impetuous way attacked him outrageously.

“That house in the precincts — if you’d only marry I’d get the Chapter to put another couple of stories on, and we’d make dormitories and studies, and your wife could help you.”

The elderly clergyman gasped. Why should he marry? He was fifty-seven, a man couldn’t marry at fifty-seven. He couldn’t start looking after a house at his time of life. He didn’t want to marry. If the choice lay between that and the country living he would much sooner resign. All he wanted now was peace and quietness.

“I’m not thinking of marrying,” he said.

Mr. Perkins looked at him with his dark, bright eyes, and if there was a twinkle in them poor Sighs never saw it.

“What a pity! Couldn’t you marry to oblige me? It would help me a great deal with the Dean and Chapter when I suggest rebuilding your house.”

But Mr. Perkins’ most unpopular innovation was his system of taking occasionally another man’s form. He asked it as a favour, but after all it was a favour which could not be refused, and as Tar, otherwise Mr. Turner, said, it was undignified for all parties. He gave no warning, but after morning prayers would say to one of the masters:

“I wonder if you’d mind taking the Sixth today at eleven. We’ll change over, shall we?”

They did not know whether this was usual at other schools, but certainly it had never been done at Tercanbury. The results were curious. Mr. Turner, who was the first victim, broke the news to his form that the headmaster would take them for Latin that day, and on the pretence that they might like to ask him a question or two so that they should not make perfect fools of themselves, spent the last quarter of an hour of the history lesson in construing for them the passage of Livy which had been set for the day; but when he rejoined his class and looked at the paper on which Mr. Perkins had written the marks, a surprise awaited him; for the two boys at the top of the form seemed to have done very ill, while others who had never distinguished themselves before were given full marks. When he asked Eldridge, his cleverest boy, what was the meaning of this the answer came sullenly:

“Mr. Perkins never gave us any construing to do. He asked me what I knew about General Gordon.”

Mr. Turner looked at him in astonishment. The boys evidently felt they had been hardly used, and he could not help agreeing with their silent dissatisfaction. He could not see either what General Gordon had to do with Livy. He hazarded an inquiry afterwards.

“Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him what he knew about

General Gordon,” he said to the headmaster, with an attempt at a chuckle.

Mr. Perkins laughed.

“I saw they’d got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus, and I wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian troubles in Ireland. But all they knew about Ireland was that Dublin was on the Liffey. So I wondered if they’d ever heard of General Gordon.”

Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head had a mania for general information. He had doubts about the utility of examinations on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.

Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get the thought out of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him to fix a day for his marriage; and he hated the attitude the head adopted towards classical literature. There was no doubt that he was a fine scholar, and he was engaged on a work which was quite in the right tradition: he was writing a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he talked of it flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great importance, like billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not to be considered with seriousness. And Squirts, the master of the Middle Third, grew more ill-tempered every day.

It was in his form that Philip was put on entering the school. The Rev. B. B. Gordon was a man by nature ill-suited to be a schoolmaster: he was impatient and choleric. With no one to call him to account, with only small boys to face him, he had long lost all power of self-control. He began his work in a rage and ended it in a passion. He was a man of middle height and of a corpulent figure; he had sandy hair, worn very short and now growing gray, and a small bristly moustache. His large face, with indistinct features and small blue eyes, was naturally red, but during his frequent attacks of anger it grew dark and purple. His nails were bitten to the quick, for while some trembling boy was construing he would sit at his desk shaking with the fury that consumed him, and gnaw his fingers. Stories, perhaps exaggerated, were told of his violence, and two years before there had been some excitement in the school when it was heard that one father was threatening a prosecution: he had boxed the ears of a boy named Walters with a book so violently that his hearing was affected and the boy had to be taken away from the school. The boy’s father lived in Tercanbury, and there had been much indignation in the city, the local paper had referred to the matter; but Mr. Walters was only a brewer, so the sympathy was divided. The rest of the boys, for reasons best known to themselves, though they loathed the master, took his side in the affair, and, to show their indignation that the school’s business had been dealt with outside, made things as uncomfortable as they could for Walters’ younger brother, who still remained. But Mr. Gordon had only escaped the country living by the skin of his teeth, and he had never hit a boy since. The right the masters possessed to cane boys on the hand was taken away from them, and Squirts could no longer emphasize his anger by beating his desk with the cane. He never did more now than take a boy by the shoulders and shake him. He still made a naughty or refractory lad stand with one arm stretched out for anything from ten minutes to half an hour, and he was as violent as before with his tongue.

No master could have been more unfitted to teach things to so shy a boy as Philip. He had come to the school with fewer terrors than he had when first he went to Mr. Watson’s. He knew a good many boys who had been with him at the preparatory school. He felt more grownup, and instinctively realised that among the larger numbers his deformity would be less noticeable. But from the first day Mr. Gordon struck terror in his heart; and the master, quick to discern the boys who were frightened of him, seemed on that account to take a peculiar dislike to him. Philip had enjoyed his work, but now he began to look upon the hours passed in school with horror. Rather than risk an answer which might be wrong and excite a storm of abuse from the master, he would sit stupidly silent, and when it came towards his turn to stand up and construe he grew sick and white with apprehension. His happy moments were those when Mr. Perkins took the form. He was able to gratify the passion for general knowledge which beset the headmaster; he had read all sorts of strange books beyond his years, and often Mr. Perkins, when a question was going round the room, would stop at Philip with a smile that filled the boy with rapture, and say:

“Now, Carey, you tell them.”

The good marks he got on these occasions increased Mr. Gordon’s indignation. One day it came to Philip’s turn to translate, and the master sat there glaring at him and furiously biting his thumb. He was in a ferocious mood. Philip began to speak in a low voice.

“Don’t mumble,” shouted the master.

Something seemed to stick in Philip’s throat.

“Go on. Go on. Go on.”

Each time the words were screamed more loudly. The effect was to drive all he knew out of Philip’s head, and he looked at the printed page vacantly. Mr. Gordon began to breathe heavily.

“If you don’t know why don’t you say so? Do you know it or not? Did you hear all this construed last time or not? Why don’t you speak? Speak, you blockhead, speak!”

The master seized the arms of his chair and grasped them as though to prevent himself from falling upon Philip. They knew that in past days he often used to seize boys by the throat till they almost choked. The veins in his forehead stood out and his face grew dark and threatening. He was a man insane.

Philip had known the passage perfectly the day before, but now he could remember nothing.

“I don’t know it,” he gasped.

“Why don’t you know it? Let’s take the words one by one. We’ll soon see if you don’t know it.”

Philip stood silent, very white, trembling a little, with his head bent down on the book. The master’s breathing grew almost stertorous.

“The headmaster says you’re clever. I don’t know how he sees it. General information.” He laughed savagely. “I don’t know what they put you in his form for, Blockhead.”

He was pleased with the word, and he repeated it at the top of his voice.

“Blockhead! Blockhead! Club-footed blockhead!”

That relieved him a little. He saw Philip redden suddenly. He told him to fetch the Black Book. Philip put down his Caesar and went silently out. The Black Book was a sombre volume in which the names of boys were written with their misdeeds, and when a name was down three times it meant a caning. Philip went to the headmaster’s house and knocked at his study-door. Mr. Perkins was seated at his table.

“May I have the Black Book, please, sir.”

“There it is,” answered Mr. Perkins, indicating its place by a nod of his head. “What have you been doing that you shouldn’t?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Mr. Perkins gave him a quick look, but without answering went on with his work. Philip took the book and went out. When the hour was up, a few minutes later, he brought it back.

“Let me have a look at it,” said the headmaster. “I see Mr. Gordon has black-booked you for ‘gross impertinence.’ What was it?”

“I don’t know, sir. Mr. Gordon said I was a club-footed blockhead.”

Mr. Perkins looked at him again. He wondered whether there was sarcasm behind the boy’s reply, but he was still much too shaken. His face was white and his eyes had a look of terrified distress. Mr. Perkins got up and put the book down. As he did so he took up some photographs.

“A friend of mine sent me some pictures of Athens this morning,” he said casually. “Look here, there’s the Akropolis.”

He began explaining to Philip what he saw. The ruin grew vivid with his words. He showed him the theatre of Dionysus and explained in what order the people sat, and how beyond they could see the blue Aegean. And then suddenly he said:

“I remember Mr. Gordon used to call me a gipsy counter-jumper when I was in his form.”

And before Philip, his mind fixed on the photographs, had time to gather the meaning of the remark, Mr. Perkins was showing him a picture of Salamis, and with his finger, a finger of which the nail had a little black edge to it, was pointing out how the Greek ships were placed and how the Persian.

XVII

Philip passed the next two years with comfortable monotony. He was not bullied more than other boys of his size; and his deformity, withdrawing him from games, acquired for him an insignificance for which he was grateful. He was not popular, and he was very lonely. He spent a couple of terms with Winks in the Upper Third. Winks, with his weary manner and his drooping eyelids, looked infinitely bored. He did his duty, but he did it with an abstracted mind. He was kind, gentle, and foolish. He had a great belief in the honour of boys; he felt that the first thing to make them truthful was not to let it enter your head for a moment that it was possible for them to lie. “Ask much,” he quoted, “and much shall be given to you.” Life was easy in the Upper Third. You knew exactly what lines would come to your turn to construe, and with the crib that passed from hand to hand you could find out all you wanted in two minutes; you could hold a Latin Grammar open on your knees while questions were passing round; and Winks never noticed anything odd in the fact that the same incredible mistake was to be found in a dozen different exercises. He had no great faith in examinations, for he noticed that boys never did so well in them as in form: it was disappointing, but not significant. In due course they were moved up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery in the distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them in after life than an ability to read Latin at sight.

Then they fell into the hands of Tar. His name was Turner; he was the most vivacious of the old masters, a short man with an immense belly, a black beard turning now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his clerical dress there was indeed something in him to suggest the tar-barrel; and though on principle he gave five hundred lines to any boy on whose lips he overheard his nickname, at dinner-parties in the precincts he often made little jokes about it. He was the most worldly of the masters; he dined out more frequently than any of the others, and the society he kept was not so exclusively clerical. The boys looked upon him as rather a dog. He left off his clerical attire during the holidays and had been seen in Switzerland in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a lady who was very probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed by generations of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of which pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity.

Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick boys into shape after they had been in the Upper Third; and now and then he let fall a sly hint, which showed that he knew perfectly what went on in his colleague’s form. He took it good-humouredly. He looked upon boys as young ruffians who were more apt to be truthful if it was quite certain a lie would be found out, whose sense of honour was peculiar to themselves and did not apply to dealings with masters, and who were least likely to be troublesome when they learned that it did not pay. He was proud of his form and as eager at fifty-five that it should do better in examinations than any of the others as he had been when he first came to the school. He had the choler of the obese, easily roused and as easily calmed, and his boys soon discovered that there was much kindliness beneath the invective with which he constantly assailed them. He had no patience with fools, but was willing to take much trouble with boys whom he suspected of concealing intelligence behind their wilfulness. He was fond of inviting them to tea; and, though vowing they never got a look in with him at the cakes and muffins, for it was the fashion to believe that his corpulence pointed to a voracious appetite, and his voracious appetite to tapeworms, they accepted his invitations with real pleasure.

Philip was now more comfortable, for space was so limited that there were only studies for boys in the upper school, and till then he had lived in the great hall in which they all ate and in which the lower forms did preparation in a promiscuity which was vaguely distasteful to him. Now and then it made him restless to be with people and he wanted urgently to be alone. He set out for solitary walks into the country. There was a little stream, with pollards on both sides of it, that ran through green fields, and it made him happy, he knew not why, to wander along its banks. When he was tired he lay face-downward on the grass and watched the eager scurrying of minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to saunter round the precincts. On the green in the middle they practised at nets in the summer, but during the rest of the year it was quiet: boys used to wander round sometimes arm in arm, or a studious fellow with abstracted gaze walked slowly, repeating to himself something he had to learn by heart. There was a colony of rooks in the great elms, and they filled the air with melancholy cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beauty, felt when he looked at it a troubling delight which he could not understand. When he had a study (it was a little square room looking on a slum, and four boys shared it), he bought a photograph of that view of the Cathedral, and pinned it up over his desk. And he found himself taking a new interest in what he saw from the window of the Fourth Form room. It looked on to old lawns, carefully tended, and fine trees with foliage dense and rich. It gave him an odd feeling in his heart, and he did not know if it was pain or pleasure. It was the first dawn of the aesthetic emotion. It accompanied other changes. His voice broke. It was no longer quite under his control, and queer sounds issued from his throat.

Then he began to go to the classes which were held in the headmaster’s study, immediately after tea, to prepare boys for confirmation. Philip’s piety had not stood the test of time, and he had long since given up his nightly reading of the Bible; but now, under the influence of Mr. Perkins, with this new condition of the body which made him so restless, his old feelings revived, and he reproached himself bitterly for his backsliding. The fires of Hell burned fiercely before his mind’s eye. If he had died during that time when he was little better than an infidel he would have been lost; he believed implicitly in pain everlasting, he believed in it much more than in eternal happiness; and he shuddered at the dangers he had run.

Since the day on which Mr. Perkins had spoken kindly to him, when he was smarting under the particular form of abuse which he could least bear, Philip had conceived for his headmaster a dog-like adoration. He racked his brains vainly for some way to please him. He treasured the smallest word of commendation which by chance fell from his lips. And when he came to the quiet little meetings in his house he was prepared to surrender himself entirely. He kept his eyes fixed on Mr. Perkins’ shining eyes, and sat with mouth half open, his head a little thrown forward so as to miss no word. The ordinariness of the surroundings made the matters they dealt with extraordinarily moving. And often the master, seized himself by the wonder of his subject, would push back the book in front of him, and with his hands clasped together over his heart, as though to still the beating, would talk of the mysteries of their religion. Sometimes Philip did not understand, but he did not want to understand, he felt vaguely that it was enough to feel. It seemed to him then that the headmaster, with his black, straggling hair and his pale face, was like those prophets of Israel who feared not to take kings to task; and when he thought of the Redeemer he saw Him only with the same dark eyes and those wan cheeks.

Mr. Perkins took this part of his work with great seriousness. There was never here any of that flashing humour which made the other masters suspect him of flippancy. Finding time for everything in his busy day, he was able at certain intervals to take separately for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes the boys whom he was preparing for confirmation. He wanted to make them feel that this was the first consciously serious step in their lives; he tried to grope into the depths of their souls; he wanted to instil in them his own vehement devotion. In Philip, notwithstanding his shyness, he felt the possibility of a passion equal to his own. The boy’s temperament seemed to him essentially religious. One day he broke off suddenly from the subject on which he had been talking.

“Have you thought at all what you’re going to be when you grow up?” he asked.

“My uncle wants me to be ordained,” said Philip.

“And you?”

Philip looked away. He was ashamed to answer that he felt himself unworthy.

“I don’t know any life that’s so full of happiness as ours. I wish I could make you feel what a wonderful privilege it is. One can serve God in every walk, but we stand nearer to Him. I don’t want to influence you, but if you made up your mind — oh, at once — you couldn’t help feeling that joy and relief which never desert one again.”

Philip did not answer, but the headmaster read in his eyes that he realised already something of what he tried to indicate.

“If you go on as you are now you’ll find yourself head of the school one of these days, and you ought to be pretty safe for a scholarship when you leave. Have you got anything of your own?”

“My uncle says I shall have a hundred a year when I’m twenty-one.”

“You’ll be rich. I had nothing.”

The headmaster hesitated a moment, and then, idly drawing lines with a pencil on the blotting paper in front of him, went on.

“I’m afraid your choice of professions will be rather limited. You naturally couldn’t go in for anything that required physical activity.”

Philip reddened to the roots of his hair, as he always did when any reference was made to his club-foot. Mr. Perkins looked at him gravely.

“I wonder if you’re not oversensitive about your misfortune. Has it ever struck you to thank God for it?”

Philip looked up quickly. His lips tightened. He remembered how for months, trusting in what they told him, he had implored God to heal him as He had healed the Leper and made the Blind to see.

“As long as you accept it rebelliously it can only cause you shame. But if you looked upon it as a cross that was given you to bear only because your shoulders were strong enough to bear it, a sign of God’s favour, then it would be a source of happiness to you instead of misery.”

He saw that the boy hated to discuss the matter and he let him go.

But Philip thought over all that the headmaster had said, and presently, his mind taken up entirely with the ceremony that was before him, a mystical rapture seized him. His spirit seemed to free itself from the bonds of the flesh and he seemed to be living a new life. He aspired to perfection with all the passion that was in him. He wanted to surrender himself entirely to the service of God, and he made up his mind definitely that he would be ordained. When the great day arrived, his soul deeply moved by all the preparation, by the books he had studied and above all by the overwhelming influence of the head, he could hardly contain himself for fear and joy. One thought had tormented him. He knew that he would have to walk alone through the chancel, and he dreaded showing his limp thus obviously, not only to the whole school, who were attending the service, but also to the strangers, people from the city or parents who had come to see their sons confirmed. But when the time came he felt suddenly that he could accept the humiliation joyfully; and as he limped up the chancel, very small and insignificant beneath the lofty vaulting of the Cathedral, he offered consciously his deformity as a sacrifice to the God who loved him.

XVIII

But Philip could not live long in the rarefied air of the hilltops. What had happened to him when first he was seized by the religious emotion happened to him now. Because he felt so keenly the beauty of faith, because the desire for self-sacrifice burned in his heart with such a gem-like glow, his strength seemed inadequate to his ambition. He was tired out by the violence of his passion. His soul was filled on a sudden with a singular aridity. He began to forget the presence of God which had seemed so surrounding; and his religious exercises, still very punctually performed, grew merely formal. At first he blamed himself for this falling away, and the fear of hell-fire urged him to renewed vehemence; but the passion was dead, and gradually other interests distracted his thoughts.

Philip had few friends. His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions’ stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when first he went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them. Indeed he would gladly have changed places with the dullest boy in the school who was whole of limb. He took to a singular habit. He would imagine that he was some boy whom he had a particular fancy for; he would throw his soul, as it were, into the other’s body, talk with his voice and laugh with his heart; he would imagine himself doing all the things the other did. It was so vivid that he seemed for a moment really to be no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many intervals of fantastic happiness.

At the beginning of the Christmas term which followed on his confirmation Philip found himself moved into another study. One of the boys who shared it was called Rose. He was in the same form as Philip, and Philip had always looked upon him with envious admiration. He was not good-looking; though his large hands and big bones suggested that he would be a tall man, he was clumsily made; but his eyes were charming, and when he laughed (he was constantly laughing) his face wrinkled all round them in a jolly way. He was neither clever nor stupid, but good enough at his work and better at games. He was a favourite with masters and boys, and he in his turn liked everyone.

When Philip was put in the study he could not help seeing that the others, who had been together for three terms, welcomed him coldly. It made him nervous to feel himself an intruder; but he had learned to hide his feelings, and they found him quiet and unobtrusive. With Rose, because he was as little able as anyone else to resist his charm, Philip was even more than usually shy and abrupt; and whether on account of this, unconsciously bent upon exerting the fascination he knew was his only by the results, or whether from sheer kindness of heart, it was Rose who first took Philip into the circle. One day, quite suddenly, he asked Philip if he would walk to the football field with him. Philip flushed.

“I can’t walk fast enough for you,” he said.

“Rot. Come on.”

And just before they were setting out some boy put his head in the study-door and asked Rose to go with him.

“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve already promised Carey.”

“Don’t bother about me,” said Philip quickly. “I shan’t mind.”

“Rot,” said Rose.

He looked at Philip with those good-natured eyes of his and laughed.

Philip felt a curious tremor in his heart.

In a little while, their friendship growing with boyish rapidity, the pair were inseparable. Other fellows wondered at the sudden intimacy, and Rose was asked what he saw in Philip.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered. “He’s not half a bad chap really.”

Soon they grew accustomed to the two walking into chapel arm in arm or strolling round the precincts in conversation; wherever one was the other could be found also, and, as though acknowledging his proprietorship, boys who wanted Rose would leave messages with Carey. Philip at first was reserved. He would not let himself yield entirely to the proud joy that filled him; but presently his distrust of the fates gave way before a wild happiness. He thought Rose the most wonderful fellow he had ever seen. His books now were insignificant; he could not bother about them when there was something infinitely more important to occupy him. Rose’s friends used to come in to tea in the study sometimes or sit about when there was nothing better to do — Rose liked a crowd and the chance of a rag — and they found that Philip was quite a decent fellow. Philip was happy.

When the last day of term came he and Rose arranged by which train they should come back, so that they might meet at the station and have tea in the town before returning to school. Philip went home with a heavy heart. He thought of Rose all through the holidays, and his fancy was active with the things they would do together next term. He was bored at the vicarage, and when on the last day his uncle put him the usual question in the usual facetious tone:

“Well, are you glad to be going back to school?”

Philip answered joyfully.

“Rather.”

In order to be sure of meeting Rose at the station he took an earlier train than he usually did, and he waited about the platform for an hour. When the train came in from Faversham, where he knew Rose had to change, he ran along it excitedly. But Rose was not there. He got a porter to tell him when another train was due, and he waited; but again he was disappointed; and he was cold and hungry, so he walked, through side-streets and slums, by a short cut to the school. He found Rose in the study, with his feet on the chimney-piece, talking eighteen to the dozen with half a dozen boys who were sitting on whatever there was to sit on. He shook hands with Philip enthusiastically, but Philip’s face fell, for he realised that Rose had forgotten all about their appointment.

“I say, why are you so late?” said Rose. “I thought you were never coming.”

“You were at the station at half-past four,” said another boy. “I saw you when I came.”

Philip blushed a little. He did not want Rose to know that he had been such a fool as to wait for him.

“I had to see about a friend of my people’s,” he invented readily. “I was asked to see her off.”

But his disappointment made him a little sulky. He sat in silence, and when spoken to answered in monosyllables. He was making up his mind to have it out with Rose when they were alone. But when the others had gone Rose at once came over and sat on the arm of the chair in which Philip was lounging.

“I say, I’m jolly glad we’re in the same study this term. Ripping, isn’t it?”

He seemed so genuinely pleased to see Philip that Philip’s annoyance vanished. They began as if they had not been separated for five minutes to talk eagerly of the thousand things that interested them.

XIX

At first Philip had been too grateful for Rose’s friendship to make any demands on him. He took things as they came and enjoyed life. But presently he began to resent Rose’s universal amiability; he wanted a more exclusive attachment, and he claimed as a right what before he had accepted as a favour. He watched jealously Rose’s companionship with others; and though he knew it was unreasonable could not help sometimes saying bitter things to him. If Rose spent an hour playing the fool in another study, Philip would receive him when he returned to his own with a sullen frown. He would sulk for a day, and he suffered more because Rose either did not notice his ill-humour or deliberately ignored it. Not seldom Philip, knowing all the time how stupid he was, would force a quarrel, and they would not speak to one another for a couple of days. But Philip could not bear to be angry with him long, and even when convinced that he was in the right, would apologise humbly. Then for a week they would be as great friends as ever. But the best was over, and Philip could see that Rose often walked with him merely from old habit or from fear of his anger; they had not so much to say to one another as at first, and Rose was often bored. Philip felt that his lameness began to irritate him.

Towards the end of the term two or three boys caught scarlet fever, and there was much talk of sending them all home in order to escape an epidemic; but the sufferers were isolated, and since no more were attacked it was supposed that the outbreak was stopped. One of the stricken was Philip. He remained in hospital through the Easter holidays, and at the beginning of the summer term was sent home to the vicarage to get a little fresh air. The Vicar, notwithstanding medical assurance that the boy was no longer infectious, received him with suspicion; he thought it very inconsiderate of the doctor to suggest that his nephew’s convalescence should be spent by the seaside, and consented to have him in the house only because there was nowhere else he could go.

Philip went back to school at half-term. He had forgotten the quarrels he had had with Rose, but remembered only that he was his greatest friend. He knew that he had been silly. He made up his mind to be more reasonable. During his illness Rose had sent him in a couple of little notes, and he had ended each with the words: “Hurry up and come back.” Philip thought Rose must be looking forward as much to his return as he was himself to seeing Rose.

He found that owing to the death from scarlet fever of one of the boys in the Sixth there had been some shifting in the studies and Rose was no longer in his. It was a bitter disappointment. But as soon as he arrived he burst into Rose’s study. Rose was sitting at his desk, working with a boy called Hunter, and turned round crossly as Philip came in.

“Who the devil’s that?” he cried. And then, seeing Philip: “Oh, it’s you.”

Philip stopped in embarrassment.

“I thought I’d come in and see how you were.”

“We were just working.”

Hunter broke into the conversation.

“When did you get back?”

“Five minutes ago.”

They sat and looked at him as though he was disturbing them. They evidently expected him to go quickly. Philip reddened.

“I’ll be off. You might look in when you’ve done,” he said to Rose.

“All right.”

Philip closed the door behind him and limped back to his own study. He felt frightfully hurt. Rose, far from seeming glad to see him, had looked almost put out. They might never have been more than acquaintances. Though he waited in his study, not leaving it for a moment in case just then Rose should come, his friend never appeared; and next morning when he went in to prayers he saw Rose and Hunter singing along arm in arm. What he could not see for himself others told him. He had forgotten that three months is a long time in a schoolboy’s life, and though he had passed them in solitude Rose had lived in the world. Hunter had stepped into the vacant place. Philip found that Rose was quietly avoiding him. But he was not the boy to accept a situation without putting it into words; he waited till he was sure Rose was alone in his study and went in.

“May I come in?” he asked.

Rose looked at him with an embarrassment that made him angry with Philip.

“Yes, if you want to.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Philip sarcastically.

“What d’you want?”

“I say, why have you been so rotten since I came back?”

“Oh, don’t be an ass,” said Rose.

“I don’t know what you see in Hunter.”

“That’s my business.”

Philip looked down. He could not bring himself to say what was in his heart. He was afraid of humiliating himself. Rose got up.

“I’ve got to go to the Gym,” he said.

When he was at the door Philip forced himself to speak.

“I say, Rose, don’t be a perfect beast.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

Rose slammed the door behind him and left Philip alone. Philip shivered with rage. He went back to his study and turned the conversation over in his mind. He hated Rose now, he wanted to hurt him, he thought of biting things he might have said to him. He brooded over the end to their friendship and fancied that others were talking of it. In his sensitiveness he saw sneers and wonderings in other fellows’ manner when they were not bothering their heads with him at all. He imagined to himself what they were saying.

“After all, it wasn’t likely to last long. I wonder he ever stuck Carey at all. Blighter!”

To show his indifference he struck up a violent friendship with a boy called Sharp whom he hated and despised. He was a London boy, with a loutish air, a heavy fellow with the beginnings of a moustache on his lip and bushy eyebrows that joined one another across the bridge of his nose. He had soft hands and manners too suave for his years. He spoke with the suspicion of a cockney accent. He was one of those boys who are too slack to play games, and he exercised great ingenuity in making excuses to avoid such as were compulsory. He was regarded by boys and masters with a vague dislike, and it was from arrogance that Philip now sought his society. Sharp in a couple of terms was going to Germany for a year. He hated school, which he looked upon as an indignity to be endured till he was old enough to go out into the world. London was all he cared for, and he had many stories to tell of his doings there during the holidays. From his conversation — he spoke in a soft, deep-toned voice — there emerged the vague rumour of the London streets by night. Philip listened to him at once fascinated and repelled. With his vivid fancy he seemed to see the surging throng round the pit-door of theatres, and the glitter of cheap restaurants, bars where men, half drunk, sat on high stools talking with barmaids; and under the street lamps the mysterious passing of dark crowds bent upon pleasure. Sharp lent him cheap novels from Holywell Row, which Philip read in his cubicle with a sort of wonderful fear.

Once Rose tried to effect a reconciliation. He was a good-natured fellow, who did not like having enemies.

“I say, Carey, why are you being such a silly ass? It doesn’t do you any good cutting me and all that.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” answered Philip.

“Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t talk.”

“You bore me,” said Philip.

“Please yourself.”

Rose shrugged his shoulders and left him. Philip was very white, as he always became when he was moved, and his heart beat violently. When Rose went away he felt suddenly sick with misery. He did not know why he had answered in that fashion. He would have given anything to be friends with Rose. He hated to have quarrelled with him, and now that he saw he had given him pain he was very sorry. But at the moment he had not been master of himself. It seemed that some devil had seized him, forcing him to say bitter things against his will, even though at the time he wanted to shake hands with Rose and meet him more than halfway. The desire to wound had been too strong for him. He had wanted to revenge himself for the pain and the humiliation he had endured. It was pride: it was folly too, for he knew that Rose would not care at all, while he would suffer bitterly. The thought came to him that he would go to Rose, and say:

“I say, I’m sorry I was such a beast. I couldn’t help it. Let’s make it up.”

But he knew he would never be able to do it. He was afraid that Rose would sneer at him. He was angry with himself, and when Sharp came in a little while afterwards he seized upon the first opportunity to quarrel with him. Philip had a fiendish instinct for discovering other people’s raw spots, and was able to say things that rankled because they were true. But Sharp had the last word.

“I heard Rose talking about you to Mellor just now,” he said. “Mellor said: Why didn’t you kick him? It would teach him manners. And Rose said: I didn’t like to. Damned cripple.”

Philip suddenly became scarlet. He could not answer, for there was a lump in his throat that almost choked him.

XX

Philip was moved into the Sixth, but he hated school now with all his heart, and, having lost his ambition, cared nothing whether he did ill or well. He awoke in the morning with a sinking heart because he must go through another day of drudgery. He was tired of having to do things because he was told; and the restrictions irked him, not because they were unreasonable, but because they were restrictions. He yearned for freedom. He was weary of repeating things that he knew already and of the hammering away, for the sake of a thick-witted fellow, at something that he understood from the beginning.

With Mr. Perkins you could work or not as you chose. He was at once eager and abstracted. The Sixth Form room was in a part of the old abbey which had been restored, and it had a gothic window: Philip tried to cheat his boredom by drawing this over and over again; and sometimes out of his head he drew the great tower of the Cathedral or the gateway that led into the precincts. He had a knack for drawing. Aunt Louisa during her youth had painted in water colours, and she had several albums filled with sketches of churches, old bridges, and picturesque cottages. They were often shown at the vicarage tea-parties. She had once given Philip a paint-box as a Christmas present, and he had started by copying her pictures. He copied them better than anyone could have expected, and presently he did little pictures of his own. Mrs. Carey encouraged him. It was a good way to keep him out of mischief, and later on his sketches would be useful for bazaars. Two or three of them had been framed and hung in his bed-room.

But one day, at the end of the morning’s work, Mr. Perkins stopped him as he was lounging out of the form-room.

“I want to speak to you, Carey.”

Philip waited. Mr. Perkins ran his lean fingers through his beard and looked at Philip. He seemed to be thinking over what he wanted to say.

“What’s the matter with you, Carey?” he said abruptly.

Philip, flushing, looked at him quickly. But knowing him well by now, without answering, he waited for him to go on.

“I’ve been dissatisfied with you lately. You’ve been slack and inattentive. You seem to take no interest in your work. It’s been slovenly and bad.”

“I’m very sorry, sir,” said Philip.

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Philip looked down sulkily. How could he answer that he was bored to death?

“You know, this term you’ll go down instead of up. I shan’t give you a very good report.”

Philip wondered what he would say if he knew how the report was treated. It arrived at breakfast, Mr. Carey glanced at it indifferently, and passed it over to Philip.

“There’s your report. You’d better see what it says,” he remarked, as he ran his fingers through the wrapper of a catalogue of second-hand books.

Philip read it.

“Is it good?” asked Aunt Louisa.

“Not so good as I deserve,” answered Philip, with a smile, giving it to her.

“I’ll read it afterwards when I’ve got my spectacles,” she said.

But after breakfast Mary Ann came in to say the butcher was there, and she generally forgot.

Mr. Perkins went on.

“I’m disappointed with you. And I can’t understand. I know you can do things if you want to, but you don’t seem to want to any more. I was going to make you a monitor next term, but I think I’d better wait a bit.”

Philip flushed. He did not like the thought of being passed over. He tightened his lips.

“And there’s something else. You must begin thinking of your scholarship now. You won’t get anything unless you start working very seriously.”

Philip was irritated by the lecture. He was angry with the headmaster, and angry with himself.

“I don’t think I’m going up to Oxford,” he said.

“Why not? I thought your idea was to be ordained.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

Philip did not answer. Mr. Perkins, holding himself oddly as he always did, like a figure in one of Perugino’s pictures, drew his fingers thoughtfully through his beard. He looked at Philip as though he were trying to understand and then abruptly told him he might go.

Apparently he was not satisfied, for one evening, a week later, when Philip had to go into his study with some papers, he resumed the conversation; but this time he adopted a different method: he spoke to Philip not as a schoolmaster with a boy but as one human being with another. He did not seem to care now that Philip’s work was poor, that he ran small chance against keen rivals of carrying off the scholarship necessary for him to go to Oxford: the important matter was his changed intention about his life afterwards. Mr. Perkins set himself to revive his eagerness to be ordained. With infinite skill he worked on his feelings, and this was easier since he was himself genuinely moved. Philip’s change of mind caused him bitter distress, and he really thought he was throwing away his chance of happiness in life for he knew not what. His voice was very persuasive. And Philip, easily moved by the emotion of others, very emotional himself notwithstanding a placid exterior — his face, partly by nature but also from the habit of all these years at school, seldom except by his quick flushing showed what he felt — Philip was deeply touched by what the master said. He was very grateful to him for the interest he showed, and he was conscience-stricken by the grief which he felt his behaviour caused him. It was subtly flattering to know that with the whole school to think about Mr. Perkins should trouble with him, but at the same time something else in him, like another person standing at his elbow, clung desperately to two words.

“I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”

He felt himself slipping. He was powerless against the weakness that seemed to well up in him; it was like the water that rises up in an empty bottle held over a full basin; and he set his teeth, saying the words over and over to himself.

“I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”

At last Mr. Perkins put his hand on Philip’s shoulder.

“I don’t want to influence you,” he said. “You must decide for yourself.

Pray to Almighty God for help and guidance.”

When Philip came out of the headmaster’s house there was a light rain falling. He went under the archway that led to the precincts, there was not a soul there, and the rooks were silent in the elms. He walked round slowly. He felt hot, and the rain did him good. He thought over all that Mr. Perkins had said, calmly now that he was withdrawn from the fervour of his personality, and he was thankful he had not given way.

In the darkness he could but vaguely see the great mass of the Cathedral: he hated it now because of the irksomeness of the long services which he was forced to attend. The anthem was interminable, and you had to stand drearily while it was being sung; you could not hear the droning sermon, and your body twitched because you had to sit still when you wanted to move about. Then Philip thought of the two services every Sunday at Blackstable. The church was bare and cold, and there was a smell all about one of pomade and starched clothes. The curate preached once and his uncle preached once. As he grew up he had learned to know his uncle; Philip was downright and intolerant, and he could not understand that a man might sincerely say things as a clergyman which he never acted up to as a man. The deception outraged him. His uncle was a weak and selfish man, whose chief desire it was to be saved trouble.

Mr. Perkins had spoken to him of the beauty of a life dedicated to the service of God. Philip knew what sort of lives the clergy led in the corner of East Anglia which was his home. There was the Vicar of Whitestone, a parish a little way from Blackstable: he was a bachelor and to give himself something to do had lately taken up farming: the local paper constantly reported the cases he had in the county court against this one and that, labourers he would not pay their wages to or tradesmen whom he accused of cheating him; scandal said he starved his cows, and there was much talk about some general action which should be taken against him. Then there was the Vicar of Ferne, a bearded, fine figure of a man: his wife had been forced to leave him because of his cruelty, and she had filled the neighbourhood with stories of his immorality. The Vicar of Surle, a tiny hamlet by the sea, was to be seen every evening in the public house a stone’s throw from his vicarage; and the churchwardens had been to Mr. Carey to ask his advice. There was not a soul for any of them to talk to except small farmers or fishermen; there were long winter evenings when the wind blew, whistling drearily through the leafless trees, and all around they saw nothing but the bare monotony of ploughed fields; and there was poverty, and there was lack of any work that seemed to matter; every kink in their characters had free play; there was nothing to restrain them; they grew narrow and eccentric: Philip knew all this, but in his young intolerance he did not offer it as an excuse. He shivered at the thought of leading such a life; he wanted to get out into the world.

XXI

Mr. Perkins soon saw that his words had had no effect on Philip, and for the rest of the term ignored him. He wrote a report which was vitriolic. When it arrived and Aunt Louisa asked Philip what it was like, he answered cheerfully.

“Rotten.”

“Is it?” said the Vicar. “I must look at it again.”

“Do you think there’s any use in my staying on at Tercanbury? I should have thought it would be better if I went to Germany for a bit.”

“What has put that in your head?” said Aunt Louisa.

“Don’t you think it’s rather a good idea?”

Sharp had already left King’s School and had written to Philip from Hanover. He was really starting life, and it made Philip more restless to think of it. He felt he could not bear another year of restraint.

“But then you wouldn’t get a scholarship.”

“I haven’t a chance of getting one anyhow. And besides, I don’t know that

I particularly want to go to Oxford.”

“But if you’re going to be ordained, Philip?” Aunt Louisa exclaimed in dismay.

“I’ve given up that idea long ago.”

Mrs. Carey looked at him with startled eyes, and then, used to self-restraint, she poured out another cup of tea for his uncle. They did not speak. In a moment Philip saw tears slowly falling down her cheeks. His heart was suddenly wrung because he caused her pain. In her tight black dress, made by the dressmaker down the street, with her wrinkled face and pale tired eyes, her gray hair still done in the frivolous ringlets of her youth, she was a ridiculous but strangely pathetic figure. Philip saw it for the first time.

Afterwards, when the Vicar was shut up in his study with the curate, he put his arms round her waist.

“I say, I’m sorry you’re upset, Aunt Louisa,” he said. “But it’s no good my being ordained if I haven’t a real vocation, is it?”

“I’m so disappointed, Philip,” she moaned. “I’d set my heart on it. I thought you could be your uncle’s curate, and then when our time came — after all, we can’t last for ever, can we? — you might have taken his place.”

Philip shivered. He was seized with panic. His heart beat like a pigeon in a trap beating with its wings. His aunt wept softly, her head upon his shoulder.

“I wish you’d persuade Uncle William to let me leave Tercanbury. I’m so sick of it.”

But the Vicar of Blackstable did not easily alter any arrangements he had made, and it had always been intended that Philip should stay at King’s School till he was eighteen, and should then go to Oxford. At all events he would not hear of Philip leaving then, for no notice had been given and the term’s fee would have to be paid in any case.

“Then will you give notice for me to leave at Christmas?” said Philip, at the end of a long and often bitter conversation.

“I’ll write to Mr. Perkins about it and see what he says.”

“Oh, I wish to goodness I were twenty-one. It is awful to be at somebody else’s beck and call.”

“Philip, you shouldn’t speak to your uncle like that,” said Mrs. Carey gently.

“But don’t you see that Perkins will want me to stay? He gets so much a head for every chap in the school.”

“Why don’t you want to go to Oxford?”

“What’s the good if I’m not going into the Church?”

“You can’t go into the Church: you’re in the Church already,” said the

Vicar.

“Ordained then,” replied Philip impatiently.

“What are you going to be, Philip?” asked Mrs. Carey.

“I don’t know. I’ve not made up my mind. But whatever I am, it’ll be useful to know foreign languages. I shall get far more out of a year in Germany than by staying on at that hole.”

He would not say that he felt Oxford would be little better than a continuation of his life at school. He wished immensely to be his own master. Besides he would be known to a certain extent among old schoolfellows, and he wanted to get away from them all. He felt that his life at school had been a failure. He wanted to start fresh.

It happened that his desire to go to Germany fell in with certain ideas which had been of late discussed at Blackstable. Sometimes friends came to stay with the doctor and brought news of the world outside; and the visitors spending August by the sea had their own way of looking at things. The Vicar had heard that there were people who did not think the old-fashioned education so useful nowadays as it had been in the past, and modern languages were gaining an importance which they had not had in his own youth. His own mind was divided, for a younger brother of his had been sent to Germany when he failed in some examination, thus creating a precedent but since he had there died of typhoid it was impossible to look upon the experiment as other than dangerous. The result of innumerable conversations was that Philip should go back to Tercanbury for another term, and then should leave. With this agreement Philip was not dissatisfied. But when he had been back a few days the headmaster spoke to him.

“I’ve had a letter from your uncle. It appears you want to go to Germany, and he asks me what I think about it.”

Philip was astounded. He was furious with his guardian for going back on his word.

“I thought it was settled, sir,” he said.

“Far from it. I’ve written to say I think it the greatest mistake to take you away.”

Philip immediately sat down and wrote a violent letter to his uncle. He did not measure his language. He was so angry that he could not get to sleep till quite late that night, and he awoke in the early morning and began brooding over the way they had treated him. He waited impatiently for an answer. In two or three days it came. It was a mild, pained letter from Aunt Louisa, saying that he should not write such things to his uncle, who was very much distressed. He was unkind and unchristian. He must know they were only trying to do their best for him, and they were so much older than he that they must be better judges of what was good for him. Philip clenched his hands. He had heard that statement so often, and he could not see why it was true; they did not know the conditions as he did, why should they accept it as self-evident that their greater age gave them greater wisdom? The letter ended with the information that Mr. Carey had withdrawn the notice he had given.

Philip nursed his wrath till the next half-holiday. They had them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since on Saturday afternoons they had to go to a service in the Cathedral. He stopped behind when the rest of the Sixth went out.

“May I go to Blackstable this afternoon, please, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said the headmaster briefly.

“I wanted to see my uncle about something very important.”

“Didn’t you hear me say no?”

Philip did not answer. He went out. He felt almost sick with humiliation, the humiliation of having to ask and the humiliation of the curt refusal. He hated the headmaster now. Philip writhed under that despotism which never vouchsafed a reason for the most tyrannous act. He was too angry to care what he did, and after dinner walked down to the station, by the back ways he knew so well, just in time to catch the train to Blackstable. He walked into the vicarage and found his uncle and aunt sitting in the dining-room.

“Hulloa, where have you sprung from?” said the Vicar.

It was very clear that he was not pleased to see him. He looked a little uneasy.

“I thought I’d come and see you about my leaving. I want to know what you mean by promising me one thing when I was here, and doing something different a week after.”

He was a little frightened at his own boldness, but he had made up his mind exactly what words to use, and, though his heart beat violently, he forced himself to say them.

“Have you got leave to come here this afternoon?”

“No. I asked Perkins and he refused. If you like to write and tell him

I’ve been here you can get me into a really fine old row.”

Mrs. Carey sat knitting with trembling hands. She was unused to scenes and they agitated her extremely.

“It would serve you right if I told him,” said Mr. Carey.

“If you like to be a perfect sneak you can. After writing to Perkins as you did you’re quite capable of it.”

It was foolish of Philip to say that, because it gave the Vicar exactly the opportunity he wanted.

“I’m not going to sit still while you say impertinent things to me,” he said with dignity.

He got up and walked quickly out of the room into his study. Philip heard him shut the door and lock it.

“Oh, I wish to God I were twenty-one. It is awful to be tied down like this.”

Aunt Louisa began to cry quietly.

“Oh, Philip, you oughtn’t to have spoken to your uncle like that. Do please go and tell him you’re sorry.”

“I’m not in the least sorry. He’s taking a mean advantage. Of course it’s just waste of money keeping me on at school, but what does he care? It’s not his money. It was cruel to put me under the guardianship of people who know nothing about things.”

“Philip.”

Philip in his voluble anger stopped suddenly at the sound of her voice. It was heart-broken. He had not realised what bitter things he was saying.

“Philip, how can you be so unkind? You know we are only trying to do our best for you, and we know that we have no experience; it isn’t as if we’d had any children of our own: that’s why we consulted Mr. Perkins.” Her voice broke. “I’ve tried to be like a mother to you. I’ve loved you as if you were my own son.”

She was so small and frail, there was something so pathetic in her old-maidish air, that Philip was touched. A great lump came suddenly in his throat and his eyes filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be beastly.”

He knelt down beside her and took her in his arms, and kissed her wet, withered cheeks. She sobbed bitterly, and he seemed to feel on a sudden the pity of that wasted life. She had never surrendered herself before to such a display of emotion.

“I know I’ve not been what I wanted to be to you, Philip, but I didn’t know how. It’s been just as dreadful for me to have no children as for you to have no mother.”

Philip forgot his anger and his own concerns, but thought only of consoling her, with broken words and clumsy little caresses. Then the clock struck, and he had to bolt off at once to catch the only train that would get him back to Tercanbury in time for call-over. As he sat in the corner of the railway carriage he saw that he had done nothing. He was angry with himself for his weakness. It was despicable to have allowed himself to be turned from his purpose by the pompous airs of the Vicar and the tears of his aunt. But as the result of he knew not what conversations between the couple another letter was written to the headmaster. Mr. Perkins read it with an impatient shrug of the shoulders. He showed it to Philip. It ran:

Dear Mr. Perkins,

Forgive me for troubling you again about my ward, but both his Aunt and I have been uneasy about him. He seems very anxious to leave school, and his Aunt thinks he is unhappy. It is very difficult for us to know what to do as we are not his parents. He does not seem to think he is doing very well and he feels it is wasting his money to stay on. I should be very much obliged if you would have a talk to him, and if he is still of the same mind perhaps it would be better if he left at Christmas as I originally intended.

Yours very truly,

William Carey.

Philip gave him back the letter. He felt a thrill of pride in his triumph. He had got his own way, and he was satisfied. His will had gained a victory over the wills of others.

“It’s not much good my spending half an hour writing to your uncle if he changes his mind the next letter he gets from you,” said the headmaster irritably.

Philip said nothing, and his face was perfectly placid; but he could not prevent the twinkle in his eyes. Mr. Perkins noticed it and broke into a little laugh.

“You’ve rather scored, haven’t you?” he said.

Then Philip smiled outright. He could not conceal his exultation.

“Is it true that you’re very anxious to leave?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you unhappy here?”

Philip blushed. He hated instinctively any attempt to get into the depths of his feelings.

“Oh, I don’t know, sir.”

Mr. Perkins, slowly dragging his fingers through his beard, looked at him thoughtfully. He seemed to speak almost to himself.

“Of course schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn’t time to bother about anything but the average.” Then suddenly he addressed himself to Philip: “Look here, I’ve got a suggestion to make to you. It’s getting on towards the end of the term now. Another term won’t kill you, and if you want to go to Germany you’d better go after Easter than after Christmas. It’ll be much pleasanter in the spring than in midwinter. If at the end of the next term you still want to go I’ll make no objection. What d’you say to that?”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

Philip was so glad to have gained the last three months that he did not mind the extra term. The school seemed less of a prison when he knew that before Easter he would be free from it for ever. His heart danced within him. That evening in chapel he looked round at the boys, standing according to their forms, each in his due place, and he chuckled with satisfaction at the thought that soon he would never see them again. It made him regard them almost with a friendly feeling. His eyes rested on Rose. Rose took his position as a monitor very seriously: he had quite an idea of being a good influence in the school; it was his turn to read the lesson that evening, and he read it very well. Philip smiled when he thought that he would be rid of him for ever, and it would not matter in six months whether Rose was tall and straight-limbed; and where would the importance be that he was a monitor and captain of the eleven? Philip looked at the masters in their gowns. Gordon was dead, he had died of apoplexy two years before, but all the rest were there. Philip knew now what a poor lot they were, except Turner perhaps, there was something of a man in him; and he writhed at the thought of the subjection in which they had held him. In six months they would not matter either. Their praise would mean nothing to him, and he would shrug his shoulders at their censure.

Philip had learned not to express his emotions by outward signs, and shyness still tormented him, but he had often very high spirits; and then, though he limped about demurely, silent and reserved, it seemed to be hallooing in his heart. He seemed to himself to walk more lightly. All sorts of ideas danced through his head, fancies chased one another so furiously that he could not catch them; but their coming and their going filled him with exhilaration. Now, being happy, he was able to work, and during the remaining weeks of the term set himself to make up for his long neglect. His brain worked easily, and he took a keen pleasure in the activity of his intellect. He did very well in the examinations that closed the term. Mr. Perkins made only one remark: he was talking to him about an essay he had written, and, after the usual criticisms, said:

“So you’ve made up your mind to stop playing the fool for a bit, have you?”

He smiled at him with his shining teeth, and Philip, looking down, gave an embarrassed smile.

The half dozen boys who expected to divide between them the various prizes which were given at the end of the summer term had ceased to look upon Philip as a serious rival, but now they began to regard him with some uneasiness. He told no one that he was leaving at Easter and so was in no sense a competitor, but left them to their anxieties. He knew that Rose flattered himself on his French, for he had spent two or three holidays in France; and he expected to get the Dean’s Prize for English essay; Philip got a good deal of satisfaction in watching his dismay when he saw how much better Philip was doing in these subjects than himself. Another fellow, Norton, could not go to Oxford unless he got one of the scholarships at the disposal of the school. He asked Philip if he was going in for them.

“Have you any objection?” asked Philip.

It entertained him to think that he held someone else’s future in his hand. There was something romantic in getting these various rewards actually in his grasp, and then leaving them to others because he disdained them. At last the breaking-up day came, and he went to Mr. Perkins to bid him good-bye.

“You don’t mean to say you really want to leave?”

Philip’s face fell at the headmaster’s evident surprise.

“You said you wouldn’t put any objection in the way, sir,” he answered.

“I thought it was only a whim that I’d better humour. I know you’re obstinate and headstrong. What on earth d’you want to leave for now? You’ve only got another term in any case. You can get the Magdalen scholarship easily; you’ll get half the prizes we’ve got to give.”

Philip looked at him sullenly. He felt that he had been tricked; but he had the promise, and Perkins would have to stand by it.

“You’ll have a very pleasant time at Oxford. You needn’t decide at once what you’re going to do afterwards. I wonder if you realise how delightful the life is up there for anyone who has brains.”

“I’ve made all my arrangements now to go to Germany, sir,” said Philip.

“Are they arrangements that couldn’t possibly be altered?” asked Mr. Perkins, with his quizzical smile. “I shall be very sorry to lose you. In schools the rather stupid boys who work always do better than the clever boy who’s idle, but when the clever boy works — why then, he does what you’ve done this term.”

Philip flushed darkly. He was unused to compliments, and no one had ever told him he was clever. The headmaster put his hand on Philip’s shoulder.

“You know, driving things into the heads of thick-witted boys is dull work, but when now and then you have the chance of teaching a boy who comes half-way towards you, who understands almost before you’ve got the words out of your mouth, why, then teaching is the most exhilarating thing in the world.” Philip was melted by kindness; it had never occurred to him that it mattered really to Mr. Perkins whether he went or stayed. He was touched and immensely flattered. It would be pleasant to end up his school-days with glory and then go to Oxford: in a flash there appeared before him the life which he had heard described from boys who came back to play in the O.K.S. match or in letters from the University read out in one of the studies. But he was ashamed; he would look such a fool in his own eyes if he gave in now; his uncle would chuckle at the success of the headmaster’s ruse. It was rather a come-down from the dramatic surrender of all these prizes which were in his reach, because he disdained to take them, to the plain, ordinary winning of them. It only required a little more persuasion, just enough to save his self-respect, and Philip would have done anything that Mr. Perkins wished; but his face showed nothing of his conflicting emotions. It was placid and sullen.

“I think I’d rather go, sir,” he said.

Mr. Perkins, like many men who manage things by their personal influence, grew a little impatient when his power was not immediately manifest. He had a great deal of work to do, and could not waste more time on a boy who seemed to him insanely obstinate.

“Very well, I promised to let you if you really wanted it, and I keep my promise. When do you go to Germany?”

Philip’s heart beat violently. The battle was won, and he did not know whether he had not rather lost it.

“At the beginning of May, sir,” he answered.

“Well, you must come and see us when you get back.”

He held out his hand. If he had given him one more chance Philip would have changed his mind, but he seemed to look upon the matter as settled. Philip walked out of the house. His school-days were over, and he was free; but the wild exultation to which he had looked forward at that moment was not there. He walked round the precincts slowly, and a profound depression seized him. He wished now that he had not been foolish. He did not want to go, but he knew he could never bring himself to go to the headmaster and tell him he would stay. That was a humiliation he could never put upon himself. He wondered whether he had done right. He was dissatisfied with himself and with all his circumstances. He asked himself dully whether whenever you got your way you wished afterwards that you hadn’t.

XXII

Philip’s uncle had an old friend, called Miss Wilkinson, who lived in Berlin. She was the daughter of a clergyman, and it was with her father, the rector of a village in Lincolnshire, that Mr. Carey had spent his last curacy; on his death, forced to earn her living, she had taken various situations as a governess in France and Germany. She had kept up a correspondence with Mrs. Carey, and two or three times had spent her holidays at Blackstable Vicarage, paying as was usual with the Careys’ unfrequent guests a small sum for her keep. When it became clear that it was less trouble to yield to Philip’s wishes than to resist them, Mrs. Carey wrote to ask her for advice. Miss Wilkinson recommended Heidelberg as an excellent place to learn German in and the house of Frau Professor Erlin as a comfortable home. Philip might live there for thirty marks a week, and the Professor himself, a teacher at the local high school, would instruct him.

Philip arrived in Heidelberg one morning in May. His things were put on a barrow and he followed the porter out of the station. The sky was bright blue, and the trees in the avenue through which they passed were thick with leaves; there was something in the air fresh to Philip, and mingled with the timidity he felt at entering on a new life, among strangers, was a great exhilaration. He was a little disconsolate that no one had come to meet him, and felt very shy when the porter left him at the front door of a big white house. An untidy lad let him in and took him into a drawing-room. It was filled with a large suite covered in green velvet, and in the middle was a round table. On this in water stood a bouquet of flowers tightly packed together in a paper frill like the bone of a mutton chop, and carefully spaced round it were books in leather bindings. There was a musty smell.

Presently, with an odour of cooking, the Frau Professor came in, a short, very stout woman with tightly dressed hair and a red face; she had little eyes, sparkling like beads, and an effusive manner. She took both Philip’s hands and asked him about Miss Wilkinson, who had twice spent a few weeks with her. She spoke in German and in broken English. Philip could not make her understand that he did not know Miss Wilkinson. Then her two daughters appeared. They seemed hardly young to Philip, but perhaps they were not more than twenty-five: the elder, Thekla, was as short as her mother, with the same, rather shifty air, but with a pretty face and abundant dark hair; Anna, her younger sister, was tall and plain, but since she had a pleasant smile Philip immediately preferred her. After a few minutes of polite conversation the Frau Professor took Philip to his room and left him. It was in a turret, looking over the tops of the trees in the Anlage; and the bed was in an alcove, so that when you sat at the desk it had not the look of a bed-room at all. Philip unpacked his things and set out all his books. He was his own master at last.

A bell summoned him to dinner at one o’clock, and he found the Frau Professor’s guests assembled in the drawing-room. He was introduced to her husband, a tall man of middle age with a large fair head, turning now to gray, and mild blue eyes. He spoke to Philip in correct, rather archaic English, having learned it from a study of the English classics, not from conversation; and it was odd to hear him use words colloquially which Philip had only met in the plays of Shakespeare. Frau Professor Erlin called her establishment a family and not a pension; but it would have required the subtlety of a metaphysician to find out exactly where the difference lay. When they sat down to dinner in a long dark apartment that led out of the drawing-room, Philip, feeling very shy, saw that there were sixteen people. The Frau Professor sat at one end and carved. The service was conducted, with a great clattering of plates, by the same clumsy lout who had opened the door for him; and though he was quick it happened that the first persons to be served had finished before the last had received their appointed portions. The Frau Professor insisted that nothing but German should be spoken, so that Philip, even if his bashfulness had permitted him to be talkative, was forced to hold his tongue. He looked at the people among whom he was to live. By the Frau Professor sat several old ladies, but Philip did not give them much of his attention. There were two young girls, both fair and one of them very pretty, whom Philip heard addressed as Fraulein Hedwig and Fraulein Cacilie. Fraulein Cacilie had a long pig-tail hanging down her back. They sat side by side and chattered to one another, with smothered laughter: now and then they glanced at Philip and one of them said something in an undertone; they both giggled, and Philip blushed awkwardly, feeling that they were making fun of him. Near them sat a Chinaman, with a yellow face and an expansive smile, who was studying Western conditions at the University. He spoke so quickly, with a queer accent, that the girls could not always understand him, and then they burst out laughing. He laughed too, good-humouredly, and his almond eyes almost closed as he did so. There were two or three American men, in black coats, rather yellow and dry of skin: they were theological students; Philip heard the twang of their New England accent through their bad German, and he glanced at them with suspicion; for he had been taught to look upon Americans as wild and desperate barbarians.

Afterwards, when they had sat for a little on the stiff green velvet chairs of the drawing-room, Fraulein Anna asked Philip if he would like to go for a walk with them.

Philip accepted the invitation. They were quite a party. There were the two daughters of the Frau Professor, the two other girls, one of the American students, and Philip. Philip walked by the side of Anna and Fraulein Hedwig. He was a little fluttered. He had never known any girls. At Blackstable there were only the farmers’ daughters and the girls of the local tradesmen. He knew them by name and by sight, but he was timid, and he thought they laughed at his deformity. He accepted willingly the difference which the Vicar and Mrs. Carey put between their own exalted rank and that of the farmers. The doctor had two daughters, but they were both much older than Philip and had been married to successive assistants while Philip was still a small boy. At school there had been two or three girls of more boldness than modesty whom some of the boys knew; and desperate stories, due in all probability to the masculine imagination, were told of intrigues with them; but Philip had always concealed under a lofty contempt the terror with which they filled him. His imagination and the books he had read had inspired in him a desire for the Byronic attitude; and he was torn between a morbid self-consciousness and a conviction that he owed it to himself to be gallant. He felt now that he should be bright and amusing, but his brain seemed empty and he could not for the life of him think of anything to say. Fraulein Anna, the Frau Professor’s daughter, addressed herself to him frequently from a sense of duty, but the other said little: she looked at him now and then with sparkling eyes, and sometimes to his confusion laughed outright. Philip felt that she thought him perfectly ridiculous. They walked along the side of a hill among pine-trees, and their pleasant odour caused Philip a keen delight. The day was warm and cloudless. At last they came to an eminence from which they saw the valley of the Rhine spread out before them under the sun. It was a vast stretch of country, sparkling with golden light, with cities in the distance; and through it meandered the silver ribband of the river. Wide spaces are rare in the corner of Kent which Philip knew, the sea offers the only broad horizon, and the immense distance he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable thrill. He felt suddenly elated. Though he did not know it, it was the first time that he had experienced, quite undiluted with foreign emotions, the sense of beauty. They sat on a bench, the three of them, for the others had gone on, and while the girls talked in rapid German, Philip, indifferent to their proximity, feasted his eyes.

“By Jove, I am happy,” he said to himself unconsciously.

XXIII

Philip thought occasionally of the King’s School at Tercanbury, and laughed to himself as he remembered what at some particular moment of the day they were doing. Now and then he dreamed that he was there still, and it gave him an extraordinary satisfaction, on awaking, to realise that he was in his little room in the turret. From his bed he could see the great cumulus clouds that hung in the blue sky. He revelled in his freedom. He could go to bed when he chose and get up when the fancy took him. There was no one to order him about. It struck him that he need not tell any more lies.

It had been arranged that Professor Erlin should teach him Latin and German; a Frenchman came every day to give him lessons in French; and the Frau Professor had recommended for mathematics an Englishman who was taking a philological degree at the university. This was a man named Wharton. Philip went to him every morning. He lived in one room on the top floor of a shabby house. It was dirty and untidy, and it was filled with a pungent odour made up of many different stinks. He was generally in bed when Philip arrived at ten o’clock, and he jumped out, put on a filthy dressing-gown and felt slippers, and, while he gave instruction, ate his simple breakfast. He was a short man, stout from excessive beer drinking, with a heavy moustache and long, unkempt hair. He had been in Germany for five years and was become very Teutonic. He spoke with scorn of Cambridge where he had taken his degree and with horror of the life which awaited him when, having taken his doctorate in Heidelberg, he must return to England and a pedagogic career. He adored the life of the German university with its happy freedom and its jolly companionships. He was a member of a Burschenschaft, and promised to take Philip to a Kneipe. He was very poor and made no secret that the lessons he was giving Philip meant the difference between meat for his dinner and bread and cheese. Sometimes after a heavy night he had such a headache that he could not drink his coffee, and he gave his lesson with heaviness of spirit. For these occasions he kept a few bottles of beer under the bed, and one of these and a pipe would help him to bear the burden of life.

“A hair of the dog that bit him,” he would say as he poured out the beer, carefully so that the foam should not make him wait too long to drink.

Then he would talk to Philip of the university, the quarrels between rival corps, the duels, and the merits of this and that professor. Philip learnt more of life from him than of mathematics. Sometimes Wharton would sit back with a laugh and say:

“Look here, we’ve not done anything today. You needn’t pay me for the lesson.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Philip.

This was something new and very interesting, and he felt that it was of greater import than trigonometry, which he never could understand. It was like a window on life that he had a chance of peeping through, and he looked with a wildly beating heart.

“No, you can keep your dirty money,” said Wharton.

“But how about your dinner?” said Philip, with a smile, for he knew exactly how his master’s finances stood.

Wharton had even asked him to pay him the two shillings which the lesson cost once a week rather than once a month, since it made things less complicated.

“Oh, never mind my dinner. It won’t be the first time I’ve dined off a bottle of beer, and my mind’s never clearer than when I do.”

He dived under the bed (the sheets were gray with want of washing), and fished out another bottle. Philip, who was young and did not know the good things of life, refused to share it with him, so he drank alone.

“How long are you going to stay here?” asked Wharton.

Both he and Philip had given up with relief the pretence of mathematics.

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose about a year. Then my people want me to go to

Oxford.”

Wharton gave a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. It was a new experience for Philip to learn that there were persons who did not look upon that seat of learning with awe.

“What d’you want to go there for? You’ll only be a glorified schoolboy. Why don’t you matriculate here? A year’s no good. Spend five years here. You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things. I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.”

He leaned back cautiously, for the chair on which he sat had a ricketty leg, and it was disconcerting when a rhetorical flourish was interrupted by a sudden fall to the floor.

“I ought to go back to England this year, but if I can scrape together enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms I shall stay another twelve months. But then I shall have to go. And I must leave all this” — he waved his arm round the dirty garret, with its unmade bed, the clothes lying on the floor, a row of empty beer bottles against the wall, piles of unbound, ragged books in every corner— “for some provincial university where I shall try and get a chair of philology. And I shall play tennis and go to tea-parties.” He interrupted himself and gave Philip, very neatly dressed, with a clean collar on and his hair well-brushed, a quizzical look. “And, my God! I shall have to wash.”

Philip reddened, feeling his own spruceness an intolerable reproach; for of late he had begun to pay some attention to his toilet, and he had come out from England with a pretty selection of ties.

The summer came upon the country like a conqueror. Each day was beautiful. The sky had an arrogant blue which goaded the nerves like a spur. The green of the trees in the Anlage was violent and crude; and the houses, when the sun caught them, had a dazzling white which stimulated till it hurt. Sometimes on his way back from Wharton Philip would sit in the shade on one of the benches in the Anlage, enjoying the coolness and watching the patterns of light which the sun, shining through the leaves, made on the ground. His soul danced with delight as gaily as the sunbeams. He revelled in those moments of idleness stolen from his work. Sometimes he sauntered through the streets of the old town. He looked with awe at the students of the corps, their cheeks gashed and red, who swaggered about in their coloured caps. In the afternoons he wandered about the hills with the girls in the Frau Professor’s house, and sometimes they went up the river and had tea in a leafy beer-garden. In the evenings they walked round and round the Stadtgarten, listening to the band.

Philip soon learned the various interests of the household. Fraulein Thekla, the professor’s elder daughter, was engaged to a man in England who had spent twelve months in the house to learn German, and their marriage was to take place at the end of the year. But the young man wrote that his father, an india-rubber merchant who lived in Slough, did not approve of the union, and Fraulein Thekla was often in tears. Sometimes she and her mother might be seen, with stern eyes and determined mouths, looking over the letters of the reluctant lover. Thekla painted in water colour, and occasionally she and Philip, with another of the girls to keep them company, would go out and paint little pictures. The pretty Fraulein Hedwig had amorous troubles too. She was the daughter of a merchant in Berlin and a dashing hussar had fallen in love with her, a von if you please: but his parents opposed a marriage with a person of her condition, and she had been sent to Heidelberg to forget him. She could never, never do this, and corresponded with him continually, and he was making every effort to induce an exasperating father to change his mind. She told all this to Philip with pretty sighs and becoming blushes, and showed him the photograph of the gay lieutenant. Philip liked her best of all the girls at the Frau Professor’s, and on their walks always tried to get by her side. He blushed a great deal when the others chaffed him for his obvious preference. He made the first declaration in his life to Fraulein Hedwig, but unfortunately it was an accident, and it happened in this manner. In the evenings when they did not go out, the young women sang little songs in the green velvet drawing-room, while Fraulein Anna, who always made herself useful, industriously accompanied. Fraulein Hedwig’s favourite song was called Ich liebe dich, I love you; and one evening after she had sung this, when Philip was standing with her on the balcony, looking at the stars, it occurred to him to make some remark about it. He began:

“Ich liebe dich.”

His German was halting, and he looked about for the word he wanted. The pause was infinitesimal, but before he could go on Fraulein Hedwig said:

“Ach, Herr Carey, Sie mussen mir nicht du sagen — you mustn’t talk to me in the second person singular.”

Philip felt himself grow hot all over, for he would never have dared to do anything so familiar, and he could think of nothing on earth to say. It would be ungallant to explain that he was not making an observation, but merely mentioning the title of a song.

“Entschuldigen Sie,” he said. “I beg your pardon.”

“It does not matter,” she whispered.

She smiled pleasantly, quietly took his hand and pressed it, then turned back into the drawing-room.

Next day he was so embarrassed that he could not speak to her, and in his shyness did all that was possible to avoid her. When he was asked to go for the usual walk he refused because, he said, he had work to do. But Fraulein Hedwig seized an opportunity to speak to him alone.

“Why are you behaving in this way?” she said kindly. “You know, I’m not angry with you for what you said last night. You can’t help it if you love me. I’m flattered. But although I’m not exactly engaged to Hermann I can never love anyone else, and I look upon myself as his bride.”

Philip blushed again, but he put on quite the expression of a rejected lover.

“I hope you’ll be very happy,” he said.

XXIV

Professor Erlin gave Philip a lesson every day. He made out a list of books which Philip was to read till he was ready for the final achievement of Faust, and meanwhile, ingeniously enough, started him on a German translation of one of the plays by Shakespeare which Philip had studied at school. It was the period in Germany of Goethe’s highest fame. Notwithstanding his rather condescending attitude towards patriotism he had been adopted as the national poet, and seemed since the war of seventy to be one of the most significant glories of national unity. The enthusiastic seemed in the wildness of the Walpurgisnacht to hear the rattle of artillery at Gravelotte. But one mark of a writer’s greatness is that different minds can find in him different inspirations; and Professor Erlin, who hated the Prussians, gave his enthusiastic admiration to Goethe because his works, Olympian and sedate, offered the only refuge for a sane mind against the onslaughts of the present generation. There was a dramatist whose name of late had been much heard at Heidelberg, and the winter before one of his plays had been given at the theatre amid the cheers of adherents and the hisses of decent people. Philip heard discussions about it at the Frau Professor’s long table, and at these Professor Erlin lost his wonted calm: he beat the table with his fist, and drowned all opposition with the roar of his fine deep voice. It was nonsense and obscene nonsense. He forced himself to sit the play out, but he did not know whether he was more bored or nauseated. If that was what the theatre was coming to, then it was high time the police stepped in and closed the playhouses. He was no prude and could laugh as well as anyone at the witty immorality of a farce at the Palais Royal, but here was nothing but filth. With an emphatic gesture he held his nose and whistled through his teeth. It was the ruin of the family, the uprooting of morals, the destruction of Germany.

“Aber, Adolf,” said the Frau Professor from the other end of the table.

“Calm yourself.”

He shook his fist at her. He was the mildest of creatures and ventured upon no action of his life without consulting her.

“No, Helene, I tell you this,” he shouted. “I would sooner my daughters were lying dead at my feet than see them listening to the garbage of that shameless fellow.”

The play was The Doll’s House and the author was Henrik Ibsen.

Professor Erlin classed him with Richard Wagner, but of him he spoke not with anger but with good-humoured laughter. He was a charlatan but a successful charlatan, and in that was always something for the comic spirit to rejoice in.

“Verruckter Kerl! A madman!” he said.

He had seen Lohengrin and that passed muster. It was dull but no worse. But Siegfried! When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head on his hand and bellowed with laughter. Not a melody in it from beginning to end! He could imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing till his sides ached at the sight of all the people who were taking it seriously. It was the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century. He lifted his glass of beer to his lips, threw back his head, and drank till the glass was empty. Then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he said:

“I tell you young people that before the nineteenth century is out Wagner will be as dead as mutton. Wagner! I would give all his works for one opera by Donizetti.”

XXV

The oddest of Philip’s masters was his teacher of French. Monsieur Ducroz was a citizen of Geneva. He was a tall old man, with a sallow skin and hollow cheeks; his gray hair was thin and long. He wore shabby black clothes, with holes at the elbows of his coat and frayed trousers. His linen was very dirty. Philip had never seen him in a clean collar. He was a man of few words, who gave his lesson conscientiously but without enthusiasm, arriving as the clock struck and leaving on the minute. His charges were very small. He was taciturn, and what Philip learnt about him he learnt from others: it appeared that he had fought with Garibaldi against the Pope, but had left Italy in disgust when it was clear that all his efforts for freedom, by which he meant the establishment of a republic, tended to no more than an exchange of yokes; he had been expelled from Geneva for it was not known what political offences. Philip looked upon him with puzzled surprise; for he was very unlike his idea of the revolutionary: he spoke in a low voice and was extraordinarily polite; he never sat down till he was asked to; and when on rare occasions he met Philip in the street took off his hat with an elaborate gesture; he never laughed, he never even smiled. A more complete imagination than Philip’s might have pictured a youth of splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast with a hotter fire. One might fancy him, passionate with theories of human equality and human rights, discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades in Paris, flying before the Austrian cavalry in Milan, imprisoned here, exiled from there, hoping on and upborne ever with the word which seemed so magical, the word Liberty; till at last, broken with disease and starvation, old, without means to keep body and soul together but such lessons as he could pick up from poor students, he found himself in that little neat town under the heel of a personal tyranny greater than any in Europe. Perhaps his taciturnity hid a contempt for the human race which had abandoned the great dreams of his youth and now wallowed in sluggish ease; or perhaps these thirty years of revolution had taught him that men are unfit for liberty, and he thought that he had spent his life in the pursuit of that which was not worth the finding. Or maybe he was tired out and waited only with indifference for the release of death.

One day Philip, with the bluntness of his age, asked him if it was true he had been with Garibaldi. The old man did not seem to attach any importance to the question. He answered quite quietly in as low a voice as usual.

“Oui, monsieur.”

“They say you were in the Commune?”

“Do they? Shall we get on with our work?”

He held the book open and Philip, intimidated, began to translate the passage he had prepared.

One day Monsieur Ducroz seemed to be in great pain. He had been scarcely able to drag himself up the many stairs to Philip’s room: and when he arrived sat down heavily, his sallow face drawn, with beads of sweat on his forehead, trying to recover himself.

“I’m afraid you’re ill,” said Philip.

“It’s of no consequence.”

But Philip saw that he was suffering, and at the end of the hour asked whether he would not prefer to give no more lessons till he was better.

“No,” said the old man, in his even low voice. “I prefer to go on while I am able.”

Philip, morbidly nervous when he had to make any reference to money, reddened.

“But it won’t make any difference to you,” he said. “I’ll pay for the lessons just the same. If you wouldn’t mind I’d like to give you the money for next week in advance.”

Monsieur Ducroz charged eighteen pence an hour. Philip took a ten-mark piece out of his pocket and shyly put it on the table. He could not bring himself to offer it as if the old man were a beggar.

“In that case I think I won’t come again till I’m better.” He took the coin and, without anything more than the elaborate bow with which he always took his leave, went out.

“Bonjour, monsieur.”

Philip was vaguely disappointed. Thinking he had done a generous thing, he had expected that Monsieur Ducroz would overwhelm him with expressions of gratitude. He was taken aback to find that the old teacher accepted the present as though it were his due. He was so young, he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them. Monsieur Ducroz appeared again five or six days later. He tottered a little more and was very weak, but seemed to have overcome the severity of the attack. He was no more communicative than he had been before. He remained mysterious, aloof, and dirty. He made no reference to his illness till after the lesson: and then, just as he was leaving, at the door, which he held open, he paused. He hesitated, as though to speak were difficult.

“If it hadn’t been for the money you gave me I should have starved. It was all I had to live on.”

He made his solemn, obsequious bow, and went out. Philip felt a little lump in his throat. He seemed to realise in a fashion the hopeless bitterness of the old man’s struggle, and how hard life was for him when to himself it was so pleasant.

XXVI

Philip had spent three months in Heidelberg when one morning the Frau Professor told him that an Englishman named Hayward was coming to stay in the house, and the same evening at supper he saw a new face. For some days the family had lived in a state of excitement. First, as the result of heaven knows what scheming, by dint of humble prayers and veiled threats, the parents of the young Englishman to whom Fraulein Thekla was engaged had invited her to visit them in England, and she had set off with an album of water colours to show how accomplished she was and a bundle of letters to prove how deeply the young man had compromised himself. A week later Fraulein Hedwig with radiant smiles announced that the lieutenant of her affections was coming to Heidelberg with his father and mother. Exhausted by the importunity of their son and touched by the dowry which Fraulein Hedwig’s father offered, the lieutenant’s parents had consented to pass through Heidelberg to make the young woman’s acquaintance. The interview was satisfactory and Fraulein Hedwig had the satisfaction of showing her lover in the Stadtgarten to the whole of Frau Professor Erlin’s household. The silent old ladies who sat at the top of the table near the Frau Professor were in a flutter, and when Fraulein Hedwig said she was to go home at once for the formal engagement to take place, the Frau Professor, regardless of expense, said she would give a Maibowle. Professor Erlin prided himself on his skill in preparing this mild intoxicant, and after supper the large bowl of hock and soda, with scented herbs floating in it and wild strawberries, was placed with solemnity on the round table in the drawing-room. Fraulein Anna teased Philip about the departure of his lady-love, and he felt very uncomfortable and rather melancholy. Fraulein Hedwig sang several songs, Fraulein Anna played the Wedding March, and the Professor sang Die Wacht am Rhein. Amid all this jollification Philip paid little attention to the new arrival. They had sat opposite one another at supper, but Philip was chattering busily with Fraulein Hedwig, and the stranger, knowing no German, had eaten his food in silence. Philip, observing that he wore a pale blue tie, had on that account taken a sudden dislike to him. He was a man of twenty-six, very fair, with long, wavy hair through which he passed his hand frequently with a careless gesture. His eyes were large and blue, but the blue was very pale, and they looked rather tired already. He was clean-shaven, and his mouth, notwithstanding its thin lips, was well-shaped. Fraulein Anna took an interest in physiognomy, and she made Philip notice afterwards how finely shaped was his skull, and how weak was the lower part of his face. The head, she remarked, was the head of a thinker, but the jaw lacked character. Fraulein Anna, foredoomed to a spinster’s life, with her high cheek-bones and large misshapen nose, laid great stress upon character. While they talked of him he stood a little apart from the others, watching the noisy party with a good-humoured but faintly supercilious expression. He was tall and slim. He held himself with a deliberate grace. Weeks, one of the American students, seeing him alone, went up and began to talk to him. The pair were oddly contrasted: the American very neat in his black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, thin and dried-up, with something of ecclesiastical unction already in his manner; and the Englishman in his loose tweed suit, large-limbed and slow of gesture.

Philip did not speak to the newcomer till next day. They found themselves alone on the balcony of the drawing-room before dinner. Hayward addressed him.

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Is the food always as bad it was last night?”

“It’s always about the same.”

“Beastly, isn’t it?”

“Beastly.”

Philip had found nothing wrong with the food at all, and in fact had eaten it in large quantities with appetite and enjoyment, but he did not want to show himself a person of so little discrimination as to think a dinner good which another thought execrable.

Fraulein Thekla’s visit to England made it necessary for her sister to do more in the house, and she could not often spare the time for long walks; and Fraulein Cacilie, with her long plait of fair hair and her little snub-nosed face, had of late shown a certain disinclination for society. Fraulein Hedwig was gone, and Weeks, the American who generally accompanied them on their rambles, had set out for a tour of South Germany. Philip was left a good deal to himself. Hayward sought his acquaintance; but Philip had an unfortunate trait: from shyness or from some atavistic inheritance of the cave-dweller, he always disliked people on first acquaintance; and it was not till he became used to them that he got over his first impression. It made him difficult of access. He received Hayward’s advances very shyly, and when Hayward asked him one day to go for a walk he accepted only because he could not think of a civil excuse. He made his usual apology, angry with himself for the flushing cheeks he could not control, and trying to carry it off with a laugh.

“I’m afraid I can’t walk very fast.”

“Good heavens, I don’t walk for a wager. I prefer to stroll. Don’t you remember the chapter in Marius where Pater talks of the gentle exercise of walking as the best incentive to conversation?”

Philip was a good listener; though he often thought of clever things to say, it was seldom till after the opportunity to say them had passed; but Hayward was communicative; anyone more experienced than Philip might have thought he liked to hear himself talk. His supercilious attitude impressed Philip. He could not help admiring, and yet being awed by, a man who faintly despised so many things which Philip had looked upon as almost sacred. He cast down the fetish of exercise, damning with the contemptuous word pot-hunters all those who devoted themselves to its various forms; and Philip did not realise that he was merely putting up in its stead the other fetish of culture.

They wandered up to the castle, and sat on the terrace that overlooked the town. It nestled in the valley along the pleasant Neckar with a comfortable friendliness. The smoke from the chimneys hung over it, a pale blue haze; and the tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air. There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart. Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold. In those days Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam was known only to the elect, and Hayward repeated it to Philip. He was very fond of reciting poetry, his own and that of others, which he did in a monotonous sing-song. By the time they reached home Philip’s distrust of Hayward was changed to enthusiastic admiration.

They made a practice of walking together every afternoon, and Philip learned presently something of Hayward’s circumstances. He was the son of a country judge, on whose death some time before he had inherited three hundred a year. His record at Charterhouse was so brilliant that when he went to Cambridge the Master of Trinity Hall went out of his way to express his satisfaction that he was going to that college. He prepared himself for a distinguished career. He moved in the most intellectual circles: he read Browning with enthusiasm and turned up his well-shaped nose at Tennyson; he knew all the details of Shelley’s treatment of Harriet; he dabbled in the history of art (on the walls of his rooms were reproductions of pictures by G. F. Watts, Burne-Jones, and Botticelli); and he wrote not without distinction verses of a pessimistic character. His friends told one another that he was a man of excellent gifts, and he listened to them willingly when they prophesied his future eminence. In course of time he became an authority on art and literature. He came under the influence of Newman’s Apologia; the picturesqueness of the Roman Catholic faith appealed to his esthetic sensibility; and it was only the fear of his father’s wrath (a plain, blunt man of narrow ideas, who read Macaulay) which prevented him from ‘going over.’ When he only got a pass degree his friends were astonished; but he shrugged his shoulders and delicately insinuated that he was not the dupe of examiners. He made one feel that a first class was ever so slightly vulgar. He described one of the vivas with tolerant humour; some fellow in an outrageous collar was asking him questions in logic; it was infinitely tedious, and suddenly he noticed that he wore elastic-sided boots: it was grotesque and ridiculous; so he withdrew his mind and thought of the gothic beauty of the Chapel at King’s. But he had spent some delightful days at Cambridge; he had given better dinners than anyone he knew; and the conversation in his rooms had been often memorable. He quoted to Philip the exquisite epigram:

“They told me, Herakleitus, they told me you were dead.”

And now, when he related again the picturesque little anecdote about the examiner and his boots, he laughed.

“Of course it was folly,” he said, “but it was a folly in which there was something fine.”

Philip, with a little thrill, thought it magnificent.

Then Hayward went to London to read for the Bar. He had charming rooms in Clement’s Inn, with panelled walls, and he tried to make them look like his old rooms at the Hall. He had ambitions that were vaguely political, he described himself as a Whig, and he was put up for a club which was of Liberal but gentlemanly flavour. His idea was to practise at the Bar (he chose the Chancery side as less brutal), and get a seat for some pleasant constituency as soon as the various promises made him were carried out; meanwhile he went a great deal to the opera, and made acquaintance with a small number of charming people who admired the things that he admired. He joined a dining-club of which the motto was, The Whole, The Good, and The Beautiful. He formed a platonic friendship with a lady some years older than himself, who lived in Kensington Square; and nearly every afternoon he drank tea with her by the light of shaded candles, and talked of George Meredith and Walter Pater. It was notorious that any fool could pass the examinations of the Bar Council, and he pursued his studies in a dilatory fashion. When he was ploughed for his final he looked upon it as a personal affront. At the same time the lady in Kensington Square told him that her husband was coming home from India on leave, and was a man, though worthy in every way, of a commonplace mind, who would not understand a young man’s frequent visits. Hayward felt that life was full of ugliness, his soul revolted from the thought of affronting again the cynicism of examiners, and he saw something rather splendid in kicking away the ball which lay at his feet. He was also a good deal in debt: it was difficult to live in London like a gentleman on three hundred a year; and his heart yearned for the Venice and Florence which John Ruskin had so magically described. He felt that he was unsuited to the vulgar bustle of the Bar, for he had discovered that it was not sufficient to put your name on a door to get briefs; and modern politics seemed to lack nobility. He felt himself a poet. He disposed of his rooms in Clement’s Inn and went to Italy. He had spent a winter in Florence and a winter in Rome, and now was passing his second summer abroad in Germany so that he might read Goethe in the original.

Hayward had one gift which was very precious. He had a real feeling for literature, and he could impart his own passion with an admirable fluency. He could throw himself into sympathy with a writer and see all that was best in him, and then he could talk about him with understanding. Philip had read a great deal, but he had read without discrimination everything that he happened to come across, and it was very good for him now to meet someone who could guide his taste. He borrowed books from the small lending library which the town possessed and began reading all the wonderful things that Hayward spoke of. He did not read always with enjoyment but invariably with perseverance. He was eager for self-improvement. He felt himself very ignorant and very humble. By the end of August, when Weeks returned from South Germany, Philip was completely under Hayward’s influence. Hayward did not like Weeks. He deplored the American’s black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, and spoke with a scornful shrug of his New England conscience. Philip listened complacently to the abuse of a man who had gone out of his way to be kind to him, but when Weeks in his turn made disagreeable remarks about Hayward he lost his temper.

“Your new friend looks like a poet,” said Weeks, with a thin smile on his careworn, bitter mouth.

“He is a poet.”

“Did he tell you so? In America we should call him a pretty fair specimen of a waster.”

“Well, we’re not in America,” said Philip frigidly.

“How old is he? Twenty-five? And he does nothing but stay in pensions and write poetry.”

“You don’t know him,” said Philip hotly.

“Oh yes, I do: I’ve met a hundred and forty-seven of him.”

Weeks’ eyes twinkled, but Philip, who did not understand American humour, pursed his lips and looked severe. Weeks to Philip seemed a man of middle age, but he was in point of fact little more than thirty. He had a long, thin body and the scholar’s stoop; his head was large and ugly; he had pale scanty hair and an earthy skin; his thin mouth and thin, long nose, and the great protuberance of his frontal bones, gave him an uncouth look. He was cold and precise in his manner, a bloodless man, without passion; but he had a curious vein of frivolity which disconcerted the serious-minded among whom his instincts naturally threw him. He was studying theology in Heidelberg, but the other theological students of his own nationality looked upon him with suspicion. He was very unorthodox, which frightened them; and his freakish humour excited their disapproval.

“How can you have known a hundred and forty-seven of him?” asked Philip seriously.

“I’ve met him in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and I’ve met him in pensions in Berlin and Munich. He lives in small hotels in Perugia and Assisi. He stands by the dozen before the Botticellis in Florence, and he sits on all the benches of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In Italy he drinks a little too much wine, and in Germany he drinks a great deal too much beer. He always admires the right thing whatever the right thing is, and one of these days he’s going to write a great work. Think of it, there are a hundred and forty-seven great works reposing in the bosoms of a hundred and forty-seven great men, and the tragic thing is that not one of those hundred and forty-seven great works will ever be written. And yet the world goes on.”

Weeks spoke seriously, but his gray eyes twinkled a little at the end of his long speech, and Philip flushed when he saw that the American was making fun of him.

“You do talk rot,” he said crossly.

XXVII

Weeks had two little rooms at the back of Frau Erlin’s house, and one of them, arranged as a parlour, was comfortable enough for him to invite people to sit in. After supper, urged perhaps by the impish humour which was the despair of his friends in Cambridge, Mass., he often asked Philip and Hayward to come in for a chat. He received them with elaborate courtesy and insisted on their sitting in the only two comfortable chairs in the room. Though he did not drink himself, with a politeness of which Philip recognised the irony, he put a couple of bottles of beer at Hayward’s elbow, and he insisted on lighting matches whenever in the heat of argument Hayward’s pipe went out. At the beginning of their acquaintance Hayward, as a member of so celebrated a university, had adopted a patronising attitude towards Weeks, who was a graduate of Harvard; and when by chance the conversation turned upon the Greek tragedians, a subject upon which Hayward felt he spoke with authority, he had assumed the air that it was his part to give information rather than to exchange ideas. Weeks had listened politely, with smiling modesty, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two insidious questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing into what a quandary they led him, answered blandly; Weeks made a courteous objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation from some little known Latin commentator, then a reference to a German authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar. With smiling ease, apologetically, Weeks tore to pieces all that Hayward had said; with elaborate civility he displayed the superficiality of his attainments. He mocked him with gentle irony. Philip could not help seeing that Hayward looked a perfect fool, and Hayward had not the sense to hold his tongue; in his irritation, his self-assurance undaunted, he attempted to argue: he made wild statements and Weeks amicably corrected them; he reasoned falsely and Weeks proved that he was absurd: Weeks confessed that he had taught Greek Literature at Harvard. Hayward gave a laugh of scorn.

“I might have known it. Of course you read Greek like a schoolmaster,” he said. “I read it like a poet.”

“And do you find it more poetic when you don’t quite know what it means? I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.”

At last, having finished the beer, Hayward left Weeks’ room hot and dishevelled; with an angry gesture he said to Philip:

“Of course the man’s a pedant. He has no real feeling for beauty. Accuracy is the virtue of clerks. It’s the spirit of the Greeks that we aim at. Weeks is like that fellow who went to hear Rubenstein and complained that he played false notes. False notes! What did they matter when he played divinely?”

Philip, not knowing how many incompetent people have found solace in these false notes, was much impressed.

Hayward could never resist the opportunity which Weeks offered him of regaining ground lost on a previous occasion, and Weeks was able with the greatest ease to draw him into a discussion. Though he could not help seeing how small his attainments were beside the American’s, his British pertinacity, his wounded vanity (perhaps they are the same thing), would not allow him to give up the struggle. Hayward seemed to take a delight in displaying his ignorance, self-satisfaction, and wrongheadedness. Whenever Hayward said something which was illogical, Weeks in a few words would show the falseness of his reasoning, pause for a moment to enjoy his triumph, and then hurry on to another subject as though Christian charity impelled him to spare the vanquished foe. Philip tried sometimes to put in something to help his friend, and Weeks gently crushed him, but so kindly, differently from the way in which he answered Hayward, that even Philip, outrageously sensitive, could not feel hurt. Now and then, losing his calm as he felt himself more and more foolish, Hayward became abusive, and only the American’s smiling politeness prevented the argument from degenerating into a quarrel. On these occasions when Hayward left Weeks’ room he muttered angrily:

“Damned Yankee!”

That settled it. It was a perfect answer to an argument which had seemed unanswerable.

Though they began by discussing all manner of subjects in Weeks’ little room eventually the conversation always turned to religion: the theological student took a professional interest in it, and Hayward welcomed a subject in which hard facts need not disconcert him; when feeling is the gauge you can snap your angers at logic, and when your logic is weak that is very agreeable. Hayward found it difficult to explain his beliefs to Philip without a great flow of words; but it was clear (and this fell in with Philip’s idea of the natural order of things), that he had been brought up in the church by law established. Though he had now given up all idea of becoming a Roman Catholic, he still looked upon that communion with sympathy. He had much to say in its praise, and he compared favourably its gorgeous ceremonies with the simple services of the Church of England. He gave Philip Newman’s Apologia to read, and Philip, finding it very dull, nevertheless read it to the end.

“Read it for its style, not for its matter,” said Hayward.

He talked enthusiastically of the music at the Oratory, and said charming things about the connection between incense and the devotional spirit. Weeks listened to him with his frigid smile.

“You think it proves the truth of Roman Catholicism that John Henry Newman wrote good English and that Cardinal Manning has a picturesque appearance?”

Hayward hinted that he had gone through much trouble with his soul. For a year he had swum in a sea of darkness. He passed his fingers through his fair, waving hair and told them that he would not for five hundred pounds endure again those agonies of mind. Fortunately he had reached calm waters at last.

“But what do you believe?” asked Philip, who was never satisfied with vague statements.

“I believe in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful.”

Hayward with his loose large limbs and the fine carriage of his head looked very handsome when he said this, and he said it with an air.

“Is that how you would describe your religion in a census paper?” asked

Weeks, in mild tones.

“I hate the rigid definition: it’s so ugly, so obvious. If you like I will say that I believe in the church of the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Gladstone.”

“That’s the Church of England,” said Philip.

“Oh wise young man!” retorted Hayward, with a smile which made Philip blush, for he felt that in putting into plain words what the other had expressed in a paraphrase, he had been guilty of vulgarity. “I belong to the Church of England. But I love the gold and the silk which clothe the priest of Rome, and his celibacy, and the confessional, and purgatory: and in the darkness of an Italian cathedral, incense-laden and mysterious, I believe with all my heart in the miracle of the Mass. In Venice I have seen a fisherwoman come in, barefoot, throw down her basket of fish by her side, fall on her knees, and pray to the Madonna; and that I felt was the real faith, and I prayed and believed with her. But I believe also in Aphrodite and Apollo and the Great God Pan.”

He had a charming voice, and he chose his words as he spoke; he uttered them almost rhythmically. He would have gone on, but Weeks opened a second bottle of beer.

“Let me give you something to drink.”

Hayward turned to Philip with the slightly condescending gesture which so impressed the youth.

“Now are you satisfied?” he asked.

Philip, somewhat bewildered, confessed that he was.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t add a little Buddhism,” said Weeks. “And I confess I have a sort of sympathy for Mahomet; I regret that you should have left him out in the cold.”

Hayward laughed, for he was in a good humour with himself that evening, and the ring of his sentences still sounded pleasant in his ears. He emptied his glass.

“I didn’t expect you to understand me,” he answered. “With your cold American intelligence you can only adopt the critical attitude. Emerson and all that sort of thing. But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up. You are a pedant, my dear fellow. The important thing is to construct: I am constructive; I am a poet.”

Weeks looked at him with eyes which seemed at the same time to be quite grave and yet to be smiling brightly.

“I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a little drunk.”

“Nothing to speak of,” answered Hayward cheerfully. “And not enough for me to be unable to overwhelm you in argument. But come, I have unbosomed my soul; now tell us what your religion is.”

Weeks put his head on one side so that he looked like a sparrow on a perch.

“I’ve been trying to find that out for years. I think I’m a Unitarian.”

“But that’s a dissenter,” said Philip.

He could not imagine why they both burst into laughter, Hayward uproariously, and Weeks with a funny chuckle.

“And in England dissenters aren’t gentlemen, are they?” asked Weeks.

“Well, if you ask me point-blank, they’re not,” replied Philip rather crossly.

He hated being laughed at, and they laughed again.

“And will you tell me what a gentleman is?” asked Weeks.

“Oh, I don’t know; everyone knows what it is.”

“Are you a gentleman?”

No doubt had ever crossed Philip’s mind on the subject, but he knew it was not a thing to state of oneself.

“If a man tells you he’s a gentleman you can bet your boots he isn’t,” he retorted.

“Am I a gentleman?”

Philip’s truthfulness made it difficult for him to answer, but he was naturally polite.

“Oh, well, you’re different,” he said. “You’re American, aren’t you?”

“I suppose we may take it that only Englishmen are gentlemen,” said Weeks gravely.

Philip did not contradict him.

“Couldn’t you give me a few more particulars?” asked Weeks.

Philip reddened, but, growing angry, did not care if he made himself ridiculous.

“I can give you plenty.” He remembered his uncle’s saying that it took three generations to make a gentleman: it was a companion proverb to the silk purse and the sow’s ear. “First of all he’s the son of a gentleman, and he’s been to a public school, and to Oxford or Cambridge.”

“Edinburgh wouldn’t do, I suppose?” asked Weeks.

“And he talks English like a gentleman, and he wears the right sort of things, and if he’s a gentleman he can always tell if another chap’s a gentleman.”

It seemed rather lame to Philip as he went on, but there it was: that was what he meant by the word, and everyone he had ever known had meant that too.

“It is evident to me that I am not a gentleman,” said Weeks. “I don’t see why you should have been so surprised because I was a dissenter.”

“I don’t quite know what a Unitarian is,” said Philip.

Weeks in his odd way again put his head on one side: you almost expected him to twitter.

“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.”

“I don’t see why you should make fun of me,” said Philip. “I really want to know.”

“My dear friend, I’m not making fun of you. I have arrived at that definition after years of great labour and the most anxious, nerve-racking study.”

When Philip and Hayward got up to go, Weeks handed Philip a little book in a paper cover.

“I suppose you can read French pretty well by now. I wonder if this would amuse you.”

Philip thanked him and, taking the book, looked at the title. It was

Renan’s Vie de Jesus.

XXVIII

It occurred neither to Hayward nor to Weeks that the conversations which helped them to pass an idle evening were being turned over afterwards in Philip’s active brain. It had never struck him before that religion was a matter upon which discussion was possible. To him it meant the Church of England, and not to believe in its tenets was a sign of wilfulness which could not fail of punishment here or hereafter. There was some doubt in his mind about the chastisement of unbelievers. It was possible that a merciful judge, reserving the flames of hell for the heathen — Mahommedans, Buddhists, and the rest — would spare Dissenters and Roman Catholics (though at the cost of how much humiliation when they were made to realise their error!), and it was also possible that He would be pitiful to those who had had no chance of learning the truth, — this was reasonable enough, though such were the activities of the Missionary Society there could not be many in this condition — but if the chance had been theirs and they had neglected it (in which category were obviously Roman Catholics and Dissenters), the punishment was sure and merited. It was clear that the miscreant was in a parlous state. Perhaps Philip had not been taught it in so many words, but certainly the impression had been given him that only members of the Church of England had any real hope of eternal happiness.

One of the things that Philip had heard definitely stated was that the unbeliever was a wicked and a vicious man; but Weeks, though he believed in hardly anything that Philip believed, led a life of Christian purity. Philip had received little kindness in his life, and he was touched by the American’s desire to help him: once when a cold kept him in bed for three days, Weeks nursed him like a mother. There was neither vice nor wickedness in him, but only sincerity and loving-kindness. It was evidently possible to be virtuous and unbelieving.

Also Philip had been given to understand that people adhered to other faiths only from obstinacy or self-interest: in their hearts they knew they were false; they deliberately sought to deceive others. Now, for the sake of his German he had been accustomed on Sunday mornings to attend the Lutheran service, but when Hayward arrived he began instead to go with him to Mass. He noticed that, whereas the Protestant church was nearly empty and the congregation had a listless air, the Jesuit on the other hand was crowded and the worshippers seemed to pray with all their hearts. They had not the look of hypocrites. He was surprised at the contrast; for he knew of course that the Lutherans, whose faith was closer to that of the Church of England, on that account were nearer the truth than the Roman Catholics. Most of the men — it was largely a masculine congregation — were South Germans; and he could not help saying to himself that if he had been born in South Germany he would certainly have been a Roman Catholic. He might just as well have been born in a Roman Catholic country as in England; and in England as well in a Wesleyan, Baptist, or Methodist family as in one that fortunately belonged to the church by law established. He was a little breathless at the danger he had run. Philip was on friendly terms with the little Chinaman who sat at table with him twice each day. His name was Sung. He was always smiling, affable, and polite. It seemed strange that he should frizzle in hell merely because he was a Chinaman; but if salvation was possible whatever a man’s faith was, there did not seem to be any particular advantage in belonging to the Church of England.

Philip, more puzzled than he had ever been in his life, sounded Weeks. He had to be careful, for he was very sensitive to ridicule; and the acidulous humour with which the American treated the Church of England disconcerted him. Weeks only puzzled him more. He made Philip acknowledge that those South Germans whom he saw in the Jesuit church were every bit as firmly convinced of the truth of Roman Catholicism as he was of that of the Church of England, and from that he led him to admit that the Mahommedan and the Buddhist were convinced also of the truth of their respective religions. It looked as though knowing that you were right meant nothing; they all knew they were right. Weeks had no intention of undermining the boy’s faith, but he was deeply interested in religion, and found it an absorbing topic of conversation. He had described his own views accurately when he said that he very earnestly disbelieved in almost everything that other people believed. Once Philip asked him a question, which he had heard his uncle put when the conversation at the vicarage had fallen upon some mildly rationalistic work which was then exciting discussion in the newspapers.

“But why should you be right and all those fellows like St. Anselm and St.

Augustine be wrong?”

“You mean that they were very clever and learned men, while you have grave doubts whether I am either?” asked Weeks.

“Yes,” answered Philip uncertainly, for put in that way his question seemed impertinent.

“St. Augustine believed that the earth was flat and that the sun turned round it.”

“I don’t know what that proves.”

“Why, it proves that you believe with your generation. Your saints lived in an age of faith, when it was practically impossible to disbelieve what to us is positively incredible.”

“Then how d’you know that we have the truth now?”

“I don’t.”

Philip thought this over for a moment, then he said:

“I don’t see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn’t be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then how can you believe anything at all?”

“I don’t know.”

Philip asked Weeks what he thought of Hayward’s religion.

“Men have always formed gods in their own image,” said Weeks. “He believes in the picturesque.”

Philip paused for a little while, then he said:

“I don’t see why one should believe in God at all.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realised that he had ceased to do so. It took his breath away like a plunge into cold water. He looked at Weeks with startled eyes. Suddenly he felt afraid. He left Weeks as quickly as he could. He wanted to be alone. It was the most startling experience that he had ever had. He tried to think it all out; it was very exciting, since his whole life seemed concerned (he thought his decision on this matter must profoundly affect its course) and a mistake might lead to eternal damnation; but the more he reflected the more convinced he was; and though during the next few weeks he read books, aids to scepticism, with eager interest it was only to confirm him in what he felt instinctively. The fact was that he had ceased to believe not for this reason or the other, but because he had not the religious temperament. Faith had been forced upon him from the outside. It was a matter of environment and example. A new environment and a new example gave him the opportunity to find himself. He put off the faith of his childhood quite simply, like a cloak that he no longer needed. At first life seemed strange and lonely without the belief which, though he never realised it, had been an unfailing support. He felt like a man who has leaned on a stick and finds himself forced suddenly to walk without assistance. It really seemed as though the days were colder and the nights more solitary. But he was upheld by the excitement; it seemed to make life a more thrilling adventure; and in a little while the stick which he had thrown aside, the cloak which had fallen from his shoulders, seemed an intolerable burden of which he had been eased. The religious exercises which for so many years had been forced upon him were part and parcel of religion to him. He thought of the collects and epistles which he had been made to learn by heart, and the long services at the Cathedral through which he had sat when every limb itched with the desire for movement; and he remembered those walks at night through muddy roads to the parish church at Blackstable, and the coldness of that bleak building; he sat with his feet like ice, his fingers numb and heavy, and all around was the sickly odour of pomatum. Oh, he had been so bored! His heart leaped when he saw he was free from all that.

He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty he had reached to his own cleverness. He was unduly pleased with himself. With youth’s lack of sympathy for an attitude other than its own he despised not a little Weeks and Hayward because they were content with the vague emotion which they called God and would not take the further step which to himself seemed so obvious. One day he went alone up a certain hill so that he might see a view which, he knew not why, filled him always with wild exhilaration. It was autumn now, but often the days were cloudless still, and then the sky seemed to glow with a more splendid light: it was as though nature consciously sought to put a fuller vehemence into the remaining days of fair weather. He looked down upon the plain, a-quiver with the sun, stretching vastly before him: in the distance were the roofs of Mannheim and ever so far away the dimness of Worms. Here and there a more piercing glitter was the Rhine. The tremendous spaciousness of it was glowing with rich gold. Philip, as he stood there, his heart beating with sheer joy, thought how the tempter had stood with Jesus on a high mountain and shown him the kingdoms of the earth. To Philip, intoxicated with the beauty of the scene, it seemed that it was the whole world which was spread before him, and he was eager to step down and enjoy it. He was free from degrading fears and free from prejudice. He could go his way without the intolerable dread of hell-fire. Suddenly he realised that he had lost also that burden of responsibility which made every action of his life a matter of urgent consequence. He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

Drunk with pride in his intelligence and in his fearlessness, Philip entered deliberately upon a new life. But his loss of faith made less difference in his behaviour than he expected. Though he had thrown on one side the Christian dogmas it never occurred to him to criticise the Christian ethics; he accepted the Christian virtues, and indeed thought it fine to practise them for their own sake, without a thought of reward or punishment. There was small occasion for heroism in the Frau Professor’s house, but he was a little more exactly truthful than he had been, and he forced himself to be more than commonly attentive to the dull, elderly ladies who sometimes engaged him in conversation. The gentle oath, the violent adjective, which are typical of our language and which he had cultivated before as a sign of manliness, he now elaborately eschewed.

Having settled the whole matter to his satisfaction he sought to put it out of his mind, but that was more easily said than done; and he could not prevent the regrets nor stifle the misgivings which sometimes tormented him. He was so young and had so few friends that immortality had no particular attractions for him, and he was able without trouble to give up belief in it; but there was one thing which made him wretched; he told himself that he was unreasonable, he tried to laugh himself out of such pathos; but the tears really came to his eyes when he thought that he would never see again the beautiful mother whose love for him had grown more precious as the years since her death passed on. And sometimes, as though the influence of innumerable ancestors, Godfearing and devout, were working in him unconsciously, there seized him a panic fear that perhaps after all it was all true, and there was, up there behind the blue sky, a jealous God who would punish in everlasting flames the atheist. At these times his reason could offer him no help, he imagined the anguish of a physical torment which would last endlessly, he felt quite sick with fear and burst into a violent sweat. At last he would say to himself desperately:

“After all, it’s not my fault. I can’t force myself to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don’t believe in Him I can’t help it.”

XXIX

Winter set in. Weeks went to Berlin to attend the lectures of Paulssen, and Hayward began to think of going South. The local theatre opened its doors. Philip and Hayward went to it two or three times a week with the praiseworthy intention of improving their German, and Philip found it a more diverting manner of perfecting himself in the language than listening to sermons. They found themselves in the midst of a revival of the drama. Several of Ibsen’s plays were on the repertory for the winter; Sudermann’s Die Ehre was then a new play, and on its production in the quiet university town caused the greatest excitement; it was extravagantly praised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists followed with plays written under the modern influence, and Philip witnessed a series of works in which the vileness of mankind was displayed before him. He had never been to a play in his life till then (poor touring companies sometimes came to the Assembly Rooms at Blackstable, but the Vicar, partly on account of his profession, partly because he thought it would be vulgar, never went to see them) and the passion of the stage seized him. He felt a thrill the moment he got into the little, shabby, ill-lit theatre. Soon he came to know the peculiarities of the small company, and by the casting could tell at once what were the characteristics of the persons in the drama; but this made no difference to him. To him it was real life. It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealed a depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honest were corrupt, the chaste were lewd. You seemed to dwell in a room where the night before an orgy had taken place: the windows had not been opened in the morning; the air was foul with the dregs of beer, and stale smoke, and flaring gas. There was no laughter. At most you sniggered at the hypocrite or the fool: the characters expressed themselves in cruel words that seemed wrung out of their hearts by shame and anguish.

Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of it. He seemed to see the world again in another fashion, and this world too he was anxious to know. After the play was over he went to a tavern and sat in the bright warmth with Hayward to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of beer. All round were little groups of students, talking and laughing; and here and there was a family, father and mother, a couple of sons and a girl; and sometimes the girl said a sharp thing, and the father leaned back in his chair and laughed, laughed heartily. It was very friendly and innocent. There was a pleasant homeliness in the scene, but for this Philip had no eyes. His thoughts ran on the play he had just come from.

“You do feel it’s life, don’t you?” he said excitedly. “You know, I don’t think I can stay here much longer. I want to get to London so that I can really begin. I want to have experiences. I’m so tired of preparing for life: I want to live it now.”

Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself. He would never exactly reply to Philip’s eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by the English language. Philip in the daytime had been led by curiosity to pass through the little street near the old bridge, with its neat white houses and green shutters, in which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trude lived; but the women, with brutal faces and painted cheeks, who came out of their doors and cried out to him, filled him with fear; and he fled in horror from the rough hands that sought to detain him. He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.

He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thing for Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw everything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality. He lied and never knew that he lied, and when it was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful. He was an idealist.

XXX

Philip was restless and dissatisfied. Hayward’s poetic allusions troubled his imagination, and his soul yearned for romance. At least that was how he put it to himself.

And it happened that an incident was taking place in Frau Erlin’s house which increased Philip’s preoccupation with the matter of sex. Two or three times on his walks among the hills he had met Fraulein Cacilie wandering by herself. He had passed her with a bow, and a few yards further on had seen the Chinaman. He thought nothing of it; but one evening on his way home, when night had already fallen, he passed two people walking very close together. Hearing his footstep, they separated quickly, and though he could not see well in the darkness he was almost certain they were Cacilie and Herr Sung. Their rapid movement apart suggested that they had been walking arm in arm. Philip was puzzled and surprised. He had never paid much attention to Fraulein Cacilie. She was a plain girl, with a square face and blunt features. She could not have been more than sixteen, since she still wore her long fair hair in a plait. That evening at supper he looked at her curiously; and, though of late she had talked little at meals, she addressed him.

“Where did you go for your walk today, Herr Carey?” she asked.

“Oh, I walked up towards the Konigstuhl.”

“I didn’t go out,” she volunteered. “I had a headache.”

The Chinaman, who sat next to her, turned round.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I hope it’s better now.”

Fraulein Cacilie was evidently uneasy, for she spoke again to Philip.

“Did you meet many people on the way?”

Philip could not help reddening when he told a downright lie.

“No. I don’t think I saw a living soul.”

He fancied that a look of relief passed across her eyes.

Soon, however, there could be no doubt that there was something between the pair, and other people in the Frau Professor’s house saw them lurking in dark places. The elderly ladies who sat at the head of the table began to discuss what was now a scandal. The Frau Professor was angry and harassed. She had done her best to see nothing. The winter was at hand, and it was not as easy a matter then as in the summer to keep her house full. Herr Sung was a good customer: he had two rooms on the ground floor, and he drank a bottle of Moselle at each meal. The Frau Professor charged him three marks a bottle and made a good profit. None of her other guests drank wine, and some of them did not even drink beer. Neither did she wish to lose Fraulein Cacilie, whose parents were in business in South America and paid well for the Frau Professor’s motherly care; and she knew that if she wrote to the girl’s uncle, who lived in Berlin, he would immediately take her away. The Frau Professor contented herself with giving them both severe looks at table and, though she dared not be rude to the Chinaman, got a certain satisfaction out of incivility to Cacilie. But the three elderly ladies were not content. Two were widows, and one, a Dutchwoman, was a spinster of masculine appearance; they paid the smallest possible sum for their pension, and gave a good deal of trouble, but they were permanent and therefore had to be put up with. They went to the Frau Professor and said that something must be done; it was disgraceful, and the house was ceasing to be respectable. The Frau Professor tried obstinacy, anger, tears, but the three old ladies routed her, and with a sudden assumption of virtuous indignation she said that she would put a stop to the whole thing.

After luncheon she took Cacilie into her bed-room and began to talk very seriously to her; but to her amazement the girl adopted a brazen attitude; she proposed to go about as she liked; and if she chose to walk with the Chinaman she could not see it was anybody’s business but her own. The Frau Professor threatened to write to her uncle.

“Then Onkel Heinrich will put me in a family in Berlin for the winter, and that will be much nicer for me. And Herr Sung will come to Berlin too.”

The Frau Professor began to cry. The tears rolled down her coarse, red, fat cheeks; and Cacilie laughed at her.

“That will mean three rooms empty all through the winter,” she said.

Then the Frau Professor tried another plan. She appealed to Fraulein Cacilie’s better nature: she was kind, sensible, tolerant; she treated her no longer as a child, but as a grown woman. She said that it wouldn’t be so dreadful, but a Chinaman, with his yellow skin and flat nose, and his little pig’s eyes! That’s what made it so horrible. It filled one with disgust to think of it.

“Bitte, bitte,” said Cacilie, with a rapid intake of the breath. “I won’t listen to anything against him.”

“But it’s not serious?” gasped Frau Erlin.

“I love him. I love him. I love him.”

“Gott im Himmel!”

The Frau Professor stared at her with horrified surprise; she had thought it was no more than naughtiness on the child’s part, and innocent, folly. but the passion in her voice revealed everything. Cacilie looked at her for a moment with flaming eyes, and then with a shrug of her shoulders went out of the room.

Frau Erlin kept the details of the interview to herself, and a day or two later altered the arrangement of the table. She asked Herr Sung if he would not come and sit at her end, and he with his unfailing politeness accepted with alacrity. Cacilie took the change indifferently. But as if the discovery that the relations between them were known to the whole household made them more shameless, they made no secret now of their walks together, and every afternoon quite openly set out to wander about the hills. It was plain that they did not care what was said of them. At last even the placidity of Professor Erlin was moved, and he insisted that his wife should speak to the Chinaman. She took him aside in his turn and expostulated; he was ruining the girl’s reputation, he was doing harm to the house, he must see how wrong and wicked his conduct was; but she was met with smiling denials; Herr Sung did not know what she was talking about, he was not paying any attention to Fraulein Cacilie, he never walked with her; it was all untrue, every word of it.

“Ach, Herr Sung, how can you say such things? You’ve been seen again and again.”

“No, you’re mistaken. It’s untrue.”

He looked at her with an unceasing smile, which showed his even, little white teeth. He was quite calm. He denied everything. He denied with bland effrontery. At last the Frau Professor lost her temper and said the girl had confessed she loved him. He was not moved. He continued to smile.

“Nonsense! Nonsense! It’s all untrue.”

She could get nothing out of him. The weather grew very bad; there was snow and frost, and then a thaw with a long succession of cheerless days, on which walking was a poor amusement. One evening when Philip had just finished his German lesson with the Herr Professor and was standing for a moment in the drawing-room, talking to Frau Erlin, Anna came quickly in.

“Mamma, where is Cacilie?” she said.

“I suppose she’s in her room.”

“There’s no light in it.”

The Frau Professor gave an exclamation, and she looked at her daughter in dismay. The thought which was in Anna’s head had flashed across hers.

“Ring for Emil,” she said hoarsely.

This was the stupid lout who waited at table and did most of the housework. He came in.

“Emil, go down to Herr Sung’s room and enter without knocking. If anyone is there say you came in to see about the stove.”

No sign of astonishment appeared on Emil’s phlegmatic face.

He went slowly downstairs. The Frau Professor and Anna left the door open and listened. Presently they heard Emil come up again, and they called him.

“Was anyone there?” asked the Frau Professor.

“Yes, Herr Sung was there.”

“Was he alone?”

The beginning of a cunning smile narrowed his mouth.

“No, Fraulein Cacilie was there.”

“Oh, it’s disgraceful,” cried the Frau Professor.

Now he smiled broadly.

“Fraulein Cacilie is there every evening. She spends hours at a time there.”

Frau Professor began to wring her hands.

“Oh, how abominable! But why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was no business of mine,” he answered, slowly shrugging his shoulders.

“I suppose they paid you well. Go away. Go.”

He lurched clumsily to the door.

“They must go away, mamma,” said Anna.

“And who is going to pay the rent? And the taxes are falling due. It’s all very well for you to say they must go away. If they go away I can’t pay the bills.” She turned to Philip, with tears streaming down her face. “Ach, Herr Carey, you will not say what you have heard. If Fraulein Forster—” this was the Dutch spinster— “if Fraulein Forster knew she would leave at once. And if they all go we must close the house. I cannot afford to keep it.”

“Of course I won’t say anything.”

“If she stays, I will not speak to her,” said Anna.

That evening at supper Fraulein Cacilie, redder than usual, with a look of obstinacy on her face, took her place punctually; but Herr Sung did not appear, and for a while Philip thought he was going to shirk the ordeal. At last he came, very smiling, his little eyes dancing with the apologies he made for his late arrival. He insisted as usual on pouring out the Frau Professor a glass of his Moselle, and he offered a glass to Fraulein Forster. The room was very hot, for the stove had been alight all day and the windows were seldom opened. Emil blundered about, but succeeded somehow in serving everyone quickly and with order. The three old ladies sat in silence, visibly disapproving: the Frau Professor had scarcely recovered from her tears; her husband was silent and oppressed. Conversation languished. It seemed to Philip that there was something dreadful in that gathering which he had sat with so often; they looked different under the light of the two hanging lamps from what they had ever looked before; he was vaguely uneasy. Once he caught Cacilie’s eye, and he thought she looked at him with hatred and contempt. The room was stifling. It was as though the beastly passion of that pair troubled them all; there was a feeling of Oriental depravity; a faint savour of joss-sticks, a mystery of hidden vices, seemed to make their breath heavy. Philip could feel the beating of the arteries in his forehead. He could not understand what strange emotion distracted him; he seemed to feel something infinitely attractive, and yet he was repelled and horrified.

For several days things went on. The air was sickly with the unnatural passion which all felt about them, and the nerves of the little household seemed to grow exasperated. Only Herr Sung remained unaffected; he was no less smiling, affable, and polite than he had been before: one could not tell whether his manner was a triumph of civilisation or an expression of contempt on the part of the Oriental for the vanquished West. Cacilie was flaunting and cynical. At last even the Frau Professor could bear the position no longer. Suddenly panic seized her; for Professor Erlin with brutal frankness had suggested the possible consequences of an intrigue which was now manifest to everyone, and she saw her good name in Heidelberg and the repute of her house ruined by a scandal which could not possibly be hidden. For some reason, blinded perhaps by her interests, this possibility had never occurred to her; and now, her wits muddled by a terrible fear, she could hardly be prevented from turning the girl out of the house at once. It was due to Anna’s good sense that a cautious letter was written to the uncle in Berlin suggesting that Cacilie should be taken away.

But having made up her mind to lose the two lodgers, the Frau Professor could not resist the satisfaction of giving rein to the ill-temper she had curbed so long. She was free now to say anything she liked to Cacilie.

“I have written to your uncle, Cacilie, to take you away. I cannot have you in my house any longer.”

Her little round eyes sparkled when she noticed the sudden whiteness of the girl’s face.

“You’re shameless. Shameless,” she went on.

She called her foul names.

“What did you say to my uncle Heinrich, Frau Professor?” the girl asked, suddenly falling from her attitude of flaunting independence.

“Oh, he’ll tell you himself. I expect to get a letter from him tomorrow.”

Next day, in order to make the humiliation more public, at supper she called down the table to Cacilie.

“I have had a letter from your uncle, Cacilie. You are to pack your things tonight, and we will put you in the train tomorrow morning. He will meet you himself in Berlin at the Central Bahnhof.”

“Very good, Frau Professor.”

Herr Sung smiled in the Frau Professor’s eyes, and notwithstanding her protests insisted on pouring out a glass of wine for her. The Frau Professor ate her supper with a good appetite. But she had triumphed unwisely. Just before going to bed she called the servant.

“Emil, if Fraulein Cacilie’s box is ready you had better take it downstairs tonight. The porter will fetch it before breakfast.”

The servant went away and in a moment came back.

“Fraulein Cacilie is not in her room, and her bag has gone.”

With a cry the Frau Professor hurried along: the box was on the floor, strapped and locked; but there was no bag, and neither hat nor cloak. The dressing-table was empty. Breathing heavily, the Frau Professor ran downstairs to the Chinaman’s rooms, she had not moved so quickly for twenty years, and Emil called out after her to beware she did not fall; she did not trouble to knock, but burst in. The rooms were empty. The luggage had gone, and the door into the garden, still open, showed how it had been got away. In an envelope on the table were notes for the money due on the month’s board and an approximate sum for extras. Groaning, suddenly overcome by her haste, the Frau Professor sank obesely on to a sofa. There could be no doubt. The pair had gone off together. Emil remained stolid and unmoved.

XXXI

Hayward, after saying for a month that he was going South next day and delaying from week to week out of inability to make up his mind to the bother of packing and the tedium of a journey, had at last been driven off just before Christmas by the preparations for that festival. He could not support the thought of a Teutonic merry-making. It gave him goose-flesh to think of the season’s aggressive cheerfulness, and in his desire to avoid the obvious he determined to travel on Christmas Eve.

Philip was not sorry to see him off, for he was a downright person and it irritated him that anybody should not know his own mind. Though much under Hayward’s influence, he would not grant that indecision pointed to a charming sensitiveness; and he resented the shadow of a sneer with which Hayward looked upon his straight ways. They corresponded. Hayward was an admirable letter-writer, and knowing his talent took pains with his letters. His temperament was receptive to the beautiful influences with which he came in contact, and he was able in his letters from Rome to put a subtle fragrance of Italy. He thought the city of the ancient Romans a little vulgar, finding distinction only in the decadence of the Empire; but the Rome of the Popes appealed to his sympathy, and in his chosen words, quite exquisitely, there appeared a rococo beauty. He wrote of old church music and the Alban Hills, and of the languor of incense and the charm of the streets by night, in the rain, when the pavements shone and the light of the street lamps was mysterious. Perhaps he repeated these admirable letters to various friends. He did not know what a troubling effect they had upon Philip; they seemed to make his life very humdrum. With the spring Hayward grew dithyrambic. He proposed that Philip should come down to Italy. He was wasting his time at Heidelberg. The Germans were gross and life there was common; how could the soul come to her own in that prim landscape? In Tuscany the spring was scattering flowers through the land, and Philip was nineteen; let him come and they could wander through the mountain towns of Umbria. Their names sang in Philip’s heart. And Cacilie too, with her lover, had gone to Italy. When he thought of them Philip was seized with a restlessness he could not account for. He cursed his fate because he had no money to travel, and he knew his uncle would not send him more than the fifteen pounds a month which had been agreed upon. He had not managed his allowance very well. His pension and the price of his lessons left him very little over, and he had found going about with Hayward expensive. Hayward had often suggested excursions, a visit to the play, or a bottle of wine, when Philip had come to the end of his month’s money; and with the folly of his age he had been unwilling to confess he could not afford an extravagance.

Luckily Hayward’s letters came seldom, and in the intervals Philip settled down again to his industrious life. He had matriculated at the university and attended one or two courses of lectures. Kuno Fischer was then at the height of his fame and during the winter had been lecturing brilliantly on Schopenhauer. It was Philip’s introduction to philosophy. He had a practical mind and moved uneasily amid the abstract; but he found an unexpected fascination in listening to metaphysical disquisitions; they made him breathless; it was a little like watching a tight-rope dancer doing perilous feats over an abyss; but it was very exciting. The pessimism of the subject attracted his youth; and he believed that the world he was about to enter was a place of pitiless woe and of darkness. That made him none the less eager to enter it; and when, in due course, Mrs. Carey, acting as the correspondent for his guardian’s views, suggested that it was time for him to come back to England, he agreed with enthusiasm. He must make up his mind now what he meant to do. If he left Heidelberg at the end of July they could talk things over during August, and it would be a good time to make arrangements.

The date of his departure was settled, and Mrs. Carey wrote to him again. She reminded him of Miss Wilkinson, through whose kindness he had gone to Frau Erlin’s house at Heidelberg, and told him that she had arranged to spend a few weeks with them at Blackstable. She would be crossing from Flushing on such and such a day, and if he travelled at the same time he could look after her and come on to Blackstable in her company. Philip’s shyness immediately made him write to say that he could not leave till a day or two afterwards. He pictured himself looking out for Miss Wilkinson, the embarrassment of going up to her and asking if it were she (and he might so easily address the wrong person and be snubbed), and then the difficulty of knowing whether in the train he ought to talk to her or whether he could ignore her and read his book.

At last he left Heidelberg. For three months he had been thinking of nothing but the future; and he went without regret. He never knew that he had been happy there. Fraulein Anna gave him a copy of Der Trompeter von Sackingen and in return he presented her with a volume of William Morris. Very wisely neither of them ever read the other’s present.

XXXII

Philip was surprised when he saw his uncle and aunt. He had never noticed before that they were quite old people. The Vicar received him with his usual, not unamiable indifference. He was a little stouter, a little balder, a little grayer. Philip saw how insignificant he was. His face was weak and self-indulgent. Aunt Louisa took him in her arms and kissed him; and tears of happiness flowed down her cheeks. Philip was touched and embarrassed; he had not known with what a hungry love she cared for him.

“Oh, the time has seemed long since you’ve been away, Philip,” she cried.

She stroked his hands and looked into his face with glad eyes.

“You’ve grown. You’re quite a man now.”

There was a very small moustache on his upper lip. He had bought a razor and now and then with infinite care shaved the down off his smooth chin.

“We’ve been so lonely without you.” And then shyly, with a little break in her voice, she asked: “You are glad to come back to your home, aren’t you?”

“Yes, rather.”

She was so thin that she seemed almost transparent, the arms she put round his neck were frail bones that reminded you of chicken bones, and her faded face was oh! so wrinkled. The gray curls which she still wore in the fashion of her youth gave her a queer, pathetic look; and her little withered body was like an autumn leaf, you felt it might be blown away by the first sharp wind. Philip realised that they had done with life, these two quiet little people: they belonged to a past generation, and they were waiting there patiently, rather stupidly, for death; and he, in his vigour and his youth, thirsting for excitement and adventure, was appalled at the waste. They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been. He felt a great pity for Aunt Louisa, and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.

Then Miss Wilkinson, who had kept discreetly out of the way till the

Careys had had a chance of welcoming their nephew, came into the room.

“This is Miss Wilkinson, Philip,” said Mrs. Carey.

“The prodigal has returned,” she said, holding out her hand. “I have brought a rose for the prodigal’s buttonhole.”

With a gay smile she pinned to Philip’s coat the flower she had just picked in the garden. He blushed and felt foolish. He knew that Miss Wilkinson was the daughter of his Uncle William’s last rector, and he had a wide acquaintance with the daughters of clergymen. They wore ill-cut clothes and stout boots. They were generally dressed in black, for in Philip’s early years at Blackstable homespuns had not reached East Anglia, and the ladies of the clergy did not favour colours. Their hair was done very untidily, and they smelt aggressively of starched linen. They considered the feminine graces unbecoming and looked the same whether they were old or young. They bore their religion arrogantly. The closeness of their connection with the church made them adopt a slightly dictatorial attitude to the rest of mankind.

Miss Wilkinson was very different. She wore a white muslin gown stamped with gay little bunches of flowers, and pointed, high-heeled shoes, with open-work stockings. To Philip’s inexperience it seemed that she was wonderfully dressed; he did not see that her frock was cheap and showy. Her hair was elaborately dressed, with a neat curl in the middle of the forehead: it was very black, shiny and hard, and it looked as though it could never be in the least disarranged. She had large black eyes and her nose was slightly aquiline; in profile she had somewhat the look of a bird of prey, but full face she was prepossessing. She smiled a great deal, but her mouth was large and when she smiled she tried to hide her teeth, which were big and rather yellow. But what embarrassed Philip most was that she was heavily powdered: he had very strict views on feminine behaviour and did not think a lady ever powdered; but of course Miss Wilkinson was a lady because she was a clergyman’s daughter, and a clergyman was a gentleman.

Philip made up his mind to dislike her thoroughly. She spoke with a slight French accent; and he did not know why she should, since she had been born and bred in the heart of England. He thought her smile affected, and the coy sprightliness of her manner irritated him. For two or three days he remained silent and hostile, but Miss Wilkinson apparently did not notice it. She was very affable. She addressed her conversation almost exclusively to him, and there was something flattering in the way she appealed constantly to his sane judgment. She made him laugh too, and Philip could never resist people who amused him: he had a gift now and then of saying neat things; and it was pleasant to have an appreciative listener. Neither the Vicar nor Mrs. Carey had a sense of humour, and they never laughed at anything he said. As he grew used to Miss Wilkinson, and his shyness left him, he began to like her better; he found the French accent picturesque; and at a garden party which the doctor gave she was very much better dressed than anyone else. She wore a blue foulard with large white spots, and Philip was tickled at the sensation it caused.

“I’m certain they think you’re no better than you should be,” he told her, laughing.

“It’s the dream of my life to be taken for an abandoned hussy,” she answered.

One day when Miss Wilkinson was in her room he asked Aunt Louisa how old she was.

“Oh, my dear, you should never ask a lady’s age; but she’s certainly too old for you to marry.”

The Vicar gave his slow, obese smile.

“She’s no chicken, Louisa,” he said. “She was nearly grown up when we were in Lincolnshire, and that was twenty years ago. She wore a pigtail hanging down her back.”

“She may not have been more than ten,” said Philip.

“She was older than that,” said Aunt Louisa.

“I think she was near twenty,” said the Vicar.

“Oh no, William. Sixteen or seventeen at the outside.”

“That would make her well over thirty,” said Philip.

At that moment Miss Wilkinson tripped downstairs, singing a song by Benjamin Goddard. She had put her hat on, for she and Philip were going for a walk, and she held out her hand for him to button her glove. He did it awkwardly. He felt embarrassed but gallant. Conversation went easily between them now, and as they strolled along they talked of all manner of things. She told Philip about Berlin, and he told her of his year in Heidelberg. As he spoke, things which had appeared of no importance gained a new interest: he described the people at Frau Erlin’s house; and to the conversations between Hayward and Weeks, which at the time seemed so significant, he gave a little twist, so that they looked absurd. He was flattered at Miss Wilkinson’s laughter.

“I’m quite frightened of you,” she said. “You’re so sarcastic.”

Then she asked him playfully whether he had not had any love affairs at Heidelberg. Without thinking, he frankly answered that he had not; but she refused to believe him.

“How secretive you are!” she said. “At your age is it likely?”

He blushed and laughed.

“You want to know too much,” he said.

“Ah, I thought so,” she laughed triumphantly. “Look at him blushing.”

He was pleased that she should think he had been a sad dog, and he changed the conversation so as to make her believe he had all sorts of romantic things to conceal. He was angry with himself that he had not. There had been no opportunity.

Miss Wilkinson was dissatisfied with her lot. She resented having to earn her living and told Philip a long story of an uncle of her mother’s, who had been expected to leave her a fortune but had married his cook and changed his will. She hinted at the luxury of her home and compared her life in Lincolnshire, with horses to ride and carriages to drive in, with the mean dependence of her present state. Philip was a little puzzled when he mentioned this afterwards to Aunt Louisa, and she told him that when she knew the Wilkinsons they had never had anything more than a pony and a dog-cart; Aunt Louisa had heard of the rich uncle, but as he was married and had children before Emily was born she could never have had much hope of inheriting his fortune. Miss Wilkinson had little good to say of Berlin, where she was now in a situation. She complained of the vulgarity of German life, and compared it bitterly with the brilliance of Paris, where she had spent a number of years. She did not say how many. She had been governess in the family of a fashionable portrait-painter, who had married a Jewish wife of means, and in their house she had met many distinguished people. She dazzled Philip with their names. Actors from the Comedie Francaise had come to the house frequently, and Coquelin, sitting next her at dinner, had told her he had never met a foreigner who spoke such perfect French. Alphonse Daudet had come also, and he had given her a copy of Sappho: he had promised to write her name in it, but she had forgotten to remind him. She treasured the volume none the less and she would lend it to Philip. Then there was Maupassant. Miss Wilkinson with a rippling laugh looked at Philip knowingly. What a man, but what a writer! Hayward had talked of Maupassant, and his reputation was not unknown to Philip.

“Did he make love to you?” he asked.

The words seemed to stick funnily in his throat, but he asked them nevertheless. He liked Miss Wilkinson very much now, and was thrilled by her conversation, but he could not imagine anyone making love to her.

“What a question!” she cried. “Poor Guy, he made love to every woman he met. It was a habit that he could not break himself of.”

She sighed a little, and seemed to look back tenderly on the past.

“He was a charming man,” she murmured.

A greater experience than Philip’s would have guessed from these words the probabilities of the encounter: the distinguished writer invited to luncheon en famille, the governess coming in sedately with the two tall girls she was teaching; the introduction:

“Notre Miss Anglaise.”

“Mademoiselle.”

And the luncheon during which the Miss Anglaise sat silent while the distinguished writer talked to his host and hostess.

But to Philip her words called up much more romantic fancies.

“Do tell me all about him,” he said excitedly.

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts. “You mustn’t be curious.”

She began to talk of Paris. She loved the boulevards and the Bois. There was grace in every street, and the trees in the Champs Elysees had a distinction which trees had not elsewhere. They were sitting on a stile now by the high-road, and Miss Wilkinson looked with disdain upon the stately elms in front of them. And the theatres: the plays were brilliant, and the acting was incomparable. She often went with Madame Foyot, the mother of the girls she was educating, when she was trying on clothes.

“Oh, what a misery to be poor!” she cried. “These beautiful things, it’s only in Paris they know how to dress, and not to be able to afford them! Poor Madame Foyot, she had no figure. Sometimes the dressmaker used to whisper to me: ‘Ah, Mademoiselle, if she only had your figure.’”

Philip noticed then that Miss Wilkinson had a robust form and was proud of it.

“Men are so stupid in England. They only think of the face. The French, who are a nation of lovers, know how much more important the figure is.”

Philip had never thought of such things before, but he observed now that Miss Wilkinson’s ankles were thick and ungainly. He withdrew his eyes quickly.

“You should go to France. Why don’t you go to Paris for a year? You would learn French, and it would — deniaiser you.”

“What is that?” asked Philip.

She laughed slyly.

“You must look it out in the dictionary. Englishmen do not know how to treat women. They are so shy. Shyness is ridiculous in a man. They don’t know how to make love. They can’t even tell a woman she is charming without looking foolish.”

Philip felt himself absurd. Miss Wilkinson evidently expected him to behave very differently; and he would have been delighted to say gallant and witty things, but they never occurred to him; and when they did he was too much afraid of making a fool of himself to say them.

“Oh, I love Paris,” sighed Miss Wilkinson. “But I had to go to Berlin. I was with the Foyots till the girls married, and then I could get nothing to do, and I had the chance of this post in Berlin. They’re relations of Madame Foyot, and I accepted. I had a tiny apartment in the Rue Breda, on the cinquieme: it wasn’t at all respectable. You know about the Rue Breda — ces dames, you know.”

Philip nodded, not knowing at all what she meant, but vaguely suspecting, and anxious she should not think him too ignorant.

“But I didn’t care. Je suis libre, n’est-ce pas?” She was very fond of speaking French, which indeed she spoke well. “Once I had such a curious adventure there.”

She paused a little and Philip pressed her to tell it.

“You wouldn’t tell me yours in Heidelberg,” she said.

“They were so unadventurous,” he retorted.

“I don’t know what Mrs. Carey would say if she knew the sort of things we talk about together.”

“You don’t imagine I shall tell her.”

“Will you promise?”

When he had done this, she told him how an art-student who had a room on the floor above her — but she interrupted herself.

“Why don’t you go in for art? You paint so prettily.”

“Not well enough for that.”

“That is for others to judge. Je m’y connais, and I believe you have the making of a great artist.”

“Can’t you see Uncle William’s face if I suddenly told him I wanted to go to Paris and study art?”

“You’re your own master, aren’t you?”

“You’re trying to put me off. Please go on with the story.” Miss Wilkinson, with a little laugh, went on. The art-student had passed her several times on the stairs, and she had paid no particular attention. She saw that he had fine eyes, and he took off his hat very politely. And one day she found a letter slipped under her door. It was from him. He told her that he had adored her for months, and that he waited about the stairs for her to pass. Oh, it was a charming letter! Of course she did not reply, but what woman could help being flattered? And next day there was another letter! It was wonderful, passionate, and touching. When next she met him on the stairs she did not know which way to look. And every day the letters came, and now he begged her to see him. He said he would come in the evening, vers neuf heures, and she did not know what to do. Of course it was impossible, and he might ring and ring, but she would never open the door; and then while she was waiting for the tinkling of the bell, all nerves, suddenly he stood before her. She had forgotten to shut the door when she came in.

“C’etait une fatalite.”

“And what happened then?” asked Philip.

“That is the end of the story,” she replied, with a ripple of laughter.

Philip was silent for a moment. His heart beat quickly, and strange emotions seemed to be hustling one another in his heart. He saw the dark staircase and the chance meetings, and he admired the boldness of the letters — oh, he would never have dared to do that — and then the silent, almost mysterious entrance. It seemed to him the very soul of romance.

“What was he like?”

“Oh, he was handsome. Charmant garcon.”

“Do you know him still?”

Philip felt a slight feeling of irritation as he asked this.

“He treated me abominably. Men are always the same. You’re heartless, all of you.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Philip, not without embarrassment.

“Let us go home,” said Miss Wilkinson.

XXXIII

Philip could not get Miss Wilkinson’s story out of his head. It was clear enough what she meant even though she cut it short, and he was a little shocked. That sort of thing was all very well for married women, he had read enough French novels to know that in France it was indeed the rule, but Miss Wilkinson was English and unmarried; her father was a clergyman. Then it struck him that the art-student probably was neither the first nor the last of her lovers, and he gasped: he had never looked upon Miss Wilkinson like that; it seemed incredible that anyone should make love to her. In his ingenuousness he doubted her story as little as he doubted what he read in books, and he was angry that such wonderful things never happened to him. It was humiliating that if Miss Wilkinson insisted upon his telling her of his adventures in Heidelberg he would have nothing to tell. It was true that he had some power of invention, but he was not sure whether he could persuade her that he was steeped in vice; women were full of intuition, he had read that, and she might easily discover that he was fibbing. He blushed scarlet as he thought of her laughing up her sleeve.

Miss Wilkinson played the piano and sang in a rather tired voice; but her songs, Massenet, Benjamin Goddard, and Augusta Holmes, were new to Philip; and together they spent many hours at the piano. One day she wondered if he had a voice and insisted on trying it. She told him he had a pleasant baritone and offered to give him lessons. At first with his usual bashfulness he refused, but she insisted, and then every morning at a convenient time after breakfast she gave him an hour’s lesson. She had a natural gift for teaching, and it was clear that she was an excellent governess. She had method and firmness. Though her French accent was so much part of her that it remained, all the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching. She put up with no nonsense. Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness. She knew what she was about and put Philip to scales and exercises.

When the lesson was over she resumed without effort her seductive smiles, her voice became again soft and winning, but Philip could not so easily put away the pupil as she the pedagogue; and this impression convicted with the feelings her stories had aroused in him. He looked at her more narrowly. He liked her much better in the evening than in the morning. In the morning she was rather lined and the skin of her neck was just a little rough. He wished she would hide it, but the weather was very warm just then and she wore blouses which were cut low. She was very fond of white; in the morning it did not suit her. At night she often looked very attractive, she put on a gown which was almost a dinner dress, and she wore a chain of garnets round her neck; the lace about her bosom and at her elbows gave her a pleasant softness, and the scent she wore (at Blackstable no one used anything but Eau de Cologne, and that only on Sundays or when suffering from a sick headache) was troubling and exotic. She really looked very young then.

Philip was much exercised over her age. He added twenty and seventeen together, and could not bring them to a satisfactory total. He asked Aunt Louisa more than once why she thought Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven: she didn’t look more than thirty, and everyone knew that foreigners aged more rapidly than English women; Miss Wilkinson had lived so long abroad that she might almost be called a foreigner. He personally wouldn’t have thought her more than twenty-six.

“She’s more than that,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip did not believe in the accuracy of the Careys’ statements. All they distinctly remembered was that Miss Wilkinson had not got her hair up the last time they saw her in Lincolnshire. Well, she might have been twelve then: it was so long ago and the Vicar was always so unreliable. They said it was twenty years ago, but people used round figures, and it was just as likely to be eighteen years, or seventeen. Seventeen and twelve were only twenty-nine, and hang it all, that wasn’t old, was it? Cleopatra was forty-eight when Antony threw away the world for her sake.

It was a fine summer. Day after day was hot and cloudless; but the heat was tempered by the neighbourhood of the sea, and there was a pleasant exhilaration in the air, so that one was excited and not oppressed by the August sunshine. There was a pond in the garden in which a fountain played; water lilies grew in it and gold fish sunned themselves on the surface. Philip and Miss Wilkinson used to take rugs and cushions there after dinner and lie on the lawn in the shade of a tall hedge of roses. They talked and read all the afternoon. They smoked cigarettes, which the Vicar did not allow in the house; he thought smoking a disgusting habit, and used frequently to say that it was disgraceful for anyone to grow a slave to a habit. He forgot that he was himself a slave to afternoon tea.

One day Miss Wilkinson gave Philip La Vie de Boheme. She had found it by accident when she was rummaging among the books in the Vicar’s study. It had been bought in a lot with something Mr. Carey wanted and had remained undiscovered for ten years.

Philip began to read Murger’s fascinating, ill-written, absurd masterpiece, and fell at once under its spell. His soul danced with joy at that picture of starvation which is so good-humoured, of squalor which is so picturesque, of sordid love which is so romantic, of bathos which is so moving. Rodolphe and Mimi, Musette and Schaunard! They wander through the gray streets of the Latin Quarter, finding refuge now in one attic, now in another, in their quaint costumes of Louis Philippe, with their tears and their smiles, happy-go-lucky and reckless. Who can resist them? It is only when you return to the book with a sounder judgment that you find how gross their pleasures were, how vulgar their minds; and you feel the utter worthlessness, as artists and as human beings, of that gay procession. Philip was enraptured.

“Don’t you wish you were going to Paris instead of London?” asked Miss

Wilkinson, smiling at his enthusiasm.

“It’s too late now even if I did,” he answered.

During the fortnight he had been back from Germany there had been much discussion between himself and his uncle about his future. He had refused definitely to go to Oxford, and now that there was no chance of his getting scholarships even Mr. Carey came to the conclusion that he could not afford it. His entire fortune had consisted of only two thousand pounds, and though it had been invested in mortgages at five per cent, he had not been able to live on the interest. It was now a little reduced. It would be absurd to spend two hundred a year, the least he could live on at a university, for three years at Oxford which would lead him no nearer to earning his living. He was anxious to go straight to London. Mrs. Carey thought there were only four professions for a gentleman, the Army, the Navy, the Law, and the Church. She had added medicine because her brother-in-law practised it, but did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman. The first two were out of the question, and Philip was firm in his refusal to be ordained. Only the law remained. The local doctor had suggested that many gentlemen now went in for engineering, but Mrs. Carey opposed the idea at once.

“I shouldn’t like Philip to go into trade,” she said.

“No, he must have a profession,” answered the Vicar.

“Why not make him a doctor like his father?”

“I should hate it,” said Philip.

Mrs. Carey was not sorry. The Bar seemed out of the question, since he was not going to Oxford, for the Careys were under the impression that a degree was still necessary for success in that calling; and finally it was suggested that he should become articled to a solicitor. They wrote to the family lawyer, Albert Nixon, who was co-executor with the Vicar of Blackstable for the late Henry Carey’s estate, and asked him whether he would take Philip. In a day or two the answer came back that he had not a vacancy, and was very much opposed to the whole scheme; the profession was greatly overcrowded, and without capital or connections a man had small chance of becoming more than a managing clerk; he suggested, however, that Philip should become a chartered accountant. Neither the Vicar nor his wife knew in the least what this was, and Philip had never heard of anyone being a chartered accountant; but another letter from the solicitor explained that the growth of modern businesses and the increase of companies had led to the formation of many firms of accountants to examine the books and put into the financial affairs of their clients an order which old-fashioned methods had lacked. Some years before a Royal Charter had been obtained, and the profession was becoming every year more respectable, lucrative, and important. The chartered accountants whom Albert Nixon had employed for thirty years happened to have a vacancy for an articled pupil, and would take Philip for a fee of three hundred pounds. Half of this would be returned during the five years the articles lasted in the form of salary. The prospect was not exciting, but Philip felt that he must decide on something, and the thought of living in London over-balanced the slight shrinking he felt. The Vicar of Blackstable wrote to ask Mr. Nixon whether it was a profession suited to a gentleman; and Mr. Nixon replied that, since the Charter, men were going into it who had been to public schools and a university; moreover, if Philip disliked the work and after a year wished to leave, Herbert Carter, for that was the accountant’s name, would return half the money paid for the articles. This settled it, and it was arranged that Philip should start work on the fifteenth of September.

“I have a full month before me,” said Philip.

“And then you go to freedom and I to bondage,” returned Miss Wilkinson.

Her holidays were to last six weeks, and she would be leaving Blackstable only a day or two before Philip.

“I wonder if we shall ever meet again,” she said.

“I don’t know why not.”

“Oh, don’t speak in that practical way. I never knew anyone so unsentimental.”

Philip reddened. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson would think him a milksop: after all she was a young woman, sometimes quite pretty, and he was getting on for twenty; it was absurd that they should talk of nothing but art and literature. He ought to make love to her. They had talked a good deal of love. There was the art-student in the Rue Breda, and then there was the painter in whose family she had lived so long in Paris: he had asked her to sit for him, and had started to make love to her so violently that she was forced to invent excuses not to sit to him again. It was clear enough that Miss Wilkinson was used to attentions of that sort. She looked very nice now in a large straw hat: it was hot that afternoon, the hottest day they had had, and beads of sweat stood in a line on her upper lip. He called to mind Fraulein Cacilie and Herr Sung. He had never thought of Cacilie in an amorous way, she was exceedingly plain; but now, looking back, the affair seemed very romantic. He had a chance of romance too. Miss Wilkinson was practically French, and that added zest to a possible adventure. When he thought of it at night in bed, or when he sat by himself in the garden reading a book, he was thrilled by it; but when he saw Miss Wilkinson it seemed less picturesque.

At all events, after what she had told him, she would not be surprised if he made love to her. He had a feeling that she must think it odd of him to make no sign: perhaps it was only his fancy, but once or twice in the last day or two he had imagined that there was a suspicion of contempt in her eyes.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Miss Wilkinson, looking at him with a smile.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he answered.

He was thinking that he ought to kiss her there and then. He wondered if she expected him to do it; but after all he didn’t see how he could without any preliminary business at all. She would just think him mad, or she might slap his face; and perhaps she would complain to his uncle. He wondered how Herr Sung had started with Fraulein Cacilie. It would be beastly if she told his uncle: he knew what his uncle was, he would tell the doctor and Josiah Graves; and he would look a perfect fool. Aunt Louisa kept on saying that Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven if she was a day; he shuddered at the thought of the ridicule he would be exposed to; they would say she was old enough to be his mother.

“Twopence for your thoughts,” smiled Miss Wilkinson.

“I was thinking about you,” he answered boldly.

That at all events committed him to nothing.

“What were you thinking?”

“Ah, now you want to know too much.”

“Naughty boy!” said Miss Wilkinson.

There it was again! Whenever he had succeeded in working himself up she said something which reminded him of the governess. She called him playfully a naughty boy when he did not sing his exercises to her satisfaction. This time he grew quite sulky.

“I wish you wouldn’t treat me as if I were a child.”

“Are you cross?”

“Very.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

She put out her hand and he took it. Once or twice lately when they shook hands at night he had fancied she slightly pressed his hand, but this time there was no doubt about it.

He did not quite know what he ought to say next. Here at last was his chance of an adventure, and he would be a fool not to take it; but it was a little ordinary, and he had expected more glamour. He had read many descriptions of love, and he felt in himself none of that uprush of emotion which novelists described; he was not carried off his feet in wave upon wave of passion; nor was Miss Wilkinson the ideal: he had often pictured to himself the great violet eyes and the alabaster skin of some lovely girl, and he had thought of himself burying his face in the rippling masses of her auburn hair. He could not imagine himself burying his face in Miss Wilkinson’s hair, it always struck him as a little sticky. All the same it would be very satisfactory to have an intrigue, and he thrilled with the legitimate pride he would enjoy in his conquest. He owed it to himself to seduce her. He made up his mind to kiss Miss Wilkinson; not then, but in the evening; it would be easier in the dark, and after he had kissed her the rest would follow. He would kiss her that very evening. He swore an oath to that effect.

He laid his plans. After supper he suggested that they should take a stroll in the garden. Miss Wilkinson accepted, and they sauntered side by side. Philip was very nervous. He did not know why, but the conversation would not lead in the right direction; he had decided that the first thing to do was to put his arm round her waist; but he could not suddenly put his arm round her waist when she was talking of the regatta which was to be held next week. He led her artfully into the darkest parts of the garden, but having arrived there his courage failed him. They sat on a bench, and he had really made up his mind that here was his opportunity when Miss Wilkinson said she was sure there were earwigs and insisted on moving. They walked round the garden once more, and Philip promised himself he would take the plunge before they arrived at that bench again; but as they passed the house, they saw Mrs. Carey standing at the door.

“Hadn’t you young people better come in? I’m sure the night air isn’t good for you.”

“Perhaps we had better go in,” said Philip. “I don’t want you to catch cold.”

He said it with a sigh of relief. He could attempt nothing more that night. But afterwards, when he was alone in his room, he was furious with himself. He had been a perfect fool. He was certain that Miss Wilkinson expected him to kiss her, otherwise she wouldn’t have come into the garden. She was always saying that only Frenchmen knew how to treat women. Philip had read French novels. If he had been a Frenchman he would have seized her in his arms and told her passionately that he adored her; he would have pressed his lips on her nuque. He did not know why Frenchmen always kissed ladies on the nuque. He did not himself see anything so very attractive in the nape of the neck. Of course it was much easier for Frenchmen to do these things; the language was such an aid; Philip could never help feeling that to say passionate things in English sounded a little absurd. He wished now that he had never undertaken the siege of Miss Wilkinson’s virtue; the first fortnight had been so jolly, and now he was wretched; but he was determined not to give in, he would never respect himself again if he did, and he made up his mind irrevocably that the next night he would kiss her without fail.

Next day when he got up he saw it was raining, and his first thought was that they would not be able to go into the garden that evening. He was in high spirits at breakfast. Miss Wilkinson sent Mary Ann in to say that she had a headache and would remain in bed. She did not come down till tea-time, when she appeared in a becoming wrapper and a pale face; but she was quite recovered by supper, and the meal was very cheerful. After prayers she said she would go straight to bed, and she kissed Mrs. Carey. Then she turned to Philip.

“Good gracious!” she cried. “I was just going to kiss you too.”

“Why don’t you?” he said.

She laughed and held out her hand. She distinctly pressed his.

The following day there was not a cloud in the sky, and the garden was sweet and fresh after the rain. Philip went down to the beach to bathe and when he came home ate a magnificent dinner. They were having a tennis party at the vicarage in the afternoon and Miss Wilkinson put on her best dress. She certainly knew how to wear her clothes, and Philip could not help noticing how elegant she looked beside the curate’s wife and the doctor’s married daughter. There were two roses in her waistband. She sat in a garden chair by the side of the lawn, holding a red parasol over herself, and the light on her face was very becoming. Philip was fond of tennis. He served well and as he ran clumsily played close to the net: notwithstanding his club-foot he was quick, and it was difficult to get a ball past him. He was pleased because he won all his sets. At tea he lay down at Miss Wilkinson’s feet, hot and panting.

“Flannels suit you,” she said. “You look very nice this afternoon.”

He blushed with delight.

“I can honestly return the compliment. You look perfectly ravishing.”

She smiled and gave him a long look with her black eyes.

After supper he insisted that she should come out.

“Haven’t you had enough exercise for one day?”

“It’ll be lovely in the garden tonight. The stars are all out.”

He was in high spirits.

“D’you know, Mrs. Carey has been scolding me on your account?” said Miss

Wilkinson, when they were sauntering through the kitchen garden. “She says

I mustn’t flirt with you.”

“Have you been flirting with me? I hadn’t noticed it.”

“She was only joking.”

“It was very unkind of you to refuse to kiss me last night.”

“If you saw the look your uncle gave me when I said what I did!”

“Was that all that prevented you?”

“I prefer to kiss people without witnesses.”

“There are no witnesses now.”

Philip put his arm round her waist and kissed her lips. She only laughed a little and made no attempt to withdraw. It had come quite naturally. Philip was very proud of himself. He said he would, and he had. It was the easiest thing in the world. He wished he had done it before. He did it again.

“Oh, you mustn’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I like it,” she laughed.

XXXIV

Next day after dinner they took their rugs and cushions to the fountain, and their books; but they did not read. Miss Wilkinson made herself comfortable and she opened the red sun-shade. Philip was not at all shy now, but at first she would not let him kiss her.

“It was very wrong of me last night,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep, I felt

I’d done so wrong.”

“What nonsense!” he cried. “I’m sure you slept like a top.”

“What do you think your uncle would say if he knew?”

“There’s no reason why he should know.”

He leaned over her, and his heart went pit-a-pat.

“Why d’you want to kiss me?”

He knew he ought to reply: “Because I love you.” But he could not bring himself to say it.

“Why do you think?” he asked instead.

She looked at him with smiling eyes and touched his face with the tips of her fingers.

“How smooth your face is,” she murmured.

“I want shaving awfully,” he said.

It was astonishing how difficult he found it to make romantic speeches. He found that silence helped him much more than words. He could look inexpressible things. Miss Wilkinson sighed.

“Do you like me at all?”

“Yes, awfully.”

When he tried to kiss her again she did not resist. He pretended to be much more passionate than he really was, and he succeeded in playing a part which looked very well in his own eyes.

“I’m beginning to be rather frightened of you,” said Miss Wilkinson.

“You’ll come out after supper, won’t you?” he begged.

“Not unless you promise to behave yourself.”

“I’ll promise anything.”

He was catching fire from the flame he was partly simulating, and at tea-time he was obstreperously merry. Miss Wilkinson looked at him nervously.

“You mustn’t have those shining eyes,” she said to him afterwards. “What will your Aunt Louisa think?”

“I don’t care what she thinks.”

Miss Wilkinson gave a little laugh of pleasure. They had no sooner finished supper than he said to her:

“Are you going to keep me company while I smoke a cigarette?”

“Why don’t you let Miss Wilkinson rest?” said Mrs. Carey. “You must remember she’s not as young as you.”

“Oh, I’d like to go out, Mrs. Carey,” she said, rather acidly.

“After dinner walk a mile, after supper rest a while,” said the Vicar.

“Your aunt is very nice, but she gets on my nerves sometimes,” said Miss

Wilkinson, as soon as they closed the side-door behind them.

Philip threw away the cigarette he had just lighted, and flung his arms round her. She tried to push him away.

“You promised you’d be good, Philip.”

“You didn’t think I was going to keep a promise like that?”

“Not so near the house, Philip,” she said. “Supposing someone should come out suddenly?”

He led her to the kitchen garden where no one was likely to come, and this time Miss Wilkinson did not think of earwigs. He kissed her passionately. It was one of the things that puzzled him that he did not like her at all in the morning, and only moderately in the afternoon, but at night the touch of her hand thrilled him. He said things that he would never have thought himself capable of saying; he could certainly never have said them in the broad light of day; and he listened to himself with wonder and satisfaction.

“How beautifully you make love,” she said.

That was what he thought himself.

“Oh, if I could only say all the things that burn my heart!” he murmured passionately.

It was splendid. It was the most thrilling game he had ever played; and the wonderful thing was that he felt almost all he said. It was only that he exaggerated a little. He was tremendously interested and excited in the effect he could see it had on her. It was obviously with an effort that at last she suggested going in.

“Oh, don’t go yet,” he cried.

“I must,” she muttered. “I’m frightened.”

He had a sudden intuition what was the right thing to do then.

“I can’t go in yet. I shall stay here and think. My cheeks are burning. I want the night-air. Good-night.”

He held out his hand seriously, and she took it in silence. He thought she stifled a sob. Oh, it was magnificent! When, after a decent interval during which he had been rather bored in the dark garden by himself, he went in he found that Miss Wilkinson had already gone to bed.

After that things were different between them. The next day and the day after Philip showed himself an eager lover. He was deliciously flattered to discover that Miss Wilkinson was in love with him: she told him so in English, and she told him so in French. She paid him compliments. No one had ever informed him before that his eyes were charming and that he had a sensual mouth. He had never bothered much about his personal appearance, but now, when occasion presented, he looked at himself in the glass with satisfaction. When he kissed her it was wonderful to feel the passion that seemed to thrill her soul. He kissed her a good deal, for he found it easier to do that than to say the things he instinctively felt she expected of him. It still made him feel a fool to say he worshipped her. He wished there were someone to whom he could boast a little, and he would willingly have discussed minute points of his conduct. Sometimes she said things that were enigmatic, and he was puzzled. He wished Hayward had been there so that he could ask him what he thought she meant, and what he had better do next. He could not make up his mind whether he ought to rush things or let them take their time. There were only three weeks more.

“I can’t bear to think of that,” she said. “It breaks my heart. And then perhaps we shall never see one another again.”

“If you cared for me at all, you wouldn’t be so unkind to me,” he whispered.

“Oh, why can’t you be content to let it go on as it is? Men are always the same. They’re never satisfied.”

And when he pressed her, she said:

“But don’t you see it’s impossible. How can we here?”

He proposed all sorts of schemes, but she would not have anything to do with them.

“I daren’t take the risk. It would be too dreadful if your aunt found out.”

A day or two later he had an idea which seemed brilliant.

“Look here, if you had a headache on Sunday evening and offered to stay at home and look after the house, Aunt Louisa would go to church.”

Generally Mrs. Carey remained in on Sunday evening in order to allow Mary Ann to go to church, but she would welcome the opportunity of attending evensong.

Philip had not found it necessary to impart to his relations the change in his views on Christianity which had occurred in Germany; they could not be expected to understand; and it seemed less trouble to go to church quietly. But he only went in the morning. He regarded this as a graceful concession to the prejudices of society and his refusal to go a second time as an adequate assertion of free thought.

When he made the suggestion, Miss Wilkinson did not speak for a moment, then shook her head.

“No, I won’t,” she said.

But on Sunday at tea-time she surprised Philip. “I don’t think I’ll come to church this evening,” she said suddenly. “I’ve really got a dreadful headache.”

Mrs. Carey, much concerned, insisted on giving her some ‘drops’ which she was herself in the habit of using. Miss Wilkinson thanked her, and immediately after tea announced that she would go to her room and lie down.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you’ll want?” asked Mrs. Carey anxiously.

“Quite sure, thank you.”

“Because, if there isn’t, I think I’ll go to church. I don’t often have the chance of going in the evening.”

“Oh yes, do go.”

“I shall be in,” said Philip. “If Miss Wilkinson wants anything, she can always call me.”

“You’d better leave the drawing-room door open, Philip, so that if Miss

Wilkinson rings, you’ll hear.”

“Certainly,” said Philip.

So after six o’clock Philip was left alone in the house with Miss Wilkinson. He felt sick with apprehension. He wished with all his heart that he had not suggested the plan; but it was too late now; he must take the opportunity which he had made. What would Miss Wilkinson think of him if he did not! He went into the hall and listened. There was not a sound. He wondered if Miss Wilkinson really had a headache. Perhaps she had forgotten his suggestion. His heart beat painfully. He crept up the stairs as softly as he could, and he stopped with a start when they creaked. He stood outside Miss Wilkinson’s room and listened; he put his hand on the knob of the door-handle. He waited. It seemed to him that he waited for at least five minutes, trying to make up his mind; and his hand trembled. He would willingly have bolted, but he was afraid of the remorse which he knew would seize him. It was like getting on the highest diving-board in a swimming-bath; it looked nothing from below, but when you got up there and stared down at the water your heart sank; and the only thing that forced you to dive was the shame of coming down meekly by the steps you had climbed up. Philip screwed up his courage. He turned the handle softly and walked in. He seemed to himself to be trembling like a leaf.

Miss Wilkinson was standing at the dressing-table with her back to the door, and she turned round quickly when she heard it open.

“Oh, it’s you. What d’you want?”

She had taken off her skirt and blouse, and was standing in her petticoat. It was short and only came down to the top of her boots; the upper part of it was black, of some shiny material, and there was a red flounce. She wore a camisole of white calico with short arms. She looked grotesque. Philip’s heart sank as he stared at her; she had never seemed so unattractive; but it was too late now. He closed the door behind him and locked it.

XXXV

Philip woke early next morning. His sleep had been restless; but when he stretched his legs and looked at the sunshine that slid through the Venetian blinds, making patterns on the floor, he sighed with satisfaction. He was delighted with himself. He began to think of Miss Wilkinson. She had asked him to call her Emily, but, he knew not why, he could not; he always thought of her as Miss Wilkinson. Since she chid him for so addressing her, he avoided using her name at all. During his childhood he had often heard a sister of Aunt Louisa, the widow of a naval officer, spoken of as Aunt Emily. It made him uncomfortable to call Miss Wilkinson by that name, nor could he think of any that would have suited her better. She had begun as Miss Wilkinson, and it seemed inseparable from his impression of her. He frowned a little: somehow or other he saw her now at her worst; he could not forget his dismay when she turned round and he saw her in her camisole and the short petticoat; he remembered the slight roughness of her skin and the sharp, long lines on the side of the neck. His triumph was short-lived. He reckoned out her age again, and he did not see how she could be less than forty. It made the affair ridiculous. She was plain and old. His quick fancy showed her to him, wrinkled, haggard, made-up, in those frocks which were too showy for her position and too young for her years. He shuddered; he felt suddenly that he never wanted to see her again; he could not bear the thought of kissing her. He was horrified with himself. Was that love?

He took as long as he could over dressing in order to put back the moment of seeing her, and when at last he went into the dining-room it was with a sinking heart. Prayers were over, and they were sitting down at breakfast.

“Lazybones,” Miss Wilkinson cried gaily.

He looked at her and gave a little gasp of relief. She was sitting with her back to the window. She was really quite nice. He wondered why he had thought such things about her. His self-satisfaction returned to him.

He was taken aback by the change in her. She told him in a voice thrilling with emotion immediately after breakfast that she loved him; and when a little later they went into the drawing-room for his singing lesson and she sat down on the music-stool she put up her face in the middle of a scale and said:

“Embrasse-moi.”

When he bent down she flung her arms round his neck. It was slightly uncomfortable, for she held him in such a position that he felt rather choked.

“Ah, je t’aime. Je t’aime. Je t’aime,” she cried, with her extravagantly

French accent.

Philip wished she would speak English.

“I say, I don’t know if it’s struck you that the gardener’s quite likely to pass the window any minute.”

“Ah, je m’en fiche du jardinier. Je m’en refiche, et je m’en contrefiche.”

Philip thought it was very like a French novel, and he did not know why it slightly irritated him.

At last he said:

“Well, I think I’ll tootle along to the beach and have a dip.”

“Oh, you’re not going to leave me this morning — of all mornings?” Philip did not quite know why he should not, but it did not matter.

“Would you like me to stay?” he smiled.

“Oh, you darling! But no, go. Go. I want to think of you mastering the salt sea waves, bathing your limbs in the broad ocean.”

He got his hat and sauntered off.

“What rot women talk!” he thought to himself.

But he was pleased and happy and flattered. She was evidently frightfully gone on him. As he limped along the high street of Blackstable he looked with a tinge of superciliousness at the people he passed. He knew a good many to nod to, and as he gave them a smile of recognition he thought to himself, if they only knew! He did want someone to know very badly. He thought he would write to Hayward, and in his mind composed the letter. He would talk of the garden and the roses, and the little French governess, like an exotic flower amongst them, scented and perverse: he would say she was French, because — well, she had lived in France so long that she almost was, and besides it would be shabby to give the whole thing away too exactly, don’t you know; and he would tell Hayward how he had seen her first in her pretty muslin dress and of the flower she had given him. He made a delicate idyl of it: the sunshine and the sea gave it passion and magic, and the stars added poetry, and the old vicarage garden was a fit and exquisite setting. There was something Meredithian about it: it was not quite Lucy Feverel and not quite Clara Middleton; but it was inexpressibly charming. Philip’s heart beat quickly. He was so delighted with his fancies that he began thinking of them again as soon as he crawled back, dripping and cold, into his bathing-machine. He thought of the object of his affections. She had the most adorable little nose and large brown eyes — he would describe her to Hayward — and masses of soft brown hair, the sort of hair it was delicious to bury your face in, and a skin which was like ivory and sunshine, and her cheek was like a red, red rose. How old was she? Eighteen perhaps, and he called her Musette. Her laughter was like a rippling brook, and her voice was so soft, so low, it was the sweetest music he had ever heard.

“What ARE you thinking about?”

Philip stopped suddenly. He was walking slowly home.

“I’ve been waving at you for the last quarter of a mile. You ARE absent-minded.”

Miss Wilkinson was standing in front of him, laughing at his surprise.

“I thought I’d come and meet you.”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” he said.

“Did I startle you?”

“You did a bit,” he admitted.

He wrote his letter to Hayward all the same. There were eight pages of it.

The fortnight that remained passed quickly, and though each evening, when they went into the garden after supper, Miss Wilkinson remarked that one day more had gone, Philip was in too cheerful spirits to let the thought depress him. One night Miss Wilkinson suggested that it would be delightful if she could exchange her situation in Berlin for one in London. Then they could see one another constantly. Philip said it would be very jolly, but the prospect aroused no enthusiasm in him; he was looking forward to a wonderful life in London, and he preferred not to be hampered. He spoke a little too freely of all he meant to do, and allowed Miss Wilkinson to see that already he was longing to be off.

“You wouldn’t talk like that if you loved me,” she cried.

He was taken aback and remained silent.

“What a fool I’ve been,” she muttered.

To his surprise he saw that she was crying. He had a tender heart, and hated to see anyone miserable.

“Oh, I’m awfully sorry. What have I done? Don’t cry.”

“Oh, Philip, don’t leave me. You don’t know what you mean to me. I have such a wretched life, and you’ve made me so happy.”

He kissed her silently. There really was anguish in her tone, and he was frightened. It had never occurred to him that she meant what she said quite, quite seriously.

“I’m awfully sorry. You know I’m frightfully fond of you. I wish you would come to London.”

“You know I can’t. Places are almost impossible to get, and I hate English life.”

Almost unconscious that he was acting a part, moved by her distress, he pressed her more and more. Her tears vaguely flattered him, and he kissed her with real passion.

But a day or two later she made a real scene. There was a tennis-party at the vicarage, and two girls came, daughters of a retired major in an Indian regiment who had lately settled in Blackstable. They were very pretty, one was Philip’s age and the other was a year or two younger. Being used to the society of young men (they were full of stories of hill-stations in India, and at that time the stories of Rudyard Kipling were in every hand) they began to chaff Philip gaily; and he, pleased with the novelty — the young ladies at Blackstable treated the Vicar’s nephew with a certain seriousness — was gay and jolly. Some devil within him prompted him to start a violent flirtation with them both, and as he was the only young man there, they were quite willing to meet him half-way. It happened that they played tennis quite well and Philip was tired of pat-ball with Miss Wilkinson (she had only begun to play when she came to Blackstable), so when he arranged the sets after tea he suggested that Miss Wilkinson should play against the curate’s wife, with the curate as her partner; and he would play later with the new-comers. He sat down by the elder Miss O’Connor and said to her in an undertone:

“We’ll get the duffers out of the way first, and then we’ll have a jolly set afterwards.”

Apparently Miss Wilkinson overheard him, for she threw down her racket, and, saying she had a headache, went away. It was plain to everyone that she was offended. Philip was annoyed that she should make the fact public. The set was arranged without her, but presently Mrs. Carey called him.

“Philip, you’ve hurt Emily’s feelings. She’s gone to her room and she’s crying.”

“What about?”

“Oh, something about a duffer’s set. Do go to her, and say you didn’t mean to be unkind, there’s a good boy.”

“All right.”

He knocked at Miss Wilkinson’s door, but receiving no answer went in. He found her lying face downwards on her bed, weeping. He touched her on the shoulder.

“I say, what on earth’s the matter?”

“Leave me alone. I never want to speak to you again.”

“What have I done? I’m awfully sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to. I say, do get up.”

“Oh, I’m so unhappy. How could you be cruel to me? You know I hate that stupid game. I only play because I want to play with you.”

She got up and walked towards the dressing-table, but after a quick look in the glass sank into a chair. She made her handkerchief into a ball and dabbed her eyes with it.

“I’ve given you the greatest thing a woman can give a man — oh, what a fool

I was — and you have no gratitude. You must be quite heartless. How could

you be so cruel as to torment me by flirting with those vulgar girls.

We’ve only got just over a week. Can’t you even give me that?”

Philip stood over her rather sulkily. He thought her behaviour childish.

He was vexed with her for having shown her ill-temper before strangers.

“But you know I don’t care twopence about either of the O’Connors. Why on earth should you think I do?”

Miss Wilkinson put away her handkerchief. Her tears had made marks on her powdered face, and her hair was somewhat disarranged. Her white dress did not suit her very well just then. She looked at Philip with hungry, passionate eyes.

“Because you’re twenty and so’s she,” she said hoarsely. “And I’m old.”

Philip reddened and looked away. The anguish of her tone made him feel strangely uneasy. He wished with all his heart that he had never had anything to do with Miss Wilkinson.

“I don’t want to make you unhappy,” he said awkwardly. “You’d better go down and look after your friends. They’ll wonder what has become of you.”

“All right.”

He was glad to leave her.

The quarrel was quickly followed by a reconciliation, but the few days that remained were sometimes irksome to Philip. He wanted to talk of nothing but the future, and the future invariably reduced Miss Wilkinson to tears. At first her weeping affected him, and feeling himself a beast he redoubled his protestations of undying passion; but now it irritated him: it would have been all very well if she had been a girl, but it was silly of a grown-up woman to cry so much. She never ceased reminding him that he was under a debt of gratitude to her which he could never repay. He was willing to acknowledge this since she made a point of it, but he did not really know why he should be any more grateful to her than she to him. He was expected to show his sense of obligation in ways which were rather a nuisance: he had been a good deal used to solitude, and it was a necessity to him sometimes; but Miss Wilkinson looked upon it as an unkindness if he was not always at her beck and call. The Miss O’Connors asked them both to tea, and Philip would have liked to go, but Miss Wilkinson said she only had five days more and wanted him entirely to herself. It was flattering, but a bore. Miss Wilkinson told him stories of the exquisite delicacy of Frenchmen when they stood in the same relation to fair ladies as he to Miss Wilkinson. She praised their courtesy, their passion for self-sacrifice, their perfect tact. Miss Wilkinson seemed to want a great deal.

Philip listened to her enumeration of the qualities which must be possessed by the perfect lover, and he could not help feeling a certain satisfaction that she lived in Berlin.

“You will write to me, won’t you? Write to me every day. I want to know everything you’re doing. You must keep nothing from me.”

“I shall be awfully, busy” he answered. “I’ll write as often as I can.”

She flung her arms passionately round his neck. He was embarrassed sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection. He would have preferred her to be more passive. It shocked him a little that she should give him so marked a lead: it did not tally altogether with his prepossessions about the modesty of the feminine temperament.

At length the day came on which Miss Wilkinson was to go, and she came down to breakfast, pale and subdued, in a serviceable travelling dress of black and white check. She looked a very competent governess. Philip was silent too, for he did not quite know what to say that would fit the circumstance; and he was terribly afraid that, if he said something flippant, Miss Wilkinson would break down before his uncle and make a scene. They had said their last good-bye to one another in the garden the night before, and Philip was relieved that there was now no opportunity for them to be alone. He remained in the dining-room after breakfast in case Miss Wilkinson should insist on kissing him on the stairs. He did not want Mary Ann, now a woman hard upon middle age with a sharp tongue, to catch them in a compromising position. Mary Ann did not like Miss Wilkinson and called her an old cat. Aunt Louisa was not very well and could not come to the station, but the Vicar and Philip saw her off. Just as the train was leaving she leaned out and kissed Mr. Carey.

“I must kiss you too, Philip,” she said.

“All right,” he said, blushing.

He stood up on the step and she kissed him quickly. The train started, and Miss Wilkinson sank into the corner of her carriage and wept disconsolately. Philip, as he walked back to the vicarage, felt a distinct sensation of relief.

“Well, did you see her safely off?” asked Aunt Louisa, when they got in.

“Yes, she seemed rather weepy. She insisted on kissing me and Philip.”

“Oh, well, at her age it’s not dangerous.” Mrs. Carey pointed to the sideboard. “There’s a letter for you, Philip. It came by the second post.”

It was from Hayward and ran as follows:

My dear boy,

I answer your letter at once. I ventured to read it to a great friend of mine, a charming woman whose help and sympathy have been very precious to me, a woman withal with a real feeling for art and literature; and we agreed that it was charming. You wrote from your heart and you do not know the delightful naivete which is in every line. And because you love you write like a poet. Ah, dear boy, that is the real thing: I felt the glow of your young passion, and your prose was musical from the sincerity of your emotion. You must be happy! I wish I could have been present unseen in that enchanted garden while you wandered hand in hand, like Daphnis and Chloe, amid the flowers. I can see you, my Daphnis, with the light of young love in your eyes, tender, enraptured, and ardent; while Chloe in your arms, so young and soft and fresh, vowing she would ne’er consent — consented. Roses and violets and honeysuckle! Oh, my friend, I envy you. It is so good to think that your first love should have been pure poetry. Treasure the moments, for the immortal gods have given you the Greatest Gift of All, and it will be a sweet, sad memory till your dying day. You will never again enjoy that careless rapture. First love is best love; and she is beautiful and you are young, and all the world is yours. I felt my pulse go faster when with your adorable simplicity you told me that you buried your face in her long hair. I am sure that it is that exquisite chestnut which seems just touched with gold. I would have you sit under a leafy tree side by side, and read together Romeo and Juliet; and then I would have you fall on your knees and on my behalf kiss the ground on which her foot has left its imprint; then tell her it is the homage of a poet to her radiant youth and to your love for her. Yours always, G. Etheridge Hayward.

“What damned rot!” said Philip, when he finished the letter.

Miss Wilkinson oddly enough had suggested that they should read Romeo and Juliet together; but Philip had firmly declined. Then, as he put the letter in his pocket, he felt a queer little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from the ideal.

XXXVI

A few days later Philip went to London. The curate had recommended rooms in Barnes, and these Philip engaged by letter at fourteen shillings a week. He reached them in the evening; and the landlady, a funny little old woman with a shrivelled body and a deeply wrinkled face, had prepared high tea for him. Most of the sitting-room was taken up by the sideboard and a square table; against one wall was a sofa covered with horsehair, and by the fireplace an arm-chair to match: there was a white antimacassar over the back of it, and on the seat, because the springs were broken, a hard cushion.

After having his tea he unpacked and arranged his books, then he sat down and tried to read; but he was depressed. The silence in the street made him slightly uncomfortable, and he felt very much alone.

Next day he got up early. He put on his tail-coat and the tall hat which he had worn at school; but it was very shabby, and he made up his mind to stop at the Stores on his way to the office and buy a new one. When he had done this he found himself in plenty of time and so walked along the Strand. The office of Messrs. Herbert Carter & Co. was in a little street off Chancery Lane, and he had to ask his way two or three times. He felt that people were staring at him a great deal, and once he took off his hat to see whether by chance the label had been left on. When he arrived he knocked at the door; but no one answered, and looking at his watch he found it was barely half past nine; he supposed he was too early. He went away and ten minutes later returned to find an office-boy, with a long nose, pimply face, and a Scotch accent, opening the door. Philip asked for Mr. Herbert Carter. He had not come yet.

“When will he be here?”

“Between ten and half past.”

“I’d better wait,” said Philip.

“What are you wanting?” asked the office-boy.

Philip was nervous, but tried to hide the fact by a jocose manner.

“Well, I’m going to work here if you have no objection.”

“Oh, you’re the new articled clerk? You’d better come in. Mr.

Goodworthy’ll be here in a while.”

Philip walked in, and as he did so saw the office-boy — he was about the same age as Philip and called himself a junior clerk — look at his foot. He flushed and, sitting down, hid it behind the other. He looked round the room. It was dark and very dingy. It was lit by a skylight. There were three rows of desks in it and against them high stools. Over the chimney-piece was a dirty engraving of a prize-fight. Presently a clerk came in and then another; they glanced at Philip and in an undertone asked the office-boy (Philip found his name was Macdougal) who he was. A whistle blew, and Macdougal got up.

“Mr. Goodworthy’s come. He’s the managing clerk. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

“Yes, please,” said Philip.

The office-boy went out and in a moment returned.

“Will you come this way?”

Philip followed him across the passage and was shown into a room, small and barely furnished, in which a little, thin man was standing with his back to the fireplace. He was much below the middle height, but his large head, which seemed to hang loosely on his body, gave him an odd ungainliness. His features were wide and flattened, and he had prominent, pale eyes; his thin hair was sandy; he wore whiskers that grew unevenly on his face, and in places where you would have expected the hair to grow thickly there was no hair at all. His skin was pasty and yellow. He held out his hand to Philip, and when he smiled showed badly decayed teeth. He spoke with a patronising and at the same time a timid air, as though he sought to assume an importance which he did not feel. He said he hoped Philip would like the work; there was a good deal of drudgery about it, but when you got used to it, it was interesting; and one made money, that was the chief thing, wasn’t it? He laughed with his odd mixture of superiority and shyness.

“Mr. Carter will be here presently,” he said. “He’s a little late on Monday mornings sometimes. I’ll call you when he comes. In the meantime I must give you something to do. Do you know anything about book-keeping or accounts?”

“I’m afraid not,” answered Philip.

“I didn’t suppose you would. They don’t teach you things at school that are much use in business, I’m afraid.” He considered for a moment. “I think I can find you something to do.”

He went into the next room and after a little while came out with a large cardboard box. It contained a vast number of letters in great disorder, and he told Philip to sort them out and arrange them alphabetically according to the names of the writers.

“I’ll take you to the room in which the articled clerk generally sits.

There’s a very nice fellow in it. His name is Watson. He’s a son of

Watson, Crag, and Thompson — you know — the brewers. He’s spending a year

with us to learn business.”

Mr. Goodworthy led Philip through the dingy office, where now six or eight clerks were working, into a narrow room behind. It had been made into a separate apartment by a glass partition, and here they found Watson sitting back in a chair, reading The Sportsman. He was a large, stout young man, elegantly dressed, and he looked up as Mr. Goodworthy entered. He asserted his position by calling the managing clerk Goodworthy. The managing clerk objected to the familiarity, and pointedly called him Mr. Watson, but Watson, instead of seeing that it was a rebuke, accepted the title as a tribute to his gentlemanliness.

“I see they’ve scratched Rigoletto,” he said to Philip, as soon as they were left alone.

“Have they?” said Philip, who knew nothing about horse-racing.

He looked with awe upon Watson’s beautiful clothes. His tail-coat fitted him perfectly, and there was a valuable pin artfully stuck in the middle of an enormous tie. On the chimney-piece rested his tall hat; it was saucy and bell-shaped and shiny. Philip felt himself very shabby. Watson began to talk of hunting — it was such an infernal bore having to waste one’s time in an infernal office, he would only be able to hunt on Saturdays — and shooting: he had ripping invitations all over the country and of course he had to refuse them. It was infernal luck, but he wasn’t going to put up with it long; he was only in this internal hole for a year, and then he was going into the business, and he would hunt four days a week and get all the shooting there was.

“You’ve got five years of it, haven’t you?” he said, waving his arm round the tiny room.

“I suppose so,” said Philip.

“I daresay I shall see something of you. Carter does our accounts, you know.”

Philip was somewhat overpowered by the young gentleman’s condescension. At Blackstable they had always looked upon brewing with civil contempt, the Vicar made little jokes about the beerage, and it was a surprising experience for Philip to discover that Watson was such an important and magnificent fellow. He had been to Winchester and to Oxford, and his conversation impressed the fact upon one with frequency. When he discovered the details of Philip’s education his manner became more patronising still.

“Of course, if one doesn’t go to a public school those sort of schools are the next best thing, aren’t they?”

Philip asked about the other men in the office.

“Oh, I don’t bother about them much, you know,” said Watson. “Carter’s not a bad sort. We have him to dine now and then. All the rest are awful bounders.”

Presently Watson applied himself to some work he had in hand, and Philip set about sorting his letters. Then Mr. Goodworthy came in to say that Mr. Carter had arrived. He took Philip into a large room next door to his own. There was a big desk in it, and a couple of big arm-chairs; a Turkey carpet adorned the floor, and the walls were decorated with sporting prints. Mr. Carter was sitting at the desk and got up to shake hands with Philip. He was dressed in a long frock coat. He looked like a military man; his moustache was waxed, his gray hair was short and neat, he held himself upright, he talked in a breezy way, he lived at Enfield. He was very keen on games and the good of the country. He was an officer in the Hertfordshire Yeomanry and chairman of the Conservative Association. When he was told that a local magnate had said no one would take him for a City man, he felt that he had not lived in vain. He talked to Philip in a pleasant, off-hand fashion. Mr. Goodworthy would look after him. Watson was a nice fellow, perfect gentleman, good sportsman — did Philip hunt? Pity, THE sport for gentlemen. Didn’t have much chance of hunting now, had to leave that to his son. His son was at Cambridge, he’d sent him to Rugby, fine school Rugby, nice class of boys there, in a couple of years his son would be articled, that would be nice for Philip, he’d like his son, thorough sportsman. He hoped Philip would get on well and like the work, he mustn’t miss his lectures, they were getting up the tone of the profession, they wanted gentlemen in it. Well, well, Mr. Goodworthy was there. If he wanted to know anything Mr. Goodworthy would tell him. What was his handwriting like? Ah well, Mr. Goodworthy would see about that.

Philip was overwhelmed by so much gentlemanliness: in East Anglia they knew who were gentlemen and who weren’t, but the gentlemen didn’t talk about it.

XXXVII

At first the novelty of the work kept Philip interested. Mr. Carter dictated letters to him, and he had to make fair copies of statements of accounts.

Mr. Carter preferred to conduct the office on gentlemanly lines; he would have nothing to do with typewriting and looked upon shorthand with disfavour: the office-boy knew shorthand, but it was only Mr. Goodworthy who made use of his accomplishment. Now and then Philip with one of the more experienced clerks went out to audit the accounts of some firm: he came to know which of the clients must be treated with respect and which were in low water. Now and then long lists of figures were given him to add up. He attended lectures for his first examination. Mr. Goodworthy repeated to him that the work was dull at first, but he would grow used to it. Philip left the office at six and walked across the river to Waterloo. His supper was waiting for him when he reached his lodgings and he spent the evening reading. On Saturday afternoons he went to the National Gallery. Hayward had recommended to him a guide which had been compiled out of Ruskin’s works, and with this in hand he went industriously through room after room: he read carefully what the critic had said about a picture and then in a determined fashion set himself to see the same things in it. His Sundays were difficult to get through. He knew no one in London and spent them by himself. Mr. Nixon, the solicitor, asked him to spend a Sunday at Hampstead, and Philip passed a happy day with a set of exuberant strangers; he ate and drank a great deal, took a walk on the heath, and came away with a general invitation to come again whenever he liked; but he was morbidly afraid of being in the way, so waited for a formal invitation. Naturally enough it never came, for with numbers of friends of their own the Nixons did not think of the lonely, silent boy whose claim upon their hospitality was so small. So on Sundays he got up late and took a walk along the tow-path. At Barnes the river is muddy, dingy, and tidal; it has neither the graceful charm of the Thames above the locks nor the romance of the crowded stream below London Bridge. In the afternoon he walked about the common; and that is gray and dingy too; it is neither country nor town; the gorse is stunted; and all about is the litter of civilisation. He went to a play every Saturday night and stood cheerfully for an hour or more at the gallery-door. It was not worth while to go back to Barnes for the interval between the closing of the Museum and his meal in an A. B. C. shop, and the time hung heavily on his hands. He strolled up Bond Street or through the Burlington Arcade, and when he was tired went and sat down in the Park or in wet weather in the public library in St. Martin’s Lane. He looked at the people walking about and envied them because they had friends; sometimes his envy turned to hatred because they were happy and he was miserable. He had never imagined that it was possible to be so lonely in a great city. Sometimes when he was standing at the gallery-door the man next to him would attempt a conversation; but Philip had the country boy’s suspicion of strangers and answered in such a way as to prevent any further acquaintance. After the play was over, obliged to keep to himself all he thought about it, he hurried across the bridge to Waterloo. When he got back to his rooms, in which for economy no fire had been lit, his heart sank. It was horribly cheerless. He began to loathe his lodgings and the long solitary evenings he spent in them. Sometimes he felt so lonely that he could not read, and then he sat looking into the fire hour after hour in bitter wretchedness.

He had spent three months in London now, and except for that one Sunday at Hampstead had never talked to anyone but his fellow-clerks. One evening Watson asked him to dinner at a restaurant and they went to a music-hall together; but he felt shy and uncomfortable. Watson talked all the time of things he did not care about, and while he looked upon Watson as a Philistine he could not help admiring him. He was angry because Watson obviously set no store on his culture, and with his way of taking himself at the estimate at which he saw others held him he began to despise the acquirements which till then had seemed to him not unimportant. He felt for the first time the humiliation of poverty. His uncle sent him fourteen pounds a month and he had had to buy a good many clothes. His evening suit cost him five guineas. He had not dared tell Watson that it was bought in the Strand. Watson said there was only one tailor in London.

“I suppose you don’t dance,” said Watson, one day, with a glance at

Philip’s club-foot.

“No,” said Philip.

“Pity. I’ve been asked to bring some dancing men to a ball. I could have introduced you to some jolly girls.”

Once or twice, hating the thought of going back to Barnes, Philip had remained in town, and late in the evening wandered through the West End till he found some house at which there was a party. He stood among the little group of shabby people, behind the footmen, watching the guests arrive, and he listened to the music that floated through the window. Sometimes, notwithstanding the cold, a couple came on to the balcony and stood for a moment to get some fresh air; and Philip, imagining that they were in love with one another, turned away and limped along the street with a heavy hurt. He would never be able to stand in that man’s place. He felt that no woman could ever really look upon him without distaste for his deformity.

That reminded him of Miss Wilkinson. He thought of her without satisfaction. Before parting they had made an arrangement that she should write to Charing Cross Post Office till he was able to send her an address, and when he went there he found three letters from her. She wrote on blue paper with violet ink, and she wrote in French. Philip wondered why she could not write in English like a sensible woman, and her passionate expressions, because they reminded him of a French novel, left him cold. She upbraided him for not having written, and when he answered he excused himself by saying that he had been busy. He did not quite know how to start the letter. He could not bring himself to use dearest or darling, and he hated to address her as Emily, so finally he began with the word dear. It looked odd, standing by itself, and rather silly, but he made it do. It was the first love letter he had ever written, and he was conscious of its tameness; he felt that he should say all sorts of vehement things, how he thought of her every minute of the day and how he longed to kiss her beautiful hands and how he trembled at the thought of her red lips, but some inexplicable modesty prevented him; and instead he told her of his new rooms and his office. The answer came by return of post, angry, heart-broken, reproachful: how could he be so cold? Did he not know that she hung on his letters? She had given him all that a woman could give, and this was her reward. Was he tired of her already? Then, because he did not reply for several days, Miss Wilkinson bombarded him with letters. She could not bear his unkindness, she waited for the post, and it never brought her his letter, she cried herself to sleep night after night, she was looking so ill that everyone remarked on it: if he did not love her why did he not say so? She added that she could not live without him, and the only thing was for her to commit suicide. She told him he was cold and selfish and ungrateful. It was all in French, and Philip knew that she wrote in that language to show off, but he was worried all the same. He did not want to make her unhappy. In a little while she wrote that she could not bear the separation any longer, she would arrange to come over to London for Christmas. Philip wrote back that he would like nothing better, only he had already an engagement to spend Christmas with friends in the country, and he did not see how he could break it. She answered that she did not wish to force herself on him, it was quite evident that he did not wish to see her; she was deeply hurt, and she never thought he would repay with such cruelty all her kindness. Her letter was touching, and Philip thought he saw marks of her tears on the paper; he wrote an impulsive reply saying that he was dreadfully sorry and imploring her to come; but it was with relief that he received her answer in which she said that she found it would be impossible for her to get away. Presently when her letters came his heart sank: he delayed opening them, for he knew what they would contain, angry reproaches and pathetic appeals; they would make him feel a perfect beast, and yet he did not see with what he had to blame himself. He put off his answer from day to day, and then another letter would come, saying she was ill and lonely and miserable.

“I wish to God I’d never had anything to do with her,” he said.

He admired Watson because he arranged these things so easily. The young man had been engaged in an intrigue with a girl who played in touring companies, and his account of the affair filled Philip with envious amazement. But after a time Watson’s young affections changed, and one day he described the rupture to Philip.

“I thought it was no good making any bones about it so I just told her I’d had enough of her,” he said.

“Didn’t she make an awful scene?” asked Philip.

“The usual thing, you know, but I told her it was no good trying on that sort of thing with me.”

“Did she cry?”

“She began to, but I can’t stand women when they cry, so I said she’d better hook it.”

Philip’s sense of humour was growing keener with advancing years.

“And did she hook it?” he asked smiling.

“Well, there wasn’t anything else for her to do, was there?”

Meanwhile the Christmas holidays approached. Mrs. Carey had been ill all through November, and the doctor suggested that she and the Vicar should go to Cornwall for a couple of weeks round Christmas so that she should get back her strength. The result was that Philip had nowhere to go, and he spent Christmas Day in his lodgings. Under Hayward’s influence he had persuaded himself that the festivities that attend this season were vulgar and barbaric, and he made up his mind that he would take no notice of the day; but when it came, the jollity of all around affected him strangely. His landlady and her husband were spending the day with a married daughter, and to save trouble Philip announced that he would take his meals out. He went up to London towards mid-day and ate a slice of turkey and some Christmas pudding by himself at Gatti’s, and since he had nothing to do afterwards went to Westminster Abbey for the afternoon service. The streets were almost empty, and the people who went along had a preoccupied look; they did not saunter but walked with some definite goal in view, and hardly anyone was alone. To Philip they all seemed happy. He felt himself more solitary than he had ever done in his life. His intention had been to kill the day somehow in the streets and then dine at a restaurant, but he could not face again the sight of cheerful people, talking, laughing, and making merry; so he went back to Waterloo, and on his way through the Westminster Bridge Road bought some ham and a couple of mince pies and went back to Barnes. He ate his food in his lonely little room and spent the evening with a book. His depression was almost intolerable.

When he was back at the office it made him very sore to listen to Watson’s account of the short holiday. They had had some jolly girls staying with them, and after dinner they had cleared out the drawing-room and had a dance.

“I didn’t get to bed till three and I don’t know how I got there then. By

George, I was squiffy.”

At last Philip asked desperately:

“How does one get to know people in London?”

Watson looked at him with surprise and with a slightly contemptuous amusement.

“Oh, I don’t know, one just knows them. If you go to dances you soon get to know as many people as you can do with.”

Philip hated Watson, and yet he would have given anything to change places with him. The old feeling that he had had at school came back to him, and he tried to throw himself into the other’s skin, imagining what life would be if he were Watson.

XXXVIII

At the end of the year there was a great deal to do. Philip went to various places with a clerk named Thompson and spent the day monotonously calling out items of expenditure, which the other checked; and sometimes he was given long pages of figures to add up. He had never had a head for figures, and he could only do this slowly. Thompson grew irritated at his mistakes. His fellow-clerk was a long, lean man of forty, sallow, with black hair and a ragged moustache; he had hollow cheeks and deep lines on each side of his nose. He took a dislike to Philip because he was an articled clerk. Because he could put down three hundred guineas and keep himself for five years Philip had the chance of a career; while he, with his experience and ability, had no possibility of ever being more than a clerk at thirty-five shillings a week. He was a cross-grained man, oppressed by a large family, and he resented the superciliousness which he fancied he saw in Philip. He sneered at Philip because he was better educated than himself, and he mocked at Philip’s pronunciation; he could not forgive him because he spoke without a cockney accent, and when he talked to him sarcastically exaggerated his aitches. At first his manner was merely gruff and repellent, but as he discovered that Philip had no gift for accountancy he took pleasure in humiliating him; his attacks were gross and silly, but they wounded Philip, and in self-defence he assumed an attitude of superiority which he did not feel.

“Had a bath this morning?” Thompson said when Philip came to the office late, for his early punctuality had not lasted.

“Yes, haven’t you?”

“No, I’m not a gentleman, I’m only a clerk. I have a bath on Saturday night.”

“I suppose that’s why you’re more than usually disagreeable on Monday.”

“Will you condescend to do a few sums in simple addition today? I’m afraid it’s asking a great deal from a gentleman who knows Latin and Greek.”

“Your attempts at sarcasm are not very happy.”

But Philip could not conceal from himself that the other clerks, ill-paid and uncouth, were more useful than himself. Once or twice Mr. Goodworthy grew impatient with him.

“You really ought to be able to do better than this by now,” he said.

“You’re not even as smart as the office-boy.”

Philip listened sulkily. He did not like being blamed, and it humiliated him, when, having been given accounts to make fair copies of, Mr. Goodworthy was not satisfied and gave them to another clerk to do. At first the work had been tolerable from its novelty, but now it grew irksome; and when he discovered that he had no aptitude for it, he began to hate it. Often, when he should have been doing something that was given him, he wasted his time drawing little pictures on the office note-paper. He made sketches of Watson in every conceivable attitude, and Watson was impressed by his talent. It occurred to him to take the drawings home, and he came back next day with the praises of his family.

“I wonder you didn’t become a painter,” he said. “Only of course there’s no money in it.”

It chanced that Mr. Carter two or three days later was dining with the Watsons, and the sketches were shown him. The following morning he sent for Philip. Philip saw him seldom and stood in some awe of him.

“Look here, young fellow, I don’t care what you do out of office-hours, but I’ve seen those sketches of yours and they’re on office-paper, and Mr. Goodworthy tells me you’re slack. You won’t do any good as a chartered accountant unless you look alive. It’s a fine profession, and we’re getting a very good class of men in it, but it’s a profession in which you have to…” he looked for the termination of his phrase, but could not find exactly what he wanted, so finished rather tamely, “in which you have to look alive.”

Perhaps Philip would have settled down but for the agreement that if he did not like the work he could leave after a year, and get back half the money paid for his articles. He felt that he was fit for something better than to add up accounts, and it was humiliating that he did so ill something which seemed contemptible. The vulgar scenes with Thompson got on his nerves. In March Watson ended his year at the office and Philip, though he did not care for him, saw him go with regret. The fact that the other clerks disliked them equally, because they belonged to a class a little higher than their own, was a bond of union. When Philip thought that he must spend over four years more with that dreary set of fellows his heart sank. He had expected wonderful things from London and it had given him nothing. He hated it now. He did not know a soul, and he had no idea how he was to get to know anyone. He was tired of going everywhere by himself. He began to feel that he could not stand much more of such a life. He would lie in bed at night and think of the joy of never seeing again that dingy office or any of the men in it, and of getting away from those drab lodgings.

A great disappointment befell him in the spring. Hayward had announced his intention of coming to London for the season, and Philip had looked forward very much to seeing him again. He had read so much lately and thought so much that his mind was full of ideas which he wanted to discuss, and he knew nobody who was willing to interest himself in abstract things. He was quite excited at the thought of talking his fill with someone, and he was wretched when Hayward wrote to say that the spring was lovelier than ever he had known it in Italy, and he could not bear to tear himself away. He went on to ask why Philip did not come. What was the use of squandering the days of his youth in an office when the world was beautiful? The letter proceeded.

I wonder you can bear it. I think of Fleet Street and Lincoln’s Inn now with a shudder of disgust. There are only two things in the world that make life worth living, love and art. I cannot imagine you sitting in an office over a ledger, and do you wear a tall hat and an umbrella and a little black bag? My feeling is that one should look upon life as an adventure, one should burn with the hard, gem-like flame, and one should take risks, one should expose oneself to danger. Why do you not go to Paris and study art? I always thought you had talent.

The suggestion fell in with the possibility that Philip for some time had been vaguely turning over in his mind. It startled him at first, but he could not help thinking of it, and in the constant rumination over it he found his only escape from the wretchedness of his present state. They all thought he had talent; at Heidelberg they had admired his water colours, Miss Wilkinson had told him over and over again that they were chasing; even strangers like the Watsons had been struck by his sketches. La Vie de Boheme had made a deep impression on him. He had brought it to London and when he was most depressed he had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all. He had a passion for pictures, and why should he not be able to paint as well as anybody else? He wrote to Miss Wilkinson and asked her how much she thought he could live on in Paris. She told him that he could manage easily on eighty pounds a year, and she enthusiastically approved of his project. She told him he was too good to be wasted in an office. Who would be a clerk when he might be a great artist, she asked dramatically, and she besought Philip to believe in himself: that was the great thing. But Philip had a cautious nature. It was all very well for Hayward to talk of taking risks, he had three hundred a year in gilt-edged securities; Philip’s entire fortune amounted to no more than eighteen-hundred pounds. He hesitated.

Then it chanced that one day Mr. Goodworthy asked him suddenly if he would like to go to Paris. The firm did the accounts for a hotel in the Faubourg St. Honore, which was owned by an English company, and twice a year Mr. Goodworthy and a clerk went over. The clerk who generally went happened to be ill, and a press of work prevented any of the others from getting away. Mr. Goodworthy thought of Philip because he could best be spared, and his articles gave him some claim upon a job which was one of the pleasures of the business. Philip was delighted.

“You’ll ‘ave to work all day,” said Mr. Goodworthy, “but we get our evenings to ourselves, and Paris is Paris.” He smiled in a knowing way. “They do us very well at the hotel, and they give us all our meals, so it don’t cost one anything. That’s the way I like going to Paris, at other people’s expense.”

When they arrived at Calais and Philip saw the crowd of gesticulating porters his heart leaped.

“This is the real thing,” he said to himself.

He was all eyes as the train sped through the country; he adored the sand dunes, their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was an old friend and he greeted them effusively; they dined in his private room with his wife, and to Philip it seemed that he had never eaten anything so delicious as the beefsteak aux pommes, nor drunk such nectar as the vin ordinaire, which were set before them.

To Mr. Goodworthy, a respectable householder with excellent principles, the capital of France was a paradise of the joyously obscene. He asked the manager next morning what there was to be seen that was ‘thick.’ He thoroughly enjoyed these visits of his to Paris; he said they kept you from growing rusty. In the evenings, after their work was over and they had dined, he took Philip to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergeres. His little eyes twinkled and his face wore a sly, sensual smile as he sought out the pornographic. He went into all the haunts which were specially arranged for the foreigner, and afterwards said that a nation could come to no good which permitted that sort of thing. He nudged Philip when at some revue a woman appeared with practically nothing on, and pointed out to him the most strapping of the courtesans who walked about the hall. It was a vulgar Paris that he showed Philip, but Philip saw it with eyes blinded with illusion. In the early morning he would rush out of the hotel and go to the Champs Elysees, and stand at the Place de la Concorde. It was June, and Paris was silvery with the delicacy of the air. Philip felt his heart go out to the people. Here he thought at last was romance.

They spent the inside of a week there, leaving on Sunday, and when Philip late at night reached his dingy rooms in Barnes his mind was made up; he would surrender his articles, and go to Paris to study art; but so that no one should think him unreasonable he determined to stay at the office till his year was up. He was to have his holiday during the last fortnight in August, and when he went away he would tell Herbert Carter that he had no intention of returning. But though Philip could force himself to go to the office every day he could not even pretend to show any interest in the work. His mind was occupied with the future. After the middle of July there was nothing much to do and he escaped a good deal by pretending he had to go to lectures for his first examination. The time he got in this way he spent in the National Gallery. He read books about Paris and books about painting. He was steeped in Ruskin. He read many of Vasari’s lives of the painters. He liked that story of Correggio, and he fancied himself standing before some great masterpiece and crying: Anch’ io son’ pittore. His hesitation had left him now, and he was convinced that he had in him the makings of a great painter.

“After all, I can only try,” he said to himself. “The great thing in life is to take risks.”

At last came the middle of August. Mr. Carter was spending the month in

Scotland, and the managing clerk was in charge of the office. Mr.

Goodworthy had seemed pleasantly disposed to Philip since their trip to

Paris, and now that Philip knew he was so soon to be free, he could look

upon the funny little man with tolerance.

“You’re going for your holiday tomorrow, Carey?” he said to him in the evening.

All day Philip had been telling himself that this was the last time he would ever sit in that hateful office.

“Yes, this is the end of my year.”

“I’m afraid you’ve not done very well. Mr. Carter’s very dissatisfied with you.”

“Not nearly so dissatisfied as I am with Mr. Carter,” returned Philip cheerfully.

“I don’t think you should speak like that, Carey.”

“I’m not coming back. I made the arrangement that if I didn’t like accountancy Mr. Carter would return me half the money I paid for my articles and I could chuck it at the end of a year.”

“You shouldn’t come to such a decision hastily.”

“For ten months I’ve loathed it all, I’ve loathed the work, I’ve loathed the office, I loathe London. I’d rather sweep a crossing than spend my days here.”

“Well, I must say, I don’t think you’re very fitted for accountancy.”

“Good-bye,” said Philip, holding out his hand. “I want to thank you for your kindness to me. I’m sorry if I’ve been troublesome. I knew almost from the beginning I was no good.”

“Well, if you really do make up your mind it is good-bye. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but if you’re in the neighbourhood at any time come in and see us.”

Philip gave a little laugh.

“I’m afraid it sounds very rude, but I hope from the bottom of my heart that I shall never set eyes on any of you again.”

XXXIX

The Vicar of Blackstable would have nothing to do with the scheme which Philip laid before him. He had a great idea that one should stick to whatever one had begun. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.

“You chose to be an accountant of your own free will,” he said.

“I just took that because it was the only chance I saw of getting up to town. I hate London, I hate the work, and nothing will induce me to go back to it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Carey were frankly shocked at Philip’s idea of being an artist. He should not forget, they said, that his father and mother were gentlefolk, and painting wasn’t a serious profession; it was Bohemian, disreputable, immoral. And then Paris!

“So long as I have anything to say in the matter, I shall not allow you to live in Paris,” said the Vicar firmly.

It was a sink of iniquity. The scarlet woman and she of Babylon flaunted their vileness there; the cities of the plain were not more wicked.

“You’ve been brought up like a gentleman and Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.”

“Well, I know I’m not a Christian and I’m beginning to doubt whether I’m a gentleman,” said Philip.

The dispute grew more violent. There was another year before Philip took possession of his small inheritance, and during that time Mr. Carey proposed only to give him an allowance if he remained at the office. It was clear to Philip that if he meant not to continue with accountancy he must leave it while he could still get back half the money that had been paid for his articles. The Vicar would not listen. Philip, losing all reserve, said things to wound and irritate.

“You’ve got no right to waste my money,” he said at last. “After all it’s my money, isn’t it? I’m not a child. You can’t prevent me from going to Paris if I make up my mind to. You can’t force me to go back to London.”

“All I can do is to refuse you money unless you do what I think fit.”

“Well, I don’t care, I’ve made up my mind to go to Paris. I shall sell my clothes, and my books, and my father’s jewellery.”

Aunt Louisa sat by in silence, anxious and unhappy. She saw that Philip was beside himself, and anything she said then would but increase his anger. Finally the Vicar announced that he wished to hear nothing more about it and with dignity left the room. For the next three days neither Philip nor he spoke to one another. Philip wrote to Hayward for information about Paris, and made up his mind to set out as soon as he got a reply. Mrs. Carey turned the matter over in her mind incessantly; she felt that Philip included her in the hatred he bore her husband, and the thought tortured her. She loved him with all her heart. At length she spoke to him; she listened attentively while he poured out all his disillusionment of London and his eager ambition for the future.

“I may be no good, but at least let me have a try. I can’t be a worse failure than I was in that beastly office. And I feel that I can paint. I know I’ve got it in me.”

She was not so sure as her husband that they did right in thwarting so strong an inclination. She had read of great painters whose parents had opposed their wish to study, the event had shown with what folly; and after all it was just as possible for a painter to lead a virtuous life to the glory of God as for a chartered accountant.

“I’m so afraid of your going to Paris,” she said piteously. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you studied in London.”

“If I’m going in for painting I must do it thoroughly, and it’s only in

Paris that you can get the real thing.”

At his suggestion Mrs. Carey wrote to the solicitor, saying that Philip was discontented with his work in London, and asking what he thought of a change. Mr. Nixon answered as follows:

Dear Mrs. Carey,

I have seen Mr. Herbert Carter, and I am afraid I must tell you that Philip has not done so well as one could have wished. If he is very strongly set against the work, perhaps it is better that he should take the opportunity there is now to break his articles. I am naturally very disappointed, but as you know you can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

Yours very sincerely,

Albert Nixon.

The letter was shown to the Vicar, but served only to increase his obstinacy. He was willing enough that Philip should take up some other profession, he suggested his father’s calling, medicine, but nothing would induce him to pay an allowance if Philip went to Paris.

“It’s a mere excuse for self-indulgence and sensuality,” he said.

“I’m interested to hear you blame self-indulgence in others,” retorted

Philip acidly.

But by this time an answer had come from Hayward, giving the name of a hotel where Philip could get a room for thirty francs a month and enclosing a note of introduction to the massiere of a school. Philip read the letter to Mrs. Carey and told her he proposed to start on the first of September.

“But you haven’t got any money?” she said.

“I’m going into Tercanbury this afternoon to sell the jewellery.”

He had inherited from his father a gold watch and chain, two or three rings, some links, and two pins. One of them was a pearl and might fetch a considerable sum.

“It’s a very different thing, what a thing’s worth and what it’ll fetch,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip smiled, for this was one of his uncle’s stock phrases.

“I know, but at the worst I think I can get a hundred pounds on the lot, and that’ll keep me till I’m twenty-one.”

Mrs. Carey did not answer, but she went upstairs, put on her little black bonnet, and went to the bank. In an hour she came back. She went to Philip, who was reading in the drawing-room, and handed him an envelope.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s a little present for you,” she answered, smiling shyly.

He opened it and found eleven five-pound notes and a little paper sack bulging with sovereigns.

“I couldn’t bear to let you sell your father’s jewellery. It’s the money

I had in the bank. It comes to very nearly a hundred pounds.”

Philip blushed, and, he knew not why, tears suddenly filled his eyes.

“Oh, my dear, I can’t take it,” he said. “It’s most awfully good of you, but I couldn’t bear to take it.”

When Mrs. Carey was married she had three hundred pounds, and this money, carefully watched, had been used by her to meet any unforeseen expense, any urgent charity, or to buy Christmas and birthday presents for her husband and for Philip. In the course of years it had diminished sadly, but it was still with the Vicar a subject for jesting. He talked of his wife as a rich woman and he constantly spoke of the ‘nest egg.’

“Oh, please take it, Philip. I’m so sorry I’ve been extravagant, and there’s only that left. But it’ll make me so happy if you’ll accept it.”

“But you’ll want it,” said Philip.

“No, I don’t think I shall. I was keeping it in case your uncle died before me. I thought it would be useful to have a little something I could get at immediately if I wanted it, but I don’t think I shall live very much longer now.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t say that. Why, of course you’re going to live for ever. I can’t possibly spare you.”

“Oh, I’m not sorry.” Her voice broke and she hid her eyes, but in a moment, drying them, she smiled bravely. “At first, I used to pray to God that He might not take me first, because I didn’t want your uncle to be left alone, I didn’t want him to have all the suffering, but now I know that it wouldn’t mean so much to your uncle as it would mean to me. He wants to live more than I do, I’ve never been the wife he wanted, and I daresay he’d marry again if anything happened to me. So I should like to go first. You don’t think it’s selfish of me, Philip, do you? But I couldn’t bear it if he went.”

Philip kissed her wrinkled, thin cheek. He did not know why the sight he had of that overwhelming love made him feel strangely ashamed. It was incomprehensible that she should care so much for a man who was so indifferent, so selfish, so grossly self-indulgent; and he divined dimly that in her heart she knew his indifference and his selfishness, knew them and loved him humbly all the same.

“You will take the money, Philip?” she said, gently stroking his hand. “I know you can do without it, but it’ll give me so much happiness. I’ve always wanted to do something for you. You see, I never had a child of my own, and I’ve loved you as if you were my son. When you were a little boy, though I knew it was wicked, I used to wish almost that you might be ill, so that I could nurse you day and night. But you were only ill once and then it was at school. I should so like to help you. It’s the only chance I shall ever have. And perhaps some day when you’re a great artist you won’t forget me, but you’ll remember that I gave you your start.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Philip. “I’m very grateful.” A smile came into her tired eyes, a smile of pure happiness.

“Oh, I’m so glad.”

XL

A few days later Mrs. Carey went to the station to see Philip off. She stood at the door of the carriage, trying to keep back her tears. Philip was restless and eager. He wanted to be gone.

“Kiss me once more,” she said.

He leaned out of the window and kissed her. The train started, and she stood on the wooden platform of the little station, waving her handkerchief till it was out of sight. Her heart was dreadfully heavy, and the few hundred yards to the vicarage seemed very, very long. It was natural enough that he should be eager to go, she thought, he was a boy and the future beckoned to him; but she — she clenched her teeth so that she should not cry. She uttered a little inward prayer that God would guard him, and keep him out of temptation, and give him happiness and good fortune.

But Philip ceased to think of her a moment after he had settled down in his carriage. He thought only of the future. He had written to Mrs. Otter, the massiere to whom Hayward had given him an introduction, and had in his pocket an invitation to tea on the following day. When he arrived in Paris he had his luggage put on a cab and trundled off slowly through the gay streets, over the bridge, and along the narrow ways of the Latin Quarter. He had taken a room at the Hotel des Deux Ecoles, which was in a shabby street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse; it was convenient for Amitrano’s School at which he was going to work. A waiter took his box up five flights of stairs, and Philip was shown into a tiny room, fusty from unopened windows, the greater part of which was taken up by a large wooden bed with a canopy over it of red rep; there were heavy curtains on the windows of the same dingy material; the chest of drawers served also as a washing-stand; and there was a massive wardrobe of the style which is connected with the good King Louis Philippe. The wall-paper was discoloured with age; it was dark gray, and there could be vaguely seen on it garlands of brown leaves. To Philip the room seemed quaint and charming.

Though it was late he felt too excited to sleep and, going out, made his way into the boulevard and walked towards the light. This led him to the station; and the square in front of it, vivid with arc-lamps, noisy with the yellow trams that seemed to cross it in all directions, made him laugh aloud with joy. There were cafes all round, and by chance, thirsty and eager to get a nearer sight of the crowd, Philip installed himself at a little table outside the Cafe de Versailles. Every other table was taken, for it was a fine night; and Philip looked curiously at the people, here little family groups, there a knot of men with odd-shaped hats and beards talking loudly and gesticulating; next to him were two men who looked like painters with women who Philip hoped were not their lawful wives; behind him he heard Americans loudly arguing on art. His soul was thrilled. He sat till very late, tired out but too happy to move, and when at last he went to bed he was wide awake; he listened to the manifold noise of Paris.

Next day about tea-time he made his way to the Lion de Belfort, and in a new street that led out of the Boulevard Raspail found Mrs. Otter. She was an insignificant woman of thirty, with a provincial air and a deliberately lady-like manner; she introduced him to her mother. He discovered presently that she had been studying in Paris for three years and later that she was separated from her husband. She had in her small drawing-room one or two portraits which she had painted, and to Philip’s inexperience they seemed extremely accomplished.

“I wonder if I shall ever be able to paint as well as that,” he said to her.

“Oh, I expect so,” she replied, not without self-satisfaction. “You can’t expect to do everything all at once, of course.”

She was very kind. She gave him the address of a shop where he could get a portfolio, drawing-paper, and charcoal.

“I shall be going to Amitrano’s about nine tomorrow, and if you’ll be there then I’ll see that you get a good place and all that sort of thing.”

She asked him what he wanted to do, and Philip felt that he should not let her see how vague he was about the whole matter.

“Well, first I want to learn to draw,” he said.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that. People always want to do things in such a hurry. I never touched oils till I’d been here for two years, and look at the result.”

She gave a glance at the portrait of her mother, a sticky piece of painting that hung over the piano.

“And if I were you, I would be very careful about the people you get to know. I wouldn’t mix myself up with any foreigners. I’m very careful myself.”

Philip thanked her for the suggestion, but it seemed to him odd. He did not know that he particularly wanted to be careful.

“We live just as we would if we were in England,” said Mrs. Otter’s mother, who till then had spoken little. “When we came here we brought all our own furniture over.”

Philip looked round the room. It was filled with a massive suite, and at the window were the same sort of white lace curtains which Aunt Louisa put up at the vicarage in summer. The piano was draped in Liberty silk and so was the chimney-piece. Mrs. Otter followed his wandering eye.

“In the evening when we close the shutters one might really feel one was in England.”

“And we have our meals just as if we were at home,” added her mother. “A meat breakfast in the morning and dinner in the middle of the day.”

When he left Mrs. Otter Philip went to buy drawing materials; and next morning at the stroke of nine, trying to seem self-assured, he presented himself at the school. Mrs. Otter was already there, and she came forward with a friendly smile. He had been anxious about the reception he would have as a nouveau, for he had read a good deal of the rough joking to which a newcomer was exposed at some of the studios; but Mrs. Otter had reassured him.

“Oh, there’s nothing like that here,” she said. “You see, about half our students are ladies, and they set a tone to the place.”

The studio was large and bare, with gray walls, on which were pinned the studies that had received prizes. A model was sitting in a chair with a loose wrap thrown over her, and about a dozen men and women were standing about, some talking and others still working on their sketch. It was the first rest of the model.

“You’d better not try anything too difficult at first,” said Mrs. Otter.

“Put your easel here. You’ll find that’s the easiest pose.”

Philip placed an easel where she indicated, and Mrs. Otter introduced him to a young woman who sat next to him.

“Mr. Carey — Miss Price. Mr. Carey’s never studied before, you won’t mind helping him a little just at first will you?” Then she turned to the model. “La Pose.”

The model threw aside the paper she had been reading, La Petite Republique, and sulkily, throwing off her gown, got on to the stand. She stood, squarely on both feet with her hands clasped behind her head.

“It’s a stupid pose,” said Miss Price. “I can’t imagine why they chose it.”

When Philip entered, the people in the studio had looked at him curiously, and the model gave him an indifferent glance, but now they ceased to pay attention to him. Philip, with his beautiful sheet of paper in front of him, stared awkwardly at the model. He did not know how to begin. He had never seen a naked woman before. She was not young and her breasts were shrivelled. She had colourless, fair hair that fell over her forehead untidily, and her face was covered with large freckles. He glanced at Miss Price’s work. She had only been working on it two days, and it looked as though she had had trouble; her paper was in a mess from constant rubbing out, and to Philip’s eyes the figure looked strangely distorted.

“I should have thought I could do as well as that,” he said to himself.

He began on the head, thinking that he would work slowly downwards, but, he could not understand why, he found it infinitely more difficult to draw a head from the model than to draw one from his imagination. He got into difficulties. He glanced at Miss Price. She was working with vehement gravity. Her brow was wrinkled with eagerness, and there was an anxious look in her eyes. It was hot in the studio, and drops of sweat stood on her forehead. She was a girl of twenty-six, with a great deal of dull gold hair; it was handsome hair, but it was carelessly done, dragged back from her forehead and tied in a hurried knot. She had a large face, with broad, flat features and small eyes; her skin was pasty, with a singular unhealthiness of tone, and there was no colour in the cheeks. She had an unwashed air and you could not help wondering if she slept in her clothes. She was serious and silent. When the next pause came, she stepped back to look at her work.

“I don’t know why I’m having so much bother,” she said. “But I mean to get it right.” She turned to Philip. “How are you getting on?”

“Not at all,” he answered, with a rueful smile.

She looked at what he had done.

“You can’t expect to do anything that way. You must take measurements. And you must square out your paper.”

She showed him rapidly how to set about the business. Philip was impressed by her earnestness, but repelled by her want of charm. He was grateful for the hints she gave him and set to work again. Meanwhile other people had come in, mostly men, for the women always arrived first, and the studio for the time of year (it was early yet) was fairly full. Presently there came in a young man with thin, black hair, an enormous nose, and a face so long that it reminded you of a horse. He sat down next to Philip and nodded across him to Miss Price.

“You’re very late,” she said. “Are you only just up?”

“It was such a splendid day, I thought I’d lie in bed and think how beautiful it was out.”

Philip smiled, but Miss Price took the remark seriously.

“That seems a funny thing to do, I should have thought it would be more to the point to get up and enjoy it.”

“The way of the humorist is very hard,” said the young man gravely.

He did not seem inclined to work. He looked at his canvas; he was working in colour, and had sketched in the day before the model who was posing. He turned to Philip.

“Have you just come out from England?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find your way to Amitrano’s?”

“It was the only school I knew of.”

“I hope you haven’t come with the idea that you will learn anything here which will be of the smallest use to you.”

“It’s the best school in Paris,” said Miss Price. “It’s the only one where they take art seriously.”

“Should art be taken seriously?” the young man asked; and since Miss Price replied only with a scornful shrug, he added: “But the point is, all schools are bad. They are academical, obviously. Why this is less injurious than most is that the teaching is more incompetent than elsewhere. Because you learn nothing….”

“But why d’you come here then?” interrupted Philip.

“I see the better course, but do not follow it. Miss Price, who is cultured, will remember the Latin of that.”

“I wish you would leave me out of your conversation, Mr. Clutton,” said

Miss Price brusquely.

“The only way to learn to paint,” he went on, imperturbable, “is to take a studio, hire a model, and just fight it out for yourself.”

“That seems a simple thing to do,” said Philip.

“It only needs money,” replied Clutton.

He began to paint, and Philip looked at him from the corner of his eye. He was long and desperately thin; his huge bones seemed to protrude from his body; his elbows were so sharp that they appeared to jut out through the arms of his shabby coat. His trousers were frayed at the bottom, and on each of his boots was a clumsy patch. Miss Price got up and went over to Philip’s easel.

“If Mr. Clutton will hold his tongue for a moment, I’ll just help you a little,” she said.

“Miss Price dislikes me because I have humour,” said Clutton, looking meditatively at his canvas, “but she detests me because I have genius.”

He spoke with solemnity, and his colossal, misshapen nose made what he said very quaint. Philip was obliged to laugh, but Miss Price grew darkly red with anger.

“You’re the only person who has ever accused you of genius.”

“Also I am the only person whose opinion is of the least value to me.”

Miss Price began to criticise what Philip had done. She talked glibly of anatomy and construction, planes and lines, and of much else which Philip did not understand. She had been at the studio a long time and knew the main points which the masters insisted upon, but though she could show what was wrong with Philip’s work she could not tell him how to put it right.

“It’s awfully kind of you to take so much trouble with me,” said Philip.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she answered, flushing awkwardly. “People did the same for me when I first came, I’d do it for anyone.”

“Miss Price wants to indicate that she is giving you the advantage of her knowledge from a sense of duty rather than on account of any charms of your person,” said Clutton.

Miss Price gave him a furious look, and went back to her own drawing. The clock struck twelve, and the model with a cry of relief stepped down from the stand.

Miss Price gathered up her things.

“Some of us go to Gravier’s for lunch,” she said to Philip, with a look at

Clutton. “I always go home myself.”

“I’ll take you to Gravier’s if you like,” said Clutton.

Philip thanked him and made ready to go. On his way out Mrs. Otter asked him how he had been getting on.

“Did Fanny Price help you?” she asked. “I put you there because I know she can do it if she likes. She’s a disagreeable, ill-natured girl, and she can’t draw herself at all, but she knows the ropes, and she can be useful to a newcomer if she cares to take the trouble.”

On the way down the street Clutton said to him:

“You’ve made an impression on Fanny Price. You’d better look out.”

Philip laughed. He had never seen anyone on whom he wished less to make an impression. They came to the cheap little restaurant at which several of the students ate, and Clutton sat down at a table at which three or four men were already seated. For a franc, they got an egg, a plate of meat, cheese, and a small bottle of wine. Coffee was extra. They sat on the pavement, and yellow trams passed up and down the boulevard with a ceaseless ringing of bells.

“By the way, what’s your name?” said Clutton, as they took their seats.

“Carey.”

“Allow me to introduce an old and trusted friend, Carey by name,” said

Clutton gravely. “Mr. Flanagan, Mr. Lawson.”

They laughed and went on with their conversation. They talked of a thousand things, and they all talked at once. No one paid the smallest attention to anyone else. They talked of the places they had been to in the summer, of studios, of the various schools; they mentioned names which were unfamiliar to Philip, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas. Philip listened with all his ears, and though he felt a little out of it, his heart leaped with exultation. The time flew. When Clutton got up he said:

“I expect you’ll find me here this evening if you care to come. You’ll find this about the best place for getting dyspepsia at the lowest cost in the Quarter.”

XLI

Philip walked down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was not at all like the Paris he had seen in the spring during his visit to do the accounts of the Hotel St. Georges — he thought already of that part of his life with a shudder — but reminded him of what he thought a provincial town must be. There was an easy-going air about it, and a sunny spaciousness which invited the mind to day-dreaming. The trimness of the trees, the vivid whiteness of the houses, the breadth, were very agreeable; and he felt himself already thoroughly at home. He sauntered along, staring at the people; there seemed an elegance about the most ordinary, workmen with their broad red sashes and their wide trousers, little soldiers in dingy, charming uniforms. He came presently to the Avenue de l’Observatoire, and he gave a sigh of pleasure at the magnificent, yet so graceful, vista. He came to the gardens of the Luxembourg: children were playing, nurses with long ribbons walked slowly two by two, busy men passed through with satchels under their arms, youths strangely dressed. The scene was formal and dainty; nature was arranged and ordered, but so exquisitely, that nature unordered and unarranged seemed barbaric. Philip was enchanted. It excited him to stand on that spot of which he had read so much; it was classic ground to him; and he felt the awe and the delight which some old don might feel when for the first time he looked on the smiling plain of Sparta.

As he wandered he chanced to see Miss Price sitting by herself on a bench. He hesitated, for he did not at that moment want to see anyone, and her uncouth way seemed out of place amid the happiness he felt around him; but he had divined her sensitiveness to affront, and since she had seen him thought it would be polite to speak to her.

“What are you doing here?” she said, as he came up.

“Enjoying myself. Aren’t you?”

“Oh, I come here every day from four to five. I don’t think one does any good if one works straight through.”

“May I sit down for a minute?” he said.

“If you want to.”

“That doesn’t sound very cordial,” he laughed.

“I’m not much of a one for saying pretty things.”

Philip, a little disconcerted, was silent as he lit a cigarette.

“Did Clutton say anything about my work?” she asked suddenly.

“No, I don’t think he did,” said Philip.

“He’s no good, you know. He thinks he’s a genius, but he isn’t. He’s too lazy, for one thing. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. The only thing is to peg away. If one only makes up one’s mind badly enough to do a thing one can’t help doing it.”

She spoke with a passionate strenuousness which was rather striking. She wore a sailor hat of black straw, a white blouse which was not quite clean, and a brown skirt. She had no gloves on, and her hands wanted washing. She was so unattractive that Philip wished he had not begun to talk to her. He could not make out whether she wanted him to stay or go.

“I’ll do anything I can for you,” she said all at once, without reference to anything that had gone before. “I know how hard it is.”

“Thank you very much,” said Philip, then in a moment: “Won’t you come and have tea with me somewhere?”

She looked at him quickly and flushed. When she reddened her pasty skin acquired a curiously mottled look, like strawberries and cream that had gone bad.

“No, thanks. What d’you think I want tea for? I’ve only just had lunch.”

“I thought it would pass the time,” said Philip.

“If you find it long you needn’t bother about me, you know. I don’t mind being left alone.”

At that moment two men passed, in brown velveteens, enormous trousers, and basque caps. They were young, but both wore beards.

“I say, are those art-students?” said Philip. “They might have stepped out of the Vie de Boheme.”

“They’re Americans,” said Miss Price scornfully. “Frenchmen haven’t worn things like that for thirty years, but the Americans from the Far West buy those clothes and have themselves photographed the day after they arrive in Paris. That’s about as near to art as they ever get. But it doesn’t matter to them, they’ve all got money.”

Philip liked the daring picturesqueness of the Americans’ costume; he thought it showed the romantic spirit. Miss Price asked him the time.

“I must be getting along to the studio,” she said. “Are you going to the sketch classes?”

Philip did not know anything about them, and she told him that from five to six every evening a model sat, from whom anyone who liked could go and draw at the cost of fifty centimes. They had a different model every day, and it was very good practice.

“I don’t suppose you’re good enough yet for that. You’d better wait a bit.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t try. I haven’t got anything else to do.”

They got up and walked to the studio. Philip could not tell from her manner whether Miss Price wished him to walk with her or preferred to walk alone. He remained from sheer embarrassment, not knowing how to leave her; but she would not talk; she answered his questions in an ungracious manner.

A man was standing at the studio door with a large dish into which each person as he went in dropped his half franc. The studio was much fuller than it had been in the morning, and there was not the preponderance of English and Americans; nor were women there in so large a proportion. Philip felt the assemblage was more the sort of thing he had expected. It was very warm, and the air quickly grew fetid. It was an old man who sat this time, with a vast gray beard, and Philip tried to put into practice the little he had learned in the morning; but he made a poor job of it; he realised that he could not draw nearly as well as he thought. He glanced enviously at one or two sketches of men who sat near him, and wondered whether he would ever be able to use the charcoal with that mastery. The hour passed quickly. Not wishing to press himself upon Miss Price he sat down at some distance from her, and at the end, as he passed her on his way out, she asked him brusquely how he had got on.

“Not very well,” he smiled.

“If you’d condescended to come and sit near me I could have given you some hints. I suppose you thought yourself too grand.”

“No, it wasn’t that. I was afraid you’d think me a nuisance.”

“When I do that I’ll tell you sharp enough.”

Philip saw that in her uncouth way she was offering him help.

“Well, tomorrow I’ll just force myself upon you.”

“I don’t mind,” she answered.

Philip went out and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner. He was eager to do something characteristic. Absinthe! of course it was indicated, and so, sauntering towards the station, he seated himself outside a cafe and ordered it. He drank with nausea and satisfaction. He found the taste disgusting, but the moral effect magnificent; he felt every inch an art-student; and since he drank on an empty stomach his spirits presently grew very high. He watched the crowds, and felt all men were his brothers. He was happy. When he reached Gravier’s the table at which Clutton sat was full, but as soon as he saw Philip limping along he called out to him. They made room. The dinner was frugal, a plate of soup, a dish of meat, fruit, cheese, and half a bottle of wine; but Philip paid no attention to what he ate. He took note of the men at the table. Flanagan was there again: he was an American, a short, snub-nosed youth with a jolly face and a laughing mouth. He wore a Norfolk jacket of bold pattern, a blue stock round his neck, and a tweed cap of fantastic shape. At that time impressionism reigned in the Latin Quarter, but its victory over the older schools was still recent; and Carolus-Duran, Bouguereau, and their like were set up against Manet, Monet, and Degas. To appreciate these was still a sign of grace. Whistler was an influence strong with the English and his compatriots, and the discerning collected Japanese prints. The old masters were tested by new standards. The esteem in which Raphael had been for centuries held was a matter of derision to wise young men. They offered to give all his works for Velasquez’ head of Philip IV in the National Gallery. Philip found that a discussion on art was raging. Lawson, whom he had met at luncheon, sat opposite to him. He was a thin youth with a freckled face and red hair. He had very bright green eyes. As Philip sat down he fixed them on him and remarked suddenly:

“Raphael was only tolerable when he painted other people’s pictures. When he painted Peruginos or Pinturichios he was charming; when he painted Raphaels he was,” with a scornful shrug, “Raphael.”

Lawson spoke so aggressively that Philip was taken aback, but he was not obliged to answer because Flanagan broke in impatiently.

“Oh, to hell with art!” he cried. “Let’s get ginny.”

“You were ginny last night, Flanagan,” said Lawson.

“Nothing to what I mean to be tonight,” he answered. “Fancy being in Pa-ris and thinking of nothing but art all the time.” He spoke with a broad Western accent. “My, it is good to be alive.” He gathered himself together and then banged his fist on the table. “To hell with art, I say.”

“You not only say it, but you say it with tiresome iteration,” said

Clutton severely.

There was another American at the table. He was dressed like those fine fellows whom Philip had seen that afternoon in the Luxembourg. He had a handsome face, thin, ascetic, with dark eyes; he wore his fantastic garb with the dashing air of a buccaneer. He had a vast quantity of dark hair which fell constantly over his eyes, and his most frequent gesture was to throw back his head dramatically to get some long wisp out of the way. He began to talk of the Olympia by Manet, which then hung in the Luxembourg.

“I stood in front of it for an hour today, and I tell you it’s not a good picture.”

Lawson put down his knife and fork. His green eyes flashed fire, he gasped with rage; but he could be seen imposing calm upon himself.

“It’s very interesting to hear the mind of the untutored savage,” he said.

“Will you tell us why it isn’t a good picture?”

Before the American could answer someone else broke in vehemently.

“D’you mean to say you can look at the painting of that flesh and say it’s not good?”

“I don’t say that. I think the right breast is very well painted.”

“The right breast be damned,” shouted Lawson. “The whole thing’s a miracle of painting.”

He began to describe in detail the beauties of the picture, but at this table at Gravier’s they who spoke at length spoke for their own edification. No one listened to him. The American interrupted angrily.

“You don’t mean to say you think the head’s good?”

Lawson, white with passion now, began to defend the head; but Clutton, who had been sitting in silence with a look on his face of good-humoured scorn, broke in.

“Give him the head. We don’t want the head. It doesn’t affect the picture.”

“All right, I’ll give you the head,” cried Lawson. “Take the head and be damned to you.”

“What about the black line?” cried the American, triumphantly pushing back a wisp of hair which nearly fell in his soup. “You don’t see a black line round objects in nature.”

“Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer,” said Lawson. “What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what’s in nature and what isn’t! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it’ll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue.”

“To hell with art,” murmured Flanagan. “I want to get ginny.”

Lawson took no notice of the interruption.

“Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola — amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said: ‘I look forward to the day when Manet’s picture will hang in the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.’ It’ll be there. Every day I see the time grow nearer. In ten years the Olympia will be in the Louvre.”

“Never,” shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way. “In ten years that picture will be dead. It’s only a fashion of the moment. No picture can live that hasn’t got something which that picture misses by a million miles.”

“And what is that?”

“Great art can’t exist without a moral element.”

“Oh God!” cried Lawson furiously. “I knew it was that. He wants morality.”

He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. “Oh,

Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you

discovered America?”

“Ruskin says…”

But before he could add another word, Clutton rapped with the handle of his knife imperiously on the table.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a stern voice, and his huge nose positively wrinkled with passion, “a name has been mentioned which I never thought to hear again in decent society. Freedom of speech is all very well, but we must observe the limits of common propriety. You may talk of Bouguereau if you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound which excites laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the names of J. Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones.”

“Who was Ruskin anyway?” asked Flanagan.

“He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style.”

“Ruskin’s style — a thing of shreds and purple patches,” said Lawson. “Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there’s one more of them gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he’s forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition. Don’t you think it was the greatest luck in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early? What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!”

The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than twenty-four, and they threw themselves upon it with gusto. They were unanimous for once. They elaborated. Someone proposed a vast bonfire made out of the works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great Victorians might be hurled on their fortieth birthday. The idea was received with acclamation. Carlyle and Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, G. F. Watts, E. B. Jones, Dickens, Thackeray, they were hurried into the flames; Mr. Gladstone, John Bright, and Cobden; there was a moment’s discussion about George Meredith, but Matthew Arnold and Emerson were given up cheerfully. At last came Walter Pater.

“Not Walter Pater,” murmured Philip.

Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.

“You’re quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona Lisa.

D’you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater.”

“Who’s Cronshaw?” asked Philip.

“Cronshaw’s a poet. He lives here. Let’s go to the Lilas.”

La Closerie des Lilas was a cafe to which they often went in the evening after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found between the hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan had had enough of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when Lawson made his suggestion, turned to Philip.

“Oh gee, let’s go where there are girls,” he said. “Come to the Gaite

Montparnasse, and we’ll get ginny.”

“I’d rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober,” laughed Philip.

XLII

There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and two or three more went on to the music-hall, while Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson to the Closerie des Lilas.

“You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse,” said Lawson to him. “It’s one of the loveliest things in Paris. I’m going to paint it one of these days.”

Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls with scornful eyes, but he had reached Paris at a time when their artistic possibilities were just discovered. The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and half the studios in the Quarter contained sketches made in one or other of the local theatres. Men of letters, following in the painters’ wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest. With Hayward, Philip had disdained humanity in the mass; he adopted the attitude of one who wraps himself in solitariness and watches with disgust the antics of the vulgar; but Clutton and Lawson talked of the multitude with enthusiasm. They described the seething throng that filled the various fairs of Paris, the sea of faces, half seen in the glare of acetylene, half hidden in the darkness, and the blare of trumpets, the hooting of whistles, the hum of voices. What they said was new and strange to Philip. They told him about Cronshaw.

“Have you ever read any of his work?”

“No,” said Philip.

“It came out in The Yellow Book.”

They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance because he practised an art, and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.

“He’s an extraordinary fellow. You’ll find him a bit disappointing at first, he only comes out at his best when he’s drunk.”

“And the nuisance is,” added Clutton, “that it takes him a devil of a time to get drunk.”

When they arrived at the cafe Lawson told Philip that they would have to go in. There was hardly a bite in the autumn air, but Cronshaw had a morbid fear of draughts and even in the warmest weather sat inside.

“He knows everyone worth knowing,” Lawson explained. “He knew Pater and

Oscar Wilde, and he knows Mallarme and all those fellows.”

The object of their search sat in the most sheltered corner of the cafe, with his coat on and the collar turned up. He wore his hat pressed well down on his forehead so that he should avoid cold air. He was a big man, stout but not obese, with a round face, a small moustache, and little, rather stupid eyes. His head did not seem quite big enough for his body. It looked like a pea uneasily poised on an egg. He was playing dominoes with a Frenchman, and greeted the new-comers with a quiet smile; he did not speak, but as if to make room for them pushed away the little pile of saucers on the table which indicated the number of drinks he had already consumed. He nodded to Philip when he was introduced to him, and went on with the game. Philip’s knowledge of the language was small, but he knew enough to tell that Cronshaw, although he had lived in Paris for several years, spoke French execrably.

At last he leaned back with a smile of triumph.

“Je vous ai battu,” he said, with an abominable accent. “Garcong!”

He called the waiter and turned to Philip.

“Just out from England? See any cricket?”

Philip was a little confused at the unexpected question.

“Cronshaw knows the averages of every first-class cricketer for the last twenty years,” said Lawson, smiling.

The Frenchman left them for friends at another table, and Cronshaw, with the lazy enunciation which was one of his peculiarities, began to discourse on the relative merits of Kent and Lancashire. He told them of the last test match he had seen and described the course of the game wicket by wicket.

“That’s the only thing I miss in Paris,” he said, as he finished the bock which the waiter had brought. “You don’t get any cricket.”

Philip was disappointed, and Lawson, pardonably anxious to show off one of the celebrities of the Quarter, grew impatient. Cronshaw was taking his time to wake up that evening, though the saucers at his side indicated that he had at least made an honest attempt to get drunk. Clutton watched the scene with amusement. He fancied there was something of affectation in Cronshaw’s minute knowledge of cricket; he liked to tantalise people by talking to them of things that obviously bored them; Clutton threw in a question.

“Have you seen Mallarme lately?”

Cronshaw looked at him slowly, as if he were turning the inquiry over in his mind, and before he answered rapped on the marble table with one of the saucers.

“Bring my bottle of whiskey,” he called out. He turned again to Philip. “I keep my own bottle of whiskey. I can’t afford to pay fifty centimes for every thimbleful.”

The waiter brought the bottle, and Cronshaw held it up to the light.

“They’ve been drinking it. Waiter, who’s been helping himself to my whiskey?”

“Mais personne, Monsieur Cronshaw.”

“I made a mark on it last night, and look at it.”

“Monsieur made a mark, but he kept on drinking after that. At that rate

Monsieur wastes his time in making marks.”

The waiter was a jovial fellow and knew Cronshaw intimately. Cronshaw gazed at him.

“If you give me your word of honour as a nobleman and a gentleman that nobody but I has been drinking my whiskey, I’ll accept your statement.”

This remark, translated literally into the crudest French, sounded very funny, and the lady at the comptoir could not help laughing.

“Il est impayable,” she murmured.

Cronshaw, hearing her, turned a sheepish eye upon her; she was stout, matronly, and middle-aged; and solemnly kissed his hand to her. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Fear not, madam,” he said heavily. “I have passed the age when I am tempted by forty-five and gratitude.”

He poured himself out some whiskey and water, and slowly drank it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“He talked very well.”

Lawson and Clutton knew that Cronshaw’s remark was an answer to the question about Mallarme. Cronshaw often went to the gatherings on Tuesday evenings when the poet received men of letters and painters, and discoursed with subtle oratory on any subject that was suggested to him. Cronshaw had evidently been there lately.

“He talked very well, but he talked nonsense. He talked about art as though it were the most important thing in the world.”

“If it isn’t, what are we here for?” asked Philip.

“What you’re here for I don’t know. It is no business of mine. But art is a luxury. Men attach importance only to self-preservation and the propagation of their species. It is only when these instincts are satisfied that they consent to occupy themselves with the entertainment which is provided for them by writers, painters, and poets.”

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

Then he said: “I wrote a poem yesterday.”

Without being asked he began to recite it, very slowly, marking the rhythm with an extended forefinger. It was possibly a very fine poem, but at that moment a young woman came in. She had scarlet lips, and it was plain that the vivid colour of her cheeks was not due to the vulgarity of nature; she had blackened her eyelashes and eyebrows, and painted both eyelids a bold blue, which was continued to a triangle at the corner of the eyes. It was fantastic and amusing. Her dark hair was done over her ears in the fashion made popular by Mlle. Cleo de Merode. Philip’s eyes wandered to her, and Cronshaw, having finished the recitation of his verses, smiled upon him indulgently.

“You were not listening,” he said.

“Oh yes, I was.”

“I do not blame you, for you have given an apt illustration of the statement I just made. What is art beside love? I respect and applaud your indifference to fine poetry when you can contemplate the meretricious charms of this young person.”

She passed by the table at which they were sitting, and he took her arm.

“Come and sit by my side, dear child, and let us play the divine comedy of love.”

“Fichez-moi la paix,” she said, and pushing him on one side continued her perambulation.

“Art,” he continued, with a wave of the hand, “is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk at length. He spoke with rotund delivery. He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice. He talked of art, and literature, and life. He was by turns devout and obscene, merry and lachrymose. He grew remarkably drunk, and then he began to recite poetry, his own and Milton’s, his own and Shelley’s, his own and Kit Marlowe’s.

At last Lawson, exhausted, got up to go home.

“I shall go too,” said Philip.

Clutton, the most silent of them all, remained behind listening, with a sardonic smile on his lips, to Cronshaw’s maunderings. Lawson accompanied Philip to his hotel and then bade him good-night. But when Philip got to bed he could not sleep. All these new ideas that had been flung before him carelessly seethed in his brain. He was tremendously excited. He felt in himself great powers. He had never before been so self-confident.

“I know I shall be a great artist,” he said to himself. “I feel it in me.”

A thrill passed through him as another thought came, but even to himself he would not put it into words:

“By George, I believe I’ve got genius.”

He was in fact very drunk, but as he had not taken more than one glass of beer, it could have been due only to a more dangerous intoxicant than alcohol.

XLIII

On Tuesdays and Fridays masters spent the morning at Amitrano’s, criticising the work done. In France the painter earns little unless he paints portraits and is patronised by rich Americans; and men of reputation are glad to increase their incomes by spending two or three hours once a week at one of the numerous studios where art is taught. Tuesday was the day upon which Michel Rollin came to Amitrano’s. He was an elderly man, with a white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted a number of decorations for the State, but these were an object of derision to the students he instructed: he was a disciple of Ingres, impervious to the progress of art and angrily impatient with that tas de farceurs whose names were Manet, Degas, Monet, and Sisley; but he was an excellent teacher, helpful, polite, and encouraging. Foinet, on the other hand, who visited the studio on Fridays, was a difficult man to get on with. He was a small, shrivelled person, with bad teeth and a bilious air, an untidy gray beard, and savage eyes; his voice was high and his tone sarcastic. He had had pictures bought by the Luxembourg, and at twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his talent was due to youth rather than to personality, and for twenty years he had done nothing but repeat the landscape which had brought him his early success. When he was reproached with monotony, he answered:

“Corot only painted one thing. Why shouldn’t I?”

He was envious of everyone else’s success, and had a peculiar, personal loathing of the impressionists; for he looked upon his own failure as due to the mad fashion which had attracted the public, sale bete, to their works. The genial disdain of Michel Rollin, who called them impostors, was answered by him with vituperation, of which crapule and canaille were the least violent items; he amused himself with abuse of their private lives, and with sardonic humour, with blasphemous and obscene detail, attacked the legitimacy of their births and the purity of their conjugal relations: he used an Oriental imagery and an Oriental emphasis to accentuate his ribald scorn. Nor did he conceal his contempt for the students whose work he examined. By them he was hated and feared; the women by his brutal sarcasm he reduced often to tears, which again aroused his ridicule; and he remained at the studio, notwithstanding the protests of those who suffered too bitterly from his attacks, because there could be no doubt that he was one of the best masters in Paris. Sometimes the old model who kept the school ventured to remonstrate with him, but his expostulations quickly gave way before the violent insolence of the painter to abject apologies.

It was Foinet with whom Philip first came in contact. He was already in the studio when Philip arrived. He went round from easel to easel, with Mrs. Otter, the massiere, by his side to interpret his remarks for the benefit of those who could not understand French. Fanny Price, sitting next to Philip, was working feverishly. Her face was sallow with nervousness, and every now and then she stopped to wipe her hands on her blouse; for they were hot with anxiety. Suddenly she turned to Philip with an anxious look, which she tried to hide by a sullen frown.

“D’you think it’s good?” she asked, nodding at her drawing.

Philip got up and looked at it. He was astounded; he felt she must have no eye at all; the thing was hopelessly out of drawing.

“I wish I could draw half as well myself,” he answered.

“You can’t expect to, you’ve only just come. It’s a bit too much to expect that you should draw as well as I do. I’ve been here two years.”

Fanny Price puzzled Philip. Her conceit was stupendous. Philip had already discovered that everyone in the studio cordially disliked her; and it was no wonder, for she seemed to go out of her way to wound people.

“I complained to Mrs. Otter about Foinet,” she said now. “The last two weeks he hasn’t looked at my drawings. He spends about half an hour on Mrs. Otter because she’s the massiere. After all I pay as much as anybody else, and I suppose my money’s as good as theirs. I don’t see why I shouldn’t get as much attention as anybody else.”

She took up her charcoal again, but in a moment put it down with a groan.

“I can’t do any more now. I’m so frightfully nervous.”

She looked at Foinet, who was coming towards them with Mrs. Otter. Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-satisfied, wore an air of importance. Foinet sat down at the easel of an untidy little Englishwoman called Ruth Chalice. She had the fine black eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but sensual, the skin like old ivory, which under the influence of Burne-Jones were cultivated at that time by young ladies in Chelsea. Foinet seemed in a pleasant mood; he did not say much to her, but with quick, determined strokes of her charcoal pointed out her errors. Miss Chalice beamed with pleasure when he rose. He came to Clutton, and by this time Philip was nervous too but Mrs. Otter had promised to make things easy for him. Foinet stood for a moment in front of Clutton’s work, biting his thumb silently, then absent-mindedly spat out upon the canvas the little piece of skin which he had bitten off.

“That’s a fine line,” he said at last, indicating with his thumb what pleased him. “You’re beginning to learn to draw.”

Clutton did not answer, but looked at the master with his usual air of sardonic indifference to the world’s opinion.

“I’m beginning to think you have at least a trace of talent.”

Mrs. Otter, who did not like Clutton, pursed her lips. She did not see anything out of the way in his work. Foinet sat down and went into technical details. Mrs. Otter grew rather tired of standing. Clutton did not say anything, but nodded now and then, and Foinet felt with satisfaction that he grasped what he said and the reasons of it; most of them listened to him, but it was clear they never understood. Then Foinet got up and came to Philip.

“He only arrived two days ago,” Mrs. Otter hurried to explain. “He’s a beginner. He’s never studied before.”

“Ca se voit,” the master said. “One sees that.”

He passed on, and Mrs. Otter murmured to him:

“This is the young lady I told you about.”

He looked at her as though she were some repulsive animal, and his voice grew more rasping.

“It appears that you do not think I pay enough attention to you. You have been complaining to the massiere. Well, show me this work to which you wish me to give attention.”

Fanny Price coloured. The blood under her unhealthy skin seemed to be of a strange purple. Without answering she pointed to the drawing on which she had been at work since the beginning of the week. Foinet sat down.

“Well, what do you wish me to say to you? Do you wish me to tell you it is good? It isn’t. Do you wish me to tell you it is well drawn? It isn’t. Do you wish me to say it has merit? It hasn’t. Do you wish me to show you what is wrong with it? It is all wrong. Do you wish me to tell you what to do with it? Tear it up. Are you satisfied now?”

Miss Price became very white. She was furious because he had said all this before Mrs. Otter. Though she had been in France so long and could understand French well enough, she could hardly speak two words.

“He’s got no right to treat me like that. My money’s as good as anyone else’s. I pay him to teach me. That’s not teaching me.”

“What does she say? What does she say?” asked Foinet.

Mrs. Otter hesitated to translate, and Miss Price repeated in execrable

French.

“Je vous paye pour m’apprendre.”

His eyes flashed with rage, he raised his voice and shook his fist.

“Mais, nom de Dieu, I can’t teach you. I could more easily teach a camel.” He turned to Mrs. Otter. “Ask her, does she do this for amusement, or does she expect to earn money by it?”

“I’m going to earn my living as an artist,” Miss Price answered.

“Then it is my duty to tell you that you are wasting your time. It would not matter that you have no talent, talent does not run about the streets in these days, but you have not the beginning of an aptitude. How long have you been here? A child of five after two lessons would draw better than you do. I only say one thing to you, give up this hopeless attempt. You’re more likely to earn your living as a bonne a tout faire than as a painter. Look.”

He seized a piece of charcoal, and it broke as he applied it to the paper. He cursed, and with the stump drew great firm lines. He drew rapidly and spoke at the same time, spitting out the words with venom.

“Look, those arms are not the same length. That knee, it’s grotesque. I tell you a child of five. You see, she’s not standing on her legs. That foot!”

With each word the angry pencil made a mark, and in a moment the drawing upon which Fanny Price had spent so much time and eager trouble was unrecognisable, a confusion of lines and smudges. At last he flung down the charcoal and stood up.

“Take my advice, Mademoiselle, try dressmaking.” He looked at his watch.

“It’s twelve. A la semaine prochaine, messieurs.”

Miss Price gathered up her things slowly. Philip waited behind after the others to say to her something consolatory. He could think of nothing but:

“I say, I’m awfully sorry. What a beast that man is!”

She turned on him savagely.

“Is that what you’re waiting about for? When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it. Please get out of my way.”

She walked past him, out of the studio, and Philip, with a shrug of the shoulders, limped along to Gravier’s for luncheon.

“It served her right,” said Lawson, when Philip told him what had happened. “Ill-tempered slut.”

Lawson was very sensitive to criticism and, in order to avoid it, never went to the studio when Foinet was coming.

“I don’t want other people’s opinion of my work,” he said. “I know myself if it’s good or bad.”

“You mean you don’t want other people’s bad opinion of your work,” answered Clutton dryly.

In the afternoon Philip thought he would go to the Luxembourg to see the pictures, and walking through the garden he saw Fanny Price sitting in her accustomed seat. He was sore at the rudeness with which she had met his well-meant attempt to say something pleasant, and passed as though he had not caught sight of her. But she got up at once and came towards him.

“Are you trying to cut me?” she said.

“No, of course not. I thought perhaps you didn’t want to be spoken to.”

“Where are you going?”

“I wanted to have a look at the Manet, I’ve heard so much about it.”

“Would you like me to come with you? I know the Luxembourg rather well. I could show you one or two good things.”

He understood that, unable to bring herself to apologise directly, she made this offer as amends.

“It’s awfully kind of you. I should like it very much.”

“You needn’t say yes if you’d rather go alone,” she said suspiciously.

“I wouldn’t.”

They walked towards the gallery. Caillebotte’s collection had lately been placed on view, and the student for the first time had the opportunity to examine at his ease the works of the impressionists. Till then it had been possible to see them only at Durand-Ruel’s shop in the Rue Lafitte (and the dealer, unlike his fellows in England, who adopt towards the painter an attitude of superiority, was always pleased to show the shabbiest student whatever he wanted to see), or at his private house, to which it was not difficult to get a card of admission on Tuesdays, and where you might see pictures of world-wide reputation. Miss Price led Philip straight up to Manet’s Olympia. He looked at it in astonished silence.

“Do you like it?” asked Miss Price.

“I don’t know,” he answered helplessly.

“You can take it from me that it’s the best thing in the gallery except perhaps Whistler’s portrait of his mother.”

She gave him a certain time to contemplate the masterpiece and then took him to a picture representing a railway-station.

“Look, here’s a Monet,” she said. “It’s the Gare St. Lazare.”

“But the railway lines aren’t parallel,” said Philip.

“What does that matter?” she asked, with a haughty air.

Philip felt ashamed of himself. Fanny Price had picked up the glib chatter of the studios and had no difficulty in impressing Philip with the extent of her knowledge. She proceeded to explain the pictures to him, superciliously but not without insight, and showed him what the painters had attempted and what he must look for. She talked with much gesticulation of the thumb, and Philip, to whom all she said was new, listened with profound but bewildered interest. Till now he had worshipped Watts and Burne-Jones. The pretty colour of the first, the affected drawing of the second, had entirely satisfied his aesthetic sensibilities. Their vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was something quite different: here was no moral appeal; and the contemplation of these works could help no one to lead a purer and a higher life. He was puzzled.

At last he said: “You know, I’m simply dead. I don’t think I can absorb anything more profitably. Let’s go and sit down on one of the benches.”

“It’s better not to take too much art at a time,” Miss Price answered.

When they got outside he thanked her warmly for the trouble she had taken.

“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, a little ungraciously. “I do it because I enjoy it. We’ll go to the Louvre tomorrow if you like, and then I’ll take you to Durand-Ruel’s.”

“You’re really awfully good to me.”

“You don’t think me such a beast as the most of them do.”

“I don’t,” he smiled.

“They think they’ll drive me away from the studio; but they won’t; I shall stay there just exactly as long as it suits me. All that this morning, it was Lucy Otter’s doing, I know it was. She always has hated me. She thought after that I’d take myself off. I daresay she’d like me to go. She’s afraid I know too much about her.”

Miss Price told him a long, involved story, which made out that Mrs.

Otter, a humdrum and respectable little person, had scabrous intrigues.

Then she talked of Ruth Chalice, the girl whom Foinet had praised that

morning.

“She’s been with every one of the fellows at the studio. She’s nothing better than a street-walker. And she’s dirty. She hasn’t had a bath for a month. I know it for a fact.”

Philip listened uncomfortably. He had heard already that various rumours were in circulation about Miss Chalice; but it was ridiculous to suppose that Mrs. Otter, living with her mother, was anything but rigidly virtuous. The woman walking by his side with her malignant lying positively horrified him.

“I don’t care what they say. I shall go on just the same. I know I’ve got it in me. I feel I’m an artist. I’d sooner kill myself than give it up. Oh, I shan’t be the first they’ve all laughed at in the schools and then he’s turned out the only genius of the lot. Art’s the only thing I care for, I’m willing to give my whole life to it. It’s only a question of sticking to it and pegging away.”

She found discreditable motives for everyone who would not take her at her own estimate of herself. She detested Clutton. She told Philip that his friend had no talent really; it was just flashy and superficial; he couldn’t compose a figure to save his life. And Lawson:

“Little beast, with his red hair and his freckles. He’s so afraid of

Foinet that he won’t let him see his work. After all, I don’t funk it, do

I? I don’t care what Foinet says to me, I know I’m a real artist.”

They reached the street in which she lived, and with a sigh of relief

Philip left her.

XLIV

But notwithstanding when Miss Price on the following Sunday offered to take him to the Louvre Philip accepted. She showed him Mona Lisa. He looked at it with a slight feeling of disappointment, but he had read till he knew by heart the jewelled words with which Walter Pater has added beauty to the most famous picture in the world; and these now he repeated to Miss Price.

“That’s all literature,” she said, a little contemptuously. “You must get away from that.”

She showed him the Rembrandts, and she said many appropriate things about them. She stood in front of the Disciples at Emmaus.

“When you feel the beauty of that,” she said, “you’ll know something about painting.”

She showed him the Odalisque and La Source of Ingres. Fanny Price was a peremptory guide, she would not let him look at the things he wished, and attempted to force his admiration for all she admired. She was desperately in earnest with her study of art, and when Philip, passing in the Long Gallery a window that looked out on the Tuileries, gay, sunny, and urbane, like a picture by Raffaelli, exclaimed:

“I say, how jolly! Do let’s stop here a minute.”

She said, indifferently: “Yes, it’s all right. But we’ve come here to look at pictures.”

The autumn air, blithe and vivacious, elated Philip; and when towards mid-day they stood in the great court-yard of the Louvre, he felt inclined to cry like Flanagan: To hell with art.

“I say, do let’s go to one of those restaurants in the Boul’ Mich’ and have a snack together, shall we?” he suggested.

Miss Price gave him a suspicious look.

“I’ve got my lunch waiting for me at home,” she answered.

“That doesn’t matter. You can eat it tomorrow. Do let me stand you a lunch.”

“I don’t know why you want to.”

“It would give me pleasure,” he replied, smiling.

They crossed the river, and at the corner of the Boulevard St. Michel there was a restaurant.

“Let’s go in there.”

“No, I won’t go there, it looks too expensive.”

She walked on firmly, and Philip was obliged to follow. A few steps brought them to a smaller restaurant, where a dozen people were already lunching on the pavement under an awning; on the window was announced in large white letters: Dejeuner 1.25, vin compris.

“We couldn’t have anything cheaper than this, and it looks quite all right.”

They sat down at a vacant table and waited for the omelette which was the first article on the bill of fare. Philip gazed with delight upon the passers-by. His heart went out to them. He was tired but very happy.

“I say, look at that man in the blouse. Isn’t he ripping!”

He glanced at Miss Price, and to his astonishment saw that she was looking down at her plate, regardless of the passing spectacle, and two heavy tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“What on earth’s the matter?” he exclaimed.

“If you say anything to me I shall get up and go at once,” she answered.

He was entirely puzzled, but fortunately at that moment the omelette came. He divided it in two and they began to eat. Philip did his best to talk of indifferent things, and it seemed as though Miss Price were making an effort on her side to be agreeable; but the luncheon was not altogether a success. Philip was squeamish, and the way in which Miss Price ate took his appetite away. She ate noisily, greedily, a little like a wild beast in a menagerie, and after she had finished each course rubbed the plate with pieces of bread till it was white and shining, as if she did not wish to lose a single drop of gravy. They had Camembert cheese, and it disgusted Philip to see that she ate rind and all of the portion that was given her. She could not have eaten more ravenously if she were starving.

Miss Price was unaccountable, and having parted from her on one day with friendliness he could never tell whether on the next she would not be sulky and uncivil; but he learned a good deal from her: though she could not draw well herself, she knew all that could be taught, and her constant suggestions helped his progress. Mrs. Otter was useful to him too, and sometimes Miss Chalice criticised his work; he learned from the glib loquacity of Lawson and from the example of Clutton. But Fanny Price hated him to take suggestions from anyone but herself, and when he asked her help after someone else had been talking to him she would refuse with brutal rudeness. The other fellows, Lawson, Clutton, Flanagan, chaffed him about her.

“You be careful, my lad,” they said, “she’s in love with you.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” he laughed.

The thought that Miss Price could be in love with anyone was preposterous. It made him shudder when he thought of her uncomeliness, the bedraggled hair and the dirty hands, the brown dress she always wore, stained and ragged at the hem: he supposed she was hard up, they were all hard up, but she might at least be clean; and it was surely possible with a needle and thread to make her skirt tidy.

Philip began to sort his impressions of the people he was thrown in contact with. He was not so ingenuous as in those days which now seemed so long ago at Heidelberg, and, beginning to take a more deliberate interest in humanity, he was inclined to examine and to criticise. He found it difficult to know Clutton any better after seeing him every day for three months than on the first day of their acquaintance. The general impression at the studio was that he was able; it was supposed that he would do great things, and he shared the general opinion; but what exactly he was going to do neither he nor anybody else quite knew. He had worked at several studios before Amitrano’s, at Julian’s, the Beaux Arts, and MacPherson’s, and was remaining longer at Amitrano’s than anywhere because he found himself more left alone. He was not fond of showing his work, and unlike most of the young men who were studying art neither sought nor gave advice. It was said that in the little studio in the Rue Campagne Premiere, which served him for work-room and bed-room, he had wonderful pictures which would make his reputation if only he could be induced to exhibit them. He could not afford a model but painted still life, and Lawson constantly talked of a plate of apples which he declared was a masterpiece. He was fastidious, and, aiming at something he did not quite fully grasp, was constantly dissatisfied with his work as a whole: perhaps a part would please him, the forearm or the leg and foot of a figure, a glass or a cup in a still-life; and he would cut this out and keep it, destroying the rest of the canvas; so that when people invited themselves to see his work he could truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show. In Brittany he had come across a painter whom nobody else had heard of, a queer fellow who had been a stockbroker and taken up painting at middle-age, and he was greatly influenced by his work. He was turning his back on the impressionists and working out for himself painfully an individual way not only of painting but of seeing. Philip felt in him something strangely original.

At Gravier’s where they ate, and in the evening at the Versailles or at the Closerie des Lilas Clutton was inclined to taciturnity. He sat quietly, with a sardonic expression on his gaunt face, and spoke only when the opportunity occurred to throw in a witticism. He liked a butt and was most cheerful when someone was there on whom he could exercise his sarcasm. He seldom talked of anything but painting, and then only with the one or two persons whom he thought worth while. Philip wondered whether there was in him really anything: his reticence, the haggard look of him, the pungent humour, seemed to suggest personality, but might be no more than an effective mask which covered nothing.

With Lawson on the other hand Philip soon grew intimate. He had a variety of interests which made him an agreeable companion. He read more than most of the students and though his income was small, loved to buy books. He lent them willingly; and Philip became acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, with Verlaine, Heredia, and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. They went to plays together and sometimes to the gallery of the Opera Comique. There was the Odeon quite near them, and Philip soon shared his friend’s passion for the tragedians of Louis XIV and the sonorous Alexandrine. In the Rue Taitbout were the Concerts Rouge, where for seventy-five centimes they could hear excellent music and get into the bargain something which it was quite possible to drink: the seats were uncomfortable, the place was crowded, the air thick with caporal horrible to breathe, but in their young enthusiasm they were indifferent. Sometimes they went to the Bal Bullier. On these occasions Flanagan accompanied them. His excitability and his roisterous enthusiasm made them laugh. He was an excellent dancer, and before they had been ten minutes in the room he was prancing round with some little shop-girl whose acquaintance he had just made.

The desire of all of them was to have a mistress. It was part of the paraphernalia of the art-student in Paris. It gave consideration in the eyes of one’s fellows. It was something to boast about. But the difficulty was that they had scarcely enough money to keep themselves, and though they argued that French-women were so clever it cost no more to keep two then one, they found it difficult to meet young women who were willing to take that view of the circumstances. They had to content themselves for the most part with envying and abusing the ladies who received protection from painters of more settled respectability than their own. It was extraordinary how difficult these things were in Paris. Lawson would become acquainted with some young thing and make an appointment; for twenty-four hours he would be all in a flutter and describe the charmer at length to everyone he met; but she never by any chance turned up at the time fixed. He would come to Gravier’s very late, ill-tempered, and exclaim:

“Confound it, another rabbit! I don’t know why it is they don’t like me. I suppose it’s because I don’t speak French well, or my red hair. It’s too sickening to have spent over a year in Paris without getting hold of anyone.”

“You don’t go the right way to work,” said Flanagan.

He had a long and enviable list of triumphs to narrate, and though they took leave not to believe all he said, evidence forced them to acknowledge that he did not altogether lie. But he sought no permanent arrangement. He only had two years in Paris: he had persuaded his people to let him come and study art instead of going to college; but at the end of that period he was to return to Seattle and go into his father’s business. He had made up his mind to get as much fun as possible into the time, and demanded variety rather than duration in his love affairs.

“I don’t know how you get hold of them,” said Lawson furiously.

“There’s no difficulty about that, sonny,” answered Flanagan. “You just go right in. The difficulty is to get rid of them. That’s where you want tact.”

Philip was too much occupied with his work, the books he was reading, the plays he saw, the conversation he listened to, to trouble himself with the desire for female society. He thought there would be plenty of time for that when he could speak French more glibly.

It was more than a year now since he had seen Miss Wilkinson, and during his first weeks in Paris he had been too busy to answer a letter she had written to him just before he left Blackstable. When another came, knowing it would be full of reproaches and not being just then in the mood for them, he put it aside, intending to open it later; but he forgot and did not run across it till a month afterwards, when he was turning out a drawer to find some socks that had no holes in them. He looked at the unopened letter with dismay. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson had suffered a good deal, and it made him feel a brute; but she had probably got over the suffering by now, at all events the worst of it. It suggested itself to him that women were often very emphatic in their expressions. These did not mean so much as when men used them. He had quite made up his mind that nothing would induce him ever to see her again. He had not written for so long that it seemed hardly worth while to write now. He made up his mind not to read the letter.

“I daresay she won’t write again,” he said to himself. “She can’t help seeing the thing’s over. After all, she was old enough to be my mother; she ought to have known better.”

For an hour or two he felt a little uncomfortable. His attitude was obviously the right one, but he could not help a feeling of dissatisfaction with the whole business. Miss Wilkinson, however, did not write again; nor did she, as he absurdly feared, suddenly appear in Paris to make him ridiculous before his friends. In a little while he clean forgot her.

Meanwhile he definitely forsook his old gods. The amazement with which at first he had looked upon the works of the impressionists, changed to admiration; and presently he found himself talking as emphatically as the rest on the merits of Manet, Monet, and Degas. He bought a photograph of a drawing by Ingres of the Odalisque and a photograph of the Olympia. They were pinned side by side over his washing-stand so that he could contemplate their beauty while he shaved. He knew now quite positively that there had been no painting of landscape before Monet; and he felt a real thrill when he stood in front of Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus or Velasquez’ Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. That was not her real name, but by that she was distinguished at Gravier’s to emphasise the picture’s beauty notwithstanding the somewhat revolting peculiarity of the sitter’s appearance. With Ruskin, Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the neat blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to Paris; and now disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed hat, a flowing black cravat, and a cape of romantic cut. He walked along the Boulevard du Montparnasse as though he had known it all his life, and by virtuous perseverance he had learnt to drink absinthe without distaste. He was letting his hair grow, and it was only because Nature is unkind and has no regard for the immortal longings of youth that he did not attempt a beard.

XLV

Philip soon realised that the spirit which informed his friends was Cronshaw’s. It was from him that Lawson got his paradoxes; and even Clutton, who strained after individuality, expressed himself in the terms he had insensibly acquired from the older man. It was his ideas that they bandied about at table, and on his authority they formed their judgments. They made up for the respect with which unconsciously they treated him by laughing at his foibles and lamenting his vices.

“Of course, poor old Cronshaw will never do any good,” they said. “He’s quite hopeless.”

They prided themselves on being alone in appreciating his genius; and though, with the contempt of youth for the follies of middle-age, they patronised him among themselves, they did not fail to look upon it as a feather in their caps if he had chosen a time when only one was there to be particularly wonderful. Cronshaw never came to Gravier’s. For the last four years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom only Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of one of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands Augustins: Lawson described with gusto the filth, the untidiness, the litter.

“And the stink nearly blew your head off.”

“Not at dinner, Lawson,” expostulated one of the others.

But he would not deny himself the pleasure of giving picturesque details of the odours which met his nostril. With a fierce delight in his own realism he described the woman who had opened the door for him. She was dark, small, and fat, quite young, with black hair that seemed always on the point of coming down. She wore a slatternly blouse and no corsets. With her red cheeks, large sensual mouth, and shining, lewd eyes, she reminded you of the Bohemienne in the Louvre by Franz Hals. She had a flaunting vulgarity which amused and yet horrified. A scrubby, unwashed baby was playing on the floor. It was known that the slut deceived Cronshaw with the most worthless ragamuffins of the Quarter, and it was a mystery to the ingenuous youths who absorbed his wisdom over a cafe table that Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his passion for beauty could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed to revel in the coarseness of her language and would often report some phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically as la fille de mon concierge. Cronshaw was very poor. He earned a bare subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of pictures for one or two English papers, and he did a certain amount of translating. He had been on the staff of an English paper in Paris, but had been dismissed for drunkenness; he still however did odd jobs for it, describing sales at the Hotel Drouot or the revues at music-halls. The life of Paris had got into his bones, and he would not change it, notwithstanding its squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any other in the world. He remained there all through the year, even in summer when everyone he knew was away, and felt himself only at ease within a mile of the Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious thing was that he had never learnt to speak French passably, and he kept in his shabby clothes bought at La Belle Jardiniere an ineradicably English appearance.

He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and a half ago when conversation was a passport to good company and inebriety no bar.

“I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,” he said himself. “What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the conversation of bishops.”

He quoted the romantic Rolla,

“Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.”

He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip, who seemed to achieve the difficult feat of talking just enough to suggest conversation and not too much to prevent monologue. Philip was captivated. He did not realise that little that Cronshaw said was new. His personality in conversation had a curious power. He had a beautiful and a sonorous voice, and a manner of putting things which was irresistible to youth. All he said seemed to excite thought, and often on the way home Lawson and Philip would walk to and from one another’s hotels, discussing some point which a chance word of Cronshaw had suggested. It was disconcerting to Philip, who had a youthful eagerness for results, that Cronshaw’s poetry hardly came up to expectation. It had never been published in a volume, but most of it had appeared in periodicals; and after a good deal of persuasion Cronshaw brought down a bundle of pages torn out of The Yellow Book, The Saturday Review, and other journals, on each of which was a poem. Philip was taken aback to find that most of them reminded him either of Henley or of Swinburne. It needed the splendour of Cronshaw’s delivery to make them personal. He expressed his disappointment to Lawson, who carelessly repeated his words; and next time Philip went to the Closerie des Lilas the poet turned to him with his sleek smile:

“I hear you don’t think much of my verses.”

Philip was embarrassed.

“I don’t know about that,” he answered. “I enjoyed reading them very much.”

“Do not attempt to spare my feelings,” returned Cronshaw, with a wave of his fat hand. “I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to existence. And as for posterity — damn posterity.”

Philip smiled, for it leaped to one’s eyes that the artist in life had produced no more than a wretched daub. Cronshaw looked at him meditatively and filled his glass. He sent the waiter for a packet of cigarettes.

“You are amused because I talk in this fashion and you know that I am poor and live in an attic with a vulgar trollop who deceives me with hair-dressers and garcons de cafe; I translate wretched books for the British public, and write articles upon contemptible pictures which deserve not even to be abused. But pray tell me what is the meaning of life?”

“I say, that’s rather a difficult question. Won’t you give the answer yourself?”

“No, because it’s worthless unless you yourself discover it. But what do you suppose you are in the world for?”

Philip had never asked himself, and he thought for a moment before replying.

“Oh, I don’t know: I suppose to do one’s duty, and make the best possible use of one’s faculties, and avoid hurting other people.”

“In short, to do unto others as you would they should do unto you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Christianity.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Philip indignantly. “It has nothing to do with

Christianity. It’s just abstract morality.”

“But there’s no such thing as abstract morality.”

“In that case, supposing under the influence of liquor you left your purse behind when you leave here and I picked it up, why do you imagine that I should return it to you? It’s not the fear of the police.”

“It’s the dread of hell if you sin and the hope of Heaven if you are virtuous.”

“But I believe in neither.”

“That may be. Neither did Kant when he devised the Categorical Imperative. You have thrown aside a creed, but you have preserved the ethic which was based upon it. To all intents you are a Christian still, and if there is a God in Heaven you will undoubtedly receive your reward. The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out. If you keep His laws I don’t think He can care a packet of pins whether you believe in Him or not.”

“But if I left my purse behind you would certainly return it to me,” said

Philip.

“Not from motives of abstract morality, but only from fear of the police.”

“It’s a thousand to one that the police would never find out.”

“My ancestors have lived in a civilised state so long that the fear of the police has eaten into my bones. The daughter of my concierge would not hesitate for a moment. You answer that she belongs to the criminal classes; not at all, she is merely devoid of vulgar prejudice.”

“But then that does away with honour and virtue and goodness and decency and everything,” said Philip.

“Have you ever committed a sin?”

“I don’t know, I suppose so,” answered Philip.

“You speak with the lips of a dissenting minister. I have never committed a sin.”

Cronshaw in his shabby great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his hat well down on his head, with his red fat face and his little gleaming eyes, looked extraordinarily comic; but Philip was too much in earnest to laugh.

“Have you never done anything you regret?”

“How can I regret when what I did was inevitable?” asked Cronshaw in return.

“But that’s fatalism.”

“The illusion which man has that his will is free is so deeply rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I were a free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. It was inevitable. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad I can accept no censure.”

“My brain reels,” said Philip.

“Have some whiskey,” returned Cronshaw, passing over the bottle. “There’s nothing like it for clearing the head. You must expect to be thick-witted if you insist upon drinking beer.”

Philip shook his head, and Cronshaw proceeded:

“You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink. Sobriety disturbs conversation. But when I speak of good and bad…” Philip saw he was taking up the thread of his discourse, “I speak conventionally. I attach no meaning to those words. I refuse to make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no signification for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.”

“But there are one or two other people in the world,” objected Philip.

“I speak only for myself. I know them only as they limit my activities. Round each of them too the world turns, and each one for himself is the centre of the universe. My right over them extends only as far as my power. What I can do is the only limit of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in society, and society holds together by means of force, force of arms (that is the policeman) and force of public opinion (that is Mrs. Grundy). You have society on one hand and the individual on the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation. It is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept society and not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay it protects me, a weakling, against the tyranny of another stronger than I am; but I submit to its laws because I must; I do not acknowledge their justice: I do not know justice, I only know power. And when I have paid for the policeman who protects me and, if I live in a country where conscription is in force, served in the army which guards my house and land from the invader, I am quits with society: for the rest I counter its might with my wiliness. It makes laws for its self-preservation, and if I break them it imprisons or kills me: it has the might to do so and therefore the right. If I break the laws I will accept the vengeance of the state, but I will not regard it as punishment nor shall I feel myself convicted of wrong-doing. Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion, I despise honours and I can do very well without riches.”

“But if everyone thought like you things would go to pieces at once.”

“I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.”

“It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,” said Philip.

“But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?”

“Yes.”

“It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.”

“No, no, no!” cried Philip.

Cronshaw chuckled.

“You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.”

“But have you never known people do things they didn’t want to instead of things they did?”

“No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct.”

“But if all that is true,” cried Philip, “what is the use of anything? If you take away duty and goodness and beauty why are we brought into the world?”

“Here comes the gorgeous East to suggest an answer,” smiled Cronshaw.

He pointed to two persons who at that moment opened the door of the cafe, and, with a blast of cold air, entered. They were Levantines, itinerant vendors of cheap rugs, and each bore on his arm a bundle. It was Sunday evening, and the cafe was very full. They passed among the tables, and in that atmosphere heavy and discoloured with tobacco smoke, rank with humanity, they seemed to bring an air of mystery. They were clad in European, shabby clothes, their thin great-coats were threadbare, but each wore a tarbouch. Their faces were gray with cold. One was of middle age, with a black beard, but the other was a youth of eighteen, with a face deeply scarred by smallpox and with one eye only. They passed by Cronshaw and Philip.

“Allah is great, and Mahomet is his prophet,” said Cronshaw impressively.

The elder advanced with a cringing smile, like a mongrel used to blows. With a sidelong glance at the door and a quick surreptitious movement he showed a pornographic picture.

“Are you Masr-ed-Deen, the merchant of Alexandria, or is it from far Bagdad that you bring your goods, O, my uncle; and yonder one-eyed youth, do I see in him one of the three kings of whom Scheherazade told stories to her lord?”

The pedlar’s smile grew more ingratiating, though he understood no word of what Cronshaw said, and like a conjurer he produced a sandalwood box.

“Nay, show us the priceless web of Eastern looms,” quoth Cronshaw. “For I would point a moral and adorn a tale.”

The Levantine unfolded a table-cloth, red and yellow, vulgar, hideous, and grotesque.

“Thirty-five francs,” he said.

“O, my uncle, this cloth knew not the weavers of Samarkand, and those colours were never made in the vats of Bokhara.”

“Twenty-five francs,” smiled the pedlar obsequiously.

“Ultima Thule was the place of its manufacture, even Birmingham the place of my birth.”

“Fifteen francs,” cringed the bearded man.

“Get thee gone, fellow,” said Cronshaw. “May wild asses defile the grave of thy maternal grandmother.”

Imperturbably, but smiling no more, the Levantine passed with his wares to another table. Cronshaw turned to Philip.

“Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these days the answer will come to you.”

“You are cryptic,” said Philip.

“I am drunk,” answered Cronshaw.

XLVI

Philip did not find living in Paris as cheap as he had been led to believe and by February had spent most of the money with which he started. He was too proud to appeal to his guardian, nor did he wish Aunt Louisa to know that his circumstances were straitened, since he was certain she would make an effort to send him something from her own pocket, and he knew how little she could afford to. In three months he would attain his majority and come into possession of his small fortune. He tided over the interval by selling the few trinkets which he had inherited from his father.

At about this time Lawson suggested that they should take a small studio which was vacant in one of the streets that led out of the Boulevard Raspail. It was very cheap. It had a room attached, which they could use as a bed-room; and since Philip was at the school every morning Lawson could have the undisturbed use of the studio then; Lawson, after wandering from school to school, had come to the conclusion that he could work best alone, and proposed to get a model in three or four days a week. At first Philip hesitated on account of the expense, but they reckoned it out; and it seemed (they were so anxious to have a studio of their own that they calculated pragmatically) that the cost would not be much greater than that of living in a hotel. Though the rent and the cleaning by the concierge would come to a little more, they would save on the petit dejeuner, which they could make themselves. A year or two earlier Philip would have refused to share a room with anyone, since he was so sensitive about his deformed foot, but his morbid way of looking at it was growing less marked: in Paris it did not seem to matter so much, and, though he never by any chance forgot it himself, he ceased to feel that other people were constantly noticing it.

They moved in, bought a couple of beds, a washing-stand, a few chairs, and felt for the first time the thrill of possession. They were so excited that the first night they went to bed in what they could call a home they lay awake talking till three in the morning; and next day found lighting the fire and making their own coffee, which they had in pyjamas, such a jolly business that Philip did not get to Amitrano’s till nearly eleven. He was in excellent spirits. He nodded to Fanny Price.

“How are you getting on?” he asked cheerily.

“What does that matter to you?” she asked in reply.

Philip could not help laughing.

“Don’t jump down my throat. I was only trying to make myself polite.”

“I don’t want your politeness.”

“D’you think it’s worth while quarrelling with me too?” asked Philip mildly. “There are so few people you’re on speaking terms with, as it is.”

“That’s my business, isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

He began to work, vaguely wondering why Fanny Price made herself so disagreeable. He had come to the conclusion that he thoroughly disliked her. Everyone did. People were only civil to her at all from fear of the malice of her tongue; for to their faces and behind their backs she said abominable things. But Philip was feeling so happy that he did not want even Miss Price to bear ill-feeling towards him. He used the artifice which had often before succeeded in banishing her ill-humour.

“I say, I wish you’d come and look at my drawing. I’ve got in an awful mess.”

“Thank you very much, but I’ve got something better to do with my time.”

Philip stared at her in surprise, for the one thing she could be counted upon to do with alacrity was to give advice. She went on quickly in a low voice, savage with fury.

“Now that Lawson’s gone you think you’ll put up with me. Thank you very much. Go and find somebody else to help you. I don’t want anybody else’s leavings.”

Lawson had the pedagogic instinct; whenever he found anything out he was eager to impart it; and because he taught with delight he talked with profit. Philip, without thinking anything about it, had got into the habit of sitting by his side; it never occurred to him that Fanny Price was consumed with jealousy, and watched his acceptance of someone else’s tuition with ever-increasing anger.

“You were very glad to put up with me when you knew nobody here,” she said bitterly, “and as soon as you made friends with other people you threw me aside, like an old glove” — she repeated the stale metaphor with satisfaction— “like an old glove. All right, I don’t care, but I’m not going to be made a fool of another time.”

There was a suspicion of truth in what she said, and it made Philip angry enough to answer what first came into his head.

“Hang it all, I only asked your advice because I saw it pleased you.”

She gave a gasp and threw him a sudden look of anguish. Then two tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked frowsy and grotesque. Philip, not knowing what on earth this new attitude implied, went back to his work. He was uneasy and conscience-stricken; but he would not go to her and say he was sorry if he had caused her pain, because he was afraid she would take the opportunity to snub him. For two or three weeks she did not speak to him, and, after Philip had got over the discomfort of being cut by her, he was somewhat relieved to be free from so difficult a friendship. He had been a little disconcerted by the air of proprietorship she assumed over him. She was an extraordinary woman. She came every day to the studio at eight o’clock, and was ready to start working when the model was in position; she worked steadily, talking to no one, struggling hour after hour with difficulties she could not overcome, and remained till the clock struck twelve. Her work was hopeless. There was not in it the smallest approach even to the mediocre achievement at which most of the young persons were able after some months to arrive. She wore every day the same ugly brown dress, with the mud of the last wet day still caked on the hem and with the raggedness, which Philip had noticed the first time he saw her, still unmended.

But one day she came up to him, and with a scarlet face asked whether she might speak to him afterwards.

“Of course, as much as you like,” smiled Philip. “I’ll wait behind at twelve.”

He went to her when the day’s work was over.

“Will you walk a little bit with me?” she said, looking away from him with embarrassment.

“Certainly.”

They walked for two or three minutes in silence.

“D’you remember what you said to me the other day?” she asked then on a sudden.

“Oh, I say, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Philip. “It really isn’t worth while.”

She gave a quick, painful inspiration.

“I don’t want to quarrel with you. You’re the only friend I had in Paris. I thought you rather liked me. I felt there was something between us. I was drawn towards you — you know what I mean, your club-foot.”

Philip reddened and instinctively tried to walk without a limp. He did not like anyone to mention the deformity. He knew what Fanny Price meant. She was ugly and uncouth, and because he was deformed there was between them a certain sympathy. He was very angry with her, but he forced himself not to speak.

“You said you only asked my advice to please me. Don’t you think my work’s any good?”

“I’ve only seen your drawing at Amitrano’s. It’s awfully hard to judge from that.”

“I was wondering if you’d come and look at my other work. I’ve never asked anyone else to look at it. I should like to show it to you.”

“It’s awfully kind of you. I’d like to see it very much.”

“I live quite near here,” she said apologetically. “It’ll only take you ten minutes.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.

They were walking along the boulevard, and she turned down a side street, then led him into another, poorer still, with cheap shops on the ground floor, and at last stopped. They climbed flight after flight of stairs. She unlocked a door, and they went into a tiny attic with a sloping roof and a small window. This was closed and the room had a musty smell. Though it was very cold there was no fire and no sign that there had been one. The bed was unmade. A chair, a chest of drawers which served also as a wash-stand, and a cheap easel, were all the furniture. The place would have been squalid enough in any case, but the litter, the untidiness, made the impression revolting. On the chimney-piece, scattered over with paints and brushes, were a cup, a dirty plate, and a tea-pot.

“If you’ll stand over there I’ll put them on the chair so that you can see them better.”

She showed him twenty small canvases, about eighteen by twelve. She placed them on the chair, one after the other, watching his face; he nodded as he looked at each one.

“You do like them, don’t you?” she said anxiously, after a bit.

“I just want to look at them all first,” he answered. “I’ll talk afterwards.”

He was collecting himself. He was panic-stricken. He did not know what to say. It was not only that they were ill-drawn, or that the colour was put on amateurishly by someone who had no eye for it; but there was no attempt at getting the values, and the perspective was grotesque. It looked like the work of a child of five, but a child would have had some naivete and might at least have made an attempt to put down what he saw; but here was the work of a vulgar mind chock full of recollections of vulgar pictures. Philip remembered that she had talked enthusiastically about Monet and the Impressionists, but here were only the worst traditions of the Royal Academy.

“There,” she said at last, “that’s the lot.”

Philip was no more truthful than anybody else, but he had a great difficulty in telling a thundering, deliberate lie, and he blushed furiously when he answered:

“I think they’re most awfully good.”

A faint colour came into her unhealthy cheeks, and she smiled a little.

“You needn’t say so if you don’t think so, you know. I want the truth.”

“But I do think so.”

“Haven’t you got any criticism to offer? There must be some you don’t like as well as others.”

Philip looked round helplessly. He saw a landscape, the typical picturesque ‘bit’ of the amateur, an old bridge, a creeper-clad cottage, and a leafy bank.

“Of course I don’t pretend to know anything about it,” he said. “But I wasn’t quite sure about the values of that.”

She flushed darkly and taking up the picture quickly turned its back to him.

“I don’t know why you should have chosen that one to sneer at. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m sure my values are all right. That’s a thing you can’t teach anyone, you either understand values or you don’t.”

“I think they’re all most awfully good,” repeated Philip.

She looked at them with an air of self-satisfaction.

“I don’t think they’re anything to be ashamed of.”

Philip looked at his watch.

“I say, it’s getting late. Won’t you let me give you a little lunch?”

“I’ve got my lunch waiting for me here.”

Philip saw no sign of it, but supposed perhaps the concierge would bring it up when he was gone. He was in a hurry to get away. The mustiness of the room made his head ache.

XLVII

In March there was all the excitement of sending in to the Salon. Clutton, characteristically, had nothing ready, and he was very scornful of the two heads that Lawson sent; they were obviously the work of a student, straight-forward portraits of models, but they had a certain force; Clutton, aiming at perfection, had no patience with efforts which betrayed hesitancy, and with a shrug of the shoulders told Lawson it was an impertinence to exhibit stuff which should never have been allowed out of his studio; he was not less contemptuous when the two heads were accepted. Flanagan tried his luck too, but his picture was refused. Mrs. Otter sent a blameless Portrait de ma Mere, accomplished and second-rate; and was hung in a very good place.

Hayward, whom Philip had not seen since he left Heidelberg, arrived in Paris to spend a few days in time to come to the party which Lawson and Philip were giving in their studio to celebrate the hanging of Lawson’s pictures. Philip had been eager to see Hayward again, but when at last they met, he experienced some disappointment. Hayward had altered a little in appearance: his fine hair was thinner, and with the rapid wilting of the very fair, he was becoming wizened and colourless; his blue eyes were paler than they had been, and there was a muzziness about his features. On the other hand, in mind he did not seem to have changed at all, and the culture which had impressed Philip at eighteen aroused somewhat the contempt of Philip at twenty-one. He had altered a good deal himself, and regarding with scorn all his old opinions of art, life, and letters, had no patience with anyone who still held them. He was scarcely conscious of the fact that he wanted to show off before Hayward, but when he took him round the galleries he poured out to him all the revolutionary opinions which himself had so recently adopted. He took him to Manet’s Olympia and said dramatically:

“I would give all the old masters except Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer for that one picture.”

“Who was Vermeer?” asked Hayward.

“Oh, my dear fellow, don’t you know Vermeer? You’re not civilised. You mustn’t live a moment longer without making his acquaintance. He’s the one old master who painted like a modern.”

He dragged Hayward out of the Luxembourg and hurried him off to the

Louvre.

“But aren’t there any more pictures here?” asked Hayward, with the tourist’s passion for thoroughness.

“Nothing of the least consequence. You can come and look at them by yourself with your Baedeker.”

When they arrived at the Louvre Philip led his friend down the Long

Gallery.

“I should like to see The Gioconda,” said Hayward.

“Oh, my dear fellow, it’s only literature,” answered Philip.

At last, in a small room, Philip stopped before The Lacemaker of Vermeer van Delft.

“There, that’s the best picture in the Louvre. It’s exactly like a Manet.”

With an expressive, eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the charming work.

He used the jargon of the studios with overpowering effect.

“I don’t know that I see anything so wonderful as all that in it,” said

Hayward.

“Of course it’s a painter’s picture,” said Philip. “I can quite believe the layman would see nothing much in it.”

“The what?” said Hayward.

“The layman.”

Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very modest. He was impressed by Philip’s assurance, and accepted meekly Philip’s implied suggestion that the painter’s arrogant claim to be the sole possible judge of painting has anything but its impertinence to recommend it.

A day or two later Philip and Lawson gave their party. Cronshaw, making an exception in their favour, agreed to eat their food; and Miss Chalice offered to come and cook for them. She took no interest in her own sex and declined the suggestion that other girls should be asked for her sake. Clutton, Flanagan, Potter, and two others made up the party. Furniture was scarce, so the model stand was used as a table, and the guests were to sit on portmanteaux if they liked, and if they didn’t on the floor. The feast consisted of a pot-au-feu, which Miss Chalice had made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and brought round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes, and the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried carrots were her specialty); and this was to be followed by poires flambees, pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had volunteered to make. The meal was to finish with an enormous fromage de Brie, which stood near the window and added fragrant odours to all the others which filled the studio. Cronshaw sat in the place of honour on a Gladstone bag, with his legs curled under him like a Turkish bashaw, beaming good-naturedly on the young people who surrounded him. From force of habit, though the small studio with the stove lit was very hot, he kept on his great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his bowler hat: he looked with satisfaction on the four large fiaschi of Chianti which stood in front of him in a row, two on each side of a bottle of whiskey; he said it reminded him of a slim fair Circassian guarded by four corpulent eunuchs. Hayward in order to put the rest of them at their ease had clothed himself in a tweed suit and a Trinity Hall tie. He looked grotesquely British. The others were elaborately polite to him, and during the soup they talked of the weather and the political situation. There was a pause while they waited for the leg of mutton, and Miss Chalice lit a cigarette.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” she said suddenly.

With an elegant gesture she untied a ribbon so that her tresses fell over her shoulders. She shook her head.

“I always feel more comfortable with my hair down.”

With her large brown eyes, thin, ascetic face, her pale skin, and broad forehead, she might have stepped out of a picture by Burne-Jones. She had long, beautiful hands, with fingers deeply stained by nicotine. She wore sweeping draperies, mauve and green. There was about her the romantic air of High Street, Kensington. She was wantonly aesthetic; but she was an excellent creature, kind and good natured; and her affectations were but skin-deep. There was a knock at the door, and they all gave a shout of exultation. Miss Chalice rose and opened. She took the leg of mutton and held it high above her, as though it were the head of John the Baptist on a platter; and, the cigarette still in her mouth, advanced with solemn, hieratic steps.

“Hail, daughter of Herodias,” cried Cronshaw.

The mutton was eaten with gusto, and it did one good to see what a hearty appetite the pale-faced lady had. Clutton and Potter sat on each side of her, and everyone knew that neither had found her unduly coy. She grew tired of most people in six weeks, but she knew exactly how to treat afterwards the gentlemen who had laid their young hearts at her feet. She bore them no ill-will, though having loved them she had ceased to do so, and treated them with friendliness but without familiarity. Now and then she looked at Lawson with melancholy eyes. The poires flambees were a great success, partly because of the brandy, and partly because Miss Chalice insisted that they should be eaten with the cheese.

“I don’t know whether it’s perfectly delicious, or whether I’m just going to vomit,” she said, after she had thoroughly tried the mixture.

Coffee and cognac followed with sufficient speed to prevent any untoward consequence, and they settled down to smoke in comfort. Ruth Chalice, who could do nothing that was not deliberately artistic, arranged herself in a graceful attitude by Cronshaw and just rested her exquisite head on his shoulder. She looked into the dark abyss of time with brooding eyes, and now and then with a long meditative glance at Lawson she sighed deeply.

Then came the summer, and restlessness seized these young people. The blue skies lured them to the sea, and the pleasant breeze sighing through the leaves of the plane-trees on the boulevard drew them towards the country. Everyone made plans for leaving Paris; they discussed what was the most suitable size for the canvases they meant to take; they laid in stores of panels for sketching; they argued about the merits of various places in Brittany. Flanagan and Potter went to Concarneau; Mrs. Otter and her mother, with a natural instinct for the obvious, went to Pont-Aven; Philip and Lawson made up their minds to go to the forest of Fontainebleau, and Miss Chalice knew of a very good hotel at Moret where there was lots of stuff to paint; it was near Paris, and neither Philip nor Lawson was indifferent to the railway fare. Ruth Chalice would be there, and Lawson had an idea for a portrait of her in the open air. Just then the Salon was full of portraits of people in gardens, in sunlight, with blinking eyes and green reflections of sunlit leaves on their faces. They asked Clutton to go with them, but he preferred spending the summer by himself. He had just discovered Cezanne, and was eager to go to Provence; he wanted heavy skies from which the hot blue seemed to drip like beads of sweat, and broad white dusty roads, and pale roofs out of which the sun had burnt the colour, and olive trees gray with heat.

The day before they were to start, after the morning class, Philip, putting his things together, spoke to Fanny Price.

“I’m off tomorrow,” he said cheerfully.

“Off where?” she said quickly. “You’re not going away?” Her face fell.

“I’m going away for the summer. Aren’t you?”

“No, I’m staying in Paris. I thought you were going to stay too. I was looking forward….”

She stopped and shrugged her shoulders.

“But won’t it be frightfully hot here? It’s awfully bad for you.”

“Much you care if it’s bad for me. Where are you going?”

“Moret.”

“Chalice is going there. You’re not going with her?”

“Lawson and I are going. And she’s going there too. I don’t know that we’re actually going together.”

She gave a low guttural sound, and her large face grew dark and red.

“How filthy! I thought you were a decent fellow. You were about the only one here. She’s been with Clutton and Potter and Flanagan, even with old Foinet — that’s why he takes so much trouble about her — and now two of you, you and Lawson. It makes me sick.”

“Oh, what nonsense! She’s a very decent sort. One treats her just as if she were a man.”

“Oh, don’t speak to me, don’t speak to me.”

“But what can it matter to you?” asked Philip. “It’s really no business of yours where I spend my summer.”

“I was looking forward to it so much,” she gasped, speaking it seemed almost to herself. “I didn’t think you had the money to go away, and there wouldn’t have been anyone else here, and we could have worked together, and we’d have gone to see things.” Then her thoughts flung back to Ruth Chalice. “The filthy beast,” she cried. “She isn’t fit to speak to.”

Philip looked at her with a sinking heart. He was not a man to think girls were in love with him; he was too conscious of his deformity, and he felt awkward and clumsy with women; but he did not know what else this outburst could mean. Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with her hair falling over her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip glanced at the door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in and put an end to the scene.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said.

“You’re just the same as all of them. You take all you can get, and you don’t even say thank you. I’ve taught you everything you know. No one else would take any trouble with you. Has Foinet ever bothered about you? And I can tell you this — you can work here for a thousand years and you’ll never do any good. You haven’t got any talent. You haven’t got any originality. And it’s not only me — they all say it. You’ll never be a painter as long as you live.”

“That is no business of yours either, is it?” said Philip, flushing.

“Oh, you think it’s only my temper. Ask Clutton, ask Lawson, ask Chalice.

Never, never, never. You haven’t got it in you.”

Philip shrugged his shoulders and walked out. She shouted after him.

“Never, never, never.”

Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d’Or was a hotel which still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime. It faced the winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had a room with a little terrace overlooking it, with a charming view of the old bridge and its fortified gateway. They sat here in the evenings after dinner, drinking coffee, smoking, and discussing art. There ran into the river, a little way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of this after their day’s work they often wandered. They spent all day painting. Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they despised. Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France; but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves deliberately to avoid it. Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine art, started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the commonplace by leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had the brilliant idea of putting in his foreground a large blue advertisement of chocolat Menier in order to emphasise his abhorrence of the chocolate box.

Philip began now to paint in oils. He experienced a thrill of delight when first he used that grateful medium. He went out with Lawson in the morning with his little box and sat by him painting a panel; it gave him so much satisfaction that he did not realise he was doing no more than copy; he was so much under his friend’s influence that he saw only with his eyes. Lawson painted very low in tone, and they both saw the emerald of the grass like dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky turned in their hands to a brooding ultramarine. Through July they had one fine day after another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing Philip’s heart, filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind was eager with a thousand thoughts. Often he spent the mornings by the side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and then dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies. The ladies of Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.

They were alone in the hotel but for a fat Frenchwoman of middle age, a Rabelaisian figure with a broad, obscene laugh. She spent the day by the river patiently fishing for fish she never caught, and Philip sometimes went down and talked to her. He found out that she had belonged to a profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the bourgeoise. She told Philip lewd stories.

“You must go to Seville,” she said — she spoke a little broken English.

“The most beautiful women in the world.”

She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her large belly, shook with inward laughter.

It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice’s room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river. The church clock struck one and two and sometimes three before they could drag themselves to bed. Suddenly Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and Lawson were lovers. He divined it in the way the girl looked at the young painter, and in his air of possession; and as Philip sat with them he felt a kind of effluence surrounding them, as though the air were heavy with something strange. The revelation was a shock. He had looked upon Miss Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to her, but it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into the forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably sylvan, Miss Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking off her shoes and stockings. It would have been very charming only her feet were rather large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe. Philip felt it made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked upon her quite differently; there was something softly feminine in her large eyes and her olive skin; he felt himself a fool not to have seen that she was attractive. He thought he detected in her a touch of contempt for him, because he had not had the sense to see that she was there, in his way, and in Lawson a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of Lawson, and he was jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his love. He wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would pass him by. He wanted a passion to seize him, he wanted to be swept off his feet and borne powerless in a mighty rush he cared not whither. Miss Chalice and Lawson seemed to him now somehow different, and the constant companionship with them made him restless. He was dissatisfied with himself. Life was not giving him what he wanted, and he had an uneasy feeling that he was losing his time.

The stout Frenchwoman soon guessed what the relations were between the couple, and talked of the matter to Philip with the utmost frankness.

“And you,” she said, with the tolerant smile of one who had fattened on the lust of her fellows, “have you got a petite amie?”

“No,” said Philip, blushing.

“And why not? C’est de votre age.”

He shrugged his shoulders. He had a volume of Verlaine in his hands, and he wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong. He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky, were almost more than he could bear. He was in love with love. In his fancy he felt the kiss of warm lips on his, and around his neck the touch of soft hands. He imagined himself in the arms of Ruth Chalice, he thought of her dark eyes and the wonderful texture of her skin; he was mad to have let such a wonderful adventure slip through his fingers. And if Lawson had done it why should not he? But this was only when he did not see her, when he lay awake at night or dreamed idly by the side of the canal; when he saw her he felt suddenly quite different; he had no desire to take her in his arms, and he could not imagine himself kissing her. It was very curious. Away from her he thought her beautiful, remembering only her magnificent eyes and the creamy pallor of her face; but when he was with her he saw only that she was flat-chested and that her teeth were slightly decayed; he could not forget the corns on her toes. He could not understand himself. Would he always love only in absence and be prevented from enjoying anything when he had the chance by that deformity of vision which seemed to exaggerate the revolting?

He was not sorry when a change in the weather, announcing the definite end of the long summer, drove them all back to Paris.

XLVIII

When Philip returned to Amitrano’s he found that Fanny Price was no longer working there. She had given up the key of her locker. He asked Mrs. Otter whether she knew what had become of her; and Mrs. Otter, with a shrug of the shoulders, answered that she had probably gone back to England. Philip was relieved. He was profoundly bored by her ill-temper. Moreover she insisted on advising him about his work, looked upon it as a slight when he did not follow her precepts, and would not understand that he felt himself no longer the duffer he had been at first. Soon he forgot all about her. He was working in oils now and he was full of enthusiasm. He hoped to have something done of sufficient importance to send to the following year’s Salon. Lawson was painting a portrait of Miss Chalice. She was very paintable, and all the young men who had fallen victims to her charm had made portraits of her. A natural indolence, joined with a passion for picturesque attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she had enough technical knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her passion for art was chiefly a passion to live the life of artists, she was quite content to neglect her own work. She liked the warmth of the studio, and the opportunity to smoke innumerable cigarettes; and she spoke in a low, pleasant voice of the love of art and the art of love. She made no clear distinction between the two.

Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working till he could hardly stand for days and then scraping out all he had done. He would have exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth Chalice. At last he got into a hopeless muddle.

“The only thing is to take a new canvas and start fresh,” he said. “I know exactly what I want now, and it won’t take me long.”

Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice said to him:

“Why don’t you paint me too? You’ll be able to learn a lot by watching Mr.

Lawson.”

It was one of Miss Chalice’s delicacies that she always addressed her lovers by their surnames.

“I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t care a damn,” said Lawson.

It was the first time that Philip set about a portrait, and he began with trepidation but also with pride. He sat by Lawson and painted as he saw him paint. He profited by the example and by the advice which both Lawson and Miss Chalice freely gave him. At last Lawson finished and invited Clutton in to criticise. Clutton had only just come back to Paris. From Provence he had drifted down to Spain, eager to see Velasquez at Madrid, and thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there three months, and he was returned with a name new to the young men: he had wonderful things to say of a painter called El Greco, who it appeared could only be studied in Toledo.

“Oh yes, I know about him,” said Lawson, “he’s the old master whose distinction it is that he painted as badly as the moderns.”

Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer, but he looked at Lawson with a sardonic air.

“Are you going to show us the stuff you’ve brought back from Spain?” asked

Philip.

“I didn’t paint in Spain, I was too busy.”

“What did you do then?”

“I thought things out. I believe I’m through with the Impressionists; I’ve got an idea they’ll seem very thin and superficial in a few years. I want to make a clean sweep of everything I’ve learnt and start fresh. When I came back I destroyed everything I’d painted. I’ve got nothing in my studio now but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve only got an inkling of what I want.”

He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he were straining to hear something which was only just audible. There seemed to be a mysterious force in him which he himself did not understand, but which was struggling obscurely to find an outlet. His strength impressed you. Lawson dreaded the criticism he asked for and had discounted the blame he thought he might get by affecting a contempt for any opinion of Clutton’s; but Philip knew there was nothing which would give him more pleasure than Clutton’s praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some time in silence, then glanced at Philip’s picture, which was standing on an easel.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too.”

“The sedulous ape,” he murmured.

He turned away again to Lawson’s canvas. Philip reddened but did not speak.

“Well, what d’you think of it?” asked Lawson at length.

“The modelling’s jolly good,” said Clutton. “And I think it’s very well drawn.”

“D’you think the values are all right?”

“Quite.”

Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his clothes like a wet dog.

“I say, I’m jolly glad you like it.”

“I don’t. I don’t think it’s of the smallest importance.”

Lawson’s face fell, and he stared at Clutton with astonishment: he had no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of expression in words, and he spoke as though it were an effort. What he had to say was confused, halting, and verbose; but Philip knew the words which served as the text of his rambling discourse. Clutton, who never read, had heard them first from Cronshaw; and though they had made small impression, they had remained in his memory; and lately, emerging on a sudden, had acquired the character of a revelation: a good painter had two chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul. The Impressionists had been occupied with other problems, they had painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves as little as the English portrait painters of the eighteenth century with the intention of his soul.

“But when you try to get that you become literary,” said Lawson, interrupting. “Let me paint the man like Manet, and the intention of his soul can go to the devil.”

“That would be all very well if you could beat Manet at his own game, but you can’t get anywhere near him. You can’t feed yourself on the day before yesterday, it’s ground which has been swept dry. You must go back. It’s when I saw the Grecos that I felt one could get something more out of portraits than we knew before.”

“It’s just going back to Ruskin,” cried Lawson.

“No — you see, he went for morality: I don’t care a damn for morality: teaching doesn’t come in, ethics and all that, but passion and emotion. The greatest portrait painters have painted both, man and the intention of his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco; it’s only the second-raters who’ve only painted man. A lily of the valley would be lovely even if it didn’t smell, but it’s more lovely because it has perfume. That picture” — he pointed to Lawson’s portrait— “well, the drawing’s all right and so’s the modelling all right, but just conventional; it ought to be drawn and modelled so that you know the girl’s a lousy slut. Correctness is all very well: El Greco made his people eight feet high because he wanted to express something he couldn’t get any other way.”

“Damn El Greco,” said Lawson, “what’s the good of jawing about a man when we haven’t a chance of seeing any of his work?”

Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence, and went away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.

“There’s something in what he says,” said Philip.

Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.

“How the devil is one to get the intention of the soul except by painting exactly what one sees?”

About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday morning models assembled at the school in order that one might be chosen for the week, and one day a young man was taken who was plainly not a model by profession. Philip’s attention was attracted by the manner in which he held himself: when he got on to the stand he stood firmly on both feet, square, with clenched hands, and with his head defiantly thrown forward; the attitude emphasised his fine figure; there was no fat on him, and his muscles stood out as though they were of iron. His head, close-cropped, was well-shaped, and he wore a short beard; he had large, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour without appearance of fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame and of determination. His air of passionate energy excited Philip’s romantic imagination, and when, the sitting ended, he saw him in his clothes, it seemed to him that he wore them as though he were a king in rags. He was uncommunicative, but in a day or two Mrs. Otter told Philip that the model was a Spaniard and that he had never sat before.

“I suppose he was starving,” said Philip.

“Have you noticed his clothes? They’re quite neat and decent, aren’t they?”

It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who worked at Amitrano’s, was going to Italy for a couple of months, and offered his studio to Philip. Philip was pleased. He was growing a little impatient of Lawson’s peremptory advice and wanted to be by himself. At the end of the week he went up to the model and on the pretence that his drawing was not finished asked whether he would come and sit to him one day.

“I’m not a model,” the Spaniard answered. “I have other things to do next week.”

“Come and have luncheon with me now, and we’ll talk about it,” said Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a smile: “It won’t hurt you to lunch with me.”

With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented, and they went off to a cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent but difficult to follow, and Philip managed to get on well enough with him. He found out that he was a writer. He had come to Paris to write novels and kept himself meanwhile by all the expedients possible to a penniless man; he gave lessons, he did any translations he could get hold of, chiefly business documents, and at last had been driven to make money by his fine figure. Sitting was well paid, and what he had earned during the last week was enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip, amazed, that he could live easily on two francs a day; but it filled him with shame that he was obliged to show his body for money, and he looked upon sitting as a degradation which only hunger could excuse. Philip explained that he did not want him to sit for the figure, but only for the head; he wished to do a portrait of him which he might send to the next Salon.

“But why should you want to paint me?” asked the Spaniard.

Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he could do a good portrait.

“I can’t afford the time. I grudge every minute that I have to rob from my writing.”

“But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at the school in the morning. After all, it’s better to sit to me than to do translations of legal documents.”

There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students of different countries lived together intimately, but this was long since passed, and now the various nations were almost as much separated as in an Oriental city. At Julian’s and at the Beaux Arts a French student was looked upon with disfavour by his fellow-countrymen when he consorted with foreigners, and it was difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite superficially any native inhabitants of the city in which he dwelt. Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris for five years knew no more French than served them in shops and lived as English a life as though they were working in South Kensington.

Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the opportunity to get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his persuasiveness to overcome the man’s reluctance.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the Spaniard at last. “I’ll sit to you, but not for money, for my own pleasure.”

Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they arranged that he should come on the following Monday at one o’clock. He gave Philip a card on which was printed his name: Miguel Ajuria.

Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and then: it was a little more expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings in the usual way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling that he was not earning his living in a degrading manner. His nationality made Philip regard him as a representative of romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada, Velasquez and Calderon. But Miguel had no patience with the grandeur of his country. For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France was the only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the centre of the world.

“Spain is dead,” he cried. “It has no writers, it has no art, it has nothing.”

Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length. To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity — c’est la vie, mon cher, c’est la vie, he cried — the naive obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the anecdote. He had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying himself all the pleasures of life which had attracted him to Paris, fighting with starvation for art’s sake, determined that nothing should hinder his great achievement. The effort was heroic.

“But why don’t you write about Spain?” cried Philip. “It would be so much more interesting. You know the life.”

“But Paris is the only place worth writing about. Paris is life.”

One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in his bad French, translating excitedly as he went along so that Philip could scarcely understand, he read passages. It was lamentable. Philip, puzzled, looked at the picture he was painting: the mind behind that broad brow was trivial; and the flashing, passionate eyes saw nothing in life but the obvious. Philip was not satisfied with his portrait, and at the end of a sitting he nearly always scraped out what he had done. It was all very well to aim at the intention of the soul: who could tell what that was when people seemed a mass of contradictions? He liked Miguel, and it distressed him to realise that his magnificent struggle was futile: he had everything to make a good writer but talent. Philip looked at his own work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or whether you were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not help you and confidence in yourself meant nothing. Philip thought of Fanny Price; she had a vehement belief in her talent; her strength of will was extraordinary.

“If I thought I wasn’t going to be really good, I’d rather give up painting,” said Philip. “I don’t see any use in being a second-rate painter.”

Then one morning when he was going out, the concierge called out to him that there was a letter. Nobody wrote to him but his Aunt Louisa and sometimes Hayward, and this was a handwriting he did not know. The letter was as follows:

Please come at once when you get this. I couldn’t put up with it any more. Please come yourself. I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. I want you to have everything.

F. Price

I have not had anything to eat for three days.

Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried to the house in which she lived. He was astonished that she was in Paris at all. He had not seen her for months and imagined she had long since returned to England. When he arrived he asked the concierge whether she was in.

“Yes, I’ve not seen her go out for two days.”

Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no reply. He called her name. The door was locked, and on bending down he found the key was in the lock.

“Oh, my God, I hope she hasn’t done something awful,” he cried aloud.

He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the room. He had had a letter from her and feared a terrible accident. He suggested breaking open the door. The porter, who had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room; they must go for the commissaire de police. They walked together to the bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith. Philip found that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter’s rent: on New Year’s Day she had not given the concierge the present which old-established custom led him to regard as a right. The four of them went upstairs, and they knocked again at the door. There was no reply. The locksmith set to work, and at last they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed. She had moved her own little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been kicked away. It was lying on its side on the floor. They cut her down. The body was quite cold.

XLIX

The story which Philip made out in one way and another was terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in restaurants, and the reason was obvious: she had been oppressed by dire poverty. He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together when first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in that manner because she was ravenous. The concierge told him what her food had consisted of. A bottle of milk was left for her every day and she brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back from the school, and consumed the rest in the evening. It was the same day after day. Philip thought with anguish of what she must have endured. She had never given anyone to understand that she was poorer than the rest, but it was clear that her money had been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford to come any more to the studio. The little room was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always worn. Philip searched among her things for the address of some friend with whom he could communicate. He found a piece of paper on which his own name was written a score of times. It gave him a peculiar shock. He supposed it was true that she had loved him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did she not let him help her? He would so gladly have done all he could. He felt remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her letter were infinitely pathetic: I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. She had died of starvation.

Philip found at length a letter signed: your loving brother, Albert. It was two or three weeks old, dated from some road in Surbiton, and refused a loan of five pounds. The writer had his wife and family to think of, he didn’t feel justified in lending money, and his advice was that Fanny should come back to London and try to get a situation. Philip telegraphed to Albert Price, and in a little while an answer came:

“Deeply distressed. Very awkward to leave my business. Is presence essential. Price.”

Philip wired a succinct affirmative, and next morning a stranger presented himself at the studio.

“My name’s Price,” he said, when Philip opened the door.

He was a commonish man in black with a band round his bowler hat; he had something of Fanny’s clumsy look; he wore a stubbly moustache, and had a cockney accent. Philip asked him to come in. He cast sidelong glances round the studio while Philip gave him details of the accident and told him what he had done.

“I needn’t see her, need I?” asked Albert Price. “My nerves aren’t very strong, and it takes very little to upset me.”

He began to talk freely. He was a rubber-merchant, and he had a wife and three children. Fanny was a governess, and he couldn’t make out why she hadn’t stuck to that instead of coming to Paris.

“Me and Mrs. Price told her Paris was no place for a girl. And there’s no money in art — never ‘as been.”

It was plain enough that he had not been on friendly terms with his sister, and he resented her suicide as a last injury that she had done him. He did not like the idea that she had been forced to it by poverty; that seemed to reflect on the family. The idea struck him that possibly there was a more respectable reason for her act.

“I suppose she ‘adn’t any trouble with a man, ‘ad she? You know what I mean, Paris and all that. She might ‘ave done it so as not to disgrace herself.”

Philip felt himself reddening and cursed his weakness. Price’s keen little eyes seemed to suspect him of an intrigue.

“I believe your sister to have been perfectly virtuous,” he answered acidly. “She killed herself because she was starving.”

“Well, it’s very ‘ard on her family, Mr. Carey. She only ‘ad to write to me. I wouldn’t have let my sister want.”

Philip had found the brother’s address only by reading the letter in which he refused a loan; but he shrugged his shoulders: there was no use in recrimination. He hated the little man and wanted to have done with him as soon as possible. Albert Price also wished to get through the necessary business quickly so that he could get back to London. They went to the tiny room in which poor Fanny had lived. Albert Price looked at the pictures and the furniture.

“I don’t pretend to know much about art,” he said. “I suppose these pictures would fetch something, would they?”

“Nothing,” said Philip.

“The furniture’s not worth ten shillings.”

Albert Price knew no French and Philip had to do everything. It seemed that it was an interminable process to get the poor body safely hidden away under ground: papers had to be obtained in one place and signed in another; officials had to be seen. For three days Philip was occupied from morning till night. At last he and Albert Price followed the hearse to the cemetery at Montparnasse.

“I want to do the thing decent,” said Albert Price, “but there’s no use wasting money.”

The short ceremony was infinitely dreadful in the cold gray morning. Half a dozen people who had worked with Fanny Price at the studio came to the funeral, Mrs. Otter because she was massiere and thought it her duty, Ruth Chalice because she had a kind heart, Lawson, Clutton, and Flanagan. They had all disliked her during her life. Philip, looking across the cemetery crowded on all sides with monuments, some poor and simple, others vulgar, pretentious, and ugly, shuddered. It was horribly sordid. When they came out Albert Price asked Philip to lunch with him. Philip loathed him now and he was tired; he had not been sleeping well, for he dreamed constantly of Fanny Price in the torn brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; but he could not think of an excuse.

“You take me somewhere where we can get a regular slap-up lunch. All this is the very worst thing for my nerves.”

“Lavenue’s is about the best place round here,” answered Philip.

Albert Price settled himself on a velvet seat with a sigh of relief. He ordered a substantial luncheon and a bottle of wine.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” he said.

He threw out a few artful questions, and Philip discovered that he was eager to hear about the painter’s life in Paris. He represented it to himself as deplorable, but he was anxious for details of the orgies which his fancy suggested to him. With sly winks and discreet sniggering he conveyed that he knew very well that there was a great deal more than Philip confessed. He was a man of the world, and he knew a thing or two. He asked Philip whether he had ever been to any of those places in Montmartre which are celebrated from Temple Bar to the Royal Exchange. He would like to say he had been to the Moulin Rouge. The luncheon was very good and the wine excellent. Albert Price expanded as the processes of digestion went satisfactorily forwards.

“Let’s ‘ave a little brandy,” he said when the coffee was brought, “and blow the expense.”

He rubbed his hands.

“You know, I’ve got ‘alf a mind to stay over tonight and go back tomorrow.

What d’you say to spending the evening together?”

“If you mean you want me to take you round Montmartre tonight, I’ll see you damned,” said Philip.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be quite the thing.”

The answer was made so seriously that Philip was tickled.

“Besides it would be rotten for your nerves,” he said gravely.

Albert Price concluded that he had better go back to London by the four o’clock train, and presently he took leave of Philip.

“Well, good-bye, old man,” he said. “I tell you what, I’ll try and come over to Paris again one of these days and I’ll look you up. And then we won’t ‘alf go on the razzle.”

Philip was too restless to work that afternoon, so he jumped on a bus and crossed the river to see whether there were any pictures on view at Durand-Ruel’s. After that he strolled along the boulevard. It was cold and wind-swept. People hurried by wrapped up in their coats, shrunk together in an effort to keep out of the cold, and their faces were pinched and careworn. It was icy underground in the cemetery at Montparnasse among all those white tombstones. Philip felt lonely in the world and strangely homesick. He wanted company. At that hour Cronshaw would be working, and Clutton never welcomed visitors; Lawson was painting another portrait of Ruth Chalice and would not care to be disturbed. He made up his mind to go and see Flanagan. He found him painting, but delighted to throw up his work and talk. The studio was comfortable, for the American had more money than most of them, and warm; Flanagan set about making tea. Philip looked at the two heads that he was sending to the Salon.

“It’s awful cheek my sending anything,” said Flanagan, “but I don’t care,

I’m going to send. D’you think they’re rotten?”

“Not so rotten as I should have expected,” said Philip.

They showed in fact an astounding cleverness. The difficulties had been avoided with skill, and there was a dash about the way in which the paint was put on which was surprising and even attractive. Flanagan, without knowledge or technique, painted with the loose brush of a man who has spent a lifetime in the practice of the art.

“If one were forbidden to look at any picture for more than thirty seconds you’d be a great master, Flanagan,” smiled Philip.

These young people were not in the habit of spoiling one another with excessive flattery.

“We haven’t got time in America to spend more than thirty seconds in looking at any picture,” laughed the other.

Flanagan, though he was the most scatter-brained person in the world, had a tenderness of heart which was unexpected and charming. Whenever anyone was ill he installed himself as sick-nurse. His gaiety was better than any medicine. Like many of his countrymen he had not the English dread of sentimentality which keeps so tight a hold on emotion; and, finding nothing absurd in the show of feeling, could offer an exuberant sympathy which was often grateful to his friends in distress. He saw that Philip was depressed by what he had gone through and with unaffected kindliness set himself boisterously to cheer him up. He exaggerated the Americanisms which he knew always made the Englishmen laugh and poured out a breathless stream of conversation, whimsical, high-spirited, and jolly. In due course they went out to dinner and afterwards to the Gaite Montparnasse, which was Flanagan’s favourite place of amusement. By the end of the evening he was in his most extravagant humour. He had drunk a good deal, but any inebriety from which he suffered was due much more to his own vivacity than to alcohol. He proposed that they should go to the Bal Bullier, and Philip, feeling too tired to go to bed, willingly enough consented. They sat down at a table on the platform at the side, raised a little from the level of the floor so that they could watch the dancing, and drank a bock. Presently Flanagan saw a friend and with a wild shout leaped over the barrier on to the space where they were dancing. Philip watched the people. Bullier was not the resort of fashion. It was Thursday night and the place was crowded. There were a number of students of the various faculties, but most of the men were clerks or assistants in shops; they wore their everyday clothes, ready-made tweeds or queer tail-coats, and their hats, for they had brought them in with them, and when they danced there was no place to put them but their heads. Some of the women looked like servant-girls, and some were painted hussies, but for the most part they were shop-girls. They were poorly-dressed in cheap imitation of the fashions on the other side of the river. The hussies were got up to resemble the music-hall artiste or the dancer who enjoyed notoriety at the moment; their eyes were heavy with black and their cheeks impudently scarlet. The hall was lit by great white lights, low down, which emphasised the shadows on the faces; all the lines seemed to harden under it, and the colours were most crude. It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolf-like; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life they led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. They were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.

He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night.

L

Philip could not get the unhappy event out of his head. What troubled him most was the uselessness of Fanny’s effort. No one could have worked harder than she, nor with more sincerity; she believed in herself with all her heart; but it was plain that self-confidence meant very little, all his friends had it, Miguel Ajuria among the rest; and Philip was shocked by the contrast between the Spaniard’s heroic endeavour and the triviality of the thing he attempted. The unhappiness of Philip’s life at school had called up in him the power of self-analysis; and this vice, as subtle as drug-taking, had taken possession of him so that he had now a peculiar keenness in the dissection of his feelings. He could not help seeing that art affected him differently from others. A fine picture gave Lawson an immediate thrill. His appreciation was instinctive. Even Flanagan felt certain things which Philip was obliged to think out. His own appreciation was intellectual. He could not help thinking that if he had in him the artistic temperament (he hated the phrase, but could discover no other) he would feel beauty in the emotional, unreasoning way in which they did. He began to wonder whether he had anything more than a superficial cleverness of the hand which enabled him to copy objects with accuracy. That was nothing. He had learned to despise technical dexterity. The important thing was to feel in terms of paint. Lawson painted in a certain way because it was his nature to, and through the imitativeness of a student sensitive to every influence, there pierced individuality. Philip looked at his own portrait of Ruth Chalice, and now that three months had passed he realised that it was no more than a servile copy of Lawson. He felt himself barren. He painted with the brain, and he could not help knowing that the only painting worth anything was done with the heart.

He had very little money, barely sixteen hundred pounds, and it would be necessary for him to practise the severest economy. He could not count on earning anything for ten years. The history of painting was full of artists who had earned nothing at all. He must resign himself to penury; and it was worth while if he produced work which was immortal; but he had a terrible fear that he would never be more than second-rate. Was it worth while for that to give up one’s youth, and the gaiety of life, and the manifold chances of being? He knew the existence of foreign painters in Paris enough to see that the lives they led were narrowly provincial. He knew some who had dragged along for twenty years in the pursuit of a fame which always escaped them till they sunk into sordidness and alcoholism. Fanny’s suicide had aroused memories, and Philip heard ghastly stories of the way in which one person or another had escaped from despair. He remembered the scornful advice which the master had given poor Fanny: it would have been well for her if she had taken it and given up an attempt which was hopeless.

Philip finished his portrait of Miguel Ajuria and made up his mind to send it to the Salon. Flanagan was sending two pictures, and he thought he could paint as well as Flanagan. He had worked so hard on the portrait that he could not help feeling it must have merit. It was true that when he looked at it he felt that there was something wrong, though he could not tell what; but when he was away from it his spirits went up and he was not dissatisfied. He sent it to the Salon and it was refused. He did not mind much, since he had done all he could to persuade himself that there was little chance that it would be taken, till Flanagan a few days later rushed in to tell Lawson and Philip that one of his pictures was accepted. With a blank face Philip offered his congratulations, and Flanagan was so busy congratulating himself that he did not catch the note of irony which Philip could not prevent from coming into his voice. Lawson, quicker-witted, observed it and looked at Philip curiously. His own picture was all right, he knew that a day or two before, and he was vaguely resentful of Philip’s attitude. But he was surprised at the sudden question which Philip put him as soon as the American was gone.

“If you were in my place would you chuck the whole thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if it’s worth while being a second-rate painter. You see, in other things, if you’re a doctor or if you’re in business, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re mediocre. You make a living and you get along. But what is the good of turning out second-rate pictures?”

Lawson was fond of Philip and, as soon as he thought he was seriously distressed by the refusal of his picture, he set himself to console him. It was notorious that the Salon had refused pictures which were afterwards famous; it was the first time Philip had sent, and he must expect a rebuff; Flanagan’s success was explicable, his picture was showy and superficial: it was just the sort of thing a languid jury would see merit in. Philip grew impatient; it was humiliating that Lawson should think him capable of being seriously disturbed by so trivial a calamity and would not realise that his dejection was due to a deep-seated distrust of his powers.

Of late Clutton had withdrawn himself somewhat from the group who took their meals at Gravier’s, and lived very much by himself. Flanagan said he was in love with a girl, but Clutton’s austere countenance did not suggest passion; and Philip thought it more probable that he separated himself from his friends so that he might grow clear with the new ideas which were in him. But that evening, when the others had left the restaurant to go to a play and Philip was sitting alone, Clutton came in and ordered dinner. They began to talk, and finding Clutton more loquacious and less sardonic than usual, Philip determined to take advantage of his good humour.

“I say I wish you’d come and look at my picture,” he said. “I’d like to know what you think of it.”

“No, I won’t do that.”

“Why not?” asked Philip, reddening.

The request was one which they all made of one another, and no one ever thought of refusing. Clutton shrugged his shoulders.

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. Besides, what’s the good of criticism? What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?”

“It matters to me.”

“No. The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it. It’s a function like any of the other functions of the body, only comparatively few people have got it. One paints for oneself: otherwise one would commit suicide. Just think of it, you spend God knows how long trying to get something on to canvas, putting the sweat of your soul into it, and what is the result? Ten to one it will be refused at the Salon; if it’s accepted, people glance at it for ten seconds as they pass; if you’re lucky some ignorant fool will buy it and put it on his walls and look at it as little as he looks at his dining-room table. Criticism has nothing to do with the artist. It judges objectively, but the objective doesn’t concern the artist.”

Clutton put his hands over his eyes so that he might concentrate his mind on what he wanted to say.

“The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees, and is impelled to express it and, he doesn’t know why, he can only express his feeling by lines and colours. It’s like a musician; he’ll read a line or two, and a certain combination of notes presents itself to him: he doesn’t know why such and such words call forth in him such and such notes; they just do. And I’ll tell you another reason why criticism is meaningless: a great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it; but in the next generation another painter sees the world in another way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look at trees in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and painted differently, people said: But trees aren’t like that. It never struck them that trees are exactly how a painter chooses to see them. We paint from within outwards — if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.”

There was a pause while Clutton with voracious appetite devoured the food that was set before him. Philip, smoking a cheap cigar, observed him closely. The ruggedness of the head, which looked as though it were carved from a stone refractory to the sculptor’s chisel, the rough mane of dark hair, the great nose, and the massive bones of the jaw, suggested a man of strength; and yet Philip wondered whether perhaps the mask concealed a strange weakness. Clutton’s refusal to show his work might be sheer vanity: he could not bear the thought of anyone’s criticism, and he would not expose himself to the chance of a refusal from the Salon; he wanted to be received as a master and would not risk comparisons with other work which might force him to diminish his own opinion of himself. During the eighteen months Philip had known him Clutton had grown more harsh and bitter; though he would not come out into the open and compete with his fellows, he was indignant with the facile success of those who did. He had no patience with Lawson, and the pair were no longer on the intimate terms upon which they had been when Philip first knew them.

“Lawson’s all right,” he said contemptuously, “he’ll go back to England, become a fashionable portrait painter, earn ten thousand a year and be an A. R. A. before he’s forty. Portraits done by hand for the nobility and gentry!”

Philip, too, looked into the future, and he saw Clutton in twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage, and unknown; still in Paris, for the life there had got into his bones, ruling a small cenacle with a savage tongue, at war with himself and the world, producing little in his increasing passion for a perfection he could not reach; and perhaps sinking at last into drunkenness. Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his abilities. It was plain anyway that the life which Clutton seemed destined to was failure. Its only justification would be the painting of imperishable masterpieces. He recollected Cronshaw’s whimsical metaphor of the Persian carpet; he had thought of it often; but Cronshaw with his faun-like humour had refused to make his meaning clear: he repeated that it had none unless one discovered it for oneself. It was this desire to make a success of life which was at the bottom of Philip’s uncertainty about continuing his artistic career. But Clutton began to talk again.

“D’you remember my telling you about that chap I met in Brittany? I saw him the other day here. He’s just off to Tahiti. He was broke to the world. He was a brasseur d’affaires, a stockbroker I suppose you call it in English; and he had a wife and family, and he was earning a large income. He chucked it all to become a painter. He just went off and settled down in Brittany and began to paint. He hadn’t got any money and did the next best thing to starving.”

“And what about his wife and family?” asked Philip.

“Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own account.”

“It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.”

“Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist. They’ve got nothing to do with one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother — well, it shows they’re excellent sons, but it’s no excuse for bad work. They’re only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There’s a writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in childbirth. He was in love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of how she looked and what she said and the things he was feeling. Gentlemanly, wasn’t it?”

“But is your friend a good painter?” asked Philip.

“No, not yet, he paints just like Pissarro. He hasn’t found himself, but he’s got a sense of colour and a sense of decoration. But that isn’t the question. It’s the feeling, and that he’s got. He’s behaved like a perfect cad to his wife and children, he’s always behaving like a perfect cad; the way he treats the people who’ve helped him — and sometimes he’s been saved from starvation merely by the kindness of his friends — is simply beastly. He just happens to be a great artist.”

Philip pondered over the man who was willing to sacrifice everything, comfort, home, money, love, honour, duty, for the sake of getting on to canvas with paint the emotion which the world gave him. It was magnificent, and yet his courage failed him.

Thinking of Cronshaw recalled to him the fact that he had not seen him for a week, and so, when Clutton left him, he wandered along to the cafe in which he was certain to find the writer. During the first few months of his stay in Paris Philip had accepted as gospel all that Cronshaw said, but Philip had a practical outlook and he grew impatient with the theories which resulted in no action. Cronshaw’s slim bundle of poetry did not seem a substantial result for a life which was sordid. Philip could not wrench out of his nature the instincts of the middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work which Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony of existence between the slovenly attic and the cafe table, jarred with his respectability. Cronshaw was astute enough to know that the young man disapproved of him, and he attacked his philistinism with an irony which was sometimes playful but often very keen.

“You’re a tradesman,” he told Philip, “you want to invest life in consols so that it shall bring you in a safe three per cent. I’m a spendthrift, I run through my capital. I shall spend my last penny with my last heartbeat.”

The metaphor irritated Philip, because it assumed for the speaker a romantic attitude and cast a slur upon the position which Philip instinctively felt had more to say for it than he could think of at the moment.

But this evening Philip, undecided, wanted to talk about himself. Fortunately it was late already and Cronshaw’s pile of saucers on the table, each indicating a drink, suggested that he was prepared to take an independent view of things in general.

“I wonder if you’d give me some advice,” said Philip suddenly.

“You won’t take it, will you?”

Philip shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“I don’t believe I shall ever do much good as a painter. I don’t see any use in being second-rate. I’m thinking of chucking it.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

Philip hesitated for an instant.

“I suppose I like the life.”

A change came over Cronshaw’s placid, round face. The corners of the mouth were suddenly depressed, the eyes sunk dully in their orbits; he seemed to become strangely bowed and old.

“This?” he cried, looking round the cafe in which they sat. His voice really trembled a little.

“If you can get out of it, do while there’s time.”

Philip stared at him with astonishment, but the sight of emotion always made him feel shy, and he dropped his eyes. He knew that he was looking upon the tragedy of failure. There was silence. Philip thought that Cronshaw was looking upon his own life; and perhaps he considered his youth with its bright hopes and the disappointments which wore out the radiancy; the wretched monotony of pleasure, and the black future. Philip’s eyes rested on the little pile of saucers, and he knew that Cronshaw’s were on them too.

LI

Two months passed.

It seemed to Philip, brooding over these matters, that in the true painters, writers, musicians, there was a power which drove them to such complete absorption in their work as to make it inevitable for them to subordinate life to art. Succumbing to an influence they never realised, they were merely dupes of the instinct that possessed them, and life slipped through their fingers unlived. But he had a feeling that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to search out the various experiences of it and wring from each moment all the emotion that it offered. He made up his mind at length to take a certain step and abide by the result, and, having made up his mind, he determined to take the step at once. Luckily enough the next morning was one of Foinet’s days, and he resolved to ask him point-blank whether it was worth his while to go on with the study of art. He had never forgotten the master’s brutal advice to Fanny Price. It had been sound. Philip could never get Fanny entirely out of his head. The studio seemed strange without her, and now and then the gesture of one of the women working there or the tone of a voice would give him a sudden start, reminding him of her: her presence was more noticable now she was dead than it had ever been during her life; and he often dreamed of her at night, waking with a cry of terror. It was horrible to think of all the suffering she must have endured.

Philip knew that on the days Foinet came to the studio he lunched at a little restaurant in the Rue d’Odessa, and he hurried his own meal so that he could go and wait outside till the painter came out. Philip walked up and down the crowded street and at last saw Monsieur Foinet walking, with bent head, towards him; Philip was very nervous, but he forced himself to go up to him.

“Pardon, monsieur, I should like to speak to you for one moment.”

Foinet gave him a rapid glance, recognised him, but did not smile a greeting.

“Speak,” he said.

“I’ve been working here nearly two years now under you. I wanted to ask you to tell me frankly if you think it worth while for me to continue.”

Philip’s voice was trembling a little. Foinet walked on without looking up. Philip, watching his face, saw no trace of expression upon it.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m very poor. If I have no talent I would sooner do something else.”

“Don’t you know if you have talent?”

“All my friends know they have talent, but I am aware some of them are mistaken.”

Foinet’s bitter mouth outlined the shadow of a smile, and he asked:

“Do you live near here?”

Philip told him where his studio was. Foinet turned round.

“Let us go there? You shall show me your work.”

“Now?” cried Philip.

“Why not?”

Philip had nothing to say. He walked silently by the master’s side. He felt horribly sick. It had never struck him that Foinet would wish to see his things there and then; he meant, so that he might have time to prepare himself, to ask him if he would mind coming at some future date or whether he might bring them to Foinet’s studio. He was trembling with anxiety. In his heart he hoped that Foinet would look at his picture, and that rare smile would come into his face, and he would shake Philip’s hand and say: “Pas mal. Go on, my lad. You have talent, real talent.” Philip’s heart swelled at the thought. It was such a relief, such a joy! Now he could go on with courage; and what did hardship matter, privation, and disappointment, if he arrived at last? He had worked very hard, it would be too cruel if all that industry were futile. And then with a start he remembered that he had heard Fanny Price say just that. They arrived at the house, and Philip was seized with fear. If he had dared he would have asked Foinet to go away. He did not want to know the truth. They went in and the concierge handed him a letter as they passed. He glanced at the envelope and recognised his uncle’s handwriting. Foinet followed him up the stairs. Philip could think of nothing to say; Foinet was mute, and the silence got on his nerves. The professor sat down; and Philip without a word placed before him the picture which the Salon had rejected; Foinet nodded but did not speak; then Philip showed him the two portraits he had made of Ruth Chalice, two or three landscapes which he had painted at Moret, and a number of sketches.

“That’s all,” he said presently, with a nervous laugh.

Monsieur Foinet rolled himself a cigarette and lit it.

“You have very little private means?” he asked at last.

“Very little,” answered Philip, with a sudden feeling of cold at his heart. “Not enough to live on.”

“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.”

Philip quietly put away the various things which he had shown.

“I’m afraid that sounds as if you didn’t think I had much chance.”

Monsieur Foinet slightly shrugged his shoulders.

“You have a certain manual dexterity. With hard work and perseverance there is no reason why you should not become a careful, not incompetent painter. You would find hundreds who painted worse than you, hundreds who painted as well. I see no talent in anything you have shown me. I see industry and intelligence. You will never be anything but mediocre.”

Philip obliged himself to answer quite steadily.

“I’m very grateful to you for having taken so much trouble. I can’t thank you enough.”

Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind and, stopping, put his hand on Philip’s shoulder.

“But if you were to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it.”

Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad.

“It is cruel to discover one’s mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.”

He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room.

Philip mechanically took up the letter from his uncle. The sight of his handwriting made him anxious, for it was his aunt who always wrote to him. She had been ill for the last three months, and he had offered to go over to England and see her; but she, fearing it would interfere with his work, had refused. She did not want him to put himself to inconvenience; she said she would wait till August and then she hoped he would come and stay at the vicarage for two or three weeks. If by any chance she grew worse she would let him know, since she did not wish to die without seeing him again. If his uncle wrote to him it must be because she was too ill to hold a pen. Philip opened the letter. It ran as follows:

My dear Philip,

I regret to inform you that your dear Aunt departed this life early this morning. She died very suddenly, but quite peacefully. The change for the worse was so rapid that we had no time to send for you. She was fully prepared for the end and entered into rest with the complete assurance of a blessed resurrection and with resignation to the divine will of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. Your Aunt would have liked you to be present at the funeral so I trust you will come as soon as you can. There is naturally a great deal of work thrown upon my shoulders and I am very much upset. I trust that you will be able to do everything for me. Your affectionate uncle, William Carey.

LII

Next day Philip arrived at Blackstable. Since the death of his mother he had never lost anyone closely connected with him; his aunt’s death shocked him and filled him also with a curious fear; he felt for the first time his own mortality. He could not realise what life would be for his uncle without the constant companionship of the woman who had loved and tended him for forty years. He expected to find him broken down with hopeless grief. He dreaded the first meeting; he knew that he could say nothing which would be of use. He rehearsed to himself a number of apposite speeches.

He entered the vicarage by the side-door and went into the dining-room.

Uncle William was reading the paper.

“Your train was late,” he said, looking up.

Philip was prepared to give way to his emotion, but the matter-of-fact reception startled him. His uncle, subdued but calm, handed him the paper.

“There’s a very nice little paragraph about her in The Blackstable

Times,” he said.

Philip read it mechanically.

“Would you like to come up and see her?”

Philip nodded and together they walked upstairs. Aunt Louisa was lying in the middle of the large bed, with flowers all round her.

“Would you like to say a short prayer?” said the Vicar.

He sank on his knees, and because it was expected of him Philip followed his example. He looked at the little shrivelled face. He was only conscious of one emotion: what a wasted life! In a minute Mr. Carey gave a cough, and stood up. He pointed to a wreath at the foot of the bed.

“That’s from the Squire,” he said. He spoke in a low voice as though he were in church, but one felt that, as a clergyman, he found himself quite at home. “I expect tea is ready.”

They went down again to the dining-room. The drawn blinds gave a lugubrious aspect. The Vicar sat at the end of the table at which his wife had always sat and poured out the tea with ceremony. Philip could not help feeling that neither of them should have been able to eat anything, but when he saw that his uncle’s appetite was unimpaired he fell to with his usual heartiness. They did not speak for a while. Philip set himself to eat an excellent cake with the air of grief which he felt was decent.

“Things have changed a great deal since I was a curate,” said the Vicar presently. “In my young days the mourners used always to be given a pair of black gloves and a piece of black silk for their hats. Poor Louisa used to make the silk into dresses. She always said that twelve funerals gave her a new dress.”

Then he told Philip who had sent wreaths; there were twenty-four of them already; when Mrs. Rawlingson, wife of the Vicar at Ferne, had died she had had thirty-two; but probably a good many more would come the next day; the funeral would start at eleven o’clock from the vicarage, and they should beat Mrs. Rawlingson easily. Louisa never liked Mrs. Rawlingson.

“I shall take the funeral myself. I promised Louisa I would never let anyone else bury her.”

Philip looked at his uncle with disapproval when he took a second piece of cake. Under the circumstances he could not help thinking it greedy.

“Mary Ann certainly makes capital cakes. I’m afraid no one else will make such good ones.”

“She’s not going?” cried Philip, with astonishment.

Mary Ann had been at the vicarage ever since he could remember. She never forgot his birthday, but made a point always of sending him a trifle, absurd but touching. He had a real affection for her.

“Yes,” answered Mr. Carey. “I didn’t think it would do to have a single woman in the house.”

“But, good heavens, she must be over forty.”

“Yes, I think she is. But she’s been rather troublesome lately, she’s been inclined to take too much on herself, and I thought this was a very good opportunity to give her notice.”

“It’s certainly one which isn’t likely to recur,” said Philip.

He took out a cigarette, but his uncle prevented him from lighting it.

“Not till after the funeral, Philip,” he said gently.

“All right,” said Philip.

“It wouldn’t be quite respectful to smoke in the house so long as your poor Aunt Louisa is upstairs.”

Josiah Graves, churchwarden and manager of the bank, came back to dinner at the vicarage after the funeral. The blinds had been drawn up, and Philip, against his will, felt a curious sensation of relief. The body in the house had made him uncomfortable: in life the poor woman had been all that was kind and gentle; and yet, when she lay upstairs in her bed-room, cold and stark, it seemed as though she cast upon the survivors a baleful influence. The thought horrified Philip.

He found himself alone for a minute or two in the dining-room with the churchwarden.

“I hope you’ll be able to stay with your uncle a while,” he said. “I don’t think he ought to be left alone just yet.”

“I haven’t made any plans,” answered Philip. “If he wants me I shall be very pleased to stay.”

By way of cheering the bereaved husband the churchwarden during dinner talked of a recent fire at Blackstable which had partly destroyed the Wesleyan chapel.

“I hear they weren’t insured,” he said, with a little smile.

“That won’t make any difference,” said the Vicar. “They’ll get as much money as they want to rebuild. Chapel people are always ready to give money.”

“I see that Holden sent a wreath.”

Holden was the dissenting minister, and, though for Christ’s sake who died for both of them, Mr. Carey nodded to him in the street, he did not speak to him.

“I think it was very pushing,” he remarked. “There were forty-one wreaths.

Yours was beautiful. Philip and I admired it very much.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the banker.

He had noticed with satisfaction that it was larger than anyone’s else. It had looked very well. They began to discuss the people who attended the funeral. Shops had been closed for it, and the churchwarden took out of his pocket the notice which had been printed: “Owing to the funeral of Mrs. Carey this establishment will not be opened till one o’clock.”

“It was my idea,” he said.

“I think it was very nice of them to close,” said the Vicar. “Poor Louisa would have appreciated that.”

Philip ate his dinner. Mary Ann had treated the day as Sunday, and they had roast chicken and a gooseberry tart.

“I suppose you haven’t thought about a tombstone yet?” said the churchwarden.

“Yes, I have. I thought of a plain stone cross. Louisa was always against ostentation.”

“I don’t think one can do much better than a cross. If you’re thinking of a text, what do you say to: With Christ, which is far better?”

The Vicar pursed his lips. It was just like Bismarck to try and settle everything himself. He did not like that text; it seemed to cast an aspersion on himself.

“I don’t think I should put that. I much prefer: The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away.”

“Oh, do you? That always seems to me a little indifferent.”

The Vicar answered with some acidity, and Mr. Graves replied in a tone which the widower thought too authoritative for the occasion. Things were going rather far if he could not choose his own text for his own wife’s tombstone. There was a pause, and then the conversation drifted to parish matters. Philip went into the garden to smoke his pipe. He sat on a bench, and suddenly began to laugh hysterically.

A few days later his uncle expressed the hope that he would spend the next few weeks at Blackstable.

“Yes, that will suit me very well,” said Philip.

“I suppose it’ll do if you go back to Paris in September.”

Philip did not reply. He had thought much of what Foinet said to him, but he was still so undecided that he did not wish to speak of the future. There would be something fine in giving up art because he was convinced that he could not excel; but unfortunately it would seem so only to himself: to others it would be an admission of defeat, and he did not want to confess that he was beaten. He was an obstinate fellow, and the suspicion that his talent did not lie in one direction made him inclined to force circumstances and aim notwithstanding precisely in that direction. He could not bear that his friends should laugh at him. This might have prevented him from ever taking the definite step of abandoning the study of painting, but the different environment made him on a sudden see things differently. Like many another he discovered that crossing the Channel makes things which had seemed important singularly futile. The life which had been so charming that he could not bear to leave it now seemed inept; he was seized with a distaste for the cafes, the restaurants with their ill-cooked food, the shabby way in which they all lived. He did not care any more what his friends thought about him: Cronshaw with his rhetoric, Mrs. Otter with her respectability, Ruth Chalice with her affectations, Lawson and Clutton with their quarrels; he felt a revulsion from them all. He wrote to Lawson and asked him to send over all his belongings. A week later they arrived. When he unpacked his canvases he found himself able to examine his work without emotion. He noticed the fact with interest. His uncle was anxious to see his pictures. Though he had so greatly disapproved of Philip’s desire to go to Paris, he accepted the situation now with equanimity. He was interested in the life of students and constantly put Philip questions about it. He was in fact a little proud of him because he was a painter, and when people were present made attempts to draw him out. He looked eagerly at the studies of models which Philip showed him. Philip set before him his portrait of Miguel Ajuria.

“Why did you paint him?” asked Mr. Carey.

“Oh, I wanted a model, and his head interested me.”

“As you haven’t got anything to do here I wonder you don’t paint me.”

“It would bore you to sit.”

“I think I should like it.”

“We must see about it.”

Philip was amused at his uncle’s vanity. It was clear that he was dying to have his portrait painted. To get something for nothing was a chance not to be missed. For two or three days he threw out little hints. He reproached Philip for laziness, asked him when he was going to start work, and finally began telling everyone he met that Philip was going to paint him. At last there came a rainy day, and after breakfast Mr. Carey said to Philip:

“Now, what d’you say to starting on my portrait this morning?” Philip put down the book he was reading and leaned back in his chair.

“I’ve given up painting,” he said.

“Why?” asked his uncle in astonishment.

“I don’t think there’s much object in being a second-rate painter, and I came to the conclusion that I should never be anything else.”

“You surprise me. Before you went to Paris you were quite certain that you were a genius.”

“I was mistaken,” said Philip.

“I should have thought now you’d taken up a profession you’d have the pride to stick to it. It seems to me that what you lack is perseverance.”

Philip was a little annoyed that his uncle did not even see how truly heroic his determination was.

“‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’” proceeded the clergyman. Philip hated that proverb above all, and it seemed to him perfectly meaningless. His uncle had repeated it often during the arguments which had preceded his departure from business. Apparently it recalled that occasion to his guardian.

“You’re no longer a boy, you know; you must begin to think of settling down. First you insist on becoming a chartered accountant, and then you get tired of that and you want to become a painter. And now if you please you change your mind again. It points to…”

He hesitated for a moment to consider what defects of character exactly it indicated, and Philip finished the sentence.

“Irresolution, incompetence, want of foresight, and lack of determination.”

The Vicar looked up at his nephew quickly to see whether he was laughing at him. Philip’s face was serious, but there was a twinkle in his eyes which irritated him. Philip should really be getting more serious. He felt it right to give him a rap over the knuckles.

“Your money matters have nothing to do with me now. You’re your own master; but I think you should remember that your money won’t last for ever, and the unlucky deformity you have doesn’t exactly make it easier for you to earn your living.”

Philip knew by now that whenever anyone was angry with him his first thought was to say something about his club-foot. His estimate of the human race was determined by the fact that scarcely anyone failed to resist the temptation. But he had trained himself not to show any sign that the reminder wounded him. He had even acquired control over the blushing which in his boyhood had been one of his torments.

“As you justly remark,” he answered, “my money matters have nothing to do with you and I am my own master.”

“At all events you will do me the justice to acknowledge that I was justified in my opposition when you made up your mind to become an art-student.”

“I don’t know so much about that. I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one’s own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody’s else advice. I’ve had my fling, and I don’t mind settling down now.”

“What at?”

Philip was not prepared for the question, since in fact he had not made up his mind. He had thought of a dozen callings.

“The most suitable thing you could do is to enter your father’s profession and become a doctor.”

“Oddly enough that is precisely what I intend.”

He had thought of doctoring among other things, chiefly because it was an occupation which seemed to give a good deal of personal freedom, and his experience of life in an office had made him determine never to have anything more to do with one; his answer to the Vicar slipped out almost unawares, because it was in the nature of a repartee. It amused him to make up his mind in that accidental way, and he resolved then and there to enter his father’s old hospital in the autumn.

“Then your two years in Paris may be regarded as so much wasted time?”

“I don’t know about that. I had a very jolly two years, and I learned one or two useful things.”

“What?”

Philip reflected for an instant, and his answer was not devoid of a gentle desire to annoy.

“I learned to look at hands, which I’d never looked at before. And instead of just looking at houses and trees I learned to look at houses and trees against the sky. And I learned also that shadows are not black but coloured.”

“I suppose you think you’re very clever. I think your flippancy is quite inane.”

LIII

Taking the paper with him Mr. Carey retired to his study. Philip changed his chair for that in which his uncle had been sitting (it was the only comfortable one in the room), and looked out of the window at the pouring rain. Even in that sad weather there was something restful about the green fields that stretched to the horizon. There was an intimate charm in the landscape which he did not remember ever to have noticed before. Two years in France had opened his eyes to the beauty of his own countryside.

He thought with a smile of his uncle’s remark. It was lucky that the turn of his mind tended to flippancy. He had begun to realise what a great loss he had sustained in the death of his father and mother. That was one of the differences in his life which prevented him from seeing things in the same way as other people. The love of parents for their children is the only emotion which is quite disinterested. Among strangers he had grown up as best he could, but he had seldom been used with patience or forbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It had been whipped into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical and callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under most circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.

“By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,” he thought cheerfully.

His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked him what he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he told him. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrase he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain working.

“My dear fellow,” Cronshaw said, “there’s no such thing as abstract morality.”

When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great weight was taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility which weighed down every action, when every action was infinitely important for the welfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. But he knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the religion in which he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality which was part and parcel of it. He made up his mind therefore to think things out for himself. He determined to be swayed by no prejudices. He swept away the virtues and the vices, the established laws of good and evil, with the idea of finding out the rules of life for himself. He did not know whether rules were necessary at all. That was one of the things he wanted to discover. Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from his earliest youth. He had read a number of books, but they did not help him much, for they were based on the morality of Christianity; and even the writers who emphasised the fact that they did not believe in it were never satisfied till they had framed a system of ethics in accordance with that of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed hardly worth while to read a long volume in order to learn that you ought to behave exactly like everybody else. Philip wanted to find out how he ought to behave, and he thought he could prevent himself from being influenced by the opinions that surrounded him. But meanwhile he had to go on living, and, until he formed a theory of conduct, he made himself a provisional rule.

“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”

He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty of spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way he had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight to the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible. Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing to say to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which he felt himself at home. He was like the explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenly upon wide uplands, with great trees in them and stretches of meadow, so that he might fancy himself in an English park. He delighted in the robust common sense of Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had never before come in contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable and austere; it reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L’Age d’Airain, which he passionately admired; and then there was Hume: the scepticism of that charming philosopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling in the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into simple words, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a novel, a smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what he wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to show that the thought of each philosopher was inseparably connected with the man he was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent the philosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own philosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men of the past had composed were only valid for the writers.

The thing then was to discover what one was and one’s system of philosophy would devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were three things to find out: man’s relation to the world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man’s relation to himself. He made an elaborate plan of study.

The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practise them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, the long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teaching which came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothing was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. He read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of much that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has reasoned that certain natural features must present themselves, and, beating up a broad river, finds here the tributary that he expected, there the fertile, populated plains, and further on the mountains. When some great discovery is made the world is surprised afterwards that it was not accepted at once, and even on those who acknowledge its truth the effect is unimportant. The first readers of The Origin of Species accepted it with their reason; but their emotions, which are the ground of conduct, were untouched. Philip was born a generation after this great book was published, and much that horrified its contemporaries had passed into the feeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart. He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of society it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious. Good and evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which the free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contest with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin consisted in being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the gates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused the individual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of his enemy. For it was clear that the two were irreconcilable, the state and the individual conscious of himself. THAT uses the individual for its own ends, trampling upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with medals, pensions, honours, when he serves it faithfully; THIS, strong only in his independence, threads his way through the state, for convenience’ sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but with no sense of obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only to be left alone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook’s tickets because they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt on the personally conducted parties. The free man can do no wrong. He does everything he likes — if he can. His power is the only measure of his morality. He recognises the laws of the state and he can break them without sense of sin, but if he is punished he accepts the punishment without rancour. Society has the power.

But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it seemed to Philip that conscience lost its power. It was with a cry of triumph that he seized the knave and flung him from his breast. But he was no nearer to the meaning of life than he had been before. Why the world was there and what men had come into existence for at all was as inexplicable as ever. Surely there must be some reason. He thought of Cronshaw’s parable of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution of the riddle, and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you found it out for yourself.

“I wonder what the devil he meant,” Philip smiled.

And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all these new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and his club-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third start in life.

LIV

The examination Philip had passed before he was articled to a chartered accountant was sufficient qualification for him to enter a medical school. He chose St. Luke’s because his father had been a student there, and before the end of the summer session had gone up to London for a day in order to see the secretary. He got a list of rooms from him, and took lodgings in a dingy house which had the advantage of being within two minutes’ walk of the hospital.

“You’ll have to arrange about a part to dissect,” the secretary told him. “You’d better start on a leg; they generally do; they seem to think it easier.”

Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy, at eleven, and about half past ten he limped across the road, and a little nervously made his way to the Medical School. Just inside the door a number of notices were pinned up, lists of lectures, football fixtures, and the like; and these he looked at idly, trying to seem at his ease. Young men and boys dribbled in and looked for letters in the rack, chatted with one another, and passed downstairs to the basement, in which was the student’s reading-room. Philip saw several fellows with a desultory, timid look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself, they were there for the first time. When he had exhausted the notices he saw a glass door which led into what was apparently a museum, and having still twenty minutes to spare he walked in. It was a collection of pathological specimens. Presently a boy of about eighteen came up to him.

“I say, are you first year?” he said.

“Yes,” answered Philip.

“Where’s the lecture room, d’you know? It’s getting on for eleven.”

“We’d better try to find it.”

They walked out of the museum into a long, dark corridor, with the walls painted in two shades of red, and other youths walking along suggested the way to them. They came to a door marked Anatomy Theatre. Philip found that there were a good many people already there. The seats were arranged in tiers, and just as Philip entered an attendant came in, put a glass of water on the table in the well of the lecture-room and then brought in a pelvis and two thigh-bones, right and left. More men entered and took their seats and by eleven the theatre was fairly full. There were about sixty students. For the most part they were a good deal younger than Philip, smooth-faced boys of eighteen, but there were a few who were older than he: he noticed one tall man, with a fierce red moustache, who might have been thirty; another little fellow with black hair, only a year or two younger; and there was one man with spectacles and a beard which was quite gray.

The lecturer came in, Mr. Cameron, a handsome man with white hair and clean-cut features. He called out the long list of names. Then he made a little speech. He spoke in a pleasant voice, with well-chosen words, and he seemed to take a discreet pleasure in their careful arrangement. He suggested one or two books which they might buy and advised the purchase of a skeleton. He spoke of anatomy with enthusiasm: it was essential to the study of surgery; a knowledge of it added to the appreciation of art. Philip pricked up his ears. He heard later that Mr. Cameron lectured also to the students at the Royal Academy. He had lived many years in Japan, with a post at the University of Tokyo, and he flattered himself on his appreciation of the beautiful.

“You will have to learn many tedious things,” he finished, with an indulgent smile, “which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.”

He took up the pelvis which was lying on the table and began to describe it. He spoke well and clearly.

At the end of the lecture the boy who had spoken to Philip in the pathological museum and sat next to him in the theatre suggested that they should go to the dissecting-room. Philip and he walked along the corridor again, and an attendant told them where it was. As soon as they entered Philip understood what the acrid smell was which he had noticed in the passage. He lit a pipe. The attendant gave a short laugh.

“You’ll soon get used to the smell. I don’t notice it myself.”

He asked Philip’s name and looked at a list on the board.

“You’ve got a leg — number four.”

Philip saw that another name was bracketed with his own.

“What’s the meaning of that?” he asked.

“We’re very short of bodies just now. We’ve had to put two on each part.”

The dissecting-room was a large apartment painted like the corridors, the upper part a rich salmon and the dado a dark terra-cotta. At regular intervals down the long sides of the room, at right angles with the wall, were iron slabs, grooved like meat-dishes; and on each lay a body. Most of them were men. They were very dark from the preservative in which they had been kept, and the skin had almost the look of leather. They were extremely emaciated. The attendant took Philip up to one of the slabs. A youth was standing by it.

“Is your name Carey?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh, then we’ve got this leg together. It’s lucky it’s a man, isn’t it?”

“Why?” asked Philip.

“They generally always like a male better,” said the attendant. “A female’s liable to have a lot of fat about her.”

Philip looked at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken. Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there was something terrible and ghastly.

“I thought I’d start at two,” said the young man who was dissecting with

Philip.

“All right, I’ll be here then.”

He had bought the day before the case of instruments which was needful, and now he was given a locker. He looked at the boy who had accompanied him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.

“Make you feel rotten?” Philip asked him.

“I’ve never seen anyone dead before.”

They walked along the corridor till they came to the entrance of the school. Philip remembered Fanny Price. She was the first dead person he had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely it had affected him. There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed. There was something horrible about the dead, and you could imagine that they might cast an evil influence on the living.

“What d’you say to having something to eat?” said his new friend to

Philip.

They went down into the basement, where there was a dark room fitted up as a restaurant, and here the students were able to get the same sort of fare as they might have at an aerated bread shop. While they ate (Philip had a scone and butter and a cup of chocolate), he discovered that his companion was called Dunsford. He was a fresh-complexioned lad, with pleasant blue eyes and curly, dark hair, large-limbed, slow of speech and movement. He had just come from Clifton.

“Are you taking the Conjoint?” he asked Philip.

“Yes, I want to get qualified as soon as I can.”

“I’m taking it too, but I shall take the F. R. C. S. afterwards. I’m going in for surgery.”

Most of the students took the curriculum of the Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians; but the more ambitious or the more industrious added to this the longer studies which led to a degree from the University of London. When Philip went to St. Luke’s changes had recently been made in the regulations, and the course took five years instead of four as it had done for those who registered before the autumn of 1892. Dunsford was well up in his plans and told Philip the usual course of events. The “first conjoint” examination consisted of biology, anatomy, and chemistry; but it could be taken in sections, and most fellows took their biology three months after entering the school. This science had been recently added to the list of subjects upon which the student was obliged to inform himself, but the amount of knowledge required was very small.

When Philip went back to the dissecting-room, he was a few minutes late, since he had forgotten to buy the loose sleeves which they wore to protect their shirts, and he found a number of men already working. His partner had started on the minute and was busy dissecting out cutaneous nerves. Two others were engaged on the second leg, and more were occupied with the arms.

“You don’t mind my having started?”

“That’s all right, fire away,” said Philip.

He took the book, open at a diagram of the dissected part, and looked at what they had to find.

“You’re rather a dab at this,” said Philip.

“Oh, I’ve done a good deal of dissecting before, animals, you know, for the Pre Sci.”

There was a certain amount of conversation over the dissecting-table, partly about the work, partly about the prospects of the football season, the demonstrators, and the lectures. Philip felt himself a great deal older than the others. They were raw schoolboys. But age is a matter of knowledge rather than of years; and Newson, the active young man who was dissecting with him, was very much at home with his subject. He was perhaps not sorry to show off, and he explained very fully to Philip what he was about. Philip, notwithstanding his hidden stores of wisdom, listened meekly. Then Philip took up the scalpel and the tweezers and began working while the other looked on.

“Ripping to have him so thin,” said Newson, wiping his hands. “The blighter can’t have had anything to eat for a month.”

“I wonder what he died of,” murmured Philip.

“Oh, I don’t know, any old thing, starvation chiefly, I suppose…. I say, look out, don’t cut that artery.”

“It’s all very fine to say, don’t cut that artery,” remarked one of the men working on the opposite leg. “Silly old fool’s got an artery in the wrong place.”

“Arteries always are in the wrong place,” said Newson. “The normal’s the one thing you practically never get. That’s why it’s called the normal.”

“Don’t say things like that,” said Philip, “or I shall cut myself.”

“If you cut yourself,” answered Newson, full of information, “wash it at once with antiseptic. It’s the one thing you’ve got to be careful about. There was a chap here last year who gave himself only a prick, and he didn’t bother about it, and he got septicaemia.”

“Did he get all right?”

“Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and had a look at him in the P. M. room.”

Philip’s back ached by the time it was proper to have tea, and his luncheon had been so light that he was quite ready for it. His hands smelt of that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that morning in the corridor. He thought his muffin tasted of it too.

“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” said Newson. “When you don’t have the good old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely.”

“I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite,” said Philip, as he followed up the muffin with a piece of cake.

LV

Philip’s ideas of the life of medical students, like those of the public at large, were founded on the pictures which Charles Dickens drew in the middle of the nineteenth century. He soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer at all like the medical student of the present.

It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless. They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds come to an end or because angry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away from the hospital. Others find the examinations too hard for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which before they had so pat. They remain year after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men: some of them crawl through the examination of the Apothecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end. But for the most part medical students are industrious young men of the middle-class with a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they have been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have already something of the professional manner; their career is mapped out: as soon as they are qualified they propose to apply for a hospital appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far East as a ship’s doctor), they will join their father and spend the rest of their days in a country practice. One or two are marked out as exceptionally brilliant: they will take the various prizes and scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject or another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.

The medical profession is the only one which a man may enter at any age with some chance of making a living. Among the men of Philip’s year were three or four who were past their first youth: one had been in the Navy, from which according to report he had been dismissed for drunkenness; he was a man of thirty, with a red face, a brusque manner, and a loud voice. Another was a married man with two children, who had lost money through a defaulting solicitor; he had a bowed look as if the world were too much for him; he went about his work silently, and it was plain that he found it difficult at his age to commit facts to memory. His mind worked slowly. His effort at application was painful to see.

Philip made himself at home in his tiny rooms. He arranged his books and hung on the walls such pictures and sketches as he possessed. Above him, on the drawing-room floor, lived a fifth-year man called Griffiths; but Philip saw little of him, partly because he was occupied chiefly in the wards and partly because he had been to Oxford. Such of the students as had been to a university kept a good deal together: they used a variety of means natural to the young in order to impress upon the less fortunate a proper sense of their inferiority; the rest of the students found their Olympian serenity rather hard to bear. Griffiths was a tall fellow, with a quantity of curly red hair and blue eyes, a white skin and a very red mouth; he was one of those fortunate people whom everybody liked, for he had high spirits and a constant gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano and sang comic songs with gusto; and evening after evening, while Philip was reading in his solitary room, he heard the shouts and the uproarious laughter of Griffiths’ friends above him. He thought of those delightful evenings in Paris when they would sit in the studio, Lawson and he, Flanagan and Clutton, and talk of art and morals, the love-affairs of the present, and the fame of the future. He felt sick at heart. He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results. The worst of it was that the work seemed to him very tedious. He had got out of the habit of being asked questions by demonstrators. His attention wandered at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere matter of learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection bored him; he did not see the use of dissecting out laboriously nerves and arteries when with much less trouble you could see in the diagrams of a book or in the specimens of the pathological museum exactly where they were.

He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends, for he seemed to have nothing in particular to say to his companions. When he tried to interest himself in their concerns, he felt that they found him patronising. He was not of those who can talk of what moves them without caring whether it bores or not the people they talk to. One man, hearing that he had studied art in Paris, and fancying himself on his taste, tried to discuss art with him; but Philip was impatient of views which did not agree with his own; and, finding quickly that the other’s ideas were conventional, grew monosyllabic. Philip desired popularity but could bring himself to make no advances to others. A fear of rebuff prevented him from affability, and he concealed his shyness, which was still intense, under a frigid taciturnity. He was going through the same experience as he had done at school, but here the freedom of the medical students’ life made it possible for him to live a good deal by himself.

It was through no effort of his that he became friendly with Dunsford, the fresh-complexioned, heavy lad whose acquaintance he had made at the beginning of the session. Dunsford attached himself to Philip merely because he was the first person he had known at St. Luke’s. He had no friends in London, and on Saturday nights he and Philip got into the habit of going together to the pit of a music-hall or the gallery of a theatre. He was stupid, but he was good-humoured and never took offence; he always said the obvious thing, but when Philip laughed at him merely smiled. He had a very sweet smile. Though Philip made him his butt, he liked him; he was amused by his candour and delighted with his agreeable nature: Dunsford had the charm which himself was acutely conscious of not possessing.

They often went to have tea at a shop in Parliament Street, because Dunsford admired one of the young women who waited. Philip did not find anything attractive in her. She was tall and thin, with narrow hips and the chest of a boy.

“No one would look at her in Paris,” said Philip scornfully.

“She’s got a ripping face,” said Dunsford.

“What DOES the face matter?”

She had the small regular features, the blue eyes, and the broad low brow, which the Victorian painters, Lord Leighton, Alma Tadema, and a hundred others, induced the world they lived in to accept as a type of Greek beauty. She seemed to have a great deal of hair: it was arranged with peculiar elaboration and done over the forehead in what she called an Alexandra fringe. She was very anaemic. Her thin lips were pale, and her skin was delicate, of a faint green colour, without a touch of red even in the cheeks. She had very good teeth. She took great pains to prevent her work from spoiling her hands, and they were small, thin, and white. She went about her duties with a bored look.

Dunsford, very shy with women, had never succeeded in getting into conversation with her; and he urged Philip to help him.

“All I want is a lead,” he said, “and then I can manage for myself.”

Philip, to please him, made one or two remarks, but she answered with monosyllables. She had taken their measure. They were boys, and she surmised they were students. She had no use for them. Dunsford noticed that a man with sandy hair and a bristly moustache, who looked like a German, was favoured with her attention whenever he came into the shop; and then it was only by calling her two or three times that they could induce her to take their order. She used the clients whom she did not know with frigid insolence, and when she was talking to a friend was perfectly indifferent to the calls of the hurried. She had the art of treating women who desired refreshment with just that degree of impertinence which irritated them without affording them an opportunity of complaining to the management. One day Dunsford told him her name was Mildred. He had heard one of the other girls in the shop address her.

“What an odious name,” said Philip.

“Why?” asked Dunsford.

“I like it.”

“It’s so pretentious.”

It chanced that on this day the German was not there, and, when she brought the tea, Philip, smiling, remarked:

“Your friend’s not here today.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said coldly.

“I was referring to the nobleman with the sandy moustache. Has he left you for another?”

“Some people would do better to mind their own business,” she retorted.

She left them, and, since for a minute or two there was no one to attend to, sat down and looked at the evening paper which a customer had left behind him.

“You are a fool to put her back up,” said Dunsford.

“I’m really quite indifferent to the attitude of her vertebrae,” replied

Philip.

But he was piqued. It irritated him that when he tried to be agreeable with a woman she should take offence. When he asked for the bill, he hazarded a remark which he meant to lead further.

“Are we no longer on speaking terms?” he smiled.

“I’m here to take orders and to wait on customers. I’ve got nothing to say to them, and I don’t want them to say anything to me.”

She put down the slip of paper on which she had marked the sum they had to pay, and walked back to the table at which she had been sitting. Philip flushed with anger.

“That’s one in the eye for you, Carey,” said Dunsford, when they got outside.

“Ill-mannered slut,” said Philip. “I shan’t go there again.”

His influence with Dunsford was strong enough to get him to take their tea elsewhere, and Dunsford soon found another young woman to flirt with. But the snub which the waitress had inflicted on him rankled. If she had treated him with civility he would have been perfectly indifferent to her; but it was obvious that she disliked him rather than otherwise, and his pride was wounded. He could not suppress a desire to be even with her. He was impatient with himself because he had so petty a feeling, but three or four days’ firmness, during which he would not go to the shop, did not help him to surmount it; and he came to the conclusion that it would be least trouble to see her. Having done so he would certainly cease to think of her. Pretexting an appointment one afternoon, for he was not a little ashamed of his weakness, he left Dunsford and went straight to the shop which he had vowed never again to enter. He saw the waitress the moment he came in and sat down at one of her tables. He expected her to make some reference to the fact that he had not been there for a week, but when she came up for his order she said nothing. He had heard her say to other customers:

“You’re quite a stranger.”

She gave no sign that she had ever seen him before. In order to see whether she had really forgotten him, when she brought his tea, he asked:

“Have you seen my friend tonight?”

“No, he’s not been in here for some days.”

He wanted to use this as the beginning of a conversation, but he was strangely nervous and could think of nothing to say. She gave him no opportunity, but at once went away. He had no chance of saying anything till he asked for his bill.

“Filthy weather, isn’t it?” he said.

It was mortifying that he had been forced to prepare such a phrase as that. He could not make out why she filled him with such embarrassment.

“It don’t make much difference to me what the weather is, having to be in here all day.”

There was an insolence in her tone that peculiarly irritated him. A sarcasm rose to his lips, but he forced himself to be silent.

“I wish to God she’d say something really cheeky,” he raged to himself, “so that I could report her and get her sacked. It would serve her damned well right.”

LVI

He could not get her out of his mind. He laughed angrily at his own foolishness: it was absurd to care what an anaemic little waitress said to him; but he was strangely humiliated. Though no one knew of the humiliation but Dunsford, and he had certainly forgotten, Philip felt that he could have no peace till he had wiped it out. He thought over what he had better do. He made up his mind that he would go to the shop every day; it was obvious that he had made a disagreeable impression on her, but he thought he had the wits to eradicate it; he would take care not to say anything at which the most susceptible person could be offended. All this he did, but it had no effect. When he went in and said good-evening she answered with the same words, but when once he omitted to say it in order to see whether she would say it first, she said nothing at all. He murmured in his heart an expression which though frequently applicable to members of the female sex is not often used of them in polite society; but with an unmoved face he ordered his tea. He made up his mind not to speak a word, and left the shop without his usual good-night. He promised himself that he would not go any more, but the next day at tea-time he grew restless. He tried to think of other things, but he had no command over his thoughts. At last he said desperately:

“After all there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go if I want to.”

The struggle with himself had taken a long time, and it was getting on for seven when he entered the shop.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” the girl said to him, when he sat down.

His heart leaped in his bosom and he felt himself reddening. “I was detained. I couldn’t come before.”

“Cutting up people, I suppose?”

“Not so bad as that.”

“You are a stoodent, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

But that seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She went away and, since at that late hour there was nobody else at her tables, she immersed herself in a novelette. This was before the time of the sixpenny reprints. There was a regular supply of inexpensive fiction written to order by poor hacks for the consumption of the illiterate. Philip was elated; she had addressed him of her own accord; he saw the time approaching when his turn would come and he would tell her exactly what he thought of her. It would be a great comfort to express the immensity of his contempt. He looked at her. It was true that her profile was beautiful; it was extraordinary how English girls of that class had so often a perfection of outline which took your breath away, but it was as cold as marble; and the faint green of her delicate skin gave an impression of unhealthiness. All the waitresses were dressed alike, in plain black dresses, with a white apron, cuffs, and a small cap. On a half sheet of paper that he had in his pocket Philip made a sketch of her as she sat leaning over her book (she outlined the words with her lips as she read), and left it on the table when he went away. It was an inspiration, for next day, when he came in, she smiled at him.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” she said.

“I was an art-student in Paris for two years.”

“I showed that drawing you left be’ind you last night to the manageress and she WAS struck with it. Was it meant to be me?”

“It was,” said Philip.

When she went for his tea, one of the other girls came up to him.

“I saw that picture you done of Miss Rogers. It was the very image of her,” she said.

That was the first time he had heard her name, and when he wanted his bill he called her by it.

“I see you know my name,” she said, when she came.

“Your friend mentioned it when she said something to me about that drawing.”

“She wants you to do one of her. Don’t you do it. If you once begin you’ll have to go on, and they’ll all be wanting you to do them.” Then without a pause, with peculiar inconsequence, she said: “Where’s that young fellow that used to come with you? Has he gone away?”

“Fancy your remembering him,” said Philip.

“He was a nice-looking young fellow.”

Philip felt quite a peculiar sensation in his heart. He did not know what it was. Dunsford had jolly curling hair, a fresh complexion, and a beautiful smile. Philip thought of these advantages with envy.

“Oh, he’s in love,” said he, with a little laugh.

Philip repeated every word of the conversation to himself as he limped home. She was quite friendly with him now. When opportunity arose he would offer to make a more finished sketch of her, he was sure she would like that; her face was interesting, the profile was lovely, and there was something curiously fascinating about the chlorotic colour. He tried to think what it was like; at first he thought of pea soup; but, driving away that idea angrily, he thought of the petals of a yellow rosebud when you tore it to pieces before it had burst. He had no ill-feeling towards her now.

“She’s not a bad sort,” he murmured.

It was silly of him to take offence at what she had said; it was doubtless his own fault; she had not meant to make herself disagreeable: he ought to be accustomed by now to making at first sight a bad impression on people. He was flattered at the success of his drawing; she looked upon him with more interest now that she was aware of this small talent. He was restless next day. He thought of going to lunch at the tea-shop, but he was certain there would be many people there then, and Mildred would not be able to talk to him. He had managed before this to get out of having tea with Dunsford, and, punctually at half past four (he had looked at his watch a dozen times), he went into the shop.

Mildred had her back turned to him. She was sitting down, talking to the German whom Philip had seen there every day till a fortnight ago and since then had not seen at all. She was laughing at what he said. Philip thought she had a common laugh, and it made him shudder. He called her, but she took no notice; he called her again; then, growing angry, for he was impatient, he rapped the table loudly with his stick. She approached sulkily.

“How d’you do?” he said.

“You seem to be in a great hurry.”

She looked down at him with the insolent manner which he knew so well.

“I say, what’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“If you’ll kindly give your order I’ll get what you want. I can’t stand talking all night.”

“Tea and toasted bun, please,” Philip answered briefly.

He was furious with her. He had The Star with him and read it elaborately when she brought the tea.

“If you’ll give me my bill now I needn’t trouble you again,” he said icily.

She wrote out the slip, placed it on the table, and went back to the German. Soon she was talking to him with animation. He was a man of middle height, with the round head of his nation and a sallow face; his moustache was large and bristling; he had on a tail-coat and gray trousers, and he wore a massive gold watch-chain. Philip thought the other girls looked from him to the pair at the table and exchanged significant glances. He felt certain they were laughing at him, and his blood boiled. He detested Mildred now with all his heart. He knew that the best thing he could do was to cease coming to the tea-shop, but he could not bear to think that he had been worsted in the affair, and he devised a plan to show her that he despised her. Next day he sat down at another table and ordered his tea from another waitress. Mildred’s friend was there again and she was talking to him. She paid no attention to Philip, and so when he went out he chose a moment when she had to cross his path: as he passed he looked at her as though he had never seen her before. He repeated this for three or four days. He expected that presently she would take the opportunity to say something to him; he thought she would ask why he never came to one of her tables now, and he had prepared an answer charged with all the loathing he felt for her. He knew it was absurd to trouble, but he could not help himself. She had beaten him again. The German suddenly disappeared, but Philip still sat at other tables. She paid no attention to him. Suddenly he realised that what he did was a matter of complete indifference to her; he could go on in that way till doomsday, and it would have no effect.

“I’ve not finished yet,” he said to himself.

The day after he sat down in his old seat, and when she came up said good-evening as though he had not ignored her for a week. His face was placid, but he could not prevent the mad beating of his heart. At that time the musical comedy had lately leaped into public favour, and he was sure that Mildred would be delighted to go to one.

“I say,” he said suddenly, “I wonder if you’d dine with me one night and come to The Belle of New York. I’ll get a couple of stalls.”

He added the last sentence in order to tempt her. He knew that when the girls went to the play it was either in the pit, or, if some man took them, seldom to more expensive seats than the upper circle. Mildred’s pale face showed no change of expression.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“When will you come?”

“I get off early on Thursdays.”

They made arrangements. Mildred lived with an aunt at Herne Hill. The play began at eight so they must dine at seven. She proposed that he should meet her in the second-class waiting-room at Victoria Station. She showed no pleasure, but accepted the invitation as though she conferred a favour. Philip was vaguely irritated.

LVII

Philip arrived at Victoria Station nearly half an hour before the time which Mildred had appointed, and sat down in the second-class waiting-room. He waited and she did not come. He began to grow anxious, and walked into the station watching the incoming suburban trains; the hour which she had fixed passed, and still there was no sign of her. Philip was impatient. He went into the other waiting-rooms and looked at the people sitting in them. Suddenly his heart gave a great thud.

“There you are. I thought you were never coming.”

“I like that after keeping me waiting all this time. I had half a mind to go back home again.”

“But you said you’d come to the second-class waiting-room.”

“I didn’t say any such thing. It isn’t exactly likely I’d sit in the second-class room when I could sit in the first is it?”

Though Philip was sure he had not made a mistake, he said nothing, and they got into a cab.

“Where are we dining?” she asked.

“I thought of the Adelphi Restaurant. Will that suit you?”

“I don’t mind where we dine.”

She spoke ungraciously. She was put out by being kept waiting and answered Philip’s attempt at conversation with monosyllables. She wore a long cloak of some rough, dark material and a crochet shawl over her head. They reached the restaurant and sat down at a table. She looked round with satisfaction. The red shades to the candles on the tables, the gold of the decorations, the looking-glasses, lent the room a sumptuous air.

“I’ve never been here before.”

She gave Philip a smile. She had taken off her cloak; and he saw that she wore a pale blue dress, cut square at the neck; and her hair was more elaborately arranged than ever. He had ordered champagne and when it came her eyes sparkled.

“You are going it,” she said.

“Because I’ve ordered fiz?” he asked carelessly, as though he never drank anything else.

“I WAS surprised when you asked me to do a theatre with you.” Conversation did not go very easily, for she did not seem to have much to say; and Philip was nervously conscious that he was not amusing her. She listened carelessly to his remarks, with her eyes on other diners, and made no pretence that she was interested in him. He made one or two little jokes, but she took them quite seriously. The only sign of vivacity he got was when he spoke of the other girls in the shop; she could not bear the manageress and told him all her misdeeds at length.

“I can’t stick her at any price and all the air she gives herself. Sometimes I’ve got more than half a mind to tell her something she doesn’t think I know anything about.”

“What is that?” asked Philip.

“Well, I happen to know that she’s not above going to Eastbourne with a man for the week-end now and again. One of the girls has a married sister who goes there with her husband, and she’s seen her. She was staying at the same boarding-house, and she ‘ad a wedding-ring on, and I know for one she’s not married.”

Philip filled her glass, hoping that champagne would make her more affable; he was anxious that his little jaunt should be a success. He noticed that she held her knife as though it were a pen-holder, and when she drank protruded her little finger. He started several topics of conversation, but he could get little out of her, and he remembered with irritation that he had seen her talking nineteen to the dozen and laughing with the German. They finished dinner and went to the play. Philip was a very cultured young man, and he looked upon musical comedy with scorn. He thought the jokes vulgar and the melodies obvious; it seemed to him that they did these things much better in France; but Mildred enjoyed herself thoroughly; she laughed till her sides ached, looking at Philip now and then when something tickled her to exchange a glance of pleasure; and she applauded rapturously.

“This is the seventh time I’ve been,” she said, after the first act, “and

I don’t mind if I come seven times more.”

She was much interested in the women who surrounded them in the stalls. She pointed out to Philip those who were painted and those who wore false hair.

“It is horrible, these West-end people,” she said. “I don’t know how they can do it.” She put her hand to her hair. “Mine’s all my own, every bit of it.”

She found no one to admire, and whenever she spoke of anyone it was to say something disagreeable. It made Philip uneasy. He supposed that next day she would tell the girls in the shop that he had taken her out and that he had bored her to death. He disliked her, and yet, he knew not why, he wanted to be with her. On the way home he asked:

“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself?”

“Rather.”

“Will you come out with me again one evening?”

“I don’t mind.”

He could never get beyond such expressions as that. Her indifference maddened him.

“That sounds as if you didn’t much care if you came or not.”

“Oh, if you don’t take me out some other fellow will. I need never want for men who’ll take me to the theatre.”

Philip was silent. They came to the station, and he went to the booking-office.

“I’ve got my season,” she said.

“I thought I’d take you home as it’s rather late, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if it gives you any pleasure.”

He took a single first for her and a return for himself.

“Well, you’re not mean, I will say that for you,” she said, when he opened the carriage-door.

Philip did not know whether he was pleased or sorry when other people entered and it was impossible to speak. They got out at Herne Hill, and he accompanied her to the corner of the road in which she lived.

“I’ll say good-night to you here,” she said, holding out her hand. “You’d better not come up to the door. I know what people are, and I don’t want to have anybody talking.”

She said good-night and walked quickly away. He could see the white shawl in the darkness. He thought she might turn round, but she did not. Philip saw which house she went into, and in a moment he walked along to look at it. It was a trim, common little house of yellow brick, exactly like all the other little houses in the street. He stood outside for a few minutes, and presently the window on the top floor was darkened. Philip strolled slowly back to the station. The evening had been unsatisfactory. He felt irritated, restless, and miserable.

When he lay in bed he seemed still to see her sitting in the corner of the railway carriage, with the white crochet shawl over her head. He did not know how he was to get through the hours that must pass before his eyes rested on her again. He thought drowsily of her thin face, with its delicate features, and the greenish pallor of her skin. He was not happy with her, but he was unhappy away from her. He wanted to sit by her side and look at her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted… the thought came to him and he did not finish it, suddenly he grew wide awake… he wanted to kiss the thin, pale mouth with its narrow lips. The truth came to him at last. He was in love with her. It was incredible.

He had often thought of falling in love, and there was one scene which he had pictured to himself over and over again. He saw himself coming into a ball-room; his eyes fell on a little group of men and women talking; and one of the women turned round. Her eyes fell upon him, and he knew that the gasp in his throat was in her throat too. He stood quite still. She was tall and dark and beautiful with eyes like the night; she was dressed in white, and in her black hair shone diamonds; they stared at one another, forgetting that people surrounded them. He went straight up to her, and she moved a little towards him. Both felt that the formality of introduction was out of place. He spoke to her.

“I’ve been looking for you all my life,” he said.

“You’ve come at last,” she murmured.

“Will you dance with me?”

She surrendered herself to his outstretched hands and they danced. (Philip always pretended that he was not lame.) She danced divinely.

“I’ve never danced with anyone who danced like you,” she said.

She tore up her programme, and they danced together the whole evening.

“I’m so thankful that I waited for you,” he said to her. “I knew that in the end I must meet you.”

People in the ball-room stared. They did not care. They did not wish to hide their passion. At last they went into the garden. He flung a light cloak over her shoulders and put her in a waiting cab. They caught the midnight train to Paris; and they sped through the silent, star-lit night into the unknown.

He thought of this old fancy of his, and it seemed impossible that he should be in love with Mildred Rogers. Her name was grotesque. He did not think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only that evening he had noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening-dress; he went over her features one by one; he did not like her mouth, and the unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common. Her phrases, so bald and few, constantly repeated, showed the emptiness of her mind; he recalled her vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the musical comedy; and he remembered the little finger carefully extended when she held her glass to her mouth; her manners like her conversation, were odiously genteel. He remembered her insolence; sometimes he had felt inclined to box her ears; and suddenly, he knew not why, perhaps it was the thought of hitting her or the recollection of her tiny, beautiful ears, he was seized by an uprush of emotion. He yearned for her. He thought of taking her in his arms, the thin, fragile body, and kissing her pale mouth: he wanted to pass his fingers down the slightly greenish cheeks. He wanted her.

He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before. He tried to think when it had first come to him. He did not know. He only remembered that each time he had gone into the shop, after the first two or three times, it had been with a little feeling in the heart that was pain; and he remembered that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless. When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair.

He stretched himself in his bed as a dog stretches himself. He wondered how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul.

LVIII

Philip woke early next morning, and his first thought was of Mildred. It struck him that he might meet her at Victoria Station and walk with her to the shop. He shaved quickly, scrambled into his clothes, and took a bus to the station. He was there by twenty to eight and watched the incoming trains. Crowds poured out of them, clerks and shop-people at that early hour, and thronged up the platform: they hurried along, sometimes in pairs, here and there a group of girls, but more often alone. They were white, most of them, ugly in the early morning, and they had an abstracted look; the younger ones walked lightly, as though the cement of the platform were pleasant to tread, but the others went as though impelled by a machine: their faces were set in an anxious frown.

At last Philip saw Mildred, and he went up to her eagerly.

“Good-morning,” he said. “I thought I’d come and see how you were after last night.”

She wore an old brown ulster and a sailor hat. It was very clear that she was not pleased to see him.

“Oh, I’m all right. I haven’t got much time to waste.”

“D’you mind if I walk down Victoria Street with you?”

“I’m none too early. I shall have to walk fast,” she answered, looking down at Philip’s club-foot.

He turned scarlet.

“I beg your pardon. I won’t detain you.”

“You can please yourself.”

She went on, and he with a sinking heart made his way home to breakfast. He hated her. He knew he was a fool to bother about her; she was not the sort of woman who would ever care two straws for him, and she must look upon his deformity with distaste. He made up his mind that he would not go in to tea that afternoon, but, hating himself, he went. She nodded to him as he came in and smiled.

“I expect I was rather short with you this morning,” she said. “You see,

I didn’t expect you, and it came like a surprise.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter at all.”

He felt that a great weight had suddenly been lifted from him. He was infinitely grateful for one word of kindness.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. “Nobody’s wanting you just now.”

“I don’t mind if I do.”

He looked at her, but could think of nothing to say; he racked his brains anxiously, seeking for a remark which should keep her by him; he wanted to tell her how much she meant to him; but he did not know how to make love now that he loved in earnest.

“Where’s your friend with the fair moustache? I haven’t seen him lately.”

“Oh, he’s gone back to Birmingham. He’s in business there. He only comes up to London every now and again.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“You’d better ask him,” she said, with a laugh. “I don’t know what it’s got to do with you if he is.”

A bitter answer leaped to his tongue, but he was learning self-restraint.

“I wonder why you say things like that,” was all he permitted himself to say.

She looked at him with those indifferent eyes of hers.

“It looks as if you didn’t set much store on me,” he added.

“Why should I?”

“No reason at all.”

He reached over for his paper.

“You are quick-tempered,” she said, when she saw the gesture. “You do take offence easily.”

He smiled and looked at her appealingly.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked.

“That depends what it is.”

“Let me walk back to the station with you tonight.”

“I don’t mind.”

He went out after tea and went back to his rooms, but at eight o’clock, when the shop closed, he was waiting outside.

“You are a caution,” she said, when she came out. “I don’t understand you.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it was very difficult,” he answered bitterly.

“Did any of the girls see you waiting for me?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“They all laugh at you, you know. They say you’re spoony on me.”

“Much you care,” he muttered.

“Now then, quarrelsome.”

At the station he took a ticket and said he was going to accompany her home.

“You don’t seem to have much to do with your time,” she said.

“I suppose I can waste it in my own way.”

They seemed to be always on the verge of a quarrel. The fact was that he hated himself for loving her. She seemed to be constantly humiliating him, and for each snub that he endured he owed her a grudge. But she was in a friendly mood that evening, and talkative: she told him that her parents were dead; she gave him to understand that she did not have to earn her living, but worked for amusement.

“My aunt doesn’t like my going to business. I can have the best of everything at home. I don’t want you to think I work because I need to.” Philip knew that she was not speaking the truth. The gentility of her class made her use this pretence to avoid the stigma attached to earning her living.

“My family’s very well-connected,” she said.

Philip smiled faintly, and she noticed it.

“What are you laughing at?” she said quickly. “Don’t you believe I’m telling you the truth?”

“Of course I do,” he answered.

She looked at him suspiciously, but in a moment could not resist the temptation to impress him with the splendour of her early days.

“My father always kept a dog-cart, and we had three servants. We had a cook and a housemaid and an odd man. We used to grow beautiful roses. People used to stop at the gate and ask who the house belonged to, the roses were so beautiful. Of course it isn’t very nice for me having to mix with them girls in the shop, it’s not the class of person I’ve been used to, and sometimes I really think I’ll give up business on that account. It’s not the work I mind, don’t think that; but it’s the class of people I have to mix with.”

They were sitting opposite one another in the train, and Philip, listening sympathetically to what she said, was quite happy. He was amused at her naivete and slightly touched. There was a very faint colour in her cheeks. He was thinking that it would be delightful to kiss the tip of her chin.

“The moment you come into the shop I saw you was a gentleman in every sense of the word. Was your father a professional man?”

“He was a doctor.”

“You can always tell a professional man. There’s something about them, I don’t know what it is, but I know at once.”

They walked along from the station together.

“I say, I want you to come and see another play with me,” he said.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“You might go so far as to say you’d like to.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s fix a day. Would Saturday night suit you?”

“Yes, that’ll do.”

They made further arrangements, and then found themselves at the corner of the road in which she lived. She gave him her hand, and he held it.

“I say, I do so awfully want to call you Mildred.”

“You may if you like, I don’t care.”

“And you’ll call me Philip, won’t you?”

“I will if I can think of it. It seems more natural to call you Mr.

Carey.”

He drew her slightly towards him, but she leaned back.

“What are you doing?”

“Won’t you kiss me good-night?” he whispered.

“Impudence!” she said.

She snatched away her hand and hurried towards her house.

Philip bought tickets for Saturday night. It was not one of the days on which she got off early and therefore she would have no time to go home and change; but she meant to bring a frock up with her in the morning and hurry into her clothes at the shop. If the manageress was in a good temper she would let her go at seven. Philip had agreed to wait outside from a quarter past seven onwards. He looked forward to the occasion with painful eagerness, for in the cab on the way from the theatre to the station he thought she would let him kiss her. The vehicle gave every facility for a man to put his arm round a girl’s waist (an advantage which the hansom had over the taxi of the present day), and the delight of that was worth the cost of the evening’s entertainment.

But on Saturday afternoon when he went in to have tea, in order to confirm the arrangements, he met the man with the fair moustache coming out of the shop. He knew by now that he was called Miller. He was a naturalized German, who had anglicised his name, and he had lived many years in England. Philip had heard him speak, and, though his English was fluent and natural, it had not quite the intonation of the native. Philip knew that he was flirting with Mildred, and he was horribly jealous of him; but he took comfort in the coldness of her temperament, which otherwise distressed him; and, thinking her incapable of passion, he looked upon his rival as no better off than himself. But his heart sank now, for his first thought was that Miller’s sudden appearance might interfere with the jaunt which he had so looked forward to. He entered, sick with apprehension. The waitress came up to him, took his order for tea, and presently brought it.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she said, with an expression on her face of real distress. “I shan’t be able to come tonight after all.”

“Why?” said Philip.

“Don’t look so stern about it,” she laughed. “It’s not my fault. My aunt was taken ill last night, and it’s the girl’s night out so I must go and sit with her. She can’t be left alone, can she?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you home instead.”

“But you’ve got the tickets. It would be a pity to waste them.”

He took them out of his pocket and deliberately tore them up.

“What are you doing that for?”

“You don’t suppose I want to go and see a rotten musical comedy by myself, do you? I only took seats there for your sake.”

“You can’t see me home if that’s what you mean?”

“You’ve made other arrangements.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that. You’re just as selfish as all the rest of them. You only think of yourself. It’s not my fault if my aunt’s queer.”

She quickly wrote out his bill and left him. Philip knew very little about women, or he would have been aware that one should accept their most transparent lies. He made up his mind that he would watch the shop and see for certain whether Mildred went out with the German. He had an unhappy passion for certainty. At seven he stationed himself on the opposite pavement. He looked about for Miller, but did not see him. In ten minutes she came out, she had on the cloak and shawl which she had worn when he took her to the Shaftesbury Theatre. It was obvious that she was not going home. She saw him before he had time to move away, started a little, and then came straight up to him.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Taking the air,” he answered.

“You’re spying on me, you dirty little cad. I thought you was a gentleman.”

“Did you think a gentleman would be likely to take any interest in you?” he murmured.

There was a devil within him which forced him to make matters worse. He wanted to hurt her as much as she was hurting him.

“I suppose I can change my mind if I like. I’m not obliged to come out with you. I tell you I’m going home, and I won’t be followed or spied upon.”

“Have you seen Miller today?”

“That’s no business of yours. In point of fact I haven’t, so you’re wrong again.”

“I saw him this afternoon. He’d just come out of the shop when I went in.”

“Well, what if he did? I can go out with him if I want to, can’t I? I don’t know what you’ve got to say to it.”

“He’s keeping you waiting, isn’t he?”

“Well, I’d rather wait for him than have you wait for me. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And now p’raps you’ll go off home and mind your own business in future.”

His mood changed suddenly from anger to despair, and his voice trembled when he spoke.

“I say, don’t be beastly with me, Mildred. You know I’m awfully fond of you. I think I love you with all my heart. Won’t you change your mind? I was looking forward to this evening so awfully. You see, he hasn’t come, and he can’t care twopence about you really. Won’t you dine with me? I’ll get some more tickets, and we’ll go anywhere you like.”

“I tell you I won’t. It’s no good you talking. I’ve made up my mind, and when I make up my mind I keep to it.”

He looked at her for a moment. His heart was torn with anguish. People were hurrying past them on the pavement, and cabs and omnibuses rolled by noisily. He saw that Mildred’s eyes were wandering. She was afraid of missing Miller in the crowd.

“I can’t go on like this,” groaned Philip. “It’s too degrading. If I go now I go for good. Unless you’ll come with me tonight you’ll never see me again.”

“You seem to think that’ll be an awful thing for me. All I say is, good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Then good-bye.”

He nodded and limped away slowly, for he hoped with all his heart that she would call him back. At the next lamp-post he stopped and looked over his shoulder. He thought she might beckon to him — he was willing to forget everything, he was ready for any humiliation — but she had turned away, and apparently had ceased to trouble about him. He realised that she was glad to be quit of him.

LIX

Philip passed the evening wretchedly. He had told his landlady that he would not be in, so there was nothing for him to eat, and he had to go to Gatti’s for dinner. Afterwards he went back to his rooms, but Griffiths on the floor above him was having a party, and the noisy merriment made his own misery more hard to bear. He went to a music-hall, but it was Saturday night and there was standing-room only: after half an hour of boredom his legs grew tired and he went home. He tried to read, but he could not fix his attention; and yet it was necessary that he should work hard. His examination in biology was in little more than a fortnight, and, though it was easy, he had neglected his lectures of late and was conscious that he knew nothing. It was only a viva, however, and he felt sure that in a fortnight he could find out enough about the subject to scrape through. He had confidence in his intelligence. He threw aside his book and gave himself up to thinking deliberately of the matter which was in his mind all the time.

He reproached himself bitterly for his behaviour that evening. Why had he given her the alternative that she must dine with him or else never see him again? Of course she refused. He should have allowed for her pride. He had burnt his ships behind him. It would not be so hard to bear if he thought that she was suffering now, but he knew her too well: she was perfectly indifferent to him. If he hadn’t been a fool he would have pretended to believe her story; he ought to have had the strength to conceal his disappointment and the self-control to master his temper. He could not tell why he loved her. He had read of the idealisation that takes place in love, but he saw her exactly as she was. She was not amusing or clever, her mind was common; she had a vulgar shrewdness which revolted him, she had no gentleness nor softness. As she would have put it herself, she was on the make. What aroused her admiration was a clever trick played on an unsuspecting person; to ‘do’ somebody always gave her satisfaction. Philip laughed savagely as he thought of her gentility and the refinement with which she ate her food; she could not bear a coarse word, so far as her limited vocabulary reached she had a passion for euphemisms, and she scented indecency everywhere; she never spoke of trousers but referred to them as nether garments; she thought it slightly indelicate to blow her nose and did it in a deprecating way. She was dreadfully anaemic and suffered from the dyspepsia which accompanies that ailing. Philip was repelled by her flat breast and narrow hips, and he hated the vulgar way in which she did her hair. He loathed and despised himself for loving her.

The fact remained that he was helpless. He felt just as he had felt sometimes in the hands of a bigger boy at school. He had struggled against the superior strength till his own strength was gone, and he was rendered quite powerless — he remembered the peculiar languor he had felt in his limbs, almost as though he were paralysed — so that he could not help himself at all. He might have been dead. He felt just that same weakness now. He loved the woman so that he knew he had never loved before. He did not mind her faults of person or of character, he thought he loved them too: at all events they meant nothing to him. It did not seem himself that was concerned; he felt that he had been seized by some strange force that moved him against his will, contrary to his interests; and because he had a passion for freedom he hated the chains which bound him. He laughed at himself when he thought how often he had longed to experience the overwhelming passion. He cursed himself because he had given way to it. He thought of the beginnings; nothing of all this would have happened if he had not gone into the shop with Dunsford. The whole thing was his own fault. Except for his ridiculous vanity he would never have troubled himself with the ill-mannered slut.

At all events the occurrences of that evening had finished the whole affair. Unless he was lost to all sense of shame he could not go back. He wanted passionately to get rid of the love that obsessed him; it was degrading and hateful. He must prevent himself from thinking of her. In a little while the anguish he suffered must grow less. His mind went back to the past. He wondered whether Emily Wilkinson and Fanny Price had endured on his account anything like the torment that he suffered now. He felt a pang of remorse.

“I didn’t know then what it was like,” he said to himself.

He slept very badly. The next day was Sunday, and he worked at his biology. He sat with the book in front of him, forming the words with his lips in order to fix his attention, but he could remember nothing. He found his thoughts going back to Mildred every minute, and he repeated to himself the exact words of the quarrel they had had. He had to force himself back to his book. He went out for a walk. The streets on the South side of the river were dingy enough on week-days, but there was an energy, a coming and going, which gave them a sordid vivacity; but on Sundays, with no shops open, no carts in the roadway, silent and depressed, they were indescribably dreary. Philip thought that day would never end. But he was so tired that he slept heavily, and when Monday came he entered upon life with determination. Christmas was approaching, and a good many of the students had gone into the country for the short holiday between the two parts of the winter session; but Philip had refused his uncle’s invitation to go down to Blackstable. He had given the approaching examination as his excuse, but in point of fact he had been unwilling to leave London and Mildred. He had neglected his work so much that now he had only a fortnight to learn what the curriculum allowed three months for. He set to work seriously. He found it easier each day not to think of Mildred. He congratulated himself on his force of character. The pain he suffered was no longer anguish, but a sort of soreness, like what one might be expected to feel if one had been thrown off a horse and, though no bones were broken, were bruised all over and shaken. Philip found that he was able to observe with curiosity the condition he had been in during the last few weeks. He analysed his feelings with interest. He was a little amused at himself. One thing that struck him was how little under those circumstances it mattered what one thought; the system of personal philosophy, which had given him great satisfaction to devise, had not served him. He was puzzled by this.

But sometimes in the street he would see a girl who looked so like Mildred that his heart seemed to stop beating. Then he could not help himself, he hurried on to catch her up, eager and anxious, only to find that it was a total stranger. Men came back from the country, and he went with Dunsford to have tea at an A. B. C. shop. The well-known uniform made him so miserable that he could not speak. The thought came to him that perhaps she had been transferred to another establishment of the firm for which she worked, and he might suddenly find himself face to face with her. The idea filled him with panic, so that he feared Dunsford would see that something was the matter with him: he could not think of anything to say; he pretended to listen to what Dunsford was talking about; the conversation maddened him; and it was all he could do to prevent himself from crying out to Dunsford for Heaven’s sake to hold his tongue.

Then came the day of his examination. Philip, when his turn arrived, went forward to the examiner’s table with the utmost confidence. He answered three or four questions. Then they showed him various specimens; he had been to very few lectures and, as soon as he was asked about things which he could not learn from books, he was floored. He did what he could to hide his ignorance, the examiner did not insist, and soon his ten minutes were over. He felt certain he had passed; but next day, when he went up to the examination buildings to see the result posted on the door, he was astounded not to find his number among those who had satisfied the examiners. In amazement he read the list three times. Dunsford was with him.

“I say, I’m awfully sorry you’re ploughed,” he said.

He had just inquired Philip’s number. Philip turned and saw by his radiant face that Dunsford had passed.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit,” said Philip. “I’m jolly glad you’re all right. I shall go up again in July.”

He was very anxious to pretend he did not mind, and on their way back along The Embankment insisted on talking of indifferent things. Dunsford good-naturedly wanted to discuss the causes of Philip’s failure, but Philip was obstinately casual. He was horribly mortified; and the fact that Dunsford, whom he looked upon as a very pleasant but quite stupid fellow, had passed made his own rebuff harder to bear. He had always been proud of his intelligence, and now he asked himself desperately whether he was not mistaken in the opinion he held of himself. In the three months of the winter session the students who had joined in October had already shaken down into groups, and it was clear which were brilliant, which were clever or industrious, and which were ‘rotters.’ Philip was conscious that his failure was a surprise to no one but himself. It was tea-time, and he knew that a lot of men would be having tea in the basement of the Medical School: those who had passed the examination would be exultant, those who disliked him would look at him with satisfaction, and the poor devils who had failed would sympathise with him in order to receive sympathy. His instinct was not to go near the hospital for a week, when the affair would be no more thought of, but, because he hated so much to go just then, he went: he wanted to inflict suffering upon himself. He forgot for the moment his maxim of life to follow his inclinations with due regard for the policeman round the corner; or, if he acted in accordance with it, there must have been some strange morbidity in his nature which made him take a grim pleasure in self-torture.

But later on, when he had endured the ordeal to which he forced himself, going out into the night after the noisy conversation in the smoking-room, he was seized with a feeling of utter loneliness. He seemed to himself absurd and futile. He had an urgent need of consolation, and the temptation to see Mildred was irresistible. He thought bitterly that there was small chance of consolation from her; but he wanted to see her even if he did not speak to her; after all, she was a waitress and would be obliged to serve him. She was the only person in the world he cared for. There was no use in hiding that fact from himself. Of course it would be humiliating to go back to the shop as though nothing had happened, but he had not much self-respect left. Though he would not confess it to himself, he had hoped each day that she would write to him; she knew that a letter addressed to the hospital would find him; but she had not written: it was evident that she cared nothing if she saw him again or not. And he kept on repeating to himself:

“I must see her. I must see her.”

The desire was so great that he could not give the time necessary to walk, but jumped in a cab. He was too thrifty to use one when it could possibly be avoided. He stood outside the shop for a minute or two. The thought came to him that perhaps she had left, and in terror he walked in quickly. He saw her at once. He sat down and she came up to him.

“A cup of tea and a muffin, please,” he ordered.

He could hardly speak. He was afraid for a moment that he was going to cry.

“I almost thought you was dead,” she said.

She was smiling. Smiling! She seemed to have forgotten completely that last scene which Philip had repeated to himself a hundred times.

“I thought if you’d wanted to see me you’d write,” he answered.

“I’ve got too much to do to think about writing letters.”

It seemed impossible for her to say a gracious thing. Philip cursed the fate which chained him to such a woman. She went away to fetch his tea.

“Would you like me to sit down for a minute or two?” she said, when she brought it.

“Yes.”

“Where have you been all this time?”

“I’ve been in London.”

“I thought you’d gone away for the holidays. Why haven’t you been in then?”

Philip looked at her with haggard, passionate eyes.

“Don’t you remember that I said I’d never see you again?”

“What are you doing now then?”

She seemed anxious to make him drink up the cup of his humiliation; but he knew her well enough to know that she spoke at random; she hurt him frightfully, and never even tried to. He did not answer.

“It was a nasty trick you played on me, spying on me like that. I always thought you was a gentleman in every sense of the word.”

“Don’t be beastly to me, Mildred. I can’t bear it.”

“You are a funny feller. I can’t make you out.”

“It’s very simple. I’m such a blasted fool as to love you with all my heart and soul, and I know that you don’t care twopence for me.”

“If you had been a gentleman I think you’d have come next day and begged my pardon.”

She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses.

“If I could only make you understand how frightfully I’m in love with you.”

“You haven’t begged my pardon yet.”

He grew very white. She felt that she had done nothing wrong on that occasion. She wanted him now to humble himself. He was very proud. For one instant he felt inclined to tell her to go to hell, but he dared not. His passion made him abject. He was willing to submit to anything rather than not see her.

“I’m very sorry, Mildred. I beg your pardon.”

He had to force the words out. It was a horrible effort.

“Now you’ve said that I don’t mind telling you that I wish I had come out with you that evening. I thought Miller was a gentleman, but I’ve discovered my mistake now. I soon sent him about his business.”

Philip gave a little gasp.

“Mildred, won’t you come out with me tonight? Let’s go and dine somewhere.”

“Oh, I can’t. My aunt’ll be expecting me home.”

“I’ll send her a wire. You can say you’ve been detained in the shop; she won’t know any better. Oh, do come, for God’s sake. I haven’t seen you for so long, and I want to talk to you.”

She looked down at her clothes.

“Never mind about that. We’ll go somewhere where it doesn’t matter how you’re dressed. And we’ll go to a music-hall afterwards. Please say yes. It would give me so much pleasure.”

She hesitated a moment; he looked at her with pitifully appealing eyes.

“Well, I don’t mind if I do. I haven’t been out anywhere since I don’t know how long.”

It was with the greatest difficulty he could prevent himself from seizing her hand there and then to cover it with kisses.

LX

They dined in Soho. Philip was tremulous with joy. It was not one of the more crowded of those cheap restaurants where the respectable and needy dine in the belief that it is bohemian and the assurance that it is economical. It was a humble establishment, kept by a good man from Rouen and his wife, that Philip had discovered by accident. He had been attracted by the Gallic look of the window, in which was generally an uncooked steak on one plate and on each side two dishes of raw vegetables. There was one seedy French waiter, who was attempting to learn English in a house where he never heard anything but French; and the customers were a few ladies of easy virtue, a menage or two, who had their own napkins reserved for them, and a few queer men who came in for hurried, scanty meals.

Here Mildred and Philip were able to get a table to themselves. Philip sent the waiter for a bottle of Burgundy from the neighbouring tavern, and they had a potage aux herbes, a steak from the window aux pommes, and an omelette au kirsch. There was really an air of romance in the meal and in the place. Mildred, at first a little reserved in her appreciation— “I never quite trust these foreign places, you never know what there is in these messed up dishes” — was insensibly moved by it.

“I like this place, Philip,” she said. “You feel you can put your elbows on the table, don’t you?”

A tall fellow came in, with a mane of gray hair and a ragged thin beard. He wore a dilapidated cloak and a wide-awake hat. He nodded to Philip, who had met him there before.

“He looks like an anarchist,” said Mildred.

“He is, one of the most dangerous in Europe. He’s been in every prison on the Continent and has assassinated more persons than any gentleman unhung. He always goes about with a bomb in his pocket, and of course it makes conversation a little difficult because if you don’t agree with him he lays it on the table in a marked manner.”

She looked at the man with horror and surprise, and then glanced suspiciously at Philip. She saw that his eyes were laughing. She frowned a little.

“You’re getting at me.”

He gave a little shout of joy. He was so happy. But Mildred didn’t like being laughed at.

“I don’t see anything funny in telling lies.”

“Don’t be cross.”

He took her hand, which was lying on the table, and pressed it gently.

“You are lovely, and I could kiss the ground you walk on,” he said.

The greenish pallor of her skin intoxicated him, and her thin white lips had an extraordinary fascination. Her anaemia made her rather short of breath, and she held her mouth slightly open. It seemed to add somehow to the attractiveness of her face.

“You do like me a bit, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, if I didn’t I suppose I shouldn’t be here, should I? You’re a gentleman in every sense of the word, I will say that for you.”

They had finished their dinner and were drinking coffee. Philip, throwing economy to the winds, smoked a three-penny cigar.

“You can’t imagine what a pleasure it is to me just to sit opposite and look at you. I’ve yearned for you. I was sick for a sight of you.”

Mildred smiled a little and faintly flushed. She was not then suffering from the dyspepsia which generally attacked her immediately after a meal. She felt more kindly disposed to Philip than ever before, and the unaccustomed tenderness in her eyes filled him with joy. He knew instinctively that it was madness to give himself into her hands; his only chance was to treat her casually and never allow her to see the untamed passions that seethed in his breast; she would only take advantage of his weakness; but he could not be prudent now: he told her all the agony he had endured during the separation from her; he told her of his struggles with himself, how he had tried to get over his passion, thought he had succeeded, and how he found out that it was as strong as ever. He knew that he had never really wanted to get over it. He loved her so much that he did not mind suffering. He bared his heart to her. He showed her proudly all his weakness.

Nothing would have pleased him more than to sit on in the cosy, shabby restaurant, but he knew that Mildred wanted entertainment. She was restless and, wherever she was, wanted after a while to go somewhere else. He dared not bore her.

“I say, how about going to a music-hall?” he said.

He thought rapidly that if she cared for him at all she would say she preferred to stay there.

“I was just thinking we ought to be going if we are going,” she answered.

“Come on then.”

Philip waited impatiently for the end of the performance. He had made up his mind exactly what to do, and when they got into the cab he passed his arm, as though almost by accident, round her waist. But he drew it back quickly with a little cry. He had pricked himself. She laughed.

“There, that comes of putting your arm where it’s got no business to be,” she said. “I always know when men try and put their arm round my waist. That pin always catches them.”

“I’ll be more careful.”

He put his arm round again. She made no objection.

“I’m so comfortable,” he sighed blissfully.

“So long as you’re happy,” she retorted.

They drove down St. James’ Street into the Park, and Philip quickly kissed her. He was strangely afraid of her, and it required all his courage. She turned her lips to him without speaking. She neither seemed to mind nor to like it.

“If you only knew how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he murmured.

He tried to kiss her again, but she turned her head away.

“Once is enough,” she said.

On the chance of kissing her a second time he travelled down to Herne Hill with her, and at the end of the road in which she lived he asked her:

“Won’t you give me another kiss?”

She looked at him indifferently and then glanced up the road to see that no one was in sight.

“I don’t mind.”

He seized her in his arms and kissed her passionately, but she pushed him away.

“Mind my hat, silly. You are clumsy,” she said.

LXI

He saw her then every day. He began going to lunch at the shop, but Mildred stopped him: she said it made the girls talk; so he had to content himself with tea; but he always waited about to walk with her to the station; and once or twice a week they dined together. He gave her little presents, a gold bangle, gloves, handkerchiefs, and the like. He was spending more than he could afford, but he could not help it: it was only when he gave her anything that she showed any affection. She knew the price of everything, and her gratitude was in exact proportion with the value of his gift. He did not care. He was too happy when she volunteered to kiss him to mind by what means he got her demonstrativeness. He discovered that she found Sundays at home tedious, so he went down to Herne Hill in the morning, met her at the end of the road, and went to church with her.

“I always like to go to church once,” she said. “It looks well, doesn’t it?”

Then she went back to dinner, he got a scrappy meal at a hotel, and in the afternoon they took a walk in Brockwell Park. They had nothing much to say to one another, and Philip, desperately afraid she was bored (she was very easily bored), racked his brain for topics of conversation. He realised that these walks amused neither of them, but he could not bear to leave her, and did all he could to lengthen them till she became tired and out of temper. He knew that she did not care for him, and he tried to force a love which his reason told him was not in her nature: she was cold. He had no claim on her, but he could not help being exacting. Now that they were more intimate he found it less easy to control his temper; he was often irritable and could not help saying bitter things. Often they quarrelled, and she would not speak to him for a while; but this always reduced him to subjection, and he crawled before her. He was angry with himself for showing so little dignity. He grew furiously jealous if he saw her speaking to any other man in the shop, and when he was jealous he seemed to be beside himself. He would deliberately insult her, leave the shop and spend afterwards a sleepless night tossing on his bed, by turns angry and remorseful. Next day he would go to the shop and appeal for forgiveness.

“Don’t be angry with me,” he said. “I’m so awfully fond of you that I can’t help myself.”

“One of these days you’ll go too far,” she answered.

He was anxious to come to her home in order that the greater intimacy should give him an advantage over the stray acquaintances she made during her working-hours; but she would not let him.

“My aunt would think it so funny,” she said.

He suspected that her refusal was due only to a disinclination to let him see her aunt. Mildred had represented her as the widow of a professional man (that was her formula of distinction), and was uneasily conscious that the good woman could hardly be called distinguished. Philip imagined that she was in point of fact the widow of a small tradesman. He knew that Mildred was a snob. But he found no means by which he could indicate to her that he did not mind how common the aunt was.

Their worst quarrel took place one evening at dinner when she told him that a man had asked her to go to a play with him. Philip turned pale, and his face grew hard and stern.

“You’re not going?” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I? He’s a very nice gentlemanly fellow.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you like.”

“But that isn’t the same thing. I can’t always go about with you. Besides he’s asked me to fix my own day, and I’ll just go one evening when I’m not going out with you. It won’t make any difference to you.”

“If you had any sense of decency, if you had any gratitude, you wouldn’t dream of going.”

“I don’t know what you mean by gratitude. If you’re referring to the things you’ve given me you can have them back. I don’t want them.”

Her voice had the shrewish tone it sometimes got.

“It’s not very lively, always going about with you. It’s always do you love me, do you love me, till I just get about sick of it.”

He knew it was madness to go on asking her that, but he could not help himself.

“Oh, I like you all right,” she would answer.

“Is that all? I love you with all my heart.”

“I’m not that sort, I’m not one to say much.”

“If you knew how happy just one word would make me!”

“Well, what I always say is, people must take me as they find me, and if they don’t like it they can lump it.”

But sometimes she expressed herself more plainly still, and, when he asked the question, answered:

“Oh, don’t go on at that again.”

Then he became sulky and silent. He hated her.

And now he said:

“Oh, well, if you feel like that about it I wonder you condescend to come out with me at all.”

“It’s not my seeking, you can be very sure of that, you just force me to.”

His pride was bitterly hurt, and he answered madly.

“You think I’m just good enough to stand you dinners and theatres when there’s no one else to do it, and when someone else turns up I can go to hell. Thank you, I’m about sick of being made a convenience.”

“I’m not going to be talked to like that by anyone. I’ll just show you how much I want your dirty dinner.”

She got up, put on her jacket, and walked quickly out of the restaurant. Philip sat on. He determined he would not move, but ten minutes afterwards he jumped in a cab and followed her. He guessed that she would take a ‘bus to Victoria, so that they would arrive about the same time. He saw her on the platform, escaped her notice, and went down to Herne Hill in the same train. He did not want to speak to her till she was on the way home and could not escape him.

As soon as she had turned out of the main street, brightly lit and noisy with traffic, he caught her up.

“Mildred,” he called.

She walked on and would neither look at him nor answer. He repeated her name. Then she stopped and faced him.

“What d’you want? I saw you hanging about Victoria. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m awfully sorry. Won’t you make it up?”

“No, I’m sick of your temper and your jealousy. I don’t care for you, I never have cared for you, and I never shall care for you. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.”

She walked on quickly, and he had to hurry to keep up with her.

“You never make allowances for me,” he said. “It’s all very well to be jolly and amiable when you’re indifferent to anyone. It’s very hard when you’re as much in love as I am. Have mercy on me. I don’t mind that you don’t care for me. After all you can’t help it. I only want you to let me love you.”

She walked on, refusing to speak, and Philip saw with agony that they had only a few hundred yards to go before they reached her house. He abased himself. He poured out an incoherent story of love and penitence.

“If you’ll only forgive me this time I promise you you’ll never have to complain of me in future. You can go out with whoever you choose. I’ll be only too glad if you’ll come with me when you’ve got nothing better to do.”

She stopped again, for they had reached the corner at which he always left her.

“Now you can take yourself off. I won’t have you coming up to the door.”

“I won’t go till you say you’ll forgive me.”

“I’m sick and tired of the whole thing.”

He hesitated a moment, for he had an instinct that he could say something that would move her. It made him feel almost sick to utter the words.

“It is cruel, I have so much to put up with. You don’t know what it is to be a cripple. Of course you don’t like me. I can’t expect you to.”

“Philip, I didn’t mean that,” she answered quickly, with a sudden break of pity in her voice. “You know it’s not true.”

He was beginning to act now, and his voice was husky and low.

“Oh, I’ve felt it,” he said.

She took his hand and looked at him, and her own eyes were filled with tears.

“I promise you it never made any difference to me. I never thought about it after the first day or two.”

He kept a gloomy, tragic silence. He wanted her to think he was overcome with emotion.

“You know I like you awfully, Philip. Only you are so trying sometimes.

Let’s make it up.”

She put up her lips to his, and with a sigh of relief he kissed her.

“Now are you happy again?” she asked.

“Madly.”

She bade him good-night and hurried down the road. Next day he took her in a little watch with a brooch to pin on her dress. She had been hankering for it.

But three or four days later, when she brought him his tea, Mildred said to him:

“You remember what you promised the other night? You mean to keep that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He knew exactly what she meant and was prepared for her next words.

“Because I’m going out with that gentleman I told you about tonight.”

“All right. I hope you’ll enjoy yourself.”

“You don’t mind, do you?”

He had himself now under excellent control.

“I don’t like it,” he smiled, “but I’m not going to make myself more disagreeable than I can help.”

She was excited over the outing and talked about it willingly. Philip wondered whether she did so in order to pain him or merely because she was callous. He was in the habit of condoning her cruelty by the thought of her stupidity. She had not the brains to see when she was wounding him.

“It’s not much fun to be in love with a girl who has no imagination and no sense of humour,” he thought, as he listened.

But the want of these things excused her. He felt that if he had not realised this he could never forgive her for the pain she caused him.

“He’s got seats for the Tivoli,” she said. “He gave me my choice and I chose that. And we’re going to dine at the Cafe Royal. He says it’s the most expensive place in London.”

“He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word,” thought Philip, but he clenched his teeth to prevent himself from uttering a syllable.

Philip went to the Tivoli and saw Mildred with her companion, a smooth-faced young man with sleek hair and the spruce look of a commercial traveller, sitting in the second row of the stalls. Mildred wore a black picture hat with ostrich feathers in it, which became her well. She was listening to her host with that quiet smile which Philip knew; she had no vivacity of expression, and it required broad farce to excite her laughter; but Philip could see that she was interested and amused. He thought to himself bitterly that her companion, flashy and jovial, exactly suited her. Her sluggish temperament made her appreciate noisy people. Philip had a passion for discussion, but no talent for small-talk. He admired the easy drollery of which some of his friends were masters, Lawson for instance, and his sense of inferiority made him shy and awkward. The things which interested him bored Mildred. She expected men to talk about football and racing, and he knew nothing of either. He did not know the catchwords which only need be said to excite a laugh.

Printed matter had always been a fetish to Philip, and now, in order to make himself more interesting, he read industriously The Sporting Times.

LXII

Philip did not surrender himself willingly to the passion that consumed him. He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life’s blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else. He had been used to delight in the grace of St. James’ Park, and often he sat and looked at the branches of a tree silhouetted against the sky, it was like a Japanese print; and he found a continual magic in the beautiful Thames with its barges and its wharfs; the changing sky of London had filled his soul with pleasant fancies. But now beauty meant nothing to him. He was bored and restless when he was not with Mildred. Sometimes he thought he would console his sorrow by looking at pictures, but he walked through the National Gallery like a sight-seer; and no picture called up in him a thrill of emotion. He wondered if he could ever care again for all the things he had loved. He had been devoted to reading, but now books were meaningless; and he spent his spare hours in the smoking-room of the hospital club, turning over innumerable periodicals. This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.

Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet. Though he yearned for Mildred so madly he despised her. He thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn.

Philip, burrowing as was his habit into the state of his feelings, discussing with himself continually his condition, came to the conclusion that he could only cure himself of his degrading passion by making Mildred his mistress. It was sexual hunger that he suffered from, and if he could satisfy this he might free himself from the intolerable chains that bound him. He knew that Mildred did not care for him at all in that way. When he kissed her passionately she withdrew herself from him with instinctive distaste. She had no sensuality. Sometimes he had tried to make her jealous by talking of adventures in Paris, but they did not interest her; once or twice he had sat at other tables in the tea-shop and affected to flirt with the waitress who attended them, but she was entirely indifferent. He could see that it was no pretence on her part.

“You didn’t mind my not sitting at one of your tables this afternoon?” he asked once, when he was walking to the station with her. “Yours seemed to be all full.”

This was not a fact, but she did not contradict him. Even if his desertion meant nothing to her he would have been grateful if she had pretended it did. A reproach would have been balm to his soul.

“I think it’s silly of you to sit at the same table every day. You ought to give the other girls a turn now and again.”

But the more he thought of it the more he was convinced that complete surrender on her part was his only way to freedom. He was like a knight of old, metamorphosed by magic spells, who sought the potions which should restore him to his fair and proper form. Philip had only one hope. Mildred greatly desired to go to Paris. To her, as to most English people, it was the centre of gaiety and fashion: she had heard of the Magasin du Louvre, where you could get the very latest thing for about half the price you had to pay in London; a friend of hers had passed her honeymoon in Paris and had spent all day at the Louvre; and she and her husband, my dear, they never went to bed till six in the morning all the time they were there; the Moulin Rouge and I don’t know what all. Philip did not care that if she yielded to his desires it would only be the unwilling price she paid for the gratification of her wish. He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even had a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her. He had plied her with liquor in the hope of exciting her, but she had no taste for wine; and though she liked him to order champagne because it looked well, she never drank more than half a glass. She liked to leave untouched a large glass filled to the brim.

“It shows the waiters who you are,” she said.

Philip chose an opportunity when she seemed more than usually friendly. He had an examination in anatomy at the end of March. Easter, which came a week later, would give Mildred three whole days holiday.

“I say, why don’t you come over to Paris then?” he suggested. “We’d have such a ripping time.”

“How could you? It would cost no end of money.”

Philip had thought of that. It would cost at least five-and-twenty pounds.

It was a large sum to him. He was willing to spend his last penny on her.

“What does that matter? Say you’ll come, darling.”

“What next, I should like to know. I can’t see myself going away with a man that I wasn’t married to. You oughtn’t to suggest such a thing.”

“What does it matter?”

He enlarged on the glories of the Rue de la Paix and the garish splendour of the Folies Bergeres. He described the Louvre and the Bon Marche. He told her about the Cabaret du Neant, the Abbaye, and the various haunts to which foreigners go. He painted in glowing colours the side of Paris which he despised. He pressed her to come with him.

“You know, you say you love me, but if you really loved me you’d want to marry me. You’ve never asked me to marry you.”

“You know I can’t afford it. After all, I’m in my first year, I shan’t earn a penny for six years.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you. I wouldn’t marry you if you went down on your bended knees to me.”

He had thought of marriage more than once, but it was a step from which he shrank. In Paris he had come by the opinion that marriage was a ridiculous institution of the philistines. He knew also that a permanent tie would ruin him. He had middle-class instincts, and it seemed a dreadful thing to him to marry a waitress. A common wife would prevent him from getting a decent practice. Besides, he had only just enough money to last him till he was qualified; he could not keep a wife even if they arranged not to have children. He thought of Cronshaw bound to a vulgar slattern, and he shuddered with dismay. He foresaw what Mildred, with her genteel ideas and her mean mind, would become: it was impossible for him to marry her. But he decided only with his reason; he felt that he must have her whatever happened; and if he could not get her without marrying her he would do that; the future could look after itself. It might end in disaster; he did not care. When he got hold of an idea it obsessed him, he could think of nothing else, and he had a more than common power to persuade himself of the reasonableness of what he wished to do. He found himself overthrowing all the sensible arguments which had occurred to him against marriage. Each day he found that he was more passionately devoted to her; and his unsatisfied love became angry and resentful.

“By George, if I marry her I’ll make her pay for all the suffering I’ve endured,” he said to himself.

At last he could bear the agony no longer. After dinner one evening in the little restaurant in Soho, to which now they often went, he spoke to her.

“I say, did you mean it the other day that you wouldn’t marry me if I asked you?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Because I can’t live without you. I want you with me always. I’ve tried to get over it and I can’t. I never shall now. I want you to marry me.”

She had read too many novelettes not to know how to take such an offer.

“I’m sure I’m very grateful to you, Philip. I’m very much flattered at your proposal.”

“Oh, don’t talk rot. You will marry me, won’t you?”

“D’you think we should be happy?”

“No. But what does that matter?”

The words were wrung out of him almost against his will. They surprised her.

“Well, you are a funny chap. Why d’you want to marry me then? The other day you said you couldn’t afford it.”

“I think I’ve got about fourteen hundred pounds left. Two can live just as cheaply as one. That’ll keep us till I’m qualified and have got through with my hospital appointments, and then I can get an assistantship.”

“It means you wouldn’t be able to earn anything for six years. We should have about four pounds a week to live on till then, shouldn’t we?”

“Not much more than three. There are all my fees to pay.”

“And what would you get as an assistant?”

“Three pounds a week.”

“D’you mean to say you have to work all that time and spend a small fortune just to earn three pounds a week at the end of it? I don’t see that I should be any better off than I am now.”

He was silent for a moment.

“D’you mean to say you won’t marry me?” he asked hoarsely. “Does my great love mean nothing to you at all?”

“One has to think of oneself in those things, don’t one? I shouldn’t mind marrying, but I don’t want to marry if I’m going to be no better off than what I am now. I don’t see the use of it.”

“If you cared for me you wouldn’t think of all that.”

“P’raps not.”

He was silent. He drank a glass of wine in order to get rid of the choking in his throat.

“Look at that girl who’s just going out,” said Mildred. “She got them furs at the Bon Marche at Brixton. I saw them in the window last time I went down there.”

Philip smiled grimly.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked. “It’s true. And I said to my aunt at the time, I wouldn’t buy anything that had been in the window like that, for everyone to know how much you paid for it.”

“I can’t understand you. You make me frightfully unhappy, and in the next breath you talk rot that has nothing to do with what we’re speaking about.”

“You are nasty to me,” she answered, aggrieved. “I can’t help noticing those furs, because I said to my aunt…”

“I don’t care a damn what you said to your aunt,” he interrupted impatiently.

“I wish you wouldn’t use bad language when you speak to me Philip. You know I don’t like it.”

Philip smiled a little, but his eyes were wild. He was silent for a while.

He looked at her sullenly. He hated, despised, and loved her.

“If I had an ounce of sense I’d never see you again,” he said at last. “If you only knew how heartily I despise myself for loving you!”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say to me,” she replied sulkily.

“It isn’t,” he laughed. “Let’s go to the Pavilion.”

“That’s what’s so funny in you, you start laughing just when one doesn’t expect you to. And if I make you that unhappy why d’you want to take me to the Pavilion? I’m quite ready to go home.”

“Merely because I’m less unhappy with you than away from you.”

“I should like to know what you really think of me.”

He laughed outright.

“My dear, if you did you’d never speak to me again.”

LXIII

Philip did not pass the examination in anatomy at the end of March. He and Dunsford had worked at the subject together on Philip’s skeleton, asking each other questions till both knew by heart every attachment and the meaning of every nodule and groove on the human bones; but in the examination room Philip was seized with panic, and failed to give right answers to questions from a sudden fear that they might be wrong. He knew he was ploughed and did not even trouble to go up to the building next day to see whether his number was up. The second failure put him definitely among the incompetent and idle men of his year.

He did not care much. He had other things to think of. He told himself that Mildred must have senses like anybody else, it was only a question of awakening them; he had theories about woman, the rip at heart, and thought that there must come a time with everyone when she would yield to persistence. It was a question of watching for the opportunity, keeping his temper, wearing her down with small attentions, taking advantage of the physical exhaustion which opened the heart to tenderness, making himself a refuge from the petty vexations of her work. He talked to her of the relations between his friends in Paris and the fair ladies they admired. The life he described had a charm, an easy gaiety, in which was no grossness. Weaving into his own recollections the adventures of Mimi and Rodolphe, of Musette and the rest of them, he poured into Mildred’s ears a story of poverty made picturesque by song and laughter, of lawless love made romantic by beauty and youth. He never attacked her prejudices directly, but sought to combat them by the suggestion that they were suburban. He never let himself be disturbed by her inattention, nor irritated by her indifference. He thought he had bored her. By an effort he made himself affable and entertaining; he never let himself be angry, he never asked for anything, he never complained, he never scolded. When she made engagements and broke them, he met her next day with a smiling face; when she excused herself, he said it did not matter. He never let her see that she pained him. He understood that his passionate grief had wearied her, and he took care to hide every sentiment which could be in the least degree troublesome. He was heroic.

Though she never mentioned the change, for she did not take any conscious notice of it, it affected her nevertheless: she became more confidential with him; she took her little grievances to him, and she always had some grievance against the manageress of the shop, one of her fellow waitresses, or her aunt; she was talkative enough now, and though she never said anything that was not trivial Philip was never tired of listening to her.

“I like you when you don’t want to make love to me,” she told him once.

“That’s flattering for me,” he laughed.

She did not realise how her words made his heart sink nor what an effort it needed for him to answer so lightly.

“Oh, I don’t mind your kissing me now and then. It doesn’t hurt me and it gives you pleasure.”

Occasionally she went so far as to ask him to take her out to dinner, and the offer, coming from her, filled him with rapture.

“I wouldn’t do it to anyone else,” she said, by way of apology. “But I know I can with you.”

“You couldn’t give me greater pleasure,” he smiled.

She asked him to give her something to eat one evening towards the end of

April.

“All right,” he said. “Where would you like to go afterwards?”

“Oh, don’t let’s go anywhere. Let’s just sit and talk. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Rather not.”

He thought she must be beginning to care for him. Three months before the thought of an evening spent in conversation would have bored her to death. It was a fine day, and the spring added to Philip’s high spirits. He was content with very little now.

“I say, won’t it be ripping when the summer comes along,” he said, as they drove along on the top of a ‘bus to Soho — she had herself suggested that they should not be so extravagant as to go by cab. “We shall be able to spend every Sunday on the river. We’ll take our luncheon in a basket.”

She smiled slightly, and he was encouraged to take her hand. She did not withdraw it.

“I really think you’re beginning to like me a bit,” he smiled.

“You ARE silly, you know I like you, or else I shouldn’t be here, should I?”

They were old customers at the little restaurant in Soho by now, and the patronne gave them a smile as they came in. The waiter was obsequious.

“Let me order the dinner tonight,” said Mildred.

Philip, thinking her more enchanting than ever, gave her the menu, and she chose her favourite dishes. The range was small, and they had eaten many times all that the restaurant could provide. Philip was gay. He looked into her eyes, and he dwelt on every perfection of her pale cheek. When they had finished Mildred by way of exception took a cigarette. She smoked very seldom.

“I don’t like to see a lady smoking,” she said.

She hesitated a moment and then spoke.

“Were you surprised, my asking you to take me out and give me a bit of dinner tonight?”

“I was delighted.”

“I’ve got something to say to you, Philip.”

He looked at her quickly, his heart sank, but he had trained himself well.

“Well, fire away,” he said, smiling.

“You’re not going to be silly about it, are you? The fact is I’m going to get married.”

“Are you?” said Philip.

He could think of nothing else to say. He had considered the possibility often and had imagined to himself what he would do and say. He had suffered agonies when he thought of the despair he would suffer, he had thought of suicide, of the mad passion of anger that would seize him; but perhaps he had too completely anticipated the emotion he would experience, so that now he felt merely exhausted. He felt as one does in a serious illness when the vitality is so low that one is indifferent to the issue and wants only to be left alone.

“You see, I’m getting on,” she said. “I’m twenty-four and it’s time I settled down.”

He was silent. He looked at the patronne sitting behind the counter, and his eye dwelt on a red feather one of the diners wore in her hat. Mildred was nettled.

“You might congratulate me,” she said.

“I might, mightn’t I? I can hardly believe it’s true. I’ve dreamt it so often. It rather tickles me that I should have been so jolly glad that you asked me to take you out to dinner. Whom are you going to marry?”

“Miller,” she answered, with a slight blush.

“Miller?” cried Philip, astounded. “But you’ve not seen him for months.”

“He came in to lunch one day last week and asked me then. He’s earning very good money. He makes seven pounds a week now and he’s got prospects.”

Philip was silent again. He remembered that she had always liked Miller; he amused her; there was in his foreign birth an exotic charm which she felt unconsciously.

“I suppose it was inevitable,” he said at last. “You were bound to accept the highest bidder. When are you going to marry?”

“On Saturday next. I have given notice.”

Philip felt a sudden pang.

“As soon as that?”

“We’re going to be married at a registry office. Emil prefers it.”

Philip felt dreadfully tired. He wanted to get away from her. He thought he would go straight to bed. He called for the bill.

“I’ll put you in a cab and send you down to Victoria. I daresay you won’t have to wait long for a train.”

“Won’t you come with me?”

“I think I’d rather not if you don’t mind.”

“It’s just as you please,” she answered haughtily. “I suppose I shall see you at tea-time tomorrow?”

“No, I think we’d better make a full stop now. I don’t see why I should go on making myself unhappy. I’ve paid the cab.”

He nodded to her and forced a smile on his lips, then jumped on a ‘bus and made his way home. He smoked a pipe before he went to bed, but he could hardly keep his eyes open. He suffered no pain. He fell into a heavy sleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow.

LXIV

But about three in the morning Philip awoke and could not sleep again. He began to think of Mildred. He tried not to, but could not help himself. He repeated to himself the same thing time after time till his brain reeled. It was inevitable that she should marry: life was hard for a girl who had to earn her own living; and if she found someone who could give her a comfortable home she should not be blamed if she accepted. Philip acknowledged that from her point of view it would have been madness to marry him: only love could have made such poverty bearable, and she did not love him. It was no fault of hers; it was a fact that must be accepted like any other. Philip tried to reason with himself. He told himself that deep down in his heart was mortified pride; his passion had begun in wounded vanity, and it was this at bottom which caused now a great part of his wretchedness. He despised himself as much as he despised her. Then he made plans for the future, the same plans over and over again, interrupted by recollections of kisses on her soft pale cheek and by the sound of her voice with its trailing accent; he had a great deal of work to do, since in the summer he was taking chemistry as well as the two examinations he had failed in. He had separated himself from his friends at the hospital, but now he wanted companionship. There was one happy occurrence: Hayward a fortnight before had written to say that he was passing through London and had asked him to dinner; but Philip, unwilling to be bothered, had refused. He was coming back for the season, and Philip made up his mind to write to him.

He was thankful when eight o’clock struck and he could get up. He was pale and weary. But when he had bathed, dressed, and had breakfast, he felt himself joined up again with the world at large; and his pain was a little easier to bear. He did not feel like going to lectures that morning, but went instead to the Army and Navy Stores to buy Mildred a wedding-present. After much wavering he settled on a dressing-bag. It cost twenty pounds, which was much more than he could afford, but it was showy and vulgar: he knew she would be aware exactly how much it cost; he got a melancholy satisfaction in choosing a gift which would give her pleasure and at the same time indicate for himself the contempt he had for her.

Philip had looked forward with apprehension to the day on which Mildred was to be married; he was expecting an intolerable anguish; and it was with relief that he got a letter from Hayward on Saturday morning to say that he was coming up early on that very day and would fetch Philip to help him to find rooms. Philip, anxious to be distracted, looked up a time-table and discovered the only train Hayward was likely to come by; he went to meet him, and the reunion of the friends was enthusiastic. They left the luggage at the station, and set off gaily. Hayward characteristically proposed that first of all they should go for an hour to the National Gallery; he had not seen pictures for some time, and he stated that it needed a glimpse to set him in tune with life. Philip for months had had no one with whom he could talk of art and books. Since the Paris days Hayward had immersed himself in the modern French versifiers, and, such a plethora of poets is there in France, he had several new geniuses to tell Philip about. They walked through the gallery pointing out to one another their favourite pictures; one subject led to another; they talked excitedly. The sun was shining and the air was warm.

“Let’s go and sit in the Park,” said Hayward. “We’ll look for rooms after luncheon.”

The spring was pleasant there. It was a day upon which one felt it good merely to live. The young green of the trees was exquisite against the sky; and the sky, pale and blue, was dappled with little white clouds. At the end of the ornamental water was the gray mass of the Horse Guards. The ordered elegance of the scene had the charm of an eighteenth-century picture. It reminded you not of Watteau, whose landscapes are so idyllic that they recall only the woodland glens seen in dreams, but of the more prosaic Jean-Baptiste Pater. Philip’s heart was filled with lightness. He realised, what he had only read before, that art (for there was art in the manner in which he looked upon nature) might liberate the soul from pain.

They went to an Italian restaurant for luncheon and ordered themselves a fiaschetto of Chianti. Lingering over the meal they talked on. They reminded one another of the people they had known at Heidelberg, they spoke of Philip’s friends in Paris, they talked of books, pictures, morals, life; and suddenly Philip heard a clock strike three. He remembered that by this time Mildred was married. He felt a sort of stitch in his heart, and for a minute or two he could not hear what Hayward was saying. But he filled his glass with Chianti. He was unaccustomed to alcohol and it had gone to his head. For the time at all events he was free from care. His quick brain had lain idle for so many months that he was intoxicated now with conversation. He was thankful to have someone to talk to who would interest himself in the things that interested him.

“I say don’t let’s waste this beautiful day in looking for rooms. I’ll put you up tonight. You can look for rooms tomorrow or Monday.”

“All right. What shall we do?” answered Hayward.

“Let’s get on a penny steamboat and go down to Greenwich.”

The idea appealed to Hayward, and they jumped into a cab which took them to Westminster Bridge. They got on the steamboat just as she was starting. Presently Philip, a smile on his lips, spoke.

“I remember when first I went to Paris, Clutton, I think it was, gave a long discourse on the subject that beauty is put into things by painters and poets. They create beauty. In themselves there is nothing to choose between the Campanile of Giotto and a factory chimney. And then beautiful things grow rich with the emotion that they have aroused in succeeding generations. That is why old things are more beautiful than modern. The Ode on a Grecian Urn is more lovely now than when it was written, because for a hundred years lovers have read it and the sick at heart taken comfort in its lines.”

Philip left Hayward to infer what in the passing scene had suggested these words to him, and it was a delight to know that he could safely leave the inference. It was in sudden reaction from the life he had been leading for so long that he was now deeply affected. The delicate iridescence of the London air gave the softness of a pastel to the gray stone of the buildings; and in the wharfs and storehouses there was the severity of grace of a Japanese print. They went further down; and the splendid channel, a symbol of the great empire, broadened, and it was crowded with traffic; Philip thought of the painters and the poets who had made all these things so beautiful, and his heart was filled with gratitude. They came to the Pool of London, and who can describe its majesty? The imagination thrills, and Heaven knows what figures people still its broad stream, Doctor Johnson with Boswell by his side, an old Pepys going on board a man-o’-war: the pageant of English history, and romance, and high adventure. Philip turned to Hayward with shining eyes.

“Dear Charles Dickens,” he murmured, smiling a little at his own emotion.

“Aren’t you rather sorry you chucked painting?” asked Hayward.

“No.”

“I suppose you like doctoring?”

“No, I hate it, but there was nothing else to do. The drudgery of the first two years is awful, and unfortunately I haven’t got the scientific temperament.”

“Well, you can’t go on changing professions.”

“Oh, no. I’m going to stick to this. I think I shall like it better when I get into the wards. I have an idea that I’m more interested in people than in anything else in the world. And as far as I can see, it’s the only profession in which you have your freedom. You carry your knowledge in your head; with a box of instruments and a few drugs you can make your living anywhere.”

“Aren’t you going to take a practice then?”

“Not for a good long time at any rate,” Philip answered. “As soon as I’ve got through my hospital appointments I shall get a ship; I want to go to the East — the Malay Archipelago, Siam, China, and all that sort of thing — and then I shall take odd jobs. Something always comes along, cholera duty in India and things like that. I want to go from place to place. I want to see the world. The only way a poor man can do that is by going in for the medical.”

They came to Greenwich then. The noble building of Inigo Jones faced the river grandly.

“I say, look, that must be the place where Poor Jack dived into the mud for pennies,” said Philip.

They wandered in the park. Ragged children were playing in it, and it was noisy with their cries: here and there old seamen were basking in the sun. There was an air of a hundred years ago.

“It seems a pity you wasted two years in Paris,” said Hayward.

“Waste? Look at the movement of that child, look at the pattern which the sun makes on the ground, shining through the trees, look at that sky — why, I should never have seen that sky if I hadn’t been to Paris.”

Hayward thought that Philip choked a sob, and he looked at him with astonishment.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry to be so damned emotional, but for six months I’ve been starved for beauty.”

“You used to be so matter of fact. It’s very interesting to hear you say that.”

“Damn it all, I don’t want to be interesting,” laughed Philip. “Let’s go and have a stodgy tea.”

LXV

Hayward’s visit did Philip a great deal of good. Each day his thoughts dwelt less on Mildred. He looked back upon the past with disgust. He could not understand how he had submitted to the dishonour of such a love; and when he thought of Mildred it was with angry hatred, because she had submitted him to so much humiliation. His imagination presented her to him now with her defects of person and manner exaggerated, so that he shuddered at the thought of having been connected with her.

“It just shows how damned weak I am,” he said to himself. The adventure was like a blunder that one had committed at a party so horrible that one felt nothing could be done to excuse it: the only remedy was to forget. His horror at the degradation he had suffered helped him. He was like a snake casting its skin and he looked upon the old covering with nausea. He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realised how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love any more if love was that. Philip told Hayward something of what he had gone through.

“Wasn’t it Sophocles,” he asked, “who prayed for the time when he would be delivered from the wild beast of passion that devoured his heart-strings?”

Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child’s pleasure in all the facts of the world. He called his period of insanity six months’ hard labour.

Hayward had only been settled in London a few days when Philip received from Blackstable, where it had been sent, a card for a private view at some picture gallery. He took Hayward, and, on looking at the catalogue, saw that Lawson had a picture in it.

“I suppose he sent the card,” said Philip. “Let’s go and find him, he’s sure to be in front of his picture.”

This, a profile of Ruth Chalice, was tucked away in a corner, and Lawson was not far from it. He looked a little lost, in his large soft hat and loose, pale clothes, amongst the fashionable throng that had gathered for the private view. He greeted Philip with enthusiasm, and with his usual volubility told him that he had come to live in London, Ruth Chalice was a hussy, he had taken a studio, Paris was played out, he had a commission for a portrait, and they’d better dine together and have a good old talk. Philip reminded him of his acquaintance with Hayward, and was entertained to see that Lawson was slightly awed by Hayward’s elegant clothes and grand manner. They sat upon him better than they had done in the shabby little studio which Lawson and Philip had shared.

At dinner Lawson went on with his news. Flanagan had gone back to America. Clutton had disappeared. He had come to the conclusion that a man had no chance of doing anything so long as he was in contact with art and artists: the only thing was to get right away. To make the step easier he had quarrelled with all his friends in Paris. He developed a talent for telling them home truths, which made them bear with fortitude his declaration that he had done with that city and was settling in Gerona, a little town in the north of Spain which had attracted him when he saw it from the train on his way to Barcelona. He was living there now alone.

“I wonder if he’ll ever do any good,” said Philip.

He was interested in the human side of that struggle to express something which was so obscure in the man’s mind that he was become morbid and querulous. Philip felt vaguely that he was himself in the same case, but with him it was the conduct of his life as a whole that perplexed him. That was his means of self-expression, and what he must do with it was not clear. But he had no time to continue with this train of thought, for Lawson poured out a frank recital of his affair with Ruth Chalice. She had left him for a young student who had just come from England, and was behaving in a scandalous fashion. Lawson really thought someone ought to step in and save the young man. She would ruin him. Philip gathered that Lawson’s chief grievance was that the rupture had come in the middle of a portrait he was painting.

“Women have no real feeling for art,” he said. “They only pretend they have.” But he finished philosophically enough: “However, I got four portraits out of her, and I’m not sure if the last I was working on would ever have been a success.”

Philip envied the easy way in which the painter managed his love affairs. He had passed eighteen months pleasantly enough, had got an excellent model for nothing, and had parted from her at the end with no great pang.

“And what about Cronshaw?” asked Philip.

“Oh, he’s done for,” answered Lawson, with the cheerful callousness of his youth. “He’ll be dead in six months. He got pneumonia last winter. He was in the English hospital for seven weeks, and when he came out they told him his only chance was to give up liquor.”

“Poor devil,” smiled the abstemious Philip.

“He kept off for a bit. He used to go to the Lilas all the same, he couldn’t keep away from that, but he used to drink hot milk, avec de la fleur d’oranger, and he was damned dull.”

“I take it you did not conceal the fact from him.”

“Oh, he knew it himself. A little while ago he started on whiskey again. He said he was too old to turn over any new leaves. He would rather be happy for six months and die at the end of it than linger on for five years. And then I think he’s been awfully hard up lately. You see, he didn’t earn anything while he was ill, and the slut he lives with has been giving him a rotten time.”

“I remember, the first time I saw him I admired him awfully,” said Philip. “I thought he was wonderful. It is sickening that vulgar, middle-class virtue should pay.”

“Of course he was a rotter. He was bound to end in the gutter sooner or later,” said Lawson.

Philip was hurt because Lawson would not see the pity of it. Of course it was cause and effect, but in the necessity with which one follows the other lay all tragedy of life.

“Oh, I’d forgotten,” said Lawson. “Just after you left he sent round a present for you. I thought you’d be coming back and I didn’t bother about it, and then I didn’t think it worth sending on; but it’ll come over to London with the rest of my things, and you can come to my studio one day and fetch it away if you want it.”

“You haven’t told me what it is yet.”

“Oh, it’s only a ragged little bit of carpet. I shouldn’t think it’s worth anything. I asked him one day what the devil he’d sent the filthy thing for. He told me he’d seen it in a shop in the Rue de Rennes and bought it for fifteen francs. It appears to be a Persian rug. He said you’d asked him the meaning of life and that was the answer. But he was very drunk.”

Philip laughed.

“Oh yes, I know. I’ll take it. It was a favourite wheeze of his. He said

I must find out for myself, or else the answer meant nothing.”

LXVI

Philip worked well and easily; he had a good deal to do, since he was taking in July the three parts of the First Conjoint examination, two of which he had failed in before; but he found life pleasant. He made a new friend. Lawson, on the lookout for models, had discovered a girl who was understudying at one of the theatres, and in order to induce her to sit to him arranged a little luncheon-party one Sunday. She brought a chaperon with her; and to her Philip, asked to make a fourth, was instructed to confine his attentions. He found this easy, since she turned out to be an agreeable chatterbox with an amusing tongue. She asked Philip to go and see her; she had rooms in Vincent Square, and was always in to tea at five o’clock; he went, was delighted with his welcome, and went again. Mrs. Nesbit was not more than twenty-five, very small, with a pleasant, ugly face; she had very bright eyes, high cheekbones, and a large mouth: the excessive contrasts of her colouring reminded one of a portrait by one of the modern French painters; her skin was very white, her cheeks were very red, her thick eyebrows, her hair, were very black. The effect was odd, a little unnatural, but far from unpleasing. She was separated from her husband and earned her living and her child’s by writing penny novelettes. There were one or two publishers who made a specialty of that sort of thing, and she had as much work as she could do. It was ill-paid, she received fifteen pounds for a story of thirty thousand words; but she was satisfied.

“After all, it only costs the reader twopence,” she said, “and they like the same thing over and over again. I just change the names and that’s all. When I’m bored I think of the washing and the rent and clothes for baby, and I go on again.”

Besides, she walked on at various theatres where they wanted supers and earned by this when in work from sixteen shillings to a guinea a week. At the end of her day she was so tired that she slept like a top. She made the best of her difficult lot. Her keen sense of humour enabled her to get amusement out of every vexatious circumstance. Sometimes things went wrong, and she found herself with no money at all; then her trifling possessions found their way to a pawnshop in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and she ate bread and butter till things grew brighter. She never lost her cheerfulness.

Philip was interested in her shiftless life, and she made him laugh with the fantastic narration of her struggles. He asked her why she did not try her hand at literary work of a better sort, but she knew that she had no talent, and the abominable stuff she turned out by the thousand words was not only tolerably paid, but was the best she could do. She had nothing to look forward to but a continuation of the life she led. She seemed to have no relations, and her friends were as poor as herself.

“I don’t think of the future,” she said. “As long as I have enough money for three weeks’ rent and a pound or two over for food I never bother. Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.”

Soon Philip grew in the habit of going in to tea with her every day, and so that his visits might not embarrass her he took in a cake or a pound of butter or some tea. They started to call one another by their Christian names. Feminine sympathy was new to him, and he delighted in someone who gave a willing ear to all his troubles. The hours went quickly. He did not hide his admiration for her. She was a delightful companion. He could not help comparing her with Mildred; and he contrasted with the one’s obstinate stupidity, which refused interest to everything she did not know, the other’s quick appreciation and ready intelligence. His heart sank when he thought that he might have been tied for life to such a woman as Mildred. One evening he told Norah the whole story of his love. It was not one to give him much reason for self-esteem, and it was very pleasant to receive such charming sympathy.

“I think you’re well out of it,” she said, when he had finished.

She had a funny way at times of holding her head on one side like an Aberdeen puppy. She was sitting in an upright chair, sewing, for she had no time to do nothing, and Philip had made himself comfortable at her feet.

“I can’t tell you how heartily thankful I am it’s all over,” he sighed.

“Poor thing, you must have had a rotten time,” she murmured, and by way of showing her sympathy put her hand on his shoulder.

He took it and kissed it, but she withdrew it quickly.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, with a blush.

“Have you any objection?”

She looked at him for a moment with twinkling eyes, and she smiled.

“No,” she said.

He got up on his knees and faced her. She looked into his eyes steadily, and her large mouth trembled with a smile.

“Well?” she said.

“You know, you are a ripper. I’m so grateful to you for being nice to me.

I like you so much.”

“Don’t be idiotic,” she said.

Philip took hold of her elbows and drew her towards him. She made no resistance, but bent forward a little, and he kissed her red lips.

“Why did you do that?” she asked again.

“Because it’s comfortable.”

She did not answer, but a tender look came into her eyes, and she passed her hand softly over his hair.

“You know, it’s awfully silly of you to behave like this. We were such good friends. It would be so jolly to leave it at that.”

“If you really want to appeal to my better nature,” replied Philip, “you’ll do well not to stroke my cheek while you’re doing it.”

She gave a little chuckle, but she did not stop.

“It’s very wrong of me, isn’t it?” she said.

Philip, surprised and a little amused, looked into her eyes, and as he looked he saw them soften and grow liquid, and there was an expression in them that enchanted him. His heart was suddenly stirred, and tears came to his eyes.

“Norah, you’re not fond of me, are you?” he asked, incredulously.

“You clever boy, you ask such stupid questions.”

“Oh, my dear, it never struck me that you could be.”

He flung his arms round her and kissed her, while she, laughing, blushing, and crying, surrendered herself willingly to his embrace.

Presently he released her and sitting back on his heels looked at her curiously.

“Well, I’m blowed!” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m so surprised.”

“And pleased?”

“Delighted,” he cried with all his heart, “and so proud and so happy and so grateful.”

He took her hands and covered them with kisses. This was the beginning for Philip of a happiness which seemed both solid and durable. They became lovers but remained friends. There was in Norah a maternal instinct which received satisfaction in her love for Philip; she wanted someone to pet, and scold, and make a fuss of; she had a domestic temperament and found pleasure in looking after his health and his linen. She pitied his deformity, over which he was so sensitive, and her pity expressed itself instinctively in tenderness. She was young, strong, and healthy, and it seemed quite natural to her to give her love. She had high spirits and a merry soul. She liked Philip because he laughed with her at all the amusing things in life that caught her fancy, and above all she liked him because he was he.

When she told him this he answered gaily:

“Nonsense. You like me because I’m a silent person and never want to get a word in.”

Philip did not love her at all. He was extremely fond of her, glad to be with her, amused and interested by her conversation. She restored his belief in himself and put healing ointments, as it were, on all the bruises of his soul. He was immensely flattered that she cared for him. He admired her courage, her optimism, her impudent defiance of fate; she had a little philosophy of her own, ingenuous and practical.

“You know, I don’t believe in churches and parsons and all that,” she said, “but I believe in God, and I don’t believe He minds much about what you do as long as you keep your end up and help a lame dog over a stile when you can. And I think people on the whole are very nice, and I’m sorry for those who aren’t.”

“And what about afterwards?” asked Philip.

“Oh, well, I don’t know for certain, you know,” she smiled, “but I hope for the best. And anyhow there’ll be no rent to pay and no novelettes to write.”

She had a feminine gift for delicate flattery. She thought that Philip did a brave thing when he left Paris because he was conscious he could not be a great artist; and he was enchanted when she expressed enthusiastic admiration for him. He had never been quite certain whether this action indicated courage or infirmity of purpose. It was delightful to realise that she considered it heroic. She ventured to tackle him on a subject which his friends instinctively avoided.

“It’s very silly of you to be so sensitive about your club-foot,” she said. She saw him blush darkly, but went on. “You know, people don’t think about it nearly as much as you do. They notice it the first time they see you, and then they forget about it.”

He would not answer.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“No.”

She put her arm round his neck.

“You know, I only speak about it because I love you. I don’t want it to make you unhappy.”

“I think you can say anything you choose to me,” he answered, smiling. “I wish I could do something to show you how grateful I am to you.”

She took him in hand in other ways. She would not let him be bearish and laughed at him when he was out of temper. She made him more urbane.

“You can make me do anything you like,” he said to her once.

“D’you mind?”

“No, I want to do what you like.”

He had the sense to realise his happiness. It seemed to him that she gave him all that a wife could, and he preserved his freedom; she was the most charming friend he had ever had, with a sympathy that he had never found in a man. The sexual relationship was no more than the strongest link in their friendship. It completed it, but was not essential. And because Philip’s appetites were satisfied, he became more equable and easier to live with. He felt in complete possession of himself. He thought sometimes of the winter, during which he had been obsessed by a hideous passion, and he was filled with loathing for Mildred and with horror of himself.

His examinations were approaching, and Norah was as interested in them as he. He was flattered and touched by her eagerness. She made him promise to come at once and tell her the results. He passed the three parts this time without mishap, and when he went to tell her she burst into tears.

“Oh, I’m so glad, I was so anxious.”

“You silly little thing,” he laughed, but he was choking.

No one could help being pleased with the way she took it.

“And what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I can take a holiday with a clear conscience. I have no work to do till the winter session begins in October.”

“I suppose you’ll go down to your uncle’s at Blackstable?”

“You suppose quite wrong. I’m going to stay in London and play with you.”

“I’d rather you went away.”

“Why? Are you tired of me?”

She laughed and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Because you’ve been working hard, and you look utterly washed out. You want some fresh air and a rest. Please go.”

He did not answer for a moment. He looked at her with loving eyes.

“You know, I’d never believe it of anyone but you. You’re only thinking of my good. I wonder what you see in me.”

“Will you give me a good character with my month’s notice?” she laughed gaily.

“I’ll say that you’re thoughtful and kind, and you’re not exacting; you never worry, you’re not troublesome, and you’re easy to please.”

“All that’s nonsense,” she said, “but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.”

LXVII

Philip looked forward to his return to London with impatience. During the two months he spent at Blackstable Norah wrote to him frequently, long letters in a bold, large hand, in which with cheerful humour she described the little events of the daily round, the domestic troubles of her landlady, rich food for laughter, the comic vexations of her rehearsals — she was walking on in an important spectacle at one of the London theatres — and her odd adventures with the publishers of novelettes. Philip read a great deal, bathed, played tennis, and sailed. At the beginning of October he settled down in London to work for the Second Conjoint examination. He was eager to pass it, since that ended the drudgery of the curriculum; after it was done with the student became an out-patients’ clerk, and was brought in contact with men and women as well as with text-books. Philip saw Norah every day.

Lawson had been spending the summer at Poole, and had a number of sketches to show of the harbour and of the beach. He had a couple of commissions for portraits and proposed to stay in London till the bad light drove him away. Hayward, in London too, intended to spend the winter abroad, but remained week after week from sheer inability to make up his mind to go. Hayward had run to fat during the last two or three years — it was five years since Philip first met him in Heidelberg — and he was prematurely bald. He was very sensitive about it and wore his hair long to conceal the unsightly patch on the crown of his head. His only consolation was that his brow was now very noble. His blue eyes had lost their colour; they had a listless droop; and his mouth, losing the fulness of youth, was weak and pale. He still talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey he was inclined to be elegiac.

“I’m a failure,” he murmured, “I’m unfit for the brutality of the struggle of life. All I can do is to stand aside and let the vulgar throng hustle by in their pursuit of the good things.”

He gave you the impression that to fail was a more delicate, a more exquisite thing, than to succeed. He insinuated that his aloofness was due to distaste for all that was common and low. He talked beautifully of Plato.

“I should have thought you’d got through with Plato by now,” said Philip impatiently.

“Would you?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

He was not inclined to pursue the subject. He had discovered of late the effective dignity of silence.

“I don’t see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,” said

Philip. “That’s only a laborious form of idleness.”

“But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?”

“I don’t want to understand him, I’m not a critic. I’m not interested in him for his sake but for mine.”

“Why d’you read then?”

“Partly for pleasure, because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for ME, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one’s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.”

Philip was not satisfied with his metaphor, but he did not know how else to explain a thing which he felt and yet was not clear about.

“You want to do things, you want to become things,” said Hayward, with a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s so vulgar.”

Philip knew Hayward very well by now. He was weak and vain, so vain that you had to be on the watch constantly not to hurt his feelings; he mingled idleness and idealism so that he could not separate them. At Lawson’s studio one day he met a journalist, who was charmed by his conversation, and a week later the editor of a paper wrote to suggest that he should do some criticism for him. For forty-eight hours Hayward lived in an agony of indecision. He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought of doing anything filled him with panic. At last he declined the offer and breathed freely.

“It would have interfered with my work,” he told Philip.

“What work?” asked Philip brutally.

“My inner life,” he answered.

Then he went on to say beautiful things about Amiel, the professor of Geneva, whose brilliancy promised achievement which was never fulfilled; till at his death the reason of his failure and the excuse were at once manifest in the minute, wonderful journal which was found among his papers. Hayward smiled enigmatically.

But Hayward could still talk delightfully about books; his taste was exquisite and his discrimination elegant; and he had a constant interest in ideas, which made him an entertaining companion. They meant nothing to him really, since they never had any effect on him; but he treated them as he might have pieces of china in an auction-room, handling them with pleasure in their shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and then, putting them back into their case, thought of them no more.

And it was Hayward who made a momentous discovery. One evening, after due preparation, he took Philip and Lawson to a tavern situated in Beak Street, remarkable not only in itself and for its history — it had memories of eighteenth-century glories which excited the romantic imagination — but for its snuff, which was the best in London, and above all for its punch. Hayward led them into a large, long room, dingily magnificent, with huge pictures on the walls of nude women: they were vast allegories of the school of Haydon; but smoke, gas, and the London atmosphere had given them a richness which made them look like old masters. The dark panelling, the massive, tarnished gold of the cornice, the mahogany tables, gave the room an air of sumptuous comfort, and the leather-covered seats along the wall were soft and easy. There was a ram’s head on a table opposite the door, and this contained the celebrated snuff. They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous terms, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else: it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite tact, attempting to, might have drawn charming pictures of the life of his day; Lord Byron in a stanza of Don Juan, aiming at the impossible, might have achieved the sublime; Oscar Wilde, heaping jewels of Ispahan upon brocades of Byzantium, might have created a troubling beauty. Considering it, the mind reeled under visions of the feasts of Elagabalus; and the subtle harmonies of Debussy mingled with the musty, fragrant romance of chests in which have been kept old clothes, ruffs, hose, doublets, of a forgotten generation, and the wan odour of lilies of the valley and the savour of Cheddar cheese.

Hayward discovered the tavern at which this priceless beverage was to be obtained by meeting in the street a man called Macalister who had been at Cambridge with him. He was a stockbroker and a philosopher. He was accustomed to go to the tavern once a week; and soon Philip, Lawson, and Hayward got into the habit of meeting there every Tuesday evening: change of manners made it now little frequented, which was an advantage to persons who took pleasure in conversation. Macalister was a big-boned fellow, much too short for his width, with a large, fleshy face and a soft voice. He was a student of Kant and judged everything from the standpoint of pure reason. He was fond of expounding his doctrines. Philip listened with excited interest. He had long come to the conclusion that nothing amused him more than metaphysics, but he was not so sure of their efficacy in the affairs of life. The neat little system which he had formed as the result of his meditations at Blackstable had not been of conspicuous use during his infatuation for Mildred. He could not be positive that reason was much help in the conduct of life. It seemed to him that life lived itself. He remembered very vividly the violence of the emotion which had possessed him and his inability, as if he were tied down to the ground with ropes, to react against it. He read many wise things in books, but he could only judge from his own experience (he did not know whether he was different from other people); he did not calculate the pros and cons of an action, the benefits which must befall him if he did it, the harm which might result from the omission; but his whole being was urged on irresistibly. He did not act with a part of himself but altogether. The power that possessed him seemed to have nothing to do with reason: all that reason did was to point out the methods of obtaining what his whole soul was striving for.

Macalister reminded him of the Categorical Imperative.

“Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming a universal rule of action for all men.”

“That seems to me perfect nonsense,” said Philip.

“You’re a bold man to say that of anything stated by Immanuel Kant,” retorted Macalister.

“Why? Reverence for what somebody said is a stultifying quality: there’s a damned sight too much reverence in the world. Kant thought things not because they were true, but because he was Kant.”

“Well, what is your objection to the Categorical Imperative?” (They talked as though the fate of empires were in the balance.)

“It suggests that one can choose one’s course by an effort of will. And it suggests that reason is the surest guide. Why should its dictates be any better than those of passion? They’re different. That’s all.”

“You seem to be a contented slave of your passions.”

“A slave because I can’t help myself, but not a contented one,” laughed

Philip.

While he spoke he thought of that hot madness which had driven him in pursuit of Mildred. He remembered how he had chafed against it and how he had felt the degradation of it.

“Thank God, I’m free from all that now,” he thought.

And yet even as he said it he was not quite sure whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a singular vigour, and his mind had worked with unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement in sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a trifle dull. For all the misery he had endured there was a compensation in that sense of rushing, overwhelming existence.

But Philip’s unlucky words engaged him in a discussion on the freedom of the will, and Macalister, with his well-stored memory, brought out argument after argument. He had a mind that delighted in dialectics, and he forced Philip to contradict himself; he pushed him into corners from which he could only escape by damaging concessions; he tripped him up with logic and battered him with authorities.

At last Philip said:

“Well, I can’t say anything about other people. I can only speak for myself. The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can’t get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe that it was inevitable from all eternity.”

“What do you deduce from that?” asked Hayward.

“Why, merely the futility of regret. It’s no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”

LXVIII

One morning Philip on getting up felt his head swim, and going back to bed suddenly discovered he was ill. All his limbs ached and he shivered with cold. When the landlady brought in his breakfast he called to her through the open door that he was not well, and asked for a cup of tea and a piece of toast. A few minutes later there was a knock at his door, and Griffiths came in. They had lived in the same house for over a year, but had never done more than nod to one another in the passage.

“I say, I hear you’re seedy,” said Griffiths. “I thought I’d come in and see what was the matter with you.”

Philip, blushing he knew not why, made light of the whole thing. He would be all right in an hour or two.

“Well, you’d better let me take your temperature,” said Griffiths.

“It’s quite unnecessary,” answered Philip irritably.

“Come on.”

Philip put the thermometer in his mouth. Griffiths sat on the side of the bed and chatted brightly for a moment, then he took it out and looked at it.

“Now, look here, old man, you must stay in bed, and I’ll bring old Deacon in to have a look at you.”

“Nonsense,” said Philip. “There’s nothing the matter. I wish you wouldn’t bother about me.”

“But it isn’t any bother. You’ve got a temperature and you must stay in bed. You will, won’t you?”

There was a peculiar charm in his manner, a mingling of gravity and kindliness, which was infinitely attractive.

“You’ve got a wonderful bed-side manner,” Philip murmured, closing his eyes with a smile.

Griffiths shook out his pillow for him, deftly smoothed down the bedclothes, and tucked him up. He went into Philip’s sitting-room to look for a siphon, could not find one, and fetched it from his own room. He drew down the blind.

“Now, go to sleep and I’ll bring the old man round as soon as he’s done the wards.”

It seemed hours before anyone came to Philip. His head felt as if it would split, anguish rent his limbs, and he was afraid he was going to cry. Then there was a knock at the door and Griffiths, healthy, strong, and cheerful, came in.

“Here’s Doctor Deacon,” he said.

The physician stepped forward, an elderly man with a bland manner, whom Philip knew only by sight. A few questions, a brief examination, and the diagnosis.

“What d’you make it?” he asked Griffiths, smiling.

“Influenza.”

“Quite right.”

Doctor Deacon looked round the dingy lodging-house room.

“Wouldn’t you like to go to the hospital? They’ll put you in a private ward, and you can be better looked after than you can here.”

“I’d rather stay where I am,” said Philip.

He did not want to be disturbed, and he was always shy of new surroundings. He did not fancy nurses fussing about him, and the dreary cleanliness of the hospital.

“I can look after him, sir,” said Griffiths at once.

“Oh, very well.”

He wrote a prescription, gave instructions, and left.

“Now you’ve got to do exactly as I tell you,” said Griffiths. “I’m day-nurse and night-nurse all in one.”

“It’s very kind of you, but I shan’t want anything,” said Philip.

Griffiths put his hand on Philip’s forehead, a large cool, dry hand, and the touch seemed to him good.

“I’m just going to take this round to the dispensary to have it made up, and then I’ll come back.”

In a little while he brought the medicine and gave Philip a dose. Then he went upstairs to fetch his books.

“You won’t mind my working in your room this afternoon, will you?” he said, when he came down. “I’ll leave the door open so that you can give me a shout if you want anything.”

Later in the day Philip, awaking from an uneasy doze, heard voices in his sitting-room. A friend had come in to see Griffiths.

“I say, you’d better not come in tonight,” he heard Griffiths saying.

And then a minute or two afterwards someone else entered the room and expressed his surprise at finding Griffiths there. Philip heard him explain.

“I’m looking after a second year’s man who’s got these rooms. The wretched blighter’s down with influenza. No whist tonight, old man.”

Presently Griffiths was left alone and Philip called him.

“I say, you’re not putting off a party tonight, are you?” he asked.

“Not on your account. I must work at my surgery.”

“Don’t put it off. I shall be all right. You needn’t bother about me.”

“That’s all right.”

Philip grew worse. As the night came on he became slightly delirious, but towards morning he awoke from a restless sleep. He saw Griffiths get out of an arm-chair, go down on his knees, and with his fingers put piece after piece of coal on the fire. He was in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Did I wake you up? I tried to make up the fire without making a row.”

“Why aren’t you in bed? What’s the time?”

“About five. I thought I’d better sit up with you tonight. I brought an arm-chair in as I thought if I put a mattress down I should sleep so soundly that I shouldn’t hear you if you wanted anything.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so good to me,” groaned Philip. “Suppose you catch it?”

“Then you shall nurse me, old man,” said Griffiths, with a laugh.

In the morning Griffiths drew up the blind. He looked pale and tired after his night’s watch, but was full of spirits.

“Now, I’m going to wash you,” he said to Philip cheerfully.

“I can wash myself,” said Philip, ashamed.

“Nonsense. If you were in the small ward a nurse would wash you, and I can do it just as well as a nurse.”

Philip, too weak and wretched to resist, allowed Griffiths to wash his hands and face, his feet, his chest and back. He did it with charming tenderness, carrying on meanwhile a stream of friendly chatter; then he changed the sheet just as they did at the hospital, shook out the pillow, and arranged the bed-clothes.

“I should like Sister Arthur to see me. It would make her sit up. Deacon’s coming in to see you early.”

“I can’t imagine why you should be so good to me,” said Philip.

“It’s good practice for me. It’s rather a lark having a patient.”

Griffiths gave him his breakfast and went off to get dressed and have something to eat. A few minutes before ten he came back with a bunch of grapes and a few flowers.

“You are awfully kind,” said Philip.

He was in bed for five days.

Norah and Griffiths nursed him between them. Though Griffiths was the same age as Philip he adopted towards him a humorous, motherly attitude. He was a thoughtful fellow, gentle and encouraging; but his greatest quality was a vitality which seemed to give health to everyone with whom he came in contact. Philip was unused to the petting which most people enjoy from mothers or sisters and he was deeply touched by the feminine tenderness of this strong young man. Philip grew better. Then Griffiths, sitting idly in Philip’s room, amused him with gay stories of amorous adventure. He was a flirtatious creature, capable of carrying on three or four affairs at a time; and his account of the devices he was forced to in order to keep out of difficulties made excellent hearing. He had a gift for throwing a romantic glamour over everything that happened to him. He was crippled with debts, everything he had of any value was pawned, but he managed always to be cheerful, extravagant, and generous. He was the adventurer by nature. He loved people of doubtful occupations and shifty purposes; and his acquaintance among the riff-raff that frequents the bars of London was enormous. Loose women, treating him as a friend, told him the troubles, difficulties, and successes of their lives; and card-sharpers, respecting his impecuniosity, stood him dinners and lent him five-pound notes. He was ploughed in his examinations time after time; but he bore this cheerfully, and submitted with such a charming grace to the parental expostulations that his father, a doctor in practice at Leeds, had not the heart to be seriously angry with him.

“I’m an awful fool at books,” he said cheerfully, “but I CAN’T work.”

Life was much too jolly. But it was clear that when he had got through the exuberance of his youth, and was at last qualified, he would be a tremendous success in practice. He would cure people by the sheer charm of his manner.

Philip worshipped him as at school he had worshipped boys who were tall and straight and high of spirits. By the time he was well they were fast friends, and it was a peculiar satisfaction to Philip that Griffiths seemed to enjoy sitting in his little parlour, wasting Philip’s time with his amusing chatter and smoking innumerable cigarettes. Philip took him sometimes to the tavern off Regent Street. Hayward found him stupid, but Lawson recognised his charm and was eager to paint him; he was a picturesque figure with his blue eyes, white skin, and curly hair. Often they discussed things he knew nothing about, and then he sat quietly, with a good-natured smile on his handsome face, feeling quite rightly that his presence was sufficient contribution to the entertainment of the company. When he discovered that Macalister was a stockbroker he was eager for tips; and Macalister, with his grave smile, told him what fortunes he could have made if he had bought certain stock at certain times. It made Philip’s mouth water, for in one way and another he was spending more than he had expected, and it would have suited him very well to make a little money by the easy method Macalister suggested.

“Next time I hear of a really good thing I’ll let you know,” said the stockbroker. “They do come along sometimes. It’s only a matter of biding one’s time.”

Philip could not help thinking how delightful it would be to make fifty pounds, so that he could give Norah the furs she so badly needed for the winter. He looked at the shops in Regent Street and picked out the articles he could buy for the money. She deserved everything. She made his life very happy.

LXIX

One afternoon, when he went back to his rooms from the hospital to wash and tidy himself before going to tea as usual with Norah, as he let himself in with his latch-key, his landlady opened the door for him.

“There’s a lady waiting to see you,” she said.

“Me?” exclaimed Philip.

He was surprised. It would only be Norah, and he had no idea what had brought her.

“I shouldn’t ‘ave let her in, only she’s been three times, and she seemed that upset at not finding you, so I told her she could wait.”

He pushed past the explaining landlady and burst into the room. His heart turned sick. It was Mildred. She was sitting down, but got up hurriedly as he came in. She did not move towards him nor speak. He was so surprised that he did not know what he was saying.

“What the hell d’you want?” he asked.

She did not answer, but began to cry. She did not put her hands to her eyes, but kept them hanging by the side of her body. She looked like a housemaid applying for a situation. There was a dreadful humility in her bearing. Philip did not know what feelings came over him. He had a sudden impulse to turn round and escape from the room.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” he said at last.

“I wish I was dead,” she moaned.

Philip left her standing where she was. He could only think at the moment of steadying himself. His knees were shaking. He looked at her, and he groaned in despair.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“He’s left me — Emil.”

Philip’s heart bounded. He knew then that he loved her as passionately as ever. He had never ceased to love her. She was standing before him humble and unresisting. He wished to take her in his arms and cover her tear-stained face with kisses. Oh, how long the separation had been! He did not know how he could have endured it.

“You’d better sit down. Let me give you a drink.”

He drew the chair near the fire and she sat in it. He mixed her whiskey and soda, and, sobbing still, she drank it. She looked at him with great, mournful eyes. There were large black lines under them. She was thinner and whiter than when last he had seen her.

“I wish I’d married you when you asked me,” she said.

Philip did not know why the remark seemed to swell his heart. He could not keep the distance from her which he had forced upon himself. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m awfully sorry you’re in trouble.”

She leaned her head against his bosom and burst into hysterical crying. Her hat was in the way and she took it off. He had never dreamt that she was capable of crying like that. He kissed her again and again. It seemed to ease her a little.

“You were always good to me, Philip,” she said. “That’s why I knew I could come to you.”

“Tell me what’s happened.”

“Oh, I can’t, I can’t,” she cried out, breaking away from him.

He sank down on his knees beside her and put his cheek against hers.

“Don’t you know that there’s nothing you can’t tell me? I can never blame you for anything.”

She told him the story little by little, and sometimes she sobbed so much that he could hardly understand.

“Last Monday week he went up to Birmingham, and he promised to be back on Thursday, and he never came, and he didn’t come on the Friday, so I wrote to ask what was the matter, and he never answered the letter. And I wrote and said that if I didn’t hear from him by return I’d go up to Birmingham, and this morning I got a solicitor’s letter to say I had no claim on him, and if I molested him he’d seek the protection of the law.”

“But it’s absurd,” cried Philip. “A man can’t treat his wife like that.

Had you had a row?”

“Oh, yes, we’d had a quarrel on the Sunday, and he said he was sick of me, but he’d said it before, and he’d come back all right. I didn’t think he meant it. He was frightened, because I told him a baby was coming. I kept it from him as long as I could. Then I had to tell him. He said it was my fault, and I ought to have known better. If you’d only heard the things he said to me! But I found out precious quick that he wasn’t a gentleman. He left me without a penny. He hadn’t paid the rent, and I hadn’t got the money to pay it, and the woman who kept the house said such things to me — well, I might have been a thief the way she talked.”

“I thought you were going to take a flat.”

“That’s what he said, but we just took furnished apartments in Highbury. He was that mean. He said I was extravagant, he didn’t give me anything to be extravagant with.”

She had an extraordinary way of mixing the trivial with the important.

Philip was puzzled. The whole thing was incomprehensible.

“No man could be such a blackguard.”

“You don’t know him. I wouldn’t go back to him now not if he was to come and ask me on his bended knees. I was a fool ever to think of him. And he wasn’t earning the money he said he was. The lies he told me!”

Philip thought for a minute or two. He was so deeply moved by her distress that he could not think of himself.

“Would you like me to go to Birmingham? I could see him and try to make things up.”

“Oh, there’s no chance of that. He’ll never come back now, I know him.”

“But he must provide for you. He can’t get out of that. I don’t know anything about these things, you’d better go and see a solicitor.”

“How can I? I haven’t got the money.”

“I’ll pay all that. I’ll write a note to my own solicitor, the sportsman who was my father’s executor. Would you like me to come with you now? I expect he’ll still be at his office.”

“No, give me a letter to him. I’ll go alone.”

She was a little calmer now. He sat down and wrote a note. Then he remembered that she had no money. He had fortunately changed a cheque the day before and was able to give her five pounds.

“You are good to me, Philip,” she said.

“I’m so happy to be able to do something for you.”

“Are you fond of me still?”

“Just as fond as ever.”

She put up her lips and he kissed her. There was a surrender in the action which he had never seen in her before. It was worth all the agony he had suffered.

She went away and he found that she had been there for two hours. He was extraordinarily happy.

“Poor thing, poor thing,” he murmured to himself, his heart glowing with a greater love than he had ever felt before.

He never thought of Norah at all till about eight o’clock a telegram came.

He knew before opening it that it was from her.

Is anything the matter? Norah.

He did not know what to do nor what to answer. He could fetch her after the play, in which she was walking on, was over and stroll home with her as he sometimes did; but his whole soul revolted against the idea of seeing her that evening. He thought of writing to her, but he could not bring himself to address her as usual, dearest Norah. He made up his mind to telegraph.

Sorry. Could not get away, Philip.

He visualised her. He was slightly repelled by the ugly little face, with its high cheekbones and the crude colour. There was a coarseness in her skin which gave him goose-flesh. He knew that his telegram must be followed by some action on his part, but at all events it postponed it.

Next day he wired again.

Regret, unable to come. Will write.

Mildred had suggested coming at four in the afternoon, and he would not tell her that the hour was inconvenient. After all she came first. He waited for her impatiently. He watched for her at the window and opened the front-door himself.

“Well? Did you see Nixon?”

“Yes,” she answered. “He said it wasn’t any good. Nothing’s to be done. I must just grin and bear it.”

“But that’s impossible,” cried Philip.

She sat down wearily.

“Did he give any reasons?” he asked.

She gave him a crumpled letter.

“There’s your letter, Philip. I never took it. I couldn’t tell you yesterday, I really couldn’t. Emil didn’t marry me. He couldn’t. He had a wife already and three children.”

Philip felt a sudden pang of jealousy and anguish. It was almost more than he could bear.

“That’s why I couldn’t go back to my aunt. There’s no one I can go to but you.”

“What made you go away with him?” Philip asked, in a low voice which he struggled to make firm.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know he was a married man at first, and when he told me I gave him a piece of my mind. And then I didn’t see him for months, and when he came to the shop again and asked me I don’t know what came over me. I felt as if I couldn’t help it. I had to go with him.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hardly help laughing at the things he said. And there was something about him — he said I’d never regret it, he promised to give me seven pounds a week — he said he was earning fifteen, and it was all a lie, he wasn’t. And then I was sick of going to the shop every morning, and I wasn’t getting on very well with my aunt; she wanted to treat me as a servant instead of a relation, said I ought to do my own room, and if I didn’t do it nobody was going to do it for me. Oh, I wish I hadn’t. But when he came to the shop and asked me I felt I couldn’t help it.”

Philip moved away from her. He sat down at the table and buried his face in his hands. He felt dreadfully humiliated.

“You’re not angry with me, Philip?” she asked piteously.

“No,” he answered, looking up but away from her, “only I’m awfully hurt.”

“Why?”

“You see, I was so dreadfully in love with you. I did everything I could to make you care for me. I thought you were incapable of loving anyone. It’s so horrible to know that you were willing to sacrifice everything for that bounder. I wonder what you saw in him.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Philip. I regretted it bitterly afterwards, I promise you that.”

He thought of Emil Miller, with his pasty, unhealthy look, his shifty blue eyes, and the vulgar smartness of his appearance; he always wore bright red knitted waistcoats. Philip sighed. She got up and went to him. She put her arm round his neck.

“I shall never forget that you offered to marry me, Philip.”

He took her hand and looked up at her. She bent down and kissed him.

“Philip, if you want me still I’ll do anything you like now. I know you’re a gentleman in every sense of the word.”

His heart stood still. Her words made him feel slightly sick.

“It’s awfully good of you, but I couldn’t.”

“Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Yes, I love you with all my heart.”

“Then why shouldn’t we have a good time while we’ve got the chance? You see, it can’t matter now.”

He released himself from her.

“You don’t understand. I’ve been sick with love for you ever since I saw you, but now — that man. I’ve unfortunately got a vivid imagination. The thought of it simply disgusts me.”

“You are funny,” she said.

He took her hand again and smiled at her.

“You mustn’t think I’m not grateful. I can never thank you enough, but you see, it’s just stronger than I am.”

“You are a good friend, Philip.”

They went on talking, and soon they had returned to the familiar companionship of old days. It grew late. Philip suggested that they should dine together and go to a music-hall. She wanted some persuasion, for she had an idea of acting up to her situation, and felt instinctively that it did not accord with her distressed condition to go to a place of entertainment. At last Philip asked her to go simply to please him, and when she could look upon it as an act of self-sacrifice she accepted. She had a new thoughtfulness which delighted Philip. She asked him to take her to the little restaurant in Soho to which they had so often been; he was infinitely grateful to her, because her suggestion showed that happy memories were attached to it. She grew much more cheerful as dinner proceeded. The Burgundy from the public house at the corner warmed her heart, and she forgot that she ought to preserve a dolorous countenance. Philip thought it safe to speak to her of the future.

“I suppose you haven’t got a brass farthing, have you?” he asked, when an opportunity presented itself.

“Only what you gave me yesterday, and I had to give the landlady three pounds of that.”

“Well, I’d better give you a tenner to go on with. I’ll go and see my solicitor and get him to write to Miller. We can make him pay up something, I’m sure. If we can get a hundred pounds out of him it’ll carry you on till after the baby comes.”

“I wouldn’t take a penny from him. I’d rather starve.”

“But it’s monstrous that he should leave you in the lurch like this.”

“I’ve got my pride to consider.”

It was a little awkward for Philip. He needed rigid economy to make his own money last till he was qualified, and he must have something over to keep him during the year he intended to spend as house physician and house surgeon either at his own or at some other hospital. But Mildred had told him various stories of Emil’s meanness, and he was afraid to remonstrate with her in case she accused him too of want of generosity.

“I wouldn’t take a penny piece from him. I’d sooner beg my bread. I’d have seen about getting some work to do long before now, only it wouldn’t be good for me in the state I’m in. You have to think of your health, don’t you?”

“You needn’t bother about the present,” said Philip. “I can let you have all you want till you’re fit to work again.”

“I knew I could depend on you. I told Emil he needn’t think I hadn’t got somebody to go to. I told him you was a gentleman in every sense of the word.”

By degrees Philip learned how the separation had come about. It appeared that the fellow’s wife had discovered the adventure he was engaged in during his periodical visits to London, and had gone to the head of the firm that employed him. She threatened to divorce him, and they announced that they would dismiss him if she did. He was passionately devoted to his children and could not bear the thought of being separated from them. When he had to choose between his wife and his mistress he chose his wife. He had been always anxious that there should be no child to make the entanglement more complicated; and when Mildred, unable longer to conceal its approach, informed him of the fact, he was seized with panic. He picked a quarrel and left her without more ado.

“When d’you expect to be confined?” asked Philip.

“At the beginning of March.”

“Three months.”

It was necessary to discuss plans. Mildred declared she would not remain in the rooms at Highbury, and Philip thought it more convenient too that she should be nearer to him. He promised to look for something next day. She suggested the Vauxhall Bridge Road as a likely neighbourhood.

“And it would be near for afterwards,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I should only be able to stay there about two months or a little more, and then I should have to go into a house. I know a very respectable place, where they have a most superior class of people, and they take you for four guineas a week and no extras. Of course the doctor’s extra, but that’s all. A friend of mine went there, and the lady who keeps it is a thorough lady. I mean to tell her that my husband’s an officer in India and I’ve come to London for my baby, because it’s better for my health.”

It seemed extraordinary to Philip to hear her talking in this way. With her delicate little features and her pale face she looked cold and maidenly. When he thought of the passions that burnt within her, so unexpected, his heart was strangely troubled. His pulse beat quickly.

LXX

Philip expected to find a letter from Norah when he got back to his rooms, but there was nothing; nor did he receive one the following morning. The silence irritated and at the same time alarmed him. They had seen one another every day he had been in London since the previous June; and it must seem odd to her that he should let two days go by without visiting her or offering a reason for his absence; he wondered whether by an unlucky chance she had seen him with Mildred. He could not bear to think that she was hurt or unhappy, and he made up his mind to call on her that afternoon. He was almost inclined to reproach her because he had allowed himself to get on such intimate terms with her. The thought of continuing them filled him with disgust.

He found two rooms for Mildred on the second floor of a house in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. They were noisy, but he knew that she liked the rattle of traffic under her windows.

“I don’t like a dead and alive street where you don’t see a soul pass all day,” she said. “Give me a bit of life.”

Then he forced himself to go to Vincent Square. He was sick with apprehension when he rang the bell. He had an uneasy sense that he was treating Norah badly; he dreaded reproaches; he knew she had a quick temper, and he hated scenes: perhaps the best way would be to tell her frankly that Mildred had come back to him and his love for her was as violent as it had ever been; he was very sorry, but he had nothing to offer Norah any more. Then he thought of her anguish, for he knew she loved him; it had flattered him before, and he was immensely grateful; but now it was horrible. She had not deserved that he should inflict pain upon her. He asked himself how she would greet him now, and as he walked up the stairs all possible forms of her behaviour flashed across his mind. He knocked at the door. He felt that he was pale, and wondered how to conceal his nervousness.

She was writing away industriously, but she sprang to her feet as he entered.

“I recognised your step,” she cried. “Where have you been hiding yourself, you naughty boy?”

She came towards him joyfully and put her arms round his neck. She was delighted to see him. He kissed her, and then, to give himself countenance, said he was dying for tea. She bustled the fire to make the kettle boil.

“I’ve been awfully busy,” he said lamely.

She began to chatter in her bright way, telling him of a new commission she had to provide a novelette for a firm which had not hitherto employed her. She was to get fifteen guineas for it.

“It’s money from the clouds. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll stand ourselves a little jaunt. Let’s go and spend a day at Oxford, shall we? I’d love to see the colleges.”

He looked at her to see whether there was any shadow of reproach in her eyes; but they were as frank and merry as ever: she was overjoyed to see him. His heart sank. He could not tell her the brutal truth. She made some toast for him, and cut it into little pieces, and gave it him as though he were a child.

“Is the brute fed?” she asked.

He nodded, smiling; and she lit a cigarette for him. Then, as she loved to do, she came and sat on his knees. She was very light. She leaned back in his arms with a sigh of delicious happiness.

“Say something nice to me,” she murmured.

“What shall I say?”

“You might by an effort of imagination say that you rather liked me.”

“You know I do that.”

He had not the heart to tell her then. He would give her peace at all events for that day, and perhaps he might write to her. That would be easier. He could not bear to think of her crying. She made him kiss her, and as he kissed her he thought of Mildred and Mildred’s pale, thin lips. The recollection of Mildred remained with him all the time, like an incorporated form, but more substantial than a shadow; and the sight continually distracted his attention.

“You’re very quiet today,” Norah said.

Her loquacity was a standing joke between them, and he answered:

“You never let me get a word in, and I’ve got out of the habit of talking.”

“But you’re not listening, and that’s bad manners.”

He reddened a little, wondering whether she had some inkling of his secret; he turned away his eyes uneasily. The weight of her irked him this afternoon, and he did not want her to touch him.

“My foot’s gone to sleep,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” she cried, jumping up. “I shall have to bant if I can’t break myself of this habit of sitting on gentlemen’s knees.”

He went through an elaborate form of stamping his foot and walking about. Then he stood in front of the fire so that she should not resume her position. While she talked he thought that she was worth ten of Mildred; she amused him much more and was jollier to talk to; she was cleverer, and she had a much nicer nature. She was a good, brave, honest little woman; and Mildred, he thought bitterly, deserved none of these epithets. If he had any sense he would stick to Norah, she would make him much happier than he would ever be with Mildred: after all she loved him, and Mildred was only grateful for his help. But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved; and he yearned for Mildred with his whole soul. He would sooner have ten minutes with her than a whole afternoon with Norah, he prized one kiss of her cold lips more than all Norah could give him.

“I can’t help myself,” he thought. “I’ve just got her in my bones.”

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with the one than happiness with the other.

When he got up to go Norah said casually:

“Well, I shall see you tomorrow, shan’t I?”

“Yes,” he answered.

He knew that he would not be able to come, since he was going to help Mildred with her moving, but he had not the courage to say so. He made up his mind that he would send a wire. Mildred saw the rooms in the morning, was satisfied with them, and after luncheon Philip went up with her to Highbury. She had a trunk for her clothes and another for the various odds and ends, cushions, lampshades, photograph frames, with which she had tried to give the apartments a home-like air; she had two or three large cardboard boxes besides, but in all there was no more than could be put on the roof of a four-wheeler. As they drove through Victoria Street Philip sat well back in the cab in case Norah should happen to be passing. He had not had an opportunity to telegraph and could not do so from the post office in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, since she would wonder what he was doing in that neighbourhood; and if he was there he could have no excuse for not going into the neighbouring square where she lived. He made up his mind that he had better go in and see her for half an hour; but the necessity irritated him: he was angry with Norah, because she forced him to vulgar and degrading shifts. But he was happy to be with Mildred. It amused him to help her with the unpacking; and he experienced a charming sense of possession in installing her in these lodgings which he had found and was paying for. He would not let her exert herself. It was a pleasure to do things for her, and she had no desire to do what somebody else seemed desirous to do for her. He unpacked her clothes and put them away. She was not proposing to go out again, so he got her slippers and took off her boots. It delighted him to perform menial offices.

“You do spoil me,” she said, running her fingers affectionately through his hair, while he was on his knees unbuttoning her boots.

He took her hands and kissed them.

“It is nipping to have you here.”

He arranged the cushions and the photograph frames. She had several jars of green earthenware.

“I’ll get you some flowers for them,” he said.

He looked round at his work proudly.

“As I’m not going out any more I think I’ll get into a tea-gown,” she said. “Undo me behind, will you?”

She turned round as unconcernedly as though he were a woman. His sex meant nothing to her. But his heart was filled with gratitude for the intimacy her request showed. He undid the hooks and eyes with clumsy fingers.

“That first day I came into the shop I never thought I’d be doing this for you now,” he said, with a laugh which he forced.

“Somebody must do it,” she answered.

She went into the bed-room and slipped into a pale blue tea-gown decorated with a great deal of cheap lace. Then Philip settled her on a sofa and made tea for her.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay and have it with you,” he said regretfully. “I’ve got a beastly appointment. But I shall be back in half an hour.”

He wondered what he should say if she asked him what the appointment was, but she showed no curiosity. He had ordered dinner for the two of them when he took the rooms, and proposed to spend the evening with her quietly. He was in such a hurry to get back that he took a tram along the Vauxhall Bridge Road. He thought he had better break the fact to Norah at once that he could not stay more than a few minutes.

“I say, I’ve got only just time to say how d’you do,” he said, as soon as he got into her rooms. “I’m frightfully busy.”

Her face fell.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

It exasperated him that she should force him to tell lies, and he knew that he reddened when he answered that there was a demonstration at the hospital which he was bound to go to. He fancied that she looked as though she did not believe him, and this irritated him all the more.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I shall have you all tomorrow.”

He looked at her blankly. It was Sunday, and he had been looking forward to spending the day with Mildred. He told himself that he must do that in common decency; he could not leave her by herself in a strange house.

“I’m awfully sorry, I’m engaged tomorrow.”

He knew this was the beginning of a scene which he would have given anything to avoid. The colour on Norah’s cheeks grew brighter.

“But I’ve asked the Gordons to lunch” — they were an actor and his wife who were touring the provinces and in London for Sunday— “I told you about it a week ago.”

“I’m awfully sorry, I forgot.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t possibly come. Isn’t there somebody else you can get?”

“What are you doing tomorrow then?”

“I wish you wouldn’t cross-examine me.”

“Don’t you want to tell me?”

“I don’t in the least mind telling you, but it’s rather annoying to be forced to account for all one’s movements.”

Norah suddenly changed. With an effort of self-control she got the better of her temper, and going up to him took his hands.

“Don’t disappoint me tomorrow, Philip, I’ve been looking forward so much to spending the day with you. The Gordons want to see you, and we’ll have such a jolly time.”

“I’d love to if I could.”

“I’m not very exacting, am I? I don’t often ask you to do anything that’s a bother. Won’t you get out of your horrid engagement — just this once?”

“I’m awfully sorry, I don’t see how I can,” he replied sullenly.

“Tell me what it is,” she said coaxingly.

He had had time to invent something. “Griffiths’ two sisters are up for the week-end and we’re taking them out.”

“Is that all?” she said joyfully. “Griffiths can so easily get another man.”

He wished he had thought of something more urgent than that. It was a clumsy lie.

“No, I’m awfully sorry, I can’t — I’ve promised and I mean to keep my promise.”

“But you promised me too. Surely I come first.”

“I wish you wouldn’t persist,” he said.

She flared up.

“You won’t come because you don’t want to. I don’t know what you’ve been doing the last few days, you’ve been quite different.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to be going,” he said.

“You won’t come tomorrow?”

“No.”

“In that case you needn’t trouble to come again,” she cried, losing her temper for good.

“That’s just as you like,” he answered.

“Don’t let me detain you any longer,” she added ironically.

He shrugged his shoulders and walked out. He was relieved that it had gone no worse. There had been no tears. As he walked along he congratulated himself on getting out of the affair so easily. He went into Victoria Street and bought a few flowers to take in to Mildred.

The little dinner was a great success. Philip had sent in a small pot of caviare, which he knew she was very fond of, and the landlady brought them up some cutlets with vegetables and a sweet. Philip had ordered Burgundy, which was her favourite wine. With the curtains drawn, a bright fire, and one of Mildred’s shades on the lamp, the room was cosy.

“It’s really just like home,” smiled Philip.

“I might be worse off, mightn’t I?” she answered.

When they finished, Philip drew two arm-chairs in front of the fire, and they sat down. He smoked his pipe comfortably. He felt happy and generous.

“What would you like to do tomorrow?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m going to Tulse Hill. You remember the manageress at the shop, well, she’s married now, and she’s asked me to go and spend the day with her. Of course she thinks I’m married too.”

Philip’s heart sank.

“But I refused an invitation so that I might spend Sunday with you.”

He thought that if she loved him she would say that in that case she would stay with him. He knew very well that Norah would not have hesitated.

“Well, you were a silly to do that. I’ve promised to go for three weeks and more.”

“But how can you go alone?”

“Oh, I shall say that Emil’s away on business. Her husband’s in the glove trade, and he’s a very superior fellow.”

Philip was silent, and bitter feelings passed through his heart. She gave him a sidelong glance.

“You don’t grudge me a little pleasure, Philip? You see, it’s the last time I shall be able to go anywhere for I don’t know how long, and I had promised.”

He took her hand and smiled.

“No, darling, I want you to have the best time you can. I only want you to be happy.”

There was a little book bound in blue paper lying open, face downwards, on the sofa, and Philip idly took it up. It was a twopenny novelette, and the author was Courtenay Paget. That was the name under which Norah wrote.

“I do like his books,” said Mildred. “I read them all. They’re so refined.”

He remembered what Norah had said of herself.

“I have an immense popularity among kitchen-maids. They think me so genteel.”

LXXI

Philip, in return for Griffiths’ confidences, had told him the details of his own complicated amours, and on Sunday morning, after breakfast when they sat by the fire in their dressing-gowns and smoked, he recounted the scene of the previous day. Griffiths congratulated him because he had got out of his difficulties so easily.

“It’s the simplest thing in the world to have an affair with a woman,” he remarked sententiously, “but it’s a devil of a nuisance to get out of it.”

Philip felt a little inclined to pat himself on the back for his skill in managing the business. At all events he was immensely relieved. He thought of Mildred enjoying herself in Tulse Hill, and he found in himself a real satisfaction because she was happy. It was an act of self-sacrifice on his part that he did not grudge her pleasure even though paid for by his own disappointment, and it filled his heart with a comfortable glow.

But on Monday morning he found on his table a letter from Norah. She wrote:

Dearest,

I’m sorry I was cross on Saturday. Forgive me and come to tea in the afternoon as usual. I love you.

Your Norah.

His heart sank, and he did not know what to do. He took the note to

Griffiths and showed it to him.

“You’d better leave it unanswered,” said he.

“Oh, I can’t,” cried Philip. “I should be miserable if I thought of her waiting and waiting. You don’t know what it is to be sick for the postman’s knock. I do, and I can’t expose anybody else to that torture.”

“My dear fellow, one can’t break that sort of affair off without somebody suffering. You must just set your teeth to that. One thing is, it doesn’t last very long.”

Philip felt that Norah had not deserved that he should make her suffer; and what did Griffiths know about the degrees of anguish she was capable of? He remembered his own pain when Mildred had told him she was going to be married. He did not want anyone to experience what he had experienced then.

“If you’re so anxious not to give her pain, go back to her,” said

Griffiths.

“I can’t do that.”

He got up and walked up and down the room nervously. He was angry with Norah because she had not let the matter rest. She must have seen that he had no more love to give her. They said women were so quick at seeing those things.

“You might help me,” he said to Griffiths.

“My dear fellow, don’t make such a fuss about it. People do get over these things, you know. She probably isn’t so wrapped up in you as you think, either. One’s always rather apt to exaggerate the passion one’s inspired other people with.”

He paused and looked at Philip with amusement.

“Look here, there’s only one thing you can do. Write to her, and tell her the thing’s over. Put it so that there can be no mistake about it. It’ll hurt her, but it’ll hurt her less if you do the thing brutally than if you try half-hearted ways.”

Philip sat down and wrote the following letter:

My dear Norah,

I am sorry to make you unhappy, but I think we had better let things remain where we left them on Saturday. I don’t think there’s any use in letting these things drag on when they’ve ceased to be amusing. You told me to go and I went. I do not propose to come back. Good-bye. Philip Carey.

He showed the letter to Griffiths and asked him what he thought of it. Griffiths read it and looked at Philip with twinkling eyes. He did not say what he felt.

“I think that’ll do the trick,” he said.

Philip went out and posted it. He passed an uncomfortable morning, for he imagined with great detail what Norah would feel when she received his letter. He tortured himself with the thought of her tears. But at the same time he was relieved. Imagined grief was more easy to bear than grief seen, and he was free now to love Mildred with all his soul. His heart leaped at the thought of going to see her that afternoon, when his day’s work at the hospital was over.

When as usual he went back to his rooms to tidy himself, he had no sooner put the latch-key in his door than he heard a voice behind him.

“May I come in? I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour.”

It was Norah. He felt himself blush to the roots of his hair. She spoke gaily. There was no trace of resentment in her voice and nothing to indicate that there was a rupture between them. He felt himself cornered. He was sick with fear, but he did his best to smile.

“Yes, do,” he said.

He opened the door, and she preceded him into his sitting-room. He was nervous and, to give himself countenance, offered her a cigarette and lit one for himself. She looked at him brightly.

“Why did you write me such a horrid letter, you naughty boy? If I’d taken it seriously it would have made me perfectly wretched.”

“It was meant seriously,” he answered gravely.

“Don’t be so silly. I lost my temper the other day, and I wrote and apologised. You weren’t satisfied, so I’ve come here to apologise again. After all, you’re your own master and I have no claims upon you. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.”

She got up from the chair in which she was sitting and went towards him impulsively, with outstretched hands.

“Let’s make friends again, Philip. I’m so sorry if I offended you.”

He could not prevent her from taking his hands, but he could not look at her.

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said.

She let herself down on the floor by his side and clasped his knees.

“Philip, don’t be silly. I’m quick-tempered too and I can understand that I hurt you, but it’s so stupid to sulk over it. What’s the good of making us both unhappy? It’s been so jolly, our friendship.” She passed her fingers slowly over his hand. “I love you, Philip.”

He got up, disengaging himself from her, and went to the other side of the room.

“I’m awfully sorry, I can’t do anything. The whole thing’s over.”

“D’you mean to say you don’t love me any more?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You were just looking for an opportunity to throw me over and you took that one?”

He did not answer. She looked at him steadily for a time which seemed intolerable. She was sitting on the floor where he had left her, leaning against the arm-chair. She began to cry quite silently, without trying to hide her face, and the large tears rolled down her cheeks one after the other. She did not sob. It was horribly painful to see her. Philip turned away.

“I’m awfully sorry to hurt you. It’s not my fault if I don’t love you.”

She did not answer. She merely sat there, as though she were overwhelmed, and the tears flowed down her cheeks. It would have been easier to bear if she had reproached him. He had thought her temper would get the better of her, and he was prepared for that. At the back of his mind was a feeling that a real quarrel, in which each said to the other cruel things, would in some way be a justification of his behaviour. The time passed. At last he grew frightened by her silent crying; he went into his bed-room and got a glass of water; he leaned over her.

“Won’t you drink a little? It’ll relieve you.”

She put her lips listlessly to the glass and drank two or three mouthfuls. Then in an exhausted whisper she asked him for a handkerchief. She dried her eyes.

“Of course I knew you never loved me as much as I loved you,” she moaned.

“I’m afraid that’s always the case,” he said. “There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”

He thought of Mildred, and a bitter pain traversed his heart. Norah did not answer for a long time.

“I’d been so miserably unhappy, and my life was so hateful,” she said at last.

She did not speak to him, but to herself. He had never heard her before complain of the life she had led with her husband or of her poverty. He had always admired the bold front she displayed to the world.

“And then you came along and you were so good to me. And I admired you because you were clever and it was so heavenly to have someone I could put my trust in. I loved you. I never thought it could come to an end. And without any fault of mine at all.”

Her tears began to flow again, but now she was more mistress of herself, and she hid her face in Philip’s handkerchief. She tried hard to control herself.

“Give me some more water,” she said.

She wiped her eyes.

“I’m sorry to make such a fool of myself. I was so unprepared.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Norah. I want you to know that I’m very grateful for all you’ve done for me.”

He wondered what it was she saw in him.

“Oh, it’s always the same,” she sighed, “if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.”

She got up from the floor and said she must go. She gave Philip a long, steady look. Then she sighed.

“It’s so inexplicable. What does it all mean?”

Philip took a sudden determination.

“I think I’d better tell you, I don’t want you to think too badly of me,

I want you to see that I can’t help myself. Mildred’s come back.”

The colour came to her face.

“Why didn’t you tell me at once? I deserved that surely.”

“I was afraid to.”

She looked at herself in the glass and set her hat straight.

“Will you call me a cab,” she said. “I don’t feel I can walk.”

He went to the door and stopped a passing hansom; but when she followed him into the street he was startled to see how white she was. There was a heaviness in her movements as though she had suddenly grown older. She looked so ill that he had not the heart to let her go alone.

“I’ll drive back with you if you don’t mind.”

She did not answer, and he got into the cab. They drove along in silence over the bridge, through shabby streets in which children, with shrill cries, played in the road. When they arrived at her door she did not immediately get out. It seemed as though she could not summon enough strength to her legs to move.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, Norah,” he said.

She turned her eyes towards him, and he saw that they were bright again with tears, but she forced a smile to her lips.

“Poor fellow, you’re quite worried about me. You mustn’t bother. I don’t blame you. I shall get over it all right.”

Lightly and quickly she stroked his face to show him that she bore no ill-feeling, the gesture was scarcely more than suggested; then she jumped out of the cab and let herself into her house.

Philip paid the hansom and walked to Mildred’s lodgings. There was a curious heaviness in his heart. He was inclined to reproach himself. But why? He did not know what else he could have done. Passing a fruiterer’s, he remembered that Mildred was fond of grapes. He was so grateful that he could show his love for her by recollecting every whim she had.

LXXII

For the next three months Philip went every day to see Mildred. He took his books with him and after tea worked, while Mildred lay on the sofa reading novels. Sometimes he would look up and watch her for a minute. A happy smile crossed his lips. She would feel his eyes upon her.

“Don’t waste your time looking at me, silly. Go on with your work,” she said.

“Tyrant,” he answered gaily.

He put aside his book when the landlady came in to lay the cloth for dinner, and in his high spirits he exchanged chaff with her. She was a little cockney, of middle age, with an amusing humour and a quick tongue. Mildred had become great friends with her and had given her an elaborate but mendacious account of the circumstances which had brought her to the pass she was in. The good-hearted little woman was touched and found no trouble too great to make Mildred comfortable. Mildred’s sense of propriety had suggested that Philip should pass himself off as her brother. They dined together, and Philip was delighted when he had ordered something which tempted Mildred’s capricious appetite. It enchanted him to see her sitting opposite him, and every now and then from sheer joy he took her hand and pressed it. After dinner she sat in the arm-chair by the fire, and he settled himself down on the floor beside her, leaning against her knees, and smoked. Often they did not talk at all, and sometimes Philip noticed that she had fallen into a doze. He dared not move then in case he woke her, and he sat very quietly, looking lazily into the fire and enjoying his happiness.

“Had a nice little nap?” he smiled, when she woke.

“I’ve not been sleeping,” she answered. “I only just closed my eyes.”

She would never acknowledge that she had been asleep. She had a phlegmatic temperament, and her condition did not seriously inconvenience her. She took a lot of trouble about her health and accepted the advice of anyone who chose to offer it. She went for a ‘constitutional’ every morning that it was fine and remained out a definite time. When it was not too cold she sat in St. James’ Park. But the rest of the day she spent quite happily on her sofa, reading one novel after another or chatting with the landlady; she had an inexhaustible interest in gossip, and told Philip with abundant detail the history of the landlady, of the lodgers on the drawing-room floor, and of the people who lived in the next house on either side. Now and then she was seized with panic; she poured out her fears to Philip about the pain of the confinement and was in terror lest she should die; she gave him a full account of the confinements of the landlady and of the lady on the drawing-room floor (Mildred did not know her; “I’m one to keep myself to myself,” she said, “I’m not one to go about with anybody.”) and she narrated details with a queer mixture of horror and gusto; but for the most part she looked forward to the occurrence with equanimity.

“After all, I’m not the first one to have a baby, am I? And the doctor says I shan’t have any trouble. You see, it isn’t as if I wasn’t well made.”

Mrs. Owen, the owner of the house she was going to when her time came, had recommended a doctor, and Mildred saw him once a week. He was to charge fifteen guineas.

“Of course I could have got it done cheaper, but Mrs. Owen strongly recommended him, and I thought it wasn’t worth while to spoil the ship for a coat of tar.”

“If you feel happy and comfortable I don’t mind a bit about the expense,” said Philip.

She accepted all that Philip did for her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and on his side he loved to spend money on her: each five-pound note he gave her caused him a little thrill of happiness and pride; he gave her a good many, for she was not economical.

“I don’t know where the money goes to,” she said herself, “it seems to slip through my fingers like water.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Philip. “I’m so glad to be able to do anything

I can for you.”

She could not sew well and so did not make the necessary things for the baby; she told Philip it was much cheaper in the end to buy them. Philip had lately sold one of the mortgages in which his money had been put; and now, with five hundred pounds in the bank waiting to be invested in something that could be more easily realised, he felt himself uncommonly well-to-do. They talked often of the future. Philip was anxious that Mildred should keep the child with her, but she refused: she had her living to earn, and it would be more easy to do this if she had not also to look after a baby. Her plan was to get back into one of the shops of the company for which she had worked before, and the child could be put with some decent woman in the country.

“I can find someone who’ll look after it well for seven and sixpence a week. It’ll be better for the baby and better for me.”

It seemed callous to Philip, but when he tried to reason with her she pretended to think he was concerned with the expense.

“You needn’t worry about that,” she said. “I shan’t ask YOU to pay for it.”

“You know I don’t care how much I pay.”

At the bottom of her heart was the hope that the child would be still-born. She did no more than hint it, but Philip saw that the thought was there. He was shocked at first; and then, reasoning with himself, he was obliged to confess that for all concerned such an event was to be desired.

“It’s all very fine to say this and that,” Mildred remarked querulously, “but it’s jolly difficult for a girl to earn her living by herself; it doesn’t make it any easier when she’s got a baby.”

“Fortunately you’ve got me to fall back on,” smiled Philip, taking her hand.

“You’ve been good to me, Philip.”

“Oh, what rot!”

“You can’t say I didn’t offer anything in return for what you’ve done.”

“Good heavens, I don’t want a return. If I’ve done anything for you, I’ve done it because I love you. You owe me nothing. I don’t want you to do anything unless you love me.”

He was a little horrified by her feeling that her body was a commodity which she could deliver indifferently as an acknowledgment for services rendered.

“But I do want to, Philip. You’ve been so good to me.”

“Well, it won’t hurt for waiting. When you’re all right again we’ll go for our little honeymoon.”

“You are naughty,” she said, smiling.

Mildred expected to be confined early in March, and as soon as she was well enough she was to go to the seaside for a fortnight: that would give Philip a chance to work without interruption for his examination; after that came the Easter holidays, and they had arranged to go to Paris together. Philip talked endlessly of the things they would do. Paris was delightful then. They would take a room in a little hotel he knew in the Latin Quarter, and they would eat in all sorts of charming little restaurants; they would go to the play, and he would take her to music halls. It would amuse her to meet his friends. He had talked to her about Cronshaw, she would see him; and there was Lawson, he had gone to Paris for a couple of months; and they would go to the Bal Bullier; there were excursions; they would make trips to Versailles, Chartres, Fontainebleau.

“It’ll cost a lot of money,” she said.

“Oh, damn the expense. Think how I’ve been looking forward to it. Don’t you know what it means to me? I’ve never loved anyone but you. I never shall.”

She listened to his enthusiasm with smiling eyes. He thought he saw in them a new tenderness, and he was grateful to her. She was much gentler than she used to be. There was in her no longer the superciliousness which had irritated him. She was so accustomed to him now that she took no pains to keep up before him any pretences. She no longer troubled to do her hair with the old elaboration, but just tied it in a knot; and she left off the vast fringe which she generally wore: the more careless style suited her. Her face was so thin that it made her eyes seem very large; there were heavy lines under them, and the pallor of her cheeks made their colour more profound. She had a wistful look which was infinitely pathetic. There seemed to Philip to be in her something of the Madonna. He wished they could continue in that same way always. He was happier than he had ever been in his life.

He used to leave her at ten o’clock every night, for she liked to go to bed early, and he was obliged to put in another couple of hours’ work to make up for the lost evening. He generally brushed her hair for her before he went. He had made a ritual of the kisses he gave her when he bade her good-night; first he kissed the palms of her hands (how thin the fingers were, the nails were beautiful, for she spent much time in manicuring them,) then he kissed her closed eyes, first the right one and then the left, and at last he kissed her lips. He went home with a heart overflowing with love. He longed for an opportunity to gratify the desire for self-sacrifice which consumed him.

Presently the time came for her to move to the nursing-home where she was to be confined. Philip was then able to visit her only in the afternoons. Mildred changed her story and represented herself as the wife of a soldier who had gone to India to join his regiment, and Philip was introduced to the mistress of the establishment as her brother-in-law.

“I have to be rather careful what I say,” she told him, “as there’s another lady here whose husband’s in the Indian Civil.”

“I wouldn’t let that disturb me if I were you,” said Philip. “I’m convinced that her husband and yours went out on the same boat.”

“What boat?” she asked innocently.

“The Flying Dutchman.”

Mildred was safely delivered of a daughter, and when Philip was allowed to see her the child was lying by her side. Mildred was very weak, but relieved that everything was over. She showed him the baby, and herself looked at it curiously.

“It’s a funny-looking little thing, isn’t it? I can’t believe it’s mine.”

It was red and wrinkled and odd. Philip smiled when he looked at it. He did not quite know what to say; and it embarrassed him because the nurse who owned the house was standing by his side; and he felt by the way she was looking at him that, disbelieving Mildred’s complicated story, she thought he was the father.

“What are you going to call her?” asked Philip.

“I can’t make up my mind if I shall call her Madeleine or Cecilia.”

The nurse left them alone for a few minutes, and Philip bent down and kissed Mildred on the mouth.

“I’m so glad it’s all over happily, darling.”

She put her thin arms round his neck.

“You have been a brick to me, Phil dear.”

“Now I feel that you’re mine at last. I’ve waited so long for you, my dear.”

They heard the nurse at the door, and Philip hurriedly got up. The nurse entered. There was a slight smile on her lips.

LXXIII

Three weeks later Philip saw Mildred and her baby off to Brighton. She had made a quick recovery and looked better than he had ever seen her. She was going to a boarding-house where she had spent a couple of weekends with Emil Miller, and had written to say that her husband was obliged to go to Germany on business and she was coming down with her baby. She got pleasure out of the stories she invented, and she showed a certain fertility of invention in the working out of the details. Mildred proposed to find in Brighton some woman who would be willing to take charge of the baby. Philip was startled at the callousness with which she insisted on getting rid of it so soon, but she argued with common sense that the poor child had much better be put somewhere before it grew used to her. Philip had expected the maternal instinct to make itself felt when she had had the baby two or three weeks and had counted on this to help him persuade her to keep it; but nothing of the sort occurred. Mildred was not unkind to her baby; she did all that was necessary; it amused her sometimes, and she talked about it a good deal; but at heart she was indifferent to it. She could not look upon it as part of herself. She fancied it resembled its father already. She was continually wondering how she would manage when it grew older; and she was exasperated with herself for being such a fool as to have it at all.

“If I’d only known then all I do now,” she said.

She laughed at Philip, because he was anxious about its welfare.

“You couldn’t make more fuss if you was the father,” she said. “I’d like to see Emil getting into such a stew about it.”

Philip’s mind was full of the stories he had heard of baby-farming and the ghouls who ill-treat the wretched children that selfish, cruel parents have put in their charge.

“Don’t be so silly,” said Mildred. “That’s when you give a woman a sum down to look after a baby. But when you’re going to pay so much a week it’s to their interest to look after it well.”

Philip insisted that Mildred should place the child with people who had no children of their own and would promise to take no other.

“Don’t haggle about the price,” he said. “I’d rather pay half a guinea a week than run any risk of the kid being starved or beaten.”

“You’re a funny old thing, Philip,” she laughed.

To him there was something very touching in the child’s helplessness. It was small, ugly, and querulous. Its birth had been looked forward to with shame and anguish. Nobody wanted it. It was dependent on him, a stranger, for food, shelter, and clothes to cover its nakedness.

As the train started he kissed Mildred. He would have kissed the baby too, but he was afraid she would laugh at him.

“You will write to me, darling, won’t you? And I shall look forward to your coming back with oh! such impatience.”

“Mind you get through your exam.”

He had been working for it industriously, and now with only ten days before him he made a final effort. He was very anxious to pass, first to save himself time and expense, for money had been slipping through his fingers during the last four months with incredible speed; and then because this examination marked the end of the drudgery: after that the student had to do with medicine, midwifery, and surgery, the interest of which was more vivid than the anatomy and physiology with which he had been hitherto concerned. Philip looked forward with interest to the rest of the curriculum. Nor did he want to have to confess to Mildred that he had failed: though the examination was difficult and the majority of candidates were ploughed at the first attempt, he knew that she would think less well of him if he did not succeed; she had a peculiarly humiliating way of showing what she thought.

Mildred sent him a postcard to announce her safe arrival, and he snatched half an hour every day to write a long letter to her. He had always a certain shyness in expressing himself by word of mouth, but he found he could tell her, pen in hand, all sorts of things which it would have made him feel ridiculous to say. Profiting by the discovery he poured out to her his whole heart. He had never been able to tell her before how his adoration filled every part of him so that all his actions, all his thoughts, were touched with it. He wrote to her of the future, the happiness that lay before him, and the gratitude which he owed her. He asked himself (he had often asked himself before but had never put it into words) what it was in her that filled him with such extravagant delight; he did not know; he knew only that when she was with him he was happy, and when she was away from him the world was on a sudden cold and gray; he knew only that when he thought of her his heart seemed to grow big in his body so that it was difficult to breathe (as if it pressed against his lungs) and it throbbed, so that the delight of her presence was almost pain; his knees shook, and he felt strangely weak as though, not having eaten, he were tremulous from want of food. He looked forward eagerly to her answers. He did not expect her to write often, for he knew that letter-writing came difficultly to her; and he was quite content with the clumsy little note that arrived in reply to four of his. She spoke of the boarding-house in which she had taken a room, of the weather and the baby, told him she had been for a walk on the front with a lady-friend whom she had met in the boarding-house and who had taken such a fancy to baby, she was going to the theatre on Saturday night, and Brighton was filling up. It touched Philip because it was so matter-of-fact. The crabbed style, the formality of the matter, gave him a queer desire to laugh and to take her in his arms and kiss her.

He went into the examination with happy confidence. There was nothing in either of the papers that gave him trouble. He knew that he had done well, and though the second part of the examination was viva voce and he was more nervous, he managed to answer the questions adequately. He sent a triumphant telegram to Mildred when the result was announced.

When he got back to his rooms Philip found a letter from her, saying that she thought it would be better for her to stay another week in Brighton. She had found a woman who would be glad to take the baby for seven shillings a week, but she wanted to make inquiries about her, and she was herself benefiting so much by the sea-air that she was sure a few days more would do her no end of good. She hated asking Philip for money, but would he send some by return, as she had had to buy herself a new hat, she couldn’t go about with her lady-friend always in the same hat, and her lady-friend was so dressy. Philip had a moment of bitter disappointment. It took away all his pleasure at getting through his examination.

“If she loved me one quarter as much as I love her she couldn’t bear to stay away a day longer than necessary.”

He put the thought away from him quickly; it was pure selfishness; of course her health was more important than anything else. But he had nothing to do now; he might spend the week with her in Brighton, and they could be together all day. His heart leaped at the thought. It would be amusing to appear before Mildred suddenly with the information that he had taken a room in the boarding-house. He looked out trains. But he paused. He was not certain that she would be pleased to see him; she had made friends in Brighton; he was quiet, and she liked boisterous joviality; he realised that she amused herself more with other people than with him. It would torture him if he felt for an instant that he was in the way. He was afraid to risk it. He dared not even write and suggest that, with nothing to keep him in town, he would like to spend the week where he could see her every day. She knew he had nothing to do; if she wanted him to come she would have asked him to. He dared not risk the anguish he would suffer if he proposed to come and she made excuses to prevent him.

He wrote to her next day, sent her a five-pound note, and at the end of his letter said that if she were very nice and cared to see him for the week-end he would be glad to run down; but she was by no means to alter any plans she had made. He awaited her answer with impatience. In it she said that if she had only known before she could have arranged it, but she had promised to go to a music-hall on the Saturday night; besides, it would make the people at the boarding-house talk if he stayed there. Why did he not come on Sunday morning and spend the day? They could lunch at the Metropole, and she would take him afterwards to see the very superior lady-like person who was going to take the baby.

Sunday. He blessed the day because it was fine. As the train approached Brighton the sun poured through the carriage window. Mildred was waiting for him on the platform.

“How jolly of you to come and meet me!” he cried, as he seized her hands.

“You expected me, didn’t you?”

“I hoped you would. I say, how well you’re looking.”

“It’s done me a rare lot of good, but I think I’m wise to stay here as long as I can. And there are a very nice class of people at the boarding-house. I wanted cheering up after seeing nobody all these months. It was dull sometimes.”

She looked very smart in her new hat, a large black straw with a great many inexpensive flowers on it; and round her neck floated a long boa of imitation swansdown. She was still very thin, and she stooped a little when she walked (she had always done that,) but her eyes did not seem so large; and though she never had any colour, her skin had lost the earthy look it had. They walked down to the sea. Philip, remembering he had not walked with her for months, grew suddenly conscious of his limp and walked stiffly in the attempt to conceal it.

“Are you glad to see me?” he asked, love dancing madly in his heart.

“Of course I am. You needn’t ask that.”

“By the way, Griffiths sends you his love.”

“What cheek!”

He had talked to her a great deal of Griffiths. He had told her how flirtatious he was and had amused her often with the narration of some adventure which Griffiths under the seal of secrecy had imparted to him. Mildred had listened, with some pretence of disgust sometimes, but generally with curiosity; and Philip, admiringly, had enlarged upon his friend’s good looks and charm.

“I’m sure you’ll like him just as much as I do. He’s so jolly and amusing, and he’s such an awfully good sort.”

Philip told her how, when they were perfect strangers, Griffiths had nursed him through an illness; and in the telling Griffiths’ self-sacrifice lost nothing.

“You can’t help liking him,” said Philip.

“I don’t like good-looking men,” said Mildred. “They’re too conceited for me.”

“He wants to know you. I’ve talked to him about you an awful lot.”

“What have you said?” asked Mildred.

Philip had no one but Griffiths to talk to of his love for Mildred, and little by little had told him the whole story of his connection with her. He described her to him fifty times. He dwelt amorously on every detail of her appearance, and Griffiths knew exactly how her thin hands were shaped and how white her face was, and he laughed at Philip when he talked of the charm of her pale, thin lips.

“By Jove, I’m glad I don’t take things so badly as that,” he said. “Life wouldn’t be worth living.”

Philip smiled. Griffiths did not know the delight of being so madly in love that it was like meat and wine and the air one breathed and whatever else was essential to existence. Griffiths knew that Philip had looked after the girl while she was having her baby and was now going away with her.

“Well, I must say you’ve deserved to get something,” he remarked. “It must have cost you a pretty penny. It’s lucky you can afford it.”

“I can’t,” said Philip. “But what do I care!”

Since it was early for luncheon, Philip and Mildred sat in one of the shelters on the parade, sunning themselves, and watched the people pass. There were the Brighton shop-boys who walked in twos and threes, swinging their canes, and there were the Brighton shop-girls who tripped along in giggling bunches. They could tell the people who had come down from London for the day; the keen air gave a fillip to their weariness. There were many Jews, stout ladies in tight satin dresses and diamonds, little corpulent men with a gesticulative manner. There were middle-aged gentlemen spending a week-end in one of the large hotels, carefully dressed; and they walked industriously after too substantial a breakfast to give themselves an appetite for too substantial a luncheon: they exchanged the time of day with friends and talked of Dr. Brighton or London-by-the-Sea. Here and there a well-known actor passed, elaborately unconscious of the attention he excited: sometimes he wore patent leather boots, a coat with an astrakhan collar, and carried a silver-knobbed stick; and sometimes, looking as though he had come from a day’s shooting, he strolled in knickerbockers, and ulster of Harris tweed, and a tweed hat on the back of his head. The sun shone on the blue sea, and the blue sea was trim and neat.

After luncheon they went to Hove to see the woman who was to take charge of the baby. She lived in a small house in a back street, but it was clean and tidy. Her name was Mrs. Harding. She was an elderly, stout person, with gray hair and a red, fleshy face. She looked motherly in her cap, and Philip thought she seemed kind.

“Won’t you find it an awful nuisance to look after a baby?” he asked her.

She explained that her husband was a curate, a good deal older than herself, who had difficulty in getting permanent work since vicars wanted young men to assist them; he earned a little now and then by doing locums when someone took a holiday or fell ill, and a charitable institution gave them a small pension; but her life was lonely, it would be something to do to look after a child, and the few shillings a week paid for it would help her to keep things going. She promised that it should be well fed.

“Quite the lady, isn’t she?” said Mildred, when they went away.

They went back to have tea at the Metropole. Mildred liked the crowd and the band. Philip was tired of talking, and he watched her face as she looked with keen eyes at the dresses of the women who came in. She had a peculiar sharpness for reckoning up what things cost, and now and then she leaned over to him and whispered the result of her meditations.

“D’you see that aigrette there? That cost every bit of seven guineas.”

Or: “Look at that ermine, Philip. That’s rabbit, that is — that’s not ermine.” She laughed triumphantly. “I’d know it a mile off.”

Philip smiled happily. He was glad to see her pleasure, and the ingenuousness of her conversation amused and touched him. The band played sentimental music.

After dinner they walked down to the station, and Philip took her arm. He told her what arrangements he had made for their journey to France. She was to come up to London at the end of the week, but she told him that she could not go away till the Saturday of the week after that. He had already engaged a room in a hotel in Paris. He was looking forward eagerly to taking the tickets.

“You won’t mind going second-class, will you? We mustn’t be extravagant, and it’ll be all the better if we can do ourselves pretty well when we get there.”

He had talked to her a hundred times of the Quarter. They would wander through its pleasant old streets, and they would sit idly in the charming gardens of the Luxembourg. If the weather was fine perhaps, when they had had enough of Paris, they might go to Fontainebleau. The trees would be just bursting into leaf. The green of the forest in spring was more beautiful than anything he knew; it was like a song, and it was like the happy pain of love. Mildred listened quietly. He turned to her and tried to look deep into her eyes.

“You do want to come, don’t you?” he said.

“Of course I do,” she smiled.

“You don’t know how I’m looking forward to it. I don’t know how I shall get through the next days. I’m so afraid something will happen to prevent it. It maddens me sometimes that I can’t tell you how much I love you. And at last, at last…”

He broke off. They reached the station, but they had dawdled on the way, and Philip had barely time to say good-night. He kissed her quickly and ran towards the wicket as fast as he could. She stood where he left her. He was strangely grotesque when he ran.

LXXIV

The following Saturday Mildred returned, and that evening Philip kept her to himself. He took seats for the play, and they drank champagne at dinner. It was her first gaiety in London for so long that she enjoyed everything ingenuously. She cuddled up to Philip when they drove from the theatre to the room he had taken for her in Pimlico.

“I really believe you’re quite glad to see me,” he said.

She did not answer, but gently pressed his hand. Demonstrations of affection were so rare with her that Philip was enchanted.

“I’ve asked Griffiths to dine with us tomorrow,” he told her.

“Oh, I’m glad you’ve done that. I wanted to meet him.”

There was no place of entertainment to take her to on Sunday night, and

Philip was afraid she would be bored if she were alone with him all day.

Griffiths was amusing; he would help them to get through the evening; and

Philip was so fond of them both that he wanted them to know and to like

one another. He left Mildred with the words:

“Only six days more.”

They had arranged to dine in the gallery at Romano’s on Sunday, because the dinner was excellent and looked as though it cost a good deal more than it did. Philip and Mildred arrived first and had to wait some time for Griffiths.

“He’s an unpunctual devil,” said Philip. “He’s probably making love to one of his numerous flames.”

But presently he appeared. He was a handsome creature, tall and thin; his head was placed well on the body, it gave him a conquering air which was attractive; and his curly hair, his bold, friendly blue eyes, his red mouth, were charming. Philip saw Mildred look at him with appreciation, and he felt a curious satisfaction. Griffiths greeted them with a smile.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you,” he said to Mildred, as he took her hand.

“Not so much as I’ve heard about you,” she answered.

“Nor so bad,” said Philip.

“Has he been blackening my character?”

Griffiths laughed, and Philip saw that Mildred noticed how white and regular his teeth were and how pleasant his smile.

“You ought to feel like old friends,” said Philip. “I’ve talked so much about you to one another.”

Griffiths was in the best possible humour, for, having at length passed his final examination, he was qualified, and he had just been appointed house-surgeon at a hospital in the North of London. He was taking up his duties at the beginning of May and meanwhile was going home for a holiday; this was his last week in town, and he was determined to get as much enjoyment into it as he could. He began to talk the gay nonsense which Philip admired because he could not copy it. There was nothing much in what he said, but his vivacity gave it point. There flowed from him a force of life which affected everyone who knew him; it was almost as sensible as bodily warmth. Mildred was more lively than Philip had ever known her, and he was delighted to see that his little party was a success. She was amusing herself enormously. She laughed louder and louder. She quite forgot the genteel reserve which had become second nature to her.

Presently Griffiths said:

“I say, it’s dreadfully difficult for me to call you Mrs. Miller. Philip never calls you anything but Mildred.”

“I daresay she won’t scratch your eyes out if you call her that too,” laughed Philip.

“Then she must call me Harry.”

Philip sat silent while they chattered away and thought how good it was to see people happy. Now and then Griffiths teased him a little, kindly, because he was always so serious.

“I believe he’s quite fond of you, Philip,” smiled Mildred.

“He isn’t a bad old thing,” answered Griffiths, and taking Philip’s hand he shook it gaily.

It seemed an added charm in Griffiths that he liked Philip. They were all sober people, and the wine they had drunk went to their heads. Griffiths became more talkative and so boisterous that Philip, amused, had to beg him to be quiet. He had a gift for story-telling, and his adventures lost nothing of their romance and their laughter in his narration. He played in all of them a gallant, humorous part. Mildred, her eyes shining with excitement, urged him on. He poured out anecdote after anecdote. When the lights began to be turned out she was astonished.

“My word, the evening has gone quickly. I thought it wasn’t more than half past nine.”

They got up to go and when she said good-bye, she added:

“I’m coming to have tea at Philip’s room tomorrow. You might look in if you can.”

“All right,” he smiled.

On the way back to Pimlico Mildred talked of nothing but Griffiths. She was taken with his good looks, his well-cut clothes, his voice, his gaiety.

“I am glad you like him,” said Philip. “D’you remember you were rather sniffy about meeting him?”

“I think it’s so nice of him to be so fond of you, Philip. He is a nice friend for you to have.”

She put up her face to Philip for him to kiss her. It was a thing she did rarely.

“I have enjoyed myself this evening, Philip. Thank you so much.”

“Don’t be so absurd,” he laughed, touched by her appreciation so that he felt the moisture come to his eyes.

She opened her door and just before she went in, turned again to Philip.

“Tell Harry I’m madly in love with him,” she said.

“All right,” he laughed. “Good-night.”

Next day, when they were having tea, Griffiths came in. He sank lazily into an arm-chair. There was something strangely sensual in the slow movements of his large limbs. Philip remained silent, while the others chattered away, but he was enjoying himself. He admired them both so much that it seemed natural enough for them to admire one another. He did not care if Griffiths absorbed Mildred’s attention, he would have her to himself during the evening: he had something of the attitude of a loving husband, confident in his wife’s affection, who looks on with amusement while she flirts harmlessly with a stranger. But at half past seven he looked at his watch and said:

“It’s about time we went out to dinner, Mildred.”

There was a moment’s pause, and Griffiths seemed to be considering.

“Well, I’ll be getting along,” he said at last. “I didn’t know it was so late.”

“Are you doing anything tonight?” asked Mildred.

“No.”

There was another silence. Philip felt slightly irritated.

“I’ll just go and have a wash,” he said, and to Mildred he added: “Would you like to wash your hands?”

She did not answer him.

“Why don’t you come and dine with us?” she said to Griffiths.

He looked at Philip and saw him staring at him sombrely.

“I dined with you last night,” he laughed. “I should be in the way.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” insisted Mildred. “Make him come, Philip. He won’t be in the way, will he?”

“Let him come by all means if he’d like to.”

“All right, then,” said Griffiths promptly. “I’ll just go upstairs and tidy myself.”

The moment he left the room Philip turned to Mildred angrily.

“Why on earth did you ask him to dine with us?”

“I couldn’t help myself. It would have looked so funny to say nothing when he said he wasn’t doing anything.”

“Oh, what rot! And why the hell did you ask him if he was doing anything?”

Mildred’s pale lips tightened a little.

“I want a little amusement sometimes. I get tired always being alone with you.”

They heard Griffiths coming heavily down the stairs, and Philip went into his bed-room to wash. They dined in the neighbourhood in an Italian restaurant. Philip was cross and silent, but he quickly realised that he was showing to disadvantage in comparison with Griffiths, and he forced himself to hide his annoyance. He drank a good deal of wine to destroy the pain that was gnawing at his heart, and he set himself to talk. Mildred, as though remorseful for what she had said, did all she could to make herself pleasant to him. She was kindly and affectionate. Presently Philip began to think he had been a fool to surrender to a feeling of jealousy. After dinner when they got into a hansom to drive to a music-hall Mildred, sitting between the two men, of her own accord gave him her hand. His anger vanished. Suddenly, he knew not how, he grew conscious that Griffiths was holding her other hand. The pain seized him again violently, it was a real physical pain, and he asked himself, panic-stricken, what he might have asked himself before, whether Mildred and Griffiths were in love with one another. He could not see anything of the performance on account of the mist of suspicion, anger, dismay, and wretchedness which seemed to be before his eyes; but he forced himself to conceal the fact that anything was the matter; he went on talking and laughing. Then a strange desire to torture himself seized him, and he got up, saying he wanted to go and drink something. Mildred and Griffiths had never been alone together for a moment. He wanted to leave them by themselves.

“I’ll come too,” said Griffiths. “I’ve got rather a thirst on.”

“Oh, nonsense, you stay and talk to Mildred.”

Philip did not know why he said that. He was throwing them together now to make the pain he suffered more intolerable. He did not go to the bar, but up into the balcony, from where he could watch them and not be seen. They had ceased to look at the stage and were smiling into one another’s eyes. Griffiths was talking with his usual happy fluency and Mildred seemed to hang on his lips. Philip’s head began to ache frightfully. He stood there motionless. He knew he would be in the way if he went back. They were enjoying themselves without him, and he was suffering, suffering. Time passed, and now he had an extraordinary shyness about rejoining them. He knew they had not thought of him at all, and he reflected bitterly that he had paid for the dinner and their seats in the music-hall. What a fool they were making of him! He was hot with shame. He could see how happy they were without him. His instinct was to leave them to themselves and go home, but he had not his hat and coat, and it would necessitate endless explanations. He went back. He felt a shadow of annoyance in Mildred’s eyes when she saw him, and his heart sank.

“You’ve been a devil of a time,” said Griffiths, with a smile of welcome.

“I met some men I knew. I’ve been talking to them, and I couldn’t get away. I thought you’d be all right together.”

“I’ve been enjoying myself thoroughly,” said Griffiths. “I don’t know about Mildred.”

She gave a little laugh of happy complacency. There was a vulgar sound in the ring of it that horrified Philip. He suggested that they should go.

“Come on,” said Griffiths, “we’ll both drive you home.”

Philip suspected that she had suggested that arrangement so that she might not be left alone with him. In the cab he did not take her hand nor did she offer it, and he knew all the time that she was holding Griffiths’. His chief thought was that it was all so horribly vulgar. As they drove along he asked himself what plans they had made to meet without his knowledge, he cursed himself for having left them alone, he had actually gone out of his way to enable them to arrange things.

“Let’s keep the cab,” said Philip, when they reached the house in which

Mildred was lodging. “I’m too tired to walk home.”

On the way back Griffiths talked gaily and seemed indifferent to the fact that Philip answered in monosyllables. Philip felt he must notice that something was the matter. Philip’s silence at last grew too significant to struggle against, and Griffiths, suddenly nervous, ceased talking. Philip wanted to say something, but he was so shy he could hardly bring himself to, and yet the time was passing and the opportunity would be lost. It was best to get at the truth at once. He forced himself to speak.

“Are you in love with Mildred?” he asked suddenly.

“I?” Griffiths laughed. “Is that what you’ve been so funny about this evening? Of course not, my dear old man.”

He tried to slip his hand through Philip’s arm, but Philip drew himself away. He knew Griffiths was lying. He could not bring himself to force Griffiths to tell him that he had not been holding the girl’s hand. He suddenly felt very weak and broken.

“It doesn’t matter to you, Harry,” he said. “You’ve got so many women — don’t take her away from me. It means my whole life. I’ve been so awfully wretched.”

His voice broke, and he could not prevent the sob that was torn from him.

He was horribly ashamed of himself.

“My dear old boy, you know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. I’m far too fond of you for that. I was only playing the fool. If I’d known you were going to take it like that I’d have been more careful.”

“Is that true?” asked Philip.

“I don’t care a twopenny damn for her. I give you my word of honour.”

Philip gave a sigh of relief. The cab stopped at their door.

LXXV

Next day Philip was in a good temper. He was very anxious not to bore Mildred with too much of his society, and so had arranged that he should not see her till dinner-time. She was ready when he fetched her, and he chaffed her for her unwonted punctuality. She was wearing a new dress he had given her. He remarked on its smartness.

“It’ll have to go back and be altered,” she said. “The skirt hangs all wrong.”

“You’ll have to make the dressmaker hurry up if you want to take it to

Paris with you.”

“It’ll be ready in time for that.”

“Only three more whole days. We’ll go over by the eleven o’clock, shall we?”

“If you like.”

He would have her for nearly a month entirely to himself. His eyes rested on her with hungry adoration. He was able to laugh a little at his own passion.

“I wonder what it is I see in you,” he smiled.

“That’s a nice thing to say,” she answered.

Her body was so thin that one could almost see her skeleton. Her chest was as flat as a boy’s. Her mouth, with its narrow pale lips, was ugly, and her skin was faintly green.

“I shall give you Blaud’s Pills in quantities when we’re away,” said

Philip, laughing. “I’m going to bring you back fat and rosy.”

“I don’t want to get fat,” she said.

She did not speak of Griffiths, and presently while they were dining Philip half in malice, for he felt sure of himself and his power over her, said:

“It seems to me you were having a great flirtation with Harry last night?”

“I told you I was in love with him,” she laughed.

“I’m glad to know that he’s not in love with you.”

“How d’you know?”

“I asked him.”

She hesitated a moment, looking at Philip, and a curious gleam came into her eyes.

“Would you like to read a letter I had from him this morning?”

She handed him an envelope and Philip recognised Griffiths’ bold, legible writing. There were eight pages. It was well written, frank and charming; it was the letter of a man who was used to making love to women. He told Mildred that he loved her passionately, he had fallen in love with her the first moment he saw her; he did not want to love her, for he knew how fond Philip was of her, but he could not help himself. Philip was such a dear, and he was very much ashamed of himself, but it was not his fault, he was just carried away. He paid her delightful compliments. Finally he thanked her for consenting to lunch with him next day and said he was dreadfully impatient to see her. Philip noticed that the letter was dated the night before; Griffiths must have written it after leaving Philip, and had taken the trouble to go out and post it when Philip thought he was in bed.

He read it with a sickening palpitation of his heart, but gave no outward sign of surprise. He handed it back to Mildred with a smile, calmly.

“Did you enjoy your lunch?”

“Rather,” she said emphatically.

He felt that his hands were trembling, so he put them under the table.

“You mustn’t take Griffiths too seriously. He’s just a butterfly, you know.”

She took the letter and looked at it again.

“I can’t help it either,” she said, in a voice which she tried to make nonchalant. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”

“It’s a little awkward for me, isn’t it?” said Philip.

She gave him a quick look.

“You’re taking it pretty calmly, I must say.”

“What do you expect me to do? Do you want me to tear out my hair in handfuls?”

“I knew you’d be angry with me.”

“The funny thing is, I’m not at all. I ought to have known this would happen. I was a fool to bring you together. I know perfectly well that he’s got every advantage over me; he’s much jollier, and he’s very handsome, he’s more amusing, he can talk to you about the things that interest you.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that. If I’m not clever I can’t help it, but I’m not the fool you think I am, not by a long way, I can tell you. You’re a bit too superior for me, my young friend.”

“D’you want to quarrel with me?” he asked mildly.

“No, but I don’t see why you should treat me as if I was I don’t know what.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I just wanted to talk things over quietly. We don’t want to make a mess of them if we can help it. I saw you were attracted by him and it seemed to me very natural. The only thing that really hurts me is that he should have encouraged you. He knew how awfully keen I was on you. I think it’s rather shabby of him to have written that letter to you five minutes after he told me he didn’t care twopence about you.”

“If you think you’re going to make me like him any the less by saying nasty things about him, you’re mistaken.”

Philip was silent for a moment. He did not know what words he could use to make her see his point of view. He wanted to speak coolly and deliberately, but he was in such a turmoil of emotion that he could not clear his thoughts.

“It’s not worth while sacrificing everything for an infatuation that you know can’t last. After all, he doesn’t care for anyone more than ten days, and you’re rather cold; that sort of thing doesn’t mean very much to you.”

“That’s what you think.”

She made it more difficult for him by adopting a cantankerous tone.

“If you’re in love with him you can’t help it. I’ll just bear it as best I can. We get on very well together, you and I, and I’ve not behaved badly to you, have I? I’ve always known that you’re not in love with me, but you like me all right, and when we get over to Paris you’ll forget about Griffiths. If you make up your mind to put him out of your thoughts you won’t find it so hard as all that, and I’ve deserved that you should do something for me.”

She did not answer, and they went on eating their dinner. When the silence grew oppressive Philip began to talk of indifferent things. He pretended not to notice that Mildred was inattentive. Her answers were perfunctory, and she volunteered no remarks of her own. At last she interrupted abruptly what he was saying:

“Philip, I’m afraid I shan’t be able to go away on Saturday. The doctor says I oughtn’t to.”

He knew this was not true, but he answered:

“When will you be able to come away?”

She glanced at him, saw that his face was white and rigid, and looked nervously away. She was at that moment a little afraid of him.

“I may as well tell you and have done with it, I can’t come away with you at all.”

“I thought you were driving at that. It’s too late to change your mind now. I’ve got the tickets and everything.”

“You said you didn’t wish me to go unless I wanted it too, and I don’t.”

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to have any more tricks played with me. You must come.”

“I like you very much, Philip, as a friend. But I can’t bear to think of anything else. I don’t like you that way. I couldn’t, Philip.”

“You were quite willing to a week ago.”

“It was different then.”

“You hadn’t met Griffiths?”

“You said yourself I couldn’t help it if I’m in love with him.”

Her face was set into a sulky look, and she kept her eyes fixed on her plate. Philip was white with rage. He would have liked to hit her in the face with his clenched fist, and in fancy he saw how she would look with a black eye. There were two lads of eighteen dining at a table near them, and now and then they looked at Mildred; he wondered if they envied him dining with a pretty girl; perhaps they were wishing they stood in his shoes. It was Mildred who broke the silence.

“What’s the good of our going away together? I’d be thinking of him all the time. It wouldn’t be much fun for you.”

“That’s my business,” he answered.

She thought over all his reply implicated, and she reddened.

“But that’s just beastly.”

“What of it?”

“I thought you were a gentleman in every sense of the word.”

“You were mistaken.”

His reply entertained him, and he laughed as he said it.

“For God’s sake don’t laugh,” she cried. “I can’t come away with you, Philip. I’m awfully sorry. I know I haven’t behaved well to you, but one can’t force themselves.”

“Have you forgotten that when you were in trouble I did everything for you? I planked out the money to keep you till your baby was born, I paid for your doctor and everything, I paid for you to go to Brighton, and I’m paying for the keep of your baby, I’m paying for your clothes, I’m paying for every stitch you’ve got on now.”

“If you was a gentleman you wouldn’t throw what you’ve done for me in my face.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, shut up. What d’you suppose I care if I’m a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn’t waste my time with a vulgar slut like you. I don’t care a damn if you like me or not. I’m sick of being made a blasted fool of. You’re jolly well coming to Paris with me on Saturday or you can take the consequences.”

Her cheeks were red with anger, and when she answered her voice had the hard commonness which she concealed generally by a genteel enunciation.

“I never liked you, not from the beginning, but you forced yourself on me, I always hated it when you kissed me. I wouldn’t let you touch me now not if I was starving.”

Philip tried to swallow the food on his plate, but the muscles of his throat refused to act. He gulped down something to drink and lit a cigarette. He was trembling in every part. He did not speak. He waited for her to move, but she sat in silence, staring at the white tablecloth. If they had been alone he would have flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately; he fancied the throwing back of her long white throat as he pressed upon her mouth with his lips. They passed an hour without speaking, and at last Philip thought the waiter began to stare at them curiously. He called for the bill.

“Shall we go?” he said then, in an even tone.

She did not reply, but gathered together her bag and her gloves. She put on her coat.

“When are you seeing Griffiths again?”

“Tomorrow,” she answered indifferently.

“You’d better talk it over with him.”

She opened her bag mechanically and saw a piece of paper in it. She took it out.

“Here’s the bill for this dress,” she said hesitatingly.

“What of it?”

“I promised I’d give her the money tomorrow.”

“Did you?”

“Does that mean you won’t pay for it after having told me I could get it?”

“It does.”

“I’ll ask Harry,” she said, flushing quickly.

“He’ll be glad to help you. He owes me seven pounds at the moment, and he pawned his microscope last week, because he was so broke.”

“You needn’t think you can frighten me by that. I’m quite capable of earning my own living.”

“It’s the best thing you can do. I don’t propose to give you a farthing more.”

She thought of her rent due on Saturday and the baby’s keep, but did not say anything. They left the restaurant, and in the street Philip asked her:

“Shall I call a cab for you? I’m going to take a little stroll.”

“I haven’t got any money. I had to pay a bill this afternoon.”

“It won’t hurt you to walk. If you want to see me tomorrow I shall be in about tea-time.”

He took off his hat and sauntered away. He looked round in a moment and saw that she was standing helplessly where he had left her, looking at the traffic. He went back and with a laugh pressed a coin into her hand.

“Here’s two bob for you to get home with.”

Before she could speak he hurried away.

LXXVI

Next day, in the afternoon, Philip sat in his room and wondered whether Mildred would come. He had slept badly. He had spent the morning in the club of the Medical School, reading one newspaper after another. It was the vacation and few students he knew were in London, but he found one or two people to talk to, he played a game of chess, and so wore out the tedious hours. After luncheon he felt so tired, his head was aching so, that he went back to his lodgings and lay down; he tried to read a novel. He had not seen Griffiths. He was not in when Philip returned the night before; he heard him come back, but he did not as usual look into Philip’s room to see if he was asleep; and in the morning Philip heard him go out early. It was clear that he wanted to avoid him. Suddenly there was a light tap at his door. Philip sprang to his feet and opened it. Mildred stood on the threshold. She did not move.

“Come in,” said Philip.

He closed the door after her. She sat down. She hesitated to begin.

“Thank you for giving me that two shillings last night,” she said.

“Oh, that’s all right.”

She gave him a faint smile. It reminded Philip of the timid, ingratiating look of a puppy that has been beaten for naughtiness and wants to reconcile himself with his master.

“I’ve been lunching with Harry,” she said.

“Have you?”

“If you still want me to go away with you on Saturday, Philip, I’ll come.”

A quick thrill of triumph shot through his heart, but it was a sensation that only lasted an instant; it was followed by a suspicion.

“Because of the money?” he asked.

“Partly,” she answered simply. “Harry can’t do anything. He owes five weeks here, and he owes you seven pounds, and his tailor’s pressing him for money. He’d pawn anything he could, but he’s pawned everything already. I had a job to put the woman off about my new dress, and on Saturday there’s the book at my lodgings, and I can’t get work in five minutes. It always means waiting some little time till there’s a vacancy.”

She said all this in an even, querulous tone, as though she were recounting the injustices of fate, which had to be borne as part of the natural order of things. Philip did not answer. He knew what she told him well enough.

“You said partly,” he observed at last.

“Well, Harry says you’ve been a brick to both of us. You’ve been a real good friend to him, he says, and you’ve done for me what p’raps no other man would have done. We must do the straight thing, he says. And he said what you said about him, that he’s fickle by nature, he’s not like you, and I should be a fool to throw you away for him. He won’t last and you will, he says so himself.”

“D’you WANT to come away with me?” asked Philip.

“I don’t mind.”

He looked at her, and the corners of his mouth turned down in an expression of misery. He had triumphed indeed, and he was going to have his way. He gave a little laugh of derision at his own humiliation. She looked at him quickly, but did not speak.

“I’ve looked forward with all my soul to going away with you, and I thought at last, after all that wretchedness, I was going to be happy…”

He did not finish what he was going to say. And then on a sudden, without warning, Mildred broke into a storm of tears. She was sitting in the chair in which Norah had sat and wept, and like her she hid her face on the back of it, towards the side where there was a little bump formed by the sagging in the middle, where the head had rested.

“I’m not lucky with women,” thought Philip.

Her thin body was shaken with sobs. Philip had never seen a woman cry with such an utter abandonment. It was horribly painful, and his heart was torn. Without realising what he did, he went up to her and put his arms round her; she did not resist, but in her wretchedness surrendered herself to his comforting. He whispered to her little words of solace. He scarcely knew what he was saying, he bent over her and kissed her repeatedly.

“Are you awfully unhappy?” he said at last.

“I wish I was dead,” she moaned. “I wish I’d died when the baby come.”

Her hat was in her way, and Philip took it off for her. He placed her head more comfortably in the chair, and then he went and sat down at the table and looked at her.

“It is awful, love, isn’t it?” he said. “Fancy anyone wanting to be in love.”

Presently the violence of her sobbing diminished and she sat in the chair, exhausted, with her head thrown back and her arms hanging by her side. She had the grotesque look of one of those painters’ dummies used to hang draperies on.

“I didn’t know you loved him so much as all that,” said Philip.

He understood Griffiths’ love well enough, for he put himself in Griffiths’ place and saw with his eyes, touched with his hands; he was able to think himself in Griffiths’ body, and he kissed her with his lips, smiled at her with his smiling blue eyes. It was her emotion that surprised him. He had never thought her capable of passion, and this was passion: there was no mistaking it. Something seemed to give way in his heart; it really felt to him as though something were breaking, and he felt strangely weak.

“I don’t want to make you unhappy. You needn’t come away with me if you don’t want to. I’ll give you the money all the same.”

She shook her head.

“No, I said I’d come, and I’ll come.”

“What’s the good, if you’re sick with love for him?”

“Yes, that’s the word. I’m sick with love. I know it won’t last, just as well as he does, but just now…”

She paused and shut her eyes as though she were going to faint. A strange idea came to Philip, and he spoke it as it came, without stopping to think it out.

“Why don’t you go away with him?”

“How can I? You know we haven’t got the money.”

“I’ll give you the money.”

“You?”

She sat up and looked at him. Her eyes began to shine, and the colour came into her cheeks.

“Perhaps the best thing would be to get it over, and then you’d come back to me.”

Now that he had made the suggestion he was sick with anguish, and yet the torture of it gave him a strange, subtle sensation. She stared at him with open eyes.

“Oh, how could we, on your money? Harry wouldn’t think of it.”

“Oh yes, he would, if you persuaded him.”

Her objections made him insist, and yet he wanted her with all his heart to refuse vehemently.

“I’ll give you a fiver, and you can go away from Saturday to Monday. You could easily do that. On Monday he’s going home till he takes up his appointment at the North London.”

“Oh, Philip, do you mean that?” she cried, clasping her hands. “If you could only let us go — I would love you so much afterwards, I’d do anything for you. I’m sure I shall get over it if you’ll only do that. Would you really give us the money?”

“Yes,” he said.

She was entirely changed now. She began to laugh. He could see that she was insanely happy. She got up and knelt down by Philip’s side, taking his hands.

“You are a brick, Philip. You’re the best fellow I’ve ever known. Won’t you be angry with me afterwards?”

He shook his head, smiling, but with what agony in his heart!

“May I go and tell Harry now? And can I say to him that you don’t mind? He

won’t consent unless you promise it doesn’t matter. Oh, you don’t know how

I love him! And afterwards I’ll do anything you like. I’ll come over to

Paris with you or anywhere on Monday.”

She got up and put on her hat.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to ask him if he’ll take me.”

“Already?”

“D’you want me to stay? I’ll stay if you like.”

She sat down, but he gave a little laugh.

“No, it doesn’t matter, you’d better go at once. There’s only one thing:

I can’t bear to see Griffiths just now, it would hurt me too awfully. Say

I have no ill-feeling towards him or anything like that, but ask him to

keep out of my way.”

“All right.” She sprang up and put on her gloves. “I’ll let you know what he says.”

“You’d better dine with me tonight.”

“Very well.”

She put up her face for him to kiss her, and when he pressed his lips to hers she threw her arms round his neck.

“You are a darling, Philip.”

She sent him a note a couple of hours later to say that she had a headache and could not dine with him. Philip had almost expected it. He knew that she was dining with Griffiths. He was horribly jealous, but the sudden passion which had seized the pair of them seemed like something that had come from the outside, as though a god had visited them with it, and he felt himself helpless. It seemed so natural that they should love one another. He saw all the advantages that Griffiths had over himself and confessed that in Mildred’s place he would have done as Mildred did. What hurt him most was Griffiths’ treachery; they had been such good friends, and Griffiths knew how passionately devoted he was to Mildred: he might have spared him.

He did not see Mildred again till Friday; he was sick for a sight of her by then; but when she came and he realised that he had gone out of her thoughts entirely, for they were engrossed in Griffiths, he suddenly hated her. He saw now why she and Griffiths loved one another, Griffiths was stupid, oh so stupid! he had known that all along, but had shut his eyes to it, stupid and empty-headed: that charm of his concealed an utter selfishness; he was willing to sacrifice anyone to his appetites. And how inane was the life he led, lounging about bars and drinking in music halls, wandering from one light amour to another! He never read a book, he was blind to everything that was not frivolous and vulgar; he had never a thought that was fine: the word most common on his lips was smart; that was his highest praise for man or woman. Smart! It was no wonder he pleased Mildred. They suited one another.

Philip talked to Mildred of things that mattered to neither of them. He knew she wanted to speak of Griffiths, but he gave her no opportunity. He did not refer to the fact that two evenings before she had put off dining with him on a trivial excuse. He was casual with her, trying to make her think he was suddenly grown indifferent; and he exercised peculiar skill in saying little things which he knew would wound her; but which were so indefinite, so delicately cruel, that she could not take exception to them. At last she got up.

“I think I must be going off now,” she said.

“I daresay you’ve got a lot to do,” he answered.

She held out her hand, he took it, said good-bye, and opened the door for her. He knew what she wanted to speak about, and he knew also that his cold, ironical air intimidated her. Often his shyness made him seem so frigid that unintentionally he frightened people, and, having discovered this, he was able when occasion arose to assume the same manner.

“You haven’t forgotten what you promised?” she said at last, as he held open the door.

“What is that?”

“About the money.”

“How much d’you want?”

He spoke with an icy deliberation which made his words peculiarly offensive. Mildred flushed. He knew she hated him at that moment, and he wondered at the self-control by which she prevented herself from flying out at him. He wanted to make her suffer.

“There’s the dress and the book tomorrow. That’s all. Harry won’t come, so we shan’t want money for that.”

Philip’s heart gave a great thud against his ribs, and he let the door handle go. The door swung to.

“Why not?”

“He says we couldn’t, not on your money.”

A devil seized Philip, a devil of self-torture which was always lurking within him, and, though with all his soul he wished that Griffiths and Mildred should not go away together, he could not help himself; he set himself to persuade Griffiths through her.

“I don’t see why not, if I’m willing,” he said.

“That’s what I told him.”

“I should have thought if he really wanted to go he wouldn’t hesitate.”

“Oh, it’s not that, he wants to all right. He’d go at once if he had the money.”

“If he’s squeamish about it I’ll give YOU the money.”

“I said you’d lend it if he liked, and we’d pay it back as soon as we could.”

“It’s rather a change for you going on your knees to get a man to take you away for a week-end.”

“It is rather, isn’t it?” she said, with a shameless little laugh. It sent a cold shudder down Philip’s spine.

“What are you going to do then?” he asked.

“Nothing. He’s going home tomorrow. He must.”

That would be Philip’s salvation. With Griffiths out of the way he could get Mildred back. She knew no one in London, she would be thrown on to his society, and when they were alone together he could soon make her forget this infatuation. If he said nothing more he was safe. But he had a fiendish desire to break down their scruples, he wanted to know how abominably they could behave towards him; if he tempted them a little more they would yield, and he took a fierce joy at the thought of their dishonour. Though every word he spoke tortured him, he found in the torture a horrible delight.

“It looks as if it were now or never.”

“That’s what I told him,” she said.

There was a passionate note in her voice which struck Philip. He was biting his nails in his nervousness.

“Where were you thinking of going?”

“Oh, to Oxford. He was at the ‘Varsity there, you know. He said he’d show me the colleges.”

Philip remembered that once he had suggested going to Oxford for the day, and she had expressed firmly the boredom she felt at the thought of sights.

“And it looks as if you’d have fine weather. It ought to be very jolly there just now.”

“I’ve done all I could to persuade him.”

“Why don’t you have another try?”

“Shall I say you want us to go?”

“I don’t think you must go as far as that,” said Philip.

She paused for a minute or two, looking at him. Philip forced himself to look at her in a friendly way. He hated her, he despised her, he loved her with all his heart.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go and see if he can’t arrange it. And then, if he says yes, I’ll come and fetch the money tomorrow. When shall you be in?”

“I’ll come back here after luncheon and wait.”

“All right.”

“I’ll give you the money for your dress and your room now.”

He went to his desk and took out what money he had. The dress was six guineas; there was besides her rent and her food, and the baby’s keep for a week. He gave her eight pounds ten.

“Thanks very much,” she said.

She left him.

LXXVII

After lunching in the basement of the Medical School Philip went back to his rooms. It was Saturday afternoon, and the landlady was cleaning the stairs.

“Is Mr. Griffiths in?” he asked.

“No, sir. He went away this morning, soon after you went out.”

“Isn’t he coming back?”

“I don’t think so, sir. He’s taken his luggage.”

Philip wondered what this could mean. He took a book and began to read. It was Burton’s Journey to Meccah, which he had just got out of the Westminster Public Library; and he read the first page, but could make no sense of it, for his mind was elsewhere; he was listening all the time for a ring at the bell. He dared not hope that Griffiths had gone away already, without Mildred, to his home in Cumberland. Mildred would be coming presently for the money. He set his teeth and read on; he tried desperately to concentrate his attention; the sentences etched themselves in his brain by the force of his effort, but they were distorted by the agony he was enduring. He wished with all his heart that he had not made the horrible proposition to give them money; but now that he had made it he lacked the strength to go back on it, not on Mildred’s account, but on his own. There was a morbid obstinacy in him which forced him to do the thing he had determined. He discovered that the three pages he had read had made no impression on him at all; and he went back and started from the beginning: he found himself reading one sentence over and over again; and now it weaved itself in with his thoughts, horribly, like some formula in a nightmare. One thing he could do was to go out and keep away till midnight; they could not go then; and he saw them calling at the house every hour to ask if he was in. He enjoyed the thought of their disappointment. He repeated that sentence to himself mechanically. But he could not do that. Let them come and take the money, and he would know then to what depths of infamy it was possible for men to descend. He could not read any more now. He simply could not see the words. He leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes, and, numb with misery, waited for Mildred.

The landlady came in.

“Will you see Mrs. Miller, sir?”

“Show her in.”

Philip pulled himself together to receive her without any sign of what he was feeling. He had an impulse to throw himself on his knees and seize her hands and beg her not to go; but he knew there was no way of moving her; she would tell Griffiths what he had said and how he acted. He was ashamed.

“Well, how about the little jaunt?” he said gaily.

“We’re going. Harry’s outside. I told him you didn’t want to see him, so he’s kept out of your way. But he wants to know if he can come in just for a minute to say good-bye to you.”

“No, I won’t see him,” said Philip.

He could see she did not care if he saw Griffiths or not. Now that she was there he wanted her to go quickly.

“Look here, here’s the fiver. I’d like you to go now.”

She took it and thanked him. She turned to leave the room.

“When are you coming back?” he asked.

“Oh, on Monday. Harry must go home then.”

He knew what he was going to say was humiliating, but he was broken down with jealousy and desire.

“Then I shall see you, shan’t I?”

He could not help the note of appeal in his voice.

“Of course. I’ll let you know the moment I’m back.”

He shook hands with her. Through the curtains he watched her jump into a four-wheeler that stood at the door. It rolled away. Then he threw himself on his bed and hid his face in his hands. He felt tears coming to his eyes, and he was angry with himself; he clenched his hands and screwed up his body to prevent them; but he could not; and great painful sobs were forced from him.

He got up at last, exhausted and ashamed, and washed his face. He mixed himself a strong whiskey and soda. It made him feel a little better. Then he caught sight of the tickets to Paris, which were on the chimney-piece, and, seizing them, with an impulse of rage he flung them in the fire. He knew he could have got the money back on them, but it relieved him to destroy them. Then he went out in search of someone to be with. The club was empty. He felt he would go mad unless he found someone to talk to; but Lawson was abroad; he went on to Hayward’s rooms: the maid who opened the door told him that he had gone down to Brighton for the week-end. Then Philip went to a gallery and found it was just closing. He did not know what to do. He was distracted. And he thought of Griffiths and Mildred going to Oxford, sitting opposite one another in the train, happy. He went back to his rooms, but they filled him with horror, he had been so wretched in them; he tried once more to read Burton’s book, but, as he read, he told himself again and again what a fool he had been; it was he who had made the suggestion that they should go away, he had offered the money, he had forced it upon them; he might have known what would happen when he introduced Griffiths to Mildred; his own vehement passion was enough to arouse the other’s desire. By this time they had reached Oxford. They would put up in one of the lodging-houses in John Street; Philip had never been to Oxford, but Griffiths had talked to him about it so much that he knew exactly where they would go; and they would dine at the Clarendon: Griffiths had been in the habit of dining there when he went on the spree. Philip got himself something to eat in a restaurant near Charing Cross; he had made up his mind to go to a play, and afterwards he fought his way into the pit of a theatre at which one of Oscar Wilde’s pieces was being performed. He wondered if Mildred and Griffiths would go to a play that evening: they must kill the evening somehow; they were too stupid, both of them to content themselves with conversation: he got a fierce delight in reminding himself of the vulgarity of their minds which suited them so exactly to one another. He watched the play with an abstracted mind, trying to give himself gaiety by drinking whiskey in each interval; he was unused to alcohol, and it affected him quickly, but his drunkenness was savage and morose. When the play was over he had another drink. He could not go to bed, he knew he would not sleep, and he dreaded the pictures which his vivid imagination would place before him. He tried not to think of them. He knew he had drunk too much. Now he was seized with a desire to do horrible, sordid things; he wanted to roll himself in gutters; his whole being yearned for beastliness; he wanted to grovel.

He walked up Piccadilly, dragging his club-foot, sombrely drunk, with rage and misery clawing at his heart. He was stopped by a painted harlot, who put her hand on his arm; he pushed her violently away with brutal words. He walked on a few steps and then stopped. She would do as well as another. He was sorry he had spoken so roughly to her. He went up to her.

“I say,” he began.

“Go to hell,” she said.

Philip laughed.

“I merely wanted to ask if you’d do me the honour of supping with me tonight.”

She looked at him with amazement, and hesitated for a while. She saw he was drunk.

“I don’t mind.”

He was amused that she should use a phrase he had heard so often on Mildred’s lips. He took her to one of the restaurants he had been in the habit of going to with Mildred. He noticed as they walked along that she looked down at his limb.

“I’ve got a club-foot,” he said. “Have you any objection?”

“You are a cure,” she laughed.

When he got home his bones were aching, and in his head there was a hammering that made him nearly scream. He took another whiskey and soda to steady himself, and going to bed sank into a dreamless sleep till mid-day.

LXXVIII

At last Monday came, and Philip thought his long torture was over. Looking out the trains he found that the latest by which Griffiths could reach home that night left Oxford soon after one, and he supposed that Mildred would take one which started a few minutes later to bring her to London. His desire was to go and meet it, but he thought Mildred would like to be left alone for a day; perhaps she would drop him a line in the evening to say she was back, and if not he would call at her lodgings next morning: his spirit was cowed. He felt a bitter hatred for Griffiths, but for Mildred, notwithstanding all that had passed, only a heart-rending desire. He was glad now that Hayward was not in London on Saturday afternoon when, distraught, he went in search of human comfort: he could not have prevented himself from telling him everything, and Hayward would have been astonished at his weakness. He would despise him, and perhaps be shocked or disgusted that he could envisage the possibility of making Mildred his mistress after she had given herself to another man. What did he care if it was shocking or disgusting? He was ready for any compromise, prepared for more degrading humiliations still, if he could only gratify his desire.

Towards the evening his steps took him against his will to the house in which she lived, and he looked up at her window. It was dark. He did not venture to ask if she was back. He was confident in her promise. But there was no letter from her in the morning, and, when about mid-day he called, the maid told him she had not arrived. He could not understand it. He knew that Griffiths would have been obliged to go home the day before, for he was to be best man at a wedding, and Mildred had no money. He turned over in his mind every possible thing that might have happened. He went again in the afternoon and left a note, asking her to dine with him that evening as calmly as though the events of the last fortnight had not happened. He mentioned the place and time at which they were to meet, and hoping against hope kept the appointment: though he waited for an hour she did not come. On Wednesday morning he was ashamed to ask at the house and sent a messenger-boy with a letter and instructions to bring back a reply; but in an hour the boy came back with Philip’s letter unopened and the answer that the lady had not returned from the country. Philip was beside himself. The last deception was more than he could bear. He repeated to himself over and over again that he loathed Mildred, and, ascribing to Griffiths this new disappointment, he hated him so much that he knew what was the delight of murder: he walked about considering what a joy it would be to come upon him on a dark night and stick a knife into his throat, just about the carotid artery, and leave him to die in the street like a dog. Philip was out of his senses with grief and rage. He did not like whiskey, but he drank to stupefy himself. He went to bed drunk on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning he got up very late and dragged himself, blear-eyed and sallow, into his sitting-room to see if there were any letters. A curious feeling shot through his heart when he recognised the handwriting of Griffiths.

Dear old man:

I hardly know how to write to you and yet I feel I must write. I hope you’re not awfully angry with me. I know I oughtn’t to have gone away with Milly, but I simply couldn’t help myself. She simply carried me off my feet and I would have done anything to get her. When she told me you had offered us the money to go I simply couldn’t resist. And now it’s all over I’m awfully ashamed of myself and I wish I hadn’t been such a fool. I wish you’d write and say you’re not angry with me, and I want you to let me come and see you. I was awfully hurt at your telling Milly you didn’t want to see me. Do write me a line, there’s a good chap, and tell me you forgive me. It’ll ease my conscience. I thought you wouldn’t mind or you wouldn’t have offered the money. But I know I oughtn’t to have taken it. I came home on Monday and Milly wanted to stay a couple of days at Oxford by herself. She’s going back to London on Wednesday, so by the time you receive this letter you will have seen her and I hope everything will go off all right. Do write and say you forgive me. Please write at once. Yours ever, Harry.

Philip tore up the letter furiously. He did not mean to answer it. He despised Griffiths for his apologies, he had no patience with his prickings of conscience: one could do a dastardly thing if one chose, but it was contemptible to regret it afterwards. He thought the letter cowardly and hypocritical. He was disgusted at its sentimentality.

“It would be very easy if you could do a beastly thing,” he muttered to himself, “and then say you were sorry, and that put it all right again.”

He hoped with all his heart he would have the chance one day to do

Griffiths a bad turn.

But at all events he knew that Mildred was in town. He dressed hurriedly, not waiting to shave, drank a cup of tea, and took a cab to her rooms. The cab seemed to crawl. He was painfully anxious to see her, and unconsciously he uttered a prayer to the God he did not believe in to make her receive him kindly. He only wanted to forget. With beating heart he rang the bell. He forgot all his suffering in the passionate desire to enfold her once more in his arms.

“Is Mrs. Miller in?” he asked joyously.

“She’s gone,” the maid answered.

He looked at her blankly.

“She came about an hour ago and took away her things.”

For a moment he did not know what to say.

“Did you give her my letter? Did she say where she was going?”

Then he understood that Mildred had deceived him again. She was not coming back to him. He made an effort to save his face.

“Oh, well, I daresay I shall hear from her. She may have sent a letter to another address.”

He turned away and went back hopeless to his rooms. He might have known that she would do this; she had never cared for him, she had made a fool of him from the beginning; she had no pity, she had no kindness, she had no charity. The only thing was to accept the inevitable. The pain he was suffering was horrible, he would sooner be dead than endure it; and the thought came to him that it would be better to finish with the whole thing: he might throw himself in the river or put his neck on a railway line; but he had no sooner set the thought into words than he rebelled against it. His reason told him that he would get over his unhappiness in time; if he tried with all his might he could forget her; and it would be grotesque to kill himself on account of a vulgar slut. He had only one life, and it was madness to fling it away. He FELT that he would never overcome his passion, but he KNEW that after all it was only a matter of time.

He would not stay in London. There everything reminded him of his unhappiness. He telegraphed to his uncle that he was coming to Blackstable, and, hurrying to pack, took the first train he could. He wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much suffering. He wanted to breathe clean air. He was disgusted with himself. He felt that he was a little mad.

Since he was grown up Philip had been given the best spare room at the vicarage. It was a corner-room and in front of one window was an old tree which blocked the view, but from the other you saw, beyond the garden and the vicarage field, broad meadows. Philip remembered the wall-paper from his earliest years. On the walls were quaint water colours of the early Victorian period by a friend of the Vicar’s youth. They had a faded charm. The dressing-table was surrounded by stiff muslin. There was an old tall-boy to put your clothes in. Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he had never realised that all those things meant anything to him at all. At the vicarage life went on as it had always done. No piece of furniture had been moved from one place to another; the Vicar ate the same things, said the same things, went for the same walk every day; he had grown a little fatter, a little more silent, a little more narrow. He had become accustomed to living without his wife and missed her very little. He bickered still with Josiah Graves. Philip went to see the churchwarden. He was a little thinner, a little whiter, a little more austere; he was autocratic still and still disapproved of candles on the altar. The shops had still a pleasant quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in which things useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins and tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his childhood the thrill of the sea and the adventurous magic of the unknown.

He could not help his heart beating at each double knock of the postman in case there might be a letter from Mildred sent on by his landlady in London; but he knew that there would be none. Now that he could think it out more calmly he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him he had been attempting the impossible. He did not know what it was that passed from a man to a woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them a slave: it was convenient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was no more than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so vehement an attraction to one person rather than another. It was irresistible: the mind could not battle with it; friendship, gratitude, interest, had no power beside it. Because he had not attracted Mildred sexually, nothing that he did had any effect upon her. The idea revolted him; it made human nature beastly; and he felt suddenly that the hearts of men were full of dark places. Because Mildred was indifferent to him he had thought her sexless; her anaemic appearance and thin lips, the body with its narrow hips and flat chest, the languor of her manner, carried out his supposition; and yet she was capable of sudden passions which made her willing to risk everything to gratify them. He had never understood her adventure with Emil Miller: it had seemed so unlike her, and she had never been able to explain it; but now that he had seen her with Griffiths he knew that just the same thing had happened then: she had been carried off her feet by an ungovernable desire. He tried to think out what those two men had which so strangely attracted her. They both had a vulgar facetiousness which tickled her simple sense of humour, and a certain coarseness of nature; but what took her perhaps was the blatant sexuality which was their most marked characteristic. She had a genteel refinement which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon the bodily functions as indecent, she had all sorts of euphemisms for common objects, she always chose an elaborate word as more becoming than a simple one: the brutality of these men was like a whip on her thin white shoulders, and she shuddered with voluptuous pain.

One thing Philip had made up his mind about. He would not go back to the lodgings in which he had suffered. He wrote to his landlady and gave her notice. He wanted to have his own things about him. He determined to take unfurnished rooms: it would be pleasant and cheaper; and this was an urgent consideration, for during the last year and a half he had spent nearly seven hundred pounds. He must make up for it now by the most rigid economy. Now and then he thought of the future with panic; he had been a fool to spend so much money on Mildred; but he knew that if it were to come again he would act in the same way. It amused him sometimes to consider that his friends, because he had a face which did not express his feelings very vividly and a rather slow way of moving, looked upon him as strong-minded, deliberate, and cool. They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective colouring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because he was indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.

He considered with some irony the philosophy which he had developed for himself, for it had not been of much use to him in the conjuncture he had passed through; and he wondered whether thought really helped a man in any of the critical affairs of life: it seemed to him rather that he was swayed by some power alien to and yet within himself, which urged him like that great wind of Hell which drove Paolo and Francesca ceaselessly on. He thought of what he was going to do and, when the time came to act, he was powerless in the grasp of instincts, emotions, he knew not what. He acted as though he were a machine driven by the two forces of his environment and his personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to alter one smallest particle of what occurred.

LXXIX

Philip went up to London a couple of days before the session began in order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him; and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great barouche of the Newcomes must have passed as it drove the family to the West of London, the plane-trees were bursting into leaf. The houses in the street which Philip fixed upon were two-storied, and in most of the windows was a notice to state that lodgings were to let. He knocked at one which announced that the lodgings were unfurnished, and was shown by an austere, silent woman four very small rooms, in one of which there was a kitchen range and a sink. The rent was nine shillings a week. Philip did not want so many rooms, but the rent was low and he wished to settle down at once. He asked the landlady if she could keep the place clean for him and cook his breakfast, but she replied that she had enough work to do without that; and he was pleased rather than otherwise because she intimated that she wished to have nothing more to do with him than to receive his rent. She told him that, if he inquired at the grocer’s round the corner, which was also a post office, he might hear of a woman who would ‘do’ for him.

Philip had a little furniture which he had gathered as he went along, an arm-chair that he had bought in Paris, and a table, a few drawings, and the small Persian rug which Cronshaw had given him. His uncle had offered a fold-up bed for which, now that he no longer let his house in August, he had no further use; and by spending another ten pounds Philip bought himself whatever else was essential. He spent ten shillings on putting a corn-coloured paper in the room he was making his parlour; and he hung on the walls a sketch which Lawson had given him of the Quai des Grands Augustins, and the photograph of the Odalisque by Ingres and Manet’s Olympia which in Paris had been the objects of his contemplation while he shaved. To remind himself that he too had once been engaged in the practice of art, he put up a charcoal drawing of the young Spaniard Miguel Ajuria: it was the best thing he had ever done, a nude standing with clenched hands, his feet gripping the floor with a peculiar force, and on his face that air of determination which had been so impressive; and though Philip after the long interval saw very well the defects of his work its associations made him look upon it with tolerance. He wondered what had happened to Miguel. There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent. Perhaps, worn out by exposure, starvation, disease, he had found an end in some hospital, or in an access of despair had sought death in the turbid Seine; but perhaps with his Southern instability he had given up the struggle of his own accord, and now, a clerk in some office in Madrid, turned his fervent rhetoric to politics and bull-fighting.

Philip asked Lawson and Hayward to come and see his new rooms, and they came, one with a bottle of whiskey, the other with a pate de foie gras; and he was delighted when they praised his taste. He would have invited the Scotch stockbroker too, but he had only three chairs, and thus could entertain only a definite number of guests. Lawson was aware that through him Philip had become very friendly with Norah Nesbit and now remarked that he had run across her a few days before.

“She was asking how you were.”

Philip flushed at the mention of her name (he could not get himself out of the awkward habit of reddening when he was embarrassed), and Lawson looked at him quizzically. Lawson, who now spent most of the year in London, had so far surrendered to his environment as to wear his hair short and to dress himself in a neat serge suit and a bowler hat.

“I gather that all is over between you,” he said.

“I’ve not seen her for months.”

“She was looking rather nice. She had a very smart hat on with a lot of white ostrich feathers on it. She must be doing pretty well.”

Philip changed the conversation, but he kept thinking of her, and after an interval, when the three of them were talking of something else, he asked suddenly:

“Did you gather that Norah was angry with me?”

“Not a bit. She talked very nicely of you.”

“I’ve got half a mind to go and see her.”

“She won’t eat you.”

Philip had thought of Norah often. When Mildred left him his first thought was of her, and he told himself bitterly that she would never have treated him so. His impulse was to go to her; he could depend on her pity; but he was ashamed: she had been good to him always, and he had treated her abominably.

“If I’d only had the sense to stick to her!” he said to himself, afterwards, when Lawson and Hayward had gone and he was smoking a last pipe before going to bed.

He remembered the pleasant hours they had spent together in the cosy sitting-room in Vincent Square, their visits to galleries and to the play, and the charming evenings of intimate conversation. He recollected her solicitude for his welfare and her interest in all that concerned him. She had loved him with a love that was kind and lasting, there was more than sensuality in it, it was almost maternal; he had always known that it was a precious thing for which with all his soul he should thank the gods. He made up his mind to throw himself on her mercy. She must have suffered horribly, but he felt she had the greatness of heart to forgive him: she was incapable of malice. Should he write to her? No. He would break in on her suddenly and cast himself at her feet — he knew that when the time came he would feel too shy to perform such a dramatic gesture, but that was how he liked to think of it — and tell her that if she would take him back she might rely on him for ever. He was cured of the hateful disease from which he had suffered, he knew her worth, and now she might trust him. His imagination leaped forward to the future. He pictured himself rowing with her on the river on Sundays; he would take her to Greenwich, he had never forgotten that delightful excursion with Hayward, and the beauty of the Port of London remained a permanent treasure in his recollection; and on the warm summer afternoons they would sit in the Park together and talk: he laughed to himself as he remembered her gay chatter, which poured out like a brook bubbling over little stones, amusing, flippant, and full of character. The agony he had suffered would pass from his mind like a bad dream.

But when next day, about tea-time, an hour at which he was pretty certain to find Norah at home, he knocked at her door his courage suddenly failed him. Was it possible for her to forgive him? It would be abominable of him to force himself on her presence. The door was opened by a maid new since he had been in the habit of calling every day, and he inquired if Mrs. Nesbit was in.

“Will you ask her if she could see Mr. Carey?” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

The maid ran upstairs and in a moment clattered down again.

“Will you step up, please, sir. Second floor front.”

“I know,” said Philip, with a slight smile.

He went with a fluttering heart. He knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said the well-known, cheerful voice.

It seemed to say come in to a new life of peace and happiness. When he entered Norah stepped forward to greet him. She shook hands with him as if they had parted the day before. A man stood up.

“Mr. Carey — Mr. Kingsford.”

Philip, bitterly disappointed at not finding her alone, sat down and took stock of the stranger. He had never heard her mention his name, but he seemed to Philip to occupy his chair as though he were very much at home. He was a man of forty, clean-shaven, with long fair hair very neatly plastered down, and the reddish skin and pale, tired eyes which fair men get when their youth is passed. He had a large nose, a large mouth; the bones of his face were prominent, and he was heavily made; he was a man of more than average height, and broad-shouldered.

“I was wondering what had become of you,” said Norah, in her sprightly manner. “I met Mr. Lawson the other day — did he tell you? — and I informed him that it was really high time you came to see me again.”

Philip could see no shadow of embarrassment in her countenance, and he admired the use with which she carried off an encounter of which himself felt the intense awkwardness. She gave him tea. She was about to put sugar in it when he stopped her.

“How stupid of me!” she cried. “I forgot.”

He did not believe that. She must remember quite well that he never took sugar in his tea. He accepted the incident as a sign that her nonchalance was affected.

The conversation which Philip had interrupted went on, and presently he began to feel a little in the way. Kingsford took no particular notice of him. He talked fluently and well, not without humour, but with a slightly dogmatic manner: he was a journalist, it appeared, and had something amusing to say on every topic that was touched upon; but it exasperated Philip to find himself edged out of the conversation. He was determined to stay the visitor out. He wondered if he admired Norah. In the old days they had often talked of the men who wanted to flirt with her and had laughed at them together. Philip tried to bring back the conversation to matters which only he and Norah knew about, but each time the journalist broke in and succeeded in drawing it away to a subject upon which Philip was forced to be silent. He grew faintly angry with Norah, for she must see he was being made ridiculous; but perhaps she was inflicting this upon him as a punishment, and with this thought he regained his good humour. At last, however, the clock struck six, and Kingsford got up.

“I must go,” he said.

Norah shook hands with him, and accompanied him to the landing. She shut the door behind her and stood outside for a couple of minutes. Philip wondered what they were talking about.

“Who is Mr. Kingsford?” he asked cheerfully, when she returned.

“Oh, he’s the editor of one of Harmsworth’s Magazines. He’s been taking a good deal of my work lately.”

“I thought he was never going.”

“I’m glad you stayed. I wanted to have a talk with you.” She curled herself into the large arm-chair, feet and all, in a way her small size made possible, and lit a cigarette. He smiled when he saw her assume the attitude which had always amused him.

“You look just like a cat.”

She gave him a flash of her dark, fine eyes.

“I really ought to break myself of the habit. It’s absurd to behave like a child when you’re my age, but I’m comfortable with my legs under me.”

“It’s awfully jolly to be sitting in this room again,” said Philip happily. “You don’t know how I’ve missed it.”

“Why on earth didn’t you come before?” she asked gaily.

“I was afraid to,” he said, reddening.

She gave him a look full of kindness. Her lips outlined a charming smile.

“You needn’t have been.”

He hesitated for a moment. His heart beat quickly.

“D’you remember the last time we met? I treated you awfully badly — I’m dreadfully ashamed of myself.”

She looked at him steadily. She did not answer. He was losing his head; he seemed to have come on an errand of which he was only now realising the outrageousness. She did not help him, and he could only blurt out bluntly.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

Then impetuously he told her that Mildred had left him and that his unhappiness had been so great that he almost killed himself. He told her of all that had happened between them, of the birth of the child, and of the meeting with Griffiths, of his folly and his trust and his immense deception. He told her how often he had thought of her kindness and of her love, and how bitterly he had regretted throwing it away: he had only been happy when he was with her, and he knew now how great was her worth. His voice was hoarse with emotion. Sometimes he was so ashamed of what he was saying that he spoke with his eyes fixed on the ground. His face was distorted with pain, and yet he felt it a strange relief to speak. At last he finished. He flung himself back in his chair, exhausted, and waited. He had concealed nothing, and even, in his self-abasement, he had striven to make himself more despicable than he had really been. He was surprised that she did not speak, and at last he raised his eyes. She was not looking at him. Her face was quite white, and she seemed to be lost in thought.

“Haven’t you got anything to say to me?”

She started and reddened.

“I’m afraid you’ve had a rotten time,” she said. “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

She seemed about to go on, but she stopped, and again he waited. At length she seemed to force herself to speak.

“I’m engaged to be married to Mr. Kingsford.”

“Why didn’t you tell me at once?” he cried. “You needn’t have allowed me to humiliate myself before you.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop you…. I met him soon after you” — she seemed to search for an expression that should not wound him— “told me your friend had come back. I was very wretched for a bit, he was extremely kind to me. He knew someone had made me suffer, of course he doesn’t know it was you, and I don’t know what I should have done without him. And suddenly I felt I couldn’t go on working, working, working; I was so tired, I felt so ill. I told him about my husband. He offered to give me the money to get my divorce if I would marry him as soon as I could. He had a very good job, and it wouldn’t be necessary for me to do anything unless I wanted to. He was so fond of me and so anxious to take care of me. I was awfully touched. And now I’m very, very fond of him.”

“Have you got your divorce then?” asked Philip.

“I’ve got the decree nisi. It’ll be made absolute in July, and then we are going to be married at once.”

For some time Philip did not say anything.

“I wish I hadn’t made such a fool of myself,” he muttered at length.

He was thinking of his long, humiliating confession. She looked at him curiously.

“You were never really in love with me,” she said.

“It’s not very pleasant being in love.”

But he was always able to recover himself quickly, and, getting up now and holding out his hand, he said:

“I hope you’ll be very happy. After all, it’s the best thing that could have happened to you.”

She looked a little wistfully at him as she took his hand and held it.

“You’ll come and see me again, won’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “It would make me too envious to see you happy.”

He walked slowly away from her house. After all she was right when she said he had never loved her. He was disappointed, irritated even, but his vanity was more affected than his heart. He knew that himself. And presently he grew conscious that the gods had played a very good practical joke on him, and he laughed at himself mirthlessly. It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one’s own absurdity.

LXXX

For the next three months Philip worked on subjects which were new to him. The unwieldy crowd which had entered the Medical School nearly two years before had thinned out: some had left the hospital, finding the examinations more difficult to pass than they expected, some had been taken away by parents who had not foreseen the expense of life in London, and some had drifted away to other callings. One youth whom Philip knew had devised an ingenious plan to make money; he had bought things at sales and pawned them, but presently found it more profitable to pawn goods bought on credit; and it had caused a little excitement at the hospital when someone pointed out his name in police-court proceedings. There had been a remand, then assurances on the part of a harassed father, and the young man had gone out to bear the White Man’s Burden overseas. The imagination of another, a lad who had never before been in a town at all, fell to the glamour of music-halls and bar parlours; he spent his time among racing-men, tipsters, and trainers, and now was become a book-maker’s clerk. Philip had seen him once in a bar near Piccadilly Circus in a tight-waisted coat and a brown hat with a broad, flat brim. A third, with a gift for singing and mimicry, who had achieved success at the smoking concerts of the Medical School by his imitation of notorious comedians, had abandoned the hospital for the chorus of a musical comedy. Still another, and he interested Philip because his uncouth manner and interjectional speech did not suggest that he was capable of any deep emotion, had felt himself stifle among the houses of London. He grew haggard in shut-in spaces, and the soul he knew not he possessed struggled like a sparrow held in the hand, with little frightened gasps and a quick palpitation of the heart: he yearned for the broad skies and the open, desolate places among which his childhood had been spent; and he walked off one day, without a word to anybody, between one lecture and another; and the next thing his friends heard was that he had thrown up medicine and was working on a farm.

Philip attended now lectures on medicine and on surgery. On certain mornings in the week he practised bandaging on out-patients glad to earn a little money, and he was taught auscultation and how to use the stethoscope. He learned dispensing. He was taking the examination in Materia Medica in July, and it amused him to play with various drugs, concocting mixtures, rolling pills, and making ointments. He seized avidly upon anything from which he could extract a suggestion of human interest.

He saw Griffiths once in the distance, but, not to have the pain of cutting him dead, avoided him. Philip had felt a certain self-consciousness with Griffiths’ friends, some of whom were now friends of his, when he realised they knew of his quarrel with Griffiths and surmised they were aware of the reason. One of them, a very tall fellow, with a small head and a languid air, a youth called Ramsden, who was one of Griffiths’ most faithful admirers, copied his ties, his boots, his manner of talking and his gestures, told Philip that Griffiths was very much hurt because Philip had not answered his letter. He wanted to be reconciled with him.

“Has he asked you to give me the message?” asked Philip.

“Oh, no. I’m saying this entirely on my own,” said Ramsden. “He’s awfully sorry for what he did, and he says you always behaved like a perfect brick to him. I know he’d be glad to make it up. He doesn’t come to the hospital because he’s afraid of meeting you, and he thinks you’d cut him.”

“I should.”

“It makes him feel rather wretched, you know.”

“I can bear the trifling inconvenience that he feels with a good deal of fortitude,” said Philip.

“He’ll do anything he can to make it up.”

“How childish and hysterical! Why should he care? I’m a very insignificant person, and he can do very well without my company. I’m not interested in him any more.”

Ramsden thought Philip hard and cold. He paused for a moment or two, looking about him in a perplexed way.

“Harry wishes to God he’d never had anything to do with the woman.”

“Does he?” asked Philip.

He spoke with an indifference which he was satisfied with. No one could have guessed how violently his heart was beating. He waited impatiently for Ramsden to go on.

“I suppose you’ve quite got over it now, haven’t you?”

“I?” said Philip. “Quite.”

Little by little he discovered the history of Mildred’s relations with Griffiths. He listened with a smile on his lips, feigning an equanimity which quite deceived the dull-witted boy who talked to him. The week-end she spent with Griffiths at Oxford inflamed rather than extinguished her sudden passion; and when Griffiths went home, with a feeling that was unexpected in her she determined to stay in Oxford by herself for a couple of days, because she had been so happy in it. She felt that nothing could induce her to go back to Philip. He revolted her. Griffiths was taken aback at the fire he had aroused, for he had found his two days with her in the country somewhat tedious; and he had no desire to turn an amusing episode into a tiresome affair. She made him promise to write to her, and, being an honest, decent fellow, with natural politeness and a desire to make himself pleasant to everybody, when he got home he wrote her a long and charming letter. She answered it with reams of passion, clumsy, for she had no gift of expression, ill-written, and vulgar; the letter bored him, and when it was followed next day by another, and the day after by a third, he began to think her love no longer flattering but alarming. He did not answer; and she bombarded him with telegrams, asking him if he were ill and had received her letters; she said his silence made her dreadfully anxious. He was forced to write, but he sought to make his reply as casual as was possible without being offensive: he begged her not to wire, since it was difficult to explain telegrams to his mother, an old-fashioned person for whom a telegram was still an event to excite tremor. She answered by return of post that she must see him and announced her intention to pawn things (she had the dressing-case which Philip had given her as a wedding-present and could raise eight pounds on that) in order to come up and stay at the market town four miles from which was the village in which his father practised. This frightened Griffiths; and he, this time, made use of the telegraph wires to tell her that she must do nothing of the kind. He promised to let her know the moment he came up to London, and, when he did, found that she had already been asking for him at the hospital at which he had an appointment. He did not like this, and, on seeing her, told Mildred that she was not to come there on any pretext; and now, after an absence of three weeks, he found that she bored him quite decidedly; he wondered why he had ever troubled about her, and made up his mind to break with her as soon as he could. He was a person who dreaded quarrels, nor did he want to give pain; but at the same time he had other things to do, and he was quite determined not to let Mildred bother him. When he met her he was pleasant, cheerful, amusing, affectionate; he invented convincing excuses for the interval since last he had seen her; but he did everything he could to avoid her. When she forced him to make appointments he sent telegrams to her at the last moment to put himself off; and his landlady (the first three months of his appointment he was spending in rooms) had orders to say he was out when Mildred called. She would waylay him in the street and, knowing she had been waiting about for him to come out of the hospital for a couple of hours, he would give her a few charming, friendly words and bolt off with the excuse that he had a business engagement. He grew very skilful in slipping out of the hospital unseen. Once, when he went back to his lodgings at midnight, he saw a woman standing at the area railings and suspecting who it was went to beg a shake-down in Ramsden’s rooms; next day the landlady told him that Mildred had sat crying on the doorsteps for hours, and she had been obliged to tell her at last that if she did not go away she would send for a policeman.

“I tell you, my boy,” said Ramsden, “you’re jolly well out of it. Harry says that if he’d suspected for half a second she was going to make such a blooming nuisance of herself he’d have seen himself damned before he had anything to do with her.”

Philip thought of her sitting on that doorstep through the long hours of the night. He saw her face as she looked up dully at the landlady who sent her away.

“I wonder what she’s doing now.”

“Oh, she’s got a job somewhere, thank God. That keeps her busy all day.”

The last thing he heard, just before the end of the summer session, was that Griffiths, urbanity had given way at length under the exasperation of the constant persecution. He had told Mildred that he was sick of being pestered, and she had better take herself off and not bother him again.

“It was the only thing he could do,” said Ramsden. “It was getting a bit too thick.”

“Is it all over then?” asked Philip.

“Oh, he hasn’t seen her for ten days. You know, Harry’s wonderful at dropping people. This is about the toughest nut he’s ever had to crack, but he’s cracked it all right.”

Then Philip heard nothing more of her at all. She vanished into the vast anonymous mass of the population of London.

LXXXI

At the beginning of the winter session Philip became an out-patients’ clerk. There were three assistant-physicians who took out-patients, two days a week each, and Philip put his name down for Dr. Tyrell. He was popular with the students, and there was some competition to be his clerk. Dr. Tyrell was a tall, thin man of thirty-five, with a very small head, red hair cut short, and prominent blue eyes: his face was bright scarlet. He talked well in a pleasant voice, was fond of a little joke, and treated the world lightly. He was a successful man, with a large consulting practice and a knighthood in prospect. From commerce with students and poor people he had the patronising air, and from dealing always with the sick he had the healthy man’s jovial condescension, which some consultants achieve as the professional manner. He made the patient feel like a boy confronted by a jolly schoolmaster; his illness was an absurd piece of naughtiness which amused rather than irritated.

The student was supposed to attend in the out-patients’ room every day, see cases, and pick up what information he could; but on the days on which he clerked his duties were a little more definite. At that time the out-patients’ department at St. Luke’s consisted of three rooms, leading into one another, and a large, dark waiting-room with massive pillars of masonry and long benches. Here the patients waited after having been given their ‘letters’ at mid-day; and the long rows of them, bottles and gallipots in hand, some tattered and dirty, others decent enough, sitting in the dimness, men and women of all ages, children, gave one an impression which was weird and horrible. They suggested the grim drawings of Daumier. All the rooms were painted alike, in salmon-colour with a high dado of maroon; and there was in them an odour of disinfectants, mingling as the afternoon wore on with the crude stench of humanity. The first room was the largest and in the middle of it were a table and an office chair for the physician; on each side of this were two smaller tables, a little lower: at one of these sat the house-physician and at the other the clerk who took the ‘book’ for the day. This was a large volume in which were written down the name, age, sex, profession, of the patient and the diagnosis of his disease.

At half past one the house-physician came in, rang the bell, and told the porter to send in the old patients. There were always a good many of these, and it was necessary to get through as many of them as possible before Dr. Tyrell came at two. The H.P. with whom Philip came in contact was a dapper little man, excessively conscious of his importance: he treated the clerks with condescension and patently resented the familiarity of older students who had been his contemporaries and did not use him with the respect he felt his present position demanded. He set about the cases. A clerk helped him. The patients streamed in. The men came first. Chronic bronchitis, “a nasty ‘acking cough,” was what they chiefly suffered from; one went to the H.P. and the other to the clerk, handing in their letters: if they were going on well the words Rep 14 were written on them, and they went to the dispensary with their bottles or gallipots in order to have medicine given them for fourteen days more. Some old stagers held back so that they might be seen by the physician himself, but they seldom succeeded in this; and only three or four, whose condition seemed to demand his attention, were kept.

Dr. Tyrell came in with quick movements and a breezy manner. He reminded one slightly of a clown leaping into the arena of a circus with the cry: Here we are again. His air seemed to indicate: What’s all this nonsense about being ill? I’ll soon put that right. He took his seat, asked if there were any old patients for him to see, rapidly passed them in review, looking at them with shrewd eyes as he discussed their symptoms, cracked a joke (at which all the clerks laughed heartily) with the H.P., who laughed heartily too but with an air as if he thought it was rather impudent for the clerks to laugh, remarked that it was a fine day or a hot one, and rang the bell for the porter to show in the new patients.

They came in one by one and walked up to the table at which sat Dr. Tyrell. They were old men and young men and middle-aged men, mostly of the labouring class, dock labourers, draymen, factory hands, barmen; but some, neatly dressed, were of a station which was obviously superior, shop-assistants, clerks, and the like. Dr. Tyrell looked at these with suspicion. Sometimes they put on shabby clothes in order to pretend they were poor; but he had a keen eye to prevent what he regarded as fraud and sometimes refused to see people who, he thought, could well pay for medical attendance. Women were the worst offenders and they managed the thing more clumsily. They would wear a cloak and a skirt which were almost in rags, and neglect to take the rings off their fingers.

“If you can afford to wear jewellery you can afford a doctor. A hospital is a charitable institution,” said Dr. Tyrell.

He handed back the letter and called for the next case.

“But I’ve got my letter.”

“I don’t care a hang about your letter; you get out. You’ve got no business to come and steal the time which is wanted by the really poor.”

The patient retired sulkily, with an angry scowl.

“She’ll probably write a letter to the papers on the gross mismanagement of the London hospitals,” said Dr. Tyrell, with a smile, as he took the next paper and gave the patient one of his shrewd glances.

Most of them were under the impression that the hospital was an institution of the state, for which they paid out of the rates, and took the attendance they received as a right they could claim. They imagined the physician who gave them his time was heavily paid.

Dr. Tyrell gave each of his clerks a case to examine. The clerk took the patient into one of the inner rooms; they were smaller, and each had a couch in it covered with black horse-hair: he asked his patient a variety of questions, examined his lungs, his heart, and his liver, made notes of fact on the hospital letter, formed in his own mind some idea of the diagnosis, and then waited for Dr. Tyrell to come in. This he did, followed by a small crowd of students, when he had finished the men, and the clerk read out what he had learned. The physician asked him one or two questions, and examined the patient himself. If there was anything interesting to hear students applied their stethoscope: you would see a man with two or three to the chest, and two perhaps to his back, while others waited impatiently to listen. The patient stood among them a little embarrassed, but not altogether displeased to find himself the centre of attention: he listened confusedly while Dr. Tyrell discoursed glibly on the case. Two or three students listened again to recognise the murmur or the crepitation which the physician described, and then the man was told to put on his clothes.

When the various cases had been examined Dr. Tyrell went back into the large room and sat down again at his desk. He asked any student who happened to be standing near him what he would prescribe for a patient he had just seen. The student mentioned one or two drugs.

“Would you?” said Dr. Tyrell. “Well, that’s original at all events. I don’t think we’ll be rash.”

This always made the students laugh, and with a twinkle of amusement at his own bright humour the physician prescribed some other drug than that which the student had suggested. When there were two cases of exactly the same sort and the student proposed the treatment which the physician had ordered for the first, Dr. Tyrell exercised considerable ingenuity in thinking of something else. Sometimes, knowing that in the dispensary they were worked off their legs and preferred to give the medicines which they had all ready, the good hospital mixtures which had been found by the experience of years to answer their purpose so well, he amused himself by writing an elaborate prescription.

“We’ll give the dispenser something to do. If we go on prescribing mist: alb: he’ll lose his cunning.”

The students laughed, and the doctor gave them a circular glance of enjoyment in his joke. Then he touched the bell and, when the porter poked his head in, said:

“Old women, please.”

He leaned back in his chair, chatting with the H.P. while the porter herded along the old patients. They came in, strings of anaemic girls, with large fringes and pallid lips, who could not digest their bad, insufficient food; old ladies, fat and thin, aged prematurely by frequent confinements, with winter coughs; women with this, that, and the other, the matter with them. Dr. Tyrell and his house-physician got through them quickly. Time was getting on, and the air in the small room was growing more sickly. The physician looked at his watch.

“Are there many new women today?” he asked.

“A good few, I think,” said the H.P.

“We’d better have them in. You can go on with the old ones.”

They entered. With the men the most common ailments were due to the excessive use of alcohol, but with the women they were due to defective nourishment. By about six o’clock they were finished. Philip, exhausted by standing all the time, by the bad air, and by the attention he had given, strolled over with his fellow-clerks to the Medical School to have tea. He found the work of absorbing interest. There was humanity there in the rough, the materials the artist worked on; and Philip felt a curious thrill when it occurred to him that he was in the position of the artist and the patients were like clay in his hands. He remembered with an amused shrug of the shoulders his life in Paris, absorbed in colour, tone, values, Heaven knows what, with the aim of producing beautiful things: the directness of contact with men and women gave a thrill of power which he had never known. He found an endless excitement in looking at their faces and hearing them speak; they came in each with his peculiarity, some shuffling uncouthly, some with a little trip, others with heavy, slow tread, some shyly. Often you could guess their trades by the look of them. You learnt in what way to put your questions so that they should be understood, you discovered on what subjects nearly all lied, and by what inquiries you could extort the truth notwithstanding. You saw the different way people took the same things. The diagnosis of dangerous illness would be accepted by one with a laugh and a joke, by another with dumb despair. Philip found that he was less shy with these people than he had ever been with others; he felt not exactly sympathy, for sympathy suggests condescension; but he felt at home with them. He found that he was able to put them at their ease, and, when he had been given a case to find out what he could about it, it seemed to him that the patient delivered himself into his hands with a peculiar confidence.

“Perhaps,” he thought to himself, with a smile, “perhaps I’m cut out to be a doctor. It would be rather a lark if I’d hit upon the one thing I’m fit for.”

It seemed to Philip that he alone of the clerks saw the dramatic interest of those afternoons. To the others men and women were only cases, good if they were complicated, tiresome if obvious; they heard murmurs and were astonished at abnormal livers; an unexpected sound in the lungs gave them something to talk about. But to Philip there was much more. He found an interest in just looking at them, in the shape of their heads and their hands, in the look of their eyes and the length of their noses. You saw in that room human nature taken by surprise, and often the mask of custom was torn off rudely, showing you the soul all raw. Sometimes you saw an untaught stoicism which was profoundly moving. Once Philip saw a man, rough and illiterate, told his case was hopeless; and, self-controlled himself, he wondered at the splendid instinct which forced the fellow to keep a stiff upper-lip before strangers. But was it possible for him to be brave when he was by himself, face to face with his soul, or would he then surrender to despair? Sometimes there was tragedy. Once a young woman brought her sister to be examined, a girl of eighteen, with delicate features and large blue eyes, fair hair that sparkled with gold when a ray of autumn sunshine touched it for a moment, and a skin of amazing beauty. The students’ eyes went to her with little smiles. They did not often see a pretty girl in these dingy rooms. The elder woman gave the family history, father and mother had died of phthisis, a brother and a sister, these two were the only ones left. The girl had been coughing lately and losing weight. She took off her blouse and the skin of her neck was like milk. Dr. Tyrell examined her quietly, with his usual rapid method; he told two or three of his clerks to apply their stethoscopes to a place he indicated with his finger; and then she was allowed to dress. The sister was standing a little apart and she spoke to him in a low voice, so that the girl should not hear. Her voice trembled with fear.

“She hasn’t got it, doctor, has she?”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.”

“She was the last one. When she goes I shan’t have anybody.”

She began to cry, while the doctor looked at her gravely; he thought she too had the type; she would not make old bones either. The girl turned round and saw her sister’s tears. She understood what they meant. The colour fled from her lovely face and tears fell down her cheeks. The two stood for a minute or two, crying silently, and then the older, forgetting the indifferent crowd that watched them, went up to her, took her in her arms, and rocked her gently to and fro as if she were a baby.

When they were gone a student asked:

“How long d’you think she’ll last, sir?”

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders.

“Her brother and sister died within three months of the first symptoms. She’ll do the same. If they were rich one might do something. You can’t tell these people to go to St. Moritz. Nothing can be done for them.”

Once a man who was strong and in all the power of his manhood came because a persistent aching troubled him and his club-doctor did not seem to do him any good; and the verdict for him too was death, not the inevitable death that horrified and yet was tolerable because science was helpless before it, but the death which was inevitable because the man was a little wheel in the great machine of a complex civilisation, and had as little power of changing the circumstances as an automaton. Complete rest was his only chance. The physician did not ask impossibilities.

“You ought to get some very much lighter job.”

“There ain’t no light jobs in my business.”

“Well, if you go on like this you’ll kill yourself. You’re very ill.”

“D’you mean to say I’m going to die?”

“I shouldn’t like to say that, but you’re certainly unfit for hard work.”

“If I don’t work who’s to keep the wife and the kids?”

Dr. Tyrell shrugged his shoulders. The dilemma had been presented to him a hundred times. Time was pressing and there were many patients to be seen.

“Well, I’ll give you some medicine and you can come back in a week and tell me how you’re getting on.”

The man took his letter with the useless prescription written upon it and walked out. The doctor might say what he liked. He did not feel so bad that he could not go on working. He had a good job and he could not afford to throw it away.

“I give him a year,” said Dr. Tyrell.

Sometimes there was comedy. Now and then came a flash of cockney humour, now and then some old lady, a character such as Charles Dickens might have drawn, would amuse them by her garrulous oddities. Once a woman came who was a member of the ballet at a famous music-hall. She looked fifty, but gave her age as twenty-eight. She was outrageously painted and ogled the students impudently with large black eyes; her smiles were grossly alluring. She had abundant self-confidence and treated Dr. Tyrell, vastly amused, with the easy familiarity with which she might have used an intoxicated admirer. She had chronic bronchitis, and told him it hindered her in the exercise of her profession.

“I don’t know why I should ‘ave such a thing, upon my word I don’t. I’ve never ‘ad a day’s illness in my life. You’ve only got to look at me to know that.”

She rolled her eyes round the young men, with a long sweep of her painted eyelashes, and flashed her yellow teeth at them. She spoke with a cockney accent, but with an affectation of refinement which made every word a feast of fun.

“It’s what they call a winter cough,” answered Dr. Tyrell gravely. “A great many middle-aged women have it.”

“Well, I never! That is a nice thing to say to a lady. No one ever called me middle-aged before.”

She opened her eyes very wide and cocked her head on one side, looking at him with indescribable archness.

“That is the disadvantage of our profession,” said he. “It forces us sometimes to be ungallant.”

She took the prescription and gave him one last, luscious smile.

“You will come and see me dance, dearie, won’t you?”

“I will indeed.”

He rang the bell for the next case.

“I am glad you gentlemen were here to protect me.”

But on the whole the impression was neither of tragedy nor of comedy. There was no describing it. It was manifold and various; there were tears and laughter, happiness and woe; it was tedious and interesting and indifferent; it was as you saw it: it was tumultuous and passionate; it was grave; it was sad and comic; it was trivial; it was simple and complex; joy was there and despair; the love of mothers for their children, and of men for women; lust trailed itself through the rooms with leaden feet, punishing the guilty and the innocent, helpless wives and wretched children; drink seized men and women and cost its inevitable price; death sighed in these rooms; and the beginning of life, filling some poor girl with terror and shame, was diagnosed there. There was neither good nor bad there. There were just facts. It was life.

LXXXII

Towards the end of the year, when Philip was bringing to a close his three months as clerk in the out-patients’ department, he received a letter from Lawson, who was in Paris.

Dear Philip,

Cronshaw is in London and would be glad to see you. He is living at 43 Hyde Street, Soho. I don’t know where it is, but I daresay you will be able to find out. Be a brick and look after him a bit. He is very down on his luck. He will tell you what he is doing. Things are going on here very much as usual. Nothing seems to have changed since you were here. Clutton is back, but he has become quite impossible. He has quarrelled with everybody. As far as I can make out he hasn’t got a cent, he lives in a little studio right away beyond the Jardin des Plantes, but he won’t let anybody see his work. He doesn’t show anywhere, so one doesn’t know what he is doing. He may be a genius, but on the other hand he may be off his head. By the way, I ran against Flanagan the other day. He was showing Mrs. Flanagan round the Quarter. He has chucked art and is now in popper’s business. He seems to be rolling. Mrs. Flanagan is very pretty and I’m trying to work a portrait. How much would you ask if you were me? I don’t want to frighten them, and then on the other hand I don’t want to be such an ass as to ask L150 if they’re quite willing to give L300.

Yours ever,

Frederick Lawson.

Philip wrote to Cronshaw and received in reply the following letter. It was written on a half-sheet of common note-paper, and the flimsy envelope was dirtier than was justified by its passage through the post.

Dear Carey,

Of course I remember you very well. I have an idea that I had some part in rescuing you from the Slough of Despond in which myself am hopelessly immersed. I shall be glad to see you. I am a stranger in a strange city and I am buffeted by the philistines. It will be pleasant to talk of Paris. I do not ask you to come and see me, since my lodging is not of a magnificence fit for the reception of an eminent member of Monsieur Purgon’s profession, but you will find me eating modestly any evening between seven and eight at a restaurant yclept Au Bon Plaisir in Dean Street.

Your sincere

J. Cronshaw.

Philip went the day he received this letter. The restaurant, consisting of one small room, was of the poorest class, and Cronshaw seemed to be its only customer. He was sitting in the corner, well away from draughts, wearing the same shabby great-coat which Philip had never seen him without, with his old bowler on his head.

“I eat here because I can be alone,” he said. “They are not doing well; the only people who come are a few trollops and one or two waiters out of a job; they are giving up business, and the food is execrable. But the ruin of their fortunes is my advantage.”

Cronshaw had before him a glass of absinthe. It was nearly three years since they had met, and Philip was shocked by the change in his appearance. He had been rather corpulent, but now he had a dried-up, yellow look: the skin of his neck was loose and winkled; his clothes hung about him as though they had been bought for someone else; and his collar, three or four sizes too large, added to the slatternliness of his appearance. His hands trembled continually. Philip remembered the handwriting which scrawled over the page with shapeless, haphazard letters. Cronshaw was evidently very ill.

“I eat little these days,” he said. “I’m very sick in the morning. I’m just having some soup for my dinner, and then I shall have a bit of cheese.”

Philip’s glance unconsciously went to the absinthe, and Cronshaw, seeing it, gave him the quizzical look with which he reproved the admonitions of common sense.

“You have diagnosed my case, and you think it’s very wrong of me to drink absinthe.”

“You’ve evidently got cirrhosis of the liver,” said Philip.

“Evidently.”

He looked at Philip in the way which had formerly had the power of making him feel incredibly narrow. It seemed to point out that what he was thinking was distressingly obvious; and when you have agreed with the obvious what more is there to say? Philip changed the topic.

“When are you going back to Paris?”

“I’m not going back to Paris. I’m going to die.”

The very naturalness with which he said this startled Philip. He thought of half a dozen things to say, but they seemed futile. He knew that Cronshaw was a dying man.

“Are you going to settle in London then?” he asked lamely.

“What is London to me? I am a fish out of water. I walk through the crowded streets, men jostle me, and I seem to walk in a dead city. I felt that I couldn’t die in Paris. I wanted to die among my own people. I don’t know what hidden instinct drew me back at the last.”

Philip knew of the woman Cronshaw had lived with and the two draggle-tailed children, but Cronshaw had never mentioned them to him, and he did not like to speak of them. He wondered what had happened to them.

“I don’t know why you talk of dying,” he said.

“I had pneumonia a couple of winters ago, and they told me then it was a miracle that I came through. It appears I’m extremely liable to it, and another bout will kill me.”

“Oh, what nonsense! You’re not so bad as all that. You’ve only got to take precautions. Why don’t you give up drinking?”

“Because I don’t choose. It doesn’t matter what a man does if he’s ready to take the consequences. Well, I’m ready to take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it’s the only thing I’ve got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay.”

Philip looked at him for a while steadily.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

For a moment Cronshaw did not answer. He seemed to consider his reply.

“Sometimes, when I’m alone.” He looked at Philip. “You think that’s a condemnation? You’re wrong. I’m not afraid of my fear. It’s folly, the Christian argument that you should live always in view of your death. The only way to live is to forget that you’re going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man. I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.”

“D’you remember that Persian carpet you gave me?” asked Philip.

Cronshaw smiled his old, slow smile of past days.

“I told you that it would give you an answer to your question when you asked me what was the meaning of life. Well, have you discovered the answer?”

“No,” smiled Philip. “Won’t you tell it me?”

“No, no, I can’t do that. The answer is meaningless unless you discover it for yourself.”

LXXXIII

Cronshaw was publishing his poems. His friends had been urging him to do this for years, but his laziness made it impossible for him to take the necessary steps. He had always answered their exhortations by telling them that the love of poetry was dead in England. You brought out a book which had cost you years of thought and labour; it was given two or three contemptuous lines among a batch of similar volumes, twenty or thirty copies were sold, and the rest of the edition was pulped. He had long since worn out the desire for fame. That was an illusion like all else. But one of his friends had taken the matter into his own hands. This was a man of letters, named Leonard Upjohn, whom Philip had met once or twice with Cronshaw in the cafes of the Quarter. He had a considerable reputation in England as a critic and was the accredited exponent in this country of modern French literature. He had lived a good deal in France among the men who made the Mercure de France the liveliest review of the day, and by the simple process of expressing in English their point of view he had acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had read some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences, carefully balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his writing an appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced Cronshaw to give him all his poems and found that there were enough to make a volume of reasonable size. He promised to use his influence with publishers. Cronshaw was in want of money. Since his illness he had found it more difficult than ever to work steadily; he made barely enough to keep himself in liquor; and when Upjohn wrote to him that this publisher and the other, though admiring the poems, thought it not worth while to publish them, Cronshaw began to grow interested. He wrote impressing upon Upjohn his great need and urging him to make more strenuous efforts. Now that he was going to die he wanted to leave behind him a published book, and at the back of his mind was the feeling that he had produced great poetry. He expected to burst upon the world like a new star. There was something fine in keeping to himself these treasures of beauty all his life and giving them to the world disdainfully when, he and the world parting company, he had no further use for them.

His decision to come to England was caused directly by an announcement from Leonard Upjohn that a publisher had consented to print the poems. By a miracle of persuasion Upjohn had persuaded him to give ten pounds in advance of royalties.

“In advance of royalties, mind you,” said Cronshaw to Philip. “Milton only got ten pounds down.”

Upjohn had promised to write a signed article about them, and he would ask his friends who reviewed to do their best. Cronshaw pretended to treat the matter with detachment, but it was easy to see that he was delighted with the thought of the stir he would make.

One day Philip went to dine by arrangement at the wretched eating-house at which Cronshaw insisted on taking his meals, but Cronshaw did not appear. Philip learned that he had not been there for three days. He got himself something to eat and went round to the address from which Cronshaw had first written to him. He had some difficulty in finding Hyde Street. It was a street of dingy houses huddled together; many of the windows had been broken and were clumsily repaired with strips of French newspaper; the doors had not been painted for years; there were shabby little shops on the ground floor, laundries, cobblers, stationers. Ragged children played in the road, and an old barrel-organ was grinding out a vulgar tune. Philip knocked at the door of Cronshaw’s house (there was a shop of cheap sweetstuffs at the bottom), and it was opened by an elderly Frenchwoman in a dirty apron. Philip asked her if Cronshaw was in.

“Ah, yes, there is an Englishman who lives at the top, at the back. I don’t know if he’s in. If you want him you had better go up and see.”

The staircase was lit by one jet of gas. There was a revolting odour in the house. When Philip was passing up a woman came out of a room on the first floor, looked at him suspiciously, but made no remark. There were three doors on the top landing. Philip knocked at one, and knocked again; there was no reply; he tried the handle, but the door was locked. He knocked at another door, got no answer, and tried the door again. It opened. The room was dark.

“Who’s that?”

He recognised Cronshaw’s voice.

“Carey. Can I come in?”

He received no answer. He walked in. The window was closed and the stink was overpowering. There was a certain amount of light from the arc-lamp in the street, and he saw that it was a small room with two beds in it, end to end; there was a washing-stand and one chair, but they left little space for anyone to move in. Cronshaw was in the bed nearest the window. He made no movement, but gave a low chuckle.

“Why don’t you light the candle?” he said then.

Philip struck a match and discovered that there was a candlestick on the floor beside the bed. He lit it and put it on the washing-stand. Cronshaw was lying on his back immobile; he looked very odd in his nightshirt; and his baldness was disconcerting. His face was earthy and death-like.

“I say, old man, you look awfully ill. Is there anyone to look after you here?”

“George brings me in a bottle of milk in the morning before he goes to his work.”

“Who’s George?”

“I call him George because his name is Adolphe. He shares this palatial apartment with me.”

Philip noticed then that the second bed had not been made since it was slept in. The pillow was black where the head had rested.

“You don’t mean to say you’re sharing this room with somebody else?” he cried.

“Why not? Lodging costs money in Soho. George is a waiter, he goes out at eight in the morning and does not come in till closing time, so he isn’t in my way at all. We neither of us sleep well, and he helps to pass away the hours of the night by telling me stories of his life. He’s a Swiss, and I’ve always had a taste for waiters. They see life from an entertaining angle.”

“How long have you been in bed?”

“Three days.”

“D’you mean to say you’ve had nothing but a bottle of milk for the last three days? Why on earth didn’t you send me a line? I can’t bear to think of you lying here all day long without a soul to attend to you.”

Cronshaw gave a little laugh.

“Look at your face. Why, dear boy, I really believe you’re distressed. You nice fellow.”

Philip blushed. He had not suspected that his face showed the dismay he felt at the sight of that horrible room and the wretched circumstances of the poor poet. Cronshaw, watching Philip, went on with a gentle smile.

“I’ve been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?”

The proofs were lying on his bed, and as he lay in the darkness he had been able to place his hands on them. He showed them to Philip and his eyes glowed. He turned over the pages, rejoicing in the clear type; he read out a stanza.

“They don’t look bad, do they?”

Philip had an idea. It would involve him in a little expense and he could not afford even the smallest increase of expenditure; but on the other hand this was a case where it revolted him to think of economy.

“I say, I can’t bear the thought of your remaining here. I’ve got an extra room, it’s empty at present, but I can easily get someone to lend me a bed. Won’t you come and live with me for a while? It’ll save you the rent of this.”

“Oh, my dear boy, you’d insist on my keeping my window open.”

“You shall have every window in the place sealed if you like.”

“I shall be all right tomorrow. I could have got up today, only I felt lazy.”

“Then you can very easily make the move. And then if you don’t feel well at any time you can just go to bed, and I shall be there to look after you.”

“If it’ll please you I’ll come,” said Cronshaw, with his torpid not unpleasant smile.

“That’ll be ripping.”

They settled that Philip should fetch Cronshaw next day, and Philip snatched an hour from his busy morning to arrange the change. He found Cronshaw dressed, sitting in his hat and great-coat on the bed, with a small, shabby portmanteau, containing his clothes and books, already packed: it was on the floor by his feet, and he looked as if he were sitting in the waiting-room of a station. Philip laughed at the sight of him. They went over to Kennington in a four-wheeler, of which the windows were carefully closed, and Philip installed his guest in his own room. He had gone out early in the morning and bought for himself a second-hand bedstead, a cheap chest of drawers, and a looking-glass. Cronshaw settled down at once to correct his proofs. He was much better.

Philip found him, except for the irritability which was a symptom of his disease, an easy guest. He had a lecture at nine in the morning, so did not see Cronshaw till the night. Once or twice Philip persuaded him to share the scrappy meal he prepared for himself in the evening, but Cronshaw was too restless to stay in, and preferred generally to get himself something to eat in one or other of the cheapest restaurants in Soho. Philip asked him to see Dr. Tyrell, but he stoutly refused; he knew a doctor would tell him to stop drinking, and this he was resolved not to do. He always felt horribly ill in the morning, but his absinthe at mid-day put him on his feet again, and by the time he came home, at midnight, he was able to talk with the brilliancy which had astonished Philip when first he made his acquaintance. His proofs were corrected; and the volume was to come out among the publications of the early spring, when the public might be supposed to have recovered from the avalanche of Christmas books.

LXXXIV

At the new year Philip became dresser in the surgical out-patients’ department. The work was of the same character as that which he had just been engaged on, but with the greater directness which surgery has than medicine; and a larger proportion of the patients suffered from those two diseases which a supine public allows, in its prudishness, to be spread broadcast. The assistant-surgeon for whom Philip dressed was called Jacobs. He was a short, fat man, with an exuberant joviality, a bald head, and a loud voice; he had a cockney accent, and was generally described by the students as an ‘awful bounder’; but his cleverness, both as a surgeon and as a teacher, caused some of them to overlook this. He had also a considerable facetiousness, which he exercised impartially on the patients and on the students. He took a great pleasure in making his dressers look foolish. Since they were ignorant, nervous, and could not answer as if he were their equal, this was not very difficult. He enjoyed his afternoons, with the home truths he permitted himself, much more than the students who had to put up with them with a smile. One day a case came up of a boy with a club-foot. His parents wanted to know whether anything could be done. Mr. Jacobs turned to Philip.

“You’d better take this case, Carey. It’s a subject you ought to know something about.”

Philip flushed, all the more because the surgeon spoke obviously with a humorous intention, and his brow-beaten dressers laughed obsequiously. It was in point of fact a subject which Philip, since coming to the hospital, had studied with anxious attention. He had read everything in the library which treated of talipes in its various forms. He made the boy take off his boot and stocking. He was fourteen, with a snub nose, blue eyes, and a freckled face. His father explained that they wanted something done if possible, it was such a hindrance to the kid in earning his living. Philip looked at him curiously. He was a jolly boy, not at all shy, but talkative and with a cheekiness which his father reproved. He was much interested in his foot.

“It’s only for the looks of the thing, you know,” he said to Philip. “I don’t find it no trouble.”

“Be quiet, Ernie,” said his father. “There’s too much gas about you.”

Philip examined the foot and passed his hand slowly over the shapelessness of it. He could not understand why the boy felt none of the humiliation which always oppressed himself. He wondered why he could not take his deformity with that philosophic indifference. Presently Mr. Jacobs came up to him. The boy was sitting on the edge of a couch, the surgeon and Philip stood on each side of him; and in a semi-circle, crowding round, were students. With accustomed brilliancy Jacobs gave a graphic little discourse upon the club-foot: he spoke of its varieties and of the forms which followed upon different anatomical conditions.

“I suppose you’ve got talipes equinus?” he said, turning suddenly to

Philip.

“Yes.”

Philip felt the eyes of his fellow-students rest on him, and he cursed himself because he could not help blushing. He felt the sweat start up in the palms of his hands. The surgeon spoke with the fluency due to long practice and with the admirable perspicacity which distinguished him. He was tremendously interested in his profession. But Philip did not listen. He was only wishing that the fellow would get done quickly. Suddenly he realised that Jacobs was addressing him.

“You don’t mind taking off your sock for a moment, Carey?”

Philip felt a shudder pass through him. He had an impulse to tell the surgeon to go to hell, but he had not the courage to make a scene. He feared his brutal ridicule. He forced himself to appear indifferent.

“Not a bit,” he said.

He sat down and unlaced his boot. His fingers were trembling and he thought he should never untie the knot. He remembered how they had forced him at school to show his foot, and the misery which had eaten into his soul.

“He keeps his feet nice and clean, doesn’t he?” said Jacobs, in his rasping, cockney voice.

The attendant students giggled. Philip noticed that the boy whom they were examining looked down at his foot with eager curiosity. Jacobs took the foot in his hands and said:

“Yes, that’s what I thought. I see you’ve had an operation. When you were a child, I suppose?”

He went on with his fluent explanations. The students leaned over and looked at the foot. Two or three examined it minutely when Jacobs let it go.

“When you’ve quite done,” said Philip, with a smile, ironically.

He could have killed them all. He thought how jolly it would be to jab a chisel (he didn’t know why that particular instrument came into his mind) into their necks. What beasts men were! He wished he could believe in hell so as to comfort himself with the thought of the horrible tortures which would be theirs. Mr. Jacobs turned his attention to treatment. He talked partly to the boy’s father and partly to the students. Philip put on his sock and laced his boot. At last the surgeon finished. But he seemed to have an afterthought and turned to Philip.

“You know, I think it might be worth your while to have an operation. Of course I couldn’t give you a normal foot, but I think I can do something. You might think about it, and when you want a holiday you can just come into the hospital for a bit.”

Philip had often asked himself whether anything could be done, but his distaste for any reference to the subject had prevented him from consulting any of the surgeons at the hospital. His reading told him that whatever might have been done when he was a small boy, and then treatment of talipes was not as skilful as in the present day, there was small chance now of any great benefit. Still it would be worth while if an operation made it possible for him to wear a more ordinary boot and to limp less. He remembered how passionately he had prayed for the miracle which his uncle had assured him was possible to omnipotence. He smiled ruefully.

“I was rather a simple soul in those days,” he thought.

Towards the end of February it was clear that Cronshaw was growing much worse. He was no longer able to get up. He lay in bed, insisting that the window should be closed always, and refused to see a doctor; he would take little nourishment, but demanded whiskey and cigarettes: Philip knew that he should have neither, but Cronshaw’s argument was unanswerable.

“I daresay they are killing me. I don’t care. You’ve warned me, you’ve done all that was necessary: I ignore your warning. Give me something to drink and be damned to you.”

Leonard Upjohn blew in two or three times a week, and there was something of the dead leaf in his appearance which made the word exactly descriptive of the manner of his appearance. He was a weedy-looking fellow of five-and-thirty, with long pale hair and a white face; he had the look of a man who lived too little in the open air. He wore a hat like a dissenting minister’s. Philip disliked him for his patronising manner and was bored by his fluent conversation. Leonard Upjohn liked to hear himself talk. He was not sensitive to the interest of his listeners, which is the first requisite of the good talker; and he never realised that he was telling people what they knew already. With measured words he told Philip what to think of Rodin, Albert Samain, and Caesar Franck. Philip’s charwoman only came in for an hour in the morning, and since Philip was obliged to be at the hospital all day Cronshaw was left much alone. Upjohn told Philip that he thought someone should remain with him, but did not offer to make it possible.

“It’s dreadful to think of that great poet alone. Why, he might die without a soul at hand.”

“I think he very probably will,” said Philip.

“How can you be so callous!”

“Why don’t you come and do your work here every day, and then you’d be near if he wanted anything?” asked Philip drily.

“I? My dear fellow, I can only work in the surroundings I’m used to, and besides I go out so much.”

Upjohn was also a little put out because Philip had brought Cronshaw to his own rooms.

“I wish you had left him in Soho,” he said, with a wave of his long, thin hands. “There was a touch of romance in that sordid attic. I could even bear it if it were Wapping or Shoreditch, but the respectability of Kennington! What a place for a poet to die!”

Cronshaw was often so ill-humoured that Philip could only keep his temper by remembering all the time that this irritability was a symptom of the disease. Upjohn came sometimes before Philip was in, and then Cronshaw would complain of him bitterly. Upjohn listened with complacency.

“The fact is that Carey has no sense of beauty,” he smiled. “He has a middle-class mind.”

He was very sarcastic to Philip, and Philip exercised a good deal of self-control in his dealings with him. But one evening he could not contain himself. He had had a hard day at the hospital and was tired out. Leonard Upjohn came to him, while he was making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen, and said that Cronshaw was complaining of Philip’s insistence that he should have a doctor.

“Don’t you realise that you’re enjoying a very rare, a very exquisite privilege? You ought to do everything in your power, surely, to show your sense of the greatness of your trust.”

“It’s a rare and exquisite privilege which I can ill afford,” said Philip.

Whenever there was any question of money, Leonard Upjohn assumed a slightly disdainful expression. His sensitive temperament was offended by the reference.

“There’s something fine in Cronshaw’s attitude, and you disturb it by your importunity. You should make allowances for the delicate imaginings which you cannot feel.”

Philip’s face darkened.

“Let us go in to Cronshaw,” he said frigidly.

The poet was lying on his back, reading a book, with a pipe in his mouth.

The air was musty; and the room, notwithstanding Philip’s tidying up, had

the bedraggled look which seemed to accompany Cronshaw wherever he went.

He took off his spectacles as they came in. Philip was in a towering rage.

“Upjohn tells me you’ve been complaining to him because I’ve urged you to have a doctor,” he said. “I want you to have a doctor, because you may die any day, and if you hadn’t been seen by anyone I shouldn’t be able to get a certificate. There’d have to be an inquest and I should be blamed for not calling a doctor in.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. I thought you wanted me to see a doctor for my sake and not for your own. I’ll see a doctor whenever you like.”

Philip did not answer, but gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. Cronshaw, watching him, gave a little chuckle.

“Don’t look so angry, my dear. I know very well you want to do everything you can for me. Let’s see your doctor, perhaps he can do something for me, and at any rate it’ll comfort you.” He turned his eyes to Upjohn. “You’re a damned fool, Leonard. Why d’you want to worry the boy? He has quite enough to do to put up with me. You’ll do nothing more for me than write a pretty article about me after my death. I know you.”

Next day Philip went to Dr. Tyrell. He felt that he was the sort of man to be interested by the story, and as soon as Tyrell was free of his day’s work he accompanied Philip to Kennington. He could only agree with what Philip had told him. The case was hopeless.

“I’ll take him into the hospital if you like,” he said. “He can have a small ward.”

“Nothing would induce him to come.”

“You know, he may die any minute, or else he may get another attack of pneumonia.”

Philip nodded. Dr. Tyrell made one or two suggestions, and promised to come again whenever Philip wanted him to. He left his address. When Philip went back to Cronshaw he found him quietly reading. He did not trouble to inquire what the doctor had said.

“Are you satisfied now, dear boy?” he asked.

“I suppose nothing will induce you to do any of the things Tyrell advised?”

“Nothing,” smiled Cronshaw.

LXXXV

About a fortnight after this Philip, going home one evening after his day’s work at the hospital, knocked at the door of Cronshaw’s room. He got no answer and walked in. Cronshaw was lying huddled up on one side, and Philip went up to the bed. He did not know whether Cronshaw was asleep or merely lay there in one of his uncontrollable fits of irritability. He was surprised to see that his mouth was open. He touched his shoulder. Philip gave a cry of dismay. He slipped his hand under Cronshaw’s shirt and felt his heart; he did not know what to do; helplessly, because he had heard of this being done, he held a looking-glass in front of his mouth. It startled him to be alone with Cronshaw. He had his hat and coat still on, and he ran down the stairs into the street; he hailed a cab and drove to Harley Street. Dr. Tyrell was in.

“I say, would you mind coming at once? I think Cronshaw’s dead.”

“If he is it’s not much good my coming, is it?”

“I should be awfully grateful if you would. I’ve got a cab at the door.

It’ll only take half an hour.”

Tyrell put on his hat. In the cab he asked him one or two questions.

“He seemed no worse than usual when I left this morning,” said Philip. “It gave me an awful shock when I went in just now. And the thought of his dying all alone…. D’you think he knew he was going to die?”

Philip remembered what Cronshaw had said. He wondered whether at that last moment he had been seized with the terror of death. Philip imagined himself in such a plight, knowing it was inevitable and with no one, not a soul, to give an encouraging word when the fear seized him.

“You’re rather upset,” said Dr. Tyrell.

He looked at him with his bright blue eyes. They were not unsympathetic.

When he saw Cronshaw, he said:

“He must have been dead for some hours. I should think he died in his sleep. They do sometimes.”

The body looked shrunk and ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr. Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he took out his watch.

“Well, I must be getting along. I’ll send the certificate round. I suppose you’ll communicate with the relatives.”

“I don’t think there are any,” said Philip.

“How about the funeral?”

“Oh, I’ll see to that.”

Dr. Tyrell gave Philip a glance. He wondered whether he ought to offer a couple of sovereigns towards it. He knew nothing of Philip’s circumstances; perhaps he could well afford the expense; Philip might think it impertinent if he made any suggestion.

“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

Philip and he went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn. Then he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety. They had always diverted him. The undertaker was a little fat Jew with curly black hair, long and greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a podgy finger. He received Philip with a peculiar manner formed by the mingling of his natural blatancy with the subdued air proper to his calling. He quickly saw that Philip was very helpless and promised to send round a woman at once to perform the needful offices. His suggestions for the funeral were very magnificent; and Philip felt ashamed of himself when the undertaker seemed to think his objections mean. It was horrible to haggle on such a matter, and finally Philip consented to an expensiveness which he could ill afford.

“I quite understand, sir,” said the undertaker, “you don’t want any show and that — I’m not a believer in ostentation myself, mind you — but you want it done gentlemanly-like. You leave it to me, I’ll do it as cheap as it can be done, ‘aving regard to what’s right and proper. I can’t say more than that, can I?”

Philip went home to eat his supper, and while he ate the woman came along to lay out the corpse. Presently a telegram arrived from Leonard Upjohn.

Shocked and grieved beyond measure. Regret cannot come tonight. Dining out. With you early tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. Upjohn.

In a little while the woman knocked at the door of the sitting-room.

“I’ve done now, sir. Will you come and look at ‘im and see it’s all right?”

Philip followed her. Cronshaw was lying on his back, with his eyes closed and his hands folded piously across his chest.

“You ought by rights to ‘ave a few flowers, sir.”

“I’ll get some tomorrow.”

She gave the body a glance of satisfaction. She had performed her job, and now she rolled down her sleeves, took off her apron, and put on her bonnet. Philip asked her how much he owed her.

“Well, sir, some give me two and sixpence and some give me five shillings.”

Philip was ashamed to give her less than the larger sum. She thanked him with just so much effusiveness as was seemly in presence of the grief he might be supposed to feel, and left him. Philip went back into his sitting-room, cleared away the remains of his supper, and sat down to read Walsham’s Surgery. He found it difficult. He felt singularly nervous. When there was a sound on the stairs he jumped, and his heart beat violently. That thing in the adjoining room, which had been a man and now was nothing, frightened him. The silence seemed alive, as if some mysterious movement were taking place within it; the presence of death weighed upon these rooms, unearthly and terrifying: Philip felt a sudden horror for what had once been his friend. He tried to force himself to read, but presently pushed away his book in despair. What troubled him was the absolute futility of the life which had just ended. It did not matter if Cronshaw was alive or dead. It would have been just as well if he had never lived. Philip thought of Cronshaw young; and it needed an effort of imagination to picture him slender, with a springing step, and with hair on his head, buoyant and hopeful. Philip’s rule of life, to follow one’s instincts with due regard to the policeman round the corner, had not acted very well there: it was because Cronshaw had done this that he had made such a lamentable failure of existence. It seemed that the instincts could not be trusted. Philip was puzzled, and he asked himself what rule of life was there, if that one was useless, and why people acted in one way rather than in another. They acted according to their emotions, but their emotions might be good or bad; it seemed just a chance whether they led to triumph or disaster. Life seemed an inextricable confusion. Men hurried hither and thither, urged by forces they knew not; and the purpose of it all escaped them; they seemed to hurry just for hurrying’s sake.

Next morning Leonard Upjohn appeared with a small wreath of laurel. He was pleased with his idea of crowning the dead poet with this; and attempted, notwithstanding Philip’s disapproving silence, to fix it on the bald head; but the wreath fitted grotesquely. It looked like the brim of a hat worn by a low comedian in a music-hall.

“I’ll put it over his heart instead,” said Upjohn.

“You’ve put it on his stomach,” remarked Philip.

Upjohn gave a thin smile.

“Only a poet knows where lies a poet’s heart,” he answered.

They went back into the sitting-room, and Philip told him what arrangements he had made for the funeral.

“I hoped you’ve spared no expense. I should like the hearse to be followed by a long string of empty coaches, and I should like the horses to wear tall nodding plumes, and there should be a vast number of mutes with long streamers on their hats. I like the thought of all those empty coaches.”

“As the cost of the funeral will apparently fall on me and I’m not over flush just now, I’ve tried to make it as moderate as possible.”

“But, my dear fellow, in that case, why didn’t you get him a pauper’s funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an unerring instinct for mediocrity.”

Philip flushed a little, but did not answer; and next day he and Upjohn followed the hearse in the one carriage which Philip had ordered. Lawson, unable to come, had sent a wreath; and Philip, so that the coffin should not seem too neglected, had bought a couple. On the way back the coachman whipped up his horses. Philip was dog-tired and presently went to sleep. He was awakened by Upjohn’s voice.

“It’s rather lucky the poems haven’t come out yet. I think we’d better hold them back a bit and I’ll write a preface. I began thinking of it during the drive to the cemetery. I believe I can do something rather good. Anyhow I’ll start with an article in The Saturday.”

Philip did not reply, and there was silence between them. At last Upjohn said:

“I daresay I’d be wiser not to whittle away my copy. I think I’ll do an article for one of the reviews, and then I can just print it afterwards as a preface.”

Philip kept his eye on the monthlies, and a few weeks later it appeared. The article made something of a stir, and extracts from it were printed in many of the papers. It was a very good article, vaguely biographical, for no one knew much of Cronshaw’s early life, but delicate, tender, and picturesque. Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn’s coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a flowering orchard. And the lack of sympathy, well-meaning but so tactless, which had taken the poet instead to the vulgar respectability of Kennington! Leonard Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained humour which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that outcast poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it reminded Leonard Upjohn of Christ among the Pharisees, and the analogy gave him opportunity for an exquisite passage. And then he told how a friend — his good taste did not suffer him more than to hint subtly who the friend was with such gracious fancies — had laid a laurel wreath on the dead poet’s heart; and the beautiful dead hands had seemed to rest with a voluptuous passion upon Apollo’s leaves, fragrant with the fragrance of art, and more green than jade brought by swart mariners from the manifold, inexplicable China. And, an admirable contrast, the article ended with a description of the middle-class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been buried like a prince or like a pauper. It was the crowning buffet, the final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things.

Leonard Upjohn had never written anything better. It was a miracle of charm, grace, and pity. He printed all Cronshaw’s best poems in the course of the article, so that when the volume appeared much of its point was gone; but he advanced his own position a good deal. He was thenceforth a critic to be reckoned with. He had seemed before a little aloof; but there was a warm humanity about this article which was infinitely attractive.

LXXXVI

In the spring Philip, having finished his dressing in the out-patients’ department, became an in-patients’ clerk. This appointment lasted six months. The clerk spent every morning in the wards, first in the men’s, then in the women’s, with the house-physician; he wrote up cases, made tests, and passed the time of day with the nurses. On two afternoons a week the physician in charge went round with a little knot of students, examined the cases, and dispensed information. The work had not the excitement, the constant change, the intimate contact with reality, of the work in the out-patients’ department; but Philip picked up a good deal of knowledge. He got on very well with the patients, and he was a little flattered at the pleasure they showed in his attendance on them. He was not conscious of any deep sympathy in their sufferings, but he liked them; and because he put on no airs he was more popular with them than others of the clerks. He was pleasant, encouraging, and friendly. Like everyone connected with hospitals he found that male patients were more easy to get on with than female. The women were often querulous and ill-tempered. They complained bitterly of the hard-worked nurses, who did not show them the attention they thought their right; and they were troublesome, ungrateful, and rude.

Presently Philip was fortunate enough to make a friend. One morning the house-physician gave him a new case, a man; and, seating himself at the bedside, Philip proceeded to write down particulars on the ‘letter.’ He noticed on looking at this that the patient was described as a journalist: his name was Thorpe Athelny, an unusual one for a hospital patient, and his age was forty-eight. He was suffering from a sharp attack of jaundice, and had been taken into the ward on account of obscure symptoms which it seemed necessary to watch. He answered the various questions which it was Philip’s duty to ask him in a pleasant, educated voice. Since he was lying in bed it was difficult to tell if he was short or tall, but his small head and small hands suggested that he was a man of less than average height. Philip had the habit of looking at people’s hands, and Athelny’s astonished him: they were very small, with long, tapering fingers and beautiful, rosy finger-nails; they were very smooth and except for the jaundice would have been of a surprising whiteness. The patient kept them outside the bed-clothes, one of them slightly spread out, the second and third fingers together, and, while he spoke to Philip, seemed to contemplate them with satisfaction. With a twinkle in his eyes Philip glanced at the man’s face. Notwithstanding the yellowness it was distinguished; he had blue eyes, a nose of an imposing boldness, hooked, aggressive but not clumsy, and a small beard, pointed and gray: he was rather bald, but his hair had evidently been quite fine, curling prettily, and he still wore it long.

“I see you’re a journalist,” said Philip. “What papers d’you write for?”

“I write for all the papers. You cannot open a paper without seeing some of my writing.” There was one by the side of the bed and reaching for it he pointed out an advertisement. In large letters was the name of a firm well-known to Philip, Lynn and Sedley, Regent Street, London; and below, in type smaller but still of some magnitude, was the dogmatic statement: Procrastination is the Thief of Time. Then a question, startling because of its reasonableness: Why not order today? There was a repetition, in large letters, like the hammering of conscience on a murderer’s heart: Why not? Then, boldly: Thousands of pairs of gloves from the leading markets of the world at astounding prices. Thousands of pairs of stockings from the most reliable manufacturers of the universe at sensational reductions. Finally the question recurred, but flung now like a challenging gauntlet in the lists: Why not order today?

“I’m the press representative of Lynn and Sedley.” He gave a little wave of his beautiful hand. “To what base uses…”

Philip went on asking the regulation questions, some a mere matter of routine, others artfully devised to lead the patient to discover things which he might be expected to desire to conceal.

“Have you ever lived abroad?” asked Philip.

“I was in Spain for eleven years.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was secretary of the English water company at Toledo.”

Philip remembered that Clutton had spent some months in Toledo, and the journalist’s answer made him look at him with more interest; but he felt it would be improper to show this: it was necessary to preserve the distance between the hospital patient and the staff. When he had finished his examination he went on to other beds.

Thorpe Athelny’s illness was not grave, and, though remaining very yellow, he soon felt much better: he stayed in bed only because the physician thought he should be kept under observation till certain reactions became normal. One day, on entering the ward, Philip noticed that Athelny, pencil in hand, was reading a book. He put it down when Philip came to his bed.

“May I see what you’re reading?” asked Philip, who could never pass a book without looking at it.

Philip took it up and saw that it was a volume of Spanish verse, the poems of San Juan de la Cruz, and as he opened it a sheet of paper fell out. Philip picked it up and noticed that verse was written upon it.

“You’re not going to tell me you’ve been occupying your leisure in writing poetry? That’s a most improper proceeding in a hospital patient.”

“I was trying to do some translations. D’you know Spanish?”

“No.”

“Well, you know all about San Juan de la Cruz, don’t you?”

“I don’t indeed.”

“He was one of the Spanish mystics. He’s one of the best poets they’ve ever had. I thought it would be worth while translating him into English.”

“May I look at your translation?”

“It’s very rough,” said Athelny, but he gave it to Philip with an alacrity which suggested that he was eager for him to read it.

It was written in pencil, in a fine but very peculiar handwriting, which was hard to read: it was just like black letter.

“Doesn’t it take you an awful time to write like that? It’s wonderful.”

“I don’t know why handwriting shouldn’t be beautiful.” Philip read the first verse:

In an obscure night

With anxious love inflamed

O happy lot!

Forth unobserved I went,

My house being now at rest…

Philip looked curiously at Thorpe Athelny. He did not know whether he felt a little shy with him or was attracted by him. He was conscious that his manner had been slightly patronising, and he flushed as it struck him that Athelny might have thought him ridiculous.

“What an unusual name you’ve got,” he remarked, for something to say.

“It’s a very old Yorkshire name. Once it took the head of my family a day’s hard riding to make the circuit of his estates, but the mighty are fallen. Fast women and slow horses.”

He was short-sighted and when he spoke looked at you with a peculiar intensity. He took up his volume of poetry.

“You should read Spanish,” he said. “It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian, Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders, but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in flood.”

His grandiloquence amused Philip, but he was sensitive to rhetoric; and he listened with pleasure while Athelny, with picturesque expressions and the fire of a real enthusiasm, described to him the rich delight of reading Don Quixote in the original and the music, romantic, limpid, passionate, of the enchanting Calderon.

“I must get on with my work,” said Philip presently.

“Oh, forgive me, I forgot. I will tell my wife to bring me a photograph of Toledo, and I will show it you. Come and talk to me when you have the chance. You don’t know what a pleasure it gives me.”

During the next few days, in moments snatched whenever there was opportunity, Philip’s acquaintance with the journalist increased. Thorpe Athelny was a good talker. He did not say brilliant things, but he talked inspiringly, with an eager vividness which fired the imagination; Philip, living so much in a world of make-believe, found his fancy teeming with new pictures. Athelny had very good manners. He knew much more than Philip, both of the world and of books; he was a much older man; and the readiness of his conversation gave him a certain superiority; but he was in the hospital a recipient of charity, subject to strict rules; and he held himself between the two positions with ease and humour. Once Philip asked him why he had come to the hospital.

“Oh, my principle is to profit by all the benefits that society provides. I take advantage of the age I live in. When I’m ill I get myself patched up in a hospital and I have no false shame, and I send my children to be educated at the board-school.”

“Do you really?” said Philip.

“And a capital education they get too, much better than I got at Winchester. How else do you think I could educate them at all? I’ve got nine. You must come and see them all when I get home again. Will you?”

“I’d like to very much,” said Philip.

LXXXVII

Ten days later Thorpe Athelny was well enough to leave the hospital. He gave Philip his address, and Philip promised to dine with him at one o’clock on the following Sunday. Athelny had told him that he lived in a house built by Inigo Jones; he had raved, as he raved over everything, over the balustrade of old oak; and when he came down to open the door for Philip he made him at once admire the elegant carving of the lintel. It was a shabby house, badly needing a coat of paint, but with the dignity of its period, in a little street between Chancery Lane and Holborn, which had once been fashionable but was now little better than a slum: there was a plan to pull it down in order to put up handsome offices; meanwhile the rents were small, and Athelny was able to get the two upper floors at a price which suited his income. Philip had not seen him up before and was surprised at his small size; he was not more than five feet and five inches high. He was dressed fantastically in blue linen trousers of the sort worn by working men in France, and a very old brown velvet coat; he wore a bright red sash round his waist, a low collar, and for tie a flowing bow of the kind used by the comic Frenchman in the pages of Punch. He greeted Philip with enthusiasm. He began talking at once of the house and passed his hand lovingly over the balusters.

“Look at it, feel it, it’s like silk. What a miracle of grace! And in five years the house-breaker will sell it for firewood.”

He insisted on taking Philip into a room on the first floor, where a man in shirt sleeves, a blousy woman, and three children were having their Sunday dinner.

“I’ve just brought this gentleman in to show him your ceiling. Did you ever see anything so wonderful? How are you, Mrs. Hodgson? This is Mr. Carey, who looked after me when I was in the hospital.”

“Come in, sir,” said the man. “Any friend of Mr. Athelny’s is welcome. Mr. Athelny shows the ceiling to all his friends. And it don’t matter what we’re doing, if we’re in bed or if I’m ‘aving a wash, in ‘e comes.”

Philip could see that they looked upon Athelny as a little queer; but they liked him none the less and they listened open-mouthed while he discoursed with his impetuous fluency on the beauty of the seventeenth-century ceiling.

“What a crime to pull this down, eh, Hodgson? You’re an influential citizen, why don’t you write to the papers and protest?”

The man in shirt sleeves gave a laugh and said to Philip:

“Mr. Athelny will ‘ave his little joke. They do say these ‘ouses are that insanitory, it’s not safe to live in them.”

“Sanitation be damned, give me art,” cried Athelny. “I’ve got nine children and they thrive on bad drains. No, no, I’m not going to take any risk. None of your new-fangled notions for me! When I move from here I’m going to make sure the drains are bad before I take anything.”

There was a knock at the door, and a little fair-haired girl opened it.

“Daddy, mummy says, do stop talking and come and eat your dinner.”

“This is my third daughter,” said Athelny, pointing to her with a dramatic forefinger. “She is called Maria del Pilar, but she answers more willingly to the name of Jane. Jane, your nose wants blowing.”

“I haven’t got a hanky, daddy.”

“Tut, tut, child,” he answered, as he produced a vast, brilliant bandanna, “what do you suppose the Almighty gave you fingers for?”

They went upstairs, and Philip was taken into a room with walls panelled in dark oak. In the middle was a narrow table of teak on trestle legs, with two supporting bars of iron, of the kind called in Spain mesa de hieraje. They were to dine there, for two places were laid, and there were two large arm-chairs, with broad flat arms of oak and leathern backs, and leathern seats. They were severe, elegant, and uncomfortable. The only other piece of furniture was a bargueno, elaborately ornamented with gilt iron-work, on a stand of ecclesiastical design roughly but very finely carved. There stood on this two or three lustre plates, much broken but rich in colour; and on the walls were old masters of the Spanish school in beautiful though dilapidated frames: though gruesome in subject, ruined by age and bad treatment, and second-rate in their conception, they had a glow of passion. There was nothing in the room of any value, but the effect was lovely. It was magnificent and yet austere. Philip felt that it offered the very spirit of old Spain. Athelny was in the middle of showing him the inside of the bargueno, with its beautiful ornamentation and secret drawers, when a tall girl, with two plaits of bright brown hair hanging down her back, came in.

“Mother says dinner’s ready and waiting and I’m to bring it in as soon as you sit down.”

“Come and shake hands with Mr. Carey, Sally.” He turned to Philip. “Isn’t she enormous? She’s my eldest. How old are you, Sally?”

“Fifteen, father, come next June.”

“I christened her Maria del Sol, because she was my first child and I dedicated her to the glorious sun of Castile; but her mother calls her Sally and her brother Pudding-Face.”

The girl smiled shyly, she had even, white teeth, and blushed. She was well set-up, tall for her age, with pleasant gray eyes and a broad forehead. She had red cheeks.

“Go and tell your mother to come in and shake hands with Mr. Carey before he sits down.”

“Mother says she’ll come in after dinner. She hasn’t washed herself yet.”

“Then we’ll go in and see her ourselves. He mustn’t eat the Yorkshire pudding till he’s shaken the hand that made it.”

Philip followed his host into the kitchen. It was small and much overcrowded. There had been a lot of noise, but it stopped as soon as the stranger entered. There was a large table in the middle and round it, eager for dinner, were seated Athelny’s children. A woman was standing at the oven, taking out baked potatoes one by one.

“Here’s Mr. Carey, Betty,” said Athelny.

“Fancy bringing him in here. What will he think?”

She wore a dirty apron, and the sleeves of her cotton dress were turned up above her elbows; she had curling pins in her hair. Mrs. Athelny was a large woman, a good three inches taller than her husband, fair, with blue eyes and a kindly expression; she had been a handsome creature, but advancing years and the bearing of many children had made her fat and blousy; her blue eyes had become pale, her skin was coarse and red, the colour had gone out of her hair. She straightened herself, wiped her hand on her apron, and held it out.

“You’re welcome, sir,” she said, in a slow voice, with an accent that seemed oddly familiar to Philip. “Athelny said you was very kind to him in the ‘orspital.”

“Now you must be introduced to the live stock,” said Athelny. “That is Thorpe,” he pointed to a chubby boy with curly hair, “he is my eldest son, heir to the title, estates, and responsibilities of the family. There is Athelstan, Harold, Edward.” He pointed with his forefinger to three smaller boys, all rosy, healthy, and smiling, though when they felt Philip’s smiling eyes upon them they looked shyly down at their plates. “Now the girls in order: Maria del Sol…”

“Pudding-Face,” said one of the small boys.

“Your sense of humour is rudimentary, my son. Maria de los Mercedes, Maria del Pilar, Maria de la Concepcion, Maria del Rosario.”

“I call them Sally, Molly, Connie, Rosie, and Jane,” said Mrs. Athelny.

“Now, Athelny, you go into your own room and I’ll send you your dinner.

I’ll let the children come in afterwards for a bit when I’ve washed them.”

“My dear, if I’d had the naming of you I should have called you Maria of the Soapsuds. You’re always torturing these wretched brats with soap.”

“You go first, Mr. Carey, or I shall never get him to sit down and eat his dinner.”

Athelny and Philip installed themselves in the great monkish chairs, and Sally brought them in two plates of beef, Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes, and cabbage. Athelny took sixpence out of his pocket and sent her for a jug of beer.

“I hope you didn’t have the table laid here on my account,” said Philip.

“I should have been quite happy to eat with the children.”

“Oh no, I always have my meals by myself. I like these antique customs. I don’t think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I’m sure it’s very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas.”

Both host and guest ate with a hearty appetite.

“Did you ever taste such Yorkshire pudding? No one can make it like my wife. That’s the advantage of not marrying a lady. You noticed she wasn’t a lady, didn’t you?”

It was an awkward question, and Philip did not know how to answer it.

“I never thought about it,” he said lamely.

Athelny laughed. He had a peculiarly joyous laugh.

“No, she’s not a lady, nor anything like it. Her father was a farmer, and she’s never bothered about aitches in her life. We’ve had twelve children and nine of them are alive. I tell her it’s about time she stopped, but she’s an obstinate woman, she’s got into the habit of it now, and I don’t believe she’ll be satisfied till she’s had twenty.”

At that moment Sally came in with the beer, and, having poured out a glass for Philip, went to the other side of the table to pour some out for her father. He put his hand round her waist.

“Did you ever see such a handsome, strapping girl? Only fifteen and she might be twenty. Look at her cheeks. She’s never had a day’s illness in her life. It’ll be a lucky man who marries her, won’t it, Sally?”

Sally listened to all this with a slight, slow smile, not much embarrassed, for she was accustomed to her father’s outbursts, but with an easy modesty which was very attractive.

“Don’t let your dinner get cold, father,” she said, drawing herself away from his arm. “You’ll call when you’re ready for your pudding, won’t you?”

They were left alone, and Athelny lifted the pewter tankard to his lips.

He drank long and deep.

“My word, is there anything better than English beer?” he said. “Let us thank God for simple pleasures, roast beef and rice pudding, a good appetite and beer. I was married to a lady once. My God! Don’t marry a lady, my boy.”

Philip laughed. He was exhilarated by the scene, the funny little man in his odd clothes, the panelled room and the Spanish furniture, the English fare: the whole thing had an exquisite incongruity.

“You laugh, my boy, you can’t imagine marrying beneath you. You want a wife who’s an intellectual equal. Your head is crammed full of ideas of comradeship. Stuff and nonsense, my boy! A man doesn’t want to talk politics to his wife, and what do you think I care for Betty’s views upon the Differential Calculus? A man wants a wife who can cook his dinner and look after his children. I’ve tried both and I know. Let’s have the pudding in.”

He clapped his hands and presently Sally came. When she took away the plates, Philip wanted to get up and help her, but Athelny stopped him.

“Let her alone, my boy. She doesn’t want you to fuss about, do you, Sally?

And she won’t think it rude of you to sit still while she waits upon you.

She don’t care a damn for chivalry, do you, Sally?”

“No, father,” answered Sally demurely.

“Do you know what I’m talking about, Sally?”

“No, father. But you know mother doesn’t like you to swear.”

Athelny laughed boisterously. Sally brought them plates of rice pudding, rich, creamy, and luscious. Athelny attacked his with gusto.

“One of the rules of this house is that Sunday dinner should never alter. It is a ritual. Roast beef and rice pudding for fifty Sundays in the year. On Easter Sunday lamb and green peas, and at Michaelmas roast goose and apple sauce. Thus we preserve the traditions of our people. When Sally marries she will forget many of the wise things I have taught her, but she will never forget that if you want to be good and happy you must eat on Sundays roast beef and rice pudding.”

“You’ll call when you’re ready for cheese,” said Sally impassively.

“D’you know the legend of the halcyon?” said Athelny: Philip was growing used to his rapid leaping from one subject to another. “When the kingfisher, flying over the sea, is exhausted, his mate places herself beneath him and bears him along upon her stronger wings. That is what a man wants in a wife, the halcyon. I lived with my first wife for three years. She was a lady, she had fifteen hundred a year, and we used to give nice little dinner parties in our little red brick house in Kensington. She was a charming woman; they all said so, the barristers and their wives who dined with us, and the literary stockbrokers, and the budding politicians; oh, she was a charming woman. She made me go to church in a silk hat and a frock coat, she took me to classical concerts, and she was very fond of lectures on Sunday afternoon; and she sat down to breakfast every morning at eight-thirty, and if I was late breakfast was cold; and she read the right books, admired the right pictures, and adored the right music. My God, how that woman bored me! She is charming still, and she lives in the little red brick house in Kensington, with Morris papers and Whistler’s etchings on the walls, and gives the same nice little dinner parties, with veal creams and ices from Gunter’s, as she did twenty years ago.”

Philip did not ask by what means the ill-matched couple had separated, but

Athelny told him.

“Betty’s not my wife, you know; my wife wouldn’t divorce me. The children are bastards, every jack one of them, and are they any the worse for that? Betty was one of the maids in the little red brick house in Kensington. Four or five years ago I was on my uppers, and I had seven children, and I went to my wife and asked her to help me. She said she’d make me an allowance if I’d give Betty up and go abroad. Can you see me giving Betty up? We starved for a while instead. My wife said I loved the gutter. I’ve degenerated; I’ve come down in the world; I earn three pounds a week as press agent to a linendraper, and every day I thank God that I’m not in the little red brick house in Kensington.”

Sally brought in Cheddar cheese, and Athelny went on with his fluent conversation.

“It’s the greatest mistake in the world to think that one needs money to bring up a family. You need money to make them gentlemen and ladies, but I don’t want my children to be ladies and gentlemen. Sally’s going to earn her living in another year. She’s to be apprenticed to a dressmaker, aren’t you, Sally? And the boys are going to serve their country. I want them all to go into the Navy; it’s a jolly life and a healthy life, good food, good pay, and a pension to end their days on.”

Philip lit his pipe. Athelny smoked cigarettes of Havana tobacco, which he rolled himself. Sally cleared away. Philip was reserved, and it embarrassed him to be the recipient of so many confidences. Athelny, with his powerful voice in the diminutive body, with his bombast, with his foreign look, with his emphasis, was an astonishing creature. He reminded Philip a good deal of Cronshaw. He appeared to have the same independence of thought, the same bohemianism, but he had an infinitely more vivacious temperament; his mind was coarser, and he had not that interest in the abstract which made Cronshaw’s conversation so captivating. Athelny was very proud of the county family to which he belonged; he showed Philip photographs of an Elizabethan mansion, and told him:

“The Athelnys have lived there for seven centuries, my boy. Ah, if you saw the chimney-pieces and the ceilings!”

There was a cupboard in the wainscoting and from this he took a family tree. He showed it to Philip with child-like satisfaction. It was indeed imposing.

“You see how the family names recur, Thorpe, Athelstan, Harold, Edward;

I’ve used the family names for my sons. And the girls, you see, I’ve given

Spanish names to.”

An uneasy feeling came to Philip that possibly the whole story was an elaborate imposture, not told with any base motive, but merely from a wish to impress, startle, and amaze. Athelny had told him that he was at Winchester; but Philip, sensitive to differences of manner, did not feel that his host had the characteristics of a man educated at a great public school. While he pointed out the great alliances which his ancestors had formed, Philip amused himself by wondering whether Athelny was not the son of some tradesman in Winchester, auctioneer or coal-merchant, and whether a similarity of surname was not his only connection with the ancient family whose tree he was displaying.

LXXXVIII

There was a knock at the door and a troop of children came in. They were clean and tidy, now. Their faces shone with soap, and their hair was plastered down; they were going to Sunday school under Sally’s charge. Athelny joked with them in his dramatic, exuberant fashion, and you could see that he was devoted to them all. His pride in their good health and their good looks was touching. Philip felt that they were a little shy in his presence, and when their father sent them off they fled from the room in evident relief. In a few minutes Mrs. Athelny appeared. She had taken her hair out of the curling pins and now wore an elaborate fringe. She had on a plain black dress, a hat with cheap flowers, and was forcing her hands, red and coarse from much work, into black kid gloves.

“I’m going to church, Athelny,” she said. “There’s nothing you’ll be wanting, is there?”

“Only your prayers, my Betty.”

“They won’t do you much good, you’re too far gone for that,” she smiled.

Then, turning to Philip, she drawled: “I can’t get him to go to church.

He’s no better than an atheist.”

“Doesn’t she look like Rubens’ second wife?” cried Athelny. “Wouldn’t she look splendid in a seventeenth-century costume? That’s the sort of wife to marry, my boy. Look at her.”

“I believe you’d talk the hind leg off a donkey, Athelny,” she answered calmly.

She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before she went she turned to

Philip with a kindly, slightly embarrassed smile.

“You’ll stay to tea, won’t you? Athelny likes someone to talk to, and it’s not often he gets anybody who’s clever enough.”

“Of course he’ll stay to tea,” said Athelny. Then when his wife had gone: “I make a point of the children going to Sunday school, and I like Betty to go to church. I think women ought to be religious. I don’t believe myself, but I like women and children to.”

Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a little shocked by this airy attitude.

“But how can you look on while your children are being taught things which you don’t think are true?”

“If they’re beautiful I don’t much mind if they’re not true. It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she’s hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you haven’t it doesn’t matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer.”

This was contrary to all Philip’s ideas. He still looked upon Christianity as a degrading bondage that must be cast away at any cost; it was connected subconsciously in his mind with the dreary services in the cathedral at Tercanbury, and the long hours of boredom in the cold church at Blackstable; and the morality of which Athelny spoke was to him no more than a part of the religion which a halting intelligence preserved, when it had laid aside the beliefs which alone made it reasonable. But while he was meditating a reply Athelny, more interested in hearing himself speak than in discussion, broke into a tirade upon Roman Catholicism. For him it was an essential part of Spain; and Spain meant much to him, because he had escaped to it from the conventionality which during his married life he had found so irksome. With large gestures and in the emphatic tone which made what he said so striking, Athelny described to Philip the Spanish cathedrals with their vast dark spaces, the massive gold of the altar-pieces, and the sumptuous iron-work, gilt and faded, the air laden with incense, the silence: Philip almost saw the Canons in their short surplices of lawn, the acolytes in red, passing from the sacristy to the choir; he almost heard the monotonous chanting of vespers. The names which Athelny mentioned, Avila, Tarragona, Saragossa, Segovia, Cordova, were like trumpets in his heart. He seemed to see the great gray piles of granite set in old Spanish towns amid a landscape tawny, wild, and windswept.

“I’ve always thought I should love to go to Seville,” he said casually, when Athelny, with one hand dramatically uplifted, paused for a moment.

“Seville!” cried Athelny. “No, no, don’t go there. Seville: it brings to the mind girls dancing with castanets, singing in gardens by the Guadalquivir, bull-fights, orange-blossom, mantillas, mantones de Manila. It is the Spain of comic opera and Montmartre. Its facile charm can offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which is superficial. Theophile Gautier got out of Seville all that it has to offer. We who come after him can only repeat his sensations. He put large fat hands on the obvious and there is nothing but the obvious there; and it is all finger-marked and frayed. Murillo is its painter.”

Athelny got up from his chair, walked over to the Spanish cabinet, let down the front with its great gilt hinges and gorgeous lock, and displayed a series of little drawers. He took out a bundle of photographs.

“Do you know El Greco?” he asked.

“Oh, I remember one of the men in Paris was awfully impressed by him.”

“El Greco was the painter of Toledo. Betty couldn’t find the photograph I wanted to show you. It’s a picture that El Greco painted of the city he loved, and it’s truer than any photograph. Come and sit at the table.”

Philip dragged his chair forward, and Athelny set the photograph before him. He looked at it curiously, for a long time, in silence. He stretched out his hand for other photographs, and Athelny passed them to him. He had never before seen the work of that enigmatic master; and at the first glance he was bothered by the arbitrary drawing: the figures were extraordinarily elongated; the heads were very small; the attitudes were extravagant. This was not realism, and yet, and yet even in the photographs you had the impression of a troubling reality. Athelny was describing eagerly, with vivid phrases, but Philip only heard vaguely what he said. He was puzzled. He was curiously moved. These pictures seemed to offer some meaning to him, but he did not know what the meaning was. There were portraits of men with large, melancholy eyes which seemed to say you knew not what; there were long monks in the Franciscan habit or in the Dominican, with distraught faces, making gestures whose sense escaped you; there was an Assumption of the Virgin; there was a Crucifixion in which the painter by some magic of feeling had been able to suggest that the flesh of Christ’s dead body was not human flesh only but divine; and there was an Ascension in which the Saviour seemed to surge up towards the empyrean and yet to stand upon the air as steadily as though it were solid ground: the uplifted arms of the Apostles, the sweep of their draperies, their ecstatic gestures, gave an impression of exultation and of holy joy. The background of nearly all was the sky by night, the dark night of the soul, with wild clouds swept by strange winds of hell and lit luridly by an uneasy moon.

“I’ve seen that sky in Toledo over and over again,” said Athelny. “I have an idea that when first El Greco came to the city it was by such a night, and it made so vehement an impression upon him that he could never get away from it.”

Philip remembered how Clutton had been affected by this strange master, whose work he now saw for the first time. He thought that Clutton was the most interesting of all the people he had known in Paris. His sardonic manner, his hostile aloofness, had made it difficult to know him; but it seemed to Philip, looking back, that there had been in him a tragic force, which sought vainly to express itself in painting. He was a man of unusual character, mystical after the fashion of a time that had no leaning to mysticism, who was impatient with life because he found himself unable to say the things which the obscure impulses of his heart suggested. His intellect was not fashioned to the uses of the spirit. It was not surprising that he felt a deep sympathy with the Greek who had devised a new technique to express the yearnings of his soul. Philip looked again at the series of portraits of Spanish gentlemen, with ruffles and pointed beards, their faces pale against the sober black of their clothes and the darkness of the background. El Greco was the painter of the soul; and these gentlemen, wan and wasted, not by exhaustion but by restraint, with their tortured minds, seem to walk unaware of the beauty of the world; for their eyes look only in their hearts, and they are dazzled by the glory of the unseen. No painter has shown more pitilessly that the world is but a place of passage. The souls of the men he painted speak their strange longings through their eyes: their senses are miraculously acute, not for sounds and odours and colour, but for the very subtle sensations of the soul. The noble walks with the monkish heart within him, and his eyes see things which saints in their cells see too, and he is unastounded. His lips are not lips that smile.

Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of Toledo, which seemed to him the most arresting picture of them all. He could not take his eyes off it. He felt strangely that he was on the threshold of some new discovery in life. He was tremulous with a sense of adventure. He thought for an instant of the love that had consumed him: love seemed very trivial beside the excitement which now leaped in his heart. The picture he looked at was a long one, with houses crowded upon a hill; in one corner a boy was holding a large map of the town; in another was a classical figure representing the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin surrounded by angels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip’s notion, for he had lived in circles that worshipped exact realism; and yet here again, strangely to himself, he felt a reality greater than any achieved by the masters in whose steps humbly he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the representation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo came to look at the picture they recognised their houses. The painter had painted exactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit. There was something unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soul seen by a wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on a green hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was surrounded by massive walls and bastions to be stormed by no machines or engines of man’s invention, but by prayer and fasting, by contrite sighs and by mortifications of the flesh. It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houses were made of no stone known to masons, there was something terrifying in their aspect, and you did not know what men might live in them. You might walk through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, and yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered like one who steps out of the light into darkness; the soul walked naked to and fro, knowing the unknowable, and conscious strangely of experience, intimate but inexpressible, of the absolute. And without surprise, in that blue sky, real with a reality that not the eye but the soul confesses, with its rack of light clouds driven by strange breezes, like the cries and the sighs of lost souls, you saw the Blessed Virgin with a gown of red and a cloak of blue, surrounded by winged angels. Philip felt that the inhabitants of that city would have seen the apparition without astonishment, reverent and thankful, and have gone their ways.

Athelny spoke of the mystical writers of Spain, of Teresa de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon; in all of them was that passion for the unseen which Philip felt in the pictures of El Greco: they seemed to have the power to touch the incorporeal and see the invisible. They were Spaniards of their age, in whom were tremulous all the mighty exploits of a great nation: their fancies were rich with the glories of America and the green islands of the Caribbean Sea; in their veins was the power that had come from age-long battling with the Moor; they were proud, for they were masters of the world; and they felt in themselves the wide distances, the tawny wastes, the snow-capped mountains of Castile, the sunshine and the blue sky, and the flowering plains of Andalusia. Life was passionate and manifold, and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearning for something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; and they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable. Athelny was not displeased to find someone to whom he could read the translations with which for some time he had amused his leisure; and in his fine, vibrating voice he recited the canticle of the Soul and Christ her lover, the lovely poem which begins with the words en una noche oscura, and the noche serena of Fray Luis de Leon. He had translated them quite simply, not without skill, and he had found words which at all events suggested the rough-hewn grandeur of the original. The pictures of El Greco explained them, and they explained the pictures.

Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism. He had always had a passion for life, and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows. For Philip his type was Hayward, fair, languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours of the street. It was in reaction from what Hayward represented that Philip clamoured for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, did not offend him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he rubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty, selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had learned that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth: the search after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny of prettiness?

But here he seemed to divine something new. He had been coming to it, all hesitating, for some time, but only now was conscious of the fact; he felt himself on the brink of a discovery. He felt vaguely that here was something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness; it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity, ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by the more vivid light in which they were seen. He seemed to see things more profoundly through the grave eyes of those dead noblemen of Castile; and the gestures of the saints, which at first had seemed wild and distorted, appeared to have some mysterious significance. But he could not tell what that significance was. It was like a message which it was very important for him to receive, but it was given him in an unknown tongue, and he could not understand. He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.

LXXXIX

The conversation between Philip and Athelny was broken into by a clatter up the stairs. Athelny opened the door for the children coming back from Sunday school, and with laughter and shouting they came in. Gaily he asked them what they had learned. Sally appeared for a moment, with instructions from her mother that father was to amuse the children while she got tea ready; and Athelny began to tell them one of Hans Andersen’s stories. They were not shy children, and they quickly came to the conclusion that Philip was not formidable. Jane came and stood by him and presently settled herself on his knees. It was the first time that Philip in his lonely life had been present in a family circle: his eyes smiled as they rested on the fair children engrossed in the fairy tale. The life of his new friend, eccentric as it appeared at first glance, seemed now to have the beauty of perfect naturalness. Sally came in once more.

“Now then, children, tea’s ready,” she said.

Jane slipped off Philip’s knees, and they all went back to the kitchen.

Sally began to lay the cloth on the long Spanish table.

“Mother says, shall she come and have tea with you?” she asked. “I can give the children their tea.”

“Tell your mother that we shall be proud and honoured if she will favour us with her company,” said Athelny.

It seemed to Philip that he could never say anything without an oratorical flourish.

“Then I’ll lay for her,” said Sally.

She came back again in a moment with a tray on which were a cottage loaf, a slab of butter, and a jar of strawberry jam. While she placed the things on the table her father chaffed her. He said it was quite time she was walking out; he told Philip that she was very proud, and would have nothing to do with aspirants to that honour who lined up at the door, two by two, outside the Sunday school and craved the honour of escorting her home.

“You do talk, father,” said Sally, with her slow, good-natured smile.

“You wouldn’t think to look at her that a tailor’s assistant has enlisted in the army because she would not say how d’you do to him and an electrical engineer, an electrical engineer, mind you, has taken to drink because she refused to share her hymn-book with him in church. I shudder to think what will happen when she puts her hair up.”

“Mother’ll bring the tea along herself,” said Sally.

“Sally never pays any attention to me,” laughed Athelny, looking at her with fond, proud eyes. “She goes about her business indifferent to wars, revolutions, and cataclysms. What a wife she’ll make to an honest man!”

Mrs. Athelny brought in the tea. She sat down and proceeded to cut bread and butter. It amused Philip to see that she treated her husband as though he were a child. She spread jam for him and cut up the bread and butter into convenient slices for him to eat. She had taken off her hat; and in her Sunday dress, which seemed a little tight for her, she looked like one of the farmers’ wives whom Philip used to call on sometimes with his uncle when he was a small boy. Then he knew why the sound of her voice was familiar to him. She spoke just like the people round Blackstable.

“What part of the country d’you come from?” he asked her.

“I’m a Kentish woman. I come from Ferne.”

“I thought as much. My uncle’s Vicar of Blackstable.”

“That’s a funny thing now,” she said. “I was wondering in Church just now whether you was any connection of Mr. Carey. Many’s the time I’ve seen ‘im. A cousin of mine married Mr. Barker of Roxley Farm, over by Blackstable Church, and I used to go and stay there often when I was a girl. Isn’t that a funny thing now?”

She looked at him with a new interest, and a brightness came into her faded eyes. She asked him whether he knew Ferne. It was a pretty village about ten miles across country from Blackstable, and the Vicar had come over sometimes to Blackstable for the harvest thanksgiving. She mentioned names of various farmers in the neighbourhood. She was delighted to talk again of the country in which her youth was spent, and it was a pleasure to her to recall scenes and people that had remained in her memory with the tenacity peculiar to her class. It gave Philip a queer sensation too. A breath of the country-side seemed to be wafted into that panelled room in the middle of London. He seemed to see the fat Kentish fields with their stately elms; and his nostrils dilated with the scent of the air; it is laden with the salt of the North Sea, and that makes it keen and sharp.

Philip did not leave the Athelnys’ till ten o’clock. The children came in to say good-night at eight and quite naturally put up their faces for Philip to kiss. His heart went out to them. Sally only held out her hand.

“Sally never kisses gentlemen till she’s seen them twice,” said her father.

“You must ask me again then,” said Philip.

“You mustn’t take any notice of what father says,” remarked Sally, with a smile.

“She’s a most self-possessed young woman,” added her parent.

They had supper of bread and cheese and beer, while Mrs. Athelny was putting the children to bed; and when Philip went into the kitchen to bid her good-night (she had been sitting there, resting herself and reading The Weekly Despatch) she invited him cordially to come again.

“There’s always a good dinner on Sundays so long as Athelny’s in work,” she said, “and it’s a charity to come and talk to him.”

On the following Saturday Philip received a postcard from Athelny saying that they were expecting him to dinner next day; but fearing their means were not such that Mr. Athelny would desire him to accept, Philip wrote back that he would only come to tea. He bought a large plum cake so that his entertainment should cost nothing. He found the whole family glad to see him, and the cake completed his conquest of the children. He insisted that they should all have tea together in the kitchen, and the meal was noisy and hilarious.

Soon Philip got into the habit of going to Athelny’s every Sunday. He became a great favourite with the children, because he was simple and unaffected and because it was so plain that he was fond of them. As soon as they heard his ring at the door one of them popped a head out of window to make sure it was he, and then they all rushed downstairs tumultuously to let him in. They flung themselves into his arms. At tea they fought for the privilege of sitting next to him. Soon they began to call him Uncle Philip.

Athelny was very communicative, and little by little Philip learned the various stages of his life. He had followed many occupations, and it occurred to Philip that he managed to make a mess of everything he attempted. He had been on a tea plantation in Ceylon and a traveller in America for Italian wines; his secretaryship of the water company in Toledo had lasted longer than any of his employments; he had been a journalist and for some time had worked as police-court reporter for an evening paper; he had been sub-editor of a paper in the Midlands and editor of another on the Riviera. From all his occupations he had gathered amusing anecdotes, which he told with a keen pleasure in his own powers of entertainment. He had read a great deal, chiefly delighting in books which were unusual; and he poured forth his stores of abstruse knowledge with child-like enjoyment of the amazement of his hearers. Three or four years before abject poverty had driven him to take the job of press-representative to a large firm of drapers; and though he felt the work unworthy his abilities, which he rated highly, the firmness of his wife and the needs of his family had made him stick to it.

XC

When he left the Athelnys’ Philip walked down Chancery Lane and along the Strand to get a ‘bus at the top of Parliament Street. One Sunday, when he had known them about six weeks, he did this as usual, but he found the Kennington ‘bus full. It was June, but it had rained during the day and the night was raw and cold. He walked up to Piccadilly Circus in order to get a seat; the ‘bus waited at the fountain, and when it arrived there seldom had more than two or three people in it. This service ran every quarter of an hour, and he had some time to wait. He looked idly at the crowd. The public-houses were closing, and there were many people about. His mind was busy with the ideas Athelny had the charming gift of suggesting.

Suddenly his heart stood still. He saw Mildred. He had not thought of her for weeks. She was crossing over from the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and stopped at the shelter till a string of cabs passed by. She was watching her opportunity and had no eyes for anything else. She wore a large black straw hat with a mass of feathers on it and a black silk dress; at that time it was fashionable for women to wear trains; the road was clear, and Mildred crossed, her skirt trailing on the ground, and walked down Piccadilly. Philip, his heart beating excitedly, followed her. He did not wish to speak to her, but he wondered where she was going at that hour; he wanted to get a look at her face. She walked slowly along and turned down Air Street and so got through into Regent Street. She walked up again towards the Circus. Philip was puzzled. He could not make out what she was doing. Perhaps she was waiting for somebody, and he felt a great curiosity to know who it was. She overtook a short man in a bowler hat, who was strolling very slowly in the same direction as herself; she gave him a sidelong glance as she passed. She walked a few steps more till she came to Swan and Edgar’s, then stopped and waited, facing the road. When the man came up she smiled. The man stared at her for a moment, turned away his head, and sauntered on. Then Philip understood.

He was overwhelmed with horror. For a moment he felt such a weakness in his legs that he could hardly stand; then he walked after her quickly; he touched her on the arm.

“Mildred.”

She turned round with a violent start. He thought that she reddened, but in the obscurity he could not see very well. For a while they stood and looked at one another without speaking. At last she said:

“Fancy seeing you!”

He did not know what to answer; he was horribly shaken; and the phrases that chased one another through his brain seemed incredibly melodramatic.

“It’s awful,” he gasped, almost to himself.

She did not say anything more, she turned away from him, and looked down at the pavement. He felt that his face was distorted with misery.

“Isn’t there anywhere we can go and talk?”

“I don’t want to talk,” she said sullenly. “Leave me alone, can’t you?”

The thought struck him that perhaps she was in urgent need of money and could not afford to go away at that hour.

“I’ve got a couple of sovereigns on me if you’re hard up,” he blurted out.

“I don’t know what you mean. I was just walking along here on my way back to my lodgings. I expected to meet one of the girls from where I work.”

“For God’s sake don’t lie now,” he said.

Then he saw that she was crying, and he repeated his question.

“Can’t we go and talk somewhere? Can’t I come back to your rooms?”

“No, you can’t do that,” she sobbed. “I’m not allowed to take gentlemen in there. If you like I’ll meet you tomorrow.”

He felt certain that she would not keep an appointment. He was not going to let her go.

“No. You must take me somewhere now.”

“Well, there is a room I know, but they’ll charge six shillings for it.”

“I don’t mind that. Where is it?”

She gave him the address, and he called a cab. They drove to a shabby street beyond the British Museum in the neighbourhood of the Gray’s Inn Road, and she stopped the cab at the corner.

“They don’t like you to drive up to the door,” she said.

They were the first words either of them had spoken since getting into the cab. They walked a few yards and Mildred knocked three times, sharply, at a door. Philip noticed in the fanlight a cardboard on which was an announcement that apartments were to let. The door was opened quietly, and an elderly, tall woman let them in. She gave Philip a stare and then spoke to Mildred in an undertone. Mildred led Philip along a passage to a room at the back. It was quite dark; she asked him for a match, and lit the gas; there was no globe, and the gas flared shrilly. Philip saw that he was in a dingy little bed-room with a suite of furniture, painted to look like pine much too large for it; the lace curtains were very dirty; the grate was hidden by a large paper fan. Mildred sank on the chair which stood by the side of the chimney-piece. Philip sat on the edge of the bed. He felt ashamed. He saw now that Mildred’s cheeks were thick with rouge, her eyebrows were blackened; but she looked thin and ill, and the red on her cheeks exaggerated the greenish pallor of her skin. She stared at the paper fan in a listless fashion. Philip could not think what to say, and he had a choking in his throat as if he were going to cry. He covered his eyes with his hands.

“My God, it is awful,” he groaned.

“I don’t know what you’ve got to fuss about. I should have thought you’d have been rather pleased.”

Philip did not answer, and in a moment she broke into a sob.

“You don’t think I do it because I like it, do you?”

“Oh, my dear,” he cried. “I’m so sorry, I’m so awfully sorry.”

“That’ll do me a fat lot of good.”

Again Philip found nothing to say. He was desperately afraid of saying anything which she might take for a reproach or a sneer.

“Where’s the baby?” he asked at last.

“I’ve got her with me in London. I hadn’t got the money to keep her on at Brighton, so I had to take her. I’ve got a room up Highbury way. I told them I was on the stage. It’s a long way to have to come down to the West End every day, but it’s a rare job to find anyone who’ll let to ladies at all.”

“Wouldn’t they take you back at the shop?”

“I couldn’t get any work to do anywhere. I walked my legs off looking for work. I did get a job once, but I was off for a week because I was queer, and when I went back they said they didn’t want me any more. You can’t blame them either, can you? Them places, they can’t afford to have girls that aren’t strong.”

“You don’t look very well now,” said Philip.

“I wasn’t fit to come out tonight, but I couldn’t help myself, I wanted the money. I wrote to Emil and told him I was broke, but he never even answered the letter.”

“You might have written to me.”

“I didn’t like to, not after what happened, and I didn’t want you to know I was in difficulties. I shouldn’t have been surprised if you’d just told me I’d only got what I deserved.”

“You don’t know me very well, do you, even now?”

For a moment he remembered all the anguish he had suffered on her account, and he was sick with the recollection of his pain. But it was no more than recollection. When he looked at her he knew that he no longer loved her. He was very sorry for her, but he was glad to be free. Watching her gravely, he asked himself why he had been so besotted with passion for her.

“You’re a gentleman in every sense of the word,” she said. “You’re the only one I’ve ever met.” She paused for a minute and then flushed. “I hate asking you, Philip, but can you spare me anything?”

“It’s lucky I’ve got some money on me. I’m afraid I’ve only got two pounds.”

He gave her the sovereigns.

“I’ll pay you back, Philip.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he smiled. “You needn’t worry.”

He had said nothing that he wanted to say. They had talked as if the whole thing were natural; and it looked as though she would go now, back to the horror of her life, and he would be able to do nothing to prevent it. She had got up to take the money, and they were both standing.

“Am I keeping you?” she asked. “I suppose you want to be getting home.”

“No, I’m in no hurry,” he answered.

“I’m glad to have a chance of sitting down.”

Those words, with all they implied, tore his heart, and it was dreadfully painful to see the weary way in which she sank back into the chair. The silence lasted so long that Philip in his embarrassment lit a cigarette.

“It’s very good of you not to have said anything disagreeable to me,

Philip. I thought you might say I didn’t know what all.”

He saw that she was crying again. He remembered how she had come to him when Emil Miller had deserted her and how she had wept. The recollection of her suffering and of his own humiliation seemed to render more overwhelming the compassion he felt now.

“If I could only get out of it!” she moaned. “I hate it so. I’m unfit for the life, I’m not the sort of girl for that. I’d do anything to get away from it, I’d be a servant if I could. Oh, I wish I was dead.”

And in pity for herself she broke down now completely. She sobbed hysterically, and her thin body was shaken.

“Oh, you don’t know what it is. Nobody knows till they’ve done it.”

Philip could not bear to see her cry. He was tortured by the horror of her position.

“Poor child,” he whispered. “Poor child.”

He was deeply moved. Suddenly he had an inspiration. It filled him with a perfect ecstasy of happiness.

“Look here, if you want to get away from it, I’ve got an idea. I’m frightfully hard up just now, I’ve got to be as economical as I can; but I’ve got a sort of little flat now in Kennington and I’ve got a spare room. If you like you and the baby can come and live there. I pay a woman three and sixpence a week to keep the place clean and to do a little cooking for me. You could do that and your food wouldn’t come to much more than the money I should save on her. It doesn’t cost any more to feed two than one, and I don’t suppose the baby eats much.”

She stopped crying and looked at him.

“D’you mean to say that you could take me back after all that’s happened?”

Philip flushed a little in embarrassment at what he had to say.

“I don’t want you to mistake me. I’m just giving you a room which doesn’t cost me anything and your food. I don’t expect anything more from you than that you should do exactly the same as the woman I have in does. Except for that I don’t want anything from you at all. I daresay you can cook well enough for that.”

She sprang to her feet and was about to come towards him.

“You are good to me, Philip.”

“No, please stop where you are,” he said hurriedly, putting out his hand as though to push her away.

He did not know why it was, but he could not bear the thought that she should touch him.

“I don’t want to be anything more than a friend to you.”

“You are good to me,” she repeated. “You are good to me.”

“Does that mean you’ll come?”

“Oh, yes, I’d do anything to get away from this. You’ll never regret what you’ve done, Philip, never. When can I come, Philip?”

“You’d better come tomorrow.”

Suddenly she burst into tears again.

“What on earth are you crying for now?” he smiled.

“I’m so grateful to you. I don’t know how I can ever make it up to you?”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’d better go home now.”

He wrote out the address and told her that if she came at half past five he would be ready for her. It was so late that he had to walk home, but it did not seem a long way, for he was intoxicated with delight; he seemed to walk on air.

XCI

Next day he got up early to make the room ready for Mildred. He told the woman who had looked after him that he would not want her any more. Mildred came about six, and Philip, who was watching from the window, went down to let her in and help her to bring up the luggage: it consisted now of no more than three large parcels wrapped in brown paper, for she had been obliged to sell everything that was not absolutely needful. She wore the same black silk dress she had worn the night before, and, though she had now no rouge on her cheeks, there was still about her eyes the black which remained after a perfunctory wash in the morning: it made her look very ill. She was a pathetic figure as she stepped out of the cab with the baby in her arms. She seemed a little shy, and they found nothing but commonplace things to say to one another.

“So you’ve got here all right.”

“I’ve never lived in this part of London before.”

Philip showed her the room. It was that in which Cronshaw had died. Philip, though he thought it absurd, had never liked the idea of going back to it; and since Cronshaw’s death he had remained in the little room, sleeping on a fold-up bed, into which he had first moved in order to make his friend comfortable. The baby was sleeping placidly.

“You don’t recognise her, I expect,” said Mildred.

“I’ve not seen her since we took her down to Brighton.”

“Where shall I put her? She’s so heavy I can’t carry her very long.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got a cradle,” said Philip, with a nervous laugh.

“Oh, she’ll sleep with me. She always does.”

Mildred put the baby in an arm-chair and looked round the room. She recognised most of the things which she had known in his old diggings. Only one thing was new, a head and shoulders of Philip which Lawson had painted at the end of the preceding summer; it hung over the chimney-piece; Mildred looked at it critically.

“In some ways I like it and in some ways I don’t. I think you’re better looking than that.”

“Things are looking up,” laughed Philip. “You’ve never told me I was good-looking before.”

“I’m not one to worry myself about a man’s looks. I don’t like good-looking men. They’re too conceited for me.”

Her eyes travelled round the room in an instinctive search for a looking-glass, but there was none; she put up her hand and patted her large fringe.

“What’ll the other people in the house say to my being here?” she asked suddenly.

“Oh, there’s only a man and his wife living here. He’s out all day, and I never see her except on Saturday to pay my rent. They keep entirely to themselves. I’ve not spoken two words to either of them since I came.”

Mildred went into the bedroom to undo her things and put them away. Philip tried to read, but his spirits were too high: he leaned back in his chair, smoking a cigarette, and with smiling eyes looked at the sleeping child. He felt very happy. He was quite sure that he was not at all in love with Mildred. He was surprised that the old feeling had left him so completely; he discerned in himself a faint physical repulsion from her; and he thought that if he touched her it would give him goose-flesh. He could not understand himself. Presently, knocking at the door, she came in again.

“I say, you needn’t knock,” he said. “Have you made the tour of the mansion?”

“It’s the smallest kitchen I’ve ever seen.”

“You’ll find it large enough to cook our sumptuous repasts,” he retorted lightly.

“I see there’s nothing in. I’d better go out and get something.”

“Yes, but I venture to remind you that we must be devilish economical.”

“What shall I get for supper?”

“You’d better get what you think you can cook,” laughed Philip.

He gave her some money and she went out. She came in half an hour later and put her purchases on the table. She was out of breath from climbing the stairs.

“I say, you are anaemic,” said Philip. “I’ll have to dose you with Blaud’s

Pills.”

“It took me some time to find the shops. I bought some liver. That’s tasty, isn’t it? And you can’t eat much of it, so it’s more economical than butcher’s meat.”

There was a gas stove in the kitchen, and when she had put the liver on,

Mildred came into the sitting-room to lay the cloth.

“Why are you only laying one place?” asked Philip. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

Mildred flushed.

“I thought you mightn’t like me to have my meals with you.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Well, I’m only a servant, aren’t I?”

“Don’t be an ass. How can you be so silly?”

He smiled, but her humility gave him a curious twist in his heart. Poor thing! He remembered what she had been when first he knew her. He hesitated for an instant.

“Don’t think I’m conferring any benefit on you,” he said. “It’s simply a business arrangement, I’m giving you board and lodging in return for your work. You don’t owe me anything. And there’s nothing humiliating to you in it.”

She did not answer, but tears rolled heavily down her cheeks. Philip knew from his experience at the hospital that women of her class looked upon service as degrading: he could not help feeling a little impatient with her; but he blamed himself, for it was clear that she was tired and ill. He got up and helped her to lay another place at the table. The baby was awake now, and Mildred had prepared some Mellin’s Food for it. The liver and bacon were ready and they sat down. For economy’s sake Philip had given up drinking anything but water, but he had in the house a half a bottle of whiskey, and he thought a little would do Mildred good. He did his best to make the supper pass cheerfully, but Mildred was subdued and exhausted. When they had finished she got up to put the baby to bed.

“I think you’ll do well to turn in early yourself,” said Philip. “You look absolute done up.”

“I think I will after I’ve washed up.”

Philip lit his pipe and began to read. It was pleasant to hear somebody moving about in the next room. Sometimes his loneliness had oppressed him. Mildred came in to clear the table, and he heard the clatter of plates as she washed up. Philip smiled as he thought how characteristic it was of her that she should do all that in a black silk dress. But he had work to do, and he brought his book up to the table. He was reading Osler’s Medicine, which had recently taken the place in the students’ favour of Taylor’s work, for many years the text-book most in use. Presently Mildred came in, rolling down her sleeves. Philip gave her a casual glance, but did not move; the occasion was curious, and he felt a little nervous. He feared that Mildred might imagine he was going to make a nuisance of himself, and he did not quite know how without brutality to reassure her.

“By the way, I’ve got a lecture at nine, so I should want breakfast at a quarter past eight. Can you manage that?”

“Oh, yes. Why, when I was in Parliament Street I used to catch the eight-twelve from Herne Hill every morning.”

“I hope you’ll find your room comfortable. You’ll be a different woman tomorrow after a long night in bed.”

“I suppose you work till late?”

“I generally work till about eleven or half-past.”

“I’ll say good-night then.”

“Good-night.”

The table was between them. He did not offer to shake hands with her. She shut the door quietly. He heard her moving about in the bed-room, and in a little while he heard the creaking of the bed as she got in.

XCII

The following day was Tuesday. Philip as usual hurried through his breakfast and dashed off to get to his lecture at nine. He had only time to exchange a few words with Mildred. When he came back in the evening he found her seated at the window, darning his socks.

“I say, you are industrious,” he smiled. “What have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“Oh, I gave the place a good cleaning and then I took baby out for a little.”

She was wearing an old black dress, the same as she had worn as uniform when she served in the tea-shop; it was shabby, but she looked better in it than in the silk of the day before. The baby was sitting on the floor. She looked up at Philip with large, mysterious eyes and broke into a laugh when he sat down beside her and began playing with her bare toes. The afternoon sun came into the room and shed a mellow light.

“It’s rather jolly to come back and find someone about the place. A woman and a baby make very good decoration in a room.”

He had gone to the hospital dispensary and got a bottle of Blaud’s Pills,

He gave them to Mildred and told her she must take them after each meal.

It was a remedy she was used to, for she had taken it off and on ever

since she was sixteen.

“I’m sure Lawson would love that green skin of yours,” said Philip. “He’d say it was so paintable, but I’m terribly matter of fact nowadays, and I shan’t be happy till you’re as pink and white as a milkmaid.”

“I feel better already.”

After a frugal supper Philip filled his pouch with tobacco and put on his hat. It was on Tuesdays that he generally went to the tavern in Beak Street, and he was glad that this day came so soon after Mildred’s arrival, for he wanted to make his relations with her perfectly clear.

“Are you going out?” she said.

“Yes, on Tuesdays I give myself a night off. I shall see you tomorrow.

Good-night.”

Philip always went to the tavern with a sense of pleasure. Macalister, the philosophic stockbroker, was generally there and glad to argue upon any subject under the sun; Hayward came regularly when he was in London; and though he and Macalister disliked one another they continued out of habit to meet on that one evening in the week. Macalister thought Hayward a poor creature, and sneered at his delicacies of sentiment: he asked satirically about Hayward’s literary work and received with scornful smiles his vague suggestions of future masterpieces; their arguments were often heated; but the punch was good, and they were both fond of it; towards the end of the evening they generally composed their differences and thought each other capital fellows. This evening Philip found them both there, and Lawson also; Lawson came more seldom now that he was beginning to know people in London and went out to dinner a good deal. They were all on excellent terms with themselves, for Macalister had given them a good thing on the Stock Exchange, and Hayward and Lawson had made fifty pounds apiece. It was a great thing for Lawson, who was extravagant and earned little money: he had arrived at that stage of the portrait-painter’s career when he was noticed a good deal by the critics and found a number of aristocratic ladies who were willing to allow him to paint them for nothing (it advertised them both, and gave the great ladies quite an air of patronesses of the arts); but he very seldom got hold of the solid philistine who was ready to pay good money for a portrait of his wife. Lawson was brimming over with satisfaction.

“It’s the most ripping way of making money that I’ve ever struck,” he cried. “I didn’t have to put my hand in my pocket for sixpence.”

“You lost something by not being here last Tuesday, young man,” said

Macalister to Philip.

“My God, why didn’t you write to me?” said Philip. “If you only knew how useful a hundred pounds would be to me.”

“Oh, there wasn’t time for that. One has to be on the spot. I heard of a good thing last Tuesday, and I asked these fellows if they’d like to have a flutter, I bought them a thousand shares on Wednesday morning, and there was a rise in the afternoon so I sold them at once. I made fifty pounds for each of them and a couple of hundred for myself.”

Philip was sick with envy. He had recently sold the last mortgage in which his small fortune had been invested and now had only six hundred pounds left. He was panic-stricken sometimes when he thought of the future. He had still to keep himself for two years before he could be qualified, and then he meant to try for hospital appointments, so that he could not expect to earn anything for three years at least. With the most rigid economy he would not have more than a hundred pounds left then. It was very little to have as a stand-by in case he was ill and could not earn money or found himself at any time without work. A lucky gamble would make all the difference to him.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” said Macalister. “Something is sure to turn up soon. There’ll be a boom in South Africans again one of these days, and then I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Macalister was in the Kaffir market and often told them stories of the sudden fortunes that had been made in the great boom of a year or two back.

“Well, don’t forget next time.”

They sat on talking till nearly midnight, and Philip, who lived furthest off, was the first to go. If he did not catch the last tram he had to walk, and that made him very late. As it was he did not reach home till nearly half past twelve. When he got upstairs he was surprised to find Mildred still sitting in his arm-chair.

“Why on earth aren’t you in bed?” he cried.

“I wasn’t sleepy.”

“You ought to go to bed all the same. It would rest you.”

She did not move. He noticed that since supper she had changed into her black silk dress.

“I thought I’d rather wait up for you in case you wanted anything.”

She looked at him, and the shadow of a smile played upon her thin pale lips. Philip was not sure whether he understood or not. He was slightly embarrassed, but assumed a cheerful, matter-of-fact air.

“It’s very nice of you, but it’s very naughty also. Run off to bed as fast as you can, or you won’t be able to get up tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t feel like going to bed.”

“Nonsense,” he said coldly.

She got up, a little sulkily, and went into her room. He smiled when he heard her lock the door loudly.

The next few days passed without incident. Mildred settled down in her new surroundings. When Philip hurried off after breakfast she had the whole morning to do the housework. They ate very simply, but she liked to take a long time to buy the few things they needed; she could not be bothered to cook anything for her dinner, but made herself some cocoa and ate bread and butter; then she took the baby out in the gocart, and when she came in spent the rest of the afternoon in idleness. She was tired out, and it suited her to do so little. She made friends with Philip’s forbidding landlady over the rent, which he left with Mildred to pay, and within a week was able to tell him more about his neighbours than he had learned in a year.

“She’s a very nice woman,” said Mildred. “Quite the lady. I told her we was married.”

“D’you think that was necessary?”

“Well, I had to tell her something. It looks so funny me being here and not married to you. I didn’t know what she’d think of me.”

“I don’t suppose she believed you for a moment.”

“That she did, I lay. I told her we’d been married two years — I had to say that, you know, because of baby — only your people wouldn’t hear of it, because you was only a student” — she pronounced it stoodent— “and so we had to keep it a secret, but they’d given way now and we were all going down to stay with them in the summer.”

“You’re a past mistress of the cock-and-bull story,” said Philip.

He was vaguely irritated that Mildred still had this passion for telling fibs. In the last two years she had learnt nothing. But he shrugged his shoulders.

“When all’s said and done,” he reflected, “she hasn’t had much chance.”

It was a beautiful evening, warm and cloudless, and the people of South London seemed to have poured out into the streets. There was that restlessness in the air which seizes the cockney sometimes when a turn in the weather calls him into the open. After Mildred had cleared away the supper she went and stood at the window. The street noises came up to them, noises of people calling to one another, of the passing traffic, of a barrel-organ in the distance.

“I suppose you must work tonight, Philip?” she asked him, with a wistful expression.

“I ought, but I don’t know that I must. Why, d’you want me to do anything else?”

“I’d like to go out for a bit. Couldn’t we take a ride on the top of a tram?”

“If you like.”

“I’ll just go and put on my hat,” she said joyfully.

The night made it almost impossible to stay indoors. The baby was asleep and could be safely left; Mildred said she had always left it alone at night when she went out; it never woke. She was in high spirits when she came back with her hat on. She had taken the opportunity to put on a little rouge. Philip thought it was excitement which had brought a faint colour to her pale cheeks; he was touched by her child-like delight, and reproached himself for the austerity with which he had treated her. She laughed when she got out into the air. The first tram they saw was going towards Westminster Bridge and they got on it. Philip smoked his pipe, and they looked at the crowded street. The shops were open, gaily lit, and people were doing their shopping for the next day. They passed a music-hall called the Canterbury and Mildred cried out:

“Oh, Philip, do let’s go there. I haven’t been to a music-hall for months.”

“We can’t afford stalls, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, I shall be quite happy in the gallery.”

They got down and walked back a hundred yards till they came to the doors. They got capital seats for sixpence each, high up but not in the gallery, and the night was so fine that there was plenty of room. Mildred’s eyes glistened. She enjoyed herself thoroughly. There was a simple-mindedness in her which touched Philip. She was a puzzle to him. Certain things in her still pleased him, and he thought that there was a lot in her which was very good: she had been badly brought up, and her life was hard; he had blamed her for much that she could not help; and it was his own fault if he had asked virtues from her which it was not in her power to give. Under different circumstances she might have been a charming girl. She was extraordinarily unfit for the battle of life. As he watched her now in profile, her mouth slightly open and that delicate flush on her cheeks, he thought she looked strangely virginal. He felt an overwhelming compassion for her, and with all his heart he forgave her for the misery she had caused him. The smoky atmosphere made Philip’s eyes ache, but when he suggested going she turned to him with beseeching face and asked him to stay till the end. He smiled and consented. She took his hand and held it for the rest of the performance. When they streamed out with the audience into the crowded street she did not want to go home; they wandered up the Westminster Bridge Road, looking at the people.

“I’ve not had such a good time as this for months,” she said.

Philip’s heart was full, and he was thankful to the fates because he had carried out his sudden impulse to take Mildred and her baby into his flat. It was very pleasant to see her happy gratitude. At last she grew tired and they jumped on a tram to go home; it was late now, and when they got down and turned into their own street there was no one about. Mildred slipped her arm through his.

“It’s just like old times, Phil,” she said.

She had never called him Phil before, that was what Griffiths called him; and even now it gave him a curious pang. He remembered how much he had wanted to die then; his pain had been so great that he had thought quite seriously of committing suicide. It all seemed very long ago. He smiled at his past self. Now he felt nothing for Mildred but infinite pity. They reached the house, and when they got into the sitting-room Philip lit the gas.

“Is the baby all right?” he asked.

“I’ll just go in and see.”

When she came back it was to say that it had not stirred since she left it. It was a wonderful child. Philip held out his hand.

“Well, good-night.”

“D’you want to go to bed already?”

“It’s nearly one. I’m not used to late hours these days,” said Philip.

She took his hand and holding it looked into his eyes with a little smile.

“Phil, the other night in that room, when you asked me to come and stay here, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant, when you said you didn’t want me to be anything to you except just to cook and that sort of thing.”

“Didn’t you?” answered Philip, withdrawing his hand. “I did.”

“Don’t be such an old silly,” she laughed.

He shook his head.

“I meant it quite seriously. I shouldn’t have asked you to stay here on any other condition.”

“Why not?”

“I feel I couldn’t. I can’t explain it, but it would spoil it all.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, very well, it’s just as you choose. I’m not one to go down on my hands and knees for that, and chance it.”

She went out, slamming the door behind her.

XCIII

Next morning Mildred was sulky and taciturn. She remained in her room till it was time to get the dinner ready. She was a bad cook and could do little more than chops and steaks; and she did not know how to use up odds and ends, so that Philip was obliged to spend more money than he had expected. When she served up she sat down opposite Philip, but would eat nothing; he remarked on it; she said she had a bad headache and was not hungry. He was glad that he had somewhere to spend the rest of the day; the Athelnys were cheerful and friendly. It was a delightful and an unexpected thing to realise that everyone in that household looked forward with pleasure to his visit. Mildred had gone to bed when he came back, but next day she was still silent. At supper she sat with a haughty expression on her face and a little frown between her eyes. It made Philip impatient, but he told himself that he must be considerate to her; he was bound to make allowance.

“You’re very silent,” he said, with a pleasant smile.

“I’m paid to cook and clean, I didn’t know I was expected to talk as well.”

He thought it an ungracious answer, but if they were going to live together he must do all he could to make things go easily.

“I’m afraid you’re cross with me about the other night,” he said.

It was an awkward thing to speak about, but apparently it was necessary to discuss it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she answered.

“Please don’t be angry with me. I should never have asked you to come and live here if I’d not meant our relations to be merely friendly. I suggested it because I thought you wanted a home and you would have a chance of looking about for something to do.”

“Oh, don’t think I care.”

“I don’t for a moment,” he hastened to say. “You mustn’t think I’m ungrateful. I realise that you only proposed it for my sake. It’s just a feeling I have, and I can’t help it, it would make the whole thing ugly and horrid.”

“You are funny,” she said, looking at him curiously. “I can’t make you out.”

She was not angry with him now, but puzzled; she had no idea what he meant: she accepted the situation, she had indeed a vague feeling that he was behaving in a very noble fashion and that she ought to admire it; but also she felt inclined to laugh at him and perhaps even to despise him a little.

“He’s a rum customer,” she thought.

Life went smoothly enough with them. Philip spent all day at the hospital and worked at home in the evening except when he went to the Athelnys’ or to the tavern in Beak Street. Once the physician for whom he clerked asked him to a solemn dinner, and two or three times he went to parties given by fellow-students. Mildred accepted the monotony of her life. If she minded that Philip left her sometimes by herself in the evening she never mentioned it. Occasionally he took her to a music hall. He carried out his intention that the only tie between them should be the domestic service she did in return for board and lodging. She had made up her mind that it was no use trying to get work that summer, and with Philip’s approval determined to stay where she was till the autumn. She thought it would be easy to get something to do then.

“As far as I’m concerned you can stay on here when you’ve got a job if it’s convenient. The room’s there, and the woman who did for me before can come in to look after the baby.”

He grew very much attached to Mildred’s child. He had a naturally affectionate disposition, which had had little opportunity to display itself. Mildred was not unkind to the little girl. She looked after her very well and once when she had a bad cold proved herself a devoted nurse; but the child bored her, and she spoke to her sharply when she bothered; she was fond of her, but had not the maternal passion which might have induced her to forget herself. Mildred had no demonstrativeness, and she found the manifestations of affection ridiculous. When Philip sat with the baby on his knees, playing with it and kissing it, she laughed at him.

“You couldn’t make more fuss of her if you was her father,” she said.

“You’re perfectly silly with the child.”

Philip flushed, for he hated to be laughed at. It was absurd to be so devoted to another man’s baby, and he was a little ashamed of the overflowing of his heart. But the child, feeling Philip’s attachment, would put her face against his or nestle in his arms.

“It’s all very fine for you,” said Mildred. “You don’t have any of the disagreeable part of it. How would you like being kept awake for an hour in the middle of the night because her ladyship wouldn’t go to sleep?”

Philip remembered all sorts of things of his childhood which he thought he had long forgotten. He took hold of the baby’s toes.

“This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home.”

When he came home in the evening and entered the sitting-room his first glance was for the baby sprawling on the floor, and it gave him a little thrill of delight to hear the child’s crow of pleasure at seeing him. Mildred taught her to call him daddy, and when the child did this for the first time of her own accord, laughed immoderately.

“I wonder if you’re that stuck on baby because she’s mine,” asked Mildred, “or if you’d be the same with anybody’s baby.”

“I’ve never known anybody else’s baby, so I can’t say,” said Philip.

Towards the end of his second term as in-patients’ clerk a piece of good fortune befell Philip. It was the middle of July. He went one Tuesday evening to the tavern in Beak Street and found nobody there but Macalister. They sat together, chatting about their absent friends, and after a while Macalister said to him:

“Oh, by the way, I heard of a rather good thing today, New Kleinfonteins; it’s a gold mine in Rhodesia. If you’d like to have a flutter you might make a bit.”

Philip had been waiting anxiously for such an opportunity, but now that it came he hesitated. He was desperately afraid of losing money. He had little of the gambler’s spirit.

“I’d love to, but I don’t know if I dare risk it. How much could I lose if things went wrong?”

“I shouldn’t have spoken of it, only you seemed so keen about it,”

Macalister answered coldly.

Philip felt that Macalister looked upon him as rather a donkey.

“I’m awfully keen on making a bit,” he laughed.

“You can’t make money unless you’re prepared to risk money.”

Macalister began to talk of other things and Philip, while he was answering him, kept thinking that if the venture turned out well the stockbroker would be very facetious at his expense next time they met. Macalister had a sarcastic tongue.

“I think I will have a flutter if you don’t mind,” said Philip anxiously.

“All right. I’ll buy you two hundred and fifty shares and if I see a half-crown rise I’ll sell them at once.”

Philip quickly reckoned out how much that would amount to, and his mouth watered; thirty pounds would be a godsend just then, and he thought the fates owed him something. He told Mildred what he had done when he saw her at breakfast next morning. She thought him very silly.

“I never knew anyone who made money on the Stock Exchange,” she said.

“That’s what Emil always said, you can’t expect to make money on the Stock

Exchange, he said.”

Philip bought an evening paper on his way home and turned at once to the money columns. He knew nothing about these things and had difficulty in finding the stock which Macalister had spoken of. He saw they had advanced a quarter. His heart leaped, and then he felt sick with apprehension in case Macalister had forgotten or for some reason had not bought. Macalister had promised to telegraph. Philip could not wait to take a tram home. He jumped into a cab. It was an unwonted extravagance.

“Is there a telegram for me?” he said, as he burst in.

“No,” said Mildred.

His face fell, and in bitter disappointment he sank heavily into a chair.

“Then he didn’t buy them for me after all. Curse him,” he added violently. “What cruel luck! And I’ve been thinking all day of what I’d do with the money.”

“Why, what were you going to do?” she asked.

“What’s the good of thinking about that now? Oh, I wanted the money so badly.”

She gave a laugh and handed him a telegram.

“I was only having a joke with you. I opened it.”

He tore it out of her hands. Macalister had bought him two hundred and fifty shares and sold them at the half-crown profit he had suggested. The commission note was to follow next day. For one moment Philip was furious with Mildred for her cruel jest, but then he could only think of his joy.

“It makes such a difference to me,” he cried. “I’ll stand you a new dress if you like.”

“I want it badly enough,” she answered.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to be operated upon at the end of July.”

“Why, have you got something the matter with you?” she interrupted.

It struck her that an illness she did not know might explain what had so much puzzled her. He flushed, for he hated to refer to his deformity.

“No, but they think they can do something to my foot. I couldn’t spare the time before, but now it doesn’t matter so much. I shall start my dressing in October instead of next month. I shall only be in hospital a few weeks and then we can go away to the seaside for the rest of the summer. It’ll do us all good, you and the baby and me.”

“Oh, let’s go to Brighton, Philip, I like Brighton, you get such a nice class of people there.” Philip had vaguely thought of some little fishing village in Cornwall, but as she spoke it occurred to him that Mildred would be bored to death there.

“I don’t mind where we go as long as I get the sea.”

He did not know why, but he had suddenly an irresistible longing for the sea. He wanted to bathe, and he thought with delight of splashing about in the salt water. He was a good swimmer, and nothing exhilarated him like a rough sea.

“I say, it will be jolly,” he cried.

“It’ll be like a honeymoon, won’t it?” she said. “How much can I have for my new dress, Phil?”

XCIV

Philip asked Mr. Jacobs, the assistant-surgeon for whom he had dressed, to do the operation. Jacobs accepted with pleasure, since he was interested just then in neglected talipes and was getting together materials for a paper. He warned Philip that he could not make his foot like the other, but he thought he could do a good deal; and though he would always limp he would be able to wear a boot less unsightly than that which he had been accustomed to. Philip remembered how he had prayed to a God who was able to remove mountains for him who had faith, and he smiled bitterly.

“I don’t expect a miracle,” he answered.

“I think you’re wise to let me try what I can do. You’ll find a club-foot rather a handicap in practice. The layman is full of fads, and he doesn’t like his doctor to have anything the matter with him.”

Philip went into a ‘small ward’, which was a room on the landing, outside each ward, reserved for special cases. He remained there a month, for the surgeon would not let him go till he could walk; and, bearing the operation very well, he had a pleasant enough time. Lawson and Athelny came to see him, and one day Mrs. Athelny brought two of her children; students whom he knew looked in now and again to have a chat; Mildred came twice a week. Everyone was very kind to him, and Philip, always surprised when anyone took trouble with him, was touched and grateful. He enjoyed the relief from care; he need not worry there about the future, neither whether his money would last out nor whether he would pass his final examinations; and he could read to his heart’s content. He had not been able to read much of late, since Mildred disturbed him: she would make an aimless remark when he was trying to concentrate his attention, and would not be satisfied unless he answered; whenever he was comfortably settled down with a book she would want something done and would come to him with a cork she could not draw or a hammer to drive in a nail.

They settled to go to Brighton in August. Philip wanted to take lodgings, but Mildred said that she would have to do housekeeping, and it would only be a holiday for her if they went to a boarding-house.

“I have to see about the food every day at home, I get that sick of it I want a thorough change.”

Philip agreed, and it happened that Mildred knew of a boarding-house at Kemp Town where they would not be charged more than twenty-five shillings a week each. She arranged with Philip to write about rooms, but when he got back to Kennington he found that she had done nothing. He was irritated.

“I shouldn’t have thought you had so much to do as all that,” he said.

“Well, I can’t think of everything. It’s not my fault if I forget, is it?”

Philip was so anxious to get to the sea that he would not wait to communicate with the mistress of the boarding-house.

“We’ll leave the luggage at the station and go to the house and see if they’ve got rooms, and if they have we can just send an outside porter for our traps.”

“You can please yourself,” said Mildred stiffly.

She did not like being reproached, and, retiring huffily into a haughty silence, she sat by listlessly while Philip made the preparations for their departure. The little flat was hot and stuffy under the August sun, and from the road beat up a malodorous sultriness. As he lay in his bed in the small ward with its red, distempered walls he had longed for fresh air and the splashing of the sea against his breast. He felt he would go mad if he had to spend another night in London. Mildred recovered her good temper when she saw the streets of Brighton crowded with people making holiday, and they were both in high spirits as they drove out to Kemp Town. Philip stroked the baby’s cheek.

“We shall get a very different colour into them when we’ve been down here a few days,” he said, smiling.

They arrived at the boarding-house and dismissed the cab. An untidy maid opened the door and, when Philip asked if they had rooms, said she would inquire. She fetched her mistress. A middle-aged woman, stout and business-like, came downstairs, gave them the scrutinising glance of her profession, and asked what accommodation they required.

“Two single rooms, and if you’ve got such a thing we’d rather like a cot in one of them.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got that. I’ve got one nice large double room, and

I could let you have a cot.”

“I don’t think that would do,” said Philip.

“I could give you another room next week. Brighton’s very full just now, and people have to take what they can get.”

“If it were only for a few days, Philip, I think we might be able to manage,” said Mildred.

“I think two rooms would be more convenient. Can you recommend any other place where they take boarders?”

“I can, but I don’t suppose they’d have room any more than I have.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me the address.”

The house the stout woman suggested was in the next street, and they walked towards it. Philip could walk quite well, though he had to lean on a stick, and he was rather weak. Mildred carried the baby. They went for a little in silence, and then he saw she was crying. It annoyed him, and he took no notice, but she forced his attention.

“Lend me a hanky, will you? I can’t get at mine with baby,” she said in a voice strangled with sobs, turning her head away from him.

He gave her his handkerchief, but said nothing. She dried her eyes, and as he did not speak, went on.

“I might be poisonous.”

“Please don’t make a scene in the street,” he said.

“It’ll look so funny insisting on separate rooms like that. What’ll they think of us?”

“If they knew the circumstances I imagine they’d think us surprisingly moral,” said Philip.

She gave him a sidelong glance.

“You’re not going to give it away that we’re not married?” she asked quickly.

“No.”

“Why won’t you live with me as if we were married then?”

“My dear, I can’t explain. I don’t want to humiliate you, but I simply can’t. I daresay it’s very silly and unreasonable, but it’s stronger than I am. I loved you so much that now…” he broke off. “After all, there’s no accounting for that sort of thing.”

“A fat lot you must have loved me!” she exclaimed.

The boarding-house to which they had been directed was kept by a bustling maiden lady, with shrewd eyes and voluble speech. They could have one double room for twenty-five shillings a week each, and five shillings extra for the baby, or they could have two single rooms for a pound a week more.

“I have to charge that much more,” the woman explained apologetically, “because if I’m pushed to it I can put two beds even in the single rooms.”

“I daresay that won’t ruin us. What do you think, Mildred?”

“Oh, I don’t mind. Anything’s good enough for me,” she answered.

Philip passed off her sulky reply with a laugh, and, the landlady having arranged to send for their luggage, they sat down to rest themselves. Philip’s foot was hurting him a little, and he was glad to put it up on a chair.

“I suppose you don’t mind my sitting in the same room with you,” said

Mildred aggressively.

“Don’t let’s quarrel, Mildred,” he said gently.

“I didn’t know you was so well off you could afford to throw away a pound a week.”

“Don’t be angry with me. I assure you it’s the only way we can live together at all.”

“I suppose you despise me, that’s it.”

“Of course I don’t. Why should I?”

“It’s so unnatural.”

“Is it? You’re not in love with me, are you?”

“Me? Who d’you take me for?”

“It’s not as if you were a very passionate woman, you’re not that.”

“It’s so humiliating,” she said sulkily.

“Oh, I wouldn’t fuss about that if I were you.”

There were about a dozen people in the boarding-house. They ate in a narrow, dark room at a long table, at the head of which the landlady sat and carved. The food was bad. The landlady called it French cooking, by which she meant that the poor quality of the materials was disguised by ill-made sauces: plaice masqueraded as sole and New Zealand mutton as lamb. The kitchen was small and inconvenient, so that everything was served up lukewarm. The people were dull and pretentious; old ladies with elderly maiden daughters; funny old bachelors with mincing ways; pale-faced, middle-aged clerks with wives, who talked of their married daughters and their sons who were in a very good position in the Colonies. At table they discussed Miss Corelli’s latest novel; some of them liked Lord Leighton better than Mr. Alma-Tadema, and some of them liked Mr. Alma-Tadema better than Lord Leighton. Mildred soon told the ladies of her romantic marriage with Philip; and he found himself an object of interest because his family, county people in a very good position, had cut him off with a shilling because he married while he was only a stoodent; and Mildred’s father, who had a large place down Devonshire way, wouldn’t do anything for them because she had married Philip. That was why they had come to a boarding-house and had not a nurse for the baby; but they had to have two rooms because they were both used to a good deal of accommodation and they didn’t care to be cramped. The other visitors also had explanations of their presence: one of the single gentlemen generally went to the Metropole for his holiday, but he liked cheerful company and you couldn’t get that at one of those expensive hotels; and the old lady with the middle-aged daughter was having her beautiful house in London done up and she said to her daughter: “Gwennie, my dear, we must have a cheap holiday this year,” and so they had come there, though of course it wasn’t at all the kind of thing they were used to. Mildred found them all very superior, and she hated a lot of common, rough people. She liked gentlemen to be gentlemen in every sense of the word.

“When people are gentlemen and ladies,” she said, “I like them to be gentlemen and ladies.”

The remark seemed cryptic to Philip, but when he heard her say it two or three times to different persons, and found that it aroused hearty agreement, he came to the conclusion that it was only obscure to his own intelligence. It was the first time that Philip and Mildred had been thrown entirely together. In London he did not see her all day, and when he came home the household affairs, the baby, the neighbours, gave them something to talk about till he settled down to work. Now he spent the whole day with her. After breakfast they went down to the beach; the morning went easily enough with a bathe and a stroll along the front; the evening, which they spent on the pier, having put the baby to bed, was tolerable, for there was music to listen to and a constant stream of people to look at; (Philip amused himself by imagining who they were and weaving little stories about them; he had got into the habit of answering Mildred’s remarks with his mouth only so that his thoughts remained undisturbed;) but the afternoons were long and dreary. They sat on the beach. Mildred said they must get all the benefit they could out of Doctor Brighton, and he could not read because Mildred made observations frequently about things in general. If he paid no attention she complained.

“Oh, leave that silly old book alone. It can’t be good for you always reading. You’ll addle your brain, that’s what you’ll do, Philip.”

“Oh, rot!” he answered.

“Besides, it’s so unsociable.”

He discovered that it was difficult to talk to her. She had not even the power of attending to what she was herself saying, so that a dog running in front of her or the passing of a man in a loud blazer would call forth a remark and then she would forget what she had been speaking of. She had a bad memory for names, and it irritated her not to be able to think of them, so that she would pause in the middle of some story to rack her brains. Sometimes she had to give it up, but it often occurred to her afterwards, and when Philip was talking of something she would interrupt him.

“Collins, that was it. I knew it would come back to me some time. Collins, that’s the name I couldn’t remember.”

It exasperated him because it showed that she was not listening to anything he said, and yet, if he was silent, she reproached him for sulkiness. Her mind was of an order that could not deal for five minutes with the abstract, and when Philip gave way to his taste for generalising she very quickly showed that she was bored. Mildred dreamt a great deal, and she had an accurate memory for her dreams, which she would relate every day with prolixity.

One morning he received a long letter from Thorpe Athelny. He was taking his holiday in the theatrical way, in which there was much sound sense, which characterised him. He had done the same thing for ten years. He took his whole family to a hop-field in Kent, not far from Mrs. Athelny’s home, and they spent three weeks hopping. It kept them in the open air, earned them money, much to Mrs. Athelny’s satisfaction, and renewed their contact with mother earth. It was upon this that Athelny laid stress. The sojourn in the fields gave them a new strength; it was like a magic ceremony, by which they renewed their youth and the power of their limbs and the sweetness of the spirit: Philip had heard him say many fantastic, rhetorical, and picturesque things on the subject. Now Athelny invited him to come over for a day, he had certain meditations on Shakespeare and the musical glasses which he desired to impart, and the children were clamouring for a sight of Uncle Philip. Philip read the letter again in the afternoon when he was sitting with Mildred on the beach. He thought of Mrs. Athelny, cheerful mother of many children, with her kindly hospitality and her good humour; of Sally, grave for her years, with funny little maternal ways and an air of authority, with her long plait of fair hair and her broad forehead; and then in a bunch of all the others, merry, boisterous, healthy, and handsome. His heart went out to them. There was one quality which they had that he did not remember to have noticed in people before, and that was goodness. It had not occurred to him till now, but it was evidently the beauty of their goodness which attracted him. In theory he did not believe in it: if morality were no more than a matter of convenience good and evil had no meaning. He did not like to be illogical, but here was simple goodness, natural and without effort, and he thought it beautiful. Meditating, he slowly tore the letter into little pieces; he did not see how he could go without Mildred, and he did not want to go with her.

It was very hot, the sky was cloudless, and they had been driven to a shady corner. The baby was gravely playing with stones on the beach, and now and then she crawled up to Philip and gave him one to hold, then took it away again and placed it carefully down. She was playing a mysterious and complicated game known only to herself. Mildred was asleep. She lay with her head thrown back and her mouth slightly open; her legs were stretched out, and her boots protruded from her petticoats in a grotesque fashion. His eyes had been resting on her vaguely, but now he looked at her with peculiar attention. He remembered how passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now he was entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with dull pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far their thoughts had travelled apart, and he had rebelled against the unsurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from every other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so madly and now loved her not at all. Sometimes he hated her. She was incapable of learning, and the experience of life had taught her nothing. She was as unmannerly as she had always been. It revolted Philip to hear the insolence with which she treated the hard-worked servant at the boarding-house.

Presently he considered his own plans. At the end of his fourth year he would be able to take his examination in midwifery, and a year more would see him qualified. Then he might manage a journey to Spain. He wanted to see the pictures which he knew only from photographs; he felt deeply that El Greco held a secret of peculiar moment to him; and he fancied that in Toledo he would surely find it out. He did not wish to do things grandly, and on a hundred pounds he might live for six months in Spain: if Macalister put him on to another good thing he could make that easily. His heart warmed at the thought of those old beautiful cities, and the tawny plains of Castile. He was convinced that more might be got out of life than offered itself at present, and he thought that in Spain he could live with greater intensity: it might be possible to practise in one of those old cities, there were a good many foreigners, passing or resident, and he should be able to pick up a living. But that would be much later; first he must get one or two hospital appointments; they gave experience and made it easy to get jobs afterwards. He wished to get a berth as ship’s doctor on one of the large tramps that took things leisurely enough for a man to see something of the places at which they stopped. He wanted to go to the East; and his fancy was rich with pictures of Bangkok and Shanghai, and the ports of Japan: he pictured to himself palm-trees and skies blue and hot, dark-skinned people, pagodas; the scents of the Orient intoxicated his nostrils. His heart beat with passionate desire for the beauty and the strangeness of the world.

Mildred awoke.

“I do believe I’ve been asleep,” she said. “Now then, you naughty girl, what have you been doing to yourself? Her dress was clean yesterday and just look at it now, Philip.”

XCV

When they returned to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages renewed: Philip prided himself a little on his skill in bandaging, and it amused him to wring a word of approval from a nurse. On certain afternoons in the week there were operations; and he stood in the well of the theatre, in a white jacket, ready to hand the operating surgeon any instrument he wanted or to sponge the blood away so that he could see what he was about. When some rare operation was to be performed the theatre would fill up, but generally there were not more than half a dozen students present, and then the proceedings had a cosiness which Philip enjoyed. At that time the world at large seemed to have a passion for appendicitis, and a good many cases came to the operating theatre for this complaint: the surgeon for whom Philip dressed was in friendly rivalry with a colleague as to which could remove an appendix in the shortest time and with the smallest incision.

In due course Philip was put on accident duty. The dressers took this in turn; it lasted three days, during which they lived in hospital and ate their meals in the common-room; they had a room on the ground floor near the casualty ward, with a bed that shut up during the day into a cupboard. The dresser on duty had to be at hand day and night to see to any casualty that came in. You were on the move all the time, and not more than an hour or two passed during the night without the clanging of the bell just above your head which made you leap out of bed instinctively. Saturday night was of course the busiest time and the closing of the public-houses the busiest hour. Men would be brought in by the police dead drunk and it would be necessary to administer a stomach-pump; women, rather the worse for liquor themselves, would come in with a wound on the head or a bleeding nose which their husbands had given them: some would vow to have the law on him, and others, ashamed, would declare that it had been an accident. What the dresser could manage himself he did, but if there was anything important he sent for the house-surgeon: he did this with care, since the house-surgeon was not vastly pleased to be dragged down five flights of stairs for nothing. The cases ranged from a cut finger to a cut throat. Boys came in with hands mangled by some machine, men were brought who had been knocked down by a cab, and children who had broken a limb while playing: now and then attempted suicides were carried in by the police: Philip saw a ghastly, wild-eyed man with a great gash from ear to ear, and he was in the ward for weeks afterwards in charge of a constable, silent, angry because he was alive, and sullen; he made no secret of the fact that he would try again to kill himself as soon as he was released. The wards were crowded, and the house-surgeon was faced with a dilemma when patients were brought in by the police: if they were sent on to the station and died there disagreeable things were said in the papers; and it was very difficult sometimes to tell if a man was dying or drunk. Philip did not go to bed till he was tired out, so that he should not have the bother of getting up again in an hour; and he sat in the casualty ward talking in the intervals of work with the night-nurse. She was a gray-haired woman of masculine appearance, who had been night-nurse in the casualty department for twenty years. She liked the work because she was her own mistress and had no sister to bother her. Her movements were slow, but she was immensely capable and she never failed in an emergency. The dressers, often inexperienced or nervous, found her a tower of strength. She had seen thousands of them, and they made no impression upon her: she always called them Mr. Brown; and when they expostulated and told her their real names, she merely nodded and went on calling them Mr. Brown. It interested Philip to sit with her in the bare room, with its two horse-hair couches and the flaring gas, and listen to her. She had long ceased to look upon the people who came in as human beings; they were drunks, or broken arms, or cut throats. She took the vice and misery and cruelty of the world as a matter of course; she found nothing to praise or blame in human actions: she accepted. She had a certain grim humour.

“I remember one suicide,” she said to Philip, “who threw himself into the Thames. They fished him out and brought him here, and ten days later he developed typhoid fever from swallowing Thames water.”

“Did he die?”

“Yes, he did all right. I could never make up my mind if it was suicide or not…. They’re a funny lot, suicides. I remember one man who couldn’t get any work to do and his wife died, so he pawned his clothes and bought a revolver; but he made a mess of it, he only shot out an eye and he got all right. And then, if you please, with an eye gone and a piece of his face blow away, he came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all, and he lived happily ever afterwards. Thing I’ve always noticed, people don’t commit suicide for love, as you’d expect, that’s just a fancy of novelists; they commit suicide because they haven’t got any money. I wonder why that is.”

“I suppose money’s more important than love,” suggested Philip.

Money was in any case occupying Philip’s thoughts a good deal just then. He discovered the little truth there was in the airy saying which himself had repeated, that two could live as cheaply as one, and his expenses were beginning to worry him. Mildred was not a good manager, and it cost them as much to live as if they had eaten in restaurants; the child needed clothes, and Mildred boots, an umbrella, and other small things which it was impossible for her to do without. When they returned from Brighton she had announced her intention of getting a job, but she took no definite steps, and presently a bad cold laid her up for a fortnight. When she was well she answered one or two advertisements, but nothing came of it: either she arrived too late and the vacant place was filled, or the work was more than she felt strong enough to do. Once she got an offer, but the wages were only fourteen shillings a week, and she thought she was worth more than that.

“It’s no good letting oneself be put upon,” she remarked. “People don’t respect you if you let yourself go too cheap.”

“I don’t think fourteen shillings is so bad,” answered Philip, drily.

He could not help thinking how useful it would be towards the expenses of the household, and Mildred was already beginning to hint that she did not get a place because she had not got a decent dress to interview employers in. He gave her the dress, and she made one or two more attempts, but Philip came to the conclusion that they were not serious. She did not want to work. The only way he knew to make money was on the Stock Exchange, and he was very anxious to repeat the lucky experiment of the summer; but war had broken out with the Transvaal and nothing was doing in South Africans. Macalister told him that Redvers Buller would march into Pretoria in a month and then everything would boom. The only thing was to wait patiently. What they wanted was a British reverse to knock things down a bit, and then it might be worth while buying. Philip began reading assiduously the ‘city chat’ of his favourite newspaper. He was worried and irritable. Once or twice he spoke sharply to Mildred, and since she was neither tactful nor patient she answered with temper, and they quarrelled. Philip always expressed his regret for what he had said, but Mildred had not a forgiving nature, and she would sulk for a couple of days. She got on his nerves in all sorts of ways; by the manner in which she ate, and by the untidiness which made her leave articles of clothing about their sitting-room: Philip was excited by the war and devoured the papers, morning and evening; but she took no interest in anything that happened. She had made the acquaintance of two or three people who lived in the street, and one of them had asked if she would like the curate to call on her. She wore a wedding-ring and called herself Mrs. Carey. On Philip’s walls were two or three of the drawings which he had made in Paris, nudes, two of women and one of Miguel Ajuria, standing very square on his feet, with clenched fists. Philip kept them because they were the best things he had done, and they reminded him of happy days. Mildred had long looked at them with disfavour.

“I wish you’d take those drawings down, Philip,” she said to him at last. “Mrs. Foreman, of number thirteen, came in yesterday afternoon, and I didn’t know which way to look. I saw her staring at them.”

“What’s the matter with them?”

“They’re indecent. Disgusting, that’s what I call it, to have drawings of naked people about. And it isn’t nice for baby either. She’s beginning to notice things now.”

“How can you be so vulgar?”

“Vulgar? Modest, I call it. I’ve never said anything, but d’you think I like having to look at those naked people all day long.”

“Have you no sense of humour at all, Mildred?” he asked frigidly.

“I don’t know what sense of humour’s got to do with it. I’ve got a good mind to take them down myself. If you want to know what I think about them, I think they’re disgusting.”

“I don’t want to know what you think about them, and I forbid you to touch them.”

When Mildred was cross with him she punished him through the baby. The little girl was as fond of Philip as he was of her, and it was her great pleasure every morning to crawl into his room (she was getting on for two now and could walk pretty well), and be taken up into his bed. When Mildred stopped this the poor child would cry bitterly. To Philip’s remonstrances she replied:

“I don’t want her to get into habits.”

And if then he said anything more she said:

“It’s nothing to do with you what I do with my child. To hear you talk one would think you was her father. I’m her mother, and I ought to know what’s good for her, oughtn’t I?”

Philip was exasperated by Mildred’s stupidity; but he was so indifferent to her now that it was only at times she made him angry. He grew used to having her about. Christmas came, and with it a couple of days holiday for Philip. He brought some holly in and decorated the flat, and on Christmas Day he gave small presents to Mildred and the baby. There were only two of them so they could not have a turkey, but Mildred roasted a chicken and boiled a Christmas pudding which she had bought at a local grocer’s. They stood themselves a bottle of wine. When they had dined Philip sat in his arm-chair by the fire, smoking his pipe; and the unaccustomed wine had made him forget for a while the anxiety about money which was so constantly with him. He felt happy and comfortable. Presently Mildred came in to tell him that the baby wanted him to kiss her good-night, and with a smile he went into Mildred’s bed-room. Then, telling the child to go to sleep, he turned down the gas and, leaving the door open in case she cried, went back into the sitting-room.

“Where are you going to sit?” he asked Mildred.

“You sit in your chair. I’m going to sit on the floor.”

When he sat down she settled herself in front of the fire and leaned against his knees. He could not help remembering that this was how they had sat together in her rooms in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, but the positions had been reversed; it was he who had sat on the floor and leaned his head against her knee. How passionately he had loved her then! Now he felt for her a tenderness he had not known for a long time. He seemed still to feel twined round his neck the baby’s soft little arms.

“Are you comfy?” he asked.

She looked up at him, gave a slight smile, and nodded. They gazed into the fire dreamily, without speaking to one another. At last she turned round and stared at him curiously.

“D’you know that you haven’t kissed me once since I came here?” she said suddenly.

“D’you want me to?” he smiled.

“I suppose you don’t care for me in that way any more?”

“I’m very fond of you.”

“You’re much fonder of baby.”

He did not answer, and she laid her cheek against his hand.

“You’re not angry with me any more?” she asked presently, with her eyes cast down.

“Why on earth should I be?”

“I’ve never cared for you as I do now. It’s only since I passed through the fire that I’ve learnt to love you.” It chilled Philip to hear her make use of the sort of phrase she read in the penny novelettes which she devoured. Then he wondered whether what she said had any meaning for her: perhaps she knew no other way to express her genuine feelings than the stilted language of The Family Herald.

“It seems so funny our living together like this.”

He did not reply for quite a long time, and silence fell upon them again; but at last he spoke and seemed conscious of no interval.

“You mustn’t be angry with me. One can’t help these things. I remember that I thought you wicked and cruel because you did this, that, and the other; but it was very silly of me. You didn’t love me, and it was absurd to blame you for that. I thought I could make you love me, but I know now that was impossible. I don’t know what it is that makes someone love you, but whatever it is, it’s the only thing that matters, and if it isn’t there you won’t create it by kindness, or generosity, or anything of that sort.”

“I should have thought if you’d loved me really you’d have loved me still.”

“I should have thought so too. I remember how I used to think that it would last for ever, I felt I would rather die than be without you, and I used to long for the time when you would be faded and wrinkled so that nobody cared for you any more and I should have you all to myself.”

She did not answer, and presently she got up and said she was going to bed. She gave a timid little smile.

“It’s Christmas Day, Philip, won’t you kiss me good-night?”

He gave a laugh, blushed slightly, and kissed her. She went to her bed-room and he began to read.

XCVI

The climax came two or three weeks later. Mildred was driven by Philip’s behaviour to a pitch of strange exasperation. There were many different emotions in her soul, and she passed from mood to mood with facility. She spent a great deal of time alone and brooded over her position. She did not put all her feelings into words, she did not even know what they were, but certain things stood out in her mind, and she thought of them over and over again. She had never understood Philip, nor had very much liked him; but she was pleased to have him about her because she thought he was a gentleman. She was impressed because his father had been a doctor and his uncle was a clergyman. She despised him a little because she had made such a fool of him, and at the same time was never quite comfortable in his presence; she could not let herself go, and she felt that he was criticising her manners.

When she first came to live in the little rooms in Kennington she was tired out and ashamed. She was glad to be left alone. It was a comfort to think that there was no rent to pay; she need not go out in all weathers, and she could lie quietly in bed if she did not feel well. She had hated the life she led. It was horrible to have to be affable and subservient; and even now when it crossed her mind she cried with pity for herself as she thought of the roughness of men and their brutal language. But it crossed her mind very seldom. She was grateful to Philip for coming to her rescue, and when she remembered how honestly he had loved her and how badly she had treated him, she felt a pang of remorse. It was easy to make it up to him. It meant very little to her. She was surprised when he refused her suggestion, but she shrugged her shoulders: let him put on airs if he liked, she did not care, he would be anxious enough in a little while, and then it would be her turn to refuse; if he thought it was any deprivation to her he was very much mistaken. She had no doubt of her power over him. He was peculiar, but she knew him through and through. He had so often quarrelled with her and sworn he would never see her again, and then in a little while he had come on his knees begging to be forgiven. It gave her a thrill to think how he had cringed before her. He would have been glad to lie down on the ground for her to walk on him. She had seen him cry. She knew exactly how to treat him, pay no attention to him, just pretend you didn’t notice his tempers, leave him severely alone, and in a little while he was sure to grovel. She laughed a little to herself, good-humouredly, when she thought how he had come and eaten dirt before her. She had had her fling now. She knew what men were and did not want to have anything more to do with them. She was quite ready to settle down with Philip. When all was said, he was a gentleman in every sense of the word, and that was something not to be sneezed at, wasn’t it? Anyhow she was in no hurry, and she was not going to take the first step. She was glad to see how fond he was growing of the baby, though it tickled her a good deal; it was comic that he should set so much store on another man’s child. He was peculiar and no mistake.

But one or two things surprised her. She had been used to his subservience: he was only too glad to do anything for her in the old days, she was accustomed to see him cast down by a cross word and in ecstasy at a kind one; he was different now, and she said to herself that he had not improved in the last year. It never struck her for a moment that there could be any change in his feelings, and she thought it was only acting when he paid no heed to her bad temper. He wanted to read sometimes and told her to stop talking: she did not know whether to flare up or to sulk, and was so puzzled that she did neither. Then came the conversation in which he told her that he intended their relations to be platonic, and, remembering an incident of their common past, it occurred to her that he dreaded the possibility of her being pregnant. She took pains to reassure him. It made no difference. She was the sort of woman who was unable to realise that a man might not have her own obsession with sex; her relations with men had been purely on those lines; and she could not understand that they ever had other interests. The thought struck her that Philip was in love with somebody else, and she watched him, suspecting nurses at the hospital or people he met out; but artful questions led her to the conclusion that there was no one dangerous in the Athelny household; and it forced itself upon her also that Philip, like most medical students, was unconscious of the sex of the nurses with whom his work threw him in contact. They were associated in his mind with a faint odour of iodoform. Philip received no letters, and there was no girl’s photograph among his belongings. If he was in love with someone, he was very clever at hiding it; and he answered all Mildred’s questions with frankness and apparently without suspicion that there was any motive in them.

“I don’t believe he’s in love with anybody else,” she said to herself at last.

It was a relief, for in that case he was certainly still in love with her; but it made his behaviour very puzzling. If he was going to treat her like that why did he ask her to come and live at the flat? It was unnatural. Mildred was not a woman who conceived the possibility of compassion, generosity, or kindness. Her only conclusion was that Philip was queer. She took it into her head that the reasons for his conduct were chivalrous; and, her imagination filled with the extravagances of cheap fiction, she pictured to herself all sorts of romantic explanations for his delicacy. Her fancy ran riot with bitter misunderstandings, purifications by fire, snow-white souls, and death in the cruel cold of a Christmas night. She made up her mind that when they went to Brighton she would put an end to all his nonsense; they would be alone there, everyone would think them husband and wife, and there would be the pier and the band. When she found that nothing would induce Philip to share the same room with her, when he spoke to her about it with a tone in his voice she had never heard before, she suddenly realised that he did not want her. She was astounded. She remembered all he had said in the past and how desperately he had loved her. She felt humiliated and angry, but she had a sort of native insolence which carried her through. He needn’t think she was in love with him, because she wasn’t. She hated him sometimes, and she longed to humble him; but she found herself singularly powerless; she did not know which way to handle him. She began to be a little nervous with him. Once or twice she cried. Once or twice she set herself to be particularly nice to him; but when she took his arm while they walked along the front at night he made some excuse in a while to release himself, as though it were unpleasant for him to be touched by her. She could not make it out. The only hold she had over him was through the baby, of whom he seemed to grow fonder and fonder: she could make him white with anger by giving the child a slap or a push; and the only time the old, tender smile came back into his eyes was when she stood with the baby in her arms. She noticed it when she was being photographed like that by a man on the beach, and afterwards she often stood in the same way for Philip to look at her.

When they got back to London Mildred began looking for the work she had asserted was so easy to find; she wanted now to be independent of Philip; and she thought of the satisfaction with which she would announce to him that she was going into rooms and would take the child with her. But her heart failed her when she came into closer contact with the possibility. She had grown unused to the long hours, she did not want to be at the beck and call of a manageress, and her dignity revolted at the thought of wearing once more a uniform. She had made out to such of the neighbours as she knew that they were comfortably off: it would be a come-down if they heard that she had to go out and work. Her natural indolence asserted itself. She did not want to leave Philip, and so long as he was willing to provide for her, she did not see why she should. There was no money to throw away, but she got her board and lodging, and he might get better off. His uncle was an old man and might die any day, he would come into a little then, and even as things were, it was better than slaving from morning till night for a few shillings a week. Her efforts relaxed; she kept on reading the advertisement columns of the daily paper merely to show that she wanted to do something if anything that was worth her while presented itself. But panic seized her, and she was afraid that Philip would grow tired of supporting her. She had no hold over him at all now, and she fancied that he only allowed her to stay there because he was fond of the baby. She brooded over it all, and she thought to herself angrily that she would make him pay for all this some day. She could not reconcile herself to the fact that he no longer cared for her. She would make him. She suffered from pique, and sometimes in a curious fashion she desired Philip. He was so cold now that it exasperated her. She thought of him in that way incessantly. She thought that he was treating her very badly, and she did not know what she had done to deserve it. She kept on saying to herself that it was unnatural they should live like that. Then she thought that if things were different and she were going to have a baby, he would be sure to marry her. He was funny, but he was a gentleman in every sense of the word, no one could deny that. At last it became an obsession with her, and she made up her mind to force a change in their relations. He never even kissed her now, and she wanted him to: she remembered how ardently he had been used to press her lips. It gave her a curious feeling to think of it. She often looked at his mouth.

One evening, at the beginning of February, Philip told her that he was dining with Lawson, who was giving a party in his studio to celebrate his birthday; and he would not be in till late; Lawson had bought a couple of bottles of the punch they favoured from the tavern in Beak Street, and they proposed to have a merry evening. Mildred asked if there were going to be women there, but Philip told her there were not; only men had been invited; and they were just going to sit and talk and smoke: Mildred did not think it sounded very amusing; if she were a painter she would have half a dozen models about. She went to bed, but could not sleep, and presently an idea struck her; she got up and fixed the catch on the wicket at the landing, so that Philip could not get in. He came back about one, and she heard him curse when he found that the wicket was closed. She got out of bed and opened.

“Why on earth did you shut yourself in? I’m sorry I’ve dragged you out of bed.”

“I left it open on purpose, I can’t think how it came to be shut.”

“Hurry up and get back to bed, or you’ll catch cold.”

He walked into the sitting-room and turned up the gas. She followed him in. She went up to the fire.

“I want to warm my feet a bit. They’re like ice.”

He sat down and began to take off his boots. His eyes were shining and his cheeks were flushed. She thought he had been drinking.

“Have you been enjoying yourself?” she asked, with a smile.

“Yes, I’ve had a ripping time.”

Philip was quite sober, but he had been talking and laughing, and he was excited still. An evening of that sort reminded him of the old days in Paris. He was in high spirits. He took his pipe out of his pocket and filled it.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” she asked.

“Not yet, I’m not a bit sleepy. Lawson was in great form. He talked sixteen to the dozen from the moment I got there till the moment I left.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Heaven knows! Of every subject under the sun. You should have seen us all shouting at the tops of our voices and nobody listening.”

Philip laughed with pleasure at the recollection, and Mildred laughed too. She was pretty sure he had drunk more than was good for him. That was exactly what she had expected. She knew men.

“Can I sit down?” she said.

Before he could answer she settled herself on his knees.

“If you’re not going to bed you’d better go and put on a dressing-gown.”

“Oh, I’m all right as I am.” Then putting her arms round his neck, she placed her face against his and said: “Why are you so horrid to me, Phil?”

He tried to get up, but she would not let him.

“I do love you, Philip,” she said.

“Don’t talk damned rot.”

“It isn’t, it’s true. I can’t live without you. I want you.”

He released himself from her arms.

“Please get up. You’re making a fool of yourself and you’re making me feel a perfect idiot.”

“I love you, Philip. I want to make up for all the harm I did you. I can’t go on like this, it’s not in human nature.”

He slipped out of the chair and left her in it.

“I’m very sorry, but it’s too late.”

She gave a heart-rending sob.

“But why? How can you be so cruel?”

“I suppose it’s because I loved you too much. I wore the passion out. The thought of anything of that sort horrifies me. I can’t look at you now without thinking of Emil and Griffiths. One can’t help those things, I suppose it’s just nerves.”

She seized his hand and covered it with kisses.

“Don’t,” he cried.

She sank back into the chair.

“I can’t go on like this. If you won’t love me, I’d rather go away.”

“Don’t be foolish, you haven’t anywhere to go. You can stay here as long as you like, but it must be on the definite understanding that we’re friends and nothing more.”

Then she dropped suddenly the vehemence of passion and gave a soft, insinuating laugh. She sidled up to Philip and put her arms round him. She made her voice low and wheedling.

“Don’t be such an old silly. I believe you’re nervous. You don’t know how nice I can be.”

She put her face against his and rubbed his cheek with hers. To Philip her smile was an abominable leer, and the suggestive glitter of her eyes filled him with horror. He drew back instinctively.

“I won’t,” he said.

But she would not let him go. She sought his mouth with her lips. He took her hands and tore them roughly apart and pushed her away.

“You disgust me,” he said.

“Me?”

She steadied herself with one hand on the chimney-piece. She looked at him for an instant, and two red spots suddenly appeared on her cheeks. She gave a shrill, angry laugh.

“I disgust YOU.”

She paused and drew in her breath sharply. Then she burst into a furious torrent of abuse. She shouted at the top of her voice. She called him every foul name she could think of. She used language so obscene that Philip was astounded; she was always so anxious to be refined, so shocked by coarseness, that it had never occurred to him that she knew the words she used now. She came up to him and thrust her face in his. It was distorted with passion, and in her tumultuous speech the spittle dribbled over her lips.

“I never cared for you, not once, I was making a fool of you always, you bored me, you bored me stiff, and I hated you, I would never have let you touch me only for the money, and it used to make me sick when I had to let you kiss me. We laughed at you, Griffiths and me, we laughed because you was such a mug. A mug! A mug!”

Then she burst again into abominable invective. She accused him of every mean fault; she said he was stingy, she said he was dull, she said he was vain, selfish; she cast virulent ridicule on everything upon which he was most sensitive. And at last she turned to go. She kept on, with hysterical violence, shouting at him an opprobrious, filthy epithet. She seized the handle of the door and flung it open. Then she turned round and hurled at him the injury which she knew was the only one that really touched him. She threw into the word all the malice and all the venom of which she was capable. She flung it at him as though it were a blow.

“Cripple!”

XCVII

Philip awoke with a start next morning, conscious that it was late, and looking at his watch found it was nine o’clock. He jumped out of bed and went into the kitchen to get himself some hot water to shave with. There was no sign of Mildred, and the things which she had used for her supper the night before still lay in the sink unwashed. He knocked at her door.

“Wake up, Mildred. It’s awfully late.”

She did not answer, even after a second louder knocking, and he concluded that she was sulking. He was in too great a hurry to bother about that. He put some water on to boil and jumped into his bath which was always poured out the night before in order to take the chill off. He presumed that Mildred would cook his breakfast while he was dressing and leave it in the sitting-room. She had done that two or three times when she was out of temper. But he heard no sound of her moving, and realised that if he wanted anything to eat he would have to get it himself. He was irritated that she should play him such a trick on a morning when he had over-slept himself. There was still no sign of her when he was ready, but he heard her moving about her room. She was evidently getting up. He made himself some tea and cut himself a couple of pieces of bread and butter, which he ate while he was putting on his boots, then bolted downstairs and along the street into the main road to catch his tram. While his eyes sought out the newspaper shops to see the war news on the placards, he thought of the scene of the night before: now that it was over and he had slept on it, he could not help thinking it grotesque; he supposed he had been ridiculous, but he was not master of his feelings; at the time they had been overwhelming. He was angry with Mildred because she had forced him into that absurd position, and then with renewed astonishment he thought of her outburst and the filthy language she had used. He could not help flushing when he remembered her final jibe; but he shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. He had long known that when his fellows were angry with him they never failed to taunt him with his deformity. He had seen men at the hospital imitate his walk, not before him as they used at school, but when they thought he was not looking. He knew now that they did it from no wilful unkindness, but because man is naturally an imitative animal, and because it was an easy way to make people laugh: he knew it, but he could never resign himself to it.

He was glad to throw himself into his work. The ward seemed pleasant and friendly when he entered it. The sister greeted him with a quick, business-like smile.

“You’re very late, Mr. Carey.”

“I was out on the loose last night.”

“You look it.”

“Thank you.”

Laughing, he went to the first of his cases, a boy with tuberculous ulcers, and removed his bandages. The boy was pleased to see him, and Philip chaffed him as he put a clean dressing on the wound. Philip was a favourite with the patients; he treated them good-humouredly; and he had gentle, sensitive hands which did not hurt them: some of the dressers were a little rough and happy-go-lucky in their methods. He lunched with his friends in the club-room, a frugal meal consisting of a scone and butter, with a cup of cocoa, and they talked of the war. Several men were going out, but the authorities were particular and refused everyone who had not had a hospital appointment. Someone suggested that, if the war went on, in a while they would be glad to take anyone who was qualified; but the general opinion was that it would be over in a month. Now that Roberts was there things would get all right in no time. This was Macalister’s opinion too, and he had told Philip that they must watch their chance and buy just before peace was declared. There would be a boom then, and they might all make a bit of money. Philip had left with Macalister instructions to buy him stock whenever the opportunity presented itself. His appetite had been whetted by the thirty pounds he had made in the summer, and he wanted now to make a couple of hundred.

He finished his day’s work and got on a tram to go back to Kennington. He wondered how Mildred would behave that evening. It was a nuisance to think that she would probably be surly and refuse to answer his questions. It was a warm evening for the time of year, and even in those gray streets of South London there was the languor of February; nature is restless then after the long winter months, growing things awake from their sleep, and there is a rustle in the earth, a forerunner of spring, as it resumes its eternal activities. Philip would have liked to drive on further, it was distasteful to him to go back to his rooms, and he wanted the air; but the desire to see the child clutched suddenly at his heartstrings, and he smiled to himself as he thought of her toddling towards him with a crow of delight. He was surprised, when he reached the house and looked up mechanically at the windows, to see that there was no light. He went upstairs and knocked, but got no answer. When Mildred went out she left the key under the mat and he found it there now. He let himself in and going into the sitting-room struck a match. Something had happened, he did not at once know what; he turned the gas on full and lit it; the room was suddenly filled with the glare and he looked round. He gasped. The whole place was wrecked. Everything in it had been wilfully destroyed. Anger seized him, and he rushed into Mildred’s room. It was dark and empty. When he had got a light he saw that she had taken away all her things and the baby’s (he had noticed on entering that the go-cart was not in its usual place on the landing, but thought Mildred had taken the baby out;) and all the things on the washing-stand had been broken, a knife had been drawn cross-ways through the seats of the two chairs, the pillow had been slit open, there were large gashes in the sheets and the counterpane, the looking-glass appeared to have been broken with a hammer. Philip was bewildered. He went into his own room, and here too everything was in confusion. The basin and the ewer had been smashed, the looking-glass was in fragments, and the sheets were in ribands. Mildred had made a slit large enough to put her hand into the pillow and had scattered the feathers about the room. She had jabbed a knife into the blankets. On the dressing-table were photographs of Philip’s mother, the frames had been smashed and the glass shivered. Philip went into the tiny kitchen. Everything that was breakable was broken, glasses, pudding-basins, plates, dishes.

It took Philip’s breath away. Mildred had left no letter, nothing but this ruin to mark her anger, and he could imagine the set face with which she had gone about her work. He went back into the sitting-room and looked about him. He was so astonished that he no longer felt angry. He looked curiously at the kitchen-knife and the coal-hammer, which were lying on the table where she had left them. Then his eye caught a large carving-knife in the fireplace which had been broken. It must have taken her a long time to do so much damage. Lawson’s portrait of him had been cut cross-ways and gaped hideously. His own drawings had been ripped in pieces; and the photographs, Manet’s Olympia and the Odalisque of Ingres, the portrait of Philip IV, had been smashed with great blows of the coal-hammer. There were gashes in the table-cloth and in the curtains and in the two arm-chairs. They were quite ruined. On one wall over the table which Philip used as his desk was the little bit of Persian rug which Cronshaw had given him. Mildred had always hated it.

“If it’s a rug it ought to go on the floor,” she said, “and it’s a dirty stinking bit of stuff, that’s all it is.”

It made her furious because Philip told her it contained the answer to a great riddle. She thought he was making fun of her. She had drawn the knife right through it three times, it must have required some strength, and it hung now in tatters. Philip had two or three blue and white plates, of no value, but he had bought them one by one for very small sums and liked them for their associations. They littered the floor in fragments. There were long gashes on the backs of his books, and she had taken the trouble to tear pages out of the unbound French ones. The little ornaments on the chimney-piece lay on the hearth in bits. Everything that it had been possible to destroy with a knife or a hammer was destroyed.

The whole of Philip’s belongings would not have sold for thirty pounds, but most of them were old friends, and he was a domestic creature, attached to all those odds and ends because they were his; he had been proud of his little home, and on so little money had made it pretty and characteristic. He sank down now in despair. He asked himself how she could have been so cruel. A sudden fear got him on his feet again and into the passage, where stood a cupboard in which he kept his clothes. He opened it and gave a sigh of relief. She had apparently forgotten it and none of his things was touched.

He went back into the sitting-room and, surveying the scene, wondered what to do; he had not the heart to begin trying to set things straight; besides there was no food in the house, and he was hungry. He went out and got himself something to eat. When he came in he was cooler. A little pang seized him as he thought of the child, and he wondered whether she would miss him, at first perhaps, but in a week she would have forgotten him; and he was thankful to be rid of Mildred. He did not think of her with wrath, but with an overwhelming sense of boredom.

“I hope to God I never see her again,” he said aloud.

The only thing now was to leave the rooms, and he made up his mind to give notice the next morning. He could not afford to make good the damage done, and he had so little money left that he must find cheaper lodgings still. He would be glad to get out of them. The expense had worried him, and now the recollection of Mildred would be in them always. Philip was impatient and could never rest till he had put in action the plan which he had in mind; so on the following afternoon he got in a dealer in second-hand furniture who offered him three pounds for all his goods damaged and undamaged; and two days later he moved into the house opposite the hospital in which he had had rooms when first he became a medical student. The landlady was a very decent woman. He took a bed-room at the top, which she let him have for six shillings a week; it was small and shabby and looked on the yard of the house that backed on to it, but he had nothing now except his clothes and a box of books, and he was glad to lodge so cheaply.

XCVIII

And now it happened that the fortunes of Philip Carey, of no consequence to any but himself, were affected by the events through which his country was passing. History was being made, and the process was so significant that it seemed absurd it should touch the life of an obscure medical student. Battle after battle, Magersfontein, Colenso, Spion Kop, lost on the playing fields of Eton, had humiliated the nation and dealt the death-blow to the prestige of the aristocracy and gentry who till then had found no one seriously to oppose their assertion that they possessed a natural instinct of government. The old order was being swept away: history was being made indeed. Then the colossus put forth his strength, and, blundering again, at last blundered into the semblance of victory. Cronje surrendered at Paardeberg, Ladysmith was relieved, and at the beginning of March Lord Roberts marched into Bloemfontein.

It was two or three days after the news of this reached London that Macalister came into the tavern in Beak Street and announced joyfully that things were looking brighter on the Stock Exchange. Peace was in sight, Roberts would march into Pretoria within a few weeks, and shares were going up already. There was bound to be a boom.

“Now’s the time to come in,” he told Philip. “It’s no good waiting till the public gets on to it. It’s now or never.”

He had inside information. The manager of a mine in South Africa had cabled to the senior partner of his firm that the plant was uninjured. They would start working again as soon as possible. It wasn’t a speculation, it was an investment. To show how good a thing the senior partner thought it Macalister told Philip that he had bought five hundred shares for both his sisters: he never put them into anything that wasn’t as safe as the Bank of England.

“I’m going to put my shirt on it myself,” he said.

The shares were two and an eighth to a quarter. He advised Philip not to be greedy, but to be satisfied with a ten-shilling rise. He was buying three hundred for himself and suggested that Philip should do the same. He would hold them and sell when he thought fit. Philip had great faith in him, partly because he was a Scotsman and therefore by nature cautious, and partly because he had been right before. He jumped at the suggestion.

“I daresay we shall be able to sell before the account,” said Macalister, “but if not, I’ll arrange to carry them over for you.”

It seemed a capital system to Philip. You held on till you got your profit, and you never even had to put your hand in your pocket. He began to watch the Stock Exchange columns of the paper with new interest. Next day everything was up a little, and Macalister wrote to say that he had had to pay two and a quarter for the shares. He said that the market was firm. But in a day or two there was a set-back. The news that came from South Africa was less reassuring, and Philip with anxiety saw that his shares had fallen to two; but Macalister was optimistic, the Boers couldn’t hold out much longer, and he was willing to bet a top-hat that Roberts would march into Johannesburg before the middle of April. At the account Philip had to pay out nearly forty pounds. It worried him considerably, but he felt that the only course was to hold on: in his circumstances the loss was too great for him to pocket. For two or three weeks nothing happened; the Boers would not understand that they were beaten and nothing remained for them but to surrender: in fact they had one or two small successes, and Philip’s shares fell half a crown more. It became evident that the war was not finished. There was a lot of selling. When Macalister saw Philip he was pessimistic.

“I’m not sure if the best thing wouldn’t be to cut the loss. I’ve been paying out about as much as I want to in differences.”

Philip was sick with anxiety. He could not sleep at night; he bolted his breakfast, reduced now to tea and bread and butter, in order to get over to the club reading-room and see the paper; sometimes the news was bad, and sometimes there was no news at all, but when the shares moved it was to go down. He did not know what to do. If he sold now he would lose altogether hard on three hundred and fifty pounds; and that would leave him only eighty pounds to go on with. He wished with all his heart that he had never been such a fool as to dabble on the Stock Exchange, but the only thing was to hold on; something decisive might happen any day and the shares would go up; he did not hope now for a profit, but he wanted to make good his loss. It was his only chance of finishing his course at the hospital. The Summer session was beginning in May, and at the end of it he meant to take the examination in midwifery. Then he would only have a year more; he reckoned it out carefully and came to the conclusion that he could manage it, fees and all, on a hundred and fifty pounds; but that was the least it could possibly be done on.

Early in April he went to the tavern in Beak Street anxious to see Macalister. It eased him a little to discuss the situation with him; and to realise that numerous people beside himself were suffering from loss of money made his own trouble a little less intolerable. But when Philip arrived no one was there but Hayward, and no sooner had Philip seated himself than he said:

“I’m sailing for the Cape on Sunday.”

“Are you!” exclaimed Philip.

Hayward was the last person he would have expected to do anything of the kind. At the hospital men were going out now in numbers; the Government was glad to get anyone who was qualified; and others, going out as troopers, wrote home that they had been put on hospital work as soon as it was learned that they were medical students. A wave of patriotic feeling had swept over the country, and volunteers were coming from all ranks of society.

“What are you going as?” asked Philip.

“Oh, in the Dorset Yeomanry. I’m going as a trooper.”

Philip had known Hayward for eight years. The youthful intimacy which had come from Philip’s enthusiastic admiration for the man who could tell him of art and literature had long since vanished; but habit had taken its place; and when Hayward was in London they saw one another once or twice a week. He still talked about books with a delicate appreciation. Philip was not yet tolerant, and sometimes Hayward’s conversation irritated him. He no longer believed implicitly that nothing in the world was of consequence but art. He resented Hayward’s contempt for action and success. Philip, stirring his punch, thought of his early friendship and his ardent expectation that Hayward would do great things; it was long since he had lost all such illusions, and he knew now that Hayward would never do anything but talk. He found his three hundred a year more difficult to live on now that he was thirty-five than he had when he was a young man; and his clothes, though still made by a good tailor, were worn a good deal longer than at one time he would have thought possible. He was too stout and no artful arrangement of his fair hair could conceal the fact that he was bald. His blue eyes were dull and pale. It was not hard to guess that he drank too much.

“What on earth made you think of going out to the Cape?” asked Philip.

“Oh, I don’t know, I thought I ought to.”

Philip was silent. He felt rather silly. He understood that Hayward was being driven by an uneasiness in his soul which he could not account for. Some power within him made it seem necessary to go and fight for his country. It was strange, since he considered patriotism no more than a prejudice, and, flattering himself on his cosmopolitanism, he had looked upon England as a place of exile. His countrymen in the mass wounded his susceptibilities. Philip wondered what it was that made people do things which were so contrary to all their theories of life. It would have been reasonable for Hayward to stand aside and watch with a smile while the barbarians slaughtered one another. It looked as though men were puppets in the hands of an unknown force, which drove them to do this and that; and sometimes they used their reason to justify their actions; and when this was impossible they did the actions in despite of reason.

“People are very extraordinary,” said Philip. “I should never have expected you to go out as a trooper.”

Hayward smiled, slightly embarrassed, and said nothing.

“I was examined yesterday,” he remarked at last. “It was worth while undergoing the gene of it to know that one was perfectly fit.”

Philip noticed that he still used a French word in an affected way when an

English one would have served. But just then Macalister came in.

“I wanted to see you, Carey,” he said. “My people don’t feel inclined to hold those shares any more, the market’s in such an awful state, and they want you to take them up.”

Philip’s heart sank. He knew that was impossible. It meant that he must accept the loss. His pride made him answer calmly.

“I don’t know that I think that’s worth while. You’d better sell them.”

“It’s all very fine to say that, I’m not sure if I can. The market’s stagnant, there are no buyers.”

“But they’re marked down at one and an eighth.”

“Oh yes, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t get that for them.”

Philip did not say anything for a moment. He was trying to collect himself.

“D’you mean to say they’re worth nothing at all?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Of course they’re worth something, but you see, nobody’s buying them now.”

“Then you must just sell them for what you can get.”

Macalister looked at Philip narrowly. He wondered whether he was very hard hit.

“I’m awfully sorry, old man, but we’re all in the same boat. No one thought the war was going to hang on this way. I put you into them, but I was in myself too.”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” said Philip. “One has to take one’s chance.”

He moved back to the table from which he had got up to talk to Macalister. He was dumfounded; his head suddenly began to ache furiously; but he did not want them to think him unmanly. He sat on for an hour. He laughed feverishly at everything they said. At last he got up to go.

“You take it pretty coolly,” said Macalister, shaking hands with him. “I don’t suppose anyone likes losing between three and four hundred pounds.”

When Philip got back to his shabby little room he flung himself on his bed, and gave himself over to his despair. He kept on regretting his folly bitterly; and though he told himself that it was absurd to regret for what had happened was inevitable just because it had happened, he could not help himself. He was utterly miserable. He could not sleep. He remembered all the ways he had wasted money during the last few years. His head ached dreadfully.

The following evening there came by the last post the statement of his account. He examined his pass-book. He found that when he had paid everything he would have seven pounds left. Seven pounds! He was thankful he had been able to pay. It would have been horrible to be obliged to confess to Macalister that he had not the money. He was dressing in the eye-department during the summer session, and he had bought an ophthalmoscope off a student who had one to sell. He had not paid for this, but he lacked the courage to tell the student that he wanted to go back on his bargain. Also he had to buy certain books. He had about five pounds to go on with. It lasted him six weeks; then he wrote to his uncle a letter which he thought very business-like; he said that owing to the war he had had grave losses and could not go on with his studies unless his uncle came to his help. He suggested that the Vicar should lend him a hundred and fifty pounds paid over the next eighteen months in monthly instalments; he would pay interest on this and promised to refund the capital by degrees when he began to earn money. He would be qualified in a year and a half at the latest, and he could be pretty sure then of getting an assistantship at three pounds a week. His uncle wrote back that he could do nothing. It was not fair to ask him to sell out when everything was at its worst, and the little he had he felt that his duty to himself made it necessary for him to keep in case of illness. He ended the letter with a little homily. He had warned Philip time after time, and Philip had never paid any attention to him; he could not honestly say he was surprised; he had long expected that this would be the end of Philip’s extravagance and want of balance. Philip grew hot and cold when he read this. It had never occurred to him that his uncle would refuse, and he burst into furious anger; but this was succeeded by utter blankness: if his uncle would not help him he could not go on at the hospital. Panic seized him and, putting aside his pride, he wrote again to the Vicar of Blackstable, placing the case before him more urgently; but perhaps he did not explain himself properly and his uncle did not realise in what desperate straits he was, for he answered that he could not change his mind; Philip was twenty-five and really ought to be earning his living. When he died Philip would come into a little, but till then he refused to give him a penny. Philip felt in the letter the satisfaction of a man who for many years had disapproved of his courses and now saw himself justified.

XCIX

Philip began to pawn his clothes. He reduced his expenses by eating only one meal a day beside his breakfast; and he ate it, bread and butter and cocoa, at four so that it should last him till next morning. He was so hungry by nine o’clock that he had to go to bed. He thought of borrowing money from Lawson, but the fear of a refusal held him back; at last he asked him for five pounds. Lawson lent it with pleasure, but, as he did so, said:

“You’ll let me have it back in a week or so, won’t you? I’ve got to pay my framer, and I’m awfully broke just now.”

Philip knew he would not be able to return it, and the thought of what Lawson would think made him so ashamed that in a couple of days he took the money back untouched. Lawson was just going out to luncheon and asked Philip to come too. Philip could hardly eat, he was so glad to get some solid food. On Sunday he was sure of a good dinner from Athelny. He hesitated to tell the Athelnys what had happened to him: they had always looked upon him as comparatively well-to-do, and he had a dread that they would think less well of him if they knew he was penniless.

Though he had always been poor, the possibility of not having enough to eat had never occurred to him; it was not the sort of thing that happened to the people among whom he lived; and he was as ashamed as if he had some disgraceful disease. The situation in which he found himself was quite outside the range of his experience. He was so taken aback that he did not know what else to do than to go on at the hospital; he had a vague hope that something would turn up; he could not quite believe that what was happening to him was true; and he remembered how during his first term at school he had often thought his life was a dream from which he would awake to find himself once more at home. But very soon he foresaw that in a week or so he would have no money at all. He must set about trying to earn something at once. If he had been qualified, even with a club-foot, he could have gone out to the Cape, since the demand for medical men was now great. Except for his deformity he might have enlisted in one of the yeomanry regiments which were constantly being sent out. He went to the secretary of the Medical School and asked if he could give him the coaching of some backward student; but the secretary held out no hope of getting him anything of the sort. Philip read the advertisement columns of the medical papers, and he applied for the post of unqualified assistant to a man who had a dispensary in the Fulham Road. When he went to see him, he saw the doctor glance at his club-foot; and on hearing that Philip was only in his fourth year at the hospital he said at once that his experience was insufficient: Philip understood that this was only an excuse; the man would not have an assistant who might not be as active as he wanted. Philip turned his attention to other means of earning money. He knew French and German and thought there might be some chance of finding a job as correspondence clerk; it made his heart sink, but he set his teeth; there was nothing else to do. Though too shy to answer the advertisements which demanded a personal application, he replied to those which asked for letters; but he had no experience to state and no recommendations: he was conscious that neither his German nor his French was commercial; he was ignorant of the terms used in business; he knew neither shorthand nor typewriting. He could not help recognising that his case was hopeless. He thought of writing to the solicitor who had been his father’s executor, but he could not bring himself to, for it was contrary to his express advice that he had sold the mortgages in which his money had been invested. He knew from his uncle that Mr. Nixon thoroughly disapproved of him. He had gathered from Philip’s year in the accountant’s office that he was idle and incompetent.

“I’d sooner starve,” Philip muttered to himself.

Once or twice the possibility of suicide presented itself to him; it would be easy to get something from the hospital dispensary, and it was a comfort to think that if the worst came to the worst he had at hand means of making a painless end of himself; but it was not a course that he considered seriously. When Mildred had left him to go with Griffiths his anguish had been so great that he wanted to die in order to get rid of the pain. He did not feel like that now. He remembered that the Casualty Sister had told him how people oftener did away with themselves for want of money than for want of love; and he chuckled when he thought that he was an exception. He wished only that he could talk his worries over with somebody, but he could not bring himself to confess them. He was ashamed. He went on looking for work. He left his rent unpaid for three weeks, explaining to his landlady that he would get money at the end of the month; she did not say anything, but pursed her lips and looked grim. When the end of the month came and she asked if it would be convenient for him to pay something on account, it made him feel very sick to say that he could not; he told her he would write to his uncle and was sure to be able to settle his bill on the following Saturday.

“Well, I ‘ope you will, Mr. Carey, because I ‘ave my rent to pay, and I can’t afford to let accounts run on.” She did not speak with anger, but with determination that was rather frightening. She paused for a moment and then said: “If you don’t pay next Saturday, I shall ‘ave to complain to the secretary of the ‘ospital.”

“Oh yes, that’ll be all right.”

She looked at him for a little and glanced round the bare room. When she spoke it was without any emphasis, as though it were quite a natural thing to say.

“I’ve got a nice ‘ot joint downstairs, and if you like to come down to the kitchen you’re welcome to a bit of dinner.”

Philip felt himself redden to the soles of his feet, and a sob caught at his throat.

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Higgins, but I’m not at all hungry.”

“Very good, sir.”

When she left the room Philip threw himself on his bed. He had to clench his fists in order to prevent himself from crying.

C

Saturday. It was the day on which he had promised to pay his landlady. He had been expecting something to turn up all through the week. He had found no work. He had never been driven to extremities before, and he was so dazed that he did not know what to do. He had at the back of his mind a feeling that the whole thing was a preposterous joke. He had no more than a few coppers left, he had sold all the clothes he could do without; he had some books and one or two odds and ends upon which he might have got a shilling or two, but the landlady was keeping an eye on his comings and goings: he was afraid she would stop him if he took anything more from his room. The only thing was to tell her that he could not pay his bill. He had not the courage. It was the middle of June. The night was fine and warm. He made up his mind to stay out. He walked slowly along the Chelsea Embankment, because the river was restful and quiet, till he was tired, and then sat on a bench and dozed. He did not know how long he slept; he awoke with a start, dreaming that he was being shaken by a policeman and told to move on; but when he opened his eyes he found himself alone. He walked on, he did not know why, and at last came to Chiswick, where he slept again. Presently the hardness of the bench roused him. The night seemed very long. He shivered. He was seized with a sense of his misery; and he did not know what on earth to do: he was ashamed at having slept on the Embankment; it seemed peculiarly humiliating, and he felt his cheeks flush in the darkness. He remembered stories he had heard of those who did and how among them were officers, clergymen, and men who had been to universities: he wondered if he would become one of them, standing in a line to get soup from a charitable institution. It would be much better to commit suicide. He could not go on like that: Lawson would help him when he knew what straits he was in; it was absurd to let his pride prevent him from asking for assistance. He wondered why he had come such a cropper. He had always tried to do what he thought best, and everything had gone wrong. He had helped people when he could, he did not think he had been more selfish than anyone else, it seemed horribly unjust that he should be reduced to such a pass.

But it was no good thinking about it. He walked on. It was now light: the river was beautiful in the silence, and there was something mysterious in the early day; it was going to be very fine, and the sky, pale in the dawn, was cloudless. He felt very tired, and hunger was gnawing at his entrails, but he could not sit still; he was constantly afraid of being spoken to by a policeman. He dreaded the mortification of that. He felt dirty and wished he could have a wash. At last he found himself at Hampton Court. He felt that if he did not have something to eat he would cry. He chose a cheap eating-house and went in; there was a smell of hot things, and it made him feel slightly sick: he meant to eat something nourishing enough to keep up for the rest of the day, but his stomach revolted at the sight of food. He had a cup of tea and some bread and butter. He remembered then that it was Sunday and he could go to the Athelnys; he thought of the roast beef and the Yorkshire pudding they would eat; but he was fearfully tired and could not face the happy, noisy family. He was feeling morose and wretched. He wanted to be left alone. He made up his mind that he would go into the gardens of the palace and lie down. His bones ached. Perhaps he would find a pump so that he could wash his hands and face and drink something; he was very thirsty; and now that he was no longer hungry he thought with pleasure of the flowers and the lawns and the great leafy trees. He felt that there he could think out better what he must do. He lay on the grass, in the shade, and lit his pipe. For economy’s sake he had for a long time confined himself to two pipes a day; he was thankful now that his pouch was full. He did not know what people did when they had no money. Presently he fell asleep. When he awoke it was nearly mid-day, and he thought that soon he must be setting out for London so as to be there in the early morning and answer any advertisements which seemed to promise. He thought of his uncle, who had told him that he would leave him at his death the little he had; Philip did not in the least know how much this was: it could not be more than a few hundred pounds. He wondered whether he could raise money on the reversion. Not without the old man’s consent, and that he would never give.

“The only thing I can do is to hang on somehow till he dies.”

Philip reckoned his age. The Vicar of Blackstable was well over seventy. He had chronic bronchitis, but many old men had that and lived on indefinitely. Meanwhile something must turn up; Philip could not get away from the feeling that his position was altogether abnormal; people in his particular station did not starve. It was because he could not bring himself to believe in the reality of his experience that he did not give way to utter despair. He made up his mind to borrow half a sovereign from Lawson. He stayed in the garden all day and smoked when he felt very hungry; he did not mean to eat anything until he was setting out again for London: it was a long way and he must keep up his strength for that. He started when the day began to grow cooler, and slept on benches when he was tired. No one disturbed him. He had a wash and brush up, and a shave at Victoria, some tea and bread and butter, and while he was eating this read the advertisement columns of the morning paper. As he looked down them his eye fell upon an announcement asking for a salesman in the ‘furnishing drapery’ department of some well-known stores. He had a curious little sinking of the heart, for with his middle-class prejudices it seemed dreadful to go into a shop; but he shrugged his shoulders, after all what did it matter? and he made up his mind to have a shot at it. He had a queer feeling that by accepting every humiliation, by going out to meet it even, he was forcing the hand of fate. When he presented himself, feeling horribly shy, in the department at nine o’clock he found that many others were there before him. They were of all ages, from boys of sixteen to men of forty; some were talking to one another in undertones, but most were silent; and when he took up his place those around him gave him a look of hostility. He heard one man say:

“The only thing I look forward to is getting my refusal soon enough to give me time to look elsewhere.”

The man, standing next him, glanced at Philip and asked:

“Had any experience?”

“No,” said Philip.

He paused a moment and then made a remark: “Even the smaller houses won’t see you without appointment after lunch.”

Philip looked at the assistants. Some were draping chintzes and cretonnes, and others, his neighbour told him were preparing country orders that had come in by post. At about a quarter past nine the buyer arrived. He heard one of the men who were waiting say to another that it was Mr. Gibbons. He was middle-aged, short and corpulent, with a black beard and dark, greasy hair. He had brisk movements and a clever face. He wore a silk hat and a frock coat, the lapel of which was adorned with a white geranium surrounded by leaves. He went into his office, leaving the door open; it was very small and contained only an American roll-desk in the corner, a bookcase, and a cupboard. The men standing outside watched him mechanically take the geranium out of his coat and put it in an ink-pot filled with water. It was against the rules to wear flowers in business.

During the day the department men who wanted to keep in with the governor admired the flower.

“I’ve never seen better,” they said, “you didn’t grow it yourself?”

“Yes I did,” he smiled, and a gleam of pride filled his intelligent eyes.

He took off his hat and changed his coat, glanced at the letters and then at the men who were waiting to see him. He made a slight sign with one finger, and the first in the queue stepped into the office. They filed past him one by one and answered his questions. He put them very briefly, keeping his eyes fixed on the applicant’s face.

“Age? Experience? Why did you leave your job?”

He listened to the replies without expression. When it came to Philip’s turn he fancied that Mr. Gibbons stared at him curiously. Philip’s clothes were neat and tolerably cut. He looked a little different from the others.

“Experience?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t any,” said Philip.

“No good.”

Philip walked out of the office. The ordeal had been so much less painful than he expected that he felt no particular disappointment. He could hardly hope to succeed in getting a place the first time he tried. He had kept the newspaper and now looked at the advertisements again: a shop in Holborn needed a salesman too, and he went there; but when he arrived he found that someone had already been engaged. If he wanted to get anything to eat that day he must go to Lawson’s studio before he went out to luncheon, so he made his way along the Brompton Road to Yeoman’s Row.

“I say, I’m rather broke till the end of the month,” he said as soon as he found an opportunity. “I wish you’d lend me half a sovereign, will you?”

It was incredible the difficulty he found in asking for money; and he remembered the casual way, as though almost they were conferring a favour, men at the hospital had extracted small sums out of him which they had no intention of repaying.

“Like a shot,” said Lawson.

But when he put his hand in his pocket he found that he had only eight shillings. Philip’s heart sank.

“Oh well, lend me five bob, will you?” he said lightly.

“Here you are.”

Philip went to the public baths in Westminster and spent sixpence on a bath. Then he got himself something to eat. He did not know what to do with himself in the afternoon. He would not go back to the hospital in case anyone should ask him questions, and besides, he had nothing to do there now; they would wonder in the two or three departments he had worked in why he did not come, but they must think what they chose, it did not matter: he would not be the first student who had dropped out without warning. He went to the free library, and looked at the papers till they wearied him, then he took out Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights; but he found he could not read: the words meant nothing to him, and he continued to brood over his helplessness. He kept on thinking the same things all the time, and the fixity of his thoughts made his head ache. At last, craving for fresh air, he went into the Green Park and lay down on the grass. He thought miserably of his deformity, which made it impossible for him to go to the war. He went to sleep and dreamt that he was suddenly sound of foot and out at the Cape in a regiment of Yeomanry; the pictures he had looked at in the illustrated papers gave materials for his fancy; and he saw himself on the Veldt, in khaki, sitting with other men round a fire at night. When he awoke he found that it was still quite light, and presently he heard Big Ben strike seven. He had twelve hours to get through with nothing to do. He dreaded the interminable night. The sky was overcast and he feared it would rain; he would have to go to a lodging-house where he could get a bed; he had seen them advertised on lamps outside houses in Lambeth: Good Beds sixpence; he had never been inside one, and dreaded the foul smell and the vermin. He made up his mind to stay in the open air if he possibly could. He remained in the park till it was closed and then began to walk about. He was very tired. The thought came to him that an accident would be a piece of luck, so that he could be taken to a hospital and lie there, in a clean bed, for weeks. At midnight he was so hungry that he could not go without food any more, so he went to a coffee stall at Hyde Park Corner and ate a couple of potatoes and had a cup of coffee. Then he walked again. He felt too restless to sleep, and he had a horrible dread of being moved on by the police. He noted that he was beginning to look upon the constable from quite a new angle. This was the third night he had spent out. Now and then he sat on the benches in Piccadilly and towards morning he strolled down to The Embankment. He listened to the striking of Big Ben, marking every quarter of an hour, and reckoned out how long it left till the city woke again. In the morning he spent a few coppers on making himself neat and clean, bought a paper to read the advertisements, and set out once more on the search for work.

He went on in this way for several days. He had very little food and began to feel weak and ill, so that he had hardly enough energy to go on looking for the work which seemed so desperately hard to find. He was growing used now to the long waiting at the back of a shop on the chance that he would be taken on, and the curt dismissal. He walked to all parts of London in answer to the advertisements, and he came to know by sight men who applied as fruitlessly as himself. One or two tried to make friends with him, but he was too tired and too wretched to accept their advances. He did not go any more to Lawson, because he owed him five shillings. He began to be too dazed to think clearly and ceased very much to care what would happen to him. He cried a good deal. At first he was very angry with himself for this and ashamed, but he found it relieved him, and somehow made him feel less hungry. In the very early morning he suffered a good deal from cold. One night he went into his room to change his linen; he slipped in about three, when he was quite sure everyone would be asleep, and out again at five; he lay on the bed and its softness was enchanting; all his bones ached, and as he lay he revelled in the pleasure of it; it was so delicious that he did not want to go to sleep. He was growing used to want of food and did not feel very hungry, but only weak. Constantly now at the back of his mind was the thought of doing away with himself, but he used all the strength he had not to dwell on it, because he was afraid the temptation would get hold of him so that he would not be able to help himself. He kept on saying to himself that it would be absurd to commit suicide, since something must happen soon; he could not get over the impression that his situation was too preposterous to be taken quite seriously; it was like an illness which must be endured but from which he was bound to recover. Every night he swore that nothing would induce him to put up with such another and determined next morning to write to his uncle, or to Mr. Nixon, the solicitor, or to Lawson; but when the time came he could not bring himself to make the humiliating confession of his utter failure. He did not know how Lawson would take it. In their friendship Lawson had been scatter-brained and he had prided himself on his common sense. He would have to tell the whole history of his folly. He had an uneasy feeling that Lawson, after helping him, would turn the cold shoulder on him. His uncle and the solicitor would of course do something for him, but he dreaded their reproaches. He did not want anyone to reproach him: he clenched his teeth and repeated that what had happened was inevitable just because it had happened. Regret was absurd.

The days were unending, and the five shillings Lawson had lent him would not last much longer. Philip longed for Sunday to come so that he could go to Athelny’s. He did not know what prevented him from going there sooner, except perhaps that he wanted so badly to get through on his own; for Athelny, who had been in straits as desperate, was the only person who could do anything for him. Perhaps after dinner he could bring himself to tell Athelny that he was in difficulties. Philip repeated to himself over and over again what he should say to him. He was dreadfully afraid that Athelny would put him off with airy phrases: that would be so horrible that he wanted to delay as long as possible the putting of him to the test. Philip had lost all confidence in his fellows.

Saturday night was cold and raw. Philip suffered horribly. From midday on Saturday till he dragged himself wearily to Athelny’s house he ate nothing. He spent his last twopence on Sunday morning on a wash and a brush up in the lavatory at Charing Cross.

CI

When Philip rang a head was put out of the window, and in a minute he heard a noisy clatter on the stairs as the children ran down to let him in. It was a pale, anxious, thin face that he bent down for them to kiss. He was so moved by their exuberant affection that, to give himself time to recover, he made excuses to linger on the stairs. He was in a hysterical state and almost anything was enough to make him cry. They asked him why he had not come on the previous Sunday, and he told them he had been ill; they wanted to know what was the matter with him; and Philip, to amuse them, suggested a mysterious ailment, the name of which, double-barrelled and barbarous with its mixture of Greek and Latin (medical nomenclature bristled with such), made them shriek with delight. They dragged Philip into the parlour and made him repeat it for their father’s edification. Athelny got up and shook hands with him. He stared at Philip, but with his round, bulging eyes he always seemed to stare, Philip did not know why on this occasion it made him self-conscious.

“We missed you last Sunday,” he said.

Philip could never tell lies without embarrassment, and he was scarlet when he finished his explanation for not coming. Then Mrs. Athelny entered and shook hands with him.

“I hope you’re better, Mr. Carey,” she said.

He did not know why she imagined that anything had been the matter with him, for the kitchen door was closed when he came up with the children, and they had not left him.

“Dinner won’t be ready for another ten minutes,” she said, in her slow drawl. “Won’t you have an egg beaten up in a glass of milk while you’re waiting?”

There was a look of concern on her face which made Philip uncomfortable. He forced a laugh and answered that he was not at all hungry. Sally came in to lay the table, and Philip began to chaff her. It was the family joke that she would be as fat as an aunt of Mrs. Athelny, called Aunt Elizabeth, whom the children had never seen but regarded as the type of obscene corpulence.

“I say, what HAS happened since I saw you last, Sally?” Philip began.

“Nothing that I know of.”

“I believe you’ve been putting on weight.”

“I’m sure you haven’t,” she retorted. “You’re a perfect skeleton.”

Philip reddened.

“That’s a tu quoque, Sally,” cried her father. “You will be fined one golden hair of your head. Jane, fetch the shears.”

“Well, he is thin, father,” remonstrated Sally. “He’s just skin and bone.”

“That’s not the question, child. He is at perfect liberty to be thin, but your obesity is contrary to decorum.”

As he spoke he put his arm proudly round her waist and looked at her with admiring eyes.

“Let me get on with the table, father. If I am comfortable there are some who don’t seem to mind it.”

“The hussy!” cried Athelny, with a dramatic wave of the hand. “She taunts me with the notorious fact that Joseph, a son of Levi who sells jewels in Holborn, has made her an offer of marriage.”

“Have you accepted him, Sally?” asked Philip.

“Don’t you know father better than that by this time? There’s not a word of truth in it.”

“Well, if he hasn’t made you an offer of marriage,” cried Athelny, “by Saint George and Merry England, I will seize him by the nose and demand of him immediately what are his intentions.”

“Sit down, father, dinner’s ready. Now then, you children, get along with you and wash your hands all of you, and don’t shirk it, because I mean to look at them before you have a scrap of dinner, so there.”

Philip thought he was ravenous till he began to eat, but then discovered that his stomach turned against food, and he could eat hardly at all. His brain was weary; and he did not notice that Athelny, contrary to his habit, spoke very little. Philip was relieved to be sitting in a comfortable house, but every now and then he could not prevent himself from glancing out of the window. The day was tempestuous. The fine weather had broken; and it was cold, and there was a bitter wind; now and again gusts of rain drove against the window. Philip wondered what he should do that night. The Athelnys went to bed early, and he could not stay where he was after ten o’clock. His heart sank at the thought of going out into the bleak darkness. It seemed more terrible now that he was with his friends than when he was outside and alone. He kept on saying to himself that there were plenty more who would be spending the night out of doors. He strove to distract his mind by talking, but in the middle of his words a spatter of rain against the window would make him start.

“It’s like March weather,” said Athelny. “Not the sort of day one would like to be crossing the Channel.”

Presently they finished, and Sally came in and cleared away.

“Would you like a twopenny stinker?” said Athelny, handing him a cigar.

Philip took it and inhaled the smoke with delight. It soothed him extraordinarily. When Sally had finished Athelny told her to shut the door after her.

“Now we shan’t be disturbed,” he said, turning to Philip. “I’ve arranged with Betty not to let the children come in till I call them.”

Philip gave him a startled look, but before he could take in the meaning of his words, Athelny, fixing his glasses on his nose with the gesture habitual to him, went on.

“I wrote to you last Sunday to ask if anything was the matter with you, and as you didn’t answer I went to your rooms on Wednesday.”

Philip turned his head away and did not answer. His heart began to beat violently. Athelny did not speak, and presently the silence seemed intolerable to Philip. He could not think of a single word to say.

“Your landlady told me you hadn’t been in since Saturday night, and she said you owed her for the last month. Where have you been sleeping all this week?”

It made Philip sick to answer. He stared out of the window.

“Nowhere.”

“I tried to find you.”

“Why?” asked Philip.

“Betty and I have been just as broke in our day, only we had babies to look after. Why didn’t you come here?”

“I couldn’t.”

Philip was afraid he was going to cry. He felt very weak. He shut his eyes and frowned, trying to control himself. He felt a sudden flash of anger with Athelny because he would not leave him alone; but he was broken; and presently, his eyes still closed, slowly in order to keep his voice steady, he told him the story of his adventures during the last few weeks. As he spoke it seemed to him that he had behaved inanely, and it made it still harder to tell. He felt that Athelny would think him an utter fool.

“Now you’re coming to live with us till you find something to do,” said

Athelny, when he had finished.

Philip flushed, he knew not why.

“Oh, it’s awfully kind of you, but I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“Why not?”

Philip did not answer. He had refused instinctively from fear that he would be a bother, and he had a natural bashfulness of accepting favours. He knew besides that the Athelnys lived from hand to mouth, and with their large family had neither space nor money to entertain a stranger.

“Of course you must come here,” said Athelny. “Thorpe will tuck in with one of his brothers and you can sleep in his bed. You don’t suppose your food’s going to make any difference to us.”

Philip was afraid to speak, and Athelny, going to the door, called his wife.

“Betty,” he said, when she came in, “Mr. Carey’s coming to live with us.”

“Oh, that is nice,” she said. “I’ll go and get the bed ready.”

She spoke in such a hearty, friendly tone, taking everything for granted, that Philip was deeply touched. He never expected people to be kind to him, and when they were it surprised and moved him. Now he could not prevent two large tears from rolling down his cheeks. The Athelnys discussed the arrangements and pretended not to notice to what a state his weakness had brought him. When Mrs. Athelny left them Philip leaned back in his chair, and looking out of the window laughed a little.

“It’s not a very nice night to be out, is it?”

CII

Athelny told Philip that he could easily get him something to do in the large firm of linendrapers in which himself worked. Several of the assistants had gone to the war, and Lynn and Sedley with patriotic zeal had promised to keep their places open for them. They put the work of the heroes on those who remained, and since they did not increase the wages of these were able at once to exhibit public spirit and effect an economy; but the war continued and trade was less depressed; the holidays were coming, when numbers of the staff went away for a fortnight at a time: they were bound to engage more assistants. Philip’s experience had made him doubtful whether even then they would engage him; but Athelny, representing himself as a person of consequence in the firm, insisted that the manager could refuse him nothing. Philip, with his training in Paris, would be very useful; it was only a matter of waiting a little and he was bound to get a well-paid job to design costumes and draw posters. Philip made a poster for the summer sale and Athelny took it away. Two days later he brought it back, saying that the manager admired it very much and regretted with all his heart that there was no vacancy just then in that department. Philip asked whether there was nothing else he could do.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Well, the fact is they’re advertising for a shop-walker tomorrow,” said

Athelny, looking at him doubtfully through his glasses.

“D’you think I stand any chance of getting it?”

Athelny was a little confused; he had led Philip to expect something much more splendid; on the other hand he was too poor to go on providing him indefinitely with board and lodging.

“You might take it while you wait for something better. You always stand a better chance if you’re engaged by the firm already.”

“I’m not proud, you know,” smiled Philip.

“If you decide on that you must be there at a quarter to nine tomorrow morning.”

Notwithstanding the war there was evidently much difficulty in finding work, for when Philip went to the shop many men were waiting already. He recognised some whom he had seen in his own searching, and there was one whom he had noticed lying about the park in the afternoon. To Philip now that suggested that he was as homeless as himself and passed the night out of doors. The men were of all sorts, old and young, tall and short; but every one had tried to make himself smart for the interview with the manager: they had carefully brushed hair and scrupulously clean hands. They waited in a passage which Philip learnt afterwards led up to the dining-hall and the work rooms; it was broken every few yards by five or six steps. Though there was electric light in the shop here was only gas, with wire cages over it for protection, and it flared noisily. Philip arrived punctually, but it was nearly ten o’clock when he was admitted into the office. It was three-cornered, like a cut of cheese lying on its side: on the walls were pictures of women in corsets, and two poster-proofs, one of a man in pyjamas, green and white in large stripes, and the other of a ship in full sail ploughing an azure sea: on the sail was printed in large letters ‘great white sale.’ The widest side of the office was the back of one of the shop-windows, which was being dressed at the time, and an assistant went to and fro during the interview. The manager was reading a letter. He was a florid man, with sandy hair and a large sandy moustache; from the middle of his watch-chain hung a bunch of football medals. He sat in his shirt sleeves at a large desk with a telephone by his side; before him were the day’s advertisements, Athelny’s work, and cuttings from newspapers pasted on a card. He gave Philip a glance but did not speak to him; he dictated a letter to the typist, a girl who sat at a small table in one corner; then he asked Philip his name, age, and what experience he had had. He spoke with a cockney twang in a high, metallic voice which he seemed not able always to control; Philip noticed that his upper teeth were large and protruding; they gave you the impression that they were loose and would come out if you gave them a sharp tug.

“I think Mr. Athelny has spoken to you about me,” said Philip.

“Oh, you are the young feller who did that poster?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No good to us, you know, not a bit of good.”

He looked Philip up and down. He seemed to notice that Philip was in some way different from the men who had preceded him.

“You’d ‘ave to get a frock coat, you know. I suppose you ‘aven’t got one.

You seem a respectable young feller. I suppose you found art didn’t pay.”

Philip could not tell whether he meant to engage him or not. He threw remarks at him in a hostile way.

“Where’s your home?”

“My father and mother died when I was a child.”

“I like to give young fellers a chance. Many’s the one I’ve given their chance to and they’re managers of departments now. And they’re grateful to me, I’ll say that for them. They know what I done for them. Start at the bottom of the ladder, that’s the only way to learn the business, and then if you stick to it there’s no knowing what it can lead to. If you suit, one of these days you may find yourself in a position like what mine is. Bear that in mind, young feller.”

“I’m very anxious to do my best, sir,” said Philip.

He knew that he must put in the sir whenever he could, but it sounded odd to him, and he was afraid of overdoing it. The manager liked talking. It gave him a happy consciousness of his own importance, and he did not give Philip his decision till he had used a great many words.

“Well, I daresay you’ll do,” he said at last, in a pompous way. “Anyhow I don’t mind giving you a trial.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“You can start at once. I’ll give you six shillings a week and your keep. Everything found, you know; the six shillings is only pocket money, to do what you like with, paid monthly. Start on Monday. I suppose you’ve got no cause of complaint with that.”

“No, sir.”

“Harrington Street, d’you know where that is, Shaftesbury Avenue. That’s where you sleep. Number ten, it is. You can sleep there on Sunday night, if you like; that’s just as you please, or you can send your box there on Monday.” The manager nodded: “Good-morning.”

CIII

Mrs. Athelny lent Philip money to pay his landlady enough of her bill to let him take his things away. For five shillings and the pawn-ticket on a suit he was able to get from a pawnbroker a frock coat which fitted him fairly well. He redeemed the rest of his clothes. He sent his box to Harrington Street by Carter Patterson and on Monday morning went with Athelny to the shop. Athelny introduced him to the buyer of the costumes and left him. The buyer was a pleasant, fussy little man of thirty, named Sampson; he shook hands with Philip, and, in order to show his own accomplishment of which he was very proud, asked him if he spoke French. He was surprised when Philip told him he did.

“Any other language?”

“I speak German.”

“Oh! I go over to Paris myself occasionally. Parlez-vous francais? Ever been to Maxim’s?”

Philip was stationed at the top of the stairs in the ‘costumes.’ His work consisted in directing people to the various departments. There seemed a great many of them as Mr. Sampson tripped them off his tongue. Suddenly he noticed that Philip limped.

“What’s the matter with your leg?” he asked.

“I’ve got a club-foot,” said Philip. “But it doesn’t prevent my walking or anything like that.”

The buyer looked at it for a moment doubtfully, and Philip surmised that he was wondering why the manager had engaged him. Philip knew that he had not noticed there was anything the matter with him.

“I don’t expect you to get them all correct the first day. If you’re in any doubt all you’ve got to do is to ask one of the young ladies.”

Mr. Sampson turned away; and Philip, trying to remember where this or the other department was, watched anxiously for the customer in search of information. At one o’clock he went up to dinner. The dining-room, on the top floor of the vast building, was large, long, and well lit; but all the windows were shut to keep out the dust, and there was a horrid smell of cooking. There were long tables covered with cloths, with big glass bottles of water at intervals, and down the centre salt cellars and bottles of vinegar. The assistants crowded in noisily, and sat down on forms still warm from those who had dined at twelve-thirty.

“No pickles,” remarked the man next to Philip.

He was a tall thin young man, with a hooked nose and a pasty face; he had a long head, unevenly shaped as though the skull had been pushed in here and there oddly, and on his forehead and neck were large acne spots red and inflamed. His name was Harris. Philip discovered that on some days there were large soup-plates down the table full of mixed pickles. They were very popular. There were no knives and forks, but in a minute a large fat boy in a white coat came in with a couple of handfuls of them and threw them loudly on the middle of the table. Each man took what he wanted; they were warm and greasy from recent washing in dirty water. Plates of meat swimming in gravy were handed round by boys in white jackets, and as they flung each plate down with the quick gesture of a prestidigitator the gravy slopped over on to the table-cloth. Then they brought large dishes of cabbages and potatoes; the sight of them turned Philip’s stomach; he noticed that everyone poured quantities of vinegar over them. The noise was awful. They talked and laughed and shouted, and there was the clatter of knives and forks, and strange sounds of eating. Philip was glad to get back into the department. He was beginning to remember where each one was, and had less often to ask one of the assistants, when somebody wanted to know the way.

“First to the right. Second on the left, madam.”

One or two of the girls spoke to him, just a word when things were slack, and he felt they were taking his measure. At five he was sent up again to the dining-room for tea. He was glad to sit down. There were large slices of bread heavily spread with butter; and many had pots of jam, which were kept in the ‘store’ and had their names written on.

Philip was exhausted when work stopped at half past six. Harris, the man he had sat next to at dinner, offered to take him over to Harrington Street to show him where he was to sleep. He told Philip there was a spare bed in his room, and, as the other rooms were full, he expected Philip would be put there. The house in Harrington Street had been a bootmaker’s; and the shop was used as a bed-room; but it was very dark, since the window had been boarded three parts up, and as this did not open the only ventilation came from a small skylight at the far end. There was a musty smell, and Philip was thankful that he would not have to sleep there. Harris took him up to the sitting-room, which was on the first floor; it had an old piano in it with a keyboard that looked like a row of decayed teeth; and on the table in a cigar-box without a lid was a set of dominoes; old numbers of The Strand Magazine and of The Graphic were lying about. The other rooms were used as bed-rooms. That in which Philip was to sleep was at the top of the house. There were six beds in it, and a trunk or a box stood by the side of each. The only furniture was a chest of drawers: it had four large drawers and two small ones, and Philip as the new-comer had one of these; there were keys to them, but as they were all alike they were not of much use, and Harris advised him to keep his valuables in his trunk. There was a looking-glass on the chimney-piece. Harris showed Philip the lavatory, which was a fairly large room with eight basins in a row, and here all the inmates did their washing. It led into another room in which were two baths, discoloured, the woodwork stained with soap; and in them were dark rings at various intervals which indicated the water marks of different baths.

When Harris and Philip went back to their bed-room they found a tall man changing his clothes and a boy of sixteen whistling as loud as he could while he brushed his hair. In a minute or two without saying a word to anybody the tall man went out. Harris winked at the boy, and the boy, whistling still, winked back. Harris told Philip that the man was called Prior; he had been in the army and now served in the silks; he kept pretty much to himself, and he went off every night, just like that, without so much as a good-evening, to see his girl. Harris went out too, and only the boy remained to watch Philip curiously while he unpacked his things. His name was Bell and he was serving his time for nothing in the haberdashery. He was much interested in Philip’s evening clothes. He told him about the other men in the room and asked him every sort of question about himself. He was a cheerful youth, and in the intervals of conversation sang in a half-broken voice snatches of music-hall songs. When Philip had finished he went out to walk about the streets and look at the crowd; occasionally he stopped outside the doors of restaurants and watched the people going in; he felt hungry, so he bought a bath bun and ate it while he strolled along. He had been given a latch-key by the prefect, the man who turned out the gas at a quarter past eleven, but afraid of being locked out he returned in good time; he had learned already the system of fines: you had to pay a shilling if you came in after eleven, and half a crown after a quarter past, and you were reported besides: if it happened three times you were dismissed.

All but the soldier were in when Philip arrived and two were already in bed. Philip was greeted with cries.

“Oh, Clarence! Naughty boy!”

He discovered that Bell had dressed up the bolster in his evening clothes.

The boy was delighted with his joke.

“You must wear them at the social evening, Clarence.”

“He’ll catch the belle of Lynn’s, if he’s not careful.”

Philip had already heard of the social evenings, for the money stopped from the wages to pay for them was one of the grievances of the staff. It was only two shillings a month, and it covered medical attendance and the use of a library of worn novels; but as four shillings a month besides was stopped for washing, Philip discovered that a quarter of his six shillings a week would never be paid to him.

Most of the men were eating thick slices of fat bacon between a roll of bread cut in two. These sandwiches, the assistants’ usual supper, were supplied by a small shop a few doors off at twopence each. The soldier rolled in; silently, rapidly, took off his clothes and threw himself into bed. At ten minutes past eleven the gas gave a big jump and five minutes later went out. The soldier went to sleep, but the others crowded round the big window in their pyjamas and night-shirts and, throwing remains of their sandwiches at the women who passed in the street below, shouted to them facetious remarks. The house opposite, six storeys high, was a workshop for Jewish tailors who left off work at eleven; the rooms were brightly lit and there were no blinds to the windows. The sweater’s daughter — the family consisted of father, mother, two small boys, and a girl of twenty — went round the house to put out the lights when work was over, and sometimes she allowed herself to be made love to by one of the tailors. The shop assistants in Philip’s room got a lot of amusement out of watching the manoeuvres of one man or another to stay behind, and they made small bets on which would succeed. At midnight the people were turned out of the Harrington Arms at the end of the street, and soon after they all went to bed: Bell, who slept nearest the door, made his way across the room by jumping from bed to bed, and even when he got to his own would not stop talking. At last everything was silent but for the steady snoring of the soldier, and Philip went to sleep.

He was awaked at seven by the loud ringing of a bell, and by a quarter to eight they were all dressed and hurrying downstairs in their stockinged feet to pick out their boots. They laced them as they ran along to the shop in Oxford Street for breakfast. If they were a minute later than eight they got none, nor, once in, were they allowed out to get themselves anything to eat. Sometimes, if they knew they could not get into the building in time, they stopped at the little shop near their quarters and bought a couple of buns; but this cost money, and most went without food till dinner. Philip ate some bread and butter, drank a cup of tea, and at half past eight began his day’s work again.

“First to the right. Second on the left, madam.”

Soon he began to answer the questions quite mechanically. The work was monotonous and very tiring. After a few days his feet hurt him so that he could hardly stand: the thick soft carpets made them burn, and at night his socks were painful to remove. It was a common complaint, and his fellow ‘floormen’ told him that socks and boots just rotted away from the continual sweating. All the men in his room suffered in the same fashion, and they relieved the pain by sleeping with their feet outside the bed-clothes. At first Philip could not walk at all and was obliged to spend a good many of his evenings in the sitting-room at Harrington Street with his feet in a pail of cold water. His companion on these occasions was Bell, the lad in the haberdashery, who stayed in often to arrange the stamps he collected. As he fastened them with little pieces of stamp-paper he whistled monotonously.

CIV

The social evenings took place on alternate Mondays. There was one at the beginning of Philip’s second week at Lynn’s. He arranged to go with one of the women in his department.

“Meet ’em ‘alf-way,” she said, “same as I do.”

This was Mrs. Hodges, a little woman of five-and-forty, with badly dyed hair; she had a yellow face with a network of small red veins all over it, and yellow whites to her pale blue eyes. She took a fancy to Philip and called him by his Christian name before he had been in the shop a week.

“We’ve both known what it is to come down,” she said.

She told Philip that her real name was not Hodges, but she always referred to “me ‘usband Misterodges;” he was a barrister and he treated her simply shocking, so she left him as she preferred to be independent like; but she had known what it was to drive in her own carriage, dear — she called everyone dear — and they always had late dinner at home. She used to pick her teeth with the pin of an enormous silver brooch. It was in the form of a whip and a hunting-crop crossed, with two spurs in the middle. Philip was ill at ease in his new surroundings, and the girls in the shop called him ‘sidey.’ One addressed him as Phil, and he did not answer because he had not the least idea that she was speaking to him; so she tossed her head, saying he was a ‘stuck-up thing,’ and next time with ironical emphasis called him Mister Carey. She was a Miss Jewell, and she was going to marry a doctor. The other girls had never seen him, but they said he must be a gentleman as he gave her such lovely presents.

“Never you mind what they say, dear,” said Mrs. Hodges. “I’ve ‘ad to go through it same as you ‘ave. They don’t know any better, poor things. You take my word for it, they’ll like you all right if you ‘old your own same as I ‘ave.”

The social evening was held in the restaurant in the basement. The tables were put on one side so that there might be room for dancing, and smaller ones were set out for progressive whist.

“The ‘eads ‘ave to get there early,” said Mrs. Hodges.

She introduced him to Miss Bennett, who was the belle of Lynn’s. She was the buyer in the ‘Petticoats,’ and when Philip entered was engaged in conversation with the buyer in the ‘Gentlemen’s Hosiery;’ Miss Bennett was a woman of massive proportions, with a very large red face heavily powdered and a bust of imposing dimensions; her flaxen hair was arranged with elaboration. She was overdressed, but not badly dressed, in black with a high collar, and she wore black glace gloves, in which she played cards; she had several heavy gold chains round her neck, bangles on her wrists, and circular photograph pendants, one being of Queen Alexandra; she carried a black satin bag and chewed Sen-sens.

“Please to meet you, Mr. Carey,” she said. “This is your first visit to our social evenings, ain’t it? I expect you feel a bit shy, but there’s no cause to, I promise you that.”

She did her best to make people feel at home. She slapped them on the shoulders and laughed a great deal.

“Ain’t I a pickle?” she cried, turning to Philip. “What must you think of me? But I can’t ‘elp meself.”

Those who were going to take part in the social evening came in, the younger members of the staff mostly, boys who had not girls of their own, and girls who had not yet found anyone to walk with. Several of the young gentlemen wore lounge suits with white evening ties and red silk handkerchiefs; they were going to perform, and they had a busy, abstracted air; some were self-confident, but others were nervous, and they watched their public with an anxious eye. Presently a girl with a great deal of hair sat at the piano and ran her hands noisily across the keyboard. When the audience had settled itself she looked round and gave the name of her piece.

“A Drive in Russia.”

There was a round of clapping during which she deftly fixed bells to her wrists. She smiled a little and immediately burst into energetic melody. There was a great deal more clapping when she finished, and when this was over, as an encore, she gave a piece which imitated the sea; there were little trills to represent the lapping waves and thundering chords, with the loud pedal down, to suggest a storm. After this a gentleman sang a song called Bid me Good-bye, and as an encore obliged with Sing me to Sleep. The audience measured their enthusiasm with a nice discrimination. Everyone was applauded till he gave an encore, and so that there might be no jealousy no one was applauded more than anyone else. Miss Bennett sailed up to Philip.

“I’m sure you play or sing, Mr. Carey,” she said archly. “I can see it in your face.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Don’t you even recite?”

“I have no parlour tricks.”

The buyer in the ‘gentleman’s hosiery’ was a well-known reciter, and he was called upon loudly to perform by all the assistants in his department. Needing no pressing, he gave a long poem of tragic character, in which he rolled his eyes, put his hand on his chest, and acted as though he were in great agony. The point, that he had eaten cucumber for supper, was divulged in the last line and was greeted with laughter, a little forced because everyone knew the poem well, but loud and long. Miss Bennett did not sing, play, or recite.

“Oh no, she ‘as a little game of her own,” said Mrs. Hodges.

“Now, don’t you begin chaffing me. The fact is I know quite a lot about palmistry and second sight.”

“Oh, do tell my ‘and, Miss Bennett,” cried the girls in her department, eager to please her.

“I don’t like telling ‘ands, I don’t really. I’ve told people such terrible things and they’ve all come true, it makes one superstitious like.”

“Oh, Miss Bennett, just for once.”

A little crowd collected round her, and, amid screams of embarrassment, giggles, blushings, and cries of dismay or admiration, she talked mysteriously of fair and dark men, of money in a letter, and of journeys, till the sweat stood in heavy beads on her painted face.

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m all of a perspiration.”

Supper was at nine. There were cakes, buns, sandwiches, tea and coffee, all free; but if you wanted mineral water you had to pay for it. Gallantry often led young men to offer the ladies ginger beer, but common decency made them refuse. Miss Bennett was very fond of ginger beer, and she drank two and sometimes three bottles during the evening; but she insisted on paying for them herself. The men liked her for that.

“She’s a rum old bird,” they said, “but mind you, she’s not a bad sort, she’s not like what some are.”

After supper progressive whist was played. This was very noisy, and there was a great deal of laughing and shouting, as people moved from table to table. Miss Bennett grew hotter and hotter.

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m all of a perspiration.”

In due course one of the more dashing of the young men remarked that if they wanted to dance they’d better begin. The girl who had played the accompaniments sat at the piano and placed a decided foot on the loud pedal. She played a dreamy waltz, marking the time with the bass, while with the right hand she ‘tiddled’ in alternate octaves. By way of a change she crossed her hands and played the air in the bass.

“She does play well, doesn’t she?” Mrs. Hodges remarked to Philip. “And what’s more she’s never ‘ad a lesson in ‘er life; it’s all ear.”

Miss Bennett liked dancing and poetry better than anything in the world. She danced well, but very, very slowly, and an expression came into her eyes as though her thoughts were far, far away. She talked breathlessly of the floor and the heat and the supper. She said that the Portman Rooms had the best floor in London and she always liked the dances there; they were very select, and she couldn’t bear dancing with all sorts of men you didn’t know anything about; why, you might be exposing yourself to you didn’t know what all. Nearly all the people danced very well, and they enjoyed themselves. Sweat poured down their faces, and the very high collars of the young men grew limp.

Philip looked on, and a greater depression seized him than he remembered to have felt for a long time. He felt intolerably alone. He did not go, because he was afraid to seem supercilious, and he talked with the girls and laughed, but in his heart was unhappiness. Miss Bennett asked him if he had a girl.

“No,” he smiled.

“Oh, well, there’s plenty to choose from here. And they’re very nice respectable girls, some of them. I expect you’ll have a girl before you’ve been here long.”

She looked at him very archly.

“Meet ’em ‘alf-way,” said Mrs. Hodges. “That’s what I tell him.”

It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the party broke up. Philip could not get to sleep. Like the others he kept his aching feet outside the bed-clothes. He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading. The soldier was snoring quietly.

CV

The wages were paid once a month by the secretary. On pay-day each batch of assistants, coming down from tea, went into the passage and joined the long line of people waiting orderly like the audience in a queue outside a gallery door. One by one they entered the office. The secretary sat at a desk with wooden bowls of money in front of him, and he asked the employe’s name; he referred to a book, quickly, after a suspicious glance at the assistant, said aloud the sum due, and taking money out of the bowl counted it into his hand.

“Thank you,” he said. “Next.”

“Thank you,” was the reply.

The assistant passed on to the second secretary and before leaving the room paid him four shillings for washing money, two shillings for the club, and any fines that he might have incurred. With what he had left he went back into his department and there waited till it was time to go. Most of the men in Philip’s house were in debt with the woman who sold the sandwiches they generally ate for supper. She was a funny old thing, very fat, with a broad, red face, and black hair plastered neatly on each side of the forehead in the fashion shown in early pictures of Queen Victoria. She always wore a little black bonnet and a white apron; her sleeves were tucked up to the elbow; she cut the sandwiches with large, dirty, greasy hands; and there was grease on her bodice, grease on her apron, grease on her skirt. She was called Mrs. Fletcher, but everyone addressed her as ‘Ma’; she was really fond of the shop assistants, whom she called her boys; she never minded giving credit towards the end of the month, and it was known that now and then she had lent someone or other a few shillings when he was in straits. She was a good woman. When they were leaving or when they came back from the holidays, the boys kissed her fat red cheek; and more than one, dismissed and unable to find another job, had got for nothing food to keep body and soul together. The boys were sensible of her large heart and repaid her with genuine affection. There was a story they liked to tell of a man who had done well for himself at Bradford, and had five shops of his own, and had come back after fifteen years and visited Ma Fletcher and given her a gold watch.

Philip found himself with eighteen shillings left out of his month’s pay. It was the first money he had ever earned in his life. It gave him none of the pride which might have been expected, but merely a feeling of dismay. The smallness of the sum emphasised the hopelessness of his position. He took fifteen shillings to Mrs. Athelny to pay back part of what he owed her, but she would not take more than half a sovereign.

“D’you know, at that rate it’ll take me eight months to settle up with you.”

“As long as Athelny’s in work I can afford to wait, and who knows, p’raps they’ll give you a rise.”

Athelny kept on saying that he would speak to the manager about Philip, it was absurd that no use should be made of his talents; but he did nothing, and Philip soon came to the conclusion that the press-agent was not a person of so much importance in the manager’s eyes as in his own. Occasionally he saw Athelny in the shop. His flamboyance was extinguished; and in neat, commonplace, shabby clothes he hurried, a subdued, unassuming little man, through the departments as though anxious to escape notice.

“When I think of how I’m wasted there,” he said at home, “I’m almost tempted to give in my notice. There’s no scope for a man like me. I’m stunted, I’m starved.”

Mrs. Athelny, quietly sewing, took no notice of his complaints. Her mouth tightened a little.

“It’s very hard to get jobs in these times. It’s regular and it’s safe; I expect you’ll stay there as long as you give satisfaction.”

It was evident that Athelny would. It was interesting to see the ascendency which the uneducated woman, bound to him by no legal tie, had acquired over the brilliant, unstable man. Mrs. Athelny treated Philip with motherly kindness now that he was in a different position, and he was touched by her anxiety that he should make a good meal. It was the solace of his life (and when he grew used to it, the monotony of it was what chiefly appalled him) that he could go every Sunday to that friendly house. It was a joy to sit in the stately Spanish chairs and discuss all manner of things with Athelny. Though his condition seemed so desperate he never left him to go back to Harrington Street without a feeling of exultation. At first Philip, in order not to forget what he had learned, tried to go on reading his medical books, but he found it useless; he could not fix his attention on them after the exhausting work of the day; and it seemed hopeless to continue working when he did not know in how long he would be able to go back to the hospital. He dreamed constantly that he was in the wards. The awakening was painful. The sensation of other people sleeping in the room was inexpressibly irksome to him; he had been used to solitude, and to be with others always, never to be by himself for an instant was at these moments horrible to him. It was then that he found it most difficult to combat his despair. He saw himself going on with that life, first to the right, second on the left, madam, indefinitely; and having to be thankful if he was not sent away: the men who had gone to the war would be coming home soon, the firm had guaranteed to take them back, and this must mean that others would be sacked; he would have to stir himself even to keep the wretched post he had.

There was only one thing to free him and that was the death of his uncle. He would get a few hundred pounds then, and on this he could finish his course at the hospital. Philip began to wish with all his might for the old man’s death. He reckoned out how long he could possibly live: he was well over seventy, Philip did not know his exact age, but he must be at least seventy-five; he suffered from chronic bronchitis and every winter had a bad cough. Though he knew them by heart Philip read over and over again the details in his text-book of medicine of chronic bronchitis in the old. A severe winter might be too much for the old man. With all his heart Philip longed for cold and rain. He thought of it constantly, so that it became a monomania. Uncle William was affected by the great heat too, and in August they had three weeks of sweltering weather. Philip imagined to himself that one day perhaps a telegram would come saying that the Vicar had died suddenly, and he pictured to himself his unutterable relief. As he stood at the top of the stairs and directed people to the departments they wanted, he occupied his mind with thinking incessantly what he would do with the money. He did not know how much it would be, perhaps no more than five hundred pounds, but even that would be enough. He would leave the shop at once, he would not bother to give notice, he would pack his box and go without saying a word to anybody; and then he would return to the hospital. That was the first thing. Would he have forgotten much? In six months he could get it all back, and then he would take his three examinations as soon as he could, midwifery first, then medicine and surgery. The awful fear seized him that his uncle, notwithstanding his promises, might leave everything he had to the parish or the church. The thought made Philip sick. He could not be so cruel. But if that happened Philip was quite determined what to do, he would not go on in that way indefinitely; his life was only tolerable because he could look forward to something better. If he had no hope he would have no fear. The only brave thing to do then would be to commit suicide, and, thinking this over too, Philip decided minutely what painless drug he would take and how he would get hold of it. It encouraged him to think that, if things became unendurable, he had at all events a way out.

“Second to the right, madam, and down the stairs. First on the left and straight through. Mr. Philips, forward please.”

Once a month, for a week, Philip was ‘on duty.’ He had to go to the department at seven in the morning and keep an eye on the sweepers. When they finished he had to take the sheets off the cases and the models. Then, in the evening when the assistants left, he had to put back the sheets on the models and the cases and ‘gang’ the sweepers again. It was a dusty, dirty job. He was not allowed to read or write or smoke, but just had to walk about, and the time hung heavily on his hands. When he went off at half past nine he had supper given him, and this was the only consolation; for tea at five o’clock had left him with a healthy appetite, and the bread and cheese, the abundant cocoa which the firm provided, were welcome.

One day when Philip had been at Lynn’s for three months, Mr. Sampson, the buyer, came into the department, fuming with anger. The manager, happening to notice the costume window as he came in, had sent for the buyer and made satirical remarks upon the colour scheme. Forced to submit in silence to his superior’s sarcasm, Mr. Sampson took it out of the assistants; and he rated the wretched fellow whose duty it was to dress the window.

“If you want a thing well done you must do it yourself,” Mr. Sampson stormed. “I’ve always said it and I always shall. One can’t leave anything to you chaps. Intelligent you call yourselves, do you? Intelligent!”

He threw the word at the assistants as though it were the bitterest term of reproach.

“Don’t you know that if you put an electric blue in the window it’ll kill all the other blues?”

He looked round the department ferociously, and his eye fell upon Philip.

“You’ll dress the window next Friday, Carey. Let’s see what you can make of it.”

He went into his office, muttering angrily. Philip’s heart sank. When Friday morning came he went into the window with a sickening sense of shame. His cheeks were burning. It was horrible to display himself to the passers-by, and though he told himself it was foolish to give way to such a feeling he turned his back to the street. There was not much chance that any of the students at the hospital would pass along Oxford Street at that hour, and he knew hardly anyone else in London; but as Philip worked, with a huge lump in his throat, he fancied that on turning round he would catch the eye of some man he knew. He made all the haste he could. By the simple observation that all reds went together, and by spacing the costumes more than was usual, Philip got a very good effect; and when the buyer went into the street to look at the result he was obviously pleased.

“I knew I shouldn’t go far wrong in putting you on the window. The fact is, you and me are gentlemen, mind you I wouldn’t say this in the department, but you and me are gentlemen, and that always tells. It’s no good your telling me it doesn’t tell, because I know it does tell.”

Philip was put on the job regularly, but he could not accustom himself to the publicity; and he dreaded Friday morning, on which the window was dressed, with a terror that made him awake at five o’clock and lie sleepless with sickness in his heart. The girls in the department noticed his shamefaced way, and they very soon discovered his trick of standing with his back to the street. They laughed at him and called him ‘sidey.’

“I suppose you’re afraid your aunt’ll come along and cut you out of her will.”

On the whole he got on well enough with the girls. They thought him a little queer; but his club-foot seemed to excuse his not being like the rest, and they found in due course that he was good-natured. He never minded helping anyone, and he was polite and even tempered.

“You can see he’s a gentleman,” they said.

“Very reserved, isn’t he?” said one young woman, to whose passionate enthusiasm for the theatre he had listened unmoved.

Most of them had ‘fellers,’ and those who hadn’t said they had rather than have it supposed that no one had an inclination for them. One or two showed signs of being willing to start a flirtation with Philip, and he watched their manoeuvres with grave amusement. He had had enough of love-making for some time; and he was nearly always tired and often hungry.

CVI

Philip avoided the places he had known in happier times. The little gatherings at the tavern in Beak Street were broken up: Macalister, having let down his friends, no longer went there, and Hayward was at the Cape. Only Lawson remained; and Philip, feeling that now the painter and he had nothing in common, did not wish to see him; but one Saturday afternoon, after dinner, having changed his clothes he walked down Regent Street to go to the free library in St. Martin’s Lane, meaning to spend the afternoon there, and suddenly found himself face to face with him. His first instinct was to pass on without a word, but Lawson did not give him the opportunity.

“Where on earth have you been all this time?” he cried.

“I?” said Philip.

“I wrote you and asked you to come to the studio for a beano and you never even answered.”

“I didn’t get your letter.”

“No, I know. I went to the hospital to ask for you, and I saw my letter in the rack. Have you chucked the Medical?”

Philip hesitated for a moment. He was ashamed to tell the truth, but the shame he felt angered him, and he forced himself to speak. He could not help reddening.

“Yes, I lost the little money I had. I couldn’t afford to go on with it.”

“I say, I’m awfully sorry. What are you doing?”

“I’m a shop-walker.”

The words choked Philip, but he was determined not to shirk the truth. He kept his eyes on Lawson and saw his embarrassment. Philip smiled savagely.

“If you went into Lynn and Sedley, and made your way into the ‘made robes’ department, you would see me in a frock coat, walking about with a degage air and directing ladies who want to buy petticoats or stockings. First to the right, madam, and second on the left.”

Lawson, seeing that Philip was making a jest of it, laughed awkwardly. He did not know what to say. The picture that Philip called up horrified him, but he was afraid to show his sympathy.

“That’s a bit of a change for you,” he said.

His words seemed absurd to him, and immediately he wished he had not said them. Philip flushed darkly.

“A bit,” he said. “By the way, I owe you five bob.”

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some silver.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Go on, take it.”

Lawson received the money silently. They stood in the middle of the pavement, and people jostled them as they passed. There was a sardonic twinkle in Philip’s eyes, which made the painter intensely uncomfortable, and he could not tell that Philip’s heart was heavy with despair. Lawson wanted dreadfully to do something, but he did not know what to do.

“I say, won’t you come to the studio and have a talk?”

“No,” said Philip.

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

He saw the pain come into Lawson’s eyes, he could not help it, he was sorry, but he had to think of himself; he could not bear the thought of discussing his situation, he could endure it only by determining resolutely not to think about it. He was afraid of his weakness if once he began to open his heart. Moreover, he took irresistible dislikes to the places where he had been miserable: he remembered the humiliation he had endured when he had waited in that studio, ravenous with hunger, for Lawson to offer him a meal, and the last occasion when he had taken the five shillings off him. He hated the sight of Lawson, because he recalled those days of utter abasement.

“Then look here, come and dine with me one night. Choose your own evening.”

Philip was touched with the painter’s kindness. All sorts of people were strangely kind to him, he thought.

“It’s awfully good of you, old man, but I’d rather not.” He held out his hand. “Good-bye.”

Lawson, troubled by a behaviour which seemed inexplicable, took his hand, and Philip quickly limped away. His heart was heavy; and, as was usual with him, he began to reproach himself for what he had done: he did not know what madness of pride had made him refuse the offered friendship. But he heard someone running behind him and presently Lawson’s voice calling him; he stopped and suddenly the feeling of hostility got the better of him; he presented to Lawson a cold, set face.

“What is it?”

“I suppose you heard about Hayward, didn’t you?”

“I know he went to the Cape.”

“He died, you know, soon after landing.”

For a moment Philip did not answer. He could hardly believe his ears.

“How?” he asked.

“Oh, enteric. Hard luck, wasn’t it? I thought you mightn’t know. Gave me a bit of a turn when I heard it.”

Lawson nodded quickly and walked away. Philip felt a shiver pass through his heart. He had never before lost a friend of his own age, for the death of Cronshaw, a man so much older than himself, had seemed to come in the normal course of things. The news gave him a peculiar shock. It reminded him of his own mortality, for like everyone else Philip, knowing perfectly that all men must die, had no intimate feeling that the same must apply to himself; and Hayward’s death, though he had long ceased to have any warm feeling for him, affected him deeply. He remembered on a sudden all the good talks they had had, and it pained him to think that they would never talk with one another again; he remembered their first meeting and the pleasant months they had spent together in Heidelberg. Philip’s heart sank as he thought of the lost years. He walked on mechanically, not noticing where he went, and realised suddenly, with a movement of irritation, that instead of turning down the Haymarket he had sauntered along Shaftesbury Avenue. It bored him to retrace his steps; and besides, with that news, he did not want to read, he wanted to sit alone and think. He made up his mind to go to the British Museum. Solitude was now his only luxury. Since he had been at Lynn’s he had often gone there and sat in front of the groups from the Parthenon; and, not deliberately thinking, had allowed their divine masses to rest his troubled soul. But this afternoon they had nothing to say to him, and after a few minutes, impatiently, he wandered out of the room. There were too many people, provincials with foolish faces, foreigners poring over guide-books; their hideousness besmirched the everlasting masterpieces, their restlessness troubled the god’s immortal repose. He went into another room and here there was hardly anyone. Philip sat down wearily. His nerves were on edge. He could not get the people out of his mind. Sometimes at Lynn’s they affected him in the same way, and he looked at them file past him with horror; they were so ugly and there was such meanness in their faces, it was terrifying; their features were distorted with paltry desires, and you felt they were strange to any ideas of beauty. They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity. Their humour was a low facetiousness. Sometimes he found himself looking at them to see what animal they resembled (he tried not to, for it quickly became an obsession,) and he saw in them all the sheep or the horse or the fox or the goat. Human beings filled him with disgust.

But presently the influence of the place descended upon him. He felt quieter. He began to look absently at the tombstones with which the room was lined. They were the work of Athenian stone masons of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, and they were very simple, work of no great talent but with the exquisite spirit of Athens upon them; time had mellowed the marble to the colour of honey, so that unconsciously one thought of the bees of Hymettus, and softened their outlines. Some represented a nude figure, seated on a bench, some the departure of the dead from those who loved him, and some the dead clasping hands with one who remained behind. On all was the tragic word farewell; that and nothing more. Their simplicity was infinitely touching. Friend parted from friend, the son from his mother, and the restraint made the survivor’s grief more poignant. It was so long, long ago, and century upon century had passed over that unhappiness; for two thousand years those who wept had been dust as those they wept for. Yet the woe was alive still, and it filled Philip’s heart so that he felt compassion spring up in it, and he said:

“Poor things, poor things.”

And it came to him that the gaping sight-seers and the fat strangers with their guide-books, and all those mean, common people who thronged the shop, with their trivial desires and vulgar cares, were mortal and must die. They too loved and must part from those they loved, the son from his mother, the wife from her husband; and perhaps it was more tragic because their lives were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing that gave beauty to the world. There was one stone which was very beautiful, a bas relief of two young men holding each other’s hand; and the reticence of line, the simplicity, made one like to think that the sculptor here had been touched with a genuine emotion. It was an exquisite memorial to that than which the world offers but one thing more precious, to a friendship; and as Philip looked at it, he felt the tears come to his eyes. He thought of Hayward and his eager admiration for him when first they met, and how disillusion had come and then indifference, till nothing held them together but habit and old memories. It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary. Your life proceeded and you did not even miss him. Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future, and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was just the same now as if he had never lived.

Philip asked himself desperately what was the use of living at all. It all seemed inane. It was the same with Cronshaw: it was quite unimportant that he had lived; he was dead and forgotten, his book of poems sold in remainder by second-hand booksellers; his life seemed to have served nothing except to give a pushing journalist occasion to write an article in a review. And Philip cried out in his soul:

“What is the use of it?”

The effort was so incommensurate with the result. The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment. Pain and disease and unhappiness weighed down the scale so heavily. What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet’s history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip’s eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

“Oh, life,” he cried in his heart, “Oh life, where is thy sting?”

For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace. Some lives, and Hayward’s was among them, the blind indifference of chance cut off while the design was still imperfect; and then the solace was comfortable that it did not matter; other lives, such as Cronshaw’s, offered a pattern which was difficult to follow, the point of view had to be shifted and old standards had to be altered before one could understand that such a life was its own justification. Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.

Philip was happy.

CVII

Mr. Sampson, the buyer, took a fancy to Philip. Mr. Sampson was very dashing, and the girls in his department said they would not be surprised if he married one of the rich customers. He lived out of town and often impressed the assistants by putting on his evening clothes in the office. Sometimes he would be seen by those on sweeping duty coming in next morning still dressed, and they would wink gravely to one another while he went into his office and changed into a frock coat. On these occasions, having slipped out for a hurried breakfast, he also would wink at Philip as he walked up the stairs on his way back and rub his hands.

“What a night! What a night!” he said. “My word!”

He told Philip that he was the only gentleman there, and he and Philip were the only fellows who knew what life was. Having said this, he changed his manner suddenly, called Philip Mr. Carey instead of old boy, assumed the importance due to his position as buyer, and put Philip back into his place of shop-walker.

Lynn and Sedley received fashion papers from Paris once a week and adapted the costumes illustrated in them to the needs of their customers. Their clientele was peculiar. The most substantial part consisted of women from the smaller manufacturing towns, who were too elegant to have their frocks made locally and not sufficiently acquainted with London to discover good dressmakers within their means. Beside these, incongruously, was a large number of music-hall artistes. This was a connection that Mr. Sampson had worked up for himself and took great pride in. They had begun by getting their stage-costumes at Lynn’s, and he had induced many of them to get their other clothes there as well.

“As good as Paquin and half the price,” he said.

He had a persuasive, hail-fellow well-met air with him which appealed to customers of this sort, and they said to one another:

“What’s the good of throwing money away when you can get a coat and skirt at Lynn’s that nobody knows don’t come from Paris?”

Mr. Sampson was very proud of his friendship with the popular favourites whose frocks he made, and when he went out to dinner at two o’clock on Sunday with Miss Victoria Virgo— “she was wearing that powder blue we made her and I lay she didn’t let on it come from us, I ‘ad to tell her meself that if I ‘adn’t designed it with my own ‘ands I’d have said it must come from Paquin” — at her beautiful house in Tulse Hill, he regaled the department next day with abundant details. Philip had never paid much attention to women’s clothes, but in course of time he began, a little amused at himself, to take a technical interest in them. He had an eye for colour which was more highly trained than that of anyone in the department, and he had kept from his student days in Paris some knowledge of line. Mr. Sampson, an ignorant man conscious of his incompetence, but with a shrewdness that enabled him to combine other people’s suggestions, constantly asked the opinion of the assistants in his department in making up new designs; and he had the quickness to see that Philip’s criticisms were valuable. But he was very jealous, and would never allow that he took anyone’s advice. When he had altered some drawing in accordance with Philip’s suggestion, he always finished up by saying:

“Well, it comes round to my own idea in the end.”

One day, when Philip had been at the shop for five months, Miss Alice Antonia, the well-known serio-comic, came in and asked to see Mr. Sampson. She was a large woman, with flaxen hair, and a boldly painted face, a metallic voice, and the breezy manner of a comedienne accustomed to be on friendly terms with the gallery boys of provincial music-halls. She had a new song and wished Mr. Sampson to design a costume for her.

“I want something striking,” she said. “I don’t want any old thing you know. I want something different from what anybody else has.”

Mr. Sampson, bland and familiar, said he was quite certain they could get her the very thing she required. He showed her sketches.

“I know there’s nothing here that would do, but I just want to show you the kind of thing I would suggest.”

“Oh no, that’s not the sort of thing at all,” she said, as she glanced at them impatiently. “What I want is something that’ll just hit ’em in the jaw and make their front teeth rattle.”

“Yes, I quite understand, Miss Antonia,” said the buyer, with a bland smile, but his eyes grew blank and stupid.

“I expect I shall ‘ave to pop over to Paris for it in the end.”

“Oh, I think we can give you satisfaction, Miss Antonia. What you can get in Paris you can get here.”

When she had swept out of the department Mr. Sampson, a little worried, discussed the matter with Mrs. Hodges.

“She’s a caution and no mistake,” said Mrs. Hodges.

“Alice, where art thou?” remarked the buyer, irritably, and thought he had scored a point against her.

His ideas of music-hall costumes had never gone beyond short skirts, a swirl of lace, and glittering sequins; but Miss Antonia had expressed herself on that subject in no uncertain terms.

“Oh, my aunt!” she said.

And the invocation was uttered in such a tone as to indicate a rooted antipathy to anything so commonplace, even if she had not added that sequins gave her the sick. Mr. Sampson ‘got out’ one or two ideas, but Mrs. Hodges told him frankly she did not think they would do. It was she who gave Philip the suggestion:

“Can you draw, Phil? Why don’t you try your ‘and and see what you can do?”

Philip bought a cheap box of water colours, and in the evening while Bell, the noisy lad of sixteen, whistling three notes, busied himself with his stamps, he made one or two sketches. He remembered some of the costumes he had seen in Paris, and he adapted one of them, getting his effect from a combination of violent, unusual colours. The result amused him and next morning he showed it to Mrs. Hodges. She was somewhat astonished, but took it at once to the buyer.

“It’s unusual,” he said, “there’s no denying that.”

It puzzled him, and at the same time his trained eye saw that it would make up admirably. To save his face he began making suggestions for altering it, but Mrs. Hodges, with more sense, advised him to show it to Miss Antonia as it was.

“It’s neck or nothing with her, and she may take a fancy to it.”

“It’s a good deal more nothing than neck,” said Mr. Sampson, looking at the decolletage. “He can draw, can’t he? Fancy ‘im keeping it dark all this time.”

When Miss Antonia was announced, the buyer placed the design on the table in such a position that it must catch her eye the moment she was shown into his office. She pounced on it at once.

“What’s that?” she said. “Why can’t I ‘ave that?”

“That’s just an idea we got out for you,” said Mr. Sampson casually.

“D’you like it?”

“Do I like it!” she said. “Give me ‘alf a pint with a little drop of gin in it.”

“Ah, you see, you don’t have to go to Paris. You’ve only got to say what you want and there you are.”

The work was put in hand at once, and Philip felt quite a thrill of satisfaction when he saw the costume completed. The buyer and Mrs. Hodges took all the credit of it; but he did not care, and when he went with them to the Tivoli to see Miss Antonia wear it for the first time he was filled with elation. In answer to her questions he at last told Mrs. Hodges how he had learnt to draw — fearing that the people he lived with would think he wanted to put on airs, he had always taken the greatest care to say nothing about his past occupations — and she repeated the information to Mr. Sampson. The buyer said nothing to him on the subject, but began to treat him a little more deferentially and presently gave him designs to do for two of the country customers. They met with satisfaction. Then he began to speak to his clients of a “clever young feller, Paris art-student, you know,” who worked for him; and soon Philip, ensconced behind a screen, in his shirt sleeves, was drawing from morning till night. Sometimes he was so busy that he had to dine at three with the ‘stragglers.’ He liked it, because there were few of them and they were all too tired to talk; the food also was better, for it consisted of what was left over from the buyers’ table. Philip’s rise from shop-walker to designer of costumes had a great effect on the department. He realised that he was an object of envy. Harris, the assistant with the queer-shaped head, who was the first person he had known at the shop and had attached himself to Philip, could not conceal his bitterness.

“Some people ‘ave all the luck,” he said. “You’ll be a buyer yourself one of these days, and we shall all be calling you sir.”

He told Philip that he should demand higher wages, for notwithstanding the difficult work he was now engaged in, he received no more than the six shillings a week with which he started. But it was a ticklish matter to ask for a rise. The manager had a sardonic way of dealing with such applicants.

“Think you’re worth more, do you? How much d’you think you’re worth, eh?”

The assistant, with his heart in his mouth, would suggest that he thought he ought to have another two shillings a week.

“Oh, very well, if you think you’re worth it. You can ‘ave it.” Then he paused and sometimes, with a steely eye, added: “And you can ‘ave your notice too.”

It was no use then to withdraw your request, you had to go. The manager’s idea was that assistants who were dissatisfied did not work properly, and if they were not worth a rise it was better to sack them at once. The result was that they never asked for one unless they were prepared to leave. Philip hesitated. He was a little suspicious of the men in his room who told him that the buyer could not do without him. They were decent fellows, but their sense of humour was primitive, and it would have seemed funny to them if they had persuaded Philip to ask for more wages and he were sacked. He could not forget the mortification he had suffered in looking for work, he did not wish to expose himself to that again, and he knew there was small chance of his getting elsewhere a post as designer: there were hundreds of people about who could draw as well as he. But he wanted money very badly; his clothes were worn out, and the heavy carpets rotted his socks and boots; he had almost persuaded himself to take the venturesome step when one morning, passing up from breakfast in the basement through the passage that led to the manager’s office, he saw a queue of men waiting in answer to an advertisement. There were about a hundred of them, and whichever was engaged would be offered his keep and the same six shillings a week that Philip had. He saw some of them cast envious glances at him because he had employment. It made him shudder. He dared not risk it.

CVIII

The winter passed. Now and then Philip went to the hospital, slinking in when it was late and there was little chance of meeting anyone he knew, to see whether there were letters for him. At Easter he received one from his uncle. He was surprised to hear from him, for the Vicar of Blackstable had never written him more than half a dozen letters in his whole life, and they were on business matters.

Dear Philip,

If you are thinking of taking a holiday soon and care to come down here I shall be pleased to see you. I was very ill with my bronchitis in the winter and Doctor Wigram never expected me to pull through. I have a wonderful constitution and I made, thank God, a marvellous recovery. Yours affectionately, William Carey.

The letter made Philip angry. How did his uncle think he was living? He did not even trouble to inquire. He might have starved for all the old man cared. But as he walked home something struck him; he stopped under a lamp-post and read the letter again; the handwriting had no longer the business-like firmness which had characterised it; it was larger and wavering: perhaps the illness had shaken him more than he was willing to confess, and he sought in that formal note to express a yearning to see the only relation he had in the world. Philip wrote back that he could come down to Blackstable for a fortnight in July. The invitation was convenient, for he had not known what to do, with his brief holiday. The Athelnys went hopping in September, but he could not then be spared, since during that month the autumn models were prepared. The rule of Lynn’s was that everyone must take a fortnight whether he wanted it or not; and during that time, if he had nowhere to go, the assistant might sleep in his room, but he was not allowed food. A number had no friends within reasonable distance of London, and to these the holiday was an awkward interval when they had to provide food out of their small wages and, with the whole day on their hands, had nothing to spend. Philip had not been out of London since his visit to Brighton with Mildred, now two years before, and he longed for fresh air and the silence of the sea. He thought of it with such a passionate desire, all through May and June, that, when at length the time came for him to go, he was listless.

On his last evening, when he talked with the buyer of one or two jobs he had to leave over, Mr. Sampson suddenly said to him:

“What wages have you been getting?”

“Six shillings.”

“I don’t think it’s enough. I’ll see that you’re put up to twelve when you come back.”

“Thank you very much,” smiled Philip. “I’m beginning to want some new clothes badly.”

“If you stick to your work and don’t go larking about with the girls like what some of them do, I’ll look after you, Carey. Mind you, you’ve got a lot to learn, but you’re promising, I’ll say that for you, you’re promising, and I’ll see that you get a pound a week as soon as you deserve it.”

Philip wondered how long he would have to wait for that. Two years?

He was startled at the change in his uncle. When last he had seen him he was a stout man, who held himself upright, clean-shaven, with a round, sensual face; but he had fallen in strangely, his skin was yellow; there were great bags under the eyes, and he was bent and old. He had grown a beard during his last illness, and he walked very slowly.

“I’m not at my best today,” he said when Philip, having just arrived, was sitting with him in the dining-room. “The heat upsets me.”

Philip, asking after the affairs of the parish, looked at him and wondered how much longer he could last. A hot summer would finish him; Philip noticed how thin his hands were; they trembled. It meant so much to Philip. If he died that summer he could go back to the hospital at the beginning of the winter session; his heart leaped at the thought of returning no more to Lynn’s. At dinner the Vicar sat humped up on his chair, and the housekeeper who had been with him since his wife’s death said:

“Shall Mr. Philip carve, sir?”

The old man, who had been about to do so from disinclination to confess his weakness, seemed glad at the first suggestion to relinquish the attempt.

“You’ve got a very good appetite,” said Philip.

“Oh yes, I always eat well. But I’m thinner than when you were here last. I’m glad to be thinner, I didn’t like being so fat. Dr. Wigram thinks I’m all the better for being thinner than I was.”

When dinner was over the housekeeper brought him some medicine.

“Show the prescription to Master Philip,” he said. “He’s a doctor too. I’d like him to see that he thinks it’s all right. I told Dr. Wigram that now you’re studying to be a doctor he ought to make a reduction in his charges. It’s dreadful the bills I’ve had to pay. He came every day for two months, and he charges five shillings a visit. It’s a lot of money, isn’t it? He comes twice a week still. I’m going to tell him he needn’t come any more. I’ll send for him if I want him.”

He looked at Philip eagerly while he read the prescriptions. They were narcotics. There were two of them, and one was a medicine which the Vicar explained he was to use only if his neuritis grew unendurable.

“I’m very careful,” he said. “I don’t want to get into the opium habit.”

He did not mention his nephew’s affairs. Philip fancied that it was by way of precaution, in case he asked for money, that his uncle kept dwelling on the financial calls upon him. He had spent so much on the doctor and so much more on the chemist, while he was ill they had had to have a fire every day in his bed-room, and now on Sunday he needed a carriage to go to church in the evening as well as in the morning. Philip felt angrily inclined to say he need not be afraid, he was not going to borrow from him, but he held his tongue. It seemed to him that everything had left the old man now but two things, pleasure in his food and a grasping desire for money. It was a hideous old age.

In the afternoon Dr. Wigram came, and after the visit Philip walked with him to the garden gate.

“How d’you think he is?” said Philip.

Dr. Wigram was more anxious not to do wrong than to do right, and he never hazarded a definite opinion if he could help it. He had practised at Blackstable for five-and-thirty years. He had the reputation of being very safe, and many of his patients thought it much better that a doctor should be safe than clever. There was a new man at Blackstable — he had been settled there for ten years, but they still looked upon him as an interloper — and he was said to be very clever; but he had not much practice among the better people, because no one really knew anything about him.

“Oh, he’s as well as can be expected,” said Dr. Wigram in answer to

Philip’s inquiry.

“Has he got anything seriously the matter with him?”

“Well, Philip, your uncle is no longer a young man,” said the doctor with a cautious little smile, which suggested that after all the Vicar of Blackstable was not an old man either.

“He seems to think his heart’s in a bad way.”

“I’m not satisfied with his heart,” hazarded the doctor, “I think he should be careful, very careful.”

On the tip of Philip’s tongue was the question: how much longer can he live? He was afraid it would shock. In these matters a periphrase was demanded by the decorum of life, but, as he asked another question instead, it flashed through him that the doctor must be accustomed to the impatience of a sick man’s relatives. He must see through their sympathetic expressions. Philip, with a faint smile at his own hypocrisy, cast down his eyes.

“I suppose he’s in no immediate danger?”

This was the kind of question the doctor hated. If you said a patient couldn’t live another month the family prepared itself for a bereavement, and if then the patient lived on they visited the medical attendant with the resentment they felt at having tormented themselves before it was necessary. On the other hand, if you said the patient might live a year and he died in a week the family said you did not know your business. They thought of all the affection they would have lavished on the defunct if they had known the end was so near. Dr. Wigram made the gesture of washing his hands.

“I don’t think there’s any grave risk so long as he — remains as he is,” he ventured at last. “But on the other hand, we mustn’t forget that he’s no longer a young man, and well, the machine is wearing out. If he gets over the hot weather I don’t see why he shouldn’t get on very comfortably till the winter, and then if the winter does not bother him too much, well, I don’t see why anything should happen.”

Philip went back to the dining-room where his uncle was sitting. With his skull-cap and a crochet shawl over his shoulders he looked grotesque. His eyes had been fixed on the door, and they rested on Philip’s face as he entered. Philip saw that his uncle had been waiting anxiously for his return.

“Well, what did he say about me?”

Philip understood suddenly that the old man was frightened of dying. It made Philip a little ashamed, so that he looked away involuntarily. He was always embarrassed by the weakness of human nature.

“He says he thinks you’re much better,” said Philip.

A gleam of delight came into his uncle’s eyes.

“I’ve got a wonderful constitution,” he said. “What else did he say?” he added suspiciously.

Philip smiled.

“He said that if you take care of yourself there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live to be a hundred.”

“I don’t know that I can expect to do that, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t see eighty. My mother lived till she was eighty-four.”

There was a little table by the side of Mr. Carey’s chair, and on it were a Bible and the large volume of the Common Prayer from which for so many years he had been accustomed to read to his household. He stretched out now his shaking hand and took his Bible.

“Those old patriarchs lived to a jolly good old age, didn’t they?” he said, with a queer little laugh in which Philip read a sort of timid appeal.

The old man clung to life. Yet he believed implicitly all that his religion taught him. He had no doubt in the immortality of the soul, and he felt that he had conducted himself well enough, according to his capacities, to make it very likely that he would go to heaven. In his long career to how many dying persons must he have administered the consolations of religion! Perhaps he was like the doctor who could get no benefit from his own prescriptions. Philip was puzzled and shocked by that eager cleaving to the earth. He wondered what nameless horror was at the back of the old man’s mind. He would have liked to probe into his soul so that he might see in its nakedness the dreadful dismay of the unknown which he suspected.

The fortnight passed quickly and Philip returned to London. He passed a sweltering August behind his screen in the costumes department, drawing in his shirt sleeves. The assistants in relays went for their holidays. In the evening Philip generally went into Hyde Park and listened to the band. Growing more accustomed to his work it tired him less, and his mind, recovering from its long stagnation, sought for fresh activity. His whole desire now was set on his uncle’s death. He kept on dreaming the same dream: a telegram was handed to him one morning, early, which announced the Vicar’s sudden demise, and freedom was in his grasp. When he awoke and found it was nothing but a dream he was filled with sombre rage. He occupied himself, now that the event seemed likely to happen at any time, with elaborate plans for the future. In these he passed rapidly over the year which he must spend before it was possible for him to be qualified and dwelt on the journey to Spain on which his heart was set. He read books about that country, which he borrowed from the free library, and already he knew from photographs exactly what each city looked like. He saw himself lingering in Cordova on the bridge that spanned the Gaudalquivir; he wandered through tortuous streets in Toledo and sat in churches where he wrung from El Greco the secret which he felt the mysterious painter held for him. Athelny entered into his humour, and on Sunday afternoons they made out elaborate itineraries so that Philip should miss nothing that was noteworthy. To cheat his impatience Philip began to teach himself Spanish, and in the deserted sitting-room in Harrington Street he spent an hour every evening doing Spanish exercises and puzzling out with an English translation by his side the magnificent phrases of Don Quixote. Athelny gave him a lesson once a week, and Philip learned a few sentences to help him on his journey. Mrs. Athelny laughed at them.

“You two and your Spanish!” she said. “Why don’t you do something useful?”

But Sally, who was growing up and was to put up her hair at Christmas, stood by sometimes and listened in her grave way while her father and Philip exchanged remarks in a language she did not understand. She thought her father the most wonderful man who had ever existed, and she expressed her opinion of Philip only through her father’s commendations.

“Father thinks a rare lot of your Uncle Philip,” she remarked to her brothers and sisters.

Thorpe, the eldest boy, was old enough to go on the Arethusa, and Athelny regaled his family with magnificent descriptions of the appearance the lad would make when he came back in uniform for his holidays. As soon as Sally was seventeen she was to be apprenticed to a dressmaker. Athelny in his rhetorical way talked of the birds, strong enough to fly now, who were leaving the parental nest, and with tears in his eyes told them that the nest would be there still if ever they wished to return to it. A shakedown and a dinner would always be theirs, and the heart of a father would never be closed to the troubles of his children.

“You do talk, Athelny,” said his wife. “I don’t know what trouble they’re likely to get into so long as they’re steady. So long as you’re honest and not afraid of work you’ll never be out of a job, that’s what I think, and I can tell you I shan’t be sorry when I see the last of them earning their own living.”

Child-bearing, hard work, and constant anxiety were beginning to tell on Mrs. Athelny; and sometimes her back ached in the evening so that she had to sit down and rest herself. Her ideal of happiness was to have a girl to do the rough work so that she need not herself get up before seven. Athelny waved his beautiful white hand.

“Ah, my Betty, we’ve deserved well of the state, you and I. We’ve reared nine healthy children, and the boys shall serve their king; the girls shall cook and sew and in their turn breed healthy children.” He turned to Sally, and to comfort her for the anti-climax of the contrast added grandiloquently: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Athelny had lately added socialism to the other contradictory theories he vehemently believed in, and he stated now:

“In a socialist state we should be richly pensioned, you and I, Betty.”

“Oh, don’t talk to me about your socialists, I’ve got no patience with them,” she cried. “It only means that another lot of lazy loafers will make a good thing out of the working classes. My motto is, leave me alone; I don’t want anyone interfering with me; I’ll make the best of a bad job, and the devil take the hindmost.”

“D’you call life a bad job?” said Athelny. “Never! We’ve had our ups and downs, we’ve had our struggles, we’ve always been poor, but it’s been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.”

“You do talk, Athelny,” she said, looking at him, not with anger but with scornful calm. “You’ve had the pleasant part of the children, I’ve had the bearing of them, and the bearing with them. I don’t say that I’m not fond of them, now they’re there, but if I had my time over again I’d remain single. Why, if I’d remained single I might have a little shop by now, and four or five hundred pounds in the bank, and a girl to do the rough work. Oh, I wouldn’t go over my life again, not for something.”

Philip thought of the countless millions to whom life is no more than unending labour, neither beautiful nor ugly, but just to be accepted in the same spirit as one accepts the changes of the seasons. Fury seized him because it all seemed useless. He could not reconcile himself to the belief that life had no meaning and yet everything he saw, all his thoughts, added to the force of his conviction. But though fury seized him it was a joyful fury. Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power.

CIX

The autumn passed into winter. Philip had left his address with Mrs. Foster, his uncle’s housekeeper, so that she might communicate with him, but still went once a week to the hospital on the chance of there being a letter. One evening he saw his name on an envelope in a handwriting he had hoped never to see again. It gave him a queer feeling. For a little while he could not bring himself to take it. It brought back a host of hateful memories. But at length, impatient with himself, he ripped open the envelope.

7 William Street, Fitzroy Square.

Dear Phil,

Can I see you for a minute or two as soon as possible. I am in awful trouble and don’t know what to do. It’s not money.

Yours truly,

Mildred.

He tore the letter into little bits and going out into the street scattered them in the darkness.

“I’ll see her damned,” he muttered.

A feeling of disgust surged up in him at the thought of seeing her again. He did not care if she was in distress, it served her right whatever it was, he thought of her with hatred, and the love he had had for her aroused his loathing. His recollections filled him with nausea, and as he walked across the Thames he drew himself aside in an instinctive withdrawal from his thought of her. He went to bed, but he could not sleep; he wondered what was the matter with her, and he could not get out of his head the fear that she was ill and hungry; she would not have written to him unless she were desperate. He was angry with himself for his weakness, but he knew that he would have no peace unless he saw her. Next morning he wrote a letter-card and posted it on his way to the shop. He made it as stiff as he could and said merely that he was sorry she was in difficulties and would come to the address she had given at seven o’clock that evening.

It was that of a shabby lodging-house in a sordid street; and when, sick at the thought of seeing her, he asked whether she was in, a wild hope seized him that she had left. It looked the sort of place people moved in and out of frequently. He had not thought of looking at the postmark on her letter and did not know how many days it had lain in the rack. The woman who answered the bell did not reply to his inquiry, but silently preceded him along the passage and knocked on a door at the back.

“Mrs. Miller, a gentleman to see you,” she called.

The door was slightly opened, and Mildred looked out suspiciously.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come in.”

He walked in and she closed the door. It was a very small bed-room, untidy as was every place she lived in; there was a pair of shoes on the floor, lying apart from one another and uncleaned; a hat was on the chest of drawers, with false curls beside it; and there was a blouse on the table. Philip looked for somewhere to put his hat. The hooks behind the door were laden with skirts, and he noticed that they were muddy at the hem.

“Sit down, won’t you?” she said. Then she gave a little awkward laugh. “I suppose you were surprised to hear from me again.”

“You’re awfully hoarse,” he answered. “Have you got a sore throat?”

“Yes, I have had for some time.”

He did not say anything. He waited for her to explain why she wanted to see him. The look of the room told him clearly enough that she had gone back to the life from which he had taken her. He wondered what had happened to the baby; there was a photograph of it on the chimney-piece, but no sign in the room that a child was ever there. Mildred was holding her handkerchief. She made it into a little ball, and passed it from hand to hand. He saw that she was very nervous. She was staring at the fire, and he could look at her without meeting her eyes. She was much thinner than when she had left him; and the skin, yellow and dryish, was drawn more tightly over her cheekbones. She had dyed her hair and it was now flaxen: it altered her a good deal, and made her look more vulgar.

“I was relieved to get your letter, I can tell you,” she said at last. “I thought p’raps you weren’t at the ‘ospital any more.”

Philip did not speak.

“I suppose you’re qualified by now, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m no longer at the hospital. I had to give it up eighteen months ago.”

“You are changeable. You don’t seem as if you could stick to anything.”

Philip was silent for another moment, and when he went on it was with coldness.

“I lost the little money I had in an unlucky speculation and I couldn’t afford to go on with the medical. I had to earn my living as best I could.”

“What are you doing then?”

“I’m in a shop.”

“Oh!”

She gave him a quick glance and turned her eyes away at once. He thought that she reddened. She dabbed her palms nervously with the handkerchief.

“You’ve not forgotten all your doctoring, have you?” She jerked the words out quite oddly.

“Not entirely.”

“Because that’s why I wanted to see you.” Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“Why don’t you go to a hospital?”

“I don’t like to do that, and have all the stoodents staring at me, and

I’m afraid they’d want to keep me.”

“What are you complaining of?” asked Philip coldly, with the stereotyped phrase used in the out-patients’ room.

“Well, I’ve come out in a rash, and I can’t get rid of it.”

Philip felt a twinge of horror in his heart. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

“Let me look at your throat?”

He took her over to the window and made such examination as he could. Suddenly he caught sight of her eyes. There was deadly fear in them. It was horrible to see. She was terrified. She wanted him to reassure her; she looked at him pleadingly, not daring to ask for words of comfort but with all her nerves astrung to receive them: he had none to offer her.

“I’m afraid you’re very ill indeed,” he said.

“What d’you think it is?”

When he told her she grew deathly pale, and her lips even turned, yellow. she began to cry, hopelessly, quietly at first and then with choking sobs.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said at last. “But I had to tell you.”

“I may just as well kill myself and have done with it.”

He took no notice of the threat.

“Have you got any money?” he asked.

“Six or seven pounds.”

“You must give up this life, you know. Don’t you think you could find some work to do? I’m afraid I can’t help you much. I only get twelve bob a week.”

“What is there I can do now?” she cried impatiently.

“Damn it all, you MUST try to get something.”

He spoke to her very gravely, telling her of her own danger and the danger to which she exposed others, and she listened sullenly. He tried to console her. At last he brought her to a sulky acquiescence in which she promised to do all he advised. He wrote a prescription, which he said he would leave at the nearest chemist’s, and he impressed upon her the necessity of taking her medicine with the utmost regularity. Getting up to go, he held out his hand.

“Don’t be downhearted, you’ll soon get over your throat.”

But as he went her face became suddenly distorted, and she caught hold of his coat.

“Oh, don’t leave me,” she cried hoarsely. “I’m so afraid, don’t leave me alone yet. Phil, please. There’s no one else I can go to, you’re the only friend I’ve ever had.”

He felt the terror of her soul, and it was strangely like that terror he had seen in his uncle’s eyes when he feared that he might die. Philip looked down. Twice that woman had come into his life and made him wretched; she had no claim upon him; and yet, he knew not why, deep in his heart was a strange aching; it was that which, when he received her letter, had left him no peace till he obeyed her summons.

“I suppose I shall never really quite get over it,” he said to himself.

What perplexed him was that he felt a curious physical distaste, which made it uncomfortable for him to be near her.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Let’s go out and dine together. I’ll pay.”

He hesitated. He felt that she was creeping back again into his life when he thought she was gone out of it for ever. She watched him with sickening anxiety.

“Oh, I know I’ve treated you shocking, but don’t leave me alone now.

You’ve had your revenge. If you leave me by myself now I don’t know what

I shall do.”

“All right, I don’t mind,” he said, “but we shall have to do it on the cheap, I haven’t got money to throw away these days.”

She sat down and put her shoes on, then changed her skirt and put on a hat; and they walked out together till they found a restaurant in the Tottenham Court Road. Philip had got out of the habit of eating at those hours, and Mildred’s throat was so sore that she could not swallow. They had a little cold ham and Philip drank a glass of beer. They sat opposite one another, as they had so often sat before; he wondered if she remembered; they had nothing to say to one another and would have sat in silence if Philip had not forced himself to talk. In the bright light of the restaurant, with its vulgar looking-glasses that reflected in an endless series, she looked old and haggard. Philip was anxious to know about the child, but he had not the courage to ask. At last she said:

“You know baby died last summer.”

“Oh!” he said.

“You might say you’re sorry.”

“I’m not,” he answered, “I’m very glad.”

She glanced at him and, understanding what he meant, looked away

“You were rare stuck on it at one time, weren’t you? I always thought it funny like how you could see so much in another man’s child.”

When they had finished eating they called at the chemist’s for the medicine Philip had ordered, and going back to the shabby room he made her take a dose. Then they sat together till it was time for Philip to go back to Harrington Street. He was hideously bored.

Philip went to see her every day. She took the medicine he had prescribed and followed his directions, and soon the results were so apparent that she gained the greatest confidence in Philip’s skill. As she grew better she grew less despondent. She talked more freely.

“As soon as I can get a job I shall be all right,” she said. “I’ve had my lesson now and I mean to profit by it. No more racketing about for yours truly.”

Each time he saw her, Philip asked whether she had found work. She told him not to worry, she would find something to do as soon as she wanted it; she had several strings to her bow; it was all the better not to do anything for a week or two. He could not deny this, but at the end of that time he became more insistent. She laughed at him, she was much more cheerful now, and said he was a fussy old thing. She told him long stories of the manageresses she interviewed, for her idea was to get work at some eating-house; what they said and what she answered. Nothing definite was fixed, but she was sure to settle something at the beginning of the following week: there was no use hurrying, and it would be a mistake to take something unsuitable.

“It’s absurd to talk like that,” he said impatiently. “You must take anything you can get. I can’t help you, and your money won’t last for ever.”

“Oh, well, I’ve not come to the end of it yet and chance it.”

He looked at her sharply. It was three weeks since his first visit, and she had then less than seven pounds. Suspicion seized him. He remembered some of the things she had said. He put two and two together. He wondered whether she had made any attempt to find work. Perhaps she had been lying to him all the time. It was very strange that her money should have lasted so long.

“What is your rent here?”

“Oh, the landlady’s very nice, different from what some of them are; she’s quite willing to wait till it’s convenient for me to pay.”

He was silent. What he suspected was so horrible that he hesitated. It was no use to ask her, she would deny everything; if he wanted to know he must find out for himself. He was in the habit of leaving her every evening at eight, and when the clock struck he got up; but instead of going back to Harrington Street he stationed himself at the corner of Fitzroy Square so that he could see anyone who came along William Street. It seemed to him that he waited an interminable time, and he was on the point of going away, thinking his surmise had been mistaken, when the door of No. 7 opened and Mildred came out. He fell back into the darkness and watched her walk towards him. She had on the hat with a quantity of feathers on it which he had seen in her room, and she wore a dress he recognized, too showy for the street and unsuitable to the time of year. He followed her slowly till she came into the Tottenham Court Road, where she slackened her pace; at the corner of Oxford Street she stopped, looked round, and crossed over to a music-hall. He went up to her and touched her on the arm. He saw that she had rouged her cheeks and painted her lips.

“Where are you going, Mildred?”

She started at the sound of his voice and reddened as she always did when she was caught in a lie; then the flash of anger which he knew so well came into her eyes as she instinctively sought to defend herself by abuse. But she did not say the words which were on the tip of her tongue.

“Oh, I was only going to see the show. It gives me the hump sitting every night by myself.”

He did not pretend to believe her.

“You mustn’t. Good heavens, I’ve told you fifty times how dangerous it is.

You must stop this sort of thing at once.”

“Oh, hold your jaw,” she cried roughly. “How d’you suppose I’m going to live?”

He took hold of her arm and without thinking what he was doing tried to drag her away.

“For God’s sake come along. Let me take you home. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s criminal.”

“What do I care? Let them take their chance. Men haven’t been so good to me that I need bother my head about them.”

She pushed him away and walking up to the box-office put down her money. Philip had threepence in his pocket. He could not follow. He turned away and walked slowly down Oxford Street.

“I can’t do anything more,” he said to himself.

That was the end. He did not see her again.

CX

Christmas that year falling on Thursday, the shop was to close for four days: Philip wrote to his uncle asking whether it would be convenient for him to spend the holidays at the vicarage. He received an answer from Mrs. Foster, saying that Mr. Carey was not well enough to write himself, but wished to see his nephew and would be glad if he came down. She met Philip at the door, and when she shook hands with him, said:

“You’ll find him changed since you was here last, sir; but you’ll pretend you don’t notice anything, won’t you, sir? He’s that nervous about himself.”

Philip nodded, and she led him into the dining-room.

“Here’s Mr. Philip, sir.”

The Vicar of Blackstable was a dying man. There was no mistaking that when you looked at the hollow cheeks and the shrunken body. He sat huddled in the arm-chair, with his head strangely thrown back, and a shawl over his shoulders. He could not walk now without the help of sticks, and his hands trembled so that he could only feed himself with difficulty.

“He can’t last long now,” thought Philip, as he looked at him.

“How d’you think I’m looking?” asked the Vicar. “D’you think I’ve changed since you were here last?”

“I think you look stronger than you did last summer.”

“It was the heat. That always upsets me.”

Mr. Carey’s history of the last few months consisted in the number of weeks he had spent in his bed-room and the number of weeks he had spent downstairs. He had a hand-bell by his side and while he talked he rang it for Mrs. Foster, who sat in the next room ready to attend to his wants, to ask on what day of the month he had first left his room.

“On the seventh of November, sir.”

Mr. Carey looked at Philip to see how he took the information.

“But I eat well still, don’t I, Mrs. Foster?”

“Yes, sir, you’ve got a wonderful appetite.”

“I don’t seem to put on flesh though.”

Nothing interested him now but his health. He was set upon one thing indomitably and that was living, just living, notwithstanding the monotony of his life and the constant pain which allowed him to sleep only when he was under the influence of morphia.

“It’s terrible, the amount of money I have to spend on doctor’s bills.” He tinkled his bell again. “Mrs. Foster, show Master Philip the chemist’s bill.”

Patiently she took it off the chimney-piece and handed it to Philip.

“That’s only one month. I was wondering if as you’re doctoring yourself you couldn’t get me the drugs cheaper. I thought of getting them down from the stores, but then there’s the postage.”

Though apparently taking so little interest in him that he did not trouble to inquire what Phil was doing, he seemed glad to have him there. He asked how long he could stay, and when Philip told him he must leave on Tuesday morning, expressed a wish that the visit might have been longer. He told him minutely all his symptoms and repeated what the doctor had said of him. He broke off to ring his bell, and when Mrs. Foster came in, said:

“Oh, I wasn’t sure if you were there. I only rang to see if you were.”

When she had gone he explained to Philip that it made him uneasy if he was not certain that Mrs. Foster was within earshot; she knew exactly what to do with him if anything happened. Philip, seeing that she was tired and that her eyes were heavy from want of sleep, suggested that he was working her too hard.

“Oh, nonsense,” said the Vicar, “she’s as strong as a horse.” And when next she came in to give him his medicine he said to her:

“Master Philip says you’ve got too much to do, Mrs. Foster. You like looking after me, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t mind, sir. I want to do everything I can.”

Presently the medicine took effect and Mr. Carey fell asleep. Philip went into the kitchen and asked Mrs. Foster whether she could stand the work. He saw that for some months she had had little peace.

“Well, sir, what can I do?” she answered. “The poor old gentleman’s so dependent on me, and, although he is troublesome sometimes, you can’t help liking him, can you? I’ve been here so many years now, I don’t know what I shall do when he comes to go.”

Philip saw that she was really fond of the old man. She washed and dressed him, gave him his food, and was up half a dozen times in the night; for she slept in the next room to his and whenever he awoke he tinkled his little bell till she came in. He might die at any moment, but he might live for months. It was wonderful that she should look after a stranger with such patient tenderness, and it was tragic and pitiful that she should be alone in the world to care for him.

It seemed to Philip that the religion which his uncle had preached all his life was now of no more than formal importance to him: every Sunday the curate came and administered to him Holy Communion, and he often read his Bible; but it was clear that he looked upon death with horror. He believed that it was the gateway to life everlasting, but he did not want to enter upon that life. In constant pain, chained to his chair and having given up the hope of ever getting out into the open again, like a child in the hands of a woman to whom he paid wages, he clung to the world he knew.

In Philip’s head was a question he could not ask, because he was aware that his uncle would never give any but a conventional answer: he wondered whether at the very end, now that the machine was painfully wearing itself out, the clergyman still believed in immortality; perhaps at the bottom of his soul, not allowed to shape itself into words in case it became urgent, was the conviction that there was no God and after this life nothing.

On the evening of Boxing Day Philip sat in the dining-room with his uncle. He had to start very early next morning in order to get to the shop by nine, and he was to say good-night to Mr. Carey then. The Vicar of Blackstable was dozing and Philip, lying on the sofa by the window, let his book fall on his knees and looked idly round the room. He asked himself how much the furniture would fetch. He had walked round the house and looked at the things he had known from his childhood; there were a few pieces of china which might go for a decent price and Philip wondered if it would be worth while to take them up to London; but the furniture was of the Victorian order, of mahogany, solid and ugly; it would go for nothing at an auction. There were three or four thousand books, but everyone knew how badly they sold, and it was not probable that they would fetch more than a hundred pounds. Philip did not know how much his uncle would leave, and he reckoned out for the hundredth time what was the least sum upon which he could finish the curriculum at the hospital, take his degree, and live during the time he wished to spend on hospital appointments. He looked at the old man, sleeping restlessly: there was no humanity left in that shrivelled face; it was the face of some queer animal. Philip thought how easy it would be to finish that useless life. He had thought it each evening when Mrs. Foster prepared for his uncle the medicine which was to give him an easy night. There were two bottles: one contained a drug which he took regularly, and the other an opiate if the pain grew unendurable. This was poured out for him and left by his bed-side. He generally took it at three or four in the morning. It would be a simple thing to double the dose; he would die in the night, and no one would suspect anything; for that was how Doctor Wigram expected him to die. The end would be painless. Philip clenched his hands as he thought of the money he wanted so badly. A few more months of that wretched life could matter nothing to the old man, but the few more months meant everything to him: he was getting to the end of his endurance, and when he thought of going back to work in the morning he shuddered with horror. His heart beat quickly at the thought which obsessed him, and though he made an effort to put it out of his mind he could not. It would be so easy, so desperately easy. He had no feeling for the old man, he had never liked him; he had been selfish all his life, selfish to his wife who adored him, indifferent to the boy who had been put in his charge; he was not a cruel man, but a stupid, hard man, eaten up with a small sensuality. It would be easy, desperately easy. Philip did not dare. He was afraid of remorse; it would be no good having the money if he regretted all his life what he had done. Though he had told himself so often that regret was futile, there were certain things that came back to him occasionally and worried him. He wished they were not on his conscience.

His uncle opened his eyes; Philip was glad, for he looked a little more human then. He was frankly horrified at the idea that had come to him, it was murder that he was meditating; and he wondered if other people had such thoughts or whether he was abnormal and depraved. He supposed he could not have done it when it came to the point, but there the thought was, constantly recurring: if he held his hand it was from fear. His uncle spoke.

“You’re not looking forward to my death, Philip?” Philip felt his heart beat against his chest.

“Good heavens, no.”

“That’s a good boy. I shouldn’t like you to do that. You’ll get a little bit of money when I pass away, but you mustn’t look forward to it. It wouldn’t profit you if you did.”

He spoke in a low voice, and there was a curious anxiety in his tone. It sent a pang into Philip’s heart. He wondered what strange insight might have led the old man to surmise what strange desires were in Philip’s mind.

“I hope you’ll live for another twenty years,” he said.

“Oh, well, I can’t expect to do that, but if I take care of myself I don’t see why I shouldn’t last another three or four.”

He was silent for a while, and Philip found nothing to say. Then, as if he had been thinking it all over, the old man spoke again.

“Everyone has the right to live as long as he can.”

Philip wanted to distract his mind.

“By the way, I suppose you never hear from Miss Wilkinson now?”

“Yes, I had a letter some time this year. She’s married, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes, she married a widower. I believe they’re quite comfortable.”

CXI

Next day Philip began work again, but the end which he expected within a few weeks did not come. The weeks passed into months. The winter wore away, and in the parks the trees burst into bud and into leaf. A terrible lassitude settled upon Philip. Time was passing, though it went with such heavy feet, and he thought that his youth was going and soon he would have lost it and nothing would have been accomplished. His work seemed more aimless now that there was the certainty of his leaving it. He became skilful in the designing of costumes, and though he had no inventive faculty acquired quickness in the adaptation of French fashions to the English market. Sometimes he was not displeased with his drawings, but they always bungled them in the execution. He was amused to notice that he suffered from a lively irritation when his ideas were not adequately carried out. He had to walk warily. Whenever he suggested something original Mr. Sampson turned it down: their customers did not want anything outre, it was a very respectable class of business, and when you had a connection of that sort it wasn’t worth while taking liberties with it. Once or twice he spoke sharply to Philip; he thought the young man was getting a bit above himself, because Philip’s ideas did not always coincide with his own.

“You jolly well take care, my fine young fellow, or one of these days you’ll find yourself in the street.”

Philip longed to give him a punch on the nose, but he restrained himself. After all it could not possibly last much longer, and then he would be done with all these people for ever. Sometimes in comic desperation he cried out that his uncle must be made of iron. What a constitution! The ills he suffered from would have killed any decent person twelve months before. When at last the news came that the Vicar was dying Philip, who had been thinking of other things, was taken by surprise. It was in July, and in another fortnight he was to have gone for his holiday. He received a letter from Mrs. Foster to say the doctor did not give Mr. Carey many days to live, and if Philip wished to see him again he must come at once. Philip went to the buyer and told him he wanted to leave. Mr. Sampson was a decent fellow, and when he knew the circumstances made no difficulties. Philip said good-bye to the people in his department; the reason of his leaving had spread among them in an exaggerated form, and they thought he had come into a fortune. Mrs. Hodges had tears in her eyes when she shook hands with him.

“I suppose we shan’t often see you again,” she said.

“I’m glad to get away from Lynn’s,” he answered.

It was strange, but he was actually sorry to leave these people whom he thought he had loathed, and when he drove away from the house in Harrington Street it was with no exultation. He had so anticipated the emotions he would experience on this occasion that now he felt nothing: he was as unconcerned as though he were going for a few days’ holiday.

“I’ve got a rotten nature,” he said to himself. “I look forward to things awfully, and then when they come I’m always disappointed.”

He reached Blackstable early in the afternoon. Mrs. Foster met him at the door, and her face told him that his uncle was not yet dead.

“He’s a little better today,” she said. “He’s got a wonderful constitution.”

She led him into the bed-room where Mr. Carey lay on his back. He gave Philip a slight smile, in which was a trace of satisfied cunning at having circumvented his enemy once more.

“I thought it was all up with me yesterday,” he said, in an exhausted voice. “They’d all given me up, hadn’t you, Mrs. Foster?”

“You’ve got a wonderful constitution, there’s no denying that.”

“There’s life in the old dog yet.”

Mrs. Foster said that the Vicar must not talk, it would tire him; she treated him like a child, with kindly despotism; and there was something childish in the old man’s satisfaction at having cheated all their expectations. It struck him at once that Philip had been sent for, and he was amused that he had been brought on a fool’s errand. If he could only avoid another of his heart attacks he would get well enough in a week or two; and he had had the attacks several times before; he always felt as if he were going to die, but he never did. They all talked of his constitution, but they none of them knew how strong it was.

“Are you going to stay a day or two?” He asked Philip, pretending to believe he had come down for a holiday.

“I was thinking of it,” Philip answered cheerfully.

“A breath of sea-air will do you good.”

Presently Dr. Wigram came, and after he had seen the Vicar talked with

Philip. He adopted an appropriate manner.

“I’m afraid it is the end this time, Philip,” he said. “It’ll be a great loss to all of us. I’ve known him for five-and-thirty years.”

“He seems well enough now,” said Philip.

“I’m keeping him alive on drugs, but it can’t last. It was dreadful these last two days, I thought he was dead half a dozen times.”

The doctor was silent for a minute or two, but at the gate he said suddenly to Philip:

“Has Mrs. Foster said anything to you?”

“What d’you mean?”

“They’re very superstitious, these people: she’s got hold of an idea that he’s got something on his mind, and he can’t die till he gets rid of it; and he can’t bring himself to confess it.”

Philip did not answer, and the doctor went on.

“Of course it’s nonsense. He’s led a very good life, he’s done his duty, he’s been a good parish priest, and I’m sure we shall all miss him; he can’t have anything to reproach himself with. I very much doubt whether the next vicar will suit us half so well.”

For several days Mr. Carey continued without change. His appetite which had been excellent left him, and he could eat little. Dr. Wigram did not hesitate now to still the pain of the neuritis which tormented him; and that, with the constant shaking of his palsied limbs, was gradually exhausting him. His mind remained clear. Philip and Mrs. Foster nursed him between them. She was so tired by the many months during which she had been attentive to all his wants that Philip insisted on sitting up with the patient so that she might have her night’s rest. He passed the long hours in an arm-chair so that he should not sleep soundly, and read by the light of shaded candles The Thousand and One Nights. He had not read them since he was a little boy, and they brought back his childhood to him. Sometimes he sat and listened to the silence of the night. When the effects of the opiate wore off Mr. Carey grew restless and kept him constantly busy.

At last, early one morning, when the birds were chattering noisily in the trees, he heard his name called. He went up to the bed. Mr. Carey was lying on his back, with his eyes looking at the ceiling; he did not turn them on Philip. Philip saw that sweat was on his forehead, and he took a towel and wiped it.

“Is that you, Philip?” the old man asked.

Philip was startled because the voice was suddenly changed. It was hoarse and low. So would a man speak if he was cold with fear.

“Yes, d’you want anything?”

There was a pause, and still the unseeing eyes stared at the ceiling. Then a twitch passed over the face.

“I think I’m going to die,” he said.

“Oh, what nonsense!” cried Philip. “You’re not going to die for years.”

Two tears were wrung from the old man’s eyes. They moved Philip horribly. His uncle had never betrayed any particular emotion in the affairs of life; and it was dreadful to see them now, for they signified a terror that was unspeakable.

“Send for Mr. Simmonds,” he said. “I want to take the Communion.”

Mr. Simmonds was the curate.

“Now?” asked Philip.

“Soon, or else it’ll be too late.”

Philip went to awake Mrs. Foster, but it was later than he thought and she was up already. He told her to send the gardener with a message, and he went back to his uncle’s room.

“Have you sent for Mr. Simmonds?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence. Philip sat by the bed-side, and occasionally wiped the sweating forehead.

“Let me hold your hand, Philip,” the old man said at last.

Philip gave him his hand and he clung to it as to life, for comfort in his extremity. Perhaps he had never really loved anyone in all his days, but now he turned instinctively to a human being. His hand was wet and cold. It grasped Philip’s with feeble, despairing energy. The old man was fighting with the fear of death. And Philip thought that all must go through that. Oh, how monstrous it was, and they could believe in a God that allowed his creatures to suffer such a cruel torture! He had never cared for his uncle, and for two years he had longed every day for his death; but now he could not overcome the compassion that filled his heart. What a price it was to pay for being other than the beasts!

They remained in silence broken only once by a low inquiry from Mr. Carey.

“Hasn’t he come yet?”

At last the housekeeper came in softly to say that Mr. Simmonds was there.

He carried a bag in which were his surplice and his hood. Mrs. Foster

brought the communion plate. Mr. Simmonds shook hands silently with

Philip, and then with professional gravity went to the sick man’s side.

Philip and the maid went out of the room.

Philip walked round the garden all fresh and dewy in the morning. The birds were singing gaily. The sky was blue, but the air, salt-laden, was sweet and cool. The roses were in full bloom. The green of the trees, the green of the lawns, was eager and brilliant. Philip walked, and as he walked he thought of the mystery which was proceeding in that bedroom. It gave him a peculiar emotion. Presently Mrs. Foster came out to him and said that his uncle wished to see him. The curate was putting his things back into the black bag. The sick man turned his head a little and greeted him with a smile. Philip was astonished, for there was a change in him, an extraordinary change; his eyes had no longer the terror-stricken look, and the pinching of his face had gone: he looked happy and serene.

“I’m quite prepared now,” he said, and his voice had a different tone in it. “When the Lord sees fit to call me I am ready to give my soul into his hands.”

Philip did not speak. He could see that his uncle was sincere. It was almost a miracle. He had taken the body and blood of his Savior, and they had given him strength so that he no longer feared the inevitable passage into the night. He knew he was going to die: he was resigned. He only said one thing more:

“I shall rejoin my dear wife.”

It startled Philip. He remembered with what a callous selfishness his uncle had treated her, how obtuse he had been to her humble, devoted love. The curate, deeply moved, went away and Mrs. Foster, weeping, accompanied him to the door. Mr. Carey, exhausted by his effort, fell into a light doze, and Philip sat down by the bed and waited for the end. The morning wore on, and the old man’s breathing grew stertorous. The doctor came and said he was dying. He was unconscious and he pecked feebly at the sheets; he was restless and he cried out. Dr. Wigram gave him a hypodermic injection.

“It can’t do any good now, he may die at any moment.”

The doctor looked at his watch and then at the patient. Philip saw that it was one o’clock. Dr. Wigram was thinking of his dinner.

“It’s no use your waiting,” he said.

“There’s nothing I can do,” said the doctor.

When he was gone Mrs. Foster asked Philip if he would go to the carpenter, who was also the undertaker, and tell him to send up a woman to lay out the body.

“You want a little fresh air,” she said, “it’ll do you good.”

The undertaker lived half a mile away. When Philip gave him his message, he said:

“When did the poor old gentleman die?”

Philip hesitated. It occurred to him that it would seem brutal to fetch a woman to wash the body while his uncle still lived, and he wondered why Mrs. Foster had asked him to come. They would think he was in a great hurry to kill the old man off. He thought the undertaker looked at him oddly. He repeated the question. It irritated Philip. It was no business of his.

“When did the Vicar pass away?”

Philip’s first impulse was to say that it had just happened, but then it would seem inexplicable if the sick man lingered for several hours. He reddened and answered awkwardly.

“Oh, he isn’t exactly dead yet.”

The undertaker looked at him in perplexity, and he hurried to explain.

“Mrs. Foster is all alone and she wants a woman there. You understood, don’t you? He may be dead by now.”

The undertaker nodded.

“Oh, yes, I see. I’ll send someone up at once.”

When Philip got back to the vicarage he went up to the bed-room. Mrs.

Foster rose from her chair by the bed-side.

“He’s just as he was when you left,” she said.

She went down to get herself something to eat, and Philip watched curiously the process of death. There was nothing human now in the unconscious being that struggled feebly. Sometimes a muttered ejaculation issued from the loose mouth. The sun beat down hotly from a cloudless sky, but the trees in the garden were pleasant and cool. It was a lovely day. A bluebottle buzzed against the windowpane. Suddenly there was a loud rattle, it made Philip start, it was horribly frightening; a movement passed through the limbs and the old man was dead. The machine had run down. The bluebottle buzzed, buzzed noisily against the windowpane.

CXII

Josiah Graves in his masterful way made arrangements, becoming but economical, for the funeral; and when it was over came back to the vicarage with Philip. The will was in his charge, and with a due sense of the fitness of things he read it to Philip over an early cup of tea. It was written on half a sheet of paper and left everything Mr. Carey had to his nephew. There was the furniture, about eighty pounds at the bank, twenty shares in the A. B. C. company, a few in Allsop’s brewery, some in the Oxford music-hall, and a few more in a London restaurant. They had been bought under Mr. Graves’ direction, and he told Philip with satisfaction:

“You see, people must eat, they will drink, and they want amusement. You’re always safe if you put your money in what the public thinks necessities.”

His words showed a nice discrimination between the grossness of the vulgar, which he deplored but accepted, and the finer taste of the elect. Altogether in investments there was about five hundred pounds; and to that must be added the balance at the bank and what the furniture would fetch. It was riches to Philip. He was not happy but infinitely relieved.

Mr. Graves left him, after they had discussed the auction which must be held as soon as possible, and Philip sat himself down to go through the papers of the deceased. The Rev. William Carey had prided himself on never destroying anything, and there were piles of correspondence dating back for fifty years and bundles upon bundles of neatly docketed bills. He had kept not only letters addressed to him, but letters which himself had written. There was a yellow packet of letters which he had written to his father in the forties, when as an Oxford undergraduate he had gone to Germany for the long vacation. Philip read them idly. It was a different William Carey from the William Carey he had known, and yet there were traces in the boy which might to an acute observer have suggested the man. The letters were formal and a little stilted. He showed himself strenuous to see all that was noteworthy, and he described with a fine enthusiasm the castles of the Rhine. The falls of Schaffhausen made him ‘offer reverent thanks to the all-powerful Creator of the universe, whose works were wondrous and beautiful,’ and he could not help thinking that they who lived in sight of ‘this handiwork of their blessed Maker must be moved by the contemplation to lead pure and holy lives.’ Among some bills Philip found a miniature which had been painted of William Carey soon after he was ordained. It represented a thin young curate, with long hair that fell over his head in natural curls, with dark eyes, large and dreamy, and a pale ascetic face. Philip remembered the chuckle with which his uncle used to tell of the dozens of slippers which were worked for him by adoring ladies.

The rest of the afternoon and all the evening Philip toiled through the innumerable correspondence. He glanced at the address and at the signature, then tore the letter in two and threw it into the washing-basket by his side. Suddenly he came upon one signed Helen. He did not know the writing. It was thin, angular, and old-fashioned. It began: my dear William, and ended: your affectionate sister. Then it struck him that it was from his own mother. He had never seen a letter of hers before, and her handwriting was strange to him. It was about himself.

My dear William,

Stephen wrote to you to thank you for your congratulations on the birth of our son and your kind wishes to myself. Thank God we are both well and I am deeply thankful for the great mercy which has been shown me. Now that I can hold a pen I want to tell you and dear Louisa myself how truly grateful I am to you both for all your kindness to me now and always since my marriage. I am going to ask you to do me a great favour. Both Stephen and I wish you to be the boy’s godfather, and we hope that you will consent. I know I am not asking a small thing, for I am sure you will take the responsibilities of the position very seriously, but I am especially anxious that you should undertake this office because you are a clergyman as well as the boy’s uncle. I am very anxious for the boy’s welfare and I pray God night and day that he may grow into a good, honest, and Christian man. With you to guide him I hope that he will become a soldier in Christ’s Faith and be all the days of his life God-fearing, humble, and pious.

Your affectionate sister,

Helen.

Philip pushed the letter away and, leaning forward, rested his face on his hands. It deeply touched and at the same time surprised him. He was astonished at its religious tone, which seemed to him neither mawkish nor sentimental. He knew nothing of his mother, dead now for nearly twenty years, but that she was beautiful, and it was strange to learn that she was simple and pious. He had never thought of that side of her. He read again what she said about him, what she expected and thought about him; he had turned out very differently; he looked at himself for a moment; perhaps it was better that she was dead. Then a sudden impulse caused him to tear up the letter; its tenderness and simplicity made it seem peculiarly private; he had a queer feeling that there was something indecent in his reading what exposed his mother’s gentle soul. He went on with the Vicar’s dreary correspondence.

A few days later he went up to London, and for the first time for two years entered by day the hall of St. Luke’s Hospital. He went to see the secretary of the Medical School; he was surprised to see him and asked Philip curiously what he had been doing. Philip’s experiences had given him a certain confidence in himself and a different outlook upon many things: such a question would have embarrassed him before; but now he answered coolly, with a deliberate vagueness which prevented further inquiry, that private affairs had obliged him to make a break in the curriculum; he was now anxious to qualify as soon as possible. The first examination he could take was in midwifery and the diseases of women, and he put his name down to be a clerk in the ward devoted to feminine ailments; since it was holiday time there happened to be no difficulty in getting a post as obstetric clerk; he arranged to undertake that duty during the last week of August and the first two of September. After this interview Philip walked through the Medical School, more or less deserted, for the examinations at the end of the summer session were all over; and he wandered along the terrace by the river-side. His heart was full. He thought that now he could begin a new life, and he would put behind him all the errors, follies, and miseries of the past. The flowing river suggested that everything passed, was passing always, and nothing mattered; the future was before him rich with possibilities.

He went back to Blackstable and busied himself with the settling up of his uncle’s estate. The auction was fixed for the middle of August, when the presence of visitors for the summer holidays would make it possible to get better prices. Catalogues were made out and sent to the various dealers in second-hand books at Tercanbury, Maidstone, and Ashford.

One afternoon Philip took it into his head to go over to Tercanbury and see his old school. He had not been there since the day when, with relief in his heart, he had left it with the feeling that thenceforward he was his own master. It was strange to wander through the narrow streets of Tercanbury which he had known so well for so many years. He looked at the old shops, still there, still selling the same things; the booksellers with school-books, pious works, and the latest novels in one window and photographs of the Cathedral and of the city in the other; the games shop, with its cricket bats, fishing tackle, tennis rackets, and footballs; the tailor from whom he had got clothes all through his boyhood; and the fishmonger where his uncle whenever he came to Tercanbury bought fish. He wandered along the sordid street in which, behind a high wall, lay the red brick house which was the preparatory school. Further on was the gateway that led into King’s School, and he stood in the quadrangle round which were the various buildings. It was just four and the boys were hurrying out of school. He saw the masters in their gowns and mortar-boards, and they were strange to him. It was more than ten years since he had left and many changes had taken place. He saw the headmaster; he walked slowly down from the schoolhouse to his own, talking to a big boy who Philip supposed was in the sixth; he was little changed, tall, cadaverous, romantic as Philip remembered him, with the same wild eyes; but the black beard was streaked with gray now and the dark, sallow face was more deeply lined. Philip had an impulse to go up and speak to him, but he was afraid he would have forgotten him, and he hated the thought of explaining who he was.

Boys lingered talking to one another, and presently some who had hurried to change came out to play fives; others straggled out in twos and threes and went out of the gateway, Philip knew they were going up to the cricket ground; others again went into the precincts to bat at the nets. Philip stood among them a stranger; one or two gave him an indifferent glance; but visitors, attracted by the Norman staircase, were not rare and excited little attention. Philip looked at them curiously. He thought with melancholy of the distance that separated him from them, and he thought bitterly how much he had wanted to do and how little done. It seemed to him that all those years, vanished beyond recall, had been utterly wasted. The boys, fresh and buoyant, were doing the same things that he had done, it seemed that not a day had passed since he left the school, and yet in that place where at least by name he had known everybody now he knew not a soul. In a few years these too, others taking their place, would stand alien as he stood; but the reflection brought him no solace; it merely impressed upon him the futility of human existence. Each generation repeated the trivial round. He wondered what had become of the boys who were his companions: they were nearly thirty now; some would be dead, but others were married and had children; they were soldiers and parsons, doctors, lawyers; they were staid men who were beginning to put youth behind them. Had any of them made such a hash of life as he? He thought of the boy he had been devoted to; it was funny, he could not recall his name; he remembered exactly what he looked like, he had been his greatest friend; but his name would not come back to him. He looked back with amusement on the jealous emotions he had suffered on his account. It was irritating not to recollect his name. He longed to be a boy again, like those he saw sauntering through the quadrangle, so that, avoiding his mistakes, he might start fresh and make something more out of life. He felt an intolerable loneliness. He almost regretted the penury which he had suffered during the last two years, since the desperate struggle merely to keep body and soul together had deadened the pain of living. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread: it was not a curse upon mankind, but the balm which reconciled it to existence.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design. He sought for beauty consciously, and he remembered how even as a boy he had taken pleasure in the Gothic cathedral as one saw it from the precincts; he went there and looked at the massive pile, gray under the cloudy sky, with the central tower that rose like the praise of men to their God; but the boys were batting at the nets, and they were lissom and strong and active; he could not help hearing their shouts and laughter. The cry of youth was insistent, and he saw the beautiful thing before him only with his eyes.

CXIII

At the beginning of the last week in August Philip entered upon his duties in the ‘district.’ They were arduous, for he had to attend on an average three confinements a day. The patient had obtained a ‘card’ from the hospital some time before; and when her time came it was taken to the porter by a messenger, generally a little girl, who was then sent across the road to the house in which Philip lodged. At night the porter, who had a latch-key, himself came over and awoke Philip. It was mysterious then to get up in the darkness and walk through the deserted streets of the South Side. At those hours it was generally the husband who brought the card. If there had been a number of babies before he took it for the most part with surly indifference, but if newly married he was nervous and then sometimes strove to allay his anxiety by getting drunk. Often there was a mile or more to walk, during which Philip and the messenger discussed the conditions of labour and the cost of living; Philip learnt about the various trades which were practised on that side of the river. He inspired confidence in the people among whom he was thrown, and during the long hours that he waited in a stuffy room, the woman in labour lying on a large bed that took up half of it, her mother and the midwife talked to him as naturally as they talked to one another. The circumstances in which he had lived during the last two years had taught him several things about the life of the very poor, which it amused them to find he knew; and they were impressed because he was not deceived by their little subterfuges. He was kind, and he had gentle hands, and he did not lose his temper. They were pleased because he was not above drinking a cup of tea with them, and when the dawn came and they were still waiting they offered him a slice of bread and dripping; he was not squeamish and could eat most things now with a good appetite. Some of the houses he went to, in filthy courts off a dingy street, huddled against one another without light or air, were merely squalid; but others, unexpectedly, though dilapidated, with worm-eaten floors and leaking roofs, had the grand air: you found in them oak balusters exquisitely carved, and the walls had still their panelling. These were thickly inhabited. One family lived in each room, and in the daytime there was the incessant noise of children playing in the court. The old walls were the breeding-place of vermin; the air was so foul that often, feeling sick, Philip had to light his pipe. The people who dwelt here lived from hand to mouth. Babies were unwelcome, the man received them with surly anger, the mother with despair; it was one more mouth to feed, and there was little enough wherewith to feed those already there. Philip often discerned the wish that the child might be born dead or might die quickly. He delivered one woman of twins (a source of humour to the facetious) and when she was told she burst into a long, shrill wail of misery. Her mother said outright:

“I don’t know how they’re going to feed ’em.”

“Maybe the Lord’ll see fit to take ’em to ‘imself,” said the midwife.

Philip caught sight of the husband’s face as he looked at the tiny pair lying side by side, and there was a ferocious sullenness in it which startled him. He felt in the family assembled there a hideous resentment against those poor atoms who had come into the world unwished for; and he had a suspicion that if he did not speak firmly an ‘accident’ would occur. Accidents occurred often; mothers ‘overlay’ their babies, and perhaps errors of diet were not always the result of carelessness.

“I shall come every day,” he said. “I warn you that if anything happens to them there’ll have to be an inquest.”

The father made no reply, but he gave Philip a scowl. There was murder in his soul.

“Bless their little ‘earts,” said the grandmother, “what should ‘appen to them?”

The great difficulty was to keep the mothers in bed for ten days, which was the minimum upon which the hospital practice insisted. It was awkward to look after the family, no one would see to the children without payment, and the husband tumbled because his tea was not right when he came home tired from his work and hungry. Philip had heard that the poor helped one another, but woman after woman complained to him that she could not get anyone in to clean up and see to the children’s dinner without paying for the service, and she could not afford to pay. By listening to the women as they talked and by chance remarks from which he could deduce much that was left unsaid, Philip learned how little there was in common between the poor and the classes above them. They did not envy their betters, for the life was too different, and they had an ideal of ease which made the existence of the middle-classes seem formal and stiff; moreover, they had a certain contempt for them because they were soft and did not work with their hands. The proud merely wished to be left alone, but the majority looked upon the well-to-do as people to be exploited; they knew what to say in order to get such advantages as the charitable put at their disposal, and they accepted benefits as a right which came to them from the folly of their superiors and their own astuteness. They bore the curate with contemptuous indifference, but the district visitor excited their bitter hatred. She came in and opened your windows without so much as a by your leave or with your leave, ‘and me with my bronchitis, enough to give me my death of cold;’ she poked her nose into corners, and if she didn’t say the place was dirty you saw what she thought right enough, ‘an’ it’s all very well for them as ‘as servants, but I’d like to see what she’d make of ‘er room if she ‘ad four children, and ‘ad to do the cookin’, and mend their clothes, and wash them.’

Philip discovered that the greatest tragedy of life to these people was not separation or death, that was natural and the grief of it could be assuaged with tears, but loss of work. He saw a man come home one afternoon, three days after his wife’s confinement, and tell her he had been dismissed; he was a builder and at that time work was slack; he stated the fact, and sat down to his tea.

“Oh, Jim,” she said.

The man ate stolidly some mess which had been stewing in a sauce-pan against his coming; he stared at his plate; his wife looked at him two or three times, with little startled glances, and then quite silently began to cry. The builder was an uncouth little fellow with a rough, weather-beaten face and a long white scar on his forehead; he had large, stubbly hands. Presently he pushed aside his plate as if he must give up the effort to force himself to eat, and turned a fixed gaze out of the window. The room was at the top of the house, at the back, and one saw nothing but sullen clouds. The silence seemed heavy with despair. Philip felt that there was nothing to be said, he could only go; and as he walked away wearily, for he had been up most of the night, his heart was filled with rage against the cruelty of the world. He knew the hopelessness of the search for work and the desolation which is harder to bear than hunger. He was thankful not to have to believe in God, for then such a condition of things would be intolerable; one could reconcile oneself to existence only because it was meaningless.

It seemed to Philip that the people who spent their time in helping the poorer classes erred because they sought to remedy things which would harass them if themselves had to endure them without thinking that they did not in the least disturb those who were used to them. The poor did not want large airy rooms; they suffered from cold, for their food was not nourishing and their circulation bad; space gave them a feeling of chilliness, and they wanted to burn as little coal as need be; there was no hardship for several to sleep in one room, they preferred it; they were never alone for a moment, from the time they were born to the time they died, and loneliness oppressed them; they enjoyed the promiscuity in which they dwelt, and the constant noise of their surroundings pressed upon their ears unnoticed. They did not feel the need of taking a bath constantly, and Philip often heard them speak with indignation of the necessity to do so with which they were faced on entering the hospital: it was both an affront and a discomfort. They wanted chiefly to be left alone; then if the man was in regular work life went easily and was not without its pleasures: there was plenty of time for gossip, after the day’s work a glass of beer was very good to drink, the streets were a constant source of entertainment, if you wanted to read there was Reynolds’ or The News of the World; ‘but there, you couldn’t make out ‘ow the time did fly, the truth was and that’s a fact, you was a rare one for reading when you was a girl, but what with one thing and another you didn’t get no time now not even to read the paper.’

The usual practice was to pay three visits after a confinement, and one Sunday Philip went to see a patient at the dinner hour. She was up for the first time.

“I couldn’t stay in bed no longer, I really couldn’t. I’m not one for idling, and it gives me the fidgets to be there and do nothing all day long, so I said to ‘Erb, I’m just going to get up and cook your dinner for you.”

‘Erb was sitting at table with his knife and fork already in his hands. He was a young man, with an open face and blue eyes. He was earning good money, and as things went the couple were in easy circumstances. They had only been married a few months, and were both delighted with the rosy boy who lay in the cradle at the foot of the bed. There was a savoury smell of beefsteak in the room and Philip’s eyes turned to the range.

“I was just going to dish up this minute,” said the woman.

“Fire away,” said Philip. “I’ll just have a look at the son and heir and then I’ll take myself off.”

Husband and wife laughed at Philip’s expression, and ‘Erb getting up went over with Philip to the cradle. He looked at his baby proudly.

“There doesn’t seem much wrong with him, does there?” said Philip.

He took up his hat, and by this time ‘Erb’s wife had dished up the beefsteak and put on the table a plate of green peas.

“You’re going to have a nice dinner,” smiled Philip.

“He’s only in of a Sunday and I like to ‘ave something special for him, so as he shall miss his ‘ome when he’s out at work.”

“I suppose you’d be above sittin’ down and ‘avin’ a bit of dinner with us?” said ‘Erb.

“Oh, ‘Erb,” said his wife, in a shocked tone.

“Not if you ask me,” answered Philip, with his attractive smile.

“Well, that’s what I call friendly, I knew ‘e wouldn’t take offence,

Polly. Just get another plate, my girl.”

Polly was flustered, and she thought ‘Erb a regular caution, you never knew what ideas ‘e’d get in ‘is ‘ead next; but she got a plate and wiped it quickly with her apron, then took a new knife and fork from the chest of drawers, where her best cutlery rested among her best clothes. There was a jug of stout on the table, and ‘Erb poured Philip out a glass. He wanted to give him the lion’s share of the beefsteak, but Philip insisted that they should share alike. It was a sunny room with two windows that reached to the floor; it had been the parlour of a house which at one time was if not fashionable at least respectable: it might have been inhabited fifty years before by a well-to-do tradesman or an officer on half pay. ‘Erb had been a football player before he married, and there were photographs on the wall of various teams in self-conscious attitudes, with neatly plastered hair, the captain seated proudly in the middle holding a cup. There were other signs of prosperity: photographs of the relations of ‘Erb and his wife in Sunday clothes; on the chimney-piece an elaborate arrangement of shells stuck on a miniature rock; and on each side mugs, ‘A present from Southend’ in Gothic letters, with pictures of a pier and a parade on them. ‘Erb was something of a character; he was a non-union man and expressed himself with indignation at the efforts of the union to force him to join. The union wasn’t no good to him, he never found no difficulty in getting work, and there was good wages for anyone as ‘ad a head on his shoulders and wasn’t above puttin’ ‘is ‘and to anything as come ‘is way. Polly was timorous. If she was ‘im she’d join the union, the last time there was a strike she was expectin’ ‘im to be brought back in an ambulance every time he went out. She turned to Philip.

“He’s that obstinate, there’s no doing anything with ‘im.”

“Well, what I say is, it’s a free country, and I won’t be dictated to.”

“It’s no good saying it’s a free country,” said Polly, “that won’t prevent ’em bashin’ your ‘ead in if they get the chanst.”

When they had finished Philip passed his pouch over to ‘Erb and they lit their pipes; then he got up, for a ‘call’ might be waiting for him at his rooms, and shook hands. He saw that it had given them pleasure that he shared their meal, and they saw that he had thoroughly enjoyed it.

“Well, good-bye, sir,” said ‘Erb, “and I ‘ope we shall ‘ave as nice a doctor next time the missus disgraces ‘erself.”

“Go on with you, ‘Erb,” she retorted. “‘Ow d’you know there’s going to be a next time?”

CXIV

The three weeks which the appointment lasted drew to an end. Philip had attended sixty-two cases, and he was tired out. When he came home about ten o’clock on his last night he hoped with all his heart that he would not be called out again. He had not had a whole night’s rest for ten days. The case which he had just come from was horrible. He had been fetched by a huge, burly man, the worse for liquor, and taken to a room in an evil-smelling court, which was filthier than any he had seen: it was a tiny attic; most of the space was taken up by a wooden bed, with a canopy of dirty red hangings, and the ceiling was so low that Philip could touch it with the tips of his fingers; with the solitary candle that afforded what light there was he went over it, frizzling up the bugs that crawled upon it. The woman was a blowsy creature of middle age, who had had a long succession of still-born children. It was a story that Philip was not unaccustomed to: the husband had been a soldier in India; the legislation forced upon that country by the prudery of the English public had given a free run to the most distressing of all diseases; the innocent suffered. Yawning, Philip undressed and took a bath, then shook his clothes over the water and watched the animals that fell out wriggling. He was just going to get into bed when there was a knock at the door, and the hospital porter brought him a card.

“Curse you,” said Philip. “You’re the last person I wanted to see tonight.

Who’s brought it?”

“I think it’s the ‘usband, sir. Shall I tell him to wait?”

Philip looked at the address, saw that the street was familiar to him, and told the porter that he would find his own way. He dressed himself and in five minutes, with his black bag in his hand, stepped into the street. A man, whom he could not see in the darkness, came up to him, and said he was the husband.

“I thought I’d better wait, sir,” he said. “It’s a pretty rough neighbour’ood, and them not knowing who you was.”

Philip laughed.

“Bless your heart, they all know the doctor, I’ve been in some damned sight rougher places than Waver Street.”

It was quite true. The black bag was a passport through wretched alleys and down foul-smelling courts into which a policeman was not ready to venture by himself. Once or twice a little group of men had looked at Philip curiously as he passed; he heard a mutter of observations and then one say:

“It’s the ‘orspital doctor.”

As he went by one or two of them said: “Good-night, sir.”

“We shall ‘ave to step out if you don’t mind, sir,” said the man who accompanied him now. “They told me there was no time to lose.”

“Why did you leave it so late?” asked Philip, as he quickened his pace.

He glanced at the fellow as they passed a lamp-post.

“You look awfully young,” he said.

“I’m turned eighteen, sir.”

He was fair, and he had not a hair on his face, he looked no more than a boy; he was short, but thick set.

“You’re young to be married,” said Philip.

“We ‘ad to.”

“How much d’you earn?”

“Sixteen, sir.”

Sixteen shillings a week was not much to keep a wife and child on. The room the couple lived in showed that their poverty was extreme. It was a fair size, but it looked quite large, since there was hardly any furniture in it; there was no carpet on the floor; there were no pictures on the walls; and most rooms had something, photographs or supplements in cheap frames from the Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers. The patient lay on a little iron bed of the cheapest sort. It startled Philip to see how young she was.

“By Jove, she can’t be more than sixteen,” he said to the woman who had come in to ‘see her through.’

She had given her age as eighteen on the card, but when they were very young they often put on a year or two. Also she was pretty, which was rare in those classes in which the constitution has been undermined by bad food, bad air, and unhealthy occupations; she had delicate features and large blue eyes, and a mass of dark hair done in the elaborate fashion of the coster girl. She and her husband were very nervous.

“You’d better wait outside, so as to be at hand if I want you,” Philip said to him.

Now that he saw him better Philip was surprised again at his boyish air: you felt that he should be larking in the street with the other lads instead of waiting anxiously for the birth of a child. The hours passed, and it was not till nearly two that the baby was born. Everything seemed to be going satisfactorily; the husband was called in, and it touched Philip to see the awkward, shy way in which he kissed his wife; Philip packed up his things. Before going he felt once more his patient’s pulse.

“Hulloa!” he said.

He looked at her quickly: something had happened. In cases of emergency the S. O. C. — senior obstetric clerk — had to be sent for; he was a qualified man, and the ‘district’ was in his charge. Philip scribbled a note, and giving it to the husband, told him to run with it to the hospital; he bade him hurry, for his wife was in a dangerous state. The man set off. Philip waited anxiously; he knew the woman was bleeding to death; he was afraid she would die before his chief arrived; he took what steps he could. He hoped fervently that the S. O. C. would not have been called elsewhere. The minutes were interminable. He came at last, and, while he examined the patient, in a low voice asked Philip questions. Philip saw by his face that he thought the case very grave. His name was Chandler. He was a tall man of few words, with a long nose and a thin face much lined for his age. He shook his head.

“It was hopeless from the beginning. Where’s the husband?”

“I told him to wait on the stairs,” said Philip.

“You’d better bring him in.”

Philip opened the door and called him. He was sitting in the dark on the first step of the flight that led to the next floor. He came up to the bed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Why, there’s internal bleeding. It’s impossible to stop it.” The S. O. C. hesitated a moment, and because it was a painful thing to say he forced his voice to become brusque. “She’s dying.”

The man did not say a word; he stopped quite still, looking at his wife, who lay, pale and unconscious, on the bed. It was the midwife who spoke.

“The gentlemen ‘ave done all they could, ‘Arry,” she said. “I saw what was comin’ from the first.”

“Shut up,” said Chandler.

There were no curtains on the windows, and gradually the night seemed to lighten; it was not yet the dawn, but the dawn was at hand. Chandler was keeping the woman alive by all the means in his power, but life was slipping away from her, and suddenly she died. The boy who was her husband stood at the end of the cheap iron bed with his hands resting on the rail; he did not speak; but he looked very pale and once or twice Chandler gave him an uneasy glance, thinking he was going to faint: his lips were gray. The midwife sobbed noisily, but he took no notice of her. His eyes were fixed upon his wife, and in them was an utter bewilderment. He reminded you of a dog whipped for something he did not know was wrong. When Chandler and Philip had gathered together their things Chandler turned to the husband.

“You’d better lie down for a bit. I expect you’re about done up.”

“There’s nowhere for me to lie down, sir,” he answered, and there was in his voice a humbleness which was very distressing.

“Don’t you know anyone in the house who’ll give you a shakedown?”

“No, sir.”

“They only moved in last week,” said the midwife. “They don’t know nobody yet.”

Chandler hesitated a moment awkwardly, then he went up to the man and said:

“I’m very sorry this has happened.”

He held out his hand and the man, with an instinctive glance at his own to see if it was clean, shook it.

“Thank you, sir.”

Philip shook hands with him too. Chandler told the midwife to come and fetch the certificate in the morning. They left the house and walked along together in silence.

“It upsets one a bit at first, doesn’t it?” said Chandler at last.

“A bit,” answered Philip.

“If you like I’ll tell the porter not to bring you any more calls tonight.”

“I’m off duty at eight in the morning in any case.”

“How many cases have you had?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Good. You’ll get your certificate then.”

They arrived at the hospital, and the S. O. C. went in to see if anyone wanted him. Philip walked on. It had been very hot all the day before, and even now in the early morning there was a balminess in the air. The street was very still. Philip did not feel inclined to go to bed. It was the end of his work and he need not hurry. He strolled along, glad of the fresh air and the silence; he thought that he would go on to the bridge and look at day break on the river. A policeman at the corner bade him good-morning. He knew who Philip was from his bag.

“Out late tonight, sir,” he said.

Philip nodded and passed. He leaned against the parapet and looked towards the morning. At that hour the great city was like a city of the dead. The sky was cloudless, but the stars were dim at the approach of day; there was a light mist on the river, and the great buildings on the north side were like palaces in an enchanted island. A group of barges was moored in midstream. It was all of an unearthly violet, troubling somehow and awe-inspiring; but quickly everything grew pale, and cold, and gray. Then the sun rose, a ray of yellow gold stole across the sky, and the sky was iridescent. Philip could not get out of his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and deprivation into a slatternly middle age — he saw the pretty face grow thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal — then, when the man was past his prime, the difficulty of getting jobs, the small wages he had to take; and the inevitable, abject penury of the end: she might be energetic, thrifty, industrious, it would not have saved her; in the end was the workhouse or subsistence on the charity of her children. Who could pity her because she had died when life offered so little?

But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was the natural order of things. Otherwise, good heavens! otherwise they would swarm over the river in their multitude to the side where those great buildings were, secure and stately, and they would pillage, burn, and sack. But the day, tender and pale, had broken now, and the mist was tenuous; it bathed everything in a soft radiance; and the Thames was gray, rosy, and green; gray like mother-of-pearl and green like the heart of a yellow rose. The wharfs and store-houses of the Surrey Side were massed in disorderly loveliness. The scene was so exquisite that Philip’s heart beat passionately. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Beside that nothing seemed to matter.

CXV

Philip spent the few weeks that remained before the beginning of the winter session in the out-patients’ department, and in October settled down to regular work. He had been away from the hospital for so long that he found himself very largely among new people; the men of different years had little to do with one another, and his contemporaries were now mostly qualified: some had left to take up assistantships or posts in country hospitals and infirmaries, and some held appointments at St. Luke’s. The two years during which his mind had lain fallow had refreshed him, he fancied, and he was able now to work with energy.

The Athelnys were delighted with his change of fortune. He had kept aside a few things from the sale of his uncle’s effects and gave them all presents. He gave Sally a gold chain that had belonged to his aunt. She was now grown up. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and set out every morning at eight to work all day in a shop in Regent Street. Sally had frank blue eyes, a broad brow, and plentiful shining hair; she was buxom, with broad hips and full breasts; and her father, who was fond of discussing her appearance, warned her constantly that she must not grow fat. She attracted because she was healthy, animal, and feminine. She had many admirers, but they left her unmoved; she gave one the impression that she looked upon love-making as nonsense; and it was easy to imagine that young men found her unapproachable. Sally was old for her years: she had been used to help her mother in the household work and in the care of the children, so that she had acquired a managing air, which made her mother say that Sally was a bit too fond of having things her own way. She did not speak very much, but as she grew older she seemed to be acquiring a quiet sense of humour, and sometimes uttered a remark which suggested that beneath her impassive exterior she was quietly bubbling with amusement at her fellow-creatures. Philip found that with her he never got on the terms of affectionate intimacy upon which he was with the rest of Athelny’s huge family. Now and then her indifference slightly irritated him. There was something enigmatic in her.

When Philip gave her the necklace Athelny in his boisterous way insisted that she must kiss him; but Sally reddened and drew back.

“No, I’m not going to,” she said.

“Ungrateful hussy!” cried Athelny. “Why not?”

“I don’t like being kissed by men,” she said.

Philip saw her embarrassment, and, amused, turned Athelny’s attention to something else. That was never a very difficult thing to do. But evidently her mother spoke of the matter later, for next time Philip came she took the opportunity when they were alone for a couple of minutes to refer to it.

“You didn’t think it disagreeable of me last week when I wouldn’t kiss you?”

“Not a bit,” he laughed.

“It’s not because I wasn’t grateful.” She blushed a little as she uttered the formal phrase which she had prepared. “I shall always value the necklace, and it was very kind of you to give it me.”

Philip found it always a little difficult to talk to her. She did all that she had to do very competently, but seemed to feel no need of conversation; yet there was nothing unsociable in her. One Sunday afternoon when Athelny and his wife had gone out together, and Philip, treated as one of the family, sat reading in the parlour, Sally came in and sat by the window to sew. The girls’ clothes were made at home and Sally could not afford to spend Sundays in idleness. Philip thought she wished to talk and put down his book.

“Go on reading,” she said. “I only thought as you were alone I’d come and sit with you.”

“You’re the most silent person I’ve ever struck,” said Philip.

“We don’t want another one who’s talkative in this house,” she said.

There was no irony in her tone: she was merely stating a fact. But it suggested to Philip that she measured her father, alas, no longer the hero he was to her childhood, and in her mind joined together his entertaining conversation and the thriftlessness which often brought difficulties into their life; she compared his rhetoric with her mother’s practical common sense; and though the liveliness of her father amused her she was perhaps sometimes a little impatient with it. Philip looked at her as she bent over her work; she was healthy, strong, and normal; it must be odd to see her among the other girls in the shop with their flat chests and anaemic faces. Mildred suffered from anaemia.

After a time it appeared that Sally had a suitor. She went out occasionally with friends she had made in the work-room, and had met a young man, an electrical engineer in a very good way of business, who was a most eligible person. One day she told her mother that he had asked her to marry him.

“What did you say?” said her mother.

“Oh, I told him I wasn’t over-anxious to marry anyone just yet awhile.” She paused a little as was her habit between observations. “He took on so that I said he might come to tea on Sunday.”

It was an occasion that thoroughly appealed to Athelny. He rehearsed all the afternoon how he should play the heavy father for the young man’s edification till he reduced his children to helpless giggling. Just before he was due Athelny routed out an Egyptian tarboosh and insisted on putting it on.

“Go on with you, Athelny,” said his wife, who was in her best, which was of black velvet, and, since she was growing stouter every year, very tight for her. “You’ll spoil the girl’s chances.”

She tried to pull it off, but the little man skipped nimbly out of her way.

“Unhand me, woman. Nothing will induce me to take it off. This young man must be shown at once that it is no ordinary family he is preparing to enter.”

“Let him keep it on, mother,” said Sally, in her even, indifferent fashion. “If Mr. Donaldson doesn’t take it the way it’s meant he can take himself off, and good riddance.”

Philip thought it was a severe ordeal that the young man was being exposed to, since Athelny, in his brown velvet jacket, flowing black tie, and red tarboosh, was a startling spectacle for an innocent electrical engineer. When he came he was greeted by his host with the proud courtesy of a Spanish grandee and by Mrs. Athelny in an altogether homely and natural fashion. They sat down at the old ironing-table in the high-backed monkish chairs, and Mrs. Athelny poured tea out of a lustre teapot which gave a note of England and the country-side to the festivity. She had made little cakes with her own hand, and on the table was home-made jam. It was a farm-house tea, and to Philip very quaint and charming in that Jacobean house. Athelny for some fantastic reason took it into his head to discourse upon Byzantine history; he had been reading the later volumes of the Decline and Fall; and, his forefinger dramatically extended, he poured into the astonished ears of the suitor scandalous stories about Theodora and Irene. He addressed himself directly to his guest with a torrent of rhodomontade; and the young man, reduced to helpless silence and shy, nodded his head at intervals to show that he took an intelligent interest. Mrs. Athelny paid no attention to Thorpe’s conversation, but interrupted now and then to offer the young man more tea or to press upon him cake and jam. Philip watched Sally; she sat with downcast eyes, calm, silent, and observant; and her long eye-lashes cast a pretty shadow on her cheek. You could not tell whether she was amused at the scene or if she cared for the young man. She was inscrutable. But one thing was certain: the electrical engineer was good-looking, fair and clean-shaven, with pleasant, regular features, and an honest face; he was tall and well-made. Philip could not help thinking he would make an excellent mate for her, and he felt a pang of envy for the happiness which he fancied was in store for them.

Presently the suitor said he thought it was about time he was getting along. Sally rose to her feet without a word and accompanied him to the door. When she came back her father burst out:

“Well, Sally, we think your young man very nice. We are prepared to welcome him into our family. Let the banns be called and I will compose a nuptial song.”

Sally set about clearing away the tea-things. She did not answer. Suddenly she shot a swift glance at Philip.

“What did you think of him, Mr. Philip?”

She had always refused to call him Uncle Phil as the other children did, and would not call him Philip.

“I think you’d make an awfully handsome pair.”

She looked at him quickly once more, and then with a slight blush went on with her business.

“I thought him a very nice civil-spoken young fellow,” said Mrs. Athelny, “and I think he’s just the sort to make any girl happy.”

Sally did not reply for a minute or two, and Philip looked at her curiously: it might be thought that she was meditating upon what her mother had said, and on the other hand she might be thinking of the man in the moon.

“Why don’t you answer when you’re spoken to, Sally?” remarked her mother, a little irritably.

“I thought he was a silly.”

“Aren’t you going to have him then?”

“No, I’m not.”

“I don’t know how much more you want,” said Mrs. Athelny, and it was quite clear now that she was put out. “He’s a very decent young fellow and he can afford to give you a thorough good home. We’ve got quite enough to feed here without you. If you get a chance like that it’s wicked not to take it. And I daresay you’d be able to have a girl to do the rough work.”

Philip had never before heard Mrs. Athelny refer so directly to the difficulties of her life. He saw how important it was that each child should be provided for.

“It’s no good your carrying on, mother,” said Sally in her quiet way. “I’m not going to marry him.”

“I think you’re a very hard-hearted, cruel, selfish girl.”

“If you want me to earn my own living, mother, I can always go into service.”

“Don’t be so silly, you know your father would never let you do that.”

Philip caught Sally’s eye, and he thought there was in it a glimmer of amusement. He wondered what there had been in the conversation to touch her sense of humour. She was an odd girl.

CXVI

During his last year at St. Luke’s Philip had to work hard. He was contented with life. He found it very comfortable to be heart-free and to have enough money for his needs. He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance: you needed a competency to rate it at its proper value. He lived a solitary life, seeing no one except the Athelnys, but he was not lonely; he busied himself with plans for the future, and sometimes he thought of the past. His recollection dwelt now and then on old friends, but he made no effort to see them. He would have liked to know what was become of Norah Nesbit; she was Norah something else now, but he could not remember the name of the man she was going to marry; he was glad to have known her: she was a good and a brave soul. One evening about half past eleven he saw Lawson, walking along Piccadilly; he was in evening clothes and might be supposed to be coming back from a theatre. Philip gave way to a sudden impulse and quickly turned down a side street. He had not seen him for two years and felt that he could not now take up again the interrupted friendship. He and Lawson had nothing more to say to one another. Philip was no longer interested in art; it seemed to him that he was able to enjoy beauty with greater force than when he was a boy; but art appeared to him unimportant. He was occupied with the forming of a pattern out of the manifold chaos of life, and the materials with which he worked seemed to make preoccupation with pigments and words very trivial. Lawson had served his turn. Philip’s friendship with him had been a motive in the design he was elaborating: it was merely sentimental to ignore the fact that the painter was of no further interest to him.

Sometimes Philip thought of Mildred. He avoided deliberately the streets in which there was a chance of seeing her; but occasionally some feeling, perhaps curiosity, perhaps something deeper which he would not acknowledge, made him wander about Piccadilly and Regent Street during the hours when she might be expected to be there. He did not know then whether he wished to see her or dreaded it. Once he saw a back which reminded him of hers, and for a moment he thought it was she; it gave him a curious sensation: it was a strange sharp pain in his heart, there was fear in it and a sickening dismay; and when he hurried on and found that he was mistaken he did not know whether it was relief that he experienced or disappointment.

At the beginning of August Philip passed his surgery, his last examination, and received his diploma. It was seven years since he had entered St. Luke’s Hospital. He was nearly thirty. He walked down the stairs of the Royal College of Surgeons with the roll in his hand which qualified him to practice, and his heart beat with satisfaction.

“Now I’m really going to begin life,” he thought.

Next day he went to the secretary’s office to put his name down for one of the hospital appointments. The secretary was a pleasant little man with a black beard, whom Philip had always found very affable. He congratulated him on his success, and then said:

“I suppose you wouldn’t like to do a locum for a month on the South coast?

Three guineas a week with board and lodging.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Philip.

“It’s at Farnley, in Dorsetshire. Doctor South. You’d have to go down at once; his assistant has developed mumps. I believe it’s a very pleasant place.”

There was something in the secretary’s manner that puzzled Philip. It was a little doubtful.

“What’s the crab in it?” he asked.

The secretary hesitated a moment and laughed in a conciliating fashion.

“Well, the fact is, I understand he’s rather a crusty, funny old fellow. The agencies won’t send him anyone any more. He speaks his mind very openly, and men don’t like it.”

“But d’you think he’ll be satisfied with a man who’s only just qualified?

After all I have no experience.”

“He ought to be glad to get you,” said the secretary diplomatically.

Philip thought for a moment. He had nothing to do for the next few weeks, and he was glad of the chance to earn a bit of money. He could put it aside for the holiday in Spain which he had promised himself when he had finished his appointment at St. Luke’s or, if they would not give him anything there, at some other hospital.

“All right. I’ll go.”

“The only thing is, you must go this afternoon. Will that suit you? If so,

I’ll send a wire at once.”

Philip would have liked a few days to himself; but he had seen the Athelnys the night before (he had gone at once to take them his good news) and there was really no reason why he should not start immediately. He had little luggage to pack. Soon after seven that evening he got out of the station at Farnley and took a cab to Doctor South’s. It was a broad low stucco house, with a Virginia creeper growing over it. He was shown into the consulting-room. An old man was writing at a desk. He looked up as the maid ushered Philip in. He did not get up, and he did not speak; he merely stared at Philip. Philip was taken aback.

“I think you’re expecting me,” he said. “The secretary of St. Luke’s wired to you this morning.”

“I kept dinner back for half an hour. D’you want to wash?”

“I do,” said Philip.

Doctor South amused him by his odd manner. He got up now, and Philip saw that he was a man of middle height, thin, with white hair cut very short and a long mouth closed so tightly that he seemed to have no lips at all; he was clean-shaven but for small white whiskers, and they increased the squareness of face which his firm jaw gave him. He wore a brown tweed suit and a white stock. His clothes hung loosely about him as though they had been made for a much larger man. He looked like a respectable farmer of the middle of the nineteenth century. He opened the door.

“There is the dining-room,” he said, pointing to the door opposite. “Your bed-room is the first door you come to when you get on the landing. Come downstairs when you’re ready.”

During dinner Philip knew that Doctor South was examining him, but he spoke little, and Philip felt that he did not want to hear his assistant talk.

“When were you qualified?” he asked suddenly.

“Yesterday.”

“Were you at a university?”

“No.”

“Last year when my assistant took a holiday they sent me a ‘Varsity man.

I told ’em not to do it again. Too damned gentlemanly for me.”

There was another pause. The dinner was very simple and very good. Philip preserved a sedate exterior, but in his heart he was bubbling over with excitement. He was immensely elated at being engaged as a locum; it made him feel extremely grown up; he had an insane desire to laugh at nothing in particular; and the more he thought of his professional dignity the more he was inclined to chuckle.

But Doctor South broke suddenly into his thoughts. “How old are you?”

“Getting on for thirty.”

“How is it you’re only just qualified?”

“I didn’t go in for the medical till I was nearly twenty-three, and I had to give it up for two years in the middle.”

“Why?”

“Poverty.”

Doctor South gave him an odd look and relapsed into silence. At the end of dinner he got up from the table.

“D’you know what sort of a practice this is?”

“No,” answered Philip.

“Mostly fishermen and their families. I have the Union and the Seamen’s Hospital. I used to be alone here, but since they tried to make this into a fashionable sea-side resort a man has set up on the cliff, and the well-to-do people go to him. I only have those who can’t afford to pay for a doctor at all.”

Philip saw that the rivalry was a sore point with the old man.

“You know that I have no experience,” said Philip.

“You none of you know anything.”

He walked out of the room without another word and left Philip by himself. When the maid came in to clear away she told Philip that Doctor South saw patients from six till seven. Work for that night was over. Philip fetched a book from his room, lit his pipe, and settled himself down to read. It was a great comfort, since he had read nothing but medical books for the last few months. At ten o’clock Doctor South came in and looked at him. Philip hated not to have his feet up, and he had dragged up a chair for them.

“You seem able to make yourself pretty comfortable,” said Doctor South, with a grimness which would have disturbed Philip if he had not been in such high spirits.

Philip’s eyes twinkled as he answered.

“Have you any objection?”

Doctor South gave him a look, but did not reply directly.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“Peregrine Pickle. Smollett.”

“I happen to know that Smollett wrote Peregrine Pickle.”

“I beg your pardon. Medical men aren’t much interested in literature, are they?”

Philip had put the book down on the table, and Doctor South took it up. It was a volume of an edition which had belonged to the Vicar of Blackstable. It was a thin book bound in faded morocco, with a copperplate engraving as a frontispiece; the pages were musty with age and stained with mould. Philip, without meaning to, started forward a little as Doctor South took the volume in his hands, and a slight smile came into his eyes. Very little escaped the old doctor.

“Do I amuse you?” he asked icily.

“I see you’re fond of books. You can always tell by the way people handle them.”

Doctor South put down the novel immediately.

“Breakfast at eight-thirty,” he said and left the room.

“What a funny old fellow!” thought Philip.

He soon discovered why Doctor South’s assistants found it difficult to get on with him. In the first place, he set his face firmly against all the discoveries of the last thirty years: he had no patience with the drugs which became modish, were thought to work marvellous cures, and in a few years were discarded; he had stock mixtures which he had brought from St. Luke’s where he had been a student, and had used all his life; he found them just as efficacious as anything that had come into fashion since. Philip was startled at Doctor South’s suspicion of asepsis; he had accepted it in deference to universal opinion; but he used the precautions which Philip had known insisted upon so scrupulously at the hospital with the disdainful tolerance of a man playing at soldiers with children.

“I’ve seen antiseptics come along and sweep everything before them, and then I’ve seen asepsis take their place. Bunkum!”

The young men who were sent down to him knew only hospital practice; and they came with the unconcealed scorn for the General Practitioner which they had absorbed in the air at the hospital; but they had seen only the complicated cases which appeared in the wards; they knew how to treat an obscure disease of the suprarenal bodies, but were helpless when consulted for a cold in the head. Their knowledge was theoretical and their self-assurance unbounded. Doctor South watched them with tightened lips; he took a savage pleasure in showing them how great was their ignorance and how unjustified their conceit. It was a poor practice, of fishing folk, and the doctor made up his own prescriptions. Doctor South asked his assistant how he expected to make both ends meet if he gave a fisherman with a stomach-ache a mixture consisting of half a dozen expensive drugs. He complained too that the young medical men were uneducated: their reading consisted of The Sporting Times and The British Medical Journal; they could neither write a legible hand nor spell correctly. For two or three days Doctor South watched Philip closely, ready to fall on him with acid sarcasm if he gave him the opportunity; and Philip, aware of this, went about his work with a quiet sense of amusement. He was pleased with the change of occupation. He liked the feeling of independence and of responsibility. All sorts of people came to the consulting-room. He was gratified because he seemed able to inspire his patients with confidence; and it was entertaining to watch the process of cure which at a hospital necessarily could be watched only at distant intervals. His rounds took him into low-roofed cottages in which were fishing tackle and sails and here and there mementoes of deep-sea travelling, a lacquer box from Japan, spears and oars from Melanesia, or daggers from the bazaars of Stamboul; there was an air of romance in the stuffy little rooms, and the salt of the sea gave them a bitter freshness. Philip liked to talk to the sailor-men, and when they found that he was not supercilious they told him long yarns of the distant journeys of their youth.

Once or twice he made a mistake in diagnosis: (he had never seen a case of measles before, and when he was confronted with the rash took it for an obscure disease of the skin;) and once or twice his ideas of treatment differed from Doctor South’s. The first time this happened Doctor South attacked him with savage irony; but Philip took it with good humour; he had some gift for repartee, and he made one or two answers which caused Doctor South to stop and look at him curiously. Philip’s face was grave, but his eyes were twinkling. The old gentleman could not avoid the impression that Philip was chaffing him. He was used to being disliked and feared by his assistants, and this was a new experience. He had half a mind to fly into a passion and pack Philip off by the next train, he had done that before with his assistants; but he had an uneasy feeling that Philip then would simply laugh at him outright; and suddenly he felt amused. His mouth formed itself into a smile against his will, and he turned away. In a little while he grew conscious that Philip was amusing himself systematically at his expense. He was taken aback at first and then diverted.

“Damn his impudence,” he chuckled to himself. “Damn his impudence.”

CXVII

Philip had written to Athelny to tell him that he was doing a locum in Dorsetshire and in due course received an answer from him. It was written in the formal manner he affected, studded with pompous epithets as a Persian diadem was studded with precious stones; and in the beautiful hand, like black letter and as difficult to read, upon which he prided himself. He suggested that Philip should join him and his family in the Kentish hop-field to which he went every year; and to persuade him said various beautiful and complicated things about Philip’s soul and the winding tendrils of the hops. Philip replied at once that he would come on the first day he was free. Though not born there, he had a peculiar affection for the Isle of Thanet, and he was fired with enthusiasm at the thought of spending a fortnight so close to the earth and amid conditions which needed only a blue sky to be as idyllic as the olive groves of Arcady.

The four weeks of his engagement at Farnley passed quickly. On the cliff a new town was springing up, with red brick villas round golf links, and a large hotel had recently been opened to cater for the summer visitors; but Philip went there seldom. Down below, by the harbour, the little stone houses of a past century were clustered in a delightful confusion, and the narrow streets, climbing down steeply, had an air of antiquity which appealed to the imagination. By the water’s edge were neat cottages with trim, tiny gardens in front of them; they were inhabited by retired captains in the merchant service, and by mothers or widows of men who had gained their living by the sea; and they had an appearance which was quaint and peaceful. In the little harbour came tramps from Spain and the Levant, ships of small tonnage; and now and then a windjammer was borne in by the winds of romance. It reminded Philip of the dirty little harbour with its colliers at Blackstable, and he thought that there he had first acquired the desire, which was now an obsession, for Eastern lands and sunlit islands in a tropic sea. But here you felt yourself closer to the wide, deep ocean than on the shore of that North Sea which seemed always circumscribed; here you could draw a long breath as you looked out upon the even vastness; and the west wind, the dear soft salt wind of England, uplifted the heart and at the same time melted it to tenderness.

One evening, when Philip had reached his last week with Doctor South, a child came to the surgery door while the old doctor and Philip were making up prescriptions. It was a little ragged girl with a dirty face and bare feet. Philip opened the door.

“Please, sir, will you come to Mrs. Fletcher’s in Ivy Lane at once?”

“What’s the matter with Mrs. Fletcher?” called out Doctor South in his rasping voice.

The child took no notice of him, but addressed herself again to Philip.

“Please, sir, her little boy’s had an accident and will you come at once?”

“Tell Mrs. Fletcher I’m coming,” called out Doctor South.

The little girl hesitated for a moment, and putting a dirty finger in a dirty mouth stood still and looked at Philip.

“What’s the matter, Kid?” said Philip, smiling.

“Please, sir, Mrs. Fletcher says, will the new doctor come?” There was a sound in the dispensary and Doctor South came out into the passage.

“Isn’t Mrs. Fletcher satisfied with me?” he barked. “I’ve attended Mrs. Fletcher since she was born. Why aren’t I good enough to attend her filthy brat?”

The little girl looked for a moment as though she were going to cry, then she thought better of it; she put out her tongue deliberately at Doctor South, and, before he could recover from his astonishment, bolted off as fast as she could run. Philip saw that the old gentleman was annoyed.

“You look rather fagged, and it’s a goodish way to Ivy Lane,” he said, by way of giving him an excuse not to go himself.

Doctor South gave a low snarl.

“It’s a damned sight nearer for a man who’s got the use of both legs than for a man who’s only got one and a half.”

Philip reddened and stood silent for a while.

“Do you wish me to go or will you go yourself?” he said at last frigidly.

“What’s the good of my going? They want you.”

Philip took up his hat and went to see the patient. It was hard upon eight o’clock when he came back. Doctor South was standing in the dining-room with his back to the fireplace.

“You’ve been a long time,” he said.

“I’m sorry. Why didn’t you start dinner?”

“Because I chose to wait. Have you been all this while at Mrs.

Fletcher’s?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I stopped to look at the sunset on my way back, and I didn’t think of the time.”

Doctor South did not reply, and the servant brought in some grilled sprats. Philip ate them with an excellent appetite. Suddenly Doctor South shot a question at him.

“Why did you look at the sunset?”

Philip answered with his mouth full.

“Because I was happy.”

Doctor South gave him an odd look, and the shadow of a smile flickered across his old, tired face. They ate the rest of the dinner in silence; but when the maid had given them the port and left the room, the old man leaned back and fixed his sharp eyes on Philip.

“It stung you up a bit when I spoke of your game leg, young fellow?” he said.

“People always do, directly or indirectly, when they get angry with me.”

“I suppose they know it’s your weak point.”

Philip faced him and looked at him steadily.

“Are you very glad to have discovered it?”

The doctor did not answer, but he gave a chuckle of bitter mirth. They sat for a while staring at one another. Then Doctor South surprised Philip extremely.

“Why don’t you stay here and I’ll get rid of that damned fool with his mumps?”

“It’s very kind of you, but I hope to get an appointment at the hospital in the autumn. It’ll help me so much in getting other work later.”

“I’m offering you a partnership,” said Doctor South grumpily.

“Why?” asked Philip, with surprise.

“They seem to like you down here.”

“I didn’t think that was a fact which altogether met with your approval,”

Philip said drily.

“D’you suppose that after forty years’ practice I care a twopenny damn whether people prefer my assistant to me? No, my friend. There’s no sentiment between my patients and me. I don’t expect gratitude from them, I expect them to pay my fees. Well, what d’you say to it?”

Philip made no reply, not because he was thinking over the proposal, but because he was astonished. It was evidently very unusual for someone to offer a partnership to a newly qualified man; and he realised with wonder that, although nothing would induce him to say so, Doctor South had taken a fancy to him. He thought how amused the secretary at St. Luke’s would be when he told him.

“The practice brings in about seven hundred a year. We can reckon out how much your share would be worth, and you can pay me off by degrees. And when I die you can succeed me. I think that’s better than knocking about hospitals for two or three years, and then taking assistantships until you can afford to set up for yourself.”

Philip knew it was a chance that most people in his profession would jump at; the profession was over-crowded, and half the men he knew would be thankful to accept the certainty of even so modest a competence as that.

“I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t,” he said. “It means giving up everything I’ve aimed at for years. In one way and another I’ve had a roughish time, but I always had that one hope before me, to get qualified so that I might travel; and now, when I wake in the morning, my bones simply ache to get off, I don’t mind where particularly, but just away, to places I’ve never been to.”

Now the goal seemed very near. He would have finished his appointment at St. Luke’s by the middle of the following year, and then he would go to Spain; he could afford to spend several months there, rambling up and down the land which stood to him for romance; after that he would get a ship and go to the East. Life was before him and time of no account. He could wander, for years if he chose, in unfrequented places, amid strange peoples, where life was led in strange ways. He did not know what he sought or what his journeys would bring him; but he had a feeling that he would learn something new about life and gain some clue to the mystery that he had solved only to find more mysterious. And even if he found nothing he would allay the unrest which gnawed at his heart. But Doctor South was showing him a great kindness, and it seemed ungrateful to refuse his offer for no adequate reason; so in his shy way, trying to appear as matter of fact as possible, he made some attempt to explain why it was so important to him to carry out the plans he had cherished so passionately.

Doctor South listened quietly, and a gentle look came into his shrewd old eyes. It seemed to Philip an added kindness that he did not press him to accept his offer. Benevolence is often very peremptory. He appeared to look upon Philip’s reasons as sound. Dropping the subject, he began to talk of his own youth; he had been in the Royal Navy, and it was his long connection with the sea that, when he retired, had made him settle at Farnley. He told Philip of old days in the Pacific and of wild adventures in China. He had taken part in an expedition against the head-hunters of Borneo and had known Samoa when it was still an independent state. He had touched at coral islands. Philip listened to him entranced. Little by little he told Philip about himself. Doctor South was a widower, his wife had died thirty years before, and his daughter had married a farmer in Rhodesia; he had quarrelled with him, and she had not come to England for ten years. It was just as if he had never had wife or child. He was very lonely. His gruffness was little more than a protection which he wore to hide a complete disillusionment; and to Philip it seemed tragic to see him just waiting for death, not impatiently, but rather with loathing for it, hating old age and unable to resign himself to its limitations, and yet with the feeling that death was the only solution of the bitterness of his life. Philip crossed his path, and the natural affection which long separation from his daughter had killed — she had taken her husband’s part in the quarrel and her children he had never seen — settled itself upon Philip. At first it made him angry, he told himself it was a sign of dotage; but there was something in Philip that attracted him, and he found himself smiling at him he knew not why. Philip did not bore him. Once or twice he put his hand on his shoulder: it was as near a caress as he had got since his daughter left England so many years before. When the time came for Philip to go Doctor South accompanied him to the station: he found himself unaccountably depressed.

“I’ve had a ripping time here,” said Philip. “You’ve been awfully kind to me.”

“I suppose you’re very glad to go?”

“I’ve enjoyed myself here.”

“But you want to get out into the world? Ah, you have youth.” He hesitated a moment. “I want you to remember that if you change your mind my offer still stands.”

“That’s awfully kind of you.”

Philip shook hands with him out of the carriage window, and the train steamed out of the station. Philip thought of the fortnight he was going to spend in the hop-field: he was happy at the idea of seeing his friends again, and he rejoiced because the day was fine. But Doctor South walked slowly back to his empty house. He felt very old and very lonely.

CXVIII

It was late in the evening when Philip arrived at Ferne. It was Mrs. Athelny’s native village, and she had been accustomed from her childhood to pick in the hop-field to which with her husband and her children she still went every year. Like many Kentish folk her family had gone out regularly, glad to earn a little money, but especially regarding the annual outing, looked forward to for months, as the best of holidays. The work was not hard, it was done in common, in the open air, and for the children it was a long, delightful picnic; here the young men met the maidens; in the long evenings when work was over they wandered about the lanes, making love; and the hopping season was generally followed by weddings. They went out in carts with bedding, pots and pans, chairs and tables; and Ferne while the hopping lasted was deserted. They were very exclusive and would have resented the intrusion of foreigners, as they called the people who came from London; they looked down upon them and feared them too; they were a rough lot, and the respectable country folk did not want to mix with them. In the old days the hoppers slept in barns, but ten years ago a row of huts had been erected at the side of a meadow; and the Athelnys, like many others, had the same hut every year.

Athelny met Philip at the station in a cart he had borrowed from the public-house at which he had got a room for Philip. It was a quarter of a mile from the hop-field. They left his bag there and walked over to the meadow in which were the huts. They were nothing more than a long, low shed, divided into little rooms about twelve feet square. In front of each was a fire of sticks, round which a family was grouped, eagerly watching the cooking of supper. The sea-air and the sun had browned already the faces of Athelny’s children. Mrs. Athelny seemed a different woman in her sun-bonnet: you felt that the long years in the city had made no real difference to her; she was the country woman born and bred, and you could see how much at home she found herself in the country. She was frying bacon and at the same time keeping an eye on the younger children, but she had a hearty handshake and a jolly smile for Philip. Athelny was enthusiastic over the delights of a rural existence.

“We’re starved for sun and light in the cities we live in. It isn’t life, it’s a long imprisonment. Let us sell all we have, Betty, and take a farm in the country.”

“I can see you in the country,” she answered with good-humoured scorn. “Why, the first rainy day we had in the winter you’d be crying for London.” She turned to Philip. “Athelny’s always like this when we come down here. Country, I like that! Why, he don’t know a swede from a mangel-wurzel.”

“Daddy was lazy today,” remarked Jane, with the frankness which characterized her, “he didn’t fill one bin.”

“I’m getting into practice, child, and tomorrow I shall fill more bins than all of you put together.”

“Come and eat your supper, children,” said Mrs. Athelny. “Where’s Sally?”

“Here I am, mother.”

She stepped out of their little hut, and the flames of the wood fire leaped up and cast sharp colour upon her face. Of late Philip had only seen her in the trim frocks she had taken to since she was at the dressmaker’s, and there was something very charming in the print dress she wore now, loose and easy to work in; the sleeves were tucked up and showed her strong, round arms. She too had a sun-bonnet.

“You look like a milkmaid in a fairy story,” said Philip, as he shook hands with her.

“She’s the belle of the hop-fields,” said Athelny. “My word, if the Squire’s son sees you he’ll make you an offer of marriage before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“The Squire hasn’t got a son, father,” said Sally.

She looked about for a place to sit down in, and Philip made room for her beside him. She looked wonderful in the night lit by wood fires. She was like some rural goddess, and you thought of those fresh, strong girls whom old Herrick had praised in exquisite numbers. The supper was simple, bread and butter, crisp bacon, tea for the children, and beer for Mr. and Mrs. Athelny and Philip. Athelny, eating hungrily, praised loudly all he ate. He flung words of scorn at Lucullus and piled invectives upon Brillat-Savarin.

“There’s one thing one can say for you, Athelny,” said his wife, “you do enjoy your food and no mistake!”

“Cooked by your hand, my Betty,” he said, stretching out an eloquent forefinger.

Philip felt himself very comfortable. He looked happily at the line of fires, with people grouped about them, and the colour of the flames against the night; at the end of the meadow was a line of great elms, and above the starry sky. The children talked and laughed, and Athelny, a child among them, made them roar by his tricks and fancies.

“They think a rare lot of Athelny down here,” said his wife. “Why, Mrs. Bridges said to me, I don’t know what we should do without Mr. Athelny now, she said. He’s always up to something, he’s more like a schoolboy than the father of a family.”

Sally sat in silence, but she attended to Philip’s wants in a thoughtful fashion that charmed him. It was pleasant to have her beside him, and now and then he glanced at her sunburned, healthy face. Once he caught her eyes, and she smiled quietly. When supper was over Jane and a small brother were sent down to a brook that ran at the bottom of the meadow to fetch a pail of water for washing up.

“You children, show your Uncle Philip where we sleep, and then you must be thinking of going to bed.”

Small hands seized Philip, and he was dragged towards the hut. He went in and struck a match. There was no furniture in it; and beside a tin box, in which clothes were kept, there was nothing but the beds; there were three of them, one against each wall. Athelny followed Philip in and showed them proudly.

“That’s the stuff to sleep on,” he cried. “None of your spring-mattresses and swansdown. I never sleep so soundly anywhere as here. YOU will sleep between sheets. My dear fellow, I pity you from the bottom of my soul.”

The beds consisted of a thick layer of hopvine, on the top of which was a coating of straw, and this was covered with a blanket. After a day in the open air, with the aromatic scent of the hops all round them, the happy pickers slept like tops. By nine o’clock all was quiet in the meadow and everyone in bed but one or two men who still lingered in the public-house and would not come back till it was closed at ten. Athelny walked there with Philip. But before he went Mrs. Athelny said to him:

“We breakfast about a quarter to six, but I daresay you won’t want to get up as early as that. You see, we have to set to work at six.”

“Of course he must get up early,” cried Athelny, “and he must work like the rest of us. He’s got to earn his board. No work, no dinner, my lad.”

“The children go down to bathe before breakfast, and they can give you a call on their way back. They pass The Jolly Sailor.”

“If they’ll wake me I’ll come and bathe with them,” said Philip.

Jane and Harold and Edward shouted with delight at the prospect, and next morning Philip was awakened out of a sound sleep by their bursting into his room. The boys jumped on his bed, and he had to chase them out with his slippers. He put on a coat and a pair of trousers and went down. The day had only just broken, and there was a nip in the air; but the sky was cloudless, and the sun was shining yellow. Sally, holding Connie’s hand, was standing in the middle of the road, with a towel and a bathing-dress over her arm. He saw now that her sun-bonnet was of the colour of lavender, and against it her face, red and brown, was like an apple. She greeted him with her slow, sweet smile, and he noticed suddenly that her teeth were small and regular and very white. He wondered why they had never caught his attention before.

“I was for letting you sleep on,” she said, “but they would go up and wake you. I said you didn’t really want to come.”

“Oh, yes, I did.”

They walked down the road and then cut across the marshes. That way it was under a mile to the sea. The water looked cold and gray, and Philip shivered at the sight of it; but the others tore off their clothes and ran in shouting. Sally did everything a little slowly, and she did not come into the water till all the rest were splashing round Philip. Swimming was his only accomplishment; he felt at home in the water; and soon he had them all imitating him as he played at being a porpoise, and a drowning man, and a fat lady afraid of wetting her hair. The bathe was uproarious, and it was necessary for Sally to be very severe to induce them all to come out.

“You’re as bad as any of them,” she said to Philip, in her grave, maternal way, which was at once comic and touching. “They’re not anything like so naughty when you’re not here.”

They walked back, Sally with her bright hair streaming over one shoulder and her sun-bonnet in her hand, but when they got to the huts Mrs. Athelny had already started for the hop-garden. Athleny, in a pair of the oldest trousers anyone had ever worn, his jacket buttoned up to show he had no shirt on, and in a wide-brimmed soft hat, was frying kippers over a fire of sticks. He was delighted with himself: he looked every inch a brigand. As soon as he saw the party he began to shout the witches’ chorus from Macbeth over the odorous kippers.

“You mustn’t dawdle over your breakfast or mother will be angry,” he said, when they came up.

And in a few minutes, Harold and Jane with pieces of bread and butter in their hands, they sauntered through the meadow into the hop-field. They were the last to leave. A hop-garden was one of the sights connected with Philip’s boyhood and the oast-houses to him the most typical feature of the Kentish scene. It was with no sense of strangeness, but as though he were at home, that Philip followed Sally through the long lines of the hops. The sun was bright now and cast a sharp shadow. Philip feasted his eyes on the richness of the green leaves. The hops were yellowing, and to him they had the beauty and the passion which poets in Sicily have found in the purple grape. As they walked along Philip felt himself overwhelmed by the rich luxuriance. A sweet scent arose from the fat Kentish soil, and the fitful September breeze was heavy with the goodly perfume of the hops. Athelstan felt the exhilaration instinctively, for he lifted up his voice and sang; it was the cracked voice of the boy of fifteen, and Sally turned round.

“You be quiet, Athelstan, or we shall have a thunderstorm.”

In a moment they heard the hum of voices, and in a moment more came upon the pickers. They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as they picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their baskets by their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops they picked straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on the soft brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a great deal. The women worked busily, they had been pickers from childhood, and they could pick twice as fast as foreigners from London. They boasted about the number of bushels they had picked in a day, but they complained you could not make money now as in former times: then they paid you a shilling for five bushels, but now the rate was eight and even nine bushels to the shilling. In the old days a good picker could earn enough in the season to keep her for the rest of the year, but now there was nothing in it; you got a holiday for nothing, and that was about all. Mrs. Hill had bought herself a pianner out of what she made picking, so she said, but she was very near, one wouldn’t like to be near like that, and most people thought it was only what she said, if the truth was known perhaps it would be found that she had put a bit of money from the savings bank towards it.

The hoppers were divided into bin companies of ten pickers, not counting children, and Athelny loudly boasted of the day when he would have a company consisting entirely of his own family. Each company had a bin-man, whose duty it was to supply it with strings of hops at their bins (the bin was a large sack on a wooden frame, about seven feet high, and long rows of them were placed between the rows of hops;) and it was to this position that Athelny aspired when his family was old enough to form a company. Meanwhile he worked rather by encouraging others than by exertions of his own. He sauntered up to Mrs. Athelny, who had been busy for half an hour and had already emptied a basket into the bin, and with his cigarette between his lips began to pick. He asserted that he was going to pick more than anyone that day, but mother; of course no one could pick so much as mother; that reminded him of the trials which Aphrodite put upon the curious Psyche, and he began to tell his children the story of her love for the unseen bridegroom. He told it very well. It seemed to Philip, listening with a smile on his lips, that the old tale fitted in with the scene. The sky was very blue now, and he thought it could not be more lovely even in Greece. The children with their fair hair and rosy cheeks, strong, healthy, and vivacious; the delicate form of the hops; the challenging emerald of the leaves, like a blare of trumpets; the magic of the green alley, narrowing to a point as you looked down the row, with the pickers in their sun-bonnets: perhaps there was more of the Greek spirit there than you could find in the books of professors or in museums. He was thankful for the beauty of England. He thought of the winding white roads and the hedgerows, the green meadows with their elm-trees, the delicate line of the hills and the copses that crowned them, the flatness of the marshes, and the melancholy of the North Sea. He was very glad that he felt its loveliness. But presently Athelny grew restless and announced that he would go and ask how Robert Kemp’s mother was. He knew everyone in the garden and called them all by their Christian names; he knew their family histories and all that had happened to them from birth. With harmless vanity he played the fine gentleman among them, and there was a touch of condescension in his familiarity. Philip would not go with him.

“I’m going to earn my dinner,” he said.

“Quite right, my boy,” answered Athelny, with a wave of the hand, as he strolled away. “No work, no dinner.”

CXIX

Philip had not a basket of his own, but sat with Sally. Jane thought it monstrous that he should help her elder sister rather than herself, and he had to promise to pick for her when Sally’s basket was full. Sally was almost as quick as her mother.

“Won’t it hurt your hands for sewing?” asked Philip.

“Oh, no, it wants soft hands. That’s why women pick better than men. If your hands are hard and your fingers all stiff with a lot of rough work you can’t pick near so well.”

He liked to see her deft movements, and she watched him too now and then with that maternal spirit of hers which was so amusing and yet so charming. He was clumsy at first, and she laughed at him. When she bent over and showed him how best to deal with a whole line their hands met. He was surprised to see her blush. He could not persuade himself that she was a woman; because he had known her as a flapper, he could not help looking upon her as a child still; yet the number of her admirers showed that she was a child no longer; and though they had only been down a few days one of Sally’s cousins was already so attentive that she had to endure a lot of chaffing. His name was Peter Gann, and he was the son of Mrs. Athelny’s sister, who had married a farmer near Ferne. Everyone knew why he found it necessary to walk through the hop-field every day.

A call-off by the sounding of a horn was made for breakfast at eight, and though Mrs. Athelny told them they had not deserved it, they ate it very heartily. They set to work again and worked till twelve, when the horn sounded once more for dinner. At intervals the measurer went his round from bin to bin, accompanied by the booker, who entered first in his own book and then in the hopper’s the number of bushels picked. As each bin was filled it was measured out in bushel baskets into a huge bag called a poke; and this the measurer and the pole-puller carried off between them and put on the waggon. Athelny came back now and then with stories of how much Mrs. Heath or Mrs. Jones had picked, and he conjured his family to beat her: he was always wanting to make records, and sometimes in his enthusiasm picked steadily for an hour. His chief amusement in it, however, was that it showed the beauty of his graceful hands, of which he was excessively proud. He spent much time manicuring them. He told Philip, as he stretched out his tapering fingers, that the Spanish grandees had always slept in oiled gloves to preserve their whiteness. The hand that wrung the throat of Europe, he remarked dramatically, was as shapely and exquisite as a woman’s; and he looked at his own, as he delicately picked the hops, and sighed with self-satisfaction. When he grew tired of this he rolled himself a cigarette and discoursed to Philip of art and literature. In the afternoon it grew very hot. Work did not proceed so actively and conversation halted. The incessant chatter of the morning dwindled now to desultory remarks. Tiny beads of sweat stood on Sally’s upper lip, and as she worked her lips were slightly parted. She was like a rosebud bursting into flower.

Calling-off time depended on the state of the oast-house. Sometimes it was filled early, and as many hops had been picked by three or four as could be dried during the night. Then work was stopped. But generally the last measuring of the day began at five. As each company had its bin measured it gathered up its things and, chatting again now that work was over, sauntered out of the garden. The women went back to the huts to clean up and prepare the supper, while a good many of the men strolled down the road to the public-house. A glass of beer was very pleasant after the day’s work.

The Athelnys’ bin was the last to be dealt with. When the measurer came Mrs. Athelny, with a sigh of relief, stood up and stretched her arms: she had been sitting in the same position for many hours and was stiff.

“Now, let’s go to The Jolly Sailor,” said Athelny. “The rites of the day must be duly performed, and there is none more sacred than that.”

“Take a jug with you, Athelny,” said his wife, “and bring back a pint and a half for supper.”

She gave him the money, copper by copper. The bar-parlour was already well filled. It had a sanded floor, benches round it, and yellow pictures of Victorian prize-fighters on the walls. The licencee knew all his customers by name, and he leaned over his bar smiling benignly at two young men who were throwing rings on a stick that stood up from the floor: their failure was greeted with a good deal of hearty chaff from the rest of the company. Room was made for the new arrivals. Philip found himself sitting between an old labourer in corduroys, with string tied under his knees, and a shiny-faced lad of seventeen with a love-lock neatly plastered on his red forehead. Athelny insisted on trying his hand at the throwing of rings. He backed himself for half a pint and won it. As he drank the loser’s health he said:

“I would sooner have won this than won the Derby, my boy.”

He was an outlandish figure, with his wide-brimmed hat and pointed beard, among those country folk, and it was easy to see that they thought him very queer; but his spirits were so high, his enthusiasm so contagious, that it was impossible not to like him. Conversation went easily. A certain number of pleasantries were exchanged in the broad, slow accent of the Isle of Thanet, and there was uproarious laughter at the sallies of the local wag. A pleasant gathering! It would have been a hard-hearted person who did not feel a glow of satisfaction in his fellows. Philip’s eyes wandered out of the window where it was bright and sunny still; there were little white curtains in it tied up with red ribbon like those of a cottage window, and on the sill were pots of geraniums. In due course one by one the idlers got up and sauntered back to the meadow where supper was cooking.

“I expect you’ll be ready for your bed,” said Mrs. Athelny to Philip. “You’re not used to getting up at five and staying in the open air all day.”

“You’re coming to bathe with us, Uncle Phil, aren’t you?” the boys cried.

“Rather.”

He was tired and happy. After supper, balancing himself against the wall of the hut on a chair without a back, he smoked his pipe and looked at the night. Sally was busy. She passed in and out of the hut, and he lazily watched her methodical actions. Her walk attracted his notice; it was not particularly graceful, but it was easy and assured; she swung her legs from the hips, and her feet seemed to tread the earth with decision. Athelny had gone off to gossip with one of the neighbours, and presently Philip heard his wife address the world in general.

“There now, I’m out of tea and I wanted Athelny to go down to Mrs. Black’s and get some.” A pause, and then her voice was raised: “Sally, just run down to Mrs. Black’s and get me half a pound of tea, will you? I’ve run quite out of it.”

“All right, mother.”

Mrs. Black had a cottage about half a mile along the road, and she combined the office of postmistress with that of universal provider. Sally came out of the hut, turning down her sleeves.

“Shall I come with you, Sally?” asked Philip.

“Don’t you trouble. I’m not afraid to go alone.”

“I didn’t think you were; but it’s getting near my bedtime, and I was just thinking I’d like to stretch my legs.”

Sally did not answer, and they set out together. The road was white and silent. There was not a sound in the summer night. They did not speak much.

“It’s quite hot even now, isn’t it?” said Philip.

“I think it’s wonderful for the time of year.”

But their silence did not seem awkward. They found it was pleasant to walk side by side and felt no need of words. Suddenly at a stile in the hedgerow they heard a low murmur of voices, and in the darkness they saw the outline of two people. They were sitting very close to one another and did not move as Philip and Sally passed.

“I wonder who that was,” said Sally.

“They looked happy enough, didn’t they?”

“I expect they took us for lovers too.”

They saw the light of the cottage in front of them, and in a minute went into the little shop. The glare dazzled them for a moment.

“You are late,” said Mrs. Black. “I was just going to shut up.” She looked at the clock. “Getting on for nine.”

Sally asked for her half pound of tea (Mrs. Athelny could never bring herself to buy more than half a pound at a time), and they set off up the road again. Now and then some beast of the night made a short, sharp sound, but it seemed only to make the silence more marked.

“I believe if you stood still you could hear the sea,” said Sally.

They strained their ears, and their fancy presented them with a faint sound of little waves lapping up against the shingle. When they passed the stile again the lovers were still there, but now they were not speaking; they were in one another’s arms, and the man’s lips were pressed against the girl’s.

“They seem busy,” said Sally.

They turned a corner, and a breath of warm wind beat for a moment against their faces. The earth gave forth its freshness. There was something strange in the tremulous night, and something, you knew not what, seemed to be waiting; the silence was on a sudden pregnant with meaning. Philip had a queer feeling in his heart, it seemed very full, it seemed to melt (the hackneyed phrases expressed precisely the curious sensation), he felt happy and anxious and expectant. To his memory came back those lines in which Jessica and Lorenzo murmur melodious words to one another, capping each other’s utterance; but passion shines bright and clear through the conceits that amuse them. He did not know what there was in the air that made his senses so strangely alert; it seemed to him that he was pure soul to enjoy the scents and the sounds and the savours of the earth. He had never felt such an exquisite capacity for beauty. He was afraid that Sally by speaking would break the spell, but she said never a word, and he wanted to hear the sound of her voice. Its low richness was the voice of the country night itself.

They arrived at the field through which she had to walk to get back to the huts. Philip went in to hold the gate open for her.

“Well, here I think I’ll say good-night.”

“Thank you for coming all that way with me.”

She gave him her hand, and as he took it, he said:

“If you were very nice you’d kiss me good-night like the rest of the family.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

Philip had spoken in jest. He merely wanted to kiss her, because he was happy and he liked her and the night was so lovely.

“Good-night then,” he said, with a little laugh, drawing her towards him.

She gave him her lips; they were warm and full and soft; he lingered a little, they were like a flower; then, he knew not how, without meaning it, he flung his arms round her. She yielded quite silently. Her body was firm and strong. He felt her heart beat against his. Then he lost his head. His senses overwhelmed him like a flood of rushing waters. He drew her into the darker shadow of the hedge.

CXX

Philip slept like a log and awoke with a start to find Harold tickling his face with a feather. There was a shout of delight when he opened his eyes. He was drunken with sleep.

“Come on, lazybones,” said Jane. “Sally says she won’t wait for you unless you hurry up.”

Then he remembered what had happened. His heart sank, and, half out of bed already, he stopped; he did not know how he was going to face her; he was overwhelmed with a sudden rush of self-reproach, and bitterly, bitterly, he regretted what he had done. What would she say to him that morning? He dreaded meeting her, and he asked himself how he could have been such a fool. But the children gave him no time; Edward took his bathing-drawers and his towel, Athelstan tore the bed-clothes away; and in three minutes they all clattered down into the road. Sally gave him a smile. It was as sweet and innocent as it had ever been.

“You do take a time to dress yourself,” she said. “I thought you was never coming.”

There was not a particle of difference in her manner. He had expected some change, subtle or abrupt; he fancied that there would be shame in the way she treated him, or anger, or perhaps some increase of familiarity; but there was nothing. She was exactly the same as before. They walked towards the sea all together, talking and laughing; and Sally was quiet, but she was always that, reserved, but he had never seen her otherwise, and gentle. She neither sought conversation with him nor avoided it. Philip was astounded. He had expected the incident of the night before to have caused some revolution in her, but it was just as though nothing had happened; it might have been a dream; and as he walked along, a little girl holding on to one hand and a little boy to the other, while he chatted as unconcernedly as he could, he sought for an explanation. He wondered whether Sally meant the affair to be forgotten. Perhaps her senses had run away with her just as his had, and, treating what had occurred as an accident due to unusual circumstances, it might be that she had decided to put the matter out of her mind. It was ascribing to her a power of thought and a mature wisdom which fitted neither with her age nor with her character. But he realised that he knew nothing of her. There had been in her always something enigmatic.

They played leap-frog in the water, and the bathe was as uproarious as on the previous day. Sally mothered them all, keeping a watchful eye on them, and calling to them when they went out too far. She swam staidly backwards and forwards while the others got up to their larks, and now and then turned on her back to float. Presently she went out and began drying herself; she called to the others more or less peremptorily, and at last only Philip was left in the water. He took the opportunity to have a good hard swim. He was more used to the cold water this second morning, and he revelled in its salt freshness; it rejoiced him to use his limbs freely, and he covered the water with long, firm strokes. But Sally, with a towel round her, went down to the water’s edge.

“You’re to come out this minute, Philip,” she called, as though he were a small boy under her charge.

And when, smiling with amusement at her authoritative way, he came towards her, she upbraided him.

“It is naughty of you to stay in so long. Your lips are quite blue, and just look at your teeth, they’re chattering.”

“All right. I’ll come out.”

She had never talked to him in that manner before. It was as though what had happened gave her a sort of right over him, and she looked upon him as a child to be cared for. In a few minutes they were dressed, and they started to walk back. Sally noticed his hands.

“Just look, they’re quite blue.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It’s only the circulation. I shall get the blood back in a minute.”

“Give them to me.”

She took his hands in hers and rubbed them, first one and then the other, till the colour returned. Philip, touched and puzzled, watched her. He could not say anything to her on account of the children, and he did not meet her eyes; but he was sure they did not avoid his purposely, it just happened that they did not meet. And during the day there was nothing in her behaviour to suggest a consciousness in her that anything had passed between them. Perhaps she was a little more talkative than usual. When they were all sitting again in the hop-field she told her mother how naughty Philip had been in not coming out of the water till he was blue with cold. It was incredible, and yet it seemed that the only effect of the incident of the night before was to arouse in her a feeling of protection towards him: she had the same instinctive desire to mother him as she had with regard to her brothers and sisters.

It was not till the evening that he found himself alone with her. She was cooking the supper, and Philip was sitting on the grass by the side of the fire. Mrs. Athelny had gone down to the village to do some shopping, and the children were scattered in various pursuits of their own. Philip hesitated to speak. He was very nervous. Sally attended to her business with serene competence and she accepted placidly the silence which to him was so embarrassing. He did not know how to begin. Sally seldom spoke unless she was spoken to or had something particular to say. At last he could not bear it any longer.

“You’re not angry with me, Sally?” he blurted out suddenly.

She raised her eyes quietly and looked at him without emotion.

“Me? No. Why should I be?”

He was taken aback and did not reply. She took the lid off the pot, stirred the contents, and put it on again. A savoury smell spread over the air. She looked at him once more, with a quiet smile which barely separated her lips; it was more a smile of the eyes.

“I always liked you,” she said.

His heart gave a great thump against his ribs, and he felt the blood rushing to his cheeks. He forced a faint laugh.

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s because you’re a silly.”

“I don’t know why you liked me.”

“I don’t either.” She put a little more wood on the fire. “I knew I liked you that day you came when you’d been sleeping out and hadn’t had anything to eat, d’you remember? And me and mother, we got Thorpy’s bed ready for you.”

He flushed again, for he did not know that she was aware of that incident.

He remembered it himself with horror and shame.

“That’s why I wouldn’t have anything to do with the others. You remember that young fellow mother wanted me to have? I let him come to tea because he bothered so, but I knew I’d say no.”

Philip was so surprised that he found nothing to say. There was a queer feeling in his heart; he did not know what it was, unless it was happiness. Sally stirred the pot once more.

“I wish those children would make haste and come. I don’t know where they’ve got to. Supper’s ready now.”

“Shall I go and see if I can find them?” said Philip.

It was a relief to talk about practical things.

“Well, it wouldn’t be a bad idea, I must say…. There’s mother coming.”

Then, as he got up, she looked at him without embarrassment.

“Shall I come for a walk with you tonight when I’ve put the children to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you wait for me down by the stile, and I’ll come when I’m ready.”

He waited under the stars, sitting on the stile, and the hedges with their ripening blackberries were high on each side of him. From the earth rose rich scents of the night, and the air was soft and still. His heart was beating madly. He could not understand anything of what happened to him. He associated passion with cries and tears and vehemence, and there was nothing of this in Sally; but he did not know what else but passion could have caused her to give herself. But passion for him? He would not have been surprised if she had fallen to her cousin, Peter Gann, tall, spare, and straight, with his sunburned face and long, easy stride. Philip wondered what she saw in him. He did not know if she loved him as he reckoned love. And yet? He was convinced of her purity. He had a vague inkling that many things had combined, things that she felt though was unconscious of, the intoxication of the air and the hops and the night, the healthy instincts of the natural woman, a tenderness that overflowed, and an affection that had in it something maternal and something sisterly; and she gave all she had to give because her heart was full of charity.

He heard a step on the road, and a figure came out of the darkness.

“Sally,” he murmured.

She stopped and came to the stile, and with her came sweet, clean odours of the country-side. She seemed to carry with her scents of the new-mown hay, and the savour of ripe hops, and the freshness of young grass. Her lips were soft and full against his, and her lovely, strong body was firm within his arms.

“Milk and honey,” he said. “You’re like milk and honey.”

He made her close her eyes and kissed her eyelids, first one and then the other. Her arm, strong and muscular, was bare to the elbow; he passed his hand over it and wondered at its beauty; it gleamed in the darkness; she had the skin that Rubens painted, astonishingly fair and transparent, and on one side were little golden hairs. It was the arm of a Saxon goddess; but no immortal had that exquisite, homely naturalness; and Philip thought of a cottage garden with the dear flowers which bloom in all men’s hearts, of the hollyhock and the red and white rose which is called York and Lancaster, and of love — in-a-mist and Sweet William, and honeysuckle, larkspur, and London Pride.

“How can you care for me?” he said. “I’m insignificant and crippled and ordinary and ugly.”

She took his face in both her hands and kissed his lips.

“You’re an old silly, that’s what you are,” she said.

CXXI

When the hops were picked, Philip with the news in his pocket that he had got the appointment as assistant house-physician at St. Luke’s, accompanied the Athelnys back to London. He took modest rooms in Westminster and at the beginning of October entered upon his duties. The work was interesting and varied; every day he learned something new; he felt himself of some consequence; and he saw a good deal of Sally. He found life uncommonly pleasant. He was free about six, except on the days on which he had out-patients, and then he went to the shop at which Sally worked to meet her when she came out. There were several young men, who hung about opposite the ‘trade entrance’ or a little further along, at the first corner; and the girls, coming out two and two or in little groups, nudged one another and giggled as they recognised them. Sally in her plain black dress looked very different from the country lass who had picked hops side by side with him. She walked away from the shop quickly, but she slackened her pace when they met, and greeted him with her quiet smile. They walked together through the busy street. He talked to her of his work at the hospital, and she told him what she had been doing in the shop that day. He came to know the names of the girls she worked with. He found that Sally had a restrained, but keen, sense of the ridiculous, and she made remarks about the girls or the men who were set over them which amused him by their unexpected drollery. She had a way of saying a thing which was very characteristic, quite gravely, as though there were nothing funny in it at all, and yet it was so sharp-sighted that Philip broke into delighted laughter. Then she would give him a little glance in which the smiling eyes showed she was not unaware of her own humour. They met with a handshake and parted as formally. Once Philip asked her to come and have tea with him in his rooms, but she refused.

“No, I won’t do that. It would look funny.”

Never a word of love passed between them. She seemed not to desire anything more than the companionship of those walks. Yet Philip was positive that she was glad to be with him. She puzzled him as much as she had done at the beginning. He did not begin to understand her conduct; but the more he knew her the fonder he grew of her; she was competent and self controlled, and there was a charming honesty in her: you felt that you could rely upon her in every circumstance.

“You are an awfully good sort,” he said to her once a propos of nothing at all.

“I expect I’m just the same as everyone else,” she answered.

He knew that he did not love her. It was a great affection that he felt for her, and he liked her company; it was curiously soothing; and he had a feeling for her which seemed to him ridiculous to entertain towards a shop-girl of nineteen: he respected her. And he admired her magnificent healthiness. She was a splendid animal, without defect; and physical perfection filled him always with admiring awe. She made him feel unworthy.

Then, one day, about three weeks after they had come back to London as they walked together, he noticed that she was unusually silent. The serenity of her expression was altered by a slight line between the eyebrows: it was the beginning of a frown.

“What’s the matter, Sally?” he asked.

She did not look at him, but straight in front of her, and her colour darkened.

“I don’t know.”

He understood at once what she meant. His heart gave a sudden, quick beat, and he felt the colour leave his cheeks.

“What d’you mean? Are you afraid that… ?”

He stopped. He could not go on. The possibility that anything of the sort could happen had never crossed his mind. Then he saw that her lips were trembling, and she was trying not to cry.

“I’m not certain yet. Perhaps it’ll be all right.”

They walked on in silence till they came to the corner of Chancery Lane, where he always left her. She held out her hand and smiled.

“Don’t worry about it yet. Let’s hope for the best.”

He walked away with a tumult of thoughts in his head. What a fool he had been! That was the first thing that struck him, an abject, miserable fool, and he repeated it to himself a dozen times in a rush of angry feeling. He despised himself. How could he have got into such a mess? But at the same time, for his thoughts chased one another through his brain and yet seemed to stand together, in a hopeless confusion, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle seen in a nightmare, he asked himself what he was going to do. Everything was so clear before him, all he had aimed at so long within reach at last, and now his inconceivable stupidity had erected this new obstacle. Philip had never been able to surmount what he acknowledged was a defect in his resolute desire for a well ordered life, and that was his passion for living in the future; and no sooner was he settled in his work at the hospital than he had busied himself with arrangements for his travels. In the past he had often tried not to think too circumstantially of his plans for the future, it was only discouraging; but now that his goal was so near he saw no harm in giving away to a longing that was so difficult to resist. First of all he meant to go to Spain. That was the land of his heart; and by now he was imbued with its spirit, its romance and colour and history and grandeur; he felt that it had a message for him in particular which no other country could give. He knew the fine old cities already as though he had trodden their tortuous streets from childhood. Cordova, Seville, Toledo, Leon, Tarragona, Burgos. The great painters of Spain were the painters of his soul, and his pulse beat quickly as he pictured his ecstasy on standing face to face with those works which were more significant than any others to his own tortured, restless heart. He had read the great poets, more characteristic of their race than the poets of other lands; for they seemed to have drawn their inspiration not at all from the general currents of the world’s literature but directly from the torrid, scented plains and the bleak mountains of their country. A few short months now, and he would hear with his own ears all around him the language which seemed most apt for grandeur of soul and passion. His fine taste had given him an inkling that Andalusia was too soft and sensuous, a little vulgar even, to satisfy his ardour; and his imagination dwelt more willingly among the wind-swept distances of Castile and the rugged magnificence of Aragon and Leon. He did not know quite what those unknown contacts would give him, but he felt that he would gather from them a strength and a purpose which would make him more capable of affronting and comprehending the manifold wonders of places more distant and more strange.

For this was only a beginning. He had got into communication with the various companies which took surgeons out on their ships, and knew exactly what were their routes, and from men who had been on them what were the advantages and disadvantages of each line. He put aside the Orient and the P. & O. It was difficult to get a berth with them; and besides their passenger traffic allowed the medical officer little freedom; but there were other services which sent large tramps on leisurely expeditions to the East, stopping at all sorts of ports for various periods, from a day or two to a fortnight, so that you had plenty of time, and it was often possible to make a trip inland. The pay was poor and the food no more than adequate, so that there was not much demand for the posts, and a man with a London degree was pretty sure to get one if he applied. Since there were no passengers other than a casual man or so, shipping on business from some out-of-the-way port to another, the life on board was friendly and pleasant. Philip knew by heart the list of places at which they touched; and each one called up in him visions of tropical sunshine, and magic colour, and of a teeming, mysterious, intense life. Life! That was what he wanted. At last he would come to close quarters with Life. And perhaps, from Tokyo or Shanghai it would be possible to tranship into some other line and drip down to the islands of the South Pacific. A doctor was useful anywhere. There might be an opportunity to go up country in Burmah, and what rich jungles in Sumatra or Borneo might he not visit? He was young still and time was no object to him. He had no ties in England, no friends; he could go up and down the world for years, learning the beauty and the wonder and the variedness of life.

Now this thing had come. He put aside the possibility that Sally was mistaken; he felt strangely certain that she was right; after all, it was so likely; anyone could see that Nature had built her to be the mother of children. He knew what he ought to do. He ought not to let the incident divert him a hair’s breadth from his path. He thought of Griffiths; he could easily imagine with what indifference that young man would have received such a piece of news; he would have thought it an awful nuisance and would at once have taken to his heels, like a wise fellow; he would have left the girl to deal with her troubles as best she could. Philip told himself that if this had happened it was because it was inevitable. He was no more to blame than Sally; she was a girl who knew the world and the facts of life, and she had taken the risk with her eyes open. It would be madness to allow such an accident to disturb the whole pattern of his life. He was one of the few people who was acutely conscious of the transitoriness of life, and how necessary it was to make the most of it. He would do what he could for Sally; he could afford to give her a sufficient sum of money. A strong man would never allow himself to be turned from his purpose.

Philip said all this to himself, but he knew he could not do it. He simply could not. He knew himself.

“I’m so damned weak,” he muttered despairingly.

She had trusted him and been kind to him. He simply could not do a thing which, notwithstanding all his reason, he felt was horrible. He knew he would have no peace on his travels if he had the thought constantly with him that she was wretched. Besides, there were her father and mother: they had always treated him well; it was not possible to repay them with ingratitude. The only thing was to marry Sally as quickly as possible. He would write to Doctor South, tell him he was going to be married at once, and say that if his offer still held he was willing to accept it. That sort of practice, among poor people, was the only one possible for him; there his deformity did not matter, and they would not sneer at the simple manners of his wife. It was curious to think of her as his wife, it gave him a queer, soft feeling; and a wave of emotion spread over him as he thought of the child which was his. He had little doubt that Doctor South would be glad to have him, and he pictured to himself the life he would lead with Sally in the fishing village. They would have a little house within sight of the sea, and he would watch the mighty ships passing to the lands he would never know. Perhaps that was the wisest thing. Cronshaw had told him that the facts of life mattered nothing to him who by the power of fancy held in fee the twin realms of space and time. It was true. Forever wilt thou love and she be fair!

His wedding present to his wife would be all his high hopes. Self-sacrifice! Philip was uplifted by its beauty, and all through the evening he thought of it. He was so excited that he could not read. He seemed to be driven out of his rooms into the streets, and he walked up and down Birdcage Walk, his heart throbbing with joy. He could hardly bear his impatience. He wanted to see Sally’s happiness when he made her his offer, and if it had not been so late he would have gone to her there and then. He pictured to himself the long evenings he would spend with Sally in the cosy sitting-room, the blinds undrawn so that they could watch the sea; he with his books, while she bent over her work, and the shaded lamp made her sweet face more fair. They would talk over the growing child, and when she turned her eyes to his there was in them the light of love. And the fishermen and their wives who were his patients would come to feel a great affection for them, and they in their turn would enter into the pleasures and pains of those simple lives. But his thoughts returned to the son who would be his and hers. Already he felt in himself a passionate devotion to it. He thought of passing his hands over his little perfect limbs, he knew he would be beautiful; and he would make over to him all his dreams of a rich and varied life. And thinking over the long pilgrimage of his past he accepted it joyfully. He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but now he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life. The ridicule and the contempt which had so often been heaped upon him had turned his mind inward and called forth those flowers which he felt would never lose their fragrance. Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known (the whole world was like a sick-house, and there was no rhyme or reason in it), he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh, weak hearts or weak lungs, and some with illness of the spirit, languor of will, or a craving for liquor. At this moment he could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance. He could pardon Griffiths for his treachery and Mildred for the pain she had caused him. They could not help themselves. The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults. The words of the dying God crossed his memory:

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

CXXII

He had arranged to meet Sally on Saturday in the National Gallery. She was to come there as soon as she was released from the shop and had agreed to lunch with him. Two days had passed since he had seen her, and his exultation had not left him for a moment. It was because he rejoiced in the feeling that he had not attempted to see her. He had repeated to himself exactly what he would say to her and how he should say it. Now his impatience was unbearable. He had written to Doctor South and had in his pocket a telegram from him received that morning: “Sacking the mumpish fool. When will you come?” Philip walked along Parliament Street. It was a fine day, and there was a bright, frosty sun which made the light dance in the street. It was crowded. There was a tenuous mist in the distance, and it softened exquisitely the noble lines of the buildings. He crossed Trafalgar Square. Suddenly his heart gave a sort of twist in his body; he saw a woman in front of him who he thought was Mildred. She had the same figure, and she walked with that slight dragging of the feet which was so characteristic of her. Without thinking, but with a beating heart, he hurried till he came alongside, and then, when the woman turned, he saw it was someone unknown to him. It was the face of a much older person, with a lined, yellow skin. He slackened his pace. He was infinitely relieved, but it was not only relief that he felt; it was disappointment too; he was seized with horror of himself. Would he never be free from that passion? At the bottom of his heart, notwithstanding everything, he felt that a strange, desperate thirst for that vile woman would always linger. That love had caused him so much suffering that he knew he would never, never quite be free of it. Only death could finally assuage his desire.

But he wrenched the pang from his heart. He thought of Sally, with her kind blue eyes; and his lips unconsciously formed themselves into a smile. He walked up the steps of the National Gallery and sat down in the first room, so that he should see her the moment she came in. It always comforted him to get among pictures. He looked at none in particular, but allowed the magnificence of their colour, the beauty of their lines, to work upon his soul. His imagination was busy with Sally. It would be pleasant to take her away from that London in which she seemed an unusual figure, like a cornflower in a shop among orchids and azaleas; he had learned in the Kentish hop-field that she did not belong to the town; and he was sure that she would blossom under the soft skies of Dorset to a rarer beauty. She came in, and he got up to meet her. She was in black, with white cuffs at her wrists and a lawn collar round her neck. They shook hands.

“Have you been waiting long?”

“No. Ten minutes. Are you hungry?”

“Not very.”

“Let’s sit here for a bit, shall we?”

“If you like.”

They sat quietly, side by side, without speaking. Philip enjoyed having her near him. He was warmed by her radiant health. A glow of life seemed like an aureole to shine about her.

“Well, how have you been?” he said at last, with a little smile.

“Oh, it’s all right. It was a false alarm.”

“Was it?”

“Aren’t you glad?”

An extraordinary sensation filled him. He had felt certain that Sally’s suspicion was well-founded; it had never occurred to him for an instant that there was a possibility of error. All his plans were suddenly overthrown, and the existence, so elaborately pictured, was no more than a dream which would never be realised. He was free once more. Free! He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with. He felt no exhilaration, but only dismay. His heart sank. The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness. It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into the open sea; and because he had let his mind dwell on these soft meads and pleasant woods of the land, the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish. He could not confront again the loneliness and the tempest. Sally looked at him with her clear eyes.

“Aren’t you glad?” she asked again. “I thought you’d be as pleased as

Punch.”

He met her gaze haggardly. “I’m not sure,” he muttered.

“You are funny. Most men would.”

He realised that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that had driven him to think of marrying, but the desire for a wife and a home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers he was seized with despair. He wanted all that more than anything in the world. What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea Islands? America was here and now. It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience. He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

He glanced quickly at Sally, he wondered what she was thinking, and then looked away again.

“I was going to ask you to marry me,” he said.

“I thought p’raps you might, but I shouldn’t have liked to stand in your way.”

“You wouldn’t have done that.”

“How about your travels, Spain and all that?”

“How d’you know I want to travel?”

“I ought to know something about it. I’ve heard you and Dad talk about it till you were blue in the face.”

“I don’t care a damn about all that.” He paused for an instant and then spoke in a low, hoarse whisper. “I don’t want to leave you! I can’t leave you.”

She did not answer. He could not tell what she thought.

“I wonder if you’ll marry me, Sally.”

She did not move and there was no flicker of emotion on her face, but she did not look at him when she answered.

“If you like.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Oh, of course I’d like to have a house of my own, and it’s about time I was settling down.”

He smiled a little. He knew her pretty well by now, and her manner did not surprise him.

“But don’t you want to marry ME?”

“There’s no one else I would marry.”

“Then that settles it.”

“Mother and Dad will be surprised, won’t they?”

“I’m so happy.”

“I want my lunch,” she said.

“Dear!”

He smiled and took her hand and pressed it. They got up and walked out of the gallery. They stood for a moment at the balustrade and looked at Trafalgar Square. Cabs and omnibuses hurried to and fro, and crowds passed, hastening in every direction, and the sun was shining.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

The Moon and Sixpence was written during the summer of 1918 and published by Heinemann in April 1919; never the critic’s choice, it has always been popular with Maugham’s general readership. It was strongly inspired by the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, and the life of key character Paul Strickland mirrors that of Gauguin in significant ways. Maugham had rarely used the first person narrative up to this point in his career; the narrator is a young writer, who witnesses Strickland’s “mid life crisis” and abandonment of his family to paint pictures in the Polynesia, (which Maugham had visited the year before he wrote the novel).  Although a rather shadowy character, the narrator is thought to be based on a young version of Maugham. Other portraits of people known to Maugham are included, such as Stroeve, who is based on fellow writer Hugh Walpole. The minor character of Captain Nichols surfaces again in Maugham’s later work The Narrow Corner (1932). Rose Waterford is based on fellow novelist Violet Hunt, who had had a short affair with Maugham and who remained his close friend for many years. Although sexually incompatible, the two writers had opposing characters that made for a perfect friendship, and Maugham had already dedicated his 1905 book The Land of the Blessed Virgin to her, which she reciprocated in 1908 by dedicating one of her novels to Maugham.

The opening paragraphs of the novel adopt a realistic approach, which might catch the unsuspecting reader unawares. We are given a résumé of how Charles Strickland, the artist, has come to be regarded as a genius, and a summary of his recognition comes complete with fictional references to non-existent books! The narrator then goes on to reveal how he met Strickland’s wife, who was an admirer of his first novel, and through her, he meets her husband. At that time, Charles Strickland is a stockbroker in London, and according to one of the narrator’s literary friends, “very dull... he’s not the least bit interested in literature or the arts.” Even his wife described him as “a perfect philistine”. When the narrator does finally meet his friend’s husband, he does indeed find Strickland an extremely dull, albeit decent and stolid fellow. The narrator concludes that he cannot conceive of having such a dull and unremarkable life as the Strickland family seemed to have.

Later that year, the narrator is stunned to hear that Charles Strickland has left his wife, abandoned his business partner (leaving them both financially disadvantaged), and run away to Paris, apparently with a young woman, who worked in a tea shop, and is living a luxurious and dissolute life.

Mrs Strickland is naturally devastated and wants her husband to return. She asks the narrator to travel to Paris to persuade her husband to come back, which the narrator agrees to do. He is shocked to find the former stockbroker living in near-squalor, alone, and with absolutely no intention of returning home. There never has been another woman. He tells the narrator in the most callous way that he could not care less what his wife or anyone else thinks and that all he wants to do is paint pictures. This news is received with fury and incredulity by his family, and finally accepting that she cannot compete with what was seen as a deranged choice of lifestyle, Mrs Strickland moves on with her life independently.

Five years pass and the narrator decides to live in Paris for a while himself, and once settled, he visits Dirk Stroeve, his artist friend. The narrator is astonished to hear his friend describe Strickland as a truly great artist. He meets the Englishman again and finds him just as irascible and unfeeling about people as before, but Strickland grudgingly accepts the narrator and Stroeve’s help (and that of Blanche, Stroeve’s wife) when he is seriously ill. Despite claiming that she cannot stand Strickland, Blanche falls hopelessly in love with him and leaves her grief stricken husband; the narrator is baffled and the only explanation he can come to is that Blanche is in “the cruel grip of appetite.” This situation leads to great personal distress, and shortly afterwards, Strickland leaves France.

There cannot be a more striking, or less likeable, character in the oeuvre of Maugham, than Charles Strickland. It would be unfair to the reader to reveal too much detail of his character, but be prepared to be in turn shocked and amazed by the blaze of emotional colour that the artist is depicted in. You may not like him, in fact, you may detest him, but he is unforgettable, and bearing in mind that the entire cast of characters in this story is also well drawn, the story cannot disappoint. Little wonder that it was an instant success on publication, and is still so fresh and edgy today.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter XLVII

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLIX

Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Chapter LIV

Chapter LV

Chapter LVI

Chapter LVII

Chapter LVIII

The first edition’s title page

Paul Gauguin, c. 1891

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, (1884–1941) was a best-selling author in the 1920’s and 1930’s and served as the basis for the character Stroeve.

Chapter I

I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary. Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness. I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests. The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him. His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits. It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character.

It was not till four years after Strickland’s death that Maurice Huret wrote that article in the Mercure de France which rescued the unknown painter from oblivion and blazed the trail which succeeding writers, with more or less docility, have followed. For a long time no critic has enjoyed in France a more incontestable authority, and it was impossible not to be impressed by the claims he made; they seemed extravagant; but later judgments have confirmed his estimate, and the reputation of Charles Strickland is now firmly established on the lines which he laid down. The rise of this reputation is one of the most romantic incidents in the history of art. But I do not propose to deal with Charles Strickland’s work except in so far as it touches upon his character. I cannot agree with the painters who claim superciliously that the layman can understand nothing of painting, and that he can best show his appreciation of their works by silence and a cheque-book. It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value, and my ignorance of painting is extreme. Fortunately, there is no need for me to risk the adventure, since my friend, Mr. Edward Leggatt, an able writer as well as an admirable painter, has exhaustively discussed Charles Strickland’s work in a little book which is a charming example of a style, for the most part, less happily cultivated in England than in France.

“A Modern Artist: Notes on the Work of Charles Strickland,” by Edward Leggatt, A.R.H.A. Martin Secker, 1917.

Maurice Huret in his famous article gave an outline of Charles Strickland’s life which was well calculated to whet the appetites of the inquiring. With his disinterested passion for art, he had a real desire to call the attention of the wise to a talent which was in the highest degree original; but he was too good a journalist to be unaware that the “human interest” would enable him more easily to effect his purpose. And when such as had come in contact with Strickland in the past, writers who had known him in London, painters who had met him in the cafes of Montmartre, discovered to their amazement that where they had seen but an unsuccessful artist, like another, authentic genius had rubbed shoulders with them there began to appear in the magazines of France and America a succession of articles, the reminiscences of one, the appreciation of another, which added to Strickland’s notoriety, and fed without satisfying the curiosity of the public. The subject was grateful, and the industrious Weitbrecht-Rotholz in his imposing monograph has been able to give a remarkable list of authorities.

“Karl Strickland: sein Leben und seine Kunst,” by Hugo Weitbrecht-Rotholz, Ph.D. Schwingel und Hanisch. Leipzig, 1914.

The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life. The incidents of the legend become the hero’s surest passport to immortality. The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely inshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the English name to undiscovered countries. Charles Strickland lived obscurely. He made enemies rather than friends. It is not strange, then, that those who wrote of him should have eked out their scanty recollections with a lively fancy, and it is evident that there was enough in the little that was known of him to give opportunity to the romantic scribe; there was much in his life which was strange and terrible, in his character something outrageous, and in his fate not a little that was pathetic. In due course a legend arose of such circumstantiality that the wise historian would hesitate to attack it.

But a wise historian is precisely what the Rev. Robert Strickland is not. He wrote his biography avowedly to “remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency” in regard to the later part of his father’s life, and which had “caused considerable pain to persons still living.” It is obvious that there was much in the commonly received account of Strickland’s life to embarrass a respectable family. I have read this work with a good deal of amusement, and upon this I congratulate myself, since it is colourless and dull. Mr. Strickland has drawn the portrait of an excellent husband and father, a man of kindly temper, industrious habits, and moral disposition. The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away, but the subtlety with which the Rev. Robert Strickland has “interpreted” all the facts in his father’s life which a dutiful son might find it inconvenient to remember must surely lead him in the fullness of time to the highest dignities of the Church. I see already his muscular calves encased in the gaiters episcopal. It was a hazardous, though maybe a gallant thing to do, since it is probable that the legend commonly received has had no small share in the growth of Strickland’s reputation; for there are many who have been attracted to his art by the detestation in which they held his character or the compassion with which they regarded his death; and the son’s well-meaning efforts threw a singular chill upon the father’s admirers. It is due to no accident that when one of his most important works, The Woman of Samaria, was sold at Christie’s shortly after the discussion which followed the publication of Mr. Strickland’s biography, it fetched POUNDS 235 less than it had done nine months before when it was bought by the distinguished collector whose sudden death had brought it once more under the hammer. Perhaps Charles Strickland’s power and originality would scarcely have sufficed to turn the scale if the remarkable mythopoeic faculty of mankind had not brushed aside with impatience a story which disappointed all its craving for the extraordinary. And presently Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz produced the work which finally set at rest the misgivings of all lovers of art.

“Strickland: The Man and His Work,” by his son, Robert Strickland. Wm. Heinemann, 1913.

This was described in Christie’s catalogue as follows: “A nude woman, a native of the Society Islands, is lying on the ground beside a brook. Behind is a tropical Landscape with palm-trees, bananas, etc. 60 in. x 48 in.”

Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz belongs to that school of historians which believes that human nature is not only about as bad as it can be, but a great deal worse; and certainly the reader is safer of entertainment in their hands than in those of the writers who take a malicious pleasure in representing the great figures of romance as patterns of the domestic virtues. For my part, I should be sorry to think that there was nothing between Anthony and Cleopatra but an economic situation; and it will require a great deal more evidence than is ever likely to be available, thank God, to persuade me that Tiberius was as blameless a monarch as King George V. Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz has dealt in such terms with the Rev. Robert Strickland’s innocent biography that it is difficult to avoid feeling a certain sympathy for the unlucky parson. His decent reticence is branded as hypocrisy, his circumlocutions are roundly called lies, and his silence is vilified as treachery. And on the strength of peccadillos, reprehensible in an author, but excusable in a son, the Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit, cunning, and bad cooking. Personally I think it was rash of Mr. Strickland, in refuting the account which had gained belief of a certain “unpleasantness” between his father and mother, to state that Charles Strickland in a letter written from Paris had described her as “an excellent woman,” since Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz was able to print the letter in facsimile, and it appears that the passage referred to ran in fact as follows: God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell. It is not thus that the Church in its great days dealt with evidence that was unwelcome.

Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz was an enthusiastic admirer of Charles Strickland, and there was no danger that he would whitewash him. He had an unerring eye for the despicable motive in actions that had all the appearance of innocence. He was a psycho-pathologist, as well as a student of art, and the subconscious had few secrets from him. No mystic ever saw deeper meaning in common things. The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psycho-pathologist the unspeakable. There is a singular fascination in watching the eagerness with which the learned author ferrets out every circumstance which may throw discredit on his hero. His heart warms to him when he can bring forward some example of cruelty or meanness, and he exults like an inquisitor at the auto da fe of an heretic when with some forgotten story he can confound the filial piety of the Rev. Robert Strickland. His industry has been amazing. Nothing has been too small to escape him, and you may be sure that if Charles Strickland left a laundry bill unpaid it will be given you in extenso, and if he forebore to return a borrowed half-crown no detail of the transaction will be omitted.

Chapter II

When so much has been written about Charles Strickland, it may seem unnecessary that I should write more. A painter’s monument is his work. It is true I knew him more intimately than most: I met him first before ever he became a painter, and I saw him not infrequently during the difficult years he spent in Paris; but I do not suppose I should ever have set down my recollections if the hazards of the war had not taken me to Tahiti. There, as is notorious, he spent the last years of his life; and there I came across persons who were familiar with him. I find myself in a position to throw light on just that part of his tragic career which has remained most obscure. If they who believe in Strickland’s greatness are right, the personal narratives of such as knew him in the flesh can hardly be superfluous. What would we not give for the reminiscences of someone who had been as intimately acquainted with El Greco as I was with Strickland?

But I seek refuge in no such excuses. I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours’ relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.

Now the war has come, bringing with it a new attitude. Youth has turned to gods we of an earlier day knew not, and it is possible to see already the direction in which those who come after us will move. The younger generation, conscious of strength and tumultuous, have done with knocking at the door; they have burst in and seated themselves in our seats. The air is noisy with their shouts. Of their elders some, by imitating the antics of youth, strive to persuade themselves that their day is not yet over; they shout with the lustiest, but the war cry sounds hollow in their mouth; they are like poor wantons attempting with pencil, paint and powder, with shrill gaiety, to recover the illusion of their spring. The wiser go their way with a decent grace. In their chastened smile is an indulgent mockery. They remember that they too trod down a sated generation, with just such clamor and with just such scorn, and they foresee that these brave torch-bearers will presently yield their place also. There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky. These gallant words which seem so novel to those that speak them were said in accents scarcely changed a hundred times before. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. The circle is ever travelled anew.

Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy. Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe? He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent. He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets. Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff. Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before. Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell. I admire their polish — their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of promise — I marvel at the felicity of their style; but with all their copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget’s Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me: to my mind they know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull. I do not like them. I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

Chapter III

But all this is by the way.

I was very young when I wrote my first book. By a lucky chance it excited attention, and various persons sought my acquaintance.

It is not without melancholy that I wander among my recollections of the world of letters in London when first, bashful but eager, I was introduced to it. It is long since I frequented it, and if the novels that describe its present singularities are accurate much in it is now changed. The venue is different. Chelsea and Bloomsbury have taken the place of Hampstead, Notting Hill Gate, and High Street, Kensington. Then it was a distinction to be under forty, but now to be more than twenty-five is absurd. I think in those days we were a little shy of our emotions, and the fear of ridicule tempered the more obvious forms of pretentiousness. I do not believe that there was in that genteel Bohemia an intensive culture of chastity, but I do not remember so crude a promiscuity as seems to be practised in the present day. We did not think it hypocritical to draw over our vagaries the curtain of a decent silence. The spade was not invariably called a bloody shovel. Woman had not yet altogether come into her own.

I lived near Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to the hospitable houses of the literary. In my timidity I wandered up and down the street while I screwed up my courage to ring the bell; and then, sick with apprehension, was ushered into an airless room full of people. I was introduced to this celebrated person after that one, and the kind words they said about my book made me excessively uncomfortable. I felt they expected me to say clever things, and I never could think of any till after the party was over. I tried to conceal my embarrassment by handing round cups of tea and rather ill-cut bread-and-butter. I wanted no one to take notice of me, so that I could observe these famous creatures at my ease and listen to the clever things they said.

I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes, who wore their clothes as though they were armour; and of little, mouse-like spinsters, with soft voices and a shrewd glance. I never ceased to be fascinated by their persistence in eating buttered toast with their gloves on, and I observed with admiration the unconcern with which they wiped their fingers on their chair when they thought no one was looking. It must have been bad for the furniture, but I suppose the hostess took her revenge on the furniture of her friends when, in turn, she visited them. Some of them were dressed fashionably, and they said they couldn’t for the life of them see why you should be dowdy just because you had written a novel; if you had a neat figure you might as well make the most of it, and a smart shoe on a small foot had never prevented an editor from taking your “stuff.” But others thought this frivolous, and they wore “art fabrics” and barbaric jewelry. The men were seldom eccentric in appearance. They tried to look as little like authors as possible. They wished to be taken for men of the world, and could have passed anywhere for the managing clerks of a city firm. They always seemed a little tired. I had never known writers before, and I found them very strange, but I do not think they ever seemed to me quite real.

I remember that I thought their conversation brilliant, and I used to listen with astonishment to the stinging humour with which they would tear a brother-author to pieces the moment that his back was turned. The artist has this advantage over the rest of the world, that his friends offer not only their appearance and their character to his satire, but also their work. I despaired of ever expressing myself with such aptness or with such fluency. In those days conversation was still cultivated as an art; a neat repartee was more highly valued than the crackling of thorns under a pot; and the epigram, not yet a mechanical appliance by which the dull may achieve a semblance of wit, gave sprightliness to the small talk of the urbane. It is sad that I can remember nothing of all this scintillation. But I think the conversation never settled down so comfortably as when it turned to the details of the trade which was the other side of the art we practised. When we had done discussing the merits of the latest book, it was natural to wonder how many copies had been sold, what advance the author had received, and how much he was likely to make out of it. Then we would speak of this publisher and of that, comparing the generosity of one with the meanness of another; we would argue whether it was better to go to one who gave handsome royalties or to another who “pushed” a book for all it was worth. Some advertised badly and some well. Some were modern and some were old-fashioned. Then we would talk of agents and the offers they had obtained for us; of editors and the sort of contributions they welcomed, how much they paid a thousand, and whether they paid promptly or otherwise. To me it was all very romantic. It gave me an intimate sense of being a member of some mystic brotherhood.

Chapter IV

No one was kinder to me at that time than Rose Waterford. She combined a masculine intelligence with a feminine perversity, and the novels she wrote were original and disconcerting. It was at her house one day that I met Charles Strickland’s wife. Miss Waterford was giving a tea-party, and her small room was more than usually full. Everyone seemed to be talking, and I, sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to break into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs. Miss Waterford was a good hostess, and seeing my embarrassment came up to me.

“I want you to talk to Mrs. Strickland,” she said. “She’s raving about your book.”

“What does she do?” I asked.

I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact before I spoke to her.

Rose Waterford cast down her eyes demurely to give greater effect to her reply.

“She gives luncheon-parties. You’ve only got to roar a little, and she’ll ask you.”

Rose Waterford was a cynic. She looked upon life as an opportunity for writing novels and the public as her raw material. Now and then she invited members of it to her house if they showed an appreciation of her talent and entertained with proper lavishness. She held their weakness for lions in good-humoured contempt, but played to them her part of the distinguished woman of letters with decorum.

I was led up to Mrs. Strickland, and for ten minutes we talked together. I noticed nothing about her except that she had a pleasant voice. She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking the unfinished cathedral, and because we lived in the same neighbourhood we felt friendly disposed to one another. The Army and Navy Stores are a bond of union between all who dwell between the river and St. James’s Park. Mrs. Strickland asked me for my address, and a few days later I received an invitation to luncheon.

My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept. When I arrived, a little late, because in my fear of being too early I had walked three times round the cathedral, I found the party already complete. Miss Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay, Richard Twining and George Road. We were all writers. It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a good humour. We talked about a hundred things. Miss Waterford, torn between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and the flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris frocks, wore a new hat. It put her in high spirits. I had never heard her more malicious about our common friends. Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the soul of wit, made observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might well have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue. Richard Twining bubbled over with quaint absurdities, and George Road, conscious that he need not exhibit a brilliancy which was almost a by-word, opened his mouth only to put food into it. Mrs. Strickland did not talk much, but she had a pleasant gift for keeping the conversation general; and when there was a pause she threw in just the right remark to set it going once more. She was a woman of thirty-seven, rather tall and plump, without being fat; she was not pretty, but her face was pleasing, chiefly, perhaps, on account of her kind brown eyes. Her skin was rather sallow. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed. She was the only woman of the three whose face was free of make-up, and by contrast with the others she seemed simple and unaffected.

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimney-piece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull.

When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.

“That was a very nice party,” I said.

“Did you think the food was good? I told her that if she wanted writers she must feed them well.”

“Admirable advice,” I answered. “But why does she want them?”

Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.

“She finds them amusing. She wants to be in the movement. I fancy she’s rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we’re all wonderful. After all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon, and it doesn’t hurt us. I like her for it.”

Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie’s Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance of London. She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who for the most part are more interested in the author than in his book, in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a world of the imagination in which she lived with a freedom she never acquired in the world of every day. When she came to know writers it was like adventuring upon a stage which till then she had known only from the other side of the footlights. She saw them dramatically, and really seemed herself to live a larger life because she entertained them and visited them in their fastnesses. She accepted the rules with which they played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a moment thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance with them. Their moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress, their wild theories and paradoxes, were an entertainment which amused her, but had not the slightest influence on her convictions.

“Is there a Mr. Strickland?” I asked

“Oh yes; he’s something in the city. I believe he’s a stockbroker. He’s very dull.”

“Are they good friends?”

“They adore one another. You’ll meet him if you dine there. But she doesn’t often have people to dinner. He’s very quiet. He’s not in the least interested in literature or the arts.”

“Why do nice women marry dull men?”

“Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.”

I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs. Strickland had children.

“Yes; she has a boy and a girl. They’re both at school.”

The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things.

Chapter V

During the summer I met Mrs. Strickland not infrequently. I went now and then to pleasant little luncheons at her flat, and to rather more formidable tea-parties. We took a fancy to one another. I was very young, and perhaps she liked the idea of guiding my virgin steps on the hard road of letters; while for me it was pleasant to have someone I could go to with my small troubles, certain of an attentive ear and reasonable counsel. Mrs. Strickland had the gift of sympathy. It is a charming faculty, but one often abused by those who are conscious of its possession: for there is something ghoulish in the avidity with which they will pounce upon the misfortune of their friends so that they may exercise their dexterity. It gushes forth like an oil-well, and the sympathetic pour out their sympathy with an abandon that is sometimes embarrassing to their victims. There are bosoms on which so many tears have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine. Mrs. Strickland used her advantage with tact. You felt that you obliged her by accepting her sympathy. When, in the enthusiasm of my youth, I remarked on this to Rose Waterford, she said:

“Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable.”

Rose Waterford had a blistering tongue. No one could say such bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.

There was another thing I liked in Mrs. Strickland. She managed her surroundings with elegance. Her flat was always neat and cheerful, gay with flowers, and the chintzes in the drawing-room, notwithstanding their severe design, were bright and pretty. The meals in the artistic little dining-room were pleasant; the table looked nice, the two maids were trim and comely; the food was well cooked. It was impossible not to see that Mrs. Strickland was an excellent housekeeper. And you felt sure that she was an admirable mother. There were photographs in the drawing-room of her son and daughter. The son — his name was Robert — was a boy of sixteen at Rugby; and you saw him in flannels and a cricket cap, and again in a tail-coat and a stand-up collar. He had his mother’s candid brow and fine, reflective eyes. He looked clean, healthy, and normal.

“I don’t know that he’s very clever,” she said one day, when I was looking at the photograph, “but I know he’s good. He has a charming character.”

The daughter was fourteen. Her hair, thick and dark like her mother’s, fell over her shoulders in fine profusion, and she had the same kindly expression and sedate, untroubled eyes.

“They’re both of them the image of you,” I said.

“Yes; I think they are more like me than their father.”

“Why have you never let me meet him?” I asked.

“Would you like to?”

She smiled, her smile was really very sweet, and she blushed a little; it was singular that a woman of that age should flush so readily. Perhaps her naivete was her greatest charm.

“You know, he’s not at all literary,” she said. “He’s a perfect philistine.”

She said this not disparagingly, but affectionately rather, as though, by acknowledging the worst about him, she wished to protect him from the aspersions of her friends.

“He’s on the Stock Exchange, and he’s a typical broker. I think he’d bore you to death.”

“Does he bore you?” I asked.

“You see, I happen to be his wife. I’m very fond of him.”

She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear that I would make the sort of gibe that such a confession could hardly have failed to elicit from Rose Waterford. She hesitated a little. Her eyes grew tender.

“He doesn’t pretend to be a genius. He doesn’t even make much money on the Stock Exchange. But he’s awfully good and kind.”

“I think I should like him very much.”

“I’ll ask you to dine with us quietly some time, but mind, you come at your own risk; don’t blame me if you have a very dull evening.”

Chapter VI

But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under circumstances which allowed me to do no more than just make his acquaintance. One morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening, and one of her guests had failed her. She asked me to stop the gap. She wrote:

“It’s only decent to warn you that you will be bored to extinction. It was a thoroughly dull party from the beginning, but if you will come I shall be uncommonly grateful. And you and I can have a little chat by ourselves.”

It was only neighbourly to accept.

When Mrs. Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me a rather indifferent hand to shake. Turning to him gaily, she attempted a small jest.

“I asked him to show him that I really had a husband. I think he was beginning to doubt it.”

Strickland gave the polite little laugh with which people acknowledge a facetiousness in which they see nothing funny, but did not speak. New arrivals claimed my host’s attention, and I was left to myself. When at last we were all assembled, waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to “take in,” that civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life. It was the kind of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come. There were ten people. They met with indifference, and would part with relief. It was, of course, a purely social function. The Stricklands “owed” dinners to a number of persons, whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them; these persons had accepted. Why? To avoid the tedium of dining tete-a-tete, to give their servants a rest, because there was no reason to refuse, because they were “owed” a dinner.

The dining-room was inconveniently crowded. There was a K.C. and his wife, a Government official and his wife, Mrs. Strickland’s sister and her husband, Colonel MacAndrew, and the wife of a Member of Parliament. It was because the Member of Parliament found that he could not leave the House that I had been invited. The respectability of the party was portentous. The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of their position to be amusing. The men were solid. There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.

Everyone talked a little louder than natural in an instinctive desire to make the party go, and there was a great deal of noise in the room. But there was no general conversation. Each one talked to his neighbour; to his neighbour on the right during the soup, fish, and entree; to his neighbour on the left during the roast, sweet, and savoury. They talked of the political situation and of golf, of their children and the latest play, of the pictures at the Royal Academy, of the weather and their plans for the holidays. There was never a pause, and the noise grew louder. Mrs. Strickland might congratulate herself that her party was a success. Her husband played his part with decorum. Perhaps he did not talk very much, and I fancied there was towards the end a look of fatigue in the faces of the women on either side of him. They were finding him heavy. Once or twice Mrs. Strickland’s eyes rested on him somewhat anxiously.

At last she rose and shepherded the ladies out of one room. Strickland shut the door behind her, and, moving to the other end of the table, took his place between the K.C. and the Government official. He passed round the port again and handed us cigars. The K.C. remarked on the excellence of the wine, and Strickland told us where he got it. We began to chat about vintages and tobacco. The K.C. told us of a case he was engaged in, and the Colonel talked about polo. I had nothing to say and so sat silent, trying politely to show interest in the conversation; and because I thought no one was in the least concerned with me, examined Strickland at my ease. He was bigger than I expected: I do not know why I had imagined him slender and of insignificant appearance; in point of fact he was broad and heavy, with large hands and feet, and he wore his evening clothes clumsily. He gave you somewhat the idea of a coachman dressed up for the occasion. He was a man of forty, not good-looking, and yet not ugly, for his features were rather good; but they were all a little larger than life-size, and the effect was ungainly. He was clean shaven, and his large face looked uncomfortably naked. His hair was reddish, cut very short, and his eyes were small, blue or grey. He looked commonplace. I no longer wondered that Mrs. Strickland felt a certain embarrassment about him; he was scarcely a credit to a woman who wanted to make herself a position in the world of art and letters. It was obvious that he had no social gifts, but these a man can do without; he had no eccentricity even, to take him out of the common run; he was just a good, dull, honest, plain man. One would admire his excellent qualities, but avoid his company. He was null. He was probably a worthy member of society, a good husband and father, an honest broker; but there was no reason to waste one’s time over him.

Chapter VII

The season was drawing to its dusty end, and everyone I knew was arranging to go away. Mrs. Strickland was taking her family to the coast of Norfolk, so that the children might have the sea and her husband golf. We said good-bye to one another, and arranged to meet in the autumn. But on my last day in town, coming out of the Stores, I met her with her son and daughter; like myself, she had been making her final purchases before leaving London, and we were both hot and tired. I proposed that we should all go and eat ices in the park.

I think Mrs. Strickland was glad to show me her children, and she accepted my invitation with alacrity. They were even more attractive than their photographs had suggested, and she was right to be proud of them. I was young enough for them not to feel shy, and they chattered merrily about one thing and another. They were extraordinarily nice, healthy young children. It was very agreeable under the trees.

When in an hour they crowded into a cab to go home, I strolled idly to my club. I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was with a touch of envy that I thought of the pleasant family life of which I had had a glimpse. They seemed devoted to one another. They had little private jokes of their own which, unintelligible to the outsider, amused them enormously. Perhaps Charles Strickland was dull judged by a standard that demanded above all things verbal scintillation; but his intelligence was adequate to his surroundings, and that is a passport, not only to reasonable success, but still more to happiness. Mrs. Strickland was a charming woman, and she loved him. I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of those two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station, not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course — the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would sink into the grave.

That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values, I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change — change and the excitement of the unforeseen.

Chapter VIII

On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am conscious that they must seem shadowy. I have been able to invest them with none of those characteristics which make the persons of a book exist with a real life of their own; and, wondering if the fault is mine, I rack my brains to remember idiosyncrasies which might lend them vividness. I feel that by dwelling on some trick of speech or some queer habit I should be able to give them a significance peculiar to themselves. As they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry; they do not separate themselves from the background, and at a distance seem to lose their pattern, so that you have little but a pleasing piece of colour. My only excuse is that the impression they made on me was no other. There was just that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking, healthy children. Nothing could be more ordinary. I do not know that there was anything about them to excite the attention of the curious.

When I reflect on all that happened later, I ask myself if I was thick-witted not to see that there was in Charles Strickland at least something out of the common. Perhaps. I think that I have gathered in the years that intervene between then and now a fair knowledge of mankind, but even if when I first met the Stricklands I had the experience which I have now, I do not believe that I should have judged them differently. But because I have learnt that man is incalculable, I should not at this time of day be so surprised by the news that reached me when in the early autumn I returned to London.

I had not been back twenty-four hours before I ran across Rose Waterford in Jermyn Street.

“You look very gay and sprightly,” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

She smiled, and her eyes shone with a malice I knew already. It meant that she had heard some scandal about one of her friends, and the instinct of the literary woman was all alert.

“You did meet Charles Strickland, didn’t you?”

Not only her face, but her whole body, gave a sense of alacrity. I nodded. I wondered if the poor devil had been hammered on the Stock Exchange or run over by an omnibus.

“Isn’t it dreadful? He’s run away from his wife.”

Miss Waterford certainly felt that she could not do her subject justice on the curb of Jermyn Street, and so, like an artist, flung the bare fact at me and declared that she knew no details. I could not do her the injustice of supposing that so trifling a circumstance would have prevented her from giving them, but she was obstinate.

“I tell you I know nothing,” she said, in reply to my agitated questions, and then, with an airy shrug of the shoulders: “I believe that a young person in a city tea-shop has left her situation.”

She flashed a smile at me, and, protesting an engagement with her dentist, jauntily walked on. I was more interested than distressed. In those days my experience of life at first hand was small, and it excited me to come upon an incident among people I knew of the same sort as I had read in books. I confess that time has now accustomed me to incidents of this character among my acquaintance. But I was a little shocked. Strickland was certainly forty, and I thought it disgusting that a man of his age should concern himself with affairs of the heart. With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself. And this news was slightly disconcerting to me personally, because I had written from the country to Mrs. Strickland, announcing my return, and had added that unless I heard from her to the contrary, I would come on a certain day to drink a dish of tea with her. This was the very day, and I had received no word from Mrs. Strickland. Did she want to see me or did she not? It was likely enough that in the agitation of the moment my note had escaped her memory. Perhaps I should be wiser not to go. On the other hand, she might wish to keep the affair quiet, and it might be highly indiscreet on my part to give any sign that this strange news had reached me. I was torn between the fear of hurting a nice woman’s feelings and the fear of being in the way. I felt she must be suffering, and I did not want to see a pain which I could not help; but in my heart was a desire, that I felt a little ashamed of, to see how she was taking it. I did not know what to do.

Finally it occurred to me that I would call as though nothing had happened, and send a message in by the maid asking Mrs. Strickland if it was convenient for her to see me. This would give her the opportunity to send me away. But I was overwhelmed with embarrassment when I said to the maid the phrase I had prepared, and while I waited for the answer in a dark passage I had to call up all my strength of mind not to bolt. The maid came back. Her manner suggested to my excited fancy a complete knowledge of the domestic calamity.

“Will you come this way, sir?” she said.

I followed her into the drawing-room. The blinds were partly drawn to darken the room, and Mrs. Strickland was sitting with her back to the light. Her brother-in-law, Colonel MacAndrew, stood in front of the fireplace, warming his back at an unlit fire. To myself my entrance seemed excessively awkward. I imagined that my arrival had taken them by surprise, and Mrs. Strickland had let me come in only because she had forgotten to put me off. I fancied that the Colonel resented the interruption.

“I wasn’t quite sure if you expected me,” I said, trying to seem unconcerned.

“Of course I did. Anne will bring the tea in a minute.”

Even in the darkened room, I could not help seeing that Mrs. Strickland’s face was all swollen with tears. Her skin, never very good, was earthy.

“You remember my brother-in-law, don’t you? You met at dinner, just before the holidays.”

We shook hands. I felt so shy that I could think of nothing to say, but Mrs. Strickland came to my rescue. She asked me what I had been doing with myself during the summer, and with this help I managed to make some conversation till tea was brought in. The Colonel asked for a whisky-and-soda.

“You’d better have one too, Amy,” he said.

“No; I prefer tea.”

This was the first suggestion that anything untoward had happened. I took no notice, and did my best to engage Mrs. Strickland in talk. The Colonel, still standing in front of the fireplace, uttered no word. I wondered how soon I could decently take my leave, and I asked myself why on earth Mrs. Strickland had allowed me to come. There were no flowers, and various knick-knacks, put away during the summer, had not been replaced; there was something cheerless and stiff about the room which had always seemed so friendly; it gave you an odd feeling, as though someone were lying dead on the other side of the wall. I finished tea.

“Will you have a cigarette?” asked Mrs. Strickland.

She looked about for the box, but it was not to be seen.

“I’m afraid there are none.”

Suddenly she burst into tears, and hurried from the room.

I was startled. I suppose now that the lack of cigarettes, brought as a rule by her husband, forced him back upon her recollection, and the new feeling that the small comforts she was used to were missing gave her a sudden pang. She realised that the old life was gone and done with. It was impossible to keep up our social pretences any longer.

“I dare say you’d like me to go,” I said to the Colonel, getting up.

“I suppose you’ve heard that blackguard has deserted her,” he cried explosively.

I hesitated.

“You know how people gossip,” I answered. “I was vaguely told that something was wrong.”

“He’s bolted. He’s gone off to Paris with a woman. He’s left Amy without a penny.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

The Colonel gulped down his whisky. He was a tall, lean man of fifty, with a drooping moustache and grey hair. He had pale blue eyes and a weak mouth. I remembered from my previous meeting with him that he had a foolish face, and was proud of the fact that for the ten years before he left the army he had played polo three days a week.

“I don’t suppose Mrs. Strickland wants to be bothered with me just now,” I said. “Will you tell her how sorry I am? If there’s anything I can do. I shall be delighted to do it.”

He took no notice of me.

“I don’t know what’s to become of her. And then there are the children. Are they going to live on air? Seventeen years.”

“What about seventeen years?”

“They’ve been married,” he snapped. “I never liked him. Of course he was my brother-in-law, and I made the best of it. Did you think him a gentleman? She ought never to have married him.”

“Is it absolutely final?”

“There’s only one thing for her to do, and that’s to divorce him. That’s what I was telling her when you came in. ‘Fire in with your petition, my dear Amy,’ I said. ‘You owe it to yourself and you owe it to the children.’ He’d better not let me catch sight of him. I’d thrash him within an inch of his life.”

I could not help thinking that Colonel MacAndrew might have some difficulty in doing this, since Strickland had struck me as a hefty fellow, but I did not say anything. It is always distressing when outraged morality does not possess the strength of arm to administer direct chastisement on the sinner. I was making up my mind to another attempt at going when Mrs. Strickland came back. She had dried her eyes and powdered her nose.

“I’m sorry I broke down,” she said. “I’m glad you didn’t go away.”

She sat down. I did not at all know what to say. I felt a certain shyness at referring to matters which were no concern of mine. I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen. Mrs. Strickland seemed to make an effort over herself.

“Are people talking about it?” she asked.

I was taken aback by her assumption that I knew all about her domestic misfortune.

“I’ve only just come back. The only person I’ve seen is Rose Waterford.”

Mrs. Strickland clasped her hands.

“Tell me exactly what she said.” And when I hesitated, she insisted. “I particularly want to know.”

“You know the way people talk. She’s not very reliable, is she? She said your husband had left you.”

“Is that all?”

I did not choose to repeat Rose Waterford’s parting reference to a girl from a tea-shop. I lied.

“She didn’t say anything about his going with anyone?”

“No.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

I was a little puzzled, but at all events I understood that I might now take my leave. When I shook hands with Mrs. Strickland I told her that if I could be of any use to her I should be very glad. She smiled wanly.

“Thank you so much. I don’t know that anybody can do anything for me.”

Too shy to express my sympathy, I turned to say good-bye to the Colonel. He did not take my hand.

“I’m just coming. If you’re walking up Victoria Street, I’ll come along with you.”

“All right,” I said. “Come on.”

Chapter IX

“This is a terrible thing,” he said, the moment we got out into the street.

I realised that he had come away with me in order to discuss once more what he had been already discussing for hours with his sister-in-law.

“We don’t know who the woman is, you know,” he said. “All we know is that the blackguard’s gone to Paris.”

“I thought they got on so well.”

“So they did. Why, just before you came in Amy said they’d never had a quarrel in the whole of their married life. You know Amy. There never was a better woman in the world.”

Since these confidences were thrust on me, I saw no harm in asking a few questions.

“But do you mean to say she suspected nothing?”

“Nothing. He spent August with her and the children in Norfolk. He was just the same as he’d always been. We went down for two or three days, my wife and I, and I played golf with him. He came back to town in September to let his partner go away, and Amy stayed on in the country. They’d taken a house for six weeks, and at the end of her tenancy she wrote to tell him on which day she was arriving in London. He answered from Paris. He said he’d made up his mind not to live with her any more.”

“What explanation did he give?”

“My dear fellow, he gave no explanation. I’ve seen the letter. It wasn’t more than ten lines.”

“But that’s extraordinary.”

We happened then to cross the street, and the traffic prevented us from speaking. What Colonel MacAndrew had told me seemed very improbable, and I suspected that Mrs. Strickland, for reasons of her own, had concealed from him some part of the facts. It was clear that a man after seventeen years of wedlock did not leave his wife without certain occurrences which must have led her to suspect that all was not well with their married life. The Colonel caught me up.

“Of course, there was no explanation he could give except that he’d gone off with a woman. I suppose he thought she could find that out for herself. That’s the sort of chap he was.”

“What is Mrs. Strickland going to do?”

“Well, the first thing is to get our proofs. I’m going over to Paris myself.”

“And what about his business?”

“That’s where he’s been so artful. He’s been drawing in his horns for the last year.”

“Did he tell his partner he was leaving?”

“Not a word.”

Colonel MacAndrew had a very sketchy knowledge of business matters, and I had none at all, so I did not quite understand under what conditions Strickland had left his affairs. I gathered that the deserted partner was very angry and threatened proceedings. It appeared that when everything was settled he would be four or five hundred pounds out of pocket.

“It’s lucky the furniture in the flat is in Amy’s name. She’ll have that at all events.”

“Did you mean it when you said she wouldn’t have a bob?”

“Of course I did. She’s got two or three hundred pounds and the furniture.”

“But how is she going to live?”

“God knows.”

The affair seemed to grow more complicated, and the Colonel, with his expletives and his indignation, confused rather than informed me. I was glad that, catching sight of the clock at the Army and Navy Stores, he remembered an engagement to play cards at his club, and so left me to cut across St. James Park.

Chapter X

A day or two later Mrs. Strickland sent me round a note asking if I could go and see her that evening after dinner. I found her alone. Her black dress, simple to austerity, suggested her bereaved condition, and I was innocently astonished that notwithstanding a real emotion she was able to dress the part she had to play according to her notions of seemliness.

“You said that if I wanted you to do anything you wouldn’t mind doing it,” she remarked.

“It was quite true.”

“Will you go over to Paris and see Charlie?”

“I?”

I was taken aback. I reflected that I had only seen him once. I did not know what she wanted me to do.

“Fred is set on going.” Fred was Colonel MacAndrew. “But I’m sure he’s not the man to go. He’ll only make things worse. I don’t know who else to ask.”

Her voice trembled a little, and I felt a brute even to hesitate.

“But I’ve not spoken ten words to your husband. He doesn’t know me. He’ll probably just tell me to go to the devil.”

“That wouldn’t hurt you,” said Mrs. Strickland, smiling.

“What is it exactly you want me to do?”

She did not answer directly.

“I think it’s rather an advantage that he doesn’t know you. You see, he never really liked Fred; he thought him a fool; he didn’t understand soldiers. Fred would fly into a passion, and there’d be a quarrel, and things would be worse instead of better. If you said you came on my behalf, he couldn’t refuse to listen to you.”

“I haven’t known you very long,” I answered. “I don’t see how anyone can be expected to tackle a case like this unless he knows all the details. I don’t want to pry into what doesn’t concern me. Why don’t you go and see him yourself?”

“You forget he isn’t alone.”

I held my tongue. I saw myself calling on Charles Strickland and sending in my card; I saw him come into the room, holding it between finger and thumb:

“To what do I owe this honour?”

“I’ve come to see you about your wife.”

“Really. When you are a little older you will doubtless learn the advantage of minding your own business. If you will be so good as to turn your head slightly to the left, you will see the door. I wish you good-afternoon.”

I foresaw that it would be difficult to make my exit with dignity, and I wished to goodness that I had not returned to London till Mrs. Strickland had composed her difficulties. I stole a glance at her. She was immersed in thought. Presently she looked up at me, sighed deeply, and smiled.

“It was all so unexpected,” she said. “We’d been married seventeen years. I never dreamed that Charlie was the sort of man to get infatuated with anyone. We always got on very well together. Of course, I had a great many interests that he didn’t share.”

“Have you found out who” — I did not quite know how to express myself— “who the person, who it is he’s gone away with?”

“No. No one seems to have an idea. It’s so strange. Generally when a man falls in love with someone people see them about together, lunching or something, and her friends always come and tell the wife. I had no warning — nothing. His letter came like a thunderbolt. I thought he was perfectly happy.”

She began to cry, poor thing, and I felt very sorry for her. But in a little while she grew calmer.

“It’s no good making a fool of myself,” she said, drying her eyes. “The only thing is to decide what is the best thing to do.”

She went on, talking somewhat at random, now of the recent past, then of their first meeting and their marriage; but presently I began to form a fairly coherent picture of their lives; and it seemed to me that my surmises had not been incorrect. Mrs. Strickland was the daughter of an Indian civilian, who on his retirement had settled in the depths of the country, but it was his habit every August to take his family to Eastbourne for change of air; and it was here, when she was twenty, that she met Charles Strickland. He was twenty-three. They played together, walked on the front together, listened together to the nigger minstrels; and she had made up her mind to accept him a week before he proposed to her. They lived in London, first in Hampstead, and then, as he grew more prosperous, in town. Two children were born to them.

“He always seemed very fond of them. Even if he was tired of me, I wonder that he had the heart to leave them. It’s all so incredible. Even now I can hardly believe it’s true.”

At last she showed me the letter he had written. I was curious to see it, but had not ventured to ask for it.

“MY DEAR AMY,

“I think you will find everything all right in the flat. I have given Anne your instructions, and dinner will be ready for you and the children when you come. I shall not be there to meet you. I have made up my mind to live apart from you, and I am going to Paris in the morning. I shall post this letter on my arrival. I shall not come back. My decision is irrevocable.

“Yours always,

“CHARLES STRICKLAND.”

“Not a word of explanation or regret. Don’t you think it’s inhuman?”

“It’s a very strange letter under the circumstances,” I replied.

“There’s only one explanation, and that is that he’s not himself. I don’t know who this woman is who’s got hold of him, but she’s made him into another man. It’s evidently been going on a long time.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Fred found that out. My husband said he went to the club three or four nights a week to play bridge. Fred knows one of the members, and said something about Charles being a great bridge-player. The man was surprised. He said he’d never even seen Charles in the card-room. It’s quite clear now that when I thought Charles was at his club he was with her.”

I was silent for a moment. Then I thought of the children.

“It must have been difficult to explain to Robert,” I said.

“Oh, I never said a word to either of them. You see, we only came up to town the day before they had to go back to school. I had the presence of mind to say that their father had been called away on business.”

It could not have been very easy to be bright and careless with that sudden secret in her heart, nor to give her attention to all the things that needed doing to get her children comfortably packed off. Mrs. Strickland’s voice broke again.

“And what is to happen to them, poor darlings? How are we going to live?”

She struggled for self-control, and I saw her hands clench and unclench spasmodically. It was dreadfully painful.

“Of course I’ll go over to Paris if you think I can do any good, but you must tell me exactly what you want me to do.”

“I want him to come back.”

“I understood from Colonel MacAndrew that you’d made up your mind to divorce him.”

“I’ll never divorce him,” she answered with a sudden violence. “Tell him that from me. He’ll never be able to marry that woman. I’m as obstinate as he is, and I’ll never divorce him. I have to think of my children.”

I think she added this to explain her attitude to me, but I thought it was due to a very natural jealousy rather than to maternal solicitude.

“Are you in love with him still?”

“I don’t know. I want him to come back. If he’ll do that we’ll let bygones be bygones. After all, we’ve been married for seventeen years. I’m a broadminded woman. I wouldn’t have minded what he did as long as I knew nothing about it. He must know that his infatuation won’t last. If he’ll come back now everything can be smoothed over, and no one will know anything about it.”

It chilled me a little that Mrs. Strickland should be concerned with gossip, for I did not know then how great a part is played in women’s life by the opinion of others. It throws a shadow of insincerity over their most deeply felt emotions.

It was known where Strickland was staying. His partner, in a violent letter, sent to his bank, had taunted him with hiding his whereabouts: and Strickland, in a cynical and humourous reply, had told his partner exactly where to find him. He was apparently living in an Hotel.

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Mrs. Strickland. “But Fred knows it well. He says it’s very expensive.”

She flushed darkly. I imagined that she saw her husband installed in a luxurious suite of rooms, dining at one smart restaurant after another, and she pictured his days spent at race-meetings and his evenings at the play.

“It can’t go on at his age,” she said. “After all, he’s forty. I could understand it in a young man, but I think it’s horrible in a man of his years, with children who are nearly grown up. His health will never stand it.”

Anger struggled in her breast with misery.

“Tell him that our home cries out for him. Everything is just the same, and yet everything is different. I can’t live without him. I’d sooner kill myself. Talk to him about the past, and all we’ve gone through together. What am I to say to the children when they ask for him? His room is exactly as it was when he left it. It’s waiting for him. We’re all waiting for him.”

Now she told me exactly what I should say. She gave me elaborate answers to every possible observation of his.

“You will do everything you can for me?” she said pitifully. “Tell him what a state I’m in.”

I saw that she wished me to appeal to his sympathies by every means in my power. She was weeping freely. I was extraordinarily touched. I felt indignant at Strickland’s cold cruelty, and I promised to do all I could to bring him back. I agreed to go over on the next day but one, and to stay in Paris till I had achieved something. Then, as it was growing late and we were both exhausted by so much emotion, I left her.

Chapter XI

During the journey I thought over my errand with misgiving. Now that I was free from the spectacle of Mrs. Strickland’s distress I could consider the matter more calmly. I was puzzled by the contradictions that I saw in her behaviour. She was very unhappy, but to excite my sympathy she was able to make a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep, for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs; I admired her forethought, but in retrospect it made her tears perhaps less moving. I could not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.

But there was something of an adventure in my trip, and my spirits rose as I approached Paris. I saw myself, too, from the dramatic standpoint, and I was pleased with my role of the trusted friend bringing back the errant husband to his forgiving wife. I made up my mind to see Strickland the following evening, for I felt instinctively that the hour must be chosen with delicacy. An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon. My own thoughts were then constantly occupied with love, but I never could imagine connubial bliss till after tea.

I enquired at my hotel for that in which Charles Strickland was living. It was called the Hotel des Belges. But the concierge, somewhat to my surprise, had never heard of it. I had understood from Mrs. Strickland that it was a large and sumptuous place at the back of the Rue de Rivoli. We looked it out in the directory. The only hotel of that name was in the Rue des Moines. The quarter was not fashionable; it was not even respectable. I shook my head.

“I’m sure that’s not it,” I said.

The concierge shrugged his shoulders. There was no other hotel of that name in Paris. It occurred to me that Strickland had concealed his address, after all. In giving his partner the one I knew he was perhaps playing a trick on him. I do not know why I had an inkling that it would appeal to Strickland’s sense of humour to bring a furious stockbroker over to Paris on a fool’s errand to an ill-famed house in a mean street. Still, I thought I had better go and see. Next day about six o’clock I took a cab to the Rue des Moines, but dismissed it at the corner, since I preferred to walk to the hotel and look at it before I went in. It was a street of small shops subservient to the needs of poor people, and about the middle of it, on the left as I walked down, was the Hotel des Belges. My own hotel was modest enough, but it was magnificent in comparison with this. It was a tall, shabby building, that cannot have been painted for years, and it had so bedraggled an air that the houses on each side of it looked neat and clean. The dirty windows were all shut. It was not here that Charles Strickland lived in guilty splendour with the unknown charmer for whose sake he had abandoned honour and duty. I was vexed, for I felt that I had been made a fool of, and I nearly turned away without making an enquiry. I went in only to be able to tell Mrs. Strickland that I had done my best.

The door was at the side of a shop. It stood open, and just within was a sign: Bureau au premier. I walked up narrow stairs, and on the landing found a sort of box, glassed in, within which were a desk and a couple of chairs. There was a bench outside, on which it might be presumed the night porter passed uneasy nights. There was no one about, but under an electric bell was written Garcon. I rang, and presently a waiter appeared. He was a young man with furtive eyes and a sullen look. He was in shirt-sleeves and carpet slippers.

I do not know why I made my enquiry as casual as possible.

“Does Mr. Strickland live here by any chance?” I asked.

“Number thirty-two. On the sixth floor.”

I was so surprised that for a moment I did not answer.

“Is he in?”

The waiter looked at a board in the bureau.

“He hasn’t left his key. Go up and you’ll see.”

I thought it as well to put one more question.

“Madame est la?”

“Monsieur est seul.”

The waiter looked at me suspiciously as I made my way upstairs. They were dark and airless. There was a foul and musty smell. Three flights up a Woman in a dressing-gown, with touzled hair, opened a door and looked at me silently as I passed. At length I reached the sixth floor, and knocked at the door numbered thirty-two. There was a sound within, and the door was partly opened. Charles Strickland stood before me. He uttered not a word. He evidently did not know me.

I told him my name. I tried my best to assume an airy manner.

“You don’t remember me. I had the pleasure of dining with you last July.”

“Come in,” he said cheerily. “I’m delighted to see you. Take a pew.”

I entered. It was a very small room, overcrowded with furniture of the style which the French know as Louis Philippe. There was a large wooden bedstead on which was a billowing red eiderdown, and there was a large wardrobe, a round table, a very small washstand, and two stuffed chairs covered with red rep. Everything was dirty and shabby. There was no sign of the abandoned luxury that Colonel MacAndrew had so confidently described. Strickland threw on the floor the clothes that burdened one of the chairs, and I sat down on it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

In that small room he seemed even bigger than I remembered him. He wore an old Norfolk jacket, and he had not shaved for several days. When last I saw him he was spruce enough, but he looked ill at ease: now, untidy and ill-kempt, he looked perfectly at home. I did not know how he would take the remark I had prepared.

“I’ve come to see you on behalf of your wife.”

“I was just going out to have a drink before dinner. You’d better come too. Do you like absinthe?”

“I can drink it.”

“Come on, then.”

He put on a bowler hat much in need of brushing.

“We might dine together. You owe me a dinner, you know.”

“Certainly. Are you alone?”

I flattered myself that I had got in that important question very naturally.

“Oh yes. In point of fact I’ve not spoken to a soul for three days. My French isn’t exactly brilliant.”

I wondered as I preceded him downstairs what had happened to the little lady in the tea-shop. Had they quarrelled already, or was his infatuation passed? It seemed hardly likely if, as appeared, he had been taking steps for a year to make his desperate plunge. We walked to the Avenue de Clichy, and sat down at one of the tables on the pavement of a large cafe.

Chapter XII

The Avenue de Clichy was crowded at that hour, and a lively fancy might see in the passers-by the personages of many a sordid romance. There were clerks and shopgirls; old fellows who might have stepped out of the pages of Honore de Balzac; members, male and female, of the professions which make their profit of the frailties of mankind. There is in the streets of the poorer quarters of Paris a thronging vitality which excites the blood and prepares the soul for the unexpected.

“Do you know Paris well?” I asked.

“No. We came on our honeymoon. I haven’t been since.”

“How on earth did you find out your hotel?”

“It was recommended to me. I wanted something cheap.”

The absinthe came, and with due solemnity we dropped water over the melting sugar.

“I thought I’d better tell you at once why I had come to see you,” I said, not without embarrassment.

His eyes twinkled. “I thought somebody would come along sooner or later. I’ve had a lot of letters from Amy.”

“Then you know pretty well what I’ve got to say.”

“I’ve not read them.”

I lit a cigarette to give myself a moment’s time. I did not quite know now how to set about my mission. The eloquent phrases I had arranged, pathetic or indignant, seemed out of place on the Avenue de Clichy. Suddenly he gave a chuckle.

“Beastly job for you this, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered.

“Well, look here, you get it over, and then we’ll have a jolly evening.”

I hesitated.

“Has it occurred to you that your wife is frightfully unhappy?”

“She’ll get over it.”

I cannot describe the extraordinary callousness with which he made this reply. It disconcerted me, but I did my best not to show it. I adopted the tone used by my Uncle Henry, a clergyman, when he was asking one of his relatives for a subscription to the Additional Curates Society.

“You don’t mind my talking to you frankly?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“Has she deserved that you should treat her like this?”

“No.”

“Have you any complaint to make against her?”

“None.”

“Then, isn’t it monstrous to leave her in this fashion, after seventeen years of married life, without a fault to find with her?”

“Monstrous.”

I glanced at him with surprise. His cordial agreement with all I said cut the ground from under my feet. It made my position complicated, not to say ludicrous. I was prepared to be persuasive, touching, and hortatory, admonitory and expostulating, if need be vituperative even, indignant and sarcastic; but what the devil does a mentor do when the sinner makes no bones about confessing his sin? I had no experience, since my own practice has always been to deny everything.

“What, then?” asked Strickland.

I tried to curl my lip.

“Well, if you acknowledge that, there doesn’t seem much more to be said.”

“I don’t think there is.”

I felt that I was not carrying out my embassy with any great skill. I was distinctly nettled.

“Hang it all, one can’t leave a woman without a bob.”

“Why not?”

“How is she going to live?”

“I’ve supported her for seventeen years. Why shouldn’t she support herself for a change?”

“She can’t.”

“Let her try.”

Of course there were many things I might have answered to this. I might have spoken of the economic position of woman, of the contract, tacit and overt, which a man accepts by his marriage, and of much else; but I felt that there was only one point which really signified.

“Don’t you care for her any more?”

“Not a bit,” he replied.

The matter was immensely serious for all the parties concerned, but there was in the manner of his answer such a cheerful effrontery that I had to bite my lips in order not to laugh. I reminded myself that his behaviour was abominable. I worked myself up into a state of moral indignation.

“Damn it all, there are your children to think of. They’ve never done you any harm. They didn’t ask to be brought into the world. If you chuck everything like this, they’ll be thrown on the streets.

“They’ve had a good many years of comfort. It’s much more than the majority of children have. Besides, somebody will look after them. When it comes to the point, the MacAndrews will pay for their schooling.”

“But aren’t you fond of them? They’re such awfully nice kids. Do you mean to say you don’t want to have anything more to do with them?”

“I liked them all right when they were kids, but now they’re growing up I haven’t got any particular feeling for them.”

“It’s just inhuman.”

“I dare say.”

“You don’t seem in the least ashamed.”

“I’m not.”

I tried another tack.

“Everyone will think you a perfect swine.”

“Let them.”

“Won’t it mean anything to you to know that people loathe and despise you?”

“No.”

His brief answer was so scornful that it made my question, natural though it was, seem absurd. I reflected for a minute or two.

“I wonder if one can live quite comfortably when one’s conscious of the disapproval of one’s fellows? Are you sure it won’t begin to worry you? Everyone has some sort of a conscience, and sooner or later it will find you out. Supposing your wife died, wouldn’t you be tortured by remorse?”

He did not answer, and I waited for some time for him to speak. At last I had to break the silence myself.

“What have you to say to that?”

“Only that you’re a damned fool.”

“At all events, you can be forced to support your wife and children,” I retorted, somewhat piqued. “I suppose the law has some protection to offer them.”

“Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven’t any money. I’ve got about a hundred pounds.”

I began to be more puzzled than before. It was true that his hotel pointed to the most straitened circumstances.

“What are you going to do when you’ve spent that?”

“Earn some.”

He was perfectly cool, and his eyes kept that mocking smile which made all I said seem rather foolish. I paused for a little while to consider what I had better say next. But it was he who spoke first.

“Why doesn’t Amy marry again? She’s comparatively young, and she’s not unattractive. I can recommend her as an excellent wife. If she wants to divorce me I don’t mind giving her the necessary grounds.”

Now it was my turn to smile. He was very cunning, but it was evidently this that he was aiming at. He had some reason to conceal the fact that he had run away with a woman, and he was using every precaution to hide her whereabouts. I answered with decision.

“Your wife says that nothing you can do will ever induce her to divorce you. She’s quite made up her mind. You can put any possibility of that definitely out of your head.”

He looked at me with an astonishment that was certainly not feigned. The smile abandoned his lips, and he spoke quite seriously.

“But, my dear fellow, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter a twopenny damn to me one way or the other.”

I laughed.

“Oh, come now; you mustn’t think us such fools as all that. We happen to know that you came away with a woman.”

He gave a little start, and then suddenly burst into a shout of laughter. He laughed so uproariously that people sitting near us looked round, and some of them began to laugh too.

“I don’t see anything very amusing in that.”

“Poor Amy,” he grinned.

Then his face grew bitterly scornful.

“What poor minds women have got! Love. It’s always love. They think a man leaves only because he wants others. Do you think I should be such a fool as to do what I’ve done for a woman?”

“Do you mean to say you didn’t leave your wife for another woman?”

“Of course not.”

“On your word of honour?”

I don’t know why I asked for that. It was very ingenuous of me.

“On my word of honour.”

“Then, what in God’s name have you left her for?”

“I want to paint.”

I looked at him for quite a long time. I did not understand. I thought he was mad. It must be remembered that I was very young, and I looked upon him as a middle-aged man. I forgot everything but my own amazement.

“But you’re forty.”

“That’s what made me think it was high time to begin.”

“Have you ever painted?”

“I rather wanted to be a painter when I was a boy, but my father made me go into business because he said there was no money in art. I began to paint a bit a year ago. For the last year I’ve been going to some classes at night.”

“Was that where you went when Mrs. Strickland thought you were playing bridge at your club?”

“That’s it.”

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

“I preferred to keep it to myself.”

“Can you paint?”

“Not yet. But I shall. That’s why I’ve come over here. I couldn’t get what I wanted in London. Perhaps I can here.”

“Do you think it’s likely that a man will do any good when he starts at your age? Most men begin painting at eighteen.”

“I can learn quicker than I could when I was eighteen.”

“What makes you think you have any talent?”

He did not answer for a minute. His gaze rested on the passing throng, but I do not think he saw it. His answer was no answer.

“I’ve got to paint.”

“Aren’t you taking an awful chance?”

He looked at me. His eyes had something strange in them, so that I felt rather uncomfortable.

“How old are you? Twenty-three?”

It seemed to me that the question was beside the point. It was natural that I should take chances; but he was a man whose youth was past, a stockbroker with a position of respectability, a wife and two children. A course that would have been natural for me was absurd for him. I wished to be quite fair.

“Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It’ll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you’ve made a hash of it.”

“I’ve got to paint,” he repeated.

“Supposing you’re never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn’t matter if you’re not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you’re just adequate; but it’s different with an artist.”

“You blasted fool,” he said.

“I don’t see why, unless it’s folly to say the obvious.”

“I tell you I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.”

There was real passion in his voice, and in spite of myself I was impressed. I seemed to feel in him some vehement power that was struggling within him; it gave me the sensation of something very strong, overmastering, that held him, as it were, against his will. I could not understand. He seemed really to be possessed of a devil, and I felt that it might suddenly turn and rend him. Yet he looked ordinary enough. My eyes, resting on him curiously, caused him no embarrassment. I wondered what a stranger would have taken him to be, sitting there in his old Norfolk jacket and his unbrushed bowler; his trousers were baggy, his hands were not clean; and his face, with the red stubble of the unshaved chin, the little eyes, and the large, aggressive nose, was uncouth and coarse. His mouth was large, his lips were heavy and sensual. No; I could not have placed him.

“You won’t go back to your wife?” I said at last.

“Never.”

“She’s willing to forget everything that’s happened and start afresh. She’ll never make you a single reproach.”

“She can go to hell.”

“You don’t care if people think you an utter blackguard? You don’t care if she and your children have to beg their bread?”

“Not a damn.”

I was silent for a moment in order to give greater force to my next remark. I spoke as deliberately as I could.

“You are a most unmitigated cad.”

“Now that you’ve got that off your chest, let’s go and have dinner.”

Chapter XIII

I dare say it would have been more seemly to decline this proposal. I think perhaps I should have made a show of the indignation I really felt, and I am sure that Colonel MacAndrew at least would have thought well of me if I had been able to report my stout refusal to sit at the same table with a man of such character. But the fear of not being able to carry it through effectively has always made me shy of assuming the moral attitude; and in this case the certainty that my sentiments would be lost on Strickland made it peculiarly embarrassing to utter them. Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

I paid for what we had drunk, and we made our way to a cheap restaurant, crowded and gay, where we dined with pleasure. I had the appetite of youth and he of a hardened conscience. Then we went to a tavern to have coffee and liqueurs.

I had said all I had to say on the subject that had brought me to Paris, and though I felt it in a manner treacherous to Mrs. Strickland not to pursue it, I could not struggle against his indifference. It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest. I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland’s state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker. He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures. But though he said nothing of any consequence, there was something in his personality which prevented him from being dull. Perhaps it was sincerity. He did not seem to care much about the Paris he was now seeing for the first time (I did not count the visit with his wife), and he accepted sights which must have been strange to him without any sense of astonishment. I have been to Paris a hundred times, and it never fails to give me a thrill of excitement; I can never walk its streets without feeling myself on the verge of adventure. Strickland remained placid. Looking back, I think now that he was blind to everything but to some disturbing vision in his soul.

One rather absurd incident took place. There were a number of harlots in the tavern: some were sitting with men, others by themselves; and presently I noticed that one of these was looking at us. When she caught Strickland’s eye she smiled. I do not think he saw her. In a little while she went out, but in a minute returned and, passing our table, very politely asked us to buy her something to drink. She sat down and I began to chat with her; but, it was plain that her interest was in Strickland. I explained that he knew no more than two words of French. She tried to talk to him, partly by signs, partly in pidgin French, which, for some reason, she thought would be more comprehensible to him, and she had half a dozen phrases of English. She made me translate what she could only express in her own tongue, and eagerly asked for the meaning of his replies. He was quite good-tempered, a little amused, but his indifference was obvious.

“I think you’ve made a conquest,” I laughed.

“I’m not flattered.”

In his place I should have been more embarrassed and less calm. She had laughing eyes and a most charming mouth. She was young. I wondered what she found so attractive in Strickland. She made no secret of her desires, and I was bidden to translate.

“She wants you to go home with her.”

“I’m not taking any,” he replied.

I put his answer as pleasantly as I could. It seemed to me a little ungracious to decline an invitation of that sort, and I ascribed his refusal to lack of money.

“But I like him,” she said. “Tell him it’s for love.”

When I translated this, Strickland shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“Tell her to go to hell,” he said.

His manner made his answer quite plain, and the girl threw back her head with a sudden gesture. Perhaps she reddened under her paint. She rose to her feet.

“Monsieur n’est pas poli,” she said.

She walked out of the inn. I was slightly vexed.

“There wasn’t any need to insult her that I can see,” I said. “After all, it was rather a compliment she was paying you.”

“That sort of thing makes me sick,” he said roughly.

I looked at him curiously. There was a real distaste in his face, and yet it was the face of a coarse and sensual man. I suppose the girl had been attracted by a certain brutality in it.

“I could have got all the women I wanted in London. I didn’t come here for that.”

Chapter XIV

During the journey back to England I thought much of Strickland. I tried to set in order what I had to tell his wife. It was unsatisfactory, and I could not imagine that she would be content with me; I was not content with myself. Strickland perplexed me. I could not understand his motives. When I had asked him what first gave him the idea of being a painter, he was unable or unwilling to tell me. I could make nothing of it. I tried to persuade myself that an obscure feeling of revolt had been gradually coming to a head in his slow mind, but to challenge this was the undoubted fact that he had never shown any impatience with the monotony of his life. If, seized by an intolerable boredom, he had determined to be a painter merely to break with irksome ties, it would have been comprehensible, and commonplace; but commonplace is precisely what I felt he was not. At last, because I was romantic, I devised an explanation which I acknowledged to be far-fetched, but which was the only one that in any way satisfied me. It was this: I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action. The cuckoo lays its egg in the strange bird’s nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest that has sheltered it.

But how strange it was that the creative instinct should seize upon this dull stockbroker, to his own ruin, perhaps, and to the misfortune of such as were dependent on him; and yet no stranger than the way in which the spirit of God has seized men, powerful and rich, pursuing them with stubborn vigilance till at last, conquered, they have abandoned the joy of the world and the love of women for the painful austerities of the cloister. Conversion may come under many shapes, and it may be brought about in many ways. With some men it needs a cataclysm, as a stone may be broken to fragments by the fury of a torrent; but with some it comes gradually, as a stone may be worn away by the ceaseless fall of a drop of water. Strickland had the directness of the fanatic and the ferocity of the apostle.

But to my practical mind it remained to be seen whether the passion which obsessed him would be justified of its works. When I asked him what his brother-students at the night classes he had attended in London thought of his painting, he answered with a grin:

“They thought it a joke.”

“Have you begun to go to a studio here?”

“Yes. The blighter came round this morning — the master, you know; when he saw my drawing he just raised his eyebrows and walked on.”

Strickland chuckled. He did not seem discouraged. He was independent of the opinion of his fellows.

And it was just that which had most disconcerted me in my dealings with him. When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man. No one runs so hurriedly to the cover of respectability as the unconventional woman who has exposed herself to the slings and arrows of outraged propriety. I do not believe the people who tell me they do not care a row of pins for the opinion of their fellows. It is the bravado of ignorance. They mean only that they do not fear reproaches for peccadillos which they are convinced none will discover.

But here was a man who sincerely did not mind what people thought of him, and so convention had no hold on him; he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you could not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage. I remember saying to him:

“Look here, if everyone acted like you, the world couldn’t go on.”

“That’s a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn’t want to act like me. The great majority are perfectly content to do the ordinary thing.”

And once I sought to be satirical.

“You evidently don’t believe in the maxim: Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule.”

“I never heard it before, but it’s rotten nonsense.”

“Well, it was Kant who said it.”

“I don’t care; it’s rotten nonsense.”

Nor with such a man could you expect the appeal to conscience to be effective. You might as well ask for a reflection without a mirror. I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation. It is the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws. It is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego. Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole. And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of his conscience. Then he has no words hard enough for the man who does not recognise its sway; for, a member of society now, he realises accurately enough that against him he is powerless. When I saw that Strickland was really indifferent to the blame his conduct must excite, I could only draw back in horror as from a monster of hardly human shape.

The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were:

“Tell Amy it’s no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn’t be able to find me.”

“My own impression is that she’s well rid of you,” I said.

“My dear fellow, I only hope you’ll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.”

Chapter XV

When I reached London I found waiting for me an urgent request that I should go to Mrs. Strickland’s as soon after dinner as I could. I found her with Colonel MacAndrew and his wife. Mrs. Strickland’s sister was older than she, not unlike her, but more faded; and she had the efficient air, as though she carried the British Empire in her pocket, which the wives of senior officers acquire from the consciousness of belonging to a superior caste. Her manner was brisk, and her good-breeding scarcely concealed her conviction that if you were not a soldier you might as well be a counter-jumper. She hated the Guards, whom she thought conceited, and she could not trust herself to speak of their ladies, who were so remiss in calling. Her gown was dowdy and expensive.

Mrs. Strickland was plainly nervous.

“Well, tell us your news,” she said.

“I saw your husband. I’m afraid he’s quite made up his mind not to return.” I paused a little. “He wants to paint.”

“What do you mean?” cried Mrs. Strickland, with the utmost astonishment.

“Did you never know that he was keen on that sort of thing.”

“He must be as mad as a hatter,” exclaimed the Colonel.

Mrs. Strickland frowned a little. She was searching among her recollections.

“I remember before we were married he used to potter about with a paint-box. But you never saw such daubs. We used to chaff him. He had absolutely no gift for anything like that.”

“Of course it’s only an excuse,” said Mrs. MacAndrew.

Mrs. Strickland pondered deeply for some time. It was quite clear that she could not make head or tail of my announcement. She had put some order into the drawing-room by now, her housewifely instincts having got the better of her dismay; and it no longer bore that deserted look, like a furnished house long to let, which I had noticed on my first visit after the catastrophe. But now that I had seen Strickland in Paris it was difficult to imagine him in those surroundings. I thought it could hardly have failed to strike them that there was something incongruous in him.

“But if he wanted to be an artist, why didn’t he say so?” asked Mrs. Strickland at last. “I should have thought I was the last person to be unsympathetic to — to aspirations of that kind.”

Mrs. MacAndrew tightened her lips. I imagine that she had never looked with approval on her sister’s leaning towards persons who cultivated the arts. She spoke of “culchaw” derisively.

Mrs. Strickland continued:

“After all, if he had any talent I should be the first to encourage it. I wouldn’t have minded sacrifices. I’d much rather be married to a painter than to a stockbroker. If it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t mind anything. I could be just as happy in a shabby studio in Chelsea as in this flat.”

“My dear, I have no patience with you,” cried Mrs. MacAndrew. “You don’t mean to say you believe a word of this nonsense?”

“But I think it’s true,” I put in mildly.

She looked at me with good-humoured contempt.

“A man doesn’t throw up his business and leave his wife and children at the age of forty to become a painter unless there’s a woman in it. I suppose he met one of your — artistic friends, and she’s turned his head.”

A spot of colour rose suddenly to Mrs. Strickland’s pale cheeks.

“What is she like?”

I hesitated a little. I knew that I had a bombshell.

“There isn’t a woman.”

Colonel MacAndrew and his wife uttered expressions of incredulity, and Mrs. Strickland sprang to her feet.

“Do you mean to say you never saw her?”

“There’s no one to see. He’s quite alone.”

“That’s preposterous,” cried Mrs. MacAndrew.

“I knew I ought to have gone over myself,” said the Colonel. “You can bet your boots I’d have routed her out fast enough.”

“I wish you had gone over,” I replied, somewhat tartly. “You’d have seen that every one of your suppositions was wrong. He’s not at a smart hotel. He’s living in one tiny room in the most squalid way. If he’s left his home, it’s not to live a gay life. He’s got hardly any money.”

“Do you think he’s done something that we don’t know about, and is lying doggo on account of the police?”

The suggestion sent a ray of hope in all their breasts, but I would have nothing to do with it.

“If that were so, he would hardly have been such a fool as to give his partner his address,” I retorted acidly. “Anyhow, there’s one thing I’m positive of, he didn’t go away with anyone. He’s not in love. Nothing is farther from his thoughts.”

There was a pause while they reflected over my words.

“Well, if what you say is true,” said Mrs. MacAndrew at last, “things aren’t so bad as I thought.”

Mrs. Strickland glanced at her, but said nothing.

She was very pale now, and her fine brow was dark and lowering. I could not understand the expression of her face. Mrs. MacAndrew continued:

“If it’s just a whim, he’ll get over it.”

“Why don’t you go over to him, Amy?” hazarded the Colonel. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t live with him in Paris for a year. We’ll look after the children. I dare say he’d got stale. Sooner or later he’ll be quite ready to come back to London, and no great harm will have been done.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Mrs. MacAndrew. “I’d give him all the rope he wants. He’ll come back with his tail between his legs and settle down again quite comfortably.” Mrs. MacAndrew looked at her sister coolly. “Perhaps you weren’t very wise with him sometimes. Men are queer creatures, and one has to know how to manage them.”

Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas.

Mrs. Strickland looked slowly from one to another of us.

“He’ll never come back,” she said.

“Oh, my dear, remember what we’ve just heard. He’s been used to comfort and to having someone to look after him. How long do you think it’ll be before he gets tired of a scrubby room in a scrubby hotel? Besides, he hasn’t any money. He must come back.”

“As long as I thought he’d run away with some woman I thought there was a chance. I don’t believe that sort of thing ever answers. He’d have got sick to death of her in three months. But if he hasn’t gone because he’s in love, then it’s finished.”

“Oh, I think that’s awfully subtle,” said the Colonel, putting into the word all the contempt he felt for a quality so alien to the traditions of his calling. “Don’t you believe it. He’ll come back, and, as Dorothy says, I dare say he’ll be none the worse for having had a bit of a fling.”

“But I don’t want him back,” she said.

“Amy!”

It was anger that had seized Mrs. Strickland, and her pallor was the pallor of a cold and sudden rage. She spoke quickly now, with little gasps.

“I could have forgiven it if he’d fallen desperately in love with someone and gone off with her. I should have thought that natural. I shouldn’t really have blamed him. I should have thought he was led away. Men are so weak, and women are so unscrupulous. But this is different. I hate him. I’ll never forgive him now.”

Colonel MacAndrew and his wife began to talk to her together. They were astonished. They told her she was mad. They could not understand. Mrs. Strickland turned desperately to me.

“Don’t you see?” she cried.

“I’m not sure. Do you mean that you could have forgiven him if he’d left you for a woman, but not if he’s left you for an idea? You think you’re a match for the one, but against the other you’re helpless?”

Mrs. Strickland gave me a look in which I read no great friendliness, but did not answer. Perhaps I had struck home. She went on in a low and trembling voice:

“I never knew it was possible to hate anyone as much as I hate him. Do you know, I’ve been comforting myself by thinking that however long it lasted he’d want me at the end? I knew when he was dying he’d send for me, and I was ready to go; I’d have nursed him like a mother, and at the last I’d have told him that it didn’t matter, I’d loved him always, and I forgave him everything.”

I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.

“But now — now it’s finished. I’m as indifferent to him as if he were a stranger. I should like him to die miserable, poor, and starving, without a friend. I hope he’ll rot with some loathsome disease. I’ve done with him.”

I thought it as well then to say what Strickland had suggested.

“If you want to divorce him, he’s quite willing to do whatever is necessary to make it possible.”

“Why should I give him his freedom?”

“I don’t think he wants it. He merely thought it might be more convenient to you.”

Mrs. Strickland shrugged her shoulders impatiently. I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I wondered if there was anything I could say that would ease the sense of bitter humiliation which at present tormented Mrs. Strickland. I thought I would try.

“You know, I’m not sure that your husband is quite responsible for his actions. I do not think he is himself. He seems to me to be possessed by some power which is using him for its own ends, and in whose hold he is as helpless as a fly in a spider’s web. It’s as though someone had cast a spell over him. I’m reminded of those strange stories one sometimes hears of another personality entering into a man and driving out the old one. The soul lives unstably in the body, and is capable of mysterious transformations. In the old days they would say Charles Strickland had a devil.”

Mrs. MacAndrew smoothed down the lap of her gown, and gold bangles fell over her wrists.

“All that seems to me very far-fetched,” she said acidly. “I don’t deny that perhaps Amy took her husband a little too much for granted. If she hadn’t been so busy with her own affairs, I can’t believe that she wouldn’t have suspected something was the matter. I don’t think that Alec could have something on his mind for a year or more without my having a pretty shrewd idea of it.”

The Colonel stared into vacancy, and I wondered whether anyone could be quite so innocent of guile as he looked.

“But that doesn’t prevent the fact that Charles Strickland is a heartless beast.” She looked at me severely. “I can tell you why he left his wife — from pure selfishness and nothing else whatever.”

“That is certainly the simplest explanation,” I said. But I thought it explained nothing. When, saying I was tired, I rose to go, Mrs. Strickland made no attempt to detain me.

Chapter XVI

What followed showed that Mrs. Strickland was a woman of character. Whatever anguish she suffered she concealed. She saw shrewdly that the world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress. Whenever she went out — and compassion for her misadventure made her friends eager to entertain her — she bore a demeanour that was perfect. She was brave, but not too obviously; cheerful, but not brazenly; and she seemed more anxious to listen to the troubles of others than to discuss her own. Whenever she spoke of her husband it was with pity. Her attitude towards him at first perplexed me. One day she said to me:

“You know, I’m convinced you were mistaken about Charles being alone. From what I’ve been able to gather from certain sources that I can’t tell you, I know that he didn’t leave England by himself.”

“In that case he has a positive genius for covering up his tracks.”

She looked away and slightly coloured.

“What I mean is, if anyone talks to you about it, please don’t contradict it if they say he eloped with somebody.”

“Of course not.”

She changed the conversation as though it were a matter to which she attached no importance. I discovered presently that a peculiar story was circulating among her friends. They said that Charles Strickland had become infatuated with a French dancer, whom he had first seen in the ballet at the Empire, and had accompanied her to Paris. I could not find out how this had arisen, but, singularly enough, it created much sympathy for Mrs. Strickland, and at the same time gave her not a little prestige. This was not without its use in the calling which she had decided to follow. Colonel MacAndrew had not exaggerated when he said she would be penniless, and it was necessary for her to earn her own living as quickly as she could. She made up her mind to profit by her acquaintance with so many writers, and without loss of time began to learn shorthand and typewriting. Her education made it likely that she would be a typist more efficient than the average, and her story made her claims appealing. Her friends promised to send her work, and took care to recommend her to all theirs.

The MacAndrews, who were childless and in easy circumstances, arranged to undertake the care of the children, and Mrs. Strickland had only herself to provide for. She let her flat and sold her furniture. She settled in two tiny rooms in Westminster, and faced the world anew. She was so efficient that it was certain she would make a success of the adventure.

Chapter XVII

It was about five years after this that I decided to live in Paris for a while. I was growing stale in London. I was tired of doing much the same thing every day. My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality. We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave up my small apartment, sold my few belongings, and resolved to start afresh.

I called on Mrs. Strickland before I left. I had not seen her for some time, and I noticed changes in her; it was not only that she was older, thinner, and more lined; I think her character had altered. She had made a success of her business, and now had an office in Chancery Lane; she did little typing herself, but spent her time correcting the work of the four girls she employed. She had had the idea of giving it a certain daintiness, and she made much use of blue and red inks; she bound the copy in coarse paper, that looked vaguely like watered silk, in various pale colours; and she had acquired a reputation for neatness and accuracy. She was making money. But she could not get over the idea that to earn her living was somewhat undignified, and she was inclined to remind you that she was a lady by birth. She could not help bringing into her conversation the names of people she knew which would satisfy you that she had not sunk in the social scale. She was a little ashamed of her courage and business capacity, but delighted that she was going to dine the next night with a K.C. who lived in South Kensington. She was pleased to be able to tell you that her son was at Cambridge, and it was with a little laugh that she spoke of the rush of dances to which her daughter, just out, was invited. I suppose I said a very stupid thing.

“Is she going into your business?” I asked.

“Oh no; I wouldn’t let her do that,” Mrs. Strickland answered. “She’s so pretty. I’m sure she’ll marry well.”

“I should have thought it would be a help to you.”

“Several people have suggested that she should go on the stage, but of course I couldn’t consent to that, I know all the chief dramatists, and I could get her a part to-morrow, but I shouldn’t like her to mix with all sorts of people.”

I was a little chilled by Mrs. Strickland’s exclusiveness.

“Do you ever hear of your husband?”

“No; I haven’t heard a word. He may be dead for all I know.”

“I may run across him in Paris. Would you like me to let you know about him?”

She hesitated a minute.

“If he’s in any real want I’m prepared to help him a little. I’d send you a certain sum of money, and you could give it him gradually, as he needed it.”

“That’s very good of you,” I said.

But I knew it was not kindness that prompted the offer. It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

Chapter XVIII

In point of fact, I met Strickland before I had been a fortnight in Paris.

I quickly found myself a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue des Dames, and for a couple of hundred francs bought at a second-hand dealer’s enough furniture to make it habitable. I arranged with the concierge to make my coffee in the morning and to keep the place clean. Then I went to see my friend Dirk Stroeve.

Dirk Stroeve was one of those persons whom, according to your character, you cannot think of without derisive laughter or an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders. Nature had made him a buffoon. He was a painter, but a very bad one, whom I had met in Rome, and I still remembered his pictures. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace. His soul palpitating with love of art, he painted the models who hung about the stairway of Bernini in the Piazza de Spagna, undaunted by their obvious picturesqueness; and his studio was full of canvases on which were portrayed moustachioed, large-eyed peasants in peaked hats, urchins in becoming rags, and women in bright petticoats. Sometimes they lounged at the steps of a church, and sometimes dallied among cypresses against a cloudless sky; sometimes they made love by a Renaissance well-head, and sometimes they wandered through the Campagna by the side of an ox-waggon. They were carefully drawn and carefully painted. A photograph could not have been more exact. One of the painters at the Villa Medici had called him Le Maitre de la Boite a Chocoloats. To look at his pictures you would have thought that Monet, Manet, and the rest of the Impressionists had never been.

“I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he said, “I’m not a Michael Angelo, no, but I have something. I sell. I bring romance into the homes of all sorts of people. Do you know, they buy my pictures not only in Holland, but in Norway and Sweden and Denmark? It’s mostly merchants who buy them, and rich tradesmen. You can’t imagine what the winters are like in those countries, so long and dark and cold. They like to think that Italy is like my pictures. That’s what they expect. That’s what I expected Italy to be before I came here.”

And I think that was the vision that had remained with him always, dazzling his eyes so that he could not see the truth; and notwithstanding the brutality of fact, he continued to see with the eyes of the spirit an Italy of romantic brigands and picturesque ruins. It was an ideal that he painted — a poor one, common and shop-soiled, but still it was an ideal; and it gave his character a peculiar charm.

It was because I felt this that Dirk Stroeve was not to me, as to others, merely an object of ridicule. His fellow-painters made no secret of their contempt for his work, but he earned a fair amount of money, and they did not hesitate to make free use of his purse. He was generous, and the needy, laughing at him because he believed so naively their stories of distress, borrowed from him with effrontery. He was very emotional, yet his feeling, so easily aroused, had in it something absurd, so that you accepted his kindness, but felt no gratitude. To take money from him was like robbing a child, and you despised him because he was so foolish. I imagine that a pickpocket, proud of his light fingers, must feel a sort of indignation with the careless woman who leaves in a cab a vanity-bag with all her jewels in it. Nature had made him a butt, but had denied him insensibility. He writhed under the jokes, practical and otherwise, which were perpetually made at his expense, and yet never ceased, it seemed wilfully, to expose himself to them. He was constantly wounded, and yet his good-nature was such that he could not bear malice: the viper might sting him, but he never learned by experience, and had no sooner recovered from his pain than he tenderly placed it once more in his bosom. His life was a tragedy written in the terms of knockabout farce. Because I did not laugh at him he was grateful to me, and he used to pour into my sympathetic ear the long list of his troubles. The saddest thing about them was that they were grotesque, and the more pathetic they were, the more you wanted to laugh.

But though so bad a painter, he had a very delicate feeling for art, and to go with him to picture-galleries was a rare treat. His enthusiasm was sincere and his criticism acute. He was catholic. He had not only a true appreciation of the old masters, but sympathy with the moderns. He was quick to discover talent, and his praise was generous. I think I have never known a man whose judgment was surer. And he was better educated than most painters. He was not, like most of them, ignorant of kindred arts, and his taste for music and literature gave depth and variety to his comprehension of painting. To a young man like myself his advice and guidance were of incomparable value.

When I left Rome I corresponded with him, and about once in two months received from him long letters in queer English, which brought before me vividly his spluttering, enthusiastic, gesticulating conversation. Some time before I went to Paris he had married an Englishwoman, and was now settled in a studio in Montmartre. I had not seen him for four years, and had never met his wife.

Chapter XIX

I had not announced my arrival to Stroeve, and when I rang the bell of his studio, on opening the door himself, for a moment he did not know me. Then he gave a cry of delighted surprise and drew me in. It was charming to be welcomed with so much eagerness. His wife was seated near the stove at her sewing, and she rose as I came in. He introduced me.

“Don’t you remember?” he said to her. “I’ve talked to you about him often.” And then to me: “But why didn’t you let me know you were coming? How long have you been here? How long are you going to stay? Why didn’t you come an hour earlier, and we would have dined together?”

He bombarded me with questions. He sat me down in a chair, patting me as though I were a cushion, pressed cigars upon me, cakes, wine. He could not let me alone. He was heart-broken because he had no whisky, wanted to make coffee for me, racked his brain for something he could possibly do for me, and beamed and laughed, and in the exuberance of his delight sweated at every pore.

“You haven’t changed,” I said, smiling, as I looked at him.

He had the same absurd appearance that I remembered. He was a fat little man, with short legs, young still — he could not have been more than thirty — but prematurely bald. His face was perfectly round, and he had a very high colour, a white skin, red cheeks, and red lips. His eyes were blue and round too, he wore large gold-rimmed spectacles, and his eyebrows were so fair that you could not see them. He reminded you of those jolly, fat merchants that Rubens painted.

When I told him that I meant to live in Paris for a while, and had taken an apartment, he reproached me bitterly for not having let him know. He would have found me an apartment himself, and lent me furniture — did I really mean that I had gone to the expense of buying it? — and he would have helped me to move in. He really looked upon it as unfriendly that I had not given him the opportunity of making himself useful to me. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stroeve sat quietly mending her stockings, without talking, and she listened to all he said with a quiet smile on her lips.

“So, you see, I’m married,” he said suddenly; “what do you think of my wife?”

He beamed at her, and settled his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. The sweat made them constantly slip down.

“What on earth do you expect me to say to that?” I laughed.

“Really, Dirk,” put in Mrs. Stroeve, smiling.

“But isn’t she wonderful? I tell you, my boy, lose no time; get married as soon as ever you can. I’m the happiest man alive. Look at her sitting there. Doesn’t she make a picture? Chardin, eh? I’ve seen all the most beautiful women in the world; I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful than Madame Dirk Stroeve.”

“If you don’t be quiet, Dirk, I shall go away.”

“Mon petit chou”, he said.

She flushed a little, embarrassed by the passion in his tone. His letters had told me that he was very much in love with his wife, and I saw that he could hardly take his eyes off her. I could not tell if she loved him. Poor pantaloon, he was not an object to excite love, but the smile in her eyes was affectionate, and it was possible that her reserve concealed a very deep feeling. She was not the ravishing creature that his love-sick fancy saw, but she had a grave comeliness. She was rather tall, and her gray dress, simple and quite well-cut, did not hide the fact that her figure was beautiful. It was a figure that might have appealed more to the sculptor than to the costumier. Her hair, brown and abundant, was plainly done, her face was very pale, and her features were good without being distinguished. She had quiet gray eyes. She just missed being beautiful, and in missing it was not even pretty. But when Stroeve spoke of Chardin it was not without reason, and she reminded me curiously of that pleasant housewife in her mob-cap and apron whom the great painter has immortalised. I could imagine her sedately busy among her pots and pans, making a ritual of her household duties, so that they acquired a moral significance; I did not suppose that she was clever or could ever be amusing, but there was something in her grave intentness which excited my interest. Her reserve was not without mystery. I wondered why she had married Dirk Stroeve. Though she was English, I could not exactly place her, and it was not obvious from what rank in society she sprang, what had been her upbringing, or how she had lived before her marriage. She was very silent, but when she spoke it was with a pleasant voice, and her manners were natural.

I asked Stroeve if he was working.

“Working? I’m painting better than I’ve ever painted before.”

We sat in the studio, and he waved his hand to an unfinished picture on an easel. I gave a little start. He was painting a group of Italian peasants, in the costume of the Campagna, lounging on the steps of a Roman church.

“Is that what you’re doing now?” I asked.

“Yes. I can get my models here just as well as in Rome.”

“Don’t you think it’s very beautiful?” said Mrs. Stroeve.

“This foolish wife of mine thinks I’m a great artist,” said he.

His apologetic laugh did not disguise the pleasure that he felt. His eyes lingered on his picture. It was strange that his critical sense, so accurate and unconventional when he dealt with the work of others, should be satisfied in himself with what was hackneyed and vulgar beyond belief.

“Show him some more of your pictures,” she said.

“Shall I?”

Though he had suffered so much from the ridicule of his friends, Dirk Stroeve, eager for praise and naively self-satisfied, could never resist displaying his work. He brought out a picture of two curly-headed Italian urchins playing marbles.

“Aren’t they sweet?” said Mrs. Stroeve.

And then he showed me more. I discovered that in Paris he had been painting just the same stale, obviously picturesque things that he had painted for years in Rome. It was all false, insincere, shoddy; and yet no one was more honest, sincere, and frank than Dirk Stroeve. Who could resolve the contradiction?

I do not know what put it into my head to ask:

“I say, have you by any chance run across a painter called Charles Strickland?”

“You don’t mean to say you know him?” cried Stroeve.

“Beast,” said his wife.

Stroeve laughed.

“Ma pauvre cherie.” He went over to her and kissed both her hands. “She doesn’t like him. How strange that you should know Strickland!”

“I don’t like bad manners,” said Mrs. Stroeve.

Dirk, laughing still, turned to me to explain.

“You see, I asked him to come here one day and look at my pictures. Well, he came, and I showed him everything I had.” Stroeve hesitated a moment with embarrassment. I do not know why he had begun the story against himself; he felt an awkwardness at finishing it. “He looked at — at my pictures, and he didn’t say anything. I thought he was reserving his judgment till the end. And at last I said: ‘There, that’s the lot!’ He said: ‘I came to ask you to lend me twenty francs.’”

“And Dirk actually gave it him,” said his wife indignantly.

“I was so taken aback. I didn’t like to refuse. He put the money in his pocket, just nodded, said ‘Thanks,’ and walked out.”

Dirk Stroeve, telling the story, had such a look of blank astonishment on his round, foolish face that it was almost impossible not to laugh.

“I shouldn’t have minded if he’d said my pictures were bad, but he said nothing — nothing.”

“And you will tell the story, Dirk,” said his wife.

It was lamentable that one was more amused by the ridiculous figure cut by the Dutchman than outraged by Strickland’s brutal treatment of him.

“I hope I shall never see him again,” said Mrs. Stroeve.

Stroeve smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He had already recovered his good-humour.

“The fact remains that he’s a great artist, a very great artist.”

“Strickland?” I exclaimed. “It can’t be the same man.”

“A big fellow with a red beard. Charles Strickland. An Englishman.”

“He had no beard when I knew him, but if he has grown one it might well be red. The man I’m thinking of only began painting five years ago.”

“That’s it. He’s a great artist.”

“Impossible.”

“Have I ever been mistaken?” Dirk asked me. “I tell you he has genius. I’m convinced of it. In a hundred years, if you and I are remembered at all, it will be because we knew Charles Strickland.”

I was astonished, and at the same time I was very much excited. I remembered suddenly my last talk with him.

“Where can one see his work?” I asked. “Is he having any success? Where is he living?”

“No; he has no success. I don’t think he’s ever sold a picture. When you speak to men about him they only laugh. But I know he’s a great artist. After all, they laughed at Manet. Corot never sold a picture. I don’t know where he lives, but I can take you to see him. He goes to a cafe in the Avenue de Clichy at seven o’clock every evening. If you like we’ll go there to-morrow.”

“I’m not sure if he’ll wish to see me. I think I may remind him of a time he prefers to forget. But I’ll come all the same. Is there any chance of seeing any of his pictures?”

“Not from him. He won’t show you a thing. There’s a little dealer I know who has two or three. But you mustn’t go without me; you wouldn’t understand. I must show them to you myself.”

“Dirk, you make me impatient,” said Mrs. Stroeve. “How can you talk like that about his pictures when he treated you as he did?” She turned to me. “Do you know, when some Dutch people came here to buy Dirk’s pictures he tried to persuade them to buy Strickland’s? He insisted on bringing them here to show.”

“What did you think of them?” I asked her, smiling.

“They were awful.”

“Ah, sweetheart, you don’t understand.”

“Well, your Dutch people were furious with you. They thought you were having a joke with them.”

Dirk Stroeve took off his spectacles and wiped them. His flushed face was shining with excitement.

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.”

“Why did I always think your pictures beautiful, Dirk? I admired them the very first time I saw them.”

Stroeve’s lips trembled a little.

“Go to bed, my precious. I will walk a few steps with our friend, and then I will come back.”

Chapter XX

Dirk Stroeve agreed to fetch me on the following evening and take me to the cafe at which Strickland was most likely to be found. I was interested to learn that it was the same as that at which Strickland and I had drunk absinthe when I had gone over to Paris to see him. The fact that he had never changed suggested a sluggishness of habit which seemed to me characteristic.

“There he is,” said Stroeve, as we reached the cafe.

Though it was October, the evening was warm, and the tables on the pavement were crowded. I ran my eyes over them, but did not see Strickland.

“Look. Over there, in the corner. He’s playing chess.”

I noticed a man bending over a chess-board, but could see only a large felt hat and a red beard. We threaded our way among the tables till we came to him.

“Strickland.”

He looked up.

“Hulloa, fatty. What do you want?”

“I’ve brought an old friend to see you.”

Strickland gave me a glance, and evidently did not recognise me. He resumed his scrutiny of the chess-board.

“Sit down, and don’t make a noise,” he said.

He moved a piece and straightway became absorbed in the game. Poor Stroeve gave me a troubled look, but I was not disconcerted by so little. I ordered something to drink, and waited quietly till Strickland had finished. I welcomed the opportunity to examine him at my ease. I certainly should never have known him. In the first place his red beard, ragged and untrimmed, hid much of his face, and his hair was long; but the most surprising change in him was his extreme thinness. It made his great nose protrude more arrogantly; it emphasized his cheekbones; it made his eyes seem larger. There were deep hollows at his temples. His body was cadaverous. He wore the same suit that I had seen him in five years before; it was torn and stained, threadbare, and it hung upon him loosely, as though it had been made for someone else. I noticed his hands, dirty, with long nails; they were merely bone and sinew, large and strong; but I had forgotten that they were so shapely. He gave me an extraordinary impression as he sat there, his attention riveted on his game — an impression of great strength; and I could not understand why it was that his emaciation somehow made it more striking.

Presently, after moving, he leaned back and gazed with a curious abstraction at his antagonist. This was a fat, bearded Frenchman. The Frenchman considered the position, then broke suddenly into jovial expletives, and with an impatient gesture, gathering up the pieces, flung them into their box. He cursed Strickland freely, then, calling for the waiter, paid for the drinks, and left. Stroeve drew his chair closer to the table.

“Now I suppose we can talk,” he said.

Strickland’s eyes rested on him, and there was in them a malicious expression. I felt sure he was seeking for some gibe, could think of none, and so was forced to silence.

“I’ve brought an old friend to see you,” repeated Stroeve, beaming cheerfully.

Strickland looked at me thoughtfully for nearly a minute. I did not speak.

“I’ve never seen him in my life,” he said.

I do not know why he said this, for I felt certain I had caught a gleam of recognition in his eyes. I was not so easily abashed as I had been some years earlier.

“I saw your wife the other day,” I said. “I felt sure you’d like to have the latest news of her.”

He gave a short laugh. His eyes twinkled.

“We had a jolly evening together,” he said. “How long ago is it?”

“Five years.”

He called for another absinthe. Stroeve, with voluble tongue, explained how he and I had met, and by what an accident we discovered that we both knew Strickland. I do not know if Strickland listened. He glanced at me once or twice reflectively, but for the most part seemed occupied with his own thoughts; and certainly without Stroeve’s babble the conversation would have been difficult. In half an hour the Dutchman, looking at his watch, announced that he must go. He asked whether I would come too. I thought, alone, I might get something out of Strickland, and so answered that I would stay.

When the fat man had left I said:

“Dirk Stroeve thinks you’re a great artist.”

“What the hell do you suppose I care?”

“Will you let me see your pictures?”

“Why should I?”

“I might feel inclined to buy one.”

“I might not feel inclined to sell one.”

“Are you making a good living?” I asked, smiling.

He chuckled.

“Do I look it?”

“You look half starved.”

“I am half starved.”

“Then come and let’s have a bit of dinner.”

“Why do you ask me?”

“Not out of charity,” I answered coolly. “I don’t really care a twopenny damn if you starve or not.”

His eyes lit up again.

“Come on, then,” he said, getting up. “I’d like a decent meal.”

Chapter XXI

I let him take me to a restaurant of his choice, but on the way I bought a paper. When we had ordered our dinner, I propped it against a bottle of St. Galmier and began to read. We ate in silence. I felt him looking at me now and again, but I took no notice. I meant to force him to conversation.

“Is there anything in the paper?” he said, as we approached the end of our silent meal.

I fancied there was in his tone a slight note of exasperation.

“I always like to read the feuilleton on the drama,” I said.

I folded the paper and put it down beside me.

“I’ve enjoyed my dinner,” he remarked.

“I think we might have our coffee here, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

We lit our cigars. I smoked in silence. I noticed that now and then his eyes rested on me with a faint smile of amusement. I waited patiently.

“What have you been up to since I saw you last?” he asked at length.

I had not very much to say. It was a record of hard work and of little adventure; of experiments in this direction and in that; of the gradual acquisition of the knowledge of books and of men. I took care to ask Strickland nothing about his own doings. I showed not the least interest in him, and at last I was rewarded. He began to talk of himself. But with his poor gift of expression he gave but indications of what he had gone through, and I had to fill up the gaps with my own imagination. It was tantalising to get no more than hints into a character that interested me so much. It was like making one’s way through a mutilated manuscript. I received the impression of a life which was a bitter struggle against every sort of difficulty; but I realised that much which would have seemed horrible to most people did not in the least affect him. Strickland was distinguished from most Englishmen by his perfect indifference to comfort; it did not irk him to live always in one shabby room; he had no need to be surrounded by beautiful things. I do not suppose he had ever noticed how dingy was the paper on the wall of the room in which on my first visit I found him. He did not want arm-chairs to sit in; he really felt more at his ease on a kitchen chair. He ate with appetite, but was indifferent to what he ate; to him it was only food that he devoured to still the pangs of hunger; and when no food was to be had he seemed capable of doing without. I learned that for six months he had lived on a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk a day. He was a sensual man, and yet was indifferent to sensual things. He looked upon privation as no hardship. There was something impressive in the manner in which he lived a life wholly of the spirit.

When the small sum of money which he brought with him from London came to an end he suffered from no dismay. He sold no pictures; I think he made little attempt to sell any; he set about finding some way to make a bit of money. He told me with grim humour of the time he had spent acting as guide to Cockneys who wanted to see the night side of life in Paris; it was an occupation that appealed to his sardonic temper and somehow or other he had acquired a wide acquaintance with the more disreputable quarters of the city. He told me of the long hours he spent walking about the Boulevard de la Madeleine on the look-out for Englishmen, preferably the worse for liquor, who desired to see things which the law forbade. When in luck he was able to make a tidy sum; but the shabbiness of his clothes at last frightened the sight-seers, and he could not find people adventurous enough to trust themselves to him. Then he happened on a job to translate the advertisements of patent medicines which were sent broadcast to the medical profession in England. During a strike he had been employed as a house-painter.

Meanwhile he had never ceased to work at his art; but, soon tiring of the studios, entirely by himself. He had never been so poor that he could not buy canvas and paint, and really he needed nothing else. So far as I could make out, he painted with great difficulty, and in his unwillingness to accept help from anyone lost much time in finding out for himself the solution of technical problems which preceding generations had already worked out one by one. He was aiming at something, I knew not what, and perhaps he hardly knew himself; and I got again more strongly the impression of a man possessed. He did not seem quite sane. It seemed to me that he would not show his pictures because he was really not interested in them. He lived in a dream, and the reality meant nothing to him. I had the feeling that he worked on a canvas with all the force of his violent personality, oblivious of everything in his effort to get what he saw with the mind’s eye; and then, having finished, not the picture perhaps, for I had an idea that he seldom brought anything to completion, but the passion that fired him, he lost all care for it. He was never satisfied with what he had done; it seemed to him of no consequence compared with the vision that obsessed his mind.

“Why don’t you ever send your work to exhibitions?” I asked. “I should have thought you’d like to know what people thought about it.”

“Would you?”

I cannot describe the unmeasurable contempt he put into the two words.

“Don’t you want fame? It’s something that most artists haven’t been indifferent to.”

“Children. How can you care for the opinion of the crowd, when you don’t care twopence for the opinion of the individual?”

“We’re not all reasonable beings,” I laughed.

“Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.”

“Wouldn’t it give you a rather pleasing sensation to think of people you didn’t know and had never seen receiving emotions, subtle and passionate, from the work of your hands? Everyone likes power. I can’t imagine a more wonderful exercise of it than to move the souls of men to pity or terror.”

“Melodrama.”

“Why do you mind if you paint well or badly?”

“I don’t. I only want to paint what I see.”

“I wonder if I could write on a desert island, with the certainty that no eyes but mine would ever see what I had written.”

Strickland did not speak for a long time, but his eyes shone strangely, as though he saw something that kindled his soul to ecstasy.

“Sometimes I’ve thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I could find what I want.”

He did not express himself quite like this. He used gestures instead of adjectives, and he halted. I have put into my own words what I think he wanted to say.

“Looking back on the last five years, do you think it was worth it?” I asked.

He looked at me, and I saw that he did not know what I meant. I explained.

“You gave up a comfortable home and a life as happy as the average. You were fairly prosperous. You seem to have had a rotten time in Paris. If you had your time over again would you do what you did?”

“Rather.”

“Do you know that you haven’t asked anything about your wife and children? Do you never think of them?”

“No.”

“I wish you weren’t so damned monosyllabic. Have you never had a moment’s regret for all the unhappiness you caused them?”

His lips broke into a smile, and he shook his head.

“I should have thought sometimes you couldn’t help thinking of the past. I don’t mean the past of seven or eight years ago, but further back still, when you first met your wife, and loved her, and married her. Don’t you remember the joy with which you first took her in your arms?”

“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”

I thought for a moment over this reply. It was obscure, perhaps, but I thought that I saw dimly his meaning.

“Are you happy?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I was silent. I looked at him reflectively. He held my stare, and presently a sardonic twinkle lit up his eyes.

“I’m afraid you disapprove of me?”

“Nonsense,” I answered promptly; “I don’t disapprove of the boa-constrictor; on the contrary, I’m interested in his mental processes.”

“It’s a purely professional interest you take in me?”

“Purely.”

“It’s only right that you shouldn’t disapprove of me. You have a despicable character.”

“Perhaps that’s why you feel at home with me,” I retorted.

He smiled dryly, but said nothing. I wish I knew how to describe his smile. I do not know that it was attractive, but it lit up his face, changing the expression, which was generally sombre, and gave it a look of not ill-natured malice. It was a slow smile, starting and sometimes ending in the eyes; it was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the satyr. It was his smile that made me ask him:

“Haven’t you been in love since you came to Paris?”

“I haven’t got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn’t long enough for love and art.”

“Your appearance doesn’t suggest the anchorite.”

“All that business fills me with disgust.”

“Human nature is a nuisance, isn’t it?” I said.

“Why are you sniggering at me?”

“Because I don’t believe you.”

“Then you’re a damned fool.”

I paused, and I looked at him searchingly.

“What’s the good of trying to humbug me?” I said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I smiled.

“Let me tell you. I imagine that for months the matter never comes into your head, and you’re able to persuade yourself that you’ve finished with it for good and all. You rejoice in your freedom, and you feel that at last you can call your soul your own. You seem to walk with your head among the stars. And then, all of a sudden you can’t stand it any more, and you notice that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it. And you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you’re blind with rage.”

He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very slowly.

“I’ll tell you what must seem strange, that when it’s over you feel so extraordinarily pure. You feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial; and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God. Can you explain that to me?”

He kept his eyes fixed on mine till I had finished, and then he turned away. There was on his face a strange look, and I thought that so might a man look when he had died under the torture. He was silent. I knew that our conversation was ended.

Chapter XXII

I settled down in Paris and began to write a play. I led a very regular life, working in the morning, and in the afternoon lounging about the gardens of the Luxembourg or sauntering through the streets. I spent long hours in the Louvre, the most friendly of all galleries and the most convenient for meditation; or idled on the quays, fingering second-hand books that I never meant to buy. I read a page here and there, and made acquaintance with a great many authors whom I was content to know thus desultorily. In the evenings I went to see my friends. I looked in often on the Stroeves, and sometimes shared their modest fare. Dirk Stroeve flattered himself on his skill in cooking Italian dishes, and I confess that his spaghetti were very much better than his pictures. It was a dinner for a King when he brought in a huge dish of it, succulent with tomatoes, and we ate it together with the good household bread and a bottle of red wine. I grew more intimate with Blanche Stroeve, and I think, because I was English and she knew few English people, she was glad to see me. She was pleasant and simple, but she remained always rather silent, and I knew not why, gave me the impression that she was concealing something. But I thought that was perhaps no more than a natural reserve accentuated by the verbose frankness of her husband. Dirk never concealed anything. He discussed the most intimate matters with a complete lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes he embarrassed his wife, and the only time I saw her put out of countenance was when he insisted on telling me that he had taken a purge, and went into somewhat realistic details on the subject. The perfect seriousness with which he narrated his misfortunes convulsed me with laughter, and this added to Mrs. Stroeve’s irritation.

“You seem to like making a fool of yourself,” she said.

His round eyes grew rounder still, and his brow puckered in dismay as he saw that she was angry.

“Sweetheart, have I vexed you? I’ll never take another. It was only because I was bilious. I lead a sedentary life. I don’t take enough exercise. For three days I hadn’t ...”

“For goodness sake, hold your tongue,” she interrupted, tears of annoyance in her eyes.

His face fell, and he pouted his lips like a scolded child. He gave me a look of appeal, so that I might put things right, but, unable to control myself, I shook with helpless laughter.

We went one day to the picture-dealer in whose shop Stroeve thought he could show me at least two or three of Strickland’s pictures, but when we arrived were told that Strickland himself had taken them away. The dealer did not know why.

“But don’t imagine to yourself that I make myself bad blood on that account. I took them to oblige Monsieur Stroeve, and I said I would sell them if I could. But really—” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m interested in the young men, but voyons, you yourself, Monsieur Stroeve, you don’t think there’s any talent there.”

“I give you my word of honour, there’s no one painting to-day in whose talent I am more convinced. Take my word for it, you are missing a good affair. Some day those pictures will be worth more than all you have in your shop. Remember Monet, who could not get anyone to buy his pictures for a hundred francs. What are they worth now?”

“True. But there were a hundred as good painters as Monet who couldn’t sell their pictures at that time, and their pictures are worth nothing still. How can one tell? Is merit enough to bring success? Don’t believe it. Du reste, it has still to be proved that this friend of yours has merit. No one claims it for him but Monsieur Stroeve.”

“And how, then, will you recognise merit?” asked Dirk, red in the face with anger.

“There is only one way — by success.”

“Philistine,” cried Dirk.

“But think of the great artists of the past — Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ingres, Delacroix — they were all successful.”

“Let us go,” said Stroeve to me, “or I shall kill this man.”

Chapter XXIII

I saw Strickland not infrequently, and now and then played chess with him. He was of uncertain temper. Sometimes he would sit silent and abstracted, taking no notice of anyone; and at others, when he was in a good humour, he would talk in his own halting way. He never said a clever thing, but he had a vein of brutal sarcasm which was not ineffective, and he always said exactly what he thought. He was indifferent to the susceptibilities of others, and when he wounded them was amused. He was constantly offending Dirk Stroeve so bitterly that he flung away, vowing he would never speak to him again; but there was a solid force in Strickland that attracted the fat Dutchman against his will, so that he came back, fawning like a clumsy dog, though he knew that his only greeting would be the blow he dreaded.

I do not know why Strickland put up with me. Our relations were peculiar. One day he asked me to lend him fifty francs.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied.

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t amuse me.”

“I’m frightfully hard up, you know.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care if I starve?”

“Why on earth should I?” I asked in my turn.

He looked at me for a minute or two, pulling his untidy beard. I smiled at him.

“What are you amused at?” he said, with a gleam of anger in his eyes.

“You’re so simple. You recognise no obligations. No one is under any obligation to you.”

“Wouldn’t it make you uncomfortable if I went and hanged myself because I’d been turned out of my room as I couldn’t pay the rent?”

“Not a bit.”

He chuckled.

“You’re bragging. If I really did you’d be overwhelmed with remorse.”

“Try it, and we’ll see,” I retorted.

A smile flickered in his eyes, and he stirred his absinthe in silence.

“Would you like to play chess?” I asked.

“I don’t mind.”

We set up the pieces, and when the board was ready he considered it with a comfortable eye. There is a sense of satisfaction in looking at your men all ready for the fray.

“Did you really think I’d lend you money?” I asked.

“I didn’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“You surprise me.”

“Why?”

“It’s disappointing to find that at heart you are sentimental. I should have liked you better if you hadn’t made that ingenuous appeal to my sympathies.”

“I should have despised you if you’d been moved by it,” he answered.

“That’s better,” I laughed.

We began to play. We were both absorbed in the game. When it was finished I said to him:

“Look here, if you’re hard up, let me see your pictures. If there’s anything I like I’ll buy it.”

“Go to hell,” he answered.

He got up and was about to go away. I stopped him.

“You haven’t paid for your absinthe,” I said, smiling.

He cursed me, flung down the money and left.

I did not see him for several days after that, but one evening, when I was sitting in the cafe, reading a paper, he came up and sat beside me.

“You haven’t hanged yourself after all,” I remarked.

“No. I’ve got a commission. I’m painting the portrait of a retired plumber for two hundred francs.”

This picture, formerly in the possession of a wealthy manufacturer at Lille, who fled from that city on the approach of the Germans, is now in the National Gallery at Stockholm. The Swede is adept at the gentle pastime of fishing in troubled waters.

“How did you manage that?”

“The woman where I get my bread recommended me. He’d told her he was looking out for someone to paint him. I’ve got to give her twenty francs.”

“What’s he like?”

“Splendid. He’s got a great red face like a leg of mutton, and on his right cheek there’s an enormous mole with long hairs growing out of it.”

Strickland was in a good humour, and when Dirk Stroeve came up and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive. Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective. The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, taken unawares, was defenceless. He reminded you of a frightened sheep running aimlessly hither and thither. He was startled and amazed. At last the tears ran from his eyes. And the worst of it was that, though you hated Strickland, and the exhibition was horrible, it was impossible not to laugh. Dirk Stroeve was one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions are ridiculous.

But after all when I look back upon that winter in Paris, my pleasantest recollection is of Dirk Stroeve. There was something very charming in his little household. He and his wife made a picture which the imagination gratefully dwelt upon, and the simplicity of his love for her had a deliberate grace. He remained absurd, but the sincerity of his passion excited one’s sympathy. I could understand how his wife must feel for him, and I was glad that her affection was so tender. If she had any sense of humour, it must amuse her that he should place her on a pedestal and worship her with such an honest idolatry, but even while she laughed she must have been pleased and touched. He was the constant lover, and though she grew old, losing her rounded lines and her fair comeliness, to him she would certainly never alter. To him she would always be the loveliest woman in the world. There was a pleasing grace in the orderliness of their lives. They had but the studio, a bedroom, and a tiny kitchen. Mrs. Stroeve did all the housework herself; and while Dirk painted bad pictures, she went marketing, cooked the luncheon, sewed, occupied herself like a busy ant all the day; and in the evening sat in the studio, sewing again, while Dirk played music which I am sure was far beyond her comprehension. He played with taste, but with more feeling than was always justified, and into his music poured all his honest, sentimental, exuberant soul.

Their life in its own way was an idyl, and it managed to achieve a singular beauty. The absurdity that clung to everything connected with Dirk Stroeve gave it a curious note, like an unresolved discord, but made it somehow more modern, more human; like a rough joke thrown into a serious scene, it heightened the poignancy which all beauty has.

Chapter XXIV

Shortly before Christmas Dirk Stroeve came to ask me to spend the holiday with him. He had a characteristic sentimentality about the day and wanted to pass it among his friends with suitable ceremonies. Neither of us had seen Strickland for two or three weeks — I because I had been busy with friends who were spending a little while in Paris, and Stroeve because, having quarreled with him more violently than usual, he had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with him. Strickland was impossible, and he swore never to speak to him again. But the season touched him with gentle feeling, and he hated the thought of Strickland spending Christmas Day by himself; he ascribed his own emotions to him, and could not bear that on an occasion given up to good-fellowship the lonely painter should be abandoned to his own melancholy. Stroeve had set up a Christmas-tree in his studio, and I suspected that we should both find absurd little presents hanging on its festive branches; but he was shy about seeing Strickland again; it was a little humiliating to forgive so easily insults so outrageous, and he wished me to be present at the reconciliation on which he was determined.

We walked together down the Avenue de Clichy, but Strickland was not in the cafe. It was too cold to sit outside, and we took our places on leather benches within. It was hot and stuffy, and the air was gray with smoke. Strickland did not come, but presently we saw the French painter who occasionally played chess with him. I had formed a casual acquaintance with him, and he sat down at our table. Stroeve asked him if he had seen Strickland.

“He’s ill,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Seriously?”

“Very, I understand.”

Stroeve’s face grew white.

“Why didn’t he write and tell me? How stupid of me to quarrel with him. We must go to him at once. He can have no one to look after him. Where does he live?”

“I have no idea,” said the Frenchman.

We discovered that none of us knew how to find him. Stroeve grew more and more distressed.

“He might die, and not a soul would know anything about it. It’s dreadful. I can’t bear the thought. We must find him at once.”

I tried to make Stroeve understand that it was absurd to hunt vaguely about Paris. We must first think of some plan.

“Yes; but all this time he may be dying, and when we get there it may be too late to do anything.”

“Sit still and let us think,” I said impatiently.

The only address I knew was the Hotel des Belges, but Strickland had long left that, and they would have no recollection of him. With that queer idea of his to keep his whereabouts secret, it was unlikely that, on leaving, he had said where he was going. Besides, it was more than five years ago. I felt pretty sure that he had not moved far. If he continued to frequent the same cafe as when he had stayed at the hotel, it was probably because it was the most convenient. Suddenly I remembered that he had got his commission to paint a portrait through the baker from whom he bought his bread, and it struck me that there one might find his address. I called for a directory and looked out the bakers. There were five in the immediate neighbourhood, and the only thing was to go to all of them. Stroeve accompanied me unwillingly. His own plan was to run up and down the streets that led out of the Avenue de Clichy and ask at every house if Strickland lived there. My commonplace scheme was, after all, effective, for in the second shop we asked at the woman behind the counter acknowledged that she knew him. She was not certain where he lived, but it was in one of the three houses opposite. Luck favoured us, and in the first we tried the concierge told us that we should find him on the top floor.

“It appears that he’s ill,” said Stroeve.

“It may be,” answered the concierge indifferently. “En effet, I have not seen him for several days.”

Stroeve ran up the stairs ahead of me, and when I reached the top floor I found him talking to a workman in his shirt-sleeves who had opened a door at which Stroeve had knocked. He pointed to another door. He believed that the person who lived there was a painter. He had not seen him for a week. Stroeve made as though he were about to knock, and then turned to me with a gesture of helplessness. I saw that he was panic-stricken.

“Supposing he’s dead?”

“Not he,” I said.

I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the handle, and found the door unlocked. I walked in, and Stroeve followed me. The room was in darkness. I could only see that it was an attic, with a sloping roof; and a faint glimmer, no more than a less profound obscurity, came from a skylight.

“Strickland,” I called.

There was no answer. It was really rather mysterious, and it seemed to me that Stroeve, standing just behind, was trembling in his shoes. For a moment I hesitated to strike a light. I dimly perceived a bed in the corner, and I wondered whether the light would disclose lying on it a dead body.

“Haven’t you got a match, you fool?”

Strickland’s voice, coming out of the darkness, harshly, made me start.

Stroeve cried out.

“Oh, my God, I thought you were dead.”

I struck a match, and looked about for a candle. I had a rapid glimpse of a tiny apartment, half room, half studio, in which was nothing but a bed, canvases with their faces to the wall, an easel, a table, and a chair. There was no carpet on the floor. There was no fireplace. On the table, crowded with paints, palette-knives, and litter of all kinds, was the end of a candle. I lit it. Strickland was lying in the bed, uncomfortably because it was too small for him, and he had put all his clothes over him for warmth. It was obvious at a glance that he was in a high fever. Stroeve, his voice cracking with emotion, went up to him.

“Oh, my poor friend, what is the matter with you? I had no idea you were ill. Why didn’t you let me know? You must know I’d have done anything in the world for you. Were you thinking of what I said? I didn’t mean it. I was wrong. It was stupid of me to take offence.”

“Go to hell,” said Strickland.

“Now, be reasonable. Let me make you comfortable. Haven’t you anyone to look after you?”

He looked round the squalid attic in dismay. He tried to arrange the bed-clothes. Strickland, breathing laboriously, kept an angry silence. He gave me a resentful glance. I stood quite quietly, looking at him.

“If you want to do something for me, you can get me some milk,” he said at last. “I haven’t been able to get out for two days.” There was an empty bottle by the side of the bed, which had contained milk, and in a piece of newspaper a few crumbs.

“What have you been having?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“For how long?” cried Stroeve. “Do you mean to say you’ve had nothing to eat or drink for two days? It’s horrible.”

“I’ve had water.”

His eyes dwelt for a moment on a large can within reach of an outstretched arm.

“I’ll go immediately,” said Stroeve. “Is there anything you fancy?”

I suggested that he should get a thermometer, and a few grapes, and some bread. Stroeve, glad to make himself useful, clattered down the stairs.

“Damned fool,” muttered Strickland.

I felt his pulse. It was beating quickly and feebly. I asked him one or two questions, but he would not answer, and when I pressed him he turned his face irritably to the wall. The only thing was to wait in silence. In ten minutes Stroeve, panting, came back. Besides what I had suggested, he brought candles, and meat-juice, and a spirit-lamp. He was a practical little fellow, and without delay set about making bread-and-milk. I took Strickland’s temperature. It was a hundred and four. He was obviously very ill.

Chapter XXV

Presently we left him. Dirk was going home to dinner, and I proposed to find a doctor and bring him to see Strickland; but when we got down into the street, fresh after the stuffy attic, the Dutchman begged me to go immediately to his studio. He had something in mind which he would not tell me, but he insisted that it was very necessary for me to accompany him. Since I did not think a doctor could at the moment do any more than we had done, I consented. We found Blanche Stroeve laying the table for dinner. Dirk went up to her, and took both her hands.

“Dear one, I want you to do something for me,” he said.

She looked at him with the grave cheerfulness which was one of her charms. His red face was shining with sweat, and he had a look of comic agitation, but there was in his round, surprised eyes an eager light.

“Strickland is very ill. He may be dying. He is alone in a filthy attic, and there is not a soul to look after him. I want you to let me bring him here.”

She withdrew her hands quickly, I had never seen her make so rapid a movement; and her cheeks flushed.

“Oh no.”

“Oh, my dear one, don’t refuse. I couldn’t bear to leave him where he is. I shouldn’t sleep a wink for thinking of him.”

“I have no objection to your nursing him.”

Her voice was cold and distant.

“But he’ll die.”

“Let him.”

Stroeve gave a little gasp. He wiped his face. He turned to me for support, but I did not know what to say.

“He’s a great artist.”

“What do I care? I hate him.”

“Oh, my love, my precious, you don’t mean that. I beseech you to let me bring him here. We can make him comfortable. Perhaps we can save him. He shall be no trouble to you. I will do everything. We’ll make him up a bed in the studio. We can’t let him die like a dog. It would be inhuman.”

“Why can’t he go to a hospital?”

“A hospital! He needs the care of loving hands. He must be treated with infinite tact.”

I was surprised to see how moved she was. She went on laying the table, but her hands trembled.

“I have no patience with you. Do you think if you were ill he would stir a finger to help you?”

“But what does that matter? I should have you to nurse me. It wouldn’t be necessary. And besides, I’m different; I’m not of any importance.”

“You have no more spirit than a mongrel cur. You lie down on the ground and ask people to trample on you.”

Stroeve gave a little laugh. He thought he understood the reason of his wife’s attitude.

“Oh, my poor dear, you’re thinking of that day he came here to look at my pictures. What does it matter if he didn’t think them any good? It was stupid of me to show them to him. I dare say they’re not very good.”

He looked round the studio ruefully. On the easel was a half-finished picture of a smiling Italian peasant, holding a bunch of grapes over the head of a dark-eyed girl.

“Even if he didn’t like them he should have been civil. He needn’t have insulted you. He showed that he despised you, and you lick his hand. Oh, I hate him.”

“Dear child, he has genius. You don’t think I believe that I have it. I wish I had; but I know it when I see it, and I honour it with all my heart. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s a great burden to its possessors. We should be very tolerant with them, and very patient.”

I stood apart, somewhat embarrassed by the domestic scene, and wondered why Stroeve had insisted on my coming with him. I saw that his wife was on the verge of tears.

“But it’s not only because he’s a genius that I ask you to let me bring him here; it’s because he’s a human being, and he is ill and poor.”

“I will never have him in my house — never.”

Stroeve turned to me.

“Tell her that it’s a matter of life and death. It’s impossible to leave him in that wretched hole.”

“It’s quite obvious that it would be much easier to nurse him here,” I said, “but of course it would be very inconvenient. I have an idea that someone will have to be with him day and night.”

“My love, it’s not you who would shirk a little trouble.”

“If he comes here, I shall go,” said Mrs. Stroeve violently.

“I don’t recognize you. You’re so good and kind.”

“Oh, for goodness sake, let me be. You drive me to distraction.”

Then at last the tears came. She sank into a chair, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook convulsively. In a moment Dirk was on his knees beside her, with his arms round her, kissing her, calling her all sorts of pet names, and the facile tears ran down his own cheeks. Presently she released herself and dried her eyes.

“Leave me alone,” she said, not unkindly; and then to me, trying to smile: “What must you think of me?”

Stroeve, looking at her with perplexity, hesitated. His forehead was all puckered, and his red mouth set in a pout. He reminded me oddly of an agitated guinea-pig.

“Then it’s No, darling?” he said at last.

She gave a gesture of lassitude. She was exhausted.

“The studio is yours. Everything belongs to you. If you want to bring him here, how can I prevent you?”

A sudden smile flashed across his round face.

“Then you consent? I knew you would. Oh, my precious.”

Suddenly she pulled herself together. She looked at him with haggard eyes. She clasped her hands over her heart as though its beating were intolerable.

“Oh, Dirk, I’ve never since we met asked you to do anything for me.”

“You know there’s nothing in the world that I wouldn’t do for you.”

“I beg you not to let Strickland come here. Anyone else you like. Bring a thief, a drunkard, any outcast off the streets, and I promise you I’ll do everything I can for them gladly. But I beseech you not to bring Strickland here.”

“But why?”

“I’m frightened of him. I don’t know why, but there’s something in him that terrifies me. He’ll do us some great harm. I know it. I feel it. If you bring him here it can only end badly.”

“But how unreasonable!”

“No, no. I know I’m right. Something terrible will happen to us.”

“Because we do a good action?”

She was panting now, and in her face was a terror which was inexplicable. I do not know what she thought. I felt that she was possessed by some shapeless dread which robbed her of all self-control. As a rule she was so calm; her agitation now was amazing. Stroeve looked at her for a while with puzzled consternation.

“You are my wife; you are dearer to me than anyone in the world. No one shall come here without your entire consent.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and I thought she was going to faint. I was a little impatient with her; I had not suspected that she was so neurotic a woman. Then I heard Stroeve’s voice again. It seemed to break oddly on the silence.

“Haven’t you been in bitter distress once when a helping hand was held out to you? You know how much it means. Couldn’t you like to do someone a good turn when you have the chance?”

The words were ordinary enough, and to my mind there was in them something so hortatory that I almost smiled. I was astonished at the effect they had on Blanche Stroeve. She started a little, and gave her husband a long look. His eyes were fixed on the ground. I did not know why he seemed embarrassed. A faint colour came into her cheeks, and then her face became white — more than white, ghastly; you felt that the blood had shrunk away from the whole surface of her body; and even her hands were pale. A shiver passed through her. The silence of the studio seemed to gather body, so that it became an almost palpable presence. I was bewildered.

“Bring Strickland here, Dirk. I’ll do my best for him.”

“My precious,” he smiled.

He wanted to take her in his arms, but she avoided him.

“Don’t be affectionate before strangers, Dirk,” she said. “It makes me feel such a fool.”

Her manner was quite normal again, and no one could have told that so shortly before she had been shaken by such a great emotion.

Chapter XXVI

Next day we moved Strickland. It needed a good deal of firmness and still more patience to induce him to come, but he was really too ill to offer any effective resistance to Stroeve’s entreaties and to my determination. We dressed him, while he feebly cursed us, got him downstairs, into a cab, and eventually to Stroeve’s studio. He was so exhausted by the time we arrived that he allowed us to put him to bed without a word. He was ill for six weeks. At one time it looked as though he could not live more than a few hours, and I am convinced that it was only through the Dutchman’s doggedness that he pulled through. I have never known a more difficult patient. It was not that he was exacting and querulous; on the contrary, he never complained, he asked for nothing, he was perfectly silent; but he seemed to resent the care that was taken of him; he received all inquiries about his feelings or his needs with a jibe, a sneer, or an oath. I found him detestable, and as soon as he was out of danger I had no hesitation in telling him so.

“Go to hell,” he answered briefly.

Dirk Stroeve, giving up his work entirely, nursed Strickland with tenderness and sympathy. He was dexterous to make him comfortable, and he exercised a cunning of which I should never have thought him capable to induce him to take the medicines prescribed by the doctor. Nothing was too much trouble for him. Though his means were adequate to the needs of himself and his wife, he certainly had no money to waste; but now he was wantonly extravagant in the purchase of delicacies, out of season and dear, which might tempt Strickland’s capricious appetite. I shall never forget the tactful patience with which he persuaded him to take nourishment. He was never put out by Strickland’s rudeness; if it was merely sullen, he appeared not to notice it; if it was aggressive, he only chuckled. When Strickland, recovering somewhat, was in a good humour and amused himself by laughing at him, he deliberately did absurd things to excite his ridicule. Then he would give me little happy glances, so that I might notice in how much better form the patient was. Stroeve was sublime.

But it was Blanche who most surprised me. She proved herself not only a capable, but a devoted nurse. There was nothing in her to remind you that she had so vehemently struggled against her husband’s wish to bring Strickland to the studio. She insisted on doing her share of the offices needful to the sick. She arranged his bed so that it was possible to change the sheet without disturbing him. She washed him. When I remarked on her competence, she told me with that pleasant little smile of hers that for a while she had worked in a hospital. She gave no sign that she hated Strickland so desperately. She did not speak to him much, but she was quick to forestall his wants. For a fortnight it was necessary that someone should stay with him all night, and she took turns at watching with her husband. I wondered what she thought during the long darkness as she sat by the bedside. Strickland was a weird figure as he lay there, thinner than ever, with his ragged red beard and his eyes staring feverishly into vacancy; his illness seemed to have made them larger, and they had an unnatural brightness.

“Does he ever talk to you in the night?” I asked her once.

“Never.”

“Do you dislike him as much as you did?”

“More, if anything.”

She looked at me with her calm gray eyes. Her expression was so placid, it was hard to believe that she was capable of the violent emotion I had witnessed.

“Has he ever thanked you for what you do for him?”

“No,” she smiled.

“He’s inhuman.”

“He’s abominable.”

Stroeve was, of course, delighted with her. He could not do enough to show his gratitude for the whole-hearted devotion with which she had accepted the burden he laid on her. But he was a little puzzled by the behaviour of Blanche and Strickland towards one another.

“Do you know, I’ve seen them sit there for hours together without saying a word?”

On one occasion, when Strickland was so much better that in a day or two he was to get up, I sat with them in the studio. Dirk and I were talking. Mrs. Stroeve sewed, and I thought I recognised the shirt she was mending as Strickland’s. He lay on his back; he did not speak. Once I saw that his eyes were fixed on Blanche Stroeve, and there was in them a curious irony. Feeling their gaze, she raised her own, and for a moment they stared at one another. I could not quite understand her expression. Her eyes had in them a strange perplexity, and perhaps — but why? — alarm. In a moment Strickland looked away and idly surveyed the ceiling, but she continued to stare at him, and now her look was quite inexplicable.

In a few days Strickland began to get up. He was nothing but skin and bone. His clothes hung upon him like rags on a scarecrow. With his untidy beard and long hair, his features, always a little larger than life, now emphasised by illness, he had an extraordinary aspect; but it was so odd that it was not quite ugly. There was something monumental in his ungainliness. I do not know how to express precisely the impression he made upon me. It was not exactly spirituality that was obvious, though the screen of the flesh seemed almost transparent, because there was in his face an outrageous sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as though his sensuality were curiously spiritual. There was in him something primitive. He seemed to partake of those obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in shapes part human and part beast, the satyr and the faun. I thought of Marsyas, whom the god flayed because he had dared to rival him in song. Strickland seemed to bear in his heart strange harmonies and unadventured patterns, and I foresaw for him an end of torture and despair. I had again the feeling that he was possessed of a devil; but you could not say that it was a devil of evil, for it was a primitive force that existed before good and ill.

He was still too weak to paint, and he sat in the studio, silent, occupied with God knows what dreams, or reading. The books he liked were queer; sometimes I would find him poring over the poems of Mallarme, and he read them as a child reads, forming the words with his lips, and I wondered what strange emotion he got from those subtle cadences and obscure phrases; and again I found him absorbed in the detective novels of Gaboriau. I amused myself by thinking that in his choice of books he showed pleasantly the irreconcilable sides of his fantastic nature. It was singular to notice that even in the weak state of his body he had no thought for its comfort. Stroeve liked his ease, and in his studio were a couple of heavily upholstered arm-chairs and a large divan. Strickland would not go near them, not from any affectation of stoicism, for I found him seated on a three-legged stool when I went into the studio one day and he was alone, but because he did not like them. For choice he sat on a kitchen chair without arms. It often exasperated me to see him. I never knew a man so entirely indifferent to his surroundings.

Chapter XXVII

Two or three weeks passed. One morning, having come to a pause in my work, I thought I would give myself a holiday, and I went to the Louvre. I wandered about looking at the pictures I knew so well, and let my fancy play idly with the emotions they suggested. I sauntered into the long gallery, and there suddenly saw Stroeve. I smiled, for his appearance, so rotund and yet so startled, could never fail to excite a smile, and then as I came nearer I noticed that he seemed singularly disconsolate. He looked woebegone and yet ridiculous, like a man who has fallen into the water with all his clothes on, and, being rescued from death, frightened still, feels that he only looks a fool. Turning round, he stared at me, but I perceived that he did not see me. His round blue eyes looked harassed behind his glasses.

“Stroeve,” I said.

He gave a little start, and then smiled, but his smile was rueful.

“Why are you idling in this disgraceful fashion?” I asked gaily.

“It’s a long time since I was at the Louvre. I thought I’d come and see if they had anything new.”

“But you told me you had to get a picture finished this week.”

“Strickland’s painting in my studio.”

“Well?”

“I suggested it myself. He’s not strong enough to go back to his own place yet. I thought we could both paint there. Lots of fellows in the Quarter share a studio. I thought it would be fun. I’ve always thought it would be jolly to have someone to talk to when one was tired of work.”

He said all this slowly, detaching statement from statement with a little awkward silence, and he kept his kind, foolish eyes fixed on mine. They were full of tears.

“I don’t think I understand,” I said.

“Strickland can’t work with anyone else in the studio.”

“Damn it all, it’s your studio. That’s his lookout.”

He looked at me pitifully. His lips were trembling.

“What happened?” I asked, rather sharply.

He hesitated and flushed. He glanced unhappily at one of the pictures on the wall.

“He wouldn’t let me go on painting. He told me to get out.”

“But why didn’t you tell him to go to hell?”

“He turned me out. I couldn’t very well struggle with him. He threw my hat after me, and locked the door.”

I was furious with Strickland, and was indignant with myself, because Dirk Stroeve cut such an absurd figure that I felt inclined to laugh.

“But what did your wife say?”

“She’d gone out to do the marketing.”

“Is he going to let her in?”

“I don’t know.”

I gazed at Stroeve with perplexity. He stood like a schoolboy with whom a master is finding fault.

“Shall I get rid of Strickland for you?” I asked.

He gave a little start, and his shining face grew very red.

“No. You’d better not do anything.”

He nodded to me and walked away. It was clear that for some reason he did not want to discuss the matter. I did not understand.

Chapter XXVIII

The explanation came a week later. It was about ten o’ clock at night; I had been dining by myself at a restaurant, and having returned to my small apartment, was sitting in my parlour, reading I heard the cracked tinkling of the bell, and, going into the corridor, opened the door. Stroeve stood before me.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

In the dimness of the landing I could not see him very well, but there was something in his voice that surprised me. I knew he was of abstemious habit or I should have thought he had been drinking. I led the way into my sitting room and asked him to sit down.

“Thank God I’ve found you,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” I asked in astonishment at his vehemence.

I was able now to see him well. As a rule he was neat in his person, but now his clothes were in disorder. He looked suddenly bedraggled. I was convinced he had been drinking, and I smiled. I was on the point of chaffing him on his state.

“I didn’t know where to go,” he burst out. “I came here earlier, but you weren’t in.”

“I dined late,” I said.

I changed my mind: it was not liquor that had driven him to this obvious desperation. His face, usually so rosy, was now strangely mottled. His hands trembled.

“Has anything happened?” I asked.

“My wife has left me.”

He could hardly get the words out. He gave a little gasp, and the tears began to trickle down his round cheeks. I did not know what to say. My first thought was that she had come to the end of her forbearance with his infatuation for Strickland, and, goaded by the latter’s cynical behaviour, had insisted that he should be turned out. I knew her capable of temper, for all the calmness of her manner; and if Stroeve still refused, she might easily have flung out of the studio with vows never to return. But the little man was so distressed that I could not smile.

“My dear fellow, don’t be unhappy. She’ll come back. You mustn’t take very seriously what women say when they’re in a passion.”

“You don’t understand. She’s in love with Strickland.”

“What!” I was startled at this, but the idea had no sooner taken possession of me than I saw it was absurd. “How can you be so silly? You don’t mean to say you’re jealous of Strickland?” I almost laughed. “You know very well that she can’t bear the sight of him.”

“You don’t understand,” he moaned.

“You’re an hysterical ass,” I said a little impatiently. “Let me give you a whisky-and-soda, and you’ll feel better.”

I supposed that for some reason or other — and Heaven knows what ingenuity men exercise to torment themselves — Dirk had got it into his head that his wife cared for Strickland, and with his genius for blundering he might quite well have offended her so that, to anger him, perhaps, she had taken pains to foster his suspicion.

“Look here,” I said, “let’s go back to your studio. If you’ve made a fool of yourself you must eat humble pie. Your wife doesn’t strike me as the sort of woman to bear malice.”

“How can I go back to the studio?” he said wearily. “They’re there. I’ve left it to them.”

“Then it’s not your wife who’s left you; it’s you who’ve left your wife.”

“For God’s sake don’t talk to me like that.”

Still I could not take him seriously. I did not for a moment believe what he had told me. But he was in very real distress.

“Well, you’ve come here to talk to me about it. You’d better tell me the whole story.”

“This afternoon I couldn’t stand it any more. I went to Strickland and told him I thought he was quite well enough to go back to his own place. I wanted the studio myself.”

“No one but Strickland would have needed telling,” I said. “What did he say?”

“He laughed a little; you know how he laughs, not as though he were amused, but as though you were a damned fool, and said he’d go at once. He began to put his things together. You remember I fetched from his room what I thought he needed, and he asked Blanche for a piece of paper and some string to make a parcel.”

Stroeve stopped, gasping, and I thought he was going to faint. This was not at all the story I had expected him to tell me.

“She was very pale, but she brought the paper and the string. He didn’t say anything. He made the parcel and he whistled a tune. He took no notice of either of us. His eyes had an ironic smile in them. My heart was like lead. I was afraid something was going to happen, and I wished I hadn’t spoken. He looked round for his hat. Then she spoke:

“‘I’m going with Strickland, Dirk,’ she said. ‘I can’t live with you any more.’

“I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. Strickland didn’t say anything. He went on whistling as though it had nothing to do with him.”

Stroeve stopped again and mopped his face. I kept quite still. I believed him now, and I was astounded. But all the same I could not understand.

Then he told me, in a trembling voice, with the tears pouring down his cheeks, how he had gone up to her, trying to take her in his arms, but she had drawn away and begged him not to touch her. He implored her not to leave him. He told her how passionately he loved her, and reminded her of all the devotion he had lavished upon her. He spoke to her of the happiness of their life. He was not angry with her. He did not reproach her.

“Please let me go quietly, Dirk,” she said at last. “Don’t you understand that I love Strickland? Where he goes I shall go.”

“But you must know that he’ll never make you happy. For your own sake don’t go. You don’t know what you’ve got to look forward to.”

“It’s your fault. You insisted on his coming here.”

He turned to Strickland.

“Have mercy on her,” he implored him. “You can’t let her do anything so mad.”

“She can do as she chooses,” said Strickland. “She’s not forced to come.”

“My choice is made,” she said, in a dull voice.

Strickland’s injurious calm robbed Stroeve of the rest of his self-control. Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor.

“You funny little man,” said Strickland.

Stroeve picked himself up. He noticed that his wife had remained perfectly still, and to be made ridiculous before her increased his humiliation. His spectacles had tumbled off in the struggle, and he could not immediately see them. She picked them up and silently handed them to him. He seemed suddenly to realise his unhappiness, and though he knew he was making himself still more absurd, he began to cry. He hid his face in his hands. The others watched him without a word. They did not move from where they stood.

“Oh, my dear,” he groaned at last, “how can you be so cruel?”

“I can’t help myself, Dirk,” she answered.

“I’ve worshipped you as no woman was ever worshipped before. If in anything I did I displeased you, why didn’t you tell me, and I’d have changed. I’ve done everything I could for you.”

She did not answer. Her face was set, and he saw that he was only boring her. She put on a coat and her hat. She moved towards the door, and he saw that in a moment she would be gone. He went up to her quickly and fell on his knees before her, seizing her hands: he abandoned all self-respect.

“Oh, don’t go, my darling. I can’t live without you; I shall kill myself. If I’ve done anything to offend you I beg you to forgive me. Give me another chance. I’ll try harder still to make you happy.”

“Get up, Dirk. You’re making yourself a perfect fool.”

He staggered to his feet, but still he would not let her go.

“Where are you going?” he said hastily. “You don’t know what Strickland’s place is like. You can’t live there. It would be awful.”

“If I don’t care, I don’t see why you should.”

“Stay a minute longer. I must speak. After all, you can’t grudge me that.”

“What is the good? I’ve made up my mind. Nothing that you can say will make me alter it.”

He gulped, and put his hand to his heart to ease its painful beating.

“I’m not going to ask you to change your mind, but I want you to listen to me for a minute. It’s the last thing I shall ever ask you. Don’t refuse me that.”

She paused, looking at him with those reflective eyes of hers, which now were so different to him. She came back into the studio and leaned against the table.

“Well?”

Stroeve made a great effort to collect himself.

“You must be a little reasonable. You can’t live on air, you know. Strickland hasn’t got a penny.”

“I know.”

“You’ll suffer the most awful privations. You know why he took so long to get well. He was half starved.”

“I can earn money for him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I shall find a way.”

A horrible thought passed through the Dutchman’s mind, and he shuddered.

“I think you must be mad. I don’t know what has come over you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Now may I go?”

“Wait one second longer.”

He looked round his studio wearily; he had loved it because her presence had made it gay and homelike; he shut his eyes for an instant; then he gave her a long look as though to impress on his mind the picture of her. He got up and took his hat.

“No; I’ll go.”

“You?”

She was startled. She did not know what he meant.

“I can’t bear to think of you living in that horrible, filthy attic. After all, this is your home just as much as mine. You’ll be comfortable here. You’ll be spared at least the worst privations.”

He went to the drawer in which he kept his money and took out several bank-notes.

“I would like to give you half what I’ve got here.”

He put them on the table. Neither Strickland nor his wife spoke.

Then he recollected something else.

“Will you pack up my clothes and leave them with the concierge? I’ll come and fetch them to-morrow.” He tried to smile. “Good-bye, my dear. I’m grateful for all the happiness you gave me in the past.”

He walked out and closed the door behind him. With my mind’s eye I saw Strickland throw his hat on a table, and, sitting down, begin to smoke a cigarette.

Chapter XXIX

I kept silence for a little while, thinking of what Stroeve had told me. I could not stomach his weakness, and he saw my disapproval. “You know as well as I do how Strickland lived,” he said tremulously. “I couldn’t let her live in those circumstances — I simply couldn’t.”

“That’s your business,” I answered.

“What would you have done?” he asked.

“She went with her eyes open. If she had to put up with certain inconveniences it was her own lookout.”

“Yes; but, you see, you don’t love her.”

“Do you love her still?”

“Oh, more than ever. Strickland isn’t the man to make a woman happy. It can’t last. I want her to know that I shall never fail her.”

“Does that mean that you’re prepared to take her back?”

“I shouldn’t hesitate. Why, she’ll want me more than ever then. When she’s alone and humiliated and broken it would be dreadful if she had nowhere to go.”

He seemed to bear no resentment. I suppose it was commonplace in me that I felt slightly outraged at his lack of spirit. Perhaps he guessed what was in my mind, for he said:

“I couldn’t expect her to love me as I loved her. I’m a buffoon. I’m not the sort of man that women love. I’ve always known that. I can’t blame her if she’s fallen in love with Strickland.”

“You certainly have less vanity than any man I’ve ever known,” I said.

“I love her so much better than myself. It seems to me that when vanity comes into love it can only be because really you love yourself best. After all, it constantly happens that a man when he’s married falls in love with somebody else; when he gets over it he returns to his wife, and she takes him back, and everyone thinks it very natural. Why should it be different with women?”

“I dare say that’s logical,” I smiled, “but most men are made differently, and they can’t.”

But while I talked to Stroeve I was puzzling over the suddenness of the whole affair. I could not imagine that he had had no warning. I remembered the curious look I had seen in Blanche Stroeve’s eyes; perhaps its explanation was that she was growing dimly conscious of a feeling in her heart that surprised and alarmed her.

“Did you have no suspicion before to-day that there was anything between them?” I asked.

He did not answer for a while. There was a pencil on the table, and unconsciously he drew a head on the blotting-paper.

“Please say so, if you hate my asking you questions,” I said.

“It eases me to talk. Oh, if you knew the frightful anguish in my heart.” He threw the pencil down. “Yes, I’ve known it for a fortnight. I knew it before she did.”

“Why on earth didn’t you send Strickland packing?”

“I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so improbable. She couldn’t bear the sight of him. It was more than improbable; it was incredible. I thought it was merely jealousy. You see, I’ve always been jealous, but I trained myself never to show it; I was jealous of every man she knew; I was jealous of you. I knew she didn’t love me as I loved her. That was only natural, wasn’t it? But she allowed me to love her, and that was enough to make me happy. I forced myself to go out for hours together in order to leave them by themselves; I wanted to punish myself for suspicions which were unworthy of me; and when I came back I found they didn’t want me — not Strickland, he didn’t care if I was there or not, but Blanche. She shuddered when I went to kiss her. When at last I was certain I didn’t know what to do; I knew they’d only laugh at me if I made a scene. I thought if I held my tongue and pretended not to see, everything would come right. I made up my mind to get him away quietly, without quarrelling. Oh, if you only knew what I’ve suffered!”

Then he told me again of his asking Strickland to go. He chose his moment carefully, and tried to make his request sound casual; but he could not master the trembling of his voice; and he felt himself that into words that he wished to seem jovial and friendly there crept the bitterness of his jealousy. He had not expected Strickland to take him up on the spot and make his preparations to go there and then; above all, he had not expected his wife’s decision to go with him. I saw that now he wished with all his heart that he had held his tongue. He preferred the anguish of jealousy to the anguish of separation.

“I wanted to kill him, and I only made a fool of myself.”

He was silent for a long time, and then he said what I knew was in his mind.

“If I’d only waited, perhaps it would have gone all right. I shouldn’t have been so impatient. Oh, poor child, what have I driven her to?”

I shrugged my shoulders, but did not speak. I had no sympathy for Blanche Stroeve, but knew that it would only pain poor Dirk if I told him exactly what I thought of her.

He had reached that stage of exhaustion when he could not stop talking. He went over again every word of the scene. Now something occurred to him that he had not told me before; now he discussed what he ought to have said instead of what he did say; then he lamented his blindness. He regretted that he had done this, and blamed himself that he had omitted the other. It grew later and later, and at last I was as tired as he.

“What are you going to do now?” I said finally.

“What can I do? I shall wait till she sends for me.”

“Why don’t you go away for a bit?”

“No, no; I must be at hand when she wants me.”

For the present he seemed quite lost. He had made no plans. When I suggested that he should go to bed he said he could not sleep; he wanted to go out and walk about the streets till day. He was evidently in no state to be left alone. I persuaded him to stay the night with me, and I put him into my own bed. I had a divan in my sitting-room, and could very well sleep on that. He was by now so worn out that he could not resist my firmness. I gave him a sufficient dose of veronal to insure his unconsciousness for several hours. I thought that was the best service I could render him.

Chapter XXX

But the bed I made up for myself was sufficiently uncomfortable to give me a wakeful night, and I thought a good deal of what the unlucky Dutchman had told me. I was not so much puzzled by Blanche Stroeve’s action, for I saw in that merely the result of a physical appeal. I do not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognises its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenceless against passion. I suspected that Blanche Stroeve’s violent dislike of Strickland had in it from the beginning a vague element of sexual attraction. Who am I that I should seek to unravel the mysterious intricacies of sex? Perhaps Stroeve’s passion excited without satisfying that part of her nature, and she hated Strickland because she felt in him the power to give her what she needed. I think she was quite sincere when she struggled against her husband’s desire to bring him into the studio; I think she was frightened of him, though she knew not why; and I remembered how she had foreseen disaster. I think in some curious way the horror which she felt for him was a transference of the horror which she felt for herself because he so strangely troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was aloofness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big and strong; he gave the impression of untamed passion; and perhaps she felt in him, too, that sinister element which had made me think of those wild beings of the world’s early history when matter, retaining its early connection with the earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own. If he affected her at all, it was inevitable that she should love or hate him. She hated him.

And then I fancy that the daily intimacy with the sick man moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him food, and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she wiped his sensual mouth and his red beard. She washed his limbs; they were covered with thick hair; and when she dried his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and sinewy. His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts they excited in her. He slept very quietly, without a movement, so that he might have been dead, and he was like some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase; and she wondered what fancies passed through his dreams. Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods of Greece with the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently, and silently he pursued, and when at last he seized her was it terror that thrilled her heart or was it ecstasy?

Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad. She was desire.

But perhaps this is very fanciful; and it may be that she was merely bored with her husband and went to Strickland out of a callous curiosity. She may have had no particular feeling for him, but succumbed to his wish from propinquity or idleness, to find then that she was powerless in a snare of her own contriving. How did I know what were the thoughts and emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?

But if one could be certain of nothing in dealing with creatures so incalculable as human beings, there were explanations of Blanche Stroeve’s behaviour which were at all events plausible. On the other hand, I did not understand Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of him. It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends’ confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another’s misery. That was in his character. He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could not understand.

I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure — if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence. These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland. Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is; he could never endure a foreign yoke. I believed him capable of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him constantly to he knew not what. If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love.

But I suppose that everyone’s conception of the passion is formed on his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with every different person. A man like Strickland would love in a manner peculiar to himself. It was vain to seek the analysis of his emotion.

Chapter XXXI

Next day, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve left me. I offered to fetch his things from the studio, but he insisted on going himself; I think he hoped they had not thought of getting them together, so that he would have an opportunity of seeing his wife again and perhaps inducing her to come back to him. But he found his traps waiting for him in the porter’s lodge, and the concierge told him that Blanche had gone out. I do not think he resisted the temptation of giving her an account of his troubles. I found that he was telling them to everyone he knew; he expected sympathy, but only excited ridicule.

He bore himself most unbecomingly. Knowing at what time his wife did her shopping, one day, unable any longer to bear not seeing her, he waylaid her in the street. She would not speak to him, but he insisted on speaking to her. He spluttered out words of apology for any wrong he had committed towards her; he told her he loved her devotedly and begged her to return to him. She would not answer; she walked hurriedly, with averted face. I imagined him with his fat little legs trying to keep up with her. Panting a little in his haste, he told her how miserable he was; he besought her to have mercy on him; he promised, if she would forgive him, to do everything she wanted. He offered to take her for a journey. He told her that Strickland would soon tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole sordid little scene I was outraged. He had shown neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted nothing that could make his wife despise him. There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation. Blanche Stroeve stopped suddenly, and as hard as she could slapped her husband’s face. She took advantage of his confusion to escape, and ran up the stairs to the studio. No word had passed her lips.

When he told me this he put his hand to his cheek as though he still felt the smart of the blow, and in his eyes was a pain that was heartrending and an amazement that was ludicrous. He looked like an overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so sorry for him, I could hardly help laughing.

Then he took to walking along the street which she must pass through to get to the shops, and he would stand at the corner, on the other side, as she went along. He dared not speak to her again, but sought to put into his round eyes the appeal that was in his heart. I suppose he had some idea that the sight of his misery would touch her. She never made the smallest sign that she saw him. She never even changed the hour of her errands or sought an alternative route. I have an idea that there was some cruelty in her indifference. Perhaps she got enjoyment out of the torture she inflicted. I wondered why she hated him so much.

I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit was exasperating.

“You’re doing no good at all by going on like this,” I said. “I think you’d have been wiser if you’d hit her over the head with a stick. She wouldn’t have despised you as she does now.”

I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often spoken to me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of Holland, where his parents still lived. They were poor people. His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the side of a sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the homely stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending their wares to the distant Indies, had lived in them calm and prosperous lives, and in their decent decay they kept still an aroma of their splendid past. You could wander along the canal till you came to broad green fields, with windmills here and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed lazily. I thought that among those surroundings, with their recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his unhappiness. But he would not go.

“I must be here when she needs me,” he repeated. “It would be dreadful if something terrible happened and I were not at hand.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I’m afraid.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object. He might have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin. He did nothing of the kind. He remained fat, and his round, red cheeks shone like ripe apples. He had great neatness of person, and he continued to wear his spruce black coat and his bowler hat, always a little too small for him, in a dapper, jaunty manner. He was getting something of a paunch, and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact when dealing with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own. What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe.

Chapter XXXII

I did not see Strickland for several weeks. I was disgusted with him, and if I had had an opportunity should have been glad to tell him so, but I saw no object in seeking him out for the purpose. I am a little shy of any assumption of moral indignation; there is always in it an element of self-satisfaction which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour. It requires a very lively passion to steel me to my own ridicule. There was a sardonic sincerity in Strickland which made me sensitive to anything that might suggest a pose.

But one evening when I was passing along the Avenue de Clichy in front of the cafe which Strickland frequented and which I now avoided, I ran straight into him. He was accompanied by Blanche Stroeve, and they were just going to Strickland’s favourite corner.

“Where the devil have you been all this time?” said he. “I thought you must be away.”

His cordiality was proof that he knew I had no wish to speak to him. He was not a man with whom it was worth while wasting politeness.

“No,” I said; “I haven’t been away.”

“Why haven’t you been here?”

“There are more cafes in Paris than one, at which to trifle away an idle hour.”

Blanche then held out her hand and bade me good-evening. I do not know why I had expected her to be somehow changed; she wore the same gray dress that she wore so often, neat and becoming, and her brow was as candid, her eyes as untroubled, as when I had been used to see her occupied with her household duties in the studio.

“Come and have a game of chess,” said Strickland.

I do not know why at the moment I could think of no excuse. I followed them rather sulkily to the table at which Strickland always sat, and he called for the board and the chessmen. They both took the situation so much as a matter of course that I felt it absurd to do otherwise. Mrs. Stroeve watched the game with inscrutable face. She was silent, but she had always been silent. I looked at her mouth for an expression that could give me a clue to what she felt; I watched her eyes for some tell-tale flash, some hint of dismay or bitterness; I scanned her brow for any passing line that might indicate a settling emotion. Her face was a mask that told nothing. Her hands lay on her lap motionless, one in the other loosely clasped. I knew from what I had heard that she was a woman of violent passions; and that injurious blow that she had given Dirk, the man who had loved her so devotedly, betrayed a sudden temper and a horrid cruelty. She had abandoned the safe shelter of her husband’s protection and the comfortable ease of a well-provided establishment for what she could not but see was an extreme hazard. It showed an eagerness for adventure, a readiness for the hand-to-mouth, which the care she took of her home and her love of good housewifery made not a little remarkable. She must be a woman of complicated character, and there was something dramatic in the contrast of that with her demure appearance.

I was excited by the encounter, and my fancy worked busily while I sought to concentrate myself on the game I was playing. I always tried my best to beat Strickland, because he was a player who despised the opponent he vanquished; his exultation in victory made defeat more difficult to bear. On the other hand, if he was beaten he took it with complete good-humour. He was a bad winner and a good loser. Those who think that a man betrays his character nowhere more clearly than when he is playing a game might on this draw subtle inferences.

When he had finished I called the waiter to pay for the drinks, and left them. The meeting had been devoid of incident. No word had been said to give me anything to think about, and any surmises I might make were unwarranted. I was intrigued. I could not tell how they were getting on. I would have given much to be a disembodied spirit so that I could see them in the privacy of the studio and hear what they talked about. I had not the smallest indication on which to let my imagination work.

Chapter XXXIII

Two or three days later Dirk Stroeve called on me.

“I hear you’ve seen Blanche,” he said.

“How on earth did you find out?”

“I was told by someone who saw you sitting with them. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought it would only pain you.”

“What do I care if it does? You must know that I want to hear the smallest thing about her.”

I waited for him to ask me questions.

“What does she look like?” he said.

“Absolutely unchanged.”

“Does she seem happy?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“How can I tell? We were in a cafe; we were playing chess; I had no opportunity to speak to her.”

“Oh, but couldn’t you tell by her face?”

I shook my head. I could only repeat that by no word, by no hinted gesture, had she given an indication of her feelings. He must know better than I how great were her powers of self-control. He clasped his hands emotionally.

“Oh, I’m so frightened. I know something is going to happen, something terrible, and I can do nothing to stop it.”

“What sort of thing?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he moaned, seizing his head with his hands. “I foresee some terrible catastrophe.”

Stroeve had always been excitable, but now he was beside himself; there was no reasoning with him. I thought it probable enough that Blanche Stroeve would not continue to find life with Strickland tolerable, but one of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly. When Blanche quarrelled with Strickland she had only to leave him, and her husband was waiting humbly to forgive and forget. I was not prepared to feel any great sympathy for her.

“You see, you don’t love her,” said Stroeve.

“After all, there’s nothing to prove that she is unhappy. For all we know they may have settled down into a most domestic couple.”

Stroeve gave me a look with his woeful eyes.

“Of course it doesn’t much matter to you, but to me it’s so serious, so intensely serious.”

I was sorry if I had seemed impatient or flippant.

“Will you do something for me?” asked Stroeve.

“Willingly.”

“Will you write to Blanche for me?”

“Why can’t you write yourself?”

“I’ve written over and over again. I didn’t expect her to answer. I don’t think she reads the letters.”

“You make no account of feminine curiosity. Do you think she could resist?”

“She could — mine.”

I looked at him quickly. He lowered his eyes. That answer of his seemed to me strangely humiliating. He was conscious that she regarded him with an indifference so profound that the sight of his handwriting would have not the slightest effect on her.

“Do you really believe that she’ll ever come back to you?” I asked.

“I want her to know that if the worst comes to the worst she can count on me. That’s what I want you to tell her.”

I took a sheet of paper.

“What is it exactly you wish me to say?”

This is what I wrote:

DEAR MRS. STROEVE, Dirk wishes me to tell you that if at any time you want him he will be grateful for the opportunity of being of service to you. He has no ill-feeling towards you on account of anything that has happened. His love for you is unaltered. You will always find him at the following address:

Chapter XXXIV

But though I was no less convinced than Stroeve that the connection between Strickland and Blanche would end disastrously, I did not expect the issue to take the tragic form it did. The summer came, breathless and sultry, and even at night there was no coolness to rest one’s jaded nerves. The sun-baked streets seemed to give back the heat that had beat down on them during the day, and the passers-by dragged their feet along them wearily. I had not seen Strickland for weeks. Occupied with other things, I had ceased to think of him and his affairs. Dirk, with his vain lamentations, had begun to bore me, and I avoided his society. It was a sordid business, and I was not inclined to trouble myself with it further.

One morning I was working. I sat in my Pyjamas. My thoughts wandered, and I thought of the sunny beaches of Brittany and the freshness of the sea. By my side was the empty bowl in which the concierge had brought me my cafe au lait and the fragment of croissant which I had not had appetite enough to eat. I heard the concierge in the next room emptying my bath. There was a tinkle at my bell, and I left her to open the door. In a moment I heard Stroeve’s voice asking if I was in. Without moving, I shouted to him to come. He entered the room quickly, and came up to the table at which I sat.

“She’s killed herself,” he said hoarsely.

“What do you mean?” I cried, startled.

He made movements with his lips as though he were speaking, but no sound issued from them. He gibbered like an idiot. My heart thumped against my ribs, and, I do not know why, I flew into a temper.

“For God’s sake, collect yourself, man,” I said. “What on earth are you talking about?”

He made despairing gestures with his hands, but still no words came from his mouth. He might have been struck dumb. I do not know what came over me; I took him by the shoulders and shook him. Looking back, I am vexed that I made such a fool of myself; I suppose the last restless nights had shaken my nerves more than I knew.

“Let me sit down,” he gasped at length.

I filled a glass with St. Galmier, and gave it to him to drink. I held it to his mouth as though he were a child. He gulped down a mouthful, and some of it was spilt on his shirt-front.

“Who’s killed herself?”

I do not know why I asked, for I knew whom he meant. He made an effort to collect himself.

“They had a row last night. He went away.”

“Is she dead?”

“No; they’ve taken her to the hospital.”

“Then what are you talking about?” I cried impatiently. “Why did you say she’d killed herself?”

“Don’t be cross with me. I can’t tell you anything if you talk to me like that.”

I clenched my hands, seeking to control my irritation. I attempted a smile.

“I’m sorry. Take your time. Don’t hurry, there’s a good fellow.”

His round blue eyes behind the spectacles were ghastly with terror. The magnifying-glasses he wore distorted them.

“When the concierge went up this morning to take a letter she could get no answer to her ring. She heard someone groaning. The door wasn’t locked, and she went in. Blanche was lying on the bed. She’d been frightfully sick. There was a bottle of oxalic acid on the table.”

Stroeve hid his face in his hands and swayed backwards and forwards, groaning.

“Was she conscious?”

“Yes. Oh, if you knew how she’s suffering! I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.”

His voice rose to a shriek.

“Damn it all, you haven’t got to bear it,” I cried impatiently. “She’s got to bear it.”

“How can you be so cruel?”

“What have you done?”

“They sent for a doctor and for me, and they told the police. I’d given the concierge twenty francs, and told her to send for me if anything happened.”

He paused a minute, and I saw that what he had to tell me was very hard to say.

“When I went she wouldn’t speak to me. She told them to send me away. I swore that I forgave her everything, but she wouldn’t listen. She tried to beat her head against the wall. The doctor told me that I mustn’t remain with her. She kept on saying, ‘Send him away!’ I went, and waited in the studio. And when the ambulance came and they put her on a stretcher, they made me go in the kitchen so that she shouldn’t know I was there.”

While I dressed — for Stroeve wished me to go at once with him to the hospital — he told me that he had arranged for his wife to have a private room, so that she might at least be spared the sordid promiscuity of a ward. On our way he explained to me why he desired my presence; if she still refused to see him, perhaps she would see me. He begged me to repeat to her that he loved her still; he would reproach her for nothing, but desired only to help her; he made no claim on her, and on her recovery would not seek to induce her to return to him; she would be perfectly free.

But when we arrived at the hospital, a gaunt, cheerless building, the mere sight of which was enough to make one’s heart sick, and after being directed from this official to that, up endless stairs and through long, bare corridors, found the doctor in charge of the case, we were told that the patient was too ill to see anyone that day. The doctor was a little bearded man in white, with an offhand manner. He evidently looked upon a case as a case, and anxious relatives as a nuisance which must be treated with firmness. Moreover, to him the affair was commonplace; it was just an hysterical woman who had quarrelled with her lover and taken poison; it was constantly happening. At first he thought that Dirk was the cause of the disaster, and he was needlessly brusque with him. When I explained that he was the husband, anxious to forgive, the doctor looked at him suddenly, with curious, searching eyes. I seemed to see in them a hint of mockery; it was true that Stroeve had the head of the husband who is deceived. The doctor faintly shrugged his shoulders.

“There is no immediate danger,” he said, in answer to our questioning. “One doesn’t know how much she took. It may be that she will get off with a fright. Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed. It’s generally a gesture to arouse pity or terror in their lover.”

There was in his tone a frigid contempt. It was obvious that to him Blanche Stroeve was only a unit to be added to the statistical list of attempted suicides in the city of Paris during the current year. He was busy, and could waste no more time on us. He told us that if we came at a certain hour next day, should Blanche be better, it might be possible for her husband to see her.

Chapter XXXV

I scarcely know how we got through that day. Stroeve could not bear to be alone, and I exhausted myself in efforts to distract him. I took him to the Louvre, and he pretended to look at pictures, but I saw that his thoughts were constantly with his wife. I forced him to eat, and after luncheon I induced him to lie down, but he could not sleep. He accepted willingly my invitation to remain for a few days in my apartment. I gave him books to read, but after a page or two he would put the book down and stare miserably into space. During the evening we played innumerable games of piquet, and bravely, not to disappoint my efforts, he tried to appear interested. Finally I gave him a draught, and he sank into uneasy slumber.

When we went again to the hospital we saw a nursing sister. She told us that Blanche seemed a little better, and she went in to ask if she would see her husband. We heard voices in the room in which she lay, and presently the nurse returned to say that the patient refused to see anyone. We had told her that if she refused to see Dirk the nurse was to ask if she would see me, but this she refused also. Dirk’s lips trembled.

“I dare not insist,” said the nurse. “She is too ill. Perhaps in a day or two she may change her mind.”

“Is there anyone else she wants to see?” asked Dirk, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

“She says she only wants to be left in peace.”

Dirk’s hands moved strangely, as though they had nothing to do with his body, with a movement of their own.

“Will you tell her that if there is anyone else she wishes to see I will bring him? I only want her to be happy.”

The nurse looked at him with her calm, kind eyes, which had seen all the horror and pain of the world, and yet, filled with the vision of a world without sin, remained serene.

“I will tell her when she is a little calmer.”

Dirk, filled with compassion, begged her to take the message at once.

“It may cure her. I beseech you to ask her now.”

With a faint smile of pity, the nurse went back into the room. We heard her low voice, and then, in a voice I did not recognise the answer:

“No. No. No.”

The nurse came out again and shook her head.

“Was that she who spoke then?” I asked. “Her voice sounded so strange.”

“It appears that her vocal cords have been burnt by the acid.”

Dirk gave a low cry of distress. I asked him to go on and wait for me at the entrance, for I wanted to say something to the nurse. He did not ask what it was, but went silently. He seemed to have lost all power of will; he was like an obedient child.

“Has she told you why she did it?” I asked.

“No. She won’t speak. She lies on her back quite quietly. She doesn’t move for hours at a time. But she cries always. Her pillow is all wet. She’s too weak to use a handkerchief, and the tears just run down her face.”

It gave me a sudden wrench of the heart-strings. I could have killed Strickland then, and I knew that my voice was trembling when I bade the nurse good-bye.

I found Dirk waiting for me on the steps. He seemed to see nothing, and did not notice that I had joined him till I touched him on the arm. We walked along in silence. I tried to imagine what had happened to drive the poor creature to that dreadful step. I presumed that Strickland knew what had happened, for someone must have been to see him from the police, and he must have made his statement. I did not know where he was. I supposed he had gone back to the shabby attic which served him as a studio. It was curious that she should not wish to see him. Perhaps she refused to have him sent for because she knew he would refuse to come. I wondered what an abyss of cruelty she must have looked into that in horror she refused to live.

Chapter XXXVI

The next week was dreadful. Stroeve went twice a day to the hospital to enquire after his wife, who still declined to see him; and came away at first relieved and hopeful because he was told that she seemed to be growing better, and then in despair because, the complication which the doctor had feared having ensued, recovery was impossible. The nurse was pitiful to his distress, but she had little to say that could console him. The poor woman lay quite still, refusing to speak, with her eyes intent, as though she watched for the coming of death. It could now be only the question of a day or two; and when, late one evening, Stroeve came to see me I knew it was to tell me she was dead. He was absolutely exhausted. His volubility had left him at last, and he sank down wearily on my sofa. I felt that no words of condolence availed, and I let him lie there quietly. I feared he would think it heartless if I read, so I sat by the window, smoking a pipe, till he felt inclined to speak.

“You’ve been very kind to me,” he said at last. “Everyone’s been very kind.”

“Nonsense,” I said, a little embarrassed.

“At the hospital they told me I might wait. They gave me a chair, and I sat outside the door. When she became unconscious they said I might go in. Her mouth and chin were all burnt by the acid. It was awful to see her lovely skin all wounded. She died very peacefully, so that I didn’t know she was dead till the sister told me.”

He was too tired to weep. He lay on his back limply, as though all the strength had gone out of his limbs, and presently I saw that he had fallen asleep. It was the first natural sleep he had had for a week. Nature, sometimes so cruel, is sometimes merciful. I covered him and turned down the light. In the morning when I awoke he was still asleep. He had not moved. His gold-rimmed spectacles were still on his nose.

Chapter XXXVII

The circumstances of Blanche Stroeve’s death necessitated all manner of dreadful formalities, but at last we were allowed to bury her. Dirk and I alone followed the hearse to the cemetery. We went at a foot-pace, but on the way back we trotted, and there was something to my mind singularly horrible in the way the driver of the hearse whipped up his horses. It seemed to dismiss the dead with a shrug of the shoulders. Now and then I caught sight of the swaying hearse in front of us, and our own driver urged his pair so that we might not remain behind. I felt in myself, too, the desire to get the whole thing out of my mind. I was beginning to be bored with a tragedy that did not really concern me, and pretending to myself that I spoke in order to distract Stroeve, I turned with relief to other subjects.

“Don’t you think you’d better go away for a bit?” I said. “There can be no object in your staying in Paris now.”

He did not answer, but I went on ruthlessly:

“Have you made any plans for the immediate future?”

“No.”

“You must try and gather together the threads again. Why don’t you go down to Italy and start working?”

Again he made no reply, but the driver of our carriage came to my rescue. Slackening his pace for a moment, he leaned over and spoke. I could not hear what he said, so I put my head out of the window. He wanted to know where we wished to be set down. I told him to wait a minute.

“You’d better come and have lunch with me,” I said to Dirk. “I’ll tell him to drop us in the Place Pigalle.”

“I’d rather not. I want to go to the studio.”

I hesitated a moment.

“Would you like me to come with you?” I asked then.

“No; I should prefer to be alone.”

“All right.”

I gave the driver the necessary direction, and in renewed silence we drove on. Dirk had not been to the studio since the wretched morning on which they had taken Blanche to the hospital. I was glad he did not want me to accompany him, and when I left him at the door I walked away with relief. I took a new pleasure in the streets of Paris, and I looked with smiling eyes at the people who hurried to and fro. The day was fine and sunny, and I felt in myself a more acute delight in life. I could not help it; I put Stroeve and his sorrows out of my mind. I wanted to enjoy.

Chapter XXXVIII

I did not see him again for nearly a week. Then he fetched me soon after seven one evening and took me out to dinner. He was dressed in the deepest mourning, and on his bowler was a broad black band. He had even a black border to his handkerchief. His garb of woe suggested that he had lost in one catastrophe every relation he had in the world, even to cousins by marriage twice removed. His plumpness and his red, fat cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous. It was cruel that his extreme unhappiness should have in it something of buffoonery.

He told me he had made up his mind to go away, though not to Italy, as I had suggested, but to Holland.

“I’m starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we shall ever meet.”

I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly.

“I haven’t been home for five years. I think I’d forgotten it all; I seemed to have come so far away from my father’s house that I was shy at the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel it’s my only refuge.”

He was sore and bruised, and his thoughts went back to the tenderness of his mother’s love. The ridicule he had endured for years seemed now to weigh him down, and the final blow of Blanche’s treachery had robbed him of the resiliency which had made him take it so gaily. He could no longer laugh with those who laughed at him. He was an outcast. He told me of his childhood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother’s passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean brightness. Everything was always in its place, and no where could you see a speck of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her. I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks like apples, toiling away from morning to night, through the long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father was a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime, silent and upright; in the evening he read the paper aloud, while his wife and daughter (now married to the captain of a fishing smack), unwilling to lose a moment, bent over their sewing. Nothing ever happened in that little town, left behind by the advance of civilisation, and one year followed the next till death came, like a friend, to give rest to those who had laboured so diligently.

“My father wished me to become a carpenter like himself. For five generations we’ve carried on the same trade, from father to son. Perhaps that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your father’s steps, and look neither to the right nor to the left. When I was a little boy I said I would marry the daughter of the harness-maker who lived next door. She was a little girl with blue eyes and a flaxen pigtail. She would have kept my house like a new pin, and I should have had a son to carry on the business after me.”

Stroeve sighed a little and was silent. His thoughts dwelt among pictures of what might have been, and the safety of the life he had refused filled him with longing.

“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”

To me it was his broken spirit that expressed itself, and I rebelled against his renunciation. But I kept my own counsel.

“What made you think of being a painter?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It happened that I had a knack for drawing. I got prizes for it at school. My poor mother was very proud of my gift, and she gave me a box of water-colours as a present. She showed my sketches to the pastor and the doctor and the judge. And they sent me to Amsterdam to try for a scholarship, and I won it. Poor soul, she was so proud; and though it nearly broke her heart to part from me, she smiled, and would not show me her grief. She was pleased that her son should be an artist. They pinched and saved so that I should have enough to live on, and when my first picture was exhibited they came to Amsterdam to see it, my father and mother and my sister, and my mother cried when she looked at it.” His kind eyes glistened. “And now on every wall of the old house there is one of my pictures in a beautiful gold frame.”

He glowed with happy pride. I thought of those cold scenes of his, with their picturesque peasants and cypresses and olive-trees. They must look queer in their garish frames on the walls of the peasant house.

“The dear soul thought she was doing a wonderful thing for me when she made me an artist, but perhaps, after all, it would have been better for me if my father’s will had prevailed and I were now but an honest carpenter.”

“Now that you know what art can offer, would you change your life? Would you have missed all the delight it has given you?”

“Art is the greatest thing in the world,” he answered, after a pause.

He looked at me for a minute reflectively; he seemed to hesitate; then he said:

“Did you know that I had been to see Strickland?”

“You?”

I was astonished. I should have thought he could not bear to set eyes on him. Stroeve smiled faintly.

“You know already that I have no proper pride.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He told me a singular story.

Chapter XXXIX

When I left him, after we had buried poor Blanche, Stroeve walked into the house with a heavy heart. Something impelled him to go to the studio, some obscure desire for self-torture, and yet he dreaded the anguish that he foresaw. He dragged himself up the stairs; his feet seemed unwilling to carry him; and outside the door he lingered for a long time, trying to summon up courage to go in. He felt horribly sick. He had an impulse to run down the stairs after me and beg me to go in with him; he had a feeling that there was somebody in the studio. He remembered how often he had waited for a minute or two on the landing to get his breath after the ascent, and how absurdly his impatience to see Blanche had taken it away again. To see her was a delight that never staled, and even though he had not been out an hour he was as excited at the prospect as if they had been parted for a month. Suddenly he could not believe that she was dead. What had happened could only be a dream, a frightful dream; and when he turned the key and opened the door, he would see her bending slightly over the table in the gracious attitude of the woman in Chardin’s Benedicite, which always seemed to him so exquisite. Hurriedly he took the key out of his pocket, opened, and walked in.

The apartment had no look of desertion. His wife’s tidiness was one of the traits which had so much pleased him; his own upbringing had given him a tender sympathy for the delight in orderliness; and when he had seen her instinctive desire to put each thing in its appointed place it had given him a little warm feeling in his heart. The bedroom looked as though she had just left it: the brushes were neatly placed on the toilet-table, one on each side of the comb; someone had smoothed down the bed on which she had spent her last night in the studio; and her nightdress in a little case lay on the pillow. It was impossible to believe that she would never come into that room again.

But he felt thirsty, and went into the kitchen to get himself some water. Here, too, was order. On a rack were the plates that she had used for dinner on the night of her quarrel with Strickland, and they had been carefully washed. The knives and forks were put away in a drawer. Under a cover were the remains of a piece of cheese, and in a tin box was a crust of bread. She had done her marketing from day to day, buying only what was strictly needful, so that nothing was left over from one day to the next. Stroeve knew from the enquiries made by the police that Strickland had walked out of the house immediately after dinner, and the fact that Blanche had washed up the things as usual gave him a little thrill of horror. Her methodicalness made her suicide more deliberate. Her self-possession was frightening. A sudden pang seized him, and his knees felt so weak that he almost fell. He went back into the bedroom and threw himself on the bed. He cried out her name.

“Blanche. Blanche.”

The thought of her suffering was intolerable. He had a sudden vision of her standing in the kitchen — it was hardly larger than a cupboard — washing the plates and glasses, the forks and spoons, giving the knives a rapid polish on the knife-board; and then putting everything away, giving the sink a scrub, and hanging the dish-cloth up to dry — it was there still, a gray torn rag; then looking round to see that everything was clean and nice. He saw her roll down her sleeves and remove her apron — the apron hung on a peg behind the door — and take the bottle of oxalic acid and go with it into the bedroom.

The agony of it drove him up from the bed and out of the room. He went into the studio. It was dark, for the curtains had been drawn over the great window, and he pulled them quickly back; but a sob broke from him as with a rapid glance he took in the place where he had been so happy. Nothing was changed here, either. Strickland was indifferent to his surroundings, and he had lived in the other’s studio without thinking of altering a thing. It was deliberately artistic. It represented Stroeve’s idea of the proper environment for an artist. There were bits of old brocade on the walls, and the piano was covered with a piece of silk, beautiful and tarnished; in one corner was a copy of the Venus of Milo, and in another of the Venus of the Medici. Here and there was an Italian cabinet surmounted with Delft, and here and there a bas-relief. In a handsome gold frame was a copy of Velasquez’ Innocent X., that Stroeve had made in Rome, and placed so as to make the most of their decorative effect were a number of Stroeve’s pictures, all in splendid frames. Stroeve had always been very proud of his taste. He had never lost his appreciation for the romantic atmosphere of a studio, and though now the sight of it was like a stab in his heart, without thinking what he was at, he changed slightly the position of a Louis XV. table which was one of his treasures. Suddenly he caught sight of a canvas with its face to the wall. It was a much larger one than he himself was in the habit of using, and he wondered what it did there. He went over to it and leaned it towards him so that he could see the painting. It was a nude. His heart began to beat quickly, for he guessed at once that it was one of Strickland’s pictures. He flung it back against the wall angrily — what did he mean by leaving it there? — but his movement caused it to fall, face downwards, on the ground. No mater whose the picture, he could not leave it there in the dust, and he raised it; but then curiosity got the better of him. He thought he would like to have a proper look at it, so he brought it along and set it on the easel. Then he stood back in order to see it at his ease.

He gave a gasp. It was the picture of a woman lying on a sofa, with one arm beneath her head and the other along her body; one knee was raised, and the other leg was stretched out. The pose was classic. Stroeve’s head swam. It was Blanche. Grief and jealousy and rage seized him, and he cried out hoarsely; he was inarticulate; he clenched his fists and raised them threateningly at an invisible enemy. He screamed at the top of his voice. He was beside himself. He could not bear it. That was too much. He looked round wildly for some instrument; he wanted to hack the picture to pieces; it should not exist another minute. He could see nothing that would serve his purpose; he rummaged about his painting things; somehow he could not find a thing; he was frantic. At last he came upon what he sought, a large scraper, and he pounced on it with a cry of triumph. He seized it as though it were a dagger, and ran to the picture.

As Stroeve told me this he became as excited as when the incident occurred, and he took hold of a dinner-knife on the table between us, and brandished it. He lifted his arm as though to strike, and then, opening his hand, let it fall with a clatter to the ground. He looked at me with a tremulous smile. He did not speak.

“Fire away,” I said.

“I don’t know what happened to me. I was just going to make a great hole in the picture, I had my arm all ready for the blow, when suddenly I seemed to see it.”

“See what?”

“The picture. It was a work of art. I couldn’t touch it. I was afraid.”

Stroeve was silent again, and he stared at me with his mouth open and his round blue eyes starting out of his head.

“It was a great, a wonderful picture. I was seized with awe. I had nearly committed a dreadful crime. I moved a little to see it better, and my foot knocked against the scraper. I shuddered.”

I really felt something of the emotion that had caught him. I was strangely impressed. It was as though I were suddenly transported into a world in which the values were changed. I stood by, at a loss, like a stranger in a land where the reactions of man to familiar things are all different from those he has known. Stroeve tried to talk to me about the picture, but he was incoherent, and I had to guess at what he meant. Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him. He had found, not himself, as the phrase goes, but a new soul with unsuspected powers. It was not only the bold simplification of the drawing which showed so rich and so singular a personality; it was not only the painting, though the flesh was painted with a passionate sensuality which had in it something miraculous; it was not only the solidity, so that you felt extraordinarily the weight of the body; there was also a spirituality, troubling and new, which led the imagination along unsuspected ways, and suggested dim empty spaces, lit only by the eternal stars, where the soul, all naked, adventured fearful to the discovery of new mysteries.

If I am rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical. (Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and he did not know how to put it into common terms. He was like the mystic seeking to describe the ineffable. But one fact he made clear to me; people talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it. The false emphasis with which they try to deck their worthless thoughts blunts their susceptibilities. Like the charlatan who counterfeits a spiritual force he has sometimes felt, they lose the power they have abused. But Stroeve, the unconquerable buffoon, had a love and an understanding of beauty which were as honest and sincere as was his own sincere and honest soul. It meant to him what God means to the believer, and when he saw it he was afraid.

“What did you say to Strickland when you saw him?”

“I asked him to come with me to Holland.”

I was dumbfounded. I could only look at Stroeve in stupid amazement.

“We both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother’s house. I think the company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good. I think he might have learnt from them something that would be very useful to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He smiled a little. I suppose he thought me very silly. He said he had other fish to fry.”

I could have wished that Strickland had used some other phrase to indicate his refusal.

“He gave me the picture of Blanche.”

I wondered why Strickland had done that. But I made no remark, and for some time we kept silence.

“What have you done with all your things?” I said at last.

“I got a Jew in, and he gave me a round sum for the lot. I’m taking my pictures home with me. Beside them I own nothing in the world now but a box of clothes and a few books.”

“I’m glad you’re going home,” I said.

I felt that his chance was to put all the past behind him. I hoped that the grief which now seemed intolerable would be softened by the lapse of time, and a merciful forgetfulness would help him to take up once more the burden of life. He was young still, and in a few years he would look back on all his misery with a sadness in which there would be something not unpleasurable. Sooner or later he would marry some honest soul in Holland, and I felt sure he would be happy. I smiled at the thought of the vast number of bad pictures he would paint before he died.

Next day I saw him off for Amsterdam.

Chapter XL

For the next month, occupied with my own affairs, I saw no one connected with this lamentable business, and my mind ceased to be occupied with it. But one day, when I was walking along, bent on some errand, I passed Charles Strickland. The sight of him brought back to me all the horror which I was not unwilling to forget, and I felt in me a sudden repulsion for the cause of it. Nodding, for it would have been childish to cut him, I walked on quickly; but in a minute I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“You’re in a great hurry,” he said cordially.

It was characteristic of him to display geniality with anyone who showed a disinclination to meet him, and the coolness of my greeting can have left him in little doubt of that.

“I am,” I answered briefly.

“I’ll walk along with you,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“For the pleasure of your society.”

I did not answer, and he walked by my side silently. We continued thus for perhaps a quarter of a mile. I began to feel a little ridiculous. At last we passed a stationer’s, and it occurred to me that I might as well buy some paper. It would be an excuse to be rid of him.

“I’m going in here,” I said. “Good-bye.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

I shrugged my shoulders, and went into the shop. I reflected that French paper was bad, and that, foiled of my purpose, I need not burden myself with a purchase that I did not need. I asked for something I knew could not be provided, and in a minute came out into the street.

“Did you get what you wanted?” he asked.

“No.”

We walked on in silence, and then came to a place where several streets met. I stopped at the curb.

“Which way do you go?” I enquired.

“Your way,” he smiled.

“I’m going home.”

“I’ll come along with you and smoke a pipe.”

“You might wait for an invitation,” I retorted frigidly.

“I would if I thought there was any chance of getting one.”

“Do you see that wall in front of you?” I said, pointing.

“Yes.”

“In that case I should have thought you could see also that I don’t want your company.”

“I vaguely suspected it, I confess.”

I could not help a chuckle. It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh. But I pulled myself together.

“I think you’re detestable. You’re the most loathsome beast that it’s ever been my misfortune to meet. Why do you seek the society of someone who hates and despises you?”

“My dear fellow, what the hell do you suppose I care what you think of me?”

“Damn it all,” I said, more violently because I had an inkling my motive was none too creditable, “I don’t want to know you.”

“Are you afraid I shall corrupt you?”

His tone made me feel not a little ridiculous. I knew that he was looking at me sideways, with a sardonic smile.

“I suppose you are hard up,” I remarked insolently.

“I should be a damned fool if I thought I had any chance of borrowing money from you.”

“You’ve come down in the world if you can bring yourself to flatter.”

He grinned.

“You’ll never really dislike me so long as I give you the opportunity to get off a good thing now and then.”

I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from laughing. What he said had a hateful truth in it, and another defect of my character is that I enjoy the company of those, however depraved, who can give me a Roland for my Oliver. I began to feel that my abhorrence for Strickland could only be sustained by an effort on my part. I recognised my moral weakness, but saw that my disapprobation had in it already something of a pose; and I knew that if I felt it, his own keen instinct had discovered it, too. He was certainly laughing at me up his sleeve. I left him the last word, and sought refuge in a shrug of the shoulders and taciturnity.

Chapter XLI

We arrived at the house in which I lived. I would not ask him to come in with me, but walked up the stairs without a word. He followed me, and entered the apartment on my heels. He had not been in it before, but he never gave a glance at the room I had been at pains to make pleasing to the eye. There was a tin of tobacco on the table, and, taking out his pipe, he filled it. He sat down on the only chair that had no arms and tilted himself on the back legs.

“If you’re going to make yourself at home, why don’t you sit in an arm-chair?” I asked irritably.

“Why are you concerned about my comfort?”

“I’m not,” I retorted, “but only about my own. It makes me uncomfortable to see someone sit on an uncomfortable chair.”

He chuckled, but did not move. He smoked on in silence, taking no further notice of me, and apparently was absorbed in thought. I wondered why he had come.

Until long habit has blunted the sensibility, there is something disconcerting to the writer in the instinct which causes him to take an interest in the singularities of human nature so absorbing that his moral sense is powerless against it. He recognises in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him; but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons. The character of a scoundrel, logical and complete, has a fascination for his creator which is an outrage to law and order. I expect that Shakespeare devised Iago with a gusto which he never knew when, weaving moonbeams with his fancy, he imagined Desdemona. It may be that in his rogues the writer gratifies instincts deep-rooted in him, which the manners and customs of a civilised world have forced back to the mysterious recesses of the subconscious. In giving to the character of his invention flesh and bones he is giving life to that part of himself which finds no other means of expression. His satisfaction is a sense of liberation.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

There was in my soul a perfectly genuine horror of Strickland, and side by side with it a cold curiosity to discover his motives. I was puzzled by him, and I was eager to see how he regarded the tragedy he had caused in the lives of people who had used him with so much kindness. I applied the scalpel boldly.

“Stroeve told me that picture you painted of his wife was the best thing you’ve ever done.”

Strickland took his pipe out of his mouth, and a smile lit up his eyes.

“It was great fun to do.”

“Why did you give it him?”

“I’d finished it. It wasn’t any good to me.”

“Do you know that Stroeve nearly destroyed it?”

“It wasn’t altogether satisfactory.”

He was quiet for a moment or two, then he took his pipe out of his mouth again, and chuckled.

“Do you know that the little man came to see me?”

“Weren’t you rather touched by what he had to say?”

“No; I thought it damned silly and sentimental.”

“I suppose it escaped your memory that you’d ruined his life?” I remarked.

He rubbed his bearded chin reflectively.

“He’s a very bad painter.”

“But a very good man.”

“And an excellent cook,” Strickland added derisively.

His callousness was inhuman, and in my indignation I was not inclined to mince my words.

“As a mere matter of curiosity I wish you’d tell me, have you felt the smallest twinge of remorse for Blanche Stroeve’s death?”

I watched his face for some change of expression, but it remained impassive.

“Why should I?” he asked.

“Let me put the facts before you. You were dying, and Dirk Stroeve took you into his own house. He nursed you like a mother. He sacrificed his time and his comfort and his money for you. He snatched you from the jaws of death.”

Strickland shrugged his shoulders.

“The absurd little man enjoys doing things for other people. That’s his life.”

“Granting that you owed him no gratitude, were you obliged to go out of your way to take his wife from him? Until you came on the scene they were happy. Why couldn’t you leave them alone?”

“What makes you think they were happy?”

“It was evident.”

“You are a discerning fellow. Do you think she could ever have forgiven him for what he did for her?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Don’t you know why he married her?”

I shook my head.

“She was a governess in the family of some Roman prince, and the son of the house seduced her. She thought he was going to marry her. They turned her out into the street neck and crop. She was going to have a baby, and she tried to commit suicide. Stroeve found her and married her.”

“It was just like him. I never knew anyone with so compassionate a heart.”

I had often wondered why that ill-assorted pair had married, but just that explanation had never occurred to me. That was perhaps the cause of the peculiar quality of Dirk’s love for his wife. I had noticed in it something more than passion. I remembered also how I had always fancied that her reserve concealed I knew not what; but now I saw in it more than the desire to hide a shameful secret. Her tranquillity was like the sullen calm that broods over an island which has been swept by a hurricane. Her cheerfulness was the cheerfulness of despair. Strickland interrupted my reflections with an observation the profound cynicism of which startled me.

“A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,” he said, “but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.”

“It must be reassuring to you to know that you certainly run no risk of incurring the resentment of the women you come in contact with,” I retorted.

A slight smile broke on his lips.

“You are always prepared to sacrifice your principles for a repartee,” he answered.

“What happened to the child?”

“Oh, it was still-born, three or four months after they were married.”

Then I came to the question which had seemed to me most puzzling.

“Will you tell me why you bothered about Blanche Stroeve at all?”

He did not answer for so long that I nearly repeated it.

“How do I know?” he said at last. “She couldn’t bear the sight of me. It amused me.”

“I see.”

He gave a sudden flash of anger.

“Damn it all, I wanted her.”

But he recovered his temper immediately, and looked at me with a smile.

“At first she was horrified.”

“Did you tell her?”

“There wasn’t any need. She knew. I never said a word. She was frightened. At last I took her.”

I do not know what there was in the way he told me this that extraordinarily suggested the violence of his desire. It was disconcerting and rather horrible. His life was strangely divorced from material things, and it was as though his body at times wreaked a fearful revenge on his spirit. The satyr in him suddenly took possession, and he was powerless in the grip of an instinct which had all the strength of the primitive forces of nature. It was an obsession so complete that there was no room in his soul for prudence or gratitude.

“But why did you want to take her away with you?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” he answered, frowning. “When she said she was coming I was nearly as surprised as Stroeve. I told her that when I’d had enough of her she’d have to go, and she said she’d risk that.” He paused a little. “She had a wonderful body, and I wanted to paint a nude. When I’d finished my picture I took no more interest in her.”

“And she loved you with all her heart.”

He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room.

“I don’t want love. I haven’t time for it. It’s weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I’m ready for other things. I can’t overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part. I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions.”

I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time. He spoke with a passion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases.

“You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves,” I said.

“It just happens that I am a completely normal man.”

I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting coherently.

“When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.”

I was silent for a while.

“What did you expect her to do when you left her?”

“She could have gone back to Stroeve,” he said irritably. “He was ready to take her.”

“You’re inhuman,” I answered. “It’s as useless to talk to you about these things as to describe colours to a man who was born blind.”

He stopped in front of my chair, and stood looking down at me with an expression in which I read a contemptuous amazement.

“Do you really care a twopenny damn if Blanche Stroeve is alive or dead?”

I thought over his question, for I wanted to answer it truthfully, at all events to my soul.

“It may be a lack of sympathy in myself if it does not make any great difference to me that she is dead. Life had a great deal to offer her. I think it’s terrible that she should have been deprived of it in that cruel way, and I am ashamed because I do not really care.”

“You have not the courage of your convictions. Life has no value. Blanche Stroeve didn’t commit suicide because I left her, but because she was a foolish and unbalanced woman. But we’ve talked about her quite enough; she was an entirely unimportant person. Come, and I’ll show you my pictures.”

He spoke as though I were a child that needed to be distracted. I was sore, but not with him so much as with myself. I thought of the happy life that pair had led in the cosy studio in Montmartre, Stroeve and his wife, their simplicity, kindness, and hospitality; it seemed to me cruel that it should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless chance; but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it made no great difference. The world went on, and no one was a penny the worse for all that wretchedness. I had an idea that Dirk, a man of greater emotional reactions than depth of feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche’s life, begun with who knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as well have never been lived. It all seemed useless and inane.

Strickland had found his hat, and stood looking at me.

“Are you coming?”

“Why do you seek my acquaintance?” I asked him. “You know that I hate and despise you.”

He chuckled good-humouredly.

“Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn what you think about me.”

I felt my cheeks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out.

“Is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?” I said, though more to myself than to him. “You’re dependent on others for everything in existence. It’s a preposterous attempt to try to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.”

“Come and look at my pictures.”

“Have you ever thought of death?”

“Why should I? It doesn’t matter.”

I stared at him. He stood before me, motionless, with a mocking smile in his eyes; but for all that, for a moment I had an inkling of a fiery, tortured spirit, aiming at something greater than could be conceived by anything that was bound up with the flesh. I had a fleeting glimpse of a pursuit of the ineffable. I looked at the man before me in his shabby clothes, with his great nose and shining eyes, his red beard and untidy hair; and I had a strange sensation that it was only an envelope, and I was in the presence of a disembodied spirit.

“Let us go and look at your pictures,” I said.

Chapter XLII

I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show them to me. I welcomed the opportunity. A man’s work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which Strickland lived, I confess that I was a little excited. It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a surprising adventure. I looked about the room with curiosity. It was even smaller and more bare than I remembered it. I wondered what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the conditions were to their liking.

“You’d better stand there,” he said, pointing to a spot from which, presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage what he had to show me.

“You don’t want me to talk, I suppose,” I said.

“No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue.”

He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a minute or two; then took it down and put another in its place. I think he showed me about thirty canvases. It was the result of the six years during which he had been painting. He had never sold a picture. The canvases were of different sizes. The smaller were pictures of still-life and the largest were landscapes. There were about half a dozen portraits.

“That is the lot,” he said at last.

I wish I could say that I recognised at once their beauty and their great originality. Now that I have seen many of them again and the rest are familiar to me in reproductions, I am astonished that at first sight I was bitterly disappointed. I felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the property of art to give. The impression that Strickland’s pictures gave me was disconcerting; and the fact remains, always to reproach me, that I never even thought of buying any. I missed a wonderful chance. Most of them have found their way into museums, and the rest are the treasured possessions of wealthy amateurs. I try to find excuses for myself. I think that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality. I know very little about painting, and I wander along trails that others have blazed for me. At that time I had the greatest admiration for the impressionists. I longed to possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet. His Olympia seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times, and Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe moved me profoundly. These works seemed to me the last word in painting.

I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me. Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides, are familiar to all who take an interest in such things. Now that his influence has so enormously affected modern painting, now that others have charted the country which he was among the first to explore, Strickland’s pictures, seen for the first time, would find the mind more prepared for them; but it must be remembered that I had never seen anything of the sort. First of all I was taken aback by what seemed to me the clumsiness of his technique. Accustomed to the drawing of the old masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatest draughtsman of recent times, I thought that Strickland drew very badly. I knew nothing of the simplification at which he aimed. I remember a still-life of oranges on a plate, and I was bothered because the plate was not round and the oranges were lop-sided. The portraits were a little larger than life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes the faces looked like caricatures. They were painted in a way that was entirely new to me. The landscapes puzzled me even more. There were two or three pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver. I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to me extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that the whole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce. Now that I look back I am more than ever impressed by Stroeve’s acuteness. He saw from the first that here was a revolution in art, and he recognised in its beginnings the genius which now all the world allows.

But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed. Even I, in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel that here, trying to express itself, was real power. I was excited and interested. I felt that these pictures had something to say to me that was very important for me to know, but I could not tell what it was. They seemed to me ugly, but they suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous significance. They were strangely tantalising. They gave me an emotion that I could not analyse. They said something that words were powerless to utter. I fancy that Strickland saw vaguely some spiritual meaning in material things that was so strange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols. It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe a new pattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul, to set it down. I saw a tormented spirit striving for the release of expression.

I turned to him.

“I wonder if you haven’t mistaken your medium,” I said.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I think you’re trying to say something, I don’t quite know what it is, but I’m not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of painting.”

When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me — and perhaps even this was fanciful — was that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house.

The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled to express it.

Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not be unmoved by the emotion that was patent in them; and, I knew not why, I felt in myself a feeling that with regard to Strickland was the last I had ever expected to experience. I felt an overwhelming compassion.

“I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling for Blanche Stroeve,” I said to him.

“Why?”

“I think your courage failed. The weakness of your body communicated itself to your soul. I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you. I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you know yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a moment you thought that you might find release in Love. I think your tired soul sought rest in a woman’s arms, and when you found no rest there you hated her. You had no pity for her, because you have no pity for yourself. And you killed her out of fear, because you trembled still at the danger you had barely escaped.”

He smiled dryly and pulled his beard.

“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”

A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles. I never saw him again.

Chapter XLIII

Looking back, I realise that what I have written about Charles Strickland must seem very unsatisfactory. I have given incidents that came to my knowledge, but they remain obscure because I do not know the reasons that led to them. The strangest, Strickland’s determination to become a painter, seems to be arbitrary; and though it must have had causes in the circumstances of his life, I am ignorant of them. From his own conversation I was able to glean nothing. If I were writing a novel, rather than narrating such facts as I know of a curious personality, I should have invented much to account for this change of heart. I think I should have shown a strong vocation in boyhood, crushed by the will of his father or sacrificed to the necessity of earning a living; I should have pictured him impatient of the restraints of life; and in the struggle between his passion for art and the duties of his station I could have aroused sympathy for him. I should so have made him a more imposing figure. Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus. There was here, maybe, the opportunity for a modern version of the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned. It is always a moving subject.

On the other hand, I might have found his motives in the influence of the married relation. There are a dozen ways in which this might be managed. A latent gift might reveal itself on acquaintance with the painters and writers whose society his wife sought; or domestic incompatability might turn him upon himself; a love affair might fan into bright flame a fire which I could have shown smouldering dimly in his heart. I think then I should have drawn Mrs. Strickland quite differently. I should have abandoned the facts and made her a nagging, tiresome woman, or else a bigoted one with no sympathy for the claims of the spirit. I should have made Strickland’s marriage a long torment from which escape was the only possible issue. I think I should have emphasised his patience with the unsuitable mate, and the compassion which made him unwilling to throw off the yoke that oppressed him. I should certainly have eliminated the children.

An effective story might also have been made by bringing him into contact with some old painter whom the pressure of want or the desire for commercial success had made false to the genius of his youth, and who, seeing in Strickland the possibilities which himself had wasted, influenced him to forsake all and follow the divine tyranny of art. I think there would have been something ironic in the picture of the successful old man, rich and honoured, living in another the life which he, though knowing it was the better part, had not had the strength to pursue.

The facts are much duller. Strickland, a boy fresh from school, went into a broker’s office without any feeling of distaste. Until he married he led the ordinary life of his fellows, gambling mildly on the Exchange, interested to the extent of a sovereign or two on the result of the Derby or the Oxford and Cambridge Race. I think he boxed a little in his spare time. On his chimney-piece he had photographs of Mrs. Langtry and Mary Anderson. He read Punch and the Sporting Times. He went to dances in Hampstead.

It matters less that for so long I should have lost sight of him. The years during which he was struggling to acquire proficiency in a difficult art were monotonous, and I do not know that there was anything significant in the shifts to which he was put to earn enough money to keep him. An account of them would be an account of the things he had seen happen to other people. I do not think they had any effect on his own character. He must have acquired experiences which would form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris, but he remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there was nothing in those years that had made a particular impression on him. Perhaps when he went to Paris he was too old to fall a victim to the glamour of his environment. Strange as it may seem, he always appeared to me not only practical, but immensely matter-of-fact. I suppose his life during this period was romantic, but he certainly saw no romance in it. It may be that in order to realise the romance of life you must have something of the actor in you; and, capable of standing outside yourself, you must be able to watch your actions with an interest at once detached and absorbed. But no one was more single-minded than Strickland. I never knew anyone who was less self-conscious. But it is unfortunate that I can give no description of the arduous steps by which he reached such mastery over his art as he ever acquired; for if I could show him undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist’s bitterest enemy, I might excite some sympathy for a personality which, I am all too conscious, must appear singularly devoid of charm. But I have nothing to go on. I never once saw Strickland at work, nor do I know that anyone else did. He kept the secret of his struggles to himself. If in the loneliness of his studio he wrestled desperately with the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a soul to divine his anguish.

When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal. To give my story coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I know nothing of the three months during which they lived together. I do not know how they got on or what they talked about. After all, there are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion can only be reached at rare intervals. I can only imagine how they passed the rest of the time. While the light lasted and so long as Blanche’s strength endured, I suppose that Strickland painted, and it must have irritated her when she saw him absorbed in his work. As a mistress she did not then exist for him, but only as a model; and then there were long hours in which they lived side by side in silence. It must have frightened her. When Strickland suggested that in her surrender to him there was a sense of triumph over Dirk Stroeve, because he had come to her help in her extremity, he opened the door to many a dark conjecture. I hope it was not true. It seems to me rather horrible. But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions. When Blanche saw that, notwithstanding his moments of passion, Strickland remained aloof, she must have been filled with dismay, and even in those moments I surmise that she realised that to him she was not an individual, but an instrument of pleasure; he was a stranger still, and she tried to bind him to herself with pathetic arts. She strove to ensnare him with comfort and would not see that comfort meant nothing to him. She was at pains to get him the things to eat that he liked, and would not see that he was indifferent to food. She was afraid to leave him alone. She pursued him with attentions, and when his passion was dormant sought to excite it, for then at least she had the illusion of holding him. Perhaps she knew with her intelligence that the chains she forged only aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass window makes your fingers itch for half a brick; but her heart, incapable of reason, made her continue on a course she knew was fatal. She must have been very unhappy. But the blindness of love led her to believe what she wanted to be true, and her love was so great that it seemed impossible to her that it should not in return awake an equal love.

But my study of Strickland’s character suffers from a greater defect than my ignorance of many facts. Because they were obvious and striking, I have written of his relations to women; and yet they were but an insignificant part of his life. It is an irony that they should so tragically have affected others. His real life consisted of dreams and of tremendously hard work.

Here lies the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them. They are flattered and excited by them, but have an uneasy feeling that they are poor creatures. But even during the brief intervals in which they are in love, men do other things which distract their mind; the trades by which they earn their living engage their attention; they are absorbed in sport; they can interest themselves in art. For the most part, they keep their various activities in various compartments, and they can pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the other. They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies them at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the other. As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place. It was unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither. He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the Entombment of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation. It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a great idealist. The fact remains.

He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder. He cared nothing for those things which with most people make life gracious and beautiful. He was indifferent to money. He cared nothing about fame. You cannot praise him because he resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with the world which most of us yield to. He had no such temptation. It never entered his head that compromise was possible. He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the deserts of Thebes. He asked nothing his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself — many can do that — but others. He had a vision.

Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.

Chapter XLIV

A certain importance attaches to the views on art of painters, and this is the natural place for me to set down what I know of Strickland’s opinions of the great artists of the past. I am afraid I have very little worth noting. Strickland was not a conversationalist, and he had no gift for putting what he had to say in the striking phrase that the listener remembers. He had no wit. His humour, as will be seen if I have in any way succeeded in reproducing the manner of his conversation, was sardonic. His repartee was rude. He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised.

Strickland was not, I should say, a man of great intelligence, and his views on painting were by no means out of the ordinary. I never heard him speak of those whose work had a certain analogy with his own — of Cezanne, for instance, or of Van Gogh; and I doubt very much if he had ever seen their pictures. He was not greatly interested in the Impressionists. Their technique impressed him, but I fancy that he thought their attitude commonplace. When Stroeve was holding forth at length on the excellence of Monet, he said: “I prefer Winterhalter.” But I dare say he said it to annoy, and if he did he certainly succeeded.

I am disappointed that I cannot report any extravagances in his opinions on the old masters. There is so much in his character which is strange that I feel it would complete the picture if his views were outrageous. I feel the need to ascribe to him fantastic theories about his predecessors, and it is with a certain sense of disillusion that I confess he thought about them pretty much as does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him, and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain himself. I remember what he said about him because it was so unsatisfactory.

“He’s all right,” said Strickland. “I bet he found it hell to paint.”

When later, in Vienna, I saw several of Peter Brueghel’s pictures, I thought I understood why he had attracted Strickland’s attention. Here, too, was a man with a vision of the world peculiar to himself. I made somewhat copious notes at the time, intending to write something about him, but I have lost them, and have now only the recollection of an emotion. He seemed to see his fellow-creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with them because they were grotesque; life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh. Brueghel gave me the impression of a man striving to express in one medium feelings more appropriate to expression in another, and it may be that it was the obscure consciousness of this that excited Strickland’s sympathy. Perhaps both were trying to put down in paint ideas which were more suitable to literature.

Strickland at this time must have been nearly forty-seven.

Chapter XLV

I have said already that but for the hazard of a journey to Tahiti I should doubtless never have written this book. It is thither that after many wanderings Charles Strickland came, and it is there that he painted the pictures on which his fame most securely rests. I suppose no artist achieves completely the realisation of the dream that obsesses him, and Strickland, harassed incessantly by his struggle with technique, managed, perhaps, less than others to express the vision that he saw with his mind’s eye; but in Tahiti the circumstances were favourable to him; he found in his surroundings the accidents necessary for his inspiration to become effective, and his later pictures give at least a suggestion of what he sought. They offer the imagination something new and strange. It is as though in this far country his spirit, that had wandered disembodied, seeking a tenement, at last was able to clothe itself in flesh. To use the hackneyed phrase, here he found himself.

It would seem that my visit to this remote island should immediately revive my interest in Strickland, but the work I was engaged in occupied my attention to the exclusion of something that was irrelevant, and it was not till I had been there some days that I even remembered his connection with it. After all, I had not seen him for fifteen years, and it was nine since he died. But I think my arrival at Tahiti would have driven out of my head matters of much more immediate importance to me, and even after a week I found it not easy to order myself soberly. I remember that on my first morning I awoke early, and when I came on to the terrace of the hotel no one was stirring. I wandered round to the kitchen, but it was locked, and on a bench outside it a native boy was sleeping. There seemed no chance of breakfast for some time, so I sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy Grail, guarded its mystery.

I did not altogether believe my eyes. The days that had passed since I left Wellington seemed extraordinary and unusual. Wellington is trim and neat and English; it reminds you of a seaport town on the South Coast. And for three days afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds chased one another across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously, like the unsubstantial fabric of a magic wand. With its jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you may imagine that there Polynesian knights guard with strange rites mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself together in a stony, inaccessible grimness. It would not surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in the reef, it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.

Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker green, in which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in their sombre depths, down which murmur and plash cool streams, and you feel that in those umbrageous places life from immemorial times has been led according to immemorial ways. Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you may see in the jester’s eyes when a merry company is laughing at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in the communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone. For Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a lovely woman graciously prodigal of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to the quay are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane, and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt their colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an unashamed violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd that throngs the wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay and debonair; it is a noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd. It is a sea of brown faces. You have an impression of coloured movement against the flaming blue of the sky. Everything is done with a great deal of bustle, the unloading of the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone seems to smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you.

Chapter XLVI

HAD not been in Tahiti long before I met Captain Nichols. He came in one morning when I was having breakfast on the terrace of the hotel and introduced himself. He had heard that I was interested in Charles Strickland, and announced that he was come to have a talk about him. They are as fond of gossip in Tahiti as in an English village, and one or two enquiries I had made for pictures by Strickland had been quickly spread. I asked the stranger if he had breakfasted.

“Yes; I have my coffee early,” he answered, “but I don’t mind having a drop of whisky.”

I called the Chinese boy.

“You don’t think it’s too early?” said the Captain.

“You and your liver must decide that between you,” I replied.

“I’m practically a teetotaller,” he said, as he poured himself out a good half-tumbler of Canadian Club.

When he smiled he showed broken and discoloured teeth. He was a very lean man, of no more than average height, with gray hair cut short and a stubbly gray moustache. He had not shaved for a couple of days. His face was deeply lined, burned brown by long exposure to the sun, and he had a pair of small blue eyes which were astonishingly shifty. They moved quickly, following my smallest gesture, and they gave him the look of a very thorough rogue. But at the moment he was all heartiness and good-fellowship. He was dressed in a bedraggled suit of khaki, and his hands would have been all the better for a wash.

“I knew Strickland well,” he said, as he leaned back in his chair and lit the cigar I had offered him. “It’s through me he came out to the islands.”

“Where did you meet him?” I asked.

“In Marseilles.”

“What were you doing there?”

He gave me an ingratiating smile.

“Well, I guess I was on the beach.”

My friend’s appearance suggested that he was now in the same predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an agreeable acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always repays the small pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are easy of approach and affable in conversation. They seldom put on airs, and the offer of a drink is a sure way to their hearts. You need no laborious steps to enter upon familiarity with them, and you can earn not only their confidence, but their gratitude, by turning an attentive ear to their discourse. They look upon conversation as the great pleasure of life, thereby proving the excellence of their civilisation, and for the most part they are entertaining talkers. The extent of their experience is pleasantly balanced by the fertility of their imagination. It cannot be said that they are without guile, but they have a tolerant respect for the law, when the law is supported by strength. It is hazardous to play poker with them, but their ingenuity adds a peculiar excitement to the best game in the world. I came to know Captain Nichols very well before I left Tahiti, and I am the richer for his acquaintance. I do not consider that the cigars and whisky he consumed at my expense (he always refused cocktails, since he was practically a teetotaller), and the few dollars, borrowed with a civil air of conferring a favour upon me, that passed from my pocket to his, were in any way equivalent to the entertainment he afforded me. I remained his debtor. I should be sorry if my conscience, insisting on a rigid attention to the matter in hand, forced me to dismiss him in a couple of lines.

I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England. It was a matter upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his kind a direct question is never very discreet. He hinted at undeserved misfortune, and there is no doubt that he looked upon himself as the victim of injustice. My fancy played with the various forms of fraud and violence, and I agreed with him sympathetically when he remarked that the authorities in the old country were so damned technical. But it was nice to see that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land had not impaired his ardent patriotism. He frequently declared that England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he felt a lively superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos, Dutchmen, and Kanakas.

But I do not think he was a happy man. He suffered from dyspepsia, and he might often be seen sucking a tablet of pepsin; in the morning his appetite was poor; but this affliction alone would hardly have impaired his spirits. He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this. Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees. There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor. Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no older. She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness. Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having married her why he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had, often, and his melancholy arose from the fact that he could never succeed. However far he went and in howsoever secret a place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs. Nichols, inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the cause can escape the effect.

The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs to no class. He is not embarrassed by the sans gene of the hobo, nor put out of countenance by the etiquette of the prince. But Mrs. Nichols belonged to the well-defined class, of late become vocal, which is known as the lower-middle. Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am certain that he was an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was on the Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her speak, but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation. At any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her. Sometimes, sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel, he would become conscious that she was walking in the road outside. She did not call him; she gave no sign that she was aware of his existence; she merely walked up and down composedly. Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain; he would look at his watch and sigh.

“Well, I must be off,” he said.

Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a man who had faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would not have hesitated to fight a dozen unarmed niggers with nothing but a revolver to help him. Sometimes Mrs. Nichols would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen child of seven, to the hotel.

“Mother wants you,” she said, in a whining tone.

“Very well, my dear,” said Captain Nichols.

He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter along the road. I suppose it was a very pretty example of the triumph of spirit over matter, and so my digression has at least the advantage of a moral.

Chapter XLVII

I have tried to put some connection into the various things Captain Nichols told me about Strickland, and I here set them down in the best order I can. They made one another’s acquaintance during the latter part of the winter following my last meeting with Strickland in Paris. How he had passed the intervening months I do not know, but life must have been very hard, for Captain Nichols saw him first in the Asile de Nuit. There was a strike at Marseilles at the time, and Strickland, having come to the end of his resources, had apparently found it impossible to earn the small sum he needed to keep body and soul together.

The Asile de Nuit is a large stone building where pauper and vagabond may get a bed for a week, provided their papers are in order and they can persuade the friars in charge that they are workingmen. Captain Nichols noticed Strickland for his size and his singular appearance among the crowd that waited for the doors to open; they waited listlessly, some walking to and fro, some leaning against the wall, and others seated on the curb with their feet in the gutter; and when they filed into the office he heard the monk who read his papers address him in English. But he did not have a chance to speak to him, since, as he entered the common-room, a monk came in with a huge Bible in his arms, mounted a pulpit which was at the end of the room, and began the service which the wretched outcasts had to endure as the price of their lodging. He and Strickland were assigned to different rooms, and when, thrown out of bed at five in the morning by a stalwart monk, he had made his bed and washed his face, Strickland had already disappeared. Captain Nichols wandered about the streets for an hour of bitter cold, and then made his way to the Place Victor Gelu, where the sailor-men are wont to congregate. Dozing against the pedestal of a statue, he saw Strickland again. He gave him a kick to awaken him.

“Come and have breakfast, mate,” he said.

“Go to hell,” answered Strickland.

I recognised my friend’s limited vocabulary, and I prepared to regard Captain Nichols as a trustworthy witness.

“Busted?” asked the Captain.

“Blast you,” answered Strickland.

“Come along with me. I’ll get you some breakfast.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Strickland scrambled to his feet, and together they went to the Bouchee de Pain, where the hungry are given a wedge of bread, which they must eat there and then, for it is forbidden to take it away; and then to the Cuillere de Soupe, where for a week, at eleven and four, you may get a bowl of thin, salt soup. The two buildings are placed far apart, so that only the starving should be tempted to make use of them. So they had breakfast, and so began the queer companionship of Charles Strickland and Captain Nichols.

They must have spent something like four months at Marseilles in one another’s society. Their career was devoid of adventure, if by adventure you mean unexpected or thrilling incident, for their days were occupied in the pursuit of enough money to get a night’s lodging and such food as would stay the pangs of hunger. But I wish I could give here the pictures, coloured and racy, which Captain Nichols’ vivid narrative offered to the imagination. His account of their discoveries in the low life of a seaport town would have made a charming book, and in the various characters that came their way the student might easily have found matter for a very complete dictionary of rogues. But I must content myself with a few paragraphs. I received the impression of a life intense and brutal, savage, multicoloured, and vivacious. It made the Marseilles that I knew, gesticulating and sunny, with its comfortable hotels and its restaurants crowded with the well-to-do, tame and commonplace. I envied men who had seen with their own eyes the sights that Captain Nichols described.

When the doors of the Asile de Nuit were closed to them, Strickland and Captain Nichols sought the hospitality of Tough Bill. This was the master of a sailors’ boarding-house, a huge mulatto with a heavy fist, who gave the stranded mariner food and shelter till he found him a berth. They lived with him a month, sleeping with a dozen others, Swedes, negroes, Brazilians, on the floor of the two bare rooms in his house which he assigned to his charges; and every day they went with him to the Place Victor Gelu, whither came ships’ captains in search of a man. He was married to an American woman, obese and slatternly, fallen to this pass by Heaven knows what process of degradation, and every day the boarders took it in turns to help her with the housework. Captain Nichols looked upon it as a smart piece of work on Strickland’s part that he had got out of this by painting a portrait of Tough Bill. Tough Bill not only paid for the canvas, colours, and brushes, but gave Strickland a pound of smuggled tobacco into the bargain. For all I know, this picture may still adorn the parlour of the tumbledown little house somewhere near the Quai de la Joliette, and I suppose it could now be sold for fifteen hundred pounds. Strickland’s idea was to ship on some vessel bound for Australia or New Zealand, and from there make his way to Samoa or Tahiti. I do not know how he had come upon the notion of going to the South Seas, though I remember that his imagination had long been haunted by an island, all green and sunny, encircled by a sea more blue than is found in Northern latitudes. I suppose that he clung to Captain Nichols because he was acquainted with those parts, and it was Captain Nichols who persuaded him that he would be more comfortable in Tahiti.

“You see, Tahiti’s French,” he explained to me. “And the French aren’t so damned technical.”

I thought I saw his point.

Strickland had no papers, but that was not a matter to disconcert Tough Bill when he saw a profit (he took the first month’s wages of the sailor for whom he found a berth), and he provided Strickland with those of an English stoker who had providentially died on his hands. But both Captain Nichols and Strickland were bound East, and it chanced that the only opportunities for signing on were with ships sailing West. Twice Strickland refused a berth on tramps sailing for the United States, and once on a collier going to Newcastle. Tough Bill had no patience with an obstinacy which could only result in loss to himself, and on the last occasion he flung both Strickland and Captain Nichols out of his house without more ado. They found themselves once more adrift.

Tough Bill’s fare was seldom extravagant, and you rose from his table almost as hungry as you sat down, but for some days they had good reason to regret it. They learned what hunger was. The Cuillere de Soupe and the Asile de Nuit were both closed to them, and their only sustenance was the wedge of bread which the Bouchee de Pain provided. They slept where they could, sometimes in an empty truck on a siding near the station, sometimes in a cart behind a warehouse; but it was bitterly cold, and after an hour or two of uneasy dozing they would tramp the streets again. What they felt the lack of most bitterly was tobacco, and Captain Nichols, for his part, could not do without it; he took to hunting the “Can o’ Beer,” for cigarette-ends and the butt-end of cigars which the promenaders of the night before had thrown away.

“I’ve tasted worse smoking mixtures in a pipe,” he added, with a philosophic shrug of his shoulders, as he took a couple of cigars from the case I offered him, putting one in his mouth and the other in his pocket.

Now and then they made a bit of money. Sometimes a mail steamer would come in, and Captain Nichols, having scraped acquaintance with the timekeeper, would succeed in getting the pair of them a job as stevedores. When it was an English boat, they would dodge into the forecastle and get a hearty breakfast from the crew. They took the risk of running against one of the ship’s officers and being hustled down the gangway with the toe of a boot to speed their going.

“There’s no harm in a kick in the hindquarters when your belly’s full,” said Captain Nichols, “and personally I never take it in bad part. An officer’s got to think about discipline.”

I had a lively picture of Captain Nichols flying headlong down a narrow gangway before the uplifted foot of an angry mate, and, like a true Englishman, rejoicing in the spirit of the Mercantile Marine.

There were often odd jobs to be got about the fish-market. Once they each of them earned a franc by loading trucks with innumerable boxes of oranges that had been dumped down on the quay. One day they had a stroke of luck: one of the boarding-masters got a contract to paint a tramp that had come in from Madagascar round the Cape of Good Hope, and they spent several days on a plank hanging over the side, covering the rusty hull with paint. It was a situation that must have appealed to Strickland’s sardonic humour. I asked Captain Nichols how he bore himself during these hardships.

“Never knew him say a cross word,” answered the Captain. “He’d be a bit surly sometimes, but when we hadn’t had a bite since morning, and we hadn’t even got the price of a lie down at the Chink’s, he’d be as lively as a cricket.”

I was not surprised at this. Strickland was just the man to rise superior to circumstances, when they were such as to occasion despondency in most; but whether this was due to equanimity of soul or to contradictoriness it would be difficult to say.

The Chink’s Head was a name the beach-combers gave to a wretched inn off the Rue Bouterie, kept by a one-eyed Chinaman, where for six sous you could sleep in a cot and for three on the floor. Here they made friends with others in as desperate condition as themselves, and when they were penniless and the night was bitter cold, they were glad to borrow from anyone who had earned a stray franc during the day the price of a roof over their heads. They were not niggardly, these tramps, and he who had money did not hesitate to share it among the rest. They belonged to all the countries in the world, but this was no bar to good-fellowship; for they felt themselves freemen of a country whose frontiers include them all, the great country of Cockaine.

“But I guess Strickland was an ugly customer when he was roused,” said Captain Nichols, reflectively. “One day we ran into Tough Bill in the Place, and he asked Charlie for the papers he’d given him.”

“‘You’d better come and take them if you want them,’ says Charlie.

“He was a powerful fellow, Tough Bill, but he didn’t quite like the look of Charlie, so he began cursing him. He called him pretty near every name he could lay hands on, and when Tough Bill began cursing it was worth listening to him. Well, Charlie stuck it for a bit, then he stepped forward and he just said: ‘Get out, you bloody swine.’ It wasn’t so much what he said, but the way he said it. Tough Bill never spoke another word; you could see him go yellow, and he walked away as if he’d remembered he had a date.”

Strickland, according to Captain Nichols, did not use exactly the words I have given, but since this book is meant for family reading I have thought it better, at the expense of truth, to put into his mouth expressions familiar to the domestic circle.

Now, Tough Bill was not the man to put up with humiliation at the hands of a common sailor. His power depended on his prestige, and first one, then another, of the sailors who lived in his house told them that he had sworn to do Strickland in.

One night Captain Nichols and Strickland were sitting in one of the bars of the Rue Bouterie. The Rue Bouterie is a narrow street of one-storeyed houses, each house consisting of but one room; they are like the booths in a crowded fair or the cages of animals in a circus. At every door you see a woman. Some lean lazily against the side-posts, humming to themselves or calling to the passer-by in a raucous voice, and some listlessly read. They are French. Italian, Spanish, Japanese, coloured; some are fat and some are thin; and under the thick paint on their faces, the heavy smears on their eyebrows, and the scarlet of their lips, you see the lines of age and the scars of dissipation. Some wear black shifts and flesh-coloured stockings; some with curly hair, dyed yellow, are dressed like little girls in short muslin frocks. Through the open door you see a red-tiled floor, a large wooden bed, and on a deal table a ewer and a basin. A motley crowd saunters along the streets — Lascars off a P. and O., blond Northmen from a Swedish barque, Japanese from a man-of-war, English sailors, Spaniards, pleasant-looking fellows from a French cruiser, negroes off an American tramp. By day it is merely sordid, but at night, lit only by the lamps in the little huts, the street has a sinister beauty. The hideous lust that pervades the air is oppressive and horrible, and yet there is something mysterious in the sight which haunts and troubles you. You feel I know not what primitive force which repels and yet fascinates you. Here all the decencies of civilisation are swept away, and you feel that men are face to face with a sombre reality. There is an atmosphere that is at once intense and tragic.

In the bar in which Strickland and Nichols sat a mechanical piano was loudly grinding out dance music. Round the room people were sitting at table, here half a dozen sailors uproariously drunk, there a group of soldiers; and in the middle, crowded together, couples were dancing. Bearded sailors with brown faces and large horny hands clasped their partners in a tight embrace. The women wore nothing but a shift. Now and then two sailors would get up and dance together. The noise was deafening. People were singing, shouting, laughing; and when a man gave a long kiss to the girl sitting on his knees, cat-calls from the English sailors increased the din. The air was heavy with the dust beaten up by the heavy boots of the men, and gray with smoke. It was very hot. Behind the bar was seated a woman nursing her baby. The waiter, an undersized youth with a flat, spotty face, hurried to and fro carrying a tray laden with glasses of beer.

In a little while Tough Bill, accompanied by two huge negroes, came in, and it was easy to see that he was already three parts drunk. He was looking for trouble. He lurched against a table at which three soldiers were sitting and knocked over a glass of beer. There was an angry altercation, and the owner of the bar stepped forward and ordered Tough Bill to go. He was a hefty fellow, in the habit of standing no nonsense from his customers, and Tough Bill hesitated. The landlord was not a man he cared to tackle, for the police were on his side, and with an oath he turned on his heel. Suddenly he caught sight of Strickland. He rolled up to him. He did not speak. He gathered the spittle in his mouth and spat full in Strickland’s face. Strickland seized his glass and flung it at him. The dancers stopped suddenly still. There was an instant of complete silence, but when Tough Bill threw himself on Strickland the lust of battle seized them all, and in a moment there was a confused scrimmage. Tables were overturned, glasses crashed to the ground. There was a hellish row. The women scattered to the door and behind the bar. Passers-by surged in from the street. You heard curses in every tongue the sound of blows, cries; and in the middle of the room a dozen men were fighting with all their might. On a sudden the police rushed in, and everyone who could made for the door. When the bar was more or less cleared, Tough Bill was lying insensible on the floor with a great gash in his head. Captain Nichols dragged Strickland, bleeding from a wound in his arm, his clothes in rags, into the street. His own face was covered with blood from a blow on the nose.

“I guess you’d better get out of Marseilles before Tough Bill comes out of hospital,” he said to Strickland, when they had got back to the Chink’s Head and were cleaning themselves.

“This beats cock-fighting,” said Strickland.

I could see his sardonic smile.

Captain Nichols was anxious. He knew Tough Bill’s vindictiveness. Strickland had downed the mulatto twice, and the mulatto, sober, was a man to be reckoned with. He would bide his time stealthily. He would be in no hurry, but one night Strickland would get a knife-thrust in his back, and in a day or two the corpse of a nameless beach-comber would be fished out of the dirty water of the harbour. Nichols went next evening to Tough Bill’s house and made enquiries. He was in hospital still, but his wife, who had been to see him, said he was swearing hard to kill Strickland when they let him out.

A week passed.

“That’s what I always say,” reflected Captain Nichols, “when you hurt a man, hurt him bad. It gives you a bit of time to look about and think what you’ll do next.”

Then Strickland had a bit of luck. A ship bound for Australia had sent to the Sailors’ Home for a stoker in place of one who had thrown himself overboard off Gibraltar in an attack of delirium tremens.

“You double down to the harbour, my lad,” said the Captain to Strickland, “and sign on. You’ve got your papers.”

Strickland set off at once, and that was the last Captain Nichols saw of him. The ship was only in port for six hours, and in the evening Captain Nichols watched the vanishing smoke from her funnels as she ploughed East through the wintry sea.

I have narrated all this as best I could, because I like the contrast of these episodes with the life that I had seen Strickland live in Ashley Gardens when he was occupied with stocks and shares; but I am aware that Captain Nichols was an outrageous liar, and I dare say there is not a word of truth in anything he told me. I should not be surprised to learn that he had never seen Strickland in his life, and owed his knowledge of Marseilles to the pages of a magazine.

Chapter XLVIII

It is here that I purposed to end my book. My first idea was to begin it with the account of Strickland’s last years in Tahiti and with his horrible death, and then to go back and relate what I knew of his beginnings. This I meant to do, not from wilfulness, but because I wished to leave Strickland setting out with I know not what fancies in his lonely soul for the unknown islands which fired his imagination. I liked the picture of him starting at the age of forty-seven, when most men have already settled comfortably in a groove, for a new world. I saw him, the sea gray under the mistral and foam-flecked, watching the vanishing coast of France, which he was destined never to see again; and I thought there was something gallant in his bearing and dauntless in his soul. I wished so to end on a note of hope. It seemed to emphasise the unconquerable spirit of man. But I could not manage it. Somehow I could not get into my story, and after trying once or twice I had to give it up; I started from the beginning in the usual way, and made up my mind I could only tell what I knew of Strickland’s life in the order in which I learnt the facts.

Those that I have now are fragmentary. I am in the position of a biologist who from a single bone must reconstruct not only the appearance of an extinct animal, but its habits. Strickland made no particular impression on the people who came in contact with him in Tahiti. To them he was no more than a beach-comber in constant need of money, remarkable only for the peculiarity that he painted pictures which seemed to them absurd; and it was not till he had been dead for some years and agents came from the dealers in Paris and Berlin to look for any pictures which might still remain on the island, that they had any idea that among them had dwelt a man of consequence. They remembered then that they could have bought for a song canvases which now were worth large sums, and they could not forgive themselves for the opportunity which had escaped them. There was a Jewish trader called Cohen, who had come by one of Strickland’s pictures in a singular way. He was a little old Frenchman, with soft kind eyes and a pleasant smile, half trader and half seaman, who owned a cutter in which he wandered boldly among the Paumotus and the Marquesas, taking out trade goods and bringing back copra, shell, and pearls. I went to see him because I was told he had a large black pearl which he was willing to sell cheaply, and when I discovered that it was beyond my means I began to talk to him about Strickland. He had known him well.

“You see, I was interested in him because he was a painter,” he told me. “We don’t get many painters in the islands, and I was sorry for him because he was such a bad one. I gave him his first job. I had a plantation on the peninsula, and I wanted a white overseer. You never get any work out of the natives unless you have a white man over them. I said to him: ‘You’ll have plenty of time for painting, and you can earn a bit of money.’ I knew he was starving, but I offered him good wages.”

“I can’t imagine that he was a very satisfactory overseer,” I said, smiling.

“I made allowances. I have always had a sympathy for artists. It is in our blood, you know. But he only remained a few months. When he had enough money to buy paints and canvases he left me. The place had got hold of him by then, and he wanted to get away into the bush. But I continued to see him now and then. He would turn up in Papeete every few months and stay a little while; he’d get money out of someone or other and then disappear again. It was on one of these visits that he came to me and asked for the loan of two hundred francs. He looked as if he hadn’t had a meal for a week, and I hadn’t the heart to refuse him. Of course, I never expected to see my money again. Well, a year later he came to see me once more, and he brought a picture with him. He did not mention the money he owed me, but he said: ‘Here is a picture of your plantation that I’ve painted for you.’ I looked at it. I did not know what to say, but of course I thanked him, and when he had gone away I showed it to my wife.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

“Do not ask me. I could not make head or tail of it. I never saw such a thing in my life. ‘What shall we do with it?’ I said to my wife. ‘We can never hang it up,’ she said. ‘People would laugh at us.’ So she took it into an attic and put it away with all sorts of rubbish, for my wife can never throw anything away. It is her mania. Then, imagine to yourself, just before the war my brother wrote to me from Paris, and said: ‘Do you know anything about an English painter who lived in Tahiti? It appears that he was a genius, and his pictures fetch large prices. See if you can lay your hands on anything and send it to me. There’s money to be made.’ So I said to my wife. ‘What about that picture that Strickland gave me?’ Is it possible that it is still in the attic?’ ‘Without doubt,’ she answered, ‘for you know that I never throw anything away. It is my mania.’ We went up to the attic, and there, among I know not what rubbish that had been gathered during the thirty years we have inhabited that house, was the picture. I looked at it again, and I said: ‘Who would have thought that the overseer of my plantation on the peninsula, to whom I lent two hundred francs, had genius? Do you see anything in the picture?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘it does not resemble the plantation and I have never seen cocoa-nuts with blue leaves; but they are mad in Paris, and it may be that your brother will be able to sell it for the two hundred francs you lent Strickland.’ Well, we packed it up and we sent it to my brother. And at last I received a letter from him. What do you think he said? ‘I received your picture,’ he said, ‘and I confess I thought it was a joke that you had played on me. I would not have given the cost of postage for the picture. I was half afraid to show it to the gentleman who had spoken to me about it. Imagine my surprise when he said it was a masterpiece, and offered me thirty thousand francs. I dare say he would have paid more, but frankly I was so taken aback that I lost my head; I accepted the offer before I was able to collect myself.’”

Then Monsieur Cohen said an admirable thing.

“I wish that poor Strickland had been still alive. I wonder what he would have said when I gave him twenty-nine thousand eight hundred francs for his picture.”

Chapter XLIX

I lived at the Hotel de la Fleur, and Mrs. Johnson, the proprietress, had a sad story to tell of lost opportunity. After Strickland’s death certain of his effects were sold by auction in the market-place at Papeete, and she went to it herself because there was among the truck an American stove she wanted. She paid twenty-seven francs for it.

“There were a dozen pictures,” she told me, “but they were unframed, and nobody wanted them. Some of them sold for as much as ten francs, but mostly they went for five or six. Just think, if I had bought them I should be a rich woman now.”

But Tiare Johnson would never under any circumstances have been rich. She could not keep money. The daughter of a native and an English sea-captain settled in Tahiti, when I knew her she was a woman of fifty, who looked older, and of enormous proportions. Tall and extremely stout, she would have been of imposing presence if the great good-nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express anything but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her breasts like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression of almost indecent nakedness, and vast chin succeeded to vast chin. I do not know how many of them there were. They fell away voluminously into the capaciousness of her bosom. She was dressed usually in a pink Mother Hubbard, and she wore all day long a large straw hat. But when she let down her hair, which she did now and then, for she was vain of it, you saw that it was long and dark and curly; and her eyes had remained young and vivacious. Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat, and would grow louder and louder till her whole vast body shook. She loved three things — a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man. To have known her is a privilege.

She was the best cook on the island, and she adored good food. From morning till night you saw her sitting on a low chair in the kitchen, surrounded by a Chinese cook and two or three native girls, giving her orders, chatting sociably with all and sundry, and tasting the savoury messes she devised. When she wished to do honour to a friend she cooked the dinner with her own hands. Hospitality was a passion with her, and there was no one on the island who need go without a dinner when there was anything to eat at the Hotel de la Fleur. She never turned her customers out of her house because they did not pay their bills. She always hoped they would pay when they could. There was one man there who had fallen on adversity, and to him she had given board and lodging for several months. When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him without payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers. She could not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said, and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a franc a day for cigarettes. She used him with the same affability as those of her clients who paid their bills once a week.

Age and obesity had made her inapt for love, but she took a keen interest in the amatory affairs of the young. She looked upon venery as the natural occupation for men and women, and was ever ready with precept and example from her own wide experience.

“I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover,” she said. “He was third mate on the Tropic Bird. A good-looking boy.”

She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.

“My father was a sensible man.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me marry Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older, of course, but he was good-looking too.”

Tiare — her father had called her by the name of the white, scented flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt, will always draw you back to Tahiti in the end, however far you may have roamed — Tiare remembered Strickland very well.

“He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking about Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he never had any money. When I heard he was in town, I used to send a boy to find him and make him come to dinner with me. I got him a job once or twice, but he couldn’t stick to anything. After a little while he wanted to get back to the bush, and one morning he would be gone.”

Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left Marseilles. He worked his passage on a sailing vessel that was making the trip from Auckland to San Francisco, and he arrived with a box of paints, an easel, and a dozen canvases. He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he had found work in Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house outside the town. I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself at home. Tiare told me that he said to her once:

“I’d been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me: ‘Why, there it is.’ And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island. I knew right away that there was the place I’d been looking for all my life. Then we came near, and I seemed to recognise it. Sometimes when I walk about it all seems familiar. I could swear I’ve lived here before.”

“Sometimes it takes them like that,” said Tiare. “I’ve known men come on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking in cargo, and never go back. And I’ve known men who came here to be in an office for a year, and they cursed the place, and when they went away they took their dying oath they’d hang themselves before they came back again, and in six months you’d see them land once more, and they’d tell you they couldn’t live anywhere else.”

Chapter L

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

I told Tiare the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was a Jew named Abraham, a blond, rather stout young man, shy and very unassuming; but he had remarkable gifts. He entered the hospital with a scholarship, and during the five years of the curriculum gained every prize that was open to him. He was made house-physician and house-surgeon. His brilliance was allowed by all. Finally he was elected to a position on the staff, and his career was assured. So far as human things can be predicted, it was certain that he would rise to the greatest heights of his profession. Honours and wealth awaited him. Before he entered upon his new duties he wished to take a holiday, and, having no private means, he went as surgeon on a tramp steamer to the Levant. It did not generally carry a doctor, but one of the senior surgeons at the hospital knew a director of the line, and Abraham was taken as a favour.

In a few weeks the authorities received his resignation of the coveted position on the staff. It created profound astonishment, and wild rumours were current. Whenever a man does anything unexpected, his fellows ascribe it to the most discreditable motives. But there was a man ready to step into Abraham’s shoes, and Abraham was forgotten. Nothing more was heard of him. He vanished.

It was perhaps ten years later that one morning on board ship, about to land at Alexandria, I was bidden to line up with the other passengers for the doctor’s examination. The doctor was a stout man in shabby clothes, and when he took off his hat I noticed that he was very bald. I had an idea that I had seen him before. Suddenly I remembered.

“Abraham,” I said.

He turned to me with a puzzled look, and then, recognizing me, seized my hand. After expressions of surprise on either side, hearing that I meant to spend the night in Alexandria, he asked me to dine with him at the English Club. When we met again I declared my astonishment at finding him there. It was a very modest position that he occupied, and there was about him an air of straitened circumstance. Then he told me his story. When he set out on his holiday in the Mediterranean he had every intention of returning to London and his appointment at St. Thomas’s. One morning the tramp docked at Alexandria, and from the deck he looked at the city, white in the sunlight, and the crowd on the wharf; he saw the natives in their shabby gabardines, the blacks from the Soudan, the noisy throng of Greeks and Italians, the grave Turks in tarbooshes, the sunshine and the blue sky; and something happened to him. He could not describe it. It was like a thunder-clap, he said, and then, dissatisfied with this, he said it was like a revelation. Something seemed to twist his heart, and suddenly he felt an exultation, a sense of wonderful freedom. He felt himself at home, and he made up his mind there and then, in a minute, that he would live the rest of his life in Alexandria. He had no great difficulty in leaving the ship, and in twenty-four hours, with all his belongings, he was on shore.

“The Captain must have thought you as mad as a hatter,” I smiled.

“I didn’t care what anybody thought. It wasn’t I that acted, but something stronger within me. I thought I would go to a little Greek hotel, while I looked about, and I felt I knew where to find one. And do you know, I walked straight there, and when I saw it, I recognised it at once.”

“Had you been to Alexandria before?”

“No; I’d never been out of England in my life.”

Presently he entered the Government service, and there he had been ever since.

“Have you never regretted it?”

“Never, not for a minute. I earn just enough to live upon, and I’m satisfied. I ask nothing more than to remain as I am till I die. I’ve had a wonderful life.”

I left Alexandria next day, and I forgot about Abraham till a little while ago, when I was dining with another old friend in the profession, Alec Carmichael, who was in England on short leave. I ran across him in the street and congratulated him on the knighthood with which his eminent services during the war had been rewarded. We arranged to spend an evening together for old time’s sake, and when I agreed to dine with him, he proposed that he should ask nobody else, so that we could chat without interruption. He had a beautiful old house in Queen Anne Street, and being a man of taste he had furnished it admirably. On the walls of the dining-room I saw a charming Bellotto, and there was a pair of Zoffanys that I envied. When his wife, a tall, lovely creature in cloth of gold, had left us, I remarked laughingly on the change in his present circumstances from those when we had both been medical students. We had looked upon it then as an extravagance to dine in a shabby Italian restaurant in the Westminster Bridge Road. Now Alec Carmichael was on the staff of half a dozen hospitals. I should think he earned ten thousand a year, and his knighthood was but the first of the honours which must inevitably fall to his lot.

“I’ve done pretty well,” he said, “but the strange thing is that I owe it all to one piece of luck.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, do you remember Abraham? He was the man who had the future. When we were students he beat me all along the line. He got the prizes and the scholarships that I went in for. I always played second fiddle to him. If he’d kept on he’d be in the position I’m in now. That man had a genius for surgery. No one had a look in with him. When he was appointed Registrar at Thomas’s I hadn’t a chance of getting on the staff. I should have had to become a G.P., and you know what likelihood there is for a G.P. ever to get out of the common rut. But Abraham fell out, and I got the job. That gave me my opportunity.”

“I dare say that’s true.”

“It was just luck. I suppose there was some kink in Abraham. Poor devil, he’s gone to the dogs altogether. He’s got some twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria — sanitary officer or something like that. I’m told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids. The fact is, I suppose, that it’s not enough to have brains. The thing that counts is character. Abraham hadn’t got character.”

Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. But I said nothing, and Alec Carmichael proceeded reflectively:

“Of course it would be hypocritical for me to pretend that I regret what Abraham did. After all, I’ve scored by it.” He puffed luxuriously at the long Corona he was smoking. “But if I weren’t personally concerned I should be sorry at the waste. It seems a rotten thing that a man should make such a hash of life.”

I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?

Chapter LI

Tiare, when I told her this story, praised my prudence, and for a few minutes we worked in silence, for we were shelling peas. Then her eyes, always alert for the affairs of her kitchen, fell on some action of the Chinese cook which aroused her violent disapproval. She turned on him with a torrent of abuse. The Chink was not backward to defend himself, and a very lively quarrel ensued. They spoke in the native language, of which I had learnt but half a dozen words, and it sounded as though the world would shortly come to an end; but presently peace was restored and Tiare gave the cook a cigarette. They both smoked comfortably.

“Do you know, it was I who found him his wife?” said Tiare suddenly, with a smile that spread all over her immense face.

“The cook?”

“No, Strickland.”

“But he had one already.”

“That is what he said, but I told him she was in England, and England is at the other end of the world.”

“True,” I replied.

“He would come to Papeete every two or three months, when he wanted paints or tobacco or money, and then he would wander about like a lost dog. I was sorry for him. I had a girl here then called Ata to do the rooms; she was some sort of a relation of mine, and her father and mother were dead, so I had her to live with me. Strickland used to come here now and then to have a square meal or to play chess with one of the boys. I noticed that she looked at him when he came, and I asked her if she liked him. She said she liked him well enough. You know what these girls are; they’re always pleased to go with a white man.”

“Was she a native?” I asked.

“Yes; she hadn’t a drop of white blood in her. Well, after I’d talked to her I sent for Strickland, and I said to him: ‘Strickland, it’s time for you to settle down. A man of your age shouldn’t go playing about with the girls down at the front. They’re bad lots, and you’ll come to no good with them. You’ve got no money, and you can never keep a job for more than a month or two. No one will employ you now. You say you can always live in the bush with one or other of the natives, and they’re glad to have you because you’re a white man, but it’s not decent for a white man. Now, listen to me, Strickland.’”

Tiare mingled French with English in her conversation, for she used both languages with equal facility. She spoke them with a singing accent which was not unpleasing. You felt that a bird would speak in these tones if it could speak English.

“‘Now, what do you say to marrying Ata? She’s a good girl and she’s only seventeen. She’s never been promiscuous like some of these girls — a captain or a first mate, yes, but she’s never been touched by a native. Elle se respecte, vois-tu. The purser of the Oahu told me last journey that he hadn’t met a nicer girl in the islands. It’s time she settled down too, and besides, the captains and the first mates like a change now and then. I don’t keep my girls too long. She has a bit of property down by Taravao, just before you come to the peninsula, and with copra at the price it is now you could live quite comfortably. There’s a house, and you’d have all the time you wanted for your painting. What do you say to it?”

Tiare paused to take breath.

“It was then he told me of his wife in England. ‘My poor Strickland,’ I said to him, ‘they’ve all got a wife somewhere; that is generally why they come to the islands. Ata is a sensible girl, and she doesn’t expect any ceremony before the Mayor. She’s a Protestant, and you know they don’t look upon these things like the Catholics.’

“Then he said: ‘But what does Ata say to it?’ ‘It appears that she has a beguin for you,’ I said. ‘She’s willing if you are. Shall I call her?’ He chuckled in a funny, dry way he had, and I called her. She knew what I was talking about, the hussy, and I saw her out of the corner of my eyes listening with all her ears, while she pretended to iron a blouse that she had been washing for me. She came. She was laughing, but I could see that she was a little shy, and Strickland looked at her without speaking.”

“Was she pretty?” I asked.

“Not bad. But you must have seen pictures of her. He painted her over and over again, sometimes with a pareo on and sometimes with nothing at all. Yes, she was pretty enough. And she knew how to cook. I taught her myself. I saw Strickland was thinking of it, so I said to him: ‘I’ve given her good wages and she’s saved them, and the captains and the first mates she’s known have given her a little something now and then. She’s saved several hundred francs.’

“He pulled his great red beard and smiled.

“‘Well, Ata,’ he said, ‘do you fancy me for a husband.’

“She did not say anything, but just giggled.

“‘But I tell you, my poor Strickland, the girl has a beguin for you,’ I said.

“I shall beat you,’ he said, looking at her.

“‘How else should I know you loved me,’ she answered.”

Tiare broke off her narrative and addressed herself to me reflectively.

“My first husband, Captain Johnson, used to thrash me regularly. He was a man. He was handsome, six foot three, and when he was drunk there was no holding him. I would be black and blue all over for days at a time. Oh, I cried when he died. I thought I should never get over it. But it wasn’t till I married George Rainey that I knew what I’d lost. You can never tell what a man is like till you live with him. I’ve never been so deceived in a man as I was in George Rainey. He was a fine, upstanding fellow too. He was nearly as tall as Captain Johnson, and he looked strong enough. But it was all on the surface. He never drank. He never raised his hand to me. He might have been a missionary. I made love with the officers of every ship that touched the island, and George Rainey never saw anything. At last I was disgusted with him, and I got a divorce. What was the good of a husband like that? It’s a terrible thing the way some men treat women.”

I condoled with Tiare, and remarked feelingly that men were deceivers ever, then asked her to go on with her story of Strickland.

“‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘there’s no hurry about it. Take your time and think it over. Ata has a very nice room in the annexe. Live with her for a month, and see how you like her. You can have your meals here. And at the end of a month, if you decide you want to marry her, you can just go and settle down on her property.’

“Well, he agreed to that. Ata continued to do the housework, and I gave him his meals as I said I would. I taught Ata to make one or two dishes I knew he was fond of. He did not paint much. He wandered about the hills and bathed in the stream. And he sat about the front looking at the lagoon, and at sunset he would go down and look at Murea. He used to go fishing on the reef. He loved to moon about the harbour talking to the natives. He was a nice, quiet fellow. And every evening after dinner he would go down to the annexe with Ata. I saw he was longing to get away to the bush, and at the end of the month I asked him what he intended to do. He said if Ata was willing to go, he was willing to go with her. So I gave them a wedding dinner. I cooked it with my own hands. I gave them a pea soup and lobster a la portugaise, and a curry, and a cocoa-nut salad — you’ve never had one of my cocoa-nut salads, have you? I must make you one before you go — and then I made them an ice. We had all the champagne we could drink and liqueurs to follow. Oh, I’d made up my mind to do things well. And afterwards we danced in the drawing-room. I was not so fat, then, and I always loved dancing.”

The drawing-room at the Hotel de la Fleur was a small room, with a cottage piano, and a suite of mahogany furniture, covered in stamped velvet, neatly arranged around the walls. On round tables were photograph albums, and on the walls enlarged photographs of Tiare and her first husband, Captain Johnson. Still, though Tiare was old and fat, on occasion we rolled back the Brussels carpet, brought in the maids and one or two friends of Tiare’s, and danced, though now to the wheezy music of a gramaphone. On the verandah the air was scented with the heavy perfume of the tiare, and overhead the Southern Cross shone in a cloudless sky.

Tiare smiled indulgently as she remembered the gaiety of a time long passed.

“We kept it up till three, and when we went to bed I don’t think anyone was very sober. I had told them they could have my trap to take them as far as the road went, because after that they had a long walk. Ata’s property was right away in a fold of the mountain. They started at dawn, and the boy I sent with them didn’t come back till next day.

“Yes, that’s how Strickland was married.”

Chapter LII

I suppose the next three years were the happiest of Strickland’s life. Ata’s house stood about eight kilometres from the road that runs round the island, and you went to it along a winding pathway shaded by the luxuriant trees of the tropics. It was a bungalow of unpainted wood, consisting of two small rooms, and outside was a small shed that served as a kitchen. There was no furniture except the mats they used as beds, and a rocking-chair, which stood on the verandah. Bananas with their great ragged leaves, like the tattered habiliments of an empress in adversity, grew close up to the house. There was a tree just behind which bore alligator pears, and all about were the cocoa-nuts which gave the land its revenue. Ata’s father had planted crotons round his property, and they grew in coloured profusion, gay and brilliant; they fenced the land with flame. A mango grew in front of the house, and at the edge of the clearing were two flamboyants, twin trees, that challenged the gold of the cocoa-nuts with their scarlet flowers.

Here Strickland lived, coming seldom to Papeete, on the produce of the land. There was a little stream that ran not far away, in which he bathed, and down this on occasion would come a shoal of fish. Then the natives would assemble with spears, and with much shouting would transfix the great startled things as they hurried down to the sea. Sometimes Strickland would go down to the reef, and come back with a basket of small, coloured fish that Ata would fry in cocoa-nut oil, or with a lobster; and sometimes she would make a savoury dish of the great land-crabs that scuttled away under your feet. Up the mountain were wild-orange trees, and now and then Ata would go with two or three women from the village and return laden with the green, sweet, luscious fruit. Then the cocoa-nuts would be ripe for picking, and her cousins (like all the natives, Ata had a host of relatives) would swarm up the trees and throw down the big ripe nuts. They split them open and put them in the sun to dry. Then they cut out the copra and put it into sacks, and the women would carry it down to the trader at the village by the lagoon, and he would give in exchange for it rice and soap and tinned meat and a little money. Sometimes there would be a feast in the neighbourhood, and a pig would be killed. Then they would go and eat themselves sick, and dance, and sing hymns.

But the house was a long way from the village, and the Tahitians are lazy. They love to travel and they love to gossip, but they do not care to walk, and for weeks at a time Strickland and Ata lived alone. He painted and he read, and in the evening, when it was dark, they sat together on the verandah, smoking and looking at the night. Then Ata had a baby, and the old woman who came up to help her through her trouble stayed on. Presently the granddaughter of the old woman came to stay with her, and then a youth appeared — no one quite knew where from or to whom he belonged — but he settled down with them in a happy-go-lucky way, and they all lived together.

Chapter LIII

“Tenez, voila le Capitaine Brunot,” said Tiare, one day when I was fitting together what she could tell me of Strickland. “He knew Strickland well; he visited him at his house.”

I saw a middle-aged Frenchman with a big black beard, streaked with gray, a sunburned face, and large, shining eyes. He was dressed in a neat suit of ducks. I had noticed him at luncheon, and Ah Lin, the Chinese boy, told me he had come from the Paumotus on the boat that had that day arrived. Tiare introduced me to him, and he handed me his card, a large card on which was printed Rene Brunot, and underneath, Capitaine au Long Cours. We were sitting on a little verandah outside the kitchen, and Tiare was cutting out a dress that she was making for one of the girls about the house. He sat down with us.

“Yes; I knew Strickland well,” he said. “I am very fond of chess, and he was always glad of a game. I come to Tahiti three or four times a year for my business, and when he was at Papeete he would come here and we would play. When he married” — Captain Brunot smiled and shrugged his shoulders— “enfin, when he went to live with the girl that Tiare gave him, he asked me to go and see him. I was one of the guests at the wedding feast.” He looked at Tiare, and they both laughed. “He did not come much to Papeete after that, and about a year later it chanced that I had to go to that part of the island for I forgot what business, and when I had finished it I said to myself: ‘Voyons, why should I not go and see that poor Strickland?’ I asked one or two natives if they knew anything about him, and I discovered that he lived not more than five kilometres from where I was. So I went. I shall never forget the impression my visit made on me. I live on an atoll, a low island, it is a strip of land surrounding a lagoon, and its beauty is the beauty of the sea and sky and the varied colour of the lagoon and the grace of the cocoa-nut trees; but the place where Strickland lived had the beauty of the Garden of Eden. Ah, I wish I could make you see the enchantment of that spot, a corner hidden away from all the world, with the blue sky overhead and the rich, luxuriant trees. It was a feast of colour. And it was fragrant and cool. Words cannot describe that paradise. And here he lived, unmindful of the world and by the world forgotten. I suppose to European eyes it would have seemed astonishingly sordid. The house was dilapidated and none too clean. Three or four natives were lying on the verandah. You know how natives love to herd together. There was a young man lying full length, smoking a cigarette, and he wore nothing but a pareo.”

The pareo is a long strip of trade cotton, red or blue, stamped with a white pattern. It is worn round the waist and hangs to the knees.

“A girl of fifteen, perhaps, was plaiting pandanus-leaf to make a hat, and an old woman was sitting on her haunches smoking a pipe. Then I saw Ata. She was suckling a new-born child, and another child, stark naked, was playing at her feet. When she saw me she called out to Strickland, and he came to the door. He, too, wore nothing but a pareo. He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. His feet were horny and scarred, so that I knew he went always bare foot. He had gone native with a vengeance. He seemed pleased to see me, and told Ata to kill a chicken for our dinner. He took me into the house to show me the picture he was at work on when I came in. In one corner of the room was the bed, and in the middle was an easel with the canvas upon it. Because I was sorry for him, I had bought a couple of his pictures for small sums, and I had sent others to friends of mine in France. And though I had bought them out of compassion, after living with them I began to like them. Indeed, I found a strange beauty in them. Everyone thought I was mad, but it turns out that I was right. I was his first admirer in the islands.”

He smiled maliciously at Tiare, and with lamentations she told us again the story of how at the sale of Strickland’s effects she had neglected the pictures, but bought an American stove for twenty-seven francs.

“Have you the pictures still?” I asked.

“Yes; I am keeping them till my daughter is of marriageable age, and then I shall sell them. They will be her dot.” Then he went on with the account of his visit to Strickland.

“I shall never forget the evening I spent with him. I had not intended to stay more than an hour, but he insisted that I should spend the night. I hesitated, for I confess I did not much like the look of the mats on which he proposed that I should sleep; but I shrugged my shoulders. When I was building my house in the Paumotus I had slept out for weeks on a harder bed than that, with nothing to shelter me but wild shrubs; and as for vermin, my tough skin should be proof against their malice.

“We went down to the stream to bathe while Ata was preparing the dinner, and after we had eaten it we sat on the verandah. We smoked and chatted. The young man had a concertina, and he played the tunes popular on the music-halls a dozen years before. They sounded strangely in the tropical night thousands of miles from civilisation. I asked Strickland if it did not irk him to live in that promiscuity. No, he said; he liked to have his models under his hand. Presently, after loud yawning, the natives went away to sleep, and Strickland and I were left alone. I cannot describe to you the intense silence of the night. On my island in the Paumotus there is never at night the complete stillness that there was here. There is the rustle of the myriad animals on the beach, all the little shelled things that crawl about ceaselessly, and there is the noisy scurrying of the land-crabs. Now and then in the lagoon you hear the leaping of a fish, and sometimes a hurried noisy splashing as a brown shark sends all the other fish scampering for their lives. And above all, ceaseless like time, is the dull roar of the breakers on the reef. But here there was not a sound, and the air was scented with the white flowers of the night. It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body. You felt that it was ready to be wafted away on the immaterial air, and death bore all the aspect of a beloved friend.”

Tiare sighed.

“Ah, I wish I were fifteen again.”

Then she caught sight of a cat trying to get at a dish of prawns on the kitchen table, and with a dexterous gesture and a lively volley of abuse flung a book at its scampering tail.

“I asked him if he was happy with Ata.

“‘She leaves me alone,’ he said. ‘She cooks my food and looks after her babies. She does what I tell her. She gives me what I want from a woman.’

“‘And do you never regret Europe? Do you not yearn sometimes for the light of the streets in Paris or London, the companionship of your friends, and equals, que sais-je? for theatres and newspapers, and the rumble of omnibuses on the cobbled pavements?’

“For a long time he was silent. Then he said:

“‘I shall stay here till I die.’

“‘But are you never bored or lonely?’ I asked.

“He chuckled.

“‘Mon pauvre ami,’ he said. ‘It is evident that you do not know what it is to be an artist.’”

Capitaine Brunot turned to me with a gentle smile, and there was a wonderful look in his dark, kind eyes.

“He did me an injustice, for I too know what it is to have dreams. I have my visions too. In my way I also am an artist.”

We were all silent for a while, and Tiare fished out of her capacious pocket a handful of cigarettes. She handed one to each of us, and we all three smoked. At last she said:

“Since ce monsieur is interested in Strickland, why do you not take him to see Dr. Coutras? He can tell him something about his illness and death.”

“Volontiers,” said the Captain, looking at me.

I thanked him, and he looked at his watch.

“It is past six o’clock. We should find him at home if you care to come now.”

I got up without further ado, and we walked along the road that led to the doctor’s house. He lived out of the town, but the Hotel de la Fleur was on the edge of it, and we were quickly in the country. The broad road was shaded by pepper-trees, and on each side were the plantations, cocoa-nut and vanilla. The pirate birds were screeching among the leaves of the palms. We came to a stone bridge over a shallow river, and we stopped for a few minutes to see the native boys bathing. They chased one another with shrill cries and laughter, and their bodies, brown and wet, gleamed in the sunlight.

Chapter LIV

As we walked along I reflected on a circumstance which all that I had lately heard about Strickland forced on my attention. Here, on this remote island, he seemed to have aroused none of the detestation with which he was regarded at home, but compassion rather; and his vagaries were accepted with tolerance. To these people, native and European, he was a queer fish, but they were used to queer fish, and they took him for granted; the world was full of odd persons, who did odd things; and perhaps they knew that a man is not what he wants to be, but what he must be. In England and France he was the square peg in the round hole, but here the holes were any sort of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss. I do not think he was any gentler here, less selfish or less brutal, but the circumstances were more favourable. If he had spent his life amid these surroundings he might have passed for no worse a man than another. He received here what he neither expected nor wanted among his own people — sympathy.

I tried to tell Captain Brunot something of the astonishment with which this filled me, and for a little while he did not answer.

“It is not strange that I, at all events, should have had sympathy for him,” he said at last, “for, though perhaps neither of us knew it, we were both aiming at the same thing.”

“What on earth can it be that two people so dissimilar as you and Strickland could aim at?” I asked, smiling.

“Beauty.”

“A large order,” I murmured.

“Do you know how men can be so obsessed by love that they are deaf and blind to everything else in the world? They are as little their own masters as the slaves chained to the benches of a galley. The passion that held Strickland in bondage was no less tyrannical than love.”

“How strange that you should say that!” I answered. “For long ago I had the idea that he was possessed of a devil.”

“And the passion that held Strickland was a passion to create beauty. It gave him no peace. It urged him hither and thither. He was eternally a pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the demon within him was ruthless. There are men whose desire for truth is so great that to attain it they will shatter the very foundation of their world. Of such was Strickland, only beauty with him took the place of truth. I could only feel for him a profound compassion.”

“That is strange also. A man whom he had deeply wronged told me that he felt a great pity for him.” I was silent for a moment. “I wonder if there you have found the explanation of a character which has always seemed to me inexplicable. How did you hit on it?”

He turned to me with a smile.

“Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was an artist? I realised in myself the same desire as animated him. But whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life.”

Then Captain Brunot told me a story which I must repeat, since, if only by way of contrast, it adds something to my impression of Strickland. It has also to my mind a beauty of its own.

Captain Brunot was a Breton, and had been in the French Navy. He left it on his marriage, and settled down on a small property he had near Quimper to live for the rest of his days in peace; but the failure of an attorney left him suddenly penniless, and neither he nor his wife was willing to live in penury where they had enjoyed consideration. During his sea faring days he had cruised the South Seas, and he determined now to seek his fortune there. He spent some months in Papeete to make his plans and gain experience; then, on money borrowed from a friend in France, he bought an island in the Paumotus. It was a ring of land round a deep lagoon, uninhabited, and covered only with scrub and wild guava. With the intrepid woman who was his wife, and a few natives, he landed there, and set about building a house, and clearing the scrub so that he could plant cocoa-nuts. That was twenty years before, and now what had been a barren island was a garden.

“It was hard and anxious work at first, and we worked strenuously, both of us. Every day I was up at dawn, clearing, planting, working on my house, and at night when I threw myself on my bed it was to sleep like a log till morning. My wife worked as hard as I did. Then children were born to us, first a son and then a daughter. My wife and I have taught them all they know. We had a piano sent out from France, and she has taught them to play and to speak English, and I have taught them Latin and mathematics, and we read history together. They can sail a boat. They can swim as well as the natives. There is nothing about the land of which they are ignorant. Our trees have prospered, and there is shell on my reef. I have come to Tahiti now to buy a schooner. I can get enough shell to make it worth while to fish for it, and, who knows? I may find pearls. I have made something where there was nothing. I too have made beauty. Ah, you do not know what it is to look at those tall, healthy trees and think that every one I planted myself.”

“Let me ask you the question that you asked Strickland. Do you never regret France and your old home in Brittany?”

“Some day, when my daughter is married and my son has a wife and is able to take my place on the island, we shall go back and finish our days in the old house in which I was born.”

“You will look back on a happy life,” I said.

“Evidemment, it is not exciting on my island, and we are very far from the world — imagine, it takes me four days to come to Tahiti — but we are happy there. It is given to few men to attempt a work and to achieve it. Our life is simple and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and what pride we have is due only to our contemplation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot touch us, nor envy attack. Ah, mon cher monsieur, they talk of the blessedness of labour, and it is a meaningless phrase, but to me it has the most intense significance. I am a happy man.”

“I am sure you deserve to be,” I smiled.

“I wish I could think so. I do not know how I have deserved to have a wife who was the perfect friend and helpmate, the perfect mistress and the perfect mother.”

I reflected for a while on the life that the Captain suggested to my imagination.

“It is obvious that to lead such an existence and make so great a success of it, you must both have needed a strong will and a determined character.”

“Perhaps; but without one other factor we could have achieved nothing.”

“And what was that?”

He stopped, somewhat dramatically, and stretched out his arm.

“Belief in God. Without that we should have been lost.”

Then we arrived at the house of Dr. Coutras.

Chapter LV

Mr. Coutras was an old Frenchman of great stature and exceeding bulk. His body was shaped like a huge duck’s egg; and his eyes, sharp, blue, and good-natured, rested now and then with self-satisfaction on his enormous paunch. His complexion was florid and his hair white. He was a man to attract immediate sympathy. He received us in a room that might have been in a house in a provincial town in France, and the one or two Polynesian curios had an odd look. He took my hand in both of his — they were huge — and gave me a hearty look, in which, however, was great shrewdness. When he shook hands with Capitaine Brunot he enquired politely after Madame et les enfants. For some minutes there was an exchange of courtesies and some local gossip about the island, the prospects of copra and the vanilla crop; then we came to the object of my visit.

I shall not tell what Dr. Coutras related to me in his words, but in my own, for I cannot hope to give at second hand any impression of his vivacious delivery. He had a deep, resonant voice, fitted to his massive frame, and a keen sense of the dramatic. To listen to him was, as the phrase goes, as good as a play; and much better than most.

It appears that Dr. Coutras had gone one day to Taravao in order to see an old chiefess who was ill, and he gave a vivid picture of the obese old lady, lying in a huge bed, smoking cigarettes, and surrounded by a crowd of dark-skinned retainers. When he had seen her he was taken into another room and given dinner — raw fish, fried bananas, and chicken — que sais-je, the typical dinner of the indigene — and while he was eating it he saw a young girl being driven away from the door in tears. He thought nothing of it, but when he went out to get into his trap and drive home, he saw her again, standing a little way off; she looked at him with a woebegone air, and tears streamed down her cheeks. He asked someone what was wrong with her, and was told that she had come down from the hills to ask him to visit a white man who was sick. They had told her that the doctor could not be disturbed. He called her, and himself asked what she wanted. She told him that Ata had sent her, she who used to be at the Hotel de la Fleur, and that the Red One was ill. She thrust into his hand a crumpled piece of newspaper, and when he opened it he found in it a hundred-franc note.

“Who is the Red One?” he asked of one of the bystanders.

He was told that that was what they called the Englishman, a painter, who lived with Ata up in the valley seven kilometres from where they were. He recognised Strickland by the description. But it was necessary to walk. It was impossible for him to go; that was why they had sent the girl away.

“I confess,” said the doctor, turning to me, “that I hesitated. I did not relish fourteen kilometres over a bad pathway, and there was no chance that I could get back to Papeete that night. Besides, Strickland was not sympathetic to me. He was an idle, useless scoundrel, who preferred to live with a native woman rather than work for his living like the rest of us. Mon Dieu, how was I to know that one day the world would come to the conclusion that he had genius? I asked the girl if he was not well enough to have come down to see me. I asked her what she thought was the matter with him. She would not answer. I pressed her, angrily perhaps, but she looked down on the ground and began to cry. Then I shrugged my shoulders; after all, perhaps it was my duty to go, and in a very bad temper I bade her lead the way.”

His temper was certainly no better when he arrived, perspiring freely and thirsty. Ata was on the look-out for him, and came a little way along the path to meet him.

“Before I see anyone give me something to drink or I shall die of thirst,” he cried out. “Pour l’amour de Dieu, get me a cocoa-nut.”

She called out, and a boy came running along. He swarmed up a tree, and presently threw down a ripe nut. Ata pierced a hole in it, and the doctor took a long, refreshing draught. Then he rolled himself a cigarette and felt in a better humour.

“Now, where is the Red One?” he asked.

“He is in the house, painting. I have not told him you were coming. Go in and see him.”

“But what does he complain of? If he is well enough to paint, he is well enough to have come down to Taravao and save me this confounded walk. I presume my time is no less valuable than his.”

Ata did not speak, but with the boy followed him to the house. The girl who had brought him was by this time sitting on the verandah, and here was lying an old woman, with her back to the wall, making native cigarettes. Ata pointed to the door. The doctor, wondering irritably why they behaved so strangely, entered, and there found Strickland cleaning his palette. There was a picture on the easel. Strickland, clad only in a pareo, was standing with his back to the door, but he turned round when he heard the sound of boots. He gave the doctor a look of vexation. He was surprised to see him, and resented the intrusion. But the doctor gave a gasp, he was rooted to the floor, and he stared with all his eyes. This was not what he expected. He was seized with horror.

“You enter without ceremony,” said Strickland. “What can I do for you?”

The doctor recovered himself, but it required quite an effort for him to find his voice. All his irritation was gone, and he felt — eh bien, oui, je ne le nie pas — he felt an overwhelming pity.

“I am Dr. Coutras. I was down at Taravao to see the chiefess, and Ata sent for me to see you.”

“She’s a damned fool. I have had a few aches and pains lately and a little fever, but that’s nothing; it will pass off. Next time anyone went to Papeete I was going to send for some quinine.”

“Look at yourself in the glass.”

Strickland gave him a glance, smiled, and went over to a cheap mirror in a little wooden frame, that hung on the wall.

“Well?”

“Do you not see a strange change in your face? Do you not see the thickening of your features and a look — how shall I describe it? — the books call it lion-faced. Mon pauvre ami, must I tell you that you have a terrible disease?”

“I?”

“When you look at yourself in the glass you see the typical appearance of the leper.”

“You are jesting,” said Strickland.

“I wish to God I were.”

“Do you intend to tell me that I have leprosy?”

“Unfortunately, there can be no doubt of it.”

Dr. Coutras had delivered sentence of death on many men, and he could never overcome the horror with which it filled him. He felt always the furious hatred that must seize a man condemned when he compared himself with the doctor, sane and healthy, who had the inestimable privilege of life. Strickland looked at him in silence. Nothing of emotion could be seen on his face, disfigured already by the loathsome disease.

“Do they know?” he asked at last, pointing to the persons on the verandah, now sitting in unusual, unaccountable silence.

“These natives know the signs so well,” said the doctor. “They were afraid to tell you.”

Strickland stepped to the door and looked out. There must have been something terrible in his face, for suddenly they all burst out into loud cries and lamentation. They lifted up their voices and they wept. Strickland did not speak. After looking at them for a moment, he came back into the room.

“How long do you think I can last?”

“Who knows? Sometimes the disease continues for twenty years. It is a mercy when it runs its course quickly.”

Strickland went to his easel and looked reflectively at the picture that stood on it.

“You have had a long journey. It is fitting that the bearer of important tidings should be rewarded. Take this picture. It means nothing to you now, but it may be that one day you will be glad to have it.”

Dr. Coutras protested that he needed no payment for his journey; he had already given back to Ata the hundred-franc note, but Strickland insisted that he should take the picture. Then together they went out on the verandah. The natives were sobbing violently. “Be quiet, woman. Dry thy tears,” said Strickland, addressing Ata. “There is no great harm. I shall leave thee very soon.”

“They are not going to take thee away?” she cried.

At that time there was no rigid sequestration on the islands, and lepers, if they chose, were allowed to go free.

“I shall go up into the mountain,” said Strickland.

Then Ata stood up and faced him.

“Let the others go if they choose, but I will not leave thee. Thou art my man and I am thy woman. If thou leavest me I shall hang myself on the tree that is behind the house. I swear it by God.”

There was something immensely forcible in the way she spoke. She was no longer the meek, soft native girl, but a determined woman. She was extraordinarily transformed.

“Why shouldst thou stay with me? Thou canst go back to Papeete, and thou wilt soon find another white man. The old woman can take care of thy children, and Tiare will be glad to have thee back.”

“Thou art my man and I am thy woman. Whither thou goest I will go, too.”

For a moment Strickland’s fortitude was shaken, and a tear filled each of his eyes and trickled slowly down his cheeks. Then he gave the sardonic smile which was usual with him.

“Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.”

“What is it that thou art saying to the doctor?” asked Ata suspiciously. “Thou wilt not go?”

“If it please thee I will stay, poor child.”

Ata flung herself on her knees before him, and clasped his legs with her arms and kissed them. Strickland looked at Dr. Coutras with a faint smile.

“In the end they get you, and you are helpless in their hands. White or brown, they are all the same.”

Dr. Coutras felt that it was absurd to offer expressions of regret in so terrible a disaster, and he took his leave. Strickland told Tane, the boy, to lead him to the village. Dr. Coutras paused for a moment, and then he addressed himself to me.

“I did not like him, I have told you he was not sympathetic to me, but as I walked slowly down to Taravao I could not prevent an unwilling admiration for the stoical courage which enabled him to bear perhaps the most dreadful of human afflictions. When Tane left me I told him I would send some medicine that might be of service; but my hope was small that Strickland would consent to take it, and even smaller that, if he did, it would do him good. I gave the boy a message for Ata that I would come whenever she sent for me. Life is hard, and Nature takes sometimes a terrible delight in torturing her children. It was with a heavy heart that I drove back to my comfortable home in Papeete.”

For a long time none of us spoke.

“But Ata did not send for me,” the doctor went on, at last, “and it chanced that I did not go to that part of the island for a long time. I had no news of Strickland. Once or twice I heard that Ata had been to Papeete to buy painting materials, but I did not happen to see her. More than two years passed before I went to Taravao again, and then it was once more to see the old chiefess. I asked them whether they had heard anything of Strickland. By now it was known everywhere that he had leprosy. First Tane, the boy, had left the house, and then, a little time afterwards, the old woman and her grandchild. Strickland and Ata were left alone with their babies. No one went near the plantation, for, as you know, the natives have a very lively horror of the disease, and in the old days when it was discovered the sufferer was killed; but sometimes, when the village boys were scrambling about the hills, they would catch sight of the white man, with his great red beard, wandering about. They fled in terror. Sometimes Ata would come down to the village at night and arouse the trader, so that he might sell her various things of which she stood in need. She knew that the natives looked upon her with the same horrified aversion as they looked upon Strickland, and she kept out of their way. Once some women, venturing nearer than usual to the plantation, saw her washing clothes in the brook, and they threw stones at her. After that the trader was told to give her the message that if she used the brook again men would come and burn down her house.”

“Brutes,” I said.

“Mais non, mon cher monsieur, men are always the same. Fear makes them cruel.... I decided to see Strickland, and when I had finished with the chiefess asked for a boy to show me the way. But none would accompany me, and I was forced to find it alone.”

When Dr. Coutras arrived at the plantation he was seized with a feeling of uneasiness. Though he was hot from walking, he shivered. There was something hostile in the air which made him hesitate, and he felt that invisible forces barred his way. Unseen hands seemed to draw him back. No one would go near now to gather the cocoa-nuts, and they lay rotting on the ground. Everywhere was desolation. The bush was encroaching, and it looked as though very soon the primeval forest would regain possession of that strip of land which had been snatched from it at the cost of so much labour. He had the sensation that here was the abode of pain. As he approached the house he was struck by the unearthly silence, and at first he thought it was deserted. Then he saw Ata. She was sitting on her haunches in the lean-to that served her as kitchen, watching some mess cooking in a pot. Near her a small boy was playing silently in the dirt. She did not smile when she saw him.

“I have come to see Strickland,” he said.

“I will go and tell him.”

She went to the house, ascended the few steps that led to the verandah, and entered. Dr. Coutras followed her, but waited outside in obedience to her gesture. As she opened the door he smelt the sickly sweet smell which makes the neighbourhood of the leper nauseous. He heard her speak, and then he heard Strickland’s answer, but he did not recognise the voice. It had become hoarse and indistinct. Dr. Coutras raised his eyebrows. He judged that the disease had already attacked the vocal chords. Then Ata came out again.

“He will not see you. You must go away.”

Dr. Coutras insisted, but she would not let him pass. Dr. Coutras shrugged his shoulders, and after a moment’s rejection turned away. She walked with him. He felt that she too wanted to be rid of him.

“Is there nothing I can do at all?” he asked.

“You can send him some paints,” she said. “There is nothing else he wants.”

“Can he paint still?”

“He is painting the walls of the house.”

“This is a terrible life for you, my poor child.”

Then at last she smiled, and there was in her eyes a look of superhuman love. Dr. Coutras was startled by it, and amazed. And he was awed. He found nothing to say.

“He is my man,” she said.

“Where is your other child?” he asked. “When I was here last you had two.”

“Yes; it died. We buried it under the mango.”

When Ata had gone with him a little way she said she must turn back. Dr. Coutras surmised she was afraid to go farther in case she met any of the people from the village. He told her again that if she wanted him she had only to send and he would come at once.

Chapter LVI

Then two years more went by, or perhaps three, for time passes imperceptibly in Tahiti, and it is hard to keep count of it; but at last a message was brought to Dr. Coutras that Strickland was dying. Ata had waylaid the cart that took the mail into Papeete, and besought the man who drove it to go at once to the doctor. But the doctor was out when the summons came, and it was evening when he received it. It was impossible to start at so late an hour, and so it was not till next day soon after dawn that he set out. He arrived at Taravao, and for the last time tramped the seven kilometres that led to Ata’s house. The path was overgrown, and it was clear that for years now it had remained all but untrodden. It was not easy to find the way. Sometimes he had to stumble along the bed of the stream, and sometimes he had to push through shrubs, dense and thorny; often he was obliged to climb over rocks in order to avoid the hornet-nests that hung on the trees over his head. The silence was intense.

It was with a sigh of relief that at last he came upon the little unpainted house, extraordinarily bedraggled now, and unkempt; but here too was the same intolerable silence. He walked up, and a little boy, playing unconcernedly in the sunshine, started at his approach and fled quickly away: to him the stranger was the enemy. Dr. Coutras had a sense that the child was stealthily watching him from behind a tree. The door was wide open. He called out, but no one answered. He stepped in. He knocked at a door, but again there was no answer. He turned the handle and entered. The stench that assailed him turned him horribly sick. He put his handkerchief to his nose and forced himself to go in. The light was dim, and after the brilliant sunshine for a while he could see nothing. Then he gave a start. He could not make out where he was. He seemed on a sudden to have entered a magic world. He had a vague impression of a great primeval forest and of naked people walking beneath the trees. Then he saw that there were paintings on the walls.

“Mon Dieu, I hope the sun hasn’t affected me,” he muttered.

A slight movement attracted his attention, and he saw that Ata was lying on the floor, sobbing quietly.

“Ata,” he called. “Ata.”

She took no notice. Again the beastly stench almost made him faint, and he lit a cheroot. His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and now he was seized by an overwhelming sensation as he stared at the painted walls. He knew nothing of pictures, but there was something about these that extraordinarily affected him. From floor to ceiling the walls were covered with a strange and elaborate composition. It was indescribably wonderful and mysterious. It took his breath away. It filled him with an emotion which he could not understand or analyse. He felt the awe and the delight which a man might feel who watched the beginning of a world. It was tremendous, sensual, passionate; and yet there was something horrible there, too, something which made him afraid. It was the work of a man who had delved into the hidden depths of nature and had discovered secrets which were beautiful and fearful too. It was the work of a man who knew things which it is unholy for men to know. There was something primeval there and terrible. It was not human. It brought to his mind vague recollections of black magic. It was beautiful and obscene.

“Mon Dieu, this is genius.”

The words were wrung from him, and he did not know he had spoken.

Then his eyes fell on the bed of mats in the corner, and he went up, and he saw the dreadful, mutilated, ghastly object which had been Strickland. He was dead. Dr. Coutras made an effort of will and bent over that battered horror. Then he started violently, and terror blazed in his heart, for he felt that someone was behind him. It was Ata. He had not heard her get up. She was standing at his elbow, looking at what he looked at.

“Good Heavens, my nerves are all distraught,” he said. “You nearly frightened me out of my wits.”

He looked again at the poor dead thing that had been man, and then he started back in dismay.

“But he was blind.”

“Yes; he had been blind for nearly a year.”

Chapter LVII

AT that moment we were interrupted by the appearance of Madame Coutras, who had been paying visits. She came in, like a ship in full sail, an imposing creature, tall and stout, with an ample bust and an obesity girthed in alarmingly by straight-fronted corsets. She had a bold hooked nose and three chins. She held herself upright. She had not yielded for an instant to the enervating charm of the tropics, but contrariwise was more active, more worldly, more decided than anyone in a temperate clime would have thought it possible to be. She was evidently a copious talker, and now poured forth a breathless stream of anecdote and comment. She made the conversation we had just had seem far away and unreal.

Presently Dr. Coutras turned to me.

“I still have in my bureau the picture that Strickland gave me,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Willingly.”

We got up, and he led me on to the verandah which surrounded his house. We paused to look at the gay flowers that rioted in his garden.

“For a long time I could not get out of my head the recollection of the extraordinary decoration with which Strickland had covered the walls of his house,” he said reflectively.

I had been thinking of it, too. It seemed to me that here Strickland had finally put the whole expression of himself. Working silently, knowing that it was his last chance, I fancied that here he must have said all that he knew of life and all that he divined. And I fancied that perhaps here he had at last found peace. The demon which possessed him was exorcised at last, and with the completion of the work, for which all his life had been a painful preparation, rest descended on his remote and tortured soul. He was willing to die, for he had fulfilled his purpose.

“What was the subject?” I asked.

“I scarcely know. It was strange and fantastic. It was a vision of the beginnings of the world, the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve — que sais-je? — it was a hymn to the beauty of the human form, male and female, and the praise of Nature, sublime, indifferent, lovely, and cruel. It gave you an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the endlessness of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every day, the cocoa-nuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the alligator-pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as though there were in them a spirit and a mystery which I am ever on the point of seizing and which forever escapes me. The colours were the colours familiar to me, and yet they were different. They had a significance which was all their own. And those nude men and women. They were of the earth, and yet apart from it. They seemed to possess something of the clay of which they were created, and at the same time something divine. You saw man in the nakedness of his primeval instincts, and you were afraid, for you saw yourself.”

Dr. Coutras shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“You will laugh at me. I am a materialist, and I am a gross, fat man — Falstaff, eh? — the lyrical mode does not become me. I make myself ridiculous. But I have never seen painting which made so deep an impression upon me. Tenez, I had just the same feeling as when I went to the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There too I was awed by the greatness of the man who had painted that ceiling. It was genius, and it was stupendous and overwhelming. I felt small and insignificant. But you are prepared for the greatness of Michael Angelo. Nothing had prepared me for the immense surprise of these pictures in a native hut, far away from civilisation, in a fold of the mountain above Taravao. And Michael Angelo is sane and healthy. Those great works of his have the calm of the sublime; but here, notwithstanding beauty, was something troubling. I do not know what it was. It made me uneasy. It gave me the impression you get when you are sitting next door to a room that you know is empty, but in which, you know not why, you have a dreadful consciousness that notwithstanding there is someone. You scold yourself; you know it is only your nerves — and yet, and yet... In a little while it is impossible to resist the terror that seizes you, and you are helpless in the clutch of an unseen horror. Yes; I confess I was not altogether sorry when I heard that those strange masterpieces had been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” I cried.

“Mais oui; did you not know?”

“How should I know? It is true I had never heard of this work; but I thought perhaps it had fallen into the hands of a private owner. Even now there is no certain list of Strickland’s paintings.”

“When he grew blind he would sit hour after hour in those two rooms that he had painted, looking at his works with sightless eyes, and seeing, perhaps, more than he had ever seen in his life before. Ata told me that he never complained of his fate, he never lost courage. To the end his mind remained serene and undisturbed. But he made her promise that when she had buried him — did I tell you that I dug his grave with my own hands, for none of the natives would approach the infected house, and we buried him, she and I, sewn up in three pareos joined together, under the mango-tree — he made her promise that she would set fire to the house and not leave it till it was burned to the ground and not a stick remained.”

I did not speak for a while, for I was thinking. Then I said:

“He remained the same to the end, then.”

“Do you understand? I must tell you that I thought it my duty to dissuade her.”

“Even after what you have just said?”

“Yes; for I knew that here was a work of genius, and I did not think we had the right to deprive the world of it. But Ata would not listen to me. She had promised. I would not stay to witness the barbarous deed, and it was only afterwards that I heard what she had done. She poured paraffin on the dry floors and on the pandanus-mats, and then she set fire. In a little while nothing remained but smouldering embers, and a great masterpiece existed no longer.

“I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had achieved what he wanted. His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.”

“But I must show you my picture,” said Dr. Coutras, moving on.

“What happened to Ata and the child?”

“They went to the Marquesas. She had relations there. I have heard that the boy works on one of Cameron’s schooners. They say he is very like his father in appearance.”

At the door that led from the verandah to the doctor’s consulting-room, he paused and smiled.

“It is a fruit-piece. You would think it not a very suitable picture for a doctor’s consulting-room, but my wife will not have it in the drawing-room. She says it is frankly obscene.”

“A fruit-piece!” I exclaimed in surprise.

We entered the room, and my eyes fell at once on the picture. I looked at it for a long time.

It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not what and at first sight it was an innocent picture enough. It would have been passed in an exhibition of the Post-Impressionists by a careless person as an excellent but not very remarkable example of the school; but perhaps afterwards it would come back to his recollection, and he would wonder why. I do not think then he could ever entirely forget it.

The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave. They were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly — one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children — and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove’s breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can tell what anguished fancy made these fruits? They belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides. There was something strangely alive in them, as though they were created in a stage of the earth’s dark history when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They were extravagantly luxurious. They were heavy with tropical odours. They seemed to possess a sombre passion of their own. It was enchanted fruit, to taste which might open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to mysterious palaces of the imagination. They were sullen with unawaited dangers, and to eat them might turn a man to beast or god. All that was healthy and natural, all that clung to happy relationships and the simple joys of simple men, shrunk from them in dismay; and yet a fearful attraction was in them, and, like the fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they were terrible with the possibilities of the Unknown.

At last I turned away. I felt that Strickland had kept his secret to the grave.

“Voyons, Rene, mon ami,” came the loud, cheerful voice of Madame Coutras, “what are you doing all this time? Here are the aperitifs. Ask Monsieur if he will not drink a little glass of Quinquina Dubonnet.”

“Volontiers, Madame,” I said, going out on to the verandah.

The spell was broken.

Chapter LVIII

The time came for my departure from Tahiti. According to the gracious custom of the island, presents were given me by the persons with whom I had been thrown in contact — baskets made of the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, mats of pandanus, fans; and Tiare gave me three little pearls and three jars of guava-jelly made with her own plump hands. When the mail-boat, stopping for twenty-four hours on its way from Wellington to San Francisco, blew the whistle that warned the passengers to get on board, Tiare clasped me to her vast bosom, so that I seemed to sink into a billowy sea, and pressed her red lips to mine. Tears glistened in her eyes. And when we steamed slowly out of the lagoon, making our way gingerly through the opening in the reef, and then steered for the open sea, a certain melancholy fell upon me. The breeze was laden still with the pleasant odours of the land. Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.

Not much more than a month later I was in London; and after I had arranged certain matters which claimed my immediate attention, thinking Mrs. Strickland might like to hear what I knew of her husband’s last years, I wrote to her. I had not seen her since long before the war, and I had to look out her address in the telephone-book. She made an appointment, and I went to the trim little house on Campden Hill which she now inhabited. She was by this time a woman of hard on sixty, but she bore her years well, and no one would have taken her for more than fifty. Her face, thin and not much lined, was of the sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in youth she must have been a much handsomer woman than in fact she was. Her hair, not yet very gray, was becomingly arranged, and her black gown was modish. I remembered having heard that her sister, Mrs. MacAndrew, outliving her husband but a couple of years, had left money to Mrs. Strickland; and by the look of the house and the trim maid who opened the door I judged that it was a sum adequate to keep the widow in modest comfort.

When I was ushered into the drawing-room I found that Mrs. Strickland had a visitor, and when I discovered who he was, I guessed that I had been asked to come at just that time not without intention. The caller was Mr. Van Busche Taylor, an American, and Mrs. Strickland gave me particulars with a charming smile of apology to him.

“You know, we English are so dreadfully ignorant. You must forgive me if it’s necessary to explain.” Then she turned to me. “Mr. Van Busche Taylor is the distinguished American critic. If you haven’t read his book your education has been shamefully neglected, and you must repair the omission at once. He’s writing something about dear Charlie, and he’s come to ask me if I can help him.”

Mr. Van Busche Taylor was a very thin man with a large, bald head, bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put into her mention of her husband’s name, and while the pair conversed I took stock of the room in which we sat. Mrs. Strickland had moved with the times. Gone were the Morris papers and gone the severe cretonnes, gone were the Arundel prints that had adorned the walls of her drawing-room in Ashley Gardens; the room blazed with fantastic colour, and I wondered if she knew that those varied hues, which fashion had imposed upon her, were due to the dreams of a poor painter in a South Sea island. She gave me the answer herself.

“What wonderful cushions you have,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor.

“Do you like them?” she said, smiling. “Bakst, you know.”

And yet on the walls were coloured reproductions of several of Strickland’s best pictures, due to the enterprise of a publisher in Berlin.

“You’re looking at my pictures,” she said, following my eyes. “Of course, the originals are out of my reach, but it’s a comfort to have these. The publisher sent them to me himself. They’re a great consolation to me.”

“They must be very pleasant to live with,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor.

“Yes; they’re so essentially decorative.”

“That is one of my profoundest convictions,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Great art is always decorative.”

Their eyes rested on a nude woman suckling a baby, while a girl was kneeling by their side holding out a flower to the indifferent child. Looking over them was a wrinkled, scraggy hag. It was Strickland’s version of the Holy Family. I suspected that for the figures had sat his household above Taravao, and the woman and the baby were Ata and his first son. I asked myself if Mrs. Strickland had any inkling of the facts.

The conversation proceeded, and I marvelled at the tact with which Mr. Van Busche Taylor avoided all subjects that might have been in the least embarrassing, and at the ingenuity with which Mrs. Strickland, without saying a word that was untrue, insinuated that her relations with her husband had always been perfect. At last Mr. Van Busche Taylor rose to go. Holding his hostess’ hand, he made her a graceful, though perhaps too elaborate, speech of thanks, and left us.

“I hope he didn’t bore you,” she said, when the door closed behind him. “Of course it’s a nuisance sometimes, but I feel it’s only right to give people any information I can about Charlie. There’s a certain responsibility about having been the wife of a genius.”

She looked at me with those pleasant eyes of hers, which had remained as candid and as sympathetic as they had been more than twenty years before. I wondered if she was making a fool of me.

“Of course you’ve given up your business,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she answered airily. “I ran it more by way of a hobby than for any other reason, and my children persuaded me to sell it. They thought I was overtaxing my strength.”

I saw that Mrs. Strickland had forgotten that she had ever done anything so disgraceful as to work for her living. She had the true instinct of the nice woman that it is only really decent for her to live on other people’s money.

“They’re here now,” she said. “I thought they’d, like to hear what you had to say about their father. You remember Robert, don’t you? I’m glad to say he’s been recommended for the Military Cross.”

She went to the door and called them. There entered a tall man in khaki, with the parson’s collar, handsome in a somewhat heavy fashion, but with the frank eyes that I remembered in him as a boy. He was followed by his sister. She must have been the same age as was her mother when first I knew her, and she was very like her. She too gave one the impression that as a girl she must have been prettier than indeed she was.

“I suppose you don’t remember them in the least,” said Mrs. Strickland, proud and smiling. “My daughter is now Mrs. Ronaldson. Her husband’s a Major in the Gunners.”

“He’s by way of being a pukka soldier, you know,” said Mrs. Ronaldson gaily. “That’s why he’s only a Major.”

I remembered my anticipation long ago that she would marry a soldier. It was inevitable. She had all the graces of the soldier’s wife. She was civil and affable, but she could hardly conceal her intimate conviction that she was not quite as others were. Robert was breezy.

“It’s a bit of luck that I should be in London when you turned up,” he said. “I’ve only got three days’ leave.”

“He’s dying to get back,” said his mother.

“Well, I don’t mind confessing it, I have a rattling good time at the front. I’ve made a lot of good pals. It’s a first-rate life. Of course war’s terrible, and all that sort of thing; but it does bring out the best qualities in a man, there’s no denying that.”

Then I told them what I had learned about Charles Strickland in Tahiti. I thought it unnecessary to say anything of Ata and her boy, but for the rest I was as accurate as I could be. When I had narrated his lamentable death I ceased. For a minute or two we were all silent. Then Robert Strickland struck a match and lit a cigarette.

“The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” he said, somewhat impressively.

Mrs. Strickland and Mrs. Ronaldson looked down with a slightly pious expression which indicated, I felt sure, that they thought the quotation was from Holy Writ. Indeed, I was unconvinced that Robert Strickland did not share their illusion. I do not know why I suddenly thought of Strickland’s son by Ata. They had told me he was a merry, light-hearted youth. I saw him, with my mind’s eye, on the schooner on which he worked, wearing nothing but a pair of dungarees; and at night, when the boat sailed along easily before a light breeze, and the sailors were gathered on the upper deck, while the captain and the supercargo lolled in deck-chairs, smoking their pipes, I saw him dance with another lad, dance wildly, to the wheezy music of the concertina. Above was the blue sky, and the stars, and all about the desert of the Pacific Ocean.

A quotation from the Bible came to my lips, but I held my tongue, for I know that clergymen think it a little blasphemous when the laity poach upon their preserves. My Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, was on these occasions in the habit of saying that the devil could always quote scripture to his purpose. He remembered the days when you could get thirteen Royal Natives for a shilling.

THE PAINTED VEIL

In August 1919, Maugham set out from Liverpool on a trip to the Far East. He travelled to China, on to Mukden, and returned via Japan and the Suez Canal. Inspired by his travels, Maugham wrote a number of works, The Painted Veil being one of them. Although he returned from his travels in 1923, it was another two years before Maugham felt ready to write this story and it was therefore not published until 1925. He chose the title from a sonnet of the same title by Shelley: “Lift not the painted veil which those who live, call life…”

The story did not have an easy path to its readers. With the married couple at the centre of the story called Lane and not Fane as later, the story had first been serialised in Cosmopolitan magazine and then in Nash’s magazine. This led to an unknown Mr Lane bringing a libel suit and settling for £250 and a change of name for the characters; then when the book was published, the Hong Kong government objected to a character that was a government official being given an adulterous role. Real places had to be given fictitious names (Hong Kong became Tching Yen, for example), and 4,000 copies that had already been distributed had to be recalled. Maugham was disgruntled that his American publisher, Doran, had not put extra effort into the promoting of the book, complaining that Doran had sent the book out to the market as if it were packets of tea, in other words, without due care and attention; despite this, it immediately went into the American bestseller list and sold 100,000 copies with excellent reviews. It was published in Britain by Heinemann. Once again there are thinly disguised portraits of real people — Walter Fane is a combination of both Maugham and his cold, monosyllabic brother, “F.H.”, and if one counts the doomed marriage of the couple as a “persona”, Maugham’s own difficult marital relationship must have been the model for this and numerous other unfortunate marriages in his work.

In 1931, aided by American dramatist Bartlett Cormack, Maugham wrote a stage adaptation of the novel for his friend, actress Gladys Cooper. Greta Garbo, Herbert Marshall and George Brent starred in a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer film version of The Painted Veil in 1934. Maugham was very taken by Cooper’s portrayal of Mrs Fane, but complained bitterly about Hollywood interpretations of his work. There have been two more film adaptations – in 1957, starring Bill Travers and Eleanor Parker and entitled The Seventh Sin, and in 2006, starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Kitty Fane is a striking, vivacious and captivating young woman in her mid twenties. The daughter of a barrister, albeit a nondescript one that received few briefs, she is well aware of her attributes and of her own ambition to do well through marriage. However, she is introduced to the reader when in a panic – she is with her lover at her home in the Far East city of Tching Yen, when she fears that her husband, Walter, has come home and secretly observed her with her forty-year-old boyfriend, Charlie Townsend, who is also married. Kitty embarks on her affair with Townsend not just out of desire. She is bored and discontented, not just with her dull husband but with her lack of social rank in the colonial outpost. At home in London she has more social status – “Why, there’s hardly anyone here [Tching Yen] that one would bother about for five minutes at home. Mother wouldn’t dream of asking any of them to dine at our house”. Townsend is a high ranking government official in the city, and Fane is his inferior in government rank, a bacteriologist who is dull and lacking in charisma, compared to Townsend. Kitty’s lover is the sort of man she should have married, had she not been panicked into marrying Lane by her younger sister’s engagement to a well connected young man. She will take any risk to be with her lover and eventually she and Townsend reassure themselves that Lane has not seen them, and the affair continues unhindered. All thoughts of Fane’s kindnesses to her, his devotion and his care for her, the little gifts he showered her with, she disregards in her resentment at his ordinariness; all she can now see is his “restrained, cold and self possessed” personality, even though she knows his passion for her is there, just hidden from view. She tolerates her husband at best, but adores her tall, masculine lover and can think of nothing else than divorcing their spouses, marrying and living happily ever after.

However, their reassurance is short lived when it is revealed that Walter had been in the house at the very time Kitty and Townsend were making love in the marital bedroom. He says nothing, but his manner towards Kitty is greatly changed; he is still attentive, but it is now perfunctory; his conversation is curt and he will not meet her gaze. Friends comment on how pale and extra-introverted he has become. At last, the inevitable confrontation occurs. Fane tells his wife that either she accepts divorce, or accompanies him to a cholera ridden district and supports him in his new role as the doctor there; or she may divorce him if her lover agrees to marry her within a week of both divorces being awarded the decree nisi and so long as Townsend’s wife gives her approval. Kitty hurries to break the news to her lover, but his reaction devastates her — he will not leave his wife. It becomes clear that he is deeply fond of his wife and that Kitty was only an infatuation and sexual diversion from a marriage that was rarely physical.

Kitty has no choice but to accompany her husband to the disease ridden area of Mei-tan-fu. The experiences she has there, and on her subsequent return to Tching Yen, are to have a life changing effect on her.

There is a rather moralistic tone to this novel, as the overall theme is that of a wayward woman that learns hard lessons, although few of the characters come out of it unscathed. Once again, Maugham excels at creating amoral characters that on the surface at least, are unlikeable, but they have enough depth for the reader to find some appealing attributes in them, and perhaps even to feel sympathy for them. The claustrophobic atmosphere of a colonial social network with its gossip, boredom and social machinations is beautifully drawn – it seems ironic that British people went to these colonies in search of advancement and adventure and found themselves – like Kitty – even more constricted than at home.

The magazine in which the novel was first serialised in 1924

The first edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

“...the painted veil which those who live call Life.”

PREFACE

This story was suggested by the lines of Dante that run as follows:

Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,

E riposato della lunga via,

Seguito il terzo spirito al secondo,

Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia:

Siena mi fè; disfecemi Maremma:

Salsi colui, che, innanellata pria

Disposando m’avea con la sua gemma.

“Pray, when you are returned to the world, and rested from the long journey,” followed the third spirit on the second, “remember me, who am Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this he knows who after betrothal espoused me with his ring.”

* * * *

I was a student at St. Thomas’s Hospital and the Easter vacation gave me six weeks to myself. With my clothes in a gladstone bag and twenty pounds in my pocket I set out. I was twenty. I went to Genoa and Pisa and then to Florence. Here I took a room in the via Laura, from the window of which I could see the lovely dome of the Cathedral, in the apartment of a widow lady, with a daughter, who offered me board and lodging (after a good deal of haggling) for four lire a day. I am afraid that she did not make a very good thing out of it, since my appetite was enormous, and I could devour a mountain of macaroni without inconvenience. She had a vineyard on the Tuscan hills, and my recollection is that the Chianti she got from it was the best I have ever drunk in Italy. Her daughter gave me an Italian lesson every day. She seemed to me then of mature age, but I do not suppose that she was more than twenty-six. She had had trouble. Her betrothed, an officer, had been killed in Abyssinia and she was consecrated to virginity. It was an understood thing that on her mother’s death (a buxom, grey-haired, jovial lady who did not mean to die a day before the dear Lord saw fit) Ersilia would enter religion. But she looked forward to this with cheerfulness. She loved a good laugh. We were very gay at luncheon and dinner, but she took her lessons seriously, and when I was stupid or inattentive rapped me over the knuckles with a black ruler. I should have been indignant at being treated like a child if it had not reminded me of the old-fashioned pedagogues I had read of in books and so made me laugh.

I lived laborious days. I started each one by translating a few pages of one of Ibsen’s plays so that I might acquire mastery of technique and ease in writing dialogue; then, with Ruskin in my hand, I examined the sights of Florence. I admired according to instructions the tower of Giotto and the bronze doors of Ghiberti. I was properly enthusiastic over the Botticellis in the Uffizi and I turned the scornful shoulder of extreme youth on what the master disapproved of. After luncheon I had my Italian lesson and then going out once more I visited the churches and wandered day-dreaming along the Arno. When dinner was done I went out to look for adventure, but such was my innocence, or at least my shyness, I always came home as virtuous as I had gone out. The Signora, though she had given me a key, sighed with relief when she heard me come in and bolt the door, for she was always afraid I should forget to do this, and I returned to my perusal of the history of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. I was bitterly conscious that not thus behaved the writers of the romantic era, though I doubt whether any of them managed to spend six weeks in Italy on twenty pounds, and I much enjoyed my sober and industrious life.

I had already read the Inferno (with the help of a translation, but conscientiously looking out in a dictionary the words I did not know), so with Ersilia started on the Purgatorio. When we came to the passage I have quoted above she told me that Pia was a gentlewoman of Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her to death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma the noxious vapours of which he was confident would do the trick; but she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her thrown out of the window. I do not know where Ersilia learnt all this, the note in my own Dante was less circumstantial, but the story for some reason caught my imagination. I turned it over in my mind and for many years from time to time would brood over it for two or three days. I used to repeat to myself the line: Siena mi fè; disfecemi Maremma. But it was one among many subjects that occupied my fancy and for long periods I forgot it. Of course I saw it as a modern story, and I could not think of a setting in the world of to-day in which such events might plausibly happen. It was not till I made a long journey in China that I found this.

I think this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character. It is difficult to explain the relation between character and plot. You cannot very well think of a character in the void; the moment you think of him, you think of him in some situation, doing something; so that the character and at least his principle action seem to be the result of a simultaneous act of the imagination. But in this case the characters were chosen to fit the story I gradually evolved; they were constructed from persons I had long known in different circumstances.

I had with this book some of the difficulties that are apt to befall an author. I had originally called my hero and heroine Lane, a common enough name, but it appeared that there were people of that name in Hong-Kong. They brought an action, which the proprietors of the magazine in which my novel was serialised, settled for two hundred and fifty pounds, and I changed the name to Fane. Then the Assistant Colonial Secretary, thinking himself libelled, threatened to institute proceedings. I was surprised, since in England we can put a Prime Minister on the stage or use him as the character of a novel, an Archbishop of Canterbury or a Lord Chancellor, and the tenants of these exalted offices do not turn a hair. It seemed to me strange that the temporary occupant of so insignificant a post should think himself aimed at, but in order to save trouble I changed Hong-Kong to an imaginary colony of Tching-Yen. The book had already been published when the incident arose and was recalled. A certain number of astute reviewers who had received it did not on one pretext and another return their copies. These have now acquired a bibliographical value; I think there are about sixty of them in existence, and are bought by collectors at a high price.

I

She gave a startled cry.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Notwithstanding the darkness of the shuttered room he saw her face on a sudden distraught with terror.

“Some one just tried the door.”

“Well, perhaps it was the amah, or one of the boys.”

“They never come at this time. They know I always sleep after tiffin.”

“Who else could it be?”

“Walter,” she whispered, her lips trembling.

She pointed to his shoes. He tried to put them on, but his nervousness, for her alarm was affecting him, made him clumsy, and besides, they were on the tight side. With a faint gasp of impatience she gave him a shoe-horn. She slipped into a kimono and in her bare feet went over to her dressing-table. Her hair was shingled and with a comb she had repaired its disorder before he had laced his second shoe. She handed him his coat.

“How shall I get out?”

“You’d better wait a bit. I’ll look out and see that it’s all right.”

“It can’t possibly be Walter. He doesn’t leave the laboratory till five.”

“Who is it then?”

They spoke in whispers now. She was quaking. It occurred to him that in an emergency she would lose her head and on a sudden he felt angry with her. If it wasn’t safe why the devil had she said it was? She caught her breath and put her hand on his arm. He followed the direction of her glance. They stood facing the windows that led out on the verandah. They were shuttered and the shutters were bolted. They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. A minute passed and there was no sound. Then, with the ghastliness of the supernatural, in the same stealthy, noiseless and horrifying manner, they saw the white china knob of the handle at the other window turn also. It was so frightening that Kitty, her nerves failing her, opened her mouth to scream; but, seeing what she was going to do, he swiftly put his hand over it and her cry was smothered in his fingers.

Silence. She leaned against him, her knees shaking, and he was afraid she would faint. Frowning, his jaw set, he carried her to the bed and sat her down upon it. She was as white as the sheet and notwithstanding his tan his cheeks were pale too. He stood by her side looking with fascinated gaze at the china knob. They did not speak. Then he saw that she was crying.

“For God’s sake don’t do that,” he whispered irritably. “If we’re in for it we’re in for it. We shall just have to brazen it out.”

She looked for her handkerchief and knowing what she wanted he gave her her bag.

“Where’s your topee?”

“I left it downstairs.”

“Oh, my God!”

“I say, you must pull yourself together. It’s a hundred to one it wasn’t Walter. Why on earth should he come back at this hour? He never does come home in the middle of the day, does he?”

“Never.”

“I’ll bet you anything you like it was the amah.”

She gave him the shadow of a smile. His rich, caressing voice reassured her and she took his hand and affectionately pressed it. He gave her a moment to collect herself.

“Look here, we can’t stay here for ever,” he said then. “Do you feel up to going out on the verandah and having a look?”

“I don’t think I can stand.”

“Have you got any brandy in here?”

She shook her head. A frown for an instant darkened his brow, he was growing impatient, he did not quite know what to do. Suddenly she clutched his hand more tightly.

“Suppose he’s waiting there?”

He forced his lips to smile and his voice retained the gentle, persuasive tone the effect of which he was so fully conscious of.

“That’s not very likely. Have a little pluck, Kitty. How can it possibly be your husband? If he’d come in and seen a strange topee in the hall and come upstairs and found your room locked, surely he would have made some sort of row. It must have been one of the servants. Only a Chinese would turn a handle in that way.”

She did feel more herself now.

“It’s not very pleasant even if it was only the amah.”

“She can be squared and if necessary I’ll put the fear of God into her. There are not many advantages in being a government official, but you may as well get what you can out of it.”

He must be right. She stood up and turning to him stretched out her arms: he took her in his and kissed her on the lips. It was such rapture that it was pain. She adored him. He released her and she went to the window. She slid back the bolt and opening the shutter a little looked out. There was not a soul. She slipped on to the verandah, looked into her husband’s dressing-room and then into her own sitting-room. Both were empty. She went back to the bedroom and beckoned to him.

“Nobody.”

“I believe the whole thing was an optical delusion.”

“Don’t laugh. I was terrified. Go into my sitting-room and sit down. I’ll put on my stockings and some shoes.”

II

He did as she bade and in five minutes she joined him. He was smoking a cigarette.

“I say, could I have a brandy and soda?”

“Yes, I’ll ring.”

“I don’t think it would hurt you by the look of things.”

They waited in silence for the boy to answer. She gave the order.

“Ring up the laboratory and ask if Walter is there,” she said then. “They won’t know your voice.”

He took up the receiver and asked for the number. He inquired whether Dr. Fane was in. He put down the receiver.

“He hasn’t been in since tiffin,” he told her. “Ask the boy whether he has been here.”

“I daren’t. It’ll look so funny if he has and I didn’t see him.”

The boy brought the drinks and Townsend helped himself. When he offered her some she shook her head.

“What’s to be done if it was Walter?” she asked.

“Perhaps he wouldn’t care.”

“Walter?”

Her tone was incredulous.

“It’s always struck me he was rather shy. Some men can’t bear scenes, you know. He’s got sense enough to know that there’s nothing to be gained by making a scandal. I don’t believe for a minute it was Walter, but even if it was my impression is that he’ll do nothing. I think he’ll ignore it.”

She reflected for a moment.

“He’s awfully in love with me.”

“Well, that’s all to the good. You’ll get round him.”

He gave her that charming smile of his which she had always found so irresistible. It was a slow smile which started in his clear blue eyes and travelled by perceptible degrees to his shapely mouth. He had small white even teeth. It was a very sensual smile and it made her heart melt in her body.

“I don’t very much care,” she said, with a flash of gaiety. “It was worth it.”

“It was my fault.”

“Why did you come? I was amazed to see you.”

“I couldn’t resist it.”

“You dear.”

She leaned a little towards him, her dark and shining eyes gazing passionately into his, her mouth a little open with desire, and he put his arms round her. She abandoned herself with a sigh of ecstasy to their shelter.

“You know you can always count on me,” he said.

“I’m so happy with you. I wish I could make you as happy as you make me.”

“You’re not frightened any more?”

“I hate Walter,” she answered.

He did not quite know what to say to this, so he kissed her. Her face was very soft against his.

But he took her wrist on which was a little gold watch and looked at the time.

“Do you know what I must do now?”

“Bolt?” she smiled.

He nodded. For one instant she clung to him more closely, but she felt his desire to go, and she released him.

“It’s shameful the way you neglect your work. Be off with you.”

He could never resist the temptation to flirt.

“You seem in a devil of a hurry to get rid of me,” he said lightly.

“You know that I hate to let you go.”

Her answer was low and deep and serious. He gave a flattered laugh.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about our mysterious visitor. I’m quite sure it was the amah. And if there’s any trouble I guarantee to get you out of it.”

“Have you had a lot of experience?”

His smile was amused and complacent.

“No, but I flatter myself that I’ve got a head screwed on my shoulders.”

III

She went out on to the verandah and watched him leave the house. He waved his hand to her. It gave her a little thrill as she looked at him; he was forty-one, but he had the lithe figure and the springing step of a boy.

The verandah was in shadow; and lazily, her heart at ease with satisfied love, she lingered. Their house stood in the Pleasant Vale, on the side of the hill, for they could not afford to live on the more eligible but expensive Mount. But her abstracted gaze scarcely noticed the blue sea and the crowded shipping in the harbour. She could think only of her lover.

Of course it was stupid to behave as they had done that afternoon, but if he wanted her how could she be prudent? He had come two or three times after tiffin, when in the heat of the day no one thought of stirring out, and not even the boys had seen him come and go. It was very difficult at Tching-Yen. She hated the Chinese city and it made her nervous to go into the filthy little house off the Victoria Road in which they were in the habit of meeting. It was a curio dealer’s; and the Chinese who were sitting about stared at her unpleasantly; she hated the ingratiating smile of the old man who took her to the back of the shop and then up a dark flight of stairs. The room into which he led her was frowsy and the large wooden bed against the wall made her shudder.

“This is dreadfully sordid, isn’t it?” she said to Charlie the first time she met him there.

“It was till you came in,” he answered.

Of course the moment he took her in his arms she forgot everything.

Oh, how hateful it was that she wasn’t free, that they both weren’t free! She didn’t like his wife. Kitty’s wandering thoughts dwelt now for a moment on Dorothy Townsend. How unfortunate to be called Dorothy! It dated you. She was thirty-eight at least. But Charlie never spoke of her. Of course he didn’t care for her; she bored him to death. But he was a gentleman. Kitty smiled with affectionate irony: it was just like him, silly old thing; he might be unfaithful to her, but he would never allow a word in disparagement of her to cross his lips. She was a tallish woman, taller than Kitty, neither stout nor thin, with a good deal of pale brown hair; she could never have been pretty with anything but the prettiness of youth; her features were good enough without being remarkable and her blue eyes were cold. She had a skin that you would never look at twice and no colour in her cheeks. And she dressed like — well, like what she was, the wife of the Assistant Colonial Secretary at Tching-Yen. Kitty smiled and gave her shoulders a faint shrug.

Of course no one could deny that Dorothy Townsend had a pleasant voice. She was a wonderful mother, Charlie always said that of her, and she was what Kitty’s mother called a gentlewoman. But Kitty did not like her. She did not like her casual manner; and the politeness with which she treated you when you went there, to tea or dinner, was exasperating because you could not but feel how little interest she took in you. The fact was, Kitty supposed, that she cared for nothing but her children: there were two boys at school in England, and another boy of six whom she was going to take home next year. Her face was a mask. She smiled and in her pleasant, well-mannered way said the things that were expected of her; but for all her cordiality held you at a distance. She had a few intimate friends in the Colony and they greatly admired her. Kitty wondered whether Mrs. Townsend thought her a little common. She flushed. After all there was no reason for her to put on airs. It was true that her father had been a Colonial Governor and of course it was very grand while it lasted — every one stood up when you entered a room and men took off their hats to you as you passed in your car — but what could be more insignificant than a Colonial Governor when he had retired? Dorothy Townsend’s father lived on a pension in a small house at Earl’s Court. Kitty’s mother would think it a dreadful bore if she asked her to call. Kitty’s father, Bernard Garstin, was a K.C., and there was no reason why he should not be made a judge one of these days. Anyhow they lived in South Kensington.

IV

Kitty, coming to Tching-Yen on her marriage, had found it hard to reconcile herself to the fact that her social position was determined by her husband’s occupation. Of course every one had been very kind and for two or three months they had gone out to parties almost every night; when they dined at Government House the Governor took her in as a bride; but she had understood quickly that as the wife of the Government bacteriologist she was of no particular consequence. It made her angry.

“It’s too absurd,” she told her husband. “Why, there’s hardly any one here that one would bother about for five minutes at home. Mother wouldn’t dream of asking any of them to dine at our house.”

“You mustn’t let it worry you,” he answered. “It doesn’t really matter, you know.”

“Of course it doesn’t matter, it only shows how stupid they are, but it is rather funny when you think of all the people who used to come to our house at home that here we should be treated like dirt.”

“From a social standpoint the man of science does not exist,” he smiled.

She knew that now, but she had not known it when she married him.

“I don’t know that it exactly amuses me to be taken in to dinner by the agent of the P. and O.,” she said, laughing in order that what she said might not seem snobbish.

Perhaps he saw the reproach behind her lightness of manner, for he took her hand and shyly pressed it.

“I’m awfully sorry, Kitty dear, but don’t let it vex you.”

“Oh, I’m not going to let it do that.”

V

It couldn’t have been Walter that afternoon. It must have been one of the servants and after all they didn’t matter. Chinese servants knew everything anyway. But they held their tongues.

Her heart beat a little faster as she remembered the way in which that white china knob slowly turned. They mustn’t take risks like that again. It was better to go to the curio shop. No one who saw her go in would think anything of it, and they were absolutely safe there. The owner of the shop knew who Charlie was and he was not such a fool as to put up the back of the Assistant Colonial Secretary. What did anything matter really but that Charlie loved her?

She turned away from the verandah and went back into her sitting-room. She threw herself down on the sofa and stretched out her hand to get a cigarette. Her eye caught sight of a note lying on the top of a book. She opened it. It was written in pencil.

Dear Kitty,

Here is the book you wanted. I was just going to send it when I met Dr. Fane and he said he’d bring it round himself as he was passing the house.

V.H.

She rang the bell and when the boy came asked him who had brought the book and when.

“Master bring it, missy, after tiffin,” he answered.

Then it had been Walter. She rang up the Colonial Secretary’s Office at once and asked for Charlie. She told him what she had just learned. There was a pause before he answered.

“What shall I do?” she asked.

“I’m in the middle of an important consultation. I’m afraid I can’t talk to you now. My advice to you is to sit tight.”

She put down the receiver. She understood that he was not alone and she was impatient with his business.

She sat down again, at a desk, and resting her face in her hands sought to think out the situation. Of course Walter might merely have thought she was sleeping: there was no reason why she should not lock herself in. She tried to remember if they had been talking. Certainly they had not been talking loud. And there was the hat. It was maddening of Charlie to have left it downstairs. But it was no use blaming him for that, it was natural enough, and there was nothing to tell that Walter had noticed it. He was probably in a hurry and had just left the book and the note on his way to some appointment connected with his work. The strange thing was that he should have tried the door and then the two windows. If he thought she was asleep it was unlike him to disturb her. What a fool she had been!

She shook herself a little and again she felt that sweet pain in her heart which she always felt when she thought of Charlie. It had been worth it. He had said that he would stand by her, and if the worse came to the worst, well.... Let Walter kick up a row if he chose. She had Charlie; what did she care? Perhaps it would be the best thing for him to know. She had never cared for Walter and since she had loved Charlie Townsend it had irked and bored her to submit to her husband’s caresses. She wanted to have nothing more to do with him. She didn’t see how he could prove anything. If he accused her she would deny, and if it came to pass that she could deny no longer, well, she would fling the truth in his teeth, and he could do what he chose.

VI

Within three months of her marriage she knew that she had made a mistake; but it had been her mother’s fault even more than hers.

There was a photograph of her mother in the room and Kitty’s harassed eyes fell on it. She did not know why she kept it there, for she was not very fond of her mother; there was one of her father too, but that was downstairs on the grand piano. It had been done when he took silk and it represented him in wig and gown. Even they could not make him imposing; he was a little, wizened man, with tired eyes, a long upper lip, and a thin mouth: a facetious photographer had told him to look pleasant, but he had succeeded only in looking severe. It was on this account, for as a rule the downturned corners of his mouth and the dejection of his eyes gave him an air of mild depression, that Mrs. Garstin, thinking it made him look judicial, had chosen it from among the proofs. But her own photograph showed her in the dress in which she had gone to Court when her husband was made a King’s Counsel. She was very grand in the velvet gown, the long train so disposed as to show to advantage, with feathers in her hair and flowers in her hand. She held herself erect. She was a woman of fifty, thin and flat-chested, with prominent cheek-bones and a large, well-shaped nose. She had a great quantity of very smooth black hair and Kitty had always suspected that, if not dyed, it was at least touched up. Her fine black eyes were never still and this was the most noticeable thing about her; for when she was talking to you it was disconcerting to see those restless eyes in that impassive, unlined and yellow face. They moved from one part of you to another, to other persons in the room, and then back to you; you felt that she was criticising you, summing you up, watchful meanwhile of all that went on around her, and that the words she spoke had no connection with her thoughts.

VII

Mrs. Garstin was a hard, cruel, managing, ambitious, parsimonious and stupid woman. She was the daughter, one of five, of a solicitor in Liverpool and Bernard Garstin had met her when he was on the Northern Circuit. He had seemed then a young man of promise and her father said he would go far. He hadn’t. He was painstaking, industrious and capable, but he had not the will to advance himself. Mrs. Garstin despised him. But she recognised, though with bitterness, that she could only achieve success through him, and she set herself to drive him on the way she desired to go. She nagged him without mercy. She discovered that if she wanted him to do something which his sensitiveness revolted against she had only to give him no peace and eventually, exhausted, he would yield. On her side she set herself to cultivate the people who might be useful. She flattered the solicitors who would send her husband briefs and was familiar with their wives. She was obsequious to the judges and their ladies. She made much of promising politicians.

In twenty-five years Mrs. Garstin never invited any one to dine at her house because she liked him. She gave large dinner parties at regular intervals. But parsimony was as strong in her as ambition. She hated to spend money. She flattered herself that she could make as much show as any one else at half the price. Her dinners were long and elaborate, but thrifty, and she could never persuade herself that people when they were eating and talking knew what they drank. She wrapped sparkling Moselle in a napkin and thought her guests took it for champagne.

Bernard Garstin had a fair, though not a large practice. Men who had been called after him had long outstripped him. Mrs. Garstin made him stand for Parliament. The expense of the election was borne by the party, but here again her parsimony balked her ambition, and she could not bring herself to spend enough money to nurse the constituency. The subscriptions Bernard Garstin made to the innumerable funds a candidate is expected to contribute to, were always just a little less than adequate. He was beaten. Though it would have pleased Mrs. Garstin to be a member’s wife she bore her disappointment with fortitude. The fact of her husband’s standing had brought her in contact with a number of prominent persons and she appreciated the addition to her social consequence. She knew that Bernard would never make his mark in the House. She wanted him to be a member only that he might have a claim on the gratitude of his party and surely to fight two or three losing seats would give him that.

But he was still a junior and many younger men than he had already taken silk. It was necessary that he should too, not only because otherwise he could scarcely hope to be made a judge, but on her account also: it mortified her to go in to dinner after women ten years younger than herself. But here she encountered in her husband an obstinacy which she had not for years been accustomed to. He was afraid that as a K.C. he would get no work. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute. He suggested to her the possibility that his income would be halved and he knew that there was no argument which could have greater weight with her. She would not listen. She called him pusillanimous. She gave him no peace and at last, as always, he yielded. He applied for silk and it was promptly awarded him.

His misgivings were justified. He made no headway as a leader and his briefs were few. But he concealed any disappointment he may have felt, and if he reproached his wife it was in his heart. He grew perhaps a little more silent, but he had always been silent at home, and no one in his family noticed a change in him. His daughters had never looked upon him as anything but a source of income; it had always seemed perfectly natural that he should lead a dog’s life in order to provide them with board and lodging, clothes, holiday and money for odds and ends; and now, understanding that through his fault money was less plentiful, the indifference they had felt for him was tinged with an exasperated contempt. It never occurred to them to ask themselves what were the feelings of the subdued little man who went out early in the morning and came home at night only in time to dress for dinner. He was a stranger to them, but because he was their father they took it for granted that he should love and cherish them.

VIII

But there was a quality of courage in Mrs. Garstin which in itself was admirable. She let no one in her immediate circle, which to her was the world, see how mortified she was by the frustration of her hopes. She made no change in her style of living. By careful management she was able to give as showy dinners as she had done before, and she met her friends with the same bright gaiety which she had so long cultivated. She had a hard and facile fund of chit-chat which in the society she moved in passed for conversation. She was a useful guest among persons to whom small talk did not come easily, for she was never at a loss with a new topic and could be trusted immediately to break an awkward silence with a suitable observation.

It was unlikely now that Bernard Garstin would ever be made a judge of the High Court, but he might still hope for a County Court judgeship or at the worst an appointment in the Colonies. Meanwhile she had the satisfaction of seeing him appointed Recorder of a Welsh town. But it was on her daughters that she set her hopes. By arranging good marriages for them she expected to make up for all the disappointments of her career. There were two, Kitty and Doris. Doris gave no sign of good looks, her nose was too long and her figure was lumpy; so that Mrs. Garstin could hope no more for her than that she should marry a young man who was well off and in a suitable profession.

But Kitty was a beauty. She gave promise of being so when she was still a child, for she had large, dark eyes, liquid and vivacious, brown, curling hair in which there was a reddish tint, exquisite teeth and a lovely skin. Her features would never be very good, for her chin was too square and her nose, though not so long as Doris’s, too big. Her beauty depended a good deal on her youth, and Mrs. Garstin realised that she must marry in the first flush of her maidenhood. When she came out she was dazzling: her skin was still her greatest beauty, but her eyes with their long lashes were so starry and yet so melting that it gave you a catch at the heart to look into them. She had a charming gaiety and the desire to please. Mrs. Garstin bestowed upon her all the affection, a harsh, competent, calculating affection, of which she was capable; she dreamed ambitious dreams; it was not a good marriage she aimed at for her daughter, but a brilliant one.

Kitty had been brought up with the knowledge that she was going to be a beautiful woman and she more than suspected her mother’s ambition. It accorded with her own desires. She was launched upon the world and Mrs. Garstin performed prodigies in getting herself invited to dances where her daughter might meet eligible men. Kitty was a success. She was amusing as well as beautiful, and very soon she had a dozen men in love with her. But none was suitable, and Kitty, charming and friendly with all, took care to commit herself with none. The drawing-room in South Kensington was filled on Sunday afternoons with amorous youth, but Mrs. Garstin observed, with a grim smile of approval, that it needed no effort on her part to keep them at a distance from Kitty. Kitty was prepared to flirt with them, and it diverted her to play one off against the other, but when they proposed to her, as none failed to do, she refused them with tact but decision.

Her first season passed without the perfect suitor presenting himself, and the second also; but she was young and could afford to wait. Mrs. Garstin told her friends that she thought it a pity for a girl to marry till she was twenty-one. But a third year passed and then a fourth. Two or three of her old admirers proposed again, but they were still penniless, one or two boys younger than herself proposed; a retired Indian Civilian, a K.C.I.E., did the same: he was fifty-three. Kitty still danced a great deal, she went to Wimbledon and Lord’s, to Ascot and Henley; she was thoroughly enjoying herself; but still no one whose position and income were satisfactory asked her to marry him. Mrs. Garstin began to grow uneasy. She noticed that Kitty was beginning to attract men of forty and over. She reminded her that she would not be any longer so pretty in a year or two and that young girls were coming out all the time. Mrs. Garstin did not mince her words in the domestic circle and she warned her daughter tartly that she would miss her market.

Kitty shrugged her shoulders. She thought herself as pretty as ever, prettier perhaps, for she had learnt how to dress in the last four years, and she had plenty of time. If she wanted to marry just to be married there were a dozen boys who would jump at the chance. Surely the right man would come along sooner or later. But Mrs. Garstin judged the situation more shrewdly: with anger in her heart for the beautiful daughter who had missed her chances she set her standard a little lower. She turned back to the professional class at which she had sneered in her pride and looked about for a young lawyer or a business man whose future inspired her with confidence.

Kitty reached the age of twenty-five and was still unmarried. Mrs. Garstin was exasperated and she did not hesitate often to give Kitty a piece of her very unpleasant mind. She asked her how much longer she expected her father to support her. He had spent sums he could ill afford in order to give her a chance and she had not taken it. It never struck Mrs. Garstin that perhaps her own hard affability had frightened the men, sons of wealthy fathers or heirs to a title, whose visits she had too cordially encouraged. She put down Kitty’s failure to stupidity. Then Doris came out. She had a long nose still, and a poor figure, and she danced badly. In her first season she became engaged to Geoffrey Dennison. He was the only son of a prosperous surgeon who had been given a baronetcy during the war. Geoffrey would inherit a title — it is not very grand to be a medical baronet, but a title, thank God, is still a title — and a very comfortable fortune.

Kitty in a panic married Walter Fane.

IX

She had known him but a little while and had never taken much notice of him. She had no idea when or where they had first met till after their engagement he told her that it was at a dance to which some friends had brought him. She certainly paid no attention to him then and if she danced with him it was because she was good-natured and was glad to dance with any one who asked her. She didn’t know him from Adam when a day or two later at another dance he came up and spoke to her. Then she remarked that he was at every dance she went to.

“You know, I’ve danced with you at least a dozen times now and you must tell me your name,” she said to him at last in her laughing way.

He was obviously taken aback.

“Do you mean to say you don’t know it? I was introduced to you.”

“Oh, but people always mumble. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you hadn’t the ghost of an idea what mine was.”

He smiled at her. His face was grace and a trifle stern, but his smile was very sweet.

“Of course I know it.” He was silent for a moment or two. “Have you no curiosity?” he asked then.

“As much as most women.”

“It didn’t occur to you to ask somebody or other what my name was?”

She was faintly amused; she wondered why he thought it could in the least interest her; but she liked to please, so she looked at him with that dazzling smile of hers, and her beautiful eyes, dewy ponds under forest trees, held an enchanting kindness.

“Well, what is it?”

“Walter Fane.”

She did not know why he came to dances, he did not dance very well, and he seemed to know few people. She had a passing thought that he was in love with her; but she dismissed it with a shrug of the shoulders: she had known girls who thought every man they met was in love with them and had always found them absurd. But she gave Walter Fane just a little more of her attention. He certainly did not behave like any of the other youths who had been in love with her. Most of them told her so frankly and wanted to kiss her: a good many did. But Walter Fane never talked of her and very little of himself. He was rather silent; she did not mind that because she had plenty to say and it pleased her to see him laugh when she made a facetious remark: but when he talked it was not stupidly. He was evidently shy. It appeared that he lived in the East and was home on leave.

One Sunday afternoon he appeared at their house in South Kensington. There were a dozen people there, and he sat for some time, somewhat ill at ease, and then went away. Her mother asked her later who he was.

“I haven’t a notion. Did you ask him to come here?”

“Yes, I met him at the Baddeleys. He said he’d seen you at various dances. I said I was always at home on Sundays.”

“His name is Fane and he’s got some sort of job in the East.”

“Yes, he’s a doctor. Is he in love with you?”

“Upon my word, I don’t know.”

“I should have thought you knew by now when a young man was in love with you.”

“I wouldn’t marry him if he were,” said Kitty lightly.

Mrs. Garstin did not answer. Her silence was heavy with displeasure. Kitty flushed: she knew that her mother did not care now whom she married so long as somehow she got her off her hands.

X

During the next week she met him at three dances and now, his shyness perhaps wearing off a little, he was somewhat more communicative. He was a doctor, certainly, but he did not practice; he was a bacteriologist (Kitty had only a very vague idea what that meant) and he had a job at Tching-Yen. He was going back in the autumn. He talked a good deal about China. She made it a practice to appear interested in whatever people talked to her of, but indeed the life in Tching-Yen sounded quite jolly; there were clubs and tennis and racing and polo and golf.

“Do people dance much there?”

“Oh, yes, I think so.”

She wondered whether he told her these things with a motive. He seemed to like her society, but never by a pressure of the hand, by a glance or by a word, did he give the smallest indication that he looked upon her as anything but a girl whom you met and danced with. On the following Sunday he came again to their house. Her father happened to come in, it was raining and he had not been able to play golf, and he and Walter Fane had a long chat. She asked her father afterwards what they had talked of.

“It appears he’s stationed in Tching-Yen. The Chief Justice is an old friend of mine at the Bar. He seems an unusually intelligent young man.”

She knew that her father was as a rule bored to death by the young people whom for her sake and now her sister’s he had been forced for years to entertain.

“It’s not often you like any of my young men, father,” she said.

His kind, tired eyes rested upon her.

“Are you going to marry him by any chance?”

“Certainly not.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“He shows no sign of it.”

“Do you like him?”

“I don’t think I do very much. He irritates me a little.”

He was not her type at all. He was short, but not thick-set, slight rather and thin; dark and clean-shaven, with very regular, clear-cut features. His eyes were almost black, but not large, they were not very mobile and they rested on objects with a singular persistence; they were curious, but not very pleasant eyes. With his straight, delicate nose, his fine brow and well-shaped mouth he ought to have been good-looking. But surprisingly enough he was not. When Kitty began to think of him at all she was surprised that he should have such good features when you took them one by one and yet be so far from handsome. His face was cold. His expression was slightly sarcastic and now that Kitty knew him better she realised that she was not quite at ease with him. He had no gaiety.

By the time the season drew to its end they had seen a good deal of one another, but he had remained as aloof and impenetrable as ever. He was not exactly shy with her, but embarrassed; his conversation remained strangely impersonal. Kitty came to the conclusion that he was not in the least in love with her. He liked her and found her easy to talk to, but when he returned to Tching-Yen in November he would not think of her again. She thought it not impossible that he was engaged all the time to some nurse in a hospital at Tching-Yen, the daughter of a clergyman, dull, plain, flat-footed and strenuous; that was the wife that would exactly suit him.

Then came the announcement of Doris’s engagement to Geoffrey Dennison. Doris, at eighteen, was making quite a good marriage, and she was twenty-five and single. Supposing she did not marry at all? That season the only person who had proposed to her was a boy of twenty who was still at Oxford: she couldn’t marry a boy five years younger than herself. She had made a hash of things. Last year she had refused a widowed Knight of the Bath with three children. She almost wished she hadn’t. Mother would be horrible now, and Doris, Doris who had always been sacrificed because she, Kitty, was expected to make the brilliant match, would not fail to crow over her. Kitty’s heart sank.

XI

But one afternoon when she was walking home from Harrod’s she chanced to meet Walter Fane in the Brompton Road. He stopped and talked to her. Then, casually, he asked her if she would not take a turn with him in the Park. She had no particular wish to go home: it was not just then a very agreeable place. They strolled along, talking as they always talked, of casual things, and he asked her where she was going for the summer.

“Oh, we always bury ourselves in the country. You see, father is exhausted after the term’s work and we just go to the quietest place we can find.”

Kitty spoke with her tongue in her cheek, for she knew quite well that her father had not nearly enough work to tire him and even if he had his convenience would never have been consulted in the choice of a holiday. But a quiet place was a cheap place.

“Don’t you think those chairs look rather inviting?” said Walter suddenly.

She followed his eyes and saw two green chairs by themselves under a tree on the grass.

“Let us sit in them,” she said.

But when they were seated he seemed to grow strangely abstracted. He was an odd creature. She chattered on, however, gaily enough and wondered why he had asked her to walk with him in the Park. Perhaps he was going to confide in her his passion for the flat-footed nurse in Tching-Yen. Suddenly he turned to her, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, so that she could not but see that he had not been listening, and his face was chalk white.

“I want to say something to you.”

She looked at him quickly and she saw that his eyes were filled with a painful anxiety. His voice was strained, low and not quite steady. But before she could ask herself what this agitation meant he spoke again.

“I want to ask you if you’ll marry me.”

“You could knock me down with a feather,” she answered so surprised that she looked at him blankly.

“Didn’t you know I was awfully in love with you?”

“You never showed it.”

“I’m very awkward and clumsy. I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.”

Her heart began to beat a little more quickly. She had been proposed to often before, but gaily or sentimentally, and she had answered in the same fashion. No one had ever asked her to marry him in a manner which was so abrupt and yet strangely tragic.

“It’s very kind of you,” she said, doubtfully.

“I fell in love with you the first time I saw you. I wanted to ask you before, but I could never bring myself to it.”

“I’m not sure if that’s very well put,” she chuckled.

She was glad to have an opportunity to laugh a little, for on that fine, sunny day the air about them seemed on a sudden heavy with foreboding. He frowned darkly.

“Oh, you know what I mean. I didn’t want to lose hope. But now you’re going away and in the autumn I have to go back to China.”

“I’ve never thought of you in that way,” she said helplessly.

He said nothing more. He looked down on the grass sullenly. He was a very odd creature. But now that he had told her she felt in some mysterious way that his love was something she had never met before. She was a little frightened, but she was elated also. His impassivity was vaguely impressive.

“You must give me time to think.”

Still he did not say anything. He did not stir. Did he mean to keep her there till she had decided? That was absurd. She must talk it over with her mother. She ought to have got up when she spoke, she had waited thinking he would answer, and now, she did not know why, she found it difficult to make a movement. She did not look at him, but she was conscious of his appearance; she had never seen herself marrying a man so little taller than herself. When you sat close to him you saw how good his features were, and how cold his face. It was strange when you couldn’t help being conscious of the devastating passion which was in his heart.

“I don’t know you, I don’t know you at all,” she said tremulously.

He gave her a look and she felt her eyes drawn to his. They had a tenderness which she had never seen in them before, but there was something beseeching in them, like a dog’s that has been whipped, which slightly exasperated her.

“I think I improve on acquaintance,” he said.

“Of course you’re shy, aren’t you?”

It was certainly the oddest proposal she had ever had. And even now it seemed to her that they were saying to one another the last things you would have expected on such an occasion. She was not in the least in love with him. She did not know why she hesitated to refuse him at once.

“I’m awfully stupid,” he said, “I want to tell you that I love you more than anything in the world, but I find it so awfully difficult to say.”

Now that was odd too, for inexplicably enough it touched her; he wasn’t really cold, of course, it was his manner that was unfortunate: she liked him at that moment better than she had ever liked him before. Doris was to be married in November. He would be on his way to China then and if she married him she would be with him. It wouldn’t be very nice to be a bridesmaid at Doris’s wedding. She would be glad to escape that. And then Doris as a married woman and herself still single! Every one knew how young Doris was and it would make her seem older. It would put her on the shelf. It wouldn’t be a very good marriage for her, but it was a marriage, and the fact that she would live in China made it easier. She was afraid of her mother’s bitter tongue. Why, all the girls who had come out with her were married long ago and most of them had children; she was tired of going to see them and gushing over their babies. Walter Fane offered her a new life. She turned to him with a smile which she well knew the effect of.

“If I were so rash as to say I’d marry you when would you want to marry me?”

He gave a sudden gasp of delight, and his white cheeks flushed.

“Now. At once. As soon as possible. We’d go to Italy for our honeymoon. August and September.”

That would save her from spending the summer in a country vicarage, hired at five guineas a week, with her father and mother. In a flash she saw in her mind’s eye the announcement in the Morning Post that, the bridegroom having to return to the East, the wedding would take place at once. She knew her mother well enough, she could be counted on to make a splash; for the moment at least Doris would be in the background and when Doris’s much grander wedding took place she would be far away.

She stretched out her hand.

“I think I like you very much. You must give me time to get used to you.”

“Then it’s yes?” he interrupted.

“I suppose so.”

XII

She knew him very little then, and now, though they had been married for nearly two years, she knew him but little more. At first she had been touched by his kindness and flattered, though surprised, by his passion. He was extremely considerate; he was very attentive to her comfort; she never expressed the slightest wish without his hastening to gratify it. He was constantly giving her little presents. When she happened to feel ill no one could have been kinder or more thoughtful. She seemed to do him a favour when she gave him the opportunity of doing something tiresome for her. And he was always exceedingly polite. He rose to his feet when she entered a room, he gave her his hand to help her out of a car, if he chanced to meet her in the street he took off his hat, he was solicitous to open the door for her when she left a room, he never came into her bedroom or her boudoir without a knock. He treated her not as Kitty had seen most men treat their wives, but as though she were a fellow-guest in a country house. It was pleasing and yet a trifle comic. She would have felt more at home with him if he had been more casual. Nor did their conjugal relations draw her closer to him. He was passionate then, fierce, oddly hysterical too, and sentimental.

It disconcerted her to realise how emotional he really was. His self-control was due to shyness or to long training, she did not know which; it seemed to her faintly contemptible that when she lay in his arms, his desire appeased, he who was so timid of saying absurd things, who so feared to be ridiculous, should use baby talk. She had offended him bitterly once by laughing and telling him that he was talking the most fearful slush. She had felt his arms grow limp about her, he remained quite silent for a little while, and then without a word released her and went into his own room. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings and a day or two later she said to him:

“You silly old thing, I don’t mind what nonsense you talk to me.”

He had laughed in a shamefaced way. She had discovered very soon that he had an unhappy disability to lose himself. He was self-conscious. When there was a party and every one started singing Walter could never bring himself to join in. He sat there smiling to show that he was pleased and amused, but his smile was forced; it was more like a sarcastic smirk, and you could not help feeling that he thought all those people enjoying themselves a pack of fools. He could not bring himself to play the round games which Kitty with her high spirits found such a lark. On their journey out to China he had absolutely refused to put on fancy dress when every one else was wearing it. It disturbed her pleasure that he should so obviously think the whole thing a bore.

Kitty was lively; she was willing to chatter all day long and she laughed easily. His silence disconcerted her. He had a way which exasperated her of returning no answer to some casual remark of hers. It was true that it needed no answer, but an answer all the same would have been pleasant. If it was raining and she said: “It’s raining cats and dogs,” she would have liked him to say: “Yes, isn’t it?” He remained silent. Sometimes she would have liked to shake him.

“I said it was raining cats and dogs,” she repeated.

“I heard you,” he answered, with his affectionate smile.

It showed that he had not meant to be offensive. He did not speak because he had nothing to say. But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

XIII

The fact was, of course, that he had no charm. That was why he was not popular, and she had not been long in Tching-Yen before she discovered that he was not. She remained very vague about his work. It was enough for her to realise, and she did this quite distinctly, that to be the government bacteriologist was no great fry. He seemed to have no desire to discuss that part of his life with her. Because she was willing to be interested in anything at first she had asked him about it. He put her off with a jest.

“It’s very dull and technical,” he said on another occasion. “And it’s grossly underpaid.”

He was very reserved. All she knew about his antecedents, his birth, his education, and his life before he met her, she had elicited by direct questioning. It was odd, the only thing that seemed to annoy him was a question; and when, in her natural curiosity, she fired a string of them at him, his answers became at every one more abrupt. She had the wit to see that he did not care to reply because he had anything to hide from her, but merely from a natural secretiveness. It bored him to talk about himself. It made him shy and uncomfortable. He did not know how to be open. He was fond of reading, but he read books which seemed to Kitty very dull. If he was not busy with some scientific treatise he would read books about China or historical works. He never relaxed. She did not think he could. He was fond of games: he played tennis and bridge.

She wondered why he had ever fallen in love with her. She could not imagine any one less suited than herself to this restrained, cold and self-possessed man. And yet it was quite certain that he loved her madly. He would do anything in the world to please her. He was like wax in her hands. When she thought of one side he showed her, a side which only she had seen, she a little despised him. She wondered whether his sarcastic manner, with its contemptuous tolerance for so many persons and things she admired, was merely a façade to conceal a profound weakness. She supposed he was clever, every one seemed to think he was, but except very occasionally when he was with two or three people he liked and was in the mood, she had never found him entertaining. He did not precisely bore her, he left her indifferent.

XIV

Though Kitty had met his wife at various tea-parties she had been some weeks in Tching-Yen before she saw Charles Townsend. She was introduced to him only when with her husband she went to dine at his house. Kitty was on the defensive. Charles Townsend was Assistant Colonial Secretary and she had no mind to allow him to use her with the condescension which, notwithstanding her good manners, she discerned in Mrs. Townsend. The room in which they were received was spacious. It was furnished as was every other drawing-room she had been in at Tching-Yen in a comfortable and homely style. It was a large party. They were the last to come and as they entered Chinese servants in uniform were handing round cocktails and olives. Mrs. Townsend greeted them in her casual fashion and looking at a list told Walter whom he was to take in to dinner.

Kitty saw a tall and very handsome man bear down on them.

“This is my husband.”

“I am to have the privilege of sitting next to you,” he said.

She immediately felt at ease and the sense of hostility vanished from her bosom. Though his eyes were smiling she had seen in them a quick look of surprise. She understood it perfectly and it made her inclined to laugh.

“I shan’t be able to eat any dinner,” he said, “and if I know Dorothy the dinner’s damned good.”

“Why not?”

“I ought to have been told. Some one really ought to have warned me.”

“What about?”

“No one said a word. How was I to know that I was going to meet a raging beauty?”

“Now what am I to say to that?”

“Nothing. Leave me to do the talking. And I’ll say it over and over again.”

Kitty, unmoved, wondered what exactly his wife had told him about her. He must have asked. And Townsend, looking down on her with his laughing eyes, suddenly remembered.

“What is she like?” he had enquired when his wife told him she had met Dr. Fane’s bride.

“Oh, quite a nice little thing. Actressy.”

“Was she on the stage?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. Her father’s a doctor or a lawyer or something. I suppose we shall have to ask them to dinner.”

“There’s no hurry, is there?”

When they were sitting side by side at table he told her that he had known Walter Fane ever since he came to the Colony.

“We play bridge together. He’s far and away the best bridge player at the Club.”

She told Walter on the way home.

“That’s not saying very much, you know.”

“How does he play?”

“Not badly. He plays a winning hand very well, but when he has bad cards he goes all to pieces.”

“Does he play as well as you?”

“I have no illusions about my play. I should describe myself as a very good player in the second class. Townsend thinks he’s in the first. He isn’t.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“I neither like him nor dislike him. I believe he’s not bad at his job and every one says he’s a good sportsman. He doesn’t very much interest me.”

It was not the first time that Walter’s moderation had exasperated her. She asked herself why it was necessary to be so prudent: you either liked people or you didn’t. She had liked Charles Townsend very much. And she had not expected to. He was probably the most popular man in the Colony. It was supposed that the Colonial Secretary would retire soon and every one hoped that Townsend would succeed him. He played tennis and polo and golf. He kept racing ponies. He was always ready to do any one a good turn. He never let red tape interfere with him. He put on no airs. Kitty did not know why she had resented hearing him so well spoken of, she could not help thinking he must be very conceited: she had been extremely silly; that was the last thing you could accuse him of.

She had enjoyed her evening. They had talked of the theatres in London, and of Ascot and Cowes, all the things she knew about, so that really she might have met him at some nice house in Lennox Gardens; and later, when the men came into the drawing-room after dinner, he had strolled over and sat beside her again. Though he had not said anything very amusing, he had made her laugh; it must have been the way he said it: there was a caressing sound in his deep, rich voice, a delightful expression in his kind, shining blue eyes, which made you feel very much at home with him. Of course he had charm. That was what made him so pleasant.

He was tall, six foot two at least, she thought, and he had a beautiful figure; he was evidently in very good condition and he had not a spare ounce of fat on him. He was well-dressed, the best-dressed man in the room, and he wore his clothes well. She liked a man to be smart. Her eyes wandered to Walter: he really should try to be a little better turned out. She noticed Townsend’s cuff-links and waistcoat buttons; she had seen similar ones at Cartier’s. Of course the Townsends had private means. His face was deeply sunburned, but the sun had not taken the healthy colour from his cheeks. She liked the little trim curly moustache which did not conceal his full red lips. He had black hair, short and brushed very sleek. But of course his eyes, under thick, bushy eyebrows, were his best feature: they were so very blue, and they had a laughing tenderness which persuaded you of the sweetness of his disposition. No man who had those blue eyes could bear to hurt any one.

She could not but know that she had made an impression on him. If he had not said charming things to her his eyes, warm with admiration, would have betrayed him. His ease was delightful. He had no self-consciousness. Kitty was at home in these circumstances and she admired the way in which amid the banter which was the staple of their conversation he insinuated every now and then a pretty, flattering speech. When she shook hands with him on leaving he gave her hand a pressure that she could not mistake.

“I hope we shall see you again soon,” he said casually, but his eyes gave his words a meaning which she could not fail to see.

“Tching-Yen is very small, isn’t it?” she said.

XV

Who would have thought then that within three months they would be on such terms? He had told her since that he was crazy about her on that first evening. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He remembered the dress she wore; it was her wedding dress, and he said she looked like a lily of the valley. She knew that he was in love with her before he told her, and a little frightened she kept him at a distance. He was impetuous and it was difficult. She was afraid to let him kiss her, for the thought of his arms about her made her heart beat so fast. She had never been in love before. It was wonderful. And now that she knew what love was she felt a sudden sympathy for the love that Walter bore her. She teased him, playfully, and saw that he enjoyed it. She had been perhaps a little afraid of him, but now she had more confidence. She chaffed him and it amused her to see the slow smile with which at first he received her banter. He was surprised and pleased. One of these days, she thought, he would become quite human. Now that she had learnt something of passion it diverted her to play lightly, like a harpist running his fingers across the strings of his harp, on his affections. She laughed when she saw how she bewildered and confused him.

And when Charlie became her lover the situation between herself and Walter seemed exquisitely absurd. She could hardly look at him, so grave and self-controlled, without laughing. She was too happy to feel unkindly towards him. Except for him, after all, she would never have known Charlie. She had hesitated some time before the final step, not because she did not want to yield to Charlie’s passion, her own was equal to his, but because her upbringing and all the conventions of her life intimidated her. She was amazed afterwards (and the final act was due to accident; neither of them had seen the opportunity till it was face to face with them) to discover that she felt in no way different from what she had before. She had expected that it would cause some, she hardly knew what, fantastic change in her so that she would feel like somebody else; and when she had a chance to look at herself in the glass she was bewildered to see the same woman she had seen the day before.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked her.

“I adore you,” she whispered.

“Don’t you think you were very silly to waste so much time?”

“A perfect fool.”

XVI

Her happiness, sometimes almost more than she could bear, renewed her beauty. Just before she married, beginning to lose her first freshness, she had looked tired and drawn. The uncharitable said that she was going off. But there is all the difference between a girl of twenty-five and a married woman of that age. She was like a rosebud that is beginning to turn yellow at the edges of the petals, and then suddenly she was a rose in full bloom. Her starry eyes gained a more significant expression; her skin (that feature which had always been her greatest pride and most anxious care) was dazzling: it could not be compared to the peach or to the flower; it was they that demanded comparison with it. She looked eighteen once more. She was at the height of her glowing loveliness. It was impossible not to remark it and her women friends asked her in little friendly asides if she was going to have a baby. The indifferent who had said she was just a very pretty woman with a long nose admitted that they had misjudged her. She was what Charlie had called her the first time he saw her, a raging beauty.

They managed their intrigue with skill. He had a broad back, he told her (“I will not have you swank about your figure,” she interrupted lightly), and it did not matter about him; but for her sake they mustn’t take the smallest risk. They could not meet often alone, not half often enough for him, but he had to think of her first, sometimes in the curio shop, now and then after luncheon in her house when no one was about; but she saw him a good deal here and there. It amused her then to see the formal way he spoke to her, jovial, for he was always that, with the same manner he used with every one. Who could imagine when they heard him chaff her with that charming humour of his that so lately he had held her in his passionate arms?

She worshipped him. He was splendid, in his smart top boots and his white breeches, when he played polo. In tennis clothes he looked a mere boy. Of course he was proud of his figure: it was the best figure she had ever seen. He took pains to keep it. He never ate bread or potatoes or butter. And he took a great deal of exercise. She liked the care he took of his hands; he was manicured once a week. He was a wonderful athlete and the year before he had won the local tennis championship. Certainly he was the best dancer she had ever danced with; it was a dream to dance with him. No one would think he was forty. She told him she did not believe it.

“I believe it’s all bluff and you’re really twenty-five.”

He laughed. He was well pleased.

“Oh, my dear, I have a boy of fifteen. I’m a middle-aged gent. In another two or three years I shall just be a fat old party.”

“You’ll be adorable when you’re a hundred.”

She liked his black, bushy eyebrows. She wondered whether it was they that gave his blue eyes their disturbing expression.

He was full of accomplishments. He could play the piano quite well, rag-time, of course, and he could sing a comic song with a rich voice and good humour. She did not believe there was anything he could not do. He was very clever at his work too and she shared his pleasure when he told her that the Governor had particularly congratulated him on the way he had done some difficult job.

“Although it’s I as says it,” he laughed, his eyes charming with the love he bore her, “there’s not a fellow in the Service who could have done it better.”

Oh, how she wished that she were his wife rather than Walter’s!

XVII

Of course it was not certain yet that Walter knew the truth, and if he didn’t it was better perhaps to leave well alone; but if he did, well, in the end it would be the best thing for all of them. At first she had been, if not satisfied, at least resigned to seeing Charlie only by stealth; but time had increased her passion and for some while now she had been increasingly impatient of the obstacles which prevented them from being always together. He had told her so often that he cursed his position which forced him to be so discreet, the ties which bound him, and the ties which bound her: how marvellous it would have been, he said, if they were both free! She saw his point of view; no one wanted a scandal, and of course it required a good deal of thinking over before you changed the course of your life; but if freedom were thrust upon them, ah, then, how simple everything would be!

It was not as though any one would suffer very much. She knew exactly what his relations were with his wife. She was a cold woman and there had been no love between them for years. It was habit that held them together, convenience, and of course the children. It was easier for Charlie than for her: Walter loved her; but after all, he was absorbed in his work; and a man always had his club, he might be upset at first, but he would get over it; there was no reason why he should not marry somebody else. Charlie had told her that he could not make out how she came to throw herself away on Walter Fane.

She wondered, half smiling, why a little while before she had been terrified at the thought that Walter had caught them. Of course it was startling to see the handle of the door slowly turn. But after all they knew the worst that Walter could do, and they were ready for it. Charlie would feel as great a relief as she that what they both desired more than anything in the world should be thus forced upon them.

Walter was a gentleman, she would do him the justice to acknowledge that, and he loved her; he would do the right thing and allow her to divorce him. They had made a mistake and the lucky thing was that they had found it out before it was too late. She made up her mind exactly what she was going to say to him and how she would treat him. She would be kind, smiling, and firm. There was no need for them to quarrel. Later on she would always be glad to see him. She hoped honestly that the two years they had spent together would remain with him as a priceless memory.

“I don’t suppose Dorothy Townsend will mind divorcing Charlie a bit,” she thought. “Now the youngest boy is going back to England it will be much nicer for her to be in England too. There’s absolutely nothing for her to do in Tching-Yen. She’ll be able to spend all the holidays with her boys. And then she’s got her father and mother in England.”

It was all very simple and everything could be managed without scandal or ill-feeling. And then she and Charlie could marry. Kitty drew a long sigh. They would be very happy. It was worth going through a certain amount of bother to achieve that. Confusedly, one picture jostling another, she thought of the life they would lead together, of the fun they would have and the little journeys they would take together, the house they would live in, the positions he would rise to and the help she would be to him. He would be very proud of her and she, she adored him.

But through all these day-dreams ran a current of apprehension. It was funny: it was as though the wood and the strings of an orchestra played Arcadian melodies and in the bass the drums, softly but with foreboding, beat a grim tattoo. Sooner or later Walter must come home and her heart beat fast at the thought of meeting him. It was strange that he had gone away that afternoon without saying a word to her. Of course she was not frightened of him; after all what could he do, she repeated to herself; but she could not quite allay her uneasiness. Once more she repeated what she would say to him. What was the good of making a scene? She was very sorry, Heaven knew she didn’t want to cause him pain, but she couldn’t help it if she didn’t love him. It was no good pretending and it was always better to tell the truth. She hoped he wouldn’t be unhappy, but they had made a mistake and the only sensible thing was to acknowledge it. She would always think kindly of him.

But even as she said this to herself a sudden gust of fear made the sweat start out in the palms of her hands. And because she was frightened she grew angry with him. If he wanted to make a scene, that was his lookout; he must not be surprised if he got more than he bargained for. She would tell him that she had never cared two pins for him and that not a day had passed since their marriage without her regretting it. He was dull. Oh, how he’d bored her, bored her, bored her! He thought himself so much better than anyone else, it was laughable; he had no sense of humour; she hated his supercilious air, his coldness, and his self-control. It was easy to be self-controlled when you were interested in nothing and nobody but yourself. He was repulsive to her. She hated to let him kiss her. What had he to be so conceited about? He danced rottenly, he was a wet blanket at a party, he couldn’t play or sing, he couldn’t play polo and his tennis was no better than anybody else’s. Bridge? Who cared about bridge?

Kitty worked herself up into a towering passion. Let him dare to reproach her. All that had happened was his own fault. She was thankful that he knew the truth at last. She hated him and wished never to see him again. Yes, she was thankful that it was all over. Why couldn’t he leave her alone? He had pestered her into marrying him and now she was fed up.

“Fed up,” she repeated aloud, trembling with anger. “Fed up! Fed up!”

She heard the car draw up to the gate of their garden. He was coming up the stairs.

XVIII

He came into the room. Her heart was beating wildly and her hands were shaking; it was lucky that she lay on the sofa. She was holding an open book as though she had been reading. He stood for an instant on the threshold and their eyes met. Her heart sank; she felt on a sudden a cold chill pass through her limbs and she shivered. She had that feeling which you describe by saying that someone was walking over your grave. His face was deathly pale; she had seen it like that once before, when they sat together in the Park and he asked her to marry him. His dark eyes, immobile and inscrutable, seemed preternaturally large. He knew everything.

“You’re back early,” she remarked.

Her lips trembled so that she could hardly frame the words. She was terrified. She was afraid she would faint.

“I think it’s about the usual time.”

His voice sounded strange to her. It was raised on the last word in order to give his remark a casual air, but it was forced. She wondered if he saw that she was shaking in every limb. It was only by an effort that she did not scream. He dropped his eyes.

“I’m just going to dress.”

He left the room. She was shattered. For two or three minutes she could not stir, but at last, raising herself from the sofa with difficulty, as though she had had an illness and were still weak, she found her feet. She did not know if her legs would support her. She felt her way by means of chairs and tables to the verandah and then with one hand on the wall went to her room. She put on a tea-gown and when she went back into her boudoir (they only used the drawing-room when there was a party) he was standing at a table looking at the pictures of the Sketch. She had to force herself to enter.

“Shall we go down? Dinner is ready.”

“Have I kept you waiting?”

It was dreadful that she could not control the trembling of her lips.

When was he going to speak?

They sat down and for a moment there was silence between them. Then he made a remark and because it was so commonplace it had a sinister air.

“The Empress didn’t come in to-day,” he said. “I wonder if she’s been delayed by a storm.”

“Was she due to-day?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him now and saw that his eyes were fixed on his plate. He made another observation, equally trivial, about a tennis tournament that was about to be played, and he spoke at length. His voice as a rule was agreeable, with a variety of tone, but now he spoke on one note. It was strangely unnatural. It gave Kitty the impression that he was speaking from a long way off. And all the time his eyes were directed to his plate, or the table, or to a picture on the wall. He would not meet hers. She realised that he could not bear to look at her.

“Shall we go upstairs?” he said when dinner was finished.

“If you like.”

She rose and he held open the door for her. His eyes were cast down as she passed him. When they reached the sitting-room he took up the illustrated paper once more.

“Is this a new Sketch? I don’t think I’ve seen it.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t noticed.”

It had been lying about for a fortnight and she knew that he had looked it through and through. He took it and sat down. She lay again on the sofa and took her book. As a rule in the evening, when they were alone, they played coon-can or patience. He was leaning back in an armchair, in a comfortable attitude, and his attention seemed absorbed by the illustration he was looking at. He did not turn the page. She tried to read, but she could not see the print before her eyes. The words were blurred. Her head began to ache violently.

When would he speak?

They sat in silence for an hour. She gave up the pretence of reading, and letting her novel fall on her lap, gazed into space. She was afraid to make the smallest gesture or the smallest sound. He sat quite still, in that same easy attitude, and stared with those wide, immobile eyes of his at the picture. His stillness was strangely menacing. It gave Kitty the feeling of a wild beast prepared to spring.

When suddenly he stood up she started. She clenched her hands and she felt herself grow pale. Now!

“I have some work to do,” he said in that quiet, toneless voice, his eyes averted. “If you don’t mind I’ll go into my study. I daresay you’ll have gone to bed by the time I’ve finished.”

“I am rather tired to-night.”

“Well, good night.”

“Good night.”

He left the room.

XIX

As soon as she could next morning she rang Townsend up at his office.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I want to see you.”

“My dear, I’m awfully busy. I’m a working man.”

“It’s very important. Can I come down to the office?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Well, come here then.”

“I can’t possibly get away. What about this afternoon? And don’t you think it would be better if I didn’t come to your house?”

“I must see you at once.”

There was a pause and she was afraid that she had been cut off.

“Are you there?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes, I was thinking. Has anything happened?”

“I can’t tell you over the telephone.”

There was another silence before he spoke again.

“Well, look here, I can manage to see you for ten minutes at one if that’ll do. You’d better go to Ku-Chou’s and I’ll come along as soon as I can.”

“The curio shop?” she asked in dismay.

“Well, we can’t meet in the lounge at the Tching Yen Hotel very well,” he answered.

She noticed a trace of irritation in his voice.

“Very well. I’ll go to Ku-Chou’s.”

XX

She got out of her rickshaw in the Victoria Road and walked up the steep, narrow lane till she came to the shop. She lingered outside a moment as though her attention were attracted by the bric-a-brac which was displayed. But a boy who was standing there on the watch for customers, recognising her at once, gave her a broad smile of connivance. He said something in Chinese to someone within and the master, a little, fat-faced man in a black gown, came out and greeted her. She walked in quickly.

“Mr. Townsend no come yet. You go top-side, yes?”

She went to the back of the shop and walked up the rickety, dark stairs. The Chinese followed her and unlocked the door that led into the bedroom. It was stuffy and there was an acrid smell of opium. She sat down on a sandalwood chest.

In a moment she heard a heavy step on the creaking stairs. Townsend came in and shut the door behind him. His face bore a sullen look, but as he saw her it vanished, and he smiled in that charming way of his. He took her quickly in his arms and kissed her lips.

“Now what’s the trouble?”

“It makes me feel better just to see you,” she smiled.

He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette.

“You look rather washed out this morning.”

“I don’t wonder,” she answered. “I don’t think I closed my eyes all night.”

He gave her a look. He was smiling still, but his smile was a little set and unnatural. She thought there was a shade of anxiety in his eyes.

“He knows,” she said.

There was an instant’s pause before he answered.

“What did he say?”

“He hasn’t said anything.”

“What!” He looked at her sharply. “What makes you think he knows then?”

“Everything. His look. The way he talked at dinner.”

“Was he disagreeable?”

“No, on the contrary, he was scrupulously polite. For the first time since we married he didn’t kiss me good night.”

She dropped her eyes. She was not sure if Charlie understood. As a rule Walter took her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers and would not let them go. His whole body grew tender and passionate with his kiss.

“Why do you imagine he didn’t say anything?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a pause. Kitty sat very still on the sandalwood box and looked with anxious attention at Townsend. His face once more was sullen and there was a frown between his brows. His mouth drooped a little at the corners. But all at once he looked up and a gleam of malicious amusement came into his eyes.

“I wonder if he is going to say anything.”

She did not answer. She did not know what he meant.

“After all, he wouldn’t be the first man who’s shut his eyes in a case of this sort. What has he to gain by making a row? If he’d wanted to make a row he would have insisted on coming into your room.” His eyes twinkled and his lips broke into a broad smile. “We should have looked a pair of damned fools.”

“I wish you could have seen his face last night.”

“I expect he was upset. It was naturally a shock. It’s a damned humiliating position for any man. He always looks a fool. Walter doesn’t give me the impression of a fellow who’d care to wash a lot of dirty linen in public.”

“I don’t think he would,” she answered reflectively. “He’s very sensitive, I’ve discovered that.”

“That’s all to the good as far as we’re concerned. You know, it’s a very good plan to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and ask yourself how you would act in his place. There’s only one way in which a man can save his face when he’s in that sort of position and that is to pretend he knows nothing. I bet you anything you like that that is exactly what he’s going to do.”

The more Townsend talked the more buoyant he became. His blue eyes sparkled and he was once more his gay and jovial self. He irradiated an encouraging confidence.

“Heaven knows, I don’t want to say anything disagreeable about him, but when you come down to brass tacks a bacteriologist is no great shakes. The chances are that I shall be Colonial Secretary when Simmons goes home, and it’s to Walter’s interest to keep on the right side of me. He’s got his bread and butter to think of, like the rest of us: do you think the Colonial Office are going to do much for a fellow who makes a scandal? Believe me, he’s got everything to gain by holding his tongue and everything to lose by kicking up a row.”

Kitty moved uneasily. She knew how shy Walter was and she could believe that the fear of a scene, and the dread of public attention, might have influence upon him; but she could not believe that he would be affected by the thought of a material advantage. Perhaps she didn’t know him very well, but Charlie didn’t know him at all.

“Has it occurred to you that he’s madly in love with me?”

He did not answer, but he smiled at her with roguish eyes. She knew and loved that charming look of his.

“Well, what is it? I know you’re going to say something awful.”

“Well, you know, women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.”

For the first time she laughed. His confidence was catching.

“What a monstrous thing to say!”

“I put it to you that you haven’t been bothering much about your husband lately. Perhaps he isn’t quite so much in love with you as he was.”

“At all events I shall never delude myself that you are madly in love with me,” she retorted.

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

Ah, how good it was to hear him say that! She knew it and her belief in his passion warmed her heart. As he spoke he rose from the bed and came and sat down beside her on the sandalwood box. He put his arm round her waist.

“Don’t worry your silly little head a moment longer,” he said. “I promise you there’s nothing to fear. I’m as certain as I am of anything that he’s going to pretend he knows nothing. You know, this sort of thing is awfully difficult to prove. You say he’s in love with you; perhaps he doesn’t want to lose you altogether. I swear I’d accept anything rather than that if you were my wife.”

She leaned towards him. Her body became limp and yielding against his arm. The love she felt for him was almost torture. His last words had struck her: perhaps Walter loved her so passionately that he was prepared to accept any humiliation if sometimes she would let him love her. She could understand that; for that was how she felt towards Charlie. A thrill of pride passed through her, and at the same time a faint sensation of contempt for a man who could love so slavishly.

She put her arm lovingly round Charlie’s neck.

“You’re simply wonderful. I was shaking like a leaf when I came here and you’ve made everything all right.”

He took her face in his hand and kissed her lips.

“Darling.”

“You’re such a comfort to me,” she sighed.

“I’m sure you need not be nervous. And you know I’ll stand by you. I won’t let you down.”

She put away her fears, but for an instant unreasonably she regretted that her plans for the future were shattered. Now that all danger was past she almost wished that Walter were going to insist on a divorce.

“I knew I could count on you,” she said.

“So I should hope.”

“Oughtn’t you to go and have your tiffin?”

“Oh, damn my tiffin.”

He drew her more closely to him and now she was held tight in his arms. His mouth sought hers.

“Oh, Charlie, you must let me go.”

“Never.”

She gave a little laugh, a laugh of happy love and of triumph; his eyes were heavy with desire. He lifted her to her feet and not letting her go but holding her close to his breast he locked the door.

XXI

All through the afternoon she thought of what Charlie had said about Walter. They were dining out that evening and when he came back from the Club she was dressing. He knocked at her door.

“Come in.”

He did not open.

“I’m going straight along to dress. How long will you be?”

“Ten minutes.”

He said nothing more, but went to his own room. His voice had that constrained note which she had heard in it the night before. She felt fairly sure of herself now. She was ready before he was and when he came downstairs she was already seated in the car.

“I’m afraid I’ve kept you waiting,” he said.

“I shall survive it,” she replied, and she was able to smile as she spoke.

She made an observation or two as they drove down the hill, but he answered curtly. She shrugged her shoulders; she was growing a trifle impatient: if he wanted to sulk, let him, she didn’t care. They drove in silence till they reached their destination. It was a large dinner party. There were too many people and too many courses. While Kitty chatted gaily with her neighbours she watched Walter. He was deathly pale and his face was pinched.

“Your husband is looking rather washed out. I thought he didn’t mind the heat. Has he been working very hard?”

“He always works hard.”

“I suppose you’re going away soon?”

“Oh, yes, I think I shall go to Japan as I did last year,” she said. “The doctor says I must get out of the heat if I don’t want to go all to pieces.”

Walter did not as usual when they were dining out give her a little smiling glance now and then. He never looked at her. She had noticed that when he came down to the car he kept his eyes averted, and he did the same when, with his usual politeness, he gave her his hand to alight. Now, talking with the women on either side of him, he did not smile, but looked at them with steady and unblinking eyes; and really his eyes looked enormous and in that pale face coal black. His face was set and stern.

“He must be an agreeable companion,” thought Kitty ironically.

The idea of those unfortunate ladies trying to indulge in small talk with that grim mask not a little diverted her.

Of course he knew; there was no doubt about that, and he was furious with her. Why hadn’t he said anything? Was it really because, though angry and hurt, he loved her as much that he was afraid she would leave him. The thought made her ever so slightly despise him, but good-naturedly: after all, he was her husband and he provided her with board and lodging; so long as he didn’t interfere with her and let her do as she liked she would be quite nice to him. On the other hand, perhaps his silence was due merely to a morbid timidity. Charlie was right when he said that no one would hate a scandal more than Walter. He never made a speech if he could help it. He had told her once that when he was subpoenaed as a witness on a case where he was to give expert evidence he had hardly slept for a week before. His shyness was a disease.

And there was another thing: men were very vain, and so long as no one knew what had happened it might be that Walter would be content to ignore it. Then she wondered whether by any possibility Charlie was right when he suggested that Walter knew which side his bread was buttered. Charlie was the most popular man in the Colony and soon would be Colonial Secretary. He could be very useful to Walter; on the other hand he could make himself very unpleasant if Walter put his back up. Her heart exulted as she thought of her lover’s strength and determination; she felt so defenceless in his virile arms. Men were strange: it would never have occurred to her that Walter was capable of such baseness, and yet you never knew; perhaps his seriousness was merely a mask for a mean and pettifogging nature. The more she considered it the more likely it seemed that Charlie was right; and she turned her glance once more on her husband. There was no indulgence in it.

It happened that just then the women on either side of him were talking with their neighbours and he was left alone. He was staring straight in front of him, forgetful of the party, and his eyes were filled with a mortal sadness. It gave Kitty a shock.

XXII

Next day when she was lying down after luncheon dozing, she was aroused by a knock at her door.

“Who is it?” she cried irritably.

At that hour she was unaccustomed to be disturbed.

“I.”

She recognized her husband’s voice and she sat up quickly.

“Come in.”

“Did I wake you?” he asked as he entered.

“In point of fact you did,” she answered in the natural tone she had adopted with him for the last two days.

“Will you come into the next room? I want to have a little talk with you.”

Her heart gave a sudden beat against her ribs.

“I’ll put on a dressing-gown.”

He left her. She slipped her bare feet into mules and wrapped herself in a kimono. She looked in the glass; she was very pale and she put on some rouge. She stood at the door for a moment, nerving herself for the interview, and then with a bold face joined him.

“How did you manage to get away from the Laboratory at this hour?” she said. “I don’t often see you at this sort of time.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

He did not look at her. He spoke gravely. She was glad to do as he asked: her knees were a little shaky, and unable to continue in that jocular tone she kept silent. He sat also and lit a cigarette. His eyes wandered restlessly about the room. He seemed to have some difficulty in starting.

Suddenly he looked full at her; and because he had held his eyes so long averted, his direct gaze gave her such a fright that she smothered a cry.

“Have you ever heard of Mei-tan-fu?” he asked. “There’s been a good deal about it in the papers lately.”

She stared at him in astonishment. She hesitated.

“Is that the place where there’s cholera? Mr. Arbuthnot was talking about it last night.”

“There’s an epidemic. I believe it’s the worst they’ve had for years. There was a medical missionary there. He died of cholera three days ago. There’s a French convent there and of course there’s the Customs man. Every one else has got out.”

His eyes were still fixed on her and she could not lower hers. She tried to read his expression, but she was nervous, and she could only discern a strange watchfulness. How could he look so steadily? He did not even blink.

“The French nuns are doing what they can. They’ve turned the orphanage into a hospital. But the people are dying like flies. I’ve offered to go and take charge.”

“You?”

She started violently. Her first thought was that if he went she would be free and without let or hindrance could see Charlie. But the thought shocked her. She felt herself go scarlet. Why did he watch her like that? She looked away in embarrassment.

“Is that necessary?” she faltered.

“There’s not a foreign doctor in the place.”

“But you’re not a doctor, you’re a bacteriologist.”

“I am an M.D., you know, and before I specialised I did a good deal of general work in a hospital. The fact that I’m first and foremost a bacteriologist is all to the good. It will be an admirable chance for research work.”

He spoke almost flippantly and when she glanced at him she was surprised to see in his eyes a gleam of mockery. She could not understand.

“But won’t it be awfully dangerous?”

“Awfully.”

He smiled. It was a derisive grimace. She leaned her forehead on her hand. Suicide. It was nothing short of that. Dreadful! She had not thought he would take it like that. She couldn’t let him do that. It was cruel. It was not her fault if she did not love him. She couldn’t bear the thought that he should kill himself for her sake. Tears flowed softly down her cheeks.

“What are you crying for?”

His voice was cold.

“You’re not obliged to go, are you?”

“No, I go of my own free will.”

“Please don’t, Walter. It would be too awful if something happened. Supposing you died?”

Though his face remained impassive the shadow of a smile once more crossed his eyes. He did not answer.

“Where is this place?” she asked after a pause.

“Mei-tan-fu? It’s on a tributary of the Western River. We should go up the Western River and then by chair.”

“Who is we?”

“You and I.”

She looked at him quickly. She thought she had heard amiss. But now the smile in his eyes had travelled to his lips. His dark eyes were fixed on her.

“Are you expecting me to come too?”

“I thought you’d like to.”

Her breath began to come very fast. A shudder passed through her.

“But surely it’s no place for a woman. The missionary sent his wife and children down weeks ago and the A. P. C. man and his wife came down. I met her at a tea-party. I’ve just remembered that she said they left some place on account of cholera.”

“There are five French nuns there.”

Panic seized her.

“I don’t know what you mean. It would be madness for me to go. You know how delicate I am. Dr. Hayward said I must get out of Tching-Yen on account of the heat. I could never stand the heat up there. And cholera. I should be frightened out of my wits. It’s just asking for trouble. There’s no reason for me to go. I should die.”

He did not answer. She looked at him in her desperation and she could hardly restrain a cry. His face had a sort of black pallor which suddenly terrified her. She saw in it a look of hatred. Was it possible that he wanted her to die? She answered her own outrageous thought.

“It’s absurd. If you think you ought to go it’s your own lookout. But really you can’t expect me to. I hate illness. A cholera epidemic. I don’t pretend to be very brave and I don’t mind telling you that I haven’t pluck for that. I shall stay here until it’s time for me to go to Japan.”

“I should have thought that you would want to accompany me when I am about to set out on a dangerous expedition.”

He was openly mocking her now. She was confused. She did not quite know whether he meant what he said or was merely trying to frighten her.

“I don’t think anyone could reasonably blame me for refusing to go to a dangerous place where I had no business or where I could be of no use.”

“You could be of the greatest use; you could cheer and comfort me.”

She grew even a little paler.

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it needed more than average intelligence.”

“I’m not going, Walter. It’s monstrous to ask me.”

“Then I shall not go either. I shall immediately file my petition.”

XXIII

She looked at him blankly. What he said was so unexpected that at the first moment she could hardly gather its sense.

“What on earth are you talking about?” she faltered.

Even to herself her reply rang false, and she saw the look of disdain which it called forth on Walter’s stern face.

“I’m afraid you’ve thought me a bigger fool than I am.”

She did not quite know what to say. She was undecided whether indignantly to assert her innocence or to break out into angry reproaches. He seemed to read her thoughts.

“I’ve got all the proof necessary.”

She began to cry. The tears flowed from her eyes without any particular anguish and she did not dry them: to weep gave her a little time to collect herself. But her mind was blank. He watched her without concern, and his calmness frightened her. He grew impatient.

“You’re not going to do much good by crying, you know.”

His voice, so cold and hard, had the effect of exciting in her a certain indignation. She was recovering her nerve.

“I don’t care. I suppose you have no objection to my divorcing you. It means nothing to a man.”

“Will you allow me to ask why I should put myself to the smallest inconvenience on your account?”

“It can’t make any difference to you. It’s not much to ask you to behave like a gentleman.”

“I have much too great a regard for your welfare.”

She sat up now and dried her eyes.

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

“Townsend will marry you only if he is co-respondent and the case is so shameless that his wife is forced to divorce him.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cried.

“You stupid fool.”

His tone was so contemptuous that she flushed with anger. And perhaps her anger was greater because she had never before heard him say to her any but sweet, flattering and delightful things. She had been accustomed to find him subservient to all her whims.

“If you want the truth you can have it. He’s only too anxious to marry me. Dorothy Townsend is perfectly willing to divorce him and we shall be married the moment we’re free.”

“Did he tell you that in so many words or is that the impression you have gained from his manner?”

Walter’s eyes shone with bitter mockery. They made Kitty a trifle uneasy. She was not quite sure that Charlie had ever said exactly that in so many words.

“He’s said it over and over again.”

“That’s a lie and you know it’s a lie.”

“He loves me with all his heart and soul. He loves me as passionately as I love him. You’ve found out. I’m not going to deny anything. Why should I? We’ve been lovers for a year and I’m proud of it. He means everything in the world to me and I’m glad that you know at last. We’re sick to death of secrecy and compromise and all the rest of it. It was a mistake that I ever married you, I never should have done it, I was a fool. I never cared for you. We never had anything in common. I don’t like the people you like and I’m bored by the things that interest you. I’m thankful it’s finished.”

He watched her without a gesture and without a movement of his face. He listened attentively and no change in his expression showed that what she said affected him.

“Do you know why I married you?”

“Because you wanted to be married before your sister Doris.”

It was true, but it gave her a funny little turn to realise that he knew it. Oddly enough, even in that moment of fear and anger, it excited her compassion. He faintly smiled.

“I had no illusions about you,” he said. “I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It’s comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn’t ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you’d only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn’t care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they’re in love with someone and the love isn’t returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn’t like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humoured affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn’t afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favour.”

Kitty, accustomed to flattery all her life, had never heard such things said to her before. Blind wrath, driving out fear, arose in her heart: it seemed to choke her, and she felt the blood-vessels in her temples swell and throb. Wounded vanity can make a woman more vindictive than a lioness robbed of her cubs. Kitty’s jaw, always a little too square, protruded with an apish hideousness and her beautiful eyes were black with malice. But she kept her temper in check.

“If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.”

“Evidently.”

His derisive tone increased her irritation. She felt that she could wound him more by maintaining her calm.

“I’m not very well educated and I’m not very clever. I’m just a perfectly ordinary young woman. I like the things that the people like among whom I’ve lived all my life. I like dancing and tennis and theatres and I like the men who play games. It’s quite true that I’ve always been bored by you and by the things you like. They mean nothing to me and I don’t want them to. You dragged me round those interminable galleries in Venice: I should have enjoyed myself much more playing golf at Sandwich.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been all that you expected me to be. Unfortunately I always found you physically repulsive. You can hardly blame me for that.”

“I don’t.”

Kitty could more easily have coped with the situation if he had raved and stormed. She could have met violence with violence. His self-control was inhuman and she hated him now as she had never hated him before.

“I don’t think you’re a man at all. Why didn’t you break into the room when you knew I was there with Charlie? You might at least have tried to thrash him. Were you afraid?”

But the moment she had said this she flushed, for she was ashamed. He did not answer, but in his eyes she read an icy disdain. The shadow of a smile flickered on his lips.

“It may be that, like a historical character, I am too proud to fight.”

Kitty, unable to think of anything to answer, shrugged her shoulders. For a moment longer he held her in his immobile gaze.

“I think I’ve said all I had to say: if you refuse to come to Mei-tan-fu I shall file my petition.”

“Why won’t you consent to let me divorce you?”

He took his eyes off her at last. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He smoked it to the end without saying a word. Then, throwing away the butt, he gave a little smile. He looked at her once more.

“If Mrs. Townsend will give me her assurance that she will divorce her husband and if he will give me his written promise to marry you within a week of the two decrees being made absolute, I will do that.”

There was something in the way he spoke which disconcerted her. But her self-respect obliged her to accept his offer in the grand manner.

“That is very generous of you, Walter.”

To her astonishment he burst suddenly into a shout of laughter. She flushed angrily.

“What are you laughing at? I see nothing to laugh at.”

“I beg your pardon. I daresay my sense of humour is peculiar.”

She looked at him, frowning. She would have liked to say something bitter and wounding, but no rejoinder occurred to her. He looked at his watch.

“You had better look sharp if you want to catch Townsend at his office. If you decide to come with me to Mei-tan-fu it would be necessary to start the day after to-morrow.”

“Do you want me to tell him to-day?”

“They say there is no time like the present.”

Her heart began to beat a little faster. It was not uneasiness that she felt, it was, she didn’t quite know what it was. She wished she could have had a little longer; she would have liked to prepare Charlie. But she had the fullest confidence in him, he loved her as much as she loved him, and it was treacherous even to let the thought cross her mind that he would not welcome the necessity that was forced upon them. She turned to Walter gravely.

“I don’t think you know what love is. You can have no conception how desperately in love Charlie and I are with one another. It really is the only thing that matters and every sacrifice that our love calls for will be as easy as falling off a log.”

He gave a little bow, but said nothing, and his eyes followed her as she walked with measured step from the room.

XXIV

She sent in a little note to Charlie on which she had written: “Please see me. It is urgent.” A Chinese boy asked her to wait and brought the answer that Mr. Townsend would see her in five minutes. She was unaccountably nervous. When at last she was ushered into his room Charlie came forward to shake hands with her, but the moment the boy, having closed the door, left them alone he dropped the affable formality of his manner.

“I say, my dear, you really mustn’t come here in working hours. I’ve got an awful lot to do and we don’t want to give people a chance to gossip.”

She gave him a long look with those beautiful eyes of hers and tried to smile, but her lips were stiff and she could not.

“I wouldn’t have come unless it was necessary.”

He smiled and took her arm.

“Well, since you’re here come and sit down.”

It was a long bare room, narrow, with a high ceiling; its walls were painted in two shades of terra cotta. The only furniture consisted of a large desk, a revolving chair for Townsend to sit in and a leather armchair for visitors. It intimidated Kitty to sit in this. He sat at the desk. She had never seen him in spectacles before; she did not know that he used them. When he noticed that her eyes were on them he took them off.

“I only use them for reading,” he said.

Her tears came easily and now, she hardly knew why, she began to cry. She had no deliberate intention of deceiving, but rather an instinctive desire to excite his sympathy. He looked at her blankly.

“Is anything the matter? Oh, my dear, don’t cry.”

She took out her handkerchief and tried to check her sobs. He rang the bell and when the boy came to the door went to it.

“If anyone asks for me say I’m out.”

“Very good, sir.”

The boy closed the door. Charlie sat on the arm of the chair and put his arm round Kitty’s shoulders.

“Now, Kitty dear, tell me all about it.”

“Walter wants a divorce,” she said.

She felt the pressure of his arm on her shoulder cease. His body stiffened. There was a moment’s silence, then Townsend rose from her chair and sat down once more in his.

“What exactly do you mean?” he said.

She looked at him quickly, for his voice was hoarse, and she saw that his face was dully red.

“I’ve had a talk with him. I’ve come straight from the house now. He says he has all the proof he wants.”

“You didn’t commit yourself, did you? You didn’t acknowledge anything?”

Her heart sank.

“No,” she answered.

“Are you quite sure?” he asked, looking at her sharply.

“Quite sure,” she lied again.

He leaned back in his chair and stared vacantly at the map of China which was hanging on the wall in front of him. She watched him anxiously. She was somewhat disconcerted at the manner in which he had received the news. She had expected him to take her in his arms and tell her he was thankful, for now they could be together always; but of course men were funny. She was crying softly, not now to arouse sympathy, but because it seemed the natural thing to do.

“This is a bloody mess we’ve got into,” he said at length. “But it’s no good losing our heads. Crying isn’t going to do us any good, you know.”

She noticed the irritation in his voice and dried her eyes.

“It’s not my fault, Charlie. I couldn’t help it.”

“Of course you couldn’t. It was just damned bad luck. I was just as much to blame as you were. The thing to do now is to see how we’re going to get out of it. I don’t suppose you want to be divorced any more than I do.”

She smothered a gasp. She gave him a searching look. He was not thinking of her at all.

“I wonder what his proofs really are. I don’t know how he can actually prove that we were together in that room. On the whole we’ve been about as careful as anyone could be. I’m sure that old fellow at the curio shop wouldn’t have given us away. Even if he’d seen us go in there’s no reason why we shouldn’t hunt curios together.”

He was talking to himself rather than to her.

“It’s easy enough to bring charges, but it’s damned difficult to prove them; any lawyer will tell you that. Our line is to deny everything, and if he threatens to bring an action we’ll tell him to go to hell and we’ll fight it.”

“I couldn’t go into court, Charlie.”

“Why on earth not? I’m afraid you’ll have to. God knows, I don’t want a row, but we can’t take it lying down.”

“Why need we defend it?”

“What a question to ask! After all, it’s not only you that are concerned, I’m concerned too. But as a matter of fact I don’t think you need be afraid of that. We shall be able to square your husband somehow. The only thing that worries me is the best way to set about it.”

It looked as though an idea occurred to him, for he turned towards her with his charming smile and his tone, a moment before abrupt and business-like, became ingratiating.

“I’m afraid you’ve been awfully upset, poor little woman. It’s too bad.” He stretched out his hand and took hers. “It’s a scrape we’ve got into, but we shall get out of it. It’s not...” He stopped and Kitty had a suspicion that he had been about to say that it was not the first he had got out of. “The great thing is to keep our heads. You know I shall never let you down.”

“I’m not frightened. I don’t care what he does.”

He smiled still, but perhaps his smile was a trifle forced.

“If the worst comes to the worst I shall have to tell the Governor. He’ll curse me like hell, but he’s a good fellow and a man of the world. He’ll fix it up somehow. It wouldn’t do him any good if there was a scandal.”

“What can he do?” asked Kitty.

“He can bring pressure to bear on Walter. If he can’t get at him through his ambition he’ll get at him through his sense of duty.”

Kitty was a little chilled. She did not seem able to make Charlie see how desperately grave the situation was. His airiness made her impatient. She was sorry that she had come to see him in his office. The surroundings intimidated her. It would have been much easier to say what she wanted if she could have been in his arms with hers round his neck.

“You don’t know Walter,” she said.

“I know that every man has his price.”

She loved Charlie with all her heart, but his reply disconcerted her; for such a clever man it was a stupid thing to say.

“I don’t think you realise how angry Walter is. You haven’t seen his face and the look of his eyes.”

He did not reply for a moment, but looked at her with a slight smile. She knew what he was thinking. Walter was the bacteriologist and occupied a subordinate position; he would hardly have the impudence to make himself a nuisance to the upper officials of the Colony.

“It’s no good deceiving yourself, Charlie,” she said earnestly. “If Walter has made up his mind to bring an action nothing that you or anybody else can say will have the slightest influence.”

His face once more grew heavy and sulky.

“Is it his idea to make me co-respondent?”

“At first it was. At last I managed to get him to consent to let me divorce him.”

“Oh, well, that’s not so terrible.” His manner relaxed again and she saw the relief in his eyes. “That seems to me a very good way out. After all, it’s the least a man can do, it’s the only decent thing.”

“But he makes a condition.”

He gave her an inquiring glance and he seemed to reflect.

“Of course I’m not a very rich man, but I’ll do anything in my power.”

Kitty was silent. Charlie was saying things which she would never have expected him to say. And they made it difficult for her to speak. She had expected to blurt it out in one breath, held in his loving arms, with her burning face hid on his breast.

“He agrees to my divorcing him if your wife will give him the assurance that she will divorce you.”

“Anything else?”

Kitty could hardly find her voice.

“And — it’s awfully hard to say, Charlie, it sounds dreadful — if you’ll promise to marry me within a week of the decrees being made absolute.”

XXV

For a moment he was silent. Then he took her hand again and pressed it gently.

“You know, darling,” he said, “whatever happens we must keep Dorothy out of this.”

She looked at him blankly.

“But I don’t understand. How can we?”

“Well, we can’t only think of ourselves in this world. You know, other things being equal, there’s nothing in the world I’d love more than to marry you. But it’s quite out of the question. I know Dorothy: nothing would induce her to divorce me.”

Kitty was becoming horribly frightened. She began to cry again. He got up and sat down beside her with his arm round her waist.

“Try not to upset yourself, darling. We must keep our heads.”

“I thought you loved me...”

“Of course I love you,” he said tenderly. “You surely can’t have any doubt of that now.”

“If she won’t divorce you Walter will make you co-respondent.”

He took an appreciable time to answer. His tone was dry.

“Of course that would ruin my career, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do you much good. If the worst came to the worst I should make a clean breast of it to Dorothy; she’d be dreadfully hurt and wretched, but she’d forgive me.” He had an idea. “I’m not sure if the best plan wouldn’t be to make a clean breast of it anyhow. If she went to your husband I daresay she could persuade him to hold his tongue.”

“Does that mean you don’t want her to divorce you?”

“Well, I have got my boys to think of, haven’t I? And naturally I don’t want to make her unhappy. We’ve always got on very well together. She’s been an awfully good wife to me, you know.”

“Why did you tell me that she meant nothing to you?”

“I never did. I said I wasn’t in love with her. We haven’t slept together for years except now and then, on Christmas Day for instance, or the day before she was going home or the day she came back. She isn’t a woman who cares for that sort of thing. But we’ve always been excellent friends. I don’t mind telling you that I depend on her more than anyone has any idea of.”

“Don’t you think it would have been better to leave me alone then?”

She found it strange that with terror catching her breath she could speak so calmly.

“You were the loveliest little thing I’d seen for years. I just fell madly in love with you. You can’t blame me for that.”

“After all, you said you’d never let me down.”

“But, good God, I’m not going to let you down. We’ve got in an awful scrape and I’m going to do everything that’s humanly possible to get you out of it.”

“Except the one obvious and natural thing.”

He stood up and returned to his own chair.

“My dear, you must be reasonable. We’d much better face the situation frankly. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but really I must tell you the truth. I’m very keen on my career. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be a Governor one of these days, and it’s a damned soft job to be a Colonial Governor. Unless we can hush this up I don’t stand a dog’s chance. I may not have to leave the service, but there’ll always be a black mark against me. If I do have to leave the service then I must go into business in China, where I know people. In either case my only chance is for Dorothy to stick to me.”

“Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?”

The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.

“Oh, my dear, it’s rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he’s in love with you.”

“Didn’t you mean them?”

“At the moment.”

“And what’s to happen to me if Walter divorces me?”

“If we really haven’t a leg to stand on of course we won’t defend. There shouldn’t be any publicity and people are pretty broadminded nowadays.”

For the first time Kitty thought of her mother. She shivered. She looked again at Townsend. Her pain now was tinged with resentment.

“I’m sure you’d have no difficulty in bearing any inconvenience that I had to suffer,” she said.

“We’re not going to get much further by saying disagreeable things to one another,” he answered.

She gave a cry of despair. It was dreadful that she should love him so devotedly and yet feel such bitterness towards him. It was not possible that he understood how much he meant to her.

“Oh, Charlie, don’t you know how I love you?”

“But, my dear, I love you. Only we’re not living in a desert island and we’ve got to make the best we can out of the circumstances that are forced upon us. You really must be reasonable.”

“How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realise that to you it was only an episode.”

“Of course it wasn’t an episode. But you know, when you ask me to get my wife, to whom I’m very much attached, to divorce me, and ruin my career by marrying you, you’re asking a good deal.”

“No more than I’m willing to do for you.”

“The circumstances are rather different.”

“The only difference is that you don’t love me.”

“One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one’s life with her.”

She gave him a quick look and despair seized her. Heavy tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Oh, how cruel! How can you be so heartless?”

She began to sob hysterically. He gave an anxious glance at the door.

“My dear, do try and control yourself.”

“You don’t know how I love you,” she gasped. “I can’t live without you. Have you no pity for me?”

She could not speak any more. She wept without restraint.

“I don’t want to be unkind and, Heaven knows, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I must tell you the truth.”

“It’s the ruin of my whole life. Why couldn’t you leave me alone? What harm had I ever done you?”

“Of course if it does you any good to put all the blame on me you may.”

Kitty blazed with sudden anger.

“I suppose I threw myself at your head. I suppose I gave you no peace till you yielded to my entreaties.”

“I don’t say that. But I certainly should never have thought of making love to you if you hadn’t made it perfectly clear that you were ready to be made love to.”

Oh, the shame of it! She knew that what he said was true. His face now was sullen and worried and his hands moved uneasily. Every now and then he gave her a little glance of exasperation.

“Won’t your husband forgive you?” he said after a while.

“I never asked him.”

Instinctively he clenched his hands. She saw him suppress the exclamation of annoyance which came to his lips.

“Why don’t you go to him and throw yourself on his mercy? If he’s as much in love with you as you say he’s bound to forgive you.”

“How little you know him!”

XXVI

She wiped her eyes. She tried to pull herself together.

“Charlie, if you desert me I shall die.”

She was driven now to appeal to his compassion. She ought to have told him at once. When he knew the horrible alternative that was placed before her his generosity, his sense of justice, his manliness, would be so vehemently aroused that he would think of nothing but her danger. Oh, how passionately she desired to feel his dear, protecting arms around her!

“Walter wants me to go to Mei-tan-fu.”

“Oh, but that’s the place where the cholera is. They’ve got the worst epidemic that they’ve had for fifty years. It’s no place for a woman. You can’t possibly go there.”

“If you let me down I shall have to.”

“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

“Walter is taking the place of the missionary doctor who died. He wants me to go with him.”

“When?”

“Now. At once.”

Townsend pushed back his chair and looked at her with puzzled eyes.

“I may be very stupid, but I can’t make head or tail out of what you’re saying. If he wants you to go to this place with him, what about a divorce?”

“He’s given me my choice. I must either go to Mei-tan-fu or else he’ll bring an action.”

“Oh, I see.” Townsend’s tone changed ever so slightly. “I think that’s rather decent of him, don’t you?”

“Decent?”

“Well, it’s a damned sporting thing of him to go there. It’s not a thing I’d fancy. Of course he’ll get a C.M.G. for it when he comes back.”

“But me, Charlie?” she cried, with anguish in her voice.

“Well, I think if he wants you to go, under the circumstances I don’t see how you can very well refuse.”

“It means death. Absolutely certain death.”

“Oh, damn it all, that’s rather an exaggeration. He would hardly take you if he thought that. It’s no more risk for you than for him. In point of fact there’s no great risk if you’re careful. I’ve been here when there’s been cholera and I haven’t turned a hair. The great thing is not to eat anything uncooked, no raw fruit or salads, or anything like that, and see that your drinking water is boiled.” He was gaining confidence as he proceeded, and his speech was fluent; he was even becoming less sullen and more alert; he was almost breezy. “After all, it’s his job, isn’t it? He’s interested in bugs. It’s rather a chance for him if you come to think of it.”

“But me, Charlie?” she repeated, not with anguish now, but with consternation.

“Well, the best way to understand a man is to put yourself in his shoes. From his point of view you’ve been rather a naughty little thing and he wants to get you out of harm’s way. I always thought he never wanted to divorce you, he doesn’t strike me as that sort of chap; but he made what he thought was a very generous offer and you put his back up by turning it down. I don’t want to blame you, but really for all our sakes I think you ought to have given it a little consideration.”

“But don’t you see it’ll kill me? Don’t you know that he’s taking me there because he knows it’ll kill me.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t talk like that. We’re in a damned awkward position and really it’s no time to be melodramatic.”

“You’ve made up your mind not to understand.” Oh, the pain in her heart, and the fear! She could have screamed. “You can’t send me to certain death. If you have no love or pity for me you must have just ordinary human feeling.”

“I think it’s rather hard on me to put it like that. As far as I can make out your husband is behaving very generously. He’s willing to forgive you if you’ll let him. He wants to get you away and this opportunity has presented itself to take you to some place where for a few months you’ll be out of harm’s way. I don’t pretend that Mei-tan-fu is a health resort, I never knew a Chinese city that was, but there’s no reason to get the wind up about it. In fact that’s the worst thing you can do. I believe as many people die from sheer fright in an epidemic as because they get infected.”

“But I’m frightened now. When Walter spoke of it I almost fainted.”

“At the first moment I can quite believe it was a shock, but when you come to look at it calmly you’ll be all right. It’ll be the sort of experience that not every one has had.”

“I thought, I thought...”

She rocked to and fro in an agony. He did not speak, and once more his face wore that sullen look which till lately she had never known. Kitty was not crying now. She was dry-eyed, calm, and though her voice was low it was steady.

“Do you want me to go?”

“It’s Hobson’s choice, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“It’s only fair to you to tell you that if your husband brought an action for divorce and won it I should not be in a position to marry you.”

It must have seemed an age to him before she answered. She rose slowly to her feet.

“I don’t think that my husband ever thought of bringing an action.”

“Then why in God’s name have you been frightening me out of my wits?” he asked.

She looked at him coolly.

“He knew that you’d let me down.”

She was silent. Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden a suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter’s mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

“He made that threat only because he knew that you’d crumple up at it, Charlie. It’s strange that he should have judged you so accurately. It was just like him to expose me to such a cruel disillusion.”

Charlie looked down at the sheet of blotting paper in front of him. He was frowning a little and his mouth was sulky. But he did not reply.

“He knew that you were vain, cowardly and self-seeking. He wanted me to see it with my own eyes. He knew that you’d run like a hare at the approach of danger. He knew how grossly deceived I was in thinking that you were in love with me, because he knew that you were incapable of loving anyone but yourself. He knew you’d sacrifice me without a pang to save your own skin.”

“If it really gives you any satisfaction to say beastly things to me I suppose I’ve got no right to complain. Women always are unfair and they generally manage to put a man in the wrong. But there is something to be said on the other side.”

She took no notice of his interruption.

“And now I know all that he knew. I know that you’re callous and heartless. I know that you’re selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven’t the nerve of a rabbit, I know you’re a liar and a humbug, I know that you’re utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is” — her face was on a sudden distraught with pain— “the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.”

“Kitty.”

She gave a bitter laugh. He had spoken her name in that melting, rich tone of his which came to him so naturally and meant so little.

“You fool,” she said.

He drew back quickly, flushing and offended; he could not make her out. She gave him a look in which there was a glint of amusement.

“You’re beginning to dislike me, aren’t you? Well, dislike me. It doesn’t make any difference to me now.”

She began to put on her gloves.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t be afraid, you’ll come to no harm. You’ll be quite safe.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk like that, Kitty,” he answered and his deep voice rang with anxiety. “You must know that everything that concerns you concerns me. I shall be frightfully anxious to know what happens. What are you going to say to your husband?”

“I’m going to tell him that I’m prepared to go to Mei-tan-fu with him.”

“Perhaps when you consent he won’t insist.”

He could not have known why, when he said this, she looked at him so strangely.

“You’re not really frightened?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “You’ve inspired me with courage. To go into the midst of a cholera epidemic will be a unique experience and if I die of it — well, I die.”

“I was trying to be as kind to you as I could.”

She looked at him again. Tears sprang into her eyes once more and her heart was very full. The impulse was almost irresistible to fling herself on his breast and crush her lips against his. It was no use.

“If you want to know,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “I go with death in my heart and fear. I do not know what Walter has in that dark, twisted mind of his, but I’m shaking with terror. I think it may be that death will be really a release.”

She felt that she could not hold on to her self-control for another moment. She walked swiftly to the door and let herself out before he had time to move from his chair. Townsend gave a long sigh of relief. He badly wanted a brandy and soda.

XXVII

Walter was in when she got home. She would have liked to go straight to her room, but he was downstairs, in the hall, giving instructions to one of the boys. She was so wretched that she welcomed the humiliation to which she must expose herself. She stopped and faced him.

“I’m coming with you to that place,” she said.

“Oh, good.”

“When do you want me to be ready?”

“To-morrow night.”

She did not know what spirit of bravado entered into her. His indifference was like the prick of a spear. She said a thing that surprised herself.

“I suppose I needn’t take more than a few summer things and a shroud, need I?”

She was watching his face and knew that her flippancy angered him.

“I’ve already told your amah what you’ll want.”

She nodded and went up to her room. She was very pale.

XXVIII

They were reaching their destination at last. They were borne in chairs, day after day, along a narrow causeway between interminable rice fields. They set out at dawn and travelled till the heat of the day forced them to take shelter in a wayside inn and then went on again till they reached the town where they had arranged to spend the night. Kitty’s chair headed the procession and Walter followed her; then in a straggling line came the coolies that bore their bedding, stores and equipment. Kitty passed through the country with unseeing eyes. All through the long hours, the silence broken only by an occasional remark from one of the bearers or a snatch of uncouth song, she turned over in her tortured mind the details of that heart-rending scene in Charlie’s office. Recalling what he had said to her and what she had said to him, she was dismayed to see what an arid and business-like turn their conversation had taken. She had not said what she wanted to say and she had not spoken in the tone she intended. Had she been able to make him see her boundless love, the passion in her heart, and her helplessness, he could never have been so inhuman as to leave her to her fate. She had been taken unawares. She could hardly believe her ears when he told her, more clearly than with words, that he cared nothing for her. That was why she had not even cried very much, she had been so dazed. She had wept since, wept miserably.

At night in the inns, sharing the principal guest chamber with her husband and conscious that Walter, lying on his camp bed, a few feet away from her, lay awake, she dug her teeth in the pillow so that no sound might escape her. But in the daytime, protected by the curtains of her chair, she allowed herself to give way. Her pain was so great that she could have screamed at the top of her voice; she had never known that one could suffer so much; and she asked herself desperately what she had done to deserve it. She could not make out why Charlie did not love her: it was her fault, she supposed, but she had done everything she knew to make him fond of her. They had always got on so well, they laughed all the time they were together, they were not only lovers but good friends. She could not understand; she was broken. She told herself that she hated and despised him; but she had no idea how she was going to live if she was never to see him again. If Walter was taking her to Mei-tan-fu as a punishment he was making a fool of himself, for what did she care now what became of her? She had nothing to live for any more. It was rather hard to be finished with life at twenty-seven.

XXIX

On the steamer that took them up the Western River Walter read incessantly, but at meal-times he endeavoured to make some kind of conversation. He talked to her as though she were a stranger with whom he happened to be making the journey, of indifferent things, from politeness, Kitty imagined, or because so he could render more marked the gulf that separated them.

In a flash of insight she had told Charlie that Walter had sent her to him with the threat of divorce as the alternative to her accompanying him to the stricken city in order that she might see for herself how indifferent, cowardly and selfish he was. It was true. It was a trick which accorded very well with his sardonic humour. He knew exactly what would happen and he had given her amah necessary instructions before her return. She had caught in his eyes a disdain which seemed to include her lover as well as herself. He said to himself, perhaps, that if he had been in Townsend’s place nothing in the world would have hindered him from making any sacrifice to gratify her smallest whim. She knew that was true also. But then, when her eyes were opened, how could he make her do something which was so dangerous, and which he must know frightened her so terribly? At first she thought he was only playing with her and till they actually started, no, later, till they left the river and took to the chairs for the journey across country, she thought he would give that little laugh of his and tell her that she need not come. She had no inkling what was in his mind. He could not really desire her death. He had loved her so desperately. She knew what love was now and she remembered a thousand signs of his adoration. For him really, in the French phrase, she did make fine weather and foul. It was impossible that he did not love her still. Did you cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly? She had not made him suffer as Charlie had made her suffer and yet, if Charlie made a sign, notwithstanding everything, even though she knew him now, she would abandon all the world had to offer and fly to his arms. Even though he had sacrificed her and cared nothing for her, even though he was callous and unkind, she loved him.

At first she thought that she had only to bide her time, and sooner or later Walter would forgive her. She had been too confident of her power over him to believe that it was gone for ever. Many waters could not quench love. He was weak if he loved her, and she felt that love her he must. But now she was not quite sure. When in the evening he sat reading in the straight-backed blackwood chair of the inn with the light of a hurricane lamp on his face she was able to watch him at her ease. She lay on the pallet on which her bed presently would be set and she was in shadow. Those straight, regular features of his made his face look very severe. You could hardly believe that it was possible for them on occasion to be changed by so sweet a smile. He was able to read as calmly as though she were a thousand miles away; she saw him turn the pages and she saw his eyes move regularly as they travelled from line to line. He was not thinking of her. And when, the table being set and dinner brought in, he put aside his book and gave her a glance (not knowing how the light on his face threw into distinctness his expression), she was startled to see in his eyes a look of physical distaste. Yes, it startled her. Was it possible that his love had left him entirely? Was it possible that he really designed her death? It was absurd. That would be the act of a madman. It was odd, the little shiver that ran through her as the thought occurred to her that perhaps Walter was not quite sane.

XXX

Suddenly her bearers, long silent, began to speak and one of them, turning round, with words she could not understand and with a gesture, sought to attract her attention. She looked in the direction he pointed and there, on the top of a hill, saw an archway; she knew by now that it was a memorial in compliment of a fortunate scholar or a virtuous widow, she had passed many of them since they left the river; but this one, silhouetted against the westering sun, was more fantastic and beautiful than any she had seen. Yet, she knew not why, it made her uneasy; it had a significance which she felt but could not put into words: Was it a menace that she vaguely discerned or was it derision? She was passing a grove of bamboos and they leaned over the causeway strangely as if they would detain her; though the summer evening was windless their narrow green leaves shivered a little. It gave her the sensation that someone hidden among them was watching her as she passed. Now they came to the foot of the hill and the rice fields ceased. The bearers took it with a swinging stride. The hill was covered close with little green mounds, close, close to one another, so that the ground was ribbed like the sea-sand when the tide has gone out; and this she knew too, for she had passed just such a spot as they approached each populous city and left it. It was the graveyard. Now she knew why the bearers had called her attention to the archway that stood on the crest of the hill: they had reached the end of their journey.

They passed through the archway and the chair-bearers paused to change the pole from shoulder to shoulder. One of them wiped his sweating face with a dirty rag. The causeway wound down. There were bedraggled houses on each side. Now the night was falling. But the bearers on a sudden broke into excited talk and with a jump that shook her ranged themselves as near as they could to the wall. In a moment she knew what had startled them, for as they stood there, chattering to one another, four peasants passed, quick and silent, bearing a new coffin, unpainted, and its fresh wood gleamed white in the approaching darkness. Kitty felt her heart beat in terror against her ribs. The coffin passed, but the bearers stood still; it seemed as though they could not summon up the will to go on. But there was a shout from behind and they started. They did not speak now.

They walked for a few minutes longer and then turned sharply into an open gateway. The chair was set down. She had arrived.

XXXI

It was a bungalow and she entered the sitting-room. She sat down while the coolies, straggling in one by one, brought in their loads. Walter in the courtyard gave directions where this or that was to be placed. She was very tired. She was startled to hear an unknown voice.

“May I come in?”

She flushed and grew pale. She was overwrought and it made her nervous to meet a stranger. A man came out of the darkness, for the long low room was lit only by a shaded lamp, and held out his hand.

“My name is Waddington. I am the Deputy Commissioner.”

“Oh, the Customs. I know. I heard that you were here.”

In that dim light she could see only that he was a little thin man, no taller than she, with a bald head and a small, bare face.

“I live just at the bottom of the hill, but coming in this way you wouldn’t have seen my house. I thought you’d be too fagged to come and dine with me, so I’ve ordered your dinner here and I’ve invited myself.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

“You’ll find the cook’s not bad. I kept on Watson’s boys for you.”

“Watson was the missionary who was here?”

“Yes. Very nice fellow. I’ll show you his grave to-morrow if you like.”

“How kind you are,” said Kitty, with a smile.

At that moment Walter came in. Waddington had introduced himself to him before coming in to see Kitty and now he said:

“I’ve just been breaking it to your missus that I’m dining with you. Since Watson died I haven’t had anybody much to talk to but the nuns, and I can never do myself justice in French. Besides, there is only a limited number of subjects you can talk to them about.”

“I’ve just told the boy to bring in some drinks,” said Walter.

The servant brought whisky and soda and Kitty noticed that Waddington helped himself generously. His manner of speaking and his easy chuckle had suggested to her when he came in that he was not quite sober.

“Here’s luck,” he said. Then, turning to Walter: “You’ve got your work cut out for you here. They’re dying like flies. The magistrate’s lost his head and Colonel Yü, the officer commanding the troops, is having a devil of a job to prevent them from looting. If something doesn’t happen soon we shall all be murdered in our beds. I tried to get the nuns to go, but of course they wouldn’t. They all want to be martyrs, damn them.”

He spoke lightly and there was in his voice a sort of ghostly laughter so that you could not listen to him without smiling.

“Why haven’t you gone?” asked Walter.

“Well, I’ve lost half my staff and the others are ready to lie down and die at any minute. Somebody’s got to stay and keep things together.”

“Have you been inoculated?”

“Yes. Watson did me. But he did himself too, and it didn’t do him much good, poor blighter.” He turned to Kitty and his funny little face was gaily puckered. “I don’t think there’s any great risk if you take proper precautions. Have your milk and water boiled and don’t eat fresh fruit or uncooked vegetables. Have you brought any gramophone records with you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Kitty.

“I’m sorry for that. I was hoping you would. I haven’t had any for a long time and I’m sick of my old ones.”

The boy came in to ask if they would have dinner.

“You won’t dress to-night, will you?” asked Waddington. “My boy died last week and the boy I have now is a fool, so I haven’t been dressing in the evening.”

“I’ll go and take off my hat,” said Kitty.

Her room was next door to that in which they sat. It was barely furnished. An amah was kneeling on the floor, the lamp beside her, unpacking Kitty’s things.

XXXII

The dining-room was small and the greater part of it was filled by an immense table. On the walls were engravings of scenes from the Bible and illuminated texts.

“Missionaries always have large dining-tables,” Waddington explained. “They get so much a year more for every child they have and they buy their tables when they marry so that there shall be plenty of room for little strangers.”

From the ceiling hung a large paraffin lamp, so that Kitty was able to see better what sort of a man Waddington was. His baldness had deceived her into thinking him no longer young, but she saw now that he must be well under forty. His face, small under a high, rounded forehead, was unlined and fresh-coloured; it was ugly like a monkey’s, but with an ugliness that was not without charm; it was an amusing face. His features, his nose and his mouth, were hardly larger than a child’s, and he had small, very bright blue eyes. His eyebrows were fair and scanty. He looked like a funny little old boy. He helped himself constantly to liquor and as dinner proceeded it became evident that he was far from sober. But if he was drunk it was without offensiveness, gaily, as a satyr might be who had stolen a wine-skin from a sleeping shepherd.

He talked of Tching-Yen; he had many friends there and he wanted to know about them. He had been down for the races a year before and he talked of ponies and their owners.

“By the way, what about Townsend?” he asked suddenly. “Is he going to become Colonial Secretary?”

Kitty felt herself flush, but her husband did not look at her.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” he answered.

“He’s the sort that gets on.”

“Do you know him?” asked Walter.

“Yes, I know him pretty well. We travelled out from home together once.”

From the other side of the river they heard the beating of gongs and the clatter of fire-crackers. There, so short a way from them, the great city lay in terror; and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets. But Waddington began to speak of London. He talked of the theatres. He knew everything that was being played at the moment and he told them what pieces he had seen when he was last home on leave. He laughed as he recollected the humour of this low comedian and sighed as he reflected on the beauty of that star of musical comedy. He was pleased to be able to boast that a cousin of his had married one of the most celebrated. He had lunched with her and she had given him her photograph. He would show it to them when they came and dined with him at the Customs.

Walter looked at his guest with a cold and ironic gaze, but he was evidently not a little amused by him, and he made an effort to show a civil interest in topics of which Kitty was well aware he knew nothing. A faint smile lingered on his lips. But Kitty, she knew not why, was filled with awe. In the house of that dead missionary, over against the stricken city, they seemed immeasurably apart from all the world. Three solitary creatures and strangers to each other.

Dinner was finished and she rose from the table.

“Do you mind if I say good-night to you? I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll take myself off, I expect the doctor wants to go to bed, too,” answered Waddington. “We must be out early to-morrow.”

He shook hands with Kitty. He was quite steady on his feet, but his eyes were shining more than ever.

“I’ll come and fetch you,” he told Walter, “and take you to see the Magistrate and Colonel Yü, and then we’ll go along to the Convent. You’ve got your work cut out, I can tell you.”

XXXIII

Her night was tortured with strange dreams. She seemed to be carried in her chair and she felt the swaying motion as the bearers marched with their long, uneven stride. She entered cities, vast and dim, where the multitude thronged about her with curious eyes. The streets were narrow and tortuous and in the open shops, with their strange wares, all traffic stopped as she went by and those who bought and those who sold, paused. Then she came to the memorial arch and its fantastic outline seemed on a sudden to gain a monstrous life; its capricious contours were like the waving arms of a Hindu god, and, as she passed under it, she heard the echo of mocking laughter. But then Charlie Townsend came towards her and took her in his arms lifting her out of the chair, and said it was all a mistake, he had never meant to treat her as he had, for he loved her and he couldn’t live without her. She felt his kisses on her mouth and she wept with joy, asking him why he had been so cruel, but though she asked she knew it did not matter. And then there was a hoarse, abrupt cry and they were separated and between, hurrying silently, coolies passed in their ragged blue and they bore a coffin.

She awoke with a start.

The bungalow stood half way down a steep hill and from her window she saw the narrow river below her and opposite, the city. The dawn had just broken and from the river rose a white mist shrouding the junks that lay moored close to one another like peas in a pod. There were hundreds of them, and they were silent, mysterious in that ghostly light, and you had a feeling that their crews lay under an enchantment, for it seemed that it was not sleep, but something strange and terrible, that held them so still and mute.

The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star. Though on the river it was light so that you could discern palely the lines of the crowded junks and the thick forest of their masts, in front it was a shining wall the eye could not pierce. But suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of coloured wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic and unsubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.

The tears ran down Kitty’s face and she gazed, her hands clasped to her breast and her mouth, for she was breathless, open a little. She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty. She took it as the believer takes in his mouth the wafer which is God.

XXXIV

Since Walter went out early in the morning, came back at tiffin only for half an hour, and did not then return till dinner was just ready, Kitty found herself much alone. For some days she did not stir from the bungalow. It was very hot and for the most part she lay in a long chair by the open window, trying to read. The hard light of midday had robbed the magic palace of its mystery and now it was no more than a temple on the city wall, garish and shabby, but because she had seen it once in such an ecstasy it was never again quite commonplace; and often at dawn or at dusk, and again at night, she found herself able to recapture something of that beauty. What had seemed to her a mighty bastion was but the city wall and on this, massive and dark, her eyes rested continually. Behind its crenellations lay the city in the dread grip of the pestilence.

Vaguely she knew that terrible things were happening there, not from Walter who when she questioned him (for otherwise he rarely spoke to her) answered with a humorous nonchalance which sent a shiver down her spine; but from Waddington and from the amah. The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and hardly any of those who were attacked by the disease recovered from it; the gods had been brought out from the abandoned temples and placed in the streets; offerings were laid before them and sacrifices made, but they did not stay the plague. The people died so fast that it was hardly possible to bury them. In some houses the whole family had been swept away and there was none to perform the funeral rights. The officer commanding the troops was a masterful man and if the city was not given over to riot and arson it was due to his determination. He forced his soldiers to bury such as there was no one else to bury and he had shot with his own hand an officer who demurred at entering a stricken house.

Kitty sometimes was so frightened that her heart sank within her and she would tremble in every limb. It was all very well to say that the risk was small if you took reasonable precautions: she was panic-stricken. She turned over in her mind crazy plans of escape. To get away, just to get away, she was prepared to set out as she was and make her way alone, without anything but what she stood up in, to some place of safety. She thought of throwing herself on the mercy of Waddington, telling him everything and beseeching him to help her to get back to Tching-Yen. If she flung herself on her knees before her husband, and admitted that she was frightened, frightened, even though he hated her now he must have enough human feeling in him to pity her.

It was out of the question. If she went, where could she go? Not to her mother; her mother would make her see very plainly that, having married her off, she counted on being rid of her; and besides she did not want to go to her mother. She wanted to go to Charlie, and he did not want her. She knew what he would say if she suddenly appeared before him. She saw the sullen look of his face and the shrewd hardness behind his charming eyes. It would be difficult for him to find words that sounded well. She clenched her hands. She would have given anything to humiliate him as he had humiliated her. Sometimes she was seized with such a frenzy that she wished she had let Walter divorce her, ruining herself if only she could have ruined him too. Certain things he had said to her made her blush with shame when she recalled them.

XXXV

The first time she was alone with Waddington she brought the conversation round to Charlie. Waddington had spoken of him on the evening of their arrival. She pretended that he was no more than an acquaintance of her husband.

“I never much cared for him,” said Waddington. “I’ve always thought him a bore.”

“You must be very hard to please,” returned Kitty, in the bright, chaffing way she could assume so easily. “I suppose he’s far and away the most popular man in Tching-Yen.”

“I know. That is his stock in trade. He’s made a science of popularity. He has the gift of making every one he meets feel that he is the one person in the world he wants to see. He’s always ready to do a service that isn’t any trouble to himself, and even if he doesn’t do what you want he manages to give you the impression that it’s only because it’s not humanly possible.”

“That is surely an attractive trait.”

“Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome, I think. It’s a relief then to deal with a man who isn’t quite so delightful but a little more sincere. I’ve known Charlie Townsend for a good many years and once or twice I’ve caught him with the mask off — you see, I never mattered, just a subordinate official in the Customs — and I know that he doesn’t in his heart give a damn for any one in the world but himself.”

Kitty, lounging easily in her chair, looked at him with smiling eyes. She turned her wedding-ring round and round her finger.

“Of course he’ll get on. He knows all the official ropes. Before I die I have every belief that I shall address him as Your Excellency and stand up when he enters the room.”

“Most people think he deserves to get on. He’s generally supposed to have a great deal of ability.”

“Ability? What nonsense! He’s a very stupid man. He gives you the impression that he dashes off his work and gets it through from sheer brilliancy. Nothing of the kind. He’s as industrious as a Eurasian clerk.”

“How has he got the reputation of being so clever?”

“There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he’ll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever. And then of course, there’s his wife. There’s an able woman if you like. She has a good sound head and her advice is always worth taking. As long as Charlie Townsend’s got her to depend on he’s pretty safe never to do a foolish thing, and that’s the first thing necessary for a man to get on in Government service. They don’t want clever men; clever men have ideas, and ideas cause trouble; they want men who have charm and tact and who can be counted on never to make a blunder. Oh, yes, Charlie Townsend will get to the top of the tree all right.”

“I wonder why you dislike him?”

“I don’t dislike him.”

“But you like his wife better?” smiled Kitty.

“I’m an old-fashioned little man and I like a well-bred woman.”

“I wish she were well-dressed as well as well-bred.”

“Doesn’t she dress well? I never noticed.”

“I’ve always heard that they were a devoted couple,” said Kitty, watching him through her eyelashes.

“He’s very fond of her: I will give him that credit. I think that is the most decent thing about him.”

“Cold praise.”

“He has his little flirtations, but they’re not serious. He’s much too cunning to let them go to such lengths as might cause him inconvenience. And of course he isn’t a passionate man; he’s only a vain one. He likes admiration. He’s fat and forty now, he does himself too well, but he was very good-looking when he first came to the Colony. I’ve often heard his wife chaff him about his conquests.”

“She doesn’t take his flirtations very seriously?”

“Oh, no, she knows they don’t go very far. She says she’d like to be able to make friends of the poor little things who fall to Charlie; but they’re always so common. She says it’s really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.”

XXXVI

When Waddington left her Kitty thought over what he had so carelessly said. It hadn’t been very pleasant to hear and she had had to make something of an effort not to show how much it touched her. It was bitter to think that all he said was true. She knew that Charlie was stupid and vain, hungry for flattery, and she remembered the complacency with which he had told her little stories to prove his cleverness. He was proud of a low cunning. How worthless must she be if she had given her heart so passionately to such a man because — because he had nice eyes and a good figure! She wished to despise him, because so long as she only hated him she knew that she was very near loving him. The way he had treated her should have opened her eyes. Walter had always held him in contempt. Oh, if she could only get him out of her mind altogether! And had his wife chaffed him about her obvious infatuation for him? Dorothy would have liked to make a friend of her, but that she found her second-rate. Kitty smiled a little: how indignant her mother would be to know that her daughter was considered that!

But at night she dreamt of him again. She felt his arms pressing her close and the hot passion of his kisses on her lips. What did it matter if he was fat and forty? She laughed with soft affection because he minded so much; she loved him all the more for his childlike vanity and she could be sorry for him and comfort him. When she awoke tears were streaming from her eyes.

She did not know why it seemed to her so tragic to cry in her sleep.

XXXVII

She saw Waddington every day, for he strolled up the hill to the Fanes’ bungalow when his day’s work was done; and so after a week they had arrived at an intimacy which under other circumstances they could scarcely have achieved in a year. Once when Kitty told him she didn’t know what she would do there without him he answered, laughing:

“You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground. The nuns walk in heaven and your husband — in darkness.”

Though she gave a careless laugh she wondered what he meant. She felt that his merry little blue eyes were scanning her face with an amiable, but disconcerting attention. She had discovered already that he was shrewd and she had a feeling that the relations between herself and Walter excited his cynical curiosity. She found a certain amusement in baffling him. She liked him and she knew that he was kindly disposed towards her. He was not witty nor brilliant, but he had a dry and incisive way of putting things which was diverting, and his funny, boyish face under that bald skull, all screwed up with laughter, made his remarks sometimes extremely droll. He had lived for many years in outports, often with no man of his own colour to talk to, and his personality had developed in eccentric freedom. He was full of fads and oddities. His frankness was refreshing. He seemed to look upon life in a spirit of banter, and his ridicule of the Colony at Tching-Yen was acid; but he laughed also at the Chinese officials in Mei-tan-fu and at the cholera which decimated the city. He could not tell a tragic story or one of heroism without making it faintly absurd. He had many anecdotes of his adventures during twenty years in China, and you concluded from them that the earth was a very grotesque, bizarre and ludicrous place.

Though he denied that he was a Chinese scholar (he swore that the Sinologues were as mad as march hares) he spoke the language with ease. He read little and what he knew he had learned from conversation. But he often told Kitty stories from the Chinese novels and from Chinese history and though he told them with that airy badinage which was natural to him it was good-humoured and even tender. It seemed to her that, perhaps unconsciously, he had adopted the Chinese view that the Europeans were barbarians and their life a folly: in China alone was it so led that a sensible man might discern in it a sort of reality. Here was food for reflection: Kitty had never heard the Chinese spoken of as anything but decadent, dirty and unspeakable. It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a colour and significance she had not dreamt of.

He sat there, talking, laughing and drinking.

“Don’t you think you drink too much,” said Kitty to him boldly.

“It’s my great pleasure in life,” he answered. “Besides, it keeps the cholera out.”

When he left her he was generally drunk, but he carried his liquor well. It made him hilarious, but not disagreeable.

One evening Walter, coming back earlier than usual, asked him to stay to dinner. A curious incident happened. They had their soup and their fish and then with the chicken a fresh green salad was handed to Kitty by the boy.

“Good God, you’re not going to eat that,” cried Waddington, as he saw Kitty take some.

“Yes, we have it every night.”

“My wife likes it,” said Walter.

The dish was handed to Waddington, but he shook his head.

“Thank you very much, but I’m not thinking of committing suicide just yet.”

Walter smiled grimly and helped himself. Waddington said nothing more, in fact he became strangely taciturn, and soon after dinner he left them.

It was true that they ate salad every night. Two days after their arrival the cook, with the unconcern of the Chinese, had sent it in and Kitty, without thinking, took some. Walter leaned forward quickly.

“You oughtn’t to eat that. The boy’s crazy to serve it.”

“Why not?” asked Kitty, looking at him full in the face.

“It’s always dangerous, it’s madness now. You’ll kill yourself.”

“I thought that was the idea,” said Kitty.

She began to eat it coolly. She was seized with she knew not what spirit of bravado. She watched Walter with mocking eyes. She thought that he grew a trifle pale, but when the salad was handed to him he helped himself. The cook, finding they did not refuse it, sent them some in every day and every day, courting death, they ate it. It was grotesque to take such a risk. Kitty, in terror of the disease, took it with the feeling not only that she was thus maliciously avenging herself on Walter, but that she was flouting her own desperate fears.

XXXVIII

It was the day after this that Waddington, coming to the bungalow in the afternoon, when he had sat a little asked Kitty if she would not go for a stroll with him. She had not been out of the compound since her arrival. She was glad enough.

“There are not many walks, I’m afraid,” he said. “But we’ll go to the top of the hill.”

“Oh, yes, where the archway is. I’ve seen it often from the terrace.”

One of the boys opened the heavy doorway for them and they stepped out into the dusty lane. They walked a few yards and then Kitty seizing Waddington’s arm in fright, gave a startled cry.

“Look!”

“What’s the matter?”

At the foot of the wall that surrounded the compound a man lay on his back with his legs stretched out and his arms thrown over his head. He wore the patched blue rags and the wild mop of hair of the Chinese beggar.

“He looks as if he were dead,” Kitty gasped.

“He is dead. Come along; you’d better look the other way. I’ll have him moved when we come back.”

But Kitty was trembling so violently that she could not stir.

“I’ve never seen anyone dead before.”

“You’d better hurry up and get used to it then, because you’ll see a good many before you’ve done with this cheerful spot.”

He took her hand and drew it in his arm. They walked for a little in silence.

“Did he die of cholera?” she said at last.

“I suppose so.”

They walked up the hill till they came to the archway. It was richly carved. Fantastic and ironical it stood like a landmark in the surrounding country. They sat down on the pedestal and faced the wide plain. The hill was sown close with the little green mounds of the dead, not in lines but disorderly, so that you felt that beneath the surface they must strangely jostle one another. The narrow causeway meandered sinuously among the green rice fields. A small boy seated on the neck of a water-buffalo drove it slowly home, and three peasants in wide straw hats lolloped with sidelong gait under their heavy loads. After the heat of the day it was pleasant in that spot to catch the faint breeze of the evening and the wide expanse of country brought a sense of restful melancholy to the tortured heart. But Kitty could not rid her mind of the dead beggar.

“How can you talk and laugh and drink whisky when people are dying all around you?” she asked suddenly.

Waddington did not answer. He turned round and looked at her, then he put his hand on her arm.

“You know, this is no place for a woman,” he said gravely. “Why don’t you go?”

She gave him a sidelong glance from beneath her long lashes and there was the shadow of a smile on her lips.

“I should have thought under the circumstances a wife’s place was by her husband’s side.”

“When they telegraphed to me that you were coming with Fane I was astonished. But then it occurred to me that perhaps you’d been a nurse and all this sort of thing was in the day’s work. I expected you to be one of those grim-visaged females who lead you a dog’s life when you’re ill in hospital. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I came into the bungalow and saw you sitting down and resting. You looked very frail and white and tired.”

“You couldn’t expect me to look my best after nine days on the road.”

“You look frail and white and tired now, and if you’ll allow me to say so, desperately unhappy.”

Kitty flushed because she could not help it, but she was able to give a laugh that sounded merry enough.

“I’m sorry you don’t like my expression. The only reason I have for looking unhappy is that since I was twelve I’ve known that my nose was a little too long. But to cherish a secret sorrow is a most effective pose: you can’t think how many sweet young men have wanted to console me.”

Waddington’s blue and shining eyes rested on her and she knew that he did not believe a word she said. She did not care so long as he pretended to.

“I knew that you hadn’t been married very long and I came to the conclusion that you and your husband were madly in love with each other. I couldn’t believe that he had wished you to come, but perhaps you had absolutely refused to stay behind.”

“That’s a very reasonable explanation,” she said lightly.

“Yes, but it isn’t the right one.”

She waited for him to go on, fearful of what he was about to say, for she had a pretty good idea of his shrewdness and was aware that he never hesitated to speak his mind, but unable to resist the desire to hear him talk about herself.

“I don’t think for a moment that you’re in love with your husband. I think you dislike him, I shouldn’t be surprised if you hated him. But I’m quite sure you’re afraid of him.”

For a moment she looked away. She did not mean to let Waddington see that anything he said affected her.

“I have a suspicion that you don’t very much like my husband,” she said with cool irony.

“I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination. I don’t suppose you know what he is doing here, because I don’t think he’s very expansive with you. If any man single-handed can put a stop to this frightful epidemic he’s going to do it. He’s doctoring the sick, cleaning the city up, trying to get the drinking water pure. He doesn’t mind where he goes nor what he does. He’s risking his life twenty times a day. He’s got Colonel Yü in his pocket and he’s induced him to put the troops at his disposal. He’s even put a little pluck into the magistrate and the old man is really trying to do something. And the nuns at the convent swear by him. They think he’s a hero.”

“Don’t you?”

“After all this isn’t his job, is it? He’s a bacteriologist. There was no call for him to come here. He doesn’t give me the impression that he’s moved by compassion for all these dying Chinamen. Watson was different. He loved the human race. Though he was a missionary it didn’t make any difference to him if they were Christian, Buddhist or Confucian; they were just human beings. Your husband isn’t here because he cares a damn if a hundred thousand Chinese die of cholera; he isn’t here either in the interests of science. Why is he here?”

“You’d better ask him.”

“It interests me to see you together. I sometimes wonder how you behave when you’re alone. When I’m there you’re acting, both of you, and acting damned badly, by George. You’d neither of you get thirty bob a week in a touring company if that’s the best you can do.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” smiled Kitty, keeping up a pretence of frivolity which she knew did not deceive.

“You’re a very pretty woman. It’s funny that your husband should never look at you. When he speaks to you it sounds as though it were not his voice but somebody’s else’s.”

“Do you think he doesn’t love me?” asked Kitty in a low voice, hoarsely, putting aside suddenly her lightness.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if you fill him with such a repulsion that it gives him goose-flesh to be near you or if he’s burning with a love that for some reason he will not allow himself to show. I’ve asked myself if you’re both here to commit suicide.”

Kitty had seen the startled glance and then the scrutinising look Waddington gave them when the incident of the salad took place.

“I think you’re attaching too much importance to a few lettuce leaves,” she said flippantly. She rose. “Shall we go home? I’m sure you want a whisky and soda.”

“You’re not a heroine at all events. You’re frightened to death. Are you sure you don’t want to go away?”

“What has it got to do with you?”

“I’ll help you.”

“Are you going to fall to my look of secret sorrow? Look at my profile and tell me if my nose isn’t a trifle too long.”

He gazed at her reflectively, that malicious, ironical look in his bright eyes, but mingled with it, a shadow, like a tree standing at a river’s edge and its reflection in the water, was an expression of singular kindliness. It brought sudden tears to Kitty’s eyes.

“Must you stay?”

“Yes.”

They passed under the flamboyant archway and walked down the hill. When they came to the compound they saw the body of the dead beggar. He took her arm, but she released herself. She stood still.

“It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

“What? Death.”

“Yes. It makes everything else seem so horribly trivial. He doesn’t look human. When you look at him you can hardly persuade yourself that he’s ever been alive. It’s hard to think that not so very many years ago he was just a little boy tearing down the hill and flying a kite.”

She could not hold back the sob that choked her.

XXXIX

A few days later Waddington, sitting with Kitty, a long glass of whisky and soda in his hand, began to speak to her of the convent.

“The Mother Superior is a very remarkable woman,” he said. “The Sisters tell me that she belongs to one of the greatest families in France, but they won’t tell me which; the Mother Superior, they say, doesn’t wish it to be talked of.”

“Why don’t you ask her if it interests you?” smiled Kitty.

“If you knew her you’d know it was impossible to ask her an indiscreet question.”

“She must certainly be very remarkable if she can impress you with awe.”

“I am the bearer of a message from her to you. She has asked me to say that, though of course you may not wish to adventure into the very centre of the epidemic, if you do not mind that it will give her great pleasure to show you the convent.”

“It’s very kind of her. I shouldn’t have thought she was aware of my existence.”

“I’ve spoken about you; I go there two or three times a week just now to see if there’s anything I can do; and I daresay your husband has told them about you. You must be prepared to find that they have an unbounded admiration for him.”

“Are you a Catholic?”

His malicious eyes twinkled and his funny little face was puckered with laughter.

“Why are you grinning at me?” asked Kitty.

“Can any good come out of Galilee? No, I’m not a Catholic. I describe myself as a member of the Church of England, which, I suppose, is an inoffensive way of saying that you don’t believe in anything very much.... When the Mother Superior came here ten years ago she brought seven nuns with her and of those all but three are dead. You see, at the best of times, Mei-tan-fu is not a health resort. They live in the very middle of the city, in the poorest district, they work very hard and they never have a holiday.”

“But are there only three and the Mother Superior now?”

“Oh, no, more have taken their places. There are six of them now. When one of them died of cholera at the beginning of the epidemic two others came up from Canton.”

Kitty shivered a little.

“Are you cold?”

“No, it was only some one walking over my grave.”

“When they leave France they leave it for ever. They’re not like the Protestant missionaries who have a year’s leave every now and then. I always think that must be the hardest thing of all. We English have no very strong attachment to the soil, we can make ourselves at home in any part of the world, but the French, I think, have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical bond. They’re never really at ease when they’re out of it. It always seems to me very moving that these women should make just that sacrifice. I suppose if I were a Catholic it would seem very natural to me.”

Kitty looked at him coolly. She could not quite understand the emotion with which the little man spoke and she asked herself whether it was a pose. He had drunk a good deal of whisky and perhaps he was not quite sober.

“Come and see for yourself,” he said, with his bantering smile, quickly reading her thought. “It’s not nearly so risky as eating a tomato.”

“If you’re not frightened there’s no reason why I should be.”

“I think it’ll amuse you. It’s like a little bit of France.”

XL

They crossed the river in a sampan. A chair was waiting for Kitty at the landing-stage and she was carried up the hill to the water-gate. It was through this that the coolies came to fetch water from the river and they hurried to and fro with huge buckets hanging from the yoke on their shoulder, splashing the causeway so that it was as wet as though it had heavily rained. Kitty’s bearers gave short, sharp cries to urge them to make way.

“Of course all business is at a standstill,” said Waddington, walking by her side. “Under normal circumstances you have to fight your way through the coolies carrying loads up and down to the junks.”

The street was narrow and winding so that Kitty lost all sense of the direction in which she was going. Many of the shops were closed. She had grown used on the journey up to the untidiness of a Chinese street, but here was the litter of weeks, garbage and refuse; and the stench was so horrible that she had to put her handkerchief to her face. Passing through Chinese cities she had been incommoded by the staring of the crowd, but now she noticed that no more than an indifferent glance was thrown at her. The passers-by, scattered rather than as usual thronging, seemed intent on their own affairs. They were cowed and listless. Now and then as they went by a house they heard the beating of gongs and the shrill, sustained lament of unknown instruments. Behind those closed doors one was lying dead.

“Here we are,” said Waddington at last.

The chair was set down at a small doorway, surmounted by a cross, in a long white wall, and Kitty stepped out. He rang the bell.

“You mustn’t expect anything very grand, you know. They’re miserably poor.”

The door was opened by a Chinese girl, and after a word or two from Waddington she led them into a little room on the side of the corridor. It contained a large table covered with a chequered oilcloth and round the walls was a set of stiff chairs. At one end of the room was a statue, in plaster, of the Blessed Virgin. In a moment a nun came in, short and plump, with a homely face, red cheeks and merry eyes. Waddington, introducing Kitty to her, called her Soeur St. Joseph.

“C’est la dame du docteur?” she asked, beaming, and then added that the Mother Superior would join them directly.

Sister St. Joseph could speak no English and Kitty’s French was halting; but Waddington, fluent, voluble and inaccurate, maintained a stream of facetious comment, which convulsed the good-humoured nun. Her cheerful, easy laughter not a little astonished Kitty. She had an idea that the religious were always grave and this sweet and childlike merriment touched her.

XLI

The door opened, to Kitty’s fancy not quite naturally, but as though it swung back of itself on its hinges, and the Mother Superior entered the little room. She stood for an instant on the threshold and a grave smile hovered upon her lips as she looked at the laughing Sister and Waddington’s puckered, clownish face. Then she came forward and held out her hand to Kitty.

“Mrs. Fane?” She spoke in English with a good deal of accent, but with a correct pronunciation, and she gave the shadow of a bow. “It is a great pleasure to me to make the acquaintance of the wife of our good and brave doctor.”

Kitty felt that the Superior’s eyes held her in a long and unembarrassed look of appraisal. It was so frank that it was not uncivil; you felt that here was a woman whose business it was to form an opinion of others and to whom it never occurred that subterfuge was necessary. With a dignified affability she motioned to her visitors to take chairs and herself sat down. Sister St. Joseph, smiling still but silent, stood at the side but a little behind the Superior.

“I know you English like tea,” said the Mother Superior, “and I have ordered some. But I must make my excuses if it is served in the Chinese fashion. I know that Mr. Waddington prefers whisky, but that I am afraid I cannot offer him.”

She smiled and there was a hint of malice in her grave eyes.

“Oh, come, ma mère, you speak as if I were a confirmed drunkard.”

“I wish you could say that you never drink, Mr. Waddington.”

“I can at all events say that I never drink except to excess.”

The Mother Superior laughed and translated into French for Sister St. Joseph the flippant remark. She looked at him with lingering, friendly eyes.

“We must make allowances for Mr. Waddington because two or three times when we had no money at all and did not know how we were to feed our orphans Mr. Waddington came to our rescue.”

The convert who had opened the door for them now came in with a tray on which were Chinese cups, a tea-pot and a little plate of the French cakes called Madeleines.

“You must eat the Madeleines,” said the Mother Superior, “because Sister St. Joseph made them for you herself this morning.”

They talked of commonplace things. The Mother Superior asked Kitty how long she had been in China and if the journey from Tching-Yen had greatly tired her. She asked her if she had been in France and if she did not find the climate of Tching-Yen trying. It was a conversation, trivial but friendly, which gained a peculiar savour from the circumstances. The parlour was very quiet, so that you could hardly believe that you were in the midst of a populous city. Peace dwelt there. And yet all round about the epidemic was raging and the people, terrified and restless, were kept in check but by the strong will of a soldier who was more than half a brigand. Within the convent walls the infirmary was crowded with sick and dying soldiers, and of the orphans in the nuns’ charge a quarter were dead.

Kitty, impressed she hardly knew why, observed the grave lady who asked her these amiable questions. She was dressed in white and the only colour on her habit was the red heart that burned on her breast. She was a woman of middle age, she might have been forty or fifty, it was impossible to say, for there were few wrinkles on her smooth, pale face, and you received the impression that she was far from young chiefly from the dignity of her bearing, her assurance, and the emaciation of her strong and beautiful hands. The face was long with a large mouth and large, even teeth; the nose though not small, was delicate and sensitive; but it was the eyes, under their thin black brows, which gave her face its intense and tragic character. They were very large, black, and though not exactly cold, by their calm steadiness strangely compelling. Your first thought when you looked at the Mother Superior was that as a girl she must have been beautiful, but in a moment you realised that this was a woman whose beauty, depending on character, had grown with advancing years. Her voice was deep, low and controlled, and whether she spoke in English or in French she spoke slowly. But the most striking thing about her was the air she had of authority tempered by Christian charity; you felt in her the habit of command. To be obeyed was natural to her, but she accepted obedience with humility. You could not fail to see that she was deeply conscious of the authority of the church which upheld her. But Kitty had a surmise that notwithstanding her austere demeanour she had for human frailty a human tolerance and it was impossible to look at her grave smile when she listened to Waddington, unabashed, talking nonsense, without being sure that she had a lively sense of the ridiculous.

But there was some other quality in her which Kitty vaguely felt, but could not put a name to. It was something that notwithstanding the Mother Superior’s cordiality and the exquisite manners which made Kitty feel like an awkward schoolgirl, held her at a distance.

XLII

“Monsieur ne mange rien,” said Sister St. Joseph.

“Monsieur’s palate is ruined by Manchu cooking,” replied the Mother Superior.

The smile left Sister St. Joseph’s face and she assumed an expression of some primness. Waddington, a roguish glance in his eyes, took another cake. Kitty did not understand the incident.

“To prove to you how unjust you are, ma mère, I will ruin the excellent dinner that awaits me.”

“If Mrs. Fane would like to see over the convent I shall be glad to show her.” The Mother Superior turned to Kitty with a deprecating smile. “I am sorry you should see it just now when everything is in disorder. We have so much work and not enough Sisters to do it. Colonel Yü has insisted on our putting our infirmary at the disposal of sick soldiers and we have had to make the réfectoire into an infirmary for our orphans.”

She stood at the door to allow Kitty to pass and together, followed by Sister St. Joseph and Waddington, they walked along cool white corridors. They went first into a large, bare room where a number of Chinese girls were working at elaborate embroideries. They stood up when the visitors entered and the Mother Superior showed Kitty specimens of the work.

“We go on with it notwithstanding the epidemic because it takes their minds off the danger.”

They went to a second room in which younger girls were doing plain sewing, hemming and stitching, and then into a third where there were only tiny children under the charge of a Chinese convert. They were playing noisily and when the Mother Superior came in they crowded round her, mites of two and three, with their black Chinese eyes and their black hair; and they seized her hands and hid themselves in her great skirts. An enchanting smile lit up her grave face, and she fondled them; she spoke little chaffing words which Kitty, ignorant though she was of Chinese, could tell were like caresses. She shuddered a little, for in their uniform dress, sallow-skinned, stunted, with their flat noses, they looked to her hardly human. They were repulsive. But the Mother Superior stood among them like Charity itself. When she wished to leave the room they would not let her go, but clung to her, so that, with smiling expostulations, she had to use a gentle force to free herself. They at all events found nothing terrifying in this great lady.

“You know of course,” she said, as they walked along another corridor, “that they are only orphans in the sense that their parents have wished to be rid of them. We give them a few cash for every child that is brought in, otherwise they will not take the trouble, but do away with them.” She turned to the Sister. “Have any come to-day?” she asked.

“Four.”

“Now, with the cholera, they are more than ever anxious not to be burdened with useless girls.”

She showed Kitty the dormitories and then they passed a door on which was painted the word infirmerie. Kitty heard groans and loud cries and sounds as though beings not human were in pain.

“I will not show you the infirmary,” said the Mother Superior in her placid tones. “It is not a sight that one would wish to see.” A thought struck her. “I wonder if Dr. Fane is there?”

She looked interrogatively at the Sister and she, with her merry smile, opened the door and slipped in. Kitty shrank back as the open door allowed her to hear more horribly the tumult within. Sister St. Joseph came back.

“No, he has been and will not be back again till later.”

“What about number six?”

“Pauvre garçon, he’s dead.”

The Mother Superior crossed herself and her lips moved in a short and silent prayer.

They passed by a courtyard and Kitty’s eyes fell upon two long shapes that lay side by side on the ground covered with a piece of blue cotton. The Superior turned to Waddington.

“We are so short of beds that we have to put two patients in one and the moment a sick man dies he must be bundled out in order to make room for another.” But she gave Kitty a smile. “Now we will show you our chapel. We are very proud of it. One of our friends in France sent us a little while ago a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin.”

XLIII

The chapel was no more than a long low room with white-washed walls and rows of deal benches; at the end was the altar on which stood the image; it was in plaster of Paris painted in crude colours; it was very bright and new and garish. Behind it was a picture in oils of the Crucifixion with the two Maries at the foot of the Cross in extravagant attitudes of grief. The drawing was bad and the dark pigments were put on with an eye that knew nothing of the beauty of colour. Around the walls were the Stations of the Cross painted by the same unfortunate hand. The chapel was hideous and vulgar.

The two nuns on entering knelt down to say a prayer and then, rising, the Mother Superior began once more to chat with Kitty.

“Everything that can be broken is broken when it comes here, but the statue presented to us by our benefactor came from Paris without so much as the smallest chip. There is no doubt that it was a miracle.”

Waddington’s malicious eyes gleamed, but he held his tongue.

“The altarpiece and the Stations of the Cross were painted by one of our Sisters, Soeur St. Anselme.” The Mother Superior crossed herself. “She was a real artist. Unfortunately, she fell a victim to the epidemic. Do you not think that they are very beautiful?”

Kitty faltered an affirmative. On the altar were bunches of paper flowers and the candlesticks were distractingly ornate.

“We have the privilege of keeping here the Blessed Sacrament.”

“Yes?” said Kitty, not understanding.

“It has been a great comfort to us during this time of so terrible trouble.”

They left the chapel and retraced their steps to the parlour in which they had first sat.

“Would you like to see the babies that came in this morning before you go?”

“Very much,” said Kitty.

The Mother Superior led them into a tiny room on the other side of the passage. On a table, under a cloth, there was a singular wriggling. The Sister drew back the cloth and displayed four tiny, naked infants. They were very red and they made funny restless movements with their arms and legs; their quaint little Chinese faces were screwed up into strange grimaces. They looked hardly human; queer animals of an unknown species, and yet there was something singularly moving in the sight. The Mother Superior looked at them with an amused smile.

“They seem very lively. Sometimes they are brought in only to die. Of course we baptize them the moment they come.”

“The lady’s husband will be pleased with them,” said Sister St. Joseph. “I think he could play by the hour with the babies. When they cry he has only to take them up, and he makes them comfortable in the crook of his arm, so that they laugh with delight.”

Then Kitty and Waddington found themselves at the door. Kitty gravely thanked the Mother Superior for the trouble she had taken. The nun bowed with a condescension that was at once dignified and affable.

“It has been a great pleasure. You do not know how kind and helpful your husband has been to us. He has been sent to us by Heaven. I am glad that you came with him. When he goes home it must be a great comfort to him to have you there with your love and your — your sweet face. You must take care of him and not let him work too hard. You must look after him for all our sakes.”

Kitty flushed. She did not know what to say. The Mother Superior held out her hand and while she held it Kitty was conscious of those cool, thoughtful eyes which rested on her with detachment and yet with something that looked like a profound understanding.

Sister St. Joseph closed the door behind them and Kitty got into her chair. They went back through the narrow, winding streets. Waddington made a casual remark; Kitty did not answer. He looked round, but the side curtains of the chair were drawn and he could not see her. He walked on in silence. But when they reached the river and she stepped out to his surprise he saw that her eyes were streaming with tears.

“What is the matter?” he asked, his face puckered into an expression of dismay.

“Nothing.” She tried to smile. “Only foolishness.”

XLIV

Alone once more in the sordid parlour of the dead missionary, lying on the long chair that faced the window, her abstracted eyes on the temple across the river (now again at the approach of evening aerial and lovely), Kitty tried to set in order the feelings in her heart. She would never have believed that this visit to the convent could so have moved her. She had gone from curiosity. She had nothing else to do and after looking for so many days at the walled city across the water she was not unwilling to have at least a glimpse of its mysterious streets.

But once within the convent it had seemed to her that she was transported into another world situated strangely neither in space nor time. Those bare rooms and the white corridors, austere and simple, seemed to possess the spirit of something remote and mystical. The little chapel, so ugly and vulgar, in its very crudeness was pathetic; it had something which was wanting in the greatness of a cathedral, with its stained glass and its pictures it was very humble; and the faith which had adorned it, the affection which cherished it, had endued it with a delicate beauty of the soul. The methodical way in which the convent’s work was carried on in the midst of the pestilence showed a coolness in the face of danger and a practical sense, almost ironical it was so matter of fact, which were deeply impressive. In Kitty’s ears rang still the ghastly sounds she heard when for a moment Sister St. Joseph opened the infirmary door.

It was unexpected the way they had spoken of Walter. First the Sister and then the Mother Superior herself, and the tone of her voice had been very gentle when she praised him. Oddly enough it gave her a little thrill of pride to know that they thought so well of him. Waddington also had told something of what Walter was doing; but it was not only his competence that the nuns praised (in Tching-Yen she had known that he was thought clever), they spoke of his thoughtfulness and his tenderness. Of course he could be very tender. He was at his best when you were ill; he was too intelligent to exasperate, and his touch was pleasant, cool and soothing. By some magic he seemed able by his mere presence to relieve your suffering. She knew that she would never see again in his eyes the look of affection which she had once been so used to that she found it merely exasperating. She knew now how immense was his capacity for loving; in some odd way he was pouring it out on these wretched sick who had only him to look to. She did not feel jealousy, but a sense of emptiness; it was as though a support that she had grown so accustomed to as not to realise its presence were suddenly withdrawn from her so that she swayed this way and that like a thing that was top-heavy.

She had only contempt for herself because once she had felt contempt for Walter. He must have known how she regarded him and he had accepted her estimate without bitterness. She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference to him. She did not hate him now, nor feel resentment of him, but fear rather and perplexity. She could not but admit that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her. After thinking, thinking, all through those long days she rated accurately Charles Townsend’s value; he was a common fellow and his qualities were second-rate. If she could only tear from her heart the love that still lingered there! She tried not to think of him.

Waddington too thought highly of Walter. She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you? But Waddington had confessed that he did not like Walter. Men didn’t. It was easy to see that those two nuns had for him a feeling which was very like affection. He was different with women; notwithstanding his shyness you felt in him an exquisite kindliness.

XLV

But after all it was the nuns that had most deeply touched her. Sister St. Joseph, with her merry face and apple red cheeks; she had been one of the little band that came out to China with the Mother Superior ten years before and she had seen one after another of her companions die of disease, privation and homesickness; and yet she remained cheerful and happy. What was it that gave her that naïve and charming humour? And the Mother Superior. Kitty in fancy stood again in her presence and once more she felt humble and ashamed. Though she was so simple and unaffected she had a native dignity which inspired awe, and you could not imagine that any one could treat her without respect. Sister St. Joseph by the way she stood, by every small gesture and the intonation of her answers, had shown the deep submission in which she held herself; and Waddington, frivolous and impertinent, had shown by his tone that he was not quite at his ease. Kitty thought it unnecessary to have told her that the Mother Superior belonged to one of the great families of France; there was that in her bearing which suggested ancient race; and she had the authority of one who has never known that it is possible to be disobeyed. She had the condescension of a great lady and the humility of a saint. There was in her strong, handsome and ravaged face an austerity that was passionate; and at the same time she had a solicitude and a gentleness which permitted those little children to cluster, noisy and unafraid, in the assurance of her deep affection. When she had looked at the four new-born babies she had worn a smile that was sweet and yet profound it was like a ray of sunshine on a wild and desolate heath. What Sister St. Joseph had said so carelessly of Walter moved Kitty strangely; she knew that he had desperately wanted her to bear a child, but she had never suspected from his reticence that he was capable with a baby of showing without embarrassment a charming and playful tenderness. Most men were silly and awkward with babies. How strange he was!

But to all that moving experience there had been a shadow (a dark lining to the silver cloud), insistent and plain, which disconcerted her. In the sober gaiety of Sister St. Joseph, and much more in the beautiful courtesy of the Mother Superior, she had felt an aloofness which oppressed her. They were friendly and even cordial, but at the same time they held something back, she knew not what, so that she was conscious that she was nothing but a casual stranger. There was a barrier between her and them. They spoke a different language not only of the tongue but of the heart. And when the door was closed upon her she felt that they had put her out of their minds so completely, going about their neglected work again without delay, that for them she might never have existed. She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her soul she hankered. She felt on a sudden alone as she had never felt alone before. That was why she had wept.

And now, throwing back her head wearily, she sighed: “Oh, I’m so worthless.”

XLVI

That evening Walter came back to the bungalow a little earlier than usual. Kitty was lying on the long chair by the open window. It was nearly dark.

“Don’t you want a lamp?” he asked.

“They’ll bring it when dinner is ready.”

He talked to her always quite casually, of trifling things, as though they were friendly acquaintances, and there was never anything in his manner to suggest that he harboured malice in his heart. He never met her eyes and he never smiled. He was scrupulously polite.

“Walter, what do you propose we should do if we get through the epidemic?” she asked.

He waited for a moment before answering. She could not see his face.

“I haven’t thought.”

In the old days she said carelessly whatever came into her head; it never occurred to her to think before she spoke; but now she was afraid of him; she felt her lips tremble and her heart beat painfully.

“I went to the convent this afternoon.”

“So I heard.”

She forced herself to speak though she could hardly frame the words.

“Did you really want me to die when you brought me here?”

“If I were you I’d leave well alone, Kitty. I don’t think any good will come of talking about what we should do much better to forget.”

“But you don’t forget; neither do I. I’ve been thinking a great deal since I came here. Won’t you listen to what I have to say?”

“Certainly.”

“I treated you very badly. I was unfaithful to you.”

He stood stock still. His immobility was strangely terrifying.

“I don’t know whether you’ll understand what I mean. That sort of thing doesn’t mean very much to a woman when it’s over. I think women have never quite understood the attitude that men take up.” She spoke abruptly, in a voice she would hardly have recognised as her own. “You know what Charlie was and you knew what he’d do. Well, you were quite right. He’s a worthless creature. I suppose I shouldn’t have been taken in by him if I hadn’t been as worthless as he. I don’t ask you to forgive me. I don’t ask you to love me as you used to love me. But couldn’t we be friends? With all these people dying in thousands round us, and with those nuns in their convent...”

“What have they got to do with it?” he interrupted.

“I can’t quite explain. I had such a singular feeling when I went there to-day. It all seems to mean so much. It’s all so terrible and their self-sacrifice is so wonderful; I can’t help feeling it’s absurd and disproportionate, if you understand what I mean, to distress yourself because a foolish woman has been unfaithful to you. I’m much too worthless and insignificant for you to give me a thought.”

He did not answer, but he did not move away; he seemed to be waiting for her to continue.

“Mr. Waddington and the nuns have told me such wonderful things about you. I’m very proud of you, Walter.”

“You used not to be; you used to feel contempt for me. Don’t you still?”

“Don’t you know that I’m afraid of you?”

Again he was silent.

“I don’t understand you,” he said at last. “I don’t know what it is you want.”

“Nothing for myself. I only want you to be a little less unhappy.”

She felt him stiffen and his voice was very cold when he answered.

“You’re mistaken in thinking I’m unhappy. I have a great deal too much to do to think of you very often.”

“I have wondered if the nuns would allow me to go and work at the convent. They are very shorthanded and if I could be of any help I should be grateful to them.”

“It is not easy work or pleasant work. I doubt if it would amuse you long.”

“Do you absolutely despise me, Walter?”

“No.” He hesitated and his voice was strange. “I despise myself.”

XLVII

It was after dinner. As usual Walter sat by the lamp and read. He read every evening till Kitty went to bed and then went into a laboratory which he had fitted up in one of the bungalow’s empty rooms. Here he worked late into the night. He slept little. He was occupied with she knew not what experiments. He told her nothing of his work; but even in the old days he had been reticent on this: he was not by nature expansive. She thought deeply of what he had just said to her: the conversation had led to nothing. She knew him so little that she could not be sure if he was speaking the truth or not. Was it possible that, whereas he now existed so ominously for her, she had entirely ceased to exist for him? Her conversation which had entertained him once because he loved her, now that he loved her no longer might be merely tedious to him. It mortified her.

She looked at him. The light of the lamp displayed his profile as though it were a cameo. With his regular and finely-cut features it was very distinguished, but it was more than severe, it was grim: that immobility of his, only his eyes moving as he perused each page, was vaguely terrifying. Who would have thought that this hard face could be melted by passion to such a tenderness of expression? She knew and it excited in her a little shiver of distaste. It was strange that though he was good-looking as well as honest, reliable and talented, it had been so impossible for her to love him. It was a relief that she need never again submit to his caresses.

He would not answer when she had asked him whether in forcing her to come here he had really wished to kill her. The mystery of this fascinated and horrified her. He was so extraordinarily kind; it was incredible that he could have had such a devilish intention. He must have suggested it only to frighten her and to get back on Charlie (that would be like his sardonic humour) and then from obstinacy or from fear of looking foolish insisted on her going through with it.

Yes, he said he despised himself. What did he mean by that? Once again Kitty looked at his calm cool face. She might not even be in the room, he was so unconscious of her.

“Why do you despise yourself?” she asked, hardly knowing that she spoke, as though she were continuing without a break the earlier conversation.

He put down his book and observed her reflectively. He seemed to gather his thoughts from a remote distance.

“Because I loved you.”

She flushed and looked away. She could not bear his cold, steady and appraising gaze. She understood what he meant. It was a little while before she answered.

“I think you do me an injustice,” she said. “It’s not fair to blame me because I was silly and frivolous and vulgar. I was brought up like that. All the girls I know are like that.... It’s like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he’s bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities I hadn’t got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn’t. I was just pretty and gay. You don’t ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair; you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon.”

“I don’t blame you.”

His voice was weary. She was beginning to feel a trifle impatient with him. Why could he not realise, what suddenly had become so clear to her, that beside all the terror of death under whose shadow they lay and beside the awe of the beauty which she had caught a glimpse of that day, their own affairs were trivial? What did it really matter if a silly woman had committed adultery and why should her husband, face to face with the sublime, give it a thought? It was strange that Walter with all his cleverness should have so little sense of proportion. Because he had dressed a doll in gorgeous robes and set her in a sanctuary to worship her, and then discovered that the doll was filled with sawdust he could neither forgive himself nor her. His soul was lacerated. It was all make-believe that he had lived on, and when the truth shattered it he thought reality itself was shattered. It was true enough, he would not forgive her because he could not forgive himself.

She thought that she heard him give a faint sigh and she shot a rapid glance at him. A sudden thought struck her and it took her breath away. She only just refrained from giving a cry.

Was it what they called — a broken heart — that he suffered from?

XLVIII

All the next day Kitty thought of the convent; and the morning after, early, soon after Walter had gone, taking the amah with her to get chairs, she crossed the river. It was barely day and the Chinese crowding the ferry boat, some in the blue cotton of the peasant, others in the black robes of respectability, had a strange look of the dead being borne over the water to the land of shadow. And when they stepped ashore they stood for a little at the landing-place uncertainly as though they did not quite know where to go, before desultorily, in twos and threes, they wandered up the hill.

At that hour the streets of the city were very empty so that more than ever it seemed a city of the dead. The passers-by had an abstracted air so that you might almost have thought them ghosts. The sky was unclouded and the early sun shed a heavenly mildness on the scene; it was difficult to imagine, on that blithe, fresh and smiling morn, that the city lay gasping, like a man whose life is being throttled out of him by a maniac’s hands, in the dark clutch of the pestilence. It was incredible that nature (the blue of the sky was clear like a child’s heart) should be so indifferent when men were writhing in agony and going to their death in fear. When the chairs were set down at the convent door a beggar arose from the ground and asked Kitty for alms. He was clad in faded and shapeless rags that looked as though he had raked them out of a muck-heap, and through their rents you saw his skin hard and rough and tanned like the hide of a goat; his bare legs were emaciated, and his head, with its shock of coarse grey hair (the cheeks hollow, the eyes wild), was the head of a madman. Kitty turned from him in frightened horror, and the chair-bearers in gruff tones bade him begone, but he was importunate, and to be rid of him, shuddering, Kitty gave him a few cash.

The door was opened and the amah explained that Kitty wished to see the Mother Superior. She was taken once more into the stiff parlour in which it seemed a window had never been opened, and here she sat so long that she began to think her message had not been delivered. At last the Mother Superior came in.

“I must ask you to excuse me for keeping you waiting,” she said. “I did not expect you and I was occupied.”

“Forgive me for troubling you. I am afraid I have come at an inconvenient moment.”

The Mother Superior gave her a smile, austere but sweet, and begged her to sit down. But Kitty saw that her eyes were swollen. She had been weeping. Kitty was startled, for she had received from the Mother Superior the impression that she was a woman whom earthly troubles could not greatly move.

“I am afraid something has happened,” she faltered. “Would you like me to go away? I can come another time.”

“No, no. Tell me what I can do for you. It is only — only that one of our Sisters died last night.” Her voice lost its even tone and her eyes filled with tears. “It is wicked of me to grieve, for I know that her good and simple soul has flown straight to Heaven; she was a saint; but it is difficult always to control one’s weakness. I am afraid I am not always very reasonable.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m so dreadfully sorry,” said Kitty.

Her ready sympathy brought a sob into her voice.

“She was one of the Sisters who came out from France with me ten years ago. There are only three of us left now. I remember, we stood in a little group at the end of the boat (what do you call it, the bow?) and as we steamed out of the harbour at Marseilles and we saw the golden figure of Saint-Marie la Grace, we said a prayer together. It had been my greatest wish since I entered religion to be allowed to come to China, but when I saw the land grow distant I could not prevent myself from weeping. I was their Superior; it was not a very good example I was giving my daughters. And then Sister St. Francis Xavier — that is the name of the Sister who died last night — took my hand and told me not to grieve; for wherever we were, she said, there was France and there was God.”

That severe and handsome face was distorted by the grief which human nature wrung from her and by the effort to restrain the tears which her reason and her faith refused. Kitty looked away. She felt that it was indecent to peer into that struggle.

“I have been writing to her father. She, like me, was her mother’s only daughter. They were fisher folk in Brittany, and it will be hard for them. Oh, when will this terrible epidemic cease? Two of our girls have been attacked this morning and nothing but a miracle can save them. These Chinese have no resistance. The loss of Sister St. Francis is very severe. There is so much to do and now fewer than ever to do it. We have Sisters at our other houses in China who are eager to come, all our Order, I think, would give anything in the world (only they have nothing) to come here; but it is almost certain death; and so long as we can manage with the Sisters we have I am unwilling that others should be sacrificed.”

“That encourages me, ma mère,” said Kitty. “I have been feeling that I had come at a very unfortunate moment. You said the other day that there was more work than the Sisters could do, and I was wondering if you would allow me to come and help them. I do not mind what I do if I can only be useful. I should be thankful if you just set me to scrub the floors.”

The Mother Superior gave an amused smile and Kitty was astonished at the mobile temperament which could so easily pass from mood to mood.

“There is no need to scrub the floors. That is done after a fashion by the orphans.” She paused and looked kindly at Kitty. “My dear child, do you not think that you have done enough in coming with your husband here? That is more than many wives would have had the courage to do, and for the rest how can you be better occupied than in giving him peace and comfort when he comes home to you after the day’s work? Believe me, he needs then all your love and all your consideration.”

Kitty could not easily meet the eyes which rested on her with a detached scrutiny and with an ironical kindliness.

“I have nothing whatever to do from morning till night,” said Kitty. “I feel that there is so much to be done that I cannot bear to think that I am idle. I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself, and I know that I have no claim either on your kindness or on your time, but I mean what I say and it would be a charity that you were doing me if you would let me be of some help to you.”

“You do not look very strong. When you did us the pleasure of coming to see us the day before yesterday it seemed to me that you were very pale. Sister St. Joseph thought that perhaps you were going to have a baby.”

“No, no,” cried Kitty, flushing to the roots of her hair.

The Mother Superior gave a little, silvery laugh.

“It is nothing to be ashamed of, my dear child, nor is there anything improbable in the supposition. How long have you been married?”

“I am pale because I am naturally pale, but I am very strong, and I promise you I am not afraid of work.”

Now the Superior was complete mistress of herself. She assumed unconsciously the air of authority which was habitual to her and she held Kitty in an appraising scrutiny. Kitty felt unaccountably nervous.

“Can you speak Chinese?”

“I’m afraid not,” answered Kitty.

“Ah, that is a pity. I could have put you in charge of the elder girls. It is very difficult just now, and I am afraid they will get — what do you call? Out of hand?” she concluded with a tentative sound.

“Could I not be of help to the Sisters in nursing? I am not at all afraid of the cholera. I could nurse the girls or the soldiers.”

The Mother Superior, unsmiling now, a reflective look on her face, shook her head.

“You do not know what the cholera is. It is a dreadful thing to see. The work in the infirmary is done by soldiers and we need a Sister only to supervise. And so far as the girls are concerned... no, no, I am sure your husband would not wish it; it is a terrible and frightening sight.”

“I should grow used to it.”

“No, it is out of the question. It is our business and our privilege to do such things, but there is no call for you to do so.”

“You make me feel very useless and very helpless. It seems incredible that there should be nothing that I can do.”

“Have you spoken to your husband of your wish?”

“Yes.”

The Mother Superior looked at her as though she were delving into the secrets of her heart, but when she saw Kitty’s anxious and appealing look she gave a smile.

“Of course you are a Protestant?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t matter. Dr. Watson, the missionary who died, was a Protestant and it made no difference. He was all that was most charming to us. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude.”

Now the flicker of a smile passed over Kitty’s face, but she did not say anything. The Mother Superior seemed to reflect. She rose to her feet.

“It is very good of you. I think I can find something for you to do. It is true that now Sister St. Francis has been taken from us, it is impossible for us to cope with the work. When will you be ready to start?”

“Now.”

“A la bonne heure. I am content to hear you say that.”

“I promise you I will do my best. I am very grateful to you for the opportunity that you are giving me.”

The Mother Superior opened the parlour door, but as she was going out she hesitated. Once more she gave Kitty a long, searching and sagacious look. Then she laid her hand gently on her arm.

“You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.”

Kitty gave a little start, but the Mother Superior passed swiftly out.

XLIX

Kitty found the work a refreshment to her spirit. She went to the convent every morning soon after sunrise and did not return to the bungalow till the westering sun flooded the narrow river and its crowded junks with gold. The Mother Superior gave into her case the smaller children. Kitty’s mother had brought to London from her native Liverpool a practical sense of housewifery and Kitty, notwithstanding her air of frivolity, had always had certain gifts to which she referred only in bantering tones. Thus she could cook quite well and she sewed beautifully. When she disclosed this talent she was set to supervise the stitching and hemming of the younger girls. They knew a little French and every day she picked up a few words of Chinese so that it was not difficult for her to manage. At other times she had to see that the smallest children did not get into mischief; she had to dress and undress them and take care that they rested when rest was needed. There were a good many babies and these were in charge of amahs, but she was bidden to keep an eye on them. None of the work was very important and she would have liked to do something which was more arduous; but the Mother Superior paid no attention to her entreaties and Kitty stood sufficiently in awe of her not to be importunate.

For the first few days she had to make something of an effort to overcome the faint distaste she felt for these little girls, in their ugly uniforms, with their stiff black hair, their round yellow faces, and their staring, sloe-black eyes. But she remembered the soft look which had transfigured so beautifully the countenance of the Mother Superior when on Kitty’s first visit to the convent she had stood surrounded by those ugly little things, and she would not allow herself to surrender to her instinct. And presently, taking in her arms one or other of the tiny creatures, crying because of a fall or a cutting tooth, when Kitty found that a few soft words, though in a language the child could not understand, the pressure of her arms and the softness of her cheek against the weeping yellow face, could comfort and console, she began to lose all her feeling of strangeness. The small children, without any fear of her, came to her in their childish troubles and it gave her a peculiar happiness to discern their confidence. It was the same with the older girls, those to whom she taught sewing; their bright, clever smiles and the pleasure she could give them by a word of praise, touched her. She felt that they liked her and, flattered and proud, she liked them in return.

But there was one child that she could not grow used to. It was a little girl of six, an idiot with a huge hydrocephalic head that swayed top-heavily on a small, squat body, large vacant eyes and a drooling mouth; the creature spoke hoarsely a few mumbled words; it was revolting and horrible; and for some reason it conceived an idiot attachment for Kitty so that it followed her about as she changed her place from one part of the large room to another. It clung to her skirt and rubbed its face against her knees. It sought to fondle her hands. She shivered with disgust. She knew it yearned for caresses and she could not bring herself to touch it.

Once, speaking of it to Sister St. Joseph, she said that it was a pity it lived. Sister St. Joseph smiled and stretched out her hand to the misformed thing. It came and rubbed its bulging forehead against it.

“Poor little mite,” said the nun. “She was brought here positively dying. By the mercy of Providence I was at the door just as she came. I thought there was not a moment to lose, so I baptized her at once. You would not believe what trouble we have had to keep her with us. Three or four times we thought that her little soul would escape to Heaven.”

Kitty was silent. Sister St. Joseph in her loquacious way began to gossip of other things. And next day when the idiot child came to her and touched her hand Kitty nerved herself to place it in a caress on the great bare skull. She forced her lips into a smile. But suddenly the child, with an idiot perversity, left her; it seemed to lose interest in her, and that day and the following days paid her no attention. Kitty did not know what she had done and tried to lure it to her with smiles and gestures, but it turned away and pretended not to see her.

L

Since the nuns were busy from morning till night with a hundred duties Kitty saw little of them but at the services in the bare, humble chapel. On her first day the Mother Superior, catching sight of her seated at the back behind the girls on the benches according to their ages, stopped and spoke to her.

“You must not think it necessary for you to come to the chapel when we do,” she said. “You are a Protestant and you have your own convictions.”

“But I like to come, Mother. I find that it rests me.”

The Mother Superior gave her a moment’s glance and slightly inclined her grave head.

“Of course you will do exactly as you choose. I merely wanted you to understand that you are under no obligation.”

But with Sister St. Joseph Kitty soon became on terms not of intimacy perhaps but of familiarity. The economy of the convent was in her charge and to look after the material well-being of that big family kept the Sister on her feet all day. She said that the only time she had to rest was that which she devoted to prayer. But it pleased her towards evening when Kitty was with the girls at their work to come in and, vowing that she was tired out and had not a moment to spare, sit down for a few minutes and gossip. When she was not in the presence of the Mother Superior she was a talkative, merry creature, fond of a joke, and she did not dislike a bit of scandal. Kitty stood in no fear of her, her habit did not prevent Sister St. Joseph from being a good-natured, homely woman, and she chattered with her gaily. She did not mind with her showing how badly she talked French and they laughed with one another over Kitty’s mistakes. The Sister taught her every day a few useful words of Chinese. She was a farmer’s daughter and at heart she was still a peasant.

“I used to keep the cows when I was little,” she said, “like St. Joan of Arc. But I was too wicked to have visions. It was fortunate, I think, for my father would certainly have whipped me if I had. He used often to whip me, the good old man, for I was a very naughty little girl. I am ashamed sometimes when I think now of the pranks I used to play.”

Kitty laughed at the thought that this corpulent, middle-aged nun could ever have been a wayward child. And yet there was something childlike in her still so that your heart went out to her: she seemed to have about her an aroma of the countryside in autumn when the apple trees are laden with fruit and the crops are in and safely housed. She had not the tragic and austere saintliness of the Mother Superior, but a gaiety that was simple and happy.

“Do you never wish to go home again, ma soeur?” asked Kitty.

“Oh, no. It would be too hard to come back. I love to be here and I am never so happy as when I am among the orphans. They’re so good, they’re so grateful. But it is all very well to be a nun (on a beau être religieuse) still one has a mother and one cannot forget that one drank the milk of her breasts. She is old, my mother, and it is hard never to see her again; but then she is fond of her daughter-in-law, and my brother is good to her. His son is growing up now, I should think they will be glad of an extra pair of strong arms on the farm; he was only a child when I left France, but he promised to have a fist that you could fell an ox with.”

It was almost impossible in that quiet room, listening to the nun, to realise that on the other side of these four walls cholera was raging. Sister St. Joseph had an unconcern which conveyed itself to Kitty.

She had a naïve curiosity about the world and its inhabitants. She asked Kitty all kinds of questions about London and England, a country, she thought, where so thick was the fog that you could not see your hand at midday, and she wanted to know if Kitty went to balls and whether she lived in a grand house and how many brothers and sisters she had. She spoke often of Walter. The Mother Superior said he was wonderful and every day they prayed for him. How lucky Kitty was to have a husband who was so good and so brave and so clever.

LI

But sooner or later Sister St. Joseph returned to the subject of the Mother Superior. Kitty had been conscious from the beginning that the personality of this woman dominated the convent. She was regarded by all that dwelt there with love certainly and with admiration, but also with awe and not a little dread. Notwithstanding her kindliness Kitty herself felt like a schoolgirl in her presence. She was never quite at her ease with her, for she was filled with a sentiment which was so strange that it embarrassed her: reverence. Sister St. Joseph with an ingenious desire to impress, told Kitty how great the family was to which the Mother Superior belonged; she had among her ancestors persons of historic importance and she was un peu cousine with half the kings in Europe: Alphonso of Spain had hunted at her father’s, and they had châteaux all over France. It must have been hard to leave so much grandeur. Kitty listened smilingly, but not a little impressed.

“Du reste, you have only to look at her,” said the Sister, “to see that, comme famille, c’est le dessus du panier.”

“She has the most beautiful hands that I have ever seen,” said Kitty.

“Ah, but if you only knew how she had used them. She is not afraid of work, notre bonne mère.”

When they had come to this city there had been nothing. They had built the convent. The Mother Superior had made the plans and supervised the work. The moment they arrived they began to save the poor little unwanted girls from the baby-tower and the cruel hands of the midwife. At first they had had no beds to sleep in and no glass to keep out the night air (“and there is nothing,” said Sister St. Joseph, “which is more unwholesome”); and often they had no money left, not only to pay the builders, but even to buy their simple fare; they lived like peasants, what was she saying? the peasants in France, tenez, the men who worked for her father, would have thrown to the pigs the food they ate. And then the Mother Superior would collect her daughters round her and they would kneel and pray; and the Blessed Virgin would send money. A thousand francs would arrive by post next day, or a stranger, an Englishman (a Protestant, if you please) or even a Chinaman would knock at the door while they were actually on their knees and bring them a present. Once they were in such straits that they all made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that they would recite a neuvaine in her honour if she succoured them, and, would you believe it? that funny Mr. Waddington came to see us next day and saying that we looked as though we all wanted a good plate of roast beef gave us a hundred dollars.

What a comic little man he was, with his bald head and his little shrewd eyes (ses petits yeux malins) and his jokes. Mon Dieu, how he murdered the French language, and yet you could not help laughing at him. He was always in a good humour. All through this terrible epidemic he carried himself as if he were enjoying a holiday. He had a heart quite French and a wit so that you would hardly believe he was English. Except for his accent. But sometimes Sister St. Joseph thought he spoke badly on purpose to make you laugh. Of course his morals were not all one could wish; but still that was his business (with a sigh, a shrug and a shake of the head) and he was a bachelor and a young man.

“What is wrong with his morals, ma soeur?” asked Kitty smiling.

“Is it possible that you do not know? It is a sin for me to tell you. I have no business to say such things. He lives with a Chinese woman, that is to say, not a Chinese woman, but a Manchu. A princess, it appears, and she loves him to distraction.”

“That sounds quite impossible,” cried Kitty.

“No, no, I promise you, it is everything that is most true. It is very wicked of him. Those things are not done. Did you not hear, when you first came to the convent and he would not eat the madeleines that I had made expressly, that notre bonne mère said his stomach was deranged by Manchu cooking? That was what she meant and you should have seen the head that he made. It is a story altogether curious. It appears that he was stationed at Hankow during the revolution when they were massacring the Manchus and this good little Waddington saved the lives of one of their great families. They are related to the Imperial Family. The girl fell violently in love with him and — well, the rest you can imagine. And then when he left Hankow she ran away and followed him and now she follows him everywhere, and he has had to resign himself to keep her, poor fellow, and I daresay he is very fond of her; they are quite charming sometimes, these Manchu women. But what am I thinking of? I have a thousand things to do and I sit here. I am a bad religious. I am ashamed of myself.”

LII

Kitty had a queer feeling that she was growing. The constant occupation distracted her mind and the glimpses she had of other lives and other outlooks awakened her imagination. She began to regain her spirits; she felt better and stronger. It had seemed to her that she could do nothing now but weep; but to her surprise, and not a little to her confusion, she caught herself laughing at this and that. It began to seem quite natural to live in the midst of a terrible epidemic. She knew that people were dying to the right and left of her, but she ceased very much to think of it. The Mother Superior had forbidden her to go into the infirmaries and the closed doors excited her curiosity. She would have liked to peep in, but could not do so without being seen, and she did not know what punishment the Mother Superior would inflict upon her. It would be dreadful to be sent away. She was devoted to the children now and they would miss her if she went; in fact she did not know what they would do without her.

And one day it occurred to her that she had neither thought of Charles Townsend nor dreamt of him for a week. Her heart gave a sudden thud against her ribs: she was cured. She could think of him now with indifference. She loved him no longer. Oh, the relief and the sense of liberation! It was strange to look back and remember how passionately she had yearned for him; she thought she would die when he failed her; she thought life thenceforward had nothing to offer but misery. And now already she was laughing. A worthless creature. What a fool she had made of herself! And now, considering him calmly, she wondered what on earth she had seen in him. It was lucky that Waddington knew nothing, she could never have endured his malicious eyeing and his ironical innuendoes. She was free, free at last, free! She could hardly prevent herself from laughing aloud.

The children were playing some romping game and it was her habit to look on with an indulgent smile, restraining them when they made too much noise and taking care that in their boisterousness none was hurt; but now in her high spirits, feeling as young as any of them, she joined in the game. The little girls received her with delight. They chased up and down the room, shouting at the top of their shrill voices, with fantastic and almost barbarous glee. They grew so excited that they leaped into the air with joy. The noise was terrific.

Suddenly the door opened and the Mother Superior stood on the threshold. Kitty, abashed, extricated herself from the clutches of a dozen little girls who with wild shrieks had seized her.

“Is this how you keep these children good and quiet?” asked the Mother Superior, a smile on her lips.

“We were having a game, Mother. They got excited. It is my fault, I led them on.”

The Mother Superior came forward and as usual the children clustered about her. She put her hands round their narrow shoulders and playfully pulled their little yellow ears. She looked at Kitty with a long, soft look. Kitty was flushed and she was breathing quickly. Her liquid eyes were shining and her lovely hair, disarranged in all the struggling and the laughter, was in adorable confusion.

“Que vous êtes belle, ma chère enfant,” said the Mother Superior. “It does the heart good to look at you. No wonder these children adore you.”

Kitty blushed deeply and, she knew not why, tears suddenly filled her eyes. She covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, Mother, you make me ashamed.”

“Come, do not be silly. Beauty is also a gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.”

She smiled again and as though Kitty were a child too gently patted her soft cheek.

LIII

Since she had been working at the convent Kitty had seen less of Waddington. Two or three times he had come down to the river bank to meet her and they had walked up the hill together. He came in to drink a whisky and soda, but he would seldom stay to dinner. One Sunday, however, he suggested that they should take their luncheon with them and go in chairs to a Buddhist monastery. It was situated ten miles from the city and had some reputation as a place of pilgrimage. The Mother Superior, insisting that Kitty must have a day’s rest, would not let her work on Sundays and Walter of course was as busy then as usual.

They started early in order to arrive before the heat of the day and were carried along a narrow causeway between the rice fields. Now and then they passed comfortable farm-houses nestling with friendly intimacy in a grove of bamboos. Kitty enjoyed the idleness; it was pleasant after being cooped up in the city to see about her the wide country. They came to the monastery, straggling low buildings by the side of the river, agreeably shaded by trees, and were led by smiling monks through courtyards, empty with a solemn emptiness, and shown temples with grimacing gods. In the sanctuary sat the Buddha, remote and sad, wistful, abstracted and faintly smiling. There was about everything a sense of dejection; the magnificence was shoddy and ruined; the gods were dusty and the faith that had made them was dying. The monks seemed to stay on sufference, as though they awaited a notice to quit; and in the smile of the abbot, with his beautiful politeness, was the irony of resignation. One of these days the monks would wander away from the shady, pleasant wood, and the buildings, crumbling and neglected, would be battered by fierce storms and besieged by the surrounding nature. Wild creepers would twine themselves about the dead images and trees would grow in the courtyards. Then the gods would dwell there no longer, but evil spirits of darkness.

LIV

They sat on the steps of a little building (four lacquered columns and a high, tiled roof under which stood a great bronze bell) and watched the river flow sluggish and with many a bend towards the stricken city. They could see its crenellated walls. The heat hung over it like a pall. But the river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholy feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.

“Do you know Harrington Gardens?” she asked Waddington, with a smile in her beautiful eyes.

“No. Why?”

“Nothing; only it’s a long way from here. It’s where my people live.”

“Are you thinking of going home?”

“No.”

“I suppose you’ll be leaving here in a couple of months. The epidemic seems to be abating and the cool weather should see the end of it.”

“I almost think I shall be sorry to go.”

For a moment she thought of the future. She did not know what plans Walter had in mind. He told her nothing. He was cool, polite, silent and inscrutable. Two little drops in that river that flowed silently towards the unknown; two little drops that to themselves had so much individuality and to the onlooker were but an undistinguishable part of the water.

“Take care the nuns don’t start converting you,” said Waddington, with his malicious little smile.

“They’re much too busy. Nor do they care. They’re wonderful and so kind; and yet — I hardly know how to explain it — there is a wall between them and me. I don’t know what it is. It is as though they possessed a secret which made all the difference in their lives and which I was unworthy to share. It is not faith; it is something deeper and more — more significant: they walk in a different world from ours and we shall always be strangers to them. Each day when the convent door closes behind me I feel that for them I have ceased to exist.”

“I can understand that it is something of a blow to your vanity,” he returned mockingly.

“My vanity.”

Kitty shrugged her shoulders. Then, smiling once more, she turned to him lazily.

“Why did you never tell me that you lived with a Manchu princess?”

“What have those gossiping old women been telling you? I am sure that it is a sin for nuns to discuss the private affairs of the Customs officials.”

“Why should you be so sensitive?”

Waddington glanced down, sideways, so that it gave him an air of shyness. He faintly shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s not a thing to advertise. I do not know that it would greatly add to my chances of promotion in the service.”

“Are you very fond of her?”

He looked up now and his ugly little face had the look of a naughty schoolboy’s.

“She’s abandoned everything for my sake, home, family, security and self-respect. It’s a good many years now since she threw everything to the winds to be with me. I’ve sent her away two or three times, but she’s always come back; I’ve run away from her myself, but she’s always followed me. And now I’ve given it up as a bad job; I think I’ve got to put up with her for the rest of my life.”

“She must really love you to distraction.”

“It’s a rather funny sensation, you know,” he answered, wrinkling a perplexed forehead. “I haven’t the smallest doubt that if I really left her, definitely, she would commit suicide. Not with any ill-feeling towards me, but quite naturally, because she was unwilling to live without me. It is a curious feeling it gives one to know that. It can’t help meaning something to you.”

“But it’s loving that’s the important thing, not being loved. One’s not even grateful to the people who love one; if one doesn’t love them, they only bore one.”

“I have no experience of the plural,” he replied. “Mine is only in the singular.”

“Is she really an Imperial Princess?”

“No, that is a romantic exaggeration of the nuns. She belongs to one of the great families of the Manchus, but they have, of course, been ruined by the revolution. She is all the same a very great lady.”

He said it in a tone of pride, so that a smile flickered in Kitty’s eyes.

“Are you going to stay here for the rest of your life then?”

“In China? Yes. What would she do elsewhere? When I retire I shall take a little Chinese house in Peking and spend the rest of my days there.”

“Have you any children?”

“No.”

She looked at him curiously. It was strange that this little bald-headed man with his monkey face should have aroused in the alien woman so devastating a passion. She could not tell why the way he spoke of her, notwithstanding his casual manner and his flippant phrases, gave her the impression so strongly of the woman’s intense and unique devotion. It troubled her a little.

“It does seem a long way to Harrington Gardens,” she smiled.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like someone who’s lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don’t want to die, I want to live. I’m beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.”

Waddington looked at her reflectively. Her abstracted gaze rested on the smoothness of the river. Two little drops that flowed silently, silently towards the dark, eternal sea.

“May I come and see the Manchu lady?” asked Kitty, suddenly raising her head.

“She can’t speak a word of English.”

“You’ve been very kind to me, you’ve done a great deal for me, perhaps I could show her by my manner that I had a friendly feeling towards her.”

Waddington gave a thin, mocking little smile, but he answered with good humour.

“I will come and fetch you one day and she shall give you a cup of jasmine tea.”

She would not tell him that this story of an alien love had from the first moment strangely intrigued her fancy, and the Manchu Princess stood now as the symbol of something that vaguely, but insistently, beckoned to her. She pointed enigmatically to a mystic land of the spirit.

LV

But a day or two later Kitty made an unforeseen discovery.

She went to the convent as usual and set about her first work of seeing that the children were washed and dressed. Since the nuns held firmly that the night air was harmful, the atmosphere in the dormitory was close and fetid. After the freshness of the morning it always made Kitty a little uncomfortable and she hastened to open such windows as would. But to-day she felt on a sudden desperately sick and with her head swimming she stood at a window trying to compose herself. It had never been as bad as this before. Then nausea overwhelmed her and she vomited. She gave a cry so that the children were frightened, and the older girl who was helping her ran up and, seeing Kitty white and trembling, stopped short with an exclamation. Cholera! The thought flashed through Kitty’s mind and then a deathlike feeling came over her; she was seized with terror, she struggled for a moment against the night that seemed agonisingly to run through her veins; she felt horribly ill; and then darkness.

When she opened her eyes she did not at first know where she was. She seemed to be lying on the floor and, moving her head slightly, she thought that there was a pillow under it. She could not remember. The Mother Superior was kneeling by her side, holding smelling salts to her nose, and Sister St. Joseph stood looking at her. Then it came back. Cholera! She saw the consternation on the nuns’ faces. Sister St. Joseph looked huge and her outline was blurred. Once more terror overwhelmed her.

“Oh, Mother, Mother,” she sobbed. “Am I going to die? I don’t want to die.”

“Of course you’re not going to die,” said the Mother Superior.

She was quite composed and there was even amusement in her eyes.

“But it’s cholera. Where’s Walter? Has he been sent for? Oh, Mother, Mother.”

She burst into a flood of tears. The Mother Superior gave her hand and Kitty seized it as though it were a hold upon the life she feared to lose.

“Come, come, my dear child, you mustn’t be so silly. It’s not cholera or anything of the kind.”

“Where’s Walter?”

“Your husband is much too busy to be troubled. In five minutes you’ll be perfectly well.”

Kitty looked at her with staring, harassed eyes. Why did she take it so calmly? It was cruel.

“Keep perfectly quiet for a minute,” said the Mother Superior. “There is nothing to alarm yourself about.”

Kitty felt her heart beat madly. She had grown so used to the thought of cholera that it had ceased to seem possible that she could catch it. Oh, the fool she had been! She knew she was going to die. She was frightened. The girls brought in a long rattan chair and placed it by the window.

“Come, let us lift you,” said the Mother Superior. “You will be more comfortable on the chaise longue. Do you think you can stand?”

She put her hands under Kitty’s arms and Sister St. Joseph helped her to her feet. She sank exhausted into the chair.

“I had better shut the window,” said Sister St. Joseph. “The early morning air cannot be good for her.”

“No, no,” said Kitty. “Please leave it open.”

It gave her confidence to see the blue sky. She was shaken, but certainly she began to feel better. The two nuns looked at her for a moment in silence, and Sister St. Joseph said something to the Mother Superior which she could not understand. Then the Mother Superior sat on the side of the chair and took her hand.

“Listen, ma chère enfant...”

She asked her one or two questions. Kitty answered them without knowing what they meant. Her lips were trembling so that she could hardly frame the words.

“There is no doubt about it,” said Sister St. Joseph. “I am not one to be deceived in such a matter.”

She gave a little laugh in which Kitty seemed to discern a certain excitement and not a little affection. The Mother Superior, still holding Kitty’s hand, smiled with soft tenderness.

“Sister St. Joseph has more experience of these things than I have, dear child, and she said at once what was the matter with you. She was evidently quite right.”

“What do you mean?” asked Kitty anxiously.

“It is quite evident. Did the possibility of such a thing never occur to you? You are with child, my dear.”

The start that Kitty gave shook her from head to foot, and she put her feet to the ground as though to spring up.

“Lie still, lie still,” said the Mother Superior.

Kitty felt herself blush furiously and she put her hands to her breasts.

“It’s impossible. It isn’t true.”

“Qu’est ce qu’elle dit?” asked Sister St. Joseph.

The Mother Superior translated. Sister St. Joseph’s broad simple face, with its red cheeks, was beaming.

“No mistake is possible. I give you my word of honour.”

“How long have you been married, my child?” asked the Mother Superior. “Why, when my sister-in-law had been married as long as you she had already two babies.”

Kitty sank back into the chair. There was death in her heart.

“I’m so ashamed,” she whispered.

“Because you are going to have a baby? Why, what can be more natural?”

“Quelle joie pour le docteur,” said Sister St. Joseph.

“Yes, think what a happiness for your husband. He will be overwhelmed with joy. You have only to see him with babies, and the look on his face when he plays with them, to see how enchanted he will be to have one of his own.”

For a little while Kitty was silent. The two nuns looked at her with tender interest and the Mother Superior stroked her hand.

“It was silly of me not to have suspected it before,” said Kitty. “At all events I’m glad it’s not cholera. I feel very much better. I will get back to my work.”

“Not to-day, my dear child. You have had a shock, you had much better go home and rest yourself.”

“No, no, I would much rather stay and work.”

“I insist. What would our good doctor say if I let you be imprudent? Come to-morrow, if you like, or the day after, but to-day you must be quiet. I will send for a chair. Would you like me to let one of our young girls go with you?”

“Oh, no, I shall be all right alone.”

LVI

Kitty was lying on her bed and the shutters were closed. It was after luncheon and the servants slept. What she had learnt that morning (and now she was certain that it was true) filled her with consternation. Ever since she came home she had been trying to think; but her mind was a blank, and she could not collect her thoughts. Suddenly she heard a step, the feet were booted so that it could not be one of the boys; with a gasp of apprehension she realised that it could only be her husband. He was in the sitting-room and she heard herself called. She did not reply. There was a moment’s silence and then a knock on her door.

“Yes?”

“May I come in?”

Kitty rose from her bed and slipped into a dressing-gown.

“Yes.”

He entered. She was glad that the closed shutters shadowed her face.

“I hope I didn’t wake you. I knocked very, very gently.”

“I haven’t been asleep.”

He went to one of the windows and threw open the shutter. A flood of warm light streamed into the room.

“What is it?” she asked. “Why are you back so early?”

“The Sisters said that you weren’t very well. I thought I had better come and see what was the matter.”

A flash of anger passed through her.

“What would you have said if it had been cholera?”

“If it had been you certainly couldn’t have made your way home this morning.”

She went to the dressing-table and passed the comb through her shingled hair. She wanted to gain time. Then, sitting down, she lit a cigarette.

“I wasn’t very well this morning and the Mother Superior thought I’d better come back here. But I’m perfectly all right again. I shall go to the convent as usual to-morrow.”

“What was the matter with you?”

“Didn’t they tell you?”

“No. The Mother Superior said that you must tell me yourself.”

He did now what he did seldom; he looked her full in the face; his professional instincts were stronger than his personal. She hesitated. Then she forced herself to meet his eyes.

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.

She was accustomed to his habit of meeting with silence a statement which you would naturally expect to evoke an exclamation, but never had it seemed to her more devastating. He said nothing; he made no gesture; no movement on his face nor change of expression in his dark eyes indicated that he had heard. She felt suddenly inclined to cry. If a man loved his wife and his wife loved him, at such a moment they were drawn together by a poignant emotion. The silence was intolerable and she broke it.

“I don’t know why it never occurred to me before. It was stupid of me, but... what with one thing and another...”

“How long have you... when do you expect to be confined?”

The words seemed to issue from his lips with difficulty. She felt that his throat was as dry as hers. It was a nuisance that her lips trembled so when she spoke; if he was not of stone it must excite his pity.

“I suppose I’ve been like this between two and three months.”

“Am I the father?”

She gave a little gasp. There was just a shadow of a tremor in his voice; it was dreadful that cold self-control of his which made the smallest token of emotion so shattering. She did not know why she thought suddenly of an instrument she had been shown in Tching-Yen upon which a needle oscillated a little and she had been told that this represented an earthquake a thousand miles away in which perhaps a thousand persons had lost their lives. She looked at him. He was ghastly pale. She had seen that pallor on him once, twice before. He was looking down, a little sideways.

“Well?”

She clasped her hands. She knew that if she could say yes it would mean everything in the world to him. He would believe her, of course he would believe her, because he wanted to; and then he would forgive. She knew how deep was his tenderness and how ready he was, for all his shyness, to expend it. She knew that he was not vindictive; he would forgive her if she could but give him an excuse to, an excuse that touched his heart, and he would forgive completely. She could count on him never to throw the past in her teeth. Cruel he might be, cold and morbid, but he was neither mean nor petty. It would alter everything if she said yes.

And she had an urgent need for sympathy. The unexpected knowledge that she was with child had overwhelmed her with strange hopes and unforeseen desires. She felt weak, frightened a little, alone and very far from any friends. That morning, though she cared little for her mother, she had had a sudden craving to be with her. She needed help and consolation. She did not love Walter, she knew that she never could, but at this moment she longed with all her heart for him to take her in his arms so that she could lay her head on his breast; clinging to him she could have cried happily; she wanted him to kiss her and she wanted to twine her arms around his neck.

She began to weep. She had lied so much and she could lie so easily. What could a lie matter when it could only do good? A lie, a lie, what was a lie? It was so easy to say yes. She saw Walter’s eyes melt and his arms outstretched towards her. She couldn’t say it; she didn’t know why, she just couldn’t. All she had gone through during these bitter weeks, Charlie and his unkindness, the cholera and all these people dying, the nuns, oddly enough even that funny, drunken little Waddington, it all seemed to have changed her so that she did not know herself; though she was so deeply moved, some bystander in her soul seemed to watch her with terror and surprise. She had to tell the truth. It did not seem worth while to lie. Her thoughts wandered strangely: on a sudden she saw that dead beggar at the foot of the compound wall. Why should she think of him? She did not sob; the tears streamed down her face, quite easily, from wide eyes. At last she answered the question. He had asked her if he was the child’s father.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He gave the ghost of a chuckle. It made Kitty shudder.

“It’s a bit awkward, isn’t it?”

His answer was characteristic, it was exactly what she would have expected him to say, but it made her heart sink. She wondered if he realised how hard it had been for her to tell the truth (at the same moment she recognised that it had not been in the least hard, but inevitable) and if he gave her credit for it. Her answer, I don’t know, I don’t know, hammered away in her head. It was impossible now to take it back. She got her handkerchief from her bag and dried her eyes. They did not speak. There was a syphon on the table by her bed and he got her a glass of water. He brought it to her and held the glass while she drank. She noticed how thin his hand was, it was a fine hand, slender, with long fingers, but now it was nothing but skin and bone; it trembled a little: he could control his face, but his hand betrayed him.

“Don’t mind my crying,” she said. “It’s nothing really; it’s only that I can’t help the water running out of my eyes.”

She drank the water and he put the glass back. He sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. He gave a little sigh. Once or twice before she had heard him sigh like that and it always gave her a catch at the heart. Looking at him now, for he was staring with abstracted gaze out of the window, she was surprised that she had not noticed before how terribly thin he had grown during the last weeks. His temples were sunken and the bones of his face showed through the skin. His clothes hung on him loosely as though they had been made for a larger man. Through his sunburn his face had a greenish pallor. He looked exhausted. He was working too hard, sleeping little and eating nothing. In her own grief and perturbation she found room to pity him. It was cruel to think that she could do nothing for him.

He put his hand over his forehead, as though his head were aching, and she had a feeling that in his brain too those words hammered madly: I don’t know, I don’t know. It was strange that this moody, cold and shy man should have such a natural affection for very little babies; most men didn’t care much even for their own, but the nuns, touched and a little amused, had more than once spoken of it. If he felt like that about those funny little Chinese babies what would he have felt about his own? Kitty bit her lips in order to prevent herself from crying again.

He looked at his watch.

“I’m afraid I must go back to the city. I have a great deal to do to-day.... Shall you be all right?”

“Oh, yes. Don’t bother about me.”

“I think you’d better not wait for me this evening. I may be very late and I’ll get something to eat from Colonel Yü.”

“Very well.”

He rose.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t try to do anything to-day. You’d better take it easy. Is there anything you want before I go?”

“No, thanks. I shall be quite all right.”

He paused for an instant, as though he were undecided, and then, abruptly and without looking at her, took his hat and walked out of the room. She heard him go through the compound. She felt terribly alone. There was no need for self-restraint now and she gave herself up to a passion of tears.

LVII

The night was sultry and Kitty sat at the window looking at the fantastic roofs, dark against the starlight, of the Chinese temple, when at last Walter came in. Her eyes were heavy with weeping, but she was composed. Notwithstanding all there was to harass her she felt, perhaps only from exhaustion, strangely at peace.

“I thought you’d be already in bed,” said Walter as he came in.

“I wasn’t sleepy. I thought it cooler to sit up. Have you had any dinner?”

“All I want.”

He walked up and down the long room and she saw that he had something to say to her. She knew that he was embarrassed. Without concern she waited for him to summon up his resolution. He began abruptly.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me this afternoon. It seems to me that it would be better if you went away. I have spoken to Colonel Yü and he will give you an escort. You could take the amah with you. You will be quite safe.”

“Where is there for me to go?”

“You can go to your mother’s.”

“Do you think she would be pleased to see me?”

He paused for a moment, hesitating, as though for reflection.

“Then you can go to Tching-Yen.”

“What should I do there?”

“You will need a good deal of care and attention. I don’t think it’s fair to ask you to stay here.”

She could not prevent the smile, not only of bitterness but of frank amusement, that crossed her face. She gave him a glance and very nearly laughed.

“I don’t know why you should be so anxious about my health.”

He came over to the window and stood looking out at the night. There had never been so many stars in the unclouded sky.

“This isn’t the place for a woman in your condition.”

She looked at him, white in his thin clothes against the darkness; there was something sinister in his fine profile, and yet oddly enough at this moment it excited in her no fear.

“When you insisted on my coming here did you want it to kill me?” she asked suddenly.

He was so long answering that she thought he had refused to hear.

“At first.”

She gave a little shudder, for it was the first time he had admitted his intention. But she bore him no ill will for it. Her feeling surprised herself; there was a certain admiration in it and a faint amusement. She did not quite know why, but suddenly thinking of Charlie Townsend he seemed to her an abject fool.

“It was a terrible risk you were taking,” she answered. “With your sensitive conscience I wonder if you could ever have forgiven yourself if I had died.”

“Well, you haven’t. You’ve thrived on it.”

“I’ve never felt better in my life.”

She had an instinct to throw herself on the mercy of his humour. After all they had gone through, when they were living amid these scenes of horror and desolation, it seemed inept to attach importance to the ridiculous act of fornication. When death stood round the corner, taking lives like a gardener digging up potatoes, it was foolishness to care what dirty things this person or that did with his body. If she could only make him realise how little Charlie meant to her, so that now already she had difficulty in calling up his features to her imagination, and how entirely the love of him had passed out of her heart! Because she had no feeling for Townsend the various acts she had committed with him had lost their significance. She had regained her heart and what she had given of her body seemed not to matter a rap. She was inclined to say to Walter: “Look here, don’t you think we’ve been silly long enough? We’ve sulked with one another like children. Why can’t we kiss and be friends. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be friends just because we’re not lovers.”

He stood very still and the lamplight made the pallor of his impassive face startling. She did not trust him; if she said the wrong thing he would turn upon her with such an icy sternness. She knew by now his extreme sensitiveness, for which his acid irony was a protection, and how quickly he could close his heart if his feelings were hurt. She had a moment’s irritation at his stupidity. Surely what troubled him most was the wound to his vanity: she vaguely realised that this is the hardest of all wounds to heal. It was singular that men attached so much importance to their wives’ faithfulness; when first she had gone with Charlie she had expected to feel quite different, a changed woman; but she had seemed to herself exactly the same, she had experienced only well-being and a greater vitality. She wished now that she had been able to tell Walter that the child was his; the lie would have meant so little to her, and the assurance would have been so great a comfort to him. And after all it might not be a lie; it was funny, that something in her heart which had prevented her from giving herself the benefit of the doubt. How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feeling towards the child? Then Kitty’s thoughts wandered to the child which she herself would bear; she thought of it not with emotion nor with a passion of maternity, but with an idle curiosity.

“I daresay you’d like to think it over a little,” said Walter, breaking the long silence.

“Think what?”

He turned a little as if he were surprised.

“About when you want to go?”

“But I don’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“I like my work at the convent. I think I’m making myself useful. I should prefer to stay as long as you do.”

“I think I should tell you that in your present condition you are probably more liable to catch any infection that happens to be about.”

“I like the discreet way you put it,” she smiled ironically.

“You’re not staying for my sake?”

She hesitated. He little knew that now the strongest emotion he excited in her, and the most unexpected, was pity.

“No. You don’t love me. I often think I rather bore you.”

“I shouldn’t have thought you were the sort of person to put yourself out for a few stuffy nuns and a parcel of Chinese brats.”

Her lips outlined a smile.

“I think it’s rather unfair to despise me so much because you made such a mistake in your judgment of me. It’s not my fault that you were such an ass.”

“If you’re determined to stay you are of course at liberty to do so.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you the opportunity of being magnanimous.” She found it strangely hard to be quite serious with him. “As a matter of fact you’re quite right, it’s not only for the orphans that I’m staying: you see, I’m in the peculiar position that I haven’t got a soul in the world that I can go to. I know no one who wouldn’t think me a nuisance. I know no one who cares a row of pins if I’m alive or dead.”

He frowned. But he did not frown in anger.

“We have made a dreadful hash of things, haven’t we?” he said.

“Do you still want to divorce me? I don’t think I care any more.”

“You must know that by bringing you here I’ve condoned the offence.”

“I didn’t know. You see, I haven’t made a study of infidelity. What are we going to do then when we leave here? Are we going on living together?”

“Oh, don’t you think we can let the future take care of itself?”

There was the weariness of death in his voice.

LVIII

Two or three days later Waddington fetched Kitty from the convent (for her restlessness had induced her immediately to resume her work) and took her to drink the promised cup of tea with his mistress. Kitty had on more than one occasion dined at Waddington’s house. It was a square, white and pretentious building, such as the Customs build for their officials all over China; and the dining-room in which they ate, the drawing-room in which they sat, were furnished with prim and solid furniture. They had the appearance of being partly offices and partly hotel; there was nothing homelike in them and you understood that these houses were merely places of haphazard sojourn to their successive occupants. It would never have occurred to you that on an upper floor mystery and perhaps romance dwelt shrouded. They ascended a flight of stairs and Waddington opened a door. Kitty went into a large, bare room with white-washed walls on which hung scrolls in various calligraphies. At a square table, on a stiff armchair, both of blackwood and heavily carved, sat the Manchu. She rose as Kitty and Waddington entered, but made no step forward.

“Here she is,” said Waddington, and added something in Chinese.

Kitty shook hands with her. She was slim in her long embroidered gown and somewhat taller than Kitty, used to the Southern people, had expected. She wore a jacket of pale green silk with tight sleeves that came over her wrists and on her black hair, elaborately dressed, was the head-dress of the Manchu women. Her face was coated with powder and her cheeks from the eyes to the mouth heavily rouged; her plucked eyebrows were a thin dark line and her mouth was scarlet. From this mask her black, slightly slanting, large eyes burned like lakes of liquid jet. She seemed more like an idol than a woman. Her movements were slow and assured. Kitty had the impression that she was slightly shy but very curious. She nodded her head two or three times, looking at Kitty, while Waddington spoke of her. Kitty noticed her hands; they were preternaturally long, very slender, of the colour of ivory; and the exquisite nails were painted. Kitty thought she had never seen anything so lovely as those languid and elegant hands. They suggested the breeding of uncounted centuries.

She spoke a little, in a high voice, like the twittering of birds in an orchard, and Waddington, translating, told Kitty that she was glad to see her; how old was she and how many children had she got? They sat down on three straight chairs at the square table and a boy brought in bowls of tea, pale and scented with jasmine. The Manchu lady handed Kitty a green tin of Three Castles cigarettes. Beside the table and the chairs the room contained little furniture; there was a wide pallet bed on which was an embroidered head rest and two sandalwood chests.

“What does she do with herself all day long?” asked Kitty.

“She paints a little and sometimes she writes a poem. But she mostly sits. She smokes, but only in moderation, which is fortunate, since one of my duties is to prevent the traffic in opium.”

“Do you smoke?” asked Kitty.

“Seldom. To tell you the truth I much prefer whisky.”

There was in the room a faintly acrid smell; it was not unpleasant, but peculiar and exotic.

“Tell her that I am sorry I cannot talk to her. I am sure we have many things to say to one another.”

When this was translated to the Manchu she gave Kitty a quick glance in which there was the hint of a smile. She was impressive as she sat, without embarrassment, in her beautiful clothes; and from the painted face the eyes looked out wary, self-possessed and unfathomable. She was unreal, like a picture, and yet had an elegance which made Kitty feel all thumbs. Kitty had never paid anything but passing and somewhat contemptuous attention to the China in which fate had thrown her. It was not done in her set. Now she seemed on a sudden to have an inkling of something remote and mysterious. Here was the East, immemorial, dark and inscrutable. The beliefs and the ideals of the West seemed crude beside ideals and beliefs of which in this exquisite creature she seemed to catch a fugitive glimpse. Here was a different life, lived on a different plane. Kitty felt strangely that the sight of this idol, with her painted face and slanting, wary eyes, made the efforts and the pains of the everyday world she knew slightly absurd. That coloured mask seemed to hide the secret of an abundant, profound and significant experience: those long, delicate hands with their tapering fingers held the key of riddles undivined.

“What does she think about all day long?” asked Kitty.

“Nothing,” smiled Waddington.

“She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”

Waddington, smiling, translated the question.

“She says I’m good.”

“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

The Manchu laughed but once. This was when Kitty, for something to say, expressed admiration of a jade bracelet she wore. She took it off and Kitty, trying to put it on, found, though her hands were small enough, that it would not pass over her knuckles. Then the Manchu burst into childlike laughter. She said something to Waddington and called for an amah. She gave her an instruction and the amah in a moment brought in a pair of very beautiful Manchu shoes.

“She wants to give you these if you can wear them,” said Waddington. “You’ll find they make quite good bedroom slippers.”

“They fit me perfectly,” said Kitty, not without satisfaction.

But she noticed a roguish smile on Waddington’s face.

“Are they too big for her?” she asked quickly.

“Miles.”

Kitty laughed and when Waddington translated, the Manchu and the amah laughed also.

When Kitty and Waddington, a little later, were walking up the hill together, she turned to him with a friendly smile.

“You did not tell me that you had a great affection for her.”

“What makes you think I have?”

“I saw it in your eyes. It’s strange, it must be like loving a phantom or a dream. Men are incalculable; I thought you were like everybody else and now I feel that I don’t know the first thing about you.”

As they reached the bungalow he asked her abruptly:

“Why did you want to see her?”

Kitty hesitated for a moment before answering.

“I’m looking for something and I don’t quite know what it is. But I know that it’s very important for me to know it, and if I did it would make all the difference. Perhaps the nuns know it; when I’m with them I feel that they hold a secret which they will not share with me. I don’t know why it came into my head that if I saw this Manchu woman I should have an inkling of what I am looking for. Perhaps she would tell me if she could.”

“What makes you think she knows it?”

Kitty gave him a sidelong glance, but did not answer. Instead she asked him a question.

“Do you know it?”

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“Tao. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whisky and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.”

LIX

Kitty fell again into the comfortable routine of her work and though in the early morning feeling far from well she had spirit enough not to let it discompose her. She was astonished at the interest the nuns took in her: sisters who, when she saw them in a corridor, had done no more than bid her good morning now on a flimsy pretext came into the room in which she was occupied and looked at her, chatting a little, with a sweet and childlike excitement. Sister St. Joseph told her with a repetition which was sometimes tedious how she had been saying to herself for days past: “Now, I wonder,” or: “I shouldn’t be surprised”; and then, when Kitty fainted: “There can be no doubt, it jumps to the eyes.” She told Kitty long stories of her sister-in-law’s confinements, which but for Kitty’s quick sense of humour would have been not a little alarming. Sister St. Joseph combined in a pleasant fashion the realistic outlook of her upbringing (a river wound through the meadows of her father’s farm and the poplars that stood on its bank trembled in the faintest breeze) with a charming intimacy with religious things. One day, firmly convinced that a heretic could know nothing of such matters, she told Kitty of the Annunciation.

“I can never read those lines in the Holy Writ without weeping,” she said. “I do not know why, but it gives me such a funny feeling.”

And then in French, in words that to Kitty sounded unfamiliar and in their precision a trifle cold, she quoted:

“And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.”

The mystery of birth blew through the convent like a little fitful wind playing among the white blossoms of an orchard. The thought that Kitty was with child disturbed and excited those sterile women. She frightened them a little now and fascinated them. They looked upon the physical side of her condition with robust common sense, for they were the daughters of peasants and fishermen; but in their childlike hearts was awe. They were troubled by the thought of her burden and yet happy and strangely exalted. Sister St. Joseph told her that they all prayed for her, and Sister St. Martin had said what a pity it was she was not a Catholic; but the Mother Superior had reproved her; she said that it was possible to be a good woman — une brave femme, she put it — even though one was Protestant and le Bon Dieu would in some way or other arrange all that.

Kitty was both touched and diverted by the interest she aroused, but surprised beyond measure when she found that even the Mother Superior, so austere in her saintliness, treated her with a new complaisance. She had always been kind to Kitty, but in a remote fashion; now she used her with a tenderness in which there was something maternal. Her voice had in it a new and gentle note and in her eyes was a sudden playfulness as though Kitty were a child who had done a clever and amusing thing. It was oddly moving. Her soul was like a calm, grey sea rolling majestically, awe-inspiring in its sombre greatness, and then suddenly a ray of sunshine made it alert, friendly and gay. Often now in the evening she would come and sit with Kitty.

“I must take care that you do not tire yourself, mon enfant,” she said, making a transparent excuse to herself, “or Dr. Fane will never forgive me. Oh, this British self-control! There he is delighted beyond measure and when you speak to him of it he becomes quite pale.”

She took Kitty’s hand and patted it affectionately.

“Dr. Fane told me that he wished you to go away, but you would not because you could not bear to leave us. That was kind of you, my dear child, and I want you to know that we appreciate the help you have been to us. But I think that you did not want to leave him either, and that is better, for your place is by his side, and he needs you. Ah, I do not know what we should have done without that admirable man.”

“I am glad to think that he has been able to do something for you,” said Kitty.

“You must love him with all your heart, my dear. He is a saint.”

Kitty smiled and in her heart sighed. There was only one thing she could do for Walter now and that she could not think how to. She wanted him to forgive her, not for her sake any more, but for his own; for she felt that this alone could give him peace of mind. It was useless to ask him for his forgiveness, and if he had a suspicion that she desired it for his good rather than hers his stubborn vanity would make him refuse at all costs (it was curious that his vanity now did not irritate her, it seemed natural and only made her sorrier for him); and the only chance was that some unexpected occurrence might throw him off his guard. She had an idea that he would welcome an uprush of emotion which would liberate him from this nightmare of resentment, but that, in his pathetic folly, he would fight when it came with all his might against it.

Was it not pitiful that men, tarrying so short a space in a world where there was so much pain, should thus torture themselves?

LX

Though the Mother Superior talked with Kitty not more than three or four times and once or twice but ten minutes the impression she made upon Kitty was profound. Her character was like a country which on first acquaintance seems grand, but inhospitable; but in which presently you discover smiling little villages among fruit trees in the folds of the majestic mountains, and pleasant ambling rivers that flow kindly through lush meadows. But these comfortable scenes, though they surprise and even reassure you, are not enough to make you feel at home in the land of tawny heights and windswept spaces. It would have been impossible to become intimate with the Mother Superior; she had that something impersonal about her which Kitty had felt with the other nuns, even with the good-humoured, chatty Sister St. Joseph, but with her it was a barrier which was almost palpable. It gave you quite a curious sensation, chilling but awe-inspiring, that she could walk on the same earth as you, attend to mundane affairs, and yet live so obviously upon a plane you could not reach. She once said to Kitty:

“It is not enough that a religious should be continually in prayer with Jesus; she should be herself a prayer.”

Though her conversation was interwoven with her religion, Kitty felt that this was natural to her and that no effort was made to influence the heretic. It seemed strange to her that the Mother Superior, with her deep sense of charity, should be content to leave Kitty in a condition of what must seem to her sinful ignorance.

One evening the two of them were sitting together. The days were shortening now and the mellow light of the evening was agreeable and a little melancholy. The Mother Superior looked very tired. Her tragic face was drawn and white; her fine dark eyes had lost their fire. Her fatigue perhaps urged her to a rare mood of confidence.

“This is a memorable day for me, my child,” she said, breaking from a long reverie, “for this is the anniversary of the day on which I finally determined to enter religion. For two years I had been thinking of it, but I had suffered as it were a fear of this calling, for I dreaded that I might be recaptured by the spirit of the world. But that morning when I communicated I made the vow that I would before nightfall announce my wish to my dear mother. After I had received the Holy Communion I asked Our Lord to give me peace of mind: Thou shalt have it only, the answer seemed to come to me, when thou hast ceased to desire it.”

The Mother Superior seemed to lose herself in thoughts of the past.

“That day, one of our friends, Madame de Viernot, had left for the Carmel without telling any of her relatives. She knew that they were opposed to her step, but she was a widow and thought that as such she had the right to do as she chose. One of my cousins had gone to bid farewell to the dear fugitive and did not come back till the evening. She was much moved. I had not spoken to my mother, I trembled at the thought of telling her what I had in mind, and yet I wished to keep the resolution I had made at Holy Communion. I asked my cousin all manner of questions. My mother, who appeared to be absorbed in her tapestry, lost no word. While I talked I said to myself: If I want to speak to-day I have not a minute to lose.

“It is strange how vividly I remember the scene. We were sitting round the table, a round table covered with a red cloth, and we worked by the light of a lamp with a green shade. My two cousins were staying with us and we were all working at tapestries to re-cover the chairs in the drawing-room. Imagine, they had not been recovered since the days of Louis XIV, when they were bought, and they were so shabby and faded, my mother said it was a disgrace.

“I tried to form the words, but my lips would not move; and then, suddenly, after a few minutes of silence my mother said to me: ‘I really cannot understand the conduct of your friend. I do not like this leaving without a word all those to whom she is so dear. The gesture is theatrical and offends my taste. A well-bred woman does nothing which shall make people talk of her. I hope that if ever you caused us the great sorrow of leaving us you would not take flight as though you were committing a crime.’

“It was the moment to speak, but such was my weakness that I could only say: ‘Ah, set your mind at rest, maman, I should not have the strength.’

“My mother made no answer and I repented because I had not dared to explain myself. I seemed to hear the word of Our Lord to St. Peter: ‘Peter, lovest thou me?’ Oh, what weakness, what ingratitude was mine! I loved my comfort, the manner of my life, my family and my diversions. I was lost in these bitter thoughts when a little later, as though the conversation had not been interrupted, my mother said to me: ‘Still, my Odette, I do not think that you will die without having done something that will endure.’

“I was still lost in my anxiety and my reflections, while my cousins, never knowing the beating of my heart, worked quietly, when suddenly my mother, letting her tapestry fall and looking at me attentively, said: ‘Ah, my dear child, I am very sure that you will end by becoming a religious.’

“‘Are you speaking seriously, my good mother,’ I answered. ‘You are laying bare the innermost thought and desire of my heart.’

“‘Mais oui,’ cried my cousins without giving me time to finish, ‘For two years Odette has thought of nothing else. But you will not give your permission, ma tante, you must not give your permission.’

“‘By what right, my dear children, should we refuse it,’ said my mother, ‘if it is the Will of God?’

“My cousins then, wishing to make a jest of the conversation, asked me what I intended to do with the trifles that belonged to me and quarrelled gaily about which should take possession of this and which of that. But these first moments of gaiety lasted a very little while and we began to weep. Then we heard my father come up the stairs.”

The Mother Superior paused for a moment and sighed.

“It was very hard for my father. I was his only daughter and men often have a deeper feeling for their daughters than they ever have for their sons.”

“It is a great misfortune to have a heart,” said Kitty, with a smile.

“It is a great good fortune to consecrate that heart to the love of Jesus Christ.”

At that moment a little girl came up to the Mother Superior and confident in her interest showed her a fantastic toy that she had somehow got hold of. The Mother Superior put her beautiful, delicate hand round the child’s shoulder and the child nestled up to her. It intrigued Kitty to observe how sweet her smile was and yet how impersonal.

“It is wonderful to see the adoration that all your orphans have for you, Mother,” she said. “I think I should be very proud if I could excite so great a devotion.”

The Mother Superior gave once more her aloof and yet beautiful smile.

“There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.”

LXI

Walter did not come back to dinner that evening. Kitty waited for him a little, for when he was detained in the city he always managed to send her word, but at last she sat down. She made no more than a pretence of eating the many courses which the Chinese cook, with his regard for propriety notwithstanding pestilence and the difficulty of provisioning, invariably set before her; and then, sinking into the long rattan chair by the open window, surrendered herself to the beauty of the starry night. The silence rested her.

She did not try to read. Her thoughts floated upon the surface of her mind like little white clouds reflected on a still lake. She was too tired to seize upon one, follow it up and absorb herself in its attendant train. She wondered vaguely what there was for her in the various impressions which her conversations with the nuns had left upon her. It was singular that, though their way of life so profoundly moved her, the faith which occasioned it left her untouched. She could not envisage the possibility that she might at any time be captured by the ardour of belief. She gave a little sigh: perhaps it would make everything easier if that great white light should illuminate her soul. Once or twice she had had the desire to tell the Mother Superior of her unhappiness and its cause; but she dared not: she could not bear that this austere woman should think ill of her. To her what she had done would naturally seem a grievous sin. The odd thing was that she herself could not regard it as wicked so much as stupid and ugly.

Perhaps it was due to an obtuseness in herself that she looked upon her connection with Townsend as regrettable and shocking even, but to be forgotten rather than to be repented of. It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it. She shuddered as she thought of Charlie with his large frame too well covered, the vagueness of his jaw and the way he had of standing with his chest thrown out so that he might not seem to have a paunch. His sanguine temperament showed itself in the little red veins which soon would form a network on his ruddy cheeks. She had liked his bushy eyebrows: there was to her in them now something animal and repulsive.

And the future? It was curious how indifferent it left her; she could not see into it at all. Perhaps she would die when her baby was born. Her sister Doris had always been much stronger than she, and Doris had nearly died. (She had done her duty and produced an heir to the new baronetcy; Kitty smiled as she thought of her mother’s satisfaction.) If the future was so vague it meant perhaps that she was destined never to see it. Walter would probably ask her mother to take care of the child — if the child survived; and she knew him well enough to be sure that, however uncertain of his paternity, he would treat it with kindness. Walter could be trusted under any circumstances to behave admirably. It was a pity that with his great qualities, his unselfishness and honour, his intelligence and sensibility, he should be so unlovable. She was not in the least frightened of him now, but sorry for him, and at the same time she could not help thinking him slightly absurd. The depth of his emotion made him vulnerable and she had a feeling that somehow and at some time she so could work upon it as to induce him to forgive her. The thought haunted her now that in thus giving him peace of mind she would make the only possible amends for the anguish she had caused him. It was a pity he had so little sense of humour: she could see them both, some day, laughing together at the way they had tormented themselves.

She was tired. She took the lamp into her room and undressed. She went to bed and presently fell asleep.

LXII

But she was awakened by a loud knocking. At first, since it was interwoven with the dream from which she was roused, she could not attach the sound to reality. The knocking went on and she was conscious that it must be at the gateway of the compound. It was quite dark. She had a watch with phosphorised hands and saw that it was half-past two. It must be Walter coming back — how late he was — and he could not awake the boy. The knocking went on, louder and louder, and in the silence of the night it was really not a little alarming. The knocking stopped and she heard the withdrawing of the heavy bolt. Walter had never come back so late. Poor thing, he must be tired out! She hoped he would have the sense to go straight to bed instead of working as usual in that laboratory of his.

There was a sound of voices, and people came into the compound. That was strange, for Walter coming home late, in order not to disturb her, took pains to be quiet. Two or three persons ran swiftly up the wooden steps and came into the room next door. Kitty was a little frightened. At the back of her mind was always the fear of an anti-foreign riot. Had something happened? Her heart began to beat quickly. But before she had time to put her vague apprehension into shape some one walked across the room and knocked at her door.

“Mrs. Fane.”

She recognised Waddington’s voice.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Will you get up at once. I have something to say to you.”

She rose and put on a dressing-gown. She unlocked the door and opened it. Her glance took in Waddington in a pair of Chinese trousers and a pongee coat, the house-boy holding a hurricane lamp, and a little further back three Chinese soldiers in khaki. She started as she saw the consternation on Waddington’s face; his head was tousled as though he had just jumped out of bed.

“What is the matter?” she gasped.

“You must keep calm. There’s not a moment to lose. Put on your clothes at once and come with me.”

“But what is it? Has something happened in the city?”

The sight of the soldiers suggested to her at once that there had been an outbreak and they were come to protect her.

“Your husband’s been taken ill. We want you to come at once.”

“Walter?” she cried.

“You mustn’t be upset. I don’t exactly know what’s the matter. Colonel Yü sent this officer to me and asked me to bring you to the Yamen at once.”

Kitty stared at him for a moment, she felt a sudden cold in her heart, and then she turned.

“I shall be ready in two minutes.”

“I came just as I was,” he answered. “I was asleep, I just put on a coat and some shoes.”

She did not hear what he said. She dressed by the light of the stars, taking the first things that came to hand; her fingers on a sudden were so clumsy that it seemed to take her an age to find the little clasps that closed her dress. She put round her shoulders the Cantonese shawl she had worn in the evening.

“I haven’t put a hat on. There’s no need, is there?”

“No.”

The boy held the lantern in front of them and they hurried down the steps and out of the compound gate.

“Take care you don’t fall,” said Waddington. “You’d better hang on to my arm.”

The soldiers followed immediately behind them.

“Colonel Yü has sent chairs. They’re waiting on the other side of the river.”

They walked quickly down the hill. Kitty could not bring herself to utter the question that trembled so horribly on her lips. She was mortally afraid of the answer. They came to the bank and there, with a thread of light at the bow, a sampan was waiting for them.

“Is it cholera?” she said then.

“I’m afraid so.”

She gave a little cry and stopped short.

“I think you ought to come as quickly as you can.”

He gave her his hand to help her into the boat. The passage was short and the river almost stagnant; they stood in a bunch at the bow, while a woman with a child tied on her hip with one oar impelled the sampan across.

“He was taken ill this afternoon, the afternoon of yesterday that is,” said Waddington.

“Why wasn’t I sent for at once?”

Although there was no reason for it they spoke in whispers. In the darkness Kitty could only feel how intense was her companion’s anxiety.

“Colonel Yü wanted to, but he wouldn’t let him. Colonel Yü has been with him all the time.”

“He ought to have sent for me all the same. It’s heartless.”

“Your husband knew that you had never seen anyone with cholera. It’s a terrible and revolting sight. He didn’t want you to see it.”

“After all he is my husband,” she said in a choking voice.

Waddington made no reply.

“Why am I allowed to come now?”

Waddington put his hand on her arm.

“My dear, you must be very brave. You must be prepared for the worst.”

She gave a wail of anguish and turned away a little, for she saw that the three Chinese soldiers were looking at her. She had a sudden strange glimpse of the whites of their eyes.

“Is he dying?”

“I only know the message Colonel Yü gave to this officer who came and fetched me. As far as I can judge collapse has set in.”

“Is there no hope at all?”

“I’m dreadfully sorry, I’m afraid that if we don’t get there quickly we shan’t find him alive.”

She shuddered. The tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“You see, he’s been overworking, he has no powers of resistance.”

She withdrew from the pressure of his arm with a gesture of irritation. It exasperated her that he should talk in that low, anguished voice.

They reached the side and two men, Chinese coolies, standing on the bank helped her to step on shore. The chairs were waiting. As she got into hers Waddington said to her:

“Try and keep a tight hold on your nerves. You’ll want all your self-control.”

“Tell the bearers to make haste.”

“They have orders to go as fast as they can.”

The officer, already in his chair, passed by and as he passed called out to Kitty’s bearers. They raised the chair smartly, arranged the poles on their shoulders, and at a swift pace set off. Waddington followed close behind. They took the hill at a run, a man with a lantern going before each chair, and at the water-gate the gate-keeper was standing with a torch. The officer shouted to him as they approached and he flung open one side of the gate to let them through. He uttered some sort of interjection as they passed and the bearers called back. In the dead of the night those guttural sounds in a strange language were mysterious and alarming. They slithered up the wet and slippery cobbles of the alley and one of the officer’s bearers stumbled. Kitty heard the officer’s voice raised in anger, the shrill retort of the bearer, and then the chair in front hurried on again. The streets were narrow and tortuous. Here in the city was deep night. It was a city of the dead. They hastened along a narrow lane, turned a corner, and then at a run took a flight of steps; the bearers were beginning to blow hard; they walked with long, rapid strides, in silence; one took out a ragged handkerchief and as he walked wiped from his forehead the sweat that ran down into his eyes; they wound this way and that so that it might have been a maze through which they sped; in the shadow of the shuttered shops sometimes a form seemed to be lying, but you did not know whether it was a man who slept to awake at dawn or a man who slept to awake never; the narrow streets were ghostly in their silent emptiness and when on a sudden a dog barked loudly it sent a shock of terror through Kitty’s tortured nerves. She did not know where they went. The way seemed endless. Could they not go faster? Faster. Faster. The time was going and any moment it might be too late.

LXIII

Suddenly, walking along a blank long wall they came to a gateway flanked by sentry boxes, and the bearers set down the chairs. Waddington hurried up to Kitty. She had already jumped out. The officer knocked loudly on the door and shouted. A postern was opened and they passed into a courtyard. It was large and square. Huddled against the walls, under the eaves of the overhanging roofs, soldiers wrapped in their blankets were lying in huddled groups. They stopped for a moment while the officer spoke to a man who might have been a sergeant on guard. He turned and said something to Waddington.

“He’s still alive,” said Waddington in a low voice. “Take care how you walk.”

Still preceded by the men with lanterns they made their way across the yard, up some steps, through a great doorway and then down into another wide court. On one side of this was a long chamber with lights in it; the lights within shining through the rice paper silhouetted the elaborate pattern of the lattice. The lantern-bearers led them across the yard towards this room and at the door the officer knocked. It was opened immediately and the officer with a glance at Kitty stepped back.

“Will you walk in,” said Waddington.

It was a long, low room and the smoky lamps that lit it made the gloom ominous. Three or four orderlies stood about. On a pallet against the wall opposite the door a man was lying huddled under a blanket. An officer was standing motionless at the foot.

Kitty hurried up and leaned over the pallet. Walter lay with his eyes closed and in that sombre light his face had the greyness of death. He was horribly still.

“Walter, Walter,” she gasped, in a low, terrified tone.

There was a slight movement in the body, or the shadow of a movement; it was so slight it was like a breath of air which you cannot feel and yet for an instant ruffles the surface of still water.

“Walter, Walter, speak to me.”

The eyes were opened slowly, as though it were an infinite effort to raise those heavy lids, but he did not look, he stared at the wall a few inches from his face. He spoke; his voice, low and weak, had the hint of a smile in it.

“This is a pretty kettle of fish,” he said.

Kitty dared not breathe. He made no further sound, no beginning of a gesture, but his eyes, those dark, cold eyes of his (seeing now what mysteries?) stared at the white-washed wall. Kitty raised herself to her feet. With haggard gaze she faced the man who stood there.

“Surely something can be done. You’re not going to stand there and do nothing?”

She clasped her hands. Waddington spoke to the officer who stood at the end of the bed.

“I’m afraid they’ve done everything that was possible. The regimental surgeon has been treating him. Your husband has trained him and he’s done all that your husband could do himself.”

“Is that the surgeon?”

“No, that is Colonel Yü. He’s never left your husband’s side.”

Distracted, Kitty gave him a glance. He was a tallish man, but stockily built, and he seemed ill at ease in his khaki uniform. He was looking at Walter and she saw that his eyes were wet with tears. It gave her a pang. Why should that man with his yellow, flat face have tears in his eyes? It exasperated her.

“It’s awful to be able to do nothing.”

“At least he’s not in pain any more,” said Waddington.

She leaned once more over her husband. Those ghastly eyes of his still stared vacantly in front of him. She could not tell if he saw with them. She did not know whether he had heard what was said. She put her lips close to his ears.

“Walter, isn’t there something we can do?”

She thought that there must be some drug they could give him which would stay the dreadful ebbing of his life. Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the dimness she saw with horror that his face had fallen. She would hardly have recognised him. It was unthinkable that in a few short hours he should look like another man; he hardly looked like a man at all; he looked like death.

She thought that he was making an effort to speak. She put her ear close.

“Don’t fuss. I’ve had a rough passage, but I’m all right now.”

Kitty waited for a moment, but he was silent. His immobility rent her heart with anguish; it was terrifying that he should lie so still. He seemed prepared already for the stillness of the grave. Some one, the surgeon or a dresser, came forward and with a gesture motioned her aside; he leaned over the dying man and with a dirty rag wet his lips. Kitty stood up once more and turned to Waddington despairingly.

“Is there no hope at all?” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“How much longer can he live?”

“No one can tell. An hour perhaps.”

Kitty looked round the bare chamber and her eyes rested for an instant on the substantial form of Colonel Yü.

“Can I be left alone with him for a little while?” she asked. “Only for a minute.”

“Certainly, if you wish it.”

Waddington stepped over to the Colonel and spoke to him. The Colonel gave a little bow and then in a low tone an order.

“We shall wait on the steps,” said Waddington as they trooped out. “You have only to call.”

Now that the incredible had overwhelmed her consciousness, like a drug coursing through her veins, and she realised that Walter was going to die she had but one thought, and that was to make his end easier for him by dragging from his soul the rancour which poisoned it. If he could die at peace with her it seemed to her that he would die at peace with himself. She thought now not of herself at all but only of him.

“Walter, I beseech you to forgive me,” she said, leaning over him. For fear that he could not bear the pressure she took care not to touch him. “I’m so desperately sorry for the wrong I did you. I so bitterly regret it.”

He said nothing. He did not seem to hear. She was obliged to insist. It seemed to her strangely that his soul was a fluttering moth and its wings were heavy with hatred.

“Darling.”

A shadow passed over his wan and sunken face. It was less than a movement, and yet it gave all the effect of a terrifying convulsion. She had never used that word to him before. Perhaps in his dying brain there passed the thought, confused and difficulty grasped, that he had only heard her use it, a commonplace of her vocabulary, to dogs and babies and motor-cars. Then something horrible occurred. She clenched her hands, trying with all her might to control herself, for she saw two tears run slowly down his wasted cheeks.

“Oh, my precious, my dear, if you ever loved me — I know you loved me and I was hateful — I beg you to forgive me. I’ve no chance now to show my repentance. Have mercy on me. I beseech you to forgive.”

She stopped. She looked at him, all breathless, waiting passionately for a reply. She saw that he tried to speak. Her heart gave a great bound. It seemed to her that it would be in a manner a reparation for the suffering she had caused him if at this last moment she could effect his deliverance from that load of bitterness. His lips moved. He did not look at her. His eyes stared unseeing at the white-washed wall. She leaned over him so that she might hear. But he spoke quite clearly.

“The dog it was that died.”

She stayed as still as though she were turned to stone. She could not understand and gazed at him in terrified perplexity. It was meaningless. Delirium. He had not understood a word she said.

It was impossible to be so still and yet to live. She stared and stared. His eyes were open. She could not tell if he breathed. She began to grow frightened.

“Walter,” she whispered. “Walter.”

At last, suddenly, she raised herself. A sudden fear seized her. She turned and went to the door.

“Will you come, please. He doesn’t seem to...”

They stepped in. The little Chinese surgeon went up to the bed. He had an electric torch in his hand and he lit it and looked at Walter’s eyes. Then he closed them. He said something in Chinese. Waddington put his arm round Kitty.

“I’m afraid he’s dead.”

Kitty gave a deep sigh. A few tears fell from her eyes. She felt dazed rather than overcome. The Chinese stood about, round the bed, helplessly, as though they did not quite know what to do next. Waddington was silent. In a minute the Chinese began to speak in a low tone among themselves.

“You’d better let me take you back to the bungalow,” said Waddington. “He’ll be brought there.”

Kitty passed her hand wearily across her forehead. She went up to the pallet bed and leaned over it. She kissed Walter gently on the lips. She was not crying now.

“I’m sorry to give you so much trouble.”

The officers saluted as she passed and she gravely bowed. They walked back across the courtyard and got into their chairs. She saw Waddington light a cigarette. A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of man.

LXIV

Dawn was breaking now, and here and there a Chinaman was taking down the shutters of his shop. In its dark recesses, by the light of a taper, a woman was washing her hands and face. In a tea-house at a corner a group of men were eating an early meal. The grey, cold light of the rising day sidled along the narrow lanes like a thief. There was a pale mist on the river and the masts of the crowded junks loomed through it like the lances of a phantom army. It was chilly as they crossed and Kitty huddled herself up in her gay and coloured shawl. They walked up the hill and they were above the mist. The sun shone from an unclouded sky. It shone as though this were a day like another and nothing had happened to distinguish it from its fellows.

“Wouldn’t you like to lie down?” said Waddington when they entered the bungalow.

“No. I’ll sit at the window.”

She had sat at the window so often and so long during the weeks that had passed and her eyes now were so familiar with the fantastic, garish, beautiful and mysterious temple on its great bastion that it rested her spirit. It was so unreal, even in the crude light of midday, that it withdrew her from the reality of life.

“I’ll get the boy to make you some tea. I’m afraid it will be necessary to bury him this morning. I’ll make all arrangements.”

“Thank you.”

LXV

They buried him three hours later. It seemed horrible to Kitty that he must be put into a Chinese coffin, as though in so strange a bed he must rest uneasily, but there was no help for it. The nuns, learning of Walter’s death as they learned everything that happened in the city, sent by a messenger a cross of dahlias, stiff and formal, but made as though by the accustomed hands of a florist; and the cross, alone on the Chinese coffin, looked grotesque and out of place. When all was ready they had to wait for Colonel Yü who had sent to Waddington to say that he desired to attend the funeral. He came accompanied by an A.D.C. They walked up the hill, the coffin borne by half a dozen coolies, to a little plot of land where lay buried the missionary whose place Walter had taken. Waddington had found among the missionary’s effects an English prayer-book and in a low voice, with an embarrassment that was unusual to him, read the burial service. Perhaps, reciting those solemn but terrible words, the thought hovered in his mind that if he in his turn fell a victim to the pestilence there would be no one now to say them over him. The coffin was lowered into the grave and the grave-diggers began to throw in the earth.

Colonel Yü, who had stood with bared head by the grave-side, put on his hat, saluted Kitty gravely, said a word or two to Waddington and followed by his A.D.C. walked away. The coolies, curious to watch a Christian burial, had lingered and now in a straggling group, their yokes trailing in their hands, sauntered off. Kitty and Waddington waited till the grave was filled and then placed on the mound, smelling of fresh earth, the nuns’ prim dahlias. She had not wept, but when the first shovelful of earth rattled on the coffin she felt a dreadful pang at her heart.

She saw that Waddington was waiting for her to come away.

“Are you in a hurry?” she asked. “I don’t want to go back to the bungalow just yet.”

“I have nothing to do. I am entirely in your hands.”

LXVI

They sauntered along the causeway till they came to the top of the hill on which stood that archway, the memorial to a virtuous widow, which had occupied so large a part of Kitty’s impression of the place. It was a symbol, but of what she scarcely knew; she could not tell why it bore a note of so sardonic irony.

“Shall we sit down a little? We haven’t sat here for ages.” The plain was spread before her widely; it was tranquil and serene in the morning light. “It’s only a few weeks that I’ve been here and it seems a lifetime.”

He did not answer and for a while she allowed her thoughts to wander. She gave a sigh.

“Do you think that the soul is immortal?” she asked.

He did not seem surprised at the question.

“How should I know?”

“Just now, when they’d washed Walter, before they put him into the coffin I looked at him. He looked very young. Too young to die. Do you remember that beggar that we saw the first time you took me for a walk? I was frightened not because he was dead, but because he looked as though he’d never been a human being. He was just a dead animal. And now again, with Walter, it looked so like a machine that has run down. That’s what is so frightening. And if it is only a machine how futile is all this suffering and the heart pains and the misery.”

He did not answer, but his eyes travelled over the landscape at their feet. The wide expanse on that gay and sunny morning filled the heart with exultation. The trim little rice fields stretched as far as the eye could see and in many of them the blue-clad peasants with their buffaloes were working industriously. It was a peaceful and a happy scene. Kitty broke the silence.

“I can’t tell you how deeply moved I’ve been by all I’ve seen at the convent. They’re wonderful, those nuns, they make me feel utterly worthless. They give up everything, their home, their country, love, children, freedom; and all the little things which I sometimes think must be harder still to give up, flowers and green fields, going for a walk on an autumn day, books and music, comfort, everything they give up, everything. And they do it so that they may devote themselves to a life of sacrifice and poverty, obedience, killing work and prayer. To all of them this world is really and truly a place of exile. Life is a cross which they willingly bear, but in their hearts all the time is the desire — oh, it’s so much stronger than desire, it’s a longing, an eager, passionate longing for the death which shall lead them to life everlasting.”

Kitty clasped her hands and looked at him with anguish.

“Well?”

“Supposing there is no life everlasting? Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They’ve given up all for nothing. They’ve been cheated. They’re dupes.”

Waddington reflected for a little while.

“I wonder. I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

Kitty sighed. What he said seemed hard. She wanted more.

“Have you ever been to a symphony concert?” he continued.

“Yes,” she smiled. “I know nothing of music, but I’m rather fond of it.”

“Each member of the orchestra plays his own little instrument, and what do you think he knows of the complicated harmonies which unroll themselves on the indifferent air? He is concerned only with his own small share. But he knows that the symphony is lovely, and though there’s none to hear it, it is lovely still, and he is content to play his part.”

“You spoke of Tao the other day,” said Kitty, after a pause. “Tell me what it is.”

Waddington gave her a little look, hesitated an instant, and then with a faint smile on his comic face answered:

“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring, all things conform to it, and to it at last all things return. It is a square without angles, a sound which ears cannot hear, and an image without form. It is a vast net and though its meshes are as wide as the sea it lets nothing through. It is the sanctuary where all things find refuge. It is nowhere, but without looking out of the window you may see it. Desire not to desire, it teaches, and leave all things to take their course. He that humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He that bends shall be made straight. Failure is the foundation of success and success is the lurking-place of failure; but who can tell when the turning point will come? He who strives after tenderness can become even as a little child. Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“Sometimes, when I’ve had half a dozen whiskies and look at the stars, I think perhaps it does.”

Silence fell upon them and when it was broken it was again by Kitty.

“Tell me, is: the dog it was that died, a quotation?”

Waddington’s lips outlined a smile and he was ready with his answer. But perhaps at that moment his sensibilities were abnormally acute. Kitty was not looking at him, but there was something about her expression which made him change his mind.

“If it is I don’t know it,” he answered warily. “Why?”

“Nothing. It crossed my mind. It had a familiar ring.”

There was another silence.

“When you were alone with your husband,” said Waddington presently, “I had a talk with the regimental surgeon. I thought we ought to have some details.”

“Well?”

“He was in a very hysterical state. I couldn’t really quite understand what he meant. So far as I can make out your husband got infected during the course of experiments he was making.”

“He was always experimenting. He wasn’t really a doctor, he was a bacteriologist; that is why he was so anxious to come here.”

“But I can’t quite make out from the surgeon’s statements whether he was infected accidentally or whether he was actually experimenting on himself.”

Kitty grew very pale. The suggestion made her shudder. Waddington took her hand.

“Forgive me for talking about this again,” he said gently, “but I thought it might comfort you — I know how frightfully difficult it is on these occasions to say anything that is of the least use — I thought it might mean something to you that Walter died a martyr to science and to his duty.”

Kitty shrugged her shoulders with a suspicion of impatience.

“Walter died of a broken heart,” she said.

Waddington did not answer. She turned and looked at him slowly. Her face was white and set.

“What did he mean by saying: the dog it was that died? What is it?”

“It’s the last line of Goldsmith’s Elegy.”

LXVII

Next morning Kitty went to the convent. The girl who opened the door seemed surprised to see her and when Kitty had been for a few minutes about her work the Mother Superior came in. She went up to Kitty and took her hand.

“I am glad to see you, my dear child. You show a fine courage in coming back here so soon after your great sorrow; and wisdom, for I am sure that a little work will keep you from brooding.”

Kitty cast down her eyes, reddening a little; she did not want the Mother Superior to see into her heart.

“I need not tell you how sincerely all of us here sympathise with you.”

“You are very kind,” whispered Kitty.

“We all pray for you constantly and for the soul of him you have lost.”

Kitty made no reply. The Mother Superior released her hand and in her cool, authoritative tone imposed various tasks upon her. She patted two or three children on the head, gave them her aloof, but winning smile, and went about her more pressing affairs.

LXVIII

A week went by. Kitty was sewing. The Mother Superior entered the room and sat down beside her. She gave Kitty’s work a shrewd glance.

“You sew very well, my dear. It is a rare accomplishment for young women of your world nowadays.”

“I owe it to my mother.”

“I am sure that your mother will be very glad to see you again.”

Kitty looked up. There was that in the Mother Superior’s manner which prevented the remark from being taken as a casual politeness. She went on.

“I allowed you to come here after the death of your dear husband because I thought occupation would distract your mind. I did not think you were fit at that moment to take the long journey to Tching-Yen by yourself, nor did I wish you to sit alone in your house with nothing to do but to remember your loss. But now eight days have passed. It is time for you to go.”

“I don’t want to go, Mother. I want to stay here.”

“There is nothing for you to stay for. You came to be with your husband. You husband is dead. You are in a condition in which you will shortly need a care and attention which it is impossible for you to get here. It is your duty, my dear child, to do everything in your power for the welfare of the being that God has entrusted to your care.”

Kitty was silent for a moment. She looked down.

“I was under the impression that I was of some use here. It has been a great pleasure to me to think that I was. I hoped that you would allow me to go on with my work till the epidemic had come to an end.”

“We are all very grateful for what you have done for us,” answered the Superior, with a slight smile, “but now that the epidemic is waning the risk of coming here is not so great and I am expecting two sisters from Canton. They should be here very shortly and when they arrive I do not think that I shall be able to make any use of your services.”

Kitty’s heart sank. The Mother Superior’s tone admitted of no reply; she knew her well enough to know that she would be insensible to entreaty. That she found it necessary to reason with Kitty had brought into her voice a note, if hardly of irritation, at least of the peremptoriness which might lead to it.

“Mr. Waddington was good enough to ask my advice.”

“I wish he could have minded his own business,” interrupted Kitty.

“If he hadn’t I should all the same have felt obliged to give it him,” said the Mother Superior gently. “At the present moment your place is not here, but with your mother. Mr. Waddington has arranged with Colonel Yü to give you a strong escort so that you will be perfectly safe on the journey, and he has arranged for bearers and coolies. The amah will go with you and arrangements will be made at the cities you pass through. In fact, everything possible for your comfort has been done.”

Kitty’s lips tightened. She thought that they might at least have consulted her in a matter which only concerned herself. She had to exercise some self-control in order not to answer sharply.

“And when am I to start?”

The Mother Superior remained quite placid.

“The sooner you can get back to Tching-Yen and then sail to England the better, my dear child. We thought you would like to start at dawn the day after to-morrow.”

“So soon.”

Kitty felt a little inclined to cry. But it was true enough; she had no place there.

“You all seem in a great hurry to be rid of me,” she said ruefully.

Kitty was conscious of a relaxation in the Superior’s demeanour. She saw that Kitty was prepared to yield and unconsciously she assumed a more gracious tone. Kitty’s sense of humour was acute and her eyes twinkled as she reflected that even the saints liked to have their own way.

“Don’t think that I fail to appreciate the goodness of your heart, my dear child, and the admirable charity which makes you unwilling to abandon your self-imposed duties.”

Kitty stared straight in front of her. She faintly shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she could ascribe to herself no such exalted virtues. She wanted to stay because she had nowhere else to go. It was a curious sensation this, that nobody in the world cared two straws whether she was alive or dead.

“I cannot understand that you should be reluctant to go home,” pursued the Superior amiably. “There are many foreigners in this country who would give a great deal to have your chance!”

“But not you, Mother?”

“Oh, with us it is different, my dear child. When we come here we know that we have left our homes for ever.”

Out of her own wounded feelings emerged the desire in Kitty’s mind, malicious perhaps, to seek the joint in the armour of faith which rendered the nuns so aloofly immune to all the natural feelings. She wanted to see whether there was left in the Superior any of the weakness of humanity.

“I should have thought that sometimes it was hard never to see again those that are dear to you and the scenes amid which you were brought up.”

The Mother Superior hesitated for a moment, but Kitty watching her could see no change in the serenity of her beautiful and austere face.

“It is hard for my mother who is old now, for I am her only daughter and she would dearly like to see me once more before she dies. I wish I could give her that joy. But it cannot be and we shall wait till we can meet in paradise.”

“All the same, when one thinks of those to whom one is so dear, it must be difficult not to ask oneself if one was right in cutting oneself off from them.”

“Are you asking me if I have ever regretted the step I took?” On a sudden the Mother Superior’s face grew radiant. “Never, never. I have exchanged a life that was trivial and worthless for one of sacrifice and prayer.”

There was a brief silence and then the Mother Superior, assuming a lighter manner, smiled.

“I am going to ask you to take a little parcel and post it for me when you get to Marseilles. I do not wish to entrust it to the Chinese post-office. I will fetch it at once.”

“You can give it to me to-morrow,” said Kitty.

“You will be too busy to come here to-morrow, my dear. It will be more convenient for you to bid us farewell to-night.”

She rose and with the easy dignity which her voluminous habit could not conceal left the room. In a moment Sister St. Joseph came in. She was come to say good-bye. She hoped that Kitty would have a pleasant journey; she would be quite safe, for Colonel Yü was sending a strong escort with her; and the sisters constantly did the journey alone and no harm came to them. And did she like the sea? Mon Dieu, how ill she was when there was a storm in the Indian ocean, Madame her mother would be pleased to see her daughter, and she must take care of herself; after all she had another little soul in her care now, and they would all pray for her; she would pray constantly for her and the dear little baby and for the soul of the poor, brave doctor. She was voluble, kindly and affectionate; and yet Kitty was deeply conscious that for Sister St. Joseph (her gaze intent on eternity) she was but a wraith without body or substance. She had a wild impulse to seize the stout, good-natured nun by the shoulders and shake her, crying: “Don’t you know that I’m a human being, unhappy and alone, and I want comfort and sympathy and encouragement; oh, can’t you turn a minute away from God and give me a little compassion; not the Christian compassion that you have for all suffering things, but just human compassion for me?” The thought brought a smile to Kitty’s lips: how very surprised Sister St. Joseph would be! She would certainly be convinced of what now she only suspected, that all English people were mad.

“Fortunately I am a very good sailor,” Kitty answered. “I’ve never been sea-sick yet.”

The Mother Superior returned with a small, neat parcel.

“They’re handkerchiefs that I’ve had made for the name-day of my mother,” she said. “The initials have been embroidered by our young girls.”

Sister St. Joseph suggested that Kitty would like to see how beautifully the work was done and the Mother Superior with an indulgent, deprecating smile untied the parcel. The handkerchiefs were of very fine lawn and the initials embroidered in a complicated cypher were surmounted by a crown of strawberry leaves. When Kitty had properly admired the workmanship the handkerchiefs were wrapped up again and the parcel handed to her. Sister St. Joseph, with an “eh bien, Madame, je vous quitte” and a repetition of her polite and impersonal salutations, went away. Kitty realised that this was the moment to take her leave of the Superior. She thanked her for her kindness to her. They walked together along the bare, white-washed corridors.

“Would it be asking too much of you to register the parcel when you arrive at Marseilles?” said the Superior.

“Of course I’ll do that,” said Kitty.

She glanced at the address. The name seemed very grand, but the place mentioned attracted her attention.

“But that is one of the châteaux I’ve seen. I was motoring with friends in France.”

“It is very possible,” said the Mother Superior. “Strangers are permitted to view it on two days a week.”

“I think if I had ever lived in such a beautiful place I should never have had the courage to leave it.”

“It is of course a historical monument. It is scarcely intimate. If I regretted anything it would not be that, but the little châteaux that we lived in when I was a child. It was in the Pyrenees. I was born within sound of the sea. I do not deny that sometimes I should like to hear the waves beating against the rocks.”

Kitty had an idea that the Mother Superior, divining her thought and the reason for her remarks, was slyly making fun of her. But they reached the little, unpretentious door of the convent. To Kitty’s surprise the Mother Superior took her in her arms and kissed her. The pressure of her pale lips on Kitty’s cheeks, she kissed her first on one side and then on the other, was so unexpected that it made her flush and inclined to cry.

“Good-bye, God bless you, my dear child.” She held her for a moment in her arms. “Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.”

The convent door closed for the last time behind her.

LXIX

Waddington walked with Kitty up the hill and they turned aside for a moment to look at Walter’s grave; at the memorial arch he said good-bye to her, and looking at it for the last time she felt that she could reply to the enigmatic irony of its appearance with an equal irony of her own. She stepped into her chair.

One day passed after the other. The sights of the wayside served as a background to her thoughts. She saw them as it were in duplicate, rounded as though in a stereoscope, with an added significance because to everything she saw was added the recollection of what she had seen when but a few short weeks before she had taken the same journey in the contrary direction. The coolies with their loads straggled disorderly, two or three together, and then a hundred yards behind one by himself, and then two or three more; the soldiers of the escort shuffled along with a clumsy walk that covered five and twenty miles a day; the amah was carried by two bearers and Kitty, not because she was heavier, but for face’s sake, by four. Now and then they met a string of coolies lolloping by in line with their heavy burdens, now and then a Chinese official in a sedan who looked at the white woman with inquisitive eyes; now they came across peasants in faded blue and huge hats on their way to market and now a woman, old or young, tottering along on her bound feet. They passed up and down little hills laid out with trim rice fields and farm-houses nestling cosily in a grove of bamboos; they passed through ragged villages and populous cities walled like the cities in a missal. The sun of the early autumn was pleasant, and if at daybreak, when the shimmering dawn lent the neat fields the enchantment of a fairy tale, it was cold, the warmth later was very grateful. Kitty was filled by it with a sense of beatitude which she made no effort to resist.

The vivid scenes with their elegant colour, their unexpected distinction, and their strangeness, were like an arras before which, like mysterious, shadowy shapes, played the phantoms of Kitty’s fancy. They seemed wholly unreal. Mei-tan-fu with its crenellated walls was like the painted canvas placed on the stage in an old play to represent a city. The nuns, Waddington and the Manchu woman who loved him, were fantastic characters in a masque; and the rest, the people sidling along the tortuous streets and those who died, were nameless supers. Of course it had, they all had, a significance of some sort, but what was it? It was as though they performed a ritual dance, elaborate and ancient, and you knew that those complicated measures had a meaning which it was important for you to know; and yet you could see no clue, no clue.

It seemed incredible to Kitty (an old woman was passing along the causeway, in blue, and the blue in the sunshine was like lapis lazuli; her face with its thousand little wrinkles was like a mask of old ivory; and she leaned, as she walked on her tiny feet, on a long black staff), it seemed incredible to Kitty that she and Walter had taken part in that strange and unreal dance. They had played important parts too. She might easily have lost her life: he had. Was it a joke? Perhaps it was nothing but a dream from which she would suddenly awake with a sigh of relief. It seemed to have taken place a long time ago and in a far-off place. It was singular how shadowy the persons of that play seemed against the sunny background of real life. And now it seemed to Kitty like a story that she was reading; it was a little startling that it seemed to concern her so little. She found already that she could not recall with distinctness Waddington’s face which had been so familiar to her.

This evening they should reach the city on the Western River from which she was to take the steamer. Thence it was but a night’s run to Tching-Yen.

LXX

At first because she had not wept when Walter died she was ashamed. It seemed dreadfully callous. Why, the eyes of the Chinese officer, Colonel Yü, had been wet with tears. She was dazed by her husband’s death. It was difficult to understand that he would not come into the bungalow again and that when he got up in the morning she would not hear him take his bath, in the Suchow tub. He was alive and now he was dead. The sisters wondered at her Christian resignation and admired the courage with which she bore her loss. But Waddington was shrewd; for all his grave sympathy she had a feeling that — how should she put it? — that he had his tongue in his cheek. Of course, Walter’s death had been a shock to her. She didn’t want him to die. But after all she didn’t love him, she had never loved him; it was decent to bear herself with becoming sorrow; it would be ugly and vulgar even to let anyone see into her heart; but she had gone through too much to make pretences to herself. It seemed to her that this at least the last few weeks had taught her, that if it is necessary sometimes to lie to others it is always despicable to lie to oneself. She was sorry that Walter had died in that tragic manner, but she was sorry with a purely human sorrow such as she might have felt if it had been an acquaintance. She would acknowledge that Walter had admirable qualities; it just happened that she did not like him; he had always bored her. She would not admit that his death was a relief to her, she could say honestly that if by a word of hers she could bring him back to life she would say it, but she could not resist the feeling that his death made her way to some extent a trifle easier. They would never have been happy together and yet to part would have been terribly difficult. She was startled at herself for feeling as she did; she supposed that people would think her heartless and cruel if they knew. Well, they shouldn’t know. She wondered if all her fellows had in their hearts shameful secrets which they spent their time guarding from curious glances.

She looked very little into the future and she made no plans. The only thing she knew was that she wanted to stay in Tching-Yen as short a while as might be. She looked forward to arriving there with horror. It seemed to her that she would like to wander for ever through that smiling and friendly country in her rattan chair, and, an indifferent spectator for ever of the phantasmagoria of life, pass each night under a different roof. But of course the immediate future must be faced: she would go to the hotel when she reached Tching-Yen, she would arrange about getting rid of the house and selling the furniture; there would be no need to see Townsend. He would have the grace to keep out of her way. She would like, all the same, to see him once more in order to tell him what a despicable creature she thought him.

But what did Charles Townsend matter?

Like a rich melody on a harp that rang in exultant arpeggios through the complicated harmonies of a symphony, one thought beat in her heart insistently. It was this thought which gave their exotic beauty to the rice fields, which made a little smile break on her pale lips as a smooth-faced lad swung past her on his way to the market town with exultation in his carriage and audacity in his eyes, and which gave the magic of a tumultuous life to the cities she passed through. The city of the pestilence was a prison from which she was escaped, and she had never known before how exquisite was the blueness of the sky and what a joy there was in the bamboo copses that leaned with such an adorable grace across the causeway. Freedom! That was the thought that sung in her heart so that even though the future was so dim, it was iridescent like the mist over the river where the morning sun fell upon it. Freedom! Not only freedom from a bond that irked, and a companionship which depressed her; freedom, not only from the death which had threatened, but freedom from the love that had degraded her; freedom from all spiritual ties, the freedom of a disembodied spirit; and with freedom, courage and a valiant unconcern for whatever was to come.

LXXI

When the boat docked at Tching-Yen Kitty, who had been standing on deck to look at the coloured, gay and vivacious traffic of the river, went into her cabin to see that the amah had left nothing behind. She gave herself a look in the glass. She wore black, the nuns had dyed a dress for her, but not mourning; and the thought crossed her mind that the first thing she must do was to see to this. The habiliments of woe could not but serve as an effective disguise to her unexpected feelings. There was a knock on her cabin door. The amah opened it.

“Mrs. Fane.”

Kitty turned round and saw a face which at the first moment she did not recognise. Then her heart gave a sudden quick beat and she flushed. It was Dorothy Townsend. Kitty so little expected to see her that she knew neither what to do nor what to say. But Mrs. Townsend came into the cabin and with an impulsive gesture took Kitty in her arms.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, I’m so dreadfully sorry for you.”

Kitty allowed herself to be kissed. She was a little surprised at this effusiveness in a woman whom she had always thought cold and distant.

“It’s very kind of you,” murmured Kitty.

“Come on deck. The amah will look after your things and my boys are here.”

She took Kitty’s hand and Kitty, allowing herself to be led, noticed that her good-natured, weather-beaten face bore an expression of real concern.

“Your boat’s early, I very nearly didn’t get down in time,” said Mrs. Townsend. “I couldn’t have borne it if I’d missed you.”

“But you didn’t come to meet me?” exclaimed Kitty.

“Of course I did.”

“But how did you know I was coming?”

“Mr. Waddington sent me a telegram.”

Kitty turned away. She had a lump in her throat. It was funny that a little unexpected kindness should so affect her. She did not want to cry; she wished Dorothy Townsend would go away. But Dorothy took the hand that was hanging by Kitty’s side and pressed it. It embarrassed Kitty that this shy woman should be so demonstrative.

“I want you to do me a great favour. Charlie and I want you to come and stay with us while you’re in Tching-Yen.”

Kitty snatched her hand away.

“It’s awfully kind of you. I couldn’t possibly.”

“But you must. You can’t go and live all by yourself in your own house. It would be dreadful for you. I’ve prepared everything. You shall have your own sitting-room. You can have your meals there if you don’t care to have them with us. We both want you to come.”

“I wasn’t thinking of going to the house. I was going to get myself a room at the Tching-Yen Hotel. I couldn’t possibly put you to so much trouble.”

The suggestion had taken her by surprise. She was confused and vexed. If Charlie had had any sense of decency he would never have allowed his wife to make the invitation. She did not wish to be under an obligation to either of them.

“Oh, but I couldn’t bear the idea of your living at a hotel. And you’d hate the Tching-Yen Hotel just now. With all those people about and the band playing jazz all the time. Please say you’ll come to us. I promise you that Charlie and I won’t bother you.”

“I don’t know why you should be so kind to me.” Kitty was getting a little short of excuses; she could not bring herself to utter a blunt and definite no. “I’m afraid I’m not very good company among strangers just now.”

“But need we be strangers to you? Oh, I do so want not to be, I so want you to allow me to be your friend.” Dorothy clasped her hands and her voice, her cool, deliberate and distinguished voice, was tremulous with tears. “I so awfully want you to come. You see, I want to make amends to you.”

Kitty did not understand. She did not know what amends Charlie’s wife owed her.

“I’m afraid I didn’t very much like you at first. I thought you rather fast. You see, I’m old-fashioned and I suppose I’m intolerant.”

Kitty gave her a passing glance. What she meant was that at first she had thought Kitty vulgar. Though Kitty allowed no shadow of it to show on her face in her heart she laughed. Much she cared for what any one thought of her now!

“And when I heard that you’d gone with your husband into the jaws of death, without a moment’s hesitation, I felt such a frightful cad. I felt so humiliated. You’ve been so wonderful, you’ve been so brave, you make all the rest of us look so dreadfully cheap and second-rate.” Now the tears were pouring down her kind, homely face. “I can’t tell you how much I admire you and what a respect I have for you. I know I can do nothing to make up for your terrible loss, but I want you to know how deeply, how sincerely I feel for you. And if you’ll only allow me to do a little something for you it will be a privilege. Don’t bear me a grudge because I misjudged you. You’re heroic and I’m just a silly fool of a woman.”

Kitty looked down at the deck. She was very pale. She wished that Dorothy would not show such uncontrollable emotion. She was touched, it was true, but she could not help a slight feeling of impatience that this simple creature should believe such lies.

“If you really mean that you’d like to have me, of course I shall be glad to come,” she sighed.

LXXII

The Townsends lived on the Mount in a house with a wide view over the sea, and Charlie did not as a rule come up to luncheon, but on the day of Kitty’s arrival Dorothy (they were Kitty and Dorothy to one another by now) told her that if she felt up to seeing him he would like to come and bid her welcome. Kitty reflected that since she must see him she might just as well see him at once and she looked forward with grim amusement to the embarrassment she must cause him. She saw very well that the invitation to stay had arisen in his wife’s fancy and notwithstanding his own feelings he had immediately approved. Kitty knew how great his desire was always to do the right thing and to offer her a gracious hospitality was obviously very much the right thing. But he could hardly remember that last interview of theirs without mortification: to a man so vain as Townsend it must be galling like an ulcer that would not heal. She hoped that she had hurt him as much as he had hurt her. He must hate her now. She was glad to think that she did not hate, but only despised him. It gave her a sardonic satisfaction to reflect that whatever his feelings he would be obliged to make much of her. When she left his office that afternoon he must have hoped with all his heart that he would never set eyes on her again.

And now, sitting with Dorothy, she waited for him to come in. She was conscious of her delight in the sober luxury of the drawing-room. She sat in an armchair, there were lovely flowers here and there, on the walls were pleasing pictures; the room was shaded and cool, it was friendly and homelike. She remembered with a faint shudder the bare and empty parlour of the missionary’s bungalow; the rattan chairs and the kitchen-table with its cotton cloth, the stained shelves with all those cheap editions of novels, and the little skimpy red curtains that had such a dusty look. Oh, it had been so uncomfortable! She supposed that Dorothy had never thought of that.

They heard a motor drive up, and Charlie strode into the room.

“Am I late? I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. I had to see the Governor and I simply couldn’t get away.”

He went up to Kitty, and took both her hands.

“I’m so very, very glad you’ve come here. I know Dorothy has told you that we want you to stay as long as ever you like and that we want you to look upon our house as your home. But I want to tell you so myself as well. If there’s anything in the world I can do for you I shall only be too happy.” His eyes wore a charming expression of sincerity; she wondered if he saw the irony in hers. “I’m awfully stupid at saying some things and I don’t want to seem a clumsy fool, but I do want you to know how deeply I sympathise with you in your husband’s death. He was a thundering good chap, and he’ll be missed here more than I can say.”

“Don’t, Charlie,” said his wife. “I’m sure Kitty understands.... Here are the cocktails.”

Following the luxurious custom of the foreigners in China two boys in uniform came into the room with savouries and cocktails. Kitty refused.

“Oh, you must have one,” insisted Townsend in his breezy, cordial way. “It’ll do you good and I’m sure you haven’t had such a thing as a cocktail since you left Tching-Yen. Unless I’m very much mistaken you couldn’t get ice at Mei-tan-fu.”

“You’re not mistaken,” said Kitty.

For a moment she had a picture before her mind’s eye of that beggar with the tousled head in the blue rags through which you saw the emaciated limbs, who had lain dead against the compound wall.

LXXIII

They went in to luncheon. Charlie, sitting at the head of his table, easily took charge of the conversation. After those first few words of sympathy he treated Kitty, not as though she had just suffered a devastating experience, but rather as though she had come in from Shanghai for a change after an operation for appendicitis. She needed cheering and he was prepared to cheer her. The best way of making her feel at home was to treat her as one of the family. He was a tactful man. He began talking of the autumn race meeting, and the polo — by Jove, he would have to give up playing polo if he couldn’t get his weight down — and a chat he had had that morning with the Governor. He spoke of a party they had been to on the Admiral’s flag-ship, the state of affairs in Canton, and of the links at Lushan. In a few minutes Kitty felt that she might have been away for no longer than a week-end. It was incredible that over there, up-country, six hundred miles away only (the distance from London to Edinburgh, wasn’t it?) men, women and children had been dying like flies. Soon she found herself asking about so and so who had broken a collar-bone at polo and if Mrs. This had gone home or Mrs. That was playing in the tennis tournament. Charlie made his little jokes and she smiled at them. Dorothy with her faint air of superiority (which now included Kitty and so was no longer slightly offensive, but a bond of union rather) was gently ironic about various persons in the colony. Kitty began to feel more alert.

“Why, she’s looking better already,” said Charlie to his wife. “She was so pale before tiffin that I was quite startled; she’s really got some colour in her cheeks now.”

But while she took her part in the conversation, if not with gaiety (for she felt that neither Dorothy nor Charlie with his admirable sense of decorum would approve of that) at least with cheerfulness, Kitty observed her host. In all those weeks during which her fancy had been revengefully occupied with him she had built up in her mind a very vivid impression of him. His thick curling hair was a little too long and too carefully brushed, in order to hide the fact that it was greying there was too much oil on it; his face was too red, with its network of mauve veins on the cheeks, and his jowl was too massive: when he did not hold his head up to hide it you saw that he had a double chin; and there was something apelike in those bushy grizzled eyebrows of his that vaguely disgusted her. He was heavy in his movements, and all the care he took in his diet and all his exercise did not prevent him from being fat; his bones were much too well covered and his joints had a middle-aged stiffness. His smart clothes were a little tight for him and a little too young.

But when he came into the drawing-room before luncheon Kitty received quite a shock (this perhaps was why her pallor had been so marked), for she discovered that her imagination had played an odd trick on her: he did not in the least look as she had pictured him. She could hardly help laughing at herself. His hair was not grey at all, oh, there were a few white hairs on the temple but they were becoming; and his face was not red, but sunburned; his head was very well placed on his neck; and he wasn’t stout and he wasn’t old: in fact he was almost slim and his figure was admirable — could you blame him if he was a trifle vain of it? — he might have been a young man. And of course he did know how to wear his clothes; it was absurd to deny that: he looked neat and clean and trim. Whatever could have possessed her to think him this and that? He was a very handsome man. It was lucky that she knew how worthless he was. Of course she had always admitted that his voice had a winning quality, and his voice was exactly as she remembered it: it made the falseness of every word he said more exasperating; its richness of tone and its warmth rang now in her ears with insincerity and she wondered how she could ever have been taken in by it. His eyes were beautiful: that was where his charm lay, they had such a soft, blue brilliance and even when he was talking balderdash an expression which was so delightful; it was almost impossible not to be moved by them.

At last the coffee was brought in and Charlie lit his cheroot. He looked at his watch and rose from the table.

“Well, I must leave you two young women to your own devices. It’s time for me to get back to the office.” He paused and then with his friendly, charming eyes on Kitty said to her: “I’m not going to bother you for a day or two till you’re rested, but then I want to have a little business talk with you.”

“With me?”

“We must make arrangements about your house, you know, and then there’s the furniture.”

“Oh, but I can go to a lawyer. There’s no reason why I should bother you about that.”

“Don’t think for a moment I’m going to let you waste your money on legal expenses. I’m going to see to everything. You know you’re entitled to a pension: I’m going to talk to H. E. about it and see if by making representations in the proper quarter we can’t get something extra for you. You put yourself in my hands. But don’t bother about anything just yet. All we want you to do now is to get fit and well: isn’t that right, Dorothy?”

“Of course.”

He gave Kitty a little nod and then passing by his wife’s chair took her hand and kissed it. Most Englishmen look a little foolish when they kiss a woman’s hand; he did it with a graceful ease.

LXXIV

It was not till Kitty was fairly settled at the Townsends’ that she discovered that she was weary. The comfort and the unaccustomed amenity of this life broke up the strain under which she had been living. She had forgotten how pleasant it was to take one’s ease, how lulling to be surrounded by pretty things, and how agreeable it was to receive attention. She sank back with a sigh of relief into the facile existence of the luxurious East. It was not displeasing to feel that in a discreet and well-bred fashion she was an object of sympathetic interest. Her bereavement was so recent that it was impossible for entertainments to be given for her, but ladies of consequence in the Colony (His Excellency’s wife, the wives of the Admiral and of the Chief Justice) came to drink a quiet cup of tea with her. His Excellency’s wife said that His Excellency was most anxious to see her and if she would come very quietly to luncheon at Government House (“not a party, of course, only ourselves and the A.D.C’s!”), it would be very nice. These ladies used Kitty as though she were a piece of porcelain which was as fragile as it was precious. She could not fail to see that they looked upon her as a little heroine, and she had sufficient humour to play the part with modesty and discretion. She wished sometimes that Waddington were there; with his malicious shrewdness he would have seen the fun of the situation; and when alone they might have had a good laugh over it together. Dorothy had had a letter from him, and he had said all manner of things about her devoted work at the convent, about her courage and her self-control. Of course he was skilfully pulling their legs: the dirty dog.

LXXV

Kitty did not know whether it was by chance or by design that she never found herself for a moment alone with Charlie. His tact was exquisite. He remained kindly, sympathetic, pleasant and amiable. No one could have guessed that they had ever been more than acquaintances. But one afternoon when she was lying on a sofa outside her room reading he passed along the verandah and stopped.

“What is that you’re reading?” he asked.

“A book.”

She looked at him with irony. He smiled.

“Dorothy’s gone to a garden-party at Government House.”

“I know. Why haven’t you gone too?”

“I didn’t feel I could face it and I thought I’d come back and keep you company. The car’s outside, would you like to come for a drive round the island?”

“No, thank you.”

He sat down on the foot of the sofa on which she lay.

“We haven’t had the chance of a talk by ourselves since you got here.”

She looked straight into his eyes with cool insolence.

“Do you think we have anything to say to one another?”

“Volumes.”

She shifted her feet a little so that she should not touch him.

“Are you still angry with me?” he asked, the shadow of a smile on his lips and his eyes melting.

“Not a bit,” she laughed.

“I don’t think you’d laugh if you weren’t.”

“You’re mistaken; I despise you much too much to be angry with you.”

He was unruffled.

“I think you’re rather hard on me. Looking back calmly, don’t you honestly think I was right?”

“From your standpoint.”

“Now that you know Dorothy, you must admit she’s rather nice?”

“Of course. I shall always be grateful for her great kindness to me.”

“She’s one in a thousand. I should never have had a moment’s peace if we’d bolted. It would have been a rotten trick to play on her. And after all I had to think of my children; it would have been an awful handicap for them.”

For a minute she held him in her reflective gaze. She felt completely mistress of the situation.

“I’ve watched you very carefully during the week I’ve been here. I’ve come to the conclusion that you really are fond of Dorothy. I should never have thought you capable of it.”

“I told you I was fond of her. I wouldn’t do anything to cause her a moment’s uneasiness. She’s the best wife a man ever had.”

“Have you never thought that you owed her any loyalty?”

“What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve for,” he smiled.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“You’re despicable.”

“I’m human. I don’t know why you should think me such a cad because I fell head over ears in love with you. I didn’t particularly want to, you know.”

It gave her a little twist of the heart-strings to hear him say that.

“I was fair game,” she answered bitterly.

“Naturally I couldn’t foresee that we were going to get into such a devil of a scrape.”

“And in any case you had a pretty shrewd idea that if anyone suffered it wouldn’t be you.”

“I think that’s a bit thick. After all, now it’s all over, you must see I acted for the best for both of us. You lost your head and you ought to be jolly glad that I kept mine. Do you think it would have been a success if I’d done what you wanted me to? We were dashed uncomfortable in the frying-pan, but we should have been a damned sight worse off in the fire. And you haven’t come to any harm. Why can’t we kiss and make friends?”

She almost laughed.

“You can hardly expect me to forget that you sent me to almost certain death without a shadow of compunction?”

“Oh, what nonsense! I told you there was no risk if you took reasonable precautions. Do you think I’d have let you go for a moment if I hadn’t been perfectly convinced of that?”

“You were convinced because you wanted to be. You’re one of those cowards who only think what it’s profitable for them to think.”

“Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You have come back, and if you don’t mind my saying anything so objectionable you’ve come back prettier than ever.”

“And Walter?”

He could not resist the facetious answer which came to his mind. Charlie smiled.

“Nothing suits you so well as black.”

She stared at him for a moment. Tears filled her eyes and she began to cry. Her beautiful face was distorted with grief. She did not seek to hide it, but lay on her back with her hands along her sides.

“For God’s sake don’t cry like that. I didn’t mean to say anything unkind. It was only a joke. You know how sincerely I feel for you in your bereavement.”

“Oh, hold your stupid tongue.”

“I’d give anything to have Walter back again.”

“He died because of you and me.”

He took her hand, but she snatched it away from him.

“Please go away,” she sobbed. “That’s the only thing you can do for me now. I hate and despise you. Walter was worth ten of you and I was too big a fool to see it. Go away. Go away.”

She saw he was going to speak again and she sprang to her feet and went into her room. He followed her, and as he entered, with instinctive prudence, drew the shutter so that they were almost in darkness.

“I can’t leave you like this,” he said, putting his arms round her. “You know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Don’t touch me. For God’s sake go. Go away.”

She tried to tear herself from him, but he would not let her. She was crying hysterically now.

“Darling, don’t you know that I’ve always loved you,” he said in his deep, charming voice. “I love you more than ever.”

“How can you tell such lies! Let me go. Damn you, let me go.”

“Don’t be unkind to me, Kitty. I know I’ve been a brute to you, but forgive me.”

She was shaking and sobbing, struggling to get away from him, but the pressure of his arms was strangely comforting. She had so longed to feel them round her once more, just once, and all her body trembled. She felt dreadfully weak. It seemed as though her bones were melting, and the sorrow she felt for Walter shifted into pity for herself.

“Oh, how could you be so unkind to me?” she sobbed. “Don’t you know that I loved you with all my heart. No one has ever loved you as I loved you.”

“Darling.”

He began to kiss her.

“No, no,” she cried.

He sought her face, but she turned it away; he sought her lips; she did not know what he was saying, broken, passionate words of love; and his arms held her so firmly that she felt like a child that has been lost and now at last is safe at home. She moaned faintly. Her eyes were closed and her face was wet with tears. And then he found her lips and the pressure of his upon them shot through her body like the flame of God. It was an ecstasy and she was burnt to a cinder and she glowed as though she were transfigured. In her dreams, in her dreams she had known this rapture. What was he doing with her now? She did not know. She was not a woman, her personality was dissolved, she was nothing but desire. He lifted her off her feet, she was very light in his arms, he carried her and she clung to him, desperate and adoring; her head sank on the pillow and his lips clung to hers.

LXXVI

She sat on the edge of the bed hiding her face with her hands.

“Would you like a drop of water?”

She shook her head. He went over to the washing stand, filled the tooth-glass and brought it to her.

“Come along, have a little drink and you’ll feel better.”

He put the glass to her lips and she sipped the water. Then, with horrified eyes, she stared at him. He was standing over her, looking down, and in his eyes was a twinkle of self-satisfaction.

“Well, do you think I’m such a dirty dog as you did?” he asked.

She looked down.

“Yes. But I know that I’m not a bit better than you. Oh, I’m so ashamed.”

“Well, I think you’re very ungrateful.”

“Will you go now?”

“To tell you the truth I think it’s about time. I’ll just go and tidy myself up before Dorothy comes in.”

He went out of the room with a jaunty step.

Kitty sat for a while, still on the edge of the bed, hunched up like an imbecile. Her mind was vacant. A shudder passed through her. She staggered to her feet and, going to the dressing-table, sank into a chair. She stared at herself in the glass. Her eyes were swollen with tears; her face was stained and there was a red mark on one cheek where his had rested. She looked at herself with horror. It was the same face. She had expected in it she knew not what change of degradation.

“Swine,” she flung at her reflection. “Swine.”

Then, letting her face fall on her arms, she wept bitterly. Shame, shame! She did not know what had come over her. It was horrible. She hated him and she hated herself. It had been ecstasy. Oh, hateful! She could never look him in the face again. He was so justified. He had been right not to marry her, for she was worthless; she was no better than a harlot. Oh, worse, for those poor women gave themselves for bread. And in this house too into which Dorothy had taken her in her sorrow and cruel desolation! Her shoulders shook with her sobs. Everything was gone now. She had thought herself changed, she had thought herself strong, she thought she had returned to Tching-Yen a woman who possessed herself; new ideas flitted about her heart like little yellow butterflies in the sunshine and she had hoped to be so much better in the future; freedom like a spirit of light had beckoned her on, and the world was like a spacious plain through which she could walk light of foot and with head erect. She had thought herself free from lust and vile passions, free to live the clean and healthy life of the spirit; she had likened herself to the white egrets that fly with leisurely flight across the rice fields at dusk and they are like the soaring thoughts of a mind at rest with itself; and she was a slave. Weak, weak! It was hopeless, it was no good to try, she was a slut.

She would not go in to dinner. She sent the boy to tell Dorothy that she had a headache and preferred to remain in her room. Dorothy came in and, seeing her red, swollen eyes, talked for a little in her gentle, commiserating way of trivial things. Kitty knew that Dorothy thought she had been crying on account of Walter and, sympathising like the good and loving wife she was, respected the natural sorrow.

“I know it’s very hard, dear,” she said as she left Kitty. “But you must try to have courage. I’m sure your dear husband wouldn’t wish you to grieve for him.”

LXXVII

But next morning Kitty rose early and leaving a note for Dorothy to say that she was gone out on business took a tram down the hill. She made her way through the crowded streets with their motor-cars, rickshaws and chairs, and the motley throng of Europeans and Chinese, to the offices of the P. & O. Company. A ship was sailing in two days, the first ship out of the port, and she had made up her mind that at all costs she must go on it. When the clerk told her that every berth was booked she asked to see the chief agent. She sent in her name and the agent, whom she had met before, came out to fetch her into his office. He knew her circumstances and when she told him what she wished he sent for the passenger list. He looked at it with perplexity.

“I beseech you to do what you can for me,” she urged him.

“I don’t think there’s any one in the Colony who wouldn’t do anything in the world for you, Mrs. Fane,” he answered.

He sent for a clerk and made enquiries. Then he nodded.

“I’m going to shift one or two people. I know you want to get home and I think we ought to do our best for you. I can give you a little cabin to yourself. I expect you’d prefer that.”

She thanked him. She left him with an elated heart. Flight: that was her only thought. Flight! She sent a cable to her father to announce her immediate return; she had already cabled to him to say that Walter was dead; and then went back again to the Townsends’ to tell Dorothy what she had done.

“We shall be dreadfully sorry to lose you,” the kind creature said, “but of course I understand that you want to be with your mother and father.”

Since her return to Tching-Yen Kitty had hesitated from day to day to go to her house. She dreaded entering it again and meeting face to face the recollections with which it was peopled. But now she had no alternative. Townsend had arranged for the sale of the furniture and he had found some one eager to take on the lease, but there were all her clothes and Walter’s, for they had taken next to nothing to Mei-tan-fu, and there were books, photographs, and various odds and ends. Kitty, indifferent to everything and anxious to cut herself off completely from the past, realised that it would outrage the susceptibilities of the Colony if she allowed these things to go with the rest to an auction-room. They must be packed and sent to her. So after tiffin she prepared to go to the house. Dorothy, eager to give her help, offered to accompany her, but Kitty begged to be allowed to go alone. She agreed that two of Dorothy’s boys should come and assist in the packing.

The house had been left in charge of the head boy and he opened the door for Kitty. It was curious to go into her own house as though she were a stranger. It was neat and clean. Everything was in its place, ready for her use, but although the day was warm and sunny there was about the silent rooms a chill and desolate air. The furniture was stiffly arranged, exactly where it should be, and the vases which should have held flowers were in their places; the book which Kitty had laid face downwards she did not remember when still lay face downwards. It was as though the house had been left empty but a minute before and yet that minute was fraught with eternity so that you could not imagine that ever again that house would echo with talk and resound with laughter. On the piano the open music of a foxtrot seemed to wait to be played, but you had a feeling that if you struck the keys no sound would come. Walter’s room was as tidy as when he was there. On the chest of drawers were two large photographs of Kitty, one in her presentation dress and one in her wedding-gown.

But the boys fetched up the trunks from the box-room and she stood over them watching them pack. They packed neatly and quickly. Kitty reflected that in the two days she had it would be easy to get everything done. She must not let herself think; she had no time for that. Suddenly she heard a step behind her and turning round saw Charles Townsend. She felt a sudden chill at her heart.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Will you come into your sitting-room? I have something to say to you.”

“I’m very busy.”

“I shall only keep you five minutes.”

She said no more, but with a word to the boys to go on with what they were doing, preceded Charles into the next room. She did not sit down, in order to show him that she expected him not to detain her. She knew that she was very pale and her heart was beating fast, but she faced him coolly, with hostile eyes.

“What is it you want?”

“I’ve just heard from Dorothy that you’re going the day after to-morrow. She told me that you’d come here to do your packing and she asked me to ring up and find out if there was anything I could do for you.”

“I’m grateful to you, but I can manage quite well by myself.”

“So I imagined. I didn’t come here to ask you that. I came to ask if your sudden departure is due to what happened yesterday.”

“You and Dorothy have been very good to me. I didn’t wish you to think I was taking advantage of your good nature.”

“That’s not a very straight answer.”

“What does it matter to you?”

“It matters a great deal. I shouldn’t like to think that anything I’d done had driven you away.”

She was standing at the table. She looked down. Her eyes fell on the Sketch. It was months old now. It was that paper which Walter had stared at all through the terrible evening when — and Walter now was.... She raised her eyes.

“I feel absolutely degraded. You can’t possibly despise me as much as I despise myself.”

“But I don’t despise you. I meant every word that I said yesterday. What’s the good of running away like this? I don’t know why we can’t be good friends. I hate the idea of your thinking I’ve treated you badly.”

“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?”

“Hang it all, I’m not a stick or a stone. It’s so unreasonable, the way you look at it; it’s so morbid. I thought after yesterday you’d feel a little more kindly to me. After all, we’re only human.”

“I don’t feel human. I feel like an animal. A pig or a rabbit or a dog. Oh, I don’t blame you, I was just as bad. I yielded to you because I wanted you. But it wasn’t me, it wasn’t the real me. I’m not that hateful, beastly, lustful woman. I disown her. It wasn’t me that lay on that bed panting for you when my husband was hardly cold in his grave and your wife had been so kind to me, so indescribably kind. It was only the animal in me, dark and fearful like an evil spirit, and I disown, and hate, and despise it. And ever since, when I’ve thought of it, my gorge rises and I feel that I must vomit.”

He frowned a little and gave a short, uneasy snigger.

“Well, I’m fairly broadminded, but sometimes you say things that positively shock me.”

“I should be sorry to do that. You’d better go now. You’re a very unimportant little man and I’m silly to talk to you seriously.”

He did not answer for a while and she saw by the shadow in his blue eyes that he was angry with her. He would heave a sigh of relief when, tactful and courteous as ever, he had finally seen her off. It amused her to think of the politeness with which, while they shook hands and he wished her a pleasant journey, she would thank him for his hospitality. But she saw his expression change.

“Dorothy tells me you’re going to have a baby,” he said.

She felt herself colour, but she allowed no gesture to escape her.

“I am.”

“Am I by any chance the father?”

“No, no. It’s Walter’s child.”

She spoke with an emphasis which she could not prevent, but even as she spoke she knew that it was not the tone with which to carry conviction.

“Are you quite sure?” He was now roguishly smiling. “After all, you were married to Walter a couple of years and nothing happened. The dates seem to fit all right. I think it’s much more likely to be mine than Walter’s.”

“I would rather kill myself than have a child of yours.”

“Oh, come now, that’s nonsense. I should be awfully pleased and proud. I’d like it to be a girl, you know. I’ve only had boys with Dorothy. You won’t be able to be in doubt very long, you know: my three kiddies are absolutely the living image of me.”

He had regained his good humour and she knew why. If the child was his, though she might never see him again, she could never entirely escape him. His power over her would reach out and he would still, obscurely but definitely, influence every day of her life.

“You really are the most vain and fatuous ass that it’s ever been my bad luck to run across,” she said.

LXXVIII

As the ship steamed into Marseilles Kitty, looking at the rugged and beautiful outline of the coast glowing in the sunlight, on a sudden caught sight of the golden statue of the Blessed Virgin which stands upon the church of Sainte Marie de la Grace as a symbol of safety to the mariner at sea. She remembered how the Sisters of the convent at Mei-tan-fu, leaving their own land for ever, had knelt as the figure faded in the distance so that it was no more than a little golden flame in the blue sky and sought in prayer to allay the pang of separation. She clasped her hands in supplication to what power she knew not.

During the long, quiet journey she had thought incessantly of the horrible thing that had happened to her. She could not understand herself. It was so unexpected. What was it that had seized her, so that, despising him, despising him with all her heart, she had yielded passionately to Charlie’s foul embrace? Rage filled her and disgust of herself obsessed her. She felt that she could never forget her humiliation. She wept. But as the distance from Tching-Yen increased she found that she was insensibly losing the vividness of her resentment. What had happened seemed to have happened in another world. She was like a person who has been stricken with sudden madness and recovering is distressed and ashamed at the grotesque things he vaguely remembers to have done when he was not himself. But because he knows he was not himself he feels that in his own eyes at least he can claim indulgence. Kitty thought that perhaps a generous heart might pity rather than condemn her. But she sighed as she thought how woefully her self-confidence had been shattered. The way had seemed to stretch before her straight and easy and now she saw that it was a tortuous way and that pitfalls awaited her. The vast spaces and the tragic and beautiful sunsets of the Indian Ocean rested her. She seemed borne then to some country where she might in freedom possess her soul. If she could only regain her self-respect at the cost of a bitter conflict, well, she must find the courage to affront it.

The future was lonely and difficult. At Port Said she had received a letter from her mother in answer to her cable. It was a long letter written in the large and fanciful writing which was taught to young ladies in her mother’s youth. Its ornateness was so neat that it gave you an impression of insincerity. Mrs. Garstin expressed her regret at Walter’s death and sympathised properly with her daughter’s grief. She feared that Kitty was left inadequately provided for, but naturally the Colonial Office would give her a pension. She was glad to know that Kitty was coming back to England and of course she must come and stay with her father and mother till her child was born. Then followed certain instructions that Kitty must be sure to follow and various details of her sister Doris’s confinement. The little boy weighed so and so much and his paternal grandfather said he had never seen a finer child. Doris was expecting again and they hoped for another boy in order to make the succession to the baronetcy quite sure.

Kitty saw that the point of the letter lay in the definite date set for the invitation. Mrs. Garstin had no intention of being saddled with a widowed daughter in modest circumstances. It was singular, when she reflected how her mother had idolised her, that now, disappointed in her, she found her merely a nuisance. How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month’s separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years. Her mother need not worry: as soon as she could she would make herself a home of her own. But she must have a little time; at present everything was vague and she could not form any picture of the future: perhaps she would die at childbirth; that would be a solution of many difficulties.

But when they docked two letters were handed to her. She was surprised to recognise her father’s writing: she did not remember that he had ever written to her. He was not effusive, and began: dear Kitty. He told her that he was writing instead of her mother who had not been well and was obliged to go into a nursing home to have an operation. Kitty was not to be frightened and was to keep to her intention of going round by sea; it was much more expensive to come across by land and with her mother away it would be inconvenient for Kitty to stay at the house in Harrington Gardens. The other was from Doris; it started: Kitty darling, not because Doris had any particular affection for her, but because it was her way thus to address every one she knew.

Kitty darling,

I expect Father has written to you. Mother has got to have an operation. It appears that she has been rotten for the last year, but you know she hates doctors and she’s been taking all sorts of patent medicines. I don’t quite know what’s the matter with her as she insists on making a secret of the whole thing and flies into a passion if you ask her questions. She has been looking simply awful and if I were you I think I’d get off at Marseilles and come back as quick as you can. But don’t let on that I told you to come as she pretends there’s nothing much the matter with her and she doesn’t want you to get here till she’s back at home. She’s made the doctors promise that she shall be moved in a week. Best love.

Doris.

I’m awfully sorry about Walter. You must have had a hell of a time, poor darling. I’m simply dying to see you. It’s rather funny our both having babies together. We shall be able to hold one another’s hands.

Kitty lost in reflection, stood for a little while on the deck. She could not imagine her mother ill. She never remembered to have seen her other than active and resolute; she had always been impatient of other people’s ailments. Then a steward came up to her with a telegram.

Deeply regret to inform you that your mother died this morning. Father.

LXXIX

Kitty rang the bell at the house in Harrington Gardens. She was told that her father was in his study and going to the door she opened it softly: he was sitting by the fire reading the last edition of the evening paper. He looked up as she entered, put down the paper, and sprang nervously to his feet.

“Oh, Kitty, I didn’t expect you till the later train.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want the bother of coming to meet me so I didn’t wire the time I expected to arrive.”

He gave her his cheek to kiss in the manner she so well remembered.

“I was just having a look at the paper,” he said. “I haven’t read the paper for the last two days.”

She saw that he thought it needed some explanation if he occupied himself with the ordinary affairs of life.

“Of course,” she said. “You must be tired out. I’m afraid mother’s death has been a great shock to you.”

He was older, and thinner than when she had last seen him. A little, lined, dried-up man, with a precise manner.

“The surgeon said there had never been any hope. She hadn’t been herself for more than a year, but she refused to see a doctor. The surgeon told me that she must have been in constant pain, he said it was a miracle that she had been able to endure it.”

“Did she never complain?”

“She said she wasn’t very well. But she never complained of pain.” He paused and looked at Kitty. “Are you very tired after your journey?”

“Not very.”

“Would you like to go up and see her?”

“Is she here?”

“Yes, she was brought here from the nursing home.”

“Yes, I’ll go now.”

“Would you like me to come with you?”

There was something in her father’s tone that made her look at him quickly. His face was slightly turned from her; he did not want her to catch his eye. Kitty had acquired of late a singular proficiency at reading the thoughts of others. After all, day after day she had applied all her sensibilities to divine from a casual word or an unguarded gesture the hidden thoughts of her husband. She guessed at once what her father was trying to hide from her. It was relief he felt, an infinite relief, and he was frightened of himself. For hard on thirty years he had been a good and faithful husband, he had never uttered a single word in dispraise of his wife, and now he should grieve for her. He had always done the things that were expected of him. It would have been shocking to him by the flicker of an eyelid or by the smallest hint to betray that he did not feel what under the circumstances a bereaved husband should feel.

“No, I would rather go by myself,” said Kitty.

She went upstairs and into the large, cold and pretentious bedroom in which her mother for so many years had slept. She remembered so well those massive pieces of mahogany and the engravings after Marcus Stone which adorned the walls. The things on the dressing-table were arranged with the stiff precision which Mrs. Garstin had all her life insisted upon. The flowers looked out of place; Mrs. Garstin would have thought it silly, affected and unhealthy to have flowers in her bedroom. Their perfume did not cover that acrid, musty smell, as of freshly washed linen, which Kitty remembered as characteristic of her mother’s room.

Mrs. Garstin lay on the bed, her hands folded across her breast with a meekness which in life she would have had no patience with. With her strong sharp features, the cheeks hollow with suffering and the temples sunken, she looked handsome and even imposing. Death had robbed her face of its meanness and left only an impression of character. She might have been a Roman empress. It was strange to Kitty that of the dead persons she had seen this was the only one who in death seemed to preserve a look as though that clay had been once a habitation of the spirit. Grief she could not feel, for there had been too much bitterness between her mother and herself to leave in her heart any deep feeling of affection; and looking back on the girl she had been she knew that it was her mother who had made her what she was. But when she looked at that hard, domineering and ambitious woman who lay there so still and silent with all her petty aims frustrated by death, she was aware of a vague pathos. She had schemed and intrigued all her life and never had she desired anything but what was base and unworthy. Kitty wondered whether perhaps in some other sphere she looked upon her earthly course with consternation.

Doris came in.

“I thought you’d come by this train. I felt I must look in for a moment. Isn’t it dreadful? Poor darling mother.”

Bursting into tears, she flung herself into Kitty’s arms. Kitty kissed her. She knew how her mother had neglected Doris in favour of her and how harsh she had been with her because she was plain and dull. She wondered whether Doris really felt the extravagant grief she showed. But Doris had always been emotional. She wished she could cry: Doris would think her dreadfully hard. Kitty felt that she had been through too much to feign a distress she did not feel.

“Would you like to come and see father?” she asked her when the strength of the outburst had somewhat subsided.

Doris wiped her eyes. Kitty noticed that her sister’s pregnancy had blunted her features and in her black dress she looked gross and blousy.

“No, I don’t think I will. I shall only cry again. Poor old thing, he’s bearing it wonderfully.”

Kitty showed her sister out of the house and then went back to her father. He was standing in front of the fire and the newspaper was neatly folded. He wanted her to see that he had not been reading it again.

“I haven’t dressed for dinner,” he said. “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

LXXX

They dined. Mr. Garstin gave Kitty the details of his wife’s illness and death, and he told her the kindness of the friends who had written (there were piles of sympathetic letters on his table and he sighed when he considered the burden of answering them) and the arrangements he had made for the funeral. Then they went back into his study. This was the only room in the house which had a fire. He mechanically took from the chimney-piece his pipe and began to fill it, but he gave his daughter a doubtful look and put it down.

“Aren’t you going to smoke?” she asked.

“Your mother didn’t very much like the smell of a pipe after dinner and since the war I’ve given up cigars.”

His answer gave Kitty a little pang. It seemed dreadful that a man of sixty should hesitate to smoke what he wanted in his own study.

“I like the smell of a pipe,” she smiled.

A faint look of relief crossed his face and taking his pipe once more he lit it. They sat opposite one another on each side of the fire. He felt that he must talk to Kitty of her own troubles.

“You received the letter your mother wrote to you to Port Said, I suppose. The news of poor Walter’s death was a great shock to both of us. I thought him a very nice fellow.”

Kitty did not know what to say.

“Your mother told me that you were going to have a baby.”

“Yes.”

“When do you expect it?”

“In about four months.”

“It will be a great consolation to you. You must go and see Doris’s boy. He’s a fine little fellow.”

They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father’s affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the breadwinner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he had probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her.

His pipe was not drawing and he rose to find something to poke it with. Perhaps it was an excuse to hide his nervousness.

“Your mother wished you to stay here till your baby was born and she was going to have your old room got ready for you.”

“I know. I promise you I won’t be a bother.”

“Oh, it’s not that. Under the circumstances it was evident that the only place for you to come to was your father’s house. But the fact is that I’ve just been offered the post of Chief Justice of the Bahamas and I have accepted it.”

“Oh, father, I’m so glad. I congratulate you with all my heart.”

“The offer arrived too late for me to tell your poor mother. It would have given her a great satisfaction.”

The bitter irony of fate! After all her efforts, intrigues and humiliations, Mrs. Garstin had died without knowing that her ambition, however modified by past disappointments, was at last achieved.

“I am sailing early next month. Of course this house will be put in the agent’s hands and my intention was to sell the furniture. I’m sorry that I shan’t be able to have you to stay here, but if you’d like any of the furniture to furnish a flat I shall be extremely pleased to give it you.”

Kitty looked into the fire. Her heart beat quickly; it was curious that on a sudden she should be so nervous. But at last she forced herself to speak. In her voice was a little tremor.

“Couldn’t I come with you, father?”

“You? Oh, my dear Kitty.” His face fell. She had often heard the expression, but thought it only a phrase, and now for the first time in her life she saw the movement that it described. It was so marked that it startled her. “But all your friends are here and Doris is here. I should have thought you’d be much happier if you took a flat in London. I don’t exactly know what your circumstances are, but I shall be very glad to pay the rent of it.”

“I have enough money to live on.”

“I’m going to a strange place. I know nothing of the conditions.”

“I’m used to strange places. London means nothing to me any more. I couldn’t breathe here.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and she thought he was going to cry. His face bore an expression of utter misery. It wrung her heart. She had been right; the death of his wife had filled him with relief and now this chance to break entirely with the past had offered him freedom. He had seen a new life spread before him and at last after all these years rest and the mirage of happiness. She saw dimly all the suffering that had preyed on his heart for thirty years. At last he opened his eyes. He could not prevent the sigh that escaped him.

“Of course if you wish to come I shall be very pleased.”

It was pitiful. The struggle had been short and he had surrendered to his sense of duty. With those few words he abandoned all his hopes. She rose from her chair and going over to him knelt down and seized his hands.

“No, father, I won’t come unless you want me. You’ve sacrificed yourself enough. If you want to go alone, go. Don’t think of me for a minute.”

He released one of his hands and stroked her pretty hair.

“Of course I want you, my dear. After all I’m your father and you’re a widow and alone. If you want to be with me it would be very unkind of me not to want you.”

“But that’s just it, I make no claims on you because I’m your daughter, you owe me nothing.”

“Oh, my dear child.”

“Nothing,” she repeated vehemently. “My heart sinks when I think how we’ve battened on you all our lives and have given you nothing in return. Not even a little affection. I’m afraid you’ve not had a very happy life. Won’t you let me try to make up a little for all I’ve failed to do in the past?”

He frowned a little. Her emotion embarrassed him.

“I don’t know what you mean. I’ve never had any complaint to make of you.”

“Oh, father, I’ve been through so much, I’ve been so unhappy. I’m not the Kitty I was when I went away. I’m terribly weak, but I don’t think I’m the filthy cad I was then. Won’t you give me a chance? I have nobody but you in the world now. Won’t you let me try to make you love me? Oh, father, I’m so lonely and so miserable; I want your love so badly.”

She buried her face in his lap and cried as though her heart were breaking.

“Oh, my Kitty, my little Kitty,” he murmured.

She looked up and put her arms round his neck.

“Oh, father, be kind to me. Let us be kind to one another.”

He kissed her, on the lips as a lover might, and his cheeks were wet with her tears.

“Of course you shall come with me.”

“Do you want me to? Do you really want me to?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so grateful to you.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t say things like that to me. It makes me feel quite awkward.”

He took out his handkerchief and dried her eyes. He smiled in a way that she had never seen him smile before. Once more she threw her arms round his neck.

“We’ll have such a lark, father dear. You don’t know what fun we’re going to have together.”

“You haven’t forgotten that you’re going to have a baby.”

“I’m glad she’ll be born out there within sound of the sea and under a wide blue sky.”

“Have you already made up your mind about the sex?” he murmured, with his thin, dry smile.

“I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet. I’m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he’s willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.”

She felt her father stiffen. He had never spoken of such things and it shocked him to hear these words in his daughter’s mouth.

“Let me be frank just this once, father. I’ve been foolish and wicked and hateful. I’ve been terribly punished. I’m determined to save my daughter from all that. I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have.”

“Why, my love, you talk as though you were fifty. You’ve got all your life before you. You mustn’t be downhearted.”

Kitty shook her head and slowly smiled.

“I’m not. I have hope and courage. The past is finished; let the dead bury their dead. It’s all uncertain, life and whatever is to come to me, but I enter upon it with a light and buoyant heart. It’s all confused, but vaguely I discern a pattern, and I see before me an inexhaustible richness, the mystery and the strangeness of everything, compassion and charity, the Way and the Wayfarer, and perhaps in the end — God.”

THE END

CAKES AND ALE

OR, THE SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD

Like Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale has a strong autobiographical element. It was published by Heinemann in September 1930, and in America by Doran the following month, to great acclaim. It had previously been serialised in Harper’s Bazaar in the first half of 1930. It was a novel that Maugham was particularly pleased with. The phrase “cakes and ale” refers to a good life and Shakespeare has his character Toby Belch use it in Twelfth Night: “Dost though think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

The story is told in the first person by Willie Ashenden, who bears a strong resemblance to Maugham. Maugham’s lover, Sue Jones, was the model for the character Rosie (wife of a well known novelist) with whom the narrator also has an affair, and it is a very kind portrayal of a woman that Maugham was closely attached to for some years. Hugh Walpole, the writer, makes an appearance (his second in a Maugham novel) thinly disguised as Alroy Kear, a caricature that he was deeply upset by to the extent that he tried in vain to halt publication of the book. A wider audience was also distressed by what was seen as a cruel caricature of revered author Thomas Hardy, as the character Edward Driffield. Author Elinor Mordaunt, a close friend of Hardy’s widow, was deeply hurt by Maugham’s depiction and decided to retaliate with a cruel caricature of Maugham himself in the novel Full Circle (1931). However, and thankfully for Maugham, none of this detracted from the outstanding reviews the novel received and continued to enjoy over the years.

The narrative concerns how Ashenden is invited to lunch by Alroy Kear, a writer of mediocre novels and a long term friend of the narrator. Kear is in need of information – he has been commissioned to write the biography of revered author Edward Driffield. Ashenden can provide valuable background knowledge to the famous author, as he was befriended by him and his young wife, Rosie, when a boy living in Blackstable. At this time, Driffield is not a famous writer, and he is still building his reputation when as a medical student Ashenden renews his acquaintance with them in London. Driffield the author is being promoted by the energetic Mrs Trafford, who at the same time is firmly but gently making sure that the lovely, rather common Rosie does not get in the way of her husband’s impending greatness. Ashenden, as an adult, finds he is still smitten by Rosie and has a brief affair with her; unfortunately Rosie is not really interested in him, and elopes with a man she had had an affair with years before in Blackstable. What will the now elderly author do, without his lover and muse?

This novel is beautifully written and widely regarded as showcasing Maugham at the height of his powers as an author. It offers fascinating insights into the literary world of London, with its mentors, hangers-on and secondary personalities that circulate around the few who are famous. Kear personifies the gossips, keen to root out the titbits of information with which to boost his own reputation, but anxious not to offend the widowed second wife of Driffield by disclosing anything too uncomfortable. It is this portrait of the literary world that is central to the story, rather than any sweeping action scenes. Certain aspects will be familiar to those that know Maugham’s earlier novels – the young Willie, and Driffield, live in Blackstable in Kent, which features in Of Human Bondage, and Maugham again uses his knowledge of the medical profession by placing Willie at medical school in London. The character of Rosie was one that Maugham had long planned to use. He had been deeply taken with the lovely blonde Sue Jones, who like Rosie gave her sexual favours freely, and even the encounter with an older Rosie has parallels. However, compared to some of Maugham’s pen portraits across his oeuvre, this one is affectionate, even tender, and no judgements are offered of Rosie’s actions.

The first edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

Sue Jones, c. 1930

PREFACE

It was as a short story, and not a very long one either, that I first thought of this novel. Here is the note I made when it occurred to me: ‘I am asked to write my reminiscences of a famous novelist, a friend of my boyhood, living at W. with a common wife, very unfaithful to him. There he writes his great books. Later he marries his secretary, who guards him and makes him into a figure. My wonder whether even in old age he is not slightly restive at being made into a monument.’ I was writing at the time a series of short stories for the Cosmopolitan. My contract stipulated that they were to be between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred words, so that with the illustration they should not occupy more than a page of the magazine, but I allowed myself some latitude and then the illustration spread across the opposite page and gave me a little more space. I thought this story would do for this purpose, and put it aside for future use. But I had long had in mind the character of Rosie. I had wanted for years to write about her, but the opportunity never presented itself; I could contrive no setting in which she found a place to suit her, and I began to think I never should. I did not very much care. A character in a writer’s head, unwritten, remains a possession; his thoughts recur to it constantly, and while his imagination gradually enriches it he enjoys the singular pleasure of feeling that there, in his mind, someone is living a varied and tremulous life, obedient to his fancy and yet in a queer wilful way independent of him. But when once that character is set down on paper it belongs to the writer no more. He forgets it. It is curious how completely a person who may have occupied your reveries for many years can thus cease to be. It suddenly struck me that the little story I had jotted down offered me just the framework for this character that I had been looking for. I would make her the wife of my distinguished novelist. I saw that my story could never be got into a couple of thousand words, so I made up my mind to wait a little and use my material for one of the much longer tales, fourteen or fifteen thousand words, with which, following upon Rain, I had been not unsuccessful. But the more I thought of it the less inclined I was to waste my Rosie on a story even of this length. Old recollections returned to me. I found I had not said all I wanted to say about the W. of the note, which in Of Human Bondage I had called Blackstable. After so many years I did not see why I should not get closer to the facts. The Uncle William, Rector of Blackstable, and his wife Isabella, became Uncle Henry, vicar, and his wife, Sophie. The Philip Carey of the earlier book became the I of Cakes and Ale.

When the book appeared I was attacked in various quarters because I was supposed in the character of Edward Driffield to have drawn a portrait of Thomas Hardy. This was not my intention. He was no more in my mind than George Meredith or Anatole France. As my note suggests, I had been struck by the notion that the veneration to which an author full of years and honour is exposed must be irksome to the little alert soul within him that is alive still to the adventures of his fancy. Many odd and disconcerting ideas must cross his mind, I thought, while he maintains the dignified exterior that his admirers demand of him. I read Tess of the D’ Urbervilles when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good. I was never so much interested in him as I was at one time in George Meredith, and later in Anatole France. I knew little of Hardy’s life. I know now only enough to be certain that the points in common between his and that of Edward Driffield are negligible. They consist only in both having been born in humble circumstances and both having had two wives. I met Thomas Hardy but once. This was at a dinner-party at Lady St Helier’s, better known in the social history of the day as Lady Jeune, who liked to ask to her house (in a much more exclusive world than the world of today) everyone that in some way or another had caught the public eye. I was then a popular and fashionable playwright. It was one of those great dinner-parties that people gave before the war, with a vast number of courses, thick and clear soup, fish, a couple of entrees, sorbet (to give you a chance to get your second wind), joint, game, sweet, ice, and savoury; and there were twenty-four people all of whom by rank, political eminence, or artistic achievement, were distinguished. When the ladies retired to the drawing-room I found myself sitting next to Thomas Hardy. I remember a little man with an earthy face. In his evening clothes, with his boiled shirt and high collar, he had still a strange look of the soil. He was amiable and mild. It struck me at the time that there was in him a curious mixture of shyness and self-assurance. I do not remember what we talked about, but I know that we talked for three-quarters of an hour. At the end of it he paid me a great compliment: he asked me (not having heard my name) what was my profession.

I am told that two or three writers thought themselves aimed at in the character of Alroy Kear. They were under a misapprehension. This character was a composite portrait: I took the appearance from one writer, the obsession with good society from another, the heartiness from a third, the pride in athletic prowess from a fourth, and a great deal from myself. For I have a grim capacity for seeing my own absurdity and I find in myself much to excite my ridicule. I am inclined to think that this is why I see people (if I am to believe what I am frequently told and frequently read of myself) in a less flattering light than many authors who have not this unfortunate idiosyncrasy. For all the characters that we create are but copies of ourselves. It may be of course also that they really are nobler, more disinterested, virtuous, and spiritual than I. It is very natural that being godlike they should create men in their own image. When I wanted to draw the portrait of a writer who used every means of advertisement possible to assist the diffusion of his works I had no need to fix my attention on any particular person. The practice is too common for that. Nor can one help feeling sympathy for it. Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost for ever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded in the press of matter that weighs down the critics’ tables and burdens the book-sellers’ shelves. It is not unnatural that he should use what means he can to attract the attention of the public. Experience has taught him what to do. He must make himself a public figure. He must keep in the public eye. He must give interviews and get his photograph in the papers. He must write letters to The Times, address meetings, and occupy himself with social questions; he must make after-dinner speeches; he must recommend books in the publishers’ advertisements; and he must be seen without fail at the proper places at the proper times. He must never allow himself to be forgotten. It is hard and anxious work, for a mistake may cost him dear; it would be brutal to look with anything but kindliness at an author who takes so much trouble to persuade the world at large to read books that he honestly considers so well worth reading.

But there is one form of advertisement that I deplore. This is the cocktail party that is given to launch a book. You secure the presence of a photographer. You invite the gossip writers and as many eminent people as you know. The gossip writers give you a paragraph in their columns and the illustrated papers publish the photographs, but the eminent people expect to get a signed copy of the book for nothing. This ignoble practice is not rendered less objectionable when it is presumed (sometimes no doubt with justice) to be given at the expense of the publisher. It did not flourish at the time I wrote Cakes and Ale. It would have given me the material for a lively chapter.

CHAPTER 1

I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you. When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favour most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds. So when I got back to my lodgings with just enough time to have a drink, a cigarette, and to read my paper before dressing for dinner, and was told by Miss Fellows, my landlady, that Mr Alroy Kear wished me to ring him up at once, I felt that I could safely ignore his request.

‘Is that the writer?’ she asked me.

‘It is.’

She gave the telephone a friendly glance.

‘Shall I get him?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘What shall I say if he rings again?’

‘Ask him to leave a message.’

‘Very good, sir.’

She pursed her lips. She took the empty siphon, swept the room with a look to see that it was tidy, and went out. Miss Fellows was a great novel reader. I was sure that she had read all Roy’s books. Her disapproval of my casualness suggested that she had read them with admiration. When I got home again, I found a note in her bold, legible writing on the sideboard:

Mr Kear rang up twice. Can you lunch with him tomorrow? If not what day will suit you?

I raised my eyebrows. I had not seen Roy for three months and then only for a few minutes at a party; he had been very friendly, he always was, and when we separated he had expressed his hearty regret that we met so seldom.

‘London’s awful,’ he said. ‘One never has time to see any of the people one wants to. Let’s lunch together one day next week, shall we?’

‘I’d like to,’ I replied.

‘I’ll look at my book when I get home and ring you up.’

‘All right.’

I had not known Roy for twenty years without learning that he always kept in the upper left-hand pocket of his waistcoat the little book in which he put down his engagements; I was therefore not surprised when I heard from him no further. It was impossible for me now to persuade myself that this urgent desire of his to dispense hospitality was disinterested. As I smoked a pipe before going to bed I turned over in my mind the possible reasons for which Roy might want me to lunch with him. It might be that an admirer of his had pestered him to introduce me to her or that an American editor, in London for a few days, had desired Roy to put me in touch with him; but I could not do my old friend the injustice of supposing him so barren of devices as not to be able to cope with such a situation. Besides, he told me to choose my own day, so it could hardly be that he wished me to meet anyone else.

Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody’s lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure, or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notoriety. The writer has his ups and downs, and I was but too conscious that at the moment I was not in the public eye. It was obvious that I might have found excuses without affront to refuse Roy’s invitation, though he was a determined fellow and if he was resolved for purposes of his own to see me, I well knew that nothing short of a downright ‘go to hell’ would check his persistence; but I was beset by curiosity. I had also a considerable affection for Roy.

I had watched with admiration his rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle. No one who for years had observed his indefatigable industry could deny that at all events he deserved to be a genius.

Roy started with certain advantages. He was the only son of a civil servant who after being Colonial Secretary for many years in Hong Kong ended his career as Governor of Jamaica. When you looked up Alroy Kear in the serried pages of Who’s Who you saw ‘o.s. of Sir Raymond Kear, KCMG, KCVO, q.v., and of Emily, y.d. of the late Major-General Percy Camperdown, Indian Army.’ He was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford. He was president of the Union and but for an unfortunate attack of measles might very well have got his rowing blue. His academic career was respectable rather than showy, and he left the university without a debt in the world. Roy was even then of a thrifty habit, without any inclination to unprofitable expense, and he was a good son. He knew that it had been a sacrifice to his parents to give him so costly an education. His father, having retired, lived in an unpretentious, but not mean, house near Stroud, in Gloucestershire, but at intervals went to London to attend official dinners connected with the colonies he had administered, and on these occasions was in the habit of visiting the Athenaeum, of which he was a member. It was through an old crony at this club that he was able to get his boy, when he came down from Oxford, appointed tutor to the delicate and only son of a very noble lord. This gave Roy a chance to become acquainted at an early age with the great world. He made good use of his opportunities. You will never find in his works any of the solecisms that disfigure the productions of those who have studied the upper circles of society only in the pages of the illustrated papers. He knew exactly how dukes spoke to one another, and the proper way they should be addressed respectively by a member of Parliament, an attorney, a bookmaker, and a valet. There is something captivating in the jauntiness with which in his early novels he handles viceroys, ambassadors, prime ministers, royalties, and great ladies. He is friendly without being patronizing and familiar without being impertinent. He does not let you forget their rank, but shares with you his comfortable feeling that they are of the same flesh as you and I. I always think it a pity that, fashion having decided that the doings of the aristocracy are no longer a proper subject for serious fiction, Roy, always keenly sensitive to the tendency of the age, should in his later novels have confined himself to the spiritual conflicts of solicitors, chartered accountants, and produce brokers. He does not move in these circles with his old assurance.

I knew him first soon after he resigned his tutorship to devote himself exclusively to literature, and he was then a fine, upstanding young man, six feet high in his stockinged feet and of an athletic build, with broad shoulders and a confident carriage. He was not handsome, but in a manly way agreeable to look at, with wide, blue, frank eyes and curly hair of a lightish brown; his nose was rather short and broad, his chin square. He looked honest, clean, and healthy. He was something of an athlete. No one who has read in his early books the descriptions of a run with the hounds, so vivid and so accurate, can doubt that he wrote from personal experience; and until quite lately he was willing now and then to desert his desk for a day’s hunting. He published his first novel at the period when men of letters, to show their virility, drank beer and played cricket, and for some years there was seldom a literary eleven in which his name did not figure. This particular school, I hardly know why, has lost its bravery, their books are neglected and cricketers though they have remained, they find difficulty in placing their articles. Roy ceased playing cricket a good many years ago, and he has developed a fine taste for claret.

Roy was very modest about his first novel. It was short, neatly written, and, as is everything he has produced since, in perfect taste. He sent it with a pleasant letter to all the leading writers of the day, and in this he told each one how greatly he admired his works, how much he had learned from his study of them, and how ardently he aspired to follow, albeit at a humble distance, the trail his correspondent had blazed. He laid his book at the feet of a great artist as the tribute of a young man entering upon the profession of letters to one whom he would always look up to as his master. Deprecatingly, fully conscious of his audacity in asking so busy a man to waste his time on a neophyte’s puny effort, he begged for criticism and guidance. Few of the replies were perfunctory. The authors he wrote to, flattered by his praise, answered at length. They commended his book; many of them asked him to luncheon. They could not fail to be charmed by his frankness and warmed by his enthusiasm. He asked for their advice with a humility that was touching, and promised to act upon it with a sincerity that was impressive. Here, they felt, was someone worth taking a little trouble over.

His novel had a considerable success. It made him many friends in literary circles and in a very short while you could not go to a tea-party in Bloomsbury, Campden Hill, or Westminster without finding him handing round bread and butter or disembarrassing an elderly lady of an empty cup. He was so young, so bluff, so gay, he laughed so merrily at other people’s jokes that no one could help liking him. He joined dining clubs where in the basement of an hotel in Victoria Street or Holborn men of letters, young barristers, and ladies in Liberty silks and strings of beads, ate a three-and-sixpenny dinner and discussed art and literature. It was soon discovered that he had a pretty gift for after-dinner speaking. He was so pleasant that his fellow writers, his rivals and contemporaries, forgave him even the fact that he was a gentleman. He was generous in his praise of their fledgeling works, and when they sent him manuscripts to criticize could never find a thing amiss. They thought him not only a good sort, but a sound judge.

He wrote a second novel. He took great pains with it and he profited by the advice his elders in the craft had given him. It was only just that more than one should at his request write a review for a paper with whose editor Roy had got into touch and only natural that the review should be flattering. His second novel was successful, but not so successful as to arouse the umbrageous susceptibilities of his competitors. In fact it confirmed them in their suspicions that he would never set the Thames on fire. He was a jolly good fellow; no side, or anything like that: they were quite content to give a leg up to a man who would never climb so high as to be an obstacle to themselves. I know some who smile bitterly now when they reflect on the mistake they made.

But when they say that he is swollen-headed they err. Roy has never lost the modesty which in his youth was his most engaging trait.

‘I know I’m not a great novelist,’ he will tell you. ‘When I compare myself with the giants I simply don’t exist. I used to think that one day I should write a really great novel, but I’ve long ceased even to hope for that. All I want people to say is that I do my best. I do work. I never let anything slipshod get past me. I think I can tell a good story and I can create characters that ring true. And after all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: The Eye of the Needle sold thirty-five thousand in England and eighty thousand in America, and for the serial rights of my next book I’ve got the biggest terms I’ve ever had yet.’

And what, after all, can it be other than modesty that makes him even now write to the reviewers of his books, thanking them for their praise, and ask them to luncheon? Nay, more: when someone has written a stinging criticism and Roy, especially since his reputation became so great, has had to put up with some very virulent abuse, he does not, like most of us, shrug his shoulders, fling a mental insult at the ruffian who does not like our work, and then forget about it; he writes a long letter to his critic, telling him that he is very sorry he thought his book bad, but his review was so interesting in itself, and if he might venture to say so, showed so much critical sense and so much feeling for words, that he felt bound to write to him. No one is more anxious to improve himself than he, and he hopes he is still capable of learning. He does not want to be a bore, but if the critic has nothing to do on Wednesday or Friday will he come and lunch at the Savoy and tell him why exactly he thought his book so bad? No one can order a lunch better than Roy, and generally by the time the critic has eaten half a dozen oysters and a cut from a saddle of baby lamb, he has eaten his words too. It is only poetic justice that when Roy’s next novel comes out the critic should see in the new work a very great advance.

One of the difficulties that a man has to cope with as he goes through life is what to do about the persons with whom he has once been intimate and whose interest for him has in due course subsided. If both parties remain in a modest station the break comes about naturally, and no ill feeling subsists, but if one of them achieves eminence the position is awkward. He makes a multitude of new friends, but the old ones are inexorable; he has a thousand claims on his time, but they feel that they have the first right to it. Unless he is at their beck and call they sigh and with a shrug of the shoulders say:

‘Ah, well, I suppose you’re like everyone else. I must expect to be dropped now that you’re a success.’

That, of course, is what he would like to do if he had the courage. For the most part he hasn’t. He weakly accepts an invitation to supper on Sunday evening. The cold roast beef is frozen and comes from Australia and was overcooked at middle day; and the burgundy – ah, why will they call it burgundy? Have they never been to Beaune and stayed at the Hotel de la Poste? Of course it is grand to talk of the good old days when you shared a crust of bread in a garret together, but it is a little disconcerting when you reflect how near to a garret is the room you are sitting in. You don’t feel at ease when your friend tells you that his books don’t sell and that he can’t place his short stories; the managers won’t even read his plays, and when he compares them with some of the stuff that’s put on (here he fixes you with an accusing eye) it really does seem a bit hard. You are embarrassed and you look away. You exaggerate the failures you have had in order that he may realize that life has its hardships for you too. You refer to your work in the most disparaging way you can and are a trifle taken aback to find that your host’s opinion of it is the same as yours. You speak of the fickleness of the public so that he may comfort himself by thinking that your popularity cannot last. He is a friendly but severe critic.

‘I haven’t read your last book,’ he says, ‘but I read the one before. I’ve forgotten its name.’

You tell him.

‘I was rather disappointed in it. I didn’t think it was quite so good as some of the things you’ve done. Of course you know which my favourite is.’

And you, having suffered from other hands than his, answer at once with the name of the first book you ever wrote: you were twenty then, and it was crude and ingenuous, and on every page was written your inexperience.

‘You’ll never do anything so good as that,’ he says heartily, and you feel that your whole career has been a long decadence from that one happy hit. ‘I always think you’ve never quite fulfilled the promise you showed then.’

The gas-fire roasts your feet, but your hands are icy. You look at your wrist-watch surreptitiously and wonder whether your old friend would think it offensive if you took your leave as early as ten. You have told your car to wait round the corner so that it should not stand outside the door and by its magnificence affront his poverty, but at the door he says:

‘You’ll find a bus at the bottom of the street. I’ll just walk down with you.’

Panic seizes you and you confess that you have a car. He finds it very odd that the chauffeur should wait round the corner. You answer that this is one of his idiosyncrasies. When you reach it your friend looks at it with tolerant superiority. You nervously ask him to dinner with you one day. You promise to write to him and you drive away wondering whether when he comes he will think you are swanking if you ask him to Claridge’s or mean if you suggest Soho.

Roy Kear suffered from none of these tribulations. It sounds a little brutal to say that when he had got all he could get from people he dropped them; but it would take so long to put the matter more delicately, and would need so subtle an adjustment of hints, half-tones, and allusions, playful or tender, that such being at bottom the fact, I think it as well to leave it at that. Most of us when we do a caddish thing harbour resentment against the person we have done it to, but Roy’s heart, always in the right place, never permitted him such pettiness. He could use a man very shabbily without afterward bearing the slightest ill-will.

‘Poor old Smith,’ he would say. ‘He is a dear; I’m so fond of him. Pity he’s growing so bitter. I wish one could do something for him. No, I haven’t seen him for years. It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.’

But if he ran across Smith at some gathering like the private view of the Royal Academy no one could be more cordial. He wrung his hand and told him how delighted he was to see him. His face beamed. He shed good fellowship as the kindly sun its rays. Smith rejoiced in the glow of this wonderful vitality and it was damned decent of Roy to say he’d give his eyeteeth to have written a book half as good as Smith’s last. On the other hand, if Roy thought Smith had not seen him, he looked the other way; but Smith had seen him, and Smith resented being cut. Smith was very acid. He said that in the old days Roy had been glad enough to share a steak with him in a shabby restaurant and spend a month’s holiday in a fisherman’s cottage at St Ives. Smith said that Roy was a timeserver. He said he was a snob. He said he was a humbug.

Smith was wrong here. The most shining characteristic of Alroy Kear was his sincerity. No one can be a humbug for five-and-twenty years. Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job. It needs also a cynical humour; although Roy laughed so much, I never thought he had a very quick sense of humour, and I am quite sure that he was incapable of cynicism. Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages. This is clearly the chief ground of his stable popularity. Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment. When he wrote novels about the aristocracy he sincerely believed that its members were dissipated and immoral, and yet had a certain nobility and an innate aptitude for governing the British Empire; when later he wrote of the middle classes he sincerely believed that they were the backbone of the country. His villains have always been villainous, his heroes heroic, and his maidens chaste.

When Roy asked the author of a flattering review to lunch it was because he was sincerely grateful to him for his good opinion, and when he asked the author of an unflattering one it was because he was sincerely concerned to improve himself. When unknown admirers from Texas or Western Australia came to London it was not only to cultivate his public that he took them to the National Gallery, it was because he was sincerely anxious to observe their reactions to art. You had only to hear him lecture to be convinced of his sincerity.

When he stood on the platform, in evening dress admirably worn, or in a loose, much used, but perfectly cut lounge suit if it better fitted the occasion, and faced his audience seriously, frankly, but with an engaging diffidence, you could not but realize that he was giving himself up to his task with complete earnestness. Though now and then he pretended to be at a loss for a word, it was only to make it more effective when he uttered it. His voice was full and manly. He told a story well. He was never dull. He was fond of lecturing upon the younger writers of England and America, and he explained their merits to his audience with an enthusiasm that attested his generosity. Perhaps he told almost too much, for when you had heard his lecture you felt that you really knew all you wanted to about them and it was quite unnecessary to read their books. I suppose that is why when Roy had lectured in some provincial town not a single copy of the books of the authors he had spoken of was ever asked for, but there was always a run on his own. His energy was prodigious. Not only did he make successful tours of the United States, but he lectured up and down Great Britain. No club was so small, no society for the self-improvement of its members so insignificant, that Roy disdained to give it an hour of his time. Now and then he revised his lectures and issued them in neat little books. Most people who are interested in these things have at least looked through the works entitled Modern Novelists, Russian Fiction, and Some Writers; and few can deny that they exhibit a real feeling for literature and a charming personality.

But this by no means exhausted his activities. He was an active member of the organizations that have been founded to further the interests of authors or to alleviate their hard lot when sickness or old age has brought them to penury. He was always willing to give his help when matters of copyright were the subject of legislation and he was never unprepared to take his place in those missions to a foreign country which are devised to establish amicable relations between writers of different nationalities. He could be counted on to reply for literature at a public dinner and he was invariably on the reception committee formed to give a proper welcome to a literary celebrity from overseas. No bazaar lacked an autographed copy of at least one of his books. He never refused to grant an interview. He justly said that no one knew better than he the hardships of the author’s trade and if he could help a struggling journalist to earn a few guineas by having a pleasant chat with him he had not the inhumanity to refuse. He generally asked his interviewer to luncheon and seldom failed to make a good impression on him. The only stipulation he made was that he should see the article before it was published. He was never impatient with the persons who call up the celebrated on the telephone at inconvenient moments to ask them for the information of newspaper readers whether they believe in God or what they eat for breakfast. He figured in every symposium and the public knew what he thought of prohibition, vegetarianism, jazz, garlic, exercise, marriage, politics, and the place of women in the home.

His views on marriage were abstract, for he had successfully evaded the state which so many artists have found difficult to reconcile with the arduous pursuit of their calling. It was generally known that he had for some years cherished a hopeless passion for a married woman of rank, and though he never spoke of her but with chivalrous admiration, it was understood that she had treated him with harshness. The novels of his middle period reflected in their unwonted bitterness the strain to which he had been put. The anguish of spirit he had passed through then enabled him without offence to elude the advances of ladies of little reputation, frayed ornaments of a hectic circle, who were willing to exchange an uncertain present for the security of marriage with a successful novelist. When he saw in their bright eyes the shadow of the registry office he told them that the memory of his one great love would always prevent him from forming any permanent tie. His quixotry might exasperate, but could not affront, them. He sighed a little when he reflected that he must be for ever denied the joys of domesticity and the satisfaction of parenthood, but it was a sacrifice that he was prepared to make not only to his ideal, but also to the possible partner of his joys. He had noticed that people really do not want to be bothered with the wives of authors and painters. The artist who insisted on taking his wife wherever he went only made himself a nuisance and indeed was in consequence often not asked to places he would have liked to go to; and if he left his wife at home, he was on his return exposed to recriminations that shattered the repose so essential for him to do the best that was in him. Alroy Kear was a bachelor and now at fifty was likely to remain one.

He was an example of what an author can do, and to what heights he can rise, by industry, common sense, honesty, and the efficient combination of means and ends. He was a good fellow and none but a cross-grained carper could grudge him his success. I felt that to fall asleep with his image in my mind would ensure me a good night. I scribbled a note to Miss Fellows, knocked the ashes out of my pipe, put out the light in my sitting-room, and went to bed.

CHAPTER 2

When I rang for my letters and the papers next morning a message was delivered to me, in answer to my note to Miss Fellows, that Mr Alroy Kear expected me at one-fifteen at his club in St James’s Street; so a little before one I strolled round to my own and had the cocktail which I was pretty sure Roy would not offer me. Then I walked down St James’s Street, looking idly at the shop windows, and since I had still a few minutes to spare (I did not want to keep my appointment too punctually) I went into Christie’s to see if there was anything I liked the look of. The auction had already begun and a group of dark, small men were passing round to one another pieces of Victorian silver, while the auctioneer, following their gestures with bored eyes, muttered in a drone: ‘Ten shillings offered, eleven, eleven and six’ … It was a fine day, early in June, and the air in King Street was bright. It made the pictures on the walls of Christie’s look very dingy. I went out. The people in the street walked with a kind of nonchalance, as though the ease of the day had entered into their souls and in the midst of their affairs they had a sudden and surprised inclination to stop and look at the picture of life.

Roy’s club was sedate. In the ante-chamber were only an ancient porter and a page; and I had a sudden and melancholy feeling that the members were all attending the funeral of the head-waiter. The page, when I had uttered Roy’s name, led me into an empty passage to leave my hat and stick and then into an empty hall hung with life-sized portraits of Victorian statesmen. Roy got up from a leather sofa and warmly greeted me.

‘Shall we go straight up?’ he said.

I was right in thinking that he would not offer me a cocktail and I commended my prudence. He led me up a noble flight of heavily carpeted stairs, and we passed nobody on the way; we entered the strangers’ dining-room, and we were its only occupants. It was a room of some size, very clean and white, with an Adam window. We sat down by it and a demure waiter handed us the bill of fare. Beef, mutton, and lamb, cold salmon, apple tart, rhubarb tart, gooseberry tart. As my eye travelled down the inevitable list I sighed as I thought of the restaurants round the corner where there were French cooking, the clatter of life, and pretty, painted women in summer frocks.

‘I can recommend the veal-and-ham pie,’ said Roy.

‘All right.’

‘I’ll mix the salad myself,’ he told the waiter in an off-hand and yet commanding way, and then, casting his eye once more on the bill of fare, generously: ‘And what about some asparagus to follow?’

‘That would be very nice.’

His manner grew a trifle grander.

‘Asparagus for two and tell the chef to choose them himself. Now what would you like to drink? What do you say to a bottle of hock? We rather fancy our hock here.’

When I had agreed to this he told the waiter to call the wine-steward. I could not but admire the authoritative and yet perfectly polite manner in which he gave his orders. You felt that thus would a well-bred king send for one of his field-marshals. The wine-steward, portly in black, with the silver chain of his office round his neck, bustled in with the wine-list in his hand. Roy nodded to him with curt familiarity.

‘Hallo, Armstrong, we want some of the Liebfraumilch, the ‘21.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘How’s it holding up? Pretty well? We shan’t be able to get any more of it, you know.’

‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Well, it’s no good meeting trouble half-way, is it, Arm-strong?’

Roy smiled at the steward with breezy cordiality. The steward saw from his long experience of members that the remark needed an answer.

‘No, sir.’

Roy laughed and his eye sought mine. Quite a character, Armstrong.

‘Well, chill it, Armstrong; not too much, you know, but just right. I want my guest to see that we know what’s what here.’ He turned to me. ‘Armstrong’s been with us for eight and forty years.’ And when the wine-steward had left us: ‘I hope you don’t mind coming here. It’s quiet and we can have a good talk. It’s ages since we did. You’re looking very fit.’

This drew my attention to Roy’s appearance.

‘Not half so fit as you,’ I answered.

‘The result of an upright, sober, and godly life,’ he laughed. ‘Plenty of work. Plenty of exercise. How’s the golf? We must have a game one of these days.’

I knew that Roy was scratch and that nothing would please him less than to waste a day with so indifferent a player as myself. But I felt I was quite safe in accepting so vague an invitation. He looked the picture of health. His curly hair was getting very grey, but it suited him and made his frank, sunburned face look younger. His eyes, which looked upon the world with such a hearty candour, were bright and clear. He was not so slim as in his youth, and I was not surprised that when the waiter offered us rolls he asked for Ryvita. His slight corpulence only added to his dignity. It gave weight to his observations. Because his movements were a little more deliberate than they had been, you had a comfortable feeling of confidence in him; he filled his chair with so much solidity that you had almost the impression that he sat upon a monument.

I do not know whether, as I wished, I have indicated by my report of his dialogue with the waiter that his conversation was not as a rule brilliant or witty, but it was fluent and he laughed so much that you sometimes had the illusion that what he said was funny. He was never at a loss for a remark and he could discourse on the topics of the day with an ease that prevented his hearers from experiencing any sense of strain.

Many authors from their preoccupation with words have the bad habit of choosing those they use in conversation too carefully. They form their sentences with unconscious care and say neither more nor less than they mean. It makes intercourse with them somewhat formidable to persons in the upper ranks of society whose vocabulary is limited by their simple spiritual needs, and their company consequently is sought only with hesitation. No constraint of this sort was ever felt with Roy. He could talk with a dancing guardee in terms that were perfectly comprehensible to him and with a racing countess in the language of her stable-boys. They said of him with enthusiasm and relief that he was not a bit like an author. No compliment pleased him better. The wise always use a number of ready-made phrases (at the moment I write ‘nobody’s business’ is the most common), popular adjectives (like ‘divine’ or ‘shy-making’), verbs that you only know the meaning of if you live in the right set (like ‘dunch’), which give a homely sparkle to small talk and avoid the necessity of thought. The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication. Roy’s repertory was extensive and his scent for the word of the minute unerring; it peppered his speech, but aptly, and he used it each time with a sort of bright eagerness, as though his fertile brain had just minted it.

Now he talked of this and that, of our common friends and the latest books, of the opera. He was very breezy. He was always cordial, but today his cordiality took my breath away. He lamented that we saw one another so seldom and told me with the frankness that was one of his pleasantest characteristics how much he liked me and what a high opinion he had of me. I felt I must not fail to meet this friendliness half-way. He asked me about the book I was writing, I asked him about the book he was writing. We told one another that neither of us had had the success he deserved. We ate the veal-and-ham pie and Roy told me how he mixed a salad. We drank the hock and smacked appreciative lips.

And I wondered when he was coming to the point.

I could not bring myself to believe that at the height of the London season Alroy Kear would waste an hour on a fellow writer who was not a reviewer and had no influence in any quarter whatever in order to talk of Matisse, the Russian Ballet, and Marcel Proust. Besides, at the back of his gaiety I vaguely felt a slight apprehension. Had I not known that he was in a prosperous state I should have suspected that he was going to borrow a hundred pounds from me. It began to look as though luncheon would end without his finding the opportunity to say what he had in mind. I knew he was cautious. Perhaps he thought that this meeting, the first after so long a separation, had better be employed in establishing friendly relations, and was prepared to look upon the pleasant, substantial meal merely as ground bait.

‘Shall we go and have our coffee in the next room?’ he said.

‘If you like.’

‘I think it’s more comfortable.’

I followed him into another room, much more spacious, with great leather arm-chairs and huge sofas; there were papers and magazines on the tables. Two old gentlemen in a corner were talking in undertones. They gave us a hostile glance, but this did not deter Roy from offering them a cordial greeting.

‘Hallo, General,’ he cried, nodding breezily.

I stood for a moment at the window, looking at the gaiety of the day, and wished I knew more of the historical associations of St James’s Street. I was ashamed that I did not even know the name of the club across the way and was afraid to ask Roy lest he should despise me for not knowing what every decent person knew. He called me back by asking me whether I would have a brandy with my coffee, and when I refused, insisted. The club’s brandy was famous. We sat side by side on a sofa by the elegant fireplace and lit cigars.

‘The last time Edward Driffield ever came to London he lunched with me here,’ said Roy casually. ‘I made the old man try our brandy and he was delighted with it. I was staying with his widow over last weekend.’

‘Were you?’

‘She sent you all sorts of messages.’

‘That’s very kind of her. I shouldn’t have thought she remembered me.’

‘Oh, yes, she does. You lunched there about six years ago, didn’t you? She says the old man was so glad to see you.’

‘I didn’t think she was.’

‘Oh, you’re quite wrong. Of course she had to be very careful. The old man was pestered with people who wanted to see him and she had to husband his strength. She was always afraid he’d do too much. It’s a wonderful thing if you come to think of it that she should have kept him alive and in possession of all his faculties to the age of eighty-four. I’ve been seeing a good deal of her since he died. She’s awfully lonely. After all, she devoted herself to looking after him for twenty-five years. Othello’s occupation, you know. I really feel sorry for her.’

‘She’s still comparatively young. I dare say she’ll marry again.’

‘Oh, no, she couldn’t do that. That would be dreadful.’

There was a slight pause while we sipped our brandy.

‘You must be one of the few persons still alive who knew Driffield when he was unknown. You saw quite a lot of him at one time, didn’t you?’

‘A certain amount. I was almost a small boy and he was a middle-aged man. We weren’t boon companions, you know.’

‘Perhaps not, but you must know a great deal about him that other people don’t.’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘Have you ever thought of writing your recollections of him?’

‘Good heavens, no!’

‘Don’t you think you ought to? He was one of the greatest novelists of our day. The last of the Victorians. He was an enormous figure. His novels have as good a chance of surviving as any that have been written in the last hundred years.’

‘I wonder. I’ve always thought them rather boring.’

Roy looked at me with eyes twinkling with laughter.

‘How like you that is! Anyhow you must admit that you’re in the minority. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve read his novels not once or twice, but half a dozen times, and every time I read them I think they’re finer. Did you read the articles that were written about him at his death?’

‘Some of them.’

‘The consensus of opinion was absolutely amazing. I read every one.’

‘If they all said the same thing, wasn’t that rather unnecessary?’

Roy shrugged his massive shoulders good-humouredly, but did not answer my question.

‘I thought The Times Lit. Sup. was splendid. It would have done the old man good to read it. I hear that the Quarterly is going to have an article in its next number.’

‘I still think his novels rather boring.’

Roy smiled indulgently.

‘Doesn’t it make you slightly uneasy to think that you disagree with everyone whose opinion matters?’

‘Not particularly. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years now, and you can’t think how many geniuses I’ve seen acclaimed, enjoy their hour or two of glory and vanish into obscurity. I wonder what’s happened to them. Are they dead, are they shut up in mad-houses, are they hidden away in offices? I wonder if they furtively lend their books to the doctor and the maiden lady in some obscure village. I wonder if they are still great men in some Italian pension.’

‘Oh, yes, they’re the flash in the pans. I’ve known them.’

‘You’ve even lectured about them.’

‘One has to. One wants to give them a leg up if one can and one knows they won’t amount to anything. Hang it all, one can afford to be generous. But after all, Driffield wasn’t anything like that. The collected edition of his works is in thirty-seven volumes and the last set that came up at Sotheby’s sold for seventy-eight pounds. That speaks for itself. His sales have increased steadily every year and last year was the best he ever had. You can take my word for that. Mrs Driffield showed me his accounts last time I was down there. Driffield has come to stay all right.’

‘Who can tell?’

‘Well, you think you can,’ replied Roy acidly.

I was not put out. I knew I was irritating him and it gave me a pleasant sensation.

‘I think the instinctive judgements I formed when I was a boy were right. They told me Carlyle was a great writer and I was ashamed that I found the French Revolution and Sartor Resartus unreadable. Can anyone read them now? I thought the opinions of others must be better than mine and I persuaded myself that I thought George Meredith magnificent. In my heart I found him affected, verbose, and insincere. A good many people think so too now. Because they told me that to admire Walter Pater was to prove myself a cultured young man, I admired Walter Pater, but heavens, how Marius bored me!’

‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose anyone reads Pater now, and, of course, Meredith has gone all to pot, and Carlyle was a pretentious windbag.’

‘You don’t know how secure of immortality they all looked thirty years ago.’

‘And have you never made mistakes?’

‘One or two. I didn’t think half as much of Newman as I do now, and I thought a great deal more of the tinkling quatrains of Fitzgerald. I could not read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister; now I think it his masterpiece.’

‘And what did you think much of then that you think much of still?’

‘Well, Tristram Shandy and Amelia and Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Anna Karenina. And Wordsworth and Keats and Verlaine.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think that’s particularly original.’

‘I don’t mind your saying so at all. I don’t think it is. But you asked me why I believed in my own judgement, and I was trying to explain to you that, whatever I said out of timidity and in deference to the cultured opinion of the day, I didn’t really admire certain authors who were then thought admirable, and the event seems to show that I was right. And what I honestly and instinctively liked then has stood the test of time with me and with critical opinion in general.’

Roy was silent for a moment. He looked in the bottom of his cup, but whether to see if there were any more coffee in it or to find something to say, I did not know. I gave the clock on the chimney-piece a glance. In a minute it would be fitting for me to take my leave. Perhaps I had been wrong and Roy had invited me only that we might idly chat of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. I chid myself for the uncharitable thoughts I had had of him. I looked at him with concern. If that was his only object it must be that he was feeling tired or discouraged. If he was disinterested it could only be that for the moment at least the world was too much for him. But he caught my look at the clock and spoke.

‘I don’t see how you can deny that there must be something in a man who’s able to carry on for sixty years, writing book after book, and who’s able to hold an ever increasing public. After all, at Ferne Court there are shelves filled with the translations of Driffield’s books into every language of civilized people. Of course I’m willing to admit that a lot he wrote seems a bit old fashioned nowadays. He flourished in a bad period and he was inclined to be long-winded. Most of his plots are melodramatic; but there’s one quality you must allow him: beauty.’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘When all’s said and done, that’s the only thing that counts, and Driffield never wrote a page that wasn’t instinct with beauty.’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I wish you’d been there when we went down to present him with his portrait on his eightieth birthday. It really was a memorable occasion.’

‘I read about it in the papers.’

‘It wasn’t only writers, you know, it was a thoroughly representative gathering – science, politics, business, art, the world; I think you’d have to go a long way to find gathered together such a collection of distinguished people as got out from that train at Blackstable. It was awfully moving when the PM presented the old man with the Order of Merit. He made a charming speech. I don’t mind telling you there were tears in a good many eyes that day.’

‘Did Driffield cry?’

‘No, he was singularly calm. He was like he always was; rather shy, you know, and quiet, very well-mannered, grateful, of course, but a little dry. Mrs Driffield didn’t want him to get over-tired and when we went in to lunch he stayed in his study, and she sent him something in on a tray. I slipped away while the others were having their coffee. He was smoking his pipe and looking at the portrait. I asked him what he thought of it. He wouldn’t tell me, he just smiled a little. He asked me if I thought he could take his teeth out, and I said, No, the deputation would be coming in presently to say good-bye to him. Then I asked him if he didn’t think it was a wonderful moment. “Rum,” he said, “very rum.” The fact is, I suppose, he was shattered, He was a messy eater in his later days and a messy smoker – he scattered the tobacco all over himself when he filled his pipe; Mrs Driffield didn’t like people to see him when he was like that, but, of course, she didn’t mind me; I tidied him up a bit, and then they all came in and shook hands with him, and we went back to town.’

I got up.

‘Well, I really must be going. It’s been awfully nice seeing you.’

‘I’m just going along to the private view at the Leicester Galleries. I know the people there. I’ll take you in if you like.’

‘It’s very kind of you, but they sent me a card. No, I don’t think I’ll come.’

We walked down the stairs and I got my hat. When we came out into the street and I turned towards Piccadilly, Roy said:

‘I’ll just walk up to the top with you.’ He got into step with me. ‘You knew his first wife, didn’t you?’

‘Whose?’

‘Driffield’s.’

‘Oh!’ I had forgotten him. ‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘Fairly.’

‘I suppose she was awful.’

‘I don’t recollect that.’

‘She must have been dreadfully common. She was a barmaid, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder why the devil he married her. I’ve always been given to understand that she was extremely unfaithful to him.’

‘Extremely.’

‘Do you remember at all what she was like?’

‘Yes, very distinctly,’ I smiled. ‘She was sweet.’

Roy gave a short laugh.

‘That’s not the general impression.’

I did not answer. We had reached Piccadilly, and stopping I held out my hand to Roy. He shook it, but I fancied without his usual heartiness. I had the impression that he was disappointed with our meeting. I could not imagine why. Whatever he had wanted of me I had not been able to do, for the reason that he had given me no inkling of what it was, and as I strolled under the arcade of the Ritz Hotel and along the park railings till I came opposite Half Moon Street I wondered if my manner had been more than ordinarily forbidding. It was quite evident that Roy had felt the moment inopportune to ask me to grant him a favour.

I walked up Half Moon Street. After the gay tumult of Piccadilly it had a pleasant silence. It was sedate and respectable. Most of the houses let apartments, but this was not advertised by the vulgarity of a card; some had a brightly polished brass plate, like a doctor’s, to announce the fact, and others the word Apartments neatly painted on the fanlight. One or two with an added discretion merely gave the name of the proprietor, so that if you were ignorant you might have thought it a tailor’s or a money-lender’s. There was none of the congested traffic of Jermyn Street, where also they let rooms, but here and there a smart car, unattended, stood outside a door and occasionally at another a taxi deposited a middle-aged lady. You had the feeling that the people who lodged here were not gay and a trifle disreputable as in Jermyn Street, racing men who rose in the morning with headaches and asked for a hair of the dog that bit them, but respectable women from the country who came up for six weeks for the London season and elderly gentlemen who belonged to exclusive clubs. You felt that they came year after year to the same house and perhaps had known the proprietor when he was still in private service. My own Miss Fellows had been cook in some very good places, but you would never have guessed it had you seen her walking along to do her shopping in Shepherd Market. She was not stout, red-faced, and blousy as one expects a cook to be; she was spare and very upright, neatly but fashionably dressed, a woman of middle age with determined features; her lips were rouged and she wore an eyeglass. She was businesslike, quiet, coolly cynical, and very expensive.

The rooms I occupied were on the ground floor. The parlour was papered with an old marbled paper and on the walls were water-colours of romantic scenes, cavaliers bidding good-bye to their ladies and knights of old banqueting in stately halls; there were large ferns in pots, and the arm-chairs were covered with faded leather. There was about the room an amusing air of the eighteen-eighties, and when I looked out of the window I expected to see a private hansom rather than a Chrysler. The curtains were of a heavy red rep.

CHAPTER 3

I had a good deal to do that afternoon, but my conversation with Roy and the impression of the day before yesterday, the sense of a past that still dwelt in the minds of men not yet old, that my room, I could not tell why, had given me even more strongly than usual as I entered it, inveigled my thoughts to saunter down the road of memory. It was as though all the people who had at one time and another inhabited my lodging pressed upon me with their old fashioned ways and odd clothes, men with mutton-chop whiskers in frock-coats and women in bustles and flounced skirts. The rumble of London, which I did not know if I imagined or heard (my house was at the top of Half Moon Street), and the beauty of the sunny June day (le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui), gave my reverie a poignancy which was not quite painful. The past I looked at seemed to have lost its reality and I saw it as though it were a scene in a play and I a spectator in the back row of a dark gallery. But it was all very clear as far as it went. It was not misty like life as one leads it, when the ceaseless throng of impressions seems to rob them of outline, but sharp and definite like a landscape painted in oils by a painstaking artist of the middle-Victorian era.

I fancy that life is more amusing now than it was forty years ago and I have a notion that people are more amiable. They may have been worthier then, possessed of more solid virtue as, I am told, they were possessed of more substantial knowledge; I do not know. I know they were more cantankerous; they ate too much, many of them drank too much, and they took too little exercise. Their livers were out of order and their digestions often impaired. They were irritable. I do not speak of London, of which I knew nothing till I was grown up, nor of grand people who hunted and shot, but of the countryside and of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers, and such-like who made up the local society. The dullness of their lives was almost incredible. There were no golf links; at a few houses was an ill-kept tennis court, but it was only the very young who played; there was a dance once a year in the Assembly Rooms; carriage folk went for a drive in the afternoon; the others went for a ‘constitutional’! You may say that they did not miss amusements they had never thought of, and that they created excitement for themselves from the small entertainment (tea when you were asked to bring your music and you sang the songs of Maude Valérie White and Tosti) which at infrequent intervals they offered one another; the days were very long; they were bored. People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarrelled bitterly, and, seeing each other every day in the town, cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their own idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with. It may be that we are flippant and careless, but we accept one another without the old suspicion; our manners, rough and ready, are kindly; we are more prepared to give and take and we are not so crabbed.

I lived with an uncle and aunt on the outskirts of a little Kentish town by the sea. It was called Blackstable and my uncle was the vicar. My aunt was a German. She came of a very noble but impoverished family, and the only portion she brought her husband was a marquetry writing-desk, made for an ancestor in the seventeenth century, and a set of tumblers. Of these only a few remained when I entered upon the scene, and they were used as ornaments in the drawing-room. I liked the grand coat-of-arms with which they were heavily engraved. There were I don’t know how many quarterings, which my aunt used demurely to explain to me, and the supporters were fine and the crest emerging from a crown incredibly romantic. She was a simple old lady, of a meek and Christian disposition, but she had not, though married for more than thirty years to a modest parson with very little income beyond his stipend, forgotten that she was hochwohlgeboren. When a rich banker from London, with a name that in these days is famous in financial circles, took a neighbouring house for the summer holidays, though my uncle called on him (chiefly, I surmise, to get a subscription to the Additional Curates Society), she refused to do so because he was in trade. No one thought her a snob. It was accepted as perfectly reasonable. The banker had a little boy of my own age, and, I forget how, I became acquainted with him. I still remember the discussion that ensued when I asked if I might bring him to the vicarage; permission was reluctantly given me, but I was not allowed to go in return to his house. My aunt said I’d be wanting to go to the coal merchant’s next, and my uncle said:

‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

The banker used to come to church every Sunday morning, and he always put half a sovereign in the plate, but if he thought his generosity made a good impression he was much mistaken. All Blackstable knew, but only thought him purse-proud.

Blackstable consisted of a long winding street that led to the sea, with little two-storey houses, many of them residential but with a good many shops; and from this ran a certain number of short streets, recently built, that ended on one side in the country and on the other in the marshes. Round about the harbour was a congeries of narrow winding alleys. Colliers brought coal from Newcastle to Blackstable and the harbour was animated. When I was old enough to be allowed out by myself I used to spend hours wandering about there looking at the rough grimy men in their jerseys and watching the coal being unloaded.

It was at Blackstable that I first met Edward Driffield. I was fifteen and had just come back from school for the summer holidays. The morning after I got home I took a towel and bathing drawers and went down to the beach. The sky was unclouded and the air hot and bright, but the North Sea gave it a pleasant tang so that it was a delight just to live and breathe. In winter the natives of Blackstable walked down the empty street with hurried gait, screwing themselves up in order to expose as little surface as possible to the bitterness of the east wind, but now they dawdled; they stood about in groups in the little space between the Duke of Kent and the Bear and Key. You heard a hum of their East Anglian speech, drawling a little with an accent that may be ugly, but in which from old association I still find a leisurely charm. They were fresh-complexioned, with blue eyes and high cheekbones, and their hair was light. They had a clean, honest, and ingenuous look. I do not think they were very intelligent, but they were guileless. They looked healthy, and, though not tall, for the most part were strong and active. There was little wheeled traffic in Blackstable in those days and the groups that stood about the road chatting seldom had to move for anything but the doctor’s dogcart or the baker’s trap.

Passing the bank, I called in to say how-do-you-do to the manager, who was my uncle’s churchwarden, and when I came out met my uncle’s curate. He stopped and shook hands with me. He was walking with a stranger. He did not introduce me to him. He was a smallish man with a beard and he was dressed rather loudly in a bright brown knickerbocker suit, the breeches very tight, with navy-blue stockings, black boots, and a billy-cock hat. Knickerbockers were uncommon then, at least in Blackstable, and being young and fresh from school I immediately set the fellow down as a cad. But while I chatted with the curate he looked at me in a friendly way, with a smile in his pale blue eyes. I felt that for two pins he would have joined in the conversation and I assumed a haughty demeanour. I was not going to run the risk of being spoken to by a chap who wore knickerbockers like a gamekeeper, and I resented the familiarity of his good-humoured expression. I was myself faultlessly dressed in white flannel trousers, a blue blazer with the arms of my school on the breast pocket, and a black-and-white straw hat with a very wide brim. The curate said that he must be getting on (fortunately, for I never knew how to break away from a meeting in the street and would endure agonies of shyness while I looked in vain for an opportunity), but said that he would be coming up to the vicarage that afternoon and would I tell my uncle. The stranger nodded and smiled as we parted, but I gave him a stony stare. I supposed he was a summer visitor, and in Blackstable we did not mix with the summer visitors. We thought London people vulgar. We said it was horrid to have all that rag-tag and bob tail down from town every year, but of course it was all right for the tradespeople. Even they, however, gave a faint sigh of relief when September came to an end and Blackstable sank back into its usual peace.

When I went home to dinner, my hair insufficiently dried and clinging dankly to my head, I remarked that I had met the curate and he was coming up that afternoon.

‘Old Mrs Shepherd died last night,’ said my uncle in explanation.

The curate’s name was Galloway; he was a tall, thin, ungainly man with untidy black hair and a small, sallow dark face. I suppose he was quite young, but to me he seemed middle-aged. He talked very quickly and gesticulated a great deal. This made people think him rather queer and my uncle would not have kept him but that he was very energetic, and my uncle, being extremely lazy, was glad to have someone to take so much work off his shoulders. After he had finished the business that had brought him to the vicarage Mr Galloway came in to say how-do-you-do to my aunt, and she asked him to stay to tea.

‘Who was that you were with this morning?’ I asked him as he sat down.

‘Oh, that was Edward Driffield. I didn’t introduce him. I wasn’t sure if your uncle would wish you to know him.’

‘I think it would be most undesirable,’ said my uncle.

‘Why, who is he? He’s not a Blackstable man, is he?’

‘He was born in the parish,’ said my uncle. ‘His father was old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff at Ferne Court. But they were chapel people.’

‘He married a Blackstable girl,’ said Mr Galloway.

‘In church, I believe,’ said my aunt. ‘Is it true that she was a barmaid at the Railway Arms?’

‘She looks as if she might have been something like that,’ said Mr Galloway with a smile.

‘Are they going to stay long?’

‘Yes, I think so. They’ve taken one of those houses in that street where the Congregational Chapel is,’ said the curate.

At that time in Blackstable, though the new streets doubtless had names, nobody knew or used them.

‘Is he coming to church?’ asked my uncle.

‘I haven’t actually talked to him about it yet,’ answered Mr Galloway. ‘He’s quite an educated man, you know.’

‘I can hardly believe that,’ said my uncle.

‘He was at Haversham School, I understand, and he got any number of scholarships and prizes. He got a scholarship to Wadham, but he ran away to sea instead.’

‘I’d heard he was rather a harum-scarum,’ said my uncle.

‘He doesn’t look much like a sailor,’ I remarked.

‘Oh, he gave up the sea many years ago. He’s been all sorts of things since then.’

‘Jack of all trades and master of none,’ said my uncle.

‘Now, I understand, he’s a writer.’

‘That won’t last long,’ said my uncle.

I had never known a writer before; I was interested.

‘What does he write?’ I asked. ‘Books?’

‘I believe so,’ said the curate, ‘and articles. He had a novel published last spring. He’s promised to lend it me.’

‘I wouldn’t waste my time on rubbish in your place,’ said my uncle, who never read anything but The Times and the Guardian.

‘What’s it called?’ I asked.

‘He told me the title, but I forget it.’

‘Anyhow, it’s quite unnecessary that you should know,’ said my uncle. ‘I should very much object to your reading trashy novels. During your holidays the best thing you can do is to keep out in the open air. And you have a holiday task, I presume?’

I had. It was Ivanhoe. I had read it when I was ten, and the notion of reading it again and writing an essay on it bored me to distraction.

When I consider the greatness that Edward Driffield afterward achieved I cannot but smile as I remember the fashion in which he was discussed at my uncle’s table. When he died a little while ago and an agitation arose among his admirers to have him buried in Westminster Abbey, the present incumbent at Blackstable, my uncle’s successor twice removed, wrote to the Daily Mail pointing out that Driffield was born in the Parish and not only had passed long years, especially the last twenty-five of his life, in the neighbourhood, but had laid there the scene of some of his most famous books; it was only becoming, then, that his bones should rest in the churchyard where under the Kentish elms his father and mother dwelt in peace. There was relief in Blackstable when, the Dean of Westminster having somewhat curtly refused the abbey, Mrs Driffield sent a dignified letter to the Press in which she expressed her confidence that she was carrying out the dearest wishes of her dead husband in having him buried among the simple people he knew and loved so well. Unless the notabilities of Blackstable have very much changed since my day, I do not believe they vastly liked that phrase about ‘simple people’, but, as I afterward learnt, they had never been able to ‘abide’ the second Mrs Driffield.

CHAPTER 4

To my surprise, two or three days after I lunched with Alroy Kear I received a letter from Edward Driffield’s widow. It ran as follows:

Dear friend,

I hear that you had a long talk with Roy last week about Edward Driffield and I am so glad to know that you spoke of him so nicely. He often talked to me of you. He had the greatest admiration for your talent and he was so very pleased to see you when you came to lunch with us. I wonder if you have in your possession any letters that he wrote to you, and if so whether you would let me have copies of them. I should be very pleased if I could persuade you to come down for two or three days and stay with me. I live very quietly now and have no one here, so please choose your own time. I shall be delighted to see you again and have a talk of old times. I have a particular service I want you to do me, and I am sure that for the sake of my dear dead husband you will not refuse. Yours ever sincerely,

Amy Driffield

I had seen Mrs Driffield only once and she but mildly interested me; I do not like being addressed as ‘dear friend’; that alone would have been enough to make me decline her invitation; and I was exasperated by its general character which, however ingenious an excuse I invented, made the reason I did not go quite obvious, namely, that I did not want to. I had no letters of Driffield’s. I suppose years ago he had written to me several times, brief notes, but he was then an obscure scribbler and even if I ever kept letters it would never have occurred to me to keep his. How was I to know that he was going to be acclaimed as the greatest novelist of our day? I hesitated only because Mrs Driffield said she wanted me to do something for her. It would certainly be a nuisance, but it would be churlish not to do it if I could, and after all, her husband was a very distinguished man.

The letter came by the first post, and after breakfast I rang up Roy. As soon as I mentioned my name I was put through to him by his secretary. If I were writing a detective story I should immediately have suspected that my call was awaited, and Roy’s virile voice calling hallo would have confirmed my suspicion. No one could naturally be quite so cheery so early in the morning.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ I said.

‘Good God, no!’ His healthy laugh rippled along the wires. ‘I’ve been up since seven. I’ve been riding in the park. I’m just going to have breakfast. Come along and have it with me.’

‘I have a great affection for you, Roy,’ I answered, ‘but I don’t think you’re the sort of person I’d care to have breakfast with. Besides, I’ve already had mine. Look here, I’ve just had a letter from Mrs Driffield asking me to go down and stay.’

‘Yes, she told me she was going to ask you. We might go down together. She’s got quite a good grass court and she does one very well. I think you’d like it.’

‘What is it that she wants me to do?’

‘Ah, I think she’d like to tell you that herself.’

There was a softness in Roy’s voice such as I imagined he would use if he were telling a prospective father that his wife was about to gratify his wishes. It cut no ice with me.

‘Come off it, Roy,’ I said. ‘I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff. Spit it out.’

There was a moment’s pause at the other end of the telephone. I felt that Roy did not like my expression.

‘Are you busy this morning?’ he asked suddenly. ‘I’d like to come and see you.’

‘All right, come on. I shall be in till one.’

‘I’ll be round in about an hour.’

I replaced the receiver and relit my pipe. I gave Mrs Driffield’s letter a second glance.

I remembered vividly the luncheon to which she referred. I happened to be staying for a long weekend not far from Tercanbury with a certain Lady Hodmarsh, the clever and handsome American wife of a sporting baronet with no intelligence and charming manners. Perhaps to relieve the tedium of domestic life she was in the habit of entertaining persons connected with the arts. Her parties were mixed and gay. Members of the nobility and gentry mingled with astonishment and an uneasy awe with painters, writers, and actors. Lady Hodmarsh neither read the books nor looked at the pictures of the people to whom she offered hospitality, but she liked their company and enjoyed the feeling it gave her of being in the artistic know. When on this occasion the conversation happened to dwell for a moment on Edward Driffield, her most celebrated neighbour, and I mentioned that I had at one time known him very well, she proposed that we should go over and lunch with him on Monday when a number of her guests were going back to London. I demurred, for I had not seen Driffield for five and thirty years and I could not believe that he would remember me; and if he did (though this I kept to myself) I could not believe that it would be with pleasure. But there was a young peer there, a certain Lord Scallion, with literary inclinations so violent that, instead of ruling this country as the laws of man and nature have decreed, he devoted his energy to the composition of detective novels. His curiosity to see Driffield was boundless, and the moment Lady Hodmarsh made her suggestion he said it would be too divine. The star guest of the party was a big young fat duchess, and it appeared that her admiration for the famous writer was so intense that she was prepared to cut an engagement in London and not go up till the afternoon.

‘That would make four of us,’ said Lady Hodmarsh. ‘I don’t think they could manage more than that. I’ll wire to Mrs Driffield at once.’

I could not see myself going to see Driffield in that company and tried to throw cold water on the scheme.

‘It’ll only bore him to death,’ I said. ‘He’ll hate having a lot of strangers barging in on him like this. He’s a very old man.’

‘That’s why if they want to see him they’d better see him now. He can’t last much longer. Mrs Driffield says he likes to meet people. They never see anyone but the doctor and the parson and it’s a change for them. Mrs Driffield said I could always bring anyone interesting. Of course she has to be very careful. He’s pestered by all sorts of people who want to see him just out of idle curiosity, and interviewers and authors who want him to read their books, and silly hysterical women. But Mrs Driffield is wonderful. She keeps everyone away from him but those she thinks he ought to see. I mean, he’d be dead in a week if he saw everyone who wants to see him. She has to think of his strength. Naturally we’re different.’

Of course I thought I was; but as I looked at them I perceived that the duchess and Lord Scallion thought they were too; so it seemed best to say no more.

We drove over in a bright yellow Rolls. Ferne Court was three miles from Blackstable. It was a stucco house built, I suppose, about 1840, plain and unpretentious, but substantial; it was the same back and front, with two large bows on each side of a flat piece in which was the front door and there were two large bows on the first floor. A plain parapet hid the low roof. It stood in about an acre of garden, somewhat overgrown with trees, but neatly tended, and from the drawing-room window you had a pleasant view of woods and green downland. The drawing-room was furnished so exactly as you felt a drawing-room in a country house of modest size should be furnished, that it was slightly disconcerting. Clean, bright chintzes covered the comfortable chairs and the large sofa, and the curtains were of the same bright clean chintz. On little Chippendale tables stood large Oriental bowls filled with pot-pourri. On the cream-coloured walls were pleasant watercolours by painters well known at the beginning of this century. There were great masses of flowers charmingly arranged, and on the grand piano, in silver frames, photographs of celebrated actresses, deceased authors, and minor royalties.

It was no wonder that the duchess cried out that it was a lovely room. It was just the kind of room in which a distinguished writer should spend the evening of his days. Mrs Driffield received us with modest assurance. She was a woman of about five and forty, I judged, with a small sallow face and neat sharp features. She had a black cloche hat pressed tight down on her head and wore a grey coat and skirt. Her figure was slight and she was neither tall nor short, and she looked trim, competent and alert. She might have been the squire’s widowed daughter, who ran the Parish and had a peculiar gift for organization. She introduced us to a clergyman and a lady, who got up as we were shown in. They were the Vicar of Blackstable and his wife. Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the cringing affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.

Then Edward Driffield came in. I had seen portraits of him from time to time in the illustrated papers, but it was with dismay that I saw him in the flesh. He was smaller than I remembered and very thin, his head was barely covered with fine silvery hair, he was clean-shaven, and his skin was almost transparent. His blue eyes were very pale and the rims of his eyelids red. He looked an old, old man, hanging on to mortality by a thread; he wore very white false teeth and they made his smile seem forced and stiff. I had never seen him but bearded, and his lips were thin and pallid. He was dressed in a new, well-cut suit of blue serge, and his low collar, two or three sizes too large for him, showed a wrinkled, scraggy neck. He wore a neat black tie with a pearl in it. He looked a little like a dean in mufti on his summer holiday in Switzerland.

Mrs Driffield gave him a quick glance as he came in and smiled encouragingly; she must have been satisfied with the neatness of his appearance. He shook hands with his guests and to each said something civil. When he came to me he said:

‘It’s very good of a busy and successful man like you to come all this way to see an old fogy.’

I was a trifle taken aback, for he spoke as though he had never seen me before, and I was afraid my friends would think I had been boasting when I claimed at one time to have known him intimately. I wondered if he had completely forgotten me.

‘I don’t know how many years it is since we last met,’ I said, trying to be hearty.

He looked at me for what I suppose was no more than a few seconds, but for what seemed to me quite a long time, and then I had a sudden shock; he gave me a little wink. It was so quick that nobody but I could have caught it, and so unexpected in that distinguished old face that I could hardly believe my eyes. In a moment his face was once more composed, intelligently benign, and quietly observant. Luncheon was announced and we trooped into the dining-room.

This also was in what can only be described as the acme of good taste. On the Chippendale sideboard were silver candlesticks. We sat on Chippendale chairs and ate off a Chippendale table. In a silver bowl in the middle were roses, and round this were silver dishes with chocolates in them and peppermint creams; the silver salt-cellars were brightly polished and evidently Georgian. On the cream-coloured walls were mezzotints of ladies painted by Sir Peter Lely and on the chimney-piece a garniture of blue delf. The service was conducted by two maids in brown uniform and Mrs Driffield in the midst of her fluent conversation kept a wary eye on them. I wondered how she had managed to train these buxom Kentish girls (their healthy colour and high cheek-bones betrayed the fact that they were ‘local’) to such a pitch of efficiency. The lunch was just right for the occasion, smart but not showy, fillets of sole rolled up and covered with a white sauce, roast chicken, with new potatoes and green peas, asparagus, and gooseberry fool. It was the dining-room and the lunch and the manner which you felt exactly fitted a literary gent of great celebrity but moderate wealth.

Mrs Driffield, like the wives of most men of letters, was a great talker and she did not let the conversation at her end of the table flag; so that, however much we might have wanted to hear what her husband was saying at the other, we had no opportunity. She was gay and sprightly. Though Edward Driffield’s indifferent health and great age obliged her to live most of the year in the country, she managed notwithstanding to run up to town often enough to keep abreast of what was going on, and she was soon engaged with Lord Scallion in an animated discussion of the plays in the London theatres and the terrible crowd at the Royal Academy. It had taken her two visits to look at all the pictures, and even then she had not had time to see the water-colours. She liked water-colours so much; they were unpretentious; she hated things to be pretentious.

So that host and hostess should sit at the head and foot of the table, the vicar sat next to Lord Scallion and his wife next to the duchess. The duchess engaged her in conversation on the subject of working-class dwellings, a subject on which she seemed to be much more at home than the parson’s lady, and my attention being thus set free I watched Edward Driffield. He was talking to Lady Hodmarsh. She was apparently telling him how to write a novel, and giving him a list of a few that he really ought to read. He listened to her with what looked like polite interest, putting in now and then a remark in a voice too low for me to catch, and when she made a jest (she made them frequently and often good ones) he gave a little chuckle and shot her a quick look that seemed to say: this woman isn’t such a damned fool after all. Remembering the past, I asked myself curiously what he thought of this grand company, his neatly-turned-out wife, so competent and discreetly managing, and the elegant surroundings in which he lived. I wondered if he regretted his early days of adventure. I wondered if all this amused him or if the amiable civility of his manner masked a hideous boredom. Perhaps he felt my eyes upon him, for he raised his. They rested on me for a while with a thoughtful look, mild and yet oddly scrutinizing, and then suddenly, unmistakably this time, he gave me another wink. The frivolous gesture in that old, withered face was more than startling, it was embarrassing; I did not know what to do. My lips outlined a dubious smile.

But the duchess joining in the conversation at the head of that table, the vicar’s wife turned to me.

‘You knew him many years ago, didn’t you?’ she asked me in a low tone.

‘Yes.’

She gave the company a glance to see that no one was attending to us.

‘His wife is anxious that you shouldn’t call up old memories that might be painful to him. He’s very frail, you know, and the least thing upsets him.’

‘I’ll be very careful.’

‘The way she looks after him is simply wonderful. Her devotion is a lesson to all of us. She realizes what a precious charge it is. Her unselfishness is beyond words.’ She lowered her voice a little more. ‘Of course he’s a very old man, and old men sometimes are a little trying; I’ve never seen her out of patience. In her way she’s just as wonderful as he is.’

These were the sort of remarks to which it was difficult to find a reply, but I felt that one was expected of me.

‘Considering everything I think he looks very well,’ I murmured.

‘He owes it all to her.’

At the end of luncheon we went back into the drawing-room, and after we had been standing about for two or three minutes Edward Driffield joined me. I was talking with the vicar, and for want of anything better to say was admiring the charming view. I turned to my host.

‘I was just saying how picturesque that little row of cottages is down there.’

‘From here.’ Driffield looked at their broken outline and an ironic smile curled his thin lips. ‘I was born in one of them. Rum, isn’t it?’

But Mrs Driffield came up to us with bustling geniality. Her voice was brisk and melodious.

‘Oh, Edward, I’m sure the duchess would like to see your writing-room. She has to go almost immediately.’

‘I’m so sorry, but I must catch the three-eighteen from Tercanbury,’ said the duchess.

We filed into Driffield’s study. It was a large room on the other side of the house, looking out on the same view as the dining-room, with a bow window. It was the sort of room that a devoted wife would evidently arrange for her literary husband. It was scrupulously tidy and large bowls of flowers gave it a feminine touch.

‘This is the desk at which he’s written all his later works,’ said Mrs Driffield, closing a book that was open face downward on it. ‘It’s the frontispiece in the third volume of the edition de luxe. It’s a period piece.’

We all admired the writing-table, and Lady Hodmarsh, when she thought no one was looking, ran her fingers along its under edge to see if it was genuine. Mrs Driffield gave us a quick, bright smile.

‘Would you like to see one of his manuscripts?’

‘I’d love to,’ said the duchess, ‘and then I simply must bolt.’

Mrs Driffield took from a shelf a manuscript bound in blue morocco, and while the rest of the party reverently examined it I had a look at the books with which the room was lined. As authors will, I ran my eye round quickly to see if there were any of mine, but could not find one; I saw, however, a complete set of Alroy Kear’s and a great many novels in bright bindings, which looked suspiciously unread; I guessed that they were the works of authors who had sent them to the master in homage to his talent and perhaps the hope of a few words of eulogy that could be used in the publisher’s advertisements. But all the books were so neatly arranged, they were so clean, that I had the impression they were very seldom read. There was the Oxford Dictionary and there were standard editions in grand bindings of most of the English classics, Fielding, Boswell, Hazlitt, and so on, and there were a great many books on the sea; I recognized the variously coloured, untidy volumes of the sailing directions issued by the Admiralty, and there were a number of works on gardening. The room had the look not of a writer’s workshop, but of a memorial to a great name, and you could almost see already the desultory tripper wandering in for want of something better to do and smell the rather musty, close smell of a museum that few visited. I had a suspicion that nowadays if Driffield read anything at all it was the Gardener’s Chronicle or the Shipping Gazette, of which I saw a bundle on a table in the corner.

When the ladies had seen all they wanted we bade our hosts farewell. But Lady Hodmarsh was a woman of tact, and it must have occurred to her that I, the excuse for the party, had scarcely had a word with Edward Driffield, for at the door, enveloping me with a friendly smile, she said to him:

‘I was so interested to hear that you and Mr Ashenden had known one another years and years ago. Was he a nice little boy?’

Driffield looked at me for a moment with that level, ironic gaze of his. I had the impression that if there had been nobody there he would have put his tongue out at me.

‘Shy,’ he replied. ‘I taught him to ride a bicycle.’

We got once more into the huge yellow Rolls and drove off.

‘He’s too sweet,’ said the duchess. ‘I’m so glad we went.’

‘He has such nice manners, hasn’t he?’ said Lady Hodmarsh.

‘You didn’t really expect him to eat his peas with a knife, did you?’ I asked.

‘I wish he had,’ said Scallion. ‘It would have been so picturesque.’

‘I believe it’s very difficult,’ said the duchess. ‘I’ve tried over and over again and I can never get them to stay on.’

‘You have to spear them,’ said Scallion.

‘Not at all,’ retorted the duchess. ‘You have to balance them on the flat, and they roll like the devil.’

‘What did you think of Mrs Driffield?’ asked Lady Hodmarsh.

‘I suppose she serves her purpose,’ said the duchess.

‘He’s so old, poor darling, he must have someone to look after him. You know she was a hospital nurse?’

‘Oh, was she?’ said the duchess. ‘I thought perhaps she’d been his secretary or typist or something.’

‘She’s quite nice,’ said Lady Hodmarsh, warmly defending a friend.

‘Oh, quite.’

‘He had a long illness about twenty years ago, and she was his nurse then, and after he got well he married her.’

‘Funny how men will do that. She must have been years younger than him. She can’t be more than – what? - forty or forty-five.’

‘No, I shouldn’t think so. Forty-seven, say. I’m told she’s done a great deal for him. I mean, she’s made him quite presentable. Alroy Kear told me that before that he was almost too Bohemian.’

‘As a rule authors’ wives are odious.’

‘It’s such a bore having to have them, isn’t it?’

‘Crashing. I wonder they don’t see that themselves.’

‘Poor wretches, they often suffer from the delusion that people find them interesting,’ I murmured.

We reached Tercanbury, dropped the duchess at the station and drove on.

CHAPTER 5

It was true that Edward Driffield had taught me to bicycle. That was indeed how I first made his acquaintance. I do not know how long the safety bicycle had been invented, but I know that it was not common in the remote part of Kent in which I lived, and when you saw someone speeding along on solid tyres you turned round and looked till he was out of sight. It was still a matter for jocularity on the part of middle-aged gentlemen who said Shank’s pony was good enough for them, and for trepidation on the part of elderly ladies who made a dash for the side of the road when they saw one coming. I had been for some time filled with envy of the boys whom I saw riding into the school grounds on their bicycles. It gave a pretty opportunity for showing off when you entered the gateway without holding on to the handles. I had persuaded my uncle to let me have one at the beginning of the summer holidays, and though my aunt was against it, since she said I should only break my neck, he had yielded to my pertinacity more willingly because I was, of course, paying for it out of my own money. I ordered it before school broke up, and a few days later the carrier brought it over from Tercanbury.

I was determined to learn to ride it by myself, and chaps at school had told me that they had learned in half an hour. I tried and tried, and at last came to the conclusion that I was abnormally stupid, but even after my pride was sufficiently humbled for me to allow the gardener to hold me up I seemed at the end of the first morning no nearer to being able to get on by myself than at the beginning. Next day, however, thinking that the carriage drive at the vicarage was too winding to give a fellow a proper chance, I wheeled the bicycle to a road not far away which I knew was perfectly flat and straight, and so solitary that no one would see me making a fool of myself. I tried several times to mount, but fell off each time. I barked my shins against the pedals, and got very hot and bothered. After I had been doing this for about an hour, though I began to think that God did not intend me to ride a bicycle, but was determined (unable to bear the thought of the sarcasms of my uncle, his representative at Blackstable) to do so all the same, to my disgust I saw two people on bicycles coming along the deserted road. I immediately wheeled my machine to the side and sat down on a stile, looking out to sea in a nonchalant way, as though I had been for a ride and were just sitting there wrapped in contemplation of the vasty ocean. I kept my eyes dreamily averted from the two persons who were advancing toward me, but I felt that they were coming nearer, and through the corner of my eye I saw that they were a man and a woman. As they passed me the woman swerved violently to my side of the road and, crashing against me, fell to the ground.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I knew I should fall off the moment I saw you.’

It was impossible under the circumstances to preserve my appearance of abstraction and, blushing furiously, I said that it didn’t matter at all.

The man had got off as she fell.

‘You haven’t hurt yourself?’ he asked.

‘Oh, no.’

I recognized him then as Edward Driffield, the author I had seen walking with the curate a few days before.

‘I’m just learning to ride,’ said his companion. ‘And I fall off whenever I see anything in the road.’

‘Aren’t you the vicar’s nephew?’ said Driffield. ‘I saw you the other day. Galloway told me who you were. This is my wife.’

She held out her hand with an oddly frank gesture, and when I took it gave mine a warm and hearty pressure. She smiled with her lips and with her eyes, and there was in her smile something that even then I recognized as singularly pleasant. I was confused. People I did not know made me dreadfully self-conscious, and I could not take in any of the details of her appearance. I just had an impression of a rather large blonde woman. I do not know if I noticed then or only remembered afterward that she wore a full skirt of blue serge, a pink shirt with a starched front and a starched collar, and a straw hat, called in those days, I think, a boater, perched on the top of a lot of golden hair.

‘I think bicycling’s lovely, don’t you?’ she said, looking at my beautiful new machine which leaned against the stile. ‘It must be wonderful to be able to ride well.’

I felt that this inferred an admiration for my proficiency.

‘It’s only a matter of practice,’ I said.

‘This is only my third lesson. Mr Driffield says I’m coming on wonderfully, but I feel so stupid I could kick myself. How long did it take you before you could ride?’

I blushed to the roots of my hair. I could hardly utter the shameful words.

‘I can’t ride,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just got this bike, and this is the first time I’ve tried.’

I equivocated a trifle there, but I made it all right with my conscience by adding the mental reservation: except yesterday at home in the garden.

‘I’ll give you a lesson if you like,’ said Driffield in his goodhumoured way. ‘Come on.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Why not?’ asked his wife, her blue eyes still pleasantly smiling. ‘Mr Driffield would like to and it’ll give me a chance to rest.’

Driffield took my bicycle, and I, reluctant but unable to withstand his friendly violence, clumsily mounted. I swayed from side to side, but he held me with a firm hand.

‘Faster,’ he said.

I pedalled and he ran by me as I wobbled from side to side. We were both very hot when, notwithstanding his efforts, I at last fell off. It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and when I started back again and for thirty or forty thrilling yards actually rode by myself and Mrs Driffield ran into the middle of the road with her arms akimbo shouting: ‘Go it, go it, two to one on the favourite,’ I was laughing so much that I positively forgot all about my social status. I got off of my own accord, my face no doubt wearing an air of immodest triumph, and received without embarrassment the Driffields’ congratulation on my cleverness in riding a bicycle the very first day I tried.

‘I want to see if I can get on by myself,’ said Mrs Driffield, and I sat down again on the stile while her husband and I watched her unavailing struggles.

Then, wanting to rest again, disappointed but cheerful, she sat down beside me. Driffield lit his pipe. We chatted. I did not, of course, realize it then, but I know now that there was a disarming frankness in her manner that put one at one’s ease. She talked with a kind of eagerness, like a child bubbling over with the zest of life, and her eyes were lit all the time by her engaging smile. I did not know why I liked it. I should say it was a little sly, if slyness were not a displeasing quality; it was too innocent to be sly. It was mischievous rather, like that of a child who has done something that he thinks funny but is quite well aware that you will think rather naughty; he knows all the same that you won’t be really cross and if you don’t find out about it quickly he’ll come and tell you himself. But of course then I only knew that her smile made me feel at home.

Presently Driffield, looking at his watch, said that they must be going and suggested that we should all ride back together in style. It was just the time that my aunt and uncle would be coming home from their daily walk down the town and I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they would not at all approve of; so I asked them to go on first, as they would go more quickly than I. Mrs Driffield would not hear of it, but Driffield gave me a funny, amused little look, which made me think that he saw through my excuse, so that I blushed scarlet and he said:

‘Let him go by himself, Rosie. He can manage better alone.’

‘All right. Shall you be here tomorrow? We’re coming.’

‘I’ll try to,’ I answered.

They rode off, and in a few minutes I followed. Feeling very much pleased with myself, I rode all the way to the vicarage gates without falling. I think I boasted a good deal at dinner, but I did not say that I had met the Drifflelds.

Next day at about eleven I got my bicycle out of the coachhouse. It was so called though it held not even a pony trap and was used by the gardener to keep the mower and the roller, and by Mary-Ann for her sack of meal for the chickens. I wheeled it down to the gate and, mounting none too easily, rode along the Tercanbury Road till I came to the old turnpike and turned into Joy Lane.

The sky was blue and the air, warm and yet fresh, crackled, as it were, with the heat. The light was brilliant without harshness. The sun’s beams seemed to hit the white road with a directed energy and bounce back like a rubber ball.

I rode backward and forward, waiting for the Drifflelds, and presently saw them come. I waved to them and turned round (getting off to do so) and we pedalled along together. Mrs Driffield and I complimented one another on our progress. We rode anxiously, clinging like grim death to the handle-bars, but exultant, and Driffield said that as soon as we felt sure of ourselves we must go for rides all over the county.

‘I want to get rubbings of one or two brasses in the neighbourhood,’ he said.

I did not know what he meant, but he would not explain.

‘Wait and I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could ride fourteen miles tomorrow, seven there and seven back?’

‘Rather,’ I said.

‘I’ll bring a sheet of paper for you and some wax and you can make a rubbing. But you’d better ask your uncle if you can come.’

‘I needn’t do that.’

‘I think you’d better, all the same.’

Mrs Driffield gave me that peculiar look of hers, mischievous and yet friendly, and I blushed scarlet. I knew that if I asked my uncle he would say no. It would be much better to say nothing about it. But as we rode along I saw coming toward us the doctor in his dogcart. I looked straight in front of me as he passed, in the vain hope that if I did not look at him he would not look at me. I was uneasy. If he had seen me the fact would quickly reach the ears of my uncle or my aunt, and I considered whether it would not be safer to disclose myself a secret that could no longer be concealed. When we parted at the vicarage gates (I had not been able to avoid riding as far as this in their company) Driffield said that if I found I could come with them next day I had better call for them as early as I could.

‘You know where we live, don’t you? Next door to the Congregational Church. It’s called Lime Cottage.’

When I sat down to dinner I looked for an opportunity to slip in casually the information that I had by accident ran across the Driffields; but news travelled fast in Blackstable.

‘Who were those people you were bicycling with this morning?’ asked my aunt. ‘We met Dr Anstey in the town and he said he’d seen you.’

My uncle, chewing his roast beef with an air of disapproval, looked sullenly at his plate.

‘The Driffields,’ I said with nonchalance. ‘You know, the author. Mr Galloway knows them.’

‘They’re most disreputable people,’ said my uncle. ‘I don’t wish you to associate with them.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘I’m not going to give you my reasons. It’s enough that I don’t wish it.’

‘How did you ever get to know them?’ asked my aunt.

‘I was just riding along, and they were riding along, and they asked me if I’d like to ride with them,’ I said, distorting the truth a little.

‘I call it very pushing,’ said my uncle.

I began to sulk. And to show my indignation, when the sweet was put on the table, though it was raspberry tart, which I was extremely fond of, I refused to have any. My aunt asked me if I was not feeling very well.

‘Yes,’ I said, as haughtily as I could, ‘I’m feeling all right.’

‘Have a little bit,’ said my aunt.

‘I’m not hungry,’ I answered.

‘Just to please me.’

‘He must know when he’s had enough,’ said my uncle.

I gave him a bitter look.

‘I don’t mind having a small piece,’ I said.

My aunt gave me a generous helping, which I ate with the air of one who, impelled by a stern sense of duty, performs an act that is deeply distasteful to him. It was a beautiful raspberry tart. Mary-Ann made short pastry that melted in the mouth. But when my aunt asked me whether I could not manage a little more I refused with cold dignity. She did not insist. My uncle said grace, and I carried my outraged feelings into the drawing-room.

But when I reckoned that the servants had finished their dinner I went into the kitchen. Emily was cleaning the silver in the pantry. Mary-Ann was washing-up.

‘I say, what’s wrong with the Drifflelds?’ I asked her.

Mary-Ann had come to the vicarage when she was eighteen. She had bathed me when I was a small boy, given me powders in plum jam when I needed them, packed my box when I went to school, nursed me when I was ill, read to me when I was bored, and scolded me when I was naughty. Emily, the housemaid, was a flighty young thing, and Mary-Ann didn’t know whatever would become of me if she had the looking after me. Mary-Ann was a Blackstable girl. She had never been to London in her life, and I do not think she had been to Tercanbury more than three or four times. She was never ill. She never had a holiday. She was paid twelve pounds a year. One evening a week she went down the town to see her mother, who did the vicarage washing; and on Sunday evenings she went to church. But Mary-Ann knew everything that went on in Blackstable. She knew who everybody was, who had married whom, what anyone’s father had died of, and how many children, and what they were called, any woman had had.

I asked Mary-Ann my question, and she slopped a wet clout noisily into the sink.

‘I don’t blame your uncle,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t let you go about with them, not if you was my nephew. Fancy their askin’ you to ride your bicycle with them. Some people will do anything.’

I saw that the conversation in the dining-room had been repeated to Mary-Ann.

‘I’m not a child,’ I said.

‘That makes it all the worse. The impudence of their comin’ ‘ere at all!’ Mary-Ann dropped her aitches freely. ‘Takin’ a house and pretendin’ to be ladies and gentlemen. Now leave that pie alone.’

The raspberry tart was standing on the kitchen table, and I broke off a piece of crust with my fingers and put it in my mouth.

‘We’re goin’ to eat that for our supper. If you’d wanted a second ‘elpin’ why didn’t you ‘ave one when you was ‘avin’ your dinner? Ted Driffield never could stick to anything. He ‘ad a good education, too. The one I’m sorry for is his mother. He’s been a trouble to ‘er from the day he was born. And then to go an’ marry Rosie Gann. They tell me that when he told his mother what he was goin’ to do she took to ‘er bed and stayed there for three weeks, and wouldn’t talk to anybody.’

‘Was Mrs Driffield Rosie Gann before she married? Which Ganns were those?’

Gann was one of the commonest names at Blackstable. The churchyard was thick with their graves.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t ‘ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier, and when he came back he ‘ad a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work more often than not. They lived in the next ‘ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.’

‘But she’s not as old as you are,’ I said, with the bluntness of my age.

‘She’ll never see thirty again.’

Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could have been more than thirty-five.

‘Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed up and everything.’

‘Is it true that she was a barmaid?’ I asked.

‘Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham. Mrs Reeves ‘ad ‘er to ‘elp in the bar at the Railway Arms, but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.’

The Railway Arms was a very modest little public-house just opposite the station of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. It had a sort of sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its licence taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear and Key or the Duke of Kent.

‘Why, what did she do?’ I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.

‘What didn’t she do?’ said Mary-Ann. ‘What d’you think your uncle would say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who come in to ‘ave a drink what she didn’t carry on with. No matter who they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after another. They tell me it was simply ‘orrible. That was when it begun with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and, of course, they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so Mrs Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she give her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I said.’

I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house property, and he owned a share in one or two collieries. He lived in a new brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with a high colour and bold blue eyes. Remembering him, I think he must have looked like some jolly rubicund merchant in an old Dutch picture. He was always very flashily dressed, and when you saw him driving at a smart pace down the middle of the High Street in a fawn-coloured covert-coat with large buttons, his brown bowler on the side of his head and a red rose in his buttonhole, you could not but look at him. On Sunday he used to come to church in a lustrous topper and a frockcoat. Everyone knew that he wanted to be made churchwarden, and it was evident that his energy would have made him useful, but my uncle said not in his time, and though Lord George as a protest went to chapel for a year my uncle remained obdurate. He cut him dead when he met him in the town. A reconciliation was effected and Lord George came to church again, but my uncle only yielded so far as to appoint him sidesman. The gentry thought him vulgar and I have no doubt that he was vain and boastful. They complained of his loud voice and his strident laugh – when he was talking to somebody on one side of the street you heard every word he said from the other – and they thought his manners dreadful. He was much too friendly; when he talked to them it was as though he were not in trade at all; they said he was very pushing. But if he thought his hail-fellow-well-met air, his activity in public works, his open purse when subscriptions were needed for the annual regatta or for the harvest festival, his willingness to do anyone a good turn were going to break the barriers at Blackstable he was mistaken. His efforts at sociability were met with blank hostility.

I remember once that the doctor’s wife was calling on my aunt and Emily came in to tell my uncle that Mr George Kemp would like to see him.

‘But I heard the front door ring, Emily,’ said my aunt.

‘Yes’m, he came to the front door.’

There was a moment’s awkwardness. Everyone was at a loss to know how to deal with such an unusual occurrence, and even Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back, looked a trifle flustered. My aunt, who was a gentle soul, I think felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position; but the doctor’s wife gave a little sniff of contempt. At last my uncle collected himself.

‘Show him into the study, Emily,’ he said. ‘I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished my tea.’

But Lord George remained exuberant, flashy, loud, and boisterous. He said the town was dead and he was going to wake it up. He was going to get the company to run excursion trains. He didn’t see why it shouldn’t become another Margate. And why shouldn’t they have a mayor? Ferne Bay had one.

‘I suppose he thinks he’d be mayor himself,’ said the people of Blackstable. They pursed their lips. ‘Pride goeth before a fall,’ they said.

And my uncle remarked that you could take a horse to the water but you couldn’t make him drink.

I should add that I looked upon Lord George with the same scornful derision as everyone else. It outraged me that he should stop me in the street and call me by my Christian name and talk to me as though there were no social difference between us. He even suggested that I should play cricket with his sons, who were of about the same age as myself. But they went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them.

I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should make love seemed to me rather disgusting.

‘You don’t mean to say they did anything?’ I asked Mary-Ann.

‘From what I hear there’s very little that Rosie Gann didn’t do. And Lord George wasn’t the only one.’

‘But, look here, why didn’t she have a baby?’

In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.

‘More by good luck than by good management, I lay,’ said Mary-Ann. Then she recollected herself and stopped drying the plates she was busy with. ‘It seems to me you know a lot more than you ought to,’ she said.

‘Of course I know,’ I said importantly. ‘Hang it all, I’m practically grown up, aren’t I?’

‘All I can tell you,’ said Mary-Ann, ‘is that when Mrs Reeves give her the sack Lord George got her a job at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham, and he was always poppin’ over there in his trap. You can’t tell me the ale’s any different over there from what it is here.’

‘Then why did Ted Driffield marry her?’ I asked.

‘Ask me another,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘It was at the Feathers he saw her. I suppose he couldn’t get no one else to marry him. No respectable girl would ‘ave ‘ad ‘im.’

‘Did he know about her?’

‘You’d better ask him.’

I was silent. It was all very puzzling.

‘What does she look like now?’ asked Mary-Ann. ‘I never seen her since she married. I never even speak to ‘er after I ‘eard what was goin’ on at the Railway Arms.’

‘She looks all right,’ I said.

‘Well, you ask her if she remembers me and see what she says.’

CHAPTER 6

I had quite made up my mind that I was going out with the Drifflelds next morning, but I knew that it was no good asking my uncle if I might. If he found out that I had been and made a row it couldn’t be helped, and if Ted Driffield asked me whether I had got my uncle’s permission I was quite prepared to say I had. But I had after all no need to lie. In the afternoon, the tide being high, I walked down to the beach to bathe, and my uncle, having something to do in the town, walked part of the way with me. Just as we were passing the Bear and Key Ted Driffield stepped out of it. He saw us and came straight up to my uncle. I was startled at his coolness.

‘Good afternoon, vicar,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you remember me. I used to sing in the choir when I was a boy. Ted Driffield. My old governor was Miss Wolfe’s bailiff.’

My uncle was a very timid man, and he was taken aback.

‘Oh, yes, how do you do? I was sorry to hear your father died.’

‘I’ve made the acquaintance of your young nephew. I was wondering if you’d let him come for a ride with me tomorrow. It’s rather dull for him riding alone, and I’m going to do a rubbing of one of the brasses at Ferne Church.’

‘It’s very kind of you but –’

My uncle was going to refuse, but Driffield interrupted him.

‘I’ll see he doesn’t get up to any mischief. I thought he might like to make a rubbing himself. It would be an interest for him. I’ll give him some paper and wax so that it won’t cost him anything.’

My uncle had not a consecutive mind, and the suggestion that Ted Driffield should pay for my paper and wax offended him so much that he quite forgot his intention to forbid me to go at all.

‘He can quite well get his own paper and wax,’ he said. ‘He has plenty of pocket-money, and he’d much better spend it on something like that than on sweets and make himself sick.’

‘Well, if he goes to Hayward, the stationer’s, and says he wants the same paper as I got and the wax, they’ll let him have it.’

‘I’ll go now,’ I said, and to prevent any change of mind on my uncle’s part dashed across the road.

CHAPTER 7

I do not know why the Driffields bothered about me unless it was from pure kindness of heart. I was a dull little boy, not very talkative, and if I amused Ted Driffield at all it must have been unconsciously. Perhaps he was tickled by my attitude of superiority. I was under the impression that it was condescension on my part to consort with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and he what my uncle called a penny-a-liner; and when, perhaps with a trace of superciliousness, I asked him to lend me one of his books, and he said it wouldn’t interest me, I took him at his word and did not insist. After my uncle had once consented to my going out with the Driffields he made no further objection to my association with them. Sometimes we went for sails together, sometimes we went to some picturesque spot and Driffield painted a little water-colour. I do not know if the English climate was better in those days or if it is only an illusion of youth, but I seem to remember that all through that summer the sunny days followed one another in an unbroken line. I began to feel a curious affection for the undulating, opulent, and gracious country. We went far afield, to one church after another, taking rubbings of brasses, knights in armour, and ladies in stiff farthingales. Ted Driffield fired me with his own enthusiasm for this simple pursuit, and I rubbed with passion. I showed my uncle proudly the results of my industry, and I suppose he thought that whatever my company, I could not come to much harm when I was occupied in church. Mrs Driffield used to remain in the churchyard while we were at work, not reading or sewing, but just mooning about; she seemed able to do nothing for an indefinite time without feeling bored. Sometimes I would go out and sit with her for a little on the grass. We chattered about my school, my friends there, and my masters, about the people at Blackstable, and about nothing at all. She gratified me by calling me Mr Ashenden. I think she was the first person who had ever done so, and it made me feel grown up. I resented it vastly when people called me Master Willie. I thought it a ridiculous name for anyone to have. In fact, I did not like either of my names, and spent much time inventing others that would have suited me better. The ones I preferred were Roderic Ravensworth and I covered sheets of paper with this signature in a suitably dashing hand. I did not mind Ludovic Montgomery either.

I could not get over what Mary-Ann had told me about Mrs Driffield. Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, I did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting, and I did not quite, quite believe it. After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I knew it was flat. Mrs Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her ‘going with’ sailors, and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George. She was not at all the type of the wicked woman I had read of in novels. Of course I knew she wasn’t ‘good form’, and she spoke with the Blackstable accent, she dropped an aitch now and then, and sometimes her grammar gave me a shock, but I couldn’t help liking her. I came to the conclusion that what Mary-Ann had told me was a pack of lies.

One day I happened to tell her that Mary-Ann was our cook.

‘She says she lived next door to you in Rye Lane,’ I added, quite prepared to hear Mrs Driffield say that she had never even heard of her.

But she smiled and her blue eyes gleamed.

‘That’s right. She used to take me to Sunday school. She used to have a rare job keeping me quiet. I heard she’d gone to service at the vicarage. Fancy her being there still! I haven’t seen her for donkey’s years. I’d like to see her again and have a chat about old days. Remember me to her, will you, and ask her to look in on her evening out. I’ll give her a cup of tea.’

I was taken aback at this. After all, the Driffields lived in a house that they were talking of buying and they had a ‘general’. It wouldn’t be at all the thing for them to have Mary-Ann to tea, and it would make it very awkward for me. They seemed to have no sense of the things one could do, and the things one simply couldn’t. It never ceased to embarrass me, the way in which they talked of incidents in their past that I should have thought they would not dream of mentioning. I do not know that the people I lived among were pretentious in the sense of making themselves out to be richer or grander than they really were, but looking back it does seem to me that they lived a life full of pretences. They dwelt behind a mask of respectability. You never caught them in their shirtsleeves with their feet on the table. The ladies put on afternoon dresses, and were not visible till then; they lived privately with rigid economy so that you could not drop in for a casual meal, but when they entertained their tables groaned with food.

Though catastrophe overwhelmed the family they held their heads high and ignored it. One of the sons might have married an actress, but they never referred to the calamity, and though the neighbours said it was dreadful, they took ostentatious care not to mention the theatre in the presence of the afflicted. We all knew that the wife of Major Greencourt who had taken the Three Gables was connected with trade, but neither she nor the major ever so much as hinted at the discreditable secret; and though we sniffed at them behind their backs, we were too polite even to mention crockery (the source of Mrs Greencourt’s adequate income) in their presence. It was still not unheard of for an angry parent to cut off his son with a shilling, or to tell his daughter (who like my own mother had married a solicitor) never to darken his doors again. I was used to all this, and it seemed to me natural. What did shock me was to hear Ted Driffield speak of being a waiter in a restaurant in Holborn as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. I knew he had run away to sea: that was romantic; I knew that boys, in books at all events, often did this and had thrilling adventures before they married a fortune and an earl’s daughter; but Ted Driffield had driven a cab at Maidstone and had been clerk in a booking-office at Birmingham. Once when we bicycled past the Railway Arms, Mrs Driffield mentioned quite casually, as though it were something that anyone might have done, that she had worked there for three years.

‘It was my first place,’ she said. ‘After that I went to the Feathers at Haversham. I only left there to get married.’

She laughed as though she enjoyed the recollection. I did not know what to say; I did not know which way to look; I blushed scarlet. Another time when we were going through Ferne Bay on our way back from a long excursion, it being a hot day, and all of us thirsty, she suggested that we should go into the Dolphin and have a glass of beer. She began talking to the girl behind the bar, and I was horrified to hear her remark that she had been in the business herself for five years. The landlord joined us, and Ted Driffield offered him a drink, and Mrs Driffield said that the barmaid must have a glass of port, and for some time they all chatted amiably about trade and tied houses, and how the price of everything was going up. Meanwhile, I stood, hot and cold all over, and not knowing what to do with myself. As we went out Mrs Driffield remarked:

‘I took quite a fancy to that girl, Ted. She ought to do well for herself. As I said to her, it’s a hard life but a merry one. You do see a bit of what’s going on and if you play your cards right you ought to marry well. I noticed she had an engagement ring on, but she told me she just wore that because it gave the fellows a chance to tease her.’

Driffield laughed. She turned to me.

‘I had a rare old time when I was a barmaid, but of course you can’t go on for ever. You have to think of your future.’

But a greater jolt awaited me. It was half-way through September and my holidays were drawing to an end. I was very full of the Driffields, but my desire to talk about them at home was snubbed by my uncle.

‘We don’t want your friends pushed down our throats all day long,’ said he. ‘There are other topics of conversation that are more suitable. But I do think that, as Ted Driffield was born in the Parish and is seeing you almost every day, he might come to church occasionally.’

One day I told Driffield: ‘My uncle wants you to come to church.’

‘All right. Let’s go to church next Sunday night, Rosie.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

I told Mary-Ann they were going. I sat in the vicarage pew just behind the squire’s and I could not look round, but I was conscious by the behaviour of my neighbours on the other side of the aisle that they were there, and as soon as I had a chance next day I asked Mary-Ann if she had seen them.

‘I see ‘er all right,’ said Mary-Ann grimly.

‘Did you speak to her afterwards?’

‘Me?’ She suddenly burst into anger. ‘You get out of my kitchen. What d’you want to come bothering me all day long? How d’you expect me to do my work with you getting in my way all the time?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Don’t get in a wax.’

‘I don’t know what your uncle’s about lettin’ you go all over the place with the likes of them. All them flowers in her ‘at. I wonder she ain’t ashamed to show her face. Now run along, I’m busy.’

I did not know why Mary-Ann was so cross. I did not mention Mrs Driffield again. But two or three days later I happened to go into the kitchen to get something I wanted. There were two kitchens at the vicarage, a small one in which the cooking was done and a large one, built, I suppose, for a time when country clergymen had large families and gave grand dinners to the surrounding gentry, where Mary-Ann sat and sewed when her day’s work was over. We had cold supper at eight so that after tea she had little to do. It was getting on for seven and the day was drawing in. It was Emily’s evening out and I expected to find Mary-Ann alone, but as I went along the passage I heard voices and the sound of laughter. I supposed Mary-Ann had someone in to see her. The lamp was lit, but it had a thick green shade and the kitchen was almost in darkness. I saw a teapot and cups on the table. Mary-Ann was having a late cup of tea with her friend. The conversation stopped as I opened the door, then I heard a voice:

‘Good evening.’

With a start I saw that Mary-Ann’s friend was Mrs Driffield. Mary-Ann laughed a little at my surprise.

‘Rosie Gann dropped in to have a cup of tea with me,’ she said. ‘We’ve been having a talk about old times.’

Mary-Ann was a little shy at my finding her thus, but not half so shy as I. Mrs Driffield gave me that childlike, mischievous smile of hers; she was perfectly at her ease. For some reason I noticed her dress, I suppose because I had never seen her so grand before. It was of pale blue cloth, very tight at the waist, with high sleeves and a long skirt with a flounce at the bottom. She wore a large, black, straw hat with a great quantity of roses and leaves and bows on it. It was evidently the hat she had worn in church on Sunday.

‘I thought if I went on waiting till Mary-Ann came to see me I’d have to wait till Doomsday, so I thought the best thing I could do was to come and see her myself.’

Mary-Ann grinned self-consciously, but did not look displeased. I asked for whatever it was I wanted and, as quickly as I could, left them. I went out into the garden and wandered about aimlessly. I walked down to the road and looked over the gate. The night had fallen. Presently I saw a man strolling along. I paid no attention to him, but he passed backward and forward and it looked as though he were waiting for someone. At first I thought it might be Ted Driffield and I was on the point of going out when he stopped and lit a pipe; I saw it was Lord George. I wondered what he was doing there and at the same moment it struck me that he was waiting for Mrs Driffield. My heart began to beat fast, and though I was hidden by the darkness I withdrew into the shade of the bushes. I waited a few minutes longer, then I saw the side door open and Mrs Driffield let out by Mary-Ann. I heard her footsteps on the gravel. She came to the gate and opened it. It opened with a little click. At the sound Lord George stepped across the road and before she could come out slipped in. He took her in his arms and gave her a great hug. She gave a little laugh.

‘Take care of my hat,’ she whispered.

I was not more than three feet away from them and I was terrified lest they should notice me. I was so ashamed for them. I was trembling with agitation. For a minute he held her in his arms.

‘What about the garden?’ he said, still in a whisper.

‘No; there’s that boy. Let’s go in the fields.’

They went out by the gate, he with his arm round her waist, and were lost in the night. Now I felt my heart pounding against my chest so that I could hardly breathe. I was so astonished at what I had seen that I could not think sensibly. I would have given anything to be able to tell someone, but it was a secret and I must keep it. I was thrilled with the importance it gave me. I walked slowly up to the house and let myself in by the side door. Mary-Ann, hearing it open, called me.

Is that you, Master Willie?’

‘Yes.’

I looked in the kitchen. Mary-Ann was putting the supper on a tray to take it into the dining-room.

‘I wouldn’t say anything to your uncle about Rosie Gann ‘avin’ been here,’ she said.

‘Oh, no.’

‘It was a surprisement to me. When I ‘eard a knock at the side door and opened it and saw Rosie standing there, you could ‘ave knocked me down with a feather. “Mary-Ann,” she says, an’ before I knew what she was up to she was kissing me all over me face. I couldn’t but ask ‘er in and when she was in I couldn’t but ask her to ‘ave a nice cup of tea.’

Mary-Ann was anxious to excuse herself. After all she had said of Mrs Driffield it must seem strange to me that I should find them sitting there together chatting away and laughing. I did not want to crow.

‘She’s not so bad, is she?’ I said.

Mary-Ann smiled. Notwithstanding her black decayed teeth her smile was sweet and touching.

‘I don’t ‘ardly know what it is, but there’s somethin’ you can’t ‘elp likin’ about her. She was ‘ere the best part of an hour and I will say that for ‘er, she never once give ‘erself airs. And she told me with ‘er own lips the material of that dress she ‘ad on cost thirteen and eleven a yard and I believe it. She remembers everything, how I used to brush her ‘air for her when she was a tiny tot and how I used to make her wash her little ‘ands before tea. You see, sometimes her mother used to send ‘er in to ‘ave her tea with us. She was as pretty as a picture in them days.’

Mary-Ann looked back into the past and her funny crumpled face grew wistful.

‘Oh, well,’ she said after a pause, ‘I dare say she’s been no worse than plenty others if the truth was only known. She ‘ad more temptation than most, and I dare say a lot of them as blame her would ‘ave been no better than what she was if they’d ‘ad the opportunity.’

CHAPTER 8

The weather broke suddenly; it grew chilly, and heavy rain fell. It put an end to our excursions. I was not sorry, for I did not know how I could look Mrs Driffield in the face now that I had seen her meeting with George Kemp. I was not so much shocked as astonished. I could not understand how it was possible for her to like being kissed by an old man, and the fantastic notion passed through my mind, filled with the novels I had read, that somehow Lord George held her in his power and forced her by his knowledge of some fearful secret to submit, to his loathsome embraces. My imagination played with terrible possibilities. Bigamy, murder, and forgery. Very few villains in books failed to hold the threat of exposure of one of these crimes over some hapless female. Perhaps Mrs Driffield had backed a bill; I never could quite understand what this meant, but I knew that the consequences were disastrous. I toyed with the fancy of her anguish (the long sleepless nights when she sat at her window in her nightdress, her fair hair hanging to her knees, and watched hopelessly for the dawn) and saw myself (not a boy of fifteen with sixpence a week pocket-money, but a tall man with a waxed moustache and muscles of steel, in faultless evening dress) with a happy blend of heroism and dexterity rescuing her from the toils of the rascally blackmailer. On the other hand, it had not looked as though she had yielded quite unwillingly to Lord George’s fondling and I could not get out of my ears the sound of her laugh. It had a note that I had never heard before. It gave me a queer feeling of breathlessness.

During the rest of my holidays I only saw the Driffields once more. I met them by chance in the town and they stopped and spoke to me. I suddenly felt very shy again, and when I looked at Mrs Driffield I could not help blushing with embarrassment, for there was nothing in her countenance that indicated a guilty secret. She looked at me with those soft blue eyes of hers in which there was a child’s playful naughtiness. She often held her mouth a little open, as though it were just going to break into a smile, and her lips were full and red. There was honesty and innocence in her face and an ingenuous frankness, and though then I could not have expressed this, I felt it quite strongly. If I had put it into words at all I think I should have said: she looks as straight as a die. It was impossible that she could be ‘carrying on’ with Lord George. There must be an explanation; I did not believe what my eyes had seen.

Then the day came when I had to go back to school. The carter had taken my trunk and I walked to the station by myself. I had refused to let my aunt see me off, thinking it more manly to go alone, but I felt rather low as I walked down the street. It was a small branch line to Tercanbury and the station was at the other end of the town near the beach. I took my ticket and settled myself in the corner of a third-class carriage. Suddenly I heard a voice: ‘There he is’; and Mr and Mrs Driffield bustled gaily up.

‘We thought we must come and see you off,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling miserable?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Oh, well, it won’t last long. We’ll have no end of a time when you come back for Christmas. Can you skate?’

‘No.’

‘I can. I’ll teach you.’

Her high spirits cheered me, and at the same time the thought that they had come to the station to say good-bye to me gave me a lump in my throat. I tried hard not to let the emotion I felt appear on my face.

‘I expect I shall be playing a lot of rugger this term,’ I said. ‘I ought to get into the second fifteen.’

She looked at me with kindly shining eyes, smiling with her full red lips. There was something in her smile I had always rather liked, and her voice seemed almost to tremble with a laugh or a tear. For one horrible moment I was afraid that she was going to kiss me. I was scared out of my wits. She talked on, she was mildly facetious as grown-up people are with schoolboys, and Driffield stood there without saying anything. He looked at me with a smile in his eyes and pulled his beard. Then the guard blew a cracked whistle and waved a flag. Mrs Driffield took my hand and shook it. Driffield came forward.

‘Good-bye,’ he said. ‘Here’s something for you.’

He pressed a tiny packet into my hand and the train steamed off. When I opened it I found two half-crowns wrapped in a piece of toilet-paper. I blushed to the roots of my hair. I was glad enough to have an extra five shillings, but the thought that Ted Driffield had dared to give me a tip filled me with rage and humiliation. I could not possibly accept anything from him. It was true that I had bicycled with him and sailed with him, but he wasn’t a sahib (I had got that from Major Greencourt) and it was an insult to give me five shillings. At first I thought of returning the money without a word, showing by my silence how outraged I was at the solecism he had committed, then I composed in my head a dignified and frigid letter, in which I thanked him for his generosity, but said that he must see how impossible it was for a gentleman to accept a tip from someone who was practically a stranger. I thought it over for two or three days, and every day it seemed more difficult to part with the two half-crowns. I felt sure that Driffield had meant it kindly, and of course he was very bad form, and didn’t know about things; it would be rather hard to hurt his feelings by sending the money back, and finally I spent it. But I assuaged my wounded pride by not writing to thank Driffield for his gift.

When Christmas came, however, and I went back to Blackstable for the holidays, it was the Drifflelds I was most eager to see. In that stagnant little place they alone seemed to have a connexion with the outside world which already was beginning to touch my daydreams with anxious curiosity. But I could not overcome my shyness enough to go to their house and call, and I hoped that I should meet them in the town. But the weather was dreadful, a boisterous wind whistled down the street, piercing you to the bone, and the few who had an errand were swept along by their full skirts like fishing boats in half a gale. The cold rain scudded in sudden squalls, and the sky, which in summer had enclosed the friendly country so snugly, now was a great pall that pressed upon the earth with awful menace. There was small hope of meeting the Driffields by chance, and at last I took my courage in both hands and one day after tea slipped out. As far as the station the road was pitch dark, but there the street lamps, few and dim, made it easier to keep to the pavement. The Driffields lived in a little two-storey house in a side street; it was of dingy yellow brick, and had a bow window. I knocked, and presently a little maid opened the door; I asked if Mrs Driffield was in. She gave me an uncertain look, and, saying she would go and see, left me standing in the passage. I had already heard voices in the next room, but they were stilled as she opened the door and, entering, shut it behind her. I had a faint impression of mystery; in the houses of my uncle’s friends, even if there was no fire and the gas had to be lit as you went you were shown into the drawing-room when you called. But the door was opened and Driffield came out. There was only a speck of light in the passage, and at first he could not see who it was; but in an instant he recognized me.

‘Oh, it’s you. We wondered when we were going to see you.’ Then he called out: ‘Rosie, it’s young Ashenden.’

There was a cry, and before you could say knife Mrs Driffield had come into the passage and was shaking my hands.

‘Come in, come in. Take off your coat. Isn’t it awful, the weather? You must be perishing.’

She helped me with my coat and took off my muffler and snatched my cap out of my hand and drew me into the room. It was hot and stuffy, a tiny room full of furniture, with a fire burning in the grate; they had gas there, which we hadn’t at the vicarage, and the three burners in round globes of frosted glass filled the room with harsh light. The air was grey with tobacco smoke. At first, dazzled and then taken aback by my effusive welcome, I did not see who the two men were who got up as I came in. Then I saw they were the curate, Mr Galloway, and Lord George Kemp. I fancied that the curate shook my hand with constraint.

‘How are you? I just came in to return some books that Mr Driffield had lent me, and Mrs Driffield very kindly asked me to stay to tea.’

I felt rather than saw the quizzical look that Driffield gave him. He said something about the mammon of unrighteousness, which I recognized as a quotation, but did not gather the sense of. Mr Galloway laughed.

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘What about the publicans and sinners?’

I thought the remark in very bad taste, but I was immediately seized upon by Lord George. There was no constraint about him.

‘Well, young fellow, home for the holidays? My word, what a big chap you’re growing.’

I shook hands with him rather coldly. I wished I had not come.

‘Let me give you a nice strong cup of tea,’ said Mrs Driffield.

‘I’ve already had tea.’

‘Have some more,’ said Lord George, speaking as though he owned the place (that was just like him). ‘A big fellow like you can always tuck away another piece of bread and butter and jam, and Mrs D. will cut you a slice with her own fair hands.’

The tea things were still on the table and they were sitting round it. A chair was brought up for me and Mrs Driffield gave me a piece of cake.

‘We were just trying to persuade Ted to sing us a song,’ said Lord George. ‘Come on, Ted.’

‘Sing All through stickin’ to a Soljer, Ted,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘I love that.’

‘No, sing First we mopped the Floor with him.’

‘I’ll sing ’em both if you’re not careful’ said Driffield.

He took his banjo, which was lying on the top of the cottage piano, tuned it and began to sing. He had a rich baritone voice. I was quite used to people singing songs. When there was a tea party at the vicarage, or I went to one at the major’s or the doctor’s, people always brought their music with them. They left it in the hall, so that it should not seem that they wanted to be asked to play or sing; but after tea the hostess asked them if they had brought it. They shyly admitted that they had, and if it was at the vicarage I was sent to fetch it. Sometimes a young lady would say that she had quite given up playing and hadn’t brought anything with her, and then her mother would break in and say that she had brought it. But when they sang it was not comic songs; it was I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby, or Good-night, Beloved, or Queen of my Heart. Once at the annual concert at the Assembly Rooms, Smithson, the draper, had sung a comic song, and though the people at the back of the hall had applauded a great deal, the gentry had seen nothing funny in it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Anyhow, before the next concert he was asked to be a little more careful about what he sang (‘Remember there are ladies present, Mr Smithson’) and so gave The Death of Nelson. The next ditty that Driffield sang had a chorus and the curate and Lord George joined in lustily. I heard it a good many times afterwards, but I can only remember four lines.

First we mopped the floor with him;

Dragged him up and down the stairs.

Then we lugged him round the room,

Under tables, over chairs.

When it was finished, assuming my best company manners, I turned to Mrs Driffield.

‘Don’t you sing?’ I asked.

‘I do, but it always turns the milk, so Ted doesn’t encourage me.’

Driffield put down his banjo and lit a pipe.

‘Well, how’s the old book getting along, Ted?’ said Lord George heartily.

‘Oh, all right. I’m working away, you know.’

‘Good old Ted and his books,’ Lord George laughed. ‘Why don’t you settle down and do something respectable for a change? I’ll give you a job in my office.’

‘Oh, I’m all right.’

‘You let him be, George,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘He likes writing, and what I say is, as long as it keeps him happy, why shouldn’t he?’

‘Well, I don’t pretend to know anything about books,’ began George Kemp.

‘Then don’t talk about them,’ interrupted Driffield with a smile.

‘I don’t think anyone need be ashamed to have written Fairhaven,’ said Mr Galloway, ‘and I don’t care what the critics said.’

‘Well, Ted, I’ve known you since I was a boy and I couldn’t read it, try as I would.’

‘Oh, come on, we don’t want to start talking about books,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘Sing us another song, Ted.’

‘I must be going,’ said the curate. He turned to me. ‘We might walk along together. Have you got anything for me to read, Driffield?’

Driffield pointed to a pile of new books that were heaped up on a table in the corner.

‘Take your pick.’

‘By Jove, what a lot!’ I said, looking at them greedily. ‘Oh, it’s all rubbish. They’re sent down for review.’ ‘What d’you do with them?’

‘Take ’em into Tercanbury and sell ’em for what they’ll fetch. It all helps to pay the butcher.’

When we left, the curate and I, he with several books under his arm, he asked me:

‘Did you tell your uncle you were coming to see the Driffields?’

‘No, I just went out for a walk and it suddenly occurred to me that I might look in.’

This of course was some way from the truth, but I did not care to tell Mr Galloway that, though I was practically grown up, my uncle realized the fact so little that he was capable of trying to prevent me from seeing people he objected to.

‘Unless you have to I wouldn’t say anything about it in your place. The Driffields are perfectly all right, but your uncle doesn’t quite approve of them.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s such rot.’

‘Of course they’re rather common, but he doesn’t write half badly, and when you think what he came from it’s wonderful that he writes at all.’

I was glad to know how the land lay. Mr Galloway did not wish my uncle to know that he was on friendly terms with the Driffields. I could feel sure at all events that he would not give me away.

The patronizing manner in which my uncle’s curate spoke of one who has been now so long recognized as one of the greatest of the later Victorian novelists must arouse a smile; but it was the manner in which he was generally spoken of at Blackstable. One day we went to tea at Mrs Greencourt’s, who had staying with her a cousin, the wife of an Oxford don, and we had been told that she was very cultivated. She was a Mrs Encombe, a little woman with an eager wrinkled face; she surprised us very much because she wore her grey hair short and a black serge skirt that only just came down below the tops of her square-toed boots. She was the first example of the New Woman that had ever been seen in Blackstable. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy. (Afterward we all scoffed at her, and my uncle said to my aunt: ‘Well, my dear, I’m thankful you’re not clever, at least I’ve been spared that’; and my aunt in a playful mood put my uncle’s slippers which were warming for him by the fire over her boots and said: ‘Look, I’m the new woman.’ And then we all said: ‘Mrs Greencourt is very funny; you never know what she’ll do next. But of course she isn’t quite quite.’ We could hardly forget that her father made china and that her grandfather had been a factory hand.)

But we all found it very interesting to hear Mrs Encombe talk of the people she knew. My uncle had been at Oxford, but everyone he asked about seemed to be dead. Mrs Encombe knew Mrs Humphry Ward, and admired Robert Elsmere. My uncle considered it a scandalous work, and he was surprised that Mr Gladstone, who at least called himself a Christian, had found a good word to say for it. They had quite an argument about it. My uncle said he thought it would unsettle people’s opinions and give them all sorts of ideas that they were much better without. Mrs Encombe answered that he wouldn’t think that if he knew Mrs Humphry Ward. She was a woman of the very highest character, a niece of Mr Matthew Arnold, and whatever you might think of the book itself (and she, Mrs Encombe, was quite willing to admit that there were parts which had better have been omitted) it was quite certain that she had written it from the very highest motives. Mrs Encombe knew Miss Broughton too. She was of very good family and it was strange that she wrote the books she did.

‘I don’t see any harm in them,’ said Mrs Hayforth, the doctor’s wife. ‘I enjoy them, especially Red as a Rose is She,’

‘Would you like your girls to read them?’ asked Mrs Encombe.

‘Not just yet perhaps,’ said Mrs Hayforth. ‘But when they’re married I should have no objection.’

‘Then it might interest you to know,’ said Mrs Encombe, ‘that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.’

‘That’s quite another matter,’ returned Mrs Hayforth. ‘I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.’

‘I read one out of curiosity,’ said Mrs Encombe. ‘I must say, it’s more what you’d expect from a Frenchman than from an English gentlewoman.’

‘Oh, but I understand she isn’t really English. I’ve always heard her real name is Mademoiselle de la Ramée.’

It was then that Mr Galloway mentioned Edward Driffield.

‘You know we have an author living here,’ he said.

‘We’re not very proud of him,’ said the major. ‘He’s the son of old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and he married a barmaid.’

‘Can he write?’ asked Mrs Encombe.

‘You can tell at once that he’s not a gentleman,’ said the curate, ‘but when you consider the disadvantages he’s had to struggle against it’s rather remarkable that he should write as well as he does.’

‘He’s a friend of Willie’s,’ said my uncle.

Everyone looked at me, and I felt very uncomfortable.

‘They bicycled together last summer, and after Willie had gone back to school I got one of his books from the library to see what it was like. I read the first volume and then I sent it back. I wrote a pretty stiff letter to the librarian and I was glad to hear that he’d withdrawn it from circulation. If it had been my own property I should have put it promptly in the kitchen stove.’

‘I looked through one of his books myself,’ said the doctor. ‘It interested me because it was set in this neighbourhood, and I recognized some of the people. But I can’t say I liked it; I thought it unnecessarily coarse.’

‘I mentioned that to him,’ said Mr Galloway, ‘and he said the men in the colliers that run up to Newcastle and the fishermen and farm hands don’t behave like ladies and gentlemen, and don’t talk like them.’

‘But why write about people of that character?’ said my uncle.

‘That’s what I say,’ said Mrs Hayforth. ‘We all know that there are coarse and wicked and vicious people in the world, but I don’t see what good it does to write about them.’

‘I’m not defending him,’ said Mr Galloway. ‘I’m only telling you what explanation he gives himself. And then of course he brought up Dickens.’

‘Dickens is quite different,’ said my uncle. ‘I don’t see how anyone can object to the Pickwick Papers.’

‘I suppose it’s a matter of taste,’ said my aunt. ‘I always found Dickens very coarse. I don’t want to read about people who drop their aitches. I must say I’m very glad the weather’s so bad now and Willie can’t take any more rides with Mr Driffield. I don’t think he’s quite the sort of person he ought to associate with.’

Both Mr Galloway and I looked down our noses.

CHAPTER 9

As often as the mild Christmas gaieties of Blackstable allowed me I went to the Drifflelds’ little house next door to the Congregational Chapel. I always found Lord George and often Mr Galloway. Our conspiracy of silence had made us friends, and when we met at the vicarage or in the vestry after church we looked at one another archly. We did not talk about our secret, but we enjoyed it; I think it gave us both a good deal of satisfaction to know that we were making a fool of my uncle. But once it occurred to me that George Kemp, meeting my uncle in the street, might remark casually that he had been seeing a lot of me at the Drifflelds’.

‘What about Lord George?’ I said to Mr Galloway.

‘Oh, I made that all right.’

We chuckled. I began to like Lord George. At first I was very cold with him and scrupulously polite, but he seemed so unconscious of the social difference between us that I was forced to conclude that my haughty courtesy failed to put him in his place. He was always cordial, breezy, even boisterous; he chaffed me in his common way and I answered him back with schoolboy wit; we made the others laugh and this disposed me kindly toward him. He was for ever bragging about the great schemes he had in mind, but he took in good part my jokes at the expense of his grandiose imaginations. It amused me to hear him tell stories about the swells of Blackstable that made them look foolish and when he mimicked their oddities I roared with laughter. He was blatant and vulgar and the way he dressed was always a shock to me (I had never been to Newmarket nor seen a trainer, but that was my idea of how a Newmarket trainer dressed), and his table manners were offensive, but I found myself less and less affronted by him. He gave me the Pink ‘Un every week and I took it home, carefully tucked away in my greatcoat pocket, and read it in my bedroom.

I never went to the Driffields’ till after tea at the vicarage, but I always managed to make a second tea when I got there. Afterward Ted Driffield sang comic songs, accompanying himself sometimes on the banjo and sometimes on the piano. He would sing, peering at the music with his rather shortsighted eyes, for an hour at a time; there was a smile on his lips and he liked us all to join in the chorus. We played whist. I had learned the game when I was a child and my uncle and aunt and I used to play at the vicarage during the long winter evenings. My uncle always took dummy, and though of course we played for love, when my aunt and I lost I used to retire under the dining-room table and cry. Ted Driffield did not play cards, he said he had no head for them, and when we started a game he would sit down by the fire and, pencil in hand, read one of the books that had been sent down to him from London to review. I had never played with three people before and of course I did not play well, but Mrs Driffield had a natural card sense. Her movements as a rule were rather deliberate, but when it came to playing cards she was quick and alert. She played the rest of us right off our heads. Ordinarily she did not speak very much and then slowly, but when, after a hand was played, she took the trouble good-humouredly to point out to me my mistakes, she was not only lucid but voluble. Lord George chaffed her as he chaffed everybody; she would smile at his banter, for she very seldom laughed, and sometimes make a neat retort. They did not behave like lovers, but like familiar friends, and I should have quite forgotten what I had heard about them and what I had seen but that now and then she gave him a look that embarrassed me. Her eyes rested on him quietly, as though he were not a man but a chair or a table, and in them was a mischievous, childlike smile. Then I would notice that his face seemed suddenly to swell and he moved uneasily in his chair. I looked quickly at the curate, afraid that he would notice something, but he was intent on the cards or else was lighting his pipe.

The hour or two I spent nearly every day in that hot, poky, smoke-laden room passed like lightning, and as the holidays drew nearer to their end I was seized with dismay at the thought that I must spend the next three months dully at school.

‘I don’t know what we shall do without you,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘We shall have to play dummy.’

I was glad that my going would break up the game. While I was doing prep I did not want to think that they were sitting in that little room and enjoying themselves just as if I did not exist.

‘How long do you get at Easter?’ asked Mr Galloway.

‘About three weeks.’

‘We’ll have a lovely time, then,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘The weather ought to be all right. We can ride in the mornings and then after tea we’ll play whist. You’ve improved a lot. If we play three or four times a week during your Easter holidays you won’t need to be afraid to play with anybody.’

CHAPTER 10

But the term came to an end at last. I was in high spirits when once more I got out of the train at Blackstable. I had grown a little and I had had a new suit made at Tercanbury, blue serge and very smart, and I had bought a new tie. I meant to go and see the Drifflelds immediately I had swallowed my tea, and I was full of hope that the carrier would have brought my box in time for me to put the new suit on. It made me look quite grown up. I had already begun putting vaseline on my upper lip every night to make my moustache grow. On my way through the town I looked down the street in which the Drifflelds lived, in the hope of seeing them. I should have liked to go in and say how-do-you-do, but I knew that Driffield wrote in the morning and Mrs Driffield was not ‘presentable.’ I had all sorts of exciting things to tell them. I had won a heat in the hundred-yard race in the sports, and I had been second in the hurdles. I meant to have a shot for the history prize in the summer, and I was going to swot up my English history during the holidays. Though there was an east wind blowing, the sky was blue and there was a feeling of spring in the air. The High Street, with its colours washed clean by the wind and its lines sharp as though drawn with a new pen, looked like a picture by Samuel Scott, quiet and naive and cosy: now, looking back; then it looked like nothing but High Street, Blackstable. When I came to the railway bridge I noticed that two or three houses were being built.

‘By Jove,’ I said. ‘Lord George is going it.’

In the fields beyond little white lambs were frisking. The elm trees were just beginning to turn green. I let myself in by the side door. My uncle was sitting in his arm-chair by the fire reading The Times. I shouted to my aunt and she came downstairs, a pink spot from the excitement of seeing me on each of her withered cheeks, and threw her thin old arms round my neck. She said all the right things.

‘How you’ve grown!’ and ‘Good gracious me, you’ll be getting a moustache soon!’

I kissed my uncle on his bald forehead, and I stood in front of the fire, with my legs well apart and my back to it, and was extremely grown up and rather condescending. Then I went upstairs to say how-do-you-do to Emily, and into the kitchen to shake hands with Mary-Ann, and out into the garden to see the gardener.

When I sat down hungrily to dinner and my uncle carved the leg of mutton I asked my aunt: ‘Well, what’s happened at Blackstable since I was here?’

‘Nothing very much. Mrs Greencourt went down to Mentone for six weeks, but she came back a few days ago. The major had an attack of gout.’

‘And your friends the Driffields have bolted,’ added my uncle.

‘They’ve done what?’ I cried.

‘Bolted. They took their luggage away one night and just went up to London. They’ve left bills all over the place. They hadn’t paid their rent and they hadn’t paid for their furniture. They owed Harris the butcher the best part of thirty pounds.’

‘How awful,’ I said.

‘That’s bad enough,’ said my aunt, ‘but it appears they hadn’t even paid the wages of the maid they had for three months.’

I was flabbergasted. I thought I felt a little sick.

‘I think in future,’ said my uncle, ‘you would be wiser not to consort with people whom your aunt and I don’t think proper associates for you.’

‘One can’t help feeling sorry for all those tradesmen they cheated,’ said my aunt.

‘It serves them right,’ said my uncle. ‘Fancy giving credit to people like that! I should have thought anyone could see they were nothing but adventurers.’

‘I always wonder why they came down here at all.’

‘They just wanted to show off, and I suppose they thought as people knew who they were here it would be easier to get things on credit.’

I did not think this quite logical, but was too much crushed to argue.

As soon as I had the chance I asked Mary-Ann what she knew of the incident. To my surprise she did not take it at all in the same way as my uncle and aunt. She giggled.

‘They let everyone in proper,’ she said. ‘They were as free as you like with their money and everyone thought they ‘ad plenty. It was always the best end of the neck for them at the butcher’s and when they wanted a steak nothing would do but the undercut. Asparagus and grapes and I don’t know what all. They ran up bills in every shop in town. I don’t know ‘ow people can be such fools.’

But it was evidently of the tradesmen she was speaking and not of the Driffields.

‘But how did they manage to bunk without anyone knowing?’ I asked.

‘Well, that’s what everybody’s askin’. They do say it was Lord George ‘elped them. How did they get their boxes to the station, I ask you, if ‘e didn’t take them in that there trap of ‘is?’

‘What does he say about it?’

‘He says ‘e knows no more about it than the man in the moon. There was a rare to-do all over the town when they found out the Driffields had shot the moon. It made me laugh. Lord George says ‘e never knew they was broke, and ‘e makes out ‘e was as surprised as anybody. But I for one don’t believe a word of it. We all know about ‘im and Rosie before she was married, and between you and me and the gatepost I don’t know that it ended there. They do say they was seen walkin’ about the fields together last summer and ‘e was in and out of the ‘ouse pretty near every day.’

‘How did people find out?’

‘Well, it’s like this. They ‘ad a girl there and they told ‘er she could go ‘ome and spend the night with her mother, but she wasn’t to be back later than eight o’clock in the morning. Well, when she come back she couldn’t get in. She knocked and she rung but nobody answered, and so she went in next door and asked the lady there what she’d better do, and the lady said she’d better go to the police station. The sergeant come back with ‘er and ‘e knocked and ‘e rang, but ‘e couldn’t get no answer. Then he asked the girl ‘ad they paid ‘er ‘er wages, and she said no, not for three months, and then ‘e said, you take my word for it, they’ve shot the moon, that’s what they’ve done. An’ when they come to get inside they found they’d took all their clothes, an’ their books – they say as Ted Driffield ‘ad a rare lot of books – an’ every blessed thing that belonged to them.’

‘And has nothing been heard of them since?’

‘Well, not exactly, but when they’d been gone about a week the girl got a letter from London, and when she opened it there was no letter or anything, but just a postal order for ‘er wages. An’ if you ask me, I call that very ‘andsome not to do a poor girl out of her wages.’

I was much more shocked than Mary-Ann. I was a very respectable youth. The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature, and though debts on the grand scale in books had seemed to me romantic, and duns and money-lenders were familiar figures to my fancy, I could not but think it mean and paltry not to pay the tradesmen’s books. I listened with confusion when people talked in my presence of the Driffields, and, when they spoke of them as my friends, I said: ‘Hang it all, I just knew them’; and when they asked: ‘Weren’t they fearfully common?’ I said: ‘Well, they didn’t exactly suggest the Vere de Veres, you know.’ Poor Mr Galloway was dreadfully upset.

‘Of course I didn’t think they were wealthy,’ he told me, ‘but I thought they had enough to get along. The house was very nicely furnished and the piano was new. It never struck me that they hadn’t paid for a single thing. They never stinted themselves. What hurts me is the deceit. I used to see quite a lot of them and I thought they liked me. They always made one welcome. You’d hardly believe it but, the last time I saw them, when they shook hands with me Mrs Driffield asked me to come next day and Driffield said: “Muffins for tea tomorrow.” And all the time they had everything packed upstairs and that very night they took the last train to London.’

‘What does Lord George say about it?’

‘To tell you the truth I haven’t gone out of my way to see him lately. It’s been a lesson to me. There’s a little proverb about evil communications that I’ve thought well to bear in mind.’

I felt very much the same about Lord George, and I was a little nervous too. If he took it into his head to tell people that at Christmas I had been going to see the Driffields almost every day, and it came to my uncle’s ears, I foresaw an unpleasant fuss. My uncle would accuse me of deceit and prevarication and disobedience and of not behaving like a gentleman, and I did not at the moment see what answer I could make. I knew him well enough to be aware that he would not let the matter drop, and that I should be reminded of my transgression for years. I was just as glad not to see Lord George. But one day I ran into him face to face in the High Street.

‘Hallo, youngster!’ he cried, addressing me in a way I particularly resented. ‘Back for the holidays, I suppose.’

‘You suppose quite correctly,’ I answered with what I thought withering sarcasm.

Unfortunately he only bellowed with laughter.

‘You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,’ he answered heartily. ‘Well, it looks as if there was no more whist for you and me just yet. Now you see what comes of living beyond your means. What I always say to my boys is, if you’ve got a pound and you spend nineteen and six you’re a rich man, but if you spend twenty shillings and sixpence you’re a pauper. Look after the pence, young fellow, and the pounds ‘ll look after themselves.’

But though he spoke after this fashion there was in his voice no note of disapproval, but a bubble of laughter as though in his heart he were tittering at these admirable maxims.

‘They say you helped them to bunk,’ I remarked.

‘Me?’ His face assumed a look of extreme surprise, but his eyes glittered with sly mirth. ‘Why, when they came and told me the Driffields had shot the moon you could have knocked me down with a feather. They owed me four pounds seventeen and six for coal. We’ve all been let in, even poor old Galloway, who never got his muffins for tea.’

I had never thought Lord George more blatant. I should have liked to say something final and crushing, but as I could not think of anything I just said that I must be getting along and with a curt nod left him.

CHAPTER 11

Musing thus over the past, while I waited for Alroy Kear, I chuckled when I considered this shabby incident of Edward Driffield’s obscurity in the light of the immense respectability of his later years. I wondered whether it was because in my boyhood he was as a writer held in such small esteem by the people about me that I had never been able to see in him the astonishing merit that the best critical opinion eventually ascribed to him. He was for long thought to write very bad English, and indeed he gave you the impression of writing with the stub of a blunt pencil; his style was laboured, an uneasy mixture of the classical and the slangy, and his dialogue was such as could never have issued from the mouth of a human being. Toward the end of his career, when he dictated his books, his style, acquiring a conversational ease, became flowing and limpid; and then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter. His prime belonged to a period when the purple patch was in vogue, and there are descriptive passages in his works that have found their way into all the anthologies of English prose. His pieces on the sea, and spring in the Kentish woods, and sunset on the lower reaches of the Thames are famous. It should be a mortification to me that I cannot read them without discomfort.

When I was a young man, though his books sold but little, and one or two were banned by the libraries, it was very much a mark of culture to admire him. He was thought boldly realistic. He was a very good stick to beat the Philistines with. Somebody’s lucky inspiration discovered that his sailors and peasants were Shakespearian, and when the advanced got together they uttered shrill cries of ecstasy over the dry and spicy humour of his yokels. This was a commodity that Edward Driffield had no difficulty in supplying. My own heart sank when he led me into the forecastle of a sailing ship or the taproom of a public-house, and I knew I was in for half a dozen pages in dialect of facetious comment on life, ethics, and immortality. But, I admit, I have always thought the Shakespearian clowns tedious, and their innumerable progeny insupportable.

Driffield’s strength lay evidently in his depiction of the class he knew best, farmers and farm labourers, shopkeepers and bartenders, skippers of sailing ships, mates, cooks, and ableseamen. When he introduces characters belonging to a higher station in life even his warmest admirers, one would have thought, must experience a certain malaise; his fine gentlemen are so incredibly fine, his high-born ladies are so good, so pure, so noble that you are not surprised that they can only express themselves with polysyllabic dignity. His women hardly come to life. But here again I must add that this is only my own opinion; the world at large and the most eminent critics have agreed that they are very winsome types of English womanhood, spirited, gallant, high-souled, and they have been often compared with the heroines of Shakespeare. We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry. I am surprised that they care to see themselves thus limned.

The critics can force the world to pay attention to a very indifferent writer, and the world may lose its head over one who has no merit at all, but the result in neither case is lasting; and I cannot help thinking that no writer can hold the public for as long as Edward Driffield without considerable gifts. The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen stillborn from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best-sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose. At all events Edward Driffield is in the running. His novels happen to bore me; I find them long; the melodramatic incidents with which he sought to stir the sluggish reader’s interest leave me cold; but he certainly had sincerity. There is in his best books the stir of life, and in none of them can you fail to be aware of the author’s enigmatic personality. In his earlier days he was praised or blamed for his realism; according to the idiosyncrasy of his critics he was extolled for his truth or censured for his coarseness. But realism has ceased to excite remark, and the library reader will take in his stride obstacles at which a generation back he would have violently shied. The cultured reader of these pages will remember the leading article in the Literary Supplement of The Times which appeared at the moment of Driffield’s death. Taking the novels of Edward Driffield as his text, the author wrote what was very well described as a hymn to beauty. No one who read it could fail to be impressed by those swelling periods, which reminded one of the noble prose of Jeremy Taylor, by that reverence and piety, by all those high sentiments, in short, expressed in a style that was ornate without excess and dulcet without effeminacy. It was itself a thing of beauty. If some suggested that Edward Driffield was by way of being a humorist and that a jest would here and there have lightened this eulogious article, it must be replied that after all it was a funeral oration. And it is well known that Beauty does not look with good grace on the timid advances of Humour. Roy Kear, when he was talking to me of Driffield, claimed that, whatever his faults, they were redeemed by the beauty that suffused his pages. Now I come to look back on our conversation, I think it was this remark that had most exasperated me.

Thirty years ago in literary circles God was all the fashion. It was good form to believe and journalists used Him to adorn a phrase or balance a sentence; then God went out (oddly enough with cricket and beer) and Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace. Spiritually they were never the same again. But Pan went out and now beauty has taken his place. People find it in a phrase, or a turbot, a dog, a day, a picture, an action, a dress. Young women in cohorts, each of whom has written so promising and competent a novel, prattle of it in every manner from allusive to arch, from intense to charming; and the young men, more or less recently down from Oxford, but still trailing its clouds of glory, who tell us in the weekly papers what we should think of art, life, and the universe, fling the word with a pretty negligence about their close-packed pages. It is sadly frayed. Gosh, they have worked it hard! The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them. I wonder if this clamour is anything more than the cry of distress of those who cannot make themselves at home in our heroic world of machines, and I wonder if their passion for beauty, the Little Nell of this shamefaced day, is anything more than sentimentality. It may be that another generation, accommodating itself more adequately to the stress of life, will look for inspiration not in a flight from reality, but in an eager acceptance of it.

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s ‘Entombment of Christ’, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty – sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love – because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: ‘Qu’est-ce que ça piouvel’ was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling hamlets; it was his longevity. Reverence for old age is one of the most admirable traits of the human race, and I think it may safely be stated that in no other country than ours is this trait more marked. The awe and love with which other nations regard old age is often platonic; but ours is practical. Who but the English would fill Covent Garden to listen to an aged prima donn a without a voice? Who but the English would pay to see dancers so decrepit that they can hardly put one foot before the other and say to one another admiringly in the intervals: ‘By George, sir, d’you know he’s a long way past sixty?’ But compared with politicians and writers these are but striplings, and I often think that a jeune premier must be of a singularly amiable disposition if it does not make him bitter to consider that when at the age of seventy he must end his career the public man and the author are only at their prime. A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that from the earlier times the old have rubbed it in to the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture; and besides, no one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that (if one may judge by results) it requires little mental ability to rule a nation. But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. At one time I thought that the praise accorded to them when they had ceased for twenty years to write anything of interest was largely due to the fact that the younger men, having no longer to fear their competition, felt it safe to extol their merit; and it is well known that to praise someone whose rivalry you do not dread is often a very good way of putting a spoke in the wheel of someone whose rivalry you do. But this is to take a low view of human nature and I would not for the world lay myself open to a charge of cheap cynicism. After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them. Of course he must go on; he must keep in the public eye. It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence. This needs time. His production must be such that if he cannot captivate a reader by his charm he can stun him by his weight.

If, as I think, longevity is genius, few in our time have enjoyed it in a more conspicuous degree than Edward Driffield. When he was a young fellow in the sixties (the cultured having had their way with him and passed him by) his position in the world of letters was only respectable; the best judges praised him, but with moderation; the younger men were inclined to be frivolous at his expense. It was agreed that he had talent, but it never occurred to anyone that he was one of the glories of English literature. He celebrated his seventieth birthday; an uneasiness passed over the world of letters, like a ruffling of the waters when on an Eastern sea a typhoon lurks in the distance, and it grew evident that there had lived among us all these years a great novelist and none of us had suspected it. There was a rush for Driffield’s books in the various libraries and a hundred busy pens, in Bloomsbury, in Chelsea, and in other places where men of letters congregate, wrote appreciations, studies, essays, and works, short and chatty or long and intense, on his novels. These were reprinted, in complete editions, in select editions, at a shilling and three and six and five shillings and a guinea. His style was analysed, his philosophy was examined, his technique was dissected. At seventy-five everyone agreed that Edward Driffield had genius. At eighty he was the Grand Old Man of English Letters. This position he held till his death.

Now we look about and think sadly that there is no one to take his place. A few septuagenarians are sitting up and taking notice, and they evidently feel that they could comfortably fill the vacant niche. But it is obvious that they lack something.

Though these recollections have taken so long to narrate they took but a little while to pass through my head. They came to me higgledy-piggledy, an incident and then a scrap of conversation that belonged to a previous time, and I have set them down in order for the convenience of the reader and because I have a neat mind. One thing that surprised me was that even at that far distance I could remember distinctly what people looked like and even the gist of what they said but only with vagueness what they wore. I knew of course that the dress, especially of women, was quite different forty years ago from what it was now, but if I recalled it at all it was not from life but from pictures and photographs that I had seen much later.

I was still occupied with my idle fancies when I heard a taxi stop at the door, the bell ring, and in a moment Alroy Kear’s booming voice telling the butler that he had an appointment with me. He came in, big, bluff, and hearty; his vitality shattered with a single gesture the frail construction I had been building out of the vanished past. He brought in with him, like a blustering wind in March, the aggressive and inescapable present.

‘I was just asking myself,’ I said, ‘who could possibly succeed Edward Driffield as the Grand Old Man of English Letters, and you arrive to answer my question.’

He broke into a jovial laugh, but into his eyes came a quick look of suspicion.

‘I don’t think there’s anybody,’ he said.

‘How about yourself?’

‘Oh, my dear boy, I’m not fifty yet. Give me another twenty-five years.’ He laughed, but his eyes held mine keenly. ‘I never know when you’re pulling my leg.’ He looked down suddenly. ‘Of course one can’t help thinking about the future sometimes. All the people who are at the top of the tree now are anything from fifteen to twenty years older than me. They can’t last for ever, and when they’re gone who is there? Of course there’s Aldous; he’s a good deal younger than me, but he’s not very strong and I don’t believe he takes great care of himself. Barring accidents, by which I mean barring some genius who suddenly springs up and sweeps the board, I don’t quite see how in another twenty or twenty-five years I can help having the field pretty well to myself. It’s just a question of pegging away and living on longer than the others.’

Roy sank his virile bulk into one of my landlady’s armchairs and I offered him a whisky and soda.

‘No, I never drink spirits before six o’clock,’ he said. He looked about him. ‘Jolly, these digs are.’

‘I know. What have you come to see me about?’

‘I thought I’d better have a little chat with you about Mrs Driffield’s invitation. It was rather difficult to explain over the telephone. The truth of the matter is that I’ve arranged to write Driffield’s life.’

‘Oh! Why didn’t you tell me the other day?’

I felt friendly disposed toward Roy. I was happy to think that I had not misjudged him when I suspected that it was not merely for the pleasure of my company that he had asked me to luncheon.

‘I hadn’t entirely made up my mind. Mrs Driffield is very keen on my doing it. She’s going to help me in every way she can. She’s giving me all the material she has. She’s been collecting it for a good many years. It’s not an easy thing to do, and of course I can’t afford not to do it well. But if I can make a pretty good job of it, it can’t fail to do me a lot of good. People have so much more respect for a novelist if he writes something serious now and then. Those critical works of mine were an awful sweat, and they sold nothing, but I don’t regret them for a moment. They’ve given me a position I could never have got without them.’

‘I think it’s a very good plan. You’ve known Driffield more intimately than most people for the last twenty years.’

‘I think I have. But of course he was over sixty when I first made his acquaintance. I wrote and told him how much I admired his books, and he asked me to go and see him. But I know nothing about the early part of his life. Mrs Driffield used to try to get him to talk about those days, and she made very copious notes of all he said, and then there are diaries that he kept now and then, and of course a lot of the stuff in the novels is obviously autobiographical. But there are immense lacunae. I’ll tell you the sort of book I want to write: a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside, you know, and then woven in with this a really exhaustive criticism of his literary work, not ponderous, of course, but although sympathetic, searching and … subtle. Naturally it wants some doing, but Mrs Driffield seems to think I can do it.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ I put in.

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Roy. ‘I am a critic, and I’m a novelist. It’s obvious that I have certain literary qualifications. But I can’t do anything unless everyone who can is willing to help me.’

I began to see where I came in. I tried to make my face look quite blank. Roy leaned forward.

‘I asked you the other day if you were going to write anything about Driffield yourself and you said you weren’t. Can I take that as definite?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Then have you got any objection to giving me your material?’

‘My dear boy, I haven’t got any.’

‘Oh, that’s nonsense,’ said Roy good-humouredly, with the tone of a doctor who is trying to persuade a child to have its throat examined. ‘When he was living at Blackstable you must have seen a lot of him.’

‘I was only a boy then.’

‘But you must have been conscious of the unusual experience. After all, no one could be for half an hour in Edward Driffield’s society without being impressed by his extraordinary personality. It must have been obvious even to a boy of sixteen, and you were probably more observant and sensitive than the average boy of that age.’

‘I wonder if his personality would have seemed extraordinary without the reputation to back it up. Do you imagine that if you went down to a spa in the west of England as Mr Atkins, a chartered accountant taking the waters for his liver, you would impress the people you met there as a man of character?’

‘I imagine they’d soon realize that I was not quite the common or garden chartered accountant,’ said Roy, with a smile that took from his remark any appearance of self-esteem.

‘Well, all I can tell you is that what chiefly bothered me about Driffield in those days was that the knickerbocker suit he wore was dreadfully loud. We used to bicycle a lot together, and it always made me feel a trifle uncomfortable to be seen with him.’

‘It sounds comic now. What did he talk about?’

‘I don’t know; nothing very much. He was rather keen on architecture, and he talked about farming, and if a pub looked nice he generally suggested stopping for five minutes and having a glass of bitter, and then he would talk to the landlord about the crops and the price of coal and things like that.’

I rambled on, though I could see by the look of Roy’s face that he was disappointed with me; he listened, but he was a trifle bored, and it struck me that when he was bored he looked peevish. But though I couldn’t remember that Driffield had ever said anything significant during those long rides of ours, I had a very acute recollection of the feel of them. Blackstable was peculiar in this, that though it was on the sea, with a long shingly beach and marshland at the back, you had only to go about half a mile inland to come into the most rural country in Kent. Winding roads that ran between the great fat green fields and clumps of huge elms, substantial and with a homely stateliness like good old Kentish farmers’ wives, high-coloured and robust, who had grown portly on good butter and homemade bread and cream and fresh eggs. And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air, you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever. Although you were pedalling with such energy you had a delicious feeling of laziness. You were quite happy when no one spoke, and if one of the party from sheer high spirits suddenly put on speed and shot ahead it was a joke that everyone laughed at and for a few minutes you pedalled as hard as you could. And we chaffed one another innocently and giggled at our own humour. Now and then one would pass cottages with little gardens in front of them, and in the gardens were hollyhocks and tiger lilies; and a little way from the road were farmhouses, with their spacious barns and oasthouses; and one would pass through hop-fields with the ripening hops hanging in garlands. The public-houses were friendly and informal, hardly more important than cottages, and on the porches often honeysuckle would be growing. The names they bore were usual and familiar: The Jolly Sailor, The Merry Ploughman, The Crown and Anchor, The Red Lion.

But of course all that could matter nothing to Roy, and he interrupted me.

‘Did he never talk of literature?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t that sort of writer. I suppose he thought about his writing, but he never mentioned it. He used to lend the curate books. In the winter, one Christmas holiday, I used to have tea at his house nearly every day, and sometimes the curate and he would talk about books, but we used to shut them up.’

‘Don’t you remember anything he said?’

‘Only one thing. I remember it because I hadn’t ever read the things he was talking about, and what he said made me do so. He said that when Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon and became respectable, if he ever thought of his plays at all, probably the two that he remembered with most interest were Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.’

‘I don’t think that’s very illuminating. Didn’t he say anything about anyone more modern than Shakespeare?’

‘Well, not then, that I can remember; but when I was lunching with the Driffields a few years ago I overheard him saying that Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses. Driffield called it il gran rifiuto. I was surprised at hearing the old man use an Italian phrase, and amused because a great big bouncing duchess who was there was the only person who knew what the devil he was talking about. He said: “Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over, and they’re having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying.”’

Roy listened to my little anecdote with attention. He shook his head reflectively.

‘I don’t think I could use that. I’d have the Henry James gang down on me like a thousand of bricks … But what used you to do during those evenings?’

‘Well, we played whist while Driffield read books for review, and he used to sing.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Roy, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Do you remember what he sang?’

‘Perfectly. All through stickin’ to a Soljer and Come where the Booze is cheaper were his favourites.’

‘Oh!’

I could see that Roy was disappointed.

‘Did you expect him to sing Schumann?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know why not. It would have been rather a good point. But I think I should have expected him to sing sea chanties or old English country airs, you know, the sort of thing they used to sing at fairings – blind fiddlers and the village swains dancing with the girls on the threshing-floor and all that sort of thing. I might have made something rather beautiful out of that, but I can’t see Edward Driffield’s singing music-hall songs. After all, when you’re drawing a man’s portrait you must get the values right; you only confuse the impression if you put in stuff that’s all out of tone.’

‘You know that shortly after this he shot the moon. He let everybody in.’

Roy was silent for fully a minute, and he looked down at the carpet reflectively.

‘Yes, I knew there’d been some unpleasantness. Mrs Driffield mentioned it. I understand everything was paid up later before he finally bought Ferne Court and settled down in the district. I don’t think it’s necessary to dwell on an incident that is not really of any importance in the history of his development. After all, it happened nearly forty years ago. You know, there were some very curious sides to the old man. One would have thought that after a rather sordid little scandal like that the neighbourhood of Blackstable would be the last place he’d choose to spend the rest of his life in when he’d become celebrated, especially when it was the scene of his rather humble origins; but he didn’t seem to mind a bit. He seemed to think the whole thing rather a good joke. He was quite capable of telling people who came to lunch about it and it was very embarrassing for Mrs Driffield. I should like you to know Amy better. She’s a very remarkable woman. Of course the old man had written all his great books before he ever set eyes on her, but I don’t think anyone can deny that it was she who created the rather imposing and dignified figure that the world saw for the last twenty-five years of his life. She’s been very frank with me. She didn’t have such an easy job of it. Old Driffield had some very queer ways and she had to use a good deal of tact to get him to behave decently. He was very obstinate in some things, and I think a woman of less character would have been discouraged. For instance, he had a habit that poor Amy had a lot of trouble to break him of: after he’d finished his meat and vegetables he’d take a piece of bread and wipe the plate clean with it and eat it.’

‘Do you know what that means?’ I said. ‘It means that for long he had so little to eat that he couldn’t afford to waste any food he could get.’

‘Well, that may be, but it’s not a very pretty habit for a distinguished man of letters. And then, he didn’t exactly tipple, but he was rather fond of going down to the Bear and Key at Blackstable and having a few beers in the public bar. Of course there was no harm in it, but it did make him rather conspicuous, especially in summer when the place was full of trippers. He didn’t mind who he talked to. He didn’t seem able to realize that he had a position to keep up. You can’t deny it was rather awkward after they’d been having a lot of interesting people to lunch – people like Edmund Gosse, for instance, and Lord Curzon – that he should go down to a public-house and tell the plumber and the baker and the sanitary inspector what he thought about them. But of course that could be explained away. One could say that he was after local colour and was interested in types. But he had some habits that really were rather difficult to cope with. Do you know that it was with the greatest difficulty that Amy Driffield could ever get him to take a bath?’

‘He was born at a time when people thought it unhealthy to take too many baths. I don’t suppose he ever lived in a house that had a bathroom till he was fifty.’

‘Well, he said he never had had a bath more than once a week and he didn’t see why he should change his habits at his time of life. Then Amy said that he must change his underlinen every day, but he objected to that too. He said he’d always been used to wearing his vest and drawers for a week and it was nonsense, it only wore them out to have them washed so often. Mrs Driffield did everything she could to tempt him to have a bath every day, with bath salts and perfumes, you know, but nothing would induce him to, and as he grew older he wouldn’t even have one once a week. She tells me that for the last three years of his life he never had a bath at all. Of course all this is between ourselves; I’m merely telling it to show you that in writing his life I shall have to use a good deal of tact. I don’t see how one can deny that he was just a wee bit unscrupulous in money matters, and he had a kink in him that made him take a strange pleasure in the society of his inferiors and some of his personal habits were rather disagreeable, but I don’t think that side of him was the most significant. I don’t want to say anything that’s untrue, but I do think there’s a certain amount that’s better left unsaid.’

‘Don’t you think it would be more interesting if you went the whole hog and drew him warts and all?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. Amy Driffield would never speak to me again. She only asked me to do the life because she felt she could trust my discretion. I must behave like a gentleman.’

‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.’

‘I don’t see why. And besides, you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism. Of course I don’t deny that if I were thoroughly unscrupulous I could make a sensation. It would be rather amusing to show the man with his passion for beauty and his careless treatment of his obligations, his fine style and his personal hatred for soap and water, his idealism and his tippling in disreputable pubs; but honestly, would it pay? They’d only say I was imitating Lytton Strachey. No. I think I shall do much better to be allusive and charming and rather subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender. I think one ought always to see a book before one starts it. Well, I see this rather like a portrait by Van Dyck, with a good deal of atmosphere, you know, and a certain gravity, and with a sort of aristocratic distinction. Do you know what I mean? About eighty thousand words.’

He was absorbed for a moment in the ecstasy of aesthetic contemplation. In his mind’s eye he saw a book, in royal octavo, slim and light in the hand, printed with large margins on handsome paper in a type that was both clear and comely, and I think he saw a binding in smooth black cloth with a decoration in gold and gilt lettering. But being human, Alroy Kear could not, as I suggested a few pages back, hold the ecstasy that beauty yields for more than a little while. He gave me a candid smile.

‘But how the devil am I to get over the first Mrs Driffield?’

‘The skeleton in the cupboard,’ I murmured.

‘She is damned awkward to deal with. She was married to Driffield for a good many years. Amy has very decided views on the subject, but I don’t see how I can possibly meet them. You see, her attitude is that Rose Driffield exerted a most pernicious influence on her husband, and that she did everything possible to ruin him morally, physically, and financially; she was beneath him in every way, at least intellectually and spiritually, and it was only because he was a man of immense force and vitality that he survived. It was of course a very unfortunate marriage. It’s true that she’s been dead for ages and it seems a pity to rake up old scandals and wash a lot of dirty linen in public; but the fact remains that all Driffield’s greatest books were written when he was living with her. Much as I admire the later books, and no one is more conscious of their genuine beauty than I am, and they have a restraint and a sort of classical sobriety which are admirable, I must admit that they haven’t the tang and the vigour and the smell and bustle of life of the early ones. It does seem to me that you can’t altogether ignore the influence his first wife had on his work.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ I asked.

‘Well, I can’t see why all that part of his life shouldn’t be treated with the greatest possible reserve and delicacy, so as not to offend the most exacting susceptibility, and yet with a sort of manly frankness, if you understand what I mean, that would be rather moving.’

‘It sounds a very tall order.’

‘As I see it, there’s no need to dot the i’s or to cross the t’s. It can only be a question of getting just the right touch. I wouldn’t state more than I could help, but I would suggest what was essential for the reader to realize. You know, however gross a subject is you can soften its unpleasantness if you treat it with dignity. But I can do nothing unless I am in complete possession of the facts.’

‘Obviously you can’t cook them unless you have them.’

Roy had been speaking with a fluent ease that revealed the successful lecturer. I wished (a) that I could express myself with so much force and aptness, never at a loss for a word, rolling off the sentences without a moment’s hesitation; and (b) that I did not feel so miserably incompetent with my one small insignificant person to represent the large and appreciative audience that Roy was instinctively addressing. But now he paused. A genial look came over his face, which his enthusiasm had reddened and the heat of the day caused to perspire, and the eyes that had held me with a dominating brilliance softened and smiled.

‘This is where you come in, old boy,’ he said pleasantly.

I have always found it a very good plan in life to say nothing when I had nothing to say and when I do not know how to answer a remark to hold my tongue. I remained silent and looked back at Roy amiably.

‘You know more about his life at Blackstable than anybody else.’

‘I don’t know about that. There must be a number of people at Blackstable who saw as much of him in the old days as I did.’

‘That may be, but after all they’re presumably not people of any importance, and I don’t think they matter very much.’

‘Oh, I see. You mean that I’m the only person who might blow the gaff.’

‘Roughly, that is what I do mean, if you feel that you must put it in a facetious way.’

I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I did not mind, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.

‘And you saw a good deal of him later on in London, I believe.’

‘Yes,’

‘That is when he had an apartment somewhere in Lower Belgravia.’

‘Well, lodgings in Pimlico.’ Roy smiled dryly.

‘We won’t quarrel about the exact designation, of the quarter of London in which he lived. You were very intimate with him then.’

‘Fairly.’

‘How long did that last?’

‘About a couple of years.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Now look here, I want you to do me a great favour. It won’t take you very long and it will be of quite inestimable value to me. I want you to jot down as fully as you can all your recollections of Driffield, and all you remember about his wife and his relations with her and so on, both at Blackstable and in London.’

‘Oh, my dear fellow, that’s asking a great deal. I’ve got a lot of work to do just now.’

‘It needn’t take you very long. You can write it quite roughly, I mean. You needn’t bother about style, you know, or anything like that. I’ll put the style in. All I want are the facts. After all, you know them and nobody else does. I don’t want to be pompous or anything like that, but Driffield was a great man and you owe it to his memory and to English literature to tell everything you know. I shouldn’t have asked you, but you told me the other day that you weren’t going to write anything about him yourself. It would be rather like a dog in a manger to keep to yourself a whole lot of material that you have no intention of using.’

Thus Roy appealed at once to my sense of duty, my indolence, my generosity, and my rectitude.

‘But why does Mrs Driffield want me to go down and stay at Ferne Court?’ I asked.

‘Well, we talked it over. It’s a very jolly house to stay in. She does one very well, and it ought to be divine in the country just now. She thought it would be very nice and quiet for you if you felt inclined to write your recollections there; of course, I said I couldn’t promise that, but naturally being so near Blackstable would remind you of all sorts of things that you might otherwise forget. And then, living in his house, among his books and things, it would make the past seem much more real. We could all talk about him, and you know how in the heat of conversation things come back. Amy’s very quick and clever. She’s been in the habit of making notes of Driffield’s talk for years, and after all it’s quite likely that you’ll say things on the spur of the moment that you wouldn’t think of writing and she can just jot them down afterward. And we can play tennis and bathe.’

‘I’m not very fond of staying with people,’ I said. ‘I hate getting up for a nine o’clock breakfast to eat things I have no mind to. I don’t like going for walks, and I’m not interested in other people’s chickens.’

‘She’s a lonely woman now. It would be a kindness to her and it would be a kindness to me too.’

I reflected.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll go down to Blackstable, but I’ll go down on my own. I’ll put up at the Bear and Key and I’ll come over and see Mrs Driffield while you’re there. You can both talk your heads off about Edward Driffield, but I shall be able to get away when I’m fed up with you.’ Roy laughed good-naturedly.

‘All right. That’ll do. And will you jot down anything you can remember that you think will be useful to me?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘When will you come? I’m going down on Friday.’

‘I’ll come with you if you’ll promise not to talk to me in the train.’

‘All right. The five-ten’s the best one. Shall I come and fetch you?’

‘I’m capable of getting to Victoria by myself. I’ll meet you on the platform.’

I don’t know if Roy was afraid of me changing my mind, but he got up at once, shook my hand heartily, and left. He begged me on no account to forget my tennis racquet and bathing suit.

CHAPTER 12

My promise to Roy sent my thoughts back to my first years in London. Having nothing much to do that afternoon, it occurred to me to stroll along and have a cup of tea with my old landlady. Mrs Hudson’s name had been given to me by the secretary of the medical school at St Luke’s when, a callow youth just arrived in town, I was looking for lodgings. She had a house in Vincent Square. I lived there for five years, in two rooms on the ground floor, and over me on the drawing-room floor lived a master at Westminster School. I paid a pound a week for my rooms and he paid twenty-five shillings. Mrs Hudson was a little, active, bustling woman, with a sallow face, a large aquiline nose, and the brightest, the most vivacious black eyes that I ever saw. She had a great deal of very dark hair, in the afternoons and all day on Sunday arranged in a fringe on the forehead with a bun at the nape of the neck as you may see in old photographs of the Jersey Lily. She had a heart of gold (though I did not know it then, for when you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right) and she was an excellent cook. No one could make a better omelette soufflè than she. Every morning she was up betimes to get the fire lit in her gentlemen’s sitting-rooms so that ‘they needn’t eat their breakfasts simply perishin’ with the cold, my word it’s bitter this morning’; and if she didn’t hear you having your bath, a flat tin bath that slipped under the bed, the water put in the night before to take the chill off, she’d say: ‘There now, there’s my dining-room floor not up yet, ‘e’ll be late for his lecture again,’ and she would come tripping upstairs and thump on the door, and you would hear her shrill voice: ‘If you don’t get up at once you won’t ‘ave time to ‘ave breakfast, an’ I’ve got a lovely ‘addick for you.’ She worked all day long and she sang at her work, and she was gay and happy and smiling. Her husband was much older than she. He had been a butler in very good families, and wore sidewhiskers and a perfect manner; he was verger at a neighbouring church, highly respected, and he waited at table and cleaned the boots and helped with the washing-up. Mrs Hudson’s only relaxation was to come up after she had served the dinners (I had mine at half past six and the schoolmaster at seven) and have a little chat with her gentlemen. I wish to goodness I had had the sense (like Amy Driffield with her celebrated husband) to take notes of her conversation, for Mrs Hudson was a mistress of Cockney humour. She had a gift of repartee that never failed her, she had a racy style and an apt and vivid vocabulary, she was never at a loss for the comic metaphor or the vivid phrase. She was a pattern of propriety, and she would never have women in her house, you never knew what they were up to (‘It’s men, men, men all the time with them, and afternoon tea and thin bread and butter, and openin’ the door and ringin’ for ‘ot water and I don’t know what all’); but in conversation she did not hesitate to use what was called in those days the blue bag. One could have said of her what she said of Marie Lloyd: ‘What I like about ‘er is that she gives you a good laugh. She goes pretty near the knuckle sometimes, but she never jumps over the fence.’ Mrs Hudson enjoyed her own humour and I think she talked more willingly to her lodgers because her husband was a serious man (‘It’s as it should be,’ she said, ‘‘im bein a verger and attendin’ weddings and funerals and what all’) and wasn’t much of a one for a joke. ‘Wot I says to ‘Udson is, laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh when you’re dead and buried.’

Mrs Hudson’s humour was cumulative, and the story of her feud with Miss Butcher who let lodgings at number fourteen was a great comic saga that went on year in and year out.

‘She’s a disagreeable old cat, but I give you my word I’d miss ‘er if the Lord took ‘er one fine day. Though what ‘E’d do with ‘er when ‘E got ‘er I can’t think. Many’s the good laugh she’s given me in ‘er time.’

Mrs Hudson had very bad teeth, and the question whether she should have them taken out and have false ones was discussed by her for two or three years with an unimaginable variety of comic invention.

‘But as I said to ‘Udson on’y last night, when he said: “Oh, come on, ‘ave ’em out and ‘ave done with it,” I shouldn’t ‘ave anythin’ to talk about.’

I had not seen Mrs Hudson for two or three years. My last visit had been in answer to a little letter in which she asked me to come and drink a nice strong cup of tea with her and announced: ‘Hudson died three months ago next Saturday, aged seventy-nine, and George and Hester send their respectful compliments.’ George was the issue of her marriage with Hudson. He was now a man approaching middle age who worked at Woolwich Arsenal, and his mother had been repeating for twenty years that George would be bringing a wife home one of these days. Hester was the maid-of-all-work she had engaged toward the end of my stay with her, and Mrs Hudson still spoke of her as ‘that dratted girl of mine’. Though Mrs Hudson must have been well over thirty when I first took her rooms, and that was five and thirty years ago, I had no feelings as I walked leisurely through the Green Park that I should not find her alive. She was as definitely part of the recollections of my youth as the pelicans that stood at the edge of my ornamental water.

I walked down the area steps and the door was opened to me by Hester, a woman getting on for fifty now, and stoutish, but still bearing on her shyly grinning face the irresponsibility of the dratted girl. Mrs Hudson was darning George’s socks when I was shown into the front room of the basement, and she took off her spectacles to look at me.

‘Well, if that isn’t Mr Ashenden! Whoever thought of seeing you? Is the water boiling, ‘Ester? You will ‘ave a nice cup of tea, won’t you?’

Mrs Hudson was a little heavier than when I first knew her, and her movements were more deliberate, but there was scarcely a white hair on her head, and her eyes, as black and shining as buttons, sparkled with fun. I sat down in a shabby little arm-chair covered with maroon leather.

‘How are you getting on, Mrs Hudson?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’ve got nothin’ much to complain of except that I’m not so young as I used to was,’ she answered. ‘I can’t do so much as I could when you was ‘ere. I don’t give my gentlemen dinner now, only breakfast.’

‘Are all your rooms let?’

‘Yes, I’m thankful to say.’

Owing to the rise of prices Mrs Hudson was able to get more for her rooms than in my day, and I think in her modest way she was quite well off. But of course people wanted a lot nowadays.

‘You wouldn’t believe it, first I ‘ad to put in a bathroom, and then I ‘ad to put in the electric light, and then nothin’ would satisfy them but I must ‘ave a telephone. What they’ll want next I can’t think.’

‘Mr George says it’s pretty near time Mrs ‘Udson thought of retiring,’ said Hester, who was laying the tea.

‘You mind your own business, my girl,’ said Mrs Hudson tartly. ‘When I retire it’ll be to the cemetery. Fancy me livin’ all alone with George and ‘Ester without nobody to talk to.’

‘Mr George says she ought to take a little ‘ouse in the country an’ take care of ‘erself,’ said Hester, unperturbed by the reproof.

‘Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ‘ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.’

A few doors away was the Vauxhall Bridge Road and down it trams were clanging, ringing their bells as they went, motor buses were lumbering along, taxis were tooting their horns. If Mrs Hudson heard it, it was London she heard, and it soothed her as a mother’s crooning soothes a restless child.

I looked round the cosy, shabby, homely little parlour in which Mrs Hudson had lived so long. I wondered if there was anything I could do for her. I noticed that she had a gramophone. It was the only thing I could think of.

‘Is there anything you want, Mrs Hudson?’ I asked.

She fixed her beady eyes on me reflectively.

‘I don’t know as there is, now you come to speak of it, except me ‘ealth and strength for another twenty years so as I can go on workin’.’

I do not think I am a sentimentalist, but her reply, unexpected but so characteristic, made a sudden lump come to my throat.

When it was time for me to go I asked if I could see the rooms I had lived in for five years.

‘Run upstairs, ‘Ester, and see if Mr Graham’s in. If he ain’t, I’m sure ‘e wouldn’t mind you ‘avin’ a look at them.’

Hester scurried up, and in a moment, slightly breathless, came down again to say that Mr Graham was out. Mrs Hudson came with me. The bed was the same narrow iron bed that I had slept in and dreamed in and there was the same chest of drawers and the same washing-stand. But the sitting-room had the grim heartiness of the athlete; on the walls were photographs of cricket elevens and rowing men in shorts; golf clubs stood in the corner and pipes and tobacco jars, ornamented with the arms of a college, were littered on the chimney-piece. In my days we believed in art for art’s sake and this I exemplified by draping the chimney-piece with a Moorish rug, putting up curtains of art serge and a bilious green, and hanging on the walls autotypes of pictures by Perugino, Van Dyck, and Hobbema.

‘Very artistic you was, wasn’t you?’ Mrs Hudson remarked, not without irony.

‘Very,’ I murmured.

I could not help feeling a pang as I thought of all the years that had passed since I inhabited that room, and of all that had happened to me. It was at that same table that I had eaten my hearty breakfast and my frugal dinner, read my medical books and written my first novel. It was in that same arm-chair that I had read for the first time Wordsworth and Stendhal, the Elizabethan dramatists and the Russian novelists, Gibbon, Boswell, Voltaire, and Rousseau. I wondered who had used them since. Medical students, articled clerks, young fellows making their way in the City and elderly men retired from the colonies or thrown unexpectedly upon the world by the break-up of an old home. The room made me, as Mrs Hudson would have put it, go queer all over. All the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own. I have no notion why, but it made me think of a woman at a cross-road with a finger on her lips, looking back, and with her other hand beckoning. What I obscurely (and rather shamefacedly) felt, communicated itself to Mrs Hudson, for she gave a laugh, and with a characteristic gesture rubbed her prominent nose.

‘My word, people are funny,’ she said. ‘When I think of all the gentlemen I’ve ‘ad here, I give you my word you wouldn’t believe it if I told you some of the things I know about them. One of them’s funnier than the other. Sometimes I lie abed thinkin’ of them, and laugh. Well, it would be a bad world if you didn’t get a good laugh now and then, but, lor’, lodgers really are the limit.’

CHAPTER 13

I lived with Mrs Hudson for nearly two years before I met the Driffields again. My life was very regular. I spent all day at the hospital, and about six walked back to Vincent Square. I bought the Star at Lambeth Bridge, and read it till my dinner was served. Then I read seriously for an hour or two, works to improve my mind, for I was a strenuous, earnest, and industrious youth, and after that wrote novels and plays till bedtime. I do not know for what reason it was that one day toward the end of June, happening to leave the hospital early, I thought I would walk down the Vauxhall Bridge Road. I liked it for its noisy bustle. It had a sordid vivacity that was pleasantly exciting, and you felt that at any moment an adventure might there befall you. I strolled along in a daydream and was surprised suddenly to hear my name. I stopped and looked, and there to my astonishment stood Mrs Driffield. She was smiling at me.

‘Don’t you know me?’ she cried.

‘Yes. Mrs Driffield.’

And though I was grown up I was conscious that I was blushing as furiously as when I was sixteen. I was embarrassed. With my lamentably Victorian notions of honesty I had been much shocked by the Driffields’ behaviour in running away from Blackstable without paying their bills. It seemed to me very shabby. I felt deeply the shame I thought they must feel, and I was astounded that Mrs Driffield should speak to someone who knew of the discreditable incident. If I had seen her coming I should have looked away, my delicacy presuming that she would wish to avoid the mortification of being seen by me; but she held out her hand and shook mine with obvious pleasure.

‘I am glad to see a Blackstable face,’ she said. ‘You know we left there in a hurry,’

She laughed and I laughed too; but her laugh was mirthful and childlike, while mine, I felt, was strained.

‘I hear there was a to-do when they found out we’d skipped. I thought Ted would never stop laughing when he heard about it. What did your uncle say?’

I was quick to get the right tone. I wasn’t going to let her think that I couldn’t see a joke as well as anyone.

‘Oh, you know what he is. He’s very old-fashioned.’

‘Yes, that’s what’s wrong with Blackstable. They want waking up.’ She gave me a friendly look. ‘You’ve grown a lot since I saw you last. Why, you’re growing a moustache.’

‘Yes,’ I said, giving it as much of a twirl as its size allowed me. ‘I’ve had that for ages.’

‘How time does fly, doesn’t it? You were just a boy four years ago, and now you’re a man.’

‘I ought to be,’ replied somewhat haughtily. ‘I’m nearly twenty-one.’

I was looking at Mrs Driffield. She wore a very small hat with feathers in it, and a pale grey dress with large leg-of-mutton sleeves and a long train. I thought she looked very smart. I had always thought that she had a nice face, but I noticed now, for the first time, that she was pretty. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered and her skin was like ivory.

‘You know we live just round the corner,’ she said. ‘So do I.’

‘We live in Limpus Road. We’ve been there almost ever since we left Blackstable.’

‘Well, I’ve been in Vincent Square for nearly two years.’ ‘I knew you were in London. George Kemp told me so, and I often wondered where you were. Why don’t you walk back with me now? Ted will be so pleased to see you.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

As we walked along she told me that Driffield was now literary editor of a weekly paper; his last book had done much better than any of his others, and he was expecting to get quite a bit as an advance on royalties for the next one. She seemed to know most of the Blackstable news, and I remembered how it had been suspected that Lord George had helped the Driffields in their flight. I guessed that he wrote to them now and then. I noticed as we walked along that sometimes the men who passed us stared at Mrs Driffield. It occurred to me presently that they must think her pretty too. I began to walk with a certain swagger.

Limpus Road was a long, wide, straight street that ran parallel with the Vauxhall Bridge Road. The houses were all alike, of stucco, dingily painted, solid, and with substantial porticoes. I suppose they had been built to be inhabited by men of standing in the city of London, but the street had gone down in the world or had never attracted the right sort of tenant; and its decayed respectability had an air at once furtive and shabbily dissipated, that made you think of persons who had seen better days and now, genteelly fuddled, talked of the social distinction of their youth. The Driffields lived in a house painted a dull red, and Mrs Driffield, letting me into a narrow dark hall, opened a door and said:

‘Go in. I’ll tell Ted you’re here.’

She walked down the hall and I entered the sitting-room. The Driffields had the basement and the ground floor of the house, which they rented from the lady who lived in the upper part. The room into which I went looked as if it had been furnished with the scourings of auction sales. There were heavy velvet curtains with great fringes, all loops and festoons, and a gilt suite, upholstered in yellow damask, heavily buttoned; and there was a great pouffe in the middle of the room. There were gilt cabinets in which were masses of little articles, pieces of china, ivory figures, wood-carvings, bits of Indian brass; and on the walls hung large oil-paintings of Highland glens and stags and gillies. In a moment Mrs Driffield brought her husband, and he greeted me warmly. He wore a shabby alpaca coat and grey trousers; he had shaved his beard, and wore now a moustache and a small imperial. I noticed for the first time how short he was; but he looked more distinguished than he used to. There was something a trifle foreign in his appearance, and I thought this was much more what I should expect an author to look like.

‘Well, what do you think of our new abode?’ he asked. ‘It looks rich, doesn’t it? I think it inspires confidence.’

He looked round him with satisfaction.

‘And Ted’s got his den at the back where he can write, and we’ve got a dining-room in the basement,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘Miss Cowley was companion for many years to a lady of title, and when she died she left her all her furniture. You can see everything’s good, can’t you? You can see it came out of a gentleman’s house.’

‘Rosie fell in love with the place the moment we saw it,’ said Driffield.

‘You did too, Ted.’

‘We’ve lived in sordid circumstances so long; it’s a change to be surrounded by luxury. Madame de Pompadour and all that sort of thing.’

When I left them it was with a very cordial invitation to come again. It appeared that they were at home every Saturday afternoon, and all sorts of people whom I would like to meet were in the habit of dropping in.

CHAPTER 14

I went. I enjoyed myself. I went again. When the autumn came and I returned to London for the winter session at St Luke’s I got into the habit of going every Saturday. It was my introduction into the world of art and letters; I kept it a profound secret that in the privacy of my lodgings I was busily writing; I was excited to meet people who were writing also, and I listened entranced to their conversation. All sorts of persons came to these parties: at that time weekends were rare, golf was still a subject for ridicule and few had much to do on Saturday afternoons. I do not think anyone came who was of any great importance; at all events, of all the painters, writers, and musicians I met at the Driffields’ I cannot remember one whose reputation has endured; but the effect was cultured and animated. You found young actors who were looking for parts and middle-aged singers who deplored the fact that the English were not a musical race, composers who played their compositions on the Driffields’ cottage piano and complained in a whispered aside that they sounded nothing except on a concert grand, poets who on pressure consented to read a little thing that they had just written, and painters who were looking for commissions. Now and then a person of title added a certain glamour; seldom, however, for in those days the aristocracy had not yet become Bohemian, and if a person of quality cultivated the society of artists it was generally because a notorious divorce or a little difficulty over cards had made life in his own station (or hers) a bit awkward. We have changed all that. One of the greatest benefits that compulsory education has conferred upon the world is the wide diffusion among the nobility and gentry of the practice of writing. Horace Walpole once wrote a Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; such a work now would have the dimensions of an encyclopedia. A title, even a courtesy one, can make a well-known author of almost anyone, and it may be safely asserted that there is no better passport to the world of letters than rank.

I have indeed sometimes thought that now that the House of Lords must inevitably in a short while be abolished, it would be a very good plan if the profession of literature were by law confined to its members and their wives and children. It would be a graceful compensation that the British people might offer the peers in return for the surrender of their hereditary privileges. It would be a means of support for those (too many) whom devotion to the public cause in keeping chorus girls and race-horses and playing chemin de fer has impoverished, and a pleasant occupation for the rest who by the process of natural selection have in the course of time become unfit to do anything but govern the British Empire. But this is an age of specialization, and if my plan is adopted it is obvious that it cannot but be to the greater glory of English literature that its various provinces should be apportioned among the various ranks of the nobility. I would suggest, therefore, that the humbler branches of literature should be practised by the lower orders of the peerage and that the barons and viscounts should devote themselves exclusively to journalism and the drama. Fiction might be the privileged demesne of the earls. They have already shown their aptitude for this difficult art and their numbers are so great that they would very competently supply the demand. To the marquises might safely be left the production of that part of literature which is known (I have never quite seen why) as belles lettres. It is perhaps not very profitable from a pecuniary standpoint, but it has a distinction that very well suits the holders of this romantic title.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese. It is evident then that the writing of poetry should be left to the dukes, and I should like to see their rights protected by the most severe pains and penalties, for it is intolerable that the noblest of arts should be practised by any but the noblest of men. And since here, too, specialization must prevail, I foresee that the dukes (like the successors of Alexander) will divide the realm of poetry between them, each confining himself to that aspect with which hereditary influence and natural bent have rendered him competent to deal: thus I see the dukes of Manchester writing poems of a didactic and moral character, the dukes of Westminster composing stirring odes on Duty and the Responsibilities of Empire; whereas I imagine that the dukes of Devonshire would be more likely to write love lyrics and elegies in the Propertian manner, while it is almost inevitable that the dukes of Marlborough should pipe in an idyllic strain on such subjects as domestic bliss, conscription, and content with modest station.

But if you say that this is somewhat formidable and remind me that the muse does not only stalk with majestic tread, but on occasion trips on a light fantastic toe; if, recalling the wise person who said that he did not care who made a nation’s laws so long as he wrote its songs, you ask me (thinking rightly that it would ill become the dukes to do so) who shall twang those measures on the lyre that the diverse and inconstant soul of man occasionally hankers after – I answer (obviously enough, I should have thought) the duchesses. I recognize that the day is past when the amorous peasants of the Romagna sang to their sweethearts the verses of Torquato Tasso and Mrs Humphry Ward crooned over young Arnold’s cradle the choruses of Oedipus in Colonus. The age demands something more up to date. I suggest, therefore, that the more domestic duchesses should write our hymns and our nursery rhymes; while the skittish ones, those who incline to mingle vine leaves with the strawberry, should write the lyrics for musical comedies, humorous verse for the comic papers, and mottoes for Christmas cards and crackers. Thus would they retain in the hearts of the British public that place which they have held hitherto only on account of their exalted station.

It was at these parties on Saturday afternoon that I discovered very much to my surprise that Edward Driffield was a distinguished person. He had written something like twenty books, and though he had never made more than a pittance out of them his reputation was considerable. The best judges admired them and the friends who came to his house were agreed that one of these days he would be recognized. They upbraided the public because it would not see that here was a great writer, and since the easiest way to exalt one man is to kick another in the pants, they reviled freely all the novelists whose contemporary fame obscured his. If, indeed, I had known as much of literary circles as I learned later I should have guessed by the not infrequent visits of Mrs Barton Trafford that the time was approaching when Edward Driffield, like a runner in a long-distance race breaking away suddenly from the little knot of plodding athletes, must forge ahead. I admit that when first I was introduced to this lady her name meant nothing to me. Driffield presented me as a young neighbour of his in the country and told her that I was a medical student. She gave me a mellifluous smile, murmured in a soft voice something about Bob Sawyer, and, accepting the bread and butter I offered her, went on talking with her host. But I noticed that her arrival had made an impression, and the conversation, which had been noisy and hilarious, was hushed. When in an undertone I asked who she was, I found that my ignorance was amazing; I was told that she had ‘made’ So-and-so and So-and-so. After half an hour she rose, shook hands very graciously with such of the people as she was acquainted with, and with a sort of lithe sweetness sidled out of the room. Driffield accompanied her to the door and put her in a hansom.

Mrs Barton Trafford was then a woman of about fifty; she was small and slight, but with rather large features, which made her head look a little too big for her body; she had crisp, white hair which she wore like the Venus of Milo, and she was supposed in her youth to have been very comely. She dressed discreetly in black silk, and wore round her neck jangling chains of beads and shells. She was said to have been unhappily married in early life, but now for many years had been congenially united to Barton Trafford, a clerk in the Home Office and a well-known authority on prehistoric man. She gave you the curious impression of having no bones in her body, and you felt that if you pinched her shin (which, of course, my respect for her sex as well as something of quiet dignity in her appearance would have never allowed me to do) your fingers would meet. When you took her hand it was like taking a fillet of sole. Her face, notwithstanding its large features, had something fluid about it. When she sat it was as though she had no backbone and were stuffed, like an expensive cushion, with swansdown.

Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain. It was this extraordinary and charming characteristic that made her the wonderful friend she was. It was this that had gained her the celebrity that she now enjoyed. The whole world was aware of her friendship with the great novelist whose death a few years back had come as such a shock to the English-speaking peoples. Everyone had read the innumerable letters which he had written to her and which she was induced to publish shortly after his demise. Every page revealed his admiration for her beauty and his respect for her judgement; he could never say often enough how much he owed to her encouragement, her ready sympathy, her tact, her taste; and if certain of his expressions of passion were such as some persons might think would not be read by Mr Barton Trafford with unmixed feelings, that only added to the human interest of the work. But Mr Barton Trafford was above the prejudices of vulgar men (his misfortune, if such it was, was one that the greatest personages in history have endured with philosophy) and, abandoning his studies of aurignacian flints and neolithic axe-heads, he consented to write a Life of the deceased novelist in which he showed quite definitely how great a part of the writer’s genius was due to his wife’s influence.

But Mrs Barton Trafford’s interest in literature, her passion for art, were not dead because the friend for whom she had done so much had become part, with her far from negligible assistance, of posterity. She was a great reader. Little that was noteworthy escaped her attention, and she was quick to establish personal relations with any young writer who showed promise. Her fame, especially since the Life, was now such that she was sure that no one would hesitate to accept the sympathy she was prepared to offer. It was inevitable that Mrs Barton Trafford’s genius for friendship should in due course find an outlet. When she read something that struck her, Mr Barton Trafford, himself no mean critic, wrote a warm letter of appreciation to the author and asked him to luncheon. After luncheon, having to get back to the Home Office, he left him to have a chat with Mrs Barton Trafford. Many were called. They all had something, but that was not enough. Mrs Barton Trafford had a flair, and she trusted her flair? her flair bade her wait.

She was so cautious indeed that with Jasper Gibbons she almost missed the bus. The records of the past tell us of writers who grew famous in a night, but in our more prudent day this is unheard of. The critics want to see which way the cat will jump, and the public has been sold a pup too often to take unnecessary chances. But in the case of Jasper Gibbons it is almost the exact truth that he did thus jump into celebrity. Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prizefight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho. Edition after edition was sold, and you saw Jasper Gibbons’s handsome volume in the boudoirs of countesses in Mayfair, in vicarage drawing-rooms from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and in the parlours of many an honest but cultured merchant in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Belfast. When it became known that Queen Victoria had accepted a specially bound copy of the book from the hands of the loyal publisher, and had given him (not the poet, the publisher) a copy of Leaves from a Journal in the Highlands in exchange, the national enthusiasm knew no bounds.

And all this happened, as it were, in the twinkling of an eye. Seven cities in Greece disputed the honour of having given birth to Homer, and though Jasper Gibbons’s birthplace (Walsall) was well known, twice seven critics claimed the honour of having discovered him; eminent judges of literature who, for twenty years, had written eulogies of one another’s works in the weekly papers quarrelled so bitterly over this matter that one cut the other dead in the Athenaeum. Nor was the great world remiss in giving him its recognition. Jasper Gibbons was asked to luncheon and invited to tea by dowager duchesses, the wives of cabinet ministers, and the widows of bishops. It is said that Harrison Ainsworth was the first English man of letters to move in English society on terms of equality (and I have sometimes wondered that an enterprising publisher on this account has not thought of bringing out a complete edition of his works); but I believe that Jasper Gibbons was the first poet to have his name engraved at the bottom of an At Home card as a draw as enticing as an opera singer or a ventriloquist.

It was out of the question then for Mrs Barton Trafford to get in on the ground floor. She could only buy in the open market. I do not know what prodigious strategy she employed, what miracles of tact, what tenderness, what exquisite sympathy, what demure blandishments; I can only surmise and admire; she nobbled Jasper Gibbons. In a little while he was eating out of her soft hand. She was admirable. She had him to lunch to meet the right people; she gave At Homes where he recited his poems before the most distinguished persons in England; she introduced him to eminent actors who gave him commissions to write plays; she saw that his poems should only appear in the proper places; she dealt with the publishers and made contracts for him that would have staggered even a Cabinet minister; she took care that he should accept only the invitations of which she approved; she even went so far as to separate him from his wife, with whom he had lived happily for ten years, since she felt that a poet to be true to himself and his art must not be encumbered with domestic ties. When the crash came Mrs Barton Trafford, had she chosen, might have said that she had done everything for him that it was humanly possible to do.

For there was a crash. Jasper Gibbons brought out another volume of poetry; it was neither better nor worse than the first; it was very much like the first; it was treated with respect, but the critics made reservations; some of them even carped. The book was a disappointment. Its sale also. And unfortunately Jasper Gibbons was inclined to tipple. He had never been accustomed to having money to spend, he was quite unused to the lavish entertainments that were offered him, perhaps he missed his homely, common little wife; once or twice he came to dinner at Mrs Barton Trafford’s in a condition that anyone less unworldly, less simple-minded than she, would have described as blind to the world. She told her guests gently that the bard was not quite himself that evening. His third book was a failure. The critics tore him limb from limb, they knocked him down and stamped on him, and, to quote one of Edward Driffield’s favourite songs, then they lugged him round the room and then they jumped upon his face; they were quite naturally annoyed that they had mistaken a fluent versifier for a deathless poet, and were determined that he should suffer for their error. Then Jasper Gibbons was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Piccadilly and Mr Barton Trafford had to go to Vine Street at midnight to bail him out.

Mrs Barton Trafford at this juncture was perfect. She did not repine. No harsh word escaped her lips. She might have been excused if she had felt a certain bitterness because this man for whom she had done so much had let her down. She remained tender, gentle, and sympathetic. She was the woman who understood. She dropped him, but not like a hot brick, or a hot potato. She dropped him with infinite gentleness, as softly as the tear that she doubtless shed when she made up her mind to do something so repugnant to her nature; she dropped him with so much tact, with such sensibility, that Jasper Gibbons perhaps hardly knew he was dropped. But there was no doubt about it. She would say nothing against him, indeed she would not discuss him at all, and when mention was made of him she merely smiled, a little sadly, and sighed. But her smile was the coup de grace, and her sigh buried him deep.

Mrs Barton Trafford had a passion for literature too sincere to allow a setback of this character long to discourage her; and however great her disappointment she was a woman of too disinterested a nature to let the gifts of tact, sympathy, and understanding with which she was blessed by nature lie fallow. She continued to move in literary circles, going to tea parties here and there, to soirees, and to At Homes, charming always and gentle, listening intelligently, but watchful, critical, and determined (if I may put it crudely) next time to back a winner. It was then that she met Edward Driffield, and formed a favourable opinion of his gifts. It is true that he was not young, but then he was unlikely like Jasper Gibbons to go to pieces. She offered him her friendship. He could not fail to be moved when, in that gentle way of hers, she told him that it was a scandal that his exquisite work remained known only in the narrow circle. He was pleased and flattered. It is always pleasant to be assured that you are a genius. She told him that Barton Trafford was reflecting on the possibility of writing an important article on him for the Quarterly Review. She asked him to luncheon to meet people who might be useful to him. She wanted him to know his intellectual equals. Sometimes she took him for a walk on the Chelsea Embankment, and they talked of poets dead and gone, and love and friendship, and had tea in an ABC shop. When Mrs Barton Trafford came to Limpus Street on Saturday afternoon she had the air of the queen bee preparing herself for the nuptial flight.

Her manner with Mrs Driffield was perfect. It was affable, but not condescending. She always thanked her very prettily for having allowed her to come and see her and complimented her on her appearance. If she praised Edward Driffield to her, telling her with a little envy in her tone what a privilege it was to enjoy the companionship of such a great man, it was certainly from pure kindness, and not because she knew that there is nothing that exasperates the wife of a literary man more than to have another woman tell her flattering things about him. She talked to Mrs Driffield of the simple things her simple nature might be supposed to be interested in, of cooking and servants and Edward’s health, and how careful she must be with him. Mrs Barton Trafford treated her exactly as you would expect a woman of very good Scotch family, which she was, to treat an ex-barmaid with whom a distinguished man of letters had made an unfortunate marriage. She was cordial, playful, and gently determined to put her at her ease.

It was strange that Rosie could not bear her; indeed, Mrs Barton Trafford was the only person that I ever knew her dislike. In those days even barmaids did not habitually use the ‘bitches’ and ‘bloodys’ that are part and parcel of the current vocabulary of the best-brought-up young ladies and I never heard Rosie use a word that would have shocked my Aunt Sophie. When anyone told a story that was a little near the knuckle she would blush to the roots of her hair. But she referred to Mrs Barton Trafford as ‘that damned old cat’. It needed the most urgent persuasions of her more intimate friends to induce her to be civil to her.

‘Don’t be a fool, Rosie,’ they said. They all called her Rosie, and presently I, though very shyly, got in the habit of doing so too. ‘If she wants to she can make him. He must play up to her. She can work the trick if anyone can.’

Though most of the Driffields’ visitors were occasional, appearing every other Saturday, say, or every third, there was a little band that, like myself, came almost every week. We were the stand-bys; we arrived early and stayed late. Of these the most faithful were Quentin Forde, Harry Retford, and Lionel Hillier.

Quentin Forde was a stocky little man with a fine head of the type that was afterward for a time much admired in the moving pictures, a straight nose and handsome eyes, neatly cropped grey hair and a black moustache; if he had been four or five inches taller he would have been the perfect type of the villain of melodrama. He was known to be very ‘well connected’, and he was affluent; his only occupation was to cultivate the arts. He went to all the first nights and all the private views. He had the amateur’s severity, and cherished for the productions of his contemporaries a polite but sweeping contempt. I discovered that he did not come to the Driffields’ because Edward was a genius, but because Rosie was beautiful.

Now that I look back I cannot get over my surprise that I should have had to be told what was surely so obvious. When I first knew her it never occurred to me to ask myself whether she was pretty or plain, and when, seeing her again after five years, I noticed for the first time that she was very pretty, I was interested but did not trouble to think much about it. I took it as part of the natural order of things, just as I took the sun setting over the North Sea or the towers of Tercanbury Cathedral. I was quite startled when I heard people speak of Rosie’s beauty, and when they complimented Edward on her looks and his eyes rested on her for a moment, mine followed his. Lionel Hillier was a painter, and he asked her to sit for him. When he talked of the picture he wanted to paint and told me what he saw in her, I listened to him stupidly. I was puzzled and confused. Harry Retford knew one of the fashionable photographers of the period and, arranging special terms, he took Rosie to be photographed. A Saturday or two later the proofs were there, and we all looked at them. I had never seen Rosie in evening dress. She was wearing a dress in white satin, with a low train and puffy sleeves, and it was cut low; her hair was more elaborately done than usual. She looked very different from the strapping young woman I had first met in Joy Lane in a boater and a starched shirt. But Lionel Hillier tossed the photographs aside impatiently.

‘Rotten,’ he said. ‘What can a photographer give of Rosie? The thing about her is her colour.’ He turned to her. ‘Rosie, don’t you know that your colour is the great miracle of the age?’

She looked at him without answering, but her full red lips broke into their childlike, mischievous smile.

‘If I can only get a suggestion of it I’m made for life,’ he said. ‘All the rich stockbrokers’ wives will come on their bended knees and beg me to paint them like you.’

Presently I learned that Rosie was sitting for him, but when, never having been in a painter’s studio and looking upon it as the gateway of romance, I asked if I might not come one day and see how the picture was getting on, Hillier said that he did not want anyone to see it yet. He was a man of five and thirty and of a flamboyant appearance. He looked like a portrait of Van Dyck in which the distinction had been replaced by good humour. He was slightly above the middle height, slim; and he had a fine mane of black hair and flowing moustaches and a pointed beard. He favoured broad-brimmed sombreros and Spanish capes. He had lived a long time in Paris, and talked admiringly of painters, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, of whom we had never heard, and with contempt of Sir Frederick Leighton and Mr Alma-Tadema and Mr G. F. Watts, whom in our heart of hearts we very much admired. I have often wondered what became of him. He spent a few years in London trying to make his way, failed, I suppose, and then drifted to Florence. I was told that he had a drawing school there, but when, years later, chancing to be in that city, I asked about him, I could find no one who had ever heard of him. I think he must have had some talent, for I have even now a very vivid recollection of the portrait he painted of Rosie Driffield. I wonder what has happened to it. Has it been destroyed, or is it hidden away, its face to the wall, in the attic of a junk shop in Chelsea? I should like to think that it has at least found a place on the walls of some provincial gallery.

When I was at last allowed to come and see it, I put my foot in it fine and proper. Hillier’s studio was in the Fulham Road, one of a group at the back of a row of shops, and you went in through a dark and smelly passage. It was a Sunday afternoon in March, a fine blue day, and I walked from Vincent Square through deserted streets. Hillier lived in his studio; there was a large divan on which he slept, and a tiny little room at the back where he cooked his breakfast, washed his brushes and, I suppose, himself.

When I arrived Rosie still wore the dress in which she had been sitting, and they were having a cup of tea. Hillier opened the door for me, and, still holding my hand, led me up to the large canvas.

‘There she is,’ he said.

He had painted Rosie full length, just a little less than life-size, in an evening dress of white silk. It was not at all like the academy portraits I was accustomed to. I did not know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘When will it be finished?’

‘It is finished,’ he answered.

I blushed furiously. I felt a perfect fool. I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artists. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the It’s so awfully sincere,’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.

‘It’s awfully like,’ was all that then I could lamely say.

‘It’s not chocolate-boxy enough for you,’ said Hillier.

‘I think it’s awfully good,’ I answered quickly, defending myself. ‘Are you going to send it to the Academy?’

‘Good God, no! I might send it to the Grosvenor.’

I looked from the painting to Rosie and from Rosie to the painting.

‘Get into the pose, Rosie,’ said Hillier, ‘and let him see you.’

She got up on to the model stand. I stared at her and I stared at the picture. I had such a funny little feeling in my heart. It was as though someone softly plunged a sharp knife into it, but it was not an unpleasant sensation at all, painful but strangely agreeable; and then suddenly I felt quite weak at the knees. But now I do not know if I remember Rosie in the flesh or in the picture. For when I think of her it is not in the shirt and boater that I first saw her in, nor in any of the other dresses I saw her in then or later, but in the white silk that Hillier painted, with a black velvet bow in her hair, and in the pose he had made her take.

I never exactly knew Rosie’s age, but reckoning the years out as well as I can, I think she must have been then thirty-five. She did not look anything like it. Her face was quite unlined and her skin as smooth as a child’s. I do not think she had very good features. They certainly had none of the aristocratic distinction of the great ladies whose photographs were at that time sold in all the shops; they were rather blunt. Her short nose was a little thick, her eyes were smallish, her mouth was large; but her eyes had the blue of cornflowers, and they smiled with her lips, very red and sensual, and her smile was the gayest, the most friendly, the sweetest thing I ever saw. She had by nature a heavy, sullen look, but when she smiled this sullenness became on a sudden infinitely attractive. She had no colour in her face; it was of a very pale brown except under the eyes where it was faintly blue. Her hair was pale gold and it was done in the fashion of the day, high on the head with an elaborate fringe.

‘She’s the very devil to paint,’ said Hillier, looking at her and at his picture. ‘You see, she’s all gold, her face and her hair; and yet she doesn’t give you a golden effect, she gives you a silvery effect.’

I knew what he meant. She glowed, but palely, like the moon rather than the sun, or if it was like the sun it was like the sun in the white mist of dawn. Hillier had placed her in the middle of his canvas and she stood, with her arms by her sides, the palms of her hands toward you and her head a little thrown back, in an attitude that gave value to the pearly beauty of her neck and bosom. She stood like an actress taking a call, confused by unexpected applause, but there was something so virginal about her, so exquisitely springlike, that the comparison was absurd. This artless creature had never known grease paint or footlights. She stood like a maiden apt for love offering herself guiltlessly, because she was fulfilling the purposes of Nature, to the embraces of a lover. She belonged to a generation that did not fear a certain opulence of line; she was slender, but her breasts were ample and her hips well marked. When, later, Mrs Barton Trafford saw the picture she said it reminded her of a sacrificial heifer.

CHAPTER 15

Edward Driffield worked at night, and Rosie, having nothing to do, was glad to go out with one or other of her friends. She liked luxury and Quentin Forde was well-to-do. He would fetch her in a cab and take her to dine at Kettner’s or the Savoy, and she would put on her grandest clothes for him; and Harry Retford, though he never had a bob, behaved as if he had, and took her about in hansoms, too, and gave her dinner at Romano’s or in one or other of the little restaurants that were becoming modish in Soho. He was an actor and a clever one, but he was difficult to suit and so was often out of work. He was about thirty, a man with a pleasantly ugly face and a clipped way of speaking that made what he said sound funny. Rosie liked his devil-may-care attitude toward life, the swagger with which he wore clothes made by the best tailor in London and unpaid for, the recklessness with which he would put a fiver he hadn’t got on a horse, and the generosity with which he flung his money about when a lucky win put him in funds. He was gay, charming, vain, boastful, and unscrupulous. Rosie told me that once he had pawned his watch to take her out to dinner and then borrowed a couple of pounds from the actor-manager who had given them seats for the play, in order to take him out to supper with them afterward.

But she was just as well pleased to go with Lionel Hillier to his studio and eat a chop that he and she cooked between them and spend the evening talking, and it was only very rarely that she would dine with me at all. I used to fetch her after I had had my dinner in Vincent Square and she hers with Driffield, and we would get on a bus and go to a music-hall. We went here and there, to the Pavilion or the Tivoli, sometimes to the Metropolitan if there was a particular turn we wanted to see; but our favourite was the Canterbury. It was cheap and the show was good. We ordered a couple of beers and I smoked my pipe. Rosie looked round with delight at the great dark smoky house, crowded to the ceiling with the inhabitants of South London.

‘I like the Canterbury,’ she said. ‘It’s so homey.’

I discovered that she was a great reader. She liked history, but only history of a certain kind, the lives of queens and of mistresses of royal personages; and she would tell me with a childlike wonder of the strange things she read. She had a wide acquaintance with the six consorts of King Henry VIII and there was little she did not know about Mrs Fitzherbert and Lady Hamilton. Her appetite was prodigious and she ranged from Lucrezia Borgia to the wives of Philip of Spain; then there was the long list of the royal mistresses of France. She knew them all, and all about them, from Agnes Sorel down to Madame du Barry.

‘I like to read about real things,’ she said. ‘I don’t much care for novels.’

She liked to gossip about Blackstable, and I thought it was on account of my connexion with it that she liked to come out with me. She seemed to know all that was going on there.

‘I go down every other week or so to see my mother,’ she said. ‘Just for the night, you know.’

‘To Blackstable?’

I was surprised.

‘No, not to Blackstable,’ Rosie smiled. ‘I don’t know that I’d care to go there just yet. To Haversham. Mother comes over to meet me. I stay at the hotel where I used to work.’

She was never a great talker. Often when, the night being fine, we decided to walk back from the music-hall at which we had been spending the evening, she never opened her mouth. But her silence was intimate and comfortable. It did not exclude you; it included you in a pervasive well-being.

I was talking about her once to Lionel Hillier and I said to him that I could not understand how she had turned from the fresh, pleasant-looking young woman I had first known at Blackstable into the lovely creature whose beauty now practically everyone acknowledged. (There were people who made reservations. ‘Of course she has a very good figure,’ they said, ‘but it’s not the sort of face I very much admire personally.’ And others said: ‘Oh, yes, a very pretty woman; but it’s a pity she hasn’t a little more distinction.’)

‘I can explain that to you in half a jiffy,’ said Lionel Hillier. ‘She was only a fresh buxom wench when you first met her. I made her beauty.’

I forget what my answer was, but I know it was ribald.

‘All right. That just shows you don’t know anything about beauty. No one ever thought very much of Rosie till I saw her like the sun shining silver. It wasn’t till I painted it that anyone knew that her hair was the most lovely thing in the world.’

‘Did you make her neck and her breasts and her carriage and her bones?’ I asked.

‘Yes, damn you, that’s just what I did do.’

When Hillier talked of Rosie in front of her she listened to him with a smiling gravity. A little flush came into her pale cheeks. I think that first when he spoke to her of her beauty she believed he was just making game of her; but when she found out that he wasn’t, when he painted her silvery gold, it had no particular effect on her. She was a trifle amused, pleased, of course, and a little surprised, but it did not turn her head. She thought him a little mad. I often wondered whether there was anything between them. I could not forget all I had heard of Rosie at Blackstable and what I had seen in the vicarage garden; I wondered about Quentin Forde, too, and Harry Retford. I used to watch them with her. She was not exactly familiar with them, comradely rather; she used to make her appointments with them quite openly in anybody’s hearing; and when she looked at them it was with that mischievous, childlike smile which I had now discovered held such a mysterious beauty. Sometimes when we were sitting side by side in a music-hall I looked at her face; I do not think I was in love with her, I merely enjoyed the sensation of sitting quietly beside her and looking at the pale gold of her hair and the pale gold of her skin. Of course Lionel Hillier was right; the strange thing was that this gold did give one a strange moonlight feeling. She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky. There was nothing dull in her immense placidity; it was as living as the sea when under the August sun it lay calm and shining along the Kentish coast. She reminded me of a sonatina by an old Italian composer with its wistfulness in which there is yet an urbane flippancy and its light rippling gaiety in which echoes still the trembling of a sigh. Sometimes, feeling my eyes on her, she would turn round and for a moment or two look me full in the face. She did not speak. I did not know of what she was thinking.

Once, I remember, I fetched her at Limpus Road, and the maid, telling me she was not ready, asked me to wait in the parlour. She came in. She was in black velvet, with a picture hat covered with ostrich feathers (we were going to the Pavilion and she had dressed up for it), and she looked so lovely that it took my breath away. I was staggered. The clothes of that day gave a woman dignity, and there was something amazingly attractive in the way her virginal beauty (sometimes she looked like the exquisite statue of Psyche in the museum at Naples) contrasted with the stateliness of her gown. She had a trait that I think must be very rare: the skin under her eyes, faintly blue, was all dewy. Sometimes I could not persuade myself that it was natural, and once I asked her if she had rubbed vaseline under her eyes. That was just the effect it gave. She smiled, took a handkerchief, and handed it to me.

‘Rub them and see,’ she said.

Then one night when we had walked home from the Canterbury, and I was leaving her at her door, when I held out my hand she laughed a little, a low chuckle it was, and leaned forward.

‘You old silly,’ she said.

She kissed me on the mouth. It was not a hurried peck, nor was it a kiss of passion. Her lips, those very full red lips of hers, rested on mine long enough for me to be conscious of their shape and their warmth and their softness. Then she withdrew them, but without hurry, in silence pushed open the door, skipped inside and left me. I was so startled that I had not been able to say anything. I accepted her kiss stupidly. I remained inert. I turned away and walked back to my lodgings. I seemed to hear still in my ears Rosie’s laughter. It was not contemptuous or wounding, but frank and affectionate; it was as though she laughed because she was fond of me.

CHAPTER 16

I did not go out with Rosie again for more than a week. She was going down to Haversham to spend a night with her mother. I had various engagements in London. Then she asked me if I would go to the Haymarket Theatre with her. The play was a success and free seats were not to be had, so we made up our minds to go in the pit. We had a steak and a glass of beer at the Cafe Monico and then stood with the crowd. In those days there was no orderly queue and when the doors were opened there was a mad rush and scramble to get in. We were hot and breathless and somewhat battered when at last we pushed our way into our seats.

We walked back through St James’s Park. The night was so lovely that we sat down on a bench. In the starlight Rosie’s face and her fair hair glowed softly. She was suffused, as it were (I express it awkwardly, but I do not know how to describe the emotion she gave me), with a friendliness at once candid and tender. She was like a silvery flower of the night that only gave its perfume to the moonbeams. I slipped my arm round her waist and she turned her face to mine This time it was I who kissed. She did not move; her soft red lips submitted to the pressure of mine with a calm, intensive passivity as the water of a lake accepts the light of the moon. I don’t know how long we stayed there.

‘I’m awfully hungry,’ she said suddenly.

‘So am I,’ I laughed.

‘Couldn’t we go and have some fish and chips somewhere?’

‘Rather.’

In those days I knew my way very well about Westminster, not yet a fashionable quarter for parliamentary and otherwise cultured persons, but slummy and down-at-heel; and after we had come out of the park, crossing Victoria Street, I led Rosie to a fried-fish shop in Horseferry Row. It was late and the only other person there was the driver of a four-wheeler waiting outside. We ordered our fish and chips and a bottle of beer. A poor woman came in and bought two penn ‘orth of mixed and took it away with her in a piece of paper. We ate with appetite.

Our way back to Rosie’s led through Vincent Square and as we passed my house I asked her:

‘Won’t you come in for a minute? You’ve never seen my rooms.’

‘What about your landlady? I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘Oh, she sleeps like a rock.’

‘I’ll come in for a little.’

I slipped my key into the lock and, because the passage was dark, took Rosie’s hand to lead her in. I lit the gas in my sitting-room. She took off her hat and vigorously scratched her head. Then she looked for a glass, but I was very artistic and had taken down the mirror that was over the chimney-piece and there was no means in the room for anyone to see what he looked like.

‘Come into my bedroom,’ I said. ‘There’s a glass there.’

I opened the door and lit the candle. Rosie followed me in and I held it up so that she should be able to see herself. I looked at her in the glass as she arranged her hair. She took two or three pins out, which she put in her mouth, and taking one of my brushes, brushed her hair up from the nape of her neck. She twisted it, patted it, and put back the pins, and as she was intent on this her eyes caught mine in the glass and she smiled at me. When she had replaced the last pin she turned and faced me; she did not say anything; she looked at me tranquilly still with that little friendly smile in her blue eyes. I put down the candle. The room was very small and the dressing-table was by the bed. She raised her hand and softly stroked my cheek.

I wish now that I had not started to write this book in the first person singular. It is all very well when you can show yourself in an amiable or touching light, and nothing can be more effective than the modest heroic or pathetic humorous which in this mode is much cultivated; it is charming to write about yourself when you see on the reader’s eyelash the glittering tear and on his lips the tender smile; but it is not so nice when you have to exhibit yourself as a plain damned fool.

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. I wish he had explained why, but he merely threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines. I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all. In none of them could I discover anything to the point at issue. All the same I can find one reason why certain novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Emily Bronte, and Proust, well known in their day but now doubtless forgotten, have used the method that Mr Evelyn Waugh reprehends. As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist grows less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience has given him. The first person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose.

Rosie raised her hand and softly stroked my face. I do not know why I should have behaved as I then did; it was not at all how I had seen myself behaving on such an occasion. A sob broke from my tight throat. I do not know whether it was because I was shy and lonely (not lonely in the body, for I spent all day at the hospital with all kinds of people, but lonely in the spirit) or because my desire was so great, but I began to cry. I felt terribly ashamed of myself; I tried to control myself, I couldn’t; the tears welled up in my eyes and poured down my cheeks. Rosie saw them and gave a little gasp.

‘Oh, honey, what is it? What’s the matter? Don’t. Don’t!’

She put her arms round my neck and began to cry too, and she kissed my lips and my eyes and my wet cheeks. She undid her bodice and lowered my head till it rested on her bosom. She stroked my smooth face. She rocked me back and forth as though I were a child in her arms. I kissed her breasts and I kissed the white column of her neck; and she slipped out of her bodice and out of her skirt and her petticoats and I held her for a moment by her corseted waist; then she undid it, holding her breath for an instant to enable her to do so, and stood before me in her shift. When I put my hands on her sides I could feel the ribbing of the skin from the pressure of the corsets.

‘Blow out the candle,’ she whispered.

It was she who awoke me when the dawn peering through the curtains revealed the shape of the bed and of the wardrobe against the darkness of the lingering night. She woke me by kissing me on the mouth and her hair falling over my face tickled me.

‘I must get up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your landlady to see me.’

‘There’s plenty of time.’

Her breasts when she leaned over me were heavy on my chest. In a little while she got out of bed. I lit the candle. She turned to the glass and tied up her hair and then she looked for a moment at her naked body. Her waist was naturally small; though so well developed she was very slender; her breasts were straight and firm and they stood out from the chest as though carved in marble. It was a body made for the act of love. In the light of the candle, struggling now with the increasing day, it was all silvery gold: and the only colour was the rosy pink of the hard nipples.

We dressed in silence. She did not put on her corsets again, but rolled them up and I wrapped them in a piece of newspaper. We tiptoed along the passage and when I opened the door and we stepped out into the street the dawn ran to meet us like a cat leaping up the steps. The square was empty; already the sun was shining on the eastern windows. I felt as young as the day. We walked arm in arm till we came to the corner of Limpus Road.

‘Leave me here,’ said Rosie. ‘One never knows.’

‘I kissed her and I watched her walk away. She walked rather slowly, with the firm tread of the country woman who likes to feel the good earth under her feet, and held herself erect. I could not go back to bed. I strolled on till I came to the Embankment. The river had the bright hues of the early morning. A brown barge came down stream and passed under Vauxhall Bridge. In a dinghy two men were rowing close to the side. I was hungry.

CHAPTER 17

After that for more than a year whenever Rosie came out with me she used on the way home to drop into my rooms, sometimes for an hour, sometimes till the breaking day warned us that the slaveys would soon be scrubbing the doorsteps. I have a recollection of warm sunny mornings when the tired air of London had a welcome freshness, and of our footfalls that seemed so noisy in the empty streets, and then of scurrying along huddled under an umbrella, silent but gay, when the winter brought cold and rain. The policeman on point duty gave us a stare as we passed, sometimes of suspicion; but sometimes also there was a twinkle of comprehension in his eyes. Now and then we would see a homeless creature huddled up asleep in a portico and Rosie gave my arm a friendly little pressure when (chiefly for show and because I wanted to make a good impression on her, for my shillings were scarce) I placed a piece of silver on a shapeless lap or in a skinny fist. Rosie made me very happy. I had a great affection for her. She was easy and comfortable. She had a placidity of temper that communicated itself to the people she was with; you shared her pleasure in the passing moment.

Before I became her lover I had often asked myself if she was the mistress of the others, Forde, Harry Retford, and Hillier, and afterward I questioned her. She kissed me.

‘Don’t be so silly. I like them, you know that. I like to go out with them, but that’s all.’

I wanted to ask her if she had been the mistress of George Kemp, but I did not like to. Though I had never seen her in a temper, I had a notion that she had one, and I vaguely felt that this was a question that might anger her. I did not want to give her the opportunity of saying things so wounding that I could not forgive her. I was young, only just over one and twenty, Quentin Forde and the others seemed old to me; it did not seem unnatural to me that to Rosie they were only friends. It gave me a little thrill of pride to think that I was her lover. When I used to look at her chatting and laughing with all and sundry at tea on Saturday afternoons, I glowed with self-satisfaction. I thought of the nights we passed together, and I was inclined to laugh at the people who were so ignorant of my great secret. But sometimes I thought that Lionel Hillier looked at me in a quizzical way, as if he were enjoying a good joke at my expense, and I asked myself uneasily if Rosie had told him that she was having an affair with me. I wondered if there was anything in my manner that betrayed me. I told Rosie that I was afraid Hillier suspected something; she looked at me with those blue eyes of hers that always seemed ready to smile.

‘Don’t bother about it,’ she said. ‘He’s got a nasty mind.’

I had never been intimate with Quentin Forde. He looked upon me as a dull and insignificant young man (which of course I was) and though he had always been civil he had never taken any notice of me. I thought it could only be my fancy that now he began to be a little more frigid with me than before. But one day Harry Retford to my surprise asked me to dine with him and go to the play. I told Rosie.

‘Oh, of course you must go. He’ll give you an awfully good time. Good old Harry, he always makes me laugh.’

So I dined with him. He made himself very pleasant, and I was impressed to hear him talk of actors and actresses. He had a sarcastic humour, and was very funny at the expense of Quentin Forde, whom he did not like; I tried to get him to talk of Rosie, but he had nothing to say of her. He seemed to be a gay dog. With leers and laughing innuendoes he gave me to understand that he was a devil with the girls. I could not but ask myself if he was standing me this dinner because he knew I was Rosie’s lover and so felt friendly disposed toward me. But if he knew, of course the others knew too. I hope I did not show it, but in my heart I certainly felt somewhat patronizing toward them.

Then in winter, toward the end of January, someone new appeared at Limpus Road. This was a Dutch Jew named Jack Kuyper, a diamond merchant from Amsterdam, who was spending a few weeks in London on business. I do not know how he had come to know the Driffields, and whether it was esteem for the author that brought him to the house, but it was certainly not that which caused him to come again. He was a tall, stout, dark man, with a bald head and a big hooked nose, a man of fifty, but of a powerful appearance, sensual, determined, and jovial. He made no secret of his admiration for Rosie. He was rich apparently, for he sent her roses every day; she chid him for his extravagance, but was flattered. I could not bear him. He was blatant and loud. I hated his fluent conversation in perfect but foreign English; I hated the extravagant compliments he paid Rosie; I hated the heartiness with which he treated her friends. I found that Quentin Forde liked him as little as I; we almost became cordial with one another.

‘Mercifully he’s not staying long.’ Quentin Forde pursed his lips and raised his black eyebrows; with his white hair and long sallow face he looked incredibly gentlemanly. ‘Women are always the same; they adore a bounder.’

‘He’s so frightfully vulgar,’ I complained.

‘That is his charm,’ said Quentin Forde.

For the next two or three weeks I saw next to nothing of Rosie. Jack Kuyper took her out night after night, to this smart restaurant and that, to one play after another. I was vexed and hurt.

‘He doesn’t know anyone in London,’ said Rosie, trying to soothe my ruffled feelings. ‘He wants to see everything he can while he’s here. It wouldn’t be very nice for him to go alone all the time. He’s only here for a fortnight more.’

I did not see the object of this self-sacrifice on her part.

‘But don’t you think he’s awful?’ I said.

‘No. I think he’s fun. He makes me laugh.’

‘Don’t you know that he’s absolutely gone on you?’

‘Well, it pleases him, and it doesn’t do me any harm.’

‘He’s old and fat and horrible. It gives me the creeps to look at him.’

‘I don’t think he’s so bad,’ said Rosie.

‘You shouldn’t have anything to do with him,’ I protested. ‘I mean, he’s such an awful cad.’

Rosie scratched her head. It was an unpleasant habit of hers.

‘It’s funny how different foreigners are from English people,’ she said.

I was thankful when Jack Kuyper went back to Amsterdam. Rosie had promised to dine with me the day after, and as a treat we arranged to dine in Soho. She fetched me in a hansom and we drove on.

‘Has your horrible old man gone?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she laughed.

I put my arm round her waist. (I have elsewhere remarked how much more convenient the hansom was for this pleasant and indeed almost essential act in human intercourse than the taxi of the present day, so unwillingly refrain from labouring the point.) I put my arm round her waist and kissed her. Her lips were like spring flowers. We arrived. I hung my hat and my coat (it was very long and tight at the waist, with a velvet collar and velvet cuffs; very smart) on a peg, and asked Rosie to give me her cape.

‘I’m going to keep it on,’ she said.

‘You’ll be awfully hot. You’ll only catch cold when we go out.’

‘I don’t care. It’s the first time I’ve worn it. Don’t you think it’s lovely? And look: the muff matches.’

I gave the cape a glance. It was of fur. I did not know it was sable.

‘It looks awfully rich. How did you get that?’

‘Jack Kuyper gave it to me. We went and bought it yesterday just before he went away.’ She stroked the smooth fur; she was as happy with it as a child with a toy. ‘How much d’you think it cost?’

‘I haven’t an idea.’

‘Two hundred and sixty pounds. Do you know I’ve never had anything that cost so much in my life? I told him it was far too much, but he wouldn’t listen. He made me have it’

Rosie chuckled with glee and her eyes shone. But I felt my face go stiff and a shiver run down my spine.

‘Won’t Driffield think it’s rather funny, Kuyper giving you a fur cape that costs all that?’ said I, trying to make my voice sound natural.

Rosie’s eyes danced mischievously.

‘You know what Ted is, he never notices anything; if he says anything about it I shall tell him I gave twenty pounds for it in a pawnshop. He won’t know any better.’ She rubbed her face against the collar. ‘It’s so soft. And everyone can see it cost money.’

I tried to eat and in order not to show the bitterness in my heart I did my best to keep the conversation going on one topic or another. Rosie did not much mind what I said. She could only think of her new cape, and every other minute her eyes returned to the muff that she insisted on holding on her lap. She looked at it with an affection in which there was something lazy, sensual, and self-complacent. I was angry with her. I thought her stupid and common.

‘You look like a cat that’s swallowed a canary,’ I could not help snapping.

She only giggled.

‘That’s what I feel like.’

Two hundred and sixty pounds was an enormous sum to me. I did not know one could pay so much for a cape. I lived on fourteen pounds a month, and not at all badly either; and in case any reader is not a ready reckoner I will add that this is one hundred and sixty-eight pounds a year. I could not believe that anyone would make as expensive a present as that from pure friendship; what did it mean but that Jack Kuyper had been sleeping with Rosie, night after night, all the time he was in London, and now when he went away was paying her? How could she accept it? Didn’t she see how it degraded her? Didn’t she see how frightfully vulgar it was of him to give her a thing that cost so much? Apparently not, for she said to me:

‘It was nice of him, wasn’t it? But then Jews are always generous.’

‘I suppose he could afford it,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, he’s got lots of money. He said he wanted to give me something before he went away and asked me what I wanted. Well, I said, I could do with a cape and a muff to match, but I never thought he’d buy me anything like this. When we went into the shop I asked them to show me something in astrakhan, but he said: No, sable, and the best money can buy. And when we saw this he absolutely insisted on my having it.’

I thought of her with her white body, her skin so milky, in the arms of that old fat gross man and his thick loose lips kissing hers. And then I knew that the suspicion that I had refused to believe was true; I knew that when she went out to dinner with Quentin Forde and Harry Retford and Lionel Hillier she went to bed with them just as she came to bed with me. I could not speak; I knew that if I did I should insult her. I do not think I was jealous so much as mortified. I felt that she had been making a damned fool of me. I used all my determination to prevent the bitter jibes from passing my lips.

We went on to the theatre. I could not listen to the play. I could only feel against my arm the smoothness of the sable cape; I could only see her fingers for ever stroking the muff. I could have borne the thought of the others; it was Jack Kuyper who horrified me. How could she? It was abominable to be poor. I longed to have enough money to tell her that if she would send the fellow back his beastly furs I would give her better ones instead. At last she noticed that I did not speak.

‘You’re very silent tonight.’

‘Am I?’

‘Aren’t you well?’

‘Perfectly.’

She gave me a sidelong look. I did not meet her eyes, but I knew they were smiling with that smile at once mischievous and childlike that I knew so well. She said nothing more. At the end of the play, since it was raining, we took a hansom, and I gave the driver her address in Limpus Road. She did not speak till we got to Victoria Street, then she said: ‘Don’t you want me to come home with you?’

‘Just as you like.’

She lifted up the trap and gave the driver my address. She took my hand and held it, but I remained inert. I looked straight out of the window with angry dignity. When we reached Vincent Square I handed her out of the cab, and let her into the house without a word. I took off my hat and coat. She threw her cape and her muff on the sofa.

‘Why are you so sulky?’ she asked, coming up to me.

‘I’m not sulky,’ I answered, looking away.

She took my face in her two hands.

‘How can you be so silly? Why should you be angry because Jack Kuyper gives me a fur cape? You can’t afford to give me one, can you?’

‘Of course I can’t.’

‘And Ted can’t either. You can’t expect me to refuse a fur cape that cost two hundred and sixty pounds. I’ve wanted a fur cape all my life. It means nothing to Jack.’

‘You don’t expect me to believe that he gave it you just out of friendship.’

‘He might have. Anyhow, he’s gone back to Amsterdam, and who knows when he’ll come back?’

‘He isn’t the only one, either.’

I looked at Rosie now, with angry, hurt, resentful eyes; she smiled at me, and I wish I knew how to describe the sweet kindliness of her beautiful smile; her voice was exquisitely gentle.

‘Oh, my dear, why d’you bother your head about any others? What harm does it do you? Don’t I give you a good time! Aren’t you happy when you’re with me?’’

‘Awfully’

‘Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years, and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.’

She put her arms round my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.

‘You must take me as I am, you know,’ she whispered.

‘All right,’ I said.

CHAPTER 18

During all this time I saw really very little of Driffield. His editorship occupied much of his day, and in the evening he wrote. He was, of course, there every Saturday afternoon, amiable and ironically amusing; he appeared glad to see me and chatted with me for a little while pleasantly of indifferent things; but naturally most of his attention was given to guests older and more important than I. But I had a feeling that he was growing more aloof; he was no longer the jolly, rather vulgar companion that I had known at Blackstable. Perhaps it was only my increasing sensibility that discerned as it were an invisible barrier that existed between him and the people he chaffed and joked with. It was as though he lived a life of the imagination that made the life of every day a little shadowy. He was asked to speak now and then at public dinners. He joined a literary club. He began to know a good many people outside the narrow circle into which his writing had drawn him, and he was increasingly asked to luncheon and tea by the ladies who like to gather about them distinguished authors. Rosie was asked too, but seldom went; she said she didn’t care for parties, and after all they didn’t want her, they only wanted Ted. I think she was shy and felt out of it. It may be that hostesses had more than once let her see how tiresome they thought it that she must be included; and after inviting her because it was polite, ignored her because to be polite irked them.

It was just about then that Edward Driffield published The Cup of Life. It is not my business to criticize his works, and of late as much has been written about them as must satisfy the appetite of any ordinary reader; but I will permit myself to say that The Cup of Life, though certainly not the most celebrated of his books, nor the most popular, is to my mind the most interesting. It has a cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an original note. It is refreshing and astringent. It tastes of tart apples. It sets your teeth on edge, but it has a subtle, bitter-sweet savour that is very agreeable to the palate. Of all Driffield’s books it is the only one I should like to have written. The scene of the child’s death, terrible and heart-rending, but written without slop or sickliness, and the curious incident that follows it, cannot easily be forgotten by anyone who has read them.

It was this part of the book that caused the sudden storm that burst on the wretched Driffield’s head. For a few days after publication it looked as though it would run its course like the rest of his novels, namely that it would have substantial reviews, laudatory on the whole, but with reservations, and that the sales would be respectable, but modest. Rosie told me that he expected to make three hundred pounds out of it, and was talking of renting a house on the river for the summer. The first two or three notices were non-committal; then in one of the morning papers appeared a violent attack. There was a column of it. The book was described as gratuitously offensive, obscene, and the publishers were rated for putting it before the public. Harrowing pictures were drawn of the devastating effect it must have on the youth of England. It was described as an insult to womanhood. The reviewer protested against the possibility of such a work falling into the hands of young boys and innocent maidens. Other papers followed suit. The more foolish demanded that the book should be suppressed and some asked themselves gravely if this was not a case where the public prosecutor might with fitness intervene. Condemnation was universal; if here and there a courageous writer, accustomed to the more realistic tone of continental fiction, asserted that Edward Driffield had never written anything better, he was ignored. His honest opinion was ascribed to a base desire to play to the gallery. The libraries barred the book and the lessors of the railway bookstalls refused to stock it.

All this was naturally very unpleasant for Edward Driffield, but he bore it with philosophic calm. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘They say it isn’t true,’ he smiled. ‘They can go to hell. It is true’

He was supported in this trial by the fidelity of his friends. To admire The Cup of Life became a mark of aesthetic acumen: to be shocked by it was to confess yourself a philistine. Mrs Barton Trafford had no hesitation in saying that it was a masterpiece, and though this wasn’t quite the moment for Barton’s article in the Quarterly, her faith in Edward Driffield’s future remained unshaken. It is strange (and instructive) to read now the book that created such a sensation; there is not a word that could bring a blush to the cheek of the most guileless, not an episode that could cause the novel-reader of the present day to turn a hair.

CHAPTER 19

About six months later, when the excitement over The Cup of Life had subsided and Driffield had already begun the novel which he published under the name of By Their Fruits, I, being then an in-patient dresser and in my fourth year, in the course of my duties went one day into the main hall of the hospital to await the surgeon whom I was accompanying on his round of the wards. I glanced at the rack in which letters were placed, For sometimes people, not knowing my address in Vincent Square, wrote to me at the hospital. I was surprised to find a telegram for me. It ran as follows:

Please come and see me at five o’clock this afternoon

without fail. Important.

Isabel Trafford

I wondered what she wanted me for. I had met her perhaps a dozen times during the last two years, but she had never taken any notice of me, and I had never been to her house. I knew that men were scarce at teatime, and a hostess, short of them at the last moment, might think that a young medical student was better than nothing; but the wording of the telegram hardly suggested a party.

The surgeon for whom I dressed was prosy and verbose. It was not till past five that I was free and then it took me a good twenty minutes to get down to Chelsea. Mrs Barton Trafford lived in a block of flats on the Embankment. It was nearly six when I rang at her door and asked if she was at home. But when I was ushered into her drawing-room and began to explain why I was late she cut me short.

‘We supposed you couldn’t get away. It doesn’t matter.’

Her husband was there.

‘I expect he’d like a cup of tea,’ he said.

‘Oh, I think it’s rather late for tea, isn’t it?’ She looked at me gently, her mild, rather fine eyes full of kindness. ‘You don’t want any tea, do you?’

I was thirsty and hungry, for my lunch had consisted of a scone and butter and a cup of coffee, but I did not like to say so. I refused tea.

‘Do you know Allgood Newton?’ asked Mrs Barton Trafford, with a gesture toward a man who had been sitting in a big arm-chair when I was shown in, and now got up. ‘I expect you’ve met him at Edward’s.’

I had. He did not come often, but his name was familiar to me and I remembered him. He made me very nervous and I do not think I had ever spoken to him. Though now completely forgotten, in those days he was the best-known critic in England. He was a large, fat, blond man, with a fleshy white face, pale blue eyes, and greying fair hair. He generally wore a pale blue tie to bring out the colour of his eyes. He was very amiable to the authors he met at Driffield’s, and said charming and flattering things to them, but when they were gone he was very amusing at their expense. He spoke in a low, even voice, with an apt choice of words: no one could with more point tell a malicious story about a friend.

Allgood Newton shook hands with me and Mrs Barton Trafford, with her ready sympathy, anxious to put me at my ease, took me by the hand and made me sit on the sofa beside her. The tea was still on the table and she took a jam sandwich and delicately nibbled it.

‘Have you seen the Driffields lately?’ she asked me, as though making conversation.

‘I was there last Saturday.’

‘You haven’t seen either of them since?’

‘No.’

Mrs Barton Trafford looked from Allgood Newton to her husband and back again as though mutely demanding their help.

‘Nothing will be gained by circumlocution, Isabel,’ said Newton, a faintly malicious twinkle in his eye, in his fat, precise way.

Mrs Barton Trafford turned to me.

‘Then you don’t know that Mrs Driffield has run away from her husband.’

‘What!’

I was flabbergasted. I could not believe my ears.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you told him the facts, Allgood,’ said Mrs Trafford.

The critic leaned back in his chair and placed the tips of the fingers of one hand against the tips of the fingers of the other. He spoke with unction.

‘I had to see Edward Driffield last night about a literary article that I am doing for him, and after dinner, since the night was fine, I thought I would walk round to his house. He was expecting me; and I knew besides that he never went out at night except for some function as important as the Lord Mayor’s banquet or the Academy dinner. Imagine my surprise then, nay, my utter and complete bewilderment, when as I approached I saw the door of his house open and Edward in person emerge. You know, of course, that Immanuel Kant was in the habit of taking his daily walk at a certain hour with such punctuality that the inhabitants of Königsberg were accustomed to set their watches by the event, and when once he came out of his house an hour earlier than usual they turned pale, for they knew that this could only mean that some terrible thing had happened. They were right; Immanuel Kant had just received intelligence of the fall of the Bastille.’

Allgood Newton paused for a moment to mark the effect of his anecdote. Mrs Barton Trafford gave him her understanding smile.

‘I did not envisage so world-shaking a catastrophe as this when I saw Edward hurrying toward me, but it immediately occurred to me that something untoward was afoot. He carried neither cane nor gloves. He wore his working coat, a venerable garment in black alpaca, and a wide-awake hat. There was something wild in his mien and distraught in his bearing. I asked myself, knowing the vicissitudes of the conjugal state, whether a matrimonial difference had driven him headlong from the house or whether he was hastening to a letter-box in order to post a letter. He sped like Hector flying the noblest of the Greeks. He did not seem to see me and the suspicion flashed across my mind that he did not want to. I stopped him. “Edward,” I said. He looked startled. For a moment I could have sworn he did not know who I was. “What avenging furies urge you with such hot haste through the rakish purlieus of Pimlico?” I asked. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Nowhere,” he replied.’

At this rate I thought Allgood Newton would never finish his story, and Mrs Hudson would be vexed with me for turning up to dinner half an hour late.

‘I told him on what errand I had come, and proposed that we should return to his house where we could more conveniently discuss the question that perturbed me. “I’m too restless to go home,” he said; “let’s walk. You can talk to me as we go along.” Assenting, I turned round and we began to walk; but his pace was so rapid that I had to beg him to moderate it. Even Dr Johnson could not have carried on a conversation when he was walking down Fleet Street at the speed of an express train. Edward’s appearance was so peculiar and his manner so agitated that I thought it wise to lead him through the less frequented streets. I talked to him of my article. The subject that occupied me was more copious than had at first sight appeared, and I was doubtful whether after all I could do justice to it in the columns of a weekly journal. I put the matter before him fully and fairly and asked him his opinion. “Rosie has left me,” he answered. For a moment I did not know what he was talking about, but in a trice it occurred to me that he was speaking of the buxom and not unprepossessing female from whose hands I had on occasion accepted a cup of tea. From his tone I divined that he expected condolence from me rather than felicitation.’

Allgood Newton paused again and his blue eyes twinkled.

‘You’re wonderful, Allgood,’ said Mrs Barton Trafford.

‘Priceless,’ said her husband.

‘Realizing that the occasion demanded sympathy, I said: “My dear fellow.” He interrupted me. “I had a letter by the last post,” he said. “She’s run away with Lord George Kemp.’”

I gasped but said nothing. Mrs Trafford gave me a quick look.

‘“Who is Lord George Kemp?” “He’s a Blackstable man,” he replied. I had little time to think. I determined to be frank. “You’re well rid of her,” I said. “Allgood! “he cried. I stopped and put my hand on his arm. “You must know that she was deceiving you with all your friends. Her behaviour was a public scandal. My dear Edward, let us face the fact: your wife was nothing but a common strumpet.” He snatched his arm away from me and gave a sort of low roar, like an orangutan in the forests of Borneo forcibly deprived of a coconut, and before I could stop him he broke away and fled. I was so startled that I could do nothing but listen to his cries and his hurrying footsteps’

‘You shouldn’t have let him go,’ said Mrs Barton Trafford. ‘In the state he was he might have thrown himself in the Thames.’

‘The thought occurred to me, but I noticed that he did not run in the direction of the river, but plunged into the meaner streets of the neighbourhood in which we had been walking. And I reflected also that there is no example in literary history of an author committing suicide while engaged on the composition of a literary work. Whatever his tribulations, he is unwilling to leave to posterity an uncompleted opus.’

I was astounded at what I heard and shocked and dismayed; but I was worried too because I could not make out why Mrs Trafford had sent for me. She knew me much too little to think that the story could be of any particular interest to me; nor would she have troubled to let me hear it as a piece of news.

‘Poor Edward,’ she said. ‘Of course no one can deny that it is a blessing in disguise, but I’m afraid he’ll take it very much to heart. Fortunately he’s done nothing rash’ She turned to me. ‘As soon as Mr Newton told us about it I went round to Limpus Road. Edward was out, but the maid said he’d only just left; that means that he must have gone home between the time he ran away from Allgood and this morning. You’ll wonder why I asked you to come and see me.’

I did not answer. I waited for her to go on.

‘It was at Blackstable you first knew the Driffields, wasn’t it? You can tell us who is this Lord George Kemp. Edward said he was a Blackstable man.’

‘He’s middle-aged. He’s got a wife and two sons. They’re as old as I am.’

‘But I don’t understand who he can be. I can’t find him in Debrett.’

I almost laughed.

‘Oh, he’s not really a lord. He’s the local coal merchant, they call him Lord George at Blackstable because he’s so grand. It’s just a joke.’

‘The quiddity of bucolic humour is often a trifle obscure to the uninitiated,’ said Allgood Newton.

‘We must all help dear Edward in every way we can,’ said Mrs Barton Trafford. Her eyes rested on me thoughtfully. ‘If Kemp has run away with Rosie Driffield he must have left his wife.’

‘I suppose so,’ I replied.

‘Will you do something very kind?’

‘If I can.’

‘Will you go down to Blackstable and find out exactly what has happened? I think we ought to get in touch with the wife.’

I have never been fond of interfering in other people’s affairs.

‘I don’t know how I could do that,’ I answered.

‘Couldn’t you see her?’

‘No, I couldn’t.’

If Mrs Barton Trafford thought my reply blunt she did not show it. She smiled a little.

‘At all events that can be left over. The urgent thing is to go down and find out about Kemp. I shall try to see Edward this evening. I can’t bear the thought of his staying on in that odious house by himself. Barton and I have made up our minds to bring him here. We have a spare room and I’ll arrange it so that he can work there. Don’t you agree that that would be the best thing for him, Allgood?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t stay here indefinitely, at all events for a few weeks, and then he can come away with us in the summer. We’re going to Brittany. I’m sure he’d like that. It would be a thorough change for him.’

‘The immediate question,’ said Barton Trafford, fixing on me an eye nearly as kindly as his wife’s, ‘is whether this young sawbones will go to Blackstable and find out what he can. We must know where we are. That is essential’

Barton Trafford excused his interest in archaeology by a hearty manner and a jocose, even slangy way of speech.

‘He couldn’t refuse,’ said his wife, giving me a soft, appealing glance. ‘You won’t refuse, will you? It’s so important and you’re the only person who can help us.’

Of course she did not know that I was as anxious to find out what had happened as she; she could not tell what a bitter, jealous pain stabbed my heart.

‘I couldn’t possibly get away from the hospital before Saturday,’ I said.

‘That’ll do. It’s very good of you. All Edward’s friends will be grateful to you. When shall you return?’

‘I have to be back in London early on Monday morning.’

‘Then come and have tea with me in the afternoon. I shall await you with impatience. Thank God, that’s settled. Now I must try and get hold of Edward.’

I understood that I was dismissed. Allgood Newton took his leave and came downstairs with me.

‘Our Isabel has un petit air of Catherine of Aragon today that I find vastly becoming,’ he murmured, when the door was closed behind us. ‘This is a golden opportunity and I think we may safely trust our friend not to miss it. A charming woman with a heart of gold. Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.’

I did not understand what he meant, for what I have already told the reader about Mrs Barton Trafford I only learned much later, but I realized that he was saying something vaguely malicious about her, and probably amusing, so I sniggered.

‘I suppose your youth inclines you to what my good Dizzy named in an unlucky moment the gondola of London.’

‘I’m going to take a bus,’ I answered.

‘Oh? Had you proposed to go by hansom I was going to ask you to be good enough to drop me on your way, but if you are going to use the homely conveyance which I, in my old-fashioned manner, still prefer to call an omnibus, I shall hoist my unwieldy carcass into a four-wheeler.’

He signalled to one and gave me two flabby fingers to shake.

‘I shall come on Monday to hear the result of what dear Henry would call your so exquisitely delicate mission.’

CHAPTER 20

But it was years before I saw Allgood Newton again, for when I got to Blackstable I found a letter from Mrs Barton Trafford (who had taken the precaution to note my address) asking me, for reasons that she would explain when she saw me, not to come to her flat but to meet her at six o’clock in the first-class waiting-room at Victoria Station. As soon then as I could get away from the hospital on Monday I made my way there, and after waiting for a while saw her come in. She came toward me with little tripping steps.

‘Well, have you anything to tell me? Let us find a quiet corner and sit down.’

We sought a place and found it.

‘I must explain why I asked you to come here,’ she said. ‘Edward is staying with me. At first he did not want to come, but I persuaded him. But he’s nervous and ill and irritable. I did not want to run the risk of his seeing you.’

I told Mrs Trafford the bare facts of my story and she listened attentively. Now and then she nodded her head. But I could not hope to make her understand the commotion I had found at Blackstable. The town was beside itself with excitement. Nothing so thrilling had happened there for years, and no one could talk of anything else. Humpty-dumpty had had a great fall. Lord George Kemp had absconded. About a week before he had announced that he had to go up to London on business, and two days later a petition in bankruptcy was filed against him. It appeared that his building operations had not been successful, his attempt to make Blackstable into a frequented seaside resort meeting with no response, and he had been forced to raise money in every way he could. All kinds of rumours ran through the little town. Quite a number of small people who had entrusted their savings to him were faced with the loss of all they had. The details were vague, for neither my uncle nor my aunt knew anything of business matters, nor had I the knowledge to make what they told me comprehensible. But there was a mortgage on George Kemp’s house and a bill of sale on his furniture. His wife was left without a penny. His two sons, lads of twenty and twenty-one, were in the coal business, but that too was involved in the general ruin. George Kemp had gone off with all the cash he could lay hands on, something like fifteen hundred pounds, they said, though how they knew I cannot imagine; and it was reported that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. It was supposed that he had left the country; some said he had gone to Australia and some to Canada.

‘I hope they catch him,’ said my uncle. ‘He ought to get penal servitude for life.’

The indignation was universal. They could not forgive him because he had always been so noisy and boisterous, because he had chaffed them and stood them drinks and given them garden parties, because he had driven such a smart trap and worn his brown billycock hat at such a rakish angle. But it was on Sunday night after church in the vestry that the churchwarden told my uncle the worst. For the last two years he had been meeting Rosie Driffield at Haversham almost every week and they had been spending the night together at a public-house. The licensee of this had put money into one of Lord George’s wildcat schemes, and on discovering that he had lost it blurted out the whole story. He could have borne it if Lord George had defrauded others, but that he should defraud him who had done him a good turn and whom he looked upon as a chum, that was the limit.

‘I expect they’ve run away together,’ said my uncle.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said the churchwarden.

After supper, while the housemaid was clearing away, I went into the kitchen to talk to Mary-Ann. She had been at church and had heard the story too. I cannot believe that the congregation had listened very attentively to my uncle’s sermon.

‘The vicar says they’ve run away together,’ I said. I had not breathed a word of what I knew.

‘Why, of course they ‘ave,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘He was the only man she ever really fancied. He only ‘ad to lift ‘is little finger and she’d leave anyone, no matter who it was.’

I lowered my eyes. I was suffering from bitter mortification,’ and I was angry with Rosie: I thought she had behaved very badly to me.

‘I suppose we shall never see her again,’ I said.

It gave me a pang to utter the words.

‘I don’t suppose we shall,’ said Mary-Ann cheerfully.

When I had told Mrs Barton Trafford as much of this story as I thought she need know, she sighed, but whether from satisfaction or distress I had no notion.

‘Well, that’s the end of Rosie at all events,’ she said. She got up and held out her hand. ‘Why will these literary men make these unfortunate marriages? It’s all very sad, very sad. Thank you so much for what you’ve done. We know where we are now. The great thing is that it shouldn’t interfere with Edward’s work.’

Her remarks seemed a trifle disconnected to me. The fact was, I have no doubt, that she was giving me not the smallest thought. I led her out of Victoria Station and put her into a bus that went down the King’s Road, Chelsea; then I walked back to my lodgings.

CHAPTER 21

I lost touch with Driffield, I was too shy to seek him out; I was busy with my examinations, and when I had passed them I went abroad. I remember vaguely to have seen in the paper that he had divorced Rosie. Nothing more was heard of her. Small sums reached her mother occasionally, ten or twenty pounds, and they came in a registered letter with a New York postmark; but no address was given, no message enclosed, and they were presumed to come from Rosie only because no one else could possibly send Mrs Gann money. Then in the fullness of years Rosie’s mother died, and it may be supposed that in some way the news reached her, for the letters ceased to come.

CHAPTER 22

Alroy Kear and I, as arranged, met on Friday at Victoria Station to catch the five-ten to Blackstable. We made ourselves comfortable in opposite corners of a smoking compartment. From him I now learned roughly what had happened to Driffield after his wife ran away from him. Roy had in due course become very intimate with Mrs Barton Trafford. Knowing him and remembering her, I realized that this was inevitable. I was not surprised to hear that he had travelled with her and Barton on the Continent, sharing with them to the full their passion for Wagner, post-impressionist painting, and baroque architecture. He had lunched assiduously at the flat in Chelsea, and when advancing years and failing health had imprisoned Mrs Trafford to her drawing-room, notwithstanding the many claims on his time he had gone regularly once a week to sit with her. He had a good heart. After her death he wrote an article about her in which with admirable emotion he did justice to her great gifts of sympathy and discrimination.

It pleased me to think that his kindliness should receive its due and unexpected reward, for Mrs Barton Trafford had told him much about Edward Driffield that could not fail to be of service to him in the work of love on which he was now engaged. Mrs Barton Trafford, exercising a gentle violence, not only took Edward Driffield into her house when the flight of his faithless wife left him what Roy could only describe by the French word désemparé, but persuaded him to stay for nearly a year. She gave him the loving care, the unfailing kindness, and the intelligent understanding of a woman who combined feminine tact with masculine vigour, a heart of gold with an unerring eye for the main chance. It was in her flat that he finished By Their Fruits. She was justified in looking upon it as her book and the dedication to her is a proof that Driffield was not unmindful of his debt. She took him to Italy (with Barton of course, for Mrs Trafford knew too well how malicious people were, to give occasion for scandal) and with a volume of Ruskin in her hand revealed to Edward Driffield the immortal beauties of that country. Then she found him rooms in the Temple, and arranged little luncheons there, she acting very prettily the part of hostess, where he could receive the persons whom his increasing reputation attracted.

It must be admitted that this increasing reputation was very largely due to her. His great celebrity came only during his last years when he had long ceased to write, but the foundations of it were undoubtedly laid by Mrs Trafford’s untiring efforts. Not only did she inspire (and perhaps write not a little, for she had a dexterous pen) the article that Barton at last contributed to the Quarterly in which the claim was first made that Driffield must be ranked with the masters of British fiction, but as each book came out she organized its reception. She went here and there, seeing editors and, more important still, proprietors of influential organs; she gave soirées to which everyone was invited who could be of use. She persuaded Edward Driffield to give readings at the houses of the very great for charitable purposes; she saw to it that his photograph should appear in the illustrated weeklies; she revised personally any interview he gave. For ten years she was an indefatigable press agent. She kept him steadily before the public.

Mrs Barton Trafford had a grand time, but she did not get above herself. It was useless indeed to ask him to a party without her; he refused. And when she and Barton and Driffield were invited anywhere to dinner they came together and went together. She never let him out of her sight. Hostesses might rave; they could take it or leave it. As a rule they took it. If Mrs Barton Trafford happened to be a little out of temper it was through him she showed it, for while she remained charming, Edward Driffield would be uncommonly gruff. But she knew exactly how to draw him out and when the company was distinguished could make him brilliant. She was perfect with him. She never concealed from him her conviction that he was the greatest writer of his day; she not only referred to him invariably as the master; but, perhaps a little playfully and yet how flatteringly, addressed him always as such. To the end she retained something kittenish.

Then a terrible thing happened. Driffield caught pneumonia and was extremely ill; for some time his life was despaired of. Mrs Barton Trafford did everything that such a woman could do, and would willingly have nursed him herself, but she was frail, she was indeed over sixty, and he had to have professional nurses. When at last he pulled through, the doctors said that he must go into the country, and since he was still extremely weak insisted that a nurse should go with him. Mrs Trafford wanted him to go to Bournemouth so that she could run down for weekends and see that everything was well with him, but Driffield had a fancy for Cornwall, and the doctors agreed that the mild airs of Penzance would suit him. One would have thought that a woman of Isabel Trafford’s delicate intuition would have had some foreboding of ill. No. She let him go. She impressed on the nurse that she entrusted her with a grave responsibility; she placed in her hands, if not the future of English literature, at least the life and welfare of its most distinguished living representative. It was a priceless charge.

Three weeks later Edward Driffield wrote and told her that he had married his nurse by special licence.

I imagine that never did Mrs Barton Trafford exhibit more pre-eminently her greatness of soul than in the manner in which she met this situation. Did she cry, Judas, Judas? Did she tear her hair and fall on the floor and kick her heels in an attack of hysterics? Did she turn on the mild and learned Barton and call him a blithering old fool? Did she inveigh against the faithlessness of men and the wantonness of women or did she relieve her wounded feelings by shouting at the top of her voice a string of those obscenities with which the alienists tell us the chastest females are surprisingly acquainted? Not at all. She wrote a charming letter of congratulation to Driffield and she wrote to his bride telling her that she was glad to think that now she would have two loving friends instead of one. She begged them both to come and stay with her on their return to London. She told everyone she met that the marriage had made her very, very happy, for Edward Driffield would soon be an old man, and must have someone to take care of him; who could do this better than a hospital nurse? She never had anything but praise for the new Mrs Driffield; she was not exactly pretty, she said, but she had a very nice face; of course she wasn’t quite, quite a lady, but Edward would only have been uncomfortable with anyone too grand. She was just the sort of wife for him. I think it may be not unjustly said that Mrs Barton Trafford fairly ran over with the milk of human kindness, but all the same I have an inkling that if ever the milk of human kindness was charged with vitriol, here was a case in point.

CHAPTER 23

When we arrived at Blackstable, Roy and I, a car, neither ostentatiously grand nor obviously cheap, was waiting for him, and the chauffeur had a note for me asking me to lunch with Mrs Driffield next day. I got into a taxi and went to the Bear and Key. I had learned from Roy that there was a new Marine Hotel on the front, but I did not propose for the luxuries of civilization to abandon a resort of my youth. Change met me at the railway station, which was not in its old place, but up a new road, and of course it was strange to be driven down the High Street in a car. But the Bear and Key was unaltered. It received me with its old churlish indifference: there was no one at the entrance, the driver put my bag down and drove away; I called, no one answered; I went into the bar and found a young lady with shingled hair reading a book by Mr Compton Mackenzie. I asked her if I could have a room. She gave me a slightly offended look, and said she thought so, but as that seemed to exhaust her interest in the matter I asked politely whether there was anyone who could show it to me. She got up and, opening a door, in a shrill voice called: ‘Katie.’

‘What is it?’ I heard.

‘There’s a gent wants a room.’

In a little while appeared an ancient and haggard female in very dirty print dress, with an untidy mop of grey hair, and showed me, two flights up, a very small grubby room.

‘Can’t you do something better than that for me?’ I asked.

‘It’s the room commercials generally ‘ave,’ she answered with a sniff.

‘Haven’t you got any others?’

‘Not single.’

‘Then give me a double room.’

‘I’ll go and ask Mrs Brentford.’

I accompanied her down to the first floor and she knocked at a door. She was told to come in, and when she opened it I caught sight of a stout woman with grey hair elaborately marcelled. She was reading a book. Apparently everyone at the Bear and Key was interested in literature. She gave me an indifferent look when Katie said I wasn’t satisfied with number seven.

‘Show him number five,’ she said.

I began to feel that I had been a trifle rash in declining so haughtily Mrs Driffield’s invitation to stay with her and then putting aside in my sentimental way Roy’s wise suggestion that I should stay at the Marine Hotel. Katie took me upstairs again and ushered me into a largish room looking on the High Street. Most of its space was occupied by a double bed. The windows had certainly not been opened for a month.

I said that would do and asked about dinner.

‘You can ‘ave what you like,’ said Katie. ‘We ‘aven’t got nothing in, but I’ll run round and get it.’

Knowing English inns, I ordered a fried sole and a grilled chop. Then I went for a stroll. I walked down to the beach and found that they had built an esplanade, and there was a row of bungalows and villas where I remembered only wind-swept fields. But they were seedy and bedraggled, and I guessed that even after all these years Lord George’s dream of turning Blackstable into a popular seaside resort had not come true. A retired military man, a pair of elderly ladies walked along the crumbling asphalt. It was incredibly dreary. A chill wind was blowing and a light drizzle swept over from the sea.

I went back into the town and here, in the space between the Bear and Key and the Duke of Kent, were little knots of men standing about notwithstanding the inclement weather; and their eyes had the same pale blue, their high cheekbones the same ruddy colour as that of their fathers before them. It was strange to see that some of the sailors in blue jerseys still wore little gold rings in their ears; and not only old ones but boys scarcely out of their teens. I sauntered down the street, and there was the bank re-fronted, but the stationery shop where I had bought paper and wax to make rubbings with an obscure writer whom I had met by chance was unchanged; there were two or three cinemas, and their garish posters suddenly gave the prim street a dissipated air so that it looked like a respectable elderly woman who had taken a drop too much.

It was cold and cheerless in the commercial room where I ate my dinner alone at a large table laid for six. I was served by the slatternly Katie. I asked if I could have a fire.

‘Not in June,’ she said. ‘We don’t ‘ave fires after April.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ I protested.

‘Not in June. In October, yes, but not in June.’

When I had finished I went into the bar to have a glass of port.

‘Very quiet,’ I said to the shingled barmaid.

‘Yes, it is quiet,’ she answered.

‘I should have thought on a Friday night you’d have quite a lot of people in here.’

‘Well, one would think that, wouldn’t one?’

Then a stout, red-faced man with a close-cropped head of grey hair came in from the back and I guessed that this was my host.

‘Are you Mr Brentford?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘I knew your father. Will you have a glass of port?’

I told him my name, in the days of his boyhood better known than any other at Blackstable, but somewhat to my mortification I saw that it aroused no echo in his memory. He consented, however, to let me stand him a glass of port.

‘Down here on business?’ he asked me. ‘We get quite a few commercial gents at one time and another. We always like to do what we can for them.’

I told him that I had come down to see Mrs Driffield, and left him to guess on what errand.

‘I used to see a lot of the old man,’ said Mr Brentford. ‘He used to be very partial to dropping in here and having his glass of bitter. Mind you, I don’t say he ever got tiddly, but he used to like to sit in the bar and talk. My word, he’d talk by the hour, and he never cared who he talked to. Mrs Driffield didn’t half like his coming here. He’d slip away, out of the house, without saying a word to anybody, and come toddling down. You know it’s a bit of a walk for a man of that age. Of course when they missed him Mrs Driffield knew where he was, and she used to telephone and ask if he was here. Then she’d drive over in the car and go in and see my wife. “You go in and fetch him, Mrs Brentford,” she’d say; “I don’t like to go in the bar meself, not with all those men hanging about”; so Mrs Brentford would come in and she’d say, “Now, Mr Driffield, Mrs Driffield’s come for you in the car, so you’d better finish your beer and let her take you home.” He used to ask Mrs Brentford not to say he was here when Mrs Driffield rang up, but of course we couldn’t do that. He was an old man and all that, and we didn’t want to take the responsibility. He was born in the parish, you know, and his first wife, she was a Blackstable girl. She’s been dead these many years. I never knew her. He was a funny old fellow. No side, you know; they tell me they thought a rare lot of him in London, and when he died the papers were full of him; but you’d never have known it to talk to him. He might have been just nobody, like you and me. Of course we always tried to make him comfortable; we tried to get him to sit in one of them easy-chairs, but no, he must sit up at the bar; he said he liked to feel his feet on a rail. My belief is he was happier here than anywhere. He always said he liked a bar. He said you saw life there, and he said he’d always loved life. Quite a character he was. Reminded me of my father except that my old governor never read a book in his life and he drank a bottle of French brandy a day and he was seventy-eight when he died and his last illness was his first. I quite missed old Driffield when he popped off. I was only saying to Mrs Brentford the other day, I’d like to read one of his books some time. They tell me he wrote several about these parts.’

CHAPTER 24

Next morning it was cold and raw, but it was not raining, and I walked down the High Street toward the vicarage. I recognized the names over the shops, the Kentish names that have been borne for centuries – the Ganns, the Kemps, the Cobbs, the Igguldens – but I saw no one that I knew. I felt like a ghost walking down that street where I had once known nearly everyone, if not to speak to, at least by sight. Suddenly a very shabby little car passed me, stopped, and backed, and I saw someone looking at me curiously. A tall, heavy, elderly man got out and came toward me.

‘Aren’t you Willie Ashenden?’ he asked.

Then I recognized him. He was the doctor’s son, and I had been at school with him; we had passed from form to form together, and I knew that he had succeeded his father in his practice.

‘Hallo, how are you?’ he asked. ‘I’ve just been along to the vicarage to see my grandson. It’s a preparatory school now, you know, and I put him there at the beginning of this term.’

He was shabbily dressed and unkempt, but he had a fine head, and I saw that in youth he must have had unusual beauty. It was funny that I had never noticed it.

‘Are you a grandfather?’ I asked.

‘Three times over,’ he laughed.

It gave me a shock. He had drawn breath, walked the earth, and presently grown to man’s estate, married, had children; and they in turn had had children, I judged from the look of him that he had lived, with incessant toil in penury. He had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous. His life was over. I had plans in my head for books and plays, I was full of schemes for the future; I felt that a long stretch of activity and fun still lay before me, and yet, I supposed, to others I must seem the elderly man that he seemed to me. I was so shaken that I had not the presence of mind to ask about his brothers, whom as a child I had played with, or about the old friends who had been my companions; after a few foolish remarks I left him. I walked on to the vicarage, a roomy, rambling house, too far out of the way for the modern incumbent who took his duties more seriously than did my uncle, and too large for the present cost of living. It stood in a big garden and was surrounded by green fields. There was a great square notice-board that announced that it was a preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen, and gave the name and the degrees of the head master. I looked over the paling; the garden was squalid and untidy, and the pond in which I used to fish for roach was choked up. The glebe fields had been cut up into building lots. There were rows of little brick houses with bumpy ill-made roads. I walked along Joy Lane, and there were houses here too, bungalows facing the sea; and the old turnpike house was a trim tea shop.

I wandered about here and there. There seemed innumerable streets of little houses of yellow brick, but I do not know who lived in them, for I saw no one about. I went down to the harbour. It was deserted. There was but one tramp lying a little way out from the pier. Two or three sailormen were sitting outside a warehouse, and they stared at me as I passed. The bottom had fallen out of the coal trade and colliers came to Blackstable no longer.

Then it was time for me to go to Ferne Court, and I went back to the Bear and Key. The landlord had told me that he had a Daimler for hire, and I had arranged that it should take me to my luncheon. It stood at the door when I came up, a brougham, but the oldest, most dilapidated car of its make that I had ever seen; it panted along with squeaks and thumps and rattlings, with sudden angry jerks, so that I wondered if I should ever reach my destination. But the extraordinary, the amazing thing about it was that it smelled exactly like the old landau which my uncle used to hire every Sunday morning to go to church in. This was a rank odour of stables and of stale straw that lay at the bottom of the carriage; and I wondered in vain why, after all these years, the motor-car should have it too. But nothing can bring back the past like a perfume or a stench, and, oblivious to the country I was trundling through, I saw myself once more a little boy on the front seat with the communion plate beside me and, facing me, my aunt, smelling slightly of clean linen and eau-de-Cologne, in her black silk cloak and her little bonnet with a feather, and my uncle in his cassock, a broad band of ribbed silk round his ample waist, and a gold cross hanging over his stomach from the gold chain round his neck.

‘Now, Willie, mind you behave nicely today. You’re not to turn round, and sit up properly in your seat. The Lord’s House isn’t the place to loll in and you must remember that you should set an example to other little boys who haven’t had your advantages.’

When I arrived at Ferne Court, Mrs Driffield and Roy were walking round the garden, and they came up to me as I got out of the car.

‘I was showing Roy my flowers,’ said Mrs Driffield, as she shook hands with me. And then with a sigh: ‘They’re all I have now.’

She looked no older than when I last saw her six years before. She wore her weeds with quiet distinction. At her neck was a collar of white crêpe and at her wrists cuffs of the same. Roy, I noticed, wore with his neat blue suit a black tie; I supposed it was a sign of respect for the illustrious dead.

‘I’ll just show you my herbaceous borders,’ said Mrs Driffield, ‘and then we’ll go in to lunch.’

We walked round, and Roy was very knowledgeable. He knew what all the flowers were called, and the Latin names tripped off his tongue like cigarettes out of a cigarette-making machine. He told Mrs Driffield where she ought to get certain varieties that she absolutely must have, and how perfectly lovely were certain others.

‘Shall we go in through Edward’s study?’ suggested Mrs Driffield. ‘I keep it exactly as it was when he was here. I haven’t changed a thing. You’d be surprised how many people come over to see the house, and of course above all they want to see the room he worked in.’

We went in through an open window. There was a bowl of roses on the desk, and on a little round table by the side of the arm-chair a copy of the Spectator. In the ash trays were the master’s pipes and there was ink in the inkstand. The scene was perfectly set. I do not know why the room seemed so strangely dead; it had already the mustiness of a museum. Mrs Driffield went to the bookshelves and with a little smile, half playful, half sad, passed a rapid hand across the back of half a dozen volumes bound in blue.

‘You know that Edward admired your work so much,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘He re-read your books quite often.’

‘I’m very glad to think that,’ I said politely.

I knew very well that they had not been there on my last visit, and in a casual way I took one of them out and ran my fingers along the top to see whether there was dust on it. There was not. Then I took another book down, one of Charlotte Brontë’s, and making a little plausible conversation tried the same experiment. No, there was no dust there either. All I learned was that Mrs Driffield was an excellent housekeeper and had a conscientious maid.

We went in to luncheon, a hearty British meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and we talked of the work on which Roy was engaged.

‘I want to spare dear Roy all the labour I can,’ said Mrs Driffield, ‘and I’ve been gathering together as much of the material as I could myself. Of course it’s been rather painful, but it’s been very interesting too. I came across a lot of old photographs that I must show you.’

After luncheon we went into the drawing-room, and I noticed again with what perfect taste Mrs Driffield had arranged it. It suited the widow of a distinguished man of letters almost more than it had suited the wife. Those chintzes, those bowls of potpourri, those Dresden China figures – there was about them a faint air of regret; they seemed to reflect pensively upon a past of distinction. I could have wished on this chilly day that there was a fire in the grate, but the English are a hardy as well as a conservative race, and it is not difficult for them to maintain their principles at the cost of the discomfort of others. I doubted whether Mrs Driffield would have conceived the possibility of lighting a fire before the first of October. She asked me whether I had lately seen the lady who had brought me to lunch with the Driffields, and I surmised from her faint acerbity that since the death of her eminent husband the great and fashionable had shown a distinct tendency to take no further notice of her. We were just settling down to talk about the defunct; Roy and Mrs Driffield were putting artful questions to incite me to disclose my recollections, and I was gathering my wits about me so that I should not in an unguarded moment let slip anything that I had made up my mind to keep to myself; when suddenly the trim parlourmaid brought in two cards on a small salver.

‘Two gentlemen in a car, mum, and they say, could they look at the house and garden?’

‘What a bore!’ cried Mrs Driffield, but with astonishing alacrity. ‘Isn’t it funny I should have been speaking just now about the people who want to see the house? I never have a moment’s peace.’

‘Well, why don’t you say you’re sorry you can’t see them?’ said Roy, with what I thought a certain cattiness.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. Edward wouldn’t have liked me to.’ She looked at the cards. ‘I haven’t got my glasses on me.’

She handed them to me, and on one I read: ‘Henry Beard MacDougal, University of Virginia’; and in pencil was written: ‘Assistant professor in English Literature.’ The other was ‘Jean-Paul Underhill,’ and there was at the bottom an address in New York.

‘Americans,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘Say I shall be very pleased if they’ll come in.’

Presently the maid ushered the strangers in. They were both tall young men and broad-shouldered, with heavy, cleanshaven, swarthy faces and handsome eyes; they both wore horn-rimmed spectacles, and they both had thick black hair combed straight back from their foreheads. They both wore English suits that were evidently brand new; they were both slightly embarrassed, but verbose and extremely civil. They explained that they were making a literary tour of England and, being admirers of Edward Driffield, had taken the liberty of stopping off on their way to Rye to visit Henry James’s house in the hope that they would be permitted to see a spot sanctified by so many associations. The reference to Rye did not go down very well with Mrs Driffield.

‘I believe they have some very good links there,’ she said.

She introduced the Americans to Roy and me. I was filled with admiration for the way in which Roy rose to the occasion. It appeared that he had lectured before the University of Virginia and had stayed with a distinguished member of the faculty. It had been an unforgettable experience. He did not know whether he had been more impressed by the lavish hospitality with which those charming Virginians had entertained him or by their intelligent interest in art and literature. He asked how So-and-so was, and So-and-so; he had made lifelong friends there, and it looked as though everyone he met was good and kind and clever. Soon the young professor was telling Roy how much he liked his books, and Roy was modestly telling him what in this one and the other his aim had been and how conscious he was that he had come far short of achieving it. Mrs Driffield listened with smiling sympathy, but I had a feeling that her smile was growing a trifle strained. It may be that Roy had too, for he suddenly broke off.

‘But you don’t want me to bore you with my stuff,’ he said in his loud, hearty way. ‘I’m only here because Mrs Driffield has entrusted to me the great honour of writing Edward Driffield’s life.’

This, of course, interested the visitors very much.

‘It’s some job, believe me,’ said Roy, playfully American. ‘Fortunately I have the assistance of Mrs Driffield, who was not only a perfect wife, but an admirable amanuensis and secretary; the materials she has placed at my disposal are so amazingly full that really little remains for me to do but take advantage of her industry and her – her affectionate zeal.’

Mrs Driffield looked down demurely at the carpet and the two young Americans turned on her their large dark eyes in which you could read their sympathy, their interest, and their respect. After a little more conversation – partly literary, but also about golf, for the visitors admitted that they hoped to get a round or two at Rye, and here again Roy was on the spot, for he told them to look out for such and such a bunker, and when they came to London hoped they would play with him at Sunningdale; after this, I say, Mrs Driffield got up and offered to show them Edward’s study and bedroom, and of course the garden. Roy rose to his feet, evidently bent on accompanying them, but Mrs Driffield gave him a little smile; it was pleasant but firm.

‘Don’t you bother to come, Roy,’ she said. ‘I’ll take them round. You stay here and talk to Mr Ashenden.’

‘Oh, all right. Of course.’

The strangers bade us farewell, and Roy and I settled down again in the chintz armchairs.

‘Jolly room this is,’ said Roy.

‘Very.’

‘Amy had to work hard to get it. You know the old man bought this house two or three years before they were married. She tried to make him sell it, but he wouldn’t. He was very obstinate in some ways. You see it belonged to a certain Miss Wolfe, whose bailiff his father was, and he said that when he was a little boy his one idea was to own it himself, and now he’d got it he was going to keep it. One would have thought the last thing he’d want to do was to live in a place where everyone knew all about his origins and everything. Once poor Amy very nearly engaged a housemaid before she discovered she was Edward’s great-niece. When Amy came here the house was furnished from attic to cellar in the best Tottenham Court Road manner; you know the sort of thing, Turkey carpets and mahogany sideboards, and a plush-covered suite in the drawing-room, and modern marquetry. It was his idea of how a gentleman’s house should be furnished. Amy says it was simply awful. He wouldn’t let her change a thing, and she had to go to work with the greatest care; she says she simply couldn’t have lived in it, and she was determined to have things right, so she had to change things one by one so that he didn’t pay any attention. She told me the hardest job she had was with his writing-desk. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the one there is in his study now. It’s a very good period piece; I wouldn’t mind having it myself. Well, he had a horrible American roll-top desk. He’d had it for years, and he’d written a dozen books on it, and he simply wouldn’t part with it, he had no feeling for things like that; he just happened to be attached to it because he’d had it so long. You must get Amy to tell you the story how she managed to get rid of it in the end. It’s really priceless. She’s a remarkable woman, you know; she generally gets her own way.’

‘I’ve noticed it,’ I said.

It had not taken her long to dispose of Roy when he showed signs of wishing to go over the house with the visitors. He gave me a quick look and laughed. Roy was not stupid.

‘You don’t know America as well as I do,’ he said. ‘They always prefer a live mouse to a dead lion. That’s one of the reasons why I like America.’

CHAPTER 25

When Mrs Driffield, having sent the pilgrims on their way, came back she bore under her arm a portfolio.

‘What very nice young men!’ she said. ‘I wish young men in England took such a keen interest in literature. I gave them that photo of Edward when he was dead, and they asked me for one of mine, and I signed it for them.’ Then very graciously: ‘You made a great impression on them, Roy. They said it was a real privilege to meet you.’

‘I’ve lectured in America so much,’ said Roy, with modesty.

‘Oh, but they’ve read your books. They say that what they like about them is that they’re so virile.’

The portfolio contained a number of old photographs, groups of schoolboys among whom I recognized an urchin with untidy hair as Driffield only because his widow pointed him out, Rugby fifteens with Driffield a little older, and then one of a young sailor in a jersey and a reefer jacket, Driffield when he ran away to sea.

‘Here’s one taken when he was first married,’ said Mrs Driffield.

He wore a beard and black-and-white check trousers; in his button-hole was a large white rose backed by maidenhair, and on the table beside him was a chimney-pot hat.

‘And here is the bride,’ said Mrs Driffield, trying not to smile.

Poor Rosie, seen by a country photographer over forty years ago, was grotesque. She was standing very stiffly against a background of baronial hall, holding a large bouquet; her dress was elaborately draped, pinched at the waist, and she wore a bustle. Her fringe came down to her eyes. On her head was a wreath of orange blossoms, perched high on a mass of hair, and from it was thrown back a long veil. Only I knew how lovely she must have looked.

‘She looks fearfully common,’ said Roy.

‘She was,’ murmured Mrs Driffield.

We looked at more photographs of Edward, photographs that had been taken of him when he began to be known, photographs when he wore only a moustache, and others, all the later ones, when he was clean-shaven. You saw his face grown thinner and more lined. The stubborn commonplace of the early portraits melted gradually into a weary refinement. You saw the change in him wrought by experience, thought, and achieved ambition. I looked again at the photograph of the young sailorman, and fancied that I saw in it already a trace of that aloofness that seemed to me so marked in the older ones and that I had had years before the vague sensation of in the man himself. The face you saw was a mask and the actions he performed were without significance. I had an impression that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets that the world took for Edward Driffield. I am conscious that in what I have written of him I have not presented a living man, standing on his feet, rounded with comprehensible motives and logical activities; I have not tried to: I am glad to leave that to the abler pen of Alroy Kear.

I came across the photographs that Harry Retford, the actor, had had taken of Rosie, and then a photograph of the picture that Lionel Hillier had painted of her. It gave me a pang. That was how I best remembered her. Notwithstanding the old-fashioned gown, she was alive there, and tremulous with the passion that filled her. She seemed to offer herself to the assault of love.

‘She gives you the impression of a hefty wench,’ said Roy.

‘If you like the milkmaid type,’ answered Mrs Driffield. ‘I’ve always thought she looked rather like a white nigger.’

That was what Mrs Barton Trafford had been fond of calling her, and with Rosie’s thick lips and broad nose there was indeed a hateful truth in the description. But they did not know how silvery golden her hair was, nor how golden silver her skin; they did not know her enchanting smile.

‘She wasn’t a bit like a white nigger,’ I said. ‘She was virginal like the dawn. She was like Hebe. She was like a tea rose.’

Mrs Driffield smiled and exchanged a meaning glance with Roy.

‘Mrs Barton Trafford told me a great deal about her. I don’t wish to seem spiteful, but I’m afraid I don’t think that she can have been a very nice woman.’

‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ I replied. ‘She was a very nice woman. I never saw her in a bad temper. You only had to say you wanted something for her to give it to you. I never heard her say a disagreeable thing about anyone. She had a heart of gold.’

‘She was a terrible slattern, Her house was always in a mess; you didn’t like to sit down in a chair because it was so dusty, and you dared not look in the corners. And it was the same with her person. She could never put a skirt on straight, and you’d see about two inches of petticoat hanging down on one side.’

‘She didn’t bother about things like that. They didn’t make her any the less beautiful. And she was as good as she was beautiful.’

Roy burst out laughing, and Mrs Driffield put up her hand to her mouth to hide her smile.

‘Oh, come, Mr Ashenden, that’s really going too far. After all, let’s face it, she was a nymphomaniac.’

‘I think that’s a very silly word,’ I said.

‘Well, then, let me say that she can hardly have been a very good woman to treat poor Edward as she did. Of course it was a blessing in disguise. If she hadn’t run away from him he might have had to bear that burden for the rest of his life, and with such a handicap he could never have reached the position he did. But the fact remains that she was notoriously unfaithful to him. From what I hear she was absolutely promiscuous.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.’

‘Do you call that love?’

‘Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness, it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.’

Mrs Driffield looked as though she had taken a dose of castor oil and had just been trying to get the taste of it out of her mouth by sucking a lemon.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘But then I’m bound to admit that I never understood what Edward saw in her.’

‘Did he know that she was carrying on with all sorts of people?’ asked Roy.

‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ she replied quickly.

‘You think him a bigger fool than I do, Mrs Driffield,’ I said.

‘Then why did he put up with it?’

‘I think I can tell you. You see, she wasn’t a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear, deep pool in a forest glade, into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.’

Roy laughed again, and this time Mrs Driffield without concealment smiled thinly.

‘It’s comic to hear you so lyrical,’ said Roy.

I stifled a sigh. I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine; unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

I saw that Mrs Driffield wished to ask me something. It caused her a certain embarrassment.

‘Do you think he’d have taken her back if she’d been willing to come?’

‘You knew him better than I. I should say no. I think that when he had exhausted an emotion he took no further interest in the person who had aroused it. I should say that he had a peculiar combination of strong feeling and extreme callousness.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ cried Roy. ‘He was the kindest man I ever met.’

Mrs Driffield looked at me steadily and then dropped her eyes.

‘I wonder what happened to her when she went to America,’ he asked.

‘I believe she married Kemp,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘I heard they had taken another name. Of course they couldn’t show their faces over here again.’

‘When did she die?’

‘Oh, about ten years ago.’

‘How did you hear?’ I asked.

‘From Harold Kemp, the son; he’s in some sort of business at Maidstone. I never told Edward. She’d been dead to him for many years and I saw no reason to remind him of the past. It always helps you if you put yourself in other people’s shoes, and I said to myself that if I were he I shouldn’t want to be reminded of an unfortunate episode of my youth. Don’t you think I was right?’

CHAPTER 26

Mrs Driffield very kindly offered to send me back to Blackstable in her car, but I preferred to walk. I promised to dine at Ferne Court next day, and meanwhile to write down what I could remember of the two periods during which I had been in the habit of seeing Edward Driffield. As I walked along the winding road, meeting no one by the way, I mused upon what I should say. Do they not tell us that style is the art of omission? If that is so I should certainly write a very pretty piece, and it seemed almost a pity that Roy should use it only as material. I chuckled when I reflected what a bombshell I could throw if I chose. There was one person who could tell them all they wanted to know about Edward Driffield and his first marriage, but this fact I proposed to keep to myself. They thought Rosie was dead; they erred; Rosie was very much alive.

Being in New York for the production of a play, and my arrival having been advertised to all and sundry by my manager’s energetic press representative, I received one day a letter addressed in a handwriting I knew but could not place. It was large and round, firm but uneducated. It was so familiar to me that I was exasperated not to remember whose it was. It would have been more sensible to open the letter at once, but instead I looked at the envelope and racked my brain. There are handwritings I cannot see without a little shiver of dismay, and some letters that look so tiresome that I cannot bring myself to open them for a week. When at last I tore open the envelope what I read gave me a strange feeling. It began abruptly:

I have just seen that you are in New York and

would like to see you again. I am not living in

New York any more, but Yonkers is quite close and

if you have a car you can easily do it in half an

hour. I expect you are very busy so leave it to you

to make a date. Although it is many years since

we last met I hope you have not forgotten your old

friend Rose Iggulden (formerly Driffield)

I looked at the address; it was the Albemarle, evidently an hotel or an apartment house, then there was the name of a street, and Yonkers. A shiver passed through me as though someone had walked over my grave. During the years that had passed I had sometimes thought of Rosie, but of late I had said to myself that she must surely be dead. I was puzzled for a moment by the name. Why Iggulden and not Kemp? Then it occurred to me that they had taken this name, a Kentish one too, when they fled from England. My first impulse was to make an excuse not to see her, I am always shy of seeing again people I have not seen for a long time; but then I was seized with curiosity. I wanted to see what she was like and to hear what had happened to her. I was going down to Dobb’s Ferry for the weekend, to reach which I had to pass through Yonkers, and so answered that I would come at about four on the following Saturday.

The Albemarle was a huge block of apartments, comparatively new, and it looked as though it were inhabited by persons in easy circumstance. My name was telephoned up by a Negro porter in uniform, and I was taken up in the elevator by another. I felt uncommonly nervous. The door was opened for me by a coloured maid.

‘Come right in,’ she said. ‘Mrs Iggulden’s expecting you.’

I was ushered into a living-room that served also as dining-room, for at one end of it was a square table of heavily carved oak, a dresser, and four chairs of the kind that the manufacturers in Grand Rapids would certainly describe as Jacobean. But the other end was furnished with a Louis XV suite, gilt and upholstered in pale blue damask; there were a great many small tables, richly carved and gilt, on which stood Sèvres vases with ormolu decorations and nude bronze ladies with draperies flowing as though in a howling gale that artfully concealed those parts of their bodies that decency required; and each one held at the end of a playfully outstretched arm an electric lamp. The gramophone was the grandest thing I had ever seen out of a shop window, all gilt and shaped like a sedan chair, and painted with Watteau courtiers and their ladies.

After I had waited for about five minutes a door was opened and Rosie came briskly in. She gave me both her hands.

‘Well, this is a surprise,’ she said. ‘I hate to think how many years it is since we met. Excuse me one moment.’ She went to the door and called: ‘Jessie, you can bring the tea in. Mind the water’s boiling properly.’ Then coming back: ‘The trouble I’ve had to teach that girl to make tea properly, you’d never believe.’

Rosie was at least seventy. She was wearing a very smart sleeveless frock of green chiffon, heavily diamanté, cut square at the neck and very short; it fitted like a bursting glove. By her shape I gathered that she wore rubber corsets. Her nails were blood-coloured and her eyebrows plucked. She was stout, and she had a double chin; the skin of her bosom, although she had powdered it freely, was red, and her face was red too. But she looked well and healthy and full of beans. Her hair was still abundant, but it was quite white, shingled and permanently waved. As a young woman she had had soft, naturally waving hair, and these stiff undulations, as though she had just come out of a hairdresser’s, seemed more than anything else to change her. The only thing that remained was her smile, which had still its old childlike and mischievous sweetness. Her teeth had never been very good, irregular, and of bad shape; but these now were replaced by a set of perfect evenness and snowy brilliance: they were obviously the best money could buy.

The coloured maid brought in an elaborate tea with pâté and sandwiches and cookies and candy and little knives and forks and tiny napkins. It was all very neat and smart.

‘That’s one thing I’ve never been able to do without – my tea,’ said Rosie, helping herself to a hot buttered scone. ‘It’s my best meal, really, though I know I shouldn’t eat it. My doctor keeps on saying to me: “Mrs Iggulden, you can’t expect to get your weight down if you will eat half a dozen cookies at tea.”’ She gave me a smile, and I had a sudden inkling that, notwithstanding the marcelled hair and the powder and the fat, Rosie was the same as ever. ‘But what I say is: A little of what you fancy does you good.’

I had always found her easy to talk to. Soon we were chatting away as though it were only a few weeks since we had last seen one another.

‘Were you surprised to get my letter? I put Driffield so as you should know who it was from. We took the name of Iggulden when we came to America. George had a little unpleasantness when he left Blackstable, perhaps you heard about it, and he thought in a new country he’d better start with a new name, if you understand what I mean.’

I nodded vaguely.

‘Poor George, he died ten years ago, you know.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Oh, well, he was getting on in years. He was past seventy, though you’d never have guessed it to look at him. It was a great blow to me. No woman could want a better husband than what he made me. Never a cross word from the day we married till the day he died. And I’m pleased to say he left me very well provided for.’

‘I’m glad to know that.’

‘Yes, he did very well over here. He went into the building trade, he always had a fancy for it, and he got in with Tammany. He always said the greatest mistake he ever made was not coming over here twenty years before. He liked the country from the first day he set foot in it. He had plenty of go, and that’s what you want here. He was just the sort to get on.’

‘Have you never been back to England?’

‘No, I’ve never wanted to. George used to talk about it sometimes, just for a trip, you know, but we never got down to it, and now he’s gone I haven’t got the inclination. I expect London would seem very dead and alive to me after New York. We used to live in New York, you know. I only came here after his death.’

‘What made you choose Yonkers?’

‘Well, I always fancied it. I used to say to George, when we retire we’ll go and live at Yonkers. It’s like a little bit of England to me, you know. Maidstone or Guildford, or some place like that.’

I smiled, but I understood what she meant. Notwithstanding its trams and its tooting cars, its cinemas and electric signs, Yonkers, with its winding main street, has a faint air of an English market town gone jazz.

‘Of course I sometimes wonder what’s happened to all the folks at Blackstable. I suppose they’re most of them dead by now, and I expect they think I am too.’

‘I haven’t been there for thirty years.’

I did not know then that the rumour of Rosie’s death had reached Blackstable. I dare say that someone had brought back the news that George Kemp was dead, and thus a mistake had arisen.

‘I suppose nobody knows here that you were Edward Driffield’s first wife?’

‘Oh, no; why, if they had I should have had the reporters buzzing around my apartment like a swarm of bees. You know sometimes I’ve hardly been able to help laughing when I’ve been out somewhere playing bridge and they’ve started talking about Ted’s books. They like them no end in America. I never thought so much of them myself.’

‘You never were a great novel-reader, were you?’

‘I used to like history better, but I don’t seem to have much time for reading now. Sunday’s my great day. I think the Sunday papers over here are lovely. You don’t have anything like them in England. Then, of course, I play a lot of bridge; I’m crazy about contract.’

I remembered that when as a young boy I had first meet Rosie her uncanny skill at whist had impressed me. I felt that I knew the sort of bridge player she was, quick, bold, and accurate; a good partner and a dangerous opponent.

‘You’d have been surprised at the fuss they made over here when Ted died. I knew they thought a lot of him, but I never knew he was such a big bug as all that. The papers were full of him, and they had pictures of him and Ferne Court; he always said he meant to live in that house some day. Whatever made him marry that hospital nurse? I always thought he’d marry Mrs Barton Trafford. They never had any children, did they?’

‘No.’

‘Ted would have liked to have some. It was a great blow to him that I couldn’t have any more after the first.’

‘I didn’t know you’d ever had a child,’ I said with surprise,

‘Oh, yes. That’s why Ted married me. But I had a very bad time when it came, and the doctors said I couldn’t have another. If she’d lived, poor little thing, I don’t suppose I’d ever have run away with George. She was six when she died. A dear little thing she was, and as pretty as a picture.’

‘You never mentioned her.’

‘No, I couldn’t bear to speak about her. She got meningitis, and we took her to the hospital. They put her in a private room, and they let us stay with her. I shall never forget what she went through, screaming, screaming all the time, and nobody able to do anything.’

Rosie’s voice broke.

‘Was it that death Driffield described in The Cup of Lifer

‘Yes, that’s it. I always thought it so funny of Ted. He couldn’t bear to speak of it, any more than I could, but he wrote it all down; he didn’t leave out a thing; even little things I hadn’t noticed at the time he put in, and then I remembered them. You’d think he was just heartless, but he wasn’t, he was upset just as much as I was. When we used to go home at night he’d cry like a child. Funny chap, wasn’t he?’

It was The Cup of Life that had raised such a storm of protest; and it was the child’s death and the episode that followed it that had especially brought down on Driffield’s head such virulent abuse. I remembered the description very well. It was harrowing. There was nothing sentimental in it; it did not excite the reader’s tears, but his anger rather that such cruel suffering should be inflicted on a little child. You felt that God at the Judgement Day would have to account for such things as this. It was a very powerful piece of writing. But if this incident was taken from life, was the one that followed it also? It was this that had shocked the public of the nineties, and this that the critics had condemned as not only indecent, but incredible. In The Cup of Life the husband and wife (I forget their names now) had come back from the hospital after the child’s death – they were poor people, and they lived from hand to mouth in lodgings – and had their tea. It was latish: about seven o’clock. They were exhausted by the strain of a week’s ceaseless anxiety and shattered by their grief. They had nothing to say to one another. They sat in a miserable silence. The hours passed. Then on a sudden the wife got up and going into their bedroom put on her hat.

‘I’m going out,’ she said.

‘All right.’

They lived near Victoria Station. She walked along the Buckingham Palace Road and through the park. She came into Piccadilly and went slowly toward the Circus. A man caught her eye, paused, and turned round.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

‘Good evening.’

She stopped and smiled.

‘Will you come and have a drink?’ he asked.

‘I don’t mind if I do.’

They went into a tavern in one of the side streets of Piccadilly, where harlots congregated and men came to pick them up, and they drank a glass of beer. She chatted with the stranger and laughed with him. She told him a cock-and-bull story about herself. Presently, he asked if he could go home with her; no, she said, he couldn’t do that, but they could go to an hotel. They got into a cab and drove to Bloomsbury, and there they took a room for the night. And next morning she took a bus to Trafalgar Square and walked through the park; when she got home her husband was just sitting down to breakfast. After breakfast they went back to the hospital to see about the child’s funeral.

‘Will you tell me something, Rosie?’ I asked. ‘What happened in the book after the child’s death – did that happen too?’

She looked at me for a moment doubtfully; then her lips broke into her still beautiful smile.

‘Well, it’s all so many years ago, what odds does it make? I don’t mind telling you. He didn’t get it quite right. You see it was only guesswork on his part. I was surprised that he knew as much as he did; I never told him anything.’

Rosie took a cigarette and pensively tapped its end on the table, but she did not light it.

‘We came back from the hospital just like he said. We walked back; I felt I couldn’t sit still in a cab, and I felt all dead inside me. I’d cried so much I couldn’t cry any more, and I was tired. Ted tried to comfort me, but I said: “For God’s sake shut up.” After that he didn’t say any more. We had rooms in the Vauxhall Bridge Road then, on the second floor, just a sitting-room and a bedroom, that’s why we’d had to take the poor little thing to the hospital; we couldn’t nurse her in lodgings, besides, the landlady said she wouldn’t have it, and Ted said she’d be looked after better at the hospital. She wasn’t a bad sort, the landlady; she’d been a tart, and Ted used to talk to her by the hour together. She came up when she heard us come in.

‘“How’s the little girl tonight?” she said.

‘“She’s dead,” said Ted.

‘I couldn’t say anything. Then she brought up the tea. I didn’t want anything, but Ted made me eat some ham. Then I sat at the window. I didn’t look round when the landlady came up to clear away. I didn’t want anyone to speak to me. Ted was reading a book; at least he was pretending to, but he didn’t turn the pages, and I saw the tears dropping on it. I kept on looking out of the window. It was the end of June, the twenty-eighth, and the days were long. It was just near the corner where we lived, and I looked at the people going in and out of the public-house and the trams going up and down. I thought the day would never come to an end; then all of a sudden I noticed that it was night. All the lamps were lit. There was an awful lot of people in the street. I felt so tired. My legs were like lead.

‘“Why don’t you light the gas?” I said to Ted.

‘“Do you want it?” he said.

‘“It’s no good sitting in the dark,” I said.

‘He lit the gas. He began smoking his pipe. I knew that would do him good. But I just sat and looked at the street. I don’t know what came over me. I felt that if I went on sitting in that room I’d go mad. I wanted to go somewhere where there were lights and people. I wanted to get away from Ted; no, not so much that, I wanted to get away from all that Ted was thinking and feeling. We only had two rooms. I went into the bedroom; the child’s cot was still there, but I wouldn’t look at it. I put on my hat and a veil and I changed my dress, and then I went back to Ted.

‘“I’m going out,” I said.

‘Ted looked at me. I dare say he noticed I’d got my new dress on, and perhaps something in the way I spoke made him see I didn’t want him.

‘“All right,” he said.

‘In the book he made me walk through the park, but I didn’t do that really. I went down to Victoria and I took a hansom to Charing Cross. It was only a shilling fare. Then I walked up the Strand. I’d made up my mind what I wanted to do before I came out. Do you remember Harry Retford? Well, he was acting at the Adelphi then, he had the second comedy part. Well, I went to the stage door and sent up my name. I always liked Harry Retford. I expect he was a bit unscrupulous and he was rather funny over money matters, but he could make you laugh, and with all his faults he was a rare good sort. You know he was killed in the Boer War, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t. I only knew he’d disappeared and one never saw his name on playbills; I thought perhaps he’d gone into business or something.’

‘No, he went out at once. He was killed at Ladysmith. After I’d been waiting a bit he came down and I said: “Harry, let’s go on the razzle tonight. What about a bit of supper at Romano’s?” “Not ‘alf,” he said. “You wait here, and the minute the show’s over and I’ve got my make-up off I’ll come down.” It made me feel better just to see him; he was playing a racing tout, and it made me laugh just to look at him in his check suit and his billycock hat and his red nose. Well, I waited till the end of the show, and then he came down and we walked along to Romano’s.

‘“Are you hungry?” he said to me.

‘“Starving,” I said; and I was.

‘“Let’s have the best,” he said, “and blow the expense. I told Bill Terris I was taking my best girl out to supper and I touched him for a couple of quid.”

‘“Let’s have champagne,” I said.

‘“Three cheers for the widow!” he said.

‘I don’t know if you ever went to Romano’s in the old days. It was fine. You used to see all the theatrical people and the racing men, and the girls from the Gaiety used to go there. It was the place. And the Roman. Harry knew him and he came up to our table; he used to talk in funny broken English; I believe he put it on because he knew it made people laugh. And if someone he knew was down and out he’d always lend him a fiver.

‘“How’s the kid?” said Harry.

‘“Better,” I said.

‘I didn’t want to tell him the truth. You know how funny men are; they don’t understand some things. I knew Harry would think it dreadful of me to come out to supper when the poor child was lying dead in the hospital. He’d be awfully sorry and all that, but that’s not what I wanted; I wanted to laugh.’

Rosie lit the cigarette that she had been playing with.

‘You know how when a woman is having a baby, sometimes the husband can’t stand it any more and he goes out and has another woman. And then when she finds out, and it’s funny how often she does, she kicks up no end of a fuss; she says, that the man should go and do it just then, when she’s going through hell, well, it’s the limit. I always tell her not to be silly. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her, and isn’t terribly upset, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just nerves; if he wasn’t so upset he wouldn’t think of it. I know, because that’s how I felt then.

‘When we’d finished our supper Harry said: “Well, what about it?”

‘“What about what?” I said.

‘There wasn’t any dancing in those days and there was nowhere to go.

‘“What about coming round to my flat and having a look at my photograph album?” said Harry.

‘“I don’t mind if I do,” I said.

‘He had a little bit of a flat in the Charing Cross Road, just two rooms and a bath and a kitchenette, and we drove round there, and I stayed the night.

‘When I got back next morning the breakfast was already on the table and Ted had just started. I’d made up my mind that if he said anything I was going to fly out at him. I didn’t care what happened. I’d earned my living before, and I was ready to earn it again. For two pins I’d have packed my box and left him there and then. But he just looked up as I came in.

‘“You’ve just come in time,” he said. “I was going to eat your sausage.”

‘I sat down and poured him out his tea. And he went on reading the paper. After we’d finished breakfast we went to the hospital. He never asked me where I’d been. I didn’t know what he thought. He was terribly kind to me all that time. I was miserable, you know. Somehow I felt that I just couldn’t get over it, and there was nothing he didn’t do to make it easier for me.’

‘What did you think when you read the book?’ I asked.

‘Well, it did give me a turn to see that he did know pretty well what had happened that night. What beat me was his writing it at all. You’d have thought it was the last thing he’d put in a book. You’re queer fish, you writers.’

At that moment the telephone bell rang. Rosie took up the receiver and listened.

‘Why, Mr Vanuzzi, how very nice of you to call me up! Oh, I’m pretty well, thank you. Well, pretty and well, if you like. When you’re my age you take all the compliments you can get.’

She embarked upon a conversation which, I gathered from her tone, was of a facetious and even flirtatious character. I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

Rosie put back the receiver and turned to me.

‘That was one of my beaux. I’m going to play bridge tonight, and he rang up to say he’d call round for me in his car. Of course he’s a Wop, but he’s real nice. He used to run a big grocery store down town, in New York, but he’s retired now.’

‘Have you never thought of marrying again, Rosie?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘Not that I haven’t had offers. I’m quite happy as I am. The way I look on it is this: I don’t want to marry an old man, and it would be silly at my age to marry a young man. I’ve had my time and I’m ready to call it a day.’

‘What made you run away with George Kemp?’

‘Well, I’d always liked him. I knew him long before I knew Ted, you know. Of course I never thought there was any chance of marrying him. For one thing he was married already, and then he had his position to think of. And then when he came to me one day and said that everything had gone wrong and he was bust and there’d be a warrant out for his arrest in a few days and he was going to America and would I go with him, well, what could I do? I couldn’t let him go all that way by himself, with no money perhaps, and him having been always so grand and living in his own house and driving his own trap. It wasn’t as if I was afraid of work.’

‘I sometimes think he was the only man you ever cared for,’ I suggested.

‘I dare say there’s some truth in that.’

‘I wonder what it was you saw in him.’

Rosie’s eyes travelled to a picture on the wall that for some reason had escaped my notice. It was an enlarged photograph of Lord George in a carved gilt frame. It looked as if it might have been taken soon after his arrival in America; perhaps at the time of their marriage. It was a three-quarter length. It showed him in a long frock-coat, tightly buttoned, and a tall silk hat cocked rakishly on one side of his head; there was a large rose in his button-hole; under one arm he carried a silver-headed cane, and smoke curled from a big cigar that he held in his right hand. He had a heavy moustache, waxed at the ends, a saucy look in his eye, and in his bearing an arrogant swagger. In his tie was a horseshoe in diamonds. He looked like a publican dressed up in his best to go to the Derby.

I’ll tell you,’ said Rosie. ‘He was always such a perfect gentleman.’

THE NARROW CORNER

Published by Heinemann in November 1932, the title of this novel is taken from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Short, therefore, is man’s life; and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.”

Set in the Malay Archipelago, Maugham turns to the mystery genre with this story and commentators have suggested that he was influenced by fellow author Joseph Conrad. Two of the characters had made an appearance in previous works – Dr Saunders in On a Chinese Screen and Captain Nichols in The Moon and Sixpence. Dr Saunders was based on a fellow student Maugham had befriended in his medical days and continued to keep contact with until his death forty years later. Captain Nichols was based on a real person too – a man Maugham described as a “beachcomber” and who whilst something of a loveable rogue, also smuggled contraband to South America and China. In the preface to this novel, Maugham tells how he wrote more extensively about Nichol’s exploits in The Moon and Sixpence, but then realised that Nichols and his adventures could make a novel in their own right and deleted the section at the proof stage. Twelve years later, he finally wrote Nichols a larger part in The Narrow Corner.

As a physician of some renown in eye surgery, Dr Saunders is asked to travel to Takana in the Malay archipelago to operate on the cataract of a wealthy Chinese merchant. It is a long way from his base in Fu-chou, but the trader’s sons, who are friends of the doctor’s, persuade him to make the journey. He completes the surgery and it is whilst waiting to return home that Saunders meets Captain Nichols and his passenger, Fred Blake, on the vessel the Fenton. Intrigued by the pair, Saunders arranges to travel back to Fu-chou with them. He makes himself useful during the voyage by treating Nichols’ digestive problem, and amuses himself by observing his fellow travellers and listening to the tales Nichols relates. Blake himself is also intriguing. Intelligent and moody, he had had to make himself scarce from his home in Australia for a time and teamed up with Nichols to take to the seas and travel. Nichols was also anxious to get away – in his case, from his wife.

The vessel stops at Kanda-Meira, an island, where Blake forms a close bond with Erik, a young Swedish man, but he also falls hopelessly in love with Louise. Louise is a beautiful blonde, “like an enchantress in an old tale whom men loved to their destruction.” There are other ex pats on the island, such as Frith, a former teacher that runs a nutmeg plantation, but not all the relationships are straightforward, and tragedy, personal revelation and mystery are to follow.

There are some fine descriptions of places in this novel, which must have been taken directly from observations made by Maugham on his travels. Whereas some Western authors highlight eccentricities in the people they encounter, or, as in the Fu Manchu stories, concentrate on some vague or imagined threat from a “foreign” race, Maugham has more of the travel writer about him – dispassionate whilst also, on occasion, affectionate. The novelist Gore Vidal claimed that this novel has enough homoerotic nuances to be described as a “gay novel”, but the hints are necessarily subtle bearing in mind that the story was published in 1932, when homosexual activity between men was criminalised in Britain. It has also been reported that Maugham told his nephew, Robin Maugham, that The Narrow Corner was his “queer novel”. Generally speaking the characters are likeable, even charming, but some have that hint of amorality that Maugham was so good at imbuing them with. It is without doubt a novel that will appeal to anyone who enjoys stories in exotic settings.

The first edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

Short, therefore, is man’s life,

and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells

PREFACE

The characters of fiction are strange fish. They come into your mind. They grow. They acquire suitable characteristics. An environment surrounds them. You think of them now and again. Sometimes they become an obsession so that you can think of nothing else. Then you write of them and for you they cease to be. It is odd that someone who has occupied a place, often only in the background of your thoughts, but also often in the very centre of them, who then perhaps for months has lived with you all the waking hours of the day and often in your dreams, should slip your consciousness so completely that you can remember neither his name nor what he looks like. You may even forget that he ever existed. But on occasion it does not happen like that. A character whom you had thought you were done with, a character to whom you had given small heed, does not vanish into oblivion. You find yourself thinking of him again. It is often exasperating, for you have had your will of him and he is no longer of any use to you. What is the good of his forcing his presence on you? He is a gate-crasher whom you do not want at your party. He is eating the food and drinking the wine prepared for others. You have no room for him. You must concern yourself with the people who are more important to you. But does he care? Unmindful of the decent sepulchre you have prepared for him, he goes on living obstinately; indeed, he betrays an uncanny activity, and one day to your surprise he has forced his way to the forefront of your thoughts and you cannot help but give him your attention.

The reader of this novel will find Dr Saunders in a brief sketch in On a Chinese Screen. He was devised in order to act his part in the little story called The Stranger. I had space there to draw him but in a few lines and I never expected to think of him again. There was no reason why he, rather than any other of the many persons who made an appearance in that book, should go on living. He took the matter into his own hands.

And Captain Nichols was introduced to the reader in The Moon and Sixpence. He was suggested by a beachcomber I met in the South Seas. But in his case I was conscious soon after I had finished that book that I was not finished with him. I went on thinking about him and when the manuscript came back from the typist and I was correcting errors, a little piece of his conversation struck me. I could not but think that here was the idea for a novel and the more I thought of it the more I liked it. When the proofs at last reached me I had made up my mind to write it and so cut out the passage in question. It ran as follows:

‘About other parts of his career he was fortunately more communicative. He had smuggled guns into South America and opium into China. He had been engaged in the blackbird business in the Solomon Islands and showed a scar on his forehead as the result of a wound some scoundrelly nigger had given him who did not understand his philanthropic intentions. His chief enterprise was a long cruise he had taken in the Eastern seas, and his recollection of this formed an unfailing topic of his conversation. It appeared that some man in Sydney had been unlucky enough to commit a murder and his friends were anxious to keep him out of harm’s way for a time, so Captain Nichols was approached. He was given twelve hours to buy a schooner and find a crew, and the following night, a little way down the coast, the interesting passenger was brought on board.

‘“I got a thousand pounds for that job, money down, paid in gold,” said Captain Nichols. “We had a wonderful trip. We went all through the Celebes and round about the islands of the Borneo Archipelago. They’re wonderful those islands. Talk of beauty, vegetation, you know, and all that sort of thing. Shooting whenever you fancy it. Of course we kept out of the beaten track.”

‘“What sort of man was your passenger?” I asked.

‘“Good fellow. One of the best. Fine card player too. We played écarté every day for a year and by the end of the year he’d got all the thousand pounds back again. I’m a pretty good card player myself and I kept my eyes skinned too.”

‘“Did he go back to Australia eventually?”

‘“That was the idea. He’d got some friends there and they reckoned as how they’d square his little trouble in a couple of years.”

‘“I see.”

‘“It looked as if I was going to be made the goat.”

‘Captain Nichols paused for a moment and his lively eyes seemed strangely veiled. A sort of opaqueness covered them.

‘“Poor fellow, he fell overboard one night off the coast of Java. I guess the sharks did the rest. He was a fine card player, one of the best I ever saw.” The Captain nodded reflectively. “I sold the schooner at Singapore. What with the money I got for that and the thousand pounds in gold I didn’t do so badly after all.”’

This then was the incident that gave me the idea for this novel, but it was not till twelve years later that I began to write it.

CHAPTER 1

All this happened a good many years ago.

CHAPTER 2

Dr Saunders yawned. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The day lay before him and he had nothing in the world to do. He had already seen a few patients. There was no doctor on the island and on his arrival such as had anything the matter with them seized the opportunity to consult him. But the place was not unhealthy and the ailments he was asked to cure were chronic, and he could do little; or they were trifling, and responded quickly to simple remedies. Dr Saunders had practised for fifteen years in Fu-chou and had acquired a great reputation among the Chinese for his skill in dealing with the ills that affect the eye, and it was to remove a cataract for a rich Chinese merchant that he had come to Takana. This was an island in the Malay Archipelago, a long way down, and the distance from Fu-chou was so great that at first he had refused to go. But the Chinese, Kim Ching by name, was himself a native of that city and two of his sons lived there. He was well acquainted with Dr Saunders, and on his periodical visits to Fu-chou had consulted him on his failing sight. He had heard how the doctor, by what looked like a miracle, had caused the blind to see, and when in due course he found himself in such a state that he could only tell day from night, he was prepared to trust no one else to perform the operation which he was assured would restore his sight. Dr Saunders had advised him to come to Fu-chou when certain symptoms appeared, but he had delayed, fearing the surgeon’s knife, and when at last he could no longer distinguish one object from another the long journey made him nervous and he bade his sons persuade the doctor to come to him.

Kim Ching had started life as a coolie, but by hard work and courage, aided by good luck, cunning, and unscrupulousness, he had amassed a large fortune. At this time, a man of seventy, he owned large plantations on several islands; his own schooners fished for pearl, and he traded extensively in all the products of the Archipelago. His sons, themselves middle-aged men, went to see Dr Saunders. They were his friends and patients. Two or three times a year they invited him to a grand dinner, when they gave him bird’s-nest soup, shark fins, bêche de mer, and many other delicacies; singing girls engaged at a high price entertained the company with their performances; and everyone got tight. The Chinese liked Dr Saunders. He spoke the dialect of Fu-chou with fluency. He lived, not like the other foreigners in the settlement, but in the heart of the Chinese city; he stayed there year in and year out and they had become accustomed to him. They knew that he smoked opium, though with moderation, and they knew what else there was to be known about him. He seemed to them a sensible man. It did not displease them that the foreigners in the community turned a cold shoulder on him. He never went to the club but to read the papers when the mail came in, and was never invited to dinner by them; they had their own English doctor and called in Dr Saunders only when he was away on leave. But when they had anything the matter with their eyes. they put their disapproval in their pockets and came down for treatment to the shabby little Chinese house over the river where Dr Saunders dwelt happily amid the stenches of a native city. They looked about them with distaste as they sat in what was both the doctor’s consulting-room and parlour. It was furnished in the Chinese style but for a roll-top desk and a couple of rocking-chairs much the worse for wear. On the discoloured walls Chinese scrolls, presented by grateful patients, contrasted oddly with the sheet of cardboard on which were printed in different sizes and combinations the letters of the alphabet. It always seemed to them that there hung about the house faintly the acrid scent of opium.

But this the sons of Kim Ching did not notice, and if they had it would not have incommoded them. After the usual compliments had passed and Dr Saunders had offered them cigarettes from a green tin, they set forth their business. Their father had bidden them say that now, too old and too blind to make the journey to Fu-chou, he desired Dr Saunders to come to Takana and perform the operation which he had said two years before would be necessary. What would be his fee? The doctor shook his head. He had a large practice in Fu-chou and it was out of the question for him to absent himself for any length of time. He saw no reason why Kim Ching should not come there; he could come on one of his own schooners. If that did not suit him he could get a surgeon from Macassar, who was perfectly competent to perform the operation. The sons of Kim Ching, talking very volubly, explained that their father knew that there was no one who could do the miracles that Dr Saunders could, and he was determined that no one else should touch him. He was prepared to double the sum that the doctor reckoned he could earn at Fu-chou during the period he would be away. Dr Saunders continued to shake his head. Then the two brothers looked at one another and the elder took out from an inner pocket a large and shabby wallet of black leather bulging with the notes of the Chartered Bank. He spread them out before the doctor, a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars; the doctor smiled and his sharp. bright eyes twinkled: the Chinese continued to spread out the notes; the two brothers were smiling too, ingratiatingly, but they keenly watched the doctor’s face and presently they were conscious of a change in his expression. He did not move. His eyes kept their tolerant good humour, but they felt in their bones that his interest was aroused. Kim Ching’s elder son paused and looked inquiringly into his face.

‘I can’t leave all my patients for three solid months,’ said the doctor. ‘Let Kim Ching get one of the Dutch doctors from Macassar or Amboyna. There’s a fellow at Amboyna who’s quite all right.’

The Chinese did not reply. He put more notes on the table. They were hundred-dollar bills and he arranged them in little packets of ten. The wallet bulged less. He laid the packets side by side and at last there were ten of them.

‘Stop,’ said the doctor. ‘That’ll do.’

CHAPTER 3

It was a complicated journey. From Fu-chou he went on a Chinese vessel to Manila in the Philippines, and from there, after waiting a few days, by cargo boat to Macassar. Thence he took passage on the Dutch ship that ran every other month to Merauke in New Guinea, stopping at a great many places on the way, and thus at last landed at Takana. He travelled with a Chinese boy who acted as his servant, gave anaesthetics when required, and made his pipes when he smoked opium. Dr Saunders performed a successful operation on Kim Ching, and now there was nothing for him to do but sit and twiddle his thumbs till the Dutch ship called on her way back from Merauke. The island was fairly large, but it was isolated and the Dutch Régisseur visited it only at intervals. The government was represented by a half-caste Javanese, who spoke no English, and a few policemen. The town consisted of a single street of shops. Two or three were owned by Arabs from Baghdad, but the rest by Chinese. There was a small rest-house about ten minutes’ walk from the town which the Régisseur inhabited on his periodical visits, and here Dr Saunders had installed himself. The path that led to it ran on through plantations for three miles, and then was lost in the virgin jungle.

When the Dutch ship came in, there was a certain animation. The captain, one or two of the officers, and the chief engineer came ashore, and the passengers if there were any, and they sat in Kim Ching’s store and drank beer, but they never stayed for more than three hours and when they got back into their boats and rowed away the little town went to sleep again. It was in the doorway of this store that Dr Saunders sat now. There was a rattan awning that protected it from the sun, but in the street the sun beat down with a harsh glare. A mangy dog sniffed about some offal over which a swarm of flies was buzzing and looked for something to eat. Two or three chickens scratched about in the roadway and one, squatting, ruffled her feathers in the dust. Outside the shop opposite, a naked Chinese child with a distended belly was trying to make a sand castle out of the dust in the road. Flies flew about him, settling on him, but he did not mind them, and intent on his game did not try to brush them away. Then a native passed, with nothing on but a discoloured sarong, and he carried two baskets of sugar-cane suspended to each end of a pole balanced on one shoulder. With his shuffling feet he kicked up the dust as he walked. Inside the store a clerk, hunched over a table, was busy with brush and ink writing some document in Chinese characters. A coolie sitting on the floor was rolling cigarettes and smoking them one after the other. No one came in to buy. Dr Saunders asked for a bottle of beer. The clerk left his writing and going to the back of the store took a bottle out of a pail of water and brought it along with a glass to the doctor. It was pleasantly cool.

Time hung somewhat heavily on the doctor’s hands, but he was not discontented. He was able to amuse himself with little things, and the mangy dog, the thin chickens, the pot-bellied child all diverted him. He drank his bottle of beer slowly.

CHAPTER 4

He looked up. He gave a cry of surprise. For there, strolling towards him, down the middle of the dusty road, were two white men. No ship was in and he wondered where they had come from. They walked idly, looking to right and left of them, like strangers visiting the island for the first time. They were shabbily dressed in trousers and singlets. Their topis were grimy. They came up, saw him sitting in the open shop and stopped. One of them addressed him.

‘Is this Kim Ching’s.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he here?’

‘No, he’s sick.’

‘Bad luck. I suppose we can get a drink.’

‘Surely.’

The speaker turned to his companion.

‘Come on in.’

They entered.

‘What’ll you have?’ asked Dr Saunders.

‘A bottle of beer for me.’

‘Same here,’ said the other.

The doctor gave the order to the coolie. He brought bottles of beer and chairs for the strangers to sit on. One of them was middle-aged, with a sallow, lined face, white hair, and a scrub of white moustache. He was of the middle height, spare, and when he spoke he showed hideously decayed teeth. His eyes were cunning and restless. They were small and pale and set somewhat close together, which gave him a foxy look, but his manner was ingratiating.

‘Where have you come from?’ asked the doctor.

‘We just come in on a lugger. From Thursday Island.’

‘A goodish way. Have fine weather?’

‘Couldn’t want better. A nice breeze and no sea to speak of. Nichols’ my name. Captain Nichols. Maybe you’ve ‘eard of me.’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘I been sailin’ these seas for thirty years. There’s not an island in the Archipelago I ain’t put in at one time or another. I’m pretty well known around ‘ere. Kim Ching knows me. Known me for twenty years.’

‘I’m a stranger myself,’ said the doctor.

Captain Nichols looked at him, and though his face was open and his expression cordial, you had a feeling that there was suspicion in his glance.

‘I seem to know your face,’ he said. ‘I could swear I seen you somewhere.’

Dr Saunders smiled but did not volunteer any information about himself. Captain Nichols screwed up his eyes in the effort to remember where he had run across the little man. He scanned his face with attention. The doctor was short, only just over five foot six, and slight, but with something of a paunch. His hands were soft and podgy, but they were small, with tapering fingers, and if he had been vain it was possible to suppose that once upon a time he had been not a little pleased with them. They had still a sort of well-bred elegance. He was very ugly, with a snub nose and a large mouth; and when he laughed, which he did often, you saw big, yellow, uneven teeth. Under his bushy grey eyebrows his green eyes gleamed bright, amusing, and clever. He was not very closely shaved and his skin was blotchy; he had a high colour which over the cheekbones spread into a purple flush. It suggested some long-standing affection of the heart. His hair must once have been thick and black and coarse, but now it was nearly white and on the crown very thin. But his ugliness, far from being repellent, was attractive. When he laughed his skin puckered round the eyes, giving his face infinite vivacity, and his expression was charged with an extreme but not ill-natured malice. You would have taken him then for a buffoon, but for the shrewdness that gleamed from his shining eyes. His intelligence was obvious. And though merry and bright, fond of a joke and amused both at his own and at others’, you had an impression that even in the abandon of laughter he never quite gave himself away. He seemed to be on his guard. For all his chattiness and however hearty his manner, you were conscious (if you were observant and did not allow yourself to be taken in by his superficial frankness) that those merry, laughing eyes were watching, weighing, judging, and forming an opinion. He was not a man to take things at their face value.

Since the doctor did not speak Captain Nichols went on:

‘This is Fred Blake,’ he said, with a gesture of his thumb towards his companion.

Dr Saunders nodded.

‘Makin’ a long stay?’ continued the captain.

‘I’m waiting for the Dutch packet.’

‘North or south?’

‘North.’

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘I didn’t mention it. Saunders.’

‘I’ve knocked about too long in the Indian Ocean to ask questions,’ said the captain, with his ingratiating laugh. ‘Ask no questions and you won’t be told no lies. Saunders? I’ve known a lot of chaps as answered to that name, but whether it was theirs or not by rights nobody knew but theirselves. What’s the matter with old Kim Ching? Fine old sport. I was lookin’ forward to ‘avin’ a bit of a chin-wag with ‘im.’

‘His eyes went back on him. He’s had cataract.’

Captain Nichols sat up and held out his hand.

‘Doc Saunders. I knew I’d seen your face. Fu-chou. I was up there seven years ago.’

The doctor took the proffered hand. Captain Nichols turned to his friend.

‘Everyone knows Doc Saunders. Best doctor in the Far East. Eyes. That’s his line. I ‘ad a pal once, everyone said ‘e’d go blind, nothing could stop it, ‘e went to see the doc and in a month ‘e could see as well as you or me. The Chinks just swear by him. Doc Saunders. Well, this is a joyful surprise. I thought you never left Fu-chou from one year’s end to the other.’

‘Well, I have now.’

‘It’s a bit of luck for me, this. You’re the very man I wanted to meet.’ Captain Nichols leaned forward and his cunning eyes fixed the doctor with an intensity in which there was something very like menace. ‘I suffer from dyspepsia something awful.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ muttered Fred Blake.

It was the first time he had spoken since they sat down and Dr Saunders turned to look at him. He slouched in his chair, gnawing his fingers, in an attitude that suggested boredom and ill-humour. He was a tall young man, slight but wiry, with curly, dark brown hair and large blue eyes. He did not look more than twenty. In his dirty singlet and dungarees he looked loutish, an unlicked cub, thought the doctor, and there was a surliness in his expression that was somewhat disagreeable; but he had a straight nose and a well-formed mouth.

‘Leave off bitin’ your nails, Fred,’ said the captain. ‘Disgustin’ ‘abit, I call it.’

‘You and your dyspepsia,’ retorted the young man, with a chuckle.

When he smiled you saw that he had exquisite teeth. They were very white, small, and of a perfect shape; they were so unexpected a grace in that sombre face, their beauty was so dazzling, that you were taken aback. His sulky smile had great sweetness.

‘You can laugh because you don’t know what it is,’ said Captain Nichols. ‘I’m a martyr to it. Don’t say I’m not careful what I eat. I’ve tried everything. Nothin’ does me any good. This beer now. Do you think I shan’t suffer for it? You know just as well as I do that I shall.’

‘Go on. Tell the doctor all about it,’ said Blake.

Captain Nichols asked nothing better. He proceeded to narrate the history of his malady. He described his symptoms with a scientific accuracy. There was not a revolting detail that he omitted to mention. He enumerated the doctors he had consulted and the patent remedies he had tried. Dr Saunders listened in silence, an expression of sympathetic interest on his face, and occasionally nodded his head.

‘If there’s anyone as can do anythin’ for me it’s you, doc,’ said the captain earnestly. ‘They don’t ‘ave to tell me you’re clever, I can see that for meself.’

‘I can’t work miracles. You can’t expect anyone to do much in a minute for a chronic condition like yours.’

‘No, I don’t ask that, but you can prescribe for me, can’t you? There’s nothin’ I won’t try. What I’d like you to do is to make a thorough examination of me, see?’

‘How long are you staying here?’

‘Our time’s our own.’

‘But we’re pushing off as soon as we’ve got what we want,’ said Blake.

A quick look passed between the two men. Dr Saunders noticed it. He did not know why he had an impression that there was something strange in it.

‘What made you put in here?’ he asked.

Fred Blake’s face once more grew sullen, and when the doctor put his question he threw him a glance. Dr Saunders read suspicion in it, and perhaps fear. He wondered. It was the captain who replied.

‘I’ve known Kim Ching donkey’s years. We wanted some stores, and we thought it wouldn’t do us any ‘arm to fill up our tank.’

‘Are you trading?’

‘In a manner of speakin’. If anythin’ comes along we ain’t goin’ to miss a chance. Who would?’

‘What cargo are you carrying?’

‘A bit of everything.’

Captain Nichols smiled genially, showing his decayed, discoloured teeth, and he looked strangely shifty and dishonest. It occurred to Dr Saunders that perhaps they were smuggling opium.

‘You’re not going to Macassar by any chance?’

‘We might be.’

‘What’s that paper?’ said Fred Blake suddenly, pointing to one that lay on the counter.

‘Oh, that’s three weeks old. We brought it down in the ship I came on.’

‘Have they got any Australian papers here?’

‘No.’

Dr Saunders chuckled at the notion.

‘Is there any Australian news in that paper?’

‘It’s Dutch. I don’t know Dutch. In any case, you’d have had later news than that on Thursday Island.’

Blake frowned a little. The captain grinned craftily.

‘This ain’t exactly the hub of the universe, Fred,’ he sniggered.

‘Don’t you ever have any English papers here at all?’ asked Blake.

‘Now and then a stray copy of the Hong Kong paper finds it way here or a Straits Times, but they’re a month old.’

‘Don’t they ever get any news?’

‘Only what the Dutch ship brings.’

‘Haven’t they got a cable or a wireless?’

‘No.’

‘If a man wanted to keep out of the way of the police I should think he’d be pretty safe here,’ said Captain Nichols.

‘For some time, anyway,’ agreed the doctor.

‘Have another bottle of beer, doc?’ asked Blake.

‘No, I don’t think I will. I’m going back to the rest-house. If you two fellows would like to come and dine there tonight, I can get you some sort of a meal.’

He addressed himself to Blake because he had a feeling that his impulse would be to refuse, but it was Captain Nichols who answered.

‘That’d be fine. A change from the lugger.’

‘You don’t want to be bothered with us,’ said Blake.

‘No bother. I’ll meet you here about six. We’ll have a few drinks and then go up.’

The doctor rose, nodded and left.

CHAPTER 5

But he did not go immediately to the rest-house. The invitation he had so cordially given to these strangers was due to no sudden urge of hospitality, but to a notion that had come into his head while he was talking to them. Now that he had left Fu-chou and his practice, he was in no hurry to get back, and he had made up his mind to make a trip to Java, his first holiday for many years, before he returned to work. It occurred to him that if they would give him a passage on the lugger, if not to Macassar, at least to one of the more frequented islands, he could then find a steamer to take him in the direction he wished to go. He had been resigned to spending another three weeks or so on Takana when it seemed impossible to get away; but Kim Ching needed his services no longer, and now that a chance offered he was seized with an immense eagerness to profit by it. The thought of staying where he was for so long with nothing to do suddenly became intolerable to him. He walked down the broad street, it was less than half a mile long, till he came to the sea. There was no quay. Coconuts grew to the water’s edge, and among them were the huts of the natives of the island. Children were playing about and gaunt pigs rooted among the piles. There was a straight line of silver beach with a few prahus and dug-outs drawn up on it. The coral sand glistened under the fiery sun, and even with shoes on it was hot under the soles of your feet. Hideous crabs scuttled out of your way as you walked. One of the prahus lay bottom up and three dark-skinned Malays in sarongs were working on it. A reef a few hundred yards out formed a lagoon, and in this the water was clear and deep. A small crowd of boys were romping in the shallow. One of Kim Ching’s schooners lay at anchor and not far from it was the stranger’s lugger. She was very shabby beside Kim Ching’s trim craft and badly needed a coat of paint. She seemed very small to rove the trackless ocean, and Dr Saunders had a moment’s hesitation. He looked up at the sky. It was cloudless. No wind stirred the leaves of the coconut trees. Drawn up on the beach was a squat little dinghy, and he supposed it was in this that the two men had rowed ashore. He could see no crew on the lugger.

Having had a good look, he turned back and strolled along to the rest-house. He changed into the Chinese trousers and silk tunic in which from long habit he felt most at ease, and taking a book went out to sit on the veranda. Fruit trees grew round about the rest-house, and opposite, on the other side of the path, was a handsome grove of coconuts. They rose, very tall and straight, in their regular lines, and the bright sun, piercing the leaves, splashed the ground with a fantastic pattern of yellow light. Behind him, in the cookhouse, the boy was preparing tiffin.

Dr Saunders was not a great reader. He seldom opened a novel. Interested in character, he liked books that displayed the oddities of human nature, and he had read over and over again Pepys and Boswell’s Johnson, Florio’s Montaigne, and Hazlitt’s essays. He liked old travel books, and he could peruse with pleasure the accounts in Hakluyt of countries he had never been to. He had at home a considerable library of the books written about China by the early missionaries. He read neither for information nor to improve his mind, but sought in books occasion for reverie. He read with a sense of humour peculiar to himself, and was able to get out of the narratives of missionary enterprise an amount of demure fun which would have much surprised the authors. He was a quiet man, of an agreeable discourse, but not one to force his conversation on you, and he could enjoy his little joke without feeling a desire to impart it to another.

He held in his hand now a volume of Père Huc’s travels, but he read with divided attention. His thoughts were occupied with the two strangers who had so unexpectedly appeared on the island. Dr Saunders had known so many thousands of people in his Eastern life that he had no difficulty in placing Captain Nichols. He was a bad hat. By his accent he was English, and if he had knocked about the China seas for so many years it was likely that he had got into some trouble in England. Dishonesty was stamped on his mean and crafty features. He could not have prospered greatly if he was no more now than skipper of this shabby little lugger, and Dr Saunders let a sigh, an ironical sigh, fall on the still air as he reflected how seldom it was that the crook received an adequate return for his labours. But of course the probability was that Captain Nichols preferred dirty work to clean. He was the sort of man who was willing to put his hand to anything. You would not trust him out of your sight. You could rely on him for nothing but to do you down. He had said he knew Kim Ching. It was probable that he was more often out of a job than in one, and he would have been glad enough to take employment under a Chinese owner. He was the kind of fellow you would engage if you had something shady to do, and it might very well be that at one time he had been skipper of one of Kim Ching’s schooners. The conclusion Dr Saunders arrived at was that he rather liked Captain Nichols. He was taken by the skipper’s genial friendliness; it gave a pleasant savour to his roguery, and the dyspepsia he suffered from added a comic note that pleased. The doctor was glad that he would see him again that evening.

Dr Saunders took an interest in his fellows that was not quite scientific and not quite human. He wanted to receive entertainment from them. He regarded them dispassionately and it gave him just the same amusement to unravel the intricacies of the individual as a mathematician might find in the solution of a problem. He made no use of the knowledge he obtained. The satisfaction he got from it was aesthetic, and if to know and judge men gave him a subtle sense of superiority he was unconscious of it. He had fewer prejudices than most men. The sense of disapproval was left out of him. Many people are indulgent to the vices they practise, and have small patience with those they have no mind to; some, broader minded, can accept them all in a comprehensive toleration, a toleration, however, that is more often theoretical than practical; but few can suffer manners different from their own without distaste. It is seldom that a man is shocked by the thought that someone has seduced another’s wife, and it may be that he preserves his equanimity when he knows that another has cheated at cards or forged a cheque (though this is not easy when you are yourself the victim), but it is hard for him to make a bosom friend of one who drops his aitches, and almost impossible if he scoops up gravy with his knife. Dr Saunders lacked this sensitiveness. Unpleasant table manners affected him as little as a purulent ulcer. Right and wrong were no more to him than good weather and bad weather. He took them as they came. He judged but he did not condemn. He laughed.

He was very easy to get on with. He was much liked. But he had no friends. He was an agreeable companion, but neither sought intimacy nor gave it. There was no one in the world to whom he was not at heart indifferent. He was self-sufficient. His happiness depended not on persons but on himself. He was selfish, but since he was at the same time shrewd and disinterested, few knew it and none was inconvenienced by it. Because he wanted nothing, he was never in anybody’s way. Money meant little to him, and he never much minded whether patients paid him or not. They thought him philanthropic. Since time was as unimportant to him as cash, he was just as willing to doctor them as not. It amused him to see their ailments yield to treatment, and he continued to find entertainment in human nature. He confounded persons and patients. Each was like another page in an interminable book, and that there were so many repetitions oddly added to the interest. It was curious to see how all these people, white, yellow, and brown, responded to the critical situations of humanity, but the sight neither touched his heart nor troubled his nerves. Death was, after all, the greatest event in every man’s life, and he never ceased to find interest in the way he faced it. It was with a little thrill that he sought to pierce into a man’s consciousness, looking through the eyes frightened, defiant, sullen, or resigned, into the soul confronted for the first time with the knowledge that its race was run, but the thrill was merely one of curiosity. His sensibility was unaffected. He felt neither sorrow nor pity. He only faintly wondered how it was that what was so important to one could matter so little to another. And yet his manner was full of sympathy. He knew exactly what to say to alleviate the terror or pain of the moment, and he left no one but fortified, consoled and encouraged. It was a game that he played, and it gave him satisfaction to play it well. He had great natural kindliness, but it was a kindliness of instinct, which betokened no interest in the recipient: he would come to the rescue if you were in a fix, but if there was no getting you out of it would not bother about you further. He did not like to kill living things, and he would neither shoot nor fish. He went so far, for no reason other than that he felt that every creature had a right to life, that he preferred to brush away a mosquito or a fly than to swat it. Perhaps he was an intensely logical man. It could not be denied that he led a good life (if at least you did not confine goodness to conformity with your own sensual inclinations), for he was charitable and kindly, and he devoted his energies to the alleviation of pain, but if motive counts for righteousness, then he deserved no praise; for he was influenced in his actions neither by love, pity, nor charity.

CHAPTER 6

Dr Saunders sat down to tiffin and having finished went into the bedroom and threw himself on his bed. But it was very hot and he could not sleep. He wondered what the connexion was between Captain Nichols and Fred Blake. Notwithstanding his grimy dungarees, the young man did not give the impression of being a sailor; the doctor did not quite know why, and for want of a better reason surmised that it was because he had not got the sea in his eyes. He was hard to place. He spoke with something of an Australian accent, but he was evidently not a rough-neck, and he might have had some education: his manners seemed quite good. Perhaps his people had a business of sorts in Sydney, and he was used to a comfortable home and decent surroundings. But why he was sailing these lonely seas on a pearling lugger with a scoundrel like Captain Nichols was mysterious. Of course the pair of them might be in partnership, but what traffic they were engaged in remained to be seen. Dr Saunders was inclined to believe that it was not a very honest one, and whatever it was, that Fred Blake would get the thin end of the stick.

Though Dr Saunders was stark naked, the sweat poured off him. Between his legs was a Dutch wife. This is the bolster which they use in those parts for coolness’ sake, and many grow so accustomed to it that even in temperate climes they cannot sleep without it; but it was strange to the doctor and it irked him. He threw it aside and rolled over on his back. In the garden round the rest-house, in the coconut grove opposite, a myriad insects were making noise, and the insistent din, which generally fell unheard on ears benumbed, now throbbed on his nerves with a racket to awake the dead. He gave up the attempt to sleep, and wrapping a sarong round him went out again on to the veranda. It was as hot there as within and as airless. He was weary. His mind was restless, but it worked perversely, and thoughts jerked through his brain like the misfirings of a defective carburettor. He tried to cool himself with a bath, but it brought no refreshment to his spirit. It remained hot, listless, and uneasy. The veranda was intolerable, and he threw himself once more on his bed. The air under the mosquito curtains seemed to stand still. He could not read, he could not think, he could not rest. The hours were leaden-footed.

He was aroused at last by a voice on the steps, and going out he found there a messenger from Kim Ching, who asked him to go and see him. The doctor had paid his patient a professional visit that morning, and there was nothing much more he could do for him, but he put on his clothes and sallied forth. Kim Ching had heard of the lugger’s arrival, and was curious to know what the strangers wanted. He had been told that the doctor had spent an hour with them that morning. He did not much care for unknown persons to come to the island, so much of which belonged to him. Captain Nichols had sent a message asking to see him, but the Chinese had replied that he was too sick to receive anyone. The captain claimed acquaintance with him, but Kim Ching had no recollection of him. An accurate description of the man had already reached him, and the doctor’s account added nothing to help him. It appeared that they were staying two or three days.

‘They told me they were sailing at dawn,’ said Dr Saunders. He reflected for a moment. ‘Perhaps they changed their plans when I told them there was no cable or wireless on the island.’

‘They’ve got nothing in the lugger but ballast,’ said Kim Ching. ‘Stones.’

‘No cargo at all?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Opium?’

Kim Ching shook his head. The doctor smiled.

‘Perhaps it’s just a pleasure trip. The skipper’s got stomach trouble. He wants me to do something for him.’

Kim Ching gave an exclamation. That gave him the clue. He remembered. He had had Captain Nichols on one of his schooners, eight or ten years before, and had fired him. There had been some dispute, but Kim Ching did not go into any detail.

‘He’s a bad man,’ said Kim Ching. ‘I could have had him put in prison.’

Dr Saunders guessed that the transaction, whatever it was, had been far from straight, and it might well be that Captain Nichols, knowing Kim Ching would not venture to prosecute, had taken more than his fair share of the profits. There was an ugly look in the Chinaman’s face. He knew all about Captain Nichols now. He had lost his certificate, there had been some trouble with an insurance company, and since then he had been glad to take employment with owners who were not particular about such things. He had been a heavy drinker till his stomach went back on him. He picked up a living as best he could. He was often on the beach. But he was a first-rate seaman, and he got jobs. He did not keep them long, because it was impossible for him to go straight.

‘You tell him he more better get out of here pletty damn quick,’ said Kim Ching, to finish, breaking into English.

CHAPTER 7

Night had fallen when Dr Saunders sauntered down once more to Kim Ching’s store. Nichols and Blake were sitting there drinking beer. He took them up to the rest-house. The sailor was full of small talk, of a facetious nature, but Fred remained sullen and silent. Dr Saunders was conscious that he came against his will. When he entered the living-room of the bungalow he gave a quick, suspicious look round as though he awaited he did not quite know what, and when the house ghekko gave its sudden harsh cry he started suddenly.

‘It’s only a lizard,’ said Dr Saunders.

‘It made me jump.’

Dr Saunders called Ah Kay, his boy, and told him to bring the whisky and some glasses.

‘I daren’t drink it,’ said the skipper. ‘It’s poison to me. How would you like never to be able to eat a thing or drink a thing, without knowin’ you was goin’ to suffer for it?’

‘Let me see what I can do for you,’ said Dr Saunders.

He went to his medicine chest and mixed something in a glass. He gave it to the captain and told him to swallow it.

‘Maybe that’ll help you to eat your dinner in comfort.’

He poured out whisky for himself and Fred Blake and turned on the gramophone. The young man listened to the record and his expression grew more alert; when it was finished he put on another himself and, slightly swaying to the rhythm, stood looking at the instrument. He stole one or two glances at the doctor, but the doctor pretended not to notice him. Captain Nichols, his shifty eyes never still, carried on the conversation. It consisted chiefly of inquiries about this man and that in Fu-chou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and descriptions of the drunken parties he had been on in those parts. Ah Kay brought in the dinner and they sat down.

‘I enjoy my food,’ said the captain. ‘Not fallals, mind you. I like it good and I like it simple. Not a big eater. I never been that. A cut off the joint and a couple of veges, with a bit of cheese to finish up with, and I’m satisfied. You couldn’t eat anything simpler than that could you? And then twenty minutes after – as regular as clockwork – agony. I tell you life ain’t worth livin’ when you suffer like what I do. D’you ever know old George Vaughan? One of the best. He was on one of the Jardine boats, used to go up to Amoy, he ‘ad dyspepsia so bad he ‘anged himself. I shouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t, too, one of these days.’

Ah Kay was not a bad cook, and Fred Blake did full justice to the dinner.

‘This is a treat after what we’ve had to eat on the lugger.’

‘Most of it comes out of a tin, but the boy flavours it up. The Chinese are natural-born cooks.’

‘It’s the best dinner I’ve had for five weeks.’

Dr Saunders remembered that they had said they had come from Thursday Island. With the fine weather they admitted that could not have taken them more than a week.

‘What sort of a place is Thursday Island?’ he asked.

It was the captain who answered.

‘Hell of a place. Nothin’ but goats. The wind blows six months one way and then it blows six months the other. Gets on your nerves.’

Captain Nichols spoke with a twinkle in his eyes as though he saw what was at the back of the doctor’s simple question and was amused at the easy way he tackled it.

‘Do you live there?’ Dr Saunders asked the young man, a guileless smile on his lips.

‘No, Brisbane,’ he answered abruptly.

‘Fred’s got a bit of capital,’ said Captain Nichols, ‘and ‘e thought he’d like to ‘ave a look-see on the chance ‘e might find somethin’ in these parts ‘e’d like to invest it in. My idea, that was. You see, I know all these islands inside out, and what I say is, there’s a rare lot of chances for a young fellow with a bit of capital. That’s what I’d do if I ‘ad a bit of capital, buy a plantation in one of these islands.’

‘Do a bit of pearl fishing, too,’ said Blake.

‘You can get all the labour you want. Native labour’s the only thing. Then you sit back and let other people work for you. Fine life, too. Grand thing for a young fellow.’

The skipper’s shifty eyes, for a moment still, were fixed on Dr Saunders’ bland face, and it was not hard to see that he was watching the effect of what he was saying. The doctor felt that they had concocted the story between them that afternoon. And when the skipper saw that Dr Saunders did not swallow it, he grinned cheerfully. It was as if he took so much delight in lying that it would have spoilt it for him if you had accepted it as the truth.

‘That’s why we put in ‘ere,’ he went on. ‘There’s not much about these islands that old Kim Ching don’t know, and it struck me we might do business with ‘im. I told the boy in the store to tell the old fellow I was ‘ere.’

‘I know. He told me.’

‘You seen ‘im, then? Did ‘e say anythin’ about me?’

‘Yes, he said you’d better get out of here pretty damn quick.’

‘Why, what’s ‘e got against me?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘We ‘ad a bit of a disagreement, I know that, but that was donkey’s years ago. There’s no sense in ‘oldin’ a thing up against a fellow all that while. Forgive and forget, I say.’

Captain Nichols had the unusual trait that he could play a mean trick on a man without bearing him any ill feeling afterwards, and he could not understand that the injured party might continue to harbour malice. Dr Saunders noticed the idiosyncrasy with amused detachment.

‘My impression is that Kim Ching has a good memory,’ he said.

They talked of one thing and another.

‘Do you know,’ said the captain suddenly, ‘I don’t believe I’m goin’ to ‘ave dyspepsia tonight. Say, what was that stuff you gave me?’

‘A little preparation that I’ve found useful in chronic cases like yours.’

‘I wish you’d give me some more of it.’

‘It mightn’t do you any good next time. What you want is treatment.’

‘Do you think you could cure me?’

The doctor saw his opportunity coming.

‘I don’t know about that. If I could watch you for a few days and try one or two things, I might be able to do something for you.’

‘I’ve got a good mind to stay on ‘ere for a bit and let you see. We’re in no ‘urry.’

‘What about Kim Ching?’

‘What can ‘e do?’

‘Come off it,’ said Fred Blake. ‘We don’t want to get into any trouble here. We’re sailing tomorrow.’

‘It’s all right for you to talk. You don’t suffer like what I do. Look ‘ere, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go and see the old devil tomorrow and find out what ‘e’s got against me.’

‘We’re sailing tomorrow,’ repeated the other.

‘We’re sailin’ when I say we sail.’

The two men looked at one another for an instant. The skipper smiled with his usual foxy geniality, but Fred Blake frowned with sullen anger. Dr Saunders interrupted the quarrel that was in the air.

‘I don’t suppose you know Chinamen as well as I do, captain, but you must know something about them. If they’ve got their knife into you they’re not going to let you off for the asking.’

The skipper thumped his fist on the table.

‘Well, it was only a matter of a couple of ‘undred quid. Old Kim’s as rich as be damned. What difference can that make to ‘im? He’s an old crook, anyway.’

‘Have you never noticed that nothing hurts the feelings of a crook so much as to have another crook do the dirty on him?’

Captain Nichols wore a moody scowl. His little greenish eyes, set too close together, seemed to converge as he shot a bitter glance into space. He looked a very ugly customer. But at the doctor’s remark he threw back his head and laughed.

‘That’s a good one. I like you, doc, you don’t mind what you say, do you? Well, it takes all sorts to make a world. Keep your eyes skinned and let the devil take the ‘indmost, that’s what I say. And when you see a chance of makin’ a bit you’re a fool if you don’t take it. Of course everyone makes a mistake now and again. But you can’t always tell beforehand ‘ow things are goin’ to turn out.’

‘If the doctor gives you some more of that stuff and tells you what to do, you’ll be all right,’ said Blake.

He had recovered his temper.

‘No, I won’t do that,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘But I’ll tell you what: I’m fed up with this God-forsaken island and I want to get out; if you’ll give me a passage on the lugger to Timor or Macassar or Surabaya, you shall have all the treatment you want.’

‘That’s an idea,’ said Captain Nichols.

‘A damned rotten one,’ cried the other.

‘Why?’

‘We can’t carry passengers.’

‘We can sign ‘im on.’

‘There’s no accommodation.’

‘I guess the doctor ain’t particular.’

‘Not a bit. I’ll bring my own food and drink. I’ll get a lot of canned stuff at Kim Ching’s, and he’s got plenty of beer.’

‘Nothing doing,’ said Blake.

‘Look ‘ere, young feller-me-lad, who gives orders on this boat, you or me?’

‘Well, if it comes down to brass tacks, I do.’

‘Put that out of your ‘ead at once, my lad. I’m skipper and what I say goes.’

‘Whose boat is it?’

‘You know very well whose boat it is.’

Dr Saunders watched them curiously. His bright quick eyes missed nothing. The captain had lost all his geniality and his face was mottled with red. The youth bore a look of thunder. His fists were clenched and his head thrust forward.

‘I won’t have him on the boat, and that’s that,’ he cried.

‘Oh, come on,’ said the doctor, ‘it’s not going to hurt you. It’ll only be for five or six days. Be a sport. If you won’t take me I shall have to stay here God knows how long.’

‘That’s your look out.’

‘What have you got against me?’

‘That’s my business.’

Dr Saunders gave him a questioning glance. Blake was not only angry, he was nervous. His handsome, sullen face was pale. It was curious that he should be so disinclined to let him come on the lugger. In these seas people made no bones about that sort of thing. Kim Ching had said they carried no cargo, but it might be the sort of cargo that did not take up much space and was easily hidden. Neither morphine or cocaine took up a great deal of room, and there was a lot of money to be made if you could take them to the right places.

‘You’d be doing me a great favour,’ he said gently.

‘I’m sorry; I don’t want to seem a rotten sport, but me and Nichols are here on business, and we can’t go out of our way to land a passenger in some place we don’t want to go to.’

‘I’ve known the doctor for twenty years,’ said Nichols. ‘He’s all right.’

‘You never set eyes on him till this morning.’

‘I know all about ‘im.’ The captain grinned, showing his broken, discoloured little teeth, and Dr Saunders reflected that he should have them out. ‘And if what I ‘ear is true ‘e ain’t got much on any of us.’

He gave the doctor a shrewd look. It was interesting to see the hardness behind his genial smile. The doctor bore the glance without flinching. You could not have told if the shaft had gone home or if he had no notion of what the skipper was talking about.

‘I don’t bother myself much with other people’s concerns,’ he smiled.

‘Live and let live, I say,’ said the captain, with the amiable toleration of the scamp.

‘When I say no, I mean no,’ answered the young man obstinately.

‘Oh, you make me tired,’ said Nichols. ‘There ain’t nothin’ to be scared about.’

‘Who says I’m scared?’

‘I do.’

‘I’ve got nothing to be scared about.’

They flung the short sentences at one another quickly. Their exasperation was increasing. Dr Saunders wondered what the secret was that lay between them. It had evidently more to do with Fred Blake than with Nichols. For once the rascal had nothing on his conscience. He reflected that Captain Nichols was not the sort of man who would make it easy for anyone whose secret he knew. He could not exactly tell why, but he had an impression that, whatever it was, Captain Nichols did not know but only suspected it. The doctor, however, was very anxious to get on the lugger, and he did not mean to give up the project before he need. It amused him to exercise a certain astuteness to gain his end.

‘Look here, I don’t want to cause a quarrel between you two. If Blake doesn’t want me, let’s say no more about it.’

‘But I want you,’ retorted the skipper. ‘It’s a chance in a million for me. If there’s a man alive as can put my digestion right, it is you, and d’you think I’m goin’ to miss an opportunity like that? Not ‘alf.’

‘You think too much about your digestion,’ said Blake. ‘That’s my belief. If you just ate what you wanted to and didn’t bother, you’d be all right.’

‘Oh, should I? I suppose you know more about me digestive apparatus than what I do. I suppose you know when a bit of dry toast sits on me stomach like a ton of lead. I suppose you’ll say it’s all fancy next.’

‘Well, if you ask me, I think fancy’s got a damned sight more to do with it than you think.’

‘You son of a bitch.’

‘Who are you calling a son of a bitch?’

‘I’m calling you a son of a bitch.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said the doctor.

Captain Nichols gave a loud belch.

‘Now the bastard’s brought it on again. It’s three months if it’s a day that I was able to sit down after supper and feel comfortable, and now he’s brought it on again. An upset like this is the death of me. Flies to me stomach at once. I’m a bundle of nerves. Always ‘ave been. I thought I was goin’ to ‘ave a pleasant evenin’ for once, and now he’s gone and ruined it. I’ve got dyspepsia somethin’ cruel.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said the doctor.

‘They all say the same thing; they all say: Captain, you’re a bundle of nerves. Delicate? You’re more delicate than a child.’

Dr Saunders was gravely sympathetic.

‘It’s as I suspected, you want watching; your stomach wants educating. If I’d been coming with you on the lugger I should have made it my business to teach your digestive juices to function in a proper manner. I don’t say I could have effected a cure in six or seven days, but I could have put you on the way.’

‘But who says you’re not comin’ on the lugger?’

‘Blake does, and from what I gather he’s the boss.’

‘Oh, do you? Well, you’re mistaken. I’m skipper, and what I says goes. Get your kit packed and come on board tomorrow mornin’. I’ll sign you on as a member of the crew.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Blake, jumping to his feet. ‘I’ve got as much say as you have, and I say he’s not coming. I won’t have anyone on the lugger, and that’s that.’

‘Oh, won’t you? And what’ll you say if I run her straight up to BNB? British territory, young feller-me-lad.’

‘You take care an accident doesn’t happen to you.’

‘D’you think I’m scared of you? D’you think I’ve knocked about all over the world since before you was born without knowin’ ‘ow to take care of meself? Stick a knife in me back, would you? And who’s goin’ to sail the boat? You and them four black niggers? You make me laugh. Why, you don’t know one end of the boat from the other.’

Blake clenched his hands again. The two men glared at one another, but in the captain’s eyes was a mocking sneer. He knew that when it came to a show-down he held the cards. A little sigh escaped the other.

‘Where d’you want to go?’ he asked the doctor.

‘Any Dutch island where I can get a ship that’ll take me on my way.’

‘All right, come on, then. Anyway, it’ll be better than being cooped up alone with that all the time.’

He gave the skipper a glance of impotent hatred. Captain Nichols laughed good-naturedly.

‘That’s true, it’ll be company for you, me boy. We’re getting off about ten tomorrow. That suit you?’

‘Suit me A1,’ said the doctor.

CHAPTER 8

His guests left early and Dr Saunders, taking his book, lay down in a long, rattan chair. He glanced at his watch. It was a little after nine. It was his habit to smoke half a dozen pipes of an evening. He liked to begin at ten. He waited for this moment, not with malaise, but with a little tremor of anticipation which was pleasant, and he would not cut this short by advancing the hour of his indulgence.

He called Ah Kay and told him that they were sailing in the morning on the strangers’ lugger. The boy nodded. He, too, was glad to get away. Dr Saunders had engaged him when he was thirteen, and now he was nineteen. He was a slim, comely youth with large black eyes and a skin as smooth as a girl’s. His hair, coal-black and cut very short, fitted his head like a close cap. His oval face was of the colour of old ivory. He was quick to smile, and then he showed two rows of the most exquisite teeth possible, small and white and regular. In his short Chinese trousers of white cotton and the tight jacket without a collar he had a languorous elegance that was strangely touching. He moved silently and his gestures had the deliberate grace of a cat. Dr Saunders sometimes flattered himself with the thought that Ah Kay regarded him with affection.

At ten, closing his book, he called:

‘Ah Kay!’

The boy came in and Dr Saunders watched him placidly as he took from a table the little tray on which were the oil lamp, the needle, the pipe, and the round tin of opium. The boy put it down on the floor by the doctor, and himself squatting on his haunches, lit the lamp. He held the needle in the flame, and with the warm end extracted a sufficiency from the tin of opium; with deft fingers he made it into a ball and delicately cooked it over the little yellow flame. Dr Saunders watched it sizzle and swell. The boy withdrew it from the flame, kneaded the pellet again and cooked it once more; he inserted it into the pipe and handed it to his master. The doctor took it and with the strong quick pull of the practised smoker inhaled the sweet-tasting smoke. He held it for a minute in his lungs and then slowly exhaled it. He handed the pipe back. The boy scraped it out and put it on the tray. He warmed the needle again and began to cook another pellet. The doctor smoked a second pipe and a third. The boy rose from the floor and went into the cookhouse. He came back with a little pot of jasmine tea and poured it into a Chinese bowl. The fragrance for an instant overpowered the acrid odour of the drug. The doctor lay back in his long chair, his head against a cushion and looked at the ceiling. They did not speak. It was very silent in the compound, and the only sound that broke the stillness was the sharp cry of a ghekko. The doctor watched it as it stood still on the ceiling, a little yellow beast that looked like a prehistoric monster in miniature, and occasionally made a rapid dart as a fly or a moth caught its attention. Ah Kay lit himself a cigarette, and taking an odd, stringed instrument, something like a banjo, amused himself by playing softly. The thin notes straggled along the air, disconnected sounds they seemed, and if now and then you heard the beginning of a melody, it was not completed and your ear was deceived; it was a slow and plaintive music, as incoherent as the varied scents of flowers, and it seemed to offer you but indications, a hint here and there, the suggestion of a rhythm, with which to create in your own soul a more subtle music than ears could hear. Now and then a sharp discord, like the scratching of a pencil on a slate, assaulted the nerves with a sudden shock. It gave the soul the same delicious tremor as startles the body when in the heat you plunge into an ice-cold pool. The boy sat on the floor in an attitude of unaffected beauty and meditatively plucked the strings of his lute. Dr Saunders wondered what vague emotions touched him. His melancholy face was impassive. He seemed to be looking into his memory for melodies heard in some long past existence.

Presently the boy looked up, a rapid, charming smile suddenly lighting up his features, and asked his master if he was ready. The doctor nodded. Ah Kay put down his lute and relit the little lamp. He prepared another pipe. The doctor smoked it and two more besides. This was his limit. He smoked regularly, but with moderation. Then he lay back and surrendered himself to his thoughts. Ah Kay now made himself a couple of pipes, and having smoked them put out the lamp. He lay down on a mat with a wooden rest under his neck and presently fell asleep.

But the doctor, exquisitely at peace, considered the riddle of existence. His body rested in the long chair so comfortably that he was not conscious of it except in so far as an obscure sense of well-being in it added to his spiritual relief. In this condition of freedom his soul could look down upon his flesh with the affectionate tolerance with which you might regard a friend who bored you but whose love was grateful to you. His mind was extraordinarily alert, but in its activity there was no restlessness and no anxiety; it moved with an assurance of power, as you might imagine a great physicist would move among his symbols, and his lucidity had the absolute delight of pure beauty. It was an end in itself. He was lord of space and time. There was no problem that he could not solve if he chose; everything was clear, everything was exquisitely simple; but it seemed foolish to resolve the difficulties of being when there was so delicate a pleasure in knowing that you could completely do so whensoever you chose.

CHAPTER 9

Dr Saunders was an early riser. The dawn had but just broken when he went out on his veranda and called Ah Kay. The boy brought his breakfast, the little delicate bananas known as lady’s fingers, the inevitable fried eggs, toast, and tea. The doctor ate with good appetite. There was little packing to do. Ah Kay’s scanty wardrobe went into a brown-paper parcel, and the doctor’s into a Chinese portmanteau of pale pigskin. The medical stores and the surgical appliances were kept in a tin box of moderate size. Three or four natives were waiting at the foot of the steps that led up to the veranda, patients who wanted to consult the doctor, and he had them up one by one while he ate his breakfast. He told them he was leaving that morning. Then he walked over to Kim Ching’s house. It stood in a plantation of coconut trees. It was an imposing bungalow, the largest on the island, with bits and pieces of architectare to give it style, but its pretentiousness contrasted oddly with a sordid environment. It had no garden, and the ground round about it, littered with empty tins of preserved foodstuff and fragments of packing-cases, was untended. Chickens, ducks, dogs, and pigs wandered about trying to find something to eat among the refuse. It was furnished in the European style, with sideboards of fumed oak, American rockers of the kind you used to see in Middle-Western hotels, and occasional tables upholstered in plush. On the walls were enlarged photographs in massive gold frames of Kim Ching and the many members of his family.

Kim Ching was tall and stout, of a dignified presence, and he wore white ducks and a watch-chain of massive gold. He was much pleased with the result of his operation; he could see as he had never expected to, but all the same he would have liked to keep Dr Saunders on the island a little longer.

‘You damn fool to go on that lugger,’ he said when the doctor told him he was sailing with Captain Nichols. ‘You velly comfortable here. Why you no wait? Take it easy an’ enjoy yourself. Much more better you wait for Dutch boat. Nichols velly bad man.’

‘You’re not a velly good man yourself, Kim Ching.’

The trader, showing a row of expensive gold teeth, greeted this sally with a slow, fat smile in which there was no hint of disagreement. He liked the doctor and was grateful to him. When he saw that there was no persuading him to stay, he ceased to urge it. Dr Saunders gave him his final instructions and took leave of him. Kim Ching accompanied him to the door and they parted. The doctor went down to the village and bought provisions for the journey, a bag of rice, a bunch of bananas, canned goods, whisky, and beer; he told the coolie to take them down to the beach and wait for him, and returned to the rest-house. Ah Kay was ready and one of that morning’s patients, willing to earn a trifle, was waiting to carry the luggage. When they came to the beach one of Kim Ching’s sons was there to see him off, and he had brought at his father’s instructions a roll of Chinese silk as a parting present, and a little square packet wrapped in white paper with Chinese characters on it, the contents of which Dr Saunders guessed.

‘Chandu?’

‘My father say velly good stuff. P’laps you not have plenty for journey.’

There was no sign of life on the lugger, and the dinghy was not to be seen on the beach. Dr Saunders shouted, but his voice was thin and throaty and did not carry. Ah Kay and Kim Ching’s son tried to make someone hear, but in vain, so they put the luggage and the stores into a dug-out and a native paddled the doctor and Ah Kay out. When they came up Dr Saunders shouted again:

‘Captain Nichols.’

Fred Blake appeared.

‘Oh, it’s you. Nichols has gone ashore to get water.’

‘I didn’t see him.’

Blake said nothing more. The doctor climbed on board, followed by Ah Kay, and the native handed them up their kit and the provisions.

‘Where shall I put my stuff?’

‘There’s the cabin,’ said Blake, pointing.

The doctor went down the companion. The cabin was aft. It was so low that you could not stand upright in it, far from spacious, and the main mast went through it. The ceiling was blackened where a smoking lamp hung. There were small portholes with wooden shutters. The mattresses of Nichols and Fred Blake were lengthways, and the only place for himself that the doctor could see was at the foot of the companion. He went on deck again and told Ah Kay to take down his sleeping mat and his portmanteau.

‘The stores had better go in the hold,’ he said to Fred.

‘Fat chance there is for them there. We keep ours in the cabin. Tell your boy he’ll find a place under the boards. They’re loose.’

The doctor looked about him. He knew nothing of the sea. Except on occasion on the Min River, he had never been on anything but a steamer. The lugger looked very small for so long a voyage. It was a little more than fifty feet long. He would have liked to ask Blake several things, but he had gone forward. It was plain that though he had consented to the doctor’s coming it was against his will. He was sulking. There were a couple of old canvas chairs on deck, and in one of them the doctor sat down.

In a little while a blackfellow, wearing nothing but a dingy pareo, came along. He was of solid build, and his crisp curly hair was very grey.

‘Captain coming,’ he said.

Dr Saunders looked in the direction in which he pointed, and saw the dinghy advancing towards them. Captain Nichols was steering and two blackfellows were rowing. They came alongside and the skipper called out:

‘Utan, Tom, give a hand with the casks.’

Another blackfellow came up from the hold. The crew consisted of these four. Torres Straits islanders, tall, strong men with fine figures. Captain Nichols climbed on board and shook hands with the doctor.

‘Settled in all right, doc? Not much of the ocean grey’ound about the Fenton, but as good a sea-boat as anyone can want. She’ll stand anything.’

He gave the dirty, unkempt little craft a sweeping glance in which there was the satisfaction of the workman with the tools he knew how to handle.

‘Well, we’ll be gettin’ off.’

He gave his orders sharply. Mainsail and foresail were hoisted, the anchor weighed, and they slipped out of the lagoon. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the sun beat down on the shining sea. The monsoon was blowing, but with no great force, and there was a slight swell. Two or three gulls flew round them in wide circles. Now and then a flying-fish pierced the surface of the water, made a long dart over it and dived down with a tiny splash. Dr Saunders read, smoked cigarettes, and when he was tired of reading looked at the sea and the green islands they passed. After a while the skipper handed over the wheel to one of the crew and came and sat down by him.

‘We’ll anchor at Badu tonight,’ he said. ‘That’s about forty-five miles. It looks all right in the Sailing Directions. There’s an anchorage there.’

‘What is it?’

‘Oh, just an uninhabited island. We generally anchor for the night.’

‘Blake doesn’t seem any more pleased to have me on board,’ said the doctor.

‘We ‘ad a bit of an argument last night.’

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘He’s only a kid.’

Dr Saunders knew that he must earn his passage, and he knew also that when a man has told you all his symptoms he will have gained confidence and will tell you a great deal more besides. He began to ask the skipper questions about his health. There was nothing on which he was prepared to talk at greater length. The doctor took him down into the cabin, made him lie down, and carefully examined him. When they went on deck again the grey-haired blackfellow, Tom Obu by name, who was cook and steward, was bringing aft their dinner.

‘Come on, Fred,’ called the skipper.

They sat down.

‘This smells good,’ said Nichols, as Tom Obu took the lid off the saucepan. ‘Somethin’ new, Tom?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if my boy hadn’t lent a hand,’ said the doctor.

‘I think I can eat this,’ said the skipper as he took a mouthful of a mess of rice and meat that he ladled on to his plate. ‘What do you think of this, Fred? Seems to me we’re goin’ to do ourselves OK with the doc on board.’

‘It’s better than Tom’s cooking, I’ll say that for it.’

They ate with hearty appetite. The captain lit his pipe.

‘If I don’t ‘ave a pain after this I’ll say you’re a wonder, doc.’

‘You won’t have a pain.’

‘What beats me is ‘ow a fellow like you come to settle in a place like Fu-chou. You could make a fortune in Sydney.’

‘I’m all right in Fu-chou. I like China.’

‘Yep? Studied in England, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve ‘eard tell you was a specialist, ‘ad a big practice in London, and I don’t know what all.’

‘You mustn’t believe all you hear.’

‘Seems funny you chuckin’ everything and settlin’ in a lousy Chinese city. You must ‘ave been makin’ a packet in London.’

The skipper looked at him with his little shifty blue eyes and his grinning face was quick with malice. But the doctor bore his scrutiny blandly. He smiled, showing those large discoloured teeth of his, his eyes shrewd and alert, but gave no sign of embarrassment.

‘Ever go back to England?’

‘No. Why should I? My home’s in Fu-chou.’

‘I don’t blame you. England’s finished, if you ask me. Too many rules and regulations for my taste. Why can’t they leave a fellow alone? That’s what I’d like to know. Not on the register, are you?’

He shot the question out suddenly as though he wished to take the doctor by surprise. But he had met someone who was a match for him.

‘Don’t say you haven’t confidence in me, Captain. You must believe in your doctor. He can’t do much for you if you don’t.’

‘Believe in you? Why, if I didn’t believe in you you wouldn’t be ‘ere.’ Captain Nichols grew deadly serious; this was something that concerned himself. ‘I know there’s no one as is a patch on you anywheres between Bombay and Sydney, and if the truth was only told I shouldn’t be surprised if you’d ‘ave to go a long way in London before you could find anyone as could ‘old a candle to you. I know you’ve taken every degree a fellow can take. I’ve ‘eard tell as ‘ow if you’d stay in London you’d be a baronet by now.’

‘I don’t mind telling you that I’ve got more degrees than are any use to me,’ the doctor laughed.

‘Funny you shouldn’t be in the book. What’s it called? The Medical Directory.’

‘What makes you think I’m not?’ murmured the doctor, smiling but wary.

‘Fellow I knew in Sydney looked you up. Talkin’ about you, ‘e was, to another doctor, pal of ‘is, and sayin’ you was such a marvel and all that, and out of curiosity they’d ‘ad a look-see.’

‘Perhaps your friend looked in the wrong edition.’

Captain Nichols chuckled slyly.

‘Perhaps he did. I never thought of that.’

‘Anyhow, I’ve never seen the inside of a gaol, Captain.’

The skipper gave a little start. He repressed it at once, but he changed colour. Dr Saunders had made a shot in the dark and his eyes twinkled. The skipper laughed.

‘That’s a good one. No more ‘ave I, doc, but don’t you forget there’s many a man gone to gaol for no fault of ‘is own and there’s many a man as might ‘ave gone there if he ‘adn’t thought a change of air would suit him.’

They looked at one another and chuckled.

‘What’s there to laugh about?’ said Fred Blake.

CHAPTER 10

Towards evening they sighted the island where Captain Nichols designed to pass the night, a cone covered to its summit with trees so that it looked like a hill in a picture by Piero della Francesca, and sailing round it they came to the anchorage they had read of in the Sailing Directions. It was a well-sheltered cove and the water was so clear that as you looked over the side you saw on the ocean floor the fantastic efflorescence of the coral. You saw the fish swimming, like natives of the forest threading their familiar way through the jungle. Not a little to their surprise they found a schooner anchored there.

‘What’s that?’ asked Fred Blake.

His eyes were anxious, and indeed it was strange to enter upon that silent cove, protected by the green hill, in the still cool of the evening and see there a sailing vessel. She lay, sails furled, and because the spot was so solitary her presence was vaguely sinister. Captain Nichols looked at her through his glasses.

‘She’s a pearler. Port Darwin. I don’t know what she’s doin’ ‘ere. There’s a lot of ’em round by the Aru Islands.’

They saw the crew, a white man among them, watching them, and presently a boat was lowered.

‘They’re comin’ over,’ said the skipper.

By the time they were anchored, the dinghy had rowed up and Captain Nichols exchanged shouts of greeting with the captain of the schooner. He came on board, an Australian, and told them that his Japanese diver was sick and he was on his way to one of the Dutch islands where he could get a doctor.

‘We got a doctor on board,’ said Captain Nichols. ‘We’re givin’ ‘im a passage.’

The Australian asked Dr Saunders if he would come along and see his sick man, and after they had given him a cup of tea, for he refused a drink, the doctor got into the dinghy.

‘Have you got any Australian papers?’ asked Fred.

‘I’ve got a Bulletin. It’s a month old.’

‘Never mind. It’ll be new to us.’

‘You’re welcome to it. I’ll send it back by the doctor.’

It did not take Dr Saunders long to discover that the diver was suffering from a severe attack of dysentery. He was very ill. He gave him a hypodermic injection, and told the captain there was nothing to do but keep him quiet.

‘Damn these Japs, they’ve got no constitution. I shan’t get any more out of him for some time then?’

‘If ever,’ said the doctor.

They shook hands and he got into the dinghy again. The blackfellow pushed off.

‘Here, wait a bit. I forgot to give you that paper.’

The Australian dived into the cabin and in a minute came out again with a Sydney Bulletin. He threw it into the dinghy.

Captain Nichols and Fred were playing cribbage when the doctor climbed back on to the Fenton. The sun was setting and the smooth sea was lucid with pale and various colour, blue, green, salmon-pink, and milky purple, and it was like the subtle and tender colour of silence.

‘Fixed ‘im up all right?’ inquired the skipper indifferently.

‘He’s pretty bad.’

‘Is that the paper?’ Fred asked.

He took it out of the doctor’s hand, and strolled forwards.

‘Play cribbage?’ said Nichols.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Me and Fred play it every night. Luck of the devil ‘e as. I shouldn’t like to tell you ‘ow much ‘e’s won off me. It can’t go on. It must turn soon.’ He called out: ‘Come on, Fred.’

‘Half a mo.’

The skipper shrugged his shoulders.

‘No manners. Anxious to see a paper, wasn’t ‘e?’

‘And a month old one at that,’ answered the doctor. ‘How long is it since you left Thursday Island?’

‘We never went near Thursday Island.’

‘Oh!’

‘What about a spot? D’you think it’d do me any ‘arm?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The skipper shouted for Tom Obu, and the blackfellow brought them a couple of glasses and some water. Nichols fetched the whisky. The sun set and the night crept softly over the still water. The only sound that broke the silence was the leap now and then of a fish. Tom Obu brought a hurricane lamp and placed it on the deck-house, and going below lit the smoking oil lamp in the cabin.

‘I wonder what our young friend is readin’ all this time.’

‘In the dark?’

‘Maybe ‘e’s thinkin’ of what ‘e ‘as read.’

But when at last Fred joined them and sat down to finish the interrupted game, it seemed to Dr Saunders, in the uncertain light, that he was very pale. He had not brought the paper with him and the doctor went forward to get it. He could not see it. He called Ah Kay and told him to look for it. Standing in the darkness he watched the players.

‘Fifteen two. Fifteen four. Fifteen six. Fifteen eight; and six are fourteen. And one for his nob seventeen.’ ‘God, what luck you ‘ave.’

The skipper was a bad loser. His face was set and hard. His shifty eyes glanced at each card he turned up with a sneering look. But the other played with a smile on his lips. The light of the hurricane lamp cut his profile out of the darkness, and it was astonishingly fine. His long lashes cast a little shadow on his cheeks. Just then he was more than a handsome young man; he had a tragic beauty that was very moving. Ah Kay came and said he could not find the paper.

‘Where did you leave that Bulletin, Fred?’ asked the doctor. ‘My boy can’t find it.’

‘Isn’t it there?’

‘No, we’ve both looked.’

‘How the hell should I know where it is? Two for his heels.’

‘Throw it overboard when you done with it?’ asked the captain.

‘Me? Why should I throw it overboard?’

‘Well, if you didn’t it must be somewhere about,’ said the doctor.

‘That’s another game to you,’ the skipper growled. ‘I never see anyone ‘old such cards.’

CHAPTER 11

It was between one and two in the morning. Dr Saunders sat in a deck-chair. The skipper was asleep in the cabin and Fred had taken his mattress forrard. It was very still. The stars were so bright that the shape of the island was very distinctly outlined against the night. Distance is less an affair of space than of time and though they had gone but five-and-forty miles it seemed to the doctor that Takana was very far away. London was at the other end of the world. He had a fleeting vision of Piccadilly Circus, with its bright lights, the crowd of buses, cars, and taxis, and the crowd that surged when the theatres disgorged their audiences. There was a part that in his day they called the Front, the street on the north side that led from Shaftesbury Avenue to the Charing Cross Road, where from eleven to twelve people walked up and down in a serried throng. That was before the war. There was a sense of adventure in the air. Eyes met and then . . . The doctor smiled. He did not regret the past; he regretted nothing. Then his wandering thoughts hovered over the bridge at Fu-chou, the bridge over the Min River, from which you saw the fishermen in the barges below fishing with cormorants; rickshaws crossed the bridge, and coolies bearing heavy loads, and the innumerable Chinese walked to and fro. On the right bank as you looked downstream was the Chinese City with its crowded houses and its temples. The schooner showed no light and the doctor only saw it in the darkness because he knew that it was there. All was silent on board. But in the hold where the pearl shell was piled, on one of the wooden bunks along the side, lay the dying diver. The doctor attached small value to human life. Who, that had lived so long amid those teeming Chinese where it was held so cheap, could have much feeling about it? He was a Japanese, the diver, and probably a Buddhist. Transmigration? Look at the sea: wave follows wave, it is not the same wave, yet one causes another and transmits its form and movement. So the beings travelling through the world are not the same today and tomorrow, nor in one life the same as in another; and yet it is the urge and the form of the previous lives that determine the character of those that follow. A reasonable belief but an incredible one. But was it any more incredible than that so much striving, such a variety of accidents, so many miraculous hazards should have combined, through the long aeons of time, to produce from the primeval slime at long last this man who, by means of Flexner’s bacillus, was aimlessly snuffed out? Dr Saunders thought it odd, but natural, senseless certainly, but he had long made himself at home in the futility of things. Of course the spirit was a difficulty. Did that cease to exist when the matter which was its instrument dissolved? In that lovely night, his thoughts flowing without purpose, like birds, sea-gulls, wheeling over the sea, rising and falling as the wind took them, he could not but keep an open mind.

There was the sound of shuffling steps on the companion and the skipper appeared. The stripe of his pyjamas was bold enough to tell against the darkness.

‘Captain?’

‘It’s me. I thought I’d come up for a breath of air.’ He sank into the chair by the doctor’s side. ‘Had your smoke?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve never took to it meself. I’ve known a good many as did, though. Never seemed to do ’em much ‘arm. Settles the stomach, they say. One fellow I knew went all to pieces. Skipper of one of Butterfield’s boats on the Yang-tze at one time. Good position and everything. They thought a rare lot of ‘im. Sent him ‘ome once to get cured, but ‘e took to it again the moment ‘e come back. Ended up as a tout for a fantan ‘ouse. Used to ‘ang about the docks at Shanghai and cadge ‘alf-dollars.’

They were silent for a while. Captain Nichols sucked a briar pipe.

‘Seen anythin’ of Fred?’

‘He’s sleeping on deck.’

‘Funny thing about that paper. He didn’t want you and me to read somethin’.’

‘What d’you suppose he did with it?’

‘Dropped it overboard.’

‘What’s it all about?’

The skipper gave a low chuckle.

‘Believe me, or believe me not, I don’t know any more than you do.’

‘I’ve lived in the East long enough to know that it’s better to mind my own business.’

But the skipper was inclined to be confidential. His digestion was not troubling him and after three or four hours of good sleep he felt very wide awake.

‘There’s somethin’ fishy about it, I know that, but I’m like you, doc, I’m all for mindin’ me own business. Ask no questions an’ you’ll be told no lies. That’s what I say, an’ if you get a chance of makin’ a bit of money, take it quick.’ The skipper gave his pipe a pull. ‘You won’t let this go any further, will you?’

‘Not on your life.’

‘Well, it’s like this. I was in Sydney. I ‘adn’t ‘ad a job for the best part of two years. And not for the want of tryin’, mind you. Just bad luck. First-rate seaman I am and got a lot of experience. Steam or sail, I don’t mind what it is. You’d think they’d jump at me. But no. I’m a married man too. Things got so bad my old woman ‘ad to go into service, I didn’t ‘alf like it, I can tell you, but there, I just ‘ad to lump it. I ‘ad a roof over me ‘ead and three meals a day, she give me that all right, but when it come to lettin’ me ‘ave ‘alf a dollar to go to the pictures and get one or two drinks, no, sir. An’ nag. Never been married, ‘ave you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t blame you. They’re near, you know. Women can’t bear partin’ with their money. I been married twenty years, and it’s been nag, nag, nag all the time. Very superior woman, my missus, that’s what begun the trouble, she thought she demeaned ‘erself by marryin’ me. Her father was a big draper up in Liverpool, and she never let me forget it. She blamed me because I couldn’t get a job. Said I liked bein’ on the beach. Lazy, idle loafer she called me and said she was fair sick of workin’ ‘erself to the bone to give me board and lodgin’ and if I didn’t get a billet soon I could just get out and shift for meself. I give you my word, sometimes I just ‘ad to ‘old on to meself like grim death not to give her a sock on the jaw, lady though she was, and no one knows that better than what I do. D’you know Sydney?’

‘No, I’ve never been there.’

‘Well, one night I was just standin’ around in a bar down by the ‘arbour I used to go to sometimes. I ‘adn’t ‘ad a drink all day, and I was just parched; my dyspepsia was somethin’ awful, and I was feeling pretty low. I ‘adn’t got a penny in me pocket, me what’s commanded more ships than you can count on the fingers of your two ‘ands, and I couldn’t go ‘ome. I knew the missus’d start on me, and she’d give me a bit of cold mutton for me supper, though she knows it’s the death of me, and she’d go on and on, always the lady, if you know what I mean, but just nasty, cuttin’ and superior-like, never raisin’ her voice, but not a minute’s peace. An’ if I was to lose me temper and tell ‘er to go to hell, she’d just draw ‘erself up and say: none of your foul language ‘ere, Captain, if you please. I may ‘ave married a common sailor, but I will be treated like a lady.’

Captain Nichols lowered his voice and leant over in a very confidential manner.

‘Now this is quite infra dig., if you know what I mean, just between you and me: you don’t know where you are with women. They don’t behave like ‘uman beings. Would you believe it, I’ve run away from ‘er four times. You would think a woman’d see what you meant after that, wouldn’t you?’

‘You would.’

‘But no. Every time she’s followed me. Of course, once she knew where I’d gone, and it was easy, but the others she didn’t know any more than the man in the moon. I’d ‘ave bet every penny I ‘ad in the world that she wouldn’t find me. Like lookin’ for a needle in a bundle of ‘ay, it was. An’ then one day she’d walk up, quite cool, as if she seen me the day before, and not a ‘ow d’you do or a fancy seein’ you or anythin’ like that, but: “You want a shave if you ask me, Captain,” or: “Them trousers of yours is a disgrace, Captain.” . . . I don’t care who it is, it’s the kind of thing to break anyone’s nerve.’

Captain Nichols was silent and his eyes swept the empty sea. In that lucid night you saw quite clearly the thin sharp line of the horizon.

‘This time I been an’ gone an’ done the trick, and I ‘ave got away from ‘er. She don’t know where I am and she can’t find out, but I give you my word I wouldn’t be surprised if she was to come rowin’ over that sea in a dinghy, all neat and tidy, she’s always the lady to look at, I will say that for ‘er, and come on board and just say to me: “What’s that nasty, filthy tobacco you’re smokin’, Captain? You know, I can’t abide anythin’ but Player’s Navy Cut.” It’s me nerves. That’s what’s at the bottom of my dyspepsia, if the truth was only known. I remember, once I went to see a doctor in Singapore as ‘ad been very strongly recommended to me and ‘e wrote a lot of stuff in a book, you know ‘ow doctors do, and he put a cross down. Well, I didn’t ‘alf like the look of that, so I said to ‘im, “I say, doctor,” I says, “what’s that cross mean?” “Oh,” he says, “I always put a cross when I ‘ave reason to suspect domestic unpleasantness.” “Oh, I see,” I says; “well, you’ve ‘it the nail on the ‘ead, doctor; I bear a cross all right.” Clever fellow ‘e was, but ‘e never done my dyspepsia much good.’

‘Socrates suffered from the same sort of affliction, Captain, but I never heard that it affected his digestion.’

‘Who was ‘e?’

‘An honest man.’

‘Much good it did ‘im, I lay.’

‘In point of fact, it didn’t.’

‘You’ve got to take things as you find ’em, I say, and if you’re too particular you won’t get anywhere.’

Dr Saunders laughed in his heart. It appealed to his sense of humour to think of this mean and unscrupulous blackguard in abject terror of his wife. It was the triumph of spirit over matter. He wondered what she looked like.

‘I was tellin’ you about Fred Blake,’ the skipper continued, after a pause to relight his pipe. ‘Well, as I was sayin’, I was in that bar. I said good evenin’ to one or two chaps, cordial like, you know, and they said good evenin’ to me and looked the other way. You could see them just sayin’ to theirselves: there’s that bum again, cadgin’ around for drinks: ‘e ain’t goin’ to get one out of me. You can’t wonder I was feelin’ pretty low. Humiliating, that’s what it was, for a man as ‘ad been in a good position like what I ‘ave. It’s terrible ‘ow near a fellow can be with ‘is money when he knows you ain’t got none. The boss give me a dirty look and I ‘alf thought he was going to ask me what I’d ‘ave, and then when I said I’d wait a bit, ‘e’d say, well, I’d better wait outside. I began talkin’ to one or two chaps I didn’t know, but they wasn’t what you’d call cordial. I cracked a joke or two, but I couldn’t get ’em laughin’, and they made it pretty plain that I was buttin’ in. And then I saw a fellow come in I knew. Big bully of a chap. What they call a larrikin’ in Australia. Name of Ryan. You ‘ad to keep in with ‘im. He ‘ad something to do with politics. Always ‘ad plenty of money. He lent me five bob once. Well, I didn’t think ‘e’d want to see me, so I pretended I didn’t recognize ‘im and just went on talkin’. But I was watchin’ ‘im out of the corner of me eye. He looked round and then ‘e come right up to me.

‘“Good evenin’, Captain,” he says, very friendly like.

‘“How’s the world been treatin’ you these days?”

‘“Rotten,” I says.

‘“Still lookin’ for a job?”

‘“Yes,” I says.

‘“What’ll you ‘aye?” he says.

‘I ‘ad a beer and ‘e ‘ad a beer. It pretty near saved my life. But you know, I’m not much of a one for believin’ in miracles. I wanted that beer pretty bad, but I knew just as well as I know I’m talkin’ to you, that Ryan wasn’t givin’ it me for nothin’. He’s one of them ‘earties, you know; slaps you on the back and laughs at your jokes as though he’d fair burst, and it’s “‘Ullo, where ‘ave you been ‘idin’ yourself?” and, “My missus is a grand little woman and you should see my kiddies,” and all that; and then all the time ‘e’s watchin’ you and ‘is eyes look right through you. It takes in the mugs. “Good old Ryan,” they say; “one of the best.” There are no flies on me, doc. You don’t catch me so easy as that. And while I was drinkin’ my beer I said to myself: “Now, then, old boy, you keep your eyes skinned. He wants something.” But of course I didn’t let on. I told ‘im a yarn or two and ‘e just laughed ‘is ‘ead off.

‘“You’re a caution, Captain,” ‘e said; “great old sport, That’s what you are. Finish your beer and we’ll ‘ave another. I could listen to you talkin’ all night.”

‘Well, I finished my beer and I saw ‘e was goin’ to order another.

‘“Look ‘ere, Bill,” he says: well, my name’s Tom, but I didn’t say nothing. I saw ‘e was tryin’ to be friendly. “Look ‘ere, Bill,” he says, “there’s too many people round ‘ere, one simply can’t ‘ear oneself talk, and you never know who’s listenin’ to what you say. I’ll tell you what we’ll do.” He called the boss. “Look ‘ere George, come ‘ere a minute.” And up he comes with a run. “Look ‘ere, George, me and my friend we want to ‘ave a little quiet yarn about old times. What about that room of yours?”

‘“My office? All right. You can go in there if you want to, and welcome.”

‘“That’s the ticket. And you bring us a couple of beers.”

‘Well, we walks round and we goes into the office, and George brings us a couple of beers ‘imself. In person; gives me a nod, ‘e does. And George goes out. Ryan shut the door after ‘im and ‘e looked at the window to see it was shut all right. Said ‘e couldn’t stand a draught at any price. I didn’t know what ‘e was after, and I thought I’d better get straight with ‘im at once.

‘“Look ‘ere, Ryan,” I says; “I’m sorry about that five bob you lent me. It’s been on me mind ever since, but the truth is I’ve ‘ad all I can do just to keep body and soul together.”

‘“Forget it,” he says. “What’s five bob? I know you’re all right. You’re a fine feller, Bill. What’s the good of ‘avin’ money if you can’t lend it to a pal when ‘e’s down on his luck?”

‘“Well, I’d do the same by you, Ryan,” says I, takin’ my cue from ‘im. To listen to us you’d ‘ave thought us a pair of brothers.’

Captain Nichols chuckled as he recalled the scene they had played. He took an artist’s delight in his own rascality,

‘“Chin, chin,” say I.

‘We both ‘ad a drink of beer. “Now look ‘ere, Bill,” says ‘e, wipin’ ‘is mouth with the back of ‘is ‘and, “I been makin’ inquiries about you. Good seaman and all that ain’t you?” “None better,” says I. “If you ain’t ‘ad a job for some time I reckon it’s more by bad luck than bad management.” “That’s right,” says I. “Now I’m going to give you a surprise, Bill,” says ‘e. “I’m going to offer you a job meself.” “I’ll take it,” says I. “No matter what it is.” “That’s the spirit,” says ‘e. “I knew I could count on you.”

‘“Well, what is it?” I ask ‘im.

‘He give me a look, and though ‘e was smilin’ at me as if I was his long lost brother and ‘e loved me like anything, ‘e was lookin’ at me pretty ‘ard. It was no jokin’ matter, I could see that.

‘“Can you keep your mouth shut?” ‘e asks me.

‘“Like a clam,” says I.

‘“That’s good,” says ‘e. “Now what d’you say to takin’ a tidy little pearling lugger, you know, one of them ketches they ‘ave at Thursday Island and Port Darwin, and cruisin’ about the islands for a few months?”

‘“Sounds all right to me,” I says.

‘“Well, that’s the job.”

‘“Tradin’?” I says.

‘“No, just pleasure.”’

Captain Nichols sniggered.

‘I nearly laughed outright when ‘e said that, but one ‘as to be careful, lot of people ‘ave no sense of humour, so I just looked as grave as a judge. He give me another look and I could see ‘e could be an ugly customer if you put ‘is back up.

‘“I’ll tell you ‘ow it is,” ‘e says. “Young fellow I know been workin’ too ‘ard. His dad’s an old pal of mine, and I’m doin’ this to please ‘im, see? He’s a man in a very good position. Got a lot of influence in one way and another.”

‘He ‘ad another drink of beer. I kep’ me eyes on ‘im but I never said a word. Not a syllable.

‘“The old man’s in a rare state. Only kid, you know. Well, I know what it is with me own kids. If one of ’em gets a pain in ‘is big toe, I’m upset for the day.”

‘“You don’t ‘ave to tell me,” I says. “I got a daughter meself.”

‘“Only child?” he says.

‘I nodded.

‘“Grand thing, children,” he says. “Nothin’ like ’em to bring ‘appiness in a man’s life.”

‘“You’re right there,” I says.

‘“Always delicate, this boy’s been,” ‘e says, shakin’ ‘is ‘ead. “Got a touch of the lungs. The doctors say the best thing ‘e can do is to ‘ave a cruise on a sailin’ ship. Well, ‘is dad didn’t ‘alf like the idea of ‘is takin’ a passage on any old ship and ‘e ‘eard of this ‘ere ketch and ‘e bought her. You see, like that, you’re not tied down and you can go anywhere. Nice easy life, that’s what ‘e wants the boy to  ‘ave; I mean, you don’t ‘ave to ‘urry. You choose your own weather an’ when you get to some island what looks like you could stay there for a bit, why, you just stay. There’s dozens of them islands up between Australia and China, they tell me.”

‘“Thousands,” says I.

‘“An’ the boy’s got to be kep’ quiet. Essential, that is. His dad wants you to keep away from where there’s a lot of people.”

‘“That’s all right,” says I, lookin’ as innocent as a newborn babe. “And ‘ow long for?”

‘“I don’t exactly know,” says he. “Depends on the boy’s ‘ealth. Two or three months, maybe, or maybe a year.”

‘“I see,” says I; “and what do I get out of it?”

‘“Two ‘undred quid when your passenger comes on board, and two ‘undred quid when you comes back.”

‘“Make it five ‘undred down and I’m game,” says I. He never says a thing, but ‘e give me a dirty look. And ‘e just shoved his jaw out at me. My word, ‘e looked a beauty. If there’s one thing I got it’s tact. He could make things pretty unpleasant for me if ‘e wanted to. I knew that, and I ‘ad a feeling that if I didn’t take care ‘e would want to. So I just shrugged me shoulders, careless like, and laughed. “Oh, well, I don’t care about the money,” I says. “Money means nothin’ to me, never ‘as. If it ‘ad I’d be one of the richest men in Australia today. I’ll take what you say. Anythin’ to oblige a friend.”

‘“Good old Bill,” says ‘e.

‘“Where’s the ketch now?” says I. “I’d like to go and ‘ave a look at her.”

‘“Oh, she’s all right. Friend of mine just brought her down from Thursday Island to sell ‘er. She’s in grand shape. She ain’t in Sydney. She’s up the coast a few miles.”

‘“What about a crew?”

‘“Niggers from Torres Straits. They brought ‘er down. All you’ve got to do is to get on board and sail away.”

‘“When would you want me to sail?”

‘“Now.”

‘“Now?” says I, surprised. “Not tonight?”

‘“Yes, tonight. I got a car waitin’ down the street. I’ll drive you over to where she’s lying.”

‘“What’s the ‘urry?” I says, smiling, but giving ‘im a look as much to say I thought it damned fishy.

‘“The boy’s dad’s a big business man. Always does things like that.”

‘“Politician?” says I.

‘I was beginning to put two and two together, so to speak.

‘“My aunt,” says Ryan.

‘“But I’m a married man,” says I. “If I just go off like this without sayin’ so much as a word to nobody, my old woman’ll be makin’ inquiries all over the place. She’ll want to know where I am and when she can’t find nobody to tell her she’ll go to the police.”

‘He looked at me pretty sharp when I said this. I knew he didn’t ‘alf like the idea of ‘er goin’ to the police.

‘“It’ll look funny, a master mariner disappearin’ like this. I mean, it ain’t like as if I was a blackfellow or a Kanaka. Of course I don’t know if there’s anyone ‘as reason to be inquisitive. There’s a lot of nosey-parkers about, especially just now with the election comin’ on.”

‘I couldn’t ‘elp thinkin’ I got a good one in there, about the election, but ‘e didn’t let on a thing. His great ugly face might ‘a’ been a blank wall.

‘“I’ll go and see ‘er meself,” ‘e said.

‘I ‘ad me own game to play, too, and I wasn’t goin’ to let a chance like this pass me by.

‘“Tell ‘er the first mate of a steamer broke his neck just as she was going out and they took me on and I didn’t ‘ave time to go ‘ome and she’ll ‘ear from me next from Cape Town.”

‘“That’s the ticket,” says ‘e.

‘“An’ if she kicks up a racket give ‘er a passage to Cape Town and a five-pound note. That’s not askin’ much.”

‘He laughed then, honest, and ‘e said ‘e’d do it.

‘He finished ‘is beer and I finished mine.

‘“Now then,” says ‘e, “if you’re ready we’ll be startin’.” He looked at ‘is watch. “You meet me at the corner of Market Street in ‘alf an hour. I’ll drive by in my car and you just jump in. You go out first. No need for you to go out by the bar. There’s a door at the end of the passage. You take that and you’ll find yourself in the street.”

‘“OK” says I, and I takes me ‘at.

‘“There’s just one thing I’d like to say to you,” ‘e says, as I was going. “An’ this refers to now and later. If you don’t want a knife in your back or a bullet in your guts you better not try no monkey tricks. See?”

‘He said it quite pleasant, but I’m no fool, and I knew ‘e meant it.

‘“Don’t you ‘ave no fear,” says I. “When a chap treats me like a gentleman, I behave like one.” Then very casual like, “Young feller on board, I suppose?”

‘“No, ‘e ain’t. Comin’ on board later.”

‘I walked out and I got into the street. I walked along to where he said. It was only a matter of two ‘undred yards. I thought to meself if ‘e wanted me to wait there for ‘alf an’ hour it was because he ‘ad to go and see someone and say what ‘ad ‘appened. I couldn’t ‘elp wonderin’ what the police’d say if I told ’em somethin’ funny was up and it’d be worth their while to follow the car and ‘ave a look at this ketch. But I thought p’raps it wouldn’t be worth my while. It’s all very well to do a public duty, and I don’t mind bein’ in well with the cops any more than anyone else does, but it wouldn’t do me much good if I got a knife in me belly for me pains. And there was no four ‘undred quid to be got out of them. P’raps it’s just as well I didn’t try any ‘anky-panky on with Ryan, because I see a chap on the other side of the street, standin’ in the shadow as if ‘e didn’t want no one to see him, and it looked to me as if he was watchin’ me. I walked over to ‘ave a look at ‘im and ‘e walked away when he saw me comin’, then I walked back again and he come and stood just where ‘e was before. Funny. It was all damned funny. The thing what grizzled me was that Ryan ‘adn’t shown more confidence in me. If you’re goin’ to trust a man, trust ‘im, that’s what I say. I want you to understand I didn’t mind its bein’ funny. I seen a lot of funny things in my day and I take ’em as they come.’

Dr Saunders smiled. He began to understand Captain Nichols. He was a man who found the daily round of honest life a trifle humdrum. He needed a spice of crookedness to counteract the depression his dyspepsia caused him. His blood ran faster, he felt better in health, his vitality was heightened when his fingers dabbled in crime. The alertness he must then exercise to protect himself from harm took his mind off the processes of his lamentable digestion. If Dr Saunders was somewhat lacking in sympathy, he made up for it by being uncommonly tolerant. He thought it no business of his to praise or condemn. He was able to recognize that one was a saint and another a villain, but his consideration of both was fraught with the same cool detachment.

‘I couldn’t ‘elp laughin’ as I thought of meself standin’ there,’ continued the skipper, ‘and startin’ off on a cruise without so much as a change of clothes, me shavin’ tackle or a toothbrush. You wouldn’t find many men as’d be prepared to do that and not give a tinker’s cuss.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said the doctor.

‘And then I thought of the face my old woman’d make when Ryan told ‘er I’d sailed. I can just see ‘er toddlin’ off to Cape Town by the next ship. She’ll never find me no more. This time I ‘ave got away from her. And who’d ‘ave thought it’d come like that just when I was thinkin’ I couldn’t stand another day of it. If it wasn’t Providence, I don’t know what it was.’

‘It’s ways are always said to be inscrutable.’

‘Don’t I know it? Brought up a Baptist, I was. “Not a sparrow shall fall –” you know ‘ow it goes. I seen it come true over and over again. And then after I’d been waitin’ there a bit, a good ‘alf hour, a car come along and stops just by me. “Jump in,” says Ryan, and off we go. The roads are terrible bad round Sydney and we was bumpin’ up and down like a cork in the water. Pretty fast he drove.

‘“What about stores and all that?” I says to Ryan.

‘“It’s all on board,” ‘e says. “You got enough to last you three months.”

‘I didn’t know where ‘e was goin’. Dark night and I couldn’t see a thing; it must have been gettin’ on for midnight.

‘“Here we are,” ‘e says, and stops. “Get out.”

‘I got out and ‘e got out after me. He turns off ‘is lights. I knew we was pretty near the sea, but I couldn’t see a yard in front of me. He ‘ad an electric torch.

‘“You follow me,” ‘e says, “an’ look where you’re goin’.”

‘We walked a bit. A sort of pathway there was. I’m pretty nimble on me feet, but I nearly come arse over tip two or three times. “Nice thing if I break my bloody leg goin’ down ‘ere,” I says to meself. I wasn’t ‘alf glad when we come to the bottom and I felt the beach under me feet. You could see the water, but you couldn’t see nothin’ else. Ryan give a whistle. Someone on the water shouted, but low, if you know what I mean, and Ryan flashed his torch to show where we was. Then I ‘eard oars splashin’ and in a minute or two a couple of black-fellows rowed up in the dinghy. Ryan and me, we got in, and they pushed off. If I’d ‘ad twenty quid on me I wouldn’t ‘ave given much for my chances of ever seein’ Australia no more. Australia felix, by gum. We rowed for about ten minutes, I should say, and then we come alongside the ketch.

‘“What d’you think of ‘er?” asks Ryan, when we got on board.

‘“Can’t see much,” says I. “Tell you more in the morning.”

‘“In the morning you got to be well out to sea,” says Ryan.

‘“When’s this poor invalid boy comin’?” says I.

‘“Pretty soon now,” says Ryan. “You go down into the cabin and light the lamp and ‘ave a look round. We’ll ‘ave a bottle of beer. Here’s a box of matches.”

‘“Suits me,” I says, and down I goes.

‘I couldn’t see much, but I knew the way about by instinct. And I didn’t go down so quick I couldn’t ‘ave a look behind me. I twigged he was up to somethin’. I see ‘im give three or four flashes with the torch. “ ‘Ullo,” I says to meself, “someone’s watchin’,” but if it was ashore or on sea, I couldn’t say. Then Ryan comes down and I ‘ad a look round. He fished out a bottle of beer for ‘isself and a bottle of beer for me.

‘“The moon’ll be gettin’ up soon,” he says. “There’s a nice little breeze.”

‘“Startin’ right away, are we?” I says.

‘“Sooner the better, after the boy’s come on board, and just keep goin’, see?”

‘“Look ‘ere, Ryan,” I says, “I ain’t got so much as a safety razor with me.”

‘“Grow a beard then, Bill,” he answers. “The orders is, no landin’ anywhere till you get to New Guinea. If you want to go ashore at Merauke, you can.”

‘“Dutch, ain’t it?” He nods. “Look here, Ryan,” I says. “You know I wasn’t born yesterday. I can’t ‘elp thinkin’, can I? What’s the good, why don’t you come out with it straight and tell me what it’s all about?”

‘“Bill, old boy,” ‘e says very friendly like, “you drink your beer and don’t you ask no questions. I know I can’t ‘elp you thinkin’, but you just believe what you’re told or I swear to God I’ll gouge your bloody eyes out meself.”

‘“Well, that’s straight enough,” says I, laughing.

‘“Here’s luck,” says ‘e.

‘He took a swig of beer and so did I.

‘“Plenty of it?” I asked.

‘“Enough to last you. I know you’re not a soaker. I wouldn’t ‘ave given you the job if I ‘adn’t known that.”

‘“No,” I says, “I like me little drop of beer, but I know when I’ve ‘ad enough. What about the money?”

‘“I got it ‘ere,” ‘e says. “I’ll give it you before I get off.”

‘Well, we sat talkin’ of one thing and another. I ask ‘im what crew there was and a lot like that, and he ask me if I’d ‘ave a job gettin’ out at night and I says, no, I could sail the boat with me eyes shut and then suddenly I ‘eard something. I got sharp ears, I ‘ave, and there ain’t much goin’ on that I miss that way.

‘“There’s a boat comin’,” I says.

‘“And about time, too,” ‘e says. “I got to get back to my missus and the kids tonight.”

‘“Better go on deck, ‘adn’t we?” I says.

‘“No necessity at all,” ‘e says.

‘“All right,” I says.

‘We just sat there listenin’. Sounded like a dinghy. She come up and give a bump on the side. Then someone come on board. He come down the companion. All dressed up he was, blue serge suit, collar and tie, brown shoes. Not like what ‘e is now.

‘“This is Fred,” says Ryan, givin’ me a look.

‘“Fred Blake,” says the young fellow.

‘“This is Captain Nichols. First-rate seaman. He’s all right.”

‘The kid give me a look and I give ‘im one. He didn’t look exactly what you’d call delicate, I must say, picture of ‘ealth, I’d ‘ave said. Bit jumpy. If you’d asked me I’d ‘ave said he was scared.

‘“Bad luck your crockin’ up like this,” I says, very affable like. “The sea air’ll pull you together, believe me. Nothin’ like a cruise to build up a young fellow’s constitution.”

‘I never see anyone go so red as ‘e done when I said that. Ryan looked at ‘im an’ ‘e looked at me and laughed. Then ‘e says ‘e’d tip over the dibs and be gettin’ off. He ‘ad it in his belt and ‘e took it off and paid it over to me, two ‘undred golden sovereigns. I ‘adn’t seen gold in donkeys’ years. Only the banks ‘ad it. Seemed to me that whoever it was wanted to get this ‘ere boy out of the way, ‘e must be pretty high up.

‘“Throw in the belt, Ryan,” I says. “I can’t leave a lot of money like that lyin’ about.”

‘“All right,” says ‘e, “take the belt. Well, good luck.” And before I could say a word he was out of the cabin and ‘e’d popped over the side and the boat was movin’ away. They wasn’t takin’ no chances of my seein’ who was in it.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘Well, I put the money back in the belt and strapped it round me.’

‘Devil of a weight, isn’t it?’

‘When we come to Merauke we bought a couple of boxes and I’ve hid mine away so as nobody knows where it is. But if things go on like they are, I’ll be able to carry all what’s left without so much as feelin’ it.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Well, we sailed all the way up the coast, inside the Bank, of course, fine weather and all that, nice breeze, and I said to the kid: “What about a game of cribbage?” Had to pass the time somehow, you know, and I knew ‘e’d got a good bit of money. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t ‘ave some of it. I’ve played cribbage all me life, and I thought I got a soft thing on. I believe the devil’s in them cards. D’you know, I ‘aven’t ‘ad a winnin’ day since we left Sydney. I’ve lost a matter of seventy pounds, I ‘ave. And it’s not as if ‘e could play. It’s the devil’s own luck he’s got.’

‘Perhaps he plays better than you think.’

‘Don’t you believe it. What I don’t know about cribbage ain’t worth knowin’. D’you think I’d ‘ave took him on if I ‘adn’t known that? No, it’s luck, and luck can’t go on for ever. It’s bound to change and then I’ll get back all I’ve lost and all he’s got besides. It’s aggravatin’, of course, but I ain’t worryin’.’

‘Has he told you anything about himself?’

‘Not a thing. But I’ve put two and two together and I got a pretty shrewd idea what’s at the bottom of it.’

‘Oh!’

‘There’s politics at the bottom of it or I’ll eat my ‘at. If there ‘adn’t been Ryan wouldn’t ‘ave been mixed up in it. The Government’s pretty rocky in New South Wales. They’re ‘angin’ on by their teeth. If there was a scandal they’d go out tomorrow. There’ll ‘ave to be an election soon, anyway. They think they’ll get in again, but my belief is it’s a toss-up and I guess they know they can’t take a risk. I shouldn’t be surprised if Fred wasn’t the son of somebody pretty important.’

‘Premier, or somebody like that, you mean? Is there one of the Ministers called Blake?’

‘Blake’s no more ‘is name than it is mine. It’s one of the ministers all right, and Fred’s ‘is son or ‘is nephew; and whatever it is, if it come out, he’d lose ‘is seat, and my opinion is they all thought it better Fred should be out of the way for a few months.’

‘And what d’you think it is he did?’

‘Murder, if you ask me.’

‘He’s only a kid.’

‘Old enough to ‘ang.’

CHAPTER 12

‘Hulloa, what’s that?’ said the skipper. ‘There’s a boat comin’.’

His hearing was indeed acute, for Dr Saunders heard nothing. The captain peered into the darkness. He put his hand on the doctor’s arm and, getting up noiselessly, slipped down into the cabin. In a moment he came up again and the doctor saw that he carried a revolver.

‘No ‘arm bein’ on the safe side,’ he said.

Now the doctor discerned the faint grating of oars turning in rusty rowlocks.

‘It’s the schooner’s dinghy,’ he said.

‘I know it is. But I don’t know what they want. Pretty late to pay a social call.’

The two men waited in silence and listened to the approaching sound. Presently, they not only heard the splash of the water, but saw the vague outline of the boat, a little black mass against the black sea.

‘Hullo, there,’ cried Nichols suddenly. ‘Boat ahoy.’

‘That you, Captain?’ a voice travelled over the water.

‘Yes, it’s me. What d’you want?’

He stood at the gunwale, the revolver in his hand, hanging from the end of his loose arm. The Australian rowed on.

‘Wait till I come on board,’ he said.

‘Pretty late, ain’t it?’ cried Nichols.

The Australian told the man who was rowing to stop.

‘Wake up the doctor, will you? I don’t half like the look of my Jap. Seems to me he’s sinking.’

‘The doctor’s ‘ere. Come to the side.’

The dinghy came on and Captain Nichols, leaning over, saw that the Australian was alone with a blackfellow.

‘D ‘you want me to come over?’ asked Dr Saunders.

‘Sorry to trouble you, doc, but I think he’s pretty bad.’

‘I’ll come. Wait till I get my things.’

He stumbled down the companion and picked up a satchel in which he had what was necessary for emergencies. He climbed over the side and let himself down into the dinghy. The blackfellow rowed off quickly.

‘You know what it is,’ said the Australian, ‘you can’t get a diver for the asking, not a Jap, and they’re the only ones worth having. There isn’t one in the Arus out of a job now, and if I lose this chap it’s going to queer my pitch good and proper. I mean, I shall have to go all the way to Yokohama, and then the chances are I shall have to hang around for a month before I get what I want.’

The diver was lying on one of the lower bunks in the crew’s quarters. The air was fetid and the heat fearful. Two blackfellows were asleep and one of them, lying on his back, breathed stertorously. A third, sitting on his haunches on the floor by the sick man’s side, was staring at him with eyes that had no meaning. A hurricane lamp hanging from a beam gave a dim light. The diver was in a state of collapse. He was conscious, but when the doctor went up to him there was no change in the expression of the coal-black Oriental eyes. One might have thought that they gazed already at Eternity and could not be distracted by a transitory object. Dr Saunders felt his pulse and put his hand on the clammy forehead. He gave him a hypodermic injection. He stood by the side of the bunk and looked reflectively at the recumbent form.

‘Let’s go up and get a little air,’ he said presently. ‘Tell this man to come and tell us if there’s any change.’

‘Is he for it?’ asked the Australian, when they got on deck.

‘Looks like it.’

‘God, I do have bad luck.’

The doctor chuckled. The Australian asked him to sit down. The night was as still as death. In the calm water the stars from their vast distances looked at themselves. The two men were silent. Some say that if you believe a thing with sufficient force it becomes true. For that Jap, lying there, dying there, painlessly, it was not the end, but the turning over of a page; he knew, as certainly as he knew that the sun in a few hours would rise, that he was but slipping from one life to another. Karma, the deeds of this as of all the other lives he had passed, would be somehow continued; and perhaps, in his exhaustion, the only emotion that remained to him was curiosity, anxious it might be or amused, to know in what condition he would be reborn. Dr Saunders dozed off. He was awakened by a black-man’s hand on his shoulder.

‘Come quick.’

The dawn was breaking. It was not yet day, but the light of the stars had dwindled and the sky was ghostly. He went below. The diver was sinking fast. His eyes were open still, but his pulse was imperceptible and his body had the coldness of death. Suddenly there was a little rattle, not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of the Japanese, and he was dead. The two sleepers had wakened and one sat on the edge of his bunk, his black naked legs dangling, while the other, as though he wanted to shut away from him what was happening so close, sat crouched on the floor with his back to the dying man, and held his head in his hands.

When the doctor went back on deck, and told the captain, he shrugged his shoulders.

‘No physique, these Japs,’ he said.

Dawn now was stealing over the water, and the first rays of the sun touched its stillness with cool and delicate colours.

‘Well, I’ll be getting back to the Fenton,’ said the doctor. ‘I know the captain wants to sail soon after it’s light.’

‘You’d better have some breakfast before you go. You must be pretty peckish.’

‘Well, I could do with a cup of tea.’

‘I’ll tell you what. I’ve got some eggs, I was keeping them for the Jap but he won’t want ’em now, let’s have some bacon and eggs.’

He shouted for the cook.

‘I just fancy a plate of bacon and eggs,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘They ought to be pretty fresh still.’

Presently the cook brought them, piping hot, with tea and biscuits.

‘God, they smell good,’ said the Australian. ‘Funny thing, you know. I never get tired of bacon and eggs. When I’m at home I have them every day. Sometimes my wife gives me something else for a change, but there’s nothing I like ‘alf so much.’

But when the blackfellow was rowing Dr Saunders back to the Fenton, it struck him that death was a funnier thing even than that the schooner’s captain should like bacon and eggs for breakfast. The flat sea was shining like polished steel. Its colours were pale and delicate like the colours in the boudoir of an eighteenth-century marquise. It seemed very odd to the doctor that men should die. There was something absurd in the notion that this pearl diver, the heir of innumerable generations, the result of a complicated process of evolution that had lasted since the planet was formed, here and now, because of a succession of accidents that confounded the imagination, should be brought to death on this lost and uninhabited spot.

Captain Nichols was shaving when the doctor reached the side and he gave him a hand to help him on board.

‘Well, what’s the news?’

‘Oh, he’s dead.’

‘I thought as much. What’s bein’ done about buryin’ him?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I suppose they’ll just throw him overboard.’

‘Like a dog?’

‘Why not?’

The skipper gave signs of an agitation that not a little surprised Dr Saunders.

‘That won’t do at all. Not on a British vessel. He must be buried in the proper way. I mean, he must ‘ave a proper service and all that.’

‘He was a Buddhist or Shintoist or something like that, you know.’

‘I can’t ‘elp that. I been at sea, man and boy, for more than thirty years, and when a chap dies on a British ship he must ‘ave a British funeral. Death levels all men, doc, you ought to know that, and at a time like this we can’t ‘old it up against a fellow that he’s a Jap, or a nigger, or a dago, or anything. Hi, you men, lower a boat and look sharp about it. I’ll go over to the schooner meself. When I see you didn’t come back all this time I said to meself that this was going to ‘appen. That’s why I was shavin’ when you come alongside.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m goin’ to talk to the skipper of that there schooner. We must do what’s right. Give that Jap a send-off in style. I’ve always made a point of that on every vessel I’ve commanded. Makes a rare good impression on the crew. Then they know what to expect if anything ‘appens to them.’

The dinghy was lowered and the skipper rowed away. Fred Blake came aft. With his tousled hair, his clear skin and blue eyes, his springtime radiance, he looked like a young Bacchus in a Venetian picture. The doctor, tired after a night of little sleep, felt a moment’s envy of his insolent youth.

‘How’s the patient, doctor?’

‘Dead.’

‘Some fellows have all the luck, don’t they?’

Dr Saunders gave him a sharp look, but did not speak.

In a little while, they saw the dinghy coming back from the schooner, but without Captain Nichols. The man called Utan spoke English well. He brought them a message that they were all to go over.

‘What the hell for?’ asked Blake.

‘Come on,’ said the doctor.

The two white men climbed over the side and the remaining two members of the crew.

‘Captain say everybody. China boy, too.’

‘Jump in, Ah Kay,’ said the doctor to his servant, who was sitting on deck, unconcerned, sewing a button on a pair of trousers.

Ah Kay put down his work and with his friendly little smile stepped down on light feet into the dinghy. They rowed over to the schooner. When they climbed up the ladder, they found Captain Nichols and the Australian waiting for them.

‘Captain Atkinson agrees with me that we ought to do the right thing by this poor Jap,’ said Nichols, ‘and as he ‘asn’t the experience what I ‘ave, ‘e’s asked me to conduct the ceremony in proper style.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Australian.

‘It isn’t my place, I know that. When you ‘ave a death at sea it’s the captain’s place to read the service, but ‘e don’t ‘appen to ‘ave a prayer-book on board and ‘e don’t know what to do any more than a canary with a rumpsteak. Am I right, Captain?’

The Australian nodded gravely.

‘But I thought you were a Baptist,’ said the doctor.

‘Ordinarily, I am,’ said Nichols. ‘But when it comes to funerals and that-like I always ‘ave used the prayer-book and I always shall use the prayer-book. Now, Captain, as soon as your party’s ready we’ll assemble the men and get on with the job.’

The Australian walked forrard and in a minute or two rejoined them.

‘Looks to me as if they was just putting in the last stitches,’ he said.

‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ said Captain Nichols somewhat to the doctor’s perplexity.

‘What d’you say to a little drink while we’re waiting?’

‘Not yet, Captain. We’ll ‘ave that afterwards. Business before pleasure.’

Then a man came along.

‘All finished, boss,’ he said.

‘That’s fine,’ said Nichols. ‘Come on, chaps.’

He was alert. He held himself erect. His little foxy eyes were twinkling with pleasant anticipation. The doctor observed with demure amusement his air of subdued gaiety. It was plain that he enjoyed the situation. They marched aft. The crews of the two boats, blackfellows all of them, were standing about, some with pipes in their mouths, one or two with the fag-end of a cigarette sticking to their thick lips. On the deck lay a bundle in what looked to the doctor like a copra sack. It was very small. You could hardly believe that it contained what had once been a man.

‘Are you all ‘ere?’ asked Captain Nichols, looking round. ‘No smokin’, please. Respect for the dead.’

They put away their pipes, and spat out the ends of their cigarettes.

‘Stand round now. You near me, Captain. I’m only doin’ this to oblige, you understand, and I don’t want you to think I don’t know it’s your place and not mine. Now then, are you all ready?’

Captain Nichols’s recollection of the burial service was somewhat sketchy. He began with a prayer that owed much to his invention, but which he delivered with unction. Its language was florid. He ended with a resounding amen.

‘Now we’ll sing a ‘ymn.’ He looked at the blackfellows. ‘You’ve all been to missionary schools and I want you to put your guts in it. Let ’em ‘ear you right away to Macassar. Come on, all of you. Onward Christian Soldiers, onwards as to war.’

He burst out singing in a throaty, tuneless strain, but with fervour, and he had hardly started before the crews of the two boats joined in. They sang lustily with rich deep voices and the sound travelled over the peaceful sea. It was a hymn they had all learnt in their native islands, and they knew every word of it; but in their unfamiliar speech, with its queer intonations, it gathered a strange mystery so that it seemed not like a Christian hymn, but like the barbaric, rhythmical shouting of a savage multitude. It rang with fantastic sounds, the beating of drums and the clang of curious instruments, and it suggested the night and dark ceremonies by the water’s edge and the dripping of blood in human sacrifice. Ah Kay, very clean in his neat white dress, stood a little apart from the black men in an attitude of negligent grace, and in his lovely liquid eyes was a look of a slightly scornful astonishment. They ended the first verse and without prompting from Captain Nichols sang the second. But when they started on the third he clapped his hands sharply.

‘Now then, that’s enough,’ he cried. ‘This ain’t a bloody concert. We don’t want to stay ‘ere all night.’

They stopped suddenly and he looked round with severity. The doctor’s eyes fell on that small bundle in the copra sack that lay on deck in the middle of the circle. He did not know why, but he thought of the little boy the dead diver once had been, with his yellow face and sloeblack eyes, who played in the streets of a Japanese town and was taken by his mother in her pretty Japanese dress, with pins in her elaborately done hair and clogs on her feet, to see the cherry blossom when it was in flower and, on holidays, to the temple, where he was given a cake; and perhaps once, dressed all in white, with an ashen wand in his hand, he had gone with all his family on pilgrimage and watched the sun rise from the summit of Fuji Yama, the sacred mountain.

‘Now I’m going to say another prayer and when I come to the words, “we therefore commend ‘is body to the deep,” and mind you watch out for them, I don’t want a hitch or anythin’ like that, you just catch ‘old of ‘im and pop ‘im over, see? Better detail two men to do that, Captain.’

‘You, Bob. And Jo.’

The two men stepped forward and made to seize the body.

‘Not yet, you damned fools,’ cried Captain Nichols. ‘Let me get the words out of me mouth, blast you.’ And then, without stopping to take breath, he burst into prayer. He went on till he could evidently think of nothing more to say, and then, raising his voice a little: ‘Forasmuch as it ‘as pleased Almighty God of ‘is great mercy to take unto ‘isself the soul of our dear brother ‘ere departed: We therefore commend his body to the deep . . .’ He gave the two men a severe look, but they were staring at him with open mouths. ‘Now then, don’t be all night about it. Pop the bleeder over, blast you.’

With a start they leapt at the little bundle that lay on deck and flung it overboard. It plunged into the water with hardly a splash. Captain Nichols went on with a little satisfied smile on his face:

‘To be turned into corruption, lookin’ for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up its dead. Now, dearly beloved brethren, we’ll all say the Lord’s prayer, and no mumblin’, please. God wants to ‘ear and I want to ‘ear. Our Father which art in ‘eaven . . .’

He repeated it to the crew in a loud voice and all but Ah Kay said it with him.

‘Now, men, that’s about all,’ he continued, but in the same unctuous voice; ‘I’m glad to ‘ave ‘ad the opportunity to conduct this sad ceremony in the proper way. In the midst of life we are in death, and accidents will ‘appen in the best regulated families. I want you to know that if you’re taken to the bourne from which no one ever comes back, so long as you’re on a British ship and under the British flag, you can be sure of ‘avin’ a decent funeral and bein’ buried like a faithful son of our Lord Jesus Christ. Under ordinary circumstances I should now call upon you to give three cheers for your captain, Captain Atkinson, but this is a sad occasion upon which we are gathered together and our thoughts are too deep for tears, so I will ask you to give ‘im three cheers in your ‘earts. And now to God the Father, God the Son and God the ‘oly Ghost. A-a-men.’

Captain Nichols turned aside with the manner of a man descending from the pulpit and held out his hand to the captain of the schooner. The Australian wrung it warmly,

‘By God, you done that first-rate,’ he said.

‘Practice,’ said Captain Nichols modestly.

‘Now, boys, what about a tiddly?’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Captain Nichols. He turned to his crew. ‘You fellers get back to the Fenton and, Tom, you come back and fetch us.’

The four men shambled along the deck. Captain Atkinson brought up from the cabin a bottle of whisky and some glasses.

‘A parson couldn’t have done it better,’ he said, raising his glass to Captain Nichols.

‘It’s just a matter of feelin’. You ‘ave to ‘ave the feelin’. I mean, when I was conductin’ that service I didn’t think it was only a dirty little Jap, it was just the same to me as if it’d been you or Fred or the doctor. That’s Christianity, that is.’

CHAPTER 13

The monsoon was blowing hard and when they left the shelter of the land they found a heavy sea. The doctor was ignorant of sailing vessels and to his unaccustomed eyes it seemed formidable. Captain Nichols had the water-cask aft lashed down. The waves, crested with white, looked very large and in that small craft one was very near the water. Now and then a heavy sea struck them and a cloud of spoon-drift swept along the deck. They were passing islands and as they passed each one the doctor asked himself if he could swim so far if they were capsized. He was nervous. It exasperated him. He knew there was no need. Two of the blackfellows were sitting on the hatch tying rope together to make a fishing line, and, intent on their job, never so much as gave the sea a glance. The water was muddy and there were reefs all around them. The skipper ordered one of the men to stand on the jib-boom and keep a lookout. The blackfellow guided the skipper with a gesture of one arm or the other. The sun shone and the sky was bright blue, but high above them white clouds raced with a swift and even motion. The doctor tried to read, but he had to duck constantly to avoid the spray when a sea broke over them. Presently there was a dull scraping and he clutched the gunwale. They had struck a reef. They bumped over and were again in deep water. Nichols shouted a curse at the look-out man for not being more careful. They struck another reef and again bumped off.

‘We’d better get out of this,’ said the skipper.

He altered his course and made for the open sea. The ketch rolled heavily and righted herself each time with a peevish jerk. Dr Saunders was wet through.

‘Why don’t you go down into the cabin?’ the skipper shouted.

‘I prefer being on deck.’

‘No danger, you know.’

‘Is it going to get any worse?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. Looks to me as if it was blowin’ up a bit.’

The doctor, looking over the stern, watched a heavy sea charge down upon them, and he expected the next wave to crash before the ketch had time to recover, but with an agility that was almost human she avoided it just in time and triumphantly rode on. He was not comfortable. He was not happy. Fred Blake came up to him.

‘Grand, isn’t it? Exhilarating having a bit of a blow like this.’

His curling hair was all blown about in the wind and his eyes were shining. He was enjoying himself. The doctor shrugged his shoulders, but did not answer. He looked at a great billow, with overhanging, breaking crest, that came rolling towards them, as though it were not the unconscious result of natural forces, but had a malignant purpose. Nearer and nearer it came and it seemed as though it must inevitably overwhelm them. The frail craft could never withstand that monstrous mountain of water.

‘Look out,’ shouted the skipper.

He kept the lugger dead before it. Dr Saunders instinctively clung to the mast. It struck them and it seemed that a wall of water poured over them. The deck was swimming.

‘That was a whopper,’ shouted Fred.

‘I needed a bath,’ said the skipper.

They both laughed. But the doctor was sick with fear. He wished with all his heart that he had stayed safely on the island of Takana till the steamer called. How stupid it was to risk his life rather than endure two or three weeks of boredom! He swore to himself that if he escaped this time nothing would induce him again to do anything so absurd. He did not attempt to read any more. He could not see through his spectacles splashed with water, and his book was drenched. He watched the waves that swept on. The islands now were dim in the distance.

‘Enjoyin’ it, doc?’ shouted the skipper.

The lugger was tossing about like a cork. Dr Saunders tried to force a smile to his lips.

‘Fine thing to blow the cobwebs away,’ the skipper added.

The doctor had never seen him in better spirits. He was alert. He seemed to enjoy his own competence. It was no figure of speech to say that he was in his element. Fear? He knew nothing of it, that vulgar, cheating, shifty man; there was nothing decent in him, he knew nothing of whatever gave dignity to man, or beauty, and you had only to know him for twenty-four hours to be certain that if there were two ways of doing a thing, a straight one and a crooked, he would choose the crooked one. In that low and squalid mind there was but one motive, the desire to get the better of his fellow men by foul means; it was not even a passion of evil, in which after all there might be a sinister grandeur, it was a puckish malice that found satisfaction in besting another. And yet here, in this tiny vessel in that vast desert of angry waves, without possibility of succour if catastrophe befell them, he was at ease, strong in his knowledge of the sea, proud, self-assured and happy. He seemed to take pleasure in his mastery of the little boat he managed with such confident skill; it was in his hands like a horse in a horseman’s when he knows every trick and habit it has, every whim and every capacity; he watched the waves with a smile in his foxy little eyes, and he nodded with self-satisfaction as they thundered by. It almost seemed to the doctor that to him they too were living things that he found a cynical amusement in getting the better of.

Dr Saunders flinched as he watched the huge waves race after them, and clinging to the mast he swayed away from the sea as the lugger heeled over; and then, as though his weight could make all the difference, swayed back as she rolled. He knew he was pale, and he felt his face stiff. He wondered if there would be any chance of getting into one of the two dinghies if the boat foundered. There wouldn’t be much chance for them if they did. They were a hundred miles away from any inhabited spot and out of the line of traffic. If anything happened the only thing was to let oneself drown quickly. It was not death he minded, but dying, and he wondered if it would be very unpleasant while he swallowed the water and choked, and, notwithstanding his will, desperately struggled.

Then the cook lurched along the deck bearing their dinner. A heavy sea had swamped out the hold, and he had not been able to light a fire, so it consisted of a tin of corned beef and cold potatoes.

‘Send Utan along to take the helm,’ the skipper shouted.

The blackfellow took the skipper’s place, and the three men gathered round their wretched meal.

‘Pretty peckish, I am,’ said Nichols jovially, as he helped himself. ‘How’s the appetite, Fred?’

‘All right.’

The lad was soaked to the skin, but his cheeks were bright and his eyes glistened. Dr Saunders wondered if his air of unconcern was assumed. Frightened, and angry with himself because he was, he gave the skipper a sour look.

‘If you can digest this you can digest an ox.’

‘Bless you, I never ‘ave dyspepsia when there’s a bit of a gale. Like a tonic to me, it is.’

‘How long is this blasted wind going to blow?’

‘Not likin’ it much, doc?’ The skipper chuckled slyly. ‘It may drop towards sunset or it may blow up a bit.’

‘Can’t we get in the shelter of some island?’

‘Better off at sea. These boats, they can stand anythin’. I don’t fancy goin’ to pieces on a reef.’

When they had finished eating Captain Nichols lit his pipe. ‘What about a game of cribbage, Fred?’ he said.

‘I’m on.’

‘You’re not going to play that damned game now?’ cried the doctor.

Captain Nichols gave the sea a sneering glance. ‘A little bit of water; that’s nothin’. Them niggers, they can steer a boat with anyone.’

They went down into the cabin. Dr Saunders stayed on deck and sullenly watched the sea. The afternoon stretched interminably before him. He wondered what Ah Kay was up to and presently he scrambled forward. Only one of the crew was on deck. The hatch was battened down.

‘Where’s my boy?’ he asked.

The man pointed to the hold.

‘Sleeping. Want to go down?’

He raised the hatch, and the doctor clambered down the companion. A lamp was alight. It was dark and noisome. One blackfellow was sitting on the floor, with nothing on but a loin cloth, mending his trousers; the other and Ah Kay were in their bunks. They were sleeping quietly. But when the doctor lurched up to Ah Kay he woke and gave his master his sweet and friendly smile.

‘Feeling all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frightened?’

Ah Kay, smiling again, shook his head.

‘Go back to sleep,’ said the doctor.

He climbed up the companion and with difficulty pushed up the hatch. The man on deck helped him, and as he came out on deck a sheet of water hit him in the face. His heart sank. He swore and shook his fists at the angry sea.

‘Better get below,’ said the blackfellow. ‘Wet up here.’

The doctor shook his head. He stood there clinging to a rope. He wanted human companionship. He knew perfectly well that he was the only man on board who was afraid. Even Ah Kay, who knew no more of the sea than he, was unconcerned. There was no danger. They were as safe on the lugger as on dry land, and yet he could not prevent the pang of terror that seized him each time that a following wave caught them up and sent a cloud of spoon-drift hurtling along the deck. The water flowed out of the scuppers in a great rush. He was terrified. It seemed to him that it was only by an effort of will that he did not curl up in a corner and whimper. He had an instinct to appeal for succour to a God he did not believe in, and he had to clench his teeth to prevent his trembling lips from uttering a prayer. The circumstance seemed to him ironical that he, an intelligent man, who looked upon himself as something of a philosopher, should be affected with this craven fear, and he smiled grimly at the absurdity. It was a bit thick, if you came to think of it, that he, with his quick brain, his wide knowledge, and reasoned view of life, he who had nothing to lose by death, should tremble while these men, ignorant like the blackfellow by his side, base like the captain or dull like Fred Blake, should remain unperturbed. It just showed what a poor thing the mind was. He felt sick with fright, and he asked himself what it was he was frightened of. Death? He had faced death before. Once indeed he had decided to make an end of himself, but painlessly, and it had needed an odd mixture of courage, cynicism, and cold reason to make him go on with a life that seemed to offer nothing desirable. He was glad now that he had had the sense. But he knew that he had no great attachment to life. Sometimes when ill he had felt his hold on it so slight that he looked forward to dissolution not only with resignation but with cheerfulness. Pain? He bore pain pretty well. After all, if you could bear dengue or a bad toothache with serenity, you could bear anything. No, it was not that, it was just some instinct over which he had no control; and he looked curiously, as though it were something outside himself, at the terror that made his throat dry and his knees shake.

‘Very odd,’ he muttered as he made his way aft.

He glanced at his wrist-watch. By God, it was only three. There was something horrible in that clean, wind-swept sky. Its brilliance was heartless. It seemed to have nothing to do with the tempestuous sea; and the sea, so hard and bright a blue, recked nothing of man. Strange, senseless powers that sported with him and destroyed him not from malice, but in wanton amusement.

‘Give me the sea from the beach,’ the doctor muttered to himself grimly.

He went down into the cabin.

‘Two for his ‘eels at all events,’ he heard from the skipper.

They were still playing their dreary game.

‘How’s the weather, doc?’

‘Rotten.’

‘It’ll ‘ave to be worse before it’s better, like a woman ‘avin’ a baby. Grand boats these are. Weather a hurricane. I’d rather go to sea in one of these Australian pearlin’ luggers than in a transatlantic liner.’

‘It’s your crib,’ said Fred.

They were playing on the captain’s mattress, and the doctor, changing his dripping clothes, flung himself on the other. He could not read in the fitful light of the swaying lamp. He lay and listened to the monotonous terms of the game. They struck the ear with an insistent jar. The cabin creaked and groaned and over his head the wind roared furiously. He was shaken from side to side.

‘That was a roll,’ said Fred.

‘Takin’ it grand, ain’t she? Fifteen two. Fifteen four.’

Fred was winning again and the skipper played to a running accompaniment of complaint. Dr Saunders stiffened his limbs to bear the misery of his fear. The hours passed with frightful slowness. Towards sunset Captain Nichols went on deck.

‘Blowin’ up a bit,’ he said, when he came down again. ‘I’m goin’ to have a nap. It don’t look to me as if I’d get much sleep tonight.’

‘Why don’t you lay her to?’ asked Fred.

‘Bring ‘er up to the wind with a sea like this runnin’? No, sir. She’s all right as long as everythin’ ‘olds.’

He coiled himself up on his mattress and in five minutes was snoring peacefully. Fred went on deck to get a breath of air. The doctor was angry with himself for having been such a fool as to take a passage on this small craft, and he was angry with the captain and with Fred because they were free of the terror that obsessed him. But when the ketch had seemed about to founder a hundred times, and each time righted herself, there stole upon him gradually an unwilling admiration for the gallant little boat. At seven the cook brought them their supper and woke Captain Nichols to eat it. He had been able to make a fire, and they had hot stew and hot tea. Then the three of them went on deck and the skipper took the helm. It was a clear night, with the stars in their myriads twinkling brightly; the sea was rough, and in the darkness the waves looked enormous.

‘By God, there’s a big ‘un,’ cried Fred.

A huge wall of green water, with a breaking crest, was rushing down on them. It looked as though it must inevitably fall on them, and if it did, the Fenton, powerless to rise to it, must be rolled over and over. The skipper glanced round and jammed himself against the wheel. He steered so that the wave should strike them dead aft. Suddenly the stern slewed off the course and there was a crash and a mass of water swept over the quarter. They were blinded. Then the bulwarks rose above the sea. The Fenton shook herself like a dog stepping on to dry land and the water poured out of the scuppers.

‘Gettin’ beyond a joke,’ bellowed the skipper.

‘Any islands near?’

‘Yep. If we can keep goin’ for a couple of hours we can get under their lee.’

‘What about reefs?’

‘There ain’t any marked. Moon’ll be out soon. You two chaps better go below.’

‘I’ll stay on deck,’ said Fred. ‘Stuffy in the cabin.’

‘Please yourself. What about you, doc?’

The doctor hesitated. He hated the look of the angry sea and he was bored with being frightened. He had died so many deaths that he had exhausted his emotion.

‘Can I be of any use?’

‘No more than a snowball in ‘ell.’

‘Remember you carry Caesar and his fortunes,’ he shouted in the skipper’s ear.

But Captain Nichols, not having had a classical education, did not see the point of the jest. If I perish, I perish, the doctor reflected, and he made up his mind to get all the enjoyment he could out of what might be his last hours on earth. He went forward to fetch Ah Kay. The boy followed him back and came down with him into the cabin.

‘Let’s try Kim Ching’s chandu,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘No need to stint ourselves tonight.’

The boy got the lamp and the opium from the valise, and with his accustomed nonchalance started to prepare the pipe. Never had the first long inhalation seemed more delicious. They smoked alternately. Gradually peace descended upon the doctor’s soul. His nerves ceased to tingle with the roll of the lugger. Fear left him. After the usual six pipes that the doctor smoked every night Ah Kay lay back as if he had finished.

‘Not yet,’ said Dr Saunders softly. ‘For once I’m going the whole hog.’

The motion of the boat was not unpleasant. Little by little it seemed to him that he grasped its rhythm. It was only his carcase that was tossed from side to side, his spirit soared in regions far above the storm. He walked in the infinite, but he knew, before Einstein, that it was bounded by his own thought. He knew once more that he had but to stretch his intelligence ever so little to solve a great mystery; and again he did not do it because it gave him more pleasure to know that it was there waiting to be solved. It had agreeably tantalized him so long, it was indelicate, when any moment might be his last, to ravish its secret. He was like a well-bred man who will not expose his mistress to the humiliation of knowing that he does not believe her lies. Ah Kay fell asleep, curled up at the foot of the mattress. Dr Saunders moved a little so as not to disturb him. He thought of God and of eternity, and he laughed softly, in his heart, at the absurdity of life. Scraps of poetry floated in his memory. It seemed to him that he was dead already and Captain Nichols, Charon in a tarpaulin, was bearing him to a strange, sweet place. At last he fell asleep also.

CHAPTER 14

He was awakened by the chill of dawn. He opened his eyes and saw that the companion hatch was open, and then he was aware of the skipper and Fred Blake sleeping on their mattresses. They had come down and left the hatch open on account of the pungent smell of the opium. Suddenly it occurred to him that the lugger rolled no longer. He raised himself. He felt a trifle heavy, for he was unaccustomed to smoke so much, and he thought he would get into the air.

Ah Kay was resting peacefully where he had fallen asleep. He touched him on the shoulder. The boy opened his eyes and his lips broke immediately into the slow smile that gave such beauty to his young face. He stretched himself and yawned.

‘Get me some tea,’ said the doctor.

Ah Kay was on his feet in a minute. The doctor followed him up the companion. The sun had not yet risen and one pale star still loitered in the sky, but the night had thinned to a ghostly grey, and the ketch seemed to float on the surface of a cloud. The man at the helm in an old coat, with a muffler round his neck and a battered hat crammed down at his head, gave the doctor a surly nod. The sea was quite calm. They were passing between two islands so close together that they might have been sailing down a canal. There was a very light breeze. The blackfellow at the helm seemed half asleep. The dawn slid between the low, wooded islands, gravely, with a deliberate calmness that seemed to conceal an inward apprehension; and you felt it natural and even inevitable that men should have personified it in a maiden. It had indeed the shyness and the grace of a young girl, the charming seriousness, the indifference, and the ruthlessness. The sky had the washed-out colour of an archaic statue. The virgin forests on each side of them still held the night, but then insensibly the grey of the sea was shot with the soft hues of a pigeon’s breast. There was a pause, and with a smile the day broke. Sailing between those uninhabited islands, on that still sea, in a silence that caused you almost to hold your breath, you had a strange and exciting impression of the beginning of the world. There man might never have passed and you had a feeling that what your eyes saw had never been seen before. You had a sensation of primeval freshness, and all the complication of the generations disappeared. A stark simplicity, as bare and severe as a straight line, filled the soul with rapture. Dr Saunders knew at that moment the ecstasy of the mystic.

Ah Kay brought him a cup of tea, jasmine-scented, and scrambling down from the spiritual altitudes on which for an instant he had floated he made himself comfortable, as in an arm-chair, in the bliss of a material enjoyment. The air was cool but balmy. He asked for nothing but to go on for ever in that boat sailing on an even keel between green islands.

When he had been sitting there an hour, delighting in his ease, he heard steps on the companion, and Fred Blake came on deck. In his pyjamas, with his tousled hair, he looked very young, and as was natural to his age he had awakened fresh, with all the lines smoothed out of his face, and not puckered and wrinkled and time-worn as sleep had left the doctor.

‘Up early, doctor?’ He noticed the empty cup. ‘I wonder if I can get a cup of tea.’

‘Ask Ah Kay.’

‘All right. I’ll just get Utan to throw a couple of buckets of water over me.’

He went forward and spoke to one of the men. The doctor saw the blackfellow lower a bucket by a rope into the sea, and then Fred Blake stripped his pyjamas and stood on deck naked while the other threw the contents over him. The bucket was lowered again and Fred turned round. He was tall, with square shoulders, a small waist and slender hips; his arms and neck were tanned, but the rest of his body was very white. He dried himself, and putting on his pyjamas again came aft. His eyes were shining and on his lips was the outline of a smile.

‘You’re a very good-looking young fellow,’ said the doctor.

Fred gave an indifferent shrug of the shoulders and sank into the next chair.

‘We lost a boat in the night. D’you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Blew like the devil. We’ve lost the jib. Just torn to tatters. Nichols wasn’t half glad to get into the shelter of the islands, I can tell you. I thought we’d never make it.’

‘Did you stay up on deck all the time?’

‘Yes, I thought if we foundered I’d rather be in the open.’

‘There wouldn’t have been much chance for you.’

‘No, I know that.’

‘Weren’t you afraid?’

‘No. You know, I think if it’s coming to you, it’ll come. And there’s nothing to do about it.’

‘I was frightened.’

‘Nichols said you were in the afternoon. He thought it a hell of a joke.’

‘It’s a question of age, you know. The old are much more easily frightened than the young. I couldn’t help thinking it rather funny at the time that I, who had so much less to lose than you who’ve got all your life before you, should dread losing it so much more than you did.’

‘How could you think if you were as scared as all that?’

‘I was scared with my body. That didn’t prevent me from thinking with my mind.’

‘Bit of a character, aren’t you, doctor.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘I’m sorry I was so short with you when you asked if you could have a passage on this boat.’ He hesitated an instant. ‘I’ve been ill, you know, and my nerves are a bit funny. I’m not crazy about people I don’t know.’

‘Oh, that’s all right.’

‘I don’t want you to think I’m just a rough-neck.’ He looked round at the peaceful scene. They had sailed out of the narrow arm between the two islands, and now found themselves in what looked like an inland sea. They were surrounded by low-lying islets, thickly covered with vegetation, and the water was as calm and blue as a Swiss lake. ‘Bit of a change from last night. Got worse when the moon rose. How you could have slept through it beats me. There was a hell of a racket.’

‘I smoked.’

‘Nichols said you were going to when you and the Chink went into the cabin. I wouldn’t believe it. But when we came down – huh, it was enough to take the roof of your head off.’

‘Why wouldn’t you believe it?’

‘I couldn’t imagine that a man like you could degrade himself by doing such a thing.’

The doctor chuckled.

‘One should be tolerant of other people’s vices,’ he said calmly.

‘I’ve got no cause to blame anybody.’

‘What else has Nichols said about me?’

‘Oh, well.’ He paused as he saw Ah Kay, as neat as a new pin in his white dress, slim and graceful, come along to fetch the empty cups. ‘It’s no business of mine, anyway. He says you were struck off the rolls for something.’

‘Removed from the Register is the correct expression,’ placidly interrupted the doctor.

‘And he says he believes you went to gaol. Naturally one can’t help wondering when one sees a man with your intelligence, and the reputation you have in the East, settled in a beastly Chinese city.’

‘What makes you think I’m intelligent?’

‘I can see that you’re educated. I don’t want you to think that I’m just a larrikin. I was studying to be an accountant when my health broke down. This isn’t the sort of life I’m used to.’

The doctor smiled. No one could have looked more radiantly well than Fred Blake. His broad chest, his athletic build, gave the lie to his tale of tuberculosis.

‘Shall I tell you something?’

‘Not if you don’t want to.’

‘Oh, not about myself. I don’t talk much about myself. I think there’s no harm in a doctor being a trifle mysterious. It adds to his patients’ belief in him. I was going to give you a reflection based on experience. When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime, or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.’

Fred looked down.

‘Why do you say that to me?’

‘I thought it might be a useful piece of information.’

The young man sighed a little.

‘You never know about people, do you? I used to think you were either white or yellow. It seems to me you can’t tell what anyone’ll do when it comes to the pinch. Of all the rotten skunks I’ve met I’ve never met one to beat Nichols. He’d rather go crooked than straight. You can’t trust him an inch. We’ve been together a good while now, and I thought there wasn’t much I didn’t know about him. He’d do his own brother down if he got the chance. Not a decent thing about him. You should have seen him last night. I don’t mind telling you it was a pretty near thing. You’d have been surprised. Calm as a cucumber. My opinion is that he just revelled in it. Once he said to me: “Said your prayers, Fred? If we don’t make the islands before it gets much worse, we shall be feeding the fishes in the morning.” And he grinned all over his ugly face. He kept his head all right. I’ve done a bit of sailing in Sydney harbour and I give you my word I’ve never seen a boat handled like he handled this one. I take my hat off to him. If we’re here now it’s him we owe it to. He’s got nerve all right. And if he thought there was twenty pounds to be made without risk by doing us in, you and me, d’you think he’d hesitate? How d’you explain that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘But don’t you think it’s funny that a chap who’s nothing but a born crook should have all that pluck? I mean, I’ve always heard that when a man was a wrong ‘un he might bluster and bully, but when it comes to a crisis he’d just crumple up. I hate that chap, and all the same, last night I couldn’t help admiring him.’

The doctor smiled quietly, but did not answer. He was amused by the lad’s ingenuous surprise at the complexity of human nature.

‘And he’s conceited. We play cribbage all the time, fancies himself at the game. I always beat him, and he will go on.’

‘He tells me you’ve been very lucky.’

‘Lucky in love, unlucky at cards, they say. I’ve played cards all my life. I’ve got a knack for it. That’s one of the reasons why I went in for being an accountant. I’ve got that sort of head. It’s not luck. You have luck in streaks. I know about cards, and in the long run it’s always the fellow who plays best who wins. Nichols thinks he’s smart. He hasn’t got a dog’s chance playing with me.’

The conversation dropped and they sat side by side in easy comfort. After a while Captain Nichols woke and came on deck. In his dirty pyjamas, unwashed, unshaved, with his decayed teeth and general air of having run to seed, he presented an appearance that was almost repulsive. His face, grey in the light of early morning, bore a peevish expression.

‘It’s come on again, doc.’

‘What?’

‘My dyspepsia. I ‘ad a snack last night before I went to bed. I knew I oughtn’t to eat anything just before turnin’ in, but I was that ‘ungry I just ‘ad to, and it’s on me chest now somethin’ cruel.’

‘We’ll see what we can do about it,’ smiled the doctor, getting up from his chair.

‘You won’t be able to do a thing,’ answered the skipper gloomily. ‘I know my digestion. After I been through a patch of dirty weather I always ‘ave dyspepsia as sure as my name’s Nichols. Cruel ‘ard, I call it. I mean, you would think after I’d been at the wheel for eight hours I could eat a bit of cold sausage and a slice of cheese without sufferin’ for it. Damn it all, a man must eat.’

CHAPTER 15

Dr Saunders was to to leave them at Kanda-Meria, twin islands in the Kanda Sea, at which vessels of the Royal Netherlands Steam Packet Company called regularly. He thought it unlikely that he would have to wait long before a ship came in bound for some place to which he was not unwilling to go. The gale had forced them out of their course, and for twenty-four hours they were becalmed, so that it was not till the sixth day that, early in the morning, with but just enough wind to fill their sails, they sighted the volcano of Meria. The town was on Kanda. It was nine o’clock before they reached the entrance to the harbour, and the Sailing Directions had warned them that it was difficult. Meria was a tall conical hill covered with jungle almost to its summit, and a plume of dense smoke, like a huge umbrella pine, rose from its crater. The channel between the two islands was narrow, and tidal streams were said to run through it with great force. In one place it was barely half a cable wide, and there were shoals in the centre with very little water over them. But Captain Nichols was a fine seaman and knew it. He liked an opportunity to show off. Looking astonishingly disreputable in loud striped pyjamas, a battered topi on his head, and a week’s growth of white beard, he took the Fenton in with style.

‘Don’t look so bad,’ he said, as the little town was discovered.

There were warehouses to the water’s edge and native houses on poles with thatched roofs. Naked children were playing about in the clear water. A Chinese in a broad-brimmed hat was fishing from a dug-out. The harbour was far from crowded: there were only two junks, three or four large prahus, a motor-boat, and a derelict schooner. Beyond the town was a hill surmounted by a flagstaff, and from it dangled limply a Dutch flag.

‘I wonder if there’s a hotel,’ murmured the doctor.

He and Fred Blake stood on each side of Captain Nichols at the helm.

‘Sure to be. Used to be a grand place in the old days. Centre of the spice trade and all that. Nutmegs. Never been ‘ere meself, but I been told there’s marble palaces and I don’t know what all.’

There were two piers. One was neat and tidy; the other, of wood, was ramshackle and badly needed a coat of paint. It was shorter than the first.

‘The long ‘un belongs to the Netherlands Company, I guess,’ said the skipper. ‘Let’s go to the other.’

They reached the side. The mainsail was lowered with a clatter and they tied up.

‘Well, doc, you’ve arrived. Luggage ready and all that?’

‘You’re coming ashore, aren’t you?’

‘What about it, Fred?’

‘Yes, come on. I’m sick of being aboard this boat. And we’ve got to get another dinghy, anyway.’

‘We’ll be wantin’ a new jib, too. I’ll just go and doll meself up and then I’ll join you.’

The skipper went down into the cabin. His toilet did not take him long, for it consisted only in changing his pyjamas for a pair of khaki trousers, putting a khaki coat on his bare back, and slipping his naked feet into old tennis shoes. They clambered by rickety steps on to the pier and walked along it. There was no one there. They reached the quay and after hesitating for a moment took what looked like the main street. It was empty and silent. They wandered down the middle of the roadway, abreast, and looked about them. It was pleasant to be able to stretch one’s legs after those days on the lugger, and a relief to feel under one’s feet the solid earth. The bungalows on either side of the road had very high roofs, thatched and pointed, and the roofs, jutting out, were supported by pillars, Doric and Corinthian, so as to form broad verandas. They had an air of ancient opulence, but their whitewash was stained and worn, and the little gardens in front of them were rank with tangled weeds. They came to shops and they all seemed to sell the same sort of things, cottons, sarongs and canned foods. There was no animation. Some of the shops had not even an attendant, as though no purchaser could possibly be expected. The few persons they passed, Malays or Chinese, walked quickly as though they were afraid to awaken the echo. Now and then a whiff of nutmeg assaulted the nostrils. Dr Saunders stopped a Chinese and asked him where the hotel was. He told them to go straight on, and presently they came to it. They went in. There was no one about but they sat down at a table on the veranda and thumped on it with their fists. A native woman in a sarong came and looked at them, but vanished when the doctor addressed her. Then appeared a half-caste, buttoning up his stengah-shifter, and Dr Saunders asked if he could have a room. The man did not understand, and the doctor spoke to him in Chinese. The man answered in Dutch, but when the doctor shook his head, with a smile made signs that they were to wait and ran down the steps. They saw him cross the road.

‘Gone to fetch someone, I expect,’ said the skipper. ‘Extraordinary thing they shouldn’t speak English. They gave me to understand the place was civilized.’

The half-caste returned in a few minutes with a white man, who gave them a curious glance as his companion pointed them out to him, and then as he came up the steps politely raised his topi.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Can I be of any service to you? Van Ryk cannot understand what you want.’

He spoke English very correctly, but with a foreign accent. He was a young man, in the twenties, very tall, six foot three at least, and broad-shouldered, a powerful fellow, but clumsily built, so that though he gave you an impression of great strength, it was of an ungainly nature. His ducks were neat and clean. A fountain pen protruded from the pocket of his closely buttoned tunic.

‘We’ve just come in on a sailing-boat,’ said the doctor, ‘and I want to know if I can have a room here till the next steamer comes in.’

‘Surely. The hotel isn’t as full as all that.’

He turned to the half-caste and fluently explained what the doctor wanted. After a brief conversation he returned to English.

‘Yes, he can give you a nice room. Your board included, it’ll come to eight gulden a day. The manager’s away at Batavia, but van Ryk’s looking after things, and he’ll make you comfortable.’

‘What about a drink?’ said the skipper. ‘Let’s ‘ave some beer.’

‘Won’t you join us?’ asked the doctor politely.

‘Thank you very much.’

The young man sat down and took off his topi. He had a broad, flat face and a flat nose, with high cheekbones and rather small black eyes; his smooth skin was sallow, and there was no colour in his cheeks; his hair, cut very short, was coal-black. He was not at all good-looking, but his great ugly face bore an expression of such good nature that you could not but be somewhat taken by him. His eyes were mild and kindly.

‘Dutch?’ asked the skipper.

‘No, I’m a Dane. Erik Christessen. I represent a Danish company here.’

‘Been here long?’

‘Four years.’

‘Good God!’ cried Fred Blake.

Erik Christessen gave a little laugh, childlike in its simplicity, and his friendly eyes beamed with good will.

‘It’s a fine place. It’s the most romantic spot in the East. They wanted to move me, but I begged them to let me stay on.’

A boy brought them bottled beer, and the huge Dane before drinking raised his glass.

‘Your very good health, gentlemen.’

Dr Saunders did not know why the stranger so very much attracted him. It was not only his cordiality, that was common enough in the East: there was something in his personality that pleased.

‘Don’t look as if there was much business ‘ere,’ said Captain Nichols.

‘The place is dead. We live on our memories, that is what gives the island its character. In the old days, you know, there was so much traffic that sometimes the harbour was full and vessels had to wait outside till the departure of a fleet gave them a chance to enter. I hope you’ll stay here long enough to let me show you round. It’s lovely. An unsuspected isle in far-off seas.’

The doctor pricked up his ears. He recognized it as a quotation, but could not place it.

‘What does that come from?’

‘That? Oh, Pippa Passes. Browning, you know.’

‘How does it happen that you’ve read that?’

‘I read a lot. I have plenty of time, you see. I like English poetry best of all. Ah, Shakespeare.’ He looked at Fred with a soft, gracious glance, a smile on his great mouth, and began to recite:

. . . of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their med’cinable gum.

It sounded odd in that foreign accent, somewhat gruff and guttural, but what was odder still was that there a young Danish trader should quote Shakespeare to the shifty scoundrel Captain Nichols and to the oafish lad Fred Blake. Dr Saunders found the situation faintly humorous. The skipper gave him a wink that signified quite clearly that this was a queer fish, but Fred Blake flushed and looked shy. The Dane had no notion that he had done anything to excite surprise. He went on eagerly:

‘The old Dutch merchants were so rich here in the great days of the spice trade, they didn’t know what to do with their money. There was no cargo for the ships to bring out and so they used to bring marble and use it for their houses. If you’re not in a hurry I’ll show you mine. It used to belong to one of the perkeniers. And sometimes, in winter, they’d bring a cargo of nothing but ice. Funny, isn’t it? That was the greatest luxury they could have. Just think of bringing ice all the way from Holland. It took six months, the journey. And they all had their carriages, and in the cool of the evening the smart thing was to drive along the shore and round and round the square. Someone ought to write about it. It was like a Dutch Arabian Nights’ Tale. Did you see the Portuguese fort as you came in? I’ll take you there this afternoon. If there is anything I can do for you, you must let me know. I shall be very glad.’

‘I shall get my traps,’ said the doctor. ‘These gentlemen have very kindly given me a passage here. I don’t want to put them out more than I can help.’

Erik Christessen beamed amiably on the other two. ‘Ah, that is what I like in the East. Everyone is so nice. Nothing is too much trouble. You cannot imagine the kindness I’ve received at the hands of perfect strangers.’

The four of them got up and the Dane told the half-caste manager that Dr Saunders would be coming along in a little while with his luggage and his boy.

‘You should have tiffin here. It is reistafel today, and they make it very well. I shall be here.’

‘You two fellows had better have tiffin with me,’ said the doctor.

‘Reistafel’s death to me,’ said Captain Nichols. ‘But I don’t mind sittin’ and watch you eat it.’

Erik Christessen solemnly shook hands with the three of them.

‘I’m so very glad to have met you. It’s not often we get strangers on the island. And it’s always a pleasure to me to meet English gentlemen.’

He gave them a bow as they separated at the bottom of the steps.

‘Intelligent chap, that,’ said Captain Nichols when they had walked a little. ‘Knew we was gentlemen at once.’

Dr Saunders gave him a glance. There was no trace of irony in his expression.

CHAPTER 16

A couple of hours later, the doctor having settled in, he and his guests off the Fenton were sitting on the veranda of the hotel drinking a glass of Schnapps before tiffin.

‘The East ain’t what it was,’ said the skipper shaking his head. ‘Why, when I was a young chap, at Dutch ‘otels there’d be bottles of Schnapps on the table, at tiffin and dinner, and you just ‘elped yourself. Free of charge it was. And when you’d finished the bottle you told the boy to bring another.’

‘Must have come expensive.’

‘Well, you know, that’s the funny thing, it didn’t. You very seldom found a chap as took advantage of it. Human nature’s like that. Treat a man proper and ‘e’ll respond wonderfully. I believe in ‘uman nature, I always ‘ave.’

Erik Christessen came up the steps, took off his hat to them and was passing into the hotel.

‘Come and have a drink with us,’ called Fred.

‘With pleasure. I’ll just go in and wash first.’

He went in.

‘Hulloa, what’s this?’ said the skipper, eyeing Fred slyly. ‘I thought you didn’t like strangers.’

‘It depends. Seems rather a good sort to me. He never asked us who we were or what we were doing here? Generally everyone’s so curious.’

‘He has naturally good manners,’ said the doctor.

‘What’ll you have?’ asked Fred when the Dane rejoined them.

‘The same as you.’

He dropped his ungainly bulk into a chair. They began to chat. He said nothing that was very clever or amusing, but there was a guilelessness in his conversation that made it pleasing. He filled you with confidence. He irradiated well-being. Dr Saunders did not judge hastily, and he mistrusted his instincts, but this he could not miss and, reflecting upon it, he could ascribe it to nothing but an amazing and delightful sincerity. It was quite obvious that Fred Blake was much taken with the huge Dane. Dr Saunders had never heard him talk so easily.

‘Look here, you’d better know our names,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘Mine’s Blake, Fred Blake, and the doctor’s called Saunders, and this fellow is Captain Nichols.’

Somewhat absurdly Erik Christessen got up and shook hands all round.

‘I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re going to stay here a few days.’

‘Are you still sailing tomorrow?’ asked the doctor.

‘Nothing to stay for. We saw a dinghy this morning.’

They went into the dining-room. It was cool and dim. Punkahs drawn by a small boy fitfully stirred the air. There was one long table, and at one end of it were sitting a Dutchman with a half-caste wife, a stout woman in loose pale draperies, and another Dutchman with a dark enough skin to suggest that he, too, had native blood in him. Erik Christessen exchanged polite greeting with them. They gave the strangers an incurious stare. Reistafel was served. They piled their plates with rice and curry, fried eggs, bananas, and a dozen strange concoctions that boys kept bringing them. When everything was handed they were faced with a mountain of food. Captain Nichols looked at his with profound distaste.

‘This’ll be my death,’ he said solemnly.

‘Don’t eat it, then,’ said Fred.

‘I must keep up me strength. Where would you be now if I ‘adn’t me strength when we struck that bad weather? It’s not for my sake I’m eatin’ it. It’s for yours. I don’t take a job unless I know I can do it, and not me worst enemy can say I spare meself.’

Gradually the piles of food diminished, and Captain Nichols with stubborn determination cleaned up his plate.

‘God, we haven’t had a meal like this for weeks,’ said Fred.

He ate voraciously, with a boy’s appetite, and enjoyed his food. They drank beer.

‘If I don’t suffer for this it’ll be a miracle,’ said the skipper.

They had their coffee on the veranda.

‘You’d better have a sleep now,’ said Erik, ‘and then when it’s cooler I’ll come round and show you the sights. Pity you’re not staying a bit longer. It’s a beautiful walk up the volcano. You can see for miles. The sea and all the islands.’

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t stay till the doctor sails,’ said Fred.

‘Suits me,’ said the skipper. ‘After all the ‘ardships of life on the ocean wave this is a bit of all right. I’m not sure if a drop of brandy wouldn’t settle that reistafel now I come to think of it.’

‘Trading, I suppose?’ asked the Dane.

‘We’re prospectin’ for shell,’ said the skipper. ‘Got to find some new beds. There’s a fortune for anyone who’s lucky.’

‘D ‘you have any papers here?’ asked Blake. ‘In English, I mean.’

‘Not London papers. But Frith gets a paper from Australia.’

‘Frith. Who’s Frith?’

‘He’s an Englishman. He gets a bundle of Sydney Bulletins every mail.’

Fred went strangely pale, but what the emotion was that blanched his cheek, who could tell?

‘D ‘you think there’s a chance of my having a squint at them?’

‘Of course. I’ll borrow them or I’ll take you up there.’

‘How old’s the latest?’

‘It oughtn’t to be very old. A mail came in four days ago.’

CHAPTER 17

Later, when the heat of the day was passed and his own work finished, Erik fetched them. Dr Saunders was sitting alone with Fred, for the skipper, suffering from a violent attack of indigestion, had announced that he didn’t want to see no bloody sights and had returned to the lugger. They sauntered through the town.There were more people about than in the morning. Now and then Erik took off his hat to a sun-burned Dutchman who walked with a stout and listless wife. There were few Chinese, for they do not settle where no trade is, but a number of Arabs, some in smart tarbouches and neat suits of duck, others in white caps and sarongs; they were dark-skinned, with large shining eyes, and they had the Semitic look of the merchants of Tyre and Sidon. There were Malays, Papuans, and half-castes. It was strangely silent. The air was heavy with fatigue. The grand houses of the old perkeniers, in which dwelt now the riff-raff of the East from Baghdad to New Hebrides, had the shame-faced look of respectable citizens who could not pay their rates. They came to a long white wall, all crumbling away, and this once had been a Portuguese monastery; and then to a ruined fort of great grey stones overrun with a wild jungle of trees and flowering shrubs. There was a wide space in front of it, facing the sea, where grew huge old trees, planted it was said by the Portuguese, casuarinas, kanaris, and wild figs; and here, after the heat of the day, they had been used to ramble.

Panting a little, for he was somewhat inclined to corpulence, the doctor with his companions ascended the hill on which stood the stronghold, grey and bare, which had commanded the harbour. It was surrounded by a deep moat and the only doorway was high from the ground, so that they had to climb a ladder to enter. Inside the great square walls was the keep, and in this were large and well-proportioned chambers, with windows and doorways of a style that suggested the later Renaissance. Here officers and garrison dwelt. From the upper towers was a spacious and magnificent view.

‘It’s like Tristan’s castle,’ said the doctor.

The day was softly dying, and the sea was as wine-dark as the sea on which Odysseus sailed. The islands, encircled by the smooth and shining water, had the rich green of a vestment in the treasury of a Spanish cathedral. It was a colour so bizarre and sophisticated that it seemed to belong to art rather than to nature.

‘Like a green thought in a green shade,’ murmured the young Dane.

‘They’re all right from a distance,’ said Fred, ‘those islands, but when you go there – my God! At first I used to want to land. They looked fine from the sea. I thought I’d like to live on one of them for the rest of my life, away from everyone, if you know what I mean, just fishing and keeping my own chickens and pigs. Nichols laughed his head off, said they were lousy, but I insisted on seeing for myself, oh, half a dozen we must have gone to before I gave it up as a bad job. When you got to one of them and went on shore, it all went – I mean, it was just trees and crabs and mosquitos. It slipped through your fingers, so to speak.’

Erik looked at him with his soft beaming eyes, and his smile was sweet with goodwill.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘It’s always a risk to put things to the test of experience. It’s like the locked room in Bluebeard’s castle. One’s all right so long as one keeps clear of that. You have to be prepared for a shock if you turn the key and walk in.’

Dr Saunders listened to the conversation of the two young men. He was perhaps a cynic and his withers were unwrung at many of the misfortunes that affect men, but he had a peculiar feeling for youth, perhaps because it promised so much and lasted too short a time, and it seemed to him that there was in the bitterness it experiences when reality breaks upon its illusions something more pathetic than in many graver ills.

Notwithstanding the clumsy expression he understood what Fred meant and gave the boy’s emotion the tribute of a sympathetic smile. As he sat there, in the mellow light, in his singlet and khaki trousers, with his hat off so that you saw his dark curling hair, he was astonishingly handsome. There was something appealing in his beauty so that Dr Saunders, who had thought him a rather dull young man, felt on a sudden kindly disposed to him. Perhaps it was his good looks that deceived him, perhaps it was due to the companionship of Erik Christessen, but at that moment he felt that there was in the lad a strain of something he had never suspected. Perhaps there was there the dim groping beginning of a soul. The thought faintly amused Dr Saunders. It gave him just that little shock of surprise that one feels when what looked like a twig on a branch suddenly opens wings and flies away.

‘I come up here almost every evening to watch the sunset,’ said Erik. ‘To me all the East is here. Not the East of story, the East of palaces and sculptured temples and conquerors with hordes of warriors, but the East of the beginning of the world, the East of the garden of Eden, when men were very few, simple and humble and ignorant, and the world was just waiting, like an empty garden for its absent owner.’

He had a way, that hulking, plain young man, of talking in a lyrical manner that would have been disconcerting if you had not had the feeling that it was as natural to him as to talk of pearl shell and copra and bêche de mer. His grandiloquence was a trifle absurd, but if it made you smile it was with kindness. He was strangely ingenuous. The prospect was so lovely, the place they sat in, that gaunt, ruined Portuguese fort, so romantic, that there high strains seemed not unfitting. Erik passed his great heavy hand gently over one of the huge blocks of stone.

‘These stones and what they’ve seen! They have one great advantage over those islands of yours, you can never discover their secret. You can only guess. And you can guess so little. No one knows anything here. Next time I go back to Europe I shall go to Lisbon and see what I can find out of the fellows who lived here.’

Of course romance was there, but it was vague, and in your ignorance you could only form pictures as blurred as ill-developed snapshots. It was on those towers that the Portuguese captains had stood, scanning the sea for the ship from Lisbon that brought them blessed news of home, or watched with apprehension the Dutch vessels that came to attack them. In your mind’s eye you saw those gallant, swarthy men, in breastplate and hauberk, who carried their adventurous lives in their hands, but they were lifeless shadows, and they owed their substance only to your fancy. There were still the ruins of the little chapel where every day the miracle of transubstantiation took place and whence the priest in his vestments came, during a siege, to administer extreme unction to the soldiers who lay dying on the ramparts. The imagination was tremulous with an indistinct impression of hazard and cruelty and dauntless courage and self-sacrifice.

‘Aren’t you ever homesick?’ asked Fred presently.

‘No. I often think of the little village from which I come, with black-and-white cows in the green pastures, and of Copenhagen. The houses in Copenhagen with their flat windows are just like smooth-faced women with large, short-sighted eyes, and the palaces and the churches look as if they had come out of a fairy tale. But I see it all like a scene in a play, it is very clear, and amusing, but I don’t know that I want to step on to the stage. I am quite willing to sit in my dark seat in the gallery and watch the spectacle from far away.’

‘After all, one’s only got one life.’

‘That is what I think, too. But life is what you make it. I might have been a clerk in an office, and then it would have been more difficult, but here, with the sea and the jungle, and all the memories of the past crowding in upon you, and these people, the Malays, the Papuans, the Chinese, the stolid Dutch, with my books and as much leisure as if I were a millionaire – good heavens, what can the imagination want more?’

Fred Blake looked at him for a moment, and the effort of unaccustomed reflection made him frown. When he understood what the Dane meant, his surprise was evident in his voice.

‘But that’s all make-believe.’

‘It’s the only reality there is,’ smiled Erik.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that. Reality’s doing things, not dreaming about them. One’s only young once, one must have one’s fling, and everyone wants to get on. One wants to make money and have a good position and all that sort or thing.

‘Oh no. What does one do things for? Of course one has to work a certain amount to earn one’s living, but after that, only to satisfy the imagination. Tell me, when you saw those islands from the sea and your heart was filled with delight, and when you landed on them and found them a dreary jungle, which was the real island? Which gave you most, and which are you going to treasure in your memory?’

Fred smiled into Erik’s eager, gentle eyes.

‘That’s bloody rot, old boy. It’s no good thinking the earth of something and when you come down to brass tacks finding out to your cost that it’s a wash-out. One doesn’t get much forrader by not facing facts. Where d’you expect to get to if you just take things at their face value?’

‘The Kingdom of Heaven,’ smiled Erik.

‘And where is that?’ asked Fred.

‘In my own mind.’

‘I do not wish to intrude upon this philosophic conversation,’ said the doctor, ‘but I’m bound to tell you that I’m suffering from the pangs of thirst.’

Erik, with a laugh, raised his huge body from the wall on which he had been sitting.

‘The sun will be setting soon, anyhow. Let’s go down and I’ll give you a drink in my house.’ He pointed to the volcano that stood over against the west, a bold cone that was silhouetted with exquisite precision against the darkening sky. He addressed himself to Fred. ‘Would you like to come for a climb tomorrow? You get a grand view from the top.’

‘I don’t mind if I do.’

‘We must start early, on account of the heat. I could fetch you on the lugger just before dawn, and we’d row over.’

‘That’ll do me.’

They strolled down the hill and soon found themselves back in the town.

Erik’s house was one of those they had passed in the morning when on landing they had wandered down the street. Dutch merchants had lived in it for a hundred years, and the firm for which he worked had bought it lock, stock and barrel. It stood within a high, whitewashed wall, but the whitewash was peeling and in places green with damp. The wall enclosed a little garden, wild and overgrown, in which grew roses and fruit trees, wantoning creepers and flowering shrubs, bananas, and two or three tall palms. It was choked with weeds. In the waning light it looked desolate and mysterious. Fire-flies flitted heavily to and fro.

‘I’m afraid it’s very neglected,’ said Erik. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll put a couple of coolies to clear up all the mess, but I think I like it like that. I like to think of the Dutch mynheer who used to take his ease here in the cool of the evening, smoking his china pipe, while his fat mevrou sat and fanned herself.’

They went into the parlour. It was a long room with a window at each end, but heavily curtained; a boy came and, standing on a chair, lit a hanging oil-lamp. There was a marble floor, and on the walls paintings in oil so dark that you could not see the subjects. There was a large round table in the middle, and round it a set of stiff chairs covered with green stamped velvet. A stuffy and uncomfortable room, but it had the charm of incongruity, and it brought vividly to the mind’s eye a demure picture of nineteenth-century Holland. The sober merchant must have unpacked with pride the furniture that had come all the way from Amsterdam, and when it was neatly arranged he must have thought it very well became his station. The boy brought beer. Erik went over to a little table to put a record on the gramophone. He caught sight of a bundle of papers.

‘Oh, here are the papers for you. I sent up for them.’

Fred rose from his chair, taking them, and sat down at the big round table under the lamp. Because of the doctor’s remark while they were up in the old Portuguese fort, Erik put on the beginning of the last act of Tristan. The recollection gave an added poignancy to the music. The strange and subtle little tune that the shepherd played on his reed, when he scanned the wide sea and saw no sail, was melancholy with blighted hope. But it was another pang that wrung the doctor’s heart. He remembered Covent Garden in the old days and himself, in evening clothes, sitting in a stall on the aisle; in the boxes were women in tiaras, with pearls round their necks; the King, obese, with great pouches under his eyes, sat in the corner of the omnibus box; on the other side, in the corner, looking over the orchestra, the Baron and the Baroness de Meyer sat together, and she catching his eye bowed. There was an air of opulence and of security. Everything in its grand manner seemed so well-ordered, the thought of change never crossed the mind. Richter conducted. How passionate that music was, how full and with what a melodious splendour it unrolled itself sonorously upon the senses! But he had not heard in it then that something shoddy, blatant and a trifle vulgar, a sort of baronial buffet effect, that now somewhat disconcerted him. It was magnificent, of course, but a little frowsty; his ear had grown accustomed in China to complications more exquisite and harmonies less suave. He was used to a music pregnant with suggestion, illusive and nervous, and the brutal statement of facts a trifle shocked the fastidiousness of his taste. When Erik got up to turn the record over Dr Saunders glanced at Fred to see what effect those strains were having on him. Music is queer. Its power seems unrelated to the other affections of man, so that a person who is elsewise perfectly commonplace may have for it an extreme and delicate sensitiveness. And he was beginning to think that Fred Blake was not so ordinary as he had at first imagined. He had in him something, scarcely awakened and to himself unknown, like a little flower self-sown in a stone wall that pathetically sought the sun, which excited sympathy and interest. But Fred had not heard a note. He sat unconscious of his surroundings, staring out of the window. The short twilight of the tropics had darkened into night, and in the blue sky one or two stars twinkled already, but he did not look at them, he seemed to look into some black abyss of thought. The light of the lamp under which he sat threw strange, sharp shadows on his face so that it was like a mask that you hardly recognized. But his body was relaxed, as though a tension had been suddenly withdrawn, and the muscles under his brown skin were loose. He felt the doctor’s cool stare and looking at him forced his lips to a smile, but it was a painful little smile, oddly appealing and pathetic. The beer by his side was untouched.

‘Anything in the paper?’ asked the doctor.

Fred suddenly flushed scarlet.

‘No, nothing. They’ve had the elections.’

‘Where?’

‘New South Wales. Labour’s got in.’

‘Are you Labour?’

Fred hesitated a little, and into his eyes came that watchful look that the doctor had seen in them once or twice before.

‘I’m not interested in politics,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about them.’

‘You might let me have a look at the paper.’

Fred took a copy from the bundle and handed it to the doctor. But he did not take it.

‘Is that the latest?’

‘No, this is the latest,’ answered Fred, putting his hand on the one he had just been reading.

‘If you’ve done with it I’ll read that. I don’t know that I’m very keen on news when it’s too stale.’

Fred hesitated for a second. The doctor held him with smiling but determined eyes. Obviously Fred could think of no plausible way to refuse the very natural request. He gave him the paper, and Dr Saunders drew forward to the light to read it. Fred did not take up any of the other copies of the Bulletin, though certainly there were some he could not have seen, but sat pretending to look at the table, and the doctor was conscious that he was closely watching him from the sides of his eyes. There was no doubt that Fred had read in the paper he now held in his hand something that deeply concerned him. Dr Saunders turned over the pages. There was much election news. There was a London letter and a certain amount of cabled information from Europe and America. There was a good deal of local intelligence. He turned to the police news. The election had given rise to some disorder, and the courts had dealt with it. There had been a burglary at Newcastle. Some man had received a sentence for an insurance fraud. A stabbing affray between two Tonga Islanders was reported. Captain Nichols suspected that it was on account of murder that this disappearance of Fred had been arranged, and there were two columns about a murder that had taken place at a farmstead in the Blue Mountains, but this arose out of a quarrel between two brothers and the murderer, who had given himself up to the police, pleaded self-defence. Besides, it had taken place after Fred and Captain Nichols had sailed from Sydney. There was the report of an inquest on a woman who had hanged herself. For a moment Dr Saunders wondered whether there was anything in this. The Bulletin is a weekly, of literary tendencies, and it dealt with the matter, not summarily, but in a fashion natural to a paper catering to a public to whom the facts in detail had been made known by the dailies. It appeared that the woman had been under suspicion of the murder of her husband some weeks before, but the evidence against her was too slight for the authorities to take action. She had been repeatedly examined by the police, and this, together with the gossip of neighbours and the scandal, had preyed on her mind. The jury found that she had committed suicide while temporarily insane. The coroner, commenting on the case, remarked that with her death vanished the last chance the police had of solving the mystery of the murder of Patrick Hudson. The doctor read the account again, reflectively; it was odd, but it was too brief to tell him much. The woman was forty-two. It seemed unlikely that a boy of Fred’s age could have had anything to do with her. And, after all, Captain Nichols had nothing to go on; it was pure guesswork; the boy was an accountant; he might just as well have taken money that did not belong to him or, pressed by financial difficulties, forged a cheque. If he was connected with some important person politically, that might have been enough to make it advisable to spirit him away for a period. Dr Saunders, putting the paper down, met Fred’s eyes fixed upon him. He gave him a reassuring smile. His curiosity was disinterested, and he was not inclined to put himself to any trouble to gratify it.

‘Going to dine at the hotel, Fred?’ he asked.

‘I’d like you both to stay and have pot-luck with me here,’ said the Dane, ‘but I’m going up to have supper with Frith.’

‘Well, we’ll be toddling.’

The doctor and Fred walked a few steps in silence along the dark street.

‘I don’t want any dinner,’ the boy said suddenly. ‘I can’t face Nichols tonight. I’m going for a tramp.’

Before Dr Saunders could answer he had turned on his heel and rapidly walked away. The doctor shrugged his shoulders and continued on his unhurried way.

CHAPTER 18

He was drinking a gin pahit before dinner, on the veranda of the hotel, when Captain Nichols strolled up. He had washed and shaved, he was wearing a khaki stengah-shifter, with his topi set at a rakish angle, so that he looked quite spruce. He reminded you of a gentlemanly pirate.

‘Feelin’ better tonight,’ he remarked as he sat down, ‘and quite peckish, to tell you the truth. I don’t believe the wing of a chicken could do me any ‘arm. Where’s Fred?’

‘I don’t know. He’s off somewhere.’

‘Lookin’ for a girl? I don’t blame him. Though I don’t know what he thinks he’s goin’ to find in a place like this. Risky, you know.’

The doctor ordered him a drink.

‘I was a rare one for the girls when I was a young fellow. Got a way with me, you know. The mistake I made was to marry. If I ‘ad my time over again . . . I never tell you about my old woman, doc.’

‘Enough,’ said the doctor.

‘That’s impossible. I couldn’t do that, not if I was to tell you about ‘er till tomorrow morning. If ever there was a devil in ‘uman form, it’s my old woman. I ask you, is it fair to treat a man like that? She’s directly responsible for my indigestion; I’m just as sure of that as I am that I’m sittin’and talking to you. It’s ‘umiliatin’, that’s what it is. I’m surprised I ‘aven’t killed her. I would ‘ave, too, only I know that if I was to start anything, and she said to me: “You put that knife down, captain,” I’d put it down. Now I ask you, is it natural? And then she’d just start on me. And if I was to edge towards the door, she’d say: “No you don’t, you stay ‘ere till I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you, and when I’ve finished with you, I’ll tell you.”’

They dined together, and the doctor lent a sympathetic ear to the recital of Captain Nichols’ domestic infelicity. Then they sat again on the veranda, smoking Dutch cigars, and drank Schnapps with their coffee. Alcohol mellowed the skipper, and he grew reminiscent. He told the doctor stories of his early days on the coast of New Guinea and about the islands. He was a racy talker, with an ironic vein of humour, and it was diverting to listen to him, since false shame never tempted him to depict himself in a flattering light. It never occurred to him that anyone would hesitate to diddle another if he had the chance, and he felt just the same satisfaction in the success of a dirty trick as a chess-player might in winning a game by a bold and ingenious move. He was a scamp, but a courageous one. Dr Saunders found a peculiar savour in his conversation when he remembered the splendid self-confidence with which he had weathered the storm. It had been impossible then not to be impressed by his readiness, resource, and coolness.

Presently the doctor found occasion to slip in a question that had been for some time on the tip of his tongue.

‘Did you ever know a fellow called Patrick Hudson?’

‘Patrick ‘udson?’

‘He was a resident magistrate in New Guinea at one time. He’s been dead a good many years now.’

‘That’s a funny coincidence. No, I didn’t know ‘im. There was a fellow called Patrick ‘udson in Sydney. Come to a sticky end.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Not so very long before we sailed. The papers was full of it.’

‘He might have been some relation of the man I mean.’

‘He was what they call a rough diamond. Been a railway man, they said, and worked ‘is way up. Took up politics and all that. He was member for some place. Labour, of course.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Well, ‘e was shot. With his own gun, if I remember right.’

‘Suicide?’

‘No, they said ‘e couldn’t ‘a’ done it ‘imself. I don’t know any more than you do what ‘appened, on account of my leavin’ Sydney. It made quite a sensation.’

‘Was he married?’

‘Yes. A lot of people thought ‘is old woman done it. They couldn’t prove anythin’. She’d been to the pictures, and when she come ‘ome she found ‘im lyin’ there. There’d been a fight. The furniture was all over the shop. I never thought it was ‘is old woman meself. My experience is they don’t let you off so easy. They want to keep you alive as long as they can. They ain’t going to lose their fun by puttin’ you out of your misery.’

‘Still, a lot of women have murdered their husbands,’ objected the doctor.

‘Pure accident. We all know that accidents will ‘appen in the best regulated families. Sometimes they get careless and go too far, and then the poor bastard dies. But they don’t mean it. Not them.’

CHAPTER 19

Dr Saunders was fortunate in this that, notwithstanding the several deplorable habits he had, and in some parts of the world they would certainly have been accounted vices (vérité au delà des Alpes, erreur ici), he awoke in the morning with a clean tongue and in a happy frame of mind. He seldom stretched himself in bed, drinking his cup of fragrant China tea and smoking the first delicious cigarette, without looking forward with pleasure to the coming day. Breakfast in the little hotels in the islands of the Dutch East Indies is served at a very early hour. It never varies. Papaia, œufs sur le plat, cold meat, and Edam cheese. However punctually you appear, the eggs are cold; they stare at you, two large round yellow eyes on a thin surface of white, and they look as if they had been scooped out of the face of an obscene monster of the deep. The coffee is an essence to which you add Nestlé’s Swiss Milk brought to a proper consistency with hot water. The toast is dry, sodden, and burnt. Such was the breakfast served in the dining-room of the hotel at Kanda and hurriedly eaten by silent Dutchmen, who had their offices to go to.

But Dr Saunders got up late next morning, and Ah Kay brought him his breakfast out on the veranda. He enjoyed his papaia, he enjoyed his eggs, that moment out of the frying-pan, and he enjoyed his scented tea. He reflected that to live was a very enjoyable affair. He wanted nothing. He envied no man. He had no regrets. The morning was still fresh and in the clean, pale light the outline of things was sharp-edged. A huge banana just below the terrace with a haughty and complacent disdain flaunted its splendid foliage to the sun’s fierce heat. Dr Saunders was tempted to philosophize: he said that the value of life lay not in its moments of excitement but in its placid intervals when, untroubled, the human spirit in tranquillity undisturbed by the recollection of emotion could survey its being with the same detachment as the Buddha contemplated his navel. Plenty of pepper on the eggs, plenty of salt and a little Worcester sauce, and then when they were finished a piece of bread to soak up the buttery remains, and that was the best mouthful of all. He was intent on this when Fred Blake and Erik Christessen came swinging down the street. They leaped up the steps and, throwing themselves on chairs at the doctor’s table, shouted for the boy. They had started for their walk up the volcano before dawn, and were now ravenous. The boy hurried out with papaia and a dish of cold meats, and they finished this before he brought them eggs. They were in great spirits. The enthusiasm of youth had ripened the acquaintance made the day before into friendship, and they called one another Fred and Erik. It was a stiff climb and the violent exercise had excited them. They talked nonsense and laughed at nothing. They were like a couple of boys. The doctor had never seen Fred so gay. He was evidently much taken with Erik, and the companionship of someone only a little older than himself had loosened his constraint so that he seemed to flower with a new adolescence. He looked so young that you could hardly believe he was a grown man, and his deep, ringing voice sounded almost comic.

‘D ‘you know, he’s as strong as an ox, this blighter,’ said he, with a glance of admiration at Erik. ‘We had one rather nasty little bit of climbing to do, a branch broke and I slipped. I might have taken a nasty toss, broken my leg or something. Erik caught hold of me with one arm, damned if I know how he did it, and lifted me right up and set me on my feet again. And I weigh a good eleven stone.’

‘I’ve always been strong,’ smiled Erik.

‘Put your hand up.’

Fred placed his elbow on the table and Erik did the same. They put palm to palm and Fred tried to force Erik’s arm down. He put all his strength into the effort. He could not move it. Then with a little smile the Dane pressed back and gradually Fred’s arm was forced to the table.

‘I’m like a kid beside you,’ he laughed. ‘Gosh, a fellow wouldn’t stand much chance if you hit him. Ever been in a fight?’

‘No. Why should I?’

He finished eating and lit a cheroot.

‘I must go to my office,’ he said. ‘Frith says, will you all go up there this afternoon? He wants us to have supper with him.’

‘Suits me all right,’ said the doctor.

‘And the captain, too. I’ll come for you about four.’

Fred watched him go.

‘Perfect loon,’ he said, turning to the doctor, with a smile. ‘My belief is he isn’t all there.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘The way he talked.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Crazy. He asked me about Shakespeare. A fat lot I know about Shakespeare. I told him I’d read Henry V when I was at school (we took it one term), and he began spouting one of the speeches. Then he started talking about Hamlet and Othello and heaven knows what. He knows yards of them by heart. I can’t tell you all he said about them. I never heard anyone talk in that way before. And the funny thing was that, although it was all a lot of bunk, you didn’t want to tell him to shut up.’

A smile lingered in his candid blue eyes, but his face was serious.

‘You’ve never been in Sydney, have you?’

‘No.’

‘We have quite a literary and artistic set there. Not much in my line, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. Women chiefly, you know. They’d talk a lot of tosh about books and then, before you knew where you were, they’d be wanting to pop into bed with you.’

‘The Philistine dots his i’s and crosses his t’s with a definiteness that is unbecoming,’ reflected the doctor, ‘and when he sees a nail he hits it on the head.’

‘You get rather leery of them. But, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, when Erik talked about all that it was different. He wasn’t showing off and he wasn’t trying to impress me. He just talked like that because he couldn’t help it. He didn’t mind if I was bored or not. He was so keen on it all it never struck him, perhaps, I didn’t care a damn about it. I didn’t understand the half of what he said, you know, but somehow, I don’t know, it was as good as a play, if you understand what I mean.’

Fred threw out his observations like stones that you dig up in a garden to prepare the ground for planting and cast in a heap one after the other. In his perplexity he vigorously scratched his head. Dr Saunders watched him with cool, shrewd eyes. The boy was tongue-tied, and it was diverting in his confused remarks to discover the emotion he was trying to put in words. Critics divide writers into those who have something to say and do not know how to say it, and those who know how to say it and have nothing to say. Often it is the same with men, with Anglo-Saxons at all events, to whom words come difficultly. When a man is fluent it is sometimes because he has said a thing so often that it has lost its meaning, and his speech is most significant when he has to fashion it laboriously from thoughts to which he can see no clear outline.

Fred gave the doctor a puckish glance that made him look like a mischievous boy.

‘D’you know, he’s lending me Othello. I don’t exactly know why, but I said I wouldn’t mind reading it. You’ve read it, I suppose.’

‘Thirty years ago.’

‘Of course I may be mistaken, but when Erik was spouting great chunks of it, it sounded quite exciting. I don’t know what it is, but when you’re with a chap like that everything seems different. I daresay he’s crazy, but I wish there were a few more like him.’

‘You’ve taken quite a fancy to him, haven’t you?’

‘Well, you can hardly help it,’ answered Fred, with a sudden attack of shyness. ‘You’d be a perfect damn fool not to see he’s as straight as a die. I’d trust him with every penny I had in the world. He couldn’t do anyone down. And you know, the funny thing is, though he’s such a big hulking fellow and as strong as an ox, you have a sort of feeling you want to take care of him. I know it sounds silly, but you can’t help feeling he oughtn’t to be allowed about by himself; someone ought to be there to see that he doesn’t get into trouble.’

The doctor, with his cynical detachment, translated in his own mind the young Australian’s awkward phrases into sense. He was surprised and a trifle touched by the emotion that with this shy clumsiness fought for expression. For what emerged from those hackneyed words was the shock of admiration the lad had received when he was confronted with the realization of something quite startling. Through the oddness of the huge, ungainly Dane, lighting up his complete sincerity, giving body to his idealism and charm to his extravagant enthusiasm, shone, with a warm, all-embracing glow, pure goodness. Fred Blake’s youth made him mystically able to see it, and he was amazed by it and baffled. It touched him and made him feel very shy. It shook his self-confidence and humbled him. At that moment the rather ordinary, handsome boy was conscious of something he had never imagined, spiritual beauty.

‘Who would have thought it possible?’ reflected the doctor.

His own feelings towards Erik Christessen, naturally enough, were more detached. He was interested in him because he was a little unusual. It was amusing, to begin with, in an island of the Malay Archipelago, to come across a trader who knew Shakespeare well enough to say long passages by heart. The doctor could not but look on it as a somewhat tiresome accomplishment. He wondered idly if Erik was a good business man. He was not very fond of idealists. It was difficult for them in this workaday world to reconcile their professions with the exigencies of life, and it was disconcerting how often they managed to combine exalted notions with a keen eye to the main chance. The doctor had often found here cause for amusement. They were apt to look down upon those who were occupied with practical matters but not averse from profiting by their industry. Like the lilies of the field they neither toiled nor spun, but took it as a right that others should perform for them these menial offices.

‘Who is this fellow Frith that we’re going up to this afternoon?’ asked the doctor.

‘He’s got a plantation. He grows nutmeg and cloves. He’s a widower. He lives there with his daughter.’

CHAPTER 20

It was about three miles to Frith’s house, and they drove out in an old Ford. On each side of the road grew densely huge trees, and there was a heavy undergrowth of ferns and creepers. The jungle began at the outskirts of the town. Here and there were miserable huts. Ragged Malays lay about the verandas and listless children played among the pigs under the piles. It was humid and sultry. The estate had once belonged to a perkenier, and it had a stucco gateway, massive but crumbling, of pleasing design. Over the archway on a tablet was the old burgher’s name and the date of erection. They turned down an earth road and bumped along over ruts, hillocks and holes till they came to the bungalow. It was a large, square building not on piles, but on a foundation of masonry, covered with an attap roof and surrounded by a neglected garden. They drove up, the Malay driver sounding his horn with energy, and a man came out of the house and waved to them. It was Frith. He waited for them at the top of the steps that led down from the veranda, and as they came up and Erik mentioned their names, shook hands with them one by one.

‘Delighted to see you. I haven’t seen any Britishers for a year. Come in and have a drink.’

He was quite a big man, but fat, with grey hair and a small grey moustache. He was growing bald and his forehead was imposing. His red face, shining with sweat, was unlined and round, so that at the first glance he looked almost boyish. He had a long yellow tooth in the middle of his mouth, which hung loosely, giving you the impression that with a sharp pull it would come out. He wore khaki shorts and a tennis shirt open at the neck. He walked with a pronounced limp. He led them into a very large room, which served at once as parlour and dining-room; the walls were adorned with Malay weapons, antlers of deer, and horns of sladang. On the floor were tiger skins that looked a trifle mouldy and moth-eaten.

When they entered a tiny little old man got up from a chair and without taking a step towards them stood and looked at them. He was wrinkled, battered and bowed. He seemed very old.

‘This is Swan,’ said Frith, with a casual nod of his head. ‘He’s by way of being my father-in-law.’

The little old man had very pale blue eyes with red-rimmed, hairless lids, but they were full of cunning, and his glance was darting and mischievous like a monkey’s. He shook hands with the three strangers without speaking and then, opening a toothless mouth, addressed Erik in a language the others did not understand.

‘Mr Swan is a Swede,’ said Erik in explanation.

The old man eyed them one after the other, and in his gaze was a certain suspicion and at the same time, hardly concealed, something of mockery.

‘I came out fifty years ago. I was mate of a sailing vessel. I never been back. Maybe I go next year.’

‘I’m a seafarin’ man meself, sir,’ said Captain Nichols.

But Mr Swan was not in the least interested in him.

‘I been pretty well most things in my day,’ he went on. ‘I been captain of a schooner in the slave trade.’

‘Blackbirding,’ interrupted Captain Nichols. ‘There was a nice little bit of money to be picked up that way in the old days.’

‘I been a blacksmith. I been a trader. I been a planter. I don’t know what I haven’t been. They tried to kill me over and over again. I got a hernia on my chest I have. That come from a wound I got in a scrap with the natives in the Solomons. Left me for dead, they did. I’ve had a lot of money in my time. Haven’t I, George?’

‘So I’ve always heard.’

‘Ruined by the great hurricane, I was. Destroyed my store. Lost everything. I didn’t care. Got nothing left now but this plantation. Never mind, it gives us enough to live on and that’s all that matters. I’ve had four wives and more children than you can count.’

He talked in a high cracked voice with a strong Swedish accent, so that you had to listen intently to understand what he said. He spoke very quickly, almost as though he were reciting a lesson, and he finished with a little cackle of senile laughter. It seemed to say that he had been through everything and it was all stuff and nonsense. He surveyed human kind and its activities from a great distance, but from no Olympian height, from behind a tree, slyly, and hopping from one foot to another with amusement.

A Malay brought in a bottle of whisky and a syphon, and Frith poured out the drinks.

‘A drop of Scotch for you, Swan?’ he suggested to the old man.

‘Why do you ask me that, George?’ he quavered. ‘You know very well I can’t abide it. Give me some rum and water. Scotch has been the ruin of the Pacific. When I first come from Sweden nobody drunk Scotch. Rum. If they’d stuck to rum and stuck to sail things wouldn’t be what they are now, not by a long way.’

‘We ran into some pretty rough weather on the way ‘ere,’ Captain Nichols remarked, by way of making conversation with a fellow-seaman.

‘Rough weather? You don’t have rough weather nowadays. You should have seen the weather you had when I was a boy. I remember on one of the schooners I had, I was taking a parcel of labour to Samoa, from the New Hebrides, and we got caught in a hurricane. I told them savages to pop over the side pretty damn quick, and I put out to sea, and for three days I never closed my eyes. Lost our sails, lost our mainmast, lost our boats. Rough weather! Don’t talk to me about rough weather, young fellow.’

‘No offence meant,’ said Captain Nichols, with a grin that showed his broken, decayed little teeth.

‘And no offence taken,’ cackled old Swan. ‘Give him a tot of rum, George. If he’s a sailor-man he don’t want that stinking whisky of yours.’

Presently Erik suggested that the strangers would like to walk round the plantation.

‘They’ve never seen a nutmeg estate.’

‘Take ’em over, George. Twenty-seven acres. Best land on the island,’ said the old man. ‘Bought it thirty years ago for a parcel of pearls.’

They got up, leaving him, like a little strange bald bird, hunched up over his rum and water, and walked out into the garden. It ended casually and the plantation began. In the cool of the evening the air was limpid. The kanari trees, in the shade of which grew the portly and profitable nutmeg trees, were enormously tall. They towered like the columns of a mosque in the Arabian Nights. Underfoot was no tangle of undergrowth but a carpet of decaying leaves. You heard the boom of great pigeons and saw them flying about with a heavy whirr of wings. Little green parrots in flocks flitted swiftly over the nutmeg trees. screeching, and they were like living jewels darting through the softly sparkling air. Dr Saunders had a sense of extreme well-being. He felt like a disembodied spirit and his imagination was pleasantly, but not exhaustingly, occupied with image after image. He walked with Frith and the skipper. Frith was explaining the details of the nutmeg trade. He did not listen. There was an idle sensuousness in the air that was almost material, so that it reminded you of the feel of a soft, rich fabric. Erik and Fred were walking a step behind. The declining sun had found a way under the branches of the lofty kanaries and shone on the foliage of the nutmeg trees so that their dense opulent green glistened like burnished copper.

They strolled along a winding path, made by the accident of people having long followed it, and all at once saw a girl coming towards them. She was walking with eyes cast down, as though absorbed in thought, and it was not till she heard voices that she looked up. She stopped.

‘There is my daughter,’ said Frith.

You might have fancied she had stopped in a momentary embarrassment at the sight of strangers; but she did not move on, she stayed still, watching with a singular calm the men who advanced towards her; and then you received an impression, not exactly of self-assurance, but of tranquil unconcern. She wore nothing but a sarong of Javanese batik, with a little white pattern on a brown ground; it was attached tightly just over her breasts and came down to her knees. She was barefoot. Beside the little smile that hovered on her lips, the only sign she gave that she noticed the approach of strangers was a little shake of the head, almost involuntary, to loosen her hair and an instinctive gesture of the hand through it, for it was long and hung down her back. It spread in a cloud over her neck and shoulders, very thick, and of a fairness so ashy pale that, but for its radiance, it would have looked white. She waited with composure. The sarong tightly wrapped round her concealed nothing of her form; she was very slim, with the narrow hips of a boy, long-legged, and at first sight tall. She was burned by the sun to a rich honey colour. The doctor was not as a rule captivated by feminine beauty; he could not but think the manner in which a woman’s frame was made for obvious physiological purposes much detracted from its aesthetic appeal. Just as a table should be solid, of a convenient height and roomy, so a woman should be large-breasted and broad in the beam; but in both cases beauty could only be an adjunct to utility. You might say that a table which was solid, roomy, and of a convenient height was beautiful, but the doctor preferred to say that it was solid, roomy, and of a convenient height. The girl standing there in an attitude of indolent beauty reminded him of some statue he had seen in a museum of a goddess attaching her peplum; he could not remember it very exactly. Greco-Roman, he thought. She had the same ambiguous slenderness as the little Chinese girls in the flowerboats at Canton, in whose company in his younger days he had on occasion passed moments of somewhat detached amusement. She had the same flower-like grace, and her fairness in that tropic scene gave the exotic sensation that made them so charming. She recalled to his mind the pale, profuse, delicate flowers of the plumbago.

‘These are Christessen’s friends,’ said her father as they came up to her.

She did not hold out her hand, but slightly and graciously inclined her head as first the doctor and then Captain Nichols were introduced to her. She gave them both a cool survey in which was inquiry and then swift appraisement. Dr Saunders noticed that her brown hands were long and slender. Her eyes were blue. Her features were fine and very regular. She was an extremely pretty young woman.

‘I’ve just been having a bathe in the pool,’ she said.

Her glance travelled to Erik, and she gave him a very sweet and friendly smile.

‘This is Fred Blake,’ he said.

She turned her head a little to look at him, and for an appreciable time her eyes rested on him. The smile died away on her lips.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Fred, holding out his hand.

She continued to look at him, not with pertness or brazenly, but as though she were a little surprised. You might have thought she had seen him before and was trying to remember where. But the incident lasted no more than a minute, and no one would have been conscious of a pause before she took the proffered hand.

‘I was just going back to the house to dress,’ she said.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Erik.

Now that he stood beside her you saw that she was not really very tall; it was only her straightness of limb, her slenderness, and her carriage, that gave the impression of more than common height.

They sauntered back towards the house.

‘Who is that boy?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ answered Erik. ‘He’s in partnership with the thin, grey one. They’re looking for pearl-shell. They’re trying to find some new beds.’

‘He’s good-looking.’

‘I thought you’d like him. He’s got a nice nature.’

The others continued their tour of the estate.

CHAPTER 21

When they came in they found Erik sitting alone with Swan. The old man was telling an interminable story, in an odd mixture of Swedish and English, of some adventure he had had in New Guinea.

‘Where’s Louise?’ asked Frith.

‘I’ve been helping her to lay the table. She’s been doing something in the kitchen and now she’s gone to change.’

They sat down and had another drink. They talked somewhat desultorily, as people do when they don’t know one another. Old Swan was tired, and when the strangers appeared lapsed into silence, but he watched them, with his sharp rheumy eyes, as though they filled him with suspicion. Captain Nichols told Frith that he was a martyr to dyspepsia.

‘I’ve never known what it is to have a pain in my tummy,’ said Frith. ‘Rheumatism’s my trouble.’

‘I’ve known men as was martyrs to it. A friend of mine at Brisbane, one of the best pilots in the business, was just crippled by it. Had to go about on crutches.’

‘One has to have something,’ said Frith.

‘You can’t ‘ave anythin’ worse than dyspepsia, you take my word for it. I’d be a rich man now if it ‘adn’t been for my dyspepsia.’

‘Money’s not everything,’ said Frith.

‘I’m not sayin’ it is. I’m sayin’ I’d ‘ave been a rich man today if it ‘adn’t been for my dyspepsia.’

‘Money’s never meant anything very much to me. So long as I have a roof over my head and three meals a day I’m content. Leisure’s the important thing.’

Dr Saunders listened to the conversation. He could not quite place Frith. He spoke like an educated man. Though fat and gross, shabbily dressed and in want of a shave, he gave the impression, scarcely of distinction, but of being accustomed to the society of decent people. He certainly did not belong to the same class as old Swan and Captain Nichols. His manners were easy. He had welcomed them with courtesy and treated them not with the fussy politeness an ill-bred person thinks it necessary to use towards strange guests, but naturally, as though he knew the ways of the world. Dr Saunders supposed that he was what in the England of his youth they would have called a gentleman. He wondered how he had found his way to that distant island. He got up from his chair and wandered about the room. A number of framed photographs hung on the wall over a long book-case. He was surprised to find that they were of rowing eights of a Cambridge college, among which, though only by the name underneath, G. P. Frith, he recognized his host; others were groups of native boys at Perak in the Malay States, and at Kuching in Sarawak, with Frith, a much younger man than now, sitting in the middle. It looked as though on leaving Cambridge he had come to the East as a schoolmaster. The book-case was untidily stacked with books, all stained with damp and the ravages of the white ant, and these, with idle curiosity, taking out one here, one there, he glanced at. There was a number of prizes bound in leather from which he learned that Frith had been at one of the smaller public schools, and had been an industrious and even brilliant boy. There were the text-books that he had used at Cambridge, a good many novels, and a few volumes of poetry which gave the impression that they had been much read, but long ago. They were well-thumbed and many passages were marked in pencil or underlined, but they had a musty smell as though they had for years remained unopened. But what surprised him most was to see two shelves filled with works on Indian religion and Indian philosophy. There were translations of the Rig-Veda and of certain of the Upanishads, and there were paper-bound books published in Calcutta or Bombay by authors with names odd to him and with titles that had a mystical sound. It was an unusual collection to find in the house of a planter in the Far East, and Dr Saunders, trying to make something of the indications they afforded, asked himself what sort of man they suggested. He was turning the pages of a book by one Srinivasa Iyengar called Outlines of Indian Philosophy, when Frith somewhat heavily limped up to him.

‘Having a look at my library?’

‘Yes.’

He glanced at the volume the doctor was holding.

‘Interesting. Those Hindus, they’re marvellous; they have a natural instinct for philosophy. They make all our philosophers look cheap and obvious. Their subtlety is so amazing. Plotinus is the only fellow I know to compare with them.’ He replaced the book on a shelf. ‘Of course, Brahma is the only religion that a reasonable man can accept without misgiving.’

The doctor gave him a sidelong glance. With his red, round face, and that long yellow tooth hanging loose in his jaw, his baldish head, he had none of the look of a man with spiritual leanings. It was surprising to hear him talk in this strain.

‘When I consider the universe, those innumerable worlds and the vast distances of interstellar space, I cannot think it the work of a creator, and if it were, then I am forced to ask who or what created the creator. The Vedanta teaches that in the beginning was the existent, for how could the existent be, born from the non-existent? And this existent was Atman, the supreme spirit, from whom emanated maya, the illusion of the phenomenal world. And when you ask those wise men of the East why the supreme spirit should have sent forth this phantasmagory they will tell you it was for his diversion. For being complete and perfect, he could not be actuated by aim or motive. Aim and motive imply desire and he that is perfect and complete needs neither change nor addition. Therefore the activity of the eternal spirit has no purpose, but like the frolic of princes or the play of children, is spontaneous and exultant. He sports in the world, he sports in the soul.’

‘That is an explanation of things that does not entirely displease me,’ the doctor murmured, smiling. ‘There is a futility about it that gratifies the sense of irony.’

But he was watchful and suspicious. He was conscious that he would have attached more sigificance to what Frith said had he been of ascetic appearance, and his face, instead of shining with sweat, shone with the travail of urgent thought. But does the outer man represent the man within? The face of a scholar or a saint may well mask a vulgar and a trivial soul. Socrates, with his flattened nose and protruding eyes, his thick lips and unwieldy belly, looked like Silenus, and yet was full of admirable temperance and wisdom.

Frith gave a little sigh.

‘For a time I was attracted by Yoga, but after all it’s only a schismatic branch of Sankhya, and its materialism is unreasonable. All that mortification of the senses is inane. The goal is perfect knowledge of the soul’s nature, and apathy and abstraction and rigidity of posture will not enable you to attain that any more than rites and ceremonies. I’ve got masses of notes. When I have time I shall get some sort of order in my material and write a book. I’ve had it in mind for twenty years.’

‘I should have thought you had time to burn here,’ said the doctor dryly.

‘Not enough for all I have to do. I’ve been spending the last four years doing a metrical translation of The Lusiads. Camoens, you know. I should like to read you one or two cantos. There’s no one here who has any critical discernment. Christessen is a Dane, and I can’t trust his ear.’

‘But hasn’t it been translated before?’

‘Yes. By Burton, among others. Poor Burton was no poet. His version is intolerable. Every generation must retranslate the great works of the world for itself. My aim is not only to render the sense, but also to preserve the rhythm and music and lyrical quality of the original.’

‘What made you think of it?’

‘It’s the last of the great epics. After all, my book on the Vedanta can only hope to appeal to a small and special public. I felt I owed it to my daughter to undertake a work of more popular character. I have nothing. This estate belongs to old Swan. My translation of The Lusiads shall be her dowry. I am going to give her every penny I make out of it. But that is not all; money isn’t very important. I want her to be proud of me; I don’t think my name will be very easily forgotten: my fame also shall be her dowry.’

Dr Saunders kept silence. It seemed to him fantastic that this man should expect to get money and fame by translating a Portuguese poem that not a hundred people had any wish to read. He shrugged a tolerant shoulder.

‘It is strange how things happen,’ Frith continued, his face heavy and serious. ‘It’s hard for me to believe that it is only by accident that I have undertaken this task. You know, of course, that Camoens, a soldier of fortune as well as a poet, came to this island, and he must often have watched the sea from the fort as I have watched it. Why should I have come here? I was a schoolmaster. When I left Cambridge I had an opportunity to come to the East, and I jumped at it. I’d longed to ever since I was a child. But the routine of school-work was too much for me. I couldn’t bear the people I had to mix with. I was in the Malay States, and then I thought I’d try Borneo. It was no better. At last I couldn’t stand it any more. I resigned. For some time I was in an office in Calcutta. Then I started a book-shop in Singapore. But it didn’t pay. I ran a hotel in Bali, but I was before my time, and I couldn’t make both ends meet. At last I drifted down here. It’s strange that my wife should have been called Catherine, because that was the name of the only woman Camoens loved. It was for her he wrote his perfect lyrics. Of course, if there’s anything that seems to me proved beyond all doubt it’s the doctrine of transmigration which the Hindus call Samsara. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if perhaps the spark that issued from the fire and formed the spirit of Camoens is not the self-same spark that now forms mine. So often when I’m reading The Lusiads I come across a line that I seem to remember so distinctly that I can’t believe I’m reading it for the first time. You know that Pedro de Alcaçova said that The Lusiads had only one fault. They were not short enough to learn by heart and not long enough to have no ending.’

He gave a deprecating smile as a man might to whom an extravagant compliment was addressed.

‘Ah, here’s Louise,’ he said. ‘That looks as if supper was nearly ready.’

Dr Saunders turned to look at her. She was wearing a sarong of green silk in which was woven an elaborate pattern in gold thread. It had a sleek and glowing splendour. It was Javanese, and such as the ladies of the Sultan’s harem at Djokjakarta wore on occasions of state. It fitted her slim body like a sheath, tight over her young nipples and tight over her narrow hips. Her bosom and her legs were bare. She wore high-heeled green shoes, and they added to her graceful stature. That ashy blonde hair of hers was done high on her head, but very simply, and the sober brilliance of the green-and-gold sarong enhanced its astonishing fairness. Her beauty took the breath away. The sarong had been kept with sweet-smelling essences or she had scented herself; when she joined them they were conscious of a faint and unknown perfume. It was languorous and illusive, and it was pleasant to surmise that it was made from a secret recipe in the palace of one of the rajahs of the islands.

‘What’s the meaning of this fancy dress?’ asked Frith, with a smile in his pale eyes and a waggle of his long tooth.

‘Erik gave me this sarong the other day, I thought it would be a good opportunity to wear it.’

She gave the Dane a friendly little smile that thanked him again.

‘It’s an old one,’ said Frith. ‘It must have cost you a small fortune, Christessen. You’ll spoil the child.’

‘I got it for a bad debt. I couldn’t resist it. I know Louise likes green.’

A Malay servant brought in a great bowl of soup and set it down on the table.

‘Will you take Dr Saunders on your right, Louise, and Captain Nichols on your left?’ said Frith, with a certain stateliness.

‘What does she want to sit between those two old men for?’ cackled the ancient Swan suddenly. ‘Let her sit between Erik and the kid.’

‘I see no reason not to conform to the usages of polite society,’ said Frith in a very dignified manner.

‘Want to show off?’

‘Then will you sit beside me, doctor?’ said Frith, taking no notice of this. ‘And perhaps Captain Nichols wouldn’t mind sitting on my left.’

Old Swan, with a funny quick crawl, took what was evidently his accustomed place. Frith ladled out the soup.

‘Pair of crooks they look to me,’ said the little old man, shooting a sharp glance from the doctor to Nichols. ‘Where’d you fish ’em from, Erik?’

‘You’re ginny, Mr Swan,’ said Frith, handing him gravely a plate of soup to be passed down the table.

‘No offence meant,’ said Mr Swan.

‘And no offence taken,’ answered Captain Nichols, graciously. ‘I’d ever so much sooner somebody said I looked like a crook than I looked like a fool. And I’m sure the doctor’ll say the same as me. What does a fellow mean when ‘e says you’re a crook? Well, ‘e means you’re cleverer than ‘im, that’s all; I ask you, am I right or am I wrong?’

‘I know a crook when I see one,’ said old Swan. ‘I’ve known too many in my time not to. Been a bit of a crook meself at times.’

He gave a little cackling laugh.

‘And who hasn’t?’ said Captain Nichols, wiping his mouth, for he ate soup somewhat untidily. ‘What I always say is, you must take the world as you find it. Compromise, that’s the thing. Ask anybody and they’ll tell you what made the British Empire what it is, is compromise.’

With a deft movement of his lower lip Frith sucked the remains of his soup off his little grey moustache.

‘It’s a matter of temperament, I suppose. Compromise has never appealed to me. I have had other fish to fry.’

‘Someone else caught ’em for you, I bet,’ said old Swan, with a little snicker of senile glee. ‘Bone-idle, that’s what you are, George. Had a dozen jobs in your time and never kept one of them.’

Frith gave Dr Saunders an indulgent smile. It said as clearly as if he had spoken that it was mightily absurd to hurl such charges at a man who had spent twenty years in the study of the highly metaphysical thought of the Hindus and in whom in all probability dwelt the spirit of a celebrated Portuguese poet.

‘My life has been a journey in search of truth and there can be no compromise with truth. The Europeans ask what is the use of truth, but for the tinkers of India it is not a means but an end. Truth is the goal of life. Years ago I used sometimes to hanker for the world I had left behind me. I would go down to the Dutch club and look at the illustrated papers, and when I saw pictures of London my heart ached. But now I know that it is only the recluse who enjoys the civilization of cities to the full. At long last I have learnt that it is we exiles from life who get most value from it. For the way of knowledge is the true way and that way passes every door.’

But at that moment, three chickens, the scrawny, pallid, tasteless chickens of the East, were set before him. He rose from his chair and seized a carving knife.

‘Ah, the duties and ceremonies of the householder,’ he said cheerfully.

Old Swan had been sitting silent, hunched up in his chair like a little gnome. He ate his soup greedily. Suddenly, in his thin cracked voice, he began to speak:

‘I spent seven years in New Guinea, I did. I spoke every language they spoke in New Guinea. You go to Port Moresby and ask ’em about Jack Swan. They remember me. I was the first white man ever walked across the island. Moreton did it afterwards, unarmed, with a walking stick, but he had his police with him. I did it by myself. Everyone thought I was dead, and when I walked into town they thought I was a ghost. Been shooting birds of paradise, we had, my mate and me, a New Zealander he was, been a bank-manager and got into some mess-up, we had our own cutter and we sailed along the coast from Merauke. Got a lot of birds. Worth a mint of money they was then. We was very friendly with the natives, used to give them a drink now and then, and a stick of tobacco. One day I’d been out shooting by myself and I was coming back to the cutter, I was just going to give my mate a shout to come and fetch me in the dinghy when I see some natives on it. We never allowed them to come on board, and I thought something was up. So I just hid myself and I stood there looking. I didn’t half like the look of it. I crept along very quiet and I saw the dinghy pulled up on the beach. I thought my mate had come ashore and some of them natives had swum out to the cutter. I thought I wouldn’t half give them what for. And then I bumped against something. My God, it did give me a turn. D’you know what it was? It was my mate’s body, with the head cut off, and all a mass of blood from the wounds in his back. I didn’t wait to see no more. I knew I’d go the same way if they caught me. They was waiting for me on the cutter, that’s what they was doing. I’d got to get away and I’d got to get away damned quick. Rare time I had getting across. The things that happened to me! You could write a book about it. One old fellow, chief of a big village he was, took quite a fancy to me, wanted to adopt me and give me a couple of wives, said I’d be chief after him. I was nippy with my hands when I was a young fellow, having been a sailor and all that. I knew a lot. Nothing I couldn’t do. Three months I stayed there. If I hadn’t been a young fool I’d have stayed for good. Powerful chief he was. I might have been a king, I might. King of the Cannibal Islands.’

He ended with his high-pitched cackle and relapsed into silence; but it was a strange silence, for he seemed to notice everything that was going on around him, and yet live his own life apart. The sudden burst of reminiscence, which had no connexion with anything that had been said, had a sort of automatic effect as though a machine controlled by an unseen clock at intervals uncannily shot forth a stream of patter. Dr Saunders was puzzled by Frith. What he said was on occasion not without interest; to the doctor, indeed, sometimes striking; and yet his manner and appearance predisposed you to listen to him warily. He seemed sincere, his attitude had even nobility, but there was something in him that the doctor found disconcerting. It was odd that these two men, old Swan and Frith, the man of action and the man who had devoted his life to speculation, should have ended up there, together, on this lonely island. It looked as though it all came to very much the same in the end. The end of all the adventurer’s hazards, like the end of the philosopher’s high thoughts, was a comfortable respectability.

Frith, having to his satisfaction divided three birds among seven people, sat down again and helped himself to boiled potatoes.

‘I have always been attracted by the idea of the Brahmans, that a man should devote his youth to study,’ he said, turning to Dr Saunders, ‘his maturity to the duties and ceremonies of a householder, and his age to abstract thought and meditation of the Absolute.’

He glanced at old Swan, hunched up in his chair and laboriously gnawing a drumstick, and then at Louise.

‘It will not be very long now before I am liberated from the obligations of my maturity. Then I shall take my staff and journey out into the world in search of the knowledge which passeth all understanding.’

The doctor’s eyes had followed Frith’s, and they rested for a while on Louise. She sat at the end of the table between the two young men. Fred, as a rule tongue-tied, was talking nineteen to the dozen. He had lost the slight sulkiness of expression that his features bore in repose and looked frank, carefree and boyish. His face was lit up by the play of his words and his desire to please lent a soft and engaging lustre to his fine eyes. Dr Saunders, smiling, saw how taking was his charm. He was not shy with women. He knew how to amuse them and you had only to see the girl’s easy gaiety, and her animation, to know that she was happy and interested. The doctor caught snatches of his conversation; it was about the races at Randwick, bathing at Manly Beach, the cinema, the amusements of Sydney; the sort of things that young people talk to one another about and because all experience is fresh to them find so absorbing. Erik, with his great clumsy size and his massive square head, a kindly smile on his pleasantly ugly face, sat watching Fred quietly. You could see that he was glad the boy he had brought to the house was going down well. It gave him a little warm feeling of self-satisfaction that he was so charming.

When dinner was finished, Louise went up to old Swan and put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Now, grandpa, you must go to bed.’

‘Not before I’ve had me tot of rum, Louise.’

‘Well, drink it up quick.’

She poured him out the considerable amount he wanted, while he watched the glass with cunning rheumy eyes, and added a little water.

‘Put a tune on the gramophone, Erik,’ she said.

The Dane did as he was bid.

‘Can you dance, Fred?’ he asked.

‘Can’t you?’

‘No.’

Fred rose to his feet, and looking at Louise outlined a gesture of invitation. She smiled. He took her hand and put his arm round her waist. They began to dance. They made a lovely couple. Dr Saunders, standing with Erik by the gramophone, saw to his surprise that Fred was an exquisite dancer. He had an unimaginable grace. He made his partner, not more than competent, appear to dance as well as he did. He had the gift of being able to absorb her movements into his so that she was instinctively responsive to the notions as they formed themselves in his brain. He made the foxtrot they danced a thing of the most delicate beauty.

‘You’re a pretty good dancer, young fellow,’ said Dr Saunders, when the record came to an end.

‘It’s the only thing I can do,’ answered the boy, with a smile.

He was so well aware of his amiable gift that he took it as a matter of course and compliments upon it meant nothing to him. Louise looked down at the floor with a serious look on her face. Suddenly she seemed to rouse herself.

‘I must go and put grandfather to bed.’

She went over to the old man, still hugging his empty glass, and leaning over him, tenderly cajoled him to come with her. He took her arm and toddled, a foot shorter than she, out of the room beside her.

‘What about a game of bridge?’ said Frith. ‘Do you gentlemen play?’

‘I do,’ said the skipper. ‘I don’t know about the doctor and Fred.’

‘I’ll make up a four.’ said Dr Saunders.

‘Christessen plays a very good game.’

‘I don’t play,’ said Fred.

‘That’s all right,’ said Frith. ‘We can manage without you.’

Erik brought forward a bridge table, its green baize patched and worn, and Frith produced two packs of greasy cards. They brought up chairs and cut for partners. Fred stood beside the gramophone, alert, as though his body were on springs, and with little movements kept time to an inaudible tune. When Louise came back he did not move, but in his eyes was a smile of goodwill. It had a familiarity that was not offensive and it gave her the feeling that she had known him all her life.

‘Shall I put on the gramophone?’ he asked.

‘No, they’ll have a fit.’

‘We must have another dance.’

‘Dad and Erik take their bridge very seriously.’

She walked over to the table and he accompanied her. He stood behind Captain Nichols for a few minutes. The skipper gave him one or two uneasy glances and then, having made a bad play, turned round irascibly.

‘I can’t do a thing with someone lookin’ over me ‘and,’ he said. ‘Nothin’ puts me off like that.’

‘Sorry, old man.’

‘Let’s go outside,’ said Louise.

The living-room of the bungalow opened on to a veranda, and they stepped out. Beyond the little garden you saw in the starlight the towering kanari-trees and below them, thick and dark, the massy verdure of the nutmegs. At the bottom of the steps, on one side, grew a large bush and it was alight with fireflies. There was a multitude of them and they sparkled softly. It was like the radiance of a soul at peace. They stood side by side for a little while looking at the night. Then he took her hand and led her down the steps. They walked along the pathway till they came to the plantation and she let her hand rest in his as though it were such a natural thing for him to hold it that she paid no attention.

‘Don’t you play bridge?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Why aren’t you playing, then?’

‘I didn’t want to.’

It was very dark under the nutmeg-trees. The great white pigeons that roosted in their branches were asleep, and the only sound that broke the silence was when one of them for some reason rustled its wings. There was not a breath of wind and the air, vaguely aromatic, had a warm softness so that it surrounded them sensible to the nerves of touch like water to the swimmer. Fire-flies hovered across the path with a sort of swaying movement that made you think of drunken men staggering down an empty street. They walked a little without saying a word. Then he stopped and took her gently in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. She did not start. She did not stiffen, with surprise, or modesty; she made no instinctive movement of withdrawal; she accepted his embrace as though it were in the order of things. She was soft in his arms, but not weak, yielding, but yielding with a sort of tender willingness. They were accustomed to the darkness now, and when he looked into her eyes they had lost their blue and were dark and unfathomable. He had his hand round her waist and an arm round her neck. She rested her head against it comfortably.

‘You are lovely,’ he said.

‘You’re awfully good-looking,’ she answered.

He kissed her again. He kissed her eyelids.

‘Kiss me,’ he whispered.

She smiled. She took his face in her two hands and pressed her lips to his. He placed his hands on her two small breasts. She sighed.

‘We must go in.’

She took his hand and side by side they walked back slowly to the house.

‘I love you,’ he whispered.

She did not answer, but tightly pressed his hand. They came into the light from the house, and when they went into the room for an instant were dazzled. Erik looked up as they entered and gave Louise a smile.

‘Been down to the pool?’

‘No, it was too dark.’

She sat down and, taking up an illustrated Dutch paper, began to look at the pictures. Then putting it down she let her gaze rest on Fred. She stared at him thoughtfully, without expression on her face, as though he were not a man but an inanimate object. Now and then Eric glanced across at her and when he caught her eye, she gave him a tiny little smile. Then she got up.

‘I shall go to bed,’ she said.

She bade them all good night. Fred sat down behind the doctor and watched them play. Presently, having finished a rubber, they stopped. The old Ford had come back for them and the four men piled in. When they reached the town it drew up to put the doctor and Erik down at the hotel and then drove on to the harbour with the others.

CHAPTER 22

‘Are you sleepy?’ asked Erik.

‘No, it’s early yet,’ replied the doctor.

‘Come over to my place and have a night-cap.’

‘All right.’

The doctor had not smoked for a night or two and intended to do so that evening, but he did not mind waiting a little. To delay the pleasure was to increase it. He accompanied Erik along the deserted street. People went to bed early at Kanda and there was not a soul about. The doctor walked with a little quick trip and he took two steps to Erik’s one. With his short legs and somewhat prominent belly he cut a comic figure beside the striding giant. It was not more than two hundred yards to the Dane’s house, but he was a little out of breath when they arrived. The door was unlocked, there was not much fear of thieves on that island where people could neither escape nor dispose of stolen properly, and Erik, opening the door, walked in ahead to light the lamp. The doctor threw himself in the most comfortable of the chairs and waited while Erik fetched glasses, ice, whisky, and soda. In the uncertain light of a paraffin lamp, with his short grey hair, snub nose, and the bright colour on his high cheek-bones, he reminded you of an elderly chimpanzee, and his little bright eyes had the monkey’s scintillating sharpness. It would have been a foolish man who thought they would not see through pretence, but perhaps it would have been a wise one who discerned that, however clumsily an awkward address concealed it, they would recognize sincerity. He was not likely to take at its face value what a man said, however plausible, though no more than the shadow of a mischievous smile betrayed his thoughts, but honesty, however naïve, and true feeling, however incongruous, he could repay with a sympathy somewhat ironical and amused, but patient and kindly.

Erik poured out a drink for his guest and a drink for himself.

‘What about Mrs Frith?’ asked the doctor. ‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes, she died last year. Heart disease. She was a fine woman. Her mother came from New Zealand, but to look at her you would have said she was pure Swedish. The real Scandinavian type, tall and big and fair, like one of the goddesses in the Rheingold. Old Swan used to say that when she was a girl she was better-looking than Louise.’

‘A very pretty young woman,’ said the doctor.

‘She was like a mother to me. You can’t imagine how kind she was. I used to spend all my spare time up there, and if I didn’t go for a few days because I was afraid of abusing their hospitality she’d come down and fetch me herself. We Danes, you know, we think the Dutch are rather dull and heavy, and it was a godsend for me to have that house to go to. Old Swan used to like talking Swedish to me.’ Erik gave a little laugh. ‘He’d forgotten most of it, he talks half Swedish, half English, and Malay words thrown in and bits of Japanese; at first I had a job to understand. Funny how a man can forget his native language. I’ve always liked the English. It was fine for me to have long talks with Frith. You wouldn’t expect to find a man with that education in a place like this.’

‘I was wondering how he ever found his way here.’

‘He’d read about it in some old travel book. He’s told me he wanted to come ever since he was a kid. It’s a funny thing, he’d got it into his head that it was the one place in the world he wanted to live in. And I’ll tell you what’s strange, he’d forgotten the name of it; he could never find again the book in which he’d read about it; he just knew there was an island all by itself in a little group somewhere between Celebes and New Guinea, where the sea was scented with spices and there were great marble palaces.’

‘It sounds more like the sort of thing you read about in The Arabian Nights than in a book of travel.’

‘That’s what a good many people expect to find in the East.’

‘Sometimes they do,’ murmured the doctor.

He thought of the noble bridge that spanned the river at Fu-chou. There was a press of traffic on the Min, great junks with eyes painted on their prows so that they could see the way to go, wupans with their rattan hoods, frail sampans and chugging motor-boats. On the barges dwelt the turbulent river-folk. In midstream on a raft two men, wearing nothing but a loin cloth, fished with cormorants. It was a sight you could watch for an hour at a time. The fisherman sent his bird into the water; it dived, it caught; as it rose to the surface he drew it in by a string tied to its leg; then, while it struggled angrily flapping its wings, he seized it by the throat and made it disgorge the fish it had seized. After all it was just such a fisherman, fishing in his different Arab way, to whom a casual chance brought such amazing adventures.

The Dane continued:

‘He came out East when he was twenty-four. It took him twelve years to get here. He asked everyone he met if they’d heard of the island, but you know, in the FMS and in Bomeo they don’t know much about these parts. He was a bit of a rolling-stone when he was a young chap and he wandered from place to place. You heard what old Swan said to him and I guess it was true. He never kept a job very long. He got here at last. The skipper of a Dutch ship told him about it. It didn’t sound very much like the place he was looking for, but it was the only island in the Archipelago that answered to the description at all, and he thought he’d come and look at it. When he landed he hadn’t much beside his books and the clothes he stood up in. At first he couldn’t believe it was the right place; you’ve seen the marble palaces, you’re sitting in one of them now.’ Erik looked round the room and laughed. ‘You see, he’d pictured them to himself all those years like the palaces on the Grand Canal. Anyhow if it wasn’t the place he was looking for it was the only place he could find. He shifted his standpoint, if you understand what I mean, and forced the reality to tally with his fancy. He came to the conclusion that it was all right. Because they’ve got marble floors and stucco columns he really thinks they are marble palaces.’

‘You make him out a wiser man than I thought he was.’

‘He got a job here, there was more trade then than there is now; after that, he fell in love with old Swan’s daughter and married her.’

‘Were they happy together?’

‘Yes. Swan didn’t like him much. He was pretty active in those days and he was always concocting some scheme or other. He could never get Frith to get a move on. But she worshipped him. She thought he was wonderful. When Swan got too old, she ran the estate and looked after things and made both ends meet. You know, some women are like that. It gave her a sort of satisfaction to think of Frith sitting in his den with his books, reading and writing and making notes. She thought him a genius. She thought everything she did for him was only his due. She was a fine woman.’

The doctor reflected on what Erik told him. What a picture of a strange life this offered to the fancy! The shabby bungalow in the nutmeg plantation, with the immensely tall kanari-trees; that old pirate of a Swede, ruthless and crotchety, brave adventurer in the soulless deserts of hard fact; the dreamy, unpractical schoolmaster, lured by the mirage of the East, who like – like a coster’s donkey let loose on a common, wandered aimlessly in the pleasant lands of the spirit, browsing at random; and then, the great blonde woman, like a goddess of the Vikings, with her efficiency, her love, her honesty of mind, and surely her charitable sense of humour, who held things together, managed, guided, and protected those two incompatible men.

‘When she knew she was dying she made Louise promise to look after them. The plantation belongs to Swan. Even now it brings in enough to keep them all. She was afraid that after she was gone the old man would turn Frith out.’ Erik hesitated a little. ‘And she made me promise to look after Louise. It hasn’t been very easy for her, poor child. Swan is like a cunning old monkey. He’s up to any mischief. His brain in a way is as active as ever it was, and he’ll lie and plot and intrigue just to play some silly little trick on you. He dotes on Louise. She’s the only person who can do anything with him. Once, just for fun, he tore some of Frith’s manuscripts into tiny fragments. When they found him he was surrounded by a snow-fall of little bits of paper.’

‘No great loss to the world, I daresay,’ smiled the doctor, ‘but exasperating to a struggling author.’

‘You don’t think much of Frith?’

‘I haven’t made my mind up about him.’

‘He’s taught me so much. I shall always be grateful to him. I was only a kid when I first came here. I’d been to the university at Copenhagen, and at home we’d always cared for culture; my father was a friend of George Brandes, and Holger Drachmann, the poet, used often to come to our house; it was Brandes who first made me read Shakespeare, but I was very ignorant and narrow. It was Frith who made me understand the magic of the East. You know, people come out here and they see nothing. Is that all? they say. And they go home again. That fort I took you to see yesterday, just a few old grey walls overgrown with weeds. I shall never forget the first time he took me there. His words built up the ruined walls and put ordnance on the battlements. When he told me how the governor had paced them week after week in sickening anxiety, for the natives, in the strange way they have in the East of knowing things before they can possibly be known, were whispering of a terrible disaster to the Portuguese, and he waited desperately for the ship that would bring news; and at last it came, and he read the letter which told him that King Sebastian, with his splendid train of nobles and courtiers, had been annihilated at the battle of Alcacer, and the tears ran down his old cheeks, not only because his king had met a cruel death, but because he foresaw that the defeat must cost his country her freedom; and that rich world they had discovered and conquered, those innumerable islands a handful of brave men had seized for the power of Portugal, must pass under the dominion of foreigners – then, believe me or not, I felt a lump in my throat, and for a little while I couldn’t see because my eyes were blurred with tears. And not only this. He talked to me of Goa the Golden, rich with the plunder of Asia, the great capital of the East, and of the Malabar Coast and Macao, and Ormuz and Bassora. He made that old life so plain and vivid that I’ve never since been able to see the East but with the past still present today. And I’ve thought what a privilege it was that I, a poor Danish country boy, should see all these wonders with my own eyes. And I think it’s grand to be a man when I think of those little swarthy chaps from a country no bigger than my own Denmark who, by their dauntless courage, their gallantry, their ardent imagination, held half the world in fee. It’s all gone now and they say that Goa the Golden is no more than a poverty-stricken village; but if it’s true that the only reality is spirit, then somehow that dream of empire, that dauntless courage, that gallantry, Live on.’

‘It was strong wine for a young head that our Mr Frith gave you to drink,’ murmured the doctor.

‘It intoxicated me,’ smiled Erik, ‘but that intoxication causes no headache in the morning.’

The doctor did not reply. He was inclined to think that its effects, more lasting, might be a great deal more pernicious. Erik took a sip of whisky.

‘I was brought up a Lutheran, but when I went to the university I became an atheist. It was the fashion, and I was very young. I just shrugged my shoulders when Frith began to talk to me of Brahma. Oh, we’ve spent hours sitting on the veranda, up at the plantation, Frith, his wife Catherine, and me. He’d talk. She never said much, but she listened, looking at him with adoring eyes, and he and I would argue. It was all vague and difficult to understand, but you know, he was very persuasive, and what he believed had a sort of grandeur and beauty; it seemed to fit in with the tropical, moonlit nights and the distant stars and the murmur of the sea. I’ve often wondered if there isn’t something in it. And if you know what I mean, it fits in too with Wagner and Shakespeare’s plays and those lyrics of Camoens. Sometimes I’ve grown impatient and said to myself, the man’s an empty windbag. You see, it bothered me that he should drink more than was good for him, and be so fond of his food, and when there was a job of work to do always have an excuse for not doing it. But Catherine believed in him. She was no fool. If he’d been a fake she couldn’t have lived with him for twenty years and not found it out. It was funny that he should be so gross and yet be capable of such lofty thoughts. I’ve heard him say things that I shall never forget. Sometimes he could soar into mystical regions of the spirit – d’you know what I mean? – when you couldn’t follow him, but just watched dizzily from the ground and yet were filled with rapture. And you know, he could do surprising things. That day that old Swan tore up his manuscript, a year’s work, two whole cantos of The Lusiads, when they saw what had happened Catherine burst out crying, but he just sighed and went out for a walk. When he came in he brought the old man, delighted with his mischief, but a little scared all the same, a bottle of rum. It’s true he’d bought it with Swan’s money, but that doesn’t matter. “Never mind, old man,” he said, “you’ve only torn up a few dozen sheets of paper; they were merely an illusion and it would be foolish to give them a second thought; the reality remains, for the reality is indestructible.” And next day he set to work to do it all over again.’

‘He said he was going to give me some passages to read,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘I suppose he forgot.’

‘He’ll remember,’ said Erik, with a smile in which there was a good-natured grimness.

Dr Saunders liked him. The Dane was genuine, at all events; an idealist, of course, but his idealism was tempered with humour. He gave you the impression that his strength of character was greater even than the strength of his mighty frame. Perhaps he was not very clever, but he was immensely reliable, and the charm of his simple, honest nature pleasantly complemented the charm of his ungainly person. It occurred to the doctor that a woman might very well fall deeply in love with him and his next remark was not entirely void of guile.

‘And that girl we saw, is that the only child they had?’

‘Catherine was a widow when Frith married her. She had a son by her first husband, and a son by Frith, too, but they both died when Louise was a child.’

‘And has she looked after everything since her mother’s death?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s very young.’

‘Eighteen. She was only a kid when I first came to the island. They sent her to the missionary school here, and then her mother thought she ought to go to Auckland. But when Catherine fell ill they sent for her. It’s funny what a year’ll do for girls; when she went away she was a child who used to sit on my knee, and when she came back she was a young woman.’ He gave the doctor his small, diffident smile. ‘I’ll tell you in confidence that we’re engaged.’

‘Oh?’

‘Not officially, so I’d sooner you didn’t mention it. Old Swan’s willing enough, but her father says she’s too young. I suppose she is, but that’s not his real reason for objecting. I’m afraid he doesn’t think me good enough. He’s got an idea that one of these days some rich English lord will come along in his yacht and fall madly in love with her. The nearest approach so far is young Fred in a pearling lugger.’

He chuckled.

‘I don’t mind waiting. I know she’s young. That’s why I didn’t ask her to marry me before. You see, it took me some time to get it into my head that she wasn’t a little girl any more. When you love anyone like I love Louise a few months, a year or two – well, they don’t matter. We’ve got all life before us. It won’t be quite the same when we’re married. I know it’s going to be perfect happiness, but we shall have it, we shan’t be looking forward to it any more. We’ve got something now that we shall lose. D’you think that’s stupid?’

‘No.’

‘Of course, you’ve only just seen her, you don’t know her. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

‘Very.’

‘Well, her beauty’s the least of her qualities. She’s got a head on her shoulders, she’s got the same practical spirit that her mother had. It makes me laugh sometimes to see this lovely child – after all, she is hardly more than a kid – manage the labour on the estate with so much common-sense. The Malays know it’s useless to try any tricks with her. Of course, having lived practically all her life here, she has all sorts of knowledge in her bones. It’s amazing how shrewd she is. And the tact she shows with those two men, her grandfather and Frith. She knows them inside out; she knows all their faults, but she doesn’t mind them; she’s awfully fond of them, of course, and she takes them as they are, as though they were just like everybody else. I’ve never seen her even impatient with either of them. And you know, one wants one’s patience when old Swan rambles on with some story you’ve heard fifty times already.’

‘I guessed that it was she who made things run smooth.’

‘I suppose one would. But what one wouldn’t guess is that her beauty, and her cleverness, and the goodness of her heart mask a spirit of the most subtle and exquisite delicacy. Mask isn’t the right word. Mask suggests disguise and disguise suggests deceit. Louise doesn’t know what disguise and deceit mean. She is beautiful, and she is kind, and she is clever; all that’s she; but there’s someone else there too, a sort of illusive spirit that somehow I think no one but her mother who is dead and I have ever suspected. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a wraith within the body; it’s like a soul within the spirit, if you can imagine it; it’s like the essential flame of the individual of which all the qualities that the world sees are only emanations.’

The doctor raised his eyebrows. It seemed to him that Erik Christessen was getting a bit out of his depth. Still, he listened to him without displeasure. He was very much in love and Dr Saunders had a half cynical tenderness for young things in that condition.

‘Have you ever read Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid?’ asked Erik.

‘A hundred years ago.’

‘That lovely flame-like spirit not my eyes but my soul has felt in Louise seems to me just like that little mermaid. It’s not quite at home in the haunts of men. It has always a vague nostalgia for the sea. It’s not quite human; she’s so sweet, she’s so gentle, she’s so tender, and yet there is a sort of aloofness in her that keeps you at a distance. It seems to me very rare and beautiful. I’m not jealous of it. I’m not afraid of it. It’s a priceless possession and I love her so much that I almost regret that she cannot always keep it. I feel that she will lose it when she becomes a wife and a mother, and whatever beauty of soul she has then it will be different. It’s something apart and independent. It’s the self which is part of the universal self; perhaps we’ve all got it; but what is so wonderful in her is that it’s almost sensible, and you feel that if only your eyes were a little more piercing you could see it plain. I’m so ashamed that I shall not go to her as pure as she will come to me.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ said the doctor.

‘Why is it silly? When you love someone like Louise it’s horrible to think that you’ve lain in strange arms and that you’ve kissed bought and painted mouths. I feel unworthy enough of her as it is. I might at least have brought her a clean and decent body.’

‘Oh, my dear boy.’

Dr Saunders thought the young man was talking nonsense, but he felt no inclination to argue with him. It was getting late and his own concerns called him. He finished his drink.

‘I have never had any sympathy with the ascetic attitude. The wise man combines the pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the spirit in such a way as to increase the satisfaction he gets from both. The most valuable thing I have learnt from life is to regret nothing. Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations and with a certain humour. and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.’

With that he got up and left.

CHAPTER 23

Next morning, comfortably seated on the veranda of the hotel, with his legs up, Dr Saunders was reading a book. He had just learnt from the steamship office that news had been received of the arrival of a ship on the following day but one. It stopped at Bali, which would give him the opportunity of seeing that attractive island, and from there it would be easy to get to Surabaya. He was enjoying his holiday. He had forgotten that it was so pleasant to have nothing in the world to do.

‘A man of leisure,’ he murmured to himself. ‘By God, I might almost pass for a gentleman.’

Presently Fred Blake strolled along the road, nodded and joined him.

‘You haven’t received a cable, have you?’ he asked.

‘No, that’s the last thing I expect.’

‘I was in the post-office a minute ago. The man asked me if my name was Saunders.’

‘That’s funny. No one has the least notion I’m here; nor do I know anyone in the world who wants to communicate with me urgently enough to waste money on a cablegram.’

But a surprise was in store for him. Barely an hour had passed when a youth rode up to the hotel on a bicycle and the manager shortly afterwards came out with him on to the veranda and asked Dr Saunders to sign for a cable that had just arrived for him.

‘What an extraordinary thing!’ he cried. ‘Old Kim Ching is the only man who can even suspect that I’m here.’

But when he opened the cablegram he was more astonished still.

‘That’s a damned idiotic thing,’ he said. ‘It’s in code. Who in God’s name can have done such a silly thing as that? How can I be expected to make head or tail of it?’

‘May I have a look?’ asked Fred. ‘If it’s one of the well-known codes I might be able to tell you. One’s sure to be able to get all the usual code-books here.’

The doctor handed him the slip of paper. It was a numeral code. The words, or phrases, were represented by groups of numbers and the termination of each group was clearly indicated by a zero.

‘The commercial codes use made-up words,’ said Fred.

‘I know as much as that.’

‘I’ve made rather a study of codes. Been a hobby of mine. D’you mind if I have a shot at deciphering it?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘They say it’s only a question of time before you can find the secret of any code. There’s one fellow in the British service, they say, who can solve the most complicated code anyone can invent in twenty-four hours.’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘I’ll go inside. I must have pens and paper.’

Dr Saunders suddenly remembered. He reached out.

‘Let me just see that cable again.’

Fred handed it to him and he looked for the place of despatch. Melbourne. He did not give it back.

‘Is it for you by any chance?’

Fred hesitated for an instant. Then he smiled. When he wanted to cajole anyone he could be very ingratiating.

‘Well, it is, as a matter of fact.’

‘Why did you have it addressed to me?’

‘Well, I thought that me living on the Fenton and all that, perhaps they wouldn’t deliver it, or they might want proof of identity or something. I thought it would save a lot of trouble if I had it sent to you.’

‘You’ve got your nerve with you.’

‘I knew you were a sport.’

‘And that little realistic detail about your being asked at the post-office if your name was Saunders?’

‘Pure invention, old man,’ Fred answered airily.

Dr Saunders chuckled.

‘What would you have done if I hadn’t been able to make head or tail of it and torn it up?’

‘I knew it couldn’t arrive till today. They only got the address yesterday.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘The people who sent the cable,’ replied Fred, with a smile.

‘Then it’s not entirely for the pleasure of my society that you have been giving me your company this morning?’

‘Not entirely.’

The doctor gave him back the flimsy.

‘You’ve got the cheek of the devil. Take it. I suppose you’ve got the key in your pocket.’

‘In my head.’

He went into the hotel. Dr Saunders began to read again. But he read with divided attention. He could not entirely dismiss from his head the incident that had just occurred. It amused him not a little and he wondered again what was the mystery in which the boy was involved. He was discreet. He had never so much as dropped a hint upon which an agile intelligence might work. There was nothing to go upon. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. After all, the matter was no business of his. He sought to dissipate his baffled curiosity by pretending to himself that he didn’t care a damn and made a resolute effort to attend to what he was reading. But after an interval Fred came back on to the veranda.

‘Have a drink, doctor?’ he said.

His eyes were shining, his face was flushed, but at the same time he bore an air of some bewilderment. He was excited. He wanted to burst out laughing, but since he could give no reason for hilarity plainly was trying to control himself.

‘Had good news?’ asked the doctor.

Suddenly Fred could restrain himself no longer. He burst into a peal of laughter.

‘As good as all that?’

‘I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s awfully funny. I wish I could tell you. It’s strange. It makes me feel rather queer. I don’t quite know what to make of it. I must have a bit of time to get used to it. I don’t quite know if I’m standing on my head or my heels.’

Dr Saunders looked at him reflectively. The boy seemed to have gained vitality. There had always been something hangdog in his expression that took away from his unusual good looks. Now he looked candid and open. You would have thought a load had been lifted from his shoulders. The drinks came.

‘I want you to drink to the memory of a deceased friend of mine,’ he said, seizing his glass.

‘By name?’

‘Smith.’

He emptied the glass in a draught.

‘I must ask Erik if we can go somewhere this afternoon. I feel like walking my legs off. A bit of exercise would do me good.’

‘When are you sailing?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I like it here. I wouldn’t mind staying for a bit. I wish you could have seen the view from the top of that volcano Erik and I went up yesterday. Pretty, I can tell you. The world’s not a bad old place, is it?’

A buggy drawn by a small shabby horse came trundling shakily down the road, raising a cloud of dust, and stopped at the hotel. Louise was driving and her father sat by her side. He got out and walked up the steps. He had in his hand a flat brown-paper parcel.

‘I forgot to give you the manuscripts last night that I promised to let you see, so I’ve brought them down.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

Frith untied the string and disclosed a small pile of typewritten sheets.

‘Of course, I want an absolutely candid opinion.’ He gave the doctor a doubtful look. ‘If you have nothing very much to do at the moment I might read you a few pages myself. I always think poetry should be read aloud and it’s only the author who can do justice to it.’

The doctor sighed. He was weak. He could think of no excuse that would turn Frith from his purpose.

‘D’you think your daughter ought to wait in the sun?’ he hazarded.

‘Oh, she has things to do. She can go upon her errands and come back for me.’

‘Would you like me to go with her, sir?’ said Fred Blake. ‘I’ve got nothing to do.’

‘I think she’d be very glad.’

He went down and spoke to Louise. The doctor saw her look at him gravely, then smile a little and say something. She was wearing this morning a dress of white cotton and a large straw hat of native make. Under it her face had a golden coolness. Fred swung himself up beside her and she drove off.

‘I’d like to read you the third canto,’ said Frith. ‘It has a lyrical quality that suits me. I think it’s about the best thing I’ve done. Do you know Portuguese?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘That’s a pity. It’s almost a word-for-word translation. It would have amused you to see how closely I’ve managed to reproduce the rhythm and music, the feeling, in fact, everything that makes it a great poem. Of course you won’t hesitate to criticize, I’m only too willing to listen to anything you have to say, but I have no doubt in my own mind that this is the definitive translation. I can’t honestly believe that it will ever be superseded.’

He began to read. His voice had a pleasing quality. The poem was in ottava rima, and Frith laid an emphasis on the metre that was not ineffective. Dr Saunders listened attentively. The version seemed fluent and easy, but he could not be sure how much this was due to the measured and stately elocution. Frith’s delivery was dramatic, but he put the drama into the sound, rather than the sense, so that the meaning of what he read tended to escape you. He stressed the rhyme so that it reminded Dr Saunders of a slow train jogging over an ill-laid rail and his body felt a slight jolt as the expected sound at regular intervals fell upon his ear. He found his attention wandering. The rich monotonous voice hammered on and he began to feel a little drowsy. He stared hard at the reader, but his eyes closed involuntarily; he opened them with a slight effort and frowned with the violence of his concentration. He gave a start, for his head fell suddenly towards his chest, and he realized that for a moment he had dozed. Frith read of gallant deeds and the great men that had made Portugal an empire. His voice rose when he read of high heroical things and trembled and fell when he read of death and untoward fate. Suddenly Dr Saunders was conscious of silence. He opened his eyes. Frith was no longer there. Fred Blake was sitting in front of him, a roguish smile on his handsome face.

‘Had a nice nap?’

‘I haven’t been asleep.’

‘You’ve been snoring your head off.’

‘Where’s Frith?’

‘He’s gone. We came back in the buggy and they’ve gone home to dinner. He said I wasn’t to disturb you.’

‘I know what’s wrong with him now,’ said the doctor. ‘He had a dream and it’s come true. What gives an ideal beauty is that it’s unattainable. The gods laugh when men get what they want.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ said Fred, ‘You’re half asleep still.’

‘Let’s have a glass of beer. That at all events is real.’

CHAPTER 24

Round about ten o’clock that night the doctor and Captain Nichols were playing piquet in the sitting-room of the hotel. They had been driven indoors by the flying ants which the lamp on the veranda attracted. Erik Christessen came in.

‘Where have you been all day?’ asked the doctor.

‘I had to visit a plantation we’ve got over at the other end of the island. I thought I’d be back earlier, but the manager’s just had a son and he was giving a feast. I had to stay for it.’

‘Fred was looking for you. He wanted to go for a walk.’

‘I wish I’d known. I’d have taken him with me.’ He threw himself into a chair and called for beer. ‘I’ve had the best part of ten miles to walk and then we had to row back half-way round the island.’

‘Like to play chouette?’ asked the skipper, giving him his sharp, foxy look.

‘No, I’m tired. Where’s Fred?’

‘Courtin’, I expect.’

‘Not much chance of that here,’ said Erik, good naturedly.

‘Don’t you be too sure. Good-lookin’ young fellow, you know. The girls fall for ‘im. At Merauke I ‘ad a rare job keepin’ ’em away from ‘im. Between you and me and the gate-post I should ‘ave said ‘e clicked good and proper last night.’

‘Who with?’

‘That girl up there.’

‘Louise?’

Erik smiled. The idea was quite preposterous to him.

‘Well, I don’t know. She come and ‘ad a look at the boat with ‘im this mornin’. And I know ‘e dolled ‘imself up somethin’ fierce tonight. Shaved ‘imself. Brushed ‘is ‘air. Put on a clean suit. I ask ‘im what it was all about and ‘e tell me to mind me own bloody business.’

‘Frith was down here this morning,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘It may be he asked Fred to go and have supper there again tonight.’

‘He ‘ad supper on the Fenton,’ said Nichols.

He dealt the cards. The players went on with their game. Erik smoking a big Dutch cigar watched them and sipped his beer. Now and again the skipper gave him that sidelong glance of his in which there was something so unpleasant that it sent a shiver down your spine. His little close-set eyes glittered with malicious amusement. After a while Erik looked at his watch.

‘I’ll go down to the Fenton. Maybe Fred’d like to come fishing with me tomorrow morning.’

‘You won’t find ‘im,’ said the skipper.

‘Why not? He wouldn’t be at Swan’s as late as this.’

‘Don’t you be too sure.’

‘They go to bed at ten and it’s past eleven now.’

‘Maybe ‘e’s gone to bed, too.’

‘Rot.’

‘Well, if you ask me I think that girl looked as though she knew a thing or two. It wouldn’t surprise me if they was comfortably tucked up together at this very minute. And very nice too. I wish I was in ‘is place.’

Erik was standing up. With his great height he towered over the two men seated at the table. His face grew pale, and he clenched his fists. For a moment it looked as though he would hit the skipper. He gave an inarticulate cry of rage. The skipper looked up at him and grinned. Dr Saunders could not but see that he was not in the least frightened. A blow from that great fist would certainly have knocked him out. He was a mean skunk, but he had pluck. The doctor saw with what a tremendous effort Erik controlled himself.

‘It’s not a bad plan to judge others by oneself,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘but not if one’s a mangy cur.’

‘ ‘Ave I said anythin’ to offend you?’ asked the skipper. ‘I didn’t know the lady was a friend of yours.’

Erik stared at him for a moment. His face showed the disgust he felt for the man, and his withering contempt. He turned on his heel and walked heavily out of the hotel.

‘Wanting to commit suicide, skipper?’ asked the doctor dryly.

‘Known a lot of them big fellows. Sentimental, that’s what they are. Never ‘it a chap smaller than yourself. Their minds don’t work quick, you know. A bit stupid, generally.’

The doctor chuckled. It diverted him to think of that rascal making shrewd use of the decent feelings of others to go his crooked, nasty way.

‘You took a risk. If he hadn’t had himself well in hand he might have hit you before he knew what he was doing.’

‘What was ‘e upset about? Sweet on the girl ‘imself?’

Dr Saunders thought it unnecessary to tell him that Erik was engaged to Louise Frith.

‘There are men who object to hearing their girl friends spoken of in that way,’ he answered.

‘Come off it, doc. Don’t pull that stuff on me. It don’t go with you at all. If a girl’s easy a chap likes to know. If someone else ‘as been there, well, there’s a chance for ‘im, ain’t there? Stands to reason.’

‘You know, you’re one of the dirtiest tykes I’ve ever met, skipper,’ said the doctor in his detached manner.

‘That’s a compliment in its way, ain’t it? Funny part is, you don’t like me any the less if I am. Seems to me to prove you ain’t exactly a saint yourself. And I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve ‘eard as much in various quarters.’

Dr Saunders’ eyes twinkled.

‘Digestion troubling you tonight, skipper?’

‘I ain’t exactly comfortable, and it would be a lie if I said I was. I don’t say I’m in pain, mind you, but I just ain’t comfortable.’

‘It’s a long business. You can’t expect to be able to digest a pound of lead after a week’s treatment.’

‘I don’t want to digest a pound of lead, doc, and I don’t pretend for a minute I do. Mind you, I ain’t complaining. I don’t say you ain’t done me good. You ‘ave. But I got a long way to go yet.’

‘Well, I’ve told you, have your teeth out. They’re no use to you, and God knows, they don’t add to your beauty.’

‘I will. I give you me word of honour. The minute I’m through with the cruise. I don’t see why we can’t pop over to Singapore. Sure to be a good American dentist there. The kid wants to go to Batavia now.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yes, ‘e got a cable this mornin’. I don’t know what it was all about, but ‘e’s all for stoppin’ on ‘ere a bit and then goin’ to Batavia.’

‘How d’you know he got a cable?’

‘I found it in the pocket of ‘is pants. He put on a clean suit to go ashore in, and ‘e left his pants lyin’ about. Untidy little blighter. That shows you ‘e’s not a sailor. A sailor-man’s always tidy. Has to be. It was all Greek to me. The cable, I mean. In cypher.’

‘I suppose you didn’t notice that it was addressed to me?’

‘You? No, I can’t say I did.’

‘Well, have another look at it. I just gave it to Fred to decode.’

The doctor found it highly diverting thus to throw Captain Nichols off the scent.

‘Then what’s the reason of all this changin’ around? He was always for keepin’ away from big places. Naturally, I thought it was on account of the cops. Anyhow, I mean to get to Singapore or sink the ruddy boat in the attempt.’ Captain Nichols leaned over impressively and looked with deep emotion into the doctor’s eyes. ‘I wonder if you realize what it means to a chap not to ‘ave ‘ad a beefsteak and kidney puddin’ for ten years. Talk of girls. You can ‘ave all the girls in the world you like. There’s not one I wouldn’t give if I could only eat a suet puddin’ with plenty of treacle and a good wallop of cream all over it. That’s my idea of ‘eaven and you can put your golden ‘arps where the monkey put the nuts.’

CHAPTER 25

Erik, with his deliberate stride that seemed to measure the earth as a man might measure a cricket pitch, walked down to the beach. He was unmoved. He dismissed the skipper’s shameless innuendo from his mind. It had left a nasty taste in his mouth and as though he had drunk a nauseous draught, he spat. But he was not devoid of humour and he gave a little low chuckle as he thought of the innuendo’s absurdity. Fred was just a boy. He could not imagine that any woman would look at him twice; and he knew Louise much too well to suppose even for an instant that she could give him even a thought.

The beach was deserted. Everyone slept. He walked along the pier and hailed the Fenton. She was anchored a hundred yards out. Her light shone like a little steady eye on the smooth surface of the water. He shouted again. There was no answer. But a muffled, sleepy voice rose from below him. It was the blackfellow in the dinghy waiting for Captain Nichols. Erik went down the steps and found it tied to the bottom rung of the rail. The man was still half asleep. He yawned noisily as he stirred himself.

‘Is that the Fenton’s dinghy?’

‘Ye’. What you want?’

The blackfellow thought it might be the skipper or Fred Blake, but seeing his mistake was irritable and suspicious.

‘Just row me on board. I want to see Fred Blake.’

‘He ain’t on board.’

‘Sure?’

‘If he ain’t swum.’

‘Oh, all right. Good night.’

The man gave a discontented grunt and settled down again to sleep. Erik walked back along the silent road. He thought that Fred had gone to the bungalow and Frith had kept him talking. He smiled as he wondered what the boy would make of the Englishman’s mystical discourse. Something. He had taken to Fred. Beneath his pretence of worldly wisdom, and behind all that idle chatter about racing and cricketing, dancing and prize-fighting, you could not but be conscious of a pleasant and simple nature. Erik was not altogether unaware of the lad’s feelings towards himself. Hero-worship. Oh, well, there was no great harm in that. It would pass. He was a decent kid. One might make something of him if one had the chance. It was nice to talk to him and feel that, even if it was all strange to him, he was trying to understand. It might be that if you cast a seed on that grateful soil a fair plant would spring up. Erik tramped on, hoping to meet Fred; they would walk back together, they might go on to his house, and they could rout themselves out some cheese and biscuits and have a bottle of beer. He did not feel at all sleepy. He had not many people to talk to on the island; with Frith and old Swan he had mostly to listen. It was good to talk deep into the night.

‘Had tired the sun with talking,’ he quoted to himself, ‘and sent him down the sky.’

Erik was reticent about his private affairs, but he made up his mind to tell Fred of his engagement to Louise. He would like him to know. He had a great desire to talk about her that night. Sometimes love so possessed him that he felt if he did not tell somebody about it his heart would break. The doctor was old and could not understand; he could say things to Fred that it would have embarrassed him to say to a grown man.

It was three miles to the plantation, but his thoughts so absorbed him that he did not notice the distance. He was quite surprised when he arrived. It was funny that he had not met Fred. Then it occurred to him that Fred must have gone in to the hotel during the time he had gone down to the beach. How stupid of him not to think of that! Oh, well, there was nothing to be done about it. Now that he was there he might just as well go in and sit down for a bit. Of course, they’d all be asleep, but he wouldn’t disturb anyone. He often did that; went up to the bungalow after they’d gone to bed and sat there thinking. There was a chair in the garden, below the veranda, in which old Swan sometimes rested in the cool of the evening. It was in front of Louise’s room and it reposed him strangely to sit there quite quietly and look at her window and think of her sleeping so peacefully under her mosquito curtains. Her lovely ash-blonde hair was spread on the pillow and she lay on her side, her young breast rising and falling softly in deep slumber. The emotion that filled his heart when he thus pictured her was angel-puff. Sometimes he was a little sad when he thought that this virginal grace must perish and that slim and lovely body at last lie still in death. It was dreadful that a being so beautiful should die. He sat there sometimes till a faint chill in the balmy air, the rustle of the pigeons in the trees, warned him that day was at hand. They were hours of peace and of enchanting serenity. Once he had seen the shutter softly open, and Louise stepped out. Perhaps the heat oppressed her or a dream had awakened her and she wanted a breath of air. On her bare feet she walked across the veranda and with her hands on the rail stood looking at the starry night. She wore a sarong round her loins, but the upper part of her body was naked. She raised her hands and shook out her pale hair over her shoulders. Her body was silhouetted in wan silver against the darkness of the house. She did not look a woman of flesh and blood. She was like a spirit-maiden and Erik, his mind full of the old Danish stories, almost expected her to change into a lovely white bird and fly away to the fabled lands of the sunrise. He sat very still. He was hidden by the darkness. It was so silent that when she gave a little sigh he heard it as though he held her in his arms and her heart were pressed to his. She turned round and went back into her room. She drew the shutter to.

Erik walked up the earth road that led to the house and sat down in the chair that faced Louise’s room. The house was dark. It was wrapped in a silence so profound that you might have thought its inmates were not asleep but dead. But there was no fear in the silence. It had an exquisite peace. It reassured you. It was comfortable, like the feel of a girl’s smooth skin. Erik gave a little sigh of content. A sadness, but a sadness in which there was anguish no longer, befell him because dear Catherine Frith was there no more. He hoped that he would never forget the kindness she had shown him when, a shy and callow boy, he had first come to the island. He had worshipped her. She was then a woman of forty-five, but neither hard work nor child-bearing had had any effect on her powerful physique. She was tall and full-breasted, with magnificent golden hair, and she held herself proudly. You would have thought she would live to be a hundred. She took the place for him of the mother, a woman of character and of courage too, that he had left in a farmhouse in Denmark, and she loved in him the sons that had been born to her years before and of whom death had robbed her. But he felt that the relation between them was more intimate than it ever could have been if they had been mother and son. They could never have talked to one another so openly. Perhaps it could never have been such a tranquil satisfaction just to be in one another’s company. He loved her and admired her and it made him very happy to be so sure that she loved him. Even then he had an inkling that the love he might one day feel for a girl would never have exactly the restful and comforting quality that he found in his very pure affection for Catherine Frith. She was a woman who had never read much, but she had a vast fund of knowledge, lying there like an unworked mine, gathered, you would have said, through innumerable generations out of the timeless experience of the race, so that she could cope with your book-learning and meet you on level terms. She was one of those persons who made you feel as though you were saying wonderful things, and when you talked to her thoughts came to you that you had never dreamt you were capable of. She was of a practical turn and she had a canny sense of humour; she was quick to ridicule absurdity, but the kindness of her heart was such that if she laughed at you, it was so tenderly that you loved her for it. It seemed to Erik that her most wonderful trait was a sincerity so perfect that it glowed all about her with a light that shone into the heart of all that had communication with her.

It filled Erik with a warm and grateful feeling to think that her life for so long had been as happy as she deserved it to be. Her marriage with George Frith had been an idyll. She had been a widow for some time when he first came to that distant and beautiful island. Her first husband was a New Zealander, skipper of a schooner engaged in the island trade, and he was drowned at sea in the great hurricane that ruined her father. Swan, owing to the wound in his chest unable to do any hard work, was broken by the accident that swept away almost all his life’s savings, and together they came to that plantation which with his shrewd Scandinavian sense he had kept for years as a refuge should all else fail. She had had a son by the New Zealander, but he had died of diphtheria when still a baby. She had never known anyone like George Frith. She had never heard anyone talk as he did. He was thirty-six, with an untidy mop of dark hair and a haggard, romantic look. She loved him. It was as though her practical sense, her nobly terrestrial instincts, sought their compensation in this mysterious waif who spoke so greatly of such high things. She loved him not as she had loved her rough downright sailor husband, but with a half-amused tenderness that wanted to protect and guard. She felt that he was infinitely above her. She stood in awe of his subtle and aspiring intelligence. She never ceased to believe in his goodness and his genius. Erik thought that, notwithstanding Frith’s tiresomeness, he would always feel kindly towards him because she had so devotedly loved him and he for so many years had given her happiness.

It was Catherine who had first said that she would like him to marry Louise. She was then a child.

‘She’ll never be as lovely as you, my dear,’ he smiled.

‘Oh, much more. You can’t tell yet. I can. She’ll be like me, but quite different, and she’ll be better-looking than I ever was.’

‘I would only marry her if she was exactly like you. I don’t want her different.’

‘Wait till she’s grown-up and then you’ll be very pleased she isn’t a fat old woman.’

It amused him now to think of that conversation. The darkness of the house was paling and for a moment he thought with a start that it must be the dawn that was breaking, but then, looking round, he saw that a lopsided moon was floating up over the tops of the trees, like an empty barrel drifting with the tide, and its light, dim still, shone on the sleeping bungalow. He gave the moon a friendly little wave of the hand.

When that strong, muscular, and vigorous woman was inexplicably attacked by a disease of the heart, and violent spasms of agonizing pain warned her that death at any moment might overtake her, she spoke to Erik again of her wish. Louise, at school in Auckland, had been sent for, but she could only get home by a round-about route, and it would take her a month to arrive.

‘She’ll be seventeen in a few days. I think she’s got a head on her shoulders, but she’ll be very young to take full charge of everything here.’

‘What makes you think she’ll want to marry me?’ asked Erik.

‘She adored you when she was a child. She used to follow you about like a dog.’

‘Oh, that’s just a school-girl’s Schwärmerei.’

‘You’ll be practically the only man she’s ever known.’

‘But, Catherine, you wouldn’t wish me to marry her if I didn’t love her.’

She gave him her sweet, humorous smile.

‘No, but I can’t help thinking that you will love her.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said something that he did not quite understand. ‘I think I’m just as glad that I shan’t be here.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. Why?’

She did not answer. She just patted his hand and chuckled.

It touched him with a sort of sad emotion to reflect how right she had been and he was inclined to attribute her prescience to the strange presentiment of the dying. He was staggered when he saw Louise on her return. She was grown into a lovely girl. She had lost her childish worship of him, but also her shyness; she was perfectly at ease with him. She was, of course, very fond of him; he couldn’t doubt that, she was so sweet, friendly and affectionate; but he had the impression, not exactly that she criticized him, but that she coolly appraised him. It did not embarrass him, but it made him feel a little self-conscious. She had acquired the quizzical, humorous look in the eyes that he knew so well in her mother, but whereas in her it warmed your heart because it was so rich with love, with Louise it slightly disconcerted you; you were not sure that she did not find you a trifle absurd. Erik discovered that he had to start with her from the beginning, for it was not only her body that had changed, it was her spirit too. She was as companionable as ever, as jolly, and they took the same long walks together as in the old days, bathed and fished; they talked and laughed together as freely as when he was twenty-two and she fourteen; but he was vaguely conscious that there was in her a new aloofness. Her soul had been transparent as glass; now it was mysteriously veiled, and he was aware that its depths held something he did not know.

Catherine died quite suddenly. She had an attack of angina, and when the half-caste doctor reached the bungalow she was beyond his aid. Louise broke down completely. The years, with the early maturity they had brought, fell away from her, and she was a little girl again. She did not know how to cope with her grief. She was shattered. For long hours she lay in Erik’s arms on his lap, weeping, like a child who cannot realize that sorrow will pass, and would not be comforted. The situation was more than she could deal with, and she did meekly what he told her. Frith went all to pieces and no sense could be got from him. He spent his time drinking whisky and water and crying. Old Swan talked of all the children he had had and how they had died one after the other. They’d all treated him very badly. There was not one of them left now to look after a poor old man. Some of them had run away and some had robbed him, and some had married he didn’t know whom, and the rest had died. One would have thought one of them would have had the decency to stay and look after his father now he wanted looking after.

Erik did everything that had to be done.

‘You are angelic,’ Louise said to him.

He saw the light of love in her eyes, but he contented himself with patting her hand and telling her not to be silly; he did not want to take advantage of her emotion, of the sense of helplessness and of being deserted that just then overwhelmed her, to ask her to marry him. She was so young. It would be unfair to take this advantage over her. He loved her madly. But no sooner had he said this to himself than he corrected it; he loved her sanely. He loved her with all the energy of his solid intelligence, with all the power of his mighty limbs, with all the vigour of his honest character; he loved her not only for the beauty of her virginal body, but for the firm outlines of her growing personality and for the purity of her virginal soul. His love increased his sense of his own strength. He felt there was nothing he could not achieve. And yet, when he considered her perfection, so much more than the healthy mind in the healthy body, the subtle, sensitive soul that so wonderfully corresponded with the lovely form, he felt abject and humble.

And now it was all settled. Frith’s hesitations were not serious; he could be induced, if not to listen to reason, at least to yield to persuasion. But Swan was very old. He was failing fast. It might be necessary to await his death before they married. Erik was efficient. The company would not leave him indefinitely on that island. Sooner or later they would move him to Rangoon, Bangkok, or Calcutta. Eventually they would need him at Copenhagen. He could never be satisfied, like Frith, to spend his life on the plantation and make a bare living by selling cloves and nutmegs. Nor had Louise the placidity that had enabled her mother to make a lovely idyll of her life on that beautiful island. There was nothing he had admired in Catherine so much as that out of these simple elements, the common round of every day, the immemorial labours of husbandry, peace, quiet, humour, and a contented mind, she had been able to make a pattern of such an exquisite and completed beauty. Louise was highstrung as her mother had never been. Though she accepted her circumstances with serenity, her vagrant spirit roved. Sometimes, when they sat on the ramparts of the old Portuguese fort and looked at the sea together, he felt that there was an activity in her soul that craved exercise.

They had often spoken of their wedding journey. He wanted to arrive in Denmark in the spring when all the trees after the long cruel winter were bursting into leaf. The green of that northern country had a fresh tenderness that the tropics never knew. The meadows with their black-and-white cows and the farmsteads nestling among trees had a sweet and tidy beauty that did not amaze you, but made you feel at home. Then there was Copenhagen, with its wide, busy streets, the prim, dignified houses with so many windows you were quite surprised, and its churches and the red palaces King Christian had built that looked as though they belonged to a fairy story. He wanted to take her to Elsinore. It was on its battlements that his father’s ghost had appeared to the Danish prince. It was grand on the Sound in summer, the calm sea grey or milk-blue; life there was very pleasant, then, with music and laughter; and all through the long northem twilight the cheerful talk flowed. But they must go to England. There was London, with the National Gallery and the British Museum. Neither of them had ever been to England. They would go to Stratford-on-Avon and see Shakespeare’s tomb. Paris, of course. It was the centre of civilization. She would go shopping at the Louvre, and they would drive in the Bois de Boulogne. They would walk hand in hand in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Italy and the Grand Canal by moonlight in a gondola! For Frith’s sake they must go to Lisbon. It would be wonderful to see the country from which those old Portuguese had sallied to found an empire of which, besides a few ruined forts and here and there a moribund station, nothing remained but a little deathless poetry and an imperishable renown. To see all these lovely places with the person who is all the world to you, what could life offer more perfect? At that moment Erik understood what Frith meant when he said that the Primal Spirit, who you can call God if you will, was not apart from the world but in it. That great spirit was in the stone on the mountain side, in the beast of the field, in man, and in the thunder that rolled down the vault of heaven.

The late moon now flooded the house with white light. It gave its neat lines an airy distinction and its substantial mass a fragile and charming unreality. Suddenly the shutter of Louise’s room was slowly pushed open. Erik held his breath. If he had been asked what he wanted most in the world, he would have said just for one moment to be allowed to see her. She came out on the veranda. She was wearing nothing but the sarong in which she slept.

In the moonlight she looked like a wraith. The night seemed on a sudden to stand still and the silence was like a living thing that listened. She took a step or two and looked up and down the veranda. She wanted to see that no one was about. Erik expected her to come to the rail as she had done before and stand there for a while. In that light he thought he could almost see the colour of her eyes. She turned round towards the window of her room and beckoned. A man came out. He stopped for an instant as though to take her hand, but she shook her head and pointed to the rail. He went up to it and quickly stepped over. He looked down at the ground, six feet below him, and leapt lightly down. Louise slipped back into her room and closed the shutter behind her.

For a moment Erik was so astonished, so bewildered, that he could not understand. He did not believe his eyes. He sat where he was, in old Swan’s chair, stockstill, and stared and stared. The man landed on his feet and then sat down on the ground. He appeared to be putting on his shoes. Suddenly Erik found the use of his limbs. He sprang forwards, the man was only a few yards away, and with a bound seized him by the collar of his coat and dragged him to his feet. The man, startled, opened his mouth to cry out, but Erik put his great heavy hand over it. Then he slowly dropped his hand till it encircled the man’s throat. The man was so taken aback that he did not struggle. He stood there stupidly, staring at Erik, powerless in that mighty grasp. Then Erik looked at him. It was Fred Blake.

CHAPTER 26

An hour later Dr Saunders, lying awake in bed, heard steps in the passage and then a scratching on the door. He did not answer and the handle was tried. The door was locked.

‘Who is it?’ he called out.

The reply came on the top of his cry, quickly, in a low, agitated voice.

‘Doctor. It’s me, Fred. I want to see you.’

The doctor had smoked half a dozen pipes after Captain Nichols had left him to go back on board the Fenton, and when he had been smoking he hated to be disturbed. Thoughts as clear as the geometrical designs in a child’s drawing-book, squares, oblongs, circles, triangles, flowed through his mind in an orderly procession. The delight he felt in their lucidity was part and parcel of the indolent pleasure of his body. He raised his mosquito curtains and padded across the bare floor to the door. When he opened it he saw the night watchman hooded with a blanket against the noxious air of the night holding a lantern, and just behind him Fred Blake.

‘Let me in, doctor. It’s frightfully important.’

‘Wait till I light the lamp.’

By the light of the watchman’s lantern he found the matches and lit the lamp. Ah Kay, who slept on a mat on the veranda outside the doctor’s room, awoke at the disturbance and raising himself on his seat rubbed his dark, sloe-like eyes. Fred gave the watchman a tip and he went away.

‘Go to sleep, Ah Kay,’ said the doctor. ‘There’s nothing for you to get up for.’

‘Look here, you must come to Erik’s at once,’ said Fred. ‘There’s been an accident.’

‘What d’you mean?’

He looked at Fred and saw that he was as white as a sheet. He was trembling in every limb.

‘He’s shot himself.’

‘Good God! How d’you know?’

‘I’ve just come from there. He’s dead.’

At Fred’s first words the doctor had instinctively begun to busy himself, but at this he stopped short.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh, quite.’

‘If he’s dead, what’s the good of my going?’

‘He can’t be left like that. Come and see. Oh, my God.’ His voice broke as though he were going to cry. ‘Perhaps you can do something.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Nobody. He’s lying there alone. I can’t bear it. You must do something. For Christ’s sake come.’

‘What’s that on your hand?’

Fred looked at it. It was smeared with blood. By a natural instinct he was about to wipe it on his duck trousers.

‘Don’t do that,’ cried the doctor, catching hold of his wrist. ‘Come and wash it off.’

Still holding him by the wrist, with the lamp in his other hand, he led him into the bath-house. This was a little dark, square chamber with a concrete floor; there was a huge tub in the corner and you bathed yourself by sluicing water over your body with a small tin pan which you filled from the tub. The doctor gave a pan full of water and a piece of soap to Fred and told him to wash.

‘Have you got any on your clothes?’

He held up the lamp to look.

‘I don’t think so.’

The doctor poured the blood-stained water away and they went back to the bedroom. The sight of the blood had startled Fred and he sought to master his hysterical agitation. He was whiter than ever and though he held his hands clenched, Dr Saunders saw that he could not control their violent trembling.

‘Better have a drink. Ah Kay, give the gentleman some whisky. No water.’

Ah Kay got up and brought a glass into which he poured the neat spirit. Fred tossed it off. The doctor watched him closely.

‘Look here, my boy, we’re in a foreign country. We don’t want to run up against the Dutch authorities. I don’t believe they’re very easy people to deal with.’

‘We can’t leave him lying there in a pool of blood.’

‘Isn’t it a fact that something happened in Sydney that made you leave in a hurry? The police here are going to ask you a lot of questions. D’you want them to cable to Sydney?’

‘I don’t care. I’m fed up with the whole thing.’

‘Don’t be a fool. If he’s dead you can do no good and neither can I. We’d better keep out of it. The best thing you can do is get away from the island as soon as you can. Did anyone see you there?’

‘Where?’

‘At his house,’ said the doctor impatiently.

‘No, I was only there a minute. I rushed straight round here.’

‘What about his boys?’

‘I suppose they were asleep. They live at the back.’

‘I know. The night watchman’s the only person who’s seen you. Why did you rouse him?’

‘I couldn’t get in. The door was locked. I had to get hold of you.’

‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. There are plenty of reasons why you should rout me out in the middle of the night. What made you go to Erik’s?’

‘I had to. I had something to say to him that couldn’t wait.’

‘I suppose he did shoot himself. You didn’t shoot him, did you?’

‘Me?’ The boy gasped with horror and surprise. ‘Why, he’s . . . I wouldn’t have hurt a hair of his head. If he’d been my brother I couldn’t have thought more of him. The best pal a chap ever had.’

The doctor frowned with faint distaste of the language Fred used, but his feeling for Erik was very clear, and the shock the doctor’s question caused him was plain enough proof that he spoke the truth.

‘Then what does it all mean?’

‘Oh, my God, I don’t know. He must have gone crazy. How the hell should I know he was going to do a thing like that?’

‘Spit it out, sonny. You needn’t be afraid I shall give you away.’

‘It’s that girl up at old Swan’s. Louise.’

The doctor sharpened his look, but did not interrupt him.

‘I had a bit of fun with her tonight.’

‘You? But you only saw her for the first time yesterday.’

‘I know. What’s that got to do with it? She took a fancy to me the first moment she saw me. I knew that. I took a fancy to her, too. I haven’t had a thing since I left Sydney. Somehow, I can’t stick these natives. When I had that dance with her I knew it was all right. I could have had her then. We went out in the garden when you were playing bridge. I kissed her. She was just aching for it. When a girl’s like that you don’t want to give her time to think twice about it. I was in a bit of a state myself. I’ve never seen anyone to touch her. If she’d told me to go and throw myself over a cliff I’d have done it. When she came this morning with her old man I asked her if we couldn’t meet. She said, No. I said, Couldn’t I come up after they’d all gone to bed and we could have a bathe in the pool together? She said, No, but she wouldn’t say why not. I told her I was crazy about her. And I was too. My God, she’s a peach. I took her down to the ketch and showed her over. I kissed her there. That damned old Nichols wouldn’t leave us alone for more than a minute. I said I’d go up to the plantation tonight. She said she wouldn’t come, but I knew she would, she wanted me just as much as I wanted her; and sure enough when I got there, she was waiting for me. It was lovely there, in the dark, except for the mosquitoes; they were biting like mad, it was more than flesh and blood could stand, and I said, Couldn’t we go to her room? and she said she was afraid, but I told her it was all right, and at last she said Yes.’

Fred stopped. The doctor looked at him from under his heavy eyelids. His pupils, from the opium he had smoked, were like pin-points. He listened and pondered over what he heard.

‘At last she said I’d better get a move on. I put on my clothes, all but my shoes, so that I shouldn’t make a row on the veranda. She went out first to see the coast was clear. Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep old Swan wandered up and down there as if it was the deck of a ship. Then I slipped out and hopped over the veranda. I sat down on the ground and started to put on my shoes and before I knew what had happened someone grabbed me and pulled me up. Erik. He’s got the strength of an ox, he lifted me up as if I was a bit of a kid, and he put his hand over my mouth, but I was so startled I couldn’t have shouted if I’d wanted to. Then he put his hand round my throat and I thought he was going to choke the life out of me. I don’t know, I was paralysed, I couldn’t even struggle. I couldn’t see his face. I heard him breathing; by God, I thought I was done for, and then suddenly he let me go; he gave me a great clout over the side of the head, with the back of his hand, I think it was, and I just fell like a log. He stood over me for a bit; I didn’t move; I thought if I moved he’d kill me, and then suddenly he turned round and walked away at about a hundred miles an hour. I got up in a minute and looked at the house. Louise hadn’t heard a thing. I thought: should I go and tell her? but I didn’t dare, I was afraid someone would hear me knocking on the shutter. I didn’t want to frighten her. I didn’t know what to do. I started to walk, and then I found I hadn’t put my shoes on, I had to go back for them. I was in a panic because just at first I couldn’t find them. I drew a long breath when I got back on the road. I was wondering if Erik was waiting for me. It’s no joke walking along a road at night, with not a soul about, and knowing that a great hulking fellow may step out at any minute and give you a hiding. He could wring my neck like a chicken’s, and I shouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. I didn’t walk very quick and I kept my eyes peeled. I thought if I saw him first I’d make a dash for it. I mean, it’s no good standing up to a chap when you haven’t got a chance, and I knew I could run a lot faster than him. I expect it was only nerves. After I’d walked about a mile I wasn’t in a funk any more. And then, you know, I felt I must see him at any price. If it had been anybody else I shouldn’t have cared a damn, but somehow, I couldn’t stand him thinking me just a damned swine. You can’t understand, but I’ve never met anyone like him, he’s so straight himself, you can’t bear he shouldn’t think you straight, too. Most people you know – well, they’re no better than you are; but Erik was different. I mean, you’d have to be a perfect damned fool not to see that he was one in a thousand. See what I mean?’

The doctor gave his thin, derisive smile, and his lips were drawn back from his long yellow teeth so that you thought of the snarl of a gorilla.

‘Goodness. I know, it’s shattering. One doesn’t know what to do about it. It knocks human relations endways. Damned shame, isn’t it?’

‘Christ, why can’t you talk like everybody else?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I just felt I had to have it out with him. I wanted to tell him the whole thing. I was quite ready to marry the girl. I just couldn’t help myself with her, I mean. After all, it was only human nature. You’re old, you don’t know what it is. It’s all very well when you’re fifty. I knew I shouldn’t have a moment’s rest till I put myself right with him. When I got to his house I stood outside for I don’t know how long, screwing up my courage; it wanted some nerve to go in, you know, but I just forced myself. I couldn’t help thinking that if he hadn’t killed me then he wouldn’t kill me now. I knew he didn’t lock the door. That first time we went there he just turned the handle and walked in. But, my God, my heart was thumping when I got in the passage. It was pitch-black when I shut the door. I called his name, but he didn’t answer. I knew where his room was and I went along and I knocked at the door. Somehow, I didn’t believe he was asleep. I knocked again and then I shouted, “Erik, Erik.” At least I tried to shout, but my throat was so dry my voice was as hoarse as a raven’s. I couldn’t make out why he didn’t answer. I thought he was just waiting in there, listening. I was in a blue funk, I had half a mind to cut and run, but I didn’t. I tried the latch, the door wasn’t locked, and I opened it. I couldn’t see a thing. I called again and I said: “For God’s sake speak to me, Erik.” Then I struck a match and I gave a great jump. I almost jumped out of my skin, he was lying on the floor, at my feet, and if I’d taken a step more I should have tumbled over him. I dropped the match and I couldn’t see a thing. I screamed at him. I thought he’d fainted or was dead drunk or something. I tried to strike another match, but the damned thing wouldn’t light, and then, when it did, I held it over him and my God, the whole side of his head was shot away. The match went out and I lit another. I saw the lamp and I lit that. I knelt down and felt his hand. It was quite warm. He had a revolver clenched in the other hand. I touched his face to see if he was alive. There was blood all over the place. My God, you never saw such a wound; and then I just came round here as quick as I could. I shall never forget that sight as long as I live.’

He hid his face with his hands and in his misery rocked to and fro. Then a sob broke from him and, throwing himself back in the chair, he turned his face away and wept. Dr Saunders let him cry. He reached out for a cigarette, lit it and deeply inhaled the smoke.

‘Did you leave the lamp burning?’ he said at last.

‘Oh, damn the lamp,’ cried Fred impatiently. ‘Don’t be such a bloody fool.’

‘It doesn’t matter. He could just as well have shot himself with the lamp burning as in the darkness. Funny none of the boys should have heard anything. I suppose they would have thought it was a Chinaman letting off a cracker.’

Fred put aside all that the doctor said. Nothing of that was of any consequence.

‘What in God’s name made him do it?’ he cried desperately.

‘He was engaged to Louise.’

The effect of the doctor’s remark was startling. Fred sprang to his feet with a bound, and his face grew livid. His eyes almost started out of his head with horror.

‘Erik? He never told me.’

‘I suppose he thought it was none of your damned business.’

‘She didn’t tell me. She never said a word. Oh, God. If I’d known I wouldn’t have touched her with the fag-end of a barge-pole. You’re just saying that. It can’t be true. It can’t.’

‘He told me so himself.’

‘Was he awfully in love with her?’

‘Awfully.’

‘Then why didn’t he kill me or her instead of himself?’

Dr Saunders gave a laugh.

‘Curious, isn’t it?’

‘For God’s sake don’t laugh. I’m so miserable. I thought nothing worse could happen to me than what has. But this . . . She meant nothing to me, really. If I’d only known I wouldn’t have thought of fooling about with her. He was the best pal a chap ever had. I wouldn’t have hurt him for anything in the world. What a beast he must have thought me! He’d been so awfully decent to me.’

Tears filled his eyes and flowed slowly down his cheeks. He cried bitterly.

‘Isn’t life foul? You start a thing and you don’t think twice about it, and then there’s hell to pay. I think there’s a curse on me.’

He looked at the doctor, his mouth trembling and his fine eyes heavy with woe. Dr Saunders examined his own feelings. He did not quite approve of the faint satisfaction he felt in the young man’s grief. He had a tendency to feel that what he was suffering served him right. At the same time he was unreasonably sorry to see him unhappy. He looked so young and woebegone he could not help being touched.

‘You’ll get over it, you know,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing one doesn’t get over.’

‘I wish I was dead. My old man said I was no damned good and I bet he was right. I make trouble wherever I go. I swear it’s not all my fault. The lousy bitch. Why didn’t she leave me alone? Can you imagine that a girl who was engaged to a chap like Erik should go to bed with the first man she sees. Well, there’s one thing, he was well rid of her.’

‘You’re talking rubbish.’

‘I may be a stinking bad lot but, by God, I’m not as bad as she is. I thought I was going to get another chance and now it’s all gone to hell.’

He hesitated a moment.

‘You remember that cable I got this morning? It told me something I didn’t know. It was so extraordinary, I couldn’t make it out at first. There’s a letter for me at Batavia. It’s all right for me to go there now. It was rather a shock at first. I didn’t know whether to laugh or what. The cable says I died of scarlet fever at the Fever Hospital just outside Sydney. I saw what it meant after a bit. Father’s rather important in New South Wales. There was a bad epidemic. They rushed someone to the hospital under my name; they had to explain why I didn’t go to the office and all that, and when the chap died I died too. If I know my old man he was damned glad to get rid of me. Well, there’s someone who’ll lie nice and cosy in the family grave. Father’s a wonderful organizer. It’s him that’s kept the party in power so long. He wasn’t going to take a risk if he could help it, and I expect as long as I was above ground he never could feel quite safe. The government got in again at the election. Did you see that? A thumping majority. I can see him with a black band round his arm.’

He gave a mirthless chuckle. Dr Saunders shot a question at him, abruptly.

‘What did you do?’

Fred looked away. He answered in a low, choked voice.

‘I killed a chap.’

‘I wouldn’t tell too many people if I were you,’ said the doctor.

‘You seem to take it pretty calm. Have you ever killed anyone?’

‘Only professionally.’

Fred looked up quickly and a smile was wrung from his tortured lips.

‘You’re a queer fellow, doc. Blest if I can make you out. When one’s talking to you, somehow nothing seems to matter a damn. Isn’t there anything that makes a difference to you? Isn’t there anything you believe in?’

‘Why did you kill him? For fun?’

‘A damned lot of fun I got out of it. What I’ve gone through! I wonder it hasn’t turned my hair grey. You see, I brooded over it. I could never forget it. I’d be feeling all merry and bright and having a good time and then suddenly I’d remember. I was afraid to go to sleep sometimes. I used to dream I was being pinioned and just going to be hanged. Half a dozen times I’ve been on the point of slipping overboard one night when nobody was looking, and just swimming till I drowned or a shark got me. If you only knew what a relief it was when I got that cable and understood what it meant! My God, it was a weight off my mind. I was safe. You know, I never felt really safe on the lugger and when we landed anywhere I was always looking for someone to nab me. The first time I saw you, I thought you were a detective and you were on my track. D’you know the first thing I thought this morning? “Now I shall be able to sleep sound.” And then this had got to happen. I tell you there’s a curse on me.’

‘Don’t talk such rot.’

‘What am I to do? Where am I to go? Tonight, while that girl and I were lying in one another’s arms, I thought: why shouldn’t I marry her and settle down here? The boat’ll be damned useful. Nichols could have gone back on the same ship that you’re taking. You could have got my letter that’s waiting in Batavia. I expect it’s got a bit of money in it. Mother would have made the old man send something. I thought me and Erik, we could have gone into partnership.’

‘You can’t do that, but you can still marry Louise.’

‘Me?’ cried Fred. ‘After what’s happened? I couldn’t stick the sight of her. I hope to God I never see her again. I’ll never forgive her. Never. Never.’

‘What are you going to do, then?’

‘God knows. I don’t. I can’t go home. I’m dead and buried in the family grave. I should like to see Sydney again, George Street, you know, and Manly Bay. I haven’t got anyone in the world now. I’m a pretty good accountant, I suppose. I can get a job as book-keeper in some store. I don’t know where to go. I’m like a lost dog.’

‘If I were you the first thing I’d do is go back to the Fenton and try and get a little sleep. You’re all in. You’ll be able to think better in the morning.’

‘I can’t go back to the boat. I hate it. If you knew how often I’ve woken up in a cold sweat, with my heart beating, because those men opened the door of my cell, and I knew the rope was waiting for me! And now Erik’s lying there with half his head blown away. My God, how can I sleep?’

‘Well, curl up on that chair. I’m going to bed.’

‘Thanks. Go ahead. Will it disturb you if I smoke?’

‘I’ll give you a little something. There’s no object in your lying awake.’

The doctor got out his hypodermic needle and gave the boy a shot of morphine. Then he put out the lamp and slipped under his mosquito curtain.

CHAPTER 27

The doctor awoke when Ah Kay brought him a cup of tea. Ah Kay drew back the mosquito curtains and raised the jalousie to let in the day. The doctor’s room looked on the garden, tangled and neglected, with its palm trees, its clumps of bananas, their immense flat leaves still shining with the night, its bedraggled but splendid cassias; and the light filtered through cool and green. The doctor smoked a cigarette. Fred lay on the long chair, sleeping still, and his unlined boyish face, so calm, had an innocence in which the doctor, with a suspicion of sardonic humour, found a certain beauty.

‘Shall I wake him?’ asked Ah Kay.

‘Not yet.’

While he slept he was at peace. He must awake to grief. An odd boy. Who would have thought that he could be so susceptible to goodness? For, though he didn’t know it, though he put what he felt in clumsy and stupid words, there was no doubt about it, what had knocked him off his feet in the Dane, what had excited his embarrassed admiration and made him feel that here was a man of a different sort, was the plain simple goodness that shone in him with so clear and steadfast a light. You might have thought Erik a trifle absurd, you might have asked yourself uneasily whether his head were quite equal to his heart but there was no doubt about it he had, heaven only knew by what accident of nature, a real and simple goodness. It was specific. It was absolute. It had an aesthetic quality, and that common-place lad, insensible to beauty in its usual forms, had been moved to ecstasy by it as a mystic might be moved by the sudden overwhelming sense of union with the Godhead. It was a queer trait that Erik had possessed.

‘It leads to no good,’ said the doctor, with a grim smile as he got out of bed.

He went over to the mirror and stared at himself. He looked at his grey hair all disarranged after the night and his stubble of white beard that had grown since he had shaved the day before. He bared his teeth to look at his long yellow fangs. There were heavy pouches under his eyes. His cheeks had an unsightly purple. He was seized with disgust. He wondered why it was that of all creatures man was the only one that age so hideously disfigured. It was pitiful to think that Ah Kay, with his slender ivory beauty, must become nothing but a little shrivelled, wizened Chinaman, and that Fred Blake, so slim, upright, and square-shouldered, would be just a red-faced old man with bald head and a belly. The doctor shaved and had his bath. Then he awakened Fred.

‘Come along, young fellow. Ah Kay’s just gone to see about our breakfast.’

Fred opened his eyes, immediately alert eager in his youth to welcome another day, but then, looking about him, he remembered where he was, and everything else. His face all of a sudden grew sullen.

‘Oh, buck up,’ said the doctor impatiently. ‘Go and have a wash down.’

Ten minutes later they were seated at breakfast, and the doctor noticed without surprise that Fred ate with a hearty appetite. He did not talk. Dr Saunders congratulated himself. After so disturbed a night he felt none too well. His reflections upon life, then, were acid, and he preferred to keep them to himself.

When they were finishing the manager came up to them and addressed himself to Dr Saunders in voluble Dutch. He knew the doctor did not understand, but talked nevertheless, and his signs and gestures would have made him comprehensible even if his manner, agitated and distressed, had not made what he was saying quite clear. Dr Saunders shrugged his shoulders. He pretended he had no notion what the half-caste was talking about, and presently, in exasperation, the little man left them.

‘They’ve found out,’ said the doctor.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose his house-boy went in to take him his tea.’

‘Isn’t there anybody who can interpret?’

‘We shall hear soon enough. Don’t forget we neither of us know anything about it.’

They relapsed into silence. A few minutes later the manager returned with a Dutch official, in a white uniform with brass buttons; he clicked his heels together, and mentioned an incomprehensible name. He spoke English with a very strong accent.

‘I’m sorry to tell you that a Danish trader called Christessen has shot himself.’

‘Christessen?’ cried the doctor. ‘That tall fellow?’

He watched Fred out of the corner of his eye.

‘He was found by his boys an hour ago. I am in charge of the inquiry. There can be no doubt that it is a case of suicide. Mr van Ryk,’ he motioned to the half-caste manager, ‘informs me that he was here last night to visit you.’

‘That’s quite true.’

‘How long did he stay?’

‘Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.’

‘Was he sober?’

‘Quite.’

‘I never saw him drunk myself. Did he say anything that suggested he had the intention of doing away with himself?’

‘No. He was quite cheerful. I didn’t know him very well, you know. I only arrived three days ago, and I’m waiting for the Princess Juliana.’

‘Yes, I know. Then you can give no explanation of the tragedy?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘That is all I wanted to know. If I have any need of anything more from you I will let you know. Perhaps you will not mind coming to my office.’ He glanced at Fred. ‘And this gentleman can tell us nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ said the doctor. ‘He was not here. I was playing cards with the skipper of the ketch in the harbour just now.’

‘I’ve seen her. I’m sorry for the poor fellow. He was very quiet and never gave any trouble. You could not help liking him. I’m afraid it’s the old story. It’s a mistake to live alone in a place like this. They brood. They get homesick. The heat is killing. And then one day they can’t stand it any more, and they just put a bullet through their heads. I’ve seen it before, more than once. Much better to have a little girl to live with you, and it makes hardly any difference to your expenses. Well, gentlemen, I am much obliged to you. I won’t take up any more of your time. You have not been to the Gesellschaft yet, I believe? We shall be very glad to see you there. You will find all the most important people of the island there from six or seven till nine. It is a jolly place. Quite a social centre. Well, good morning, gentlemen.’

He clicked his heels, shook hands with the doctor and Fred, and stumped somewhat heavily away.

CHAPTER 28

In that hot country not much time was permitted to pass between a person’s death and his burial, but in this case the examination had to be conducted, and it was not till latish in the afternoon that the funeral took place. It was attended by a few Dutch friends of Erik, Frith and Dr Saunders, Fred Blake and Captain Nichols. This was an occasion after the skipper’s heart. He had managed to borrow a black suit from an acquaintance he had made on the island. It did not fit very well, since it belonged to a man both taller and stouter than he, and he was obliged to turn up the trousers and the sleeves, but in contrast with the others, clad in nondescript fashion, it produced a satisfactory effect of respectability. The service was conducted in Dutch, which seemed to Captain Nichols a little out of place, and he could not take part in it, but there was much unction in his deportment; and when it was over he shook hands with the Lutheran pastor and the two or three Dutch officials present as though they had rendered him a personal service, so that they thought for a moment he must be a near relative of the deceased. Fred wept.

The four Britishers walked back together. They came to the harbour.

‘If you gentlemen will come on board the Fenton,’ said the skipper, ‘I’ll open a bottle of port for you. I ‘appened to see it in the store this mornin’, and I always think a bottle of port’s the right thing after a funeral. I mean, it’s not like beer and whisky. There’s somethin’ serious about port.’

‘I never thought of it before,’ said Frith, ‘but I quite see what you mean.’

‘I’m not coming,’ said Fred. ‘I’ve got a hump. Can I go along with you, doctor?’

‘If you like.’

‘We’ve all got a ‘ump,’ said Captain Nichols. ‘That’s why I vote we ‘ave a bottle of port. It won’t take the ‘ump away. Not by any manner of means. It’ll make it worse if anythin’, at least that’s my experience, but it means you can enjoy it, if you follow me, you get something out of it and it’s not wasted.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Fred.

‘Come on, Frith. If you’re the man I take you for, you and me can drink a bottle of port without strainin’ ourselves.’

‘We live in degenerate days,’ said Frith. ‘Two-bottle men, three-bottle men, they’re as extinct as the dodo.’

‘An Australian bird,’ said Captain Nichols.

‘If two grown men can’t drink one bottle of port between them I despair of the human race. Babylon is fallen, is fallen.’

‘Exactly,’ replied Captain Nichols.

They got into the dinghy and a blackfellow rowed them out to the Fenton. The doctor and Fred walked slowly on. When they reached the hotel they went in.

‘Let’s go to your room,’ said Fred.

The doctor poured himself out a whisky and soda and gave one to Fred.

‘We’re sailing at dawn,’ said the boy.

‘Are you? Have you seen Louise?’

‘No.’

‘Aren’t you going to?’

‘No.’

Dr Saunders shrugged his shoulders. It was no business of his. For a while they drank and smoked in silence.

‘I’ve told you so much,’ the boy said at last, ‘I may as well tell you the rest.’

‘I’m not curious.’

‘I’ve wanted to tell someone badly. Sometimes I could hardly prevent myself from telling Nichols. Thank God, I wasn’t such a fool as that. Grand opportunity for blackmail it would have been for him.’

‘He isn’t the sort of man I’d choose to confide a secret to.’

Fred gave a little derisive chuckle.

‘It wasn’t my fault, really. It was just rotten luck. It is bloody that your life should be ruined by an accident like that. It’s so damned unfair. My people are in a very good position. I was in one of the best firms in Sydney. Eventually, my old man was going to buy me a partnership. He’s got a lot of influence and he could have thrown business in my way. I could have made plenty of money and sooner or later of course I should have married and settled down. I expect I should have gone into politics like father did. If ever anyone had a chance I had. And look at me now. No home, no name, no prospects, a couple of hundred pounds in my belt and whatever the old man’s sent to Batavia. Not a friend in the world.’

‘You’ve got youth. You’ve got some education. And you’re not bad-looking.’

‘That’s what makes me laugh. If I’d had a squint in my eye or a hump-back I’d have been all right. I’d be in Sydney now. You’re no beauty, doctor.’

‘I am conscious of the fact and resigned to it.’

‘Resigned to it! Thank your lucky stars every day of your life.’

Dr Saunders smiled.

‘I’m not prepared to go as far as that.’

But the foolish boy was desperately serious.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m conceited. God knows I’ve got nothing to be conceited about. But you know, I’ve always been able to get any girl I wanted to. Oh, almost since I was a kid. I thought it rather a lark. After all, you’re only young once. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have all the fun I could get. D’you blame me?’

‘No. The only people who would are those who never had your opportunities.’

‘I never went out of my way to get them. But when they practically asked for it – well, I should have been a fool not to take what I could get. It used to make me laugh sometimes to see them all in a dither and often I’d pretend I didn’t notice. They’d get furious with me. Girls are funny, you know, nothing makes them so mad as a chap standing off. Of course, I never let it interfere with my work; I’m not a fool, you know, in any sense of the word, and I wanted to get on.’

‘An only child, were you?’

‘No. I’ve got a brother. He went into the business with father. He’s married. And I’ve got a married sister, too.

‘Well, one Sunday last year, a chap brought his wife to spend the day up at our house. His name was Hudson. He was a Roman Catholic, and he’d got a lot of influence with the Irish and the Italians. Father said he could make all the difference at the election, and he told mother she was to do them proud. They came up to dinner, the Premier came and brought his wife, and mother gave them enough to eat to feed a regiment. After dinner father took them into his den to talk business and the rest of us went and sat in the garden. I’d wanted to go fishing, but father said I’d got to stay and make myself civil. Mother and Mrs Dames had been at school together.’

‘Who was Mrs Darnes?’

‘Mr Darnes is the Premier. He’s the biggest man in Australia.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘They always had a lot to talk about. They tried to be polite to Mrs Hudson, but I could see they didn’t much like her. She was doing her best to be nice to them, admiring everything and buttering them up, but the more she laid it on the less they liked it. At last mother asked me if I wouldn’t show her round the garden. We strolled off and the first thing she said was: “For God’s sake give me a cigarette.” She gave me a look when I lit it for her and she said: “You’re a very good-looking boy.” “D’you think so?” I said. “I suppose you’ve been told that before?” she said. “Only by mother,” I said, “and I thought perhaps she was prejudiced.” She asked me if I was fond of dancing and I said I was, so she said she was having tea at the Australia next day and if I liked to come in after the office we could have a dance together. I wasn’t keen on it, so I said I couldn’t; then she said: “What about Tuesday or Wednesday?” I couldn’t very well say I was engaged both days, so I said Tuesday would suit me all right; and when they’d gone away I told father and mother. She didn’t much like the idea, but father was all for it. He said it wouldn’t suit his book at all to have us stand-offish. “I didn’t like the way she kept on looking at him,” said mother, but father told her not to be silly. “Why, she’s old enough to be his mother,” he said. “How old is she?” Mother said: “She’ll never see forty again.”

‘She was nothing to look at. Thin as a rail. Her neck was absolutely scraggy. Tallish. She had a long thin face, with hollow cheeks, and a brown skin, all one colour, rather leathery, if you know what I mean; and she never seemed to take any trouble with her hair, it always looked as though it would come down in a minute; and she’d have a wisp hanging down in front of her ear or over her forehead. I do like a woman to have a neat head, don’t you? It was black, rather like a gipsy’s, and she had enormous black eyes. They made her face. When you talked to her you didn’t really see anything else. She didn’t look British, she looked like a foreigner, a Hungarian or something like that. There was nothing attractive about her.

‘Well, I went on the Tuesday. She knew how to dance, you couldn’t deny that. You know, I’m rather keen on dancing. I enjoyed myself more than I expected. She had a lot to say for herself. I shouldn’t have had a bad time if there hadn’t been some of my pals there: I knew they’d rot my head off for dancing the whole afternoon with an old geyser like that. There are ways and ways of dancing. It didn’t take me long to see what she was up to. I couldn’t help laughing. Poor old cow, I thought, if it gives her any pleasure, well, let her have it. She asked me to go to the pictures with her one night when her husband had to go to a meeting. I said I didn’t mind, and we made a date. I held her hand at the pictures. I thought it’d please her and it didn’t do me any harm, and afterwards she said, Couldn’t we walk a bit. We were pretty friendly by then; she was interested in my work, and she wanted to know all about my home. We talked about racing, I told her there was nothing I’d like to do more than ride in a big race myself. In the dark she wasn’t so bad, and I kissed her. Well, the end of it was that we went to a place I knew and we had a bit of a rough and tumble. I did it more out of politeness than anything else. I thought that would be the finish. Not a bit of it. She went crazy about me. She said she’d fallen in love with me the first time she saw me. I don’t mind telling you that just at first I was a bit flattered. She had something. Those great flashing eyes, sometimes they made me feel all funny, and that gipsy look, I don’t know, it was so unusual, it seemed to take you right away and you couldn’t believe you were in good old Sydney; it was like living in a story about Nihilists and Grand Dukes and I don’t know what all. By God, she was hot stuff. I thought I knew a thing or two about all that but when she took me in hand I found I didn’t know a thing. I’m not particular, but really, sometimes she almost disgusted me. She was proud of it. She used to say that after a chap had loved her, other women were duller than cold roast mutton.

‘I couldn’t help liking it in a way, but you know, I didn’t feel easy about it. You don’t like a woman to be absolutely shameless. There was no satisfying her either. She made me see her every day, and she’d ring me up at the office and ring me up at home I told her for God’s sake to be careful; after all she had a husband to think of, and there was father and mother, father was quite capable of packing me off to a sheep-station for a year if he had the smallest suspicion that things weren’t going right, but she said she didn’t care. She said if I was packed off to a sheep-station she’d come with me She didn’t seem to mind what risks she took, and if it hadn’t been for me it would have been all over Sydney in a week. She’d telephone to mother and ask if I couldn’t go to supper at her place and make a four at bridge, and when I was there she’d make love to me under her husband’s nose. When she saw I was scared she laughed her head off. It excited her. Pat Hudson just treated me like a boy; he never took much notice of me, he fancied himself at bridge, and got a lot of fun out of telling me all about it. I didn’t dislike him. He was a bit of a rough-neck, and he could put his liquor away rather, but he was a smart fellow in his way. He was ambitious, and he liked having me there because I was father’s son. He was quite ready to come in with father, but he wanted to get something pretty substantial for himself out of it.

‘I was getting a bit fed up with it all. I couldn’t call my soul my own. And she was as jealous as hell. If we were anywhere and I happened to look at a girl it would be: “Who’s that? Why d’you look at her like that? Have you had her?” And if I said I hadn’t ever spoken to her even, she’d say I was a damned liar. I thought I’d slack off a bit. I didn’t want to chuck her too suddenly in case she got her knife in me. She could turn Hudson round her little finger, and I knew father wouldn’t be very pleased if he did the dirty on us at the election. I began to say I was busy at the office or had to stay at home, when she wanted me to go out with her. I told her mother was getting suspicious and that we must be careful. She was as sharp as a knife. She wouldn’t believe a word I said. She made me the most awful scenes. To tell you the truth I began to get rather scared. I’d never known anyone like that. With most of the girls I’d played about with – well, they’d known it was just a lark, same as I did, and it just ended naturally, without any fuss or bother. You’d have thought, when she guessed I’d had enough, her pride would prevent her from clinging to me. But no. Quite the contrary. D’you know, she actually wanted me to run away with her, to America or somewhere, so that we could get married. It never seemed to occur to her that she was twenty years older than me. I mean, it was too ridiculous. I had to pretend that it was out of the question, on account of the election, you know, and because we shouldn’t have anything to live on. She was absolutely unreasonable. She said, what did we care about the election, and anyone could make a living in America, she said; she’d been on the stage and she was sure she could get a part. She seemed to think she was a girl. She asked me if I’d marry her if it wasn’t for her husband and I had to say I would. The scenes she made got me so nervous I was ready to say anything. You don’t know what a life she led me. I wished to God I’d never set eyes on her. I was so worried I didn’t know what to do. I had half a mind to tell mother, but I knew it would upset her so frightfully. She never left me alone for a minute. She came up to the office once. I had to be polite to her and pretend it was all right because I knew she was capable of making a scene before everybody, but afterwards I told her if she ever did it again I wouldn’t have anything more to do with her. Then she started waiting for me in the street outside. My God, I could have wrung her neck. Father used to go home in a car and I always walked to his office to fetch him, and she insisted on walking there with me. At last things got to such a pitch that I just couldn’t stick it any more; I didn’t care what happened. I told her I was sick and tired of the whole thing and it had got to stop.

‘I made up my mind that I was going to say it and I did. My God, it was awful. It was at her place, they had a little jerry-built house, overlooking the harbour, on a cliff, rather far out and I’d got off from the office in the middle of the afternoon on purpose. She screamed and she cried. She said she loved me and she couldn’t live without me and I don’t know what all. She said she’d do anything I liked and she wouldn’t bother me in future and she’d be quite different. She promised every sort of thing. God knows what she didn’t say. Then she flew into a rage and cursed me and swore at me and called me every name under the sun. She went for me, and I had to hold her hands to prevent her from scratching my eyes out. She was like a mad woman. Then she said she was going to commit suicide, and tried to run out of the house. I thought she’d throw herself over the cliff or something, and I held her back by main force. She kicked and struggled. And then she threw herself on her knees and tried to kiss my hands, and when I pushed her away she fell on the ground and started sobbing and sobbing. I seized the opportunity and made a bolt for it.

‘I’d hardly got home before she rang me up. I wouldn’t speak to her and rang off. She rang again and again, fortunately mother was out, and I just didn’t answer. There was a letter waiting for me at the office next morning, ten pages of it, you know the sort of thing; I took no notice of it, I certainly wasn’t going to answer. When I went out for lunch at one o’clock she was standing in the doorway waiting for me, but I walked right past her, as quick as I could, and got away in the crowd. I thought she might be there when I came back, so I walked along with one of the chaps at the office, who had his dinner the same place that I had lunch. She was there right enough, but I pretended I didn’t see her, and she was afraid to speak. I found another chap to walk out with in the evening. She was still there. I suppose she’d been waiting all the time so that I shouldn’t slip out. D’you know, she had the nerve to come straight up to me. She put on a society manner.

‘“How d’you do, Fred?” she said. “What a bit of luck meeting you. I’ve got a message for your father.”

‘The chap walked on before I could stop him, and I was caught.

‘“What d’you want?” I said.

‘I was in a flaming passion.

‘“Oh, my God. don’t talk to me like that,” she said. “Have pity on me. I’m so unhappy. I can’t see straight.”

‘“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

‘Then she began to cry, right there in the middle of the street with people passing all the time. I could have killed her.

‘“Fred, it’s no good,” she said, “you can’t throw me over. You’re everything in the world to me.”

‘“Oh, don’t be so silly,” I said. “You’re an old woman and I’m hardly more than a kid. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

‘“What does that matter?” she said. “I love you with all my heart.”

‘“Well, I don’t love you,” I said. “I can’t bear the sight of you. I tell you it’s finished. For God’s sake leave me alone.”

‘“Isn’t there anything I can do to make you love me?” she said.

‘“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fed up with you.”

‘“Then I shall kill myself,” she said.

‘“That’s your trouble,” I said, and I walked away quickly before she could stop me.

‘But although I said it just like that, as if I didn’t care a damn, I wasn’t easy about it. They say people who threaten to commit suicide never do, but she wasn’t like other people. The fact is, she was a madwoman. She was capable of anything. She was capable of coming up to the house and shooting herself in the garden. She was capable of swallowing poison and leaving some awful letter behind. She might accuse me of anything. You see, I hadn’t only myself to think of, I had to think of father, too. If I was mixed up in something it might have done him an awful lot of harm, especially just then. And he isn’t the sort of man to let you off easy, if you’ve made a fool of yourself. I can tell you I didn’t sleep much that night. I worried myself sick. I should have been furious if I’d found her hanging about the street outside the office in the morning, but in a way I’d have been rather relieved. She wasn’t there. There was no letter for me either. I began to get a bit scared, and I had a job to prevent myself ringing up to see if she was all right. When the evening paper came out I just made a grab at it. Pat Hudson was pretty prominent, and if something had happened to her there’d sure to be a lot about it. But there wasn’t a thing. That day there was nothing, no sign of her, no telephone message, no letter, nothing in the paper, and the day after, and the day after that it was just the same. I began to think it was all right and I was rid of her. I came to the conclusion it was all a bluff. Oh, my God, how thankful I was! But I’d had my lesson. I made up my mind to be damned careful in future. No more middle-aged women for me. I’d got all nervous and wrought-up. You can’t think what a relief it was to me. I don’t want to make myself out any better than I am, but I have some sense of decency, and really that woman was the limit. I know it sounds silly, but sometimes she just horrified me. I’m all for having a bit of fun, but damn it all, I don’t want to make a beast of myself.’

Dr Saunders did not reply. He understood pretty well what the boy meant. Careless and hot-blooded, with the callousness of youth, he took his pleasure where he found it, but youth is not only callous, it is modest, and his instinct was outraged by the unbridled passion of the experienced woman.

‘Then about ten days later I got a letter from her. The envelope was typewritten or I shouldn’t have opened it. But it was quite sensible. It started, “Dear Fred.” She said she was awfully sorry she’d made me all those scenes, and she thought she must have been rather crazy, but she’d had time to calm down and she didn’t want to be a nuisance to me. She said it was her nerves, and she’d taken me much too seriously. Everything was all right now, and she didn’t bear me any ill will. She said I mustn’t blame her, because it was partly my fault for being so absurdly good-looking. Then she said she was starting for New Zealand next day, and was going to be away for three months. She’d got a doctor to say she needed a complete change. Then she said Pat was going to Newcastle that night, and would I come in for a few minutes to say good-bye to her. She gave me her solemn word of honour that she wouldn’t be troublesome, all that was over and done with, but somehow or other Pat had got wind of something, it was nothing important, but it was just as well I told the same story as her if by any chance he asked me any questions. She hoped I’d come, because though it couldn’t matter to me and I was absolutely safe, things might be a little awkward for her and she certainly didn’t want to get into any trouble if she could help it.

‘I knew it was true about Hudson going to Newcastle because my old man had said something about it at breakfast that morning. The letter was absolutely normal. Sometimes she wrote in a scrawl that you could hardly read, but she could write very well when she wanted to, and I could see that when she’d written this she’d been absolutely calm. I was a little anxious about what she’d said about Pat. She had insisted on taking the most awful risks, though I’d warned her over and over again. If he’d heard anything it did seem better that we should tell the same lie, and forewarned is forearmed, isn’t it? So I rang her up and said I’d be there about six. She was so casual over the telephone that I was almost surprised. It sounded as though she didn’t much care if I came or not.

‘When I got there she shook hands with me as if we were just friends. She asked me if I’d like some tea, I said I’d had it before I came. She said she wouldn’t keep me a minute because she was going to the pictures. She was all dressed up. I asked her what was the matter with Pat, and she said it wasn’t really very serious, only he’d heard that I’d been at the pictures with her, and he didn’t much like it. She’d said it was just an accident. Once I’d seen her sitting by herself and come over and sat by her, and another time we’d met in the vestibule, and as she was alone I’d paid for her seat and we’d gone in together. She said she didn’t think Pat would mention it, but if he did, she wanted me to back her up. Of course I said I would. She mentioned the two times he was asking about, so that I should know, and then she began talking about her journey. She knew New Zealand well and she started talking about it. I’d never been there. It sounded fine. She was going to stay with friends and she made me laugh telling me about them. She could be jolly nice when she liked. She was awfully good company when she was in a good temper, I must admit that, and I never realized that time was passing. She was just like what she was when I first knew her. At last she got up and said she’d better be going. I suppose I’d been there about half an hour, maybe three-quarters. She gave me her hand and she looked at me half laughing.

‘“It wouldn’t really hurt you to kiss me good-bye, would it?” she said.

‘She said it chaffingly, and I laughed.

‘“No, I don’t suppose it would,” I said.

‘I bent down and kissed her. Or rather she kissed me. She put her arms round my neck and when I tried to break away she wouldn’t let me go. She just clung to me like a vine. And then she said, as she was going away tomorrow, wouldn’t I have her just once more. I said she’d promised she wouldn’t make a nuisance of herself, and she said she didn’t mean to, but seeing me, she couldn’t help herself, and she swore it would be the last time. After all, she was going away, and it couldn’t matter just once. And all the time she was kissing me and stroking my face. She said she didn’t blame me for anything, and she was just a foolish woman and wouldn’t I be kind to her? Well, it had all gone off so well and I was so relieved that she seemed to accept the situation; I didn’t want to be a brute. If she’d been staying I’d have refused at any price, but as she was going away I thought I might just as well send her away happy.

‘“All right,” I said, “let’s go upstairs.”

‘It was a little two-storey house, and the bedroom and spare-room were on the first floor. They’ve been building a lot of them round Sydney lately.

‘“No,” she said. “The whole place is in a mess.”

‘She drew me towards the sofa. It was one of those Chesterfields, and there was lots of room to cuddle up in it.

‘“I love you, I love you,” she kept on saying.

‘Suddenly the door opened. I sprang up and there was Hudson. For a minute he was just as startled as I was. Then he shouted at me, I don’t know what he said, and jumped. He let out his fist, but I dodged it; I’m pretty quick on my feet, and I’ve done a bit of boxing; and then he just chucked himself at me. We grappled. He was a big, powerful chap, bigger than me, but I’m pretty strong. He was trying to get me down, but I wasn’t going to let him do that if I could help it. We were struggling all over the room. He hit me when he could, and I hit him back. Once I got away from him, but he charged me like a bull and I staggered. We knocked down chairs and tables. We had a hell of a fight. I tried to get away from him again, but I couldn’t. He wanted to trip me up. It didn’t take me long to find out he was a lot stronger than me. But I was more active. He’d got his coat on and I hadn’t got anything but my undies. Then he got me down; I don’t know if I slipped, or if he just forced me, but we were rolling over on the floor like a couple of madmen. He got on top of me and began hitting my face; there was nothing I could do then, and I just tried to protect it with my arm. Suddenly I thought he was going to kill me. God, I was scared. I made a hell of an effort and slipped away, but he was on me again like a flash of lightning. I felt my strength giving out; he put his knee on my windpipe and I knew I’d choke. I tried to shout, but I couldn’t. I threw out my right arm and suddenly I felt a revolver put in my hand; I swear I didn’t know what I was doing, it all happened in a second, I twisted my arm and fired. He gave a cry and started back. I fired again. He gave a great groan and rolled off me on to the floor. I slid away and jumped to my feet.

‘I was trembling like a leaf.’

Fred threw himself back in his chair and closed his eyes, so that Dr Saunders thought he was going to faint. He was as white as a sheet, and great beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He took a long breath.

‘I was in a sort of daze. I saw Florrie kneel down, and, though you wouldn’t believe it I noticed that she was careful about it so that she shouldn’t get any blood on her. She felt his pulse and she pulled down his eyelid. She got up.

‘“I think it’s all right,” she said. “He’s dead.” She gave me a funny look. “It wouldn’t have been very nice if we’d had to polish him off.”

‘I was horror-struck. I suppose I couldn’t have been all there or I wouldn’t have said anything so stupid as I did.

‘“I thought he was at Newcastle,” I said.

‘“No, he didn’t go,” she said. “He had a telephone message.’

‘“What telephone message?” I said. Somehow I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. “Who sent it?”

‘D’you know that she almost laughed.

‘“I did,” she said.

‘“What for?” I said. Then it suddenly flashed across me. “You don’t mean to say it was a put-up job?”

‘“Don’t be silly,” she said. “What you’ve got to do now is to keep your head. You go home and have supper quite quietly with the family. I’m going to the pictures like I said I would.”

‘“You’re crazy,” I said.

‘“No, I’m not,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. You’ll be all right if you do what I say. You just behave as if nothing had happened and leave it all to me. Don’t forget that if it comes out you’ll hang.”

‘I expect I nearly jumped out of my skin when she said that, because she laughed. My God, the nerve that woman had got!

‘“You’ve got nothing to be afraid of,” she said. “I won’t let them touch a hair of your head. You’re my property, and I know how to look after what belongs to me. I love you and I want you, and when it’s all over and forgotten we’ll be married. What a fool you were to think I was ever going to give you up.”

‘I swear to you that I felt my blood run icy in my veins. I was in a trap and there was no getting out of it. I stared at her and I hadn’t a thing to say. I shall never forget the look on her face. Suddenly she looked at my undervest. I hadn’t got anything on but that and my drawers.

‘“Oh, look!” she said.

‘I looked at myself and saw that on one side it was just dripping with blood I was just going to touch it, I don’t know why, when she caught hold of my hand.

‘“Don’t do that,” she said. “Wait a minute.”

‘She got a newspaper and began rubbing it.

‘“Hold your head down,” she said. “I’ll take it off.”

‘I bent my head and she skinned me.

‘“Have you got any blood anywhere else?” she said. “Damned lucky for you you hadn’t got your trousers on.”

‘My drawers were all right. I dressed myself as quick as I could. She took the vest.

‘“I’ll burn it and I’ll burn the paper,” she said, “I’ve got a fire in the kitchen. It’s my washing day.”

‘I looked at Hudson. He was dead all right. It made me feel rather sick to look at him. There was a great pool of blood on the carpet.

‘“Are you ready?” she said.

‘“Yes,” I said.

‘She came out in the passage with me and just before she opened the door she put her arms round my neck and kissed me as if she wanted to eat me alive.

‘“My darling,” she said, “Darling. Darling.”

‘She opened the door and I slipped out. It was pitch dark.

‘I seemed to walk in a dream. I walked pretty quick. As a matter of fact, I had all I could do not to run. I had my hat as far down as it would go and my collar turned up, but I hardly passed anybody and no one could have recognized me. I went a long way round, as she’d said I was to, and took the tram from right away in the neighbourhood of Chester Avenue.

‘They were just going to sit down to dinner when I got home. We always had late dinner and I ran upstairs to wash my hands. I looked at myself in the glass, and d’you know, I was absolutely astonished because I looked just the same as usual. But when I sat down and mother said, “Tired, Fred? You’re looking very white,” I went as red as a turkey-cock. I didn’t manage to eat very much. Luckily I didn’t have to talk, we never talked much when we were alone, and after dinner father started to read some reports and mother looked at the evening paper. I was feeling awful.’

‘Half a minute,’ said the doctor. ‘You said you suddenly felt a revolver in your hand. I don’t quite understand.’

‘Florrie put it there.’

‘How did she get it?’

‘How should I know? She took it out of Pat’s pocket when he was on the top of me or else she had it there. I only fired in self-defence.’

‘Go on.’

‘Suddenly mother said, “What’s the matter, Fred?” It came so unexpectedly and her voice was so – gentle, it just broke me. I tried to control myself; I couldn’t, I just burst out crying. “Hullo, what’s this?” said father. Mother put her arms round me and rocked me as if I was a baby. She kept on asking me what was the matter, and at first I wouldn’t say. At last I had to. I pulled myself together. I made a clean breast of the whole thing. Mother was frightfully upset, and started weeping, but father shut her up She began reproaching me, but he wouldn’t let her do that either. “All that doesn’t matter now,” he said. His face was like thunder. If the earth could have opened and swallowed me on a word of his, he’d have said the word. I told them everything. Father had always said the only chance a criminal has is to be absolutely frank with his lawyer, and that a lawyer couldn’t do a thing unless he knew every single fact.

‘I finished. Mother and I looked at father. He’d stared at me all the time I was speaking, but now he looked down. You could see he was thinking like hell. You know, in some ways father’s an extraordinary man. He’s always been very keen on culture. He’s one of the trustees of the Art Gallery and he’s on the committee that gets up the symphony concerts and all that. He’s gentlemanly and rather quiet. Mother used to say he looked very distinguished. He was always very mild and amiable and polite. You’d have thought he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was everything he seemed, but there was a lot more in him than that. After all, he’d got the biggest lawyer’s business in Sydney, and there was nothing he didn’t know about people. Of course he was highly respected, but everyone knew it wasn’t much good trying on any hanky-panky with him. And it was the same in politics. He ran the party and old Darnes never did a thing without consulting him. He could have been premier himself if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t, he was quite satisfied just to be in the government and manage the whole shooting match behind the scenes.

‘“You mustn’t blame the boy too much, Jim,” mother said.

‘He made a sort of impatient movement with his hand. I almost thought he wasn’t thinking about me at all. It sent a chill down my spine. He spoke at last.

‘“It looks very much like a put-up job between those two,” he said. “Hudson has been rather difficult lately. I shouldn’t be surprised if there was blackmail behind it. And she double-crossed him.”

‘“What’s Fred to do?” said mother.

‘Father looked at me. You know, he looked just as mild as always and his voice had the same rather pleasant note in it. “If he’s caught, he’ll hang,” he said. Mother gave a shriek and father frowned a little. “Oh, I’m not going to let him hang,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. He can escape that by going out now and shooting himself.” “Jim, d’you want to kill me?” said mother. “Unfortunately that wouldn’t help us much,” he said. “What?” I asked. “Your shooting yourself,” he said. “The thing’s got to be hushed up. We can’t afford a scandal. We’re going to have a stiff fight at the election, and with me out of it and all this we shouldn’t have much chance.” “Father, I’m so awfully sorry,” I said. “I don’t doubt that,” he said. “Fools and blackguards generally are when they have to take the consequences of their actions.”

‘We were all silent for a bit and then I said, “I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be the best thing if I went and shot myself.” “Don’t be so stupid,” he said; “that would only make things worse. D’you think the newspapers are such fools that they wouldn’t put two and two together? Don’t talk. Let me think.” We sat like mutes. Mother was holding my hand. “There’s the woman to deal with, too,” he said at last. “We’re in her clutches all right. Nice to have her as a daughter-in-law.” Mother didn’t dare say a word. Father leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. A little smile came into his eyes. “Fortunately we live in the most democratic country in the world,” he said. “Nobody is above corruption.” He liked saying that. He looked at us for a minute or two. He had a way of thrusting out his jaw when he’d made up his mind to do something and meant to put it through that I knew as well as mother did. “I suppose it’ll be in the paper tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll go and see Mrs Hudson. I think I know what she’s going to say. If she sticks to her story, barring accidents I don’t think anyone can prove anything. It looks to me as if she’d worked it all out pretty thoroughly. The police will question her, but I’ll see they don’t interview her without my being present.” “And what about Fred?” said mother. Father smiled again. You’d have sworn butter couldn’t melt in his mouth. “Fred’ll go to bed and stay there,” he said. “By a merciful interposition of providence there’s a lot of scarlet fever about, an epidemic practically; tomorrow or the next day we’ll rush him off to the fever hospital.” “But why?” asked mother. “What’s the use of that?” “My dear,” said father, “it’s the best way I know of keeping someone out of the way for a few weeks with perfect security.” “But supposing he catches it?” said mother. “He’d be acting natural,” he said.

‘In the morning father rang up my boss and said I’d got a temperature and he didn’t half like the look of it. He was keeping me in bed and had sent for the doctor. The doctor came all right. He was my uncle, mother’s brother, and he’d attended me since I was born. He said he couldn’t say for certain, it looked like scarlet fever, but he wouldn’t send me to the hospital till the symptoms declared themselves. Mother told the cook and the maid that they weren’t to come near me, and she’d look after me herself.

‘The evening paper was full of the murder. Mrs Hudson had gone to the pictures by herself, and when she came home and went into the sitting-room she had found the body of her husband. They didn’t keep a servant. You don’t know Sydney, but the house was a sort of little villa in a quarter they’d been developing; it stood in its own ground, and the next house was twenty or thirty yards away. Florrie didn’t know the people who lived in it, but she ran there and battered on the door till they opened it. They were in bed and asleep. She told them her husband had been murdered and asked them to come quickly; they ran along, and there he was lying all heaped up on the floor. The man from the other house remembered after a while that he’d better call up the police. Mrs Hudson was hysterical. She threw herself on her husband, screaming and crying, and they had to drag her away.

‘Then there were all the details that the reporters had managed to pick up. The police doctor thought the man had been dead two or three hours. Strangely enough, he’d been shot with his own revolver, but the possibility of suicide was dismissed at once. When Mrs Hudson had collected herself a bit she told the police that she’d spent the evening at a picture palace. She had a part of the ticket still in her bag, and she’d spoken while there to two people she knew. She explained that she’d decided to go to the pictures that evening because her husband had arranged to go to Newcastle. He’d come home shortly before six and told her he wasn’t going. She said she’d stay at home with him and get him his supper, but he told her to go as she’d intended. Someone was coming to see him on important business, and he wanted to be alone. She went out and that was the last she saw of him alive. There were signs of a terrific struggle in the room. Hudson had evidently fought desperately for his life. Nothing had been stolen from the house, and the police and the reporters at once jumped to the conclusion that the crime had a political motive. Passions run pretty high politically in Sydney, and Pat Hudson was known to be mixed up with some very rough characters. He had a lot of enemies. The police were pursuing their inquiries, and the public were asked to inform them if they had seen a suspicious-looking person, possibly an Italian, in the neighbourhood or in a tram coming away from there who bore signs of having been engaged in a fight. A couple of nights later an ambulance came to our house and I was taken to the hospital. They kept me there for three or four days, and then I was slipped out and brought to the place where the Fenton was waiting for me.’

‘But that cable,’ said the doctor. ‘How did they manage to get the death certificate?’

‘I know no more than you do. I’ve been trying to puzzle it out. I didn’t enter the hospital as myself, I was told to call myself Blake. I’ve been asking myself if someone else didn’t go in as me. They’d done all they could in the papers to pretend there wasn’t an epidemic, but there was, and the hospital was crowded. The nurses were just run off their feet, and there was a lot of confusion. It’s pretty clear that someone died and was buried in my place. Father’s clever, you know, and he wouldn’t stick at much.’

‘I think I should like to meet your father,’ said Dr Saunders.

‘It’s struck me that perhaps people got suspicious. After all we must have been seen about together, and they may have started asking questions. I expect the police went into it all pretty thoroughly. I daresay father thought it safer to have me die. I expect he got a lot of sympathy.’

‘It may be that’s why she hanged herself,’ said the doctor.

Fred started violently.

‘How did you know that?’

‘I read it in the paper Erik Christessen brought the other night from Frith’s.’

‘Did you know it was anything to do with me?’

‘No, not till you began to tell me. Then I remembered the name.’

‘It gave me an awful turn when I read it.’

‘Why d’you think she did it?’

‘It said in the paper she’d been worried by malicious gossip. I don’t think father would be satisfied till he got even with her. D’you know, I think the thing that made him see red was that she’d wanted to marry into his family. He must have got a lot of pleasure when he told her I was dead. She was horrible, and I hated her, but, by God, she must have loved me to do that.’ Fred hesitated for a moment reflectively. ‘Father knew the whole story. I shouldn’t put it past him to tell her that I’d confessed before my death and the police were going to arrest her.’

Dr Saunders slowly nodded. It seemed to him a pretty device. He only wondered that the woman had adopted such an unpleasant means of death as hanging. Of course it looked as though she were in a hurry to do what she intended. Fred’s supposition seemed very plausible.

‘Anyway, she’s out of it,’ said Fred. ‘And I’ve got to go on.’

‘You surely don’t regret her?’

‘Regret her? She’s ruined my life. And the rotten thing is that the whole thing happened by the merest chance. I never intended to have an affair with her. I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known she was going to take it seriously. If father had let me go out fishing that Sunday, I shouldn’t even have met her. I don’t know what to make of anything And except for that I should never have come to this blasted island. I seem to bring misfortune wherever I go.’

‘You should put a little vitriol on your handsome face,’ said the doctor. ‘You are certainly a public danger.’

‘Oh, don’t sneer at me. I’m so awfully unhappy. I’ve never cared for a chap like I cared for Erik. I shall never forgive myself for his death.’

‘Don’t think he killed himself on your account. You had very little to do with that. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, he killed himself because he couldn’t survive the shock of finding out that the person whom he’d endowed with every quality and every virtue was, after all, but human. It was madness on his part. That’s the worst of being an idealist; you won’t accept people as they are. Wasn’t it Christ who said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do?”’

Fred stared at him with perplexed and haggard eyes.

‘But you’re not a religious man, are you?’

‘Sensible men are all of the same religion. And what is that? Sensible men never tell.’

‘My father wouldn’t say that. He’d say that sensible men don’t go out of their way to give offence. He’d say, it looks well to go to church and you must respect the prejudices of your neighbours. He’d say, what is the good of getting off the fence when you can sit on it very comfortably? Nichols and I have talked about it all. You wouldn’t believe it, but he can talk about religion by the hour. It’s funny, I’ve never met a meaner crook, or a man who had less idea of decency, and yet he honestly believes in God. And hell, too. But it never strikes him that he may go there. Other people are going to suffer for their sins and serve ’em damn well right. But he’s a stout fellow, he’s all right, and when he does the dirty on a friend it isn’t of any importance; it’s what anyone would do under the circumstances, and God isn’t going to hold that up against him. At first I thought he was just a hypocrite. But he isn’t. That’s the odd thing about it.’

‘It shouldn’t make you angry. The contrast between a man’s profession and his actions is one of the most diverting spectacles that life offers.’

‘You look at it from the outside and you can laugh, but I look at it from the in, and I’m a ship that’s lost its bearings. What does it all mean? Why are we here? Where are we going? What can we do?’

‘My dear boy, you don’t expect me to answer, do you? Ever since men picked up a glimmer of intelligence in the primeval forests, they’ve been asking those questions.’

‘What do you believe?’

‘Do you really want to know? I believe in nothing but myself and my experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consistent dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be.’

‘But that’s quite incredible,’ cried Fred.

‘That is no reason for me to hesitate to believe it,’ smiled the doctor.

‘Well, I’m not prepared to be made a fool of. If life won’t fulfil the demands I make on it, then I have no use for it. It’s dull and stupid play, and it’s only waste of time to sit it out.’

The doctor’s eyes twinkled and a grin puckered his ugly little face.

‘Oh, my dear boy, what perfect nonsense you talk. Youth, youth! You’re a stranger in the world yet. Presently, like a man on a desert island, you’ll learn to do without what you can’t get and make the most of what you can. A little common sense, a little tolerance, a little good humour, and you don’t know how comfortable you can make yourself on this planet.’

‘By giving up all that makes life worth while. Like you. I want life to be fair. I want life to be brave and honest. I want men to be decent and things to come right in the end. Surely that’s not asking too much, is it?’

I don’t know. It’s asking more than life can give.’

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not much.’

‘You’re content to wallow in the gutter.’

‘I get a certain amount of fun from watching the antics of the other creatures that dwell there.’

Fred gave his shoulder an angry shrug and a sigh was rung from him.

‘You believe nothing. You respect nobody. You expect man to be vile. You’re a cripple chained to a bath-chair and you think it’s just stuff and nonsense that anyone should walk or run.’

‘I’m afraid you don’t very much approve of me,’ the doctor suggested mildly.

‘You’ve lost heart, hope, faith, and awe. What in God’s name have you got left?’

‘Resignation.’

The young man jumped to his feet.

‘Resignation? That’s the refuge of the beaten. Keep your resignation. I don’t want it. I’m not willing to accept evil and ugliness and injustice. I’m not willing to stand by while the good are punished and the wicked go scot-free. If life means that virtue is trampled on and honesty is mocked and beauty is fouled, then to hell with life.’

‘My dear boy, you must take life as you find it’

‘I’m fed up with life as I find it. It fills me with horror. I’ll either have it on my own terms or not at all.’

Rhodomontade. The boy was nervous and upset. It was very natural. Dr Saunders had little doubt that in a day or two he would be more sensible, and his reply was designed to check this extravagance.

‘Have you ever read that laughter is the only gift the gods have vouchsafed to man that he does not share with the beasts?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Fred sullenly.

‘I have acquired resignation by the help of an unfailing sense of the ridiculous.’

‘Laugh, then. Laugh your head off.’

‘So long as I can,’ returned the doctor, looking at him with his tolerant humour, ‘the gods may destroy me, but I remain unvanquished.’

Rhodomontade? Perhaps.

The conversation might have proceeded indefinitely if at that moment there had not come a knock on the door.

‘Who the devil is that?’ cried Fred irascibly.

A boy who spoke a little English came in to say that someone wished to see Fred, but they could not understand who it was. Fred, shrugging his shoulders, was about to go when an idea struck him and he stopped.

‘Is it a man or a woman?’

He had to repeat the question in two or three different ways before the boy caught his meaning. Then with a smile brightened by the appreciation of his own cleverness, he answered that it was a woman.

‘Louise.’ Fred shook his head with decision. ‘You say, Tuan sick, no can come.’

The boy understood this and withdrew.

‘You’d better see her,’ said the doctor.

‘Never. Erik was worth ten of her. He meant all the world to me. I loathe the thought of her. I only want to get away. I want to forget. How could she trample on that noble heart!’

Dr Saunders raised his eyebrows. Language of that sort chilled his sympathy.

‘Perhaps she’s very unhappy,’ he suggested mildly.

‘I thought you were a cynic. You’re a sentimentalist.’

‘Have you only just discovered it?’

The door was slowly opened, pushed wide, silently, and Louise stood in the doorway. She did not come forward. She did not speak. She looked at Fred, and a faint, shy, deprecating smile hovered on her lips. You could see that she was nervous. Her whole body seemed to express a timid uncertainty. It had, as much as her face, an air of appeal. Fred stared at her. He did not move. He did not ask her to come in. His face was sullen and in his eyes was a cold and relentless hatred. The little smile froze on her lips and she seemed to give a gasp, not with her mouth, but with her body, as though a sharp pain pierced her heart. She stood there, for two or three minutes, it seemed, and neither of them moved an eyelash. Their eyes met in an insistent stare. Then, very slowly, and as silently as when she opened it, she drew the door to and softly closed it on herself. The two men were left alone once more. To the doctor the scene had appeared strangely, horribly pathetic.

CHAPTER 29

The Fenton sailed at dawn. The ship that was to take Dr Saunders to Bali was due in the course of the afternoon. She was to stay only just long enough to take on cargo, and so, towards eleven, hiring a horse-cab, the doctor drove out to Swan’s plantation. He thought it would be uncivil to go without saying good-bye.

When he arrived he found the old man sitting in a chair in the garden. It was the same chair as that in which Erik Christessen had sat on the night when he saw Fred come out of Louise’s room. The doctor passed the time of day with him. The old man did not remember him, but he was spry enough and asked the doctor a number of questions without paying any attention to the replies. Presently Louise came down the steps from the house. She shook hands with him. She bore no sign that she had passed through an emotional crisis, but greeted him with that composed and winning smile that she had had the first time he saw her on the way back from the bathing pool. She wore a brown sarong of batik and a little native coat. Her very fair hair was plaited and bound round her head.

‘Won’t you come inside and sit down?’ she said. ‘Dad is working. He’ll be along presently.’

The doctor accompanied her into the large living-room. The jalousies were drawn and the subdued light was pleasant. There was not much comfort in the room, but it was cool, and a great bunch of yellow cannas in a bowl, flaming like the new-risen sun, gave it a peculiar and exotic distinction.

‘We haven’t told grandpa about Erik. He liked him; they were both Scandinavians, you know. We were afraid it would upset him. But perhaps he knows; one can never tell. Sometimes, weeks after, he’ll let fall a remark and we find out that he’s known all along something that we thought we’d better say nothing about.’

She talked in a leisurely manner, with a soft, rather full voice, as though of indifferent things.

‘Old age is very strange. It has a kind of aloofness. It’s lost so much, that you can hardly look upon the old as quite human any more. But sometimes you have a feeling that they’ve acquired a sort of new sense that tells them things that we can never know.’

‘Your grandfather was gay enough the other night. I hope I shall be as alert at his age.’

‘He was excited. He likes having new people to talk to. But that’s just like a phonograph that you wind up. That’s the machine. But there’s something else there, like a little animal, a rat burrowing away or a squirrel turning in its cage, that’s busy within him with things we know nothing of. I feel its existence and I wonder what it’s about.’

The doctor had nothing to say to this, and silence for a minute or two fell upon them.

‘Will you have a stengah?’ she said.

‘No, thank you.’

They were sitting opposite one another in easy chairs. The large room surrounded them with strangeness. It seemed to await something.

‘The Fenton sailed this morning,’ said the doctor.

‘I know.’

He looked at her reflectively and she returned his gaze with tranquillity.

‘I’m afraid Christessen’s death was a great shock to you.’

‘I was very fond of him.’

‘He talked to me a great deal about you the night before he died. He was very much in love with you. He told me he was going to marry you.’

‘Yes.’ She gave him a fleeting glance. ‘Why did he kill himself?’

‘He saw that boy coming out of your room.’

She looked down. She reddened a little.

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Fred told me. He was there when he jumped over the rail of the veranda.’

‘Who told Fred I was engaged to Erik?’

‘I did.’

‘I thought it was that yesterday afternoon when he wouldn’t see me. And then when I came in and he looked at me like that I knew it was hopeless.’

There was no despair in her manner, but a collected acceptance of the inevitable. You might almost have said that there was in her tone a shrug of the shoulders.

‘You weren’t in love with him, then?’

She leaned her face on her hand and for a moment seemed to look into her heart.

‘It’s all rather complicated,’ she said.

‘Anyhow, it’s no business of mine.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind telling you. I don’t care what you think of me.’

‘Why should you?’

‘He was very good-looking. D’you remember the other afternoon when I met you in the plantation? I couldn’t take my eyes off him. And then at supper, and afterwards when we danced together. I suppose you’d call it love at first sight.’

‘I’m not sure that I would.’

‘Oh?’ She looked at him with an air of surprise, which changed to a quick, scrutinizing glance, as though for the first time she paid him attention. ‘I knew he’d taken a fancy to me. I felt something I’d never felt in my life before. I wanted him simply frightfully. I generally sleep like a log. I was terribly restless all night. Father wanted to bring you his translation and I offered to drive him down. I knew he was only staying a day or two. Perhaps if he’d been staying a month it wouldn’t have happened. I should have thought there was plenty of time, and if I’d seen him every day for a week I daresay I shouldn’t have bothered about him. And afterwards, I didn’t regret it. I felt contented and free. I lay awake for a little while after he left me that night. I was awfully happy, but, you know, I didn’t really care if I never saw him again. It was very comfortable to be alone. I don’t suppose you’ll know what I mean, but I felt that my soul was a little lightheaded.’

‘Have you no fear of consequences?’ asked the doctor.

‘How d’you mean?’ She understood and smiled. ‘Oh, that. Oh, doctor, I’ve lived on this island almost all my life. When I was a child I used to play with the children on the estate. My great friend, the daughter of our overseer, is the same age as me and she’s been married for four years and has had three babies. You don’t imagine sex has many secrets for Malay children. I’ve heard everything connected with it talked about since I was seven.’

‘Why did you come to the hotel yesterday?’

‘I was distracted. I was awfully fond of Erik. I couldn’t believe it when they told me he’d shot himself. I was afraid I was to blame. I wanted to know if it was possible that he knew about Fred.’

‘You were to blame.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry he’s dead. I owe a great deal to him. When I was a child I used to worship him. He was like one of grandpa’s old Vikings to me. I’ve always liked him awfully. But I’m not to blame.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘He didn’t know it, but it wasn’t me he loved, it was mother. She knew it and at the end I think she loved him, too. It’s funny if you come to think of it. He was almost young enough to be her son. What he loved in me was my mother, and he never knew that either.’

‘Didn’t you love him?’

‘Oh, very much. With my soul, not with my heart, or with my heart, perhaps, and not with my nerves. He was very good. He was wonderfully reliable. He was incapable of unkindness. He was very genuine. There was something almost saintly in him.’

She took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes, for while talking of him she had begun to cry.

‘If you weren’t in love with him, why did you become engaged to him?’

‘I promised mother I would before she died. I think she felt that in me she would gratify her love for him. And I was very fond of him. I knew him so well. I was very much at home with him. I think if he’d wanted to marry me just when mother died and I was so unhappy I might have loved him. But he thought I was too young. He didn’t want to take advantage of the feelings I had then.’

‘And then?’

‘Daddy didn’t very much want me to marry him. He was always waiting for the fairy prince who would come and carry me off to an enchanted castle. I suppose you think daddy’s feckless and unpractical. Of course I didn’t believe in a fairy prince, but there’s generally something behind daddy’s ideas. He has a sort of instinct for things. He lives in the clouds, if you know what I mean but very often those clouds glow with the light of heaven. Oh, I suppose if nothing had happened we should have married in the end and been very happy. No one could have helped being happy with Erik. It would have been very nice to see all those places he talked about. I should have liked to go to Sweden, to the place where grandpa was born, and Venice.’

‘It’s unfortunate that we ever came here. And, after all, it was only a chance; we might just as well have made for Amboyna.’

‘Could you have gone to Amboyna? I think it was fated from all eternity that you should come here.’

‘Do you think our destinies are so important that the fates should make such a to-do about them?’ smiled the doctor.

She did not answer and for a little while they sat in silence.

‘I’m terribly unhappy, you know,’ she said at last.

‘You must try not to grieve too much.’

‘Oh, I don’t grieve.’

She spoke with a sort of decision, so that the doctor looked at her with surprise.

‘You blame me. Anyone would. I don’t blame myself. Erik killed himself because I’d fallen short of the ideal he’d made of me.’

‘Ah.’

Dr Saunders perceived that her instinct had come to the same conclusion as his reasoning.

‘If he’d loved me he might have killed me or he might have forgiven me. Don’t you think it’s rather stupid the importance men, white men at least, attach to the act of flesh? D’you know, when I was at school in Auckland I had an attack of religion – girls often have at that age – and in Lent I made a vow that I wouldn’t eat anything with sugar in it. After about a fortnight I hankered after something sweet so that it was positive torture. One day I passed a candy shop and I looked at the chocolates in the window and my heart turned round inside me. I went in and bought half a pound and ate them in the street outside, every one, till the bag was empty. I shall never forget what a relief it was. Then I went back to school and denied myself quite comfortably for the rest of Lent. I told that story to Erik and he laughed. He thought it very natural. He was so tolerant. Don’t you think if he’d loved me he would have been tolerant about the other, too?’

‘Men are very peculiar in that respect.’

‘Not Erik. He was so wise and so charitable. I tell you he didn’t love me. He loved his ideal. My mother’s beauty and my mother’s qualities in me and those Shakespeare heroines of his and the princesses in Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. What right have people to make an image after their own heart and force it on you and be angry if it doesn’t fit you? He wanted to imprison me in his ideal. He didn’t care who I was. He wouldn’t take me as I am. He wanted to possess my soul, and because he felt that there was somewhere in me something that escaped him, he tried to replace that little spark within me which is me by a phantom of his own fancy. I’m unhappy, but I tell you I don’t grieve. And Fred in his way was the same. When he lay by my side that night he said he’d like to stay here always on this island, and marry me and cultivate the plantation, and I don’t know what else. He made a picture of his life and I was to fit in it. He wanted, too, to imprison me in his dream. It was a different dream, but it was his dream. But I am I. I don’t want to dream anyone else’s dream. I want to dream my own. All that’s happened is terrible and my heart is heavy, but at the back of my mind I know that it’s given me freedom.’

She did not speak with emotion, but slowly and in measured terms, with the collected manner that the doctor had always found so singular. He listened attentively. He shuddered a little within himself, for the spectacle of the naked human soul always affected him with horror. He saw there that same bare, ruthless instinct that impelled those shapeless creatures of the beginning of the world’s history to force their way through the blind hostility of chance. He wondered what would become of this girl.

‘Have you any plan for the future?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘I can wait. I’m young, When grandpa dies this will be mine. Perhaps I shall sell it. Daddy wants to go to India. The world is wide.’

‘I must go,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘Can I see your father to say good-bye to him?’

‘I’ll take you to his study.’

She led him along a passage to a smallish room at the side of the house. Frith was sitting at a table littered with manuscripts and books. He was pounding a typewriter, and the sweat pouring from his fat red face made his spectacles slip down his nose.

‘This is the final typing of the ninth canto,’ he said. ‘You’re going away, aren’t you? I’m afraid I shan’t have time to show it you.’

He had forgotten that Dr Saunders had fallen asleep while he was reading his translation aloud to him, or if he remembered was undiscouraged.

‘I am nearing the end. It has been an arduous task, and I hardly think I could ever have brought it to a successful conclusion but for my little girl’s encouragement. It is very right and proper that she should be the chief gainer.’

‘You mustn’t work too hard, daddy.’

‘Tempus fugit,’ he murmured. ‘Ars longa, vita brevis.’

She put her hand gently on his shoulder and with a smile looked at the sheet of paper in the machine. Once more the doctor was struck by the loving-kindness with which Louise treated her father. With her shrewd sense she could not have failed to form a just estimate of his futile labour.

‘We haven’t come to disturb you, darling. Dr Saunders wants to say good-bye.’

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ said Frith. He got up from the table. ‘Well, it’s been a treat to see you. In this backwater of life we don’t often have visitors. It was kind of you to come to Christessen’s funeral yesterday. We Britishers ought to stick together on these occasions. It impresses the Dutch. Not that Christessen was British. But we’d seen a great deal of him since he came to the island, and after all he belonged to the same country as Queen Alexandra. A glass of sherry before you go?’

‘No, thank you. I must be getting back.’

‘I was very much upset when I heard. The Contrôleur told me he had no doubt it was the heat. He wanted to marry Louise. I’m very glad now I wouldn’t give my consent. Lack of self-control, of course. The English are the only people who can transplant themselves to strange lands and keep their balance. He’ll be a great loss to us. Of course he was a foreigner, but all the same it’s a shock. I’ve felt it very much.’

It was evident, however, that he looked upon it as much less serious for a Dane to die than for an Englishman. Frith insisted on coming out into the compound. The doctor, turning round to wave his hand as he drove off, saw him with his arm round his daughter’s waist. A ray of sun finding its way through the heavy leafage of the kanari trees touched her fair hair with gold.

CHAPTER 30

A month later Dr Saunders was sitting on the little dusty terrace of the van Dyke Hotel at Singapore. It was late in the afternoon. From where he sat he could see the street below. Cars dashed past and cabs drawn by two sturdy ponies; rickshaws sped by with a patter of naked feet. Now and then Tamils, tall and emaciated, sauntered along, and in their silence, in the quiet of their stealthy movement, was the night of a far-distant past. Trees shaded the street and the sun splashed down in irregular patches. Chinese women in trousers, with gold pins in their hair, stepped out of the shade into the light like marionettes passing across the stage. Now and then a young planter, deeply sunburned, in a double-brimmed hat and khaki shorts, walked past with the long stride he had learnt tramping over the rubber estates. Two dark-skinned soldiers, very smart in their clean uniforms, strutted by conscious of their importance. The heat of the day was past, the light was golden, and in the air was a crisp nonchalance as though life, there and then, invited you to take it lightly. A water-cart passed, slithering the dusty road with a stream of water.

Dr Saunders had spent a fortnight in Java. Now he was catching the first ship that came in for Hong-Kong, and from there he intended to take a coasting vessel to Fu-chou. He was glad he had made the journey. It had taken him out of the rut he had been in so long. It had liberated him from the bonds of unprofitable habits, and, relaxed as never before from all earthly ties, he rejoiced in a heavenly sense of spiritual independence. It was an exquisite pleasure to him to know that there was no one in the world who was essential to his peace of mind. He had reached, though by a very different path, the immunity from the concerns of this world which is the aim of the ascetic. While, like the Buddha contemplating his navel, he was delectably immersed in his self-satisfaction, someone touched him on the shoulder. He looked up and saw Captain Nichols.

‘I was passin’ by and saw you sittin’ there. I came up to say ‘ow d’ye do to you.’

‘Sit down and have a drink.’

‘I don’t mind if I do.’

The skipper wore his shore-going clothes. They were not old, but they looked astonishingly seedy. He had two day’s growth of beard on his lean face, and the nails on his hands were rimmed with grime. He looked down at heel.

‘I’m havin’ me teeth attended to,’ he said. ‘You was right. The dentist say I must ‘ave ’em all out. Says ‘e’s not surprised I suffer from dyspepsia. It’s a miracle I’ve gone on as long as I ‘ave, according to ‘im.’

The doctor gave him a glance and noticed that his upper front teeth had been extracted. It made his ingratiating smile more sinister than ever.

‘Where’s Fred Blake?’ asked Dr Saunders.

The smile faded from the skipper’s lips, but lingered sardonic in his eyes.

‘Come to a sticky end, poor young chap,’ he replied.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Fell overboard one night or jumped over. Nobody knows. He was gone in the morning.’

‘In a storm?’

The doctor could hardly believe his ears.

‘No. Sea was as flat as a mill-pond. He was very low after we come away from Kanda. We went to Batavia same as we said we was goin’ to do. I suspicioned ‘e was expectin’ a letter there. But if it come or if it didn’t I don’t know, and it’s no good askin’ me.’

‘But how could he go overboard without anyone noticing? What about the man at the helm?’

‘We’d ‘ove to for the night. Been drinkin’ very ‘eavy. Nothin’ to do with me, of course, but I tell ‘im he’d better go easy. Told me to mind me own bloody business. All right, I says, go your own way. It ain’t goin’ to disturb my night’s rest what you do.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘A week ago last Tuesday.’

The doctor leaned back. It was a shock to him. It was so short a while since that boy and he had sat together and talked. It had seemed to him then that there was in him something naïve and aspiring that was not devoid of charm. It was not very pleasant to think of him now drifting, mangled and terrible, at the mercy of the tides. He was only a kid. Notwithstanding his philosophy, the doctor could not but feel a pang when the young died.

‘Very awkward it was for me, too,’ continued the skipper. ‘He’d won nearly all my money at cribbage. We played a lot after we left you, and I tell you the luck ‘e ‘ad was unbelievable. I knew I was a better player than ‘im; I’d never ‘ave took him on if I ‘adn’t been as sure of that as I am that you’re sittin’ there, and I doubled the stakes. And d’you know, I couldn’t win. I began to think there was somethin’ phoney about it, but there’s not much you can teach me in that direction, and I couldn’t see ‘ow it was done if it was done. No, it was just luck. Well, to cut a long story short, by the time we got to Batavia ‘e’d took off me every penny I’d got for the cruise.

‘Well, after the accident I broke open his strong box. We’d bought a couple when we was at Merauke. I ‘ad to, you know, to see if there was an address or anythin’ so as I could communicate with the sorrowin’ relatives. I’m very particular about that sort of thing. And d’you know, there wasn’t a shillin’ there. It was as empty as the palm of my ‘and. The dirty little tyke carried all ‘is money in ‘is belt and ‘e gone overboard with it.’

‘It must have been a sell for you.’

‘I never liked him, not from the beginnin’. Crooked ‘e was. And mind you, it was me own money, most of it. You can’t tell me ‘e could win like that playin’ on the square. I don’t know whatever I should ‘ave done if I ‘adn’t been able to sell the ketch to a Chink at Penang. It looked like I was bein’ made the goat.’

The doctor stared. It was a queer story. He wondered if there was any truth in it. Captain Nichols filled him with repulsion.

‘I suppose you didn’t by any chance push him overboard when he was drunk?’ he asked acidly.

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘You didn’t know the money was in his belt. It was quite a packet for a bum like you. I wouldn’t put it past you to have done the dirty on the wretched boy.’

Captain Nichols went green in the face. His jaw dropped and a glassy stare came into his eyes. The doctor chuckled. That random shot of his had gone home. The scoundrel. But then he saw that the skipper was not looking at him, but at something behind; he turned round and saw a woman slowly ascending the steps from the street to the terrace. She was a shortish woman and stout, with a flat, pasty face and somewhat protruding eyes. They were strangely round and shone like boot-buttons. She wore a dress of black cloth that was a little too tight for her, and on her head a black straw hat, like a man’s. She was most unsuitably dressed for the tropics. She looked hot and out of temper.

‘My God!’ gasped the skipper, under his breath. ‘My old woman.’

She walked up to the table in a leisurely manner. She looked at the unhappy man with distaste in her eyes and he watched her in helpless fascination.

‘What ‘ave you done with your front teeth, captain?’ she said.

He smiled ingratiatingly.

‘Whoever thought of seein’ you, my dear,’ he said. ‘This is a joyful surprise.’

‘We’ll go and ‘ave a cup of tea, captain.’

‘Just as you say, my dear.’

He got up. She turned round and walked the way she came. Captain Nichols followed her. His face wore a very serious expression. The doctor reflected that now he would never know the truth about poor Fred Blake. He smiled grimly as he saw the skipper walk in silence down the street by his wife’s side.

A faint breeze rustled suddenly the leaves of the trees and a ray of sun found its way through them and danced for a moment by his side. He thought of Louise and her ash-blonde hair. She was like an enchantress in an old tale whom men loved to their destruction. She was an enigmatic figure going about her household duties with that steady composure and with serenity waiting for what would in due course befall her. He wondered what it would be. He sighed a little, for whatever it was, if the richest dreams the imagination offered came true, in the end it remained nothing but illusion.

THEATRE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

PREFACE

It is not very difficult to write a preface to a book that you wrote a long time ago, for the hurrying years have made a different man of you and you can look upon it with a stranger’s eyes. You see its faults, and for the reader’s delectation you can recall, according to your temperament with toleration or with dismay, the defects in your character as it was then which account for the defects of your book; or you can look back, maybe with the pleasure which distance lends the past, upon the conditions under which you wrote; you can draw a pretty picture of your garret or dwell with modest complacency on the stiff upper lip with which you faced neglect. But when, in order to tempt a reader to buy a book that has no longer the merit of novelty, you set about writing a preface to a work of fiction that you composed no more than two or three years back, it is none too easy to find anything that you want to say, for you have said in your book all you have to say upon the theme with which it deals and having done so have never given it another thought. As nothing is more dead than a love that has burnt itself out, so no subject is less interesting to an author than one upon which he has said his say. Of course you can quarrel with your reviewers, but there is little point in that; what such and such a critic thought of a novel that he read the year before last can only matter to an author of his susceptibility is really too tender for the rough and tumble of this queer world; the critic has long forgotten both the book and his criticism, and the generality of readers never trouble their heads with criticism anyhow.

When first I set up as a professional author I used to paste such reviews as I got in great scrap-books, thinking it would amuse me some day to read them again, and I would carefully head each one with the date and the name of the paper in which it had appeared. But in course of time these unwieldy volumes grew very cumbersome, and because for one reason and another I have seldom lived for long in the same house, I found it necessary at last to get the dustman to rid me of them. Since then I have contented myself with reading my notices, as time wore on with sufficient equanimity not to be unduly perturbed by those that were unfavourable nor unduly elated by those that were laudatory, and throwing them into my waste-paper basket. My recollection is that on the whole the criticisms of Theatre were pretty good. Some critics, however, complained that Julia Lambert, my heroine, was not a creature of high moral character, great intelligence and nobility of soul, and concluded from this that she was a mediocre actress. I have been given to understand that a number of leading ladies were of the same opinion. Indeed one old actress, celebrated for her acting when I was a boy, and still remembered by the middle-aged for the amusingly disagreeable things she so often said, chiefly at the expense of her fellow-players, was quite biting in her references to me; but I think her acrimony was due to a misapprehension. I took pains in my novel to make it clear that my heroine, whatever her other faults, was not a snob, and this naturally enough prevented the old person in question from recognising the fact that my Julia was a fine actress. We are all inclined to think that others can only have our virtues if they also have our vices.

Greatness is rare. During the last fifty years I have seen most of the actresses who have made a name for themselves. I have seen many who had eminent gifts, many who excelled in a domain they had made their own, many who had charm, beauty and knowledge, but I cannot think of more than one to whom I could without hesitation ascribe greatness. This was Eleanora Duse. It may be that Mrs. Siddons had it; it may be that Rachel had it; I do not know; I never saw Sarah Bernhardt till she was past her prime; the glory that surrounded her, the extravagance of her legend, made it difficult to judge her coolly; she was often mannered and she could rant at times like any player queen; at her best she may have had greatness, I only saw its appurtenances, the crown, the sceptre and the ermine cloak – the Emperor of China’s new clothes, but no Emperor of China. With the one exception I have mentioned I have only seen actresses who could be good, sometimes very good, in certain parts. I have a notion that one’s opinion in this matter depends a good deal on how much one is affected by the glamour of the stage. There are many people whom the theatre fills with an excitement which no familiarity can stale. It is to them a world of mystery and delight; it gives them entry into a realm of the imagination which increases their joy in life, and its illusion colours the ordinariness of their daily round with the golden shimmer of romance. When they watch the celebrated actress, her beauty enhanced by make-up, her significance emphasized by spot-lights, uttering her fine phrases as though they came out of her own head, undergoing remarkable experiences and suffering poignant emotions, they feel that they live more fully; and it is natural enough that they should make a somewhat excessive use of hyperbole when they seek to describe the sensations which the skilful interpreter has given them. It is natural also that they should overlook the fact that the performance which has filled them with rapture owes at least something to the costumier, the scene-painter, the electrician and the author.

Even in my early youth I was never stage-struck; but whether because I am by nature of a somewhat sceptical disposition or whether because my mind was filled with private dreams which satisfied my romantic yearnings, I cannot say; and when I began to have plays acted I lost even the few illusions I had. When I discovered how much effort was put to achieving the gesture that had such a spontaneous look, when I realized how often the perfect intonation which moved an audience to tears was due not to the actress’s sensibility but to the producer’s experience, when in short I learnt from the inside how complicated was the process by which a play is made ready to set before an audience, I found it impossible to regard even the most brilliant members of the profession with the same awed and admiring wonder as the general public. On the other hand I learnt that they had qualities with which the public is little inclined to credit them. I learnt, for example, that with few exceptions they were hard-working, courageous, patient and conscientious. Though dropping with fatigue after a long day’s work, I saw them consent with cheerfulness to go through still once more a difficult scene that they had that very day rehearsed half a dozen times already; I saw them, in illness, give a performance when they could hardly stand on their feet rather than let the company down; and I learnt that for all the frills and airs they might put on, when it came down to the business of getting the best out of the play and themselves, they were as reasonable as anyone could desire. Behind their famous ‘temperament’, which is a combination of selfishness and nerves more or less consciously emphasized under the erroneous impression that it is a proof of artistic sensibility, there is far oftener than the public imagines an abundance of shrewd, practical sense. I have never known a child that didn’t like to show off, and in every actor there remains something of the child; it is to this that he owes many of his most charming gifts. He has more than the normal exhibitionism which is common to all but very few of us, and if he hadn’t he would not be an actor; it is wiser to regard this particular trait with humour than with disdain. If I had to put in a phrase the impressions I formed of actors during the long time of my connection with the stage, I should say that their virtues are more solid than they pretend and their failings incidental to the hazardous and exacting profession they follow.

Thirty years elapsed between the production of my first play and the production of my last and in that period I was thrown into intimate contact with a great number of distinguished actresses. Julia Lambert is a portrait of none of them. I have taken a trait here and a trait there and sought to create a living person. Because I was not much affected by the glamour of the brilliant creatures I had known in the flesh I drew the creature of my fancy, I daresay, with a certain coolness. It is this, perhaps, which has disconcerted those readers who cannot separate the actress from the limelight that surrounds her and vexed those actresses who have been so dazzled by the limelight that they honestly think there is no more in them than that. They do themselves an injustice. The quality of the artist depends on the quality of the man and no one can excel in the arts who has not, besides his special gifts, moral rectitude; I would not deny, however, that this may exhibit itself in a form that is surprising and fantastic. I think Julia Lambert is true to life. I should like the reader to notice that though her admirers ascribe greatness to her, and though she accepts the flattery greedily, I, speaking in my own person, have not claimed that she was more than highly successful, very talented, serious and industrious. I should add that for my part I feel a great affection for her; I am not shocked by her naughtiness, nor scandalized by her absurdities; I can only consider her, whatever she does, with fond indulgence.

Before I bring this preface to a close I must tell the reader that in the book which I am now inviting him to peruse I have made two errors in fact. The novelist tries to be accurate in every detail, but sometimes he makes a mistake, and there is generally no lack of persons who are prepared to point it out to him. Once I wrote a novel in which I had occasion to mention a beach called Manly, which is a favourite resort during the bathing season of the inhabitants of Sydney, and unfortunately I spelt it Manley. The superfluous ‘e’ brought me hundreds of angry and derisive letters from New South Wales. You would have thought that the slip, which might after all have been a printer’s error, though of course it was due only to my own carelessness, was a deliberate insult that I had offered to the Commonwealth. Indeed one lady told me that it was one more proof of the ignorant superciliousness of the English towards the inhabitants of the English colonies, and that it was people like me who would be responsible if next time Great Britain was embroiled in a Continental war the youth of Australia, instead of flying to her rescue, preferred to stay quietly at home. She ended her letter on a rhetorical note. What, she asked me, would the English say if an Australian novelist, writing about England, should spell Bournmouth with an ‘e’? My first impulse was to answer that to the best of my belief the English wouldn’t turn a hair, even if it were incorrect, which in point of fact it wasn’t, but I thought it would better become me to suffer the lady’s stern rebuke in silence. Now in this book I have made two mistakes; I have made my heroine put down her failure in Beatrice to the fact that she was not at ease with blank verse, and I have made her, when she speaks of Racine’s Phèdre, complain that the heroine did not appear till the third act. Instead of verifying my facts as I should have done, I trusted my memory, and my memory played me false. Beatrice speaks very little verse; all her important scenes are in prose; and if Julia failed in the part it was not for the reason she gave. Phèdre enters upon the stage in the third scene of the first act. I do not know why only two persons, one apiece, pointed out to me these inexcusable blunders; I like to think that most readers did me the credit of supposing that they were due, not to my ignorance, but to my subtlety, and that in making Julia Lambert speak in this casual and haphazard fashion I was adding a neat touch to my delineation of her character. But I may be unduly flattering myself, and it is just possible that my readers’ recollection of the famous plays in which these characters appear was as hazy as my own, and they knew no better.

CHAPTER 1

THE DOOR OPENED and Michael Gosselyn looked up. Julia came in.

‘Hulloa! I won’t keep you a minute. I was just signing some letters.’

‘No hurry. I only came to see what seats had been sent to the Dennorants. What’s that young man doing here?’

With the experienced actress’s instinct to fit the gesture to the word, by a movement of her neat head she indicated the room through which she had just passed.

‘He’s the accountant. He comes from Lawrence and Hamphreys. He’s been here three days.’

‘He looks very young.’

‘He’s an articled clerk. He seems to know his job. He can’t get over the way our accounts are kept. He told me he never expected a theatre to be run on such businesslike lines. He says the way some of those firms in the city keep their accounts is enough to turn your hair grey.’

Julia smiled at the complacency on her husband’s handsome face.

‘He’s a young man of tact.’

‘He finishes to-day. I thought we might take him back with us and give him a spot of lunch. He’s quite a gentleman.’

‘Is that a sufficient reason to ask him to lunch?’

Michael did not notice the faint irony of her tone.

‘I won’t ask him if you don’t want him. I merely thought it would be a treat for him. He admires you tremendously. He’s been to see the play three times. He’s crazy to be introduced to you.’

Michael touched a button and in a moment his secretary came in.

‘Here are the letters, Margery. What appointments have I got for this afternoon?’

Julia with half an ear listened to the list Margery read out and, though she knew the room so well, idly looked about her. It was a very proper room for the manager of a first-class theatre. The walls had been panelled (at cost price) by a good decorator and on them hung engravings of theatrical pictures of Zoffany and de Wilde. The armchairs were large and comfortable. Michael sat in a heavily-carved Chippendale chair, a reproduction but made by a well-known firm, and his Chippendale table, with heavy ball and claw feet, was immensely solid. On it stood in a massive silver frame a photograph of herself and to balance it a photograph of Roger, their son. Between these was a magnificent silver ink-stand that she had herself given him on one of his birthdays and behind it a rack in red morocco, heavily gilt, in which he kept his private paper in case he wanted to write a letter in his own hand. The paper bore the address, Siddons Theatre, and the envelope his crest, a boar’s head with the motto underneath: Nemo me impune lacessit. A bunch of yellow tulips in a silver bowl, which he had got through winning the theatrical golf tournament three times running, showed Margery’s care. Julia gave her a reflective glance. Notwithstanding her cropped peroxide hair and her heavily-painted lips she had the neutral look that marks the perfect secretary. She had been with Michael for five years. In that time she must have got to know him inside and out. Julia wondered if she could be such a fool as to be in love with him.

But Michael rose from his chair.

‘Now, darling, I’m ready for you.’

Margery gave him his black Homburg hat and opened the door for Julia and Michael to go out. As they entered the office the young man Julia had noticed turned round and stood up.

‘I should like to introduce you to Miss Lambert,’ said Michael. Then with the air of an ambassador presenting an attaché to the sovereign of the court to which he is accredited: ‘This is the gentleman who is good enough to put some order into the mess we make of our accounts.’

The young man went scarlet. He smiled stiffly in answer to Julia’s warm, ready smile and she felt the palm of his hand wet with sweat when she cordially grasped it. His confusion was touching. That was how people had felt when they were presented to Sarah Siddons. She thought that she had not been very gracious to Michael when he had proposed asking the boy to luncheon. She looked straight into his eyes. Her own were large, of a very dark brown, and starry. It was no effort to her, it was as instinctive as brushing away a fly that was buzzing round her, to suggest now a faintly amused, friendly tenderness.

‘I wonder if we could persuade you to come and eat a chop with us. Michael will drive you back after lunch.’

The young man blushed again and his adam’s apple moved in his thin neck.

‘It’s awfully kind of you.’ He gave his clothes a troubled look. ‘I’m absolutely filthy.’

‘You can have a wash and brush up when we get home.’

The car was waiting for them at the stage door, a long car in black and chromium, upholstered in silver leather, and with Michael’s crest discreetly emblazoned on the doors. Julia got in.

‘Come and sit with me. Michael is going to drive.’

They lived in Stanhope Place, and when they arrived Julia told the butler to show the young man where he could wash his hands. She went up to the drawing-room. She was painting her lips when Michael joined her.

‘I’ve told him to come up as soon as he’s ready.’

‘By the way, what’s his name?’

‘I haven’t a notion.’

‘Darling, we must know. I’ll ask him to write in our book.’

‘Damn it, he’s not important enough for that.’ Michael asked only very distinguished people to write in their book. ‘We shall never see him again.’

At that moment the young man appeared. In the car Julia had done all she could to put him at his ease, but he was still very shy. The cocktails were waiting and Michael poured them out. Julia took a cigarette and the young man struck a match for her, but his hand was trembling so much that she thought he would never be able to hold the light near enough to her cigarette, so she took his hand and held it.

‘Poor lamb,’ she thought, ‘I suppose this is the most wonderful moment in his whole life. What fun it’ll be for him when he tells his people. I expect he’ll be a blasted little hero in his office.’

Julia talked very differently to herself and to other people: when she talked to herself her language was racy. She inhaled the first whiff of her cigarette with delight. It was really rather wonderful, when you came to think of it, that just to have lunch with her and talk to her for three-quarters of an hour, perhaps, could make a man quite important in his own scrubby little circle.

The young man forced himself to make a remark.

‘What a stunning room this is.’

She gave him the quick, delightful smile, with a slight lift of her fine eyebrows, which he must often have seen her give on the stage.

‘I’m so glad you like it.’ Her voice was rather low and ever so slightly hoarse. You would have thought his observation had taken a weight off her mind. ‘We think in the family that Michael has such perfect taste.’

Michael gave the room a complacent glance.

‘I’ve had a good deal of experience. I always design the sets myself for our plays. Of course, I have a man to do the rough work for me, but the ideas are mine.’

They had moved into that house two years before, and he knew, and Julia knew, that they had put it into the hands of an expensive decorator when they were going on tour, and he had agreed to have it completely ready for them, at cost price in return for the work they promised him in the theatre, by the time they came back. But it was unnecessary to impart such tedious details to a young man whose name even they did not know. The house was furnished in extremely good taste, with a judicious mixture of the antique and the modern, and Michael was right when he said that it was quite obviously a gentleman’s house. Julia, however, had insisted that she must have her bedroom as she liked, and having had exactly the bedroom that pleased her in the old house in Regent’s Park which they had occupied since the end of the war she brought it over bodily. The bed and the dressing-table were upholstered in pink silk, the chaise-longue and the armchair in Nattier blue; over the bed there were fat little gilt cherubs who dangled a lamp with a pink shade, and fat little gilt cherubs swarmed all round the mirror on the dressing-table. On satinwood tables were signed photographs, richly framed, of actors and actresses and members of the royal family. The decorator had raised his supercilious eyebrows, but it was the only room in the house in which Julia felt completely at home. She wrote her letters at a satinwood desk, seated on a gilt Hamlet stool.

Luncheon was announced and they went downstairs.

‘I hope you’ll have enough to eat,’ said Julia. ‘Michael and I have very small appetites.’

In point of fact there was grilled sole, grilled cutlets and spinach, and stewed fruit. It was a meal designed to satisfy legitimate hunger, but not to produce fat. The cook, warned by Margery that there was a guest to luncheon had hurriedly made some fried potatoes. They looked crisp and smelt appetizing. Only the young man took them. Julia gave them a wistful look before she shook her head in refusal. Michael stared at them gravely for a moment as though he could not quite tell what they were, and then with a little start, breaking out of a brown study, said No thank you. They sat at a refectory table, Julia and Michael at either end in very grand Italian chairs, and the young man in the middle on a chair that was not at all comfortable, but perfectly in character. Julia noticed that he seemed to be looking at the sideboard and with her engaging smile, leaned forward.

‘What is it?’

He blushed scarlet.

‘I was wondering if I might have a piece of bread.’

‘Of course.’

She gave the butler a significant glance; he was at that moment helping Michael to a glass of dry white wine, and he left the room.

‘Michael and I never eat bread. It was stupid of Jevons not to realize that you might want some.’

‘Of course bread is only a habit,’ said Michael. ‘It’s wonderful how soon you can break yourself of it if you set your mind to it.’

‘The poor lamb’s as thin as a rail, Michael.’

‘I don’t not eat bread because I’m afraid of getting fat. I don’t eat it because I see no point in it. After all, with the exercise I take I can eat anything I like.’

He still had at fifty-two a very good figure. As a young man, with a great mass of curling chestnut hair, with a wonderful skin and large deep blue eyes, a straight nose and small ears, he had been the best-looking actor on the English stage. The only thing that slightly spoiled him was the thinness of his mouth. He was just six foot tall and he had a gallant bearing. It was his obvious beauty that had engaged him to go on the stage rather than to become a soldier like his father. Now his chestnut hair was very grey, and he wore it much shorter; his face had broadened and was a good deal lined; his skin no longer had the soft bloom of a peach and his colour was high. But with his splendid eyes and his fine figure he was still a very handsome man. Since his five years at the war he had adopted a military bearing, so that if you had not known who he was (which was scarcely possible, for in one way and another his photograph was always appearing in the illustrated papers) you might have taken him for an officer of high rank. He boasted that his weight had not changed since he was twenty, and for years, wet or fine, he had got up every morning at eight to put on shorts and a sweater and have a run round Regent’s Park.

‘The secretary told me you were rehearsing this morning, Miss Lambert,’ the young man remarked. ‘Does that mean you’re putting on a new play?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ answered Michael. ‘We’re playing to capacity.’

‘Michael thought we were getting a bit ragged, so he called a rehearsal.’

‘I’m very glad I did. I found little bits of business had crept in that I hadn’t given them and a good many liberties were being taken with the text. I’m a great stickler for saying the author’s exact words, though, God knows, the words authors write nowadays aren’t much.’

‘If you’d like to come and see our play,’ Julia said graciously, ‘I’m sure Michael will be delighted to give you some seats.’

‘I’d love to come again,’ the young man answered eagerly. ‘I’ve seen it three times already.’

‘You haven’t?’ cried Julia, with surprise, though she remembered perfectly that Michael had already told her so. ‘Of course it’s not a bad little play, it’s served our purpose very well, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to see it three times.’

‘It’s not so much the play I went to see, it was your performance.’

‘I dragged that out of him all right,’ thought Julia, and then aloud: ‘When we read the play Michael was rather doubtful about it. He didn’t think my part was very good.

You know, it’s not really a star part. But I thought I could make something out of it. Of course we had to cut the other woman a lot in rehearsals.’

‘I don’t say we re-wrote the play,’ said Michael, ‘but I can tell you it was a very different play we produced from the one the author submitted to us.’

‘You’re simply wonderful in it,’ the young man said.

(‘He has a certain charm.’) ‘I’m glad you liked me,’ she answered.

‘If you’re very nice to Julia I daresay she’ll give you a photograph of herself when you go.’

‘Would you?’

He blushed again and his blue eyes shone (‘He’s really rather sweet.’) He was not particularly good-looking, but he had a frank, open face and his shyness was attractive. He had curly light brown hair, but it was plastered down and Julia thought how much better he would look if, instead of trying to smoothe out the wave with brilliantine, he made the most of it. He had a fresh colour, a good skin and small well-shaped teeth. She noticed with approval that his clothes fitted and that he wore them well. He looked nice and clean.

‘I suppose you’ve never had anything to do with the theatre from the inside before?’ she said.

‘Never. That’s why I was so crazy to get this job. You can’t think how it thrills me.’

Michael and Julia smiled on him kindly. His admiration made them feel a little larger than life-size.

‘I never allow outsiders to come to rehearsals, but as you’re our accountant you almost belong to the theatre, and I wouldn’t mind making an exception in your favour if it would amuse you to come.’

‘That would be terribly kind of you. I’ve never been to a rehearsal in my life. Are you going to act in the next play?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not very keen about acting any more. I find it almost impossible to find a part to suit me. You see, at my time of life I can’t very well play young lovers, and authors don’t seem to write the parts they used to write when I was a young fellow. What the French call a raisonneur. You know the sort of thing I mean, a duke, or a cabinet minister, or an eminent K.C. who says clever, witty things and turns people round his little finger. I don’t know what’s happened to authors. They don’t seem able to write good lines any more. Bricks without straw; that’s what we actors are expected to make nowadays. And are they grateful to us? The authors, I mean. You’d be surprised if I told you the terms some of them have the nerve to ask.’

‘The fact remains, we can’t do without them,’ smiled Julia. ‘If the play’s wrong no acting in the world will save it.’

‘That’s because the public isn’t really interested in the theatre. In the great days of the English stage people didn’t go to see the plays, they went to see the players. It didn’t matter what Kemble and Mrs Siddons acted. The public went to see them. And even now, though I don’t deny that if the play’s wrong you’re dished, I do contend that if the play’s right, it’s the actors the public go to see, not the play.’

‘I don’t think anyone can deny that,’ said Julia.

‘All an actress like Julia wants is a vehicle. Give her that and she’ll do the rest.’

Julia gave the young man a delightful, but slightly deprecating smile.

‘You mustn’t take my husband too seriously. I’m afraid we must admit that he’s partial where I’m concerned.’

‘Unless this young man is a much bigger fool than I think him he must know that there’s nothing in the way of acting that you can’t do.’

‘Oh, that’s only an idea that people have got because I take care never to do anything but what I can do.’

Presently Michael looked at his watch.

‘I think when you’ve finished your coffee, young man, we ought to be going.’

The boy gulped down what was left in his cup and Julia rose from the table.

‘You won’t forget my photograph?’

‘I think there are some in Michael’s den. Come along and we’ll choose one.’

She took him into a fair-sized room behind the dining-room. Though it was supposed to be Michael’s private sitting-room – ‘a fellow wants a room where he can get away by himself and smoke his pipe’ – it was chiefly used as a cloak-room when they had guests. There was a noble mahogany desk on which were signed photographs of George V and Queen Mary. Over the chimney-piece was an old copy of Lawrence’s portrait of Kemble as Hamlet. On a small table was a pile of typescript plays. The room was surrounded by bookshelves under which were cupboards, and from one of these Julia took a bundle of her latest photographs. She handed one to the young man.

‘This one is not so bad.’

‘It’s lovely.’

‘Then it can’t be as like me as I thought.’

‘But it is. It’s exactly like you.’

She gave him another sort of smile, just a trifle roguish; she lowered her eyelids for a second and then raising them gazed at him for a little with that soft expression that people described as her velvet look. She had no object in doing this. She did it, if not mechanically, from an instinctive desire to please. The boy was so young, so shy, he looked as if he had such a nice nature, and she would never see him again, she wanted him to have his money’s worth; she wanted him to look back on this as one of the great moments of his life. She glanced at the photograph again. She liked to think she looked like that. The photographer had so posed her, with her help, as to show her at her best. Her nose was slightly thick but he had managed by his lighting to make it look very delicate, not a wrinkle marred the smoothness of her skin, and there was a melting look in her fine eyes.

‘All right. You shall have this one. You know I’m not a beautiful woman, I’m not even a very pretty one; Coquelin always used to say I had the beauté du diable. You understand French, don’t you?’

‘Enough for that.’

‘I’ll sign it for you.’

She sat at the desk and with her bold, flowing hand wrote: Yours sincerely, Julia Lambert.

CHAPTER 2

WHEN THE TWO men had gone she looked through the photographs again before putting them back.

‘Not bad for a woman of forty-six,’ she smiled. ‘They are like me, there’s no denying that.’ She looked round the room for a mirror, but there wasn’t one. ‘These damned decorators. Poor Michael, no wonder he never uses this room. Of course I never have photographed well.’

She had an impulse to look at some of her old photographs. Michael was a tidy, business-like man, and her photographs were kept in large cardboard cases, dated and chronologically arranged. His were in other cardboard cases in the same cupboard.

‘When someone comes along and wants to write the story of our careers he’ll find all the material ready to his hand,’ he said.

With the same laudable object he had had all their press cuttings from the very beginning pasted in a series of books.

There were photographs of Julia when she was a child, and photographs of her as a young girl, photographs of her in her first parts, photographs of her as a young married woman, with Michael, and then with Roger, her son, as a baby. There was one photograph of the three of them, Michael very manly and incredibly handsome, herself all tenderness looking down at Roger with maternal feeling, and Roger a little boy with a curly head, which had been an enormous success. All the illustrated papers had given it a full page and they had used it on the programmes. Reduced to picture-postcard size it had sold in the provinces for years. It was such a bore that Roger when he got to Eton refused to be photographed with her any more. It seemed so funny of him not to want to be in the papers.

‘People will think you’re deformed or something,’ she told him. ‘And it’s not as if it weren’t good form. You should just go to a first night and see the society people how they mob the photographers, cabinet ministers and judges and everyone. They may pretend they don’t like it, but just see them posing when they think the camera man’s got his eye on them.’

But he was obstinate.

Julia came across a photograph of herself as Beatrice. It was the only Shakespearean part she had ever played. She knew that she didn’t look well in costume; she could never understand why, because no one could wear modern clothes as well as she could. She had her clothes made in Paris, both for the stage and for private life, and the dressmakers said that no one brought them more orders. She had a lovely figure, everyone admitted that; she was fairly tall for a woman, and she had long legs. It was a pity she had never had a chance of playing Rosalind, she would have looked all right in boy’s clothes, of course it was too late now, but perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t risked it. Though you would have thought, with her brilliance, her roguishness, her sense of comedy she would have been perfect. The critics hadn’t really liked her Beatrice. It was that damned blank verse. Her voice, her rather low rich voice, with that effective hoarseness, which wrung your heart in an emotional passage or gave so much humour to a comedy line, seemed to sound all wrong when she spoke it. And then her articulation; it was so distinct that, without raising her voice, she could make you hear her every word in the last row of the gallery; they said it made verse sound like prose. The fact was, she supposed, that she was much too modern.

Michael had started with Shakespeare. That was before she knew him. He had played Romeo at Cambridge, and when he came down, after a year at a dramatic school, Benson had engaged him. He toured the country and played a great variety of parts. But he realized that Shakespeare would get him nowhere and that if he wanted to become a leading actor he must gain experience in modern plays. A man called James Langton was running a repertory theatre at Middlepool that was attracting a good deal of attention; and after Michael had been with Benson for three years, when the company was going to Middlepool on its annual visit, he wrote to Langton and asked whether he would see him. Jimmie Langton, a fat, bald-headed, rubicund man of forty-five, who looked like one of Rubens’ prosperous burghers, had a passion for the theatre. He was an eccentric, arrogant, exuberant, vain and charming fellow. He loved acting, but his physique prevented him from playing any but a few parts, which was fortunate, for he was a bad actor. He could not subdue his natural flamboyance, and every part he played, though he studied it with care and gave it thought, he turned into a grotesque. He broadened every gesture, he exaggerated every intonation. But it was a very different matter when he rehearsed his cast; then he would suffer nothing artificial. His ear was perfect, and though he could not produce the right intonation himself he would never let a false one pass in anyone else.

‘Don’t be natural,’ he told his company. ‘The stage isn’t the place for that. The stage is make-believe. But seem natural.’

He worked his company hard. They rehearsed every morning from ten till two, when he sent them home to learn their parts and rest before the evening’s performance. He bullied them, he screamed at them, he mocked them. He underpaid them. But if they played a moving scene well he cried like a child, and when they said an amusing line as he wanted it said he bellowed with laughter. He would skip about the stage on one leg if he was pleased, and if he was angry would throw the script down and stamp on it while tears of rage ran down his cheeks. The company laughed at him and abused him and did everything they could to please him. He aroused a protective instinct in them, so that one and all they felt that they couldn’t let him down. Though they said he drove them like slaves, and they never had a moment to themselves, flesh and blood couldn’t stand it, it gave them a sort of horrible satisfaction to comply with his outrageous demands. When he wrung an old trooper’s hand, who was getting seven pounds a week, and said, by God, laddie, you’re stupendous, the old trooper felt like Charles Kean.

It happened that when Michael kept the appointment he had asked for, Jimmie Langton was in need of a leading juvenile. He had guessed why Michael wanted to see him, and had gone the night before to see him play. Michael was playing Mercutio and he had not thought him very good, but when he came into the office he was staggered by his beauty. In a brown coat and grey flannel trousers, even without make-up, he was so handsome it took your breath away. He had an easy manner and he talked like a gentleman. While Michael explained the purpose of his visit Jimmie Langton observed him shrewdly. If he could act at all, with those looks that young man ought to go far.

‘I saw your Mercutio last night,’ he said. ‘What d’you think of it yourself?’

‘Rotten.’

‘So do I. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘I suppose you’ve been told you’re good-looking?’

‘That’s why I went on the stage. Otherwise I’d have gone into the army like my father.’

‘By gum, if I had your looks what an actor I’d have been.’

The result of the interview was that Michael got an engagement. He stayed at Middlepool for two years. He soon grew popular with the company. He was good-humoured and kindly; he would take any amount of trouble to do anyone a service. His beauty created a sensation in Middlepool and the girls used to hang about the stage door to see him go out. They wrote him love letters and sent him flowers. He took it as a natural homage, but did not allow it to turn his head. He was eager to get on and seemed determined not to let any entanglement interfere with his career. It was his beauty that saved him, for Jimmie Langton quickly came to the conclusion that, notwithstanding his perseverance and desire to excel, he would never be more than a competent actor. His voice was a trifle thin and in moments of vehemence was apt to go shrill. It gave then more the effect of hysteria than of passion. But his gravest fault as a juvenile lead was that he could not make love. He was easy enough in ordinary dialogue and could say his lines with point, but when it came to making protestations of passion something seemed to hold him back. He felt embarrassed and looked it.

‘Damn you, don’t hold that girl as if she was a sack of potatoes,’ Jimmie Langton shouted at him. ‘You kiss her as if you were afraid you were standing in a draught. You’re in love with that girl. You must feel that you’re in love with her. Feel as if your bones were melting inside you and if an earthquake were going to swallow you up next minute, to hell with the earthquake.’

But it was no good. Notwithstanding his beauty, his grace and his ease of manner, Michael remained a cold lover. This did not prevent Julia from falling madly in love with him. For it was when he joined Langton’s repertory company that they met.

Her own career had been singularly lacking in hardship. She was born in Jersey, where her father, a native of that island, practised as a veterinary surgeon. Her mother’s sister was married to a Frenchman, a coal merchant, who lived at St. Malo, and Julia had been sent to live with her while she attended classes at the local lycée. She learnt to speak French like a Frenchwoman. She was a born actress and it was an understood thing for as long as she could remember that she was to go on the stage. Her aunt, Madame Falloux, was ‘en relations’ with an old actress who had been a sociétaire of the Comédie Française and who had retired to St. Malo to live on the small pension that one of her lovers had settled on her when after many years of faithful concubinage they had parted. When Julia was a child of twelve this actress was a boisterous, fat old woman of more than sixty, but of great vitality, who loved food more than anything else in the world. She had a great, ringing laugh, like a man’s, and she talked in a deep, loud voice. It was she who gave Julia her first lessons. She taught her all the arts that she had herself learnt at the Conservatoire and she talked to her of Reichenberg who had played ingénues till she was seventy, of Sarah Bernhardt and her golden voice, of Mounet-Sully and his majesty, and of Coquelin the greatest actor of them all. She recited to her the great tirades of Corneille and Raine as she had learnt to say them at the Français and taught her to say them in the same way. It was charming to hear Julia in her childish voice recite those languorous, passionate speeches of Phèdre, emphasizing the beat of the Alexandrines and mouthing her words in the manner which is so artificial and yet so wonderfully dramatic. Jane Taitbout must always have been a very stagy actress, but she taught Julia to articulate with extreme distinctness, she taught her how to walk and how to hold herself, she taught her not to be afraid of her own voice, and she made deliberate that wonderful sense of timing which Julia had by instinct and which afterwards was one of her greatest gifts.

‘Never pause unless you have a reason for it,’ she thundered, banging with her clenched fist on the table at which she sat, ‘but when you pause, pause as long as you can.’

When Julia was sixteen and went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Gower Street she knew already much that they could teach her there. She had to get rid of a certain number of tricks that were out of date and she had to acquire a more conversational style. But she won every prize that was open to her, and when she was finished with the school her good French got her almost immediately a small part in London as a French maid. It looked for a while as though her knowledge of French would specialize her in parts needing a foreign accent, for after this she was engaged to play an Austrian waitress. It was two years later that Jimmie Langton discovered her. She was on tour in a melodrama that had been successful in London; in the part of an Italian adventuress, whose machinations were eventually exposed, she was trying somewhat inadequately to represent a woman of forty. Since the heroine, a blonde person of mature years, was playing a young girl, the performance lacked verisimilitude. Jimmie was taking a short holiday which he spent in going every night to the theatre in one town after another. At the end of the piece he went round to see Julia. He was well enough known in the theatrical world for her to be flattered by the compliments he paid her, and when he asked her to lunch with him next day she accepted.

They had no sooner sat down to table than he went straight to the point.

‘I never slept a wink all night for thinking of you,’ he said.

‘This is very sudden. Is your proposal honourable or dishonourable?’

He took no notice of the flippant rejoinder.

‘I’ve been at this game for twenty-five years. I’ve been a call-boy, a stage-hand, a stage-manager, an actor, a publicity man, damn it, I’ve even been a critic. I’ve lived in the theatre since I was a kid just out of a board school, and what I don’t know about acting isn’t worth knowing. I think you’re a genius.’

‘It’s sweet of you to say so.’

‘Shut up. Leave me to do the talking. You’ve got everything. You’re the right height, you’ve got a good figure, you’ve got an indiarubber face.’

‘Flattering, aren’t you?’

‘That’s just what I am. That’s the face an actress wants. The face that can look anything, even beautiful, the face that can show every thought that passes through the mind. That’s the face Duse’s got. Last night even though you weren’t really thinking about what you were doing every now and then the words you were saying wrote themselves on your face.’

‘It’s such a rotten part. How could I give it my attention? Did you hear the things I had to say?’

‘Actors are rotten, not parts. You’ve got a wonderful voice, the voice that can wring an audience’s heart, I don’t know about your comedy, I’m prepared to risk that.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Your timing is almost perfect. That couldn’t have been taught, you must have that by nature. That’s the far, far better way. Now let’s come down to brass tacks. I’ve been making enquiries about you. It appears you speak French like a Frenchwoman and so they give you broken English parts. That’s not going to lead you anywhere, you know.’

‘That’s all I can get.’

‘Are you satisfied to go on playing those sort of parts for ever? You’ll get stuck in them and the public won’t take you in anything else. Seconds, that’s all you’ll play. Twenty pounds a week at the outside and a great talent wasted.’

‘I’ve always thought that some day or other I should get a chance of a straight part.’

‘When? You may have to wait ten years. How old are you now?’

‘Twenty.’

‘What are you getting?’

‘Fifteen pounds a week.’

‘That’s a lie. You’re getting twelve, and it’s a damned sight more than you’re worth. You’ve got everything to learn. Your gestures are commonplace. You don’t know that every gesture must mean something. You don’t know how to get an audience to look at you before you speak. You make up too much. With your sort of face the less make-up the better. Wouldn’t you like to be a star?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘Come to me and I’ll make you the greatest actress in England. Are you a quick study? You ought to be at your age.’

‘I think I can be word-perfect in any part in forty-eight hours.’

‘It’s experience you want and me to produce you. Come to me and I’ll let you play twenty parts a year. Ibsen, Shaw, Barker, Sudermann, Hankin, Galsworthy. You’ve got magnetism and you don’t seem to have an idea how to use it.’ He chuckled. ‘By God, if you had, that old hag would have had you out of the play you’re in now before you could say knife. You’ve got to take an audience by the throat and say, now, you dogs, you pay attention to me. You’ve got to dominate them. If you haven’t got the gift no one can give it to you, but if you have you can be taught how to use it. I tell you, you’ve got the makings of a great actress. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’

‘I know I want experience. I’d have to think it over of course. I wouldn’t mind coming to you for a season.’

‘Go to hell. Do you think I can make an actress of you in a season? Do you think I’m going to work my guts out to make you give a few decent performances and then have you go away to play some twopenny-halfpenny part in a commercial play in London? What sort of a bloody fool do you take me for? I’ll give you a three years’ contract, I’ll give you eight pounds a week and you’ll have to work like a horse.’

‘Eight pounds a week’s absurd. I couldn’t possibly take that.’

‘Oh yes, you could. It’s all you’re worth and it’s all you’re going to get.’

Julia had been on the stage for three years and had learnt a good deal. Besides, Jane Taitbout, no strict moralist, had given her a lot of useful information.

‘And are you under the impression by any chance, that for that I’m going to let you sleep with me as well?’

‘My God, do you think I’ve got time to go to bed with the members of my company? I’ve got much more important things to do than that, my girl. And you’ll find that after you’ve rehearsed for four hours and played a part at night to my satisfaction, besides a couple of matinées, you won’t have much time or much inclination to make love to anybody. When you go to bed all you’ll want to do is to sleep.’

But Jimmie Langton was wrong there.

CHAPTER 3

JULIA, TAKEN BY his enthusiasm and his fantastic exuberance, accepted his offer. He started her in modest parts which under his direction she played as she had never played before. He interested the critics in her, he flattered them by letting them think that they had discovered a remarkable actress, and allowed the suggestion to come from them that he should let the public see her as Magda. She was a great hit and then in quick succession he made her play Nora in ‘The Doll’s House,’ Ann in ‘Man and Superman,’ and Hedda Gabler. Middlepool was delighted to discover that it had in its midst an actress who it could boast was better than any star in London, and crowded to see her in plays that before it had gone to only from local patriotism. The London paragraphers mentioned her now and then, and a number of enthusiastic patrons of the drama made the journey to Middlepool to see her. They went back full of praise, and two or three London managers sent representatives to report on her. They were doubtful. She was all very well in Shaw and Ibsen, but what would she do in an ordinary play? The managers had had bitter experiences. On the strength of an outstanding performance in one of these queer plays they had engaged an actor, only to discover that in any other sort of play he was no better than anybody else.

When Michael joined the company Julia had been playing in Middlepool for a year. Jimmie started him with Marchbanks in ‘Candida.’ It was the happy choice one would have expected him to make, for in that part his great beauty was an asset and his lack of warmth no disadvantage.

Julia reached over to take out the first of the cardboard cases in which Michael’s photographs were kept. She was sitting comfortably on the floor. She turned the early photographs over quickly, looking for that which he had had taken when first he came to Middlepool; but when she came upon it, it gave her a pang. For a moment she felt inclined to cry. It had been just like him then. Candida was being played by an older woman, a sound actress who was cast generally for mothers, maiden aunts or character parts, and Julia with nothing to do but act eight times a week attended the rehearsals. She fell in love with Michael at first sight. She had never seen a more beautiful young man, and she pursued him relentlessly. In due course Jimmie put on ‘Ghosts,’ braving the censure of respectable Middlepool, and Michael played the boy and she played Regina. They heard one another their parts and after rehearsals lunched, very modestly, together so that they might talk of them. Soon they were inseparable. Julia had little reserve; she flattered Michael outrageously. He was not vain of his good looks, he knew he was handsome and accepted compliments, not exactly with indifference, but as he might have accepted a compliment on a fine old house that had been in his family for generations. It was a well-known fact that it was one of the best houses of its period, one was proud of it and took care of it, but it was just there, as natural to possess as the air one breathed. He was shrewd and ambitious. He knew that his beauty was at present his chief asset, but he knew it could not last for ever and was determined to become a good actor so that he should have something besides his looks to depend on. He meant to learn all he could from Jimmie Langton and then go to London.

‘If I play my cards well I can get some old woman to back me and go into management. One’s got to be one’s own master. That’s the only way to make a packet.’

Julia soon discovered that he did not much like spending money, and when they ate a meal together, or on a Sunday went for a small excursion, she took care to pay her share of the expenses. She did not mind this. She liked him for counting the pennies, and, inclined to be extravagant herself and always a week or two behind with her rent, she admired him because he hated to be in debt and even with the small salary he was getting managed to save up a little every week. He was anxious to have enough put by so that when he went to London he need not accept the first part that was offered him, but could afford to wait till he got one that gave him a real chance. His father had little more than his pension to live on, and it had been a sacrifice to send him to Cambridge. His father, not liking the idea of his going on the stage, had insisted on this.

‘If you want to be an actor I suppose I can’t stop you,’ he said, ‘but damn it all, I insist on your being educated like a gentleman.’

It gave Julia a good deal of satisfaction to discover that Michael’s father was a colonel, it impressed her to hear him speak of an ancestor who had gambled away his fortune at White’s during the Regency, and she liked the signet ring Michael wore with the boar’s head on it and the motto: Nemo me impune lacessit.

‘I believe you’re prouder of your family than of looking like a Greek god,’ she told him fondly.

‘Anyone can be good-looking,’ he answered, with his sweet smile, ‘but not everyone can belong to a decent family. To tell you the truth I’m glad my governor’s a gentleman.’

Julia took her courage in both hands.

‘My father’s a vet.’

For an instant Michael’s face stiffened, but he recovered himself immediately and laughed.

‘Of course it doesn’t really matter what one’s father is. I’ve often heard my father talk of the vet in his regiment. He counted as an officer of course. Dad always said he was one of the best.’

And she was glad he’d been to Cambridge. He had rowed for his College and at one time there was some talk of putting him in the university boat.

‘I should have liked to get my blue. It would have been useful to me on the stage. I’d have got a lot of advertisement out of it.’

Julia could not tell if he knew that she was in love with him. He never made love to her. He liked her society and when they found themselves with other people scarcely left her side. Sometimes they were asked to parties on Sunday, dinner at midday or a cold, sumptuous supper, and he seemed to think it natural that they should go together and come away together. He kissed her when he left her at her door, but he kissed her as he might have kissed the middle-aged woman with whom he had played Candida. He was friendly, good-humoured and kind, but it was distressingly clear that she was no more to him than a comrade. Yet she knew that he was not in love with anybody else. The love-letters that women wrote to him he read out to Julia with a chuckle, and when they sent him flowers he immediately gave them to her.

‘What blasted fools they are,’ he said. ‘What the devil do they think they’re going to get out of it?’

‘I shouldn’t have thought it very hard to guess that,’ said Julia dryly.

Although she knew he took these attentions so lightly she could not help feeling angry and jealous.

‘I should be a damned fool if I got myself mixed up with some woman in Middlepool. After all, they’re mostly flappers. Before I knew where I was I’d have some irate father coming along and saying, now you must marry the girl.’

She tried to find out whether he had had any adventures while he was playing with Benson’s company. She gathered that one or two of the girls had been rather inclined to make nuisances of themselves, but he thought it was a terrible mistake to get mixed up with any of the actresses a chap was playing with. It was bound to lead to trouble.

‘And you know how people gossip in a company. Everyone would know everything in twenty-four hours. And when you start a thing like that you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. I wasn’t risking anything.’

When he wanted a bit of fun he waited till they were within a reasonable distance of London and then he would race up to town and pick up a girl at the Globe Restaurant. Of course it was expensive, and when you came to think of it, it wasn’t really worth the money; besides, he played a lot of cricket in Benson’s company, and golf when he got the chance, and that sort of thing was rotten for the eye.

Julia told a thumping lie.

‘Jimmie always says I’d be a much better actress if I had an affair.’

‘Don’t you believe it. He’s just a dirty old man. With him, I suppose. I mean, you might just as well say that I’d give a better performance of Marchbanks if I wrote poetry.’

They talked so much together that it was inevitable for her at last to learn his views on marriage.

‘I think an actor’s a perfect fool to marry young. There are so many cases in which it absolutely ruins a chap’s career. Especially if he marries an actress. He becomes a star and then she’s a millstone round his neck. She insists on playing with him, and if he’s in management he has to give her leading parts, and if he engages someone else there are most frightful scenes. And of course, for an actress it’s insane. There’s always the chance of her having a baby and she may have to refuse a damned good part. She’s out of the public eye for months, and you know what the public is, unless they see you all the time they forget that you ever existed.’

Marriage? What did she care about marriage? Her heart melted within her when she looked into his deep, friendly eyes, and she shivered with delightful anguish when she considered his shining, russet hair. There was nothing that he could have asked her that she would not gladly have given him. The thought never entered his lovely head.

‘Of course he likes me,’ she said to herself. ‘He likes me better than anyone, he even admires me, but I don’t attract him that way.’

She did everything to seduce him except slip into bed with him, and she only did not do that because there was no opportunity. She began to fear that they knew one another too well for it to seem possible that their relations should change, and she reproached herself bitterly because she had not rushed to a climax when first they came in contact with one another. He had too sincere an affection for her now ever to become her lover. She found out when his birthday was and gave him a gold cigarette case which she knew was the thing he wanted more than anything in the world. It cost a good deal more than she could afford and he smilingly reproached her for her extravagance. He never dreamt what ecstatic pleasure it gave her to spend her money on him. When her birthday came along he gave her half a dozen pairs of silk stockings. She noticed at once that they were not of very good quality, poor lamb, he had not been able to bring himself to spring to that, but she was so touched that he should give her anything that she could not help crying.

‘What an emotional little thing you are,’ he said, but he was pleased and touched to see her tears.

She found his thrift rather an engaging trait. He could not bear to throw his money about. He was not exactly mean, but he was not generous. Once or twice at restaurants she thought he undertipped the waiter, but he paid no attention to her when she ventured to remonstrate. He gave the exact ten per cent, and when he could not make the exact sum to a penny asked the waiter for change.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ he quoted from Polonius.

When some member of the company, momentarily hard up, tried to borrow from him it was in vain. But he refused so frankly, with so much heartiness, that he did not affront.

‘My dear old boy, I’d love to lend you a quid, but I’m absolutely stony. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent at the end of the week.’

For some months Michael was so much occupied with his own parts that he failed to notice how good an actress Julia was. Of course he read the reviews, and their praise of Julia, but he read summarily, without paying much attention till he came to the remarks the critics made about him. He was pleased by their approval, but not cast down by their censure. He was too modest to resent an unfavourable criticism.

‘I suppose I was rotten,’ he would say ingenuously.

His most engaging trait was his good humour. He bore Jimmie Langton’s abuse with equanimity. When tempers grew frayed during a long rehearsal he remained serene. It was impossible to quarrel with him. One day he was sitting in front watching the rehearsal of an act in which he did not appear. It ended with a powerful and moving scene in which Julia had the opportunity to give a fine display of acting. When the stage was being set for the next act Julia came through the pass door and sat down beside Michael. He did not speak to her, but looked sternly in front of him. She threw him a surprised look. It was unlike him not to give her a smile and a friendly word. Then she saw that he was clenching his jaw to prevent its trembling and that his eyes were heavy with tears.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’

‘Don’t talk to me. You dirty little bitch, you’ve made me cry.’

‘Angel!’

The tears came to her own eyes and streamed down her face. She was so pleased, so flattered.

‘Oh, damn it,’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t help it.’

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dried his eyes.

(‘I love him, I love him, I love him.’)

Presently he blew his nose.

‘I’m beginning to feel better now. But, my God, you shattered me.’

‘It’s not a bad scene, is it?’

‘The scene be damned, it was you. You just wrung my heart. The critics are right, damn it, you’re an actress and no mistake.’

‘Have you only just discovered it?’

‘I knew you were pretty good, but I never knew you were as good as all that. You make the rest of us look like a piece of cheese. You’re going to be a star. Nothing can stop you.’

‘Well then, you shall be my leading man.’

‘Fat chance I’d have of that with a London manager.’

Julia had an inspiration.

‘Then you must go into management yourself and make me your leading lady.’

He paused. He was not a quick thinker and needed a little time to let a notion sink into his mind. He smiled.

‘You know that’s not half a bad idea.’

They talked it over at luncheon. Julia did most of the talking while he listened to her with absorbed interest.

‘Of course the only way to get decent parts consistently is to run one’s own theatre,’ he said. ‘I know that.’

The money was the difficulty. They discussed how much was the least they could start on. Michael thought five thousand pounds was the minimum. But how in heaven’s name could they raise a sum like that? Of course some of those Middlepool manufacturers were rolling in money, but you could hardly expect them to fork out five thousand pounds to start a couple of young actors who had only a local reputation. Besides, they were jealous of London.

‘You’ll have to find your rich old woman,’ said Julia gaily.

She only half believed all she had been saying, but it excited her to discuss a plan that would bring her into a close and constant relation with Michael. But he was being very serious.

‘I don’t believe one could hope to make a success in London unless one were pretty well known already. The thing to do would be to act there in other managements for three or four years first; one’s got to know the ropes. And the advantage of that would be that one would have had time to read plays. It would be madness to start in management unless one had at least three plays. One of them out to be a winner.’

‘Of course if one did that, one ought to make a point of acting together so that the public got accustomed to seeing the two names on the same bill.’

‘I don’t know that there’s much in that. The great thing is to have good, strong parts. There’s no doubt in my mind that it would be much easier to find backers if one had made a bit of a reputation in London.’

CHAPTER 4

IT WAS GETTING on for Easter, and Jimmie Langton always closed his theatre for Holy Week. Julia did not quite know what to do with herself; it seemed hardly worth while to go to Jersey. She was surprised to receive a letter one morning from Mrs Gosselyn, Michael’s mother, saying that it would give the Colonel and herself so much pleasure if she would come with Michael to spend the week at Cheltenham. When she showed the letter to Michael he beamed.

‘I asked her to invite you. I thought it would be more polite than if I just took you along.’

‘You are sweet. Of course I shall love to come.’

Her heart beat with delight. The prospect of spending a whole week with Michael was enchanting. It was just like his good nature to come to the rescue when he knew she was at a loose end. But she saw there was something he wanted to say, yet did not quite like to.

‘What is it?’

He gave a little laugh of embarrassment.

‘Well, dear, you know, my father’s rather old-fashioned, and there are some things he can’t be expected to understand. Of course I don’t want you to tell a lie or anything like that, but I think it would seem rather funny to him if he knew your father was a vet. When I wrote and asked if I could bring you down I said he was a doctor.’

‘Oh, that’s all right.’

Julia found the Colonel a much less alarming person than she had expected. He was thin and rather small, with a lined face and close-cropped white hair. His features had a worn distinction. He reminded you of a head on an old coin that had been in circulation too long. He was civil, but reserved. He was neither peppery nor tyrannical as Julia, from her knowledge of the stage, expected a colonel to be. She could not imagine him shouting out words of command in that courteous, rather cold voice. He had in point of fact retired with honorary rank after an entirely undistinguished career, and for many years had been content to work in his garden and play bridge at his club. He read The Times went to church on Sunday and accompanied his wife to tea-parties. Mrs Gosselyn was a tall, stoutish, elderly woman, much taller than her husband, who gave you the impression that she was always trying to diminish her height. She had the remains of good looks, so that you said to yourself that when young she must have been beautiful. She wore her hair parted in the middle with a bun on the nape of her neck. Her classic features and her size made her at first meeting somewhat imposing, but Julia quickly discovered that she was very shy. Her movements were stiff and awkward. She was dressed fussily, with a sort of old-fashioned richness which did not suit her. Julia, who was entirely without self-consciousness, found the elder woman’s deprecating attitude rather touching. She had never known an actress to speak to and did not quite know how to deal with the predicament in which she now found herself. The house was not at all grand, a small detached stucco house in a garden with a laurel hedge, and since the Gosselyns had been for some years in India there were great trays of brass ware and brass bowls, pieces of Indian embroidery and highly-carved Indian tables. It was cheap bazaar stuff, and you wondered how anyone had thought it worth bringing home.

Julia was quick-witted. It did not take her long to discover that the Colonel, notwithstanding his reserve, and Mrs Gosselyn, notwithstanding her shyness, were taking stock of her. The thought flashed through her mind that Michael had brought her down for his parents to inspect her. Why? There was only one possible reason, and when she thought of it her heart leaped. She saw that he was anxious for her to make a good impression. She felt instinctively that she must conceal the actress, and without effort, without deliberation, merely because she felt it would please, she played the part of the simple, modest, ingenuous girl who had lived a quiet country life. She walked round the garden with the Colonel and listened intelligently while he talked of peas and asparagus; she helped Mrs Gosselyn with the flowers and dusted the ornaments with which the drawing-room was crowded. She talked to her of Michael. She told her how cleverly he acted and how popular he was and she praised his looks. She saw that Mrs Gosselyn was very proud of him, and with a flash of intuition saw that it would please her if she let her see, with the utmost delicacy, as though she would have liked to keep it a secret but betrayed herself unwittingly, that she was head over ears in love with him.

‘Of course we hope he’ll do well,’ said Mrs Gosselyn. ‘We didn’t much like the idea of his going on the stage; you see, on both sides of the family, we’re army, but he was set on it.’

‘Yes, of course I see what you mean.’

‘I know it doesn’t mean so much as when I was a girl, but after all he was born a gentleman.’

‘Oh, but some very nice people go on the stage nowadays, you know. It’s not like in the old days.’

‘No, I suppose not. I’m so glad he brought you down here. I was a little nervous about it. I thought you’d be made-up and . . . perhaps a little loud. No one would dream you were on the stage.’

(‘I should damn well think not. Haven’t I been giving a perfect performance of the village maiden for the last forty-eight hours?’)

The Colonel began to make little jokes with her and sometimes he pinched her ear playfully.

‘Now you mustn’t flirt with me, Colonel,’ she cried, giving him a roguish, delicious glance. ‘Just because I’m an actress you think you can take liberties with me.’

‘George, George,’ smiled Mrs Gosselyn. And then to Julia: ‘He always was a terrible flirt.’

(‘Gosh, I’m going down like a barrel of oysters.’)

Mrs Gosselyn told her about India, how strange it was to have all those coloured servants, but how nice the society was, only army people and Indian civilians, but still it wasn’t like home, and how glad she was to get back to England.

They were to leave on Easter Monday because they were playing that night, and on Sunday evening after supper Colonel Gosselyn said he was going to his study to write letters; a minute or two later Mrs Gosselyn said she must go and see the cook. When they were left alone Michael, standing with his back to the fire, lit a cigarette.

‘I’m afraid it’s been very quiet down here; I hope you haven’t had an awfully dull time.’

‘It’s been heavenly.’

‘You’ve made a tremendous success with my people. They’ve taken an enormous fancy to you.’

‘God, I’ve worked for it,’ thought Julia, but aloud said: ‘How d’you know?’

‘Oh, I can see it. Father told me you were very ladylike, and not a bit like an actress, and mother says you’re so sensible.’

Julia looked down as though the extravagance of these compliments was almost more than she could bear. Michael came over and stood in front of her. The thought occurred to her that he looked like a handsome young footman applying for a situation. He was strangely nervous. Her heart thumped against her ribs.

‘Julia dear, will you marry me?’

For the last week she had asked herself whether or not he was going to propose to her, and now that he had at last done so, she was strangely confused.

‘Michael!’

‘Not immediately, I don’t mean. But when we’ve got our feet on the ladder. I know that you can act me off the stage, but we get on together like a house on fire, and when we do go into management I think we’d make a pretty good team. And you know I do like you most awfully. I mean, I’ve never met anyone who’s a patch on you.’

(‘The blasted fool, why does he talk all that rot? Doesn’t he know I’m crazy to marry him? Why doesn’t he kiss me, kiss me, kiss me? I wonder if I dare tell him I’m absolutely sick with love for him.’)

‘Michael, you’re so handsome. No one could refuse to marry you.’

‘Darling!’

(‘I’d better get up. He wouldn’t know how to sit down. God, that scene that Jimmie made him do over and over again!’)

She got on her feet and put up her face to his. He took her in his arms and kissed her lips.

‘I must tell mother.’

He broke away from her and went to the door.

‘Mother, mother!’

In a moment the Colonel and Mrs Gosselyn came in. They bore a look of happy expectancy.

(‘By God, it was a put-up job.’)

‘Mother, father, we’re engaged.’

Mrs Gosselyn began to cry. With her awkward, lumbering gait she came up to Julia, flung her arms round her, and sobbing, kissed her. The Colonel wrung his son’s hand in a manly way and releasing Julia from his wife’s embrace kissed her too. He was deeply moved. All this emotion worked on Julia and, though she smiled happily, the tears coursed down her cheeks. Michael watched the affecting scene with sympathy.

‘What d’you say to a bottle of pop to celebrate?’ he said. ‘It looks to me as though mother and Julia were thoroughly upset.’

‘The ladies, God bless ’em,’ said the Colonel when their glasses were filled.

CHAPTER 5

JULIA NOW WAS looking at the photograph of herself in her wedding-dress.

‘Christ, what a sight I looked.’

They decided to keep their engagement to themselves, and Julia told no one about it but Jimmie Langton, two or three girls in the company and her dresser. She vowed them to secrecy and could not understand how within forty-eight hours everyone in the theatre seemed to know all about it. Julia was divinely happy. She loved Michael more passionately than ever and would gladly have married him there and then, but his good sense prevailed. They were at present no more than a couple of provincial actors, and to start their conquest of London as a married couple would jeopardize their chances. Julia showed him as clearly as she knew how, and this was very clearly indeed, that she was quite willing to become his mistress, but this he refused. He was too honourable to take advantage of her.

‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,’ he quoted.

He felt sure that when they were married they would bitterly regret it if they had lived together before as man and wife. Julia was proud of his principles. He was a kind and affectionate lover, but in a very short while seemed to take her a trifle for granted; by his manner, friendly but casual, you might have thought they had been married for years. But he showed great good nature in allowing Julia to make love to him. She adored to sit cuddled up to him with his arm round her waist, her face against his, and it was heaven when she could press her eager mouth against his rather thin lips. Though when they sat side by side like that he preferred to talk of the parts they were studying or make plans for the future, he made her very happy. She never tired of praising his beauty. It was heavenly, when she told him how exquisite his nose was and how lovely his russet, curly hair, to feel his hold on her tighten a little and to see the tenderness in his eyes.

‘Darling, you’ll make me as vain as a peacock.’

‘It would be so silly to pretend you weren’t divinely handsome.’

Julia thought he was, and she said it because she liked saying it, but she said it also because she knew he liked to hear it. He had affection and admiration for her, he felt at ease with her, and he had confidence in her, but she was well aware that he was not in love with her. She consoled herself by thinking that he loved her as much as he was capable of loving, and she thought that when they were married, when they slept together, her own passion would excite an equal passion in him. Meanwhile she exercised all her tact and all her self-control. She knew she could not afford to bore him. She knew she must never let him feel that she was a burden or a responsibility. He might desert her for a game of golf, or to lunch with a casual acquaintance, she never let him see for a moment that she was hurt. And with an inkling that her success as an actress strengthened his feeling for her she worked like a dog to play well.

When they had been engaged for rather more than a year an American manager, looking for talent and having heard of Jimmie Langton’s repertory company, came to Middlepool and was greatly taken by Michael. He sent him round a note asking him to come to his hotel on the following afternoon. Michael, breathless with excitement, showed it to Julia; it could only mean that he was going to offer him a part. Her heart sank, but she pretended that she was as excited as he, and went with him next day to the hotel. She was to wait in the lobby while Michael saw the great man.

‘Wish me luck,’ he whispered, as he turned from her to enter the lift. ‘It’s almost too good to be true.’

Julia sat in a great leather armchair willing with all her might the American manager to offer a part that Michael would refuse or a salary that he felt it would be beneath his dignity to accept. Or alternatively that he should get Michael to read the part he had in view and come to the conclusion that he could not touch it. But when she saw Michael coming towards her half an hour later, his eyes bright and his step swinging, she knew he had clicked. For a moment she thought she was going to be sick, and when she forced on her face an eager, happy smile, she felt that her muscles were stiff and hard.

‘It’s all right. He says it’s a damned good part, a boy’s part, nineteen. Eight or ten weeks in New York and then on the road. It’s a safe forty weeks with John Drew. Two hundred and fifty dollars a week.’

‘Oh, darling, how wonderful for you.’

It was quite clear that he had accepted with alacrity. The thought of refusing had never even occurred to him.

‘And I – I,’ she thought, ‘if they’d offered me a thousand dollars a week I wouldn’t have gone if it meant being separated from Michael.’

Black despair seized her. She could do nothing. She must pretend to be as delighted as he was. He was too much excited to sit still and took her out into the crowded street to walk.

‘It’s a wonderful chance. Of course America’s expensive, but I ought to be able to live on fifty dollars a week at the outside, they say the Americans are awfully hospitable and I shall get a lot of free meals. I don’t see why I shouldn’t save eight thousand dollars in the forty weeks and that’s sixteen hundred pounds.’

(‘He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t care a damn about me. I hate him. I’d like to kill him. Blast that American manager.’)

‘And if he takes me on for a second year I’m to get three hundred. That means that in two years I’d have the best part of four thousand pounds. Almost enough to start management on.’

‘A second year!’ For a moment Julia lost control of herself and her voice was heavy with tears. ‘D’you mean to say you’ll be gone two years?’

‘Oh, I should come back next summer of course. They pay my fare back and I’d go and live at home so as not to spend any money.’

‘I don’t know how I’m going to get on without you.’

She said the words very brightly, so that they sounded polite, but somewhat casual.

‘Well, we can have a grand time together in the summer and you know a year, two years at the outside, well, it passes like a flash of lightning.’

Michael had been walking at random, but Julia without his noticing had guided him in the direction she wished, and now they arrived in front of the theatre. She stopped.

‘I’ll see you later. I’ve got to pop up and see Jimmie.’ His face fell.

‘You’re not going to leave me now! I must talk to somebody. I thought we might go and have a snack together before the show.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. Jimmie’s expecting me and you know what he is.’

Michael gave her his sweet, good-natured smile.

‘Oh, well, go on then. I’m not going to hold it up against you because for once you’ve let me down.’

He walked on and she went in by the stage door. Jimmie Langton had arranged himself a tiny flat under the roof to which you gained access through the balcony. She rang the bell of his front door and he opened it himself. He was surprised, but pleased, to see her.

‘Hulloa, Julia, come in.’

She walked past him without a word, and when they got into his sitting-room, untidy, littered with typescript plays, books and other rubbish, the remains of his frugal luncheon still on a tray by his desk, she turned and faced him. Her jaw was set and her eyes were frowning.

‘You devil!’

With a swift gesture she went up to him, seized him by his loose shirt collar with both hands and shook him. He struggled to get free of her, but she was strong and violent.

‘Stop it. Stop it.’

‘You devil, you swine, you filthy low-down cad.’

He took a swing and with his open hand gave her a great smack on the face. She instinctively loosened her grip on him and put her own hand up to her cheek, for he had hurt her. She burst out crying.

‘You brute. You rotten hound to hit a woman.’

‘You put that where the monkey put the nuts, dearie. Didn’t you know that when a woman hits me I always hit back?’

‘I didn’t hit you.’

‘You damned near throttled me.’

‘You deserved it. Oh, my God, I’d like to kill you.’

‘Now sit down, duckie, and I’ll give you a drop of Scotch to pull you together. And then you can tell me all about it.’

Julia looked round for a big chair into which she could conveniently sink.

‘Christ, the place is like a pig-sty. Why the hell don’t you get a charwoman in?’

With an angry gesture she swept the books on to the floor from an armchair, threw herself in it, and began to cry in earnest. He poured her out a stiff dose of whisky, added a drop of soda, and made her drink it.

‘Now what’s all this Tosca stuff about?’

‘Michael’s going to America.’

‘Is he?’

She wrenched herself away from the arm he had round her shoulder.

‘How could you? How could you?’

‘I had nothing to do with it.’

‘That’s a lie. I suppose you didn’t even know that filthy American manager was in Middlepool. Of course it’s your doing. You did it deliberately to separate us.’

‘Oh, dearie, you’re doing me an injustice. In point of fact I don’t mind telling you that I said to him he could have anyone in the company he liked with the one exception of Michael Gosselyn.’

Julia did not see the look in Jimmie’s eyes when he told her this, but if she had would have wondered why he was looking as pleased as if he had pulled off a very clever little trick.

‘Even me?’ she said.

‘I knew he didn’t want women. They’ve got plenty of their own. It’s men they want who know how to wear their clothes and don’t spit in the drawing room.’

‘Oh, Jimmie, don’t let Michael go. I can’t bear it.’

‘How can I prevent it? His contract’s up at the end of the season. It’s a wonderful chance for him.’

‘But I love him. I want him. Supposing he sees someone else in America. Supposing some American heiress falls in love with him.’

‘If he doesn’t love you any more than that I should have thought you’d be well rid of him.’

The remark revived Julia’s fury.

‘You rotten old eunuch, what do you know about love?’

‘These women,’ Jimmie sighed. ‘If you try to go to bed with them they say you’re a dirty old man, and if you don’t they say you’re a rotten old eunuch.’

‘Oh, you don’t understand. He’s so frightfully handsome, they’ll fall for him like a row of ninepins, and poor lamb, he’s so susceptible to flattery. Anything can happen in two years.’

‘What’s this about two years?’

‘If he’s a success he’s to stay another year.’

‘Well, don’t worry your head about that. He’ll be back at the end of the season and back for good. That manager only saw him in “Candida”. It’s the only part he’s halfway decent in. Take my word for it, it won’t be long before they find out they’ve been sold a pup. He’s going to be a flop.’

‘What do you know about acting?’

‘Everything.’

‘I’d like to scratch your eyes out.’

‘I warn you that if you attempt to touch me I shan’t give you a little bit of a slap, I shall give you such a biff on the jaw that you won’t be able to eat in comfort for a week.’

‘By God, I believe you’d do it. Do you call yourself a gentleman?’

‘Not even when I’m drunk.’

Julia giggled, and Jimmie felt the worst of the scene was over.

‘Now you know just as well as I do that you can act him off his head. I tell you, you’re going to be the greatest actress since Mrs Kendal. What do you want to go and hamper yourself with a man who’ll always be a millstone round your neck? You want to go into management; he’ll want to play opposite you. He’ll never be good enough, my dear.’

‘He’s got looks. I can carry him.’

‘You’ve got a pretty good opinion of yourself, haven’t you? But you’re wrong. If you want to make a success you can’t afford to have a leading man who’s not up to the mark.’

‘I don’t care. I’d rather marry him and be a failure than be a success and married to somebody else.’

‘Are you a virgin?’

Julia giggled again.

‘I don’t know that it’s any business of yours, but in point of fact I am.’

‘I thought you were. Well, unless it means something to you, why don’t you go over to Paris with him for a fortnight when we close? He won’t be sailing till August. It might get him out of your system.’

‘Oh, he wouldn’t. He’s not that sort of man. You see, he’s by way of being a gentleman.’

‘Even the upper classes propagate their species.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Julia haughtily.

‘I bet you don’t either.’

Julia did not condescend to reply. She was really very unhappy.

‘I can’t live without him, I tell you. What am I to do with myself when he’s away?’

‘Stay on with me. I’ll give you a contract for another year. I’ve got a lot of new parts I want to give you and I’ve got a juvenile in my eye who’s a find. You’ll be surprised how much easier you’ll find it when you’ve got a chap opposite you who’ll really give you something. You can have twelve pounds a week.’

Julia went up to him and stared into his eyes searchingly.

‘Have you done all this to get me to stay on for another year? Have you broken my heart and ruined my whole life just to keep me in your rotten theatre?’

‘I swear I haven’t. I like you and I admire you. And we’ve done better business the last two years than we’ve ever done before. But damn it, I wouldn’t play you a dirty trick like that.’

‘You liar, you filthy liar.’

‘I swear it’s the truth.’

‘Prove it then,’ she said violently.

‘How can I prove it? You know I’m decent really.’

‘Give me fifteen pounds a week and I’ll believe you.’

‘Fifteen pounds a week? You know what our takings are. How can I? Oh well, all right. But I shall have to pay three pounds out of my own pocket.’

‘A fat lot I care.’

CHAPTER 6

AFTER A FORTNIGHT of rehearsals, Michael was thrown out of the part for which he had been engaged, and for three or four weeks was left to kick his heels about till something else could be found for him. He opened in due course in a play that ran less than a month in New York. It was sent on the road; but languished and was withdrawn. After another wait he was given a part in a costume play where his good looks shone to such advantage that his indifferent acting was little noticed, and in this he finished the season. There was no talk of renewing his contract. Indeed the manager who had engaged him was caustic in his comments.

‘Gee, I’d give something to get even with that fellow Langton, the son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘He knew what he was doing all right when he landed me with that stick.’

Julia wrote to Michael constantly, pages and pages of love and gossip, while he answered once a week, four pages exactly in a neat, precise hand. He always ended up by sending her his best love and signing himself hers very affectionately, but the rest of his letter was more informative than passionate. Yet she awaited its coming in an agony of impatience and read it over and over again. Though he wrote cheerfully, saying little about the theatre except that the parts they gave him were rotten and the plays in which he was expected to act beneath contempt, news travels in the theatrical world, and Julia knew that he had not made good.

‘I suppose it’s beastly of me,’ she thought, ‘but thank God, thank God.’

When he announced the date of his sailing she could not contain her joy. She got Jimmie so to arrange his programme that she might go and meet him at Liverpool.

‘If the boat comes in late I shall probably stay the night,’ she told Jimmie.

He smiled ironically.

‘I suppose you think that in the excitement of homecoming you may work the trick.’

‘What a beastly little man you are.’

‘Come off it, dear. My advice to you is, get him a bit tight and then lock yourself in a room with him and tell him you won’t let him out till he’s made a dishonest woman of you.’

But when she was starting he came to the station with her. As she was getting into the carriage he took her hand and patted it.

‘Feeling nervous, dear?’

‘Oh, Jimmie dear, wild with happiness and sick with anxiety.’

‘Well, good luck to you. And don’t forget you’re much too good for him. You’re young and pretty and you’re the greatest actress in England.’

When the train steamed out Jimmie went to the station bar and had a whisky and soda. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be,’ he sighed. But Julia stood up in the empty carriage and looked at herself in the glass.

‘Mouth too large, face too puddingy, nose too fleshy. Thank God, I’ve got good eyes and good legs. Exquisite legs. I wonder if I’ve got too much make-up on. He doesn’t like make-up off the stage. I look bloody without rouge. My eyelashes are all right. Damn it all, I don’t look so bad.’

Uncertain till the last moment whether Jimmie would allow her to go, Julia had not been able to let Michael know that she was meeting him. He was surprised and frankly delighted to see her. His beautiful eyes beamed with pleasure.

‘You’re more lovely than ever,’ she said.

‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ he laughed, squeezing her arm affectionately. ‘You haven’t got to go back till after dinner, have you?’

‘I haven’t got to go back till to-morrow. I’ve taken a couple of rooms at the Adelphi, so that we can have a real talk.’

‘The Adelphi’s a bit grand, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, well, you don’t come back from America every day. Damn the expense.’

‘Extravagant little thing, aren’t you? I didn’t know when we’d dock, so I told my people I’d wire when I was getting down to Cheltenham. I’ll tell them I’ll be coming along to-morrow.’

When they got to the hotel Michael came to Julia’s room, at her suggestion, so that they could talk in peace and quiet. She sat on his knees, with her arm round his neck, her cheek against his.

‘Oh, it’s so good to be home again,’ she sighed.

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ he said, not understanding that she referred to his arms and not to his arrival.

‘D’you still like me?’

‘Rather.’

She kissed him fondly.

‘Oh, you don’t know how I’ve missed you.’

‘I was an awful flop in America,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you in my letters, because I thought it would only worry you. They thought me rotten.’

‘Michael,’ she cried, as though she could not believe him.

‘The fact is, I suppose, I’m too English. They don’t want me another year. I didn’t think they did, but just as a matter of form I asked them if they were going to exercise their option and they said no, not at any price.’

Julia was silent. She looked deeply concerned, but her heart was beating with exultation.

‘I honestly don’t care, you know. I didn’t like America. It’s a smack in the eye of course, it’s no good denying that, but the only thing is to grin and bear it. If you only knew the people one has to deal with! Why, compared with some of them, Jimmie Langton’s a great gentleman. Even if they had wanted me to stay I should have refused.’

Though he put a brave face on it, Julia felt that he was deeply mortified. He must have had to put up with a good deal of unpleasantness. She hated him to have been made unhappy, but, oh, she was so relieved.

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked quietly.

‘Well, I shall go home for a bit and think things over. Then I shall go to London and see if I can’t get a part.’

She knew that it was no good suggesting that he should come back to Middlepool. Jimmie Langton would not have him.

‘You wouldn’t like to come with me, I suppose?’

Julia could hardly believe her ears.

‘Me? Darling, you know I’d go anywhere in the world with you.’

‘Your contract’s up at the end of this season, and if you want to get anywhere you’ve got to make a stab at London soon. I saved every bob I could in America, they all called me a tight-wad but I just let them talk, I’ve brought back between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds.’

‘Michael, how on earth can you have done that?’

‘I didn’t give much away, you know,’ he smiled happily. ‘Of course it’s not enough to start management on, but it’s enough to get married on, I mean we’d have something to fall back on if we didn’t get parts right away or happened to be out of a job for a few months.’

It took Julia a second or two to understand what he meant.

‘D’you mean to say, get married now?’

‘Of course it’s a risk, without anything in prospect, but one has to take a risk sometimes.’

Julia took his head in both her hands and pressed his lips with hers. Then she gave a sigh.

‘Darling, you’re wonderful and you’re as beautiful as a Greek god, but you’re the biggest damned fool I’ve ever known in my life.’

They went to a theatre that night and at supper drank champagne to celebrate their reunion and toast their future. When Michael accompanied her to her room she held up her face to his.

‘D’you want me to say good-night to you in the passage? I’ll just come in for a minute.’

‘Better not, darling,’ she said with quiet dignity.

She felt like a high-born damsel, with all the traditions of a great and ancient family to keep up; her purity was a pearl of great price; she also felt that she was making a wonderfully good impression: of course he was a great gentleman and ‘damn it all’ it behoved her to be a great lady. She was so pleased with her performance that when she had got into her room and somewhat noisily locked the door, she paraded up and down bowing right and left graciously to her obsequious retainers. She stretched out her lily white hand for the trembling old steward to kiss (as a baby he had often dandled her on his knee), and when he pressed it with his pallid lips she felt something fall upon it. A tear.

CHAPTER 7

THE FIRST YEAR of their marriage would have been stormy except for Michael’s placidity. It needed the excitement of getting a part or a first night, the gaiety of a party where he had drunk several glasses of champagne, to turn his practical mind to thoughts of love. No flattery, no allurements, could tempt him when he had an engagement next day for which he had to keep his brain clear or a round of golf for which he needed a steady eye. Julia made him frantic scenes. She was jealous of his friends at the Green Room Club, jealous of the games that took him away from her, and jealous of the men’s luncheons he went to under the pretext that he must cultivate people who might be useful to them. It infuriated her that when she worked herself up into a passion of tears he should sit there quite calmly, with his hands crossed and a good-humoured smile on his handsome face, as though she were merely making herself ridiculous.

‘You don’t think I’m running after any other woman, do you?’ he asked.

‘How do I know? It’s quite obvious that you don’t care two straws for me.’

‘You know you’re the only woman in the world for me.’

‘My God!’

‘I don’t know what you want.’

‘I want love. I thought I’d married the handsomest man in England and I’ve married a tailor’s dummy.’

‘Don’t be so silly. I’m just the ordinary normal Englishman. I’m not an Italian organ-grinder.’

She swept up and down the room. They had a small flat at Buckingham Gate and there was not much space, but she did her best. She threw up her hands to heaven.

‘I might be squint-eyed and hump-backed. I might be fifty. Am I so unattractive as all that? It’s so humiliating to have to beg for love. Misery, misery.’

‘That was a good movement, dear. As if you were throwing a cricket ball. Remember that.’

She gave him a look of scorn.

‘That’s all you can think of. My heart is breaking, and you can talk of a movement that I made quite accidentally.’

But he saw by the expression of her face that she was registering it in her memory, and he knew that when the occasion arose she would make effective use of it.

‘After all love isn’t everything. It’s all very well at its proper time and in its proper place. We had a lot of fun on our honeymoon, that’s what a honeymoon’s for, but now we’ve got to get down to work.’

They had been lucky. They had managed to get fairly good parts together in a play that had proved a success. Julia had one good acting scene in which she had brought down the house, and Michael’s astonishing beauty had made a sensation. Michael with his gentlemanly push, with his breezy good-nature, had got them both a lot of publicity and their photographs appeared in the illustrated papers. They were asked to a number of parties and Michael, notwithstanding his thriftiness, did not hesitate to spend money on entertaining people who might be of service. Julia was impressed by his lavishness on these occasions. An actor-manager offered Julia the leading part in his next play, and though there was no part for Michael and she was anxious to refuse it, he would not let her. He said they could not afford to let sentiment stand in the way of business. He eventually got a part in a costume play.

They were both acting when the war broke out. To Julia’s pride and anguish Michael enlisted at once, but with the help of his father, one of whose old brother officers was an important personage at the War Office, he very soon got a commission. When he went out to France Julia bitterly regretted the reproaches she had so often heaped upon him, and made up her mind that if he were killed she would commit suicide. She wanted to become a nurse so that she could go out to France too and at least be on the same soil as he, but he made her understand that patriotism demanded that she should go on acting, and she could not resist what might very well be his dying request. Michael thoroughly enjoyed the war. He was popular in the regimental mess, and the officers of the old army accepted him almost at once, even though he was an actor, as one of themselves. It was as though the family of soldiers from which he was born had set a seal on him so that he fell instinctively into the manner and way of thinking of the professional soldier. He had tact and a pleasant manner, and he knew how to pull strings adroitly; it was inevitable that he should get on the staff of some general. He showed himself possessed of considerable organizing capacity and the last three years of the war he passed at G.H.Q. He ended it as a major, with the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour.

Meanwhile Julia had been playing a succession of important parts and was recognized as the best of the younger actresses. Throughout the war the theatre was very prosperous, and she profited by being seen in plays that had long runs. Salaries went up, and with Michael to advise her she was able to extort eighty pounds a week from reluctant managers. Michael came over to England on his leaves and Julia was divinely happy. Though he was in no more danger than if he had been sheep-farming in New Zealand, she acted as though the brief periods he spent with her were the last days the doomed man would ever enjoy on earth. She treated him as though he had just come from the horror of the trenches and was tender, considerate, and unexacting.

It was just before the end of the war that she fell out of love with him.

She was pregnant at the time. Michael had judged it imprudent to have a baby just then, but she was nearly thirty and thought that if they were going to have one at all they ought to delay no longer; she was so well established on the stage that she could afford not to appear for a few months, and with the possibility that Michael might be killed at any moment – it was true he said he was as safe as a house, he only said that to reassure her, and even generals were killed sometimes – if she was to go on living she must have a child by him. The baby was expected at the end of the year. She looked forward to Michael’s next leave as she had never done before. She was feeling very well, but she had a great yearning to feel his arms around her, she felt a little lost, a little helpless, and she wanted his protective strength. He came, looking wonderfully handsome in his well-cut uniform, with the red tabs and the crown on his shoulder-straps. He had filled out a good deal as the result of the hardships of G.H.Q. and his skin was tanned. With his close-cropped hair, breezy manner and military carriage he looked every inch a soldier. He was in great spirits, not only because he was home for a few days, but because the end of the war was in sight. He meant to get out of the army as quickly as possible. What was the good of having a bit of influence if you didn’t use it? So many young men had left the stage, either from patriotism or because life was made intolerable for them by the patriotic who stayed at home, and finally owing to conscription, that leading parts had been in the hands either of people who were inapt for military service or those who had been so badly wounded that they had got their discharge. There was a wonderful opening, and Michael saw that if he were available quickly he could get his choice of parts. When he had recalled himself to the recollection of the public they could look about for a theatre, and with the reputation Julia had now acquired it would be safe to start in management.

They talked late into the night and then they went to bed. She cuddled up to him voluptuously and he put his arms round her. After three months of abstinence he was amorous.

‘You’re the most wonderful little wife,’ he whispered.

He pressed his mouth on hers. She was filled on a sudden with a faint disgust. She had to resist an inclination to push him away. Before, to her passionate nostrils his body, his young beautiful body, had seemed to have a perfume of flowers and honey, and this had been one of the things that had most enchained her to him, but now in some strange way it had left him. She realized that he no longer smelt like a youth, he smelt like a man. She felt a little sick. She could not respond to his ardour, she was eager that he should get his desire satisfied quickly, turn over on his side, and go to sleep. For long she lay awake. She was dismayed. Her heart sank because she knew she had lost something that was infinitely precious to her, and pitying herself she was inclined to cry; but at the same time she was filled with a sense of triumph, it seemed a revenge that she enjoyed for the unhappiness he had caused her; she was free of the bondage in which her senses had held her to him and she exulted. Now she could deal with him on equal terms. She stretched her legs out in bed and sighed with relief.

‘By God, it’s grand to be one’s own mistress.’

They had breakfast in their room, Julia in bed and Michael seated at a little table by her side. She looked at him while he read the paper. Was it possible that three months had made so much difference in him, or was it merely that for years she had still seen him with the eyes that had seen him when he came on the stage to rehearse at Middlepool in the glorious beauty of his youth and she had been stricken as with a mortal sickness? He was wonderfully handsome still, after all he was only thirty-six, but he was not a boy any more; with his close-cropped hair and weather-beaten skin, little lines beginning to mark the smoothness of his forehead and to show under his eyes, he was definitely a man. He had lost his coltish grace and his movements were set. Each difference was very small, but taken altogether they amounted, in her shrewd, calculating eyes, to all the difference in the world. He was a middle-aged man.

They still lived in the small flat that they had taken when first they came to London. Though Julia had been for some time earning a good income it had not seemed worth while to move while Michael was on active service, but now that a baby was coming the flat was obviously too small. Julia had found a house in Regent’s Park that she liked very much. She wanted to be settled down in good time for her confinement.

The house faced the gardens. Above the drawing-room floor were two bedrooms and above these, two rooms that could be made into a day and a night nursery. Michael was pleased with everything; even the price seemed to him reasonable. Julia had, during the last four years, been earning so much more money than he that she had offered to furnish the house herself. They stood in one of the bedrooms.

‘I can make do with a good deal of what we’ve got for my bedroom,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a nice suite at Maple’s.’

‘I wouldn’t go to much expense,’ he smiled. ‘I don’t suppose I shall use it much, you know.’

He liked to share a bed with her. Though not passionate he was affectionate, and he had an animal desire to feel her body against his. For long it had been her greatest comfort. The thought now filled her with irritation.

‘Oh, I don’t think there should be any more nonsense till after the baby’s born. Until all that’s over and done with I’m going to make you sleep by yourself.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. If you think it’s better for the kid . . .’

CHAPTER 8

MICHAEL GOT HIMSELF demobbed the moment the war was finished and stepped straight into a part. He returned to the stage a much better actor than he left it. The breeziness he had acquired in the army was effective. He was a well set-up, normal, high-spirited fellow, with a ready smile and a hearty laugh. He was well suited to drawing-room comedy. His light voice gave a peculiar effect to a flippant line, and though he never managed to make love convincingly he could carry off a chaffing love scene, making a proposal as if it were rather a joke, or a declaration as though he were laughing at himself, in a manner that the audience found engaging. He never attempted to play anyone but himself. He specialized in men about town, gentlemanly gamblers, guardsmen and young scamps with a good side to them. Managers liked him. He worked hard and was amenable to direction. So long as he could get work he didn’t mind much what sort of part it was. He stuck out for the salary he thought he was worth, but if he couldn’t get it was prepared to take less rather than be idle.

He was making his plans carefully. During the winter that followed the end of the war there was an epidemic of influenza. His father and mother died. He inherited nearly four thousand pounds, and this with his own savings and Julia’s brought up their joint capital to seven thousand. But the rent of theatres had gone up enormously, the salaries of actors and the wages of stage-hands had increased, so that the expense of running a theatre was very much greater than it had been before the war. A sum that would then have been amply sufficient to start management on was now inadequate. The only thing was to find some rich man to go in with them so that a failure or two to begin with would not drive them from the field. It was said that you could always find a mug in the city to write a fat cheque for the production of a play, but when you came down to business you discovered that the main condition was that the leading part should be played by some pretty lady in whom he was interested. Years before, Michael and Julia had often joked about the rich old woman who would fall in love with him and set him up in management. He had long since learnt that no rich old woman was to be found to set up in management a young actor whose wife was an actress to whom he was perfectly faithful. In the end the money was found by a rich woman, and not an old one either, but who was interested not in him but in Julia.

Mrs de Vries was a widow. She was a short stout woman with a fine Jewish nose and fine Jewish eyes, a great deal of energy, a manner at once effusive and timid, and a somewhat virile air. She had a passion for the stage. When Julia and Michael had decided to try their luck in London Jimmie Langton, to whose rescue she had sometimes come when it looked as though he would be forced to close his repertory theatre, had written to her asking her to do what she could for them. She had seen Julia act in Middlepool. She gave parties so that the young actors might get to know managers, and asked them to stay at her grand house near Guildford where they enjoyed a luxury they had never dreamt of. She did not much like Michael. Julia accepted the flowers with which Dolly de Vries filled her flat and her dressing-room, she was properly delighted with the presents she gave her, bags, vanity cases, strings of beads in semi-precious stones, brooches; but appeared to be unconscious that Dolly’s generosity was due to anything but admiration for her talent. When Michael went away to the war Dolly pressed her to come and live in her house in Montagu Square, but Julia, with protestations of extravagant gratitude, refused in such a way that Dolly, with a sigh and a tear, could only admire her the more. When Roger was born Julia asked her to be his godmother.

For some time Michael had been turning over in his mind the possibility that Dolly de Vries might put up the money they needed, but he was shrewd enough to know that while she might do it for Julia she would not do it for him. Julia refused to approach her.

‘She’s already been so kind to us I really couldn’t ask her, and it would be so humiliating if she refused.’

‘It’s a good gamble, and even if she lost the money she wouldn’t feel it. I’m quite sure you could get round her if you tried.’

Julia was pretty sure she could too. Michael was very simple-minded in some ways; she did not feel called upon to point out to him the obvious facts.

But he was not a man who let a thing drop when he had set his mind to it. They were going to Guildford to spend the week-end with Dolly, and were driving down after the Saturday night’s performance in the new car that Julia had given Michael for his birthday. It was a warm beautiful night. Michael had bought options, though it wrung his heart to write the cheques, on three plays that they both liked, and he had heard of a theatre that they could get on reasonable terms. Everything was ready for the venture except the capital. He urged Julia to seize the opportunity that the week-end presented.

‘Ask her yourself then,’ said Julia impatiently. ‘I tell you, I’m not going to.’

‘She wouldn’t do it for me. You can twist her round your little finger.’

‘We know a thing or two about financing plays now. People finance plays for two reasons, either because they want notoriety, or because they’re in love with someone. A lot of people talk about art, but you don’t often find them paying out hard cash unless they’re going to get something out of it for themselves.’

‘Well, we’ll give Dolly all the notoriety she wants.’

‘That doesn’t happen to be what she’s after.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

Light dawned on him, and he was so surprised that he slowed down. Was it possible that what Julia suspected was true? He had never even thought that Dolly liked him much, and as for supposing she was in love with him – why, the notion had never crossed his mind. Of course Julia had sharp eyes, not much got by her, but she was a jealous little thing, she was always thinking women were making a dead set at him. It was true that Dolly had given him a pair of cuff links at Christmas, but he thought that was only so that he shouldn’t feel left out in the cold because she had given Julia a brooch that much have cost at least two hundred pounds. That might be only her cunning. Well, he could honestly say he’d never done a thing to make her think there was anything doing. Julia giggled.

‘No, darling, it’s not you she’s in love with.’

It was disconcerting the way Julia knew what he was thinking. You couldn’t hide a thing from that woman.

‘Then why did you put the idea into my head? I wish to goodness you’d express yourself so that a fellow can understand.’

Julia did.

‘I never heard such nonsense,’ he cried. ‘What a filthy mind you’ve got, Julia!’

‘Come off it, dear.’

‘I don’t believe there’s a word of truth in it. After all I’ve got eyes in my head. Do you mean to say I shouldn’t have noticed it?’ He was more irritable than she had ever known him. ‘And even if it were true I suppose you can take care of yourself. It’s a chance in a thousand, and I think it would be madness not to take it.’

‘Claudio and Isabella in “Measure for Measure.”’

‘That’s a rotten thing to say, Julia. God damn it, I am a gentleman.’

‘Nemo me impune lacessit.’

They drove the rest of the journey in stormy silence. Mrs de Vries was waiting up for them.

‘I didn’t want to go to bed till I’d seen you,’ she said as she folded Julia in her arms and kissed her on both cheeks. She gave Michael a brisk handshake.

Julia spent a happy morning in bed reading the Sunday papers. She read first the theatrical news, then the gossip columns, after that the woman’s pages, and finally cast an eye over the head-lines of the world’s news. The book reviews she ignored; she could never understand why so much space was wasted on them. Michael, who had the room next hers, had come in to say good morning, and then gone out into the garden. Presently there was a timid little knock at her door and Dolly came in. Her great black eyes were shining. She sat on the bed and took Julia’s hand.

‘Darling, I’ve been talking to Michael. I’m going to put up the money to start you in management.’

Julia’s heart gave a sudden beat.

‘Oh, you mustn’t. Michael shouldn’t have asked you. I won’t have it. You’ve been far, far too kind to us already.’

Dolly leant over and kissed Julia on the lips. Her voice was lower than usual and there was a little tremor in it.

‘Oh, my love, don’t you know there isn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t do for you? It’ll be so wonderful; it’ll bring us so close together and I shall be so proud of you.’

They heard Michael come whistling along the passage, and when he came into the room Dolly turned to him with her great eyes misty with tears.

‘I’ve just told her.’

He was brimming over with excitement.

‘What a grand woman!’ He sat down on the other side of the bed and took Julia’s disengaged hand. ‘What d’you say, Julia?’

She gave him a little reflective look.

‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Molière.’

As soon as the deed of partnership had been signed and Michael had got his theatre booked for the autumn he engaged a publicity agent. Paragraphs were sent to the papers announcing the new venture and Michael and the publicity agent prepared interviews for him and Julia to give to the Press. Photographs of them, singly and together, with and without Roger, appeared in the weeklies. The domestic note was worked for all it was worth. They could not quite make up their minds which of the three plays they had it would be best to start with. Then one afternoon when Julia was sitting in her bedroom reading a novel, Michael came in with a manuscript in his hand.

‘Look here, I want you to read this play at once. It’s just come in from an agent. I think it’s a knockout. Only we’ve got to give an answer right away.’

Julia put down her novel.

‘I’ll read it now.’

‘I shall be downstairs. Let me know when you’ve finished and I’ll come up and talk it over with you. It’s got a wonderful part for you.’

Julia read quickly, skimming over the scenes in which she was not concerned, but the principal woman’s part, the part of course she would play, with concentration. When she had turned the last page she rang the bell and asked her maid (who was also her dresser) to tell Michael she was ready for him.

‘Well, what d’you think?’

‘The play’s all right. I don’t see how it can fail to be a success.’

He caught something doubtful in her tone.

‘What’s wrong then? The part’s wonderful. I mean, it’s the sort of thing that you can do better than anyone in the world. There’s a lot of comedy and all the emotion you want.’

‘It’s a wonderful part, I know that; it’s the man’s part.’

‘Well, that’s a damned good part too.’

‘I know; but he’s fifty, and if you make him younger you take all the point out of the play. You don’t want to take the part of a middle-aged man.’

‘But I wasn’t thinking of playing that. There’s only one man for that. Monte Vernon. And we can get him. I’ll play George.’

‘But that’s a tiny part. You can’t play that.’

‘Why not?’

‘But I thought the point of going into management was that we should both play leads.’

‘Oh, I don’t care a hang about that. As long as we can find plays with star parts for you I don’t matter. Perhaps in the next play there’ll be a good part for me too.’

Julia leant back in her chair, and the ready tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

‘Oh, what a beast I am.’

He smiled, and his smile was as charming as ever. He came over to her and kneeling by her side put his arms round her.

‘Lor Lumme, what’s the matter with the old lady now?’

When she looked at him now she wondered what there was in him that had ever aroused in her such a frenzy of passion. The thought of having sexual relations with him nauseated her. Fortunately he found himself very comfortable in the bedroom she had furnished for him. He was not a man to whom sex was important, and he was relieved when he discovered that Julia no longer made any demands on him. He thought with satisfaction that the birth of the baby had calmed her down, he was bound to say that he had thought it might, and he was only sorry they had not had one before. When he had two or three times, more out of amiability than out of desire, suggested that they should resume marital relations and she had made excuses, either that she was tired, not very well, or had two performances next day, to say nothing of a fitting in the morning, he accepted the situation with equanimity. Julia was much easier to get on with, she never made scenes any more, and he was happier than he had ever been before. It was a damned satisfactory marriage he had made, and when he looked at other people’s marriages he couldn’t help seeing he was one of the lucky ones. Julia was a damned good sort and clever, as clever as a bagful of monkeys; you could talk to her about anything in the world. The best companion a chap ever had, my boy. He didn’t mind saying this, he’d rather spend a day alone with her than play a round of golf.

Julia was surprised to discover in herself a strange feeling of pity for him because she no longer loved him. She was a kindly woman, and she realized that it would be a bitter blow to his pride if he ever had an inkling how little he meant to her. She continued to flatter him. She noticed that for long now he had come to listen complacently to her praise of his exquisite nose and beautiful eyes. She got a little private amusement by seeing how much he could swallow. She laid it on with a trowel. But now she looked more often at his straight thin-lipped mouth. It grew meaner as he grew older, and by the time he was an old man it would be no more than a cold hard line. His thrift, which in the early days had seemed an amusing, rather touching trait, now revolted her. When people were in trouble, and on the stage they too often are, they got sympathy and kind friendly words from Michael, but very little cash. He looked upon himself as devilish generous when he parted with a guinea, and a five-pound note was to him the extreme of lavishness. He had soon discovered that Julia ran the house extravagantly, and insisting that he wanted to save her trouble took the matter in his own hands. After that nothing was wasted. Every penny was accounted for. Julia wondered why servants stayed with them. They did because Michael was so nice to them. With his hearty, jolly, affable manner he made them anxious to please him, and the cook shared his satisfaction when she had found a butcher from whom they could get meat a penny a pound cheaper than elsewhere. Julia could not but laugh when she thought how strangely his passion for economy contrasted with the devil-may-care, extravagant creatures he portrayed so well on the stage. She had often thought that he was incapable of a generous impulse; and now, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he was prepared to stand aside so that she might have her chance. She was too deeply moved to speak. She reproached herself bitterly for all the unkind things she had for so long been thinking of him.

CHAPTER 9

THEY PUT ON the play, and it was a success. After that they continued to produce plays year after year. Because Michael ran the theatre with the method and thrift with which he ran his home they lost little over the failures, which of course they sometimes had, and made every possible penny out of their successes. Michael flattered himself that there was not a management in London where less money was spent on the productions. He exercised great ingenuity in disguising old sets so that they looked new, and by ringing the changes on the furniture that he gradually collected in the store-room saved the expense of hiring. They gained the reputation of being an enterprising management because Michael in order not to pay the high royalties of well-known authors was always willing to give an unknown one a trial. He sought out actors who had never been given a chance and whose salaries were small. He thus made some very profitable discoveries.

When they had been in management for three years they were sufficiently well established for Michael to be able to borrow from the bank enough money to buy the lease of a theatre that had just been built. After much discussion they decided to call it the Siddons Theatre. They opened with a failure and this was succeeded by another. Julia was frightened and discouraged. She thought that the theatre was unlucky and that the public were getting sick of her. It was then that Michael showed himself at his best. He was unperturbed.

‘In this business you have to take the rough with the smooth. You’re the best actress in England. There are only three people who bring money into the theatre regardless of the play, and you’re one of them. We’ve had a couple of duds. The next play’s bound to be all right and then we shall get back all we’ve lost and a packet into the bargain.’

As soon as Michael had felt himself safe he had tried to buy Dolly de Vries out, but she would not listen to his persuasion and was indifferent to his coldness. For once his cunning found its match. Dolly saw no reason to sell out an investment that seemed sound, and her half share in the partnership kept her in close touch with Julia. But now with great courage he made another effort to get rid of her. Dolly indignantly refused to desert them when they were in difficulties, and he gave it up as a bad job. He consoled himself by thinking that Dolly might leave Roger, her godson, a great deal of money. She had no one belonging to her but nephews in South Africa, and you could not look at her without suspecting that she had high blood pressure. Meanwhile it was convenient to have the house near Guildford to go to whenever they wished. It saved the expense of having a country house of their own. The third play was a winner, and Michael did not hesitate to point out how right he had been. He spoke as though he was directly responsible for its success. Julia could almost have wished that it had failed like the others in order to take him down a peg or two. For his conceit was outrageous. Of course you had to admit that he had a sort of cleverness, shrewdness rather, but he was not nearly so clever as he thought himself. There was nothing in which he did not think that he knew better than anybody else.

As time went on he began to act less frequently. He found himself much more interested in management.

‘I want to run my theatre in as businesslike a way as a city office,’ he said.

And he felt that he could more profitably spend his evenings, when Julia was acting, by going to outlying theatres and trying to find talent. He kept a little book in which he made a note for every actor who seemed to show promise. Then he had taken to directing. It had always grizzled him that directors should ask so much money for rehearsing a play, and of late some of them had even insisted on a percentage on the gross. At last an occasion came when the two directors Julia liked best were engaged and the only other one she trusted was acting and thus could not give them all his time.

‘I’ve got a good mind to have a shot at it myself,’ said Michael.

Julia was doubtful. He had no fantasy and his ideas were commonplace. She was not sure that he would have authority over the cast. But the only available director demanded a fee that they both thought exorbitant and there was nothing left but to let Michael try. He made a much better job of it than Julia expected. He was thorough; he worked hard. Julia, strangely enough, felt he was getting more out of her than any other director had done. He knew what she was capable of, and, familiar with her every inflection, every glance of her wonderful eyes, every graceful movement of her body, he was able to give her suggestions out of which she managed to build up the best performance of her career. With the cast he was at once conciliatory and exacting. When tempers were frayed his good humour, his real kindliness, smoothed things over. After that there was no question but that he should continue to direct their plays. Authors liked him because, being unimaginative, he was forced to let the plays speak for themselves and often not being quite sure what they meant he was obliged to listen to them.

Julia was now a rich woman. She could not but admit that Michael was as careful of her money as of his own. He watched her investments and was as pleased when he could sell stocks at a profit on her account as if he had made the money for himself. He put her down for a very large salary, and was proud to be able to say that she was the most highly-paid actress in London, but when he himself acted he never put himself down for a higher salary than he thought the part was worth. When he directed a play he put down on the expense account the fee that a director of the second rank would have received. They shared the expenses of the house and the cost of Roger’s education. Roger had been entered for Eton within a week of his birth. It was impossible to deny that Michael was scrupulously fair and honest. When Julia realized how much richer she was than he she wanted to pay all these expenses herself.

‘There’s no reason why you should,’ said Michael. ‘As long as I can pay my whack I’ll pay it. You earn more than I do because you’re worth more. I put you down for a good salary because you draw it.’

No one could do other than admire the self-abnegation with which he sacrificed himself for her sake. Any ambition he may have had for himself he had abandoned in order to foster her career. Even Dolly, who did not like him, acknowledged his unselfishness. A sort of modesty had always prevented Julia from discussing him with Dolly, but Dolly, with her shrewdness, had long seen how intensely Michael exasperated his wife, and now and then took the trouble to point out how useful he was to her. Everybody praised him. A perfect husband. It seemed to her that none but she knew what it was like to live with a man who was such a monster of vanity. His complacency when he had beaten an opponent at golf or got the better of someone in a business deal was infuriating. He gloried in his artfulness. He was a bore, a crashing bore. He liked to tell Julia everything he did and every scheme that passed through his head; it had been charming when merely to have him with her was a delight, but for years she had found his prosiness intolerable. He could describe nothing without circumstantial detail. Nor was he only vain of his business acumen; with advancing years he had become outrageously vain of his person. As a youth he had taken his beauty for granted: now he began to pay more attention to it and spared no pains to keep what was left of it. It became an obsession. He devoted anxious care to his figure. He never ate a fattening thing and never forgot his exercises. He consulted hair specialists when he thought his hair was thinning, and Julia was convinced that had it been possible to get the operation done secretly he would have had his face lifted. He had got into the way of sitting with his chin slightly thrust out so that the wrinkles in his neck should not show and he held himself with an arched back to keep his belly from sagging. He could not pass a mirror without looking into it. He hankered for compliments and beamed with delight when he had managed to extract one. They were food and drink to him. Julia laughed bitterly when she remembered that it was she who had accustomed him to them. For years she had told him how beautiful he was and now he could not live without flattery. It was the only chink in his armour. An actress out of a job had only to tell him to his face that he was too handsome to be true for him to think that she might do for a part he had in mind. For years, so far as Julia knew, Michael had not bothered with women, but when he reached the middle forties he began to have little flirtations. Julia suspected that nothing much came of them. He was prudent, and all he wanted was admiration. She had heard that when women became pressing he used her as a pretext to get rid of them. Either he couldn’t risk doing anything to hurt her, or she was jealous or suspicious and it seemed better that the friendship should cease.

‘God knows what they see in him,’ Julia exclaimed to the empty room.

She took up half a dozen of his later photographs at random and looked at them carefully one by one. She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Well, I suppose I can’t blame them. I fell in love with him too. Of course he was better-looking in those days.’

It made Julia a little sad to think how much she had loved him. Because her love had died she felt that life had cheated her. She sighed.

‘And my back’s aching,’ she said.

CHAPTER 10

THERE WAS A knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Julia.

Evie entered.

‘Aren’t you going to bed to-day, Miss Lambert?’ She saw Julia sitting on the floor surrounded by masses of photographs. ‘Whatever are you doing?’

‘Dreaming.’ She took up two of the photographs. ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this.’

One was of Michael as Mercutio in all the radiant beauty of his youth and the other of Michael in the last part he had played, in a white topper and a morning coat, with a pair of field-glasses slung over his shoulder. He looked unbelievably self-satisfied.

Evie sniffed.

‘Oh, well, it’s no good crying over spilt milk.’

‘I’ve been thinking of the past and I’m as blue as the devil.’

‘I don’t wonder. When you start thinking of the past it means you ain’t got no future, don’t it?’

‘You shut your trap, you old cow,’ said Julia, who could be very vulgar when she chose.

‘Come on now, or you’ll be fit for nothing to-night. I’ll clear up all this mess.’

Evie was Julia’s dresser and maid. She had come to her first at Middlepool and had accompanied her to London. She was a cockney, a thin, raddled, angular woman, with red hair which was always untidy and looked as if it much needed washing; two of her front teeth were missing but, notwithstanding Julia’s offer, repeated for years, to provide her with new ones she would not have them replaced.

‘For the little I eat I’ve got all the teeth I want. It’d only fidget me to ‘ave a lot of elephant’s tusks in me mouth.’

Michael had long wanted Julia at least to get a maid whose appearance was more suitable to their position, and he had tried to persuade Evie that the work was too much for her, but Evie would not hear of it.

‘You can say what you like, Mr Gosselyn, but no one’s going to maid Miss Lambert as long as I’ve got me ‘ealth and strength.’

‘We’re all getting on, you know, Evie. We’re not so young as we were.’

Evie drew her forefinger across the base of her nostrils and sniffed.

‘As long as Miss Lambert’s young enough to play women of twenty-five, I’m young enough to dress ‘er. And maid ‘er.’ Evie gave him a sharp look. ‘An’ what d’you want to pay two lots of wages for, when you can get the work done for one?’

Michael chuckled in his good-humoured way.

‘There’s something in that, Evie dear.’

She bustled Julia upstairs. When she had no matinée Julia went to bed for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then had a light massage. She undressed now and slipped between the sheets.

‘Damn, my hot water bottle’s nearly stone cold.’

She looked at the clock on the chimney-piece. It was no wonder. It must have been there an hour. She had no notion that she had stayed so long in Michael’s room, looking at those photographs and idly thinking of the past.

‘Forty-six. Forty-six. Forty-six. I shall retire when I’m sixty. At fifty-eight South Africa and Australia. Michael says we can clean up there. Twenty thousand pounds. I can play all my old parts. Of course even at sixty I could play women of forty-five. But what about parts? Those bloody dramatists.’

Trying to remember any plays in which there was a first-rate part for a woman of five-and-forty she fell asleep. She slept soundly till Evie came to awake her because the masseuse was there. Evie brought her the evening paper, and Julia, stripped, while the masseuse rubbed her long slim legs and her belly, putting on her spectacles, read the same theatrical intelligence she had read that morning, the gossip column and the woman’s page. Presently Michael came in and sat on her bed. He often came at that hour to have a little chat with her.

‘Well, what was his name?’ asked Julia.

‘Whose name?’

‘The boy who came to lunch?’

‘I haven’t a notion. I drove him back to the theatre. I never gave him another thought.’

Miss Phillips, the masseuse, liked Michael. You knew where you were with him. He always said the same things and you knew exactly what to answer. No side to him. And terribly good-looking. My word.

‘Well, Miss Phillips, fat coming off nicely?’

‘Oh, Mr Gosselyn, there’s not an ounce of fat on Miss Lambert. I think it’s wonderful the way she keeps her figure.’

‘Pity I can’t have you to massage me, Miss Phillips. You might be able to do something about mine.’

‘How you talk, Mr Gosselyn. Why, you’ve got the figure of a boy of twenty. I don’t know how you do it, upon my word I don’t.’

‘Plain living and high thinking, Miss Phillips.’

Julia was paying no attention to what they said, but Miss Phillips’s reply reached her.

‘Of course there’s nothing like massage, I always say that, but you’ve got to be careful of your diet. That there’s no doubt about at all.’

‘Diet!’ she thought. ‘When I’m sixty I shall let myself go. I shall eat all the bread and butter I like. I’ll have hot rolls for breakfast, I’ll have potatoes for lunch and potatoes for dinner. And beer. God, how I like beer. Pea soup and tomato soup; treacle pudding and cherry tart. Cream, cream, cream. And so help me God, I’ll never eat spinach again as long as I live.’

When the massage was finished Evie brought her a cup of tea, a slice of ham from which the fat had been cut, and some dry toast. Julia got up, dressed, and went down with Michael to the theatre. She liked to be there an hour before the curtain rang up. Michael went on to dine at his club. Evie had preceded her in a cab and when she got into her dressing-room everything was ready for her. She undressed once more and put on a dressing-gown. As she sat down at her dressing-table to make up she noticed some fresh flowers in a vase.

‘Hulloa, who sent them? Mrs de Vries?’

Dolly always sent her a huge basket on her first nights, and on the hundredth night, and the two hundredth if there was one, and in between, whenever she ordered flowers for her own house, had some sent to Julia.

‘No, miss.’

‘Lord Charles?’

Lord Charles Tamerley was the oldest and the most constant of Julia’s admirers, and when he passed a florist’s he was very apt to drop in and order some roses for her.

‘Here’s the card,’ said Evie.

Julia looked at it. Mr Thomas Fennell. Tavistock Square.

‘What a place to live. Who the hell d’you suppose he is, Evie?’

‘Some feller knocked all of a heap by your fatal beauty, I expect.’

‘They must have cost all of a pound. Tavistock Square doesn’t look very prosperous to me. For all you know he may have gone without his dinner for a week to buy them.’

‘I don’t think.’

Julia plastered her face with grease paint.

‘You’re so damned unromantic, Evie. Just because I’m not a chorus girl you can’t understand why anyone should send me flowers. And God knows, I’ve got better legs than most of them.’

‘You and your legs,’ said Evie.

‘Well, I don’t mind telling you I think it’s a bit of all right having an unknown young man sending me flowers at my time of life. I mean it just shows you.’

‘If he saw you now ‘e wouldn’t, not if I know anything about men.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Julia.

But when she was made up to her satisfaction, and Evie had put on her stockings and her shoes, having a few minutes still to spare she sat down at her desk and in her straggling bold hand wrote to Mr Thomas Fennell a gushing note of thanks for his beautiful flowers. She was naturally polite and it was, besides, a principle with her to answer all fan letters. That was how she kept in touch with her public. Having addressed the envelope she threw the card in the wastepaper basket and was ready to slip into the first act dress. The call-boy came round knocking at the dressing-room doors.

‘Beginners, please.’

Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her a thrill. They braced her like a tonic. Life acquired significance. She was about to step from the world of make-believe into the world of reality.

CHAPTER 11

NEXT DAY JULIA had luncheon with Charles Tamerley. His father, the Marquess of Dennorant, had married an heiress and he had inherited a considerable fortune. Julia often went to the luncheon parties he was fond of giving at his house in Hill Street. At the bottom of her heart she had a profound contempt for the great ladies and the noble lords she met there, because she was a working woman and an artist, but she knew the connection was useful. It enabled them to have first nights at the Siddons which the papers described as brilliant, and when she was photographed at week-end parties among a number of aristocratic persons she knew that it was good publicity. There were one or two leading ladies, younger than she, who did not like her any better because she called at least two duchesses by their first names. This caused her no regret. Julia was not a brilliant conversationalist, but her eyes were so bright, her manner so intelligent, that once she had learnt the language of society she passed for a very amusing woman. She had a great gift of mimicry, which ordinarily she kept in check thinking it was bad for her acting, but in these circles she turned it to good account and by means of it acquired the reputation of a wit. She was pleased that they liked her, these smart, idle women, but she laughed at them up her sleeve because they were dazzled by her glamour. She wondered what they would think if they really knew how unromantic the life of a successful actress was, the hard work it entailed, the constant care one had to take of oneself and the regular, monotonous habits which were essential. But she good-naturedly offered them advice on make-up and let them copy her clothes. She was always beautifully dressed. Even Michael, fondly thinking she got her clothes for nothing, did not know how much she really spent on them.

Morally she had the best of both worlds. Everyone knew that her marriage with Michael was exemplary. She was a pattern of conjugal fidelity. At the same time many people in that particular set were convinced that she was Charles Tamerley’s mistress. It was an affair that was supposed to have been going on so long that it had acquired respectability, and tolerant hostesses when they were asked to the same house for a week-end gave them adjoining rooms. This belief had been started by Lady Charles, from whom Charles Tamerley had been long separated, and in point of fact there was not a word of truth in it. The only foundation for it was that Charles had been madly in love with her for twenty years, and it was certainly on Julia’s account that the Tamerleys, who had never got on very well, agreed to separate. It was indeed Lady Charles who had first brought Julia and Charles together. They happened, all three, to be lunching at Dolly de Vries’ when Julia, a young actress, had made her first great success in London. It was a large party and she was being made much of. Lady Charles, a woman of over thirty then, who had the reputation of being a beauty, though except for her eyes she had not a good feature, but by a sort of brazen audacity managed to produce an effective appearance, leant across the table with a gracious smile.

‘Oh, Miss Lambert, I think I used to know your father in Jersey. He was a doctor, wasn’t he? He used to come to our house quite often.’

Julia felt a slight sickness in the pit of her stomach; she remembered now who Lady Charles was before she married, and she saw the trap that was being set for her. She gave a rippling laugh.

‘Not at all,’ she answered. ‘He was a vet. He used to go to your house to deliver the bitches. The house was full of them.’

Lady Charles for a moment did not quite know what to say.

‘My mother was very fond of dogs,’ she answered.

Julia was glad that Michael was not there. Poor lamb, he would have been terribly mortified. He always referred to her father as Dr Lambert, pronouncing it as though it were a French name, and when soon after the war he died and her mother went to live with her widowed sister at St. Malo he began to speak of her as Madame de Lambert. At the beginning of her career Julia had been somewhat sensitive on the point, but when once she was established as a great actress she changed her mind. She was inclined, especially among the great, to insist on the fact that her father had been a vet. She could not quite have explained why, but she felt that by so doing she put them in their place.

But Charles Tamerley knew that his wife had deliberately tried to humiliate the young woman, and angered, went out of his way to be nice to her. He asked her if he might be allowed to call and brought her some beautiful flowers.

He was then a man of nearly forty, with a small head on an elegant body not very good-looking, but of distinguished appearance. He looked very well-bred, which indeed he was, and he had exquisite manners. He was an amateur of the arts. He bought modern pictures and collected old furniture. He was a lover of music and exceedingly well read. At first it amused him to go to the tiny flat off the Buckingham Palace Road in which these two young actors lived. He saw that they were poor and it excited him to get into touch with what he fondly thought was Bohemia. He came several times and he thought it quite an adventure when they asked him to have a luncheon with them which was cooked and served by a scarecrow of a woman whom they called Evie. This was life. He did not pay much attention to Michael who seemed to him, notwithstanding his too obvious beauty, a somewhat ordinary young man, but he was taken by Julia. She had a warmth, a force of character, and a bubbling vitality which were outside his experience. He went to see her act several times and compared her performance with his recollections of the great foreign actresses. It seemed to him that she had in her something quite individual. Her magnetism was incontestable. It gave him quite a thrill to realize on a sudden that she had genius.

‘Another Siddons perhaps. A greater Ellen Terry.’

In those days Julia did not think it necessary to go to bed in the afternoons, she was as strong as a horse and never tired, so he used often to take her for walks in the Park. She felt that he wanted her to be a child of nature. That suited her very well. It was no effort for her to be ingenuous, frank and girlishly delighted with everything. He took her to the National Gallery, and the Tate, and the British Museum, and she really enjoyed it almost as much as she said. He liked to impart information and she was glad to receive it. She had a retentive memory and learnt a great deal from him. If later she was able to talk about Proust and Cezanne with the best of them, so that you were surprised and pleased to find so much culture in an actress, it was to him she owed it. She knew that he had fallen in love with her some time before he knew it himself. She found it rather comic. From her standpoint he was a middle-aged man, and she thought of him as a nice old thing. She was madly in love with Michael. When Charles realized that he loved her his manner changed a little, he seemed struck with shyness and when they were together was often silent.

‘Poor lamb,’ she said to herself, ‘he’s such a hell of a gentleman he doesn’t know what to do about it.’

But she had already prepared her course of conduct for the declaration which she felt he would sooner or later bring himself to make. One thing she was going to make quite clear to him. She wasn’t going to let him think that because he was a lord and she was an actress he had only to beckon and she would hop into bed with him. If he tried that sort of thing she’d play the outraged heroine on him, with the outflung arm and the index extended in the same line, as Jane Taitbout had taught her to make the gesture, pointed at the door. On the other hand if he was shattered and tongue-tied, she’d be all tremulous herself, sobs in the voice and all that, and she’d say it had never dawned on her that he felt like that about her, and no, no, it would break Michael’s heart. They’d have a good cry together and then everything would be all right. With his beautiful manners she could count upon him not making a nuisance of himself when she had once got it into his head that there was nothing doing.

But when it happened it did not turn out in the least as she had expected. Charles Tamerley and Julia had been for a walk in St. James’s Park, they had looked at the pelicans, and the scene suggesting it, they had discussed the possibility of her playing Millamant on a Sunday evening. They went back to Julia’s flat to have a cup of tea. They shared a crumpet. Then Charles got up to go. He took a miniature out of his pocket and gave it to her.

‘It’s a portrait of Clairon. She was an eighteenth-century actress and she had many of your gifts.’

Julia looked at the pretty, clever face, with the powdered hair, and wondered whether the stones that framed the little picture were diamonds or only paste.

‘Oh, Charles, how can you! You are sweet.’

‘I thought you might like it. It’s by way of being a parting present.’

‘Are you going away?’

She was surprised, for he had said nothing about it. He looked at her with a faint smile.

‘No. But I’m not going to see you any more.’

‘Why?’

‘I think you know just as well as I do.’

Then Julia did a disgraceful thing. She sat down and for a minute looked silently at the miniature. Timing it perfectly, she raised her eyes till they met Charles’s. She could cry almost at will, it was one of her most telling accomplishments, and now without a sound, without a sob, the tears poured down her cheeks. With her mouth slightly open, with the look in her eyes of a child that has been deeply hurt and does not know why, the effect was unbearably pathetic. His face was crossed by a twinge of agony. When he spoke his voice was hoarse with emotion.

‘You’re in love with Michael, aren’t you?’

She gave a little nod. She tightened her lips as though she were trying to control herself, but the tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘There’s no chance for me at all?’ He waited for some answer from her, but she gave none, she raised her hand to her mouth and seemed to bite a nail, and still she stared at him with those streaming eyes. ‘Don’t you know what torture it is to go on seeing you? D’you want me to go on seeing you?’

Again she gave a little nod.

‘Clara’s making me scenes about you. She’s found out I’m in love with you. It’s only common sense that we shouldn’t see one another any more.’

This time Julia slightly shook her head. She gave a sob. She leant back in the chair and turned her head aside. Her whole body seemed to express the hopelessness of her grief. Flesh and blood couldn’t stand it. Charles stepped forward and sinking to his knees took that broken woebegone body in his arms.

‘For God’s sake don’t look so unhappy. I can’t bear it. Oh, Julia, Julia, I love you so much, I can’t make you so miserable. I’ll accept anything. I’ll make no demands on you.’

She turned her tear-stained face to him (‘God, what a sight I must look now’) and gave him her lips. He kissed her tenderly. It was the first time he had ever kissed her.

‘I don’t want to lose you,’ she muttered huskily.

‘Darling, darling!’

‘It’ll be just as it was before?’

‘Just.’

She gave a deep sigh of contentment and for a minute or two rested in his arms. When he went away she got up and looked in the glass.

‘You rotten bitch,’ she said to herself.

But she giggled as though she were not in the least ashamed and then went into the bathroom to wash her face and eyes. She felt wonderfully exhilarated. She heard Michael come in and called out to him.

‘Michael, look at that miniature Charles has just given me. It’s on the chimney-piece. Are those diamonds or paste?’

Julia was somewhat nervous when Lady Charles left her husband. She threatened to bring proceedings for divorce, and Julia did not at all like the idea of appearing as intervenor. For two or three weeks she was very jittery. She decided to say nothing to Michael till it was necessary, and she was glad she had not, for in due course it appeared that the threats had been made only to extract more substantial alimony from the innocent husband. Julia managed Charles with wonderful skill. It was understood between them that her great love for Michael made any close relation between them out of the question, but so far as the rest was concerned he was everything to her, her friend, her adviser, her confidant, the man she could rely on in any emergency or go to for comfort in any disappointment. It was a little more difficult when Charles, with his fine sensitiveness, saw that she was no longer in love with Michael. Then Julia had to exercise a great deal of tact. It was not that she had any scruples about being his mistress; if he had been an actor who loved her so much and had loved her so long she would not have minded popping into bed with him out of sheer good nature; but she just did not fancy him. She was very fond of him, but he was so elegant, so well-bred, so cultured, she could not think of him as a lover. It would be like going to bed with an objet d’art. And his love of art filled her with a faint derision; after all she was a creator, when all was said and done he was only the public. He wished her to elope with him. They would buy a villa at Sorrento on the bay of Naples, with a large garden, and they would have a schooner so that they could spend long days on the beautiful wine-coloured sea. Love and beauty and art; the world well lost.

‘The damned fool,’ she thought. ‘As if I’d give up my career to bury myself in some hole in Italy!’

She persuaded him that she had a duty to Michael, and then there was the baby; she couldn’t let him grow up with the burden on his young life that his mother was a bad woman. Orange trees or no orange trees, she would never have a moment’s peace in that beautiful Italian villa if she was tortured by the thought of Michael’s unhappiness and her baby being looked after by strangers. One couldn’t only think of oneself, could one? One had to think of others too. She was very sweet and womanly. She sometimes asked Charles why he did not arrange a divorce with his wife and marry some nice woman. She could not bear the thought of his wasting his life over her. He told her that she was the only woman he had ever loved and that he must go on loving her till the end.

‘It seems so sad,’ said Julia.

All the same she kept her eyes open, and if she noticed that any woman had predatory intentions on Charles she took care to queer her pitch. She did not hesitate if the danger seemed to warrant it to show herself extremely jealous. It had been long agreed, with all the delicacy that might be expected from his good-breeding and Julia’s good heart, in no definite words, but with guarded hints and remote allusiveness, that if anything happened to Michael, Lady Charles should somehow or other be disposed of and they would then marry. But Michael had perfect health.

On this occasion Julia had much enjoyed lunching at Hill Street. The party had been very grand. Julia had never encouraged Charles to entertain any of the actors or authors he sometimes came across, and she was the only person there who had ever had to earn a living. She had sat between an old, fat, bald and loquacious Cabinet Minister who took a great deal of trouble to entertain her, and a young Duke of Westreys who looked like a stable-boy and who flattered himself that he knew French slang better than a Frenchman. When he discovered that Julia spoke French he insisted on conversing with her in that language. After luncheon she was persuaded to recite a tirade from ‘Phèdre’ as it was done at the Comédie Française and the same tirade as an English student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art would deliver it. She made the company laugh very much and came away from the party flushed with success. It was a fine bright day and she made up her mind to walk from Hill Street to Stanhope Place. A good many people recognized her as she threaded her way through the crowd in Oxford Street, and though she looked straight ahead of her she was conscious of their glances.

‘What a hell of a nuisance it is that one can’t go anywhere without people staring at one.’

She slackened her pace a little. It certainly was a beautiful day.

She let herself into her house with a latch-key and as she got in heard the telephone ringing. Without thinking she took up the receiver.

‘Yes?’

She generally disguised her voice when she answered, but for once forgot to.

‘Miss Lambert?’

‘I don’t know if Miss Lambert’s in. Who is it please?’ she asked, assuming quickly a cockney accent.

The monosyllable had betrayed her. A chuckle travelled over the wire.

‘I only wanted to thank you for writing to me. You know, you needn’t have troubled. It was so nice of you to ask me to lunch, I thought I’d like to send you a few flowers.’

The sound of his voice and the words told her who it was. It was the blushing young man whose name she did not know. Even now, though she had looked at his card, she could not remember it. The only thing that had struck her was that he lived in Tavistock Square.

‘It was very sweet of you,’ she answered, in her own voice.

‘I suppose you wouldn’t come to tea with me one day, would you?’

The nerve of it! She wouldn’t go to tea with a duchess; he was treating her like a chorus girl. It was rather funny when you came to think of it.

‘I don’t know why not.’

‘Will you really?’ his voice sounded eager. He had a pleasant voice. ‘When?’

She did not feel at all like going to bed that afternoon.

‘To-day.’

‘OK. I’ll get away from the office. Half-past four? 138, Tavistock Square.’

It was nice of him to have suggested that. He might so easily have mentioned some fashionable place where people would stare at her. It proved that he didn’t just want to be seen with her.

She took a taxi to Tavistock Square. She was pleased with herself. She was doing a good action. It would be wonderful for him in after years to be able to tell his wife and children that Julia Lambert had been to tea with him when he was just a little insignificant clerk in an accountant’s office. And she had been so simple and so natural. No one to hear her prattling away would have guessed that she was the greatest actress in England. And if they didn’t believe him he’d have her photograph to prove it, signed yours sincerely. He’d laugh and say that of course if he hadn’t been such a kid he’d never have had the cheek to ask her.

When she arrived at the house and had paid off the taxi she suddenly remembered that she did not know his name and when the maid answered the door would not know whom to ask for. But on looking for the bell she noticed that there were eight of them, four rows of two, and by the side of each was a card or a name written in ink on a piece of paper. It was an old house that had been divided up into flats. She began looking, rather hopelessly, at the names wondering whether one of them would recall something, when the door opened and he stood before her.

‘I saw you drive up and I ran down. I’m afraid I’m on the third floor. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’

She climbed the uncarpeted stairs. She was a trifle out of breath when she came to the third landing. He had skipped up eagerly, like a young goat, she thought, and she had not liked to suggest that she would prefer to go more leisurely. The room into which he led her was fairly large, but dingily furnished. On the table was a plate of cakes and two cups, a sugar basin and a milk-jug. The crockery was of the cheapest sort.

‘Take a pew,’ he said. ‘The water’s just on the boil. I’ll only be a minute. I’ve got a gas-ring in the bathroom.’

He left her and she looked about.

‘Poor lamb, he must be as poor as a church mouse.’

The room reminded her very much of some of the lodgings she had lived in when she was first on the stage. She noticed the pathetic attempts he had made to conceal the fact that it was a bedroom as well as a sitting-room. The divan against the wall was evidently his bed at night. The years slipped away from her in fancy and she felt strangely young again. What fun they had had in rooms very like that and how they had enjoyed the fantastic meals they had had, things in paper bags and eggs and bacon fried on the gas-ring! He came in with the tea in a brown pot. She ate a square sponge-cake with pink icing on it. That was a thing she had not done for years. The Ceylon tea, very strong, with milk and sugar in it, took her back to days she thought she had forgotten. She saw herself as a young, obscure, struggling actress. It was rather delicious. It needed a gesture, but she could only think of one: she took off her hat and gave her head a shake.

They talked. He seemed shy, much shyer than he had seemed over the telephone; well, that was not to be wondered at, now she was there he must be rather overcome, and she set herself to put him at his ease. He told her that his parents lived at Highgate, his father was a solicitor, and he had lived there too, but he wanted to be his own master and now in the last year of his articles he had broken away and taken this tiny flat. He was working for his final examination. They talked of the theatre. He had seen her in every play she had acted in since he was twelve years old. He told her that once when he was fourteen he had stood outside the stage door after a matinée and when she came out had asked her to sign her name in his autograph-book. He was sweet with his blue eyes and pale brown hair. It was a pity he plastered it down like that. He had a white skin and rather a high colour; she wondered if he was consumptive. Although his clothes were cheap he wore them well, she liked that, and he looked incredibly clean.

She asked him why he had chosen Tavistock Square. It was central, he explained, and he liked the trees. It was quite nice when you looked out of the window. She got up to look, that would be a good way to make a move, then she would put on her hat and say goodbye to him.

‘Yes, it is rather charming, isn’t it. It’s so London; it gives one a sort of jolly feeling.’

She turned to him, standing by her side, as she said this. He put his arm round her waist and kissed her full on the lips. No woman was ever more surprised in her life. She was so taken aback that she never thought of doing anything. His lips were soft and there was a perfume of youth about him which was really rather delightful. But what he was doing was preposterous. He was forcing her lips apart with the tip of his tongue and now he had both arms round her. She did not feel angry, she did not feel inclined to laugh, she did not know what she felt. And now she had a notion that he was gently drawing her along, his lips still pressing hers, she felt quite distinctly the glow of his body, it was as though there was a furnace inside him, it was really remarkable; and then she found herself laid on the divan and he was beside her, kissing her mouth and her neck and her cheeks and her eyes. Julia felt a strange pang in her heart. She took his head in her hands and kissed his lips.

A few minutes later she was standing at the chimneypiece, in front of the looking-glass, making herself tidy.

‘Look at my hair.’

He handed her a comb and she ran it through. Then she put on her hat. He was standing just behind her, and over her shoulder she saw his face with those eager blue eyes and a faint smile in them.

‘And I thought you were such a shy young man,’ she said to his reflection.

He chuckled.

‘When am I going to see you again?’

‘Do you want to see me again?’

‘Rather.’

She thought rapidly. It was too absurd, of course she had no intention of seeing him again, it was stupid of her to have let him behave like that, but it was just as well to temporize. He might be tiresome if she told him that the incident would have no sequel.

‘I’ll ring up one of these days.’

‘Swear.’

‘On my honour.’

‘Don’t be too long.’

He insisted on coming downstairs with her and putting her into a cab. She had wanted to go down alone, so that she could have a look at the cards attached to the bells on the lintel.

‘Damn it all, I ought at least to know his name.’

But he gave her no chance. When the taxi drove off she sank into one corner of it and gurgled with laughter.

‘Raped, my dear. Practically raped. At my time of life. And without so much as a by your leave. Treated me like a tart. Eighteenth-century comedy, that’s what it is. I might have been a waiting-maid. In a hoop, with those funny puffy things – what the devil are they called? – that they wore to emphasize their hips, an apron and a scarf round me neck.’ Then with vague memories of Farquhar and Goldsmith she invented the dialogue. ‘La, sir, ’tis shame to take advantage of a poor country girl. What would Mrs Abigail, her ladyship’s woman, say an she knew her ladyship’s brother had ravished me of the most precious treasure a young woman in my station of life can possess, videlicet her innocence. Fie, o fie, sir.’

When Julia got home the masseuse was already waiting for her. Miss Phillips and Evie were having a chat.

‘Wherever ‘ave you been, Miss Lambert?’ said Evie. ‘An’ what about your rest, I should like to know.’

‘Damn my rest.’

Julia tore off her clothes, and flung them with ample gestures all over the room. Then, stark naked, she skipped on to the bed, stood up on it for a moment, like Venus rising from the waves, and then throwing herself down stretched herself out.

‘What’s the idea?’ said Evie.

‘I feel good.’

‘Well, if I behaved like that people’d say I’d been drinkin’.’

Miss Phillips began to massage her feet. She rubbed gently, to rest and not to tire her.

‘When you came in just now, like a whirlwind,’ she said, ‘I thought you looked twenty years younger. Your eyes were shining something wonderful.’

‘Oh, keep that for Mr Gosselyn, Miss Phillips.’ And then as an afterthought, ‘I feel like a two-year-old.’

And it was the same at the theatre later on. Archie Dexter, who was her leading man, came into her dressing-room to speak about something. She had just finished making-up. He was startled.

‘Hulloa, Julia, what’s the matter with you to-night? Gosh, you look swell. Why, you don’t look a day more than twenty-five.’

‘With a son of sixteen it’s no good pretending I’m so terribly young any more. I’m forty and I don’t care who knows it.’

‘What have you done to your eyes? I’ve never seen them shine like that before.’

She felt in tremendous form. They had been playing the play, it was called ‘The Powder Puff,’ for a good many weeks, but to-night Julia played it as though it were the first time. Her performance was brilliant. She got laughs that she had never got before. She always had magnetism, but on this occasion it seemed to flow over the house in a great radiance. Michael happened to be watching the last two acts from the corner of a box and at the end he came into her dressing-room.

‘D’you know the prompter says we played nine minutes longer to-night, they laughed so much.’

‘Seven curtain calls. I thought the public were going on all night.’

‘Well, you’ve only got to blame yourself, darling. There’s no one in the world who could have given the performance you gave to-night.’

‘To tell you the truth I was enjoying myself. Christ, I’m hungry. What have we got for supper?’

‘Tripe and onions.’

‘Oh, how divine!’ She flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. ‘I adore tripe and onions. Oh, Michael, Michael, if you love me, if you’ve got any spark of tenderness in that hard heart of yours, let me have a bottle of beer.’

‘Julia.’

‘Just this once. It’s not often I ask you to do anything for me.’

‘Oh well, after the performance you gave to-night I suppose I can’t say no, but by God, I’ll see that Miss Phillips pitches into you to-morrow.’

CHAPTER 12

WHEN JULIA GOT to bed and slipped her feet down to the comfort of her hot-water bottle, she took a happy look at her room, rose-pink and Nattier-blue, with the gold cherubs of her dressing-table, and sighed with satisfaction. She thought how very Madame de Pompadour it was. She put out the light but she did not feel at all sleepy. She would have liked really to go to Quag’s and dance, but not to dance with Michael, to dance with Louis XV or Ludwig of Bavaria or Alfred de Musset. Clairon and the Bal de l’Opéra. She remembered the miniature Charles had once given her. That was how she felt to-night. Such an adventure had not happened to her for ages. The last time was eight years before. That was an episode that she ought to have been thoroughly ashamed of; goodness, how scared she’d been afterwards, but she had in point of fact never been able to think of it since without a chuckle.

That had been an accident too. She had been acting for a long time without a rest and she badly needed one. The play she was in was ceasing to attract and they were about to start rehearsing a new one when Michael got the chance of letting the theatre to a French company for six weeks. It seemed a good opportunity for Julia to get away. Dolly had rented a house at Cannes for the season and Julia could stay with her. It was just before Easter when she started off and the trains south were so crowded that she had not been able to get a sleeper, but at a travel agency they had said that it would be quite all right and there would be one waiting for her at the station in Paris. To her consternation she found when they got to Paris that nothing seemed to be known about her, and the chef de train told her that every sleeper was engaged. The only chance was that someone should not turn up at the last moment. She did not like the idea of sitting up all night in the corner of a first-class carriage, and went in to dinner with a perturbed mind. She was given a table for two, and soon a man came and sat down opposite her. She paid no attention to him. Presently the chef de train came along and told her that he was very sorry, but he could do nothing for her. She made a useless scene. When the official had gone, the man at her table addressed her. Though he spoke fluent, idiomatic French, she recognized by his accent that he was not a Frenchman. She told him in answer to his polite enquiry the whole story and gave him her opinion of the travel agency, the railway company, and the general inefficiency of the human race. He was very sympathetic. He told her that after dinner he would go along the train and see for himself if something could not be arranged. One never knew what one of the conductors could not manage for a tip.

‘I’m simply tired out,’ she said. ‘I’d willingly give five hundred francs for a sleeper.’

The conversation thus started, he told her that he was an attaché at the Spanish Embassy in Paris and was going down to Cannes for Easter. Though she had been talking to him for a quarter of an hour she had not troubled to notice what he was like. She observed now that he had a beard, a black curly beard and a black curly moustache, but the beard grew rather oddly on his face; there were two bare patches under the corners of his mouth. It gave him a curious look. With his black hair, drooping eyelids and rather long nose, he reminded her of someone she had seen. Suddenly she remembered, and it was such a surprise that she blurted out:

‘D’you know, I couldn’t think who you reminded me of. You’re strangely like Titian’s portrait of Francis I in the Louvre.’

‘With his little pig’s eyes?’

‘No, not them, yours are large, I think it’s the beard chiefly.’

She glanced at the skin under his eyes; it was faintly violet and unwrinkled. Notwithstanding the ageing beard he was quite a young man; he could not have been more than thirty. She wondered if he was a Spanish Grandee. He was not very well dressed, but then foreigners often weren’t, his clothes might have cost a lot even if they were badly cut, and his tie, though rather loud, she recognised as a Charvet. When they came to the coffee he asked her whether he might offer her a liqueur.

‘That’s very kind of you. Perhaps it’ll make me sleep better.’

He offered her a cigarette. His cigarette-case was silver, that put her off a little, but when he closed it she saw that in the corner was a small crown in gold. He must be a count or something. It was rather chic, having a silver cigarette-case with a gold crown on it. Pity he had to wear those modern clothes! If he’d been dressed like Francis I he would really look very distinguished. She set herself to be as gracious as she knew how.

‘I think I should tell you,’ he said presently, ‘that I know who you are. And may I add that I have a great admiration for you?’

She gave him a lingering look of her splendid eyes.

‘You’ve seen me act?’

‘Yes, I was in London last month.’

‘An interesting little play, wasn’t it?’

‘Only because you made it so.’

When the man came round to collect the money she had to insist on paying her own bill. The Spaniard accompanied her to the carriage and then said he would go along the train to see if he could find a sleeper for her. He came back in a quarter of an hour with a conductor and told her that he had got her a compartment and if she would give the conductor her things he would take her to it. She was delighted. He threw down his hat on the seat she vacated and she followed him along the corridor. When they reached the compartment he told the conductor to take the portmanteau and the dispatch-case that were in the rack to the carriage madame had just left.

‘But it’s not your own compartment you’re giving up to me?’ cried Julia.

‘It’s the only one on the train.’

‘Oh, but I won’t hear of it.’

‘Allez,’ the Spaniard said to the conductor.

‘No, no.’

The conductor, on a nod from the stranger, took the luggage away.

‘I don’t matter. I can sleep anywhere, but I shouldn’t sleep a wink if I thought that such a great artist was obliged to spend the night in a stuffy carriage with three other people.’

Julia continued to protest, but not too much. It was terribly sweet of him. She didn’t know how to thank him. He would not even let her pay for the sleeper. He begged her, almost with tears in his eyes, to let him have the great privilege of making her that trifling present. She had with her only a dressing-bag, in which were her face creams, her night-dress and her toilet things, and this he put on the table for her. All he asked was that he might be allowed to sit with her and smoke a cigarette or two till she wanted to go to bed. She could hardly refuse him that. The bed was already made up and they sat down on it. In a few minutes the conductor came back with a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses. It was an odd little adventure and Julia was enjoying it. It was wonderfully polite of him, all that, ah, those foreigners, they knew how to treat a great actress. Of course that was the sort of thing that happened to Bernhardt every day. And Siddons, when she went into a drawing-room everyone stood up as though she were royalty. He complimented her on her beautiful French. Born in Jersey and educated in France? Ah, that explained it. But why hadn’t she chosen to act in French rather than in English? She would have as great a reputation as Duse if she had. She reminded him of Duse, the same magnificent eyes and the pale skin, and in her acting the same emotion and the wonderful naturalness.

They half finished the bottle of champagne and Julia realized that it was very late.

‘I really think I ought to go to bed now.’

‘I’ll leave you.’

He got up and kissed her hand. When he was gone Julia bolted the door and undressed. Putting out all the lights except the one just behind her head she began to read. Presently there was a knock at the door.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I left my toothbrush in the lavabo. May I get it?’

‘I’m in bed.’

‘I can’t go to sleep unless I brush my teeth.’

‘Oh well, he’s clean anyway.’

With a little shrug of her shoulders Julia slipped her hand to the door and drew back the bolt. It would be stupid in the circumstances to be prudish. He came in, went into the lavatory and in a moment came out, brandishing a toothbrush. She had noticed it when she brushed her own teeth, but thought it belonged to the person who had the compartment next door. At that period adjoining compartments shared a lavatory. The Spaniard seemed to catch sight of the bottle.

‘I’m so thirsty, do you mind if I have a glass of champagne?’

Julia was silent for a fraction of a second. It was his champagne and his compartment. Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

‘Of course not.’

He poured himself out a glass, lit a cigarette and sat down on the edge of her bed. She moved a little to give him more room. He accepted the situation as perfectly natural.

‘You couldn’t possibly have slept in that carriage,’ he said. ‘There’s a man there who’s a heavy breather. I’d almost rather he snored. If he snored one could wake him.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. If the worst comes to the worst I’ll curl up in the corridor outside your door.’

‘He can hardly expect me to ask him to come and sleep in here,’ Julia said to herself. ‘I’m beginning to think this was all a put-up job. Nothing doing, my lad.’ And then aloud: ‘Romantic, of course, but uncomfortable.’

‘You’re a terribly attractive woman.’

She was just as glad that her nightdress was pretty and that she had put no cream on her face. She had in point of fact not troubled to take off her make-up. Her lips were brightly scarlet, and with the reading light behind her she well knew that she did not look her worst. But she answered ironically.

‘If you think that because you’ve given up your compartment to me I’m going to let you sleep with me, you’re mistaken.’

‘Just as you say, of course. But why not?’

‘I’m not that sort of terribly attractive woman.’

‘What sort of woman are you then?’

‘A faithful wife and a devoted mother.’

He gave a little sigh.

‘Very well. Then I’ll say good night to you.’

He crushed the stub of his cigarette on the ashtray and took her hand and kissed it. He slowly ran his lips up her arm. It gave Julia a funny little sensation. The beard slightly tickled her skin. Then he leant over and kissed her lips. His beard had a somewhat musty smell, which she found peculiar; she was not sure if it revolted or thrilled her. It was odd when she came to think of it, she had never been kissed by a man with a beard before. It seemed strangely indecent. He snapped out the light.

He did not leave her till a chink of light through the drawn blind warned them that day had broken. Julia was shattered morally and physically.

‘I shall look a perfect wreck when we get to Cannes.’

And what a risk to take! He might have murdered her or stolen her pearl necklace. She went hot and cold all over as she pictured to herself the danger she had incurred. He was going to Cannes too. Supposing he claimed acquaintance with her there, how on earth was she going to explain him to her friends? She felt sure Dolly wouldn’t like him. He might try to blackmail her. And what should she do if he wanted to repeat the experience? He was passionate, there was no doubt about that, he had asked her where she was staying, and though she had not told him, he could certainly find out if he tried; in a place like Cannes, it would be almost impossible not to run across him. He might pester her. If he loved her as much as he said it was inconceivable that he should let her alone, and foreigners were so unreliable, he might make frightful scenes. The only comfort was that he was only staying over Easter, she would pretend she was tired and tell Dolly that she preferred to stay quietly at the villa.

‘How could I have been such a fool?’ she cried angrily.

Dolly would be there to meet her at the station, and if he was tactless enough to come up and say good-bye to her she would tell Dolly that he had given up his compartment to her. There was no harm in that. It was always best to tell as much of the truth as you could. But there was quite a crowd of passengers getting out at Cannes, and Julia got out of the station and into Dolly’s car without catching a glimpse of him.

‘I’ve arranged nothing for to-day,’ said Dolly. ‘I thought you’d be tired and I wanted to have you all to myself just for twenty-four hours.’

Julia gave her arm an affectionate squeeze.

‘That’ll be too wonderful. We’ll just sit about the villa and grease our faces and have a good old gossip.’

But next day Dolly had arranged that they should go out to luncheon, and they were to meet their hosts at one of the bars on the Croisette to have cocktails. It was a beautiful day, clear, warm and sunny. When they got out of the car Dolly stopped to give the chauffeur instructions about fetching them and Julia waited for her. Suddenly her heart gave a great jump, for there was the Spaniard walking towards her, with a woman on one side of him clinging to his arm and on the other a little girl whose hand he held. She had not time to turn away. At that moment Dolly joined her to walk across the pavement. The Spaniard came, gave her a glance in which there was no sign of recognition, he was in animated conversation with the woman on his arm, and walked on. In a flash Julia understood that he was just as little anxious to see her as she was to see him. The woman and the child were obviously his wife and daughter whom he had come down to Cannes to spend Easter with. What a relief! Now she could enjoy herself without fear. But as she accompanied Dolly to the bar, Julia thought how disgusting men were. You simply couldn’t trust them for a minute. It was really disgraceful that a man with a charming wife and such a sweet little girl should be willing to pick up a woman in the train. You would think they’d have some sense of decency.

But as time passed Julia’s indignation was mitigated, and she had often thought of the adventure since with a good deal of pleasure. After all it had been fun. Sometimes she allowed her reveries to run away with her and she went over in her fancy the incidents of that singular night. He had been a most agreeable lover. It would be something to look back on when she was an old woman. It was the beard that had made such an impression on her, the odd feeling of it on her face and that slightly musty smell which was repulsive and yet strangely exciting. For years she looked out for men with beards, and she had a feeling that if one of them made proposals to her she simply wouldn’t be able to resist him. But few men wore beards any more, luckily for her because the sight made her go a little weak at the knees, and none of those that did ever made any advance to her. She would have liked to know who the Spaniard was. She saw him a day or two later playing chemin de fer at the Casino and asked two or three people if they knew him. Nobody did, and he remained in her recollection, and in her bones, without a name. It was an odd coincidence that she didn’t know the name either of the young man who had that afternoon behaved in so unexpected a manner. It struck her as rather comic.

‘If I only knew beforehand that they were going to take liberties with me I’d at least ask for their cards.’

With this thought she fell happily asleep.

CHAPTER 13

SOME DAYS PASSED, and one morning, while Julia was lying in bed reading a play, they rang through from the basement to ask if she would speak to Mr Fennell. The name meant nothing to her and she was about to refuse when it occurred to her that it might be the young man of her adventure. Her curiosity induced her to tell them to connect him. She recognized his voice.

‘You promised to ring me up,’ he said. ‘I got tired of waiting, so I’ve rung you up instead.’

‘I’ve been terribly busy the last few days.’

‘When am I going to see you?’

‘As soon as I have a moment to spare.’

‘What about this afternoon?’

‘I’ve got a matinée to-day.’

‘Come to tea after the matinée.’

She smiled. (‘No, young feller-me-lad, you don’t catch me a second time like that.’)

‘I can’t possibly,’ she answered. ‘I always stay in my dressing-room and rest till the evening performance.’

‘Can’t I come and see you while you’re resting?’

She hesitated for an instant. Perhaps the best thing would be to let him come; with Evie popping in and out and Miss Phillips due at seven, there would be no chance of any nonsense, and it would be a good opportunity to tell him, amiably, because he was really a sweet little thing, but firmly, that the incident of the other afternoon was to have no sequel. With a few well-chosen words she would explain to him that it was quite unreasonable and that he must oblige her by erasing the episode from his memory.

‘All right. Come at half-past five and I’ll give you a cup of tea.’

There was no part of her busy life that she enjoyed more than those three hours that she spent in her dressing-room between the afternoon and the evening performances. The other members of the cast had gone away; and Evie was there to attend to her wants and the door-keeper to guard her privacy. Her dressing-room was like the cabin of a ship. The world seemed a long way off, and she relished her seclusion. She felt an enchanting freedom. She dozed a little, she read a little, or lying on the comfortable sofa she let her thoughts wander. She reflected on the part she was playing and the favourite parts she had played in the past. She thought of Roger her son. Pleasant reveries sauntered through her mind like lovers wandering in a green wood. She was fond of French poetry, and sometimes she repeated to herself verses of Verlaine.

Punctually at half-past five Evie brought her in a card. ‘Mr Thomas Fennell,’ she read.

‘Send him in and bring some tea.’

She had decided how she was going to treat him. She would be amiable, but distant. She would take a friendly interest in his work and ask him about his examination. Then she would talk to him about Roger. Roger was seventeen now and in a year would be going to Cambridge. She would insinuate the fact that she was old enough to be his mother. She would act as if there had never been anything between them and he would go away, never to see her again except across the footlights, half convinced that the whole thing had been a figment of his fancy. But when she saw him, so slight, with his hectic flush and his blue eyes, so charmingly boyish, she felt a sudden pang. Evie closed the door behind him. She was lying on the sofa and she stretched out her arm to give him her hand, the gracious smile of Madame Récamier on her lips, but he flung himself on his knees and passionately kissed her mouth. She could not help herself, she put her arms round his neck, and kissed him as passionately.

(‘Oh, my good resolutions. My God, I can’t have fallen in love with him.’)

‘For goodness’ sake, sit down. Evie’s coming in with the tea.’

‘Tell her not to disturb us.’

‘What do you mean?’ But what he meant was obvious. Her heart began to beat quickly. ‘It’s ridiculous. I can’t. Michael might come in.’

‘I want you.’

‘What d’you suppose Evie would think? It’d be idiotic to take such a risk. No, no, no.’

There was a knock at the door and Evie came in with the tea. Julia gave her instructions to put the table by the side of her sofa and a chair for the young man on the other side of the table. She kept Evie with unnecessary conversation. She felt him looking at her. His eyes moved quickly, following her gestures and the expression of her face; she avoided them, but she felt their anxiety and the eagerness of his desire. She was troubled. It seemed to her that her voice did not sound quite natural.

(‘What the devil’s the matter with me? God, I can hardly breathe.’)

When Evie reached the door the boy made a gesture that was so instinctive that her sensitiveness rather than her sight caught it. She could not but look at him. His face had gone quite pale.

‘Oh, Evie,’ she said. ‘This gentleman wants to talk to me about a play. See that no one disturbs me. I’ll ring when I want you.’

‘Very good, miss.’

Evie went out and closed the door.

(‘I’m a fool. I’m a bloody fool.’)

But he had moved the table, and he was on his knees, and she was in his arms.

She sent him away a little before Miss Phillips was due, and when he was going rang for Evie.

‘Play any good?’ asked Evie.

‘What play?’

‘The play ‘e was talkin’ to you about.’

‘He’s clever. Of course he’s young.’

Evie was looking down at the dressing-table. Julia liked everything always to be in the same place, and if a pot of grease or her eyeblack was not exactly where it should be made a scene.

‘Where’s your comb?’

He had used it to comb his hair and had carelessly placed it on the tea-table. When Evie caught sight of it she stared at it for a moment reflectively.

‘How on earth did it get there?’ cried Julia lightly.

‘I was just wondering.’

It gave Julia a nasty turn. Of course it was madness to do that sort of thing in the dressing-room. Why, there wasn’t even a key in the lock. Evie kept it. All the same the risk had given it a spice. It was fun to think that she could be so crazy. At all events they’d made a date now. Tom, she’d asked him what they called him at home and he said Thomas, she really couldn’t call him that. Tom wanted to take her to supper somewhere so that they could dance, and it happened that Michael was going up to Cambridge for a night to rehearse a series of one-act plays written by undergraduates. They would be able to spend hours together.

‘You can get back with the milk,’ he’d said.

‘And what about my performance next day?’

‘We can’t bother about that.’

She had refused to let him fetch her at the theatre, and when she got to the restaurant they had chosen he was waiting for her in the lobby. His face lit up as he saw her.

‘It was getting so late, I was afraid you weren’t coming.’

‘I’m sorry, some tiresome people came round after the play and I couldn’t get rid of them.’

But it wasn’t true. She had been as excited all the evening as a girl going to her first ball. She could not help thinking how absurd she was. But when she had taken off her theatrical make-up and made up again for supper she could not satisfy herself. She put blue on her eyelids and took it off again, she rouged her cheeks, rubbed them clean and tried another colour.

‘What are you trying to do?’ said Evie.

‘I’m trying to look twenty, you fool.’

‘If you try much longer you’ll look your age.’

She had never seen him in evening clothes before. He shone like a new pin. Though he was of no more than average height his slimness made him look tall. She was a trifle touched to see that for all his airs of the man of the world he was shy with the head-waiter when it came to ordering supper. They danced and he did not dance very well, but she found his slight awkwardness rather charming. People recognized her, and she was conscious that he enjoyed the reflected glory of their glances. A pair of young things who had been dancing came up to their table to say how do you do to her. When they had left he asked:

‘Wasn’t that Lord and Lady Dennorant?’

‘Yes. I’ve known George since he was at Eton.’

He followed them with his eyes.

‘She was Lady Cecily Laweston, wasn’t she?’

‘I’ve forgotten. Was she?’

It seemed a matter of no interest to her. A few minutes later another couple passed them.

‘Look, there’s Lady Lepard.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Don’t you remember, they had a big party at their place in Cheshire a few weeks ago and the Prince of Wales was there. It was in the Bystander.’

Oh, that was how he got all his information. Poor sweet. He read about grand people in the papers and now and then, at a restaurant or a theatre, saw them in the flesh. Of course it was a thrill for him. Romance. If he only knew how dull they were really! This innocent passion for the persons whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers made him seem incredibly naïve, and she looked at him with tender eyes.

‘Have you ever taken an actress out to supper before?’

He blushed scarlet.

‘Never.’

She hated to let him pay the bill, she had an inkling that it was costing pretty well his week’s salary, but she knew it would hurt his pride if she offered to pay it herself. She asked casually what the time was and instinctively he looked at his wrist.

‘I forgot to put on my watch.’

She gave him a searching look.

‘Have you pawned it?’

He reddened again.

‘No. I dressed in rather a hurry to-night.’

She only had to look at his tie to know that he had done no such thing. He was lying to her. She knew that he had pawned his watch in order to take her out to supper. A lump came into her throat. She could have taken him in her arms then and there and kissed his blue eyes. She adored him.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

They drove back to his bed-sitting room in Tavistock Square.

CHAPTER 14

NEXT DAY JULIA went to Cartier’s and bought a watch to send to Tom Fennell instead of the one he had pawned, and two or three weeks later, discovering that it was his birthday, she sent him a gold cigarette-case.

‘D’you know, that’s the one thing I’ve wanted all my life.’

She wondered if there were tears in his eyes. He kissed her passionately.

Then, on one excuse and another, she sent him pearl studs and sleeve-links and waistcoat buttons. It thrilled her to make him presents.

‘It’s so awful that I can’t give you anything in return,’ he said.

‘Give me the watch you pawned to stand me a supper.’

It was a little gold watch that could not have cost more than ten pounds, but it amused her to wear it now and then.

It was not till after that night when they had first supped together that Julia confessed to herself that she had fallen in love with Tom. It came to her as a shock. But she was exhilarated.

‘I who thought I could never be in love again. Of course it can’t last. But why shouldn’t I get what fun out of it I can?’

She decided that he must come again to Stanhope Place. It was not long before an opportunity presented itself.

‘You know that young accountant of yours,’ she said to Michael. ‘Tom Fennell’s his name. I met him out at supper the other night and I’ve asked him to dinner next Sunday. We want an extra man.’

‘Oh, d’you think he’ll fit in?’

It was rather a grand party. It was on that account she had asked him. She thought it would please him to meet some of the people he had known only from their pictures. She had realized already that he was a bit of a snob. Well, that was all to the good; she could give him all the smart people he wanted. For Julia was shrewd, and she knew very well that Tom was not in love with her. To have an affair with her flattered his vanity. He was a highly-sexed young man and enjoyed sexual exercise. From hints, from stories that she had dragged out of him, she discovered that since he was seventeen he had had a great many women. He loved the act rather than the person. He looked upon it as the greatest lark in the world. And she could understand why he had so much success. There was something appealing in his slightness, his body was just skin and bone, that was why his clothes sat on him so well, and something charming in his clean freshness. His shyness and his effrontery combined to make him irresistible. It was strangely flattering for a woman to be treated as a little bit of fluff that you just tumbled on to a bed.

‘What he’s got, of course, is sex appeal.’

She knew that his good looks were due to his youth. He would grow wizened as he grew older, dried up and haggard; that charming flush on his cheeks would turn into a purple glow and his delicate skin would go lined and sallow; but the feeling that what she loved in him would endure so short a time increased her tenderness. She felt a strange compassion for him. He had the high spirits of youth, and she lapped them up as a kitten laps up milk. But he was not amusing. Though he laughed when Julia said a funny thing he never said one himself. She did not mind. She found his dullness restful. She never felt so light-hearted as in his company, and she could be brilliant enough for two.

People kept on telling Julia that she was looking ten years younger and that she had never acted better. She knew it was true and she knew the reason. But it behoved her to walk warily. She must keep her head. Charles Tamerley always said that what an actress needed was not intelligence, but sensibility, and he might be right; perhaps she wasn’t clever, but her feelings were alert and she trusted them. They told her now that she must never tell Tom that she loved him. She was careful to make it plain to him that she laid no claims on him and that he was free to do whatever he liked. She took up the attitude that the whole thing was a bit of nonsense to which neither of them must attach importance. But she left nothing undone to bind him to her. He liked parties and she took him to parties. She got Dolly and Charles Tamerley to ask him to luncheon. He was fond of dancing and she got him cards for balls. For his sake she would go to them herself for an hour, and she was conscious of the satisfaction he got out of seeing how much fuss people made of her. She knew that he was dazzled by the great, and she introduced him to eminent persons. Fortunately Michael took a fancy to him. Michael liked to talk, and Tom was a good listener. He was clever at his business. One day Michael said to her:

‘Smart fellow, Tom. He knows a lot about income-tax. I believe he’s shown me a way of saving two or three hundred pounds on my next return.’

Michael, looking for new talent, often took him to the play in the evenings, either in London or the suburbs; they would fetch Julia after the performance, and the three of them supped together. Now and then Michael asked Tom to play golf with him on Sundays and then if there was no party would bring him home to dinner.

‘Nice to have a young fellow like that around,’ he said. ‘It keeps one from growing rusty.’

Tom was very pleasant about the house. He would play backgammon with Michael, or patience with Julia, and when they turned on the gramophone he was always there to change the records.

‘He’ll be a nice friend for Roger,’ said Michael. ‘Tom’s got his head screwed on his shoulders the right way, and he’s a lot older than Roger. He ought to have a good influence on him. Why don’t you ask him to come and spend his holiday with us?’

(‘Lucky I’m a good actress.’) But it wanted an effort to keep the joy out of her voice and to prevent her face from showing the exultation that made her heart beat so violently. ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ she answered. ‘I’ll ask him if you like.’

Their play was running through August, and Michael had taken a house at Taplow so that they could spend the height of the summer there. Julia was to come up for her performances and Michael when business needed it, but she would have the day in the country and Sundays. Tom had a fortnight’s holiday; he accepted the invitation with alacrity.

But one day Julia noticed that he was unusually silent. He looked pale and his buoyant spirits had deserted him. She knew that something was wrong, but he would not tell her what it was; he would only say that he was worried to death. At last she forced him to confess that he had got into debt and was being dunned by tradesmen. The life into which she had led him had made him spend more money than he could afford, and ashamed of his cheap clothes at the grand parties to which she took him, he had gone to an expensive tailor and ordered himself new suits. He had backed a horse hoping to make enough money to get square and the horse was beaten. To Julia it was a very small sum that he owed, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and she found it absurd that anyone should allow a trifle like that to upset him. She said at once that she would give it to him.

‘Oh, I couldn’t. I couldn’t take money from a woman.’

He went scarlet; the mere thought of it made him ashamed. Julia used all her arts of cajolery. She reasoned, she pretended to be affronted, she even cried a little, and at last as a great favour he consented to borrow the money from her. Next day she sent him a letter in which were bank notes to the value of two hundred pounds. He rang her up and told her that she had sent far more than he wanted.

‘Oh, I know people always lie about their debts,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I’m sure you owe more than you said.

‘I promise you I don’t. You’re the last person I’d lie to.’

‘Then keep the rest for anything that turns up. I hate seeing you pay the bill when we go out to supper. And taxis and all that sort of thing.’

‘No, really. It’s so humiliating.’

‘What nonsense! You know I’ve got more money than I know what do do with. Can you grudge me the happiness it gives me to get you out of a hole?’

‘It’s awfully kind of you. You don’t know what a relief it is. I don’t know how to thank you.’

But his voice was troubled. Poor lamb, he was so conventional. But it was true, it gave her a thrill she had never known before to give him money; it excited in her a surprising passion. And she had another scheme in her head which during the fortnight Tom was to spend at Taplow she thought she could easily work. Tom’s bed-sitting room in Tavistock Square had at first seemed to her charming in its sordidness, and the humble furniture had touched her heart. But time had robbed it of these moving characteristics. Once or twice she had met people on the stairs and thought they stared at her strangely. There was a slatternly housekeeper who made Tom’s room and cooked his breakfast, and Julia had a feeling that she knew what was going on and was spying on her. Once the locked door had been tried while Julia was in the room, and when she went out the housekeeper was dusting the banisters. She gave Julia a sour look. Julia hated the smell of stale food that hung about the stairs and with her quick eyes she soon discovered that Tom’s room was none too clean. The dingy curtains, the worn carpet, the shoddy furniture; it all rather disgusted her. Now it happened that a little while before, Michael, always on the look out for a good investment, had bought a block of garages near Stanhope Place. By letting off those he did not want he found that he could get their own for nothing. There were a number of rooms over. He divided them into two small flats, one for their chauffeur and one which he proposed to let. This was still vacant and Julia suggested to Tom that he should take it. It would be wonderful. She could slip along and see him for an hour when he got back from the office; sometimes she could drop in after the theatre and no one would be any the wiser. They would be free there. She talked to him of the fun they would have furnishing it; she was sure they had lots of things in their house that they did not want, and by storing them he would be doing them a kindness. The rest they would buy together. He was tempted by the idea of having a flat of his own, but it was out of the question; the rent, though small, was beyond his means. Julia knew that. She knew also that if she offered to pay it herself he would indignantly refuse. But she had a notion that during that idle, luxurious fortnight by the river she would be able to overcome his scruples. She saw how much the idea tempted him, and she had little doubt that she could devise some means to persuade him that by falling in with her proposal he was really doing her a service.

‘People don’t want reasons to do what they’d like to,’ she reflected. ‘They want excuses.’

Julia looked forward to Tom’s visit to Taplow with excitement. It would be lovely to go on the river with him in the morning and in the afternoon sit about the garden with him. With Roger in the house she was determined that there should be no nonsense between her and Tom; decency forbad. But it would be heaven to spend nearly all day with him. When she had matinees he could amuse himself with Roger.

But things did not turn out at all as she expected. It had never occurred to her that Roger and Tom would take a great fancy to one another. There were five years between them and she thought, or would have if she had thought about it at all, that Tom would look upon Roger as a hobbledehoy, quite nice of course, but whom you treated as such, who fetched and carried for you and whom you told to go and play when you did not want to be bothered with him. Roger was seventeen. He was a nice-looking boy, with reddish hair and blue eyes, but that was the best you could say of him. He had neither his mother’s vivacity and changing expression nor his father’s beauty of feature. Julia was somewhat disappointed in him. As a child when she had been so constantly photographed with him he was lovely. He was rather stolid now and he had a serious look. Really when you came to examine him his only good features were his teeth and his hair. Julia was very fond of him, but she could not but find him a trifle dull. When she was alone with him the time hung somewhat heavily on her hands. She exhibited a lively interest in the things she supposed must interest him, cricket and such like, but he did not seem to have much to say about them. She was afraid he was not very intelligent.

‘Of course he’s young,’ she said hopefully. ‘Perhaps he’ll improve as he grows older.’

From the time that he first went to his preparatory school she had seen little of him. During the holidays she was always acting at night and he went out with his father or with a boy friend, and on Sundays he and his father played golf together. If she happened to be lunching out it often happened that she did not see him for two or three days together except for a few minutes in the morning when he came to her room. It was a pity he could not always have remained a sweetly pretty little boy who could play in her room without disturbing her and be photographed, smiling into the camera, with his arm round her neck. She went down to see him at Eton occasionally and had tea with him. It flattered her that there were several photographs of her in his room. She was conscious that when she went to Eton it created quite a little excitement, and Mr Brackenbridge, in whose house he was, made a point of being very polite to her. When the half ended Michael and Julia had already moved to Taplow and Roger came straight there. Julia kissed him emotionally. He was not so much excited at getting home as she had expected him to be. He was rather casual. He seemed suddenly to have grown very sophisticated.

He told Julia at once that he desired to leave Eton at Christmas, he thought he had got everything out of it that he could, and he wanted to go to Vienna for a few months and learn German before going up to Cambridge. Michael had wished him to go into the army, but this he had set his face against. He did not yet know what he wanted to be. Both Julia and Michael had from the first been obsessed by the fear that he would go on the stage, but for this apparently he had no inclination.

‘Anyhow he wouldn’t be any good,’ said Julia.

He led his own life. He went out on the river and lay about the garden reading. On his seventeenth birthday Julia had given him a very smart roadster, and in this he careered about the country at breakneck speeds.

‘There’s one comfort,’ said Julia. ‘He’s no bother. He seems quite capable of amusing himself.’

On Sundays they had a good many people down for the day, actors and actresses, an occasional writer, and a sprinkling of some of their grander friends. Julia found these parties very amusing and she knew that people liked to come to them. On the first Sunday after Roger’s arrival there was a great mob. Roger was very polite to the guests. He did his duty as part host like a man of the world. But it seemed to Julia that he held himself in some curious way aloof, as though he were playing a part in which he had not lost himself, and she had an uneasy feeling that he was not accepting all these people, but coolly judging them. She had an impression that he took none of them very seriously.

Tom had arranged to come on the following Saturday and she drove him down after the theatre. It was a moonlit night and at that hour the roads were empty. The drive was enchanting. Julia would have liked it to go on for ever. She nestled against him and every now and then in the darkness he kissed her.

‘Are you happy?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely.’

Michael and Roger had gone to bed, but supper was waiting for them in the dining-room. The silent house gave them the feeling of being there without leave. They might have been a couple of wanderers who had strolled out of the night into a strange house and found a copious repast laid out for them. It was romantic. It had a little the air of a tale in the Arabian Nights. Julia showed him his room, which was next door to Roger’s, and then went to bed. She did not wake till late next morning. It was a lovely day. So that she might have Tom all to herself she had not asked anybody down. When she was dressed they would go on the river together. She had her breakfast and her bath. She put on a little white frock that suited the sunny riverside and her, and a large-brimmed red straw hat whose colour threw a warm glow on her face. She was very little made-up. She looked at herself in the glass and smiled with satisfaction. She really looked very pretty and young. She strolled down into the garden. There was a lawn that stretched down to the river, and here she saw Michael surrounded by the Sunday papers. He was alone.

‘I thought you’d gone to play golf.’

‘No, the boys have gone. I thought they’d have more fun if I let them go alone.’ He smiled in his friendly way. ‘They’re a bit too active for me. They were bathing at eight o’clock this morning, and as soon as they’d swallowed their breakfast they bolted off in Roger’s car.’

‘I’m glad they’ve made friends.’

Julia meant it. She was slightly disappointed that she would not be able to go on the river with Tom, but she was anxious that Roger should like him, she had a feeling that Roger did not like people indiscriminately; and after all she had the next fortnight to be with Tom.

‘They make me feel damned middle-aged, I don’t mind telling you that,’ Michael remarked.

‘What nonsense. You’re much more beautiful than either of them, and well you know it, my pet.’

Michael thrust out his jaw a little and pulled in his belly.

The boys did not come back till luncheon was nearly ready.

‘Sorry we’re so late,’ said Roger. ‘There was a filthy crowd and we had to wait on nearly every tee. We halved the match.’

They were hungry and thirsty, excited and pleased with themselves.

‘It’s grand having no one here to-day,’ said Roger. ‘I was afraid you’d got a whole gang coming and we’d have to behave like little gentlemen.’

‘I thought a rest would be rather nice,’ said Julia.

Roger gave her a glance.

‘It’ll do you good, mummy. You’re looking awfully fagged.’

(‘Blast his eyes. No, I mustn’t show I mind. Thank God, I can act.’)

She laughed gaily.

‘I had a sleepless night wondering what on earth we were going to do about your spots.’

‘I know, aren’t they sickening? Tom says he used to have them too.’

Julia looked at Tom. In his tennis shirt open at the neck, with his hair ruffled, his face already caught by the sun, he looked incredibly young. He really looked no older than Roger.

‘Anyhow, his nose is going to peel,’ Roger went on with a chuckle. ‘He’ll look a sight then.’

Julia felt slightly uneasy. It seemed to her that Tom had shed the years so that he was become not only in age Roger’s contemporary. They talked a great deal of nonsense. They ate enormously and drank tankards of beer. Michael, eating and drinking as sparingly as usual, watched them with amusement. He was enjoying their youth and their high spirits. He reminded Julia of an old dog lying in the sun and gently beating his tail on the ground as he looked at a pair of puppies gambolling about him. They had coffee on the lawn. Julia found it very pleasant to sit there in the shade, looking at the river. Tom was slim and graceful in his long white trousers. She had never seen him smoke a pipe before. She found it strangely touching. But Roger mocked him.

‘Do you smoke it because it makes you feel manly or because you like it?’

‘Shut up,’ said Tom.

‘Finished your coffee?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on then, let’s go on the river.’

Tom gave her a doubtful look. Roger saw it.

‘Oh, it’s all right, you needn’t bother about my respected parents, they’ve got the Sunday papers. Mummy’s just given me a racing punt.’

(‘I must keep my temper. I must keep my temper. Why was I such a fool as to give him a racing punt?’)

‘All right,’ she said, with an indulgent smile, ‘go on the river, but don’t fall in.’

‘It won’t hurt us if we do. We’ll be back for tea. Is the court marked out, daddy? We’re going to play tennis after tea.’

‘I daresay your father can get hold of somebody and you can have a four.’

‘Oh, don’t bother. Singles are better fun really and one gets more exercise.’ Then to Tom. ‘I’ll race you to the boathouse.’

Tom leapt to his feet and dashed off with Roger in quick pursuit. Michael took up one of the papers and looked for his spectacles.

‘They’ve clicked all right, haven’t they?’

‘Apparently.’

‘I was afraid Roger would be rather bored alone here with us. It’ll be fine for him to have someone to play around with.’

‘Don’t you think Roger’s rather inconsiderate?’

‘You mean about the tennis? Oh, my dear, I don’t really care if I play or not. It’s only natural that those two boys should want to play together. From their point of view I’m an old man, and they think I’ll spoil their game. After all the great thing is that they should have a good time.’

Julia had a pang of remorse. Michael was prosy, near with his money, self-complacent, but how extraordinarily kind he was and how unselfish! He was devoid of envy. It gave him a real satisfaction, so long as it did not cost money, to make other people happy. She read his mind like an open book. It was true that he never had any but a commonplace thought; on the other hand he never had a shameful one. It was exasperating that with so much to make him worthy of her affection, she should be so excruciatingly bored by him.

‘I think you’re a much better man that I am a woman, my sweet,’ she said.

He gave her his good, friendly smile and slightly shook his head.

‘No, dear, I had a wonderful profile, but you’ve got genius.’

Julia giggled. There was a certain fun to be got out of a man who never knew what you were talking about. But what did they mean when they said an actress had genius? Julia had often asked herself what it was that had placed her at last head and shoulders above her contemporaries. She had had detractors. At one time people had compared her unfavourably with some actress or other who at the moment enjoyed the public favour, but now no one disputed her supremacy. It was true that she had not the world-wide notoriety of the film-stars; she had tried her luck on the pictures, but had achieved no success; her face on the stage so mobile and expressive for some reason lost on the screen, and after one trial she had with Michael’s approval refused to accept any of the offers that were from time to time made her. She had got a good deal of useful publicity out of her dignified attitude. But Julia did not envy the film-stars; they came and went; she stayed. When it was possible she went to see the performance of actresses who played leading parts on the London stage. She was generous in her praise of them and her praise was sincere. Sometimes she honestly thought them so very good that she could not understand why people made so much fuss over her. She was much too intelligent not to know in what estimation the public held her, but she was modest about herself. It always surprised her when people raved over something she had done that came to her so naturally that she had never thought it possible to do anything else. The critics admired her variety. They praised especially her capacity for insinuating herself into a part. She was not aware that she deliberately observed people, but when she came to study a new part vague recollections surged up in her from she knew not where, and she found that she knew things about the character she was to represent that she had had no inkling of. It helped her to think of someone she knew or even someone she had seen in the street or at a party; she combined with this recollection her own personality, and thus built up a character founded on fact but enriched with her experience, her knowledge of technique and her amazing magnetism. People thought that she only acted during the two or three hours she was on the stage; they did not know that the character she was playing dwelt in the back of her mind all day long, when she was talking to others with all the appearance of attention, or in whatever business she was engaged. It often seemed to her that she was two persons, the actress, the popular favourite, the best-dressed woman in London, and that was a shadow; and the woman she was playing at night, and that was the substance.

‘Damned if I know what genius is,’ she said to herself. ‘But I know this, I’d give all I have to be eighteen.’

But she knew that wasn’t true. If she were given the chance to go back again would she take it? No. Not really. It was not the popularity, the celebrity if you like, that she cared for, nor the hold she had over audiences, the real love they bore her, it was certainly not the money this had brought her; it was the power she felt in herself, her mastery over the medium, that thrilled her. She could step into a part, not a very good one perhaps, with silly words to say, and by her personality, by the dexterity which she had at her fingertips, infuse it with life. There was no one who could do what she could with a part. Sometimes she felt like God.

‘And besides,’ she chuckled, ‘Tom wouldn’t be born.’

After all it was very natural that he should like to play about with Roger. They belonged to the same generation. It was the first day of his holiday, she must let him enjoy himself; there was a whole fortnight more. He would soon get sick of being all the time with a boy of seventeen. Roger was sweet, but he was dull; she wasn’t going to let maternal affection blind her to that. She must be very careful not to show that she was in the least put out. From the beginning she had made up her mind that she would never make any claim on Tom; it would be fatal if he felt that he owed something to her.

‘Michael, why don’t you let that flat in the mews to Tom? Now that he’s passed his exam and is a chartered accountant he can’t go on living in a bed-sitting room.’

‘That’s not a bad idea. I’ll suggest it to him.’

‘It would save an agent’s fees. We could help him to furnish it. We’ve got a lot of stuff stored away. We might just as well let him use it as have it moulder away in the attics.’

Tom and Roger came back to eat an enormous tea and then played tennis till the light failed. After dinner they played dominoes. Julia gave a beautiful performance of a still young mother fondly watching her son and his boy friend. She went to bed early. Presently they too went upstairs. Their rooms were just over hers. She heard Roger go into Tom’s room. They began talking, her windows and theirs were open, and she heard their voices in animated conversation. She wondered with exasperation what they found to say to one another. She had never found either of them very talkative. After a while Michael’s voice interrupted them.

‘Now then, you kids, you go to bed. You can go on talking to-morrow.’

She heard them laugh.

‘All right, daddy,’ cried Roger.

‘A pair of damned chatterboxes, that’s what you are.’

She heard Roger’s voice again.

‘Well, good-night, old boy.’

And Tom’s hearty answer: ‘So long, old man.’

‘Idiots!’ she said to herself crossly.

Next morning while she was having her breakfast Michael came into Julia’s room.

‘The boys have gone off to play golf at Huntercombe. They want to play a couple of rounds and they asked if they need come back to lunch. I told them that was quite all right.’

‘I don’t know that I particularly like the idea of Tom treating the house as if it was a hotel.’

‘Oh, my dear, they’re only a couple of kids. Let them have all the fun they can get, I say.’

She would not see Tom at all that day, for she had to start for London between five and six in order to get to the theatre in good time. It was all very well for Michael to be so damned good-natured about it. She was hurt. She felt a little inclined to cry. He must be entirely indifferent to her, it was Tom she was thinking of now; and she had made up her mind that to-day was going to be quite different from the day before. She had awakened determined to be tolerant and to take things as they came, but she hadn’t been prepared for a smack in the face like this.

‘Have the papers come yet?’ she asked sulkily.

She drove up to town with rage in her heart.

The following day was not much better. The boys did not go off to play golf, but they played tennis. Their incessant activity profoundly irritated Julia. Tom in shorts, with his bare legs, and a cricket shirt, really did not look more than sixteen. Bathing as they did three or four times a day he could not get his hair to stay down, and the moment it was dry it spread over his head in unruly curls. It made him look younger than ever, but oh, so charming. Julia’s heart was wrung. And it seemed to her that his demeanour had strangely changed; in the constant companionship of Roger he had shed the young man about town who was so careful of his dress, so particular about wearing the right thing, and was become again a sloppy little schoolboy. He never gave a hint, no glance even betrayed, that he was her lover; he treated her as if she were no more than Roger’s mother. In every remark he made, in his mischievousness, in his polite little ways, he made her feel that she belonged to an older generation. His behaviour had nothing of the chivalrous courtesy a young man might show to a fascinating woman; it was the tolerant kindness he might display to a maiden aunt.

Julia was irritated that Tom should docilely follow the lead of a boy so much younger than himself. It indicated lack of character. But she did not blame him; she blamed Roger. Roger’s selfishness revolted her. It was all very well to say he was young. His indifference to anyone’s pleasure but his own showed a vile disposition. He was tactless and inconsiderate. He acted as though the house, the servants, his father and mother were there for his particular convenience. She would often have been rather sharp with him, but that she did not dare before Tom assume the role of the correcting mother. And when you reproved Roger he had a maddening way of looking deeply hurt, like a stricken hind, which made you feel that you had been unkind and unjust. She could look like that too, it was an expression of the eyes that he had inherited from her; she had used it over and over again on the stage with moving effect, and she knew it need not mean very much, but when she saw it in his it shattered her. The mere thought of it now made her feel tenderly towards him. And that sudden change of feeling showed her the truth; she was jealous of Roger, madly jealous. The realization gave her something of a shock; she did not know whether to laugh or to be ashamed. She reflected a moment.

‘Well, I’ll cook his goose all right.’

She was not going to let the following Sunday pass like the last. Thank God, Tom was a snob. ‘A woman attracts men by her charm and holds them by their vices,’ she murmured and wondered whether she had invented the aphorism or remembered it from some play she had once acted in.

She gave instructions for some telephoning to be done. She got the Dennorants to come for the week-end. Charles Tamerley was staying at Henley and accepted an invitation to come over for Sunday and bring his host, Sir Mayhew Bryanston, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer. To amuse him and the Dennorants, because she knew that the upper classes do not want to meet one another in what they think is Bohemia, but artists of one sort or another, she asked Archie Dexter, her leading man, and his pretty wife who acted under her maiden name of Grace Hard-will. She felt pretty sure that with a marquess and marchioness to hover round and a Cabinet Minister to be impressed by, Tom would not go off to play golf with Roger or spend the afternoon in a punt. In such a party Roger would sink into his proper place of a schoolboy that no one took any notice of, and Tom would see how brilliant she could be when she took the trouble. In the anticipation of her triumph she managed to bear the intervening days with fortitude. She saw little of Roger and Tom. On her matinée days she did not see them at all. If they were not playing some game they were careering about the country in Roger’s car.

Julia drove the Dennorants down after the play. Roger had gone to bed, but Michael and Tom were waiting up to have supper with them. It was a very good supper. The servants had gone to bed too and they helped themselves. Julia noticed the shy eagerness with which Tom saw that the Dennorants had everything they wanted, and his alacrity to jump up if he could be of service. His civility was somewhat officious. The Dennorants were an unassuming young couple to whom it had never occurred that their rank could impress anyone, and George Dennorant was a little embarrassed when Tom took away his dirty plate and handed him a dish to help himself to the next course.

‘No golf for Roger to-morrow, I think,’ said Julia to herself.

They stayed up talking and laughing till three in the morning, and when Tom said good night to her his eyes were shining; but whether from love or champagne she did not know. He pressed her hand.

‘What a lovely party,’ he said.

It was late when Julia, dressed in organdie, looking her best, came down into the garden. She saw Roger in a long chair with a book.

‘Reading?’ she said, lifting her really beautiful eyebrows. ‘Why aren’t you playing golf?’

Roger looked a trifle sulky.

‘Tom said it was too hot.’

‘Oh?’ she smiled charmingly. ‘I was afraid you thought you ought to stay and entertain my guests. There are going to be so many people, we could easily have managed without you. Where are the others?’

‘I don’t know. Tom’s making chichi with Cecily Dennorant.’

‘She’s very pretty, you know.’

‘It looks to me as though it’s going to be a crashing bore to-day.’

‘I hope Tom won’t find it so,’ she said, as though she were seriously concerned.

Roger remained silent.

The day passed exactly as she had hoped. It was true that she saw little of Tom, but Roger saw less. Tom made a great hit with the Dennorants; he explained to them how they could get out of paying as much income-tax as they did. He listened respectfully to the Chancellor while he discoursed on the stage and to Archie Dexter while he gave his views on the political situation. Julia was at the top of her form. Archie Dexter had a quick wit, a fund of stage stories and a wonderful gift for telling them; between the two of them they kept the table during luncheon laughing uproariously; and after tea, when the tennis players were tired of playing tennis, Julia was persuaded (not much against her will) to do her imitations of Gladys Cooper, Constance Collier and Gertie Lawrence. But Julia did not forget that Charles Tamerley was her devoted, unrewarded lover, and she took care to have a little stroll alone with him in the gloaming. With him she sought to be neither gay nor brilliant, she was tender and wistful. Her heart ached, notwithstanding the scintillating performance she had given during the day; and it was with almost complete sincerity that with sighs, sad looks and broken sentences, she made him understand that her life was hollow and despite the long continued success of her career she could not but feel that she had missed something. Sometimes she thought of the villa at Sorrento on the bay of Naples. A beautiful dream. Happiness might have been hers for the asking, perhaps; she had been a fool; after all what were the triumphs of the stage but illusion? Pagliacci. People never realized how true that was; Vesti la giubba and all that sort of thing. She was desperately lonely. Of course there was no need to tell Charles that her heart ached not for lost opportunities, but because a young man seemed to prefer playing golf with her son to making love to her.

But then Julia and Archie Dexter got together. After dinner when they were all sitting in the drawing-room, without warning, starting with a few words of natural conversation they burst, as though they were lovers, into a jealous quarrel. For a moment the rest did not realize it was a joke till their mutual accusations became so outrageous and indecent that they were consumed with laughter. Then they played an extempore scene of an intoxicated gentleman picking up a French tart in Jermyn Street. After that, with intense seriousness, while their little audience shook with laughter, they did Mrs Alving in ‘Ghosts’ trying to seduce Pastor Manders. They finished with a performance that they had given often enough before at theatrical parties to enable them to do it with effect. This was a Chekov play in English, but in moments of passion breaking into something that sounded exactly like Russian. Julia exercised all her great gift for tragedy, but underlined it with a farcical emphasis, so that the effect was incredibly funny. She put into her performance the real anguish of her heart, and with her lively sense of the ridiculous made a mock of it. The audience rolled about in their chairs; they held their sides; they groaned in an agony of laughter. Perhaps Julia had never acted before. She was acting for Tom and for him alone.

‘I’ve seen Bernhardt and Réjane,’ said the Chancellor; ‘I’ve seen Duse and Ellen Terry and Mrs Kendal. Nunc Dimittis.’

Julia, radiant, sank back into a chair and swallowed at a draught a glass of champagne.

‘If I haven’t cooked Roger’s goose I’ll eat my hat,’ she thought.

But for all that the two lads had gone off to play golf when she came downstairs next morning. Michael had taken the Dennorants up to town. Julia was tired. She found it an effort to be bright and chatty when Tom and Roger came in to lunch. In the afternoon the three of them went on the river, but Julia had the feeling that they took her, not because they much wanted to, but because they could not help it. She stifled a sigh when she reflected how much she had looked forward to Tom’s holiday. Now she was counting the days that must pass till it ended. She drew a deep breath of relief when she got into the car to go to London. She was not angry with Tom, but deeply hurt; she was exasperated with herself because she had so lost control over her feelings. But when she got into the theatre she felt that she shook off the obsession of him like a bad dream from which one awoke; there, in her dressing-rom, she regained possession of herself and the affairs of the common round of daily life faded to insignificance. Nothing really mattered when she had within her grasp this possibility of freedom.

Thus the week went by. Michael, Roger and Tom enjoyed themselves. They bathed, they played tennis, they played golf, they lounged about on the river. There were only four days more. There were only three days more.

(‘I can stick it out now. It’ll be different when we’re back in London again. I mustn’t show how miserable I am. I must pretend it’s all right.’)

‘A snip having this spell of fine weather,’ said Michael. ‘Tom’s been a success, hasn’t he? Pity he can’t stay another week.’

‘Yes, a terrible pity.’

‘I think he’s a nice friend for Roger to have. A thoroughly normal, clean-minded English boy.’

‘Oh, thoroughly.’ (‘Bloody fool, bloody fool.’)

‘To see the way they eat is a fair treat.’

‘Yes, they seem to have enjoyed their food.’ (‘My God, I wish it could have choked them.’)

Tom was to go up to town by an early train on Monday morning. The Dexters, who had a house at Bourne End, had asked them all to lunch on Sunday. They were to go down in the launch. Now that Tom’s holiday was nearly over Julia was glad that she had never by so much as a lifted eyebrow betrayed her irritation. She was certain that he had no notion how deeply he had wounded her. After all she must be tolerant, he was only a boy, and if you must cross your t’s, she was old enough to be his mother. It was a bore that she had a thing about him, but there it was, she couldn’t help it; she had told herself from the beginning that she must never let him feel that she had any claims on him. No one was coming to dinner on Sunday. She would have liked to have Tom to herself on his last evening; that was impossible, but at all events they could go for a stroll by themselves in the garden.

‘I wonder if he’s noticed that he hasn’t kissed me since he came here?’

They might go out in the punt. It would be heavenly to lie in his arms for a few minutes; it would make up for everything.

The Dexters’ party was theatrical. Grace Hardwill, Archie’s wife, played in musical comedy, and there was a bevy of pretty girls who danced in the piece in which she was then appearing. Julia acted with great naturalness the part of a leading lady who put on no frills. She was charming to the young ladies, with their waved platinum hair, who earned three pounds a week in the chorus. A good many of the guests had brought Kodaks and she submitted with affability to being photographed. She applauded enthusiastically when Grace Hardwill sang her famous song to the accompaniment of the composer. She laughed as heartily as anyone when the comic woman did an imitation of her in one of her best-known parts. It was all very gay, rather rowdy, and agreeably light-hearted. Julia enjoyed herself, but when it was seven o’clock was not sorry to go. She was thanking her hosts effusively for the pleasant party when Roger came up to her.

‘I say, mum, there’s a whole crowd going on to Maidenhead to dine and dance, and they want Tom and me to go too. You don’t mind, do you?’

The blood rushed to her cheeks. She could not help answering rather sharply.

‘How are you to get back?’

‘Oh, that’ll be all right. We’ll get someone to drop us.’

She looked at him helplessly. She could not think what to say.

‘It’s going to be a tremendous lark. Tom’s crazy to go.’

Her heart sank. It was with the greatest difficulty that she managed not to make a scene. But she controlled herself.

‘All right, darling. But don’t be too late. Remember that Tom’s got to rise with the lark.’

Tom had come up and heard the last words.

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ he asked.

‘Of course not. I hope you’ll have a grand time.’

She smiled brightly at him, but her eyes were steely with hatred.

‘I’m just as glad those two kids have gone off,’ said Michael when they got into the launch. ‘We haven’t had an evening to ourselves for ever so long.’

She clenched her hands in order to prevent herself from telling him to hold his silly tongue. She was in a black rage. This was the last straw. Tom had neglected her for a fortnight, he had not even treated her with civility, and she had been angelic. There wasn’t a woman in the world who would have shown such patience. Any other woman would have told him that if he couldn’t behave with common decency he’d better get out. Selfish, stupid and common, that’s what he was. She almost wished he wasn’t going to-morrow so that she could have the pleasure of turning him out bag and baggage. And to dare to treat her like that, a two-penny half-penny little man in the city; poets, cabinet ministers, peers of the realm would be only to glad to break the most important engagements to have the chance of dining with her, and he threw her over to go and dance with a pack of peroxide blondes who couldn’t act for nuts. That showed what a fool he was. You would have thought he’d have some gratitude. Why, the very clothes he had on she’d paid for. That cigarette-case he was so proud of, hadn’t she given him that? And the ring he wore. My God, she’d get even with him. Yes, and she knew how she could do it. She knew where he was most sensitive and how she could most cruelly wound him. That would get him on the raw. She felt a faint sensation of relief as she turned the scheme over in her mind. She was impatient to carry out her part of it at once, and they had no sooner got home than she went up to her room. She got four single pounds out of her bag and a ten-shilling note. She wrote a brief letter.

DEAR TOM,

I’m enclosing the money for your tips as I shan’t see you in the morning. Give three pounds to the butler, a pound to the maid who’s been valeting you, and ten shillings to the chauffeur.

JULIA.

She sent for Evie and gave instructions that the letter should be given to Tom by the maid who awoke him. When she went down to dinner she felt much better. She carried on an animated conversation with Michael while they dined and afterwards they played six pack bezique. If she had racked her brains for a week she couldn’t have thought of anything that would humiliate Tom more bitterly.

But when she went to bed she could not sleep. She was waiting for Roger and Tom to come home. A notion came to her that made her restless. Perhaps Tom would realize that he had behaved rottenly, if he gave it a moment’s thought he must see how unhappy he was making her; it might be that he would be sorry and when he came in, after he had said good night to Roger, he would creep down to her room. If he did that she would forgive everything. The letter was probably in the butler’s pantry; she could easily slip down and get it back. At last a car drove up. She turned on her light to look at the time. It was three. She heard the two young men go upstairs and to their respective rooms. She waited. She put on the light by her bedside so that when he opened the door he should be able to see. She would pretend she was sleeping and then as he crept forward on tiptoe slowly open her eyes and smile at him. She waited. In the silent night she heard him get into bed and switch off the light. She stared straight in front of her for a minute, then with a shrug of the shoulders opened a drawer by her bedside and from a little bottle took a couple of sleeping-tablets.

‘If I don’t sleep I shall go mad.’

CHAPTER 15

JULIA DID NOT wake till after eleven. Among her letters was one that had not come by post. She recognized Tom’s neat, commercial hand and tore it open. It contained nothing but the four pounds and the ten-shilling note. She felt slightly sick. She did not quite know what she had expected him to reply to her condescending letter and the humiliating present. It had not occurred to her that he would return it. She was troubled, she had wanted to hurt his feelings, but she had a fear now that she had gone too far.

‘Anyhow I hope he tipped the servants,’ she muttered to reassure herself. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘He’ll come round. It won’t hurt him to discover that I’m not all milk and honey.’

But she remained thoughtful throughout the day. When she got to the theatre a parcel was waiting for her. As soon as she looked at the address she knew what it contained. Evie asked if she should open it.

‘No.’

But the moment she was alone she opened it herself. There were the cuff-links and the waistcoat buttons, the pearl studs, the wrist-watch and the cigarette-case of which Tom was so proud. Not a word of explanation. Her heart sank and she noticed that she was trembling.

‘What a damned fool I was! Why didn’t I keep my temper?’

Her heart now beat painfully. She couldn’t go on the stage with that anguish gnawing at her vitals, she would give a frightful performance; at whatever cost she must speak to him. There was a telephone in his house and an extension to his room. She rang him. Fortunately he was in.

‘Tom.’

‘Yes?’

He had paused for a moment before answering and his voice was peevish.

‘What does this mean? Why have you sent me all those things?

‘Did you get the notes this morning?’

‘Yes. I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Have I offended you?’

‘Oh no,’ he answered. ‘I like being treated like a kept boy. I like having it thrown in my face that even my tips have to be given me. I thought it rather strange that you didn’t send me the money for a third-class ticket back to London.’

Although Julia was in a pitiable state of anxiety, so that she could hardly get the words out of her mouth, she almost smiled at his fatuous irony. He was a silly little thing.

‘But you can’t imagine that I wanted to hurt your feelings. You surely know me well enough to know that’s the last thing I should do.’

‘That only makes it worse.’ (‘Damn and curse,’ thought Julia.) ‘I ought never to have let you make me those presents. I should never have let you lend me money.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. It’s all some horrible misunderstanding. Come and fetch me after the play and we’ll have it out. I know I can explain.’

‘I’m going to dinner with my people and I shall sleep at home.’

‘To-morrow then.’

‘I’m engaged to-morrow.’

‘I must see you, Tom. We’ve been too much to one another to part like this. You can’t condemn me unheard. It’s so unjust to punish me for no fault of mine.’

‘I think it’s much better that we shouldn’t meet again.’

Julia was growing desperate.

‘But I love you, Tom. I love you. Let me see you once more and then, if you’re still angry with me, we’ll call it a day.’

There was a long pause before he answered.

‘All right. I’ll come after the matinée on Wednesday.’

‘Don’t think unkindly of me, Tom.’

She put down the receiver. At all events he was coming. She wrapped up again the things he had returned to her, and hid them away where she was pretty sure Evie would not see them. She undressed, put on her old pink dressing-gown and began to make-up. She was out of humour: this was the first time she had ever told him that she loved him. It vexed her that she had been forced to humiliate herself by begging him to come and see her. Till then it had always been he who sought her company. She was not pleased to think that the situation between them now was openly reversed.

Julia gave a very poor performance at the matinée on Wednesday. The heat wave had affected business and the house was apathetic. Julia was indifferent. With that sickness of apprehension gnawing at her heart she could not care how the play went. (‘What the hell do they want to come to the theatre for on a day like this anyway?’) She was glad when it was over.

‘I’m expecting Mr. Fennell,’ she told Evie. ‘While he’s here I don’t want to be disturbed.’

Evie did not answer. Julia gave her a glance and saw that she was looking grim.

(‘To hell with her. What do I care what she thinks!’)

He ought to have been there by now. It was after five. He was bound to come; after all, he’d promised, hadn’t he? She put on a dressing-gown, not the one she made up in, but a man’s dressing-gown, in plum-coloured silk. Evie took an interminable time to put things straight.

‘For God’s sake don’t fuss, Evie. Leave me alone.’

Evie did not speak. She went on methodically arranging the various objects on the dressing-table exactly as Julia always wanted them.

‘Why the devil don’t you answer when I speak to you?’

Evie turned round and looked at her. She thoughtfully rubbed her finger along her nostrils.

‘Great actress you may be . . .’

‘Get the hell out of here.’

After taking off her stage make-up Julia had done nothing to her face except put the very faintest shading of blue under her eyes. She had a smooth, pale skin and without rouge on her cheeks or red on her lips she looked wan. The man’s dressing-gown gave an effect at once helpless, fragile and gallant. Her heart was beating painfully and she was very anxious, but looking at herself in the glass she murmured: Mimi in the last act of Bohème. Almost without meaning to she coughed once or twice consumptively. She turned off the bright lights on her dressing-table and lay down on the sofa. Presently there was a knock at the door and Evie announced Mr. Fennell. Julia held out a white, thin hand.

‘I’m lying down. I’m afraid I’m not very well. Find yourself a chair. It’s nice of you to come.’

‘I’m sorry. What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ She forced a smile to her ashy lips. ‘I haven’t been sleeping very well the last two or three nights.’

She turned her beautiful eyes on him and for a while gazed at him in silence. His expression was sullen, but she had a notion that he was frightened.

‘I’m waiting for you to tell me what you’ve got against me,’ she said at last in a low voice.

It trembled a little, she noticed, but quite naturally. (‘Christ, I believe I’m frightened too.’)

‘There’s no object in going back to that. The only thing I wanted to say to you was this: I’m afraid I can’t pay you the two hundred pounds I owe you right away, I simply haven’t got it, but I’ll pay you by degrees. I hate having to ask you to give me time, but I can’t help myself.’

She sat up on the sofa and put both her hands to her breaking heart.

‘I don’t understand. I’ve lain awake for two whole nights turning it all over in my mind. I thought I should go mad. I’ve been trying to understand. I can’t. I can’t.’

(‘What play did I say that in?’)

‘Oh yes, you can, you understand perfectly. You were angry with me and you wanted to get back on me. And you did. You got back on me all right. You couldn’t have shown your contempt for me more clearly.’

‘But why should I want to get back on you? Why should I be angry with you?’

‘Because I went to Maidenhead with Roger to that party and you wanted me to come home.’

‘But I told you to go. I said I hoped you’d have a good time.’

‘I know you did, but your eyes were blazing with passion. I didn’t want to go, but Roger was keen on it. I told him I thought we ought to come back and dine with you and Michael, but he said you’d be glad to have us off your hands, and I didn’t like to make a song and dance about it. And when I saw you were in a rage it was too late to get out of it.’

‘I wasn’t in a rage. I can’t think how you got such an idea in your head. It was so natural that you should want to go to the party. You can’t think I’m such a beast as to grudge you a little fun in your fortnight’s holiday. My poor lamb, my only fear was that you would be bored. I so wanted you to have a good time.’

‘Then why did you send me that money and write me that letter? It was so insulting.’

Julia’s voice faltered. Her jaw began to tremble and the loss of control over her muscles was strangely moving. Tom looked away uneasily.

‘I couldn’t bear to think of you having to throw away your good money on tips. I know that you’re not terribly rich and I knew you’d spent a lot on green fees. I hate women who go about with young men and let them pay for everything. It’s so inconsiderate. I treated you just as I’d have treated Roger. I never thought it would hurt your feelings.’

‘Will you swear that?’

‘Of course I will. My God, is it possible that after all these months you don’t know me better than that? If what you think were true, what a mean cruel, despicable woman I should be, what a cad, what a heartless, vulgar beast! Is that what you think I am?’

A poser.

‘Anyhow it doesn’t matter. I ought never to have accepted valuable presents from you and allowed you to lend me money. It’s put me in a rotten position. Why I thought you despised me is that I can’t help feeling that you’ve got a right to. The fact is I can’t afford to run around with people who are so much richer than I am. I was a fool to think I could. It’s been fun and I’ve had a grand time, but now I’m through. I’m not going to see you any more.’

She gave a deep sigh.

‘You don’t care two hoots for me. That’s what that means.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘You’re everything in the world to me. You know that. I’m so lonely and your friendship meant a great deal to me. I’m surrounded by hangers-on and parasites and I knew you were disinterested. I felt I could rely on you. I so loved being with you. You were the only person in the world with whom I could be entirely myself. Don’t you know what a pleasure it was to me to help you a little? It wasn’t for your sake I made you little presents, it was for my own; it made me so happy to see you using the things I’d given you. If you’d cared for me at all they wouldn’t have humiliated you, you’d have been touched to owe me something.’

She turned her eyes on him once more. She could always cry easily, and she was really so miserable now that she did not have to make even a small effort. He had never seen her cry before. She could cry, without sobbing, her wonderful dark eyes wide open, with a face that was almost rigid. Great heavy tears ran down it. And her quietness, the immobility of the tragic body, were terribly moving. She hadn’t cried like that since she cried in ‘The Stricken Heart.’ Christ, how that play had shattered her. She was not looking at Tom, she was looking straight in front of her; she was really distracted with grief, but, what was it? another self within her knew what she was doing, a self that shared in her unhappiness and yet watched its expression. She felt him go white. She felt a sudden anguish wring his heartstrings, she felt that his flesh and blood could not support the intolerable pain of hers.

‘Julia.’

His voice was broken. She slowly turned her liquid eyes on him. It was not a woman crying that he saw, it was all the woe of human kind, it was the immeasurable, the inconsolable grief that is the lot of man. He threw himself down on his knees and took her in his arms. He was shattered.

‘Dearest, dearest.’

For a minute she did not move. It was as if she did not know that he was there. He kissed her streaming eyes and with his mouth sought hers. She gave it to him as though she were powerless, as though, scarcely conscious of what was befalling her, she had no will left. With a scarcely perceptible movement she pressed her body to his and gradually her arms found their way round his neck. She lay in his arms, not exactly inert, but as though all the strength, all the vitality, had gone out of her. In his mouth he tasted the saltness of her tears. At last, exhausted, clinging to him with soft arms she sank back on the sofa. His lips clung to hers.

You would never have thought had you seen her a quarter of an hour later, so quietly gay, flushed a little, that so short a while before she had passed through such a tempest of weeping. They each had a whisky and soda and a cigarette and looked at one another with fond eyes.

‘He’s a sweet little thing,’ she thought.

It occurred to her that she would give him a treat.

‘The Duke and Duchess of Rickaby are coming to the play to-night and we’re going to have supper at the Savoy. I suppose you wouldn’t come, would you? I want a man badly to make a fourth.’

‘If you’d like me to, of course I will.’

The heightened colour on his cheeks told her how excited he was to meet such distinguished persons. She did not tell him that the Rickabys would go anywhere for a free meal. Tom took back the presents that he had returned to her rather shyly, but he took them. When he had gone she sat down at the dressing-table and had a good look at herself.

‘How lucky I am that I can cry without my eyelids swelling,’ she said. She massaged them a little. ‘All the same, what mugs men are.’

She was happy. Everything would be all right now. She had got him back. But somewhere, at the back of her mind or in the bottom of her heart, was a feeling of ever so slight contempt for Tom because he was such a simple fool.

CHAPTER 16

THEIR QUARREL, DESTROYING in some strange way the barrier between them, brought them closer together. Tom offered less resistance than she had expected when she mooted once more the question of the flat. It looked as though, after their reconciliation, having taken back her presents and consented to forget the loan, he had put aside his moral scruples. They had a lot of fun furnishing it. The chauffeur’s wife kept it clean for him and cooked his breakfast. Julia had a key and would sometimes let herself in and sit by herself in the little sitting-room till he came back from his office. They supped together two or three times a week and danced, then drove back to the flat in a taxi. Julia enjoyed a happy autumn. The play they put on was a success. She felt alert and young. Roger was coming home at Christmas, but only for a fortnight, and was then going to Vienna. Julia expected him to monopolize Tom and she was determined not to mind. Youth naturally appealed to youth and she told herself that there was no reason for her to feel anxious if for a few days the two of them were so wrapped up in one another that Tom had no thought for her. She held him now. He was proud to be her lover, it gave him confidence in himself, and he was pleased to be on familiar terms with a large number of more or less distinguished persons whom after all he only knew through her. He was anxious now to join a good club and Julia was preparing the ground. Charles had never refused her anything, and with tact she was certain that she could wheedle him into proposing Tom for one of those to which he belonged. It was a new and delicious sensation for Tom to have money to spend; she encouraged him to be extravagant; she had a notion that he would get used to living in a certain way and then would realize that he could not do without her.

‘Of course it can’t last,’ she told herself, ‘but when it comes to an end it will have been a wonderful experience for him. It’ll really have made a man of him.’

But though she told herself that it could not last she did not see really why it shouldn’t. As the years went by and he grew older there wouldn’t be any particular difference between them. He would no longer be so very young in ten or fifteen years and she would be just the same age as she was now. They were very comfortable together. Men were creatures of habit; that gave women such a hold on them, she did not feel a day older than he, and she was convinced that the disparity in their ages had never even occurred to him. It was true that on this point she had once had a moment’s disquietude. She was lying on his bed. He was standing at the dressing-table, in his shirt sleeves, brushing his hair. She was stark naked and she lay in the position of a Venus by Titian that she remembered to have seen in a country house at which she had stayed. She felt that she made really a lovely picture, and in complete awareness of the charming sight she offered, held the pose. She was happy and satisfied.

‘This is romance,’ she thought, and a light, quick smile hovered over her lips.

He caught sight of her in the mirror, turned round and without a word, twitched the sheet over her. Though she smiled at him affectionately, it gave her quite a turn. Was he afraid that she would catch cold or was it that his English modesty was shocked at her nakedness? Or could it be that, his boyish lust satisfied, he was a trifle disgusted at the sight of her ageing body? When she got home she again took all her clothes off and examined herself in the looking-glass. She determined not to spare herself. She looked at her neck, there was no sign of age there, especially when she held her chin up; and her breasts were small and firm; they might have been a girl’s. Her belly was flat, her hips were small, there was a very small roll of fat there, like a long sausage, but everyone had that, and anyhow Miss Phillips could have a go at it. No one could say that her legs weren’t good, they were long and slim and comely; she passed her hands over her body, her skin was as soft as velvet and there wasn’t a blemish on it. Of course there were a few wrinkles under her eyes, but you had to peer to see them; they said there was an operation now by which you could get rid of them, it might be worth while to inquire into that; it was lucky that her hair had retained its colour; however well hair was dyed, to dye hardened the face; hers remained a rich, deep brown. Her teeth were all right too.

‘Prudishness, that’s all it was.’

She had a moment’s recollection of the Spaniard with the beard in the wagon-lit and she smiled roguishly at herself in the glass.

‘No damned modesty about him.’

But all the same from that day on she took care to act up to Tom’s standards of decency.

Julia’s reputation was so good that she felt she need not hesitate to show herself with Tom in public places. It was a new experience for her to go to night-clubs, she enjoyed it, and though no one could have been better aware than she that she could go nowhere without being stared at, it never entered her head that such a change in her habits must excite comment. With twenty years of fidelity behind her, for of course she did not count the Spaniard, an accident that might happen to any woman, Julia was confident that no one would imagine for a moment that she was having an affair with a boy young enough to be her son. It never occurred to her that perhaps Tom was not always so discreet as he might have been. It never occurred to her that the look in her eyes when they danced together betrayed her. She looked upon her position as so privileged that it never occurred to her that people at last were beginning to gossip.

When this gossip reached the ears of Dolly de Vries she laughed. At Julia’s request she had invited Tom to parties and once or twice had him down for a week-end in the country, but she had never paid any attention to him. He seemed a nice little thing, a useful escort for Julia when Michael was busy, but perfectly insignificant. He was one of those persons who everywhere pass unnoticed, and even after you had met him you could not remember what he was like. He was the extra man you invited to dinner to make an odd number even. Julia talked of him gaily as ‘me boy friend’ or as ‘my young man’; she could hardly have been so cool about it, so open, if there were anything in it. Besides Dolly knew very well that the only two men there had ever been in Julia’s life were Michael and Charles Tamerley. But it was funny of Julia, after taking so much care of herself for years, suddenly to start going to night clubs three or four times a week. Dolly had seen little of her of late and indeed had been somewhat piqued by her neglect. She had many friends in theatrical circles and she began to make enquiries. She did not at all like what she heard. She did not know what to think. One thing was evident, Julia couldn’t know what was being said about her, and someone must tell her. Not she; she hadn’t the courage. Even after all these years she was a little frightened of Julia. Julia was a very good-tempered woman, and though her language was often brusque it was hard to ruffle her; but there was something about her that prevented you from taking liberties with her; you had a feeling that if once you went too far you would regret it. But something must be done. Dolly turned the matter over in her mind for a fortnight, anxiously; she tried to put her own wounded feelings aside and look at it only from the point of view of Julia’s career, and at last she came to the conclusion that Michael must speak to her. She had never liked Michael, but after all he was Julia’s husband and it was her duty to tell him at least enough to make him put a stop to whatever was going on.

She rang Michael up and made an appointment with him at the theatre. Michael liked Dolly as little as she liked him, though for other reasons, and when he heard that she wanted to see him he swore. He was annoyed that he had never been able to induce her to sell out her shares in the management, and he resented whatever suggestions she made as an unwarrantable interference. But when she was shown into his office he greeted her with cordiality. He kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Sit down and make yourself comfy. Come to see that the old firm’s still raking in dividends for you?’

Dolly de Vries was now a woman of sixty. She was very fat, and her face, with its large nose and heavy red lips, seemed larger than life. There was a slightly masculine touch in her black satin dress, but she wore a double string of pearls round her neck, a diamond brooch at her waist and another in her hat. Her short hair was dyed a rich copper. Her lips and her fingernails were bright red. Her voice was loud and deep, but when she got excited the words were apt to tumble over one another and a slight cockney accent revealed itself.

‘Michael, I’m upset about Julia.’

Michael, always the perfect gentleman, slightly raised his eyebrows and compressed his thin lips. He was not prepared to discuss his wife even with Dolly.

‘I think she’s doing a great deal too much. I don’t know what’s come over her. All these parties she’s going to now. These night clubs and things. After all, she’s not a young woman any more; she’ll just wear herself out.’

‘Oh, nonsense. She’s as strong as a horse and she’s in the best of health. She’s looking younger than she has for years. You’re not going to grudge her a bit of fun when her day’s work is over. The part she’s playing just now doesn’t take it out of her; I’m very glad that she should want to go out and amuse herself. It only shows how much vitality she has.’

‘She never cared for that sort of thing before. It seems so strange that she should suddenly take to dancing till two in the morning in the horrible atmosphere of those places.’

‘It’s the only exercise she gets. I can’t expect her to put on shorts and come for a run with me in the park.’

‘I think you ought to know that people are beginning to talk. It’s doing her reputation a lot of harm.’

‘What the devil d’you mean by that?’

‘Well, it’s absurd that at her age she should make herself so conspicuous with a young boy.’

He looked at her for a moment without understanding, and when he caught what she meant he laughed loud.

‘Tom? Don’t be such a fool, Dolly.’

‘I’m not a fool. I know what I’m talking about. When anyone’s as well known as Julia and she’s always about with the same man naturally people talk.’

‘But Tom’s just as much my friend as hers. You know very well that I can’t take Julia out dancing. I have to get up every morning at eight to get my exercise in before my day’s work. Hang it all, I do know something about human nature after thirty years on the stage. Tom’s a very good type of clean honest English boy and he’s by way of being a gentleman. I daresay he admires Julia, boys of that age often think they’re in love with women older than themselves, well, it won’t do him any harm, it’ll do him good; but to think Julia could possibly give him a thought – my poor Dolly, you make me laugh.’

‘He’s boring, he’s dull, he’s common and he’s a snob.’

‘Well, if you think he’s all that doesn’t it strike you as rather strange that Julia should be so wrapped up in him as you seem to think?’

‘Only a woman knows what a woman can do.’

‘That’s not a bad line, Dolly. We shall have you writing a play next. Now let’s get this straight. Can you look me in the face and tell me that you really think Julia is having an affair with Tom?’

She looked him in the face. Her eyes were anguished. For though at first she had only laughed at what was being said about Julia she had not been able altogether to suppress the doubts that soon assailed her; she remembered a dozen little incidents that at the time had escaped her notice, but when considered in cold blood looked terribly suspicious. She had suffered such torture as she had never thought it possible to endure. Proof? She had no proof; she only had an intuition that she could not mistrust; she wanted to say yes, the impulse to do so was almost uncontrollable; she controlled it. She could not give Julia away. The fool might go and tell her and Julia would never speak to her again. He might have Julia watched and catch her out. No one could tell what might happen if she told the truth.

‘No, I don’t.’

Her eyes filled with tears and began to roll down her massive cheeks. Michael saw her misery. He thought her ridiculous, but he realized that she was suffering and in the kindness of his heart sought to console her.

‘I was sure you didn’t really. You know how fond Julia is of you, you mustn’t be jealous, you know, if she has other friends.’

‘God knows I don’t grudge her anything,’ she sobbed. ‘She’s been so different to me lately. She’s been so cold. I’ve been such a loyal friend to her, Michael.’

‘Yes, dear, I know you have.’

‘Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my King . . .’

‘Oh, come now, it’s not so bad as that. You know, I’m not the sort of chap to talk about his wife to other people. I always think that’s such frightfully bad form. But you know, honestly you don’t know the first thing about Julia. Sex doesn’t mean a thing to her. When we were first married it was different, and I don’t mind telling you after all these years that she made life a bit difficult for me. I don’t say she was a nymphomaniac or anything like that, but she was inclined to be rather tiresome sometimes. Bed’s all very well in its way, but there are other things in life. But after Roger was born she changed completely. Having a baby settled her. All those instincts went into her acting. You’ve read Freud, Dolly; what does he call it when that happens?’

‘Oh, Michael, what do I care about Freud?’

‘Sublimation. That’s it. I often think that’s what’s made her such a great actress. Acting’s a whole time job and if you want to be really good you’ve got to give your whole self to it. I’m so impatient with the public who think actors and actresses lead a devil of a life. We haven’t got the time for that sort of nonsense.’

What Michael was saying made her so angry that she recovered her self-control.

‘But Michael, it may be that you and I know that there’s nothing wrong in Julia’s going about all the time with that miserable little pip-squeak. It’s so bad for her reputation. After all, one of your great assets has been your exemplary married life. Everyone has looked up to you. The public has loved to think of you as such a devoted and united couple.’

‘And so we are, damn it.’

Dolly was growing impatient.

‘But I tell you people are talking. You can’t be so stupid as not to see that they’re bound to. I mean, if Julia had had one flagrant affair after another, nobody would take any notice, but after the life she’s led for so many years suddenly to break out like this – naturally everybody starts chattering. It’s so bad for business.’

Michael gave her a swift glance. He smiled a little.

‘I see what you mean, Dolly. I daresay there’s something in what you say and in the circumstances I feel that you have a perfect right to say it. You were awfully good to us when we started and I should hate to see you let down now. I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy you out.’

‘Buy me out?’

Dolly straightened herself and her face, a moment ago rumpled and discomposed, hardened. She was seized with indignation. He went on suavely.

‘I see your point. If Julia’s gadding about all night it must tell on her performances. That’s obvious. She’s got a funny sort of public, a lot of old ladies come to our matinees because they think she’s such a sweet good woman. I don’t mind admitting that if she gets herself unpleasantly talked about it might have some effect on the takings. I know Julia well enough to know that she wouldn’t put up with any interference with her liberty of action. I’m her husband and I’ve got to put up with it. But you’re in a different position altogether. I shouldn’t blame you if you wanted to get out while the going was good.’

Dolly was alert now. She was far from a fool and when it came to business was a match for Michael. She was angry, but her anger gave her self-control.

‘I should have thought after all these years, Michael, that you knew me better than that. I thought it my duty to warn you, but I’m prepared to take the rough with the smooth. I’m not the woman to desert a sinking ship. I daresay I can afford to lose my money better than you can.’

It gave her a great deal of satisfaction to see the disappointment that was clearly expressed on Michael’s face. She knew how much money meant to him and she had a hope that what she had said would rankle. He pulled himself together quickly.

‘Well, think it over, Dolly.’

She gathered up her bag and they parted with mutual expressions of affection and good will.

‘Silly old bitch,’ he said when the door was closed behind her.

‘Pompous old ass,’ she hissed as she went down in the lift.

But when she got into her magnificent and very expensive car and drove back to Montagu Square she could not hold back the heavy, painful tears that filled her eyes. She felt old, lonely, unhappy, and desperately jealous.

CHAPTER 17

MICHAEL FLATTERED HIMSELF on his sense of humour. On the Sunday evening that followed his conversation with Dolly he strolled into Julia’s room while she was dressing. They were going to the pictures after an early dinner.

‘Who’s coming to-night besides Charles?’ he asked her.

‘I couldn’t find another woman. I’ve asked Tom.’

‘Good! I wanted to see him.’

He chuckled at the thought of the joke he had up his sleeve. Julia was looking forward to the evening. At the cinema she would arrange the seating so that Tom sat next to her and he would hold her hand while she chatted in undertones to Charles on the other side of her. Dear Charles, it was nice of him to have loved her so long and so devotedly; she would go out of her way to be very sweet to him. Charles and Tom arrived together. Tom was wearing his new dinner jacket for the first time and he and Julia exchanged a little private glance, of satisfaction on his part and of compliment on hers.

‘Well, young feller,’ said Michael heartily, rubbing his hands, ‘do you know what I hear about you? I hear that you’re compromising my wife.’

Tom gave him a startled look and went scarlet. The habit of flushing mortified him horribly, but he could not break himself of it.

‘Oh my dear,’ cried Julia gaily, ‘how marvellous! I’ve been trying to get someone to compromise me all my life. Who told you, Michael?’

‘A little bird,’ he said archly.

‘Well, Tom, if Michael divorces me you’ll have to marry me, you know.’

Charles smiled with his gentle, rather melancholy eyes.

‘What have you been doing, Tom?’ he asked.

Charles was gravely, Michael boisterously, diverted by the young man’s obvious embarrassment. Julia, though she seemed to share their amusement, was alert and watchful.

‘Well, it appears that the young rip has been taking Julia to night clubs when she ought to have been in bed and asleep.’

Julia crowed with delight.

‘Shall we deny it, Tom, or shall we brazen it out?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I said to the little bird,’ Michael broke in. ‘I said to her, as long as Julia doesn’t want me to go to night clubs with her . . .’

Julia ceased to listen to what he said. Dolly, she thought, and oddly enough she described her to herself in exactly the words Michael had used a couple of days before. Dinner was announced and their bright talk turned to other things. But though Julia took part in it with gaiety, though she appeared to be giving her guests all her attention and even listened with a show of appreciation to one of Michael’s theatrical stories that she had heard twenty times before, she was privately holding an animated conversation with Dolly. Dolly cowered before her while she told her exactly what she thought of her.

‘You old cow,’ she said to her. ‘How dare you interfere with my private concerns? No, don’t speak. Don’t try to excuse yourself. I know exactly what you said to Michael. It was unpardonable. I thought you were a friend of mine. I thought I could rely on you. Well, that finishes it. I’ll never speak to you again. Never. Never. D’you think I’m impressed by your rotten old money? Oh, it’s no good saying you didn’t mean it. Where would you be except for me, I should like to know. Any distinction you’ve got, the only importance you have in the world, is that you happen to know me. Who’s made your parties go all these years? D’you think that people came to them to see you? They came to see me. Never again. Never.’

It was in point of fact a monologue rather than a conversation.

Later on, at the cinema, she sat next to Tom as she had intended and held his hand, but it seemed to her singularly unresponsive. Like a fish’s fin. She suspected that he was thinking uncomfortably of what Michael had said. She wished that she had had an opportunity of a few words with him so that she might have told him not to worry. After all no one could have carried off the incident with more brilliance than she had. Aplomb; that was the word. She wondered what it was exactly that Dolly had told Michael. She had better find out. It would not do to ask Michael, that would look as though she attached importance to it; she must find out from Dolly herself. It would be much wiser not to have a row with her. Julia smiled as she thought of the scene she would have with Dolly. She would be sweetness itself, she would wheedle it all out of her, and never give her an inkling that she was angry. It was curious that it should send a cold shiver down her back to think that people were talking about her. After all if she couldn’t do what she liked who could? Her private life was nobody’s business. All the same one couldn’t deny that it wouldn’t be very nice if people were laughing at her. She wondered what Michael would do if he found out the truth. He couldn’t very well divorce her and continue to manage for her. If he had any sense he’d shut his eyes. But Michael was funny in some ways; every now and then he would get up on his hind legs and start doing his colonel stuff. He was quite capable of saying all of a sudden that damn it all, he must behave like a gentleman. Men were such fools; there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t cut off his nose to spite his face. Of course it wouldn’t really matter very much to her. She could go and act in America for a year till the scandal had died down and then go into management with somebody else. But it would be a bore. And then there was Roger to consider; he’d feel it, poor lamb; he’d be humiliated, naturally; it was no good shutting one’s eyes to the fact, at her age she’d look a perfect fool being divorced on account of a boy of three-and-twenty. Of course she wouldn’t be such a fool as to marry Tom. Would Charles marry her? She turned and in the half-light looked at his distinguished profile. He had been madly in love with her for years; he was one of those chivalrous idiots that a woman could turn round her little finger; perhaps he wouldn’t mind being co-respondent instead of Tom. That might be a very good way out. Lady Charles Tamerley. It sounded all right. Perhaps she had been a little imprudent. She had always been very careful when she went to Tom’s flat, but it might be that one of the chauffeurs in the mews had seen her go in or come out and had thought things. That class of people had such filthy minds. As far as the night clubs were concerned, she’d have been only too glad to go with Tom to quiet little places where no one would see them, but he didn’t like that. He loved a crowd, he wanted to see smart people, and be seen. He liked to show her off.

‘Damn,’ she said to herself. ‘Damn, damn.’

Julia didn’t enjoy her evening at the cinema as much as she had expected.

CHAPTER 18

NEXT DAY JULIA got Dolly on her private number.

‘Darling, it seems ages since I’ve seen you. What have you been doing with yourself all this time?’

‘Nothing very much.’

Dolly’s voice sounded cold.

‘Now listen, Roger’s coming home to-morrow. You know he’s leaving Eton for good. I’m sending the car for him early and I want you to come to lunch. Not a party; only you and me, Michael and Roger.’

‘I’m lunching out to-morrow.’

In twenty years Dolly had never been engaged when Julia wanted her to do something with her. The voice at the other end of the telephone was hostile.

‘Dolly, how can you be so unkind? Roger’ll be terribly disappointed. His first day at home; besides, I want to see you. I haven’t seen you for ages and I miss you terribly. Can’t you break your engagement, just for this once, darling, and we’ll have a good old gossip after lunch, just you and me?’

No one could be more persuasive than Julia when she liked, no one could put more tenderness into her voice, nor a more irresistible appeal. There was a moment’s pause and Julia knew that Dolly was struggling with her wounded feelings.

‘All right, darling, I’ll manage.’

‘Darling.’ But when she rang off Julia through clenched teeth muttered: ‘The old cow.’

Dolly came. Roger listened politely while she told him that he had grown and with his grave smile answered her suitably when she said the sort of things she thought proper to a boy of his age. Julia was puzzled by him. Without talking much he listened, apparently with attention, to what the rest of them were saying, but she had an odd feeling that he was occupied with thoughts of his own. He seemed to observe them with a detached curiosity like that with which he might have observed animals in a zoo. It was faintly disquieting. When the opportunity presented itself she delivered the little bit of dialogue she had prepared for Dolly’s benefit.

‘Oh, Roger darling, you know your wretched father’s busy to-night. I’ve got a couple of seats for the second house at the Palladium and Tom wants you to dine with him at the Café Royal.’

‘Oh!’ He paused for a second. ‘All right.’

She turned to Dolly.

‘It’s so nice for Roger to have somebody like Tom to go about with. They’re great friends, you know.’

Michael gave Dolly a glance. There was a twinkle in his eyes. He spoke.

‘Tom’s a very decent sort of boy. He won’t let Roger get into any mischief.’

‘I should have thought Roger would prefer to go about with his Eton friends,’ said Dolly.

‘Old cow,’ thought Julia. ‘Old cow.’

But when luncheon was over she asked her to come up to her room.

‘I’ll get into bed and you can talk to me while I’m resting. A good old girls’ gossip, that’s what I want.’

She put her arm affectionately round Dolly’s vast waist and led her upstairs. For a while they spoke of indifferent things, clothes and servants, make-up and scandal; then Julia, leaning on her elbow, looked at Dolly with confiding eyes.

‘Dolly, there’s something I want to talk to you about. I want advice and you’re the only person in the world whose advice I would take. I know I can trust you.’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘It appears that people are saying rather disagreeable things about me. Someone’s been to Michael and told him that there’s a lot of gossip about me and poor Tom Fennell.’

Though her eyes still wore the charming and appealing look that she knew Dolly found irresistible, she watched her closely for a start or for some change in her expression. She saw nothing.

‘Who told Michael?’

‘I don’t know. He won’t say. You know what he is when he starts being a perfect gentleman.’

She wondered if she only imagined that Dolly’s features at this slightly relaxed.

‘I want the truth, Dolly.’

‘I’m so glad you’ve asked me, darling. You know how I hate to interfere in other people’s business and if you hadn’t brought the matter up yourself nothing would have induced me to mention it.’

‘My dear, if I don’t know that you’re a loyal friend, who does?’

Dolly slipped off her shoes and settled down massively in her chair. Julia never took her eyes off her.

‘You know how malicious people are. You’ve always led such a quiet, regular life. You’ve gone out so little, and then only with Michael or Charles Tamerley. He’s different; of course everyone knows he’s adored you for ages. It seems so funny that all of a sudden you should run around all over the place with a clerk in the firm that does your accounts.’

‘He isn’t exactly that. His father has bought him a share in the firm and he’s a junior partner.’

‘Yes, he gets four hundred a year.’

‘How d’you know?’ asked Julia quickly.

This time she was certain that Dolly was disconcerted.

‘You persuaded me to go to his firm about my income tax. One of the head partners told me. It seems a little strange that on that he should be able to have a flat, dress the way he does and take people to night clubs.’

‘For all I know his father may make him an allowance.’

‘His father’s a solicitor in the North of London. You know very well that if he’s bought him a partnership he isn’t making him an allowance as well.’

‘Surely you don’t imagine that I’m keeping him,’ said Julia, with a ringing laugh.

‘I don’t imagine anything, darling. Other people do.’

Julia liked neither the words Dolly spoke nor the way she said them. But she gave no sign of her uneasiness.

‘It’s too absurd. He’s Roger’s friend much more than mine. Of course I’ve been about with him. I felt I was getting too set. I’m tired of just going to the theatre and taking care of myself. It’s no life. After all if I don’t enjoy myself a little now I never shall. I’m getting on, you know, Dolly, it’s no good denying it. You know what Michael is; of course he’s sweet, but he is a bore.’

‘No more a bore than he’s ever been,’ said Dolly acidly.

‘I should have thought I was the last person anyone would dream would have an affair with a boy twenty years younger than myself.’

‘Twenty-five,’ corrected Dolly. ‘I should have thought so too. Unfortunately he’s not very discreet.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, he’s told Avice Crichton that he’ll get her a part in your next play.’

‘Who the devil is Avice Crichton?’

‘Oh, she’s a young actress I know. She’s as pretty as a picture.’

‘He’s only a silly kid. I suppose he thinks he can get round Michael. You know what Michael is with his little bits.’

‘He says he can get you to do anything he wants. He says you just eat out of his hand.’

It was lucky for Julia that she was a good actress. For a second her heart stood still. How could he say a thing like that? The fool. The blasted fool. But recovering herself at once she laughed lightly.

‘What nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘He’s a very commonplace, rather vulgar young man. It’s not surprising if all the fuss you’ve made of him has turned his head.’

Julia, smiling good-naturedly, looked at her with ingenuous eyes.

‘But, darling, you don’t think he’s my lover, do you?’

‘If I don’t, I’m the only person who doesn’t.’

‘And do you?’

For a minute Dolly did not answer. They looked at one another steadily, their hearts were black with hatred; but Julia still smiled.

‘If you give me your solemn word of honour that he isn’t, of course I’ll believe you.’

Julia dropped her voice to a low, grave note. It had a true ring of sincerity.

‘I’ve never told you a lie yet, Dolly, and I’m too old to begin now. I give you my solemn word of honour that Tom has never been anything more to me than just a friend.’

‘You take a great weight off my mind.’

Julia knew that Dolly did not believe her and Dolly was aware that Julia knew it. She went on.

‘But in that case, for your own sake, Julia dear, do be sensible. Don’t go about with this young man any more. Drop him.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. That would be an admission that people were right in what they thought. After all, my conscience is clear. I can afford to hold my head high. I should despise myself if I allowed my behaviour to be influenced by malicious gossip.’

Dolly slipped her feet back into he shoes and getting her lipstick out of her bag did her lips.

‘Well, dear, you’re old enough to know your own mind.’

They parted coldly.

But one or two of Dolly’s remarks had been somewhat of a shock to Julia. They rankled. It was disconcerting that gossip had so nearly reached the truth. But did it matter? Plenty of women had lovers and who bothered? And an actress. No one expected an actress to be a pattern of propriety.

‘It’s my damned virtue. That’s at the bottom of the trouble.’

She had acquired the reputation of a perfectly virtuous woman, whom the tongue of scandal could not touch, and now it looked as though her reputation was a prison that she had built round herself. But there was worse. What had Tom meant by saying that she ate out of his hand? That deeply affronted her. Silly little fool. How dare he? She didn’t know what to do about it either. She would have liked to tax him with it. What was the good? He would deny it. The only thing was to say nothing; it had all gone too far now, she must accept everything. It was no good not facing the truth, he didn’t love her, he was her lover because it gratified his self-esteem, because it brought him various things he cared for and because in his own eyes at least it gave him a sort of position.

‘If I had any sense I’d chuck him.’ She gave an angry laugh. ‘It’s easy to say that. I love him.’

The strange thing was that when she looked into her heart it was not Julia Lambert the woman who resented the affront, she didn’t care for herself, it was the affront to Julia Lambert the actress that stung her. She had often felt that her talent, genius the critics called it, but that was a very grand word, her gift, if you like, was not really herself, not even part of her, but something outside that used her, Julia Lambert the woman, in order to express itself. It was a strange, immaterial personality that seemed to descend upon her and it did things through her that she did not know she was capable of doing. She was an ordinary, prettyish, ageing woman. Her gift had neither age nor form. It was a spirit that played on her body as the violinist plays on his violin. It was the slight to that that galled her.

She tried to sleep. She was so accustomed to sleeping in the afternoon that she could always drop off the moment she composed herself, but on this occasion she turned restlessly from side to side and sleep would not come. At last she looked at the clock. Tom often got back from his office soon after five. She yearned for him; in his arms was peace, when she was with him nothing else mattered. She dialled his number.

‘Hulloa? Yes. Who is it?’

She held the receiver to her ear, panic-stricken. It was Roger’s voice. She hung up.

CHAPTER 19

NOR DID JULIA sleep well that night. She was awake when she heard Roger come in, and turning on her light she saw that it was four. She frowned. He came clattering down the stone stairs next morning just when she was beginning to think of getting up.

‘Can I come in, mummy?’

‘Come in.’

He was still in his pyjamas and dressing-gown. She smiled at him because he looked so fresh and young.

‘You were very late last night.’

‘No, not very. I was in by one.’

‘Liar. I looked at my clock. It was four.’

‘All right. It was four then,’ he agreed cheerfully.

‘What on earth were you doing?’

‘We went on to some place after the show and had supper. We danced.’

‘Who with?’

‘A couple of girls we picked up. Tom knew them before.’

‘What were their names?’

‘One was called Jill and one was called Joan. I don’t know what their other names were. Joan’s on the stage. She asked me if I couldn’t get her an understudy in your next play.’

At all events neither of them was Avice Crichton. That name had been in her thoughts ever since Dolly had mentioned it.

‘But those places aren’t open till four.’

‘No, we went back to Tom’s flat. Tom made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. He said you’d be furious.’

‘Oh, my dear, it takes a great deal more than that to make me furious. I promise you I won’t say a word.’

‘If anyone’s to blame I am. I went to see Tom yesterday afternoon and we arranged it then. All this stuff about love that one hears about in plays and reads in novels. I’m nearly eighteen. I thought I ought to see for myself what it was all about.’

Julia sat up in bed and looked at Roger with wide, enquiring eyes.

‘Roger, what do you mean?’

He was composed and serious.

‘Tom said he knew a couple of girls who were all right. He’s had them both himself. They live together and so we phoned and asked them to meet us after the show. He told them I was a virgin and they’d better toss up for me. When we got back to the flat he took Jill into the bedroom and left me the sitting-room and Joan.’

For the moment she did not think of Tom, she was so disturbed at what Roger was saying.

‘I don’t think it’s so much really. I don’t see it’s anything to make all that fuss about.’

She could not speak. The tears filled her eyes and ran quickly down her face.

‘Mummy, what’s the matter? Why are you crying?’

‘But you’re a little boy.’

He came over to her and sitting on the side of her bed took her in his arms.

‘Darling, don’t cry. I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought it was going to upset you. After all, it had to happen sooner or later.’

‘But so soon. So soon. It makes me feel so old.’

‘Not you, darling. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.’

She giggled through her tears.

‘You fool, Roger, d’you think Cleopatra would have liked what that silly old donkey said of her? You might have waited a little longer.’

‘It’s just as well I didn’t. I know all about it now. To tell you the truth I think it’s rather disgusting.’

She sighed deeply. It was a comfort to feel him holding her so tenderly. But she felt terribly sorry for herself.

‘You’re angry with me, darling?’ he asked.

‘Angry? No. But if it had to come I wish it hadn’t been quite so matter of fact. You talk as though it had just been a rather curious experiment.’

‘I suppose it was in a way.’

She gave him a little smile.

‘And you really think that was love?’

‘Well, it’s what most people mean by it, isn’t it?’

‘No, they don’t, they mean pain and anguish, shame, ecstasy, heaven and hell; they mean the sense of living more intensely, and unutterable boredom; they mean freedom and slavery; they mean peace and unrest.’

Something in the stillness with which he listened to her made her give him a glance through her eyelashes. There was a curious expression in his eyes. She did not know what it meant. It was as though he were gravely listening to a sound that came from a long way off.

‘It doesn’t sound as though it were much fun,’ he murmured.

She took his smooth face in her hands and kissed his lips.

‘I’m a fool, aren’t I? You see, I still see you as a little baby boy that I’m holding in my arms.’

A twinkle shone in his eyes.

‘What are you grinning at, you ape?’

‘It made a damned good photograph, didn’t it?’

She could not but laugh.

‘You pig. You filthy pig.’

‘I say, about the understudy, is there any chance for Joan?’

‘Tell her to come and see me one day.’

But when Roger left her she sighed. She was depressed. She felt very lonely. Her life had always been so full and so exciting that she had never had the time to busy herself much with Roger. She got in a state, of course, when he had whooping-cough or measles, but he was for the most part in robust health, and then he occupied a pleasant place in the background of her consciousness. But she had always felt that he was there to be attended to when she was inclined and she had often thought it would be nice when he was old enough really to share her interests. It came to her as a shock now to realize that, without ever having really possessed him, she had lost him. Her lips tightened when she thought of the girl who had taken him from her.

‘An understudy. My foot.’

Her pain absorbed her so that she could not feel the grief she might have felt from her discovery of Tom’s perfidy. She had always known in her bones that he was unfaithful to her. At his age, with his wanton temperament, with herself tied down by her performances at the theatre, by all manner of engagements which her position forced upon her, it was plain that he had ample opportunity to gratify his inclinations. She had shut her eyes. All she asked was that she should not know. This was the first time that an actual fact had been thrust upon her notice.

‘I must just put up with it,’ she sighed. Thoughts wandered through her mind. ‘It’s like lying and not knowing you’re lying, that’s what’s fatal; I suppose it’s better to be a fool and know it than a fool and not know it.’

CHAPTER 20

TOM WENT TO Eastbourne with his family for Christmas. Julia had two performances on Boxing Day, so the Gosselyns stayed in town; they went to a large party at the Savoy that Dolly de Vries gave to see the New Year in; and a few days later Roger set off for Vienna. While he was in London Julia saw little of Tom. She did not ask Roger what they did when they tore about the town together, she did not want to know, she steeled herself not to think and distracted her mind by going to as many parties as she could. And there was always her acting; when once she got into the theatre her anguish, her humiliation, her jealousy were allayed. It gave her a sense of triumphant power to find, as it were in her pot of grease paint, another personality that could be touched by no human griefs. With that refuge always at hand she could support anything.

On the day that Roger left, Tom rang her up from his office.

‘Are you doing anything to-night? What about going out on the binge?’

‘No, I’m busy.’

It was not true, but the words slipped out of her mouth independent of her will.

‘Oh, are you? Well, what about to-morrow?’

If he had expressed disappointment, if he had asked her to cut the date he supposed she had, she might have had strength to break with him then and there. His casualness defeated her.

‘To-morrow’s all right.’

‘O.K. I’ll fetch you at the theatre after the show. Bye-bye.’

Julia was ready and waiting when he was shown into her dressing-room. She was strangely nervous. His face lit up when he saw her, and when Evie went out of the room for a moment he caught her in his arms and warmly kissed her on the lips.

‘I feel all the better for that,’ he laughed.

You would never have thought to look at him, so young, fresh and ingenuous, in such high spirits, that he was capable of giving her so much pain. You would never have thought that he was so deceitful. It was quite plain that he had not noticed that for more than a fortnight he had hardly seen her.

(‘Oh, God, if I could only tell him to go to hell.’)

But she looked at him with a gay smile in her lovely eyes.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve got a table at Quag’s. They’ve got a new turn there, an American conjurer, who’s grand.’

She talked with vivacity all through supper. She told him about the various parties she had been to, and the theatrical functions she had not been able to get out of, so that it seemed only on account of her engagements that they had not met. It disconcerted her to perceive that he took it as perfectly natural. He was glad to see her, that was plain, he was interested in what she had been doing and in the people she had seen, but it was plain also that he had not missed her. To see what he would say she told him that she had had an offer to take the play in which she was acting to New York. She told him the terms that had been suggested.

‘They’re marvellous,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘What a snip! You can’t lose and you may make a packet.’

‘The only thing is, I don’t much care for leaving London.’

‘Why on earth not? I should have thought you’d jump at it. The play’s had a good long run, for all you know it’ll be pretty well through by Easter, and if you want to make a stab at America you couldn’t have a better vehicle.’

‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t run through the summer. Besides, I don’t like strangers very much. I’m fond of my friends.’

‘I think that’s silly. Your friends’ll get along without you all right. And you’ll have a grand time in New York.’

Her gay laugh was very convincing.

‘One would think you were terribly anxious to get rid of me.’

‘Of course I should miss you like hell. But it would only be for a few months. If I had a chance like that I’d jump at it.’

But when they had finished supper and the commissionaire had called up a taxi for them he gave the address of the flat as if it were an understood thing that they should go back to it. In the taxi he put his arm round her waist and kissed her, and later, when she lay in his arms, in the little single bed, she felt that all the pain she had suffered during that last fortnight was not too great a price to pay for the happy peace that filled her heart.

Julia continued to go to the smart supper places and to night clubs with Tom. If people wanted to think he was her lover, let them; she was past caring. But it happened more than once that he was engaged when she wanted him to go somewhere with her. It had spread around among Julia’s grander friends that Tom was very clever at helping one with one’s income-tax returns. The Dennorants had asked him down to the country for a week-end, and here he had met a number of persons who were glad to take advantage of his technical knowledge. He began to get invitations from people whom Julia did not know. Acquaintances would mention him to her.

‘You know Tom Fennell, don’t you? He’s very clever, isn’t he? I hear he’s saved the Gillians hundreds of pounds on their income-tax.’

Julia was none too pleased. It was through her that he had got asked to parties that he wanted to go to. It began to look as if in this respect he could do without her. He was pleasant and unassuming, very well-dressed now, and with a fresh, clean look that was engaging; he was able to save people money; Julia knew the world which he was so anxious to get into well enough to realize that he would soon establish himself in it. She had no very high opinion of the morals of the women he would meet there and she could name more than one person of title who would be glad to snap him up. Julia’s comfort was that they were all as mean as cat’s meat. Dolly had said he was only earning four hundred a year; he certainly couldn’t live in those circles on that.

Julia had with decision turned down the American offer before ever she mentioned it to Tom; their play was playing to very good business. But one of those inexplicable slumps that occasionally affect the theatre now swept over London and the takings suddenly dropped. It looked as though they would not be able to carry on long after Easter. They had a new play on which they set great hopes. It was called ‘Nowadays,’ and the intention had been to produce it early in the autumn. It had a great part for Julia and the advantage of one that well suited Michael. It was the sort of play that might easily run a year. Michael did not much like the idea of producing it in May, with the summer coming on, but there seemed no help for it and he began looking about for a cast.

One afternoon, during the interval at a matinée, Evie brought a note in to Julia. She was surprised to see Roger’s handwriting.

DEAR MOTHER,

This is to introduce to you Miss Joan Denver who I talked to you about. She’s awfully keen on getting in the Siddons Theatre and would be quite satisfied with an understudy however small.

Your affectionate son,

ROGER.

Julia smiled at the formal way in which he wrote; she was tickled because he was so grown up as to try to get jobs for his girl friends. Then she suddenly remembered who Joan Denver was. Joan and Jill. She was the girl who had seduced poor Roger. Her face went grim. But she was curious to see her.

‘Is George there?’ George was the doorkeeper. Evie nodded and opened the door.

‘George.’

He came in.

‘Is the lady who brought this letter here now?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Tell her I’ll see her after the play.’

She wore in the last act an evening dress with a train; it was a very grand dress and showed her beautiful figure to advantage. She wore diamonds in her dark hair and diamond bracelets on her arms. She looked, as indeed the part required, majestic. She received Joan Denver the moment she had taken her last call. Julia could in the twinkling of an eye leap from her part into private life, but now without an effort she continued to play the imperious, aloof, stately and well-bred woman of the play.

‘I’ve kept you waiting so long I thought I wouldn’t keep you till I’d got changed.’

Her cordial smile was the smile of a queen; her graciousness kept you at a respectful distance. In a glance she had taken in the young girl who entered her dressing-room. She was young, with a pretty little face and a snub nose, a good deal made-up and not very well made-up.

‘Her legs are too short,’ thought Julia. ‘Very second-rate.’

She had evidently put on her best clothes and the same glance had told Julia all about them.

(‘Shaftesbury Avenue. Off the rail.’)

The poor thing was at the moment frightfully nervous. Julia made her sit down and offered her a cigarette.

‘There are matches by your side.’

She saw her hands tremble when she tried to strike one. It broke and she rubbed a second three times against the box before she could get it to light.

(‘If Roger could only see her now! Cheap rouge, cheap lipstick, and scared out of her wits. Gay little thing, he thought she was.’)

‘Have you been on the stage long, Miss — I’m so sorry I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Joan Denver.’ Her throat was dry and she could hardly speak. Her cigarette went out and she held it helplessly. She answered Julia’s question. ‘Two years.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen.’

(‘That’s a lie. You’re twenty-two if you’re a day.’) ‘You know my son, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s just left Eton. He’s gone to Vienna to learn German. Of course he’s very young, but his father and I thought it would be good for him to spend a few months abroad before going up to Cambridge. And what parts have you played? Your cigarette’s gone out. Won’t you have another?’

‘Oh, it’s all right, thanks. I’ve been playing on tour. But I’m frightfully anxious to be in town.’ Despair gave her courage and she uttered the speech she had evidently prepared. ‘I’ve got the most tremendous admiration for you, Miss Lambert. I always say you’re the greatest actress on the stage. I’ve learnt more from you than I did all the years I was at the R.A.D.A. My greatest ambition is to be in your theatre, Miss Lambert, and if you could see your way to giving me a little something, I know it would be the most wonderful chance a girl could have.’

‘Will you take off your hat?’

Joan Denver took the cheap little hat off her head and with a quick gesture shook out her close-cropped curls.

‘What pretty hair you have,’ said Julia.

Still with that slightly imperious, but infinitely cordial smile, the smile that a queen in royal procession bestows on her subjects, Julia gazed at her. She did not speak. She remembered Jane Taitbout’s maxim: Don’t pause unless it’s necessary, but then pause as long as you can. She could almost hear the girl’s heart beating and she felt her shrinking in her ready-made clothes, shrinking in her skin.

‘What made you think of asking my son to give you a letter to me?’

Joan grew red under her make-up and she swallowed before she answered.

‘I met him at a friend’s house and I told him how much I admired you and he said he thought perhaps you’d have something for me in your next play.’

‘I’m just turning over the parts in my mind.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of a part. If I could have an understudy – I mean, that would give me a chance of attending rehearsals and studying your technique. That’s an education in itself. Everyone agrees about that.’

(‘Silly little fool, trying to flatter me. As if I didn’t know that. And why the hell should I educate her?’) ‘It’s very sweet of you to put it like that. I’m only a very ordinary person really. The public is so kind, so very kind. You’re a pretty little thing. And young. Youth is so beautiful. Our policy has always been to give the younger people a chance. After all we can’t go on for ever, and we look upon it as a duty we owe the public to train up actors and actresses to take our place when the time comes.’

Julia said these words so simply, in her beautifully modulated voice, that Joan Denver’s heart was warmed. She’d got round the old girl and the understudy was as good as hers. Tom Fennell had said that if she played her cards well with Roger it might easily lead to something.

‘Oh, that won’t be for a long while yet, Miss Lambert,’ she said, her eyes, her pretty dark eyes glowing.

(‘You’re right there, my girl, dead right. I bet I could play you off the stage when I was seventy.’)

‘I must think it over. I hardly know yet what understudies we shall want in our next play.’

‘I hear there’s some talk of Avice Crichton for the girl’s part. I thought perhaps I could understudy her.’

Avice Crichton. No flicker of the eyes showed that the name meant anything to Julia.

‘My husband has mentioned her, but nothing is settled yet. I don’t know her at all. Is she clever?’

‘I think so. I was at the Academy with her.’

‘And pretty as a picture, they tell me.’ Rising to her feet to show that the audience was at an end, Julia put off her royalty. She changed her tone and became on a sudden the jolly, good-natured actress who would do a good turn to anyone if she could. ‘Well, dear, leave me your name and address and if there’s anything doing I’ll let you know.’

‘You won’t forget me, Miss Lambert?’

‘No, dear, I promise you I won’t. It’s been so nice to see you. You have a very sweet personality. You’ll find your way out, won’t you? Good-bye.’

‘A fat chance she’s got of ever setting foot in this theatre,’ said Julia to herself when she was gone. ‘Dirty little bitch to seduce my son. Poor lamb. It’s a shame, that’s what it is; women like that oughtn’t to be allowed.’

She looked at herself in the glass as she slipped out of her beautiful gown. Her eyes were hard and her lips had a sardonic curl. She addressed her reflection.

‘And I may tell you this, old girl: there’s one person who isn’t going to play in ‘Nowadays’ and that’s Miss Avice Crichton.’

CHAPTER 21

BUT A WEEK or so later Michael mentioned her.

‘I say, have you ever heard of a girl called Avice Crichton?’

‘Never.’

‘I’m told she’s rather good. A lady and all that sort of thing. Her father’s in the army. I was wondering if she’d do for Honor.’

‘How did you hear about her?’

‘Through Tom. He knows her, he says she’s clever. She’s playing in a Sunday night show. Next Sunday, in point of fact. He says he thinks it might be worth while to go and have a look-see.’

‘Well, why don’t you?’

‘I was going down to Sandwich to play golf. Would it bore you awfully to go? I expect the play’s rotten, but you’d be able to tell if it was worth while letting her read the part. Tom’ll go with you.’

Julia’s heart was beating nineteen to the dozen.

‘Of course I’ll go.’

She phoned to Tom and asked him to come round and have a snack before they went to the theatre. He arrived before she was ready.

‘Am I late or were you early?’ she said, when she came into the drawing-room.

She saw that he had been waiting impatiently. He was nervous and eager.

‘They’re going to ring up sharp at eight,’ he said. ‘I hate getting to a play after it’s begun.’

His agitation told her all she wanted to know. She lingered a little over the cocktails.

‘What is the name of this actress we’re going to see to-night?’ she asked.

‘Avice Crichton. I’m awfully anxious to know what you think about her. I think she’s a find. She knows you’re coming to-night. She’s frightfully nervous, but I told her she needn’t be. You know what these Sunday night plays are; scratch rehearsals and all that; I said you’d quite understand and you’d make allowances.’

All through dinner he kept looking at his watch. Julia acted the woman of the world. She talked of one thing and another and noticed that he listened with distraction. As soon as he could he brought the conversation back to Avice Crichton.

‘Of course I haven’t said anything to her about it, but I believe she’d be all right for Honor.’ He had read ‘Nowadays,’ as he read, before they were produced, all Julia’s plays. ‘She looks the part all right, I’m sure of that. She’s had a struggle and of course it would be a wonderful chance for her. She admires you tremendously and she’s terribly anxious to get into a play with you.’

‘That’s understandable. It means the chance of a year’s run and a lot of managers seeing her.’

‘She’s the right colour, she’s very fair; she’d be a good contrast to you.’

‘What with platinum and peroxide there’s no lack of blondes on the stage.’

‘But hers is natural.’

‘Is it? I had a long letter from Roger this morning. He seems to be having quite a good time in Vienna.’

Tom’s interest subsided. He looked at his watch. When the coffee came Julia said it was undrinkable. She said she must have some more made.

‘Oh, Julia, it isn’t worth while. We shall be awfully late.’

‘I don’t suppose it matters if we miss the first few minutes.’

His voice was anguished.

‘I promised we wouldn’t be late. She’s got a very good scene almost at the beginning.’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go without my coffee.’

While they waited for it she maintained a bright flow of conversation. He scarcely answered. He looked anxiously at the door. And when the coffee came she drank it with maddening deliberation. By the time they got in the car he was in a state of cold fury and he stared silently in front of him with a sulky pout on his mouth. Julia was not dissatisfied with herself. They reached the theatre two minutes before the curtain rose and as Julia appeared there was burst of clapping from the audience. Julia, apologizing to the people she disturbed, threaded her way to her seat in the middle of the stalls. Her faint smile acknowledged the applause that greeted her beautifully-timed entrance, but her downcast eyes modestly disclaimed that it could have any connection with her.

The curtain went up and after a short scene two girls came in, one very pretty and young, the other much older and plain. In a minute Julia turned to Tom and whispered:

‘Which is Avice Crichton, the young one or the old one?’

‘The young one.’

‘Oh, of course, you said she was fair, didn’t you?’

She gave his face a glance. He had lost his sulky look; a happy smile played on his lips. Julia turned her attention to the stage. Avice Crichton was very pretty, no one could deny that, with lovely golden hair, fine blue eyes and a little straight nose; but it was a type that Julia did not care for.

‘Insipid,’ she said to herself. ‘Chorus-girly.’

She watched her performance for a few minutes. She watched intently; then she leant back in her stall with a little sigh.

‘She can’t act for toffee,’ she decided.

When the curtain fell Tom turned to her eagerly. He had completely got over his bad temper.

‘What do you think of her?’

‘She’s as pretty as a picture.’

‘I know that. But her acting. Don’t you think she’s good?’

‘Yes, clever.’

‘I wish you’d come round and tell her that yourself. It would buck her up tremendously.’

‘I?’

He did not realize what he was asking her to do. It was unheard-of that she, Julia Lambert, should go behind and congratulate a small-part actress.

‘I promised I’d take you round after the second act. Be a sport Julia. It’ll please her so much.’

(‘The fool. The blasted fool. All right, I’ll go through with it.’) ‘Of course if you think it’ll mean anything to her, I’ll come with pleasure.’

After the second act they went through the iron door and Tom led her to Avice Crichton’s dressing-room. She was sharing it with the plain girl with whom she had made her first entrance. Tom effected the introductions. She held out a limp hand in a slightly affected manner.

‘I’m so glad to meet you, Miss Lambert. Excuse the dressing-room, won’t you? But it was no good trying to make it look nice just for one night.’

She was not in the least nervous. Indeed, she seemed self-assured.

(‘Hard as nails. And with an eye to the main chance. Doing the colonel’s daughter on me.’)

‘It’s awfully nice of you to come round. I’m afraid it’s not much of a play, but when one’s starting like I am one has to put up with what one can get. I was rather doubtful about it when they sent it me to read, but I took a fancy to the part.’

‘You play it charmingly,’ said Julia.

‘It’s awfully nice of you to say so. I wish we could have had a few more rehearsals. I particularly wanted to show you what I could do.’

‘Well, you know, I’ve been connected with the profession a good many years. I always think, if one has talent one can’t help showing it. Don’t you?’

‘I know what you mean. Of course I want a lot more experience, I know that, but it’s only a chance I want really. I know I can act. If I could only get a part that I could really get my teeth into.’

She waited a little in order to let Julia say that she had in her new play just the part that would suit her, but Julia continued to look at her smilingly. Julia was grimly amused to find herself treated like a curate’s wife to whom the squire’s lady was being very kind.

‘Have you been on the stage long?’ she said at last. ‘It seems funny I should never have heard of you.’

‘Well, I was in revue for a while, but I felt I was just wasting my time. I was out on tour all last season. I don’t want to leave London again if I can help it.’

‘The theatrical profession’s terribly overcrowded,’ said Julia.

‘Oh, I know. It seems almost hopeless unless you’ve got influence or something. I hear you’re putting a new play on soon.’

‘Yes.’

Julia continued to smile with an almost intolerable sweetness.

‘If there’s a part for me in it, I’d most awfully like to play with you. I’m so sorry Mr Gosselyn couldn’t come to-night.’

‘I’ll tell him about you.’

‘D’you really think there’s a chance for me?’ Through her self-assurance, through the country-house manner she assumed in order to impress Julia, there pierced an anxious eagerness. ‘If you’d put in a word for me it would help so much.’

Julia gave her a reflective look.

‘I take my husband’s advice more often than he takes mine,’ she smiled.

When they left the dressing-room so that Avice Crichton might change for the third act, Julia caught the questioning glance she gave Tom as she said good-bye to him. Julia was conscious, though she saw no movement, that he slightly shook his head. Her sensibility at that moment was extraordinarily acute and she translated the mute dialogue into words.

‘Coming to supper afterwards?’

‘No, damn it, I can’t, I’ve got to see her home.’

Julia listened to the third act grimly. That was in order since the play was serious. When it was over and a pale shattered author had made a halting speech, Tom asked her where she would like to go for supper.

‘Let’s go home and talk,’ she said. ‘If you’re hungry I’m sure we can find you something to eat in the kitchen.’

‘D’you mean to Stanhope Place?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right.’

She felt his relief that she did not want to go back to the flat. He was silent in the car and she knew that it irked him to have to come back with her. She guessed that someone was giving a supper party to which Avice Crichton was going and he wanted to be there. The house was dark and empty when they reached it. The servants were in bed. Julia suggested that they should go down to the basement and forage.

‘I don’t want anything to eat unless you do,’ he said. ‘I’ll just have a whisky and soda and go to bed. I’ve got a very heavy day to-morrow at the office.’

‘All right. Bring it up to the drawing-room. I’ll go and turn on the lights.’

When he came up she was doing her face in front of a mirror and she continued till he had poured out the whisky and sat down. Then she turned round. He looked very young, and incredibly charming, in his beautiful clothes, sitting there in the big armchair, and all the bitterness she had felt that evening, all the devouring jealousy of the last few days, were dissipated on a sudden by the intensity of her passion. She sat down on the arm of his chair and caressingly passed her hand over his hair. He drew back with an angry gesture.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I do hate having my hair mussed about.’

It was like a knife in her heart. He had never spoken to her in that tone before. But she laughed lightly and getting up took the whisky he had poured out for her and sat down in a chair opposite him. The movement he had made, the words he had spoken were instinctive and he was a trifle abashed. He avoided her glance and his face once more bore a sulky look. The moment was decisive. For a while they were silent. Julia’s heart beat painfully, but at last she forced herself to speak.

‘Tell me,’ she said, smiling, ‘have you been to bed with Avice Crichton?’

‘Of course not,’ he cried.

‘Why not? She’s pretty.’

‘She’s not that sort of girl. I respect her.’

Julia let none of her feelings appear on her face. Her manner was wonderfully casual; she might have been talking of the fall of empires or the death of kings.

‘D’you know what I should have said? I should have said you were madly in love with her.’ He still avoided her eyes. ‘Are you engaged to her by any chance?’

‘No.’

He looked at her now, but the eyes that met Julia’s were hostile.

‘Have you asked her to marry you?’

‘How could I? A damned rotter like me.’

He spoke so passionately that Julia was astonished.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Oh what’s the good of beating about the bush? How could I ask a decent girl to marry me? I’m nothing but a kept boy and, God knows, you have good reason to know it.’

‘Don’t be so silly. What a fuss to make over a few little presents I’ve given you.’

‘I oughtn’t to have taken them. I knew all the time it was wrong. It all came so gradually that I didn’t realize what was happening till I was in it up to my neck. I couldn’t afford to lead the life you made me lead; I was absolutely up against it. I had to take money from you.’

‘Why not? After all, I’m a very rich woman.’

‘Damn your money.’

He was holding a glass in his hands and yielding to a sudden impulse, he flung it into the fireplace. It shattered.

‘You needn’t break up the happy home,’ said Julia ironically.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.’ He sank back into his chair and turned his head away. ‘I’m so ashamed of myself. It’s not very nice to have lost one’s self-respect.’

Julia hesitated. She did not quite know what to say.

‘It seemed only natural to help you when you were in a hole. It was a pleasure to me.’

‘I know, you were wonderfully tactful about it. You almost persuaded me that I was doing you a service when you paid my debts. You made it easy for me to behave like a cad.’

‘I’m sorry you should feel like that about it.’

She spoke rather tartly. She was beginning to feel a trifle irritated.

‘There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. You wanted me and you bought me. If I was such a skunk as to let myself be bought that was no business of yours.’

‘How long have you been feeling like this?’

‘From the beginning.’

‘That isn’t true.’

She knew that what had awakened his conscience was the love that had seized him for a girl who he believed was pure. The poor fool! Didn’t he know that Avice Crichton would go to bed with an assistant stage manager if she thought it would get her a part?

‘If you’re in love with Avice Crichton why don’t you tell me so?’ He looked at her miserably, but did not answer. ‘Are you afraid it’ll crab her chances of getting a part in the new play? You ought to know me well enough by now to know that I would never let sentiment interfere with business.’

He could hardly believe his ears.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I think she’s rather a find. I’m going to tell Michael that I think she’ll do very well.’

‘Oh, Julia, you are a brick. I never knew what a wonderful woman you were.’

‘You should have asked me and I’d have told you.’

He gave a sigh of relief.

‘My dear, I’m so terribly fond of you.’

‘I know, and I’m terribly fond of you. You’re great fun to go about with and you’re always so well turned out, you’re a credit to any woman. I’ve liked going to bed with you and I’ve a sort of notion you’ve liked going to bed with me. But let’s face it, I’ve never been in love with you any more than you’ve been in love with me. I knew it couldn’t last. Sooner or later you were bound to fall in love and that would end it. And you have fallen in love, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

She was determined to make him say it, but when he did the pang it gave her was dreadful. Notwithstanding, she smiled good-humouredly.

‘We’ve had some very jolly times together, but don’t you think the moment has come to call it a day?’

She spoke so naturally, almost jestingly, that no one could have guessed that the pain at her heart seemed past bearing. She waited for her answer with sickening dread.

‘I’m awfully sorry, Julia; I must regain my self-respect.’ He looked at her with troubled eyes. ‘You aren’t angry with me?’

‘Because you’ve transferred your volatile affections from me to Avice Crichton?’ Her eyes danced with mischievous laughter. ‘My dear, of course not. After all they stay in the profession.’

‘I’m very grateful to you for all you’ve done for me. I don’t want you to think I’m not.’

‘Oh, my pet, don’t talk such nonsense. I’ve done nothing for you.’ She got up. ‘Now you really must go. You’ve got a heavy day at the office to-morrow and I’m dog-tired.’

It was a load off his mind. But he wasn’t quite happy for all that, he was puzzled by her tone, which was so friendly and yet at the same time faintly ironical; he felt a trifle let down. He went up to her to kiss her goodnight. She hesitated for the fraction of a second, then with a friendly smile gave him first one cheek and then the other.

‘You’ll find your way out, won’t you?’ She put her hand to her mouth to hide an elaborate yawn. ‘Oh, I’m so sleepy.’

The moment he had gone she turned out the lights and went to the window. She peered cautiously through the curtains. She heard him slam the front door and saw him come out. He looked right and left. She guessed at once that he was looking for a taxi. There was none in sight and he started to walk in the direction of the Park. She knew that he was going to join Avice Crichton at the supper party and tell her the glad news. Julia sank into a chair. She had acted, she had acted marvellously, and now she felt all in. Tears, tears that nobody could see, rolled down her cheeks. She was miserably unhappy. There was only one thing that enabled her to bear her wretchedness, and that was the icy contempt that she could not but feel for the silly boy who could prefer to her a small-part actress who didn’t even begin to know how to act. It was grotesque. She couldn’t use her hands; why, she didn’t even know how to walk across the stage.

‘If I had any sense of humour I’d just laugh my head off,’ she cried. ‘It’s the most priceless joke I’ve ever heard.’

She wondered what Tom would do now. The rent of the flat would be falling due on quarter-day. A lot of the things in it belonged to her. He wouldn’t much like going back to his bed-sitting-room in Tavistock Square. She thought of the friends he had made through her. He’d been clever with them. They found him useful and he’d keep them. But it wouldn’t be so easy for him to take Avice about. She was a hard, mercenary little thing, Julia was sure of that, she wouldn’t be much inclined to bother about him when his money flowed less freely. The fool to be taken in by her pretence of virtue! Julia knew the type. It was quite obvious, she was only using Tom to get a part at the Siddons and the moment she got it she would give him the air. Julia started when this notion crossed her mind. She had promised Tom that Avice should have the part in ‘Nowadays’ because it fell into the scene she was playing, but she had attached no importance to her promise. Michael was always there to put his foot down.

‘By God, she shall have the part,’ she said, out loud. She chuckled maliciously. ‘Heaven knows, I’m a good-natured woman, but there are limits to everything.’

It would be a satisfaction to turn the tables on Tom and Avice Crichton. She sat on in the darkness grimly thinking how she would do it. But every now and then she started to cry again, for from the depths of her subconscious surged up recollections that were horribly painful. Recollections of Tom’s slim, youthful body against hers, his warm nakedness and the peculiar feel of his lips, his smile, at once shy and roguish, and the smell of his curly hair.

‘If I hadn’t been a fool I’d have said nothing. I ought to know him by now. It’s only an infatuation. He’d have got over it and then he’d have come hungrily back to me.’

Now she was nearly dead with fatigue. She got up and went to bed. She took a sleeping-draught.

CHAPTER 22

BUT SHE WOKE early next morning, at six, and began to think of Tom. She repeated to herself all she had said to him and all he had said to her. She was harassed and unhappy. Her only consolation was that she had carried the rupture through with so careless a gaiety that he could not guess how miserable he had made her.

She spent a wretched day, unable to think of anything else, and angry with herself because she could not put Tom out of her mind. It would not have been so bad if she could have confided her grief to a friend. She wanted someone to console her, someone to tell her that Tom was not worth troubling about and to assure her that he had treated her shamefully. As a rule she took her troubles to Charles or to Dolly. Of course Charles would give her all the sympathy she needed, but it would be a terrible blow to him, after all he had loved her to distraction for twenty years, and it would be cruel to tell him that she had given to a very ordinary young man what he would gladly have sacrificed ten years of his life for. She was his ideal and it would be heartless on her part to shatter it. It certainly did her good at that moment to be assured that Charles Tamerley, so distinguished, so cultured, so elegant, loved her with an imperishable devotion. Of course Dolly would be delighted if she confided in her. They had not seen much of one another lately, but Julia knew that she had only to call up and Dolly would come running. Even though she more than suspected the truth already she’d be shocked and jealous when Julia made a clean breast of it, but she’d be so thankful that everything was over, she’d forgive. It would be a comfort to both of them to tear Tom limb from limb. Of course it wouldn’t be very nice to admit that Tom had chucked her, and Dolly was so shrewd, she would never get away with the lie that she had chucked him. She wanted to have a good cry with somebody, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it if she had made the break herself. It would be a score for Dolly, and however sympathetic she was it was asking too much of human nature to expect that she would be altogether sorry that Julia had been taken down a peg or two. Dolly had always worshipped her. She wasn’t going to give her a peep at her feet of clay.

‘It almost looks as if the only person I can go to is Michael,’ she giggled. ‘But I suppose it wouldn’t do.’

She knew exactly what he would say.

‘My dear girl, I’m really not the sort of feller you ought to come to with a story like that. Damn it all, you put me in a very awkward position. I flatter myself I’m pretty broad-minded, I may be an actor, but when all’s said and done I am a gentleman, and well, I mean, I mean it’s such damned bad form.’

Michael did not get home till the afternoon, and when he came into her room she was resting. He told her about his week-end and the result of his matches. He had played very well, some of his recoveries had been marvellous, and he described them in detail.

‘By the way, what about that girl you saw last night, is she any good?’

‘I really think she is, you know. She’s very pretty. You’re sure to fall for her.’

‘Oh, my dear, at my time of life. Can she act?’

‘She’s inexperienced of course, but I think she’s got it in her.’

‘Oh well, I’d better have her up and give her the once over. How can I get hold of her?’

‘Tom’s got her address.’

‘I’ll phone him right away.’

He took off the receiver and dialled Tom’s number. Tom was in and Michael wrote down the address on a pad.

The conversation went on.

‘Oh, my dear old chap, I’m sorry to hear that. What rotten luck!’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Julia.

He motioned her to be quiet.

‘Oh, well, I don’t want to be hard on you. Don’t you worry. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement that will be satisfactory to you.’ He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Julia. ‘Shall I ask him to dinner next Sunday?’

‘If you like.’

‘Julia says, will you come and dine on Sunday? Oh, I’m sorry. Well, so long, old man.’

He put down the receiver.

‘He’s got a date. Is the young ruffian having an affair with this girl?’

‘He assures me not. He respects her. She’s a colonel’s daughter.’

‘Oh, she’s a lady.’

‘I don’t know that that follows,’ said Julia acidly. ‘What were you talking to him about?’

‘He says they’ve cut his salary. Bad times. He wants to give up the flat.’ Julia’s heart gave a sudden sickening beat. ‘I’ve told him not to worry. I’ll let him stay there rent free till times improve.’

‘I don’t know why you should do that. After all, it was a purely business arrangement.’

‘It seems rather tough luck on a young chap like that. And you know he’s very useful to us; if we want an extra man we can always call upon him, and it’s convenient having him round the corner when I want someone to play golf with me. It’s only twenty-five pounds a quarter.’

‘You’re the last person I should expect to see indulge in indiscriminate generosity.’

‘Oh, don’t you be afraid, if I lose on the swings I’ll get back on the roundabouts.’

The masseuse came in and put an end to the conversation. Julia was thankful that it would soon be time to go down to the theatre and so put an end for a while to the misery of that long day; when she got back she would take a sleeping-draught again and so get some hours of forgetfulness. She had a notion that in a few days the worst of her pain would be over; the important thing was to get through them as best she could. She must distract her mind. When she left for the theatre she told the butler to ring up Charles Tamerley and see if she could lunch with him at the Ritz next day.

He was extraordinarily nice at luncheon. His look, his manner bespoke the different world he lived in, and she felt a sudden abhorrence for the circle in which on Tom’s account she had moved during the last year. He spoke of politics, of art, of books; and peace entered into her soul. Tom had been an obsession and she saw now that it had been hurtful; but she would escape from it. Her spirits rose. She did not want to be alone, she knew that even though she went home after luncheon she would not sleep, so she asked Charles if he would take her to the National Gallery. She could give him no greater pleasure; he liked to talk about pictures and he talked of them well. It took them back to the old days when she had made her first success in London and they used to spend so many afternoons together, walking in the park or sauntering through museums. The day after that she had a matinée and the next a luncheon-party, but when they separated they arranged to lunch again together on the Friday and go to the Tate.

A few days later Michael told her that he had engaged Avice Crichton.

‘She has the looks for the part, there’s no doubt about that, and she’ll be a good contrast to you. I’m taking her acting on the strength of what you said.’

Next morning they rang through from the basement to say that Mr Fennell was on the telephone. It seemed to her that her heart stopped beating.

‘Put him through.’

‘Julia, I wanted to tell you, Michael has engaged Avice.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘He told her he was engaging her on what you’d told him. You are a brick.’

Julia, her heart now beating nineteen to the dozen, made an effort to control her voice.

‘Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,’ she answered gaily. ‘I told you it would be all right.’

‘I’m awfully glad it’s fixed up. She’s accepted the part on what I’ve told her about it. Ordinarily she won’t take anything unless she’s read the play.’

It was just as well he could not see Julia’s face when she heard him say this. She would have liked to answer tartly that it was not their habit when they engaged small-part actresses to let them read the play, but instead she said mildly.

‘Well, I think she’ll like it, don’t you? It’s quite a good part.’

‘And you know, she’ll play it for all it’s worth. I believe she’ll make a sensation.’

Julia took a long breath.

‘It’ll be wonderful, won’t it. I mean, it may make her.’

‘Yes, I’ve told her that. I say, when am I going to see you again?’

‘I’ll phone you, shall I? It’s such a bore, I’m terribly full of engagements for the next few days.’

‘You’re not going to drop me just because . . .’

She gave a low, rather hoarse chuckle, that chuckle which so delighted audiences.

‘Don’t be so silly. Oh lord, there’s my bath running. I must go and have it. Good-bye, my sweet.’

She put down the receiver. The sound of his voice! The pain in her heart was unendurable. Sitting up in her bed she rocked to and fro in an agony.

‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

She had thought she was getting over it, and now that brief, silly conversation had shown her that she loved him as much as ever. She wanted him. She missed him every minute of the day. She could not do without him.

‘I shall never get over it,’ she moaned.

Once again the theatre was her only refuge. By an ironic chance the great scene of the play in which she was then acting, the scene to which the play owed its success, showed the parting of two lovers. It was true that they parted from a sense of duty; and Julia, in the play, sacrificed her love, her hopes of happiness, all that she held dear, to an ideal of uprightness. It was a scene that had appealed to her from the beginning. She was wonderfully moving in it. She put into it now all the agony of her spirit; it was no longer the broken heart of a character that she portrayed but her own. In ordinary life she tried to stifle a passion that she knew very well was ridiculous, a love that was unworthy of the woman she was, and she steeled herself to think as little as possible of the wretched boy who had wrought such havoc with her; but when she came to this scene she let herself go. She gave free rein to her anguish. She was hopeless with her own loss, and the love she poured out on the man who was playing opposite to her was the love she still felt, the passionate, devouring love, for Tom. The prospect of the empty life that confronted the woman of the play was the prospect of her own empty life. There was at least that solace, she felt she had never played so magnificently.

‘My God, it’s almost worth while to suffer so frightfully to give such a performance.’

She had never put more of herself into a part.

One night a week or two later when she came into her dressing-room at the end of the play, exhausted by all the emotion she had displayed, but triumphant after innumerable curtain calls, she found Michael sitting there.

‘Hulloa? You haven’t been in front, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you were in front two or three days ago.’

‘Yes, I’ve sat through the play for the last four nights.’

She started to undress. He got up from his chair and began to walk up and down. She gave him a glance and saw that he was frowning slightly.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘That’s what I want to know.’

She gave a start. The thought flashed through her mind that he had once more heard something about Tom.

‘Why the devil isn’t Evie here?’ she asked.

‘I told her to get out. I’ve got something to say to you, Julia. It’s no good your flying in a temper. You’ve just got to listen.’

A cold shiver ran down her spine.

‘Well, what is it?’

‘I heard something was up and I thought I’d better see for myself. At first I thought it was just an accident. That’s why I didn’t say anything till I was quite sure. What’s wrong with you, Julia?’

‘With me?’

‘Yes. Why are you giving such a lousy performance?’

‘Me?’ That was the last thing she expected to hear him say. She faced him with blazing eyes. ‘You damned fool, I’ve never acted better in my life.’

‘Nonsense. You’re acting like hell.’

Of course it was a relief that he was talking about her acting, but what he was saying was so ridiculous that, angry as she was, she had to laugh.

‘You blasted idiot, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why, what I don’t know about acting isn’t worth knowing. Everything you know about it I’ve taught you. If you’re even a tolerable actor, it’s due to me. After all, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating. D’you know how many curtain calls I got to-night? The play’s never gone better in all its run.’

‘I know all about that. The public are a lot of jackasses. If you yell and scream and throw yourself about you’ll always get a lot of damned fools to shout themselves silly. Just barn-storming, that’s what you’ve been doing the last four nights. It was false from beginning to end.’

‘False? But I felt every word of it.’

‘I don’t care what you felt, you weren’t acting it. Your performance was a mess. You were exaggerating; you were over-acting; you didn’t carry conviction for a moment. It was about as rotten a piece of ham acting as I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘You bloody swine, how dare you talk to me like that? It’s you the ham.’

With her open hand she gave him a great swinging blow on the face. He smiled.

‘You can hit me, you can swear at me, you can yell your head off, but the fact remains that your acting’s gone all to hell. I’m not going to start rehearsing “Nowadays” with you acting like that.’

‘Find someone who can act the part better than I can then.’

‘Don’t be silly, Julia. I may not be a very good actor myself, I never thought I was, but I know good acting from bad. And what’s more there’s nothing about you I don’t know. I’m going to put up the notices on Saturday and then I want you to go abroad. We’ll make “Nowadays” our autumn production.’

The quiet, decisive way in which he spoke calmed her. It was true that when it came to acting Michael knew everything there was to know about her.

‘Is it true that I’m acting badly?’

‘Rottenly.’

She thought it over. She knew exactly what had happened. She had let her emotion run away with her; she had been feeling, not acting. Again a cold shiver ran down her spine. This was serious. It was all very fine to have a broken heart, but if it was going to interfere with her acting . . . no, no, no. That was quite another pair of shoes. Her acting was more important than any love affair in the world.

‘I’ll try and pull myself together.’

‘It’s no good trying to force oneself. You’re tired out. It’s my fault, I ought to have insisted on your taking a holiday long ago. What you want is a good rest.’

‘What about the theatre?’

‘If I can’t let it, I’ll revive some play that I can play in. There’s “Hearts are Trumps.” You always hated your part in that.’

‘Everyone says the season’s going to be wonderful. You can’t expect much of a revival with me out of the cast; you won’t make a penny.’

‘I don’t care a hang about that. The only thing that matters is your health.’

‘Oh, Christ, don’t be so magnanimous,’ she cried. ‘I can’t bear it.’

Suddenly she burst into a storm of weeping.

‘Darling!’

He took her in his arms and sat her down on the sofa with himself beside her. She clung to him desperately.

‘You’re so good to me, Michael, and I hate myself. I’m a beast, I’m a slut, I’m just a bloody bitch. I’m rotten through and through.’

‘All that may be,’ he smiled, ‘but the fact remains that you’re a very great actress.’

‘I don’t know how you can have the patience you have with me. I’ve treated you foully. You’ve been too wonderful and I’ve sacrificed you heartlessly.’

‘Now, dear, don’t say a lot of things that you’ll regret later. I shall only bring them up against you another time.’

His tenderness melted her and she reproached herself bitterly because for years she had found him so boring.

‘Thank God, I’ve got you. What should I do without you?’

‘You haven’t got to do without me.’

He held her close and though she sobbed still she began to feel comforted.

‘I’m sorry I was so beastly to you just now.’

‘Oh, my dear.’

‘Do you really think I’m a ham actress?’

‘Darling, Duse couldn’t hold a candle to you.’

‘Do you honestly think that? Give me your hanky. You never saw Sarah Bernhardt, did you?’

‘No, never.’

‘She ranted like the devil.’

They sat together for a little while, in silence, and Julia grew calmer in spirit. Her heart was filled with a great love for Michael.

‘You’re still the best-looking man in England,’ she murmured at last. ‘No one will ever persuade me to the contrary.’

She felt that he drew in his belly and thrust out his chin, and it seemed to her rather sweet and touching.

‘You’re quite right. I’m tired out. I feel low and miserable. I feel all empty inside. The only thing is to go away.’

CHAPTER 23

AFTER JULIA HAD made up her mind to that she was glad. The prospect of getting away from the misery that tormented her at once made it easier to bear. The notices were put up; Michael collected his cast for the revival and started rehearsals. It amused Julia to sit idly in a stall and watch the actress who had been engaged rehearse the part which she had played herself some years before. She had never lost the thrill it gave her when she first went on the stage to sit in the darkened playhouse, under dust-sheets, and see the characters grow in the actors’ hands. Merely to be inside a theatre rested her; nowhere was she so happy. Watching the rehearsals she was able to relax so that when at night she had her own performance to give she felt fresh. She realized that all Michael had said was true. She took hold of herself. Thrusting her private emotion into the background and thus getting the character under control, she managed once more to play with her accustomed virtuosity. Her acting ceased to be a means by which she gave release to her feelings and was again the manifestation of her creative instinct. She got a quiet exhilaration out of thus recovering mastery over her medium. It gave her a sense of power and of liberation.

But the triumphant effort she made took it out of her, and when she was not in the theatre she felt listless and discouraged. She lost her exuberant vitality. A new humility overcame her. She had a feeling that her day was done. She sighed as she told herself that nobody wanted her any more. Michael suggested that she should go to Vienna to be near Roger, and she would have liked that, but she shook her head.

‘I should only cramp his style.’

She was afraid he would find her a bore. He was enjoying himself and she would only be in the way. She could not bear the thought that he would find it an irksome duty to take her here and there and occasionally have luncheon or dinner with her. It was only natural that he should have more fun with the friends of his own age that he had made. She decided to go and stay with her mother. Mrs. Lambert – Madame de Lambert, as Michael insisted on calling her – had lived for many years now with her sister, Madame Falloux, at St. Malo. She spent a few days every year in London with Julia, but this year had not been well enough to come. She was an old lady, well over seventy, and Julia knew that it would be a great joy for her to have her daughter on a long visit. Who cared about an English actress in Vienna? She wouldn’t be anyone there. In St. Malo she would be something of a figure, and it would be fun for the two old women to be able to show her off to their friends.

‘Ma fille, la plus grande actrice d’Angleterre,’ and all that sort of thing.

Poor old girls, they couldn’t live much longer and they led drab, monotonous lives. Of course it would be fearfully boring for her, but it would be a treat for them. Julia had a feeling that perhaps in the course of her brilliant and triumphant career she had a trifle neglected her mother. She could make up for it now. She would lay herself out to be charming. Her tenderness for Michael and her ever-present sense of having been for years unjust to him filled her with contrition. She felt that she had been selfish and overbearing, and she wanted to atone for all that. She was eager to sacrifice herself, and so wrote to her mother to announce her imminent arrival.

She managed in the most natural way in the world to see nothing of Tom till her last day in London. The play had closed the night before and she was starting for St. Malo in the evening. Tom came in about six o’clock to say good-bye to her. Michael was there, Dolly, Charles Tamerley and one or two others, so that there was no chance of their being left even for a moment by themselves. Julia found no difficulty in talking to him naturally. To see him gave her not the anguish she had feared but no more than a dull heartache. They had kept the date and place of her departure secret, that is to say, the Press representative of the theatre had only rung up a very few newspapers, so that when Julia and Michael reached the station there were not more than half a dozen reporters and three cameramen. Julia said a few gracious words to them, and Michael a few more, then the Press representative took the reporters aside and gave them a succinct account of Julia’s plans. Meanwhile Julia and Michael posed while the camera-men to the glare of flashes photographed them arm in arm, exchanging a final kiss, and at last Julia, half out of the carriage window, giving her hand to Michael who stood on the platform.

‘What a nuisance these people are,’ she said. ‘One simply cannot escape them.’

‘I can’t imagine how they knew you were going.’

The little crowd that had assembled when they realized that something was going on stood at a respectful distance. The Press representative came up and told Michael he thought he’d given the reporters enough for a column. The train steamed out.

Julia had refused to take Evie with her. She had a feeling that in order to regain her serenity she must cut herself off completely for a time from her old life. Evie in that French household would be out of place. For Madame Falloux, Julia’s Aunt Carrie, married as a girl to a Frenchman, now as an old, old lady spoke French more easily than English. She had been a widow for many years and her only son had been killed in the war. She lived in a tall, narrow stone house on a hill, and when you crossed its threshold from the cobbled street you entered upon the peace of a by-gone age. Nothing had been changed for half a century. The drawing-room was furnished with a Louis XV suite under covers, and the covers were only taken off once a month to give the silk underneath a delicate brushing. The crystal chandelier was shrouded in muslin so that the flies should not spot it. In front of the chimney-piece was a fire-screen of peacocks’ feathers artfully arranged and protected by glass. Though the room was never used Aunt Carrie dusted it herself every day. The dining-room was panelled and here too the chairs were under dust-covers. On the sideboard was a silver épergne, a silver coffee-pot, a silver teapot and a silver tray. Aunt Carrie and Julia’s mother, Mrs Lambert, lived in the morning-room, a long narrow room, with empire furniture. On the walls in oval frames were oil portraits of Aunt Carrie and her deceased husband, of his father and mother, and a pastel of the dead son as a child. Here they had their work-boxes, here they read their papers, the Catholic La Croix, the Revue des Deux Mondes and the local daily, and here they played dominoes in the evening. Except on Thursday evenings when the Abbé and the Commandant La Garde, a retired naval officer, came to dinner, they had their meals there; but when Julia arrived they decided that it would be more convenient to eat in the dining-room.

Aunt Carrie still wore mourning for her husband and her son. It was seldom warm enough for her to leave off the little black tricot that she crocheted herself. Mrs Lambert wore black too, but when Monsieur L’Abbé and the Commandant came to dinner she put over her shoulders a white lace shawl that Julia had given her. After dinner they played plafond for two sous a hundred. Mrs Lambert, because she had lived for so many years in Jersey and still went to London, knew all about the great world, and she said that a game called contract was much played, but the Commandant said it was all very well for Americans, but he was content to stick to plafond, and the Abbé said that for his part he thought it a pity that whist had been abandoned. But there, men were never satisfied with what they had; they wanted change, change, change, all the time.

Every Christmas Julia gave her mother and her aunt expensive presents, but they never used them. They showed them to their friends with pride, these wonderful things that came from London, and then wrapped them up in tissue paper and put them away in cupboards. Julia had offered her mother a car, but she refused it. For the little they went out, they could go on foot; a chauffeur would steal their petrol, if he had his meals out it would be ruinous and if he had them in it would upset Annette. Annette was cook, house-keeper and housemaid. She had been with Aunt Carrie for five and thirty years. Her niece was there to do the rough work, but Angèle was young, she wasn’t forty yet, and it would hardly do to have a man constantly about the house.

They put Julia in the same room she had had as a girl when she was living with Aunt Carrie for her education. It gave her a peculiar, heart-rending sensation, indeed for a little it made her quite emotional. But she fell into the life very easily. Aunt Carrie had become a Catholic on her marriage and Mrs Lambert, when on losing her husband she settled down in St. Malo, having received instructions from the Abbé, in due course took the same step. The two old ladies were very devout. They went to Mass every morning and to High Mass on Sundays. Otherwise they seldom went out. When they did it was to pay a ceremonious call on some old lady who had had a bereavement in the family or one of whose grandchildren was become engaged. They read their papers, and their magazine, did a great deal of sewing for charitable purposes, played dominoes and listened to the radio that Julia had given them. Though the Abbé and the Commandant had dined with them every Thursday for many years they were always in a flutter when Thursday came. The Commandant, with the sailor’s downrightness that they expected of him, did not hesitate to say so if something was not cooked to his liking, and even the Abbé, though a saint, had his likes and dislikes. For instance, he was very fond of sole normande, but he insisted on its being cooked with the best butter, and with butter at the price it was since the war that was very expensive. Every Thursday morning Aunt Carrie took the cellar key from the place where she had hidden it and herself fetched a bottle of claret from the cellar. She and her sister finished what was left of it by the end of the week.

They made a great fuss of Julia. They dosed her with tisanes, and were anxious that she should not sit in anything that might be thought a draught. Indeed a great part of their lives was devoted to avoiding draughts. They made her lie on sofas and were solicitous that she should cover her feet. They reasoned with her about the clothes she wore. Those silk stockings that were so thin you could see through them; and what did she wear next to her skin? Aunt Carrie would not have been surprised to learn that she wore nothing but a chemise.

‘She doesn’t even wear that,’ said Mrs Lambert.

‘What does she wear then?’

‘Panties,’ said Julia.

‘And a soutien-gorge, I suppose.’

‘Certainly not,’ cried Julia tartly.

‘Then, my niece, under your dress you are naked?’

‘Practically.’

‘C’est de la folie,’ said Aunt Carrie.

‘C’est vraiment pas raisonnable, ma fille,’ said Mrs Lambert.

‘And without being a prude,’ added Aunt Carrie, ‘I must say that it is hardly decent.’

Julia showed them her clothes, and on the first Thursday after her arrival they discussed what she should wear for dinner. Aunt Carrie and Mrs Lambert grew rather sharp with one another. Mrs Lambert thought that since her daughter had evening dresses with her she ought to wear one, but Aunt Carrie considered it quite unnecessary.

‘When I used to come and visit you in Jersey, my dear, and gentlemen were coming to dinner, I remember you would put on a tea-gown.’

‘Of course a tea-gown would be very suitable.’

They looked at Julia hopefully. She shook her head.

‘I would sooner wear a shroud.’

Aunt Carrie wore a high-necked dress of heavy black silk, with a string of jet, and Mrs Lambert a similar one, but with her lace shawl and a paste necklace. The Commandant, a sturdy little man with a much-wrinkled face, white hair cut en brosse and an imposing moustache dyed a deep black, was very gallant, and though well past seventy pressed Julia’s foot under the table during dinner. On the way out he seized the opportunity to pinch her bottom.

‘Sex appeal,’ Julia murmured to herself as with dignity she followed the two old ladies into the parlour.

They made a fuss of her, not because she was a great actress, but because she was in poor health and needed rest. Julia to her great amazement soon discovered that to them her celebrity was an embarrassment rather than an asset. Far from wanting to show her off, they did not offer to take her with them to pay calls. Aunt Carrie had brought the habit of afternoon tea with her from Jersey, and had never abandoned it. One day, soon after Julia’s arrival, when they had invited some ladies to tea, Mrs Lambert at luncheon thus addressed her daughter.

‘My dear, we have some very good friends at St. Malo, but of course they still look upon us as foreigners, even after all these years, and we don’t like to do anything that seems at all eccentric. Naturally we don’t want you to tell a lie, but unless you are forced to mention it, your Aunt Carrie thinks it would be better if you did not tell anyone that you are an actress.’

Julia was taken aback, but, her sense of humour prevailing, she felt inclined to laugh.

‘If one of the friends we are expecting this afternoon happens to ask you what your husband is, it wouldn’t be untrue, would it? to say that he was in business.’

‘Not at all,’ said Julia, permitting herself to smile.

‘Of course, we know that English actresses are not like French ones,’ Aunt Carrie added kindly. ‘It’s almost an understood thing for a French actress to have a lover.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Julia.

Her life in London, with its excitements, its triumphs and its pains, began to seem very far away. She found herself able soon to consider Tom and her feeling for him with a tranquil mind. She realized that her vanity had been more wounded than her heart. The days passed monotonously. Soon the only thing that recalled London to her was the arrival on Monday of the Sunday papers. She got a batch of them and spent the whole day reading them. Then she was a trifle restless. She walked on the ramparts and looked at the islands that dotted the bay. The grey sky made her sick for the grey sky of England. But by Tuesday morning she had sunk back once more into the calmness of the provincial life. She read a good deal, novels, English and French, that she bought at the local bookshop, and her favourite Verlaine. There was a tender melancholy in his verses that seemed to fit the grey Breton town, the sad old stone houses and the quietness of those steep and tortuous streets. The peaceful habits of the two old ladies, the routine of their uneventful existence and their quiet gossip, excited her compassion. Nothing had happened to them for years, nothing now would ever happen to them till they died, and then how little would their lives have signified. The strange thing was that they were content. They knew neither malice nor envy. They had achieved the aloofness from the common ties of men that Julia felt in herself when she stood at the footlights bowing to the applause of a enthusiastic audience. Sometimes she had thought that aloofness her most precious possession. In her it was born of pride; in them of humility. In both cases it brought one precious thing, liberty of spirit; but with them it was more secure.

Michael wrote to her once a week, brisk, business-like letters in which he told her what the takings were at the Siddons and the preparations he was making for the next production; but Charles Tamerley wrote to her every day. He told her the gossip of the town, he talked in his charming, cultivated way of the pictures he saw and the books he read. He was tenderly allusive and playfully erudite. He philosophized without pedantry. He told her that he adored her. They were the most beautiful love-letters Julia had ever received, and for the sake of posterity she made up her mind to keep them. One day perhaps someone would publish them and people would go to the National Portrait Gallery and look at her portrait, the one McEvoy had painted, and sigh when they thought of the sad, romantic love-story of which she had been the heroine.

Charles had been wonderful to her during the first two weeks of her bereavement, she did not know what she would have done without him. He had always been at her beck and call. His conversation, by taking her into a different world, had soothed her nerves. Her soul had been muddied, and in his distinction of spirit she had washed herself clean. It had rested her wonderfully to wander about the galleries with him and look at pictures. She had good reason to be grateful to him. She thought of all the years he had loved her. He had waited for her now for more than twenty years. She had not been very kind to him. It would have given him so much happiness to possess her and really it would not have hurt her. She wondered why she had resisted him so long. Perhaps because he was so faithful, because his devotion was so humble, perhaps only because she wanted to preserve in his mind the ideal that he had of her. It was stupid really and she had been selfish. It occurred to her with exultation that she could at last reward him for all his tenderness, his patience and his selflessness. She had not lost the sense of unworthiness which Michael’s great kindness had aroused in her, and she was remorseful still because she had been for so long impatient of him. The desire for self-sacrifice with which she left England burnt still in her breast with an eager flame. She felt that Charles was a worthy object for its exercise. She laughed a little, kindly and compassionately, as she thought of his amazement when he understood what she intended; for a moment he would hardly be able to believe it, and then what rapture, then what ecstasy! The love that he had held banked up for so many years would burst its sluices like a great torrent and in a flood o’erwhelm her. Her heart swelled at the thought of his infinite gratitude. But still he could hardly believe in his good fortune; and when it was all over and she lay in his arms she would nestle up to him and whisper tenderly:

‘Was it worth waiting for?’

‘Like Helen, you make me immortal with a kiss.’

It was wonderful to be able to give so much happiness to a human being.

‘I’ll write to him just before I leave St. Malo,’ she decided.

The spring passed into summer, and at the end of July it was time for Julia to go to Paris and see about her clothes. Michael wanted to open with the new play early in September, and rehearsals were to start in August. She had brought the play with her to St. Malo, intending to study her part, but the circumstances in which she lived had made it impossible. She had all the leisure she needed, but in that grey, austere and yet snug little town, in the constant company of those two old ladies whose interests were confined to the parish church and their household affairs, though it was a good play, she could take but little interest in it.

‘It’s high time I was getting back,’ she said. ‘It would be hell if I really came to the conclusion that the theatre wasn’t worth the fuss and bother they make about it.’

She said good-bye to her mother and to Aunt Carrie. They had been very kind to her, but she had an inkling that they would not be sorry when her departure allowed them to return to the life she had interrupted. They were a little relieved besides to know that now there was no more danger of some eccentricity, such as you must always run the risk of with an actress, which might arouse the unfavourable comment of the ladies of St. Malo.

She arrived in Paris in the afternoon, and when she was shown into her suite at the Ritz, she gave a sigh of satisfaction. It was a treat to get back to luxury. Three or four people had sent her flowers. She had a bath and changed. Charley Deveril, who always made her clothes for her, an old friend, called to take her to dinner at the Bois.

‘I had a wonderful time,’ she told him, ‘and of course it was a grand treat for those old girls to have me there, but I have a feeling that if I’d stayed a day longer I should have been bored.’

To drive up the Champs Elysées on that lovely evening filled her with exhilaration. It was good to smell once more the smell of petrol. The cars, the taxis, the hooting of horns, the chestnut trees, the street lights, the crowd on the pavement and the crowd sitting outside the cafés; it was an enchantment. And when they got to the Château de Madrid, so gay, so civilized and so expensive, it was grand to see once more well-dressed women, decently made-up, and tanned men in dinner-jackets.

‘I feel like a queen returning from exile.’

Julia spent several happy days choosing her clothes and having the first fittings. She enjoyed every moment of them. But she was a woman of character, and when she had come to a decision she adhered to it; before leaving for London she wrote a note to Charles. He had been to Goodwood and Cowes and was spending twenty-four hours in London on his way to Salzburg.

CHARLES DEAR,

How wonderful that I shall see you so soon. Of course I am free on Wednesday. Shall we dine together and do you love me still?

YOUR JULIA.

As she stuck down the envelope she murmured: Bis dat qui cito dat. It was a Latin tag that Michael always quoted when, asked to subscribe to a charity, he sent by return of post exactly half what was expected of him.

CHAPTER 24

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING Julia had her face massaged and her hair waved. She could not make up her mind whether to wear for dinner a dress of flowered organdie, very pretty and spring-like with its suggestion of Botticelli’s Primavera, or one of white satin beautifully cut to show off her slim young figure, and virginal; but while she was having her bath she decided on the white satin: it indicated rather delicately that the sacrifice she intended was in the nature of an expiation for her long ingratitude to Michael. She wore no jewels but a string of pearls and a diamond bracelet; besides her wedding-ring only one square-cut diamond. She would have liked to put on a slight brown tan, it looked open-air-girl and suited her, but reflecting on what lay before her she refrained. She could not very well, like the actor who painted himself black all over to play Othello, tan her whole body. Always a punctual woman, she came downstairs as the front door was being opened for Charles. She greeted him with a look into which she put tenderness, a roguish charm and intimacy. Charles now wore his thinning grey hair rather long, and with advancing years his intellectual, distinguished features had sagged a little; he was slightly bowed and his clothes looked as though they needed pressing.

‘Strange world we live in,’ thought Julia. ‘Actors do their damnedest to look like gentlemen and gentlemen do all they can to look like actors.’

There was no doubt that she was making a proper effect on him. He gave her the perfect opening.

‘Why are you looking so lovely to-night?’ he asked.

‘Because I’m looking forward to dining with you.’

With her beautiful, expressive eyes she looked deep into his. She parted her lips in the manner that she found so seductive in Romney’s portraits of Lady Hamilton.

They dined at the Savoy. The head-waiter gave them a table on the gangway so that they were admirably in view. Though everyone was supposed to be out of town the grill-room was well filled. Julia bowed and smiled to various friends of whom she caught sight. Charles had much to tell her; she listened to him with flattering interest.

‘You are the best company in the world, Charles,’ she told him.

They had come late, they dined well, and by the time Charles had finished his brandy people were already beginning to come in for supper.

‘Good gracious, are the theatres out already?’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘How quickly the time flies when I’m with you. D’you imagine they want to get rid of us?’

‘I don’t feel a bit like going to bed.’

‘I suppose Michael will be getting home presently?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Why don’t you come back to my house and have a talk?’

That was what she called taking a cue.

‘I’d love it,’ she answered, putting into her tone the slight blush which she felt would have well become her cheek.

They got into his car and drove to Hill Street. He took her into his study. It was on the ground floor and looked on a tiny garden. The french windows were wide open. They sat down on a sofa.

‘Put out some of the lights and let the night into the room,’ said Julia. She quoted from ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ ‘“In such a night as this, when the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees . . .”’

Charles switched off everything but one shaded lamp, and when he sat down again she nestled up to him. He put his arm round her waist and she rested her head on his shoulder.

‘This is heaven,’ she murmured.

‘I’ve missed you terribly all these months.’

‘Did you get into mischief?’

‘Well, I bought an Ingres drawing and paid a lot of money for it. I must show it to you before you go.’

‘Don’t forget. Where have you put it?’

She had wondered from the moment she got into the house whether the seduction would take place in the study or upstairs.

‘In my bedroom,’ he answered.

‘That’s much more comfortable really,’ she reflected.

She laughed in her sleeve as she thought of poor old Charles devising a simple little trick like that to get her into his bedroom. What mugs men were! Shy, that was what was the matter with them. A sudden pang shot through her heart as she thought of Tom. Damn Tom. Charles really was very sweet and she was determined to reward him at last for his long devotion.

‘You’ve been a wonderful friend to me, Charles,’ she said in her low, rather husky voice. She turned a little so that her face was very near his, her lips, again like Lady Hamilton’s, slightly open. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t always been very kind to you.’

She looked so deliciously yielding, a ripe peach waiting to be picked, that it seemed inevitable that he should kiss her. Then she would twine her soft white arms round his neck. But he only smiled.

‘You mustn’t say that. You’ve been always divine.’

(‘He’s afraid, poor lamb.’) ‘I don’t think anyone has ever been so much in love with me as you were.’

He gave her a little squeeze.

‘I am still. You know that. There’s never been any woman but you in my life.’

Since, however, he did not take the proffered lips she slightly turned. She looked reflectively at the electric fire. Pity it was unlit. The scene wanted a fire.

‘How different everything would have been if we’d bolted that time. Heigh-ho.’

She never quite knew what heigh-ho meant, but they used it a lot on the stage, and said with a sigh it always sounded very sad.

‘England would have lost its greatest actress. I know now how dreadfully selfish it was of me ever to propose it.’

‘Success isn’t everything. I sometimes wonder whether to gratify my silly little ambition I didn’t miss the greatest thing in the world. After all, love is the only thing that matters.’ And now she looked at him again with eyes more beautiful than ever in their melting tenderness. ‘D’you know, I think that now, if I had my time over again, I’d say take me.’

She slid her hand down to take his. He gave it a graceful pressure.

‘Oh, my dear.’

‘I’ve so often thought of that dream villa of ours. Olive trees and oleanders and the blue sea. Peace. Sometimes I’m appalled by the dullness and vulgarity of my life. What you offered was beauty. It’s too late now, I know; I didn’t know then how much I cared for you, I never dreamt that as the years went on you would mean more and more to me.’

‘It’s heavenly to hear you say that, my sweet. It makes up for so much.’

‘I’d do anything in the world for you, Charles. I’ve been selfish. I’ve ruined your life, I didn’t know what I was doing.’

Her voice was low and tremulous and she threw back her head so that her neck was like a white column. Her décolleté showed part of her small firm breasts and with her hands she pressed them forward a little.

‘You mustn’t say that, you mustn’t think that,’ he answered gently. ‘You’ve been perfect always. I wouldn’t have had you otherwise. Oh, my dear, life is so short and love is so transitory. The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want. Now that I look back on our long past together I know that you were wiser than I. “What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape?” Don’t you remember how it goes? “Never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’’’

(‘Idiotic.’) ‘Such lovely lines,’ she sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Heigh-ho.’

He went on quoting. That was a trick of his that Julia had always found somewhat tiresome.

‘“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new! . . .”’

It gave Julia an opportunity to think. She stared in the unlit fire, her gaze intent, as though she were entranced by the exquisite beauty of those words. It was quite obvious that he just hadn’t understood. It could hardly be wondered at. She had been deaf to his passionate entreaties for twenty years, and it was very natural if he had given up his quest as hopeless. It was like Mount Everest; if those hardy mountaineers who had tried for so long in vain to reach the summit finally found an easy flight of steps that led to it, they simply would not believe their eyes: they would think there was a catch in it. Julia felt that she must make herself a little plainer; she must, as it were, reach out a helping hand to the weary pilgrim.

‘It’s getting dreadfully late,’ she said softly. ‘Show me your new drawing and then I must go home.’

He rose and she gave him both her hands so that he should help her up from the sofa. They went upstairs. His pyjamas and dressing-gown were neatly arranged on a chair.

‘How well you single men do yourselves. Such a cosy, friendly bedroom.’

He took the framed drawing off the wall and brought it over for her to look at under the light. It was a portrait in pencil of a stoutish woman in a bonnet and a low-necked dress with puffed sleeves. Julia thought her plain and the dress ridiculous.

‘Isn’t it ravishing?’ she cried.

‘I knew you’d like it. A good drawing, isn’t it?’

‘Amazing.’

He put the little picture back on its nail. When he turned round again she was standing near the bed with her hands behind her back a little like a Circassian slave introduced by the chief eunuch to the inspection of the Grand Vizier; there was a hint of modest withdrawal in her bearing, a delicious timidity, and at the same time the virgin’s anticipation that she was about to enter into her kingdom. Julia gave a sigh that was ever so slightly voluptuous.

‘My dear, it’s been such a wonderful evening. I’ve never felt so close to you before.’

She slowly raised her hands from behind her back and with the exquisite timing that came so naturally to her moved them forwards, stretching out her arms, and held them palms upward as though there rested on them, invisibly, a lordly dish, and on the dish lay her proffered heart. Her beautiful eyes were tender and yielding and on her lips played a smile of shy surrender.

She saw Charles’s smile freeze on his face. He had understood all right.

(‘Christ, he doesn’t want me. It was all a bluff.’) The revelation for a moment staggered her. (‘God, how am I going to get out of it? What a bloody fool I must look.’)

She very nearly lost her poise. She had to think like lightning. He was standing there, looking at her with an embarrassment that he tried hard to conceal. Julia was panic-stricken. She could not think what to do with those hands that held the lordly dish; God knows, they were small, but at the moment they felt like legs of mutton hanging there. Nor did she know what to say. Every second made her posture and the situation more intolerable.

(‘The skunk, the dirty skunk. Codding me all these years.’)

She did the only thing possible. She continued the gesture. Counting so that she should not go too fast, she drew her hands towards one another, till she could clasp them, and then throwing back her head, raised them, very slowly, to one side of her neck. The attitude she reached was as lovely as the other, and it was the attitude that suggested to her what she had to say. Her deep rich voice trembled a little with emotion.

‘I’m so glad when I look back to think that we have nothing to reproach ourselves with. The bitterness of life is not death, the bitterness of life is that love dies. (She’d heard something like that said in a play.) If we’d been lovers you’d have grown tired of me long ago, and what should we have now to look back on but regret for our own weakness? What was that line of Shelley’s that you said just now about fading?’

‘Keats,’ he corrected. ‘“She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss.”’

‘That’s it. Go on.’

She was playing for time.

‘“For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”’

She threw her arms wide in a great open gesture and tossed her curly head. She’d got it.

‘It’s true, isn’t it? “For ever wilt thou love and I be fair.” What fools we should have been if for a few moments’ madness we had thrown away the wonderful happiness our friendship has brought us. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We’re clean. We can walk with our heads held high and look the whole world in the face.’

She instinctively felt that this was an exit line, and suiting her movements to the words, with head held high, backed to the door and flung it open. Her power was such that she carried the feeling of the scene all the way down the stairs with her. Then she let it fall and with the utmost simplicity turned to Charles who had followed her.

‘My cloak.’

‘The car is there,’ he said as he wrapped it round her. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘No, let me go alone. I want to stamp this hour on my heart. Kiss me before I go.’

She held up her lips to him. He kissed them. But she broke away from him, with a stifled sob, and tearing open the door ran to the waiting car.

When she got home and stood in her own bedroom she gave a great whoof of relief.

‘The bloody fool. Fancy me being taken in like that. Thank God, I got out of it all right. He’s such an ass, I don’t suppose he began to see what I was getting at.’ But that frozen smile disconcerted her. ‘He may have suspected, he couldn’t have been certain, and afterwards he must have been pretty sure he’d made a mistake. My God, the rot I talked. It seemed to go down all right, I must say. Lucky I caught on when I did. In another minute I’d have had my dress off. That wouldn’t have been so damned easy to laugh away.’

Julia began to titter. The situation was mortifying of course, he had made a damned fool of her, but if you had any sense of humour you could hardly help seeing that there was a funny side to it. She was sorry that there was nobody to whom she could tell it; even if it was against herself it would make a good story. What she couldn’t get over was that she had fallen for the comedy of undying passion that he had played all those years; for of course it was just a pose; he liked to see himself as the constant adorer, and the last thing he wanted, apparently, was to have his constancy rewarded.

‘Bluffed me, he did, completely bluffed me.’

But an idea occurred to Julia and she ceased to smile. When a woman’s amorous advances are declined by a man she is apt to draw one or two conclusions; one is that he is homosexual and the other is that he is impotent. Julia reflectively lit a cigarette. She asked herself if Charles had used his devotion to her as a cover to distract attention from his real inclinations. But she shook her head. If he had been homosexual she would surely have had some hint of it; after all, in society since the war they talked of practically nothing else. Of course it was quite possible he was impotent. She reckoned out his age. Poor Charles. She smiled again. And if that were the case it was he, not she, who had been placed in an embarrassing and even ridiculous position. He must have been scared stiff, poor lamb. Obviously it wasn’t the sort of thing a man liked to tell a woman, especially if he were madly in love with her; the more she thought of it the more probable she considered the explanation. She began to feel very sorry for him, almost maternal in fact.

‘I know what I’ll do,’ she said, as she began to undress, ‘I’ll send him a huge bunch of white lilies to-morrow.’

CHAPTER 25

JULIA LAY AWAKE next morning for some time before she rang her bell. She thought. When she reflected on her adventure of the previous night she could not but be pleased that she had shown so much presence of mind. It was hardly true to say that she had snatched victory from defeat, but looking upon it as a strategic retreat her conduct had been masterly. She was notwithstanding ill at ease. There might be yet another explanation for Charles’s singular behaviour. It was possible that he did not desire her because she was not desirable. The notion had crossed her mind in the night, and though she had at once dismissed it as highly improbable, there was no denying it, at that hour of the morning it had a nasty look. She rang. As a rule, since Michael often came in while Julia had breakfast, Evie when she had drawn the curtains handed her a mirror and a comb, her powder and lipstick. On this occasion, instead of running the comb rapidly through her hair and giving her face a perfunctory dab with the puff, Julia took some trouble. She painted her lips with care and put on some rouge; she arranged her hair.

‘Speaking without passion or prejudice,’ she said, still looking at herself in the glass, when Evie placed the breakfast tray on her bed, ‘would you say I was by way of being a good-looking woman, Evie?’

‘I must know what I’m letting myself in for before answering that question.’

‘You old bitch,’ said Julia.

‘You’re no beauty, you know.’

‘No great actress ever has been.’

‘When you’re all dolled up posh like you was last night, and got the light b’ind you, I’ve seen worse, you know.’

(‘Fat lot of good it did me last night.’) ‘What I want to say is, if I really set my mind on getting off with a man, d’you think I could?’

‘Knowing what men are, I wouldn’t be surprised. Who d’you want to get off with now?’

‘Nobody. I was only talking generally.’

Evie sniffed and drew her forefinger along her nostrils.

‘Don’t sniff like that. If your nose wants blowing, blow it.’

Julia ate her boiled egg slowly. She was busy with her thoughts. She looked at Evie. Funny-looking old thing of course, but one never knew.

‘Tell me, Evie, do men ever try to pick you up in the street?’

‘Me? I’d like to see ’em try.’

‘So would I, to tell you the truth. Women are always telling me how men follow them in the street and if they stop and look in at a shop window come up and try to catch their eye. Sometimes they have an awful bother getting rid of them.’

‘Disgusting, I call it.’

‘I don’t know about that. It’s rather flattering. You know, it’s a most extraordinary thing, no one ever follows me in the street. I don’t remember a man ever having tried to pick me up.’

‘Oh well, you walk along Edgware Road one evening. You’ll get picked up all right.’

‘I shouldn’t know what to do if I was.’

‘Call a policeman,’ said Evie grimly.

‘I know a girl who was looking in a shop window in Bond Street, a hat shop, and a man came up and asked her if she’d like a hat. I’d love one, she said, and they went in and she chose one and gave her name and address, he paid for it on the nail, and then she said, thank you so much, and walked out while he was waiting for the change.’

‘That’s what she told you.’ Evie’s sniff was sceptical. She gave Julia a puzzled look. ‘What’s the idea?’

‘Oh, nothing. I was only wondering why in point of fact I never have been accosted by a man. It’s not as if I had no sex appeal.’

But had she? She made up her mind to put the matter to the test.

That afternoon, when she had had her sleep, she got up, made up a little more than usual, and without calling Evie put on a dress that was neither plain nor obviously expensive and a red straw hat with a wide brim.

‘I don’t want to look like a tart,’ she said as she looked at herself in the glass. ‘On the other hand I don’t want to look too respectable.’

She tiptoed down the stairs so that no one should hear her and closed the door softly behind her. She was a trifle nervous, but pleasantly excited; she felt that she was doing something rather shocking. She walked through Connaught Square into the Edgware Road. It was about five o’clock. There was a dense line of buses, taxis and lorries; bicyclists dangerously threaded their way through the traffic. The pavements were thronged. She sauntered slowly north. At first she walked with her eyes straight in front of her, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but soon realized that this was useless. She must look at people if she wanted them to look at her. Two or three times when she saw half a dozen persons gazing at a shop window she paused and gazed too, but none of them took any notice of her. She strolled on. People passed her in one direction and another. They seemed in a hurry. No one paid any attention to her. When she saw a man alone coming towards her she gave him a bold stare, but he passed on with a blank face. It occurred to her that her expression was too severe, and she let a slight smile hover on her lips. Two or three men thought she was smiling at them and quickly averted their gaze. She looked back as one of them passed her and he looked back too, but catching her eye he hurried on. She felt a trifle snubbed and decided not to look round again. She walked on and on. She had always heard that the London crowd was the best behaved in the world, but really its behaviour on this occasion was unconscionable.

‘This couldn’t happen to one in the streets of Paris, Rome or Berlin,’ she reflected.

She decided to go as far as the Marylebone Road, and then turn back. It would be too humiliating to have to go home without being once accosted. She was walking so slowly that passers-by sometimes jostled her. This irritated her.

‘I ought to have tried Oxford Street,’ she said. ‘That fool Evie. The Edgware Road’s obviously a wash-out.’

Suddenly her heart gave an exultant leap. She had caught a young man’s eye and she was sure that there was a gleam in it. He passed, and she had all she could do not to turn round. She started, for in a moment he passed her again, he had retraced his steps, and this time he gave her a stare. She shot him a glance and then modestly lowered her eyes. He fell back and she was conscious that he was following her. It was all right. She stopped to look into a shop window and he stopped too. She knew how to behave now. She pretended to be absorbed in the goods that were displayed, but just before she moved on gave him a quick flash of her faintly-smiling eyes. He was rather short, he looked like a clerk or a shop-walker, he wore a grey suit and a brown soft hat. He was not the man she would have chosen to be picked up by, but there it was, he was evidently trying to pick her up. She forgot that she was beginning to feel tired. She did not know what would happen next. Of course she wasn’t going to let the thing go too far, but she was curious to see what his next step would be. She wondered what he would say to her. She was excited and pleased; it was a weight off her mind. She walked on slowly and she knew he was close behind her. She stopped at another shop window, and this time when he stopped he was close beside her. Her heart began to beat wildly. It was really beginning to look like an adventure.

‘I wonder if he’ll ask me to go to a hotel with him. I don’t suppose he could afford that. A cinema. That’s it. It would be rather fun.’

She looked him full in the face now and very nearly smiled. He took off his hat.

‘Miss Lambert, isn’t it?’

She almost jumped out of her skin. She was indeed so taken aback that she had not the presence of mind to deny it.

‘I thought I recognized you the moment I saw you, that’s why I turned back, to make sure, see, and I said to meself, if that’s not Julia Lambert I’m Ramsay Macdonald. Then you stopped to look in that shop window and that give me the chance to ‘ave a good look at you. What made me ‘esitate was seeing you in the Edgware Road. It seems so funny, if you know what I mean.’

It was much funnier than he imagined. Anyhow it didn’t matter if he knew who she was. She ought to have guessed that she couldn’t go far in London without being recognized. He had a cockney accent and a pasty face, but she gave him a jolly, friendly smile. He mustn’t think she was putting on airs.

‘Excuse me talking to you, not ‘aving been introduced and all that, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity. Will you oblige me with your autograph?’

Julia caught her breath. It couldn’t be that this was why he had followed her for ten minutes. He must have thought that up as an excuse for speaking to her. Well, she would play up.

‘I shall be delighted. But I can’t very well give it you in the street. People would stare so.’

‘That’s right. Look here, I was just going along to ‘ave my tea. There’s a Lyons at the next corner. Why don’t you come in and ‘ave a cup too?’

She was getting on. When they’d had tea he’d probably suggest going to the pictures.

‘All right,’ she said.

They walked along till they came to the shop and took their places at a small table.

‘Two teas, please, miss,’ he ordered. ‘Anything to eat?’ And when Julia declined: ‘Scone and butter for one, miss.’

Julia was able now to have a good look at him. Though stocky and short he had good features, his black hair was plastered down on his head and he had fine eyes, but his teeth were poor and his pale skin gave him an unhealthy look. There was a sort of impudence in his manner that Julia did not much like, but then, as she sensibly reflected, you could hardly expect the modesty of the violet in a young man who picked you up in the Edgware Road.

‘Before we go any further let’s ‘ave this autograph, eh? Do it now, that’s my motto.’

He took a fountain pen from his pocket and from a bulging pocket-book a large card.

‘One of our trade cards,’ he said. ‘That’ll do O.K.’

Julia thought it silly to carry the subterfuge to this length, but she good-humouredly signed her name on the back of the card.

‘Do you collect autographs?’ she asked him with a subtle smile.

‘Me? Noa. I think it’s a lot of tommy rot. My young lady does. She’s got Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks and I don’t know what all. Show you ‘er photo if you like.’

From his pocket-book he extracted a snapshot of a rather pert-looking young woman showing all her teeth in a cinema smile.

‘Pretty,’ said Julia.

‘And how. We’re going to the pictures to-night. She will be surprised when I give her your autograph. The first thing I said to meself when I knew it was you was, I’ll get Julia Lambert’s autograph for Gwen or die in the attempt. We’re going to get married in August, when I ‘ave my ‘oliday, you know; we’re going to the Isle of Wight for the ‘oneymoon. I shall ‘ave a rare lot of fun with ‘er over this. She won’t believe me when I tell her you an’ me ‘ad tea together, she’ll think I’m kidding, and then I’ll show ‘er the autograph, see?’

Julia listened to him politely, but the smile had left her face.

‘I’m afraid I shall have to go in a minute,’ she said. ‘I’m late already.’

‘I ‘aven’t got too much time meself. You see, meeting my young lady, I want to get away from the shop on the tick.’

The check had been put on the table when the girl brought their tea, and when they got up Julia took a shilling out of her bag.

‘What are you doing that for? You don’t think I’m going to let you pay. I invited you.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘But I’ll tell you what you can do, let me bring my young lady to see you in your dressing-room one day. Just shake ‘ands with her, see? It would mean a rare lot to her. Why, she’d go on talking about it the rest of her life.’

Julia’s manner had been for some minutes growing stiffer and now, though gracious still, it was almost haughty.

‘I’m sorry, but we never allow strangers behind.’

‘Oh, sorry. You don’t mind my asking though, do you? I mean, it’s not as if it was for meself.’

‘Not at all. I quite understand.’

She signalled to a cab crawling along the curb and gave her hand to the young man.

‘Good-bye, Miss Lambert. So long, good luck and all that sort of thing. And thanks for the autograph.’

Julia sat in the corner of the taxi raging.

‘Vulgar little beast. Him and his young lady. The nerve of asking if he could bring her to see ME.’

When she got home she went upstairs to her room. She snatched her hat off her head and flung it angrily on the bed. She strode over to the looking-glass and stared at herself.

‘Old, old, old,’ she muttered. ‘There are no two ways about it; I’m entirely devoid of sex appeal. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? You’d say it was preposterous. What other explanation is there? I walk from one end of the Edgware Road to the other and God knows I’d dressed the part perfectly, and not a man pays the smallest attention to me except a bloody little shop-assistant who wants my autograph for his young lady. It’s absurd. A lot of sexless bastards. I don’t know what’s coming to the English. The British Empire!’

The last words she said with a scorn that would have withered a whole front bench of cabinet ministers. She began to gesticulate.

‘It’s ridiculous to suppose that I could have got to my position if I hadn’t got sex appeal. What do people come to see an actress for? Because they want to go to bed with her. Do you mean to tell me that I could fill a theatre for three months with a rotten play if I hadn’t got sex appeal? What is sex appeal anyway?’

She paused, looking at herself reflectively.

‘Surely I can act sex appeal. I can act anything.’

She began to think of the actresses who notoriously had it, of one especially, Lydia Mayne, whom one always engaged when one wanted a vamp. She was not much of an actress, but in certain parts she was wonderfully effective. Julia was a great mimic, and now she began to do an imitation of Lydia Mayne. Her eyelids drooped sensually over her eyes as Lydia’s did and her body writhed sinuously in her dress. She got into her eyes the provoking indecency of Lydia’s glance and into her serpentine gestures that invitation which was Lydia’s speciality. She began to speak in Lydia’s voice, with the lazy drawl that made every remark she uttered sound faintly obscene.

‘Oh, my dear man, I’ve heard that sort of thing so often. I don’t want to make trouble between you and your wife. Why won’t men leave me alone?’

It was a cruel caricature that Julia gave. It was quite ruthless. It amused her so much that she burst out laughing.

‘Well, there’s one thing, I may not have any sex appeal, but after seeing my imitation there aren’t many people who’d think Lydia had either.’

It made her feel much better.

CHAPTER 26

REHEARSALS BEGAN AND distracted Julia’s troubled mind. The revival that Michael put on when she went abroad had done neither very well nor very badly, but rather than close the theatre he was keeping it in the bill till ‘Nowadays’ was ready. Because he was acting two matinées a week, and the weather was hot, he determined that they should take rehearsals easy. They had a month before them.

Though Julia had been on the stage so long she had never lost the thrill she got out of rehearsing, and the first rehearsal still made her almost sick with excitement. It was the beginning of a new adventure. She did not feel like a leading lady then, she felt as gay and eager as if she were a girl playing her first small part. But at the same time she had a delicious sense of her own powers. Once more she had the chance to exercise them.

At eleven o’clock she stepped on to the stage. The cast stood about idly. She kissed and shook hands with the artists she knew and Michael with urbanity introduced to her those she did not. She greeted Avice Crichton with cordiality. She told her how pretty she was and how much she liked her hat; she told her about the lovely frocks she had chosen for her in Paris.

‘Have you seen Tom lately?’ she asked.

‘No, I haven’t. He’s away on his holiday.’

‘Oh yes. He’s a nice little thing, isn’t he?’

‘Sweet.’

The two women smiled into one another’s eyes. Julia watched her when she read her part and listened to her intonations. She smiled grimly. It was exactly what she had expected. Avice was one of those actresses who were quite sure of themselves from the first rehearsal. She didn’t know what was coming to her. Tom meant nothing to Julia any more, but she had a score to settle with Avice and she wasn’t going to forget it. The slut!

The play was a modern version of ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray,’ but with the change of manners of this generation it had been treated from the standpoint of comedy. Some of the old characters were introduced, and Aubrey Tanqueray, now a very old man, appeared in the second act. After Paula’s death he had married for the third time. Mrs Cortelyon had undertaken to compensate him for his unfortunate experience with his second wife, and she was now a cantankerous and insolent old lady. Ellean, his daughter, and Hugh Ardale had agreed to let bygones be bygones, for Paula’s tragic death had seemed to wipe out the recollection of his lapse into extra-conjugal relations; and they had married. He was now a retired brigadier-general who played golf and deplored the decline of the British Empire – ‘Gad, sir, I’d stand those damned socialists against a wall and shoot ’em if I had my way’; whereas Ellean by this time an elderly woman, after a prudish youth had become gay, modern and plain-spoken. The character that Michael played was called Robert Humphreys, and like the Aubrey of Pinero’s play he was a widower with an only daughter; he had been a consul in China for many years, and having come into money had retired and was settling on the estate, near where the Tanquerays still lived, which a cousin had left him. His daughter, Honor (this was the part for which Avice Crichton had been engaged), was studying medicine with the intention of practising in India. Alone in London, and friendless after so many years abroad, he had picked up a well-known woman of the town called Mrs Marten. Mrs Marten belonged to the same class as Paula, but she was less exclusive; she ‘did’ the summer and the winter season at Cannes and in the intervals lived in a flat in Albermarle Street where she entertained the officers of His Majesty’s brigade. She played a good game of bridge and an even better game of golf. The part well suited Julia.

The author followed the lines of the old play closely. Honor announced to her father that she was abandoning her medical studies and until her marriage wished to live with him, for she had just become engaged to Ellean’s son, a young guardsman. Somewhat disconcerted, Robert Humphreys broke to her his intention of marrying Mrs Marten. Honor took the information with composure.

‘Of course you know she’s a tart, don’t you?’ she said coolly.

He, much embarrassed, spoke of the unhappy life she had led and how he wanted to make up to her for all she had suffered.

‘Oh, don’t talk such rot,’ she answered. ‘It’s grand work if you can get it.’

Ellean’s son had been one of Mrs Marten’s numerous lovers just as Ellean’s husband had been one of Paula Tanqueray’s. When Robert Humphreys brought his wife down to his home in the country and this fact was discovered, they decided that Honor must be informed. To their consternation Honor did not turn a hair. She knew already.

‘I was as pleased as Punch when I found out,’ she told her step-mother. ‘You see, darling, you can tell me if he’s all right in bed.’

This was Avice Crichton’s best scene, it lasted a full ten minutes, and Michael had realized from the beginning that it was effective and important. Avice’s cold, matter-of-fact prettiness had been exactly what he had thought would be so telling in the circumstances. But after half-a-dozen rehearsals he began to think that that was all she had to give. He talked it over with Julia.

‘How d’you think Avice is shaping?’

‘It’s early days to tell yet.’

‘I’m not happy about her. You said she could act. I’ve seen no sign of it yet.’

‘It’s a cast-iron part. She can’t really go wrong in it.’

‘You know just as well as I do that there’s no such thing as a cast-iron part. However good a part is, it has to be acted for all it’s worth. I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be better to kick her out and get somebody else.’

‘That wouldn’t be so easy. I think you ought to give her a chance.’

‘She’s so awkward, her gestures are so meaningless.’

Julia reflected. She had her reasons for wishing to keep Avice in the cast. She knew her well enough to be sure that if she were dismissed she would tell Tom that it was because Julia was jealous of her. He loved her and would believe anything she said. He might even think that Julia had put this affront on her in revenge for his desertion. No, no, she must stay. She must play the part, and fail; and Tom must see with his own eyes what a bad actress she was. They both of them thought the play would make her. Fools. It would kill her.

‘You know how clever you are, Michael, I’m sure you can train her if you’re willing to take a little trouble.’

‘But that’s just it, she doesn’t seem able to take direction. I show her exactly how to say a line and then she goes and says it in her own way. You wouldn’t believe it, but sometimes I can hardly help thinking she’s under the delusion that she knows better than I do.’

‘You make her nervous. When you tell her to do something she’s in such a dither she doesn’t know what she’s up to.’

‘Good lord, no one could be more easy than I am. I’ve never even been sharp with her.’

Julia gave him an affectionate smile.

‘Are you going to pretend that you really don’t know what’s the matter with her?’

‘No, what?’

He looked at her with a blank face.

‘Come off it, darling. Haven’t you noticed that she’s madly in love with you?’

‘With me? But I thought she was practically engaged to Tom. Nonsense. You’re always fancying things like that.’

‘But it’s quite obvious. After all she isn’t the first who’s fallen for your fatal beauty, and I don’t suppose she’ll be the last.’

‘Heaven knows, I don’t want to queer poor Tom’s pitch.’

‘It’s not your fault, is it?’

‘What d’you want me to do about it then?’

‘Well, I think you ought to be nice to her. She’s very young, you know, poor thing. What she wants is a helping hand. If you took her alone a few times and went through the part with her I believe you could do wonders. Why don’t you take her out to lunch one day and have a talk to her?’

She saw the gleam in Michael’s eyes as he considered the proposition and the shadow of a smile that was outlined on his lips.

‘Of course the great thing is to get the play as well acted as we can.’

‘I know it’ll be a bore for you, but honestly, for the sake of the play I think it’ll be worth while.’

‘You know that I would never do anything to upset you, Julia. I mean, I’d much sooner fire the girl and get someone else in her place.’

‘I think that would be such a mistake. I’m convinced that if you’ll only take enough trouble with her she’ll give a very good performance.’

He walked up and down the room once or twice. He seemed to be considering the matter from every side.

‘Well, I suppose it’s my job to get the best performance I can out of every member of my cast. In every case you have to find out which is the best method of approach.’

He threw out his chin and drew in his belly. He straightened his back. Julia knew that Avice Crichton would hold the part, and next day at rehearsal he took her aside and had a long talk with her. She knew by his manner exactly what he was saying and, watching them out of the corner of her eye, presently she saw Avice nod and smile. He had asked her to lunch with him. With a contented mind Julia went on studying her part.

CHAPTER 27

THEY HAD BEEN rehearsing for a fortnight when Roger arrived from Austria. He had been spending a few weeks on a Carinthian lake, and after a day or two in London was to go and stay with friends in Scotland. Since Michael had to dine early to go to the theatre Julia went to meet him by herself. When she was dressing, Evie, sniffing as usual, told her that she was taking as much pains to make herself look nice as if she were going to meet a young man. She wanted Roger to be proud of her, and certainly she looked very young and pretty in her summer frock as she strolled down the platform. You would have thought, but wrongly, that she was perfectly unconscious of the attention she attracted. Roger, after a month in the sun, was very brown, but he was still rather spotty and he seemed thinner than when he had left London at the New Year. She hugged him with exuberant affection. He smiled slightly.

They were to dine by themselves. Julia asked him if he would like to go to a play afterwards or to the pictures, but he said he preferred to stay at home.

‘That’ll be much nicer,’ she answered, ‘and we’ll just talk.’

There was indeed a subject that Michael had invited her to discuss with Roger when the opportunity arose. Now that he was going to Cambridge so soon he ought to make up his mind what he wanted to do. Michael was afraid that he would drift through his time there and then go into a broker’s office or even on the stage. Thinking that Julia had more tact than he, and more influence with the boy, he had urged her to put before him the advantages of the Foreign Office and the brilliant possibilities of the Bar. Julia thought it would be strange if in the course of two or three hours’ conversation she could not find a way to lead to this important topic. At dinner she tried to get him to talk about Vienna. But he was reticent.

‘Oh, I just did the usual things, you know. I saw the sights and worked hard at my German. I knocked about in beer places. I went to the opera a good deal.’

She wondered if he had had any love affairs.

‘Anyhow, you haven’t come back engaged to a Viennese maiden,’ she said, thinking to draw him out.

He gave her a reflective, but faintly amused look. You might almost have thought that he had seen what she was driving at. It was strange; though he was her own son she did not feel quite at home with him.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘I was too busy to bother with that sort of thing.’

‘I suppose you went to all the theatres.’

‘I went two or three times.’

‘Did you see anything that would be any use to me?’

‘You know, I never thought about that.’

His answer might have seemed a little ungracious but that it was accompanied by a smile, and his smile was very sweet. Julia wondered again how it was that he had inherited so little of Michael’s beauty and of her charm. His red hair was nice, but his pale lashes gave his face a sort of empty look. Heaven only knew where with such a father and such a mother he had got his rather lumpy figure. He was eighteen now; it was time he fined down. He seemed a trifle apathetic; he had none of her sparkling vitality; she could picture the vividness with which she would have narrated her experiences if she had just spent six months in Vienna. Why, already she had made a story about her stay at St. Malo with Aunt Carrie and her mother that made people roar with laughter. They all said it was as good as a play, and her own impression was that it was much better than most. She told it to Roger now. He listened with his slow, quiet smile; but she had an uneasy feeling that he did not think it quite so funny as she did. She sighed in her heart. Poor lamb, he could have no sense of humour. Then he made some remark that led her to speak of ‘Nowadays.’ She told him its story, and explained what she was doing with her part; she talked to him of the cast and described the sets. At the end of dinner it suddenly struck her that she had been talking entirely of herself and her own interests. She did not know how she had been led to do this, and the suspicion flashed across her mind that Roger had guided the conversation in that direction so that it should be diverted from him and his affairs. But she put it aside. He really wasn’t intelligent enough for that. It was later when they sat in the drawing-room listening to the radio and smoking, that Julia found the chance to slip in, apparently in the most casual fashion, the question she had prepared.

‘Have you made up your mind what you’re going to be yet?’

‘No. Is there any hurry?’

‘You know how ignorant I am about everything. Your father says that if you’re going to be a barrister you ought to work at law when you go to Cambridge. On the other hand, if you fancy the Foreign Office you should take up modern languages.’

He looked at her for so long, with that queer, reflective air of his, that Julia had some difficulty in holding her light, playful and yet affectionate expression.

‘If I believed in God I’d be a priest,’ he said at last.

‘A priest?’

Julia could hardly believe her ears. She had a feeling of acute discomfort. But his answer sank into her mind and in a flash she saw him as a cardinal, inhabiting a beautiful palazzo in Rome, filled with wonderful pictures, and surrounded by obsequious prelates; and then again as a saint, in a mitre and vestments heavily embroidered with gold, with benevolent gestures distributing bread to the poor. She saw herself in a brocaded dress and a string of pearls. The mother of the Borgias.

‘That was all right in the sixteenth century,’ she said. ‘It’s too late in the day for that.’

‘Much.’

‘I can’t think what put such an idea in your head.’ He did not answer, so that she had to speak again. ‘Aren’t you happy?’

‘Quite,’ he smiled.

‘What is it you want?’

Once again he gave her his disconcerting stare. It was hard to know if he was serious, for his eyes faintly shimmered with amusement.

‘Reality.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You see, I’ve lived all my life in an atmosphere of make-believe. I want to get down to brass tacks. You and father are all right breathing this air, it’s the only air you know and you think it’s the air of heaven. It stifles me.’

Julia listened to him attentively, trying to understand what he meant.

‘We’re actors, and successful ones. That’s why we’ve been able to surround you with every luxury since you were born. You could count on the fingers of one hand the actors who’ve sent their son to Eton.’

‘I’m very grateful for all you’ve done for me.’

‘Then what are you reproaching us for?’

‘I’m not reproaching you. You’ve done everything you could for me. Unfortunately for me you’ve taken away my belief in everything.’

‘We’ve never interfered with your beliefs. I know we’re not religious people, we’re actors, and after eight performances a week one wants one’s Sundays to oneself. I naturally expected they’d see to all that at school.’

He hesitated a little before he spoke again. One might have thought that he had to make a slight effort over himself to continue.

‘When I was just a kid, I was fourteen, I was standing one night in the wings watching you act. It must have been a pretty good scene, you said the things you had to say so sincerely, and what you were saying was so moving, I couldn’t help crying. I was all worked up. I don’t know how to say it quite, I was uplifted; I felt terribly sorry for you, I felt a bloody little hero; I felt I’d never do anything again that was beastly or underhand. And then you had to come to the back of the stage, near where I was standing, the tears were streaming down your face; you stood with your back to the audience and in your ordinary voice you said to the stage manager; what the bloody hell is that electrician doing with the lights? I told him to leave out the blue. And then in the same breath you turned round and faced the audience with a great cry of anguish and went on with the scene.’

‘But, darling, that was acting. If an actress felt the emotions she represented she’d tear herself to pieces. I remember the scene well. It used to bring down the house. I’ve never heard such applause in my life.’

‘I suppose I was a fool to be taken in by it. I believed you meant what you said. When I saw that it was all pretence it smashed something. I’ve never believed in you since. I’d been made a fool of once; I made up my mind that I wouldn’t ever be made a fool of again.’

She gave him her delightful and disarming smile.

‘Darling, I think you’re talking nonsense.’

‘Of course you do. You don’t know the difference between truth and make-believe. You never stop acting. It’s second nature to you. You act when there’s a party here. You act to the servants, you act to father, you act to me. To me you act the part of the fond, indulgent, celebrated mother. You don’t exist, you’re only the innumerable parts you’ve played. I’ve often wondered if there was ever a you or if you were never anything more than a vehicle for all these other people that you’ve pretended to be. When I’ve seen you go into an empty room I’ve sometimes wanted to open the door suddenly, but I’ve been afraid to in case I found nobody there.’

She looked up at him quickly. She shivered, for what he said gave her an eerie sensation. She listened to him attentively, with a certain anxiety, for he was so serious that she felt he was expressing something that had burdened him for years. She had never in his whole life heard him talk so much.

‘D’you think I’m only sham?’

‘Not quite. Because sham is all you are. Sham is your truth. Just as margarine is butter to people who don’t know what butter is.’

She had a vague feeling of guilt. The Queen in ‘Hamlet’: ‘And let me wring your heart; for so I shall, if it be made of penetrable stuff.’ Her thoughts wandered.

(‘I wonder if I’m too old to play Hamlet. Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt played him. I’ve got better legs than any of the men I’ve seen in the part. I’ll ask Charles what he thinks. Of course there’s that bloody blank verse. Stupid of him not to write it in prose. Of course I might do it in French at the Français. God, what a stunt that would be.’)

She saw herself in a black doublet, with long silk hose. ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ But she bethought herself.

‘You can hardly say that your father doesn’t exist. Why, he’s been playing himself for the last twenty years.’ (‘Michael could play the King, not in French, of course, but if we decided to have a shot at it in London.’)

‘Poor father, I suppose he’s good at his job, but he’s not very intelligent, is he? He’s so busy being the handsomest man in England.’

‘I don’t think it’s very nice of you to speak of your father like that.’

‘Have I told you anything you don’t know?’ he asked coolly.

Julia wanted to smile, but would not allow the look of somewhat pained dignity to leave her face.

‘It’s our weakness, not our strength, that endears us to those who love us,’ she replied.

‘In what play did you say that?’

She repressed a gesture of annoyance. The words had come naturally to her lips, but as she said them she remembered that they were out of a play. Little brute! But they came in very appositely.

‘You’re hard,’ she said plaintively. She was beginning to feel more and more like Hamlet’s mother. ‘Don’t you love me?’

‘I might if I could find you. But where are you? If one stripped you of your exhibitionism, if one took your technique away from you, if one peeled you as one peels an onion of skin after skin of pretence and insincerity, of tags of old parts and shreds of faked emotions, would one come upon a soul at last?’ He looked at her with his grave sad eyes and then he smiled a little. ‘I like you all right.’

‘Do you believe I love you?’

‘In your way.’

Julia’s face was suddenly discomposed.

‘If you only knew the agony I suffered when you were ill! I don’t know what I should have done if you’d died!’

‘You would have given a beautiful performance of a bereaved mother at the bier of her only child.’

‘Not nearly such a good performance as if I’d had the opportunity of rehearsing it a few times,’ Julia answered tartly. ‘You see, what you don’t understand is that acting isn’t nature; it’s art, and art is something you create. Real grief is ugly; the business of the actor is to represent it not only with truth but with beauty. If I were really dying as I’ve died in half a dozen plays, d’you think I’d care whether my gestures were graceful and my faltering words distinct enough to carry to the last row of the gallery? If it’s a sham it’s no more a sham than a sonata of Beethoven’s, and I’m no more of a sham than the pianist who plays it. It’s cruel to say that I’m not fond of you. I’m devoted to you. You’ve been the only thing in my life.’

‘No. You were fond of me when I was a kid and you could have me photographed with you. It made a lovely picture and it was fine publicity. But since then you haven’t bothered much about me. I’ve bored you rather than otherwise. You were always glad to see me, but you were thankful that I went my own way and didn’t want to take up your time. I don’t blame you; you hadn’t got time in your life for anyone but yourself.’

Julia was beginning to grow a trifle impatient. He was getting too near the truth for her comfort.

‘You forget that young things are rather boring.’

‘Crashing, I should think,’ he smiled. ‘But then why do you pretend that you can’t bear to let me out of your sight? That’s just acting too.’

‘You make me very unhappy. You make me feel as if I hadn’t done my duty to you.’

‘But you have. You’ve been a very good mother. You’ve done something for which I shall always be grateful to you, you’ve left me alone.’

‘I don’t understand what you want.’

‘I told you. Reality.’

‘But where are you going to find it?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. I’m young still; I’m ignorant. I thought perhaps that at Cambridge, meeting people and reading books, I might discover where to look for it. If they say it only exists in God, I’m done.’

Julia was disturbed. What he said had not really penetrated to her understanding, his words were lines and the important thing was not what they meant, but whether they ‘got over’, but she was sensitive to the emotion she felt in him. Of course he was only eighteen, and it would be silly to take him too seriously, she couldn’t help thinking he’d got all that from somebody else, and that there was a good deal of pose in it. Did anyone have ideas of his own and did anyone not pose just a wee, wee bit? But of course it might be that at the moment he felt everything he said, and it wouldn’t be very nice of her to make light of it.

‘Of course I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘My greatest wish in the world is that you should be happy. I’ll manage your father, and you can do as you like. You must seek your own salvation, I see that. But I think you ought to make sure that all these ideas of yours aren’t just morbid. Perhaps you were too much alone in Vienna and I daresay you read too much. Of course your father and I belong to a different generation and I don’t suppose we can help you. Why don’t you talk it over with someone more of your own age? Tom, for instance.’

‘Tom? A poor little snob. His only ambition in life is to be a gentleman, and he hasn’t the sense to see that the more he tries the more hopeless it is.’

‘I thought you liked him so much. Why, at Taplow last summer you just lived in his pocket.’

‘I didn’t dislike him. I made use of him. He could tell me a lot of things that I wanted to know. But I thought him an insignificant, silly little thing.’

Julia remembered how insanely jealous she had been of their friendship. It made her angry to think of all the agony she had wasted.

‘You’ve dropped him, haven’t you?’ he asked suddenly.

She was startled.

‘I suppose I have more or less.’

‘I think it’s very wise of you. He wasn’t up to your mark.’

He looked at her with his calm, reflective eyes, and on a sudden Julia had a sickening fear that he knew that Tom had been her lover. It was impossible, she told herself, it was only her guilty conscience that made her think so; at Taplow there had been nothing; it was incredible that any of the horrid gossip had reached his ears; and yet there was something in his expression that made her certain that he knew. She was ashamed.

‘I only asked him to come down to Taplow because I thought it would be nice for you to have a boy of that age to play around with.’

‘It was.’

There was in his eyes a faint twinkle of amusement. She felt desperate. She would have liked to ask him what he was grinning at, but dared not; for she knew; he was not angry with her, she could have borne that, he was merely diverted. She was bitterly hurt. She would have cried, but that he would only laugh. And what could she say to him? He believed nothing she said. Acting! for once she was at a loss how to cope with a situation. She was up against something that she did not know, something mysterious and rather frightening. Could that be reality? At that moment they heard a car drive up.

‘There’s your father,’ she exclaimed.

What a relief! The scene was intolerable, and she was thankful that his arrival must end it. In a moment Michael, very hearty, with his chin thrust out and his belly pulled in, looking for all his fifty odd years incredibly handsome, burst into the room and, in his manly way, thrust out his hand to greet, after a six months’ absence, his only begotten son.

CHAPTER 28

THREE DAYS LATER Roger went up to Scotland. By the exercise of some ingenuity Julia had managed that they should not again spend any length of time alone together. When they happened to be by themselves for a few minutes they talked of indifferent things. Julia was not really sorry to see him go. She could not dismiss from her mind the curious conversation she had had with him. There was one point in particular that unaccountably worried her; this was his suggestion that if she went into an empty room and someone suddenly opened the door there would be nobody there. It made her feel very uncomfortable.

‘I never set out to be a raving beauty, but the one thing no one has ever denied me is personality. It’s absurd to pretend that because I can play a hundred different parts in a hundred different ways I haven’t got an individuality of my own. I can do that because I’m a bloody good actress.’

She tried to think what happened to her when she went alone into an empty room.

‘But I never am alone, even in an empty room. There’s always Michael, or Evie, or Charles, or the public; not in the flesh, of course, but in the spirit, as it were. I must speak to Charles about Roger.’

Unfortunately he was away. But he was coming back for the dress-rehearsal and the first night; he had not missed these occasions for twenty years, and they had always had supper together after the dress-rehearsal. Michael would remain in the theatre, busy with the lights and so on, so that they would be alone. They would be able to have a good talk.

She studied her part. Julia did not deliberately create the character she was going to act by observation; she had a knack of getting into the shoes of the woman she had to portray so that she thought with her mind and felt with her senses. Her intuition suggested to her a hundred small touches that afterwards amazed people by their verisimilitude; but when they asked her where she had got them she could not say. Now she wanted to show the courageous yet uneasy breeziness of the Mrs Marten who played golf and could talk to a man like one good chap to another and yet, essentially a respectable, middle-class woman, hankered for the security of the marriage state.

Michael never liked to have a crowd at a dress-rehearsal, and this time, anxious to keep the secret of the play till the first night, he had admitted besides Charles only the people, photographers and dressmakers, whose presence was necessary. Julia spared herself. She had no intention of giving all she had to give till the first night. It was enough if her performance was adequate. Under Michael’s businesslike direction everything went off without a hitch, and by ten o’clock Julia and Charles were sitting in the Grill Room of the Savoy. The first thing she asked him was what he thought of Avice Crichton.

‘Not at all bad and wonderfully pretty. She really looked lovely in that second-act dress.’

‘I’m not going to wear the dress I wore in the second act. Charley Deverill has made me another.’

He did not see the slightly humorous glance she gave him, and if he had would not have guessed what it meant. Michael, having taken Julia’s advice, had gone to a good deal of trouble with Avice. He had rehearsed her by herself upstairs in his private room and had given her every intonation and every gesture. He had also, Julia had good reason to believe, lunched with her several times and taken her out to supper. The result of all this was that she was playing the part uncommonly well. Michael rubbed his hands.

‘I’m very pleased with her. I think she’ll make quite a hit. I’ve half a mind to give her a contract.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Julia. ‘Not till after the first night. You can never really tell how a performance is going to pan out till you’ve got an audience.’

‘She’s a nice girl and a perfect lady.’

‘A nice girl, I suppose, because she’s madly in love with you, and a perfect lady because she’s resisting your advances till she’s got a contract.’

‘Oh, my dear, don’t be silly. Why, I’m old enough to be her father.’

But he smiled complacently. She knew very well that his love-making went no farther than holding hands and a kiss or two in a taxi, but she knew also that it flattered him to imagine that she suspected him capable of infidelity.

But now Julia, having satisfied her appetite with proper regard for her figure, attacked the subject which was on her mind.

‘Charles dear, I want to talk to you about Roger.’

‘Oh yes, he came back the other day, didn’t he? How is he?’

‘My dear, a most terrible thing has happened. He’s come back a fearful prig and I don’t know what to do about it.’

She gave him her version of the conversation. She left out one or two things that it seemed inconvenient to mention, but what she told was on the whole accurate.

‘The tragic thing is that he has absolutely no sense of humour,’ she finished.

‘After all he’s only eighteen.’

‘You could have knocked me down with a feather when he said all those things to me. I felt just like Balaam when his ass broke into light conversation.’

She gave him a gay look, but he did not even smile. He did not seem to think her remark as funny as she did.

‘I can’t imagine where he got his ideas. It’s absurd to think that he could have thought out all that nonsense for himself.’

‘Are you sure that boys of that age don’t think more than we older people imagine? It’s a sort of puberty of the spirit and its results are often strange.’

‘It seems so deceitful of Roger to have harboured thoughts like those all these years and never breathed a word about them. He might have been accusing me.’ She gave a chuckle. ‘To tell you the truth, when Roger was talking to me I felt just like Hamlet’s mother.’ Then with hardly a break: ‘I wonder if I’m too old to play Hamlet?’

‘Gertrude isn’t a very good part, is it?’

Julia broke into a laugh of frank amusement.

‘Don’t be idiotic, Charles. I wouldn’t play the Queen. I’d play Hamlet.’

‘D’you think it’s suited to a woman?’

‘Mrs. Siddons played it and so did Sarah Bernhardt. It would set a seal on my career, if you know what I mean. Of course there’s the difficulty of the blank verse.’

‘I have heard actors speak it so that it was indistinguishable from prose,’ he answered.

‘Yes, but that’s not quite the same, is it?’

‘Were you nice to Roger?’

She was surprised at his going back to that subject so suddenly, but she returned to it with a smile.

‘Oh, charming.’

‘It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have just discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do so little to resolve them.’

‘But you don’t really think there’s anything in all this stuff of Roger’s? I believe it’s all a lot of communist nonsense that he’s learnt in Vienna. I wish we’d never sent him there.’

‘You may be right. It may be that in a year or two he’ll lose sight of the clouds of glory and accept the chain. It may be that he’ll find what he’s looking for, if not in God, then in art.’

‘I should hate him to be an actor if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I don’t think he’ll fancy that.’

‘And of course he can’t be a playwright, he hasn’t a sense of humour.’

‘I daresay he’ll be quite content to go into the Foreign Office. It would be an asset to him there.’

‘What would you advise me to do?’

‘Nothing. Let him be. That’s probably the greatest kindness you can do him.’

‘But I can’t help being worried about him.’

‘You needn’t be. Be hopeful. You thought you’d only given birth to an ugly duckling; perhaps he’s going to turn into a white-winged swan.’

Charles was not giving Julia what she wanted. She had expected him to be more sympathetic.

‘I suppose he’s getting old, poor dear,’ she reflected. ‘He’s losing his grip of things. He must have been impotent for years; I wonder it never struck me before.’

She asked what the time was.

‘I think I ought to go. I must get a long night’s rest.’

Julia slept well and when she awoke had at once a feeling of exultation. To-night was the first night. It gave her a little thrill of pleasure to recollect that people had already been assembling at the pit and gallery doors when she left the theatre after the dress-rehearsal, and now at ten in the morning there was probably already a long queue.’

‘Lucky it’s a fine day for them, poor brutes.’

In bygone years she had been intolerably nervous before a first night. She had felt slightly sick all day and as the hours passed got into such a state that she almost thought she would have to leave the stage. But by now, after having passed through the ordeal so many times, she had acquired a certain nonchalance. Throughout the early part of the day she felt only happy and mildly excited; it was not till late in the afternoon that she began to feel ill at ease. She grew silent and wanted to be left alone. She also grew irritable, and Michael, having learnt from experience, took care to keep out of her way. Her hands and feet got cold and by the time she reached the theatre they were like lumps of ice. But still the apprehension that filled her was not unpleasant.

Julia had nothing to do that morning but go down to the Siddons for a word-rehearsal at noon, so she lay in bed till late. Michael did not come back to luncheon, having last things to do to the sets, and she ate alone. Then she went to bed and for an hour slept soundly. Her intention was to rest all the afternoon; Miss Phillips was coming at six to give her a light massage, and by seven she wanted to be at the theatre. But when she awoke she felt so much refreshed that it irked her to stay in bed, so she made up her mind to get up and go for a walk. It was a fine, sunny day. Liking the town better than the country and streets more than trees, she did not go into the Park, but sauntered round the neighbouring squares, deserted at that time of year, idly looking at the houses, and thought how much she preferred her own to any of them. She felt at ease and light-hearted. Then she thought it time to go home. She had just reached the corner of Stanhope Place when she heard her name called in a voice that she could not but recognize.

‘Julia.’

She turned round and Tom, his face all smiles, caught her up. She had not seen him since her return from France. He was very smart in a neat grey suit and a brown hat. He was tanned by the sun.

‘I thought you were away.’

‘I came back on Monday. I didn’t ring up because I knew you were busy with the final rehearsals. I’m coming to-night; Michael gave me a stall.’

‘Oh, I’m glad.’

It was plain that he was delighted to see her. His face was eager and his eyes shone. She was pleased to discover that the sight of him excited no emotion in her. She wondered as they went on talking what there was in him that had ever so deeply affected her.

‘What on earth are you wandering about like this for?’

‘I’ve been for a stroll. I was just going in to tea.’

‘Come and have tea with me.’

His flat was just round the corner. Indeed he had caught sight of her just as he was going down the mews to get to it.

‘How is it you’re back so early?’

‘Oh, there’s nothing much on at the office just now. You know, one of our partners died a couple of months ago, and I’m getting a bigger share. It means I shall be able to keep on the flat after all. Michael was jolly decent about it, he said I could stay on rent free till things got better. I hated the idea of turning out. Do come. I’d love to make you a cup of tea.’

He rattled on so vivaciously that Julia was amused. You would never have thought to listen to him that there had ever been anything between them. He seemed perfectly unembarrassed.

‘All right. But I can only stay a minute.’

‘O.K.’

They turned into the mews and she preceded him up the narrow staircase.

‘You toddle along to the sitting-room and I’ll put the water on to boil.’

She went in and sat down. She looked round the room that had been the scene of so many emotions for her. Nothing was changed. Her photograph stood in its old place, but on the chimney piece was a large photograph also of Avice Crichton. On it was written for Tom from Avice. Julia took everything in. The room might have been a set in which she had once acted; it was vaguely familiar, but no longer meant anything to her. The love that had consumed her then, the jealousy she had stifled, the ecstasy of surrender, it had no more reality than one of the innumerable parts she had played in the past. She relished her indifference. Tom came in, with the tea-cloth she had given him, and neatly set out the tea-service which she had also given him. She did not know why the thought of his casually using still all her little presents made her inclined to laugh. Then he came in with the tea and they drank it sitting side by side on the sofa. He told her more about his improved circumstances. In his pleasant, friendly way he acknowledged that it was owing to the work that through her he had been able to bring the firm that he had secured a larger share in the profits. He told her of the holiday from which he had just returned. It was quite clear to Julia that he had no inkling how much he had made her suffer. That too made her now inclined to laugh.

‘I hear you’re going to have an enormous success to-night.’

‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

‘Avice says that both you and Michael have been awfully good to her. Take care she doesn’t romp away with the play.’

He said it chaffingly, but Julia wondered whether Avice had told him that this was what she expected to do.

‘Are you engaged to her?’

‘No. She wants her freedom. She says an engagement would interfere with her career.’

‘With her what?’ The words slipped out of Julia’s mouth before she could stop them, but she immediately recovered herself. ‘Yes, I see what she means of course.’

‘Naturally, I don’t want to stand in her way. I mean, supposing after to-night she got a big offer for America I can quite see that she ought to be perfectly free to accept.’

Her career! Julia smiled quietly to herself.

‘You know, I do think you’re a brick, the way you’ve behaved to her.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh well, you know what women are!’

As he said this he slipped his arm round her waist and kissed her. She laughed outright.

‘What an absurd little thing you are.’

‘How about a bit of love?’

‘Don’t be so silly.’

‘What is there silly about it? Don’t you think we’ve been divorced long enough?’

‘I’m all for irrevocable divorce. And what about Avice?’

‘Oh, she’s different. Come on.’

‘Has it slipped your memory that I’ve got a first night to-night?’

‘There’s plenty of time.’

He put both arms round her and kissed her softly. She looked at him with mocking eyes. Suddenly she made up her mind.

‘All right.’

They got up and went into the bedroom. She took off her hat and slipped out of her dress. He held her in his arms as he had held her so often before. He kissed her closed eyes and the little breasts of which she was so proud. She gave him her body to do what he wanted with, but her spirit held aloof. She returned his kisses out of amiability, but she caught herself thinking of the part she was going to play that night. She seemed to be two persons, the mistress in her lover’s embrace, and the actress who already saw in her mind’s eye the vast vague dark audience and heard the shouts of applause as she stepped on to the stage. When, a little later, they lay side by side, he with his arm round her neck, she forgot about him so completely that she was quite surprised when he broke a long silence.

‘Don’t you care for me any more?’

She gave him a little hug.

‘Of course, darling. I dote on you.’

‘You’re so strange to-day.’

She realized that he was disappointed. Poor little thing, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He was very sweet really.

‘With the first night before me I’m not really myself to-day. You mustn’t mind.’

When she came to the conclusion, quite definitely now, that she no longer cared two straws for him she could not help feeling a great pity for him. She stroked his cheek gently.

‘Sweetie pie. (I wonder if Michael remembered to have tea sent along to the queues. It doesn’t cost much and they do appreciate it so enormously.) You know, I really must get up. Miss Phillips is coming at six. Evie will be in a state, she won’t be able to think what’s happened to me.’

She chattered brightly while she dressed. She was conscious, although she did not look at him, that Tom was vaguely uneasy. She put her hat on, then she took his face in both her hands and gave him a friendly kiss.

‘Good-bye, my lamb. Have a good time to-night.’

‘Best of luck.’

He smiled with some awkwardness. She perceived that he did not quite know what to make of her. Julia slipped out of the flat, and if she had not been England’s leading actress, and a woman of hard on fifty, she would have hopped on one leg all the way down Stanhope Place till she got to her house. She was as pleased as Punch. She let herself in with her latchkey and closed the front door behind her.

‘I daresay there’s something in what Roger said. Love isn’t worth all the fuss they make about it.’

CHAPTER 29

FOUR HOURS LATER it was all over. The play went well from the beginning; the audience, notwithstanding the season, a fashionable one, were pleased after the holidays to find themselves once more in a playhouse, and were ready to be amused. It was an auspicious beginning for the theatrical season. There had been great applause after each act and at the end a dozen curtains calls; Julia took two by herself, and even she was startled by the warmth of her reception. She had made the little halting speech, prepared beforehand, which the occasion demanded. There had been a final call of the entire company and then the orchestra had struck up the National Anthem. Julia, pleased, excited and happy, went to her dressing-room. She had never felt more sure of herself. She had never acted with greater brilliance, variety and resource. The play ended with a long tirade in which Julia, as the retired harlot, castigated the flippancy, the uselessness, the immorality of the idle set into which her marriage had brought her. It was two pages long, and there was not another actress in England who could have held the attention of the audience while she delivered it. With her exquisite timing, with the modulation of her beautiful voice, with her command of the gamut of emotions, she had succeeded by a miracle of technique in making it a thrilling, almost spectacular climax to the play. A violent action could not have been more exciting not an unexpected dénouement more surprising. The whole cast had been excellent with the exception of Avice Crichton. Julia hummed in an undertone as she went into her dressing-room.

Michael followed her in almost at once.

‘It looks like a winner all right.’ He threw his arms round her and kissed her. ‘By God, what a performance you gave.’

‘You weren’t so bad yourself dear.’

‘That’s the sort of part I can play on my head,’ he answered carelessly, modest as usual about his own acting. ‘Did you hear them during your long speech? That ought to knock the critics.’

‘Oh, you know what they are. They’ll give all their attention to the blasted play and then three lines at the end to me.’

‘You’re the greatest actress in the world, darling, but by God, you’re a bitch.’

Julia opened her eyes very wide in an expression of the most naïve surprise.

‘Michael, what do you mean?’

‘Don’t look so innocent. You know perfectly well. Do you think you can cod an old trooper like me?’

He was looking at her with twinkling eyes, and it was very difficult for her not to burst out laughing.

‘I am as innocent as a babe unborn.’

‘Come off it. If anyone ever deliberately killed a performance you killed Avice’s. I couldn’t be angry with you, it was so beautifully done.’

Now Julia simply could not conceal the little smile that curled her lips. Praise is always grateful to the artist. Avice’s one big scene was in the second act. It was with Julia, and Michael had rehearsed it so as to give it all to the girl. This was indeed what the play demanded and Julia, as always, had in rehearsals accepted his direction. To bring out the colour of her blue eyes and to emphasize her fair hair they had dressed Avice in pale blue. To contrast with this Julia had chosen a dress of an agreeable yellow. This she had worn at the dress rehearsal. But she had ordered another dress at the same time, of sparkling silver, and to the surprise of Michael and the consternation of Avice it was in this that she made her entrance in the second act. Its brilliance, the way it took the light, attracted the attention of the audience. Avice’s blue looked drab by comparison. When they reached the important scene they were to have together Julia produced, as a conjurer produces a rabbit from his hat, a large handkerchief of scarlet chiffon and with this she played. She waved it, she spread it out as though to look at it, she screwed it up, she wiped her brow with it, she delicately blew her nose. The audience fascinated could not take their eyes away from the red rag. And she moved up stage so that Avice to speak to her had to turn her back on the audience, and when they were sitting on a sofa together she took her hand, in an impulsive way that seemed to the public exquisitely natural, and sitting well back herself forced Avice to turn her profile to the house. Julia had noticed early in rehearsals that in profile Avice had a sheep-like look. The author had given Avice lines to say that had so much amused the cast at the first rehearsal that they had all burst out laughing. Before the audience had quite realized how funny they were Julia had cut in with her reply, and the audience anxious to hear it suppressed their laughter. The scene which was devised to be extremely amusing took on a sardonic colour, and the character Avice played acquired a certain odiousness. Avice in her inexperience, not getting the laughs she had expected, was rattled; her voice grew hard and her gestures awkward. Julia took the scene away from her and played it with miraculous virtuosity. But her final stroke was accidental. Avice had a long speech to deliver, and Julia nervously screwed her red handkerchief into a ball; the action almost automatically suggested an expression; she looked at Avice with troubled eyes and two heavy tears rolled down her cheeks. You felt the shame with which the girl’s flippancy affected her, and you saw her pain because her poor little ideals of uprightness, her hankering for goodness, were so brutally mocked. The episode lasted no more than a minute, but in that minute, by those tears and by the anguish of her look, Julia laid bare the sordid misery of the woman’s life. That was the end of Avice.

‘And I was such a damned fool, I thought of giving her a contract,’ said Michael.

‘Why don’t you?’

‘When you’ve got your knife into her? Not on your life. You’re a naughty little thing to be so jealous. You don’t really think she means anything to me, do you? You ought to know by now that you’re the only woman in the world for me.’

Michael thought that Julia had played this trick on account of the rather violent flirtation he had been having with Avice, and though, of course, it was hard luck on Avice he could not help being a trifle flattered.

‘You old donkey,’ smiled Julia, knowing exactly what he was thinking and tickled to death at his mistake. ‘After all, you are the handsomest man in London.’

‘All that’s as it may be. But I don’t know what the author’ll say. He’s a conceited little ape and it’s not a bit the scene he wrote.’

‘Oh, leave him to me. I’ll fix him.’

There was a knock at the door and it was the author himself who came in. With a cry of delight, Julia went up to him, threw her arms round his neck and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘Are you pleased?’

‘It looks like a success,’ he answered, but a trifle coldly.

‘My dear, it’ll run for a year.’ She placed her hands on his shoulders, and looked him full in the face. ‘But you’re a wicked, wicked man.’

‘I?’

‘You almost ruined my performance. When I came to that bit in the second act and suddenly saw what it meant I nearly broke down. You knew what was in that scene, you’re the author; why did you let us rehearse it all the time as if there was no more in it than appeared on the surface? We’re only actors, how can you expect us to – to fathom your subtlety? It’s the best scene in your play and I almost bungled it. No one in the world could have written it but you. Your play’s brilliant, but in that scene there’s more than brilliance, there’s genius.’

The author flushed. Julia looked at him with veneration. He felt shy and happy and proud.

(‘In twenty-four hours the mug’ll think he really meant the scene to go like that.’)

Michael beamed.

‘Come along to my dressing-room and have a whisky and soda. I’m sure you need a drink after all that emotion.’

They went out as Tom came in. Tom’s face was red with excitement.

‘My dear, it was grand. You were simply wonderful. Gosh, what a performance.’

‘Did you like it? Avice was good, wasn’t she?’

‘No, rotten.’

‘My dear, what do you mean? I thought she was charming.’

‘You simply wiped the floor with her. She didn’t even look pretty in the second act.’

Avice’s career!

‘I say, what are you doing afterwards?’

‘Dolly’s giving a party for us.’

‘Can’t you cut it and come along to supper with me? I’m madly in love with you.’

‘Oh, what nonsense. How can I let Dolly down?’

‘Oh, do.’

His eyes were eager. She could see that he desired her as he had never done before, and she rejoiced in her triumph. But she shook her head firmly. There was a sound in the corridor of a crowd of people talking, and they both knew that a troop of friends were forcing their way down the narrow passage to congratulate her.

‘Damn all these people. God, how I want to kiss you. I’ll ring you up in the morning.’

The door burst open and Dolly, fat, perspiring and bubbling over with enthusiasm, swept in at the head of a throng that packed the dressing-room to suffocation. Julia submitted to being kissed by all and sundry. Among others were three or four well-known actresses, and they were prodigal of their praise. Julia gave a beautiful performance of unaffected modesty. The corridor was packed now with people who wanted to get at least a glimpse of her. Dolly had to fight her way out.

‘Try not to be too late,’ she said to Julia. ‘It’s going to be a heavenly party.’

‘I’ll come as soon as ever I can.’

At last the crowd was got rid of and Julia, having undressed, began to take off her make-up. Michael came in, wearing a dressing-gown.

‘I say, Julia, you’ll have to go to Dolly’s party by yourself. I’ve got to see the libraries and I can’t manage it. I’m going to sting them.’

‘Oh, all right.’

‘They’re waiting for me now. See you in the morning.’

He went out and she was left alone with Evie. The dress she had arranged to wear for Dolly’s party was placed over a chair. Julia smeared her face with cleansing cream.

‘Evie, Mr Fennell will be ringing up to-morrow. Will you say I’m out?’

Evie looked in the mirror and caught Julia’s eyes.

‘And if he rings up again?’

‘I don’t want to hurt his feelings, poor lamb, but I have a notion I shall be very much engaged for some time now.’

Evie sniffed loudly, and with that rather disgusting habit of hers drew her forefinger across the bottom of her nose.

‘I understand,’ she said dryly.

‘I always said you weren’t such a fool as you looked.’ Julia went on with her face. ‘What’s that dress doing on that chair?’

‘That? That’s the dress you said you’d wear for the party.

‘Put it away. I can’t go to the party without Mr Gosselyn.’

‘Since when?’

‘Shut up, you old hag. Phone through and say that I’ve got a bad headache and had to go home to bed, but Mr Gosselyn will come if he possibly can.’

‘The party’s being given special for you. You can’t let the poor old gal down like that?’

Julia stamped her feet.

‘I don’t want to go to a party. I won’t go to a party.’

‘There’s nothing for you to eat at home.’

‘I don’t want to go home. I’ll go and have supper at a restaurant.’

‘Who with?’

‘By myself.’

Evie gave her a puzzled glance.

‘The play’s a success, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Everything’s a success. I feel on top of the world. I feel like a million dollars. I want to be alone and enjoy myself. Ring up the Berkeley and tell them to keep a table for one in the little room. They’ll know what I mean.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘I shall never in all my life have another moment like this. I’m not going to share it with anyone.’

When Julia had got her face clean she left it. She neither painted her lips nor rouged her cheeks. She put on again the brown coat and skirt in which she had come to the theatre and the same hat. It was a felt hat with a brim, and this she pulled down over one eye so that it should hide as much of her face as possible. When she was ready she looked at herself in the glass.

‘I look like a working dressmaker whose husband’s left her, and who can blame him? I don’t believe a soul would recognize me.’

Evie had had the telephoning done from the stage-door, and when she came back Julia asked her if there were many people waiting for her there.

‘About three ‘undred I should say.’

‘Damn.’ She had a sudden desire to see nobody and be seen by nobody. She wanted just for one hour to be obscure. ‘Tell the fireman to let me out at the front and I’ll take a taxi, and then as soon as I’ve got out let the crowd know there’s no use in their waiting.’

‘God only knows what I ‘ave to put up with,’ said Evie darkly.

‘You old cow.’

Julia took Evie’s face in her hands and kissed her raddled cheeks; then slipped out of her dressing-room, on to the stage and through the iron door into the darkened auditorium.

Julia’s simple disguise was evidently adequate, for when she came into the little room at the Berkeley of which she was peculiarly fond, the head waiter did not immediately know.

‘Have you got a corner that you can squeeze me into?’ she asked diffidently.

Her voice and a second glance told him who she was.

‘Your favourite table is waiting for you, Miss Lambert. The message said you would be alone?’ Julia nodded and he led her to a table in the corner of the room. ‘I hear you’ve had a big success to-night, Miss Lambert.’ How quickly good news travelled. ‘What can I order?’

The head waiter was surprised that Julia should be having supper by herself, but the only emotion that it was his business to show clients was gratification at seeing them.

‘I’m very tired, Angelo.’

‘A little caviare to begin with, madame, or some oysters?’

‘Oysters, Angelo, but fat ones.’

‘I will choose them myself, Miss Lambert, and to follow?’

Julia gave a long sigh, for now she could, with a free conscience, order what she had had in mind ever since the end of the second act. She felt she deserved a treat to celebrate her triumph, and for once she meant to throw prudence to the winds.

‘Grilled steak and onions, Angelo, fried potatoes, and a bottle of Bass. Give it me in a silver tankard.’

She probably hadn’t eaten fried potatoes for ten years. But what an occasion it was! By a happy chance on this day she had confirmed her hold on the public by a performance that she could only describe as scintillating, she had settled an old score, by one ingenious devise disposing of Avice and making Tom see what a fool he had been, and best of all had proved to herself beyond all question that she was free from the irksome bonds that had oppressed her. Her thoughts flickered for an instant round Avice.

‘Silly little thing to try to put a spoke in my wheel. I’ll let her have her laughs to-morrow.’

The oysters came and she ate them with enjoyment. She ate two pieces of brown bread and butter with the delicious sense of imperilling her immortal soul, and she took a long drink from the silver tankard.

‘Beer, glorious beer,’ she murmured.

She could see Michael’s long face if he knew what she was doing. Poor Michael who imagined she had killed Avice’s scene because she thought he was too attentive to that foolish little blonde. Really, it was pitiful how stupid men were. They said women were vain, why they were modest violets in comparison with men. She could not but laugh when she thought of Tom. He had wanted her that afternoon, he had wanted her still more that night. It was wonderful to think that he meant no more to her than a stage hand. It gave one a grand feeling of confidence to be heart-whole.

The room in which she sat was connected by three archways with the big dining-room where they supped and danced; amid the crowd doubtless were a certain number who had been to the play. How surprised they would be if they knew that the quiet little woman in the corner of the adjoining room, her face half hidden by a felt hat, was Julia Lambert. It gave her a pleasant sense of independence to sit there unknown and unnoticed. They were acting a play for her and she was the audience. She caught brief glimpses of them as they passed the archway, young men and young women, young men and women not so young, men with bald heads and men with fat bellies, old harridans clinging desperately to their painted semblance of youth. Some were in love, and some were jealous, and some were indifferent.

Her steak arrived. It was cooked exactly as she liked it, and the onions were crisp and brown. She ate the fried potatoes delicately, with her fingers, savouring each one as though it were the passing moment that she would bid delay.

‘What is love beside steak and onions?’ she asked. It was enchanting to be alone and allow her mind to wander. She thought once more of Tom and spiritually shrugged a humorous shoulder. ‘It was an amusing experience.’

It would certainly be useful to her one of these days. The sight of the dancers seen through the archway was so much like a scene in a play that she was reminded of a notion that she had first had in St. Malo. The agony that she had suffered when Tom deserted her recalled to her memory Racine’s Phèdre which she had studied as a girl with old Jane Taitbout. She read the play again. The torments that afflicted Theseus’ queen were the torments that afflicted her, and she could not but think that there was a striking similarity in their situations. That was a part she could act; she knew what it felt like to be turned down by a young man one had a fancy for. Gosh, what a performance she could give! She knew why in the spring she had acted so badly that Michael had preferred to close down; it was because she was feeling the emotions she portrayed. That was no good. You had to have had the emotions, but you could only play them when you had got over them. She remembered that Charles had once said to her that the origin of poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity. She didn’t know anything about poetry, but it was certainly true about acting.

‘Clever of poor old Charles to get hold of an original idea like that. It shows how wrong it is to judge people hastily. One thinks the aristocracy are a bunch of nitwits, and then one of them suddenly comes out with something like that that’s so damned good it takes your breath away.’

But Julia had always felt that Racine had made a great mistake in not bringing on his heroine till the third act.

‘Of course I wouldn’t have any nonsense like that if I played it. Half an act to prepare my entrance if you like, but that’s ample.’

There was no reason why she should not get some dramatist to write her a play on the subject, either in prose or in short lines of verse with rhymes at not too frequent intervals. She could manage that, and effectively. It was a good idea, there was no doubt about it, and she knew the clothes she would wear, not those flowing draperies in which Sarah swathed herself, but the short Greek tunic that she had seen on a bas-relief when she went to the British Museum with Charles.

‘How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time.’

Of course she had the legs for a tunic, but could one be tragic in one? This she thought about seriously for two or three minutes. When she was eating out her heart for the indifferent Hippolytus (and she giggled when she thought of Tom, in his Savile Row clothes, masquerading as a young Greek hunter) could she really get her effects without abundant draperies? The difficulty excited her. But then a thought crossed her mind that for a moment dashed her spirits.

‘It’s all very well, but where are the dramatists? Sarah had her Sardou, Duse her D’Annunzio. But who have I got? “The Queen of Scots hath a bonnie bairn and I am but a barren stock.”’

She did not, however, let this melancholy reflection disturb her serenity for long. Her elation was indeed such that she felt capable of creating dramatists from the vast inane as Deucalion created men from the stones of the field.

‘What nonsense that was that Roger talked the other day, and poor Charles, who seemed to take it seriously. He’s a silly little prig, that’s all.’ She indicated a gesture towards the dance room. The lights had been lowered, and from where she sat it looked more than ever like a scene in a play. ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ But there’s the illusion, through that archway; it’s we, the actors, who are the reality. That’s the answer to Roger. They are our raw materials. We are the meaning of their lives. We take their silly little emotions and turn them into art, out of them we create beauty, and their significance is that they form the audience we must have to fulfil ourselves. They are the instruments on which we play, and what is an instrument without somebody to play on it?’

The notion exhilarated her, and for a moment or two she savoured it with satisfaction. Her brain seemed miraculously lucid.

‘Roger says we don’t exist. Why, it’s only we who do exist. They are the shadows and we give them substance. We are the symbols of all this confused, aimless struggling that they call life, and it’s only the symbol which is real. They say acting is only make-believe. That make-believe is the only reality.’

Thus Julia out of her own head framed anew the platonic theory of ideas. It filled her with exultation. She felt a sudden wave of friendliness for that immense anonymous public who had being only to give her opportunity to express herself. Aloof on her mountain top she considered the innumerable activities of men. She had a wonderful sense of freedom from all earthly ties, and it was such an ecstasy that nothing in comparison with it had any value. She felt like a spirit in heaven.

The head waiter came up to her with a ingratiating smile.

‘Everything all right, Miss Lambert?’

‘Lovely. You know, it’s strange how people differ. Mrs. Siddons was a rare one for chops; I’m not a bit like her in that; I’m a rare one for steaks.’

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 1

WITH A JOURNEY before him, Charley Mason’s mother was anxious that he should make a good breakfast, but he was too excited to eat. It was Christmas Eve and he was going to Paris. They had got through the mass of work that quarter-day brought with it, and his father, having no need to go to the office, drove him to Victoria. When they were stopped for several minutes by a traffic block in Grosvenor Gardens Charley, afraid that he would miss the train, went white with anxiety. His father chuckled.

‘You’ve got the best part of half an hour.’

But it was a relief to arrive.

‘Well, good-bye, old boy,’ his father said, ‘have a good time and don’t get into more mischief than you can help.’

The steamer backed into the harbour and the sight of the gray, tall, dingy houses of Calais filled him with elation. It was a raw day and the wind blew bitter. He strode along the platform as though he walked on air. The Golden Arrow, powerful, rich and impressive, which stood there waiting for him, was no ordinary train, but a symbol of romance. While the light lasted he looked out of the window and he laughed in his heart as he recognized the pictures he had seen in galleries; sand dunes, with patches of grass gray under the leaden sky, cramped villages of poor persons’ houses with slate roofs, and then a broad, sad landscape of ploughed fields and sparse bare trees; but the day seemed in a hurry to be gone from the cheerless scene and in a short while, when he looked out, he could see only his own reflection and behind it the polished mahogany of the Pullman. He wished he had come by air. That was what he’d wanted to do, but his mother had put her foot down; she’d persuaded his father that in the middle of winter it was a silly risk to take, and his father, usually so reasonable, had made it a condition of his going on the jaunt that he should take the train.

Of course Charley had been to Paris before, half a dozen times at least, but this was the first time that he had ever gone alone. It was a special treat that his father was giving him for a special reason: he had completed a year’s work in his father’s office and had passed the necessary examinations to enable him to follow usefully his chosen calling. For as long as Charley could remember, his father and mother, his sister Patsy and he had spent Christmas at Godalming with their cousins the Terry-Masons; and to explain why Leslie Mason, after talking over the matter with his wife, had one evening, a smile on his kindly face, asked his son whether instead of coming with them as usual he would like to spend a few days in Paris by himself, it is necessary to go back a little. It is necessary indeed to go back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when an industrious and intelligent man called Sibert Mason, who had been head gardener at a grand place in Sussex and had married the cook, bought with his savings and hers a few acres north of London and set up as a market gardener. Though he was then forty and his wife not far from it they had eight children. He prospered, and, with the money he made, bought little bits of land in what was still open country. The city expanded and his market garden acquired value as a building site; with money borrowed from the bank he put up a row of villas and in a short while let them all on lease. It would be tedious to go into the details of his progress, and it is enough to say that when he died, at the age of eighty-four, the few acres he had bought to grow vegetables for Covent Garden, and the properties he had continued to acquire whenever opportunity presented, were covered with bricks and mortar. Sibert Mason took care that his children should receive the education that had been denied him. They moved up in the social scale. He made the Mason Estate, as he had somewhat grandly named it, into a private company and at his death each child received a certain number of shares as an inheritance. The Mason Estate was well managed and though it could not compare in importance with the Westminster or the Portman Estate, for its situation was modest and it had long ceased to have any value as a residential quarter, shops, warehouses, factories, slums, long rows of dingy houses in two storeys, made it sufficiently profitable to enable its proprietors, through no merit and little exertion of their own, to live like the gentlemen and ladies they were now become. Indeed, the head of the family, the only surviving child of old Sibert’s eldest son, a brother having been killed in the war and a sister by a fall in the hunting-field, was a very rich man. He was a member of parliament and at the time of King George the Fifth’s Jubilee had been created a baronet. He had tacked his wife’s name on to his own and was now known as Sir Wilfred Terry-Mason. The family had hopes that his staunch allegiance to the Tory party and the fact that he had a safe seat would result in his being raised to the peerage.

Leslie Mason, youngest of Sibert’s many grandchildren, had been sent to a public school and to Cambridge. His share in the Estate brought him in two thousand pounds a year, but to this was added another thousand which he received as secretary of the company. Once a year there was a meeting attended by such members of the family as were in England, for of the third generation some were serving their country in distant parts of the Empire, and some were gentlemen of leisure who were often abroad, and with Sir Wilfred in the chair, he presented the highly satisfactory statement which the chartered accountants had prepared.

Leslie Mason was a man of varied interests. At this time he was in the early fifties, tall, with a good figure, and with his blue eyes, fine gray hair worn rather long, and high colour, of an agreeable aspect. He looked more like a soldier or a colonial governor home on leave than a house agent and you would never have guessed that his grandfather was a gardener and his grandmother a cook. He was a good golfer, for which pastime he had ample leisure, and a good shot. But Leslie Mason was more than a sportsman; he was keenly interested in the arts. The rest of the family had no such foibles and they looked upon Leslie’s predilections with an amused tolerance, but when, for some reason or other, one of them wanted to buy a piece of furniture or a picture, his advice was sought and taken. It was natural enough that he should know what he was talking about, for he had married a painter’s daughter. John Peron, his wife’s father, was a member of the Royal Academy and for a long time, between the eighties and the end of the century, had made a good income by painting pictures of young women in eighteenth-century costume dallying with young men similarly dight. He painted them in gardens of old world flowers, in leafy bowers and in parlours furnished correctly with the chairs and tables of the period. But now when his pictures turned up at Christie’s they were sold for thirty shillings or two pounds. Venetia Mason had inherited quite a number when her father died, but they had long stood in a box-room, covered with dust, their faces to the wall; for at this time of day even filial affection could not persuade her that they were anything but dreadful. The Leslie Masons were not in the least ashamed of the fact that his grandmother had been a cook, indeed with their friends they were apt to make a facetious point of it, but it embarrassed them to speak of John Peron. Some of the Mason relations still had on their walls examples of his work; they were a mortification to Venetia.

‘I see you’ve still got father’s picture there,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think it dates rather? Why don’t you put it in one of the spare rooms?’

‘My father-in-law was a very charming old man,’ said Leslie, ‘with beautiful manners, but I’m afraid he wasn’t a very good painter.’

‘Well, my governor gave a tidy sum for it. It would be absurd to put a picture that cost three hundred pounds in a spare bedroom, but if you feel like that about it, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll sell it you for a hundred and fifty.’

For though in the course of three generations they had become ladies and gentlemen, the Masons had not lost their business acumen.

The Leslie Masons had gone a long way in artistic appreciation since their marriage and on the walls of the handsome new house they now inhabited in Porchester Close were pictures by Wilson Steer and Augustus John, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. There was an Utrillo and a Vuillard, both bought while these masters were of moderate price, and there was a Derain, a Marquet and a Chirico. You could not enter their house, somewhat sparsely furnished, without knowing at once that they were in the movement. They seldom missed a private view, and when they went to Paris made a point of going to Rosenberg’s and the dealers in the Rue de Seine to have a look at what there was to be seen; they really liked pictures and if they did not buy any before the cultured opinion of the day had agreed on their merits this was due partly to a modest lack of confidence in their own judgement and partly to a fear that they might be making a bad bargain. After all, John Peron’s pictures had been praised by the best critics and he had sold them for several hundred pounds apiece, and now what did they fetch? Two or three. It made you careful. But it was not only in painting that they were interested. They loved music; they went to Symphony Concerts throughout the winter; they had their favourite conductors and allowed no social engagements to prevent them from attending their performances. They went to hear the Ring once a year. To listen to music was a genuine delight to both of them. They had good taste and discrimination. They were regular first-nighters and they belonged to the societies that produce plays which are supposed to be above the comprehension of plain people. They read promptly the books that were talked about. They did this not only because they liked it, but because they felt it right to keep abreast of the times. They were honestly interested in art and it would be unjust even to hint a sneer because their taste lacked boldness and their appreciation originality. It may be that they were conventional in their judgements, but their conventionality was that of the highest culture of their day. They were incapable of making a discovery, but were quick to appreciate the discoveries of others. Though left to themselves they might never have seen anything very much to admire in Cézanne, no sooner was it borne in upon them that he was a great artist than in all sincerity they recognised the fact for themselves. They took no pride in their taste and there was no trace of snobbishness in their attitude.

‘We’re just very ordinary members of the public,’ said Venetia.

‘Those objects of contempt to the artist, the people who know what they like,’ added Leslie.

It was a happy accident that they liked Debussy better than Arthur Sullivan and Virginia Woolf better than John Galsworthy.

This preoccupation with art left them little time for social life; they sought neither the great nor the distinguished, and their friends were very nice people who were well-to-do without being rich, and who took a judicious interest in the things of the mind. They did not much care for dinner parties and neither gave them often nor went to them more than civility required; but they were fond of entertaining their friends to supper on Sunday evenings when they could drop in dressed any way they liked and eat kedgeree and sausages and mash. There was good music and tolerable bridge. The conversation was intelligent. These parties were as pleasantly unpretentious as the Leslie Masons themselves, and though all the guests had their own cars and few of them less than five thousand a year, they flattered themselves that the atmosphere was quite bohemian.

But Leslie Mason was never happier than when, with no concert or first night to go to, he could spend the evening in the bosom of his family. He was fortunate in it. His wife had been pretty and now, a middle-aged woman, was still comely. She was nearly as tall as he, with blue eyes and soft brown hair only just streaked with gray. She was inclined to be stout, but her height enabled her to carry with dignity a corpulence which a strict attention to diet prevented from becoming uncomfortable. She had a broad brow, an open countenance and a diffident smile. Though she got her clothes in Paris, not from one of the fashionable dressmakers, but from a little woman ‘round the corner,’ she never succeeded in looking anything but thoroughly English. She naturalized whatever she wore, and though she occasionally went to the extravagance of getting a hat at Reboux she had no sooner put it on her head than it looked as if it had come from the Army and Navy Stores. She always looked exactly what she was, an honest woman of the middle class in easy circumstances. She had loved her husband when she married him and she loved him still. With the community of interests that existed between them it was no wonder that they should live in harmony. They had agreed at the beginning of their married life that she knew more about painting than he and that he knew more about music than she, so that in these matters each bowed to the superior judgement of the other. When it came to Picasso’s later work, for instance, Leslie said:

‘Well, I don’t mind confessing it took me some time before I learnt to like it, but Venetia never had a moment’s doubt; with her flair she cottoned on to it like a flash of lightning.’

And Mrs Mason admitted that she’d had to listen to Sibelius’ Second three or four times before she really understood what Leslie meant when he said that in its way it was as good as Beethoven.

‘But of course he’s got a real understanding of music. Compared with him I’m almost a low-brow.’

Leslie and Venetia Mason were not only fortunate in one another, but also in their children. They had two, which they thought the perfect number, since an only child might be spoiled, and three or four meant a great expense, so that they couldn’t have lived as comfortably as they liked to, nor provided for them in such a way as to assure their future. They had taken their parental duties seriously. Instead of putting silly, childish pictures on the nursery walls they had decorated them with reproductions of pictures by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Marie Laurencin, so that from their earliest years their children’s taste should be formed, and they had chosen the records for the nursery gramophone with equal care, with the result that before either of them could ride a bicycle they were familiar with Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Wagner. As soon as they were old enough they began to learn to play the piano, with very good teachers, and Charley especially showed great aptitude. Both children were ardent concert-goers. They would scramble in to a Sunday concert, where they followed the music with a score, or wait for hours to get a seat in the gallery at Covent Garden; for their parents, thinking that it proved a real enthusiasm if they had to listen to music in some discomfort, considered it unnecessary to buy expensive seats for them. The Leslie Masons did not very much care for Old Masters and seldom went to the National Gallery except when a new purchase was making a stir in the papers, but it had seemed to them only right to make their children acquainted with the great paintings of the past, and as soon as they were old enough took them regularly to the National Gallery, but they soon realized that if they wanted to give them a treat they must take them to the Tate, and it was with gratification that they found that what really excited them was the most modern.

‘It makes one think a bit,’ said Leslie to his wife, a smile of pride shining in his kindly eyes, ‘to see two young things like that taking to Matisse like a duck takes to water.’

She gave him a look that was partly amused and partly rueful.

‘They think I’m dreadfully old-fashioned because I still like Monet. They say it’s pure chocolate-box.’

‘Well, we trained their taste. We mustn’t grouse if they go ahead and leave us behind.’

Venetia Mason gave a sweet and affectionate laugh.

‘Bless their hearts, I don’t grudge it them if they think me hopelessly out of date. I shall go on liking Monet and Manet and Degas whatever they say.’

But it was not only to the artistic education of their offspring that the Leslie Masons had given thought. They were anxious that there should be nothing namby-pamby about them and they saw to it that they should acquire proficiency in games. They both rode well and Charley was not half a bad shot. Patsy, who was just eighteen, was studying at the Royal Academy of Music. She was to come out in May and they were giving a ball for her at Claridge’s. Lady Terry-Mason was to present her at Court. Patsy was so pretty, with her blue eyes and fair hair, with her slim figure, her attractive smile and her gaiety, she would be snapped up all too soon. Leslie wanted her to marry a rising young barrister with political ambitions. For such a one, with the money she’d eventually inherit from the Mason Estate, with her culture, she’d make an admirable wife. But that would be the end of the united, cosy and happy family life which was so enjoyable. There would be no more of those pleasant, domestic evenings when they dined, the four of them, in the well-appointed dining-room with its Steer over the Chippendale sideboard, the table shining with Waterford glass and Georgian silver, waited on by well-trained maids in neat uniforms; simple English food perfectly cooked; and after dinner with its lively talk about art, literature and the drama, a glass of port, and then a little music in the drawing-room and a game of bridge. Venetia was afraid it was very selfish of her, but she couldn’t help feeling glad that it would be some years at least before Charley could afford to marry too.

Charley was born during the war, he was twenty-three now, and when Leslie had been demobbed and gone down to Godalming to stay with the head of the family, already a member of parliament, but then only a knight, Sir Wilfred had suggested that he should be put down for Eton. Leslie would not hear of it. It was not the financial sacrifice he minded, but he had too much good sense to send his boy to a school where he would get extravagant tastes and acquire ideas unfitted to the station in life he would ultimately occupy.

‘I went to Rugby myself and I don’t believe I can do better than send him there too.’

‘I think you’re making a mistake, Leslie. I’ve sent my boys to Eton. Thank God, I’m not a snob, but I’m not a fool either, and there’s no denying it, it’s a social asset.’

‘I daresay it is, but my position is very different from yours. You’re a very rich man, Wilfred, and if things go well, you ought to end up in the House of Lords. I think it’s quite right that you should give your sons the sort of start that’ll enable them to take their proper place in society, but though officially I’m secretary of the Mason Estate and that sounds very respectable, when you come down to brass tacks I’m only a house agent, and I don’t want to bring up my son to be a grand gentleman, I want him to be a house agent after me.’

When Leslie spoke thus he was using an innocent diplomacy. By the terms of old Sibert’s will and the accidents that have been already narrated, Sir Wilfred now possessed three-eighths of the Mason Estate, and it brought him in an income which was already large, and which, with leases falling in, the increasing value of the property, and good management, would certainly grow much larger. He was a clever, energetic man, and his position and his wealth gave him an influence with the rest of the family which none of its members questioned, but which it did not displease him to have acknowledged.

‘You don’t mean to say you’d be satisfied to let your boy take on your job?’

‘It was good enough for me. Why shouldn’t it be good enough for him? One doesn’t know what the world’s coming to and it may be that when he’s grown up he’ll be damned glad to step into a cushy billet at a thousand a year. But of course you’re the boss.’

Sir Wilfred made a gesture that seemed modestly to deprecate this description of himself.

‘I’m a shareholder like the rest of you, but as far as I’m concerned, if you want it, he shall have it. Of course it’s a long time ahead and I may be dead by then.’

‘We’re a long-lived family and you’ll live as long as old Sibert. Anyhow, there’ll be no harm in letting the rest of them know that it’s an understood thing that my boy should have my job when I’m through with it.’

In order to enlarge their children’s minds the Leslie Masons spent the holidays abroad, in winter at places where they ski and in summer at seaside resorts in the South of France; and once or twice with the same praiseworthy intention they made excursions to Italy and Holland. When Charley left school his father decided that before going to Cambridge he should spend six months at Tours to learn French. But the result of his sojourn in that agreeable town was unexpected and might very well have been disastrous, for when he came back he announced that he did not want to go to Cambridge, but to Paris, and that he wished to be a painter. His parents were dumbfounded. They loved art, they often said it was the most important thing in their lives; indeed Leslie, not averse at times from philosophical reflection, was inclined to think that it was art only that redeemed human existence from meaninglessness, and he had the greatest respect for the persons who produced it; but he had never envisaged the possibility that any member of his family, let alone his own son, should adopt a career that was uncertain, to some extent irregular, and in most cases far from lucrative. Nor could Venetia forget the fate that had befallen her father. It would be unjust to say that the Leslie Masons were put out because their son had taken their preoccupation with art more seriously than they intended; their preoccupation couldn’t have been more serious, but it was from the patron’s point of view; though no two people could have been more bohemian, they did have the Mason Estate behind them, and that, as anyone could see, must make a difference. Their reaction to Charley’s declaration was quite definite, but they were aware that it would be difficult to put it in a way that wouldn’t make their attitude look a trifle insincere.

‘I can’t think what put the idea into his head,’ said Leslie, talking it over with his wife.

‘Heredity, I suppose. After all, my father was an artist.’

‘A painter, darling. He was a great gentleman and a wonderful raconteur, but no one in his senses could call him an artist.’

Venetia flushed and Leslie saw that he had hurt her feelings. He hastened to make up for it.

‘If he’s inherited a feeling for art it’s much more likely to be from my grandmother. I know old Sibert used to say you didn’t know what tripe and onions were until you tasted hers. When she gave up being a cook to become a wife of a market gardener a great artist was lost to the world.’

Venetia chuckled and forgave him.

They knew one another too well to have need to discuss their quandary. Their children loved them and looked up to them; they were agreed that it would be a thousand pities by a false step to shake Charley’s belief in his parents’ wisdom and integrity. The young are intolerant and when you talk common sense to them are only too apt to think you an old humbug.

‘I don’t think it would be wise to put one’s foot down too decidedly,’ said Venetia. ‘Opposition might only make him obstinate.’

‘The situation’s delicate. I don’t deny that for a moment.’

What made it more awkward was that Charley had brought back several canvases from Tours and when he had shown them they had expressed themselves in terms which it was difficult now to withdraw. They had praised as fond parents rather than as connoisseurs.

‘You might take Charley up to the box-room one morning and let him have a look at your father’s pictures. Don’t make a point of it, you know, but let it seem accidental; and then when I get an opportunity I’ll have a talk with him.’

The opportunity came. Leslie was in the sitting-room they had arranged for the children so that they might have a place of their own. The reproductions of Gauguin and Van Gogh that had been in their nursery adorned the walls. Charley was painting a bunch of mixed flowers in a green vase.

‘I think we’d better have those pictures you brought back from France framed and put up instead of these reproductions. Let’s have another look at them.’

There was one of three apples on a blue-and-white plate.

‘I think it’s damned good,’ said Leslie. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of three apples on a blue-and-white plate and it’s well up to the average.’ He chuckled. ‘Poor old Cézanne, I wonder what he’d say if he knew how many thousands of times people had painted that picture of his.’

There was another still life which represented a bottle of red wine, a packet of French tobacco in a blue wrapper, a pair of white gloves, a folded newspaper and a violin. These objects were resting on a table covered with a cloth in green and white squares.

‘Very good. Very promising.’

‘D’you really think so, daddy?’

‘I do indeed. It’s not very original, you know, it’s the sort of picture that every dealer has a dozen of in his store-room, but you’ve never had a lesson in your life and it’s a very creditable piece of work. You’ve evidently inherited some of your grandfather’s talent. You have seen his pictures, haven’t you?’

‘I hadn’t for years. Mummy wanted to find something in the box-room and she showed them to me. They’re awful.’

‘I suppose they are. But they weren’t thought so in his own day. They were highly praised and they were bought. Remember that a lot of stuff that we admire now will be thought just as awful in fifty years’ time. That’s the worst of art; there’s no room for the second-rate.’

‘One can’t tell what one’ll be till one tries.’

‘Of course not, and if you want to take up painting professionally your mother and I are the last people who’d stand in your way. You know how much art means to us.’

‘There’s nothing I want to do in the world more than paint.’

‘With the share of the Mason Estate that’ll come to you eventually you’ll always have enough to live on in a modest way, and there’ve been several amateurs who’ve made quite a nice little reputation for themselves.’

‘Oh, but I don’t want to be an amateur.’

‘It’s not so easy to be anything else with a thousand to fifteen hundred a year behind you. I don’t mind telling you it’ll be a bit of a disappointment to me. I was keeping this job as secretary to the Estate warm for you, but I daresay some of the cousins will jump at it. I should have thought myself it was better to be a competent business man than a mediocre painter, but that’s neither here nor there. The great thing is that you should be happy and we can only hope that you’ll turn out a better artist than your grandfather.’

There was a pause. Leslie looked at his son with kindly eyes.

‘There’s only one thing I’m going to ask you to do. My grandfather started life as a gardener and his wife was a cook. I only just remember him, but I have a notion that he was a pretty rough diamond. They say it takes three generations to make a gentleman, and at all events I don’t eat peas with a knife. You’re a member of the fourth. You may think it’s just snobbishness on my part, but I don’t much like the idea of you sinking in the social scale. I’d like you to go to Cambridge and take your degree, and after that if you want to go to Paris and study painting you shall go with my blessing.’

That seemed a very generous offer to Charley and he accepted it with gratitude. He enjoyed himself very much at Cambridge. He did not find much opportunity to paint, but he got into a set interested in the drama and in his first year wrote a couple of one-act plays. They were acted at the A.D.C. and the Leslie Masons went to Cambridge to see them. Then he made the acquaintance of a don who was a distinguished musician. Charley played the piano better than most undergraduates, and he and the don played duets together. He studied harmony and counterpoint. After consideration he decided that he would rather be a musician than a painter. His father with great good humour consented to this, but when Charley had taken his degree, he carried him off to Norway for a fortnight’s fishing. Two or three days before they were due to return Venetia Mason received a telegram from Leslie containing the one word Eureka. Notwithstanding their culture neither of them knew what it meant, but its significance was perfectly clear to the recipient and that is the primary use of language. She gave a sigh of relief. In September Charley went for four months into the firm of accountants employed by the Mason Estate to learn something of book-keeping and at the New Year joined his father in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was to reward the application he had shown during his first year in business that his father was now sending him, with twenty-five pounds in his pocket, to have a lark in Paris. And a great lark Charley was determined to have.

CHAPTER 2

THEY WERE NEARLY there. The attendants were collecting the luggage and piling it up inside the door so that it could be conveniently handed down to the porters. Women put a last dab of lipstick on their mouths and were helped into their furs. Men struggled into their great-coats and put on their hats. The propinquity in which these persons had sat for a few hours, the pleasant warmth of the Pullman, had made a corporate unity of them, separated as occupants of a coach with its own number from the occupants of other coaches; but now they fell asunder, and each one, or each group of two or three, regained the discreet individuality which for a while had been merged in that of all the others. In the smoke-laden air, rank with stale tobacco, strong scent, the odour of human bodies and the frowst of steam-heating, they acquired on a sudden an air of mystery. Strangers once more, they looked at one another with preoccupied, unseeing eyes. Each one felt in himself a vague hostility to his neighbour. Some were already queuing up in the passage so that they might get out quickly. The heat of the Pullman had coated the windows with vapour and Charley wiped them a bit clean with his hand to look out. He could see nothing.

The train ran into the station. Charley gave his bag to a porter and with long steps walked up the platform; he was expecting his friend Simon Fenimore to meet him. He was disappointed not to see him at once; but there was a great mob at the barrier and he supposed that he was waiting there. He scanned eagerly the eager faces; he passed through; persons struggled through the crowd to seize a new arrival’s hand; women kissed one another; he could not see his friend. He was so convinced he must be there that he lingered for a little, but he was intimidated by his porter’s obvious impatience and presently followed him out to the courtyard. He felt vaguely let down. The porter got him a taxi and Charley gave the driver the name of the hotel where Simon had taken a room for him. When the Leslie Masons went to Paris they always stayed at an hotel in the Rue St Honoré. It was exclusively patronized by English and Americans, but after twenty years they still cherished the delusion that it was a discovery of their own, essentially French, and when they saw American luggage on a landing or went up in the lift with persons who could be nothing but English, they never ceased to be surprised.

‘I wonder how on earth they happen to be here,’ they said.

For their own part they had always been careful never to speak about it to their friends; when they had hit upon a little bit of old France they weren’t going to risk its being spoilt. Though the director and the porter talked English fluently they always spoke to them in their own halting French, convinced that this was the only language they knew. But the mere fact that he had so often been to this hotel with his family was a sufficient reason for Charley not to stay there when he was going to Paris by himself. He was bent on adventure, and a respectable family hotel, where, according to his parents, nobody went but the French provincial nobility, was hardly the right place for the glorious, wild and romantic experiences with which his imagination for the last month had been distracting his mind. So he had written to Simon asking him to get him a room somewhere in the Latin Quarter; he wasn’t particular about sanitary conveniences and didn’t mind how grubby it was so long as it had the right atmosphere; and Simon in due course had written back to tell him that he had engaged a room at a hotel near the Gare Montparnasse. It was in a quiet street just off the Rue de Rennes and conveniently near the Rue Campagne Première where he himself lived.

Charley quickly got over his disappointment that Simon had not come to meet him, he was sure either to be at the hotel or to have telephoned to say that he would be round immediately, and driving through the crowded streets that lead from the Gare du Nord to the Seine his spirits rose. It was wonderful to arrive in Paris by night. A drizzling rain was falling and it gave the streets an exciting mystery. The shops were brightly lit. The pavements were multitudinous with umbrellas and the water dripping on them glistened dimly under the street lamps. Charley remembered one of Renoir’s pictures. Sometimes a gust of wind made women crouch under their umbrellas and their skirts swirled round their legs. His taxi drove furiously to his prudent English idea and he gasped whenever with a screeching of brakes it pulled up suddenly to avoid a collision. The red lights held them up at a crossing and in both directions a great stream of persons surged over like a panic-stricken mob flying before a police charge. To Charley’s excited gaze they seemed quite different from an English crowd, more alert, more eager; when by chance his eyes fell on a girl walking by herself, a sempstress or a typist going home after the day’s work, it delighted him to fancy that she was hurrying to meet her lover; and when he saw a pair walking arm in arm under an umbrella, a young man with a beard, in a broad-brimmed hat, and a girl with a fur round her neck, walking as though it were such bliss to be together they did not mind the rain and were unconscious of the jostling throng, he thrilled with a poignant and sympathetic joy. At one corner owing to a block his taxi was side by side with a handsome limousine. There sat in it a woman in a sable coat, with painted cheeks and painted lips, and a profile of incredible distinction. She might have been the Duchesse de Guermantes driving back after a tea party to her house in the Boulevard St Germain. It was wonderful to be twenty-three and in Paris on one’s own.

‘By God, what a time I’m going to have.’

The hotel was grander than he had expected. Its façade, with its architectural embellishments, suggested the flamboyant taste of the late Baron Haussmann. He found that a room had been engaged for him, but Simon had left neither letter nor message. He was taken upstairs not as he had anticipated by a slovenly boots in a dirty apron, with a sinister look on his ill-shaven face, but by an affable director who spoke perfect English and wore a morning coat. The room was furnished with hygienic severity, and there were two beds in it, but the director assured him that he would only charge him for the use of one. He showed Charley with pride the communicating bath-room. Left to himself Charley looked about him. He had expected a little room with heavy curtains of dull rep, a wooden bed with a huge eiderdown and an old mahogany wardrobe with a large mirror; he had expected to find used hair-pins on the dressing-table and in the drawer of the table de nuit half a lipstick and a broken comb in which a few dyed hairs were still entangled. That was the idea his romantic fancy had formed of a student’s room in the Latin Quarter. A bath-room! That was the last thing he had bargained for. This room might have been a room in one of the cheaper hotels in Switzerland to which he had sometimes been with his parents. It was clean, threadbare and sordid. Not even Charley’s ardent imagination could invest it with mystery. He unpacked his bag disconsolately. He had a bath. He thought it rather casual of Simon, even if he could not be bothered to meet him, not to have left a message. If he made no sign of life he would have to dine by himself. His father and mother and Patsy would have got down to Godalming by now; there was going to be a jolly party, Sir Wilfred’s two sons and their wives and two nieces of Lady Terry-Mason’s. There would be music, games and dancing. He half wished now that he hadn’t jumped at his father’s offer to spend the holiday in Paris. It suddenly occurred to him that Simon had perhaps had to go off somewhere for his paper and in the hurry of an unexpected departure had forgotten to let him know. His heart sank.

Simon Fenimore was Charley’s oldest friend and indeed it was to spend a few days with him that he had been so eager to come to Paris. They had been at a private school together and together at Rugby; they had been at Cambridge together too, but Simon had left without taking a degree, at the end of his second year in fact, because he had come to the conclusion that he was wasting time; and it was Charley’s father who had got him on to the London newspaper for which for the last year he had been one of the Paris correspondents. Simon was alone in the world. His father was in the Indian Forest Department and while Simon was still a young child had divorced his mother for promiscuous adultery. She had left India and Simon, by order of the Court in his father’s custody, was sent to England and put into a clergyman’s family till he was old enough to go to school. His mother vanished into obscurity. He had no notion whether she was alive or dead. His father died of cirrhosis of the liver when Simon was twelve and he had but a vague recollection of a thin, slightly-built man with a sallow, lined face and a tight-lipped mouth. He left only just enough money to educate his son. The Leslie Masons had been touched by the poor boy’s loneliness and had made a point of asking him to spend good part of his holidays with them. As a boy he was thin and weedy, with a pale face in which his black eyes looked enormous, a great quantity of straight dark hair which was always in need of a brush, and a large, sensual mouth. He was talkative, forward for his age, a great reader, and clever. He had none of the diffidence which was in Charley such an engaging trait. Venetia Mason, though from a sense of duty she tried hard, could not like him. She could not understand why Charley had taken a fancy to someone who was in every way so unlike him. She thought Simon pert and conceited. He was insensible to kindness and took everything that was done for him as a matter of course. She had a suspicion that he had no very high opinion either of her or of Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting Simon would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker. You would have thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid. Now and then when they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together, chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away, and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though he were by himself. It gave you the impression that their conversation wasn’t worth listening to. It wasn’t even polite. But Venetia Mason chid herself.

‘Poor lamb, he’s never had a chance to learn manners. I will be nice to him. I will like him.’

Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body, (‘it’s awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his dinner-jacket are too short for him already,’) his curling brown hair, his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin. Though perhaps he hadn’t Simon’s showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his fingers’ ends. But who could tell what he might have become if she had run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had had, like Simon, to fend for himself? Poor Simon! Next day she went out and bought him half a dozen ties. He seemed pleased.

‘I say, that’s jolly decent of you. I’ve never had more than two ties at one time in my life.’

Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.

‘You poor lonely boy,’ she cried, ‘it’s so dreadful for you to have no parents.’

‘Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I daresay I don’t miss much.’

He was seventeen when he said this.

It was no good, Venetia simply couldn’t like him. He was harsh, cynical and unscrupulous. It exasperated her to see how much Charley admired him; Charley thought him brilliant and anticipated a great career for him. Even Leslie was impressed by the extent of his reading and the clearness with which even as a boy he expressed himself. At school he was already an ardent socialist and at Cambridge he became a communist. Leslie listened to his wild theories with good-humoured tolerance. To him it was all talk, and talk, he had an instinctive feeling, was just talk; it didn’t touch the essential business of life.

‘And if he does become a well-known journalist or gets into the House, there’ll be no harm in having a friend in the enemy’s camp.’

Leslie’s ideas were liberal, so liberal that he didn’t mind admitting the Socialists had several notions that no reasonable man could object to; theoretically he was all in favour of the nationalization of the coal-mines, and he didn’t see why the state shouldn’t run the public services as well as private companies; but he didn’t think they should go too far. Ground rents, for instance, that was a matter that was really no concern of the state; and slum property; in a great city you had to have slums, in point of fact the lower classes preferred them to model dwelling-houses, not that the Mason Estate hadn’t done what it could in this direction; but you couldn’t expect a landlord to let people live in his houses for nothing, and it was only fair that he should get a decent return on his capital.

Simon Fenimore had decided that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent for some years so that he could gain a knowledge of Continental politics which would enable him when he entered the House of Commons to be an expert on a subject of which most Labour members were necessarily ignorant; but when Leslie took him to see the proprietor of the newspaper who was prepared to give a brilliant young man his chance, he warned him that the proprietor was a very rich man, and that he could not expect to create a favourable impression if he delivered himself of revolutionary sentiments. Simon, however, made a very good impression on the magnate by the modesty of his demeanour, his air of energy and his easy conversation.

‘He was as good as gold,’ Leslie told his wife afterwards. ‘He’s got his head screwed on his shoulders all right, that young fellow. It’s what I always told you, talk doesn’t amount to anything really. When it comes down to getting a job with a living wage attached to it, like every sensible man he’s prepared to put his theories in his pocket.’

Venetia agreed with him. It was quite possible, their own experience proved it, to have a real love for beauty and at the same time to realize the importance of material things. Look at Lorenzo de’ Medici; he’d been a successful banker and an artist to his finger-tips. She thought it very good of Leslie to have taken so much trouble to do a service for someone who was incapable of gratitude. Anyhow the job he had got him would take Simon to Vienna and thus remove Charley from an influence which she had always regarded with misgiving. It was that wild talk of his that had put it into the boy’s head that he wanted to be an artist. It was all very well for Simon, he hadn’t a penny in the world and no connections; but Charley had a snug berth to go into. There were enough artists in the world. Her consolation had been that Charley had so much candour of soul and a disposition of such sweetness that no evil communications could corrupt his good manners.

At this moment Charley was dressing himself and wondering, forlorn, how he should spend the evening. When he had got his trousers on he rang up the office of Simon’s newspaper, and it was Simon himself who answered.

‘Simon.’

‘Hulloa, have you turned up? Where are you?’

Simon seemed so casual that Charley was taken aback.

‘At the hotel.’

‘Oh, are you? Doing anything to-night?’

‘No.’

‘We’d better dine together, shall we? I’ll stroll around and fetch you.’

He rang off. Charley was dashed. He had expected Simon to be as eager to see him as he was to see Simon, but from Simon’s words and from his manner you would have thought that they were casual acquaintances and that it was a matter of indifference to him if they met or not. Of course it was two years since they’d seen one another and in that time Simon might have changed out of all recognition. Charley had a sudden fear that his visit to Paris was going to be a failure and he awaited Simon’s arrival with a nervousness that annoyed him. But when at last he walked into the room there was in his appearance at least little alteration. He was now twenty-three and he was still the lanky fellow, though only of average height, that he had always been. He was shabbily dressed in a brown jacket and gray flannel trousers and wore neither hat nor great-coat. His long face was thinner and paler than ever and his black eyes seemed larger. They were never still. Hard, shining, inquisitive, suspicious, they seemed to indicate the quality of the brain behind. His mouth was large and ironical, and he had small irregular teeth that somewhat reminded you of one of the smaller beasts of prey. With his pointed chin and prominent cheek-bones he was not good-looking, but his expression was so high-strung, there was in it so strange a disquiet, that you could hardly have passed him in the street without taking notice of him. At fleeting moments his face had a sort of tortured beauty, not a beauty of feature but the beauty of a restless, striving spirit. A disturbing thing about him was that there was no gaiety in his smile, it was a sardonic grimace, and when he laughed his face was contorted as though he were suffering from an agony of pain. His voice was high-pitched; it did not seem to be quite under his control, and when he grew excited often rose to shrillness.

Charley, restraining his natural impulse to run to the door and wring his hand with the eager friendliness of his happy nature, received him coolly. When there was a knock he called ‘come in,’ and went on filing his nails. Simon did not offer to shake hands. He nodded as though they had met already in the course of the day.

‘Hulloa!’ he said. ‘Room all right?’

‘Oh, yes. The hotel’s a bit grander than I expected.’

‘It’s convenient and you can bring anyone in you like. I’m starving. Shall we go along and eat?’

‘O.K.’

‘Let’s go to the Coupole.’

They sat down opposite one another at a table upstairs and ordered their dinner. Simon gave Charley an appraising look.

‘I see you haven’t lost your looks, Charley,’ he said with his wry smile.

‘Luckily they’re not my fortune.’

Charley was feeling a trifle shy. The separation had for the moment at all events destroyed the old intimacy there had so long been between them. Charley was a good listener, he had indeed been trained to be so from early childhood, and he was never unwilling to sit silent while Simon poured out his ideas with eloquent confusion. Charley had always disinterestedly admired him; he was convinced he was a genius so that it seemed quite natural to play second fiddle to him. He had an affection for Simon because he was alone in the world and nobody much liked him, whereas he himself had a happy home and was in easy circumstances; and it gave him a sense of comfort that Simon, who cared for so few people, cared for him. Simon was often bitter and sarcastic, but with him he could also be strangely gentle. In one of his rare moments of expansion he had told him that he was the only person in the world that he gave a damn for. But now Charley felt with malaise that there was a barrier between them. Simon’s restless eyes darted from his face to his hands, paused for an instant on his new suit and then glanced rapidly at his collar and tie; he felt that Simon was not surrendering himself as he had to him alone in the old days, but was holding back, critical and aloof; he seemed to be taking stock of him as if he were a stranger and he were making up his mind what sort of a person this was. It made Charley uncomfortable and he was sore at heart.

‘How d’you like being a business man?’ asked Simon.

Charley faintly coloured. After all the talks they had had in the past he was prepared for Simon to treat him with derision because he had in the end fallen in with his father’s wishes, but he was too honest to conceal the truth.

‘I like it much better than I expected. I find the work very interesting and it’s not hard. I have plenty of time to myself.’

‘I think you’ve shown a lot of sense,’ Simon answered, to his surprise. ‘What did you want to be a painter or a pianist for? There’s a great deal too much art in the world. Art’s a lot of damned rot anyway.’

‘Oh, Simon!’

‘Are you still taken in by the artistic pretensions of your excellent parents? You must grow up, Charley. Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich. Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense.’

‘I should have thought . . .’

‘I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to a nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.’

‘Oh, Lord!’

‘The people want dope and it may be that art is the best form in which we can give it them. But they’re not ready for it yet. At present it’s another form they want.’

‘What is that?’

‘Words.’

It was extraordinary, the sardonic vigour he put into the monosyllable. But he smiled, and though his lips grimaced Charley saw in his eyes for a moment that same look of good-humoured affection that he had been accustomed to see in them.

‘No, my boy,’ he continued, ‘you have a good time, go to your office every day and enjoy yourself. It can’t last very long now and you may just as well get all the fun out of it that you can.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Never mind. We’ll talk about it some other time. Tell me, what have you come to Paris for?’

‘Well, chiefly to see you.’

Simon flushed darkly. You would have thought that a word of kindness, and when Charley spoke you could never doubt that it was from the heart, horribly embarrassed him.

‘And besides that?’

‘I want to see some pictures, and if there’s anything good in the theatre I’d like to go. And I want to have a bit of a lark generally.’

‘I suppose you mean by that that you want to have a woman.’

‘I don’t get much opportunity in London, you know.’

‘Later on I’ll take you to the Sérail.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll see. It’s not bad fun.’

They began to talk of Simon’s experiences in Vienna, but he was reticent about them.

‘It took me some time to find my feet. You see, I’d never been out of England before. I learnt German. I read a great deal. I thought. I met a lot of people who interested me.’

‘And since then, in Paris?’

‘I’ve been doing more or less the same thing; I’ve been putting my ideas in order. I’m young. I’ve got plenty of time. When I’m through with Paris I shall go to Rome, Berlin or Moscow. If I can’t get a job with the paper, I shall get some other job; I can always teach English and earn enough to keep body and soul together. I wasn’t born in the purple and I can do without things. In Vienna, as an exercise in self-denial, I lived for a month on bread and milk. It wasn’t even a hardship. I’ve trained myself now to do with one meal a day.’

‘D’you mean to say this is your first meal to-day?’

‘I had a cup of coffee when I got up and a glass of milk at one.’

‘But what’s the object of it? You’re adequately paid in your job, aren’t you?’

‘I get a living wage. Certainly enough to have three meals a day. Who can achieve mastery over others unless he first achieves mastery over himself?’

Charley grinned. He was beginning to feel more at his ease.

‘That sounds like a tag out of a dictionary of quotations.’

‘It may be,’ Simon replied indifferently. ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve. A proverb distils the wisdom of the ages and only a fool is scornful of the commonplace. You don’t suppose I intend to be a foreign correspondent for a London paper or a teacher of English all my life. These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to spend them in acquiring the education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important; an unconquerable will. I want to mould myself as the Jesuit novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order. I think I’ve always known myself; there’s nothing that teaches you what you are, like being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your life with people to whom you mean nothing. But my knowledge was instinctive. In these two years I’ve been abroad I’ve learnt to know myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid. I know my strength and my weakness and I’m ready to spend the next five or six years cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness. I’m going to take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him. I’ve got a good brain. There’s no one in the world who can see to the end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and believe me, in the world we live in that’s a great force. I can talk. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words, and however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending. Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I’m through I shall be able to do anything.’

Simon took a long draught of the white wine they were drinking and sitting back in his chair began to laugh. His face writhed into a grimace of intolerable suffering.

‘I must tell you an incident that happened a few months ago here. They were having a meeting of the British Legion or something like that, I forget what for, war graves or something; my chief was going to speak, but he had a cold in the head and he sent me instead. You know what our paper is, bloody patriotic as long as it helps our circulation, all the dirt we can get, and a high moral tone. My chief’s the right man in the right place. He hasn’t had an idea in his head for twenty years. He never opens his mouth without saying the obvious and when he tells a dirty story it’s so stale that it doesn’t even stink any more. But he’s as shrewd as they make ’em. He knows what the proprietor wants and he gives it to him. Well, I made the speech he would have made. Platitudes dripped from my mouth. I made the welkin ring with claptrap. I gave them jokes so hoary that even a judge would have been ashamed to make them. They roared with laughter. I gave them pathos so shaming that you would have thought they would vomit. The tears rolled down their cheeks. I beat the big drum of patriotism like a Salvation Lass sublimating her repressed sex. They cheered me to the echo. It was the speech of the evening. When it was all over the big-wigs wrung my hand still overwhelmed with emotion. I got them all right. And d’you know, I didn’t say a single word that I didn’t know was contemptible balderdash. Words, words, words! Poor old Hamlet.’

‘It was a damned unscrupulous thing to do,’ said Charley. ‘After all, I daresay they were just a lot of ordinary, decent fellows who were only wanting to do what they thought was the right thing, and what’s more they were probably prepared to put their hands in their pockets to prove the sincerity of their convictions.’

‘You would think that. In point of fact more money was raised for whatever the damned cause was than had ever been raised before at one of their meetings and the organisers told my chief it was entirely due to my brilliant speech.’

Charley in his candour was distressed. This was not the Simon he had known so long. Formerly, however wild his theories were, however provocatively expressed, there was a sort of nobility in them. He was disinterested. His indignation was directed against oppression and cruelty. Injustice roused him to fury. But Simon did not notice the effect he had on Charley or if he did was indifferent to it. He was absorbed in himself.

‘But brain isn’t enough and eloquence, even if it’s necessary, is after all a despicable gift. Kerensky had them both and what did they avail him? The important thing is character. It’s my character I’ve got to mould. I’m sure one can do anything with oneself if one tries. It’s only a matter of will. I’ve got to train myself so that I’m indifferent to insult, neglect and ridicule. I’ve got to acquire a spiritual aloofness so complete that if they put me in prison I shall feel myself as free as a bird in the air. I’ve got to make myself so strong that when I make mistakes I am unshaken, but profit by them to act rightly. I’ve got to make myself so hard that not only can I resist the temptation to be pitiful, but I don’t even feel pity. I’ve got to wring out of my heart the possibility of love.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t afford to let my judgement be clouded by any feeling that I might have for a human being. You are the only person I’ve ever cared for in the world, Charley. I shan’t rest till I know in my bones that if it were necessary to put you against a wall and shoot you with my own hands I could do it without a moment’s hesitation and without a moment’s regret.’

Simon’s eyes had a dark opaqueness which reminded you of an old mirror, in a deserted house, from which the quick-silver was worn away, so that when you looked in it you saw, not yourself, but a sombre depth in which seemed to lurk the reflections of long-past events and passions long since dead and yet in some terrifying way tremulous still with a borrowed and mysterious life.

‘Did you wonder why I didn’t come to the station to meet you?’

‘It would have been nice if you had. I supposed you couldn’t get away.’

‘I knew you’d be disappointed. It’s our busy time at the office, we have to be on tap then to telephone to London the news that’s come through in the course of the day, but it’s Christmas Eve, the paper doesn’t come out to-morrow and I could have got away easily. I didn’t come because I wanted to so much. Ever since I got your letter saying you were coming over I’ve been sick with the desire to see you. When the train was due and I knew you’d be wandering up the platform looking for me and rather lost in that struggling crowd, I took a book and began to read. I sat there, forcing myself to attend to it, and refusing to let myself listen for the telephone that I expected every moment to ring. And when it did and I knew it was you, my joy was so intense that I was enraged with myself. I almost didn’t answer. For more than two years now I’ve been striving to rid myself of the feeling I have for you. Shall I tell you why I wanted you to come over? One idealizes people when they’re away, it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when one sees them again one’s often surprised that one saw anything in them at all. I thought that if there were anything left in me of the old feeling I had for you the few days you’re spending here now would be enough to kill it.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll think me very stupid,’ said Charley, with his engaging smile, ‘but I can’t for the life of me see why you want to.’

‘I do think you’re very stupid.’

‘Well, taking that for granted, what is the reason?’

Simon frowned a little and his restless eyes darted here and there like a hare trying to escape a pursuer.

‘You’re the only person who ever cared for me.’

‘That’s not true. My father and mother have always been very fond of you.’

‘Don’t talk such nonsense. Your father was as indifferent to me as he is to art, but it gave him a warm, comfortable feeling of benevolence to be kind to the orphan penniless boy whom he could patronize and impress. Your mother thought me unscrupulous and self-seeking. She hated the influence she thought I had over you and she was affronted because she saw that I thought your father an old humbug, the worst sort of humbug, the one who humbugs himself; the only satisfaction I ever gave her was that she couldn’t look at me without thinking how nice it was that you were so very different from me.’

‘You’re not very flattering to my poor parents,’ said Charley, mildly.

Simon took no notice of the interruption.

‘We clicked at once. What that old bore Goethe would have called elective affinity. You gave me what I’d never had. I, who’d never been a boy, could be a boy with you. I could forget myself in you. I bullied you and ragged you and mocked you and neglected you, but all the time I worshipped you. I felt wonderfully at home with you. With you I could be just myself. You were so unassuming, so easily pleased, so gay and so good-natured, merely to be with you rested my tortured nerves and released me for a moment from that driving force that urged me on and on. But I don’t want rest and I don’t want release. My will falters when I look at your sweet and diffident smile. I can’t afford to be soft, I can’t afford to be tender. When I look into those blue eyes of yours, so friendly, so confiding in human nature, I waver, and I daren’t waver. You’re my enemy and I hate you.’

Charley had flushed uncomfortably at some of the things that Simon had said to him, but now he chuckled good-humouredly.

‘Oh, Simon, what stuff and nonsense you talk.’

Simon paid no attention. He fixed Charley with his glittering, passionate eyes as though he sought to bore into the depths of his being.

‘Is there anything there?’ he said, as though speaking to himself. ‘Or is it merely an accident of expression that gives the illusion of some quality of the soul?’ And then to Charley: ‘I’ve often asked myself what it was that I saw in you. It wasn’t your good looks, though I daresay they had something to do with it; it wasn’t your intelligence, which is adequate without being remarkable; it wasn’t your guileless nature or your good temper. What is it in you that makes people take to you at first sight? You’ve won half your battle before ever you take the field. Charm? What is charm? It’s one of the words we all know the meaning of, but we can none of us define. But I know if I had that gift of yours, with my brain and my determination there’s no obstacle in the world I couldn’t surmount. You’ve got vitality and that’s part of charm. But I have just as much vitality as you; I can do with four hours’ sleep for days on end and I can work for sixteen hours a day without getting tired. When people first meet me they’re antagonistic, I have to conquer them by sheer brain-power, I have to play on their weaknesses, I have to make myself useful to them, I have to flatter them. When I came to Paris my chief thought me the most disagreeable young man and the most conceited he’d ever met. Of course he’s a fool. How can a man be conceited when he knows his defects as well as I know mine? Now he eats out of my hand. But I’ve had to work like a dog to achieve what you can do with a flicker of your long eyelashes. Charm is essential. In the last two years I’ve got to know a good many prominent politicians and they’ve all got it. Some more and some less. But they can’t all have it by nature. That shows it can be acquired. It means nothing, but it arouses the devotion of their followers so that they’ll do blindly all they’re bidden and be satisfied with the reward of a kind word. I’ve examined them at work. They can turn it on like water from a tap. The quick, friendly smile; the hand that’s so ready to clasp yours. The warmth in the voice that seems to promise favours, the show of interest that leads you to think your concerns are your leader’s chief preoccupation, the intimate manner which tells you nothing, but deludes you into thinking you are in your master’s confidence. The clichés, the hundred varieties of dear old boy that are so flattering on influential lips. The ease and naturalness, the perfect acting that imitates nature, and the sensitiveness that discerns a fool’s vanity and takes care never to affront it. I can learn all that, it only means a little more effort and a little more self-control. Sometimes of course they overdo it, the pros, their charm becomes so mechanical that it ceases to work; people see through it, and feeling they’ve been duped are resentful.’ He gave Charley another of his piercing glances. ‘Your charm is natural, that’s why it’s so devastating. Isn’t it absurd that a tiny wrinkle should make life so easy for you?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘One of the reasons why I wanted you to come over was to see exactly in what your charm consisted. As far as I can tell it depends on some peculiar muscular formation of your lower orbit. I believe it to be due to a little crease under your eyes when you smile.’

It embarrassed Charley to be thus anatomized, and to divert the conversation from himself; he asked:

‘But all this effort of yours, what is it going to lead you to?’

‘Who can tell? Let’s go and have our coffee at the Dôme.’

‘All right. I’ll get hold of a waiter.’

‘I’m going to stand you your dinner. It’s the first meal that we’ve had together that I’ve ever paid for.’

When he took out of his pocket some notes to settle up with he found with them a couple of cards.

‘Oh, look, I’ve got a ticket for you for the Midnight Mass at St Eustache. It’s supposed to be the best church music in Paris and I thought you’d like to go.’

‘Oh, Simon, how nice of you. I should love to. You’ll come with me, won’t you?’

‘I’ll see how I feel when the time comes. Anyhow take the tickets.’

Charley put them in his pocket. They walked to the Dôme. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still wet and when the light of a shop window or a street lamp fell upon it, palely glistened. A lot of people were wandering to and fro. They came out of the shadow of the leafless trees as though from the wings of a theatre, passed across the light and then were lost again in another patch of night. Cringing but persistent, the Algerian peddlers, their eyes alert for a possible buyer, passed with a bundle of Eastern rugs and cheap furs over their arms. Coarse-faced boys, a fez on their heads, carried baskets of monkey-nuts and monotonously repeated their raucous cry: cacaouettes, cacaouettes! At a corner stood two negroes, their dark faces pinched with cold, as though time had stopped and they waited because there was nothing in the world to do but wait. The two friends reached the Dôme. The terrace where in summer the customers sat in the open was glassed in. Every table was engaged, but as they came in a couple got up and they took the empty places. It was none too warm, and Simon wore no coat.

‘Won’t you be cold?’ Charley asked him. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to sit inside?’

‘No, I’ve taught myself not to mind cold.’

‘What happens when you catch one?’

‘I ignore it.’

Charley had often heard of the Dôme, but had never been there, and he looked with eager curiosity at the people who sat all round them. There were young men in turtle-neck sweaters, some of them with short beards, and girls bare-headed, in raincoats; he supposed they were painters and writers, and it gave him a little thrill to look at them.

‘English or American,’ said Simon, with a scornful shrug of the shoulders. ‘Wasters and rotters most of them, pathetically dressing up for a role in a play that has long ceased to be acted.’

Over there was a group of tall, fair-haired youths who looked like Scandinavians, and at another table a swarthy, gesticulating, loquacious band of Levantines. But the greater number were quiet French people, respectably dressed, shopkeepers from the neighbourhood who came to the Dôme because it was convenient, with a sprinkling of provincials who, like Charley, still thought it the resort of artists and students.

‘Poor brutes, they haven’t got the money to lead the Latin Quarter life any more. They live on the edge of starvation and work like galley-slaves. I suppose you’ve read the Vie de Bohême? Rodolphe now wears a neat blue suit that he’s bought off the nail and puts his trousers under his mattress every night to keep them in shape. He counts every penny he spends and takes care to do nothing to compromise his future. Mimi and Musette are hard-working girls, trade unionists, who spend their spare evenings attending party meetings, and even if they lose their virtue, keep their heads.’

‘Don’t you live with a girl?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? I should have thought it would be very pleasant. In the year you’ve been in Paris you must have had plenty of chances of picking someone up.’

‘Yes, I’ve had one or two. Strange when you come to think of it. D’you know what my place consists of? A studio and a kitchen. No bath. The concierge is supposed to come and clean up every day, but she has varicose veins and hates climbing the stairs. That’s all I have to offer and yet there’ve been three girls who wanted to come and share my squalor with me. One was English, she’s got a job here in the International Communist Bureau, another was a Norwegian, she’s working at the Sorbonne, and one was French – you’d have thought she had more sense; she was a dressmaker and out of work. I picked her up one evening when I was going out to dinner, she told me she hadn’t had a meal all day and I stood her one. It was a Saturday night and she stayed till Monday. She wanted to stay on, but I told her to get out and she went. The Norwegian was rather a nuisance. She wanted to darn my socks and cook for me and scrub the floor. When I told her there was nothing doing she took to waiting for me at street corners, walking beside me in the street and telling me that if I didn’t relent she’d kill herself. She taught me a lesson that I’ve taken to heart. I had to be rather firm with her in the end.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Well, one day I told her that I was sick of her pestering. I told her that next time she addressed me in the street I’d knock her down. She was rather stupid and she didn’t know I meant it. Next day when I came out of my house, it was about twelve and I was just going to the office, she was standing on the other side of the street. She came up to me, with that hang-dog look of hers, and began to speak. I didn’t let her get more than two or three words out, I hit her on the chin and she went down like a ninepin.’

Simon’s eyes twinkled with amusement.

‘What happened then?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose she got up again. I walked on and didn’t look round to see. Anyhow she took the hint and that’s the last I saw of her.’

The story made Charley very uncomfortable and at the same time made him want to laugh. But he was ashamed of this and remained silent.

‘The comic one was the English communist. My dear, she was the daughter of a dean. She’d been to Oxford and she’d taken her degree in economics. She was terribly genteel, oh, a perfect lady, but she looked upon promiscuous fornication as a sacred duty. Every time she went to bed with a comrade she felt she was helping the Cause. We were to be good pals, fight the good fight together, shoulder to shoulder, and all that sort of thing. The dean gave her an allowance and we were to pool our resources, make my studio a Centre, have the comrades in to afternoon tea and discuss the burning questions of the day. I just told her a few home truths and that finished her.’

He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him. Charley had several things to say, but did not know how to put them so that they should not sound affected and so arouse Simon’s irony.

‘But is it your wish to cut human relations out of your life altogether?’ he asked, uncertainly.

‘Altogether. I’ve got to be free. I daren’t let another person get a hold over me. That’s why I turned out the little sempstress. She was the most dangerous of the lot. She was gentle and affectionate. She had the meekness of the poor who have never dreamt that life can be other than hard. I could never have loved her, but I knew that her gratitude, her adoration, her desire to please, her innocent cheerfulness, were dangerous. I could see that she might easily become a habit of which I couldn’t break myself. Nothing in the world is so insidious as a woman’s flattery; our need for it is so enormous that we become her slave. I must be as impervious to flattery as I am indifferent to abuse. There’s nothing that binds one to a woman like the benefits one confers on her. She would have owed me everything, that girl, I should never have been able to escape from her.’

‘But, Simon, you have human passions like the rest of us. You’re twenty-three.’

‘And my sexual desires are urgent? Less urgent than you imagine. When you work from twelve to sixteen hours a day and sleep on an average six, when you content yourself with one meal a day, much as it may surprise you, your desires are much attenuated. Paris is singularly well arranged for the satisfaction of the sexual instinct at moderate expense and with the least possible waste of time, and when I find that my appetite is interfering with my work I have a woman just as when I’m constipated I take a purge.’

Charley’s clear blue eyes twinkled with amusement and a charming smile parting his lips displayed his strong white teeth.

‘Aren’t you missing a lot of fun? You know, one’s young for such a little while.’

‘I may be. I know one can do nothing in the world unless one’s single-minded. Chesterfield said the last word about sexual congress: the pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous, and the expense is damnable. It may be an instinct that one can’t suppress, but the man’s a pitiful fool who allows it to divert him from his chosen path. I’m not afraid of it any more. In a few more years I shall be entirely free from its temptation.’

‘Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.’

Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look.

‘I should tear it out of my heart as I’d wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.’

‘That’s easier said than done.’

‘I know. Nothing that’s worth doing is done easily, but that’s one of the odd things about man, if his self-preservation is concerned, if he has to do something on which his being depends, he can find in himself the strength to do it.’

Charley was silent. If anyone else had spoken to him as Simon had done that evening he would have thought it a pose adopted to impress. Charley had heard during his three years at Cambridge enough extravagant talk to be able, with his common sense and quiet humour, to attach no more importance to it than it deserved. But he knew that Simon never talked for effect. He was too contemptuous of his fellows’ opinion to extort their admiration by taking up an attitude in which he did not believe. He was fearless and sincere. When he said that he thought this and that, you could be certain that he did, and when he said he had done that and the other you need not hesitate to believe that he had. But just as the manner of life that Simon had described seemed to Charley morbid and unnatural, so the ideas he expressed with a fluency that showed they were well considered seemed to him outrageous and horrible. He noticed that Simon had avoided saying what was the end for which he was thus so sternly disciplining himself; but at Cambridge he had been violently communist and it was natural to suppose that he was training himself to play his part in the revolution they had then, all of them, anticipated in the near future. Charley, much more concerned with the arts, had listened with interest, but without feeling that the matter was any particular affair of his, to the heated arguments he heard in Simon’s rooms. If he had been obliged to state his views on a subject to which he had never given much thought, he would have agreed with his father: whatever might happen on the Continent there was no danger of communism in England; the hash they’d made in Russia showed it was impracticable; there always had been rich and poor in the world and there always would be; the English working man was too shrewd to let himself be led away by a lot of irresponsible agitators; and after all he didn’t have a bad time.

Simon went on. He was eager to deliver himself of thoughts that he had bottled up for many months and he had been used to impart them to Charley for as long as he could remember. Though he reflected upon them with the intensity which was one of his great gifts, he found that they gained in clearness and force when he had this perfect listener to put them to.

‘An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end and aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it’s suffocated us. It’s weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria.’

‘But, Simon, the slave population of the ancient world was just the proletariat of to-day.’

Simon’s lips trembled with a smile and the look he fixed on Charley made him feel that he had said a silly thing.

‘I know,’ said Simon quietly.

For a while his restless eyes were still, but though he looked at Charley his gaze seemed fixed on something in the far distance. Charley did not know of what he thought, but he was conscious of a faint malaise.

‘It may be that the habit of two thousand years has made love a human necessity and in that case it must be taken into account. But if dope must be administered the best person to do so is surely not a dope-fiend. If love can be put to some useful purpose it can only be by someone who is himself immune to it.’

‘You don’t seem to want to tell me what end you expect to attain by denying yourself everything that makes life pleasant. I wonder if any end can be worth it.’

‘What have you been doing with yourself for the last year, Charley?’

The sudden question seemed inconsequent, but he answered it with his usual modest frankness.

‘Nothing very much, I’m afraid. I’ve been going to the office pretty well every day; I’ve spent a certain amount of time on the Estate getting to know the properties and all that sort of thing: I’ve played golf with father. He likes to get in a round two or three days a week. And I’ve kept up with my piano-playing. I’ve been to a good many concerts. I’ve seen most of the picture shows. I’ve been to the opera a bit and seen a certain number of plays.’

‘You’ve had a thoroughly good time?’

‘Not bad. I’ve enjoyed myself.’

‘And what d’you expect to do next year?’

‘More or less the same, I should think.’

‘And the year after, and the year after that?’

‘I suppose in a few years I shall get married and then my father will retire and hand over his job to me. It brings in a thousand a year, not so bad in these days, and of course eventually I shall get my half of my father’s share in the Mason Estate.’

‘And then you’ll lead the sort of life your father has led before you?’

‘Unless the Labour party confiscate the Mason Estate. Then of course I shall be in the cart. But until then I’m quite prepared to do my little job and have as much fun as I can on the income I’ve got.’

‘And when you die will it have mattered a damn whether you ever lived or not?’

For a moment the unexpected question disconcerted Charley and he flushed.

‘I don’t suppose it will.’

‘Are you satisfied with that?’

‘To tell you the truth I’ve never thought about it. But if you ask me point-blank, I think I should be a fool if I weren’t. I could never have become a great artist. I talked it over with father that summer after I came down when we went fishing in Norway. He put it awfully nicely. Poor old dear, he was very anxious not to hurt my feelings, but I couldn’t help admitting that what he said was true. I’ve got a natural facility for doing things, I can paint a bit and write a bit and play a bit, perhaps I might have had a chance if I’d only been able to do one thing; but it was only a facility. Father was quite right when he said that wasn’t enough, and I think he was right too when he said it was better to be a pretty good business man than a second-rate artist. After all, it’s a bit of luck for me that old Sibert Mason married the cook and started growing vegetables on a bit of land that the growth of London turned into a valuable property. Don’t you think it’s enough if I do my duty in that state of life in which providence or chance, if you like, has placed me?’

Simon gave him a smile more indulgent than any that had tortured his features that evening.

‘I daresay, Charley. But not for me. I would sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.’

Charley looked at him calmly.

‘You see, Simon, I have a happy nature and you haven’t.’

Simon chuckled.

‘We must see if we can’t change that. Let’s stroll along. I’ll take you to the Sérail.’

CHAPTER 3

THE FRONT DOOR, a discreet door in a house of respectable appearance, was opened for them by a negro in Turkish dress and as they entered a narrow ill-lit passage a woman came out of an ante-room. She took them in with a quick, cool glance, but then recognising Simon, immediately assumed an air of geniality. They shook hands warmly.

‘This is Mademoiselle Ernestine,’ he said to Charley and then to her: ‘My friend has arrived from London this evening. He wishes to see life.’

‘You’ve brought him to the right place.’

She gave Charley an appraising look. Charley saw a woman who might have been in the later thirties, good-looking in a cold, hard way, with a straight nose, thin painted lips, and a firm chin; she was neatly dressed in a dark suit of somewhat masculine cut. She wore a collar and tie and as a pin the crest of a famous English regiment.

‘He’s good-looking,’ she said. ‘These ladies will be pleased to see him.’

‘Where is Madame to-night?’

‘She’s gone home to spend the holidays with her family. I am in charge.’

‘We’ll go in, shall we?’

‘You know your way.’

The two young men passed along the passage and opening a door found themselves in a vast room garishly decorated in the pinchbeck style of a Turkish bath. There were settees round the walls and in front of them little tables and chairs. A fair sprinkling of people were sitting about, mostly in day clothes, but a few in dinner-jackets; men in twos and threes; and at one table a mixed party, the women in evening frocks, who had evidently come to see one of the sights of Paris. Waiters in Turkish dress stood about and attended to orders. On a platform was an orchestra consisting of a pianist, a fiddler and a man who played the saxophone. Two benches facing one another jutted out on to the dance floor and on these sat ten or twelve young women. They wore Turkish slippers, but with high heels, baggy trousers of some shimmering material that reached to their ankles, and small turbans on their heads. The upper part of their bodies was naked. Other girls similarly dressed were seated with men who were standing a drink. Simon and Charley sat down and ordered a bottle of champagne. The band started up. Three or four men rose to their feet and going over to the benches chose partners to dance with. The rest of the girls listlessly danced together. They talked in a desultory way to one another and threw inquisitive glances at the men who were sitting at the various tables. It was apparent that the party of sight-seers, with the smart women from a different world, excited their curiosity. On the face of it, except that the girls were half naked, there was nothing to distinguish the place from any night club but the fact that there was room to dance in comfort. Charley noticed that at a table near theirs two men with dispatch-cases, from which in the course of conversation they extracted papers, were talking business as unconcernedly as if they were in a café. Presently one of the men from the group of sight-seers went and spoke to two girls who were dancing together, whereupon they stopped and went up to the table from which he had come; one of the women, beautifully dressed in black, with a string of emeralds round her neck, got up and began dancing with one of the two girls. The other went back to the bench and sat down. The sous-maîtresse, the woman in the coat and skirt, came up to Simon and Charley.

‘Well, does your friend see any of these ladies who takes his fancy?’

‘Sit down with us a minute and have a drink. He’s having a look round. The night’s young yet.’

She sat down and when Simon called the waiter ordered an orangeade.

‘I’m sorry he’s come here for the first time on such a quiet night. You see, on Christmas Eve a lot of people have to stay at home. But it’ll get more lively presently. A crowd of English have come over to Paris for the holidays. I saw in the paper that they’re running the Golden Arrow in three sections. They’re a great nation, the English; they have money.’

Charley, feeling rather shy, was silent, and she asked Simon if he understood French.

‘Of course he does. He spent six months in Touraine to learn it.’

‘What a beautiful district! Last summer when I took my holiday I motored all through the Châteaux country. Angèle comes from Tours. Perhaps your friend would like to dance with her.’ She turned to Charley. ‘You do dance, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I like it.’

‘She’s very well educated and she comes from an excellent family. I went to see them when I was in Tours and they thanked me for all that I had done for their daughter. They were persons of the greatest respectability. You mustn’t think that we take anyone here. Madame is very particular. We have our name and we value it. All these ladies here come from families who are highly esteemed in their own town. That is why they like to work in Paris. Naturally they don’t want to cause embarrassment to their relations. Life is hard and one has to earn one’s living as best one can. Of course I don’t pretend that they belong to the aristocracy, but the aristocracy in France is thoroughly corrupt, and for my part I set much greater value on the good French bourgeois stock. That is the backbone of the country.’

Mademoiselle Ernestine gave you the impression of a sensible woman of sound principle. You could not but feel that her views on the social questions of the day would be well worth listening to. She patted Simon’s hand and again speaking to Charley said:

‘It always gives me pleasure to see Monsieur Simon. He’s a good friend of the house. He doesn’t come very often, but when he does he behaves like a gentleman. He is never drunk like some of your compatriots and one can talk to him of interesting subjects. We are always glad to see journalists here. Sometimes I think the life we lead is a little narrow and it does one good to talk to someone who is in the centre of things. It takes one out of one’s rut. He’s sympathetic.’

In those surroundings, as though he felt himself strangely at home, Simon was easy and genial. If he was acting it was a very good performance that he was giving. You would have thought that he felt some queer affinity between himself and the sous-maîtresse of the brothel.

‘Once he took me to a répétition générale at the Français. All Paris was there. Academicians, ministers, generals. I was dazzled.’

‘And I may add that not one of the women looked more distinguished than you. It did my reputation a lot of good to be seen with you.’

‘You should have seen the faces of some of the big-wigs who come here, when they saw me in the foyer walking on the arm of Monsieur Simon.’

Charley knew that to go to a great social function with such a companion was the kind of joke that appealed to Simon’s sardonic humour. They talked a little more and then Simon said:

‘Listen, my dear, I think we ought to do our young friend proud as it’s the first time he’s been here. What about introducing him to the Princess? Don’t you think he’d like her?’

Mademoiselle Ernestine’s strong features relaxed into a smile and she gave Charley an amused glance.

‘It’s an idea. It would at least be an experience that he hasn’t had before. She has a pretty figure.’

‘Let’s have her along and stand her a drink.’

Mademoiselle Ernestine called a waiter.

‘Tell the Princess Olga to come here.’ Then to Charley: ‘She’s Russian. Of course since the revolution we have been swamped with Russians, we’re fed to the teeth with them and their Slav temperament; for a time the clients were amused by it, but they’re tired of them now. And then they’re not serious. They’re noisy and quarrelsome. The truth is, they’re barbarians, and they don’t know how to behave. But Princess Olga is different. She has principles. You can see that she’s been well brought up. She has something, there’s no denying it.’

While she was speaking Charley saw the waiter go up to a girl who was sitting on one of the benches and speak to her. His eyes had been wandering and he had noticed her before. She sat strangely still, and you would have thought that she was unconscious of her surroundings. She got up now, gave a glance in their direction, and walked slowly towards them. There was a singular nonchalance in her gait. When she came up she gave Simon a slight smile and they shook hands.

‘I saw you come in just now,’ she said, as she sat down.

Simon asked her if she would drink a glass of champagne.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘This is a friend of mine who wants to know you.’

‘I’m flattered.’ She turned an unsmiling glance on Charley. She looked at him for a time that seemed to him embarrassingly long, but her eyes held neither welcome nor invitation; their perfect indifference was almost nettling. ‘He’s handsome.’ Charley smiled shyly and then the faintest suspicion of a smile trembled on her lips. ‘He looks good-natured.’

Her turban, her baggy trousers were of gauze, pale blue and thickly sprinkled with little silver stars. She was not very tall; her face was heavily made up, her cheeks extravagantly rouged, her lips scarlet and her eyelids blue; eyebrows and eyelashes were black with mascara. She was certainly not beautiful, she was only prettyish, with rather high cheek-bones, a fleshy little nose and eyes not set deep in their sockets, not prominent either, but on a level as it were with her face, like windows set flush with a wall. They were large and blue, and their blue, emphasized both by the colour of her turban and by the mascara, was like a flame. She had a neat, trim, slight figure, and the skin of her body, pale amber in hue, had a look of silky softness. Her breasts were small and round, virginal, and the well-shaped nipples were rosy.

‘Why don’t you ask the Princess to dance with you, Charley?’ said Simon.

‘Will you?’ said he.

She gave the very faintest shrug of one shoulder and without a word rose to her feet. At the same time Mademoiselle Ernestine, saying she had affairs to attend to, left them. It was a new and thrilling experience for Charley to dance with a girl with nothing on above the waist. It made him rather breathless to put his hand on her naked body and to feel her bare breasts against him. The hand which he held in his was small and soft. But he was a well-brought-up young man, with good manners, and feeling it was only decent to make polite conversation, talked in the same way as he would have to any girl at a dance in London whom he did not know. She answered civilly enough, but he had a notion that she was not giving much heed to what he said. Her eyes wandered vaguely about the room, but there was no indication that they found there anything to excite her interest. When he clasped her a little more closely to him she accepted the more intimate hold without any sign that she noticed it. She acquiesced. The band stopped playing and they returned to their table. Simon was sitting there alone.

‘Well, does she dance well?’ he asked.

‘Not very.’

Suddenly she laughed. It was the first sign of animation she had given and her laugh was frank and gay.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, speaking English, ‘I wasn’t attending. I can dance better than that and next time I will.’

Charley flushed.

‘I didn’t know you spoke English. I wouldn’t have said that.’

‘But it was quite true. And you dance so well, you deserve a partner who can dance too.’

Hitherto they had spoken French. Charley’s was not very accurate, but it was fluent enough, and his accent was good. She spoke it very well, but with the sing-song Russian intonation which gives the language an alien monotony. Her English was not bad.

‘The Princess was educated in England,’ said Simon.

‘I went there when I was two and stayed till I was fourteen. I haven’t spoken it much since then and I’ve forgotten.’

‘Where did you live?’

‘In London. In Ladbroke Grove. In Charlotte Street. Wherever it was cheap.’

‘I’m going to leave you young things now,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll see you to-morrow, Charley.’

‘Aren’t you going to the Mass?’

‘No.’

He left them with a casual nod.

‘Have you known Monsieur Simon long?’ asked the Princess.

‘He’s my oldest friend.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s very different from you. I should have thought he was the last person you would have taken to.’

‘He’s brilliantly clever. He’s been a very good friend to me.’

She opened her mouth to speak, but then seemed to think better of it, and kept silent. The music began to play once more.

‘Will you dance with me again?’ she asked. ‘I want to show you that I can dance when I want to.’

Perhaps it was because Simon had left them and she felt less constraint, perhaps it was something in Charley’s manner, maybe his confusion when he had realized that she spoke English, that had made her take notice of him, there was a difference in her attitude. It had now a kindliness which was unexpected and attractive. While they danced she talked with something approaching gaiety. She went back to her childhood and spoke with a sort of grim humour of the squalor in which she and her parents had lived in cheap London lodgings. And now, taking the trouble to follow Charley’s steps, she danced very well. They sat down again and Charley glanced at his watch; it was getting on towards midnight. He was in a quandary. He had often heard them speak at home of the church music at St Eustache, and the opportunity of hearing Mass there on Christmas Eve was one that he could not miss. The thrill of arriving in Paris, his talk with Simon, the new experience of the Sérail and the champagne he had drunk, had combined to fill him with a singular exaltation and he had an urgent desire to hear music; it was as strong as his physical desire for the girl he had been dancing with. It seemed silly to go at this particular juncture and for such a purpose; but there it was, he wanted to, and after all nobody need know.

‘Look,’ he said, with an engaging smile, ‘I’ve got a date. I must go away now, but I shall be back in an hour. I shall still find you here, shan’t I?’

‘I’m here all night.’

‘But you won’t get fixed up with anybody else?’

‘Why have you got to go away?’

He smiled a trifle shyly.

‘I’m afraid it sounds absurd, but my friend has given me a couple of tickets for the Mass at St Eustache, and I may never have another opportunity of hearing it.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Will you take me?’

‘You? But how could you get away?’

‘I can arrange that with Mademoiselle. Give me a couple of hundred francs and I’ll fix it.’

He gave her a doubtful glance. With her naked body, her powder-blue turban and trousers, her painted face, she did not look the sort of person to go to church with. She saw his glance and laughed.

‘I’d give anything in the world to go. Do, do. I can change in ten minutes. It would give me so much pleasure.’

‘All right.’

He gave her the money and telling him to wait for her in the entrance, she hurried away. He paid for the wine and after ten minutes, counted on his watch, went out.

As he stepped into the passage a girl came up to him.

‘I haven’t kept you waiting, you see. I’ve explained to Mademoiselle. Anyway she thinks Russians are mad.’

Until she spoke he had not recognized her. She wore a brown coat and skirt and a felt hat. She had taken off her make-up, even the red on her lips, and her eyes under the thin fair line of her shaven eyebrows looked neither so large nor so blue. In her brown clothes, neat but cheap, she looked nondescript. She might have been a workgirl such as you see pouring along side streets from the back door of a department store at the luncheon hour. She was hardly even pretty, but she looked very young; and there was something humble in her bearing that gave Charley a pang.

‘Do you like music, Princess?’ he asked, when they got into a taxi.

He did not quite know what to call her. Even though she was a prostitute, he felt it would be rude, with her rank, on so short an acquaintance to call her Olga, and if she had been reduced to so humiliating a position by the stress of circumstances it behoved him all the more to treat her with respect.

‘I’m not a princess, you know, and my name isn’t Olga. They call me that at the Sérail because it flatters the clients to think they are going to bed with a princess and they call me Olga because it’s the only Russian name they know besides Sasha. My father was a professor of economics at the University of Leningrad and my mother was the daughter of a customs official.’

‘What is your name then?’

‘Lydia.’

They arrived just as the Mass was beginning. There were crowds of people and no chance of getting a seat. It was bitterly cold and Charley asked her if she would like his coat. She shook her head without answering. The aisles were lit by naked electric globes and they threw harsh beams on the vaulting, the columns and the dark throng of worshippers. The choir was brilliantly lit. They found a place by a column where, protected by its shadow, they could feel themselves isolated. There was an orchestra on a raised platform. At the altar were priests in splendid vestments. The music seemed to Charley somewhat florid, and he listened to it with a faint sense of disappointment. It did not move him as he had expected it would and the soloists, with their metallic, operatic voices, left him cold. He had a feeling that he was listening to a performance rather than attending a religious ceremony, and it excited in him no sensation of reverence. But for all that he was glad to have come. The darkness into which the light from the electric globes cut like a bright knife, making the Gothic lines grimmer; the soft brilliance of the altar, with its multitude of candles, with the priests performing actions whose meaning was unknown to him; the silent crowd that seemed not to participate but to wait anxiously like a crowd at a station barrier waiting for the gate to open; the stench of wet clothes and the aromatic perfume of incense; the bitter cold that lowered like a threatening unseen presence; it was not a religious emotion that he got from all this, but the sense of a mystery that had its roots far back in the origins of the human race. His nerves were taut, and when on a sudden the choir to the full accompaniment of the orchestra burst with a great shout into the Adeste Fidelis he was seized with an exultation over he knew not what. Then a boy sang a canticle; the thin, silvery voice rose in the silence and the notes trickled, with a curious little hesitation at first, as though the singer were not quite sure of himself, trickled like water crystal-clear trickling over the white stones of a brook; and then, the singer gathering assurance, the sounds were caught up, as though by great dark hands, and borne into the intricate curves of the arches and up to the night of the vaulted roof. Suddenly Charley was conscious that the girl by his side, Lydia, was crying. It gave him a bit of a turn, but with his polite English reticence he pretended not to notice; he thought that the dark church and the pure sound of the boy’s voice had filled her with a sudden sense of shame. He was an imaginative youth and he had read many novels. He could guess, he fancied, what she was feeling and he was seized with a great pity for her. He found it curious, however, that she should be so moved by music that was not of the best quality. But now she began to be shaken by heavy sobs and he could pretend no longer that he did not know she was in trouble. He put out a hand and took hers, thinking to offer her thus the comfort of his sympathy, but she snatched away her hand almost roughly. He began to be embarrassed. She was now crying so violently that the bystanders could not but notice it. She was making an exhibition of herself and he went hot with shame.

‘Would you like to go out?’ he whispered.

She shook her head angrily. Her sobbing grew more and more convulsive and suddenly she sank down on her knees and, burying her face in her hands, gave herself up to uncontrolled weeping. She was heaped up on herself strangely, like a bundle of cast-off clothes, and except for the quivering shoulders you would have thought her in a dead faint. She lay crouched at the foot of the tall pillar, and Charley, miserably self-conscious, stood in front of her trying to protect her from view. He saw a number of persons cast curious glances at her and then at him. It made him angry to think what they must suppose. The musicians were hushed, the choir was mute, and the silence had a thrilling quality of awe. Communicants, serried row upon row, pressed up to the altar steps to take in their mouths the Sacred Host that the priest offered them. Charley’s delicacy prevented him from looking at Lydia and he kept his eyes fixed on the bright-lit chancel. But when she raised herself a little he was conscious of her movement. She turned to the pillar and putting her arm against it hid her face in the crook of her elbow. The passion of her weeping had exhausted her, but the way in which she now sprawled, leaning against the hard stone, her bent legs on the stone paving, expressed such a hopelessness of woe that it was even more intolerable than to see her crushed and bowed on the floor like a person thrown into an unnatural attitude by a violent death.

The service reached its close. The organ joined with the orchestra for the voluntary, and an increasing stream of people, anxious to get to their cars or to find taxis, streamed to the doors. Then it was finished, and a great throng swept down the length of the church. Charley waited till they were alone in the place they had chosen and the last thick wedge of people seemed to be pressing to the doors. He put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Come. We must go now.’

He put his arm round her and lifted her to her feet. Inert, she let him do what he liked. She held her eyes averted. Linking her arm in his he led her down the aisle and waited again a little till all but a dozen people had gone out.

‘Would you like to walk a few steps?’

‘No, I’m so tired. Let’s get into a taxi.’

But they had to walk a little after all, for they could not immediately find one. When they came to a street lamp she stopped and taking a mirror from her bag looked at herself. Her eyes were swollen. She took out a puff and dabbed it over her face.

‘There’s not much to be done,’ he said, with a kindly smile. ‘We’d better go and have a drink somewhere. You can’t go back to the Sérail like that.’

‘When I cry my eyes always swell. It’ll take hours to go down.’

Just then a taxi passed and Charley hailed it.

‘Where shall we go?’

‘I don’t care. The Select. Boulevard Montparnasse.’

He gave the address and they drove across the river. When they arrived he hesitated, for the place she had chosen seemed crowded, but she stepped out of the taxi and he followed her. Notwithstanding the cold a lot of people were sitting on the terrace. They found a table within.

‘I’ll go into the ladies’ room and wash my eyes.’

In a few minutes she returned and sat down by his side. She had pulled down her hat as far as she could to hide her swollen lids and had powdered herself, but she had put on no rouge and her face was white. She was quite calm. She said nothing about the passion of weeping that had overcome her and you might have thought she took it as a natural thing that needed no excuse.

‘I’m very hungry,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry, too.’

Charley was ravenous and while he waited for her had wondered whether in the circumstances it would seem very gross if he ordered himself bacon and eggs. Her remark relieved his mind. It appeared that bacon and eggs were just what she fancied. He wanted to order a bottle of champagne, thinking she needed the stimulant, but she would not let him.

‘Why should you waste your money? Let’s have some beer.’

They ate their simple meal with appetite. They talked little. Charley, with his good manners, tried to make polite conversation, but she did not encourage him and presently they fell into silence. When they had finished and had had coffee, he asked Lydia what she would like to do.

‘I should like to sit here. I’m fond of this place. It’s cosy and intimate. I like to look at the people who come here.’

‘All right, we’ll sit here.’

It was not exactly how he had proposed to pass his first night in Paris. He wished he hadn’t been such a fool as to take her to the Midnight Mass. He had not the heart to be unkind to her. But perhaps there was some intonation in his reply that struck her, for she turned a little to look him in the face. She gave him once more the smile he had already seen two or three times on her. It was a queer sort of smile. It hardly moved the lips; it held no gaiety, but was not devoid of kindliness; there was more irony in it than amusement and it was rare and unwilling, patient and disillusioned.

‘This can’t be very amusing for you. Why don’t you go back to the Sérail and leave me here?’

‘No, I won’t do that.’

‘I don’t mind being alone, you know. I sometimes come here by myself and sit for hours. You’ve come to Paris to enjoy yourself. You’d be a fool not to.’

‘If it doesn’t bore you I’d like to sit here with you.’

‘Why?’ She gave him on a sudden a disdainful glance. ‘Do you look upon yourself as being noble and self-sacrificing? Or are you sorry for me or only curious?’

Charley could not imagine why she seemed angry with him or why she said these wounding things.

‘Why should I feel sorry for you? Or curious?’

He meant her to understand that she was not the first prostitute he had met in his life and he was not likely to be impressed with a life-story which was probably sordid and in all likelihood untrue. Lydia stared at him with an expression which to him looked like incredulous surprise.

‘What did your friend Simon tell you about me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why do you redden when you say that?’

‘I didn’t know I reddened,’ he smiled.

In fact Simon had told him that she was not a bad romp, and would give him his money’s worth, but that was not the sort of thing he felt inclined to tell her just then. With her pale face and swollen eyelids, in that poor brown dress and the black felt hat, there was nothing to remind one of the creature, in her blue Turkish trousers, with a naked body, who had had a curious, exotic attractiveness. It was another person altogether, quiet, respectable, demure, with whom Charley could as little think of going to bed as with one of the junior mistresses at Patsy’s old school. Lydia relapsed into silence. She seemed to be sunk in reverie. When at last she spoke it was as though she were continuing her train of thought rather than addressing him.

‘If I cried just now in church it wasn’t for the reason that you thought. I’ve cried enough for that, heaven knows, but just then it was for something different. I felt so lonely. All those people, they have a country, and in that country, homes; to-morrow they’ll spend Christmas Day together, father and mother and children; some of them, like you, went only to hear the music, and some have no faith, but just then, all of them, they were joined together by a common feeling; that ceremony, which they’ve known all their lives, and whose meaning is in their blood, every word spoken, every action of the priests, is familiar to them, and even if they don’t believe with their minds, the awe, the mystery, is in their bones and they believe with their hearts; it is part of the recollections of their childhood, the gardens they played in, the countryside, the streets of the towns. It binds them together, it makes them one, and some deep instinct tells them that they belong to one another. But I am a stranger. I have no country, I have no home, I have no language. I belong nowhere. I am outcast.’

She gave a mournful little chuckle.

‘I’m a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I’ve read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I’ve read of in books and though I try and try, I can’t see them with my mind’s eye. I know Moscow from what I’ve seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it’s no good, I know that what I see isn’t that at all. I’m a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I’m just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who’ve got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them – how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere?’

‘But have you no relations at all?’

‘Not one. My father was a socialist, but he was a quiet, peaceable man absorbed in his studies, and he took no active part in politics. He welcomed the revolution and thought it was the opening of a new era for Russia. He accepted the Bolsheviks. He only asked to be allowed to go on with his work at the university. But they turned him out and one day he got news that he was going to be arrested. We escaped through Finland, my father, my mother and me. I was two. We lived in England for twelve years. How, I don’t know. Sometimes my father got a little work to do, sometimes people helped us, but my father was homesick. Except when he was a student in Berlin he’d never been out of Russia before; he couldn’t accustom himself to English life, and at last he felt he had to go back. My mother implored him not to. He couldn’t help himself, he had to go, the desire was too strong for him; he got into touch with people at the Russian embassy in London, he said he was prepared to do any work the Bolsheviks gave him; he had a good reputation in Russia, his books had been widely praised, and he was an authority on his subject. They promised him everything and he sailed. When the ship docked he was taken off by the agents of the Cheka. We heard that he’d been taken to a cell on the fourth floor of the prison and thrown out of the window. They said he’d committed suicide.’

She sighed a little and lit another cigarette. She had been smoking incessantly since they finished supper.

‘He was a mild gentle creature. He never did anyone harm. My mother told me that all the years they’d been married he’d never said a harsh word to her. Because he’d made his peace with the Bolsheviks the people who’d helped us before wouldn’t help us any more. My mother thought we’d be better off in Paris. She had friends there. They got her work addressing letters. I was apprenticed to a dressmaker. My mother died because there wasn’t enough to eat for both of us and she denied herself so that I shouldn’t go hungry. I found a job with a dressmaker who gave me half the usual wages because I was Russian. If those friends of my mother’s, Alexey and Evgenia, hadn’t given me a bed to sleep in I should have starved too. Alexey played the violin in an orchestra at a Russian restaurant and Evgenia ran the ladies’ cloak-room. They had three children and the six of us lived in two rooms. Alexey was a lawyer by profession, he’d been one of my father’s pupils at the university.’

‘But you have them still?’

‘Yes, I have them still. They’re very poor now. You see, everyone’s sick of the Russians, they’re sick of Russian restaurants and Russian orchestras. Alexey hasn’t had a job for four years. He’s grown bitter and quarrelsome and he drinks. One of the girls has been taken charge of by an aunt who lives at Nice, and another has gone into service, the son has become a gigolo and he does the night clubs at Montmartre; he’s often here, I don’t know why he isn’t here this evening, perhaps he’s clicked. His father curses him and beats him when he’s drunk, but the hundred francs he brings home when he’s found a friend helps to keep things going. I live there still.’

‘Do you?’ said Charley in surprise.

‘I must live somewhere. I don’t go to the Sérail till night and when trade is slack I often get back by four or five. But it’s terribly far away.’

For a while they sat in silence.

‘What did you mean when you said just now you hadn’t been crying for the reason I thought?’ asked Charley at length.

She gave him once more a curious, suspicious look.

‘Do you really mean that you don’t know who I am? I thought that was why your friend Simon sent for me.’

‘He told me nothing except – except that you’d give me a good time.’

‘I’m the wife of Robert Berger. That is why, although I’m a Russian, they took me at the Sérail. It gives the clients a kick.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll think me very stupid, but I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She gave a short, hard laugh.

‘Such is fame. A day’s journey and the name that’s on every lip means nothing. Robert Berger murdered an English bookmaker called Teddie Jordan. He was condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude. He’s at St Laurent in French Guiana.’

She spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that Charley could hardly believe his ears. He was startled, horrified and thrilled.

‘And you really didn’t know?’

‘I give you my word I didn’t. Now you speak of it I remember reading about the case in the English papers. It created rather a sensation because the – the victim was English, but I’d forgotten the name of the – of your husband.’

‘It created a sensation in France, too. The trial lasted three days. People fought to get to it. The papers gave it the whole of their front page. No one talked of anything else. Oh, it was a sensation all right. That was when I first saw your friend Simon, at least that’s when he first saw me, he was reporting the case for his paper and I was in court. It was an exciting trial, it gave the journalists plenty of opportunity. You must get him to tell you about it. He’s proud of the articles he wrote. There were so clever, bits of them got translated and were put in the French papers. It did him a lot of good.’

Charley did not know what to say. He was angry with Simon; he recognized his puckish humour in putting him in the situation in which he now found himself.

‘It must have been awful for you,’ he said lamely.

She turned a little and looked into his eyes. He, whose life had been set in pleasant places, had never before seen on a face a look of such hideous despair. It hardly looked like a human face, but like one of those Japanese masks which an artist has fashioned to portray a certain emotion. He shivered. Lydia till now, for Charley’s sake, had been talking mostly in English, breaking into French now and then when she found it too difficult to say what she wanted in the unfamiliar language, but now she went on in French. The sing-song of her Russian accent gave it a strange plaintiveness, but at the same time lent a sense of unreality to what she said. It gave you the impression of a person talking in a dream.

‘I’d only been married six months. I was going to have a baby. Perhaps it was that that saved his neck. That and his youth. He was only twenty-two. The baby was born dead. I’d suffered too much. You see, I loved him. He was my first love and my last love. When he was sentenced they wanted me to divorce him, transportation is a sufficient reason in French law; they told me that the wives of convicts always divorced and they were angry with me when I wouldn’t. The lawyer who defended him was very kind to me. He said that I’d done everything I could, and that I’d had a bad time, but I’d stood by him to the end and now I ought to think of myself, I was young and must remake my life, I was making it even more difficult if I stayed tied to a convict. He was impatient with me when I said that I loved Robert and Robert was the only thing in the world that mattered to me, and that whatever he did I’d love him, and that if ever I could go out to him, and he wanted me, I’d go and gladly. At last he shrugged his shoulders and said there was nothing to be done with us Russians, but if ever I changed my mind and wanted a divorce I was to come to him and he’d help me. And Evgenia and Alexey, poor drunken, worthless Alexey, they gave me no peace. They said Robert was a scoundrel, they said he was wicked, they said it was disgraceful that I should love him. As if one could stop loving because it’s disgraceful to love! It’s so easy to call a man a scoundrel. What does it mean? He murdered and he suffered for his crime. None of them knew him as I knew him. You see, he loved me. They didn’t know how tender he was, how charming, how gay, how boyish. They said he came near killing me as he killed Teddie Jordan; they didn’t see that it only made me love him more.’

It was almost impossible for Charley, knowing nothing of the circumstances, to get anything coherent out of what she was saying.

‘Why should he have killed you?’ he asked.

‘When he came home – after he’d killed Jordan, it was very late and I’d gone to bed, but his mother was waiting up for him. We lived with her. He was in high spirits, but when she looked at him she knew he’d done something terrible. You see, for weeks she’d been expecting it and she’d been frantic with anxiety.

‘“Where have you been all this time?” she asked him.

‘“I? Nowhere,” he said. “Round with the boys.” He chuckled and gently patted her cheek. “It’s so easy to kill a man, mother,” he said. “It’s quite ridiculous, it’s so easy.”

‘Then she knew what he’d done and she burst out crying.

‘“Your poor wife,” she said. “Oh, how desperately unhappy you’re going to make her.”

‘He looked down and sighed.

‘“Perhaps it would be better if I killed her too,” he said.

‘“Robert!” she cried.

‘He shook his head.

‘“Don’t be afraid, I shouldn’t have the courage,” he said. “And yet, if I did it in her sleep, she’d know nothing.”

‘“My God, why did you do it?” she cried.

‘Suddenly he laughed. He had a wonderfully gay, infectious laugh. You couldn’t hear it without feeling happy.

‘“Don’t be so silly, mother, I was only joking,” he said. “I’ve done nothing. Go to bed and to sleep.”

‘She knew he was lying. But that’s all he would say. At last she went to her room. It was a tiny house, in Neuilly, but it had a bit of garden and there was a little pavilion at the end of it. When we married she gave us the house and moved in there so that she could be with her son and yet not on the top of us. Robert came up to our room and he waked me with a kiss on my lips. His eyes were shining. He had blue eyes, not so blue as yours, gray rather, but they were large and very brilliant. There was almost always a smile in them. They were wonderfully alert.’

But Lydia had gradually slowed down the pace of her speech as she came to these sentences. It was as though a thought had struck her and she was turning it over in her mind while she talked. She looked at Charley with a curious expression.

‘There is something in your eyes that reminds me of him, and your face is the same shape as his. He wasn’t so tall as you and he hadn’t got your English complexion. He was very good-looking.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘What a malicious fool that Simon of yours is.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Nothing.’

She leant forward, with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and went on, in a rather monotonous voice, as though she were reciting under hypnosis something that was passing before her vacant eyes.

‘I smiled when I woke.

‘“How late you are,” I said. “Be quick and come to bed.”

‘“I can’t sleep now,” he said. “I’m too excited. I’m hungry. Are there any eggs in the kitchen?”

‘I was wide awake by then. You can’t think how charming he looked sitting on the side of the bed in his new gray suit. He was always well-dressed and he wore his clothes wonderfully well. His hair was very beautiful, dark brown and waving, and he wore it long, brushed back on his head.

‘“I’ll put on a dressing-gown and we’ll go and see,” I said.

‘We went into the kitchen and I found eggs and onions. I fried the onions and scrambled them with the eggs. I made some toast. Sometimes when we went to the theatre or had been to a concert we used to make ourselves something to eat when we got home. He loved scrambled eggs and onions, and I cooked them just in the way he liked. We used to love those modest suppers that we had by ourselves in the kitchen. He went into the cellar and brought out a bottle of champagne. I knew his mother would be cross, it was the last of half a dozen bottles that Robert had had given him by one of his racing friends, but he said he felt like champagne just then and he opened the bottle. He ate the eggs greedily and he emptied his glass at a gulp. He was in tearing spirits. When we first got into the kitchen I’d noticed that though his eyes were shining so brightly his face was pale, and if I hadn’t known that nothing was more unlikely I should have thought he’d been drinking, but now the colour came back to his cheeks. I thought he’d been just tired and hungry. He’d been out all day, tearing about, I was sure, and it might be that he hadn’t had a bite to eat. Although we’d only been parted a few hours he was almost crazy with joy at being with me again. He couldn’t stop kissing me and while I was scrambling the eggs I had to push him away because he wanted to hug me and I was afraid he’d spoil the cooking. But I couldn’t help laughing. We sat side by side at the kitchen table as close as we could get. He called me every sweet, endearing name he could think of, he couldn’t keep his hands off me, you would have thought we’d only been married a week instead of six months. When we’d finished I wanted to wash everything up so that when his mother came in for breakfast she shouldn’t find a mess, but he wouldn’t let me. He wanted to get to bed quickly.

‘He was like a man possessed of a god. I never thought it was possible for a man to love a woman as he loved me that night. I never knew a woman was capable of such adoration as I was filled with. He was insatiable. It seemed impossible to slake his passion. No woman ever had such a wonderful lover as I had that night. And he was my husband. Mine! Mine! I worshipped him. If he’d let me I would have kissed his feet. When at last he fell asleep exhausted, the dawn was already peeping through a chink in the curtains. But I couldn’t sleep. I looked at his face as the light grew stronger; it was the unlined face of a boy. He slept, holding me in his arms, and there was a tiny smile of happiness on his lips. At last I fell asleep too.

‘He was still sleeping when I woke and I got out of bed very quietly so as not to disturb him. I went into the kitchen to make his coffee for him. We were very poor. Robert had worked in a broker’s office, but he’d had a quarrel with his employer and had walked out on him, and since then he hadn’t found anything regular to do. He was crazy about racing and sometimes he made a bit that way, though his mother hated it, and occasionally he earned a little money by selling second-hand cars on commission, but all we really had to depend on was his mother’s pension, she was the widow of an army doctor, and the little money she had besides. We didn’t keep a servant and my mother-in-law and I did the housework. I found her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for lunch.

‘“How is Robert?” she asked me.

‘“He’s still asleep. I wish you could see him. With his hair all tousled he looks as if he was sixteen.”

‘The coffee was on the hob and the milk was warm. I put it on to boil and had a cup, then I crept upstairs to get Robert’s clothes. He was a dressy fellow and I’d learnt how to press them. I wanted to have them all ready for him and neatly laid out on a chair when he woke. I brought them down into the kitchen and gave them a brush and then I put an iron on to heat. When I put the trousers on the kitchen table I noticed there were stains on one of the legs.

‘“What on earth is that?” I cried. “Robert has got his trousers in a mess.”

‘Madame Berger got up from her chair so quickly that she upset the potatoes. She snatched up the trousers and looked at them. She began to tremble.

‘“I wonder what it is,” I said. “Robert will be furious. His new suit.”

‘I saw she was upset, but you know, the French are funny in some ways, they don’t take things like that as casually as we Russians do. I don’t know how many hundred francs Robert had paid for the suit, and if it was ruined she wouldn’t sleep for a week thinking of all the money that had been wasted.

‘“It’ll clean,” I said.

‘“Take Robert up his coffee,” she said sharply. “It’s after eleven and quite time he woke. Leave me the trousers. I know what to do with them.”

‘I poured him out a cup and was just going upstairs with it when we heard Robert clattering down in his slippers. He nodded to his mother and asked for the paper.

‘“Drink your coffee while it’s hot,” I said to him.

‘He paid no attention to me. He opened the paper and turned to the latest news.

‘“There’s nothing,” said his mother.

‘I didn’t know what she meant. He cast his eyes down the columns and then took a long drink of coffee. He was unusually silent. I took his coat and began to give it a brush.

‘“You made your trousers in an awful mess last night,” I said. “You’ll have to wear your blue suit to-day.”

‘Madame Berger had put them over the back of a chair. She took them to him and showed him the stains. He looked at them for a minute while she watched him in silence. You would have thought he couldn’t take his eyes off them. I couldn’t understand their silence. It was strange. I thought they were taking a trivial accident in an absurdly tragic way. But of course the French have thrift in their bones.

‘“We’ve got some petrol in the house,” I said. “We can get the stains out with that. Or they can go to the cleaner’s.”

‘They didn’t answer. Robert, frowning, looked down. His mother turned the trousers round, I suppose to look if there were stains on the back, and then, I think, felt that there was something in the pockets.

‘“What have you got here?”

‘He sprang to his feet.

‘“Leave it alone. I won’t have you look in my pockets.”

‘He tried to snatch the trousers from her, but before he could do so she had slipped her hand into the hip-pocket and taken out a bundle of bank-notes. He stopped dead when he saw that she had them. She let the trousers drop to the ground and with a groan put her hand to her breast as though she’d been stabbed. I saw then that they were both of them as pale as death. A sudden thought seized me; Robert had often said to me that he was sure his mother had a little hoard hidden away somewhere in the house. We’d been terribly short of money lately. Robert was crazy to go down to the Riviera; I’d never been there and he’d been saying for weeks that if he could only get a bit of cash we’d go down and have a honeymoon at last. You see, at the time we married, he was working at that broker’s and couldn’t get away. The thought flashed through my mind that he’d found his mother’s hoard. I blushed to the roots of my hair at the idea that he’d stolen it and yet I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t lived with him for six months without knowing that he’d think it rather a lark. I saw that they were thousand-franc notes that she held in her hand. Afterwards I knew there were seven of them. She looked at him as though her eyes would start out of her head.

‘“When did you get them, Robert?” she asked.

‘He gave a laugh, but I saw he was nervous.

‘“I made a lucky bet yesterday,” he answered.

‘“Oh, Robert,” I cried, “you promised your mother you’d never play the horses again.”

‘“This was a certainty,” he said, “I couldn’t resist. We shall be able to go down to the Riviera, my sweet. You take them and keep them or they’ll just slip through my fingers.”

‘“No, no, she mustn’t have them,” cried Madame Berger. She gave Robert a look of real horror, so that I was astounded, then she turned to me. “Go and do your room. I won’t have the rooms left unmade all day long.”

‘I saw she wanted to get rid of me and I thought I’d be better out of the way if they were going to quarrel. The position of a daughter-in-law is delicate. His mother worshipped Robert, but he was extravagant and it worried her to death. Now and then she made a scene. Sometimes they’d shut themselves up in her pavilion at the end of the garden and I’d hear their voices raised in violent discussions. He would come away sulky and irritable and when I saw her I knew she’d been crying. I went upstairs. When I came down again they stopped talking at once and Madame Berger told me to go out and buy some eggs for lunch. Generally Robert went out about noon and didn’t come back till night, often very late, but that day he stayed in. He read and played the piano. I asked him what had passed between him and his mother, but he wouldn’t tell me, he told me to mind my own business. I think neither of them spoke more than a dozen sentences all day. I thought it would never end. When we went to bed I snuggled up to Robert and put my arms round his neck, for of course I knew he was worried and I wanted to console him, but he pushed me away.

‘“For God’s sake leave me alone,” he said. “I’m in no mood for love-making to-night. I’ve got other things to think about.”

‘I was bitterly wounded, but I didn’t speak. I moved away from him. He knew he’d hurt me, for in a little while he put out his hand and lightly touched my face.

‘“Go to sleep, my sweet,” he said. “Don’t be upset because I’m in a bad humour to-day. I drank too much yesterday. I shall be all right to-morrow.”

‘“Was it your mother’s money?” I whispered.

‘He didn’t answer at once.

‘“Yes,” he said at last.

‘“Oh, Robert, how could you?” I cried.

‘He paused again before he said anything. I was wretched. I think I began to cry.

‘“If anyone should ask you anything you never saw me with the money. You never knew that I had any.”

‘“How can you think I’d betray you?” I cried.

‘“And the trousers. Maman couldn’t get the stains out. She’s thrown them away.”

‘I suddenly remembered that I’d smelt something burning that afternoon while Robert was playing and I was sitting with him. I got up to see what it was.

‘“Stay here,” he said.

‘“But something’s burning in the kitchen,” I said.

‘“Maman’s probably burning old rags. She’s in a dirty temper to-day, she’ll bite your head off if you go and interfere with her.”

‘I knew now that it wasn’t old rags she was burning; she hadn’t thrown the trousers away, she’d burnt them. I began to be horribly frightened, but I didn’t say anything. He took my hand.

‘“If anyone should ask you about them,” he said, “you must say that I got them so dirty cleaning a car that they had to be given away. My mother gave them to a tramp the day before yesterday. Will you swear to that?”

‘“Yes,” I said, but I could hardly speak.

‘Then he said a terrifying thing.

‘“It may be that my head depends on it.”

‘I was too stunned, I was too horrified, to say anything. My head began to ache so that I thought it would burst. I don’t think I closed my eyes all night. Robert slept fitfully. He was restless even in his sleep and turned from side to side. We went downstairs early, but my mother-in-law was already in the kitchen. As a rule she was very decently dressed and when she went out she looked quite smart. She was a doctor’s widow and the daughter of a staff officer; she had a feeling about her position and she would let no one know to what economies she was reduced to make the show she did when she went to pay visits on old army friends. Then, with her waved hair and her manicured hands, with rouge on her cheeks, she didn’t look more than forty; but now, her hair tousled, without any make-up, in a dressing-gown, she looked like an old procuress who’d retired to live on her savings. She didn’t say good morning to Robert. Without a word she handed him the paper. I watched him while he read it and I saw his expression change. He felt my eyes upon him and looked up. He smiled.

‘“Well, little one,” he said gaily, “what about this coffee? Are you going to stand there all the morning looking at your lord and master or are you going to wait on him?”

‘I knew there was something in the paper that would tell me what I had to know. Robert finished his breakfast and went upstairs to dress. When he came down again, ready to go out, I had a shock, for he was wearing the light gray suit that he had worn two days before, and the trousers that went with it. But then of course I remembered that he’d had a second pair made when he ordered the suit. There had been a lot of discussion about it. Madame Berger had grumbled at the expense, but he had insisted that he couldn’t hope to get a job unless he was decently dressed and at last she gave in as she always did, but she insisted that he should have a second pair of trousers, she said it was always the trousers that grew shabby first and it would be an economy in the end if he had two pairs. Robert went out and said he wouldn’t be in to lunch. My mother-in-law went out soon afterwards to do her marketing and the moment I was alone I seized the paper. I saw that an English bookmaker, called Teddie Jordan, had been found dead in his flat. He had been stabbed in the back. I had often heard Robert speak of him. I knew it was he who had killed him. I had such a sudden pain in my heart that I thought I should die. I was terrified. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t move. At last I heard a key in the door and I knew it was Madame Berger coming in again. I put the paper back where she’d left it and went on with my work.’

Lydia gave a deep sigh. They had not got to the restaurant till one or after and it was two by the time they finished supper. When they came in the tables were full and there was a dense crowd at the bar. Lydia had been talking a long time and little by little people had been going. The crowd round the bar thinned out. There were only two persons sitting at it now and only one table besides theirs was occupied. The waiters were getting restive.

‘I think we ought to be going,’ said Charley. ‘I’m sure they want to be rid of us.’

At that moment the people at the other table got up to go. The woman who brought their coats from the cloak-room brought Charley’s too and put it on the table beside him. He called for the bill.

‘I suppose there’s some place we could go to now?’

‘We could go to Montmartre. Graaf’s is open all night. I’m terribly tired.’

‘Well, if you like I’ll drive you home.’

‘To Alexey and Evgenia’s? I can’t go there to-night. He’ll be drunk. He’ll spend the whole night abusing Evgenia for bringing up the children to be what they are and weeping over his own sorrows. I won’t go to the Sérail. We’d better go to Graaf’s. At least it’s warm there.’

She seemed so woebegone, and really so exhausted, that Charley with hesitation made a proposal. He remembered that Simon had told him that he could take anyone into the hotel.

‘Look here, I’ve got two beds in my room. Why don’t you come back with me there?’

She gave him a suspicious look, but he shook his head smiling.

‘Just to sleep, I mean,’ he added. ‘You know, I’ve had a journey to-day and what with the excitement and one thing and another I’m pretty well all in.’

‘All right.’

There was no cab to be found when they got out into the street, but it was only a little way to the hotel and they walked. A sleepy night watchman opened the door for them and took them upstairs in the lift. Lydia took off her hat. She had a broad, white brow. He had not seen her hair before. It was short, curling round the neck, and pale brown. She kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her dress. When Charley came back from the bathroom, having got into his pyjamas, she was not only in bed but asleep. He got into his own bed and put out the light. They had not exchanged a word since they left the restaurant.

Thus did Charley spend his first night in Paris.

CHAPTER 4

IT WAS LATE when he woke. For a moment he had no notion where he was. Then he saw Lydia. They had not drawn the curtains and a gray light filtered through the shutters. The room with its pitchpine furniture looked squalid. She lay on her back in the twin bed with her eyes open, staring up at the dingy ceiling. Charley glanced at his watch. He felt shy of the strange woman in the next bed.

‘It’s nearly twelve,’ he said. ‘We’d better just have a cup of coffee and then I’ll take you to lunch somewhere if you like.’

She looked at him with grave, but not unkindly, eyes.

‘I’ve been watching you sleep. You were sleeping as peacefully, as profoundly, as a child. You had such a look of innocence on your face, it was shattering.’

‘My face badly needs a shave,’ said he.

He telephoned down to the office for coffee and it was brought by a stout middle-aged maid, who gave Lydia a glance, but whose expression heavily conveyed nothing. Charley smoked a pipe and Lydia one cigarette after another. They talked little. Charley did not know how to deal with the singular situation in which he found himself and Lydia seemed lost in thoughts unconcerned with him. Presently he went into the bathroom to shave and bath. When he came back he found Lydia sitting in an armchair at the window in his dressing-gown. The window looked into the courtyard and all there was to see was the windows, storey above storey, of the rooms opposite. On the gray Christmas morning it looked incredibly cheerless. She turned to him.

‘Couldn’t we lunch here instead of going out?’

‘Downstairs, d’you mean? If you like. I don’t know what the food’s like.’

‘The food doesn’t matter. No, up here, in the room. It’s so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by.’

‘If you like I’ll order you lunch here and I’ll go out.’

Her eyes lingered on him and there was a slightly ironic smile in them.

‘I don’t mind you. I think probably you’re very sweet and nice. I’d rather you stayed; there’s something cosy about you that I find comforting.’

Charley was not a youth who thought very much about himself, but at that moment he could not help a slight sense of irritation because really she seemed to be using him with more unconcern than was reasonable. But he had naturally good manners and did not betray his feeling. Besides, the situation was odd, and though it was not to find himself in such a one that he had come to Paris, it could not be denied that the experience was interesting. He looked round the room. The beds were unmade; Lydia’s hat, her coat and skirt, her shoes and stockings were lying about, mostly on the floor; his own clothes were piled up untidily on a chair.

‘The place looks terribly frowsy,’ he said. ‘D’you think it would be very nice to lunch in all this mess?’

‘What does it matter?’ she answered, with the first laugh he had heard from her. ‘But if it upsets your prim English sense of decorum, I’ll make the beds, or the maid can while I’m having a bath.’

She went into the bathroom and Charley telephoned for a waiter. He ordered some eggs, some meat, cheese and fruit, and a bottle of wine. Then he got hold of the maid. Though the room was heated there was a fireplace and he thought a fire would be cheerful. While the maid was getting the logs he dressed himself, and then, when she got busy setting things to rights, he sat down and looked at the grim courtyard. He thought disconsolately of the jolly party at the Terry-Masons’. They would be having a glass of sherry now before sitting down to their Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding, and they would all be very gay, pleased with their Christmas presents, noisy and jolly. After a while Lydia came back. She had no make-up on her face, but she had combed her hair neatly, the swelling of her eyelids had gone down, and she looked young and pretty; but her prettiness was not the sort that excites carnal desires and Charley, though naturally susceptible, saw her come in without a flutter of his pulse.

‘Oh, you’ve dressed,’ she said. ‘Then I can keep on your dressing-gown, can’t I? Let me have your slippers. I shall float about in them, but it doesn’t matter.’

The dressing-gown had been a birthday present from his mother, and it was of blue patterned silk; it was much too long for her, but she arranged herself in it so that it was not unbecoming. She was glad to see the fire and she sat down in the chair he had drawn up for her. She smoked a cigarette. What seemed to him strange was that she took the situation as though there were nothing strange in it. She was as casual in her behaviour as though she had known him all her life; if anything more was needed to banish any ideas he might have cherished about her, nothing could have been more efficacious than the impression he so clearly got from her that she had put out of her mind for good and all the possibility of him wanting to go to bed with her. He was surprised to see with what good appetite she ate. He had a notion after what she had told him the night before that she was too distraught to eat but sparingly, and it was a shock to his romantic sensibility to see that she ate as much as he did and with obvious satisfaction.

They were drinking their coffee when the telephone rang. It was Simon.

‘Charley? Would you like to come round and have a talk?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t just now.’

‘Why not?’ Simon asked sharply.

It was characteristic of him to think that everyone should be ready to drop whatever he was doing if he wanted him. However little something mattered to him, if he had a whim for it and he was crossed, it immediately assumed consequence.

‘Lydia’s here.’

‘Who the devil’s Lydia?’

Charley hesitated an instant.

‘Well, Princess Olga.’

There was a pause and then Simon burst into a harsh laugh.

‘Congratulations, old boy. I knew you’d click. Well, when you have a moment to spare for an old friend, let me know.’

He rang off. When Charley turned back to Lydia she was staring into the fire. Her impassive face gave no sign that she had heard the conversation. Charley pushed back the little table at which they had lunched and made himself as comfortable as he could in a shallow armchair. Lydia leaned over and put another log on the fire. There was a sort of intimacy in the action that did not displease Charley. She was settling herself down as a small dog turns round two or three times on a cushion and having made a suitable hollow curls up in it. They stayed in all the afternoon. The joyless light of the winter day gradually failed and they sat by the light of the wood-fire. In the rooms on the opposite side of the court lights were turned on here and there, and the pale, uncurtained windows had a false strange look like lighted windows in the stage-set of a street. But they were not more unreal than the position in which he found himself seemed to Charley, sitting in that sordid bedroom, by the fitful blazing of the log fire, while that woman whom he did not know told him her terrible story. It seemed not to occur to her that he might be unwilling to listen. So far as he could tell she had no inkling that he might have anything else to do, nor that in baring her heart to him, in telling him her anguish, she was putting a burden on him that a stranger had no right to exact. Was it that she wanted his sympathy? He wasn’t even sure of that. She knew nothing about him and wanted to know nothing. He was only a convenience, and but for his sense of humour, he would have found her indifference exasperating. Towards evening she fell silent, and presently by her quiet breathing Charley knew she had fallen asleep. He got up from his chair, for he had sat in it so long that his limbs ached, and went to the window, on tiptoe so as not to wake her, and sitting down on a stool looked out into the courtyard. Now and again he saw someone pass behind the lighted windows; he saw an elderly woman watering a flower-pot; he saw a man in his shirt-sleeves lying on his bed reading; he wondered who and what these people were. They looked like ordinary middle-class persons in modest circumstances, for after all the hotel was cheap and the quarter dowdy; but seen like that, through the windows, as though in a peep-show, they looked strangely unreal. Who could tell what people were really and what grim passions, what crimes, their commonplace aspect concealed? In some of the rooms the curtains were drawn and only a chink of light between them showed that there was anyone there. Some of the windows were black; they were not empty, for the hotel was full, but their occupants were out. On what mysterious errands? Charley’s nerves were shaken and he had a sudden feeling of horror for all those unknown persons whose lives were so strange to him; below the smooth surface he seemed to sense something confused, dark, monstrous and terrible.

He pondered, his brow knit in concentration, the long, unhappy story to which he had listened all the afternoon. Lydia had gone back and forth, now telling him of her struggle to live when she was working for a pittance at a dressmaker’s and after that some incident of her poverty-stricken childhood in London; then more of those agonizing days that followed the murder, the terror of the arrest and the anguish of the trial. He had read detective stories, he had read the papers, he knew that crimes were committed, he knew that people lived in penury, but he had known it all, as it were from the outside; it gave him a strange, a frightening sensation to find himself thrown into personal contact with someone to whom horrible things had actually happened. He remembered suddenly, he did not know why, a picture of Manet’s of somebody’s execution – was it Maximilian’s? – by a shooting squad. He had always thought it a striking picture. Now it came to him as a shock to realise that it portrayed an incident that had occurred. The Emperor had in fact stood in that place, and as the soldiers levelled their rifles, it must have seemed incredible to him that he should stand there and in a moment cease to live.

And now that he knew Lydia, now that he had listened to her last night and that day, now that he had eaten with her, and danced with her, now that for so many hours they had lived together in such close proximity, it seemed unbelievable that such things should have befallen her.

If ever anything looked like pure chance it was that Lydia and Robert Berger met at all. Through the friends she lived with, who worked in a Russian restaurant, Lydia sometimes got a ticket for a concert, and when she couldn’t and there was something she very much wanted to hear, she scraped together out of her weekly earnings enough to buy herself standing-room. This was her only extravagance and to go to a concert her only recreation. It was chiefly Russian music she liked. Listening to that she felt that somehow she was getting to the heart of the country she had never seen, but which drew her with a yearning that must ever remain unsatisfied. She knew nothing of Russia but what she had heard from the lips of her father and mother, from the conversations between Evgenia and Alexey when they talked of old times, and from the novels she had read. It was when she was listening to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov, to the racy and mordant compositions of Stravinsky, that the impressions she had thus gained gathered form and substance. Those wild melodies, those halting rhythms, in which there was something so alien from Europe, took her out of herself and her sordid existence and overwhelmed her with such a passion of love that happy, releasing tears flowed down her cheeks. But because nothing of what she saw with the mind’s eye had she seen with a bodily eye, because it was a product of hearsay and a fevered imagination, she saw it in a strangely distorted fashion; she saw the Kremlin, with its gilt and star-sprinkled domes, the Red Square and the Kitai Gorod, as though they were the setting of a fairy tale; for her Prince Andrey and the charming Natasha still went their errands in the busy streets of Moscow, Dmitri Karamazov, after a wild night with the gipsies, still met the sweet Alyosha on the Mostbaretsk Bridge, the merchant Rogozhin dashed past in his sled with Nastasya Filippovna by his side, and the wan characters of Chekov’s stories drifted hither and yon at the breath of circumstance like dead leaves before the wind; the Summer Garden and the Nevsky Prospekt were magic names, and Anna Karenina still drove in her carriage, Vronsky elegant in his new uniform climbed the stairs of the great houses on the Fontanka Canal, and the misbegotten Raskolnikov walked the Liteiny. In the passion and nostalgia of that music, with Turgeniev at the back of her mind, she saw the spacious, dilapidated country houses where they talked through the scented night, and the marshes, pale in the windless dawn, where they shot the wild duck; with Gorki, the wretched villages where they drank furiously, loved brutally and killed; the turbid flow of the Volga, the interminable steppes of the Caucasus, and the enchanting garish Crimea. Filled with longing, filled with regret for a life that had passed for ever, homesick for a home she had never known, a stranger in a hostile world, she felt at that moment one with the great, mysterious country. Even though she spoke its language haltingly, she was Russian, and she loved her native land; at such moments she felt that there was where after all she belonged and she understood how it was that her father, despite the warnings, was obliged, even at the risk of death, to return to it.

It was at a concert, one where all the music was Russian, that she found herself standing next to a young man who, she noticed, now and then looked at her curiously. Once she happened to turn her eyes on him and was struck by the passionate absorption with which he seemed to be listening; his hands were clasped and his mouth slightly open as though he were out of breath. He was rapt in ecstasy. He had clean-cut features and looked well-bred. Lydia gave him but a passing glance and once more returned to the music and the crowding dreams it awoke in her. She too was carried away and she was hardly aware that a little sob broke from her lips. She was startled when she felt a small, soft hand take hers and give it a slight pressure. She quickly drew her hand away. The piece was the last before the interval and when it ended the young man turned to her. He had lovely eyes, gray under bushy eyebrows, and they were peculiarly gentle.

‘You’re crying, Mademoiselle.’

She had thought he might be Russian like herself, but his accent was purely French. She understood that that quick pressure of her hand was one of instinctive sympathy, and was touched by it.

‘Not because I am unhappy,’ she answered, with a faint smile.

He smiled back and his smile was charming.

‘I know. This Russian music, it’s strangely thrilling and yet it tears one’s heart to pieces.’

‘But you’re French. What can it mean to you?’

‘Yes. I’m French. I don’t know what it means to me. It’s the only music I want to listen to. It is power and passion, blood and destruction. It makes every nerve in my body tingle.’ He gave a little laugh at himself. ‘Sometimes when I listen to it I feel there is nothing that man is capable of that I cannot do.’

She did not answer. It was singular that the same music could say such different things to different people. To her the music they had just heard spoke of the tragedy of human destiny, the futility of striving against fate, and the joy, the peace of humility and resignation.

‘Are you coming to next week’s concert?’ he asked then. ‘That’s to be all Russian too.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

He was very young, he could be no older than herself, and there was an ingenuousness to him that made it impossible for her to answer too stiffly a question which in a stranger was indiscreet. There was something in his manner that made her sure he was not trying to pick her up. She smiled.

‘I’m not a millionaire. They’re rare now, you know, the Russians who are.’

‘I know some of the people who are running these concerts. I have a pass that admits two. If you like to meet me next Sunday in the doorway, you can come in on it.’

‘I don’t think I could quite do that.’

‘Do you think it would be compromising?’ he smiled. ‘The crowd would surely be a sufficient chaperon.’

‘I work in a dressmaker’s shop. It would be hard to compromise me. I don’t know that I can put myself under an obligation to a total stranger.’

‘I am sure you are a very well-brought-up young lady, but you should not have unreasonable prejudices.’

She did not want to argue the point.

‘Well, we’ll see. In any case I thank you for the suggestion.’

They talked of other things till the conductor once more raised his baton. At the end of the concert he turned to say good-bye to her.

‘Till next Sunday then?’ he said.

‘We’ll see. Don’t wait for me.’

They lost one another in the crowd that thronged towards the exits. During the next week she thought from time to time of the good-looking young man with the large gray eyes. She thought of him with pleasure. She had not arrived at her age without having had to resist now and then the advances of men. Both Alexey and his son the gigolo had made a pass at her, but she had not found it difficult to deal with them. A smart box on the ear had made the lachrymose drunkard understand that there was nothing doing, and the boy she had kept quiet by a judicious mingling of ridicule and plain speech. Often enough men had tried to pick her up in the street, but she was always too tired and often too hungry to be tempted by their advances; it caused her a grim amusement to reflect that the offer of a square meal would have tempted her much more than the offer of a loving heart. She had felt, with her woman’s instinct, that the young man of the concert was not quite like that. Doubtless, like any other youth of his age, he would not miss an opportunity for a bit of fun if he could get it, but it was not for the sake of that that he had offered to take her to the concert on Sunday. She had no intention of going, but she was touched that he had asked her. There was something very nice about him, something ingenuous and frank. She felt that she could trust him. She looked at the programme. They were giving the Symphonie Pathétique, she didn’t much care about that, Tchaikovsky was too Europeanized for her taste, but they were giving also the Sacre du Printemps and Borodin’s string quartet. She wondered whether the young man had really meant what he said. It might very well be that his invitation had been issued on the spur of the moment and in half an hour completely forgotten. When Sunday came she had half a mind to go and see, she did very much want to hear the concert, and she had not a penny more in her pocket than she needed for her Metro and her lunches during the week, she had had to give everything else to Evgenia to provide the household with food; if he was not there no harm would have been done, and if he was and really had a pass for two, well, it would cost him nothing and committed her to nothing.

Finally an impulse took her to the Salle Pleyel and there he was, where he had said he would be, waiting for her. His eyes lit up and he shook her warmly by the hand as though they were old friends.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes. I was so afraid I’d miss you.’

She blushed and smiled. They went into the concert room and she found he had seats in the fifth row.

‘Did you get these given you?’ she asked with surprise.

‘No, I bought them. I thought it would be nice to be comfortable.’

‘What folly! I’m so used to standing.’

But she was flattered by his generosity and when presently he took her hand did not withdraw it. She felt that if it gave him pleasure to hold it, it did her no harm, and she owed him that. During the interval he told her his name, Robert Berger, and she told him hers. He added that he lived with his mother at Neuilly and that he worked in a broker’s office. He talked in an educated way, with a boyish enthusiasm that made her laugh, and there was an animation about him that Lydia could not but feel attractive. His shining eyes, the mobility of his face, suggested an ardent nature. To sit next to him was like sitting in front of a fire; his youth glowed with a physical warmth. When the concert was over they walked along the Champs-Élysées together and then he asked her if she would like some tea. He would not let her refuse. It was a luxury Lydia had never known to sit in a smart tea-shop among well-dressed people, and the appetising smell of cakes, the heady smell of women’s perfume, the warmth, the comfortable chairs, the noisy talk, went to her head. They sat there for an hour. Lydia told him about herself, what her father had been and what had happened to him, how she lived now and how she earned her living; he listened as eagerly as he talked. His gray eyes were tender with sympathy. When it was time for her to go he asked her whether she would come to a cinema one evening. She shook her head.

‘Why not?’

‘You are a rich young man, and . . .’

‘Oh, no, I’m not. Far from it. My mother has little more than her pension and I have only the little I make.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have tea at expensive tea-rooms. Anyhow I am a poor working girl. Thank you for all your kindness to me, but I am not a fool; you have been sweet to me, I don’t think it would be very nice of me to accept more of your kindness when I can make no return for it.’

‘But I don’t want a return. I like you. I like to be with you. Last Sunday, when you were crying, you looked so touching, it broke my heart. You’re alone in the world, and I – I’m alone too in my way. I was hoping we could be friends.’

She looked at him coolly for a moment. They were the same age, but of course really she was years older than he; his mien was so candid she had no doubt that he believed what he said, but she was wise enough to know that he was talking nonsense.

‘Let me be quite frank with you,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not a raving beauty, but after all I’m young and there are people who think me prettyish, people who like the Russian type, it’s asking too much of me to believe that you are seeking my society just for the pleasure of my conversation. I’ve never been to bed with a man. I don’t think it would be very honest of me if I let you go on wasting your time and your money on me when I have no intention of going to bed with you.’

‘That is frank enough in all conscience,’ he smiled, oh, so charmingly, ‘but you see, I knew that. I haven’t lived in Paris all my life without learning something. I know instinctively whether a girl is ready for a little fun or if she isn’t. I saw at once that you were good. If I held your hand at the concert it was because you were feeling the music as deeply as I was, and the touch of your hand – I hardly know how to explain it – I felt that your emotion flowed into me and gave mine a richer intensity. Anyhow there was in my feeling nothing of desire.’

‘And yet we were feeling very different things,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Once I looked at your face and I was startled by its expression. It was cruel and ruthless. It was not like a human face any more, it was a mask of triumphant malice. It frightened me.’

He laughed gaily and his laugh was so young, so musical and care-free, the look of his eyes so tenderly frank, it was impossible to believe that for a moment under the influence of that emotional music his features had borne an expression of such cold ferocity.

‘What fancies you have! You don’t think I am a white-slaver, like at the cinema, and that I am trying to get you into my clutches and shall then ship you out to Buenos Aires?’

‘No,’ she smiled, ‘I don’t think that.’

‘How can it hurt you to come to the pictures with me? You’ve made the position quite clear and I accept it.’

She laughed now. It was absurd to make so much fuss. She had little enough amusement in her life, and if he liked to give her a treat and was content merely to sit beside her and to talk, she would be a fool to forgo it. After all, she was nothing. She need answer for her actions to nobody. She could take care of herself and she had given him full warning.

‘Oh, very well,’ she said.

They went to the pictures several times and after the show Robert accompanied Lydia to whichever was the nearest station for her to get a train home. During the little walk he took her arm and for a part of the performance he held her hand, once or twice when they parted he kissed her lightly on both cheeks, but these were the only familiarities he permitted himself. He was good company. He had a chaffing, ironic way of talking about things that pleased her. He did not pretend to have read very much, he had no time, he said, and life was more entertaining than books, but he was not stupid and he could speak intelligently of such books as he had read. It interested Lydia to discover that he had a peculiar admiration for André Gide. He was an enthusiastic tennis-player and he told her that at one time he had been encouraged to take it seriously; people of importance in the game, thinking he had the making of a champion, had interested themselves in him. But nothing came of it.

‘One needs more money and more time to get into the first rank than I could dispose of,’ he said.

Lydia had a notion that he was in love with her, but she would not allow herself to be certain of it, for she could not but fear that her own feelings made her no safe judge of his. He occupied her thoughts more and more. He was the first friend of her own age that she had ever had. She owed him happy hours at the concerts he took her to on Sunday afternoons, and happy evenings at the cinema. He gave her life an interest and excitement it had never had before. For him she took pains to dress more prettily. She had never been in the habit of making up, but on the fourth or fifth time she met him she rouged her cheeks a little and made up her eyes.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ he said, when they got into the light. ‘Why have you been putting all that stuff on your face?’

She laughed and blushed under her rouge.

‘I wanted to be a little more of a credit to you. I couldn’t bear that people should think you were with a little kitchen-maid who’d just come up to Paris from her native province.’

‘But almost the first thing I liked in you was that you were so natural. One gets so tired of all these painted faces. I don’t know why, I found it touching that you had nothing on your pale cheeks, nothing on your lips, nothing on your eyebrows. It was refreshing, like a little wood that you come into after you’ve been walking in the glare of the road. Having no make-up on gives you a look of candour and one feels it is a true expression of the uprightness of your soul.’

Her heart began to beat almost painfully, but it was that curious sort of pain which is more blissful than pleasure.

‘Well, if you don’t like it, I’ll not do it again. After all, I only did it for your sake.’

She looked with an inattentive mind at the picture he had brought her to see. She had mistrusted the tenderness in his musical voice, the smiling softness of his eyes, but after this it was almost impossible not to believe that he loved her. She had been exercising all the self-control she possessed to prevent herself from falling in love with him. She had kept on saying to herself that it was only a passing fancy on his part and that it would be madness if she let her feelings run away with her. She was determined not to become his mistress. She had seen too much of that sort of thing among the Russians, the daughters of refugees who had so much difficulty in making any sort of living; often enough, because they were bored, because they were sick of grinding poverty, they entered upon an affair, but it never lasted; they seemed to have no capacity for holding a man, at least not the Frenchmen whom they generally fell for; their lovers grew tired of them, or impatient, and chucked them; then they were even worse off than they had been before, and often nothing remained but the brothel. But what else was there that she could hope for? She knew very well he had no thought of marriage. The possibility of such a thing would never have crossed his head. She knew French ideas. His mother would not consent to his marrying a Russian sewing-woman, which was all she was really, without a penny to bless herself with. Marriage in France was a serious thing; the position of the respective families must be on a par and the bride had to bring a dowry comformable with the bridegroom’s situation. It was true that her father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university, but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual labour. Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable. People were sick of them. Lydia’s mother, whose grandfather had been a serf, was herself hardly more than a peasant, and the professor had married her in accordance with his liberal principles; but she was a pious woman and Lydia had been brought up with strict principles. It was in vain that she reasoned with herself; it was true that the world was different now and one must move with the times: she could not help it, she had an instinctive horror of becoming a man’s mistress. And yet. And yet. What else was there to look forward to? Wasn’t she a fool to miss the opportunity that presented itself? She knew that her prettiness was only the prettiness of youth, in a few years she would be drab and plain; perhaps she would never have another chance. Why shouldn’t she let herself go? Only a little relaxation of her self-control and she would love him madly, it would be a relief not to keep that constant rein on her feelings, and he loved her, yes, he loved her, she knew it, the fire of his passion was so hot it made her gasp, in the eagerness of his mobile face she read his fierce desire to possess her; it would be heavenly to be loved by someone she loved to desperation, and if it didn’t last, and of course it couldn’t, she would have had the ecstasy of it, she would have the recollection, and wouldn’t that be worth all the anguish, the bitter anguish she must suffer when he left her? When all was said and done, if it was intolerable there was always the Seine or the gas oven.

But the curious, the inexplicable, thing was that he didn’t seem to want her to be his mistress. He used her with a consideration that was full of respect. He could not have behaved differently if she had been a young girl in the circle of his family acquaintance whose situation and fortune made it reasonable to suppose that their friendship would eventuate in a marriage satisfactory to all parties. She could not understand it. She knew that the notion was absurd, but in her bones she had a queer inkling that he wished to marry her. She was touched and flattered. If it was true he was one in a thousand, but she almost hoped it wasn’t, for she couldn’t bear that he should suffer the pain that such a wish must necessarily bring him; whatever crazy ideas he harboured, there was his mother in the background, the sensible, practical, middle-class Frenchwoman, who would never let him jeopardize his future and to whom he was devoted as only a Frenchman can be to his mother.

But one evening, after the cinema, when they were walking to the Metro station he said to her:

‘There’s no concert next Sunday. Will you come and have tea at home? I’ve talked about you so much to my mother that she’d like to make your acquaintance.’

Lydia’s heart stood still. She realized the situation at once. Madame Berger was getting anxious about this friendship that her son had formed, and she wanted to see her, the better to put an end to it.

‘My poor Robert, I don’t think your mother would like me at all. I think it’s much wiser we shouldn’t meet.’

‘You’re quite wrong. She has a great sympathy for you. The poor woman loves me, you know, I’m all she has in the world, and it makes her happy to think that I’ve made friends with a young girl who is well brought up and respectable.’

Lydia smiled. How little he knew women if he imagined that a loving mother could feel kindly towards a girl that her son had casually picked up at a concert! But he pressed her so strongly to accept the invitation, which he said he issued on his mother’s behalf, that at last she did. She thought indeed that it would only make Madame Berger look upon her with increased suspicion if she refused to meet her. They arranged that he should pick her up at the Porte St Denis at four on the following Sunday and take her to his mother’s. He drove up in a car.

‘What luxury!’ said Lydia, as she stepped in.

‘It’s not mine, you know. I borrowed it from a friend.’

Lydia was nervous of the ordeal before her and not even Robert’s affectionate friendliness sufficed to give her confidence.

They drove to Neuilly.

‘We’ll leave the car here,’ said Robert, drawing up to the kerb in a quiet street. ‘I don’t want to leave it outside our house. It wouldn’t do for the neighbours to think I had a car and of course I can’t explain that it’s only lent.’

They walked a little.

‘Here we are.’

It was a tiny detached villa, rather shabby from want of paint and smaller than, from the way Robert had talked, she expected. He took her into the drawing-room. It was a small room crowded with furniture and ornaments, with oil pictures in gold frames on the walls, and opened by an archway on to the dining-room in which the table was set for tea. Madame Berger put down the novel she was reading and came forward to greet her guest. Lydia had pictured her as a rather stout, short woman in widow’s weeds, with a mild face and the homely, respectable air of a person who has given up all thought of earthly vanity; she was not at all like that; she was thin, and in her high-heeled shoes as tall as Robert; she was smartly dressed in black flowered silk and she wore a string of false pearls round her neck; her hair, permanently waved, was very dark brown and though she must have been hard on fifty there was not a white streak in it. Her sallow skin was somewhat heavily powdered. She had fine eyes, Robert’s delicate, straight nose, and the same thin lips, but in her, age had given them a certain hardness. She was in her way and for her time of life a good-looking woman, and she evidently took pains over her appearance, but there was in her expression nothing of the charm that made Robert so attractive. Her eyes, so bright and dark, were cool and watchful. Lydia felt the sharp, scrutinizing look with which Madame Berger took her in from head to foot as she entered the room, but it was immediately superseded by a cordial and welcoming smile. She thanked Lydia effusively for coming so long a distance to see her.

‘You must understand how much I wanted to see a young girl of whom my son has talked to me so much. I was prepared for a disagreeable surprise. I have, to tell you the truth, no great confidence in my son’s judgement. It is a relief to me to see that you are as nice as he told me you were.’

All this she said with a good deal of facial expression, with smiles and little nods of the head, flatteringly, in the manner of a hostess accustomed to society trying to set a stranger at her ease. Lydia, watchful too, answered with becoming diffidence. Madame Berger gave an emphatic, slightly forced laugh and made an enthusiastic little gesture.

‘But you are charming. I’m not surprised that this son of mine should neglect his old mother for your sake.’

Tea was brought in by a stolid-looking young maid whom Madame Berger, while continuing her gesticulative, complimentary remarks, watched with sharp, anxious eyes, so that Lydia guessed that a tea-party was an unusual event in the house and the hostess not quite sure that the servant knew how to set about things. They went into the dining-room and sat down. There was a small grand piano in it.

‘It takes up room,’ said Madame Berger, ‘but my son is passionately devoted to music. He plays for hours at a time. He tells me that you are a musician of the first class.’

‘He exaggerates. I’m very fond of it, but very ignorant.’

‘You are too modest, mademoiselle.’

There was a dish of little cakes from the confectioner’s and a dish of sandwiches. Under each plate was a doyley and on each a tiny napkin. Madame Berger had evidently taken pains to do things in a modish way. With a smile in her cold eyes she asked Lydia how she would like her tea.

‘You Russians always take lemon, I know, and I got a lemon for you specially. Will you begin with a sandwich?’

The tea tasted of straw.

‘I know you Russians smoke all through your meals. Please do not stand on any ceremony with me. Robert, where are the cigarettes?’

Madame Berger pressed sandwiches on Lydia, she pressed cakes; she was one of those hostesses who look upon it as a mark of hospitality to make their guests eat however unwilling they may be. She talked without ceasing, well, in a high-pitched, metallic voice, smiling a great deal, and her politeness was effusive. She asked Lydia a great many questions, which had a casual air so that on the face of it they looked like the civil inquiries a woman of the world would put out of sympathy for a friendless girl, but Lydia realized that they were cleverly designed to find out everything she could about her. Lydia’s heart sank; this was not the sort of woman who for love of her son would allow him to do an imprudent thing; but the certainty of this gave her back her own assurance. It was obvious that she had nothing to lose; she certainly had nothing to hide; and she answered the questions with frankness. She told Madame Berger, as she had already told Robert, about her father and mother, and what her life had been in London and how she had lived since her mother’s death. It even amused her to see behind Madame Berger’s warm sympathy, through her shocked commiserating answers, the shrewdness that weighed every word she heard and drew conclusions upon it. After two or three unavailing attempts to go, which Madame Berger would not hear of, Lydia managed to tear herself away from so much friendliness. Robert was to see her home. Madame Berger seized both her hands when she said good-bye to her and her fine dark eyes glittered with cordiality.

‘You are delicious,’ she said. ‘You know your way now, you must come and see me often, often; you will be always sure of a hearty welcome.’

When they were walking along to the car Robert took her arm with an affectionate gesture which seemed to ask for protection rather than to offer it and which charmed her.

‘Well, my dear one, it went off very well. My mother liked you. You made a conquest of her at once. She’ll adore you.’

Lydia laughed.

‘Don’t be silly. She detested me.’

‘No, no, you’re wrong. I promise you. I know her, I saw at once that she took to you.’

Lydia shrugged her shoulders, but did not answer. When they parted they arranged to go to the cinema on the following Tuesday. She agreed to his plan, but she was pretty sure that his mother would put a stop to it. He knew her address now.

‘If anything should happen to prevent you, you’ll send me a petit bleu?’

‘Nothing will happen to prevent me,’ he said fondly.

She was very sad that evening. If she could have got by herself she would have cried. But perhaps it was just as well that she couldn’t; it was no good making oneself bad blood. It had been a foolish dream. She would get over her unhappiness; after all, she was used to it. It would have been much worse if he had been her lover and thrown her over.

Monday passed, Tuesday came; but no petit bleu. She was certain that it would be there when she got back from work. Nothing. She had an hour before she need think of getting ready, and she passed it waiting with sickening anxiety for the bell to ring; she dressed with the feeling that she was foolish to take the trouble, for the message would arrive before she was finished. She wondered if it were possible that he would let her go to the cinema and not turn up. It would be heartless, it would be cruel, but she knew that he was under his mother’s thumb, she suspected he was weak, and it might be that to let her go to a meeting-place and not come himself would seem to him the best way, brutal though it was, to show her that he was done with her. No sooner had this notion occurred to her than she was sure of it and she nearly decided not to go. Nevertheless she went. After all, if he could be so beastly it would prove that she was well rid of him.

But he was there all right and when he saw her walking along he came towards her with the springy gait which marked his eager vitality. On his face shone his sweet smile. His spirits seemed even higher than usual.

‘I’m not in the mood for the pictures this evening,’ he said. ‘Let us have a drink at Fouquet’s and then go for a drive. I’ve got a car just round the corner.’

‘If you like.’

It was fine and dry, though cold, and the stars in the frosty night seemed to laugh with a good-natured malice at the gaudy lights of the Champs-Élysées. They had a glass of beer, Robert meanwhile talking nineteen to the dozen, and then they walked up the Avenue George V to where he had parked his car. Lydia was puzzled. He talked quite naturally, but she had no notion what were his powers of dissimulation, and she could not help asking herself whether he proposed the drive in order to break unhappy news to her. He was an emotional creature, sometimes, she had discovered, even a trifle theatrical, (but that amused rather than offended her), and she wondered whether he were setting the stage for an affecting scene of renunciation.

‘This isn’t the same car that you had on Sunday,’ she said, when they came to it.

‘No. It belongs to a friend who wants to sell. I said I wanted to show it to a possible purchaser.’

They drove to the Arc de Triomphe and then along the Avenue Foch till they came to the Bois. It was dark there except when they met the head-lights of a car coming towards them, and deserted except for a car parked here and there in which one surmised a couple was engaged in amorous conversation. Presently Robert drew up at the kerb.

‘Shall we stop here and smoke a cigarette?’ he said. ‘You’re not cold?’

‘No.’

It was a solitary spot and in other circumstances Lydia might have felt a trifle nervous. But she thought she knew Robert well enough to know that he was incapable of taking advantage of the situation. He had too nice a nature. Moreover she had an intuition that he had something on his mind, and was curious to know what it was. He lit her cigarette and his and for a moment kept silent. She realized that he was embarrassed and did not know how to begin. Her heart began to beat anxiously.

‘I’ve got something to say to you, my dear,’ he said at last.

‘Yes?’

‘Mon Dieu, I hardly know how to put it. I’m not often nervous, but at the moment I have a curious sensation that is quite new to me.’

Lydia’s heart sank, but she had no intention of showing that she was suffering.

‘If one has something awkward to say,’ she answered lightly, ‘it’s better to say it quite plainly, you know. One doesn’t do much good by beating about the bush.’

‘I’ll take you at your word. Will you marry me?’

‘Me?’

It was the last thing she had expected him to say.

‘I love you passionately. I think I fell in love with you at first sight, when we stood side by side at that concert, and the tears poured down your pale cheeks.’

‘But your mother?’

‘My mother is delighted. She’s waiting now. I said that if you consented I would take you to her. She wants to embrace you. She’s happy at the thought that I’m settling down with someone she entirely approves of, and the idea is that after we’ve all had a good cry together we should crack a bottle of champagne.’

‘Last Sunday when you took me to see your mother, had you told her that you wished to marry me?’

‘But of course. She very naturally wanted to see what you were like. She’s not stupid, my mother; she made up her mind at once.’

‘I had an idea she didn’t like me.’

‘You were wrong.’

They smiled into one another’s eyes, and she raised her face to his. For the first time he kissed her on the lips.

‘There’s no doubt,’ he said, ‘that a right-hand drive is much more convenient for kissing a girl than a left-hand.’

‘You fool,’ she laughed.

‘Then you do care for me a little?’

‘I’ve worshipped you ever since I first saw you.’

‘But with the reserve of a well-brought up young woman who will not give free rein to her emotions until she’s quite sure it’s prudent?’ he answered, tenderly chaffing her.

But she answered seriously:

‘I’ve suffered so much in my short life, I didn’t want to expose myself to a suffering perhaps greater than I could bear.’

‘I adore you.’

She had never known such happiness; indeed, she could hardly bring herself to believe it: at that moment her heart overflowed with gratitude to life. She would have liked to sit there, nestling in his arms, for ever; at that moment she would have liked to die. But she bestirred herself.

‘Let us go to your mother,’ she said.

She felt on a sudden warm with love for that woman who but just knew her, and yet, contrary to all expectation, because her son loved her, because with her sharp eyes she had seen that she deeply loved her son, had consented, even gladly, to their marriage. Lydia did not think there could be another woman in France who was capable of such a sacrifice.

They drove off. Robert parked the car in a street parallel to the one in which he lived. When they reached the little house he opened the front door with his latchkey and excitedly preceded Lydia into the sitting-room.

‘O.K., mother.’

Lydia immediately followed him in and Madame Berger, in the same black dress of flowered silk as she had worn on Sunday, came forward and took her in her arms.

‘My dear child,’ she cried. ‘I’m so happy.’

Lydia burst into tears. Madame Berger kissed her tenderly.

‘There, there, there! You mustn’t cry. I give you my son with all my heart. I know you’ll make him a good wife. Come, sit down. Robert will open a bottle of champagne.’

Lydia composed herself and dried her eyes.

‘You are too good to me, Madame. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve so much kindness.’

Madame Berger took her hand and gently patted it.

‘You have fallen in love with my son and he has fallen in love with you.’

Robert had gone out of the room. Lydia felt that she must at once state the facts as they were.

‘But, Madame, I don’t feel sure that you realize the circumstances. The little money that my father was able to get out of Russia went years ago. I have nothing but what I earn. Nothing, absolutely nothing. And only two dresses besides the one I’m wearing.’

‘But, my dear child, what does that matter? Oh, I don’t deny it, I should have been pleased if you had been able to bring Robert a reasonable dot, but money isn’t everything. Love is more important. And nowadays what is money worth? I flatter myself that I am a good judge of character and it didn’t take me long to discover that you have a sweet and honest nature. I saw that you had been well brought up and I judged that you had good principles. After all that is what one wants in a wife, and you know, I know my Robert, he would never have been happy with a little French bourgeoise. He has a romantic disposition and it says something to him that you are Russian. And it isn’t as if you were nobody; it is after all something one need not be ashamed of to be the daughter of a professor.’

Robert came in with glasses and a bottle of champagne. They sat talking late into the night. Madame Berger had her plan cut and dried and they could do nothing but accept it; Lydia and Robert should live in the house while she would make herself comfortable in the little pavilion at the back of the garden. They would have their meals in common, but otherwise she would keep to her own quarters. She was decided that the young couple must be left to themselves and not exposed to interference from her.

‘I don’t want you to look upon me as a mother-in-law,’ she told Lydia. ‘I want to be the mother to you that you’ve lost, but I also want to be your friend.’

She was anxious that the marriage should take place without delay. Lydia had a League of Nations passport and a Carte de Séjour; her papers were in order; so they had only to wait the time needed for notification to be made at the Mairie. Since Robert was Catholic and Lydia Orthodox, they decided, notwithstanding Madame Berger’s reluctance, to waive a religious ceremony that neither of them cared about. Lydia was too excited and too confused to sleep that night.

The marriage took place very quietly. The only persons present were Madame Berger and an old friend of the family, Colonel Legrand, an army doctor who had been a brother officer of Robert’s father; Evgenia and Alexey and their children. It took place on a Friday and since Robert had to go to work on the Monday morning their honeymoon was brief. Robert drove Lydia to Dieppe in a car that he had been lent and drove her back on Sunday night.

Lydia did not know that the car, like the cars in which he had on other occasions driven her, was not lent, but stolen; that was why he had always parked them a street or two from that in which he lived; she did not know that Robert had a few months before been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with sursis, that is, with a suspended sentence because it was his first conviction; she did not know that he had since been tried on a charge of smuggling drugs and had escaped conviction by the skin of his teeth; she did not know that Madame Berger had welcomed the marriage because she thought it would settle Robert and that it was indeed the only chance he had of leading an honest life.

CHAPTER 5

CHARLEY HAD NO idea how long he had been sitting at the window, absent-mindedly gazing out into the dark court, when he was called back from the perplexed welter of his thoughts by the sound of Lydia’s voice.

‘I believe I’ve been asleep,’ she said.

‘You certainly have.’

He turned on the light, which he had not done before for fear of waking her. The fire was almost out and he put on another log.

‘I feel so refreshed. I slept without dreaming.’

‘D’you have bad dreams?’

‘Fearful.’

‘If you’ll dress we might go out to dinner.’

There was an ironic, but not unkindly, quality in the smile she gave him.

‘I don’t suppose this is the way you usually spend Christmas Day.’

‘I’m bound to say it isn’t,’ he answered, with a cheerful grin.

She went into the bathroom and he heard her having a bath. She came back still wearing his dressing-gown.

‘Now if you’ll go in and wash, I’ll dress.’

Charley left her. He accepted it as quite natural that though she had slept all night in the next bed to his she should not care to dress in his presence.

Lydia took him to a restaurant she knew in the Avenue du Maine where she said the food was good. Though a trifle self-consciously old-world, with its panelled walls, chintz curtains and pewter plates, it was a friendly little place, and there was no one there but two middle-aged women in collars and ties and three young Indians who ate in moody silence. You had a feeling that, lonely and friendless, they dined there that evening because they had no place to go.

Lydia and Charley sat in a corner where their conversation could not be overheard. Lydia ate with hearty appetite. When he offered her a second helping of one of the dishes they had ordered she pushed forward her plate.

‘My mother-in-law used to complain of my appetite. She used to say that I ate as though I had never had enough in my life. Which was true, of course.’

It gave Charley a turn. It was a queer sensation to sit down to dinner with someone who year in and year out had never had quite enough to eat. And another thing: it disturbed his preconceived ideas to discover that one could undergo all the misery she had undergone and yet eat voraciously. It made her tragedy a little grotesque; she was not a romantic figure, but just a quite ordinary young woman, and that somehow made all that had happened to her more horrible.

‘Did you get on well with your mother-in-law?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Reasonably. She wasn’t a bad woman. She was hard, scheming, practical and avaricious. She was a good housekeeper and she liked everything in the house to be just so. I used to infuriate her with my Russian sloppiness, but she had a great control over her temper and never allowed an irritable word to escape her. After Robert, her great passion was for respectability. She was proud of her father having been a staff officer and her husband a colonel in the Medical Service. They were both officers in the Legion of Honour. Her husband had lost a leg in the war. She was very proud of their distinguished record, and she had a keen sense of the social importance their position gave her. I suppose you’d say she was a snob, but in such a petty way that it didn’t offend you, it only made you laugh. She had notions of morality that foreigners often think are unusual in France. For instance, she had no patience with women who were unfaithful to their husbands, but she looked upon it as natural enough that men should deceive their wives. She would never have dreamt of accepting an invitation unless she had the power to return it. Once she’d made a bargain she’d stick to it even though it turned out to be a bad one. Though she counted every penny she spent she was scrupulously honest, honest by principle and honest from loyalty to her family. She had a deep sense of justice. She knew she’d acted dishonourably in letting me marry Robert in the dark, and should at least have given me the chance of deciding whether, knowing all, I would marry him or not – and of course I would never have hesitated; but she didn’t know that, and she thought that I should have good cause to blame her when I found out and all she could answer was that where Robert was concerned she was prepared to sacrifice anyone else; and because of that she forced herself to be tolerant of a great deal in me that she didn’t like. She put all her determination, all her self-control, all her tact, into the effort of making the marriage a success. She felt it was the only chance that Robert had of reforming and her love was so great that she was prepared to lose him to me. She was even prepared to lose her influence over him, and that I think is what a woman values, whether it’s a son or a husband or a lover or anything, even more than his love for her. She said that she wouldn’t interfere with us and she never did. Except in the kitchen, later on when we gave up the maid, and at meal-times, we hardly saw her. When she wasn’t out she spent the whole time in her little pavilion at the end of the garden and when, thinking she was lonely, we asked her to come and sit with us, she refused on the excuse that she had work to do, letters to write, or a book she wanted to finish. She was a woman whom it was difficult to love, but impossible not to respect.’

‘What has happened to her now?’ asked Charley.

‘The cost of the trial ruined her. Most of her small fortune had already gone to keep Robert out of prison and the rest went on lawyers. She had to sell the house which was the mainstay of her pride in her position as an officer’s widow and she had to mortgage her pension. She was always a good cook, she’s gone as general servant in the apartment of an American who has a studio at Auteuil.’

‘D’you ever see her?’

‘No. Why should I? We have nothing in common. Her interest in me ceased when I could be no further use in keeping Robert straight.’

Lydia went on to tell him about her married life. It was a pleasure for her to have a house of her own and heaven not to have to go to work every morning. She soon discovered that there was no money to waste, but compared with what she had been used to, the circumstances in which she now lived were affluent. And at least she had security. Robert was sweet to her, he was easy to live with, inclined to let her wait on him, but she loved him so much that this was a delight to her, gay with an impudent, happy-go-lucky cynicism that made her laugh, and brim-full of vitality. He was generous to a fault considering how poor they were. He gave her a gold wrist-watch and a vanity case that must have cost at least a couple of thousand francs and a bag in crocodile skin. She was surprised to find a tram ticket in one of the pockets, and when she asked Robert how it got there, he laughed. He said he had bought the bag off a girl who had had a bad day at the races. Her lover had only just given it her and it was such a bargain that he had not been able to resist buying it. Now and then he took her to the theatre and then they went to Montmartre to dance. When she wanted to know how he had the money for such extravagance he answered gaily that with the world full of fools it would be absurd if a clever man couldn’t get on to a good thing now and again. But these excursions they kept secret from Madame Berger. Lydia would have thought it impossible to love Robert more than when she married him, but every day increased her passion. He was not only a charming lover, but also a delightful companion.

About four months after their marriage Robert lost his job. This created a disturbance in the household that she failed to understand, for his salary had been negligible; but he and his mother shut themselves up in the pavilion for a long time, and when Lydia saw her mother-in-law next it was obvious that she had been crying. Her face was haggard and she gave Lydia a look of sullen exasperation as though she blamed her. Lydia could not make it out. Then the old doctor, the friend of the family, Colonel Legrand, came and the three of them were again closeted in Madame Berger’s room. For two or three days Robert was silent and for the first time since she had known him somewhat irritable; when she asked him what was the matter he told her sharply not to bother. Then, thinking perhaps that he must offer some explanation, he said the whole trouble was that his mother was so avaricious. Lydia knew that though she was sparing, she was never so where her son was concerned, for him nothing was too good; but seeing that Robert was in a highly nervous state, she felt it better to say nothing. For two or three days Madame Berger looked dreadfully worried, but then, whatever the difficulty was, it was settled; she dismissed, however, the maid to keep whom had been almost a matter of principle, for so long as she had a servant Madame Berger could look upon herself as a lady. But now she told Lydia that it was a useless waste; the two of them could easily run the little house between them, and doing the marketing herself she could be sure of not being robbed; and besides, with nothing to do really, she would enjoy cooking. Lydia was only too willing to do the housework.

Life went on pretty much as it had before. Robert quickly regained his good humour and was as gay, loving and delightful as he had ever been. He got up late in the morning and went out to hunt for a job, and often he did not come back till late in the night. Madame Berger always had a good meal for Robert, but when the two women were alone they ate sparingly; a bowl of thin soup, a salad and a bit of cheese. It was plain that Madame Berger was harassed. More than once Lydia came into the kitchen and found her standing there, doing nothing, with her face distraught, as though an intolerable anxiety possessed her, but on Lydia’s approach she chased the expression away and busied herself with the work upon which she was engaged. She still kept up appearances, and on the ‘days’ of old friends dressed herself in her best, faintly rouged her cheeks, and sallied forth, very upright and a pattern of middle-class respectability, to pay her visit. After a short while, though he was still without a job, Robert seemed to have no less spending-money than he had before. He told Lydia that he had managed to sell one or two second-hand cars on commission; and then that he had got in with some racing men at a bar he went to and got tips from them. Lydia did not know why a suspicion insinuated itself into her unwilling mind that something was going on that was not above board. On one occasion an incident occurred which troubled her. One Sunday Robert told his mother that a man who, he hoped, was going to give him a job had asked him to bring Lydia to lunch at his house near Chartres and he was going to drive her down; but when they had started, picking up the car two streets off the one in which they lived, he told Lydia that this was an invention. He had had a bit of luck at the races on the previous Thursday and was taking her to lunch at Jouy. He had told his mother this story because she would look upon it as an unjustified extravagance to go and spend money at a restaurant. It was a warm and beautiful day. Luncheon was served in the garden and the place was crowded. They found two seats at a table that was already occupied by a party of four. This party were finishing their meal and left while they were but half through theirs.

‘Oh, look,’ said Robert, ‘one of those ladies has left her bag behind.’

He took it and, to Lydia’s surprise, opened it. She saw there was money inside. He looked quickly right and left then gave her a sharp, cunning, malicious glance. Her heart stood still. She had a conviction that he was just about to take the money out and put it in his pocket. She gasped with horror. But at that moment one of the men who had been at the table came back and saw Robert with the bag in his hands.

‘What are you doing with that bag?’ he asked.

Robert gave him his frank and charming smile.

‘It was left behind. I was looking to see if I could find out to whom it belonged.’

The man looked at him with stern, suspicious eyes.

‘You had only to give it to the proprietor.’

‘And do you think you would ever have got it back?’ Robert answered blandly, returning him the bag.

Without a word the man took it and went away.

‘Women are criminally careless with their bags,’ said Robert.

Lydia gave a sigh of relief. Her suspicion was absurd. After all, with people all around, no one could have the effrontery to steal money out of a bag; the risk was too great. But she knew every expression of Robert’s face and, unbelievable as it was, she was certain that he had intended to take it. He would have looked upon it as a capital joke.

She had resolutely put the occurrence out of her mind, but on that dreadful morning when she read in the paper that the English bookmaker, Teddie Jordan, had been murdered it returned to her. She remembered the look in Robert’s eyes. She had known then, in a horrible flash of insight, that he was capable of anything. She knew now what the stain was on his trousers. Blood! And she knew where those thousand-franc notes had come from. She knew also why, when he had lost his job, Robert had worn that sullen look, why his mother had been distracted and why Colonel Legrand, the doctor, had been closeted with mother and son for hours of agitated colloquy. Because Robert had stolen money. And if Madame Berger had sent away the maid and since then had skimped and saved, it was because she had had to pay a sum she could ill afford to save him from prosecution. Lydia read once more the account of the crime. Teddie Jordan lived alone in a ground-floor flat which the concierge kept clean for him. He had his meals out, but the concierge brought him his coffee every morning at nine. It was thus she had found him. He was lying on the floor, in his shirt-sleeves, a knife wound in his back, near the gramophone, with a broken record under him so that it looked as if he had been stabbed while changing it. His empty pocket-book was on the chimney-piece. There was a half-finished whiskey and soda on a table by the side of an armchair and another glass, unused, on a tray with the bottle of whiskey, a syphon and an uncut cake. It was obvious that he had been expecting a visitor, but the visitor had refused to drink. Death had taken place some hours before. The reporter had apparently conducted a small investigation of his own, but how much fact there was in what he narrated and how much fiction, it was hard to say. He had questioned the concierge, and from her learnt that so far as she knew no women ever came to the apartment, but a certain number of men, chiefly young, and from this she had drawn her own conclusions. Teddie Jordan was a good tenant, gave no trouble, and when in funds, was generous. The knife had been thrust into his back with such violence that, according to the reporter, the police were convinced that the murderer must have been a man of powerful physique. There were no signs of disorder in the room, which indicated that Jordan had been attacked suddenly and had had no chance to defend himself. The knife was not found, but stains on the window curtain showed that it had been wiped on it. The reporter went on to say that, though the police had looked with care, they had discovered no fingerprints; from this he concluded that the murderer had either wiped them away or worn gloves. In the first case it showed great coolness and in the second premeditation.

The reporter had then gone on to Jojo’s Bar. This was a small bar in a back street behind the Boulevard de la Madeleine, frequented by jockeys, bookmakers and betting men. You could get simple fare, bacon and eggs, sausages and chops, and it was here that Jordan regularly had his meals. It was here too that he did much of his business. The reporter learnt that Jordan was popular among the bar’s frequenters. He had his ups and downs, but when he had had a good day was open-handed. He was always ready to stand anyone a drink and was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone. All the same he had the reputation of being a pretty wily customer. Sometimes he was up against it and then would run up a fairly heavy bill, but in the end he always paid up. The reporter mentioned the concierge’s suspicions to Jojo, the proprietor of the bar, but was assured by him that there was no foundation for them. He ended his graphic story by saying that the police were actively engaged in making inquiries and expected to make an arrest within twenty-four hours.

Lydia was terrified. She did not doubt for a moment that Robert was guilty of the crime; she was as sure of that as if she had seen him commit it.

‘How could he? How could he?’ she cried.

But she was startled at the sound of her own voice. Even though the kitchen was empty she must not let her thoughts find expression. Her first, her only feeling was that he must be saved from the terrible danger that faced him. Whatever he had done, she loved him; nothing he could do would ever make her love him less. When it occurred to her that they might take him from her she could have screamed with anguish. Even at that moment she was intoxicated by the thought of his soft lips on hers and the feel of his slim body, still a boy’s body, in her arms. They said the knife-thrust had shown great violence, and they were looking for a big, powerful man. Robert was strong and wiry, but he was neither big nor powerful. And then there was what the concierge suspected. The police would hunt in the night-clubs and the cafés, in Montmartre and the Rue de Lappe, which the homosexuals frequented. Robert never went to such places and no one knew better than she how far he was from any abnormal inclination. It was true that he went a good deal to Jojo’s Bar, but so did many others; he went to get tips from the jockeys and better odds from the bookmakers than he was likely to get at the tote. It was all above board. There was no reason why suspicion should ever fall on him. The trousers had been destroyed, and who would ever think that Madame Berger, with her thrift, had persuaded Robert to buy a second pair? If the police discovered that Robert knew Jordan (and Jordan knew masses of people) and made an examination of the house (it was unlikely, but it might be that they would make enquiries of everyone with whom the bookmaker was known to have been friendly) they would find nothing. Except that little packet of thousand-franc notes. At the thought of them Lydia was panic-stricken. It would be easy to ascertain that they had been in straitened circumstances. Robert and she had always thought that his mother had a little hoard hidden away somewhere in her pavilion, but that doubtless had gone at the time Robert lost his job; if suspicion once fell on him it was inevitable that the police should discover what the trouble had been; and how then could she explain that she had several thousand francs? Lydia did not know how many notes there had been in the packet. Perhaps eight or ten. It was a substantial sum to poor people. It was a sum that Madame Berger, even though she knew how Robert had got the notes, would never have the courage to part with. She would trust in her own cunning to hide them where no one would think of looking. Lydia knew it would be useless to talk to her. No argument would move her in such a case. The only thing was to get at them herself and burn them. She would never have a moment’s peace till then. Then the police might come and no incriminating evidence could be discovered. With frenzied anxiety she set her mind to think where Madame Berger would have been most likely to put them. She did not often go into the pavilion, for Madame Berger did the room herself, but she had in her mind’s eye a pretty clear picture of it, and in her thought now she examined minutely every piece of furniture and every likely place of concealment. She determined to take the first opportunity to make a search.

The opportunity presented itself sooner than she could have foreseen. That very afternoon, after the meagre lunch which the two women had eaten in silence, Lydia was sitting in the parlour, sewing. She could not read, but she had to do something to calm the frightful disquietude that gnawed at her heartstrings. She heard Madame Berger come into the house and supposed she was going into the kitchen, but the door was opened.

‘If Robert comes back tell him I shall be in soon after five.’

To Lydia’s profound astonishment she saw that her mother-in-law was dressed in all her best. She wore her black dress of flowered silk and a black satin toque, and she had a silver fox round her neck.

‘Are you going out?’ Lydia cried.

‘Yes, it’s the last day of la générale. She would think it very ill-mannered of me if I did not put in an appearance. Both she and the general had a great affection for my poor husband.’

Lydia understood. She saw that in view of what might happen Madame Berger was determined that on that day of all others she must behave as she naturally would. To omit a social duty might be ascribed to fear that her son was implicated in the murder of the bookmaker. To fulfil it, on the other hand, was proof that the possibility had never entered her head. She was a woman of indomitable courage. Beside her, Lydia could only feel herself weak and womanish.

As soon as she was gone Lydia bolted the front door so that no one could come in without ringing and crossed the tiny garden. She gave it a cursory glance; there was a patch of weedy grass surrounded by a gravel walk, and in the middle of the grass a bed in which chrysanthemums had been planted to flower in the autumn. She had a conviction that her mother-in-law was more likely to have hidden the notes in her own apartment than there. The pavilion consisted of one largish room with a closet adjoining which Madame Berger had made into her dressing-room. The larger room was furnished with a highly carved bedroom suite in mahogany, a sofa, an armchair and a rosewood desk. On the walls were enlarged photographs of herself and her deceased husband, a photograph of his grave, under which hung his medals and his Legion of Honour, and photographs of Robert at various ages. Lydia considered where a woman of that sort would naturally hide something. She had doubtless a place that she always used, since for years she had had to keep her money where Robert could not find it. She was too cunning to choose such an obvious hiding-place as the bed, a secret drawer in the writing-desk, or the slits in the armchair and the sofa. There was no fireplace in the room, but a gas stove with an iron pipe. Lydia looked at it. She saw no possibility of concealing anything there; besides, in winter it was used, and Lydia thought her mother-in-law the sort of woman who, having found a safe place, would stick to it. She stared about her with perplexity. Because she could think of nothing better to do she unmade the bed and took the pillow out of its slip. She looked at it carefully and felt it over. The mattress was covered with a material so hard that she felt sure Madame Berger could not have cut one of the seams and re-sewn it. If she had used the same hiding-place for a long period it must be one that she could get at conveniently and such that, if she wanted to take money out, she could quickly efface all trace of her action. For form’s sake Lydia looked through the chest of drawers and the writing-desk. Nothing was locked and everything was carefully arranged. She looked into the wardrobe. Her mind had been working busily all the time. She had heard innumerable stories of how the Russians hid things, money and jewels, so that they might save them from the Bolsheviks. She had heard stories of extreme ingenuity that had been of no avail and of others in which by some miracle discovery had been averted. She remembered one of a woman who had been searched in the train between Moscow and Leningrad. She had been stripped to the skin, but she had sewn a diamond necklace in the hem of her fur-coat, and though it had been carefully examined the diamonds were overlooked. Madame Berger had a fur-coat too, an old astrakhan that she had had for years, and this was in the wardrobe. Lydia took it out and made a thorough search, but she could neither see nor feel anything. There was no sign of recent stitching. She replaced it and one by one took out the three or four dresses that Madame Berger possessed. There was no possibility that the notes could have been sewn up in any of them. Her heart sank. She was afraid that her mother-in-law had hidden the notes so well that she would never find them. A new idea occurred to her. People said that the best way to hide something was in a place so conspicuous that no one would think of looking there. A work basket, for instance, like the one Madame Berger had on a little table beside the armchair. Somewhat despondently, with a look at her watch, for time was passing and she could not afford to stay too long, she turned the things in it over. There was a stocking that Madame Berger had been mending, scissors, needles, various odds and ends, and reels of cotton and silk. There was a half-finished tippet in black wool that Madame Berger was making to put over her shoulders when she came from the pavilion to the house. Among the reels of black and white cotton Lydia was surprised to find one of yellow thread. She wondered what her mother-in-law used that for. Her heart gave a great leap as her eyes fell on the curtains. The only light in the room came from the glass door, and one pair hung there; another pair served as a portière for the door that led to the dressing-room. Madame Berger was very proud of them, they had belonged to her father the colonel and she remembered them from her childhood. They were very rich and heavy, with a fringed and festooned pelmet, and they were of yellow damask. Lydia went up first to those at the window and turned back the lining. They had been made for a higher room than that in which they now were, and since Madame Berger had not had the heart to cut them, had been turned up at the bottom. Lydia examined the deep hem; it had been sewn by a professional sempstress and the thread was faded. Then she looked at the curtains on each side of the door. She gave a deep sigh. At the corner nearest to the front wall, and so in darkness, there was a little piece about four inches long which the clean thread showed to have been recently stitched. Lydia got the scissors out of the work-basket and quickly cut; she slipped her hand through the opening and pulled out the notes. She put them in her dress and then it did not take her more than a few minutes to get a needle and the yellow thread and sew up the seam so that no one could tell it had been touched. She looked round the room to see that no trace of her interference remained. She went back to the house, upstairs into the bathroom, and tore the notes into little pieces; she threw them into the pan of the closet and pulled the plug. Then she went downstairs again, drew back the bolt on the front door, and sat down once more to her sewing. Her heart was beating so madly that she could hardly endure it; but she was infinitely relieved. Now the police could come and they would find nothing.

Presently Madame Berger returned. She came into the drawing-room and sank down on a sofa. The effort she had made had taken it out of her and she was all in. Her face sagged and she looked an old woman. Lydia gave her a glance, but said nothing. In a few minutes, with a sigh of weariness, she raised herself to her feet and went to her room. When she came back she had taken off her smart clothes and wore felt slippers and a shabby black dress. Notwithstanding the marcelled hair, the paint on her lips and the rouge on her face, she looked like an old charwoman.

‘I’ll see about preparing dinner,’ she said.

‘Shall I come and help you?’ asked Lydia.

‘No, I prefer to be alone.’

Lydia went on working. The silence in the little house was sinister. It was so intense that the sound after a while of Robert inserting his latch-key in the lock had all the effect of a frightening noise. Lydia clenched her hands to prevent herself from crying out. He gave his little whistle as he entered the house, and Lydia, gathering herself together, went out into the passage. He had two or three papers in his hand.

‘I’ve brought you the evening papers,’ he cried gaily. ‘They’re full of the murder.’

He went into the kitchen where he knew his mother would be and threw the papers on the table. Lydia followed him in. Without a word Madame Berger took one of them and began to read it. There were big headlines. It was front-page news.

‘I’ve been to Jojo’s Bar. They can talk of nothing else. Jordan was one of their regular clients and everybody knew him. I talked to him myself on the night he was murdered. He’d not done so badly on the day’s racing and he was standing everybody drinks.’

His conversation was so easy and natural, you would have thought he had not a care in the world. His eyes glittered and there was a slight flush on the cheeks that were usually rather pasty. He was excited, but showed no sign of nervousness. Trying to make her tone as unconcerned as his, Lydia asked him:

‘Have they any idea who the murderer was?’

‘They suspect it was a sailor. The concierge says she saw Jordan come in with one about a week ago. But of course it may just as well have been someone disguised as a sailor. They’re rounding up the frequenters of the notorious bars in Montmartre. From the condition of the skin round the wound it appears that the blow was struck with great force. They’re looking for a husky, big man of powerful physique. Of course there are one or two boxers who have a funny reputation.’

Madame Berger put down the paper without remark.

‘Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,’ she said. ‘Is the cloth laid, Lydia?’

‘I’ll go and lay it.’

When Robert was there they took the two principal meals of the day in the dining-room, even though it gave more work. But Madame Berger said:

‘We can’t live like savages. Robert has been well brought up and he’s accustomed to having things done properly.’

Robert went upstairs to change his coat and put on his slippers. Madame Berger could not bear him to sit about the house in his best clothes. Lydia set about laying the table. Suddenly a thought occurred to her and it was such a violent shock that she staggered and to support herself had to put her hand on the back of a chair. It was two nights before that Teddie Jordan had been murdered, and it was two nights before that Robert had awakened her, made her cook supper for him, and then hurried her to bed. He had come to her arms straight from committing the horrible crime; and his passion, his insatiable desire, the frenzy of his lust had their source in the blood of a human being.

‘And if I conceived that night?’

Robert clattered downstairs in his slippers.

‘I’m ready, mummy,’ he cried.

‘I’m coming.’

He entered the dining-room and sat down in his usual place. He took his napkin out of the ring and stretched over to take a piece of bread from the platter on which Lydia had put it.

‘Is the old woman giving us a decent dinner to-night? I’ve got a beautiful appetite. I had nothing but a sandwich at Jojo’s for lunch.’

Madame Berger brought in the bowl of soup and taking her seat at the head of the table ladled out a couple of spoonfuls for the three of them. Robert was in high spirits. He talked gaily. But the two women hardly answered. They finished the soup.

‘What’s coming next?’ he asked.

‘Cottage pie.’

‘Not one of my favourite dishes.’

‘Be thankful you have anything to eat at all,’ his mother answered sharply.

He shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a gay wink. Madame Berger went into the kitchen to fetch the cottage pie.

‘The old woman doesn’t seem in a very good humour to-night. What’s she been doing with herself?’

‘It was the générale’s last day of the season. She went there.’

‘The old bore! That’s enough to put anyone out of temper.’

Madame Berger brought in the dish and served it. Robert helped himself to some wine and water. He went on talking of one thing and another, in his usual ironical and rather amusing way, but at last he could ignore no longer the taciturnity of his companions.

‘But what is the matter with you both to-night?’ he interrupted himself angrily. ‘You sit there as glum as two mutes at a funeral.’

His mother, forcing herself to eat, had been sitting with her eyes glued to her plate, but now she raised them and, silently, looked him full in the face.

‘Well, what is it?’ he cried flippantly.

She did not answer, but continued to stare at him. Lydia gave her a glance. In those dark eyes, as full of expression as Robert’s, she read reproach, fear, anger, but also an unhappiness so poignant that it was intolerable. Robert could not withstand the intensity of that anguished gaze and dropped his eyes. They finished the meal in silence. Robert lit a cigarette and gave one to Lydia. She went into the kitchen to fetch the coffee. They drank it in silence.

There was a ring at the door. Madame Berger gave a little cry. They all sat still as though they were paralysed. The ring was repeated.

‘Who is that?’ whispered Madame Berger.

‘I’ll go and see,’ said Robert. Then, with a hard look on his face: ‘Pull yourself together, mother. There’s nothing to get upset about.’

He went to the front door. They heard strange voices, but he had closed the parlour door after him and they could not distinguish what was said. In a minute or two he came back. Two men followed him into the room.

‘Will you both go into the kitchen,’ he said. ‘These gentlemen wish to talk to me.’

‘What do they want?’

‘That is precisely what they are going to tell me,’ Robert answered coolly.

The two women got up and went out. Lydia stole a glance at him. He seemed perfectly self-possessed. It was impossible not to guess that the two strangers were detectives. Madame Berger left the kitchen door open, hoping she would be able to hear what was being said, but across the passage, through a closed door, the words spoken were inaudible. The conversation went on for the best part of an hour, then the door was opened.

‘Lydia, go and fetch me my coat and my shoes,’ cried Robert. ‘These gentlemen want me to accompany them.’

He spoke in his light, gay voice, as though his assurance were unperturbed, but Lydia’s heart sank. She went upstairs to do his bidding. Madame Berger said never a word. Robert changed his coat and put on his shoes.

‘I shall be back in an hour or two,’ he said. ‘But don’t wait up for me.’

‘Where are you going?’ asked his mother.

‘They want me to go to the Commissariat. The Commissaire de Police thinks I may be able to throw some light on the murder of poor Teddie Jordan.’

‘What has it got to do with you?’

‘Only that, like many others, I knew him.’

Robert left the house with the two detectives.

‘You’d better clear the table and help me to wash up,’ said Madame Berger.

They washed up and put everything in its place. Then they sat on each side of the kitchen table to wait. They did not speak. They avoided one another’s eyes. They sat for an interminable time. The only sound that broke the ominous silence was the striking of the cuckoo clock in the passage. When it struck three Madame Berger got up.

‘He won’t come back to-night. We’d better go to bed.’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I’d rather wait here.’

‘What is the good of that? It’s only wasting the electric light. You’ve got something to make you sleep, haven’t you? Take a couple of tablets.’

With a sigh Lydia rose to her feet. Madame Berger gave her a frowning glance and burst out angrily:

‘Don’t look as if the world was coming to an end. You’ve got no reason to pull a face like that. Robert’s done nothing that can get him into trouble. I don’t know what you suspect.’

Lydia did not answer, but she gave her a look so charged with pain that Madame Berger dropped her eyes.

‘Go to bed! Go to bed!’ she cried angrily.

Lydia left her and went upstairs. She lay awake all night waiting for Robert, but he did not come. When in the morning she came down, Madame Berger had already been out to get the papers. The Jordan murder was still front-page news, but there was no mention of an arrest; the Commissaire was continuing his investigations. As soon as she had drunk her coffee Madame Berger went out. It was eleven before she came back. Lydia’s heart sank when she saw her drawn face.

‘Well?’

They won’t tell me anything. I got hold of the lawyer and he’s gone to the Commissariat.’

They were finishing a miserable luncheon when there was a ring at the front door. Lydia opened it and found Colonel Legrand and a man she had not seen before. Behind them were two other men, whom she at once recognised as the police officers who had come the night before, and a grim-faced woman. Colonel Legrand asked for Madame Berger. Her anxiety had brought her to the kitchen door, and seeing her, the man who was with him pushed past Lydia.

‘Are you Madame Léontine Berger?’

‘I am.’

‘I am Monsieur Lukas, Commissaire de Police. I have an order to search this house.’ He produced a document. ‘Colonel Legrand has been designated by your son, Robert Berger, to attend the search on his behalf.’

‘Why do you want to search my house?’

‘I trust that you will not attempt to prevent me from fulfilling my duty.’

She gave the Commissaire an angry, scornful look.

‘If you have an order I have no power to prevent you.’

Accompanied by the Colonel and the two detectives the Commissaire went upstairs, while the woman who had come with them remained in the kitchen with Madame Berger and Lydia. There were two rooms on the upper floor, a fairly large one which Robert and his wife used, and a smaller one in which he had slept as a bachelor. There was besides only a bathroom with a geyser. They spent nearly two hours there and when they came down the Commissaire had in his hand Lydia’s vanity-case.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘My husband gave it me.’

‘Where did he get it?’

‘He bought it off a woman who was down and out.’

The Commissaire gave her a searching look. His eyes fell on the wrist-watch she was wearing and he pointed to it.

‘Did your husband also give you that?’

‘Yes.’

He made no further observation. He put the vanity-case down and rejoined his companions who had gone into the double room which was part dining-room and part parlour. But in a minute or two Lydia heard the front door slam and looking out of the window saw one of the police officers go to the gate and drive off in the car that was standing at the kerb. She looked at the pretty vanity-case with sudden misgiving. Presently, so that a search might be made of the kitchen, Lydia and Madame Berger were invited to go into the parlour. Everything there was in disorder. It was plain that the search had been thorough. The curtains had been taken down and they lay on the floor. Madame Berger winced when her eyes fell on them, and she opened her mouth to speak, but by an effort of will kept silence. But when, after some time in the kitchen, the men crossed the tiny patch of garden to the pavilion, she could not prevent herself from going to the window and looking at them. Lydia saw that she was trembling, and was afraid the woman who was with them would see it too. But she was idly looking at a motor paper. Lydia went up to the window and took her mother-in-law’s hand. She dared not even whisper that there was no danger. When Madame Berger saw the yellow brocade curtains being taken down she clutched Lydia’s hand violently, and all Lydia could do was by an answering pressure to attempt to show her that she need not fear. The men remained in the room nearly as long as they had remained upstairs.

While they were there the officer who had gone away returned. After a little he went out again and fetched two shovels from the waiting car. The two underlings, with Colonel Legrand watching, proceeded to dig up the flower bed. The Commissaire came into the sitting-room.

‘Have you any objection to letting this lady search you?’ he asked.

‘None.’

‘None.’

He turned to Lydia.

‘Then perhaps Madame would go to her room with this person.’

When Lydia went upstairs she saw why they had been so long. It looked as though the room had been ransacked by burglars. On the bed were Robert’s clothes and she guessed that they had been subjected to very careful scrutiny. The ordeal over, the Commissaire asked Lydia questions about her husband’s wardrobe. They were not difficult to answer, for it was not extensive: two pairs of tennis trousers, two suits besides the one he had on, a dinner-jacket and plus-fours; and she had no reason not to reply truthfully. It was past seven o’clock when the search was at last concluded. But the Commissaire had not yet done. He took up Lydia’s vanity-case which she had brought in from the kitchen and which was lying on a table.

‘I am going to take this away with me and also your watch, Madame, if you will kindly give it me.’

‘Why?’

‘I have reason to suspect that they are stolen goods.’

Lydia stared at him in dismay. But Colonel Legrand stepped forward.

‘You have no right to take them. Your warrant to search the house does not permit you to remove a single thing from it.’

The Commissaire smiled blandly.

‘You are quite right, Monsieur, but my colleague has, on my instructions, secured the necessary authority.’

He made a slight gesture, whereupon the man who had gone away in the car – on an errand which was now patent – produced from his pocket a document which he handed to him. The Commissaire passed it on to Colonel Legrand. He read it and turned to Lydia.

‘You must do as Monsieur le Commissaire desires.’

She took the watch off her wrist. The Commissaire put it with the vanity-case in his pocket.

‘If my suspicions prove to be unfounded the objects will of course be returned to you.’

When at last they all left and Lydia had bolted the door behind them, Madame Berger hurried across the garden. Lydia followed her. Madame Berger gave a cry of consternation when she saw the condition in which the room was.

‘The brutes!’

She rushed to the curtains. They were lying on the floor. She gave a piercing scream when she saw that the seams had been ripped up. She flopped on to the ground and turned on Lydia a face contorted with horror.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Lydia. ‘They didn’t find the notes. I found them and destroyed them. I knew you’d never have the courage.’

She gave her hand to Madame Berger and helped her to her feet. Madame Berger stared at her. They had never spoken of the subject that for forty-eight hours had obsessed their tortured thoughts. But now the time for silence was passed. Madame Berger seized Lydia’s arm with a cruel grip and in a harsh, intense voice said:

‘I swear to you by all the love I bear him that Robert didn’t murder the Englishman.’

‘Why do you say that when you know as certainly as I do that he did?’

‘Are you going to turn against him?’

‘Does it look like it? Why do you suppose I destroyed those notes? You must have been mad to think they wouldn’t find them. Could you think a trained detective would miss such an obvious hiding-place?’

Madame Berger released her hold of Lydia’s arm. Her expression changed and a sob burst from her throat. Suddenly she stretched out her arms, took Lydia in them, and pressed her to her breast.

‘Oh, my poor child, what trouble, what unhappiness I’ve brought upon you.’

It was the first time Lydia had ever seen Madame Berger betray emotion. It was the first time she had ever known her show an uncalculated, disinterested affection. Hard, painful sobs rent her breast and she clung desperately to Lydia. Lydia was deeply moved. It was horrible to see that self-controlled woman, with her pride and her iron will, break down.

‘I ought never to have let him marry you,’ she wailed. ‘It was a crime. It was unfair to you. It seemed his only chance. Never, never, never should I have allowed it.’

‘But I loved him.’

‘I know. But will you ever forgive him? Will you ever forgive me? I’m his mother, it doesn’t matter to me, but you’re different; how can your love survive this?’

Lydia snatched herself away and seized Madame Berger by the shoulders. She almost shook her.

‘Listen to me. I don’t love for a month or a year. I love for always. He’s the only man I’ve loved. He’s the only man I shall ever love. Whatever he’s done, whatever the future has in store, I love him. Nothing can make me love him less. I adore him.’

Next day the evening papers announced that Robert Berger had been arrested for the murder of Teddie Jordan.

A few weeks later Lydia knew that she was with child and she realised with horror that she had received the fertilising seed on the very night of the brutal murder.

Silence fell between Lydia and Charley. They had long since finished their dinner and the other diners had gone. Charley, listening without a word, absorbed as he had never been in his life, to Lydia’s story, had, all the same, been conscious that the restaurant was empty and that the waitresses were anxious for them to go, and once or twice he had been on the point of suggesting to Lydia that they should move. But it was difficult, for she spoke as if in a trance, and though often her eyes met his he had an uncanny sensation that she did not see him. But then a party of Americans came in, six of them, three men and three girls, and asked if it was too late to have dinner. The patronne, forseeing a lucrative order, since they were all very lively, assured them that her husband was the cook and if they didn’t mind waiting, would cook them whatever they wished. They ordered champagne cocktails. They were out to enjoy themselves and their gaiety filled the little restaurant with laughter. But Lydia’s tragic story seemed to encompass the table at which she and Charley sat with a mysterious and sinister atmosphere which the high spirits of that happy crowd could not penetrate; and they sat in their corner, alone, as though they were surrounded by an invisible wall.

‘And do you love him still?’ asked Charley at last.

‘With all my heart.’

She spoke with such a passionate sincerity that it was impossible not to believe her. It was strange, and Charley could not prevent the slight shiver of dismay that passed through him. She did not seem to belong to quite the same human species as he did. That violence of feeling was rather terrifying, and it made him a little uncomfortable to be with her. He might have felt like that if he had been talking quite casually to someone for an hour or two and then suddenly discovered it was a ghost. But there was one thing that troubled him. It had been on his mind for the last twenty-four hours, but not wishing her to think him censorious, he had not spoken of it.

‘In that case I can’t help wondering how you can bear to be in a place like the Sérail. Couldn’t you have found some other means of earning your living?’

‘Easily.’

‘Then I don’t understand.’

‘People were very kind to me after the trial. I could have got a job as saleswoman in one of the big shops. I’m a good needle-woman, I was apprenticed to a dressmaker, I could have got work in that business. There was even a man who wanted to marry me if I would divorce Robert.’

There seemed nothing more to say, and Charley was silent. She planted her elbows on the red-and-white-checkered table-cloth and rested her face on her hands. Charley was sitting oppoite to her and she gazed into his eyes with a long reflective look that seemed to bore into the depths of his being.

‘I wanted to atone.’

Charley stared at her uncomprehendingly. Her words, spoken hardly above a whisper, gave him a shock. He had a sensation that he had never had before; it seemed to him that a veil that painted the world in pleasant, familiar colours had been suddenly rent and he looked into a convulsed and writhing darkness.

‘What in God’s name do you mean?’

‘Though I love Robert with all my heart, with all my soul, I know that he sinned. I felt that the only way I could serve Robert now was by submitting to a degradation that was the most horrible I could think of. At first I thought I would go to one of those brothels where soldiers go, and workmen, and the riff-raff of a great city, but I feared I should feel pity for those poor people whose hurried, rare visits to such places afford the only pleasure of their cruel lives. The Sérail is frequented by the rich, the idle, the vicious. There was no chance there that I should feel anything but hatred and contempt for the beasts who bought my body. There my humiliation is like a festering wound that nothing can heal. The brutal indecency of the clothes I have to wear is a shame that no habit can dull. I welcome the suffering. I welcome the contempt these men have for the instrument of their lust. I welcome their brutality. I’m in hell as Robert is in hell and my suffering joins with his, and it may be that my suffering makes it more easy for him to bear his.’

‘But he’s suffering because he committed a crime. You suffered enough for no fault of yours. Why should you expose yourself to suffering unnecessarily?’

‘Sin must be paid for by suffering. How can you with your cold English nature know what the love is that is all my life? I am his and he is mine. I should be as vile as his crime was if I hesitated to share his suffering. I know that my suffering as well as his is necessary to expiate his sin.’

Charley hesitated. He had no particular religious feelings. He had been brought up to believe in God, but not to think of him. To do that would be – well, not exactly bad form, but rather priggish. It was difficult for him now to say what he had in mind, but he found himself in a situation where it seemed almost natural to say the most unnatural things.

‘Your husband committed a crime and was punished for it. I daresay that’s all right. But you can’t think that a – a merciful God demands atonement from you for somebody else’s misdeeds.’

‘God? What has God to do with it? Do you suppose I can look at the misery in which the vast majority of the people live in the world and believe in God? Do you suppose I believe in God who let the Bolsheviks kill my poor, simple father? Do you know what I think? I think God has been dead for millions upon millions of years. I think when he took infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for them.’

‘But if you don’t believe in God I can’t see the point of what you’re doing. I could understand it if you believed in a cruel God who exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Atonement, the sort of atonement you want to make, is meaningless if there’s no God.’

‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? There’s no logic in it. There’s no sense. And yet, deep down in my heart, no, much more than that, in every fibre of my body, I know that I must atone for Robert’s sin. I know that that is the only way he can gain release from the evil that racks him. I don’t ask you to think I’m reasonable. I only ask you to understand that I can’t help myself. I believe that somehow – how I don’t know – my humiliation, my degradation, my bitter, ceaseless pain, will wash his soul clean, and even if we never see one another again he will be restored to me.’

Charley sighed. It was all strange to him, strange, morbid and disturbing. He did not know what to make of it. He felt more than ever ill-at-ease with that alien woman with her crazy fancies; and yet she looked ordinary enough, a prettyish little thing, not very well dressed; a typist or a girl in the post-office. Just then, at the Terry-Masons’, they would probably have started dancing; they would be wearing the paper caps they’d got out of the crackers at dinner. Some of the chaps would be a bit tight, but hang it all, on Christmas Day no one could mind. There’d have been a lot of kissing under the mistletoe, a lot of fun, a lot of ragging, a lot of laughter; they were all having a grand time. It seemed very far away, but thank God, it was there, normal, decent, sane and real; this was a nightmare. A nightmare? He wondered if there was anything in what she said, this woman with her tragic history and her miserable life, that God had died when he created the wide world; and was he lying dead on some vast mountain range on a dead star or was he absorbed into the universe he had caused to be? It was rather funny, if you came to think of it, Lady Terry-Mason rounding up all the house party to go to church on Christmas morning. And his own father backing her up.

‘I don’t pretend I’m much of a church-goer myself, but I think one ought to go on Christmas Day. I mean, I think it sets a good example.’

That’s what he would say.

‘Don’t look so serious,’ said Lydia. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked along the forbidding, sordid street that leads from the Avenue du Maine to the Place de Rennes, and there Lydia suggested that they should go to the news reel for an hour. It was the last performance of the day. Then they had a glass of beer and went back to the hotel. Lydia took off her hat and the fur she wore round her neck. She looked at Charley thoughtfully.

‘If you want to come to bed with me you can, you know,’ she said in just the same tone as she might have used if she had asked him if he would like to go to the Rotonde or the Dôme.

Charley caught his breath. All his nerves revolted from the idea. After what she had told him he could not have touched her. His mouth for a moment went grim with anger; he really was not going to have her mortify her flesh at his expense. But his native politeness prevented him from uttering the words that were on the tip of his tongue.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, thank you.’

‘Why not? I’m there for that and that’s what you came to Paris for, isn’t it? Isn’t that why all you English come to Paris?’

‘I don’t know. Anyhow I didn’t.’

‘What else did you come for?’

‘Well, partly to see some pictures.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘It’s just as you like.’

She went into the bathroom. Charley was a trifle piqued that she accepted his refusal with so much unconcern. He thought at least she might have given him credit for his delicacy. Because perhaps she owed him something, at least board and lodging for twenty-four hours, he might well have looked upon it as a right to take what she offered; it wouldn’t have been unbecoming if she had thanked him for his disinterestedness. He was inclined to sulk. He undressed, and when she came in from the bathroom, in his dressing-gown, he went in to wash his teeth. She was in bed when he returned.

‘Will it bother you if I read a little before I go to sleep?’ he asked.

‘No. I’ll turn my back to the light.’

He had brought a Blake with him. He began to read. Presently from Lydia’s quiet breathing in the next bed he knew she was asleep. He read on for a little and switched off the light.

Thus did Charley Mason spend Christmas Day in Paris.

CHAPTER 6

THEY DID NOT wake till so late next morning that by the time they had had their coffee, read the papers (like a domestic couple who had been married for years), bathed and dressed, it was nearly one.

‘We might go along and have a cocktail at the Dôme and then lunch,’ he said. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘There’s a very good restaurant on the boulevard in the other direction from the Coupole. Only it’s rather expensive.’

‘Well, that doesn’t matter.’

‘Are you sure?’ She looked at him doubtfully. ‘I don’t want you to spend more than you can afford. You’ve been very sweet to me. I’m afraid I’ve taken advantage of your kindness.’

‘Oh, rot!’ he answered, flushing.

‘You don’t know what it’s meant to me, these two days. Such a rest. Last night’s the first night for months that I’ve slept without waking and without dreams. I feel so refreshed. I feel quite different.’

She did indeed look much better this morning. Her skin was clearer and her eyes brighter. She held her head more alertly.

‘It’s been a wonderful little holiday you’ve given me. It’s helped me so much. But I mustn’t be a burden to you.’

‘You haven’t been.’

She smiled with gentle irony.

‘You’ve been very well brought up, my dear. It’s nice of you to say that, and I’m so unused to having people say nice things to me that it makes me want to cry. But after all you’ve come to Paris to have a good time; you know now you’re not likely to have it with me. You’re young and you must enjoy your youth. It lasts so short a while. Give me lunch to-day if you like and this afternoon I’ll go back to Alexey’s.’

‘And to-night to the Sérail?’

‘I suppose so.’

She sighed, but she checked the sigh and with a little gay shrug of the shoulders gave him a bright smile. Frowning slightly in his uncertainty Charley looked at her with pained eyes. He felt awkward and big, and his radiant health, his sense of well-being, the high spirits that bubbled inside him, seemed to himself in an odd way an offence. He was like a rich man vulgarly displaying his wealth to a poor relation. She looked very frail, a slim little thing in a shabby brown dress, and after that good night so much younger that she seemed almost a child. How could you help being sorry for her? And when you thought of her tragic story, when you thought – oh, unwillingly, for it was ghastly and senseless, yet troubling so that it haunted you – of that crazy idea of hers of atoning for her husband’s crime by her own degradation, your heartstrings were wrung. You felt that you didn’t matter at all, and if your holiday in Paris, to which you’d looked forward with such excitement, was a wash-out – well, you just had to put up with it. It didn’t seem to Charley that it was he who was uttering the halting words he spoke, but a power within him that acted independently of his will. When he heard them issue from his lips he didn’t even then know why he said them.

‘I don’t have to get back to the office till Monday morning and I’m staying till Sunday. If you care to stay on here till then, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

Her face lit up so that you might have thought a haphazard ray of the winter sun had strayed into the room.

‘Do you mean that?’

‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have suggested it.’

It looked as though her legs suddenly gave way, for she sank on to a chair.

‘Oh, it would be such a blessing. It would be such a rest. It would give me new courage. But I can’t, I can’t.’

‘Why not? On account of the Sérail?’

‘Oh, no, not that. I could send them a wire to say I had influenza. It’s not fair to you.’

‘That’s my business, isn’t it?’

It seemed a bit grim to Charley that he should have to persuade her to do what it was quite plain she was only too anxious to do, and what he would just as soon she didn’t. But he didn’t see how else he could act now. She gave him a searching look.

‘Why should you do this? You don’t want me, do you?’ He shook his head. ‘What can it matter to you if I live or die, what can it matter to you if I’m happy or not? You’ve not known me forty-eight hours yet. Friendship? I’m a stranger to you. Pity? What has one got to do with pity at your age?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t ask me embarrassing questions,’ he grinned.

‘I suppose it’s just natural goodness of heart. They always say the English are kind to animals. I remember one of our landladies who used to steal our tea took in a mangy mongrel because it was homeless.’

‘If you weren’t so small I’d give you a smack on the face for that,’ he retorted cheerfully. ‘Is it a go?’

‘Let’s go out and have lunch. I’m hungry.’

During luncheon they spoke of indifferent things, but when they had finished and Charley, having paid the bill, was waiting for his change, she said to him:

‘Did you really mean it when you said I could stay with you till you went away?’

‘Definitely.’

‘You don’t know what a boon it would be to me. I can’t tell you how I long to take you at your word.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘It won’t be much fun for you.’

‘No, it won’t,’ he answered frankly, but with a charming smile. ‘But it’ll be interesting.’

She laughed.

‘Then I’ll go back to Alexey’s and get a few things. At least a toothbrush and some clean stockings.’

They separated at the station and Lydia took the Metro. Charley thought that he would see if Simon was in. After asking his way two or three times he found the Rue Campagne Première. The house in which Simon lived was tall and dingy, and the wood of the shutters showed gray under the crumbling paint. When Charley put in his head at the concierge’s loge he was almost knocked down by the stink of fug, food and human body that assailed his nostrils. A little old woman in voluminous skirts, with her head wrapped in a dirty red muffler, told him in rasping, angry tones, as though she violently resented his intrusion, where exactly Simon lived, and when Charley asked if he was in bade him go and see. Charley, following her directions, went through the dirty courtyard and up a narrow staircase smelling of stale urine. Simon lived on the second floor and in answer to Charley’s ring opened the door.

‘H’m. I wondered what had become of you.’

‘Am I disturbing you?’

‘No. Come in. You’d better keep on your coat. It’s not very warm in here.’

That was true. It was icy. It was a studio, with a large north light, and there was a stove in it, but Simon, who had apparently been working, for the table in the middle was littered with papers, had forgotten to keep it up and the fire was almost out. Simon drew a shabby armchair up to the stove and asked Charley to sit down.

‘I’ll put some more coke on. It’ll soon get warmer. I don’t feel the cold myself.’

Charley found that the armchair, having a broken spring, was none too comfortable. The walls of the studio were a cold slate-grey, and they too looked as though they hadn’t been painted for years. Their only ornament was large maps tacked up with drawing-pins. There was a narrow iron bed which hadn’t been made.

‘The concierge hasn’t been up to-day yet,’ said Simon, following Charley’s glance.

There was nothing else in the studio but the large dining-table, bought second-hand, which Simon wrote at, some shelves with books in them, a desk-chair such as they used in offices, two or three kitchen chairs piled up with books, and a strip of worn carpet by the bed. It was cheerless and the cold winter light coming in through the north window added its moroseness to the squalid scene. A third-class waiting-room at a wayside station could not have seemed more unfriendly.

Simon drew a chair up to the stove and lit a pipe. With his quick wits he guessed the impression his surroundings were making on Charley and smiled grimly.

‘It’s not very luxurious, is it? But then I don’t want luxury.’ Charley was silent and Simon gave him a coolly disdainful look. ‘It’s not even comfortable, but then I don’t want comfort. No one should be dependent on it. It’s a trap that’s caught many a man who you would have thought had more sense.’

Charley was not without a streak of malice and he was not inclined to let Simon put it over on him.

‘You look cold and peaked and hungry, old boy. What about taking a taxi to the Ritz Bar and having some scrambled eggs and bacon in warmth and comfortable armchairs?’

‘Go to hell. What have you done with Olga?’

‘Her name’s Lydia. She’s gone home to get a toothbrush. She’s staying with me at the hotel till I go back to London.’

‘The devil she is. Going some, aren’t you?’ The two young men stared at one another for a moment. Simon leant forward. ‘You haven’t fallen for her, have you?’

‘Why did you bring us together?’

‘I thought it would be rather a joke. I thought it would be a new experience for you to go to bed with the wife of a notorious murderer. And to tell you the truth, I thought she might fall for you. I should laugh like a hyena if she has. After all, you’re rather the same type as Berger, but a damned sight better-looking.’

Charley suddenly remembered a remark that Lydia had made when they were having supper together after the Midnight Mass. He had not understood what she meant at the time, but now he did.

‘It may surprise you to learn that she tumbled to that. I’m afraid you won’t be able to laugh like a hyena.’

‘Have you been together ever since I left you with her on Christmas Eve?’

‘Yes.’

‘It seems to agree with you. You look all right. A bit pale, perhaps.’

Charley tried not to look self-concious. He would not for the world have had Simon know that his relations with Lydia had been entirely platonic. It would only have aroused his derisive laughter. He would have looked upon Charley’s behaviour as despicably sentimental.

‘I don’t think it was a very good joke to get me off with her without letting me now what I was in for,’ said Charley.

Simon gave him a tortured smile.

‘It appealed to my sense of humour. It’ll be something to tell your parents when you go home. Anyhow you’ve got nothing to grouse about. It’s all panned out very well. Olga knows her job and will give you a damned good time in that way, and she’s no fool; she’s read a lot and she can talk much more intelligently than most women. It’ll be a liberal education, my boy. D’you think she’s as much in love with her husband as ever she was?’

‘I think so.’

‘Curious, human nature, isn’t it? He was an awful rotter, you know. I suppose you know why she’s at the Sérail? She wants to make enough money to pay for his escape; then she’ll join him in Brazil.’

Charley was disconcerted. He had believed her when she told him that she was there because she wanted to atone for Robert’s sin, and even though the notion had seemed to him extravagant there was something about it that had strangely moved him. It was a shock to think that she might have lied to him. If what Simon said were true she had just been making a fool of him.

‘I covered the trial for our paper, you know,’ Simon went on. ‘It caused rather a sensation in England because the fellow that Berger killed was an Englishman, and they gave it a lot of space. It was a snip for me; I’d never been to a murder trial in France before and I was pretty keen to see one. I’ve been to the Old Bailey, and I was curious to compare their methods with ours. I wrote a very full account of it; I’ve got it here; I’ll give it you to read if you like.’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘The murder created a great stir in France. You see, Robert Berger wasn’t an apache or anything like that. He was by way of being a gent. His people were very decent. He was well-educated and he spoke English quite passably. One of the papers called him the Gentleman Gangster and it caught on; it took the public fancy and made him quite a celebrity. He was good-looking too, in his way, and young, only twenty-two, and that helped. The women all went crazy over him. God, the crush there was to get into the trial! It was a real thrill when he came into the court-room. He was brought in between two warders for the press photographers to have a go at him before the judges came in. I never saw anyone so cool. He was quite nicely dressed and he knew how to wear his clothes. He was freshly shaved and his hair was very neat. He had a fine head of dark brown hair. He smiled at the photographers and turned this way and that, as they asked him to, so that they could all get a good view of him. He looked like any young chap with plenty of money that you might see at the Ritz Bar having a drink with a girl. It tickled me to think that he was such a rogue. He was a born criminal. Of course his people weren’t rich, but they weren’t starving, and I don’t suppose he ever really wanted for a hundred francs. I wrote a rather pretty article about him for one of the weekly papers, and the French press printed extracts from it. It did me a bit of good over here. I took the line that he engaged in crime as a form of sport. See the idea? It worked up quite amusingly. He’d been almost a first-class tennis-player and there was some talk of training him for championship play, but oddly enough, though he played a grand game in ordinary matches, he had a good serve and was quick at the net, when it came to tournaments he always fell down. Something went wrong then. He hadn’t got power of resistance, determination or whatever it is, that the great tennis-player has got to have. An interesting psychological point, I thought. Anyhow his career as a tennis-player came to an end because money began to be missed from the changing-room when he was about, and though it was never actually proved that he’d taken it everyone concerned was pretty well convinced that he was the culprit.’

Simon relit his pipe.

‘One thing that peculiarly struck me in Robert Berger was his combination of nerve, self-possession and charm. Of course charm is an invaluable quality, but it doesn’t often go with nerve and self-possession. Charming people are generally weak and irresolute, charm is the weapon nature gives them to cope with their disadvantages; I would never set much trust in anyone who had it.’

Charley gave his friend a slightly amused glance; he knew that Simon was belittling a quality he did not think he possessed in order to assure himself that it was of no great consequence beside those he was convinced he had. But he did not interrupt.

‘Robert Berger was neither weak nor irresolute. He very nearly got away with his murder. It was a damned smart bit of work on the part of the police that they got him. There was nothing sensational or spectacular in the way they went about the job; they were just thorough and patient. Perhaps accident helped them a little, but they were clever enough to take advantage of it. People must always be prepared to do that, you know, and they seldom are.’

An absent look came into Simon’s eyes, and once more Charley was aware that he was thinking of himself.

‘What Lydia didn’t tell me was how the police first came to suspect him,’ said Charley.

‘When first they questioned him they hadn’t the ghost of an idea that he had anything to do with the murder. They were looking for a much bigger man.’

‘What sort of a chap was Jordan?’

‘I never ran across him. He was a bad hat, but he was all right in his way. Everybody liked him. He was always ready to stand you a drink, and if you were down and out he never minded putting his hand in his pocket. He was a little fellow, he’d been a jockey, but he’d got warned off in England, and it turned out later that he’d done nine months at Wormwood Scrubs for false pretences. He was thirty-six. He’d been in Paris ten years. The police had an idea that he was mixed up in the drug traffic, but they’d never been able to get the goods on him.’

‘But how did the police come to question Berger at all?’

‘He was one of the frequenters of Jojo’s Bar. That’s where Jordan used to have his meals. It’s rather a shady place patronized by bookmakers and jockeys, touts, runners and the sort of people with the reputation that we journalists describe as unsavoury, and naturally the police interviewed as many of them as they could get hold of. You see, Jordan had a date with someone that night, that was shown by the fact that there were a couple of glasses on the tray and a cake, and they thought he might have dropped a hint about whom he was going to meet. They had a pretty shrewd suspicion that he was queer, and it was just possible one of the chaps at Jojo’s had seen him about with someone. Berger had been rather pally with Jordan, and Jojo, the owner of the bar, told the police he’d seen him touch the bookie for money several times. Berger had been tried on a charge of smuggling heroin into France from Belgium, and the two men who were up with him went to jug, but he got off somehow. The police knew he was as guilty as hell, and if Jordan had been mixed up with dope and had met his death in connection with that, they thought Berger might very well know who was responsible. He was a bad lot. He’d been convicted on another charge, stealing motor-cars, and got a suspended sentence of two years.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said Charley.

‘His system was as simple as it was ingenious. He used to wait till he saw someone drive up to one of the big stores, the Printemps or the Bon Marché, in a Citroën, and go in, leaving it at the kerb. Then he’d walk up, as bold as brass, as though he’d just come out of the store, jump in and drive off.’

‘But didn’t they lock the cars?’

‘Seldom. And he had some Citroën keys. He always stuck to the one make. He’d use the car for two or three days and then leave it somewhere, and when he wanted another, he’d start again. He stole dozens. He never tried to sell them, he just borrowed them when he wanted one for a particular purpose. That was what gave me the idea for my article. He pinched them for the fun of the thing, for the pleasure of exercising his audacious cleverness. He had another ingenious dodge that came out at the trial. He’d hang around in his car about the bus stops just at the time the shops closed, and when he saw a woman waiting for a bus he’d stop and ask her if she’d like a lift. I suppose he was a pretty good judge of character and knew the sort of woman who’d be likely to accept a ride from a good-looking young man. Well, the woman got in and he’d drive off in the direction she wanted to go, and when they came to a more or less deserted street he stalled the car. He pretended he couldn’t get it to start and he would ask the woman to get out, lift the hood and tickle the carburettor while he pressed the self-starter. The woman did so, leaving her bag and her parcels in the car, and just as she was going to get in again, when the engine was running, he’d shoot off and be out of sight before she realized what he was up to. Of course a good many woman went and complained to the police, but they’d only seen him in the dark, and all they could say was that he was a good-looking gentlemanly young man in a Citroën, with a pleasant voice, and all the police could do was to tell them that it was very unwise to accept lifts from good-looking, gentlemanly young men. He was never caught. At the trial it came out that he must often have done very well out of these transactions.

‘Anyhow a couple of police officers went to see him. He didn’t deny that he’d been at Jojo’s Bar on the evening of the murder and had been with Jordan, but he said he’d left about ten o’clock and hadn’t seen him after that. After some conversation they invited him to accompany them to the Commissariat. The Commissaire de Police who was in charge of the preliminary proceedings had no notion, mind you, that Berger was the murderer. He thought it was a toss-up whether Jordan had been killed by some tough that he’d brought to his flat or by a member of the drug-ring whom he might have double-crossed. If the latter, he thought he could wheedle, jockey, bully or frighten Berger into giving some indication that would enable the police to catch the man they were after.

‘I managed to get an interview with the Commissaire. He was a chap called Lukas. He was not at all the sort of type you’d expect to find in a job like that. He was a big, fat, hearty fellow, with red cheeks, a heavy moustache and great shining black eyes. He was a jolly soul and you’d have bet a packet that there was nothing he enjoyed more than a good dinner and a bottle of wine. He came from the Midi and he had an accent that you could cut with a knife. He had a fat, jovial laugh. He was a friendly, back-slapping, good-natured man to all appearances and you felt inclined to confide in him. In point of fact he’d had wonderful success in getting confessions out of suspects. He had great physical endurance and was capable of conducting an examination for sixteen hours at a stretch. There’s no third degree in France of the American sort, no knocking about, I mean, or tooth-drilling or anything like that, to extort a confession; they just bring a man into the room and make him stand, they don’t let him smoke and they don’t give him anything to eat, they just ask him questions; they go on and on, they smoke, and when they’re hungry they have a meal brought in to them; they go on all night, because they know that at night a man’s powers of resistance are at their lowest; and if he’s guilty he has to be very strong-minded if by morning for the sake of a cup of coffee and a cigarette he won’t confess. The Commissaire got nothing out of Berger. He admitted that at one time he’d been friendly with the heroin smugglers, but he asserted his innocence of the charge on which he’d been tried and acquitted. He said he’d done stupid things in his youth, but he’d had his lesson; after all, he’d only borrowed cars for two or three days to take girls out, it wasn’t a very serious crime, and now that he was married he was going straight. As far as the drug traffickers were concerned he’d had nothing to do with them since his trial and he had had no idea that Teddie Jordan was mixed up with them. He was very frank. He told the Commissaire that he was very much in love with his wife, and his great fear was that she would discover his past. For her sake as well as for his own and his mother’s, he was determined to lead in future a decent and honourable life. The fat, jolly man went on asking questions, but in a friendly, sympathetic way so that you felt, I think, that he couldn’t wish you any harm. He applauded Berger’s good resolutions, he congratulated him on marrying a penniless girl for love, he hoped they would have children which were not only an ornament to a home, but a comfort to their parents. But he had Berger’s dossier; he knew that in the heroin case, though the jury had refused to convict, he was undoubtedly guilty, and from enquiries he had made that day, that he had been discharged from the broker’s firm and had only escaped prosecution because his mother had made restitution of the money he had embezzled. It was a lie that since his marriage he had been leading an honest life. He asked him about his financial circumstances. Berger confessed that they were difficult, but his mother had a little and soon he was bound to get a job and then they would be all right. And pocket money? Now and then he made a bit racing and he introduced clients to bookmakers, that was how he’d become friendly with Jordan, and got a commission. Sometimes he just went without.

‘“En effet,” said the Commisssaire, “the day before he was killed you said you were penniless and you borrowed fifty francs from Jordan.”

‘“He was good to me. Poor chap. I shall miss him.”

‘The Commissaire was looking at Berger with his friendly, twinkling eyes, and it occurred to him that the young man was not ill-favoured. Was it possible? But no, that was nonsense. He had a notion that Berger was lying when he said he had given up all relations with the drug traffickers. After all, he was hard up and there was good money to be made there; Berger went about among the sort of people who were addicted to dope. The Commissaire had an impression, though he had no notion on what he founded it, that Berger, if he didn’t know for certain who’d committed the murder, had his suspicions: of course he wouldn’t tell, but if they found heroin hidden away in the house at Neuilly they might be able to force him to. The Commissaire was a shrewd judge of character and he was pretty sure that Berger would give a friend away to save his own skin. He made up his mind that he would hold Berger and have the house searched before he had any chance of disposing of anything that was there. With the same idea in his mind he asked him about his movements on the night of murder. Berger stated that he had come in from Neuilly rather late and had walked to Jojo’s Bar; he had found a lot of men there who had come in after the races. He got two or three drinks stood him, and Jordan, who’d had a good day, said he’d pay for his dinner. After he’d eaten he hung about for a bit, but it was very smoky and it made his head ache, so he went for a stroll on the boulevard. Then about eleven he went back to the bar and stayed there till it was time to catch the last Metro back to Neuilly.

‘“You were away just long enough to kill the Englishman in point of fact,” said the Commissaire in a joking sort of way.

‘Berger burst out laughing.

‘“You’re not going to accuse me of that?” he said.

‘“No, not that,”’ laughed the other.

‘“Believe me, Jordan’s death is a loss to me. The fifty francs he lent me the day before he was murdered wasn’t the first I’d had from him. I don’t say it was very scrupulous, but when he’d had a few drinks it wasn’t hard to get money out of him.’

‘“Still, he’d made a lot that day, and though he wasn’t drunk when he left the bar, he was in a happy mood. You might have thought it worth while to make sure of a few thousand francs at one go rather than get it in fifties from time to time.”

‘The Commissaire said this more to tease than because he thought there was anything in it. And he didn’t think it a bad thing to let Berger suppose he was a possible object of suspicion. It would certainly not make him less disinclined to tell the culprit’s name if he had an inkling of it. Berger took out the money in his pocket and put it on the table. It amounted to less than ten francs.

‘“If I’d robbed poor Jordan of his money you don’t suppose I’d only have that in my pocket now.”

‘“My dear boy, I suppose nothing. I only pointed out that you had the time to kill Jordan and that money would have been useful to you.”

‘Berger gave him his frank and disarming smile.

‘“Both those things, I admit,” he said.

‘“I will be perfectly open with you,” said the other. “I don’t think you murdered Jordan, but I’m fairly certain that if you don’t know who did, you have at least a suspicion.”

‘Berger denied this, and though the Commissaire pressed him, persisted in his denial. It was late by now and the Commissaire thought it would be better to resume the conversation next day, he thought also that a night in the cells would give Berger an opportunity to consider his position. Berger, who had been arrested twice before, knew that it was useless to protest.

‘You know that the dope traffickers are up to every sort of trick to conceal their dope. They hide it in hollow walking-sticks, in the heels of shoes, in the lining of old clothes, in mattresses and pillows, in the frames of bedsteads, in every imaginable place, but the police know all their dodges, and you can bet your boots that if there’d been anything in the house at Neuilly they’d have found it. They found nothing. But when the Commissaire had been going through Lydia’s bedroom he’d come across a vanity-case, and it struck him that was an expensive one for a woman of that modest class to have. She had a watch on that looked as if it had cost quite a lot of money. She said that her husband had given her both the watch and the vanity-case, and it occurred to the Commissaire that it might be interesting to find out how he had got the money to buy them. On getting back to his office he had inquiries made and in a very short while learnt that several women had reported that they had had bags stolen by a young man who had offered them lifts in a Citroën. One woman had left a description of a vanity-case which she had thus lost and it corresponded with that which the Commissaire had found in Lydia’s possession; another stated that there had been in her bag a gold watch from such and such a maker. The same maker’s name was on Lydia’s. It was plain that the mysterious young man whom the police had never been able to lay their hands on was Robert Berger. That didn’t seem to bring the solution of the Jordan murder any nearer, but it gave the Commissaire an additional weapon to induce Berger to spill the beans. He had him brought into his room and asked him to explain how he had come by the vanity-case and the watch. Berger said he’d bought one of them from a tart who wanted money and the other from a man he’d met in a bar. He could give the name of neither. They were casual persons whom he’d got into conversation with and had neither seen before nor since. The Commissaire then formally arrested him on a charge of theft, and telling him that he would be confronted next morning with the two women to whom he was convinced the articles belonged, tried to persuade him to save trouble by making a confession. But Berger stuck to his story and refused to answer any more questions till he had the assistance of a lawyer, which by French law, now that he was arrested, he was entitled to have at an examination. The Commissaire could do nothing but acquiesce, and that finished the proceedings for the night.

‘On the following morning the two women in question came to the Commissariat and immediately they were shown the objects recognized them. Berger was brought in and one of them at once identified him as the obliging young man who had given her a lift. The other was doubtful; it was night when she had accepted his offer to drive her home and she had not seen his face very well, but she thought she would recognize his voice. Berger was told to read out a couple of sentences from a paper and he had not read half a dozen words before the woman cried out that she was certain it was the same man. I may tell you that Berger had a peculiarly soft and caressing voice. The women were dismissed and Berger taken back to the cell. The vanity-case and the watch were in the table before him and the Commissaire looked at them idly. Suddenly his expression grew more intent.’

Charley interrupted.

‘Simon, how could you know that? You’re romancing.’

Simon laughed.

‘I’m dramatizing a little. I’m telling you what I said in my first article. I had to make as good a story out of it as I could, you know.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Well, he sent for one of his men, and asked him if Berger had on a wrist-watch when he was arrested, and if he had, to bring it. Remember, all this came out at the trial afterwards. The cop got Berger’s watch. It was an imitation gold thing, in a metal that I think’s called aureum, and it had a round face. The press had given a lot of details about Jordan’s murder; they’d said, for instance, that the knife with which the blow had been inflicted hadn’t been found, and, incidentally, it never was; and they’d said that the police hadn’t discovered any finger prints. You’d have expected to find some either on the leather note-case in which Jordan had kept his money or on the door handle; and of course they deduced from that that the murderer had worn gloves. But what they didn’t say, because the police had taken care to keep it dark, was that when they had gone through Jordan’s room with a fine comb they had found fragments of a broken watch-glass. It couldn’t have belonged to Jordan’s watch, and it needn’t necessarily have belonged to the murderer’s, but there was just a chance that somehow or other, in his nervousness or haste, by an accidental knock against a piece of furniture, the murderer had broken the glass of his watch. It wasn’t a thing he would be likely to notice at such a moment. Not all the pieces had been found, but enough to show that the watch they had belonged to was small and oblong. The Commissaire had the pieces in an envelope, carefully wrapped up in tissue-paper, and he now laid them out before him. They would have exactly fitted Lydia’s watch. It might be only a coincidence; there were in use thousands of watches of just that size and shape. Lydia’s had a glass. But the Commissaire pondered. He turned over in his mind various possibilities. They seemed so far-fetched that he shrugged his shoulders. Of course during the period, three-quarters of an hour at least, that Berger claimed he’d been strolling along the boulevard, he would have had plenty of time to get to Jordan’s apartment, a ten minutes’ walk from Jojo’s Bar, commit the murder, wash his hands, tidy himself up, and walk back again; but why should he have been wearing his wife’s watch? He had one of his own. His own, of course, might have been out of order. The Commissaire nodded his head thoughtfully.’

Charley giggled.

‘Really, Simon.’

‘Shut up. He gave instructions that plain-clothes men should go to every watchmaker’s within a radius of two miles round the house in Neuilly where the Bergers lived. They were to ask if within the last week any watchmaker had repaired a watch in imitation gold or had put a glass in a small lady’s-watch with an oblong face. Within a few hours one of the men came back and said that a watchmaker, not more than a quarter of a mile from the Bergers’ house, said that he had repaired a watch corresponding to the description and it had been called for, and at the same time the customer had brought another watch to have a glass put in. He had done it on the spot and she had come in for it half an hour later. He couldn’t remember what the customer looked like, but he thought she had a Russian accent. The two watches were taken for the watchmaker to look at and he claimed that they were those he had repaired. The Commissaire beamed as he might have beamed if he had a great plate of bouillabaisse set before him in the Old Port at Marseilles. He knew he’d got his man.’

‘What was the explanation?’ asked Charley.

‘Simple as A B C. Berger had broken the watch and borrowed the one he’d given to Lydia. She hardly ever went out and didn’t need it. You must remember that in those days she was a quiet, modest, rather shy girl with few friends of her own, and I should say somewhat lethargic. At the trial two men swore that they’d noticed Berger wearing it. Jojo, who was a police informer, knew that Berger was a crook and wondered how he had got it. In a casual way he mentioned to Berger that he had a new watch on and Berger told him it was his wife’s. Lydia went to the watchmaker’s to get her husband’s watch the morning after the murder, and very naturally, since she was there, had a new glass put in her own. It never occurred to her to mention it and Berger never knew that he had broken it.’

‘But you don’t mean to say that he was convicted on that?’

‘No. But it was enough to justify the Commissaire charging him with the murder. He thought, quite rightly as it turned out, that new evidence would be forthcoming. All through his interrogations Berger conducted himself with amazing adroitness and self-possession. He admitted everything that could be proved and no longer attempted to deny that it was he who had robbed all those women of their handbags, he admitted that even after his conviction he had gone on pinching cars whenever he wanted one; he said the ease with which it could be done was too much for him and the risk appealed to his adventurousness; but he denied absolutely that he’d had anything to do with the murder. He claimed that the fact of the pieces of glass fitting Lydia’s watch proved nothing, and she swore black and blue that she’d broken the glass herself. The juge d’instruction in whose charge the case was of course eventually placed was puzzled because no trace could be found of the money Berger must have stolen, and actually it never was found. Another odd thing was that there was no trace of blood on the clothes that Berger was wearing on that particular night. The knife wasn’t found either. It was proved that Berger had one, in the circles he moved in that was usual enough, but he swore that he’d lost it a month before. I told you that the detectives’ work was pretty good. There’d been no finger-prints on the stolen cars nor on the stolen handbags, which when he’d emptied he’d apparently just thrown into the street and some of which had eventually got into the hands of the police, so it was pretty obvious that he had worn gloves. They found a pair of leather gauntlets among his things, but it was unlikely that he would have kept them on when he went to see Jordan, and from the place in which the body was found, which suggested that Jordan had been changing a record when he was struck, it was plain that Berger hadn’t murdered him the moment Jordan let him into the room. Besides, they were too large to go in his pocket and if he had had them at the bar someone would have noticed them. Of course Berger’s photo had been published in all the papers, and in their difficulty the police got the press to help them. They asked anyone who could remember having sold about such-and-such a date a pair of gloves, probably gray, to a young man in a gray suit, to come forward. The papers made rather a thing about it; they put his photo in again with the caption: “Did you sell him the gloves he wore to kill Teddie Jordan?”

‘You know, a thing that has always struck me is people’s fiendish eagerness to give anyone away. They pretend it’s public spirit, I don’t believe a word of it; I don’t believe it’s even, as a rule anyway, the desire for notoriety; I believe it’s just due to the baseness of human nature that gets a kick out of injuring others. You know, of course, that in England the Treasury and the King’s Proctor are supposed to have a wonderful system of espionage to detect income-tax evasions, and collusion and so forth in divorce cases. Well, there’s not a word of truth in it. They depend entirely on anonymous letters. There are a whole mass of people who can’t wait if they have the chance of doing down someone who’s trying to get away with anything.’

‘It’s a grim thought,’ said Charley, but added cheerfully: ‘I can only hope you’re exaggerating.’

‘Well, anyhow, a woman from the glove department at the Trois Quartiers came forward and said she remembered selling a young man a pair of gray suede gloves on the day of the murder. She was a woman of about forty and she’d liked the look of him. He was particularly anxious that they should match his gray suit and he wanted them rather large so that he shouldn’t have any difficulty in slipping into them. Berger was paraded with a dozen other young men and she picked him out at once, but, as his lawyer pointed out, that was easy since she had only just seen his picture in the paper. Then they got hold of one of Berger’s crooked friends who said he’d met him on the night of the murder, not walking towards the boulevard, but in a direction that would have taken him to Jordan’s apartment. He’d shaken hands with him and had noticed that he was wearing gloves. But that particular witness was a thorough scamp. He had a foul record, and Berger’s counsel at the trial attacked him violently. Berger denied that he had seen him on that particular evening and his counsel tried to persuade the jury that it was a cooked-up story that the man had invented in order to ingratiate himself with the police. The damning thing was the trousers. There’d been a lot of stuff in the papers about Berger’s smart clothes, the well-dressed gangster and all that sort of thing; you’d have thought, to read it, that he got his suits in Savile Row and his haberdashery at Charvet’s. The prosecution was anxious to prove that he was in desperate need of money and they went round to all the shops that supplied things both to him and for the household to find out if there had been any pressure put to settle unpaid accounts. But it appeared that everything bought for the house was paid for on the nail and there were no outstanding debts. So far as clothes were concerned Berger, it turned out, had bought nothing since he lost his job but one gray suit. The detective who was interviewing the tailor asked when this had been paid for and the tailor turned up his books. He was an advertising tailor in a large way of business who made clothes to measure at a lowish price. It was then discovered that Berger had ordered an extra pair of trousers with the suit. The police had a list of every article in his wardrobe, and this pair of trousers didn’t figure on it. They at once saw the importance of the fact and they made up their minds to keep it dark till the trial.

‘It was a thrilling moment, believe me, when the prosecution introduced the subject. There could be no doubt that Berger had had two pairs of trousers to his new gray suit and that one of the pairs was missing. When he was asked about it he never even attempted to explain. He didn’t seem flummoxed. He said he didn’t know they were missing. He pointed out that he had had no opportunity of going over his wardrobe for some months, having been in prison awaiting trial, and when he was asked how he could possibly account for this disappearance suggested flippantly that perhaps one of the police officers who had searched the house was in need of a pair of new trousers and had sneaked them. But Madame Berger had her explanation pat, and I’m bound to say I thought it a very ingenious one. She said that Lydia had been ironing the trousers, as she always did after Robert had worn them, and the iron was too hot and she had burnt them. He was fussy about his clothes and it had been something of a struggle to find the money to pay for the suit, they knew he would be angry with his wife, and Madame Berger, wishing to spare her his reproaches and seeing how scared she was, proposed that they shouldn’t tell him; she would get rid of the trousers and Robert perhaps would never notice that they had disappeared. Asked what she had done with them she said that a tramp had come to the door, asking for money, and she had given him the trousers instead. The size of the burn was gone into. She claimed that it made the trousers unwearable, and when the public prosecutor pointed out that invisible mending would have repaired the damage, she answered tht it would have cost more than the trousers were worth. Then he suggested that in their impoverished circumstances Berger might well have worn them in the house; it would surely have been better to risk his displeasure than to throw away a garment which might still be useful. Madame Berger said she never thought of that, she gave them to the tramp on an impulse, to get rid of them. The prosecutor put it to her that she had to get rid of them because they were blood-stained and that she hadn’t given them to a tramp who had so conveniently presented himself, but had herself destroyed them. She hotly denied this. Then where was the tramp? He would read of the incident in the papers and knowing that a man’s life was at stake would surely present himself. She turned to the press, throwing out her arms with a dramatic gesture.

‘“Let all these gentlemen,” she cried, “spread it far and wide. Let them beseech him to come forward and save my son.”

‘She was magnificent on the witness stand. The public prosecutor subjected her to a merciless examination; she fought like a fury. He took her through young Berger’s life and she admitted all his misdeeds, from the episode at the tennis club to his thefts from the broker who after his conviction had, out of charity, given him another chance. She took all the blame of them on herself. A French witness is allowed much greater latitude than is allowed to a witness in an English criminal trial, and with bitter self-reproach she confessed that his errors were due to the indulgence with which she had brought him up. He was an only child and she had spoilt him. Her husband had lost a leg in the war, while attending to the wounded under fire, and his ill health had made it necessary for her to give him unremitting attention to the detriment of her maternal duties. His untimely end had left the wretched boy without guidance. She appealed to the emotions of the jury by dwelling on the grief that had afflicted them both when death robbed their little family of its head. Then her son had been her only consolation. She described him as high-spirited, headstrong, easily led by bad companions, but deeply affectionate and, whatever else he was guilty of, incapable of murdering a man who had never shown him anything but kindness.

‘But somehow she didn’t create a favourable impression. She insisted on her own unimpeachable respectability in a way that grated on you. Even though she was defending the son she adored she missed no opportunity to remind the Court that she was the daughter of a staff officer. She was smartly dressed, in black, perhaps too smartly, she gave you the impression of a woman who was trying to live above her station; and she had a calculating expression on her hard, decided features; you couldn’t believe that she’d have given a crust of bread, much less a pair of trousers, even though damaged, to a beggar.’

‘And Lydia?’

‘Lydia was rather pathetic. She was very much in the family way. Her face was swollen with tears and her voice hardly rose above a whisper, so that you could only just hear what she said. No one believed her story that she had broken the glass of the watch herself, but the prosecutor wasn’t hard on her as he’d been on her mother-in-law; she was too obviously the innocent victim of a cruel fate. Madame Berger and Robert had used her unmercifully for their own ends. The Court took it as natural enough that she should do everything in her power to save her husband. It was even rather touching when she told how kind and sweet he had always been to her. It was quite clear that she was madly in love with him. The look she gave him when she came on to the witness stand was very moving. Out of all that crowd of witnesses, policemen and detectives, jailors, bar-loungers, informers, crooks, mental experts – they called a couple of experts who had made a psychological examination of Berger and a pretty picture they painted of his character – out of all that crowd, I say, she was the only one who appeared to have any human feeling.

‘They’d got Maitre Lemoine, one of the best criminal lawyers at the French bar, to defend Berger; he was a very tall, thin man, with a long sallow face, immense black eyes and very black thick hair. He had the most eloquent hands I’ve ever seen. He was a striking figure in his black gown, with the white of his lawyer’s bands under his chin. He had a deep, powerful voice. He reminded you, I hardly know why, of one of those mysterious figures in a Longhi picture. He was an actor as well as an orator. By a look he could express his opinion of man’s character and by a pause the improbability of his statements. I wish you could have seen the skill with which he treated the hostile witnesses, the suavity with which he inveigled them into contradicting themselves, the scorn with which he exposed their baseness, the ridicule with which he treated their pretensions. He could be winningly persuasive and brutally harsh. When the mental experts deposed that on repeated examinations of Berger in prison they had formed the opinion that he was vain, arrogant and mendacious, ruthless, devoid of moral sense, unscrupulous and insensible to remorse, he reasoned with them as though he were a trained psychologist. It was a delight to watch the working of his subtle brain. He spoke generally in an easy, conversational tone, but enriched by his lovely voice and with a beautiful choice of words; you felt that everything he said could have gone straight down in a book without alteration; but when he came to his final speech and used all the resources at his disposal the effect was stupendous. He insisted on the flimsiness of the evidence; he poured contempt on the credibility of the disreputable witnesses; he drew red herrings across the path; he contended that the prosecution hadn’t made out a case upon which it was possible to convict. Now he was chatty and seemed to talk to the jury as man to man, now he worked up to a flight of impassioned pleading and his voice grew and grew in volume till it rang through the court-room like the pealing of thunder. Then a pause so dramatic that you felt your skin go all goosy. His peroration was magnificent. He told the jury that they must do their duty and decide according to their conscience, but he besought them to put out of their minds all the prejudice occasioned by the young man’s admitted crimes, and his voice low and tremulous with emotion – by God! it was effective – he reminded them that the man the public prosecutor asked them to sentence to death was the son of a widow, herself the daughter of a soldier who had deserved well of his country, and the son of an officer who had given his life in its defence; he reminded them that he was recently married, and had married for love, and his young wife now bore in her womb the fruits of their union. Could they let this innocent child be brought into the world with the stigma that his father was a convicted murderer? Claptrap? Of course it was claptrap, but if you’d been there and heard those thrilling, grave accents you wouldn’t have thought so. Gosh! how people cried. I nearly did myself, only I saw the tears coursing down Berger’s cheeks and him wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, and that seemed to me so comic that I kept my head. But it was a fine effort, and not all the huissiers in the world could have prevented the applauses that burst from the crowd when he sat down.

‘The prosecuting counsel was a stout, rubicund fellow of thirty-five, I should say, or forty, who looked like a North Country farmer. He oozed self-satisfaction. You felt that for him the case was a wonderful chance to make a splash and so further his career. He was verbose and confused, so that, if the presiding judge hadn’t come to his help now and then, the jury would hardly have known what he was getting at. He was cheaply melodramatic. On one occasion he turned to Berger who had just made some remark aside to one of the warders who sat in the dock with him, and said:

‘“You may smile now, but you won’t smile when, with your arms pinioned behind your back, you walk in the cold gray light of dawn and see the guillotine rear its horror before your eyes. No smile then will break on your lips, but your limbs will shake with terror, and remorse for your monstrous crime wring your heart.’

‘Berger gave the warder an amused look, but so contemptuous of what the public prosecutor had said, that if he hadn’t been eaten up with vanity he couldn’t have failed to be disconcerted. It was grand to see the way Lemoine treated him. He paid him extravagant compliments, but charged with such corrosive irony that, for all his conceit, the public prosecutor couldn’t help seeing he was made a fool of. Lemoine was so malicious, but with such perfect courtesy and with such a condescending urbanity, that you could see in the eyes of the presiding judge a twinkle of appreciation. I very much doubt if the prosecuting counsel advanced his career by his conduct of this case.

‘The three judges sat in a row on the bench. They were rather impressive in their scarlet robes and black squarish caps. Two were middle-aged men and never opened their mouths. The presiding judge was a little old man, with the wrinkled face of a monkey, and a tired, flat voice, but he was very observant; he listened attentively, and when he spoke it was without severity, but with a passionless calm that was rather frightening. He had the exquisite reasonableness of a man who has no illusions about human nature, but having long since learnt that man is capable of any vileness accepts the fact as just as much a matter of course as that he has two arms and two legs. When the jury went out to consider their verdict we journalists scattered to have a chat, a drink or a cup of coffee. We all hoped they wouldn’t be too long, because it was getting late and we wanted to get our stuff in. We had no doubt that they’d find Berger guilty. One of the odd circumstances I’ve noticed in the murder trials I’ve attended is how unlike the impression is you get about things in court to that which you get by reading about them in the paper. When you read the evidence you think that after all it’s rather slight, and if you’d been on the jury you’d have given the accused the benefit of the doubt. But what you’ve left out of account is the general atmosphere, the feeling that you get; it puts an entirely different colour on the evidence. After about an hour we were told that the jury had arrived at a decision and we trooped in again. Berger was brought up from the cells and we all stood up as the three judges trailed in one after the other. The lights had been lit and it was rather sinister in that crowded court. There was a tremor of apprehension. Have you ever been to the Old Bailey?’

‘No, in point of fact, I haven’t,’ said Charley.

‘I go often when I’m in London. It’s a good place to learn about human nature. There’s a difference in feeling between that and a French court that made a most peculiar impression on me. I don’t pretend to understand it. At the Old Bailey you feel that a prisoner is confronted with the majesty of the law. It’s something impersonal that he has to deal with, Justice in the abstract. An idea, in fact. It’s awful in the literal sense of the world. But in that French court, during the two days I spent there, I was beset by a very different feeling, I didn’t get the impression that it was permeated by a grandiose abstraction, I felt that the apparatus of law was an arrangement by which a bourgeois society protected its safety, its property, its privileges from the evil-doer who threatened them. I don’t mean the trial wasn’t fair or the verdict unjustified, what I mean is that you got the sensation of a society that was outraged because it feared, rather than of a principle that must be upheld. The prisoner was up against men who wanted to safeguard themselves, rather than, as with us, up against an idea that must prevail though the heavens fall. It was terrifying rather than awful. The verdict was guilty of murder with extenuating circumstances.’

‘What were the extenuating circumstances?’

‘There were none, but French juries don’t like to sentence a man to death, and by French law when there are extenuating circumstances capital punishment can’t be inflicted. Berger got off with fifteen years’ penal servitude.’

Simon looked at his watch and got up.

‘I must be going. I’ll give you the stuff I wrote about the trial and you can read it at your leisure. And look, here’s the article I wrote on crime as a form of sport. I showed it to your girl friend, but I don’t think she liked it very much; anyhow, she returned it without a word of comment. As an exercise in sardonic humour it’s not so dusty.’

CHAPTER 7

SINCE HE HAD no wish to read Simon’s articles in Lydia’s presence, Charley, on parting from his friend, went to the Dôme, ordered himself a cup of coffee, and settled himself down to their perusal. He was glad to read a connected account of the murder and the trial, for Lydia’s various narratives had left him somewhat confused. She had told him this and that, not in the order in which it had occurred, but as her emotion dictated. Simon’s three long articles were coherent, and though there were particulars which Charley had learnt from Lydia and of which he was ignorant, he had succeeded in constructing a graphic story which it was easy to follow. He wrote almost as he spoke, in a fluent journalistic style, but he had managed very effectively to present the background against which the events he described had been enacted. You got a sinister impression of a world, sordid, tumultuous, in which these gangsters, dope traffickers, bookies and racecourse touts lived their dark and hazardous lives. Dregs of the population of a great city, living on their wits, suspicious of one another, ready to betray their best friend if it could be of advantage to themselves, open-handed, sociable, gaily cynical, even good-humoured, they seemed to enjoy that existence, with all its dangers and vicissitudes, which kept you up to the mark and made you feel that you really were living. Each man’s hand was against his neighbour’s, but the alertness which this forced upon you was exhilarating. It was a world in which a man would shoot another for a trifle, but was just as ready to take flowers and fruit, bought at no small sacrifice, to a third who was sick in hospital. The atmosphere with which Simon had not unskilfully encompassed his story filled Charley with a strange unease. The world he knew, the peaceful happy world of the surface, was like a pretty lake in which were reflected the dappled clouds and the willows that grew on its bank, where care-free boys paddled their canoes and the girls with them trailed their fingers in the soft water. It was terrifying to think that below, just below, dangerous weeds waved tentacles to ensnare you and all manner of strange, horrible things, poisonous snakes, fish with murderous jaws, waged an unceasing and hidden warfare. From a word here, a word there, Charley got the impression that Simon had peered fascinated into those secret depths, and he asked himself whether it was merely curiosity, or some horrible attraction, that led him to observe those crooks and blackguards with a cynical indulgence.

In this world Robert Berger had found himself wonderfully at home. Of a higher class and better educated than most of its inhabitants, he had enjoyed a certain prestige. His charm, his easy manner and his social position attracted his associates, but at the same time put them on their guard against him. They knew he was a crook, but curiously enough, because he was a garçon de bonne famille, a youth of respectable parentage, took it somewhat amiss that he should be. He worked chiefly alone, without confederates, and kept his own counsel. They had a notion that he despised them, but they were impressed when he had been to a concert and talked enthusiastically and, for all they could tell, with knowledge of the performance. They did not realize that he felt himself wonderfully at ease in their company. In his mother’s house, with his mother’s friend, he felt lonely and oppressed; he was irritated by the inactivity of the respectable life. After his conviction on the charge of stealing a motor car he had said to Jojo in one of his rare moments of confidence:

‘Now I needn’t pretend any more. I wish my father were alive, he would have turned me out of the house and then I should be free to lead the only life I like. Evidently I can’t leave my mother. I’m all she has.’

‘Crime doesn’t pay,’ said Jojo.

‘You seem to make a pretty good thing out of it,’ Robert laughed. ‘But it’s not the money, it’s the excitement and the power. It’s like diving from a great height. The water looks terribly far away, but you make the plunge, and when you rise to the surface, gosh! you feel pleased with yourself.’

Charley put the newspaper cuttings back in his pocket, and, his brow slightly frowning with the effort, tried to piece together what he now knew of Robert Berger in order to get some definite impression of the sort of man he really was. It was all very well to say he was a worthless scamp of whom society was well rid, that was true of course, but it was too simple and too sweeping a judgement to be satisfactory; the idea dawned in Charley’s mind that perhaps men were more complicated than he had imagined, and if you just said that a man was this or that you couldn’t get very far. There was Robert’s passion for music, especially Russian music, which, so unfortunately for her, had brought Lydia and him together. Charley was very fond of music. He knew the delight it gave him, the pleasure, partly sensual, partly intellectual, when intoxicated by the loveliness that assailed his ears, he remained yet keenly appreciative of the subtlety with which the composer had worked out his idea. Looking into himself, as perhaps he had never looked before, to find out what exactly it was he felt when he listened to one of the greater symphonies, it seemed to him that it was a complex of emotions, excitement and at the same time peace, love for others and a desire to do something for them, a wish to be good and a delight in goodness, a pleasant languor and a funny detachment as though he were floating above the world and whatever happened there didn’t very much matter; and perhaps if you had to combine all those feelings into one and give it a name, the name you’d give it was happiness. But what was it that Robert Berger got when he listened to music? Nothing like that, that was obvious. Or was it unjust to dismiss such emotions as music gave him as vile and worthless? Might it not be rather that in music he found release from the devil that possessed him, that devil which was stronger than himself so that he neither could be delivered, nor even wanted to be delivered, from the urge that drove him to crime because it was the expression of his warped nature, because by throwing himself into antagonism with the forces of law and order he realized his personality – might it not be that in music he found peace from that impelling force and for a while, resting in heavenly acquiescence, saw as though through a rift in the clouds a vision of love and goodness?

Charley knew what it was to be in love. He knew that it made you feel friendly to all men, he knew that you wanted to do everything in the world for the girl you loved, he knew that you couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her and he knew that you couldn’t help wondering what she saw in you, because of course she was wonderful, definitely, and if you were honest with yourself you were bound to confess that you couldn’t hold a candle to her. And Charley supposed that if he felt like that everyone else must feel like that and therefore Robert Berger had too. There was no doubt that he loved Lydia with passion, but if love filled him with a sense of – Charley jibbed at the word that came to his mind, it made him almost blush with embarrassment to think of it – well, with a sense of holiness, it was strange that he could commit sordid and horrible crimes. There must be two men in him. Charley was perplexed, which can hardly be considered strange, for he was but twenty-three, and older, wiser men have failed to understand how a scoundrel can love as purely and disinterestedly as a saint. And was it possible for Lydia to love her husband even now with an all-forgiving devotion if he were entirely worthless?

‘Human nature wants a bit of understanding,’ he muttered to himself.

Without knowing it, he had said a mouthful.

But when he came to consider the love that consumed Lydia, a love that was the cause of her every action, the inspiration of her every thought, so that it was like a symphonic accompaniment that gave depth and significance to the melodic line which was her life from day to day, he could only draw back in an almost horrified awe as he might have drawn back, terrified but fascinated, at the sight of a forest on fire or a river in flood. This was something with which his experience could not cope. By the side of this he knew that his own little love affairs had been but trivial flirtations, and the emotion which had from time to time brought charm and gaiety into his somewhat humdrum life no more than a boy’s sentimentality. It was incomprehensible that in the body of that commonplace, drab little woman there should be room for a passion of such intensity. It was not only what she said that made you realize it, you felt it, intuitively as it were, in the aloofness which, for all the intimacy with which she treated you, kept you at a distance; you saw it in the depths of her transparent eyes, in the scorn of her lips when she didn’t know you were looking at her, and you heard it in the undertones of her sing-song voice. It was not like any of the civilized feelings that Charley was familiar with, there was something wild and brutal in it, and notwithstanding her high-heeled shoes, her silk stockings, and her coat and skirt, Lydia did not seem a woman of to-day, but a savage with elemental instincts who still harboured in the darkest recesses of her soul the apelike creature from which the human being is descended.

‘By God! what have I let myself in for?’ said Charley.

He turned to Simon’s article. Simon had evidently taken pains over it, for the style was more elegant than that of his reports of the trial. It was an exercise in irony written with detachment, but beneath the detachment you felt the troubled curiosity with which he had considered the character of this man who was restrained neither by scruple nor by the fear of consequences. It was a clever little essay, but so callous that you could not read it without discomfort. Trying to make the most of his ingenious theme, Simon had forgotten that human beings, with feelings, were concerned; and if you smiled, for it was not lacking in a bitter wit, it was with malaise. It appeared that Simon had somehow gained admittance to the little house at Neuilly, and in order to give an impression of the environment in which Berger had lived, he described with acid humour the tasteless, stuffy and pretentious room into which he had been ushered. It was furnished with two drawing-room suites, one Louis Quinze and the other Empire. The Louis Quinze suite was in carved wood, gilt, and covered in blue silk with little pink flowers on it; the Empire suite was upholstered in light yellow satin. In the middle of the room was an elaborately-carved gilt table with a marble top. Both suites had evidently come from one of those shops in the Boulevard St Antoine that manufacture period furniture wholesale, and had been then bought at auction when their first owners had wanted to get rid of them. With two sofas and all those chairs it was impossible to move without precaution and there was nowhere you could sit in comfort. On the walls were large oil paintings in heavy gold frames, which, it was obvious, had been bought at sale-rooms because they were going for nothing.

The prosecution had reconstructed the story of the murder with plausibility. It was evident that Jordan had taken a fancy to Robert Berger. The meals he had stood him, the winners he had given him and the money he had lent him, proved that. At last Berger had consented to come to his apartment, and so that their leaving the bar together should not attract attention they had arranged for one to go some minutes after the other. They met according to plan, and since the concierge was certain she had admitted that night no one who asked for Jordan, it was plain that they had entered the house together. Jordan lived on the ground floor. Berger, still wearing his smart new gloves, sat down and smoked a cigarette while Jordan busied himself getting the whiskey and soda and bringing in the cake from his tiny kitchen. He was the sort of man who always sat in his shirt-sleeves at home, and he took off his coat. He put on a record. It was a cheap, old-fashioned gramophone, without an automatic change, and it was while Jordan was putting on a new record that Berger, coming up behind him as though to see what it was, had stabbed him in the back. To claim, as the defence did, that he had not the strength to give a blow of such violence as the post-mortem indicated, was absurd. He was very wiry. Persons who had known him in his tennis days testified that he had been known for the power of his forehand drive. If he had never got into the first rank it was not due to an inadequate physique, but to some psychological failing that defeated his will to win.

Simon accepted the view of the prosecution. He thought they had got the facts pretty accurately, and that the reaason they gave for Jordan’s asking the young man to come to his apartment was correct, but he was convinced they were wrong in supposing that Berger had murdered him for the money he knew he had made during the day. For one thing, the purchase of the gloves showed that he had decided upon the deed before he knew that Jordan would be in possession that night of an unusually large sum. Though the money had never been found Simon was persuaded that he had taken it, but that was by the way; it was there for the taking and he was glad enough to get it, but to do so was not the motive of the murder. The police claimed that he had stolen between fifty and sixty cars; he had never even attempted to sell one of them; he abandoned them sometimes after a few hours, at the most after a few days. He purloined them for the convenience of having one when he needed it, but much more to exercise his daring and resource. His robberies from women, by means of the simple trick he had devised, brought him little profit; they were practical jokes that appealed to his sense of humour. To carry them out required the charm which he loved to exert. It made him giggle to think of those women left speechless and gaping in an empty street while he sped on. The thing was, in short, a form of sport, and each time he had successfully brought it off he was filled with the self-satisfaction that he might have felt when by a clever lob or by a drop shot he won a point off an opponent at tennis. It gave him confidence. And it was the risk, the coolness that was needed, the power to make a quick decision if it looked as though discovery were inevitable, much more than the large profits, that had induced him to engage in the business of smuggling dope into France. It was like rock-climbing; you had to be sure of foot, you had to keep your head; your life depended on your nerve, your strength, your instinct; but when you had surmounted every difficulty and achieved your aim, how wonderful after that terrific strain was the feeling of deliverance and how intoxicating the sense of victory! Certainly for a man of his slender means he had got a good deal of money out of the broker who had employed him; but it had come in driblets and he had spent it on taking Lydia to night clubs and for excursions in the country, or with his friends at Jojo’s Bar. Every penny had gone by the time he was caught; and it was only a chance that he was; the method he had conceived for robbing his employer was so adroit that he might very well have got away with it indefinitely. Here again it looked as though it were much more for the fun of the thing, than for profit, that he had committed a crime. He told his lawyer quite frankly that the broker was so confident of his own cleverness, he could not resist making a fool of him.

But by now, Simon went on, pursuing his idea, Robert Berger had exhausted the amusement he was capable of getting out of the smaller varieties of evil-doing. During one of the periods he spent in jail awaiting trial he had made friends with an old lag, and had listened to his stories with fascinated interest. The man was a cat burglar who specialized in jewellery and he made an exciting tale of some of his exploits. First there was the marking down of the prey, then the patient watching to discover her habits, the examination of the premises; you had to find out not only where the jewels were kept and how to get into the house, but also what were the chances of making a quick get-away if necessary; and after you had made sure of everything there was the long waiting for the suitable opportunity. Often months elapsed between the time when you made up your mind to go after the stuff and the time when at last you had a whack at it. That was what choked Berger off; he had the nerve, the agility and the presence of mind that were needed, but he would never have had had the patience for the complicated business that must precede the burglary.

Simon likened Robert Berger to a man who has shot partridge and pheasant for years, and having ceased to find diversion in the exercise of his skill, craves for a sport in which there is an element of danger and so turns his mind to big game. No one could say when Berger began to be obsessed with the idea of murder, but it might be supposed that it took possession of him gradually. Like an artist heavy with the work demanding expression in his soul, who knows that he will not find peace till he has delivered himself of the burden, Berger felt that by killing he would fulfil himself. After that, having expressed his personality to its utmost, he would be at rest and then could settle down with Lydia to a life of humdrum respectability. His instincts would have been satisfied. He knew that it was a monstrous crime, he knew that he risked his neck, but it was the monstrousness of it that tempted him and the risk that made it worth the attempt.

Here Charley put the article down. He thought that Simon was really going too far. He could just fancy himself committing murder in a moment of ungovernable rage, but by no effort of imagination could he conceive of anyone doing such a thing – doing it not even for money, but for sport as Simon put it – because he was driven to it by an urge to destroy and so assert his own being. Did Simon really believe there was anything in his theory, or was it merely that he thought it would make an effective article? Charley, though with a slight frown on his handsome face, went on reading.

Perhaps, Simon continued, Robert Berger would have been satisfied merely to toy with the idea if circumstances had not offered him the predestined victim. He may often, when drinking with one of his boon companions, have considered the feasibility of killing him and put the notion aside because the difficulties were too great or detection too certain. But when chance threw him in contact with Teddie Jordan he must have felt that here was the very man he had been looking for. He was a foreigner, with a large acquaintance, but no close friends, who lived alone in a blind alley. He was a crook; he was connected with the dope traffic; if he were found dead one day the police might well suppose that his murder was the result of a gangsters’ quarrel. If they knew nothing of his sexual habits, they would be sure to find out about them after his death and likely enough to assume that he had been killed by some rough who wanted more money than he was prepared to give. Among the vast number of bullies, blackmailers, dope-peddlers and bad hats who might have done him in, the police would not know where to look, and in any case he was an undesirable alien and they would think he was just as well out of the way. They would make enquiries and if results were not soon obtained quietly shelve the case. Berger saw that Jordan had taken a fancy to him and he played him like an angler playing a trout. He made dates which he broke. He made half-promises which he did not keep. If Jordan, thinking he was being made a fool of, threatened to break away, he exercised his charm to induce him to have patience. Jordan thought it was he who pursued and the other who fled. Berger laughed in his sleeve. He tracked him as a hunter day after day tracks a shy and suspicious beast in the jungle, waiting for his opportunity, with the knowledge that, for all its instinctive caution, the brute will at last be delivered into his hands. And because Berger had no feeling of animosity for Jordan, neither liking him nor disliking him, he was able to devote himself without hindrance to the pleasure of the chase. When at length the deed was done and the little bookmaker lay dead at his feet, he felt neither fear nor remorse, but only a thrill so intense that he was transported.

Charley finished the essay. He shuddered. He did not know whether it was Robert Berger’s brutal treachery and callousness that more horrified him or the cool relish with which Simon described the workings of the murderer’s depraved and tortuous mind. It was true that this description was the work of his own invention, but what fearful instinct was it in him that found delight in peering into such vile depths? Simon leaned over to look into Berger’s soul, as one might lean over the edge of a fearful precipice, and you had the impression that what he saw filled him with envy. Charley did not know how he had got the impression (because there was nothing in those careful periods or in that half-flippant irony actually to suggest it) that while he wrote he asked himself whether there was in him, Simon Fenimore, the courage and the daring to do a deed so shocking, cruel and futile. Charley sighed.

‘I’ve known Simon for nearly fifteen years. I thought I knew him inside out. I’m beginning to think I don’t know the first thing about him.’

But he smiled happily. There were his father and his mother and Patsy. They would be leaving the Terry-Masons next day, tired after those strenuous days of fun and laughter, but glad to get back to their bright, artistic and comfortable house.

‘Thank God, they’re decent, ordinary people. You know where you are with them.’

He suddenly felt a wave of affection for them sweep over him.

But it was growing late; Lydia would be getting back and he did not want to keep her waiting, she would be lonely, poor thing, by herself in that sordid room; he stuffed the essay into his pocket with the other cuttings and walked back to the hotel. He need not have fashed himself. Lydia was not there. He took Mansfield Park, which with Blake’s Poems was the only book he had brought with him, and began to read. It was a delight to move in the company of those well-mannered persons who after the lapse of more than a hundred years seemed as much alive as anyone you met to-day. There was a gracious ease in the ordered course of their lives, and the perturbations from which they suffered were not so serious as to distress you. It was true that Cinderella was an awful little prig and Prince Charming a monstrous pedant; it was true that you could not but wish that instead of setting her prim heart on such an owl she had accepted the proposals of the engaging and witty villain; but you accepted with indulgence Jane Austen’s determination to reward good sense and punish levity. Nothing could lessen the delight of her gentle irony and caustic humour. It took Charley’s mind off that story of depravity and crime in which he seemed to have got so strangely involved. He was removed from the dingy, cheerless room and in fancy saw himself sitting on a lawn, under a great cedar, on a pleasant summer evening; and from the fields beyond the garden came the scent of hay. But he began to feel hungry and looked at his watch. It was half-past eight. Lydia had not returned. Perhaps she had no intention of doing so? It wouldn’t be very nice of her to leave him like that, without a word of explanation or farewell, and the possibility made him rather angry, but then he shrugged his shoulders.

‘If she doesn’t want to come back, let her stay away.’

He didn’t see why he should wait any longer, so he went out to dinner, leaving word at the porter’s desk where he was going so that if she came she could join him. Charley wasn’t quite sure if it amused, flattered or irritated him, that the staff should treat him with a sort of confidential familiarity as though they got a vicarious satisfaction out of the affair which, naturally enough, they were convinced he was having. The porter was smilingly benevolent and the young woman at the cashier’s desk excited and curious. Charley chuckled at the thought of their shocked surprise if they had known how innocent were his relations with Lydia. He came back from his solitary dinner and she was not yet there. He went up to his room and went on reading, but now he had to make a certain effort to attend. If she didn’t come back by twelve he made up his mind to give her up and go out on the loose. It was absurd to spend the best part of a week in Paris and not have a bit of fun. But soon after eleven she opened the door and entered, carrying a small and very shabby suitcase.

‘Oh, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought a few things with me. I’ll just have a wash and then we’ll go out to dinner.’

‘Haven’t you dined? I have.’

‘Have you?’

She seemed surprised.

‘It’s past eleven.’

She laughed.

‘How English you are! Must you always dine at the same hour?’

‘I was hungry,’ he answered rather stiffly.

It seemed to him that she really might express some regret for having kept him waiting so long. It was plain, however, that nothing was farther from her thoughts.

‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I don’t want any dinner. What a day I’ve had! Alexey was drunk; he had a row with Paul this morning, because he didn’t come home last night, and Paul knocked him down. Evgenia was crying, and she kept on saying: “God has punished us for our sins. I have lived to see my son strike his father. What is going to happen to us all?” Alexey was crying too. “It is the end of everything,” he said. “Children no longer respect their parents. Oh, Russia, Russia!”’

Charley felt inclined to giggle, but he saw that Lydia was taking the scene in all seriousness.

‘And did you cry too?’

‘Naturally,’ she answered, with a certain coldness.

She had changed her dress and now wore one of black silk. It was plain enough but well cut. It suited her. It made her clear skin more delicate and deepened the colour of her blue eyes. She wore a black hat, rather saucy in shape, with a feather in it, and much more becoming than the old black felt. The smarter clothes had had an effect on her; she wore them more elegantly and carried herself with a graceful assurance. She no longer looked like a shop-girl, but like a young woman of some distinction, and prettier than Charley had ever seen her, but she gave you less than ever the impression that there was anything doing, as the phrase goes; if she had given before the effect of a respectable work-girl who knew how to take care of herself, she gave now that of a modish young woman perfectly capable of putting a too enterprising young man in his place.

‘You’ve got a different frock on,’ said Charley, who was already beginning to get over his ill humour.

‘Yes, it’s the only nice one I’ve got. I thought it was too humiliating for you to have to be seen with such a little drab as I was looking. After all, the least a handsome young man in beautiful clothes can ask is that when he goes into a restaurant with a woman people shouldn’t say: how can he go about with a slut who looks as though she were wearing the cast-off clothes of a maid of all work? I must at least try to be a credit to you.’

Charley laughed. There was really something rather likeable about her.

‘Well, we’d better go out and get you something to eat. I’ll sit with you. If I know anything about your appetite you could eat a horse.’

They started off in high spirits. He drank a whiskey and soda and smoked his pipe while Lydia ate a dozen oysters, a beefsteak and some fried potatoes. She told him at greater length of her visit to her Russian friends. She was greatly concerned at their situation. There was no money except the little the children earned. One of these days Paul would get sick of doing his share and would disappear into that equivocal night life of Paris, to end up, if he was lucky, when he had lost his youth and looks, as a waiter in a disreputable hotel. Alexey was growing more and more of a soak and even if by chance he got a job would never be able to hold it. Evgenia had no longer the courage to withstand the difficulties that beset her; she had lost heart. There was no hope for any of them.

‘You see, it’s twenty years since they left Russia. For a long time they thought they’d be a change there and they’d go back, but now they know there’s no chance. It’s been hard on people like that, the revolution; they’ve got nothing to do now, they and all their generation, but to die.’

But it occurred to Lydia that Charley could not be much interested in people whom he had not even seen. She could not know that while she was talking to him about her friends he was telling himself uneasily that, if he guessed aright what was in Simon’s mind, it was just such a fate that he was preparing for him, for his father, mother and sister, and for their friends. Lydia changed the subject.

‘And what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon? Did you go and see any pictures?’

‘No. I went to see Simon.’

Lydia was looking at him with an expression of indulgent interest, but when he answered her question, she frowned.

‘I don’t like your friend Simon,’ she said. ‘What is it that you see in him?’

‘I’ve known him since I was a kid. We were at school together and at Cambridge. He’s been my friend always. Why don’t you like him?’

‘He’s cold, calculating and inhuman.’

‘I think you’re wrong there. No one knows better than I do that he’s capable of great affection. He’s a lonely creature. I think he hankers for a love that he can never arouse.’

Lydia’s eyes shone with mockery, but, as ever, there was in it a rueful note.

‘You’re very sentimental. How can anyone expect to arouse love who isn’t prepared to give himself? In spite of all the years you’ve known him I wonder if you know him as well as I do. He comes a lot to the Sérail; he doesn’t often go up with a girl, and then not from desire, but from curiosity. Madame makes him welcome, partly because he’s a journalist and she likes to keep in with the press, and partly because he sometimes brings foreigners who drink a lot of champagne. He likes to talk to us and it never enters his head that we find him repulsive.’

‘Remember that if he knew that he wouldn’t be offended. He’d only be curious to know why. He has no vanity.’

Lydia went on as though Charley had said nothing.

‘He hardly looks upon us as human beings, he despises us and yet he seeks our company. He’s at ease with us. I think he feels that our degradation is so great, he can be himself, whereas in the outside world he must always wear a mask. He’s strangely insensitive. He thinks he can permit himself anything with us and he asks us questions that put us to shame and never sees how bitterly he wounds us.’

Charley was silent. He knew well enough how Simon, with his insatiable curiosity, could cause people profound embarrassment and was only surprised and scornful when he found that they resented his inquiries. He was willing enough to display the nakedness of his soul and it never occurred to him that the reserves of others could be due, not to stupidity as he thought, but to modesty. Lydia continued:

‘Yet he’s capable of doing things that you’d never expect of him. One of our girls was suddenly taken ill. The doctor said she must be operated on at once, and Simon took her to a nursing home himself so that she shouldn’t have to go to the hospital, and paid for the operation; and when she got better he paid her expenses to go away to a convalescent home. And he’d never even slept with her.’

‘I’m not surprised. He attaches no importance to money. Anyhow it shows you that he’s capable of a disinterested action.’

‘Or do you think he wanted to examine in himself what the emotion of goodness exactly was?’

Charley laughed.

‘It’s obvious that you haven’t got much use for poor Simon.’

‘He’s talked to me a great deal. He wanted to find out all I could tell him about the Russian Revolution, and he wanted me to take him to see Alexey and Evgenia so that he could ask them. You know he reported Robert’s trial. He tried to make me tell him all sorts of things that he wanted to know. He went to bed with me because he thought he could get me to tell him more. He wrote an article about it. All that pain, all that horror and disgrace, were no more to him than an occasion to string clever, flippant words together; and he gave it me to read to see how I would take it. I shall never forgive him that. Never.’

Charley sighed. He knew that Simon, with his amazing insensitiveness to other people’s feelings, had shown her that cruel essay with no intention of hurting, but from a perfectly honest desire to see how she reacted to it and to discover how far her intimate knowledge would confirm his fanciful theory.

‘He’s a strange creature,’ said Charley. ‘I daresay he has a lot of traits which one would rather he hadn’t, but he has great qualities. There’s one thing at all events that you can say about him: if he doesn’t spare others, he doesn’t spare himself. After not seeing him for two years, and he’s changed a lot in that time, I can’t help finding his personality rather impressive.’

‘Frightening, I should have said.’

Charley moved uneasily on his plush seat, for that also, somewhat to his dismay, was what he had found it.

‘He lives an extraordinary life, you know. He works sixteen hours a day. The squalor and discomfort of his surroundings are indescribable. He’s trained himself to eat only one meal a day.’

‘What is the object of that?’

‘He wants to strengthen and deepen his character. He wants to make himself independent of circumstances. He wants to prepare himself for the role he expects one day to be called upon to play.’

‘And has he told you what that role is?’

‘Not precisely.’

‘Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?’

‘No.’

‘Simon has talked to me about him a great deal. Alexey was a lawyer in the old days, a clever one with liberal principles, and he defended Dzerjinsky at one of his trials. That didn’t prevent Dzerjinsky from having Alexey arrested as a counter-revolutionary and sending him for three years to Alexandrovsk. That was one of the reasons why Simon wanted me so much to take him to see Alexey. And when I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t bear that he should see to what depths that poor, broken-down man had sunk, he charged me with questions to put to him.’

‘But who was Dzerjinsky?’ asked Charley.

‘He was the head of the Cheka. He was the real master of Russia. He had an unlimited power over the life and death of the whole population. He was monstrously cruel; he imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands upon thousands of people. At first I thought it strange that Simon should be so interested in that abominable man, he seemed to be fascinated by him, and then I guessed the reason. That is the role he means to play when the revolution he’s working for takes place. He knows that the man who is master of the police is master of the country.’

Charley’s eyes twinkled.

‘You make my flesh creep, dear. But you know, England isn’t like Russia; I think Simon will have to wait a hell of a long time before he’s dictator of England.’

But this was a matter upon which Lydia could brook no flippancy. She gave him a dark look.

‘He’s prepared to wait. Didn’t Lenin wait? Do you still think the English are made of different clay from other men? Do you think the proletariat, which is growing increasingly conscious of its power, is going to leave the class you belong to indefinitely in possession of its privileges? Do you think that a war, whether it results in your defeat or your victory, is going to result in anything but a great social upheaval?’

Charley was not interested in politics. Though, like his father, of liberal views, with mildly socialistic tendencies so long as they were not carried beyond the limits of prudence, by which, though he didn’t know it, he meant so long as they didn’t interfere with his comfort and his income, he was quite prepared to leave the affairs of the country to those whose business it was to deal with them; but he could not let these provocative questions of Lydia’s go without an answer.

‘You talk as though we did nothing for the working classes. You don’t seem to know that in the last fifty years their condition has changed out of all recognition. They work fewer hours than they did and get higher wages for what they do. They have better houses to live in. Why, on our own estate we’re doing away with slums as quickly as it’s economically possible. We’ve given them old age pensions and we provide them with enough to live on when they’re out of work. They get free schooling, free hospitals, and now we’re beginning to give them holidays with pay. I really don’t think the British working man has much to complain of.’

‘You must remember that the views of a benefactor and the views of a beneficiary on the value of a benefaction are apt to differ. Do you really expect the working man to be grateful to you for the advantages he’s extracted from you at the point of a pistol? Do you think he doesn’t know that he owes the favours you’ve conferred on him to your fear rather than to your generosity?’

Charley was not going to let himself be drawn into a political discussion if he could help it, but there was one more thing he couldn’t refrain from saying.

‘I shouldn’t have thought that the condition in which you and your Russian friends now find yourselves would lead you to believe that mob-rule was a great success.’

‘That is the bitterest part of our tragedy. However much we may deny it, we know in our hearts that whatever has happened to us, we’ve deserved it.’

Lydia said this with a tragic intensity that somewhat disconcerted Charley. She was a difficult woman; she could take nothing lightly. She was the sort of woman who couldn’t even ask you to pass the salt without giving you the impression that it was no laughing matter. Charley sighed; he supposed he must make allowances, for she had had a rotten deal, poor thing; but was the future really so black?

‘Tell me about Dzerjinsky,’ he said, stumbling a little over the pronunciation of the difficult name.

‘I can only tell you what Alexey has told me. He says the most remarkable thing about him was the power of his eyes; he had a curious gift, he was able to fix them upon you for an immensely long time, and the glassy stare of them, with their dilated pupils, was simply terrifying. He was extremely thin, he’d contracted tuberculosis in prison, and he was tall; not bad-looking, with good features. He was absolutely single-minded, that was the secret of his power, he had a cold, arid temperament; I don’t suppose he’d ever given himself up with a whole heart to a moment’s pleasure. The only thing he cared about was his work; he worked day and night. At the height of his career he lived in one small room with nothing in it but a desk and an old screen, and behind the screen a narrow iron bed. They say that in the year of famine, when they brought him decent food instead of horseflesh, he sent it away, demanding the same rations as were given to the other workers in the Cheka. He lived for the Cheka and nothing else. There was no humanity in him, neither pity nor love, only fanaticism and hatred. He was terrible and implacable.’

Charley shuddered a little. He could not but see why Lydia had told him about the terrorist, and in truth it was startling to note how close the resemblance was between the sinister man she had described and the man he had so surprisingly discovered that Simon was become. There was the same asceticism, the same indifference to the pleasant things of life, the same power of work, and perhaps the same ruthlessness. Charley smiled his good-natured smile.

‘I daresay Simon has his faults like the rest of us. One has to be tolerant with him because he hasn’t had a very happy or a very easy life. I think perhaps he craves for affection, and there’s something that people find repellent in his personality which prevents him from getting it. He’s frightfully sensitive and things which wouldn’t affect ordinary people wound him to the quick. But at heart I think he’s kind and generous.’

‘You’re deceived in him. You think he has your own good nature and unselfish consideration. I tell you, he’s dangerous. Dzerjinsky was the narrow idealist who for the sake of his ideal could bring destruction upon his country without a qualm. Simon isn’t even that. He has no heart, no conscience, no scruple, and if the occasion arises he will sacrifice you who are his dearest friend without hesitation and without remorse.’

CHAPTER 8

THEY WOKE NEXT day at what was for them an early hour. They had breakfast in bed, each with his tray, and after breakfast, while Charley, smoking his pipe, read the Mail, Lydia, a cigarette between her lips, did her hands. You would have thought, to see them, each engaged on his respective occupation, that they were a young married couple whose first passion had dwindled into an easy friendship. Lydia painted her nails and spread out her fingers on the sheet to let them dry. She gave Charley a mischievous glance.

‘Would you like to go to the Louvre this morning? You came to Paris to see pictures, didn’t you?’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘Well, let’s get up, then, and go.’

When the maid who brought them their coffee drew the curtains the day that filtered into the room from the courtyard had looked as gray and bleak as on the mornings that had gone before; and they were surprised, on stepping into the street, to see that the weather had suddenly changed. It was cold still, but the sun was bright and the clouds, high up in the heavens, were white and shining. The air had a frosty bite that made your blood tingle.

‘Let’s walk,’ said Lydia.

In that gay, quivering light the Rue de Rennes lost its dinginess, and the gray, shabby houses no longer wore the down-at-heel, despondent air they usually do, but had a mellow friendliness as though, like old women in reduced circumstances, they felt less forlorn now that the unexpected sunshine smiled on them as familiarly as on the grand new buildings on the other side of the river. When they crossed the Place St Germain-des-Prés and there was a confusion of buses and trams, recklessly-speeding taxis, lorries and private cars, Lydia took Charley’s arm; and like lovers, or a grocer and his wife taking a walk of a Sunday afternoon, they sauntered arm in arm, stopping now and then to look into the window of a picture-dealer, down the narrow Rue de Seine. Then they came on to the quay. Here the Paris day burst upon them in all its winter beauty and Charley gave a little exclamation of delight.

‘You like this?’ smiled Lydia.

‘It’s a picture by Raffaelli.’ He remembered a line in a poem that he had read at Tours: ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.’

The air had a sparkle so that you felt you could take it up in your hands and let it run through your fingers like the water of a fountain. To Charley’s eyes, accustomed to the misty distances and soft haze of London, it seemed amazingly transparent. It outlined the buildings, the bridge, the parapet by the side of the river, with an elegant distinctness, but the lines, as though drawn by a sensitive hand, were tender and gracious. Tender too was the colour, the colour of sky and cloud, the colour of stone; they were the colours of the eighteenth-century pastelists; and the leafless trees, their slim branches a faint mauve against the blue, repeated with exquisite variety a pattern of delicate intricacy. Because he had seen pictures of just that scene Charley was able to take it in, without any sense of surprise, but with a loving, understanding recognition; its beauty did not shatter him by its strangeness, nor perplex him by its unexpectedness, but filled him with a sense of familiar joy such as a countryman might feel when after an absence of years he sees once more the dear, straggling street of his native village.

‘Isn’t it lovely to be alive?’ he cried.

‘It’s lovely to be as young and enthusiastic as you are,’ said Lydia, giving his arm a little squeeze, and if she choked down a sob he did not notice it.

Charley knew the Louvre well, for every time his parents spent a few days in Paris (to let Venetia get her clothes from the little dressmaker who was just as good as those expensive places in the Rue Royale and the Rue Cambon) they made a point of taking their children there. Leslie Mason made no bones at confessing that he preferred new pictures to old.

‘But after all, it’s part of a gentleman’s education to have done the great galleries of Europe, and when people talk about Rembrandt and Titian and so on, you look a bit of a fool if you can’t put your word in. And I don’t mind telling you that you couldn’t have a better guide than your mother. She’s very artistic, and she knows what’s what, and she won’t waste your time over a lot of tripe.’

‘I don’t claim that your grandfather was a great artist,’ said Mrs Mason, with the modest self-assurance of someone who is without conceit aware that he knows his subject, ‘but he knew what was good. All I know about art he taught me.’

‘Of course you had a flair,’ said her husband.

Mrs Mason considered this for a moment.

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right, Leslie. I had a flair.’

What made it easier to do the Louvre with expedition and spiritual profit was that in those days they had not rearranged it, and the Salon Carré contained most of the pictures which Mrs Mason thought worthy of her children’s attention. When they entered that room they walked straight to Leonardo’s Gioconda.

‘I always think one ought to look at that first,’ she said. ‘It puts you in the right mood for the Louvre.’

The four of them stood in front of the picture and with reverence gazed at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman. After a decent interval for meditation Mrs Mason turned to her husband and her two children. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Words fail me to express what that picture always makes me feel,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘Leonardo was a Great Artist. I think everybody’s bound to acknowledge that.’

‘I don’t mind admitting that I’m a bit of a philistine when it comes to old masters,’ said Leslie, ‘but that’s got a je ne sais quoi that gets you, there’s no denying that. Can you remember that bit of Pater’s, Venetia? He hit the nail on the head and no mistake.’

Mrs Mason, a faint, enigmatic smile on her lips, in a low but thrilling voice repeated the celebrated lines that two generations ago wrought such havoc on the aesthetic young.

‘Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.’

They listened to her in awed silence. She broke off, and in her natural voice said brightly:

‘Now let’s go and look at the Raphael.’

But it was impossible to avoid seeing the two vast canvases of Paolo Veronese that faced one another on opposite walls.

‘It’s worth while giving them a glance,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather had a very high opinion of them. Of course Veronese was neither subtle nor profound. He had no soul. But he certainly had a gift of composition, and you must remember that there’s no one now who could arrange so great a number of figures in a harmonious, and yet natural, design. You must admire them if for no other reason because of their vitality and for the sheer physical vigour Veronese must have had to paint such enormous pictures. But I think there’s more in them than that. They do give you an impression of the abundant, multicoloured life of the period and of the pleasure-loving, pagan spirit which was characteristic of patrician Venice in the heyday of its glory.’

‘I’ve often tried to count the number of figures in the Marriage of Cana,’ said Leslie Mason, ‘but every time I make it different.’

The four of them began to count, but none of the results they reached agreed. Presently they strolled into the Grande Galerie.

‘Now here is L’Homme au Gant,’ said Mrs Mason. ‘I’m not sorry you looked at the Veroneses first, because they do bring out very clearly the peculiar merit of Titian. You remember what I said about Veronese having no soul; well, you’ve only got to look at L’Homme au Gant to see that soul is just what Titian had.’

‘He was a remarkable old buffer,’ said Leslie Mason. ‘He lived to the age of ninety-nine and then it needed the plague to kill him.’

Mrs Mason smiled slightly.

‘I have no hesitation,’ she continued, ‘in saying that I consider this one of the finest portraits that’s ever been painted. Of course one can’t compare it with a portrait by Cézanne or even by Manet.’

‘We mustn’t forget to show them the Manet, Venetia.’

‘No, we won’t do that. We’ll come to that presently. But what I mean to say is that you must accept the idiom of the time at which it was painted, and bearing that in mind I don’t think anyone can deny that it’s a masterpiece. Of course just as a piece of painting it’s beyond praise, but it’s got a distinction and an imaginative quality which are very unique. Don’t you think so, Leslie?’

‘Definitely.’

‘When I was a girl I used to spend hours looking at it. It’s a picture that makes you dream. Personally I think it’s a finer portrait than Velasquez’s Pope, the one in Rome, you know, just because it’s more suggestive. Velasquez was a very great painter, I admit that, and he had an enormous influence on Manet, but what I miss in him is exactly what Titian had – Soul.’

Leslie Mason looked at his watch.

‘We mustn’t waste too much time here, Venetia,’ he said, ‘or we shall be late for lunch.’

‘All right. We’ll just go and look at the Ingres and the Manet.’

They walked on, glancing right and left at the pictures that lined the walls, but there was nothing that Mrs Mason thought worth lingering over.

‘It’s no good burdening their minds with a lot of impressions that’ll only confuse them,’ she told her husband. ‘It’s much better that they should concentrate on what’s really important.’

‘Definitely,’ he answered.

They entered the Salle des États, but at the threshold Mrs Mason stopped.

‘We won’t bother about the Poussins to-day,’ she said. ‘You have to come to the Louvre to see them, and there’s no doubt that he was a Great Artist. But he was more of a painter’s painter than a layman’s, and I think you’re a little young to appreciate him. One day when you’re both of you a bit older we’ll come and have a good go at him. I mean you have to be rather sophisticated to thoroughly understand him. The room that we’re coming to now is nineteenth century. But I don’t think we need bother about Delacroix either. He was a painter’s painter too, and I wouldn’t expect you to see in him what I do; you must take my word for it that he was a very considerable artist. He was no mean colourist and he had a strong romantic feeling. And you certainly needn’t trouble your heads with the Barbizon School. In my young days they were very much admired, but that was before we understood the Impressionists even, and of course we hadn’t so much as heard of Cézanne or Matisse; they don’t amount to anything and they can be safely ignored. I want you to look first at the Odalisque of Ingres and then at the Olympia of Manet. They’re wonderfully placed, opposite one another, so that you can look at both of them at the same time, compare them and draw your own conclusions.’

Having said this Mrs Mason advanced into the room with her husband by her side, while Charley and Patsy followed together a step or two behind. But her eyes falling on Millet’s The Gleaners, she paused.

‘I’d just like you to look at this for a minute. I don’t want you to admire it, but I want you to give it a glance because at one time it was thought very highly of. I’m ashamed to say that when I was a girl it used to bring tears to my eyes. I thought it a very beautiful and moving picture. But when I look at it now I simply can’t think what I ever saw in it. It just shows how one’s opinions change as one grows older.’

‘It shows also how even the youngest of us may err,’ said Leslie, with a shrewd smile, as though he had just invented the phrase.

They turned away and presently Venetia reached the exact spot where she thought the two pictures which she particularly wanted her offspring to admire could be seen to best advantage. She stopped with the triumphant air with which a conjurer extracts a rabbit from a hat and cried:

‘There!’

They stood in a row for some minutes and Mrs Mason gazed at the two nudes with rapture. Then she turned to the children.

‘Now let’s go and examine them close at hand.’

They stood in front of the Odalisque.

‘It’s no good, Venetia,’ said Leslie. ‘You may say I’m a philistine, but I don’t like the colour. The pink of that body is just the pink of that face cream you used to put on at night till I made you stop it.’

‘You needn’t reveal the secrets of the alcove to these innocent children,’ said Venetia with a prim and at the same time roguish smile. ‘But I would never claim for a moment that Ingres was a great colourist; all the same I do think that blue is a very sweet colour and I’ve often thought I’d like an evening dress just like it. D’you think it would be too young, Patsy?’

‘No, darling. Not a bit.’

‘But that’s neither here nor there. Ingres was probably the greatest draughtsman who ever lived. I don’t know how anyone can look at those firm and lovely lines and not feel he’s in the presence of one of the great manifestations of the human spirit. I remember my father telling me that once he came here with one of his fellow-students from Julian’s who’d never seen it, and when his eyes fell on it he was so overcome with its beauty of line that he actually fainted.’

‘I think it’s much more likely that it was long past the hour at which reasonable people have lunch and that he fainted with hunger.’

‘Isn’t your father awful?’ smiled Mrs Mason. ‘Well, let’s just have five minutes more for the Olympia, Leslie, and then I’m ready to go.’

They marched up to Manet’s great picture.

‘When you come to a masterpiece like this,’ said Mrs Mason, ‘you can do nothing but keep your mouth shut and admire. The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence. No one, not even Renoir, not even El Greco, has ever painted flesh like that. Look at that right breast. It’s a miracle of loveliness. One is simply left gasping. Even my poor father, who couldn’t bear the moderns, was forced to admit that the painting of that breast was pretty good. Pretty good? I ask you. Now I suppose you see a black line all round the figure. You do, Charley, don’t you?’

Charley acknowledged that he did.

‘And you, Patsy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ she cried triumphantly. ‘I used to see it, I know it’s there, but I give you my word, I don’t see it any more.’

After that they went to lunch at one of the little places Mr and Mrs Mason had discovered where no English ever went. It was just as good as the fashionable restaurants foreigners went to and half the price. It was fairly full and, oddly enough, there were Engish people at the table on the right of theirs and Americans on the left. Opposite sat two tall blond Swedes and a little way off some Japanese. In fact you heard almost every language but French. Leslie gave the company a sweeping glance of disapproval.

‘It looks to me, Venetia, as though this place is getting spoilt.’

The four of them were given huge menus written in violet ink and they looked at them in some perplexity. Leslie rubbed his hands cheerfully.

‘Now what are we going to start on? I suppose in France we’d better do as the French do, so what do you all say to snails to begin with and frogs to follow?’

‘Don’t be disgusting, daddy,’ said Patsy.

‘You’re merely showing your ignorance when you say that, my child. They’re a great delicacy. I don’t see them on the bill of fare.’ He could never quite remember whether in French grenouille was a frog and crapaud a toad or the other way about; he looked up at the head waiter who was standing beside him and in his sturdy British accent said: ‘Garçong, est-ce-quer vous avez des crapauds?’

The head waiter didn’t much like being addressed as garçong, but he gravely answered that it was not the season.

‘How sickening,’ cried Leslie. ‘Well, what about snails? Escargots?’

‘Daddy, I shall be sick if you eat snails.’

‘He’s only teasing you, darling,’ said Mrs Mason. ‘I think we’d better have a nice omelette. You can always be sure of an omelette in France.’

‘That’s true,’ said Leslie. ‘No matter where you go in France you can be sure of getting a good omelette. Very well. Garçong, une omelette pour quatre.’

Then, for the sake of the children, they ordered rosbif à l’anglaise. The young people had vanilla ice cream after that while their parents had camembert. They often had it in England, but they agreed that somehow or other it tasted quite different in France. They ended up with an infusion of chicory, and as she sipped it with relish Mrs Mason said:

‘You have to come to France to know what coffee really tastes like.’

Through his long-standing acquaintance with the famous gallery and the useful information he had acquired from his mother, Charley, with Lydia by his side, entered the Salon Carré now with something of the confidence of a good tennis-player stepping on to the court. He was eager to show Lydia his favourite pictures and ready to explain to her exactly what was admirable in them. It was, however, something of a surprise to discover that the room had been rearranged and the Gioconda, to which he would naturally have taken her first, was nowhere to be seen. They spent but ten minutes there. When Charley went with his parents it took them an hour to do that room and even then, his mother said, they hadn’t exhausted its treasures. But L’Homme au Gant was in its old place and he gently led her up to it. They looked at it for a while.

‘Stunning, isn’t it?’ he said then, giving her arm an affectionate pressure.

‘Yes, it’s all right. What business is it of yours?’

Charley turned his head sharply. No one had ever asked him a question like that about a picture before.

‘What on earth d’you mean? It’s one of the great portraits of the world. Titian, you know.’

‘I daresay. But what’s it got to do with you?’

Charley didn’t quite know what to say.’

‘Well, it’s a very fine picture and it’s beautifully painted. Of course it doesn’t tell a story if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she smiled.

‘I don’t suppose it’s got anything to do with me really.’

‘Then why should you bother about it?’

Lydia moved on and Charley followed her. She gave other pictures an indifferent glance. Charley was troubled by what she had said and he puzzled his brains to discover what could be at the back of her mind. She gave him an amused smile.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you some pictures.’

She took his arm and they walked on. Suddenly he caught sight of the Gioconda.

‘There she is,’ he cried. ‘I must stop and have a good look at that. I make a point of it when I come to the Louvre.’

‘Why?’

‘Hang it all, it’s Leonardo’s most celebrated picture. It’s one of the most important pictures in the world.’

‘Important to you?’

Charley was beginning to find her a trifle irritating; he couldn’t make out what she was getting at; but he was a good-humoured youth, and he wasn’t going to lose his temper.

‘A picture may be important even if it isn’t very important to me.’

‘But it’s only you who count. So far as you’re concerned the only meaning a picture has is the meaning it has for you.’

‘That seems an awfully conceited way of looking at it.’

‘Does that picture say anything to you really?’

‘Of course it does. It says all sorts of things, but I don’t suppose I could put them any better than Pater did. Unfortunately I haven’t got my mother’s memory. She can repeat the whole passage by heart.’

But even as he spoke he recognized that his answer was lame. He was beginning to have a vague inkling of what Lydia meant, and then the uneasy feeling came to him that there was something in art that he’d never been told about. But he fortunately remembered what his mother had said about Manet’s Olympia.

‘In point of fact I don’t know why you should say anything about a picture at all. You either like it or you don’t.’

‘And you really like that one?’ she asked in a tone of mild interrogation.

‘Very much.’

‘Why?’

He thought for a moment.

‘Well, you see, I’ve known it practically all my life.’

‘That’s why you like your friend Simon, isn’t it?’ she smiled.

He felt it was an unfair retort.

‘All right. You take me and show me the pictures you like.’

The position was reversed. It was not he, as he had expected, who was leading the way and with such information as would add interest to the respective canvases, sympathetically drawing her attention to the great masterpieces he had always cared for; but it was she who was conducting him. Very well. He was quite ready to put himself in her hands and see what it was all about.

‘Of course,’ he said to himself, ‘she’s Russian. One has to make allowances for that.’

They trudged past acres of canvas, through one room after another, for Lydia had some difficulty in finding her way; but finally she stopped him in front of a small picture that you might easily have missed if you had not been looking for it.

‘Chardin,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve seen that before.’

‘But have you ever looked at it?’

‘Oh, yes. Chardin wasn’t half a bad painter in his way. My mother thinks a lot of him. I’ve always rather liked his still lifes myself.’

‘Is that all it means to you? It breaks my heart.’

‘That?’ cried Charley with astonishment. ‘A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine? Of course it’s very well painted.’

‘Yes, you’re right; it’s very well painted; it’s painted with pity and love. It’s not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it’s the bread of life and the blood of Christ, but not held back from those who starve and thirst for them and doled out by priests on stated occasions; it’s the daily fare of suffering men and women. It’s so humble, so natural, so friendly; it’s the bread and wine of the poor who ask no more than that they should be left in peace, allowed to work and eat their simple food in freedom. It’s the cry of the despised and rejected. It tells you that whatever their sins men at heart are good. That loaf of bread and that flagon of wine are symbols of the joys and sorrows of the meek and lowly. They ask for your mercy and your affection; they tell you that they’re of the same flesh and blood as you. They tell you that life is short and hard and the grave is cold and lonely. It’s not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it’s the mystery of man’s lot on earth, his craving for a little friendship and a little love, the humility of his resignation when he sees that even they must be denied him.’

Lydia’s voice was tremulous and now the tears flowed from her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently.

‘And isn’t it wonderful that with those simple objects, with his painter’s exquisite sensibility, moved by the charity in his heart, that funny, dear old man should have made something so beautiful that it breaks you? It was as though, unconsciously perhaps, hardly knowing what he was doing, he wanted to show you that if you only have enough love, if you only have enough sympathy, out of pain and distress and unkindness, out of all the evil of the world, you can create beauty.’

She was silent and for long stood looking at the little picture. Charley looked at it too, but with perplexity. It was a very good picture; he hadn’t really given it more than a glance before, and he was glad Lydia had drawn his attention to it; in some odd way it was rather moving; but of course he could never have seen in it all she saw. Strange, unstable woman! It was rather embarrassing that she should cry in a public gallery; they did put you in an awkward position, these Russians; but who would have thought a picture could affect anyone like that? He remembered his mother’s story of how a student friend of his grandfather’s had fainted when he first saw the Odalisque of Ingres; but that was away back in the nineteenth century, they were very romantic and emotional in those days. Lydia turned to him with a sunny smile on her lips. It disconcerted him to see with what suddenness she could go from tears to laughter.

‘Shall we go now?’ she said.

‘But don’t you want to see any more pictures?’

‘Why? I’ve seen one. I feel happy and peaceful. What could I get if I saw another?’

‘Oh, all right.’

It seemed a very odd way of doing a picture gallery. After all, they hadn’t looked at the Watteaus or the Fragonards. His mother was bound to ask him if he’d seen the Embarkation for Cythera. Someone had told her they’d cleaned it and she’d want to know how the colours had come out.

They did a little shopping and then lunched at a restaurant on the quay on the other side of the river and Lydia, as usual, ate with a very good appetite. She liked the crowd that surrounded them and the traffic that passed noisily in the roadway. She was in a good humour. It was as though the violent emotion from which she had suffered had rinsed her spirit clean, and she talked of trivial things with a pleasant cheerfulness. But Charley was thoughtful. He did not find it so easy to dismiss the disquietude that affected him. She did not usually notice his moods, but the trouble of his mind was so clearly reflected on his face that at last she could not but be struck by it.

‘Why are you so silent?’ she asked him, with a kindly, sympathetic smile.

‘I was thinking. You see, I’ve been interested in art all my life. My parents are very artistic, I mean some people might even say they were rather highbrow, and they were always keen on my sister and me having a real appreciation of art; and I think we have. It rather worries me to think that with all the pains I’ve taken, and the advantages I’ve had, I don’t seem really to know so much about it as you do.’

‘But I know nothing about art,’ she laughed.

‘But you do seem to feel about it very strongly, and I suppose art is really a matter of feeling. It’s not as though I didn’t like pictures. I get an enormous kick out of them.’

‘You mustn’t be worried. It’s very natural that you should look at pictures differently from me. You’re young and healthy, happy and prosperous. You’re not stupid. They’re a pleasure to you among a lot of other pleasures. It gives you a feeling of warmth and satisfaction to look at them. To walk through a gallery is a very agreeable way of passing an idle hour. What more can you want? But you see, I’ve always been poor, often hungry, and sometimes terribly lonely. They’ve been riches to me, food and drink and company. When I was working and my employer had nagged me to distraction I used to slip into the Louvre at the luncheon hour and her scolding didn’t matter any more. And when my mother died and I had nobody left, it comforted me. During those long months when Robert was in prison before the trial and I was pregnant, I think I should have gone mad and killed myself if it hadn’t been that I could go there, where nobody knew me and nobody stared at me, and be alone with my friends. It was rest and peace. It gave me courage. It wasn’t so much the great well-known masterpieces that helped me, it was the smaller, shyer pictures that no one noticed, and I felt they were pleased that I looked at them. I felt that nothing really mattered so very much, because everything passed. Patience! Patience! That’s what I learnt there. And I felt that above all the horror and misery and cruelty of the world, there was something that helped you to bear it, something that was greater and more important than all that, the spirit of man and the beauty he created. Is it really strange that that little picture I showed you this morning should mean so much to me?’

To make the most of the fine weather they walked up the busy Boulevard St Michel and when they got to the top turned into the gardens of the Luxembourg. They sat down and, talking little, idly watched the nurses, no longer, alas, wearing the long satin streamers of a generation ago, trundling prams, the old ladies in black who walked with sober gait in charge of little children, and the elderly gentlemen, with thick scarves up to their noses, who paced up and down immersed in thought; with friendly hearts they looked at the long-legged boys and girls who ran about playing games, and when a pair of young students passed wondered what it was they so earnestly discussed. It seemed not a public park, but a private garden for the people on the left bank, and the scene had a moving intimacy. But the chilly rays of the waning sun gave it withal a certain melancholy, for within the iron grille that separated it from the bustle of the great city, the garden had a singular air of unreality, and you had a feeling that those old people who trod the gravel paths, those children whose cries made a cheerful hubbub, were ghosts taking phantom walks or playing phantom games, who at dusk would dissolve, like the smoke of a cigarette, into the oncoming darkness. It was growing very cold, and Charley and Lydia wandered back, silent friendly companions, to the hotel.

When they got to their room Lydia took out of her suit-case a thin sheaf of piano pieces.

‘I brought some of the things Robert used to play. I play so badly and we haven’t got a piano at Alexey’s. D’you think you could play them?’

Charley looked at the music. It was Russian. Some of the pieces were familiar to him.

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘There’s a piano downstairs and there’ll be nobody in the salon now. Let’s go down.’

The piano badly wanted tuning. It was an upright. The keyboard was yellow with age and because it was seldom played on the notes were stiff. There was a long music stool and Lydia sat down by Charley’s side. He put on the rack a piece by Scriabin that he knew and after a few resounding chords to try the instrument began to play. Lydia followed the score and turned the pages for him. Charley had had as good masters as could be found in London, and he had worked hard. He had played at concerts at school and afterwards at Cambridge, so that he had acquired confidence. He had a light, pleasant touch. He enjoyed playing.

‘There,’ he said when he came to the end of the piece.

He was not displeased with himself. He knew that he had played it according to the composer’s intention and with the clear, neat straightforwardness that he liked in piano-playing.

‘Play something else,’ said Lydia.

She chose a piece. It was an arrangement for the piano of folk songs and folk dances by a composer of whom Charley had never heard. It startled him to see the name of Robert Berger written in a firm, bold hand on the cover. Lydia stared at it in silence and then turned the page. He looked at the music he was about to play and wondered what Lydia was thinking now. She must have sat by Robert’s side just as she was sitting by his. Why did she want to torture herself by making him play those pieces that must recall to her bitter memories of her short happiness and the misery that followed it?

‘Well, begin.’

He played well at sight and the music was not difficult. He thought he acquitted himself of his task without discredit. Having struck the last chord he waited for a word of praise.

‘You played it very nicely,’ said Lydia, ‘but where does Russia come in?’

‘What exactly d’you mean by that?’ he asked, somewhat affronted.

‘You play it as if it was about a Sunday afternoon in London with people in their best clothes walking around those great empty squares and wishing it was time for tea. But that’s not what it is at all. It’s the old, old song of peasants who lament the shortness and the hardness of their life, it’s the wide fields of golden corn and the labour of gathering in the harvest, it’s the great forest of beech-trees, and the nostalgia of the workers for an age when peace and plenty reigned on the earth, and it’s the wild dance that for a brief period brings them forgetfulness of their lot.’

‘Well, you play it better.’

‘I can’t play,’ she answered, but she edged him along the bench and took his seat.

He listened. She played badly, but for all that got something out of the music that he hadn’t seen in it. She managed, though at a price, to bring out the tumult of its emotion and the bitterness of its melancholy; and she infused the dance rhythms with a barbaric vitality that stirred the blood. But Charley was put out.

‘I must confess I don’t see why you should think you get the Russian atmosphere better by playing false notes and keeping your foot firmly on the loud pedal,’ he said acidly, when she finished.

She burst out laughing and flinging both her arms round his neck kissed him on the cheeks.

‘You are a sweet,’ she cried.

‘It’s very nice of you to say so,’ he answered coldly, disengaging himself.

‘Have I offended you?’

‘Not at all.’

She shook her head and smiled at him with soft tenderness.

‘You play very well and your technique is excellent, but it’s no good thinking you can play Russian music; you can’t. Play me some Schumann. I’m sure you can.’

‘No, I’m not going to play any more.’

‘If you’re angry with me, why don’t you hit me?’

Charley couldn’t help chuckling.

‘You fool. It never occurred to me. Besides, I’m not angry.’

‘You’re so big and strong and handsome, I forget that you’re only a young boy.’ She sighed. ‘And you’re so unprepared for life. Sometimes when I look at you I get such a pang.’

‘Now don’t get all Russian and emotional.’

‘Be nice to me and play some Schumann.’

When Lydia liked she could be very persuasive. With a diffident smile Charley resumed his seat. Schumann, in point of fact, was the composer he liked best and he knew a great deal by heart. He played to her for an hour, and whenever he wanted to stop she urged him to go on. The young woman at the cashier’s desk was curious to see who was playing the piano and peeped in. When she went back to her counter she murmured to the porter with an arch and meaning smile:

‘The turtle doves are having a good time.’

When at last Charley stopped, Lydia gave a little sigh of contentment.

‘I knew that was the music to suit you. It’s like you, healthy and comfortable and wholesome. There’s fresh air in it and sunshine and the delicious scent of pine-trees. It’s done me good to listen to it and it’s done me good to be with you. Your mother must love you very much.’

‘Oh, come off it.’

‘Why are you so good to me? I’m tiresome, dull and exasperating. You don’t even like me very much, do you?’

Charley considered this for a moment.

‘Well, I don’t very much, to tell you the truth.’

She laughed.

‘Then why do you bother about me? Why don’t you just turn me out into the street?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Shall I tell you? Goodness. Just pure, simple, stupid goodness.’

‘Go to hell.’

They dined in the Quarter. It had not escaped Charley’s notice that Lydia took no interest in him as an individual. She accepted him as you might accept a person with whom you find yourself on a ship for a few days and so forced to a certain intimacy, but it does not matter to you where he came from and what sort of a man he is; he emerged from non-existence when he stepped on board and will return to it when, on reaching port, you part company with him. Charley was modest enough not to be piqued by this, for he could not but realize that her own troubles and perplexities were so great that they must absorb her attention; and he was not a little surprised now when she led him to talk about himself. He told her of his artistic inclinations and of the wish he had so long harboured to be an artist, and she approved his common sense which in the end had persuaded him to prefer the assured life of a business man. He had never seen her more cheerful and more human. Knowing English domestic life only through Dickens, Thackeray and H. G. Wells, she was curious to hear how existence was pursued in those prosperous, sober houses in Bayswater that she knew but from their outside. She asked him about his home and his family. These were subjects on which he was always glad to talk. He spoke of his father and mother with a faintly mocking irony which Lydia saw well enough he assumed only to conceal the loving admiration with which he regarded them. Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbours according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good nature, their kindliness, their not unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.

‘How lucky you English are,’ she said.

But Charley was a trifle surprised at the impression his own words made on him. In the course of his recital he had for the first time seen himself from the standpoint of an observer. Until now, like an actor who says his lines, but never having seen the play from the front, has but a vague idea of what it is all about, he had played his part without asking himself whether it had any meaning. It would be too much to say that it made him uneasy, it slightly perplexed him, to realize that while they were all, his father, his mother, his sister, himself, busy from morning till night, so that the days were not long enough for what they wanted to do; yet when you came to look upon the life they led from one year’s end to another it gave you an uncomfortable feeling that they, none of them, did anything at all. It was like one of those comedies where the sets are good and the clothes pretty, where the dialogue is clever and the acting competent, so that you pass an agreeable evening, but a week later cannot remember a thing about it.

When they had finished dinner they took a taxi to a cinema on the other side of the river. It was a film of the Marx brothers and they rocked with laughter at the extravagant humour of the marvellous clowns; but they laughed not only at Groucho’s wise-cracks and at Harpo’s comic quandaries, they laughed at one another’s laughter. The picture finished at midnight, but Charley was too excited to go quietly to bed and he asked Lydia if she would come with him to some place where they could dance.

‘Where would you like to go?’ asked Lydia. ‘Montmartre?’

‘Wherever you like as long as it’s gay.’ And then, remembering his parents’ constant, but seldom achieved, desire when they came to Paris: ‘Where there aren’t a lot of English people.’

Lydia gave him the slightly mischievous smile that he had seen on her lips once or twice before. It surprised him, but at the same time was sympathetic to him. It surprised him because it went so strangely with what he thought he knew of her character; and it was sympathetic to him because it suggested that, for all her tragic history, there was in her a vein of high spirits and of a rather pleasing, teasing malice.

‘I’ll take you somewhere. It won’t be gay, but it may be interesting. There’s a Russian woman who sings there.’

They drove a long way, and when they stopped Charley saw that they were on the quay. The twin towers of Notre-Dame were distinct against the frosty, starry night. They walked a few steps up a dark street and then went through a narrow door; they descended a flight of stairs and Charley, to his astonishment, found himself in a large cellar with stone walls; from these jutted out wooden tables large enough to accommodate ten or twelve persons, and there were wooden benches on each side of them. The heat was stifling and the air gray with smoke. In the space left by the tables a dense throng was dancing to a melancholy tune. A slatternly waiter in shirt-sleeves found them two places and took their order. People sitting here and there looked at them curiously and whispered to one another; and indeed Charley in his well-cut English blue serge, Lydia in her black silk and her smart hat with the feather in it, contrasted violently with the rest of the company. The men wore neither collars nor ties, and they danced with their caps on, the end of a cigarette stuck to their lips. The women were bare-headed and extravagantly painted.

‘They look pretty tough,’ said Charley.

‘They are. Most of them have been in jug and those that haven’t should be. If there’s a row and they start throwing glasses or pulling knives, just stand against the wall and don’t move.’

‘I don’t think they much like the look of us,’ said Charley. ‘We seem to be attracting a good deal of attention.’

‘They think we’re sight-seers and that always puts their backs up. But it’ll be all right. I know the patron.’

When the waiter brought the two beers they had ordered Lydia asked him to get the landlord along. In a moment he came, a big fellow with the naked look of a fat priest, and immediately recognized Lydia. He gave Charley a shrewd, suspicious stare, but when Lydia introduced him as a friend of hers, shook hands with him warmly and said he was glad to see him. He sat down and for a few minutes talked with Lydia in an undertone. Charley noticed that their neighbours watched the scene and he caught one man giving another a wink. They were evidently satisfied that it was all right. The dance came to an end and the other occupants of the table at which they sat came back. They gave the strangers hostile looks, but the patron explained that they were friends, whereupon one of the party, a sinister-looking chap, with the scar of a razor wound on his face, insisted on offering them a glass of wine. Soon they were all talking merrily together. They were plainly eager to make the young Englishman at home, and a man sitting by his side explained to him that though the company looked a bit rough they were all good fellows with their hearts in the right place. He was a little drunk. Charley, having got over his first uneasiness, began to enjoy himself.

Presently the saxophone player got up and advanced his chair. The Russian singer of whom Lydia had spoken came forward with a guitar in her hand and sat down. There was a burst of applause.

‘C’est La Marishka,’ said Charley’s drunken friend, ‘there’s no one like her. She was the mistress of one of the commissars, but Stalin had him shot, and if she hadn’t managed to get out of Russia he’d have shot her too.’

A woman on the other side of the table overheard him.

‘What nonsense you’re telling him, Loulou,’ she cried. ‘La Marishka was the mistress of a grand duke before the revolution, everyone knows that, and she had diamonds worth millions, but the Bolsheviks took everything from her. She escaped disguised as a peasant.’

La Marishka was a woman of forty, haggard and sombre, with gaunt, masculine features, a brown skin, and enormous, blazing eyes under black, heavy, arching brows. In a raucous voice, at the top of her lungs, she sang a wild, joyless song, and though Charley could not understand the Russian words a cold feeling ran down his spine. She was loudly applauded. Then she sang a sentimental ballad in French, the lament of a girl for her lover who was to be executed next morning, which roused her audience to frenzy. She finished, for the time being, with another Russian song, lively this time, and her face lost its tragic cast; it took on a look of rude and brutal gaiety, and her voice, deep and harsh, acquired a rollicking quality; your blood was stirred and you could not but exult, but at the same time you were moved, for below the bacchanalian merriment was the desolation of futile tears. Charley looked at Lydia and caught her mocking glance. He smiled good-naturedly. That grim woman got something out of the music which he was concious now was beyond his reach. Another burst of applause greeted the end of the number, but La Marishka, as though she did not hear it, without a sign of acknowledgement, rose from her chair and came over to Lydia. The two women began to talk in Russian. Lydia turned to Charley.

‘She’ll have a glass of champagne if you’ll offer it to her.’

‘Of course.’

He signalled to a waiter and ordered a bottle; then, with a glance at the half-dozen people sitting at the table, changed his order.

‘Two bottles and some glasses. Perhaps these gentlemen and ladies will allow me to offer them a glass too.’

There was a murmur of polite acceptance. The wine was brought and Charley filled a number of glasses and passed them down the table. There was a great deal of health-drinking and clinking of glasses together.

‘Vive l’Entente Cordiale.’

‘A nos alliés.’

They all got very friendly and merry. Charley was having a grand time. But he had come to dance, and when the orchestra began once more to play he pulled Lydia to her feet. The floor was soon crowded and he noticed that a lot of curious eyes were fixed upon her; he guessed that it had spread through the company who she was; it made her to those bullies and their women, somewhat to Charley’s embarrassment, an object of interest, but she did not seem even to be aware that anyone looked at her.

Presently the patron touched her on the shoulder.

‘I have a word to say to you,’ he muttered.

Lydia released herself from Charley’s arms and going to one side with the fat landlord listened to what he said. Charley could see that she was startled. He was evidently trying to point someone out to her, for Charley saw her craning her neck; but with the thick mass of dancers in the way she could see nothing, and in a moment she followed the patron to the other end of the long cellar. She seemed to have forgotten Charley. Somewhat piqued, he went back to his table. Two couples were sitting there comfortably enjoying his champagne, and they greeted him heartily. They were all very familiar now and they asked him what he had done with his little friend. He told them what had happened. One of the men was a short thick-set fellow with a red face and a magnificent moustache. His shirt open at the neck showed his hairy chest, and his arms, for he had taken off his coat in that stifling heat and turned up his shirt-sleeves, were profusely tattooed. He was with a girl who might have been twenty years younger than he. She had very sleek black hair, parted in the middle, with a bun on her neck, a face dead-white with powder, scarlet lips and eyes heavy with mascara. The man nudged her with his elbow.

‘Now then, why don’t you dance with the Englishman? You’ve drunk his bubbly, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

She danced clingingly. She smelt strongly of scent, but not so strongly as to disguise the fact that she had eaten at dinner a dish highly flavoured with garlic. She smiled alluringly at Charley.

‘He must be rotten with vice, this pretty little Englishman,’ she gurgled, with a squirm of a lithe body in her black, but dusty, velvet gown.

‘Why do you say that?’ he smiled.

‘To be with the wife of Berger, what’s that if it isn’t vice?’

‘She’s my sister,’ said Charley gaily.

She thought this such a good joke that when the band stopped and they went back to the table she repeated it to the assembled company. They all thought it very funny, and the thick-set man with the hairy chest slapped him on the back.

‘Farceur, va!’

Charley was not displeased to be looked upon as a humorist. It was nice to be a success. He realized that as the lover of a notorious murderer’s wife he was something of a personage there. They urged him to come again.

‘But come alone next time,’ said the girl he had just danced with.

‘We’ll find you a girl. What d’you want to get mixed up with one of the Russians for? The wine of the country, that’s what you want.’

Charley ordered another bottle of champagne. He was far from tight, but he was merry. He was seeing life with a vengeance. When Lydia came back he was talking and laughing with his new friends as if he had known them all his life. He danced the next dance with her. He noticed that she was not keeping step with him and he gave her a little shake.

‘You’re not attending.’

She laughed.

‘I’m sorry. I’m tired. Let’s go.’

‘Has something happened to upset you?’

‘No. It’s getting very late and the heat’s awful.’

Having warmly shaken hands with their new friends, they left and got into a taxi. Lydia sank back exhausted. He was feeling happy and affectionate and he took her hand and held it. They drove in silence.

They went to bed, and in a few minutes Charley became aware from her regular breathing that Lydia had fallen asleep. But he was too excited to sleep. The evening had amused him and he was keenly alert. He thought it all over for a while and chuckled at the grand story he would make of it when he got home. He turned on the light to read. But he could not give his attention to the poems of Blake just then. Disordered notions flitted across his mind. He switched off the light and presently fell into a light doze, but in a little while awoke. He was tingling with desire. He heard the quiet breathing of the sleeping woman in the bed by his side and a peculiar sensation stirred his heart. Except on that first evening at the Sérail no feeling for Lydia had touched him except pity and kindliness. Sexually she did not in the least attract him. After seeing her for several days all day long he did not even think her pretty; he did not like the squareness of her face, her high cheek-bones, and the way her pale eyes were set flat in their orbits; sometimes, indeed, he thought her really plain. Notwithstanding the life she had adopted – for what strange, unnatural reason – she gave him a sense of such deadly respectability that it choked him off. And then her indifference to sexual congress was chilling. She looked with contempt and loathing on the men who for money sought their pleasure of her. The passionate love she bore for Robert gave her an aloofness from all human affections that killed desire. But besides all that Charley didn’t think he liked her very much for herself; she was sometimes sullen, almost always indifferent; she took whatever he did for her as her right; it was all very well to say that she asked for nothing, it would have been graceful if she had shown, not gratitude, but a glimmering recognition of the fact that he was trying to do his best for her. Charley had an uneasy fear that she was making a mug of him; if what Simon said was true and she was making money at the brothel in order to help Robert to escape, she was nothing but a callous liar; he flushed hotly when it occurred to him that she was laughing behind his back at his simplicity. No, he didn’t admire her, and the more he thought of her the less he thought he liked her. And yet at that moment he was so breathless with desire of her that he felt he would choke. He thought of her not as he saw her every day, rather drab, like a teacher at a Sunday school, but as he had first seen her in those baggy Turkish trousers and the blue turban spangled with little stars, her cheeks painted and her lashes black with mascara; he thought of her slender waist, her clear, soft, honey-coloured skin, and her small firm breasts with their rosy nipples. He tossed on his bed. His desire now was uncontrollable. It was anguish. After all, it wasn’t fair; he was young and strong and normal; why shouldn’t he have a bit of fun when he had the chance? She was there for that, she’d said so herself. What did it matter if she thought him a dirty swine? He’d done pretty well by her, he deserved something in return. The faint sound of her quiet breathing was strangely exciting and it quickened his own. He thought of the feel of her soft lips when he pressed his mouth to hers and the feel of her little breasts when he took them in his hands; he thought of the feel of her lissom body in his arms and the feel of his long legs lying against hers. He put on the light, thinking it might wake her, and got out of bed. He leaned over her. She lay on her back, her hands crossed over her breast like a stone figure on a tomb; tears were running out of her closed eyes and her mouth was distorted with grief. She was crying in her sleep. She looked like a child, lying there, and her face had a child’s look of hopeless misery, for a child does not know that sorrow, like all other things, will pass. Charley gave a gasp. The unhappiness of that sleeping woman was intolerable to see, and all his passion, all his desire, were extinguished by the pity that overcame him. She had been gay during the day, easy to talk to and companionable, and it had seemed to him that she was free, at least for a while, from the pain that, he was concious, lurked always in the depths of her being; but in sleep it had returned to her and he knew only too well what unhappy dreams distraught her. He gave a deep sigh.

But he felt more disinclined for sleep than ever, and he could not bear the thought of getting into bed again. He turned the shade down so that the light should not disturb Lydia, and going to the table filled his pipe and lit it. He drew the heavy curtain that was over the window and sitting down looked out into the court. It was in darkness but for one lighted window, and this had a sinister look. He wondered whether someone lay ill in that room or, simply sleepless like himself, brooded over the perplexity of life. Or perhaps some man had brought a woman in, and their lust appeased, they lay contented in one another’s arms. Charley smoked. He felt dull and flat. He did not think of anything in particular. At last he went back to bed and fell asleep.

CHAPTER 9

CHARLEY WAS AWAKENED by the maid bringing in the morning coffee. For a moment he forgot the events of the previous night.

‘Oh, I was sleeping so soundly,’ he said, rubbing his eyes.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s half-past ten and I have an engagement at eleven-thirty.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s my last day in Paris and it would be silly to waste it in sleep.’

The maid had brought the two breakfasts on one tray and Lydia told her to give it to Charley. She put on a dressing-gown and sat down at the end of his bed, leaning against the foot. She poured out a cup of coffee, cut a roll in two and buttered it for him.

‘I’ve been watching you sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s nice; you sleep like an animal or a child, so deep, so quiet, it rests one just to look at you.’

Then he remembered.

‘I’m afraid you didn’t have a very good night.’

‘Oh, yes, I did. I slept like a top. I was tired out, you know. That’s one of the things I’m most grateful to you for, I’ve had such wonderful nights. I dream terribly. But since I’ve been here I haven’t dreamt once; I’ve slept quite peacefully. And I who thought I should never sleep like that again.’

He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forbore to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one was sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down a face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind. An uncomfortable thought crossed his mind. He could not quite make it explicit, but had he been able to, he would perhaps have asked himself:

‘Who are we really? What do we know about ourselves? And that other life of ours, is that less real than this one?’

It was all very strange and complicated. It looked as though nothing were quite so simple as it seemed; it looked as though the people we thought we knew best carried secrets that they didn’t even know themselves. Charley had a sudden inkling that human beings were infinitely mysterious. The fact was that you knew nothing about anybody.

‘What’s this engagement you’ve got?’ he asked, more for the sake of saying something than because he wanted to know.

Lydia lit a cigarette before she answered.

‘Marcel, the fat man who runs the place we were at last night, introduced me to two men there and I’ve made an appointment to meet them at the Palette this morning. We couldn’t talk in all that crowd.’

‘Oh!’

He was too discreet to ask who they were.

‘Marcel’s in touch with Cayenne and St Laurent. He often gets news. That’s why I wanted to go there. They landed at St Nazaire last week.’

‘Who? The two men? Are they escaped convicts?’

‘No. They’ve served their sentence. They got their passage paid by the Salvation Army. They knew Robert.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘If you want to, you can come with me. They’ve got no money. They’d be grateful if you gave them a little.’

‘All right. Yes, I’d like to come.’

‘They seem very decent fellows. One of them doesn’t look more than thirty now. Marcel told me he was a cook and he was sent out for killing another man in the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked. I don’t know what the other had done. You’d better go and have your bath.’ She went over to the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass. ‘Funny, I wonder why my eyelids are swollen. To look at me you’d think I’d been crying, and you know I haven’t, don’t you?’

‘Perhaps it was that smoky atmosphere last night. By George! you could have cut it with a knife.’

‘I’ll ring down for some ice. They’ll be all right after we’ve been out in the air for five minutes.’

The Palette was empty when they got there. Late breakfasters had had their coffee and gone, and it was too early for anyone to have come in for an apéritif before luncheon. They sat in a corner, near the window, so that they could look out into the street. They waited for several minutes.

‘There they are,’ said Lydia.

Charley looked out and saw two men walking past. They glanced in, hesitated a moment and strolled on, then came back; Lydia gave them a smile, but they took no notice of her; they stood still, looking up and down the street, and then doubtfully at the café. It looked as thought they couldn’t make up their minds to enter. Their manner was timid and furtive. They said a few words to one another and the younger of the two gave a hasty anxious glance behind him. The other seemed on a sudden to force himself to a decision and walked towards the door. His friend followed quickly. Lydia gave them a wave and a smile when they came in. They still took no notice. They looked round stealthily, as though to assure themselves that they were safe, and then, the first with averted eyes, the other fixing the ground, came up. Lydia shook hands with them and introduced Charley. They evidently had expected her to be alone and his presence disconcerted them. They gave him a look of suspicion. Lydia explained that he was an Englishman, a friend who was spending a few days in Paris. Charley, a smile on his lips which he sought to make cordial, stretched out his hand; they took it, one after the other, and gave it a limp pressure. They seemed to have nothing to say. Lydia bade them sit down and asked them what they would have.

‘A cup of coffee.’

‘You’ll have something to eat?’

The elder one gave the other a faint smile.

‘A cake, if there is one. The boy has a sweet tooth, and over there, from where we come, there wasn’t much in that line.’

The man who spoke was a little under the middle height. He might have been forty. The other was two or three inches taller and perhaps ten years younger. Both were very thin. They both wore collars and ties and thick suits, one of a gray-and-white check and the other dark green, but the suits were ill-cut and sat loosely on them. They did not look at ease in them. The elder one, sturdy though short, had a well-knit figure; his sallow, colourless face was much lined. He had an air of determination. The other’s face was as sallow and colourless, but his skin, drawn tightly over the bones, was smooth and unlined; he looked very ill. There was another trait they shared; the eyes of both seemed preternaturally large, and when they turned them on you they did not appear to look at you, but beyond, with a demented stare, as though they were gazing at something that filled them with horror. It was very painful. At first they were shy, and since Charley was shy too, though he tried to show his friendliness by offering them cigarettes, while Lydia, seeming to find no need for words, contented herself with looking at them, they sat in silence. But she looked at them with such tender concern that the silence was not embarrassing. The waiter brought them coffee and a dish of cakes. The elder man toyed with one of them, but the other ate greedily, and as he ate he gave his friend now and then little touching looks of surprised delight.

‘The first thing we did when we got out by ourselves in Paris was to go to a confectioner’s, and the boy ate six chocolate éclairs one after the other. But he paid for it.’

‘Yes,’ said the other seriously. ‘When we got out into the street I was sick. You see, my stomach wasn’t used to it. But it was worth it.’

‘Did you eat very badly over there?’

The elder man shrugged his shoulders.

‘Beef three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. One doesn’t notice it after a time. And then, if you behave yourself you get cheese and a little wine. And it’s better to behave yourself. Of course it’s worse when you’ve done your sentence and you’re freed. When you’re in prison you get board and lodging, but when you’re free you have to shift for yourself.’

‘My friend doesn’t know,’ said Lydia. ‘Explain to him. They don’t have the same system in England.’

‘It’s like this. You’re sentenced to a term of imprisonment, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and when you’ve done it you’re a libéré. You have to stay in the colony the same number of years that you were sentenced to. It’s hard to get work. The libérés have a bad name and people won’t employ them. It’s true that you can get a plot of land and cultivate it, but it’s not everyone who can do that. After being in prison for years, taking orders from the warders and half the time doing nothing, you’ve lost your initiative; and then there’s malaria and hook-worm; you’ve lost your energy. Most of them get work only when a ship comes in to harbour and they can earn a little by unloading the cargo. There’s nothing much for the libéré but to sleep in the market, drink rafia when he gets the chance, and starve. I was lucky. You see, I’m an electrician by trade, and a good one; I know my job as well as anyone, so they needed me. I didn’t do so badly.’

‘How long was your sentence?’ asked Lydia.

‘Only eight years.’

‘And what did you do?’

He slightly shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a deprecating smile.

‘Folly of youth. One’s young, one gets into bad company, one drinks too much and then one day something happens and one has to pay for it all one’s life. I was twenty-four when I went out and I’m forty now. I’ve spent my best years in that hell.’

‘He could have got away before,’ said the other, ‘but he wouldn’t.’

‘You mean you could have escaped?’ said Lydia.

Charley gave her a quick, searching glance but her face told him nothing.

‘Escape? No, that’s a mug’s game. One can always escape, but there are few who get away. Where can you go? Into the bush? Fever, wild animals, starvation, and the natives who’ll take you for the sake of the reward. A good many try it. You see, they get so fed up with the monotony, the food, the orders, the sight of all the rest of the prisoners, they think anything’s better, but they can’t stick it out; if they don’t die of illness or starvation, they’re captured or give themselves up; and then it’s two years’ solitary confinement, or more, and you have to be a hefty chap if that doesn’t break you. It was easier in the old days when the Dutch were building their railway, you could get across the river and they’d put you to work on it, but now they’ve finished the railway and they don’t want labour any more. They catch you and send you back. But even that had its risks. There was a customs official who used to promise to take you over the river for a certain sum, he had a regular tariff, you’d arrange to meet him at a place in the jungle at night, and when you kept the appointment he just shot you dead and emptied your pockets. They say he did away with more than thirty fellows before he was caught. Some of them get away by sea. Half a dozen club together and get a libéré to buy a rickety boat for them. It’s a hard journey, without a compass or anything, and one never knows when a storm will spring up; it’s more by luck than good management if they get anywhere. And where can they go? They won’t have them in Venezuela any longer and if they land there they’re just put in prison and sent back. If they land in Trinidad the authorities keep them for a week, stock them up with provisions, even give them a boat if theirs isn’t seaworthy, and then send them off, out into the sea with no place to go to. No, it’s silly to try to escape.’

‘But men do,’ said Lydia. ‘There was that doctor, what was his name? They say he’s practising somewhere in South America and doing well.’

‘Yes, if you’ve got money you can get away sometimes, not if you’re on the islands, but if you’re at Cayenne or St Laurent. You can get the skipper of a Brazilian schooner to pick you up at sea, and if he’s honest he’ll land you somewhere down the coast and you’re pretty safe. If he isn’t, he takes your money and chucks you overboard. But he’ll want twelve thousand francs now, and that means double because the libéré who gets the money in for you takes half as his commission. And then you can’t land in Brazil without a penny in your pocket. You’ve got to have at least thirty thousand francs, and who’s got that?’

Lydia asked a question and once more Charley gave her an inquiring look.

‘But how can you be sure that the libéré will hand over the money that’s sent him?’ she said.

‘You can’t. Sometimes he doesn’t, but then he ends with a knife in his back, and he knows very well the authorities aren’t going to bother very much if a damned libéré is found dead one morning.’

‘Your friend said just now you could have got away sooner, but didn’t. What did he mean by that?’

The little man gave his shoulders a deprecating shrug.

‘I made myself useful. The commandant was a decent chap and he knew I was a good worker and honest. They soon found out they could leave me in a house by myself when they wanted a job done and I wouldn’t touch a thing. He got me permission to go back to France when I still had two more years to go of my time as a libéré.’ He gave his friend a touching smile. ‘But I didn’t like to leave that young scamp. I knew that without me to look after him he’d get into trouble.’

‘It’s true,’ said the other. ‘I owe everything to him.’

‘He was only a kid when he came out. He had the next bed to mine. He put up a pretty good show in the daytime, but at night he’d cry for his mother. I felt sorry for him. I don’t know how it happened, I got an affection for him; he was lost among all those men, poor little chap, and I had to look after him. Some of them were inclined to be nasty to him, one Algerian was always bothering, but I settled his hash and after that they left the boy in peace.’

‘How did you do that?’

The little man gave a grin so cheerful and roguish that it made him look on a sudden ten years younger.

‘Well, you know, in that life a man can only make himself respected if he knows how to use his knife. I ripped him up the belly.’

Charley gave a gasp. The man made the statement so naturally that one could hardly believe one had heard right.

‘You see, one’s shut up in the dormitory from nine to five and the warders don’t come in. To tell you the truth, it would be as much as their lives were worth. If in the morning a man’s found with a hole in his gizzard, the authorities ask no questions so as they won’t be told no lies. So you see, I felt a kind of responsibility for the boy. I had to teach him everything. I’ve got a good brain and I soon discovered that out there if you want to make it easy for yourself the only thing is to do what you’re told and give no trouble. It’s not justice that reigns on the earth, it’s force, and they’ve got the force, the authorities; one of these days perhaps we shall have it, we the working men, and then we shall get a bit of our own back on the bourgeois, but till then we’ve got to obey. That’s what I taught him, and I taught him my job too, and now he’s almost as good an electrician as I am.’

‘The only thing now is to find work,’ said the other. ‘Work together.’

‘We’ve gone through so much together we can’t be parted now. You see, he’s all I’ve got. I’ve got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother’s dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It’s hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life.’

‘And I, who have I got? It’s for life, us two.’

There was something very affecting in the friendship that bound those two hapless men together. It gave Charley a sense of exaltation that somewhat embarrassed him; he would have liked to tell them that he thought it brave and beautiful, but he knew he could never bring himself to say anything so unusual. But Lydia had none of his shyness.

‘I don’t think there are many men who would have stayed in that hell for two long years when they could get away, for the sake of a friend.’

The man chuckled.

‘You see, over there time is just the opposite of money; there a little money is a great deal and a lot of time is nothing very much. While six sous is a sum that you hoard as if it was a fortune, two years is a period that’s hardly worth talking about.’

Lydia sighed deeply. It was plain of what she was thinking.

‘Berger isn’t there for so long, is he?’

‘Fifteen years.’

There was a silence. One could see that Lydia was making a great effort to control her emotion, but when she spoke there was a break in her voice.

‘Did you see him?’

‘Yes. I talked to him. We were in hospital together. I went in to have my appendix out, I didn’t want to get back to France and have trouble with it here. He’d been working on the road they’re making from St Laurent to Cayenne and he got a bad go of malaria.’

‘I didn’t know. I’ve had one letter from him, but he said nothing about it.’

‘Out there everyone has malaria sooner or later. It’s not worth making a song and dance about. He’s lucky to have got it so soon. The chief medical officer took a fancy to him, he’s an educated man, Berger, and there aren’t many of them. They were going to apply to get him transferred to the hospital service when he recovered. He’ll be all right there.’

‘Marcel told me last night that he’d given you a message for me.’

‘Yes, he gave me an address.’ He took a bundle of papers out of his pocket and gave Lydia a scrap on which something was written. ‘If you can send any money, send it there. But remember that he’ll only get half what you send.’

Lydia took the bit of paper, looked at it, and put it in her bag.

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. He said you weren’t to worry. He said it wasn’t so bad as it might be, and he was finding his feet and he’d make out all right. And that’s true, you know. He’s no fool. He won’t make many mistakes. He’s a chap who’ll make the best of a bad job. You’ll see, he’ll be happy enough.’

‘How can he be happy?’

‘It’s funny what one can get used to. He’s a bit of a wag, isn’t he? He used to make us laugh at some of the things he said. He’s a rare one for seeing the funny side of things, there’s no mistake about that.’

Lydia was very pale. She looked down in silence. The elder man turned to his friend.

‘What was that funny thing I told you he’d said about that cove in the hospital who cut his blasted throat?’

‘Oh, I remember. Now what was it? It’s clean gone out of my mind, but I know it made my laugh my head off.’

A long silence fell. There seemed nothing more to say. Lydia was pensive; and the two men sat limp on their chairs, their eyes vacant, like the mechanical dolls they sell on the Boulevard Montparnasse which gyrate, rocking, round and round and then on a sudden stop dead. Lydia sighed.

‘I think that’s about all,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming. I hope you’ll get the job you’re looking for.’

‘The Salvation Army are doing what they can for us. I expect something will turn up.’

Charley fished his note-case out of his pocket.

‘I don’t suppose you’re very flush. I’d like to give you something to help you along till you find work.’

‘It would be useful,’ the man smiled pleasantly. ‘The Army doesn’t do much but give one board and lodging.’

Charley handed them five hundred francs.

‘Give it to the kid to take care of. He’s got the saving disposition of the peasant he is, he sweats blood when he has to spend money, and he can make five francs go farther than any old woman in the world.’

They went out of the café, the four of them, and shook hands. During the hour they had spent together the two men had lost their shyness, but when they got out into the street it seized them again. They seemed to shrink as though they desired to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, and looked furtively to right and left as if afraid that someone would pounce upon them. They walked off side by side, with bent heads, and after another quick glance backward slunk round the nearest corner.

‘I suppose it’s only prejudice on my part,’ said Charley, ‘but I’m bound to say that I didn’t feel very much at my ease in that company.’

Lydia made no reply. They walked along the boulevard in silence; they lunched in silence. Lydia was immersed in thought the nature of which he could guess and he felt that any attempt on his part at small talk would be unwelcome. Besides, he had thoughts of his own to occupy him. The conversation they had had with the two convicts, the questions Lydia asked, had revived the suspicion which Simon had sown in his mind and which, though he had tried to put it aside, had since then lurked in his consciousness like the musty smell of a long closed room which no opening of windows can quite dispel. It worried him, not so much because he minded being made a fool of, as because he did not want to think that Lydia was a liar and a hypocrite.

‘I’m going along to see Simon,’ he said when they had finished luncheon. ‘I came over largely to see him and I’ve hardly had a glimpse of him. I ought at least to go and say good-bye.’

‘Yes, I suppose you ought.’

He also wanted to return to Simon the newspaper cuttings and the article which he had lent him. He had them in his pocket.

‘If you want to spend the afternoon with your Russian friends, I’ll drive you there first if you like.’

‘No, I’ll go back to the hotel.’

‘I don’t suppose I shall be back till late. You know what Simon is when he gets talking. Won’t you be bored by yourself?’

‘I’m not used to so much consideration,’ she smiled. ‘No, I shan’t be bored. It’s not often I have the chance to be alone. To sit in a room by oneself and to know that no one can come in – why, I can’t imagine a greater luxury.’

They parted and Charley walked to Simon’s. He knew that at that hour he stood a good chance of finding him in. Simon opened the door on his ring. He was in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.

‘Hulloa! I thought you might breeze along. I didn’t have to go out this morning, so I didn’t dress!’

He hadn’t shaved and he looked as though he hadn’t washed either. His long straight hair was in disorder. By the bleak light that came through the north window his restless, angry eyes looked coal-black in his white thin face and there were dark shadows beneath them.

‘Sit down,’ he continued. ‘I’ve got a good fire to-day and the studio’s warm.’

It was, but it was as forlorn, cheerless and unswept as before.

‘Is the love affair still going strong?’

‘I’ve just left Lydia.’

‘You’re going back to London to-morrow, aren’t you? Don’t let her sting you too much. There’s no reason why you should help to get her rotten husband out of jug.’

Charley took the cuttings from his pocket.

‘By your article I judged that you had a certain amount of sympathy for him.’

‘Sympathy, no. I found him interesting just because he was such an unmitigated, cold-blooded, unscrupulous cad. I admired his nerve. In other circumstances he might have been a useful instrument. In a revolution a man like that who’ll stick at nothing, who has courage and no scruples, may be invaluable.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought a very reliable instrument.’

‘Wasn’t it Danton who said that in a revolution it’s the scum of society, the rogues and criminals, who rise to the surface? It’s natural. They’re needed for certain work and when they’ve served their purpose they can be disposed of.’

‘You seem to have it all cut and dried, old boy,’ said Charley, with a cheerful grin.

Simon impatiently shrugged his bony shoulders.

‘I’ve studied the French Revolution and the Commune. The Russians did too and they learnt a lot from them, but we’ve got the advantage now that we can profit by the lessons we’ve learnt from subsequent events. They made a bad mess of things in Hungary, but they made a pretty good job of it in Russia and they didn’t do so badly either in Italy or in Germany. If we’ve got any sense we ought to be able to emulate their success, but avoid their mistakes. Bela Kun’s revolution failed because people were hungry. The rise of the proletariat has made it comparatively simple to make a revolution, but the proletariat must be fed. Organization is needed to see that means of transport are adequate and food supplies abundant. That incidentally is why power, which the proletariat thought to seize by making the revolution, must always elude their grasp and fall into the hands of a small body of intelligent leaders. The people are incapable of governing themselves. The proletariat are slaves and slaves need masters.’

‘You would hardly describe yourself any longer as a good democrat, I take it,’ said Charley with a twinkle in his blue eyes.

Simon impatiently dismissed the ironical remark.

‘Democracy is moonshine. It’s an unrealizable ideal which the propagandist dangles before the masses as you dangle a carrot before a donkey. Those great watchwords of the nineteenth century, liberty, equality, fraternity, are pure hokum. Liberty? The mass of men don’t need liberty and don’t know what to do with it when they’ve got it. Their duty and their pleasure is to serve; thus they attain the security which is their deepest want. It’s been decided long ago that the only liberty worth anything is the liberty to do right, and right is decided by might. Right is an idea occasioned by public opinion and prescribed by law, but public opinion is created by those who have the power to enforce their point of view, and the only sanction of law is the might behind it. Fraternity? What do you mean by fraternity?’

Charley considered the question for a moment.

‘Well, I don’t know. I suppose it’s a feeling that we’re all members of one great family and we’re here on earth for so short a time, it’s better to make the best of one another.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well, only that life is a difficult job, and it probably makes it easier for everybody if we’re kind and decent to one another. Men have plenty of faults, but there’s a lot of good in them. The more you know people the nicer you find they are. That rather suggests that if you give them a chance they’ll meet you half way.’

‘Tosh, my dear boy, tosh. You’re a sentimental fool. In the first place it’s not true that people improve as you know them better: they don’t. That’s why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he’s considerate and polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him so well that he doesn’t trouble any longer to pretend; then you’ll discover a being of such meanness, of such a trivial nature, of such weakness, of such corruption, that you’d be aghast if you didn’t realize that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes. For the essence of man is egoism. Egoism is at once his strength and his weakness. Oh, I’ve got to know men pretty well during the two years I’ve spent in the newspaper world. Vain, petty, unscrupulous, avaricious, double-faced and abject, they’ll betray one another, not even for their own advantage, but from sheer malice. There’s no trick they don’t descend to in order to queer a rival’s pitch; there’s no humiliation they won’t accept to obtain a title or an order; and not only politicians; lawyers, doctors, merchants, artists, men of letters. And their craving for publicity; they’ll cringe and flatter a twopenny-halfpenny journalist to get a good press. Rich men will hesitate at no shabby dodge to make a few pounds that they have no use for. Honesty, political honesty, commercial honesty – the only thing that counts with them is what they can get away with; the only thing that restrains them is fear. For they’re craven. And the protestations they make, the high-flown humbug that falls from their lips, the shameless lies they tell themselves. Oh, believe me, you can’t do the work I’ve been doing since I left Cambridge and preserve many illusions about human nature. Men are vile. Cowards and hypocrites. I loathe them.’

Charley looked down. He was a little shy about saying what he wanted to. It sounded rather silly.

‘Haven’t you any pity for them?’

‘Pity? Pity is womanish. Pity is what the beggar entreats of you because he hasn’t the guts, the industry and the brains to make a decent living. Pity is the flattery the failure craves so that he may preserve his self-esteem. Pity is the cheap blackmail that the prosperous pay to the down-and-out so that they may enjoy their own prosperity with a better conscience.’

Simon drew his dressing-gown angrily round his thin body. Charley recognized it as an old one of his which he had been going to throw away when Simon asked if he could have it; he had laughed and said he would give him a new one, but Simon, saying it was quite good enough for him, had insisted on having it. Charley wondered uncomfortably if he resented the trifling gift. Simon went on:

‘Equality? Equality is the greatest nonsense that’s ever muddled the intelligence of the human race. As if men were equal or could be equal! They talk of equality of opportunity. Why should men have that when they can’t take advantage of it? Men are born unequal; different in character, in vitality, in brain; and no equality of opportunity can offset that. The vast majority are densely stupid. Credulous, shallow, feckless, why should they be given equality of opportunity with those who have character, intelligence, industry and force? And it’s that natural inequality of man that knocks the bottom out of democracy. What a stupid farce it is to govern a country by the counting of millions of empty heads! In the first place they don’t know what’s good for them and in the second, they haven’t the capacity to get the good they want. What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily, self-seeking politicians. A democracy is ruled by words, and the orator seldom has brains, and if he has, he hasn’t time to use them, since all his energy has to be given to cajoling the fools on whose votes he depends. Democracy has had a hundred years’ trial: theoretically it was always absurd, and now we know that practically it’s a wash-out.’

‘Notwithstanding which you propose, if you can, to get into parliament. You’re a very dishonest fellow, my poor Simon.’

‘In an old-fashioned country like England, which cherishes its established institutions, it would be impossible to gain sufficient power to carry out one’s plans except from within those institutions. I don’t suppose anyone could gain support in the country and gather round himself an adequate band of followers to effect a coup d’état unless he were a prominent member of one of the great parties in the House of Commons. And since an upheaval can only be effected by means of the people it would have to be the Labour party. Even when the conditions are ripe for revolution the possessing classes still retain enough of their privileges to make it worth their while to make the best of a bad job.’

‘What conditions have you in mind? Defeat in war and economic distress?’

‘Exactly. Even then the possessing classes only suffer relatively. They put down their cars or close their country houses, thus adding to unemployment, but not greatly inconveniencing themselves. But the people starve. Then they will listen to you when you tell them they have nothing to lose but their chains, and when you dangle before them the bait of other people’s property the greed, the envy, which they’ve had to repress because they had no means of gratifying them, are let loose. With liberty and equality as your watchwords you can lead them to the attack. The history of the last five-and-twenty years shows that they’re bound to win. The possessing classes are enervated by their possessions, they’re humanitarian and sentimental, they have neither the will nor the courage to defend themselves; their counsels are divided, and when their only chance is in immediate and ruthless action they waste their time in recrimination. But the mob, which is the instrument of the revolutionary leaders, is a thing not of reason but of instinct, it is amenable to hypnotic suggestion and you can rouse it to frenzy by catchwords; it is an entity, and so is indifferent to the death in its ranks of such as fall; it knows neither pity nor mercy. It rejoices in destruction because in destruction it becomes conscious of its own power.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t deny that that entails the killing of thousands of inoffensive people and the destruction of institutions that have taken hundreds of years to build up.’

‘There’s bound to be destruction in a revolution and there’s bound to be killing. Engels said years ago that the possessing classes must be expected to resist suppression by every means in their power. It’s a fight to the death. Democracy has attached an absurd importance to human life. Morally man is worthless and it’s no loss to suppress him. Biologically he’s of no consequence; there’s no more reason why it should shock you to kill a man than to swat a fly.’

‘I begin to see why you were interested in Robert Berger.’

‘I was interested in him because he killed, not for any sordid motive, not for money, nor jealousy, but to prove himself and affirm his power.’

‘Of course it remains to be proved that communism is practicable.’

‘Communism? Who talked of communism? Everyone knows now that communism is a wash-out. It was the dream of impractical idealists who knew nothing of the realities of life. Communism is the lure you offer to the working classes to rouse them to revolt just as the cry of liberty and equality is the slogan with which you fire them to dare. Throughout the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be. And it’s right that it should be so because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves; they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.’

‘That’s rather a startling assertion.’

‘It’s not mine, old boy,’ Simon answered ironically. ‘It’s Plato’s, but the history of the world since he made it has amply demonstrated its truth. What has been the result of the revolutions we’ve seen in our own lifetime? The people haven’t lost their masters, they’ve only changed them, and nowhere has authority been wielded with a more iron hand than under communism.’

‘Then the people are duped?’

‘Of course. Why not? They’re fools, and they deserve to be. What does it matter? Their gain is substantial. They’re not asked to think for themselves any more; they’re told what to do, and so long as they’re obedient they have the security they’ve always hankered after. The dictators of our own day have made mistakes and we can learn by their errors. They’ve forgotten Machiavelli’s dictum that you can enslave the people politically if you leave their private lives free. I should give the people the illusion of liberty by allowing them as much personal freedom as is compatible with the safety of the state. I would socialize industry as widely as the idiosyncrasy of the human animal permits and so give men the illusion of equality. And since they would all be brothers under one yoke they would even have the illusion of fraternity. Remember that a dictator can do all sorts of things for the benefit of the people that democracy is prevented from doing because it has to consider vested interests, jealousies and personal ambitions, and so he has an unparalleled opportunity to alleviate the lot of the masses. I went to a great communist meeting here the other day and on banner after banner I read the words Peace, Work and Well-Being. Could any claims be more natural? And yet there man is after a hundred years of democracy still making them. A dictator can satisfy them by a stroke of the pen.’

‘But by your own admission the people only change their master; they’re still exploited; what makes you think that they’ll put up with it?’

‘Because they’ll damned well have to. Under present conditions a dictator with planes to drop bombs and armoured cars to fire machine guns can quell any revolt. The possessing classes could do the same, and no revolution would succeed, but the event has shown that they haven’t the nerve; they kill a hundred men, a thousand even, but then they get scared, they want to compromise, they offer to make concessions, but it’s too late then for concession or compromise and they’re swept away. But the people will accept their master because they know that he is better and wiser than they are.’

‘Why should he be better and wiser?’

‘Because he’s stronger. Because he has the power, what he says is right is right and what he says is good is good.’

‘It’s as simple as A B C but even less convincing,’ said Charley with some flippancy.

Simon gave him an angry scowl.

‘You’d find it convincing enough if not only your bread and butter but your life depended on it.’

‘And who, pray, is to choose the master?’

‘Nobody. He’s the ineluctable product of circumstances.’

‘That’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?’

‘He rises to the top because he has the instinct to lead. He has the will to power. He has audacity and enthusiasm, ability, industry and energy. He fears nothing because to him danger is the salt of life.’

‘No one could say that you hadn’t a good conceit of yourself, Simon,’ smiled Charley.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, I suppose you imagine yourself to possess the qualities you’ve just enumerated.’

‘What makes you suppose it? I know myself as well as any man can know himself. I know my capacities, but I also know my limitations. A dictator must have a mystic appeal so that he excites his followers to a religious frenzy. He must have a magnetism which makes it a privilege for them to lay down their lives for him. In him they must feel that they more greatly live. I have nothing in me of that. I repel rather than attract. I could make people fear me, I could never make them love me. You remember what Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” But that’s just what a dictator must do; he must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way he can do that, he must also fool himself. None of the dictators has a lucid, logical brain; he has drive, force, magnetism, charm, but if you examine his words closely you’ll see that his intelligence is mediocre; he can act because he acts on instinct, but when he begins to think he gets muddled. I have too good a brain and too little charm to be a dictator. Besides, it’s better that the dictator brought to power by the proletariat should be a member of it. The working classes will find it more easy to identify themselves with him and thus will give him more willingly their obedience and devotion. The technique of revolution has been perfected. Given the right conditions it’s easy for a resolute body of men to seize power; the difficulty is to hold it. The Russian revolution in the clearest possible way, the Italian and the German revolutions in a lesser degree, have shown that there’s only one means by which it can be done. Terror. The working man who becomes head of a state is exposed to temptations that only a very strong character can resist. He must be almost superhuman if his head isn’t turned by adulation and if his resolution isn’t enfeebled by unaccustomed luxury. The working man is naturally sentimental; he’s kind-hearted and so accessible to pity; when he’s got what he wants he sits back and lets things slide; he forgives his enemies and is surprised when they stick a knife in him as soon as his back is turned. He needs at his elbow someone who by his birth, education, training and character, is indifferent to the trappings of greatness and immune to the debilitating influence of success.’

Simon for some time had been walking up and down the studio, but now he came to an abrupt halt before his friend. With his white unshaven face and dishevelled hair, in the dressing-gown huddled round his emaciated limbs, he presented a grotesque appearance. But in a past that is not so distant other young men as pale, as thin, as unkempt as he, in shabby suits or in a student’s blouse, had walked about their sordid rooms and told of dreams seemingly as unrealizable; and yet time and opportunity had strangely made their dreams come true, and, fighting their way to power through blood, they held in their hands the life of millions.

‘Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?’

Charley gave him a startled look. That was the name Lydia had mentioned.

‘Yes, oddly enough I have.’

‘He was a gentleman. His family had been landowners in Poland since the seventeenth century. He was a cultivated, well-read man. Lenin and the Old Guard made the revolution, but without Dzerjinsky it would have been crushed within a year. He saw that it could only be saved by terror. He applied for the post that gave him control of the police and organized the Cheka. He made it into an instrument of repression that acted with the precision of a perfect machine. He let neither love nor hate interfere with his duty. His industry was prodigious. He would work all night examining the suspects himself, and they say he acquired so keen an insight into the hearts of men that it was impossible for them to conceal their secrets from him. He invented the system of hostages which was one of the most effective systems the revolution ever discovered to preserve order. He signed hundreds, nay, thousands of death warrants with his own hand. He lived with spartan simplicity. His strength was that he wanted nothing for himself. His only aim was to serve the revolution. And he made himself the most powerful man in Russia. It was Lenin the people acclaimed and worshipped, but it was Dzerjinsky who ruled them.’

‘And is that the part you wish to play if ever revolution comes to England?’

‘I should be well fitted for it.’

Charley gave him his boyish, good-natured smile.

‘It’s just possible that I’d be doing the country a service if I strangled you here and now. I could, you know.’

‘I daresay. But you’d be afraid of the consequences.’

‘I don’t think I should be found out. No one saw me come in. Only Lydia knows I was going to see you and she wouldn’t give me away.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of those consequences. I was thinking of your conscience. You’re not tough-fibred enough for that, Charley, old boy. You’re soft.’

‘I daresay you’re right.’

Charley did not speak for a while.

‘You say Dzerjinsky wanted nothing for himself,’ he said then, ‘but you want power.’

‘Only as a means.’

‘What to do?’

Simon stared at him fixedly and there was a light in his eyes that seemed to Charley almost crazy.

‘To fulfil myself. To satisfy my creative instinct. To exercise the capacities that nature has endowed me with.’

Charley found nothing to say. He looked at his watch and got up.

‘I must go now.’

‘I don’t want to see you again, Charley.’

‘Well, you won’t. I’m off to-morrow.’

‘I mean, ever.’

Charley was taken aback. He looked into Simon’s eyes. They were dark and grim.

‘Oh? Why?’

‘I’m through with you.’

‘For good?’

‘For good and all.’

‘Don’t you think that’s rather a pity? I haven’t been a bad friend to you, Simon.’

Simon was silent for a space no longer than it takes for an over-ripe fruit to fall from the tree to the ground.

‘You’re the only friend I’ve ever had.’

There was a break in his voice and his distress was so plain that Charley, moved, with both hands outstretched, stepped forward impulsively.

‘Oh, Simon, why d’you make yourself so unhappy?’

A flame of rage leapt into Simon’s tortured eyes and clenching his fist he hit Charley as hard as he could on the chin. The blow was so unexpected that he staggered and then, his feet slipping on the uncarpeted floor, fell headlong; he was on his feet in a flash and, furious with anger, sprang forward to give Simon the hiding he had often, when driven beyond endurance, given him before. Simon stood quite still, his hands behind his back, as though ready and willing to take the chastisement that was coming to him without an effort to defend himself, and on his face was an expression of so much suffering, of such consternation, that Charley’s wrath was melted. He stopped. His chin was hurting him, but he gave a good-natured, chuckling laugh.

‘You are an ass, Simon,’ he said. ‘You might have hurt me.’

‘For God’s sake, get out. Go back to that bloody whore. I’m fed to the teeth with you. Go, go!’

‘All right, old man, I’m going. But I want to give you a little presy that I brought you for your birthday on the seventh.’

He took out of his pocket one of those watches, covered in leather, which you open by pulling out the two sides, and which are wound by opening.

‘There’s a ring on it so you can hang it on your key-chain.’

He put it down on the table. Simon would not look at it. Charley, his eyes twinkling with amusement, gave him a glance. He waited for him to say something, but he did not speak. Charley went to the door, opened it and walked out.

It was night, but the Boulevard Montparnasse was brightly lit. With the New Year imminent there was a holiday feeling in the air. The street was crowded and the cafés were chock-a-block. Everybody was taking it easy. But Charley was depressed. He had a feeling of mortification, as one might have if one had gone to a party, expecting to enjoy oneself, and because one had been stupid and tactless, had come away conscious that one had left behind a bad impression. It was a comfort to get back to the sordid bedroom at the hotel. Lydia was sitting by the log fire sewing, and the air was thick with the many cigarettes she had smoked. The scene had a pleasant domesticity. It reminded one of an interior of Vuillard’s, with its intimate, cosy charm, but painted by Utrillo so that it had at the same time a touching squalor. Lydia greeted him with her quiet, friendly smile.

‘How was your friend Simon?’

‘Mad as a hatter.’

Lighting his pipe, he sat down on the floor in front of the fire, with his back against the seat of her chair. Her nearness gave him a sense of comfort. He was glad that she did not speak. He was troubled by all the horrible things Simon had said to him. He could not get out of his head the picture of that thin creature, his pale face scrubby with a two days’ beard, underfed and overworked, walking up and down in his old dressing-gown and with a cold-blooded, ruthless malignance delivering himself of his fantastic ideas. But breaking in upon this, as it were, was the recollection of the little boy with the big dark eyes who seemed to yearn for affection and yet repelled it, the little boy with whom he went to the circus during the Christmas holidays and who got so wildly excited at the unaccustomed treat, with whom be bicycled or went for long walks in the country, who was at times so gay and amusing, with whom it was jolly to talk and laugh and rag and play the fool. It seemed incredible that that little boy should have turned into that young man, and so heart-rending that he could have wept.

‘I wonder what’ll happen to Simon in the end?’ he muttered.

Hardly knowing that he had spoken aloud, he almost thought Lydia had read his thoughts when she answered:

‘I don’t know the English. If he were Russian I’d say he’ll either become a dangerous agitator or he’ll commit suicide.’

Charley chuckled.

‘Oh well, we English have a wonderful capacity for making our wild oats into a nourishing diet. It’s equally on the cards that he’ll end up as the editor of The Times.’

He got up and seated himself in the armchair which was the only fairly comfortable seat in the room. He looked reflectively at Lydia busily plying her needle. There was something he wanted to say to her, but the thought of it made him nervous, and yet he was leaving next day and this might well be his last opportunity. The suspicion that Simon had sown in his candid heart rankled. If she had been making a fool of him, he would sooner know; then when they parted he could shrug his shoulders and with a good conscience forget her. He decided to settle the matter there and then, but being shy of making her right out the offer he had in mind, he approached it in a round-about way.

‘Have I ever told you about my Great-Aunt Martha?’ he started lightly.

‘No.’

‘She was my great-grandfather’s eldest child. She was a grim-faced spinster with more wrinkles on her sallow face than I’ve ever seen on a human being. She was very small and thin, with tight lips, and she never looked anything but acidly disapproving. She used to terrify me when I was a kid. She had an enormous admiration for Queen Alexandra and to the end of her days wore her hair, only it was a wig, as the Queen wore hers. She always dressed in black, with very full long skirts and a pinched-in waist, and the collar of her bodice came up to her ears. She wore a heavy gold chain round her neck, with a large gold cross dangling from it, and gold bangles on her wrists. She was appallingly genteel. She continued to live in the grand old house old Sibert Mason built for himself when he began to get on in the world and she never changed a thing. To go there was like stepping back into the eighteen-seventies. She died only a few years ago at a great age and left me five hundred pounds.’

‘That was nice.’

‘I should have rather liked to blue it, but my father persuaded me to save it. He said I should be damned thankful to have a little nest-egg like that when I came to marry and wanted to furnish a flat. But I don’t see any prospect of my marrying for years yet and I don’t really want the money. Would you like me to give you two hundred of it?’

Lydia, going on with her work, had listened amiably, though without more than polite interest, to a story that could mean nothing very much to her; but now, jabbing her needle in the material she was sewing, she looked up.

‘What on earth for?’

‘I thought it might be useful to you.’

‘I don’t understand. What have I done that you should wish to give me two hundred pounds?’

Charley hesitated. She was gazing at him with those blue, large, but rather flat eyes of hers, and there was in them an extreme attention as though she were trying to see into the depths of his soul. He turned his head away.

‘You could do a good deal to help Robert.’

A faint smile broke on her lips. She understood.

‘Has your friend Simon been telling you that I was at the Sérail to earn enough money to enable Robert to escape?’

‘Why should you think that?’

She gave a little scornful laugh.

‘You’re very naïve, my poor friend. It’s what they all suppose. Do you think I would trouble to undeceive them and do you think they would understand if I told them the truth? I don’t want your money; I have no use for it.’ Her voice grew tender. ‘It’s sweet of you to offer it. You’re a dear creature, but such a kid. Do you know that what you’re suggesting is a crime which might easily land you in prison?’

‘Oh well.’

‘You don’t believe what I told you the other day?’

‘I’m beginning to think it’s very hard to know what to believe in this world. After all, I was nothing to you, there was no reason for you to tell me the truth if you didn’t want to. And those men this morning and the address they gave you to send money to. You can’t be surprised if I put two and two together.’

‘I’m glad if I can send Robert money so that he can buy himself cigarettes and a little food. But what I told you was true. I don’t want him to escape. He sinned and he must suffer.’

‘I can’t bear the thought of your going back to that horrible place. I know you a little now; it’s awful to think of you of all people leading that life.’

‘But I told you; I must atone; I must do for him what he hasn’t the strength to do for himself.’

‘But it’s crazy. It’s so morbid. It’s senseless. I might understand, though even then I’d think it outrageously wrong-headed, if you believed in a cruel god who exacted vengeance and who was prepared to take your suffering, well, in part-payment for the wrong Robert had done, but you told me you don’t believe in God.’

‘You can’t argue with feeling. Of course it’s unreasonable, but reason has nothing to do with it. I don’t believe in the god of the Christians who gave his son in order to save mankind. That’s a myth. But why should it have arisen if it didn’t express some deep-seated intuition in men? I don’t know what I believe, because it’s instinctive, and how can you describe an instinct with words? I have an instinct that the power that rules us, human beings, animals and things, is a dark and cruel power and that everything has to be paid for, a power that demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and that though we may writhe and squirm we have to submit, for the power is ourselves.’

Charley made a vague gesture of discouragement. He felt as if he were trying to talk with someone whose language he could not understand.

‘How long are you going on at the Sérail?’

‘I don’t know. Until I have done my share. Until the time comes when I feel in my bones that Robert is liberated not from his prison, but from his sin. At one time I used to address envelopes. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and you think you’ll never get them all done, you scribble and scribble interminably, and for a long time there seem to be as many to do as there ever were, and then suddenly, when you least expect it, you find you’ve done the last one. It’s such a curious sensation.’

‘And then, will you go out to join Robert?’

‘If he wants me.’

‘Of course he’ll want you,’ said Charley.

She gave him a look of infinite sadness.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How can you doubt it? He loves you. After all, think what your love must mean to him.’

‘You heard what those men said to-day. He’s gay, he’s got a soft billet, he’s making the best of things. He was bound to. That’s what he’s like. He loved me, yes, I know, but I know also that he’s incapable of loving for very long. I couldn’t have held him indefinitely even if nothing had happened. I knew that always. And when the times comes for me to go, what hope have I that anything will be left of the love he once bore me?’

‘But how, if you think that, can you still do what you’re doing?’

‘It’s stupid, isn’t it? He’s cruel and selfish, unscrupulous and wicked. I don’t care. I don’t respect him, I don’t trust him, but I love him; I love him with my body, with my thoughts, with my feelings, with everything that’s me.’ She changed her tone to one of light raillery. ‘And now that I’ve told you that, you must see that I’m a very disreputable woman who is quite unworthy of your interest or sympathy.’

Charley considered for a moment.

‘Well, I don’t mind telling you that I’m rather out of my depth. But for all the hell he’s enduring I’m not sure if I wouldn’t rather be in his shoes than yours.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, because I can’t imagine anything more heart-rending than to love with all your soul someone that you know is worthless.’

Lydia gave him a thoughtful, rather surprised look, but did not answer.

CHAPTER 10

CHARLEY’S TRAIN LEFT at midday. Somewhat to his surprise Lydia told him that she would like to come and see him off. They breakfasted late and packed their bags. Before going downstairs to pay his bill Charley counted his money. He had plenty left.

‘Will you do me a favour?’ he asked.

‘What is it?’

‘Will you let me give you something to keep in case of emergency?’

‘I don’t want your money,’ she smiled. ‘If you like you can give me a thousand francs for Evgenia. It’ll be a godsend to her.’

‘All right.’

They drove first to the Rue du Château d’Eau, where she lived, and there she left her bag with the concierge. Then they drove to the Gare du Nord. Lydia walked along the platform with him and he bought a number of English papers. He found his seat in the Pullman. Lydia, coming in with him, looked about her.

‘D’you know, this is the first time I’ve ever been inside a first-class carriage in my life,’ she said.

It gave Charley quite a turn. He had a sudden realization of a life completely devoid not only of the luxuries of the rich, but even of the comforts of the well-to-do. It caused him a sharp pang of discomfort to think of the sordid existence that had always been, and always would be, hers.

‘Oh well, in England I generally go third,’ he said apologetically, ‘but my father says that on the Continent one ought to travel like a gentleman.’

‘It makes a good impression on the natives.’

Charley laughed and flushed.

‘You have a peculiar gift for making me feel a fool.’

They walked up and down the platform, trying as people do on such occasions to think of something to say, but able to think of nothing that seemed worth saying. Charley wondered if it passed through her mind that in all probability they would never see one another again in all their lives. It was odd to think that for five days they had been almost inseparable and in an hour it would be as though they had never met. But the train was about to start. He put out his hand to say good-bye to her. She crossed her arms over her breast in a way she had which had always seemed to him strangely moving; she had had her arms so crossed when she wept in her sleep; and raised her face to his. To his amazement he saw that she was crying. He put his arms round her and for the first time kissed her on the mouth. She disengaged herself and, turning away from him, quickly hurried down the platform. Charley got into his compartment. He was singularly troubled. But a substantial luncheon, with half a bottle of indifferent Chablis, did something to restore his equanimity; and then he lit his pipe and began to read The Times. It soothed him. There was something solid in the feel of the substantial fabric on which it was printed that seemed to him grandly English. He looked at the picture papers. He was of a resilient temper. By the time they reached Calais he was in tearing spirits. Once on board he had a small Scotch and pacing the deck watched with satisfaction the waves that Britannia traditionally rules. It was grand to see the white cliffs of Dover. He gave a sigh of relief when he stepped on the stubborn English soil. He felt as though he had been away for ages. It was a treat to hear the voices of the English porters, and he laughed at the threatening uncouthness of the English customs officials who treated you as though you were a confirmed criminal. In another two hours he would be home again. That’s what his father always said:

‘There’s only one thing I like better than getting out of England, and that’s getting back to it.’

Already the events of his stay in Paris seemed a trifle dim. It was like a nightmare which left you shaken when with a start you awoke from it, but as the day wore on faded in your recollection, so that after a while you remembered nothing but that you had had a bad dream. He wondered if anyone would come to meet him; it would be nice to see a friendly face on the platform. When he got out of the Pullman at Victoria almost the first person he saw was his mother. She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him as though he had been gone for months.

‘I told your father that as he’d seen you off I was going to meet you. Patsy wanted to come too, but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted to have you all to myself for a few minutes.’

Oh, how good it was to be enveloped in that safe affection!

‘You are an old fool, mummy. It’s idiotic of you to risk catching your death of cold on a draughty platform on a bitter night like this.’

They walked, arm in arm and happy, to the car. They drove to Porchester Close. Leslie Mason heard the front door open and came out into the hall, and then Patsy tore down the stairs and flung herself into Charley’s arms.

‘Come into my study and have a tiddly. The whiskey’s there. You must be perished with the cold.’

Charley fished out of his great-coat pocket the two bottles of scent he had brought for his mother and Patsy. Lydia had chosen them.

‘I smuggled ’em,’ he said triumphantly.

‘Now those two women will stink like a brothel,’ said Leslie Mason, beaming.

‘I’ve brought you a tie from Charvet, daddy.’

‘Is it loud?’

‘Very.’

‘Good.’

They were all so pleased with one another that they burst out laughing. Leslie Mason poured out the whiskey and insisted that his wife should have some to prevent her from catching cold.

‘Have you had any adventures, Charley?’ asked Patsy.

‘None.’

‘Liar.’

‘Well, you must tell us all about everything later,’ said Mrs Mason. ‘Now you’d better go and have a nice hot bath and dress for dinner.’

‘It’s all ready for you,’ said Patsy. ‘I’ve put in half a bottle of bath salts.’

They treated him as though he had just come back from the North Pole after a journey of incredible hardship. It warmed the cockles of his heart.

‘Is it good to be home again?’ asked his mother, her eyes tender with love.

‘Grand.’

But when Leslie, partly dressed, went into his wife’s room to have a chat with her while she did her face, she turned to him with a somewhat anxious look.

‘He’s looking awfully pale, Leslie,’ she said.

‘A bit washed out. I noticed that myself.’

‘His face is so drawn. It struck me the moment he got out of the Pullman, but I couldn’t see very well till we got here. And he’s as white as a ghost.’

‘He’ll be all right in a day or two. I expect he’s been racketing about a bit. By the look of him I suspect he’s helped quite a number of pretty ladies to provide for their respectable old age.’

Mrs Mason was sitting at her dressing-table, in a Chinese jacket trimmed with white fur, carefully doing her eye-brows, but now, the pencil in her hand, she suddenly turned round.

‘What do you mean, Leslie? You don’t mean to say you think he’s been having a lot of horrid foreign women.’

‘Come of it, Venetia. What d’you suppose he went to Paris for?’

‘To see the pictures and Simon, and well, go to the Français. He’s only a boy.’

‘Don’t be so silly, Venetia. He’s twenty-three. You don’t suppose he’s a virgin, do you?’

‘I do think men are disgusting.’

Her voice broke, and Leslie, seeing she was really upset, put his hand kindly on her shoulder.

‘Darling, you wouldn’t like your only son to be a eunuch, would you now?’

Mrs Mason didn’t quite know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

‘I don’t suppose I would really,’ she giggled.

It was with a sense of peculiar satisfaction that Charley, half an hour later, in his second-best dinner-jacket, seated himself with his father in a velvet coat, his mother in a tea-gown of mauve silk, and Patsy maidenly in rose chiffon, at the Chippendale table. The Georgian silver, the shaded candles, the lace doyleys which Mrs Mason had bought in Florence, the cut glass – it was all pretty, but, above all, it was familiar. The pictures on the walls, each with its own strip-lighting, were meritorious; and the two maids, in their neat brown uniforms, added a nice touch. You had a feeling of security, and the world outside was comfortably distant. The good, plain food was designed to satisfy a healthy appetite without being fattening. In the hearth an electric fire very satisfactorily imitated burning logs. Leslie Mason looked at the menu.

‘I see we’ve killed the fatted calf for the prodigal son,’ he said, with an arch look at his wife.

‘Did you have any good food in Paris, Charley?’ asked Mrs Mason.

‘All right. I didn’t go to any of the smart restaurants, you know. We used to have our meals at little places in the Quarter.’

‘Oh. Who’s we?’

Charley hesitated an instant and flushed.

‘I dined with Simon, you know.’

This was a fact. His answer neatly concealed the truth without actually telling a lie. Mrs Mason was aware that her husband was giving her a meaning look, but she paid no attention to it; she continued to gaze on her son with tenderly affectionate eyes, and he was much too ingenuous to suspect that they were groping deep into his soul to discover whatever secrets he might be hiding there.

‘And did you see any pictures?’ she asked kindly.

‘I went to the Louvre. I was rather taken with the Chardins.’

‘Were you?’ said Leslie Mason. ‘I can’t say he’s ever appealed to me very much. I always thought him on the dull side.’ His eyes twinkled with the jest that had occurred to him. ‘Between you and me and the gatepost I prefer Charvet to Chardin. At least he is modern.’

‘Your father’s impossible,’ Mrs Mason smiled indulgently. ‘Chardin was a very conscientious artist, one of the minor masters of the eighteenth century, but of course he wasn’t Great.’

In point of fact, however, they were much more anxious to tell him about their doings than to listen to his. The party at Cousin Wilfred’s had been a riot, and they had come back so exhausted that they’d all gone to bed immediately after dinner on the night of their return. That showed you how they’d enjoyed themselves.

‘Patsy had a proposal of marriage,’ said Leslie Mason.

‘Thrilling, wasn’t it?’ cried Patsy. ‘Unfortunately the poor boy was only sixteen, so I told him that, bad woman as I was, I hadn’t sunk so low as to snatch a baby from his cradle, and I gave him a chaste kiss on the brow and told him I would be a sister to him.’

Patsy rattled on. Charley, smiling, listened to her, and Mrs Mason took the opportunity to look at him closely. He was really very good-looking and his pallor suited him. It gave her an odd little feeling in her heart to think how much those women in Paris must have liked him; she supposed he’d gone to one of those horrible houses; what a success he must have had, so young and fresh and charming, after the fat, bald, beastly old men they were used to! She wondered what sort of girl he had been attracted by, she so hoped she was young and pretty, they said men were attracted by the same type as their mother belonged to. She was sure he’d be an enchanting lover; she couldn’t help feeling proud of him; after all, he was her son and she’d carried him in her womb. The dear; and he looked so white and tired. Mrs Mason had strange thoughts, thoughts that she wouldn’t have had anybody know for anything in the world; she was sad, and a little envious, yes, envious of the girls he had slept with, but at the same time proud, oh, so proud, because he was strong and handsome and virile.

Leslie interrupted Patsy’s nonsense and her own thoughts.

‘Shall we tell him the great secret, Venetia?’

‘Of course.’

‘But mind, Charley, keep it under your hat. Cousin Wilfred’s worked it. There’s an ex-Indian governor that the party want to find a safe seat for, so Wilfred’s giving up his and in recognition he’s to get a peerage. What d’you think of that?’

‘It’s grand.’

‘Of course he pretends it means nothing to him, but he’s as pleased as Punch really. And you know, it’s nice for all of us. I mean, having a peer in the family adds to one’s prestige. Well, it gives one a sort of position. And when you think how we started . . .’

‘That’ll do, Leslie,’ said Mrs Mason, with a glance at the servants. ‘We needn’t go into that.’ And when they left the room immediately afterwards, she added: ‘Your father’s got a mania for telling everyone about his origins. I really think the time has now arrived when we can let bygones be bygones. It’s not so bad when we’re with people of our own class, they think it’s rather chic to have a grandfather who was a gardener and a grandmother who was a cook, but there’s no need to tell the servants. It only makes them think you’re no better than they are.’

‘I’m not ashamed of it. After all the greatest families in England started just as humbly as we did. And we’ve worked the oracle in less than a century.’

Mrs Mason and Patsy got up from the table and Charley was left with his father to drink a glass of port. Leslie Mason told him of the discussions they had had about the title Cousin Wilfred should assume. It wasn’t so easy as you might think to find a name which didn’t belong to somebody else, which had some kind of connection with you, and which sounded well.

‘I suppose we’d better join the ladies,’ he said, when he had exhausted the subject. ‘I expect your mother will want a rubber before we go to bed.’

But as they were at the door and about to go out, he put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

‘You look a bit washed out, old boy. I expect you’ve been going the pace a bit in Paris. Well, you’re young and that’s to be expected.’ He suddenly felt a trifle embarrassed. ‘Anyhow, that’s no business of mine, and I think there are things a father and son needn’t go into. But accidents will happen in the best regulated families, and well, what I want to say is, if you find you’ve got anything the matter with you, don’t hesitate but go and see a doctor right away. Old Sinnery brought you into the world and so you needn’t be shy of him. He’s discretion himself and he’ll put you right in no time; the bill will be paid and no questions asked. That’s all I wanted to tell you; now let’s go and join your poor mother.’

Charley had blushed scarlet when he understood what his father was talking about. He felt he ought to say something, but could think of nothing to say.

When they came into the drawing-room Patsy was playing a waltz of Chopin’s and after she had finished his mother asked Charley to play something.

‘I suppose you haven’t played since you left?’

‘One afternoon I played a little on the hotel piano, but it was a very poor one.’

He sat down and played again that piece of Scriabin’s that Lydia thought he played so badly, and as he began he had a sudden recollection of that stuffy, smoky cellar to which she had taken him, of those roughs he had made such friends with, and of the Russian woman, gaunt and gipsy-skinned, with her enormous eyes, who had sung those wild, barbaric songs with such a tragic abandon. Through the notes he struck he seemed to hear her raucous, harsh and yet deeply moving voice. Leslie Mason had a sensitive ear.

‘You play that thing differently from the way you used,’ he said when Charley got up from the piano.

‘I don’t think so. Do I?’

‘Yes, the feeling’s quite different. You get a sort of tremor in it that’s rather effective.’

‘I like the old way better, Charley. You made it sound rather morbid,’ said Mrs Mason.

They sat down to bridge.

‘This is like old times,’ said Leslie. ‘We’ve missed our family bridge since you’ve been away.’

Leslie Mason had a theory that the way a man played bridge was an indication of his character, and since he looked upon himself as a dashing, open-handed, free-and-easy fellow, he consistently overcalled his hand and recklessly doubled. He looked upon a finesse as un-English. Mrs Mason on the other hand played strictly according to the rule of Culbertson and laboriously counted up the pips before she ventured on a call. She never took a risk. Patsy was the only member of the family who by some freak of nature had a card sense. She was a bold, clever player and seemed to know by intuition how the cards were placed. She made no secret of her disdain for the respective methods of play of her parents. She was domineering at the card table. The game proceeded in just the same way as on how many evenings it had done. Leslie, after over-calling, was doubled by his daughter, redoubled, and with triumph went down fourteen hundred; Mrs Mason with her hand full of picture cards refused to listen to her partner’s insistent demand for a slam; Charley was careless.

‘Why didn’t you return me a diamond, you fool?’ cried Patsy.

‘Why should I return you a diamond?’

‘Didn’t you see me play a nine and then a six?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Gosh, that I should be condemned to play all my life with people who don’t know the ace of spades from a cow’s tail.’

‘It only made the difference of a trick.’

‘A trick? A trick? A trick can make all the difference in the world.’

None of them paid any attention to Patsy’s indignation. They only laughed and she, giving them up as a bad job, laughed with them. Leslie carefully added up the scores and entered them in a book. They only played for a penny a hundred, but they pretended to play for a pound, because it looked better and was more thrilling. Sometimes Leslie would have marked up against him in the book sums like fifteen hundred pounds and would say with seeming seriousness that if things went on like that he’d have to put down the car and go to his office by bus.

The clock struck twelve and they bade one another good-night. Charley went to his warm and comfortable room and began to undress, but suddenly he felt very tired and sank into an armchair. He thought he would have one more pipe before he went to bed. The evening that had just gone by was like innumerable others that he had passed, and none had ever seemed to him more cosy and more intimate; it was all charmingly familiar, in every particular it was exactly as he would have wished it to be; nothing could be, as it were, more stable and substantial; and yet, he could not for the life of him tell why, he had all the time been fretted by an insinuating notion that it was nothing but make-believe. It was like a pleasant parlour-game that grown-ups played to amuse children. And that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened – at this hour Lydia, her eyelids stained and her nipples painted, in her blue Turkish trousers and her blue turban, would be dancing at the Sérail or, naked, lying mortified and cruelly exulting in her mortification, in the arms of a man she abhorred; at this hour Simon, his work at the office finished, would be walking about the emptying streets of the Left Bank, turning over in his morbid and tortured mind his monstrous schemes; at this hour Alexey and Evgenia, whom Charley had never seen but whom through Lydia he seemed to know so well that he was sure he would have recognized them if he met them in the street; Alexey, drunk, would be inveighing with maudlin tears against the depravity of his son, and Evgenia, sewing, sewing for dear life, would cry softly because life was so bitter; at this hour the two released convicts, with those staring eyes of theirs that seemed to be set in a gaze of horror at which they had seen, would be sitting, each with his glass of beer, in the smoky, dim cellar and there hidden amid the crowd feel themselves for a moment safe from the ever-present fear that someone watched them; and at this hour Robert Berger, over there, far away on the coast of South America, in the pink-and-white stripes of the prison garb, with the ugly straw hat on his shaven head, walking from the hospital on some errand, would cast his eyes across the wide expanse of sea and, weighing the chances of escape, think for a moment of Lydia with tolerant affection – and that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened had a fearful reality which rendered all else illusory. It was absurd, it was irrational, but that, all that seemed to have a force, a dark significance, which made the life he shared with those three, his father, his mother, his sister, who were so near his heart, and the larger, decent yet humdrum life of the environment in which some blind chance had comfortably ensconced him, of no more moment than a shadow play. Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn’t even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn’t just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.

UP AT THE VILLA

First published by Doubleday in April 1941, this novella is perhaps most remarkable for Maugham’s incisive portrayal of his lover, Gerald Haxton, as the character Rowley Flint. It received lukewarm reviews at best and became an embarrassment to Maugham in later years. The manuscript was bought in 1960 by the University of Texas for the price of £1,200.

Mary Panton is an attractive young woman, who has been disappointed in love. Aged twenty-one, she married Matthew, out of love alone, but he soon reveals himself to be a gambler, adulterer and an alcoholic; he also physically abuses Mary. However, by the time she is thirty years old, her husband has died, the victim of his own drunk driving, thus ending a miserable eight year marriage and leaving Mary in an uncertain position financially. She needs time to recover; “don’t marry for love next time, it’s a mistake; marry for position and companionship,” advises a friend before she leaves for Italy. The late husband is no loss in her life, and Mary takes up the offer of some friends to stay at their Florentine villa in the hills, to rest, and rethink her life. In this quiet time of sightseeing in Florence, pleasant socialising and her own company, Mary has no thoughts of remarrying at present, and rejects the one proposal she is given, from Rowley Flint, a young Englishman of independent means, but dubious reputation. This is not the only proposal Mary has received since becoming a widow; a friend of her family, Sir Edgar Swift, has already proposed before she left for Italy, offering her financial and emotional security as the wife of a high ranking civil servant in India. Mary is undecided and says she will give Swift her answer when she returns to England. In the meantime, Sir Edgar still tries to look after her and insists that she take the revolver he offered so that she would be safe on her own at the villa.

In the meantime, Mary takes pity on a young Austrian refugee (from Nazi rule), Karl Richter, who is virtually living rough nearby, and playing the violin rather badly in restaurants to make some money. She invites him to the villa for a meal, but things escalate and they end up becoming lovers. Mary wishes to take the relationship no further, but Richter wants to see her again. Feeling threatened by the young man, she points a revolver at him and tells him to leave the area, but he again tries to seduce her. The situation soon turns violent, but in an unexpected way…

Written more in the crime or thriller genre than Maugham’s usual stories, this is a well-paced tale with some strong, engaging characterisation.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

The 2000 film adaptation

CHAPTER I

The villa stood on the top of a hill. From the terrace in front of it you had a magnificent view of Florence; behind was an old garden, with few flowers, but with fine trees, hedges of cut box, grass walks and an artificial grotto in which water cascaded with a cool, silvery sound from a cornucopia. The house had been built in the sixteenth century by a noble Florentine, whose impoverished descendants had sold it to some English people, and it was they who had lent it for a period to Mary Panton. Though the rooms were large and lofty, it was of no great size and she managed very well with the three servants they had left her. It was somewhat scantily furnished with fine old furniture and it had an air; and though there was no central heating, so that when she had arrived at the end of March it had been still bitterly cold, the Leonards, its owners, had put in bathrooms and it was comfortable enough to live in. It was June now and Mary spent most of the day, when she was at home, on the terrace from which she could see the domes and towers of Florence, or in the garden behind.

For the first few weeks of her stay she had spent much time seeing the sights: she passed pleasant mornings at the Uffizi and the Bargello, she visited the churches and wandered at random in old streets; but now she seldom went down to Florence except to lunch or dine with friends. She was satisfied to lounge about the garden and read books, and if she wanted to go out she preferred to get into the Fiat and explore the country round about. Nothing could have been more lovely with its sophisticated innocence than that Tuscan scene. When the fruit trees were in blossom and when the poplars burst into leaf, their fresh colour crying aloud amid the grey evergreen of the olives, she had felt a lightness of spirit she had thought never to feel again. After the tragic death of her husband, a year before, after the anxious months when she had to be always on hand in case the lawyers who were gathering together what was left of his squandered fortune wanted to see her, she had been glad to accept the Leonards’ offer of this grand old house so that she could rest her nerves and consider what she should do with her life. After eight years of extravagant living, and an unhappy marriage, she found herself at the age of thirty with some fine pearls and an income just large enough, with rigid economy, for her support. Well, that was better than it had looked at first when the lawyers, with glum faces, had told her that after the debts were paid they were afraid that nothing would be left at all. At this moment, with two and a half months in Florence behind her, she felt that she could have faced even that prospect with serenity. When she left England the lawyer, an old man and an old friend, had patted her hand.

“Now you’ve got nothing to worry about, my dear,” he said, “except to get back your health and strength. I don’t say anything about your looks because nothing affects them. You’re a young woman and a very pretty one, and I have no doubt you’ll marry again. But don’t marry for love next time; it’s a mistake; marry for position and companionship.”

She laughed. She had had a bitter experience and had no intention then of ever hazarding again the risks of wedlock; it was odd that now she was contemplating doing exactly what the shrewd old lawyer had advised. It looked indeed as though she would have to make up her mind that very afternoon. Edgar Swift was even then on his way to the villa. He had called up a quarter of an hour before to say that he had unexpectedly to go to Cannes to meet Lord Seafair and was starting at once, but urgently wanted to see her before he went. Lord Seafair was the Secretary of State for India and this sudden summons could only mean that Edgar was after all going to be offered the distinguished position upon which he had set his heart. Sir Edgar Swift, K.C.S.I., was in the Indian Civil Service, as her father had been, and he had had a distinguished career. He had been for five years Governor of the North-West Provinces and during a period of great unrest had conducted himself with conspicuous ability. He had finished his term with the reputation of being the most capable man in India. He had proved himself a great administrator; though resolute he was tactful, and if he was peremptory he was also generous and moderate. The Hindus and the Muslims liked and trusted him. Mary had known him all her life. When her father died, still a young man, and she and her mother had returned to England, Edgar Swift, whenever he came home on leave, spent a great part of his time with them. As a child he took her to the pantomime or the circus; as a girl in her teens, to the pictures or to the theatre; he sent her presents for her birthday and at Christmas. When she was nineteen her mother had said to her:

“I wouldn’t see too much of Edgar if I were you, darling. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but he’s in love with you.”

Mary laughed.

“He’s an old man.”

“He’s forty-three,” her mother answered tartly.

But he had given her some beautiful Indian emeralds when two years later she married Matthew Panton, and when he had discovered that her marriage was unhappy he had been wonderfully kind. On the expiration of his term as Governor he had gone to London and finding she was in Florence he had come down to pay her a brief visit. He had stayed week after week and Mary would have been a fool not to see that he was waiting for the favourable moment to ask her to marry him. How long had he been in love with her? Looking back, she thought it was ever since she was fifteen, when he had come home on leave and found her no longer a child but a young girl. It was rather touching, that long fidelity. And of course there was a difference between the girl of nineteen, the man of forty-three; and the woman of thirty, the man of fifty-four. The disparity seemed much less. And he was no longer an unknown Indian civilian; he was a man of consequence. It was absurd to suppose that the Government would be content to dispense with his services; he was certainly destined to hold positions of increasing importance. Mary’s mother was dead too now, she had no other relations in the world; there was no one of whom she was so fond as of Edgar.

“I wish I could make up my mind,” she said.

He couldn’t be long now. She wondered whether she should receive him in the drawing-room of the villa, mentioned in the guide books for its frescoes by the younger Ghirlandaio, with its stately Renaissance furniture and its magnificent candelabra; but it was a formal, sumptuous room, and she felt it would give the occasion an awkward solemnity: it would be better to wait for him on the terrace where she was fond of sitting toward evening to enjoy the view of which she never tired. It seemed a little more casual. If he were really going to ask her to marry him, well, it would make it easier for both of them, out in the open air, over a cup of tea, while she was nibbling a scone. The setting was seemly and not unduly romantic. There were orange trees in tubs and marble sarcophagi brimming over with gaily wanton flowers. The terrace was protected by an old stone balustrade on which at intervals were great stone vases and at each end a somewhat battered statue of a baroque saint.

Mary lay down in a long cane chair and told Nina, the maid, to bring tea. Another chair waited for Edgar. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the city below, in the distance, was bathed in the soft clear brilliance of the June afternoon. She heard a car drive up. A moment later, Ciro, the Leonards’ manservant and Nina’s husband, ushered Edgar on to the terrace. Tall and spare, in his well-cut blue serge and a black Homburg, he looked both athletic and distinguished. Even had she not known, Mary would have guessed that he was a good tennis player, a fine rider and an excellent shot. Taking off his hat he displayed a thick head of black curling hair hardly touched with grey. His face was bronzed by the Indian sun, a lean face with a strong chin and an aquiline nose; his brown eyes under the heavy brows were deep-set and vigilant. Fifty-four? He did not look a day more than forty-five. A handsome man in the prime of life. He had dignity without arrogance. He inspired you with confidence. Here was a fellow whom no predicament could perplex and no accident discompose. He wasted no time on small talk.

“Seafair called me on the phone this morning and definitely offered me the governorship of Bengal. They’ve made up their minds that in view of the circumstances they don’t want to bring out a man from England who would have to learn the conditions before he could be of use, but someone who is already familiar with them.”

“Of course you accepted.”

“Of course. It’s the job of all others that I wanted.”

“I’m so glad.”

“But there are various things to discuss and I’ve arranged to go to Milan this evening and get a plane from there to Cannes. I shall be away two or three days, which is a bore, but Seafair was anxious that we should meet at once.”

“That’s only natural.”

A pleasing smile broke on his firm, somewhat thin-lipped mouth and his eyes shone softly.

“You know, my dear, this is a very important position I’m going to take up. If I make a success of it, it’ll be, well, rather a feather in my cap.”

“I’m sure you’ll make a success of it.”

“It means a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. But that’s what I like. Of course it has its compensations. The Governor of Bengal lives in a good deal of state and I don’t mind telling you that that somewhat appeals to me. It’s a fine house he lives in too, almost a palace. I shall have to do a lot of entertaining.”

She saw what this was leading to, but looked at him with a bright, sympathetic smile on her lips, as though she had no notion. She was pleasantly excited.

“Of course a man ought to have a wife for a job like that,” he went on. “It’s very difficult for a bachelor.”

Her eyes were wonderfully candid when she replied.

“I’m quite sure there are plenty of eligible females who would be glad to share your grandeur.”

“I haven’t lived in India for nearly thirty years without having a pretty shrewd suspicion that there’s something in what you say. The unfortunate thing is that there’s only one eligible female that I would ever dream of asking to do that.”

Now it was coming. Should she say yes or no? Oh dear, oh dear, it was very difficult to make up one’s mind. He gave her a glance that was slightly arch.

“Am I telling you something you don’t know when I tell you that I’ve been head over heels in love with you since you were a kid with bobbed hair?”

What did one say to that? One laughed brightly.

“Oh, Edgar, what nonsense you talk.”

“You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in my life and the most delightful. Of course I knew I hadn’t a chance. I was twenty-five years older than you. A contemporary of your father’s. I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that when you were a girl you looked upon me as a funny old fogey.”

“Never,” cried Mary, not quite truthfully.

“Anyway, when you fell in love it was natural enough that it should be with someone of your own generation. I ask you to believe me when I tell you that when you wrote and told me you were going to be married I only hoped you would be very happy. I was miserable when I discovered you weren’t.”

“Perhaps Mattie and I were too young to marry.”

“A lot of water has flown under the bridges since then. I was wondering if now the discrepancy of our ages seemed as important to you as it did then.”

That was such a difficult question to answer that Mary thought it much better to say nothing but leave him to continue.

“I’ve always taken care to keep myself pretty fit, Mary. I don’t feel my age. But the worst of it is, the years have had no effect on you except to make you more beautiful than ever.”

She smiled.

“Is it possible that you’re a little nervous, Edgar? That’s something I never expected to see you. You, the man of iron.”

“You’re a little monster. But you’re quite right, I am nervous; and so far as the man of iron is concerned, no one knows better than you that in your hands I’ve never been anything but a lump of putty.”

“Am I right in thinking that you’re proposing to me?”

“Quite right. Are you shocked or surprised?”

“Certainly not shocked. You know, Edgar, I’m very fond of you. I think you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. I’m terribly flattered that you should want to marry me.”

“Then will you?”

There was a curious sense of apprehension in her heart. He was certainly very handsome. It would be thrilling to be the wife of the Governor of Bengal and very nice to be grand and to have A.D.C.s running about to do one’s bidding.

“You say you’ll be away two or three days?”

“Three at the outside. Seafair has to go back to London.”

“Will you wait for an answer till you come back?”

“Of course. In the circumstances I think it’s very reasonable. I’m sure it’s much better that you should know your own mind, and I take it that if you definitely knew the answer would be ‘No’ — you wouldn’t have to think it over.”

“That’s true,” she smiled.

“Then we’ll leave it at that. I’m afraid I must go now if I don’t want to miss my train.”

She walked with him to his taxi.

“By the way, have you told the Princess you wouldn’t be able to go to-night?”

They had both been going to a dinner party which the old Princess San Ferdinando was giving that evening.

“Yes, I called her up and told her that I was obliged to leave Florence for a few days.”

“Did you tell her why?”

“You know what an old tyrant she is,” he smiled indulgently. “She told me off good and proper for throwing her over at the last moment and in the end I had to confess the truth.”

“Oh, well, she’ll find someone to take your place,” Mary replied casually.

“I trust you’ll take Ciro with you as I shan’t be able to come and fetch you.”

“I can’t. I told Ciro and Nina that they could go out.”

“I think it’s terribly unsafe for you to drive along these deserted roads by yourself at all hours of the night. But you’ll keep your promise to me, won’t you?”

“What promise? Oh, the revolver. I think it’s perfectly ridiculous, the roads of Tuscany are just as safe as the roads of England, but if it’ll set your mind at ease I’ll take it with me to-night.”

Knowing how fond Mary was of driving about the country by herself, and having the Englishman’s belief that foreigners on the whole were very dangerous people, Edgar had insisted on lending her a revolver and exacted a promise from her that unless she were only going into Florence she would always take it with her.

“The country’s full of starving workmen and penniless refugees,” he said. “I shan’t have a moment’s peace unless I know that if the need arises you can take care of yourself.”

The manservant was at the taxi to open the door for him. Edgar took a fifty-lira note out of his pocket and gave it to him.

“Look here, Ciro, I’m going away for a few days. I shan’t be able to come for the Signora to-night. Be sure she takes the revolver when she goes out in the car. She’s promised me she would.”

“Very good, Signore,” said the man.

CHAPTER II

Mary was doing her face. Nina stood behind her, watching with interest and offering now and then unsolicited advice. Nina had been with the Leonards long enough to speak a certain amount of English and Mary in the five months she had lived at the villa had learnt a good deal of Italian, so they got on very well together.

“D’you think I’ve put on enough rouge, Nina?” asked Mary.

“With the beautiful colour the Signora has naturally, I don’t know why she wants to put any rouge on at all.”

“The other women at the party will be plastered with it, and if I don’t put on a little I shall look like death.”

She slipped into her pretty frock, put on the various bits and pieces of jewellery she had decided to wear, and then perched on her head a tiny, quite ridiculous, but very smart hat. For it was to be that sort of party. They were going to a new restaurant on one of the banks of the Arno where the food was supposed to be very good and where, sitting in the open, they could enjoy the balmy June night and when the moon rose the lovely view of the old houses on the opposite side of the river. The old Princess had discovered a singer there whose voice she thought unusual and whom she wanted her guests to hear.

Mary took up her bag.

“Now I’m ready.”

“The Signora has forgotten the revolver.”

It lay on the dressing-table.

Mary laughed.

“You idiot, that’s just what I was trying to do. What is the use of it? I’ve never fired a revolver in my life and I’m scared to death of it. I haven’t got a licence and if I were found with it I should get into all sorts of trouble.”

“The Signora promised the Signore she’d take it.”

“The Signore is an old silly.”

“Men are when they’re in love,” said Nina sententiously.

Mary looked away. That wasn’t a matter she wished to go into just then; Italian servants were admirable, loyal and hard-working, but it was no good to delude yourself with the belief that they didn’t know all your business, and Mary was well aware that Nina would be perfectly willing to discuss the whole matter with her in the frankest possible way. She opened her bag.

“All right. Put the beastly thing in.”

Ciro had brought the car round. It was a convertible coupe that Mary had bought when she took the villa and which she was proposing to sell for what it would fetch when she left. She stepped in, drove cautiously along the narrow drive, out of the iron gates and down a winding country lane till she got on to the highway that led into Florence. She turned the light on to see what the time was and finding that she had plenty kept to a leisurely speed. At the back of her mind was a faint disinclination to arrive, for really she would have much preferred to dine by herself on the terrace of the villa. To dine there on a June evening, when it was still day, and after dinner to sit till the softness of the night gradually enveloped her, was a delight of which Mary felt that she could never tire. It gave her a delicious feeling of peace, but not of an empty peace in which there was something lethargic, of an active, thrilling peace rather in which her brain was all alert and her senses quick to respond. Perhaps it was something in that light Tuscan air that affected you so that even physical sensation had in it something spiritual. It gave you just the same emotion as listening to the music of Mozart, so melodious and so gay, with its undercurrent of melancholy, which filled you with so great a contentment that you felt as though the flesh had no longer any hold on you. For a few blissful minutes you were purged of all grossness and the confusion of life was dissolved in perfect loveliness.

“I was a fool to go,” Mary said out loud. “I ought to have cried off when Edgar was called away.”

But of course that would have been silly. Still, she would have given a good deal to have that evening to herself so that she could think things over quietly. Though she had long guessed Edgar’s intentions she had not till that afternoon been quite sure that he would ever bring himself to the point of speaking, and till he did she had felt it unnecessary to make up her mind what she should answer. She would leave it then to the impulse of the moment. Well, now he had, and she felt more hopelessly undecided than before. But by this time she had reached the city, and the crowds of people walking in the roadway, the string of cyclists, forced her to give all her attention to her driving.

When Mary reached the restaurant, she found that she was the last to arrive. The Princess San Ferdinando was American; an elderly woman with iron-grey, tightly waved hair and an authoritative manner, who had lived in Italy for forty years without ever going back to her native country; her husband, a Roman prince, had been dead for a quarter of a century and she had two sons in the Italian Army. She had little money, but a caustic tongue and great good-nature. Though she could never have been beautiful and now, with her upright carriage, fine eyes and determined features, was probably better-looking than she had ever been in her youth, she was reported to have been very unfaithful to the Prince; but this had not affected the great position she had made for herself; she knew everybody she wished to know and everybody was pleased to know her. The rest of the party consisted of a couple of travelling English people, Colonel and Lady Grace Trail, a sprinkling of Italians and a young Englishman called Rowley Flint. Mary during her stay in Florence had got to know him pretty well. He had indeed been paying her a good deal of attention.

“I must tell you that I’m only a stop-gap,” he said when Mary shook hands with him.

“It was unusually nice of him,” the Princess put in. “I asked him when Sir Edgar called up to say he had to go to Cannes and he broke another engagement to come to me.”

“You know quite well I’d break any engagement in the world to come and dine with you, Princess,” he said.

The Princess smiled dryly.

“I think I should tell you that he wanted to know exactly who was going to be here before he accepted.”

“It’s flattering that we met with his approval,” said Mary.

The Princess gave him another of those quiet smiling looks of hers in which there was the indulgence of an old rip who has neither forgotten nor repented of her naughty past and at the same time the shrewdness of a woman who knows the world like the palm of her hand and has come to the conclusion that no one is any better than he should be.

“You’re an awful scamp, Rowley, and you’re not even good-looking enough to excuse it, but we like you,” she said.

It was true that Rowley was not much to look at. He had a tolerable figure, but he was of no more than average height, and in clothes he looked thick-set. He had not a single feature that you could call good: he had white teeth, but they were not very even; he had a fresh colour, but not a very clear skin; he had a good head of hair, but it was of a vague brown between dark and fair; his eyes were fairly large, but they were of that pallid blue that is generally described as grey. He had an air of dissipation and people who didn’t like him said he looked shifty. It was freely admitted, even by his greatest friends, that he couldn’t be trusted. He had a bad record. When he was only just over twenty he had run away and married a girl who was engaged to somebody else, and three years afterwards he had been co-respondent in a divorce case, whereupon his wife divorced him and he had married, not the woman who had been divorced on his account, but another, only to leave her two or three years later. He was now just over thirty. He was in short a young man with a shocking reputation which he thoroughly deserved. You would have said there was nothing to recommend him; and Colonel Trail, the travelling Englishman, tall, thin, weather-beaten, with a lean red face, a grey toothbrush moustache and an air of imbecility, wondered that the Princess had asked him and his wife to meet a damned rotter like that.

“I mean he’s not the sort of feller” — he would have said if there’d been anyone to say it to— “that a decent woman ought to be asked to sit in the same room with.”

He was glad to see, when they took their places at table, that though his wife sat next to Rowley Flint, she was listening to the civil remarks he was making to her with a cold look of disapproval. The worst of it was, the feller wasn’t an adventurer or anything like that; in fact, he was a cousin of his wife’s; so far as family went he was as good as anybody and he had quite a decent income. The mistake was that he’d never had to earn his living. Oh, well, every family had its black sheep, but what the Colonel couldn’t understand was what the women saw in him. He couldn’t be expected to know, this simple, honest Englishman, that what Rowley Flint had which explained everything was sex appeal, and the fact that in his relations with women he was unreliable and unscrupulous seemed only to make him more irresistible. However prejudiced she might be against him, he had only to be with a woman for half an hour for her heart to melt, and soon she would be saying to herself that she didn’t believe half the things that were said against him. But if she had been asked what it was she saw in him she would have found it hard to answer. He certainly wasn’t very good-looking, there was even no distinction in his appearance, he looked like any mechanic in a garage; he wore his smart clothes as if they were overalls, but as if he didn’t care a hang what he looked like. It was exasperating that he seemed to be serious about nothing, not even about making love; he made it quite clear that there was only one thing that he wanted from a woman, and his complete lack of sentimentality was intolerably offensive. But there was something that swept you off your feet, a sort of gentleness behind the roughness of his manner, a thrilling warmth behind his mockery, some instinctive understanding of woman as a different creature from man, which was strangely flattering; and the sensuality of his mouth and the caress in his grey eyes. The old Princess had put the matter with her usual crudity:

“Of course he’s a bad lot, a thorough wrong ‘un, but if I were thirty years younger and he asked me to run away with him I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment even though I knew he’d chuck me in a week and I’d be wretched for the rest of my life.”

But the Princess liked general conversation at her table and when her guests were settled down she addressed Mary.

“I’m so sorry Sir Edgar was unable to come to-night.”

“He was sorry, too. He had to go to Cannes.”

The Princess took the rest of the party in.

“It’s a great secret, so you mustn’t any of you tell anybody, but he’s just been made Governor of Bengal.”

“Has he, by Jove!” cried the Colonel. “A damned nice job to get.”

“Did it come as a surprise?”

“He knew he was one of the people who were being considered,” said Mary.

“He’ll be the right man in the right place; there’s no doubt about that,” said the Colonel. “If he pulls it off, I shouldn’t be surprised if later on they didn’t make him Viceroy.”

“I can’t imagine anything I’d like better than to be Vicereine of India,” said the Princess.

“Why don’t you marry him on the off-chance?” smiled Mary.

“Oh, isn’t he married?” asked Lady Grace.

“No.” The Princess gave Mary a shrewd, malicious look. “I won’t conceal from you that he’s been flirting with me outrageously during the six weeks he’s been here.”

Rowley chuckled and from beneath his long eyelashes threw a sidelong glance at Mary.

“Have you decided to marry him, Princess? Because if you have, I don’t think he’s got much chance, poor blighter.”

“I think it would be a very suitable alliance,” said Mary.

She knew quite well that both the Princess and Rowley were chaffing her, but she had no intention of giving anything away. Edgar Swift had made it sufficiently plain to his friends and hers in Florence that he was in love with her; and the Princess had more than once tried to find out from her whether anything was going to come of it.

“I don’t know whether you’d much like the climate of Calcutta,” said Lady Grace, who took everything with complete seriousness.

“Oh, I’ve reached an age when I prefer my alliances to be temporary,” returned the Princess. “You see, I have no time to waste. That is why I have such a soft spot in my heart for Rowley; his intentions are always dishonourable.”

The colonel looked at his fish with a frown, which was unreasonable since it consisted of scampi which had arrived from Viareggio that evening, and his wife smiled with constraint.

The restaurant had a small band. Its members were shabbily dressed in a sort of musical-play Neapolitan costume and they played Neapolitan tunes.

Presently the Princess remarked:

“I think it’s about time we had the singer. You’ll be astonished. He’s really got a magnificent voice, all macaroni and emotion. Harold Atkinson is seriously thinking of having him trained for opera.” She called the head-waiter. “Ask that man to sing that song he sang the other night when I was here.”

“I’m sorry, Excellency, but he’s not here to-night. He’s sick.”

“How tiresome! I particularly wanted my friends to hear him. I asked them to dine here on purpose for that.”

“He’s sent a substitute, but he only plays the violin. I’ll tell him to play.”

“If there’s anything I dislike it’s the violin,” she answered. “Why one should want to hear anyone scrape the hairs of a horse’s tail against the guts of a dead cat is something I shall never understand.”

The head-waiter could speak half a dozen languages fluently, but understood none. He took the Princess’s remark to mean that she was pleased with his suggestion, and went up to the violinist, who rose from his chair and stepped forward. He was a dark, slender young man with enormous hungry eyes and a melancholy look. He managed to wear that grotesque costume with a romantic air, but he looked half-starved. His smooth face was thin and pinched. He played his piece.

“He’s quite frightful, my poor Giovanni,” the Princess said to the head-waiter.

This time he understood.

“He’s not very good, Princess. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But the other will be back to-morrow.”

The band started upon another number and under cover of this Rowley turned to Mary.

“You’re looking very beautiful to-night.”

“Thank you.”

His eyes twinkled.

“Shall I tell you one of the things I particularly like about you? Unlike some women, when one tells you you’re beautiful, you don’t pretend you don’t know it. You accept it as naturally as if one told you you had five fingers on each hand.”

“Until I married my looks were my only means of livelihood. When my father died my mother and I had only her pension to live on. If I got parts as soon as I passed out of the Dramatic School it was because I was lucky enough to have the looks I have.”

“I should have thought you could have made a fortune on the movies.”

She laughed.

“Unfortunately I had absolutely no talent. Nothing but looks. Perhaps in time I might have learnt to act, but I married and left the stage.”

A faint shadow seemed to fall on her face and she looked for a moment disconsolately into her past. Rowley looked at her perfect profile. She was indeed a beautiful creature. It was not only that she had exquisite features; what made her so remarkable was her wonderful colouring.

“You’re a brown and gold girl, aren’t you?” he said.

Her hair was of a dark rich gold, her large eyes deep brown, and her skin pale gold. It was her colouring which took away the coldness which her regular features might have given her face and gave her a warmth and a richness which were infinitely alluring.

“I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“And how many women have you said that to?”

“A good many. But that doesn’t make it any less true when I say it now.”

She laughed.

“I suppose it doesn’t. But we’ll leave it at that, shall we?”

“Why? It’s a subject that I find excessively interesting.”

“People have been telling me I was beautiful since I was sixteen and it’s ceased to excite me very much. It’s an asset and I should be a fool not to know its value. It has its disadvantages as well.”

“You’re a very sensible girl.”

“Now you’re paying me a compliment that does flatter me.”

“I wasn’t trying to flatter you.”

“Weren’t you? It sounded to me like an opening I’ve heard very often before. Give a plain woman a hat and a pretty one a book. Isn’t that the idea?”

He was not in the least disconcerted.

“Aren’t you a trifle caustic to-night?”

“I’m sorry you should think that. I merely wanted to make it quite plain once and for all that there’s nothing doing.”

“Don’t you know that I’m desperately in love with you?”

“Desperately is perhaps hardly the word. You’ve made it pretty clear during the last few weeks that you’d be glad to have a little flutter with me. A widow, pretty and unattached, in a place like Florence — it looked just your mark.”

“Can you blame me? Surely it’s very natural that in spring a young man’s fancy should lightly turn to thoughts of love.”

His manner was so disarming, his frankness so engaging that Mary could not but smile.

“I’m not blaming you. Only so far as I’m concerned, you’re barking up the wrong tree and I hate the idea of you wasting your time.”

“Full of consideration, aren’t you? In point of fact I have plenty of time to waste.”

“Ever since I was sixteen men have been making love to me. Whatever they are, old or young, ugly or handsome, they seem to think you’re there for no purpose except to gratify their lust.”

“Have you never been in love?”

“Yes, once.”

“Who with?”

“My husband. That’s why I married him.”

There was a moment’s pause. The Princess broke in with some casual remark and once more the conversation became general.

CHAPTER III

They had dined late and soon after eleven the Princess called for her bill. When it grew evident that they were about to go, the violinist who had played to them came forward with a plate. There were a few coins on it from diners at other tables and some small notes. What they thus received was the band’s only remuneration. Mary opened her bag.

“Don’t bother,” said Rowley. “I’ll give him a trifle.”

He took a ten-lira note out of his pocket and put it on the plate.

“I’d like to give him something too,” said Mary. She laid a hundred-lira note on the others. The man looked surprised, gave Mary a searching look, bowed slightly and withdrew.

“What on earth did you give him that for?” exclaimed Rowley. “That’s absurd.”

“He plays so badly and he looks so wretched.”

“But they don’t expect anything like that.”

“I know. That’s why I gave it. It’ll mean so much to him. It may make all the difference to his life.”

The Italian members of the party drove off in their respective cars and the Princess took the Trails in hers.

“You might drop Rowley at his hotel, Mary,” she said. “He’s right out of my way.”

“Would you mind?” he asked.

Mary had a suspicion that this plan had been arranged beforehand, for she knew how the lewd old woman loved to forward love affairs and Rowley was a favourite of hers, but there seemed no possibility of refusing so reasonable a request and so she answered that of course she would be delighted. They got into her car and drove along the quay. The full moon flooded their way with radiance. They spoke little. Rowley had a feeling that she was occupied with thoughts in which he had no part and he did not wish to disturb them. But when they came to his hotel he said:

“It’s such a gorgeous night; it seems a pity to waste it by going to bed: wouldn’t you drive on a little? You’re not sleepy, are you?”

“No.”

“Let’s drive into the country.”

“Isn’t it rather late for that?”

“Are you afraid of the country or afraid of me?”

“Neither.”

She drove on. She followed the course of the river, and presently they were going through fields with only a cottage here and there by the roadside or, a little way back, a white farmhouse with tall cypresses that stood black and solemn against the moonlight.

“Are you going to marry Edgar Swift?” he asked suddenly.

She looked round at him.

“Did you know I was thinking of him?”

“How should I?”

She paused for a while before she answered.

“Before he went away to-day he asked me to. I said I’d give him an answer when he got back.”

“You’re not in love with him, then?”

Mary slowed up. It looked as though she wanted to talk.

“What makes you think that?”

“If you had been you wouldn’t have wanted three days to think it over. You’d have said yes there and then.”

“I suppose that’s true. No, I’m not in love with him.”

“He’s in love with you all right.”

“He was a friend of my father’s and I’ve known him all my life. He was wonderfully kind to me when I wanted kindness, and I’m grateful to him.”

“He must be twenty years older than you.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Are you dazzled by the position he can give you?”

“I dare say. Don’t you think most women would be? After all, I’m not inhuman.”

“Do you think it would be much fun to live with a man you weren’t in love with?”

“But I don’t want love. I’m fed to the teeth with love.”

She said this so violently that Rowley was startled.

“That’s a strange thing to say at your age.”

They were well out in the country now, on a narrow road; the full moon shone down from an unclouded sky. She stopped the car.

“You see, I was madly in love with my husband. They told me I was a fool to marry him; they said he was a gambler and a drunkard; I didn’t care. He wanted me to marry him so much. He had plenty of money then, but I’d have married him if he hadn’t had a cent. You don’t know how charming he was in those days, so good to look at, so gay and light-hearted. The fun we used to have together! He had immense vitality. He was so kind and gentle and sweet — when he was sober. When he was drunk he was noisy and boastful and vulgar and quarrelsome. It was terribly distressing; I used to be so ashamed. I couldn’t be angry with him; he was so sorry afterwards; he didn’t want to drink; when he was alone with me he was as sober as anyone, it was only when there were other people there that he got excited, and after two or three drinks there was no holding him; then I used to wait till he was so blas that he let me lead him away and at last I could put him to bed. I did everything I knew to cure him, it was useless; it’s no good. I don’t believe a drunk can ever be cured. And I was forced into the position of nurse and keeper. It irritated him beyond endurance when I tried to restrain him, but what else could I do? It was so difficult, I didn’t want him to look upon me as a sort of governess, but I had to do what I could to keep him from drinking. Sometimes I couldn’t help flying into a passion with him and then we’d have an awful row. You see, he was a dreadful gambler and when he was drunk he’d lose hundreds of pounds. If he hadn’t died when he did he’d have gone bankrupt and I should have had to go back to the stage to keep him. As it is I have a few hundreds a year and the bits and pieces of jewellery he gave me when we were first married. Sometimes he wouldn’t come back all night and then I knew he’d got blind and picked up the first woman he met. At first I used to be furiously jealous and unhappy, but at last I got to prefer it, for if he didn’t do that he’d come home and make love to me with his breath stinking of whisky, all hunched up, his face distorted, and I knew it wasn’t love that made him passionate but drink, just drink. I or another woman, it made no difference, and his kisses made me sick and his desire horrified and mortified me. And when he’d satisfied his lust he’d sink into the snoring sleep of drunkenness. You’re surprised that I should say I was fed to the teeth with love. For years I only knew the humiliation of it.”

“But why didn’t you leave him?”

“How could I leave him? He was so dependent on me. When anything went wrong, if he got into trouble, if he was ill, it was me he came to for help. He clung to me like a child.” Her voice broke. “He was so broken then that my heart bled for him. Though he was unfaithful to me, though he hid himself from me so that he could drink without restraint, though I exasperated him sometimes so that he hated me, deep down he always loved me, he knew I’d never let him down and he knew that except for me he’d go all to pieces. He was so beastly when he was drunk he had no friends, only the riff-raff that sponged on him and bled him and robbed him; he knew I was the only person in the world who cared if he lived or died and I knew that I was the only person who stood between him and absolute ruin. And when he died, in my arms, I was broken-hearted.”

The tears were flowing down Mary’s face and she made no effort to restrain them. Rowley, thinking perhaps that it would relieve her to cry, sat still and said no word. Presently he lit a cigarette.

“Give me one too. I’m being stupid.”

He took a cigarette out of his case and handed it to her.

“I’d like my handkerchief. It’s in my bag.”

The bag was between them and when he opened it to find her handkerchief he was surprised to feel a revolver.

“What have you got a gun here for?”

“Edgar didn’t like the idea of my driving about alone. He made me promise to take it. I know it’s idiotic.” But the new subject that Rowley had brought up helped her to regain her self-control. “I’m sorry to have got so emotional.”

“When did your husband die?”

“A year ago. And now I’m thankful he died. I know now that my life was wretched with him and he had nothing to look forward to but hopeless misery.”

“He was young to die, wasn’t he?”

“He was smashed up in a motor accident. He was drunk. He was driving at sixty miles an hour and skidded on a slippery road. He died in a few hours. Mercifully I was able to get to him. His last words were: ‘I’ve always loved you, Mary.’” She sighed. “His death has given us both freedom.”

For a little while they sat and smoked in silence. Rowley lit another cigarette on the stub of the first.

“Are you sure you’re not committing yourself to a slavery just as great when you marry a man who means nothing to you?” he asked, as though their conversation had gone on without interruption.

“How well do you know Edgar?”

“I’ve met him fairly often during the five or six weeks he’s been here dangling at your skirts. He’s the Empire-builder; it’s not a type that has ever very much appealed to me.”

Mary giggled.

“No, I should hardly think it would. He’s strong, he’s clever, he’s trustworthy.”

“Everything I’m not, in short.”

“Can’t we leave you out of it for the minute?”

“All right. Go on with his virtues.”

“He’s kind and considerate. He’s ambitious. He’s a man who has done great things and he’ll do still greater in future. It may be I can help him. I can’t hope that you’ll think it anything but idiotic when I tell you that I should like to be of some use in the world.”

“You haven’t got a very good opinion of me, have you?”

“No, I haven’t,” chuckled Mary.

“I wonder why?”

“If you’d like to know I’ll tell you,” she answered coolly. “Because you’re a waster and a rotter. Because you think of nothing but having a good time and as many women as are fools enough to fall for you.”

“I look upon that as a very accurate description. I was lucky enough to inherit an income which made it unnecessary for me to earn my living. Do you think I should have got some job that would have taken the bread out of the mouth of a poor devil who needed it? So far as I know I’ve only got this one life to dispose of. I like it awfully. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to live for living’s sake. What a fool I should be if I didn’t make the most of my opportunities! I like women, and strangely enough they like me. I’m young and I know youth doesn’t last for ever. Why shouldn’t I have as good a time as I can while I have the chance?”

“It would be hard to find a greater contrast to Edgar.”

“I agree. It may be that I’d be easier to live with. I should certainly be more fun.”

“You forget that Edgar wishes to marry me. You are suggesting a much more temporary arrangement.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, for one thing, you happen to be married already.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken. I was divorced a couple of months ago.”

“You kept very quiet about it.”

“Naturally. Women have funny ideas about marriage. It makes things easier all round if there’s never any question of that. We all know where we are then.”

“I see your point,” smiled Mary. “Why should you divulge this guilty secret to me? With the idea that if I behaved myself and gave satisfaction you might in due course reward me with a wedding ring?”

“Darling, I’m quite intelligent enough to know you’re no fool.”

“You need not call me darling.”

“Damn it all, I’m in process of making you a proposal of marriage.”

“Are you? Why?”

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Do you?”

“Rotten. What on earth put it in your head?”

“It just occurred to me. You see, when you told me about your husband I suddenly realised that I was terribly fond of you. That’s different from being in love, you know, but I’m in love too. I feel a great tenderness toward you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t say things like that. You are a devil, you seem to know instinctively what to say that’ll melt a woman.”

“I couldn’t say them if I didn’t feel them.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s lucky for you that I have a cool head and a sense of humour. Let’s go back to Florence. I’ll drop you at your hotel.”

“Does that mean the answer is no?”

“It does.”

“Why?”

“I’m sure it’ll surprise you; I’m not in the least in love with you.”

“It doesn’t surprise me. I knew it; but you would be if you gave yourself half a chance.”

“Modest fellow, aren’t you? But I don’t want to give myself half a chance.”

“Are you determined to marry Edgar Swift?”

“Now I am, yes. Thank you for letting me talk to you. It was hard having no one I could talk to. You’ve helped me to make up my mind.”

“I’m damned if I see how.”

“Women don’t reason in the same way that men do. All you’ve said, all I’ve said, the recollection of the life with my husband, the misery, the mortification — well, against that Edgar stands like a great rock; he’s so strong and so staunch. I know I can rely on him; he’d never let me down, because he couldn’t. He offers me security. I have so great an affection for him at this moment that it’s almost love.”

“It’s rather a narrow road,” said Rowley, “would you like me to turn the car for you?”

“I’m perfectly capable of turning my own car, thank you,” she answered.

His remark had given her a moment’s irritation, not because it reflected on her driving, but because for some reason it made what she had just said seem a trifle high-flown. He chuckled.

“There’s a ditch on one side and a ditch on the other. I shall be vexed if you pitch me into either one or the other.”

“Hold your bloody tongue,” she said.

He lit a cigarette and watched her as she advanced, turned the wheel with an effort of all her strength, stopped the engine and started it again, put the clutch in reverse and gingerly backed, grew very hot, and eventually got the car round and set off on the homeward journey. They drove in silence till they reached the hotel. It was late now and the door was shut. Rowley made no attempt to get out.

“Here we are,” said Mary.

“I know.”

He sat silent for a moment or two staring straight in front of him. She gave him a questioning look and with a smile he turned to her.

“You’re a fool, Mary, my dear. Oh, I know, you’ve turned me down. That’s all right. Though I dare say I’d have made a better husband than you think. But you’re a fool to marry a man twenty-five years older than yourself. How old are you? Thirty at the outside. You’re not a fish. One only has to look at your mouth and the warmth of your eyes, and at the lines of your body, to know that you’re a passionate and sensual woman. Oh, I know you had a rotten break. But at your age one recovers from those things; you’ll fall in love again. D’you think you can ignore your sexual instincts? That beautiful body of yours is made for love; it won’t allow you to deny it. You’re too young to shut the door on life.”

“You disgust me, Rowley. You talk as though bed were its aim and end.”

“Have you never had a lover?”

“Never.”

“Many men besides your husband must have loved you.”

“I don’t know. Some have said they did. You can’t think how little they meant to me. I can’t say I’ve resisted temptation; I’ve never been tempted.”

“Oh, how can you waste your youth and beauty? They last so short a time. What’s the good of riches if one does nothing with them? You’re a kind woman and a generous one. Haven’t you ever the desire to give of your riches?”

Mary was silent for an instant.

“Shall I tell you something? I’m afraid you’ll think me even more foolish than you do.”

“Very possibly. But tell me all the same.”

“I should be a fool if I didn’t know I was prettier than most women. It’s true that sometimes I felt that I had something to give that might mean a great deal to the person I gave it to. Does that sound frightfully conceited?”

“No. It’s the plain truth.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to myself lately and I dare say I’ve wasted too much of it on idle thoughts. If ever I’d taken a lover it wouldn’t have been a man like you. My poor Rowley, you’re the last man I would ever have had an affair with. But I’ve sometimes thought that if I ever ran across someone who was poor, alone and unhappy, who’d never had any pleasure in life, who’d never known any of the good things money can buy — and if I could give him a unique experience, an hour of absolute happiness, something that he’d never dreamt of and that would never be repeated, then I’d give him gladly everything I had to give.”

“I never heard such a crazy idea in my life!” cried Rowley.

“Well, now you know,” she answered brightly. “So get out and let me drive home.”

“Will you be all right alone?”

“Of course.”

“Then good-night. Marry your Empire-builder and be damned to you.”

CHAPTER IV

Mary drove through the silent streets of Florence, along the road by which she had come, and then up the hill on the top of which was the villa. The hill was steep and wound sharply with horseshoe turns. About half-way up was a little semi-circular terrace, with a tall, very old cypress and a parapet in front, from which one got a view of the cathedral and the towers of Florence. Tempted by the beauty of the night Mary stopped the car and got out. She walked to the edge and looked over. The sight that met her eyes, the valley flooded with the full moon under the vastness of the cloudless sky, was so lovely that it wrung her heart with a throb of pain.

Suddenly she was aware that a man was standing in the shadow of the cypress. She saw the gleam of his cigarette. He came towards her. She was a trifle startled, but had no intention of showing it. He took off his hat.

“Excuse me, are you not the lady who was so generous in the restaurant?” he said. “I should like to thank you.”

She recognised him.

“You are the violinist.”

He no longer wore that absurd Neapolitan costume, but nondescript clothes which looked threadbare and dingy. He spoke English well enough but with a foreign accent.

“I owed my landlady for my board and lodging. The people I live with are very good to me, but they are poor and they need the money. Now I shall be able to pay them.”

“What are you doing here?” asked Mary.

“It is on my way home. I stopped to look at the view.”

“Do you live near here, then?”

“I live in one of the cottages just before you come to your villa.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“I’ve seen you passing in your car. I know that you have a beautiful garden and there are frescoes in the villa.”

“Have you been in it?”

“No. How should I? The contadini have told me about it.”

Mary had lost the slight nervousness which she had had for a moment. He was a pleasant-spoken, rather shy young man; she remembered how ill at ease he had looked in the restaurant.

“Would you like to come and see the garden and the frescoes?” she said.

“It would give me much pleasure. When would it be convenient?”

Rowley and his unexpected proposal of marriage had amused and excited her. She had no wish to go to bed.

“Why not now?” she said on an impulse.

“Now?” he repeated, surprised.

“Why not? The garden is never so beautiful as under the full moon.”

“I should be very pleased,” he said primly.

“Jump into the car. I’ll drive you up.”

He took his seat by her side. She continued on her way and they came to a group of cottages huddled together.

“That is where I live,” he told her.

She slowed down and looked reflectively at the poverty-stricken little houses. They were horribly sordid. She drove on and presently they came to the gates of her villa. They stood open and she drove in.

She parked the car and they walked up the narrow drive. The principal rooms and Mary’s bedroom were on the second floor, to which you ascended by a fine flight of steps. She opened the door and turned on the lights. There was nothing much to see in the hall and she took the young man straight into the drawing-room with the painted walls. It was a noble apartment and the owners of the villa had furnished it with period pieces of fine quality. Flowers arranged in great vases mitigated its stately severity. The frescoes were somewhat damaged and had been none too well restored, but with all those figures in their sixteenth-century clothes they gave an impression of a multifarious and magnificent vitality.

“Wonderful, wonderful!” he cried. “I didn’t think one ever saw such things except in a museum. I never realised that people could possess them.”

It gave her a thrill to see his delight. She did not think it necessary to tell him that there was not a chair in which you could sit with comfort nor that, with those marble floors and that vaulted ceiling, except in the warmest of warm weather you shivered with cold.

“And is it all yours?” he asked.

“Oh no. It belongs to friends of mine. They’ve lent it to me while they’re away.”

“I’m sorry. You are beautiful and it’s right that you should possess beautiful things.”

“Come along,” she said, “and I’ll get you a glass of wine and then we’ll go and look at the garden.”

“No, I had no dinner. Wine would go to my head.”

“Why did you have no dinner?”

He gave a careless, boyish laugh.

“I had no money. But never mind about that; I shall eat to-morrow.”

“Oh, but that’s awful. Come into the kitchen and we’ll see if we can’t find something for you to eat now.”

“I’m not hungry. This is better than food. Let me see the garden with the moon shining.”

“The garden will keep and so will the moon. I’m going to make you some supper and then you shall see anything you like.”

They went down into the kitchen. It was vast, with a stone floor and a huge old-fashioned range where you might have cooked for fifty people. Nina and Ciro were long since in bed and asleep and the cook had gone home to her cottage half-way down the hill. Mary and the stranger, hunting about for food, felt like a pair of burglars. They found bread and wine, eggs, bacon and butter. Mary turned on the electric stove which the Leonards had put in, started to toast some slices of bread and broke the eggs into a frying-pan to scramble them.

“Cut some rashers of bacon,” she told the young man, “and we’ll fry them. What is your name?”

With the bacon in one hand and a knife in the other, he clicked his heels together.

“Karl Richter, student of art.”

“Oh, I thought you were Italian,” she said lightly, as she beat the eggs. “That sounds German.”

“I was Austrian when Austria existed.”

There was a sullenness in his tone which made Mary give him a questioning look.

“How is it you speak English? Have you ever been to England?”

“No. I learnt it at school and at the University.” Suddenly he smiled. “You’re marvellous to be able to do that.”

“To do what?”

“Cook.”

“Would it surprise you if I told you I’d been a working girl and not only was able to cook for myself, but had to?”

“I shouldn’t believe it.”

“Would you rather believe that I’d lived in luxury all my life with a host of servants to look after me?”

“Yes. Like a princess in a fairy story.”

“Then it’s true. I can scramble eggs and fry bacon because that was one of the gifts I received at my christening from my fairy godmother.”

When everything was ready they put it on a tray and, Mary leading, went into the dining-room. It was a large room with a painted ceiling, with a tapestry at each end and great gilt-wood sconces on the side walls. They sat opposite one another in tall stately chairs at a refectory table.

“I’m ashamed of my poor and shabby clothes,” he smiled. “In this splendid room I should be dressed in silk and fine velvet like the cavaliers in an old picture.”

His suit was shabby, his shoes patched, and his shirt, open at the neck, frayed. He wore no tie. By the light of the tall candles on the table his eyes were dark and cavernous. He had a strange head with close-cropped black hair, high cheek-bones, hollow cheeks, a pallid skin and a look of strain which was somewhat moving. It occurred to Mary that in costume, dressed, say, like one of those young princes in a picture by Bronzino at the Uffizi, he would have been very nearly beautiful.

“How old are you?” she asked him.

“Twenty-three.”

“What else matters?”

“What is the good of youth that has no opportunity? I live in a prison and there’s no escape from it.”

“Are you an artist?”

He laughed.

“Can you ask me after hearing me play? I’m not a violinist. When I escaped from Austria I got work in a hotel, but business was bad and I was sent away. I’ve had one or two odd jobs, but it’s difficult to get them when you’re a foreigner and your papers aren’t in order. I play the fiddle when I get the chance just to keep body and soul together, but I don’t get the chance every day.”

“Why did you have to leave Austria?”

“Some of us students protested against the Anschluss. We tried to organise resistance. It was stupid of course. We hadn’t a hope. The only result was that two of us were shot and the rest put in a concentration camp. They put me in for six months, but I escaped and crossed the mountains into Italy.”

“It all sounds rather horrible,” said Mary.

It was a lame and inadequate thing to say, but it was all she could think of. He gave her an ironical smile.

“I’m not the only one, you know. There are thousands and thousands of us in the world now. Anyhow I’m free.”

“But what are your plans for the future?”

A look of despair crossed his face and he was about to answer. But he made an impatient gesture and laughed.

“Don’t let me think of that now. Let me enjoy this priceless moment. Nothing has ever happened to me like this in all my life. I want to enjoy it so that whatever comes to me later it will be a recollection that I can always treasure.”

Mary looked at him strangely and it seemed to her that she could hear the beating of her heart. It had been almost a joke, what she had said to Rowley, the reverie of an idle day that, when the moment came, she knew she would shrink from. Had the moment come now? She felt queerly reckless. She drank very little as a rule and the strong red wine she had been drinking to keep him company had gone to her head. There was something mysteriously disturbing in thus sitting in that vast room with its memories of long ago opposite this young man with the tragic face. It was long past midnight. The air that came in through the open windows was warm and scented. Mary felt a sort of languor running through her excitement; her heart seemed to melt in her bosom and at the same time the blood seemed to race madly through her veins. She rose abruptly from the table.

“Now I will show you the garden and then you must go.”

Access to it was most convenient from the great room in which were the frescoes, and thither she led him. On the way through he paused to look at a handsome cassone that stood against the wall; then he caught sight of the gramophone.

“How strange that looks in these surroundings!”

“I sometimes put it on when I’m sitting in the garden by myself.”

“May I put it on now?”

“If you like.”

He turned the switch. By chance the record was that of a Strauss waltz. He gave a little cry of delight.

“Vienna. It’s one of our dear Viennese waltzes.”

He looked at her with shining eyes. His face was transfigured. She had an intuition of what he wanted to ask her, and saw at the same time that he was too timid to speak. She smiled.

“Can you dance?”

“Oh, yes; I can do that. I dance better than I play.”

“Let me see.”

He put his arm round her and in that sumptuous, empty room, to the dead of night, they waltzed to the old-fashioned charming tune of the Viennese conductor. Then she took his hand and led him out into the garden. By the garish light of day it had sometimes a look that was a trifle forlorn, like a woman much loved who has lost her loveliness; but now under the full moon, with its trimmed hedges and ancient trees, with its grotto and its lawns, it was thrilling and secret. The centuries fell away and wandering there you felt yourself the inhabitant of a fresher, younger world in which instinct was more reckless and consequences less material. The light summer air was scented with the white flowers of night.

They walked silently, hand-in-hand.

“It’s so beautiful,” he murmured at last, “it’s almost unbearable.” He quoted that celebrated line of Goethe’s in which Faust, satisfied at length, begs the fleeting moment to stay. “You must be very happy here.”

“Very,” she smiled.

“I’m glad. You’re kind and good and generous. You deserve happiness. I should like to think that you have everything in the world you desire.”

She chuckled.

“At all events I have everything I have any right to hope for.”

He sighed.

“I should like to die this night. Nothing so wonderful will ever happen to me again. I shall think of it all my life. I shall always have this evening to remember, the glimpse of your beauty and the recollection of this lovely spot. I shall always think of you as a goddess in heaven and I shall pray to you as though you were the Madonna.”

He lifted her hand to his lips and with an awkward, touching little bow, kissed it. She gently touched his face. Suddenly he fell on his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. Then a great exaltation seized her. She took his head in her hands, raising him towards her, and kissed his eyes and his mouth. There was something solemn and mystical in the action. She had a feeling that was strange to her. Her heart was filled with loving kindness.

He rose to his feet and passionately clasped her in his arms. He was twenty-three. She was not a goddess to pray to, but a woman to possess.

They went back into the silent house.

CHAPTER V

It was dark in the room, but the windows were wide open and the moon shone in. Mary was sitting in a straight-backed antique chair and the youth sat at her feet leaning his head against her knees. He was smoking a cigarette and in the darkness the glow shone red. In answer to her questioning he told her that his father had been head of the police in one of the smaller towns of Austria during the Dollfuss Government and he had put down with severity the various agitations which disturbed the peace during those troubled times. When Schuschnigg became head of the State after the assassination of the little peasant Chancellor, his firmness and determined attitude had maintained him in his post. He favoured the restoration of the Archduke Otto because he thought that this was the only way to prevent Austria, which he loved with ardent patriotism, from being absorbed by Germany. During the three years that followed he aroused the bitter enmity of the Austrian Nazis by the stern measures he took to curb their treasonable activities. On that fatal day when the German troops marched into the defenceless little country he shot himself through the heart. The young Karl, his boy, was then finishing his education. He had specialised in the history of art, but was going to be a schoolmaster. At the moment nothing could be done and with rage in his heart he listened among the crowd to the speech Hitler made at Linz from the balcony of the Landhaus when he entered the town in triumph. He heard the Austrians shout themselves hoarse with joy as they acclaimed their conqueror. But this enthusiasm was soon followed by disillusion, and when some of the bolder spirits gathered together to form a secret association to fight the alien rule by every means in their power they found many adherents. Karl was among them. They held meetings which they were convinced were private; they conspired in an ineffective way; they were no more than boys any of them, and they never dreamt that every move they made, every word they said, was reported at the headquarters of the secret police. One day they were all arrested. Two were shot as a warning to the rest, and the others were sent to a concentration camp. Karl escaped after three months and by good luck was able to get over the frontier into the Italian Tyrol. He had no passport nor papers of any kind, for these had been taken from him in the concentration camp, and he lived in terror of being arrested and either put in prison as a vagabond or deported back to the Reich where a harsh punishment awaited him.

“If I’d only had enough money to buy a revolver I’d have shot myself as my father did.”

He took her hand and placed it on his chest.

“There, between the fourth and fifth ribs. Just where your fingers are.”

“Don’t say such things,” said Mary, with a shudder, snatching her hand away.

He gave a mirthless laugh.

“You don’t know how often I’ve looked at the Arno and wondered when the time would come when nothing was left to me but to throw myself in.”

Mary sighed deeply. His fate seemed so cruel that any words she might have found to console him could only have been futile. He pressed her hand.

“Don’t sigh,” he said tenderly. “I regret nothing any more. It’s all been worth it for this wonderful night.”

They ceased to speak. Mary thought of his miserable story. There was no way out. What could she do? Give him money? That would help him for a little while perhaps, but that was all; he was a romantic creature, his high-flown, extravagant language was that of a boy who knew more of books than, for all his terrible experiences, of life, and it was quite possible that he would refuse to take anything from her. On a sudden a cock crew. The sound broke the silence of the night so shrilly that she was startled. She took her hand away from his.

“You must go now, my dear,” she said.

“Not yet,” he cried. “Not yet, my love.”

“The dawn will break soon.”

“Not for a long time yet.” He raised himself to his knees and threw his arms round her. “I adore you.”

She disengaged herself.

“No, really you must go. It’s so late. Please.”

She felt rather than saw the sweet smile that broke on his lips. He scrambled to his feet. He looked for his coat and shoes and she switched on a light. When he was once more dressed he took her in his arms again.

“My lovely one,” he whispered. “You’ve made me so happy.”

“I’m glad.”

“You’ve given me something to live for. Now I have you I have everything. Let the future look after itself. Life’s not so bad; something will turn up.”

“You’ll never forget?”

“Never.”

She lifted her lips to his.

“Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye till when?” he murmured passionately.

She freed herself again.

“Good-bye for ever, my dear. I’m leaving here very soon — in three or four days, I expect.” It seemed difficult to say what she had to say. “We can’t see one another any more. You see, I’m not free.”

“Are you married? They told me you were a widow.”

It would have been easy to lie. She did not know what prevented her. She hedged.

“What did you think I meant when I said I wasn’t free? I tell you it’s impossible we should ever meet again. You don’t want to ruin my life, do you?”

“But I must see you again. Once more, only once more. Or else I shall die.”

“My dear, don’t be unreasonable. I tell you it’s impossible. When we part now we part for ever.”

“But I love you. Don’t you love me?”

She hesitated a moment. She did not want to be unkind, but thought it necessary at that moment to tell the plain truth. She shook her head and smiled a little.

“No.”

He stared at her as if he didn’t understand.

“Then why did you take me?”

“You were lonely and miserable. I wanted to give you a few moments’ happiness.”

“Oh, how cruel! How monstrously cruel!”

Her voice broke.

“Don’t say that. I didn’t mean to be cruel. My heart was full of tenderness and pity.”

“I never asked for your pity. Why didn’t you leave me alone? You have shown me heaven and now you want to thrust me back to earth. No. No. No.”

He seemed to grow in stature as he flung the words at her. There was something tragic in his indignation. She was vaguely impressed. It had never occurred to her that he would take it like that.

“Perhaps I’ve been very stupid,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

There was no love in his eyes now, but cold, sullen anger. His white face had gone whiter still and it was like a death mask. It made her uneasy. She knew now what a fool she’d been. The servants slept far away and if she screamed they would not hear her. Idiot, idiot that she was! The only thing was to keep her head and not show him that she was frightened.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she faltered. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. If there’s anything I can do to make up I’ll only be too glad to do it.”

He frowned darkly.

“What are you doing now? Are you offering me money? I don’t want your money. How much money have you got here?”

She took her bag which was on the dressing-table, and as she put her hand in felt the revolver. It gave her a start. She had never fired one in her life. Oh, it was nonsense to suppose it would come to that. But thank God she had it. Dear Edgar, he hadn’t been such an old donkey after all. The inconsequent thought flashed through her mind that it was not with the idea of her ever finding herself in such a situation that he had forced it on her. Even at that moment the idea amused her and she regained her self-possession.

“I’ve got two or three thousand lire. It would be enough to get you into Switzerland. You’d be safer there. Believe me, I shan’t miss it.”

“Of course you won’t miss it. You’re rich, aren’t you? You’re rich enough to pay for the pleasure of a night’s fun. D’you always have to pay for your lovers? If I wanted money d’you think I’d be satisfied with a few lire? I should take the pearls you wore, and the bracelets you had on your arm.”

“You can have them, too, if you want them. They mean nothing to me. They’re on the dressing-table. Take them.”

“You vile woman. Are you so vile that you think any man can be bought off at a price? You fool, if money had meant so much to me don’t you think I could have made terms with the Nazis? I didn’t need to be an outcast. I didn’t need to starve.”

“My God, why can’t I make you understand? I meant to do you a kindness, you seem to think I’ve done you harm. I want to make up for the harm. If I’ve offended you, if I’ve hurt you, I ask your forgiveness. I only wanted your good.”

“You lie. An idle, sensual, worthless woman. What good have you ever done in your life, I wonder? You go about seeking excitement, new experiences, anything to cheat your boredom, and you don’t care what injury you cause to others. But this time you’ve made a mistake. It’s a risk to take strange men into one’s house. I took you for a goddess and you’re just a whore. It would be a good thing, maybe, if I strangled you to prevent you from hurting others as you’ve hurt me. I could, you know. Who would ever suspect me? Who saw me come into this house?”

He took a step towards her. She was seized with panic. He looked sinister and menacing. His gaunt face was distorted with hatred and those dark deep-set eyes flashed. She made an effort at self-control. She was still holding the bag in her hand; she snatched the revolver and pointed it at him.

“If you don’t go at once I shall fire!” she cried.

“Fire, then.”

He took another step towards her.

“If you come an inch nearer I shall shoot.”

“Shoot. Do you think life means anything to me? You will be robbing me of an intolerable burden. Shoot. Shoot and I’ll forgive you everything. I love you!”

His face was transfigured. The sullen rage was wiped clean off it and his great black eyes shone with exaltation. He came towards her, his head thrown back, his arms outspread, offering his breast to her aim.

“You can say a thief broke into your room and you shot him dead. Quick, quick!”

She let the revolver fall from her hand and throwing herself into a chair hid her face and burst into a passion of tears. He looked at her for a moment.

“Hadn’t you the courage? Poor child. How stupid you are, how terribly stupid. You mustn’t play with men as you played with me. Come.”

He put his arms round her and tried to lift her to her feet. She did not know what he wanted and, still sobbing bitterly, clung to the chair. He hit her hand roughly, so that, crying out with the pain, she let go instinctively, with a swift gesture he picked her up, carried her across the room and roughly threw her down on the bed. He flung himself beside her, took her in his arms and covered her face with kisses. She tried to get away from him, but he would not let her go. He was strong, much stronger than he looked, and she was powerless in his firm grasp. At last she ceased to resist.

A few minutes later he got up. She was shattered. He stood at the side of the bed looking down at her.

“You asked me not to forget you. I shall forget, but you won’t.”

She did not stir. She glared at him with terrified eyes. He gave a little harsh laugh.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She said nothing. Unable to withstand the anger of his cruel stare, she closed her eyes. She heard him move stealthily about the darkened room. Suddenly she heard a report and then the sound of a fall. It brought her to her feet with a shriek of dismay.

“God, what have you done?”

He was lying in front of the window, with the moonlight pouring down on him. She flung herself down on her knees beside him and called him by his name.

“Karl, Karl, what have you done?”

She took him by the hand and when she dropped it, it fell with a lifeless thud on the floor. She put her hand on his face and on his heart. He was dead. She fell back on her heels and stared at the body with terror. Her mind went blank. She did not know what to do. Her head swam and she was afraid she was going to faint.

Suddenly she started, for she had heard a pattering in the passage, the patter of bare feet; then it stopped and she knew that there was someone outside the door, listening. She stared at it in a panic. There was a soft little knock. She was trembling violently, and it was only by a violent effort that she choked down the scream that came to her lips. She sat there, on the floor, as still as the dead man by her side. The knock was repeated. She forced herself to speak.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Are you all right, Signora?” It was Nina’s voice. “I thought I heard a bang.”

Mary, clenching her hands, dug her nails into her palms in order to force herself to speak naturally.

“You must have been dreaming. I heard nothing. Go to bed.”

“Very well, Signora.”

There was a moment’s pause, and then she heard the bare feet pattering away again. As though she could follow the sound with her eyes, Mary, turning her head, followed it down the passage. She had spoken instinctively to give herself time to gather her wits together. She sighed deeply. But something had to be done. She leant over to look once more at the Austrian. She shuddered. Getting on to her feet again, she put her hands under the dead man’s arms and tried to drag him out of the window. She hardly knew what she was doing; it was some blind impulse that led her to want somehow to get him out of the room. But the body was heavy. She gave a gasp of anguish; she felt as weak as a rat. Now she couldn’t think what to do. Suddenly it occurred to her that it had been madness to send Nina away. How could she explain that, with that man lying dead in the room, she had said there was nothing the matter? Why had she said that she had heard no sound when he had shot himself within those four walls? A confused rush of all the terrible difficulties of her position swirled in her head like a whirlpool. And the shame. The dishonour. And what answer could she give when they asked her why he had killed himself? The only thing she could do was to tell the truth; and the truth was vile. It was awful to be alone there without anyone to help her and tell her what to do. In her distraction she felt she must see someone. Help, help, she must have help. Rowley. He was the only person she could think of. She was sure he would come if she asked him. He liked her, he said he loved her, and, bad lot as he was, he was a good sort; at all events he’d give her advice. But it was so late. How could she expect to get hold of him like that, in the middle of the night? But she couldn’t wait till daybreak, nothing would be any good unless it were done at once.

There was a phone by her bed. She knew the number because Edgar had stayed at the same hotel and she had often called him. She dialled it. At first there was no reply and then an Italian voice answered. Presumably it was a night porter whom she had roused out of a stolen nap. She asked to be put through to Rowley’s room. She could hear the bell ringing, but there was no answer. For a moment she was terrified, thinking that he was out; he might have gone somewhere after he left her, to gamble or, being what he was, he might have found some woman and gone home with her. She gave a sigh of relief when she heard a cross, sleepy voice.

“Yes. What is it?”

“Rowley. It’s me. Mary. I’m in frightful trouble.”

She suddenly felt that he was wide awake. He gave a little chuckle.

“Late to get into trouble, isn’t it? What’s it all about?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s serious. I want you to come here.”

“When?”

“Now. At once. As soon as you can. For God’s sake.”

He heard the quaver in her voice.

“Of course I’ll come. Don’t worry.”

What a comfort those two words were. She put down the receiver. She tried to think how long he’d be. It was more than three miles, much of it uphill, from the hotel to her villa. At that hour he wouldn’t be likely to get a taxi; if he had to walk it would take him nearly an hour. In an hour it would be dawn. She could not wait in the room. It was horrible. She changed quickly from the wrap she was wearing into a dress. She turned out the light, unlocked the door, very cautiously in order not to make a sound, and slipped into the passage; she opened the front door and walked down the monumental stairway that led to the drive, then along the drive, keeping in the shade of the trees that lined it — for the moon, which before had filled her with such rapture, now, by the light it gave, terrified her — till she came to the gates. Here she stood. She was sick at heart when she thought of the interminable time she must still wait. But suddenly she heard footsteps, and panic-stricken she cowered back into the shadows. It was someone coming up the steep flight of steps which led from the bottom of the hill to the villa and which till the road had been made was its only means of access. Whoever it was, was coming to the villa and seemed to hurry. A man came out of the darkness and she saw it was Rowley. Her relief was overwhelming.

“Thank God, you’ve come. How did you get here so quickly?”

“The night porter was asleep, so I borrowed his bike. I’ve hidden it at the bottom. I thought I’d get here more quickly by the steps.”

“Come.”

He peered into her face.

“I say, what’s the matter? You look like hell.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t tell him. She seized his arm and walked quickly back to the house.

“Be as quiet as you can,” she whispered when they got inside. “Don’t speak.”

She led him to her room. She opened the door and he followed her in. She closed and locked it. For a moment she could not bring herself to turn on the light, but there was no help for it. She touched the switch. A great chandelier hung from the ceiling and at once the room was brilliantly alight. Rowley gave a violent start when his eyes fell on the body of a man lying on the floor near one of the two big windows.

“My God!” he cried. He turned and stared at her. “What does it mean?”

“He’s dead.”

“It looks damned well like it.”

He knelt and pulled down one of the man’s eyelids, then, as Mary had done, put his hand on his heart.

“He’s dead all right.” The revolver was still clasped in the man’s hand. “He killed himself.”

“Did you think I’d killed him?”

“Where are the servants? Have you sent for the police?”

“No,” she gasped.

“But you must. He can’t be left there. You must do something.” Mechanically, without thinking what he was doing, he loosened the revolver from the man’s hand. He looked at it.

“That looks damned like the gun you showed me in the car.”

“It is.”

He stared at her. He couldn’t understand. How could he understand? The situation was incomprehensible.

“Why did he shoot himself?”

“For God’s sake don’t ask me questions.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“No.”

She was pale and trembling. She looked as if she were going to faint.

“You’d better pull yourself together, Mary. No good getting jittery, you know. Wait a minute, I’ll go along to the dining-room and get you some brandy. Where is it?”

He started to go, but with a cry she stopped him.

“Don’t leave me. I’m afraid to stop here by myself.”

“Come along, then,” he said abruptly.

He put his arm round her shoulders to support her and led her from the room. The candles were still burning in the dining-room and the first thing he saw when he entered was what remained of the supper they had eaten, the two plates, the two glasses, the bottle of wine and the frying-pan in which Mary had cooked eggs and bacon. Rowley walked up to the table. By the side of the chair in which Karl had sat was his shabby felt hat. Rowley picked it up, looked at it and then turned to look at Mary. She could not meet his eyes.

“It wasn’t true when I said I didn’t know him.”

“That, I must say, is almost painfully obvious.”

“For God’s sake don’t talk like that, Rowley. I’m so terribly unhappy.”

“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “Who is he, then?”

“The violinist. At the restaurant. The man who came round with the plate. Don’t you remember?”

“I thought his face was vaguely familiar. He was dressed like a Neapolitan fisherman, wasn’t he? That’s why I didn’t recognise him. And of course he looks different now. How did he happen to be here?”

Mary hesitated.

“I met him just as I was coming home. He was on the terrace half-way up the road. He talked to me. He seemed so lonely. He looked terribly unhappy.”

Rowley looked down at his feet. He was embarrassed. Mary was the last woman in the world he would have expected to do what he could not but suspect that she had done.

“Mary dear, you know I’d do anything in the world for you. I want to help you.”

“He was hungry. I gave him something to eat.”

Rowley frowned.

“And after you’d given him a snack he just went and shot himself with your revolver. Is that the idea?”

Mary began to cry.

“Here, have a drink of wine. You can cry later.”

She shook her head.

“No, I’m all right. I won’t cry. I know now it was madness, but it seemed different then. I suppose for a minute I was crazy. You know what I told you in the car, just before you got out.”

He suddenly understood what she meant.

“I thought it was a lot of romantic tripe. I never guessed you could be mad enough to do such a damn-fool thing. Why did he kill himself?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He reflected a minute and then began to gather the plates and glasses together and put them on the tray.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Don’t you think it’s just as well to leave no trace that you had a gentleman in to supper? Where’s the kitchen?”

“Through that door and down a flight of stairs.”

He took the tray out. When he came back Mary was sitting at the table with her head in her hands.

“It’s lucky I went down; you’d left all the lights on. You’re evidently not used to covering up your tracks. Your servants hadn’t washed up after their dinner. I just put the things with the rest. The chances are they won’t notice. Now we must send for the police.”

She almost screamed.

“Rowley!”

“Listen to me, dear. You’ve got to keep your head. I’ve been thinking a lot and I’ll tell you what I suggest. You must say that you were asleep and you were awakened by a man, obviously a burglar, coming into your room. You put on the light and snatched up the gun, which was on the bed-table. There was a struggle and the gun went off. If you shot him or if he shot himself doesn’t matter. It’s probable enough that when he found himself cornered and was afraid your screams would bring along the servants he shot himself.”

“Who’s going to believe a story like that? It’s incredible.”

“Anyhow it’s more credible than the truth. If you stick to it no one can prove it’s a lie.”

“Nina heard the shot. She came along to my room and asked if anything was the matter. I said no. She’ll tell them that, when the police question her. How am I going to explain then? The story will fall to pieces. Why should I have told her nothing was the matter when a man was lying dead in my room? It’s hopeless.”

“You can’t bring yourself to tell me the truth?”

“It’s so disgraceful. And yet — at the time — I thought I was doing something rather beautiful.”

She said no more and he stared at her, half understanding, but still puzzled. She gave a deep sigh.

“Oh, yes, let’s send for the police and get it over with. It means ruin. Well, I suppose I’ve deserved it. I shall never be able to look anyone in the face again. The newspapers. And Edgar. That’s the end of that.” Then she said a surprising thing. “After all, he wasn’t a thief. I did him harm enough without casting a slur like that on the poor boy. I’m to blame for everything and I must take what’s coming to me.”

Rowley looked at her intently.

“Yes, it means ruin, you’re right there, and a hell of a scandal. You’re in for an awful time, dear, and if it comes out nobody can help you. Are you willing to take a risk? I warn you, it’s a great risk and if it doesn’t come off it’ll make it all the worse for you.”

“I’ll take any risk.”

“Why can’t we get the body away from here? Who could suspect then that his death had anything to do with you?”

“How can we? It’s impossible.”

“No, it isn’t. If you’ll help me we can get him into the car. You know all these hills round here. We can surely find a place to put him where he won’t be found for months.”

“But he’ll be missed. They’ll look for him.”

“Why should they? Who’s going to bother about an Italian fiddler? He might have just done a bolt because he couldn’t pay his rent, or run away with somebody else’s wife.”

“He wasn’t Italian. He was an Austrian refugee.”

“Well, that’s all the better. Then you can bet your boots no one’s going to make a song and dance about him.”

“It’s an awful thing to have to do, Rowley. And what about you? Aren’t you taking a fearful risk?”

“It’s the only thing to do, my dear, and as far as I’m concerned you needn’t worry about that. To tell you the truth I rather like taking chances. I’m for getting all the thrills out of life one can.”

It heartened Mary to hear him speak so lightly. Her anguish seemed not quite so intolerable. There was just a hope that they might be able to do what he proposed. But one more doubt assailed her.

“It’ll be light soon. The peasants will be setting out to their work as soon as it’s dawn.”

He glanced at his watch.

“When does it get light? Not before five. We’ve got an hour. If we look sharp we can just manage it.”

She sighed deeply.

“I put myself in your hands. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Come on, then. And keep a stiff upper lip for Christ’s sake.”

Rowley picked up the dead man’s hat and they went back into the room in which he was lying.

“Catch hold of the legs,” said Rowley. “I’ll take him under the arms.”

They lifted him up and carried him into the hall and out of the front door. With difficulty, Rowley walking backwards, they got him down the steps. Then they put the body down. It seemed fearfully heavy.

“Can you bring the car up here?” asked Rowley.

“Yes, but there’s no place to turn. I shall have to back down,” she answered doubtfully.

“I’ll manage that.”

She walked down to the end of the narrow drive and brought the car up. Meanwhile Rowley went back into the house. There was blood on the marble floor — not much, fortunately, because the man had shot himself through the breast and the hæmorrhage was internal.

He went into the bathroom, took a towel off the rack and soaked it in water. He mopped up the bloodstains. The floor was of a deep red marble and he was pretty sure that on a cursory glance, the sort of glance a maid would give who was sweeping, nothing would be apparent. He took the wet, blood-stained towel in his hand and once more went out. Mary was waiting by the car. She did not ask him what he had been doing.

Rowley opened the rear door and again put his arms under the dead man’s. He hoisted him up and Mary, seeing he was having difficulty, lifted the feet. They did not speak. They laid the body on the floor and Rowley wrapped the towel round the dead man’s middle in case the jolting caused a flow of blood. He jammed the soft hat on his head. Rowley got into the driving seat and backed down to the gates. Here there was plenty of room to turn.

“Shall I drive?”

“Yes. Turn to the right at the bottom of the hill.”

“Let’s get off the main road as soon as we can.”

“About four or five miles along there’s a road that leads up to a village on the top of a hill. I think I remember a wood on one side.”

When they came to the highway Rowley put on speed.

“You’re driving awfully fast,” said Mary.

“We haven’t got much time to waste, my sweet,” he said acidly.

“I’m so terribly scared.”

“That’s going to do a fat lot of good.”

His manner was bitter and she was silent. The moon had set and it was very dark. Mary could not see the speedometer; she had a notion they must be doing hard on eighty. She sat with her hands clenched. It seemed an awful thing that they were doing, a dangerous thing, and yet it was her only chance. Her heart was beating painfully. She kept on repeating to herself:

“What a fool I’ve been!”

“We must have gone about five miles now. We haven’t missed the turning, have we?”

“No, but we ought to be getting to it soon. Slow down a little.”

They went on. Mary looked anxiously for the narrow road that led winding up to the hill town. She had been along it two or three times, tempted by the sight of it in the distance, for it looked like one of those hill towns in the background of an old Florentine picture, one of those pictures of a scene from the Gospels which the painter has set in the lovely landscape of his native Tuscany.

“There it is!” she cried suddenly.

But Rowley had already passed it; he put on his brakes, and then backed till he could turn. They slowly ascended the hill. They peered into the darkness on each side. Suddenly Mary touched Rowley’s arm. She pointed to the left. He stopped. There was a coppice on that side of what looked like acacias, and the ground was thick with undergrowth. It seemed to slope sharply down. He put out the lights.

“I’ll just get out and have a scout round. It looks all right.”

He stepped out and plunged into the thicket. In the deathly silence that surrounded them the noise he made scrambling through the undergrowth seemed fearfully loud. In two or three minutes he appeared once more.

“I think it’ll do.” He talked in whispers, although there could not have been a soul within earshot. “Help me to get him out. I shall have to carry him if I can. You’d never be able to get down. You’d be scratched to pieces.”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s not you I’m thinking about,” he answered roughly. “How are you going to explain to your servants that your stockings are torn and your shoes in a devil of a mess? I think I can manage.”

She got out of the car and they opened the rear door. They were just about to lift the body out when they saw a light above them. It was a car coming down the hill.

“Oh, my God, we’re caught!” she cried. “Run, Rowley, you must keep out of this.”

“Don’t talk such rot.”

“I won’t get you into trouble,” she cried desperately.

“Don’t be a damned fool. We shan’t get into trouble if you keep your head. We can bluff it out.”

“No, Rowley, for God’s sake. I’m done for.”

“Stop it. You’ve got to keep cool. Get into the back.”

“He’s there.”

“Shut up.”

He pushed her in and scrambled in after her. The lights of the oncoming car were hidden by a turn in the road, but another turn must bring it in full view.

“Cuddle up to me. They’ll take us for lovers who’ve come to a quiet place to have a bit of nonsense. But keep still. Don’t move.”

The car came on. In two or three minutes it would be upon them and the road was so narrow that it would have to slow down to pass them. It could just scrape by. Rowley flung his arms round her and drew her closely to him. Under their feet was the huddled body of the dead man.

“I’m going to kiss you. Kiss me as if you mean it.”

The car was nearer now and it seemed to be swaying from side to side of the road. Then they heard the occupants singing at the tops of their voices.

“By God, I believe they’re drunk. I hope to God they see us. Christ, it would be bad luck if they hit us. Quick, now, kiss me.”

She put her lips to his and they appeared to kiss as though so absorbed in one another they were unconscious of the approaching car. It seemed to be full of people and they were shouting loud enough to wake the dead. Perhaps there had been a wedding at the village on the top of the hill and these were wedding guests who had been making merry till this late hour and now, much the worse for liquor, were returning to their own home in some other village. They appeared to be coming down the middle of the road and it looked as though they must infallibly crash into the other car. There was nothing to do. Suddenly there was a yell. The headlights had disclosed the stationary car. There was a great screeching of brakes and the oncoming car slackened down. It might be that the recognition of the danger he had just escaped somewhat sobered the driver, for he now drove at a snail’s pace. Then someone noticed that there were people in the darkened car and when they all saw that it was a couple linked together in a passionate embrace a great laugh arose; one man shouted out a ribald joke and two or three others made rude noises. Rowley held Mary tight in his arms; you would have thought that in an ecstasy of love they were unconscious of all else. One bright spirit conceived an idea: in a rich baritone he broke out into Verdi’s song from Rigoletto, “La Donna è mobile”, whereupon the rest, not knowing the words apparently, but anxious to join in, bellowed the tune after him. They passed the car very slowly; there was but an inch to spare.

“Throw your arms round my neck,” whispered Rowley, and as the other car came abreast of them, his lips still against Mary’s, he gaily waved his hand at the drunkards.

“Bravo! Bravo!” they shouted. “Buon divertimento.” And then, as they went by, the baritone began once more to chant: “La Donna è mobile”.... They staggered dangerously down the hill, still lustily singing, and when they were lost to view their shouting could still be heard in the distance.

Rowley released his hold on Mary and she sank back, exhausted, into the corner of the car.

“It’s a good thing for us all the world loves a lover,” said Rowley. “Now we’d better get on with the job.”

“Is it safe? If he were found just here...”

“If he’s found anywhere on this road they might think our being in the neighbourhood was fishy. But we might go a long way and not find a better place and we haven’t time to scour the country. They were drunk. There are hundreds of Fiats like this and what is there to connect us? Anyway, it would be obvious the man committed suicide. Get out of the car.”

“I’m not sure if I can stand.”

“Well, you’ll damned well have to help me out with him. After that you can sit around.”

He got out and pulled her after him. Suddenly, flopping down on the running board, she burst into a passion of hysterical tears. He swung his arm and gave her a sharp, stinging slap on the face; she was so startled that she sprang to her feet with a gasp and stopped crying as quickly as she had begun. She did not even cry out.

“Now help me.”

Without a word more they set about what they had to do and together got the body out. Rowley picked it up under the arms.

“Now put the legs over my other arm. He’s as heavy as hell. Try to pull those bushes aside so that I can get in without breaking them down.”

She did as he told her and he plunged heavily into the undergrowth. To her terrified ears the noise he made was so great that you would have thought it could be heard for miles. It seemed an interminable time that he was away. At last she saw him walking up the road.

“I thought I’d better not come out the same way as I went in.”

“Is it all right?” she asked anxiously.

“I think so. By God, I’m all in. I could do with a drink.” He gave her a look in which was the flicker of a smile. “Now you can cry if you want to.”

She did not answer and they got back into the car. He drove on.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I can’t turn here. Besides, it’s just as well to drive on a bit so that there shouldn’t be any trace of a car having stopped and turned here. Do you know if there’s a road further on that will get us back on the main road?”

“I’m sure there isn’t. The road just leads up to the village.”

“All right. We’ll go on a bit and turn where we can.”

They drove for a while in silence.

“The towel is still in the car.”

“I’ll take that. I’ll chuck it away somewhere.”

“It’s got the Leonards’ initials on it.”

“Don’t bother about that. I’ll manage. If I can do nothing else I’ll tie it round a stone and chuck it into the Arno on my way home.”

After they had gone another couple of miles they came to a place where there was a bit of flat ground by the side of the road and here Rowley made up his mind to turn.

“Christ!” he cried, as he was about to do so. “The revolver.”

“What? It’s in my room.”

“I forgot all about it till now. If the man’s found and they don’t find the gun he killed himself with, it’ll start them guessing. We ought to have left it by his side.”

“What’s to be done?”

“Nothing. Trust to luck. It’s been with us so far. If the body’s found and no gun, the police will probably think that some boy had come upon the body by chance, sneaked the revolver and said nothing to anybody.”

They drove back as quickly as they had come. Now and then Rowley gave an anxious glance at the sky. It was night still, but the darkness had no longer quite the intensity it had had when they set out. It was not yet day, but you had a sensation that day was at hand. The Italian peasant goes to work early and Rowley wanted to get Mary back to the villa before anyone was stirring. At length they reached the bottom of the hill on which the villa stood and he stopped. Dawn was about to break.

“You’d better drive up by yourself. This is where I left my bike.”

He could just see the wan smile she gave him. He saw that she tried to speak. He patted her shoulder.

“That’s all right. Don’t bother. And look here, take a couple of sleeping tablets; it’s no good lying awake and grousing. You’ll feel better after a good sleep.”

“I feel as if I’d never sleep again.”

“I know. That’s why I say take something to make sure you do. I’ll come round sometime to-morrow.”

“I shall be in all day.”

“I thought you were lunching with the Atkinsons. I was asked to meet you.”

“I shall call up and say I’m not well enough.”

“No. You mustn’t do that. You must go, and you must act as though you hadn’t a care in the world. That’s only common prudence. Supposing by a remote chance suspicion fell on you, there must have been nothing in your behaviour to indicate a guilty conscience. See?”

“Yes.”

Mary got into the driver’s seat and waited a moment to see Rowley get his bicycle from where he had hidden it and ride away. Then she made her way up the hill. She left the car in the garage, which was just within the gates, and then walked along the drive. She crept noiselessly into the house. She went up to her room and at the door hesitated. She hated to go in and for a moment was seized with a superstitious fear that when she opened the door she would see Karl in his shabby black coat standing there before her. She was distraught with woe, but she couldn’t give way to it; she pulled herself together, but it was with a trembling hand that she turned the handle. She switched on the light quickly and gave a gasp of relief when she saw the room was empty. It looked exactly as it always did. She glanced at her bedside clock. It was not five. What fearful things had happened in so short a while! She would have given everything she had in the world to put time back and be once more the carefree woman she had been so few hours ago. Tears began to trickle down her face. She was terribly tired, her head was throbbing and confusedly she recollected, in one rush of memory as it were, everything happening simultaneously, all the incidents of that unhappy night. She undressed slowly. She didn’t want to get into that bed again and yet there was no help for it. She would have to stay in the villa at least a few days more; Rowley would tell her when it would be safe to go: if she announced her engagement to Edgar it would seem very reasonable that she should leave Florence a few weeks sooner than she had planned. She forgot if he had said when he would have to sail for India. It must be quickly. Once there she would be safe; once there she could forget.

But as she was getting into bed she remembered the supper things that Rowley had taken into the kitchen. Notwithstanding what he had said she was uneasy and felt she must see for herself that everything was in order. She slipped on her dressing-gown and went down into the dining-room and so to the kitchen. If by any chance one of the servants heard her she could say that she had awakened hungry and had gone down to see if she could find something to eat. The house seemed fearfully empty and the kitchen a great gloomy cavern. She found the bacon on the table and put it back in the larder. She threw the broken eggshells into a pail under the sink, washed the two glasses and the plates she and Karl had used, and put them in their proper places. She put the frying-pan on its hook. There was nothing now to excite suspicions and she crept back to the bedroom. She took a sleeping draught and turned out the light. She hoped the tablets would not take long to act, but she was utterly exhausted, and while she was saying to herself that if she didn’t sleep soon she would go mad, she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VI

When Mary opened her eyes she saw Nina standing by her side.

“What is it?” she asked sleepily.

“It’s very late, Signora. The Signora has to be in the Villa Bolognese at one and it’s twelve already.”

Suddenly Mary remembered and a pang of anguish pierced her heart. Wide awake now, she looked at the maid. She was as usual smiling and friendly. Mary gathered her wits together.

“I couldn’t get to sleep again after you woke me. I didn’t want to lie awake the rest of the night, so I took a couple of my little tablets.”

“I’m very sorry, Signora. I heard a sound and I thought I’d better come and see if anything was wrong.”

“What sort of a sound?”

“Well, like a shot. I remembered the revolver that the Signore had left with you, and I was frightened.”

“It must have been a car on the road. At night sound travels so far. Get me a cup of coffee and then I’ll have my bath. I shall have to hurry.”

As soon as Nina left the room Mary jumped up and went to the drawer in which she had hidden the revolver. For one moment she had been afraid that Nina had found it while she lay fast asleep and taken it away. Her husband Ciro could have told her at once that a chamber had been discharged. But the revolver was still there. While she waited for her coffee she reflected intently. She saw why Rowley had insisted that she should go to that luncheon party. There must be nothing in her behaviour that was not quite natural; for his sake now as well as for her own she must be careful. She felt infinitely grateful to him. He had kept cool, he had thought of everything; who would have thought that that idle waster had so much grit in him! What would have happened to her if he hadn’t kept his head when the drunken Italians in the car had come upon them at the most dangerous moment? She sighed. Perhaps he wasn’t a very useful member of society, but he was a good friend; no one could deny that.

When Mary had had a cup of coffee and her bath, when she sat at her dressing-table and arranged her face, she began to feel much more herself. It was astonishing to see that notwithstanding what she had gone through, she looked no different. All that terror, all those tears had left no trace. She looked alert and well. Her honey-coloured skin showed no sign of fatigue; her hair shone and her eyes were bright. She felt a certain excitement steal over her; it gave her a kick to look forward to that luncheon where she would have to give a performance of high spirits and careless gaiety which would lead them all to say when she left: Mary was in wonderful form to-day. She had forgotten to ask Rowley if he had accepted the invitation he had said he had got; she hoped he would be there, it would give her confidence.

At last she was ready to go. She took a last glance at herself in the mirror. Nina gave her a fond smile.

“The Signora is looking more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her.”

“You mustn’t flatter me so much, Nina.”

“But it’s true. A good sleep has done you good. You look like a girl.”

The Atkinsons were middle-aged Americans who owned a large and sumptuous villa which had once belonged to the Medici, and they had spent twenty years collecting the furniture, pictures and statues which made it one of the show places of Florence. They were hospitable and they gave large parties. When Mary was shown into the drawing-room, with its Renaissance cabinets, its Virgins by Desiderio da Settignano and Sansovino, and its Perugino and Filippino Lippi, most of the guests were already there. Two footmen in livery were walking about, one with a tray of cocktails and one with a tray of things to eat. The women were pretty in the summer dresses they had been to Paris to buy, and the men, in light suits, looked cool and easy. The tall windows were open on a formal garden of clipped box, with great stone vases of flowers symmetrically placed and weather-beaten statues of the Baroque period. On that warm day of early June there was an animation in the air which put everyone in a good humour. You had a sensation that no one there was affected by anxiety; everyone seemed to have plenty of money, everyone seemed ready to enjoy himself. It was impossible to believe that anywhere in the world there could be people who hadn’t enough to eat. On such a day it was very good to be alive.

Coming into the room Mary was acutely sensitive to the general spirit of cheerful goodwill that greeted her, but just that, that heedless pleasure in the moment, shocking her like the sudden furnace heat when you came out of the cool shade of a narrow Florentine street on to a sun-baked square, gave her a sharp, cruel pang of dismay. That poor boy was even now lying under the open sky on a hillside over the Arno with a bullet in his heart. But she caught sight of Rowley at the other end of the room, his eyes upon her, and she remembered what he had said. He was making his way towards her. Harold Atkinson, her host, was a fine, handsome, grey-haired man, plethoric and somewhat corpulent, with an eye for a pretty woman, and he was fond of flirting in a heavy, fatherly way with Mary. He was holding her hand now longer than was necessary. Rowley came up.

“I’ve just been telling this girl she’s as pretty as a picture,” said Atkinson, turning to him.

“You’re wasting your time, dear boy,” drawled Rowley, with his engaging smile. “You might as well pay compliments to the Statue of Liberty.”

“Turned you down flat, has she?”

“Flat.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“The fact is, Mr. Atkinson, that I don’t like boys,” said Mary, her eyes dancing. “My experience is that no man’s worth talking to till he’s fifty.”

“We must get together some time and go into this matter,” answered Atkinson. “I believe we’ve got a lot in common.”

He turned away to shake hands with a guest who had just arrived.

“You’re grand,” said Rowley in an undertone.

The approving look in his eyes encouraged her, but notwithstanding she could not help giving him a frightened, harassed glance.

“Don’t let up. Think of yourself as an actress playing a part.”

“I always told you I had no talent for the stage,” she answered, but with a smile.

“If you’re a woman you can act,” he retorted.

And that is what she did during the luncheon to which they soon sat down. On her right was her host, and she carried on with him a laughing flirtation, which amused and flattered him; and with her neighbour on the other side, who was an expert on Italian art, she talked of the Sienese painters. Society in Florence is not very large and several of the people were there who had been at the dinner the night before. Princess San Ferdinando, who had been her hostess, was on Atkinson’s right. This occasioned an incident which nearly robbed Mary of her composure. The old lady leant across the table to address Mary.

“I was just telling the Count about last night.” She turned to Atkinson. “I’d asked them to come and dine at Peppino’s to hear a man who’s got a marvellous voice and, would you believe it, he wasn’t there!”

“I’ve heard him,” said Atkinson. “Mrs. Atkinson wants me to pay for his training. She thinks he ought to sing in opera.”

“Instead they had the most awful fiddler. I talked to Peppino. He says he’s a German refugee and he only gave him a chance out of charity. He said he wouldn’t have him again. You remember him, Mary, don’t you? He was quite impossible.”

“He didn’t play very well.”

She wondered if her voice sounded as unnatural to the others as it did to herself.

“That’s putting it mildly,” said the Princess. “If I played the fiddle like that I’d shoot myself.”

Mary felt she must say something. She gave her shoulders a little shrug.

“It must be very difficult for people like that to find anything to do.”

“It’s a bad business,” said Atkinson. “Young chap, was he?”

“Yes, hardly more than a boy,” returned the Princess. “He had quite an interesting head, hadn’t he, Mary?”

“I didn’t pay very much attention to him,” she replied. “I suppose they have to dress them up in those absurd clothes.”

“I didn’t know he was a refugee. You know, now I feel rather badly about it. I suppose it’s because I made such a fuss that Peppino said he’d fire him. I wonder if I could get hold of him, I might give him two or three hundred lire to carry on with till he finds another job.”

They went on talking about him interminably. Mary shot a distressed glance at Rowley, but he was at the other end of the table and did not see her. She had to cope with the situation alone. At last, mercifully, the conversation changed. Mary felt exhausted. She continued to talk of one thing and another, to laugh at her neighbour’s jokes, to feign interest, to seem to enjoy herself; and all the time at the back of her mind, so vividly that it was like seeing a play on the stage, all the events of the previous night, from beginning to end, unfolded themselves before her tortured memory. She was thankful when she was at last able to get away.

“Thank you so much; it’s been a lovely party. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself more.”

Mrs. Atkinson, white-haired, kind, shrewd and with a dry humour, held her hand.

“Thank you, my dear. You’re so beautiful, you make any party a success; and Harold’s had a grand time. He’s a terrible old flirt.”

“He was very nice to me.”

“And so he should be. Is it true that we’re going to lose you soon?”

Mrs. Atkinson’s tone showed Mary that she was referring to Edgar. Perhaps the Princess had told her something.

“Who can tell?” she smiled.

“Well, I hope what I hear is true. You know, I look upon myself as a great judge of character. And you’re not only beautiful, you’re good and sweet and natural; I should like you to be very happy.”

Mary could not help the tears filling her eyes. She gave the kind lady a wan smile and quickly left.

CHAPTER VII

When she got home a telegram, just arrived, was waiting for her:

Flying back tomorrow. Edgar.

The garden was terraced and there was one place in it for which Mary had a great affection. It was a little strip of lawn, like a bowling alley, surrounded by clipped cypresses, and on one side they had been cut into an arcade in order to give a view, not of Florence, but of an olive-clad hill on the top of which was a village with old red roofs and the campanile of a church. The spot was cool and sequestered and here Mary, lying on a long chair, sought peace. It was a relief to be alone and not to have to pretend. She could surrender herself now to her anxious thoughts. After some time Nina brought her a cup of tea. Mary told her she was expecting Rowley.

“When he comes, bring some whisky and a syphon and the ice.”

“Very good, Signora.”

Nina was a young woman who liked to gossip, and she had now a piece of news that she wanted to impart. Agata, the cook, had brought it up from the near-by village where she had her own cottage. Some of her relations there had let a room to one of those refugees who swarmed in Italy, and now he had run off, without paying for his board and lodging, and they were poor people and couldn’t afford to lose the money. He’d never had anything but the clothes he stood up in, and the things he had left behind him wouldn’t fetch five lire. They’d let him owe money for three weeks because he was so simpatico, and they were sorry for him, but it was a dirty trick to bolt like that; it was a lesson and it just showed that you were never repaid for the kindnesses you did people.

“When did he go?” asked Mary.

“He went out yesterday evening to go and play the violin at Peppino’s — why, that was where the Signora dined last night; he said that when he came back he’d give Assunta money. But he never came back. She went down to Peppino’s and they told her they knew nothing about him. He didn’t give satisfaction and they said he needn’t come again. But he had some money. You see, he got his share of the plate; one lady put in a hundred lire, and...”

Mary interrupted. She didn’t want to hear any more.

“Find out from Agata how much he owed Assunta. I — I don’t like the idea of her suffering because she did someone a kindness. I will pay.”

“Oh, Signora, that would be such a help to them. You see, with both their sons doing their military service and earning nothing, it’s a job they have to keep going. They fed him, and food’s expensive these days. It’s us, the poor people, who have to suffer for making Italy into a great nation.”

“That’ll do. You can go now.”

That was the second time that day that she had had to listen to someone speaking of Karl. Mary was seized with terror. It looked as though that unhappy man, whom no one bothered about while he was alive, now that he was dead was in some uncanny way calling attention to himself. A remark of the Princess’s recalled itself. She had said that because she had been the cause of his losing his job she wanted to do something for him. She was a woman of her word and would seek him out; and she was an obstinate woman; if she could not find him she would move heaven and earth to discover what had become of him.

“I must get away from here. I’m frightened.”

If only Rowley would come! At the moment he seemed her only refuge. She had brought Edgar’s wire in her bag; she took it out and read it once more. That was a way of escape. She began to think intently.

At last she heard her name called.

“Mary.”

It was Rowley. He appeared at the end of the grass plot and slouched towards her with his hands in his pockets; there was no elegance in his gait, but a lounging ease which in such a disreputable fellow would to some have seemed out of place, but which just then was strangely reassuring to Mary. He was entirely unruffled.

“Nina said I’d find you here. She’s bringing along a drink that I badly want. Jove, it’s hot walking up that hill of yours.” He gave her a scrutinising glance. “What’s the matter? You don’t look any too good.”

“Wait till Nina has brought the drinks.”

He sat down and lit a cigarette. When Nina came he chaffed her gaily.

“Now, Nina, what about all these babies that the Duce says every Italian woman should provide the State with? It doesn’t look to me as though you were doing your duty.”

“Mamma mia, it’s hard enough to feed oneself these days. How am I going to feed half a dozen brats?”

But when she was gone he turned to Mary.

“What is it?”

She told him of the incident at luncheon when the Princess had spoken of Karl and what Nina had just told her. He listened attentively.

“But, my dear, there’s nothing in all that to get the wind up about. Jittery, that’s what’s the matter with you. He thought he’d got a permanent job and got fired; he owed his landlady money. He’d promised to pay her and hadn’t got enough. Supposing he’s found? He shot himself and he had plenty of motives.”

What Rowley said certainly sounded reasonable. Mary smiled and sighed.

“I suppose you’re right. I’ve got the jitters. What should I do without you, Rowley?”

“I can’t think,” he chuckled.

“If we’d been caught last night — what would have happened to us?”

“We should have got it in the neck, dear heart.”

Mary gasped.

“You don’t mean that we should have — gone to prison?”

He looked at her with smiling ironical eyes.

“It would have wanted a hell of a lot of explanation, you know. Two English people careering round the country with a corpse. I don’t quite see how we could have proved he shot himself. Either you or I might have shot him.”

“Why should you?”

“A dozen reasons would occur to the fertile imagination of a cop. We went off together last night from Peppino’s. People tell me that I haven’t got the best reputation possible where women are concerned. You’re an almost perfect specimen of the genus peach. How could we have proved that there wasn’t something between us? I might have found him in your room and killed him out of jealousy; he might have caught us in compromising circumstances, and I might have killed him to save your reputation. People do these damn-fool things.”

“You were taking a most awful risk.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I was so upset last night I didn’t even thank you. It was frightful of me. But I am grateful, Rowley. I owe everything to you. Except for you I think I should have killed myself. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that you should do so much for me.”

He looked at her steadily for a moment and then gave a good-natured, casual smile.

“My dear, I’d have done it for any pal. I’m not quite sure if I wouldn’t even have done it for a total stranger. You know, I like risk. I’m not really a law-abiding person and I got a grand thrill out of it. Once at Monte I had a thousand pounds on the turn of a card, that was a thrill too; but nothing to this. By the way, where’s the gun?”

“I have it in my bag. I dared not leave it in the house when I went out to lunch. I was afraid Nina would find it.”

He stretched out his hand.

“Let me have your bag.”

She did not know why he asked for it, but passed it over to him. He opened it, took out the revolver and put it in his pocket.

“Why are you doing that?”

He leaned back lazily in his chair.

“I take it that sooner or later the body will be found. I’ve been thinking it over and I believe it’s better that the gun should be found with it.”

Mary smothered a cry of fright.

“You’re not going back to that place?”

“Why not? It’s a lovely afternoon and I want exercise badly. I rented a bike. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t ride along the high road and then have an impulse to take a side one with the idea of having a look at that picturesque village on the top of the hill.”

“Someone might see you go into the wood.”

“I shall certainly take the elementary precaution of looking about to see that no one is around.”

He got up.

“You’re not going now?”

“I think so. As a matter of fact it’s not much of a wood; I didn’t tell you last night, because I thought you’d get more scared than ever, and there was no time to look further. I don’t think you can expect that he won’t be found pretty soon.”

“I shall live agonies till I know you’re safely back again.”

“Will you?” He smiled. “I’ll look in on my way home. I dare say I shall be ready for another drink.”

“Oh, Rowley!”

“Don’t be afraid. The devil’s a sportsman and he looks after his own.”

He went off. To wait for him now was a torture such that beside it all she had gone through before seemed trifling. It was no good telling herself that compared with the risk which they had taken last night this was nothing; that, at the moment at all events, had seemed inevitable, but this was needless; he was putting his head in the lion’s mouth for the fun of the thing, because he was getting pleasure out of exposing himself to danger. She grew on a sudden angry with him. He had no right to do such stupid things; she should have prevented him. But the fact was that when he was there taking it all in that breezy, humorous way, it was almost impossible to see things in their proper light. She had a feeling, moreover, that when he had made up his mind to do a thing it would need a great deal to dissuade him. A strange man. Who would have guessed that his flippant manner concealed so much determination?

“Of course he’s been hopelessly spoilt,” she said irritably.

At last he returned. She heaved a great sigh of relief. You had only to look at him, strolling jauntily towards her, a mocking smile on his lips, to know that everything had gone well. He threw himself in a chair and helped himself to a whisky and soda.

“That’s a good job jobbed. There wasn’t a soul in sight. You know, it looks as though chance went out of its way sometimes to give the criminal a helping hand. There was a little bit of a trickle of water just at the right place. I suppose there’s a spring there and that’s why there’s all that undergrowth. I dropped the gun in it. In a few days it ought to be in a nice state.”

She wanted to ask him about the body, but could not bring herself to speak the words. They sat for a while in silence while he indolently smoked and with enjoyment sipped his cold drink.

“I should like to tell you exactly what happened last night,” she said at last.

“You need not. I can guess the essentials and the rest doesn’t much matter, does it?”

“But I want to. I want you to know the worst of me. I don’t really know why that poor boy killed himself. I’m tortured with remorse.”

He listened without a word, his eyes, cool and shrewd, fixed on her, while she told him word for word all that had passed between her first sight of Karl, when he had stepped out of the shadow of the cypress, till the dreadful moment when the sound of the shot had startled her out of bed. Some of it was very difficult to tell, but with those steady grey eyes upon her she had an inkling that he would at once know if she concealed any part of the truth; it relieved her also to tell the story in all its shame. When she finished he leaned back in his chair and seemed intent on the smoke rings he was making with his cigarette.

“I think I can tell you why he killed himself,” he said at last. “He was homeless, outcast, penniless and half-starved. He hadn’t got much to live for, had he? And then you came. I don’t suppose he’d ever seen such a beautiful woman in his life. You gave him something that in his wildest dream he could never have dreamt of. Suddenly the whole world was changed because you loved him. How could you expect him to guess that it wasn’t love that had made you give yourself to him? You told him it was only pity. Mary, my dear, men are vain, especially very young men: did you never know that? It was an intolerable humiliation. No wonder he nearly killed you. You’d raised him to the stars and then you flung him back to the gutter. He was like a prisoner whose jailers lead him to the door of his prison and just as he is about to step out to freedom, slam it in his face. Wasn’t that enough to decide him that life wasn’t worth living?”

“If that’s true I can never forgive myself.”

“I think it’s true, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth. You see, he was unbalanced by all he’d gone through before, perhaps he wasn’t quite sane; it may be that there was something else: it may be that you had given him a few moments of such ecstasy that he thought life after that could have nothing better to offer and so was willing to call it a day. You know, most of us have had moments in our lives when our happiness was so complete that we’ve said to ourselves: ‘O God, if I could only die now!’ Well, he’d had that moment and that feeling, and he died.”

Mary looked at Rowley with amazement. Was it really he, the mocking, happy-go-lucky, reckless tough, who said such things! This was a Rowley that she had never known existed.

“Why do you say that to me?”

“Well, partly because I want you not to take it all too much to heart. There’s nothing you can do about it now. The only thing is to forget, and perhaps what I’ve just told you will enable you to forget without misgiving.” He gave her the derisive smile which she knew so well. “And partly because I’ve had several drinks and perhaps I’m a little tight.”

She did not answer. She handed him the telegram she had received from Edgar. He read it.

“Are you going to marry him?”

“I want to get away from here. I hate this house now. When I go into my room it’s all I can do not to scream with horror.”

“And India’s a long way off.”

“He has strength and character. He loves me. You see, Rowley, I’ve been taken down a peg or two. I want someone to take care of me. I want someone I can look up to.”

“Well, that settles that, doesn’t it?”

She was not quite sure what he meant. She gave him a glance, but he was looking at her with smiling eyes which betrayed nothing.

She gave a faint sigh.

“But of course he may not want to marry me.”

“What the devil are you talking about now? He’s crazy about you.”

“I must tell him, Rowley.”

“Why?” he cried, aghast.

“I couldn’t marry him with this thing hanging over me. It would be on my conscience. I should never have a minute’s peace.”

“Your peace? What about his peace? D’you think he’ll thank you for telling him? I tell you everything’s all right. Nothing can ever connect you now with the death of that wretched fellow.”

“I must be honest.”

He frowned.

“You’re making a terrible mistake. I know these Empire-builders. The soul of integrity and all that. What do they know of indulgence? They’ve never had need of it themselves. It’s madness to destroy his trust in you. He dotes on you. He thinks you perfect.”

“What is the good of that if I’m not?”

“Don’t you think the better people think you are the better you’re liable to become? You know, he’s got many excellent qualities, your Edgar; they’ve got him where he is. But if you don’t mind my saying so, he’s got a certain obstinate stupidity; and that also has helped him. Without it he wouldn’t be the big noise he is. You’re asking something right out of his line when you’re asking him to understand the labyrinth of a woman’s sensibility.”

“If he loves me enough he will.”

“Very well, my dear, have it your own way. He’s not the sort of cove I should want to marry if I were a woman, but if you’ve set your heart on him I suppose you must. But if you want to make a good job of it, take my advice and — emulate the clam.”

He gave a little chuckle, touched her hand lightly and with his jaunty step strolled away. The thought occurred to her that she might possibly never see him again. It gave her a slight pang. Funny he should have asked her to marry him. She had to smile at his dismay if she had taken him seriously and said she would.

CHAPTER VIII

It was about four next afternoon when Nina came out to Mary, again sitting in the garden and seeking to distract her mind by working on a piece of tapestry, and told her that Edgar Swift was on the telephone. He had just arrived at his hotel and wanted to know if he could see Mary.

She had not known at what time his plane would get in, and had been waiting for him since luncheon. She sent the message that she would be glad to see him whenever he cared to come. Her heart began to beat a trifle hurriedly. She took out her looking-glass from her bag and looked at herself. She was pale, but she did not put on any rouge, since she knew he did not much like it; she dabbed the powder-puff over her face and painted her lips. She was wearing a light summer dress, of yellow linen with a wallpaper design; it looked so simple that you would have thought a housemaid might have worn it, but it had been made by the best dressmaker in Paris.

Presently she heard the car drive up and a moment or two later Edgar appeared. She got up from her chair and advanced to greet him. As usual he was dressed perfectly as became his age and station. It was a pleasure to look at him as he strode along the strip of lawn; he was so tall and slim; he held himself so erect. He had removed his hat: his thick black hair shone with the oil he had put on to keep its wave set. His fine blue eyes below the thick eyebrows wore a friendly gleam; his fine, spare features no longer had the sternness which was his habitual expression, but were softened by a happy smile. He warmly clasped her hand.

“How cool and fresh you look, and as pretty as a picture.”

Mr. Atkinson had used that hackneyed phrase every time he saw her. Mary, faintly tickled to hear it from Edgar, supposed it was what gentlemen of a certain age always said to women much younger than themselves.

“Sit down and Nina will bring us some tea. Did you have a nice trip?”

“I’m so very glad to see you again,” he said. “It seems a century since I went away.”

“It hasn’t been very long.”

“Luckily, I knew exactly what you’d be doing all the time. I knew where you’d be at such and such an hour and I followed you from place to place with my thoughts.”

Mary faintly smiled.

“I should have thought you were much too busy.”

“I was busy, of course; I had a couple of long talks with my Minister and I think we’ve settled everything. I’m to sail at the beginning of September. He was very decent to me. He didn’t conceal from me that it was a difficult job, though of course I knew that when I accepted it, but he said that was why they wanted me. I don’t want to bore you with the compliments he paid me, but...”

“I want to hear. I shan’t be bored.”

“Well, he said that owing to the particular circumstances, it was important to put a man there who was conciliatory and at the same time firm, and he was good enough to say that he knew no one who combined those qualities to so high a degree as I do.”

“I’m sure he was right.”

“Anyhow it was very flattering. You see, I’ve had a long fight and it’s satisfactory to find oneself pretty near the top of the tree at last. It’s a big job and an important one. It’ll give me a chance to show what I can do, and between you and me and the gate-post, I think I can do a great deal.” He hesitated for an instant. “And if I do as well as I hope, and as they hope, it may lead to even higher things.”

“You’re very ambitious, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am. I like power and I’m not afraid of responsibility. I have certain gifts, and I’m glad of the opportunity to make the most of them.”

“There was a Colonel Trail at dinner the other night. He said that if you made a success in Bengal, there was no reason why you shouldn’t become Viceroy.”

A gleam came into Edgar’s bold eyes.

“Governor-General, they call him now. I imagine that’s within the bounds of possibility. They made Willingdon Viceroy, and a damned good Viceroy he was.”

They had finished tea and he put down his cup.

“You know, Mary, that the pleasure with which I’m looking forward to all this activity, and the honour that’s attached to it, wouldn’t mean half so much to me if I weren’t hoping that you’d share it with me.”

Her heart stood still. The moment had come. To calm herself she lit a cigarette. She did not look at him, but she felt that his eyes, tenderly smiling, were fixed upon her.

“You promised to give me my answer when I came back.” He chuckled. “The fact that I chartered a plane this morning to fly over here is proof that I’m impatient to have it.”

She threw away the cigarette she had just lit. She gave a little sigh.

“Before we go any further I’ve got something to tell you. I’m afraid it’ll bitterly distress you. Please listen to me without saying anything. Anything you’ve got to say, any questions you’ve got to ask me, you can say later.”

His face on a sudden hardened and he looked at her sharply.

“I’ll say nothing.”

“I don’t have to tell you that I’d give anything in the world to hold my tongue, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be honest. You must know the facts and then do what you think fit.”

“I’m listening.”

Once again she told the long painful story which the day before she had told Rowley. She omitted nothing. She tried neither to exaggerate nor to minimise. But it was harder to tell it to Edgar. He listened without a movement. His face was set and stern. No flicker in his eyes showed what he was thinking. She was conscious as she spoke that her behaviour seemed more senseless and wanton than it had done when she was telling Rowley what had happened. She found it impossible to give her motives even a plausible air; some of the incidents appeared incredible and her heart sank as she imagined that perhaps he was not believing her. And now she realised that there was something peculiarly shocking in Rowley and her having placed the body in a car and taken it to hide in a sequestered spot in the hills. She still didn’t know what else she could have done to avoid a fearful scandal and heaven only knew what difficulties with the police. But it was so fantastic that anything like that should happen to people like her that it didn’t seem to belong to real life; it was the kind of thing that happened to one in a nightmare.

At last she finished. Edgar sat quite still for a little while without saying a word, then he got up and began to pace to and fro across the green patch. His head was bent, he had his hands clasped behind his back, and on his face was a dark, sullen look that she had never seen on it before. He looked strangely older. At last he stopped still in front of her. He looked down at her and there was a painful smile on his lips, but his voice was so tender that it wrung her heart.

“You must forgive me if I’m rather taken aback. You see, you’re the last woman I should ever have expected to do anything like this. I knew you when you were the most innocent, charming child; it seems incredible that you of all people...”

He stopped, but she knew what he had in mind; it seemed incredible that she of all people should have become the mistress of a casual vagabond.

“I have no excuses to make for myself.”

“I’m afraid I think you’ve been very foolish.”

“Worse.”

“We need not go into that. I think I love you enough to understand and to forgive.” There was a break in that strong man’s voice, but his smile now was indulgent and gentle. “You’re a romantic, silly little thing. I can quite believe that what you did after that man killed himself seemed the only thing to do in the circumstances. It was an awful risk you took, but it appears to have panned out all right. The fact is, you badly need a man to look after you.”

She looked at him doubtfully.

“Do you still want to marry me now that you know everything?”

He hesitated, but for so brief a moment that to anyone but Mary it would have been unnoticeable.

“You surely didn’t think I was going to leave you in the lurch? I couldn’t do that, Mary dear.”

“I feel terribly ashamed of myself.”

“I want you to marry me. I will do everything I can to make you happy. Career isn’t everything. After all, I’m not so young as I was. I’ve done a good deal for the country; there’s no reason why I shouldn’t sit back now and let younger men have a chance.”

She stared at him with sudden perplexity.

“What do you mean?”

He sat down again and took her hands in his.

“Well, darling, you see this does alter things a bit. I couldn’t take on this job; it wouldn’t be fair. If the facts leaked out the effects might very well be disastrous.”

She was aghast.

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t bother about it, Mary dear. I’ll telegraph to the Minister to say that I’m going to be married and so can’t go to India. I can make your health a very reasonable pretext. I can’t offer you quite the same position as I’d hoped, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a very good time. We can take a house on the Riviera. I’ve always wanted a boat of my own. We can have a lot of fun sailing about and fishing.”

“But you can’t throw everything up just when you’re reaching the top of the tree. Why should you?”

“Listen to me, dear. It’s a very ticklish job I’ve been offered; it needs all my intelligence and all my serenity. I should always have the anxiety that something might be discovered. You’re not at an advantage to make a calm and considered judgment when you’re standing on the crater of a volcano.”

“What can be discovered now?”

“Well, there’s the revolver. The police could find out if they took the trouble that it had belonged to me.”

“I dare say they could. I’ve thought of that. It might be that the man had taken it out of my bag at the restaurant.”

“Yes, I have no doubt one could think of a variety of plausible ways how he might have got hold of it. But there’d have to be explanations, and I can’t afford to have it necessary to make explanations. I don’t want to put on any frills, but I’m not the sort of man to tell a pack of lies. And then it’s not only your secret. It’s Rowley Flint’s as well.”

“You can’t suppose for a moment that he’d ever give me away!”

“That’s just what I can suppose. He’s an unscrupulous scamp. An idler. A waster. He’s just the sort of man that I have no use for. How do you know what he’ll do when he’s had a couple? It’s too good a story to waste. He’ll tell it in confidence to some woman. He’ll tell one and then he’ll tell another, and before you know where you are it’ll be all over London. Believe me, it won’t take long then to reach India.”

“You’re wrong, Edgar. You misjudge him. I know he’s wild and reckless, if he hadn’t been he’d never have taken that risk to save me, but I know I can trust him. He’ll never give me away. He’d rather die first.”

“You don’t know human nature as I do. I tell you he hasn’t got it in him to resist telling the story.”

“But if you think that, it would be just the same if you’d retired or not.”

“There might be a lot of gossip, but if I’m in a private position what does it matter? We can snap our fingers at it. But it would be very different if I were Governor of Bengal. After all, what you did is a criminal offence. For all I know it’s extraditable. It would be a fine chance for an unfriendly Italy to sling mud. Has it occurred to you that you might be accused of killing the man yourself?”

He stared at her so sternly that she shuddered.

“I’ve got to play fair,” he went on. “The Government has trusted me and I’ve never let them down. In the position they want to put me in it’s essential that nothing can be said about my character or my wife’s. Our situation in India largely depends now on the prestige of its administrators. If I had to resign in disgrace it might be the occasion of the most serious events. It’s no good arguing, Mary, I must do what I’m convinced is right.”

His tone had gradually changed and his voice was as harsh as his expression was stern. Mary saw now the man who was known all through India not only for his administrative ability but for his ruthless determination. Watching every line of his grim face, intent on the flicker of his eyes which might disclose his real feelings to her, she sought to discern his inmost thoughts. She knew very well that he had been shattered by her confession. He was incapable of sympathy for such outrageous, such shocking behaviour. She had destroyed his belief in her and he would never again feel quite sure of her. But he was not the man to take back the offer he had made. When of her own free will she had told him what she might easily have kept to herself, he could do nothing but respond to her frankness with generosity; he was prepared to sacrifice his career and the chance of making a great name for himself, to marry her; and she had an inkling that he took something like a bitter joy in the prospect of such a sacrifice, not because he loved her so much that it was worth while, but because his sacrifice heightened his pride in himself. She knew him well enough to know that he would never reproach her because on her account he had had to give up so much; but she knew also that with his energy, his passion for work and his ambition, he would never cease to regret his lost opportunities. He loved her and it would be a cruel disappointment not to marry her, but she had something more than a suspicion that now he would give her up, however unhappily, if it were humanly possible to do so without a surrender of his self-respect. He was the slave of his own integrity.

Mary lowered her eyes so that he should not see the faint gleam of amusement in them. Strangely enough, the situation struck her as slightly diverting. For she knew now, quite definitely, that whatever the circumstances, even if nothing had happened that he need be afraid of, even if he were made Governor-General of India to-morrow, she didn’t want to marry him. She was attached to him, she was grateful because he had taken the unhappy incidents she had felt bound to tell him so kindly, and if she could help it she did not want to hurt his feelings. She must go warily. If she said the wrong thing he would grow obstinate; he was quite capable of overruling her objections and marrying her almost by main force. Well, if the worst came to the worst, she would have to sacrifice whatever remained of the good opinion he had of her. It was not very pleasant, but it might be necessary; and if then he thought the worst of her, well, that would make it the easier for him.

With a sigh she thought of Rowley; how much easier it was to deal with an unscrupulous scamp like that! Whatever his faults, he was not afraid of the truth. She pulled herself together.

“You know, Edgar dear, it would make me miserable to think that I’d ruined this distinguished career of yours.”

“I hope you’d never give it a thought. I promise you that when I’d retired into private life I shouldn’t.”

“But we oughtn’t only to think of ourselves. You’re the man for this particular job. You’re needed. It’s your duty to take it regardless of your personal feelings.”

“I’m not so conceited as to think I’m indispensable, you know.”

“I’ve got such a very great admiration for you, Edgar. I can’t bear the thought of you deserting your post when your presence is so necessary. It seems so weak.”

He gave a little uncomfortable movement and she felt that she had caught him on the raw.

“There’s nothing else to do. It would be even more dishonourable to accept the position under the circumstances.”

“But there is something else to be done. After all, you’re not obliged to marry me.”

He gave her a look so fleeting that she could not be sure what it meant. He knew that, of course, and did that look mean: Good God, if I could only get out of it, don’t you think I would? But he had great control over his expression and when he answered his lips were smiling and his eyes were tender.

“But I want to marry you. There’s nothing in the world I want more.”

Oh, well then, she’d got to take her medicine.

“Edgar dear, I’m very fond of you. I owe so much to you; you’re the greatest friend I’ve ever had. I know how splendid you are, how true and kind and faithful; but I don’t love you.”

“Of course I know that I’m a great many years older than you. I realise that you couldn’t love me in quite the same way as you’d love a fellow of your own age. I was hoping that, well, the advantages I had to offer would in some measure compensate for that. I’m dreadfully sorry that what I have to offer you now isn’t perhaps so much worth your accepting.”

God, how difficult he was making it! Why couldn’t he have said right out that she was a slut and he’d see her damned before he married her? Well, there was the cauldron of boiling oil; there was nothing to do but to shut one’s eyes and jump right in.

“I want to be quite frank with you, Edgar. When you were going to be Governor of Bengal, you would have had a lot of work and I should have had a lot too; after all, I’m human and the position was dazzling; it seemed enough if I liked you. We should have had so many interests in common, it didn’t seem to matter if I wasn’t in love with you.” Now the most difficult part was coming. “But if we’re just going to live a quiet life on the Riviera, with nothing much to do from morning till night, well, I think the only thing that would make it possible would be if I were as much in love with you as you are with me.”

“I’m not set on the Riviera. We could live anywhere you liked.”

“What difference would that make?”

He was silent for a long time. When he looked at her again his eyes were cold.

“You mean that you were prepared to marry the Governor of Bengal, but not a retired Indian Civilian on a pension.”

“When it comes down to brass tacks I suppose that is really what it amounts to.”

“In that case we need not discuss the matter further.”

“There doesn’t seem much point in doing so, does there?”

Again he was silent. He was very grave and his face showed no indication of what he was thinking. He was humiliated, poor man, and bitterly disappointed in her, but at the same time Mary was pretty sure he was infinitely relieved. But that was the last thing he proposed to let her see. At last he hoisted himself out of his chair.

“There seems no object in my staying in Florence any longer. Unless, of course, you’d like me to stay in case there’s any bother over — over that man who killed himself.”

“Oh no, I think that’s quite unnecessary.”

“In that case I shall go back to London to-morrow. Perhaps I had better say good-bye to you now.”

“Good-bye, Edgar. And forgive me.”

“I have nothing to forgive.”

He took her hand and kissed it, then with a dignity in which there was nothing absurd walked slowly down the grass patch and in a moment was hidden by the box hedge. She heard his car drive away.

CHAPTER IX

The interview had tired Mary. She had had no natural rest for two nights and now, lulled by the smoothness of the summer air and the monotonous, pleasant chattering of the cicadas, the only sound that disturbed the silence, she fell asleep. In an hour she woke refreshed. She took a stroll in the old garden and then made up her mind to sit on the terrace so that she could look again at the city below her by the lovely light of the declining day. But as she passed the house Ciro, the manservant, came out to her.

“Signor Rolando is on the phone, Signora,” he said.

“Ask him to leave a message.”

“He wishes to speak to you, Signora.”

Mary shrugged her shoulders slightly. She did not particularly want to speak to Rowley just then; but it occurred to her that he might have something to tell her. The thought of that poor boy’s body lying on the hillside was always on her mind. She went to the telephone.

“Have you got any ice in the house?” he said.

“Is it to ask me that that you made me come to the phone?” she answered coldly.

“Not entirely. I wanted to ask you also if you had any gin and vermouth.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d give me a cocktail if I got into a taxi and came along.”

“I’ve got a lot to do.”

“That’s fine. I’ll come along and help you.”

Shrugging her shoulders a trifle irritably, Mary told Ciro to bring what was wanted to make a cocktail and went out on to the terrace. She was eager to get away from Florence as quickly as possible. She hated it now, but she did not want her departure to arouse comment. Perhaps it was just as well Rowley was coming; she would ask him. It was rather absurd, when you came to think of it, that she should rely so entirely on someone who was so notoriously unreliable.

Fifteen minutes later he was with her. It was a strange contrast he made with Edgar as he walked across the terrace. Edgar, with his height and his spareness, had looked wonderfully distinguished; he had a natural dignity and the assured air of a man who had been accustomed for many years to the obedience of others. If you had seen him in a crowd you would have asked who that man was whose face was so full of character and whose manner bespoke authority. Rowley, rather short, rather stocky, wearing his clothes as though they were a workman’s overalls, slouched across, with his hands as usual in his pockets, with a kind of lazy impudence, debonair and careless, which, Mary was bound to admit, had a certain attractiveness. With his smiling mouth and the good-humoured mockery of his grey eyes, of course not a person you could take seriously, but one who was easy to get on with. It suddenly occurred to Mary why notwithstanding his faults (and disregarding the great service he had rendered her) she felt so much at ease with him. You could be entirely yourself. You never had to pretend with him, first because he had a keen eye for any sort of humbug and only laughed at you, and then because he never pretended himself.

He mixed himself a cocktail, drank it at a gulp and then sank comfortably into an arm-chair. He gave her a roguish look.

“Well, darling, so the Empire-builder’s turned you down.”

“How d’you know?” she asked quickly.

“I put two and two together. When he came back to the hotel he asked about trains and when he found he could catch the Rome-Paris Express to-night he ordered a car to take him to Pisa. I surmised that if it hadn’t been a bust he would hardly have left with such precipitation. I told you it was stupid of you to spill the beans. You couldn’t expect a man like that to swallow that story of yours.”

It was no good making a tragedy of it when Rowley took it so flippantly. Mary smiled.

“He behaved very well.”

“He would. I’m sure he behaved like a perfect gentleman.”

“He is a perfect gentleman.”

“Which is a damned sight more than I am. I’m a gentleman by birth, but not by nature.”

“You don’t have to tell me that, Rowley.”

“You’re not sore, are you?”

“I? No, I don’t ask you to believe me, but the truth is that as we talked it all over I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t marry him at any price.”

“You’re well out of it. I didn’t want to say too much as you seemed so set on marrying him, but you’d have been bored to death. I know women. You’re not the sort of woman to marry an Empire-builder.”

“He’s a great man, Rowley.”

“I know he is. He’s a great man posing as a great man. That’s what’s so fantastic about him. It’s like Charlie Chaplin impersonating Charlie Chaplin.”

“I want to get away from here, Rowley.”

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t. A change will do you good.”

“You’ve been very kind to me. I shall miss you.”

“Oh, but I think we shall see a great deal of one another in the future.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, because as far as I can see there doesn’t seem much else for you to do but to marry me.”

She sat up and stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a lot has happened since then and I dare say it’s slipped your memory, but I did make you a proposal of marriage the other night. You don’t suppose I took your answer as final. So far, every woman I’ve asked to marry me always has, you know.”

“I thought you were joking. You couldn’t really want to marry me now.”

He sat back in the arm-chair, smoking a cigarette, a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his good-natured eyes; and his tone was so casual that you would have thought he was indulging only in badinage.

“You see, my dear, the advantage of me is that I’m a bad hat. A lot of people reproach me for the things I’ve done; I dare say they’re right; I don’t think I’ve done anyone much harm — women have liked me and I have a naturally affectionate disposition, so the rest followed almost automatically; but anyhow I’ve got neither the right nor the inclination to reproach other people for what they’ve done. Live and let live has been my motto. You see, I’m not an Empire-builder, I’m not a man of character with an unimpeachable reputation, I’m just an easy-going chap with a bit of money who likes to have a good time. You say I’m a rotter and an idler. Well, what about reforming me? I’ve got an estate in Kenya and I’m sacking my manager because he’s no good; I’ve been thinking it mightn’t be a bad idea if I went out and managed it myself. Perhaps it is about time that I settled down. You might like the life there.”

He waited a moment for her to speak, but she said nothing. She was so surprised and all he said was so unexpected that she could only look at him as though she scarcely understood. He went on, talking with a slight drawl, as though what he was saying were rather funny and he expected her to be amused by it.

“You know, you were quite right in saying that at first I only wanted to have an affair with you. Well, why not? You’re very beautiful. I should be a funny sort of cove if I hadn’t wanted to do something about you. But the other evening when we were driving you said one or two things that rather touched me. I couldn’t help thinking you rather sweet.”

“A lot of things have happened since then.”

“I know, and I don’t mind telling you that at one moment I was very angry with you.”

She gave him a glance from under her eyelashes.

“Is that why you hit me?”

“When you got out of the car, d’you mean? I hit you because I wanted you to stop crying.”

“You hurt me.”

“That was the idea.”

Mary looked down. When she told Edgar what had passed between her and that unfortunate boy, his face had gone grey with anguish. He had been profoundly shocked. But she had felt that what afflicted him was that she could thus have sullied the purity which he so prized in her; the truth was that he loved not the woman she was now, but still the pretty little girl to whom he gave chocolates and who had fascinated him by her ingenuous and childish innocence. It was the sexual jealousy of the male, baulked in his desire, that had caused Rowley to give her that vicious blow; it was odd what a strange, proud feeling it gave her suddenly to know that. She could not help giving him a look in which there was the suspicion of a smile. Their eyes met.

“But I’m not angry with you any more. You see, I liked your sending for me when you were in a hell of a mess. And then the way you kept your head — it looked pretty sticky at one moment; you’ve got nerve all right and I liked that too. Of course you behaved like a perfect idiot. But it showed you had a generous heart, and, to tell you the truth, not many of the sort of women I’ve known had that. I love you terribly, Mary.”

“How strange men are!” she sighed. “Both of you, Edgar and you, attach so much importance to something that really doesn’t very much matter. What really matters, what wrings my heart, is that that poor, friendless boy through my fault should lie dead and unburied under the open sky.”

“He’s just as well off there as in a cemetery. You can’t bring him back to a life he had no use for by grieving over him. What does he mean to you really? Nothing. If he passed you in the street to-morrow you probably wouldn’t even recognise him. Clear your mind of cant. That’s what Dr. Johnson said, and damned good advice it was.”

She opened her eyes wide.

“What on earth do you know about Dr. Johnson?”

“In the leisure moments of an ill-spent life I’ve read a good deal. Old Sam Johnson is rather a favourite of mine. He had a lot of common sense and he knew a thing or two about human nature.”

“You’re full of unexpectedness, Rowley. I would never have thought you read anything but the sporting news.”

“I don’t keep all my goods in the shop window,” he grinned. “I don’t think you’d find it so boring to be married to me as you might suppose.”

She was glad to find a flippant remark.

“How on earth could I ever hope to keep you even moderately faithful?”

“Well, that would be up to you. They say a woman ought to have an occupation, and that would be a very suitable one for you in Kenya.”

She looked at him for a moment reflectively.

“Why should you bother to marry me, Rowley? If you love me as much as you say I don’t mind coming for a trip with you. We can take the car and go for a tour in Provence.”

“That’s a suggestion, of course. But it’s a damned rotten one.”

“There doesn’t seem much object in exchanging a good friend for an indifferent husband.”

“That’s a nice thing for a respectable woman to say.”

“I’m not so respectable as all that. Don’t you think it’s rather late for me to put on frills?”

“No, I don’t. And if you start getting an inferiority complex I shall give you such a hiding as you won’t forget for a month. It’s marriage lines for me, my dear, or nothing. I want you for keeps.”

“But I don’t love you, Rowley.”

“I told you the other night, you will if you give yourself half a chance.”

She looked at him for some time, doubtfully, and then suddenly the gleam of a shy but faintly teasing smile stole into her lovely eyes.

“I wonder if you’re right,” she murmured. “The other night, in the car, when those drunken people passed us and you held me in your arms, though I was scared to death, I don’t mind admitting that while your lips were pressed to mine the sensation wasn’t — entirely unpleasant.”

He gave a great throaty chuckle. He jumped up and dragged her to her feet and flung his arms round her. He kissed her on the mouth.

“So now what?”

“Well, if you insist on marrying me.... But it’s an awful risk we’re taking.”

“Darling, that’s what life’s for — to take risks.”

THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

In every work regard the writer’s end,

Since none can compass more than they intend.

I

SHE WALKED ACROSS the wide stretch of lawn, with its fine cedars, through a wrought-iron gate in a brick wall mellow with age, and out into the formal garden. There was a raised terrace that ran along the whole rear of the stately house and it was reached by a flight of steps at the top of which, on each side, was a weather-beaten Italian statue on a pedestal. The garden, rich with the gay flowers of late August, extended from the terrace to a low iron fence that separated it from the great park and prevented the cattle that grazed there from wandering in. She was a young woman with pale brown hair and dark brown eyes, slim and tall, and with that virginal look that many English women strangely retain after years of marriage. She had a straight nose, with delicate nostrils, a candid brow and a well-shaped mouth; the red of her painted lips made her clear white skin look even whiter. In her quiet, almost demure way, she was a very pretty woman, but since there was nothing striking in her appearance, since she dressed very simply, it was not till you talked to her that you were aware of it. Because she was shy she gave many people the impression that she was cold or casual, but the most censorious dowagers in the county admitted in their ponderous, old-fashioned way that though she might be a trifle offhand she was a gentlewoman. It offended them a little that she was obviously quite indifferent to their opinion of her. Without rank, a naval officer’s daughter, and without a penny of her own, she had the unassuming distinction of a well-bred woman who is aware without arrogance of her place in society and makes no claim to be other than what she is.

Her thoughts troubled her and her face had been grave as she walked across the lawn, but a faint smile softened her brown eyes as she saw her mother-in-law, Mrs. Henderson, sitting on the terrace. The table was laid out for tea. A butler and a couple of footmen were in the act of bringing out from the house the urn and the tea-pot, plates of bread and butter, scones and cake. Mrs. Henderson was reading a novel, but she put it down as her daughter-in-law joined her.

“Haven’t you been playing, May?” she asked.

“No. I felt lazy. They’re just finishing a sett and then they’re coming along.”

From the terrace you could hear the voices of the players as they called the score and the ping of the ball against the taut gut of the racket.

“You’re looking rather washed out, dear. D’you think the heat’s too much for you?” asked Mrs. Henderson.

May faintly coloured under Mrs. Henderson’s kindly but shrewd eye.

“Oh, no, I’ll play after tea.”

“I dare say that Roger’ll be glad to have a game.” Roger was her eldest son and May’s husband. He had arrived from abroad the night before and had telephoned that morning to say that he would drive down in the course of the day. It was Mrs. Henderson’s birthday, her fifty-third, and according to their habit all the family were assembled. There were her two younger sons, Jim who was still at Oxford, and Tommy who was only thirteen and home from school; and there were her daughter Jane and her daughter’s husband Ian Foster. And of course there was her own husband the General. Mrs. Henderson had a suspicion that sometimes they didn’t find it altogether convenient to come from wherever they might be to spend her birthday with her, especially as it was on the last day of August and there was grouse to be shot on the Yorkshire moors, but she liked to have them there, round her, on that one day of the year and though they might come when they would have preferred to be elsewhere only to please her she knew that they made the sacrifice willingly. She accepted it as a proof of their love for her. It was her only selfishness. Roger was a soldier, in the Military Intelligence, and for the last three or four years had been much out of England. He had been in Japan and in the United States, and during the last twelve months, since Munich, he had been in Spain and the Balkans, several times to France and now was just back from Poland. Mrs. Henderson had given up hope that he would be able to spend this birthday with her and it was with joyful surprise that she had heard his voice on the telephone that morning. His arrival would make her happiness complete. She was glad for May’s sake too. May hadn’t seen much of him of late. It was a pity she had no children.

“Here’s Jane,” said Mrs. Henderson, with her ready smile.

Jane Foster came through the gateway, up the steps on to the terrace, and sank into a chair. It was odd that Mrs. Henderson should have such a daughter. Mrs. Henderson was a tall, handsome, grey-haired woman, with fine features that gave her a somewhat severe look, but with mild, friendly eyes. She was dressed in black. But Jane wore bright green slacks and a green and yellow tunic with a bold geometrical pattern. On her feet were yellow sandals with enormously thick cork soles. From each sandal protruded a scarlet toenail. She was thirty-four, Mrs. Henderson’s eldest child, a tall, rather gaunt, rather masculine, rather horsey woman. Her naturally dark hair was hennaed and she was as heavily made-up as an actress about to face the footlights. The obvious desire of that big-featured woman to look alluring would have been pathetic if its grotesqueness hadn’t been disarming. She was a joke and you couldn’t but believe that she knew it and saw the fun of it. And to add to the fantastic quality of her appearance she wore in her left eye a rimless monocle without a cord. The dowagers who have just been mentioned were agreed that if you didn’t know all about her you would have said she was dreadfully common. Little escaped the sharp eye behind the monocle, and being perfectly aware of this she took care to give these ladies ample cause for their remarks.

“It’s funny,” they said plaintively, “that men seem to like her.”

It was mortifying that at a dinner party when the men, having finished their port, came into the drawing-room they should gather round Jane and shout with coarse laughter while she aired her views on things in general with a freedom of speech unusual in county society. And her father and mother were such nice people.

Mrs. Henderson, when she took in the details of Jane’s turn-out, raised her eyebrows.

“My poor Jane, are you obliged to make up quite so much on a summer afternoon in the depths of the country?”

“I feel so funny if I haven’t got my face on,” answered Jane, taking out her lipstick and painting lips that were already heavily painted.

“You wouldn’t look so funny if you hadn’t.”

Jane gave a deep throaty laugh.

“Darling, how sweet you are to me, but I love you just the same.”

Mrs. Henderson wasn’t devoid of a sense of humour.

“You’re so vulgar, the neighbours can’t help thinking there must have been a little nonsense between me and one of the gamekeepers and that isn’t very nice for me as I was only nineteen when you were born.”

“And was there, Mother?”

Mrs. Henderson and May burst out laughing.

“You fool, Jane.” Mrs. Henderson ladled spoonfuls of tea into the tea-pot and poured hot water in. “They won’t be long, will they? Who’s playing?”

“Father and Tommy are playing against Dick Murray and Dora.”

“Why doesn’t Jim come along then and have his tea?”

“Why indeed? You don’t suppose he could tear himself away when Dora’s on the court.”

“Don’t be so silly, Jane,” said Mrs. Henderson a trifle tartly.

Jane secured her glass more firmly in her eye.

“Darling, you don’t miss much. I know I can never get away with anything with you. I don’t know if Dora’s in love with Jim, but I know Jim’s so much in love with her he can’t see straight. And you know it too.”

Mrs. Henderson stirred the tea leaves while her daughter and her daughter-in-law looked at her curiously. She gave her shoulders a faint shrug.

“He’s only twenty-one, poor lamb. He’ll forget her when he goes back to Oxford.”

“You wouldn’t like it very much if he went off and married a foreigner, would you?”

“Even foreigners are human, darling,” said Mrs. Henderson, with what for her was considerable acidity. “I’ve noticed that’s something we English are apt to forget.”

Jane sat up in her chair.

“D’you mean to say you wouldn’t mind?”

For a moment Mrs. Henderson was silent and when she spoke it was more as if she were speaking to herself than answering Jane.

“She’s pretty and she’s intelligent. I’m terribly sorry for her. She’s alone in the world. She hasn’t a home and she hasn’t a country. And that nightmare of her father having been done to death in a concentration camp!”

“Still she is a German. If war breaks out you won’t be able to keep her here.”

“Your father says there won’t be a war. He says he knows it for a fact that when it comes to the point Hitler will climb down.”

“Father would hate Jim to marry Dora.”

Mrs. Henderson looked with her mild eyes from Jane to May and then from May to Jane.

“I wonder. May has been married for eight years and she hasn’t any children. You haven’t either, Jane.”

“What do you suggest I should do about it? Get a new chauffeur?” Jane asked.

Mrs. Henderson, going on with her thoughts, took no notice of the flippant remark.

“We’ve had this place for two hundred years. It’s the pride of your father’s heart. I don’t think he’d mind much whom Jim married if only there were children to carry on.”

She gave a glance at the noble façade of the great house and then her eyes travelled over the formal garden with its Italian fountain, its statues, its grass paths and many-coloured flowers, till they rested on the park beyond. There were trees there as old as the house. Under the shade of a huge oak cows were lying. As far as the eye could reach it was Henderson land. It kept them poor to maintain that vast house and that great estate. But they loved their home, she and her husband, and there was hardly a tenant who didn’t farm the land that his father and grandfather and great-grandfather hadn’t farmed before him. They were prepared to sacrifice themselves to hand down to their successors intact the house and land that they held in trust.

Jane was about to speak when she saw the General stroll through the wrought-iron gate.

“Here they are,” she said.

General Henderson was a tall man, slim and erect, with a lined, bronzed face and white hair, whom you could never have taken for anything but a soldier. Even in tennis things he managed to look well groomed and you might have guessed that he was fussy about his clothes. His manner was brisk and authoritative, but you couldn’t know him long without discovering that this was, as it were, a professional veneer and that at heart he was a kindly, easy-going man; he was brave and honest, but he had the narrowness of his caste and calling, and he had common sense rather than intelligence. He could more easily forgive an injury than a social solecism. You could rely on him to the death, but you couldn’t always rely on him to do the wise thing. He walked up to the terrace accompanied by his two sons, and a moment later Ian Foster, Jane’s husband, appeared with Dick Murray, the General’s agent. Between them was the girl of whom Mrs. Henderson and her daughter had been speaking. Dora Friedberg was twenty. She had very fair hair and large blue intelligent eyes and a honey-coloured skin. She was slender, but with full breasts, and her elegant little head was set proudly on a lovely neck. Notwithstanding the blond and healthy radiance of her youth, there was in the firmness of her chin, in the decision of her mouth and the singular repose in her eyes when she was not speaking, something that suggested a strong will. Jane, who had taken an instinctive dislike to her, had told her husband:

“I wouldn’t trust her a yard. She’d be a demon, that girl, if she was roused.”

But Jane was wrong in saying that Dora was German; she was Austrian. The Hendersons had met her at Kitzbuhl in the Austrian Tyrol during the winter that preceded the Anschluss. She was staying with her mother at the same hotel as they were. Frau Friedberg was a woman of distinguished appearance and Mrs. Henderson, who was not indifferent to such things, was not surprised to learn that she was of good family. She spoke little of her husband, a lawyer, and Mrs. Henderson guessed that he was of a class inferior to her own. It was likely enough that after the ruin of Austria she had been glad to marry any man who offered her security. The two boys, Jim and Tommy, took a fancy to the pretty, lively girl and Jim went on long excursions with her. She was a beautiful skier. A year later she wrote to Mrs. Henderson to say that her father had died in a concentration camp and she wanted to come to England to get work. She didn’t mind what it was and she asked Mrs. Henderson to help her to find something. Mrs. Henderson, full of pity, after consulting the General wrote back asking Dora to stay with them while they looked about. But it wasn’t easy to get a job for an Austrian refugee just then. Dora could cook and was quite willing to go into domestic service, but the Hendersons didn’t like the idea of it, and they thought, moreover, that in such a situation her beauty must inevitably expose her to unpleasantness. They begged her to wait till something turned up that was suitable to her education and culture. While she waited she made herself useful. The General was a justice of the peace and chairman of the local county council; and Mrs. Henderson, much occupied with good works, was on a number of committees; they found it very convenient to have at hand a willing and intelligent secretary. With Jim at Oxford and Tommy at school, they were alone for months at a time and the presence of that charming girl brought life to the great, stately house. It was the General’s suggestion that she should stay with them indefinitely. She accepted it with a gratitude that touched them. The Hendersons had taken her out of the kindness that was natural to them, but before long they looked upon her with real affection. She became one of the family. In Mrs. Henderson’s heart she took the place of the two daughters who had come between Roger and Jim and whose death in childhood she still mourned.

Mrs. Henderson began to pour out tea.

“How did you play, Tommy?” she smilingly asked the untidy, tousle-haired little boy who was her youngest son, when he sat down at the tea table.

“Like a foot,” he answered in his treble voice. “We only just beat them.”

“If you’d been on your game we shouldn’t have had a look in, I suppose,” said Dick Murray with a grin.

“All right. Pull my leg.”

He stretched out a thin arm and took a big piece of cake.

“Bread and butter first, darling,” said his mother.

“What a life!” he piped. “I thought in the holidays I was supposed to have a little happiness.”

He carefully examined the plate and chose the smallest piece he could find.

“You have a rotten life, old boy, don’t you?” the General smiled.

Mrs. Henderson gave her son a glance of tender amusement. He was by years the youngest of her children and she doted on him. There was in his skinny legs and arms, in that slender body and in that smooth funny little face of his something that wrung her heartstrings. She felt she must be constantly on her guard not to spoil him. But he was growing so fast, he seemed so frail, and he was never still, busy from morning till night with one thing and another, that sometimes she was afraid; she didn’t know what she would do if anything happened to him.

When Dick Murray had come on to the terrace with the others he took a quick look round and then moved as if to sit down in the vacant chair next to May; but she gave him a glance and it may be that it bore a message, for he changed his mind and seated himself by Mrs. Henderson. Jane, puffing a cigarette, noticed it. She looked at him thoughtfully. A fellow of not unpleasing appearance. He was young, four or five years younger than herself, but his hair, thick and wavy, was prematurely grey; and this, with his tanned, unlined skin, was peculiarly attractive; it made his fine blue eyes look even bluer than they were and his lashes darker. His features weren’t particularly good, rather blunt, but when he smiled he showed a set of very white, regular teeth. He was somewhat heavily built, with broad shoulders, and of no more than average height. There was a charming twinkle in his blue eyes and on his face a look of great good humour. Everybody liked him; he had so much vitality, it warmed you to be with him; and if there was something aggressively animal about him, it was so healthy, it was combined with so much friendliness and simplicity of nature, that it was not offensive, but only invigorating.

“A wonderful lover, I should think,” reflected Jane.

With a sardonic smile on her painted lips she now turned her gaze on her husband. Ian Foster sank his huge bulk into a rattan chair and it creaked under his two hundred pounds. He was a huge, red-faced man, with a great booming voice, and his obesity was a disgrace. He took his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

“I don’t know why you should be hot,” Jane said to him tartly. “You haven’t been playing.”

“They all ran about so strenuously it made the sweat drip off me just to look at them. It’s given me such a thirst that unless I have a whisky and soda I shall pass out.”

“You’ll drink tea, Ian,” his wife said firmly. “And if you’d run about a bit more yourself you might get a little of that horrible fat off you.”

“What was it that Solomon said about a nagging woman?”

“Nothing,” Jane retorted. “He said a virtuous wife is above rubies.”

“Considering that you’ve been flagrantly unfaithful to me for years I fail to see how that applies to you, Jane.”

“What did you expect when you married a glamour girl?”

“Idiots,” said Mrs. Henderson, enveloping them both with her affectionate smile.

They were accustomed to hearing Ian and Jane say outrageous things to one another; they sparred all day long and when one got a rise out of the other he chortled with glee. No one knew better than Mrs. Henderson how deeply Jane loved that corpulent, gross, loquacious man and how devoted he was to the plain, gawky creature who by some strange freak of nature was her daughter. Though he was constantly flying into a passion with her, when he would abuse her in language of incredible violence, he was entirely dependent upon her and without her was lost. To him she was the grandest woman in the world, the most amusing and the cleverest and the truest. They were comics, both of them, and theirs was a perfect marriage.

The General looked at his watch.

“Where the devil’s that scoundrel Roger?” he asked. “He ought to be here by now.”

“He won’t be long,” answered Mrs. Henderson. “His secretary phoned from the War Office two hours ago to say he was just starting.”

“You’ll be glad to see him, May, won’t you?” said Jane.

May flushed a little.

“Naturally,” she smiled. “After five months.”

“I suppose he’ll bring all the latest news,” said Dora. It was the first time she had spoken. She had a pleasant voice and only a trace of a German accent. The General turned to her with a kindly smile on his thin, weather-beaten face.

“Take my word for it, Dora, you’ve got nothing to be alarmed about. There’s not going to be a war. Chamberlain will keep us out of it as he kept us out last year.”

“It’ll be a bit awkward for you if there’s a war, won’t it, Jim?” asked Jane.

He looked at her coolly.

“Not at all.”

“You’re still a pacifist, aren’t you?”

The General looked down with a slight frown and Mrs. Henderson gave her daughter a glance of annoyance. Jim’s views were a subject that she sought to keep out of the conversation. Jim and his father had already had several arguments upon it and they had said things to one another that would have been better left unsaid. Why couldn’t they understand that he was a boy, only twenty-one, and it was natural at his age to have extravagant opinions? He would change them when he grew older and learnt something about life. His pacifism was like his communism, merely an expression of the natural idealism of youth. Why, you only had to look at him. He was as tall as his father, broad-shouldered and well set up, with a nice-looking sensitive face, more sensitive than Roger’s, but with the same family likeness. There was nothing mawkish or abnormal about him; indeed he was a high-spirited, manly youth. Though a fine athlete who rowed for his college and had played golf for his university, he was a hard worker. He was the only one of her children who cared for books for their own sake. Roger was a great reader too, but he only read what immediately concerned his job; he had a one-track mind: Jim was a boy of wide interests, and, even making allowances for a mother’s partiality, Mrs. Henderson felt herself justified in cherishing high hopes for his future. He had done well at school, he was doing well at Oxford; he was a good speaker and was going to be a lawyer; there was no knowing to what eminence he might not rise. But of course he must be sensible. Mrs. Henderson wanted to hear what answer Jim would make to Jane’s deliberately provocative question. He turned to her gravely; he spoke not with truculence, but with a firmness that was impressive. He looked Jane straight in the eyes.

“Yes, I’m still a pacifist. War settles nothing. It’s not only an iniquitous business, but a stupid business. There are a lot of us at Oxford and if there’s a war we shall refuse to fight.”

“You say that now, old boy,” Ian broke in, with a tolerant grin on his fat red face, “but if war breaks out you’ll change your mind all right. Heaven knows, I don’t want war, but if it does come I’m going to be in on it.”

“Don’t be so silly, Ian,” cried Jane. “You’re too old to fight and much too fat.”

“Will you oblige me by keeping your trap shut, darling?” he retorted.

Mrs. Henderson’s eyes wandered past the formal garden to the park beyond. The late sun bathed it in a golden beauty. The trees, the gnarled oak trees with their dark foliage, the lush green of the meadowland and the sheen of the lake — oh it was lovely. Not a breath of wind stirred the leaves. It gave you the impression of such perfect, such heavenly tranquillity that you felt it must last forever. You had a singular feeling that the moment would never pass, the cows lying under the oak trees never rise to their feet and the night never come. Time, as though tired of his restless wandering, stood still. Mrs. Henderson gave a faint sigh.

“When I went down to the village this morning with everyone so happy and friendly and contented, and when I look at that peaceful scene with all of you here, I can’t bring myself to believe that there’s even a possibility of war.”

But Jim still held Jane fixed with his serious eyes.

“Are there any more questions you want to ask me?” he said.

“No, there aren’t,” said Mrs. Henderson sharply. “Let me have at least this one day without an argument.”

Dick Murray with his good nature and ready tact threw a casual remark into a conversation that was on the point of losing its amenity.

“Lucky Roger was able to make it, Mrs. Henderson. It would have been a disappointment to you if he hadn’t got back in time.”

“It would. It’s dreadfully sentimental and old-fashioned of me, but I’m bound to admit it, it means a great deal to me to have my family round me on my birthday.”

“Let’s hope Roger won’t be so damned secretive as he usually is,” said Ian.

“Well, he’s a sleuth, isn’t he?” Tommy piped in. “If you’re a sleuth you’ve jolly well got to be secretive.”

“I wish I could get into the Intelligence Department,” Ian went on. “It’s just the sort of job that would suit me.”

“What in Heaven’s name makes you think that, Ian?” Jane cried, fixing him with her monocle. “They want brains for that, my boy, brains.”

He gave a great guffaw. She had given him an opening and he promptly took it.

“I suppose you think if I’d had a spark of intelligence I wouldn’t have married you and I’m not sure that you’re not damned well right.”

But before Jane could think of a crushing retort Mrs. Henderson gave a cry.

“Roger.”

He was standing in front of one of the open french windows that led from the great hall of the house on to the terrace. He had come in as quietly as was his habit and was watching them with an amused smile. He came forward and taking his mother in his arms kissed her warmly. Tommy jumped up and flung his arms round him.

“You’re not too old to kiss yet, are you, old boy?” said Roger, giving him a fond embrace.

Then he turned to his wife. She had risen on seeing him and put her hand to her heart as though to stay its beating. Her pale face had gone paler still. When he kissed her she slightly turned her mouth away so that his lips only touched her cheek.

“Hulloa, May. You’re looking grand.”

“Have a nice journey, Roger?” she asked.

“Not so bad. A bit bumpy.”

He greeted the rest of them and then his eyes fell on a stranger.

“This is Dora Friedberg,” said Mrs. Henderson. “I forgot, you haven’t been down here since she’s been living with us. She’s been a great help.”

“May wrote and said you had a friend staying with you.”

“The General and Mrs. Henderson have been wonderfully kind to me,” said Dora with a little smile.

“Nonsense, my dear,” said the General. “I don’t know what we should have done without you in this great barn with no one but my wife and me to live in it.”

Roger turned back to his mother and fished out of his pocket a small box.

“I’ve brought you a present from Warsaw, darling. Many happy returns.”

He kissed her again. It was an antique brooch and Mrs. Henderson, flushing with pleasure, put it on. Roger was her eldest and best-loved son. He was the heir to the property. She looked at him now as he drank his tea and ate cake, talking the while easily, and thought with pride that he was a fine figure of a man. He too was tall, broad-shouldered and well-knit, but his face was stronger than his father’s or Jim’s; there was decision, even sternness in his well-marked features, and his eyes were keen and observant. Now and then they rested for an instant on Dora and Mrs. Henderson knew he was taking her measure. When he had done eating she asked whether he wouldn’t like to go and put on something cooler, for he was wearing a blue serge suit.

“You and May have got your usual rooms.”

“I don’t mind giving you a tennis lesson after you’ve changed,” said Tommy, with a grin.

“That’s awfully good of you, old boy,” smiled Roger. “I’m afraid I can’t stay, Mother. I must get back to town after dinner.”

“Oh, Roger.”

“I didn’t want to miss your birthday altogether, darling, but I’m up to my eyes in work at the War Office.”

The General pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.

“Come into the library with me, Roger,” he said. “I want to have a chat.”

“Oh, George, he wants to talk to May,” said Mrs. Henderson. “He hasn’t seen her for so long.”

“Let me have him for half an hour, May. You shall have him for as long as you like after that.”

“Of course,” she answered.

When the General and Roger had left them Dick Murray got up and announced that he must go.

“Aren’t you going to play any more tennis?” cried Tommy.

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve got a job to do in the village.”

“You might take a note for me,” said May. “I’ll go and get it. I’ll bring it out to your car.”

She went in to the house. Dick was at the wheel when she came out of the front door with an envelope in her hand.

“You look awfully white, dear,” he said, in a low voice, as she gave it to him.

“I’m nervous, that’s only natural.”

“I wish I could be with you.”

“I must do it alone.”

There was a troubled look on his good-natured sunburnt face, and his fine blue eyes, with their dark lashes, were harassed. She smiled.

“Don’t look so worried. I shall manage. You’d better be going.”

As he started the car he glanced at the envelope she had given him. He saw his own name scribbled on it. When he got out of the park gates he stopped the car and opened the letter. There was a sheet of note-paper inside and on it written in pencil only three words.

I love you.

II

MAY WENT to her room. She wanted to collect herself. She wanted to be sure that she would say exactly what she had made up her mind to say. A shiver ran down her spine and her heart seemed to miss a beat as she considered the ordeal before her. But she was determined to go through with it.

At last she heard Roger come in to the adjoining room.

“May,” he called.

“I’m here.”

He came in.

“I was looking for you.”

“Sit down, will you? I want to have a talk with you.”

“That suits me,” he answered cheerily. “Gosh, it’s good to be home again. Mother’s looking grand, isn’t she? And Tommy’s shooting up. He’ll be as tall as Jim when he’s full grown.”

She looked at him steadily, though her heart now was beating fast. Her throat was dry. It was awful to be so scared. The only thing was to set her teeth and make a dash at it. She knew Roger well enough to be aware that it was useless to beat about the bush.

“Roger, I want you to let me divorce you.”

“May,” he cried.

He stared at her with horrified bewilderment.

“Please don’t speak. I want you to listen to me. You’ve always been kind to me. I’ve got no fault to find with you. It’s just that I can’t go on like this any longer. I’m so terribly lonely.”

His eyes were suddenly distressed.

“My dear.”

“I’m not blaming you for that. I know it isn’t your fault.”

“I know I’m away a great deal. I’d take you with me if I could, but I can’t. It’s a very peculiar job I’ve got and I must be completely on my own.”

“I realize that.”

“You must know that I love you, May.”

She gave him a faint derisive smile. The worst was over now and she had her nerves under control.

“I think you really do in your way. But it’s not a way that brings me much happiness. You love me as you love an old suit of clothes, because you feel comfortable in it. You like to think of me sitting in the flat all ready to welcome you when you come back from one of your hush-hush jobs.”

He moved uncomfortably in his chair.

“You make me sound horribly selfish.”

She shook her head.

“Heaven knows you’re not that. I know that your work is important and that you’re very good at it. It’s just my bad luck that there’s no place for me in your life but just to sit and wait. That’s what I’ve been doing for years now, waiting. I’m tired of it.”

He made an odd little movement of his hands and then clasped them together. It was as though he were distraught, but were unwilling to betray himself. May noticed it and thought bitterly how well that instinctive repressed gesture revealed their married life. She looked at him sadly.

“Has it occurred to you that after being married to you eight years I’m still rather frightened of you?”

“Oh, May, what a terrible thing to say,” he cried. “It’s a fact. Don’t you think it’s rather pitiful? You see, I don’t know you. I only know the side of you you’ve chosen to show me. I’m not sure that there isn’t another side of you that’s hard and ruthless.”

He looked away quickly as though there were something in his soul that he did not want her to see.

“You don’t seem able ever to let yourself go. You’re incapable of intimacy.”

He looked back to her now and there was a good-humoured smile on his lips.

“Aren’t you being rather melodramatic, my dear? I’ve always looked upon myself as a very simple sort of chap. I try to do my duty and I want to do my job as well as I can.”

“And your job is the most important thing in your life, isn’t it? More important far than me.”

“Need I answer that question?” he chuckled.

“I’d like you to.”

“I wouldn’t think much of a chap who let his love for his wife hamper him in the performance of his duty. Would you have me otherwise?”

She sighed.

“I had no idea that you weren’t just as happy as I was,” he went on.

“If you hadn’t been so absorbed in your work you’d have noticed long ago that something was wrong.”

“You can’t expect me to chuck my work.”

“Of course not.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“There’s nothing you can do. I want to live. I want to be happy. I’m twenty-eight, Roger; if I don’t make a break now it’ll be too late.”

She could see that he was deeply distressed and it hurt her to pain him; but at the same time she felt that he thought her unreasonable. He didn’t understand. He gave her a searching look and she coloured.

“Are you in love with somebody else?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated a moment. His eyes seemed to try to pierce her inmost soul.

“D’you mind telling me who it is?”

“Dick Murray.”

“Dick?”

His utter surprise was obvious in his face and tone. Evidently Dick was the last person in the world whom he would have expected her to have any feeling for.

“Is he in love with you?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a while. She knew that he hated scenes and she knew how great was his self-control. He would have been ashamed to show emotion. He took out a cigarette and deliberately lit it.

“Some fellows have all the luck,” he said at last. “He’s got nothing in the world to do except make himself pleasant.”

The acidity in his tone made her flush and she was on the point of giving him a sharp answer. But she restrained herself; she was determined not to get angry. It would be horrible if they began to say cruel and bitter things to one another. She forced a little smile to her lips.

“He’s the best agent your father ever had. He’s the only one who ever made the estate pay.”

“He’s a very good agent. I knew that. That’s why I got him the job.”

It was her turn now to give him a searching look. “He’s not my lover, you know.”

“It never occurred to me that he was. I may not know you very well, darling, but at least I know that you’d never be able to do anything underhand.”

“Dick wouldn’t either. It’s not our fault, Roger. We didn’t want to fall in love. We couldn’t help ourselves. He owes everything to you. He knows he’s let you down.”

“He’s a very good chap and he has a lot of charm. You’ve been thrown together a great deal; I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve come to care for him.”

“I know he isn’t as intelligent as you are. You’ve got a brilliant future before you. He’s so cosy, Roger. I’m not up to your mark really. Dick and I speak the same language.”

“How do you imagine you would live if you were married to him? He could hardly stay on here as my father’s agent.”

“He could get another job.”

“Have you any idea how hard jobs are to get now?”

“That’s our look-out. We want to be married as soon as you’ll give me my freedom.”

He got up and began to walk up and down the room.

He was thinking deeply. He stopped in front of her chair.

“It’ll be an awful blow for my father and mother. I can’t imagine anything they’d hate more.”

“Your people have always been very kind to me, but I should be a fool if. I didn’t know I’ve been a disappointment to them. Your father wanted me so awfully to have a son. When they’ve got over the shock, honestly they won’t mind very much. They’ll think you’ll marry again and have better luck next time.”

“You’ve got it all settled, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking of nothing else for weeks.”

“And supposing I come to the conclusion that this is only a passing infatuation and refuse to let myself be divorced?”

“I should go and live with Dick and force you to divorce me.”

She saw him frown and she almost smiled, for she knew very well what he was thinking. The mere idea of the scandal such a step would cause gave him goose-flesh. But when he spoke it was to give her a shock that she had never anticipated.

“I think I should tell you that the Germans are marching into Poland tomorrow and we shall be at war in twenty-four hours.”

She gave a horrified cry.

“I didn’t say anything about it. I thought you’d all know soon enough and I wanted dear Mother to enjoy her birthday. Dick is in the Territorials. He’ll be called up at once. It’s going to be a long and terrible war. No one can tell what’s going to happen to any of us.”

“Oh, how awful!”

“Dick may be killed or I may be killed. This isn’t the time to think of oneself. The French are unprepared and we’re unprepared. The Germans will go all out to snatch a quick victory. We shall all be in it, every man and woman in the country.”

May tried to control herself, but she couldn’t. She began to cry. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.

“It may be that I haven’t been a very good husband. Poor May. I want you to be happy. But don’t you think this is a moment when we should forget our private interests? I am going to ask you for your own sake, for all our sakes, to wait till after the war. Then if you’re still of the same mind I promise I’ll do everything I can to give you your liberty as quickly as possible.”

She sighed deeply. She was shattered.

“Very well, Roger. I’ll wait.”

“You know, darling, you’ll have to do your bit like everyone else.”

“I shall be thankful to help.”

“You might stow it away in the back of your mind that I love you very much and shall always love you and there’s nothing in the world I want more than your happiness.”

“Except winning the war?” she smiled ironically.

“Except that, yes,” he answered gravely.

And with that answer she saw that he wasn’t thinking of her any more. They sat in silence.

“Hadn’t you better go and see your mother?” she said at last. “If you’re going back tonight after dinner you won’t have another chance of talking to her.”

“Yes, I suppose I had.”

He roused himself unwillingly from his reflections and rose to his feet. He looked at May for an instant; his eyes were cold and his lips thin. She knew what he was thinking: he was impatient that just then she had introduced into his life a complication that might be a distraction from the pressing affairs he had to deal with. It wasn’t her fault; if he had only told her before that war was inevitable she wouldn’t have spoken. She would at least have waited to see what happened. She sighed. She supposed it was unreasonable to expect that in such a terrible crisis her happiness should seem of any particular importance to him. And, of course, her happiness wasn’t of any importance to anyone but herself — and Dick.

Roger walked towards the door, but as he was about to open it, turned back. He gave a light laugh and when he spoke it was in the bright, cheery way in which he was accustomed to speak. At that moment it positively startled her.

“Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you a little present from Warsaw too. As soon as I saw it I knew it was just the sort of thing you’d like.”

He took out of his pocket a small parcel wrapped in tissue paper and undoing it handed her a long gold chain of curious workmanship.

“Unless I’ve been done in the eye it’s an old one.”

“It’s lovely,” said May as he handed it to her.

And it was. It was either Polish or Russian. May was charmed with its delicate beauty and touched that he should have gone to the trouble of picking out something that was so much to her taste, but at the same time she was grievously embarrassed. It seemed shocking to accept a present from him after what had just passed between them.

“I can’t take it, Roger,” she cried miserably.

“Why on earth not? Of course you must take it. It’s much too good for Jane and I practically snatched it away from the French ambassador’s wife. She was crazy to get it. Don’t be a fool, May.”

He spoke with such good nature, with such a breezy friendliness, that she did not know what to say. She flushed deeply.

“Thank you very much. It’s wonderfully kind of you, Roger.”

“That’s a good girl.”

There was an ironical twinkle in his eyes as he nodded and walked out. May looked at the door he had closed behind him as though she could see him stalking along the passage to his mother’s room. She knew that his manner, almost jaunty at the last, had changed the moment he withdrew from her sight and that his face wore once more the stern, vigilant mien that it always wore when he thought no one was looking at him. But whether he thought of her as he went or of the war that was imminent she could not guess; what she knew was that when he entered his mother’s sitting-room there would be no trace that he was anxious or troubled, and she would find him as ever sweet, sympathetic and tenderly affectionate.

May sighed. She sank into a chair and her eyes stared vacantly out of the open window. She had never really understood him. He was a strange, subtle man. Was he deceitful? No, it wouldn’t be fair to call him that: it wasn’t an act that he had been putting on when with so much pleasant friendliness he had given her the necklace she still held in her hands, he had always liked to give her presents, and he had felt all he seemed to feel; his breezy, chaffing, light manner was natural to him; it inspired confidence because it was genuine. And yet it was only a rind that covered the active, calculating wariness within. He was wrapped up in his work, and when he met people he judged them according to the use they might be to its furtherance. Even when he seemed to be gaily immersed in social pleasures she knew that at the back of his mind he was turning over the tortuous schemes he was always concocting. She sometimes felt that the only pure delight he ever experienced was that of triumph when he had circumvented the scheme of one of Britain’s possible enemies or discovered some crafty plan that might be to the country’s disadvantage. Of course his motives were patriotic, no one could have a more passionate love for England than he, but she had an inkling that there was something in his nature, pitiless and rather dreadful, that made him take a peculiar pleasure in his secret work. Because his motives were pure he allowed himself to revel in the crooked ways in which, setting his wits against theirs, he strove to combat the wiles of his adversaries. It was a game he played of which the stakes were the safety and liberty of England, and he found it so absorbing that he could not stop to consider the feelings of others. It was true what she had said, there was no room in his life for her.

May smiled bitterly when she thought that she had once imagined that she loved him. Now that she knew what love was she realized only too clearly that it was not love that had induced her to marry him. That had come about so naturally that she could not blame herself. Her father was killed in the last war and her mother was left with little more than a pension to support her. She had been a school friend of Mrs. Henderson’s and when May’s mother was widowed the Hendersons had offered her one of the cottages in the village. It was only a mile away from Graveney Holt and the two families saw one another constantly. From a very early age May had known that her mother and Roger’s had set their hearts on her marrying him. They both attached a great deal of importance to family and May’s parents, though poor, were what is known as well-connected; and Mrs. Henderson was too disinterested to care that her prospective daughter-in-law was penniless. Roger grew into a tall good-looking boy, and when he came home for the holidays, first from school and then from Sandhurst, she conceived a girlish enthusiasm for him. They were like brother and sister together. A greater familiarity existed between them then, strangely enough, than ever did after they were married. She worshipped him as his mother worshipped him, but she knew now that there was no love in her feeling for him. It was a schoolgirl’s infatuation for a boy, a young man, five years older than herself.

Mrs. Henderson had always been fond of her and she was pleased with the girl’s admiration for the son of whom she was so proud. She treated her as though it were understood that she was the future mistress of the house. She took pains to instil into May her own feeling for the noble pile. She made her love its beauties. She taught her to appreciate treasured pieces of furniture and told her the stories of the ancestors whose portraits hung on the walls. She filled her with her own dismay when economic difficulties forced the General to sell the Filipino Lippi and the Goya. It could not be expected that a young girl should not be dazzled by the slightly faded splendour that surrounded her when she came up to the great house from the modest cottage in the village. It seemed like her real home and she could not refrain from planning what she would do when she became its mistress. Nor could she be insensible to the general feeling in the county that it had been settled long ago that she would marry Roger. There were in the neighbourhood mothers with daughters who were inclined to think that Roger could do better than marry the penniless girl of a deceased naval officer, but since it looked as though there were nothing to do about it, they decided to take a romantic view of the situation. Sometimes May wondered what Roger thought of it. He was easy and friendly, he made her fetch and carry for him when he was a boy, he played tennis and golf with her when she grew older, he danced with her, he chaffed her playfully; but he never gave any sign that he was aware of the plans his mother and hers had made for their future.

Then her mother died. It was a terrible grief to her and she didn’t know how she could have borne it if Mrs. Henderson hadn’t been so wonderfully kind to her. May had nothing now but her pension as an officer’s daughter, she was nineteen, and she wanted to earn her own living. She had a good figure and the first thing that occurred to her was that she might become a mannequin. But Mrs. Henderson would not hear of it.

Jane was married by then and Mrs. Henderson was insistent that she should live with them until her own marriage. It was then that for the first time she came out into the open with the scheme that had before been only vaguely presupposed. She told May that she had always loved her as a daughter and that it was her dearest wish, as it had been her mother’s, that she and Roger should marry. May was too open to pretend to a surprise she did not feel.

“I should be a perfect fool if I hadn’t known that you and Mamma had settled that when I was four and Roger was nine.”

“You like Roger, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Ever since I could walk I’ve thought him wonderful.”

“Then what is to prevent you from getting married as soon as possible?”

“Only Roger. We must let him have a say in the matter, poor brute.”

“Oh, but Roger’s devoted to you.”

“He’s never said so.”

“I suppose he thought you knew. Men are apt to take so much for granted.”

“There are limits.”

“You would marry him if he asked you, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would.” May flushed. “But, darling, you must promise me you won’t suggest it to him. I couldn’t bear to think he was marrying me just to please you.”

Mrs. Henderson smiled.

“My dear, has it never occurred to you that you’re exceptionally pretty? You only want a little more colour to be a raving beauty.”

“You must promise me that.”

“I understand. It’s very natural. I promise you I’ll never say a word to Roger. I think he’s much too clever not to see that if he doesn’t snap you up quickly somebody else will.” She looked at May tenderly. “I’d sooner give my son to you than to anyone in the world. I know how good you are and I know you’re no fool. You’re sweet-tempered and you’re a lady, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that important. Sooner or later Roger will come into the property and if I’m still alive it will be a comfort to me to think that I can safely deliver the place into your hands.”

“Oh, darling, don’t let us count our chickens before they’re hatched.”

“I’ve had a happy life, and I want nothing now but a grandson to dandle on my knee. You must have beautiful children, my pretty.”

May, young though she was then, knew very well how intense was the desire of the General and Mrs. Henderson to see the succession to the estate assured. The family’s fortunes had been started in no very glorious fashion at the Restoration by a clever and time-serving parson who married a poor connection of the great lord to whom he was domestic chaplain. His patron found him useful and advanced him. In due course he became a bishop and, his wife dying, he very prudently married the heiress of a rich haberdasher in the City. When the son she brought him was of a suitable age he married him to another handsome fortune and it was this son who in the reign of Queen Anne built the house in which the Hendersons had lived ever since. He served in Marlborough’s army and on one side of the chimney-piece in the great hall, a pendant to the portrait in full canonicals of the astute bishop, hung the life-size portrait of him in uniform. From that time the Hendersons had been soldiers and country gentlemen and though none had greatly distinguished himself they had for the most part acquitted themselves honourably. They had been decent people who did their duty by their country. No doubt ever entered their minds that God had intended anything else than that they should look after their property as good landlords should, sit on the bench and sentence poachers to the penalties ordained by law, hunt foxes, shoot pheasants, aid the needy, marry according to their station and hand on to their heirs an undiminished estate. And though with the decline of agricultural values their income was now sadly diminished these were still the sentiments of General Henderson and his wife. May at nineteen had no reason to think them controvertible.

She was little expecting it when Roger at last did ask her to marry him. He was home on leave for a few days’ shooting and one very rainy afternoon he was sitting in the library by himself. May had been living with the Hendersons for several months. She happened to go into the library to replace a book she had taken up to her room. She looked about for another.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“No, don’t bother.”

She found a book and was about to leave the room when he stopped her with another question.

“What have you got?”

“Hajji Baba.”

“What made you think of reading that?”

“You were talking about it the other night.”

“I forgot. You’ll enjoy it. It’s grand fun.” He took out his case. “Have a cigarette?”

“Aren’t you working?”

“I’ve been working for hours. I think I deserve a spell off.”

She took the cigarette and lighting it sat on the arm of a chair to show him that she was only going to stay a minute. He looked at her with the slightly quizzical glint in his eyes that even then somewhat disconcerted her.

“You know, May, you’re awfully pretty.”

“It’s nice of you to say so,” she smiled.

“You were pretty awful when you were thirteen or fourteen.”

“I know I was. Frightful.”

“Funny how girls change, almost from one day to the other.”

She could not think of anything to say to this so tried to make a smoke ring. He watched her.

“Not a very good attempt.”

“Rotten.”

“Don’t you think it’s about time we got married?” Her heart gave a great thud against her chest, but she continued to try to make smoke rings.

“I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

“Well, will you?”

He got up from the desk and stood in front of her. He was slightly nervous and it touched her.

“I can’t imagine what put the idea in your head.”

“That’s a lie. You know I’ve wanted to marry you ever since I was ten.”

“Even when I was thirteen and hideous?”

“I admit I wasn’t so keen about it then,” he laughed. But all at once he grew serious again. “May, I think you’re far and away the nicest girl I’ve ever known in my life. I’d rather marry you than anyone else in the world.”

There was one thing he hadn’t said and she waited.

Her cigarette was finished and he took the butt from her fingers. He turned away to put it In an ash-tray. “I’m awfully in love with you.”

“You might have said that before.”

“I thought you knew it. It made me shy to say it in so many words.”

She didn’t know why tears should come to her eyes. She felt a little shy too and it seemed vaguely pathetic. He saw the tears and came and sat with her on the arm of the chair. He took her hand.

“Well, what d’you say to it?”

Because she felt a trifle hysterical she laughed.

“Of course I’ll marry you, Roger. I don’t know if it’s ever struck you, but you’re a great catch.”

Laughing he bent over and kissed her. Since he was a boy, on occasion, when he went off to school or when he came back, he had kissed her on the cheek in the perfunctory, meaningless way in which he kissed Jane, but he had never kissed her before on the mouth. It was a curious sensation. It made her flush; its intimacy was slightly embarrassing.

“Come on,” he said, lifting her to her feet, “let’s go and tell Mother. She’ll be tickled to death.”

A shadow of irritation passed through her mind at his eagerness to do this. She would have liked to stay there alone with him for at least a few minutes. But she suppressed the feeling. He was devoted to his mother and it was only natural that he should want to give her at once the great pleasure it would be to her to hear that they were engaged to be married.

They were married in the village church and went to Paris for their honeymoon. May had never been abroad before and she enjoyed herself. Roger knew Paris well and his French was fluent. They went to Montparnasse and Montmartre. They ate in famous restaurants. It was fun to go about with someone who knew all the ropes and of course because she had known him so long and so well she felt very much at home with him. They had so many common memories that they were never at a loss for something to talk about. They had always been good friends. The only difference was that they slept in the same room. May, brought up in the country and a great reader, was not ignorant of the facts of life; Roger was an affectionate, thoughtful lover and she felt very tenderly towards him when he lay by her side and held her in his arms. For the rest she was glad and proud to give him a pleasure she did not altogether share. She was happy. It amused her that he should only now have discovered that she had a lovely body. She thought she loved him.

After eight years she knew that what she had felt for him was admiration, trust, confidence, affection, anything you like but love.

He was already at the War Office and they took a tiny flat in Chelsea. It was fun to furnish it with the superfluous furniture from Graveney Holt that they rescued from the attics. They settled down to married life. Roger went to the War Office every morning at ten, and at six, when his work was over, went to his club to play bridge for an hour or so before coming back to dinner. Sometimes they dined out or had Roger’s soldier friends and their wives to dine with them; sometimes they went to the pictures or to a play; but most evenings they sat at home and May read or played patience while Roger worked. After the first few months, during which the new flat, the new friends and the excitement of living in London had been sufficient distraction, May began to find time hang somewhat heavily on her hands. She set out on a systematic exploration of the city; she went to the galleries and museums; she visited churches. She was not exactly bored; she only felt slightly let down. She had expected a fuller life. But she was a sensible girl and told herself that it would be different when she had a baby; that would give her plenty to do and she wouldn’t feel lonely any more. But unfortunately there was no sign that she was going to have a baby. She knew how much Roger wanted her to have one, and she knew that his parents were anxiously awaiting the news that she was pregnant. When a year passed and nothing happened she discussed the matter with her mother-in-law. Mrs. Henderson told her not to worry, she was very young, it wouldn’t hurt her to wait a couple of years; but she saw that May was worried and to give her peace sent her to a specialist. He told her that there was nothing to prevent her from having children and advised her to have patience. But when a second year passed and a third she was more than worried and went to him again. The specialist suggested that he should see Roger and after an examination announced that there was nothing in him to account for her sterility; he gave them certain advice. They followed it with no result and as the years went on they began to lose hope. They were normal healthy people, but for no conceivable reason nature seemed to have decided that there should be no result of their union in sexual congress. It made May unhappy, not only on her own account, but because, though he never alluded to her barrenness except jocosely and remained as ever kind, tender and affectionate, she knew that Roger was bitterly disappointed; and, her nerves on edge, she thought that the General sometimes looked at her with something close to annoyance. She imagined him talking it over with his wife.

“I’m afraid we’ve been sold a pup, my dear,” she thought of him saying.

And his wife’s reply.

“Well, George, she looked healthy enough. That’s why I encouraged the marriage, I thought she’d have a baby once a year.”

Of course she was unjust. She knew that. They loved her for herself and never by the smallest word made her feel that she had failed them. But it was more than you could expect from human nature that they shouldn’t grieve.

Early in her married life she had tried to interest herself in Roger’s work, but he had not encouraged her.

“Oh, it’s only a lot of routine stuff,” he said when she asked him to tell her about it. “It would only bore you.”

“Won’t you let me be the judge of that?”

He gave her his friendly, playful glance.

“To tell you the truth, practically the only pull I have at the War Office is that I know how to keep my mouth shut, and believe me, the way some of the nobs shoot their faces off is enough to make your hair stand on end. And you know, after I’ve been up to my eyes in work from ten till six, I’m glad to put it out of my mind for the rest of the day. Once I’ve closed my office door behind me I never give it a thought.”

She knew that wasn’t true; she knew that when he sat in a brown study, by the fire, and gazed at the glancing flames his thoughts were busy with the problems that had occupied him during the day. But she did not insist. As time wore on she discovered certain things about him that she had never suspected. On one occasion they met at dinner the ambassador of a foreign power and his wife. Roger was seated next to her and somewhat to her surprise May saw that he was laying himself out to be as charming to her as he knew how. She had never before seen him pay any woman more attention than civility demanded. After dinner he sat again beside the somewhat massive beauty and openly flirted with her. When they got into the taxi to drive, home May said rather stiffly:

“You seemed to be getting on very well with the ambassador’s wife.”

He chuckled and even in the darkness she could see the gleam in his eyes.

“Did you think I did my stuff well?”

“Beautifully.”

“The damned fool, she thinks she’s irresistible. I gave her the works.”

“I don’t quite know why.”

“Darling, it’s as plain as the nose on your beautiful face. Her husband had told her to pump me and I let her pump me. She swallowed everything I told her and I bet the wires’ll be busy tonight.”

May was silent for a moment.

“You were wonderfully convincing.”

“I thought I was putting on a pretty good show myself.”

Sometimes, as Roger was given more responsible work to do, they had the military attachés of various embassies to dine with them. He was so frank, so amiable, so guileless that no one could have imagined that there was an ulterior motive in anything he said; and if in that convivial little gathering, flushed with wine and warmed by his own good fellowship, he let fall a hint that was almost an indiscretion only May could have suspected that it was calculated. She did not know then whether to admire his astuteness or be disconcerted by his duplicity.

One morning, opening the paper, May saw that a British officer had been arrested and was charged with espionage on behalf of Italy. It was a peculiar shock to her because Roger had brought him one evening to dine at the fiat and she had found him very pleasant. For days people talked of nothing else. It was frontpage stuff. But May had no notion that Roger was in any way connected with it till, meeting his chief at luncheon one day, he congratulated her on the good work her husband had put in.

“I’m not sure that we’d ever have caught the blighter if it hadn’t been for Roger. He worked for months and when he was through we had a cast-iron case. Nice job he did.”

She told Roger that evening what his chief had said.

“I dare say I didn’t do so badly. It wasn’t so easy to get the goods on the fellow; he was as wary as a fox. I had to be careful; one mistake and he’d have hopped over the Channel.”

“I thought him rather nice,” said May.

“He could be very amusing. I saw quite a lot of him. He had no idea we were on to him. You should have seen his face when he was arrested.”

Roger gave a grim chuckle.

“What will they do with him?”

“Give him ten years, I suppose. I’d hang him.” He said it so fiercely that May looked up at him with a start. His eyes were ruthless. She shuddered. She realized that if need were, and he thought himself justified, Roger would hesitate at nothing.

Gradually May resigned herself to the monotony of her married life. She told herself that she had expected too much. It was silly to complain because her girlish dreams had remained unsatisfied. She thought of them sometimes with a smiling sadness. She had no real reason to complain of her lot. She had a husband who was devoted to her and proud of her; everyone told her he was brilliant and it looked as though a distinguished career lay ahead of him; he was kind and considerate and he was faithful to her. He was very appreciative; on all subjects except his work he talked to her as man to man and he attached weight to her opinions. She had a pleasant, pretty flat, and though they were far from rich, she never had to skimp and save to make both ends meet. In the future lay Graveney Holt, that lovely house with all the treasures it contained, the beautiful gardens and the wide-spreading park; and the numerous activities which the possession of the estate must entail.

After they had been married for four years Roger was sent to Japan as member of a mission and was away for three months. It was the first time they had been separated and feeling more lonely than ever after a few weeks she went down to stay at Graveney. She fell very easily into the life that she had led before her marriage. The following year Roger went away again, to Iran; then he went to Australia, and to Egypt and Turkey. He was plainly delighted to see her, on his return from each journey, but after a day or two fell into his old way of taking her for granted. She had an exasperated feeling that he liked to come back to her with something of the same sort of feeling as he had on coming back to his favourite arm-chair and the comfort of his old golf coat. He was more absorbed in his work than ever. She could not help knowing that to that he was prepared without a qualm to sacrifice her feelings, her comfort, her well-being. He would often stay at the War Office till eleven at night, ringing up a quarter of an hour before dinner to say he wouldn’t be coming home, and she spent the evening by herself. On Saturdays, if he could get away, they would drive down to Graveney Holt, but there he was busy with his family, for which his affection was deep and staunch, and with the estate, in the conduct of which he took a keen interest; she felt herself as unnecessary to him as in London. She retired into herself. She was not a woman to make scenes and she was sensible enough to know that they would only irritate Roger. What had she to complain of? Nothing that could be remedied. She remained gracious, pleasant, a trifle silent, and never by a word disclosed that there was an aching emptiness in her heart.

Then the General’s agent died and Roger strongly recommended him to engage an old friend of his called Richard Murray. He had been at school with Roger, and for a year at Sandhurst with him; but his mother, a widow, suffering a financial reverse he had abandoned the notion of going into the Army and had gone into estate agency. May had never met him till she found him installed in the village. She took a fancy to him, and next time Roger came back from abroad told him how much she liked his father’s new agent.

“He’s a rattling good chap,” said Roger. “He’s got an amazing gift for friendship. He’s as straight as a die and what he doesn’t know about his job isn’t worth knowing. I think Father’s damned lucky to have got hold of him.”

May saw a great deal of him when she went down to Graveney. With Jim at Oxford and Tommy at school the house was very quiet, and Dick brought a welcome gaiety into it. He was a bachelor and he came to lunch every Sunday, but Mrs. Henderson asked him in to dinner once or twice a week, and a day seldom passed without his coming to see the General on estate business and stopping for a few minutes to say a few words to the two ladies. Sometimes May met him in the village and they would stop and talk for a little. During the summer holidays he would often come up to make a four at tennis. It gave May pleasure to see him. He was gay, unassuming and easy to talk to. She found that she could say all sorts of things to him that she had never thought of saying to anyone else. She could talk nonsense with him as it was impossible to do with Roger. She was flattered because he found her amusing, and though she told herself that he laughed at her little jests because he laughed easily it was nice to be appreciated. Of course he had charm, immense charm, there was no doubt about that, and it was no wonder that everybody liked him. She asked herself what it was due to. Well, it was the contrast between his grey, strong, curly hair and his bronzed, smooth face; the thick lashes of his blue eyes, and that warm friendly smile that made you feel that his heart went out to you because he had a natural love for his fellow-beings. She had known him for a full year when, in London for a while and as usual alone, she received a note from him to say that he had to come up to town for a night and couldn’t they dine together and go to some place to dance. She thought it very sweet of him to take pity on her solitariness and accepted with pleasure. They spent a delightful evening. He was an unexpectedly good dancer and she hadn’t danced for months. When he dropped her at her door he suggested that they should repeat the experiment next time he came to London. She agreed without hesitation. It was long since she had enjoyed herself so much.

But when she closed the door behind her, instead of going straight to bed, she went into the empty sitting-room and sat down. She was breathless. When he held her hand to bid her good-bye there had been in his eyes a look so tender, so gentle, so strangely understanding, that it stabbed her to the heart. She knew on a sudden that he had realized how empty her life was and was sorry, wistfully sorry for her. And as suddenly she knew that she was in love with him, and had never been in love before. She was frightened out of her wits. That was the last straw. She had been dissatisfied with life, but resigned and determined to make the best of it, but this was going to be hell. It was bad enough to be starving for bread, and be given a stone, but when the bread was there within your reach and you might not stretch out your hand for it, no, that was too much to put up with. Her strong common-sense came to the rescue. There was nothing to be dramatic about. It was only Dick’s charm. Charm? People always said it meant nothing. Roger had often told her that one must be wary of people who had it. Dick was charming to everyone, because he couldn’t help it; it had probably never occurred to him that it had such a devastating effect, and there was not the smallest reason to suppose that he cared two straws for her. He was a naturally friendly soul and had wanted to give her a good time. But what had made him see that she was unhappy and lonely? She was sure that never by a word or sign had she betrayed her feeling, and was convinced that neither Roger nor Jane nor anyone else had an inkling of it. But had he seen it or was that just her fancy, and had she read in the blueness of his eyes a meaning that was not there? She shrugged her shoulders.

“I dare say it’s only because I’m dog tired,” she murmured. “I shall feel quite differently tomorrow.”

She went to bed and soon fell into a deep sleep. Next day as she had foreseen, she found herself able to consider the matter with calm. It was no good shutting her eyes to the fact; she was in love; but it never occurred to her for a moment that she could do anything but push back into her inmost heart this new trouble as for so long she had pushed back her frustrated hopes. It was impossible never to see Dick, but she made up her mind not to go down so frequently to Graveney as during Roger’s absences she had been in the habit of doing, and should Dick ever ask her again to go dancing with him firmly to refuse. She must try not to think of him. With the world in an unsettled state war might be imminent, Roger told her it was bound to come sooner or later, and to distract her mind she thought it would be a good plan to take up some occupation that would enable her to be useful if it broke out. That very morning she made inquiries about nursing and a couple of days later started upon a course. That had the added advantage that it would give her an excuse not to go down to Graveney except for an occasional week-end. She found that it helped to have work to do and she took it seriously. A month passed without any sign from Dick and she laughed at herself wryly when she thought of the brave resolutions she had made to say no when next he came up to London and asked her to go out with him. She had been right, what she had thought was deep feeling on his part was no more than natural kindliness, and he would be dismayed if he knew the effect it had had on her. But she was angry with herself because she could not but feel a trifle sore.

Then one evening, when she had just got back from the hospital, and was tired and depressed, the telephone bell rang. She answered and the blood rushed to her heart when she heard Dick’s voice.

“I’m only in London for the day; I’m going back tonight. I was wondering if you’d give me a spot of dinner.”

This was so little what she had expected that she lost her head and did not make the obvious excuse that she was engaged.

“There’s nothing much to eat. I was just going to have an egg,” she said.

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll bring in a pâté or something.”

It was impossible to say that he mustn’t come. And she wanted to see him so badly. His voice over the telephone, that warm, caressing voice, took all her strength away.

“You needn’t do that. I’ll manage.”

“I’ll be up at half past seven.”

She sent the maid out to buy a sole and some cutlets, had a bath and put on a very simple dress. She seldom used rouge, but her cheeks were so pale that she felt obliged to put on a little. Then, with one eye on the clock, she read the evening paper. The minutes passed with maddening slowness. When she heard the bell ring she started violently; but when he came in and gave her his cordial handshake there was nothing to show that she was not her usual placid and amiable self. He explained that a sudden piece of business had brought him unexpectedly up to London or he would have written and asked her to keep the evening for him. She gave him a glass of sherry. They dined. He talked in his usual fluent, pleasant way, telling her the news of the estate. He asked her advice on some point that was troubling him and when she gave it told her he thought it first-rate and would act on it. She could not but be pleased and flattered. They discussed his plan to introduce modern methods of agriculture. He was in full agreement with her on the necessity of ameliorating housing conditions for the labourers. Their conversation could have been heard by any one and no one could have found in it anything that was not perfectly natural; and yet she had an uneasy feeling that it was not quite natural. She tried to persuade herself that it was only her fancy that he was talking in order to avoid a silence fraught with danger, and that there was in the tone of his voice something strange. The look in his eyes was anxious and did not accord with the sense of his words. Folly. She was reading into them something that was due only to her own imagination.

They finished dinner and went back to the sitting-room. They drank their coffee and May lit a cigarette. Dick asked her if he might smoke his pipe. He was silent while he lit it and then somehow the silence, like an emanation rising from the depths, dark and terrifying, a thing with a sinister life of its own, seized them, thrusting itself between them and yet drawing them together as in a common danger. Though May was looking down at the floor she knew that Dick’s eyes were fixed upon her. She felt herself trembling. It was absurd that she could not speak. The silence was unendurable. At last she raised her eyes and they met his. That seemed to break the spell.

“You know, a very awkward thing has happened,” he said, still in that strange voice. “I’ve fallen head over heels in love with you.”

She did not say anything. She looked at him and tears filled her eyes and trickled down her face.

“Are you in love with me?”

She still could not speak, she only nodded.

“Bore, isn’t it?”

She laughed through her tears. It was so like him to say that.

“D’you think I ought to go away?”

She gave a gasp. Her face was suddenly twisted with anguish.

“No,” she cried violently. But she made a great effort to control herself. “The Hendersons wouldn’t hear of it. The General thinks you’re indispensable.”

It was a fact that Dick had brought order into the estate which the last agent, old and none too competent, had allowed to fall into poor condition and for the first time in years it was being run at a profit. At that rate it would be possible to start paying off the mortgages.

“It’s serious, you know,” he continued. “It’s not just a passing infatuation that I can get over. I’m in it up to the neck and I’m in it for good.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. I might get another job as agent somewhere else, or I might emigrate. That’s what fellows generally do when they’re up a gum tree.” There was another long silence and it was May who broke it.

“Can’t we ignore it?” He did not answer and presently she went on. “Why should you throw up a good job and one that suits you? No one need know anything about it. We’re not going to do anybody any harm. We needn’t even talk about it. It’s just something between ourselves.”

“I don’t think I quite know what you mean.”

“I don’t love Roger, you know, but I’d never do anything that was — oh, you must know what I mean. I think the only thing to do is to go on as we were. After all, we’re both decent people, aren’t we?”

“Roger’s my oldest friend and he got me this job. Of course I wouldn’t do the dirty on him.”

“Well, then?”

With his elbows on his knees and his face on his clenched fists he fell into deep thought. She watched him anxiously. Every now and then he gave her a troubled glance.

“It’s a hell of a situation,” he said at last.

“D’you want to go?”

“God, no. It would break my heart,” he cried.

“Well, then, let’s face it. Surely we’ve got the strength.”

“You don’t understand. You think we’ll get over it. But I don’t want to get over it.”

“I don’t either. It’s all I’ve got to live for.”

They left it at that. He agreed to let things slide and see how they went. She felt that he was prepared to lean on her strength and she exulted in the thought that he was glad to do so. It made her proud and confident.

“Now you’d better go,” she said.

“I suppose I had,” he answered, getting up. “May I kiss you?”

She did not speak. He took her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers. She had never known that a kiss could mean so much. She threw her arms round his neck.

“Darling, darling, I love you,” she murmured.

“My sweet.”

The kiss shattered her. When he was gone she stood where he had left her, her hands to her breasts, and felt that at last life had meaning. She was so happy that she felt there was nothing more for her to ask.

She was a very innocent woman. She had been persuaded that they could see one another occasionally and, sharing this secret, continue to act as though they were the casual, happy-go-lucky friends they had been before. It never occurred to her that nature could take a hand in the matter. Sex had not been an important matter in May’s life and her relations with her husband had been perfunctory. But now a revolution took place in her. Her imagination would not let her rest and shocking, enchanting dreams troubled her nights. The touch of Dick’s hand sent the blood rushing to her heart. The sound of his voice on the telephone made her knees wobble beneath her. She desired him as much as she knew he desired her. Sometimes he would look at her and the passion in his eyes possessed her with all the violence of carnal possession. She knew now what it was that had from the first attracted her to him, his overpowering virility, it called to her with a terrifying force, and she exulted in it. And because she knew that she had the strength never to yield to her desire she did not even attempt to curb it. She gloried in it. It made her feel more alive than ever before. She had a sense of triumph because she could feel something she had never thought to feel. She was ashamed of nothing now. She would stand in her room, stark naked, and look at herself in the glass and revel in the beauty of her slim figure, her breasts small and virginal, and think of Dick’s body warm against hers and his arms round her. And she would laugh because everyone thought her cold. But it was not only from sexual desire that she loved Dick; she felt herself so much at home with him, so confidentially at ease. It was balm to her soul merely to be in the same room with him. He was the only person in the world with whom she was not a little shy.

Thus things went on. May’s conscience was tranquil because after that first time when Dick told her of his love, he had never even kissed her. Though they had not agreed upon it, by mutual consent, as it were, they took care not to speak of their feelings for each other; and they never said a thing to one another that anyone might not have heard. Of course what made it easier was that May’s work at the hospital kept her much in London and that when they met at Graveney it was almost always in the company of others. They could have counted on the fingers of one hand the occasions during that period on which they had been alone together. There was one thing of which May was quite certain, that there was no one at Graveney Holt, neither Jane with her sharp tongue and sharp eyes, nor that Austrian girl the Hendersons had given refuge to, who had the remotest suspicion that Dick was anything more to her than her father-in-law’s agent.

But when Roger telegraphed that he would soon be coming home they felt that the situation they must face was insufferable. It revolted May to receive him with the pretence that she was still his loving wife. She knew that after a sexual abstinence that had lasted so long he would want a normal gratification; he was a man, young and strong, with healthy appetites, and though sex had never absorbed him he had his natural share of desire and he needed to satisfy it as he needed to satisfy his desire for food at dinner-time. May had never quite overcome the embarrassment with which the sexual act had filled her and now she felt that she could not possibly submit to it. The thought disgusted her and to commit it with him seemed grossly indecent. With Dick it would have been natural, inevitable, sacred. She had an inkling that Dick was thinking of it too. His eyes were worried and he, so frank and open as a rule, was unusually silent, as though he were brooding over a subject he could not bring himself to discuss. A day or two before Roger was due, lying in wait to catch him when he came out of the General’s study, she stopped him.

“What do you say to my coming to your house this afternoon? I think we ought to have a talk.”

“That’s O.K. by me,” he answered.

She had been there two or three times with Mrs. Henderson to see that his maid of all work kept it clean and tidy, but she had never been to it alone before, nor of late at all. It was a pleasant house, with a walled garden, on the outskirts of the village; but it was large for a single man and Dick only used two of the rooms. He ate in the living-room, comfortable with the technical books of his trade and mystery stories, radio, pipes, tobacco, gramophone records, papers, magazines and all the litter of an untidy bachelor. It had a pleasant, lived-in, cosy feel.

“You know what I wanted to talk about?” she said when she sat down in one of the big, shabby chairs.

“I can guess.”

He smiled, but his smile was wan.

“I thought I could go through with it. It seemed possible when Roger was away and wouldn’t be back for ages. But now I know I can’t.”

“God knows I don’t want you to. I love you so much, May.”

“I know. I love you too. I can’t pretend, and I don’t believe Roger would want me to. Wouldn’t it be better to tell him the truth?”

“I’m all for the truth.”

“Heaven knows I’ve given it a good trial.”

“How much in love with you is he?”

They spoke elliptically, leaping over intermediate remarks, for they understood one another so perfectly that you would have fancied they followed one another’s thought without the need of speech.

“I don’t think he’s ever asked himself. He’s taken it for granted that a husband loves his wife and a wife loves her husband.”

“I owe a great deal to him. He’s an awfully good chap. It’s beastly to play him a dirty trick like this.”

“I know it is. He’s a reasonable man; he’ll know we couldn’t help ourselves.”

“You know I haven’t a bob except what I earn here. I’ve got about two hundred pounds in the bank.”

“Does that matter?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“I don’t see that we’ve got anything to reproach ourselves with.”

“Of course you know what you’re giving up. This place and everything that goes with it.”

“It’s a prison. It stifles me.”

He knew the idea that was in her mind though she had made no mention of it.

“D’you think he’d let you go?”

“He can’t keep me against my will. I don’t think he’d want to; that’s not in his nature.”

“I suppose it would have been better for you if I’d never come here.”

“Oh, don’t say that. It’s not true.”

He pondered.

“I think you ought to know what you’re in for. Poverty.”

“I’ve been poor before.”

“It won’t make a very pretty story, the son’s wife running off with her father-in-law’s agent.”

“Do you care?”

“Not a damn,” he laughed.

“Neither do I,” she laughed back.

“Come and sit on my knee. God damn it, let’s have something we can blame ourselves for.”

She moved over to him and put her arms round his neck. For the second time he kissed her.

“I feel so intolerably happy,” she murmured.

They talked it over and decided that she should ask Roger to allow himself to be divorced and if he refused they would force him to divorce her by going away together.

And now she had done what they had arranged only to receive the shattering blow that in a few hours the country would be at war. What was there to do now except what she had told Roger she was willing to do? Wait. She smiled when she thought how wrong Roger was when he imagined that she could change. It was funny how such an intelligent man could be so stupid. The dinner-bell rang and May roused herself from her reflections. The maid had got her bath ready. May undressed and stepped into it. She inhaled the pleasant smell of bath salts.

“I shan’t have luxuries like this when I’m married to Dick,” she chuckled.

Roger drove back to London after dinner.

III

NEXT DAY at dawn the Germans invaded Poland and forty-eight hours later, on the third of September, Britain was at war. It was Sunday. There was not yet a hint of autumn in the air and the sun shone radiant in a cloudless sky. As you stood on the terrace and gazed at the peaceful scene, so fresh, so green, so mild, so amiable, it was almost impossible to realize that for hours already tanks had been thundering across the Polish frontier and bombers dropping their hideous loads on the defenceless capital. The bells of the little church in the village, the church where generations of Hendersons lay buried, called the parishioners to morning service with their familiar peal. They had a friendly, welcoming sound which, as never before, comforted the anguished heart. Mrs. Henderson and May alone went. They prayed for peace. Dick, as was usual, came to lunch and in the course of the afternoon May found an opportunity to tell him of her conversation with Roger. He listened attentively.

“I see his point,” he said when she had finished. “I can wait, darling.”

“I can wait too.”

“It may take a year to smash ’em, it can’t take longer than that, and we’ve got all our lives before us.”

“I’m glad I told him. I’m glad everything is aboveboard.”

He took her hand and gave it a little squeeze. They were happy to be together. They did not even need to talk very much; they had so much confidence in each other that there was no occasion for the common endearments of lovers and their intimacy was such that they found refreshment in one another’s silence.

But it was a sad day. No one had the heart to play tennis. They could talk of nothing but the war. They listened to the radio and commented eagerly on every scrap of news they heard. They got Paris and tried to get Warsaw. At six they gathered together to listen to the King’s speech. Big Ben struck the hour. It filled the great hall of Graveney Holt with its reverberation. The speech began with these words.

“In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depths of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.”

May and Mrs. Henderson began to cry and Jane nervously painted her scarlet lips.

“The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then with God’s help we shall prevail. May He bless and keep us all.”

For a moment there was an awed silence.

“God save the King,” said the General.

“It’s no good, I must have a drink after that,” cried Ian, his great booming voice husky. “If I weren’t the typical strong silent Englishman I think I should probably have a good cry now.”

It relieved the tension.

“No one knows what it is to be married to a damned fool like that,” exclaimed Jane, “but about once a year he does have a bright idea. For God’s sake give me a whisky and soda, Ian, and don’t drown it with soda or I’ll kill you.”

The General and Ian wanted to offer their services at once and so started off for London bright and early next morning. Ian, before his marriage, had been in the Grenadiers and proposed to join his old regiment. Mrs. Henderson, Jane and May followed a little later. Mrs. Henderson had a plan and since she thought she might need Roger’s help phoned him to ask if he could possibly look in at Jane’s house between five and six. But when they had been gone about an hour Dora asked Jim if he would drive her up to town. She was worried by her position as an enemy alien and wished to go to the Home Office to find out for herself where she actually stood.

“Oh, you’ll be all right,” he said. “Father’ll settle all that.”

“Your father’s got more important things to do than to fuss about me,” she insisted. “Please.”

He had looked forward to spending the day alone with her.

“It seems rather rough on Tommy to leave him all alone,” he said.

“Oh, he’ll be all right. He can amuse himself,” she answered a trifle impatiently.

Graveney Holt was only ten miles from the sea.

“I thought we might go and have a bathe. It’ll be beastly in London in this heat.”

“I must go. Really. If you won’t take me I shall go by train.”

“Oh, all right,” he smiled. “Of course I’ll take you.”

She slipped her arm through his. She had got her way.

“Couldn’t we dine together and come down after dinner?”

Jim gave a little gasp of delight and his face lit up.

“Come on then, we’ll have a lark.”

When they arrived in London she told him that she wished to go about her business alone. She thought it probable that she would have to wait about for hours and would not hear of it when he told her that he would be only too glad to wait with her. She was quite firm.

“It would get on my nerves. It would only make me impatient to think I was trying your patience.”

He suggested then that she should go to Jane’s when she was through and he would wait for her there.

“I shall have to tell Mother that we’ve come up to town and shan’t be back till late.”

“I don’t think I shall go to your sister’s. She doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, what nonsense. Of course she likes you.” Dora shook her pretty head with decision.

“That’s what you think,” she said tartly. “I know.” They arranged to meet at six in St. James’s Park at Queen Anne’s Gate and go to a newsreel before dinner. She left him with a smile and a jaunty wave of the hand. Jim watched her thread her way through the crowd in Parliament Street till he lost sight of her. He liked her gallant carriage and the energy of her walk. Because he had nothing to do he went to the National Gallery, but finding that the pictures had been put away, went to the club to which he had recently been elected. He found no one there he knew. He read the early editions of the evening papers and then the news on the tape. He lunched. Then, over a cup of coffee in the smoking room, he surrendered himself to his reflections. They were none too pleasant. He hated war; he thought it senseless and criminal. He had long declared that he would take no part in it if it broke out and now the moment had come to show that he had meant what he said. He knew that a lot of the fellows who had thought with him, who had been so loud in their denunciations of the folly of war, would be carried away by the wave of patriotism that was sweeping the country, and, cravenly forsaking their principles, hasten to join up. He would only despise himself if he followed their example. They would say he was a coward; it wasn’t true. If they only knew how much more courage it needed to stand up alone and friendless against common opinion than to stand side by side with your comrades and let yourself be shot at! They would say he was soft and feared the hardship and discomfort, the cold, the wet, the intolerable boredom of trench life; that wasn’t true either. It wasn’t very pleasant to see the finger of scorn pointed at you, but it was much worse to lose your soul alive. Now was the time to prove what stuff he was made of; he would be ashamed to surrender now. His self-respect was at stake and whatever the consequences he must follow the dictates of his conscience. He loved his father and mother and he knew that his decision must cause them bitter pain. Jane would mock him and Tommy would be aghast. He didn’t quite know how Roger would take it. Oh, yes, he did. With icy disapproval. Oh, well, none of that could be helped. He must put up with whatever came. He was in for a bad time all right. Thank God he had the strength to endure it. He had made up his mind and nothing that anyone could say should make him swerve from the clear path of duty. You would never have thought it possible for that pleasant young face to assume an expression of such stern determination.

“Sooner or later there must be a show-down,” he said to himself. “And the sooner the better.”

He made up his mind at the first opportunity to tell them all what he had resolved and to clarify his thoughts sat down at a desk and wrote them out as succinctly as he could. When he had finished he glanced at the clock. His mother should be at Jane’s now and he might just as well go there and wait till it was time to meet Dora. His eyes softened as he thought of her and his moody look grew tender. She understood him and sympathized with him and believed in him. Nothing mattered really as long as he didn’t lose her. He loved her with all his heart. If she’d have him he’d marry her tomorrow. She was beautiful. But she was more than that; she was good and clever and brave. It was not only love he felt for her; it was deep respect. Though she was but a year younger than himself he knew there was much he could learn from her. She made him feel very humble.

He left the club, got into his car and driving down St. James’s Street crossed the Park. Jane had a little Georgian house in Westminster, close to the Abbey, and with her infallible sense of unfitness had furnished it in a style of aggressive modernity, so that her drawing-room with its chromium plate, cubist pictures and fantastic draperies looked more like the waiting-room of a beauty parlour than a room in which any human being could take his ease. She was dressed to suit her setting and with her marcelled and dyed hair, her painted face and her monocle would have made a caricaturist throw up his hands in despair. His malice could not have made her more absurd than she had made herself. She was the only person there whom the events of the last three days appeared not to have touched. Mrs. Henderson and May were subdued. They had been to Westminter Abbey and were still shaken by the sight, tragic and yet heartening, of the many people silently praying. The General and Ian, who had just arrived, were having a drink. Jim told his mother how he chanced to be in London and added that he was taking Dora out to dinner.

“I’m glad,” she said, smiling at him fondly. “Sometimes I’m afraid it’s very dull for her in the country. It’ll do her good to see a bit of life for a change.”

“What happened to you at the War Office?” Jim asked Ian.

“Need you ask?” answered Jane before he could speak. “Did you ever see anyone look more like a bear with a sore head?”

“Can you wonder?” he exploded. “I went and told them I wanted to rejoin my old regiment and some damned little whipper-snapper told me I was too old. Me! Too old at forty. I’m in the prime of life.”

“I tried to see Hore-Belisha,” said the General, “but he was busy, and I only saw his private secretary. I told him I didn’t mind what I did as long as I did something. I can’t say he was very encouraging. ‘This is going to be a young man’s war,’ he said.”

“But, damn it, I am a young man,” Ian boomed. “I tell you this, I’m going to get into it somehow. Roger ought to be able to wangle something for me.”

Mrs. Henderson turned to her husband.

“George dear, May and I have been talking things over and with your approval I want to take some evacuated children. If we made the large drawing-room and the ball-room into dormitories I think we could accommodate fifty or sixty.”

“Of course it’ll be an upset,” he said, “but in these times we mustn’t think of that. It’ll give you something to do, my dear, and what’s more, something very much worth while.”

“May and I can look after them and I’m sure Dora’ll be only too glad to give a hand. You know how competent she is.”

“She’s that all right.”

Mrs. Henderson went on to explain in detail what arrangements she and May had devised and they were still discussing them when Roger came in. Ian attacked him at once.

“Look here, Roger, I want to have a word with you.”

“Give me a drink, old boy. I know exactly what you’re going to say. You want to get back into uniform and so does Father. You must have patience. Before we’re through with this show every man and woman in this country will be wanted. Don’t make any mistake, it’s going to be a long and terrible business.”

He looked very soldierly in his uniform, a fine and upright figure, and there was a cheerful composure in his manner that inspired confidence. He gave May a friendly little nod and she smiled faintly in return. He sat down beside his mother and as soon as she was sure of his attention she told him of her plan. He made one or two suggestions and promised to find out what she must do to put it into effect. May knew he must have important matters to think about, and much to do, and she could not help admiring the kindly patience with which he listened to his mother’s long-winded explanations. He was a good son and a good friend. He was the sort of man you could rely on, but he was the sort of man you couldn’t love. May had entered into Mrs. Henderson’s scheme with eagerness not only because she was anxious to do whatever she could in the emergency, but also because it offered an escape from a situation that had caused her disquiet. Their flat was small; there were a living-room and a dining-room, there were two rooms behind the kitchen for the cook and the maid, a bedroom with twin beds for Roger and her, and a smaller one that had been intended for the use of the expected baby. They had taken the flat with the idea that it would do for two or three years and when other babies made it necessary to have more space they would move into a larger one. But no baby had come and Roger had turned the extra room into a study where he could keep his books and papers and receive visitors whom it was imprudent for him to see at the War Office. Of course this room could be turned into a bedroom but it might be that he would need it now more than ever; moreover, she felt a certain embarrassment at suggesting that they should no longer share the same room; it was an awkward thing to do, and Jane who liked to look in on her when she had nothing better to do would soon find out what she had done, and then the whole family would know that there was a change in their relations. It was part of the spirit of her bargain with Roger that the arrangement he had agreed to should remain a secret between them. Mrs. Henderson’s plan solved the difficulty. May would be living at Graveney for the duration of the war and Roger could have the flat to himself.

“Oh, and there’s something else, Roger,” said Mrs. Henderson, when she had finished with the children, “I wanted to talk to you about Dora. She’s afraid she’ll be interned, but there’s no risk of that really, is there?”

“They’ll round up the German men, but I don’t suppose they’ll bother about the women.”

“She’s not German, she’s Austrian. Your father and I are prepared to vouch for her.”

“The difficulty is that you live within five miles of—” he hesitated for an instant “ — of a military objective.”

“You needn’t be so mysterious about it, Roger,” said Jim, a trifle acidly. “Everyone in the county knows that you’ve taken over the land to build a secret airfield there.”

Roger shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose that’s so. But we’re going to take damned good care that the Germans don’t, and I don’t suppose the authorities will want aliens living in the immediate neighbourhood.” He turned again to his mother. “What do you know about this girl?”

Mrs. Henderson told him Dora’s moving story. “With all those children in the house she’ll be invaluable. You know Jane isn’t much use at that sort of thing.”

“None,” interjected Jane.

“And May and I couldn’t possibly manage alone.”

“What do you think of this girl, May?” he asked.

“Dora’s a good worker and she’s willing to put her hand to anything. She couldn’t dislike the Germans more.”

“No one could be more anti-Nazi than she is,” Mrs.

Henderson went on. “Her stories of the way the Germans treated those poor Austrians when they seized the country simply make your blood boil.”

“What’s her name?” asked Roger.

“Dora Friedberg.”

“I’ll just make a note of it in case of need,” he said, taking out his note-book and scribbling in it. “In your place I wouldn’t worry just yet. When the regulations for aliens are issued Father can go and talk it over with the chief constable. If he guarantees her I expect it’ll be all right.”

“Shall you be going over to France, Roger?” asked the General.

“I’m trying to wangle it. I certainly don’t want to spend the war sitting in an office in Whitehall.”

“What d’you think’s going to happen in Poland?”

“The Poles were very confident when I left. My own impression is that they can’t hold out for more than three months.”

“No longer than that?”

“Well, that’ll be something. It’ll give us time to look round and get a bit more ready than we are now.”

He turned to Jim and with the affectionate look in his eyes that always came in to them when he talked with any member of his own family, jokingly asked him:

“Well, old boy, how d’you like the prospect of forming fours in a barrack square?”

Jim did not answer for a moment. The time had come and it seemed to him that his hands and feet had suddenly gone cold. He went very white. He glanced round the room and because he was nervous his eyes were hostile when they met Roger’s.

“I don’t like it at all,” he said deliberately. “I’m not going to do it.”

Mrs. Henderson smothered an exclamation and looked anxiously at her husband. He stared at Jim as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Jane, her lips compressed in disapproval, took out her lipstick and began to paint them. Roger knew nothing of Jim’s pacifist views; he had not seen him for some time and for one reason or another no one had thought fit to tell him. He gave Jim a quick, puzzled glance and then after a moment’s pause, laughed.

“You’ll have to, old boy. You’ll be called up and you’d much better go of your own accord. It looks better, you know.”

Jim did not move. It was with something like scorn on his face that he answered. He was sure of himself now.

“I think war is horrible and senseless. What did the last war do? Killed millions of men and left as many men halt, lame and blind. And what for? To start again after twenty years of misery and unrest. If you like to be such damned fools as to fight you can. I’m not going to.”

No one spoke for a while. Roger looked at his brother reflectively.

“I didn’t know you were a pacifist, Jim,” he said as casually as he might have said that he didn’t know his brother was a vegetarian.

“Well, you know now.”

Roger turned to the General.

“Did you know about this, Father?” he asked with an air of half-amused indulgence.

The General made a little gesture of helpless bewilderment.

“I knew that Jim went about saying he was a pacifist. I didn’t take it very seriously; I thought it was just a lot of undergraduate nonsense and if war came he’d forget it.”

Jim grew angry. His brother’s manner, his father’s words, making him seem like a naughty, troublesome child, deeply affronted him. But he controlled himself.

“You were wrong, Father,” he said, rising to his feet and speaking with all the earnestness of which he was capable. “I think that war is wicked. At Oxford I signed a solemn declaration that if it broke out I would take no part in it. You despise me because I won’t break my word. I should despise myself if I did.”

“No one despises you, old boy,” said Roger. “We’re only trying to understand.”

His voice was conciliatory, almost caressing, and there was a loving kindness in his eyes. May, watching him, recognized that look. They were attached to one another with an unusual love, the members of that family, and though you married into it, though they were fond and indulgent, you remained, in some strange way, outside it. They never felt completely themselves except in one another’s company. Jim frowned. It would have been easier if his brother had upbraided him, he could have coped with bitter words, but that gentle tone, the deep affection in those eyes so like his own, nearly broke him. He clenched his hands, but when he spoke he hardly knew his own voice.

“I believe in God. I believe in peace and goodwill to all men. I believe that if humanity is to advance we must tear hate out of our hearts and put love in its place. This isn’t the moment to hesitate. It’s now that we’ve got to make our stand, we who hate war, and bear witness to our faith.”

Roger answered with a deep seriousness equal to his own.

“We all hate war, old boy. But we think our honour is at stake.”

“Poland!” Jim cried scornfully. “It was Belgium last time. What will it be next? Afghanistan? Ecuador? Bunk!”

“And we think our freedom is at stake. We’re fighting for everything that makes life worth living.”

Jim interrupted him hotly.

“We’re going to make the world safe for democracy a second time. Really, Roger. I thought you were intelligent.”

Meanwhile Ian, redder in the face than ever, had been puffing and blowing and now could restrain himself no longer.

“But look here, Jim, if the Germans start invading this country d’you mean to say you’re not going to resist?”

Jim turned on him angrily.

“Good God, Ian, don’t bring up all those stale arguments over again. We’re sick to death of them. No, I’m not. And if they come to my house and take everything that’s in it, I’ll let them take it. And if they try to rape my sister—”

Before he could finish Jane broke in with a shrill cackle of laughter.

“Don’t bother about that, Jim. I shall know how to deal with that perfectly.”

He flushed. He gave Jane a piteous look and his voice was not quite steady when he continued.

“D’you think I like to find myself in this position? D’you think I like disappointing you and angering you? It would be so much easier to toe the line and put my principles in my pocket. But I can’t. I tell you I can’t.

They can beat me, they can put me in prison, they can stand me up against a wall and shoot me — I will not serve in the Army, I will not kill, I will not do anything to help others to kill.”

“No one’s going to put you up against a wall and shoot you, old boy,” said Roger mildly. “You’ll have to go before a tribunal and state your reasons for refusing military service, and if they’re accepted you’ll be put to some work unconnected with the war.”

“That I’m quite willing to do.”

Roger gazed at his brother and in his harassed eyes was now a deep compassion.

“I’m afraid you’re in for a rather rough time, old boy.”

“I can’t help that. I’ve got to do my duty as I see it.”

“We’ve all got to do that.”

Roger took a cigarette case from his pocket and took out a cigarette. He tapped one end against the silver. He seemed lost in thought.

“Is there anything more you want to say to me?” Jim asked aggressively.

“Nothing.”

“Then I’ll go. I’ve got to meet Dora. Good night, Mother. Good night, Father.”

He glanced at his father and for a moment, staring, stood stock still. He was as taken aback as though someone for no reason had suddenly struck him. Tears, scalding tears were trickling down that worn, lined face. It was such a dreadful sight that Jim gasped. Then, with a hoarse cry of anguish, he flung out of the room. For a while no one spoke.

“I’m afraid this is a bad blow for you, Father,” said Roger, at last.

Mrs. Henderson got up and sat beside her husband. She took his handkerchief out of his pocket and put it in his hand. He took it and dried his eyes. He tried to laugh.

“I’m sorry to make such an exhibition of myself.”

“Don’t take it too hard, darling,” she said.

“I’m so ashamed. I don’t know what I did wrong. The boy couldn’t have turned out like that if I hadn’t been somehow to blame.” He sighed. “The world of today is too much for me. I’ve lived too long; it’s about time I made way for you, Roger, my boy.”

There was another silence and then Mrs. Henderson spoke.

“The boy’s got a right to his own opinions. After all, that’s one of the things we’re fighting for. I don’t suppose it was easy for him to say the things he did just now and I’m afraid he’s dreadfully unhappy. He’s doing what he thinks is right. I beseech you all not to make it harder for him.”

“Are we expected to treat him as if he was a damned fine fellow?” asked Jane acidly.

You would never have thought that Mrs. Henderson’s face could assume an expression of such sternness. Jane lowered her eyes before her mother’s imperious gaze.

“You’re expected to treat him as my dearly loved son. The laws of England give him the right to do what he feels is his duty. No one in my family shall blame him. I will allow none of you by anything you say or anything you do to hurt him.”

IV

JIM DROVE through the quiet streets of Westminster, crossed Victoria Street and parked his car at the entrance to St. James’s Park. He went in. It was early and Dora wouldn’t be there yet, but that was just as well, for he was shattered, and he needed a little while to compose himself. He longed for her. He had never wanted her as he wanted her now. He knew he was doing the right thing, but he was wretched and she would comfort him. She was wise and good. It had been a great happiness to him to discover that she was in complete agreement with him in his opinions. She was indeed as ardent a pacifist as himself. Though like him she knew the actual horror of war only from hearsay she had the personal experience of its bitter after-math. She had seen the despair of industrious workers who could get no work and had to sit by while their children died of starvation; she had seen the grey faces of the gaunt and hungry; she had seen the bitterness that warped the souls of those for whom tomorrow must be as hopeless as today; she had seen the brave grow cowardly, the generous mean and the honest deceitful; she had seen hatred grow up in the hearts of those who had nothing for those who had a pittance; she had seen class venomously attacking class; she had seen virtue perish, and all that lent grace to life; and the values that give man his dignity, honour, truth, loyalty, uprightness, made the mock of fools and scoundrels. And what had brought it about? A stupid, senseless war, a war brought about by greedy, ambitious, unscrupulous knaves. The misery of half a continent was the price of defeat.

And what was the reward of victory? Profiteers had made fortunes. Night clubs had raked in money hand over fist. Restaurants had done thriving business. Motor car manufacturers had sold a multitude of cars. Unemployment reached staggering proportions. The miners starved. The dole sapped the independence and the spirit of those who found in it a miserable subsistence. The moneyed wasted their substance in witless dissipation. It seemed as though the only sensible thing was to have a good time and the only foolish one to count the cost. You were honest and sober, chaste and decent; oh God, what à bloody prig! To take serious things seriously; oh, my pet, how shy-making! Virtue and valour — Christ, what a crashing bore! Flippancy took the place of wit and cynicism of wisdom. Vice was no longer shameful, sloth abject and intemperance discreditable. To be a gigolo was an honourable profession and if a kept woman gave good enough parties half the world would scramble for invitations to them. That was what the war had brought to England, an upper class dead to its responsibilities, a middle class that had renounced its standards and a working class, ill-housed, ill-fed and resentful.

Victors and vanquished, they had both been defeated. And now, fools and knaves, they had blundered into war again. No matter what they thought of him, no matter the pain and the anguish, the disgrace and humiliation, Jim swore that he for his part would be true to his conviction. It happened that he was walking by the ornamental water, and suddenly growing conscious of the pretty charming scene he stopped to look at it. An engaging smile broke on his lips as his eyes fell on the two pelicans that were waddling on the grass with an air of self-importance. Ducks of bright plumage were swimming on the water and one of them dived down every now and then and you saw its tail flutter jauntily on the surface. Mothers with their children playing about them were sitting on the public benches. Here and there on a chair, reading a book, was a tired-looking woman. Jim sauntered on. There was an old gentleman on a bench reading an evening paper. A couple of soldiers in khaki strolled along and a Canadian trooper asked him the way to Parliament Street. The trees were in full leaf, as yet untouched by approaching autumn, and the flower beds were gay with dahlias. There was a peculiar charm in that little park in the middle of the city; it was very graceful, rural and at the same time urbane; and to a well-read youth like Jim it had a pleasant aroma of the eighteenth century. Here Tom Jones had taken the air with Lady Bellaston and Lady Teazle had listened to the blandishments of Joseph Surface. And here his own ancestors, Hendersons in tie wigs and embroidered coats, their womenfolk in hoops, with powdered hair, had hob-nobbed with the great world of fashion when they came to London on their periodical visits. Jim’s heart sank when he thought that destruction must inevitably visit that happy pleasance. They said that only those who had known London before the last war knew the enchantment of life. What would they say if they were unfortunate enough to live through the next? He sought in one comprehensive look to take in what his eyes beheld so that it might be a permanent possession that nothing could erase from his sensibility. Its beauty rested him.

But he looked at his watch. It was still early and he rambled on. The air was delicious on that warm summer evening and there was something stimulating in the vague, dull roar of the city north and south of the park. It was as exciting in its way as when things, momentous things, are happening behind a closed door and you await the outcome of you know not what. Suddenly he caught sight of Dora. She was sitting on a bench talking to a woman. He was surprised, for to the best of his belief she didn’t know a soul in London. The woman was talking rapidly and emphatically and Dora, her eyes fixed on her, was nodding every now and then as though to show she followed and understood. She was so much absorbed that she did not see him till he came close enough to hear that the stranger was talking German. It was the woman who noticed him first and she abruptly stopped speaking. Dora gave a start and the colour flushed her cheeks.

“Oh, Jim, I didn’t expect you yet; I never heard you come up. It made me jump.”

The woman looked at him for a moment and it struck him that her gaze was strangely cold, then she got up, gave Dora a curt nod and with brisk steps walked away.

“Who was that?” he asked as he sat down beside her.

“I’ve no idea. She was sitting on the bench when I came. She saw I was a foreigner and began to talk to me. She’s a refugee. She told me her story. It was pitiful and the tragic part is that one can do nothing to help her. I felt so sorry for her.”

“She looked a pretty determined sort of woman. I expect she’ll make out all right.”

“Give me a cigarette, will you? What have you been doing all day?”

“Nothing very much.”

His tone was so despondent that she gave him a look. He was pale and drawn.

“Is anything the matter? You look dreadfully tired.”

“I’m all in. I told them. That I wasn’t going to join up, I mean. They were all there. It was awfully painful. My father cried.”

“Why?” she asked tartly.

“He thinks it such a disgrace. He’s ashamed. He doesn’t begin to understand my point of view.”

She was silent for a moment and her face grew sullen. He went on.

“You mustn’t think too hardly of him. He’s an old man and we’ve been in the Army for generations. You see, he thinks if you’re not a soldier you might just as well be a chimney-sweep. And when there’s a war on he can’t conceive of one’s not moving heaven and earth to get in.”

“Was your brother angry with you?”

“Not angry exactly. Kind with the tolerant kindness with which you’d treat someone who was just a bit dotty.” Jim gave a mournful chuckle. “I don’t think life is going to be very pleasant at home.”

Dora gave her shoulders a shrug that might have meant anything.

“Did your mother say anything to your brother about me?” she asked.

A smile broke on his lips. He was glad to talk about her.

“Yes. He made a note of your name. He says it’ll be all right and I’m sure it will. It would be monstrous to intern you. After all, you’re not German, you’re Austrian, and the rotten deal you’ve had entitles you to some consideration.”

“The fact remains that I’m an enemy alien.”

“You needn’t be, you know,” he smiled.

His meaning was plain and she made a slight gesture, but what it signified he couldn’t have said. He took her hand and she let him hold it, but did not speak. A passer-by looked at them inquisitively and smiled as he went on. Jim waited till he was out of earshot.

“Darling, won’t you marry me?”

She withdrew her hand and looked down. There was the shadow of a frown between her eyes.

“If you were my wife you’d be a British subject and then the authorities would have nothing to say.”

She seemed to hesitate for an instant. She gave him a little smile with her lips, but her eyes were grave.

“You’re sweet, Jim. No, I can’t marry you.”

“Why not? I love you. You know how passionately I love you. I thought you cared for me.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to your father and mother. They’ve been so kind to me; I couldn’t repay their kindness like that. They’d hate your marrying me.”

“I don’t believe it. They want me to get married.”

“Perhaps. But not to a penniless, middle-class foreigner. Even if she had half a dozen babies they’d resent her.”

Jim sighed. He couldn’t expect Dora with her cleverness not to have discovered that his father, now Roger had failed him, looked to his second son to produce the heir on whom his heart was set. He realized that a high-spirited, idealistic girl was justified in disliking to be treated like a brood-mare.

“I need you so badly, darling. I’m going to have a rotten time, make no mistake about that; I can bear it. But I need you.”

“It would only make it harder for you if you had an Austrian wife.”

“I wouldn’t care. Then they couldn’t take you away from me. Oh, Dora, say yes. I promise you you’ll never regret it.”

She looked at him with her fine, candid eyes and leaning towards him lightly kissed his cheek.

“Don’t let’s decide now. Let’s think it over. I don’t want them to take me away, you can be very sure of that. It wouldn’t suit my book at all. If there’s any danger of that, then yes, let’s get married.”

She said it so lightly, so charmingly, that his heart was uplifted.

“I’ve got half a mind to denounce you as a German spy so as to force your hand,” he said gaily.

She laughed.

“That wouldn’t be very nice of you.”

“You might say you don’t positively dislike me.”

“You’re more nearly a civilized being than anyone else I’ve met in this country. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that I was madly in love with you.”

“My angel.”

She put up her hands in protest against the passionate embrace she foresaw.

“Not here. It’s really too public. Didn’t you say you were going to take me to a newsreel?”

They got up and strolled out of the Park. As they came to the gate a newsboy ran past with a late edition of the Star.

“Paper. Paper,” he shouted. “Liner Athenia sunk. Paper. Paper.”

V

MRS. HENDERSON went to work without delay for it was urgent in as short a time as possible to get the house ready to receive the children she designed to take. Everyone expected London to be heavily bombed and the hospitals were instructed to make preparations to accommodate several thousand casualties. Such of the sick as could be moved were sent to the country and those who could without danger be discharged were returned to their homes. There was an air-raid warning on the first day of the war and great numbers of people, many in fun, many in fear, the majority because they thought it was expected of them, hurried to the inadequate shelters. The authorities were pressing for the evacuation of children and the trains out of London were crowded with them. It was hard at such short notice to find suitable accommodation for that daily stream.

Mrs. Henderson cleared the ball-room of its furniture and placed cots, hurried down from London, in two rows along the walls; she emptied the great drawing-room and made it into a play-room; and the big dining-room, used only for large parties, was turned into a refectory. That left the hall, decorated by William Kent and one of the show-pieces of the house, a smaller dining-room, a smaller drawing-room, and the library, its carving by Grinling Gibbons, for their own use. On Roger’s advice she had decided to start with thirty children and they came in two batches, one of twelve and the next of eighteen. They came from Stepney and they were from four to twelve years old; some were decent enough, the children of respectable working-men, but others only too shamefully betrayed their parents’ debasing poverty. They were ragged and lousy. They had to be washed and scrubbed and clothes had to be provided for them. The little ones were easy enough to deal with, but some of the older ones, especially the boys, were hard to control; they were of dirty habits, foul-mouthed and wilfully destructive. Two or three at first seemed quite unmanageable. They broke whatever was breakable and with eager little feet mischievously trampled on the flower beds in the garden so that not a flower was left standing. Some had never sat at a table before to eat their meals, but had eaten them on the floor, and when they were made to sit at table in obstinate rage threw everything within reach on the ground. But perhaps those most difficult to deal with were the homesick. They felt frightened and lonely in the big house in the depths of the country, and hankered for the noisy, squalid streets of the London slums. Then there were the mothers who came down for the day to see their children. Some were glad to have them out of harm’s way and though they missed them could not but see that to live a healthy life in the country was good for them. They felt instinctively that they could entrust them to the kind lady who spoke so nicely. But others were more difficult. They were dissatisfied with the plain, wholesome food Mrs. Henderson gave the children and complained that they were starved. It was a grievance that she provided fresh milk instead of canned. Mean, they called it; they were convinced that she was getting money for the children’s keep from the Government and didn’t try to conceal their belief that she was making a good thing out of it. They resented the neat clothes she had bought for them; it was an aspersion on their ability to clothe their children decently; and because they were all dressed alike anyone would have thought “they was charity.” Nor did they hold with “all them baths” Mrs. Henderson insisted on their having. “They’ll only catch their death of cold, poor little things,” they protested. Several indeed insisted on taking their children away. Others came in their place, and it was a toss-up if they would be nice and well behaved or little ruffians bent on making trouble.

But in a few weeks, by a combination of firmness and kindliness, Mrs. Henderson succeeded in establishing an influence even over the most obstreperous. Her tender heart was glad when she saw how with good food to eat and good air to breathe they filled out and their cheeks grew rosy. The most acid of the mothers were obliged to acknowledge that they seemed to be doing all right and were ready to admit in a funny shamefaced way that “the old girl wasn’t ‘alf bad really.” It was a triumph for Mrs. Henderson when a fierce, hard-featured woman, the mother of six, said to her:

“You’re a lady and no mistake, and I don’t mind who hears me say it.”

But it was hard work. The men servants had gone, the butler to drive a truck and the two footmen into training, so that only the women servants were left. By the time Mrs. Henderson, May and Dora had tucked the children up in their cots for the night they were exhausted. The older ones went to the village school and so were kept out of mischief for some part of the day. May and Dora took it in turns to look after the others.

Dora, as Mrs. Henderson had predicted, was invaluable. She was more severe than either May or Mrs. Henderson could bring themselves to be, and Mrs. Henderson had to remind her once or twice that they were only children, children who had never had a chance to learn and so too much could not be expected of them, but there was no doubt that she knew how to keep them in order. They did not like her as much as they liked Mrs. Henderson or May, but they respected her. They soon learnt that when she told them to do anything she meant it should be done.

A curious incident occurred soon after the outbreak of war. Jim was looking at an illustrated paper and saw a picture of the staff of the German embassy leaving London. He showed it to Dora.

“Look at that,” he said. “Isn’t that the old girl you were talking to in St. James’s Park the other evening when we were up in town?”

It was a tall, dark woman with marked features. Dora gave the picture a glance.

“I shouldn’t think so,” she said casually. “That woman said she was a refugee.”

“It’s the same hat. And she has the same hard look. I wonder if she really was a refugee.”

“Well, if she was trying to get anything out of me she didn’t succeed,” Dora answered with her frank smile.

Jim thought no more about it. But when his father came down for the week-end and just as a matter of curiosity he thought he would show him the picture he couldn’t find the paper. He wondered where it had got to. The General, despairing of getting anything better to do, was working at the central office of the Red Cross and only came down for week-ends. He treated Jim as kindly as he had always done, but avoided being alone with him; and Jim, his nerves on edge, felt that now and then his father’s eyes rested on him with a sort of unhappy perplexity. But when he deliberately looked at him, his father looked away. May and Mrs. Henderson talked to him with invariable cordiality but of indifferent things, and never mentioned the subject that divided them. Once he tried to broach it with his mother.

“Oh, Jim, let’s not discuss it,” she said. “Presumably you’ve made up your mind and nothing I can say will change it.”

“Am I making you very wretched?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

One Sunday morning when they were at breakfast he found a letter on his plate. He opened it and taking out its contents showed it to them.

“The first white feather,” he said.

The General and Mrs. Henderson stared at it aghast. May in embarrassment looked down and Dora gazed at him with a singular expression in her blue eyes. Jim examined the postmark.

“Not very far from home,” he remarked. “I wonder which of our kind friends had the thought.”

With a smile on his lips he put the feather in the button hole of his coat. The General rose from the table and walked out of the room. The others finished breakfast in silence.

In due course he received a summons from the local tribunal that had been established to hear the pleas of those who had been called up and claimed exemption from military service. He had courage and it was without fear of the ordeal before him that on the appointed morning he drove to the neighbouring town of Lewes. He was a trifle disconcerted by the appearance of the other conscientious objectors who were gathered in the hall waiting for the members of the tribunal to enter. There were seven of them and, with the exception of an agricultural labourer with an honest, open face, they were miserable, undersized, weakly creatures. It wasn’t very pleasant company to be in. Jim, tall and stalwart, felt ill at ease when he looked at them; they wouldn’t have been of much use in the Army anyway; they were such a pitiable crew, they gave his convictions a shoddiness that momentarily shook him. One, the first to be heard, was obviously filled with self-conceit and when he was asked on what he based his claim made a long, rhetorical harangue flaunting his communist beliefs. He was a haberdasher by trade. He refused not only to serve in the Army, but to do anything that was even remotely connected with a capitalist war. He challenged the tribunal to send him to prison. The labourer, whose case was heard next, came under a different category. He belonged to a small and obscure sect called the Twelve Apostles. In this strange and heartless world its adherents sought to carry out to the letter the precepts of Jesus Christ. It was moving to hear that plain, unlettered man proclaim in halting words his earnest faith. There could be no doubt of his sincerity. He took them far back, those who were there to decide and those who were there to be heard, and with an astonished awe you felt that you were listening to one who might himself have been a disciple of the Nazarene. Jim was deeply affected. That good man’s idealism was a ray of sunshine that flooded his heart with light and when his own turn came he faced his judges with manly confidence. He knew personally the members of the tribunal and the chairman was an intimate friend of his father’s; but if any of them thought it strange that he should appear before them they showed no sign of it. Jim read the short statement he had prepared and answered the questions that were put to him.

“Are you prepared to work on the land?” the chairman asked.

“Yes, sir. I’ll do that very gladly.”

“Very well.”

Exemption was granted him.

There were several farms on the Graveney estate, but the tribunal had stipulated that he should not work with one of his father’s tenants, so next day he applied for a job to a farmer who cultivated his own land.

“Concilie, are you?” the farmer asked him.

“Yes.”

“You look a strong, husky young fellow. Have you ever done a day’s work in your life?”

“Not the sort of work you mean.”

The man looked him up and down as though he were a strange animal.

“Well, I don’t mind giving you a trial. I’m short of hands. All my young chaps are in the Army and I suppose I must put up with any riff-raff I can get.”

Jim found a room in a cottage near by that belonged to a couple whose son had joined up. He was glad to get away from home. He was sensitive, and the fact that the others, his father, his mother, May, avoided any reference to his inglorious situation exasperated his nerves more than if they had openly condemned it. He felt like a man who has come back to his family after a term of imprisonment and who knows that they are always on their guard to see that no remark escapes their lips to wound him. He was at ease only with Dora. But since the children had descended upon them she had been kept too busy to have much time to give him; and he had to content himself with an occasional stroll in the park or a few minutes’ conversation when he chanced to catch her by herself. He reproached her sometimes because he saw so little of her, but she told him she thought it wise that they shouldn’t seem to be too intimate.

“I don’t want anyone to suspect that there’s anything between us till we’ve finally made up our minds.”

“I’ve made mine up,” he said.

“I haven’t.”

Her retort would have made him angry and unhappy if she hadn’t accompanied it with such a radiant smile.

The farm on which Jim had found work was only six miles away and it was arranged that he should come home every Sunday to spend the day. But that would give him small chance of seeing Dora alone and he exacted a promise from her that now and then, when she could get away, she would meet him of an evening at a little Elizabethan cottage that stood on the brow of a low hill near the high road but just within one of the park gates. It was only a short bicycle ride from Graveney. It had a thatched roof and though tiny was habitable; indeed a cranky uncle of the General’s had lived in it for years and in recollection of that the Hendersons still spoke of it as Uncle Algy’s cottage. But in the neighbourhood it was known as Badger’s. Jim had always hoped that Roger, when he succeeded to the property, would let him have it for his own; and he liked to take Dora there and plan the alterations they would make in it.

“It would be perfect for you and me,” he told her, looking at her with fond eyes.

“It certainly has a lovely view,” she smiled.

Situated as it was on an elevation you could see from its windows a great stretch of the surrounding country.

“All Sussex is spread before you,” he said proudly.

“It’s sweet.”

“I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t get married right away and come and live here.”

“You must be very stupid then. I’ve told you often enough.”

He sighed. He knew by now that when once she had made up her mind no appeal could shake her. She had decided that to marry him would be a shabby trick to play on his father and mother who had been so kind to her, and though he thought her notion unreasonable he could not but esteem the delicacy of her scruple.

“All the same I wish you weren’t so damned high-minded,” he said.

VI

IT WAS a lovely autumn. Towards the end of September Tommy went back to school. But by then a Russian army had entered eastern Poland and with the invasion, Polish resistance collapsed. Warsaw surrendered. The victors divided the spoils between them. The first brief chapter of the war was written. British troops in a steady stream were ferried across the Channel and Roger went on the staff of the Commander in Chief. Winter set in. Dick Murray was with his regiment in the wilds of Norfolk. Though it had been a grief to see him go, May was relieved that he was no longer there to drop in at odd moments. She felt that she must keep not only to the letter but to the spirit of her bargain with Roger and it was harder to do it when she saw him constantly. She was glad that he, like Roger, was serving the country. They did not write to one another often, but when she got a letter from him, and it wasn’t a love letter, it was just an account of what he was doing, interspersed with complaints that it was all very boring, her day was made. She could hear his rich, eager voice in his matter-of-fact phrases and every casual word told her that he loved her. It was lucky for her that she had plenty to do. Her work kept her so busy that she had little time for thoughts unconnected with it and, though one day was exactly like the last, the weeks flew by at a gallop. She had not realized that Christmas was so near till Mrs. Henderson announced one morning that she was going up to London to buy presents for the children. A tree was brought in and placed in a private room, and May and Dora in their leisure moments set about decorating it. Tommy came home for the holiday. He had grown, but he was still a little boy, thin and weedy, with hands and feet too big for him and a mop of brown hair that his mother in vain tried to keep tidy. His dark eyes were keen and intelligent. His vitality was so abounding that, except when he was reading, it seemed a torture to him to sit still: you might have thought quicksilver flowed in his veins rather than blood. His movements had the clumsy, charming awkwardness of a new-born colt. Mrs. Henderson, noticing how tall he was growing, could not but think rather sadly that soon his voice would break and then in a little while he would be a great big fellow like his brothers and in the grown man she would lose the child who was so dear to her. She thanked God he was too young to fight. No harm could befall him.

Christmas Day came. The General, down from London for forty-eight hours, brought Tommy a new bicycle. The evacuated children were thrilled with their presents and the Christmas tree, of which they had never seen the like, filled them with admiring wonder. They ate turkey and plum pudding and drank ginger beer. They played games. They had a grand time. One small boy remarked that he didn’t care how long the war lasted.

It was just after the New Year, one evening, while the children were being given their supper, that Tommy came in to the refectory.

“May, you’re wanted on the phone,” he said.

“Who is it? I can’t come now. I’m busy.”

“It’s Dick Murray. He says he only wants to speak to you for a minute. I’ll carry on for you.”

May was holding a plate heaped with macaroni and she put it down quickly, for her hand trembled. She knew why Dick was calling. His last letter had told her that his regiment had a good chance of being sent over to France and he hoped to God it would come off; for he was sick and tired of sitting about and doing nothing. If there was a chance of seeing him before he went she meant to take it; she couldn’t let him leave without at least a glimpse of him. She went out into the hall and then to the library, so that she could speak without risk of being overheard. She lifted the receiver, but her knees were shaking so that she had to sit down.

“Yes?”

“May, we’re off.”

His voice was gay and eager. She clenched her hands.

“Oh, that’s splendid,” she said lightly. “When?”

“Tonight. We’re sailing at dawn.”

“So soon? Oh, Dick.”

She hadn’t expected that and she had to bite her lip to prevent herself from crying.

“You mustn’t be upset. I shan’t be in any more danger than if we’d stayed on in Norfolk. Nothing is going to happen till the Germans attack in the spring and then we’ll smash them to smithereens.”

She made an effort.

“I hope it won’t be dreadfully boring.”

“I’d have given anything in the world to see you to say good-bye. I naturally expected to get a day or two’s leave and I’ve been grousing like hell at being done out of it.”

She couldn’t speak for a moment and he asked if she was still there. She strove to keep her voice steady.

“Perhaps it’s just as well. I don’t think I could have borne it.”

“Oh, my sweet.”

His voice faltered.

“Good-bye, darling. God bless you.”

“I love you with all my heart.”

“Good-bye.”

She put the receiver down. It was all over and it hadn’t lasted three minutes. It was too little, oh, so much too little. Her mouth trembled, but she couldn’t let herself cry, and she clenched her teeth. She stayed where she was, by the telephone, for a while to collect herself. She couldn’t afford to let anyone see that the news she had received meant more to her than it should. Oh, the deceit — how hateful it was! When she went back to the refectory there was no sign, except the whiteness of her face, that her heart was wrung.

“What did he want?” asked Mrs. Henderson.

“He rang up to say good-bye. He’s going to France tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m glad. He must be delighted.”

“He seemed in the highest spirits.”

Ian was ordered out to France too, for, after pulling all possible strings, he had achieved his desire and was once more in khaki. Because he spoke French adequately he had been made a Security Officer, which was a job that he thought suited him perfectly; Jane disagreed; she pointed out to him that it needed tact, judgment and common sense, and no one knew better than she that those were qualities in which he was completely deficient. He listened to her tart remarks without turning a hair.

When the time came for him to go, having agreed that she shouldn’t come to the station, he and Jane had a last drink together in the drawing-room of their little house in Westminster. He was to sail from Southampton to Cherbourg.

“I hope we have a smooth crossing,” he said. “You know what a rotten sailor I am.”

“You look awful when you’re seasick.”

“I don’t care a hang about that. I feel awful.”

As a rule they had plenty to say to one another, but just then, they didn’t quite know why, there really didn’t seem anything to say. Jane was smoking a cigarette through an immensely long holder and suddenly, as though she were angry with it, took it out and crushed the stub savagely into an ash-tray. Ian glanced at his watch and gulped down the last mouthful of his whisky and soda.

“Well, I suppose I ought to be toddling.”

“Ought you?”

She took out her lipstick and applied it to her lips. Looking at herself in her pocket mirror as she did this, she asked casually:

“You’re quite sure you don’t want me to come to the station with you?”

“Not on your life. I don’t want a hysterical woman sobbing all over my brand-new uniform.”

“Hysterical be damned. But what they want to send a fat old man like you to France for is more than I can understand.”

“Old my foot. I’m in the prime of life. And fat my other foot. I’ve lost twenty pounds since I got back in the Army.”

She gave him a derisive glance.

“No one would know it to look at you.” She fixed him sternly with her monocle. “Now look here, Ian, if you see a German coming for you, you run like a hare.”

He grinned.

“I don’t mind telling you I get awfully out of breath when I run.”

“Well, I warn you, if you go and get yourself killed I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

Jane threw up her hands in desperation.

“Why in God’s name did I ever marry that man?”

“I can answer that one,” he cried with a throaty chuckle. “Because no one else was such a fool as to ask you.”

Jane giggled.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

He heaved his great weight out of the chair and taking Jane’s hands pulled her to her feet.

“Give the old man a kiss before he goes.”

Jane swallowed.

“O God, I believe I’m going to cry.”

“Don’t be a damned fool, Jane,” he said roughly. “O God, don’t let me cry. I’ll never be able to manage that man again if I cry.”

“Think of your eyelashes, darling, don’t think of me.”

She looked at him with one eye because for a reason she could only guess, the monocle was dimmed and she couldn’t see through it.

“You’re old and you’re fat and you’re stupid,” she said angrily, and then her funny hoarse voice went back on her, “but you’re all I’ve got in the world and I don’t want to lose you.”

“Shut up, Jane, or I’ll give you a sock in the jaw. If you go on like this, you’ll have me crying too.”

“I’m not crying, you fool. I won’t cry.” She made a terrible face. “Oh, Ian, I do love you so.”

“I’ve sort of suspected that for a good many years, dear,” he said, taking her in his fat arms.

She flung hers round his neck and with a fearful grimace asked him pitifully:

“You do like me a bit, don’t you?”

“You’re a nagging old bitch, Jane, but, my God, I love you.”

Their lips met and they put into that long kiss all their love and all their devotion. She tore herself away from him.

“Get the hell out of here. I can’t bear it another instant.”

Without a further word he flung out of the room, slamming the door behind him, as though they had had a prodigious fight. Jane, her eyes on the door by which he had gone, bit her lips to cling on to her self-control. Her comic, ugly face worked in strange contortions. Then she gave up the struggle.

“To hell with my eyelashes.”

She threw herself on her knees and joined her hands. “O God, keep the old fool safe.”

The tears streamed down her face. They made a terrific mess of her make-up.

And in like manner, though in their different ways, women in England through the long, bitter winter said good-bye to their men. They said good-bye to them in the crofts of the distant Hebrides and in the fishermen’s cottages of wind-swept Cornwall, in the slum dwellings of the big cities, in the drab villas of the suburbs, in the orderly houses of the well-to-do and in the mansions of the great. When it was possible they went to the station to get a last sight of them as they entrained. On the coaches the men in high spirits chalked up facetious quips. Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line. They sang lustily as the train steamed out. They were going to France. They were going to Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt or the East. Not all of them, it might be, would reach their destination in safety. The women, many of them crying still, flowed out of the station and went about their chores.

Jane continued to lead her normal life. She went out to dinner a great deal and lunched at the Ritz where you saw everyone you knew. She gave smart little parties in her tiny house. Since she lived in a convenient spot friends of Roger’s from the War Office, men at the Foreign Office and members of the House of Commons were glad to drop in of an evening for a cocktail and a gossip. She generally had a funny story to tell about this general or that or a bit of scandal about a Cabinet Minister and you were pretty sure of two or three good laughs when you went to see her. Her fantastic appearance added point to her wisecracks. Of course the war was a crashing bore, but it was no use to pull a long face and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t get what fun out of it she could. It certainly gave her ample scope for her sardonic wit. She missed Ian; he was the perfect foil; and when the conversation was growing sticky she could always count on him to rise when, as though it were a fly and he the fat trout he really rather looked like, she flung a caustic remark at him. They played into one another’s hands like a pair of black-face comedians.

But when people asked her if she missed him, Jane shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly.

“I suppose I do in a way. Sometimes I could kill him when he’s here, but there’s no doubt about it, absence does make the heart grow fonder.”

She was thankful that he was in no danger. Some of the people who came to see her were quite important and it was a comfort to her to be told by them that everything was going according to plan. The blockade was doing very well and the information that came out of Germany was that there was already a considerable shortage of raw materials. The Germans weren’t starving yet, though they’d had to tighten their belts; but they were suffering from cold, for owing to the breakdown of transport they couldn’t get coal in sufficient quantity. That could hardly fail to have a depressing effect on the population, which in any case had accepted the war with resignation rather than with enthusiasm. For the sake of morale, if for no other reason, Hitler would have to attack in the spring. The Maginot Line was impregnable. It was common knowledge that, though the generals, who belonged to the old army, weren’t to be despised, the Germans suffered from a serious lack of company commanders, and when they got up against the well-trained and well-officered troops of the French they’d discover what a fatal handicap that was. After they’d been beaten back from the Maginot Line the Allies would advance. The Germans would have to dig in, if a revolution didn’t break out and put an end to the whole show without any more bother, and then all the Allies had to do was to sit tight and let the blockade do the rest. Jane’s friends at the Foreign Office told her they were pretty confident that Italy would stay out; Bastianini, the ambassador, informed everybody who was prepared to listen that she would never fight her old ally England. It was reassuring to hear those Foreign Office men talk. They were so calm, apparently so unconcerned, you couldn’t but feel that there was nothing to worry about. The war might have been a game they were playing, a game you played according to the rules in a gentlemanlike way, and if you lost it, which was out of the question but of course possible, you must take your defeat like a good sportsman. One evening Jane had three Ministers of the Crown at dinner. The conversation turned to literature and she was impressed with their intimate acquaintance with the modern poets. She had no idea they were so cultivated.

January, February and March went by.

VII

THIS STORY is concerned with the war only in so far as it affected the fortunes of a small group of persons, members of a single English family, and so nothing need be said here of the events that followed upon one another’s heels in a rapid and appalling succession, the invasions of Denmark and Norway, of Belgium and the Netherlands. But then the French lines broke south of Sedan and a few days later the Germans captured Arras and then Amiens and reached the Channel. A week after that King Leopold surrendered the Belgian Army. The German communiqué announced that the fate of the Allied armies was sealed.

Jane was shattered. What had they meant by what they had been saying for three months, those confident fellows who came to drink her cocktails? They had never so much as hinted at the possibility of disaster. Why, Chamberlain himself, when the Germans invaded Norway, said in the House of Commons that Hitler had missed the bus. It wasn’t a month ago that one of the big shots, with ribbons all over his chest, had told her that the French Army was on its toes and he’d eat his brass hat if it didn’t give the Hun the surprise of his life. Ian was in France. He might be killed and the best that could be hoped was that he would be taken prisoner. Of course Roger was there too. But Roger could take care of himself. Ian was such a fool. She was distracted with fear. She went here and there trying to get reassuring news, she called up influential friends; one of the Ministers told her over the telephone that the B.E.F. was entrapped and it would be a miracle if more than thirty or forty thousand got away.

“Not so good, is it?” she said.

“Pretty grim,” he answered.

She gave a little, throaty chuckle.

“I suppose Ian will be taken prisoner. I’ve been telling him for years he ought to take a slimming cure. He’ll take it now, won’t he, willynilly?”

“Don’t lose your nerve, old girl,” said the Minister. “We shall pull through, you know.”

“Of course.”

She hung up. She put her hand to her heart, for the pain in it was agonizing. With her funny face all puckered with anguish she stood biting her lips and stared at the blank wall in front of her. She felt on a sudden terribly alone. Friends? What was the use of friends? She was suffering. She couldn’t face the dinner party at the Savoy she was due to go to that evening. She couldn’t face solitude either. Even when he wasn’t there Ian was all over the house. His clothes, his old pipes, his guns and fishing tackle, his golf clubs — she couldn’t go into a single room without feeling his presence. And now the house was empty and hostile.

“I can’t bear it,” she cried aloud. “I want to go home.”

Only her mother knew really what Ian, that great hulking brute, with his great bellow, was to her. She had to go to her as she had done when she was a tiny girl, plain as the devil, and had fallen down and hurt herself. It was a filthy trick nature had played to give her a face like hers and a heart like hers. She packed, took the first train available and three hours later, putting on a jaunty air, strolled into the hall of Graveney Holt. Mrs. Henderson and May were alone and May’s eyes were red and swollen.

“Hulloa, Mother, I thought I’d run down and see how you were getting on. This is a pretty kettle of fish those fools in Whitehall have got us into.”

“We must all hope for the best, darling,” said Mrs. Henderson gravely. “You mustn’t lose heart.”

Sitting down and peeling off her gloves Jane took a mirror out of her bag and looked at herself.

“My God, what a sight! I’m not in the least worried about Ian if that’s what you mean. Before he went away I made him promise that if he saw a German he’d bolt like a hare and he knows he’d get hell from me if he didn’t do what I told him.” Jane fixed her monocle more firmly in her eye. “London’s frightfully boring just now and I’m a bit run down; I thought if you’d have me I’d like to stay a few days.”

Mrs. Henderson looked at her daughter with calm, discerning eyes and Jane had more than a suspicion that she understood the situation.

“Of course.”

“I brought a few things down in a suit case. And of course my face.”

What Jane called her face was a flat, rectangular metal box in a neat velvet cover. It contained a large number of little bottles, rouge, powder, lipstick, mascara, and whatever else could possibly be needed to compose that fantastic counterfeit of the human visage which she presented to the world.

“I thought you’d probably be coming down,” said Mrs. Henderson. “You can make yourself useful with the children. We’ve tried to keep the worst of the news from them, but they’re as sharp as nails, the older ones, and they come to me and ask: ‘Is my dad all right, ma’am?’ and I can’t answer them.”

“I suppose there’s no news of Roger?”

“What news could there be? We’re worried, dreadfully worried.”

“Well, he’s on the staff. Nothing ever happens to Red Tabs.”

It irritated her to see May’s white face and swollen eyes. Roger would get away with Lord Gort and the rest of them, but who was going to bother about her fat, old Ian? She gave May a sharp look. Perhaps it wasn’t Roger that May was so upset about. It had occurred to her in the summer that she and Dick seemed on very good terms.

May rose to her feet.

“I must go to the children now. I can’t leave Dora alone with them too long.”

She left them. She hadn’t missed the glance Jane had given her and had been seized with a panic fear that she guessed that her eyes were not red with crying for Roger. She was concerned about him, of course, she didn’t want harm to befall him, but she felt certain he would be all right and would get away, the only real danger he incurred was from a stray bomb; but Dick — it was no good trying not to, she could think really of no one but him. That was a sharp, nerve-racking misery that gave her not a moment’s respite through the long day and held her sleepless hour after hour of the interminable night. She hadn’t heard from him since the march of the British troops into Belgium. For a fortnight he had been in the thick of the fighting. He might be wounded; he might be dead; and there was no one she could turn to in her pain. Mrs. Henderson, ascribing May’s distress to anxiety on Roger’s account, was kind to her as even she had never been before. Never a demonstrative woman she sought ways now to show May how deep and sincere was her love for her. Suppressing her own fears, in order to console her she tried to make light of Roger’s peril. Her tenderness was very hard to bear. May hated herself for the dissimulation she must practise, the comfort she must feign when Mrs. Henderson told her she was convinced that Roger would get back safely and she must try to be brave in this time of trial; for it was Dick she was thinking of, Dick who might even now be lying dead on the field of battle, Dick whose death, if he was killed, she could only mourn in secret. But what could she do? In her anguish she felt like blurting out the truth to Mrs. Henderson, but she restrained herself; she could not bear to cause that poor woman an added grief. It would be dreadful just then to tell her that if she had ever loved Roger, she had long ceased to do so. It would be worse than hitting a child. There was no help for it, she must bear her burden alone.

“God knows, I didn’t want to love Dick,” she said to herself. “I can’t help myself. He’s everything in the world to me.”

Thinking of him, thinking of him incessantly, praying for him, she conceived the notion that if she promised God to give him up, God would spare him. It was only her strong good sense that prevented her from yielding to the temptation. God was not a cruel God and to save did not need from his creatures the propitiation of a frustrated life and a broken heart. It was the God of Moses who had claimed eye for eye and tooth for tooth, not the God of love. She fell on her knees and prayed for Dick’s safety, but she prayed also for all those who were even then in deadly peril.

VIII

THE NEXT FIVE DAYS, those during which the evacuation from Dunkirk was effected, were days of fear to the women of Graveney Holt. Sick at heart, their faces drawn, they listened in silent dread to the radio. The German bombers without pause attacked the retreating troops and the rescue ships. The men, weary after a fortnight’s hard fighting, waited on the open beaches to take their turn in the small craft that had gathered to bring the survivors to the ships that waited off shore.

The Germans entered Dunkirk to find that their prey had escaped. After fearing the worst it was almost with exultation, as though victory had been snatched from defeat, that those women heard the news that, though all else was lost, guns, tanks and equipment, more than three hundred thousand men had been saved. And though they knew nothing of what had happened to those whose fate most concerned them they ventured once more to hope. All through that dark period Mrs. Henderson went about the heavy work entailed by the care of thirty children with a stern, set face. She kept the others at it too and with something like ferocity, as though hoping that by driving them to death she could take their minds off their sickening fears.

On Sunday Jim as usual came over to spend the day, but it was a sad, harassed meal they sat down to at one o’clock. The General had stayed in town over the weekend. May was silent because her heart was heavy and Jane could not bring herself to speak to Jim. She avoided looking at him and when he addressed her answered in a monosyllable. His eight months on the farm had braced him; the hard manual labour had steeled his muscles; the sun had bronzed him and he looked the picture of health. But his physical condition was an affront to Jane and it was only fear of her mother that prevented her from uttering the bitter sarcasms that were on the tip of her tongue. Mrs. Henderson looked at him sorrowfully. His face was drawn, as though from a spiritual conflict, but it gave him a new distinction of appearance and now, so strong and well in body, he was really a very handsome young man. His hands distressed her, for they were rough and stained and calloused; but for all that they were fine and well formed. It was with a demure pride that Mrs. Henderson told herself that they betrayed his breeding. Only a gentleman could have hands like that. It chanced that May’s eyes fell on them too and she was struck by their sinewy power. They were like Roger’s, but larger, and she hardly knew why, more significant. There was something queer about them, almost sinister, that didn’t depend altogether on the hard usage that had coarsened them. They contrasted oddly with the pained, stubborn, pathetic look in his brown eyes. Mrs. Henderson gave Dora a glance. She was sitting with downcast eyes apparently absorbed in the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding she was eating with healthy appetite. With her corn-coloured hair and lovely neck she was certainly a very comely young woman. Of course Mrs. Henderson knew that Jim was in love with her, but she was quite certain that Dora wasn’t in love with him. It was nice of her to have refused the offer he must surely have made. It showed that she was disinterested. For with May childless Jim must eventually inherit the property and it was a good match for a penniless refugee. Mrs. Henderson felt very tenderly to her. It was true what Jane had said long ago, the General would hate Jim to marry a foreigner; that was of course a prejudice; she wouldn’t have liked it much either, she wanted Jim to marry a nice English girl of good family, the sort of girl the Hendersons had always married; but if Dora had loved him and he was sure she would make him happy, she was the last person to put obstacles in the way. And there was no doubt about it, you only had to look at her to know that she wouldn’t leave the nurseries at Graveney untenanted. Mrs. Henderson wondered what Dora was thinking about. She seemed to be holding herself apart from the rest of them and made no attempt to join in the conversation that Mrs. Henderson sought with effort to keep going. The atmosphere was so strained that, having exhausted every other possible subject, she turned to Jim and began asking him about his work on the farm. He answered her questions, but it was hard to be natural when he knew that she only asked them to avoid any reference to the disaster that weighed so heavily on their hearts. She might have been making conversation with a stranger to whom the catastrophe was indifferent. In point of fact he was happy in his work. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to see the wheat growing in the fields himself had ploughed, and the chores of the daily round in their variety were a source of unceasing interest to him. He was proud because during the lambing season he had not lost a lamb. He sat up all night with a cow that was about to calve, not because his employer told him to, but because he was uneasy about her. He milked the cows, fed and watered the horses, mixed slop, for the pigs and fed them. To work hand in hand with nature gave him a sense of peace that was very grateful to him.

It enabled him to bear with half-amused indifference the hostility of his employer. Mr. Jenkins was a small, wiry man with grey, thinning hair, a lined, bony face and red-rimmed eyes. He was determined to keep Jim on the job. The utmost praise Jim ever got out of him was a scornful grunt and when he made mistakes, as in his ignorance at first he often did, Jenkins berated him with obscene abuse. Jim had a notion that he took a malicious pleasure in giving the son of General Henderson the rough side of his tongue. He spoke of him, even in his hearing, as the conchie and would not let his wife and children have any further communication with him than was inevitable. Sometimes he would go out of his way to make Jim lose his temper so that he could go to the police and complain of him.

“Picking oakum, that’s what you ought to be doing,” he snarled.

Jim took care to be as civil and respectful to Jenkins as, if their positions had been reversed, he would have expected the man to be to him. But he made up his mind that when peace came and he was free he would thrash the brute within an inch of his life. That would be well worth going to prison for.

It happened that the evening before something had happened about which he could not avoid speaking to his mother. He knew it would be a score for Jane and would as soon she should not know about it, but just because of this feeling he forced himself to mention it then and there.

“Mother,” he said, “d’you think Father would have any objection to my sleeping at Uncle Algy’s cottage?” This was the cottage, known to the villagers as Badger’s, which was at the north gate of the park.

“Oh, my dear, it would be awfully uncomfortable for you.”

“Well, the people I’ve been living with, the Carrs, want me to get out.”

“Why?”

“It’s rather a long story. When I paid my weekly bill last night, I saw Mrs. Carr had something on her mind. Carr was hanging about outside and I knew he was listening. I asked her if there was anything the matter and she said, ‘Well, sir, the fact is we’re wanting your room, so I must ask you to make other arrangements.’ I couldn’t make it out at first; my board and lodging have been a godsend to them now that their son’s away and they haven’t got his wages to help. I asked her why she wanted me to get out and she said it was too much work. I knew that was all rot, I give hardly any trouble; and at last she came out with it.”

Jim looked steadily at Jane and there was a caustic smile on his lips. Repeating Mrs. Carr’s words, he imitated her broad Sussex accent so well that, if you hadn’t known how bitterly he felt, you would have laughed.

“She said, ‘Well, sir, if the truth must be told it’s like this. Carr, he says, what with our Bert in the Army, in the thick of the fray, as you might say, and perhaps we’ll never see the poor boy again — we don’t want you here. Seems like an insult to our Bert, if you understand what I mean.’”

“I’m bound to say I see her point,” said Jane.

“Be quiet, Jane,” said Mrs. Henderson sharply. “Yes, of course your father will be glad to have you live at Uncle Algy’s. What will you do about your meals?”

“I can get them at the Cornford pub.” Cornford was the name of the village near which was Jenkins’s farm. Jim smiled wryly. “They’re not allowed by law to refuse to serve me.”

They finished lunch in an oppressive silence. Dora hadn’t opened her mouth.

It was a relief to Jim to escape for a stroll with her later in the afternoon. It was warm and sunny and great snowy clouds, like white primeval monsters sunning themselves on the surface of the deep, lay at rest in the blue sky. After two days’ rain the green of the oak trees was glossy and shining. Dora was what the French call journalière; there were days when she was almost plain and others when she was beautiful. This was a good one. Her eyes had caught the colour of the sky and there was a warm glow in her cheeks. She trod the earth with a lovely impetuosity as though it were dirt beneath her feet and she had only to will and she would sail through the air like a witch on a broomstick. Jim had never loved her with a more eager longing. He took her hand. Suddenly, to his utter surprise, she burst into a ringing peal of laughter.

“What on earth are you laughing at?” he cried.

She stopped at once and gave him a rapid, searching glance. Her bright eyes were on a sudden veiled.

“Nothing; I’m sorry, it was just hysteria. All those glum faces round the table.”

He flushed in momentary vexation. He thought her tactless.

“You couldn’t expect them to be very cheerful. They’re frightfully anxious.”

“I know. Forgive me. I didn’t mean it. It was stupid. I suppose this is the end.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

He was still a trifle affronted, but she gave him a charming, even a tender, smile.

“Darling, have a little sense. France is beaten. England can’t go on alone.”

“She will.”

“She can’t. What’s the use of prolonging a hopeless struggle? Don’t you want peace?”

He looked down with harassed eyes.

“I don’t want England to be beaten.”

“Why don’t you go and fight then?” she said coolly. “Dora,” he cried aghast. “You’re not going to turn against me too?”

“Of course not. Only I don’t understand your attitude. It doesn’t seem logical.”

“I dare say it isn’t,” he smiled sadly, “but there’s nothing I can do about it. I hate war. I still think it criminal and senseless. But I don’t want England to be defeated.”

“England is defeated. What’s the good of shutting your eyes to obvious facts? The only thing she can do now is to make the best terms she can with the Germans. Then we shall have peace for a hundred years.”

“What sort of a peace?”

She shrugged her shoulders. She seemed about to speak, but apparently changed her mind, and they walked for a while in silence. Once or twice she gave him a sidelong glance from beneath her eyelashes. “You’re very quiet today,” she said at length.

“I’m unhappy.”

“You needn’t be,” she smiled.

“I wouldn’t be if you’d marry me.”

She made a quick gesture of withdrawal.

“No, no, no. I’ve told you it’s impossible.”

“Oh, Dora, don’t say that. It breaks my heart.”

“Don’t be so silly,” she laughed. “Not yet, I meant. You know that. There’s no hurry.”

He sighed.

“I sometimes wonder if you care for me at all.”

She gave him a teasing smile.

“Have you never looked at yourself in the glass? I was looking at you at lunch today. You’re very good-looking.”

She paid him a compliment so seldom that he blushed.

{HOUR NOVEL}

“Pure Aryan, at all events,” he laughed.

She took his hand.

“You’re very sweet,” she said. “But you mustn’t try to bustle me. You must have patience.”

IX

A DAY OR TWO later they got some good news. It wasn’t what Mrs. Henderson would have liked best to have, but it strengthened her hope of better news to come. Dick Murray rang her up and told her that he thought she might like to know he was back in England safe and sound.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” she answered. “Are you quite all right?”

“Not a scratch. A bit tired, you know, but otherwise in fine fettle.”

“D’you know anything about Roger and Ian?”

“Oddly enough I ran across Ian on the beach at Dunkirk. I heard his bellow one night and routed him out. Don’t you worry, he’ll turn up.”

“And Roger?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, Dick.”

Mrs. Henderson could not keep the dismay out of her voice.

“Don’t get in a panic, Mrs. Henderson. Everything is in a bit of a muddle just now. I expect he’ll be all right. There may be all sorts of reasons why he hasn’t been able to let you know. I dare say it never even occurred to him that you were anxious.”

There was something in that. If he had got away with Lord Gort, and were frightfully busy, the thought might never have entered his head that there was any need to assure them of his safety. When Mrs. Henderson went back and told the others what Dick had said it was only by a miracle that May prevented a great cry of relief from breaking through her lips. She had to make a tremendous effort not to appear more than decently interested.

“I’m glad he’s all right,” she said very quietly. “Did he seem cheerful?”

“Quite.”

She wondered how long she must stay, acting as though it meant nothing more than was natural in the circumstances, before she could get away to her room and there thank God, thank God with all her heart, for his great mercy. But Jane broke out in violent exasperation.

“If that old fool’s back and hasn’t let me know I’ll give him such hell when I see him he’ll wish to God the Germans had taken him prisoner.”

“Remember that May and I are just as anxious about Roger,” Mrs. Henderson said mildly.

Jane gave May a sidelong glance.

“Why should it be Dick that’s come back? I don’t suppose he matters a damn to anyone.”

She saw May flush.

“How can you be so selfish?” Mrs. Henderson answered. “At a time like this we must try to hold all men equally dear.”

Though Jane protested that she was no good at that sort of thing. Mrs. Henderson had insisted on her helping with the children. She refused to do any housework, vowing that she simply didn’t know how to make a bed or sweep a room, and as for washing up she wasn’t going to risk breaking her nails for any children in the world; but she constituted herself their entertainer. In twenty-four hours she had them eating out of her hand. She swore at them with her deep, husky voice, and threatened to beat the hide off them if they didn’t behave; they thought her the grandest buffoon they had ever seen and they crowded round her laughing shrilly at her absurdity. She told them highly immoral stories in which the bad boy came off best and the good little girl never got her reward; they loved them and made her repeat them over and over again. The babies struggled for a place on her lap, and she held them there telling them what little beasts they were, and the others pressed close begging for her attention and shouting with glee when, her monocle fixed in her eye, but a look in it few had ever seen, she made a fool of herself for their amusement.

“Why haven’t you got any kids of your own?” one urchin asked her.

“D’you think I want a lot of dirty little brats like you round me? As a matter of fact I’ve had twelve, but I always drowned them before they got their eyes open, like puppies.”

“Where d’you drown them?”

“In the water I did the week’s washing in,” she answered promptly. “Then I knew that for once in their lives they were clean.”

Then Jane received a telegram from Ian, sent on from her house in London, telling her that he was in a hospital at York.

“Both doing well,” he added. “Baby weighs forty-two pounds. Sex uncertain.”

“Fool!” cried Jane furiously. “He’s wounded. He may be dying.”

“D’you think he’d send that silly telegram if he were?” laughed Mrs. Henderson.

“O God, why did I ever marry a congenital imbecile?”

Jane sent him a frantic wire to say that she was coming up by the first train. There was a great wailing among the children when she set off for the station and she had to promise faithfully to come back soon. She was inclined to preen herself because she had been such a success with them.

“It seems to me I’ve got quite a way with kids,” she said. “I suppose it’s because they know I’m just as unscrupulous and immoral as they are.”

Mrs. Henderson gave her a tender, slightly mocking little smile.

“You can’t deceive children. They know instinctively if you really like them or if you’re only pretending.”

“Do they like Dora?”

“She’s a very good disciplinarian,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“Then they must dote on her,” answered Jane dryly.

Next day but one she wrote to her mother.

Well darling all the way up to York I designed my weeds I never have worn black but with my colouring I believe it would suit me and I thought out some frocks that were positively startling What I was going to wear at the funeral is nobody’s business Ian would have jumped out of his coffin and run screaming from the church But I’m not going to be a widow after all so I took all that trouble for nothing That big fat fool you made me marry is going to get perfectly well He got away from Dunkirk all right and then was such a donkey he would be as to get on a ship that was torpedoed The idiot got his face bashed in and lost all his front teeth I don’t so much mind about that as his teeth always were bad and I’ve been nagging him for years to have them out but his face is a mess He looks as though he’d got dropsy mumps and elefantasis (how’d you spell the bloody word) and he’s got two of the most beautiful black eyes you ever saw He can’t speak only mumble but that’s just as well because when he tries to say anything it’s only to curse and swear something horrible I really didn’t know there were so many four letter words in the language I’ve told him exactly what I thought of him and as he can’t really answer back I’m having my chance at last I’m going to get him out of hospital as soon as I can so as I can look after him myself It makes my blood boil to see those nurses fussing over him as if he was a blasted hero And the indecent questions they ask him about his bowels and him a married man too it just makes me blush all over A lot of desiccated virgins that’s what they are Your loving JANE

PS He seemed quite glad to see me He called me a lousy bitch this morning He is rather sweet sometimes isn’t he though of course the most selfish brute that ever was PPS It was all a lie about his having a baby though to look at him I’ve often wondered if he wasn’t going to

X

THE MEN who had been rescued from Dunkirk were safely home. Roger was missing. The General went to the War Office day after day to see if there were news of him and by dint of persistence discovered that during the retreat to Dunkirk Roger had been ordered to go on some errand to a village where a battery was holding back the Germans as they tried to advance. It was known that he had got there and when the battery, short of ammunition, was forced to retire he had left in the car he had come in to go back to headquarters. He had never got there. There could be little doubt that he was either killed or taken prisoner. The General telegraphed to the Red Cross at Geneva and asked them to make inquiries. Until the answer came it was possible to hope for something better than the worst.

Mrs. Henderson went about her duties as usual, but her silence and the severity of her mien betrayed sadly the torture of her gnawing anxiety. May’s heart was wrung with compassion. She reproached herself bitterly because, try as she might, she couldn’t share the dumb misery that made Mrs. Henderson’s eyes so woebegone. Dick was safe and well. That was everything. She went cold with terror when she thought that instead of being alive now he might well be dead, but she was horrified when, in the same breath, as it were, it occurred to her that if Roger were dead there would be no obstacle to her happiness. Oh, shameful! She couldn’t owe her happiness to his death. That would be awful. She didn’t want him to die. If any word, any deed of hers, could have brought him safely back she would not have hesitated to say or do it. With all her heart she desired his safety. He was young and should have many fruitful years of life before him and he had a right to them. No, no, even though his death would solve all her difficulties she didn’t, she wouldn’t wish his death. But it was very hard to keep her mind off the possibility that her wanton fancy, whether she would or no, presented to her. Everyone has a right to happiness and she and Dick could be so happy if only... if only, no, no, no — it was dreadful to think of that. And Roger perhaps not yet cold in a foreign grave. They were made for one another, Dick and she; she understood him as she had never understood Roger; they had everything in common. What fun life with him would be! He was so easy. You needn’t ever be afraid of saying a foolish thing to him — he wouldn’t think it foolish, he’d only laugh and think you very sweet. She had an intense conviction that with him she would have children. Heaven! It was much more than love she felt for him; it was a strange, powerful yearning as though, only half herself, in him she could find the complement of her incompleteness. Oh, it was so hard to put it into words! It was as though, hankering for home, she had been an exile all her life and in him had found the home she had always known was waiting for her.

A week went by, a week of tremulous hope; a second week went by, a week of terrified foreboding. The Red Cross telegraphed from Geneva that they had been unable to discover that Roger was a prisoner. Mrs. Henderson never spoke to May about him, but one evening when they were strolling in the garden after the evacuated children had been put to bed, she slipped her hand through May’s arm.

“Darling,” she said, “I’ve thought it better that you and I shouldn’t talk to one another about Roger. I knew that you were feeling just what I was feeling and I thought it would only upset us more to speak. You’ve been wonderfully courageous.”

May said nothing. She was ashamed.

“But now I think we’ve got to talk about it. I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for the worst.”

“Don’t you think there’s any hope at all?” asked May in a low voice.

“I wish I could say yes. No, I’m afraid there’s very little. I want you to be brave. I want you to say to yourself that he died a gallant death in the service of his country, and we must be proud of him.” Her voice faltered. “We must try to find in our hearts the strength to look upon his death as a sacrifice we make willingly for the sake of the land we love and all we hold dear in this England to which we owe everything we are.”

May wished she could cry; she couldn’t. It wasn’t certain, not quite certain yet that Roger was dead, and the odd thought crossed her mind that Mrs. Henderson was anticipating the worst with a strange superstition that thus it might be averted. Poor lady. She was terribly sorry for her. And how shocking it was that at that very moment of all others she felt a pang of joy in her heart because Dick was safe and free!

She had not seen him since his return to England, but he had written to say that as soon as he could get leave he would come down to Graveney. He asked her to come to his house so that they could spend an hour or two together by themselves. Ordinarily, because it didn’t seem fair to Roger, she would have hesitated to consent to this, but now, after all the horror Dick had gone through, her desire to be alone with him was too strong to be resisted. She wrote and told him that she would gladly come. She wasn’t surprised then, but only overjoyed, when a maid called her to the telephone and she heard his voice. He asked her if she could come at once.

“Yes, easily,” she said. “I’ll get on my bike and be down in ten minutes.”

He had evidently been on the look-out for her, since as she dismounted at his door he opened it and drew her into his living-room. Her eager face froze as she saw the look on his. It was very grave. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t even ask her to sit down.

“I haven’t come to stay. I’ve got to get back to town at once. The General asked me to come down. He phoned me from the War Office.”

“Oh, Dick,” she cried.

Her heart seemed to miss a beat and she went deathly white. She knew what was coming.

“May, Roger’s dead.”

She stared at him with horrified eyes. She was stunned. For a moment neither of them could speak. They looked at one another blankly. Dick, clenching his fists, forced himself to continue.

“He’s been posted missing, presumed dead. The General wouldn’t come; he said he had to work at the Red Cross and couldn’t get away. I think he couldn’t bear to bring the news himself and he hadn’t the heart to tell it over the phone. He’s all to pieces, poor old chap. He asked me to tell you and ask you to break it to Mrs. Henderson.”

“Oh, Dick, how awful! What a frightful thing to ask me to do!”

“I know.”

They gazed at one another miserably.

“Do they know any details?” she asked at length.

“It appears that a Belgian refugee got into Havre in one of our staff cars. They spotted it and asked him how he’d got hold of it. He said he’d found it in a ditch and had got it to run. He crowded into it as many people as it would hold and eventually managed to reach Havre. It was riddled with machine-gun bullets and the front seat was covered with blood. It was the car Roger had taken when he went off that morning. The whole district was lousy with Fifth Columnists and parachutists and it looks as though Roger and his chauffeur had run into an ambush and been killed.”

May sighed deeply.

“Poor Roger. God knows I didn’t wish him dead.”

Each knew what thoughts, unwelcome but importunate, beset the other; it was bad enough to envisage them, it would have been shocking to utter them. They were silent.

“You don’t look any the worse for what you’ve gone through, Dick,” she said at last.

“Oh, I’m all right.”

They spoke as though there were nothing between them. May sighed again.

“I suppose I’d better go back. His mother’s been expecting it. Poor thing, I’m so desperately sorry for her.”

She moved towards the door and he opened it for her. He did not even touch her hand. He watched her as she got on her bicycle and then turned back into the house.

When May reached home she went into the sitting-room, looking out onto the terrace, which in summer they used in preference to the great hall; for she felt that she must have a short respite to collect herself. The house was ominously silent and you might have thought those old walls held their breath as they waited for impending evil. Mrs. Henderson and Dora were with the children, who just then would be having their tea, and there was no one about but Tommy. German bombers had been over the seaside town on the outskirts of which was situated Tommy’s preparatory school and it had seemed prudent to send the boys home. May could see him in the garden engaged in complicated evolutions among the narrow paths between the flower beds on the bicycle that had been his father’s Christmas present. She knit her brows as she tried to think how best to break the tragic news she brought. It seemed brutal to blurt out the truth without some kind of preparation, but with Mrs. Henderson in the state she was the first word must tell her everything. Poor Roger. His death grieved her piteously, and yet at the back of her mind, like a mischievous glimmer of light in the black-out, lurked the cognizance that it removed all hindrance to her marriage with Dick. She hated herself because at such a moment such a notion should occur to her. With a sigh, she rose to her feet and with set jaw went to find Mrs. Henderson.

“It’s no good funking it. The longer I wait the harder it’ll be.”

She went to the refectory.

“Oh, May, I wondered what had become of you,” said Mrs. Henderson.

But as the words fell from her lips, catching sight of May’s face, she stiffened.

“Can I speak to you for a minute?”

Without a word, with a curious, swift motion, like a tiger pacing his cage, she came down the length of the room and followed May out. She shut the door behind her.

“He’s dead?”

May nodded.

“Come.”

She took May by the wrist and pulled her into the hall. There was something terrible about her at that moment. Very white, but with a frown on her brow, she stood fronting her daughter-in-law as though she were a thief caught in the act and she were about to mete out punishment on her. Faltering, May told her that she had seen Dick and repeated what he had said.

Mrs. Henderson, listening, held May’s eyes with her own as though by main force she would drag from her everything she had to tell. But when there was no more to say she bent her head and slow tears trickled down her face.

“Oh, darling, darling,” cried May, wanting to take her in her arms.

But Mrs. Henderson drew herself away.

“Don’t touch me.”

The two women stood thus, facing one another, and May’s heart was full. She wept now too; she wept with compassion for the unhappy woman who was so dear to her. She would have liked to utter some word of comfort, but she could think of nothing that might avail, and she felt that Mrs. Henderson didn’t want her to say anything. It would have been so much easier if the poor thing would only have allowed her to share her sorrow. But she was shutting herself up in it and May felt that she resented it that anyone should try to share it with her. Suddenly they heard Tommy’s voice.

“Mummy,” he called. “Mummy.”

Mrs. Henderson pricked up her ears and looked in the direction from which the sound came.

“I shan’t tell him yet.”

“Oh, darling, you must. He’s bound to know.”

“Later perhaps, not yet. He worshipped Roger. After all it’s not absolutely certain. He may be in a hospital and unable to communicate. He may have lost his memory. Why should Tommy be made miserable before it’s absolutely necessary? It’ll be time enough to tell him when we’ve abandoned hope.”

The younger woman was dismayed. It was true that Tommy worshipped Roger; to him he was a hero and his vocation, with the secrecy it involved, excited his imagination. He had always been fonder of him than of Jim. He adored him as a small boy may adore an elder brother who is to him the personification of adventure and romance. He thought him perfect. But after all Tommy wasn’t a child, he was thirteen, bright, and with all his wits about him. It was impossible to keep Roger’s death a secret and surely it would be much worse for him to hear it from a stranger than from one of them. And how could Mrs. Henderson pretend that the event was in doubt? None of their inquiries had resulted in anything. The refugee and the blood-stained car. And how could one imagine that the General would have sent Dick down to break the dreadful news to them if he hadn’t himself been certain? May sighed.

“It must be as you wish, darling,” she said.

Mrs. Henderson did not seem to hear her. She turned away and went out of the room.

“I suppose I must carry on,” May said to herself.

She went back to the refectory to see if she was wanted there. The children had finished their tea and Dora was clearing away.

When the children had been put to bed and they had had their own frugal dinner, Dora, as she did now and then, went out for a walk. It was still light. Mrs. Henderson, May and Tommy sat in the sitting-room. The two women knitted and Tommy, unusually quiet, was poring over some books. No one spoke. The clock struck and Mrs. Henderson looked up.

“Half past nine, Tommy. You must go to bed.”

“Half a mo. I’m just trying to find something out.”

“Are you?” said Mrs. Henderson, giving him a wan, indulgent smile. “What is it?”

He ran his hand through his unruly hair and faced her with a frown of absorption on his fresh, young face.

“Well, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and I’ve come to the conclusion that Roger’s a prisoner in Germany. Now if I know anything about Roger he’ll escape. A lot of chaps did in the last war. I wanted to see how he could get to Switzerland. I mean, Holland’s out, isn’t it?”

He was so immensely serious that, if it hadn’t been intolerably pathetic, one would have laughed.

“Oh, well, that’ll wait till tomorrow. Come and say good night to me.”

He got up and went over to kiss his mother. She took him in her arms and pressing him to her heart kissed him on the lips. A little surprised at the warmth of her embrace, he gave her a questioning look, but said nothing. When they were alone Mrs. Henderson felt that May’s sad eyes were on her, but she would not meet them. She went on knitting. They sat in silence.

XI

ON THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON May, off duty for a while, went into the sitting-room to think things over. She knew that at that hour she would have it to herself. During luncheon Tommy, still full of his notion that Roger was a prisoner, had asked Dora a string of questions about Germany. He had been studying books in the library and was crammed with knowledge of mountain passes and unfrequented roads. He had learnt where the chief prisoners’ camps had been during the last war. He insisted on telling them the plan of escape he had thought out for Roger. He didn’t know how he could fail. It was painful to listen to him. May felt that it was false kindness to keep the truth from him. It was bound to leak out — why, Dick, not knowing that it was to be kept secret, might very well have told someone in the village before he went back to London, and it would be cruel to let Tommy hear it casually from a gamekeeper or one of the tradesmen. Though she didn’t relish it, for Mrs. Henderson could at times be obstinate, May decided that she must try to make her see reason. Surely, after brooding over it for twenty-four hours, she must see that to go on hoping against hope was bootless.

Unwillingly May got up to look for her. She was at the door when Tommy burst into the room.

“May, May, there are two strange men in the park,” he cried. “D’you think they’re parachutists?”

She turned back and stepped out on to the terrace. “Where?”

“Shall I get Daddy’s gun? We’ll capture them.” Unhappy as she was, she could not but smile at his excitement. He was such a kid. Of course it would be awful for his mother, telling him; he was so unprepared for it. She looked at the two men who were walking slowly towards them. One limped badly.

“They’re only a couple of tramps.”

“They’re foreigners. Look how they’re dressed. I’m sure they’re parachutists.”

“Nonsense. I expect they’re Belgian refugees or something like that. They’ve probably wandered up here from the village and lost their way.”

“I’d better get the gun in case.”

“Don’t be so silly, Tommy. They don’t look in the least dangerous. I wonder if they’re hungry and want food.”

The two men climbed over the low iron railing that separated the park from the formal garden and were now walking up the broad grass path that led to the terrace steps. One was dressed in dirty, rumpled denims, with a beret on his head, and the other, the one who limped, had a handkerchief round his neck and wore an odd sort of jacket and a funny, high-peaked cap. They both had short, scrubby beards. They were unkempt and dirty. May looked at them with distaste. She went to the top of the steps and stood there with Tommy by her side. As they came near it was quite obvious that they were foreigners.

“Bonjour, monsieur, dame,” said the man who limped, the taller of the two.

May answered in French.

“What do you want? You must go round to the side door.”

Suddenly, with a shriek, Tommy flung himself down the steps and into the arms of the tall bearded man with the limp.

“Roger.”

May had been pale before, but now her pallor was ashy and to steady herself she put out her hand on the balustrade. She stared aghast. For a moment she thought she was going to faint. Tommy, clinging to Roger, burst into tears.

“I knew you weren’t killed,” he sobbed hysterically. “They all thought you were, but I knew you weren’t.”

“Of course I’m not killed, old boy.”

The voice! Yes, that was his voice all right; she knew that faintly mocking ring.

“I kept a stiff upper lip when you were missing, but now — now I don’t — seem — able to control myself.”

“Never mind, old boy. You have a good cry if you want to.”

“I’m not crying,” sobbed Tommy. “It’s only water pouring out of my eyes.”

Roger kissed him and petted him as though he were a child. May, as still as the statue at her side, stood at the top of the steps staring. Contradictory emotions assaulted her. She was glad he was alive, thankful he was alive and well, and yet her heart sank; that was the end of those dreams that she had striven to drive away, but that for all her striving battered at her consciousness like desperate strangers beating on a door to be let in.

“Where’s your mummy?” asked Roger.

Tommy snatched himself from his brother’s arms.

“I’ll go and tell her. Oh, she’ll be so pleased.”

He bounded up the steps and ran into the house shouting for his mother as he went. Roger limped up to May.

“I’d better not come too near you, darling,” he said. “I haven’t had a bath for weeks and I stink.”

“Oh, Roger.”

She threw her arms round his neck and he kissed her on both cheeks.

“I’m so glad you’re safe, Roger. We’ve been so frightfully anxious.”

“Is that why you’re looking so pale, dear?” he said, with an odd, slightly derisive smile in his eyes.

“Why are you limping? Are you wounded?”

“Nothing to speak of. D’you like my beard?”

It changed his face completely. His eyes seemed larger than they used to be and his temples were hollow. He looked over her shoulder and saw his mother come out of the french window. He went towards her and she held out her arms to him.

“Oh, my boy, my dear boy.”

Their lips met as though they were lovers.

“I recognized him first,” chirruped Tommy, jumping from foot to foot in his excitement. “May didn’t know him.”

Mrs. Henderson stepped back a little and with her hands on his shoulders looked at him. Her face was transfigured and her eyes shone.

“My poor boy, you look a perfect scarecrow. No wonder they didn’t know you. Don’t you want a bath?”

“Badly. A drink first and a bath next.”

“May and Tommy will look after you. I must phone your father. I want to tell him myself. He’s been in an awful state about you. I’m sure he’ll come down at once.”

“I can’t stay, Mother. We only stopped off because I thought you might be anxious. We got somebody to give us a lift as far as the village and I took a short cut through the park. As soon as I’ve had a bath I must get on to London and report. I’ll see Father there.”

During this time the man who had come with Roger was standing where Roger had left him, watching what was going forward on the terrace with a shy but friendly grin on his face. He was a short, sturdy fellow with a knowing look in his bright little eyes; he had a cigarette stuck to his lips and with a fortnight’s beard on his chin, his filthy denims and the slouching way he stood, he looked so tough that had you met him on a dark night you would have been glad to give him a wide berth. Roger gave him a twinkling smile.

“Come along, Nobby.”

The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, crushed it out, and putting it behind his ear shambled up the steps.

“This is my friend Nobby Clark, Mother. We had a bit of a job getting back, didn’t we, Nobby?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Nobby spoke with a cockney accent you could have cut with a knife. Dirty as he was, and unkempt, the merry look in his eyes, the impudent cheerfulness of his grin, made his ugly, common little face singularly attractive. Mrs. Henderson held out her hand. He looked at his own, came to the conclusion it was filthy and rubbed it on his dirty denims, making it filthier still, and then shook hands with her. Roger introduced him to May, then turned to Tommy.

“This is my friend Corporal Clark, Tommy. I don’t know if we should be here now if he hadn’t been a damned good mechanic. Take him upstairs and give him a bath. He needs it.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Come along, Corporal,” said Tommy.

Tommy was a Boy Scout and he looked very nippy in his short khaki pants and his shirt open at his thin neck. Thrilled to have a soldier who had escaped from France put in his charge, he was determined to do the thing in style. He took him to a bathroom and emptied half a bottle of bath salts into the hot water. Nobby took off his foul clothes and stepped into it.

“Gorblime, don’t it smell good?” He soaped himself and then said: “Give me back a scrub, will you, sonny?”

“Right-ho, Corporal.”

“Cheese it. Don’t call me Corporal. Call me Nobby same as they all do.”

Tommy scrubbed him vigourously.

“You’re simply disgusting,” he said with delight. “I never saw anyone so dirty.”

“I was surprised at meself when I saw me feet. I ‘aven’t ‘ad me clothes off for a month.”

“The water’s simply black. We’d better change it.”

“Don’t you do no such thing, me lad. I like it like that. I like to see ‘ow dirty I was.” He lay down luxuriously. “This is a bit of all right and no mistake. And them bath salts you put in — Lor lumme, I could stay ‘ere for a week.”

“I know what you want now,” said Tommy. “Wait a minute.”

He bolted out and in a moment came back with a tankard of beer.

“What’s this? Beer? BEER.”

He put into that monosyllable all the passion that ever poet put into the praise of his mistress. He drained the tankard at a gulp.

Roger went up and had a bath too. He shaved off his beard and got clothes from his father’s room. It was a bit of luck that he and his father were of a size; the look of the things he had taken off disgusted him. It was good to put on clean linen. He was sitting at the dressing-table in his shirt sleeves, combing his hair, when May came in to see if there was anything he wanted. Though he looked again very much his old smart, confident self May was suddenly shocked at the sight of him. Now that he was shaved she saw how thin he was and white; his cheeks had fallen in, and in that drawn face his haggard eyes were enormous. He looked frightfully tired. He saw her look of dismay in the mirror in front of him and laughed.

“Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost.”

“I’ve seen you look better,” she said, forcing a smile to her lips.

“I got into a bit of a jam. I shall be all right after a few days’ rest.”

“Your limp?”

“Oh, that’s nothing. I got a bullet in my leg and it was rather painful for a bit. But it’s healing up nicely.”

“I want to tell you again how awfully glad I am that you got back safely. I’m so ashamed that I didn’t recognize you at once.”

He turned round on the stool he was sitting on and smiled kindly.

“Oh, that’s all right, dear. I looked a hell of a sight, didn’t I? If I’d met myself in the street I’d have cut myself dead.”

“I didn’t expect you. And then, coming with another man. You see, you’d been posted missing, believed dead.”

“Was I, by Jove?”

“The car in which you’d been driving turned up at Havre. It had been fired at and there was a lot of blood.”

“It wasn’t mine; it was my driver’s; he was killed, poor chap. I got away with a few scratches.”

“I’m so thankful now we didn’t tell Tommy. You see, we only heard yesterday. We didn’t tell anybody.”

“How did you hear, by the way?”

“Your father was told at the War Office. He asked Dick to come down and break it to us.”

“Dick? He got away all right, did he?”

“Yes.”

“Good for him.” He gave her a slightly mocking glance. “I hope this isn’t too great a disappointment to you, May.”

She flushed deeply.

“Oh, Roger, how can you say anything so unkind? Surely you know me better than that?”

“Sorry, old girl.”

He made a great play of lighting a cigarette, and then in a tone deliberately casual asked:

“Are you still in love with Dick?”

“I’m afraid I am,” she replied gravely.

“I see.” He gave her a friendly little smile. “Let’s go down and have a drink, shall we? And then I must be off.”

“Must you really go so soon?”

“I’m afraid so. I couldn’t have come as it is if it hadn’t been on my way to town. But I’m sure to get a spot of leave and then I’ll come down again.”

It was a relief to get the conversation back on to a level of commonplace.

“Don’t forget that we’re dying to know how you escaped. Tommy will be simply thrilled to hear.”

“I’ll tell you all about it in due course.”

Half an hour later Roger stepped out of the front door. The Hendersons still had their chauffeur, an elderly man, and the Rolls was waiting. Nobby Clark was standing by. A pair of grey flannel pants had been found for him and a sweater.

“Why, Nobby, you look a new man,” smiled Roger. “Same to you, sir,” he answered with a grin. Then with some misgiving: “Sir, Master Tommy’s given me an undershirt and drawers — silk they are — and a pair of socks. I dunno where they come from.”

“His things were filthy, Roger. They just stank.”

“Quite right, Tommy. That’s O.K., Nobby. I expect they’re my father’s and I’m sure he’ll be glad you should have them.”

“My ole woman won’t ‘arf laugh when she sees me in silk drawers tonight.”

XII

ROGER REPORTED at the War Office, saw his father, and then he went into hospital to have the bullet still in his shoulder taken out. It was nearly three weeks before he was able to get back to Graveney. He was much better, but still looked tired, and he was as thin as a rail. Tommy made haste to remind him that he had promised to tell them the story of his escape, but he laughed and said there was nothing to tell. He had got into a jam and more by good luck than by good management had got out of it. But this was far from satisfying the schoolboy’s curiosity and by dint of questioning, notwithstanding his mother’s expostulations, in the end he succeeded in getting it out of Roger. He wouldn’t sit down and narrate it step by step from the beginning, but told them an incident here and an incident there, as it occurred to him and the conversation led up to it, so that May had to exercise her imagination in order to construct out of his desultory reminiscences a story that hung together.

So far as she could make out, the whole thing had started with an order he had been given to transmit. There was a small village near Cassel that it had been decided must be defended to delay the enemy, and since there was no infantry available the task was entrusted to a battery of the R.H.A. It was so late at night when Roger reached it that he decided to stay the night, but at dawn an attack started, and tanks, supported by parties of German infantry, penetrated the outskirts of the village. The fighting was furious. By afternoon the ammunition had run low and the guns could only fire every few minutes; it was clear that the small garrison could hold out no longer and a withdrawal was ordered. Roger had felt it impossible to go when every man was needed and he had taken command of a small detachment of yeomanry that had appeared. But now, since he could no longer be of use, he decided to get back to headquarters. He shook hands with the commander.

“You’ve put up a grand show,” he said.

“Well, I had to do something,” the other grinned.

All the guns but two had been put out of action and they and the wounded were to be sent ahead, and the rest of the force was following later by a different route.

They were to meet at a village three or four miles away.

“What makes you think the Germans aren’t holding it?” asked Roger.

“If they are we shall be damned unlucky. But we’ll kill a hell of a lot of them first.”

“Well, good luck to you.”

“You’ll want a bit of luck yourself to get through. The blighters are swarming all over the shop.”

“Oh, I shall be all right. I’m going to get off the high road as soon as I can. It’ll take me a bit longer, but I think it’s worth it.”

There was a lull and Roger set off with his chauffeur. They drove for some distance, along a river, and then, at a fork, saw a car coming towards them on the road they intended to take themselves. There were two British officers in it and Roger stopped them.

“Is the road all right behind you?” he called out.

“Right as rain. Not a sign of a Hun.”

“O.K.”

He drove on. Looking at his map he saw that there was a bridge some miles on and shortly after that a side road he judged would lead him by a detour to his destination. The country was flat and they didn’t spare the gas, but there was a straggling line of refugees on the road and every now and then they were held up. They passed through a wood and were just getting to the bridge when there was a sudden burst of machine-gun fire and the car swerved violently. The driver slumped over the wheel. The car skidded into a ditch and with a terrific jerk stopped, but by a happy chance did not turn over. Roger jumped out and amid a hail of bullets ran for the bridge and dived over the parapet into the water. He was hit as he went over. He swam for dear life. The Germans ran to the bridge and fired down the river, but it was overhung with trees and they could only fire at random. He wasn’t hit again. Then he heard another burst of firing, much more intense, but it wasn’t directed at him; he paused for a moment to take breath and then heard the droning of a plane. He guessed at once what had happened. A British plane was gunning the men who had lain in ambush and they had scuttled to the cover of the wood. He looked about him; he was pretty well done in by now, and it seemed to him that he could do nothing better than climb up the bank and hide in the thick undergrowth. He lay there for a while listening with all his ears; the firing had ceased; the Germans had either taken to their heels or had thought him not worth pursuing. He got up and, moving cautiously, started to walk, but his leg hurt him and he staggered and fell. He was wounded in the leg, though he didn’t think badly, and he had what felt like a nasty cut on his face and a flesh wound in the right shoulder. He slithered along the ground and sitting down propped his back against the trunk of a tree.

“This is a howd’ye do,” he said to himself.

“Why did you say that?” asked Tommy.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”

“If I’d been you I’d have cursed and sworn.”

“I knew Mother wouldn’t approve of that,” laughed Roger.

“Oh, my dear, after being married to your father for thirty-five years I may say that there’s not a word in the English language that can make me turn a hair,” she smiled.

“Go on,” said Tommy impatiently.

“Well, I tried to think what I’d better do next. I thought the first thing was to have a bit of a rest, and then, when it got dark, to get back to the road and see if I couldn’t find some house where I could put up for the night. You see, I had to try and get back to headquarters somehow. Luckily I had several thousand francs on me.”

“Didn’t you feel awful?”

“Rotten. I was wet through. I couldn’t do anything about my face and my shoulder, but I thought I’d have a look at my leg. It wasn’t much, but it was bleeding a bit; I’d got a bullet just above the knee and as far as I could make out it had injured a tendon. That’s why it gave me such gyp to walk. I wanted a cigarette more than anything in the world and my cigarettes were in that case you gave me, May, and they were as dry as a bone; but my lighter wouldn’t work and so I couldn’t smoke. Well, I made myself as comfortable as I could and just lay there — I should think for an hour, and then I heard some one trampling through the brushwood.”

“Weren’t you scared?” asked Tommy.

“Scared out of my wits. I took my revolver and pointed it in the direction of the sound. If it was a German he was for it.”

To his surprise it was a woman that appeared. When she saw him she held up her hands.

“Friend. Friend,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Well, you’ve found me,” he replied. “What are you going to do about it?”

She was a stocky young woman, with a flat face and apple-red cheeks; she looked like a peasant and Roger supposed she was a refugee. She had very small, very black eyes, like buttons, and they were hard and shrewd.

“Are you wounded?” she asked him.

“Not seriously.”

“I saw it happen. They were parachutists. It was luck for you that plane came along. Five of them were killed.”

“How about my chauffeur?”

“He was dead.”

“Are there any Germans about?”

“Motor cyclists. No tanks yet.”

“How can I get away from here?”

He couldn’t tell from the look on her flat face if she was stupid or hostile.

“You’re an officer, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to consider.

“Look,” she said then, “you’re safe here for the present. Wait till it’s dark and then I’ll take you to the farm.”

“What farm?”

“My father-in-law’s. It’s on the edge of the wood. Shall you be able to walk there if I help you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Don’t move. I’ll whistle when I come back.”

She disappeared into the greenery and he was left alone once more. He was in pain and he was none too sure that she meant what she said. It might be that she had gone to inform on him and would come back with a party of Germans to take him prisoner. He had a mind to crawl from where he was to a place of greater safety, but it seemed useless; she’d know he couldn’t get far and they’d soon find him. The only thing was to sit still and take his chance. He was beginning not to care what happened. Night came and he shivered in his wet clothes. At last he heard a sound of someone coming and then a cautious whistle. He waited a moment, listening with all his ears, to make sure the girl was alone and then whistled back. She made her way to where he was lying. He could only just stand now, but she put a strong arm round him and together they made their way through the wood. He wondered if he’d find half a dozen Huns waiting for him when he got out of it, and heaved a sigh of relief when they got into the open and there was not a soul to be seen. The farm stood a little way back from the road.

“I’ve told my mother-in-law,” the girl said. “You can sleep the night. My father-in-law has been down in the village since dinner. He hasn’t come back yet.”

The door was opened for them by a plump, tallish woman of middle age.

“Here he is,” said the girl.

The woman, without speaking, made way for them to enter and Roger sank into a chair. He was terribly thirsty and asked for a glass of water. While he was drinking it there was the sound of footsteps outside and the girl said:

“There’s Father.”

She unlocked the door and a thin, wizened man, with a mean face, entered. He started when he saw Roger. He gave the two women an angry look.

“What’s this? Who have you got here?”

“It’s an English officer. He escaped when the parachutists attacked his car.”

He clenched his fist and went up to Roger.

“Get out. Get out.”

“He’s wounded,” the girl said.

“I don’t care. The Germans are here. If they find him they’ll burn the farm. I was in the last war and I know.”

“I only want to stay the night,” said Roger. “I’ll pay you well.”

“No, no, no. Get out.”

“He can’t go, he can hardly stand,” cried the girl. “He’ll die.”

“Let him. That’s his look-out.”

Roger hoisted himself up from the chair.

“I’ll go.”

“No, I won’t let you,” she cried. She turned to the farmer and, her eyes furious, screamed: “And my husband? Have you forgotten him? He’s your son, isn’t he? For all you know he too may be wounded or in want of help.”

“Yes, man, there’s your son,” said his wife.

“You don’t know the Germans. They’re capable of putting us up against a wall and shooting us all three.”

“Let him stay the night, Michel.”

At that moment they pricked up their ears. There was a screech of brakes and then the tramp of heavy boots.

“Germans.”

The farmer’s wife sprang to a door and opened it.

“Go in there. Hide under the bed.”

The girl put her hands under Roger’s armpits, lifted him to his feet and flung him into the next room. He stood against the closed door, his revolver in his hand, and heard her say to her father-in-law:

“If you give him away I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

There was a loud knocking.

“Open. Open.”

One or other of them unlocked the door and two motor cyclists came in.

“Don’t be frightened. We’re not going to hurt you. We’ve lost our way and we saw your light. We want to get to Andrecy.”

“Where have you come from?” said the farmer.

“Germany. Where did you think?”

“You keep on this road for another four kilometres, and then you take the turning on your left.”

“And we’re as thirsty as the devil. Have you got any wine?”

The girl set a couple of bottles before them. They took them and prepared to go, but the farmer got between them and the door.

“That’ll be four francs.”

“The general will be along tomorrow. You ask him for it.”

The man who spoke pushed the wizened Frenchman aside with a sweep of his arm and the two of them strode out. The farmer shook his fist at them. “Swine.”

Roger hobbled back to the kitchen and sank down once more into a chair. He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands.

“You see he’s not fit to move,” said the girl. “You can’t have the heart to turn him out into the night.” The farmer looked at him sulkily. It might have been that his wrath at having two bottles of wine taken from him without payment had more effect on him than pity for a wounded man. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Let him stay. But I won’t have him in the house. He can go in the hayloft. If the Germans find him there I can say I knew nothing about him.”

The girl gave him a suspicious stare and then went up so close to him that her face almost touched his. Her little black eyes were set and fierce.

“The Boches aren’t going to find him unless you tell them where he is. Swear that you won’t give him away. Swear on the head of your son.”

The farmer, as though he could not meet that menacing stare, glanced shiftily away. His wife looked up.

“Swear, Michel.”

The farmer uttered a filthy word. Then sulkily:

“I swear — on the head of my son.”

It was a job for the two women to get Roger up a ladder into the loft. They laid him down on a pile of hay.

“Oh, my poor boy,” said Mrs. Henderson, when he told them this part of the story.

“I was jolly glad to hit the hay,” Roger smiled. “It’s astonishing how comfortable you can make yourself when you get used to it, and anyhow it was a damned sight better than a prison camp. I was pretty well all in, you know.”

He spent ten days in that loft. For next morning he was so sick that there could be no question of his going. Jeannette, that was the girl’s name, brought the farmer to see him; the man looked at him angrily, and then without a word clambered down the ladder again. His daughter-in-law followed him. Roger guessed that a bitter altercation took place, but he felt too ill to bother. He could only trust in the power of those two strong-willed women over the frightened, mean-spirited man. In an hour Jeannette came back and said that her father-in-law had agreed to let him stay till he was well enough to walk. She brought him milk to drink, and food; he couldn’t touch the food, but he drank the milk greedily. His leg didn’t trouble him much, nor the scratch on his face, but his shoulder throbbed painfully. He felt feverish. He felt worse and worse as the day wore on and that night he was delirious. He was no better next day. He wasn’t sure if it was on the third or fourth night that he heard other steps besides Jeannette’s on the ladder. That was the end, he thought; either a gendarme or a Gestapo man. He was too weak to resist. But it was the village doctor that Jeannette, frightened at his condition, had persuaded under seal of secrecy to come and see him. He was a rough, uncouth fellow, who looked as if he were more used to treating animals than human beings and who was evidently nervous at what he was doing, but he was not incompetent and he cleaned and dressed Roger’s wounds and gave him aspirin. After that, he came every night. Roger began to mend. He was a strong man, young and in good condition; feeling better every day he occupied his long hours of solitude in making plans for his escape. He had been looking at his maps when the parachutists had attacked him and had lost them when he jumped out of the car and ran for the bridge, so to decide what route to take he had to trust to his own inadequate knowledge of the country and what he could learn from Jeannette. She had lived all her life in the vicinity and such information as she could give him of what lay beyond was unreliable. His scheme was to reach the sea and then get a fisherman to take him across the Channel. He was thankful that he had enough money on him to make it worth a man’s while. The news Jeannette brought him was bad; she said the British Army in Flanders had surrendered and the French were retreating. Weygand was in command now, and was withdrawing his troops with the idea of launching a counter-offensive at the proper moment and driving the Boches back to their own frontiers. Roger didn’t know what to believe. He couldn’t think it was true that the British had surrendered, but he knew in what a perilous situation the capitulation of the Belgian King had placed them and it was instinct rather than reason that made him refuse to believe it.

According to Jeannette the whole place swarmed with Germans and it looked as though his only chance of getting through was in disguise. He asked her if she could get him clothes in which he could pass unnoticed. She suggested a suit of her husband’s.

“He’s about your size,” she said.

She brought it to him, wrapped in a large bundle, one night, and he tried it on. The sleeves were short for him, and so were the pants, but he could wear it. He would look a sight, but so dressed no one would take him for a British officer. To exercise his limbs he walked up and down the loft for half an hour at a time. He could walk now without great pain. On two nights, after they had gone to bed at the farm, he crept down and walked for a while along the road. It made him light-headed and he was tired when he got back. One morning when Jeannette brought him food, which she did soon after dawn and then again when night fell, she said to him:

“I’ve been thinking. What’ll you do about papers? A gendarme might stop you and ask for them.”

“I’ve thought of that. I think I can pass as a Belgian refugee and I’ll say they were stolen from me on the way.”

“That’s dangerous. I’ll give you my husband’s.”

“Good girl.”

She was indeed a pearl. That flat plain face, the sullen mouth and the cold shrewd eyes were no indication of her character. Roger had been mistaken in her. In her rough, churlish way she was wonderfully kind. Her behaviour proved her courage, her tenacity and her compassion. When Roger tried to express something of his gratitude for all she had done, she only made a gesture of impatience.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d have done the same for anyone.” For the first time he saw something like a smile on her face. “You’re a fine-looking man. It would be a shame to let the Boches get you.”

Then one morning she came somewhat later than was her habit. The sun had been up for an hour.

“Good morning, Jeannette,” he said breezily. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”

“I had to wait till the old man was out of the way.”

“Oh, why? Is he turning nasty again? How about some food? I’m starving.”

“Listen, we’ve kept you as long as we can. There are Germans in the village and the old man’s frightened. They say they’ll shoot anyone found harbouring an Englishman.”

“Charming people.” He gave a cheerful nod. “All right. I’ll get out tonight. I’m quite strong enough.”

“The old man’s gone down to the village and we don’t know why. You must go now. Get into my husband’s clothes. I’ve got his papers all ready and a cup of coffee waiting for you.”

It was plain enough that Jeannette thought her father-in-law had gone down to the village to give him away. There was not time to lose. He hastened to dress, climbed down the rickety ladder and walked over to the farm. He went into the kitchen. He hadn’t seen the farmer’s wife since the night on which Jeannette had brought him, wet through and wounded, to the farm and he greeted her warmly. But she interrupted him. He saw that she was in a fever of nervousness.

“Drink your coffee quickly,” she said. “This is no time for fine speeches.”

It was waiting for him on the table in a bowl. He sat down and dipping pieces of bread in it began to eat. Jeannette gave him a little booklet.

“Here are the papers.”

He glanced at the photograph of a stolid-looking man of about his own age.

“I can’t say he looks much like me,” he grinned.

“The beard makes a difference, but he might have grown one too.”

“Good God, I forgot I hadn’t shaved since I got here. What do I look like?”

“See for yourself.”

Jeannette handed him a glass and he saw himself for the first time since he arrived at the farm. He gasped.

“Make haste, make haste,” said the farmer’s wife. “Here’s a piece of bread with a bit of meat in it. That’ll do you till tonight.”

Roger took it and stood up.

“I shall never forget your kindness to me. I should like to give you something for all your trouble.”

“We don’t want your money,” said Jeannette. “What we’ve done for you we’ve done for France.”

“Go now for God’s sake,” said the other.

Roger kissed them, shut the door behind him and slipped out on the road to freedom.

XIII

THE SUN shone and the air was sweet-scented with the fragrance of the morning. He was in high spirits. It was good to be on the way and the risk he ran pleasantly excited him. He walked and rested and walked again. In the evening he ran across Nobby Clark. He related the incident with so much gusto that Tommy was beside himself with glee.

“I’d been tramping all day and I thought it was about time to find some place to sleep. Well, just as it was getting dark I passed a small, two-storeyed house standing by itself; the shutters were up and it looked deserted. It was one of those little houses that you see all over France and that retired tradesmen build as a retreat for their declining years. It had a bit of garden in front with painted statuettes in it, of gnomes and dwarfs, and two great silver balls. You know the sort of thing. Typical. Well, I was dog-tired and my leg was giving me hell. I didn’t know how far the next village was, and I thought it very improbable that I’d get a bed there, so I thought I’d better do a bit of house-breaking and spend the night in that empty house. I tried the door, but it was locked and so I went round to the back. There was a glass door there, but it was locked too. I looked round for something to smash it with. There was a wood shed at the end of the garden and I thought I might find something there. I did and it was just what I wanted. A hatchet.”

Roger paused for a moment, a grin on his face, and looked around at his tiny audience.

“You know, I don’t believe I’d ever make a first-rate burglar. I was as nervous as a cat when I smashed the lock and got into what was obviously their living-room.”

“Whose?” asked Tommy.

“The people who lived there, you owl. I suppose they’d done a bunk when they heard the Huns were coming. It was crammed full of furniture and everything was covered with dust-sheets. I don’t know why, but there was something damned frightening about it.”

“I bet you weren’t frightened, Roger,” said Tommy. “You’d lose your bet, old boy. I was trembling like a leaf. That’s the worst of being a law-abiding feller. It shakes your nerve to pieces when you start breaking the law. Well, I went out of the door into the passage; there was a staircase that led upstairs and I was just going up when I happened to look at a looking-glass that was hanging on the wall. I got the shock of my life. I saw a man crouching at the top of the stairs with what looked suspiciously like a jemmy in his hand. Well, his intentions were obvious and they weren’t what you might call friendly. My heart jumped to my mouth. I turned damned quick and then I saw he was a British soldier.”

“And it was the corporal?”

“It was,” said Roger.

The man almost started out of his skin when Roger spoke to him.

“What the hell are you doing there?”

“English, by gum,” the man spluttered. He chuckled. “Lucky you spoke, I was just going to biff you one.” He came down the stairs. “You don’t look English.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Got a fag?”

“Here you are,” said Roger, handing him a cigarette. “Come along in here.”

They went back into the sitting-room.

“How did you get here?” asked Roger.

“I was taken prisoner. We was in a camp first and then we was marched off somewhere, Lille or some place, and when we was passing a wood I legged it. They ‘ad two or three shots at me, but they didn’t get me. An’ I been leggin’ it ever since, goin’ by night on account of me uniform.”

“It does make you a bit conspicuous, I must say.”

The soldier looked at him with sudden suspicion. “Look ‘ere, you ain’t an orficer, are you? You look like a blinkin’ tramp.”

“Oh, that’s all right, old boy. Don’t you worry about that. Where are you legging it to?”

“Blessed if I know. I want to get back to me regiment.”

“Fat chance you’ve got of doing that.”

“Where are you goin’?”

“England. Want to come?”

“Not ‘arf.”

“All right. I don’t know the way, mind you, but I’ve got a pocket compass. We’ll get to the coast and then we’ll see.”

“I suppose you ‘aven’t got anythin’ to eat, ‘ave you? I ain’t ‘ad a bite all day.”

“Yes, I got something in the last village I came through.”

Roger took out of his pocket a hunk of bread and cheese and handed it to the soldier.

“Can you spare it?”

“Rather. All I want’s a sleep. I’ve been walking since morning and I’m all in.”

“There’s a bed up there,” said the soldier as he began to eat hungrily. “I been sleepin’ in it meself.”

“Wake me up in two or three hours and we’ll get going. I don’t think we’d better waste any more time than we need.”

“Right you are, sir.”

“And you needn’t call me sir. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Clark’s my name.”

He just avoided adding the sir. Roger smiled.

“And I suppose they call you Nobby?”

“That’s right.”

While Roger was telling them this Tommy had been showing signs of lively impatience and now could contain himself no longer.

“I say, Roger, was that the compass I gave you before you went over to France?”

“It was, old boy, and very useful I found it.”

“I knew you would. You see I was right, Mummy. Mummy said she couldn’t possibly see what you’d want with a compass.”

They trudged through what remained of the night, Roger and his companion, and at dawn found a coppice well away from the road which they decided would be a good place to spend the day at. Roger went on to a hamlet they had caught sight of with the first glimpse of daylight and brought back a loaf, sausages and two bottles of wine. From his accent Roger knew that Nobby was a cockney and he learnt now that he was born and bred in London. He was a mechanic who in peacetime worked in a garage in the Horseferry Road, which is in Westminster, behind Victoria Street. He seemed an alert, clever little man who could make himself useful in an emergency and the way he had escaped showed that he had spirit. The only thing that bothered Roger was the uniform. That increased the risk of their being caught, and somehow or other civilian clothes must be got for him. It wasn’t too easy, since they had to travel by night and in any case avoid even the smallest towns where they might be stopped and asked inconvenient questions. The nearer they got to the coast the greater the danger would be.

When Roger on leaving the hospital came to stay at Graveney Dora diffidently withdrew herself from the family circle. She continued to do her work conscientiously, but spent such leisure as she had walking in the park and in the evening, immediately after dinner, went up to her room. Mrs. Henderson could not but appreciate her tact, for much as they all liked her, it was natural that just then they should want to be alone with Roger and an outsider, however intimate, could not but be in the way. It was clever of Dora to realize it. She seldom joined them except at meals and then, though Roger politely sought to bring her into the conversation she seemed disinclined to take part in it. She spoke only when spoken to. Mrs. Henderson was glad to see that Roger was disposed to like her and she took care to tell him how much they all thought of her.

“Except Jane,” he smiled.

“Oh, you know what Jane is. She thinks she’s broadminded, and in point of fact she’s the most insular and prejudiced woman I’ve ever met.”

“That sounds as though you were quite resigned to Jim’s marrying Dora.”

“Has Jane been talking to you?”

“What would you expect?”

Mrs. Henderson paused for an instant of reflection.

“I have a great admiration for Dora. I’m sure she’s a thoroughly nice girl and of course she’s wonderfully pretty. I suppose I’ve got my prejudices too and I won’t deny that she isn’t the wife I’d have chosen for Jim myself, but if she’ll make him happy — well, that’s the chief thing; and there’s no doubt that he’s very much in love with her.”

Jim came over on Sunday. The two brothers had not met since that afternoon in Jane’s house when Jim to the general dismay had stated that he meant to abide by the dictates of his conscience. But they had a real affection for one another and Jim had been as cruelly anxious as the others when May waited from day to day for news of Roger and no news came. He was immensely happy to see him again. They chaffed one another in the old way.

“Well, old boy, I’ve done you out of the broad acres this time. I suppose you were counting on your chickens like mad.”

“Well, wouldn’t you? As a matter of fact I got an adding machine. A dirty trick I call it to do the Enoch Arden stunt on us when we’d all given you up as lost.”

“Damned inconsiderate of me, wasn’t it? Now you may have to wait another forty years for the property.”

“I know. And it’ll probably be mortgaged up to the hilt when I do get it.”

“Be quiet, you boys,” said Mrs. Henderson. “I’m not amused.”

“Like Queen Victoria,” they said in unison.

Mrs. Henderson was delighted to see that notwithstanding everything they were such good friends. Jim was in unusually good spirits. Roger chatted with him about his work as though it were the most natural thing that just at that period in the world’s history he should be an agricultural labourer. The General had come down for the week-end, but he took his cue from Roger and was more genial with Jim than he had been since the beginning of the war. He even went so far as to suggest archly that he was having a devil of a time with the land girls he had heard Jim’s employer had lately taken on. He was in fact beginning to accept his son’s aberration as an idiosyncrasy such as you found from time to time in many old families. In the St. Erths, for instance, there was always a spinster aunt who had been shut up in a lunatic asylum for twenty years; and in the Hollingtons at least one member who was a confirmed drunk. But he was as anxious as Tommy to hear the details of Roger’s escape from France and that evening at dinner made him tell again some part of what he had already told.

“But how was it that you never saw any Germans?” he asked him at one point.

“Oh, but I did,” answered Roger. With his breezy smile he turned to Dora. “I had one very narrow shave of being collared by your Nazi friends.”

“They’re not friends of mine,” she answered coldly.

He laughed.

“I know they’re not. I was only being facetious.”

“I’m sorry. I sometimes don’t understand English humour.”

“That has all the ear-marks of a nasty crack,” he retorted good-humouredly.

“Go on, Roger,” said Tommy. “Tell us about it.”

This is the story he told them. They had been on the road two days, trudging through the night and only resting when the pain in Roger’s leg became unendurable, and early on the third morning came to a tiny village. They had been looking for a wood where they could lie doggo for the day, but the country was bare and the only thing was to push on. They were tired, hungry and thirsty. They walked through the one street of which the place consisted and opposite the church came to a humble little inn where the men of the village came to have their apéritif and play cards; a woman was sweeping the floor and they caught a whiff of roasting coffee. The smell was inviting.

“Let’s chance it,” said Roger and walked in, with Nobby following.

The woman gasped when she saw his British uniform. Roger told her in his fluent French that they were English escaping and were hungry, and asked her if they could stay there for the day. He could see by her face that she was friendly, but frightened, and he was hardly surprised when, frowning a little, she said that she would give them coffee and something to eat, but couldn’t let them stay. She led them into a kitchen behind the bar and poured out for them two bowls of steaming coffee and gave them a loaf of bread. When Roger had finished he went out to ask her what was the least dangerous route they could take to get to the coast, but before she could answer a little boy rushed in.

“Maman,” he cried, “the Germans.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when several motor cyclists stopped at the door and dismounted.

“My God, they’re coming in,” said the woman. “Hide yourself.”

“Keep cool,” said Roger.

He thought they might have seen him and if he wasn’t there might find it suspicious. He quickly got behind the counter and began mopping it with a wet rag. They came in, six of them, and one addressed him in halting French.

“Two bottles of champagne,” he ordered.

Pale, but apparently calm, the woman stepped forward.

“Certainly, gentlemen.”

She pointed to two bottles on a shelf behind Roger and gave him a nipper to cut the wire. He opened the bottles and filled six glasses.

“Prosit. Prosit,” the Germans said, clinking glasses before they drank thirstily.

“Why aren’t you in the Army?” asked the one who had spoken before, presumably the only one who spoke French.

“I’ve got kidney trouble,” answered Roger. “They wouldn’t take me.”

“Lucky, aren’t you? Have a glass of champagne.”

“I’m not allowed to drink. It’s bad for my kidneys.”

“Damn you, when a German soldier offers you a drink, you drink.”

Roger filled himself a glass and drank the champagne. The soldier turned to one of the others and broke into German.

“Surly blighter, I’ve got a good mind to smack his face.”

“None of that, Fritz,” said the man he had spoken to. “Orders are orders. The civil population must be treated with every consideration.”

“For the present. But when we’ve finished with England we’ll show them who their masters are.”

They drank the wine, paid what Roger asked for it, and crowded out. The woman began to laugh.

“Well, you had your nerve with you when you asked them twenty francs a bottle,” she said. “I sell it for five-fifty.”

He couldn’t find Nobby when he went to look for him, but on opening a door discovered him standing on the seat of a stinking toilet. He was holding the bar of iron from which he had refused to be parted and had evidently intended to make a fight for it if he was found. He followed Roger back into the kitchen, wiping his sweating forehead with the sleeve of his tunic.

“That was a near thing, governor,” he said. “I thought you was for it.”

“I don’t mind telling you that I had a bit of a sinking feeling myself.”

The woman of the house joined them. Her nerve was shaken and she begged Roger to be off. He asked her where her husband was. In the Army. He told her they would go at once if he could get some civilian clothes for Nobby and asked her if she wouldn’t sell him some of her husband’s. She wouldn’t, he’d want them when he came back, and though Roger offered to pay twice what they cost she would not be persuaded. At last he got her to let him have some overalls and these, to his surprise, she refused to accept money for.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help you,” she said, “but one has to think of oneself.”

It didn’t take Nobby long to get out of his uniform and into the overalls. Half an hour later they were tramping confidently along the high road; no one would have guessed that those two dusty vagabonds were respectively a British corporal and an officer in the Military Intelligence. They trudged on for three days more. They kept away from the towns, buying their food in villages, and slept under hedges, for they dared not go to an inn for a night’s lodging in case they were asked for their papers. Roger had those of Jeannette’s husband, but he was none too sure that he could persuade an inquisitive policeman that he was the man they said he was, and Nobby had none. Then, climbing one morning wearily to the top of a steep hill they caught sight of the sea. Roger couldn’t trust himself to speak. He pointed to the shining expanse below them. Nobby spat.

“Thinkin’ of swimmin’ across, are you?”

“You fool, Nobby,” laughed Roger.

“Let’s ‘ave a sit down. I could do with a fag.”

“Well, we’ve got so far without mishap,” said Roger. “I think the worst is over.”

“Oh, you do, do you? I wish I did.”

“You mustn’t lose heart now, Nobby. I’ll get you home all right.”

“They do say that where there’s a will there’s a way.”

They couldn’t take their eyes off that great sheet of water and Roger’s heart quivered in exultation. Over there was England. He inhaled the smoke of his harsh French cigarette with voluptuous relish.

Nobby grinned his ugly, attractive grin.

“My old woman won’t be ‘arf sorry to see me,” he said. “I promised to bring my Ernie a German tin ‘at. I ‘aven’t told you about my Ernie, ‘ave I? Fine little nipper, ‘e is. Nine years old next month.”

“Come on, let’s get going. You can tell me about your Ernie when we’re on the briny ocean.”

They started off again and presently, below them, saw a town with boats lying in a trim little harbour. “One of those would suit us all right,” said Roger. “‘Ow are you goin’ to get one?”

“Beg, borrow or steal it.”

Nobby grinned.

“You’re so ‘uman, sometimes I forget you’re a gentleman,” he said. “Can you sail a boat?”

“I have sailed a boat,” said Roger prudently.

They walked on and after a while, on the cliff, came to a row of small villas facing the sea. They sat down again in front of one of them to rest and decide what they had best do next. An old woman was working in the garden and Roger had a mind to ask her for something to eat so that they needn’t go into the town till nightfall. He didn’t like the notion of taking Nobby with him and he thought it a risk to leave him alone. She had a pleasant, homely face. But while he was still considering, an old man of respectable appearance came up the road, evidently from the town, and opening the gate turned into the garden.

“Any news?” the old woman asked him.

“Only bad news.”

“Poor France,” she sighed.

He had been so abstracted that he had not noticed the two disreputable men who sat at the roadside.

“They say the English are going on.”

“That’s not bad news.”

“How can they? They’ve lost everything, their guns, their equipment, everything.”

Roger heard no more for they walked together up the path and went into the house.

“They’re all right,” he said. “They’ll help us if they can. Come on.”

With Nobby following he went up to the front door and rang. The old woman opened it.

“What is it?”

“May I talk to the master of the house?” said Roger.

“He’s busy. We’ve got nothing to give you, my poor friends.”

She tried to shut the door, but he put his foot in it.

“Please listen to me.”

“No, no, no. I’m sorry we can do nothing for you.”

The old man came into the passage.

“What is it, Adèle?”

“More refugees.” Then again to Roger: “I tell you we can’t help you. They come every day.”

“I am a British officer, madam. My companion is a corporal.”

The woman seemed to catch her breath; she went white and stood aside to let them pass.

“Come in.”

She closed the door behind them and led them into a room the walls of which were lined with books. The old man presented himself.

“I am Professor Dubois of the University of Rouen.”

Roger gave his name and rank.

“We have been walking for five days. We want to get back to England.”

“But there are Germans everywhere,” the professor’s wife broke in. “The town is occupied. Why do you come to us? You put us in such danger.”

The professor looked at Roger with speculative eyes. He was a small man with thick grey hair and an untidy grey beard; but he had a look that was both intelligent and kindly.

“What do you want us to do?”

“I want to get a boat. I have money.”

“Money? It’s not a question of money.”

The professor pulled his beard. He continued to gaze at Roger with musing, preoccupied eyes. His wife, on a sudden seeming to see what he had in mind, gave a gasp of terror.

“André, what are you thinking of?” she cried. “It’s not fair to me to take such a risk.”

Roger had no notion what she meant, but guessed that the professor had in view some way to help them and he turned to her.

“Madam, we should never have got so far if there hadn’t been women in France who weren’t afraid to take risks to help us. I was wounded and a peasant woman kept me hidden in a hayloft for ten days.”

“We’re old people, my husband and I. I’m a coward.”

Tears came into her eyes and rolled down her withered cheeks.

“It is our duty to help them,” said her husband.

She gave a heart-rending sigh.

“I know.” Her voice broke. “Do what you like, my dear.”

It was with a sad, unsmiling face that the professor turned to Roger.

“Can you sail a boat?”

“Certainly,” said Roger with a confidence he was far from feeling.

“I have a cutter, but she’s very small. The barometer is falling and I wouldn’t advise anyone to cross the Channel unless he was an experienced sailor.”

“It’s better to take a risk than to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

“Very well. When it’s dark I’ll show you where she lies. You can take her. But I warn you I shall have to report her disappearance tomorrow morning. You’ll only have twelve hours’ start.”

“That’ll be enough.”

“She’s got a motor auxiliary, six horse-power, but I’m afraid it’s not in very good condition.”

“The corporal’s a mechanic in civil life. He boasts there’s not an engine in the world so bad that he can’t make it go by a suitable combination of kind words and firmness.”

The professor cast a wan smile on Nobby, who had been standing there not knowing what they were jabbering about.

“Have you eaten today, my poor friends?” asked Madame Dubois.

“Not yet.”

“They’d better go into the kitchen. They’ll be safer there,” said the professor. “Anyone would take them for refugees.”

“There’s Marie,” said his wife. “I’m not so sure she can be trusted. She’ll know they’re not French or Belgian.”

“Then we must warn her.” The professor went to the door and called: “Marie.”

The maid, a sturdy, middle-aged woman, came in, and seeing the two disreputable tramps, uttered a groan.

“More refugees. Oh, no, I’ve had enough of them here. I’ve got nothing in the kitchen.”

“Marie,” said the professor, “these are two English soldiers. They’ve come here for shelter till night so that they may escape to England to return and drive the Germans out of the country. If you won’t help us I must send them away.”

She looked from the professor to the two men and then back again to him. She threw back her head.

“Vive la France,” she said.

“You know that if they’re found here we shall all go to prison.”

“Vive la France,” she repeated.

Madame Dubois began to cry.

“They’re hungry, Marie,” she faltered. “Take them into the kitchen and feed them.”

A look of grim determination came over the maid’s broad face.

“Come along, boys. I’ll feed you till you burst.”

Roger was overjoyed. Their luck, their wonderful luck, kept up and here, providentially, it had placed in their hands the means of escape.

“We shall be in England tomorrow, old boy,” he said to Nobby, his eyes sparkling.

When night fell the professor took them down to the harbour. He was nervous but determined; and Roger had a warm feeling in his heart for that old man, trembling in his shoes, but, though it might mean imprisonment or even death, determined to do what he thought was right. He walked ahead of them and since the night was dark they had to keep their eyes skinned not to lose him. There was nobody about. Finally he stopped.

“There she is,” he whispered. “The little one painted black. The dinghy is attached to the stern. You’ll have to swim out to her. It’s only a few metres. Here’s a torch. I must leave you. I daren’t stay any longer. Good-bye and God-speed.”

He did not stop to hear Roger’s thanks, but hurried away on noiseless feet. In an instant they lost sight of him.

“We’ve got to swim out to her, Nobby,” whispered Roger.

“I can’t swim.”

“Oh, damn. All right, I’ll go and fetch the dinghy.”

He slipped off his boots and coat and slid into the water. He got into the dinghy and paddled back to fetch Nobby. They climbed into the cutter and while Roger raised the anchor Nobby started pottering with the engine.

“I’ll get her going in two shakes,” he said.

“We must get out of the harbour first. Can you row?”

“I’ve rowed on the Serpentine.”

“Take this rope and jump in the dinghy. Make it fast to the seat and then row out of the port.”

Nobby got in and started to tow the cutter while Roger remained at the helm. At regular intervals a searchlight swept the sky. When they got out to sea Nobby clambered back on board and they cast the dinghy adrift. Nobby went to work on the engine and after a while got it going.

“It’s a rotten little engine this,” said Nobby. “I don’t know if it’ll ‘old out.”

“You’re a mechanic, aren’t you? You’ve bloody well got to make it hold out.”

It seemed to make a terrific noise in the silence of the night and Roger cast an anxious glance at the searchlight. He knew it was planes they were looking for, but it might occur to some bright spark to swing his light over the sea. It would be tough luck if they got caught just when they had a chance of getting away. Then Nobby pricked up his ears.

“I don’t like the sound that engine’s makin’. I’d better ‘ave a look at it.” He crouched down. “I think there’s water in the gas. I’ll ‘ave to take the carburettor down and clean it.”

“All right, go ahead. How long will it take you?”

“Seven or eight minutes, and then I’ll ‘ave to do it all over again.”

Roger’s heart sank.

“At that rate we shan’t get to England till the middle of next week.”

They were in the open now and there was a bit of sea running.

“Beginning to bob about, ain’t she?” said Nobby uneasily.

“We’re running into a squall, thank God. They’ll have a job to find us if they do come after us.”

“I’m feelin’ sick,” said Nobby.

“Be sick, blast you,” said Roger savagely.

He didn’t feel like trying to hoist the sail in the pitch darkness, for he had small experience of sailing a boat, and he thought they had better trust to the auxiliary. But the engine only ran for a few minutes at a time. Nobby, feeling like death, cleaned the carburettor every quarter of an hour, and while he was cleaning it they tossed about helplessly in the choppy sea.

“D’you think we shall make it?” asked Nobby, peering into the darkness.

“Better be drowned than fall into the hands of those filthy Huns,” Roger snapped.

Nobby vanished again.

The night seemed endless and when the grey dawn broke they were both very tired. The sky was’ heavy with threatening clouds and the sea was dirty. Roger had no notion how far they had gone. He didn’t think they could even now be more than a few miles away from the coast of France. The daylight was a comfort, but a danger as well, for they might be seen by a German motor boat and then it was all up with them. Giving the reluctant Nobby the tiller and showing him in which direction to steer he managed to hoist the sail and then they proceeded with an easier motion. Madame Dubois had stuffed their pockets with food and there was water in the tank, but Roger would let Nobby eat only sparingly; he did not know how long they would have to make their provisions last. All that day they went on and all the next night. Every few minutes Nobby had to take down the carburettor and clean it; he took cat-naps between times, but Roger felt he couldn’t afford to close his eyes. Whenever the motor began to splutter he gave Nobby a kick to rouse him. They were wet and cold and Nobby was very seasick. They didn’t speak for a couple of hours at a time. Their stock of food was getting low and it looked as if soon they would have to go hungry. Luckily there was plenty of water. But where was the land? Where was that bloody land? Roger didn’t like the look of the weather; the old man had said the glass was falling and if a storm came up, inexperienced sailor as he was, he was none too sure that he could cope with it.

“We shall be in the soup,” he muttered.

The day seemed endless. Roger, thinking that hours had passed, would look at his watch only to find that scarcely an hour had gone by. Time loitered like an idle errand boy. You might have thought that for two steps forward it took one step back. They never saw a ship. They might have sailed an unknown sea that none had sailed before. At long last the day drew to a close. The sun set threatening behind a bank of cloud and darkness shrouded them in a fearful loneliness. When morning came, a dun, sullen morning, with the sea running high, Roger wondered grimly whether either of them would see the night. His tired eyes persistently searched the horizon. Suddenly his heart turned over. For a moment he felt as sick as his wretched companion.

“Hi, Nobby, take a look out.”

Nobby, lying in the cockpit, was groaning with misery; he raised a miserable and aching head.

“What’s up?”

“Can you see something straight ahead?”

Wearily Nobby got to his feet and supporting himself on the gunwale stared in the direction in which Roger pointed.

“That?” He made a funny little sound in his throat; it might almost have been a sob. “That ain’t land, is it?”

“That’s what it is, old boy, land.”

“Lor lumme, if I didn’t feel so awful I’d ‘ave me last fag.”

“England.”

There was something in Roger’s voice that made Nobby give him a quick look. He grinned.

“Makes you feel you want to cry, don’t it?”

“Shut your bloody trap, damn you,” Roger snapped angrily.

Nobby, with still the remains of a grin on his sharp little face, sketched a military salute.

“Right you are, sir.”

As he told Tommy afterwards: “Rare job the major ‘ad to pretend ‘e wasn’t feelin’ same as I was, but ‘e was, and when ‘e thought I wasn’t lookin”e blew ‘is nose so I thought ‘e’d blow it right off.”

For that was the end. A couple of hours later they landed on the Sussex coast.

XIV

BUT THERE WAS ONE PART of his story Roger left untold. There was little light in the loft in which he had spent ten dreary days and even had there been enough to read by he had nothing to read. It was hot and stuffy. He was in pain. He turned from side to side on the hay trying to make himself comfortable and when he fell asleep it was only to be awakened after a few minutes by the throbbing of his shoulder. He had nothing to do but to think, and the fever that was upon him confused his thoughts so that, even when he was awake, they had the incoherence of a crazy dream. They ran riot in his aching head like a panic-stricken crowd rushing hither and thither without knowing where they wanted to go. The war, the day he had spent with the battery, the sudden shooting when his chauffeur had slumped over the wheel and the car had skidded into the ditch, the scene at the farm, Graveney Holt, his mother, Tommy, May, his ignorance of what had happened to the retreating forces — it was all muddled together like the pieces of a hideous jig-saw puzzle and every piece was a pain.

He had always valued the lucidity of his brain and it was a relief when, after his wounds were dressed and the fever abated, he found himself able to think clearly. His thoughts were dark. He was anxious about the fate of the British force; it was a bad, bad show, but notwithstanding the gloomy news that Jeannette brought him he had a strong confidence that it would not prove an irreparable disaster. England had been in a tough spot before and in the end had won through. He was in a tough spot himself. For the first time since he was wounded he chuckled; if he didn’t get back to England somehow — well, he’d eat his hat. His spirits rose as he considered ways and means. He’d have to be wary — well, he was wary; he’d want a bit of nerve — well, he had a bit of nerve; he’d have to keep his wits about him — well, he was not entirely devoid of them.

He thought of May. If he’d been killed instead of his chauffeur she could have married Dick Murray. Poor May. He wondered what she saw in Dick. Of course he was a good fellow, he was a gentleman and all that sort of thing, and he had a certain charm. What else? He was conscientious, a very good agent, not a bad business man either; and he was gay and pleasant, a good shot, and he rode well. But that was about all. No one could call him intellectual. If he ever read anything beside the morning paper, the Tatler and the Field, it was a detective story. May on the other hand was a tireless reader. She had been ever since as a young girl she had had the run of the Graveney Holt library, and Roger had often been amused to discover the out-of-the-way information she possessed. She had a good brain. It was not often that he had had occasion to ask her advice, but when he had it was with pleasure that he had noticed how well she reasoned and how sound her judgment was. She had a feeling for beautiful things. Not even his mother had a more sensitive appreciation of the fine furniture at Graveney Holt. May had a charming feeling for decoration. With the odds and ends they had gathered from the attics she had made a little gem of their flat in Chelsea. It was an admirable background to her flower-like beauty.

What could all that mean to Dick Murray? And of what use would be her social sense to him? When Roger had military attachés of foreign nations to dine at the flat, or members of some mission or other, the effortless ease of her manner was beyond all praise. Because she was so natural, so candid she made them feel at home and the pleasant impression she created had more than once helped him to enter into useful relations with the strangers. He was proud of her. He had been very happy with her and it had come as an astounding shock when without warning she had asked him to let her divorce him. He could not remember that they had ever had a quarrel. They had never even had a disagreement. He recalled that at first she had seemed a trifle put out because he was reticent about his work. But it was not his business to talk, there was a great deal too much chatter going around on the matters with which he was particularly concerned, often unfortunately coming from persons in high place who should have known better, and on occasion May had been a trifle tart because she had learnt something which he had thought fit to keep secret from her. Well, it was not his fault if his superiors were indiscreet. But all that belonged to the past. For years now May had realized that part of his job was to hold his tongue and had ceased to concern herself with his affairs.

He couldn’t see what she had to complain of. Of course he was away a great deal, but that again was part of his job, and he couldn’t take her with him. The heads of missions sometimes carried their wives along and that meant all sorts of social complications that certainly didn’t facilitate the work of the mission. It was true that when he was away he didn’t think of her a great deal, he was generally too busy for that, but when he did it was with tenderness; and when the time came for him to return to England his first thought was of the pleasure it would be to be with her again. It had never occurred to him that she was lonely. She had friends in London and she could always go down to Graveney. The pity was that she had no children. They’d been married eight years and they might have had three by now. Then she would never have thought of leaving him. She would have had plenty to do and wouldn’t have missed him so much. He had never let her see that her childlessness was a grief to him and when on occasion she had lamented it he had done his best to persuade her that he did not mind. So far as his means allowed he gave her everything she wanted. She had never expressed a wish that he hadn’t been only too pleased to grant. He had had no reason to suppose that she was not as happy in their marriage as he was.

Certainly no one could admire her more. He felt that no one delighted as he did in her slightly fragile beauty. He liked her delicate nose, her wide-browed eyes and the exquisite texture of her skin. He liked her good breeding, her unassuming self-assurance, her tact and her poise. It might be that after the war there would be changes and that many things that had seemed of consequence before would cease to seem so, but as things were, it could not be denied that she fitted her station in life with supreme distinction.

She wasn’t happy. It wrung Roger’s heart to know it and the tormenting thing was that he didn’t know what to do about it. For a moment he had been irritated that just when the crisis came she should have thrown this unexpected complication into his life. It was as if you were running to catch a train and someone stopped you to ask a futile question. But that was unfair; naturally she hadn’t known that war was imminent. Now, in his hayloft, Roger saw that down there at Graveney, in that peaceful scene, it was inconceivable that the world was even then rushing to destruction. Anyhow he had to face the facts. She had fallen in love with Dick and for his sake was prepared to give up all that he, Roger, had to offer her. It was a pity that there was nothing of the snob in her and that she was completely disinterested.

He had failed her somehow. What was it that Dick could give that he couldn’t? He visualized his friend. With his grey, curling hair, his fine, blue eyes, with their dark lashes, his sturdy build, his hearty good-humour and ready, friendly smile — yes, he supposed Dick had a sexual attractiveness that might appeal to some women. But May was the last woman he would have expected to be interested in it. He had never found her a sensual woman and he would have been a fool to think that she was eager for sexual congress. He had not much minded that. He had not expected it. He was hard-worked and he had things to think of that seemed urgently important. And after all they had been married for eight years.

He had grown up with the idea that they would marry. Although neither his father nor his mother brought any pressure to bear on him, he was very well aware that they hoped for it. Before his marriage he had had the ordinary adventures of young men, but he had never met any woman that he liked half as much as he liked May. He had never known another as well. Perhaps that was part of the trouble. They had been as intimate as brother and sister and when they set off on their honeymoon it had been with no sense of strangeness or even of great excitement; he might almost have been going on a jaunt with his sister Jane. Of course the honeymoon had been fun; they had had a grand time in Paris. It had been nice to sleep in the same bed with May and at the same time rather comic and slightly indecent. It was somewhat like committing incest with the blessing of the Church. And what made it so delightful was that there was no embarrassment between them; they kissed and laughed and loved, and it was all as natural as going to supper in Montmartre before they went to bed or drinking their café au lait before they got up in the morning. It was perfect.

Since then he had never looked at another woman. During his long absences he had often had opportunities to divert himself with others, but he had never done so. He could not say that he had resisted temptation; he had never been tempted. There was always May to go back to and there wasn’t a woman in the world to compare with her. She was sweet. And now his marriage was on the rocks; May wanted to divorce him and he had promised to let her if she still wanted to after the war was over. He wished he hadn’t done that; he didn’t want to lose her; it was not only her beauty he loved, he loved her character, gentle yet firm, quietly humourous yet sedate; she was a woman in a thousand. And he was used to her. It might be that that was where he had gone wrong, he had grown so used to her that he had taken her for granted. That was what she herself had said. She had said that she was no more to him than the chair he habitually sat in or the old golf coat he put on when he came home from work. He had been a fool. But why wouldn’t women be taken for granted? With so much to do and the world in a hell of a mess how could they expect you to fuss about them all day long? A man had his work, hadn’t he? In any case it was too late now, even if he had the time or the opportunity, to be the assiduous husband who spent his time forestalling his wife’s wishes. Besides, he wasn’t that sort of man. Funny, women were; he had always thought May so sensible. He hated the idea of divorce. Even now that the law had been changed it was an odious business, this going down to Brighton with a stray female you had never seen before, registering at a hotel as man and wife and making sure that the chambermaid saw you in the same room next morning. It was ugly and vulgar, and the thought of the tittle-tattle that would ensue gave him goose-flesh. Roger shared with his family a horror of publicity. It would have seemed shameful to them, when they had a house-party at Graveney, to have pictures of it in the Tatler or the Bystander or when they went up to London for a few weeks to have the unimportant fact announced in the Morning Post. They had an almost morbid dislike of seeing their names in print. They were quiet people, with a sense of their own dignity, and anything approaching self-advertisement was disgusting to them. And there was another thing: Roger had long had the intention of standing for Parliament in his own constituency; he had ideas about the Army that he thought should be put before the nation and the House of Commons was the best place from which to do it; but in the respectable district in which Graveney was situated the fact that he had been co-respondent in a divorce case and that his wife had afterwards married his father’s agent would ruin his chance of being chosen as a candidate.

But he had given his word and he was prepared to keep it. It was dreadful to think of May being unhappy, and what would their life be together if she was continually hankering after another man? She had as much right to happiness as anyone else. It was a mistake she was making, at least from the worldly point of view, but if she was determined on it, and he had never thought her a weak, easily influenced woman, what could he do about it? It was his own fault that she had ceased to love him, though not his wilful fault; it had been a dreary life he had asked her to lead, he saw that now only too clearly; it was a pity he saw it too late; and it wasn’t much good to say he was a soldier and had to obey orders. Youth lasted such a little while; she was right when she said she was passing it waiting, just waiting. Selfishness on his part? Yes, he supposed it was, and the worst of it was that if he had his time over again he would do exactly as he had done before. His work, and the peculiar form it took, gave him the great exhilaration of his life. But the war would be a long one. He had expected it to last three years, but now with this disaster in Flanders he was convinced it would last five. Much may happen in five years. May would see Dick, if she saw him at all, only at rare intervals; he would change and she would change; and mightn’t it be that when they met again they would find that everything was different? They had fallen in love because they were thrown in daily contact with one another; well, when that contact ceased mightn’t they fall out of love? It might be that then May would come back to him. He knew so well what she’d say:

“Roger darling, I’ve got a sort of idea that you’ve prevented me from making an awful fool of myself.”

“Have I, my pet?” he would answer.

He could see the amusement in her eyes, amused because she felt ever so slightly embarrassed, and yet meaning exactly what she said.

“You know, I don’t really think Dick is quite my cup of tea.”

“I never thought he was, sweetie.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that on the whole I like you best.”

“I’ve been telling you for years that I’m quite a likable chap really.”

“Well, the long and short of it is that even if I catch you in bed with one of the housemaids and you give me a black eye I shall absolutely refuse to divorce you.”

“Does that mean that I’ve got to be burdened with you for the rest of my life?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about it,” he answered as he took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her soft lips.

For a moment he forgot that he was lying on hay in a dark loft and fancied himself back at Graveney Holt in the room May always had. It was a nice room. The chintz was faded, but the dressing-table, the tallboy and the bed were Chippendale, and from the wide windows you saw the green meadowland of the park and the spreading oak trees.

Though it was in response to Tommy’s impetuous questioning and to satisfy his father’s demand for meticulous detail that Roger told such parts of his story as he chose to tell, May had a feeling that he was particularly concerned with the effect it might have on her. His eyes rested on her and there was a look in them that seemed to say: you mustn’t take it too seriously, you know; it was all rather a lark really. She had a notion that it was on her account that he passed off with a pleasantry the risks he had run and made a joke of the hardships. He spoke as though his adventure was something that might have happened to anybody and indeed as though there was nothing to it. You had to read between the lines, as it were, to recognize the dreadful danger in which he had been, how near death, and what resource, presence of mind and endurance he had shown. His attitude put May, sitting there in silence, listening intently, strangely ill at ease. He seemed bent on ridding her mind of any suspicion she might have that there was anything remarkable in his exploit, as though for such a reason to excite her admiration or to appeal to her sympathy would not be quite playing the game. You would have thought he got a sardonic amusement out of showing himself in a ridiculous light when he was in imminent peril. It slightly wounded her. It was an aspersion both on her heart and on her head. May saw very well how greatly it lessened his chance of escape to be saddled with a man in uniform who couldn’t speak a word of French and she was sure that it had never even occurred to him that it would be wiser to leave him to shift for himself. She knew Roger well enough to be certain that never in the darkest moment of all had he given way to discouragement. It was in circumstances that called for his utmost that he was at his best: he was fearless, reliable, quick to decide and undaunted by obstacles.

At night when she lay in bed, unable to sleep, in the next room to Roger’s with only a closed door separating them, and turned over in her mind some of the incidents he had related, May’s eyes filled with tears. It was heart-rending to think of him lying there in the wood, soaked to the skin, wounded and alone; it was awful to think of those long days in the hayloft when he had lain there hour after hour, burning with fever and in pain. She wondered if he had thought of her then. Perhaps not: perhaps he thought only of the straits in which the calamity in Flanders had thrown the country and of the slim chance he had of escaping; but if he did, it could only be with bitterness because she had let him down. He still bore on him the traces of his ordeal. His cheek-bones were prominent, his temples hollow, his face was haggard and his eyes had a hard brilliance that was abnormal. In a way he was better looking than he had ever been; his illness and the hardship he had undergone, his determined neglect of the pain in his leg as he plodded on mile after mile, had worn him down and there was something pathetic and even romantic in his appearance that he had never had before. May was truly thankful that he had come through; and it filled her with shame to remember that she had wished — no, that she had never done — that she had considered the possibility of his death. She wondered if he knew that; if he did, he wouldn’t blame her, he would only find it slightly comic. Bit of a sell for the poor girl: that’s what he would say. He’d chuckle. That woman who had made her in-laws give him refuge, who had brought the doctor to see him, who had done so much to get him home safely — she didn’t love him; he meant nothing to her and what she had done, she had done in human charity and perhaps from patriotism. It was curious when you came to think of it that Roger owed his escape almost entirely to women; women had hidden him, women had clothed him so that he might pass without remark, women had fed him, women had risked their liberty to succour him.

Strangers. She was his wife; he had surely the right to expect something from her that strangers couldn’t give him, and yet it was strangers who had done so much for him while she — what had she done? Nothing very pretty or very kind. She didn’t quite know why it should distress her so much, more than anything almost, that she hadn’t recognized him when he came limping along the path in those funny clothes he was wearing. If she had loved him, if she had only loved him as Tommy loved him, she would have known him at once. Not to have done so seemed frightfully heartless: it must have cut him to the quick. For of course he loved her; it was no good pretending to doubt that; it wasn’t the sort of love she craved for, but how could he help it if it wasn’t in him to give her that? It was a matter of temperament. May was tormented. She was conscience-stricken. In the darkness she stretched out her arms and called to Dick to help her. She wanted him, she wanted him so badly, and yet if he had been there she would have pushed him away with horror. Oh, misery! To love with all your heart and to feel — to feel what? To feel that if you surrendered to the love that consumed you, you would never have a moment’s peace or happiness for the rest of your life.

For a thought, no, hardly a thought, a feeling seemed to entwine itself with her deep dissatisfaction with herself; in dismay she tried to drive it away, but it was no good; it frightened her like an angry man with his foot in a door she couldn’t close; and at last, in despair, flinging the door open, she faced it. She had always been confident that Britain would win the war; it was inconceivable that she shouldn’t, she couldn’t be beaten; but now the possibility had to he considered that she might be. The idea filled her with horror. Yet there it was, the B.E.F. had escaped from France, but with the loss of all its equipment; tanks, guns and ammunition had to be provided before it could take the field again; France had fallen; it might be that, for all their promises, the French would deliver their fleet to the Germans; the Germans were flushed with triumph; any day now they might attempt an invasion, and who could be sure that just then, after the disaster of Flanders, the British had the power to repel it? Hitler had said he would sign peace in London on the fifteenth of August and up till now he had been as good as his word. The peril was desperate. It was no good shutting one’s eyes to it. The shame of defeat. The ignominy of living under the heel of a brutal conqueror. To lose everything you held dear; to knuckle under to people you despised; to be reduced to thralldom. There would be no more laughter then; there would be no more frankness; you would have to be constantly on your guard. May had met in the Tyrol a Bavarian prince and he had told her how, at home, in his family, they had to watch their every word, for they knew that their servants were Nazi spies who would report what they said. And defeat would mean more than that; it would mean that goodness was banished from the world and the only meaning of right was might. It would mean the end of honour and decency and fair play and uprightness and loving kindness. It would mean that life wasn’t worth living.

What was it that Roger had said when he told her that the Germans were about to march into Poland? This isn’t the moment that any of us can afford to think of his private concerns; or something like that. If it wasn’t the moment then, it was far, far less the moment now. Now everyone was concerned, everyone must do his utmost or all would be lost; now happiness didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was England. It was vile to think of oneself. One must be prepared to sacrifice everything one held dear. May smothered the shriek that burst from her lips when, like the corpse of a murdered man rising to the surface of the water, like a discreditable action that haunts your memory, like a vulgar jingle that teases a fevered brain, the notion came to her of the sacrifice that was demanded of her. It was absurd. She couldn’t make it. It was asking too much. It was as silly and childish as when Dick had been in the retreat to Dunkirk and she had been tempted to promise God to give him up if only he escaped alive. It was as stupid and dangerous as when at that time, playing patience in the evening, she had had the inclination to tell herself that if it came out Dick would be saved. What good could it do anybody if she made the sacrifice? There was no sense in it. Why should she lose her only chance of happiness? It was insane. And yet some inner compulsion stronger than her will, her reason, her instinct constrained her; it availed her nothing to say that it was witless, she knew that she would have to make the sacrifice. There was no help for it.

So one evening after Roger had been at Graveney for some days, May asked him to come for a stroll with her. They sauntered under the ancient cedars of what was called the English garden; it was shut off from the formal garden by an old red brick wall on which ivy grew thick, and it was very pleasant to walk there in the cool of the day. Though only two old men and a boy remained to tend it, the lawns were kept mowed and the herbaceous borders in flower. Just then they were in full beauty. Roger talked as he always did with her, agreeably, but of casual things, the evacuated children, Jim and his work on the farm, the Government and so on. He never referred to their personal relationship. May was a trifle nervous.

“Will you give me a cigarette?” she said.

He stopped to light it for her and as they sauntered on she slipped her arm through his. She did not look at him, but gazed straight in front of her.

“Roger, you know what I asked you just after you came back from Poland?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to do what I asked you to do then!”

“I’m very glad.”

He did not seem particularly surprised; indeed he took it almost as a matter of course. She would have liked him to be more enthusiastic, perhaps even a trifle demonstrative. It wouldn’t have been unnatural if he had taken her in his arms and kissed her. He did not speak for a minute or two.

“That day I got back from France,” he said then, “I asked you if you were still in love with Dick and you said you were.”

“I’ve written to Dick and told him I don’t wish to be divorced from you.” She gave him a quick look. “You don’t wish it, do you?”

“Of course not. I’ve never wished it. You see, I happen to love you.”

“Won’t you kiss me?”

He smiled a little shyly and lightly kissed her lips.

“I want you so awfully to be happy, Roger, I’ll do all I can to be a good wife to you.”

“I know you will, darling.”

There seemed nothing more to say and May was relieved when she saw the General wandering towards them. She glanced at her watch as he joined them and said:

“I’m going to leave you two together. I must go and see to my chores.”

Walking back to the house she felt an ease of mind she hadn’t known for days. Now that she had made her decision she was convinced that she had done right; she felt almost light-hearted; she wasn’t the only person in the world who couldn’t have what she wanted and she had a feeling that in time this aching for Dick, this bitter aching, would grow less violent; perhaps one day it would be no more than a tender regret. Perhaps then she would even be glad that she had thrown away her hope of happiness. The letter she had written to him had been hard to write and painful; to receive it would be a cruel grief to him, but she thought he would understand that she had no alternative. At least he could never doubt that he had all her love.

She was glad that Roger had asked for no explanation of her change of mind. Though at the first moment she had been a little taken aback that he should accept it so casually, now she saw that it had been well for him to do so. But as the days went by May was a trifle puzzled that the talk she had had with Roger seemed to result in no great difference in their relations. He was pleasant, friendly and thoughtful, affectionate even, but he had always been that. She wondered if it was possible that he had not understood all she meant to intimate. His leave was drawing to an end and when he went away it might be that she would not see him again for weeks. He had a bed in his office and slept there every night, so that, even if her work at Graveney hadn’t made it necessary for her to stay there, it would have been pointless to set up housekeeping together again in London. She didn’t mean to do things by halves. If she hadn’t made what she meant quite plain, well, she must make it plain; but it wasn’t easy. She still felt a little strange with Roger; it wasn’t that she was frightened of him really, it was that she was never quite at home with him; even though she had known him nearly all her life she had never been intimate with him in quite the way in which she knew it would have been so easy to be with Dick; perhaps it was their marital relations that had made her shy with Roger, and in any case sex was something it made her uncomfortable to refer to. It had often made her flush hotly to hear Jane talk of it so coarsely. On the day before he was due to go, having given the children their dinner and done her share of the washing-up, she went in search of Roger. She found him in the library, sunk in a huge arm-chair, with a book in his hands. He looked up with a smile as she came in.

“I wanted to find something to read,” she said.

“Plenty to choose from,” he said with a glance at the crowded shelves.

As though she meant nothing by it, she seated herself on the arm of his chair and putting her arm round his neck, asked him:

“What is it you’re reading?”

He showed her. She did not move. Her cheeks were burning and her voice wasn’t quite steady when she spoke.

“Roger, when we talked about things the other day and I said I wanted to be a good wife to you, I meant every word of it. I meant all that that implies. I wanted to make no reservation.”

“You’re very sweet, darling. I wouldn’t ever wish you to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

She lightly stroked his cheek.

“Don’t you think it would be nice if we had a baby? Because we haven’t had one yet there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have one now.”

He closed the book he held and turning his head a little, half grave, half smiling, looked into her eyes.

“Dear heart, I think I have an idea why you said what you did the other day. It was very dear of you. But I don’t believe I’m mistaken in thinking it was due to a change of mind rather than a change of heart. And in these things it’s the heart that matters. I don’t set much store on the Victorian notion of conjugal rights. I don’t think sexual relations are very satisfactory unless they spring from mutual desire; unless they do that there’s something rather humiliating about them for both parties, don’t you think? There are certain things no one can force himself to want. I’m afraid it isn’t enough for me that there should be desire on my side. Desire’s a funny thing, you can’t bid it to come, it comes unbidden; perhaps one day the desire will be mutual; I shall know, you know, you won’t have to tell me.”

She looked down without answering; tears rose to her eyes and slowly trickled down her cheeks. He took her hand and kissed it.

“Don’t cry, my pet. It’s no good grieving over things over which we have no control.”

“I wanted so to make you happy.”

“You have, darling, you’ve made me very happy. My heart is full of warm, devoted love for you.”

She sighed. It seemed hard that he should give her everything and she should give him nothing in return, and the cruel part of it, the part that left her miserably aware that she had failed in what she desired to do, so that her sacrifice came to nothing, was that deep down in her heart was a feeling of relief that he was content to let their relations stay as they were. She shivered as though someone were walking over her grave.

XV

ROGER WENT back to London and resumed his work. He had good reason to know that Nobby was a reliable, clever little fellow, so, sending for him, he offered him a job as messenger in his own office. Nobby jumped at the chance. To its other advantages was added this one, that he would be able to sleep at home, for as he said himself, “I’m a family man, I am,” and he had felt it “cruel ‘ard” to be separated from his wife and children.

“Lost like I feel without the missus,” he had told Roger during one of their long talks on the way to the coast, “an’ it’s a funny thing if you come to think of it, ‘cos I didn’t really want to marry ‘er, only she never give me a moment’s peace till I did. If I told ‘er once I told ‘er fifty times I wasn’t a marryin’ man.”

“I suppose she knew what was good for you,” smiled Roger.

“You never said a truer word in all your life. An’ that’s a fact.”

One day, at the War Office, Roger noticed that Nobby had something he wanted to say, but was shy about saying. He asked what it was.

“Well, sir, it’s like this; I’ve told me old woman all you done for me, an’ she says, might she thank you ‘erself?”

“I don’t know that I did any more for you than you did for me, Nobby.”

“I told ‘er you was too busy to be bothered with ‘er, but you know what women are, sir, once they get an idea in their ‘eads they don’t seem able to get it out again an’ she’s been naggin’ the life out of me to ask you if you won’t come an ‘ave a cup of tea one day when you can spare the time. It’d be a rare treat for the kids.”

“Is that all? Of course I’ll come. Tell your wife I’ll be delighted.”

Having fixed a date there and then, a few days later he went with Nobby to the mean little house in a Westminster slum of which the Clarks occupied the ground floor. Nobby’s wife was a small, untidy, brisk woman with thin, carroty hair and a missing front tooth. The two children, a girl of ten and a boy of nine, were puny, but keen-faced; they were struck with awe at the sight of the officer in uniform and watched him with speechless wonder. But Mrs. Clark was as chatty as her husband, and as unself-conscious. She had the same quick cockney humour that he had and Roger found himself laughing heartily at her quips. He was touched to see the affection that obviously existed between the members of that lively, contented family. It was touching, too, to see the pride the Clarks took in their sordid dwelling. There was no bathroom and they shared the only privy with the other people in the house; the children slept in an airless cubby-hole, and the living-room, which was the kitchen as well, was tiny and so crowded with furniture and knick-knacks that you could hardly move; but it was home and they loved it. Roger suggested that the children would be better off in the country and said his mother would gladly take them, but neither Nobby nor his wife would hear of parting with them.

“Whatever should we do without them kids to worry the life out of us?” said Nobby with his friendly grin.

“My kids don’t leave London till I leave London,” said Mrs. Clark with decision. “An’ I don’t leave London till Nobby leaves London.”

“An’, speakin’ for meself, I don’t leave London till the major leaves London.”

“And I don’t suppose I shall leave London in any circumstances,” laughed Roger.

“So there you are, as you might say,” added Mrs. Clark. “An’ if you don’t stop pickin’ your nose, Ernie, I will send you to the country. Whatever will the major think of you?”

“‘Ere’s me ‘anky,” said Nobby, taking out a handkerchief that was none too clean. “If you want to blow it, blow it, and if you don’t, leave it alone.”

Roger could hardly have said why he felt in such good spirits as he walked back to the War Office.

Dick Murray went out to Egypt and within a few weeks, Ian, having recovered from his injuries and got himself a handsome set of false teeth, followed. Jane was once more alone in her little house. Since it was close to the War Office, whenever she was free and he could manage it, Roger strolled along and dined with her. Meanwhile life at Graveney Holt went its accustomed way. Owing to a reorganization the General lost his job at the Red Cross and having nothing to do in London returned to Graveney for good. His uselessness made him fretful and though ordinarily a placid man he was inclined now to be moody and irritable. He felt his age. Since Dick was no longer there to look after it, he took over the management of the estate; but he was too easy-going and too irascible to do it with conspicuous success. Tommy’s preparatory school had been transferred to Canada, and his parents, not quite knowing what to do with him, decided to keep him at home till they saw how things went. Jim continued to work on the farm. Mrs. Henderson had a notion that of late he had seemed more at peace with himself. She wondered whether his passion for Dora was grown less intense: to the best of her belief they met only on Sundays and then there was nothing in their behaviour to suggest that there was even an understanding between them. It was true that in the afternoon they went for a walk, but there was no harm in that. She was sufficiently assured of Dora’s high principles to be certain that she would permit no undue intimacy. Besides, she was not in love with the boy. Of that by now Mrs. Henderson was also certain.

In this manner the summer wore on. All over England work was pursued furiously in order to prepare for the invasion that seemed imminent. Wiseacres examined the tides and decided on which day exactly it would take place. There were rumours that a party of saboteurs had landed on the South Coast and been exterminated, and rumours that a fleet of barges had been intercepted off Cornwall and sunk; hospitals in Paris were said to be jammed with German soldiers suffering from frightful burns. The Luftwaffe started in earnest to attack England and every day towns were bombed. People learnt to distinguish by the sound of the engine which were German planes and which were British. There was furious fighting in the air and hundreds of enemy planes were brought down. At the end of September the Germans assailed London. The docks were bombed, and whole streets of poor houses in the East End were reduced to a mass of smoking rubble; then came the turn of the West End; Buckingham Palace was hit; Regent Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly: there were great holes in Mayfair where an old Georgian house had once stood. A factory in Croydon was bombed and two hundred girls were killed. Here and there a direct hit caught a shelter and few who had sought refuge in it escaped. The raids started at dusk and the all-clear did not sound till the first sign of dawn. The people of London passed harassed nights, but they went on with their work and maintained their calm.

The country was much disturbed by the common talk that Fifth Columnists were active; for it was notorious that their operations had greatly helped the enemy in the invasions of Poland, Belgium, Holland and Norway, and it was not to be supposed that the Germans would fail to employ in England methods that had elsewhere proved so efficacious. Wild tales flew about and the complaints were universal that the Government was not sufficiently alive to the danger. In consequence aliens were rounded up and numbers of them sent to detention camps. Then there was an outcry that they had been taken pell-mell, those that were suspect as well as those that were beyond suspicion, and the left-wing papers were violent on the Government’s want of discrimination. But this also kept the matter in the public eye. The Hendersons were anxious. It was impossible to deny that Dora, though an Austrian who had suffered from Nazi persecution, was according to the letter of the law an enemy alien, and the risk that she would be, if not interned, at least removed to some other part of the country, was intensified by the fact that Graveney Holt lay within five miles of a secret airfield. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew about it, but it was supposed to be so ingeniously camouflaged as to be invisible from the air at the height at which enemy planes, wary of anti-aircraft guns, would be forced to fly. There was notwithstanding the danger that a Fifth Columnist might find means to give its exact locality away. General Henderson went to see the chief constable of the county and the Air Force commander at the airdrome and gave his personal guarantee of Dora’s integrity. He made a point of the good work she had done since the outbreak of the war. With all those children to look after they simply couldn’t get on without her. It would be a monstrous abuse of power to insist on her departure. He was a man used to getting his own way and he was extremely dissatisfied when the utmost he could extract from the authorities was permission for Dora to stay till her case was further considered. He wrote a very cross letter to Roger and was annoyed when he replied that the matter was not within his province and he was afraid nothing he might say would have any effect. Roger was not surprised when two or three days later he was called from Lewes by the chief constable. It was about nine at night and he was just finishing his work at the office. The chief constable was an old friend of the family’s. He told Roger that it had been decided to remove Dora to some place, at a distance from any military objectives, which the proper authority would shortly appoint.

“I’m afraid your father will make trouble,” he concluded. “He gets very peppery when he’s crossed.”

“I know he does,” smiled Roger.

“I understand you’re coming down to these parts next week anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you couldn’t advance it. Couldn’t you come tomorrow?”

“I suppose I could, but I don’t quite see the object.”

“Well, I think you could make your father see reason. We’ve had to put up with a lot of criticism lately. It would be a bore if your father got a question asked in the House or wrote to the Times.”

“Those are the only two things you fellows are afraid of,” chuckled Roger. “All right, I’ll come tomorrow. Though mind you, I’m pretty certain that Miss Friedberg is all right. My people have known her for some years and her father was done to death by the Nazis. But I agree with you, it’s better to be on the safe side.”

He put down the receiver and began to reflect. Dora had struck him as a nice, honest sort of girl, and it was inconceivable that she should be mixed up in espionage. If the Huns got on the track of the secret airfield it could hardly be through her; she hadn’t the opportunity either to get or to transmit information. But of course if the authorities wanted to shift her they were within their rights. He smiled again when he thought of the chief constable’s obvious disinclination to tackle his father. The General was an obstinate fellow. He had held various honorific positions in the county and as a large landowner and a magistrate was inclined to think that his word was law; as a soldier he had been something of a martinet and, when crossed, could fly into a towering passion. Roger had a notion that his mother too wouldn’t very much like having her wishes disregarded; gentle and sweet-tempered as she was, she also was accustomed to having her own way.

Roger touched the bell and Nobby came in. At that moment there was a burst of anti-aircraft fire.

“Jerries are a bit busy tonight, sir,” said Nobby.

“It does seem rather noisy. I’m just going along to Mrs. Foster’s. She’s inclined to be a bit jittery these days and I may spend the night there.”

“Very good, sir.”

Nobby helped him on with his coat and he put on his tin hat.

“You can go now, Nobby.”

“Right you are, sir. If there’s no objection I’ll just go along an’ see ‘ow me old woman and the kids are gettin’ on.”

“Of course. Are they all right?”

“Yes, sir — when last ‘eard of. We ‘ad a bomb in our street last night and all the windows are gone.”

“Bit chilly, isn’t it? D’you think it’s very safe to leave them there?”

“Well, sir, they go to the shelter in the Horseferry Road at night. Nice and cosy they are there.”

“You’re a damn’ fool not to send them down to Graveney.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re about right, sir. But my old woman won’t ‘ear of it. Separate me from my kids? she says. Not much. I wish you’d speak to ‘er, sir. Since you give me this job she thinks the world of you.”

“I’ll go and see her in a day or two. I’ll try and persuade her.”

Roger walked along to Jane’s house and let himself in with a latch-key. She was playing the piano.

“I suppose you know there’s a hell of a raid on,” he said with a grin, as he opened the door of the drawing room.

His words were accompanied by another burst of anti-aircraft fire. It sounded to Roger as if the planes were just overhead.

“I suspected it, I admit,” she answered, going on with the Chopin waltz she was playing.

Roger poured himself out a whisky and soda. Jane’s playing was better than you would have expected and he listened to her with pleasure.

“You played a wrong note there, dearie.”

“I did it on purpose.”

Suddenly she stopped and turned round on the stool. He saw that her face under the outrageous make-up was drawn and that her eyes were haggard.

“I couldn’t knit any more; I was dropping every other stitch. It’s no good denying it, Roger, I’m just scared stiff.”

“Why the devil don’t you get out of London, then? You’ve got nothing to keep you here now that Ian’s gone. Go home. You’ll be safe there.”

She gave him an indignant stare.

“Me leave London? Why, I wouldn’t miss the excitement for anything in the world.”

There was a dull thud and the house gave a little tremor like the tremor that passes through a ship when a great wave strikes her. A bomb had fallen not far away.

“Blast them,” Jane barked angrily.

“You’re looking awfully tired, darling.”

“I haven’t slept very well for the last few nights,” she replied with a deprecating smile. “To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I’ve been much too frightened.”

“Why in heaven’s name don’t you go and sleep in a shelter?”

She snorted.

“I’m not going to let old Hitler drive me out of my house. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.”

“I think the chances are that he won’t hear about it.”

Just at that moment there was a deafening explosion and all the windows in the room were shattered. Jane gave a piercing shriek and Roger instinctively sprang to his feet and put his arms round her.

“It’s all right, dear. No great harm done. It fell next door.”

“Oh, I’m scared, I’m scared,” she whimpered.

“Come on down to the basement. Where are the maids?”

“I sent them to a shelter. They went before the raid started.”

There was a terrific noise of firing and again the explosion of a falling bomb. The house shook and rattled as a tea cup on a saucer held by a trembling hand rattles and shakes, and with a crash, covering them with dust and debris, part of the ceiling fell down. They leapt out of the way. The lights went out.

“Come on,” said Roger, grabbing her wrist, “we’d better get out of here. We shall have the house on our heads in a minute.”

They hustled down the stairs. Jane snatched up a fur and they ran into the street. There were patches of flame where incendiaries had fallen and the house next door was burning. Men were running along, air-wardens and police, and there was a shouting of orders. You couldn’t see planes, but a hundred searchlights swept the skies. A-A guns were firing furiously.

“We must run for it,” said Roger.

“I can’t run in these heels.”

“Damn your heels.”

He took her arm and scurried her along. The nearest shelter was that off the Horseferry Road where Nobby’s wife and children were and that was where he wanted to go, but in the black-out it wasn’t easy to find the way. They passed vague and mysterious figures, people hurrying like themselves, hurrying, and in the darkness they were like flitting, shapeless chunks of night. Suddenly they heard the sinister, terrifying whistle of a falling bomb ahead of them.

“Throw yourself on your face,” cried Roger.

To make his meaning plain he gave Jane a slap on the back and they both flung themselves full length on the pavement. The bomb fell and the crash was deafening. For a moment Jane thought she would choke.

“That’s all right, get up,” said Roger.

“I don’t want to get up. I’m very comfortable where I am.”

“Get up, you fool.”

He pulled her roughly to her feet. She clung to him and he knew that she was badly shaken. Her voice didn’t sound her own when she spoke.

“I thought we were for it then, Roger.”

“Bit too close for comfort, wasn’t it?” he said grimly. “Bastards!”

“I don’t know why I don’t have a heart attack. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”

“Come on. I expect we shall have to go round. The road’s blocked ahead of us.”

Suddenly Jane gave a sharp cry.

“What’s up?”

“Wait a minute, I’ve forgotten something.”

Before he could stop her she had kicked off her shoes, picked up her skirts and was racing back to the house they had just left. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone for. He groped about for her shoes. For a moment he was at a loss; he was afraid to go after her in case he missed her in the black-out; it was better to wait where he was. He fumed. Several minutes passed and he grew desperately anxious. He was on the point of going back to try to find her when up she ran. She was breathless. He saw that she was carrying something.

“I’d forgotten my face,” she panted. “I only just got there in time, the house is on fire.”

“D’you mean to say you went back to fetch your damned make-up,” he shouted at her. “You might have been killed.”

“I had to have my face.”

He was so angry, he very nearly hit her; but he didn’t: the absurdity of it struck him suddenly and he burst into a shout of laughter.

“Don’t stand there laughing like a fool,” she cried irritably. “Let’s get to this damned shelter. I’m scared stiff.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. You’re as brave as a lion.”

“I had to have my face, you idiot, bomb or no bomb. And I’ve ruined a pair of brand-new silk stockings and I shan’t be able to get any more. What a life!”

She leant against Roger while she put on first one shoe and then the other.

“Now you’ve got your make-up perhaps you’d like to paint your lips.”

“Don’t be a damned fool, how can I in pitch darkness?”

“If you’re quite ready then let’s get a move on and be damned quick about it.”

“If you want to run, dear, you run. I’ll find my way all right.”

“If I have any more of your lip I’ll give you such a smack on the jaw you won’t be able to speak for a week.”

“Spoken like a perfect gentleman,” she said.

There seemed to be a lull and they walked through the black uncanny streets. Searchlights restlessly swept the sky.

“Is the raid over?” she asked.

“The planes have passed over. There won’t be another wave for a few minutes.”

They took one or two wrong turnings, but eventually reached the shelter. Two or three wardens were standing outside and one of them opened the door for them. The shelter was a large one, with several rooms, and it was crowded with people. Some, trying to sleep, were lying on mattresses or blankets and some on the bare concrete; others were sitting on chairs and camp-stools. Others again were eating and drinking, and a group of four men, sitting on the floor, were playing cards. Others stolidly read the newspaper. Women chatted in undertones and a good many were knitting. There were boys and girls and children in arms. It was hot and smelly. Jane stopped for a moment as the musty stench of humanity assailed her nostrils.

“The stink,” she said. “I can’t stand this.”

“Nonsense. You’ll get used to it in a minute.”

He pushed forward, for he wanted to find Mrs. Clark and put Jane in charge of her so that he could go back to the War Office. He was afraid it had been hit. He looked about and in the second room caught sight of Nobby with his wife and children. They had found a corner for themselves and the two children were lying together on a couple of blankets.

“Why, look who’s ‘ere,” said Nobby, as he and Jane made their way to him.

He jumped up and saluted.

“This is my sister. She’s just been bombed out of her house, so I thought I’d bring her along here.”

“My dear, I’ve lost everything,” said Jane cheerfully, as she shook hands with Mrs. Clark. “I’ve got nothing except the clothes I stand up in, and my face, thank God.”

The children sat up on their blankets and stared at the painted woman in her fantastic raiment.

“Who’s that, mum?” asked the little boy.

“Now then, Ernie, you go to sleep,” said his mother sharply.

“I ain’t sleepy.”

“Shut your eyes, lovey, and pretend you’re sleepy and you’ll be asleep in no time.”

Jane looked at him with an impassive face and deliberately winked at him. His mouth fell open and he stared at her in startled amazement. Room was made for Jane to sit down and Mrs. Clark offered her a cup of tea.

“I got a thermos,” she said. “I ain’t got a cup though, you’ll ‘ave to drink it out of the top.”

“Never mind that. I’d love a cup of tea.”

There was another burst of gunfire.

“There they are again.”

“How they can expect children to get their night’s rest with all this bombing and all them guns is more than I know,” said Mrs. Clark.

“You’ll be all right here for the night, Jane, won’t you? I must go back to the War Office,” said Roger.

“Of course I shall be all right; I’ve got my face with me.”

“Mrs. Clark will look after you. I’m going down to Graveney tomorrow morning. You’d better come with me.”

“I suppose I had. I hate leaving London, but I must have a roof over my head — though they do say that streetwalkers are doing a wonderful business just now.”

“You’ll be able to get a taxi when the all-clear sounds. Then the best thing you can do is to go along to the Dorchester and have a wash and brush-up and I’ll come and fetch you after breakfast.”

“Right-ho. Domineering man, my brother,” she added to Mrs. Clark. “Though what they’ll say to my turning up at the Dorchester in a fur coat and my harlequin négligé is nobody’s business. They’ll probably take me for the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Roger and Nobby started to thread their way through the crowd when there was an explosion so near, so loud, so shattering that it seemed for an instant as if the shelter had been struck. Women shrieked and all, men and women alike, leapt to their feet. The wardens shouted: “All right. No harm done. Keep calm.” Many of the children burst out crying and there was a loud, confused buzz of excited talk. It had evidently been a close shave. Roger, with Nobby at his heels, pushed forward to the entrance and as he passed the card players noticed that they hadn’t interrupted their game. He almost laughed. A woman shouted: “Now then, boys, ‘Roll out the Barrel’”; and a lot of them started singing. The guns blazed away. A pasty-faced lad came through the doorway of the room in which the Clarks had their corner and hurried up.

“Mrs. Clark, there’s that woman as lives in your house,” he said, “will you come along? She’s taken bad and the nurse is busy. She’s askin’ for you.”

“Oh, poor thing, yes, I’ll come immediately.” She gave Jane a hesitating glance. “Would you mind keepin’ an eye on the kids, ma’am, I shan’t be long?”

“Don’t hurry. I’ll look after them.”

The children were white and tearful. It had been a bad fright. Jane tried to get them to lie down again, but they were too startled.

“Don’t let them hurt me, miss,” the little girl whimpered.

“Of course I won’t let them hurt you,” Jane answered in her gruff, deep voice; then she gave a cackle of laughter. “You couldn’t be more frightened than me, dear, and when I’m frightened I always do my face.”

She reached over for the velvet-covered box and opening it displayed enough bottles, tubes, little china pots and what not to stock a beauty parlour. The two children watched her open-mouthed and wide-eyed as she began upon the complicated process of making herself look more like a figure of fun than nature had done already. Some of the people had settled themselves down again in the hope of getting to sleep, but there were still a number scurrying here and there, and there was a lot of nervous talking. But the two children, fascinated by Jane’s proceedings, forgot their fear. She gave the little girl a smile, that queer, droll smile of hers that was so disarming that your heart went out to her.

“Like me to do you?”

“Oh, yes,” cried the little girl.

“Come here then.”

Jane daubed cream on the child’s face, powdered and rouged her, reddened her lips and darkened her lashes.

“Your mother won’t know you when I’ve d’one with you,” she chuckled, as a sudden burst of firing made her start. She was in the middle of giving the child a fine pair of arched eyebrows. “That’s made a mess of your eyebrow; I shall have to do that one again. Spit on your hanky, child.”

“Do me too,” cried Ernie, wild with excitement.

“You’re a boy. You can’t have your cheeks rouged. I’ll give you a moustache.”

With her eyebrow crayon she painted a black moustache on his upper lip and gave him whiskers and a goatee; and then, giggling, with her lipstick gave him a bright red nose. Jane was contemplating her work with a good deal of satisfaction when Mrs. Clark came back.

“Look, mummy,” the two children cried.

“Why, whatever ‘ave you two gorn and done?”

“She done it.”

“Now you’ll ‘ave to ‘ave your faces washed.”

“I don’t want me face washed,” Ernie whined.

“What was the matter with the woman?” asked Jane.

“Oh, she’s all right. She’s only goin’ to ‘ave a baby. Could I leave the kids with you, ma’am? I think I ought to go back. It may come any minute now.”

“Go ahead. They’ll be all right with me.”

“We needn’t ‘ave our faces washed, need we, ma’am?” said Ernie as soon as his mother’s back was turned.

“Not until I wash mine,” said Jane, “and I’m not going to do that till the all-clear sounds.”

Just then Roger came back and told her what had happened. The bomb had fallen in the street just opposite the doorway and two wardens had been killed and a man who was just coming in badly wounded. But all the same they had to congratulate themselves; if the bomb had fallen a little more to the right it would have got the shelter fair and square and the slaughter would have been dreadful. Roger went off and Jane settled herself down on the blankets with a child on each side of her. Soon they fell asleep. She lay on her back longing for a cigarette, and stared at the ceiling.

“Very rum life is,” she muttered. Then, thinking of the woman in labour: “And my God, what a place and time to have a baby.”

XVI

JANE WAS UP and about betimes next morning, for when need be she could cope with an emergency as well as anyone. She found a friend at the Dorchester who lent her a dress to go out in and a hurried visit to the shops in Regent Street provided her with an outfit sufficient for the moment so that when Roger drove up to fetch her she presented an appearance that was not too fanciful. Since it was but little out of their way they went to have a look at her house. Nothing remained but a bare wall against which a bath was precariously perched. Houses on either side had been burnt out and men were already clearing the debris. The roadway was littered with broken glass. For once Jane found nothing to say. Heavy tears rolled down her painted face.

“Never mind, dear,” said Roger.

“Damn you, I do mind.”

He drove on. The household had just finished luncheon when they arrived at Graveney. They were all, all but Tommy who had gone off on his bicycle, in the sitting-room having their coffee; and though it was a week-day Jim happened to be there too. He had had to go to the dentist’s and had dropped in to lunch. Mrs. Henderson and May were knitting and Dora was listening to the General who was telling her how he would conduct the war if he were Prime Minister. She had heard it all before, but notwithstanding appeared to listen with interest. Jane and Roger’s appearance was a surprise, for he had not telephoned to announce their coming and Jane, without giving them a moment to draw breath, broke into a humourous account of her adventures on the previous night. She had already told her story several times at the Dorchester so that by now it was highly coloured. It had become a slap-stick farce so outrageous and so absurd that her listeners in their laughter lost sight of the fact that she and Roger had escaped death by a hair’s breadth. When she had finished Roger got up and sat down beside Dora.

“Miss Friedberg, I’ve got bad news for you,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave here. They’re tightening up on aliens and the authorities think it undesirable that you should remain at Graveney.”

Before she could speak the General burst out irascibly.

“I never heard such nonsense,” he cried. “I’ll go and see the chief constable again. Who the devil does he think he is? I’ve given him my personal guarantee that Dora is all right.”

“We can’t do without her, Roger,” said Mrs. Henderson. “She’s been incredibly useful and she’s worked wonderfully well.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Mother, but I’m afraid there’s no help for it. I knew it would put you out, that’s why I thought I’d better come down and tell you myself. I had a little job to do here anyway.”

Dora seemed less agitated than the others; she even smiled a little when she addressed herself to Roger. He had a suspicion that there was something derisive in the smile.

“I suppose it’s on account of the airdrome,” she said. “I’ve never been near it. In fact I don’t know exactly where it is.”

“It’s maddening, all this red tape,” the General fumed. “Why, she’s like our own daughter. She isn’t even German, she’s Austrian, and she’s as anti-Nazi as we are.”

“All that’s perfectly true,” answered Roger. “It’s inevitable in a time like this that individuals should suffer hardship. It’s not a question of interning her. It’s only that she’s got to go and live in some place that the authorities approve of. She’s an alien and she’s got to adhere to the regulations.”

“But she’s not an alien,” said Jim quietly. “She’s a British subject. She’s my wife.”

There was a general gasp of astonishment.

“Is it true, Dora?” asked Mrs. Henderson.

Dora’s face in repose often had a sullen look and it had it now.

“We were married last August,” she answered.

“Why have you kept it secret? I didn’t deserve that of you, Dora.”

There was an unaccustomed coldness in Mrs. Henderson’s eyes.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Henderson. I’m afraid I’m very much to blame. How could I expect you to be pleased that your son should marry a penniless refugee that you know nothing about?”

Mrs. Henderson raised her eyebrows.

“Is that the sort of people you think we are after living with us all these months?”

“She didn’t want to marry me, Mother,” said Jim, with a pathetic eagerness that she shouldn’t think ill of Dora. “I asked her over and over again and she refused. She begged me to wait till after the war.”

Roger looked up quickly.

“What made you change your mind?” he asked Dora.

She hesitated an instant.

“He was unhappy. No one was very kind to him here.”

“That’s not true, Dora,” said Mrs. Henderson, sharply. “We couldn’t approve, but we respected his convictions.”

“It wasn’t respect he wanted, it was love.”

Mrs. Henderson looked from her daughter-in-law to her son.

“I’m a soldier’s daughter and I’m a soldier’s wife and I’m a soldier’s mother. It’s been a bitter grief to me that a son of mine should refuse to fight for his country, but I accepted his decision. I tried to understand and to sympathize. I felt sure he wouldn’t have done what he has if his conscience hadn’t persuaded him it was the right thing to do.”

The General had been looking at Dora. She was so pretty and young; he had a soft spot in his heart for her.

It would be a pity if his wife said anything to hurt her.

“It’s no good crying over spilt milk, my dear,” he said. “What’s done is done. She’s his wife now.”

“This alters things, Roger, doesn’t it?” asked Jim.

“I suppose it does.”

He understood now the meaning of the derisive smile that he had seen on Dora’s face. He glanced at May. She wasn’t knitting, but sat there, looking down at the floor, with knitted brows. Jane was painting her lips and managed to put into that proceeding the maximum of disapproval.

Dora rose to her feet and went over to Mrs. Henderson.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Henderson.”

“I want my son to be happy, Dora.”

“I shall try to make him so.”

Mrs. Henderson sighed and then drawing Dora down, kissed her.

“If you do that I shall have nothing to forgive.”

“Dora can come and live with me at Badger’s,” said Jim.

He had been sleeping there since the people with whom he had found lodging at first had turned him out. The cottage was partly furnished and there were still plenty of unwanted things in the attics at Graveney to make it pretty and comfortable. Walking, if you took the short cut through the park, it was barely a mile from the house and by road not much more.

Dora could very easily continue to help with the evacuated children. Jim’s remark eased the tension and with relief they entered upon a discussion of the sheets and blankets, pots and pans, dishes and plates, knives and forks that would be required to enable the young couple to set up housekeeping.

Roger left them to it and drove off to Lewes to keep his appointment with the chief constable. He found him in his office, waiting, a grizzled, retired colonel, slightly fussy and not too bright, and with him were an officer of the R.A.F. from the neighbouring airdrome and a police inspector.

“Well, is it all settled?” asked the chief constable when Roger had taken a seat.

Roger frowned.

“I’m afraid it’s not. There’s a snag. It appears that she’s a British subject. She’s married to my brother.”

“What? Damned fool.” The chief constable recollected himself. “Sorry, old man.”

“Oh, that’s all right. They’ve been married since August. For reasons best known to themselves they’ve kept quiet about it.”

“That’s awkward.”

“I don’t quite know what to do about it,” said Roger.

“The fact remains that the Germans know we’ve got an airfield in the neighbourhood,” said the R.A.F. officer.

“What about your camouflage?”

“That’s all right. No one could spot it who didn’t know it was there. We had a German plane over the other day. It had obviously just come to have a look and when we sent a plane up after it, it sheered off. Someone’s given the show away; there’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Roger had been as surprised as the others to hear that Jim and Dora were man and wife, and he didn’t like the idea of Jim having married a girl who when all was said and done was an enemy alien, but he thought like his father that there was nothing to do but make the best of it and now that she was one of the family his instinct was to stand up for her.

“You know, as far as this girl’s concerned,” he said, “I’m pretty sure you’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s Austrian in the first place and my people have known her since long before the war.”

The chief constable turned to the detective.

“You haven’t got anything more to tell us, Inspector?”

“No, sir. She seems to have no friends outside. She’s a good worker and everyone speaks well of her.”

“What about her correspondence?”

“She’s never had a letter since we’ve been on her track.”

“That’s not very strange,” said Roger. “Her only relative is her mother who lives in Austria.”

“Of course we knew she’d been seeing a lot of Mr.

James Henderson, but that was none of our business.”

“Where did they meet?”

“In Graveney Park and sometimes she went to see him in that cottage he’s been living in. Badger’s they call it.”

“If they were married it’s natural that they should be together sometimes,” said Roger.

“I’m not saying it isn’t, sir,” answered the inspector. “Of course we didn’t know they were married.”

“So I suppose you put the worst construction on it.”

“Come off it, Roger,” said the chief constable. “They’re young and she’s a damned pretty girl. What construction would you expect the inspector to put upon it?”

“Well, sir, if you want the truth, the fact is, sir, that my man saw a light in the bedroom when she was there.”

“And drew the obvious conclusion,” continued the chief constable. “Don’t look so glum about it. If they were occupied as the inspector seems to think they were, it’s unlikely that she was up to any monkey business. It all sounds perfectly normal to me and I think we can probably give her a clean bill of health.”

“Where is this cottage you’re talking about?” asked the airman.

There was a large-scale map open on the table round which they sat and the inspector pointed out the exact position of Badger’s. The airman raised his eyebrows.

“Funny,” he said. “Look, Henderson, there’s Graveney Holt and there’s Badger’s. From your house it gives a direct line on our airdrome.”

“Remember it’s only a four-roomed cottage with a thatched roof. It couldn’t be seen from the air.”

“I dare say not. Unless someone showed a light. It seems to be on a hill.”

“Hardly that. A hummock.”

“Are you quite sure of your brother? He’s a conchie, isn’t he?”

Roger thought the question offensive; but answered pleasantly enough.

“I’m absolutely sure of him. He’s a damned fool, but he’s been an ardent pacifist ever since he went up to Oxford. He’s incapable of doing the dirty.”

“Incapable,” agreed the chief constable, who had known Jim all his life.

“Is he going on living at the cottage?” asked the airman. “You’d better tell him to be very careful not to show a light.”

“He wouldn’t be such a fool as that. But I will. I’ll get my mother to see that they take every precaution.”

“They? Who’s they?”

“Of course his wife is going to live with him.”

The airman looked sulky.

“I don’t like it and it’s no good saying I do. Someone’s given the show away and I miss my guess if we don’t get bombers over one of these fine nights.”

“Damn it all, you can’t prevent a man from living with his wife,” said Roger.

He was irritated at the fellow’s persistence. He might be a good airman; he was an obstinate, insular and narrow-minded man. It was exasperating that at this time of day you should still have to deal with people who suspected anyone who hadn’t had the good fortune to be born British. But as ever Roger was wary of his prepossessions. Even though the airman had rubbed him up the wrong way, it wouldn’t do to pay no heed to his misgivings. And he was none too easy in his own mind. He couldn’t see why Dora had insisted on making a secret of her marriage with Jim. The reason she had given was flimsy. Her behaviour struck him as unpleasantly deceitful. He rose to go, for he had urgent matters to attend to elsewhere.

“I’m sure I needn’t tell you fellows to keep your eyes skinned,” he said, in his hearty manner.

It was a general admonition and if they applied it to a particular case that was not his look-out.

XVII

JIM AND DORA set up housekeeping. They ransacked the attics of Graveney for such furniture as they needed.

Jim brought his books and the woodcuts he had had in his bedroom, and they gave the tiny parlour a homelike air. Mrs. Henderson gave them linen. The General drove over to Lewes and brought back the kitchen utensils of which Dora had given him a list. Having got over the first shock he was delighted with his new daughter-in-law and described admiringly to his wife the brisk, orderly way in which she put everything in its place.

“Jim might have gone a damned sight further and fared a damned sight worse,” he told her.

Jim was thankful that now everything was open and above-board. He had hated the deception he had been forced to practise; it seemed so unkind to his parents, and he had only consented to it because otherwise Dora refused to marry him. It was heaven to sit facing her at the little table and eat the supper she had cooked for him. It was heaven to sit in an arm-chair by the fire in his slippers, smoking a pipe, while she in another armchair on the other side of the fire place knitted woollies for the children. It was heaven to talk, it was heaven to be silent. It was heaven to think that after a while they would go up to bed together. Now everything would be all right. For things hadn’t turned out quite as he had expected and marriage hitherto hadn’t been as completely satisfying as he had hoped it would be. He was passionately in love with Dora and it perplexed and hurt him that his passion roused no corresponding warmth in her. She had sought to avoid the consummation of their marriage until the time came when she was prepared to acknowledge it and she had only yielded when he threatened, half jokingly and half angrily, to produce the marriage certificate to his family there and then. But he was too sensitive not to be conscious that she submitted to his embraces with coldness.

He was young and inexperienced and even if, since Dora had sworn him to secrecy, it had been possible to seek advice, there was no one with whom he could have brought himself to talk the matter over. He would have been ashamed to speak of it to his mother, and Jane would only mock him; there was a virginal quality in May that made it impossible for him even to think of mentioning it to her. It never entered his head to consult Roger. He was driven therefore to reassure himself with the scraps and pieces he had heard about women and tell himself that they weren’t like men and that desire in them was more slowly awakened. Yet from the look of her, so fresh, healthy and blooming, you would never have suspected that Dora was a frigid woman. She was very modern and highly educated; what they called the mysteries of sex were no mysteries to her; seeking for a plausible explanation for behaviour that seemed so contrary to her nature he asked himself whether it was possible that she had attached some mystical value to her chastity and could not yet reconcile herself to the normal exigencies of the male. From the very first Dora had given him to understand that she was not prepared to have a baby and, though unwillingly, he had agreed that it would be as well to wait till they could announce their marriage. Now that this had been done and they were living together there seemed no reason to hesitate. To his dismay Dora would not hear of it.

“No, no, no,” she said. “This is no time to bring a child into the world.”

He tried to reason with her. He knew how much it would please his parents and if she had a baby it would dissipate any feeling of disapproval they still might have because Dora and he had married on the sly. The dearest wish of his father’s heart was to behold the birth of a boy who could inherit the land his forbears had owned so long. Dora listened to him in sullen silence. He would never have believed her face could bear such an expression of exasperated stubbornness as he saw on it then.

“If you loved me you’d want to have a baby by me,” he said.

The look she gave him sent a cold shiver down his spine. It was a look of hatred. He was so startled that he said no more.

Of course she had been working very hard for a long time and it might be that she was suffering from the strain. She was worried about her mother in Austria of whom she had had no news since the outbreak of the war. He must go easy. He must be very kind to her and hope that with time she would change her mind. After all, he couldn’t expect to know already the business of being a husband and why should he expect her to know that of being a wife? They both had a lot to learn. They had to get used to one another and they had to discover all the things about one another that only the intimacy of common life in marriage can manifest. As time went on he discovered one or two things that he wasn’t prepared for. He discovered that Dora had a quick temper. He had never seen her anything but composed and good-humoured; indeed at Graveney they had often marvelled at the fact that nothing put her out; but now she seemed at times to be seized with an uncontrollable irritation and would say sharp and wounding things. One might almost have thought that marriage had changed her disposition. Then her face went red and there was a cruel hardness in her eyes. She would recover herself very quickly, say she was sorry and behave towards him with unwonted tenderness. But he hated to see her like that and, though without definite intention, made it his business to avoid giving her occasion to be annoyed with him.

Another thing that distressed him was her attitude towards his relations. He was deeply attached to them and it was a grief to him that she was inclined to be acid about them. Considering how kind they had been to her, and how generous, it seemed rather ungrateful. She took care never to say anything about his mother, but it was not difficult for him to guess that she looked upon the General as an old fool. Jim would have thought his father’s open partiality for her would have touched her. Perhaps it was natural that she didn’t like Jane or Roger. She couldn’t understand that Jane’s offhand way was only a mannerism and that, for all her brusque downrightness, she was a thoroughly good sort. You could expect short shrift if she thought you were trying to put something over on her, but if you were really in a hole you could count on her doing her damnedest to get you out of it. And if she made a perfect sight of herself, well, did it really matter? It amused her and did no one any harm. It was true that Roger had tried to turn Dora out of Graveney, but he was only doing his duty; it didn’t seem fair to hold it up against him. Dora said he didn’t like her and when Jim said she must give him time, answered with a shrug of the shoulders:

“To tell you the truth I don’t care a damn if he does or not. He’s ridiculous.”

“Why d’you think him that?” asked Jim with a smile of frank amusement, for that was the last thing he would have said of his brother.

“Don’t you know that May is having an affair with Dick Murray?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” he said with amazement. He laughed. “My poor Dora, May’s incapable of doing a mean and despicable thing.”

“She’s been in love with him ever since he came down here. She doesn’t care twopence for Roger.”

“Nonsense. They get on like a house on fire. You’ve got your knife into Roger and you’re prepared to believe anything to his discredit.”

“Ask Jane. She knows.”

Jim was vexed, not because he thought there was a word of truth in what Dora said, but because she could so calmly make such shocking aspersions; but he did not want to start an argument that might become acrimonious.

“I don’t think you know English people very well yet, darling,” he said mildly.

“Jane doesn’t suffer under the disadvantage of being a foreigner. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Shall we talk of something else?”

Dora shrugged her shoulders disdainfully. What she had said rankled, but Jim told himself that he would be a fool to take it seriously; women, he knew, were inclined to say outrageous things about one another and half the time they didn’t mean them. After all, it wasn’t unusual for people not to like their in-laws, and women were funny, they were sensitive about all sorts of little things that men wouldn’t think worth bothering about. It might be that Dora in her somewhat dependent position at Graveney had suffered slights that he had never noticed and that he was sure weren’t intended, but that had stung her. Well, now they had their own home that couldn’t happen any more; he felt pretty sure that she only had to know his people better, and perhaps in a different way, as one of the family herself, to discover that they weren’t really half a bad lot. And even if marriage hadn’t given him quite all he had hoped, at least not yet, he couldn’t complain. He had wanted to marry Dora ever since they first met at Kitzbuhl, and he was married to her. She made him wonderfully comfortable in that dear little house. She did all the housework herself and kept it like a new pin. It was a treat, after his long day at the farm, to come back to that nice cosy room and eat the tasty Austrian dishes she had prepared for him. He thought it was too much for her, for after she had made the beds and washed up the breakfast things in the morning she went off to Graveney to help with the children and did not come back till it was time to cook supper. She worked seven days a week. But when he suggested that they should get a woman from the village to help her she refused.

“I like to do everything for you myself,” she said.

She could be very endearing when she chose: when she said things like that he could have died for her. It might be that she didn’t love him quite as much as he loved her, well, he could hardly expect that, perhaps he wasn’t very lovable, but surely if he loved her enough he could make her love him as he wanted to be loved.

There was plenty of time; they had all their lives before them.

When the airman told Roger he was convinced the Germans had got wind of the secret airfield he was right. Bombers came over twice, but it looked as though they weren’t able exactly to locate it, for they went away without discharging their loads, and it wasn’t till a month later that an attack was made on it. That night, Dora, saying she was tired, went to bed early. Jim was reading and, wanting to finish a chapter, told her he would stay up a little longer; but once she was gone he felt restless and so in a few minutes, putting down his book, he went up to their room. He was surprised to see that she hadn’t started to undress. The room was in darkness, but she was sitting at the open window, though it was a cold December night, and she had just lit a cigarette. She was holding the match in her hand and it gave a surprisingly bright light.

“Dora, what are you doing?” he cried.

“Lighting a cigarette,” she answered unconcernedly.

“Put out that match. You mustn’t show a light like that.”

“Oh, don’t be so silly. We’re miles from anywhere.”

“Put it out I tell you. I’ve told you how careful we must be.”

He snatched the match from her fingers and blew it out. He shut the window, drew the curtain and lit a couple of candles.

“It was so hot downstairs in that poky little room, I felt I had to have a breath of air.”

He happened to catch sight of the match she had used. He took it up. It was a fusee. This is a match with a long black head and a wire core in its stem, which holds its flame for a considerable time and which some people in England still use because it doesn’t easily go out in a wind and is convenient for lighting a pipe in the open.

“Why on earth were you lighting a cigarette with a fusee?”

“I didn’t know I was. In the darkness I just took the first box I could find.”

“But how d’you happen to have fusees?”

“Oh, I’ve had them for ages. I thought they might be useful.”

“A light like that can be seen for miles.”

She put up her mouth to be kissed.

“Oh, Jim, don’t be such an old fuss-pot. What harm can it do in the depths of the country like this?”

He put his arm round her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“Darling, those R.A.F. people don’t much like the idea of your living here because you were Austrian. I know it’s idiotic, but there it is. If anyone saw that light we shall get it in the neck.”

“It was stupid of me; I didn’t think. I won’t do it again.”

“Suppose you give me those matches.”

“Trusting fellow, aren’t you?” she smiled.

But she handed him the box and he put it in his pocket.

Jim slept so soundly that he heard neither the planes coming over nor the firing, and it wasn’t till next morning when he went to work that he knew that the airfield had been bombed. No harm was done and it was not positive even then that the Germans knew its precise situation; it might well be that having only a vague idea of it they had dropped bombs at a hazard and chance had favoured them. But Jim was worried; the planes, it appeared, had come over at nine and it must have been around half past eight when Dora had lit her cigarette at the open window. Of course it couldn’t be anything but a coincidence, the light of her fusee couldn’t have lasted a minute and it was absurd to think that, even if it had been seen from the air, a reconnaissance plane could have seen it and by rounding up a squadron somehow given it a direction. It was a heart-felt relief when a few days later there was another raid which could by no possibility have been connected with any carelessness of Dora’s, because it came on an evening when they were both at Graveney. There was a good deal of uneasiness in the neighbourhood and a lot of people were convinced that there were Fifth Columnists at work in their midst. It wasn’t hard to guess the names that were given them. He, because he was a conchie, and Dora, because she was a foreigner, were under suspicion and he was conscious of a veiled hostility in the persons he encountered. It vexed him, but he knew there was nothing he could do. Since he did not want to disturb Dora he took care not to give her any hint of the feeling against them. Fortunately, since she never went anywhere except to the big house to look after the children, there was no likelihood that she would discover it.

It was getting on for Christmas. General Henderson had the gout. He was sitting in an arm-chair, with his foot up, in the great hall of Graveney Holt reading the Times. Tommy, in the Boy Scout uniform that gave him an inordinate satisfaction, curled up in another chair, was reading a book. It was seven o’clock and the General looked up as it struck.

“Tommy, you haven’t done your good deed for the day, have you?” he asked.

“I haven’t had a chance, Daddy.”

“Well, you can do one now. Just walk round the house and see that no lights are showing. Put a coat on.”

“All right.”

The little boy ran out and when he had been gone a few minutes Jim came in.

“Hulloa, Father,” he said. “I thought I’d come round and see how you were and take Dora back with “I can’t walk yet, but I’m better. Dora’s gone. She left about half an hour ago.”

“She can’t have. I’ve just come from the cottage and I didn’t meet her on the road.”

“Perhaps she walked back through the park.”

“She wouldn’t do that. It’s pitch dark.”

“I know she’s gone. She came to say good night to me.”

“I wonder where the devil she is.”

The front door opened and slammed and Tommy came racing in.

“Daddy, there’s a fire.”

“A fire.”

“It’s just where your cottage is, Jim.”

“Gosh!”

He ran out and Tommy bolted after him. They could see a blaze in the distance. They jumped on their bicycles and rode towards it. The road was winding and they lost sight of the fire, but on turning a corner came in full view of it.

“That’s not the cottage,” cried Jim. “My God, it looks like a rick burning.”

They pedalled with all their might and as they came near saw that in fact it was a rick blazing fiercely in a field a few hundred yards from Badger’s.

“How did it catch?” asked Tommy. “D’you think “It looks damned well like it.” Jim gave an anxious glance at the sky. “We shall know very soon.”

As they reached the field two or three men ran up with pitchforks and began raking at the hay, trying to get the fire under control, but the heat was intense and they had to give up. The whole rick was in flames.

“You nip back home, Tommy, and ring up the police station,” said Jim. “I’ll go and see what Dora’s up to.” He was thankful she’d had the sense to keep away. Heaven only knew what those men would have said if they’d come and found her there. He went back to the cottage. Dora was standing in the dark at the open window of their little parlour looking at the blaze. “Where have you been, Dora?”

“Nowhere. I’ve been waiting for you to come back.”

“I was here half an hour ago. You weren’t here then.”

“I was. I didn’t hear you. I had a headache and went upstairs to lie on the bed.”

“But your bike wasn’t in the shed. That’s why I went on to the house to ride back with you.”

“Well, it was. I put it there myself.”

Funny. He could have sworn her bicycle wasn’t in its usual place.

“There’s nothing to do about that rick. It’ll just have to burn itself out.”

“I love a fire. It’s thrilling.”

Jim saw that she had no idea that it might be a signal. He thought he had better not say anything.

“I wonder how it caught.”

For a while they stood side by side and watched the soaring flames. Presently Dora turned away.

“D’you want to go and wash?” she said. “Supper’s ready.”

“All right. I’ll only be a minute.”

When he went up to their bedroom he noticed that the bed showed no sign of having been lain on, but of course Dora was a tidy woman and she might very well have smoothed down the counterpane and shaken up the pillow if she had mussed them up. They had barely started to eat when he heard the hum of planes overhead. He jumped impulsively to his feet.

“Good God! It was a signal then?”

“What d’you mean?”

“The rick.”

“Oh, Jim, don’t be so silly. D’you mean to say you think someone set fire to it on purpose?”

“It’s obvious now.”

“It’s much more likely a tramp set it on fire by accident.”

“What would a tramp be doing at the bottom of that field at this time of night?”

“He might have been going to sleep there. For goodness sake sit down to your supper. You’re not frightened, are you?”

“No, dear,” he grinned.

He sat down and went on eating. Then in the distance they heard the sound of firing.

“That means they’re over the airdrome.”

She pricked up her ears, but did not say anything. They finished the meal in silence.

Tommy got home and proceeded impetuously to tell his father about the burning rick. They heard the planes too and this raised his excitement to fever heat. He wanted to run upstairs to look if he could see anything from an upper window.

“No, you little devil, you stay here,” said the General. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”

“I won’t go out on the roof, Daddy. I promise.”

“You do as I tell you. Read a book.”

“I don’t want to read a book.”

“Then twiddle your thumbs.”

Mrs. Henderson came in.

“George, there are dozens of planes flying over.”

“I’m not deaf, dear. It looks as though they were making a mass attack on the airdrome. I hope our fellows get after them.”

“I’ve left May and Jane to keep the children quiet. They’re all mad to go out and see what’s happening.”

“I can’t blame them. If it weren’t for this damned foot of mine I’d be out myself.”

Tommy looked at him wide-eyed, but was too wily to say anything. Bitterness filled his soul as he took cognizance once more of the flagrant injustice of grownups.

“I’m worried about the boys who’ve gone down to the village for choir practice,” said Mrs. Henderson. “What the devil have they done that for?”

“Christmas carols. They were so keen to go I didn’t like to disappoint them. There are five of them who’ve got good voices and the choir-master wanted them.”

“They’ll be all right,” said the General calmly. “The Huns aren’t going to waste their bombs on them.”

“I know, but when the planes go back they’ll come right over us, and you know, when they’re unloading no one can tell where a bomb will drop. I think I’d feel easier in my mind if they stayed where they are till the raid’s over.”

“All right then, telephone.”

“How can I? They’re practising in the vestry.” Tommy saw his chance and leapt at it.

“Mummy, shall I go down on my bike and tell them? It’ll only take me five minutes.”

“No, Tommy, I don’t want you to go out.”

“Oh, Mummy, please let me. I might see a German plane brought down.”

Mrs. Henderson felt a great responsibility towards the young children placed in her care and she knew she would never forgive herself if anything happened to them. She didn’t know what to do.

“Daddy, tell her it’s quite safe,” pleaded Tommy.

The General smiled. He loved the boy’s eagerness and he was proud that he was fearless. A chip of the old block.

“Honestly, my dear, I don’t think there’s the smallest risk. If you’re really anxious about the kids why don’t you let him nip down to the village?”

Mrs. Henderson hesitated. Somebody ought to go; she hadn’t ridden a bicycle herself for twenty years; of course there were May and Jane; if it was dangerous for Tommy it was dangerous for them. With a sigh she gave in.

“All right, dear, you can go. But you must stay till the raid’s over, and tell the choir-master to keep all the boys in the crypt.”

“All right, Mummy; I promise you I shall be all right.”

He dashed out. But he had no sooner gone than Mrs. Henderson regretted it. She walked up and down the enormous room restlessly. After a while the General looked at his watch.

“You can stop fussing now. He’s got there by this time. It’s ten minutes since he left.”

She drew a long breath of relief. They put out the lights and opened the windows to listen to the distant firing. They looked up at the sky, but could see nothing. The night was pitch black. Then they heard once more the sound of planes overhead, but whether it was another wave coming over or those that had come going back they could not tell. Suddenly they heard a dull thud.

“What’s that?” cried Mrs. Henderson.

“A bomb. Some blighter unloading.”

“It sounded awfully close.”

“Hard to tell.”

“That means they’re going back?”

“Yes, I suppose they found it too hot for them.”

“I wish I hadn’t let Tommy go.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t be so silly. He’s all right in the church. The choir-master’s a sensible fellow, he won’t let any of them stir till the all-clear.”

She tried to smile.

“I’m sure he won’t. Don’t take any notice of me; I’m only nervous because I’m so tired.”

“Well, the fun’s over for the present. Sit down and rest yourself. May and Jane can look after the kids for once.”

The anti-aircraft guns ceased fire and silence, as softly as falling snow, settled upon the night. They shut the windows, drew the curtains and turned on the light. Mrs. Henderson was exhausted and lay down on a sofa. The General, putting on his spectacles, went back to his paper and in a few minutes she dropped off to sleep. She was awakened by the coming of Jim and Dora.

“We came over to see if you were all right. We heard a bomb and it sounded pretty close to you.”

“We heard it too,” said the General. “I think it may have fallen somewhere in the park.”

“D’you think they got the airfield?” asked Dora. “We shall hear tomorrow. There was a lot of firing overhead. I suppose that means we sent planes up after them. I wonder if we brought any down?” They went on talking over the raid and then Jane came in.

“We’ve put all the little brats to bed, Mother,” she said, “and they’re waiting for you to go and say their prayers with them.”

“The boys who went down to choir practice aren’t in yet.”

“Yes, they are; they’ve just come in. They’re undressing.”

“But where’s Tommy?”

“Tommy? Isn’t he here?”

Mrs. Henderson gave a frightened gasp.

“Don’t get in a state, dear,” the General said, frowning. “He’s all right. He’s probably only up to some mischief. You know what a young devil he is.”

But she was terrified and nothing that anyone said could reassure her. Jim suggested going out to look for him, but that seemed useless. The only thing was to wait. They racked their brains to think of a possible reason for his non-appearance.

“He must know how anxious I am,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“I’m sure he’s only stayed out on the chance of seeing something exciting,” said the General.

“But it’s all over now,” cried Mrs. Henderson.

“If I hadn’t got the gout I’d give him a damned good hiding when he comes back.”

But when there was a great, thundering knock of the bronze knocker on the front door they all had a sickening fear that something dreadful had happened. Jim went to the door and opened it.

“Who is it, Jim?” asked his mother in desperate anxiety.

A constable came in.

“I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Your little boy, ma’am.”

Mrs. Henderson put her hand to her heart and stared at the man with horror-stricken eyes. The General rose painfully to his feet and hobbled up.

“Where is he, Constable?”

“Two chaps of the Home Guard have got him.”

He signed to the unseen men waiting at the door and they brought in the body of the dead boy. There was a silence of black horror. They were stunned. Then Jim sank into a chair and covering his face with his hands burst into tears. Mrs. Henderson looked at the child with a frozen face. It was heart-rending to see.

“Take him upstairs,” she said. “Put him on his bed.”

Jim thought she was speaking to him and getting up went towards the two Home Guards, but his mother stopped him.

“Don’t touch him,” she cried. “Aren’t you ashamed to cry like a woman for a child you wouldn’t defend like a man?”

He gasped when he heard her words and, his face ashy white, shrank back. Jane stepped forward and touched one of the Home Guards on the arm.

“I’ll show you the way.” Then to her mother: “Come, Mother.”

“In a minute. The children are waiting to say their prayers.”

Gaunt-faced, her eyes tragic, she went with slow steps out of the room.

Those who were left, Jim, Dora and the General, were silent. The General sat slumped in his chair, and Jim, glancing at him, saw how hard he was trying to maintain his self-control. He sat staring into vacancy, but his mouth was twitching. He felt Jim’s pitying look.

“Someone must go and tell May,” he said.

“I’ll go.” Jim turned to his wife. “You can do no good here, Dora; you’d better go home. I shall stay the night.”

“After what your mother said to you?”

“My mother has the right to say what she damned well likes to me.”

His tone was so strange that she gave him a quick look of misgiving. Their eyes met in a cold stare.

“As you like,” she said at last, with a slight, contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.

She went out without another word.

XVIII

JIM TELEPHONED to the War Office and told Roger the awful thing that had happened. Work prevented him from getting down that night, but he said he would come as early as possible next morning. Then Jim sat with his father. They found nothing to say to one another and so after an hour he went up to the room he had slept in as a boy. It looked bare without his books and pictures. An alien room, a room that seemed to resent his presence. He tried to read, but dreadful thoughts distracted him, and the words on the paper made no sense. He read the same lines two or three times over and his mind remained blank. The blood in his head was throbbing, throbbing, and every now and then a stabbing pain shot through his skull as though someone had thrust a red-hot bodkin into it. Agony; but not such agony as his appalling thoughts. They chilled him to the bone and he shivered. He put a match to the fire. It warmed his icy hands and feet, but against the cold in his heart availed nothing. Horror! Horror! An anguished sob burst from his throat and in anger he dug his nails savagely into his palms; he felt near tears; this was no time to feel sorry for himself. He wished he had never been born; he wished he was dead. He felt as though phantoms, crowded and menacing, pressed him on every side and he could not force a way through.

Presently the handle of his door turned softly and his mother came in.

“I thought you might be asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Her face still bore that look of anguish he had seen on it when they had carried in the child’s body, but she was calm.

“Jim, dear, I’m sorry I spoke to you like that. I didn’t know what I was saying. It was dreadfully unkind. Will you forgive me?”

Tears came to his eyes.

“Darling, there’s nothing to forgive.”

“I’ve always loved you and I know how bitter life has been for you all these months. And now I want your love more than ever.” She kissed him tenderly; then she said: “I want you to come and see Tommy.”

The little boy lay on his bed. You could not see the wound that had killed him. Mrs. Henderson looked at him sadly.

“I’m not certain if one ought to regret those who die in these times. Perhaps they’re fortunate to be out of it.”

They stood for a while in silence. Then she gave Jim a piteous look.

“Do you believe in God, Jim?”

“Yes.”

“I try to. Would you mind, I’d like to pray.”

They sank on their knees by the bedside and buried their faces in their hands. After a little Mrs. Henderson rose to her feet.

“I must go to your father,” she said. “And you must go to bed. There’s no use in your tiring yourself out. Good night, darling.”

“Good night, Mother.”

But though he undressed and got into bed he could not sleep. He tossed from side to side in anguish of spirit. He tried to find reasons to allay the suspicion that beat upon his consciousness, thump, thump, thump, like the hammering of a nail into a granite wall. It was so monstrous that you only had to look at it fair and square to know there couldn’t be anything in it. It was against nature: it was as incredible as that water should run uphill. A dozen little incidents that when they happened had made no impression on his mind now recurred to him. He remembered the woman he had seen with Dora in St. James’s Park and whose likeness to the woman on the staff of the German embassy had so struck him; Dora had said she was a refugee with whom she had got into conversation: was it true, or was she a German agent and had Dora been in relations with her? Was it possible that Dora had managed to get herself invited to stay at Graveney because the German Secret Service knew that Roger was in the Military Intelligence and thought it would be useful to have someone in the house who might get hold of useful information? It wasn’t the first time Jim had miserably asked himself if Dora had married him only because otherwise the authorities would have insisted on her leaving. Was it she who had first given away the closely guarded secret of the airfield? And that evening, a fortnight back, when he had found her lighting a cigarette with a fusee when an ordinary match would obviously have been more convenient, was it only a coincidence that shortly afterwards the German planes had come over? Was it she who had set fire to the rick? Jim buried his face in the pillow trying to shut out the dreadful fear that assailed him. He loved her, loved her with all the strength of his soul and with all the vigour of his body. It was inconceivable that she should have acted a part for so long; and it was inconceivable that anyone should be so dead to the natural feelings of gratitude for all the kindness his father and mother had shown her; it was inconceivable that anyone should be so treacherous. He hated himself that such doubts should even occur to him. There must be an explanation for everything, but, O God, what was the explanation? She couldn’t be a spy, he loved her so much; there must be an explanation.

Towards morning he fell into an uneasy doze, and though used to early rising did not wake till nine. He was angry with himself for he had purposed with the first light of day to go to the field in which the rick had burnt on the chance that he might find out how it had been set on fire. He knew what he meant to look for. He did not intend to go to the farm that day; he wanted to be with his father and mother, and there would be dreadful things to see to that they were in no fit state to deal with. He dressed in haste and set out. He did not take his bicycle, but went the shorter way through the park; he passed his own cottage, but there was no sign of life in it and he presumed Dora was still asleep; he did not go in; he took the gate out of the park and walked along the road. What he feared had happened, the police were there; two cars stood in the road and when he came to the stile that led into the field he saw that several men were busy over what remained of the rick. He climbed over and tramped across the stubble till he came up to them. Among them were the village constable and the local inspector of police. Nodding, he bade them good morning. It was easy to guess that they had come with the same intention as himself. They were routing among the ashes.

“You chaps are on the job early,” he said in as hearty a manner as he could assume.

“We’ve been at it since it was light enough to see,” said the inspector. “And perishing cold it was when we first come.”

“What are you up to?” Jim asked.

“We’re trying to find out how the fire was started. We’ve been through the ashes with a fine tooth comb.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“We shall know when we find it.”

“Pretty hopeless I should think.”

They didn’t know what to look for and he did. If they went away he would have a chance.

“We haven’t done so badly so far.”

His heart sank.

“Got anything?”

“Something.”

The inspector pointed to a handkerchief that lay on the ground. Jim walked over and looked. There were four or five charred fragments on it, little bits of wire that had resisted the heat, and on one of them was still a scrap of fibre. Jim wouldn’t have known what they were if he hadn’t known what to expect.

“Any idea what they are?” asked the inspector.

Jim shook his head.

“I wouldn’t be certain, mind you, but they look to me as if they might be fusees. If that’s what they are and we can find out who they belonged to we shall know who the devil was that set fire to this rick.” Jim’s mind was in a daze. He wanted time to think.

“You don’t think it was an accident? A tramp lighting his pipe.”

“Ever heard of a tramp going about with a box of fusees in his pocket?”

Jim was silent. One of the men still working over the ashes cried out suddenly:

“‘Ere, what’s this?”

The inspector stepped over to him quickly.

“Don’t touch it, you bloody fool,” he exclaimed as the man was about to pick up what he had found.

The inspector got a shovel and scooped up the object together with the ashes that surrounded it. He took it aside. It was a fragment of charred sheets of paper held together by the wire that had been used to bind them. A little jagged bit, perhaps two inches wide, had resisted the flames and you could just see on it the beginnings of printed lines.

“Looks like a pamphlet or something,” said the inspector. “Be careful with it now. It may be important. Looks as though they’d used it for a torch.” He peered. “Blowed if I can make out the words.”

Jim couldn’t either. But he had recognized the type.

The black of printer’s ink was slightly shiny, visible against the brown of burnt paper. He knew that that charred scrap had once been the New Statesman. He stared aghast. He thought the inspector looked at him curiously and he pulled himself together.

“Well, I’ll leave you fellows to it,” he said. “I haven’t had any breakfast yet and I’m getting peckish.”

He walked away. He knew now what he wanted to know; he knew now what he had feared to know. There was smoke coming from the chimney at Badger’s: Dora was up and had lit the fire. He went back to Graveney. Miserably, his heart wrung with pain, his brain dazed with the dreadful assurance of Dora’s guilt, he went about the necessary things he had to do that morning. She didn’t come, so Mrs. Henderson, Jane and May had to see to the children without her brisk and efficient help. They did not mention her and Jim had a notion they were glad she had kept away. The General hobbled about the house as in a maze. He could find nothing to do and when, his gouty foot still hurting him, he sank into a chair it was only to stare moodily into space. No one knew how Tommy had come by his death; he had been found on the road, fifty yards from where the bomb had exploded, and had been hit by a fragment. It could only be supposed that instead of staying with the other boys in the crypt he had gone out to see what he could of the fighting. Soon after lunch Roger arrived. It was a sad meeting. They all had difficulty in finding anything to say; after such a tragic event words were futile and they spoke to one another in broken, inept sentences. What was the good of saying you were broken-hearted? What was the good of saying you were sorry? Roger had been to the airfield on his way and told them what had happened there. Then Jim said he would go over to the cottage and see why Dora hadn’t appeared.

“I suppose she’s too upset,” said Mrs. Henderson mildly. “Give her my love and tell her not to come over till she feels up to it.”

Roger came to the door with Jim.

“Jim, old boy, I have something to tell you that I think you ought to know,” he said.

Jim looked at him, his white face going even whiter, and waited. Roger hesitated for a moment.

“We’ve found out that Dora’s mother wasn’t Austrian, but German. Her husband, Dora’s father, was Austrian. He was a socialist and anti-Nazi. His wife betrayed him to the Germans and he was put in a concentration camp. He died there.”

Roger saw his brother’s face stiffen.

“That’s not to say that Dora shared her mother’s views or had any connection with the act that cost her father his life.”

Jim found nothing to say. He got on his bicycle and rode off. He was sick at heart. He too had been relieved that Dora had not come that morning; he had been turning over in his mind what he must do and his head was aching; he felt as though a slow fire within his skull was burning his brain. He dreaded seeing Dora. He longed, he longed desperately for her to have an explanation of those damning facts. Even now, though the evidence was overwhelming, he had a faint tremulous hope that she might somehow be able to clear herself. What heaven it would be if those doubts that racked him so cruelly could be dispelled and, taking her in his arms, he could beg her to forgive him because he had ever had the disloyalty to suspect her. Then something occurred to him. He turned round and rode back, past the gates of Graveney again, to the village. He went to the one general shop it boasted, a little shop that provided all the odds and ends the villagers needed, and asked for a box of fusees.

“Lor’ bless you, master Jim,” the old woman who kept it replied. “We ain’t had none of them for donkey’s years.”

He got back on his bicycle and rode to the cottage. He found Dora lying on the bed in their bedroom reading a novel.

“Hulloa, where have you come from?” she asked coldly.

“From the house. Why didn’t you go there today?”

“I didn’t think they’d want me.”

“The children have still got to be washed and fed.”

Dora shrugged her shoulders.

“I was angry at what your mother said to you. It was cruel.”

“Nonsense.”

“I haven’t your capacity for turning the other cheek.”

“Roger’s come down.”

“Your mother will be glad of that. He’s always been her favourite son.”

“Several poor chaps were killed last night, but not much damage considering has been done to the airfield.”

“Oh?”

“Aren’t you glad?” he asked, eyeing her.

“That men were killed?”

“No, that no great harm was done to the airfield.”

She slightly shrugged her shoulders, but made no remark. She got off the bed and lit a cigarette.

“Dora, the police have been routing around in the ashes of the rick.”

“Oh?”

“They’ve found charred fragments of fusees.” He waited an instant, watching her face carefully to see what effect his disclosure had on her. It remained impassive. “You set the rick on fire, Dora.”

For a moment she was taken aback, but only for a moment. She gave her head a scornful toss.

“Don’t be so stupid, Jim.”

“How’d you explain the fusees?”

“I don’t know that any explanation is necessary. You know they weren’t mine. You took mine away from me.”

“I took one box away from you. You might have had another.”

“I hadn’t. Anyone might have fusees. One of the workmen on the estate.”

“They’re not much used now, you know. I’ve just come from the village shop. They haven’t had any for years. How did you ever come to have some?”

“I don’t know. I happened to find them. I thought they were yours.”

“Where were you last night when I came in?”

“I told you. In this room.”

“How is it that your bike wasn’t in its usual place the first time I came and it was when I came back?” She smiled slightly.

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve remembered that I left it outside and then went out and brought it in.”

“Why should you have thought about it? Because you thought it might be necessary to furnish an explanation?”

She frowned.

“I’m rather tired of answering your questions, Jim. I want to read. Please leave me alone.”

“You were out of the cottage for just the time necessary to cycle to the field and set fire to the rick.”

“It’s a lie.”

“I can’t prove it, but I know it’s so.”

“All right, have it your own way. Now please leave me.

“Dora, there’s no doubt in the minds of the authorities that the rick was set on fire as a signal to German planes. They’re going to make an inquiry. D’you think they’ll be satisfied with the answers you’ve given me?”

“Why should they ask me anything? The only thing against me is that I’m a foreigner. Except for that no one would dream of suspecting me.”

“I think I should tell you that the police didn’t only find remains of fusees. They also found remains of a New Statesman.”

She gave a start now and for the first time he saw fear in her eyes.

“It was only a charred fragment and the local people don’t know what to make of it. But they’ll find out what it is in London all right. Who is there around here who takes in the New Statesman but me?”

They stared at one another for a moment. “Anyone can get into the cottage in the daytime,” said Dora. “Anyone can get hold of a paper that’s been thrown in the dust bin.”

He made no reply and they continued to stare at one another.

“What are you going to do?” she asked at length.

“I can’t bring myself to give you away.” He paused. “If I’m asked questions I shall have to tell the truth.”

“You say you love me.”

He flushed.

“God knows, I love you. I loved you. You don’t love me, do you? You married me to become a British subject.”

She looked at him sharply. He could see that she was thinking.

“What if I did? It’s no crime. It’s what lots of other refugee women have done. Do me the justice to acknowledge that I never said I loved you. After all, May married Roger because he was a good match; I’ve been a better wife to you than she’s been to him. I’ve refused to have a baby; I’ve told you why: this is no time to bring a child into the world. You can’t really think I set fire to the rick. What would have been the object? You know just as well as I do that if the Germans get here I shall suffer.”

“Just before I came here Roger told me that it was your German mother who betrayed your father to the Nazis and sent him to die in a concentration camp.”

“It’s not true. That’s just another of your English lies.”

“Our English lies? That’s a funny thing for you to say.”

He noticed the rapid intake of her breath. It looked as though, taken unawares, she had made a blunder and was aware of it. Her face red, her eyes dark and sullen, she gazed at him reflectively. She lit another cigarette.

“Do you really believe I set fire to that beastly rick?”

“I’m certain of it.”

She inhaled the smoke and watched it emerge from her nostrils.

“And if I did what’s it got to do with you? This war is no business of yours. You’re a pacifist.”

“Do you think I don’t love my country?”

She had regained her self-possession and spoke now with calm. There was no longer any hostility in her tone; it was indeed strangely conciliatory.

“I’m sure you do. But then why not listen to reason? England’s beaten. She deserved to be beaten. Nothing lasts forever in this world, and you’ve had a long spell of power, you English; now it’s our turn. You don’t really suppose the Germans are the inhuman monsters your propaganda makes them out to be. In a revolution severity is necessary and there are bound to be excesses, but in reality we’re gemütlich, idealistic, warm-hearted people. We’ve always admired the English. We’re only too anxious to be friends with you if you’ll be sensible enough to accept the inevitable. You were ruled by the Romans for four hundred years and they transformed you from half-naked savages to civilized people. We’re prepared to give you our science and our culture, our art and our organization; we’ll teach you our industry and our discipline. The French are a logical people and they’ve accepted the New Order. Can’t you see that it’s only common sense to look facts in the face and cease this useless slaughter? You’re a pacifist: we offer you peace. You’re clever, Jim, you’re well educated; the Germans want Englishmen they can put in a position of authority. Your name means something in the county and the party would welcome your collaboration. You know, they’re no fools, the Nazis; they’ll be glad to have German women marry English men and produce children who’ll be half German. The party has always rewarded those who’ve served it well and they owe me something. Wouldn’t you like to own Graveney? You love it better than anything in the world. We could be very happy there, Jim. I promise you you’d never regret that you married me.”

He had listened to her without trying to say a word, but as he listened he went paler and paler.

“And what about my father and mother and Roger?” he asked now.

“We’ve got accounts of long standing to settle with Roger. He’ll be disposed of. Your father and mother are old, they can be sent away.”

“You slut!”

With his open hand he smacked her face so hard that she staggered. She put her hand to her cheek and held it there. She was not frightened, but mad with rage. Her eyes blazed.

“Swine,” she screamed. “Swine. I have no patience with you. You’re as stupid as all the rest of you. All right, you can hear the truth. Yes, I married you because I wanted to be a British subject. Yes, I lit a fusee at the open window as a signal, and the fusees were given me for that purpose. Yes, I set fire to the rick to give our planes a line. And now you know, what are you going to do about it? Call the police?

Have you forgotten that by your English law a husband can’t give evidence against his wife? That was the second reason why I married you. The third was that I knew you were a fool. Go on, call the police. I shall deny everything. What can you prove? I’m a German, yes, that’s true, but you’re a conchie, and your word’s no better than mine. Doesn’t it strike you that the fusees might have been your fusees just as the New Statesman was your New Statesman? D’you think I’m frightened of prison? The Germans will be here in three months and they’ll release me. I shall swear that whatever I did, I did because you forced me; I shall swear that you set the rick on fire yourself because you thought a German victory was the only way of bringing about peace. If I go to prison, you’ll go to prison too. But you’ll stay there.”

It seemed as if she had cast off the self-restraint she had exercised ever since she came to Graveney Holt, the ceaseless guard she had kept over her every word, her every action, and were drunk with the sudden liberation. Her eyes were black with hatred and she was like a woman possessed.

“You say you love your country. You make me laugh. If you loved your country you’d be prepared to die for it. D’you call yourself a man? I despise you from the bottom of my heart. D’you think I’d have married you if there’d been any other way of doing the work I was sent here to do? A child? I should have been ashamed to have a child of yours. I hate you as I hate all you English with all my soul. How can you be expected to understand me — you poor, mean-spirited creature? I knew the risk I was taking when I came here. I took it gladly. And I’ve done what I had to do; they know where the airdrome is now and before they’re through they’ll bomb it to pieces. And it’s me that led them to it, me, me, me.”

She burst into a rasping scream of laughter. Her lovely face was a mask of malice. Jim stood swaying a little on his feet as if he weren’t quite sober, and his lips twitched as if he were trying to speak and couldn’t form the words. His face was livid and there was sweat on his brow. There was so strange a look in his eyes that on a sudden she was frightened. She stopped laughing abruptly and the silence between them was as startling as the crash of thunder. She stepped back, away from him, and gave a quick glance at the door. He moved towards her and she knew what he was going to do; she made a dash for it, but he caught her by the arm and pulled her roughly back.

“Jim, Jim,” she screamed.

Before she could say another word he had put his hand over her mouth and with a violent gesture flung her on the bed; and then he took her neck in his avenging hands. He was very powerful and though she struggled desperately she struggled in vain. He pinned her body down with his knee. He was like a man mad with a mute and sinister madness. His hands, rough with hard usage, strong with hard work, pressed upon her throat. Her face swelled and went blue and her eyes stared horribly. Her mouth opened wide as she fought for breath. His teeth clenched, blind fury in his look, his pitiless hands pressed on her windpipe. When he released her she was dead. He panted like a man who has run a race. He looked at the woman lying on the bed, a horrid sight to see, and a great shudder passed through him. He sank into a chair; he felt very tired. He couldn’t think; his mind was blank. The silence in the room was ghastly. It was a silence that was alive.

He couldn’t have guessed how long it was before he heard the sound of a car stopping and the toot of a horn. He did not move. There was a knock on the front door. He looked out of the window and recognized Roger’s car. He went downstairs and opened the door for him.

“Jim, is Dora here?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see her?”

“What do you want to see her for?”

Roger came in and sat down on the edge of the table.

“Well, old boy, I’m afraid you’ve got to prepare yourself for a bit of unpleasantness. I don’t mind telling you that she’s been under observation for some time, but nothing actually has come up against her, except what I told you just now about her mother. She wasn’t quite straight about that. She very distinctly gave us to understand that her mother was Austrian and anti-Nazi. I’m sure it’ll be all right, but they want to question her about her movements last night. The chief constable is up at the house. You’d better come along too so that you can confirm her statements. Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

“Call her, will you, old boy. I want you to come along in the car right away.”

“She’s dead,” said Jim quietly.

Roger looked at him aghast. What Jim said was incredible.

“Dead? What do you mean?”

“I killed her.”

“Good God!”

He looked at the little wooden staircase and ran up. In a minute he came down again. He looked at Jim in silence.

“She set fire to the rick. It was a light she showed a fortnight ago that gave the Germans a line on the airfield. She was a spy.”

“But, my God, why did you kill her?”

“I killed her because I had to. I killed her because I wanted to see her dead.”

Roger gave a deep sigh. For a long time neither of them spoke. But something had to be done; they couldn’t stay there indefinitely and stare at one another.

“I’m afraid you’ve made an awful mess of things, old boy,” said Roger, almost in a whisper.

“A hell of a mess. I only had in my heart, love and peace for all men. And it’s all gone phut. I had to stand by my convictions. It’s funny, isn’t it, that I who put up with all that humiliation rather than take a human life, should have killed the person I loved more than anyone in the world?”

Roger was shattered. Poor Jim. He could only feel compassion for him and deep affection. And what was there to do?

“I’m afraid you’re in for a very sticky time,” he said, his voice husky.

“Shall I be hanged?”

“No, of course you won’t be hanged, but you’ll have to go to trial. You know what English justice is, we can’t take the law into our own hands. A good lawyer will be able to make a pretty good case in your defence. I’m sure any jury would bring in a verdict of manslaughter.”

“You mean I’d get off with a few years in prison.”

“I can’t say. I dare say you wouldn’t get more than a year or two.”

“What shall I do, Roger?”

“One can’t give advice in a case like this, old boy.”

“What would you do if you were in my place?”

Roger, looking down, hesitated. It was horrible to say what was in his mind. He thought of his father and mother. What a fearful blow to them, what a grief and what a humiliation! And then there was something he hadn’t the heart to mention; it wouldn’t help Jim that he was a conscientious objector; it would seem strange to a jury that this man who wouldn’t fight for his country should kill his wife. They might find him guilty of murder and then he’d be condemned to death; the sentence would be commuted to penal servitude for life. Fifteen years. He forced himself to answer Jim’s question, but he couldn’t look at him and kept his eyes on the ground.

“I think if I’d been so unfortunate as to kill somebody I wouldn’t want to put up with all the beastliness of a trial. I’d go while the going was good.”

“You’re a good friend, Roger,” Jim replied, with a little smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“I know you have courage, old boy.”

Roger’s face was grey. He stole a glance at Jim. There was something he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. Jim caught the look and understood.

“I’ve got my gun,” he said.

Roger shut his eyes. He was afraid he was going to cry.

“I think if one’s got to do something unpleasant it’s better to do it quickly,” said Jim.

“I dare say you’re right.”

Jim held out his hand.

“Good-bye, Roger. You’ve been a brick to me.”

“Good-bye, old boy.”

Roger’s eyes were wet with tears so that he could hardly see his way out. He got into the car and waited. In a few minutes he heard within the cottage the sound of a gun being fired. He leant over the wheel and hid his face. Then he pulled himself together and drove back to Graveney Holt.

XIX

IT WOULD SERVE no good purpose to tell of the consternation, the horror, of the persons concerned in this story when Roger broke his appalling news to them. They were stunned by this new and unexpected sorrow; it would be futile to dwell on the anguish that desolated them. Because of certain circumstances connected with national defence it was possible to avoid the wide notoriety that such a sensational occurrence must otherwise have aroused; but the facts in a garbled form were bruited about the neighbourhood. The General and his wife, shamed as well as unhappy, were touched by the expressions of sympathy they received even from persons unknown to them, and by the great kindness that was shown them by all and sundry in their tragic misfortune. Though nothing could console, to discover how much they were loved and how deeply respected made their grief perhaps a little easier to bear. Mrs. Henderson sought to still her gnawing misery by unremitting toil on behalf of the little band of children entrusted to her care. For a while, now that Dora was no longer there to give her efficient help, the others had so much to do that there was little time to give way to fruitless mourning; but presently Roger persuaded Mrs. Clark to come down with her two children, and she proved a capable and willing assistant. Her lively bustling, her quick humour lightened the darkness of that sad house. Roger was fortunate in that his work demanded all his attention. He made a point of coming down to Graveney, even if only for a few hours, whenever he could get away. He was the only son left to his parents and he knew how much he meant to them. Relations between Roger and May remained cordial, even intimate, but they were those of two very close friends and not those of husband and wife. It was to her alone that he told the story of that last awful visit of his to Badger’s. She heard it with fear and pity. She knew it was true that in Jim’s place he would have done as Jim did, but it was a hard, pitiless thing to tell poor Jim to kill himself, for that was what it amounted to, and it distressed her and a little frightened her too, that he should have been capable of it. And yet, what was the alternative? To face the music; to stand trial, with perhaps a shameful death at the end of it, and at best the horror of imprisonment, and on release a life without honour or usefulness. Poor Jim. He was not twenty-two. So young. Too young. It was shocking that Roger should have been able to bring himself to do such a fearful thing. His manner to his father and mother was so tender, so charming in its solicitude, that she could not doubt for a moment that it sprang from a deep and genuine feeling: how could he be at the same time so ruthless and so gentle, so harsh and so kindly? She sighed unhappily; it was no good trying, she could never feel at home with such a man; there was something in him that repelled her. Yet he was all she had now, for she neither wrote to Dick nor did he write to her. She had made her decision, for reasons that seemed good, and was prepared to abide by it.

It was hard that her sacrifice had brought her no satisfaction; she could not even persuade herself that it had any utility. With a touch of humour she told herself that it was like leaving a peach for somebody else to eat and seeing it go bad because nobody wanted it.

The war went on, Greece withstood the Italian onslaught with unexpected tenacity; the German Air Force bombed the cities of England, men, women and children were killed; the British pounded away at the Rhineland and the Channel ports, they made ready with grim determination to repel the expected invasion; and then suddenly the British Army set upon the Italian troops and drove them out of Egypt. They drove them back into Libya, stormed stronghold after stronghold and took prisoners by the ten thousand. The triumph was spectacular, and the public enthusiasm, after so many disasters, was great. But Jane’s satisfaction, like many another woman’s whose kin were in the fighting force, was mingled with apprehension. Ian was in Egypt and she had not heard from him for weeks. Dick Murray was in Egypt too. One morning May went down to the village on an errand and one of the Graveney tenants stopped her.

“I’m sorry to hear about Captain Murray, Mrs. Roger,” he said.

Her heart almost stopped beating.

“Has he been — has he been wounded?”

“Mrs. Murray, his mother, wrote to his housekeeper. She got the letter last night. Yes, he’s been wounded.”

“Seriously?”

“She didn’t say. I hope not; but we miss him here, you know. He was very popular with the tenants. It would be a good thing for all of us if he were invalided out and could come back.”

When she got home and told what she had heard she constrained herself to speak calmly, but she was in a pitiful state of anxiety; of course General Henderson and his wife were concerned, Dick was a competent agent and they liked him, but they contented themselves with saying they trusted it was nothing of consequence; Jane, to her relief, asked if inquiries couldn’t be made, and the General said he would drop a note to Roger and tell him to find out if he could how Dick was. Roger was due for a few days’ leave very shortly and was coming down to Graveney; perhaps by then he might have heard. With her heart in a turmoil May found it hard to accept the casual way they took the matter.

“I understand there’ve been astonishingly few casualties,” said the General. “Good man, Wavell. I knew him when he was Allenby’s chief of staff.”

But when Roger came down, May could not bring herself to ask him whether he had any news. Though sick with fear, she compelled herself to listen with a show of interest while he talked of the recent raids on London and the seriousness of the German attacks on Atlantic convoys. She had been able, if not to forget Dick, at least to keep from thinking of him as long as she knew he was well and safe; and she had tried to persuade herself that the pain of parting from him forever was growing more endurable; but now that he was wounded, perhaps dangerously, her love, like a fire that has sunk and on a sudden wind bursts again into leaping flame, was as consuming as it had ever been. She knew now that nothing could ever kill it. It was when the General entered upon a discussion of the Libyan campaign that Jane put the question that May, though it trembled on her lips, had resolutely prevented herself from asking.

“Oh, Roger, have you heard anything about Dick? You got Father’s letter, didn’t you?”

Roger gave May a fleeting glance.

“Yes. I cabled. He’s on his way home.”

“Is he badly hurt?”

It seemed to May that he hesitated for a brief instant and she held her breath.

“I don’t really know. His life is not in danger.”

It seemed a strange answer. She had an inkling that, though he spoke to Jane, it was to reassure her that he added the last sentence.

“When will he be back?” asked Jane.

“Any day.”

Only three days later, early in the afternoon, Mrs. Henderson, the General and Jane were sitting out on the terrace, for it was one of those warm sunny days that we sometimes get in England at the end of March. The two women were knitting and the General was reading the Times.

“Where’s Roger?” asked the General.

“I don’t know where he’s gone,” his wife answered. “Here’s Clark, he may know.”

Roger had brought Nobby down so that he might see his wife and children and the Hendersons had taken a fancy to the facetious little man. He was walking towards them, along the centre path of the formal garden, and the General called him up on to the terrace.

“Well, Clark, been taking a stroll in the park?” he said.

“Yes, sir. First ‘oliday I’ve ‘ad since the beginnin’ of the war. It’s a treat to me.”

“Where’s the major? My wife tells me he went out early this morning.”

“Yes, sir. He didn’t say where he was goin’.”

“I wish Roger wouldn’t be so damned secretive about all his movements,” said the General, after dismissing Nobby. “Why couldn’t he say where he was going?” The General had taken his grief very hardly. He had aged much in the last three months and was apt, even more than before, to be unreasonably peevish over trifling annoyances. He had imposed upon himself a determined silence in respect of the catastrophe that had befallen; he could not speak of Tommy and would not speak of Jim; but the strain had worn him down and his nerves were in a state of fretful irritability. Mrs. Henderson understood that his pettishness was only superficial; beneath, he was the devoted, unselfish, well-intentioned man he had always been.

“Isn’t it lovely today?” she said now, to distract him. “Some of the shrubs are already in bud.”

The General, taking off his reading glasses, scanned the fair sight that he had known as long as he could remember. The trees were bare of leaf, but the grandeur of their naked branches lent the landscape, in summer so urbane, a more solemn austerity. The contours, in that clear, limpid air, had an exquisite and precise delicacy. It was indeed a noble prospect. He gazed at it with singular intensity. You might have imagined that he thought never to see it again and was impressing every particular of it on his perceptivity so that it might remain an imperishable memory. He sighed.

“I wish it weren’t so lovely. It’s on a day like this that I feel what a wrench it’ll be to part with it.”

“Oh, Father, don’t talk like that,” said Jane cheerfully.

“My dear, it’s no good fooling ourselves. We shall never be able to live here after the war. We shall be as poor as church mice. The life we knew and loved has gone never to return.”

“Nothing in the world can last forever, George,” said Mrs. Henderson. “We’ve had a pretty long innings.”

He smiled at her sadly.

“I’m not grousing, dear. It would be inhuman to expect me not to regret the past, but I hope I can face the future like a man. Jim and Tommy are gone now, and after me there’s only Roger to come.”

“Oh, George,” Mrs. Henderson began compassionately.

But he interrupted her.

“No, dear, let me speak. I’ve been chewing the cud on this for a long time and I want to get it off my chest. We haven’t always been wise, we landowners, and I dare say we’ve been complacent and high-handed, but on the whole we’ve been decent and honest and we haven’t done badly by our country. Perhaps we’ve accepted the good things our happy lot provided us as though they were our due, but according to our lights we’ve tried, the best of us, I mean, and I think I may say most of us, to do our duty. But you’re right, dear, we’ve had a long innings. What is it that feller Landor said? Something about warming both hands before the fire of life. ‘It sinks and I am ready to depart.’ The future belongs to the soldiers and sailors and workmen who will have won the war. Let’s hope they’ll make it a happier and better England for all the people who live in it.”

It was not often that the General gave expression to such feelings. Mrs. Henderson took his hand and pressed it in loving sympathy. She too could not but be sad that the land should know them no more. Silence fell upon them. It was broken by the appearance of Nobby with a packet of letters. The General took them and handed one to Jane.

“Here’s a letter for you, dear.”

“It’s from Ian,” she cried excitedly.

She tore it open and began to read it avidly. “Where’s it from?” asked the General.

“He doesn’t say. He’s well and happy. Bless his heart. Grousing about the heat. Oh, listen.” She began to read aloud. “‘Have you seen Dick Murray yet? He ought to be back by the time you get this. Rotten luck for him, wasn’t it? Anyway he’s out of the war, poor chap.’ What can he mean?”

“I’m afraid it means he’s very badly wounded,” said Mrs. Henderson.

“They wouldn’t have sent him back if it hadn’t been pretty serious,” added the General.

“Oh, poor Dick.”

Just then Roger came out of the house.

“Oh, Roger,” cried Jane. “I’ve just had a letter from Ian. It looks as though Dick was badly wounded.”

“I’ve just seen him. I’ve been to the hospital he’s in.”

“How did you know where he was?”

“I made it my business to find out,” he answered dryly. “Where’s May?”

Jane gave him a questioning glance. He looked very grim.

“He’s not dying?”

“No, he’s not dying.”

“May’s with the children.”

“Go and take her place. I want to talk to her.

His manner was so peremptory that ordinarily Jane would have felt called upon to tell him somewhat crudely where he got off, but she had an instinct that this was no time for backchat.

“All right.”

She went into the house and in a moment he followed her. May found him walking up and down the library. It was the room he liked best in the house. She stopped dead still on the threshold when she saw his face. She flinched. She thought he was going to tell her that Dick was dead. Her knees shook.

“Come in, May.”

She stepped forward. She put her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself.

“I’ve just seen Dick. He’s at a military hospital about thirty miles from here.”

“He’s not dying?” she cried.

“No, he’s not dying, he’s blind.”

She gave a great cry and tears trickled down her white cheeks. He watched her in silence. With a desperate effort she controlled herself and raised her eyes to meet Roger’s.

“I must go to him, Roger.”

“I know.”

She had a sudden pain in her heart, as though it had been pierced with a sharp knife, for though he spoke so quietly his voice was desolate. She had tried to persuade herself that he had long since ceased to care for her, but it was no use; she couldn’t be so dishonest as to pretend to believe it; she knew that in his strange, undemonstrative way he loved her truly.

“Don’t think me terribly unkind, Roger.”

“My dear, I know you’re incapable of being unkind.”

“If this hadn’t happened I promise you I’d have stayed. I thought I’d get over it in time. But now it’s different. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I see that all right.” A funny little sound issued from his throat; it was something like a melancholy chuckle and something like a sigh. “The luck’s against me.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yes. Nobby will drive you over.”

“Good-bye then, and thank you.”

“Good-bye, May.”

She held out her hand and he took it, then with a strange, bitter smile dropped it; she turned and walked quickly out of the room. He hesitated a moment as though he didn’t quite know what to do, then took up an illustrated paper and sitting down on a sofa began to look at it. Time passed. He heard the door open, but did not look up. It was Jane. She came over and sitting down beside him affectionately slipped her arm through his.

“Why aren’t you looking after the kids?”

“Don’t talk, you fool.”

He went on looking at the paper and she looked with him.

“I suppose you know,” he said.

“Yes, I’ve known all along.”

“I did love her so, Jane, in my way.”

“I know you did, old boy. I’m afraid it wasn’t the right way. Women are queer cattle.”

“You never really liked her, did you?”

“Oh, yes, I did. I thought her a dear. A little colourless, but very sweet.”

“Cat.”

He turned the page and looked at another.

He didn’t know how long he had been looking at the same picture.

“He’s blind, you know. As soon as I heard that I knew I hadn’t a chance. I knew that if she had to choose between a man who was hale and hearty and a man who was blind she wouldn’t hesitate. Damned unfair advantage to take, I call it.”

“Rotten. D’you think he did it on purpose?”

“You fool, Jane.”

He turned another page and with a show of interest they looked at a row of young women in large hats and a few sequins, each of whom was kicking a black-stockinged leg as high as her head.

“Anyhow I’ve got my work. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“And to coin a phrase: there’ll always be an England.”

He smiled and for the first time looked at her.

Not a bad phrase either. But I seem to have heard it before.”

“You can’t have. I’ve just invented it this moment.” He slipped his hand along and took hers and gave it a little squeeze.

“You’re a good girl, Jane.”

“No, dear,” she said. “Not good. Beautiful.”

THE RAZOR’S EDGE

It could be said that the genesis of this novel is the short story The Fall of Edward Barnard, which originally featured in the collection The Trembling of a Leaf. The novel was published in 1944 by Doubleday (Britain) and Doran (America) and took its title from the Sanskrit text Katha Upanishad: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over”. The novel itself was written in the aftermath of the death of Maugham’s adored lover, Gerald Haxton, and it was part of a plan Maugham devised to see him through to the end of his writing career. The idea was to write four more books – this one, then two historical novels, and finally a family saga set in the East End of London. Maugham managed to write the first three, but not his saga.

The novel was rapturously received, selling over half a million copies in America alone in the first month. Maugham also wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of the book, even foregoing a fee for doing so since the film company, Twentieth-Century Fox, had already paid a quarter of a million dollars for the rights. However, as the script was outstanding, the company bought Maugham a painting by Matisse as a gift. The film was made in 1946 and starred Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney.

This story has rather an odd plot. From the very beginning, Maugham features in it as himself, and early on discourses about his approach to using the stories he has been told, and his observations of life and his travels, in his fiction. We are then taken straight into a story narrated directly by Maugham, and he introduces us to suave Elliott Templeton, with whom he has lunch whilst in Chicago en route to the Far East.

Maugham states in the book that he has depicted Americans as an Englishman would see them, not as they might see themselves. He also gives an almost forensic amount of detail about some characters — Elliott Templeton is so thoroughly introduced to us that it is impossible not to know him. Templeton invites the narrator to dine with him at his widowed sister’s home, and it is here that both the narrator and the reader meet Larry Darrell. Darrell is the boyfriend of Isabel, Elliott’s niece; he is tall and thin, “a pleasant looking boy, neither handsome nor plain, rather shy and in no way remarkable.” He is an American pilot that has been affected badly by his experience in the First World War (presumably suffering what would now be diagnosed at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). He tells Isabel that he does not want to work and will live off his small private income. He rejects an offer of a secure job as a stock broker, and also reveals to his fiancée that he wants to delay the marriage. In modern parlance, he wants to review his life, travel and “find himself”. To add to Larry’s distress, his beloved childhood friend, Sophie, loses her husband and baby in a motor accident.

To facilitate this life change, Larry travels to Paris, to study and experience a different lifestyle and culture. Isabel waits patiently for two years for her fiancé, but in the end has to travel to Paris to see him. She cannot persuade him to come home; instead, he asks Isabel to join him in his travels and bohemian lifestyle. This is too much for Isabel, who ends the engagement and returns to America, where in startling contrast, she marries a millionaire.

Larry is undeterred. He sets off on his wanderings alone, visiting Germany and India, taking manual work, and exploring his spirituality; his conclusions about spiritual matters are recounted by the narrator (Maugham) later in the novel. Eventually, he returns to Paris, only to find that Isabel, her husband, and Larry’s childhood friend Sophie, are all living in the city – but circumstances have changed considerably...

Some strong characterisation is complemented in this novel by an interesting contrast of the material and the spiritual, exploring different ways of life and thinking. It takes a short while to get used to any confusion arising from Maugham being in the novel, as himself in a sense, but the novel is certainly original and worthy of the praise heaped upon it on publication.

The first edition

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART TWO

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART THREE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

PART SIX

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

The 1946 film adaptation

Gerald Haxton

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

I HAVE NEVER begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come. But I leave my reader in the air. This book consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the gaps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know of my own knowledge.

Many years ago I wrote a novel called The Moon and Sixpence. In that I took a famous painter, Paul Gauguin, and, using the novelist’s privilege, devised a number of incidents to illustrate the character I had created on the suggestions afforded me by the scanty facts I knew about the French artist. In the present book I have attempted to do nothing of the kind. I have invented nothing. To save embarrassment to people still living I have given to the persons who play a part in this story names of my own contriving, and I have in other ways taken pains to make sure that no one should recognize them. The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Then my book, if it is read at all, will be read only for what intrinsic interest it may possess. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature. Then it will be quite clear of whom I write in this book and those who want to know at least a little about his early life may find in it something to their purpose. I think my book, within its acknowledged limitations, will be a useful source of information to my friend’s biographers.

I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasion, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said. I remarked a little while back that I have invented nothing; I want now to modify that statement. I have taken the liberty that historians have taken from the time of Herodotus to put into the mouths of the persons of my narrative speeches that I did not myself hear and could not possibly have heard. I have done this for the same reasons as the historians have, to give liveliness and verisimilitude to scenes that would have been ineffective if they had been merely recounted. I want to be read and I think I am justified in doing what I can to make my book readable. The intelligent reader will easily see for himself where I have used this artifice, and he is at perfect liberty to reject it.

Another reason that has caused me to embark upon this work with apprehension is that the persons I have chiefly to deal with are American. It is very difficult to know people and I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them. And because you cannot know persons of a nation foreign to you except from observation, it is difficult to give them credibility in the pages of a book. Even so subtle and careful an observer as Henry James, though he lived in England for forty years, never managed to create an Englishman who was through and through English. For my part, except in a few short stories, I have never attempted to deal with any but my own countrymen, and if I have ventured to do otherwise in short stories it is because in them you can treat your characters more summarily. You give the reader broad indications and leave him to fill in the details. It may be asked why, if I turned Paul Gauguin into an Englishman, I could not do the same with the persons of this book. The answer is simple: I couldn’t. They would not then have been the people they are. I do not pretend that they are American as Americans see themselves; they are American seen through an English eye. I have not attempted to reproduce the peculiarities of their speech. The mess English writers make when they try to do this is only equalled by the mess American writers make when they try to reproduce English as spoken in England. Slang is the great pitfall. Henry James in his English stories made constant use of it, but never quite as the English do, so that instead of getting the colloquial effect he was after, it too often gives the English reader an uncomfortable jolt.

CHAPTER 2

In 1919 I happened to be in Chicago on my way to the Far East, and for reasons that have nothing to do with this narrative I was staying there for two or three weeks. I had recently brought out a successful novel and being for the moment news, I had no sooner arrived than I was interviewed. Next morning my telephone rang. I answered.

‘Elliott Templeton speaking.’

‘Elliott? I thought you were in Paris.’

‘No, I’m visiting with my sister. We want you to come along and lunch with us today.’

‘I should love to.’

He named the hour and gave me the address.

I had known Elliott Templeton for fifteen years. He was at this time in his late fifties, a tall, elegant man with good features and thick waving dark hair only sufficiently greying to add to the distinction of his appearance. He was always beautifully dressed. He got his haberdashery at Charvet’s, but his suits, his shoes, and his hats in London. He had an apartment in Paris on the Rive Gauche in the fashionable Rue St Guillaume. People who did not like him said he was a dealer, but this was a charge that he resented with indignation. He had taste and knowledge, and he did not mind admitting that in bygone years, when he first settled in Paris, he had given rich collectors who wanted to buy pictures the benefit of his advice; and when through his social connexions he heard that some impoverished nobleman, English or French, was disposed to sell a picture of first-rate quality he was glad to put him in touch with the directors of American museums who, he happened to know, were on the lookout for a fine example of such and such a master. There were many old families in France and some in England whose circumstances compelled them to part with a signed piece of Buhl or a writing-table made by Chippendale himself if it could be done quietly, and they were glad to know a man of great culture and perfect manners who could arrange the matter with discretion. One would naturally suppose that Elliott profited by the transactions, but one was too well bred to mention it. Unkind people asserted that everything in his apartment was for sale and that after he had invited wealthy Americans for an excellent lunch, with vintage wines, one or two of his valuable drawings would disappear, or a marquetry commode would be replaced by one in lacquer. When he was asked why a particular piece had vanished he very plausibly explained that he hadn’t thought it quite up to his mark and had exchanged it for one of much finer quality. He added that it was tiresome always to look at the same things.

‘Nous autres Américains, we Americans,’ he said, ‘like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.’

Some of the American ladies in Paris, who claimed to know all about him, said that his family was quite poor and if he was able to live in the way he did it was only because he had been very clever. I do not know how much money he had, but his ducal landlord certainly made him pay a lot for his apartment and it was furnished with objects of value. On the walls were drawings by the great French masters, Watteau, Fragonard, Claude Lorraine and so on; Savonnerie and Aubusson rugs displayed their beauty on the parquet floors; and in the drawing-room there was a Louis Quinze suite in petit point of such elegance that it might well have belonged, as he claimed, to Madame de Pompadour. Anyhow he had enough to live in what he considered was the proper style for a gentleman without trying to earn money, and the method by which he had done so in the past was a matter which, unless you wished to lose his acquaintance, you were wise not to refer to. Thus relieved of material cares he gave himself over to the ruling passion of his life, which was social relationships. His business connexions with the impecunious great both in France and in England had secured the foothold he had obtained on his arrival in Europe as a young man with letters of introduction to persons of consequence. His origins recommended him to the American ladies of title to whom he brought letters, for he was of an old Virginian family and through his mother traced his descent from one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. He was well-favoured, bright, a good dancer, a fair shot, and a fine tennis player. He was an asset at any party. He was lavish with flowers and expensive boxes of chocolates, and though he entertained little, when he did it was with an originality that pleased. It amused these rich ladies to be taken to bohemian restaurants in Soho or bistros in the Latin Quarter. He was always prepared to make himself useful, and there was nothing, however tiresome, that you asked him to do for you that he would not do with pleasure. He took an immense amount of trouble to make himself agreeable to ageing women, and it was not long before he was the ami de la maison, the household pet, in many an imposing mansion. His amiability was extreme; he never minded being asked at the last moment because someone had thrown you over and you could put him next to a very boring old lady and count on him to be as charming and amusing with her as he knew how.

In two or more years, both in London to which he went for the last part of the season and to pay a round of country house visits in the early autumn, and in Paris, where he had settled down, he knew everyone whom a young American could know. The ladies who had first introduced him into society were surprised to discover how wide the circle of his acquaintance had grown. Their feelings were mixed. On the one hand they were pleased that their young protégé had made so great a success, and on the other a trifle nettled that he should be on intimate terms with persons with whom their own relations had remained strictly formal. Though he continued to be obliging and useful to them, they were uneasily conscious that he had used them as stepping-stones to his social advancement. They were afraid he was a snob. And of course he was. He was a colossal snob. He was a snob without shame. He would put up with any affront, he would ignore any rebuff, he would swallow any rudeness to get asked to a party he wanted to go to or to make a connexion with some crusty old dowager of great name. He was indefatigable. When he had fixed his eye on his prey he hunted it with the persistence of a botanist who will expose himself to dangers of flood, earthquake, fever, and hostile natives to find an orchid of peculiar rarity. The war of 1914 gave him his final chance. When it broke out he joined an ambulance corps and served first in Flanders and then in the Argonne; he came back after a year with a red ribbon in his buttonhole and secured a position in the Red Cross in Paris. By then he was in affluent circumstances and he contributed generously to the good works patronized by persons of consequence. He was always ready with his exquisite taste and his gift for organization to help in any charitable function that was widely publicized. He became a member of the two most exclusive clubs in Paris. He was ce cher Elliott to the greatest ladies in France. He had finally arrived.

CHAPTER 3

When I first met Elliott I was just a young author like another and he took no notice of me. He never forgot a face and when I ran across him here or there he shook hands with me cordially, but showed no desire to further our acquaintance; and if I saw him at the opera, say, he being with a person of high rank, he was apt not to catch sight of me. But then I happened to make a somewhat startling success as a playwright, and presently I became aware that Elliott regarded me with a warmer feeling. One day I received a note from him asking me to lunch at Claridge’s, where he lived when in London. It was a small party and not a very smart one, and I conceived the notion that he was trying me out. But from then on, since my success had brought me many new friends, I began to see him more frequently. Shortly after this I spent some weeks of the autumn in Paris and met him at the house of a common acquaintance. He asked me where I was staying and in a day or two I received another invitation to lunch, this time at his apartment; when I arrived I was surprised to see that it was a party of considerable distinction. I giggled to myself. I knew that with his perfect sense of social relations he had realized that in English society as an author I was not of much account, but that in France, where an author just because he is an author has prestige, I was. During the years that followed our acquaintance became fairly intimate without ever developing into friendship. I doubt whether it was possible for Elliott Templeton to be a friend. He took no interest in people apart from their social position. When I chanced to be in Paris or he in London, he continued to ask me to parties when he wanted an extra man or was obliged to entertain travelling Americans. Some of these were, I suspected, old clients and some were strangers sent to him with letters of introduction. They were the cross of his life. He felt he had to do something for them and yet was unwilling to have them meet his grand friends. The best way of disposing of them of course was to give them dinner and take them to a play, but that was often difficult when he was engaged every evening for three weeks ahead, and also he had an inkling that they would scarcely be satisfied with that. Since I was an author and so of little consequence he didn’t mind telling me his troubles on this matter.

‘People in America are so inconsiderate in the way they give letters. It’s not that I’m not delighted to see the people who are sent to me, but I really don’t see why I should inflict them on my friends.’

He sought to make amends by sending them great baskets of roses and huge boxes of chocolates, but sometimes he had to do more. It was then, somewhat naïvely after what he had told me, that he asked me to come to the party he was organizing.

‘They want to meet you so much,’ he wrote to flatter me. ‘Mrs So-and-so is a very cultivated woman and she’s read every word you’ve written.’

Mrs So-and-so would then tell me she’d so much enjoyed my book Mr Perrin and Mr Traill and congratulate me on my play The Mollusc. The first of these was written by Hugh Walpole and the second by Hubert Henry Davies.

CHAPTER 4

If I have given the reader an impression that Elliott Templeton was a despicable character I have done him an injustice.

He was for one thing what the French call serviable, a word for which, so far as I know, there is no exact equivalent in English. The dictionary tells me that serviceable in the sense of helpful, obliging, and kind is archaic. That is just what Elliott was. He was generous, and though early in his career he had doubtless showered flowers, candy, and presents on his acquaintance from an ulterior motive, he continued to do so when it was no longer necessary. It caused him pleasure to give. He was hospitable. His chef was as good as any in Paris and you could be sure at his table of having set before you the earliest delicacies of the season. His wine proved the excellence of his judgement. It is true that his guests were chosen for their social importance rather than because they were good company, but he took care to invite at least one or two for their powers of entertainment, so that his parties were almost always amusing. People laughed at him behind his back and called him a filthy snob, but nevertheless accepted his invitations with alacrity. His French was fluent and correct and his accent perfect. He had taken great pains to adopt the manner of speech as it is spoken in England and you had to have a very sensitive ear to catch now and then an American intonation. He was a good talker if only you could keep him off the subject of dukes and duchesses, but even about them, now that his position was unassailable, he allowed himself, especially when you were alone with him, to be amusing. He had a pleasantly malicious tongue and there was no scandal about these exalted personages that did not reach his ears. From him I learnt who was the father of the Princess X’s last child and who was the mistress of the Marquis de Y. I don’t believe even Marcel Proust knew more of the inner life of the aristocracy than Elliott Templeton.

When I was in Paris we used often to lunch together, sometimes at his apartment and sometimes at a restaurant. I like to wander about the antiquity shops, occasionally to buy but more often to look, and Elliott was always enchanted to go with me. He had knowledge and a real love of beautiful objects. I think he knew every shop of the kind in Paris and was on familiar terms with the proprietor. He adored haggling and when we started out would say to me:

‘If there’s anything you want don’t try to buy it yourself, Just give me a hint and let me do the rest.’

He would be delighted when he had got for me something I fancied for half the asking price. It was a treat to watch him bargain. He would argue, cajole, lose his temper, appeal to the seller’s better nature, ridicule him, point out the defects of the object in question, threaten never to cross his threshold again, sigh, shrug his shoulders, admonish, start for the door in frowning anger, and when finally he had won his point shake his head sadly as though he accepted defeat with resignation. Then he would whisper to me in English.

‘Take it with you. It would be cheap at double the money.’

Elliott was a zealous Catholic. He had not lived long in Paris before he met an abbé who was celebrated for his success in bringing infidels and heretics back to the fold. He was a great diner-out and a noted wit. He confined his ministrations to the rich and the aristocratic. It was inevitable that Elliott should be attracted by a man who, though of humble origins, was a welcome guest in the most exclusive houses, and he confided to a wealthy American lady who was one of the abbé’s recent converts that, though his family had always been Episcopalian, he had for long been interested in the Catholic Church. She asked Elliott to meet the abbé at dinner one evening, just three of them, and the abbé was scintillating. Elliott’s hostess brought the conversation around to Catholicism and the abbé spoke of it with unction, but without pedantry, as a man of the world, though a priest, speaking to another man of the world. Elliott was flattered to discover that the abbé knew all about him.

‘The Duchesse de Vendôme was speaking of you the other day. She told me that she thought you highly intelligent.’

Elliott flushed with pleasure. He had been presented to Her Royal Highness, but it had never occurred to him that she would give him a second thought. The abbé spoke of the faith with wisdom and benignity; he was broad-minded, modern in his outlook, and tolerant. He made the Church seem to Elliott very like a select club that a well-bred man owed it to himself to belong to. Six months later he was received into it. His conversion, combined with the generosity he showed in his contributions to Catholic charities, opened several doors that had been closed to him before.

It may be that his motives in abandoning the faith of his fathers were mixed, but there could be no doubt of his devoutness when he had done so. He attended Mass every Sunday at the church frequented by the best people, went to confession regularly, and made periodical visits to Rome. In course of time he was rewarded for his piety by being made a papal chamberlain, and the assiduity with which he performed the duties of his office was rewarded by the order of, I think, the Holy Sepulchre. His career as a Catholic was in fact no less successful than his career as an homme du monde.

I often asked myself what was the cause of the snobbishness that obsessed this man who was so intelligent, so kindly, and so cultivated. He was no upstart. His father had been president of one of the southern universities and his grandfather a divine of some eminence. Elliott was too clever not to see that many of the persons who accepted his invitations did so only to get a free meal and that of these some were stupid and some worthless. The glamour of their resounding titles blinded him to their faults. I can only guess that to be on terms of intimate familiarity with these gentlemen of ancient lineage, to be the faithful retainer of their ladies, gave him a sensation of triumph that never palled; and I think that at the back of it all was a passionate romanticism that led him to see in the weedy little French duke the crusader who had gone to the Holy Land with Saint Louis, and in the blustering, fox-hunting English earl the ancestor who had attended Henry the Eighth to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In the company of such as these he felt that he lived in a spacious and gallant past. I think when he turned the pages of the Almanach de Gotha his heart beat warmly as one name after another brought back to him recollections of old wars, historic sieges, and celebrated duels, diplomatic intrigues, and the love affairs of kings. Such anyhow was Elliott Templeton.

CHAPTER 5

I was having a wash and a brush-up before starting out to go to the luncheon Elliott had invited me to, when they rang up from the desk to say that he was below. I was a little surprised, but as soon as I was ready went down.

‘I thought it would be safer if I came and fetched you,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘I don’t know how well you know Chicago.’

He had the feeling I have noticed in some Americans who have lived many years abroad that America is a difficult and even dangerous place in which the European cannot safely be left to find his way about by himself.

‘It’s early yet. We might walk part of the way,’ he suggested.

There was a slight nip in the air, but not a cloud in the sky, and it was pleasant to stretch one’s legs.

‘I thought I’d better tell you about my sister before you meet her,’ said Elliott as we walked along. ‘She’s stayed with me once or twice in Paris, but I don’t think you were there at the time. It’s not a big party, you know. Only my sister and her daughter Isabel and Gregory Brabazon.’

‘The decorator?’ I asked.

‘Yes. My sister’s house is awful, and Isabel and I want her to have it done over. I happened to hear that Gregory was in Chicago and so I got her to ask him to lunch today. He’s not quite a gentleman, of course, but he has taste. He did Raney Castle for Mary Olifant and St Clement Talbot for the St Erths. The duchess was delighted with him. You’ll see Louisa’s house for yourself. How she can have lived in it all these years I shall never understand. For the matter of that, how she can live in Chicago I shall never understand either.’

It appeared that Mrs Bradley was a widow with three children, two sons and a daughter; but the sons were much older and married. One was in a government post in the Philippines, and the other, in the diplomatic service as his father had been, was at Buenos Aires. Mrs Bradley’s husband had occupied posts in various parts of the world, and after being first secretary in Rome for some years was made minister to one of the republics on the west coast of South America and had there died.

‘I wanted Louisa to sell the house in Chicago when he passed over,’ Elliott went on, ‘but she had a sentiment about it. It had been in the Bradley family for quite a long while. The Bradleys are one of the oldest families in Illinois. They came from Virginia in 1839 and took up land about sixty miles from what is now Chicago. They still own it.’ Elliott hesitated a little and looked at me to see how I would take it. ‘The Bradley who settled here was what I suppose you might call a farmer. I’m not sure whether you know, but about the middle of last century, when the Middle West began to be opened up, quite a number of Virginians, younger sons of good family, you know, were tempted by the lure of the unknown to leave the flesh-pots of their native state. My brother-in-law’s father, Chester Bradley, saw that Chicago had a future and entered a law office here. At all events he made enough money to leave his son very adequately provided for.’

Elliott’s manner, rather than his words, suggested that perhaps it was not quite the thing for the late Chester Bradley to have left the stately mansion and the broad acres he had inherited to enter an office, but the fact that he had amassed a fortune at least partly compensated for it. Elliott was none too pleased when on a later occasion Mrs Bradley showed me some snapshots of what he called their ‘place’ in the country, and I saw a modest frame house with a pretty little garden, but with a barn and a cowhouse and hog pens within a stone’s throw, surrounded by a desolate waste of flat fields. I couldn’t help thinking that Mr Chester Bradley knew what he was about when he abandoned this to make his way in the city.

Presently we hailed a taxi. It put us down before a brownstone house. Narrow and rather high, and you ascended to the front door by a flight of steep steps. It was in a row of houses, in a street that led off Lake Shore Drive, and its appearance, even on that bright autumn day, was so drab that you wondered how anyone could feel any sentiment about it. The door was opened by a tall and stout Negro butler with white hair, and we were ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs Bradley got up from her chair as we came in and Elliott presented me to her. She must have been a handsome woman when young, for her features, though on the large side, were good, and she had fine eyes. But her sallowish face, almost aggressively destitute of make-up, had sagged, and it was plain that she had lost the battle with the corpulence of middle age. I surmised that she was unwilling to accept defeat, for when she sat down she sat very erect in a straight-backed chair which the cruel armour of her corsets doubtless made more comfortable than an upholstered one. She wore a blue gown, heavily braided, and her high collar was stiff with whalebone. She had a fine head of white hair tightly marcelled and intricately dressed. Her other guest had not arrived and while waiting for him we talked of one thing and another.

‘Elliott tells me that you came over by the southern route,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Did you stop in Rome?’

‘Yes, I spent a week there.’

‘And how is dear Queen Margherita?’

Somewhat surprised by her question, I said I didn’t know.

‘Oh, didn’t you go and see her? Such a very nice woman. She was so kind to us when we were in Rome. Mr Bradley was first secretary. Why didn’t you go and see her? You’re not like Elliott, so black that you can’t go to the Quirinal?’

‘Not at all,’ I smiled. ‘The fact is I don’t know her.’

‘Don’t you?’ said Mrs Bradley as though she could hardly believe her ears. ‘Why not?’

‘To tell you the truth authors don’t hobnob with kings and queens as a general rule.’

‘But she’s such a sweet woman,’ Mrs Bradley expostulated, as though it were very hoity-toity of me not to know that royal personage. ‘I’m sure you’d like her.’

At this moment the door was opened and the butler ushered in Gregory Brabazon.

Gregory Brabazon, notwithstanding his name, was not a romantic creature. He was a short, very fat man, as bald as an egg except for a ring of black curly hair round his ears and at the back of his neck, with a red, naked face that looked as though it were on the point of breaking out into a violent sweat, quick grey eyes, sensual lips, and a heavy jowl. He was an Englishman and I had sometimes met him at bohemian parties in London. He was very jovial, very hearty, and laughed a great deal, but you didn’t have to be a great judge of character to know that his noisy friendliness was merely cover for a very astute man of business. He had been for some years the most successful decorator in London. He had a great booming voice and little fat hands that were wonderfully expressive. With telling gestures, with a spate of excited words he could thrill the imagination of a doubting client so that it was almost impossible to withhold the order he seemed to make it a favour to accept.

The butler came in again with a tray of cocktails.

‘We won’t wait for Isabel,’ said Mrs Bradley as she took one.

‘Where is she?’ asked Elliott.

‘She went to play golf with Larry. She said she might be late.’

Elliott turned to me.

‘Larry is Laurence Darrell. Isabel is supposed to be engaged to him.’

‘I didn’t know you drank cocktails, Elliott,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ he answered grimly, as he sipped the one he had taken, ‘but in this barbarous land of prohibition what can one do?’ He sighed. ‘They’re beginning to serve them in some houses in Paris. Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

‘Stuff and nonsense, Elliott,’ said Mrs Bradley.

She said it good-naturedly enough, but with a decision that suggested to me that she was a woman of character, and I suspected from the look she gave him, amused but shrewd, that she had no illusions about him. I wondered what she would make of Gregory Brabazon. I had caught the professional look he gave the room as he came in and the involuntary lifting of his bushy eyebrows. It was indeed an amazing room. The paper on the walls, the cretonne of the curtains and on the upholstered furniture were of the same pattern; on the walls were oil paintings in massive gold frames that the Bradleys had evidently bought when they were in Rome. Virgins of the school of Raphael, Virgins of the school of Guido Reni, landscapes of the school of Zuccarelli, ruins of the school of Pannini. There were trophies of their sojourn in Peking, blackwood tables too profusely carved, huge cloisonné vases, and there were the purchases they had made in Chile or Peru, obese figures in hard stone and earthenware vases. There was a Chippendale writing-table and a marquetry vitrine. The lamp-shades were of white silk on which some ill-advised artist had painted shepherds and shepherdesses in Watteau costumes. It was hideous and yet, I don’t know why, agreeable. It had a homely, lived-in air, and you felt that that incredible jumble had a significance. All those incongruous objects belonged together because they were part of Mrs Bradley’s life.

We had finished our cocktails when the door was flung open and a girl came in, followed by a boy.

‘Are we late?’ she asked. ‘I’ve brought Larry back. Is there anything for him to eat?’

‘I expect so,’ smiled Mrs Bradley. ‘Ring the bell and tell Eugene to put another place.’

‘He opened the door for us. I’ve already told him.’

‘This is my daughter Isabel,’ said Mrs Bradley, turning to me. ‘And this is Laurence Darrell.’

Isabel gave me a rapid handshake and turned impetuously to Gregory Brabazon.

‘Are you Mr Brabazon? I’ve been crazy to meet you. I love what you’ve done for Clementine Dormer. Isn’t this room terrible? I’ve been trying to get Mamma to do something about it for years and now you’re in Chicago it’s our chance. Tell me honestly what you think of it.’

I knew that was the last thing Brabazon would do. He gave Mrs Bradley a quick glance, but her impassive face told him nothing. He decided that Isabel was the person who counted and broke into a boisterous laugh.

‘I’m sure it’s very comfortable and all that,’ he said, ‘but if you ask me point-blank, well, I do think it’s pretty awful.’

Isabel was a tall girl with the oval face, straight nose, fine eyes, and full mouth that appeared to be characteristic of the family. She was comely though on the fat side, which I ascribed to her age, and I guessed that she would fine down as she grew older. She had strong, good hands, though they also were a trifle fat, and her legs, displayed by her short skirt, were fat too. She had a good skin and a high colour, which exercise and the drive back in an open car had doubtless heightened. She was sparkling and vivacious. Her radiant health, her playful gaiety, her enjoyment of life, the happiness you felt in her were exhilarating. She was so natural that she made Elliott, for all his elegance, look rather tawdry. Her freshness made Mrs Bradley, with her pasty, lined face, look tired and old.

We went down to lunch. Gregory Brabazon blinked when he saw the dining-room. The walls were papered with a dark red paper that imitated stuff and hung with portraits of grim, sour-faced men and women, very badly painted, who were the immediate forebears of the late Mr Bradley. He was there, too, with a heavy moustache, very stiff in a frock coat and a white starched collar. Mrs Bradley, painted by a French artist of the nineties, hung over the chimney-piece in full evening dress of pale blue satin with pearls around her neck and a diamond star in her hair. With one bejewelled hand she fingered a lace scarf so carefully painted that you could count every stitch and with the other negligently held an ostrich-feather fan. The furniture, of black oak, was overwhelming.

‘What do you think of it?’ asked Isabel of Gregory Brabazon as we sat down.

‘I’m sure it cost a great deal of money,’ he answered.

‘It did,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘It was given to us as a wedding present by Mr Bradley’s father. It’s been all over the world with us. Lisbon, Peking, Quito, Rome. Dear Queen Margherita admired it very much.’

‘What would you do if it was yours?’ Isabel asked Brabazon, but before he could answer, Elliott answered for him.

‘Burn it,’ he said.

The three of them began to discuss how they would treat the room. Elliot was all for Louis Quinze, while Isabel wanted a refectory table and Italian chairs. Brabazon thought Chippendale would be more in keeping with Mrs Bradley’s personality.

‘I always think that’s so important,’ he said, ‘a person’s personality.’ He turned to Elliott. ‘Of course you know the Duchess of Olifant?’

‘Mary? She’s one of my most intimate friends.’

‘She wanted me to do her dining-room and the moment I saw her I said George the Second.’

‘How right you were. I noticed the room the last time I dined there. It’s in perfect taste.’

So the conversation went on. Mrs Bradley listened, but you could not tell what she was thinking. I said little, and Isabel’s young man, Larry, I’d forgotten his surname, said nothing at all. He was sitting on the other side of the table between Brabazon and Elliott and every now and then I glanced at him. He looked very young. He was about the same height as Elliott, just under six feet, thin and loose-limbed. He was a pleasant–looking boy, neither handsome nor plain, rather shy and in no way remarkable. I was interested in the fact that though, so far as I could remember, he hadn’t said half a dozen words since entering the house, he seemed perfectly at ease and in a curious way appeared to take part in the conversation without opening his mouth. I noticed his hands. They were long, but not large for his size, beautifully shaped and at the same time strong. I thought that a painter would be pleased to paint them. He was slightly built but not delicate in appearance; on the contrary I should have said he was wiry and resistant. His face, grave in repose, was tanned, but otherwise there was little colour in it, and his features, though regular enough, were undistinguished. He had rather high cheekbones and his temples were hollow. He had dark brown hair with a slight wave in it. His eyes looked larger than they really were because they were deep set in the orbits and his lashes were thick and long. His eyes were peculiar, not of the rich hazel that Isabel shared with her mother and her uncle, but so dark that the iris made one colour with the pupil, and this gave them a peculiar intensity. He had a natural grace that was attractive and I could see why Isabel had been taken by him. Now and again her glance rested on him for a moment and I seemed to see in her expression not only love but fondness. Their eyes met and there was in his a tenderness that was beautiful to see. There is nothing more touching than the sight of young love, and I, a middle-aged man then, envied them, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine why, I felt sorry for them. It was silly because, so far as I knew, there was no impediment to their happiness; their circumstances seemed easy and there was no reason why they should not marry and live happily ever afterwards.

Isabel, Elliott, and Gregory Brabazon went on talking of the redecoration of the house, trying to get out of Mrs Bradley a least an admission that something should be done, but she only smiled amiably.

‘You mustn’t try to rush me. I want to have time to think it over.’ She turned to the boy. ‘What do you think of it all, Larry?’

He looked round the table, a smile in his eyes.

‘I don’t think it matters one way or the other,’ he said.

‘You beast, Larry,’ cried Isabel. ‘I particularly told you to back us up.’

‘If Aunt Louisa is happy with what she’s got, what is the object of changing?’

His question was so much to the point and so sensible that it made me laugh. He looked at me then and smiled.

‘And don’t grin like that just because you’ve made a very stupid remark,’ said Isabel.

But he only grinned the more, and I noticed then that he had small and white and regular teeth. There was something in the look he gave Isabel that made her flush and catch her breath. Unless I was mistaken she was madly in love with him, but I don’t know what it was that gave me the feeling that in her love for him there was also something maternal. It was a little unexpected in so young a girl. With a soft smile on her lips she directed her attention once more to Gregory Brabazon.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s very stupid and entirely uneducated. He doesn’t know anything about anything except flying.’

‘Flying?’ I said.

‘He was an aviator in the war.’

‘I should have thought he was too young to have been in the war.’

‘He was. Much too young. He behaved very badly. He ran away from school and went to Canada. By lying his head off he got them to believe he was eighteen and got into the air corps. He was fighting in France at the time of the armistice.’

‘You’re boring your mother’s guests, Isabel,’ said Larry.

‘I’ve known him all my life, and when he came back he looked lovely in his uniform, with all those pretty ribbons on his tunic, so I just sat on his doorstep, so to speak, till he consented to marry me just to have a little peace and quiet. The competition was awful.’

‘Really, Isabel,’ said her mother.

Larry leant over towards me.

“I hope you don’t believe a word she says. Isabel isn’t a bad girl really, but she’s a liar.’

Luncheon was finished and soon after Elliott and I left. I had told him before that I was going to the museum to look at the pictures and he said he would take me. I don’t particularly like going to a gallery with anyone else, but I could not say I would sooner go alone, so I accepted his company. On our way we spoke of Isabel and Larry.

‘It’s rather charming to see two young things so much in love with one another,’ I said.

‘They’re much too young to marry.’

‘Why? It’s such fun to be young and in love and to marry.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. She’s nineteen and he’s only just twenty. He hasn’t got a job. He has a tiny income, three thousand a year Louisa tells me, and Louisa’s not a rich woman by any manner of means. She needs all she has.’

‘Well, he can get a job.’

‘That’s just it. He’s not trying to. He seems to be quite satisfied to do nothing.’

‘I dare say he had a pretty rough time in the war. He may want a rest.’

‘He’s been resting for a year. That’s surely long enough.’

‘I thought he seemed a nice sort of boy.’

‘Oh, I have nothing against him. He’s quite well born and all that sort of thing. His father came from Baltimore. He was assistant professor of Romance languages at Yale or something like that. His mother was a Philadelphian of old Quaker stock.’

‘You speak of them in the past. Are they dead?’

‘Yes, his mother died in childbirth and his father about twelve years ago. He was brought up by an old college friend of his father’s who’s a doctor at Marvin. That’s how Louisa and Isabel knew him.’

‘Where’s Marvin?’

‘That’s where the Bradley place is. Louisa spends the summer there. She was sorry for the child. Dr Nelson’s a bachelor and didn’t know the first thing about bringing up a boy. It was Louisa who insisted that he should be sent to St Paul’s and she always had him out here for his Christmas vacation.’ Elliott shrugged a Gallic shoulder. ‘I should have thought she would foresee the inevitable result.’

We had now arrived at the museum and our attention was directed to the pictures. Once more I was impressed by Elliott’s knowledge and taste. He shepherded me around the rooms as though I were a group of tourists, and no professor of art could have discoursed more instructively than he did. Making up my mind to come again by myself when I could wander at will and have a good time, I submitted; after a while he looked at his watch.

‘Let us go,’ he said. ‘I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one’s power of appreciation persists. We will finish another day.’

I thanked him warmly when we separated. I went my way perhaps a wiser but certainly a peevish man.

When I was saying good-bye to Mrs Bradley she told me that next day Isabel was having a few of her young friends in to dinner and they were going on to dance afterwards, and if I would come Elliott and I could have a talk when they had gone.

‘You’ll be doing him a kindness,’ she added. ‘He’s been abroad so long, he feels rather out of it here. He doesn’t seem able to find anyone he has anything in common with.’

I accepted and before we parted on the museum steps Elliott told me he was glad I had.

‘I’m like a lost soul in this great city,’ he said. ‘I promised Louisa to spend six weeks with her, we hadn’t seen one another since 1912, but I’m counting the days till I can get back to Paris. It’s the only place in the world for a civilized man to live. My dear fellow, d’you know how they look upon me here? They look upon me as a freak. Savages.’

I laughed and left.

CHAPTER 6

The following evening, having refused Elliott’s telephoned offer to fetch me, I arrived quite safely at Mrs Bradley’s house. I had been delayed by someone who had come to see me and was a trifle late. So much noise came from the sitting-room as I walked upstairs that I thought it must be a large party and I was surprised to find that there were, including myself, only twelve people. Mrs Bradley was very grand in green satin with a dog-collar of seed pearls round her neck, and Elliott in his well-cut dinner jacket looked elegant as he alone could look. When he shook hands with me my nostrils were assailed by all the perfumes of Arabia. I was introduced to a stoutish, tall man with a red face who looked somewhat ill at ease in evening clothes. He was a Dr Nelson, but at the moment that meant nothing to me. The rest of the party consisted of Isabel’s friends, but their names escaped me as soon as I heard them. The girls were young and pretty and the men young and upstanding. None of them made any impression on me except one boy and that only because he was so tall and so massive. He must have been six foot three or four and he had great broad shoulders. Isabel was looking very pretty; she was dressed in white silk, with a long, hobbled skirt that concealed her fat legs; the cut of her frock showed that she had well-developed breasts; her bare arms were a trifle fat, but her neck was lovely. She was excited and her fine eyes sparkled. There was no doubt about it, she was a very pretty and desirable young woman, but it was obvious that unless she took care she would develop an unbecoming corpulence.

At dinner I found myself placed between Mrs Bradley and a shy drab girl who seemed even younger than the others. As we sat down, to make the way easier Mrs Bradley explained that her grandparents lived at Marvin and that she and Isabel had been at school together. Her name, the only one I heard mentioned, was Sophie. A lot of chaff was bandied across the table, everyone talked at the top of his voice and there was a great deal of laughter. They seemed to know one another very well. When I was not occupied with my hostess I attempted to make conversation with my neighbour, but I had no great success. She was quieter than the rest. She was not pretty, but she had an amusing face, with a little tilted nose, a wide mouth, and greenish blue eyes; her hair, simply done, was of a sandy brown. She was very thin and her chest was almost as flat as a boy’s. She laughed at the badinage that went on, but in a manner that was a little forced so that you felt she wasn’t as much amused as she pretended to be. I guessed that she was making an effort to be a good sport. I could not make out if she was a trifle stupid or only painfully timid and, having tried various topics of conversation only to have them dropped, for want of anything better to say I asked her to tell me who all the people at table were.

‘Well, you know Dr Nelson,’ she said, indicating the middle-aged man who was opposite me on Mrs Bradley’s other side. ‘He’s Larry’s guardian. He’s our doctor at Marvin. He’s very clever, he invents gadgets for planes that no one will have anything to do with, and when he isn’t doing that he drinks.’

There was a gleam in her pale eyes as she said this that made me suspect that there was more in her than I had at first supposed. She went on to give me the names of one young thing after another, telling me who their parents were, and in the case of the men what college they had been to and what work they did. It wasn’t very illuminating.

‘She’s very sweet,’ or: ‘He’s a very good golfer.’

‘And who is that big fellow with the eyebrows?’

‘That? Oh, that’s Gray Maturin. His father’s got an enormous house on the river at Marvin. He’s our millionaire. We’re very proud of him. He gives us class. Maturin, Hobbes, Rayner, and Smith. He’s one of the richest men in Chicago and Gray’s his only son.’

She put such a pleasant irony into that list of names that I gave her an inquisitive glance. She caught it and flushed.

‘Tell me more about Mr Maturin.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. He’s rich. He’s highly respected. He built us a new church at Marvin and he’s given a million dollars to the University of Chicago.’

‘His son’s a fine-looking fellow.’

‘He’s nice. You’d never think his grandfather was shanty Irish and his grandmother a Swedish waitress in an eating house.’

Gray Maturin was striking rather than handsome. He had a rugged, unfinished look; a short blunt nose, a sensual mouth, and the florid Irish complexion; a great quantity of raven black hair, very sleek, and under heavy eyebrows clear, very blue eyes. Though built on so large a scale he was finely proportioned, and stripped he must have been a fine figure of a man. He was obviously very powerful. His virility was impressive. He made Larry who was sitting next to him, though only three or four inches shorter, look puny.

‘He’s very much admired,’ said my shy neighbour. ‘I know several girls who would stop at nothing short of murder to get him. But they haven’t a chance.’

‘Why not?’

‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

‘How should I?’

‘He’s so much in love with Isabel, he can’t see straight, and Isabel’s in love with Larry.’

‘What’s to prevent him from setting to and cutting Larry out?’

‘Larry’s his best friend.’

‘I suppose that complicates matters.’

‘If you’re as high-principled as Gray is.’

I was not sure whether she said this in all seriousness or whether there was in her tone a hint of mockery. There was nothing saucy in her manner, forward or pert, and yet I got the impression that she was lacking neither in humour nor in shrewdness. I wondered what she was really thinking while she made conversation with me, but that I knew I should never find out. She was obviously unsure of herself and I conceived the notion that she was an only child who had lived a secluded life with people a great deal older than herself. There was a modesty, an unobtrusiveness about her that I found engaging, but if I was right in thinking that she had lived much alone I guessed that she had quietly observed the older persons she lived with and had formed decided opinions upon them. We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us. I looked again into her greenish blue eyes.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Seventeen.’

‘Do you read much?’ I asked at a venture.

But before she could answer, Mrs Bradley, attentive to her duties as a hostess, drew me to her with some remark and before I could disengage myself dinner was at an end. The young people went off at once to wherever they were going and the four of us who were left went up to the sitting-room.

I was surprised that I had been asked to this party, for after a little desultory conversation they began to talk of a matter that I should have thought they would have preferred to discuss in private. I could not make up my mind whether it would be more discreet in me to get up and go or whether, as a disinterested audience of one, I was useful to them. The question at issue was Larry’s odd disinclination to go to work, and it had been brought to a point by an offer from Mr Maturin, the father of the boy who had been at dinner, to take him into his office. It was a fine opportunity. With ability and industry Larry could look forward to making in due course a great deal of money. Young Gray Maturin was eager for him to take it.

I cannot remember all that was said, but the gist of it is clear in my memory. On Larry’s return from France Dr Nelson, his guardian, had suggested that he should go to college, but he had refused. It was natural that he should want to do nothing for a while; he had had a hard time and had been twice, though not severely, wounded. Dr Nelson thought that he was still suffering from shock and it seemed a good idea that he should rest till he had completely recovered. But the weeks passed into months and now it was over a year since he’d been out of uniform. It appeared that he had done well in the air corps and on his return he cut something of a figure in Chicago, the result of which was that several business men offered him positions. He thanked them, but refused. He gave no reason except that he hadn’t made up his mind what he wanted to do. He became engaged to Isabel. This was no surprise to Mrs Bradley since they had been inseparable for years and she knew that Isabel was in love with him. She was fond of him and thought he would make Isabel happy.

‘Her character’s stronger than his. She can give him just what he lacks.’

Though they were both so young Mrs Bradley was quite willing that they should marry at once, but she wasn’t prepared for them to do so until Larry had gone to work. He had a little money of his own, but even if he had had ten times more than he had she would have insisted on this. So far as I could gather, what she and Elliott wished to find out from Dr Nelson was what Larry intended to do. They wanted him to use his influence to get him to accept the job that Mr Maturin offered him.

‘You know I never had much authority over Larry,’ he said. ‘Even as a boy he went his own way.’

‘I know. You let him run wild. It’s a miracle he’s turned out as well as he has.’

Dr Nelson, who had been drinking quite heavily, gave her a sour look. His red face grew a trifle redder.

‘I was very busy. I had my own affairs to attend to. I took him because there was nowhere else for him to go and his father was a friend of mine. He wasn’t easy to do anything with.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ Mrs Bradley answered tartly. ‘He has a very sweet disposition.’

‘What are you to do with a boy who never argues with you, but does exactly what he likes and when you get mad at him just says he’s sorry and lets you storm? If he’d been my own son I could have beaten him. I couldn’t beat a boy who hadn’t got a relation in the world and whose father had left him to me because he thought I’d be kind to him.’

‘That’s neither here nor there,’ said Elliott, somewhat irritably. ‘The position is this: he’s dawdled around long enough; he’s got a fine chance of a position in which he stands to make a lot of money, and if he wants to marry Isabel he must take it.’

‘He must see that in the present state of the world’, Mrs Bradley put in, ‘a man has to work. He’s perfectly strong and well now. We all know how after the war between the States, there were men who never did a stroke after they came back from it. They were a burden to their families and useless to the community.’

Then I added my word.

‘But what reason does he give for refusing the various offers that are made him?’

‘None. Except that they don’t appeal to him.’

‘But doesn’t he want to do anything?’

‘Apparently not.’

Dr Nelson helped himself to another highball. He took a long drink and then looked at his two friends.

‘Shall I tell you what my impression is? I dare say I’m not a great judge of human nature, but at any rate after thirty-odd years of practice I think I know something about it. The war did something to Larry. He didn’t come back the same person that he went. It’s not only that he’s older. Something happened that changed his personality.’

‘What sort of thing?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t know. He’s very reticent about his war experiences.’ Dr Nelson turned to Mrs Bradley. ‘Has he ever talked to you about them, Louisa?’

She shook her head.

‘No. When he first came back we tried to get him to tell us some of his adventures, but he only laughed in that way of his and said there was nothing to tell. He hasn’t even told Isabel. She’s tried and tried, but she hasn’t got a thing out of him.’

The conversation went on in this unsatisfactory way and presently Dr Nelson, looking at his watch, said he must go. I prepared to leave with him, but Elliott pressed me to stay. When he had gone, Mrs Bradley apologized for troubling me with their private affairs and expressed her fear that I had been bored.

‘But you see it’s all very much on my mind,’ she finished.

‘Mr Maugham is very discreet, Louisa; you needn’t be afraid of telling him anything. I haven’t the feeling that Bob Nelson and Larry are very close, but there are some things that Louisa and I thought we’d better not mention to him.’

‘Elliott.’

You’ve told him so much, you may as well tell him the rest. I don’t know whether you noticed Gray Maturin at dinner?’

‘He’s so big, one could hardly fail to.’

‘He’s a beau of Isabel’s. All the time Larry was away he was very attentive. She likes him, and if the war had lasted much longer she might very well have married him. He proposed to her. She didn’t accept and she didn’t refuse. Louisa guessed she didn’t want to make up her mind till Larry came home.’

‘How is it that he wasn’t in the war?’ I asked.

‘He strained his heart playing football. It’s nothing serious, but the army wouldn’t take him. Anyhow when Larry came home he had no chance. Isabel turned him down flat.’

I didn’t know what I was expected to say to that, so I said nothing. Elliott went on. With his distinguished appearance and his Oxford accent he couldn’t have been more like an official of high standing at the Foreign Office.

‘Of course Larry’s a very nice boy and it was damned sporting of him to run away and join the air corps, but I’m a pretty good judge of character . . .’ He gave a knowing little smile and made the only reference I ever heard him make to the fact that he had made a fortune by dealing in works of art. ‘Otherwise I shouldn’t have at this moment a tidy sum in gilt-edged securities. And my opinion is that Larry will never amount to very much. He has no money to speak of and no standing. Gray Maturin is a very different proposition. He has a good old Irish name. They’ve had a bishop in the family, and a dramatist and several distinguished soldiers and scholars.’

‘How do you know all that?’ I asked.

‘It’s the sort of thing one knows,’ he answered casually. ‘As a matter of fact I happened to be glancing through the Dictionary of National Biography the other day at the club and I came across the name.’

I didn’t think it was my business to repeat what my neighbour at dinner had told me of the shanty Irishman and the Swedish waitress who were Gray’s grandfather and grandmother. Elliott proceeded.

‘We’ve all known Henry Maturin for many years. He’s a very fine man and a very rich one. Gray’s stepping into the best brokerage house in Chicago. He’s got the world at his feet. He wants to marry Isabel and one can’t deny that from her point of view it would be a very good match. I’m all in favour of it myself and I know Louisa is too.’

‘You’ve been away from America so long, Elliott,’ said Mrs Bradley, with a dry smile, ‘you’ve forgotten that in this country girls don’t marry because their mothers and their uncles are in favour of it.’

‘That is nothing to be proud of, Louisa,’ said Elliott sharply. ‘As the result of thirty years’ experience I may tell you that a marriage arranged with proper regard to position, fortune, and community of circumstances has every advantage over a love match. In France, which after all is the only civilized country in the world, Isabel would marry Gray without thinking twice about it; then, after a year or two, if she wanted it, she’d take Larry as her lover, Gray would install a prominent actress in a luxurious apartment, and everyone would be perfectly happy.’

Mrs Bradley was no fool. She looked at her brother with sly amusement.

‘The objection to that, Elliott, is that as the New York plays only come here for limited periods, Gray could only hope to keep the tenants of his luxurious apartment for a very uncertain length of time. That would surely be very unsettling for all parties.’

Elliott smiled.

‘Gray could buy a seat on the New York stock exchange. After all, if you must live in America I can’t see any object in living anywhere but in New York.’

I left soon after this, but before I did Elliott, I hardly know why, asked me if I would lunch with him to meet the Maturins, father and son.

‘Henry is the best type of the American businessman,’ he said, ‘and I think you ought to know him. He’s looked after our investments for many years.’

I hadn’t any particular wish to do this, but no reason to refuse, so I said I would be glad to.

CHAPTER 7

I had been put up for the length of my stay at a club which possessed a good library, and next morning I went there to look at one or two of the university magazines that for the person who does not subscribe to them have always been rather hard to come by. It was early and there was only one other person there. He was seated in a big leather chair absorbed in a book. I was surprised to see it was Larry. He was the last person I should have expected to find in such a place. He looked up as I passed, recognized me and made as if to get up.

‘Don’t move,’ I said, and then almost automatically: ‘What are you reading?’

‘A book,’ he said, with a smile, but a smile so engaging that the rebuff of his answer was in no way offensive.

He closed it and looking at me with his peculiarly opaque eyes held it so that I couldn’t see the title.

‘Did you have a good time last night?’ I asked.

‘Wonderful. Didn’t get home till five.’

‘It’s very strenuous of you to be here so bright and early.’

‘I come here a good deal. Generally I have the place to myself at this time.’

‘I won’t disturb you.’

‘You’re not disturbing me,’ he said, smiling again, and now it occurred to me that he had a smile of great sweetness. It was not a brilliant, flashing smile, it was a smile that lit his face as with an inner light. He was sitting in an alcove made by jutting out shelves and there was a chair next to him. He put his hand on the arm. ‘Won’t you sit down for a minute?’

‘All right.’

He handed me the book he was holding.

‘That’s what I was reading.’

I looked at it and saw it was William James’s Principles of Psychology. It is, of course, a standard work and important in the history of the science with which it deals; it is moreover exceedingly readable; but it is not the sort of book I should have expected to see in the hands of a very young man, an aviator, who had been dancing till five in the morning.

‘Why are you reading this?’ I asked.

‘I’m very ignorant.’

‘You’re also very young,’ I smiled.

He did not speak for so long a time that I began to find the silence awkward and I was on the point of getting up and looking for the magazines I had come to find. But I had a feeling that he wanted to say something. He looked into vacancy, his face grave and intent, and seemed to meditate. I waited. I was curious to know what it was all about. When he began to speak it was as though he were continuing the conversation without awareness of that long silence.

‘When I came back from France they all wanted me to go to college. I couldn’t. After what I’d been through I felt I couldn’t go back to school. I learnt nothing at my prep school anyway. I felt I couldn’t enter into a freshman’s life. They wouldn’t have liked me. I didn’t want to act a part I didn’t feel. And I didn’t think the instructors would teach me the sort of things I wanted to know.’

‘Of course I know this is no business of mine,’ I answered, ‘but I’m not convinced you were right. I think I understand what you mean and I can see that, after being in the war for two years, it would have been rather a nuisance to become the sort of glorified schoolboy an undergraduate is during his first and second years. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have liked you. I don’t know much about American universities, but I don’t believe American undergraduates are very different from English ones, perhaps a little more boisterous and a little more inclined to horseplay, but on the whole very decent, sensible boys, and I take it that if you don’t want to lead their lives they’re quite willing, if you exercise a little tact, to let you lead yours. I never went to Cambridge as my brothers did. I had the chance, but I refused it. I wanted to get out into the world. I’ve always regretted it. I think it would have saved me a lot of mistakes. You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.’

‘You may be right. I don’t mind if I make mistakes. It may be that in one of the blind alleys I may find something to my purpose.’

‘What is your purpose?’

He hesitated a moment.

‘That’s just it. I don’t quite know it yet.’

I was silent, for there didn’t seem to be anything to say in answer to that. I, who from a very early age have always had before me a clear and definite purpose, was inclined to feel impatient, but I chid myself; I had what I can only call an intuition that there was in the soul of that boy some confused striving, whether of half-thought-out ideas or of dimly felt emotions I could not tell, which filled him with a restlessness that urged him he did not know whither. He strangely excited my sympathy. I had never before heard him speak much and it was only now that I became conscious of the melodiousness of his voice. It was very persuasive. It was like balm. When I considered that, his engaging smile, and the expressiveness of his very black eyes I could well understand that Isabel was in love with him. There was indeed something very lovable about him. He turned his head and looked at me without embarrassment, but with an expression in his eyes that was at once scrutinizing and amused.

‘Am I right in thinking that after we all went off to dance last night you talked about me?’

‘Part of the time.’

‘I thought that was why Uncle Bob had been pressed to come to dinner. He hates going out.’

‘It appears that you’ve got the offer of a very good job.’

‘A wonderful job.’

‘Are you going to take it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

I was butting into an affair that was no concern of mine, but I had a notion that just because I was a stranger from a foreign country Larry was not disinclined to talk to me about it.

‘Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers,’ I said, with a chuckle.

‘I have no talent.’

‘Then what do you want to do?’

He gave me his radiant, fascinating smile.

‘Loaf,’ he said.

I had to laugh.

‘I shouldn’t have thought Chicago the best place in the world to do that in,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, I’ll leave you to your reading. I want to have a look at the Yale Quarterly.’

I got up. When I left the library Larry was still absorbed in William James’s book. I lunched by myself at the club and since it was quiet in the library went back there to smoke my cigar and idle an hour or two away, reading and writing letters. I was surprised to see Larry still immersed in his book. He looked as if he hadn’t moved since I left him. He was still there when about four I went away. I was struck by his evident power of concentration. He had neither noticed me go nor come. I had various things to do during the afternoon and did not go back to the Blackstone till it was time to change for the dinner party I was going to. On my way I was seized with an impulse of curiosity. I dropped into the club once more and went into the library. There were quite a number of people there then, reading the papers and what not. Larry was still sitting in the same chair, intent on the same book. Odd!

CHAPTER 8

Next day Elliott asked me to lunch at the Palmer House to meet the elder Maturin and his son. We were only four. Henry Maturin was a big man, nearly as big as his son, with a red fleshy face and a great jowl, and he had the same blunt aggressive nose, but his eyes were smaller than his son’s, not so blue and very, very shrewd. Though he could not have been much more than fifty he looked ten years older and his hair, rapidly thinning, was snow-white. At first sight he was not prepossessing. He looked as though for many years he had done himself too well, and I received the impression of a brutal, clever, competent man who, in business matters at all events, would be pitiless. At first he said little and I had a notion that he was taking my measure. I could not but perceive that he looked upon Elliott as something of a joke. Gray, amiable and polite, was almost completely silent, and the party would have been sticky if Elliott, with his perfect social tact, hadn’t kept up a flow of easy conversation. I guessed that in the past he had acquired a good deal of experience in dealing with Middle Western businessmen who had to be cajoled into paying a fancy price for an old master. Presently Mr Maturin began to feel more at his ease and he made one or two remarks that showed he was brighter than he looked and indeed had a dry sense of humour. For a while the conversation turned on stocks and shares. I should have been surprised to discover that Elliott was very knowledgeable on the subject if I had not long been aware that for all his nonsense he was nobody’s fool. It was then that Mr Maturin remarked:

‘I had a letter from Gray’s friend Larry Darrell this morning.’

‘You didn’t tell me, Dad,’ said Gray.

Mr Maturin turned to me.

‘You know Larry, don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘Gray persuaded me to take him into my business. They’re great friends. Gray thinks the world of him.’

‘What did he say, Dad?’

‘He thanked me. He said he realized it was a great chance for a young fellow and he’d thought it over very carefully and come to the conclusion he’d have been a disappointment to me and thought it better to refuse.’

‘That’s very foolish of him,’ said Elliott.

‘It is,’ said Mr Maturin.

‘I’m awfully sorry, Dad,’ said Gray. ‘It would have been grand if we could have worked together.’

‘You can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink.’

Mr Maturin looked at his son while he said this and his shrewd eyes softened. I realized that there was another side to the hard businessman; he doted on this great hulking son of his. He turned to me once more.

‘D ‘you know, that boy did our course in two under par on Sunday. He beat me seven and six. I could have brained him with my niblick. And to think that I taught him to play golf myself.’

He was brimming over with pride. I began to like him.

‘I had a lot of luck, Dad.’

‘Not a bit of it. Is it luck when you get out of a bunker and lay your ball six inches from the hole? Thirty-five yards if it was an inch, the shot was. I want him to go into the amateur championship next year.’

‘I shouldn’t be able to spare the time.’

‘I’m your boss, ain’t I?’

‘Don’t I know it! The hell you raise if I’m a minute late at the office.’

Mr Maturin chuckled.

‘He’s trying to make me out a tyrant,’ he said to me. ‘Don’t you believe him. I’m my business, my partners are no good, and I’m very proud of my business. I’ve started this boy of mine at the bottom and I expect him to work his way up just like any young fellow I’ve hired, so that when the time comes for him to take my place he’ll be ready for it. It’s a great responsibility, a business like mine. I’ve looked after the investments of some of my clients for thirty years and they trust me. To tell you the truth, I’d rather lose my own money than see them lose theirs.’

Gray laughed.

‘The other day when an old girl came in and wanted to invest a thousand dollars in a wildcat scheme that her minister had recommended he refused to take the order, and when she insisted he gave her such hell that she went out sobbing. And then he called up the minister and gave him hell too.’

‘People say a lot of hard things about us brokers, but there are brokers and brokers. I don’t want people to lose money, I want them to make it, and the way they act, most of them, you’d think their one object in life was to get rid of every cent they have.’

‘Well, what did you think of him?’ Elliott asked me as we walked away after the Maturins had left us to go back to the office.

‘I’m always glad to meet new types. I thought the mutual affection of father and son was rather touching. I don’t know that that’s so common in England.’

‘He adores that boy. He’s a queer mixture. What he said about his clients was quite true. He’s got hundreds of old women, retired service men, and ministers whose savings he looks after. I’d have thought they were more trouble than they’re worth, but he takes pride in the confidence they have in him. But when he’s got some big deal on and he’s up against powerful interests there isn’t a man who can be harder and more ruthless. There’s no mercy in him then. He wants his pound of flesh and there’s nothing much he’ll stop at to get it. Get on the wrong side of him and he’ll not only ruin you, but get a big laugh out of doing it.’

On getting home Elliott told Mrs Bradley that Larry had refused Henry Maturin’s offer. Isabel had been lunching with girl friends and came in while they were still talking about it. They told her. I gathered from Elliott’s account of the conversation that ensued that he had expressed himself with considerable eloquence. Though he had certainly not done a stroke of work for ten years, and the work by which he had amassed an ample competence had been far from arduous, he was firmly of opinion that for the run of mankind industry was essential. Larry was a perfectly ordinary young fellow, of no social consequence, and there was no possible reason why he shouldn’t conform to the commendable customs of his country. It was evident to a man as clear-sighted as Elliott that America was entering upon a period of prosperity such as it had never known. Larry had a chance of getting in on the ground floor, and if he kept his nose to the grindstone he might well be many times a millionaire by the time he was forty. If he wanted to retire then and live like a gentleman, in Paris, say, with an apartment in the Avenue du Bois and a château in Touraine, he (Elliott) would have nothing to say against it. But Louisa Bradley was more succinct and more unanswerable.

‘If he loves you, he ought to be prepared to work for you.’

I don’t know what Isabel answered to all this, but she was sensible enough to see that her elders had reason on their side. All the young men of her acquaintance were studying to enter some profession or already busy in an office. Larry could hardly expect to live the rest of his life on his distinguished record in the air corps. The war was over, everyone was sick of it and anxious only to forget about it as quickly as possible. The result of the discussion was that Isabel agreed to have the matter out with Larry once and for all. Mrs Bradley suggested that Isabel should ask him to drive her down to Marvin. She was ordering new curtains for the living-room and had mislaid the measurements, so she wanted Isabel to take them again.

‘Bob Nelson will give you luncheon,’ she said.

‘I have a better plan than that,’ said Elliott. ‘Put up a luncheon basket for them and let them lunch on the stoop and after lunch they can talk.’

‘That would be fun,’ said Isabel.

‘There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort,’ Elliott added sententiously. ‘The old Duchesse d’Uzès used to tell me that the most recalcitrant male becomes amenable to suggestion in these conditions. What will you give them for luncheon?’

‘Stuffed eggs and a chicken sandwich.’

‘Nonsense. You can’t have a picnic without pâté de foie gras. You must give them curried shrimps to start with, breast of chicken in aspic, with a heart-of-lettuce salad for which I’ll make the dressing myself, and after the pâté if you like, as a concession to your American habits, an apple pie.’

‘I shall give them stuffed eggs and a chicken sandwich, Elliott,’ said Mrs Bradley with decision.

‘Well, mark my words, it’ll be a failure and you’ll only have yourself to blame.’

‘Larry eats very little, Uncle Elliott,’ said Isabel, ‘and I don’t believe he notices what he eats.’

‘I hope you don’t think that is to his credit, my poor child,’ her uncle returned.

But what Mrs Bradley said they should have was what they got. When Elliott later told me the outcome of the excursion he shrugged his shoulders in a very French way.

‘I told them it would be a failure. I begged Louisa to put in a bottle of the Montrachet I sent her just before the war, but she wouldn’t listen to me. They took a thermos of hot coffee and nothing else. What would you expect?’

It appeared that Louisa Bradley and Elliott were sitting by themselves in the living-room when they heard the car stop at the door and Isabel came into the house. It was just after dark and the curtains were drawn. Elliott was lounging in an armchair by the fireside reading a novel and Mrs Bradley was at work on a piece of tapestry that was to be made into a firescreen. Isabel did not come in, but went on up to her room.

Elliott looked over his spectacles at his sister.

‘I expect she’s gone to take off her hat. She’ll be down in a minute,’ she said.

But Isabel did not come. Several minutes passed.

‘Perhaps she’s tired. She may be lying down.’

‘Wouldn’t you have expected Larry to have come in?’

‘Don’t be exasperating, Elliott.’

‘Well, it’s your business, not mine.’

He returned to his book. Mrs Bradley went on working. But when half an hour had gone by she got up suddenly.

‘I think perhaps I’d better go up and see that she’s all right. If she’s resting I won’t disturb her.’

She left the room, but in a very short while came down again.

‘She’s been crying. Larry’s going to Paris. He’s going to be away for two years. She’s promised to wait for him.’

Why does he want to go to Paris?’

‘It’s no good asking me questions, Elliott. I don’t know. She won’t tell me anything. She says she understands and she isn’t going to stand in his way. I said to her, “If he’s prepared to leave you for two years he can’t love you very much.” “I can’t help that,” she said, “the thing that matters is that I love him very much.” “Even after what’s happened today?” I said “Today’s made me love him more than ever I did,” she said, “and he does love me, Mamma. I’m sure of that.”’

Elliott reflected for a while.

‘And what’s to happen at the end of two years?’

‘I tell you I don’t know, Elliott.’

‘Don’t you think it’s very unsatisfactory?’

‘Very.’

‘There’s only one thing to be said and that is that they’re both very young. It won’t hurt them to wait two years and in that time a lot may happen.’

They agreed that it would be better to leave Isabel in peace. They were going out to dinner that night.

‘I don’t want to upset her,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘People would only wonder if her eyes were all swollen.’

But next day after luncheon, which they had by themselves, Mrs Bradley brought the subject up again. But she got little out of Isabel.

‘There’s really nothing more to tell you than I’ve told you already, Mamma,’ she said.

‘But what does he want to do in Paris?’

Isabel smiled, for she knew how preposterous her answer would seem to her mother.

‘Loaf.’

‘Loaf? What on earth do you mean?’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘Really I have no patience with you. If you had any spirit you’d have broken off your engagement there and then. He’s just playing with you.’

Isabel looked at the ring she wore on her left hand.

‘What can I do? I love him.’

Then Elliott entered the conversation. He approached the matter with his famous tact, ‘Not as if I was her uncle, my dear fellow, but as a man of the world speaking to an inexperienced girl,’ but he did no better than her mother had done. I received the impression that she had told him, no doubt politely but quite unmistakably, to mind his own business. Elliott told me all this later on in the day in the little sitting-room I had at the Blackstone.

‘Of course Louisa is quite right,’ he added. ‘It’s all very unsatisfactory, but that’s the sort of thing you run up against when young people are left to arrange their marriages on no better basis than mutual inclination. I’ve told Louisa not to worry; I think it’ll turn out better than she expects. With Larry out of the way and young Gray Maturin on the spot – well, if I know anything about my fellow-creatures the outcome is fairly obvious. When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.’

‘You’re full of worldly wisdom, Elliott,’ I smiled.

‘I haven’t read my La Rochefoucauld for nothing. You know what Chicago is; they’ll be meeting all the time. It flatters a girl to have a man so devoted to her, and when she knows there isn’t one of her girl friends who wouldn’t be only too glad to marry him – well, I ask you, is it in human nature to resist the temptation of cutting out everyone else? I mean it’s like going to a party where you know you’ll be bored to distraction and the only refreshments will be lemonade and biscuits; but you go because you know your best friends would give their eye-teeth to and haven’t been asked.’

‘When does Larry go?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think that’s been decided yet.’ Elliott took a long, thin cigarette case in platinum and gold out of his pocket and extracted an Egyptian cigarette. Not for him were Fatimas, Chesterfields, Camels, or Lucky Strikes. He looked at me with a smile full of insinuation. ‘Of course I wouldn’t care to say so to Louisa, but I don’t mind telling you that I have a sneaking sympathy for the young fellow. I understand that he got a glimpse of Paris during the war, and I can’t blame him if he was captivated by the only city in the world fit for a civilized man to live in. He’s young and I have no doubt he wants to sow his wild oats before he settles down to married life. Very natural and very proper. I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll introduce him to the right people; he has nice manners and with a hint or two from me he’ll be quite presentable; I can guarantee to show him a side of French life that very few Americans have a chance of seeing. Believe me, my dear fellow, the average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St Germain. He’s twenty and he has charm. I think I could probably arrange a liaison for him with an older woman. It would form him. I always think there’s no better education for a young man than to become the lover of a woman of a certain age and of course if she is the sort of person I have in view, a femme du monde, you know, it would immediately give him a situation in Paris.’

‘Did you tell that to Mrs Bradley?’ I asked, smiling.

Elliott chuckled.

‘My dear fellow, if there’s one thing I pride myself on it’s my tact. I did not tell her. She wouldn’t understand, poor dear. It’s one of the things I’ve never understood about Louisa; though she’s lived half her life in diplomatic society, in half the capitals of the world, she’s remained hopelessly American.’

CHAPTER 9

That evening I went to dine at a great stone house on Lake Shore Drive which looked as though the architect had started to build a medieval castle and then, changing his mind in the middle, had decided to turn it into a Swiss chalet. It was a huge party and I was glad when I got into the vast and sumptuous drawing-room, all statues, palms, chandeliers, old masters, and overstuffed furniture, to see that there were at least a few people I knew. I was introduced by Henry Maturin to his thin, raddled, frail wife. I said how d’you do to Mrs Bradley and Isabel. Isabel was looking very pretty in a red silk dress that suited her dark hair and rich hazel eyes. She appeared to be in high spirits and no one could have guessed that she had so recently gone through a harassing experience. She was talking gaily to the two or three young men, Gray among them, who surrounded her. She sat at dinner at another table and I could not see her, but afterwards, when we men, after lingering interminably over our coffee, liqueurs, and cigars, returned to the drawing-room, I had a chance to speak to her. I knew her too little to say anything directly about what Elliott had told me, but I had something to say that I thought she might be glad to hear.

‘I saw your young man the other day in the club,’ I remarked casually.

‘Oh, did you?’

She spoke as casually as I had, but I perceived that she was instantly alert. Her eyes grew watchful and I thought I read in them something like apprehension.

‘He was reading in the library. I was very much impressed by his power of concentration. He was reading when I went in soon after ten, he was still reading when I went back after lunch, and he was reading when I went in again on my way out to dinner. I don’t believe he’d moved from his chair for the best part of ten hours.’

‘What was he reading?’

‘William James’s Principles of Psychology.’

She looked down so that I had no means of knowing how what I had said affected her, but I had a notion that she was at once puzzled and relieved. I was at that moment fetched by my host who wanted me to play bridge and by the time the game broke up Isabel and her mother had gone.

CHAPTER 10

A couple of days later I went to say good-bye to Mrs Bradley and Elliott. I found them sitting over a cup of tea. Isabel came in shortly after me. We talked about my approaching journey, I thanked them for their kindness to me during my stay in Chicago and after a decent interval got up to go.

‘I’ll walk with you as far as the drugstore,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve just remembered there’s something I want to get.’

The last words Mrs Bradley said to me were, ‘You will give my love to dear Queen Margherita the next time you see her, won’t you?’

I had given up disclaiming any acquaintance with that august lady and answered glibly that I would be sure to.

When we got into the street Isabel gave me a sidelong smiling glance.

‘D’you think you could drink an ice-cream soda?’ she asked me.

‘I could try,’ I answered prudently.

Isabel did not speak till we reached the drugstore, and I, having nothing to say, said nothing. We went in and sat at a table on chairs with twisted wire backs and twisted wire legs. They were very uncomfortable. I ordered two ice-cream sodas. There were a few people at the counters buying; two or three couples were seated at other tables, but they were busy with their own concerns; and to all intents and purposes we were alone. I lit a cigarette and waited while Isabel with every appearance of satisfaction sucked at a long straw. I had a notion that she was nervous.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she said abruptly.

‘I gathered that,’ I smiled.

For a moment or two she looked at me reflectively.

‘Why did you say that about Larry at the Satterthwaites’ the night before last?’

‘I thought it would interest you. It occurred to me that perhaps you didn’t quite know what his idea of loafing was.’

‘Uncle Elliott’s a terrible gossip. When he said he was going to the Blackstone to have a chat with you I knew he was going to tell you all about everything.’

‘I’ve known him a good many years, you know. He gets a lot of fun out of talking about other people’s business.’

‘He does,’ she smiled. But it was only a gleam. She looked at me steadily and her eyes were serious. ‘What do you think of Larry?’

‘I’ve only seen him three times. He seems a very nice boy.’

‘Is that all?’

There was a note of distress in her voice.

‘No, not quite. It’s hard for me to say; you see, I know him so little. Of course, he’s attractive. There’s something modest and friendly and gentle in him that is very appealing. He’s got a lot of self-possession for so young a man. He isn’t quite like any of the other boys I’ve met here.’

While I was thus fumblingly trying to put into words an impression that was not distinct in my own mind, Isabel looked at me intently. When I had finished she gave a little sigh, as if of relief, and then flashed a charming, almost roguish smile at me.

‘Uncle Elliott says he’s often been surprised at your power of observation. He says nothing much escapes you, but that your great asset as a writer is your common sense.’

‘I can think of a quality that would be more valuable,’ I answered dryly. ‘Talent, for instance.’

‘You know, I have no one to talk this over with. Mamma can only see things from her own point of view. She wants my future to be assured.’

‘That’s natural, isn’t it?’

‘And Uncle Elliott only looks at it from the social side. My own friends, those of my generation, I mean, think Larry’s a washout. It hurts terribly.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s not that they’re not nice to him. One can’t help being nice to Larry. But they look upon him as a joke. They josh him a lot and it exasperates them that he doesn’t seem to care. He only laughs. You know how things are at present?’

‘I only know what Elliott has told me.’

‘May I tell you exactly what happened when we went down to Marvin?’

‘Of course.’

I have reconstructed Isabel’s account partly from my recollection of what she then said to me and partly with the help of my imagination. But it was a long talk that she and Larry had, and I have no doubt that they said a great deal more than I now propose to relate. I suspect that as people do on these occasions they not only said much that was irrelevant, but said the same things over and over again.

When Isabel awoke and saw that it was a fine day she gave Larry a ring and, telling him that her mother wanted her to go to Marvin to do something for her, asked him to drive her down. She took the precaution to add a thermos of martinis to the thermos of coffee her mother had told Eugene to put in the basket. Larry’s roadster was a recent acquisition and he was proud of it. He was a fast driver and the speed at which he went exhilarated them both. When they arrived, Isabel, with Larry to write down the figures, measured the curtains that were to be replaced. Then they set out the luncheon on the stoop. It was sheltered from any wind there was and the sun of the Indian summer was good to bask in. The house, on a dirt road, had none of the elegance of the old frame houses of New England, and the best you could say of it was that it was roomy and comfortable, but from the stoop you had a pleasing view of a great red barn with a black roof, a clump of old trees, and beyond them, as far as the eye could reach, brown fields. It was a dull landscape, but the sunshine and the glowing tints of the waning year gave it that day an intimate loveliness. There was an exhilaration in the great space that was spread before you. Cold, bleak, and dreary as it must have been in winter, dry, sunbaked, and oppressive as it may have been in the dog days, just then it was strangely exciting, for the vastness of the view invited the soul to adventure.

They enjoyed their lunch like the healthy young things they were and they were happy to be together. Isabel poured out the coffee and Larry lit his pipe.

‘Now go right ahead, darling,’ he said, with an amused smile in his eyes.

Isabel was taken aback.

‘Go right ahead about what?’ she asked with as innocent a look as she could assume.

He chuckled.

‘Do you take me for a perfect fool, honey? If your mother didn’t know perfectly well the measurements of the living-room windows I’ll eat my hat. That isn’t why you asked me to drive you down here.’

Recovering her self-assurance, she gave him a brilliant smile.

‘It might be that I thought it would be nice if we spent a day together by ourselves.’

‘It might be, but I don’t think, it is. My guess is that Uncle Elliott has told you that I’ve turned down Henry Maturin’s offer.’

He spoke gaily and lightly and she found it convenient to continue in the same tone.

‘Gray must be terribly disappointed. He thought it would be grand to have you in the office. You must get down to work some time, and the longer you leave it the harder it’ll be.’

He puffed at his pipe and looked at her, tenderly smiling, so that she could not tell if he was serious or not.

‘Do you know, I’ve got an idea that I want to do more with my life than sell bonds.’

‘All right then. Go into a law office or study medicine.’

‘No, I don’t want to do that either.’

‘What do you want to do then?’

‘Loaf,’ he replied calmly.

‘Oh, Larry, don’t be funny. This is desperately serious.’

Her voice quivered and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Don’t cry, darling. I don’t want to make you miserable.’

He went and sat down beside her and put his arm round her. There was a tenderness in his voice that broke her and she could no longer hold back her tears. But she dried her eyes and forced a smile to her lips.

‘It’s all very fine to say you don’t want to make me miserable. You are making me miserable. You see, I love you.’

‘I love you too, Isabel.’

She sighed deeply. Then she disengaged herself from his arm and drew away from him.

‘Let’s be sensible. A man must work, Larry. It’s a matter of self-respect. This is a young country, and it’s a man’s duty to take part in its activities. Henry Maturin was saying only the other day that we were beginning an era that would make the achievements of the past look like two bits. He said he could see no limit to our progress and he’s convinced that by 1930 we shall be the richest and greatest country in the world. Don’t you think that’s terribly exciting?’

‘Terribly.’

‘There’s never been such a chance for a young man. I should have thought you’d be proud to take part in the work that lies before us. It’s such a wonderful adventure.’

He laughed lightly.

‘I dare say you’re right. The Armours and the Swifts will pack more and better meat, the McCormicks will make more and better harvesters, and Henry Ford will turn out more and better cars. And everyone’ll get richer and richer.’

‘And why not?’

‘As you say, and why not? Money just doesn’t happen to interest me.’

Isabel giggled.

‘Darling, don’t talk like a fool. One can’t live without money.’

‘I have a little. That’s what gives me the chance to do what I want.’

‘Loaf?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, smiling.

‘You’re making it so difficult for me, Larry,’ she sighed.

‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t if I could help it.’

‘You can help it.’

He shook his head. He was silent for a while, lost in thought. When at last he spoke it was to say something that startled her.

‘The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.’

‘What do you mean exactly?’ she asked, troubled.

‘Just that.’ He gave her a rueful smile. ‘You have a lot of time to think when you’re up in the air by yourself. You get odd ideas.’

‘What sort of ideas?’

‘Vague,’ he said, smiling. ‘Incoherent. Confused.’

Isabel thought this over for a while.

‘Don’t you think if you took a job they might sort themselves out and you’d know where you were?’

‘I’ve thought of that. I had a notion that I might go to work with a carpenter or in a garage.’

‘Oh, Larry, people would think you were crazy.’

‘Would that matter?’

‘To me, yes.’

Once more silence fell upon them. It was she who broke it. She sighed.

‘You’re so different from what you were before you went out to France.’

‘That’s not strange. A lot happened to me then, you know.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, just the ordinary casual run of events. My greatest friend in the air corps was killed saving my life. I didn’t find that easy to get over.’

‘Tell me, Larry.’

He looked at her with deep distress in his eyes.

‘I’d rather not talk about it. After all, it was only a trivial incident.’

Emotional by nature, Isabel’s eyes again filled with tears.

‘Are you unhappy, darling?’

‘No,’ he answered, smiling. ‘The only thing that makes me unhappy is that I’m making you unhappy.’ He took her hand and there was something so friendly in the feel of his strong firm hand against hers, something so intimately affectionate, that she had to bite her lips to prevent herself from crying. ‘I don’t think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,’ he said gravely. He hesitated. ‘It’s very difficult to put into words. The moment you try to you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: “Who am I that I should bother my head about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it’s only because I’m a conceited prig. Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?” And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.’

It was impossible not to be moved when Larry, with that wonderfully melodious voice of his, spoke, haltingly as though he forced himself to say what he would sooner have left unsaid and yet with such an anguished sincerity; and for a while Isabel did not trust herself to speak.

‘Would it help you if I went away for a bit?’

She put the question with a sinking heart. He took a long time to answer.

‘I think so. You try to be indifferent to public opinion, but it’s not easy. When it’s antagonistic it arouses antagonism in you and that disturbs you.’

‘Why don’t you go then?’

‘Well, on account of you.’

‘Let’s be frank with one another, darling. There’s no place for me in your life just now.’

‘Does that mean you don’t want to be engaged to me any more?’

She forced a smile to her trembling lips.

‘No, foolish, it means I’m prepared to wait.’

‘It may be a year. It may be two.’

‘That’s all right. It may be less. Where’d you want to go?’

He looked at her intently as though he were trying to see into her innermost heart. She smiled lightly to hide her deep distress.

‘Well, I thought I’d start by going to Paris. I know no one there. There’d be no one to interfere with me. I went to Paris several times on leave. I don’t know why, but I’ve got it into my head that there everything that’s muddled in my mind would grow clear. It’s a funny picture, it gives you the feeling that there you can think out your thoughts to the end without let or hindrance. I think there I may be able to see my way before me.’

‘And what’s to happen if you don’t?’

He chuckled.

‘Then I shall fall back on my good American horse sense, give it up as a bad job and come back to Chicago and take any work I can get.’

The scene had affected Isabel too much for her to be able to tell it to me without getting somewhat emotional, and when she finished she looked at me pitifully.

‘Do you think I did right?’

‘I think you did the only thing you could do, but what’s more I think you’ve been wonderfully kind, generous, and understanding.’

‘I love him and I want him to be happy. And you know, in a way I’m not sorry he should go. I want him to be out of this hostile atmosphere, and that not only for his sake, but for mine too. I can’t blame people when they say he’ll never amount to anything; I hate them for it, and yet all the time deep down in me I have an awful fear that they’re right. But don’t say I’m understanding. I don’t begin to understand what he’s after.’

‘Perhaps you understand with your heart rather than with your reason.’ I smiled. ‘Why don’t you marry him right away and go off to Paris with him?’

The shadow of a smile came into her eyes.

‘There’s nothing I’d like to do more. But I couldn’t. And you know, though I hate to acknowledge it, I do really think he’s better off without me. If Dr Nelson is right and he’s suffering from delayed shock surely new surroundings and new interests will cure him, and when he’s got his balance again he’ll come back to Chicago and go into business like everybody else. I wouldn’t want to marry an idler.’

Isabel had been brought up in a certain way and she accepted the principles that had been instilled into her. She did not think of money, because she had never known what it was not to have all she needed, but she was instinctively aware of its importance. It meant power, influence, and social consequence. It was the natural and obvious thing that a man should earn it. That was his plain life’s work.

‘It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t understand Larry,’ I said, ‘because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand himself. If he’s reticent about his aims it may be that it’s because they’re obscure to him. Mind you, I hardly know him and this is only guesswork: isn’t it possible that he’s looking for something, but what it is he doesn’t know, and perhaps he isn’t even sure it’s there? Perhaps whatever it is that happened to him during the war has left him with a restlessness that won’t let him be. Don’t you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing – like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?’

‘I feel that something’s troubling him.’

‘His soul? It may be that he’s a little frightened of himself. It may be that he has no confidence in the authenticity of the vision that he dimly perceives in his mind’s eye.’

‘He gives me such an odd impression sometimes; he gives me the impression of a sleep-walker who’s suddenly wakened in a strange place and can’t think where he is. He was so normal before the war. One of the nice things about him was his enormous zest for life. He was so scatter-brained and gay, it was wonderful to be with him; he was so sweet and ridiculous. What can have happened to change him so much?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Sometimes a very small thing will have an effect on you out of all proportion to the event. It depends on the circumstances and your mood at the time. I remember going to mass on All Saints’ Day, which the French called the Day of the Dead, in a village church that the Germans had knocked about a bit on their first advance into France. It was filled with soldiers and with women in black. In the graveyard were rows of little wooden crosses and as the sad, solemn service went on, and women wept and men too, I had a feeling that perhaps those men who lay under the little crosses were better off than we who lived. I told a friend what I felt and he asked me what I meant. I couldn’t explain and I saw that he thought me a perfect damned fool. And I remember after a battle seeing a pile of dead French soldiers heaped upon one another. They looked like the marionettes in a bankrupt puppet show that had been cast pell-mell into a dusty corner because they were of no use any more. I thought then just what Larry said to you: the dead look so awfully dead.’

I do not want the reader to think I am making a mystery of whatever it was that happened to Larry during the war that so profoundly affected him, a mystery that I shall disclose at a convenient moment. I don’t think he ever told anybody. He did, however, many years later tell a woman, Suzanne Rouvier, whom Larry and I both knew, about the young airman who had met his death saving his life. She repeated it to me and so I can only relate it at second hand. I have translated it from her French. Larry had apparently struck up a great friendship with another boy in his squadron. Suzanne knew him only by the ironical nickname by which Larry spoke of him.

‘He was a little chap with red hair, an Irishman. We used to call him Patsy,’ Larry said, ‘and he had more vitality than anyone I’ve ever known. Gosh, he was a live wire. He had a funny face and a funny grin, so that it made you laugh just to look at him. He was a harum-scarum devil and he’d do the craziest things; he was always getting hell from the higher-ups. He was absolutely without fear and when he’d escaped death by a hair’s breadth he’d grin all over his face as if it was the best joke in the world. But he was a natural-born flyer and up in the air he was cool and wary. He taught me a lot. He was a bit older than me and he took me under his wing; it was rather comic really, because I was a good six inches taller than he was and if it had come to a scrap I could have knocked him out cold. Once in Paris when he was drunk and I was afraid he was going to get into trouble I did.

‘I felt a bit out of it when I joined the squadron and I was afraid I wouldn’t make good, but he just joshed me into having confidence in myself. He was funny about the war, he had no feeling of hatred for the Jerries; he loved a scrap and to fight them tickled him to death. He simply couldn’t look upon bringing down one of their planes as anything but a practical joke. He was impudent and wild and irresponsible, but there was something so genuine about him that you couldn’t help liking him. He’d give you his last penny as freely as he’d take yours. And if you were lonely or homesick or scared, and I was sometimes, he’d see it and with his ugly little face puckered up with laughter he’d say just the right thing to make you feel all right again.’

Larry puffed at his pipe and Suzanne waited for him to go on.

‘We used to wangle it so that we could get our leave together, and when we were in Paris he went wild. We had a grand time. We were due for a spot of leave early in March, in ‘eighteen that was, and we made our plans beforehand. There wasn’t a thing we weren’t going to do. The day before we were to go we were sent up to fly over the enemy lines and bring back reports of what we saw. Suddenly we came bang up against some German planes, and before we knew where we were we were in the middle of a dogfight. One of them came after me, but I got in first. I took a look to see if he was going to crash and then out of the corner of my eye I saw another plane on my tail. I dived to get away from him, but he was on to me like a flash and I thought I was done for; then I saw Patsy come down on him like a streak of lightning and give him all he’d got. They’d had enough and sheered off and we made for home. My machine had got pretty well knocked about and I only just made it. Patsy got in before me. When I got out of my plane they’d just got him out of his. He was lying on the ground and they were waiting for the ambulance to come up. When he saw me he grinned.

‘“I got that blighter who was on your tail,” he said.

‘“What’s the matter, Patsy?” I asked.

‘“Oh, it’s nothing. He winged me.”

‘He was looking deathly white. Suddenly a strange look came over his face. It had just come to him that he was dying, and the possibility of death had never so much as crossed his mind. Before they could stop him he sat up and gave a laugh.

‘“Well I’m jiggered,” he said.

‘He fell back dead. He was twenty-two. He was going to marry a girl in Ireland after the war.’

The day after my talk with Isabel I left Chicago for San Francisco, where I was to take ship for the Far East.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 1

I DID NOT see Elliott till he came to London towards the end of June in the following year. I asked him whether Larry had after all gone to Paris. He had. I was faintly amused at Elliott’s exasperation with him.

‘I had a kind of sneaking sympathy for the boy. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to spend a couple of years in Paris and I was prepared to launch him. I told him to let me know the moment he arrived, but it was only when Louisa wrote and told me he was there that I knew he’d come. I wrote to him care of the American Express, which was the address she gave me, and asked him to come and dine to meet some of the people I thought he ought to know; I thought I’d try him out first with the Franco-American set, Emily de Montadour and Gracie de Château-Gaillard and so on, and d’you know what he answered? He said he was sorry he couldn’t come, but he hadn’t brought any evening clothes with him.’

Elliott looked me full in the face to see the stupefaction with which he expected this communication to fill me. He raised a supercilious eyebrow when he observed that I took it with calm.

‘He replied to my letter on a sheet of nasty paper with the heading of a café in the Latin Quarter and when I wrote back I asked him to let me know where he was staying. I felt I must do something about him for Isabel’s sake, and I thought perhaps he was shy – I mean I couldn’t believe that any young fellow in his senses could come to Paris without evening clothes, and in any case there are tolerable tailors there, so I asked him to lunch and said it would be quite a small party, and would you believe it, not only did he ignore my request to give me some other address than the American Express, but he said he never ate luncheon. That finished him as far as I was concerned.’

‘I wonder what he’s been doing with himself.’

‘I don’t know, and to tell you the truth I don’t care. I’m afraid he’s a thoroughly undesirable young man and I think it would be a great mistake for Isabel to marry him. After all, if he led a normal sort of life I’d have run across him at the Ritz bar or at Fouquet’s or somewhere.’

I go sometimes to these fashionable places myself, but I go to others also, and it happened that I spent several days in Paris early in the autumn of that year on my way to Marseilles, where I was proposing to take one of the Messagerie ships for Singapore. I dined one evening with friends in Montparnasse and after dinner we went to the Dôme to drink a glass of beer. Presently my wandering eye caught sight of Larry sitting by himself at a little marble-topped table on the crowded terrace. He was looking idly at the people who strolled up and down enjoying the coolness of the night after a sultry day. I left my party and went up to him. His face lit up when he saw me and he gave me an engaging smile. He asked me to sit down, but I said I couldn’t as I was with a party.

‘I just wanted to say how d’you do to you,’ I said.

‘Are you staying here?’ he asked.

‘Only for a very few days.’

‘Will you lunch with me tomorrow?’

‘I thought you never lunched.’

He chuckled.

‘You’ve seen Elliott. I don’t generally. I can’t afford the time, I just have a glass of milk and a brioche, but I’d like you to lunch with me.’

‘All right.’

We arranged to meet at the Dôme next day to have an aperitif and eat at some place on the boulevard. I rejoined my friends. We sat on talking. When next I looked for Larry he had gone.

CHAPTER 2

I spent the next morning very pleasantly. I went to the Luxembourg and passed an hour looking at some pictures I liked. Then I strolled in the gardens, recapturing the memories of my youth. Nothing had changed. They might have been the same students who walked along the gravel paths in pairs, eagerly discussing the writers who excited them. They might have been the same children who trundled the same hoops under the watchful eyes of the same nurses. They might have been the same old men who basked in the sunshine, reading the morning paper. They might have been the same middle-aged women in mourning who sat on the free benches and gossiped with one another about the price of food and the misdeeds of servants. Then I went to the Odéon and looked at the new books in the galleries and I saw the lads who like myself thirty years before were trying under the petulant eyes of the smock-frocked attendants to read as much as they could of books they could not afford to buy. Then I strolled leisurely along those dear, dingy streets till I came to the Boulevard du Montparnasse and so to the Dôme. Larry was waiting. We had a drink and walked along to a restaurant where he could lunch in the open air.

He was perhaps a little paler than I remembered him and this made his very dark eyes, in their deep orbits, more striking; but he had the same self-possession, curious in one so young, and the same ingenuous smile. When he ordered his lunch I noticed that he spoke French fluently and with a good accent. I congratulated him on it.

‘I knew a certain amount of French before, you know,’ he explained. ‘Aunt Louisa had a french governess for Isabel, and when they were at Marvin she used to make us talk French with her all the time.’

I asked him how he liked Paris.

‘Very much.’

‘D’you live in Montparnasse?’

‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment’s hesitation which I interpreted into a disinclination to tell exactly where he lived.

‘Elliott was rather put out that the only address you gave was the American Express.’

Larry smiled but did not answer.

‘What do you do with yourself all the time?’

‘I loaf.’

‘And you read?’

‘Yes, I read.’

‘Do you ever hear from Isabel?’

‘Sometimes. We’re neither of us great letter-writers. She’s having a grand time in Chicago. They’re coming over next year to stay with Elliott.’

‘That’ll be nice for you.’

‘I don’t believe Isabel’s ever been to Paris. It’ll be fun taking her around.’

He was curious to know about my journey in China and listened attentively to what I told him; but when I tried to get him to talk about himself, I failed. He was so uncommunicative that I was forced to the conclusion that he had asked me to lunch with him merely to enjoy my company. I was pleased, but baffled. We had no sooner finished our coffee than he called for the bill, paid it, and got up.

‘Well, I must be off,’ he said.

We parted. I knew no more of what he was up to than before. I did not see him again.

CHAPTER 3

I was not in Paris in the spring when, sooner than they had planned, Mrs Bradley and Isabel arrived to stay with Elliott; and again I have to eke out my knowledge of what passed during the few weeks they spent there by the exercise of my imagination. They landed at Cherbourg, and Elliott, always considerate, went to meet them. They passed through the customs. The train started. Elliott with some complacency told them that he had engaged a very good lady’s maid to look after them and when Mrs Bradley said that was quite unnecessary, since they didn’t need one, he was very sharp with her.

‘Don’t be tiresome the moment you arrive, Louisa. No one can be well turned out without a maid, and I’ve engaged Antoinette not only for your sake and Isabel’s but for mine. It would mortify me that you shouldn’t be perfectly dressed.’

He gave the clothes they were wearing a disparaging glance.

‘Of course you’ll want to buy some new frocks. On mature consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t do better than Chanel.’

‘I always used to go to Worth,’ said Mrs Bradley.

She might as well not have spoken, for he took no notice.

‘I’ve talked to Chanel myself and I’ve made an appointment for you tomorrow at three. Then there are hats. Obviously Reboux.’

‘I don’t want to spend a lot of money, Elliott.’

‘I know. I am proposing to pay for everything myself. I’m determined that you shall be a credit to me. Oh, and Louisa, I’ve arranged several parties for you and I’ve told my French friends that Myron was an ambassador, which, of course, he would have been if he’d lived a little longer, and it makes a better effect. I don’t suppose it’ll come up, but I thought I’d better warn you.’

‘You’re ridiculous, Elliott.’

‘No, I’m not. I know the world. I know that the widow of an ambassador has more prestige than the widow of a minister.’

As the train steamed into the Gare du Nord, Isabel, who was standing at the window, called out:

‘There’s Larry.’

It had hardly stopped when she sprang out and ran to meet him. He threw his arms around her.

‘How did he know you were coming?’ Elliott asked his sister acidly.

‘Isabel wirelessed him from the ship.’

Mrs Bradley kissed him affectionately, and Elliott gave him a limp hand to shake. It was ten o’clock at night.

‘Uncle Elliott, can Larry come to lunch tomorrow?’ cried Isabel, her arm in the young man’s, her face eager and her eyes shining.

‘I should be charmed, but Larry has given me to understand that he doesn’t eat lunch.’

‘He will tomorrow, won’t you, Larry?’

‘I will,’ he smiled.

‘I shall look forward to seeing you at one o’clock then.’

He stretched out his hand once more, intending to dismiss him, but Larry grinned at him impudently.

‘I’ll help with the luggage and get a cab for you.’

‘My car is waiting and my man will see to the luggage,’ said Elliott with dignity.

‘That’s fine. Then all we’ve got to do is to go. If there’s room for me I’ll come as far as your door with you.’

‘Yes, do, Larry,’ said Isabel.

They walked down the platform together, followed by Mrs Bradley and Elliott. Elliott’s face bore a look of frigid disapproval.

‘Quelles manières,’ he said to himself, for in certain circumstances he felt he could express his sentiments more forcibly in French.

Next morning at eleven, having finished dressing, for he was not an early riser, he sent a note to his sister, via his man Joseph and her maid Antoinette, to ask her to come to the library so that they could have a talk. When she appeared he closed the door carefully and, putting a cigarette into an immensely long agate holder, lit it and sat down.

‘Am I to understand that Isabel and Larry are still engaged?’ he asked.

‘So far as I know.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t a very good account to give you of the young man.’ He told her then how he had been prepared to launch him in society and the plans he had made to establish him in a fit and proper manner. ‘I even had my eye on a rez-de-chaussée that would have been the very thing for him. It belongs to the young Marquis de Rethel and he wanted to sublet it because he’d been appointed to the embassy at Madrid.’

But Larry had refused his invitations in a manner that made it quite clear that he did not want his help.

‘What the object of coming to Paris is if you’re not going to take advantage of what Paris has to give you is beyond my comprehension. I don’t know what he does with himself. He doesn’t seem to know anybody. Do you know where he lives?’

‘The only address we’ve ever had is the American Express.’

‘Like a travelling salesman or a school-teacher on vacation. I shouldn’t be surprised if he was living with some little trollop in a studio in Montmartre.’

‘Oh, Elliott.’

‘What other explanation can there be for the mystery he’s making of his dwelling place and for his refusal to consort with people of his own class?’

‘It doesn’t sound like Larry. And last night, didn’t you get the impression that he was just as much in love with Isabel as ever? He couldn’t be so false.’

Elliott by a shrug of the shoulders gave her to understand that there was no limit to the duplicity of men.

‘What about Gray Maturin? Is he still in the picture?’

‘He’d marry Isabel tomorrow if she’d have him.’

Mrs Bradley told him then why they had come to Europe sooner than they had at first intended. She had found herself in ill-health, and the doctors had informed her that she was suffering from diabetes. It was not serious, and by attention to her diet and taking moderate doses of insulin there was no reason why she should not live for a good many years, but the knowledge that she had an incurable disease made her anxious to see Isabel settled. They had talked the matter over. Isabel was sensible. She had agreed that if Larry refused to come back to Chicago at the end of the two years in Paris they had agreed upon and get a job, there was only one thing to do and that was to break with him. But it offended Mrs Bradley’s sense of personal dignity that they should wait till the appointed time and then come to fetch him, like a fugitive from justice, back to his own country. She felt that Isabel would put herself in a humiliating position. But it was very natural that they should spend the summer in Europe, where Isabel had not been since she was a child. After their visit in Paris they could go to some watering-place suitable to Mrs Bradley’s complaint, then on to the Austrian Tyrol for a while and from there travel slowly through Italy. Mrs Bradley’s intention was to ask Larry to accompany them, so that he and Isabel could see whether the long separation had left their feelings unchanged. It would be manifest in due course whether Larry, having had his fling, was prepared to accept the responsibilities of life.

‘Henry Maturin was sore with him for turning down the position he offered him, but Gray has talked him round, and he can go into the business the moment he comes back to Chicago.’

‘Gray’s a very nice fellow.’

‘He certainly is.’ Mrs Bradley sighed. ‘I know he’d make Isabel happy.’

Elliott then told her what parties he had arranged for them. He was giving a big luncheon on the following day and at the end of the week a grand dinner party. He was taking them to a reception at the Chãteau-Gaillards and he had got cards for them to a ball that the Rothschilds were giving.

‘You’ll ask Larry, won’t you?’

‘He tells me he hasn’t any evening clothes,’ Elliott sniffed.

‘Well, ask him all the same. After all, he is a nice boy, and it wouldn’t help to give him the cold shoulder. It would only make Isabel obstinate.’

‘Of course I’ll ask him if you wish it.’

Larry came to lunch at the appointed time, and Elliott, whose manners were admirable, was pointedly cordial to him. It was not difficult, since Larry was so gay, in such high spirits that it would have needed a much more ill-natured man than Elliott not to be charmed with him. The conversation dealt with Chicago and their common friends there, so that there was not much for Elliott to do other than to look amiable and pretend to be interested in the concerns of persons whom he thought of no social consequence. He did not mind listening; indeed, he thought it rather touching to hear them tell of this young couple’s engagement, that young couple’s marriage, and another young couple’s divorce. Who had ever heard of them? He knew that the pretty little Marquise de Clinchant had tried to poison herself because her lover, the Prince de Colombey, had left her to marry the daughter of a South American millionaire. That was something to talk about. Looking at Larry, he was obliged to admit that there was something peculiarly attractive in him; with his deep-set strangely black eyes, his high cheekbones, pale skin, and mobile mouth he reminded Elliott of a portrait by Botticelli, and it occurred to him that if he were dressed in the costume of the period he would look extravagantly romantic. He remembered his notion of getting him off with a distinguished Frenchwoman and he smiled slyly on reflecting that he was expecting at dinner on Saturday Marie Louise de Florimond, who combined irreproachable connexions with notorious immorality. She was forty, but looked ten years younger; she had the delicate beauty of her ancestress painted by Nattier which, owing to Elliott himself, now hung in one of the great American collections; and her sexual voracity was insatiable. Elliott decided to put Larry next to her. He knew she would waste no time in making her desires clear to him. He had already invited a young attaché at the British embassy whom he thought Isabel might like. Isabel was very pretty, and as he was an Englishman, and well off, it wouldn’t matter that she had no fortune. Mellowed by the excellent Montrachet with which they had started lunch and by the fine Bordeaux that followed, Elliott thought with tranquil pleasure of the possibilities that presented themselves to his mind. If things turned out as he thought they very well might, dear Louisa would have no more cause for anxiety. She had always slightly disapproved of him; poor dear, she was very provincial; but he was fond of her. It would be a satisfaction to him to arrange everything for her by help of his knowledge of the world.

To waste no time, Elliott had arranged to take his ladies to look at clothes immediately after lunch, so as they got up from table he intimated to Larry with the tact of which he was a master that he must make himself scarce, but at the same time he asked him with pressing affability to come to the two grand parties he had arranged. He need hardly have taken so much trouble, since Larry accepted both invitations with alacrity.

But Elliott’s plan failed. He was relieved when Larry appeared at the dinner party in a very presentable dinner-jacket, for he had been a little nervous that he would wear the same blue suit that he had worn at lunch; and after dinner, getting Marie Louise de Florimond into a corner, he asked her how she had liked his young American friend.

‘He has nice eyes and good teeth.’

‘Is that all? I put you beside him because I thought he was just your cup of tea.’

She looked at him suspiciously.

‘He told me he was engaged to your pretty niece.’

‘Voyons, ma chère, the fact that a man belongs to another woman has never prevented you from taking him away from her if you could.’

‘Is that what you want me to do? Well, I’m not going to do your dirty work for you, my poor Elliott.’

Elliott chuckled.

‘The meaning of that, I presume, is that you tried your stuff and found there was nothing doing.’

‘Why I like you, Elliott, is that you have the morals of a bawdy-house keeper. You don’t want him to marry your niece. Why not? He is well bred and quite charming. But he’s really too innocent. I don’t think he had the least suspicion of what I meant.’

‘You should have been more explicit, dear friend.’

‘I have enough experience to know when I’m wasting my time. The fact is that he has eyes only for your little Isabel, and between you and me, she has twenty years advantage over me. And she’s sweet.’

‘Do you like her dress? I chose it for her myself.’

‘It’s pretty and it’s suitable. But of course she has no chic.’

Elliott took this as a reflection on himself, and he was not prepared to let Madame de Florimond get away without a dig. He smiled genially.

‘One has to have reached your ripe maturity to have your chic, dear friend,’ he said.

Madame de Florimond wielded a bludgeon rather than a rapier. Her retort made Elliott’s Virginian blood boil.

‘But I’m sure that in your fair land of gangsters [votre beau pays d’apaches] they will hardly miss something that is so subtle and so inimitable.’

But if Madame de Florimond carped, the rest of Elliott’s friends were delighted both with Isabel and with Larry. They liked her fresh prettiness, her abounding health, and her vitality; they liked his picturesque appearance, his good manners, and his quiet, ironic humour. Both had the advantage of speaking good and fluent French. Mrs Bradley, after living so many years in diplomatic circles, spoke it correctly enough but with an unabashed American accent. Elliott entertained them lavishly. Isabel, pleased with her new clothes and her new hats, amused by all the gaiety Elliott provided, and happy to be with Larry, thought she had never enjoyed herself so much.

CHAPTER 4

Elliott was of opinion that breakfast was a meal that you should share only with total strangers, and then only if there was no help for it, so Mrs Bradley, somewhat against her will, and Isabel, far from displeased, were obliged to have theirs in their bedrooms. But Isabel, when she awoke, sometimes told Antoinette, the grand maid Elliott had engaged for them, to take her café au lait into her mother’s room so that she could talk to her while she had it. In the busy life she led it was the only moment of the day in which she could be alone with her. One such morning, when they had been in Paris nearly a month, after Isabel had done narrating the events of the previous night, most of which she and Larry had spent going the rounds of the night clubs with a party of friends, Mrs Bradley let fall the question she had had in mind to ask ever since their arrival.

‘When is he coming back to Chicago?’

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t spoken of it.’

‘Haven’t you asked him?’

‘No.’

‘Are you scared to?’

‘No, of course not.’

Mrs Bradley, lying on a chaise longue, in a modish dressing-gown that Elliott had insisted on giving her, was polishing her nails.

‘What do you talk about all the time when you’re alone?’

‘We don’t talk all the time. It’s nice to be together. You know, Larry was always rather silent. When we talk I think I do most of the talking.’

‘What has he been doing with himself?’

‘I don’t really know. I don’t think anything very much. I suppose he’s been having a good time.’

‘And where is he living?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘He seems very reticent, doesn’t he?’

Isabel lit a cigarette and, as she blew a cloud of smoke from her nostrils, looked coolly at her mother.

‘What exactly do you mean by that, Mamma?’

‘Your uncle Elliott thinks he has an apartment and is living there with a woman.’

Isabel burst out laughing.

‘You don’t believe that, do you?’

‘No. I honestly don’t.’ Mrs Bradley looked reflectively at her nails. ‘Don’t you ever talk to him about Chicago?’

‘Yes, a lot.’

‘Hasn’t he given any sort of indication that he intends to come back?’

‘I can’t say he has.’

‘He will have been gone two years next October.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, it’s your business, dear, and you must do what you think right. But things don’t get any easier by putting them off.’ She glanced at her daughter, but Isabel would not meet her eyes. Mrs Bradley gave her an affectionate smile. ‘If you don’t want to be late for lunch you’d better go and have your bath.’

‘I’m lunching with Larry. We’re going to some place in the Latin Quarter.’

‘Enjoy yourself.’

An hour later Larry came to fetch her. They took a cab to the Pont St Michel and sauntered up the crowded boulevard till they came to a café they liked the look of. They sat down on the terrace and ordered a couple of Dubonnets. Then they took another cab and went to a restaurant. Isabel had a healthy appetite and she enjoyed the good things Larry ordered for her. She enjoyed looking at the people sitting cheek by jowl with them, for the place was packed, and it made her laugh to see the intense pleasure they so obviously took in their food; but she enjoyed above all sitting at a tiny table alone with Larry. She loved the amusement in his eyes while she chattered away gaily It was enchanting to feel so much at home with him. But at the back of her mind was a vague disquiet, for though he seemed very much at home too, she felt it was not so much with her as with the surroundings. She had been faintly disturbed by what her mother had said, and though seeming to prattle so guilelessly she observed his every expression. He was not quite the same as when he had left Chicago, but she couldn’t tell in what the difference lay. He looked exactly as she remembered him, as young, as frank, but his expression was changed. It was not that he was more serious, his face in repose had always been serious, it had a calmness that was new to her; it was as though he had settled something with himself and were at ease in a way he had never been before.

When they had finished lunch he suggested that they should take a stroll through the Luxembourg.

‘No, I don’t want to go and look at pictures.’

‘All right then, let’s go and sit in the gardens.’

‘No, I don’t want to do that either. I want to go and see where you live.’

‘There’s nothing to see. I live in a scrubby little room in a hotel.’

‘Uncle Elliott says you’ve got an apartment and are living in sin with an artist’s model.’

‘Come on then and see for yourself,’ he laughed. ‘It’s only a step from here. We can walk.’

He took her through narrow, tortuous streets, dingy notwithstanding the streak of blue sky that showed between the high houses, and after a while stopped at a small hotel with a pretentious façade.

‘Here we are.’

Isabel followed him into a narrow hall, on one side of which was a desk and behind it a man in shirt-sleeves, with a waistcoat in thin black and yellow stripes and a dirty apron, reading a paper. Larry asked for his key, and the man handed it to him from the rack immediately behind him. He gave Isabel an inquisitive glance that turned into a knowing smirk. It was clear that he thought she was going to Larry’s room for no honest purpose.

They climbed up two flights of stairs, on which was a threadbare red carpet, and Larry unlocked his door. Isabel entered a smallish room with two windows. They looked out on the grey apartment house opposite, on the ground floor of which was a stationer’s shop. There was a single bed in the room, with a night table beside it, a heavy wardrobe with a large mirror, an upholstered but straight-backed armchair, and a table between the windows on which were a typewriter, papers, and a number of books. The chimney-piece was piled with paper-bound volumes.

‘You sit in the armchair. It’s not very comfortable, but it’s the best I can offer.’

He drew up another chair and sat down.

‘Is this where you live?’ asked Isabel.

He chuckled at the look on her face.

‘It is. I’ve been here ever since I came to Paris.’

‘But why?’

‘It’s convenient. It’s near the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Sorbonne.’ He pointed to a door she had not noticed. ‘It’s got a bathroom. I can get breakfast here and I generally dine at that restaurant where we had lunch.’

‘It’s awfully sordid.’

‘Oh no, it’s all right. It’s all I want.’

‘But what sort of people live here?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Up in the attics a few students. Two or three old bachelors in government offices and a retired actress at the Odéon; the only other room with a bath is occupied by a kept woman whose gentleman friend comes to see her every other Thursday; I suppose a few transients. It’s a very quiet and respectable place.’

Isabel was a trifle disconcerted and because she knew Larry noticed it and was amused she was half inclined to take offence.

‘What’s that great big book on the table?’ she asked.

‘That? Oh, that’s my Greek dictionary.’

‘Your what?’ she cried.

‘It’s all right. It won’t bite you.’

‘Are you learning Greek?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought I’d like to.’

He was looking at her with a smile in his eyes and she smiled back at him.

‘Don’t you think you might tell me what you’ve been up to all the time you’ve been in Paris?’

‘I’ve been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I’ve attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I’ve read everything that’s important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as easily as I can read French. Of course Greek’s more difficult. But I have a very good teacher. Until you came here I used to go to him three evenings a week.’

‘And what is that going to lead to?’

‘The acquisition of knowledge,’ he smiled.

‘It doesn’t sound very practical.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t and on the other hand perhaps it is. But it’s enormous fun. You can’t imagine what a thrill it is to read the Odyssey in the original. It makes you feel as if you had only to get on tiptoe and stretch out your hands to touch the stars.’

He got up from his chair, as though impelled by an excitement that seized him, and walked up and down the small room.

‘I’ve been reading Spinoza the last month or two. I don’t suppose I understand very much of it yet, but it fills me with exultation. It’s like landing from your plane on a great plateau in the mountains. Solitude, and an air so pure that it goes to your head like wine and you feel like a million dollars.’

‘When are you coming back to Chicago?’

‘Chicago? I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it.’

‘You said that if you hadn’t got what you wanted after two years you’d give it up as a bad job.’

‘I couldn’t go back now. I’m on the threshold. I see vast lands of the spirit stretching out before me, beckoning, and I’m eager to travel them.’

‘What do you expect to find in them?’

‘The answers to my questions.’ He gave her a glance that was almost playful, so that except that she knew him so well, she might have thought he was speaking in jest. ‘I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.’

Isabel gave a little gasp. It made her uncomfortable to hear Larry say such things, and she was thankful that he spoke so lightly, in the tone of ordinary conversation, that it was possible for her to overcome her embarrassment.

‘But Larry,’ she smiled. ‘People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now.’

Larry chuckled.

‘Don’t laugh as if I’d said something idiotic,’ she said sharply.

‘On the contrary I think you’ve said something shrewd. But on the other hand you might say that if men have been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them. Besides, it’s not true that no one has found the answers. There are more answers than questions, and lots of people have found answers that were perfectly satisfactory for them. Old Ruysbroek for instance.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Oh, just a guy I didn’t know at college,’ Larry answered flippantly.

Isabel didn’t know what he meant, but passed on.

‘It all sounds so adolescent to me. Those are the sort of things sophomores get excited about and then when they leave college they forget about them. They have to earn a living.’

‘I don’t blame them. You see, I’m in the happy position that I have enough to live on. If I hadn’t I’d have had to do like everybody else and make money.’

‘But doesn’t money mean anything to you?’

‘Not a thing,’ he grinned.

‘How long d’you think all this is going to take you?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Five years. Ten years.’

‘And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?’

‘If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.’

Isabel clasped her hands passionately and leant forwards in her chair.

‘You’re so wrong, Larry. You’re an American. Your place isn’t here. Your place is in America.’

‘I shall come back when I’m ready.’

‘But you’re missing so much, How can you bear to sit here in a backwater just when we’re living through the most wonderful adventure the world has ever known? Europe’s finished. We’re the greatest, the most powerful people in the world. We’re going forward by leaps and bounds. We’ve got everything. It’s your duty to take part in the development of your country. You’ve forgotten, you don’t know how thrilling life is in America today. Are you sure you’re not doing this because you haven’t the courage to stand up to the work that’s before every American now? Oh, I know you’re working in a way, but isn’t it just an escape from your responsibilities? Is it more than just a sort of laborious idleness? What would happen to America if everyone shirked as you’re shirking?’

‘You’re very severe, honey,’ he smiled. ‘The answer to that is that everyone doesn’t feel like me. Fortunately for themselves, perhaps, most people are prepared to follow the normal course; what you forget is that I want to learn as passionately as – Gray, for instance, wants to make pots of money. Am I really a traitor to my country because I want to spend a few years educating myself? It may be that when I’m through I shall have something to give that people will be glad to take. It’s only a chance, of course, but if I fail I shall be no worse off than a man who’s gone into business and hasn’t made a go of it.’

‘And what about me? Am I of no importance to you at all?’

‘You’re of very great importance. I want you to marry me.’

‘When? In ten years?’

‘No. Now. As soon as possible.’

‘On what? Mamma can’t afford to give me anything. Besides, she wouldn’t if she could. She’d think it wrong to help you to live without doing anything.’

‘I wouldn’t want to take anything from your mother,’ said Larry. ‘I’ve got three thousand a year. That’s plenty in Paris. We could have a little apartment and a bonne à tout faire. We’d have such a lark, darling.’

‘But, Larry, one can’t live on three thousand a year.’

‘Of course one can. Lots of people live on much less.’

‘But I don’t want to live on three thousand a year. There’s no reason why I should.’

‘I’ve been living on half that.’

‘But how!’

She looked at the dingy little room with a shudder of distaste.

‘It means I’ve got a bit saved up. We could go down to Capri for our honeymoon and then in the fall we’d go to Greece. I’m crazy to go there. Don’t you remember how we used to talk about travelling all over the world together?’

‘Of course I want to travel. But not like that. I don’t want to travel second-class on steamships and put up at third-rate hotels, without a bathroom, and eat at cheap restaurants.’

‘I went all through Italy last October like that. I had a wonderful time. We could travel all over the world on three thousand a year.’

‘But I want to have babies, Larry.’

‘That’s all right. We’ll take them along with us.’

‘You’re so silly,’ she laughed. ‘D ‘you know what it costs to have a baby? Violet Tomlinson had one last year and she did it as cheaply as she could and it cost her twelve hundred and fifty. And what d’you think a nurse costs?’ She grew more vehement as one idea after another occurred to her. ‘You’re so impractical. You don’t know what you’re asking me to do. I’m young, I want to have fun. I want to do all the things that people do. I want to go to parties, I want to go to dances, I want to play golf and ride horseback. I want to wear nice clothes. Can’t you imagine what it means to a girl not to be as well dressed as the rest of her crowd? D’you know what it means, Larry, to buy your friends’ old dresses when they’re sick of them and be thankful when someone out of pity makes you a present of a new one? I couldn’t even afford to go to a decent hairdresser to have my hair properly done. I don’t want to go about in street-cars and omnibuses; I want to have my own car. And what d’you suppose I’d find to do with myself all day long while you were reading at the Library? Walk about the streets window-shopping or sit in the Luxembourg Garden seeing that my children didn’t get into mischief? We wouldn’t have any friends.’

‘Oh, Isabel,’ he interrupted.

‘Not the sort of friends I’m used to. Oh yes, Uncle Elliott’s friends would ask us now and then for his sake, but we couldn’t go because I wouldn’t have the clothes to go in, and we wouldn’t go because we couldn’t afford to return their hospitality. I don’t want to know a lot of scrubby, unwashed people; I’ve got nothing to say to them and they’ve got nothing to say to me. I want to live, Larry.’ She grew suddenly conscious of the look in his eyes, tender as it always was when fixed on her, but gently amused. ‘You think I’m silly, don’t you? You think I’m being trivial and horrid.’

‘No, I don’t. I think what you say is very natural.’

He was standing with his back to the fireplace, and she got up and went up to him so that they were face to face.

‘Larry, if you hadn’t a cent to your name and got a job that brought you in three thousand a year I’d marry you without a minute’s hesitation. I’d cook for you, I’d make the beds, I wouldn’t care what I wore, I’d go without anything, I’d look upon it as wonderful fun, because I’d know that it was only a question of time and you’d make good. But this means living in a sordid beastly way all our lives with nothing to look forward to. It means that I should be a drudge to the day of my death. And for what? So that you can spend years trying to find answers to questions that you say yourself are insoluble. It’s so wrong. A man ought to work. That’s what he’s here for. That’s how he contributes to the welfare of the community.’

‘In short it’s his duty to settle down in Chicago and enter Henry Maturin’s business. Do you think that by getting my friends to buy the securities that Henry Maturin is interested in I should add greatly to the welfare of the community?’

‘There must be brokers and it’s a perfectly decent and honourable way of earning a living.’

‘You’ve drawn a very black picture of life in Paris on a moderate income. You know, it isn’t really like that. One can dress very nicely without going to Chanel. And all the interesting people don’t live in the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe and the Avenue Foch. In fact few interesting people do, because interesting people generally don’t have a lot of money. I know quite a number of people here, painters and writers and students, French, English, American, and what not, whom I think you’d find much more amusing than Elliott’s seedy marquises and long-nosed duchesses. You’ve got a quick mind and a lively sense of humour. You’d enjoy hearing them swap ideas across the dinner table even though the wine was only vin ordinaire and you didn’t have a butler and a couple of footmen to wait on you.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Larry. Of course I would. You know I’m not a snob. I’d love to meet interesting people.’

‘Yes, in a Chanel dress. D’you think they wouldn’t catch on to it that you looked upon it as a sort of cultured slumming? They wouldn’t be at their ease, any more than you would, and you wouldn’t get anything out of it except to tell Emily de Montadour and Gracie de Château-Gaillard afterwards what fun you’d had meeting a lot of weird bohemians in the Latin Quarter.’

Isabel slightly shrugged her shoulders.

‘I dare say you’re right. They’re not the sort of people I’ve been brought up with. They’re not the sort of people I have anything in common with.’

‘Where does that leave us?’

‘Just where we started. I’ve lived in Chicago ever since I can remember. All my friends are there. All my interests are there. I’m at home there. It’s where I belong and it’s where you belong. Mamma’s ill and she’s never going to get any better. I couldn’t leave her even if I wanted to.’

‘Does that mean that unless I’m prepared to come back to Chicago you don’t want to marry me?’

Isabel hesitated. She loved Larry. She wanted to marry him. She wanted him with all the power of her senses. She knew that he desired her. She couldn’t believe that when it came to a showdown he wouldn’t weaken. She was afraid, but she had to risk it.

‘Yes, Larry, that’s just what it does mean.’

He struck a match on the chimney-piece, one of those old-fashioned French sulphur matches that fill your nostrils with an acrid odour, and lit his pipe. Then, passing her, he went over and stood by one of the windows. He looked out. He was silent for what seemed an endless time. She stood as she had stood before, when she was facing him, and looked in the mirror over the chimney-piece, but she did not see herself. Her heart was beating madly and she was sick with apprehension. He turned at last.

‘I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You’re intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t exchange it for all the power and glory in the world. I was reading Descartes the other day. The ease, the grace, the lucidity. Gosh!’

‘But Larry,’ she interrupted him desperately, ‘don’t you see you’re asking something of me that I’m not fitted for, that I’m not interested in and don’t want to be interested in? How often have I got to repeat to you that I’m just an ordinary, normal girl. I’m twenty, in ten years I shall be old, I want to have a good time while I have the chance. Oh, Larry, I do love you so terribly. All this is just trifling. It’s not going to lead you anywhere. For your own sake I beseech you to give it up. Be a man, Larry, and do a man’s work. You’re just wasting the precious years that others are doing so much with. Larry, if you love me you won’t give me up for a dream. You’ve had your fling. Come back with us to America.’

‘I can’t, darling. It would be death to me. It would be the betrayal of my soul.’

‘Oh, Larry, why d’you talk in that way? That’s the way hysterical, highbrow women talk. What does it mean? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’

‘It happens to mean exactly what I feel,’ he answered, his eyes twinkling.

‘How can you laugh? Don’t you realize this is desperately serious? We’ve come to the cross-roads and what we do now is going to affect our whole lives.’

‘I know that. Believe me, I’m perfectly serious.’

She sighed.

‘If you won’t listen to reason there’s nothing more to be said.’

‘But I don’t think it’s reason. I think you’ve been talking the most terrible nonsense all the time.’

‘I?’ If she hadn’t been so miserable she would have laughed. ‘My poor Larry, you’re as crazy as a coot.’

She slowly slipped her engagement ring off her finger. She placed it on the palm of her hand and looked at it. It was a square-cut ruby set in a thin platinum band and she had always liked it.

‘If you loved me you wouldn’t make me so unhappy.’

‘I do love you. Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.’

She stretched out her hand on which the ruby was resting and forced a smile to her trembling lips.

‘Here you are, Larry.’

‘It’s no good to me. Won’t you keep it as a memento of our friendship? You can wear it on your little finger. Our friendship needn’t stop, need it?’

‘I shall always care for you, Larry.’

‘Then keep it. I should like you to.’

She hesitated for an instant, then put it on the finger of her right hand.

‘It’s too large.’

‘You can have it altered. Let’s go to the Ritz bar and have a drink.’

‘All right.’

She was a trifle taken aback that it had all gone so easily. She had not cried. Nothing seemed to be changed except that now she wasn’t going to marry Larry. She could hardly believe that everything was over and done with. She resented a little the fact that they hadn’t had a terrific scene. They had talked it all over almost as coolly as though they had been discussing the taking a house. She felt let down, but at the same time was conscious of a slight sense of satisfaction because they had behaved in such a civilized way. She would have given a lot to know exactly what Larry was feeling. But it was always difficult to know that; his smooth face, his dark eyes were a mask that she was aware even she, who had known him for so many years, could not penetrate. She had taken off her hat and laid it on the bed. Now, standing before the mirror, she put it on again.

‘Just as a matter of interest,’ she said, arranging her hair, ‘did you want to break our engagement?’

‘No.’

‘I thought it might be a relief to you.’ He made no reply. She turned round with a gay smile on her lips. ‘Now I’m ready.’

Larry locked the door behind him. When he handed the key to the man at the desk he enveloped them both in a look of conniving archness. It was impossible for Isabel not to guess what he thought they had been up to.

‘I don’t believe that old fellow would bet much on my virginity,’ she said.

They took a taxi to the Ritz and had a drink. They spoke of indifferent things, without apparent constraint, like two old friends who saw one another every day. Though Larry was naturally silent, Isabel was a talkative girl, with an ample fund of chit-chat, and she was determined that no silence should fall between them that might be hard to break. She wasn’t going to let Larry think she felt any resentment towards him and her pride constrained her to act so that he should not suspect that she was hurt and unhappy. Presently she suggested that he should drive her home. When he dropped her at the door she said to him gaily:

‘Don’t forget that you’re lunching with us tomorrow.’

‘You bet your life I won’t.’

She gave him her cheek to kiss and passed through the porte cochère.

CHAPTER 5

When Isabel entered the drawing-room she found that some people had dropped in to tea. There were two American women who lived in Paris, exquisitely gowned, with strings of pearls round their necks, diamond bracelets on their wrists, and costly rings on their fingers. Though the hair of one was darkly hennaed and that of the other unnaturally golden they were strangely alike. They had the same heavily mascaraed eyelashes, the same brightly painted lips, the same rouged cheeks, the same slim figures, maintained at the cost of extreme mortification, the same clear, sharp features, the same hungry restless eyes; and you could not but be conscious that their lives were a desperate struggle to maintain their fading charms. They talked with inanity in a loud, metallic voice without a moment’s pause as though afraid that if they were silent for an instant the machine would run down and the artificial construction which was all they were would fall to pieces. There was also a secretary from the American Embassy, suave, silent, for he could not get a word in, and very much the man of the world, and a small dark Rumanian prince, all bows and servility, with little darting black eyes and a clean-shaven swarthy face, who was for ever jumping up to hand a teacup, pass a plate of cakes, or light a cigarette, and who shamelessly dished out to those present the most flattering, the most gross compliments. He was paying for all the dinners he had received from the objects of his adulation and for all the dinners he hoped to receive.

Mrs Bradley, seated at the tea table and dressed to please Elliott somewhat more grandly than she thought suitable to the occasion, performed her duties as hostess with her usual civil but rather indifferent composure. What she thought of her brother’s guests I can only imagine. I never knew her more than slightly and she was a woman who kept herself to herself. She was not a stupid woman; in all the years she had lived in foreign capitals she had met innumerable people of all kinds and I think she summed them up shrewdly enough according to the standards of the small Virginian town where she was born and bred. I think she got a certain amount of amusement from observing their antics, and I don’t believe she took their airs and graces any more seriously than she took the aches and pains of the characters in a novel which she knew from the beginning (otherwise she wouldn’t have read it) would end happily. Paris, Rome, Peking had had no more effect on her Americanism than Elliott’s devout Catholicism on her robust, but not inconvenient, Presbyterian faith.

Isabel, with her youth, her strapping good looks, and her vitality, brought a breath of fresh air into that meretricious atmosphere. She swept in like a young earth goddess. The Rumanian prince leapt to his feet to draw forward a chair for her and with ample gesticulation did his shift. The two American ladies, with shrill amiabilities on their lips, looked her up and down, took in the details of her dress, and perhaps in their hearts felt a pang of dismay at being confronted with her exuberant youth. The American diplomat smiled to himself as he saw how false and haggard she made them look. But Isabel thought they were grand; she liked their rich clothes and expensive pearls and felt a twinge of envy for their sophisticated poise. She wondered if she would ever achieve that supreme elegance. Of course the little Rumanian was quite ridiculous, but he was rather sweet and even if he didn’t mean the charming things he said it was nice to listen to them. The conversation which her entrance had interrupted was resumed, and they talked so brightly, with so much conviction that what they were saying was worth saying, that you almost thought they were talking sense. They talked of the parties they had been to and the parties they were going to. They gossiped about the latest scandal. They tore their friends to pieces. They bandied great names from one to the other. They seemed to know everybody. They were in on all the secrets. Almost in a breath they touched upon the latest play, the latest dressmaker, the latest portrait painter, and the latest mistress of the latest premier. One would have thought there was nothing they didn’t know. Isabel listened with ravishment. It all seemed to her wonderfully civilized. This really was life. It gave her a thrilling sense of being in the midst of things. This was real. The setting was perfect. That spacious room with the Savonnerie carpet on the floor, the lovely drawings on the richly-panelled walls, the petit-point chairs on which they sat, the priceless pieces of marquetry, commodes and occasional tables, every piece worthy to go into a museum; it must have cost a fortune, that room, but it was worth it. Its beauty, its discretion struck her as never before because she had still so vividly in her mind the shabby little hotel room, with its iron bed and that hard, comfortless chair in which he had sat, that room that Larry saw nothing wrong in. It was bare, cheerless, and horrid. It made her shudder to remember it.

The party broke up and Isabel was left with her mother and Elliott.

‘Charming women,’ said Elliott when he came back from seeing the two poor painted drabs to the door. ‘I knew them when they first settled in Paris. I never dreamt they’d turn out as well as they have. It’s amazing, the adaptability of our women. You’d hardly know now they were Americans and Middle West into the bargain.’

Mrs Bradley, raising her eyebrows, without speaking gave him a look which he was too quick-witted not to understand.

‘No one could ever say that of you, my poor Louisa,’ he continued half acidly and half affectionately. ‘Though heaven knows, you’ve had every chance.’

Mrs Bradley pursed her lips.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been a sad disappointment to you, Elliott, but to tell you the truth I’m very satisfied with myself as I am.’

‘Tous les goûts sont dans la nature,’ Elliott murmured.

‘I think I ought to tell you that I’m no longer engaged to Larry,’ said Isabel.

‘Tut,’ cried Elliott. ‘That’ll put my luncheon table out for tomorrow. How on earth ám I going to get another man at this short notice?’

‘Oh, he’s coming to lunch all right.’

‘After you’ve broken off your engagement? That sounds very unconventional.’

Isabel giggled. She kept her gaze on Elliott, for she knew her mother’s eyes were fixed upon her and she didn’t want to meet them.

‘We haven’t quarrelled. We talked it over this afternoon and came to the conclusion we’d made a mistake. He doesn’t want to come back to America; he wants to stop on in Paris. He’s talking of going to Greece.’

‘What on earth for? There’s no society in Athens. As a matter of fact I never thought so much of Greek art myself. Some of that Hellenistic stuff has a certain decadent charm that’s rather attractive. But Phidias: no, no.’

‘Look at me, Isabel,’ said Mrs Bradley.

Isabel turned and with a faint smile on her lips faced her mother. Mrs Bradley gave her a scrutinizing stare, but all she said was, ‘H’m.’ The girl hadn’t been crying, that she saw; she looked calm and composed.

‘I think you’re well out of it, Isabel,’ said Elliott. ‘I was prepared to make the best of it, but I never thought it a good match. He wasn’t really up to your mark, and the way he’s been behaving in Paris is a pretty clear indication that he’ll never amount to anything. With your looks and your connexions you can aspire to something better than that. I think you’ve behaved in a very sensible manner.’

Mrs Bradley gave her daughter a glance that was not devoid of anxiety.

‘You haven’t done this on my account, Isabel?’

Isabel shook her head decidedly.

‘No, darling, I’ve done it entirely on my own.’

CHAPTER 6

I had come back from the East and was spending some time in London just then. It was perhaps a fortnight after the events I have just related that Elliott called me up one morning. I was not surprised to hear his voice, for I knew that he was in the habit of coming to England to enjoy the fag end of the season. He told me that Mrs Bradley and Isabel were with him and if I would drop in that evening at six for a drink they would be glad to see me. They were, of course, staying at Claridge’s. I was at that time living not far from there, so I strolled down Park Lane and through the quiet, dignified streets of Mayfair till I came to the hotel. Elliott had his usual suite. It was panelled in brown wood like the wood of a cigar box and furnished with quiet sumptuousness. He was alone when I was ushered in. Mrs Bradley and Isabel had gone shopping and he was expecting them at any minute. He told me that Isabel had broken her engagement to Larry.

Elliott with his romantic and highly conventional sense of how people should comport themselves under given circumstances had been disconcerted by the young people’s behaviour. Not only had Larry come to lunch the very day after the break, but he had acted as though his position were unchanged. He was as pleasant, attentive, and soberly gay as usual. He treated Isabel with the same comradely affectionateness with which he had always treated her. He seemed neither harassed, upset, nor woebegone. Nor did Isabel appear dispirited. She looked as happy, she laughed as lightly, she jested as merrily as though she had not just taken a decisive and surely searing step in her life. Elliott could not make head or tail of it. From such scraps of their conversation as he caught he gathered that they had no intention of breaking any of the dates they had made. On the first opportunity he talked it over with his sister.

‘It’s not decent,’ he said. ‘They can’t run around together as if they were still engaged. Larry really should have more sense of propriety. Besides, it damages Isabel’s chances. Young Fotheringham, that boy at the British Embassy, is obviously taken with her; he’s got money and he’s very well connected; if he knew the coast was clear I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he made her an offer. I think you ought to talk to her about it.’

‘My dear, Isabel’s twenty and she has a technique for telling you to mind your own business without offensiveness which I’ve always found very difficult to cope with.’

‘Then you’ve brought her up extremely badly, Louisa. And besides, it is your business.’

‘That is a point on which you and she would certainly differ.’

‘You’re trying my patience, Louisa.’

‘My poor Elliott, if you’d ever had a grown-up daughter you’d know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her – well, it’s much better to pretend you’re the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.’

‘But you have talked the matter over with her?’

‘I tried to. She laughed at me and told me there was really nothing to tell.’

‘Is she cut up?’

‘I wouldn’t know. All I do know is that she eats well and sleeps like a child.’

‘Well, take my word for it, if you let them go on like this they’ll go off one of these days and get married without saying a word to anybody.’

Mrs Bradley permitted herself to smile.

‘It must be a relief to you to think that at present we’re living in a country where every facility is afforded to sexual irregularity and every obstacle put in the way of marriage.’

‘And quite rightly. Marriage is a serious matter on which rest the security of the family and the stability of the state. But marriage can only maintain its authority if extracon – jugal relations are not only tolerated but sanctioned. Prostitution, my poor Louisa –’

‘That’ll do, Elliott,’ interrupted Mrs Bradley. ‘I’m not interested in your views on the social and moral values of promiscuous fornication.’

It was then he put forward a scheme that would interrupt Isabel’s continued intercourse with Larry, which was so repugnant to his sense of what was fitting. The Paris season was drawing to a close and all the best people were arranging to go to watering places or to Deauville before repairing for the rest of the summer to their ancestral châteaux in Touraine, Anjou, or Brittany. Ordinarily Elliott went to London at the end of June, but his family feeling was strong and his affection for his sister and Isabel sincere; he had been quite ready to sacrifice himself and remain in Paris, if they wished it, when no one who was anyone was there; but he found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient to himself. He proposed to Mrs Bradley that the three of them should go to London immediately, where the season was still in full swing and where new interests and new friends would distract Isabel’s mind from her unfortunate entanglement. According to the papers the great specialist on Mrs Bradley’s disease was then in the British capital, and the desirability of consulting him would reasonably account for their precipitate departure and override any disinclination to leave Paris that Isabel might have. Mrs Bradley fell in with the plan. She was puzzled by Isabel. She could not make up her mind whether she was as carefree as she seemed or whether, hurt, angry, or heartsick, she was putting on a bold front to conceal her wounded feelings. Mrs Bradley could only agree with Elliott that it would do Isabel good to see new people and new places.

Elliot got busy on the telephone and when Isabel, who had been spending the day at Versailles with Larry, came home, he was able to tell her that he had made an appointment for her mother to see the celebrated doctor three days from then, that he had engaged a suite at Claridge’s and that they were starting on the next day but one. Mrs Bradley watched her daughter while this intelligence was being somewhat smugly imparted to her by Elliott, but she did not turn a hair.

‘Oh, darling, I’m so glad you’re going to see that doctor,’ she cried with her usual rather breathless impetuosity. ‘Of course, you mustn’t miss the chance. And it’ll be grand going to London. How long are we going to stay?’

‘It would be useless to come back to Paris,’ said Elliott. ‘There won’t be a soul here in a week. I want you to stay with me at Claridge’s for the rest of the season. There are always some good balls in July and of course there’s Wimbledon. And then Goodwood and Cowes. I’m sure the Ellinghams will be glad to have us on their yacht for Cowes and the Bantocks always have a large party for Goodwood.’

Isabel appeared to be delighted and Mrs Bradley was reassured. It looked as though she were not giving Larry a thought.

Elllott had just finished telling me all this when mother and daughter came in. I had not seen them for more than eighteen months. Mrs Bradley was a little thinner than before and more pasty-faced; she looked tired and none too well. But Isabel was blooming. With her high colour, the rich brown of her hair, her shining hazel eyes, her clear skin, she gave an impression of such youth, of so much enjoyment of the mere fact of being alive, that you felt half inclined to laugh with delight. She gave me the rather absurd notion of a pear, golden and luscious, perfectly ripe and simply asking to be eaten. She radiated warmth so that you thought that if you held out your hands you could feel its comfort. She looked taller than when I had last seen her, whether because she wore higher heels or because the clever dressmaker had cut her frock to conceal her youthful plumpness I don’t know, and she held herself with the graceful ease of a girl who has played outdoor games since childhood. She was in short sexually a very attractive young woman. Had I been her mother I should have thought it high time she was married.

Glad of the opportunity to repay some of the kindness I had received from Mrs Bradley in Chicago, I asked them all three to come to a play with me one evening. I arranged to give a luncheon for them.

‘You’ll be wise to get in at once, my dear fellow,’ said Elliott. ‘I’ve already let my friends know we’re here and I presume that in a day or two we shall be fixed up for the rest of the season.’

I understood by this that Elliott meant that then they would have no time for the likes of me and I laughed. Elliott gave me a glance in which I discerned a certain hauteur.

‘But of course you’ll generally find us here about six o’clock and we shall always be glad to see you,’ he said graciously, but with the evident intention of putting me, as an author, in my humble place.

But the worm sometimes turns.

‘You must try to get in touch with the St Olpherds,’ I said. ‘I hear they want to dispose of their Constable of Salisbury Cathedral.’

‘I’m not buying any pictures just now.’

‘I know, but I thought you might dispose of it for them.’

A steely glitter came into Elliott’s eyes.

‘My dear fellow, the English are a great people, but they have never been able to paint and never will be able to paint. I am not interested in the English school.’

CHAPTER 7

During the next four weeks I saw little of Elliott and his relations. He did them proud. He took them for a week-end to a grand house in Sussex and for another week-end to an even grander one in Wiltshire. He took them to the royal box at the opera as guests of a minor princess of the House of Windsor. He took them to lunch and dine with the great. Isabel went to several balls. He entertained at Claridge’s a series of guests whose names made a fine show in the paper next day. He gave supper parties at Ciro’s and the Embassy. In fact he did all the right things and Isabel would have had to be much more sophisticated than she was not to have been a trifle dazzled by the splendour and elegance he provided for her delectation. Elliott could flatter himself that he was taking all this trouble from the purely unselfish motive of distracting Isabel’s mind from an unfortunate love affair; but I had a notion he got besides a good deal of satisfaction out of letting his sister see with her own eyes how familiar he was with the illustrious and fashionable. He was an admirable host and he took a delight in displaying his virtuosity.

I went to one or two of his parties myself and now and again I dropped in at Claridge’s at six o’clock. I found Isabel surrounded by strapping young men in beautiful clothes who were in the Household Brigade or by elegant young men in less beautiful clothes from the Foreign Office. It was on one of these occasions that she drew me aside.

‘I want to ask you something,’ she said. ‘Do you remember that evening we went to a drugstore and had an ice-cream soda?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘You were very nice and helpful then. Will you be nice and helpful again?’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘I want to talk to you about something. Couldn’t we lunch one day?’

‘Almost any day you like.’

‘Somewhere quiet.’

‘What d’you say to driving down to Hampton Court and lunching there? The gardens should be at their best just now and you could see Queen Elizabeth’s bed.’

The notion suited her and we fixed a day. But when the day came the weather, which had been fine and warm, broke; the sky was grey and a drizzling rain was falling. I called up and asked her if she wouldn’t prefer to lunch in town.

‘We shouldn’t be able to sit in the gardens and the pictures will be so dark, we shan’t see a thing.’

‘I’ve sat in lots of gardens and I’m fed to the teeth with old masters. Let’s go anyway.’

‘All right.’

I fetched her and we drove down. I knew a small hotel where one ate tolerably and we went straight there. On the way Isabel talked with her usual vivacity of the parties she had been to and the people she had met. She had been enjoying herself, but her comments on various acquaintances she had made suggested to me that she had shrewdness and a quick eye for the absurd. The bad weather kept visitors away and we were the only occupants of the dining-room. The hotel specialized in homely English fare and we had a cut off a leg of excellent lamb with green peas and new potatoes and a deep-dish apple pie with Devonshire cream to follow. With a tankard of pale ale it made an excellent lunch. When we had finished I suggested that we should go into the empty coffee-room where there were armchairs in which we could sit in comfort. It was chilly in there, but the fire was laid, so I put a match to it. The flames made the dingy room more companionable.

‘That’s that,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what you want to talk to me about.’

‘It’s the same as last time,’ she chuckled. ‘Larry.’

‘So I guessed.’

‘You know that we’ve broken off our engagement.’

‘Elliott told me.’

‘Mamma’s relieved and he’s delighted.’

She hesitated for a moment and then embarked upon the account of her talk with Larry of which I have done my best faithfully to inform the reader. It may surprise the reader that she should have chosen to tell so much to someone whom she knew so little. I don’t suppose I had seen her a dozen times and, except for that one occasion at the drugstore, never alone. It did not surprise me. For one thing, as any writer will tell you, people do tell a writer things that they don’t tell others. I don’t know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are. And I think that Isabel felt that I liked Larry and her, and that their youth touched me, and that I was sympathetic to their distresses. She could not expect to find a friendly listener in Elliott who was disinclined to trouble himself with a young man who had spumed the best chance a young man ever had of getting to society. Nor could her mother help her. Mrs Bradley had high principles and common sense. Her common sense assured her that if you wanted to get on in this world you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability. Her high principles led her to believe that a man’s duty was to go to work in a business where by energy and initiative he had a chance of earning enough money to keep his wife and family in accordance with the standards of his station, give his sons such an education as would enable them on reaching man’s estate to make an honest living, and on his death leave his widow adequately provided for.

Isabel had a good memory and the various turns of the long discussion had engraved themselves upon it. I listened in silence till she had finished. She only interrupted herself once to ask me a question.

‘Who was Ruysdael?’

‘Ruysdael? He was a Dutch landscape painter. Why?’

She told me that Larry had mentioned him. He had said that Ruysdael at least had found an answer to the questions he was asking, and she repeated to me his flippant reply when she had inquired who he was.

‘What d’you suppose he meant?’

I had an inspiration.

‘Are you sure he didn’t say Ruysbroek?’

‘He might have. Who was he?’

‘He was a Flemish mystic who lived in the fourteenth century.’

‘Oh,’ she said with disappointment.

It meant nothing to her. But it meant something to me. That was the first indication I had of the turn Larry’s reflection was taking, and while she went on with her story, though still listening attentively, part of my mind busied itself with the possibilities that reference of his had suggested. I did not want to make too much of it, for it might be that he had only mentioned the name of the Ecstatic Teacher to make an argumentative point; it might also have a significance that had escaped Isabel. When he answered her question by saying Ruysbroek was just a guy he hadn’t known in college he evidently meant to throw her off the scent.

‘What do you make of it all?’ she asked when she had come to an end.

I paused before replying.

‘D’you remember his saying that he was just going to loaf? If what he tells you is true his loafing seems to involve some very strenuous work.’

‘I’m sure it’s true. But don’t you see that if he’d worked as hard at any productive form of work he’d be earning a decent income?’

‘There are people who are strangely constituted. There are criminals who’ll work like beavers to contrive schemes that land them in prison and they no sooner get out than they start all over again and again land in prison. If they put as much industry, as much cleverness, resource, and patience into honest practices they could make a handsome living and occupy important positions. But they’re just made that way. They like crime.’

‘Poor Larry,’ she giggled. ‘You’re not going to suggest that he’s learning Greek to cook up a bank robbery.’

I laughed too.

‘No, I’m not. What I’m trying to tell you is that there are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can’t help themselves, they’ve got to do it. They’re prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.’

‘Even the people who love them?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Is that anything more than plain selfishness?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I smiled.

‘What can be the possible use of Larry’s learning dead languages?’

‘Some people have a disinterested desire for knowledge. It’s not an ignoble desire.’

‘What’s the good of knowledge if you’re not going to do anything with it?’

‘Perhaps he is. Perhaps it will be sufficient satisfaction merely to know, as it’s a sufficient satisfaction to an artist to produce a work of art. And perhaps it’s only a step towards something further.’

‘If he wanted knowledge why couldn’t he go to college when he came back from the war? It’s what Dr Nelson and Mamma wanted him to do.’

‘I talked to him about that in Chicago. A degree would be of no use to him. I have an inkling that he had a definite idea of what he wanted and felt he couldn’t get it at a university. You know, in learning there’s the lone wolf as well as the wolf who runs in the pack. I think Larry is one of those persons who can go no other way than their own.’

‘I remember once asking him if he wanted to write. He laughed and said he had nothing to write about.’

‘That’s the most inconclusive reason for not writing that I’ve ever heard,’ I smiled.

Isabel made a gesture of impatience. She was in no mood even for the mildest jest.

‘What I can’t make out is why he should have turned out like this. Before the war he was just like everybody else. You wouldn’t think it, but he plays a very good game of tennis and he’s quite a decent golfer. He used to do all the things the rest of us did. He was a perfectly normal boy and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t become a perfectly normal man. After all you’re a novelist, you ought to be able to explain it.’

‘Who am I to explain the infinite complexities of human nature?’

‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you today,’ she added, taking no notice of what I said.

‘Are you unhappy?’

‘No, not exactly unhappy. When Larry isn’t there I’m all right; it’s when I’m with him that I feel so weak. Now it’s just a sort of ache, like the stiffness you get after a long ride when you haven’t been on a horse for months; it’s not pain, it’s not at all unbearable, but you’re conscious of it. I shall get over it all right. I hate the idea of Larry making such a mess of his life.’

‘Perhaps he won’t. It’s a long, arduous road he’s starting to travel, but it may be that at the end of it he’ll find what he’s seeking.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you? It seems to me that in what he said to you he indicated it pretty plainly. God.’

‘God!’ she cried. But it was an exclamation of incredulous surprise. Our use of the same word, but in such a different, sense, had a comic effect, so that we were obliged to laugh. But Isabel immediately grew serious again and I felt in her whole attitude something like fear. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘I’m only guessing. But you asked me to tell you what I thought as a novelist. Unfortunately you don’t know what experience he had in the war that so profoundly moved him. I think it was some sudden shock for which he was unprepared. I suggest to you that whatever it was that happened to Larry filled him with a sense of the transiency of life, and an anguish to be sure that there was a compensation for the sin and sorrow of the world.’

I could see that Isabel didn’t like the turn I had given the conversation. It made her feel shy and awkward.

‘Isn’t all that awfully morbid? One has to take the world as it comes. If we’re here, it’s surely to make the most of life.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I don’t pretend to be anything but a perfectly normal, ordinary girl. I want to have fun.’

‘It looks as though there were complete incompatibility of temper between you. It’s much better that you should have found it out before marriage.’

‘I want to marry and have children and live –’

‘In that state of life in which a merciful Providence has been pleased to place you,’ I interrupted, smiling.

‘Well, there’s no harm in that, is there? It’s a very pleasant state and I’m quite satisfied with it.’

‘You’re like two friends who want to take their holiday together, but one of them wants to climb Greenland’s icy mountains while the other wants to fish off India’s coral strand. Obviously it’s not going to work.’

‘Anyway, I might get a sealskin coat off Greenland’s icy mountains, and I think it’s very doubtful if there are any fish off India’s coral strand.’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘Why d’you say that?’ she asked, frowning a little. ‘All the time you seem to be making some sort of mental reservation. Of course I know that I’m not playing the star part in this. Larry’s got that. He’s the idealist, he’s the dreamer of a beautiful dream, and even if the dream doesn’t come true, it’s rather thrilling to have dreamt it. I’m cast for the hard, mercenary, practical part. Common sense is never very sympathetic, is it? But what you forget is that it’s I who’d have to pay. Larry would sweep along, trailing clouds of glory, and all there’d be left for me would be to tag along and make both ends meet. I want to live.’

‘I don’t forget that at all. Years ago, when I was young, I knew a man who was a doctor, and not a bad one either, but he didn’t practise. He spent years burrowing away in the library of the British Museum and at long intervals produced a huge pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical book that nobody read and that he had to publish at his own expense. He wrote four or five of them before he died and they were absolutely worthless. He had a son who wanted to go into the army, but there was no money to send him to Sandhurst, so he had to enlist. He was killed in the war. He had a daughter too. She was very pretty and I was rather taken with her. She went on the stage, but she had no talent and she traipsed around the provinces playing small parts in second-rate companies at a miserable salary. His wife, after years of dreary, sordid drudgery, broke down in health and the girl had to come home and nurse her and take on the drudgery her mother no longer had the strength for. Wasted, thwarted lives and all to no purpose. It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called but few are chosen.’

‘Mother and Uncle Elliott approve of what I’ve done. Do you approve too?’

‘My dear, what can that matter to you? I’m almost a stranger to you.’

‘I look upon you as a disinterested observer,’ she said, with a pleasant smile. ‘I should like to have your approval. You do think I’ve done right, don’t you?’

‘I think you’ve done right for you,’ I said, fairly confident that she would not catch the slight distinction I made in my reply.

‘Then why have I a bad conscience?’

‘Have you?’

With a smile still on her lips, but a slightly rueful smile now, she nodded.

‘I know it’s only horse sense. I know that every reasonable person would agree that I’ve done the only possible thing. I know that from every practical standpoint, from the standpoint of worldly wisdom, from the standpoint of common decency, from the standpoint of what’s right and wrong, I’ve done what I ought to do. And yet at the bottom of my heart I’ve got an uneasy feeling that if I were better, if I were more disinterested, more unselfish, nobler, I’d marry Larry and lead his life. If I only loved him enough I’d think the world well lost.’

‘You might put it the other way about. If he loved you enough he wouldn’t have hesitated to do what you want.’

‘I’ve said that to myself too. But it doesn’t help. I suppose it’s more in woman’s nature to sacrifice herself than in a man’s.’ She chuckled. ‘Ruth and the alien corn and all that sort of thing.’

‘Why don’t you risk it?’

We had been talking quite lightly, almost as if we were having a casual conversation about people we both knew but in whose affairs we were not intimately concerned, and even when she narrated to me her talk with Larry, Isabel had spoken with a sort of breezy gaiety, enlivening it with humour, as if she did not want me to take what she said too seriously. But now she went pale.

‘I’m afraid.’

For a while we were silent. A chill went down my spine as it strangely does when I am confronted with deep and genuine human emotion. I find it terrible and rather awe-inspiring.

‘Do you love him very much?’ I asked at last.

‘I don’t know. I’m impatient with him. I’m exasperated with him. I keep longing for him.’

Silence again fell upon us. I didn’t know what to say. The coffee-room in which we sat was small, and heavy lace curtains over the window shut out the light. On the walls, covered with yellow marbled paper, were old sporting prints. With its mahogany furniture, its shabby leather chairs, and its musty smell, it was strangely reminiscent of a coffee-room in a Dickens novel. I poked the fire and put more coal on it. Isabel suddenly began to speak.

‘You see, I thought when it came to a showdown he’d knuckle under. I knew he was weak.’

‘Weak?’ I cried. ‘What made you think that? A man who for a year withstood the disapproval of all his friends and associates because he was determined to go his own way.’

‘I could always do anything I wanted with him. I could turn him round my little finger. He was never a leader in the things we did. He just tagged along with the crowd.’

I had lit a cigarette and watched the smoke ring I had made. It grew larger and larger and then faded away into the air.

‘Mamma and Elliott thought it very wrong of me to go about with him afterwards as though nothing had happened, but I didn’t take it very seriously. I kept on thinking up to the end that he’d yield. I couldn’t believe that when he’d got it into his thick head that I meant what I said he wouldn’t give in.’ She hesitated and gave me a smile of roguish, playful malice. ‘Will you be awfully shocked if I tell you something?’

‘I think it very unlikely.’

‘When we decided to come to London I called Larry and asked him if we couldn’t spend my last evening in Paris together. When I told them, Uncle Elliott said it was most improper and Mamma said she thought it unnecessary. When Mamma says something is unnecessary it means she thoroughly disapproves. Uncle Elliott asked me what the idea was and I said we were going to dine somewhere and then make a tour of the night clubs. He told Mamma she ought to forbid me to go. Mamma said, “Will you pay any attention if I forbid you to go?” “No, darling,” I said, “none.” Then she said, “That is what I imagined. In that case there doesn’t seem to be much point in my forbidding it.”’

‘Your mother appears to be a woman of enormous sense.’

‘I don’t believe she misses much. When Larry called for me I went into her room to say good night to her. I’d made up a bit; you know, you have to in Paris or else you look so naked, and when she saw the dress I had on, I had an uneasy suspicion from the way she took me in from top to toe that she had a pretty shrewd idea what I was after. But she didn’t say anything. She just kissed me and said she hoped I’d have a good time.’

‘What were you after?’

Isabel looked at me doubtfully, as though she couldn’t quite decide how frank she was prepared to be.

‘I didn’t think I was looking too bad and it was my last chance. Larry had reserved a table at Maxim’s. We had lovely things to eat, all the things I particularly liked, and we had champagne. We talked our heads off, at least I did, and I made Larry laugh. One of the things I’ve liked about him is that I can always amuse him. We danced. When we’d had enough of that we went on to the Château de Madrid. We found some people we knew and joined them and we had more champagne. Then we all went to the Acacia. Larry dances quite well, and we fit. The heat and the music and the wine – I was getting a bit light-headed. I felt absolutely reckless. I danced with my face against Larry’s and I knew he wanted me. God knows I wanted him. I had an idea. I suppose it had been at the back of my mind all the time. I thought I’d get him to come home with me and once I’d got him there, well, it was almost inevitable that the inevitable should happen.’

‘Upon my word you couldn’t put it more delicately.’

‘My room was quite a way from Uncle Elliott’s and Mamma’s, so I knew there was no risk. When we were back in America I thought I’d write and say I was going to have a baby. He’d be obliged to come back and marry me, and when I’d got him home I didn’t believe it would be hard to keep him there, especially with Mamma ill. “What a fool I am not to have thought of that before,” I said to myself. “Of course that’ll settle everything.” When the music stopped I just stayed there in his arms. Then I said it was getting late and we had to take the train at noon, so we’d better go. We got into a taxi. I nestled close to him and he put his arms around me and kissed me. He kissed me, he kissed me – oh, it was heaven. It hardly seemed a moment before the taxi stopped at the door. Larry paid it.

‘“I shall walk home,” he said.

‘The taxi rattled off and I put my arms round his neck.

‘“Won’t you come up and have one last drink?” I said.

‘“Yes, if you like,” he said.

‘He’d rung the bell and the door swung open. He switched on the light as we stepped in. I looked into his eyes. They were so trusting, so honest, so – so guileless; he so obviously hadn’t the smallest idea that I was laying a trap for him; I felt I couldn’t play him such a dirty trick. It was like taking candy off a child. D’you know what I did? I said, “Oh well, perhaps you’d better not. Mamma’s not very well tonight and if she’s fallen asleep I don’t want to wake her up. Good night.” I put my face up for him to kiss and pushed him out of the door. That was the end of that.’

‘Are you sorry?’ I asked.

‘I’m neither pleased nor sorry. I just couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t me that did what I did. It was just an impulse that took possession of me and acted for me.’ She grinned.

‘I suppose you’d call it my better nature.’

‘I suppose you would.’

‘Then my better nature must take the consequences. I trust in the future it’ll be more careful.’

That was in effect the end of our talk. It may be that it was some consolation to Isabel to have been able to speak to someone with entire freedom, but that was all the good I had been able to do her. Feeling I had been inadequate, I tried to say at least some small thing that would give her comfort.

‘You know, when one’s in love,’ I said, ‘and things go all wrong, one’s terribly unhappy and one thinks one won’t ever get over it. But you’ll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.’

‘What do you mean?’ she smiled.

‘Well, love isn’t a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You’ll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.’

‘Do you speak from experience?’

‘From the experience of a stormy past. When I suffered from the pangs of unrequited love I immediately got on an ocean liner.’

The rain showed no sign of letting up, so we decided that Isabel could survive without seeing the noble pile of Hampton Court or even Queen Elizabeth’s bed, and drove back to London. I saw her two or three times after that, but only when other people were present, and then, having had enough of London for a while, I set off for the Tyrol.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 1

FOR TEN YEARS after this I saw neither Isabel nor Larry. I continued to see Elliott, and indeed, for a reason that I shall tell later, more frequently than before, and from time to time I learnt from him what was happening to Isabel. But of Larry he could tell me nothing.

‘For all I know he’s still living in Paris, but I’m not likely to run across him. We don’t move in the same circles,’ he added, not without complacency. ‘It’s very sad that he should have gone so completely to seed. He comes of a very good family. I’m sure I could have made something of him if he’d put himself in my hands. Anyhow it was a lucky escape for Isabel.’

My circle of acquaintance was not so restricted as Elliott’s and I knew a number of persons in Paris whom he would have thought eminently undesirable. On my brief but not infrequent sojoums I asked one or other of them whether he had run across Larry or had news of him; a few knew him casually, but none could claim any intimacy with him and I could find nobody to give me news of him. I went to the restaurant at which he habitually dined, but found he had not been there for a long time, and they thought he must have gone away. I never saw him at any of the cafés on the Boulevard du Montparnasse which people who live in the neighbourhood are apt to go to.

His intention, after Isabel left Paris, was to go to Greece, but this he abandoned. What he actually did he told me himself many years later, but I will relate it now because it is more convenient to place events as far as I can in chronological order. He stayed on in Paris during the summer and worked without a break till autumn was well advanced.

‘I thought I needed a rest from books then,’ he said, ‘I’d been working from eight to ten hours a day for two years. So I went to work in a coal mine.’

‘You did what?’ I cried.

He laughed at my astonishment.

‘I thought it would do me good to spend a few months in manual labour. I had a notion it would give me an opportunity to sort my thoughts and come to terms with myself.’

I was silent. I wondered whether that was the only reason for this unexpected step or whether it was connected with Isabel’s refusal to marry him. The fact was, I didn’t know at all how deeply he loved her. Most people when they’re in love invent every kind of reason to persuade themselves that it’s only sensible to do what they want. I suppose that’s why there are so many disastrous marriages. They are like those who put their affairs in the hands of someone they know to be a crook, but who happens to be an intimate friend because, unwilling to believe that a crook is a crook first and a friend afterwards, they are convinced that, however dishonest he may be with others, he won’t be so with them. Larry was strong enough to refuse to sacrifice for Isabel’s sake the life that he thought was the life for him, but it may be that to lose her was bitterer to endure than he had expected. It may be that like most of us he wanted to eat his cake and have it.

‘Well, go on,’ I said.

‘I packed my books and my clothes in a couple of trunks and got the American Express to store them. Then I put an extra suit and some linen in a grip and started off. My Greek teacher had a sister who was married to the manager of a mine near Lens and he gave me a letter to him. D’you know Lens?’

‘No.’

‘It’s in the North of France, not far from the Belgian border. I only spent a night there, at the station hotel, and next day I took a local to the place where the mine was. Ever been to a mining village?’

‘In England.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s much the same. There’s the mine and the manager’s house, rows and rows of trim little two-storey houses, all alike, exactly alike, and it’s so monotonous it makes your heart sink. There’s a newish, ugly church and several bars. It was bleak and cold when I got there and a thin rain was falling. I went to the manager’s office and sent in my letter. He was a little, fat man with red cheeks and the look of a guy who enjoys his food. They were short of labour, a lot of miners had been killed in the war, and there were a good many Poles working there, two or three hundred, I should think. He asked me one or two questions, he didn’t much like my being an American, he seemed to think it rather fishy, but his brother-in-law’s letter spoke well of me and anyhow he was glad to have me. He wanted to give me a job on the surface, but I told him I wanted to work down below. He said I’d find it hard if I wasn’t used to it, but I told him I was prepared for that, so then he said I could be helper to a miner. That was boy’s work really, but there weren’t enough boys to go round. He was a nice fellow; he asked me if I’d done anything about finding a lodging, and when I told him I hadn’t he wrote an address on a piece of paper and said that if I went there the woman of the house would let me have a bed. She was the widow of a miner who’d been killed and her two sons were working in the mine.

‘I took up my grip and went on my way. I found the house, and the door was opened for me by a tall, gaunt woman with greying hair and big, dark eyes. She had good features and she must have been nice-looking once. She wouldn’t have been bad then in a haggard way except for two missing front teeth. She told me she hadn’t a room, but there were two beds in a room she’d let to a Pole and I could have the other one. Her two sons had one of the upstairs rooms and she had the other. The room she showed me was on the ground floor and supposed, I imagined, to be the living-room; I should have liked a room to myself, but I thought I’d better not be fussy; and the drizzle had turned into a steady, light rain and I was wet already. I didn’t want to go farther and get soaked to the skin. So I said that would suit me and I settled in. They used the kitchen as a living-room. It had a couple of rickety armchairs in it. There was a coal shed in the yard which was also the bath-house. The two boys and the Pole had taken their lunch with them, but she said I could eat with her at midday. I sat in the kitchen afterwards smoking and while she went on with her work she told me all about herself and her family. The others came in at the end of their shift. The Pole first and then the two boys. The Pole passed through the kitchen, nodded to me without speaking when our landlady told him I was to share his room, took a great kettle off the hob and went off to wash himself in the shed. The two boys were tall good-looking fellows notwithstanding the grime on their faces, and seemed inclined to be friendly. They looked upon me as a freak because I was American. One of them was nineteen, off to his military service in a few months, and the other eighteen.

‘The Pole came back and then they went to clean up. The Pole had one of those difficult Polish names, but they called him Kosti. He was a big fellow, two or three inches taller than me, and heavily built. He had a pale fleshy face with a broad short nose and a big mouth. His eyes were blue and because he hadn’t been able to wash the coal dust off his eyebrows and eyelashes he looked as if he was made up. The black lashes made the blue of his eyes almost startling. He was an ugly, uncouth fellow. The two boys after they’d changed their clothes went out. The Pole sat on in the kitchen, smoking a pipe and reading the paper. I had a book in my pocket, so I took it out and began reading too. I noticed that he glanced at me once or twice and presently he put his paper down.

‘“What are you reading?” he asked.

‘I handed him the book to see for himself. It was a copy of the Princesse de Clèves that I’d bought at the station in Paris because it was small enough to put in my pocket. He looked at it, then at me, curiously, and handed it back. I noticed an ironical smile on his lips.

‘“Does it amuse you?”

‘“I think it’s very interesting – even absorbing.”

‘“I read it at school at Warsaw. It bored me stiff.” He spoke very good French, with hardly a trace of Polish accent. “Now I don’t read anything but the newspaper and detective stories.”

‘Madame Leclerc, that was our old girl’s name, with an eye on the soup that was cooking for supper, sat at the table darning socks. She told Kosti that I had been sent to her by the manager of the mine and repeated what else I had seen fit to tell her. He listened, puffing away at his pipe, and looked at me with brilliantly blue eyes. They were hard and shrewd. He asked me a few questions about myself. When I told him I had never worked in a mine before his lips broke again into an ironical smile.

‘“You don’t know what you’re in for. No one would go to work in a mine who could do anything else. But that’s your affair and doubtless you have your reasons. Where did you live in Paris?”

‘I told him.

‘“At one time I used to go to Paris every year, but I kept to the Grands Boulevards. Have you ever been to Larue’s? It was my favourite restaurant.”

‘That surprised me a bit because, you know, it’s not cheap.’

‘Far from it.’

‘I fancy he saw my surprise, for he gave me once more his mocking smile, but evidently didn’t think it necessary to explain further. We went on talking in a desultory fashion and then the two boys came in. We had supper and when we’d finished Kosti asked me if I’d like to come to the bistro with him and have a beer. It was just a rather large room with a bar at one end of it and a number of marble-topped tables with wooden chairs around them. There was a mechanical piano and someone had put a coin in the slot and it was braying out a dance tune. Only three tables were occupied besides ours. Kosti asked me if I played belote. I’d learnt it with some of my student friends, so I said I did and he proposed that we should play for the beer. I agreed and he called for cards. I lost a beer and a second beer. Then he proposed that we should play for money. He had good cards and I had bad luck. We were playing for very small stakes, but I lost several francs. This and the beer put him in a good humour and he talked. It didn’t take me long to guess both by his way of expressing himself and by his manners, that he was a man of education. When he spoke again of Paris it was to ask me if I knew So-and-so and So-and-so, American women I had met at Elliott’s when Aunt Louisa and Isabel were staying with him. He appeared to know them better than I did and I wondered how it was that he found himself in his present position. It wasn’t late, but we had to get up at the crack of dawn.

‘“Let’s have one more beer before we go,” said Kosti.

‘He sipped it and peered at me with his shrewd little eyes. I knew what he reminded me of then, an ill-tempered pig. ‘“Why have you come here to work in this rotten mine?” he asked me.

‘“For the experience.”

‘“Tu es fou, mon petit,” he said.

‘“And why are you working in it?”

‘He shrugged his massive, ungainly shoulders.

‘“I entered the nobleman’s cadet school when I was a kid, my father was a general under the Czar and I was a cavalry officer in the last war. I couldn’t stand Pilsudski. We arranged to kill him, but someone gave us away. He shot those of us he caught. I managed to get across the frontier just in time. There was nothing for me but the Foreign Legion or a coal mine. I chose the lesser of two evils.”

‘I had already told Kosti what job I was to have in the mine and he had said nothing, but now, putting his elbow on the marble-topped table, he said:

‘“Try to push my hand back.”

‘I knew the old trial of strength and I put my open palm against his. He laughed. “Your hand won’t be as soft as that in a few weeks.” I pushed with all my might, but I could make no effect against his huge strength and gradually he pressed my hand back and down to the table.

‘“You’re pretty strong,” he was good enough to say. “There aren’t many men who keep up as long as that. Listen, my helper’s no good, he’s a puny little Frenchman, he hasn’t got the strength of a louse. You come along with me tomorrow and I’ll get the foreman to let me have you instead.”

‘“I’d like that,” I said. “D ‘you think he’ll do it?”

‘“For a consideration. Have you got fifty francs to spare?”

‘He stretched out his hand and I took a note out of my wallet. We went home and to bed. I’d had a long day and I slept like a log.’

‘Didn’t you find the work terribly hard?’ I asked Larry.

‘Back-breaking at first,’ he grinned. ‘Kosti worked it with the foreman and I was made his helper. At that time Kosti was working in a space about the size of a hotel bathroom and one got to it through a tunnel so low that you had to crawl through it on your hands and knees. It was as hot as hell in there and we worked in nothing but our pants. There was something terribly repulsive in that great white fat torso of Kosti’s; he looked like a huge slug. The row of the pneumatic cutter in that narrow space was deafening. My job was to gather the blocks of coal that he hacked away and load a basket with them and drag the basket through the tunnel to its mouth, where it could be loaded into a truck when the train came along at intervals on its way to the elevators. It’s the only coal mine I’ve ever known, so I don’t know if that’s the normal practice. It seemed amateurish to me and it was damned hard work. At half time we knocked off for a rest and ate our lunch and smoked. I wasn’t sorry when we were through for the day, and gosh, it was good to have a bath. I thought I’d never get my feet clean; they were as black as ink. Of course my hands blistered and they got as sore as the devil, but they healed. I got used to the work.’

‘How long did you stick it out?’

‘I was only kept on that job for a few weeks. The trucks that carried the coal to the elevators were hauled by a tractor and the driver was a poor mechanic and the engine was always breaking down. Once he couldn’t get it going and he didn’t seem to know what to do. Well, I’m a pretty good mechanic, so I had a look at it and in half an hour I got it working. The foreman told the manager and he sent for me and asked me if I knew about cars. The result was that he gave me the mechanic’s job; of course it was monotonous, but it was easy, and because they didn’t have any more engine trouble they were pleased with me.

‘Kosti was as sore as hell at my leaving him. I suited him and he’d got used to me. I got to know him pretty well, working with him all day, going to the bistro with him after supper, and sharing a room with him. He was a funny fellow. He was the sort of man who’d have appealed to you. He didn’t mix with the Poles and we didn’t go to the cafés they went to. He couldn’t forget he was a nobleman and had been a cavalry officer and he treated them like dirt. Naturally they resented it, but they couldn’t do anything about it; he was as strong as an ox, and if it had ever come to a scrap, knives or no knives, he’d have been a match for half a dozen of them together. I got to know some of them all the same, and they told me he’d been a cavalry officer all right in one of the smart regiments, but it was a lie about his having left Poland for political reasons. He’d been kicked out of the Officers’ Club at Warsaw and cashiered because he’d been caught cheating at cards. They warned me against playing with him. They said that was why he fought so shy of them, because they knew too much about him and wouldn’t play with him.

‘I’d been losing to him consistently, not much, you know, just a few francs a night, but when he won he always insisted on paying for drinks, so it didn’t amount to anything really. I thought I was just having a run of bad luck or that I didn’t play as well as he did. But after that I kept my eyes skinned and I was dead sure he was cheating, but d’you know, for the life of me I couldn’t see how he did it. Gosh, he was clever. I knew he simply couldn’t have the best cards all the time. I watched him like a lynx. He was as cunning as a fox and I guess he saw I’d been put wise to him. One night, after we’d been playing for a while, he looked at me with that rather cruel, sarcastic smile of his which was the only way he knew how to smile, and said:

‘“Shall I show you a few tricks?”

‘He took the pack of cards and asked me to name one. He shuffled them and he told me to choose one; I did, and it was the card I’d named. He did two or three more tricks and then he asked me if I played poker. I said I did and he dealt me a hand. When I looked at it I saw I’d got four aces and a king.

‘“You’d be willing to bet a good deal on that hand, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

‘“My whole stack,” I answered.

‘“You’d be silly.” He put down the hand he’d dealt himself. It was a straight flush. How it was done I don’t know. He laughed at my amazement. “If I weren’t an honest man I’d have had your shirt by now.”

‘“You haven’t done so badly as it is,” I grinned.

‘“Chicken feed. Not enough to buy a dinner at Larue’s.”

‘We continued to play pretty well every night. I came to the conclusion that he cheated not so much for the money as for the fun of it. It gave him a queer satisfaction to know that he was making a fool of me, and I think he got a lot of amusement out of knowing that I was on to what he was doing and couldn’t see how it was done.

‘But that was only one side of him and it was the other side that made him so interesting to me. I couldn’t reconcile the two. Though he boasted he never read anything but the paper and detective stories he was a cultivated man. He was a good talker, caustic, harsh, cynical, but it was exhilarating to listen to him. He was a devout Catholic and had a crucifix hanging over his bed, and he went to Mass every Sunday regularly. On Saturday nights he used to get drunk. The bistro we went to was crammed jammed full then, and the air was heavy with smoke. There were quiet, middle-aged miners with their families, and there were groups of young fellows kicking up a hell of a row, and there were men with sweaty faces round tables playing belote with loud shouts, while their wives sat by, a little behind them, and watched. The crowd and the noise had a strange effect on Kosti and he’d grow serious and start talking – of all unlikely subjects – of mysticism. I knew nothing of it then but an essay of Maeterlinck’s on Ruysbroek that I’d read in Paris. But Kosti talked of Plotinus and Denis the Areopagite and Jacob Boehme the shoemaker and Meister Eckhart. It was fantastic to hear that great hulking bum, who’d been thrown out of his own world, that sardonic, bitter down-and-out, speaking of the ultimate reality of things and the blessedness of union with God. It was all new to me and I was confused and excited. I was like someone who’s lain awake in a darkened room and suddenly a chink of light shoots through the curtains and he knows he only has to draw them and there the country will be spread before him in the glory of the dawn. But if I tried to get him on the subject when he was sober he got mad at me. His eyes were spiteful.

‘“How should I know what I was talking about when I didn’t know what I was saying?” he snapped.

‘But I knew he was lying. He knew perfectly well what he was talking about. He knew a lot. Of course he was soused, but the look in his eyes, the rapt expression on his ugly face, weren’t due only to drink. There was more to it than that. The first time he talked in that way he said something that I’ve never forgotten, because it horrified me; he said that the world isn’t a creation, for out of nothing nothing comes; but a manifestation of the eternal nature; well, that was all right, but then he added that evil is as direct a manifestation of the divine as good. They were strange words to hear in that sordid, noisy café, to the accompaniment of dance tunes on the mechanical piano.’

CHAPTER 2

To give the reader a moment’s rest I am starting here upon a new section, but I am doing it only for his convenience; the conversation was uninterrupted. I may take this opportunity to say that Larry spoke without haste, often choosing his words with care, and though of course I do not pretend to report them exactly, I have tried to reproduce not only the matter, but the manner of his discourse. His voice, rich in tone, had a musical quality that was grateful to the ear; and as he talked without gesticulation of any kind, puffing away at his pipe and stopping now and again to relight it, he looked you in the face with a pleasant, often whimsical expression in his dark eyes.

‘Then the spring came, late in that flat, dismal part of the country, cold and rainy still; but sometimes a fine warm day made it hard to leave the world above ground and go down hundreds of feet in a rickety elevator, crowded with miners in their grimy overalls, into the bowels of the earth. It was spring all right, but it seemed to come shyly in that grim and sordid landscape as though unsure of a welcome. It was like a flower, a daffodil or a lily, growing in a pot on the window-sill of a slum dwelling and you wondered what it did there. One Sunday morning we were lying in bed, we always slept late on Sunday morning, and I was reading, when Kosti said to me out of a blue sky:

“I’m getting out of here. D’you want to come with me?”

‘I knew a lot of the Poles went back to Poland in the summer to get the harvest in, but it was early for that, and besides, Kosti couldn’t go back to Poland.

‘“Where are you going?” I asked.

‘“Tramping. Across Belgium and into Germany and down the Rhine. We could get work on a farm that would see us through the summer.”

‘It didn’t take a minute to make up my mind.

‘“It sounds fine,” I said.

‘Next day we told the foreman we were through. I found a fellow who was willing to take my grip in exchange for a rucksack. I gave the clothes I didn’t want or couldn’t carry on my back to the younger of Madame Leclerc’s sons who was about my size. Kosti left a bag, packed what he wanted in his rucksack and the day after, as soon as the old girl had given us our coffee, we started off.

‘We weren’t in any hurry as we knew we couldn’t get taken on at a farm at least until the hay was ready to cut, and so we dawdled along through France and Belgium by way of Namur and Liege and got into Germany through Aachen. We didn’t do more than ten or twelve miles a day. When we liked the look of a village we stopped there. There was always some kind of an inn where we could get beds and an alehouse where we could get something to eat and beer to drink. On the whole we had fine weather. It was grand to be out in the open air after all those months in the mine. I don’t think I’d ever realized before how good a green meadow is to look at and how lovely a tree is when the leaves aren’t out yet, but the branches are veiled in a faint green mist. Kosti started to teach me German and I believe he spoke it as well as he spoke French. As we trudged along he would tell me the German for the various objects we passed, a cow, a horse, a man and so on, and then repeat simple German sentences. It made the time pass and by the time we got into Germany I could at least ask for the things I wanted.

‘Cologne was a bit out of our way, but Kosti insisted on going there, on account of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, he said, and when we got there he went on a bat. I didn’t see him for three days and when he turned up at the room we’d taken in a sort of workmen’s rooming-house he was very surly. He’d got in a fight and he had a black eye and a cut on his lip. He wasn’t a pretty object, I can tell you. He went to bed for twenty-four hours, and then we started to walk down the valley of the Rhine towards Darmstadt, where he said the country was good and we stood the best chance of getting work.

‘I never enjoyed anything more. The fine weather held and we wandered through towns and villages. When there were sights to see we stopped off and looked at them. We put up where we could and once or twice we slept in a loft on the hay. We ate at wayside inns, and when we got in the wine country we turned from beer to wine. We made friends with the people in the taverns we drank in. Kosti had a sort of rough joviality that inspired them with confidence and he’d play skat with them, that’s a German card game, and skin them with such bluff good humour, with the earthy jokes they appreciated, that they hardly minded losing their pfennigs to him. I practised my German on them. I’d bought a little English–German conversation grammar at Cologne and I was getting on pretty well. And then at night, when he’d got a couple of litres of white wine inside him, Kosti would talk in a morbid way of the flight from the Alone to the Alone, of the Dark Night of the Soul and of the final ecstasy in which the creature becomes one with the Beloved. But when in the early morning, as we walked through the smiling country, with the dew still on the grass, I tried to get him to tell me more, he grew so angry that he could have hit me.

‘“Shut up, you fool,” he said. “What do you want with all that stuff and nonsense? Come, let’s get on with our German.”

‘You can’t argue with a man who’s got a fist like a steam hammer and wouldn’t think twice about using it. I’d seen him in a rage. I knew he was capable of laying me out cold and leaving me in a ditch and I wouldn’t have put it past him to empty my pockets while I was out. I couldn’t make head or tail of him. When wine had loosened his tongue and he spoke of the Ineffable, he shed the rough obscene language that he ordinarily used, like the grimy overalls he wore in the mine, and he was well-spoken and even eloquent. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sincere. I don’t know how it occurred to me, but I got the idea somehow that he’d taken on that hard, brutal labour of the mine to mortify his flesh. I thought he hated that great, uncouth body of his and wanted to torture it, and that his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will against – oh, I don’t know what you’d call it – against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.

‘We’d taken our time, the spring was pretty well over and the trees were in full leaf. The grapes in the vineyards were beginning to fill out. We kept to the dirt roads as much as we could and they were getting dusty. We were in the neighbourhood of Darmstadt, and Kosti said we’d better start looking for a job. Our money was getting short. I had half a dozen travellers’ cheques in my pocket, but I’d made up my mind not to use them if I could possibly help it. When we saw a farmhouse that looked promising we stopped and asked if they wanted a couple of hands. I dare say we didn’t look very inviting. We were dusty and sweaty and dirty. Kosti looked a terrible ruffian and I don’t suppose I looked much better either. We were turned down time after time. At one place the farmer said he’d take Kosti but couldn’t do with me and Kosti said we were buddies and wouldn’t separate. I told him to go ahead, but he wouldn’t. I was surprised. I knew Kosti had taken a fancy to me, though I couldn’t imagine why, as I didn’t begin to be the kind of guy he had any use for, but I would never have thought he liked me well enough to refuse a job on my account. I felt rather conscience-stricken as we walked on, because I didn’t really like him, in fact I found him rather repulsive, but when I tried to say something to show I was pleased with what he’d done, he bit my head off.

‘But at last our luck turned. We’d just gone through a village in a hollow and we came to a rambling farmhouse that didn’t look so bad. We knocked at the door and a woman opened it. We offered ourselves as usual. We said we didn’t want any wages, but were willing to work for our board and lodging, and to my surprise instead of slamming the door in our face, she told us to wait. She called to someone inside the house and presently a man came out. He had a good stare at us and asked us where we came from. He asked to see our papers. He gave me another stare when he saw I was American. He didn’t seem to like it very much, but anyhow he asked us to come in and have a glass of wine. He took us into the kitchen and we sat down. The woman brought a flagon and some glasses. He told us that his hired man had been gored by a bull and was in hospital and wouldn’t be fit for anything till after the harvest was in. With so many men killed, and others going into the factories that were springing up along the Rhine, it was the devil’s own job to get labour. We knew that and had been counting on it. Well, to make a long story short he said he’d take us. There was plenty of room in the house, but I suppose he didn’t fancy having us there; anyway he told us there were two beds in the hayloft and that was where we were to sleep.

‘The work wasn’t hard. There were the cows to look after and the hogs; the machinery was in a bad way, and we had to do something about that; but I had some leisure. I loved the sweet-smelling meadows and in the evenings I used to wander about and dream. It was a good life.

‘The household consisted of old Becker, his wife, his widowed daughter-in-law, and her children. Becker was a heavy, grey-haired man in his late forties; he’d been through the war and still limped from a wound in the leg. It hurt him a lot and he drank to kill the pain. He was generally high by the time he got to bed. Kosti got on with him fine and they used to go down to the inn together after supper to play skat and swill wine. Frau Becker had been a hired girl. They’d got her out of an orphanage and Becker had married her soon after his wife’s death. She was a good many years younger than he was, rather handsome in a way, full-blown, with red cheeks and fair hair and a hungry sensual look. It didn’t take Kosti long to come to the conclusion that there was something doing there. I told him not to be a fool. We had a good job and we didn’t want to lose it. He only jeered at me; he said Becker wasn’t satisfying her and she was asking for it. I knew it was useless to appeal to his sense of decency, but I told him to be careful; it might be that Becker wouldn’t see what he was after, but there was his daughter-in-law, and she wasn’t missing anything.

‘Ellie, that was her name, was a thickset, big young woman, well under thirty, with black eyes and black hair, a sallow square face and a sullen look. She still wore mourning for her husband killed at Verdun. She was very devout and on Sunday mornings trudged down to the village to early Mass and again in the afternoon to vespers. She had three children, one of whom had been born after her husband’s death, and she never spoke at meals except to scold them. She did little work on the farm, but spent most of her time looking after the kids, and in the evening sat by herself in the sitting-room, with the door open so that she could hear if one of them was crying, and read novels. The two women hated one another. Ellie despised Frau Becker because she was a foundling and had been a servant, and bitterly resented her being the mistress of the house and in a position to give orders.

‘Ellie was the daughter of a prosperous farmer and had brought a good dowry with her. She hadn’t gone to the village school, but to Zwingenberg, the nearest town, where there was a girl’s gymnasium, and she’d got quite a good education. Poor Frau Becker had come to the farm when she was fourteen and if she could read and write that’s about all she could do. That was another cause of discord between the two women. Ellie lost no opportunity of showing off her knowledge, and Frau Becker, red in the face with anger, would ask what use it was to a farmer’s wife. Then Ellie would look at her husband’s identification disc which she wore on a steel chain round her wrist and with a bitter look on her sullen face say:

‘“Not a farmer’s wife. Only a farmer’s widow. Only the widow of a hero who gave his life for his country.”

‘Poor old Becker had his work cut out to keep the peace between them.’

‘But what did they make of you?’ I interrupted Larry.

‘Oh, they thought I’d deserted from the American Army and couldn’t go back to America or I’d be put in jail. That’s how they explained that I didn’t care to go down to the inn and drink with Becker and Kosti. They thought I didn’t want to attract attention to myself and have the village constable asking questions. When Ellie found out I was trying to learn German she brought out her old schoolbooks and said she’d teach me. So after supper she and I would go into the sitting-room, leaving Frau Becker in the kitchen, and I’d read aloud to her while she corrected my accent and tried to make me understand words I couldn’t get the sense of. I guessed she was doing it not so much to help me as to put something over on Frau Becker.

‘All this time Kosti was trying to make Frau Becker and wasn’t getting anywhere. She was a jolly, merry woman and quite prepared to joke and laugh with him, and he had a way with him with women. I guess she knew what he was after and I dare say she was flattered, but when he started pinching her she told him to keep his hands to himself and smacked his face. And I bet it was a good hard smack.’

Larry hesitated a little and smiled rather shyly.

‘I’ve never been the sort who thinks women are after me, but it occurred to me that – well, that Frau Becker had fallen for me. It made me rather uncomfortable. For one thing she was a lot older than me, and then old Becker had been very decent to us. She dished out the food at table and I couldn’t help noticing that she helped me more liberally than the others, and she seemed to me to look for opportunities of being alone with me. She’d smile at me in what I suppose you’d call a provocative manner. She’d ask me if I had a girl, and say that a young fellow like me must suffer for the want of it in a place like that. You know the sort of thing. I only had three shirts and they were pretty well worn. Once she said it was a disgrace that I should wear such rags and if I’d bring them along she’d mend them. Ellie heard her and next time we were alone said that if I had anything to mend she’d do it. I said it didn’t matter. But a day or two later I found that my socks had been darned and my shirts patched and put back on the bench in the loft on which we kept our things; but which of them had done it I don’t know. Of course I didn’t take Frau Becker seriously; she was a good-natured old soul and I thought it might be just motherliness on her part; but then one day Kosti said to me:.

‘“Listen, it’s not me she wants; it’s you. I haven’t got a chance.”

‘“Don’t talk such nonsense,” I said to him. “She’s old enough to be my mother.”

‘“What of it? You go ahead, my boy, I won’t stand in your way. She’s not so young as she might be, but she’s a fine figure of a woman.”

‘“Oh, shut up.”

‘“Why d’you hesitate? Not on my account, I hope. I’m a philosopher and I know there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out. I don’t blame her. You’re young. I’ve been young too. Jeunesse ne dure qu’un moment.”

‘I wasn’t too pleased that Kosti was so sure of what I didn’t want to believe. I didn’t quite know how to deal with the situation, and then I recalled various things that hadn’t struck me at the time. Things said by Ellie that I hadn’t paid much attention to. But now I understood them and I was pretty sure that she too knew what was happening. She’d turn up suddenly in the kitchen when Frau Becker and I happened to be alone. I got the impression that she was watching us. I didn’t like it. I thought she was out to catch us. I knew she hated Frau Becker, and if she had half a chance she’d make trouble. Of course I knew she couldn’t catch us, but she was a malevolent creature and I didn’t know what lies she mightn’t invent and pour into old Becker’s ears. I didn’t know what to do except to pretend I was such a fool I didn’t see what the old girl was up to. I was happy at the farm and enjoying the work and I didn’t want to go till after we’d got the harvest in.’

I couldn’t help smiling. I could imagine what Larry had looked like then, in his patched shirt and shorts, his face and neck burnt brown by the hot sun of the Rhine valley, with his lithe slim body, and his black eyes in their deep sockets. I could well believe that the sight of him set the matronly Frau Becker, so blonde, so full-breasted, all of a flutter with desire.

‘Well, what happened?’ I asked.

‘Well, the summer wore on. We worked like demons there. We cut and stacked the hay. Then the cherries were ripe, Kosti and I got up on ladders and picked them, and the two women put them in great baskets and old Becker took them into Zwingenberg and sold them. Then we cut the rye. And of course there were always the animals to look after. We were up before dawn and we didn’t stop work till nightfall. I supposed Frau Becker had given me up as a bad job; as far as I could without offending her, I kept her at arm’s length. I was too sleepy to read much German in the evenings and soon after supper I’d take myself off to our loft and fall into bed. Most evenings Becker and Kosti went to the inn down in the village, but I was fast asleep by the time Kosti came back. It was hot in the loft and I slept naked.

‘One night I was awakened. At the first moment I couldn’t make out what it was; I was only half awake. I felt a hot hand on my mouth and I realized somebody was in bed with me. I tore the hand away and then a mouth was pressed to mine, two arms were thrown round me, and I felt Frau Becker’s great breasts against my body.

‘“Sei still,” she whispered. “Be quiet.”

‘She pressed up against me and kissed my face with hot full lips and her hands travelled over my body and she twined her legs in mine.’

Larry stopped. I giggled.

‘What did you do?’

He gave me a deprecating smile. He even flushed a little.

‘What could I do? I could hear Kosti breathing heavily in his sleep in the bed next to mine. The situation of Joseph has always seemed to me faintly ridiculous. I was only just twenty-three. I couldn’t make a scene and kick her out. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I did what was expected of me.

‘Then she slipped out of bed and tiptoed out of the loft. I can tell you, I heaved a sigh of relief. You know, I’d been scared. “Gosh,” I said, “what a risk to take!” I thought it likely that Becker had come home drunk and fallen asleep in a stupor, but they slept in the same bed, and it might be that he’d woken up and seen his wife wasn’t there. And there was Ellie. She always said she didn’t sleep well. If she’d been awake she’d have heard Frau Becker go downstairs and out of the house. And then, suddenly, something struck me. When Frau Becker was in bed with me I’d felt a piece of metal against my skin. I’d paid no attention, you know one doesn’t in those circumstances, and I’d never thought of asking myself what the devil it was. And now it flashed across me. I was sitting on the side of my bed thinking and worrying about the consequences of all this and it was such a shock that I jumped up. The piece of metal was Ellie’s husband’s identification disc that she wore round her wrist and it wasn’t Frau Becker that had been in bed with me. It was Ellie.’

I roared with laughter. I couldn’t stop.

‘It may seem funny to you,’ said Larry. ‘It didn’t seem funny to me.’

‘Well, now you look back on it, don’t you think there is just a faint element of the humorous about it?’

An unwilling smile played on his lips.

‘Perhaps. But it was an awkward situation. I didn’t know what it was going to lead to. I didn’t like Ellie. I thought her a most unpleasant female.’

‘But how could you mistake one for the other?’

‘It was pitch dark. She never said a word except to tell me to keep my trap shut. They were both big stout women. I thought Frau Becker had her eye on me. It never occurred to me for a moment that Ellie gave me a thought. She was always thinking of her husband. I lit a cigarette and thought the position over and the more I thought of it the less I liked it. It seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to get out.

‘I’d often cursed Kosti because he was so hard to wake. When we were at the mine I used to have to shake the life out of him to get him up in time to go to work. But I was thankful now that he slept so heavily. I lit my lantern and dressed, bundled my things into my rucksack – I hadn’t got much, so it didn’t take a minute – and slipped my arms through the straps. I walked across the loft in my stocking feet and didn’t put my shoes on till I got to the bottom of the ladder. I blew out the lantern. It was a dark night, with no moon, but I knew my way to the road and I turned in the direction of the village. I walked fast as I wanted to get through it before anyone was up and about. It was only twelve miles to Zwingenberg and I got there just as it was stirring. I shall never forget that walk. There wasn’t a sound except my footsteps on the road and now and then the crowing of a cock in a farm. Then the first greyness when it wasn’t yet light and not quite dark, and the first hint of dawn, and the sunrise with the birds all starting to sing, and that lush green country, meadows and woods and the wheat in the fields silvery gold in the cool light of the beginning day. I got a cup of coffee at Zwingenberg and a roll, then I went to the post office and sent a wire to the American Express to have my clothes and my books sent to Bonn.’

‘Why Bonn?’ I interrupted.

‘I’d taken a fancy to it when we stopped off there on our tramp down the Rhine. I liked the way the light shone on the roofs and the river, and its old narrow streets, and its villas and gardens and avenues of chestnut trees and the rococo buildings of the university. It struck me then it wouldn’t be a bad place to stay in for a bit. But I thought I’d better present a respectable appearance when I got there, I looked like a tramp and I didn’t think I’d inspire much confidence if I went to a pension and asked for a room, so I took a train to Frankfurt and bought myself a grip and a few clothes. I stayed in Bonn off and on for a year.’

‘And did you get anything out of your experience, at the mine, I mean, and on the farm?’

‘Yes,’ said Larry, nodding his head and smiling.

But he didn’t tell me what it was and I knew him well enough by then to know that when he felt like telling you something he did, but when he didn’t he would turn off questions with a cool pleasantry that made it useless to insist. For I must remind the reader that he narrated all this to me ten years after it happened. Till then, when I once more came in contact with him, I had no notion where he was or how he was engaged. For all I knew he might be dead. Except for my friendship with Elliott, who kept me posted with the course of Isabel’s life and so reminded me of Larry, I should doubtless have forgotten his existence.

CHAPTER 3

Isabel was married to Gray Maturin early in the June of the year after the termination of her engagement to Larry. Though Elliott hated leaving Paris at a moment when the season was at its height and he must miss a number of grand parties, his family feeling was too strong to allow him to neglect what he thought a social duty. Isabel’s brothers were unable to leave their distant posts and so it behoved him to make the irksome journey to Chicago to give his niece away. Remembering that French aristocrats had gone to the guillotine in all their finery, he made a special journey to London to get himself a new morning coat, a dove-grey double-breasted waistcoat, and a silk hat. On his return to Paris he invited me to come and see them on. He was in a state of perturbation because the grey pearl he usually wore in his necktie would not make any sort of effect against the pale grey tie he had chosen as suitable to the festive occasion. I suggested his emerald-and-diamond pin.

‘If I were a guest – yes,’ he said. ‘But in the particular position I shall occupy I feel that a pearl is indicated.’

He was much pleased with the marriage, which concorded with all his ideas of propriety, and he spoke of it with the unctuousness of a dowager duchess expressing herself on the suitability of a union between a scion of the La Rochefoucaulds with a daughter of the Montmorencys. As a visible mark of his satisfaction he was taking over as a wedding present, sparing no expense, a fine portrait by Nattier of a princess of the House of France.

It appeared that Henry Maturin had bought for the young couple a house in Astor Street so that they should be close to where Mrs Bradley lived and not too far from his own palatial residence on Lake Shore Drive. By a happy chance, in which I suspected the deft complicity of Elliott, Gregory Brabazon was in Chicago at the time the purchase was made and the decoration was entrusted to him. When Elliott returned to Europe and, throwing in his hand so far as the season in Paris was concerned, came straight to London, he brought photographs of the result. Gregory Brabazon had let himself go. In the drawing-room he had gone all George the Second and it was very grand. In the library, which was to be Gray’s den, he had been inspired by a room in the Amalienburg Palace at Munich, and except that there was no place in it for books it was perfect. Save for the twin beds, Louis Quinze visiting Madame de Pompadour would have found himself perfectly at home in the bedroom Gregory had provided for this young American couple, but Isabel’s bathroom would have been an eye-opener to him; it was all glass – walls, ceiling and bath – and on the walls silver fish meandered profusely among gilded aquatic plants.

‘Of course it’s a tiny house,’ said Elliott, ‘but Henry told me the decoration set him back a hundred thousand dollars. A fortune to some people.’

The ceremony was performed with such pomp as the Episcopalian church could afford.

‘Not like a wedding at Notre Dame,’ he told me complacently, ‘but for a Protestant affair it didn’t lack style.’

The press had behaved very handsomely and Elliott negligently tossed the cuttings to me. He showed me photographs of Isabel, hefty but handsome in her wedding-dress, and Gray, a massive but fine figure of a man, a trifle self-conscious in his formal clothes. There was a group of the young couple with bridesmaids and another group with Mrs Bradley in a sumptuous garment and Elliott holding his new top-hat with a grace that only he could have achieved. I asked how Mrs Bradley was.

She’s lost a good deal of weight and I don’t like her colour, but she’s pretty well. Of course the whole thing was a strain on her, but now it’s all over she’ll be able to rest up.’

A year later Isabel was delivered of a daughter, to whom, following the fashion of the moment, she gave the name of Joan; and after an interval of two years she had another daughter whom, following another fashion, she called Priscilla.

One of Henry Maturin’s partners died and the other two under pressure soon afterwards retired, so that he entered into sole possession of the business over which he had always exercised despotic control. He realized the ambition he had long entertained and took Gray into partnership with him. The firm had never been so prosperous.

‘They’re making money hand over fist, my dear fellow,’ Elliott told me. ‘Why, Gray at the age of twenty-five is making fifty thousand a year, and that’s only a beginning. The resources of America are inexhaustible. It isn’t a boom, it’s just the natural development of a great country.’

His chest swelled with an unwonted patriotic fervour.

‘Henry Maturin can’t live for ever, high blood pressure, you know, and by the time Gray’s forty he should be worth twenty million dollars. Princely, my dear fellow, princely.’

Elliott kept up a fairly regular correspondence with his sister and from time to time as the years went on passed on to me what she told him. Gray and Isabel were very happy, and the babies were sweet. They lived in a style that Elliott gladly admitted was eminently suitable; they entertained lavishly and were lavishly entertained; he told me with satisfaction that Isabel and Gray hadn’t dined by themselves once in three months. Their whirl of gaiety was interrupted by the death of Mrs Maturin, that colourless, highborn lady whom Henry Maturin had married for her connexions when he was making a place for himself in the city to which his father had come as a country bumpkin; and out of respect for her memory for a year the young couple never entertained more than six people to dinner.

‘I’ve always said that eight was the perfect number,’ said Elliott, determined to look on the bright side of things. ‘It’s intimate enough to permit of general conversation and yet large enough to give the impression of a party.’

Gray was wonderfully generous to his wife. On the birth of their first child he gave her a square-cut diamond ring and on the birth of her second a sable coat. He was too busy to leave Chicago much, but such holidays as he could take they spent at Henry Maturin’s imposing house at Marvin. Henry could deny nothing to the son whom he adored and one Christmas gave him a plantation in South Carolina so that he could get a fortnight’s duck-shooting in the season.

‘Of course our merchant princes correspond to those great patrons of the arts of the Italian Renaissance who made fortunes by commerce. The Medici, for instance. Two kings of France were not too proud to marry the daughters of that illustrious family and I foresee the day when the crowned heads of Europe will seek the hands of our dollar princesses. What was it Shelley said? “The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return.”’

Henry Maturin had for many years looked after Mrs Bradley’s and Elliott’s investments and they had a well-justified confidence in his acumen. He had never countenanced speculation and had put their money into sound securities, but with the great increase in values they found their comparatively modest fortunes increased in a manner that both surprised and delighted them. Elliott told me that, without stirring a finger, he was nearly twice as rich in 1926 as he had been in 1918. He was sixty-five, his hair was grey, his face lined, and there were pouches under his eyes, but he bore his years gallantly; he was as slim and held himself as erectly as ever; he had always been moderate in his habits and taken care of his appearance. He had no intention of submitting to the ravages of time so long as he could have his clothes made by the best tailor in London, his hair dressed and his face shaved by his own particular barber, and a masseur to come in every morning to keep his elegant body in perfect condition. He had long forgotten that he had ever so far demeaned himself as to engage in a trade, and without ever saying so outright, for he was not so stupid as to tell a lie that might be found out, he was inclined to suggest that in his youth he had been in the diplomatic service. I must admit that if I had ever had occasion to draw a portrait of an ambassador I should without hesitation have chosen Elliott as my model.

But things were changing. Such of the great ladies who had advanced Elliott’s career as were still alive were well along in years. The English peeresses, having lost their lords, had been forced to surrender their mansions to daughters-in-law, and had retired to villas at Cheltenham or to modest houses in Regent’s Park. Stafford House was turned into a museum, Curzon House became the seat of an organization, Devonshire House was for sale. The yacht on which Elliott had been in the habit of staying at Cowes had passed into other hands. The fashionable persons who occupied the stage had no use for the elderly man that Elliott now was. They found him tiresome and ridiculous. They were still willing to come to his elaborate luncheon parties at Claridge’s but he was quick-witted enough to know that they came to meet one another rather than to see him. He could no longer pick and choose among the invitations that once had littered his writing-table, and much more often than he would have liked anyone to know he suffered the humiliation of dining by himself in the privacy of his suite. Women of rank in England, when a scandal has closed the doors of society to them, develop an interest in the arts and surround themselves with painters, writers and musicians. Elliott was too proud thus to humiliate himself.

‘The death duties and the war profiteers have ruined English society,’ he told me. ‘People don’t seem to mind who they know. London still has its tailors, its bootmakers, and its hatters, and I trust they’ll last my time, but except for them it’s finished. My dear fellow, do you know that the St Erth’s have women to wait at table?’

This he said when we were walking away from Carlton House Terrace after a luncheon party at which an unfortunate incident had occurred. Our noble host had a well-known collection of pictures, and a young American who was there, Paul Barton by name, expressed a desire to see them.

‘You’ve got a Titian, haven’t you?’

‘We had. It’s in America now. Some old Jew offered us a packet of money for it and we were damned hard up at the time, so my governor sold it.’

I noticed that Elliott, bristling, threw a venomous glance at the jovial marquess, and guessed that it was he who had bought the picture. He was furious at hearing himself, Virginian born and the descendant of a signatory of the Declaration, thus described. He had never in his life suffered so great an affront. And what made it worse was that Paul Barton was the object of his virulent hatred. He was a young man who had appeared in London soon after the war. He was twenty-three, blond, very good-looking, charming, a beautiful dancer, and had an ample fortune. He had brought a letter of introduction to Elliott, who with the kindness of heart natural to him had presented him to several of his friends. Not content with this he had given him some valuable hints on conduct. Delving back into his own experience, he had shown him how it was possible, by paying small attentions to old ladies and by lending a willing ear to distinguished men, however tedious, for a stranger to make his way in society.

But it was a different world that Paul Barton entered from that into which, a generation before, Elliott Templeton had penetrated by means of dogged perseverance. It was a world bent on amusing itself. Paul Barton’s high spirits, pleasing exterior, and engaging manner did for him in a few weeks what Elliott had achieved only after years of industry and determination. Soon he no longer needed Elliott’s help and took small pains to conceal the fact. He was pleasant to him when they met, but in an offhand way that deeply offended the older man Elliott did not ask people to a party because he liked them, but because they helped to make it go, and since Paul Barton was popular he continued to invite him on occasion to his weekly luncheons; but the successful young man was generally engaged and twice he threw Elliott over at the last moment. Elliott had done this himself too often not to know it was because he had just had a more tempting invitation.

‘I don’t ask you to believe it,’ Elliott told me, fuming, ‘but it’s God’s truth that when I see him now he patronizes me. ME. Titian. Titian,’ he spluttered. ‘He wouldn’t know a Titian if he saw one.’

I had never seen Elliott so angry and I guessed his wrath was caused by his belief that Paul Barton had asked about the picture maliciously, having somehow learnt that Elliott had bought it, and would make a funny story at his expense out of the noble lord’s reply.

‘He’s nothing but a dirty little snob, and if there’s one thing in the world I detest and despise it’s snobbishness. He’d have been nowhere except for me. Would you believe it, his father makes office furniture. Office furniture.’ He put withering scorn into the two words. ‘And when I tell people he simply doesn’t exist in America, his origins couldn’t be more humble, they don’t seem to care. Take my word for it, my dear fellow, English society is as dead as the dodo.’

Nor did Elliott find France much better. There the great ladies of his youth, if still alive, were given over to bridge (a game he loathed), piety, and the care of their grandchildren. Manufacturers, Argentines, Chileans, American women separated or divorced from their husbands, inhabited the stately houses of the aristocracy and entertained with splendour, but at their parties Elliott was confounded to meet politicians who spoke French with a vulgar accent, journalists whose table manners were deplorable, and even actors. The scions of princely families thought it no shame to marry the daughters of shopkeepers. It was true Paris was gay, but with what a shoddy gaiety! The young, devoted to the mad pursuit of pleasure, thought nothing more amusing than to go from one stuffy little night club to another, drinking champagne at a hundred francs a bottle and dancing close-packed with the riff-raff of the town till five o’clock in the morning. The smoke, the heat, the noise made Elliott’s head ache. This was not the Paris that he had accepted thirty years before as his spiritual home. This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.

CHAPTER 4

But Elliott had a flair. An inner monitor suggested to him that the Riviera was on the point of becoming once more the resort of rank and fashion. He knew the coast well from having often spent a few days in Monte Carlo at the Hotel de Paris on his way back from Rome, whither his duties at the papal court had called him, or at Cannes in the villa of one or the other of his friends. But that was in the winter, and of late rumours had reached him that it was beginning to be well spoken of as a summer resort. The big hotels were remaining open; their summer visitors were listed in the social columns of the Paris Herald and Elliott read the familiar names with approval.

‘The world is too much with me,’ he said. ‘I have now reached a time of life when I am prepared to enjoy the beauties of nature.’

The remark may seem obscure. It isn’t really. Elliott had always felt that nature was an impediment to the social life, and he had no patience with people who could bother to go to see a lake or a mountain when they had before their eyes a Regency commode or a painting by Watteau. He had at the time a considerable sum of money to spend. Henry Maturin, urged by his son and exasperated by the sight of his friends on the stock exchange who were making fortunes overnight, had surrendered at last to the current of events and, abandoning little by little his old conservatism, had seen no reason why he too should not get on the band wagon. He wrote to Elliott that he was as much opposed to gambling as he had ever been, but this was not gambling, it was an affirmation of his belief in the inexhaustible resources of the country. His optimism was based on common sense. He could see nothing to halt the progress of America. He ended by saying that he had bought on margin a number of sound securities for dear Louisa Bradley and was glad to be able to tell Elliott that she now had a profit of twenty thousand dollars. Finally, if Elliott wanted to make a little money and would allow him to act according to his judgement, he was confident that he would not be disappointed. Elliott, apt to use hackneyed quotations, remarked that he could resist anything but temptation; the consequence of which was that from then on, instead of turning to the social intelligence as he had done for many years when the Herald was brought him with his breakfast, he gave his first attention to the reports of the stock market. So successful were Henry Maturin’s transactions on his behalf that now Elliott found himself with the tidy sum of fifty thousand dollars which he had done nothing to earn.

He decided to take his profit and buy a house on the Riviera. As a refuge from the world he chose Antibes, which held a strategic position between Cannes and Monte Carlo so that it could be conveniently reached from either; but whether it was the hand of Providence or his own sure instinct that led him to choose a spot that was soon to become the centre of fashion, it is impossible to say. To live in a villa with a garden had a suburban vulgarity that revolted his fastidious taste, so he acquired two houses in the old town looking on the sea, knocked them into one, and installed central heating, bathrooms, and the sanitary conveniences that American example has forced on a recalcitrant Europe. Pickling was all the rage just then, so he furnished the house with old Provençal furniture duly pickled and, surrendering discreetly to modernity, with modern fabrics. He was still unwilling to accept such painters as Picasso and Braque – ‘horrors, my dear fellow, horrors’ – whom certain misguided enthusiasts were making such a fuss about, but felt himself at long last justified in extending his patronage to the Impressionists and so adorned his walls with some very pretty pictures. I remember a Monet of people rowing on a river, a Pissaro of a quay and a bridge on the Seine, a Tahitian landscape by Gauguin, and a charming Renoir of a young girl in profile with long yellow hair hanging down her back. His house when finished was fresh and gay, unusual, and simple with that simplicity that you knew could only have been achieved at great expense.

Then began the most splendid period of Elliott’s life. He brought his excellent chef down from Paris and it was soon acknowledged that he had the best cuisine on the Riviera. He dressed his butler and his footman in white with gold straps on their shoulders. He entertained with a magnificence that never overstepped the bounds of good taste. The shores of the Mediterranean were littered with royalties from all parts of Europe: some lured there on account of the climate, some in exile, and some because a scandalous past or an unsuitable marriage made it more convenient for them to inhabit a foreign country. There were Romanoffs from Russia, Hapsburgs from Austria, Bourbons from Spain, the two Sicilys, and Parma; there were princes of the House of Windsor and princes of the House of Bragança; there were Royal Highnesses from Sweden and Royal Highnesses from Greece: Elliott entertained them. There were princes and princesses not of royal blood, dukes and duchesses, marquesses and marchionesses, from Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Belgium: Elliott entertained them. In winter the King of Sweden and the King of Denmark made sojourns on the coast; now and then Alfonso of Spain paid a hurried visit: Elliott entertained them. I never ceased to admire the way in which, while he bowed with courtly grace to those exalted personages, he managed to maintain the independent demeanour of the citizen of a country where all men are said to be born equal.

I had then, after some years of travel, bought a house on Cap Ferrat and thus saw a good deal of Elliott. I had risen so high in his good graces that sometimes he invited me to his very grandest parties.

‘Come as a favour to me, my dear fellow,’ he would say. ‘Of course I know just as well as you do that royalties ruin a party. But other people like to meet them and I think one owes it to oneself to show the poor things some attention. Though heaven knows they don’t deserve it. They’re the most ungrateful people in the world; they’ll use you, and when they have no further use for you they’ll cast you aside like a frayed shirt; they’ll accept innumerable favours from you, but there’s not one of them who’d cross the road to do the smallest thing for you in return.’

Elliott had taken pains to get on good terms with the local authorities, and the prefect of the district and the bishop of the diocese, accompanied by his vicar general, often graced his table. The bishop had been a cavalry officer before entering the Church and in the war had commanded a regiment. He was a rubicund, stoutish man, who affected the rough-and-ready language of the barracks, and his austere, cadaverous vicar general was always on pins and needles lest he should say something scandalous. He listened with a deprecating smile when his superior told his favourite stories. But the bishop conducted his diocese with remarkable competence, and his eloquence in the pulpit was no less moving than his sallies at the luncheon table were amusing. He approved of Elliott for his pious generosity to the Church and liked him for his amiability and the good food he provided; and the two became good friends. Elliott could thus flatter himself that he was making the best of both worlds and, if I may venture so to put it, effecting a very satisfactory working arrangement between God and Mammon.

Elliott was house-proud and he was anxious to show his new house to his sister; he had always felt a certain reserve in her approval of him and he wanted her to see the style in which he now lived and the friends he hobnobbed with. It was the definitive answer to her hesitations. She would have to admit that he had made good. He wrote and asked her to come over with Gray and Isabel, not to stay with him, for he had no room, but to stay as his guests at the near-by Hotel du Cap. Mrs Bradley replied that her travelling days were over, for her health was indifferent and she thought she was better off at home; and in any case it was impossible for Gray to absent himself from Chicago; business was booming and he was making a great deal of money and had to stay put. Elliott was attached to his sister and her letter alarmed him. He wrote to Isabel. She replied by cable that, though her mother was so far from well that she had to stay in bed one day a week, she was in no immediate danger and indeed with care might be expected to live a long time yet; but that Gray needed a rest and, with his father there to look after things, there was no reason why he should not take a holiday; so, not that summer but the next, she and Gray would come over.

On October the 23rd, 1929, the New York market broke.

CHAPTER 5

I was in London then and at first we in England did not realize how grave the situation was nor how distressing its results would be. For my own part, though chagrined at losing a considerable sum, it was for the most part paper profits that I lost, and when the dust had settled I found myself little the poorer in cash. I knew that Elliott had been gambling heavily and feared that he was badly hit, but I did not see him till we both returned to the Riviera for Christmas. He told me then that Henry Maturin was dead and Gray ruined.

I know little of business matters and I dare say that my account of the events, given me by Elliott, will seem confused. So far as I could make out the catastrophe that had befallen the firm was due in part to Henry Maturin’s self-will and in part to Gray’s rashness. Henry Maturin at first would not believe that the break was serious, but persuaded himself that it was a plot of the New York brokers to put a quick one over their provincial brethren, and setting his teeth he poured forth money to support the market. He raged against the Chicago brokers who were letting themselves be stampeded by those scoundrels in New York. He had always prided himself on the fact that none of his smaller clients, widows with settled incomes, retired officers and such like, had ever lost a penny by following his advice, and now, instead of letting them take a loss, he supported their accounts out of his own pocket. He said he was prepared to go broke, he could make another fortune, but he could never hold up his head again if the little people who trusted him lost their all. He thought he was magnanimous; he was only vain. His great fortune melted and one night he had a heart attack. He was in his sixties, he had always worked hard, played hard, eaten too much, and drunk heavily; after a few hours of agony he died of coronary thrombosis.

Gray was left to deal with the situation alone. He had been speculating extensively on the side, without the knowledge of his father, and was personally in the greatest difficulty. His efforts to extricate himself failed. The banks would not lend him money; older men on the exchange told him that the only thing was to throw up the sponge. I am not clear about the rest of the story. He was unable to meet his obligations and was, I understand, declared bankrupt; he had already mortgaged his own house and was glad to hand it over to the mortgagees; his father’s house on Lake Shore Drive and the house at Marvin were sold for what they would fetch; Isabel sold her jewels: all that was left them was the plantation in South Carolina, which was settled on Isabel and for which a purchaser could not be found. Gray was wiped out.

‘And what about you, Elliott?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ he answered airily. ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.’

I did not question him further, for his financial affairs were no business of mine, but whatever his losses were I presumed that like the rest of us he had suffered.

The depression did not at first hit the Riviera badly. I heard of two or three people who had lost a good deal, many villas remained closed for the winter and several were put up for sale. The hotels were far from full and the Casino at Monte Carlo complained that the season was poor. But it was not for a couple of years that the draught made itself felt. Then an estate agent told me that on the stretch of coast that reaches from Toulon to the Italian border there were forty-eight thousand properties, large and small, to be sold. The shares of the Casino slumped. The great hotels put down their prices in a vain attempt to attract. The only foreigners to be seen were those who had always been so poor that they couldn’t be poorer, and they spent no money because they had no money to spend. The shopkeepers were in despair. But Elliott neither diminished his staff nor lessened their wages as many did; he continued to provide choice food and choice wines to royal and titled persons. He bought himself a large new car, which he imported from America and on which he had to pay a heavy duty. He gave generously to the charity the bishop had organized to provide free meals for the families of the workless. In fact he lived as though there had never been a crisis and half the world were not staggering from its effects.

I discovered the reason by chance: Elliott had by this time ceased to go to England except for a fortnight once a year to buy clothes, but he still transferred his establishment to his apartment in Paris for three months in the autumn and for May and June, these being the periods when the Riviera was deserted by Elliott’s friends; he liked the summer there, partly on account of the bathing, but chiefly, I think, because the hot weather gave him the opportunity to indulge in a gaiety of dress that his sense of decorum had always forced him to eschew. He would appear then in trousers of startling colour, red, blue, green, or yellow, and with them wear singlets of contrasting hue, mauve, violet, puce, or harlequin, and would accept the compliments his attire clamoured for with the deprecating grace of an actress who is told that she has played a new role divinely.

I happened to be spending a day in Paris in the spring on my way back to Cap Ferrat and had asked Elliott to lunch with me. We met in the Ritz bar, no longer thronged with college boys come from America to have a good time, but as deserted as a playwright after the first night of an unsuccessful play. We had a cocktail, a transatlantic habit to which Elliott had at last become reconciled, and ordered our lunch. When we had finished, he suggested that we should go round the curio shops, and though I told him I had no money to spend I was glad enough to accompany him. We walked through the Place Vendôme and he asked if I would mind going in to Charvet’s for a moment; he had ordered some things and wanted to know if they were ready. It appeared that he was having some vests made, and some drawers, and he was having his initials embroidered on them. The vests had not come in yet, but the drawers were there and the shop assistant asked Elliott if he would like to see them.

‘I would,’ said he, and when the man had gone to fetch them added to me: ‘I have them made to order on a pattern of my own.’

They were brought, and to me, except that they were of silk, looked exactly like the drawers I had frequently bought for myself at Macy’s; but what caught my eye was that above the intertwined E. T. of the initials was a count’s crown. I did not say a word.

‘Very nice, very nice,’ said Elliott. ‘Well, when the undershirts are ready you’ll send them along.’

We left the shop and Elliott, as he walked away, turned to me with a smile.

‘Did you notice the crown? To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten about it when I asked you to come in to Charvet’s. I don’t think I’ve had occasion to tell you that His Holiness has been graciously pleased to revive in my favour my old family title.’

‘Your what?’ I said, startled out of my politeness.

Elliott raised a disapproving eyebrow.

‘Didn’t you know? I am descended in the female line from the Count de Lauria who came over to England in the suite of Philip the Second and married a maid of honour of Queen Mary’s.’

‘Our old friend Bloody Mary?’

‘That, I believe, is what heretics call her,’ Elliott answered stiffly. ‘I don’t think I ever told you that I spent September of ‘twenty-nine in Rome. I thought it a bore having to go because Rome is empty then, but it was fortunate for me that my sense of duty prevailed over my desire for worldly pleasures. My friends at the Vatican told me that the crash was coming and strongly advised me to sell all my American securities. The Catholic Church has the wisdom of twenty centuries behind it and I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I cabled to Henry Maturin to sell everything and buy gold, and I cabled to Louisa to tell her to do the same. Henry cabled back asking me if I was crazy and said he’d do nothing until I confirmed the instructions. I immediately cabled in the most peremptory manner, telling him to carry them out and to cable me that he had done so. Poor Louisa paid no attention to my advice and suffered for it.’

‘So when the crash came you were sitting pretty?’

‘An Americanism, my dear fellow, which I see no occasion for you to use, but it expresses my situation with a good deal of accuracy. I lost nothing; in fact I had made what you would probably call a packet. I was able some time later to buy back my securities for a fraction of their original cost, and since I owed it all to what I can only describe as the direct interposition of Providence I felt it only right and proper that I should do something for Providence in return.’

‘Oh, and how did you set about that?’

‘Well, you know the Duce has been reclaiming great tracts of land in the Pontine Marshes and it was represented to me that His Holiness was gravely concerned at the lack of places of worship for the settlers. So, to cut a long story short, I built a little Romanesque church, an exact copy of one I knew in Provence, and perfect in every detail, which, though I say it myself, is a gem. It is dedicated to St Martin because I was lucky enough to find an old stained-glass window representing St Martin in the act of cutting his cloak in two to give half of it to a naked beggar, and as the symbolism seemed so apt I bought it and placed it over the high altar.’

I didn’t interrupt Elliott to ask him what connexion he saw between the Saint’s celebrated action and the rake-off on the pretty penny he had made by selling out in the nick of time which, like an agent’s commission, he was paying to a higher power. But to a prosaic person like me symbolism is often obscure. He went on.

‘When I was privileged to show the photographs to the Holy Father, he was gracious enough to tell me that he could see at a glance that I was a man of impeccable taste, and he added that it was a pleasure to him to find in this degenerate age someone who combined devotion to the Church with such rare artistic gifts. A memorable experience, my dear fellow, a memorable experience. But no one was more surprised than I when shortly afterwards it was intimated to me that he had been pleased to confer a title upon me. As an American citizen I feel it more modest not to use it, except of course at the Vatican, so I have forbidden my Joseph to address me as Monsieur le Comte, and I trust you will respect my confidence. I don’t wish it bruited abroad. But I would not like His Holiness to think that I do not value the honour that he has done me and it is purely out of respect for him that I have the crown embroidered on my personal linen. I don’t mind telling you that I take a modest pride in concealing my rank under the sober pin-stripe of an American gentleman.’

We parted. Elliott told me he would come down to the Riviera at the end of June. He did not do so. He had just made his arrangements to transfer his staff from Paris, intending to drive down leisurely in his car so that everything should be in perfect order on his arrival, when he received a cable from Isabel to say that her mother had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Elliott, besides being fond of his sister, had, as I have said, a strong strain of family feeling. He took the first ship out of Cherbourg and from New York went to Chicago. He wrote to tell me that Mrs Bradley was very ill and grown so thin that it was a shock to him. She might last a few weeks longer or even a few months, but in any case he felt it his sad duty to remain with her till the end. He said he found the great heat more supportable than he had expected, but the lack of congenial society only tolerable because at such a moment he had in any case no heart for it. He said he was disappointed with the way his fellow-countrymen had reacted to the depression; he would have expected them to take their misfortune with more equanimity. Knowing that nothing is easier than to bear other people’s calamities with fortitude, I thought that Elliott, richer now than he had ever been in his life, was perhaps hardly entitled to be severe. He ended by giving me messages for several of his friends and bade me by no means forget to explain to everyone I met why it was that his house must remain closed for the summer.

Little more than a month later I received another letter from him to tell me that Mrs Bradley had died. He wrote with sincerity and emotion. I should never have thought him capable of expressing himself with such dignity, real feeling, and simplicity, had I not long known that notwithstanding his snobbishness and his absurd affectations Elliott was a kindly, affectionate, and honest man. In the course of this letter he told me that Mrs Bradley’s affairs appeared to be in some disorder. Her elder son, a diplomatist, being chargé d’affaires in Tokyo during the absence of the ambassador, had been of course unable to leave his post. Her second son, Templeton, who had been in the Philippines when I first knew the Bradleys, had been in due course recalled to Washington and occupied a responsible position in the State Department. He had come with his wife to Chicago when his mother’s condition was recognized as hopeless, but had been obliged to return to the capital immediately after the funeral. In these circumstances Elliott felt that he must remain in America until things were straightened out. Mrs Bradley had divided her fortune equally between her three children, but it appeared that her losses in the crash of ‘twenty-nine had been substantial. Fortunately they had found a purchaser for the farm at Marvin. Elliott in his letter referred to it as dear Louisa’s country place.

‘It is always sad when a family has to part with its ancestral home,’ he wrote, ‘but of late years I have seen this forced upon so many of my English friends that I feel that my nephews and Isabel must accept the inevitable with the same courage and resignation that they have. Noblesse oblige.’

They had been lucky too in disposing of Mrs Bradley’s house in Chicago. There had long been a scheme afoot to tear down the row of houses in one of which Mrs Bradley lived and build in their stead a great block of apartments, but it had been held up by her obstinate determination to die in the house in which she had lived. But no sooner was the breath out of her body than the promoters came forward with an offer and it was promptly accepted. Yet even at that Isabel was left very ill provided for.

After the crash Gray had tried to get a job, even as a clerk in the office of such of the brokers as had weathered the storm, but there was no business. He applied to his old friends to give him something to do, however humble and however badly paid, but he applied in vain. His frenzied efforts to stave off the disaster that finally overwhelmed him, the burden of anxiety, the humiliation, resulted in a nervous breakdown, and he began to have headaches so severe that he was incapacitated for twenty-four hours and as limp as a wet rag when they ceased. It had appeared to Isabel that they could not do better than go down with the children to the plantation in South Carolina till Gray regained his health. In its day it had brought in a hundred thousand dollars a year for its rice crop, but for long now had been no more than a wilderness of marsh and gumwood, useful only to sportsmen who wanted to shoot duck, and no purchaser could be found for it. There they had lived off and on since the crash and there they proposed to return till conditions improved and Gray could find employment.

‘I couldn’t allow that,’ Elliott wrote. ‘Why, my dear fellow, they live like pigs. Isabel without a maid, no governess for the children, and only a couple of coloured women to look after them. So I’ve offered them my apartment in Paris and proposed that they should stay there till things change in this fantastic country. I shall provide them with a staff, as a matter of fact my kitchen-maid is a very good cook, so I shall leave her with them and I can easily find someone to take her place. I shall arrange to settle the accounts myself so that Isabel can spend her small income on her clothes and the menus plaisirs of the family. This means of course that I shall spend much more of my time on the Riviera and so hope to see a great deal more of you, my dear fellow, than I have in the past. London and Paris being now what they are, I’m really more at home on the Riviera. It’s the only place remaining where I can meet people who speak my own language. I dare say I shall go to Paris now and then for a few days, but when I do, I don’t in the least mind pigging it at the Ritz. I’m glad to say that I’ve at long last persuaded Gray and Isabel to accede to my wishes and I’m bringing them all over as soon as the necessary arrangements can be made. The furniture and the pictures (very poor in quality, my dear fellow, and of the most doubtful authenticity) are being sold the week after next and meanwhile, as I thought to live in the house till the last moment would be painful to them, I have brought them to stay with me at the Drake. I shall settle them in when we get to Paris and then come down to the Riviera. Don’t forget to remember me to your royal neighbour.’

Who could deny that Elliott, that arch-snob, was also the kindest, most considerate and generous of men?

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 1

ELLIOTT, HAVING INSTALLED the Maturins in his spacious apartment on the Left Bank, returned to the Riviera at the end of the year. He had planned his house to suit his own convenience and there was no room in it for a family of four, so that, even if he had wanted to, he could not have had them to stay with him there. I do not think he regretted it. He was well aware that as a man by himself he was a more desirable asset than if he must be accompanied by a niece and a nephew, and he could hardly expect to arrange his own distinguished little parties (a matter over which he took immense trouble) if he had to count invariably on the presence of two house guests.

‘It’s much better for them to settle down in Paris and accustom themselves to civilized life. Besides, the two girls are old enough to go to school and I’ve found one not far from my apartment which I’m assured is very select.’

In consequence of this I did not see Isabel till the spring when, because I had some work to do that made it desirable for me to spend some weeks there, I went to Paris and took a couple of rooms in a hotel just out of the Place Vendôme. It was a hotel I frequented, not only for its convenient situation, but because it had an air. It was a big old house built around a courtyard and it had been an inn for close upon two hundred years. The bathrooms were far from luxurious and the plumbing far from satisfactory; the bedrooms with their iron beds, painted white, their old-fashioned white counterpanes, and their huge armoires à glace had a poverty-stricken look; but the parlours were furnished with fine old furniture. The sofa, the armchairs, dated from the gaudy reign of Napoleon the Third, and, though I could not say they were comfortable, they had a florid charm. In that room I lived in the past of the French novelists. When I looked at the Empire clock under its glass case I thought that a pretty woman in ringlets and a flounced dress might have watched the minute hand move as she waited for a visit from Rastignac, the well-born adventurer whose career in novel after novel Balzac followed from his humble beginnings to his ultimate grandeur. Dr Bianchon, the physician who was so real to Balzac that when he lay dying he said: ‘Only Bianchon can save me,’ might well have come into that room to feel the pulse and look at the tongue of a noble dowager from the provinces who had come to Paris to see an attorney about a lawsuit and had called in a doctor for a passing ailment. At that bureau a lovesick woman in a crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover, or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock indited an angry epistle to his extravagant son.

The day after my arrival I called up Isabel and asked if she would give me a cup of tea if I came along at five. It was ten years since I’d seen her. She was reading a French novel when I was ushered into the drawing-room by a staid butler, and getting up she took both my hands and greeted me with a warm and winning smile. I had never seen her more than a dozen times, and only twice alone, but she made me feel at once that we were not casual acquaintances but old friends. The ten years that had passed had reduced the gulf that separated the young girl from the middle-aged man and I was no longer conscious of the disparity of age between us. With the delicate flattery of a woman of the world she treated me as if I were her contemporary, and in five minutes we were chatting as frankly and as unconstrainedly as though we were playmates who had been in the habit of meeting without interruption. She had acquired ease, self-possession, and assurance.

But what chiefly struck me was the change in her appearance. I remembered her as a pretty, bouncing girl who threatened to run to fat; I do not know whether, realizing this, she had taken heroic measures to reduce her weight or whether it was an unusual, though happy, accident of childbearing; but now she was as slender as anyone could wish. The mode of the moment accentuated this. She was in black, and at a glance I noticed that her silk dress, neither too plain nor too fancy, had been made by one of the best dressmakers in Paris, and she wore it with the careless confidence of a woman to whom it is second nature to wear expensive clothes. Ten years before, even with Elliott to advise, her frocks had been somewhat on the showy side and she had worn them as though she were not quite at home in them. Marie Louise de Florimond could not have said now that she lacked chic. She had chic to the tips of her rose-painted nails. Her features had fined down and it occurred to me that she had as pretty and as straight a nose as I had ever seen on a woman’s face. There was not a line on her forehead or under her hazel eyes, and though her skin had lost the fresh bloom of extreme youth, its texture was as fine as ever; it obviously owed something now to lotions, creams, and massage, but they had given it a soft, transparent delicacy that was singularly attractive. Her thin cheeks were very faintly rouged and her mouth was painted with discretion. She wore her bright brown hair bobbed as was the fashion of the moment and marcelled. She had no rings on her fingers, and I remembered that Elliott had told me that she had sold her jewellery; her hands, though not remarkably small, were well made. At that period women wore short frocks in the day-time and I saw that her legs in champagne-coloured stockings were shapely, long, and slender. Legs are the undoing of many a comely woman; Isabel’s legs, as a girl her most unfortunate trait, were now uncommonly good. In fact from the pretty girl whose glowing health, high spirits, and brilliant colour had given her attractiveness she was become a beautiful woman. That she owed her beauty in some degree to art, discipline, and mortification of the flesh did not seem to matter. The result was vastly satisfactory. It might be that the grace of her gestures, the felicity of her carriage, had been acquired by taking thought, but they had a look of perfect spontaneity. I conceived the notion that these four months in Paris had put the finishing touches to a work of conscious art that had been years in the making. Elliott, even in his most censorious mood, could not but have approved of her; I, a person less difficult to please, found her ravishing.

Gray had gone to Mortefontaine to play golf, but she told me he would be in presently.

‘And you must see my two little girls. They’ve gone to the Tuileries Gardens, but they ought to be in soon. They’re sweet.’

We talked of one thing and another. She liked being in Paris and they were very comfortable in Elliott’s apartment. Before leaving them he had made them acquainted with such of his friends as he thought they would like and they had already a pleasant circle of acquaintances. He had pressed them to entertain as abundantly as he had been in the habit of doing.

‘You know, it tickles me to death to think that we’re living like quite rich people when really we’re absolutely broke.’

‘Is it as bad as that?’

She chuckled, and now I remembered the light, gay laugh that I had found so pleasing in her ten years before.

‘Gray hasn’t a penny and I have almost exactly the income Larry had when he wanted me to marry him and I wouldn’t because I thought we couldn’t possibly live on it and now I’ve got two children besides. It’s rather funny, isn’t it?’

‘I’m glad you can see the joke of it.’

‘What news have you of Larry?’

‘I? None. I haven’t set eyes on him since before you were last in Paris. I knew slightly some of the people he used to know and I did ask them what had become of him, but that was years ago. No one seemed to know anything about him. He just vanished.’

‘We know the manager of the bank in Chicago where Larry has his account and he told us that every now and then he got a draft from some queer place. China, Burma, India. He seems to have been getting around.’

I did not hesitate to put the question that came to the tip of my tongue. After all, if you want to know something the best way is to ask.

‘D’you wish now that you had married him?’

She smiled engagingly.

‘I’ve been very happy with Gray. He’s been a wonderful husband. You know, until the crash came we had a grand time together. We like the same people, and we like doing the same things. He’s very sweet. And it’s nice being adored; he’s just as much in love with me now as when we first married. He thinks I’m the most wonderful girl in the world. You can’t imagine how kind and considerate he is. It was quite absurd how generous he was; you see, he thought nothing was too good for me. D’you know, he’s never said an unkind or harsh thing to me all these years we’ve been married. Oh, I’ve been very lucky.’

I asked myself if she thought she’d answered my question. I changed the conversation.

‘Tell me about your little girls.’

As I spoke the doorbell rang.

‘Here they are. You shall see for yourself.’

In a moment they came in followed by a nursery governess and I was introduced first to Joan, the elder, and then to Priscilla. Each in turn gave a polite little knick as she took my hand. One was eight and the other six. They were tall for their age; Isabel of course was tall, and Gray, I remembered, was immense; but they were pretty only in the way all children are pretty. They looked frail. They had their father’s black hair and their mother’s hazel eyes. The presence of a stranger did not make them shy, and they talked eagerly to her of their doings in the gardens. They cast eager eyes on the dainties Isabel’s cook had provided for tea, but which neither of us had touched, and being given permission to have one thing were thrown into a small agony of doubt as to which to choose. It was pleasant to see the demonstrative affection they had for their mother and the three of them clustered together made a charming picture. When they had eaten the little cake each had selected, Isabel sent them away and they went without a word of expostulation. I received the impression that she was bringing them up to do as they were told.

When they were gone I said the usual things one says to a mother about her children and Isabel accepted my compliments with evident, but somewhat casual, pleasure. I asked her how Gray was liking Paris.

‘Well enough. Uncle Elliott left us a car so he can go and play golf almost every day and he’s joined the Traveller’s Club and he plays bridge there. Of course, Uncle Elliott’s offer to support us in this apartment has been a godsend. Gray’s nerves went all to pieces and he still has those terrible headaches; even if he could get a job he isn’t really fit to take it; and naturally that worries him. He wants to work, he feels he ought to, and it humiliates him not to be wanted. You see, he feels it’s a man’s business to work and if he can’t work he may just as well be dead. He can’t bear his feeling of being a drug on the market, and I only got him to come here by persuading him that rest and change would bring him back to normalcy. But I know he won’t be happy till he gets back into harness.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve had a very rough time these last two and a half years.’

‘Well, you know, when the crash came at first I simply couldn’t believe it. It seemed inconceivable to me that we should be ruined. I could understand that other people should be ruined, but that we should be – well, it just seemed impossible. I went on thinking that something would happen to save us at the last moment. And then, when the final blow came, I felt that life wasn’t worth living any more, I didn’t think I could face the future; it was too black. For a fortnight I was absolutely miserable. God, it was awful, having to part with everything, knowing there wouldn’t be any fun any more, having to do without everything I liked – and then at the end of a fortnight I said: “Oh, to hell with it, I’m not going to give it another thought,” and I promise you I never have. I don’t regret anything. I had a lot of fun while it lasted and now it’s gone, it’s gone.’

‘It’s obvious that ruin is easier to bear in a luxurious apartment in a fashionable quarter, with a competent butler and an excellent cook free and for nothing, and when one can cover one’s haggard bones with a dress by Chanel, isn’t it?’

‘Lanvin,’ she giggled. ‘I see you haven’t changed much in ten years. I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, being a cynical brute, but I’m not sure if I’d have accepted Uncle Elliott’s offer except for Gray and the children. On my twenty-eight hundred a year we could have managed perfectly well on the plantation and we’d have grown rice and rye and corn and kept pigs. After all I was born and raised on a farm in Illinois.’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I smiled, knowing that in point of fact she had been born in an expensive clinic in New York.

At this point Gray came in. It is true that I had only seen him two or three times twelve years before, but I had seen a photograph of him with his bride (Elliott kept it in a splendid frame on his piano along with signed photographs of the King of Sweden, the Queen of Spain, and the Duc de Guise) and I had a fair recollection of him. I was taken aback. His hair had receded on the temples and there was a small bald patch on the crown, his face was puffy and red, and he had a double chin. He had put on a lot of weight during years of good living and hard drinking, and only his great height saved him from being grossly obese. But the thing I most noticed was the expression of his eyes. I remembered quite well the trusting, open frankness of their Irish blue, when the world was before him and he hadn’t a care in the world; now I seemed to see in them a sort of puzzled dismay, and even if I hadn’t known the facts I think I might have guessed that something had occurred to destroy his confidence in himself and in the ordered course of events. I felt a kind of diffidence in him, as though he had done wrong, though unwittingly, and were ashamed. It was plain that his nerve was shaken. He greeted me with pleasant cordiality and indeed seemed as glad to see me as if I were an old friend, but I had the impression that his rather noisy heartiness was a habit of manner that scarcely corresponded with his inner feeling.

Drinks were brought in and he mixed us a cocktail. He’d played a couple of rounds of golf and was satisfied with his game. He went into somewhat verbose detail over the difficulties he had surmounted over one of the holes and Isabel listened with an appearance of lively interest. After a few minutes having made a date to take them to dine and see a play, I left.

CHAPTER 2

I fell into the habit of dropping in to see Isabel three or four times a week in the afternoon after my day’s work was over. She was generally alone at that hour and glad to have a gossip. The persons to whom Elliott had introduced her were much older than she and I discovered that she had few friends of her own generation. Mine were for the most part busy till dinnertime and I found it more agreeable to talk with Isabel than to go to my club and play bridge with rather grouchy Frenchmen who did not particularly welcome the intrusion of a stranger. Her charming way of treating me as if she and I were of an age made conversation easy and we joked and laughed and chaffed one another, chatting now about ourselves, now about our common acquaintances, now about books and pictures, so that the time passed very agreeably. One of the defects of my character is that I can never grow used to the plainness of people; however sweet a disposition a friend of mine may have, years of intimacy can never reconcile me to his bad teeth or lopsided nose: on the other hand I never cease to delight in his comeliness and after twenty years of familiarity I am still able to take pleasure in a well-shaped brow or the delicate line of a cheekbone. So I never came into Isabel’s presence without feeling anew a little thrill of pleasure in the perfection of her oval face, in the creamy delicacy of her skin, and in the bright warmth of her hazel eyes.

Then a very unexpected thing happened.

CHAPTER 3

In all big cities there are self-contained groups that exist without intercommunication, small worlds within a greater world that lead their lives, their members dependent upon one another for companionship, as though they inhabited islands separated from each other by an unnavigable strait. Of no city, in my experience, is this more true than of Paris. There high society seldom admits outsiders into its midst, the politicians live in their own corrupt circle, the bourgeoisie, great and small, frequent one another, writers congregate with writers (it is remarkable in André Gide’s Journal to see with how few people he seems to have been intimate who did not follow his own calling), painters hobnob with painters and musicians with musicians. The same thing is true of London, but in a less marked degree; there birds of a feather flock much less together, and there are a dozen houses where at the same table you may meet a duchess, an actress, a painter, a member of Parliament, a lawyer, a dressmaker, and an author.

The events of my life have led me at one time and another to dwell transitorily in pretty well all the worlds of Paris, even (through Elliott) in the closed world of the Boulevard St Germain; but that which I liked best, better than the discreet circle that has its centre in what is now called the Avenue Foch, better than the cosmopolitan crew that patronize Larue’s and the Café de Paris, better than the noisy sordid gaiety of Montmartre, is that section of which the artery is the Boulevard du Montpamasse. In my youth I spent a year in a tiny apartment near the Lion de Belfort, on the fifth floor, from which I had a spacious view of the cemetery. Montparnasse has still for me the tranquil air of a provincial town that was characteristic of it then. When I pass through the dingy narrow Rue d’Odessa I remember with a pang the shabby restaurant where we used to foregather to dine, painters and illustrators and sculptors, I, but for Arnold Bennett on occasion, the only writer, and sit late discussing excitedly, absurdly, angrily, painting and literature. It is still a pleasure to me to stroll down the boulevard and look at the young people who are as young as I was then and invent stories for myself about them. When I have nothing better to do I take a taxi and go and sit in the old Café du Dôme. It is no longer what it was then, the meeting place exclusively of Bohemia; the small tradesmen of the neighbourhood have taken to visiting it, and strangers from the other side of the Seine come to it in the hope of seeing a world that has ceased to exist. Students come to it still, of course, painters and writers, but most of them are foreigners; and when you sit there you hear around you as much Russian, Spanish, German, and English as French. But I have a notion that they are saying very much the same sort of things as we said forty years ago, only they speak of Picasso instead of Manet and of André Breton instead of Guillaume Apollinaire. My heart goes out to them.

When I had been in Paris about a fortnight I was sitting one evening at the Dôme and since the terrace was crowded I had been forced to take a table in the front row. It was fine and warm. The plane trees were just bursting into leaf and there was in the air that sense of leisure, lightheartedness, and alacrity that was peculiar to Paris. I felt at peace with myself, but not lethargically, with exhilaration rather. Suddenly a man walking past me, stopped and with a grin that displayed a set of very white teeth said: ‘Hello!’ I looked at him blankly. He was tall and thin. He wore no hat and he had a mop of dark brown hair that badly needed cutting. His upper lip and his chin were concealed by a thick brown beard. His forehead and his neck were deeply tanned. He wore a frayed shirt, without a tie, a brown, threadbare coat, and a pair of shabby grey slacks. He looked a bum and to the best of my belief I had never seen him before. I put him down for one of those good-for-nothings who have gone to the devil in Paris and I expected him to pull a hard-luck story to wheedle a few francs out of me for a dinner and a bed. He stood in front of me, his hands in his pockets, showing his white teeth, with a look of amusement in his dark eyes.

‘You don’t remember me?’ he said.

‘I’ve never set eyes on you in my life.’

I was prepared to give him twenty francs, but I wasn’t prepared to let him get away with the bluff that we knew one another.

‘Larry,’ he said.

‘Good God! Sit down.’ He chuckled, stepped forward and took the empty chair at my table. ‘Have a drink.’ I beckoned to the waiter. ‘How could you expect me to recognize you with all that hair on your face?’

The waiter came and he ordered an orangeade. Now that I looked at him I remembered the peculiarity of his eyes, which came from the black of the iris being as black as that of the pupil and which gave them at once intensity and opaqueness.

‘How long have you been in Paris?’ I asked.

‘A month.’

‘Are you going to stay?’

‘For a while.’

While I asked these questions my mind was busy. I noticed that the cuffs of his trousers were ragged and that there were holes in the elbows of his coat. He looked as destitute as any beachcomber I had ever met in an Eastern port. It was hard in those days to forget the depression and I wondered whether the crash of ‘twenty-nine had left him penniless. I didn’t much like the thought of that and not being a person to beat about the bush I asked outright:

‘Are you down and out?’

‘No, I’m all right. What makes you think that?’

‘Well, you look as if you could do with a square meal and the things you’ve got on are only fit for the garbage can.’

‘Are they as bad as all that? I never thought about it. As a matter of fact I have been meaning to get myself a few odds and ends, but I never seem able to get down to it.’

I thought he was shy or proud and I didn’t see why I should put up with that sort of nonsense.

‘Don’t be a fool, Larry. I’m not a millionaire, but I’m not poor. If you’re short of cash let me lend you a few thousand francs. That won’t break me.’

He laughed outright.

‘Thanks a lot, but I’m not short of cash. I’ve got more money than I can spend.’

‘Notwithstanding the crash?’

‘Oh, that didn’t affect me. Everything I had was in government bonds. I don’t know whether they went down in value, I never inquired, but I do know that Uncle Sam went on paying up on the coupons like the decent old party he is. In point of fact I’ve been spending so little during the last few years, I must have quite a bit in hand.’

‘Where have you come from now then?’

‘India.’

‘Oh, I heard you’d been there. Isabel told me. She apparently knows the manager of your bank in Chicago.’

‘Isabel? When did you last see her?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘She’s not in Paris?’

‘She is indeed. She’s living in Elliott Templeton’s apartment.’

‘That’s grand. I’d love to see her.’

Though I was watching his eyes pretty closely while we were exchanging these remarks I could discern only a natural surprise and pleasure, but no feeling more complicated.

‘Gray’s there too. You know they’re married?’

‘Yes, Uncle Bob – Dr Nelson, my guardian – wrote and told me, but he died some years ago.’

It occurred to me that with this break in what appeared his only link with Chicago and his friends there he probably knew nothing of what had happened. I told him of the birth of Isabel’s two daughters, of the death of Henry Maturin and Louisa Bradley, of Gray’s ruin and of Elliott’s generosity.

‘Is Elliott here too?’

‘No.’

For the first time in forty years Elliott was not spending the spring in Paris. Though looking younger he was now seventy and as usual with men of that age there were days when he felt tired and ill. Little by little he had given up taking any but walking exercise. He was nervous about his health and his doctor came to see him twice a week to thrust into an alternate buttock a hypodermic needle with the fashionable injection of the moment. At every meal, at home or abroad, he took from his pocket a little gold box from which he extracted a tablet which he swallowed with the reserved air of one performing a religious rite. His doctor had recommended him to take the cure at Montecatini, a watering-place in the north of Italy, and after this he proposed to go to Venice to look for a font of a design suitable to his Romanesque church. He was less unwilling to leave Paris unvisited since each year he found it socially more unsatisfactory. He did not like old people, and resented it when he was invited to meet only persons of his own age, and the young he found vapid. The adornment of the church he had built was now a main interest of his life and here he could indulge his ineradicable passion for buying works of art with the comfortable assurance that he was doing it to the glory of God. He had found in Rome an early altar of honey-coloured stone and had been dickering in Florence for six months for a triptych of the Siennese school to put over it.

Then Larry asked me how Gray was liking Paris.

‘I’m afraid he’s feeling rather lost here.’

I tried to explain to him how Gray had struck me. He listened to me with his eyes fixed on my face in a meditative, unblinking gaze that suggested to me, I don’t know why, that he was listening to me not with his ears, but with some inner more sensitive organ of hearing. It was queer and not very comfortable.

‘But you’ll see for yourself,’ I finished.

‘Yes, I’d love to see them. I suppose I shall find the address in the phone book.’

‘But if you don’t want to scare them out of their wits and drive the children into screaming hysterics, I think you’d be wise to have your hair cut and your beard shaved.’

He laughed.

‘I’ve been thinking of it. There’s no object in making myself conspicuous.’

‘And while you’re about it you might get yourself a new outfit.’

‘I suppose I am a bit shabby. When I came to leave India I found that I had nothing but the clothes I stand up in.’

He looked at the suit I was wearing, and asked me who my tailor was. I told him, but added that he was in London and so couldn’t be of much use to him. We dropped the subject and he began to talk again of Gray and Isabel.

‘I’ve been seeing quite a lot of them,’ I said. ‘They’re very happy together. I’ve never had a chance of talking to Gray alone, and anyway I dare say he wouldn’t talk to me about Isabel, but I know he’s devoted to her. His face is rather sullen in repose and his eyes are harassed, but when he looks at Isabel such a gentle, kind look comes into them, it’s rather moving. I have a notion that all through their trouble she stood by him like a rock and he never forgets how much he owes her. You’ll find Isabel changed.’ I didn’t tell him she was beautiful as she had never been before. I wasn’t sure he had the discernment to see how the pretty, strapping girl had made herself into the wonderfully graceful, delicate, and exquisite woman. There are men who are affronted by the aids that art can supply to feminine nature. ‘She’s very good to Gray. She’s taking infinite pains to restore his confidence in himself.’

But it was growing late and I asked Larry if he would come along the boulevard and dine with me.

‘No, I don’t think I will, thanks,’ he answered. ‘I must be off.’

He got up, nodded in a friendly way, and stepped out on to the pavement.

CHAPTER 4

I saw gray and Isabel next day and told them that I had seen Larry. They were as much surprised as I had been.

‘It’ll be wonderful to see him,’ said Isabel. ‘Let’s call him up at once.’

Then I remembered that I hadn’t thought of asking him where he was staying. Isabel gave me hell.

‘I’m not sure he’d have told me if I had,’ I protested, laughing. ‘Probably my subconscious had something to do with it. Don’t you remember, he never liked telling people where he lived. It was one of his oddities. He may walk in at any moment.’

‘That would be like him,’ said Gray. ‘Even in the old days you could never count on his being where you expected him to be. He was here today and gone tomorrow. You’d see him in a room and think in a moment you’d go and say hello to him and when you turned round he’d disappeared.’

‘He always was the most exasperating fellow,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s no good denying that. I suppose we shall just have to wait till it suits him to turn up.’

He didn’t come that day, nor the next, nor the day after. Isabel accused me of having invented the story to annoy. I promised her I hadn’t and sought to give her reasons why he hadn’t shown up. But they were implausible. Within myself I wondered whether on thinking it over he hadn’t made up his mind that he just didn’t want to see Gray and Isabel and had wandered off somewhere or other away from Paris. I had a feeling already that he never took root anywhere, but was always prepared at a moment’s notice, for a reason that seemed good to him or on a whim, to move on.

He came at last. It was a rainy day and Gray hadn’t gone to Mortefontaine. The three of us were together, Isabel and I drinking a cup of tea, Gray sipping a whisky and Perrier, when the butler opened the door and Larry strolled in. Isabel with a cry sprang to her feet and throwing herself into his arms kissed him on both cheeks. Gray, his fat red face redder than ever, warmly wrung his hand.

‘Gee, I’m glad to see you, Larry,’ he said, his voice choked with emotion.

Isabel bit her lip and I saw she was constraining herself not to cry.

‘Have a drink, old man,’ said Gray unsteadily.

I was touched by their delight at seeing the wanderer. It must have been pleasant for him to perceive how much he meant to them. He smiled happily. It was plain to me that he was, however, completely self-possessed. He noticed the tea things.

‘I’ll have a cup of tea,’ he said.

‘Oh, gosh, you don’t want tea,’ cried Gray. ‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne.’

‘I’d prefer tea,’ smiled Larry.

His composure had on the others the effect he may have intended. They calmed down, but looked at him still with fond eyes. I don’t mean to suggest that he responded to their natural exuberance with an ungracious coldness; on the contrary, he was as cordial and charming as one could wish; but I was conscious in his manner of something that I could only describe as remoteness and I wondered what it signified.

‘Why didn’t you come and see us at once, you horror?’ cried Isabel, with a pretence of indignation. ‘I’ve been hanging out of the window for the last five days to see you coming and every time the bell rang my heart leapt to my mouth and I had all I could do to swallow it again.’

Larry chuckled.

‘Mr M. told me I looked so tough that your man would never let me through the door. I flew over to London to get some clothes.’

‘You needn’t have done that,’ I smiled. ‘You could have got a reach-me-down at the Printemps or the Belle Jardinière.’

‘I thought if I was going to do it at all, I’d better do the thing in style. I haven’t bought any European clothes for ten years. I went to your tailor and said I wanted a suit in three days. He said it would take a fortnight, so we compromised on four. I got back from London an hour ago.’

He wore a blue serge that nicely fitted his slim figure, a white shirt with a soft collar, a blue silk tie, and brown shoes. He had had his hair cut short and shaved off the hair on his face. He looked not only neat, but well-groomed. It was a transformation. He was very thin; his cheekbones were more prominent, his temples hollower, and his eyes in the deep sockets larger than I remembered them; but notwithstanding he looked very well; he looked, indeed, with his deeply sunburnt, unlined face, amazingly young. He was a year younger than Gray, they were both in their early thirties, but whereas Gray looked ten years more than his age, Larry looked ten years less. Gray’s movements, owing to his great bulk, were deliberate and rather heavy; but Larry’s were light and easy. His manner was boyish, gay, and debonair, but withal it had a serenity that I was peculiarly conscious of and that I did not recollect in the lad I had known before. And as the conversation proceeded, flowing without difficulty as was natural in old friends with so many common memories, with bits of news about Chicago thrown in by Gray and Isabel, trivial gossip, one thing leading to another, with airy laughter, my impression persisted that in Larry, though his laughter was frank and he listened with evident pleasure to Isabel’s breezy chatter, there was a very singular detachment. I didn’t feel that he was playing a part, he was too natural for that and his sincerity was obvious; I felt that there was something within him, I don’t know whether to call it awareness or a sensibility or a force, that remained strangely aloof.

The children were brought in and made known to Larry, and gave him their polite little knicks. He held out his hand, looking at them with an engaging tenderness in his soft eyes, and they took it, staring at him gravely. Isabel brightly told him they were getting on nicely with their lessons, gave them a cookie each, and sent them away.

‘I’ll come and read to you for ten minutes when you’re in bed.’

She did not at that moment want to be interrupted in her pleasure at seeing Larry. The little girls went up to say good night to their father. It was charming to see the love that lit up the red face of that gross man as he took them in his arms and kissed them. No one could help seeing that he proudly adored them and when they were gone he turned to Larry and with a sweet slow smile on his lips said:

‘They’re not bad kids, are they?’

Isabel gave him an affectionate glance.

‘If I let Gray have his way he’d spoil them to death. He’d let me starve, that great brute would, to feed the children on caviare and pâté de foie gras.’

He looked at her with a smile and said: ‘You’re a liar and you know it. I worship the ground you tread on.’

There was a responsive smile in Isabel’s eyes. She knew that and was glad of it. A happy couple.

She insisted that we should stay to dinner. I, thinking they would prefer to be by themselves, made excuses, but she would not listen to them.

‘I’ll tell Marie to put another carrot in the soup and there’ll be plenty for four. There’s a chicken, and you and Gray can eat the legs while Larry and I eat the wings, and she can make the soufflé large enough for all of us.’

Gray too seemed to want me to stay, so I let myself be persuaded to do what I wanted to.

While we waited Isabel told Larry at length what I had already told him in brief. Though she narrated the lamentable story as gaily as possible Gray’s face assumed an expression of sullen melancholy. She tried to cheer him up.

‘Anyhow, it’s all over now. We’ve fallen on our feet and we’ve got the future before us. As soon as things improve, Gray’s going to get a splendid job and make millions.’

Cocktails were brought in and a couple did something to raise the poor fellow’s spirits. I saw that Larry, though he took one, scarcely touched it, and when Gray, unobservant, offered him another he refused. We washed our hands and sat down to dinner. Gray had ordered a bottle of champagne, but when the butler began to fill Larry’s glass he told him he didn’t want any.

‘Oh, but you must have some,’ cried Isabel. ‘It’s Uncle Elliott’s best and he only gives it to very special guests.’

‘To tell you the truth I prefer water. After having been in the East so long it’s a treat to drink water that’s safe.’

‘This is an occasion.’

‘All right, I’ll drink a glass.’

The dinner was excellent, but Isabel noticed, as I did too, that Larry ate very little. It struck her, I suppose, that she had been doing all the talking and that Larry had had no chance to do more than listen, so now she began to question him on his actions during the ten years since she had seen him. He answered with his cordial frankness, but so vaguely as not to tell us much.

‘Oh, I’ve been loafing around, you know. I spent a year in Germany and some time in Spain and Italy. And I knocked about the East for a bit.’

‘Where have you just come from now?’

‘India.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘Five years.’

‘Did you have fun?’ asked Gray. ‘Shoot any tigers?’

‘No,’ Larry smiled.

‘What on earth were you doing with yourself in India for five years?’ said Isabel.

‘Playing about,’ he answered, with a smile of kindly mockery.

‘What about the Rope Trick?’ asked Gray. ‘Did you see that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘What did you see?’

‘A lot’

I put a question to him then.

‘Is it true that the Yogis acquire powers that would seem to us supernatural?’

‘I wouldn’t know. All I can tell you is that it’s commonly believed in India. But the wisest don’t attach any importance to powers of that sort; they think they’re apt to hinder spiritual progress. I remember one of them telling me of a Yogi who came to the bank of a river; he hadn’t the money to pay the ferryman to take him across and the ferryman refused to take him for nothing, so he stepped on the water and walked upon its surface to the other side. The Yogi who told me shrugged his shoulders rather scornfully. “A miracle like that,” he said “is worth no more than the penny it would have cost to go on the ferryboat.”’

‘But d’you think the Yogi really walked over the water?’ asked Gray.

‘The Yogi who told me believed it implicitly.’

It was a pleasure to hear Larry talk, because he had a wonderfully melodious voice; it was light, rich without being deep, and with a singular variety of tone. We finished dinner and went back to the drawing-room to have our coffee. I had never been to India and was eager to hear more of it.

‘Did you come in contact with any writers and thinkers?’ I asked.

‘I notice that you make a distinction between the two,’ said Isabel to tease me.

‘I made it my business to,’ Larry answered.

‘How did you communicate with them? In English?’

‘The most interesting, if they spoke at all, didn’t speak it very well and understood less. I learnt Hindustani. And when I went south I picked up enough Tamil to get along pretty well.’

‘How many languages d’you know now, Larry?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Half a dozen or so.’

‘I want to know more about the Yogis,’ said Isabel. ‘Did you get to know any of them intimately?’

‘As intimately as you can know persons who pass the best part of their time in the Infinite,’ he smiled. ‘I spent two years in the Ashrama of one.’

‘Two years? What’s an Ashrama?’

‘Well, I suppose you might call it a hermitage. There are holy men who live alone, in a temple, in the forest, or on the slopes of the Himalayas. There are others who attract disciples. A charitable person to acquire merit builds a room, large or small, to lodge a Yogi whose piety has impressed him, and the disciples live with him, sleeping on the veranda or in the cookhouse if there is one or under the trees. I had a tiny hut in the compound just big enough for my camp bed, a chair and a table, and a bookshelf.’

‘Where was this?’ I inquired.

‘In Travancore, a beautiful country of green hills and valleys and soft-flowing rivers. Up in the mountains there are tigers, leopards, elephants, and bison, but the Ashrama was on a lagoon and all around it grew coconuts and areca palms. It was three or four miles from the nearest town, but people used to come from there, and even from much farther, on foot or by bullock cart, to hear the Yogi talk when he was inclined to, or just to sit at his feet and share with one another the peace and blessedness that were radiated from his presence as fragrance is wafted upon the air by a tuberose.’

Gray moved uneasily in his chair. I guessed that the conversation was taking a turn that he found uncomfortable.

‘Have a drink?’ he said to me.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Well, I’m going to have one. What about you Isabel?’

He raised his great weight from the chair and went over to the table on which stood whisky and Perrier and glasses.

‘Were there other white men there?’

‘No. I was the only one.’

‘How could you stand it for two years?’ cried Isabel.

‘They passed like a flash. I’ve spent days that seemed to be unconscionably longer.’

‘What did you do with yourself all the time?’

‘I read. I took long walks. I went out in a boat on the lagoon. I meditated. Meditation is very hard work; after two or three hours of it you’re as exhausted as if you’d driven a car five hundred miles, and all you want to do is to rest.’

Isabel frowned slightly. She was puzzled and I’m not sure that she wasn’t a trifle scared. I think she was beginning to have a notion that the Larry who had entered the room a few hours before, though unchanged in appearance and seemingly as open and friendly as he had ever been, was not the same as the Larry, so candid, easy, and gay, wilful to her mind but delightful, that she had known in the past. She had lost him before, and on seeing him again, taking him for the old Larry, she had a feeling that, however altered the circumstances, he was still hers; and now, as though she had sought to catch a sunbeam in her hand and it slipped through her fingers as she grasped it, she was a trifle dismayed. I had looked at her a good deal that evening, which was always a pleasant thing to do, and had seen the fondness in her eyes as they rested on his trim head, with the small ears close to the skull, and how the expression in them changed when they dwelt on his hollow temples and the thinness of his cheek. She glanced at his long lean hands, which notwithstanding their emaciation were strong and virile. Then her gaze lingered on his mobile mouth, well shaped, full without being sensual, and on his serene brow and clean-cut nose. He wore his new clothes not with the bandbox elegance of Elliott, but with a sort of loose carelessness as though he had worn them every day for a year. I felt that he aroused in Isabel motherly instincts I had never felt in her relation with her children. She was an experienced woman; he still looked a boy; and I seemed to read in her air the pride of a mother for her grown-up son because he is talking intelligently and others are listening to him as if he made sense. I don’t think the import of what he said penetrated her consciousness.

But I was not done with my questioning.

‘What was your Yogi like?’

‘In person, d’you mean? Well, he wasn’t tall, neither thin nor fat, palish brown in colour and clean-shaven, with close-cropped white hair. He never wore anything but a loincloth, and yet he managed to look as trim and neat and well dressed as a young man in one of Brooks Brothers’ advertisements.’

‘And what had he got that particularly attracted you?’

Larry looked at me for a full minute before answering. His eyes in their deep sockets seemed as though they were trying to pierce to the depths of my soul.

‘Saintliness.’

I was slightly disconcerted by his reply. In that room, with its fine furniture, with those lovely drawings on the walls, the word fell like a plop of water that has seeped through the ceiling from an overflowing bath.

‘We’ve read all about the saints, St Francis, St John of the Cross, but that was hundreds of years ago. I never thought it possible to meet one who was alive now. From the first time I saw him I never doubted that he was a saint. It was a wonderful experience.’

‘And what did you gain from it?’

‘Peace,’ he said casually, with a light smile. Then, abruptly, he rose to his feet. ‘I must go.’

‘Oh not yet Larry,’ cried Isabel. ‘It’s quite early.’

‘Good night,’ he said, smiling still, taking no notice of her expostulation. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you again in a day or two.’

‘Where are you staying? I’ll call you.’

‘Oh, don’t bother to do that. You know how difficult it is to get a call through in Paris, and in any case our telephone is generally out of order.’

I laughed inwardly at the neatness with which Larry had got out of giving an address. It was a queer kink of his to make a secret of his abode. I suggested that they should all dine with me next evening but one in the Bois de Boulogne. It was very pleasant in that balmy spring weather to eat out-of-doors, under the trees, and Gray could drive us there in the coupé. I left with Larry and would willingly have walked some way with him, but as we got into the street he shook hands with me and walked quickly off. I got into a taxi.

CHAPTER 5

We had arranged to meet at the apartment and have a cocktail before starting. I arrived before Larry. I was taking them to a very smart restaurant and expected to find Isabel arrayed for the occasion; with all the women dressed up to the nines I was confident she would not wish to be outshone. But she had on a plain woollen frock.

‘Gray’s got one of his headaches,’ she said. ‘He’s in agony. I can’t possibly leave him. I told the cook she could go out when she’d given the children their supper and I must make something for him myself and try to get him to take it. You and Larry had better go alone.’

‘Is Gray in bed?’

‘No, he won’t ever go to bed when he has his headaches. God knows, it’s the only place for him, but he won’t. He’s in the library.’

This was a little panelled room, brown and gold, that Elliott had found in an old château. The books were protected from anyone who wanted to read them by gilt latticework, and locked up, but this was perhaps as well, as they consisted for the most part of illustrated pornographic works of the eighteenth century. In their contemporary morocco, however, they made a very pretty effect. Isabel led me in. Gray was sitting humped up in a big leather chair, with picture papers scattered on the floor beside him. His eyes were closed and his usually red face had a grey pallor. It was evident that he was in great pain. He tried to get up, but I stopped him.

‘Have you given him any aspirin?’ I asked Isabel.

‘That never does any good. I have an American prescription, but that doesn’t help either.’

‘Oh, don’t bother, darling,’ said Gray. ‘I shall be all right tomorrow.’ He tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry to make such a nuisance of myself,’ he said to me. ‘You all go out to the Bois.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Isabel. ‘D’you think I should enjoy myself when I knew you were suffering the tortures of the damned?’

‘Poor slut, I think she loves me,’ said Gray, his eyes closed.

Then his face was suddenly contorted and you could almost see the lancinating pain that pierced his head. The door was softly opened and Larry stepped in. Isabel told him what was the matter.

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ he said, giving Gray a look of commiseration. ‘Isn’t there anything one can do to relieve him?’

‘Nothing,’ said Gray, his eyes still closed. ‘The only thing you can any of you do for me is to leave me alone; go off and have a good time by yourselves.’

I thought myself that was the only sensible course to take, but I didn’t suppose Isabel could square it with her conscience.

‘Will you let me see if I can help you?’ asked Larry.

‘No one can help me,’ said Gray wearily. ‘It’s just killing me and sometimes I wish to God it would.’

‘I was wrong in saying that perhaps I could help you. What I meant was that perhaps I could help you to help yourself.’

Gray slowly opened his eyes and looked at Larry.

‘How can you do that?’

Larry took what looked like a silver coin out of his pocket and put it in Gray’s hand.

‘Close your fingers on it tightly and hold your hand palm downwards. Don’t fight against me. Make no effort, but hold the coin in your clenched fist. Before I count twenty your hand will open and the coin will drop out of it.’

Gray did as he was told. Larry seated himself at the writing-table and began to count. Isabel and I remained standing. One, two, three, four. Till he got up to fifteen there was no movement in Gray’s hand, then it seemed to tremble a little and I had the impression, I can hardly say I saw, that the clenched fingers were loosening. The thumb moved away from the fist.

I distinctly saw the fingers quiver. When Larry reached nineteen the coin fell out of Gray’s hand and rolled to my feet. I picked it up and looked at it. It was heavy and misshapen, and in bold relief on one side of it was a youthful head which I recognized as that of Alexander the Great. Gray stared at his hand with perplexity.

‘I didn’t let the coin drop,’ he said. ‘It fell of itself.’

He was sitting with his right arm resting on the arm of the leather chair.

‘Are you quite comfortable in that chair?’ asked Larry.

‘As comfortable as I can be when my head’s giving me hell.’

‘Well, let yourself go quite slack. Take it easy. Do nothing. Don’t resist. Before I count twenty your right arm will rise from the arm of the chair until your hand is above your head. One, two, three, four.’

He spoke the numbers slowly in that silver-toned, melodious voice of his, and when he had reached nine we saw Gray’s hand rise, only just perceptibly, from the leather surface on which it rested until it was perhaps an inch above it. It stopped for a second.

‘Ten, eleven, twelve.’

There was a little jerk and then slowly the whole arm began to move upwards. It wasn’t resting on the chair any more. Isabel, a little scared, took hold of my hand. It was a curious effect. It had no likeness to a voluntary movement. I’ve never seen a man walking in his sleep, but I can imagine that he would move in just the same strange way that Gray’s arm moved. It didn’t look as though the will were the motive power. I should have thought it would be hard to raise the arm so slowly and so evenly by a conscious effort. It gave the impression that a subconscious force, independent of the mind, was raising it. It was the same sort of movement as that of a piston moving very slowly back and forth in a cylinder.

‘Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.’

The words fell, slow, slow, slow, like drops of water in a basin from a defective tap. Gray’s arm rose, rose, till his hand was above his head, and as Larry reached the number he had said it fell of its own weight on to the arm of the chair.

‘I didn’t lift my arm,’ said Gray. ‘I couldn’t help its rising like that. It did it of its own accord.’

Larry faintly smiled.

‘It’s of no consequence. I thought it might give you confidence in me. Where’s that Greek coin?’

I gave it to him.

‘Hold it in your hand.’ Gray took it. Larry glanced at his watch. ‘It’s thirteen minutes past eight. In sixty seconds your eyelids will grow so heavy that you’ll be obliged to close them and then you’ll sleep. You’ll sleep for six minutes. At eight-twenty you’ll wake and you’ll have no more pain.’

Neither Isabel nor I spoke. Our eyes were on Larry. He said nothing more. He fixed his gaze on Gray, but did not seem to look at him; he seemed rather to look through and beyond him. There was something eerie in the silence that fell upon us; it was like the silence of flowers in a garden at nightfall. Suddenly I felt Isabel’s hand tighten. I glanced at Gray. His eyes were closed. He was breathing easily and regularly; he was asleep. We stood there for a time that seemed interminable. I badly wanted a cigarette, but did not like to light one. Larry was motionless. His eyes looked into I knew not what distance. Except that they were open he might have been in a trance. Suddenly he appeared to relax; his eyes took on their normal expression and he looked at his watch. As he did so, Gray opened his eyes.

‘Gosh,’ he said, ‘I believe I dropped off to sleep.’ Then he started. I noticed that his face had lost its ghastly pallor. ‘My headache’s gone.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Larry. ‘Have a cigarette and then we’ll all go out to dinner.’

‘It’s a miracle. I feel perfectly swell. How did you do it?’

‘I didn’t do it. You did it yourself.’

Isabel went to change and meanwhile Gray and I drank a cocktail. Though it was plain that Larry did not wish it. Gray insisted on talking of what had just happened. He couldn’t make it out at all.

‘I didn’t believe you could do a thing, you know,’ he said. ‘I just gave in because I felt too lousy to argue.’

He went on to describe the onset of his headaches, the anguish he endured, and the wreck he was when the attack subsided. He could not understand how it was that just then he felt his usual robust self. Isabel came back. She was wearing a dress I had not seen before; it reached to the ground, a white sheath of what I think is called marocain, with a flare of black tulle, and I could not but think she would be a credit to us.

It was very gay at the Château de Madrid and we were in high spirits. Larry talked amusing nonsense in a way I had not heard him do before and he made us laugh. I had a notion he was doing this with the idea of diverting our minds from the exhibition of his unexpected power. But Isabel was a determined woman. She was prepared to play ball with him as long as it suited her convenience, but she did not lose sight of her desire to satisfy her curiosity. When we had finished dinner and were drinking coffee and liqueurs and she might well have supposed that the good food, the one glass of wine he drank, and the friendly talk had weakened his defences she fixed her bright eyes on Larry.

‘Now tell us how you cured Gray’s headache.’

‘You saw for yourself,’ he answered, smiling.

‘Did you learn to do that sort of thing in India?’

‘Yes.’

‘He suffers agonies. D’you think you could cure him permanently?’

‘I don’t know. I might be able to.’

‘It would make a difference to his whole life. He couldn’t expect to hold a decent job when he may be incapacitated for forty-eight hours. He’ll never be happy till he’s at work again.’

‘I can’t work miracles, you know.’

‘But it was a miracle. I saw it with my own eyes.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I merely put an idea in old Gray’s head and he did the rest himself.’ He turned to Gray. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Playing golf.’

‘I’ll look in at six and we’ll have a talk.’ Then, giving Isabel his winning smile: ‘I haven’t danced with you for ten years, Isabel. Would you care to see if I still know how to?’

CHAPTER 6

After that we saw a good deal of Larry. For the next week he came to the apartment every day and for half an hour shut himself up with Gray in the library. It appeared that he wanted to persuade him – that was how he smilingly put it – out of having those shattering megrims, and Gray conceived a child-like trust in him. From the little Gray said I got the idea that he was trying besides to restore his broken confidence in himself. About ten days later Gray had another headache, and it so happened that Larry was not to come till the evening. It was not a very bad one, but Gray was so confident now in Larry’s odd power that he thought if Larry could be got hold of he could take it away in a few minutes. But neither I, whom Isabel called on the phone, nor they knew where he lived. When Larry at last came and relieved Gray of his pain, Gray asked him for his address so that in case of need he could summon him at once. Larry smiled.

‘Call the American Express and leave a message. I’ll call them every morning.’

Isabel asked me later why Larry made a secret of his address. He had done that before and then it had turned out that he lived without any mystery in a third-rate hotel in the Latin Quarter.

‘I haven’t a notion,’ I said in answer. ‘I can only suggest something very fanciful and there’s probably nothing in it. It may be that some queer instinct urges him to carry over to his dwelling-place some privacy of his spirit.’

‘What in God’s name d’you mean by that?’ she cried irritably.

‘Hasn’t it struck you that when he’s with us, easy as he is to get on with, friendly and sociable, one’s conscious of a sort of detachment in him, as though he weren’t giving all of himself, but withheld in some hidden part of his soul something I don’t know what it is – a tension, a secret, an aspiration, a knowledge – that sets him apart?’

‘I’ve known Larry all my life,’ she said impatiently.

‘Sometimes he reminds me of a great actor playing perfectly a part in a trumpery play. Like Eleanora Duse in La Locandiera.’

Isabel pondered over this for a moment.

‘I suppose I know what you mean. One’s having fun, and one thinks he’s just like one of us, just like everybody else, and then suddenly you have the feeling that he’s escaped you like a smoke ring that you try to catch in your hands. What do you think it can be that makes him so queer?’

‘Perhaps something so commonplace that one simply doesn’t notice it.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, goodness, for instance.’

Isabel frowned.

‘I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. It gives me a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach.’

‘Or is it a little pain in the depth of your heart?’

Isabel gave me a long look as though she were trying to read my thoughts. She took a cigarette from the table beside her and, lighting it, leant back in her chair. She watched the smoke curl up into the air.

‘Do you want me to go?’ I asked.

‘No.’

I was silent for a moment, watching her, and I took my pleasure in the contemplation of her shapely nose and the exquisite line of her jaw.

‘Are you very much in love with Larry?’

‘God damn you, I’ve never loved anyone else in all my life.’

‘Why did you marry Gray?’

‘I had to marry somebody. He was mad about me and Mamma wanted me to marry him. Everybody told me I was well rid of Larry. I was very fond of Gray; I’m very fond of him still. You don’t know how sweet he is. No one in the world could be so kind and so considerate. He looks as though he had an awful temper, doesn’t he? With me he’s always been angelic. When we had money, he wanted me to want things so that he could have the pleasure of giving them to me. Once I said it would be fun if we could have a yacht and go round the world, and if the crash hadn’t come he’d have bought one.’

‘He sounds almost too good to be true,’ I murmured.

‘We had a grand time. I shall always be grateful to him for that. He made me very happy.’

I looked at her but did not speak.

‘I suppose I didn’t really love him, but one can get on all right without love. At the bottom of my heart I hankered for Larry, but as long as I didn’t see him it didn’t really bother me. D’you remember saying to me that with three thousand miles of ocean between, the pangs of love become quite tolerable? I thought it a cynical remark then, but of course it’s true.’

‘If it’s a pain to see Larry, don’t you think it would be wiser not to see him?’

‘But it’s a pain that’s heaven. Besides, you know what he is. Any day he may vanish like a shadow when the sun goes in and we may not see him again for years.’

‘Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?’

‘I’ve got no reason for divorcing him.’

‘That doesn’t prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to.’

She laughed.

‘Why d’you suppose they do it?’

‘Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.’

Isabel gave her head such a haughty toss that I wondered she didn’t get a crick in the neck.

‘Because Gray isn’t articulate you think there’s nothing to him.’

‘You’re wrong there,’ I interrupted quickly. ‘I think there’s something rather moving about him. He has a wonderful faculty of love. One has only to glance at his face when he’s looking at you to see how deeply, how devotedly he’s attached to you. He loves his children much more than you do.’

‘I suppose you’re going to say now that I’m not a good mother.’

‘On the contrary I think you’re an excellent mother. You see that they’re well and happy. You watch over their diet and take care that their bowels act regularly. You teach them to behave nicely and you read to them and make them say their prayers. If they were sick you’d send for a doctor at once and nurse them with care. But you’re not wrapped up in them as Gray is.’

‘It’s unnecessary that one should be. I’m a human being and I treat them as human beings. A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.’

‘I think you’re quite right.’

‘And the fact remains that they worship me.’

‘I’ve noticed that. You’re their ideal of all that’s graceful and beautiful and wonderful. But they’re not cosy and at their ease with you as they are with Gray. They worship you, that’s true; but they love him.’

‘He’s very lovable.’

I liked her for saying that. One of her most amiable traits was that she was never affronted by the naked truth.

‘After the crash Gray went all to pieces. For weeks he worked at the office till midnight. I used to sit at home in an agony of fear, I was afraid he’d blow his brains out, he was so ashamed. You see, they’d been so proud of the firm, his father and Gray, they were proud of their integrity and the sureness of their judgement. It wasn’t so much that we’d lost all our money, what he couldn’t get over was that all those people who’d trusted him had lost theirs. He felt that he ought to have had more foresight. I couldn’t get him to see that he wasn’t to blame.’

Isabel took a lipstick out of her bag and painted her lips.

‘But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. The one thing we had left was the plantation and I felt that the only chance for Gray was to get away, so we parked the children with Mamma and went down there. He’d always liked it, but we’d never been there by ourselves; we’d taken a crowd with us and had a grand time. Gray’s a good shot, but he hadn’t the heart to shoot then. He used to take a boat and go out on the marsh by himself for hours at a time and watch the birds. He’d wander up and down the canals with the pale rushes on each side of him and only the blue sky above. On some days the canals are as blue as the Mediterranean. He used not to say much when he came back. He’d say it was swell. But I could see what he felt. I knew that his heart was moved by the beauty and the vastness and the stillness. There’s a moment just before sunset when the light on the marsh is lovely. He used to stand and look at it and it filled him with bliss. He took long rides in those solitary, mysterious woods; they’re like the woods in a play of Maeterlinck’s, so grey, so silent, it’s almost uncanny; and there’s a moment in spring – it hardly lasts more than a fortnight – when the dogwood bursts into flower, and the gum trees burst into leaf, and their young fresh green against the grey Spanish moss is like a song of joy; the ground is carpeted with great white lilies and wild azalea. Gray couldn’t say what it meant to him, but it meant the world. He was drunk with the loveliness of it. Oh, I know I don’t put it well, but I can’t tell you how moving it was to see that great hulk of a man uplifted by an emotion so pure and so beautiful that it made me want to cry. If there is a God in heaven Gray was very near Him then.’

Isabel had grown a trifle emotional while she told me this and taking a tiny handkerchief she carefully wiped away a tear that glistened at the corner of each eye.

‘Aren’t you romanticizing?’ I said, smiling. ‘I have a notion that you’re ascribing to Gray thoughts and emotions that you would have expected him to have.’

‘How should I have seen them if they hadn’t been there? You know what I am. I’m never really happy unless I feel the cement of a sidewalk under my feet and there are large plateglass windows all along the street with hats to look at and fur coats and diamond bracelets and gold-mounted dressing cases.’

I laughed and we were silent for a moment. Then she went back to what we had been talking of before.

‘I’d never divorce Gray. We’ve been through too much together. And he’s absolutely dependent upon me. It’s rather flattering, you know, and it gives you a sense of responsibility. And besides . . .’

‘Besides what?’

She gave me a sidelong glance and there was a roguish twinkle in her eyes. I had a notion she didn’t quite know how I ‘would’ take what she had in mind to say.

‘He’s wonderful in bed. We’ve been married for ten years and he’s as passionate a lover as he was at the beginning. Didn’t you say in a play once that no man wants the same woman longer than five years? Well, you didn’t know what you were talking about. Gray wants me as much as when we were first married. He’s made me very happy in that way. Although you wouldn’t think it to look at me, I’m a very sensual woman.’

‘You’re quite wrong, I would think it.’

‘Well, it’s not an unattractive trait, is it?’

‘On the contrary.’ I gave her a searching look. ‘Do you regret you didn’t marry Larry ten years ago?’

‘No. It would have been madness. But of course if I’d known then what I know now I’d have gone away and lived with him for three months, and then I’d have got him out of my system for good and all.’

‘I think it’s lucky for you you didn’t make the experiment; you might have found yourself bound to him by bonds you couldn’t break.’

‘I don’t think so. It was merely a physical attraction. You know, often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.’

‘Has it ever struck you that you’re a very possessive woman? You’ve told me that Gray has a deep strain of poetic feeling and you’ve told me that he’s an ardent lover; and I can well believe that both mean a lot to you; but you haven’t told me what means much more to you than both of them put together – your feeling that you hold him in the hollow of that beautiful but not so small hand of yours. Larry would always have escaped you. D’you remember that Ode of Keats’s? “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.”’

‘You often think you know a great deal more than you do,’ she said, a trifle acidly. ‘There’s only one way a woman holds a man and you know it. And let me tell you this: it’s not the first time she goes to bed with him that counts, it’s the second. If she holds him then she holds him for good.’

‘You do pick up the most extraordinary bits of information.’

‘I get around and I keep my eyes and ears open.’

‘May I inquire how you acquired that one?’

She gave me her most teasing smile.

‘From a woman I made friends with at a dress show. The vendeuse told me she was the smartest kept woman in Paris, so I made up my mind I’d get to know her. Adrienne de Troye. Ever heard of her?’

‘Never.’

‘How your education has been neglected! She’s forty-five and not even pretty, but she looks much more distinguished than any of Uncle Elliott’s duchesses. I sat down beside her and put on my impulsive little-American-girl act. I told her I had to speak to her because I’d never seen anyone more ravishing in my life. I told her she had the perfection of a Greek cameo.’

‘The nerve you’ve got.’

‘She was rather stiff at first and stand-offish, but I ran on in my simple naïve way and she thawed. Then we had quite a nice little chat. When the show was over I asked her if she wouldn’t come to lunch with me at the Ritz one day. I told her I’d always admired her wonderful chic.’

‘Had you ever seen her before?’

‘Never. She wouldn’t lunch with me, she said they had such malicious tongues in Paris, it would compromise me, but she was pleased that I’d asked her, and when she saw my mouth quiver with disappointment she asked me if I wouldn’t come and lunch with her in her house. She patted my hand when she saw I was simply overwhelmed by her affability.’

‘And did you go?’

‘Of course I went. She has a dear little house off the Avenue Foch and we were waited on by a butler who’s the very image of George Washington. I stayed till four o’clock. We took our hair down and our stays off, and had a thorough girls’ gossip. I learnt enough that afternoon to write a book.’

‘Why don’t you? It’s just the sort of thing to suit the Ladies’ Home Journal.’

‘You fool,’ she laughed.

I was silent for a moment. I pursued my thoughts.

‘I wonder if Larry was ever really in love with you,’ I said presently.

She sat up. Her expression lost its amenity. Her eyes were angry.

‘What are you talking about? Of course he was in love with me. D’you think a girl doesn’t know when a man’s in love with her?’

‘Oh, I dare say he was in love with you after a fashion. He didn’t know any girl so intimately as he knew you. You’d played around together since you were children. He expected himself to be in love with you. He had the normal sexual instinct. It seemed such a natural thing that you should marry. There wouldn’t have been any particular difference in your relations except that you lived under the same roof and went to bed together.’

Isabel, to some exent mollified, waited for me to go on and, knowing that women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love, I went on.

‘Moralists try to persuade us that the sexual instinct hasn’t got so very much to do with love. They’re apt to speak of it as if it were an epiphenomenon.’

‘What in God’s name is that?’

‘Well there are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them, but doesn’t itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn’t exist without the tree, but it doesn’t in any way affect the tree. I think it’s all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they’re talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit. Especially habit. Two people can go on having sexual intercourse from habit in just the same way as they grow hungry at the hour they’re accustomed to have their meals. Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn’t passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct and it isn’t of any more importance than any other function of the human animal. That’s why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and the place are propitious.’

‘Does that apply only to men?’

I smiled.

‘If you insist I’ll admit that what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. The only thing to be said against it is that with a man a passing connexion of that sort has no emotional significance, while with a woman it has.’

‘It depends on the woman.’

I wasn’t going to let myself be interrupted.

‘Unless love is passion, it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment. What d’you suppose Keats meant when he told the lover on his Grecian urn not to grieve? “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Why? Because she was unattainable, and however madly the lover pursued she still eluded him. For they were both imprisoned in the marble of what I suspect was an indifferent work of art. Your love for Larry and his for you were as simple and natural as the love of Paolo and Francesca or Romeo and Juliet. Fortunately for you it didn’t come to a bad end. You made a rich marriage and Larry roamed the world to find out what song the Sirens sang. Passion didn’t enter into it.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘Passion doesn’t count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. And if it doesn’t destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one’s life, that one’s brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one’s expended all one’s tenderness, poured out all the riches of one’s soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one’s dreams, who wasn’t worth a stick of chewing gum.’

Before I finished this harangue I knew very well that Isabel wasn’t paying any attention to me, but was occupied with her own reflections. But her next remark surprised me.

‘Do you think Larry is a virgin?’

‘My dear, he’s thirty-two.’

‘I’m certain he is.’

‘How can you be?’

‘That’s the kind of thing a woman knows instinctively.’

‘I knew a young man who had a very prosperous career for some years by convincing one beautiful creature after another that he’d never had a woman. He said it worked like a charm.’

‘I don’t care what you say. I believe in my intuition.’

It was growing late, Gray and Isabel were dining with friends, and she had to dress. I had nothing to do, so I walked in the pleasant spring evening up the Boulevard Raspail. I have never believed very much in women’s intuition; it fits in too neatly with what they want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy; and as I thought of the end of my long talk with Isabel I couldn’t help but laugh. It put me in mind of Suzanne Rouvier and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her for several days. I wondered if she was doing anything. If not, she might like to dine with me and go to a movie. I stopped a prowling taxi and gave the address of her apartment.

CHAPTER 7

I mentioned suzanne Rouvier at the beginning of this book. I had known her for ten or twelve years and at the date which I have now reached she must have been not far from forty. She was not beautiful; in fact she was rather ugly. She was tall for a Frenchwoman, with a short body, long legs, and long arms, and she held herself gawkily as though she didn’t know how to cope with the length of her limbs. The colour of her hair changed according to her whim, but most often it was a reddish brown. She had a small square face, with very prominent cheekbones vividly rouged, and a large mouth with heavily-painted lips. None of this sounds attractive, but it was; it is true that she had a good skin, strong white teeth, and big, vividly blue eyes. They were her best feature, and she made the most of them by painting her eyelashes and her eyelids. She had a shrewd, roving, friendly look and she combined great good nature with a proper degree of toughness. In the life she had led she needed to be tough. Her mother, the widow of a small official in the government, had on his death returned to her native village in Anjou to live on her pension, and when Suzanne was fifteen she apprenticed her to a dressmaker in the neighbouring town, which was near enough for her to be able to come home on Sundays. It was during her fortnight’s holiday, when she had reached the age of seventeen, that she was seduced by an artist who was spending his summer in the village to paint landscape. She already knew very well that without a penny to bless herself with her chance of marriage was remote and when the painter, at the end of the summer, proposed taking her to Paris she consented with alacrity. He took her to live with him in a rabbit-warren of studios in Montmartre, and she spent a very pleasant year in his company. At the end of this he told her that he had not sold a single canvas and could no longer afford the luxury of a mistress. She had been expecting the news for some time and was not disconcerted by it. He asked her if she wanted to go home and when she said she didn’t, told her that another painter in the same block would be glad to have her. The man he named had made a pass at her two or three times and though she had rebuffed him it had been with so much good humour that he was not affronted. She did not dislike him and so accepted the proposition with placidity. It was convenient that she did not have to go to the expense of taking a taxi to transport her trunk. Her second lover, a good deal older than the first, but still presentable, painted her in every conceivable position, clothed and in the nude; and she passed two happy years with him. She was proud to think that with her as a model he had made his first real success and she showed me a reproduction cut out of an illustrated paper of the picture that had brought it about. It had been purchased by an American gallery. It was a nude, life-size, and she was lying in something of the same position as Manet’s Olympe. The artist had been quick to see that there was something modern and amusing in her proportions, and, fining down her thin body to emaciation, he had elongated her long legs and arms, he had emphasized her high cheekbones and made her blue eyes extravagantly large. From the reproduction I naturally could not tell what the colour was like, but I was sensible of the elegance of the design. The picture brought him sufficient notoriety to enable him to marry an admiring widow with money, and Suzanne, well aware that a man had to think of his future, accepted the rupture of their cordial relations without acrimony.

For by now she knew her value. She liked the artistic life, it amused her to pose, and after the day’s work was over she found it pleasant to go to the café and sit with painters, their wives and mistresses, while they discussed art, reviled dealers, and told bawdy stories. On this occasion, having seen the break coming, she had made her plans. She picked out a young man who was unattached and who, she thought, had talent. She chose her opportunity when he was alone at the café, explained the circumstances, and without further preamble suggested that they should live together.

‘I’m twenty and a good housekeeper. I’ll save you money there and I’ll save you the expense of a model. Look at your shirt, it’s a disgrace, and your studio is a mess. You want a woman to look after you.’

He knew she was a good sort. He was amused at her proposal and she saw he was inclined to accept.

‘After all, there’s no harm in trying,’ she said. ‘If it doesn’t work we shall neither of us be worse off than we are now.’

He was a non-representative artist and he painted portraits of her in squares and oblongs. He painted her with one eye and no mouth. He painted her as a geometrical arrangement in black and brown and grey. He painted her in a criss-cross of lines through which you vaguely saw a human face. She stayed with him for a year and a half and left him of her own accord.

‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘Didn’t you like him?’

‘Yes, he was a nice boy. I didn’t think he was getting any further. He was repeating himself.’

She found no difficulty in discovering a successor. She remained faithful to artists.

‘I’ve always been in painting,’ she said. ‘I was with a sculptor for six months, but I don’t know why, it said nothing to me.’

She was pleased to think that she had never separated from a lover with unpleasantness. She was not only a good model, but a good housewife. She loved working about the studio she happened for a while to be living in and took pride in keeping it in apple-pie order. She was a good cook and could turn out a tasty meal at the smallest possible cost. She mended her lovers’ socks and sewed buttons on their shirts.

‘I never saw why because a man was an artist he shouldn’t be neat and tidy.’

She only had one failure. This was a young Englishman who had more money than anyone she had known before and he had a car.

‘But it didn’t last long,’ she said. ‘He used to get drunk and then he was tiresome. I wouldn’t have minded that if he’d been a good painter, but, my dear, it was grotesque. I told him I was going to leave him and he began to cry. He said he loved me.

‘“My poor friend,” I said to him. “Whether you love me or not isn’t of the smallest consequence. What is of consequence is that you have no talent. Return to your own country and go into the grocery business. That is all you’re fit for.”’

‘What did he say to that?’ I asked.

‘He flew into a passion and told me to get out. But it was good advice I gave him, you know. I hope he took it, he wasn’t a bad fellow; only a bad artist.’

Common sense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult to a light woman, but the profession Suzanne had adopted had its ups and downs like any other. There was the Scandinavian for instance. She was so imprudent as to fall in love with him.

‘He was a god, my dear,’ she told me. ‘He was immensely tall, as tall as the Eiffel Tower, with great broad shoulders and a magnificent chest, a waist that you could almost put your hands round, a belly flat, but flat like the palm of my hand, and muscles like a professional athlete’s. He had golden, wavy hair and a skin of honey. And he didn’t paint badly. I liked his brush work, it was bold and dashing, and he had a rich vivid palette.’

She made up her mind to have a child by him. He was against it, but she told him she would take the responsibility.

‘He liked it well enough when it was born. Oh, such a lovely baby, rosy, fair-haired and blue-eyed like her papa. It was a girl.’

Suzanne lived with him for three years.

‘He was a little stupid and sometimes he bored me, but he was very sweet and so beautiful that I didn’t really mind.’

Then he got a telegram from Sweden to say his father was dying and he must come back at once. He promised to return, but she had a premonition that he never would. He left her all the money he had. She didn’t hear from him for a month and then she got a letter from him saying that his father had died, leaving his affairs in confusion, and that he felt it his duty to remain by his mother and go into the lumber business. He enclosed a draft for ten thousand francs. Suzanne was not the woman to give way to despair. She came to the conclusion very quickly that a child would hamper her activities, so she took the baby girl down to her mother’s and left her, along with the ten thousand francs, in her care.

‘It was heart-rending, I adored that child, but in life one has to be practical.’

‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I got along. I found a friend.’

But then came her typhoid. She always spoke of it as ‘my typhoid’ as a millionaire might speak of ‘my place at Palm Beach’ or ‘my grouse moor’. She nearly died of it and was in the hospital for three months. When she left she was nothing but skin and bone, as weak as a rat, and so nervous that she could do nothing but cry. She wasn’t much use to anyone then, she wasn’t strong enough to pose and she had very little money.

‘Oh la, la,’ she said, ‘I passed through some hard times. Luckily I had good friends. But you know what artists are, it’s a struggle for them to make both ends meet, anyway. I was never a pretty woman, I had something of course, but I wasn’t twenty any more. Then I ran into the cubist I’d been with; he’d been married and divorced since we lived together, he’d given up cubism and become a surrealist. He thought he could use me and said he was lonely; he said he’d give me board and lodgings and I promise you, I was glad to accept.’

Suzanne stayed with him till she met her manufacturer. The manufacturer was brought to the studio by a friend on the chance that he might buy one of the ex-cubist’s pictures, and Suzanne, anxious to effect a sale, set herself out to be as agreeable to him as she knew how. He could not make up his mind to buy on the spur of the moment, but said he would like to come and see the pictures again. He did, a fortnight later, and this time she received the impression that he had come to see her rather than works of art. When he left, still without buying, he pressed her hand with unnecessary warmth. Next day the friend who had brought him waylaid her when she was on her way to market to buy the day’s provisions and told her that the manufacturer had taken a fancy to her and wanted to know if she would dine with him next time he came to Paris, because he had a proposition to make to her.

‘What does he see in me, d’you suppose?’ she asked.

‘He’s an amateur of modern art. He’s seen portraits of you. You intrigue him. He’s a provincial and a businessman. You represent Paris to him, art, romance, everything that he misses in Lille.’

‘Has he money?’ she asked in her sensible way.

‘Plenty.’

‘Well, I’ll dine with him. There’s no harm hearing what he’s got to say.’

He took her to Maxim’s, which impressed her; she had dressed very quietly, and she felt as she looked at the women around her that she could pass very well for a respectable married woman. He ordered a bottle of champagne, and this persuaded her that he was a gentleman. When they came to coffee he put his proposition before her. She thought it very handsome. He told her that he came to Paris regularly once a fortnight to attend a board meeting, and it was tiresome in the evening to dine alone and if he felt the need of feminine society to go to a brothel. Being a married man with two children, he thought that an unsatisfactory arrangement for a man in his position. Their common friend had told him all about her and he knew she was a woman of discretion. He was no longer young and he had no wish to get entangled with a giddy girl. He was something of a collector of the modern school and her connexion with it was sympathetic to him. Then he came down to brass tacks. He was prepared to take an apartment for her and furnish it and provide her with an income of two thousand francs a month. In return for this he wished to enjoy her company for one night every fourteen days. Suzanne had never had the spending of so much money in her life, and she quickly reckoned that on such a sum she could not only live and dress as such an advancement in the world evidently demanded, but provide for her daughter and put away something for a rainy day. But she hesitated for a moment. She had always been ‘in painting’, as she put it, and there was no doubt in her mind that it was a come-down to be the mistress of a businessman.

‘C’est à prendre ou a laisser,’ he said. ‘You can take it or leave it.’

He was not repulsive to her and the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole proved that he was a man of distinction. She smiled.

‘Je prends,’ she replied. ‘I’ll take it.’

CHAPTER 8

Though suzanne had always lived in Montmartre, she decided that it was necessary to break with the past, so she took an apartment in Montparnasse in a house just off the boulevard. It consisted of two rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom; it was on the sixth floor, but there was a lift. To her a bathroom and a lift, even though it only held two persons and moved at a snail’s pace and you had to walk downstairs, represented not only luxury but style.

For the first few months of their union Monsieur Achille Gauvain, for such was his name, put up at a hotel on his fortnightly visits to Paris and, after spending such part of the night with Suzanne as his amorous inclination demanded, returned to it to sleep by himself till it was time for him to get up and catch his train to return to his business affairs and the sober pleasures of family life; but then Suzanne pointed out to him that he was throwing away money to no purpose and it would be both more economical and more comfortable if he stayed in the apartment till morning. He could not but see the force of this. He was flattered at Suzanne’s thoughtfulness for his comfort – it was true, there was nothing agreeable in going out into the street and finding a taxi on a cold winter night – and he approved of her disinclination to put him to useless expense. It was a good woman who counted not only her own pennies but her lover’s.

Monsieur Achille had every reason to feel pleased with himself. In general they went to dine at one of the better restaurants in Montparnasse, but now and then Suzanne prepared dinner for him in the apartment. The tasty food she gave him was very much to his liking. On warm evenings he would dine in his shirt-sleeves and feel deliciously wanton and bohemian. He had always had an inclination for buying pictures, but Suzanne would let him buy nothing that she did not approve of, and he soon found reason to trust her judgement. She would have no truck with dealers, but took him to the studios of the painters and thus enabled him to buy pictures for half the money he would otherwise have had to pay. He knew that she was putting something aside, and when she told him that year by year she was buying a bit of land in her native village, he felt a thrill of pride. He knew the desire to own land that is in the heart of every person of French blood, and his esteem for her was increased because she possessed it too.

On her side Suzanne was well satisfied. She was neither faithful to him nor unfaithful; that is to say, she took care not to form any permanent connexion with another man, but if she came across one who took her fancy she was not averse from going to bed with him. But it was a point of honour with her not to let him stay all night. She felt she owed that to the man of means and position who had settled her life in such an assured and respectable manner.

I had come to know Suzanne when she was living with a painter who happened to be an acquaintance of mine and had often sat in his studio while she posed; I continued to see her now and then at irregular intervals, but did not enter upon terms of any intimacy with her till she moved to Montparnasse. It appeared that Monsieur Achille, for this was how she always spoke of him and how she addressed him, had read one or two of my books in translation, and one evening he invited me to dine with them at a restaurant. He was a little man, half a head shorter than Suzanne, with iron-grey hair and a neat grey moustache. He was on the plump side, and he had a pot-belly, but only to the extent of giving him an air of substance. He walked with the short fat man’s strut and it was plain that he was not displeased with himself. He gave me a fine dinner. He was very polite. He told me he was glad I was a friend of Suzanne’s, he could see at a glance that I was comme il faut and he would be glad to think that I should see something of her. His affairs, alas! kept him tied to Lille and the poor girl was too often alone; it would be a comfort to him to know that she was in touch with a man of education. He was a businessman, but he had always admired artists.

‘Ah, mon cher monsieur, art and literature have always been the twin glories of France. Along with her military prowess, of course. And I, a manufacturer of woollen goods, have no hesitation in saying that I put the painter and the writer on a level with the general and the statesman.’

No one could say handsomer than that.

Suzanne would not hear of having a maid to do the housework, partly for economy’s sake and partly because (for reasons best known to herself) she didn’t want anyone poking her nose into what was nobody’s business but her own. She kept the tiny apartment, furnished in the most modern style of the moment, clean and neat, and she made all her own underclothes. But even then, now that she no longer posed, time hung heavily on her hands, for she was an industrious woman; and presently the idea occurred to her that, after having sat to so many painters, there was no reason why she should not paint too. She bought canvases, brushes, and paints and forthwith set to work. Sometimes when I was to take her out to dinner I would go early and find her in a smock busily at work. Just as the embryo in the womb recapitulates in brief the evolution of the species, so did Suzanne recapitulate the styles of all her lovers. She painted landscape like the landscape painter, abstractions like the cubist, and with the help of picture postcards sailing-boats lying at anchor like the Scandinavian. She could not draw, but she had an agreeable sense of colour, and if her pictures were not very good she got a lot of fun out of painting them.

Monsieur Achille encouraged her. It gave him a sense of satisfaction that his mistress should be an artist. It was on his insistence that she sent a canvas to the autumn salon and they were both very proud when it was hung. He gave her one bit of good advice.

‘Don’t try to paint like a man, my dear,’ he said. ‘Paint like a woman. Don’t aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm. And be honest. In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.’

At the time of which I write the connexion had lasted for five years to their mutual content.

‘Evidently he doesn’t thrill me,’ said Suzanne. ‘But he’s intelligent and in a good position. I’ve reached an age when it’s necessary for me to think of my situation.’

She was sympathetic and understanding and Monsieur Achille conceived a high opinion of her judgement. She lent a willing ear when he discussed with her his business and domestic affairs. She condoled with him when his daughter failed in an examination and rejoiced with him when his son got engaged to a girl with money. He had himself married the only child of a man in his own line of business and the amalgamation of two rival firms had been a source of profit to both parties. It was naturally a satisfaction to him that his son was sensible enough to see that the soundest basis of a happy marriage is community of financial interests. He confided to Suzanne his ambition to marry his daughter into the aristocracy.

‘And why not, with her fortune?’ said Suzanne.

Monsieur Achille made it possible for Suzanne to send her own daughter to a convent where she would receive a good education, and he promised that at the proper age he would pay to have her suitably trained to earn her living as a typist and stenographer.

‘She’s going to be a beauty when she grows up,’ Suzanne told me, ‘but evidently it won’t hurt her to have an education and to be able to pound a typewriter. She’s so young it’s too soon to tell, but it may be that she’ll have no temperament.’

Suzanne had delicacy. She left it to my intelligence to infer her meaning. I inferred it all right.

CHAPTER 9

A week or so after I had so unexpectedly run into Larry, Suzanne and I one night, having dined together and gone to a movie, were sitting in the Select on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a glass of beer, when he strolled in. She gave a gasp and to my surprise called out to him. He came up to the table, kissed her, and shook hands with me. I could see that she could hardly believe her eyes.

‘May I sit down?’ he said. ‘I haven’t had any dinner and I’m going to have something to eat.’

‘Oh, but it’s good to see you, mon petit,’ she said, her eyes sparkling. ‘Where have you sprung from? And why have you given no sign of life all these years? My God, how thin you are! For all I knew you might have been dead.’

‘Well, I wasn’t,’ he answered, his eyes twinkling. ‘How is Odette?’

That was the name of Suzanne’s daughter.

‘Oh, she’s growing a big girl. And pretty. She still remembers you.’

‘You never told me you knew Larry,’ I said to her.

‘Why should I? I never knew you knew him. We’re old friends.’

Larry ordered himself eggs and bacon. Suzanne told him all about her daughter and then about herself. He listened in his smiling, charming way while she chattered. She told him that she had settled down and was painting. She turned to me.

‘I’m improving, don’t you think? I don’t pretend I’m a genius, but I have as much talent as many of the painters I’ve known.’

‘D’you sell any pictures,’ asked Larry.

‘I don’t have to,’ she answered airily. ‘I have private means.’

‘Lucky girl.’

‘No, not lucky: clever. You must come and see my pictures.’

She wrote down her address on a piece of paper and made him promise to go. Suzanne, excited, went on talking nineteen to the dozen. Then Larry asked for his bill.

‘You’re not going?’ she cried.

‘I am,’ he smiled.

He paid and with a wave of the hand left us. I laughed. He had a way that always amused me of being with you one moment and without explanation gone the next. It was so abrupt; it was almost as if he had faded into the air.

‘Why did he want to go away so quickly?’ said Suzanne, with vexation.

‘Perhaps he’s got a girl waiting for him,’ I replied mockingly.

‘That’s an idea like another.’ She took her compact out of her bag and powdered her face. ‘I pity any woman who falls in love with him. Oh la. la.’

‘Why do you say that?’

She looked at me for a minute with a seriousness I had not often seen in her.

‘I very nearly fell in love with him myself once. You might as well fall in love with a reflection in the water or a ray of sunshine or a cloud in the sky. I had a narrow escape. Even now when I think of it I tremble at the danger I ran.’

Discretion be blowed. It would have been inhuman not to want to know what this was all about. I congratulated myself that Suzanne was a woman who had no notion of reticence.

‘How on earth did you ever get to know him?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it was years ago. Six years, seven years, I forget. Odette was only five. He knew Marcel when I was living with him. He used to come to the studio and sit while I was posing. He’d take us out to dinner sometimes. You never knew when he’d come. Sometimes not for weeks and then two or three days running. Marcel used to like to have him there; he said he painted better when he was there. Then I had my typhoid. I went through a bad time when I came out of the hospital.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘But I’ve already told you all that. Well, one day I’d been round the studios trying to get work and no one wanted me, and I’d had nothing but a glass of milk and a croissant all day and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for my room, and I met him accidentally on the Boulevard Clichy. He stopped and asked me how I was and I told him about my typhoid, and then he said to me: “You look as if you could do with a square meal.” And there was something in his voice and in the look of his eyes that broke me; I began to cry.

‘We were next door to La Mere Mariette and he took me by the arm and sat me down at a table. I was so hungry I was ready to eat an old boot, but when the omelette came I felt I couldn’t eat a thing. He forced me to take a little and he gave me a glass of burgundy. I felt better then and I ate some asparagus. I told him all my troubles. I was too weak to hold a pose. I was just skin and bone and I looked terrible; I couldn’t expect to get a man. I asked him if he’d lend me the money to go back to my village. At least I’d have my little girl there. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said of course not, Mamma didn’t want me, she could hardly live on her pension with prices the way they were, and the money I’d sent for Odette had all been spent, but if I appeared at the door she would hardly refuse to take me in, she’d see how ill I looked. He looked at me for a long time, and I thought he was going to say he couldn’t lend me anything. Then he said:

‘“Would you like me to take you down to a little place I know in the country, you and the kid? I want a bit of a holiday.”

‘I could hardly believe my ears. I’d known him for ages and he’d never made a pass at me.

“In the condition I’m in?” I said. I couldn’t help laughing. “My poor friend,” I said, “I’m no use to any man just now.”

‘He smiled at me. Have you ever noticed what a wonderful smile he’s got? It’s as sweet as honey.

‘“Don’t be so silly,” he said. “I’m not thinking of that.”

‘I was crying so hard by then, I could hardly speak. He gave me money to fetch the child and we all went to the country together. Oh, it was charming, the place he took us to.’

Suzanne described it to me. It was three miles from a little town the name of which I have forgotten, and they took a car out to the inn. It was a ramshackle building on a river with a lawn that ran down to the water. There were plane trees on the lawn and they had their meals in their shade. In summer artists came there to paint, but it was early for that yet and they had the inn to themselves. The fare was famous, and on Sundays people used to drive from here and there to lunch with abandon, but on week-days their peace was seldom disturbed. With the rest and the food and wine, Suzanne grew stronger, and she was happy to have her child with her.

‘He was sweet with Odette and she adored him. I had to prevent her from making a nuisance of herself, but he never seemed to mind how much she pestered him. It used to make me laugh, they were like two children together.’

‘What did you do with yourselves?’ I asked.

‘Oh, there was always something to do. We used to take a boat and fish and sometimes we’d get the patron to lend us his Citroën and we’d go into town. Larry liked it. The old houses and the place. It was so quiet that your footsteps on the cobblestones were the only sound you heard. There was a Louis Quatorze hôtel de ville and an old church, and at the edge of the town was the château with a garden by Le Nôtre. When you sat at the café on the place you had the feeling that you had stepped back three hundred years and the Citroën at the kerb didn’t seem to belong to this world at all.’

It was after one of these outings that Larry told her the story of the young airman which I narrated at the beginning of this book.

‘I wonder why he told you,’ I said.

‘I haven’t an idea. They’d had a hospital in the town during the war and in the cemetery there were rows and rows of little crosses. We went to see it. We didn’t stay long, it gave me the creeps – all those poor boys lying there. Larry was very silent on the way home. He never ate much, but at dinner he hardly touched a thing. I remember so well, it was a beautiful, starry night and we sat on the riverbank, it was pretty with the poplars silhouetted against the darkness, and he smoked his pipe. And suddenly, à propos de bottes, he told me about his friend and how he died to save him.’ Suzanne took a swig of beer. ‘He’s a strange creature. I shall never understand him. He used to like to read to me. Sometimes in the daytime, while I sewed things for the little one, and in the evening after I’d put her to bed.’

‘What did he read?’

‘Oh, all sorts of things. Letters of Madame de Sévigné and bits of Saint-Simon. Imagine-toi, I who’d never read anything before but the newspaper and now and then a novel when I heard them talk about it in the studios and didn’t want them to think me a fool! I had no idea reading could be so interesting. Those old writers weren’t such fatheads as one would think.’

‘Who would think?’ I chuckled.

‘Then he made me read with him. We read Phèdre and Bérénice. He took the men’s parts and I took the women’s. You can’t think how amusing it was,’ she added naïvely. ‘He used to look at me so strangely when I cried at the pathetic parts. Of course it was only because I hadn’t got my strength. And you know, I’ve still got the books. Even now I can’t read some of the letters of Madame de Sévigné that he read to me without hearing his lovely voice and without seeing the river flowing so quietly and the poplars on the opposite bank, and sometimes I can’t go on, it gives me such a pain in my heart. I know now that those were the happiest weeks I ever spent in my life. That man, he’s an angel of sweetness.’

Suzanne felt she was growing sentimental and feared (wrongly) that I should laugh at her. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

‘You know, I’ve always made up my mind that when I’ve reached the canonical age and no man wants to sleep with me any more I shall make my peace with the Church and repent of my sins. But the sins I committed with Larry nothing in the world will ever induce me to repent of. Never, never, never!’

‘But as you’ve described it I can see nothing you can possibly have to repent of.’

‘I haven’t told you the half of it yet. You see, I have a naturally good constitution and being out in the air all day, eating well, sleeping well, with not a care in the world, in three or four weeks I was as strong as ever I’d been. And I was looking well; I had colour in my cheeks and my hair had recovered its sheen. I felt twenty. Larry swam in the river every morning and I used to watch him. He has a beautiful body, not an athlete’s like my Scandinavian, but strong and of an infinite grace.

‘He’d been very patient while I was so weak, but now that I was perfectly well I saw no reason to keep him waiting any longer. I gave him a hint or two that I was ready for anything, but he didn’t seem to understand. Of course you Anglo-Saxons are peculiar, you’re brutal and at the same time you’re sentimental; there’s no denying it, you’re not good lovers. I said to myself, “Perhaps it’s his delicacy, he’s done so much for me, he’s let me have the child here, it may be that he hasn’t the heart to ask me for the return that is his right.” So one night, as we were going to bed, I said to him, “D’you want me to come to your room tonight?”’

I laughed.

‘You put it a bit bluntly, didn’t you?’

‘Well, I couldn’t ask him to come to mine, because Odette was sleeping there,’ she answered ingenuously. ‘He looked at me with those kind eyes of his for a moment, then he smiled. “D ‘you want to come?” he said.

‘“What do you think – with that fine body of yours?”

‘“All right, come then.”

‘I went upstairs and undressed and then I slipped along the passage to his room. He was lying in bed reading and smoking a pipe. He put down his pipe and his book and moved over to make room for me.’

Suzanne was silent for a while and it went against my grain to ask her questions. But after a while she went on.

‘He was a strange lover. Very sweet, affectionate and even tender, virile without being passionate, if you understand what I mean, and absolutely without vice. He loved like a hot-blooded schoolboy. It was rather funny and rather touching. When I left him I had the feeling that I should be grateful to him rather than he to me. As I closed the door I saw him take up his book and go on reading from where he had left off.’

I began to laugh.’

‘I’m glad it amuses you,’ she said a trifle grimly. But she was not without a sense of humour. She giggled. ‘I soon discovered that if I waited for an invitation I might wait indefinitely, so when I felt like it I just went into his room and got into bed. He was always very nice. He had in short natural human instincts, but he was like a man so preoccupied that he forgets to eat, yet when you put a good dinner before him he eats it with appetite. I know when a man’s in love with me, and I should have been a fool if I’d believed that Larry loved me, but I thought he’d get into the habit of me. One has to be practical in life and I said to myself that it would suit me very well if when we went back to Paris he took me to live with him. I knew he’d let me have the child and I should have liked that. My instinct told me I’d be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.’

Suzanne inhaled the smoke of her cigarette and blew it out through her nose. It was growing late and many of the tables were now empty, but there was still a group of people hanging around the bar.

‘One morning, after breakfast, I was sitting on the riverbank sewing, and Odette was playing with some bricks he’d bought her when Larry came up to me.

‘“I’ve come to say good-bye to you,” he said.

‘“Are you going somewhere?” I said, surprised.

‘“Yes.”

‘“Not for good?” I said.

‘“You’re quite well now. Here’s enough money to keep you for the rest of the summer and to start you off when you get back to Paris.”

‘For a moment I was so upset I didn’t know what to say. He stood in front of me, smiling in that candid way of his.

‘“Have I done something to displease you?” I asked him.

‘“Nothing. Don’t think that for a moment. I’ve got work to do. We’ve had a lovely time down here. Odette, come and say good-bye to your uncle.”

‘She was too young to understand. He took her up in his arms and kissed her; then he kissed me and walked back into the hotel; in a minute I heard the car drive away. I looked at the banknotes I had in my hand. Twelve thousand francs. It came so quickly I hadn’t time to react. “Zut alors,” I said to myself. I had at least one thing to be thankful for, I hadn’t allowed myself to fall in love with him. But I couldn’t make head or tail of it.’

I was obliged to laugh.

‘You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.’

‘I don’t see the connexion.’

‘Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.’

Suzanne stared at me.

‘My poor friend, you’ve had too much to drink.’

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 1

I DAWDLED OVER my work in Paris. It was very agreeable in the springtime, with the chestnuts in the Champs Elysées in bloom and the light in the streets so gay. There was pleasure in the air, a light transitory pleasure, sensual without grossness, that made your step more springy and your intelligence more alert. I was happy in the various company of my friends and, my heart filled with amiable memories of the past, I regained in spirit at least something of the glow of youth. I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.

Isabel, Gray, Larry, and I went for excursions to places of interest within convenient distance. We went to Chantilly and Versailles, to St Germain and Fontainebleau. Wherever we went, we lunched well and copiously. Gray ate largely to satisfy his enormous frame and was apt to drink a little too much. His health, whether owing to Larry’s treatment or merely to the course of time, was certainly improved. He ceased to have racking headaches and his eyes were losing the look of bewilderment that when first I saw him on coming to Paris had been so distressing. He did not talk much except now and then to tell a long-winded story, but laughed with great loud guffaws at the nonsense Isabel and I talked. He enjoyed himself. Though not amusing, he was so good-humoured and so easily pleased that it was impossible not to like him. He was the kind of man with whom one would have hesitated to pass a lonely evening, but with whom one might cheerfully have looked forward to spending six months.

His love for Isabel was a delight to see; he adored her beauty and thought her the most brilliant, fascinating creature in the world; and his devotion, his doglike devotion to Larry was touching. Larry appeared to enjoy himself too; I had a notion that he looked upon this time as a holiday that he was taking from whatever projects he had in mind and was serenely making the most of it. He didn’t talk very much either, but it didn’t matter, his company was sufficient conversation; he was so easy, so pleasantly cheerful that you didn’t ask more of him than what he gave, and I well knew that if the days we spent together were so happy it was due to his being with us. Though he never said a brilliant or a witty thing, we should have been dull without him.

It was on the return from one of these jaunts that I witnessed a scene that somewhat startled me. We had been to Chartres and were on our way back to Paris. Gray was driving and Larry was sitting beside him; Isabel and I were at the back. We were tired after the long day. Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt-cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldenly upon them. Something in Isabel’s immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I should never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick. She was unconscious of my presence; she was conscious of nothing but the hand, lying along the rim so negligently, that filled her with frantic desire. Then as it were a spasm twitched across her face, she gave a shudder and shutting her eyes sank into the corner of the car.

‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said in a voice I hardly recognized, it was so raucous.

I got one out of my case and lit it for her. She smoked it greedily. For the rest of the drive she looked out of the window and never said a word.

When we arrived at their house Gray asked Larry to drive me back to my hotel and then take the car to the garage. Larry got into the driver’s seat and I sat myself beside him. As they crossed the pavement Isabel took Gray’s arm and, snuggling up to him, gave him a look which I could not see, but whose sense I could divine. I guessed that he would have a passionate bedfellow that night, but would never know to what prickings of conscience he owed her ardour.

June was approaching its end and I had to get back to the Riviera. Friends of Elliott’s, who were going to America, had lent the Maturins their villa at Dinard and they were going there with the children as soon as their school closed. Larry was staying in Paris to work, but was buying himself a secondhand Citroën and had promised to spend a few days with them in August. On my last night in Paris I asked the three of them to dine with me.

It was on that night that we met Sophie Macdonald.

CHAPTER 2

Isabel had conceived the desire to make a tour of the tough joints, and because I had some acquaintance with them she asked me to be their guide. I did not much like the notion, because in places of that sort in Paris they are apt to make their disapproval of sightseers from another world unpleasantly obvious. But Isabel insisted. I warned her that it would be very boring and begged her to dress plainly. We dined late, went to the Folies-Bergère for an hour, and then set out. I took them first to a cellar near Notre Dame frequented by gangsters and their molls where I knew the proprietor, and he made room for us at a long table at which were sitting some very disreputable people, but I ordered wine for all of them and we drank one another’s healths. It was hot, smoky, and dirty. Then I took them to the Sphynx where women, naked under their smart, tawdry evening dresses, their breasts, nipples and all, exposed, sit in a row on two benches opposite one another and when the band strikes up dance together listlessly with their eyes on the lookout for the men who sit round the dance hall at marble-topped tables. We ordered a bottle of warm champagne. Some of the women gave Isabel the eye as they passed us and I wondered if she knew what it meant.

Then we went on to the Rue de Lappe. It is a dingy, narrow street, and even as you enter it you get the impression of sordid lust. We went into a café. There was the usual young man, pale and dissipated, playing the piano, while another man, old and tired, scraped away on a fiddle, and a third made discordant noises on a saxophone. The place was packed and it looked as though there wasn’t a vacant table, but the patron, seeing that we were customers with money to spend, unceremoniously turned a couple out, making them take seats at a table already occupied, and settled us down. The two persons who were hustled away did not take it well, and they made remarks about us that were far from complimentary. A lot of people were dancing, sailors with the red pompon on their hats, men mostly with their caps on and handkerchiefs round their necks, women of mature age, and young girls, painted to the eyes, bareheaded, in short skirts and coloured blouses. Men danced with podgy boys with made-up eyes; gaunt, hard-featured women danced with fat women with dyed hair; men danced with women. There was a frowst of smoke and liquor and of sweating bodies. The music went on interminably and that unsavoury mob proceeded round the room, the sweat shining on their faces, with a solemn intensity in which there was something horrible. There were a few big men of brutal aspect, but for the most part they were puny and ill-nourished. I watched the three who were playing. They might have been robots, so mechanical was their performance, and I asked myself if it was possible that at one time, when they were setting out, they had thought they might be musicians whom people would come from far to hear and to applaud. Even to play the violin badly you must take lessons and practise: did that fiddler go to all that trouble just to play fox-trots till the small hours of the morning in that stinking squalor? The music stopped and the pianist wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. The dancers slouched or sidled or squirmed back to their tables. Suddenly we heard an American voice:

‘For Christ’s sake.’

A woman got up from one of the tables across the room. The man she was with tried to stop her, but she pushed him aside and staggered across the floor. She was very drunk. She came up to our table and stood in front of us, swaying a little and grinning stupidly. She seemed to find the sight of us vastly amusing. I glanced at my companions. Isabel was staring at her blankly, Gray had a sullen frown on his face, and Larry gazed as though he couldn’t believe his eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Sophie,’ said Isabel.

‘Who the hell did you think it was?’ she gurgled. She grabbed the waiter who was passing. ‘Vincent, fetch me a chair.’

‘Fetch one yourself,’ he said, snatching himself away.

‘Salaud,’ she cried, spitting at him.

‘T’en fais pas, Sophie,’ said a big fat fellow with a great head of greasy hair, who was sitting next to us in his shirt-sleeves. ‘Here’s a chair.’

‘Fancy meeting you all like this,’ she said, still swaying. ‘Hello, Larry. Hello, Gray.’ She sank into the chair which the man who had spoken placed behind her. ‘Let’s all have a drink. Patron,’ she screamed.

I had noticed that the proprietor had his eye on us and now he came up.

‘You know these people, Sophie?’ he asked, addressing her in the familiar second person singular.

‘Ta gueule,’ she laughed drunkenly. ‘They’re my childhood friends. I’m buying a bottle of champagne for them. And don’t you bring us any urine de cheval. Bring us something one can swallow without vomiting.’

‘You’re drunk, my poor Sophie,’ he said.

‘To hell with you.’

He went off, glad enough to sell a bottle of champagne – we for safety’s sake had been drinking brandy and soda – and Sophie stared at me dully for a moment.

‘Who’s your friend, Isabel?’

Isabel told her my name.

‘Oh? I remember, you came to Chicago once. Bit of a stuffed shirt, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I smiled.

I had no recollection of her, but that was not surprising, since I had not been to Chicago for more than ten years and had met a great many people then and a great many since.

She was quite tall and, when standing, looked taller still, for she was very thin. She wore a bright green silk blouse, but it was crumpled and spotted, and a short black skirt. Her hair, cut short and loosely curled, but tousled, was brightly hennaed. She was outrageously made up, her cheeks rouged to the eyes, and her eyelids, upper and lower, heavily blued; her eyebrows and eyelashes were thick with mascara and her mouth scarlet with lipstick. Her hands, with their painted nails, were dirty. She looked more of a slut than any woman there and I had a suspicion that she was not only drunk but doped. But one couldn’t deny that there was a certain vicious attractiveness about her; she held her head with an arrogant tilt and her make-up accentuated the startling greenness of her eyes. Sodden with drink as she was, she had a bold-faced shamelessness that I could well imagine appealed to all that was base in men. She embraced us in a sardonic smile.

‘I can’t say you seem so terribly pleased to see me,’ she said.

‘I heard you were in Paris,’ said Isabel lamely, a chilly smile on her face.

‘You might have called me. I’m in the phone-book.’

‘We haven’t been here very long.’

Gray came to the rescue.

‘Are you having a good time over here, Sophie?’

‘Fine. You went bust, Gray, didn’t you?’

His face flushed a deeper red.

‘Yes.’

‘Tough on you. I guess it’s pretty grim in Chicago right now. Lucky for me I got out when I did. For Christ’s sake why doesn’t that bastard bring us something to drink?’

‘He’s just coming,’ I said, seeing the waiter threading his way through the tables with glasses and wine on a tray.

My remark drew her attention to me.

‘My loving in-laws kicked me out of Chicago. Said I was gumming up their f — reputations.’ She giggled savagely. ‘I’m a remittance man.’

The champagne came and was poured out. With a shaking hand she raised a glass to her lips.

‘To hell with stuffed shirts,’ she said. She emptied the glass and glanced at Larry. ‘You don’t seem to have much to say for yourself, Larry.’

He had been looking at her with an impassive face. He had not taken his eyes off her since she had appeared. He smiled amiably.

‘I’m not a very talkative guy.’

The music struck up again and a man came over to us. He was a tallish fellow and well built, with a great hooked nose, a mat of shining black hair, and great sensual lips. He looked like an evil Savonarola. Like most of the men there he wore no collar and his tight-fitting coat was closely buttoned to give him a waist.

‘Come on, Sophie. We’re going to dance.’

‘Go away. I’m busy. Can’t you see I’m with friends?’

‘I’ m’en fous de tes amis. To hell with your friends. You’re dancing.’

He took hold of her arm but she snatched it away.

‘Fous-moi lapaix, espèce de con,’ she cried, with sudden violence.

‘Merde.’

‘Mange.’

Gray did not understand what they were saying, but I saw that Isabel, with that strange knowledge of obscenity that the most virtuous woman seems to possess, understood perfectly, and her face went hard with a frown of disgust. The man raised his arm with his hand open, the horny hand of a workman, and was about to slap her, when Gray half raised himself from his chair.

‘Allaiz vous ong,’ he shouted, with his execrable accent.

The man stopped and threw Gray a furious glance.

‘Take care, Coco,’ said Sophie, with a bitter laugh. ‘He’ll lay you out cold.’

The man took in Gray’s great height and weight and strength. He shrugged his shoulders sullenly and, throwing a filthy word at us, slunk off. Sophie giggled drunkenly. The rest of us were silent. I refilled her glass.

‘You living in Paris, Larry?’ she asked after she had drained it.

‘For the present.’

It’s always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there’s no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him. We went on talking for a few minutes in a dreary, embarrassed way. Then Sophie pushed back her chair.

‘If I don’t go back to my boy friend he’ll be as mad as hell. He’s a sulky brute, but Christ, he’s a good screw.’ She staggered to her feet. ‘So long, folks. Come again. I’m here every night.’

She pushed her way through the dancers and we lost sight of her in the crowd. I almost laughed at the icy scorn on Isabel’s classic features. None of us said a word.

‘This is a foul place,’ said Isabel suddenly. ‘Let’s go.’

I paid for our drinks and for Sophie’s champagne and we trooped out. The crowd was on the dance floor and we got out without remark. It was after two, and to my mind time to go to bed, but Gray said he was hungry, so I suggested that we should go to Graf’s in Montmartre and get something to eat. We were silent as we drove up. I sat beside Gray to direct him. We reached the garish restaurant. There were still people sitting on the terrace. We went in and ordered bacon and eggs and beer. Isabel, outwardly at least, had regained her composure. She congratulated me, somewhat ironically perhaps, on my acquaintance with the more disreputable parts of Paris.

‘You asked for it,’ I said.

‘I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ve had a grand evening.’

‘Hell,’ said Gray. ‘It stank. And Sophie.’

Isabel shrugged an indifferent shoulder.

‘D’you remember her at all?’ she asked me. ‘She sat next to you the first night you came to dinner with us. She hadn’t got that awful red hair then. Its natural colour is dingy beige.’

I threw my mind back. I had a recollection of a very young girl with blue eyes that were almost green and an attractive tilt to her head. Not pretty, but fresh and ingenuous with a mixture of shyness and pertness that I found amusing.

‘Of course I remember. I liked her name. I had an aunt called Sophie.’

‘She married a boy called Bob Macdonald.’

‘Nice fellow,’ said Gray.

‘He was one of the best-looking boys I ever saw. I never understood what he saw in her. She married just after I did. Her parents were divorced and her mother married a Standard Oil man in China. She lived with her father’s people at Marvin and we used to see a lot of her then, but after she married she dropped out of our crowd somehow. Bob Macdonald was a lawyer, but he wasn’t making much money, and they had a walk-up apartment on the North Side. But it wasn’t that. They didn’t want to see anybody. I never saw two people so crazy about one another. Even after they’d been married two or three years and had a baby they’d go to the pictures and he’d sit with his arm round her waist and she with her head on his shoulder just like lovers. They were quite a joke in Chicago.’

Larry listened to what Isabel said, but made no comment. His face was inscrutable.

‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘One night they were driving back to Chicago in a little open car of theirs, and they had the baby with them. They always had to take the baby along because they hadn’t any help. Sophie did everything herself, and, anyway, they worshipped it. And a bunch of drunks in a great sedan driving at eighty miles an hour crashed into them head on. Bob and the baby were killed outright, but Sophie only had concussion and a rib or two broken. They kept it from her as long as they could that Bob and the baby were dead, but at last they had to tell her. They say it was awful. She nearly went crazy. She shrieked the place down. They had to watch her night and day and once she nearly succeeded in jumping out of the window. Of course we did all we could, but she seemed to hate us. After she came out of the hospital they put her in a sanatorium and she was there for months.’

‘Poor thing.’

‘When they let her go she started to drink, and when she was drunk she’d go to bed with anyone who asked her. It was terrible for her in-laws. They’re very nice quiet people and they hated the scandal. At first we all tried to help her, but it was impossible; if you asked her to dine she’d arrive plastered and she was quite likely to pass out before the evening was over. Then she got in with a rotten crowd and we had to drop her. She was arrested once for driving a car when she was drunk. She was with a dago she’d picked up in a speak-easy and it turned out that he was wanted by the cops.’

‘But had she money?’ I asked.

‘There was Bob’s insurance; the people who owned the car that smashed into them were insured and she got something from them. But it didn’t last long. She spent it like a drunken sailor and in two years she was broke. Her grandmother wouldn’t have her back at Marvin. Then her in-laws said they’d make her an allowance if she’d go and live abroad. I suppose that’s what she’s living on now.’

‘The wheel comes full circle,’ I remarked. ‘There was a time when the black sheep of the family was sent from my country to America; now apparently he’s sent from your country to Europe.’

‘I can’t help feeling sorry for her,’ said Gray.

‘Can’t you?’ said Isabel coolly. ‘I can. Of course it was a shock and no one could have sympathized with Sophie more than I did. We’d known one another always. But a normal person recovers from a thing like that. If she went to pieces it’s because there was a rotten streak in her. She was naturally unbalanced; even her love for Bob was exaggerated. If she’d had character she’d have been able to make something of life.’

‘If pots and pans . . . Aren’t you very hard, Isabel?’ I murmured.

‘I don’t think so. I have common sense and I see no reason to be sentimental about Sophie. God knows, no one could be more devoted to Gray and the babes than I am, and if they were killed in a motor accident I should go out of my mind, but sooner or later I’d pull myself together. Isn’t that what you’d wish me to do, Gray, or would you prefer me to get blind every night and go to bed with every apache in Paris?’

Gray then came as near to making a humorous remark as I ever heard him.

‘Of course I’d prefer you to hurl yourself on my funeral pyre in a new Molyneux dress, but as that’s not done any more, I guess the best thing you could do would be to take the bridge. And I’d like you to remember not to go an original no-trump on less than three and a half to four quick tricks.’

It was not the occasion for me to point out to Isabel that her love for her husband and her children, though sincere enough, was scarcely passionate. Perhaps she read the thought that was passing through my mind, for she addressed me somewhat truculently.

‘What have you got to say?’

‘I’m like Gray, I’m sorry for the girl.’

‘She’s not a girl. She’s thirty.’

‘I suppose it was the end of the world for her when her husband and her baby were killed. I suppose she didn’t care what became of her and flung herself into the horrible degradation of drink and promiscuous copulation to get even with life that had treated her so cruelly. She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn’t drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.’

‘That’s the sort of thing you say in novels. It’s nonsense and you know it’s nonsense. Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn’t that that made her evil. Evil doesn’t spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defences it set her free to be herself. Don’t waste your pity on her; she’s now what at heart she always was.’

All this time Larry had remained silent. He seemed to be in a brown study and I thought he hardly heard what we were saying. Isabel’s words were followed by a brief silence. He began to speak, but in a strange, toneless voice, as though not to us, but to himself; his eyes seemed to look into the dim distance of past time.

‘I remember her when she was fourteen with her long hair brushed back off her forehead and a black bow at the back, with her freckled, serious face. She was a modest, high-minded, idealistic child. She read everything she could get hold of and we used to talk about books.’

‘When?’ asked Isabel, with a slight frown.

‘Oh, when you were out being social with your mother. I used to go up to her grandfather’s and we’d sit under a great elm they had there and read to one another. She loved poetry and wrote quite a lot herself.’

‘Plenty of girls do that at that age. It’s pretty poor stuff.’

‘Of course it’s a long time ago and I dare say I wasn’t a very good judge.’

‘You couldn’t have been more than sixteen yourself.’

‘Of course it was imitative. There was a lot of Robert Frost in it. But I have a notion it was rather remarkable for so young a girl. She had a delicate ear and a sense of rhythm. She had a feeling for the sounds and scents of the country, the first softness of spring in the air and the smell of the parched earth after rain.’

‘I never knew she wrote poetry,’ said Isabel.

‘She kept it a secret, she was afraid you’d all laugh at her. She was very shy.’

‘She’s not that now.’

‘When I came back from the war she was almost grown-up. She’d read a lot about the condition of the working classes and she’d seen something of it for herself in Chicago. She’d got on to Carl Sandburg and was writing savagely in free verse about the misery of the poor and the exploitation of the working classes. I dare say it was rather commonplace, but it was sincere and it had pity in it and aspiration. At that time she wanted to become a social worker. It was moving, her desire for sacrifice. I think she was capable of a great deal. She wasn’t silly or mawkish, but she gave one the impression of a lovely purity and a strange loftiness of soul. We saw a lot of one another that year.’

I could see that Isabel listened to him with growing exasperation. Larry had no notion that he was driving a dagger in her heart and with his every detached word twisting it in the wound. But when she spoke it was with a smile on her lips.

‘How did she come to choose you for her confidant?’

Larry looked at her with his trustful eyes.

‘I don’t know. She was a poor girl among all of you who had plenty of dough, and I didn’t belong. I was there just because Uncle Bob practised at Marvin. I suppose she felt that gave us something in common.’

Larry had no relations. Most of us have at least cousins whom we may hardly know, but who at least give us a sense that we are part of the human family. Larry’s father had been an only son, his mother an only daughter; his grandfather on one side, the Quaker, had been lost at sea when a young man and his grandfather on the other side had neither brother nor sister. No one could be more alone in the world than Larry.

‘Did it ever occur to you that Sophie was in love with you?’ asked Isabel.

‘Never,’ he smiled.

‘When he came back from the war as a wounded hero half the girls in Chicago had a crush on Larry,’ said Gray in his bluff way.

‘This was more than a crush. She worshipped you, my poor Larry. D’you mean to say you didn’t know it?’

‘I certainly didn’t and I don’t believe it.’

‘I suppose you thought she was too high-minded.’

‘I can still see that skinny little girl with the bow in her hair and her serious face whose voice trembled with tears when she read that ode of Keats’s because it was so beautiful. I wonder where she is now.’

Isabel gave a very slight start and threw him a suspicious inquiring glance.

‘It’s getting frightfully late and I’m so tired I don’t know what to do. Let’s go.’

CHAPTER 3

On the following evening I took the Blue Train to the Riviera and two or three days later went over to Antibes to see Elliott and give him news of Paris. He looked far from well. The cure at Montecatini had not done him the good he expected, and his subsequent wanderings had exhausted him. He found a baptismal font in Venice and then went on to Florence to buy the triptych he had been negotiating for. Anxious to see these objects duly placed, he went down to the Pontine Marshes and put up at a miserable inn where the heat had been hard to bear. His precious purchases were a long time on the way, but determined not to leave till he had accomplished his purpose, he stayed on. He was delighted with the effect when at last everything was in order, and he showed me with pride the photographs he had taken. The church, though small, had dignity, and the restrained richness of the interior was proof of Elliott’s good taste.

‘I saw an early Christian sarcophagus in Rome that took my fancy and I deliberated a long time about buying it, but in the end I thought better of it.’

‘What on earth did you want with an early Christian sarcophagus, Elliott?’

‘To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of a very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the entrance, but those early Christians were stumpy little fellows and I shouldn’t have fitted in. I wasn’t going to lie there till the Last Trump with my knees doubled up to my chin like a foetus. Most uncomfortable.’

I laughed, but Elliott was serious.

‘I had a better idea. I’ve made all arrangements, with some difficulty, but that was to be expected, to be buried in front of the altar at the foot of the chancel steps, so that when the poor peasants of the Pontine Marshes come up to take the Sacrament they’ll clump over my bones with their heavy shoes. Rather chic, don’t you think? Just a plain stone slab with my name on it and a couple of dates. Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around, you know.’

‘I do know enough Latin to understand a hackneyed quotation, Elliott,’ I said tartly.

‘I beg your pardon, my dear fellow. I’m so accustomed to the crass ignorance of the upper classes, I forgot for the moment that I was talking to an author.’

He scored.

‘But what I wanted to say to you was this,’ he continued. ‘I’ve left proper instructions in my will, but I want you to see they’re carried out. I will not be buried on the Riviera among a lot of retired colonels and middle-class French people.’

‘Of course I’ll do what you wish, Elliott, but I don’t think we need plan for anything like that for many years to come.’

‘I’m getting on, you know, and to tell you the truth I shan’t be sorry to go. What are those lines of Landor’s? “I’ve warmed both hands . . .”’

Though I have a bad verbal memory, the poem is very short and I was able to repeat it.

‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and. next to Nature, Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks and I am ready to depart.’

‘That’s it,’ he said.

I could not but reflect that it was only by a violent stretch of the imagination that Elliott could fit the epigram to himself.

‘It expresses my sentiments exactly,’ he said, however. ‘The only thing I could add to it is that I’ve always moved in the best society in Europe.’

‘It would be difficult to squeeze that into a quatrain.’

‘Society is dead. At one time I had hopes that America would take the place of Europe and create an aristocracy that the hoi polloi would respect, but the depression has destroyed any chance of that. My poor country is becoming hopelessly middle-class. You wouldn’t believe it, my dear fellow, but last time I was in America a taxi driver addressed me as brother.’

But though the Riviera, still shaken by the crash of ‘twenty-nine, was not what it had been, Elliott continued to give parties and go to parties. He had never frequented Jews, making an exception only for the family of Rothschild, but the grandest parties were being given now by members of the chosen race, and when there was a party Elliott could not bear not to go to it. He wandered through these gatherings, graciously shaking the hand of one or kissing that of another, but with a kind of forlorn detachment like an exiled royalty who felt a trifle embarrassed to find himself in such company. The exiled royalties, however, had the time of their lives, and to meet a film star seemed the height of their ambitions. Nor had Elliott ever looked with approval on the modern practice of treating members of the theatrical profession as persons whom you met socially; but a retired actress had built herself a sumptuous residence in his immediate neighbourhood and kept open house. Cabinet ministers, dukes, great ladies stayed with her for weeks on end. Elliott became a constant visitor.

‘Of course it’s a very mixed crowd,’ he told me, ‘but one doesn’t have to talk to people one doesn’t want to. She’s a compatriot of mine and I feel I ought to help her out. It must be a relief to her house guests to find someone who can talk their own language.’

Sometimes he was obviously so far from well that I asked him why he didn’t take things more easily.

‘My dear fellow, at my age one can’t afford to fall out. You don’t think I’ve moved in the highest circles for nearly fifty years without realizing that if you’re not seen everywhere you’re forgotten.’

I wondered if he realized what a lamentable confession he was then making. I had not the heart to laugh at Elliott any more; he seemed to me a profoundly pathetic object. Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked to one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification; and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid.

So the summer passed. Elliott spent it scurrying from one end of the Riviera to the other, lunching in Cannes, dining in Monte Carlo, and exercising all his ingenuity to fit in a tea party here and a cocktail party there; and however tired he felt, taking pains to be affable, chatty, and amusing. He was full of gossip and you could trust him to know the details of the latest scandal before anyone but the parties immediately concerned. He would have stared at you with frank amazement had you suggested to him that his existence was futile. He would have thought you distressingly plebeian.

CHAPTER 4

The autumn came and Elliott decided to go to Paris for a while, partly to see how Isabel, Gray, and the children were getting on, and partly to make what he called acte de presence in the capital. Then he meant to go to London to order some new clothes and incidentally to look up some old friends. My own plan was to go straight to London, but he asked me to drive up with him to Paris, and since that is an agreeable thing to do I consented and, having done so, saw no reason why I should not spend at least a few days in Paris myself. We made the journey by easy stages, stopping at places where the food was good; Elliott had something the matter with his kidneys and drank nothing but Vichy, but always insisted on choosing my half-bottle of wine for me and, too good-natured to grudge me a pleasure he could not share, got a genuine satisfaction out of my enjoyment of a fine vintage. He was so generous that I had difficulty in persuading him to let me pay my share of the expenses. Though I grew a little tired of his stories of the great whom he had known in the past I liked the trip. Much of the country we drove through, just touched with the beginning of its autumn beauty, was very lovely. Having lunched at Fontainebleau, we did not arrive in Paris till afternoon. Elliott dropped me at my modest, old-fashioned hotel and went round the corner to the Ritz.

We had warned Isabel of our arriving, so I was not surprised to find a note from her awaiting me, but I was surprised at its contents:

Come round the moment you get in. Something terrible has happened. Don’t bring Uncle Elliott. for God’s sake come as soon as you can.

I am not less curious than anyone else, but I had to have a wash and put on a clean shirt; then I took a taxi and went round to the apartment in the Rue St Guillaume. I was shown into the drawing-room. Isabel sprang to her feet.

‘Where have you been all this time? I’ve been waiting for hours.’

It was five o’clock and, before I could answer, the butler brought in the tea-things. Isabel, her hands clenched, watched him with impatience. I couldn’t imagine what was the matter.

‘I’ve only just arrived. We dawdled over lunch at Fontainebleau.’

‘God, how slow he is. Maddening!’ said Isabel.

The man placed the salver with the teapot and the sugar basin and the cups on the table and with what really was exasperating deliberation arranged around it plates of bread and butter, cakes, and cookies. He went out and closed the door behind him.

‘Larry’s going to marry Sophie Macdonald.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ cried Isabel, her eyes flashing with anger. ‘That drunken slut we met at that filthy café you took us to. God knows why you took us to a place like that. Gray was disgusted.’

‘Oh, you mean your Chicago friend?’ I said, ignoring her unjust reproach. ‘How d’you know?’

‘How should I know? He came and told me himself yesterday afternoon. I’ve been frantic ever since.’

‘Supposing you sat down, gave me a cup of tea, and told me all about it.’

‘Help yourself.’

She sat behind the tea-table and watched me irritably while I poured myself out a cup. I made myself comfortable on a small sofa by the fireplace.

‘We haven’t seen so much of him lately, since we came back from Dinard, I mean; he came up there for a few days, but wouldn’t stay with us, he stayed at a hotel. He used to come down to the beach and play with the children. They’re crazy about him. We played golf at St Briac. Gray asked him one day if he’d seen Sophie again.

‘“Yes, I’ve seen her several times,” he said.

‘“Why?” I asked.

‘“She’s an old friend,” he said.

‘“If I were you I wouldn’t waste my time on her,” I said.

‘Then he smiled. You know how he smiles, as though he thought what you’d said funny, though it isn’t funny at all.

‘“But you’re not me,” he said.

‘I shrugged my shoulders and changed the conversation. I never gave the matter another thought. You can imagine my horror when he came here and told me they were going to be married.

‘“You can’t, Larry,” I said. “You can’t.”

‘“I’m going to,” he said as calmly as if he was going to have a second helping of potatoes. “And I want you to be very nice to her, Isabel.”

‘“That’s asking too much,” I said. “You’re crazy. She’s bad, bad, bad.”’

‘What makes you think that?’ I interrupted.

Isabel looked at me with flashing eyes.

‘She’s soused from morning till night. She goes to bed with every tough who asks her.’

‘That doesn’t mean she’s bad. Quite a number of highly respected citizens get drunk and have a liking for rough trade. They’re bad habits, like biting one’s nails, but I don’t know that they’re worse than that. I call a person bad who lies and cheats and is unkind.’

‘If you’re going to take her part I’ll kill you.’

‘How did Larry meet her again?’

‘He found her address in the phone-book. He went to see her. She was sick, and no wonder, with the life she leads. He got a doctor and had someone in to look after her. That’s how it started. He says she’s given up drink; the damned fool thinks she’s cured.’

‘Have you forgotten what Larry did for Gray? He’s cured him, hasn’t he?’

‘That’s different. Gray wanted to be cured. She doesn’t.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘Because I know women. When a woman goes to pieces like that she’s done for; she can never get back. If Sophie’s what she is, it’s because she was like that always. D’you think she’ll stick to Larry? Of course not. Sooner or later she’ll break out. It’s in her blood. It’s a brute she wants, that’s what excites her, and it’s a brute she’ll go after. She’ll lead Larry a hell of a life.’

‘I think it’s very probable, but I don’t know what you can do about it. He’s going into this with his eyes open.’

‘I can do nothing about it, but you can.’

‘I?’

‘Larry likes you and he listens to what you say. You’re the only person who has any influence over him. You know the world. Go to him and tell him that he can’t make such a fool of himself. Tell him that it’ll ruin him.’

‘He’ll only tell me that it’s no business of mine and he’ll be quite right.’

‘But you like him, at least you’re interested in him, you can’t sit by and let him make a hopeless mess of his life.’

‘Gray’s his oldest and most intimate friend. I don’t think it’ll do any good, but I should have thought Gray was the best person to speak to him.’

‘Oh, Gray,’ she said impatiently.

‘You know it may not turn out so badly as you think. I’ve known two or three fellows, one in Spain and two in the East, who married whores, and they made them very good wives. They were grateful to their husbands, for the security they gave them, I mean, and they of course knew what pleases a man.’

‘You make me tired. D’you think I sacrificed myself to let Larry fall into the hands of a raging nymphomaniac?’

‘How did you sacrifice yourself?’

‘I gave Larry up for the one and only reason that I didn’t want to stand in his way.’

‘Come off it, Isabel. You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat.’

The words were hardly out of my mouth when a plate of bread and butter came flying at my head. By sheer luck I caught the plate, but the bread and butter was scattered on the floor. I got up and put the plate back on the table.

‘Your uncle Elliott wouldn’t have thanked you if you’d broken one of his Crown Derby plates. They were made for the third Duke of Dorset and they’re almost priceless.’

‘Pick up the bread and butter,’ she snapped.

‘Pick it up yourself,’ I said, seating myself again on the sofa.

She got up and, fuming, picked up the scattered pieces.

‘And you call yourself an English gentleman,’ she exclaimed, savagely.

‘No, that’s a thing I’ve never done in all my life.’

‘Get the hell out of here. I never want to see you again. I hate the sight of you.’

‘I’m sorry for that, because the sight of you always gives me pleasure. Have you ever been told that your nose is exactly like that of the Psyche in the museum of Naples, and that’s the loveliest representation of virginal beauty that ever existed. You’ve got exquisite legs, so long and shapely, and I never cease to be surprised at them, because they were thick and lumpy when you were a girl. I can’t imagine how you’ve managed it.’

‘An iron will and the grace of God,’ she said angrily.

‘But of course your hands are your most fascinating feature. They’re so slim and so elegant.’

‘I was under the impression you thought them too big.’

‘Not for your height and build. I’m always amazed at the infinite grace with which you use them. Whether by nature or by art you never make a gesture without imparting beauty to it. They’re like flowers sometimes and sometimes like birds on the wing. They’re more expressive than any words you can say. They’re like the hands of El Greco’s portraits; in fact, when I look at them I’m inclined to believe Elliott’s highly improbable story of your having an ancestor who was a Spanish grandee.’

She looked up crossly.

‘What are you talking about? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

I told her about the Count de Lauria and Queen Mary’s maid of honour from whose issue in the female line Elliott traced his descent. Meanwhile Isabel contemplated her long fingers and her manicured painted nails with complacency.

‘One must be descended from someone,’ she said. Then with a tiny chuckle, giving me a mischievous look in which no trace of rancour remained, she added: ‘You lousy bastard.’

So easy is it to make a woman see reason if you only tell her the truth.

‘There are moments when I don’t positively dislike you,’ said Isabel.

She came and sat on the sofa beside me and, slipping her arm through mine, leant over to kiss me. I withdrew my cheek.

‘I will not have my face smeared with lipstick,’ I said. ‘If you want to kiss me, kiss me on the lips, which is what merciful Providence intended them for.’

She giggled and, her hand turning my head towards her, with her lips pressed a thin layer of paint on mine. The sensation was far from unpleasant.

‘Now you’ve done that, perhaps you’ll tell me what it is you want.’

‘Advice.’

‘I’m quite willing to give you that, but I don’t think for a moment you’ll take it. There’s only one thing you can do and that is to make the best of a bad job.’

Flaring up again, she snatched her arm away and, getting up, flung herself into a chair on the other side of the fireplace.

‘I’m not going to sit by and let Larry ruin himself. I’ll stick at nothing to prevent him from marrying that slut.’

‘You won’t succeed. You see, he’s enthralled by one of the most powerful emotions that can beset the human breast.’

‘You don’t mean to say you think he’s in love with her?’

‘No. That would be trifling in comparison.’

‘Well?’

‘Have you ever read the New Testament?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘D ‘you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. Then the devil set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For angels had charge of him and would bear him up. But again Jesus resisted. Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said that he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That’s the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn’t. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross, thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.’

Isabel looked at me indignantly.

‘Where on earth did you get that?’

‘Nowhere. I’ve invented it on the spur of the moment.’

‘I think it’s idiotic and blasphemous.’

‘I only wanted to suggest to you that self-confidence is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.’

‘Oh, Christ, how you bore me,’ said Isabel.

I paid no attention.

‘How can you suppose that common sense or prudence will have any effect on Larry when he’s in the grip of a passion like that? You don’t know what he’s been seeking all these years. I don’t know either, I only suspect. All these years of labour, all these experiences he garnered weigh nothing in the balance now they’re set against his desire – oh, it’s more than a desire, his urgent, clamorous need to save the soul of a wanton woman whom he’d known as an innocent child. I think you’re right, I think he’s undertaking a hopeless job; with his acute sensibility he’ll suffer the tortures of the damned; his life’s work, whatever it may be, will remain undone. The ignoble Paris killed Achilles by shooting an arrow in his heel. Larry lacks just that touch of ruthlessness that even the saint must have to win his halo.’

‘I love him,’ said Isabel. ‘God knows, I ask nothing of him. I expect nothing. No one could love anyone more unselfishly than I love him. He’s going to be so unhappy.’

She began to cry and, thinking it would do her good, I let her be. I diverted myself idly with the idea that had sprung so unexpectedly into my mind. I played with it. I couldn’t but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocrisy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing pleasures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.

Presently Isabel took a handkerchief from her bag and a mirror and, looking at herself, carefully wiped the corner of her eyes.

‘Damned sympathetic, aren’t you?’ she snapped.

I looked at her pensively, but did not answer. She powdered her face and painted her lips.

‘You said just now you suspected what he’s been after all these years. What did you mean?’

‘I can only guess, you know, and I may be quite wrong. I think he’s been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that’ll satisfy both his head and his heart.’

Isabel considered this for a moment. She sighed.

‘Don’t you think it’s very strange that a country boy from Marvin, Illinois, should have a notion like that?’

‘No stranger than that Luther Burbank who was born on a farm in Massachusetts should have produced a seedless orange or that Henry Ford who was born on a farm in Michigan should have invented a Tin Lizzie.’

‘But those are practical things. That’s in the American tradition.’

I laughed.

‘Can anything in the world be more practical than to learn how to live to best advantage?’

Isabel gave a gesture of lassitude.

‘You don’t want to lose Larry altogether, do you?’

She shook her head.

‘You know how loyal he is: if you won’t have anything to do with his wife he won’t have anything to do with you. If you’ve got any sense you’ll make friends with Sophie. You’ll forget the past and be as nice to her as you can be when you like. She’s going to be married and I suppose she’s buying some clothes. Why don’t you offer to go shopping with her? I think she’d jump at it.’

Isabel listened to me with narrowed eyes. She seemed intent upon what I was saying. For a moment she pondered, but I could not guess what was passing through her mind. Then she surprised me.

‘Will you ask her to lunch? It would be rather awkward for me after what I said to Larry yesterday.’

‘Will you behave if I do?’

‘Like an angel of light,’ she answered with her most engaging smile,

‘I’ll fix it up right away.’

There was a phone in the room. I soon found Sophie’s number, and after the usual delay which those who use the French telephone learn to put up with patiently, I got her. I mentioned my name.

‘I’ve just arrived in Paris,’ I said, ‘and heard that you and Larry are going to be married. I want to congratulate you. I hope you’ll be very happy.’ I smothered a cry as Isabel, who was standing by me, gave the soft of my arm a vicious pinch. ‘I’m only here for a very short time and I wonder if you and Larry will come and lunch with me the day after tomorrow at the Ritz. I’m asking Gray and Isabel and Elliott Templeton.’

‘I’ll ask Larry. He’s here now.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, we shall be glad to.’

I fixed an hour, made a civil remark, and replaced the receiver on its stand. I caught an expression in Isabel’s eyes that caused me some misgiving.

‘What are you thinking?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t quite like the look of you.’

‘I’m sorry; I thought that was the one thing about me you did like.’

‘You haven’t got some nefarious scheme that you’re hatching, Isabel?’

She opened her eyes very wide.

‘I promise you I haven’t. As a matter of fact I’m terribly curious to see what Sophie looks like now Larry has reformed her. All I hope is that she won’t come to the Ritz with a mask of paint on her face.’

CHAPTER 5

My little party did not go too badly. Gray and Isabel arrived first; Larry and Sophie Macdonald five minutes later. Isabel and Sophie kissed each other warmly and Isabel and Gray congratulated her on her engagement. I caught the appraising sweep of the eyes with which Isabel took in Sophie’s appearance. I was shocked at it. When I saw her in that dive in the Rue de Lappe, outrageously painted, with hennaed hair, in the bright green coat, though she looked outrageous and was very drunk, there was something provocative and even basely alluring in her; but now she looked drab and, though certainly a year or two younger than Isabel, much older. She still had that gallant tilt of her head, but now, I don’t know why, it was pathetic. She was letting her hair go back to its natural colour and it had the slatternly look that hair has when it has been dyed and left to grow. Except for a streak of red on her lips she had no make-up on. Her skin was rough and it had an unhealthy pallor. I remembered how vividly green her eyes had looked, but now they were pale and grey. She wore a red dress, obviously brand-new, with hat, shoes, and bag to match; I don’t pretend to know anything about women’s clothes, but I had a feeling that it was fussy and too elaborate for the occasion. On her breast was a piece of showy artificial jewellery such as you buy in the Rue de Rivoli. Beside Isabel, in black silk, with a string of cultured pearls round her neck and in a very smart hat, she looked cheap and dowdy.

I ordered cocktails, but Larry and Sophie refused them. Then Elliott arrived. His progress through the vast foyer was, however, impeded by the hands he had to shake and the hands he had to kiss as he saw one person after the other whom he knew. He behaved as though the Ritz were his private house and he were assuring his guests of his pleasure that they had been able to accept his invitation. He had been told nothing about Sophie except she had lost her husband and child in a motor accident and was now going to marry Larry. When at last he reached us he congratulated them both with the elaborate graciousness of which he was a master. We went in to the dining-room and since we were four men and two women I placed Isabel and Sophie opposite one another at the round table, with Sophie between Gray and myself; but the table was small enough for the conversation to be general. I had already ordered the luncheon and the wine waiter came along with the wine card.

‘You don’t know anything about wine, my dear fellow,’ said Elliott. ‘Give me the wine card, Albert.’ He turned over the pages. ‘I drink nothing but Vichy myself, but I can’t bear to see people drink wine that isn’t perfect.’

He and Albert, the wine waiter, were old friends and after an animated discussion they decided on the wine I should give my guests. Then he turned to Sophie.

‘And where are you going for your honeymoon, my dear?’

He glanced at her dress and an almost imperceptible raising of his eyebrows showed me that he had formed an unfavourable opinion of it.

‘We’re going to Greece.’

‘I’ve been trying to get there for ten years,’ said Larry, ‘but somehow I’ve never been able to manage it.’

‘It ought to be lovely at this time of the year,’ said Isabel, with a show of enthusiasm.

She remembered, as I remembered, that that was where Larry proposed to take her when he wanted her to marry him. It seemed to be an idée fixe with Larry to go to Greece on a honeymoon.

The conversation flowed none too easily and I should have found it a difficult row to hoe if it hadn’t been for Isabel. She was on her best behaviour. Whenever silence seemed to threaten us and I racked my brain for something fresh to talk about, she broke in with facile chatter. I was grateful to her. Sophie hardly spoke except when she was spoken to and then it seemed an effort to her. The spirit had gone out of her. You would have said that something had died in her and I asked myself if Larry wasn’t putting her to a strain greater than she could support. If as I suspected she had doped as well as drunk, the sudden deprivation must have worn her nerves to a frazzle. Sometimes I intercepted a look between them. In his I saw tenderness and encouragement, but in hers an appeal that was pathetic. It may be that Gray with his sweetness of disposition instinctively felt what I thought I saw, for he began to tell her how Larry had cured him of the headaches that had incapacitated him and went on to say how much he had depended on him and how much he owed him.

‘Now I’m fit as a flea,’ he continued. ‘As soon as ever I can get a job I’m going back to work. I’ve got several irons in the fire and I’m hoping to land something before long. Gosh, it’ll be good to be back home again.’

Gray meant well, but what he had said was perhaps not very tactful if, as I supposed, Larry to cure Sophie of her aggravated alcoholism had used with her the same method of suggestion – for that to my mind was what it was – that had been successful with Gray.

‘You never have headaches now, Gray?’ asked Elliott.

‘I haven’t had one for three months and if I think one’s coming on I take hold of my charm and I’m all right.’ He fished out of his pocket the ancient coin Larry had given him. ‘I wouldn’t sell it for a million dollars.’

We finished luncheon and coffee was served. The wine waiter came up and asked whether we wanted liqueurs. We all refused except Gray, who said he would have a brandy. When the bottle was brought Elliott insisted on looking at it.

‘Yes, I can recommend it. That’ll do you no harm.’

‘A little glass for Monsieur?’ asked the waiter.

‘Alas, it’s forbidden me.’

Elliott told him at some length that he was having trouble with his kidneys and that his doctor would not allow him to drink alcohol.

‘A tear of zubrovka could do Monsieur no harm. It’s well known to be very good for the kidneys. We have just received a consignment from Poland.’

‘Is that true? It’s hard to get nowadays. Let me have a look at a bottle.’

The wine waiter, a portly, dignified creature with a long silver chain round his neck, went away to fetch it, and Elliott explained that it was the Polish form of vodka but in every way superior.

‘We used to drink it at the Radziwills when I stayed with them for the shooting. You should have seen those Polish princes putting it away; I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that they’d drink it by the tumbler without turning a hair. Good blood, of course; aristocrats to the tips of their fingers. Sophie, you must try it, and you too, Isabel. It’s an experience no one can afford to miss.’

The wine waiter brought the bottle. Larry, Sophie, and I refused to be tempted, but Isabel said she would like to try it, I was surprised, for habitually she drank very little and she had had two cocktails and two or three glasses of wine. The waiter poured out a glass of pale green liquid and Isabel sniffed it.

‘Oh, what a lovely smell.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ cried Elliott. ‘That’s the herbs they put in it; it’s they that give it its delicate taste. Just to keep you company I’ll have a drop. It can’t hurt me for once.’

‘It tastes divine,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s like mother’s milk. I’ve never tasted anything so good.’

Elliott raised his glass to his lips.’

‘Oh, how it brings back the old days! You people who never stayed with the Radziwills don’t know what living is. That was the grand style. Feudal, you know. You might have thought yourself back in the Middle Ages. You were met at the station by a carriage with six horses and postilions. And at dinner a footman in livery behind every person.’

He went on to describe the magnificence and luxury of the establishment and the brilliance of the parties; and the suspicion, doubtless unworthy, occurred to me that the whole thing was a put-up job between Elliott and the wine waiter to give Elliott an opportunity to discourse upon the grandeur of this princely family and the host of Polish aristocrats he hobnobbed with in their castle. There was no stopping him.

‘Another glass, Isabel?’

‘Oh, I daren’t. But it is heavenly. I’m so glad to know about it; Gray, we must get some.’

‘I’ll have some sent round to the apartment.’

‘Oh, Uncle Elliott, would you?’ cried Isabel enthusiastically. ‘You are so kind to us. You must try it, Gray; it smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it’s soft on the palate and so comfortable, it’s like listening to music by moonlight.’

It was unlike Isabel to gush inordinately and I wondered if she was a trifle tight. The party broke up. I shook hands with Sophie.

‘When are you going to be married?’ I asked her.

‘The week after next. I hope you’ll come to the wedding.’

‘I’m afraid I shan’t be in Paris. I’m leaving for London tomorrow.’

While I was saying good-bye to the rest of my guests Isabel took Sophie aside and talked to her for a minute, then turned to Gray.

‘Oh, Gray, I’m not coming home just yet. There’s a dress show at Molyneux’s and I’m taking Sophie to it. She ought to see the new models.’

‘I’d love to,’ said Sophie.

We parted. I took Suzanne Rouvier out to dinner that night and next morning started for England.

CHAPTER 6

Elliott arrived at Claridge’s a fortnight later and shortly afterwards I dropped in to see him. He had ordered himself several suits of clothes and at what I thought excessive length told me in detail what he had chosen and why. When at last I could get a word in I asked him how the wedding had gone off.

‘It didn’t go off,’ he answered grimly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Three days before it was to take place Sophie disappeared. Larry hunted everywhere for her.’

‘What an extraordinary thing! Did they have a row?’

‘No. Far from it. Everything had been arranged. I was going to give her away. They were taking the Orient Express immediately after the wedding. If you ask me, I think Larry’s well out of it.’

I guessed that Isabel had told Elliott everything.

‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

‘Well, you remember that day we lunched at the Ritz with you. Isabel took her to Molyneux’s. D’you remember the dress Sophie wore? Deplorable. Did you notice the shoulders? That’s how you tell if a dress is well made, by the way it fits over the shoulders. Of course, poor girl, she couldn’t afford Molyneux’s prices, and Isabel, you know how generous she is, and after all they’ve known one another since they were children, Isabel offered to give her a dress so that at least she’d have something decent to be married in. Naturally she jumped at it. Well, to cut a long story short, Isabel asked her to come to the apartment one day at three so that they could go together for the final fitting. Sophie came all right, but unfortunately Isabel had to take one of the children to the dentist’s and didn’t get in till after four and by that time Sophie had gone. Isabel thought she’d got tired of waiting and had gone on to Molyneux’s, so she went there at once, but she hadn’t come. At last she gave her up and went home again. They were all going to dine together and Larry came along at dinner-time and the first thing she asked him was where Sophie was.

‘He couldn’t understand it and he rang up her apartment, but there was no reply, so he said he’d go down there. They held dinner up as long as they could, but neither of them turned up and so they had dinner by themselves. Of course you know what Sophie’s life was before you ran into her in the Rue de Lappe; that was a most unfortunate idea of yours to take them down there. Well, Larry spent all night going around her old haunts, but couldn’t find her anywhere. He went to the apartment after time, but the concierge said she hadn’t been in. He spent three days hunting for her. She’d just vanished. Then on the fourth day he went to the apartment again and the concierge told him she’d been in and packed a bag and gone away in a taxi.’

‘Was Larry awfully upset?’

‘I didn’t see him. Isabel tells me he was rather.’

‘She didn’t write or anything?’

‘Nothing.’

I thought it over.

‘What do you make of it?’ I said.

‘My dear fellow, exactly what you make of it. She couldn’t stick it out. She went on the booze again.’

That was obvious, but for all that it was strange. I couldn’t see why she had chosen just that moment to skip.

‘How is Isabel taking it?’

‘Of course she’s sorry, but she’s a sensible girl and she told me she always thought it would be a disaster if Larry married a woman like that.’

‘And Larry?’

‘Isabel’s been very kind to him. She says that what makes it difficult is that he won’t discuss it. He’ll be all right, you know; Isabel says he was never in love with Sophie. He was only marrying her out of a sort of misguided chivalry.’

I could see Isabel putting a brave face on a turn of events that was certainly causing her a great deal of satisfaction. I well knew that next time I saw her she would not fail to point out to me that she had known all along what would happen.

But it was nearly a year before I saw her again and though by that time I could have told her something about Sophie that would have set her thinking, the circumstances were such that I had no inclination to. I stayed in London till nearly Christmas and then, wanting to get home, went straight down to the Riviera without stopping in Paris. I set to work on a novel and for the next few months lived in retirement. I saw Elliott now and then. It was obvious that his health was failing, and it pained me that he persisted notwithstanding in leading a social life. He was vexed with me because I would not drive thirty miles to go to the constant parties he continued to give. He thought it very conceited of me to prefer to sit at home and work.

‘It’s an unusually brilliant season, my dear fellow,’ he told me. ‘It’s a crime to shut yourself up in your house and miss everything that’s going on. And why you had to choose a part of the Riviera to live in that’s completely out of fashion I shan’t be able to understand if I live to be a hundred.’

Poor nice silly Elliott; it was very clear that he would live to no such age.

By June I had finished the rough draft of my novel and thought I deserved a holiday, so, packing a bag, I got on the cutter from which in summer we used to bathe in the Baie des Fosses and set sail along the coast towards Marseilles. There was only a fitful breeze and for the most part we chugged along with the motor auxiliary. We spent a night in the harbour at Cannes, another at Sainte Maxime, and a third at Sanary. Then we got to Toulon. That is a port I have always had an affection for. The ships of the French fleet give it an air at once romantic and companionable, and I am never tired of wandering about its old streets. I can linger for hours on the quay, watching the sailors on shore leave strolling about in pairs or with their girls, and the civilians who saunter back and forth as though they had nothing in the world to do but enjoy the pleasant sunshine. Because of all these ships and the ferryboats that take the bustling crowd to various points of the vast harbour, Toulon gives you the effect of a terminal on which all the ways of the wide world converge; and as you sit in a café, your eyes a little dazzled by the brightness of sea and sky, your fancy takes golden journeys to the uttermost parts of the earth. You land in a longboat on a coral beach, fringed with coconut palms, in the Pacific; you step off the gangway on to the dock at Rangoon and get into a rickshaw; you watch from the upper deck the noisy, gesticulating crowd of Negroes as your ship is made fast to the pier at Port au Prince.

We got in lateish in the morning and towards the middle of the afternoon I landed and walked along the quay, looking at the shops, at the people who passed me, and at the people sitting under the awning in the cafés. Suddenly I saw Sophie and at the same moment she saw me. She smiled and said hello. I stopped and shook hands with her. She was by herself at a small table with an empty glass before her.

‘Sit down and have a drink,’ she said.

‘You have one with me,’ I replied, taking a chair.

She wore the striped blue-and-white jersey of the French sailor, a pair of bright red slacks, and sandals through which protruded the painted nails of her big toes. She wore no hat, and her hair, cut very short and curled, was of so pale a gold that it was almost silver. She was as heavily made up as when we had run across her at the Rue de Lappe. She had had a drink or two as I judged from the saucers on the table, but she was sober. She did not seem displeased to see me.

‘How are all the folks in Paris?’ she asked.

‘I think they’re all right. I haven’t seen any of them since that day we all lunched together at the Ritz.’

She blew a great cloud of smoke from her nostrils and began to laugh.

‘I didn’t marry Larry after all.’

‘I know. Why not?’

‘Darling, when it came to the point I couldn’t see myself being Mary Magdalen to his Jesus Christ. No, sir.’

‘What made you change your mind at the last moment?’

She looked at me mockingly. With that audacious tilt of the head, with her small breasts and narrow flanks, in that get-up, she looked like a vicious boy; but I must admit that she was much more attractive than in the red dress, with its dismal air of provincial smartness, in which I had last seen her. Face and neck were deeply burnt by the sun, and though the brownness of her skin made the rouge on her cheeks and the black of her eyebrows more aggressive, the effect in its vulgar way was not without lure.

‘Would you like me to tell you?’

I nodded. The waiter brought the beer I had ordered for myself and the brandy and seltzer for her. She lit a caporal from one she had just finished.

‘I hadn’t had a drink for three months. I hadn’t had a smoke.’ She saw my faint look of surprise and laughed. ‘I don’t mean cigarettes. Opium. I felt awful. You know, sometimes when I was alone I’d shriek the place down; I’d say, “I can’t go through with it, I can’t go through with it.” It wasn’t so bad when I was with Larry, but when he wasn’t there it was hell.’

I was looking at her and when she mentioned opium I scanned her more sharply; I noticed the pin-point pupils that showed she was smoking it now. Her eyes were startlingly green.

‘Isabel was giving me my wedding dress. I wonder what’s happened to it now. It was a peach. We’d arranged that I should pick her up and we’d go to Molyneux’s together. I will say this for Isabel, what she doesn’t know about clothes isn’t worth knowing. When I got to the apartment their man said she’d had to take Joan to the dentist’s and had left a message that she’d be in directly. I went into the living-room. The coffee things were still on the table and I asked the man if I could have a cup. Coffee was the only thing that kept me going. He said he’d bring me some and took the empty cups and the coffee-pot away. He left a bottle on the tray. I looked at it, and it was that Polish stuff you’d all talked about at the Ritz.’

‘Zubrovka. I remember Elliott saying he’d send Isabel some.’

‘You’d all raved how good it smelt and I was curious. I took out the cork and had a sniff. You were quite right; it smelt damned good. I lit a cigarette and in a few minutes the man came in with the coffee. That was good too. They talk a lot about French coffee, they can have it; give me American coffee. That’s the only thing I miss here. But Isabel’s coffee wasn’t bad, I was feeling lousy, and after I’d had a cup I felt better. I looked at that bottle standing there. It was a terrible temptation, but I said, “To hell with it, I won’t think of it,” and I lit another cigarette. I thought Isabel would be in any minute, but she didn’t come. I got frightfully nervous; I hate being kept waiting and there was nothing to read in the room. I started walking about and looking at the pictures, but I kept on seeing that damned bottle. Then I thought I’d just pour out a glass and look at it. It had such a pretty colour.’

‘Pale green.’

‘That’s right. It’s funny, its colour is just like its smell. It’s like that green you sometimes see in the heart of a white rose. I had to see if it tasted like that, I thought just a taste couldn’t hurt me; I only meant to take a sip and then I heard a sound, I thought it was Isabel coming in and I swallowed the glassful because I didn’t want her to catch me. But it wasn’t Isabel after all. Gosh, it made me feel good, I hadn’t felt like that since I’d gone on the wagon. I really began to feel alive again. If Isabel had come in then I suppose I’d be married to Larry now. I wonder how it would have turned out.’

‘And she didn’t come in?’

‘No, she didn’t. I was furious with her. Who did she think she was, keeping me waiting like that? And then I saw that the liqueur glass was full again; I suppose I must have poured it out without thinking, but, believe it or not, I didn’t know I had. It seemed silly to pour it back again, so I drank it. There’s no denying it, it was delicious. I felt a different woman; I felt like laughing and I hadn’t felt like that for three months. D’you remember that old cissie saying he’d seen fellas in Poland drink it by the tumbler without turning a hair? Well, I thought I could take what any Polish son of a bitch could take and you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, so I emptied the dregs of my coffee in the fireplace and filled the cup to the brim. Talk of mother’s milk – my arse. Then I don’t quite know what happened, but I don’t believe there was much left in the bottle by the time I was through. Then I thought I’d get out before Isabel came in. She nearly caught me. Just as I got out of the front door I heard Joanie’s voice. I ran up the stairs and waited till they were safely in the apartment and then I dashed down and got into a taxi. I told the driver to drive like hell and when he asked where to I burst out laughing in his face. I felt like a million dollars.’

‘Did you go back to your apartment?’ I asked, though I knew she hadn’t.

‘What sort of a damn fool d’you take me for? I knew Larry would come and look for me. I didn’t dare go to any of the places I used to go to, so I went to Hakim’s. I knew Larry’d never find me there. Besides, I wanted a smoke.’

‘What’s Hakim’s?’

‘Hakim’s? Hakim’s an Algerian and he can always get you opium if you’ve got the dough to pay for it. He was quite a friend of mine. He’ll get you anything you want, a boy, a man, a woman, or a nigger. He always has half a dozen Algerians on tap. I spent three days there. I don’t know how many men I didn’t have.’ She began to giggle. ‘All shapes, sizes, and colours. I made up for lost time all right. But you know, I was scared. I didn’t feel safe in Paris, I was afraid Larry’d find me, besides I hadn’t got any money left, those bastards you have to pay them to go to bed with you, so I got out, I went back to the apartment and gave the concierge a hundred francs and told her if anyone came and asked for me to say I’d gone away. I packed my things and that night I took the train to Toulon. I didn’t feel really safe till I got here.’

‘And have you been here ever since?’

‘You betcha, and I’m going to stay here. You can get all the opium you want, the sailors bring it back from the East, and it’s good stuff, not that muck they sell you in Paris. I’ve got a room at the hotel. You know, the Commerce et la Marine. When you go in there at night the corridors just reek of it.’ She sniffed voluptuously. ‘Sweet and acrid, and you know they’re smoking in their rooms, and it gives you a nice homey feeling. And they don’t mind who you take in with you. They come and thump at your door at five in the morning to get the sailors up to go back to their ships, so you don’t have to worry about that.’ And then, without transition: ‘I saw a book of yours in the store just along the quay; if I’d known I was going to see you I’d have bought it and got you to sign it.’

When passing the bookshop I had stopped to look in the window and had noticed among other new books the translation of a novel of mine that had recently appeared.

‘I don’t suppose it would have amused you much,’ I said.

‘I don’t know why it shouldn’t. I can read, you know.’

‘And you can write too, I believe.’

She gave me a rapid glance and began to laugh.

‘Yeah, I used to write poetry when I was a kid. I guess it was pretty terrible, but I thought it fine. I suppose Larry told you.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘Life’s hell anyway, but if there is any fun to be got out of it, you’re only a god-damn fool if you don’t get it.’ She threw back her head defiantly. ‘If I buy that book will you write in it?’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow. If you really want it, I’ll get you a copy and leave it at your hotel.’

‘That’d be swell.’

Just then a naval launch came up to the quay and a crowd of sailors tumbled out of it. Sophie embraced them with a glance.

‘That’ll be my boy friend.’ She waved her arm at someone. ‘You can stand him a drink and then you better scram. He’s a Corsican and as jealous as our old friend Jehovah.’

A young man came up to us, hesitated when he saw me, but on a beckoning gesture came up to the table. He was tall, swarthy, clean-shaven, with splendid dark eyes, an aquiline nose, and raven black, wavy hair. He did not look more than twenty. Sophie introduced me as an American friend of her childhood.

‘Dumb but beautiful,’ she said to me.

‘You like ’em tough, don’t you?’

‘The tougher the better.’

‘One of these days you’ll get your throat cut.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ she grinned. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

‘One’s going to speak French, isn’t one?’ the sailor said sharply.

Sophie turned upon him a smile in which there was a trace of mockery. She spoke a fluent and slangy French, with a strong American accent, but this gave the vulgar and obscene colloquialisms that she commonly used a comic tang, so that you could not help but laugh.

‘I was telling him that you were beautiful, but to spare your modesty I was saying it in English.’ She addressed me. ‘And he’s strong. He has the muscles of a boxer. Feel them.’

The sailor’s sullenness was dispelled by the flattery and with a complacent smile he flexed his arm so that the biceps stood out.

‘Feel it,’ he said. ‘Go on, feel it.’

I did so and expressed a proper admiration. We chatted for a few minutes. I paid for the drinks and got up.

‘I must be going.’

‘It’s nice to have seen you. Don’t forget the book.’

‘I won’t.’

I shook hands with them both and strolled off. On my way I stopped at the bookshop, bought the novel, and wrote Sophie’s name and my own. Then, because it suddenly occurred to me I could think of nothing else, I wrote the first line of Ronsard’s lovely little poem which is in all the anthologies:

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose . . .

I left it at the hotel. It is on the quay and I have often stayed there because when you are awakened at dawn by the clarion that calls the men on night leave back to duty the sun rising mistily over the smooth water of the harbour invests the wraithlike ships with a shrouded loveliness. Next day we sailed for Cassis, where I wanted to buy some wine, and then to Marseilles to take up a new sail that we had ordered. A week later I got home.

CHAPTER 7

I found a message from Joseph, Elliott’s manservant, to tell me that Elliott was ill in bed and would be glad to see me, so next day I drove over to Antibes. Joseph, before taking me up to see his master, told me that Elliott had had an attack of uraemia and that his doctor took a grave view of his condition. He had come through it and was getting better, but his kidneys were diseased and it was impossible that he should ever completely recover. Joseph had been with Elliott for forty years and was devoted to him, but though his manner was regretful it was impossible not to notice the inner satisfaction with which, like so many members of his class, catastrophe in the house filled him.

‘Ce pauvre monsieur,’ he sighed. ‘Evidently he had his manias but at bottom he was good. Sooner or later he must die.’

He spoke already as though Elliott were at his last gasp.

‘I’m sure he’s provided for you, Joseph,’ I said grimly.

‘One must hope it,’ he said mournfully.

I was surprised when he ushered me into the bedroom to find Elliott very spry. He was pale and looked old, but was in good spirits. He was shaved and his hair was neatly brushed. He wore pale blue silk pyjamas, on the pocket of which were embroidered his initials surmounted by his count’s crown. These, much larger and again with the crown, were heavily embroidered on the turned-down sheet.

I asked him how he felt.

‘Perfectly well,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s only a temporary indisposition. I shall be up and about again in a few days. I’ve got the Grand Duke Dimitri lunching with me on Saturday, and I’ve told my doctor he must put me to rights by then at all costs.’

I spent half an hour with him, and on my way out asked Joseph to let me know if Elliott had a relapse. I was astonished a week later when I went to lunch with one of my neighbours to find him there. Dressed for a party, he looked like death.

‘You oughtn’t to be out, Elliott,’ I told him.

‘Oh, what nonsense, my dear fellow. Frieda is expecting the Princess Mafalda. I’ve known the Italian royal family for years, ever since poor Louisa was en poste at Rome, and I couldn’t let poor Frieda down.’

I did not know whether to admire his indomitable spirit or to lament that at his age, stricken with mortal illness, he should still retain his passion for society. You would never have thought he was a sick man. Like a dying actor when he has the grease paint on his face and steps on the stage, who forgets for the time being his aches and pains, Elliott played his part of the polished courtier with his accustomed assurance. He was infinitely amiable, flatteringly attentive to the proper people, and amusing with that malicious irony at which he was an adept. I think I had never see him display his social gift to greater advantage. When the Royal Highness had departed (and the grace with which Elliott bowed, managing to combine respect for her exalted rank with an old man’s admiration for a comely woman, was a sight to see) I was not surprised to hear our hostess tell him that he had been the life and soul of the party.

A few days later he was in bed again and his doctor forbade him to leave his room. Elliott was exasperated.

‘It’s too bad this should happen just now. It’s a particularly brilliant season.’

He reeled off a long list of persons of importance who were spending the summer on the Riviera.

I went to see him every three or four days. Sometimes he was in bed, but sometimes he lay on a chaise longue in a gorgeous dressing-gown. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, for I do not remember that I ever saw him in the same one twice. On one of these occasions, it was the beginning of August by now, I found Elliott unusually quiet. Joseph had told me when he let me into the house that he seemed a little better so I was surprised that he was so listless. I tried to amuse him with such gossip of the coast as I had picked up, but he was plainly uninterested. There was a slight frown between his eyes, and a sullenness in his expression that was unusual with him.

‘Are you going to Edna Novemali’s party?’ he asked me suddenly.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Has she asked you?’

‘She’s asked everybody on the Riviera.’

The Princess Novemali was an American of immense wealth who had married a Roman prince, but not an ordinary prince such as go for two a penny in Italy, but the head of a great family and the descendant of a condottiere who had carved out a principality for himself in the sixteenth century. She was a woman of sixty, a widow, and since the Fascist regime demanded too large a slice of her American income to suit her, she had left Italy and built herself, on a fine estate behind Cannes, a Florentine villa. She had brought marble from Italy with which to line the walls of her great reception rooms and imported painters to paint the ceilings. Her pictures, her bronzes, were uncommonly fine and even Elliott, though he didn’t like Italian furniture, was obliged to admit that hers was magnificent. The gardens were lovely and the swimming-pool must have cost a small fortune. She entertained largely and you never sat down less than twenty at table. She had arranged to give a fancy-dress party on the night of the August full moon, and although it was still three weeks ahead nothing else was being talked of on the Riviera. There were to be fireworks and she was bringing down a coloured orchestra from Paris. The exiled royalties were telling one another with envious admiration that it would cost her more than they had to live on for a year.

‘It’s princely,’ they said.

‘It’s crazy,’ they said.

‘It’s in bad taste,’ they said.

‘What are you going to wear?’ Elliott asked me.

‘But I told you, Elliott, I’m not going. You don’t think I’m going to dress myself up in fancy dress at my time of life.’

‘She hasn’t asked me,’ he said hoarsely.

He looked at me with haggard eyes.

‘Oh, she will,’ I said coolly. ‘I dare say all the invitations haven’t gone out yet.’

‘She’s not going to ask me.’ His voice broke. ‘It’s a deliberate insult.’

‘Oh, Elliott, I can’t believe that. I’m sure it’s an oversight.’

‘I’m not a man that people overlook.’

‘Anyhow, you wouldn’t have been well enough to go.’

‘Of course I should. The best party of the season! If I were on my deathbed I’d get up for it. I’ve got the costume of my ancestor, the Count de Lauria, to wear.’

I did not quite know what to say and so remained silent.

‘Paul Barton was in to see me just before you came,’ Elliott said suddenly.

I cannot expect the reader to remember who this was, since I had to look back myself to see what name I had given him. Paul Barton was the young American whom Elliott had introduced into London society and who had aroused his hatred by dropping him when he no longer had any use for him. He had been somewhat in the public eye of late, first because he had adopted British nationality and then because he had married the daughter of a newspaper magnate who had been raised to the peerage. With this influence behind him and with his own adroitness it was evident that he would go far. Elliott was very bitter.

‘Whenever I wake up in the night and hear a mouse scratching away in the wainscoat I say: “That’s Paul Barton climbing.” Believe me, my dear fellow, he’ll end up in the House of Lords. Thank God I shan’t be alive to see it.’

‘What did he want?’ I asked, for I knew as well as Elliott that this young man did nothing for nothing.

‘I’ll tell you what he wanted,’ said Elliott, snarling. ‘He wanted to borrow my Count de Lauria costume.’

‘Nerve!’

‘Don’t you see what it means? It means he knew Edna hadn’t asked me and wasn’t going to ask me. She put him up to it. The old bitch. She’d never have got anywhere without me. I gave parties for her. I introduced her to everyone she knows. She sleeps with her chauffeur; you knew that of course. Disgusting! He sat there and told me that she’s having the whole garden illuminated and there are going to be fireworks. I love fireworks. And he told me that Edna was being pestered by people who were asking for invitations, but she had turned them all down because she wanted the party to be really brilliant. He spoke as though there were no question of my being invited.’

‘And are you lending him the costume?’

‘I’d see him dead and in hell first. I’m going to be buried in it.’ Elliott, sitting up in bed, rocked to and fro like a woman distraught. ‘Oh, it’s so unkind,’ he said. ‘I hate them, I hate them all. They were glad enough to make a fuss of me when I could entertain them, but now I’m old and sick they have no use for me. Not ten people have called to inquire since I’ve been laid up, and all this week only one miserable bunch of flowers. I’ve done everything for them. They’ve eaten my food and drunk my wine. I’ve run their errands for them. I’ve made their parties for them. I’ve turned myself inside out to do them favours. And what have I got out of it? Nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s not one of them who cares if I live or die. Oh, it’s so cruel.’ He began to cry. Great heavy tears trickled down his withered cheeks. ‘I wish to God I’d never left America.’

It was lamentable to see that old man, with the grave yawning in front of him, weep like a child because he hadn’t been asked to a party: shocking and at the same time almost intolerably pathetic.

‘Never mind, Elliott,’ I said, ‘it may rain on the night of the party. That’ll bitch it.’

He caught at my words like the drowning man we’ve all heard about at a straw. He began to giggle through his tears.

‘I’ve never thought of that. I’ll pray to God for rain as I’ve never prayed before. You’re quite right; that’ll bitch it.’

I managed to divert his frivolous mind into another channel and left him, if not cheerful, at least composed. But I was not willing to let the matter rest, so on getting home I called up Edna Novemali and, saying I had to come to Cannes next day, asked if I could lunch with her. She sent a message that she’d be pleased but there’d be no party. Nevertheless when I arrived I found ten people there besides herself. She was not a bad sort, generous and hospitable, and her only grave fault was her malicious tongue. She could not help saying beastly things about even her intimate friends, but she did this because she was a stupid woman and knew no other way to make herself interesting. Since her slanders were repeated she was often not on speaking terms with the objects of her venom, but she gave good parties and most of them found it convenient after a while to forgive her. I did not want to expose Elliott to the humiliation of asking her to invite him to her big do, so waited to see how the land lay. She was excited about it and the conversation at luncheon was concerned with nothing else.

‘Elliott will be delighted to have an opportunity to wear his Philip the Second costume,’ I said as casually as I could.

‘I haven’t asked him,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I replied, with an air of surprise.

‘Why should I? He doesn’t count socially any more. He’s a bore and a snob and a scandalmonger.’

Since these accusations could with equal truth be brought against her, I thought this a bit thick. She was a fool.

‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I want Paul to wear Elliott’s costume. He’ll look simply divine in it.’

I said nothing more, but determined by hook or by crook to get poor Elliott the invitation he hankered after. After luncheon Edna took her friends out into the garden. That gave me the chance I was looking for. On one occasion I had stayed in the house for a few days and knew its arrangement. I guessed that there would still be a number of invitation cards left over and that they would be in the secretary’s room. I whipped along there, meaning to slip one in my pocket, write Elliott’s name on it, and post it. I knew he was much too ill to go, but it would mean a great deal to him to receive it. I was taken aback when I opened the door to find Edna’s secretary at her desk. I had expected her to be still at lunch. She was a middle-aged Scotch woman, called Miss Keith, with sandy hair, a freckled face, pince-nez, and an air of determined virginity. I collected myself.

‘The Princess is taking the crowd around the garden, so I thought I’d come in and smoke a cigarette with you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Miss Keith spoke with a Scotch burr and when she indulged in the dry humour which she reserved for her favourites she so broadened it as to make her remarks extremely amusing, but when you were overcome with laughter she looked at you with pained surprise as though she thought you daft to see anything funny in what she said.

‘I suppose this party is giving you a hell of a lot of work, Miss Keith,’ I said.

‘I don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or on my heels.’

Knowing I could trust her, I went straight to the point.

‘Why hasn’t the old girl asked Mr Templeton?’

Miss Keith permitted a smile to cross her grim features.

‘You know what she is. She’s got a down on him. She crossed his name out on the list herself.’

‘He’s dying, you know. He’ll never leave his bed again. He’s awfully hurt at being left out.’

‘If he wanted to keep in with the Princess he’d have been wiser not to tell everyone that she goes to bed with her chauffeur. And him with a wife and three children.’

‘And does she?’

Miss Keith looked at me over her pince-nez.

‘I’ve been a secretary for twenty-one years, my dear sir, and I’ve made it a rule to believe all my employers as pure as the driven snow. I’ll admit that when one of my ladies found herself three months gone in the family way when his lordship had been shooting lions in Africa for six, my faith was sorely tried, but she took a little trip to Paris, a very expensive little trip it was too, and all was well. Her ladyship and I shared a deep sigh of relief.’

‘Miss Keith, I didn’t come here to smoke a cigarette with you, I came to snitch an invitation card and send it to Mr Templeton myself.’

‘That would have been a very unscrupulous thing to do.’

‘Granted. Be a good sport, Miss Keith. Give me a card. He won’t come and it’ll make the poor old man happy. You’ve got nothing against him, have you?’

‘No, he’s always been very civil to me. He’s a gentleman, I will say that for him, and that’s more than you can say for most of the people who come here and fill their fat bellies at the Princess’s expense.’

All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them. This Elliott knew better than anybody and he had always a friendly word and a cordial smile for the poor relation, the old maidservant, or the trusted secretary. I was sure he had often exchanged pleasant badinage with Miss Keith and at Christmas had not forgotten to send her a box of chocolates, a vanity case, or a handbag.

‘Come on, Miss Keith, have a heart.’

Miss Keith fixed her pince-nez more firmly on her prominent nose.

‘I am sure you wish me to do nothing disloyal to my employer, Mr Maugham, besides which the old cow would fire me if she found out I’d disobeyed her. The cards are on the desk in their envelopes. I am going to look out of the window, partly to stretch my legs which are cramped from sitting too long in one position and also to observe the beauty of the prospect. What happens when my back is turned neither God nor man can hold me responsible for.’

When Miss Keith resumed her seat the invitation was in my pocket.

‘It’s been nice to see you, Miss Keith,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘What are you wearing at the fancy-dress party?’

‘I am a minister’s daughter, my dear sir,’ she replied. ‘I leave such foolishness to the upper classes. When I have seen that the representatives of the Herald and the Mail get a good supper and a bottle of our second-best champagne, my duties will be terminated and I shall retire to the privacy of my bedchamber with a detective story.’

CHAPTER 8

A couple of days later, when I went to see Elliott, I found him beaming.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve had my invitation. It came this morning.’

He took the card out from under his pillow and showed it to me.

‘It’s what I told you,’ I said. ‘You see, your name begins with a T. The secretary has evidently only just reached you.’

‘I haven’t answered yet. I’ll do it tomorrow.’

I had a moment’s fright at that.

‘Would you like me to answer it for you? I could post it when I leave you.’

‘No, why should you? I’m quite capable of answering invitations myself.’

Fortunately, I thought, the envelope would be opened by Miss Keith and she would have the sense to suppress it. Elliott rang the bell.

‘I want to show you my costume.’

‘You’re not thinking of going, Elliott?’

‘Of course I am. I haven’t worn it since the Beaumont’s ball.’

Joseph answered the bell and Elliott told him to bring the costume. It was in a large flat box, wrapped in tissue paper. There were long white silk hose, padded trunks of cloth of gold slashed with white satin, a doublet to match, a cloak, a ruff to wear round the neck, a flat velvet cap, and a long gold chain from which hung the order of the Golden Fleece. I recognized it as a copy of the gorgeous dress worn by Philip the Second in Titian’s portrait at the Prado, and when Elliott told me it was exactly the costume the Count de Lauria had worn at the wedding of the King of Spain with the Queen of England I could not but think that he was giving rein to his imagination.

On the following morning while I was having breakfast I was called to the telephone. It was Joseph to tell me that Elliott had had another bad attack during the night and the doctor, hurriedly summoned, doubted whether he would last through the day. I sent for the car and drove over to Antibes. I found Elliott unconscious. He had resolutely refused to have a nurse, but I found one there, sent for by the doctor from the English hospital between Nice and Beau-lieu, and was glad to see her. I went out and telegraphed to Isabel. She and Gray were spending the summer with the children at the inexpensive seaside resort of La Baule. It was a long journey and I was afraid they would not get to Antibes in time. Except for her two brothers, whom he had not seen for years, she was Elliott’s only living relative.

But the will to live was strong in him, or it may be that the doctor’s medicaments were effective, for during the course of the day he rallied. Though shattered, he put on a bold front and amused himself by asking the nurse indecent questions about her sex life. I stayed with him most of the afternoon, and next day, on going to see him again, found him, though very weak, sufficiently cheerful. The nurse would only let me stay with him a short time. I was worried at not having received an answer to my telegram. Not knowing Isabel’s address at La Baule I had sent it to Paris and feared that the concierge had delayed to forward it. It was not till two days later that I got a reply to say that they were starting at once. As ill luck would have it, Gray and Isabel were on a motor trip in Brittany and had only just had my wire. I looked up the trains and saw that they could not arrive for at least thirty-six hours.

Early next morning Joseph called me again to tell me that Elliott had had a very bad night and was asking for me. I hurried over. When I arrived Joseph took me aside.

‘Monsieur will excuse me if I speak to him on a delicate subject,’ he said to me. ‘I am of course a freethinker and believe all religion is nothing but a conspiracy of the priests to gain control over the people, but Monsieur knows what women are. My wife and the chambermaid insist that the poor gentleman should receive the last sacraments and evidently the time is growing short.’ He looked at me in rather a shamefaced way. ‘And the fact remains, one never knows, perhaps it is better, if one’s got to die, to regularize one’s situation with the Church.’

I understood him perfectly. However freely they mock, most Frenchmen, when the end comes, prefer to make their peace with the faith that is part of their blood and bones.

‘Do you want me to suggest it to him?’

‘If Monsieur would have the goodness.’

It was not a job I much fancied, but after all Elliott had been for many years a devout Catholic, and it was fitting that he should conform to the obligations of his faith. I went up to his room. He was lying on his back, shrivelled and wan, but perfectly conscious. I asked the nurse to leave us alone.

‘I’m afraid you’re very ill, Elliott,’ I said. ‘I was wondering, I was wondering if you wouldn’t like to see a priest?’

He looked at me for a minute without answering.

‘D’you mean to say I’m going to die?’

‘Oh, I hope not. But it’s just as well to be on the safe side.’

‘I understand.’

He was silent. It is a terrible moment when you have to tell someone what I had just told Elliott. I could not look at him. I clenched my teeth because I was afraid I was going to cry. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing him, with my arm outstretched for support.

He patted my hand.

‘Don’t be upset, my dear fellow. Noblesse oblige, you know.’

I laughed hysterically.

‘You ridiculous creature, Elliott.’

‘That’s better. Now call up the bishop and say that I wish to make my confession and receive Extreme Unction. I would be grateful if he’d send the Abbé Charles. He’s a friend of mine.’

The Abbé Charles was the bishop’s vicar general whom I had occasion to mention before. I went downstairs and telephoned. I spoke to the bishop himself.

‘Is it urgent?’ he asked.

‘Very.’

‘I will attend to it at once.’

The doctor arrived and I told him what I had done. He went up with the nurse to see Elliott and I waited on the ground floor in the dining-room. It is only twenty minutes’ drive from Nice to Antibes and little more than half an hour later a black sedan drew up at the door. Joseph came to me.

‘C’est Monseigneur en personne, Monsieur,’ he said in a flurry. ‘It’s the bishop himself.’

I went out to receive him. He was not as usual accompanied by his vicar general, but, why I did not know, by a young abbé who bore a basket that contained, I supposed, the utensils needed to administer the sacrament. The chauffeur followed with a shabby black valise. The bishop shook hands with me and presented his companion.

‘How is our poor friend?’

‘I’m afraid he’s very ill, Monseigneur.’

‘Will you be so obliging as to show us into a room where we can enrobe?’

‘The dining-room is here, Monseigneur, and the drawing-room is on the next floor.’

‘The dining-room will do very well.’

I ushered him in. Joseph and I waited in the hall. Presently the door opened and the bishop came out, followed by the abbé holding in both hands the chalice surmounted by a little platter on which lay the consecrated wafer. They were covered by a cambric napkin so fine that it was transparent. I had never seen the bishop but at a dinner or luncheon party, and a very good trencherman he was, who enjoyed his food and a glass of good wine, telling funny and sometimes ribald stories with verve. He had struck me then as a sturdy, thickset man of no more than average height. Now, in surplice and stole, he looked not only tall, but stately. His red face, puckered as a rule with malicious yet kindly laughter, was grave. There was in his appearance nothing left of the cavalry officer he had once been; he looked, what indeed he was, a great dignitary of the Church. I was hardly surprised to see Joseph cross himself. The bishop inclined his head in a slight bow.

‘Conduct me to the sick man,’ he said.

I made way for him to ascend the stairs before me, but he bade me precede him. We went up in solemn silence. I entered Elliott’s room.

‘The bishop has come himself, Elliott.’

Elliott struggled to raise himself to a sitting position.

‘Monseigneur, this is an honour I did not venture to expect.’

‘Do not move, my friend.’ The bishop turned to the nurse and me. ‘Leave us.’ And then to the abbé: ‘I will call you when I am ready.’

The abbé glanced around and I guessed that he was looking for a place to set down the chalice. I pushed aside the tortoiseshell-backed brushes on the dressing-table. The nurse went downstairs and I led the abbé into the adjoining room which Elliott used as a study. The windows were open to the blue sky and he went over and stood by one of them. I sat down. A race of Stars was in progress and their sails gleamed dazzling white against the azure. A big schooner with a black hull, her red sails spread, was beating up against the breeze towards the harbour. I recognized her for a lobster boat, bringing a catch from Sardinia to supply the gala dinners at the casinos with a fish course. Through the closed door I could hear the muffled murmur of voices. Elliott was making his confession. I badly wanted a cigarette, but feared the abbé would be shocked if I lit one. He stood motionless, looking out, a slender young man, and his thick waving black hair, his fine dark eyes, his olive skin revealed his Italian origin. There was the quick fire of the South in his aspect and I asked myself what urgent faith, what burning desire had caused him to abandon the joys of life, the pleasures of his age, and the satisfaction of his senses, to devote himself to the service of God.

Suddenly the voices in the next room were still and I looked at the door. It was opened and the bishop appeared.

‘Venez,’ he said to the priest.

I was left alone. I heard the bishop’s voice once more and I knew he was saying the prayers that the Church has ordained should be said for the dying. Then there was another silence and I knew that Elliott was partaking of the body and the blood of Christ. From I know not what feeling, inherited, I suppose, from far-away ancestors, though not a Catholic I can never attend Mass without a sense of tremulous awe when the little tinkle of the servitor’s bell informs me of the Elevation of the Host; and now, similarly, I shivered as though a cold wind ran through me, I shivered with fear and wonder. The door was opened once more.

‘You may come in,’ said the bishop.

I entered. The abbé was spreading the cambric napkin over the cup and the little gilt plate on which the consecrated wafer had lain. Elliott’s eyes shone.

‘Conduct Monseigneur to his car,’ he said.

We descended the stairs. Joseph and the maids were waiting in the hall. The maids were crying. There were three of them and one after the other they came forward and, dropping to their knees, kissed the bishop’s ring. He blessed them with two fingers. Joseph’s wife nudged him and he advanced, fell to his knees too, and kissed the ring. The bishop smiled faintly.

‘You are a freethinker, my son?’

I could see Joseph making an effort over himself.

‘Yes, Monseigneur.’

‘Do not let it trouble you. You have been a good and faithful servant to your master. God will overlook the errors of your understanding.’

I went out into the street with him and opened the door of his car. He gave me a bow as he stepped in and smiled indulgently.

‘Our poor friend is very low. His defects were of the surface; he was generous of heart and kindly towards his fellow men.’

CHAPTER 9

Thinking that Elliott might want to be alone after the ceremony in which he had taken part, I went up to the drawing-room and began to read, but no sooner had I settled myself than the nurse came in to tell me that he wanted to see me. I climbed the flight of stairs to his room. Whether owing to a shot that the doctor had given him to help him to support the Ordeal before him or whether from the excitement of it, he was calmly cheerful and his eyes were bright.

‘A great honour, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘I shall enter the kingdom of heaven with a letter of introduction from a prince of the Church. I fancy that all doors will be open to me.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll find the company very mixed,’ I smiled.

‘Don’t you believe it, my dear fellow. We know from Holy Writ that there are class distinctions in heaven just as there are on earth. There are seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels. I have always moved in the best society in Europe and I have no doubt that I shall move in the best society in heaven. Our Lord has said: The House of my Father hath many mansions. It would be highly unsuitable to lodge the hoi polloi in a way to which they’re entirely unaccustomed.’

I suspected that Elliott saw the celestial habitations in the guise of the châteaux of a Baron de Rothschild with eighteenth-century panelling on the walls, Buhl tables, marquetry cabinets, and Louis Quinze suites covered with their original petit-point.

‘Believe me, my dear fellow,’ he went on after a pause, ‘there’ll be none of this damned equality in heaven.’

He dropped off quite suddenly into a doze. I sat down with a book. He slept off and on. At one o’clock the nurse came in to tell me that Joseph had luncheon ready for me. Joseph was subdued.

‘Fancy Monseigneur the Bishop coming himself It is a great honour he has done our poor gentleman. You saw me kiss his ring?’

‘I did.’

‘It’s not a thing I would have done of myself! I did it to satisfy my poor wife.’

I spent the afternoon in Elliott’s room. In the course of it a telegram came from Isabel to say that she and Gray would arrive by the Blue Train next morning. I could hardly hope they would be in time. The doctor came. He shook his head. Towards sunset Elliott awoke and was able to take a little nourishment. It seemed to give him a momentary strength. He beckoned to me and I went up to the bed. His voice was very weak.

‘I haven’t answered Edna’s invitation.’

‘Oh, don’t bother about that now, Elliott.’

‘Why not? I’ve always been a man of the world; there’s no reason why I should forget my manners as I’m leaving it. Where is the card?’

It was on the chimney piece and I put it in his hand, but I doubt whether he could see it.

‘You’ll find a pad of writing paper in my study. If you’ll get it I’ll dictate my answer.’

I went into the next room and came back with writing materials. I sat down by the side of his bed.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

His eyes were closed, but there was a mischievous smile on his lips and I wondered what was coming.

‘Mr Elliot Templeton regrets that he cannot accept Princess Novemali’s kind invitation owing to a previous engagement with his Blessed Lord.’

He gave a faint, ghostly chuckle. His face was of a strange blue-white, ghastly to behold, and he exhaled the nauseating stench peculiar to his disease. Poor Elliott who had loved to spray himself with the perfumes of Chanel and Molyneux. He was still holding the purloined invitation card and, thinking it incommoded him, I tried to take it out of his hand, but he tightened his grip on it. I was startled to hear him speak quite loudly.

‘The old bitch,’ he said.

These were the last words he spoke. He sank into a coma. The nurse had been up with him all the previous night and looked very tired, so I sent her to bed, promising to call her if necessary, and said I would sit up. There was indeed nothing to do. I lit a shaded lamp and read till my eyes ached and then, turning it off, I sat in darkness. The night was warm and the windows wide open. At regular intervals the flash of the lighthouse swept the room with a passing glimmer. The moon, which when full would look upon the vacuous, noisy gaiety of Edna Novemali’s fancy-dress party, set, and in the sky, a deep, deep blue, the countless stars shone with their terrifying brilliance. I think I may have dropped off into a light sleep, but my senses were still awake, and I was suddenly startled into intense consciousness by a hurried, angry sound, the most awe-inspiring sound anyone can hear, the death rattle. I went over to the bed and by the gleam of the lighthouse felt Elliott’s pulse. He was dead. I lit the lamp by his bedside and looked at him. His jaw had fallen. His eyes were open and before closing them I stared into them for a minute. I was moved and I think a few tears trickled down my cheeks. An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.

I saw no reason to wake the exhausted nurse, so I returned to my chair by the window. I was asleep when she came in at seven. I left her to do whatever she thought fit and had breakfast, then I went to the station to meet Gray and Isabel. I told them that Elliott was dead, and since there was no room for them at his house asked them to stay with me, but they preferred to go to a hotel. I went back to my own house to have a bath, shave, and change.

In the course of the morning Gray called me to say that Joseph had given them a letter addressed to me that Elliott had entrusted to him. Since it might contain something for my eyes alone I said I would drive over at once, and so less than an hour later I once more entered the house. The letter, marked on the envelope: To be delivered immediately after my death, contained instructions for his obsequies. I knew that he had set his heart on being buried in the church that he had built and I had already told Isabel. He wished to be embalmed and mentioned the name of the firm to which the commission should be given. ‘I have made inquiries,’ he continued, ‘and I am informed that they make a very good job of it. I trust you to see that it is not scamped. I desire to be dressed in the dress of my ancestor the Count de Lauria, with his sword by my side and the order of the Golden Fleece on my breast. I leave the choice of my coffin to you. It should be unpretentious but suitable to my position. In order to give no one unnecessary trouble I desire that Thomas Cook and Son should make all arrangements for the transportation of my remains and that one of their men should accompany the coffin to its final resting-place.’

I remembered that Elliott had said he wanted to be buried in that fancy dress of his, but I had taken it for a passing whim and hadn’t thought he meant it seriously. Joseph was insistent that his wishes be carried out and there seemed no reason why they should not be. The body was duly embalmed and then I went with Joseph to dress it in those absurd clothes. It was a gruesome business. We slipped his long legs into the white silk hose and pulled the cloth-of-gold over them. It was a job to get his arms through the sleeves of the doublet. We fixed the great starched ruff and draped the satin cape over his shoulders. Finally we placed the flat velvet cap on his head and the collar of the Golden Fleece round his neck. The embalmer had rouged his cheeks and reddened his lips. Elliott, the costume too large now for his emaciated frame, looked like a chorus man in an early opera of Verdi’s. The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose. When the undertaker’s men had put him in the coffin I laid the property sword down the length of his body, between his legs, with his hands on the pommel as I have seen the sword laid on the sculptured tomb of a Crusader.

Gray and Isabel went to Italy to attend the funeral.

PART SIX

CHAPTER 1

I FEEL IT right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

CHAPTER 2

That autumn, a couple of months after Elliott’s death, I spent a week in Paris on my way to England. Isabel and Gray, after their grim journey to Italy, had returned to Brittany, but were now once more settled in the apartment in the Rue St Guillaume. She told me the details of his will. He had left a sum of money for Masses to be said for his soul in the church he had built and a further sum for its upkeep. He had bequeathed a handsome amount to the Bishop of Nice to be spent on charitable purposes. He had left me the equivocal legacy of his eighteenth-century pornographic library and a beautiful drawing by Fragonard of a satyr engaged with a nymph on a performance that is usually conducted in private. It was too indecent to hang on my walls and I am not one to gloat upon obscenity in private. He had provided generously for his servants. His two nephews were to have ten thousand dollars each, and the residue of his estate went to Isabel. What this amounted to she did not tell me and I did not inquire; I gathered from her complacency that it was quite a lot of money.

For long, ever since he had regained his health, Gray had been impatient to go back to America and get to work again, and though Isabel was comfortable enough in Paris, his restlessness had affected her too. He had for some time been in communication with his friends, but the best opening that presented itself was contingent on his putting in a considerable amount of capital. That he had not got, but Elliott’s death had put Isabel in possession of very much more than was needed; and Gray with her approval was starting negotiations with the view, if everything turned out as well as it was presented, of leaving Paris and going to look into the matter for himself. But before that was possible there was much to attend to. They had to come to a reasonable agreement with the French Treasury over the inheritance tax. They had to get rid of the house at Antibes and the apartment in the Rue St Guillaume. They had to arrange for a sale at the Hotel Drouot of Elliott’s furniture, pictures, and drawings. These were valuable and it seemed wise to wait till spring when the great collectors were likely to be in Paris. Isabel was not sorry to spend another winter there; the children by now could chatter French as easily as they could chatter English and she was glad to let them have a few more months at a French school. They had grown in three years and were now long-legged, skinny, vivacious little creatures, with little at present of their mother’s beauty, but with nice manners and an insatiable curiosity.

So much for that.

CHAPTER 3

I met Larry by chance. I had asked Isabel about him and she told me that since their return from La Baule they had seen little of him. She and Gray had by now made a number of friends for themselves, people of their own generation, and they were more often engaged than during the pleasant weeks when the four of us were so much together. One evening I went to the Théâtre Français to see Bérénice. I had read it of course, but had never seen it played, and since it is seldom given I was unwilling to miss the opportunity. It is not one of Racine’s best plays, for the subject is too tenuous to support five acts, but it is moving and contains passages that are justly famous. The story is founded on a brief passage in Tacitus: Titus, who loved Bérénice, Queen of Palestine, with passion and who had even, as was supposed, promised her marriage, for reasons of state sent her away from Rome during the first days of his reign in despite of his desires and in despite of hers. For the Senate and the people of Rome were violently opposed to their Emperor’s alliance with a foreign queen. The play is concerned with the struggle in his breast between love and duty, and when he falters, it is Bérénice who in the end, assured that he loves her, confirms his purpose and separates herself from him for ever.

I suppose only a Frenchman can appreciate to the full the grace and grandeur of Racine and the music of his verse, but even a foreigner, once he has accustomed himself to the periwigged formality of the style, can hardly fail to be moved by his passionate tenderness and by the nobility of his sentiment. Racine knew as few have done how much drama is contained in the human voice. To me at all events the roll of those mellifluous Alexandrines is a sufficient substitute for action, and I find the long speeches, worked up with infinite skill to the expected climax, every bit as thrilling as any hair-raising adventure of the movies.

There was an interval after the third act and I went out to smoke a cigarette in the foyer over which presides Houdon’s Voltaire with his toothless, sardonic grin. Someone touched me on the shoulder. I turned round, perhaps with a slight movement of annoyance, for I wanted to be left with the exaltation with which those sonorous lines had filled me, and saw Larry. As always, I was glad to see him. It was a year since I had set eyes on him, and I suggested that at the end of the play we should meet and have a glass of beer together. Larry said he was hungry, for he had had no dinner, and proposed that we should go to Montmartre. We found one another in due course and stepped out into the open. The Théâtre Français has a musty fug that is peculiar to it. It is impregnated with the body odour of those unnumbered generations of sour-faced, unwashed women called ouvreuses who show you to your seat and domineeringly await their tip. It was a relief to get into the fresh air, and since the night was fine we walked. The arc lamps in the Avenue de l’Opéra glared so defiantly that the stars above, as though too proud to compete, shrouded their brightness in the dark of their infinite distance. As we walked we spoke of the performance we had just seen. Larry was disappointed. He would have liked it to be more natural, the lines spoken as people naturally speak and the gestures less theatrical. I thought his point of view mistaken. It was rhetoric, magnificent rhetoric, and I had a notion that it should be spoken rhetorically. I liked the regular thump of the rhymes; and the stylized gestures, handed down in a long tradition, seemed to me to suit the temper of that formal act. I could not but think that that was how Racine would have wished his play to be played. I had admired the way in which the actors had contrived to be human, passionate, and true within the limitations that confined them. Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

We reached the Avenue de Clichy and went into the Brasserie Graf. It was not long past midnight and the room was crowded, but we found a table and ordered ourselves eggs and bacon. I told Larry I had seen Isabel.

‘Gray will be glad to get back to America,’ he said. ‘He’s a fish out of water here. He won’t be happy till he’s at work again. I dare say he’ll make a lot of money.’

‘If he does it’ll be due to you. You not only cured him in body, but in spirit as well. You restored his confidence in himself.’

‘I did very little. I merely showed him how to cure himself.’

‘How did you learn to do that little?’

‘By accident. It was when I was in India. I’d been suffering from insomnia and happened to mention it to an old Yogi I knew and he said he’d soon settle that. He did just what you saw me do with Gray and that night I slept as I hadn’t slept for months. And then, a year later it must have been, I was in the Himalayas with an Indian friend of mine and he sprained his ankle. It was impossible to get a doctor and he was in great pain I thought I’d try to do what the old Yogi had done, and it worked. You can believe it or not, he was completely relieved of the pain.’ Larry laughed. ‘I can assure you, no one was more surprised than I. There’s nothing to it really; it only means putting the idea into the sufferer’s mind.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘Would it surprise you if your arm raised itself from the table without any volition of yours?’

‘Very much.’

‘It will. My Indian friend told people what I’d done when we got back to civilization and he brought others to see me. I hated doing it, because I couldn’t quite understand it, but they insisted. Somehow or other I did them good. I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It’s strange how many people suffer from it. I don’t mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what’s worse, fear of life. Often they’re people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they’re tortured by it. I’ve sometimes thought it was the most besetting humour of men, and I asked myself at one time if it was due to some deep animal instinct that man has inherited from that primeval something that first felt the thrill of life.’

I was listening to Larry with expectation, for it was not often that he spoke at any length, and I had an inkling that for once he felt communicative. Perhaps the play we had just seen had released some inhibition and the rhythm of its sonorous cadences, as music will, had overcome his instinctive reserve. Suddenly I realized that something was happening to my hand. I had not given another thought to Larry’s half-laughing question. I was conscious that my hand no longer rested on the table, but was raised an inch above it without my willing it. I was taken aback. I looked at it and saw that it trembled slightly. I felt a queer tingling in the nerves of my arm, a little jerk, and my hand and forearm lifted of themselves, I to the best of my belief neither aiding nor resisting, until they were several inches from the table. Then I felt my whole arm being raised from the shoulder.

‘This is very odd,’ I said.

Larry laughed. I made the slightest effort of will and my hand fell back on to the table.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t attach any importance to it.’

‘Were you taught that by the Yogi you spoke to us about when you first came back from India?’

‘Oh no, he had no patience with that kind of thing. I don’t know whether he believed that he possessed the powers that some Yogis claim to have, but he would have thought it puerile to exercise them.’

Our eggs and bacon arrived and we ate them with good appetite. We drank our beer. Neither of us spoke. Larry was thinking of I knew not what and I was thinking of him. We finished. I lit a cigarette and he lit a pipe.

‘What made you go to India in the first place?’ I asked abruptly.

‘Chance. At least I thought so at the time. Now I’m inclined to think it was the inevitable outcome of my years in Europe. Almost all the people who’ve had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them. It’s as if they were waiting there to be called upon when I needed them. I went to India because I wanted a rest. I’d been working very hard and wished to sort out my thoughts. I got a job as a deck hand on one of those pleasure-cruise ships that go around the world. It was going to the East and through the Panama Canal to New York. I hadn’t been to America for five years and I was homesick. I was depressed. You know how ignorant I was when we first met in Chicago all those years ago. I’d read an awful lot in Europe and seen a lot, but I was no nearer than when I started to what I was looking for.’

I wanted to ask him what that was, but had a feeling that he’d just laugh, shrug his shoulders, and say it was a matter of no consequence.

‘But why did you go as a deck hand?’ I asked instead. ‘You had money.’

‘I wanted the experience. Whenever I’ve got water-logged spiritually, whenever I’ve absorbed all I can for the time, I’ve found it useful to do something of that sort. That winter, after Isabel and I broke off our engagement, I worked in a coal-mine near Lens for six months.’

It was then that he told me of those incidents that I have narrated in a previous chapter.

‘Were you sore when Isabel threw you over?’

Before he answered he looked at me for some time with those strangely black eyes of his that seemed then to look inwards rather than out.

‘Yes. I was very young. I’d made up my mind that we were going to marry. I’d made plans for the life that we were going to lead together. I expected it to be lovely.’ He laughed faintly. ‘But it takes two to make a marriage just as it takes two to make a quarrel. It had never occurred to me that the life I offered Isabel was a life that filled her with dismay. If I’d had any sense I’d never have suggested it. She was too young and ardent. I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t yield.’

It’s just possible that the reader will remember that on his flight from the farm, after that grotesque encounter with the farmer’s widowed daughter-in-law, he had gone to Bonn. I was anxious to get him to continue, but knew I must be careful not to ask more direct questions than I could help.

‘I’ve never been to Bonn,’ I said. ‘When I was a boy I spent some time as a student at Heidelberg. It was, I think, the happiest time of my life.’

‘I liked Bonn. I spent a year there. I got a room in the house of the widow of one of the professors at the university who took in a couple of boarders. She and her two daughters, both of them middle-aged, did the cooking and the house-work. I found my fellow boarder was a Frenchman and I was disappointed at first because I wanted to speak nothing but German; but he was an Alsatian and he spoke German, if not more fluently, with a better accent than he spoke French. He was dressed like a German pastor and I was surprised to find out after a few days that he was a Benedictine monk. He’s been granted leave of absence from his monastery to make researches at the university library. He was a very learned man, but he didn’t look it any more than he looked like my idea of a monk. He was a tall, stout fellow, with sandy hair, prominent blue eyes, and a red, round face. He was shy and reserved and didn’t seem to want to have anything much to do with me, but he was very polite in a rather elaborate way and always took a civil part in the conversation at table; I only saw him then; as soon as we had finished dinner he went back to work at the library, and after supper, when I sat in the parlour improving my German with whichever of the two daughters wasn’t washing up, he retired to his room.

‘I was surprised when one afternoon, after I’d been there at least a month, he asked me if I’d care to take a walk with him. He said he could show me places in the neighbourhood that he didn’t think I’d be likely to discover for myself. I’m a pretty good walker, but he could outwalk me any day. We must have covered a good fifteen miles on that first walk. He asked me what I was doing in Bonn, and I said I’d come to learn German and get to know something about German literature. He talked very intelligently. He said he’d be glad to help me in any way he could. After that we went for walks two or three times a week. I discovered that he’d taught philosophy for some years. When I was in Paris I’d read a certain amount, Spinoza and Plato and Descartes, but I hadn’t read any of the great German philosophers and I was only too glad to listen while he talked about them. One day, when we’d made an excursion across the Rhine and were sitting in a beer-garden drinking a glass of beer, he asked me if I was a Protestant.

‘“I suppose so,” I said.

‘He gave me a quick look and I thought I saw in his eyes the glimmer of a smile. He began to talk about Aeschylus; I’d been learning Greek, you know, and he knew the great tragedians as I could never hope to know them. It was inspiring to hear him. I wondered why he’d suddenly asked me that question. My guardian, Uncle Bob Nelson, was an agnostic, but he went to church regularly because his patients expected it of him and sent me to Sunday school for the same reason. Martha, our help, was a rigid Baptist and she used to frighten my childhood by telling me of the hell fire to which the sinner would be condemned to all eternity. She took a real delight in picturing to me the agonies that would be endured by the various people in the village whom for some reason or other she had had it in for.

‘By winter I’d got to know Father Ensheim very well. I think he was rather a remarkable man. I never saw him vexed. He was good-natured and kindly, far more broad-minded than I would have expected, and wonderfully tolerant. His erudition was prodigious and he must have known how ignorant I was, but he used to talk to me as though I were as learned as he. He was very patient with me. He seemed to want nothing but to be of service to me. One day, I don’t know why, I had an attack of lumbago, and Frau Grabau, my landlady, insisted on putting me to bed with hot-water-bottles. Father Ensheim, hearing I was laid up, came into my room to see me, after supper. Except that I was in a good deal of pain I felt perfectly well. You know what bookish people are, they’re inquisitive about books, and as I put down the book I was reading when he came in, he took it up and looked at the title. It was a book about Meister Eckhart that I’d found at a bookseller’s in the town. He asked me why I was reading it, so I said that I’d been going through a certain amount of mystical literature and told him about Kosti and how he’d aroused my interest in the subject. He surveyed me with his prominent blue eyes and there was a look in them that I can only describe as amused tenderness. I had the feeling that he found me rather ridiculous, but felt so much loving-kindness towards me that he didn’t like me any the less. Anyhow, I’ve never much minded if people thought me a bit of a fool.

‘“What are you looking for in these books?” he asked me.

‘“If I knew that,” I answered, “I’d at least be on the way to finding it.”

‘“Do you remember my asking you if you were a Protestant? You said you supposed so. What did you mean by that?”

‘“I was brought up as one,” I said.

‘“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

‘I don’t like personal questions and my first impulse was to tell him that was no business of his. But there was so much goodness in his aspect that I felt it impossible to affront him. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t want to answer yes and I didn’t want to answer no. It may have been the pain I was suffering that enabled me to speak or it may have been something in him. Anyhow, I told him about myself.’

Larry hesitated for a moment, and when he went on I knew he wasn’t speaking to me but to the Benedictine monk. He had forgotten me. I don’t know what there was in the time or the place that enabled him to speak, without my prompting, of what his natural reticence had so long concealed.

‘Uncle Bob Nelson was very democratic and he sent me to the high school at Marvin. It was only because Louisa Bradley nagged him into it that when I was fourteen he let me go to St Paul’s. I wasn’t very good at anything, either at work or games, but I fitted in all right. I think I was an entirely normal boy. I was crazy about aviation. Those were the early days of flying and Uncle Bob was as excited about it as I was. He knew some of the airmen, and when I said I wanted to learn to fly he said he’d fix it for me. I was tall for my age and when I was sixteen I could easily pass for eighteen. Uncle Bob made me promise to keep it a secret, because he knew everyone would be down on him like a ton of bricks for letting me go, but as a matter of fact he helped me to get over to Canada and gave me a letter to someone he knew, and the result was that by the time I was seventeen I was flying in France.

‘They were terrible gimcrack planes we flew in then, and you practically took your life in your hands each time you went up. The heights we got to were absurd, judged by present standards, but we didn’t know any better and thought it wonderful. I loved flying. I couldn’t describe the feeling it gave me, I only knew I felt proud and happy. In the air, ‘way up, I felt that I was part of something very great and very beautiful. I didn’t know what it was all about, I only knew that I wasn’t alone any more, by myself as I was, two thousand feet up, but that I belonged. I can’t help it if it sounds silly. When I was flying above the clouds and they were like an enormous flock of sheep below me I felt that I was at home with infinitude.’

Larry paused. He gazed at me from the caverns of his impenetrable eyes, but I did not know whether he saw me.

‘I’d known that men had been killed by the hundred thousand, but I hadn’t seen them killed. It didn’t mean very much to me. Then I saw a dead man with my own eyes. The sight filled me with shame.’

‘Shame?’ I exclaimed involuntarily.

‘Shame, because that boy, he was only three or four years older than me, who’d had such energy and daring, who a moment before had had so much vitality, who’d been so good, was now just mangled flesh that looked as if it had never been alive.’

I didn’t say anything. I had seen dead men when I was a medical student and I had seen many more during the war. What had dismayed me was how trifling they looked. There was no dignity in them. Marionettes that the showman had thrown into the discard.

‘I didn’t sleep that night. I cried. I wasn’t frightened for myself; I was indignant; it was the wickedness of it that broke me. The war came to an end and I went home. I’d always been keen on mechanics, and if there was nothing doing in aviation, I’d intended to get into an automobile factory. I’d been wounded and had to take it easy for a while. Then they wanted me to go to work. I couldn’t do the sort of work they wanted me to do. It seemed futile. I’d had a lot of time to think. I kept on asking myself what life was for. After all it was only by luck that I was alive; I wanted to make something of my life, but I didn’t know what. I’d never thought much about God. I began to think about Him now. I couldn’t understand why there was evil in the world. I knew I was very ignorant; I didn’t know anyone I could turn to and I wanted to learn, so I began to read at haphazard.

‘When I told Father Ensheim all this he asked me: “Then you’ve been reading for four years? Where have you got?”

‘“Nowhere,” I said.

‘He looked at me with such an air of radiant benignity that I was confused. I didn’t know what I’d done to arouse so much feeling in him. He softly drummed his fingers on the table as though he were turning a notion over in his mind.

‘“Our wise old Church,” he said then, “has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you. I am returning to my monastery in a little while. Why don’t you come and spend a few weeks with us? You can work in the fields with our lay brothers; you can read in our library. It will be an experience no less interesting than working in a coal mine or on a German farm.”

‘“Why do you suggest it?” I asked.

‘“I’ve been observing you for three months,” he said. “Perhaps I know you better than you know yourself. The distance that separates you from faith is no greater than the thickness of a cigarette paper.”

‘I didn’t say anything to that. It gave me a funny sort of feeling, as though someone had got hold of my heartstrings and were giving them a tug. At last I said I’d think about it. He dropped the subject. For the rest of Father Ensheim’s stay in Bonn we never spoke of anything connected with religion again, but as he was leaving he gave me the address of his monastery and told me if I made up my mind to come I had only to write him a line and he’d make arrangements. I missed him more than I expected. The year wore on and it was midsummer. I liked it well enough in Bonn. I read Goethe and Schiller and Heine. I read Hölderlin and Rilke. Still I wasn’t getting anywhere. I thought a lot of what Father Ensheim had said, and at last I decided to accept his offer.

‘He met me at the station. The monstery was in Alsace and the country was pretty. Father Ensheim presented me to the abbot and then showed me to the cell that had been assigned to me. It had a narrow iron bed, a crucifix on the wall, and by way of furniture only the barest necessities. The dinner bell rang and I made my way to the refectory. It was a huge vaulted chamber. The abbot stood at the door with two monks, one of whom held a basin and the other a towel, and the abbot sprinkled a few drops of water on the hands of the guests by way of washing them and dried them with the towel one of the two monks handed him. There were three guests besides myself, two priests who were passing that way and had stopped off for dinner and an elderly, grouchy Frenchman who was making a retreat.

‘The abbot and the two priors, senior and junior, sat at the head of the room, each at his separate table; the fathers along two sides of the walls, while the novices, the lay brothers, and the guests sat at tables in the middle. Grace was said and we ate. A novice took up his position near the refectory door and in a monotonous voice read from an edifying work. When we had finished grace was said again. The abbot, Father Ensheim, the guests, and the monk in charge of them went into a small room where we had coffee and talked of casual things. Then I went back to my cell.

‘I stayed there three months. I was very happy. The life exactly suited me. The library was good and I read a great deal. None of the fathers tried in any way to influence me, but they were glad to talk to me. I was deeply impressed by their learning, their piety, and their unworldliness. You mustn’t think it was an idle life they led. They were constantly occupied. They farmed their own land and worked it themselves and they were glad to have my help. I enjoyed the splendour of the services, but the one I liked best of all was Matins. It was at four in the morning. It was wonderfully moving to sit in the church with the night all around you while the monks, mysterious in their habits, their cowls drawn over their heads, sang with their strong male voices the plain-song of the liturgy. There was something reassuring in the regularity of the daily round, and notwithstanding all the energy that was displayed, notwithstanding the activity of thought, you had an abiding sense of repose.’

Larry smiled a trifle ruefully.

‘Like Rolla, I’ve come too late into a world too old. I should have been born in the Middle Ages when faith was a matter of course; then my way would have been clear to me and I’d have sought to enter the order. I couldn’t believe, I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the ordinary decent man. The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.

‘I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord’s Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel nor need to feel gratitude to him for doing it, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can’t or won’t provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he’d have done better not to create them.’

‘Dear Larry,’ I said, ‘I think it’s just as well you weren’t born in the Middle Ages. You’d undoubtedly have perished at the stake.’

He smiled.

‘You’ve had a great deal of success,’ he went on. ‘Do you want to be praised to your face?’

‘It only embarrasses me.’

‘That’s what I should have thought. I couldn’t believe that God wanted it either. We didn’t think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his CO by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

‘But that wasn’t the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn’t reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin which, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks’ thoughts. I’d known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could, and used foul language; we had one or two bad hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn’t altogether his fault; he’d never had any money before, and when he got more than he’d ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I’d known bad men in Paris, and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn’t help, or to their environment, which they didn’t choose: I’m not sure that society wasn’t more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I’d been God I couldn’t have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Ensheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God’s presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, He created men: if He so created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into my back yard, it wouldn’t be fair to beat him when he did so.

‘If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did He create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive His grace. It seemed to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim, and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t common sense. I didn’t see why you shouldn’t believe in a God who hadn’t created the world, but had to make the best of the bad job he’d found, a being enormously better, wise, and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn’t made and who you hoped might in the end overcome it. But on the other hand, I didn’t see why you should.

‘Those good fathers had no answers that satisfied either my head or my heart to the questions that perplexed me. My place was not with them. When I went to say good-bye to Father Ensheim he didn’t ask me whether I had profited by the experience in the way he had been so sure I would. He looked at me with inexpressible kindness.

‘“I’m afraid I’ve been a disappointment to you, Father,” I said.

‘“No,” he answered. “You are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God. God will seek you out. You’ll come back. Whether here or elsewhere only God can tell.”

CHAPTER 4

‘I settled down in Paris for the rest of the winter. I knew nothing of science, and I thought the time had come when I must acquire at least a nodding acquaintance with it. I read a lot. I don’t know that I learnt much except that my ignorance was abysmal. But I knew that before. When the spring came I went to the country and stayed at a little inn on a river near one of those beautiful old French towns where life doesn’t seem to have moved for two hundred years.’

I guessed that this was the summer Larry had spent with Suzanne Rouvier, but I did not interrupt him.

‘After that I went to Spain. I wanted to see Velasquez and El Greco. I wondered if art could point out the way to me that religion hadn’t. I wandered about a bit and then came to Seville. I liked it and thought I’d spend the winter there.’

I had myself been to Seville when I was twenty-three and I, too, had liked it. I liked its white, tortuous streets, its cathedral, and the wide-spreading plain of the Guadalquivir; but I liked also those Andalusian girls with their grace and their gaiety, with their dark shining eyes, the carnation in their hair stressing its blackness and by the contrast itself more vivid; I liked the rich colour of their skins and the inviting sensuality of their lips. Then indeed to be young was very heaven. When Larry went there he was only a little older than I had been and I could not but ask myself whether it was possible that he had remained indifferent to the lure of those enchanting creatures. He answered my unspoken question.

‘I ran across a French painter I’d known in Paris, a fellow called Auguste Cottet, who’d kept Suzanne Rouvier at one time. He’d come to Seville to paint and was living with a girl he’d picked up there. He asked me to go with them one evening to Eretania to listen to a flamenco singer and they brought along with them a friend of hers. She was the prettiest little thing you ever saw. She was only eighteen. She’d got into trouble with a boy and had had to leave her native village because she was going to have a baby. The boy was doing his military service. After she had the baby she put it out to nurse and got a job in the tobacco factory. I took her home with me. She was very gay and very sweet, and after a few days I asked her if she’d like to come and live with me. She said she would, so we took a couple of rooms in a casa de huéspedes, a bedroom and a sitting-room. I told her she could leave her job, but she didn’t want to, and that suited me because it left me my days to myself. We had the run of the kitchen, so she used to make my breakfast for me before she went to work and then at midday she’d come back and cook the lunch and in the evening we’d dine at a restaurant and go to a movie or to some place to dance. She looked upon me as a lunatic because I had a rubber bath and insisted on having a cold sponge every morning. The baby was farmed out in a village a few miles from Seville and we used to go and see it on Sundays. She made no secret of the fact that she was living with me to make enough money to furnish the lodging in a tenement they were going to take when her boy friend was through with his military service. She was a dear little thing and I’m sure she’s made her Paco a good wife. She was cheerful, good-tempered, and affectionate. She looked upon what you delicately call sexual congress as a natural function of the body like any other. She took pleasure in it and she was happy to give pleasure. She was of course a little animal, but a very nice, attractive, domesticated animal.

‘Then one evening she told me that she’d had a letter from Paco in Spanish Morocco, where he was doing his service, to say that he was to be released and would arrive in Cadiz in a couple of days. She packed her belongings next morning and slipped her money in her stocking and I took her to the station. She gave me a hearty kiss as I put her into the railway carriage, but she was too excited at the thought of seeing her lover again to have a thought for me and I’m sure that before the train was out of the station she’d forgotten my existence.

‘I stayed on in Seville and in the fall I set out on the journey that landed me in India.’

CHAPTER 5

It was getting late. The crowd had thinned out and only a few tables were occupied. The people who had been sitting there because they had nothing else to do had gone home. Those who had been to a play or a picture and had come to have a drink or a bite to eat had left. Now and then latecomers straggled in. I saw a tall man, evidently an Englishman, come in with a young rough. He had the long, washed-out face with thinning wavy hair of the British intellectual and evidently suffered from the delusion common to many that when you are abroad no one you know at home can possibly recognize you. The young rough greedily ate a great plate of sandwiches while his companion watched him with amused benevolence. What an appetite. I saw one man whom I knew by sight because he went to the same barber’s at Nice. He was stout, elderly, and grey-haired, with a puffy red face and heavy pouches under his eyes. He was a Middle Western banker who had left his native city after the crash rather than face an investigation. I do not know whether he had committed any crime; if he had, he was perhaps too small fry to put the authorities to the trouble of getting him extradited. He had a pompous manner and the false heartiness of a cheap politician, but his eyes were frightened and unhappy. He was never quite drunk and never quite sober. He was always with some harlot who was obviously getting all she could out of him, and he was now with two painted middle-aged women who treated him with a mockery they didn’t trouble to conceal while he, only half understanding what they said, giggled fatuously. The gay life! I wondered if he wouldn’t have done better to stay at home and take his medicine. One day his women would have squeezed him dry and then there would be nothing left for him but the river or an overdose of veronal.

Between two and three there was a slight increase of custom and I supposed that the night clubs were closing their doors. A bunch of young Americans strolled in, very drunk and noisy, but they didn’t stay long. Not far from us two fat, sombre women, tightly fitted into mannish clothes, sat side by side, drinking whiskies and sodas in gloomy silence. A party in evening dress put in an appearance, what they call in French gens du monde, who had evidently been doing the rounds and now wanted a spot of supper to finish up with. They came and went. My curiosity had been excited by a little man, quietly dressed, who had been sitting there for an hour or more with a glass of beer in front of him reading the paper. He had a neat black beard and wore pince-nez. At last a woman came in and joined him. He gave her a nod devoid of friendliness and I conjectured that he was annoyed because she had kept him waiting. She was young, rather shabby, but heavily painted, and looked very tired. Presently I noticed her take something out of her bag and hand it to him. Money. He looked at it and his face darkened. He addressed her in words I could not hear, but from her manner I guessed they were abusive, and she seemed to be making excuses. Suddenly he leant over and gave her a resounding smack on the cheek. She gave a cry and began to sob. The manager, drawn by the disturbance, came up to see what was the matter. It looked as if he were telling them to get out if they couldn’t behave. The girl turned on him and shrilly, so that one heard every word, told him in foul language to mind his own business.

‘If he slapped my face it’s because I deserved it,’ she cried.

Women! I had always thought that to live on a woman’s immoral earnings you must be a strapping flashy fellow with sex appeal, ready with your knife or your gun; it was astonishing that such a puny creature, who might have been a lawyer’s clerk from his appearance, could get a footing in such an overcrowded profession.

CHAPTER 6

The waiter who had served us was going off duty and to get his tip presented the bill. We paid and ordered coffee.

‘Well?’ I said.

I felt that Larry was in the mood to talk and I knew that I was in the mood to listen.

‘Aren’t I boring you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, we got to Bombay. The ship was stopping there for three days to give the tourists a chance to see the sights and make excursions. On the third day I got the afternoon off and went ashore. I walked about for a while, looking at the crowd: what a conglomeration! Chinese, Mohammedans, Hindus, Tamils as black as your hat; and those great humped bullocks with their long horns that draw the carts! Then I went to Elephanta to see the caves. An Indian had joined us at Alexandria for the passage to Bombay and the tourists were rather sniffy about him. He was a fat little man with a brown round face and he wore a thick tweed suit of black and green check and a clerical collar. I was having a breath of air on deck one night and he came up and spoke to me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone just then, I wanted to be alone; he asked me a lot of questions and I’m afraid I was rather short with him. Anyhow I told him I was a student working my passage back to America.

‘“You should stop off in India,” he said. “The East has more to teach the West than the West conceives.”

‘“Oh yes?” I said.

‘“At any rate,” he went on, “be sure you go and see the caves at Elephanta. You’ll never regret it.”’ Larry interrupted himself to ask me a question. ‘Have you ever been to India?’

‘Never.’

‘Well, I was looking at the colossal image with its three heads which is the great sight at Elephanta and wondering what it was all about when I heard someone behind me say: “I see you’ve taken my advice.” I turned round and it took me a minute to realize who it was that had spoken to me. It was the little man in the heavy check suit and the clerical collar, but now he was wearing a long saffron robe, the robe, I knew later, of the Ramakrishna Swamis; and instead of the funny, spluttering little guy he’d been before, he was dignified and rather splendid. We both stared at the colossal bust.

‘“Brahma, the Creator,” he said. “Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer. The three manifestations of the Ultimate Reality.”

‘“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” I said.

‘“I’m not surprised,” he answered, with a little smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes, as though he were gently mocking me. “A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?”

‘He joined the palms of his hands together and with just the indication of a bow strolled on. I stayed looking at those three mysterious heads. Perhaps because I was in a receptive mood, I was strangely stirred. You know how sometimes you try to recall a name; it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t get it: that was the feeling I had then. When I came out of the caves I sat for a long while on the steps and looked at the sea. All I knew about Brahminism were those verses of Emerson’s and I tried to remember them. It exasperated me that I couldn’t and when I went back to Bombay I went into a bookshop to see if I could find a volume of poetry that had them in. They’re in the Oxford Book of English Verse. D’you remember them?

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

‘I had supper in a native eating-house and then, as I didn’t have to be on board till ten, I went and walked on the Maidan and looked at the sea. I thought I’d never seen so many stars in the sky. The cool was delicious after the heat of the day. I found a public garden and sat on a bench. It was very dark there and silent white figures flitted to and fro. That wonderful day, with the brilliant sunshine, the coloured, noisy crowds, the smell of the East, acrid and aromatic, enchanted me; and like an object, a splash of colour that a painter puts in to pull his composition together, those three enormous heads of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva gave a mysterious significance to it all. My heart began to beat like mad, because I’d suddenly become aware of an intense conviction that India had something to give me that I had to have. It seemed to me that a chance was offered to me and I must take it there and then or it would never be offered me again. I made up my mind quickly. I decided not to go back to the ship. I’d left nothing there but a few things in a grip. I walked slowly back to the native quarter and looked about for a hotel. I found one after a while and took a room. I had the clothes I stood up in, some loose cash, my passport, and my letter of credit. I felt so free, I laughed out loud.

‘The ship was sailing at eleven and just to be on the safe side I stayed in my room till then. I went down to the quay and watched her pull out. After that I went to the Ramakrishna Mission and routed out the Swami who’d spoken to me at Elephanta. I didn’t know his name, but I explained that I wanted to see the Swami who’d just arrived from Alexandria. I told him I’d decided to stay in India and asked him what I ought to see. We had a long talk and at last he said he was going to Benares that night and asked me if I’d like to go with him. I jumped at it. We went third-class. The carriage was full of people eating and drinking and talking and the heat was terrific. I didn’t get a wink of sleep and next morning I was pretty tired, but the Swami was as fresh as a daisy. I asked him how come and he said: “By meditation on the formless one; I found rest in the Absolute.” I didn’t know what to think, but I could see with my own eyes that he was as alert and wide awake as though he’d had a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.

‘When at last we got to Benares a young man of my own age came to meet my companion and the Swami asked him to find me a room. His name was Mahendra and he was a teacher at the university. He was a nice, kindly, intelligent fellow and he seemed to take as great a fancy to me as I took to him. That evening he took me out in a boat on the Ganges; it was a thrill for me, very beautiful with the city crowding down to the water’s edge, and awe-inspiring; but next morning he had something better to show me, he fetched me at my hotel before dawn and took me out on the river again. I saw something I could never have believed possible, I saw thousands upon thousands of people come down to take their lustral bath and pray. I saw one tall gaunt fellow, with a mass of tangled hair and a great ragged beard, with nothing but a jock-strap to cover his nakedness, stand with his long arms outstretched, his head up, and in a loud voice pray to the rising sun. I can’t tell you what an impression it made on me. I spent six months in Benares and I went over and over again on the Ganges at dawn to see that strange sight. I never got over the wonder of it. Those people believed not halfheartedly, not with reservation or uneasy doubt, but with every fibre of their being.

‘Everyone was very kind to me. When they discovered I hadn’t come to shoot tigers or to buy or sell anything, but only to learn, they did everything to help me. They were pleased that I should wish to learn Hindustani, and found teachers for me. They lent me books. They were never tired of answering my questions. Do you know anything about Hinduism?’

‘Very little,’ I answered.

‘I should have thought it would interest you. Can there be anything more stupendous than the conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?’

‘And what do the Hindus think is the object of this endless recurrence?’

‘I think they’d say that such is the nature of the Absolute. You see, they believe that the purpose of creation is to serve as a stage for the punishment or reward of the deeds of the soul’s earlier existence.’

‘Which presupposes belief in the transmigration of souls.’

‘It’s a belief held by two thirds of the human race.’

‘The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.’

‘No, but at least it makes it worthy of consideration. Christianity absorbed so much of Neo-Platonism, it might very easily have absorbed that too, and in point of fact there was an early Christian sect that believed in it, but it was declared heretical. Except for that Christians would believe in it as confidently as they believe in the resurrection of Christ.’

‘Am I right in thinking that it means that the soul passes from body to body in an endless course of experience occasioned by the merit or demerit of previous works?’

‘I think so.’

‘But you see, I’m not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?’

‘The Indians wouldn’t speak of an accident. They would answer that it’s your actions in previous lives that have determined your soul to inhabit an imperfect body.’ Larry drummed idly on the table and, lost in thought, gazed into space. Then, with a faint smile on his lips and a reflective look in his eyes, he went on. ‘Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive towards virtue our future lives will be less afflicted. But it’s easy enough to bear our own evils, all we need for that is a little manliness; what’s intolerable is the evil, often so unmerited in appearance, that befalls others. If you can persuade yourself that it is the inevitable result of the past you may pity, you may do what you can to alleviate, and you should, but you have no cause to be indignant.’

‘But why didn’t God create a world free from suffering and misery at the beginning when there was neither merit nor demerit in the individual to determine his actions?’

‘The Hindus would say that there was no beginning. The individual soul, co-existent with the universe, has existed from all eternity and owes its nature to some prior existence.’

‘And does the belief in the transmigration of souls have a practical effect on the lives of those who believe it? After all, that is the test.’

‘I think it has. I can tell you of one man I knew personally on whose life it certainly had a very practical effect. The first two or three years I was in India I lived mostly in native hotels, but now and then someone asked me to stay with him and once or twice I lived in grandeur as the guest of a maharajah. Through one of my friends in Benares I got an invitation to stay in one of the smaller northern states. The capital was lovely: a rose-red city half as old as time. I was recommended to the Minister of Finance. He’d had a European education and had been to Oxford. When you talked to him you got the impression of a progressive, intelligent, and enlightened man; and he had the reputation of being an extremely efficient minister and a clever, astute politician. He wore European clothes and was very natty in appearance. He was rather a nice-looking fellow, a little on the stout side as Indians tend to become in middle age, with a close-cropped, neat moustache. He often asked me to go to his house. He had a large garden and we’d sit under the shade of great trees and talk. He had a wife and two grown-up children. You’d have taken him for just the ordinary, rather commonplace Anglicized Indian and I was staggered when I found out that in a year, when he reached the age of fifty, he was going to resign his profitable position, dispose of his property to his wife and children, and go out into the world as a wandering mendicant. But the most surprising part was that his friends, and the maharajah, accepted it as a settled thing and looked upon it not as an extraordinary proceeding but as a natural one.

‘One day I said to him: “You, who are so liberal, who know the world, who’ve read so much, science, philosophy, literature – do you in your heart of hearts believe in reincarnation?”

‘His whole face changed. It became the face of a visionary.

‘“My dear friend,” he said, “if I didn’t believe in it life would have no meaning for me.”’

‘And do you believe in it, Larry?’ I asked.

‘That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t think it’s possible for us Occidentals to believe in it as implicitly as these Orientals do. It’s in their blood and bones. With us it can only be an opinion. I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it.’

He paused for a moment and with his face resting on his hand looked down at the table. Then he leant back.

‘I should like to tell you of a very strange experience I had once. I was practising meditation one night in my little room at the Ashrama as my Indian friends had taught me to do. I had lit a candle and was concentrating my attention on its flame, and after a time, through the flame, but quite clearly, I saw a long line of figures one behind the other. The foremost was an elderly lady in a lace cap with grey ringlets that hung down over her ears. She wore a tight black bodice and a black silk flounced skirt – the sort of clothes, I think, they wore in the seventies – and she was standing full face to me in a gracious, diffident attitude, her arms hanging straight down her sides with the palms towards me. The expression on her lined face was kindly, sweet, and mild. Immediately behind her, but sideways so that I saw his profile, with a great hooked nose and thick lips, was a tall gaunt Jew in a yellow gabardine with a yellow skullcap on his thick dark hair. He had the studious look of a scholar and an air of grim and at the same time passionate austerity. Behind him, but facing me and as distinct as though there were no one between us, was a young man with a cheerful ruddy countenance, whom you couldn’t have taken for anything but an Englishman of the sixteenth century. He stood firmly on his feet, his legs a little apart, and he had a bold, reckless, wanton look. He was dressed all in red, grandly as though it were a court dress, with broad-toed velvet shoes on his feet and a flat velvet cap on his head. Behind those three there was an endless chain of figures, like a queue outside a movie house, but they were dim and I couldn’t see what they looked like. I was only aware of their vague shapes and of the movement that passed through them like wheat waving in a summer breeze. In a little while, I don’t know whether it was in a minute, or five, or ten, they faded slowly into the darkness of the night and there was nothing but the steady flame of the candle.’

Larry gave a little smile.

‘Of course it may be that I’d fallen into a doze and dreamt. It may be that my concentration on that feeble flame had induced a sort of hypnotic condition in me and that those three figures that I saw as distinctly as I see you were recollections of pictures preserved in my subconscious. But it may be that they were myself in past lives. It may be that I was not so very long ago an old lady in New England and before that a Levantine Jew and somewhere back, soon after Sebastian Cabot had sailed from Bristol, a gallant at the Court of Henry Prince of Wales.’

‘What eventually happened to your friend of the rose-red city?’

‘Two years later I was down south at a place called Madura. One night in the temple someone touched me on the arm. I looked round and saw a bearded man with long black hair, dressed in nothing but a loincloth, with the staff and the begging-bowl of the holy man. It was not till he spoke that I recognized him. It was my friend. I was so astounded that I didn’t know what to say. He asked me what I’d been doing and I told him; he asked me where I was going and I said to Travancore; he told me to go and see Shri Ganesha. “He will give you what you’re looking for,” he said. I asked him to tell me about him, but he smiled and said I’d find out all that was necessary for me to know when I saw him. I’d got over my surprise by then and asked him what he was doing in Madura. He said he was making a pilgrimage on foot to the holy places of India. I asked him how he ate and how he slept. He told me that when anyone offered him shelter he slept on the veranda, but otherwise under a tree or in the precincts of a temple; and as for food, if people offered him a meal he ate it and if they didn’t he went without. I looked at him: “You’ve lost weight,” I said. He laughed and answered that he felt all the better for it. Then he said good-bye to me – it was funny to hear that guy in a loincloth say, “Well, so long, old chap” – and stepped into that part of the temple where I couldn’t follow him.

‘I stayed in Madura for some time. I think it’s the only temple in India in which the white man can walk about freely so long as he doesn’t enter the holy of holies. At nightfall it was packed with people. Men, women, and children. The men, stripped to the waist, wore dhoties, and their foreheads, and often their chests and arms, were thickly smeared with the white ash of burnt cow dung. You saw them making obeisance at one shrine or another and sometimes lying full length on the ground, face downwards, in the ritual attitude of prostration. They prayed and recited litanies. They called to one another, quarrelled with one another, heatedly argued with one another. There was an ungodly row, and yet in some mysterious way God seemed to be near and living.

‘You pass through long halls, the roof supported by sculptured columns, and at the foot of each column a religious mendicant is seated; each has in front of him a bowl for offerings or a small mat on which the faithful now and again throw a copper coin. Some are clad; some are almost naked. Some look at you vacantly as you pass; some are reading, silently or aloud, and appear unconscious of the streaming throng. I looked for my friend among them; I never saw him I again. I suppose he proceeded on the journey to his goal.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts, but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed from eternity and when at last it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at last it reaches the boundless sea from which it rose.’

‘But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality.’

Larry grinned.

‘You want to taste sugar, you don’t want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our egoism? Until the soul has shed the last trace of that it cannot become one with the Absolute.’

‘You talk very familiarly of the Absolute, Larry, and it’s an imposing word. What does it actually signify to you?’

‘Reality. You can’t say what it is; you can only say what it isn’t. It’s inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It’s nowhere and everywhere. All things imply and depend upon it. It’s not a person, it’s not a thing, it’s not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom.’

‘Golly!’ I said to myself, but to Larry: ‘But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in distress for comfort and encouragement.’

‘It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that’s so, whom or what am I to worship – myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and by a hundred other names. The Absolute is in Isvara, the creator and ruler of the world, and it is in the humble fetish before which the peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.’

I looked at Larry reflectively.

‘I wonder just what it was that attracted you to this austere faith,’ I said.

‘I think I can tell you. I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. They remind you of those old pagan gods who grew wan and faint if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout. Advaita doesn’t ask you to take anything on trust; it asks only that you should have a passionate craving to know Reality; it states that you can experience God as surely as you can experience joy or pain. And there are men in India today – hundreds of them for all I know – who have the certitude that they have done so. I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that you can attain Reality by knowledge. In later ages the sages of India in recognition of human infirmity admitted that salvation may be won by the way of love and the way of works, but they never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.’

CHAPTER 7

I must interrupt myself to make it plain that I am not attempting here to give anything in the nature of a description of the philosophical system known as Vedanta. I have not the knowledge to do so, but even if I had this would not be the proper place for it. Our conversation was a long one and Larry told me a great deal more than I have felt it possible to set down in what after all purports to be a novel. My concern is with Larry. I should not have touched on such an intricate subject at all except that it seemed to me that without at least some slight account of his speculations and the singular experiences that were perhaps occasioned by them I could not give plausibility to the line of conduct which he was led to adopt and with which I shall presently acquaint the reader. It irks me that I cannot hope with any words of mine to give an idea of the pleasantness of his voice that invested even his most casual utterances with persuasiveness, or of the constant change in his expression, from grave to gently gay, from reflective to playful, that accompanied his thoughts like the ripple of a piano when the violins with a great sweep sing the several themes of a concerto. Although he spoke of serious things he spoke of them quite naturally, in a conversational tone, with a certain diffidence, perhaps, but without any more constraint than if he had been speaking of the weather and the crops. If I have given the impression that there was anything didactic in his manner the fault is mine. His modesty was as evident as his sincerity.

There was no more than a sprinkling of people in the café. The roisterers had long since departed. The sad creatures who make a business of love had gone to their sordid dwellings. Now and then a tired-looking man came in to have a glass of beer and a sandwich, or one, who seemed only half awake, for a cup of coffee. White-collar workers. One had been on a night shift and was going home to bed; the other, roused by the call of an alarm clock, was on his unwilling way to the long day’s labour. Larry appeared as unconscious of the time as of the surroundings. I have found myself in the course of my life in many strange situations. More than once I have been within a hair’s breadth of death. More than once I have touched hands with romance and known it. I have ridden a pony through Central Asia along the road that Marco Polo took to reach the fabulous lands of Cathay; I have drunk a glass of Russian tea in a prim parlour in Petrograd while a soft-spoken little man in a black coat and striped trousers told me how he had assassinated a grand duke. I have sat in a drawing-room in Westminster and listened to the serene geniality of a piano trio of Haydn’s while the bombs were crashing without; but I do not think I have ever found myself in a stranger situation than when I sat on the red-plush seats of that garish restaurant for hour after hour while Larry talked of God and eternity, of the Absolute and the weary wheel of endless becoming.

CHAPTER 8

Larry had been silent for a few minutes, and unwilling to hurry him, I waited. Presently he gave me a friendly little smile as though he had suddenly once more become aware of me.

‘When I got down to Travancore I found I needn’t have asked for information about Shri Ganesha. Everyone knew of him. For many years he’d lived in a cave in the hills, but finally he’d been persuaded to move down to the plain where some charitable person had given him a plot of land and had built a little adobe house for him. It was a long way from Trivandrum, the capital, and it took me all day, first by train and then by bullock cart, to get to the Ashrama. I found a young man at the entrance of the compound and asked him if I could see the Yogi. I’d brought with me the basket of fruit which is the customary gift to offer. In a few minutes the young man came back and led me into a long hall with windows all around it. In one corner Shri Ganesha sat in the attitude of meditation on a raised dais covered with a tiger skin. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said. I was surprised, but supposed my friend of Madura had told him something about me. But he shook his head when I mentioned his name. I presented my fruit and he told the young man to take it away. We were left alone and he looked at me without speaking. I don’t know how long the silence lasted. It might have been for half an hour. I’ve told you what he looked like; what I haven’t told you is the serenity that he irradiated, the goodness, the peace, the selflessness. I was hot and tired after my journey, but gradually I began to feel wonderfully rested. Before he’d said another word I knew that this was the man I’d been seeking.’

‘Did he speak English?’ I interrupted.

‘No. But, you know, I’m pretty quick at languages, I’d picked up enough Tamil to understand and make myself understood in the South. At last he spoke.

‘“What have you come here for?” he asked.

‘I began to tell him how I’d come to India and how I’d passed my time for three years; how, on report of their wisdom and sanctity, I’d gone to one holy man after another and had found no one to give me what I looked for. He interrupted me.

‘“All that I know. There is no need to tell me. What have you come here for?”

‘“So that you may be my Guru,” I answered.

‘“Brahman alone is the Guru,” he said.

‘He continued to look at me with a strange intensity and then suddenly his body became rigid, his eyes seemed to turn inwards, and I saw that he’d fallen into the trance which the Indians call Samadhi and in which they hold the duality of subject and object vanishes and you become Knowledge Absolute. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in front of him, and my heart beat violently. After how long a time I don’t know he sighed and I realized that he had recovered normal consciousness. He gave me a glance sweet with loving-kindness.

‘“Stay,” he said. “They will show you where you may sleep.”

‘I was given as a dwelling-place the shack in which Shri Ganesha had lived when first he came down to the plain. The hall in which he now passed both day and night had been built when disciples gathered around him and more and more people, attracted by his fame, came to visit him. So that I mightn’t be conspicuous I adopted the comfortable Indian dress and I got so sunburnt that unless your attention was drawn to me you might have taken me for a native. I read a great deal. I meditated. I listened to Shri Ganesha when he chose to talk; he didn’t talk very much, but he was always willing to answer questions and it was wonderfully inspiring to listen to him. It was like music in your ears. Though in his youth he had himself practised very severe austerities he did not enjoin them on his disciples. He sought to wean them from the slavery of selfhood, passion, and sense, and told them that they could acquire liberation by tranquillity, restraint, renunciation, resignation, by steadfastness of mind and by an ardent desire for freedom. People used to come from the nearby town three or four miles away, where there was a famous temple to which great crowds flocked once a year for a festival; they came from Trivandrum and from far-off places to tell him their troubles, to ask his advice, to listen to his teaching; and all went away strengthened in soul and at peace with themselves. What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self. But it wasn’t his teaching that was so remarkable; it was the man himself, his benignity, his greatness of soul, his saintliness. His presence was a benediction. I was very happy with him. I felt that at last I had found what I wanted. The weeks, the months passed with unimaginable rapidity. I proposed to stay either till he died, and he told us that he did not intend very much longer to inhabit his perishable body, or till I received illumination, the state when you have at last burst the bonds of ignorance, and know with a certainty there is no disputing that you and the Absolute are one.’

‘And then?’

‘Then, if what they say is true, there is nothing more. The soul’s course on earth is ended and it will return no more.’

‘And is Shri Ganesha dead?’ I asked.

‘Not so far as I know.’

As he spoke he saw what was implied in my question and gave a light laugh. He went on after a moment’s hesitation, but in such a manner as led me at first to suppose that he wished to avoid answering the second question that he well knew was on the tip of my tongue, the question, of course, whether he had received illumination.

‘I didn’t stay at the Ashrama continuously. I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a native forestry officer whose permanent residence was on the outskirts of a village at the foot of the mountains. He was a devotee of Shri Ganesha and when he could get away from his work came and spent two or three days with us. He was a nice fellow and we had long talks. He liked to practise his English on me. After I’d known him for some time, he told me that the forestry service had a bungalow up in the mountains and if ever I wanted to go there to be by myself he would give me the key. I went there now and then. It was a two-day journey; first you had to go by bus to the forestry officer’s village, then you had to walk, but when you got there it was magnificent in its grandeur and its solitude. I took what I could in a knapsack on my back and hired a bearer to carry provisions for me, and I stayed till they were exhausted. It was only a log cabin with a cookhouse behind it and for furniture there was nothing but a trestle bed on which to put your sleeping-mat, a table, and a couple of chairs. It was cool up there and at times it was pleasant to light a fire at night. It gave me a wonderful thrill to know that there wasn’t a living soul within twenty miles of me. At night I used often to hear the roar of a tiger or the racket of elephants as they crashed through the jungle. I used to take long walks in the forest. There was one place where I loved to sit because from it I saw the mountains spread before me and below, a lake to which at dusk the wild animals, deer, pig, bison, elephant, leopard came to drink.

‘When I’d been at the Ashrama just two years I went up to my forest retreat for a reason that’ll make you smile. I wanted to spend my birthday there. I got there the day before. Next morning I awoke before dawn and I thought I’d go and see the sunrise from the place I’ve just told you about. I knew the way blindfold. I sat down under a tree and waited. It was night still, but the stars were pale in the sky, and day was at hand. I had a strange feeling of suspense. So gradually that I was hardly aware of it light began to filter through the darkness, slowly, like a mysterious figure slinking between the trees. I felt my heart beating as though at the approach of danger. The sun rose.’

Larry paused and a rueful smile played on his lips.

‘I have no descriptive talent, I don’t know the words to paint a picture; I can’t tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendour. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I’d never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and travelled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstasy of my bliss. When I came to myself I was exhausted and trembling. I fell asleep.

‘It was high noon when I woke. I walked back to the bungalow, and I was so light at heart that it seemed to me that I hardly touched the ground. I made myself some food, gosh, I was hungry, and I lit my pipe.’

Larry lit his pipe now.

‘I dared not think that this was illumination that I, Larry. Darrell of Marvin, Illinois, had received when others striving for it for years, with austerity and mortification, still waited.’

‘What makes you think that it was anything more than a hypnotic condition induced by your state of mind combined with the solitude, the mystery of the dawn, and the burnished steel of your lake?’

‘Only my overwhelming sense of its reality. After all it was an experience of the same order as the mystics have had all over the world through all the centuries, Brahmins in India, Sufis in Persia, Catholics in Spain, Protestants in New England; and so far as they’ve been able to describe what defies description they’ve described it in similar terms. It’s impossible to deny the fact of its occurrence; the only difficulty is to explain it. If I was for a moment one with the Absolute or if it was an inrush from the subconscious of an affinity with the universal spirit which is latent in all of us, I wouldn’t know.’

Larry paused for an instant and threw me a quizzical glance.

‘By the way, can you touch your little finger with your thumb?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ I said with a laugh, proving it with the appropriate action.

‘Are you aware that that’s something that only man and the primates can do? It’s because the thumb is opposable to the other digits that the hand is the admirable instrument it is. Isn’t it possible that the opposable thumb, doubtless in a rudimentary form, was developed in the remote ancestor of man and the gorilla in certain individuals, and was a characteristic that only became common to all after innumerable generations? Isn’t it at least possible that these experiences of oneness with Reality that so many diverse persons have had point to a development in the human consciousness of a sixth sense which in the far, far future will be common to all men so that they may have as direct a perception of the Absolute as we have now of the objects of sense?’

‘And how would you expect that to affect them?’ I asked.

‘I can as little tell you that as the first creature that found it could touch its little finger with its thumb could have told you that infinite consequences were entailed in that insignificant action. So far as I’m concerned I can only tell you that the intense sense of peace, joy, and assurance that possessed me in that moment of rapture abides with me still and that the vision of the world’s beauty is as fresh and vivid now as when first my eyes were dazzled by it.’

‘But Larry, surely your idea of the Absolute forces you to believe that the world and its beauty are merely an illusion – the fabric of Maya.’

‘It’s a mistake to think that the Indians look upon the world as an illusion; they don’t; all they claim is that it’s not real in the same sense as the Absolute. Maya is only a speculation devised by those ardent thinkers to explain how the Infinite could produce the Finite. Samkara, the wisest of them all, decided that it was an insoluble mystery. You see, the difficulty is to explain why Brahman, which is Being, Bliss, and Intelligence, which is unalterable, which ever is and forever maintains itself in rest, which lacks nothing and needs nothing and so knows neither change nor strife, which is perfect, should create the world. Well, if you ask that question the answer you’re generally given is that the Absolute created the world in sport without reference to any purpose. But when you think of flood and famine, of earthquake and hurricane and all the ills that flesh is heir to, your moral sense is outraged at the idea that so much that is shocking can have been created in play. Shri Ganesha had too much kindliness of heart to believe that; he looked upon the world as the expression of the Absolute and as the overflow of its perfection. He taught that God cannot help creating and that the world is the manifestation of his nature. When I asked how, if the world was a manifestation of the nature of a perfect being, it should be so hateful that the only reasonable aim man can set before him is to liberate himself from its bondage, Shri Ganesha answered that the satisfactions of the world are transitory and that only the Infinite gives enduring happiness. But endless duration makes good no better, nor white any whiter. If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premiss of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

‘The Aryans when they first came down into India saw that the world we know is but an appearance of the world we know not; but they welcomed it as gracious and beautiful; it was only centuries later, when the exhaustion of conquest, when the debilitating climate had sapped their vitality so that they became a prey to invading hordes, that they saw only evil in life and craved for liberation from its return. But why should we of the West, we Americans especially, be daunted by decay and death, hunger and thirst, sickness, old age, grief, and delusion? The spirit of life is strong in us. I felt more alive then, as I sat in my log cabin smoking my pipe, than I had ever felt before. I felt in myself an energy that cried out to be expended. It was not for me to leave the world and retire to a cloister, but to live in the world and love the objects of the world, not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them. If in those moments of ecstasy I had indeed been one with the Absolute, then, if what they said was true, nothing could touch me and when I had worked out the karma of my present life I should return no more. The thought filled me with dismay. I wanted to live again and again. I was willing to accept every sort of life, no matter what its pain and sorrow; I felt that only life after life, life after life could satisfy my eagerness, my vigour, and my curiosity.

‘Next morning I started down the mountain and the day after arrived at the Ashrama. Shri Ganesha was surprised to see me in European clothes. I’d put them on at the forestry officer’s bungalow when I started uphill because it was colder there and hadn’t thought to change them.

‘“I’ve come to bid you farewell, master,” I said. “I am going back to my own people.”

‘He did not speak. He was sitting, as ever, cross-legged on the tiger skin on the dais. A stick of incense burnt in the brazier before it and scented the air with its faint fragrance. He was alone as he had been on the first day I saw him. He looked at me with an intensity so piercing that I had the impression he saw into the deepest recesses of my being. I know he knew what had happened.

‘“It is well,” he said. “You have been gone long enough.”

‘I went down on my knees and he gave me his blessing. When I rose to my feet my eyes were filled with tears. He was a man of noble and saintly character. I shall always look upon it as a privilege to have known him. I said good-bye to the devotees. Some had been there for years; some had come after me. I left my few belongings and my books, thinking they might be useful to someone, and with my knapsack on my back, in the same old slacks and brown coat I had arrived in, a battered topee on my head, I trudged back to the town. A week later I boarded a ship at Bombay and landed at Marseilles.’

Silence fell upon us as we pursued our separate reflections; but, tired though I was, there was one more point which I very much wanted to put to him, and it was I who finally spoke.

‘Larry, old boy,’ I said, ‘this long quest of yours started with the problem of evil. It was the problem of evil that urged you on. You’ve said nothing all this time to indicate that you’ve reached even a tentative solution of it.’

‘It may be that there is no solution or it may be that I’m not clever enough to find it. Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of God. “It is like a game,” he said. “In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil. The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation.” I would reject that with all my strength. The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth’s crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour, and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can’t make it anything but fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn’t it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?’

‘It’s an ingenious notion, Larry. I don’t think it’s very satisfactory.’

‘Neither do I,’ he smiled. ‘The best to be said for it is that when you’ve come to the conclusion that something is inevitable all you can do is to make the best of it.’

‘What are your plans now?’

‘I’ve got a job of work to finish here and then I shall go back to America.’

‘What to do?’

‘Live.’

‘How?’

He answered very coolly, but with an impish twinkle in his eyes, for he knew very well how little I expected such a reply.

‘With calmness, forbearance, compassion, selflessness, and continence.’

‘A tall order,’ I said. ‘And why continence? You’re a young man; is it wise to attempt to suppress what with hunger is the strongest instinct of the human animal?’

‘I am in the fortunate position that sexual indulgence with me has been a pleasure rather than a need. I know by personal experience that in nothing are the wise men of India more dead right than in their contention that chastity intensely enhances the power of the spirit.’

‘I should have thought that wisdom consisted in striking a balance between the claims of the body and the claims of the spirit.’

‘That is just what the Indians maintain that we in the West haven’t done. They think that we with our countless inventions, with our factories and machines and all they produce, have sought happiness in material things, but that happiness rests not in them, but in spiritual things. And they think the way we have chosen leads to destruction.’

‘And are you under the impression that America is a suitable place to practise the particular virtues you mentioned?’

‘I don’t see why not. You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We care nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.’

‘It’s a noble one, Larry.’

‘Isn’t it worth while to try to live up to it?’

‘But can you for a moment imagine that you, one man, can have any effect on such a restless, busy, lawless, intensely individualistic people as the people of America? You might as well try to hold back the waters of the Mississippi with your bare hands.’

‘I can try. It was one man who invented the wheel. It was one man who discovered the law of gravitation. Nothing that happens is without effect. If you throw a stone in a pond the universe isn’t quite the same as it was before. It’s a mistake to think that those holy men of India lead useless lives. They are a shining light in the darkness. They represent an ideal that is a refreshment to their fellows; the common run may never attain it, but they respect it and it affects their lives for good. When a man becomes pure and perfect the influence of his character spreads so that they who seek truth are naturally drawn to him. It may be that if I lead the life I’ve planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third; it’s just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and that they in their turn will teach what they have learnt to others.’

‘I wonder if you have any idea what you’re up against, Larry. You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they’ve discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction – the wisecrack.’

‘I’m a pretty tough guy,’ smiled Larry.

‘Well, all I can say is that it’s damned lucky for you that you have a private income.’

‘It’s been of great use to me. Except for that I shouldn’t have been able to do all I’ve done. But my apprenticeship is over. From now on it can only be a burden to me. I shall rid myself of it.’

‘That would be very unwise. The only thing that may make the kind of life you propose possible is financial independence.’

‘On the contrary, financial independence would make the life I propose meaningless.’

I couldn’t restrain a gesture of impatience.

‘It may be all very well for the wandering mendicant in India; he can sleep under a tree and the pious are willing enough to acquire merit by filling his begging-bowl with food. But the American climate is far from suitable for sleeping out in the open, and though I don’t pretend to know much about America, I do know that if there’s one thing your countrymen are agreed upon it is that if you want to eat you must work. My poor Larry, you’d be sent to the workhouse as a vagrant before ever you got into your stride.’

He laughed.

‘I know. One must adapt oneself to one’s environment and of course I’d work. When I get to America I shall try to get a job in a garage. I’m a pretty good mechanic and I don’t think it ought to be difficult.’

‘Wouldn’t you then be wasting energy that might be more usefully employed in other ways?’

‘I like manual labour. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating. I remember reading a biography of Spinoza and thinking how silly the author was to look upon it as a terrible hardship that in order to earn his scanty living Spinoza had to polish lenses. I’m sure it was a help to his intellectual activity, if only because it diverted his attention for a while from the hard work of speculation. My mind is free when I’m washing a car or tinkering with a carburettor and when the job’s done I have the pleasant sensation of having accomplished something. Naturally I wouldn’t want to stay in a garage indefinitely. It’s many years since I was in America and I must learn it afresh. I shall try to get work as a truck driver. In that way I should be able to travel from end to end of the country.’

‘You’ve forgotten perhaps the most important use of money. It saves time. Life is so short, and there’s so much to do, one can’t afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.’

Larry smiled.

‘True enough and I hadn’t thought of it, but I could cope with that difficulty by having my own taxi.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘Eventually I shall settle in New York, among other reasons because of its libraries; I can live on very little, I don’t mind where I sleep and I’m quite satisfied with one meal a day; by the time I’ve seen all I want to of America I should be able to have saved enough to buy a taxi and become a taxi driver.’

‘You ought to shut up, Larry. You’re as crazy as a loon.’

‘Not at all. I’m very sensible and practical. As an owner-driver I would need to work only for as many hours as would provide for my board and lodging and for the depreciation on the car. The rest of my time I could devote to other work and if I wanted to go anywhere in a hurry I could always go in my taxi.’

‘But, Larry, a taxi is just as much of a possession as a government bond,’ I said, to tease him. ‘As an owner-driver you’d be a capitalist.’

He laughed.

‘No. My taxi would be merely the instrument of my labour. It would be an equivalent to the staff and the begging-bowl of the wandering mendicant.’

On this note of banter our conversation ended. I had noticed for some time that people were coming into the café with greater frequency. One man in evening dress sat down not far from us and ordered himself a substantial breakfast. He had the tired but satisfied mien of one who looks back with complacency upon a night of amorous dalliance. A few old gentlemen, early risers because old age needs little sleep, were drinking their café au lait with deliberation while through thick-lensed spectacles they read the morning paper. Younger men, some of them neat and spruce, others in threadbare coats, hurried in to devour a roll and swallow a cup of coffee on their way to a shop or an office. An old crone entered with a pile of newspapers and went round offering them for sale, vainly as far as I could see, at the various tables. I looked out of the great plate glass windows and saw that it was broad daylight. A minute or two later the electric light was turned off except at the rear of the huge restaurant. I looked at my watch. It was past seven o’clock.

‘What about a spot of breakfast?’ I said.

We had croissants, all crisp and hot from the baker’s, and café au lait. I was tired and listless, and felt certain I looked like the wrath of God, but Larry seemed as fresh as ever. His eyes were shining, there wasn’t a line on his smooth face, and he didn’t look a day more than twenty-five. The coffee revived me.

‘Will you allow me to give you a piece of advice, Larry? It’s not a thing I give often.’

‘It’s not a thing I take often,’ he answered with a grin.

‘Will you think very carefully before you dispossess yourself of your very small fortune? When it’s gone, it’s gone for ever. A time may come when you’ll want money very badly, either for yourself or for somebody else, and then you’ll bitterly regret that you were such a fool.’

There was a glint of mockery in his eyes as he answered, but it was devoid of malice.

‘You attach more importance to money than I do.’

‘I can well believe it,’ I answered tartly. ‘You see, you’ve always had it and I haven’t. It’s given me what I value almost more than anything else in life – independence. You can’t think what a comfort it’s been to me to think that if I wanted to I could tell anyone in the world to go to hell.’

‘But I don’t want to tell anyone in the world to go to hell, and if I did the lack of a bank balance wouldn’t prevent me. You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.

‘You’re an obstinate brute, Larry.’

‘I know. I can’t help it. But in any case I have plenty of time to change my mind if I want to. I’m not going back to America till next spring. My friend Auguste Cottet, the painter, has lent me a cottage at Sanary and I’m going to spend the winter there.’

Sanary is an unpretentious seaside resort on the Riviera, between Bandol and Toulon, and it is frequented by artists and writers who do not care for the garish mummery of St Tropez.

‘You’ll like it if you don’t mind its being as dull as ditchwater.’

‘I have work to do. I’ve collected a lot of material and I’m going to write a book.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘You’ll see when it comes out,’ he smiled.

‘If you’d like to send it to me when it’s finished I think I can get it published for you.’

‘You needn’t bother about that. I have some American friends who run a small press in Paris and I’ve arranged with them to print it for me.’

‘But you can’t expect a book brought out like that to have any sale and you won’t get any reviews.’

‘I don’t care if it’s reviewed and I don’t expect it to sell. I’m only printing enough copies to send to my friends in India and the few people I know in France who might be interested in it. It’s of no particular importance. I’m only writing it to get all that material out of the way, and I’m publishing it because I think you can only tell what a thing’s like when you see it in print.’

‘I see the point of both those reasons.’

We had finished our breakfast by now and I called the waiter for the bill. When it came I passed it over to Larry.

‘If you’re going to chuck your money down the drain you can damn well pay for my breakfast.’

He laughed and paid. I was stiff from sitting so long and as we walked out of the restaurant my sides ached. It was good to get into the fresh clean air of the autumn morning. The sky was blue, and the Avenue de Clichy, a sordid thoroughfare by night, had a mild jauntiness, like a painted, haggard woman walking with a girl’s springy step, that was not displeasing. I signalled a passing taxi.

‘Can I give you a lift?’ I asked Larry.

‘No. I shall walk down to the Seine and have a swim at one of the baths, then I must go to the Bibliotheque, I’ve got some research to do there.’

We shook hands and I watched him cross the road with his loose, long-legged stride. I, being made of stuff less stern, stepped into a taxi and returned to my hotel. When I got into my sitting-room I noticed that it was after eight.

‘This is a nice hour for an elderly gentleman to get home,’ I remarked disapprovingly to the nude lady (under a glass case) who had since the year 1813 been lying on top of the clock in what I should have thought was a position of extreme discomfort.

She continued to look at her gilt bronze face in a gilt bronze mirror, and all the clock said was: tick, tick. I turned on a hot bath. When I had lain in it till it was tepid, I dried myself, swallowed a sleeping-tablet, and taking to bed with me Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin, which happened to be on the night table, read till I fell asleep.

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER 1

ONE MORNING, SIX months later, in April, I was busy writing in my study on the roof of my house at Cap Ferrat when a servant came up to say that the police of St Jean (my neighbouring village) were below and wished to see me. I was vexed at being interrupted and could not imagine what they wanted. My conscience was at ease and I had already given my subscription to the Benevolent Fund. In return I had received a card, which I kept in my car so that if I was stopped for exceeding the speed limit or found parked on the wrong side of a street I could unostentatiously let it be seen while producing my driving licence and so escape with an indulgent caution. I thought it more likely then that one of my servants had been the victim of an anonymous denunciation, that being one of the amenities of French life, because her papers were not in order; but being on good terms with the local cops, whom I never allowed to leave my house without a glass of wine to speed them on their way, I anticipated no great difficulty. But they, for they worked in pairs, had come on a very different errand.

After we had shaken hands and inquired after our respective healths, the senior of the two – he was called a brigadier and had one of the most imposing moustaches I ever saw – fished a notebook out of his pocket. He turned over the pages with a dirty thumb.

‘Does the name Sophie Macdonald say something to you?’ he asked.

‘I know a person of that name,’ I replied cautiously.

‘We have just been in telephonic communication with the police station at Toulon and the chief inspector requests you to betake yourself there (vous prie de vous y rendre) without delay.’

‘For what reason?’ I asked. ‘I am only slightly acquainted with Mrs Macdonald.’

I jumped to the conclusion that she had got into trouble, probably connected with opium, but I didn’t see why I should be mixed up in it.

‘That is not my affair. There is no doubt that you have had dealings with this woman. It appears that she has been missing from her lodgings for five days and a body has been fished out of the harbour which the police have reason to believe is hers. They want you to identify it.’

A cold shiver passed through me. I was not, however, too much surprised. It was likely enough that the life she led would incline her in a moment of depression to put an end to herself.

‘But surely she can be identified by her clothes and her papers.’

‘She was found stark naked with her throat cut.’

‘Good God!’ I was horrified. I reflected for an instant. For all I knew the police could force me to go and I thought I had better submit with good grace. ‘Very well. I will take the first train I can.’

I looked up a timetable and found that I could catch one that would get me to Toulon between five and six. The brigadier said he would phone the chief inspector to that effect and asked me on my arrival to go straight to the police station. I did no more work that morning. I packed a few necessary things in a suitcase and after luncheon drove to the station.

CHAPTER 2

On presenting myself at the headquarters of the Toulon police I was immediately ushered into the room of the chief inspector. He was sitting at a table, a heavy, swarthy man of saturnine appearance whom I took to be a Corsican. He threw me, perhaps from force of habit, a suspicious glance; but noticing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, which I had taken the precaution to put in my buttonhole, with an unctuous smile asked me to sit down and proceeded to make profuse apologies for having been obliged to incommode a person of my distinction. Adopting a similar tone, I assured him that nothing could make me happier than to be of service to him. Then we got down to brass tacks and he resumed his brusque, rather insolent manner. Looking at some papers before him, he said:

‘This is a dirty business. It appears that the woman Macdonald had a very bad reputation. She was a drunkard, a dope fiend, and a nymphomaniac. She was in the habit of sleeping not only with sailors off the ships, but with the riffraff of the town. How does it happen that a person of your age and respectability should be acquainted with such a character?’

I was inclined to tell him that it was no business of his, but from a diligent perusal of hundreds of detective stories I have learnt that it is well to be civil with the police.

‘I knew her very little. I met her when she was a girl in Chicago, where she afterwards married a man of good position. I met her again in Paris a year or so ago through friends of hers and mine.’

I had been wondering how on earth he had ever connected me with Sophie, but now he pushed forward a book.

‘This volume was found in her room. If you will kindly look at the dedication you will see that it hardly suggests that your acquaintance with her was as slight as you claim.’

It was the translation of that novel of mine that she had seen in the bookshop window and asked me to write in. Under my own name I had written ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,’ because it was the first thing that occurred to me. It certainly looked a trifle familiar.

‘If you are suggesting that I was her lover, you are mistaken.’

‘It would be no affair of mine,’ he replied, and then with a gleam in his eye: ‘And without wishing to say anything offensive to you I must add that from what I have heard of her proclivities I should not say you were her type. But it is evident that you would not address a perfect stranger as mignonne.’

‘That line, monsieur le commissaire, is the first line of a celebrated poem by Ronsard, whose works I am certain are familiar to a man of your education and culture. I wrote it because I felt sure she knew the poem and would recall the following lines, which might suggest to her that the life she was leading was, to say the least of it, indiscreet.’

‘Evidently I have read Ronsard at school, but with all the work I have to do I confess that the lines you refer to have escaped my memory.’

I repeated the first stanza and knowing very well he had never heard the poet’s name till I mentioned it, had no fear that he would recall the last one which can hardly be taken as an incitement to virtue.

‘She was apparently a woman of some education. We found a number of detective stories in her room and two or three volumes of poetry. There was a Baudelaire and a Rimbaud and an English volume by someone called Eliot. Is he known?’

‘Widely.’

‘I have no time to read poetry. In any case I cannot read English. If he is a good poet it is a pity he doesn’t write in French, so that educated people could read him.’

The thought of my chief inspector reading The Waste Land filled me with pleasure. Suddenly he pushed a snapshot towards me.

‘Have you any idea who that is?’

I immediately recognized Larry. He was in bathing trunks, and the photograph, a recent one, had been taken, I guessed, during the summer part of which he had spent with Isabel and Gray at Dinard. My first impulse was to say I did not know, for I wanted nothing less than to get Larry mixed up in this hateful business, but I reflected that if the police discovered his identity my assertion would look as if I thought there was something to hide.

‘He’s an American citizen called Laurence Darrell.’

‘It was the only photograph found among the woman’s effects. What was the connexion between them?’

‘They both came from the same village near Chicago. They were childhood friends.’

‘But this photograph was taken not long ago, I suspect at a seaside resort in the North or on the West of France. It would be easy to discover the exact place. What is he, this individual?’

‘An author,’ I said boldly. The inspector slightly raised his bushy eyebrows and I guessed that he did not attribute high morality to members of my calling. ‘Of independent means,’ I added to make it sound more respectable.

‘Where is he now?’

Again I was tempted to say I didn’t know, but again decided it would only make things awkward if I did. The French police may have many faults, but their system enables them to find anyone they want without delay.

‘He’s living at Sanary.’

The inspector looked up and it was clear that he was interested.

‘Where?’

I had remembered Larry telling me that Auguste Cottet had lent him his cottage and on my return at Christmas I had written to ask him to come and stay with me for a while, but as I fully expected he had refused. I gave the inspector his address.

‘I’ll telephone to Sanary and have him brought here. It might be worth while to question him.’

I could not but see that the inspector thought that here might be a suspect, but I was only inclined to laugh; I was convinced that Larry could easily prove that he had nothing to do with the affair. I was anxious to hear more about Sophie’s lamentable end, but the inspector only told me in somewhat greater detail what I already knew. Two fishermen had brought the body in. It was a romantic exaggeration of my local policeman’s that it was stark naked. The murderer had left girdle and brassiere. If Sophie had been dressed in the same way as I had seen her he had had to strip her only of her slacks and her jersey. There was nothing to identify her and the police had inserted a description in the local paper. This had brought a woman to the station who kept a small rooming-house in a back street, what the French call a maison de passe, to which men could bring women or boys. She was an agent of the police, who liked to know who frequented her house and what for. Sophie had been turned out of the hotel on the quay at which she was living when I ran across her because her conduct was more scandalous than even the tolerant proprietor could put up with. She had offered to engage a room with a tiny sitting-room beside it in the house of the woman I have just mentioned. It was more profitable to let it two or three times a night for short periods, but Sophie offered to pay so handsomely that the woman consented to rent it to her by the month. She came to the police station now to state that her tenant had been absent for several days, she had not bothered, thinking she had gone for a trip to Marseilles or to Villefranche, where ships of the British fleet had lately arrived, an event that always attracted women, young and old, from all along the coast; but she had read the description of the deceased in the paper and thought it might apply to her tenant. She had been taken to see the body and after a trifling hesitation declared it was that of Sophie Macdonald.

‘But if the body’s been identified, what do you want me for?’

‘Madame Bellet is a woman of high honourability and excellent character,’ said the inspector, ‘but she may have reasons for identifying the dead woman that we do not know; and in any case I think she should be seen by someone who was more closely connected with her so that the fact may be confirmed.’

‘Do you think you have any chance of catching the murderer?’

The inspector shrugged his massive shoulders.

‘Naturally we are making inquiries. We have questioned a number of persons at the bars she used to go to. She may have been killed out of jealousy by a sailor whose ship has already left the port, or by a gangster for whatever money she had on her. It appears that she always had on her a sum that would seem large to a man of that sort. It may be that some people have a strong suspicion who the culprit is, but in the circles she moved it is unlikely that anyone will speak unless it is to his advantage. Consorting with the bad characters she did, such an end as she has come to was only too probable.’

I had nothing to say to this. The inspector asked me to come next morning at nine o’clock, by which time he would have seen ‘this gentleman of the photograph’, after which a policeman would take us to the nearest morgue to see the body.

‘And how about burying her?’

‘If after identifying the body you claim it as friends of the deceased and are prepared to undertake the expense of the funeral yourselves, you will receive the necessary authorization.’

‘I’m sure that Mr Darrell and I would like to have it as soon as possible.’

‘I quite understand. It is a sad story and it is better that the poor woman should be laid to rest without delay. And that reminds me that I have here the card of an undertaker who will arrange the matter for you on reasonable terms and with dispatch. I will just write a line on it so that he may give you every attention.’

I was pretty sure he would get a rake-off on the amount paid, but I thanked him warmly, and when he had ushered me out with every expression of esteem I went forthwith to the address on the card. The undertaker was brisk and businesslike. I chose a coffin, neither the cheapest nor the most expensive, accepted his offer to get me two or three wreaths from a florist of his acquaintance – ‘to save monsieur a painful duty and out of respect for the dead,’ he said – and arranged for the hearse to be at the morgue at two o-clock next day. I could not but admire his efficiency when he told me that I need not trouble to see about a grave, he would do all that was necessary, and ‘Madame was a Protestant, I assume,’ furthermore he would, if I wished it, have a pastor waiting at the cemetery to read the burial service. But since I was a stranger and a foreigner he was sure that I would not take it amiss if he asked me to be good enough to give him a cheque in advance. He named a larger sum than I had foreseen, evidently expecting me to beat him down, and I discerned a look of surprise, perhaps even of disappointment, on his face when I took out my cheque-book and wrote out a cheque without demur.

I took a room at an hotel and next morning returned to the police station. I was kept waiting for some time and then was bidden to go into the chief inspector’s office. I found Larry, looking grave and distressed, sitting in the chair I had sat in the day before. The inspector greeted me with joviality. I might have been a long-lost brother.

‘Well, mon cher monsieur, your friend has answered all the questions it was my duty to put him with the utmost frankness. I have no reason to disbelieve his statement that he had not seen this poor woman for eighteen months. He has accounted for his movements during the last week in a perfectly satisfactory manner as well as for the fact that his photograph was found in her room. It was taken at Dinard and he happened to have it in his pocket one day when he was lunching with her. I have had excellent reports of the young man from Sanary and I am besides, I say it without vanity, a good judge of character myself; I am convinced that he is incapable of committing a crime of this nature. I have ventured to offer him my sympathy that a friend of his childhood, brought up with all the advantages of a healthy family life, should have turned out so badly. But such is life. And now, my dear gentlemen, one of my men will accompany you to the morgue and when you have identified the body, your time is at your own disposal. Go and have a good lunch. I have a card here of the best restaurant in Toulon and I will just write a word on it which will assure you of the patron’s best attention. A good bottle of wine will do you both good after this harrowing experience.’

He was by now positively beaming with good will. We walked to the mortuary with a policeman. They were not doing a lively business in that establishment. There was a body on one slab only. We went up to it and the mortuary attendant uncovered the head. It was not a pleasant sight. The sea water had taken the curl out of the dyed silvery hair and it was plastered dankly on the skull. The face was horribly swollen and it was ghastly to look at, but there was no doubt that it was Sophie’s. The attendant drew the covering sheet down to show us what we both would rather not have seen, the horrid gash across the throat that stretched from ear to ear.

We went back to the station. The chief inspector was busy, but we said what we had to say to an assistant; he left us and presently returned with the necessary papers. We took them to the undertaker.

‘Now let’s have a drink,’ I said.

Larry hadn’t uttered a word since we left the police station to go to the mortuary except on our return there to declare that he identified the body as that of Sophie Macdonald. I led him down to the quay and we sat in the café in which I had sat with her. A strong mistral was blowing and the harbour, usually so smooth, was flecked with white foam. The fishing-boats were gently rocking. The sun shone brightly and, as always happens with a mistral, every object in sight had a peculiar sparkling sharpness as though you looked at it through glasses focused with more than common accuracy. It imparted a nerve-racking, throbbing vitality to everything in sight. I drank a brandy and soda, but Larry never touched the one I had ordered for him. He sat in moody silence and I did not disturb him.

Presently I looked at my watch.

‘We’d better go and have something to eat,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to be at the mortuary at two.’

‘I’m hungry, I didn’t have any breakfast.’

Having judged from his appearance that the chief inspector knew where the food was good, I took Larry to the restaurant he had told us of. Knowing that Larry seldom ate meat, I ordered an omelette and a grilled lobster and then, asking for the wine list, chose, again following the policeman’s counsel, a vintage wine. When it appeared I poured out a glass for Larry.

‘You damn well drink it,’ I said. ‘It may suggest a topic of conversation to you.’

He obediently did as I bade him.

‘Shri Ganesha used to say that silence also is conversation,’ he murmured.

‘That suggests a jolly social gathering of intellectual dons at the University of Cambridge.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stand the racket of this funeral by yourself,’ he said. ‘I haven’t any money.’

‘I’m quite prepared to do that,’ I answered. Then the implication of his remark hit me. ‘You haven’t been and gone and done it really?’

He did not answer for a moment. I noticed the whimsical, teasing glint in his eyes.

‘You haven’t got rid of your money?’

‘Every cent except what I need to last me till my ship comes in.’

‘What ship?’

‘The man who has the next cottage to mine at Sanary is the Marseilles agent of a line of freighters that run from the Near East to New York. They’ve cabled him from Alexandria that they’ve had to put off a couple of sick men there from a ship that’s coming on to Marseilles and asked him to get two more to take their place. He’s a buddy of mine and he’s promised to get me on. I’m giving him my old Citroën as a parting present. When I step on board I shall have nothing but the clothes I stand up in and a few things in a grip.’

‘Well, it’s your own money. You’re free, white, and twenty-one.’

‘Free is the right word. I’ve never been happier or felt more independent in my life. When I get to New York I shall have my wages and they’ll carry me on till I can get a job.’

‘What about your book?’

‘Oh, it’s finished and printed. I made a list of people I wanted it sent to – you ought to get a copy in a day or two.’

‘Thank you.’

There was not much more to say and we finished our meal in amiable silence. I ordered coffee. Larry lit a pipe and I a cigar. I looked at him thoughtfully. He felt my eyes upon him and threw me a glance; his own were lit with an impish twinkle.

‘If you feel like telling me I’m a damned fool, don’t hesitate. I wouldn’t in the least mind.’

‘No, I don’t particularly feel like that. I was only wondering if your life wouldn’t have fallen into a more perfect pattern if you’d married and had children like everybody else.’

He smiled. I must have remarked twenty times on the beauty of his smile, it was so cosy, trustful, and sweet. It reflected the candour, the truthfulness of his charming nature; but I must do so once again, for now, besides all that, there was in it something rueful and tender.

‘It’s too late for that now. The only woman I’ve met whom I could have married was poor Sophie.’

I looked at him with amazement.

‘Can you say that after all that’s happened?’

‘She had a lovely soul, fervid, aspiring, and generous. Her ideals were greathearted. There was even at the end a tragic nobility in the way she sought destruction.’

I was silent. I did not know what to make of these strange assertions.

‘Why didn’t you marry her then?’ I asked.

‘She was a child. To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me when I used to go over to her grandfather’s and we read poetry together under the elm tree that there was in that skinny brat the seed of spiritual beauty.’

I could not but think it surprising that at this juncture he made no mention of Isabel. He could not have forgotten that he had been engaged to her and I could only suppose that he regarded the episode as a foolishness without consequence of two young things not old enough to know their own minds. I was ready to believe that the suspicion had never so much as fugitively crossed his mind that ever since she had been eating her heart out for him.

It was time for us to go. We walked to the square where Larry had left his car, very shabby now, and drove to the mortuary. The undertaker was as good as his word. The businesslike efficiency with which everything was accomplished, under that garish sky, with the violent wind bending the cypresses of the cemetery, added a last note of horror to the proceedings. When it was all over the undertaker shook hands with us cordially.

‘Well, gentlemen, I hope you were satisfied. It went very well.’

‘Very well,’ I said.

‘Monsieur will not forget that I am always at his disposition if he has need of my services. Distance is no object.’

I thanked him. When we came to the gate of the cemetery Larry asked me if there was anything further I wanted him for.

‘Nothing.’

‘I’d like to get back to Sanary as soon as possible.’

‘Drop me at my hotel, will you?’

We spoke never a word as we drove. When we arrived I got out. We shook hands and he went off. I paid my bill, got my bag, and took a taxi to the station. I too wanted to get away.

CHAPTER 3

A few days later I started for England. My intention had been to go straight through, but after what had happened I particularly wanted to see Isabel, so I decided to stop in Paris for twenty-four hours. I wired to her to ask if I could come in late in the afternoon and stay to dinner; when I reached my hotel I found a note from her to say that she and Gray were dining out, but that she would be very glad to see me if I would come not before half past five as she had a fitting.

It was chilly and raining off and on quite heavily, so that I presumed Gray would not have gone to Mortefontaine to play golf. This did not suit me very well, since I wanted to see Isabel alone, but when I arrived at the apartment the first thing she said was that Gray was at the Travellers playing bridge.

‘I told him not to be too late if he wanted to see you, but we’re not dining till nine, which means we needn’t get there before nine-thirty, so we’ve got plenty of time for a good talk. I’ve got all sorts of things to tell you.’

They had sublet the apartment, and the sale of Elliott’s collection was to take place in a fortnight. They wanted to attend it and were moving into the Ritz. Then they were sailing. Isabel was selling everything except the modern pictures that Elliott had had in his house at Antibes. Though she didn’t care much for them she thought quite rightly that they would be a prestige item in their future home.

‘It’s a pity poor Uncle Elliott wasn’t more advanced. Picasso, Matisse, and Rouault, you know. I suppose his pictures are good in their way, but I’m afraid they’ll seem rather old-fashioned.’

‘I wouldn’t bother about that if I were you. Other painters will come along in a few years and Picasso and Matisse won’t seem any more up to date than your Impressionists.’

Gray was in process of concluding his negotiations and with the capital provided by Isabel was to enter a flourishing business as vice-president. It was connected with oil and they were to live at Dallas.

‘The first thing we shall have to do is to find a suitable house. I want a nice garden so that Gray can have somewhere to potter about when he comes home from work and I must have a really large living-room so that I can entertain.’

‘I wonder you don’t take Elliott’s furniture over with you.’

‘I don’t think it would be very suitable. I shall make it all modern, with perhaps just a little touch of Mexican here and there to give it a note. As soon as I get to New York I’ll find out who is the decorator everyone’s going to now.’

Antoine, the manservant, brought in a tray with an array of bottles, and Isabel, always tactful, knowing that nine men out of ten are convinced they can mix a better cocktail than any woman (and they are right), asked me to shake a couple. I poured out the gin and the Noilly-Prat and added the dash of absinthe that transforms a dry Martini from a nondescript drink to one for which the gods of Olympus would undoubtedly have abandoned their home-brewed nectar, a beverage that I have always thought must have been rather like Coca-Cola. I noticed a book on the table as I handed Isabel her glass.

‘Hello!’ I said. ‘Here’s Larry’s book.’

‘Yes, it came this morning, but I’ve been so busy, I had a thousand things to do before lunch and I was lunching out and I was at Molyneux’s this afternoon. I don’t know when I shall have a moment to get down to it.’

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and may be puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do. It was a volume of three hundred pages nicely printed and neatly bound.

‘I suppose you know Larry has been in Sanary all the winter. Did you see him by any chance?’

‘Yes, we were at Toulon together only the other day.’

‘Were you? What were you doing there?’

‘Burying Sophie.’

‘She’s not dead?’ cried Isabel.

‘If she hadn’t been we’d have had no plausible reason to bury her.’

‘That’s not funny.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry. A combination of drink and dope, I suppose.’

‘No, she had her throat cut and was thrown into the sea stark naked.’

Like the brigadier at St Jean I found myself impelled a trifle to exaggerate her undress.

‘How horrible! Poor thing. Of course leading the life she did she was bound to come to a bad end.’

‘That’s what the commissaire de police at Toulon said.’

‘Do they know who did it?’

‘No, but I do. I think you killed her.’

She gave me a stare of amazement.

‘What are you talking about?’ Then with the ghost of a chuckle: ‘Guess again; I have a cast-iron alibi.’

‘I ran across her at Toulon last summer. I had a long talk with her.’

‘Was she sober?’

‘Sufficiently. She told me how it happened that she’d disappeared so unaccountably just a few days before she was going to be married to Larry.’

I noticed Isabel’s face stiffen. I proceeded to tell her exactly what Sophie had told me. She listened warily.

‘I’ve thought of her story a good deal since then and the more I’ve thought about it the more convinced I am that there’s something fishy about it. I’ve lunched here twenty times and you never have liqueurs for luncheon. You’d been lunching alone. Why should there have been a bottle of zubrovka on the tray with the coffee-cup?’

‘Uncle Elliott had just sent it to me. I wanted to see if I liked it as much as when I’d had it at the Ritz.’

‘Yes, I remember how you raved about it then. I was surprised, as you never drink liqueurs anyway; you’re much too careful of your figure for that. I had at the time an impression that you were trying to tantalize Sophie. I thought it was just malice.’

‘Thank you.’

‘On the whole you’re very good at keeping appointments. Why should you have gone out when you were expecting Sophie for something so important to her and interesting to you as a fitting of her wedding dress?’

‘She told you that herself. I wasn’t happy about Joan’s teeth. Our dentist is very busy and I just had to take the time he could give me.’

‘When one goes to a dentist one makes the next appointment before leaving.’

‘I know. But he called me up in the morning and said he had to break it, but could give me three o’clock that afternoon instead, so of course I jumped at it.’

‘Couldn’t the governess have taken Joan.’

‘She was scared, poor darling, I felt she’d be happier if I went with her.’

‘And when you came back and found the bottle of zubrovka three parts empty and Sophie gone, weren’t you rather surprised?’

‘I thought she’d got tired of waiting and gone on to Molyneux’s by herself. I couldn’t make it out when I went there and they told me she hadn’t been.’

‘And the zubrovka?’

‘Well, I did notice that a good deal had been drunk. I thought Antoine had drunk it and I very nearly spoke to him about it, but Uncle Elliott was paying for him and he was a friend of Joseph’s, so I thought I’d better ignore it. He’s a very good servant and if he takes a little nip now and then who am I to blame him?’

‘What a liar you are, Isabel.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Not for a moment.’

Isabel got up and walked over to the chimney-piece. There was a wood fire and it was pleasant on that dreary day. She stood with one elbow on the mantel-shelf in a graceful attitude which it was one of her most charming gifts to be able to assume without any appearance of intention. Like most French women of distinction she dressed in black in the daytime, which peculiarly suited her rich colouring, and on this occasion she wore a dress the expensive simplicity of which displayed her slender figure to advantage. She puffed at her cigarette for a minute.

‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be perfectly frank with you. It was most unfortunate that I had to go out and of course Antoine should never have left the liqueur and the coffee-things in the room. They ought to have been taken away when I went out. When I came back and saw the bottle was nearly empty of course I knew what had happened, and when Sophie disappeared I guessed she’d gone off on a bat. I didn’t say anything about it because I thought it would only distress Larry, and he was worried enough as it was.’

‘Are you sure the bottle wasn’t left there on your explicit instructions?’

‘Quite.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Don’t then.’ She flung the cigarette viciously into the fire. Her eyes were dark with anger. ‘All right, if you want the truth you can have it and to hell with you. I did it and I’d do it again. I told you I’d stick at nothing to prevent her from marrying Larry. You wouldn’t do a thing, either you or Gray. You just shrugged your shoulders and said it was a terrible mistake. You didn’t care a damn. I did.’

‘If you’d left her alone she’d be alive now.’

‘Married to Larry and he’d be utterly miserable. He thought he’d make a new woman of her. What fools men are! I knew that sooner or later she’d break down. It stuck out a mile. You saw yourself when we were all lunching together at the Ritz how jittery she was. I noticed you looking at her when she was drinking her coffee; her hand was shaking so, she was afraid to take the cup with one hand, she had to put both her hands to it to get it up to her mouth. I noticed her watching the wine when the waiter filled our glasses; she followed the bottle with those horrible washed-out eyes of hers like a snake following the fluttering of a new-fledged chick and I knew she’d give her soul for a drink.’

Isabel faced me now, her eyes flashing with passion, and her voice was harsh. She couldn’t get the words out quickly enough.

‘The idea came to me when Uncle Elliott made all that fuss about that damned Polish liqueur. I thought it beastly, but I pretended it was the most wonderful stuff I’d ever tasted. I was certain that if she got a chance she’d never have the strength to resist. That’s why I took her to the dress show. That’s why I offered to make her a present of her wedding dress. That day, when she was going to have the last fitting, I told Antoine I’d have the zubrovka after lunch and then I told him I was expecting a lady and to ask her to wait and offer her some coffee and to leave the liqueur in case she fancied a glass. I did take Joan to the dentist’s, but of course we hadn’t an appointment and he couldn’t see us, so I took her to a newsreel. I’d made up my mind that if I found Sophie hadn’t touched the stuff I’d make the best of things and try to be friends with her. That’s true, I swear it. But when I got home and saw the bottle I knew I’d been right. She’d gone and I’d have bet any money in the world she’d gone for good.’

Isabel was actually panting when she finished.

‘That’s more or less what I imagined had happened,’ I said. ‘You see, I was right; you cut her throat as surely as if you’d drawn the knife across it with your own hands.’

‘She was bad, bad, bad. I’m glad she’s dead.’ She threw herself into a chair. ‘Give me a cocktail, damn you.’

I went over and mixed another.

‘You are a mean devil,’ she said as she took it from me. Then she allowed herself to smile. Her smile was like a child’s that knows it’s been naughty, but thinks it can wheedle you by its ingenuous charm not to be cross. ‘You won’t tell Larry, will you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Cross your heart? Men are so untrustworthy.’

‘I promise you I won’t. But even if I wanted to, I shouldn’t have an opportunity as I don’t suppose I shall ever see him again in my life.’

She sat bolt upright.

‘What do you mean?’

‘At this moment, he’s on a freighter, either as a deck hand or a stoker, on his way to New York.’

‘You don’t mean that? What a strange creature he is! He was up here a few weeks ago for something to do with his book that he had to look up at the public library, but he never said a word about going to America. I’m glad; that means we shall see him.’

‘I doubt it. His America will be as remote from your America as the Gobi desert.’

Then I told her what he had done and what he intended to do. She listened to me open-mouthed. Consternation was written on her face. She interrupted me now and then with an interjection ‘He’s crazy. He’s crazy.’ When I had finished she hung her head and I saw two tears trickle down her cheeks.

‘Now I really have lost him.’

She turned away from me and wept, leaning her face against the back of the chair. Her lovely face was twisted with the grief she did not care to hide. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t know what vain, conflicting hopes she had cherished that my tidings had finally shattered. I had a vague notion that to see him occasionally, at least to know that he was part of her world, had been a bond of union, however tenuous, that his action had finally severed so that she knew herself for ever bereft. I wondered what unavailing regret afflicted her. I thought it would do her good to cry. I picked up Larry’s book and looked at the table of contents. My copy had not arrived when I left the Riviera and I could not now hope to get it for several days. It was not in the least the sort of thing I expected. It was a collection of essays of about the same length as those in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, upon a number of famous persons. The choice he had made puzzled me. There was one on Sulla, the Roman dictator who, having achieved absolute power, resigned it to return to private life; there was one on Akbar, the Mogul conqueror who won an empire; there was one on Rubens, there was one on Goethe, and there was one on the Lord Chesterfield of the Letters. It was obvious that each of the essays had needed a tremendous amount of reading and I was no longer surprised that it had taken Larry so long to produce this book, but I could not see why he had thought it worth while to give it so much time or why he had chosen those particular men to study. Then it occurred to me that every one of them in his own way had made a supreme success of life and I guessed that this was what had interested Larry. He was curious to see what in the end it amounted to.

I skimmed a page to see how he wrote. His style was scholarly, but lucid and easy. There was nothing in it of the pretentiousness or the pedantry that too often characterizes the writing of the amateur. One could tell that he had frequented the best authors as assiduously as Elliott Templeton frequented the nobility and gentry. I was interrupted by a sigh from Isabel. She sat up and finished with a grimace the cocktail which was now luke-warm.

‘If I don’t stop crying my eyes’ll be terrible and we’re going out to dinner tonight.’ She took a mirror out of her bag and looked at herself anxiously. ‘Yes, half an hour with an ice bag over my eyes, that’s what I want.’ She powdered her face and reddened her lips. Then she looked at me reflectively. ‘Do you think any the worse of me for what I did?’

‘Would you care?’

‘Strange as it may seem to you, I would. I want you to think well of me.’

I grinned.

‘My dear, I’m a very immoral person,’ I answered. ‘When I’m really fond of anyone, though I deplore his wrongdoing it doesn’t make me less fond of him. You’re not a bad woman in your way and you have every grace and every charm. I don’t enjoy your beauty any the less because I know how much it owes to the happy combination of perfect taste and ruthless determination. You only lack one thing to make you completely enchanting.’

She smiled and waited.

‘Tenderness.’

The smile died on her lips and she gave me a glance that was totally lacking in amenity, but before she could collect herself to reply Gray lumbered into the room. In the three years he had been in Paris Gray had put on a good many pounds, his face had grown redder, and his hair was thinning rapidly, but he was in rude health and in high spirits. He was unaffectedly pleased to see me. Gray’s conversation was composed of clichés. However shop-worn, he uttered them with an obvious conviction that he was the first person to think of them. He never went to bed, but hit the hay, where he slept the sleep of the just; if it rained, it rained to beat the band and to the very end Paris to him was Gay Paree. But he was so kindly, so unselfish, so upright, so reliable, so unassuming that it was impossible not to like him. I had a real affection for him. He was excited now over their approaching departure.

‘Gosh, it’ll be great to get into harness again,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling my oats already.’

‘Is it all settled then?’

‘I haven’t signed on the dotted line yet, but it’s on ice. The fella I’m going in with was a room-mate of mine at college, and he’s a good scout, and I’m dead sure he wouldn’t hand me a lemon. But as soon as we get to New York I’ll fly down to Texas to give the outfit the once-over, and you bet I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a nigger in the woodpile before I cough up any of Isabel’s dough.’

‘Gray’s a very good businessman, you know,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t raised in a barn,’ he smiled.

He went on to tell me at somewhat excessive length about the business he was entering, but I understood little of such matters and the only concrete fact I gathered was that he stood a good chance of making a lot of money. He grew so interested in what he was saying that presently he turned to Isabel and said:

‘Look here, why shouldn’t we cut this lousy party and us three go and have a slap-up dinner at the Tour d’Argent by ourselves?’

‘Oh, darling, we can’t do that. They’re giving the party for us.’

‘Anyhow, I couldn’t come now,’ I interrupted. ‘When I heard you were fixed up this evening I called up Suzanne Rouvier and arranged to take her out.’

‘Who’s Suzanne Rouvier?’ asked Isabel.

‘Oh, one of Larry’s gals,’ I said to tease her.

‘I always suspected Larry had a little floozie tucked away somewhere,’ said Gray, with a fat chuckle.

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Isabel. ‘I know all about Larry’s sex life. There isn’t any.’

‘Well, let’s have one more drink before we part,’ said Gray.

We had it and then I said good-bye to them. They came into the hall with me and while I was putting on my coat Isabel slipped her arm through Gray’s and, nestling up to him, looked into his eyes with an expression that imitated very well the tenderness I had accused her of lacking.

‘Tell me, Gray – frankly – do you think I’m hard-boiled?’

‘No, darling, far from it. Why, has anybody been saying you were?’

‘No.’

She turned her head away so that he shouldn’t see, and in a manner that Elliott would certainly have thought very unladylike put out her tongue at me.

‘It’s not the same thing,’ I murmured as I stepped out of the door and closed it behind me.

CHAPTER 4

When I passed through Paris again the Maturins had gone and other people lived in Elliott’s apartment. I missed Isabel. She was good to look at and easy to talk to. She was quick on the uptake and bore no malice. I have never seen her since. I am a poor and dilatory correspondent and Isabel was no letter writer. If she could not communicate with you by telephone or telegram she did not communicate with you. I had a Christmas card from her that Christmas with a pretty picture on it of a house with a Colonial portico surrounded by live oaks, which I took to be the house of the plantation that they had been unable to sell when they wanted the money and which now they were probably willing to keep. The postmark showed that it had been posted at Dallas, So I concluded that the deal had gone through satisfactorily and they were settled there.

I have never been to Dallas, but I suppose that, like other American cities I know, it has a residential district within easy motoring distance of the business section and the country club where the affluent have fine houses in large gardens with a handsome view of hill or dale from the living-room windows. In such a district and in such a house, furnished from cellar to attic in the latest mode by the most fashionable decorator in New York, Isabel certainly dwells. I can only hope that her Renoir, her flower piece by Manet, her landscape by Monet, and her Gauguin do not look too dated. The dining-room is doubtless of a convenient size for the women’s luncheons which she gives at frequent intervals and at which the wine is good and the food superlative. Isabel learnt a great deal in Paris. She would not have settled on the house unless she had seen at a glance that the living-room would do very well for the sub-deb dances which it would be her pleasant duty to give as her daughters grew older. Joan and Priscilla must be now of a marriageable age. I am sure that they have been admirably brought up; they have been sent to the best schools and Isabel has taken care that they should acquire the accomplishments that must make them desirable in the eyes of eligible young men. Though I suppose Gray by now is still a little redder in the face, more jowly, balder, and a good deal heavier, I can’t believe that Isabel has changed. She is still more beautiful than her daughters. The Maturins must be a great asset to the community and I have little doubt that they are as popular as they deserve to be. Isabel is entertaining, gracious, complaisant, and tactful; Gray, of course, is the quintessence of the Regular Guy.

CHAPTER 5

I continued to see Suzanne Rouvier from time to time until an unexpected change in her condition caused her to leave Paris and she too went out of my life. One afternoon, roughly two years after the events that I have just related, having spent an hour pleasantly browsing over the books in the galleries of the Odéon and with nothing to do for a while, I thought I would call on Suzanne. I had not seen her for six months. She opened the door, a palette on her thumb and a paintbrush between her teeth, clad in a smock covered with paint.

‘Ah, c’est vous, cher ami. Entrez, je vous en prie.’

I was a little surprised at this formal address, for generally we spoke to one another in the second person singular, but I stepped into the small room that served both as living-room and studio. There was a canvas on the easel.

‘I’m so busy, I don’t know which way to turn, but sit down and I will go on with my work. I haven’t a moment to waste. You wouldn’t believe it, but I’m giving a one-man show at Meyerheim’s, and I have to get thirty canvases ready.’

‘At Meyerheim’s? That’s wonderful. How on earth have you managed that?’

For Meyerheim is not one of those fly-by-night dealers in the Rue de la Seine who have a small shop that is always on the verge of closing for lack of money to pay the rent. Meyerheim has a fine gallery on the moneyed side of the Seine and he has an international reputation. An artist whom he takes up is well on the way to fortune.

‘Monsieur Achille brought him to see my work and he thinks I have a lot of talent.’

‘À d’autres, ma vieille,’ I replied, which I think can best be translated by: ‘Tell that to the marines, old girl.’

She threw me a glance and giggled.

‘I’m going to be married.’

‘To Meyerheim?’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’ She put down her brushes and her palette. ‘I’ve been working all day and I deserve a rest. Let us have a little glass of porto and I’ll tell you all about it.’

One of the less agreeable features of French life is that you are apt to be pressed to drink a glass of vinegary port at an unseasonable hour. You must resign yourself to it. Suzanne fetched a bottle and two glasses, filled them, and sat down with a sigh of relief.

‘I’ve been standing for hours and my varicose veins are aching. Well, it’s like this. Monsieur Achille’s wife died at the beginning of this year. She was a good woman and a good Catholic, but he did not marry her from inclination, he married her because it was good business, and though he esteemed and respected her it would be an exaggeration to say that her death left him inconsolable. His son is suitably married and is doing well in the firm and now a marriage has been arranged between his daughter and a count. Belgian it is true, but authentic, with a very pretty château in the neighbourhood of Namur. Monsieur Achille thought his poor wife would not wish the happiness of two young people to be deferred on her account, so the marriage, notwithstanding that they are in mourning, is to take place as soon as the financial arrangements are completed. Evidently Monsieur Achille will be lonely in that large house at Lille, and needs a woman not only to minister to his comfort, but also to run the important establishment necessary to his position. To cut a long story short, he has asked me to take the place of his poor wife, for as he very reasonably said: “I married for the first time to eliminate competition between two rival firms, and I do not regret it, but there is no reason why I should not marry the second time to please myself.”’

‘I congratulate you,’ said I.

‘Evidently I shall miss my liberty. I have enjoyed it. But one has to think of the future. Between ourselves, I don’t mind telling you that I shall never see forty again. Monsieur Achille is at a dangerous age; where should I be if he suddenly took it into his head to run after a girl of twenty? And then there is my daughter to think of. She is now sixteen and promises to be as beautiful as her father. I have given her a good education. But it is no good denying facts that stare you in the face; she has neither the talent to be an actress nor the temperament to be a whore like her poor mother: I ask you then, what has she to look forward to? A secretaryship or a job in the post office. Monsieur Achille has very generously agreed that she should live with us and has promised to give her a handsome dot so that she can make a good marriage. Believe me, my dear friend, people can say what they like, but marriage still remains the most satisfactory profession a woman can adopt. Obviously when my daughter’s welfare was concerned I could not hesitate to accept a proposition even at the cost of certain satisfactions which in any case, as the years go by, I should find it more difficult to obtain; for I must tell you that when I am married I propose to be of a ferocious virtue (d ‘une vertu farouche), for my long experience has convinced me that the only basis of a happy marriage is complete fidelity on both sides.’

‘A highly moral sentiment, my pretty,’ I said. ‘And will Monsieur Achille continue to make his fortnightly visits to Paris on business?’

‘Oh, la la, for whom do you take me, my little one? The first thing I said to Monsieur Achille when he asked for my hand was: “Now listen, my dear, when you come to Paris for your board meetings it is understood that I come too. I am not going to trust you here by yourself.” “You cannot imagine that I am capable of committing follies at my age,” he answered. “Monsieur Achille,” I said to him, “you are a man in the prime of life and no one knows better than I that you have a passionate temperament. You have a fine presence and a distinguished air. You have everything to please a woman; in short I think it better that you should not be exposed to temptation.” In the end he agreed to give up his place on the board to his son, who will come to Paris instead of his father. Monsieur Achille pretended to think me unreasonable, but he was in point of fact enormously flattered.’ Suzanne gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Life would be even harder for us poor women than it is if it were not for the unbelievable vanity of men.’

‘All that is very fine, but what has it got to do with your having a one-man show at Meyerheim’s?’

‘You are a little stupid today, my poor friend. Have I not told you for years that Monsieur Achille is a highly intelligent man? He has his position to think of and the people of Lille are censorious. Monsieur Achille wishes me to take the place in society which as the wife of a man of his importance it will be my right to occupy. You know what these provincials are, they love to poke their long noses in other people’s affairs, and the first thing they will ask is: who is Suzanne Rouvier? Well, they will have their answer. She is the distinguished painter whose recent show at the Meyerheim Gallery had a remarkable and well-deserved success. “Madame Suzanne Rouvier, the widow of an officer in the colonial infantry, has with the courage characteristic of our Frenchwomen for some years supported herself and a charming daughter deprived too soon of a father’s care by means of her talent, and we are happy to know that the general public will soon have the opportunity to appreciate the delicacy of her touch and the soundness of her technique at the galleries of the ever perspicacious Monsieur Meyerheim.”’

‘What gibberish is that?’ I said, pricking up my ears.

‘That, my dear, is the advance publicity that Monsieur Achille is putting out. It will appear in every paper in France of any consequence. He has been magnificent. Meyerheim’s terms were onerous, but Monsieur Achille accepted them as if they were a bagatelle. There will be a champagne d’honneur at the private view and the Minister of Fine Arts, who is under an obligation to Monsieur Achille, will open the exhibition with an eloquent speech in which he will dwell upon my virtues as a woman and my talent as a painter and which he will end with the declaration that the state, whose duty and privilege it is to reward merit, has bought one of my pictures for the national collections. All Paris will be there and Meyerheim is looking after the critics himself. He has guaranteed that their notices will be not only favourable but lengthy. Poor devils, they earn so little, it is a charity to give them an opportunity of making something on the side.’

‘You’ve deserved it all, my dear. You’ve always been a good sort.’

‘Et ta sœur,’ she replied, which is untranslatable. ‘But that’s not all. Monsieur Achille has bought in my name a villa on the coast at St Rafael, so I shall take my place in Lille society not only as a distinguished artist, but as a woman of property. In two or three years he is going to retire and we shall live on the Riviera like gentlefolks (comme des gens bien). He can paddle in the sea and catch shrimps while I devote myself to my art. Now I will show you my pictures.’

Suzanne had been painting for several years and she had worked through the manner of her various lovers to arrive at a style of her own. She still could not draw, but she had acquired a pretty sense of colour. She showed me landscapes that she had painted while staying with her mother in the province of Anjou, bits of the gardens at Versailles and the forest at Fontainebleau, street scenes that had taken her fancy in the suburbs of Paris. Her painting was vaporous and unsubstantial, but it had a flowerlike grace and even a certain careless elegance.

There was one picture that took my fancy and because I thought she would be pleased I offered to buy it. I cannot remember whether it was called A Glade in the Forest or The White Scarf and subsequent examination has left me uncertain to this day. I asked the price, which was reasonable, and said I would take it.

‘You’re an angel,’ she cried. ‘My first sale. Of course you can’t have it till after the show, but I’ll see that it gets into the papers that you’ve bought it. After all, a little publicity can do you no harm. I’m glad you’ve chosen that one, I think it’s one of my best.’ She took a hand mirror and looked at the picture in it. ‘It has charm,’ she said, screwing up her eyes. ‘No one can deny that. Those greens – how rich they are and yet how delicate! And that white note in the middle, that is a real find; it ties the picture together, it has distinction. There’s talent there, there can be no doubt of it, there’s real talent.’

I saw that she was already a long way on the road to being a professional painter.

‘And now, my little one, we’ve gossiped long enough, I must get back to work.’

‘And I must be going,’ I said.

‘À propos, is that poor Larry still among the Redskins?’

For that was the disrespectful way in which she was accustomed to refer to the inhabitants of God’s Own Country.

‘So far as I know.’

‘It must be hard for someone like him who is so sweet and gentle. If one can believe the movies life is terrible over there with all those gangsters and cowboys and Mexicans. Not that those cowboys haven’t physical attraction which says something to you. Oh, la la! But it appears that it is excessively dangerous to go out into the streets of New York without a revolver in your pocket.’

She came to the door to see me out and kissed me on both cheeks.

‘We’ve had some good times together. ‘Keep a good recollection of me.’

CHAPTER 6

This is the end of my story. I have heard nothing of Larry, nor indeed did I expect to. Since he generally did what he proposed, I think it likely that on his return to America he got a job in a garage and then drove a truck till he had acquired the knowledge he wanted of the country from which he had for so many years absented himself. When he had done that he may very well have carried out his fantastic suggestion of becoming a taxi driver: true, it was only a random idea thrown across a café table in jest, but I shouldn’t be altogether surprised if he had put it into effect; and I have never since taken a taxi in New York without glancing at the driver on the chance that I might meet Larry’s gravely smiling, deep-set eyes. I never have. War broke out. He would have been too old to fly, but he may be once more driving a truck, at home or abroad; or he may be working in a factory. I should like to think that in his leisure hours he is writing a book in which he is trying to set forth whatever life has taught him and the message he has to deliver to his fellow-men; but if he is, it may be long before it is finished. He has plenty of time, for the years have left no mark on him and to all intents and purposes he is still a young man.

He is without ambition and he has no desire for fame; to become anything of a public figure would be deeply distasteful to him; and so it may be that he is satisfied to lead his chosen life and be no more than just himself. He is too modest to set himself up as an example to others; but it may be he thinks that a few uncertain souls, drawn to him like moths to a candle, will be brought in time to share his own glowing belief that ultimate satisfaction can only be found in the life of the spirit, and that by himself following with selflessness and renunciation the path of perfection he will serve as well as if he wrote books or addressed multitudes.

But this is conjecture. I am of the earth, earthy; I can only admire the radiance of such a rare creature, I cannot step into his shoes and enter into his innermost heart as I sometimes think I can do with persons more nearly allied to the common run of men. Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world’s confusion, so wishful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful, and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States. That is all I can tell of him: I know it is very unsatisfactory; I can’t help it. But as I was finishing this book, uneasily conscious that I must leave my reader in the air and seeing no way to avoid it, I looked back with my mind’s eye on my long narrative to see if there was any way in which I could devise a more satisfactory ending; and to my intense surprise it dawned upon me that without in the least intending to I had written nothing more or less than a success story. For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: Elliott social eminence; Isabel an assured position backed by a substantial fortune in an active and cultured community; Gray a steady and lucrative job, with an office to go to from nine till six every day; Suzanne Rouvier security; Sophie death; and Larry happiness. And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hearts all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all.

THEN AND NOW

This novel is the second of Maugham’s plan to bring to a close his fiction writing career and despite his continuing bereavement over the death of his lover Gerald Haxton, he managed to finish this book by February 1945, using his work as an escape from his personal trauma. It is an historical novel and thus something of a departure for Maugham. Published by Heinemann in 1946, it received excellent reviews, except from Edward Wilson of the New Yorker, who wrote a withering critique of both novel and author. Maugham was sanguine; “Nobody can be liked by everyone,” he commented. The publisher Doubleday had optimistically printed 2,500,000 copies, and their faith was justified when it sold 750,000 in the first fortnight. The film rights were purchased for $200,000.

The narrative opens in Imola, Italy, in 1502, when Niccolò Machiavelli, diplomat and writer, sets out as the city’s emissary to Caesar Borgia. Accompanying him is Piero, the nephew of Biagio Buonaccorsi. Piero is being groomed for government service, and Buonaccorsi is happy to entrust his beloved nephew to the talented and well connected envoy. Piero is rather naïve and excited to be travelling with the great man and does his best to please his master, even singing to him as they ride along. This relationship is largely significant for showing the combination of fear and admiration Machiavelli’s underlings felt for him, yet he in turn was not well used by his own betters.

When the party reaches the Borgia court, the encounter between Machiavelli and Borgia is described in detail, and rightly so, as Caesar Borgia was the inspiration for Machiavelli’s famous work, Il Principe (The Prince). There is also a romance of sorts in the story, when Machiavelli tries to seduce the wife of his host in Imola, which was later to inspire Machiavelli to write The Mandrake.

Then and Now is a pleasant story, with a somewhat lighter tone than one is used to from Maugham; it also offers interesting portraits of Machiavelli and Caesar Borgia, although the descriptions of the politics of the day are rather long and involved. The dialogue is sharp and interesting, and Maugham’s research enables him to depict Renaissance Italy with flair. As a departure from Maugham’s usual subject matter, it is a fascinating diversion.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

EPILOGUE

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito, c. 1600

No one could write a book of this kind out of his head, and I have taken what I wanted where I could find it. My chief source of information has naturally been the works of Machiavelli. I have found much that was to my purpose in Tommasini’s biography and something in Villari’s, and I have made some use of Woodward’s solid Cesar Borgia. I wish to acknowledge the great debt I owe to Count Carlo Beuf for his lively and accurate life of Cæsar, for his kindness in lending me books which otherwise I should never have known about, and for his patience in answering the many questions I put to him.

CHAPTER 1

PLUS CA CHANGE, plus c’est la même chose.

CHAPTER 2

BIAGIO BUONACCORSI HAD had a busy day. He was tired, but being a man of methodical habit before going to bed made a note in his diary. It was brief: ‘The City sent a man to Imola to the Duke.’ Perhaps because he thought it of no importance he did not mention the man’s name: it was Machiavelli. The Duke was Cæsar Borgia.

It had been not only a busy day, but a long one, for Biagio had set forth from his house at dawn. With him on a stout pony went his nephew, Piero Giacomini, whom Machiavelli had consented to take with him. It happened to be Piero’s eighteenth birthday, October 6th, 1502, and so was a fitting day for him to go out into the world for the first time. He was a well set-up youth, tall for his age and of an agreeable aspect. Under his uncle’s guidance, for his mother was a widow, he had received a good education; he could write a good hand and turn a comely phrase, not only in Italian, but in Latin. On the advice of Machiavelli, who passionately admired the ancient Romans, he had acquired more than a cursory knowledge of their history. Machiavelli cherished the conviction that men are always the same and have the same passions, so that when circumstances are similar the same causes must lead to the same effects; and thus, by bearing in mind how the Romans coped with a given situation, men of a later day might conduct themselves with prudence and efficiency. It was the wish both of Biagio and his sister that Piero should enter the government service, in which Biagio held a modest post under his friend Machiavelli. The mission on which Machiavelli was now going seemed a good opportunity for the boy to learn something of affairs, and Biagio knew that he could not have a better mentor. The matter had been settled on the spur of the moment, for it was only the day before that Machiavelli had been given his letter of credence to the Duke and his safe conduct. Machiavelli was of an amiable disposition, a friend to his friends, and when Biagio asked him to take Piero with him immediately agreed. But the lad’s mother, though she saw that it was a chance that could not be missed, was uneasy. He had never been parted from her before and he was young to go out into a hostile world; he was besides a good boy and she was afraid that Machiavelli would corrupt him, for it was notorious that Machiavelli was a gay fellow and a dissolute. He was, moreover, not in the least ashamed of it, and would tell improper stories about his adventures with women of the town and with maid-servants at wayside inns which must bring a blush to a virtuous woman’s cheek. And what made it worse was that he told them so amusingly that though outraged you could not keep a straight face. Biagio reasoned with her.

‘Dear Francesca, now that Niccolo is married he will abandon his loose habits. Marietta, his wife, is a good woman and she loves him. Why should you think him so foolish as to spend money outside for what he can get at home for nothing?’

‘A man who likes women as much as Niccolo will never be content with one,’ said she, ‘and if she is his wife less than ever.’

Biagio thought there was something in what she said, but he was not prepared to admit it. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Piero is eighteen. If he has not lost his innocence already it is quite time he did. Are you a virgin, nephew?’

‘Yes,’ answered Piero, with so much candour that anyone might have been forgiven for believing him.

‘There is nothing that I do not know about my son. He is incapable of doing anything of which I should disapprove.’

‘In that case,’ said Biagio, ‘there is no reason why you should hesitate to entrust him to a man who can be useful in his career and from whom, if he has sense, he can learn much that will be valuable to him all his life.’

Monna Francesca gave her brother a sour look.

‘You are infatuated with the man. You’re like putty in his hands. And how does he treat you? He makes use of you; he makes fun of you. Why should he be your superior in the Chancery? Why are you satisfied to be his subordinate?’

Biagio was of about the same age as Machiavelli, who was thirty-three, but because he had married the daughter of Marsilio Ficino, a celebrated scholar patronized by the Medici who then ruled the city, he had entered the government before him. For in those days influence got a man a job as often as merit. Biagio was of the middle size, plump, with a round face, a high colour and an expression of great good nature. He was honest and hard-working, a man without envy who knew his own limitations and was satisfied with his modest position. He liked good living and good company, and since he asked for no more than he could have, might be counted a happy man. He was not brilliant, but neither was he stupid. Had he been so Machiavelli would not have endured his companionship.

‘Niccolo has the most brilliant mind of anyone at present in the service of the Signory,’ he said now.

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Monna Francesca.

(The Signory was the City Council of Florence and since the expulsion of the Medici eight years before the chief executive body of the State.)

‘He has a knowledge of men and of affairs that men twice his age might envy. Take my word for it, sister, he will go far, and take my word for this too: he is not one to abandon his friends.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch. He’ll cast you aside like an old shoe when he has no further use for you.’

Biagio laughed.

‘Are you so bitter because he never made advances to you, sister? Even with a son of eighteen you must be still attractive to men.’

‘He knows better than to try his tricks with a decent woman. I know his habits. It’s a disgrace that the Signory allows harlots to flaunt themselves in the city to the scandal of respectable people. You like him because ha makes you laugh and tells you dirty stories. You’re as bad as he is.’

‘You must remember that no one tells a dirty story better.’

‘And is it that that makes you think him so wonderfully intelligent?’

Biagio laughed again.

‘No, not only. He made a great success of his mission to France and his dispatches were masterly; even the members of the Signory who don’t like him personally were obliged to admit it.’

Madonna Francesca shrugged her shoulders crossly. Meanwhile Piero, like the prudent young man he was, held his peace. He looked forward without enthusiasm to the job in the Chancery to which his uncle and his mother had destined him, and the idea of going on a journey was very much to his liking. As he had foreseen, his uncle’s worldly wisdom triumphed over his mother’s anxious scruples, and so it came to pass that on the following morning Biagio called for him and, Biagio on foot, Piero on his pony, they went the short distance to Machiavelli’s house.

CHAPTER 3

THE HORSES WERE already at the door, one for Machiavelli and two for the servants he was taking with him. Piero, giving his pony to one of the servants to hold, followed his uncle into the house. Machiavelli was waiting for them with impatience. He greeted them curtly.

‘Now let us start,’ he said.

Marietta was in tears. She was a young woman of no great beauty, but it was not for her beauty that Machiavelli had married her; he had married her, that very year, because it was proper that he should marry, and she was of a reputable family and brought him as good a dowry as a man of his means and position could expect.

‘Don’t weep, dearest,’ he said, ‘you know I shall be gone only a little while.’

‘But you ought not to go,’ she sobbed, and then, turning to Biagio: ‘He’s not fit to ride so far. He’s not well.’

‘What is the matter with you, Niccolo?’ asked Biagio.

‘The old trouble. My stomach is out of order once more. It can’t be helped.’

He took Marietta in his arms.

‘Good-bye, my sweet.’

‘You will write to me often.’

‘Often,’ he smiled.

When he smiled his face lost the sardonic look it generally wore, and there was something engaging in him so that you could understand that Marietta loved him. He kissed her and patted her cheek.

‘Don’t fret, my dear. Biagio will look after you.’

Piero, on entering the room, had stood just within the door. No one paid him attention. Though his uncle was Machiavelli’s most intimate friend, he had seen little of him and had not exchanged more than a few words with him in all his life. Piero took the opportunity to have a good look at the man who would be thenceforth his master. Machiavelli was of the middle height, but because he was so thin looked somewhat taller than he was. He had a small head, with very black hair cut short which fitted his skull like a velvet cap. His dark eyes were small and restless, and his nose long: his lips were thin, and when he was not speaking so tightly closed that his mouth was little more than a sarcastic line. In repose his sallow face wore an expression that was wary, thoughtful, severe and cold. This was evidently not a man you could play pranks with.

Perhaps Machiavelli felt Piero’s uneasy stare, for he gave him a quick, questioning glance.

‘This is Piero?’ he asked Biagio.

‘His mother hopes you will look after him and see that he doesn’t get into mischief.’

Machiavelli gave a thin smile.

‘By observing the unfortunate consequences of my errors he will doubtless learn that virtue and industry are the highways to success in this world and happiness in the next.’

They set forth. They walked the horses over the cobblestones till they came to the city gate, and when they got on to the open road broke into a jog-trot. They had a long way to go and it was prudent to spare the horses. Machiavelli and Piero rode together and the two servants behind. All four were armed, for though Florence was at peace with her neighbours, the country was unsettled and you could never be sure that you might not run across marauding soldiers. The safe conduct the travellers carried would have been of small help to them then. Machiavelli did not speak and Piero, though not by nature shy, was somewhat intimidated by that sharp, set face, a slight frown between the brows, and thought it wise to wait till he was spoken to. The morning, notwithstanding an autumnal chill, was fine, and Piero’s spirits were high. It was grand to be setting out on such an adventure and it was hard to keep silent when he was bubbling over with excitement. There were a hundred questions he wanted to ask. But they rode on and on. Soon the sun was bright in the heavens and the warmth of it was pleasant. Machiavelli never said a word. Now and then he raised one hand to indicate that they should walk the horses.

CHAPTER 4

MACHIAVELLI WAS BUSY with his thoughts. It was much against his will that he went on this mission and he had done his best to get someone else sent in his place. For one thing he was far from well and even now as he rode he had an ache in his stomach; and then, having recently married, he did not wish to pain his wife by leaving her. He had promised her that his absence would be short, but in his heart he knew that the days might run into weeks and the weeks into months before he got permission to return. His mission to France had taught him how protracted diplomatic negotiations might be.

But these were the least of his troubles. The state of Italy was desperate. Louis XII, King of France, was the paramount power. He held a large part of the kingdom of Naples, though insecurely, since the Spaniards who held Sicily and Calabria continually harassed him, but he was in firm possession of Milan and its territories; he was on good terms with Venice and for a consideration had taken the city states of Florence, Siena and Bologna under his protection. He had an alliance with the Pope, who had granted him a dispensation to put away his barren and scrupulous wife so that he might marry Anne of Brittany, the widow of Charles VIII, and in return the King had created the Pope’s son, Cæsar Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, given him Charlotte d’Albret, sister to the King of Navarre, in marriage, and promised to supply troops to enable him to recover the lands, lordships and dominions of the Church, possession of which she had lost.

Cæsar Borgia, known now throughout Italy as II Valentino from the Duchy that Louis XII had bestowed upon him, was still well under thirty. His mercenary captains, of whom the most important were Pagolo Orsini, head of the great Roman house, Gian Paolo Baglioni, Lord of Perugia, and Vitellozzo Vitelli, Lord of Città di Castello, were the best in Italy. He proved himself a bold and astute commander. By force of arms, treachery and the terror he inspired, he made himself prince of a considerable state, and Italy rang with his exploits. Taking advantage of a favourable opportunity be blackmailed the Florentines into hiring him at a large salary with his men-at-arms for a period of three years; but then, having assured themselves of the protection of King Louis by a further payment in hard cash, they revoked Cæsar’s commission and stopped his salary. This enraged him, and presently he took his revenge.

In June of the year with which this narrative is concerned Arezzo, a city subject to Florence, revolted and declared itself independent. Vitellozzo Vitelli, the ablest of Il Valentino’s commanders and bitter enemy of the Florentines because they had executed his brother Paolo, and Baglioni, Lord of Perugia, went to the support of the rebellious citizens and defeated the forces of the Republic. Only the citadel held out. The Signory in a panic sent Piero Soderini to Milan to hasten the expedition of the four hundred lancers King Louis had promised them. Piero Soderini was an influential citizen and as Gonfalonier occupied the position of president of the Republic. They ordered their own troops encamped before Pisa, which they had long been trying to subdue, to advance to the rescue, but before they arrived the citadel fell. At this juncture Il Valentino, who was at Urbino which he had recently conquered, sent the Signory a peremptory demand for the dispatch of an ambassador to confer with him. They sent the Bishop of Volterra, Piero Soderini’s brother, and Machiavelli accompanied him as his secretary. The crisis was resolved, for the French King sent a strong force to fulfil his obligation towards Florence, and Cæsar Borgia, yielding to the threat, recalled his captains.

But his captains were themselves lords of petty states, and they could not but fear that when they had served his purpose he would crush them as ruthlessly as he had crushed other lords of other states. They received information that he had made a secret arrangement with Louis XII by the terms of which the King was to provide a contingent to assist him first in the capture of Bologna and then in the destruction of the captains, whose territories it would be convenient for him to incorporate in his own dominions. After some preliminary discussion they met at a place called La Magione, near Perugia, to consider how best to protect themselves. Vitellozzo, who was ill, was carried to the meeting on a litter. Pagolo Orsini came accompanied by his brother the Cardinal and his nephew the Duke of Gravina. Among others who attended were Ermek Bentivoglio, the son of the Lord of Bologna, two Baglionis from Perugia, the young Oliverotto da Fermo, and Antonio da Venafro, the right-hand man of Pandolfo Petrucci, Lord of Siena. Their danger was great and they agreed that for their own safety they must act, but the Duke was a dangerous man and they knew that they must act with prudence. They decided for the present not to break with him openly, but to make preparations in secret and attack only when they were ready. They had in their pay a considerable body of troops, horse and foot, and Vitellozzo’s artillery was powerful; they sent emissaries to hire several thousand of the mercenaries that then swarmed in Italy, and at the same time agents to Florence to ask for aid, for the Borgia’s ambition was as great a threat to the Republic as to them.

It was not long before Cæsar heard of the conspiracy, and on his side he summoned the Signory to provide him with the troops which he declared they had engaged to let him have in case of need and requested them to send him an envoy empowered to treat with him. This was how it came about that Machiavelli was on his way to Imola. He went with misgiving. The Signory had dispatched him because he was a man of no official consequence, with no authority to make an agreement, who could only refer back to Florence and at every step must await his government’s instructions. It was invidious to send such an emissary to one who, though a bastard of the Pope, in official documents styled himself Duke of Romagna, Valencia and Urbino, Prince of Andria, Lord of Piombino, Gonfalonier and Captain-General of the Church. Machiavelli’s instructions were to inform him that the Signory had refused the conspirators’ request for help, but that if he wanted either men or money he must apprise the Signory and await their reply. His business was to temporize, for such was the consistent policy of the Republic. The Signory could always find excellent reasons for doing nothing. If they got into too tight a corner they would untie the strings of their money-bags and disburse as small a sum as was acceptable. His business was to allay the impatience of a man unused to procrastination, to make no promises that had substance, to cajole a suspicious man with specious words, to use craft against craft, to counter deceit with deceit, and to discover the secrets of one who was notorious for his dissimulation.

Although he had but briefly seen him at Urbino, Machiavelli had been deeply impressed by him. He had heard there how the Duke Guidobaldo di Montefeltro, confiding in Cæsar Borgia’s friendship, had lost his state and barely escaped with his life; and though he recognized that Il Valentino had acted with shocking perfidy he could not but admire the energy and adroit planning with which he had conducted the enterprise. This was a man of parts, fearless, unscrupulous, ruthless and intelligent, not only a brilliant general but a capable organizer and an astute politician. A sarcastic smile played upon Machiavelli’s thin lips and his eyes gleamed, for the prospect of matching his wits with such an antagonist excited him, He began in consequence to feel much better and was no longer conscious of his queasy stomach; he was able indeed to look forward without displeasure to eating a snack at Scarperia, which was about half-way between Florence and Imola, and where he had decided to hire post horses. They had ridden as fast as was reasonable, for he wanted to get to Imola that day, and the horses, carrying not only their riders, but a good deal of baggage as well, could hardly be expected without hurt to themselves to go so far without more rest than he could afford to give them. He proposed to go on with Piero, leaving the two servants to follow next day with his own horse and Piero’s pony.

They stopped at the Albergo della Posta and Machiavelli, dismounting, was glad to stretch his legs. He enquired what food could be prepared without delay and was not dissatisfied when he learnt that he could have macaroni, a dish of small birds, sausage from Bologna and a pork chop. He was a good trencherman and he devoured the meal that was set before him with enjoyment. He drank the strong red wine of the country and felt all the better for it. Piero ate as copiously as his master, and when they got into the saddle again and set out, he felt good and happy, so happy indeed that he began to hum one of the popular songs that ran about the streets of Florence. Machiavelli pricked up his ears.

‘Why, Piero, your uncle never told me you had a voice.’

Piero let it out with complacency and sang an ascending scale.

‘A pretty tenor,’ Machiavelli said with a warm and friendly smile.

He reined in his horse to a walk, and Piero, accepting this as an invitation, broke into a well-known air, but the words were some that Machiavelli had written himself. He was pleased, but did not fail to reflect that the boy sang them to ingratiate himself with him. It was a neat device and he did not disapprove of it.

‘How did you learn those words?’

‘Uncle Biagio wrote them out for me and they fitted the tune.’

Machiavelli made no reply and broke again into a canter. It occurred to him that it would be worth while to find out what he could about this boy whom he had taken, certainly, to oblige his friend Biagio, but whom also he had the intention of making good use of; so during the rest of the journey, when hilly country obliged them to walk the horses, he set out to do this. No one could be more affable, interesting and amusing than he when he chose, nor so subtle, and Piero would have had to be more worldly-wise than at his age he could be to discover that the friendly, careless questions put to him were designed to make him discover himself naked as when he was born. Piero was neither shy nor self-conscious, he had indeed the assurance of youth, and he answered frankly and ingenuously. To talk about himself seemed a very pleasant way of passing time that was beginning to grow tedious. Marsilio Ficino, the famous old scholar, had died only three years before; he was Biagio’s father-in-law and had directed the young boy’s studies. It was on his advice that Piero had acquired a sound knowledge of Latin and though against his will a smattering of Greek.

‘It is one of the misfortunes of my life that I never learnt it,’ said Machiavelli. ‘I envy you for having read the Greek authors in the original.’

‘What good will that do me?’

‘It will teach you that happiness is the good at which all men aim, and that in order to attain it you need nothing but good birth, good friends, good luck, health, wealth, beauty, strength, fame, honour and virtue.’

Piero burst out laughing.

‘It will also teach you that life is uncertain and full of tribulation, from which you may conclude that it is only reasonable to snatch what pleasure you can while you are of an age to enjoy it.’

‘I didn’t need to learn the tenses of Greek verbs to know that,’ said Piero.

‘Perhaps not, but it is reassuring to have good authority for following one’s natural inclinations.’

By well-directed questions Machiavelli learnt who the boy’s friends were in Florence and what life he had led there, and by flattering attention to the opinions on one subject and another that he inveigled him into pronouncing he gained presently a fair impression of Piero’s capacity and character. He was inexperienced, of course, but quick-witted, more so than his Uncle Biagio, who, though good and honest, was of mediocre intelligence; he had the high spirits of his youth, a natural wish to enjoy himself, and an adventurous temper; though ingenuous and in a way simple, he was not over-scrupulous, a trait to Machiavelli’s mind of no disadvantage, for it meant that he would not be hindered by a too delicate conscience if he were wanted to do something that was a trifle less than honourable; he was strong and active and there was no reason to suppose that he lacked courage; his open face, his air of frankness, his engaging manner might all turn out to be valuable assets; it remained to discover whether he knew how to keep his own counsel and whether he could be trusted. It required only a little time to find out the first, and as to the second Machiavelli had no intention of trusting him or anyone else more than need be. In any case the boy was clever enough to know that it could only be to his benefit to gain the good opinion of his master. A good word from Machiavelli could assure his future; a bad report would entail his dismissal from the service of the Republic.

CHAPTER 5

THEY WERE NEARING Imola. It was situated on a river in a fertile plain, and the surrounding country showed none of the ravages of war, since it had capitulated on the approach of Caesar’s forces. When they were about two miles away they met seven or eight horsemen and Machiavelli recognized among them Agapito da Amalia, the Duke’s first secretary, whose acquaintance he had made at Urbino. He greeted Machiavelli warmly, and on learning the errand on which he was found, turned back and accompanied him to the city. The Signory had sent a courier a day before to inform their agent at the Duke’s court of their envoy’s arrival and the courier was waiting for him at the city gate. It had been a long ride and Agapito asked Machiavelli whether he would not like to refresh himself and rest before presenting his credentials to the Duke. Though the army was encamped outside the walls, the small city, now Il Valentino’s capital, was crowded with his personal staff, the members of his court, agents of other Italian states, merchants with necessities or luxuries to sell, solicitors of favours, sycophants, spies, actors, poets, loose women, and all the rag tag and bobtail that followed a victorious condottiere in the hope of making money by fair means or foul. The result was that lodging was hard to get. The city’s two or three inns were chock-a-block and men were sleeping three, four and five in a bed. But the Florentine agent had made arrangements for Machiavelli and his servants to be put up in the Dominican monastery and it was thither that the courier now suggested conducting him. Machiavelli turned to Agapito.

‘If His Excellency can receive me I should prefer to see him at once,’ he said.

‘I will ride on and find out if he is at liberty. This officer will lead you to the Palace.’

Leaving the man he had indicated behind, Agapito trotted off with the rest of his party. The others walked their horses through the narrow streets till they came to the main square. On the way Machiavelli asked the officer which was the city’s best inn.

‘I don’t fancy the fare those good monks of the monastery will provide and I have no wish to go supperless to bed.’

‘The Golden Lion.’

Machiavelli addressed himself to the courier.

‘When you have deposited me at the Palace go to the Golden Lion and see that an ample meal is prepared for me.’ Then to Piero: ‘Attend to the stabling of the horses. The courier will show you the way to the monastery and you will leave the saddle-bags in charge of Antonio.’ This was one of his two servants. ‘Then you and the courier will come to the Palace and wait for me.’

The Palace, a large, but unpretentious building, for Caterina Sforza who had built it was a thrifty woman, took up one end of the square, and here Machiavelli and the officer, dismounting, were admitted by the guard. The officer sent a soldier to tell the first secretary they were there. In a few minutes he came into the room in which Machiavelli was waiting. Agapito da Amalia was a swarthy man, with long black hair and a small black beard, with a pale skin and sombre, clever eyes. He was a gentleman, with good manners, suave of speech and with a candid air which deceived many into thinking less of his abilities than was wise. He was devoted both to the person and the interest of the Duke, for II Valentino had the gift of attaching to himself those whose loyalty was necessary to him. He told Machiavelli that the Duke would receive him at once. They ascended a fine flight of stairs and Machiavelli was ushered into a handsome apartment, the walls painted in fresco, with a large stone fireplace on the hood of which were carved the arms of the intrepid, but unfortunate Caterina Sforza whom Cæsar Borgia now held prisoner in Rome. A bright fire of logs blazed on the hearth, and the Duke stood with his back to it. The only other person in the room was Juan Borgia, Cardinal of Monreale, the portly, shrewd nephew of Pope Alexander. He was seated in a carved, high-backed chair toasting his toes at the fire.

Machiavelli bowed to the Duke and the Cardinal, and the Duke, coming towards him graciously, took his hand and led him to a chair.

‘You must be cold and tired after your long journey, Secretary,’ he said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, your Excellency, I ate on the way. I offer you my apologies for presenting myself as I am, in my riding clothes, but I did not wish to delay telling you what I have to say on behalf of the Republic.’

He then presented his letter of audience. The Duke gave it a brief glance and handed it to the Secretary. Cæsar Borgia was a man of striking beauty, of more than common height, with broad shoulders, a powerful chest and a slim waist. He was dressed in black, which emphasized his vivid colouring, and besides a ring on the index finger of his right hand, his only ornament was the collar of St. Michael, the order which King Louis had conferred upon him. His hair, of a rich auburn and carefully dressed, was worn long and reached his shoulders; he had a moustache and a short beard trimmed to a point. His nose was straight and delicate and his eyes, under well-marked brows, were fine and bold; his well-shaped mouth was sensual; his skin clear and glowing. His gait was stately, yet graceful, and in his bearing was something of majesty. Machiavelli asked himself how it came about that this young man, the offspring of a Roman woman of the people and a fat, hook-nosed Spanish priest who had bought the papacy by shameless simony, had acquired the demeanour of a great prince.

‘I requested your government to send me an envoy because I wish to know exactly how I stand with the Republic,’ he said with deliberation.

Machiavelli delivered the discourse he had prepared, but though the Duke listened Machiavelli could not but see that he looked upon the assurances of good will to which on the Signory’s instructions he gave utterance as no more than fine phrases. There was a moment’s silence. The Duke leant back in his chair and with his left hand fingered the order on his breast. When he spoke it was with a certain coolness.

‘My dominions border upon yours along an extended frontier. I am bound to take every means in my power to safeguard them. I know only too well that your city is ill-disposed to me. You have tried to embroil me with the Pope and the King of France. You couldn’t have treated me worse if I were a murderer. Now you must choose whether you will have me as a friend or as an enemy.’

His voice was musical, light rather than deep, and it had a quality, not acid, but cutting, which gave his words an insolence which was not easy to bear. He might have been speaking to a scullion. But Machiavelli was a practised diplomatist and knew how to keep his temper.

‘I can assure Your Excellency that there is nothing my government wants more than your friendship,’ he answered blandly, ‘but they have not forgotten that you allowed Vitellozzo to invade our territories and they are doubtful of its value.’

‘I had nothing to do with that. Vitellozzo acted on his own account.’

‘He was in your pay and under your command.’

‘The expedition was begun without my knowledge and continued without my aid. I will not pretend I regretted it. I didn’t. The Florentines had broken faith with me and it was right that they should suffer for it. But when I thought they had been sufficiently punished I ordered my captains to withdraw. It has won me their enmity and they are now conspiring my overthrow.’

Machiavelli did not think it the moment to remind the Duke that he had recalled his commanders only on the peremptory command of the King of France.

‘You are to blame for that, just as you are to blame for Vitellozzo’s invasion of your territory.’

‘We?’ cried Machiavelli in frank astonishment.

‘Nothing of this would have happened if you hadn’t been such fools as to torture and execute Paolo Vitelli. You can hardly be surprised that his brother Vitellozzo should seek his revenge, and because I prevented him from pursuing it to the end he has turned against me.’

It is necessary to explain what the Duke meant by this.

The Florentines had long been engaged on the siege of Pisa, but things had gone badly and the army of the Republic suffered a severe defeat which the Signory ascribed to the incompetence of their Captain-General; so they engaged two condottieri then in the service of King Louis, Paolo and Vitellozzo Vitelli, and gave the chief command to Paolo, a captain of renown. A battle was fought, a breach was effected in the walls and the army was on the point of storming the city when suddenly Paolo Vitelli gave the order to retreat. Though he said he had done this to save further loss of life since he was sure of the city’s surrender on conditions, the Signory was convinced that he was playing them false, and sent two commissioners ostensibly to furnish funds but in fact to seize the persons of the two generals. Paolo Vitelli was quartered about a mile beyond Cascina, and the commissioners requested him to meet them there so that they might discuss with him the conduct of the war. They gave him dinner and then, leading him into a secret chamber, arrested him. He was taken to Florence and beheaded, though under torture he would not admit his guilt.

‘Paolo Vitelli was a traitor,’ said Machiavelli.’ ‘He had a fair trial and was found guilty. He suffered the just punishment of his crime.’

‘Whether he was innocent or guilty is no matter. To execute him was a blunder.’

‘It was necessary for our honour to act with energy against enemies of the Republic. It was necessary to show that Florence has the courage to provide for her safety.’

‘Why then did you leave his brother alive?’

Machiavelli irritably shrugged his shoulders. It was a sore point.

‘Men were sent to fetch Vitellozzo and bring him to Cascina. He suspected a trap. He was ill in bed. He asked for time to dress and somehow managed to escape. The affair was bungled. How can you provide always against the stupidity of the people you have to act through?’

The Duke’s laugh was light and gay. His eyes sparkled with good humour.

‘It is an error to keep to a plan when circumstances have arisen that make its execution inadvisable. When Vitellozzo slipped through your fingers you should have taken Paolo to Florence, and instead of throwing him into a dungeon housed him in the best apartment of the Palazzo Vecchio. You should have tried him and whatever the evidence declared him innocent. Then you should have restored his command to him, increased his pay, and bestowed on him the highest honours at the disposal of the Republic. You should have convinced him that you had entire confidence in him.’

‘With the result that he would have betrayed us to our enemies.’

‘That might have been his intention, but for a while he would have had so to act as to prove that the trust you placed in him was justified. These mercenary captains are avaricious and will do anything for money. You might have made offers to Vitellozzo so handsome that he could not have brought himself to refuse; he would have rejoined his brother, and when you had lulled them into security, with a little ingenuity you could have found a suitable occasion to kill them both swiftly and without trial.’

Machiavelli went red in the face.

‘Such treachery would have an eternal blot on the fair name of Florence,’ he cried.

‘Traitors must be dealt with treacherously. A state is not governed by the exercise of Christian virtues, it is governed by prudence, boldness, determination and ruthlessness.’

At this moment an officer came into the room and in a whisper spoke to Agapito da Amalia. Il Valentino, frowning at the interruption, with impatient fingers drummed on the table at which he sat.

‘His Excellency is occupied,’ said Agapito. ‘They must wait.’

‘What is it?’ asked the Duke sharply.

‘Two Gascon soldiers have been caught looting, Excellency. They have been brought here under guard with the objects they seized.’

‘It would be a pity to make the subjects of the King of France wait,’ said the Duke, smiling faintly. ‘Let them be brought in.’

The officer went out and the Duke amiably addressed himself to Machiavelli.

‘You will excuse me if I attend to a little matter of business.’

‘My time is at your Excellency’s disposal.’

‘I trust you had no adventures on the road, Secretary.’

Machiavelli took his cue from the Duke’s tone.

‘None. I was fortunate to find an inn at Scarperia where I was given a tolerable meal.’

‘It is my desire that men should travel in my dominions as safely as it is said they travelled in the Roman Empire of the Antonines. While you are here you will have opportunity to see for yourself that now that I have dispossessed those petty tyrants who were the curse of Italy I have by wise administration done much to render the lives of my people secure and prosperous.’

There was a noise without of shuffling feet, voices were raised, and then, the great doors of the spacious chamber being flung open, a crowd surged in. First came the officer who had come in before, and he was followed by two men who from their respectable dress Machiavelli guessed must be dignitaries of the city. On their heels came two women, one old, the other middle-aged, and with them an elderly man of decent appearance. Then came a soldier carrying a pair of silver candlesticks, and another with an ornamental goblet of silver gilt and two silver platters. They wore the red and yellow uniform of the Duke’s own troops. Then, half pushed, half dragged by soldiers entered two men with their hands tied behind their backs. They were shabby in nondescript garments and, standing among the Duke’s uniformed men, looked a ruffianly pair. One was a scowling fellow of forty, of powerful physique, with a thick black beard and a livid scar on his forehead, and the other a smooth-faced boy with a sallow skin and shifty, frightened eyes.

‘Stand forward,’ said the Duke.

The two men were given a shove.

‘What is the charge?’

It appeared that the house of the two women had been broken into when they were at mass and the silverware stolen.

‘How can you prove these articles were your property?’

‘Monna Brigida is my cousin, Excellency,’ said one of the two respectable men. ‘I know the articles well. They were part of her dowry.’

The other confirmed this. The Duke turned to the elderly man who seemed to be with the two women.

‘Who are you?’

‘Giacomo Fabronio, Excellency, silversmith. These two men sold me the pieces. They said they had got them at the sack of Forlì.’

‘You have no doubt that these are the men?’

‘None, Excellency.’

‘We took Giacomo to the Gascon camp,’ said the officer, ‘and he picked them out without hesitation.’

The Duke fixed the silversmith with harsh eyes.

‘Well?’

‘When I heard that Monna Brigida’s house had been broken into and her candlesticks and platters stolen, I became suspicious,’ the fellow answered, his face pale and his voice tremulous. ‘I went at once to Messer Bernardo and told him that two Gascon soldiers had sold me some silverware.’

‘Was it from fear or sense of duty?’

The silversmith for a moment could not find his voice. He was shaking with terror.

‘Messer Bernardo is a magistrate, I have done much work for him. If the goods were stolen I didn’t want them to be in my possession.’

‘What he says is true, Your Excellency,’ said the magistrate. ‘I went to see the articles and immediately recognized them.’

‘They are mine, Excellency,’ vehemently cried the younger of the two women. ‘Everyone will tell you they are mine.’

‘Be quiet.’ The Duke turned his gaze on the two Gascons. ‘Do you confess that you stole these things?’

‘No, no, no,’ screamed the boy. ‘It is a mistake. I swear on the soul of my mother than I didn’t. The silversmith is mistaken. I have never seen him before.

‘Take him away. A few turns on the rack will bring out the truth.’

The boy gave a piercing shriek.

‘No, not that. I couldn’t bear that.’

‘Take him.’

‘I confess,’ gasped the boy.

The Duke gave a short laugh and turned to the other.

‘And you?’

The older man threw back his head defiantly,

‘I didn’t steal them. I took them. It was our right; we had captured the city.’

‘A lie. You did not capture the city. It capitulated.’

By the rules of Italian warfare at the time, if a city was taken by storm the soldiers were allowed to loot and keep everything they could lay hands on; but if it had capitulated, though the citizens were called upon to pay a large sum to defray the expense to which the condittieri had been put to gain possession of their city, they saved their lives and their property. The rule was useful, for it made the citizens willing enough to surrender; it was not often that devotion to their prince induced them to fight to the death.

The Duke pronounced sentence.

‘My orders were that the troops were to remain without the walls and that any harm done to the persons or property of the citizens should be punished by death.’ He turned to the officer. ‘Hang them in the square at dawn. Let it be published in the camp what their crime and its punishment were. Have two soldiers stand guard over the bodies till noon and let the town crier inform the population at proper intervals that they can rely on the justice of their prince.’

‘What does he say?’ asked the terrified boy of his companion, for the Duke had spoken to the two Gascons in French and to the officer in Italian.

The man did not answer, but looked at the Duke with sullen hatred. The Duke, having heard, repeated the sentence in French.

‘You will be hanged at dawn as a warning to others.’

The boy gave a great cry of anguish and fell to his knees.

‘Mercy, mercy,’ he screamed. ‘I’m too young to die. I don’t want to die. I’m afraid.’

‘Take them away,’ said the Duke.

The boy was dragged to his feet, screaming incoherently, tears running from his eyes; but the other, his face distorted with rage, gathered the spittle in his mouth and spat in his face. The pair were hustled from the room. The Duke turned to Agapito da Amalia.

‘See that they are provided with the consolations of religion. It would weigh on my conscience if they faced their Maker without having had the opportunity to repent of their sins.’

A faint smile on his lips, the secretary slid out of the room. The Duke, apparently in high good humour, addressed himself to the Cardinal his cousin and together to Machiavelli.

‘They were fools as well as knaves. It was an unpardonable stupidity to sell the articles they had stolen in the very town they had been stolen in. They should have hidden them till they came to a much larger city, Bologna or Florence for instance, where they could have disposed of them in safety.’

But he noticed that the silversmith was lingering by the door and seemed to wish to say something.

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Who is to going to give me back my money, Excellency? I am a poor man.’

‘Did you pay a fair price for the articles?’ Il Valentino asked suavely.

‘I paid what they were worth. The sum the scoundrels asked was ridiculous. I had to make my profit.’

‘Let it be a lesson to you. Another time don’t buy anything unless you are sure it has been honestly come by.’

‘I can’t afford to lose so much money, Excellency.’

‘Go,’ cried the Duke in a tone so savage that the man with a cry scuttled out of the room like a frightened rabbit.

Il Valentino threw himself back in his chair and roared with laughter. Then he turned courteously to Machiavelli.

‘I must ask you to pardon the interruption; I think it important that justice should be administered promptly, and I wish the people of the territories under my rule to know that they can come to me if they have been ill-used and be sure to find in me an impartial judge.’

‘It is the wisest policy for a prince who wishes to assure his hold on dominions that he has recently acquired,’ said the Cardinal.

‘Men will always forgive the loss of their political liberty if their private liberty is left undisturbed,’ said the Duke casually. ‘So long as their women are not molested and their property is safe, they will be reasonably contented with their lot.’

Machiavelli had watched the incident with calm, even with amusement, which he took care not to show, for he was convinced that the whole affair was a piece of play acting. He knew very well that Il Valentino would never dare to hang two subjects of the King of France. In all probability they had already been released, with a gift of money for the trouble they had been put to, and on the following day would be found again in the ranks of the Gascon contingent. Machiavelli guessed that the scene had been arranged so that he could tell the Signory how efficiently the Duke was ruling his new conquests, but more particularly for his reference at the end to Florence and Bologna. The suggestion that the troops might find themselves there was a threat too plain to be missed by anyone with so shrewd a brain as Machiavelli.

Silence fell. The Duke, gently stroking his neat beard, stared at Machiavelli reflectively. Machiavelli had the feeling that he was making up his mind what sort of a man this was that the Signory had sent to negotiate with him, and not wishing to meet the searching eyes fixed on him he looked down at his hands, as though wondering if the nails wanted cutting. He was perplexed, and being perplexed was uneasy. For it was he that had conducted the business that led to the execution of Paolo Vitelli. Assured of his guilt, he had exercised all his powers of persuasion to convince his nervous and temporizing superiors that action must be taken without delay. It was he that had given the commissioners orders to proceed with energy. It was he that had urged the death sentence notwithstanding the fact that Vitellozzo had escaped. But his activities had been behind the scenes and he could not imagine how Il Valentino was aware of them. The thought crossed his mind that the Duke had dwelt upon the unsatisfactory outcome of the affair only to show that he knew what part Machiavelli had played in it and was maliciously pleased to be able to point out to him that he had handled it incompetently. But that man did nothing without a reason. It was unlikely that he wished to let the Florentine envoy know that he was well-informed of what happened in the Chancery of the Republic: it was more probable that his object was to shake Machiavelli’s confidence in himself and so render him more amenable. The idea caused the suspicion of a smile to appear on his lips, and he glanced at the Duke. It looked as though the Duke had been waiting to meet his eyes before speaking.

‘Secretary, I desire to confide to you a secret I have told to no living man.’

‘Do you wish me to leave you, Cousin?’ asked the Cardinal.

‘No, I trust in your discretion as much as I trust in the Secretary’s.’

Machiavelli, his jaw set, his gaze fixed on the handsome Duke, waited.

‘The Orsini have begged me almost on their bended knees to attack Florence. I bear your city no ill will and I have refused. But if the gentlemen of your government want to come to terms with me they must do it before I patch things up with the Orsini. We’re both friends of the King of France; surely it’s advisable that we should be friends of one another. With our territories adjoining each of us can make things easy for the other; each of us can make things difficult. You depend upon mercenary troops under unreliable captains; I have my own army, well-trained, well-armed, and my captains are the best in Europe.’

‘But no more reliable than ours, Your Excellency,’ said Machiavelli dryly.

‘I have others who are reliable. Who are they, the fools who are conspiring against me? Pagolo Orsini, a fool, Bentivoglio who thinks I have designs on Bologna, the Baglioni who fears for Perugia, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Vitellozzo, who is laid aside by the French sickness.

‘They are powerful, and in revolt.’

‘All their movements are known to me and when things are ripe I shall act. Believe me, the ground is burning under their feet and it needs more water to put out the fire than such men as they can throw. Be sensible, Secretary. With Urbino in my hands I command Central Italy. Guidobaldo di Montefeltro was my friend, and the Pope intended to give his niece Angela Borgia in marriage to Guidobaldo’s nephew and heir. I would never have attacked him unless I had seen the strategic importance of his state. I had to have it in order to carry out my plans, and I could not allow sentiment to interfere with policy. I can offer you security from your enemies. If we were to act together, I with my armies, you with your rich lands and your wealth, and with the spiritual authority of the Pope to support us, we should be the strongest power in Italy. Instead of having to pay hard cash for the favours of the French, they would have to treat with us as equals. The moment has come for you to conclude an alliance with me.’

Machiavelli was startled, but he answered with easy amiability.

‘I see the force of your Excellency’s arguments. No one could have put them more clearly or more convincingly. It is rare to find a man of action, and a great general such as Your Excellency has shown himself, who possesses so logical a mind and such a gift of expression.’

The Duke with a slight smile made a modest gesture of protest. Machiavelli, his heart in his mouth, for he knew that what he had to say was not what the Duke wanted, went on blandly.

‘I will write to the Signory and tell the gentlemen what you have said.’

‘What do you mean?’ cried Il Valentino. ‘The matter is urgent and must be settled at once.’

‘I have no power to make an agreement.’

The Duke sprang to his feet.

‘Then what have you come here for?’

At that instant the door was opened; it was only Agapito da Amalia coming in after attending to the Duke’s order, but it had a startling effect. Machiavelli was not a nervous man, but it shook him strangely.

‘I have come because Your Excellency requested my government to send an envoy to treat with him.’

‘But an envoy with full powers to treat.’

Until now the Duke had treated Machiavelli with tolerable courtesy, but now, his eyes blazing, he strode up to him. Machiavelli rose and the two men faced one another.

‘The Signory is fooling me. They sent you precisely because you have no power to decide anything. Their eternal shilly-shallying exasperates me beyond endurance. How long do they think they can continue to try my patience?’

The Cardinal, who had sat in silence, put in a word to calm the storm, but the Duke harshly told him to hold his tongue. He began to pace up and down the room, storming; he was bitter, brutal and sarcastic; he seemed to have lost all control over himself. Machiavelli, unmoved and far from frightened, watched him with curiosity. At last the Duke flung himself back into his chair.

‘Tell your government that I am deeply affronted.’

‘The last thing my government would wish is to affront Your Excellency. They instructed me to inform you that the rebels had requested their aid and they had refused.’

‘Waiting as usual, I suppose, to see which way the cat would jump.’

There was more truth in this than was pleasant for Machiavelli to hear. His face remained impassive.

‘They have no love for the Orsini or for Vitellozzo. They are anxious to be on friendly terms with Your Excellency, and I must press you to be more definite. It is at least necessary that I should be able to tell the Signory precisely what sort of an agreement it is that you desire.’

‘The discussion is ended. You force me to come to terms with the rebels. I can reduce them to submission tomorrow by agreeing to the proposal of the Orsini to attack Florence.’

‘Florence is under the protection of the King of France,’ answered Machiavelli sharply. ‘He has promised us four hundred lancers and an ample force of infantry whenever we need them.’

‘The French promise much in return for the money they continually demand, but when they have received it seldom keep their promises.’

Machiavelli knew that was true. The Florentines had suffered much from the rapacity and double-dealing of King Louis. He had more than once undertaken at a price to send troops to assist them in their difficulties and then, having received the money, had delayed and delayed, and in the end sent only half the number paid for. The Duke could not have made himself more plain. The Florentines must either accept the alliance he offered them (and everyone in Italy knew what a faithless friend he was), or else he would compose his differences with his discontented captains and together with them attack the Republic. Blackmail! The situation was alarming, and Machiavelli in distress sought for something to say that would at least leave the way open for further negotiations, but the Duke prevented him from speaking.

‘What are you waiting for, Secretary? You may withdraw.’

He did not trouble to acknowledge Machiavelli’s low bow. Agapito da Amalia accompanied the envoy down the stairs.

‘His Excellency is a quick-tempered man and is unused to being crossed,’ he said.

‘That is a fact which has not escaped my observation,’ replied Machiavelli acidly.

CHAPTER 6

PIERO AND THE courier were waiting in the guard-room, and when the doors were duly unbarred and unlocked the three of them went out into the square. His attendants conducted Machiavelli to the Golden Lion. They had made much of the fact that the repast they had ordered was for the Florentine envoy, and he ate well and amply. The wine of the country, though not to be compared with the Tuscan wine, was strong, and he drank freely. On reflection he came to the conclusion that his conversation with the Duke was after all not unsatisfactory. Il Valentino’s anger seemed to indicate that he was nervous, and his insistence on an immediate alliance with the Republic that he knew his position was perilous. Machiavelli was indifferent to the scant courtesy with which he had been treated. He knew when he started on his mission that he need not expect to be used with consideration. Having done eating and belched his full, he bade the courier show the way to the monastery where he was to lodge. In view of his importance a cell had been vacated for him, but Piero and the courier were to share a straw mattress in a corridor along with a number of transients only too glad to have a roof over their heads. But before going to bed Machiavelli wrote a letter to the Signory in which he described the events of the evening. The courier was to take it back to Florence at the crack of dawn.

‘You had better write to Biagio so that he can tell your mother you have arrived here without mishap,’ he said to Piero. ‘And ask him to send me a Plutarch.’

Machiavelli had brought his Dante with him, and besides that only Livy’s Annals. When Piero had finished, Machiavelli without ceremony took the letter and read it. He smiled faintly when he read: ‘Messer Niccolo was silent throughout the morning, and thinking he was occupied with weighty matters I did not disturb him; but after he had dined he talked with so much wit, clearness and good sense that it seemed to me we had hardly left Scarperia when we were arrived at Imola. He thinks I have a good voice. I wish it had been possible to bring my lute.’

‘A very good letter,’ said Machiavelli. ‘The message you have asked Biagio to deliver to your mother is very fit and proper. And now after this long day let us take a well-earned rest.’

CHAPTER 7

MACHIAVELLI NEEDED LITTLE sleep and awoke soon after sunrise. He called Piero to help him dress. His riding clothes were packed in the saddle-bags and he put on the black raiment which was his usual wear. He had no intention of remaining at the monastery, for he needed quarters where he could if necessary receive persons in secret, and he knew very well that at the monastery his visitors and his movements would be conspicuous. The courier was already on his way to Florence. With Piero to accompany him, Machiavelli set out for the Golden Lion. Imola was a bright little town and there was no sign that it had not long since changed masters. As they walked through the narrow, tortuous streets they passed a good many people going about their various business, and they looked contented. You received the impression that the tenor of their lives remained unaltered. Now and then pedestrians had to make way for a man on horseback or for a string of donkeys with a load of firewood. A man sauntered by with she-asses, whose milk was good for pregnant women, and announced his presence with the habitual cry; an old crone popped her head out of a window and called him; he stopped, and in a minute she appeared at her door with a beaker. A pedlar of pins and needles, thread and ribands, passed along raucously calling his wares. There were shops in the street in which was the Golden Lion; there was a customer at the saddler’s, a man was having his hair cut at the barber’s, and a woman was trying on a pair of shoes at the shoemaker’s. There was about all an air, not of opulence, but of a comfortable prosperity. No beggars pestered.

They entered the Golden Lion and Machiavelli ordered for himself and Piero bread and wine. Dipping the bread in the wine they made it palatable and then drank what remained of the wine. Thus fortified they went to the barber’s and Machiavelli had himself shaved; the barber sprinkled strongly-scented water on his short black hair, and combed it. Meanwhile Piero had been meditatively stroking his smooth chin.

‘I think I need a shave, Messer Niccolo,’ he said.

‘It can wait a few weeks yet,’ said Machiavelli, smiling thinly; then to the barber: ‘Put some of your scent on his head and run a comb through his hair.’

They were both ready. Machiavelli enquired of the barber where was the house of a certain Messer Bartolomeo Martelli whom he desired to visit. The barber gave them directions, but they were so complicated that Machiavelli asked if he could not get someone to show them the way. The barber went to the door of his shop, and calling an urchin who was playing in the street, told him to conduct the strangers. Their way led through the principal square, the square in which was the palace occupied by the Duke, and since it was market day it was crowded with the stalls of the farmers who had brought into the city for sale fruits and vegetables, chickens, meat and cheese, and with the stalls of chapmen with brass, ironmongery, cloth goods, old clothes and what not. A great throng of people were bargaining, buying, or merely looking, and there was a din of voices. It was a gay and busy scene under the bright October sun. As Machiavelli and Piero entered the square they heard the wail of a brass horn and some of the noise was stilled.

‘It’s the crier,’ yelled the little boy excitedly, and seizing Machiavelli’s hand he began to run. ‘I have not heard him yet.’

A number of people surged forward, and looking in the direction they took Machiavelli saw that there was a gallows at the other end of the square and two men were hanging there. It was not a sight he cared to see, and he snatched his hand away. Forgetting his errand the boy raced towards the centre of interest. The crier in a loud voice began to speak, but he was too far away for Machiavelli to hear what he said. He turned impatiently to a stout woman who was standing guard over her stall.

‘What has happened?’ he asked her. ‘What is the crier saying?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘It’s only two thieves who’ve been hanged. By the Duke’s orders the crier comes every half hour till noon and says they’ve been hanged because they stole the property of citizens. They’re French soldiers, they say.’

Machiavelli repressed a start. It could not be what he suspected, but he had to see for himself. He strode forward, squeezing his way through the crowd, jostling and jostled, his eyes fixed on the two hanging bodies. The crier had said his say, and stepping down from the platform on which the gallows had been erected sauntered nonchalantly away. The crowd thinned and Machiavelli was able to get close; there was no doubt about it; though their faces were horribly distorted by the strangling rope, they were the two Gascon soldiers, the man with the scowl and the scar, the boy with the shifty eyes, who had been brought in the night before to be judged and sentenced by the Duke. It hadn’t been a comedy then. Machiavelli stood stock still and stared with dismay. His small guide touched his arm.

‘I wish I’d been here when they hanged them,’ he said regretfully. ‘No one knew anything about it till it was all over.’

‘It’s nothing for little boys to see,’ said Machiavelli, hardly knowing that he spoke, for his thoughts were busy.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ the child grinned. ‘It’s fun to see them dancing in the air.’

‘Piero.’

‘I’m here, Messere.’

‘Come, boy, take us to Messer Bartolomeo.’

For the rest of the way Machiavelli, frowning, his lips closed so tightly that his mouth was no more than a bitter line, walked in silence. He tried to think what had been in Il Valentino’s mind. Why should he have hanged two useful soldiers because they had stolen a few bits and pieces of silverware when a flogging would have adequately punished the crime? It was true that human life meant nothing to him, but it was unbelievable that he should be so eager to win the confidence of the people of Imola as to risk the anger not only of the commander of the Gascon troops, but of the troops themselves. Machiavelli was puzzled. He was convinced that his presence at that moment was in some way necessary to the Duke’s purpose; otherwise, even if he had troubled to deal with the affair in person, he would have waited till he had finished his important conversation with the Florentine envoy. Did he want to show the Signory that he was independent of the French and, notwithstanding the revolt of his captains, strong enough to risk their displeasure; or was the whole point of the scene the scarcely veiled threat he had made when he told Machiavelli that the soldiers could have safely sold their loot when they were in Florence? But who could tell the workings of that ruthless, crafty brain?

‘This is the house, Messere,’ said the boy suddenly.

Machiavelli gave him a coin and the urchin with a hop, skip and a jump ran off. Piero raised the bronze knocker and let it fall. There was a delay and Piero knocked again. Machiavelli noticed that the house was of handsome proportions, evidently the abode of a man of substance; and the windows on the second floor, the piano principale, were not as might have been expected of oiled paper, but of glass, which showed that he had ample means.

CHAPTER 8

MACHIAVELLI DID NOT know Bartolomeo Martelli, but he had been instructed to get in touch with him. He was a person of consequence in the small city, an alderman, and a man of property. He owned land in the immediate neighbourhood of Imola and several houses in the town itself; his father had made money by trade in the Levant and he had himself spent some years of his youth in Smyrna. It was on this account that he had connections with Florence, since the Florentines had always traded with the Near East and many of the citizens were settled in its various cities. Bartolomeo’s father had been in partnership with a Florentine merchant of good family and had eventually married his daughter. He was distantly related to Biagio Buonaccorsi, for their maternal grandmothers, long since dead, were sisters; this indeed was one of the inducements Biagio had held out to Machiavelli to persuade him to take young Piero with him. The connection would make it easier for Machiavelli to get on intimate terms with the useful man.

And Bartolomeo might be very useful. He was not only a considerable man in Imola, but it was he who had led the party that brought about the capitulation of the city without a struggle. The Duke, who was always generous with other people’s property, had rewarded him with the gift of an estate which carried with it the title of count, a fact Machiavelli had learnt from the loquacious barber, and he had learnt also that Bartolomeo, though he pretended otherwise, was inordinately pleased with his rank. The Duke trusted him, knowing it was to his advantage to be trustworthy, and had employed him on various commercial missions in which he had conducted himself with credit. The Duke was secret, but it was likely that Bartolomeo knew as much about his plans as anybody, and Machiavelli was confident that he would in due course succeed in extracting from him anything he knew. The Signory had a hold on him. He had inherited from his mother two houses in Florence, and if he did not behave an accidental fire might easily destroy one of them; and if this were not a sufficient deterrent means might possibly be found to damage the business in the Levant in which he still had a large interest.

‘It is good to have friends,’ Machiavelli reflected, ‘but it is as well that they should know you can retaliate if they should be led to act otherwise than as friends should.’

The door was opened by a serving man. When Machiavelli, first giving his name, asked for his master, he said:

‘The Count is expecting you.’

He led them into a court-yard, up an outside staircase, and into a room of moderate size which a glance showed was used by the master of the house as his office. They waited a minute or two and Bartolomeo blustered in. He greeted his visitors with noisy heartiness.

‘I heard of your arrival, Messer Niccolo, and I have been awaiting you with eagerness.’

He was a big corpulent man of about forty, with long hair, receding from his forehead, and a full black beard; he had a red face, shining with sweat, a double chin, and a somewhat imposing paunch. Machiavelli, himself as lean as a rail, did not like fat men; he was used to say that no man could grow fat in Italy without robbing the widow and the orphan and grinding the faces of the poor.

‘Biagio Buonaccorsi wrote and told me you were coming. A courier brought the letter yesterday.’

‘Yes, a courier was coming and Biagio made use of him. This is Piero Canestrini, son of our good Biagio’s sister.’

Bartolomeo gave a ringing laugh, and taking the boy in his arms, pressed him to his paunch and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘Then we are cousins,’ he cried in a loud, booming voice.

‘Cousins?’ murmured Machiavelli.

‘Did you not know? Biagio’s grandmother and my grandmother were sisters. They were both daughters of Carlo Peruzzi.’

‘Strange he should never have told me. Did you know this, Piero?’

‘My mother never told me.’

Machiavelli only disclaimed knowledge of this fact with which of course he was perfectly acquainted, because it was one of his principles never to let anyone know how much you know except with good reason. He was pleased to see that Piero had taken the cue without a moment’s hesitation. A good boy.

Bartolomeo asked them to sit down. There was no fire-place in the room, but a brazier of live charcoal took the chill off the air. He asked after his friends in Florence, which he frequently visited on business, and Machiavelli gave him news of such as he knew. They chatted about one thing and another, and presently the conversation turned upon Piero Soderini who had just been elected Gonfalonier for life.

‘He is a good friend of mine, a very worthy and honest man,’ said Machiavelli. ‘It is at his express desire that I have come to Imola now.’

He thought it well to let Bartolomeo know that he had the confidence of the head of the Republic.

‘I am very glad to see you and you may be assured that you can count on my services. I asked Biagio to send a bolt of fine linen, but in the circumstances I suppose you had no opportunity to bring it.’

Biagio, since he was ever ready to do a service, was constantly asked to do commissions for all and sundry, and no one used him more unconscionably than Machiavelli.

‘On the contrary,’ he answered. ‘Biagio made a point of my bringing it, but my servants have it and they will not get to Imola till later in the day.’

‘My wife is making me some shirts. She was taught embroidery by the nuns and I have no hesitation in saying that there isn’t a woman in Imola to equal her. She is an artist.’

Machiavelli’s mind was busy. He was trying to size the man up. Bluff and hearty, plethoric, which suggested that he liked to eat well and drink deep, with a fat laugh and a booming loquacity. It remained to be seen whether the jovial manner and frank cordiality masked an astute and scheming brain. He had the reputation of being a good business man who drove a hard bargain. Machiavelli turned the conversation to Imola and its condition. Bartolomeo was eloquent in praise of the Duke. He had adhered scrupulously to the terms of the capitulation; the sum he had exacted on occupying the city was not unreasonable, and he was proposing to spend much on making it a finer and grander place. For Imola was the capital of his newly-acquired state. He was having plans drawn out for building a new palace for himself, a new house for the merchants to meet at, a hospital for the poor; order reigned in the city, crime had diminished and justice was prompt and cheap. Poor and rich were equal before the law. Commerce was flourishing; bribery and corruption had ceased. The Duke interested himself in the agricultural resources of the country and had given instructions that everything possible should be done to foster them. The troops were stationed outside the city, which was entering upon an era of prosperity and everyone was well satisfied.

‘Long may it last,’ said Machiavelli pleasantly, ‘and what will happen to you if the Duke’s captains overthrow him and march into your city with their troops?’

Bartolomeo burst into a bellow of laughter and slapped his thigh.

‘They amount to nothing. They know they’re powerless without the Duke and they’ll come to terms with him. Believe me, it will all blow over.’

Machiavelli could not make up his mind whether Bartolomeo believed what he said, wanted to believe what he said, or was just saying what he wanted Machiavelli to believe. He had still not made up his mind whether the man was stupid or clever. That frankness, that enthusiasm, that guileless air and those smiling, friendly eyes might conceal anything. He changed the conversation.

‘You were good enough to say that you would be pleased to be of service to me. Can you tell me where I can find a place to live with Piero and my servants?’

‘I wish you had asked me anything but that,’ Bartolomeo laughed boisterously. ‘What with the Duke’s court and all the hangers-on, poets, painters, architects, engineers, to say nothing of the people from his other possessions who are here on business, and the merchants, the vendors of this and that, who’ve been attracted by the opportunities to make money, there isn’t a hole or corner in the city that isn’t occupied.’

‘I wish to stay here no longer than I need, but I am at the orders of the Signory. I cannot conduct my business in a monastery cell. I must find accommodation for Piero and my servants.’

‘I will ask my mother-in-law. She knows more about a matter like this than I do. I will call her.’

He left the room, and on his return after an interval invited his guests to follow him. He led them into a much larger apartment, with handsomely-painted walls and a fireplace. The ladies were seated at work by the fire. They rose when the strangers entered and curtsied in response to their low bows. One of them was a middle-aged woman of a comely presence.

‘This is my mother-in-law, Monna Caterina Cappello,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘And this is my wife.’

She was young enough to be his daughter. Following the fashion of the day her hair, naturally dark, was dyed very fair; and since the swarthy skin of Italian women did not go with this, her face, neck and bosom were heavily coated with a white cosmetic. The contrast of the golden hair with her handsome black eyes was very effective. Her eyebrows were plucked to a thin line. She had a small straight nose and a lovely mouth. She was dressed in a pale grey, with a full skirt, billowing sleeves, and a bodice fitting her slim figure tightly and cut low in a square to show her snowy bosom and the outline of her young full breasts. There was a virginal quality in her beauty and at the same time a ripeness that made a highly attractive combination. Machiavelli, though his face gave no indication of it, felt a queer sensation in what he was pleased to call his heart.

‘A very pretty young woman,’ he said to himself. ‘I should like to go to bed with her.’

While the two ladies brought up chairs for the visitors to sit on, Bartolomeo explained to Monna Caterina Machiavelli’s difficulty and then, as an afterthought, added that in Piero he had found a cousin whom he had never seen. Both women gave the boy a smile when the relationship was explained to them, and Machiavelli noticed with pleasure that Bartolomeo’s wife had good teeth, small, even and white.

‘Would these gentlemen not like some refreshment?’ asked Monna Caterina.

She was dressed very like her daughter, but in a darker colour, and since it was not thought proper for a respectable elderly woman to dye her hair or to paint her cheeks she was as nature made her; but she had her daughter’s fine black eyes and in youth must have been as beautiful. Machiavelli said they had already breakfasted, but his host insisted that they should at least drink a glass of wine.

‘Aurelia, go and tell Nina,’ he said to his wife.

The young woman went out. He repeated to his mother-in-law what Machiavelli had told him about his requirements.

‘It’s impossible. There’s not a room to be let in the whole city. But wait. Since Messere is a person of consequence and this young man your cousin, it may be that Serafina would take them. She has always refused to take lodgers; only the other day I told her it was a shame to keep that room empty when people were willing to pay anything to have a roof over their heads.’

Bartolomeo explained that Monna Serafina was the widow of one of his factors in the Levant and the house she lived in belonged to him. Her eldest son was in his office at Smyrna, and she had two children living with her, a boy who was to be a priest and a girl of fourteen. It was on their account, so that they might not be exposed to the danger of bad company, that she had refused to have strangers in her house.

‘She could hardly refuse you, my son, if you made a point of it.’

It was odd to hear Monna Caterina address the fat man as her son, for she could not have been more than two or three years older than he.

‘I will take you round myself,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘I’m sure it can be arranged.’

Aurelia came back and was immediately followed by a maid who brought a salver on which were glasses, a bottle of wine and a dish of sweetmeats. Aurelia sat down and resumed her work.

‘Messer Niccolo has brought you the linen, dear,’ Bartolomeo said, ‘so you can get to work on my shirts.’

‘God knows you needed some new ones,’ said Monna Caterina.

Aurelia smiled, but did not speak.

‘Let me show you how beautifully my wife embroiders.’

Bartolomeo went over to Aurelia and took the material on which she was busy.

‘No, Bartolomeo, these are women’s things.’

‘If Messer Niccolo has never seen a woman’s shift it is high time he did.’

‘I am a married man, Monna Aurelia,’ said Machiavelli with a smile that made his thin face not unattractive.

‘Look at the beauty of her needlework and the elegance of her design.’

‘Is it possible that she draws it herself?’

‘Of course. She is an artist.’

Machiavelli made a suitable compliment and the garment was returned to her. She thanked him with a smile of her bright eyes. When they had eaten of the sweetmeats and drunk a glass of wine Bartolomeo proposed that he should take them round to the widow Serafina.

‘Her house is just behind this one,’ he said.

Machiavelli and Piero accompanied him downstairs, and through a small yard in which was a well with a carved well-head and a chestnut-tree, its leaves now scattered after the first frost of autumn, to a small door that led into a narrow alley.

‘Here we are,’ said Bartolomeo.

The deserted alley suggested to Machiavelli that visitors could in all likelihood come to see him without being observed. Bartolomeo knocked, and in a minute the door was opened by a thin, tallish woman with a lined face, darkly pale, sullen eyes and grey hair. The look of suspicion she wore changed, when she saw who it was that knocked, into one of effusive welcome. She begged them to enter.

‘This is Messer Niccolo Machiavelli, First Secretary of the Second Chancery, and envoy to the Duke from the Florentine Republic, and this youth is my cousin Piero, nephew of my good friend and relative, Biagio Buonaccorsi.’

Monna Serafina led them into a parlour and Bartolomeo set forth the purpose of their visit. Monna Serafina’s face went glum.

‘Oh, Messer Bartolomeo, you know I’ve refused everybody. You see, with two young children in the house. And people one knows nothing about.’

‘I know, I know, Serafina, but here are people I vouch for. Piero is my cousin; he will be a good friend to your Luigi.’

The discussion proceeded. Bartolomeo, in his bluff, hearty way, managed to convey to the unwilling woman that the house was his and if he wanted to he could turn her out, and that her elder son was in his employment and depended on his good will for advancement; but it was done in such a friendly, bantering manner as to excite Machiavelli’s admiration. The man, simple though he looked, was no fool. Serafina was poor and she could not afford to offend Bartolomeo. With a grim smile she said that she would be happy to do him and his friends a service. It was arranged that Machiavelli should have a room and the use of the parlour, Piero would double up with her son Luigi, and she would put down mattresses for the two servants in the attic. The sum she asked for rent was high, and Bartolomeo remarked on it, but Machiavelli thought it beneath his official dignity to haggle and said that he would be glad to pay it. He knew that nothing more predisposes someone in your favour than to let him rob you a little. There was of course no glass in the windows, but there were shutters to them and oiled paper screens which could be opened entirely or in part to let in air and light. There was a fireplace in the kitchen and the parlour could be warmed by a brazier. Serafina consented to give her own room to Machiavelli and move in with her daughter to a smaller room on the ground floor.

CHAPTER 9

THIS HAVING BEEN settled Bartolomeo left them, and Machiavelli and Piero went back to the Golden Lion to have dinner. They were just finishing when the two servants arrived from Scaperia with the horses and the baggage. Machiavelli told Piero to show them the way to the monastery and fetch the saddle-bags which had been left there.

‘Take the bolt of linen to Messer Bartolomeo’s and bid the maid take it up to the ladies. She wasn’t a bad-looking wench; it might be worth your while to get into conversation with her. Then go back to Serafina’s and wait till I come.’

He paused for a moment.

‘She’s a talkative woman and certainly a gossip. Go and sit with her in the kitchen. She’ll be glad of company. Let her talk to you about her children, and talk to her about your mother. Then find out all you can about Bartolomeo, his wife and his mother-in-law. Serafina’s under too great an obligation to him not to bear him a grudge; you have a frank, honest face, you’re only a boy, if you can gain her confidence she’ll pour out her soul to you. It will be good practice for you to learn how with kind words and pretty speeches you can get someone to betray the hatred that is in his heart.’

‘But, Messer Niccolo, why are you so certain that she hates him?’

‘I’m not certain at all. It may be that she’s only a foolish, garrulous woman. The fact remains that she is poor and he is rich, and that she depends on his bounty; the burden of gratitude is very hard to bear. Believe me, it is easier to forgive the offences your enemy does you than the benefits your friend confers upon you.’

He smiled acidly and went his way. He had an appointment with the Florentine agent to meet a fellow-citizen, Giacomo Farinelli by name, who had been exiled with the Medici, and who, being a clever accountant, had been engaged by the Duke. But he was anxious to get back to Florence and have his confiscated property restored to him, and so could be counted on to make himself useful. He confirmed what Bartolomeo had told Machiavelli in the morning. The Duke’s new subjects were contented with his rule. The administration was severe, but competent. The people who had groaned under the tyranny of their petty princes enjoyed a freedom from oppression they had not known for a century. By conscription, taking one man from every house in his dominions, the Duke had created an army which was much more reliable than the hirelings of which in general armies consisted. The French men-at-arms and the Gascons might at any time be recalled by their king, the Swiss were always prepared to desert if another power made it worth their while, and the Germans ravaged every district they went through and were a terror to the population. The Duke’s soldiers were proud of the red and yellow uniform into which he had put them; they were well paid, well drilled and well armed; and he had succeeded in inspiring them with loyalty.

‘And what of the Captains, Vitellozzo and the Orsini?’ asked Machiavelli.

There was no news of them. No one knew what they were doing.

‘What is the feeling at the Palace?’

‘You would say that nothing was the matter,’ said Farinelli. ‘The Duke is secret and keeps to his apartments. The secretaries give no sign that there is cause for anxiety. I have never seen Messer Agapito in a better humour.’

Machiavelli frowned. He was puzzled. It was evident enough that something was brewing, but though the accountant was very willing to tell all he knew, at the end Machiavelli was obliged to admit that he was no wiser than before. He returned to his lodging, where Piero was waiting for him.

‘Did you deliver the linen?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Messer Bartolomeo was at the Palace. The maid told me to wait while she took it up to the ladies, and when she came down said they wanted to thank me in person for bringing it. So I went up.’

‘Then you didn’t make friends with the maid as I told you to.’

‘There was no opportunity.’

‘You might have pinched her or at least told her she was pretty. There was opportunity for that.’

‘The ladies were very nice to me. They gave me fruit and cake and wine. They asked me a lot of questions about you.’

‘What did they ask?’

‘They wanted to know how long you’d been married and whom you’d married and what Monna Marietta was like.’

‘And have you talked to Serafina?’

‘You were right about her, Messere. If you hadn’t come in she’d be talking still. I thought she’d never stop.’

‘Tell me.’

When Piero had finished Machiavelli gave him a genial smile.

‘You have done very well. I knew I was right, I knew that your youth would appeal to the ageing woman and your simple innocent look make it easy for her to confide in you.’

Piero had found out a great deal. Bartolomeo was in high favour with the Duke. He was one of the first men in the city. He was honest, kindly, generous and devout. This was his third marriage. His first had been arranged by his parents, and his wife after eight years died of cholera. After a decent interval he married again, but eleven years later his second wife also died. Both had brought him handsome dowries, and both were childless. He had remained a widower for three years and then suddenly married Aurelia. She was a native of Sinigaglia, a port on the Adriatic, and her father was owner and master of a coasting vessel that carried merchandise to the Dalmatian cities. He was lost with his ship in a storm, and his widow was reduced to poverty so that she had to earn her living as a sempstress. She had three daughters, a son having been drowned with his father, but two of them were married. Aurelia was sixteen when accident brought her to the notice of Bartolomeo. He was struck by her virginal beauty, but neither by birth nor fortune was she a proper match for a man of his consequence; but, young though she was, there was in her a ripeness that gave promise of fecundity, and that was a matter of moment to Bartolomeo, for there was nothing in the world he wanted more than a son. During the lifetime of his two wives he had kept likely young women of humble station, but none of these irregular amours had resulted in issue. The fact that Monna Caterina had had six children (two had died in infancy) showed that the stock was fruitful, and by discreet enquiries he discovered that Aurelia’s older sisters had already had three or four babies each. They had in fact given birth once a year with the regularity which was proper to a healthy young person of the female sex. But Bartolomeo was cautious. He had married two barren women and did not want to marry a third. Through an intermediary he proposed to Monna Caterina that he should install her and her daughter on a handsome allowance in one of his villas outside Imola, with a promise that he would recognize any child that might be born. He went so far as to permit the intermediary to hint at the possibility of marriage if the child were male. But Monna Caterina whether owing to religious scruples or worldly wisdom refused the offer with indignation. Her dead husband, though no more the master of a small coasting vessel, had been an honourable man, and her two daughters were respectably, if not richly, married. Sooner than see her beloved child the kept woman of a merchant she would put her in a nunnery. Bartolomeo reviewed the marriageable young women in Imola and could think of none who attracted him so much as Aurelia or who seemed more likely to give him the son he yearned for. He was a business man and a sensible one. He knew that if you wanted something enough and could not get it at your own price there was only one thing to do and that was to give the price asked for it. With a good grace he made an offer of marriage. It was promptly accepted.

Bartolomeo was not only a business man, but a shrewd one. Aurelia was twenty years younger than he, and he thought it advisable that she should have someone to keep an eye on her. He invited Monna Caterina to live with him and his bride.

Serafina sniggered.

‘The old fool trusts her. But look at her; that isn’t a woman who was faithful to her husband. You can tell at once. When her husband was at sea she wasn’t so virtuous as all that.’

‘She evidently doesn’t like Monna Caterina,’ said Machiavelli. ‘I wonder why. Perhaps she wanted to marry Bartolomeo herself and have him adopt her children. Perhaps merely envy. It may be of no importance, but it is just as well to know.’

The marriage had been happy and Bartolomeo was delighted with his young wife. He gave her fine clothes and fine jewels. She was dutiful, respectful, submissive, in fact all that a wife should be, but though they had been married three years she had not had a baby and showed no sign of having one. It was the great cross of Bartolomeo’s life, and now that he had a title to transmit he wanted a son more than ever.

‘Did Monna Serafina hint that the beautiful Aurelia might be unfaithful to her old husband?’ Machiavelli asked with a smile.

‘No. She seldom goes out except to mass, and then only with her mother or the maid to accompany her. According to Monna Serafina she is very pious. She would look upon it as a mortal sin to deceive her husband.’

Machiavelli pondered.

‘When you were talking to the ladies about me did you happen to mention that Monna Marietta was pregnant?’

The boy flushed.

‘I thought there was no harm.’

‘None at all. I’m not sorry they know.’

Machiavelli smiled significantly, but the significance of his smile escaped Piero. It has been said that Machiavelli had not married Marietta for love. He respected her, he appreciated her good qualities, and he approved of her devotion to him. She was a thrifty housekeeper, an important matter to one of his small means, and she never wasted a penny; she would be the mother of his children, and a good mother; there was every reason why he should regard her with indulgence and affection, but it had never entered his mind that he should be faithful to her. Aurelia’s beauty had taken his breath away, but it was not only her beauty that had moved him, he could not remember any woman who had so immediately and so violently excited his senses. His very stomach ached with the vehemence of his desire.

‘I’m going to have that woman if I die for it,’ he said to himself.

He knew a great deal about women and it was not often that he had failed to satisfy his lust. He had no illusions about his appearance; he knew that other men were handsomer than he and that many had the advantage of him in wealth and station. But he was confident in his powers of attraction. He could amuse them, he knew just how to flatter them, he had a way with him that put them at their ease with him, but above all he desired them; they were very conscious of that and it excited them.

‘When a woman feels with every nerve in her body that you want her she can resist only if she’s passionately in love with another,’ he had once told Biagio.

It was impossible to suppose that Aurelia loved her fat husband, a man so many years older than herself, to whom she had been married by her mother because it was a good business proposition. But Bartolomeo must know that there were young men in the city, dissolute fellows attached to the Duke’s court, who had noticed that she was beautiful, and he must be on his guard. The serving man had suspicious eyes. He was beetle-browed, a sullen fellow with a great bony nose and a cruel mouth; he might well have been put there to spy on his young mistress. And then there was the mother. Serafina said she had been gay in her youth and it might be true; she had the bold roving eye of the woman who has had adventures, and though it might be that it would be no outrage to her virtue if her daughter took a lover, it was a risk to run. Machiavelli had come to the conclusion that Bartolomeo was a vain man, and he knew that no one can be so vindictive as the vain man who discovers that he has been fooled. It was no easy matter that Machiavelli was undertaking, but that did not disturb him, he had confidence in himself, and the difficulty made that affair more interesting. It was evident that he must cultivate Bartolomeo and lull him into security, and it would be well to get on good terms with Monna Caterina. It had been a sound idea to get Piero to question Serafina and it had given him some notion of the situation. But he had to know more, and then some plan might suggest itself to his fertile mind. He knew it was no use to rack his brain. He must wait for an inspiration.

‘Let us go and have supper,’ he said to Piero.

They walked to the Golden Lion and having eaten returned to their lodging. Serafina had put her children to bed and was in the kitchen darning a pair of stockings. Machiavelli sent Piero up to the room he shared with her son, and politely asking if he might warm himself for a little by her fire sat down. He had an inkling that Monna Caterina would be over very soon to ask Serafina about him and he wanted her to give a good report of him. He could be very charming when he chose, and now he did. He told her of his mission to the court of France, partly because he knew it would interest her, but more to impress upon her his own importance; he talked of the King and of his minister the Cardinal as though he were hail-fellow well-met with them, and told her scandalous and amusing stories of the gallantries of great ladies. Then he took another line; he told her of Marietta, and how hard it was to leave her when she was pregnant, and how much he wanted to go back to Florence and his happy home. Serafina would have had to be a very clever woman to doubt that he was the good and devoted husband, the plain, honest man he made himself out to be. He listened with sympathetic interest while she told him of her husband’s illness and death, the better days she had seen, and the responsibility it was to have two young children to launch into the world. Of course she thought him a delightful, distinguished and kindly man. When he told her that he was delicate, with a digestion that was the torment of his life, and that the food at the Golden Lion didn’t agree with him, for he was used to Monna Marietta’s simple fare, it was natural enough for Serafina to say that if he wasn’t too proud to eat with her and her children she would gladly provide meals for him and Piero. This suited him very well, for it would save money and in other ways be more convenient. He left her with just the impression of himself that he wanted, went up to his room, and by the light of a candle read his Livy till he felt inclined to sleep.

CHAPTER 10

MACHIAVELLI LAY IN bed late next morning. He read one of the cantos of the Inferno. Though he knew the noble poem almost by heart it filled him as usual with exaltation; he could never read it without being ravished by the beauty of its language; but at the back of his mind hovered the picture of Aurelia primly at work on her embroidery, and now and then he was obliged to put the book down and indulge in thoughts of some indecency. He wondered how on earth he could arrange to see her again. Of course it might be that on a second meeting she would seem less desirable, and in a way it would be a blessing, for he had enough to do without engaging in a love affair. on the other hand it would be a pleasant distraction from his political labours. His reflections were interrupted by his servant Antonio, who told him that Messer Bartolomeo was below and desired to see him. Sending down a message that he would join him immediately Machiavelli threw on his clothes and went downstairs.

‘Forgive me for keeping you waiting, Count, but I was just finishing a letter to the Signory,’ he lied easily.

Bartolomeo, with a slight gesture of deprecation at Machiavelli’s use of his title, as though to say that it was a trifle of no account, was obviously flattered. He brought news. The strongest fortress in the Urbinate was San Leo; it was perched on a steep, isolated rock and was reputed to be impregnable. It happened that it was undergoing repair, and taking advantage of this a number of armed peasants had rushed the gate and massacred Il Valentino’s garrison. The news spread quickly and other villages at once rose in revolt. Il Valentino had flown into a temper when intelligence of this was brought him; it was evident that the rising had been instigated by the conspirators at La Magione, and that could only mean that they had decided to attack him. The Palace was in a turmoil of activity.

‘What are the troops the Duke can at present dispose of?’ Machiavelli interrupted.

‘You’d better come and see for yourself.’

‘I doubt whether His Excellency would give me permission.’

‘Come with me. I’m going to the camp now. I’ll take you.’

It flashed across Machiavelli’s mind that Bartolomeo had not come in a friendly way to give him information which in any case could not have been for long kept secret, but had been sent by the Duke expressly to tender this invitation. Like a hunter in the forest who hears a rustling in the undergrowth, Machiavelli was on a sudden alert, but he smiled amiably.

‘You must be a powerful man, friend, if you can come and go about the camp at your own free will.’

‘No, it isn’t that,’ Bartolomeo replied, with a semblance of modesty. ‘The Duke has put me at the head of the citizens commissioned to see to the provisioning of the troops.’

‘You must be making a pretty penny out of it,’ said Machiavelli slyly.

Bartolomeo burst into a fat laugh.

‘A bare profit, if that. The Duke isn’t a man to trifle with. At Urbino the men almost mutinied over the quality of their food, and when the matter was brought to his attention and he discovered that their complaints were justified, he hanged the three commissioners.’

‘I can well understand that it makes you careful.’

They rode out to the camp. It was three miles from the city. There were three companies of fifty lancers under Spanish captains, and a hundred lancers, Roman gentleman who had joined the Duke’s army for adventure and to win renown. Each lancer was mounted, and had a page on a pony and an infantryman as attendants. There were twenty-five hundred mercenaries; and the Duke’s conscripted soldiers, six thousand of them, were expected to arrive in two days. He had sent an agent to Milan to collect five hundred of the Gascon adventurers who were scattered in Lombardy and another to hire fifteen hundred Swiss. His artillery was formidable and in good condition. Machiavelli was interested in military affairs, of which he had gained some experience in the unsuccessful siege of Pisa, and he flattered himself on his knowledge. He kept his eyes open. He asked a lot of questions, both of officers and men, and sorting the answers, accepting what looked like truth and rejecting what was improbable, formed the opinion that the Duke’s force was far from negligible.

On getting back to the city he found a message from Agapito da Amalia to say that the Duke desired to see him at eight o’clock that evening. After dinner he sent Piero over to Bartolomeo’s house to tell him that he was to have an audience with the Duke that night, and if Bartolomeo would meet him later at the Golden Lion they might drink a cup of wine together; it was possible that he could only get into communication with Aurelia through her husband and therefore must make friends with him. Bartolomeo was a trusting soul, who liked good cheer and good company, and such a proof of confidence as the envoy of the Republic was now offering could not fail to flatter his conceit.

Machiavelli went to his room and had a siesta, then decided that it would be worth his while to have another talk with Serafina. He had a notion that he could get more out of her than Piero had. She had spoken well of Bartolomeo to him, but that might have been from discretion; if he knew anything about human nature she must be less grateful for the benefits the fat man had conferred on her than resentful on account of those he had omitted. Machiavelli thought himself clever enough to induce her to divulge her real feelings.

When he awoke he strolled downstairs as though to go to the parlour and on his way sang, a little more loudly than was necessary, the catch of a Florentine song.

‘Are you there, Monna Serafina,’ he said as he passed the kitchen door. ‘I thought you were out.’

‘You have a fine voice, Messere,’ she said.

‘A thousand thanks. May I come in for a minute?’

‘My eldest son has a beautiful voice; Messer Bartolomeo used often to have him over and they would sing together. Messer Bartolomeo is a bass. It is strange that a man so big and strong should have a voice of so little power.’

Machiavelli pricked up his ears.

‘My friend Biagio Buonaccorsi, Messer Bartolomeo’s cousin, and I are fond of singing together. What a pity I couldn’t bring my lute with me! It would have been a pleasure to me to sing some of my songs to you.’

‘But my son left his lute here. He wanted to take it with him, but it’s a valuable instrument which was given to his father, my poor husband, by a gentleman to whom he had done a service, and I wouldn’t let him take it.’

‘Will you let me see it?’

‘It hasn’t been touched for three years now. I dare say some of the strings are broken.’

But she fetched it and put it in Machiavelli’s hands. It was a lovely thing of cedar with ivory inlay. He tuned it and proceeded in a low voice to sing. He was not only very fond of music, but had a technical knowledge of it, and he had written the words and himself composed the melody of several songs. As he finished he noticed that tears were in Serafina’s eyes. He put down the instrument and had looked at her kindly.

‘I didn’t wish to make you cry.’

‘It reminds me of my boy, so far away and exposed to so many dangers among those heathen people.’

‘It’ll be good experience for him, and under the protection of Messer Bartolomeo his future is assured.’

She gave him a pinched glance.

‘Lazarus must be thankful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.’

Her acid remark assured him that he had not been far wrong in his conjecture.

‘The Holy Scriptures assure us that in heaven the position will be reversed,’ he answered.

She gave a laugh that was more like a snort.

‘He would give half his wealth to have my children.’

‘It is strange that none of his three wives should have produced a child.’

‘You men, you always think it’s the woman’s fault. Monna Caterina has her head screwed on her shoulders all right; she knows that if Aurelia doesn’t have a baby soon it’ll go badly with both of them. No more fine dresses then. No more rings and bracelets. I’ve known Bartolomeo all his life. He doesn’t give much away for nothing. Monna Caterina is wise to worry. She’s giving Fra Timoteo money to pray that Aurelia should conceive.’

‘Who, pray, is Fra Timoteo?’ asked Machiavelli.

‘Their confessor. Bartolomeo has promised to give a Virgin and Child when Aurelia has a son. Fra Timoteo is making a pretty penny out of them. He twists them round his little finger, and he knows as well as I do that poor Bartolomeo is impotent.’

Machiavelli had learnt more than he had hoped; a scheme beautiful and simple flashed through his mind and he thought it wise to drop the conversation. He idly plucked the strings of the lute.

‘You’re right, it’s a beautiful instrument. It’s a pleasure to play on it. I don’t wonder that you were unwilling to let your son take it overseas.’

‘You are very sympathetic, Messere,’ she said. ‘If it gives you pleasure to play, I will lend it you while you’re here. I know you’ll be careful with it.’

Machiavelli had been wondering how he could induce her to make such an offer: she saved him all further trouble. There was no doubt about it, he had a way with women: it was a pity she was old, haggard and sallow; otherwise he might have permitted himself a little nonsense with her. He thanked her warmly.

‘It will be a comfort to me to sing the little songs my wife is fond of. I haven’t been married to her long and she is pregnant; it was hard to leave her. But how could I help it? I am a servant of the Republic and I must put my duty before my inclination.’

When, a little later, Machiavelli left her he had persuaded Serafina that he was not only a person of distinction, but a good husband, a sincere friend, and an honest, charming and reliable man.

CHAPTER 11

AT THE APPOINTED time one of the Duke’s secretaries, accompanied by men with torches, came to fetch him, and Machiavelli, calling one of his servants to follow, started out for the Palace. The Duke received him with a show of affection that was the more surprising since two nights before he had dismissed him in a passion. He appeared to be in high spirits. He mentioned the fall of the fortress of San Leo in an off-hand way and seemed to have no doubt that he would easily settle the trouble in Urbino. Then in an intimately confidential manner that would have flattered Machiavelli had he been sensible to flattery he told him that he had sent for him to impart some news that would interest the gentlemen of the Signory. He produced a letter he had just received from the Bishop of Arles, the Pope’s legate in France, in which the Bishop told him that the King and the Cardinal, his minister, were anxious to please him and knowing that he needed men for his attack on Bologna had given orders to Monsieur de Chaumont at Milan to send him three hundred lancers under Monsieur de Lancres, and on the Duke’s demand to march in person on Parma with another three hundred lancers. The Duke showed the letter to Machiavelli so that he could vouch for its authenticity.

The cause of the Duke’s good humour was obvious. If he had not marched on Florence after his capture of Urbino it was only because the French had sent a force to protect it, and the only conclusion to be drawn from this was that he could no longer count on their aid. It was the assurance of this that had encouraged the captains to revolt. But if the French, for reasons which could only be surmised, were once more prepared to support him his situation was much improved.

‘Now listen to me, Secretary,’ he said. ‘This letter was written in answer to the request I made for help to attack Bologna. You can see for yourself that I shan’t lack strength to cope with these rascals. They couldn’t have discovered themselves at a more convenient time. I know now against whom I have to protect myself and who are my friends. I’m telling you this so that you may write to your masters and show them that I’m not bowing before the storm. I have good friends, and among them I should like to count the Signory – if they’re disposed to come to terms quickly; but if they’re not I’m finished with them for good and all, and even if I were up to my neck in water I wouldn’t talk of friendship again.’

Though his words were menacing, he spoke in such a gay and debonair fashion that they hardly seemed offensive. Machiavelli said he would write at once to the Signory to inform them of what the Duke had told him. The Duke bade him good night with cordiality.

When Machiavelli arrived at the inn he found Bartolomeo waiting for him. They ordered mulled wine. Machiavelli, pledging him to secrecy to make what he had to say appear more important, though he guessed that if Bartolomeo did not know it already, he soon would, told him what he had learnt from the Duke. It suited him then to invent a little; he told Bartolomeo that the Duke had spoken most obligingly of him, and when the fat man wanted to know in exactly what terms, Machiavelli had no difficulty in specifying them. Bartolomeo beamed.

‘You are already the first man in Imola, Messer Bartolomeo; if the Pope lives and things prosper with the Duke you may well be one of the first men in Italy.’

‘I am nothing but a merchant. I do not aim so high.’

‘Cosimo de’ Medici was nothing but a merchant, and yet he became the master of Florence and his son, Lorenzo the Magnificent, treated on equal terms with kings and princes.’

The expression on Bartolomeo’s face showed him that the dart had hit its mark.

‘Is it true that your wife is pregnant, Messere?’

‘It is a great joy to me. She expects her confinement some time next year.’

‘You are more fortunate than I,’ sighed Bartolomeo. ‘I have had three wives and not one of them has borne me a child.’

‘Monna Aurelia is a strong and healthy young woman. It is impossible to believe that she is barren.’

‘What other explanation can there be? We have been married three years.’

‘Perhaps if you took her to the baths . . .’

‘I took her to the baths, and when that failed, we went on a pilgrimage to Santa Maria de la Misericordia at Alvanio, where there is a miraculous image of the Madonna which causes barren women to conceive. It had no effect. You can imagine what a mortification it is to me. My enemies say that I am impotent. That is absurd. Few men are more virile than I am. Why, I have bastards in every village within ten miles of Imola.’

Machiavelli knew that was a lie.

‘Would you imagine that anyone could have such bad luck as to marry three barren women?’

‘You mustn’t despair, my friend. A miracle is always possible and you have surely deserved well of our Holy Church.’

‘That is what Fra Timoteo says. He prays for me daily.’

‘Fra Timoteo?’ asked Machiavelli as though the name meant nothing to him.

‘Our confessor. He tells me to have faith.’

Machiavelli called for more wine. By the exercise of judicious flattery, namely by asking Bartolomeo’s advice on how he should conduct himself in his difficult negotiations with the Duke, he soon brought him to a more cheerful state of mind. Then he told him a number of highly indecent stories, of which he had a great store and which he told with effect. Bartolomeo laughed with great guffaws and by the time they parted he had decided that he had never known a more entertaining fellow. On his side Machiavelli thought that he had spent his evening to advantage. He was a temperate man, but he had a strong head, and the wine that had made Bartolomeo a trifle tipsy had not affected him at all. When he got back to his room he proceeded to write a long letter to the Signory telling them of his interview with the Duke and what forces he had at his disposal or within easy call. He wrote fluently and without erasures. Then he read what he had written. It was a good letter.

CHAPTER 12

IL VALENTINO WAS in the habit of working far into the night, and so did not get up early in the morning. His secretaries, kept busy till all hours, took advantage of this to sleep late, and so next morning Machiavelli, with nothing much to do till after dinner, his letter to the Signory dispatched, thought he would take things easily. He read his Livy and made a few notes of the reflections his reading had occasioned and then to pass the time took his borrowed lute. It had a good tone, resonant but sweet, and he had noticed when first he tried it that it suited his light baritone. It was a sunny day and he sat by the open window enjoying the grateful warmth. Somewhere in the not far distance they were burning wood and the smell of it was pleasant in his nostrils. The lane that separated Serafina’s house from Messer Bartolomeo’s was so narrow that a donkey with panniers could hardly have scraped its way through, and from his window Machiavelli looked down into the tiny courtyard with its well-head and its chestnut-tree. He began to sing. He was in good voice that morning and liking the sound of it went on. Then he noticed that the window in a room opposite was being opened, he could not see by whom, he did not even see the hand that fixed the paper panel, but he had a sudden thrill of exultation, for he was convinced that the unseen person could be none other than Aurelia. He sang two of his favourite songs, love songs both of them, and was in the middle of a third when the window was suddenly closed as though someone had come into the room. This somewhat disconcerted him and a suspicion passed through his mind that it might have been the maid interrupted by her mistress who did not want to be found neglecting her work to listen to a stranger singing in the next house. But at dinner-time his well-directed conversation discovered to him that the window that had been opened was that of the nuptial chamber of Bartolomeo and his young wife.

Later on in the day he went to the Palace, but succeeded in seeing neither the Duke nor any of the secretaries. He entered into conversation with various persons who were lounging about apparently with nothing to do and asked them what the news was. They knew nothing, but he received the impression that they knew at least that something had happened. Whatever it was, a secret was being made of it. Presently he ran across Bartolomeo, who told him he had an appointment with the Duke, but he was too busy to see him.

‘We’re both wasting our time here,’ said Machiavelli with his pleasant friendliness. ‘let us go to the inn and drink a cup of wine. We might have a game of cards, or if you can play chess, a game of chess.’

‘I’m fond of chess.’

On their way to the Golden Lion Machiavelli asked him what everyone at the Palace was so busy about that day.

‘I haven’t a notion. I can’t get anyone to tell me anything.’

By the slight peevishness of Bartolomeo’s tone Machiavelli guessed that he was telling the truth. He had a great idea of his own importance and it humiliated him to find that he was not in the Duke’s entire confidence.

‘I have heard that when the Duke wishes to keep something secret not even those closest to him know about it,’ said Machiavelli.

‘He’s beer occupied with his secretaries all day. Messengers have been dispatched one after the other.’

‘It’s evident that something has happened.’

‘I know that a courier arrived from Perugia this morning.’

‘A courier, or someone disguised as a courier?’

Bartolomeo looked at him quickly.

‘I don’t know. What do you suspect?’

‘Nothing. I was only asking.’

It was but a short walk to the inn. They ordered a flagon of wine and asked for chessmen. Machiavelli was a good player and it did not take him long to discover that Bartolomeo was no match for him, but he amused himself by giving him a hard game and letting himself be beaten in the end. Bartolomeo was puffed up with pride and while they drank their wine pointed out to Machiavelli exactly what mistakes he had made and what his move should have been to counter his opponent’s strategy. Machiavelli blamed himself for his want of foresight. On their way back to their respective domiciles Bartolomeo remarked:

‘My mother-in-law says she heard someone singing in your house this morning. A very pretty voice. Was that you or my young cousin Piero?’

‘Piero’s voice is better than mine, but it was I who was singing. I’m flattered that Monna Caterina should not have thought too badly of my efforts. Biagio and I and one or two more used often to while away the time by singing.’

‘I sing a very good bass myself.’

‘Piero sings tenor. It would be an excellent combination. If you don’t object to my humble quarters it would be a great pleasure to me if you would come in when you have nothing better to do, and we’ll give our good friend Serafina a little concert.’

Would the fish swallow the fly that was so skilfully cast? There was no sign of it.

‘We will certainly do that. It will bring me back my youth. When I was a young fellow in Smyrna we Italians would sing all the time.’

‘Patience,’ Machiavelli muttered to himself. ‘Patience.’

When he got in, taking a greasy pack of cards, he began to play patience, but as he played he turned over in his mind what Bartolomeo had told him and what he had learnt from Serafina. He had a plan, and it was a good one, but to carry it out called for ingenuity. The more he thought of Aurelia the more she inflamed his fancy, and it tickled him to death to think that he could provide Bartolomeo with the child, preferably male, that he so much wanted.

‘It is not often,’ he reflected, ‘that you can do a good action with so much pleasure to yourself.’

It was evident that he must ingratiate himself with Monna Caterina, for without her he could do nothing, but the difficulty was to get on terms with her sufficiently intimate to enable him to enlist her help. She was a woman of voluptuous appearance, and it occurred to him that he might persuade Piero to go to bed with her. Piero was young. At her age she could not fail to be grateful. But he dismissed the notion; it would serve his purpose better if Piero became the maid’s lover. But they said that in her time Monna Caterina had been gay. If there was one thing of which Machiavelli was convinced it was that when a woman ceased to be desirable a procuress is born. He thought there was a natural instinct in the sex that led them to enjoy vicariously pleasures that were no longer befitting to their age. And what should she care about Bartolomeo’s honour? It was to her interest that Aurelia should have offspring.

And what about this Fra Timoteo? He was their confessor; he was a friend of the house. It might be worth while to see him and find out what sort of a man he was. It might be that he could be put to good use. Machiavelli’s meditation was on a sudden disturbed by a tap on the shutter. He looked up but did not move; the tap, low and discreet, was repeated. He went to the window and slightly opened the shutter. A name was muttered.

‘Farinelli.’

‘Wait.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘I am alone.’

He went into the passage and opened the door. In the darkness he could see nothing but that someone was standing there. Farinelli, it may be remembered, was the Florentine accountant with whom Machiavelli had made contact the day after his arrival. Huddled in a cape, with a scarf to conceal his face, he slipped in and followed Machiavelli into the parlour. It was lit by a single candle. He sat at the table close to Machiavelli so that he need hardly raise his voice above a whisper.

‘I have something important to tell you.’

‘Speak.’

‘Can I count on the generosity of the Signory if what I say is useful to them?’

‘Without doubt.’

‘A messenger, riding post, arrived at the Palace today. The rebels have at last signed articles of agreement. They are pledged to stand by Bentivoglio in defence of Bologna, to reinstate the dispossessed lords in their dominions, and not to undertake any separate negotiations with the Duke. They have decided to collect seven hundred men-at-arms, a hundred light horse and nine thousand foot. Bentivoglio is to attack Imola and Vitellozzo and the Orsini are to march on Urbino.’

‘That is news indeed,’ said Machiavelli.

He was pleasantly excited. Stirring events exhilarated him and he looked forward with the anticipation of a spectator at a play to seeing how the Duke would cope with the danger that confronted him.

‘There is one more thing. Vitellozzo has given the Duke to understand that if he can have reliable assurances that no attempt will be made to deprive him of his own state of Castello he will rejoin him.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘It is enough that I know it.’

Machiavelli was perplexed. He knew Vitellozzo, a sullen, suspicious, moody man, subject to wild rages and to attacks of profound depression. The syphilis from which he suffered had so affected him that sometimes he was hardly sane. Who could tell what wicked plans that tortured brain was contriving? Machiavelli dismissed the accountant.

‘I can count on your discretion, Messer Niccolo? My life would be short if it were discovered that I have told you what I have.’

‘I know. But I am not one to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’

CHAPTER 13

FROM THEN ON things moved quickly. On hearing of the uprising in Urbino the Duke had sent two of his captains, Spaniards both, Don Ugo da Moncada and Don Michele da Corella, to put it down. Making Pergola and Fossombrone their headquarters they ravaged the surrounding territories, sacked the towns and killed most of the inhabitants. At Fossombrone women threw themselves and their children into the river to escape the savagery of the soldiery. The Duke, sending for Machiavelli, told him of these exploits with a great deal of good humour.

‘It looks as though the season were not too healthy for rebels,’ he said with a grim smile.

He had just received news from an envoy of the Pope at Perugia that on his arrival the Orsini had come to assure him of their loyalty to the Holy Father and to excuse their acts. Machiavelli remembered what Farinelli had told him about Vitellozzo.

‘It is difficult to understand what they have done that,’ he said.

‘Use your brain, Secretary. It can only mean that they’re not yet ready and want to gain time by behaving as though an accommodation were still possible.’

A few days later Vitellozzo carried the city of Urbino by assault and the Duke again sent for Machiavelli. Machiavelli expected to find him disconcerted by the bad news, but he did not even mention it.

‘I want to confer with you as usual on the matters that concern your government and our common interests,’ he said. ‘I have received this letter from someone I sent to Siena.’

He read it aloud. It was from the Chevalier Orsini, a bastard of that noble and powerful house, who was in the Duke’s service. He had spoken with the leaders of the conspiracy, and they had declared their desire to be on good terms with the Duke and professed their willingness to re-enter his service if he would abandon his attack on Bologna and instead combine with them to invade the Florentine territories.

‘You see what confidence I place in you,’ he added, when he had finished, ‘and what trust I have in the good faith of your government. In return they should place more reliance on me than they have in the past and they can be sure that I shall not fail them.’

Machiavelli did not know how much of this to believe. The Orsini were the bitter enemies of Florence and would welcome the opportunity to restore the exiled Medici to power. It was not unlikely that they had made some such offer. He could only suppose that the Duke had not accepted it for fear of angering the French and was divulging in it in order to put the Republic under such an obligation that the Signory would be willing to give him again the profitable condotta he had not long before forced upon them at the sword’s point, but which, the danger passed, they had to his vexation withdrawn from him. A condotta was the term used for the engagement of a mercenary captain, hence called condottiere, for a period of time. On his salary, settled after a lot of haggling on both sides, he paid his men and made a pretty penny for himself.

Two days later the rebel forces attacked the Duke’s army under the joint command of the two Spaniards and defeated it. Don Ugo da Moncada was taken prisoner and Don Michele da Corella, wounded, fled to the stronghold of Fossombrone. It was more than a set-back, it was a disaster. The news was kept secret in Imola, for, as Machiavelli wrote to the Signory, in the Duke’s court things which were not to be bruited about were not spoken of; but he had his ways of finding out what was important for him to know, and as soon as the event reached his ears he went to the Palace and requested an audience.

Machiavelli entered the presence with a lively sense of curiosity. He was desirous to see in what state he would find the Duke, hitherto self-confident and imperturbable, now that ruin stared him in the face. He could not but know that he could expect no mercy from his enemies. He was calm and even gay. He spoke of the rebels with disdain.

‘I don’t want to boast,’ he said, ‘but I expect the outcome, whatever it is, will show what stuff they’re made of and what stuff I’m made of. I know them well, the whole gang of them, and I think nothing of them. Vitellozzo has a great reputation, but all I can tell you is that I’ve never seen him do a thing that needed courage. His excuse is the French sickness. The fact is, he’s good for nothing but to ravage undefended territories and rob those who haven’t the guts to stand up to him. A false friend and a treacherous enemy.’

Machiavelli could not withold his admiration for this man who faced destruction with such an indomitable spirit. His situation was desperate. The Bentivogli, Lords of Bologna, were on his northern frontiers; Vitellozzo and the Orsini, flushed with victory, must be advancing from the south. Attacked simultaneously on two fronts by superior forces he could not escape annihilation. Il Valentino was no friend of Florence and his downfall and death would be a relief to the Republic, but Machiavelli, against his will, had an inclination – it was no more than that – to wish that he might succeed in extricating himself from the strait he was in.

‘I have received letters from France,’ said the Duke after a pause, ‘from which I learn that the King has instructed your government to give me every possible assistance.’

‘I have heard nothing of it,’ said Machiavelli.

‘Well, it is true. You will write to your masters and tell them to send me ten squadrons of cavalry, and you may add that I am ready to make a firm and indissoluble alliance with them from which they will gain all the advantages that may be expected from my help and my good fortune.’

‘I will naturally carry out Your Excellency’s instructions.’

The Duke was not alone. With him were Agapito da Amalia, the Bishop of Elna, his cousin, and another secretary. There was an ominous silence. The Duke stared at the Florentine envoy reflectively. The silence and those staring eyes would have incommoded a more nervous man than Machiavelli, and even he had to exercise some self-control to maintain an air of composure.

‘I’ve heard from various sources,’ said the Duke at last, ‘that your government is urging the Lords of Bologna to declare war on me, and that they’re doing this either because they wish to ruin me or to make a pact with me on more favourable terms.’

Machiavelli contrived to smile with as much geniality as his cold and somewhat austere cast of countenance allowed.

‘I don’t believe it for a moment, Excellency,’ he replied. ‘The letters I receive from the Signory never fail to contain protestations of friendship for the Holy Father and yourself.’

‘I don’t believe it either, but protestations of friendship are more convincing when acts conform with them.’

‘I am sure my government will do everything in its power to show the sincerity of its intentions.’

‘If it is as wise as it is dilatory I am sure it will.’

Within himself Machiavelli shivered. He had never in his life heard such cold ferocity in a man’s voice.

CHAPTER 14

FOR SOME DAYS after this Machiavelli busied himself in gathering information from his agents, from Bartolomeo, from Farinelli and from those about the Duke. He could trust no one completely and he knew that Il Valentino’s intimates told him only what they wanted him to know. But the most puzzling fact of it all was the inactivity of the revolting captains. The Duke’s troops, which he had been enlisting wherever men were for sale, had not yet arrived, and thought he still held some fortresses in the states that had rebelled, it was impossible to believe that he could withstand a determined assault. Now was the time to attack. Now. Yet they did nothing. Machiavelli was at his wit’s end; he could not for the life of him understand what caused them to delay. Then an event occurred that increased his bewilderment: the Orsini sent an emissary to the Duke’s court, who arrived one evening and left next day; Machiavelli for all his efforts could not find out the purpose of his visit.

He had by now received the Signory’s reply to the Duke’s demand for armed help, and in the hope of getting some inkling of what was happening, he applied for an audience. It was not without trepidation that he went to the Palace, for what he had to tell the Duke was that the Florentines had no troops to send and all they were prepared to offer was an assurance of their benevolence. Machiavelli had seen Il Valentino in a rage and he knew that it was terrible; he braced himself to bear the storm with fortitude. No one could have been more astonished than he when the Duke received the intelligence he brought with indifference.

‘I’ve told you several times and tonight I tell you again that I’m not devoid of resources. The French lancers will be here soon and so will the Swiss infantry. You can see for yourself that I’m engaging troops every day. The Pope has no lack of money, nor the King of men. It may well be that my enemies will regret their treachery.’

He smiled, and his smile was cruel and cunning.

‘Would it surprise you to know that they’ve already made offers of peace?’

Machiavelli repressed a start.

‘Messer Antonio da Venafro came on their behalf.’

This was evidently the mysterious visitor of whom Machiavelli had heard. He was the confidant and trusted adviser of Pandolfo Petrucci, Lord of Siena, who by common report was the brains of the conspiracy.

‘He made the proposal that we should overthrow the government of Florence, but I answered that your state had never offended me and that I was on the point of signing a treaty with you. ‘Don’t sign on any account,’ he said. ‘Let me go back and return and we’ll do something worth while.’ To which I answered: ‘We’ve gone so far it’s impossible to withdraw.’ And I tell you once more that though I’m prepared to listen to these people and throw dust in their eyes I’ll do nothing against your state unless it forces me to.’

As Machiavelli was taking his leave the Duke in a very casual fashion dropped a remark which astounded the envoy of the Republic as in all probability he expected it to do.

‘I’m expecting Pagolo Orsini at any moment.’

Piero had accompanied Machiavelli to the Palace and was waiting for him in the guard-room with a lantern to light him back to their lodging. Piero had learnt to read his master’s face and he saw at a glance that he was in no mood for conversation. They walked in silence. When Machiavelli had taken off his cloak and his headgear he told Piero to bring him ink, quills and paper, and sat down to write to the Signory.

‘I shall to go bed,’ said Piero.

‘No, wait,’ said Machiavelli, throwing himself back in his chair. ‘I want to talk to you.’

He did not know how much to believe of what the Duke had told him and he thought it might help him with his letter if before writing he put into words what he had in mind.

‘I’m confused by this guile, these lies, and the deceit of everyone I have to deal with.’

In no more words than were necessary he repeated to Piero what the Duke had said to him.

‘How is it possible for Il Valentino, with his spirit, his good fortune and his great ambition, to condone the acts of men who’ve not only prevented him from acquiring a state he has cast his eyes on, but have caused him to lose a state he had already acquired? The captains revolted because they wanted to destroy him before he could destroy them. Why have they delayed to attack when they had him at their mercy?’

Machiavelli looked at Piero with frowning eyes, but Piero, very sensibly surmising that the question was rhetorical, made no attempt to answer.

‘Now he’s strengthened his fortresses and garrisoned important places. Every day more troops are arriving. He’s getting money from the Pope and men from the French. And he has the great advantage that he need consult no one but himself. The captains are united only by their hatred and fear of the Duke. Alliances are fragile because the respective parties are more concerned with their particular interests than with their common advantage. Allies cannot act swiftly because every step must be discussed, and the folly, unpreparedness or incompetence of one may cause the disaster of all. They’re necessarily jealous of one another, for no one of them wishes any one of the rest to gain so much power that he will be later a danger. The captains must know that emissaries are passing to and fro – you can be sure that Il Valentino has seen to that – and each at the back of his mind must be haunted by the suspicion that he is to be thrown to the wolves.’

Machiavelli nervously gnawed his thumbnail.

‘The more I think of it the more I believe that the rebels can no longer do much harm to the Duke, they’ve missed their opportunity, and in that case they may think it better worth their while to seek a reconciliation.’

Machiavelli gave the boy an angry look for which there was no justification since he had not opened his mouth.

‘D’you know what that means?’

‘No.’

‘It means that with their forces joined to his the Duke will have under his orders a formidable army, and it’s inevitable that it will be put to use. No one can afford to pay troops to sit about in idleness. How will it be used? Against whom? That will be decided, I suspect, when Il Valentino and Pagolo Orsini come face to face.’

CHAPTER 15

SINCE NO ONE in Italy was such a fool as to trust anyone else farther than he could see, and a safe conduct was worth no more than the paper it was written on, Cardinal Borgia, the Pope’s nephew, put himself in the hands of the Orsini as a hostage, and two days later Pagolo, the head of the house arrived at Imola disguised as a courier. He was a vain, loquacious, effeminate and silly man, middle-aged, plump and baldish, with a round, smooth face, and a fussy, familiar manner. Il Valentino treated him with great distinction and in his honour gave a great banquet followed by a performance of the Menaechmi of Plautus. The two leaders held long conferences, but what they discussed Machiavelli could discover neither for love nor money. Such of the Duke’s secretaries as had seemed friendly disposed deliberately avoided him. He had nothing to go on but a smiling remark of Agapito da Amalia’s that the negotiations were devised only to keep the enemy from taking action. Neither army in fact moved, and indeed the Bolognese troops withdrew from the places in the Duke’s dominions that they had occupied. The suspense soon grew too great for Machiavelli to bear and, taking advantage of a letter he had just received from Florence, he asked the Duke to see him. Il Valentino received him in bed. He listened with his usual good humour to the Signory’s protestations of friendship and then entered upon the topic which so much concerned Machiavelli.

‘I think we shall come to an agreement,’ he said. ‘They want no more from me than that the possession of their states shall be secured to them and now we’ve only got to decide how that can be arranged. Cardinal Orsini is drawing up articles and we must wait and see what they are. So far as you’re concerned you can rest assured that nothing will be done contrary to the interests of your masters. I would never allow the slightest harm to be done them.’

He paused, and when he spoke again it was with the smiling indulgence with which you might speak of the whims of a spoilt woman.

‘Poor Pagolo is very much incensed with Ramiro de Lorqua. He accuses him of oppressing the people, of peculation, and of maltreating various persons who are under the protection of the Orsini.’

Ramiro de Lorqua was the most trusted of the Duke’s commanders. It was he who had conducted the retreat of the routed forces after the battle of Fossombrone and so saved them to fight another day. Il Valentino chuckled.

‘It appears that on one occasion a page was bringing him some wine and spilt it, and Ramiro flew into a temper and had him thrown into the fire and burnt alive. For some reason Pagolo took an interest in the boy. I’ve promised to look into the charges and if they’re proved give him satisfaction.’

But then a piece of news arrived which suggested that the revolting captains were far from agreement among themselves: though the more prudent were ready to make peace, the more adventurous were still determined to wage war. Vitellozzo seized the Duke’s fortress of Fossombrone and two days later Oliverotto da Fermo took Camerino by storm. This completed the loss of all the territories Il Valentino had won during his last campaign. It looked as though the ruffians were deliberately set upon frustrating the negotiations, and Pagolo Orsini was enraged. But the Duke maintained his equanimity. Bentivoglio and the Orsini were the most powerful of his enemies and he knew that if he came to terms with them the others would have to toe the line. Pagolo went to Bologna. On his return Agapito da Amalia told Machiavelli that an agreement had been reached and only awaited the consent of Pagolo’s brother the Cardinal.

Machiavelli was filled with apprehension. If this was a fact, Il Valentino was prepared to forgive the injury the rebels had done him, if they were prepared to forget the fear that had driven them to take up arms, it could only be for one reason, which was that they had agreed to make a joint attack on a third party; and this third party could only be Florence or Venice. Venice was strong and Florence was weak. Her only safeguard was the power of France, but she had bought the protection of France with gold and the coffers of the Republic were empty. What would France do if she were confronted with the brute fact that Cæsar Borgia with his reconciled commanders had invaded the territories of Florence and captured her defenceless cities?

Machiavelli had a poor opinion of the French. Experience had taught him that they were more concerned with present loss and present gain than with future good and future ill. When asked to render a service their first thought was how it could be useful to them, and they kept faith only so long as it served their purpose. The Pope’s jubilee had brought enormous amounts of money into the Vatican treasury, and his somewhat high-handed procedure of seizing a cardinal’s property on his decease was continually adding to the sums at his disposal; for the mortality of these princes of the church was high; and the malicious indeed whispered that His Holiness found it convenient on occasion discreetly to come to the aid of a dilatory Providence. Thus he had ample funds to appease the anger of King Louis should he take it amiss that his orders had been disobeyed. Il Valentino had a well equipped and well trained army; the King might hesitate to pit his strength against one who after all was a vassal and a friend. The more Machiavelli considered, the more likely it seemed to him that the crafty Louis would accept a situation in which the profit was immediate and the danger, that Caesar Borgia would grow too powerful, remote. There was every reason for Machiavelli to fear that the Florence he loved with all his heart was doomed.

CHAPTER 16

BUT MACHIAVELLI WAS not only the diligent and conscientious servant of the Republic, he was also a man consumed with the lusts of the flesh; and while he studied with attention the letters he received from the Signory and wrote almost every day careful and exact reports; while he received in Serafina’s house, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, messengers, spies, agents; while he betook himself here and there, to the Palace, to the market-place, to houses where he had acquaintance to discuss and consult with; while he gathered every scrap of news, every rumour, every piece of gossip so that he could come to conclusions that were at least plausible; he found time to pursue the plan he had devised to seduce Aurelia. But his plan involved spending money, and money was just what he hadn’t got. The Florentine government was stingy, his salary was miserable, and he had already spent much of the sum he had been given on leaving Florence. He was extravagant and liked to live well. He had often to pay in advance the messengers who took his dispatches and he had besides to satisfy the various persons about the Duke’s court who were prepared for a consideration to give him useful information. There were fortunately Florentine merchants in the city who would advance him money, and he wrote to Biagio urging him to send whatever he could raise by hook or by crook. Then a strange thing happened. Jacopo Farinelli, the accountant, who before had only come to see him at night, muffled-up so that no one should recognize him, appeared at the door in broad daylight and asked to see him. His manner, which hitherto had been furtive and frightened, was now open and cordial. He did not delay to come to the object of his visit.

‘I am commissioned by someone who is your friend and who highly esteems your abilities to ask you to accept this small token of his appreciation.’

From the folds of his dress he drew a bag and placed it on the table. Machiavelli heard the clink of coin.

‘What is that?’ he asked, his lips tightening and his eyes cold.

‘Fifty ducats,’ smiled Farinelli.

It was a handsome amount. At the moment nothing could have been more useful to Machiavelli.

‘Why should the Duke wish to give me fifty ducats?’

‘I have no reason to suppose that the Duke is concerned. I was ordered to bring the money to you on behalf of a well-wisher who desired to remain unknown, and you may rest assured that no one but your well-wisher and I will ever know anything of the gift.’

‘It appears that both my well-wisher and you take me for a fool as well as a knave. Take your money, return it to him who gave it to you and tell him that the envoy of the Republic does not accept bribes.’

‘But it is not a bribe. It is a spontaneous gift offered by a friend in appreciation of your high talents and literary attainments.’

‘I do not know how this generous friend can have formed an appreciation of my literary attainments,’ said Machiavelli acidly.

‘He had an opportunity to read the letters you wrote to the Signory during your legation to France and greatly admired your acuteness of observation, your good sense, your tact and above all the excellence of your style.’

‘It is impossible that the person of whom you speak could have had access to the files of the Chancery.’

‘I wonder. It is certainly not impossible that someone in the Chancery found your letters interesting enough to copy, and that by some hazard the person of whom I speak gained possession of them. No one knows better than you with what parsimony the Republic pays its officials.’

Machiavelli frowned. He was silent while he asked himself which of the clerks it could be that had sold the letters to the Duke. It was true that they were all ill paid and some were doubtless secret adherents of the Medici. But perhaps there was no truth in what Farinelli said. It was easy enough to invent such a story. Farinelli went on.

‘The Duke would be the last man to wish you to do anything against your conscience or to the injury of Florence. What he wants is to your mutual benefit, the Republic’s and his. The Signory has confidence in your judgement and all he would have you do is to put his case in such a way as to appeal to the common sense of intelligent men.’

‘You need say no more,’ said Machiavelli, his thin lips curling into a sarcastic smile. ‘I have no use for the Duke’s money. I shall continue to advise the Signory according to the best interests of the Republic.’

Farinelli stood up and replaced the bag of gold from where he had taken it.

‘The Duke of Ferrara’s agent was not too proud to accept a present from His Excellency when it was a question of deciding his master to send a detachment to His Excellency’s help. If Monsieur de Chaumont hastened the departure of the French troops from Milan it was because the King’s orders were supplemented by a handsome present from the Duke.’

‘I am well aware of it.’

When Machiavelli was once more alone he laughed out loud. Of course the possibility of accepting the money had never for an instant occurred to him, but he could not help being amused when he thought how devilish useful it would have been to him. But as he laughed an idea on a sudden occurred to him and he laughed again. He was sure he could borrow the money he needed from Bartolomeo, who would be only too glad to oblige him; and it would be a priceless jest to seduce his wife by means of money he had himself provided. Nothing could be prettier. And what a good story it would make to tell when he got back to Florence! He could hear his friends chuckle as he gathered them round him one evening in a tavern and narrated it with all the effect he could contrive.

‘Ah, Niccolo, Niccolo, what a good companion! No one can tell a story as he can. What humour, what wit! It’s as good as a play to listen to him.’

He had not seen Bartolomeo for two days when he ran across him just before dinner at the Palace to which he had gone for news. After exchanging a few friendly words he said:

‘Why don’t you come this evening and we’ll have a little music?’

Bartolomeo was pleased to say he could think of nothing he would enjoy more. Machiavelli proceeded.

‘It’s true the room is small and the vaulted ceiling echoes, but we’ll have a brazier against the chill and with wine to keep the cold out we shall do very well.’

He had not long finished eating when Bartolomeo’s servant brought a letter. He wrote that the ladies of his house didn’t see why they should be deprived of a treat, the big room in his house was much better suited for music than Serafina’s cold small parlour, it had a fireplace so that they could warm themselves at its cheerful blaze, and if he and cousin Piero would do him the honour to come to supper his happiness would be complete. Machiavelli accepted with alacrity.

‘It’s as easy as falling off a log,’ he said to himself.

Machiavelli had himself shaved and his hair trimmed and he put on his best clothes, a long black damask sleeveless tunic and a tight-fitting jacket with billowing velvet sleeves. Piero had dressed himself up also for the occasion, but his pale blue tunic reached only half-way down his thighs and he wore a purple belt round his waist; his handsome legs were encased in dark blue hose, and his jacket with sleeves less ample than Machiavelli’s was dark blue also; a purple cap was perched jauntily on his curly locks. Machiavelli looked at him with approval.

‘You should make quite an impression on the little maid, Piero,’ he smiled. ‘What did you say her name was? Nina?’

‘Why do you wish me to go to bed with her?’ asked Piero, smiling.

‘I like to think that you will not have entirely wasted your time on this trip. And besides, it may be useful to me.’

‘How?’

‘Because I wish to go to bed with her mistress.’

‘You?’

There was so much surprise in Piero’s tone that Machiavelli flushed angrily.

‘And why not, if you please?’

Piero saw that his master was put out and hesitated.

‘You’re married and – well, as old as my uncle.’

‘You speak like a fool. A woman of sense will always prefer a man in the flower of his age to an inexperienced boy.’

‘It never entered my head that she meant anything to you. Do you love her?’

‘Love? I loved my mother, I esteem my wife and I shall love my children; but I want to go to bed with Aurelia. There is much you still have to learn, my poor boy. Take the lute and let us go.’

But though Machiavelli was quick-tempered he could not be angry long. He patted Piero’s smooth cheek.

‘It is very hard to keep secrets from a maid,’ he smiled. ‘You would be doing me a service if you shut her mouth with kisses.’

They had only to step across the narrow lane, and on knocking were let in by the serving man. Monna Caterina was handsomely gowned in black, but Aurelia wore a rich dress of Venetian brocade; its opulent colours enhanced the whiteness of her breast and the brilliant fairness of her hair. It was with a little sigh of relief that Machiavelli decided she was more beautiful even than he had imagined. She was very, very desirable and it was absurd that she should have for a husband that gross, self-satisfied man who would certainly never see forty again.

After the usual compliments they sat down to wait for supper. The ladies had been working when Machiavelli and Piero came in.

‘You see, they’ve already got busy on the linen you brought me from Florence,’ said Bartolomeo.

‘You are pleased with it, Monna Aurelia?’ asked Machiavelli.

‘It’s impossible to get material of this quality in Imola,’ she said.

She looked at him as she spoke and her great dark eyes resting on him for a moment made his heart beat.

‘I’m going to have that woman if I die for it,’ he said to himself; but of course he didn’t quite mean that; what he meant was that he had never met a harlot with whom he more urgently wanted to go to bed.

‘We do the rough work, Nina and I,’ said Monna Caterina. ‘We measure and cut and sew and my daughter does the embroidery. When it comes to that my fingers are all thumbs and poor Nina’s no better than I am.’

‘Monna Aurelia never makes two alike,’ said Bartolomeo proudly. ‘Show Messer Niccolo the design for the shirt you’re working on now.’

‘Oh, I should be ashamed,’ she said prettily.

‘Nonsense. I’ll show him myself.’

He brought over a sheet of paper.

‘Do you see how cleverly she’s introduced my initials?’

‘It is a masterpiece of elegance and ingenuity,’ said Machiavelli with a very good imitation of enthusiasm, for he was in truth entirely indifferent to such things. ‘I wish my Marietta had such a charming gift and the industry to make such good use of it.’

‘This woman of mine is as industrious as she is good,’ Bartolomeo said fondly.

Machiavelli could not but reflect that he was interested neither in her goodness nor her industry. He reflected further that husbands are often mistaken in the virtues they ascribe to their wives.

Supper was served and he exerted himself to be at his best. He knew that he told a story well and his sojourn in France had provided him with a number of spicy tales about the ladies and gentlemen at the King’s court. Aurelia assumed a modest confusion when his indecencies grew too obvious, but Bartolomeo guffawed and Monna Caterina, enjoying herself hugely, egged him on. He could not but think that he was proving himself a most agreeable guest. They did full justice to a copious repast, and after a decent interval during which he drew Bartolomeo out to talk about himself, his affairs and his properties, which he did with complacency, Machiavelli suggested that they should try their voices. He tuned his lute and by way of prelude played a gay little tune. Then they settled on a song they all knew. Part singing was a common accomplishment of the day, and with Bartolomeo’s bass, Machiavelli’s light baritone and Piero’s agreeable tenor they acquitted themselves to their mutual satisfaction. Then Machiavelli sang one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s songs and the other two joined in the chorus. As he sang he looked at Aurelia in the hope that she would guess he was singing only to her, and when their eyes met, and she looked down, he flattered himself that she was at least aware of his feelings. That was the first step. So the evening passed. It was a dull life the two ladies led and such a diversion was a rare treat to them. Aurelia’s delight was plain in the shining of her splendid eyes. The more Machiavelli looked at them the more sure he was that here was a woman, unawakened still, who was capable of passion. He was prepared to awaken her. But before they separated he had something to say that he had been holding back for the proper moment. He did not think he was a vain man; but he could not help finding the idea ingenious. So when the occasion arose he said:

‘You were good enough to say that you would be willing to do me a service, Messer Bartolomeo, and now I am going to take you at your word.’

‘I would do a great deal for the envoy of the Republic,’ answered Bartolomeo, who had drunk a great deal of wine and was, if not drunk, at least mellow. ‘But for my good friend Niccolo I would do anything.’

‘Well, the matter is this: The Signory are looking for a preacher to deliver the Lenten sermons in the Cathedral next year and they asked me to enquire whether there was anyone in Imola who could be entrusted with this important duty.’

‘Fra Timoteo,’ cried Monna Caterina.

‘Be quiet, mother-in-law,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘This is a matter of consequence for men to settle after due deliberation. It may bring glory or discredit to our city and we must be sure to recommend only one who is worthy of the honour.’

But Monna Caterina would not be easily silenced.

‘He delivered the Lenten sermons in our own church this very year and the whole city thronged to hear him. When he described the tortures of the damned strong men burst into tears, women swooned, and one poor creature who was near her time suddenly felt the pangs of childbirth and was carried shrieking from the church.’

‘I do not deny it. I am a hard-headed man of business and I sobbed like a child. It is true, Fra Timoteo has eloquence and a fine choice of words.’

‘Who is this Fra Timoteo?’ asked Machiavelli. ‘What you tell me is interesting. The Florentines dearly love to be called to repentance at the proper season; it enables them to cheat their neighbours for the rest of the year with a good conscience.’

‘Fra Timoteo is our confessor,’ said Bartolomeo, a fact of which Machiavelli was well aware. ‘And for my own part I never do a thing without his advice. He is not only a worthy man, but a wise one. Why, only a few months ago I was about to buy a cargo of spices in the Levant and he told me that he had seen St. Paul in a vision who told him that the ship would be wrecked on the coast of Crete, so I did not buy.’

‘And was the ship wrecked?’ asked Machiavelli.

‘No, but three caravels arrived in Lisbon laden with spices, with the result that the bottom fell out of the market and I should have lost money on the transaction, so it came to the same thing.’

‘The more you tell me of this friar the more curious I am to see him.’

‘You are very likely to find him in the church in the morning, and if not you can ask the brother sacristan to fetch him.’

‘May I tell him that I come to him with your recommendation?’ Machiavelli asked politely.

‘The envoy of the Republic needs no recommendation from a poor merchant in a town which is of small account compared with the magnificent city of Florence.’

‘And what do you think of this Fra Timoteo?’ Machiavelli went on, addressing himself to Aurelia. ‘It is important that I should have the opinion not only of a man of position and discernment like Messer Bartolomeo and of a woman of discretion and experience like Monna Caterina, but also of one who has the enthusiasm, the innocence and the sensitiveness of youth, one to whom the world and its perils are still unknown; for the preacher I would recommend to the Signory must not only call sinners to repentance, but confirm the virtuous in their integrity.’

It was a pretty speech.

‘Fra Timoteo can do no wrong in my eyes. I am prepared to be guided by him in everything.’

‘And I,’ added Bartolomeo, ‘am prepared that you should be guided by him. He will never advise anything that is not to your best advantage.’

It had all gone very well and exactly as Machiavelli wished. He went to bed satisfied with himself.

CHAPTER 17

EARLY NEXT MORNING, being market day, Machiavelli took Piero with him to the market-place and bought two brace of plump partridges. At another stall he brought a basket of the luscious figs which were the speciality of Rimini and were so much prized that they were sent all over Italy. These comestibles he told Piero to take to Messer Bartolomeo and deliver with his compliments. With Imola crowded with strangers food was scarce and high in price so that he knew his present would be welcome. Then he made his way to the Franciscan church attached to the monastery in which Fra Timoteo was a monk. It was not far from Bartolomeo’s house. It was a building of some size, but of no architectural merit. It was empty but for two or three women praying, a lay brother, obviously the sacristan, who was sweeping the floor, and a friar who was pottering about the altar of a chapel. Machiavelli with a passing glance saw that he was only pretending to be busy and guessed that this must be Fra Timoteo who had been warned by Monna Caterina to expect him.

‘Pardon me, father,’ said he, with a polite inclination of his backbone, ‘I have been told that you are so fortunate as to have a miraculous Virgin in this church and I have a great desire to light a candle before her altar so that she may assist my dear wife, now pregnant, in the pains of childbirth.

‘This is she, Messere,’ said the monk. ‘I was about to change her veil. I can’t get the brothers to keep her clean and tidy, and then they’re surprised because the pious neglect to pay their devotions to her. I remember when there were dozens of votive offerings in this chapel for graces received, and now there aren’t twenty. And it’s our own fault; they have no sense, my brothers.’

Machiavelli chose a candle of imposing dimensions, paid for it extravagantly with a florin, and watched the monk while he fixed it on an iron candlestick and lit it. When this was done Machiavelli said:

‘I have a favour to ask of you, father. I have reason to speak privately to Fra Timoteo and I should be grateful if you would tell me how I can find him.’

‘I am Fra Timoteo,’ said the monk.

‘Impossible! It looks as though Providence had a hand in this. It is a miracle that I should come here and in the first person I see find the very person I am looking for.’

‘The designs of Providence are inscrutable,’ said Fra Timoteo.

The monk was a man of medium stature, of a comfortable, but not disgusting corpulence, which suggested to Machiavelli’s cool mind that he was given to fasting no more than the rules of his order demanded but not to the gross vice of gluttony. He had a fine head. It reminded one of a Roman emperor’s whose fine features, not yet debased by luxury and unlimited power, bore notwithstanding a suggestion of the cruel sensuality that would lead to his assassination. It was a type not unfamiliar to Machiavelli. In those full red lips, in that bold hook nose, in those fine black eyes he read ambition, cunning and covetousness, but these qualities were masked by a semblance of good nature and simple piety. Machiavelli could well understand how he had gained so great an influence over Bartolomeo and the women of his family. He felt instinctively that this was a man he could deal with; he hated monks; to him they were either fools or knaves, and this one was probably a knave, but he must step warily.

‘I should tell you, father, that I have heard a great deal to your credit from my friend Messer Bartolomeo Martelli. He has the highest opinion both of your virtue and your ability.’

‘Messer Bartolomeo is a faithful son of the Church. Our monastery is very poor and we owe much to his generosity. But may I know whom I have the honour of addressing, Messere?’

Machiavelli knew that the friar was well aware of this, but answered gravely.

‘I should have introduced myself. Niccolo Machiavelli, citizen of Florence and Secretary to the Second Chancery.’

The monk bowed low.

‘It is a great privilege to speak with the envoy of that illustrious state.’

‘You fill me with confusion, father, I am but a man with all the failings of humanity; but where can we speak in private and at length?’

‘Why not here, Messere? The brother sacristan is as deaf as a post and as stupid as a mule and the three or four old women you see are too busy with their prayers to listen to what we are saying and too ignorant to understand it if they did.’

They sat down on two of the praying-stools which were in the chapel and Machiavelli told Fra Timoteo how he had been commissioned by the Signory to find a preacher to deliver the Lenten sermons in the cathedral. The friar’s Roman face remained impassive, but Machiavelli felt in him an alertness of attention which confirmed his assurance that he had been informed of the previous night’s conversation. Machiavelli apprised him of the Signory’s requirements.

‘They are naturally nervous,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to make again the mistake they made with Fra Girolamo Savonarola. It is very well that the people should be persuaded to repentance, but the prosperity of Florence depends on its commerce and the Signory cannot allow repentance to disturb the peace or interfere with trade. Excess of virtue can be as harmful to the State as excess of vice.’

‘Such, I seem to remember, was the opinion of Aristotle.’

‘Ah, I see that you, unlike friars in general, are a man of education. That is all to the good. The people of Florence have agile and critical minds and have no patience with a preacher, however eloquent, who is without learning.’

‘It is true that many of my brethren are of a shocking ignorance,’ Fra Timoteo replied complacently. ‘If I understand you aright you want to know if there is anyone in Imola who is in my opinion worthy of the honour you speak of. It is a matter that needs consideration. I shall have to think. I must make discreet enquiries.’

‘You will be doing me a great favour. I know from Messer Bartolomeo and his ladies that you are a man of singular perspicacity and of the highest rectitude. I am confident that you will give me a disinterested opinion.’

‘Messer Bartolomeo’s ladies are saints. That is the only reason why they think so favourably of me.’

‘I live in the house of Monna Serafina just behind Messer Bartolomeo’s. If I could persuade you to join us in our modest meal tomorrow evening we could discuss the matter further, and it would give my good Serafina infinite pleasure to have you at her table.’

Fra Timoteo accepted the invitation. Machiavelli went home, but on the way called on Bartolomeo and asked him for a loan. He explained that he was put to great expense at Imola in connection with his mission, and the funds he was expecting from the Signory had not yet arrived. He pulled a long story about the parsimoniousness of the Florence government and complained that in order to maintain the dignity of his position and to meet the cost of information he had to pay money out of his own pocket. But Bartolomeo cut him short.

‘Dear Niccolo,’ he said in his jovial way, ‘you do not have to tell me that in this court one can get nothing without paying for it. For your own sake as well as for that of the Signory I shall be happy to lend you whatever you require. How much do you want?’

Machiavelli was surprised and pleased.

‘Twenty-five ducats.’

‘Is that all? Wait and I will give it you at once.’

He left the room and in a minute or two came back with the money. Machiavelli regretted that he had asked for so little.

‘And when you want more don’t hesitate to ask me,’ said Bartolomeo, beaming. ‘You must look upon me as your banker.’

‘A fool and his money are soon parted,’ Machiavelli said to himself as he returned to his lodging.

CHAPTER 18

BROTHER TIMOTEO CAME to supper. Machiavelli had bidden Serafina to buy the best the city could provide and the friar needed little pressing to eat heartily. Machiavelli saw that his cup was well-filled and when, supper finished, he led him into the parlour so that they might talk undisturbed, he told one of his servants to bring a flagon of wine.

‘Now let us get down to business,’ he said.

Fra Timoteo told him that he had been giving the subject of their conversation careful thought, and mentioned three monks who had some reputation in the city as preachers. He described their respective merits with candour, but with an ingenuity that Machiavelli could not but admire introduced into his eulogy of each a note of disparagement that effectively overrode his recommendation. Machiavelli smiled blandly.

‘You have spoken of these excellent monks with a sincerity and a disinterestedness which are what I should have expected of you, father, but you have left out the name of one whose talents and piety according to all accounts are infinitely superior to theirs.’

‘And who may that be, Messere?’

‘Fra Timoteo.’

The monk gave a start of well-simulated surprise.

‘A good actor,’ Machiavelli said to himself. ‘A preacher must have histrionic gifts, and if the Signory had really given me the commission to find one I should be half inclined to propose this rascally friar.’

‘You are joking, Messere.’

‘What makes you think that I should joke on a subject of such importance, father? I have not been idle on my side. I have learnt that in the whole history of Imola no preacher has made such a profound impression as you did in the sermons you delivered this Lent. I am told that you have a remarkable eloquence and I can tell for myself that you have a melodious and a beautiful voice. Your presence is imposing and even in the short while that we have talked together I have discovered that you are intelligent, tactful and cultivated. I am assured that your knowledge of the fathers is only equalled by your classical erudition.’

‘You cover me with confusion, Messere. The Signory want a monk of reputation, and I am but a poor friar in a poverty-stricken monastery of a provincial city. I have neither great birth to recommend me nor powerful friends. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the good opinion you so generously have of me, but I am unworthy of the honour you propose.’

‘That is something that those can better judge who know you better than you know yourself.’

Machiavelli was enjoying himself hugely. He appreciated the monk’s affectation of modesty and with his sharp eyes delving into his innermost heart discerned the greediness of his ambition. With such a bait to dangle he was certain he could get him to do anything he wanted.

‘I think I should be less than honest if I did not tell you that I am a person of no great consequence in the state of Florence. I can only advise; the last word is with the gentlemen of the Signory.’

‘I cannot think that they would lightly disregard the advice of their envoy to His Excellency the Duke of Romagna and Valentinois,’ said Fra Timoteo with an ingratiating smile.

‘It is true that our new Gonfalonier for life, Piero Soderini, is my friend, and I think I may say without vanity that his brother the Bishop of Volterra has some faith in my honesty and good sense.’

This remark led Machiavelli very naturally to tell the monk of the mission to Caesar Borgia when he had accompanied the Cardinal, then a bishop, to Urbino to protest against the attack Vitellozzo had made on Arezzo; and this as naturally led him to describe his own activities in the war with Pisa and his legation to France. He was careful to minimize his role in these proceedings, and yet managed to suggest to the friar that it was he who had pulled the strings. He talked lightly, amusingly, in a familiar way, of kings and cardinals, princes and generals, and thus delicately led his listener to believe that he had the ear of the great both in Italy and France. Secrets of state were no secrets to him. Only a fool could doubt that he knew much more than he told. Fra Timoteo was dazzled.

‘Ah, Messere, you cannot know what it means to me to talk with a man of your intelligence and experience. It is like a glimpse of the promised land. We live in this dull little town and know nothing of the world. There is not a man in Imola of culture or distinction. Our wits, if we have any, grow rusty because there is no occasion to use them. One needs the patience of Job to support the stupidity of the people among whom one is compelled to pass one’s life.

‘Father, I will admit that from what I know of you and from what I have heard I think it a thousand pities that a man of your capacity should be wasted on this place. It is not for me to remind one of your calling of the Parable of the Talents.’

‘I have often thought of it. I have buried my talent in the ground, and when the Master asks me to what use I have put it I shall have no answer.’

‘Father, no one can do more for another than give him an opportunity; he must know for himself how to make use of it.’

‘Who is going to give an unknown monk an opportunity?’

‘I am your friend, Father, and such little influence as I have is at your service. And you will not be entirely unknown when I have mentioned your name to the Bishop of Volterra. It would be unbecoming for a man of your habit to put himself forward; but there is no reason why I should not speak of the matter with our good friend Bartolomeo, and I have little doubt that I can persuade him that it is an idea of his own to write to certain powerful connections of his in Florence.’

Fra Timoteo smiled.

‘Our dear Bartolomeo! He is goodness itself, but it cannot be denied that he is a little simple. He does not combine the craftiness of the serpent with the innocence of the dove.’

Thus Machiavelli conducted their colloquy to the point at which he had been aiming. He refilled the empty cups. The brazier gave out a pleasant warmth.

‘Bartolomeo is a very worthy creature. It has often struck me as remarkable that business men should be able to conduct commercial transaction with success and yet remain so unversed in the affairs of the world. But I do not esteem him less on that account and I would do a great deal to promote his welfare. You have a strong influence over him, father.’

‘He is good enough to attach some small value to my counsels.’

‘There at all events he shows a natural good sense. How sad it is that such an excellent and deserving creature should not have been granted the dearest wish of his heart!’

Fra Timoteo looked at him enquiringly.

‘You must know as well as I do that he would give half his possessions to have a son.’

‘It is an obsession with him; he can talk of nothing else. We have interceded for him with our miraculous Virgin, but to no purpose, and he is angry with us because our prayers have not achieved the desired result; but he is unreasonable. The poor man is sterile.’

‘Father, I have a small property not far from Florence called San Casciano, and to augment the poor salary I receive from the Signory I make what money I can by selling timber from my woods and farming my land. I have cows, and it sometimes happens that you get a bull, to all appearance strong and healthy, who for some reason suffers from the same unfortunate disability as our good friend Bartolomeo. Then you kill the bull for butcher’s meat and on the proceeds buy another.’

Fra Timoteo smiled.

‘It is not practicable to go to such lengths with human beings.’

‘Nor necessary. But the theory is sound.’

It took the friar a moment to grasp exactly what Machiavelli meant, and when he did he smiled again.

‘Monna Aurelia is a virtuous wife, and she is well guarded, though for different reasons, by her mother and her husband. Bartolomeo is not so stupid as not to know that a young and beautiful wife must be a temptation to the dissolute youth of the city, and Monna Caterina lived in poverty long enough to make her take good care that she shall not lose a comfortable home through the indiscretion of her daughter.’

‘And yet it might well be that an indiscretion would turn out to be the height of discretion. Monna Caterina’s position would be more secure if she had a little grandson to dandle on her knee.’

‘I don’t deny it. Now that the Duke has bestowed this property on him, with the title that accompanies it, Bartolomeo is more than ever anxious to have an heir. The ladies of his family have discovered that he is thinking of adopting his two nephews. He has a widowed sister in Forlì, and she is willing enough that he should thus provide for her boys; but she will not be separated from them and makes it a condition that he should take her into his house along with them.’

‘It is natural that a mother should not wish to be parted from her children.’

‘Very. But the prospect distresses both Monna Caterina and Monna Aurelia. They see that their position would be difficult. Monna Aurelia had no dowry. Bartolomeo is a weak and foolish man; Monna Costanza, the mother of his adopted sons, would undermine the influence of a wife whom his vanity insists on thinking a barren woman, and his sister would in no long time be mistress of the house. Monna Caterina has besought me to dissuade him from a course in which there is so much danger to her daughter and herself.’

‘He has consulted you?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And what advice have you given him?’

‘I have temporized. His sister’s confessor at Forlì is a Dominican, and if she came here it is likely enough that she would take a confessor from the same order. The Dominicans are no friends of ours. We owe much to the generosity of Bartolomeo, and it would be unfortunate if Monna Costanza took advantage of his disappointment with our efforts to get him to bestow his favours in another quarter.’

‘No one could see more clearly than I how difficult your situation is, dear father. The only possible solution is the one I suggest.’

‘Has it escaped you that it smacks somewhat of sin, Messere?’ said the friar with an indulgent smile.

‘A small sin, father, from which a great good may come. You can bring happiness to a worthy man, security to two women whose piety merits your help, and last but not least you preserve for the brethren of your habit the munificence of a generous donor. It would be presumption on my part to recall the Holy Scripture to your memory, but I will venture to suggest to you that if the woman of Samaria had not committed adultery the Founder of our religion would never have had occasion to utter those precepts of tolerance and forgiveness which have been of such inestimable value to the miserable sinners that we are.’

‘It is a pretty point, Messere.’

‘I am human, father. I will not try to conceal from you that the beauty of Monna Aurelia has excited so violent a passion in me that I must satisfy it or die.’

‘I did not imagine that your desire for Bartolomeo’s welfare and the peace of mind of his two ladies was prompted only by the goodness of your heart,’ said Fra Timoteo dryly.

‘Your monastery is poor and you doubtless have many calls upon your charity. I would give twenty-five ducats to be assured of your good will, father.’

Machiavelli saw the glint of greed in the monk’s dark eyes.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

He took the bag of money out of an inner pocket and flung it carelessly on the table. The coins made a pleasant clink against the wooden surface.

‘You have acquired my good will by the charm of your conversation and the graciousness of your manner, Messere,’ said the monk. ‘But I do not see how I can be of service to you.’

‘I will ask you to do nothing that can weigh on your conscience. I should like you to arrange it so that I may have a conversation with Monna Caterina in private.’

‘I can see no harm in that. But it will get you no farther. Bartolomeo is a fool, but he is too good a business man to take unnecessary risks. When his affairs force him to absent himself his servant is there to protect Monna Aurelia from the importunities of unscrupulous and lascivious men.’

‘I am well aware of it. Our good Bartolomeo, however, has a confidence in you which is as implicit as it is well-deserved. He has taken Monna Aurelia to the baths and he has taken her on pilgrimages to the shrines of saints who are accredited with the blessed gift of ridding women of the curse of barrenness. I suggest to you that if our good Bartolomeo, accompanied by his servant, went to Ravenna and spent a night in prayer and meditation before the sarcophagus which contains the mortal remains of San Vitale, you could guarantee that Monna Aurelia would conceive.’

‘San Vitale was evidently a great saint, or a church would not have been built in his honour; but what makes you suppose that his bones have the power to cure men of sterility?’

‘The name is eminently suggestive, and Bartolomeo knows no more of the miraculous powers of the saint than you or I. A drowning man will catch at a straw and Ravenna is but twenty miles from Imola. Can you believe that our friend would hesitate to make so short a journey to achieve a result he so much desires?’

‘Let me ask you a question in return, Messere. Have you any reason to suppose that Monna Aurelia, a virtuous and timid wife, would respond to your advances? Have you made your desires known to her?’

‘I have not exchanged more than a few words with her, but unless she is different from the rest of her sex she is well aware of them. Women are subject to two defects, curiosity and vanity.’

‘Venial sins,’ said the monk.

‘And yet they lead these fair creatures to abandon the narrow path of virtue more often than passion.’

‘There is much of which my habit has kept me in happy ignorance.’

‘When your eminent merit has raised you to the position it deserves you will learn that you can gain influence over men less by fostering their virtues or encouraging their vices than by humouring their foibles.’

‘Your scheme is ingenious. I have little doubt that you could persuade Monna Caterina to help you; she will stop at nothing to prevent Bartolomeo from adopting his nephews; but I know Monna Aurelia too well to believe that she would let herself be persuaded to commit a mortal sin either by her mother or by you.’

‘That is possible. There are many things which from a distance seem strange and terrifying, but when you come closer to them appear natural, easy and reasonable. I have no reason to suppose that Monna Aurelia is more intelligent than the majority of her sex. It would be well if you explained to her that when there is in prospect a good that is certain and an evil that is uncertain, it is wrong not to do the good for fear of the evil. The certain good is that she will conceive and so create an immortal soul; the evil is that she may be found out, but with proper precautions the possibility of that is eliminated. And so far as sin is concerned – well, there is nothing in that, since it is the will that sins and not the body. It would be a sin to displease her husband, but in this she can only please him. In all things the end must be considered, and the end here is to fill a seat in Paradise and give a husband his heart’s desire.’

Fra Timoteo looked at Machiavelli without replying. It seemed to the Florentine that he was preventing himself from laughing only by an effort of will. The monk looked away and his eyes fell on the bag of gold that was lying on the table.

‘I am sure that the Signory was well advised when they sent you on a mission to the Duke, Messere,’ he said at last. ‘I may condemn your intentions, but I can only admire your subtlety.’

‘I am very sensible to flattery,’ Machiavelli answered.

‘You must give me time to think the matter over.’

‘It is always best to trust the impulse of the moment, Father. But if you will excuse me I will go into the yard, for I wish to relieve nature. Your local wine is something of a diuretic, I fancy.’

When Machiavelli returned the monk was sitting as he had left him, but the bag of gold was no longer on the table.

‘Monna Caterina will bring her daughter on Friday for confession,’ he said, looking at his well-kept hands. ‘You will have an opportunity of talking to her while Monna Aurelia is in the confessional.’

CHAPTER 19

A HAPPY CHANCE gave Machiavelli an opportunity to pursue his suit which he was quick to seize. Unless obliged to, he did not get up early, and the sun had risen some time when, on the morning after his conversation with Fra Timoteo, he rolled out of bed and got into his clothes. He went into the kitchen where Serafina gave him his frugal breakfast and then out into the yard where he drew water from the well and shudderingly washed his hands and face. Then he went up to his room to fetch such of his papers as he wanted. He raised the window to look at the weather and suddenly saw Nina, the maid, bring a chair and a footstool out on to the roof of Bartolomeo’s house. The weather had been cloudy for some time, with occasional showers of rain, but that morning the sun shone brightly from an unclouded sky. He guessed what Nina’s actions betokened. Presently Aurelia came on to the roof, swathed in a quilted wrapper, carrying a great straw hat in her hand. He was right. Aurelia had taken advantage of the fine day to dry her hair. She sat in the chair and the maid took the long fair hair in her hands and passed it through the hat, which had no crown but only an immense brim; then, placing the hat on Aurelia’s head, she spread the hair all around the brim, so that the sun should shine on it and the dye colour it more brightly.

Machiavelli changed his plans. He left his letters to a more suitable season and taking his lute ascended the stairs to a loggia on the upper storey of Serafina’s house. By the time he got there the maid had gone about her business and Aurelia was alone. The wide brim of her hat prevented her from seeing him, and indeed she was certainly too much intent on the process of getting her hair a perfect shade to have thoughts of anything else; but when he began to sing, startled, she raised the brim and looked across the narrow space that divided the two houses. Before Machiavelli could catch her eye she lowered it. As though to himself he sang a little love song. Following the fashion of the time his theme was Cupid and his darts, the cruel wounds his loved one’s eyes inflicted, and the happiness that would be his if he could pass one moment without thinking of her. He had Aurelia at his mercy; from coyness she might have wished to withdraw, but the sun was essential to make the dye hold, and he felt it was not in a woman’s nature to sacrifice her appearance to her modesty. If there had been any doubt in her mind of his feelings towards her there could surely be none now, but such an occasion might not soon recur, so he thought it just as well to make them unmistakable. He had composed a serenade to a woman called Fenice, which began, Hail, Lady, from all women set apart, and which went on to address her as a rare example of earthly beauty, a perfect soul imbued with every loveliness; and it was easy, without interfering with the scansion, to change O only Fenice into O only Aurelia. Plucking the strings of the lute he spoke the words in a recitative which was not wanting in a certain melodiousness. Aurelia sat still, her face hidden by the wide brim of her hat and the overhanging hair, but Machiavelli had a notion that she was listening intently. That was all he wanted. But he had sung no more than two stanzas when she rang a little bell she had evidently brought to call her maid. Machiavelli paused. Nina appeared; Aurelia said something to her and rose from her chair, which the maid took to another part of the roof; Aurelia moved over and the maid sat down on the footstool. The two women began to talk and Machiavelli guessed she was going to keep her there till he withdrew. He was not dissatisfied. He went down to his room, got his papers out of the box in which he kept them locked, and was soon immersed in a letter he was writing to the Signory.

So far so good.

CHAPTER 20

HE WAS NOT in the habit of attending the services of the Church, and on Friday waited till vespers were over and the small congregation coming out before entering the sacred edifice. He was just in time to see Fra Timoteo go into the confessional. In a moment Aurelia followed him. Monna Caterina was sitting by herself in one of the chapels. Machiavelli joined her. She did not seem surprised to see him, and he thought it not unlikely that the monk had spoken to her and she was expecting him. Anyhow he could see no object in beating about the bush. He told her that he had fallen passionately in love with her daughter and asked her to plead his cause with her. Monna Caterina seemed amused rather than indignant. She informed him that he was not the first who had attempted her daughter’s virtue, but none had succeeded.

‘I brought her up very strictly, Messer Niccolo, and since the night I put her to bed, an innocent virgin, with Messer Bartolomeo, she has been a faithful and dutiful wife to him.’

‘If I am rightly informed she has never had the opportunity to be anything else.’

Monna Caterina gave a low, somewhat bawdy laugh.

‘Messer Niccolo, you have lived long enough to know that when a wife wishes to deceive her husband no precautions he may take can stop her.’

‘All history bears you out, Monna Caterina, and I perceive from what you say that you are a woman with whom one can speak frankly.’

She turned her head a little and looked at him earnestly.

‘Messer Niccolo, I have had great misfortunes in my life. I have been tossed on stormy seas and now that I am safe in harbour I have no wish to expose myself again to the fury of the elements.’

‘I can well understand it, but are you so sure that your anchor is firm and your mooring taut?’

Monna Caterina did not answer and Machiavelli was conscious of the uneasiness of her silence. He went on.

‘Am I not right in thinking that if Monna Aurelia does not soon produce the heir Bartolomeo craves he has it in mind to adopt the two sons of Monna Costanza?’

Once again Monna Caterina made no reply.

‘You have too great an experience of the world, Madonna, to make it necessary for me to tell you what your position and that of your daughter would be in such a case.’

Two tears trickled down Monna Caterina’s cheeks. Machiavelli patted her hand in kindness.

‘Desperate situations demand desperate remedies.’

She shrugged her shoulders despondently.

‘Even though I should be able to overcome Aurelia’s fears, the opportunity would be lacking.’

‘Am I displeasing to your daughter?’

‘You make her laugh,’ smiled Monna Caterina, ‘and a jest will as often gain a woman’s favours as a handsome face.’

‘You are a woman after my own heart, Madonna. Should the opportunity present itself so that what we both wish could be effected without danger, may I count on your help?’

‘It is not only my daughter’s fears that must be overcome, but also her scruples.’

‘Such of them as you will not have been able to dispel by the exercise of your common sense we can safely leave to be dealt with by the excellent Fra Timoteo. He does not like the Dominicans.’

Monna Caterina gave a low laugh.

‘You are a charming man, Messer Niccolo. If I were still desirable and you desired me, I would refuse you nothing.’

‘The old cow,’ Machiavelli said to himself, but he pressed her hand and aloud answered: ‘If I were not so passionately in love with your daughter I should not hesitate to take you at your word.’

‘There is Aurelia.’

‘I will leave you.’

Slipping out of the church, he went to a silversmith and there bought a chain, only of silver gilt, certainly, for he had not the money for a gold one, but of very pretty workmanship. Next morning he sent Piero to buy a basket of the luscious figs which Monna Caterina had told him she liked so much, and putting the chain at the bottom of the basket told Piero to take it to her. He was to say that the figs were a gift from Machiavelli and to add that underneath them she would find something that he begged her to accept as a mark of his esteem. He felt that he and Monna Caterina understood one another perfectly, but he knew that nothing confirms an understanding like a little present.

CHAPTER 21

SOME DAYS LATER Bartolomeo suggested that they should repeat the evening of good cheer and singing which had been so enjoyable. They did so. Things went off as before, with pleasant conversation and some good music; Aurelia, never very chatty, was more silent than usual, but Machiavelli was conscious that when he was talking in his sprightly way to the others she looked at him appraisingly. He was pretty sure that she and her mother had discussed him and his desires, and these enquiring glances of hers meant that she was wondering what he would be like in the capacity of a lover. He knew that it was not his good looks that made his success with women, but his agreeable discourse, his wit and his easy manner. He put his best foot forward. He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both. The laughter with which his sallies were greeted excited him and he flattered himself that he had never been more amusing. He took care, however, to show that he was not only a jester, but a good-natured man, kindly and easy to get on with, one in whom you could have confidence and whom it would not be hard to love. Was it only his fancy that when from time to time he caught Aurelia’s eyes he saw in them a smiling tenderness that suggested she was not indifferent to him? He had seen that look before in women’s eyes. They were strange creatures: they had to bring sentiment in and thus tiresomely complicate a pleasure which a merciful Providence had provided for human beings in compensation for the expulsion of their first parents from the Garden of Eden. But sometimes it was convenient that they should have this foible. He gave a passing thought to Marietta, who had married him by arrangement with her parents and now so doted on him that she could hardly bear him out of her sight. She was a good woman and he had a real affection for her, but she couldn’t expect him to be tied to her apron strings.

The affairs of his mission kept Machiavelli so busy that for several days after this he was obliged to devote his whole time to them; but through Piero he sent Aurelia a flask of attar of roses which he had bought at a cost he could ill afford from a merchant who had recently come from the Levant. It was a good sign that she did not refuse it. He congratulated Piero on the tact and skill with which he had managed to convey it to her without anyone’s knowing, and gave him a scudo so that he could prosecute his suit with Nina.

‘How are you getting on, my boy?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think she dislikes me,’ said Piero. ‘She’s frightened of that servant of theirs. He’s her lover.’

‘I suspected that, but don’t be discouraged; if she wants you she’ll find ways and means to arrange things.’

Then came a rainy afternoon. Bartolomeo sent round to ask Machiavelli if he could spare the time to come to his house and play chess. Machiavelli decided that what work he had to do could be done later, and went. Bartolomeo received him in his study. Though there was no fireplace a brazier warmed it not inadequately.

‘I thought we could play more conveniently here than in company with a pair of chattering women,’ said Bartolomeo.

Machiavelli had gone in the hope of seeing Aurelia and was somewhat put out, but he answered civilly enough.

‘Women will talk, and chess is a game that demands concentration.’

They played, and perhaps because Machievelli’s attention was divided, Bartolomeo to his delight beat him without difficulty. He called for wine, and when it had been brought and Machiavelli was setting up the pieces for another game, he leant back in his chair and said:

‘It was not only for the pleasure of playing chess with you that I asked you to be good enough to come here, dear Niccolo. I want to ask your advice.’

‘It is at your service.’

‘Have you ever heard of San Vitale?’

A faint sigh of satisfaction escaped Machiavelli’s lips. Fra Timoteo had not failed him.

‘Strange that you should ask that! You’re speaking of the church at Ravenna? The saint’s bones are buried there. Everyone in Florence was talking about him not so very long ago.’

‘In what connection?’

‘There is no limit to the folly of mankind, and our good Florentines, who pride themselves on their lively intelligence, are of a credulity beyond belief.’

He saw that Bartolomeo was all agog and he thought, I will keep him on tenterhooks.

‘What is it that you refer to?’

‘The story is so absurd that I am really ashamed to tell it. Within the limits set by our Holy Church my fellow-citizens have a healthy scepticism, and are disinclined to believe in anything that they cannot see, smell or touch for themselves.’

‘That is what makes them the good business men they are.’

‘Maybe. But how surprising that now and then they fall prey to the most absurd superstition! To tell you the truth I can’t bring myself to tell you a story that shows them in such a ridiculous light.’

‘I am almost a Florentine myself and now I shall never rest till I hear it. It is always a pleasure to listen to you and on such a cheerless day it is well to laugh.’

‘Well, the facts are these: Giuliano degli Albertelli, a citizen of Florence, is a man of property, a man in the flower of his age, with a fine house in the city and a beautiful wife to whom he is greatly attached. He should have been a happy man, but he had no child, and this was a bitter grief to him because he had quarrelled desperately with his brother and could not endure to think that this man and his brood of squalling brats should one day inherit all he possessed. He took his wife to the baths, he took her on pilgrimages to various holy places, he consulted doctors and the old women who pretend to have secret herbs to make women conceive, but nothing served.’

Bartolomeo, breathing heavily, listened as though his life depended on it.

‘Then it happened that a monk who had been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land told him that on his way home he had stopped at Ravenna where there was the church of San Vitale, and the saint had the miraculous power of making sterile men fertile. Though his friends sought to dissuade him, Giuliano insisted on visiting the shrine, and you can image how everyone laughed when he set out on the journey. Lampoons were written and passed from hand to hand. When he came back men had to turn away to prevent themselves from bursting into laughter before his face. Nine months to a day from the date of his return his wife was delivered of a nine-pound son. It was Giuliano who laughed then. All Florence was confounded and the pious cried out that it was a miracle.’

The sweat glistened on Bartolomeo’s brow.

‘If it wasn’t a miracle what was it?’

‘Within these four walls, dear friend, I will tell you that I think the time of miracles has passed, doubtless because owing to our sins we are no longer worthy of them, but I must confess that this occurrence has greatly shaken me. I can only repeat after you, if it wasn’t a miracle, what was it? I have given you the facts and it is for you to make what you can of them.’

Bartolomeo took a long draught of wine. Machiavelli decided to offer another candle at the shrine of Fra Timoteo’s wonder-working Madonna: his invention had served him well.

‘I know I can trust you, dear Niccolo,’ said Bartolomeo after a pause. ‘I am a judge of human nature and I am sure that you are a man of discretion. It was not for nothing that I asked you if you had ever heard of San Vitale, but I never expected you to confirm so promptly the information I have received.’

‘You talk in riddles, friend.’

‘You are well aware that I too have a great desire for a son to whom I can leave my fortune, my lands and houses, and who will inherit the property and the title which the Duke has granted me. I have a widowed sister who has two sons and having no child of my own I have had it in mind to adopt them. Though it is to their advantage she will not consent to be parted from them; she insists on our all living here together. But she shares with me the masterful character which has made me the man I am, and I can see little peace for me in a house inhabited by three jarring women. It would be the scene of incessant quarrels.’

‘That I can believe.’

‘I shouldn’t have a moment’s peace.’

‘Your life would be a torment. They would tear you limb from limb.’

Bartolomeo gave a deep sigh.

‘And it is on this question that you want my advice?’ asked Machiavelli.

‘No. I was discussing my difficulties with Fra Timoteo only yesterday and strangely enough he spoke to me of San Vitale. I do not for a moment believe that I am at fault in this matter, but if the saint’s relics have the miraculous property reported, it might be worth while to go to Ravenna. I have some business to transact there, so that even if my main object were not achieved my journey would not be wasted.’

‘In that case I don’t see why you hesitate. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose.’

‘Fra Timoteo is a good and saintly man, but he knows nothing of the world. It seems strange to me that if the saint has the power he is reputed to have his celebrity should not have been bruited abroad.’

For a moment Machiavelli was floored, but only for a moment.

‘You forget that men are unwilling to admit that they suffer from a deficiency which they prefer to ascribe to their wives. You may be sure that the men who have availed themselves of the saint’s intercession go in secret and take care never to divulge by what means their wives have been able to conceive.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. But don’t forget this, if it were ever known that I had gone and my pilgrimage were not blessed with a happy event I should be a laughing-stock in this city. It would be an admission of impotence.’

‘But how could it be known? Has Fra Timoteo not told you what you must do? According to Giuliano you must spend the night in prayer and meditation before the relics of the saint.’

‘But how is that possible?’

‘For a gratuity the sacristan will let you remain when he locks up the church for the night. You will attend the first mass in the morning and then break your fast. Having done that, in your case, you will attend to your business and after that ride home to your expectant wife.’

Bartolomeo gave his friend a smile.

‘Then you would not think me too great a fool if I made the experiment?’

‘My dear, the ways of Providence are inscrutable. I can only tell you what happened to Giuliano degli Albertelli. Whether it was a miracle or not, who am I to say?’

‘It is my last hope,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘I will try it. It succeeded with Messer Giuliano; there is no reason why it should not succeed with me.’

‘None,’ said Machiavelli.

CHAPTER 22

DURING THE FOLLOWING week Machiavelli’s emotions were as various as the colours of a crazy quilt. At one moment he was hopeful, at another despondent; he passed from happy anticipation to angry disappointment; now he was in a fever of excitement, then in the depths of despair. For Bartolomeo could not make up his mind. He was at once eager and loath to go. He was like a man who is tempted to risk his money on an off chance and is torn between his fear of losing it and his greed for gain. One day he would decide to make the journey and the next decide not to. Machiavelli’s digestion was always delicate and this uncertainty gravely affected it. It would be too cruel if, everything being arranged, he were so indisposed that he could not take advantage of the opportunity he had taken such pains and spent so much money to create. He had himself bled, he took a purge, he ate nothing but slops. And to make things worse he had more work to do than ever; negotiations between the Duke and his rebellious commanders were coming to a head, and Machiavelli had to write constant letters to the Signory, see agents, spend hours at the Palace to pick up news, and visit influential persons who were come to Imola on behalf of their respective states. But at the last moment fortune smiled upon him. A letter reached Bartolomeo from his factor in Ravenna to say that if he did not immediately clinch the deal which he had been for some time negotiating another offer would be accepted. This decided him.

Machiavelli’s pains vanished. On the day after his conversation with Bartolomeo he had seen Fra Timoteo and the monk had agreed to give Bartolomeo the instructions which Machiavelli suggested. To ingratiate himself with Aurelia he went to one of the merchants whom the chance of easy money had attracted to Imola and bought a pair of scented gloves stitched with gold thread. They cost a great deal of money, but this was not an occasion on which he could stint. He sent them by Piero, telling the boy to ask for Monna Caterina so that the servants might think no more than that he had a message to give her from his master; and at the same time he bade him tell her that he wished to talk with her and would meet her in the church at whatever hour suited her. He was elated when Piero came back and told him that Monna Caterina had called her daughter in and she had been delighted with the costly present. Gloves of that kind were greatly prized, and the Marchioness of Mantua had thought such a gift not unworthy of the acceptance of the Queen of France.

‘How did she look?’ asked Machiavelli.

‘Monna Aurelia? She looked pleased.’

‘Don’t be stupid, boy. Did she look beautiful?’

‘She looked as she always looks.’

‘Fool! When will Monna Caterina be at the church?’

‘She is going to vespers this afternoon.’

Machiavelli was well pleased when he returned from his interview with her.

‘What a noble animal is man,’ he reflected, as he walked home. ‘With audacity, cunning and money there is practically nothing he cannot do.’

At first Aurelia had been frightened and firmly refused to listen to the proposal, but little by little she had allowed herself to be convinced by Monna Caterina’s arguments. They were indeed unanswerable, Machiavelli thought, and that was natural since he himself suggested them. They were strengthened by the gentle, yet firm admonitions of Fra Timoteo. Aurelia was a sensible girl and she could not but admit that it was unreasonable to jib at a small evil when a great good might come of it. The long and short of it was that if Bartolomeo were safely out of the way she was prepared to accede to Machiavelli’s wishes.

Having made up his mind Bartolomeo saw no reason to delay and so, accompanied by his servant and a groom, he set out for Ravenna at noon on the following day. Machiavelli with his usual politeness went to bid him goodbye and wish success on the expedition. Nina, the maid, was sent home to spend the night with her parents, and when she had gone Machiavelli dispatched Piero to Bartolomeo’s house with a basket in which were fish fresh from the river, a pair of fat capons, sweetmeats from the confectioner’s, fruit, and a demi-john of the best wine the city could produce. The plan was that Machiavelli should wait till three hours after sunset, nine o’clock, by which time Serafina would be in bed and asleep, and then present himself at the little door of the yard. Monna Caterina would let him in and they would have supper. At a convenient moment she would retire to her own bed-chamber and Machiavelli would be left with the object of his affections; but she made him promise that he would leave the house well before dawn. When Piero returned, having delivered the basket, he brought a last message from Monna Caterina. She would be waiting at the door as the church clock struck the hour. To make sure it was he, he was to knock twice quickly, wait a moment, knock once, and then after another brief pause again knock twice. The door would be opened and he was to step in without a word.

‘What it is to have to do with a woman of experience,’ said Machiavelli. ‘She leaves nothing to chance.’

He told one of his servants to bring a pail of hot water to his bedroom and he washed himself all over. It was a thing he hadn’t done since the night before his marriage to Marietta. He remembered that he had caught cold as the result and as was only natural had given his cold to Marietta. Then he scented himself with perfume he had bought at the same time as he bought the attar of roses for Aurelia. He put on his best clothes. Since he did not want to spoil his appetite for the excellent supper he looked forward to, he refused to partake of the modest meal Serafina had prepared on the excuse that he was going to sup at the inn with the agent of the Duke of Ferrara. He tried to read, but was too excited to read with attention. He strummed a little on the lute, but his fingers served him ill. He thought for a while of that dialogue of Plato’s in which he proves to his own satisfaction that pleasure, being mingled with pain, is an imperfect good. There was something in it, but there were moments when meditation on eternal things was but an insipid resource. He laughed in his heart when he passed in review the difficulties of his undertaking and the ingenuity of his devices to overcome them. It would have been a false modesty unworthy of him not to acknowledge that he had been wonderfully clever. He didn’t know anyone who could so skilfully have worked on the passions, foibles and interest of the parties concerned as to bend them to his will. The church clock struck eight. He called Piero, thinking to pass the long hour ahead by playing draughts; ordinarily he could beat him easily, but tonight he was careless and Piero won game after game. It seemed as though the hour would never end, and then on a sudden the clock began to strike. Machiavelli sprang to his feet, flung his cloak round him and opened the house door on to the darkness of the night. He was about to step out into the alley when he heard the tread of feet on the cobbles. He closed the door partly and stood just within to wait till the men, whoever they were, had passed. But they didn’t pass, they stopped at his door and one of them knocked; since it was not latched the knock pushed it back and the flare of the torches two of the men carried discovered Machiavelli in the passage.

‘Ah, Messer Niccolo,’ said a man whom Machiavelli immediately recognized as one of the Duke’s secretaries. ‘We were coming to fetch you. And you, you were just coming to the Palace? His Excellency desires to see you. He has important news for you.’

For once Machiavelli lost his presence of mind. He could not think of any excuse to make. Had he not been caught thus, ready to go out, he could have sent a message to say that he was sick in bed and could not come, but how could he say that now? The Duke was not a man to whom you could say that you had other things to do, and besides, if he had important news to tell, it was essential that he should hear them. It might very well be that they concerned the safety of Florence. His heart sank.

‘Wait a moment and I will tell my boy that he need not accompany me.’

‘It is quite unnecessary. Men will be sent to bring you safely back.’

Machiavelli went into the parlour and closed the door behind him.

‘Listen, Piero. The Duke has sent for me. I will make the interview short by telling the Duke I have the colic. Monna Caterina must be waiting. Go to the door and knock in the way she told you. Tell her what has happened and say I will come as soon as possible. Ask her to let you wait in the yard so that you can open for me when I knock.’

‘Very well.’

‘And say that I am distressed, mortified, miserable, woebegone and exasperated. I shall be back in half an hour.’

With that he joined the men who had come for him and went to the Palace. He was taken into an ante-room and the secretary left him saying he would inform the Duke of his arrival. Machiavelli waited. Minutes went by. Five, ten, fifteen. Then the secretary returned to say that the Duke sent his excuses, but a courier had just arrived from the Pope with letters and he was closeted with the Bishop of Elna and Agapito da Amalia to consider them. He would send for Machiavelli as soon as he was ready. Once more Machiavelli was left alone. His patience was sorely tried. He fidgeted, he tossed from side to side in his chair, he bit his fingers, he walked up and down. He fretted, he chafed, he fumed, he raged. At last, in desperation, he flung out of the room and sought out the secretary who had come for him and in icy tones asked him if the Duke had forgotten he was there.

‘I have the colic,’ he said. ‘If the Duke cannot see me I will go home and return tomorrow.’

‘It is an unfortunate accident. Surely His Excellency wouldn’t keep you waiting except for matters of the greatest urgency. I believe he has something to say to you that is of vital interest to the Signory. Please have patience.’

Mastering his vexation as best he could Machiavelli threw himself into a handy chair. The secretary engaged him in conversation, and though Machiavelli answered in monosyllables and was evidently not paying attention to what he said, would not be discouraged. It was only by a great effort that Machiavelli prevented himself from telling the chatter-box to hold his silly tongue. He kept on saying to himself: if they’d only come one minute later they wouldn’t have found me. At last Agapito da Amalia himself came and said the Duke was ready to receive him. Machiavelli had been kept waiting an hour. He gave a sardonic smile as he thought of Piero standing inside the door shivering in the yard. It was some small consolation that he was not the only one to suffer.

The Duke was with his cousin the Bishop of Elna. He was gracious, but wasted no time on compliments.

‘I have always been frank with you, Secretary, and I wish now to put my position quite plainly. I am not satisfied with the declaration of good will which at the Signory’s direction you convey to me. The Pope may die any day, and if I want to keep my states I must take measures to secure myself. The King of France is my ally and I have an armed force; but that may not be enough and so I wish to make friends of my neighbours. These are Bologna, Mantua, Ferrara and Florence.’

Machiavelli thought this was no time to repeat his assurances of the Republic’s good will, so wisely he held his tongue.

‘So far as Ferrara is concerned I have acquired the Duke’s friendship by his alliance with Monna Lucrezia, my beloved sister, the enormous dowry the Pope gave her, and the benefits we have conferred on his brother the Cardinal. So far as Mantua is concerned, we are arranging two things; one is to give the Cardinal’s hat to the Marquis’s brother, for which the Marquis and his brother will deposit forty thousand ducats; and the other is to give my daughter in marriage to the Marquis’s son, whereupon the forty thousand ducats will be returned as her dowry. I need not point out to you, Secretary, that mutual advantage is the most solid basis of enduring friendship.’

‘I would not dispute it, Excellency,’ smiled Machiavelli. ‘And Bologna?’

The Lord of Bologna, Giovanni Bentivoglio, had joined the rebellious captains, and though his army had withdrawn from the Duke’s frontiers it remained on war footing. II Valentino stroked his well-kept, pointed beard and smiled maliciously.

‘I have no wish to seize Bologna, but only to assure myself of that state’s co-operation. I would sooner have Messer Giovanni my friend than drive him out of a state which I might not be able to hold and which might prove my ruin. Besides which, the Duke of Ferrara refuses to give me aid unless I come to an agreement with Bologna.’

‘Messer Giovanni has signed the articles of association with the rebels.’

‘For once your information is at fault, Secretary,’ the Duke answered good-naturedly. ‘Messer Giovanni is of the opinion that the articles do not safeguard his interests and has refused to agree to them. I am in communication with his brother the Protonotary and things are proceeding to our mutual satisfaction. When we come to an agreement the Protonotary will receive a Cardinal’s hat, or if he prefers to relinquish Holy Orders the hand of my cousin, the sister of the Cardinal Borgia. The forces of our four states, supported further by the King of France, will be formidable, and then your masters will have more need of me than I have of them. I don’t say that I bear them ill will, but circumstances alter cases, and if I am not bound to them by a definite pact I shall feel myself at liberty to act as appears best to me.’

The velvet glove was off and the mailed fist was bared. Machiavelli allowed himself a moment’s reflection. He was aware that Agapito and the Bishop of Elna were watching him intently.

‘What exactly would Your Excellency have us do?’ he asked as nonchalantly as he could. ‘I understand that you have already come to terms with Vitellozzo and the Orsini.’

‘Nothing has been signed yet and as far as I’m concerned I’d just as soon nothing were signed. It is not my policy to crush the Orsini: if the Pope dies I must have friends in Rome. When Pagolo Orsini came to see me one of his complaints was the behaviour of Ramiro de Lorqua; I promised to give him satisfaction and I shall be as good as my word. Vitellozzo is another matter. He is a snake and he has done everything he could to prevent my settling my differences with the Orsini.’

‘Perhaps it would be better if Your Excellency were more explicit.’

‘Very well. I desire you to write to your masters that it may very well be that the King of France will order them to restore to me the condotta which they withdrew without rhyme or reason and they will be obliged to obey. It is surely better for them to do this willingly than by compulsion.’

Machiavelli paused to collect himself. He knew that every word he said was fraught with danger. When he spoke it was in as ingratiating a manner as he could assume.

‘Your Excellency acts with prudence in assembling his forces and making friends; but so far as the condotta is concerned, Your Excellency can’t be classed with hireling captains who have nothing but themselves and a few troops to sell. Your Excellency is one of the powers of Italy, and it would be more suitable to make an alliance with you than to engage you as a mercenary.’

‘I should look upon such an engagement as an honour,’ the Duke answered suavely. ‘Come now, Secretary, surely we can arrange something that will be to our common advantage. I am a professional soldier, bound to your state by ties of friendship; it is a slight your masters put upon me in refusing my request. I don’t believe that I’m mistaken in thinking that I could serve them as well as anyone else.’

‘I venture to point out that there would be no great safety for my government when three-quarters of its troops were in the hands of Your Excellency.’

‘Does that mean that you doubt my good faith?’

‘Not at all,’ said Machiavelli with a fervour he was far from feeling. ‘But my masters are prudent and they must be circumspect. They cannot afford to take a step which they might have reason to regret. Their chief desire is to be at peace with all men.’

‘You are too intelligent not to know, Secretary, that the only way to assure peace is to be prepared for war.’

‘I have no doubt that my government will take such steps as they deem necessary.’

‘By taking other captains into their service?’ the Duke asked sharply.

This was the opportunity Machiavelli had been looking for. He knew that Il Valentino was subject to sudden attacks of rage, and having vented it would scornfully dismiss the object of wrath. Machiavelli was too eager to get away to care if he angered him.

‘I have every reason to believe that such are its intentions.’

To his astonishment the Duke laughed. He rose from his chair and stood with his back to the fire. He answered with complete good humour.

‘Are they under the impression that it is possible to remain neutral in the unsettled conditions that now prevail? Surely they have more sense. When two neighbouring states go to war, the one that has counted on your help because of its intimate relations with you will consider you under an obligation to share its fortunes, and when you fail to do so, will bear you a grudge: the other will despise you for your timidity and lack of spirit. To the one side you are a useless friend and to the other an enemy little to be feared.

‘The neutral is in such a position that he can help one party or the other; and in the end he is forced into such a situation that he is obliged against his will to join in the fray which he was unwilling at the beginning to enter boldly and with a good grace. Believe me, it is always wiser to take one side or the other without hesitation, for one or the other of them will be victorious and then you will fall prey to the winner. For who will come to your rescue? You can give no reason why anyone should protect you and will find no one to do it. The victor has no use for friends he can’t trust, and the vanquished will do nothing for you, even if he could, because you wouldn’t come to his help when your forces might have saved him.’

Machiavelli had no wish at the moment to listen to a disquisition on neutrality and he only hoped that by then the Duke had said his say. But he hadn’t.

‘Whatever the risks of war, the risks of neutrality are greater. It renders you an object of hatred and contempt, and sooner or later you will fall victim to the first person who thinks it worth his while to destroy you. If on the other hand you come out vigorously on one side and that side wins, even though its power is so great that you may have cause to fear it, you have put it under an obligation and attached it to yourself by bonds of friendship.’

‘And it is Your Excellency’s experience that men’s gratitude for past benefits is so considerable that they will hesitate to exercise their power at your expense?’

‘Victories are never so decisive that the victor can afford to alienate his friends. It is to his best interest to treat them with justice.’

‘And supposing the side you have taken loses?’

‘Then you are all the more valuable to your ally. He helps you to the best of his ability and you are the companion of fortunes that may rise again. So, whichever way you look at it, neutrality is folly. That is all I have to say to you. You will be wise to repeat to your masters the little lesson in statemanship that I have thought well to give you.’

With these words the Duke sank into a chair and held out his hand to the blazing fire. Machiavelli, bowing, was about to withdraw when the Duke turned to Agapito da Amalia.

‘Have you told the Secretary that his friend Buonarotti is delayed in Florence and will not be arriving for some time?’

Agapito shook his head.

‘I know no such person, Excellency,’ said Machiavelli.

‘Surely. The sculptor.’

The Duke was looking at him with smiling eyes and Machiavelli on a sudden guessed of whom he was speaking. He had written to his friend Biagio for money and had received an answer from him to say that he was sending it by Michelangelo, a sculptor. The name meant nothing to him. But the Duke’s remark suggested that his effects had been searched, evidently with the connivance of Serafina, and he congratulated himself on having put his important correspondence in a safe place; he had kept in his lodging only papers of little consequence, but among them was Biagio’s letter.

‘There are many stone-cutters in Florence, Excellency,’ he said coolly. ‘I cannot be expected to know them all.’

‘This Michelangelo is not without talent. He made a Cupid in marble and buried it in the ground so that when it was dug up it was taken for an antique. Cardinal di San Giorgio bought it, but when he discovered the fraud returned it to the dealer and in the end it came into my hands. I have sent it as a present to the Marchioness of Mantua.’

Il Valentino spoke in a jesting way and Machiavelli for a reason obscure to him received the impression that he was being made a fool of. He had the irascibility of the highly sensitive man he was, and his impatience overcame him. He was quite willing to affront the Duke if only he could secure his freedom to keep his appointment.

‘And does Your Excellency propose to order from him a statue to rival the one Leonardo made for the Duke of Milan?’

The shaft quivered through the air, and the secretaries, startled, glanced at the Duke to see how he would take it. The great equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, thought by many to be Leonardo’s masterpiece, had been destroyed by the soldiery when Marshal Trevulzio captured the city; and Francesco’s son, Lodovico il Moro, who had commissioned it, a usurper like Cæsar Borgia himself, driven from his city, was now a prisoner in the castle of Loches. Machiavelli’s remark was well designed to remind Il Valentino how dangerous his position was and to what depths he might fall if his good fortune deserted him. The Duke laughed.

‘No, I have more important work for this fellow Michelangelo to do than to make statues. The defences of this city are useless and I’m going to let him draw plans for its fortification. But you were speaking of Leonardo; I should like to show you some drawings he has made of me.’

He made a sign to one of the secretaries who left the room and soon returned with a portfolio which he handed to the Duke. He showed the drawings to Machiavelli one after the other.

‘Unless you had told me they were portraits of Your Excellency I should never have known it,’ said he.

‘Poor Leonardo, he has no great gift for catching a likeness. But as drawings I am assured they are not without merit.’

‘That may be, but I think it a pity that with his gifts he should waste his time painting pictures and making statues.’

‘I can assure you that he will not do so while he is in my service. I sent him to Piombino to drain the marshes and lately he has been at Cesena and Cesenatico to cut a canal and make a harbour.’

He handed the drawings back to the secretary, and with a graciousness which Machiavelli noted acidly was no less regal than that of the King of France, dismissed him. Agapito da Amalia accompanied him out of the Duke’s study. During the month he had been at Imola Machiavelli had taken pains to gain the Chief Secretary’s confidence. He was related to the great Roman family of the Colonna, the bitter rivals of the Orsini, and so might be supposed to have a certain friendliness for the Florentines whose enemies they were. From time to time he had given Machiavelli information which he accepted as true or false according to his judgment of its likelihood. As now they passed through the presence chamber which was used on ceremonial occasions he took Machiavelli’s arm and said:

‘Come into my room. I have something to show you that will interest you.’

‘It is late and I am sick. I will come tomorrow.’

‘As you will. I wanted to show you the articles of agreement between the Duke and the rebels.’

Machiavelli’s heart stood still. He knew that the document had arrived at Imola and he had in vain used every method he could think of to get a sight of it. It was of extreme importance to the Signory to know what the terms of the pact were, and they had written to complain of his negligence. It was useless for him to tell them that he sent them all the facts as he discovered them, but that in the Duke’s court secrets were well kept and none knew what the Duke meant to do until he did it. At that moment a clock struck: he had kept Aurelia waiting for two hours. The fish fry would be ruined and the fat capons roasted to a cinder, and he was hungry, for he had eaten nothing since before noon. It was said that love and hunger were the two most deep-rooted instincts of man, and who could be blamed for yielding to them? Machiavelli sighed: the safety of Florence was at stake; her liberty in danger.

‘Come then,’ he said.

He thought bitterly that never had a man been called upon to sacrifice so much for the good of his country.

Agapito led him up a flight of stairs, unlocked a door, and ushered him into a small room, with a bed along one wall, which was dimly lit by the flame of an oil lamp. From it he lit a tallow candle and offered Machiavelli a chair, then he sat down himself, at a table littered with papers, and leaning back, crossed his legs comfortably. He had the appearance of a man to whom time was no object.

‘I could not give you a copy of the articles before for a reason I will tell you, and for the same reason I did not give one to the agent of the Duke of Ferrara or to anyone else. The Duke and Pagolo Orsini drew up a draft which was agreeable to them both and the Lord Pagolo took it away to show it to the captains with the understanding that if they agreed to it he would do likewise on behalf of the Duke, who gave him his power of attorney. But when he had started the Duke examined the document again and it seemed to him that an article should have been included which took into account the interests of France.’

Machiavelli had been listening with impatience, for he wanted to see the agreement, if possible get hold of it, and be gone; but now he gave the speaker all his attention.

‘The article was duly drawn up and the Duke ordered me to ride after the Lord Pagolo and tell him that unless it was accepted he wouldn’t sign. I caught him up and he flatly refused to accept it, but after some discussion he said that he would take it to the others, but he didn’t think they would accept it either. And so I left him.’

‘What is the point of the article?’

There was laughter in Agapito’s voice when he answered.

‘If it is accepted it opens a window through which we can slip out of the agreement, and if it is not accepted it unlocks a door through which we can stride with our heads in the air.’

‘It looks as though the Duke had more desire for revenge on those who have endangered his state than for peace.’

‘You may be quite sure that the Duke will never allow his desires to interfere with his interests.’

‘You promised to show me the agreement.’

‘Here it is.’

Machiavelli read it eagerly. By its terms the Duke and the rebels were thenceforward to live in peace, concord and union: they were to retain their commands under him with the same pay as before and as a sign of good faith each one of them was to deliver into his safekeeping one of his legitimate sons as a hostage; but they stipulated that not more than one of the captains at a time should encamp with the Duke, and then for no longer than suited him. On their side they agreed to restore to him Urbino and Camerino and in return he undertook to defend their states against anyone, with the exception of His Holiness the Pope or His Majesty the King of France, who attacked them. This was the clause that Il Valentino had insisted on and which, as Agapito had said, even a child might see made the treaty worthless. Bentivoglio of Bologna and Petrucci of Siena were signing a separate agreement with the Pope. With a frown Machiavelli read the document a second time.

‘How can they expect the Duke to forgive the injuries they have done him?’ he exclaimed when he had finished. ‘And how can the Duke be expected to forget the perils in which they have put him?’

‘Quem Jupiter vult perdere dementat prius,’ quoted Agapito with a cheerful smile.

‘Will you allow me to take this document away to make a copy of it?’

‘I couldn’t let it out of my hands.’

‘I promise to return it tomorrow.’

‘It’s impossible. The Duke may ask for it any minute.’

‘The Duke never ceases to assure me of his sincere friendship for Florence. It is of the greatest importance that my government should be made acquainted with this agreement. Believe me, you will not find them ungrateful for any service you are able to render them.’

‘I have been concerned with affairs of state too long to count on the gratitude of princes or governments.’

Machiavelli continued to press him and at last he said:

‘You know that I would do a great deal to oblige you. My respect for your intelligence is only equalled by my admiration for your integrity. I do it with misgiving, I will allow you to make a copy of the agreement here.’

Machiavelli gasped. It would take him half an hour to do this and time was passing. Was ever lover placed in such a predicament? There was nothing to do but to submit. Agapito gave him his place at the table, a sheet of paper and a new quill. He lay down on the bed while Machiavelli scribbled away as fast as his task would let him. As he wrote the last line he heard the night watchman cry out the hour of the night and immediately afterwards the church clock struck. Midnight.

Agapito went downstairs with him and when they came to the court round which the Palace was built called for two men of the guard to light Machiavelli back to his lodging. A chill rain was falling and the night was raw. When they arrived at his house Machiavelli dismissed the soldiers with a gratuity and unlocked the door. He waited within till he could no longer hear their steps and, locking up behind him, slipped out again. He crossed the alley and gently knocked in the prearranged manner. There was no reply. He knocked again. Twice, a pause, once, a pause and then twice more. He waited. A bleak wind blew down the narrow alley, gusts of rain splashed his face, and though he was well wrapped up, with a muffler to keep the noxious air of night out of his lungs, he shivered in the cold. Was it possible that the women had grown tired of waiting? But where was Piero? He had told him to stay in the yard till he came, and Piero had never failed him before. Piero must have explained why he was delayed, and after all, though for different reasons, it was as essential to them, those two women, as it was urgent to him, that the opportunity should not be lost. On the walk from the Palace he had noticed on passing the front of the house that no light showed, and it occurred to him now that it would be well to see if there as a light at the back. After knocking once more, again to no purpose, he went back into his own house and up to his bedroom, since from there he could see into the yard of Bartolomeo’s house and the windows that faced it. Nothing. He looked into impenetrable darkness. It might be that Piero had gone in for a moment to drink a cup of wine and to warm himself and by now was back at his post. Machiavelli went out again into the cruel night. He knocked, he waited, he knocked, he waited, he knocked, he waited. His feet and hands were like ice; his teeth were chattering.

‘I shall catch my death of cold,’ he mumbled.

Suddenly he was swept by a gust of anger and he was on the point of thundering on the door with both his fists. But prudence restrained him; he would be no further advanced if he aroused the neighbours. At last he was forced to conclude that they had given him up and were gone to bed. He turned away, and miserably let himself into his own house. He was cold, hungry and bitterly disappointed.

‘If I don’t catch my death of cold, I really shall have the colic tomorrow.’

He went into the kitchen to find something to eat, but Serafina bought the day’s food every morning and if there was anything left over kept it under lock and key, so he found nothing. The brazier had been taken out of the parlour, which was cold as death, but Machiavelli had not even the solace of going to bed; he had to sit down and write a report of his conversation with the Duke. It took him a long time, because he had to write the most important parts in cypher. Then he had to make a fair copy of the articles of agreement to enclose in his letter. He did not finish till the small hours of the morning. The missive was urgent and he could not afford to wait till he found a casual messenger who could be trusted to deliver a letter for a gold florin or two, so he clambered upstairs to the attic where his two servants slept, woke them and told the more reliable of the two to get his horse saddled and be ready to ride out of the city as soon as the gates were opened. He waited till the man was dressed, let him out of the street door, and then at last went to bed.

‘And this should have been a night of love,’ he muttered savagely as he pulled his nightcap well over his ears.

CHAPTER 23

HE SLEPT RESTLESSLY. He woke late in the morning and found his worst fears realized. He had caught cold and when he went to the door to shout for Piero his voice sounded like an old crow’s. Piero appeared.

‘I’m sick,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve got fever. I think I’m dying. Get me some hot wine and something to eat. If I don’t die of fever I shall die of starvation. Bring a brazier. I’m chilled to the bone. Where the hell did you get to last night?’

Piero was about to speak when Machiavelli stopped him.

‘Never mind about that. Later, later. Get me some wine.’

He felt a little better when he had drunk and eaten. He listened sullenly when Piero explained that he had waited in the yard for more than an hour as Machiavelli had told him to do. He had waited though the pouring rain soaked him to the skin. He had waited though Monna Caterina begged him to come in.

‘Did you tell them what had happened?’

‘I said exactly what you told me to say, Messere.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said it was a pity.’

‘They said it was a pity?’ croaked Machiavelli wrathfully. ‘My God! And to think that the Almighty created woman to be a helpmate to man. They said it was a pity. What would they have said to the death of Hector and the fall of Troy?’

‘At last they forced me to take shelter. My teeth were chattering. They said we could hear your knock from the kitchen. They made me take off my coat and dry myself by the fire.’

‘And the fish and the capons?’

‘We kept them hot a long time and at last Monna Caterina said they’d only spoil so we’d better eat them. We were hungry.’

‘I was starving.’

‘We left something for you. Some fish and half a chicken.’

‘Considerate.’

‘We heard the clock strike once and we heard it strike a second time and Monna Aurelia went to bed.’

‘She did what?’ Machiavelli spluttered.

‘We tried to get her to wait a little longer. We said you’d be coming in a minute. She said that two hours was enough to wait for any man. She said that if business meant more to you than pleasure there wasn’t much pleasure to be expected from any intimate relations with you.’

‘A non sequitur.’

‘She said that if you loved her as much as you pretended you’d have found some excuse to break off your interview with the Duke. We reasoned with her.’

‘As if one could reason with women!’

‘But she wouldn’t listen. So Monna Caterina told me it was no good my waiting, she gave me another drink of wine and sent me away.’

It occurred to Machiavelli then that Piero had no key to get in with.

‘Where did you spend the night?’

The boy gave him an arch, complacent smile.

‘With Nina.’

‘You spent your night more profitably than I did then,’ said Machiavelli grimly. ‘But I thought she’d gone to stay with her parents.’

‘That’s what she told Monna Caterina. We’d arranged it beforehand. She got La Barberina to let her have a room in her house and I was to join her as soon as I could get away.’

La Barberina was a procuress with a well-established and respectable business in Imola. For some minutes Machiavelli was silent. He was not a man to accept defeat.

‘Listen, Piero,’ he said when he had well considered, ‘that old fool Bartolomeo will be back before night. We must act quickly. Let us not forget that when Jupiter wished to gain the favours of the beautiful Danae he approached her in the likeness of a shower of gold. Go to the merchant Luca Capelli where I bought the gloves I sent to Monna Aurelia and get him to let you have the scarf in blue silk with the silver embroidery that he showed me. Say I’ll pay for it as soon as the money I’m expecting from Florence arrives. Then take it and ask to see Monna Caterina; give her the scarf for Aurelia and tell her that I’m dying of love and the cold I caught waiting at the door, but that as soon as I’m better we’ll meet and I will devise a new plan to satisfy Monna Aurelia’s desires and my own.’

He waited impatiently for Piero to execute the commission and return with a report of his reception.

‘She likes the scarf,’ said Piero. ‘She said it was pretty and asked how much it cost. When I told her she liked it still more.’

‘Very natural. What else?’

‘I told her that it had been impossible for you to get away from the Palace and she said it didn’t matter at all and not to give it another thought.’

‘What!’ cried Machiavelli, outraged. ‘Really women are the most irresponsible creatures in the world. Doesn’t she see that her whole future is involved? Did you tell her that I stood out in the rain for an hour?’

‘Yes. She said it was very imprudent.’

‘Who expects a lover to be prudent? You might as well ask the sea to be calm when it is assailed by the angry winds of heaven.’

‘And Monna Caterina said she hoped you’d take care of yourself.’

CHAPTER 24

MACHIAVELLI WAS LAID up for several days, but by dint of purging and blood-letting recovered, and the first thing he did then was to seek out Fra Timoteo. He told him the tragic story. The monk was sympathetic.

‘And now,’ said Machiavelli, ‘let us put our heads together and think out some way to get rid of our good Bartolomeo again.’

‘I have done my best, Messere; I can do no more.’

‘Father, when our illustrious Duke attacked the city of Forlì he was repulsed, but he did not for that reason raise the siege; he used every stratagem his intelligence suggested and eventually brought about its surrender.’

‘I have seen Messer Bartolomeo. He did exactly what I told him to do and he is persuaded that the intercession of San Vitale was efficacious. He is convinced that Monna Aurelia conceived on the night of his return from Ravenna.’

‘The man is a fool.’

‘Though a religious I am not so ignorant as to be unaware that a certain time must elapse before it can be known whether he is right or wrong.’

Machiavelli felt some irritation. The friar was proving less helpful than he had expected.

‘Come, come, Father, do not take me for a fool too. Whatever miraculous powers the saint’s relics may possess we know that to make a sterile man fertile is not one of them. I invented the story myself and you know as well as I do that there isn’t a word of truth in it.’

Fra Timoteo smiled blandly and there was unction in his voice when he replied.

‘The operations of Providence are mysterious, and who can know the ways of the Eternal? Have you never heard the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary? Forbidden by her cruel husband to succour the necessities of the needy, she met him in the street one day when she was carrying bread to the poor. Suspecting that she was disobeying his orders, he asked her what she had in her basket and in her fright she told him it was roses. He snatched the basket from her and when he opened it found that she had told the truth: the loaves of bread had been miraculously turned into sweet-smelling roses.’

‘The story is edifying,’ said Machiavelli coldly, ‘but the point escapes me.’

‘May it not be that San Vitale hearing in Paradise the prayers that the pious Bartolomeo addressed to him was moved by the simple faith of this good man and performed for him the miracle which you had assured him it was in the saint’s power to do? Does not Holy Scripture tell us that is we have faith we can move mountains?’

If Machiavelli had not possessed great self-control he would have given rein to his anger. He knew very well why the monk was refusing his further aid. For twenty-five ducats he had done what he had agreed to do and it was not his fault if the plan had miscarried. He wanted more money, and Machiavelli had no money to give him. The chain he had given Monna Caterina, the gloves, the attar of roses he had bought for Aurelia, had taken all his spare cash; he owed money to Bartolomeo, he owed money to several merchants, the money he was receiving from the Signory only sufficed for his current expenses. He had nothing to offer now but promises and he had an inkling that promises would mean little to Fra Timoteo.

‘Your eloquence and your piety, father, bear out the good report I have heard of you, and if my letter of recommendation to the Signory has the effect we both desire I am sure it will be to the spiritual benefit of the people of Florence.’

The monk bowed with a grave dignity, but Machiavelli saw that he was unmoved. He went on.

‘A wise man does not put all his eggs in one basket. If a plan miscarries he tries another. Do not let us lose sight of the fact that if Bartolomeo is disappointed in his hopes he will adopt his nephews to the injury of his wife and his mother-in-law and to the loss of your church.’

‘It would be a misfortune which it would be my Christian duty to persuade all concerned to bear with resignation.’

‘We are told that God helps those who help themselves. You have not found me ungenerous in the past, you will not find me ungenerous in the future. It is to your interest as well as to that of the two ladies that Bartolomeo’s hopes should not be disappointed.’

A faint smile for a moment lit Fra Timoteo’s Roman features.

‘You know that I would do much to oblige a person of your distinction, but supposing that the good Bartolomeo’s hopes are disappointed, how do you propose that we should gain God’s help by helping ourselves?’

Machiavelli suddenly got an idea. It amused him so much that he nearly burst out laughing.

‘Father, like the rest of the world you have doubtless from time to time to take a purge, and suppose you take a dose of aloes at night, you have certainly discovered that its action is more satisfactory if you take a dose of salts in the morning. Does it not occur to you that the efficacy of Bartolomeo’s pilgrimage to San Vitale would be increased if he made another to Rimini, for example, which would oblige him to absent himself from this city for another twenty-four hours?’

‘You are a man of so many desires, Messere, that I cannot refuse you my admiration. But this one comes too late. Messer Bartolomeo may be a fool, but I should be more of a fool than he if I counted on his being more of a fool than he is.’

‘Your influence over him is great.’

‘That is all the more reason for my not losing it.’

‘Then I can’t count upon your aid?’

‘I do not say that. Wait a month and then we will talk of it again.’

‘To a lover a month is a hundred years.’

‘Let us not forget that the patriarch Jacob waited seven years for Rachel.’

Machiavelli saw well enough that the monk was mocking him. He was going to do nothing until Machiavelli could make it worth his while. He was seething, but he knew it would be fatal to show his irritation. Controlling himself he parted from the monk with a pleasantry: he begged him to accept a florin for a candle to be burnt at the altar of the miraculous Virgin so that Bartolomeo’s wishes might be fulfilled. There was no sting in a defeat accepted with spirit.

CHAPTER 25

HIS ONLY HOPE now of having his way with Aurelia was to enlist the aid of Monna Caterina. It was obvious that her concern at the misadventure which had frustrated their well-laid scheme must be great, greater than his indeed, for with him it was only a matter of satisfying his desire for a pretty woman; but her very security was at stake. He could no longer rely on the monk, but in her he had a self-interested ally, and that was an ally you could count on. He had a firm belief in the ingenuity of her sex; to deceive was food and drink to it, and it was to her manifest advantage to do everything she could to bring their plan to a successful issue. He decided to arrange a meeting with her. The secluded life the two women led made it none too easy, but fortunately Piero was there to act as a go-between. He congratulated himself on his foresight in urging the boy to make love to Nina.

Next day he bought a beautiful fish at the market and sent it by Piero to Bartolomeo’s house at a time when he knew the fat man would be about his business in the city. It would be very unlucky if he could not get an opportunity to see her alone and make an appointment. Piero carried out his commission with his usual competence and returned to tell his master that Monna Caterina after some hesitation had agreed to meet him at such and such an hour, three days from then, at the church of St. Dominic. Her choice of place was adroit. It was evident that with her feminine intuition she had realized that Fra Timoteo could be trusted no longer and it was just as well that he should not see them together.

Machiavelli went to St. Dominic’s without an idea in his head, but he was untroubled, for he was confident that Monna Caterina would be able to suggest something; his only fear was that it would cost too much money. Ah, well, if the worst came to the worst he would have to borrow once again from Bartolomeo; after all, it was only just that he should pay for the service Machiavelli was prepared to render him.

There was not a soul in the church. Machiavelli told Monna Caterina how it had happened that he had not been able to keep the appointment and how he had stood knocking at the door in the rain and how he had caught a dreadful cold.

‘I know, I know,’ said Monna Caterina. ‘Piero told us and we were greatly distressed. Aurelia kept on saying: “The poor gentleman, it would be on my conscience if he died.”’

‘I had no intention of dying,’ said Machiavelli. ‘And if I had been at the gates of Paradise the thought of Aurelia would have brought me back.’

‘It was all very unfortunate.’

‘Let us not think of the past. I have recovered my health. I am full of vigour. Let us think of the future. Our scheme has miscarried, we must devise another; you are a clever woman, and I find it hard to believe that you cannot arrange some way whereby all our wishes may be satisfied.’

‘Messer Niccolo, I did not want to come here today; I only came because of your Piero’s entreaties.’

‘He said you had shown hesitation. I could not understand.’

‘No one likes to be the bearer of ill tidings.’

‘What do you mean?’ cried Machiavelli. ‘It is impossible that Bartolomeo should have conceived any suspicion.’

‘No, no, it is not that. It is Aurelia. I have argued with her, I have gone down on my bended knees. I can do nothing with her. Ah, my poor friend, girls are not what they were when I was young; then it never occurred to them that they could disobey their parents.’

‘Don’t beat about the bush, woman. Tell me what you mean.’

‘Aurelia refuses to go on. She will not do what you desire.’

‘But have you put the consequences before her? Haven’t you shown her what her position will be, and yours, if Bartolomeo adopts his sister’s sons and Monna Costanza becomes mistress of your house?’

‘I have said everything.’

‘But the reason? Even a woman must have a reason for what she does.’

‘She believes that by a special interposition of Providence she has been preserved from mortal sin.’

‘Sin?’ shouted Machiavelli, in his agitation forgetting the decorum due to the sacred building in which they were thus conversing.

‘Do not be angry with me, Messer Niccolo. It is not for a mother to persuade her daughter to act contrary to the dictates of her conscience.’

‘Saving your presence, Madonna, you are talking stuff and nonsense. You are an experienced woman and she is but an ignorant girl. It is your duty to point out to her that of two evils not only reason, but heaven itself commands us to choose the lesser. Who in his senses would refuse to commit a little sin, and one to which considerable pleasure is attached, in order to gain a great good?’

‘It is no use, Messere, I know my daughter, she is as stubborn as a mule; she had made up her mind and I can do nothing with her. She wishes me to tell you that in memory of the interest you have taken in her she will always treasure the elegant gloves and the silk scarf you gave her, but she will accept no more presents from you and desires you to offer none. She desired you further to make no more attempt, either direct or indirect, to see her. For my part I shall always remember your kindness with gratitude and I only wish I could make up to you for the disappointment you have suffered.’

She paused for a moment, but Machiavelli made no reply.

‘I need not tell a man of your wit and worldly wisdom that women are capricious and uncertain. If he chooses the right moment even the prude will accept the embraces of a lover, but if he misses it even the wanton will refuse them. I bid you a very good day.’

Monna Caterina gave him a curtsey in which according to his perspicacity an observer might have seen derision, resentment or civility, and was gone.

Machiavelli was confounded.

CHAPTER 26

NOTWITHSTANDING ALL HIS attempts during the next month it was not till he was about to leave Imola that he saw Aurelia again. Fortunately his work kept him too busy to brood over his disappointment. The rebels were reported to be at loggerheads. At last, however, all signed the agreement which Agapito had shown Machiavelli except Baglioni of Perugia, who told them they were fools and dupes to put their hands to such a document, and when he found them determined to make peace at any cost strode in a passion out of the church in which they were meeting. The Duke appointed Pagolo Orsini governor of Urbino, which by the terms of the treaty he recovered, and to reward him for persuading the captains to sign it made him a present of five thousand ducats. Vitellozzo wrote humble letters in which he sought to excuse his actions.

‘The traitor stuck a knife in our backs,’ said Agapito, ‘and now he thinks he can undo the harm with soft words.’

But Il Valentino appeared to be well pleased. It looked as though he were prepared to let bygones be bygones and restore the repentant rebels to his confidence. His amiability seemed suspicious to Machiavelli and he wrote to the Signory that it was hard to guess and impossible to know what the Duke had in mind. He had now large forces at his disposal and it was evident to all that he would make use of them. Rumours were current that he was making preparations for his departure from Imola, but whether he intended to march south and attack the Kingdom of Naples or north to wage war on the Venetians was more than anyone could tell. Machiavelli was disturbed to hear that influential persons from Pisa had come to offer him their city. Florence had spent time, money and lives in the attempt to recapture it, for its possession was necessary to their commerce, and if it was held by the Duke their position, both from the economic and the military standpoint, would be hazardous. Lucca was close, and the Duke, speaking of it, remarked in a way that Machiavelli thought ominous that it was a rich territory and a mouthful for gluttons. If after gaining possession of Pisa he seized Lucca, Florence would be at his mercy. In an interview with Machiavelli the Duke brought up again the matter of the condotta, and the wretched envoy was hard put to it to explain the Signory’s hesitation to grant him the command he wanted in such a way as not to offend him. The plain fact was that they were determined not to place themselves in the power of an unscrupulous man whom they had every reason to distrust. But whatever sinister plans he turned round in that handsome head of his, the Duke was evidently not ready to resort to more than veiled threats to induce the Florentines to accede to his demands, for he listened to Machiavelli calmly enough. He ended by telling him that he was about to set out for Cesena with his army and once there would do what he decided was necessary.

He started for Forlì on the tenth of December and reached Cesena on the twelfth. Machiavelli made arrangements to follow him. He sent Piero with one of the servants ahead to make sure of a dwelling, and having taken leave of certain persons who had obliged him during his sojourn at Imola, empty now that the Duke, with his court and all the hangers-on, had left, finally went to say goodbye to Bartolomeo. He found him at home and was ushered into his study. The fat man received him with his usual boisterous cordiality. He had already heard of Machiavelli’s approaching departure and expressed his regret in very handsome terms. He said how greatly he had enjoyed the acquaintance of such a distinguished visitor and how much he deplored that he would no longer have the opportunity to play with him those too infrequent games of chess and to entertain him at his house with music and such poor fare as he could provide. Machiavelli on his side paid him appropriate compliments and then with some embarrassment entered upon a matter which was on his mind.

‘Listen, my dear friend, I am come not only to thank you for all your kindness to me, but to ask you to do me one more kindness still.’

‘You have only to mention it.’

Machiavelli gave a slightly bitter laugh.

‘I owe you twenty-five ducats. I haven’t the money to pay you. I must ask you to wait a little longer.’

‘It is a matter of no consequence.’

‘Twenty-five ducats is a considerable sum.’

‘Let it wait, let it wait, and if it’s inconvenient for you to pay there’s no reason why you should. Look upon it as a gift rather than a loan.’

‘There is no reason why you should make me such a present. I couldn’t possibly accept such a favour at your hands.’

Bartolomeo leaned back in his chair and burst into a great booming laugh.

‘But didn’t you guess? It is not my money. Our good Duke knew that with the rise of prices and the necessary expenses of your mission your circumstances were embarrassed. Everyone knows that the Signory is niggardly. I received instructions from His Excellency’s treasurer to provide you with any sum you might need. If you had asked me for two hundred ducats instead of twenty-five I should have given them to you.’

Machiavelli went pale. He was dumbfounded.

‘But if I had known the money came from the Duke nothing would have induced me to take it.’

‘It was because the Duke knew your scruples and admired your integrity that he chose me to be the go-between. He respected your delicacy. I am betraying his confidence, but I do not think you should remain ignorant of so generous and disinterested a gesture.’

Machiavelli stifled the obscenity that rose to his lips. He had little belief in the Duke’s generosity and none in his disinterestedness. Did he think to buy his good will for twenty-five ducats? Machiavelli’s thin lips tightened so that his mouth showed as no more than a bitter line.

‘You are surprised?’ smiled Bartolomeo.

‘Nothing the Duke may do can any longer surprise me.’

‘He is a very great man. I have no doubt that we who have enjoyed the privilege of being useful to him shall on that account be remembered by posterity.’

‘My good Bartolomeo,’ said Machiavelli, ‘it is not the great deeds men do that make them remembered by posterity, but the fine language with which men of letters describe their deeds. Pericles would be no more than a name if Thucydides had not put into his mouth the speech that has made him famous.’

While saying these words he got up.

‘You mustn’t go without seeing the ladies. It would grieve them not to bid you farewell.’

Machiavelli followed him into the parlour. There was a certain constriction in his throat and it seemed to him that his heart was beating at an unaccustomed rate. The women had not expected a visitor and they were in their everyday clothes. They were taken aback to see him and perhaps none too well pleased. They rose to their feet and curtseyed. Bartolomeo told them that Machiavelli was leaving for Cesena.

‘What shall we do without you?’ cried Monna Caterina.

Since Machiavelli had the conviction that they would do perfectly well without him, he merely smiled a rather sour smile.

‘Messer Niccolo will doubtless be glad to leave a place which offers so little to divert a stranger,’ said Aurelia.

Machiavelli could not but think there was a hint of malice in her tone. She resumed her work and he noticed that she was still busy with the elaborate embroidery of the shirts, the material for which he had brought from Florence.

‘I hardly know which to admire most, Monna Aurelia,’ he said, ‘your patience or your industry.’

‘They say the devil finds work for idle hands to do,’ she replied.

‘And pleasant work, too, on occasion.’

‘But dangerous.’

‘And hence more attractive.’

‘Yet discretion is the better part of valour.’

Machiavelli didn’t much like having his remarks capped, and though he smiled, his retort as acidulous.

‘They say that proverbs are the wisdom of the multitude, but the multitude is always in the wrong.’

Aurelia was not looking her best. The weather had been bad for some time and she had waited too long to dye her hair. The roots showed black. One might have thought that she had made-up that morning in haste, for the natural olive of her skin was not quite disguised by the cosmetics she had applied.

‘By the time she’s forty she’ll be no more desirable than her mother,’ said Machiavelli to himself.

After a decent interval he took his leave. He was glad he had seen Aurelia again. He still desired her, but his desire was not so importunate as it had been. He was not a man who because he was disappointed of the fat quails he had promised himself for his dinner was disinclined to eat the pig’s trotters that were set before him; and when he saw that to pursue Aurelia further was fruitless, he had on occasion assuaged his urgent passions in the arms of sundry not too expensive young women whose acquaintance he made through the good offices of La Barberina. Now when he looked into his heart he could not but see that, so far as Aurelia was concerned, he was suffering as much from wounded vanity as from the pangs of unrequited love. He came to the conclusion that she was rather stupid; otherwise she would not have gone to bed in a pet because he had kept her waiting a mere three hours; otherwise it would never have occurred to her that in going to bed with him she was committing a sin, at least till after she had committed it. If only she knew as much about life as he did, she would know that it is not the temptations you have succumbed to that you regret, but those you have resisted.

‘Well, it’ll serve her right if Bartolomeo adopts his nephews,’ he said to himself. ‘She’ll be sorry then that she was such a fool.’

CHAPTER 27

TWO DAYS LATER he arrived at Cesena. The Duke’s artillery was approaching the city, his army was at full strength, and he was well provided with money. It was evident that something was afoot, but none knew what. Notwithstanding the activity that prevailed there was in the air a stillness like that which they say obtains before an earthquake: men are uneasy and restless, they know not why, and suddenly, without warning, the ground under their feet shakes and the houses come tumbling about their ears. Machiavelli twice requested the Duke to receive him, and the Duke, thanking him for his courtesy, returned the message that he would send for him when he had need of him. He could get no information from the secretaries. They repeated that the Duke told nothing till he was ready to act, and he acted as necessity dictated. It was obvious that they were as ignorant of his plans as anyone else. Machiavelli was sick and sore and he had no money. He wrote to the Signory asking for his recall and advised them to send in his place an ambassador with fuller powers than they had been willing to grant him.

But Machiavelli had not been in Cesena a week before an unexpected event occurred. Going one morning to the Palace which the Duke had requisitioned for his own use he found all the French captains there. They were angry and excited. It appeared that they had on a sudden received the order to take themselves off within two days, and they were deeply affronted by their abrupt dismissal. Machiavelli racked his brains to think of a plausible explanation for this step. His friends at court told him that the Duke could no longer stand the French, since they caused him more trouble than they were worth; but it seemed the height of folly to send away so important a part of his armed force when the troops left to him would not be superior to those under the command of the captains, Orsini, Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo and the rest, in whose loyalty, after their recent rebellion and unwilling submission, he could certainly place small trust. Was it possible that the Duke had so much confidence in himself that he wanted to show the King of France that he no longer needed his help?

The French went away and a few days later another occurrence took place which Machiavelli, a student of human nature as well as of politics, found of quite peculiar interest. Ramiro de Lorqua was summoned to Cesena. He had remained faithful to the Duke, he was a good soldier and an able administrator. He had been for some time governor of Romagna. But his cruelty and dishonesty had made him hated and feared by the people, and at last, driven beyond endurance, they sent representatives to lay their complaints before the Duke. When Ramiro arrived he was arrested and thrown into prison.

On Christmas Day Piero woke Machiavelli early.

‘Come into the Piazza, Messere, and you will see a sight worth seeing,’ he said, his young eyes sparkling with excitement.

‘What is it?’

‘I will not tell you. There is a great crowd assembled. Everyone is amazed.’

It did not take Machiavelli long to dress. It had been snowing and the morning was raw. In the Piazza, on a mat on the snow, lay the headless body of Ramiro de Lorqua, richly dressed, with all his decorations, and gloves on his hands. At a little distance was his head stuck on a pike. Machiavelli turned away from the shocking sight and slowly walked back to his lodging.

‘What do you make of it, Messere?’ asked Piero. ‘He was the Duke’s most valiant captain. They always said the Duke trusted him and relied on him as on nobody else.’

Machiavelli shrugged his shoulders.

‘It has so pleased the Duke. It shows that he can make and unmake men at his pleasure according to their deserts. I suppose that the Duke had no further use for him and was not displeased to show by an act of justice that he had the interests of his people at heart.’

It was generally believed that Ramiro had been the lover of Lucrezia Borgia, and it was dangerous to be either the husband or the lover of Cæsar Borgia’s sister. He loved her. Her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, escaped death only because she warned him that Cæsar had given orders for him to be killed. He threw himself on a horse and rode for dear life till he reached the safety of Pesaro. When the Duke of Gandia was fished out of the Tiber with nine wounds in his body, common report ascribed his murder to Cæsar, and the reason given was that he also had loved Lucrezia. Pedro Calderon, a Spaniard and a chamberlain of the Pope, was killed at Cæsar’s command ‘because of something offending the honour of Madonna Lucrezia’. She was in point of fact, it was said, with child by him. Her second husband Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglie, was equally unfortunate. One day, a year after his marriage, when he was only nineteen, he was set upon by armed men as he was leaving the Vatican and desperately wounded; he was helped back to the papal apartments, where for a month he hovered between life and death; then, refusing to die of his wounds, Burchard relates, he was strangled in bed one hour after sunset. Alfonso of Bisceglie was the handsomest man in Rome and Lucrezia had made the mistake of loving him too fondly. No one in Italy doubted that he owed his death to Cæsar Borgia’s jealousy.

Machiavelli had a good memory and he had not forgotten something that the Duke had said to him at Imola. Pagolo Orsini had complained of Ramiro’s brutality and the Duke had promised to give him satisfaction. It was unlikely that he cared anything for the complaints of Pagolo whom he despised, but was it not possible that by his execution of Ramiro he would dissipate the last of the suspicions harboured by the rebellious captains? How could they fail to rely on his good faith when to gratify one of their number he had sacrificed the most competent and highly trusted of his lieutenants? Machiavelli laughed within himself. It was just the kind of thing that would appeal to Il Valentino, at one stroke to placate the outraged people of Romagna, assure his false friends of his confidence in them, and wreak his private vengeance on one who had enjoyed the favours of Lucrezia.

‘At all events,’ he said to Piero cheerfully, ‘our good Duke has rid the earth of one more rascal. Let us find a tavern and drink a cup of hot wine to get the chill out of our bones.’

CHAPTER 28

THERE WAS A very good reason why Machiavelli had not been able to discover Il Valentino’s projects, and that was because they were still unsettled. Something had to be done, for there was no sense in having an army and not using it, but it was not so easy to decide what. The captains sent representatives to Cesena to discuss the matter with the Duke, but no agreement was reached, so after some days they dispatched Oliverotto da Fermo with a concrete proposition to put before him.

This Oliverotto da Fermo was a young man who not long before had got himself much talked about. Having been left fatherless in early childhood he was brought up by his uncle, his mother’s brother, called Giovanni Fogliati, and on reaching a suitable age was sent to learn the profession of arms under Paolo Vitelli. After Paolo’s execution he joined his brother Vitellozzo, and in a short while, because he was intelligent and vigorous, became one of his best officers. But he was ambitious. He thought it base to serve when he might rule, and so concocted an ingenious plan to better himself. He wrote to his uncle and benefactor that since he had been away from home for some years, he would like to visit him and his native town and at the same time see to his paternal estate. And because his only concern had been to gain renown, so that his fellow-citizens should see that he had not spent his time in vain he desired to come in an imposing way with a hundred horsemen, his friends and servants, in his train; and he begged his uncle to see that he was received in an honourable manner, which would be not only a credit to him but to his uncle whose foster child he was. Giovanni Fogliati was gratified to see that his nephew was not forgetful of the care and affection with which he had treated him, and when Oliverotto arrived at Fermo very naturally took him to live with him. But after some days Oliverotto, not to be a burden on his uncle, moved into a house of his own and invited him and all the most important personages of Fermo to a solemn banquet.

When they had feasted and made merry, Oliverotto, broaching a topic that was of concern to all of them, spoke of the greatness of the Pope and his son Cæsar and of their undertakings; but getting up on a sudden with a remark that these were matters that must be discussed in private, he led his guests into another room. They had no sooner seated themselves than soldiers came out of their hiding-places and killed them one and all. Thus he gained possession of the city, and since all were dead who might have resisted him, and the regulations he made, both civil and military, were efficient, within a year he made himself not only safe in Fermo, but formidable to his neighbours. This was the man then whom the captains sent to Il Valentino. The proposition he brought was with their combined forces to invade Tuscany or if that did not suit him to seize Sinigaglia. Tuscany was a rich prize. The capture of Siena, Pisa, Lucca and Florence would provide great spoil to all who took part in the enterprise, and Vitellozzo and the Orsini had old scores with Florence which they would be glad to settle. But Siena and Florence were under the protection of the King of France and the Duke was not prepared to anger an ally of whom he might yet have need. He therefore told Oliverotto that he would not join in an attack on Tuscany, but would be well pleased to have Sinigaglia taken.

Sinigaglia was small, but not unimportant, for it was on the sea and had a good port. Its ruler, the widowed sister of the unfortunate Duke of Urbino, had signed the compact at La Magione along with the rebel captains; but after the reconciliation, in which she would have no share, she had fled with her young son to Venice, leaving Andrea Doria, a Genoese, to defend the citadel. Oliverotto marched on the city and occupied it without opposition. Vitellozzo and the Orsini advanced with their troops and quartered them in the vicinity. The operation had been conducted with only one hitch: Andrea Doria refused to surrender the citadel except to Il Valentino in person. It was strong, and to take it by storm would cost time, money and men. Common sense prevailed. Now that the Duke had sent away his French contingent the captains could no longer regard him as formidable, and so, informing him of Andrea Doria’s demand, they invited him to come to Sinigaglia.

When he received this summons he had already left Cesena and was at Fano. He sent a trusted secretary to tell the captains that he would come to Sinigaglia at once and to request them to await him there. Since the signing of the treaty they had shown no inclination to encounter the Duke in person. Anxious to dispel the mistrust which their neglect indicated, he instructed the secretary to inform them in a friendly manner that the estrangement they persisted in maintaining could only prevent the pact they had agreed on from being effective; and that for his part his one and only desire was to avail himself of their forces and their counsels.

Machiavelli was astounded when he heard that the Duke had accepted the captains’ invitation. He had closely studied the treaty and it was evident to him that neither side put the smallest trust in the other. On learning that the captains had asked Il Valentino to join them at Sinigaglia because the commander of the citadel refused to deliver it to one of his officers, he was convinced that they were setting a trap for him. The Duke had dismissed his French men-at-arms and so considerably diminished his strength. The captains had all their men at Sinigaglia or near at hand. It seemed obvious that the commander had made his condition with their connivance, and that when the Duke arrived with his mounted men they would attack him and cut him and them to pieces. It was incredible that he should hazard himself almost defenceless among his mortal enemies. The only explanation was that he trusted in his star and, blinded by arrogance, thought to cow those brutal men by the power of his will and the force of his personality. He knew they were afraid of him, but perhaps he had forgotten that fear may well make brave men out of cowards. True, fortune hitherto had favoured the Duke, but fortune was inconstant. Pride goeth before a fall. Machiavelli chuckled. If the Duke walked into the trap laid for him and were destroyed it would be to the great advantage of Florence. He was the enemy; the captains, held together only by their dread of him, could be separated by skilful manœuvres and disposed of one by one.

Machiavelli chuckled too soon. When the Orsini made the commander of the citadel an offer of money to refuse to deliver it except to the Duke in person he already had the gold the Duke had paid him to do exactly that. He had guessed his captains’ design and foreseen what they would do to induce him to come among them. He was a secret man and it was not his habit to discuss his plans till the moment arrived to put them in execution. On the night before leaving Fano he called together eight of his most trusted followers. He told them that when the captains came to meet him one of them was to place himself on each side of each one of them and, as though to do him honour, accompany him till they reached the Palace which had been chosen as his residence. He bade them take care that none of them made his escape. Once in the Palace they would be at his mercy. None of them would leave it alive and free. He had scattered his troops about the country so that none should know how great a force he disposed of, and now he gave orders that they should assemble in the morning at a river about six miles on the way to Sinigaglia. As a sign of good faith he had sent his baggage wagons on ahead of him, and he smiled as he thought how the captains must lick their chops when they contemplated the great booty that awaited them.

All being settled he went to bed and slept soundly. He started betimes in the morning. It was the thirty-first of December, 1502. The distance between Fano and Sinigaglia was fifteen miles and the road ran between the mountains and the sea. The advance guard of fifteen hundred men was headed by Lodovico della Mirandola; then came a number of Gascons and Swiss, a thousand of them; after them the Duke in full armour on a richly-caparisoned charger; and then the rest of his cavalry. Machiavelli was not highly susceptible to æsthetic emotion, but he thought he had never seen a prettier sight than this army winding its slow way between the snowcapped mountains and the blue sea.

The captains were waiting at a point three miles from Sinigaglia.

Vitellozzo Vitelli, till his health was ruined by the French sickness, was a man of powerful physique, big and strong, but spare, even gaunt, with a sallow, clean-shaven face, an aggressive nose and a small, receding chin. His eyelids drooping heavily over his eyes gave them a strange, brooding expression. Ruthless, cruel, rapacious and brave, he was a fine soldier and had the reputation of being the best artilleryman in Europe. He was proud of his possession, Citta di Castello, and of the fine palaces, adorned with frescoes, bronzes, marble figures and Flemish tapestries, with which he and his family had enriched it. He had loved his brother Paolo whom the Florentines had beheaded and he hated them for it with a hatred time could not lessen. But owing to the mercury with which the doctors dosed him he suffered from attacks of intolerable depression, and was but a shadow of his old self. When Pagolo Orsini at the time they were negotiating a reconciliation brought Il Valentino’s terms to the assembled captains, Gian Paolo Baglioni, Lord of Perugia, would not accept them, and though for a time Vitellozzo, mistrusting the Duke’s offers, sided with him, he had not the strength to withstand the nagging arguments of the others and in the end agreed to sign. But he signed against his better judgment. True, he had written humble letters of submission and apology, and Il Valentino in return had assured him that all was forgiven and forgotten; but he was uneasy. His instinct told him that the Duke had neither forgotten nor forgiven. One of the articles of the agreement had been that only one of the captains at a time should be on service in the Duke’s camp, and there they were, all of them, gathered together. Pagolo Orsini reasoned with him. He had visited the Duke several times, they had talked together long and often, openly and frankly, as man to man, and it was impossible not to be convinced of his sincerity. What better proof of it could there be than that he had dismissed his French lancers and so could only conduct an enterprise with their assistance? And why had he executed Ramiro de Lorqua if not to show that he was prepared to listen to their demands?

‘Believe me, the rebellion has taught the young man a lesson, and there’s good reason to believe that in future we shall have no cause to be displeased with him.’

Pagolo Orsini did not, however, think it necessary to tell Vitellozzo of a certain conversation he had had with the Duke. The Pope was seventy, a man of a plethoric condition who lived the life of a man in his prime, and a stroke might kill him at any moment. If Il Valentino could control the votes of the Spanish cardinals and the cardinals his father had created; he was prepared in return for an assurance that his states would be secured to him to ensure the election to the papacy of Pagolo’s brother Cardinal Orsini. The prospect was dazzling. Pagolo was the more inclined to trust the Duke, since it seemed certain that he needed the Orsini as much as they needed him. Vitellozzo was the first of the captains to come forward to greet the Duke. He was unarmed, dressed in a shabby black tunic, and over it he wore a black cloak lined with green. He was pale and troubled and you might have thought from the look on his face that he knew the fate in store for him. No one seeing him now would have supposed that this was the man who had once thought on his own resources to drive the King of France out of Italy. He was riding a mule and was about to dismount, but the Duke prevented him, and leaning over put a friendly arm round his shoulder and kissed him on both cheeks. Within a few minutes Pagolo Orsini and the Duke of Gravina rode up with their attendants and Cæsar Borgia received them with the courtesy due to their great birth and the happy cordiality of one who has been too long parted from dear friends. But he noticed the absence of Oliverotto da Fermo, and on asking for him was told that he was awaiting him in the city. He sent Don Michele to fetch the young man and while they waited engaged the captains in desultory conversation. No one could be more charming than he when it was worth his while, and to see him then you would have thought that nothing had ever happened to mar the harmony of his relations with the three commanders. He was gracious, as befitted his station, but without hauteur, so that there was no hint of condescension in his manner. He was composed, urbane and affable. He enquired after Vitellozzo’s health and suggested sending his own surgeon to treat him. With an amused smile he gaily chaffed the Duke of Gravina about a love affair in which he was engaged. He listened with flattering interest to Pagolo Orsini’s description of the Villa he was building in the Alban hills.

Don Michele found Oliverotto drilling his troops in a square beyond the river outside the city walls. He told him that it would be wise to let his men take possession of their quarters or they would be seized by the Duke’s. The advice was good and Oliverotto, thanking him for the sensible suggestion, immediately acted on it. Having given the necessary orders he accompanied Don Michele to the spot where the others were waiting. The Duke welcomed him with the same warm friendliness as he had shown to the others. He would not let him do the homage he was prepared to do; he used him as comrade rather than as a subordinate.

The Duke gave the order to advance.

Vitellozzo was seized with terror. He had seen by now how great was the force that followed the Duke, and knew for a certainty that the plot the captains had made stood no chance of success. He made up his mind to rejoin his own troops, which were camped but a few miles away. His illness offered a convincing excuse. But Pagolo would not let him go. This was no time, he argued, to let the Duke think they were doubtful of his good faith. Vitellozzo was broken in spirit; he lacked the resolution to do what his instinct told him was his only chance to escape. He allowed himself to be persuaded.

‘I have a conviction that if I go, I go to my death,’ he said, ‘but since you are determined to take the chance, whether it be to live or die, I am ready to face fate with you and with the others to whom destiny has linked me.’

The eight men whom the Duke had ordered to escort the captains took up their positions one on either side of each of the doomed men and, headed by their commander, splendid in his shining armour, the cavalcade rode into the city. On reaching the Palace that had been set aside for the Duke’s residence the captains wished to take leave of him, but he urged them in his frank and open way to come in so that they might immediately discuss the plan he wished to put before them. He had much to say that could not fail to be of interest to them. Time was important. Whatever they decided to do must be done quickly. They agreed to what he asked. He ushered them through the doorway and up a fine flight of stairs that led to the great reception room. Once there he begged them to excuse him so that he might attend to a call of nature, and no sooner was he gone than armed men burst in and arrested them. Thus he played the same neat and simple trick on them that the graceless Oliverotto had played on his uncle and the chief citizens at Fermo, and it had not even cost him a banquet. Pagolo Orsini protested at the Duke’s breach of faith and called for him, but he had already left the Palace. He gave orders that the troops of the four captains should be disarmed. Oliverotto’s men, being near at hand, were taken by surprise and those who resisted were butchered, but the others who were encamped at some distance were more fortunate; they got wind of the disaster that had befallen their masters and combining their forces succeeded, though with serious losses, in fighting their way to safety. Cæsar Borgia had to content himself with putting to death the immediate followers of Vitellozzo and the Orsini.

The Duke’s soldiers, however, were not satisfied with plundering Oliverotto’s men. They set about sacking the city. They would have spared nothing but for the Duke’s stern measures; he did not want a ruined city, but a prosperous one from which he could get revenue, and he had the looters hanged. The city was in a turmoil. The shopkeepers had put up their shutters and honest citizens cowered in their houses behind locked doors. Soldiers broke into the wine-shops and forced their owners at the sword’s point to give them wine. Men were lying dead in the streets and mongrel dogs lapped their blood.

CHAPTER 29

MACHIAVELLI HAD FOLLOWED the Duke to Sinigaglia. He spent an anxious day. It was dangerous to go out alone or unarmed and when obliged to leave the wretched inn where he had taken refuge he was careful to be accompanied by Piero and his servants. He had no wish to be killed by excitable Gascons the worse for liquor.

At eight o’clock that night the Duke sent for him. On all other occasions on which Machiavelli had had audience with him it had been in the presence of others, secretaries, churchmen or members of the suite; but on this occasion, to his surprise, the officer who ushered him into the room in which the Duke was seated immediately withdrew, and for the first time they were alone.

The Duke was in high spirits. With his auburn hair and neat beard, his cheeks flushed and his eyes shining, he looked handsomer than Machiavelli had ever seen him. There was assurance in his mien and majesty in his bearing. He might be the bastard of a wicked priest but he bore himself like a king. As usual he came straight to the point.

‘Well, I have done your masters a great service in ridding them of their enemies,’ he said. ‘I desire you now to write to them to collect infantry and send it with their cavalry so that we can march together on Castello or Perugia.’

‘Perugia?’

A cheerful smile lit up the Duke’s face.

‘The Baglioni refused to sign the treaty with the others and he left them saying: “If Cæsar Borgia wants me he can come and fetch me at Perugia and come armed.” That is what I propose to do.’

Machiavelli thought that it had not done the others much good to sign the treaty, but contented himself with smiling.

‘To crush Vitellozzo and destroy the Orsini would have cost the Signory a lot of money and they they wouldn’t have done it half so neatly as I have. I don’t think they should be ungrateful.’

‘I’m sure they are not, Excellency.’

The Duke, a smile still on his lips, but his eyes shrewd, held Machiavelli with a steady gaze.

‘Then let them show it. They haven’t stirred a finger, and what I’ve done is worth a hundred thousand ducats to them. The obligation is not legal, but tacit, and it would be well if they started to discharge it.’

Machiavelli very well knew that the Signory would be outraged at such a demand and he had no wish to be the transmitter of it. He was glad to have a way out.

‘I should tell Your Excellency that I have asked my government to recall me. I have pointed out to them that they should have here an envoy of more consequence and with fuller powers than mine. Your Excellency could more profitably discuss this matter with my successor.’

‘You are right. I am tired of your government’s temporizing. The time has come for them to make the decision whether they will be with me or against me. I should have left here today, but if I had the town would have been sacked. Andrea Doria is to surrender the citadel tomorrow morning and then I shall set out for Castello and Perugia. When I have settled my business there I shall turn my attention to Siena.’

‘Would the King of France consent to your taking cities that are under his protection?’

‘He wouldn’t and I’m not so foolish as to think so. I propose to take them on behalf of the Church. All I want for myself is my own state of Romagna.’

Machiavelli sighed. He was filled with an unwilling admiration for this man whose spirit was so fiery and who was so confident in his power to get whatsoever he wanted.

‘No one can doubt that you are favoured by fortune, Excellency,’ he said.

‘Fortune favours him who knows how to take advantage of his opportunity. Do you suppose it was a happy accident, by which I profited, that the governor of the citadel refused to surrender except to me personally?’

‘I wouldn’t do Your Excellency that injustice. After what has happened today I can guess that you made it worth his while.’

The Duke laughed.

‘I like you, Secretary. You are a man with whom one can talk. I shall miss you.’ He paused and for what seemed quite a long time looked searchingly at Machiavelli. ‘I could almost wish that you were in my service.’

‘Your Excellency is very kind. I am very well content to serve the Republic.’

‘What does it profit you? The salary you receive is so miserable that to make both ends meet you have to borrow from your friends.’

This gave Machiavelli something of a turn, but then he remembered that the Duke must know of the twenty-five ducats Bartolomeo had lent him.

‘I am careless of money and of an extravagant disposition,’ he answered with a pleasant smile. ‘It is my own fault if from time to time I live beyond my means.’

‘You would find it hard to do that if you were employed by me. It is very pleasant to be able to give a pretty lady a ring, a bracelet or a brooch when one wishes to obtain her favours.’

‘I have made it my rule to satisfy my desires with women of easy virtue and modest pretensions.’

‘A good rule enough if one’s desires were under one’s control, but who can tell what strange tricks love can play on him? Have you never discovered, Secretary, to what expense one is put when one loves a virtuous woman?’

The Duke was looking at him with mocking eyes and for an instant Machiavelli asked himself uneasily whether it was possible that he knew of his unsatisfied passion for Aurelia, but the thought had no sooner come into his mind than he rejected it. The Duke had more important things to occupy him than the Florentine envoy’s love affairs.

‘I am willing to take it for granted and leave both the pleasure and the expense to others.’

The Duke gazed at him thoughtfully. You might have imagined that he was asking himself what kind of a man this was, but with no ulterior motive, from idle curiosity rather. So when you find yourself alone with a stranger in the waiting-room of an office, to pass the time you try from the look of him to guess his business, his calling, his habits and his character.

‘I should have thought you were too intelligent a man to be content to remain for the rest of your life in a subordinate position,’ said the Duke.

‘I have learnt from Aristotle that it is the better part of wisdom to cultivate the golden mean.’

‘Is it possible that you are devoid of ambition?’

‘Far from it, Excellency,’ smiled Machiavelli. ‘My ambition is to serve my state to the best of my ability.’

‘That is just what you will not be allowed to do. You know better than anyone that in a republic talent is suspect. A man attains high office because his mediocrity prevents him from being a menace to his associates. That is why a democracy is ruled, not by the men who are most competent to rule it, but by the men whose insignificance can excite nobody’s apprehension. Do you know what are the cankers that eat the heart of a democracy?’

He looked at Machiavelli as though waiting for an answer, but Machiavelli said nothing.

‘Envy and fear. The petty men in office are envious of their colleagues, and rather than that one of them should gain reputation will prevent him from taking a measure on which may depend the safety and prosperity of the state; and they are fearful because they know that all about them are others who will stop at neither lies nor trickery to step into their shoes. And what is the result? The result is that they are more afraid of doing wrong than zealous to do right. They say that dog doesn’t bite dog: whoever invented that proverb never lived under a democratic government.’

Machiavelli remained silent. He knew only too well how much truth there was in what the Duke said. He remembered how hotly the election to his own subordinate post had been contested and with what bitterness his defeated rivals had taken it. He knew that he had colleagues who were watching his every step ready to pounce upon any slip he made that might induce the Signory to dismiss him. The Duke continued.

‘A prince in my position is free to choose men to serve him for their ability. He need not give a post to a man who is incapable of filling it because he needs his influence or because he has a party behind him whose services must be recognized. He fears no rival because he is above rivalry, and so instead of favouring mediocrity, which is the curse and bane of democracy, seeks out talent, energy, initiative and intelligence. No wonder things go from bad to worse in your republic; the last reason for which anyone gets office is his fitness for it.’

Machiavelli smiled thinly.

‘Your Excellency will permit me to remind him that the favour of princes is notoriously uncertain. They can exalt a man to great heights, but they can also cast him down to the depths.’

The Duke gave a chuckle of frank amusement.

‘You are thinking of Ramiro de Lorqua. A prince must know both how to reward and how to punish. His generosity must be profuse and his justice severe. Ramiro committed abominable crimes; he deserved to die. What would have happened to him in Florence? There would have been people whom his death would have offended; there would have been people to intercede for him because they had profited by his misdeeds; the Signory would have hesitated and in the end have sent him on an embassy to the King of France or to me.’

Machiavelli laughed.

‘Believe me, Your Excellency, the ambassador they propose to send to you now is of unimpeachable respectability.’

‘He will probably bore me to death. There is no doubt about it, I shall miss you, Secretary.’ Then, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, he gave Machiavelli a warm smile. ‘Why don’t you enter my service? I will find work for you to do that will give scope to your quick mind and wide experience, and you won’t find me ungenerous.’

‘What confidence could you place in a man who had betrayed his country for money?’

‘I do not ask you to betray your country. By serving me you could serve it to better advantage than you will ever be able to do as secretary of the Second Chancery. Other Florentines have entered my service and I don’t know that they have regretted it.’

‘Adherents of the Medici who fled when their lords were driven out and were prepared to do anything that gave them a means of livelihood.’

‘Not only. Leonardo and Michelangelo were not too proud to accept my offers.’

‘Artists. They will go wherever there is a patron to give them a commission; they are not responsible people.’

There was still a smile in the eyes that steadily held Machiavelli’s when the Duke answered.

‘I have an estate in the immediate neighbourhood of Imola. It has vineyards, arable land, pasture and woods. I should be happy to give it to you. It would bring you in ten times as much as the few beggarly acres you own at San Casciano.’

Imola? Why had Caesar thought of that city rather than another? Once more the suspicion crossed Machiavelli’s mind that he knew of his fruitless pursuit of Aurelia.

‘Those beggarly acres at San Casciano have belonged to my family for three hundred years,’ he said acidly. ‘What should I do with an estate at Imola?’

‘The villa is new, handsome and well built. It would be an agreeable retreat from the city in the heat of summer.’

‘You speak in riddles, Excellency.’

‘I am sending Agapito to Urbino as its governor. I know no one more competent than you take his place as my chief secretary, but I can see that it would make negotiations with the ambassador Florence is sending to replace you somewhat embarrassing. I am prepared to appoint you governor of Imola.’

It seemed to Machiavelli that his heart on a sudden stopped beating. It was a position of importance and one to which he had never dreamt of aspiring. There were cities that had come into the possession of Florence, either by capture or by treaty, but the men sent to govern them were of great family and with powerful connections. If he were governor of Imola Aurelia would be proud to be his mistress, and by the same token he could easily find pretexts to rid himself of Bartolomeo whenever it suited him. It was almost impossible that the Duke should make this offer without being aware of the circumstances. But how could he be aware of them? Machiavelli felt in himself a certain complacency as he noticed that the double prospect did not for a moment affect him.

‘I love my native land more than my soul, Excellency.’

Il Valentino was unused to being crossed and Machiavelli thought it certain that on this he would dismiss him with an angry gesture. To his surprise, the Duke, playing idly with his order of St. Michael, continued to look at him reflectively. It seemed a long time before he spoke.

‘I have always been frank with you, Secretary,’ he said at last. ‘I know you are a man not easy to deceive and I would not waste my time in trying. I will put my cards on the table. I do not ask you for secrecy if I divulge my plans to you; you will not betray my confidence because no one would believe that I gave it to you. The Signory would think you were trying to make yourself important by giving out your guesses as matters of fact.’

The Duke paused for a moment only.

‘My hold on Romagna and Urbino is secure. In a little while I shall have control of Castello, Perugia and Siena. Pisa is mine for the asking. Lucca will surrender at my bidding. What will be the position of Florence when it is surrounded by states in my possession or under my authority?’

‘Dangerous without doubt, except for our treaty with France.’

Machiavelli’s reply seemed to amuse the Duke.

‘A treaty is an arrangement two states make to their common advantage, and a prudent government will disavow it whenever its provisions are no longer advantageous. What do you think the French King would say if in return for his connivance while I seized Florence I offered to join my forces with his to attack Venice?’

Machiavelli shivered. He knew only too well that Louis XII would never hesitate to sacrifice his honour to his interest. He took some time to answer and when he did he spoke with deliberation.

‘It would be a mistake on Your Excellency’s part to suppose that Florence could be taken at small cost. We should fight to the death to preserve our liberty.’

‘What with? Your citizens have been too busy making money to be willing to train themselves to defend their country. You have hired mercenaries to fight for you so that you shouldn’t be disturbed in your avocations. Folly! Hireling soldiers do not go to war for any reason other than a little money. That is not enough to make them die for you. A country is doomed to destruction if it cannot defend itself and the only way it can do that is to create out of its own citizens a trained, well-disciplined and well-equipped army. But are you Florentines prepared to make the sacrifices this entails? I don’t believe it. You are governed by business men, and a business man’s only idea is to make a deal at any price. Short profits and quick returns, peace in our time even at the cost of humiliation and the risk of disaster. Your Livy has taught you that the safety of a republic depends on the integrity of the individuals that compose it. Your people are soft. Your state is corrupt and deserves to perish.’

Machiavelli’s face grew sullen. He had no answer to make. The Duke drove his point home.

‘Now that Spain is united and France, rid of the English, is strong, the time is past when small states could maintain their independence. Their independence is a sham, for it is not based on force, and they maintain it only so long as it suits the convenience of the great powers. The states of the Church are under my control; Bologna will fall into my hands; Florence is doomed. I shall then be master of all the country from the Kingdom of Naples in the south to the Milanese and Venetia in the north. I shall have my own artillery and the artillery of the Vitelli. I shall create an army as efficient as my army of Romagna. The King of France and I will divide among ourselves the possessions of Venice.’

‘But should all this happen as you desire, Excellency,’ said Machiavelli, grimly, ‘all you will have achieved will be to increase the power of France and arouse the fear and envy both of France and Spain. Either of them could crush you.’

‘True. But with my arms and my gold I should be so powerful an ally that the party I sided with would be certain of victory.’

‘You would still remain the vassal of the victor.’

‘Tell me, Secretary, you have been in France and have had dealings with the French. What is your opinion of them?’

Machiavelli shrugged a somewhat disdainful shoulder.

‘They’re frivolous and unreliable. When an enemy resists the ferocity of their first attack they waver and lose courage. They can stand neither hardship nor discomfort and after a little while grow so careless that it’s easy to take advantage of their unpreparedness.’

‘I know. When winter comes with cold and rain they slink of out of camp one by one and then they’re at the mercy of a more sturdy foe.’

‘On the other hand the country is rich and fertile. The King has broken the strength of the barons and is very powerful. He’s somewhat foolish, but well advised by men as clever as any in Italy.’

The Duke nodded.

‘And now tell me what you think of the Spaniards.’

‘I have had little to do with them.’

‘Then I will tell you. They’re brave, hardy, resolute and poor. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It would be impossible to withstand them but for one circumstance: they have to bring their troops and armaments across the sea. If they were once driven out of Italy it shouldn’t be difficult to prevent them from coming back.’

Silence fell upon them. Il Valentino, his chin resting on his hand, appeared to be sunk in thought, and Machiavelli watched him at his ease. His eyes were hard and brilliant. They looked into a future of tortuous diplomacy and of bloody battles. Excited as he was by the events of the day and the amazing success of his duplicity, no enterprise seemed too difficult or too dangerous for him to undertake, and who could tell what visions of greatness and glory dazzled his bold imagination? He smiled.

‘With my help the French could drive the Spaniards out of Naples and Sicily: with my help the Spaniards could drive the French out of the Milanese.’

‘Whichever you helped would remain the master of Italy and you, Excellency.’

If I helped the Spaniards, yes; not if I helped the French. We drove them out of Italy before; we can drive them out again.’

‘They will bide their time and return.’

‘I shall be ready for them. The old fox, King Ferdinand, is not one to cry over spilt milk; if they attack me he will seize the opportunity of revenge and march his armies into France. He married his daughter to the son of the King of England. The English will not miss the chance to declare war on their hereditary enemies. The French will have more reasons to fear me than I to fear them.’

‘But the Pope is old, Excellency; his death will deprive you of half your force and great part of your reputation.’

‘Do you suppose I haven’t taken that into consideration? I’ve provided for everything that may happen when my father dies. I am prepared for it and the next Pope will be of my choosing. He will be protected by my troops. No, I do not fear the Pope’s death. It will not interfere with my plans.’

Suddenly the Duke sprang out of his chair and began to pace the room.

‘It is the Church that has kept this country divided. She has never been strong enough to bring all Italy under her rule, but only to prevent anyone else from doing so. Italy cannot prosper till it is united.’

‘It is true that if our poor country has become the prey of the barbarians it is because it has been ruled by this multitude of lords and princes.’

Il Valentino stopped walking and, his sensual lips curling with a sardonic smile, looked into Machiavelli’s eyes.

‘For the remedy we must turn to the Gospel, my good Secretary, which tells us to render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.’

The Duke’s meaning was plain. Machiavelli gave a gasp of fearful amazement. He was strangely fascinated by this man who could calmly speak of taking a step which must arouse the horror of all Christendom.

‘A prince should support the spiritual authority of the Church,’ he went on coolly, ‘for this will keep his people good and happy, and I cannot think of a better way to restore to the Church the spiritual authority she has so unfortunately lost than to deprive her of the burden of temporal power.’

Machiavelli was at a loss to know how to answer a remark in which there was so brutal a cynicism, but he was saved from the necessity of doing so by a scratching at the door.

‘Who is it?’ cried the Duke with sudden anger at the interruption.

There was no answer, but the door was flung open and a man entered whom Machiavelli recognized as Don Michele, the Spaniard known as Michelotto. It was he, they said, who had strangled with his own hands the handsome and unfortunate boy, Alfonso of Bisceglie, whom Lucrezia loved. Michelotto was a big, hairy man of powerful build, with bushy eyebrows, hard eyes, a short blunt nose, and an expression of cold ferocity.

‘Ah, it’s you,’ cried the Duke, his look changing.

‘Murieron.’

Machiavelli knew little Spanish, but he could not fail to understand that one grim word. They died. The man had remained at the door and the Duke went over to him. They spoke in an undertone and in Spanish, and Machiavelli could not hear what they said. The Duke asked one or two abrupt questions and the other seemed to answer in detail.

Il Valentino gave that curious light, gay laugh of his which meant that he was pleased as well as amused. After a little Don Michele went and the Duke, a happy smile in his eyes, resumed his seat.

‘Vitellozzo and Oliverotto are dead. They died less valiantly than they lived. Oliverotto cried for mercy. He put the blame for his treachery on Vitellozzo and said that he had been led astray.’

‘And Pagolo Orsini and the Duke of Gravina?’

‘I am taking them with me tomorrow under guard. I shall hold them until I hear from His Holiness the Pope.’

Machiavelli gave him a questioning glance and the Duke answered it.

‘As soon as I had arrested the rascals I sent a messenger to the Pope to ask him to seize the person of the Cardinal Orsini. Pagolo and his nephew must await the punishment of their crimes till I am assured that this has been done.’

The Borgia’s face grew sombre and it was as though a heavy cloud lurked between his eyebrows. There was a silence and Machiavelli, supposing the audience was at an end, rose to his feet. But the Duke with a sudden gesture of impatience motioned him to sit still. When he spoke it was in a low voice, but in accents that were hard, angry and resolute.

‘It is not enough to destroy these petty tyrants whose subjects groan under their misrule. We are the prey of the barbarians; Lombardy is plundered, Tuscany and Naples are laid under tribute. I alone can crush these horrible and inhuman beasts. I alone can free Italy.’

‘God knows, Italy prays for the liberator who will deliver her from bondage.’

‘The time is ripe and the enterprise will bring glory to those who take part in it and good to the mass of the people of the land.’ He turned his bright-eyed, frowning gaze on Machiavelli as though by its force he thought to bend him to his will. ‘How can you hold back? Surely there is not an Italian who will refuse to follow me.’

Machiavelli stared gravely at Cæsar Borgia. He sighed deeply.

‘The greatest wish of my heart is to free Italy from these barbarians who overrun and despoil us, lay waste our territories, rape our women and rob our citizens. It may be that you are the man chosen by God to redeem our country. The price you ask me to pay is to join with you in destroying the liberty of the city that gave me birth.’

‘With or without you Florence will lose her liberty.’

‘Then I will go down to destruction with her.’

The Duke gave his shoulders a displeased, peevish shrug.

‘Spoken like an ancient Roman, but not like a man of sense.’

With a haughty wave of the hand he indicated that the audience was terminated. Machiavelli got up, bowed and uttered the usual expressions of respect. He was at the door when the Duke’s voice stopped him. And now, clever actor that he was, he changed his tone to one of affable friendliness.

‘Before you go, Secretary, I should like you to give me the benefit of your advice. At Imola you became friendly with Bartolomeo Martelli. He’s done one or two odd jobs for me not too badly. I need a man to go to Montpellier to conduct negotiations with the wool merchants, and it would be convenient if he went on to Paris to do various things for me there. From your knowledge of Bartolomeo, do you think I should be wise to send him?’

He spoke casually as though there were nothing more in the enquiry than the words signified, but Machiavelli understood what was at the back of them. The Duke was offering to dispatch Bartolomeo on a journey that would take him away from Imola for a considerable period, and now there could be no doubt that he knew of Machiavelli’s desire for Aurelia. Machiavelli’s lips tightened, but otherwise his face betrayed nothing.

‘Since Your Excellency is good enough to ask my opinion I should say that Bartolomeo is so useful to you in keeping the people of Imola contented with your rule that it would be a grave mistake to send him away.’

‘Perhaps you are right. He shall stay.’

Machiavelli bowed once more and left.

CHAPTER 30

PIERO AND THE servants were waiting for him. The streets were dark and empty. Dead men, most of them stripped to the bone, still lay about, and from a gallows in the main square looters hung as a warning to others. They walked to the inn. The heavy doors were locked and barred, but on their knocking they were examined through the judas and let in. The night was bitter cold and Machiavelli was glad to warm himself at the kitchen fire. Some men were drinking, some were playing dice or cards; others were asleep on benches or on the floor. The landlord put down a mattress for Machiavelli and Piero in his room at the foot of the great bed in which his wife and children were already asleep. They lay down side by side, wrapped in their cloaks, and Piero, tired after the morning’s ride from Fano, the exciting events of the day and the long wait at the Palace, fell asleep instantly; but Machiavelli stayed wide awake. He had much to occupy his thoughts.

It was obvious that Il Valentino knew of his abortive intrigue with Aurelia, and Machiavelli smiled with bitter irony over the mistake that man of tortuous mind had made in thinking that he could use the passion he supposed him to feel to seduce him from the service of the Republic. Machiavelli would have credited him with more intelligence than to imagine that a man of sense could be so besotted with desire for a woman as to allow it to interfere with the serious business of life. Women were a-plenty. Why, when the Duke had kidnapped Dorotea Caracciolo, wife of the captain of the Venetian infantry, and Venice had sent envoys to demand her return, he had asked them whether they thought he found the women of Romagna so unapproachable that he was compelled to abduct transient females. Except to say goodbye to her Machiavelli had not seen Aurelia for several weeks, and if he wanted her now it was because he did not like to be thwarted rather than because his passion was still at fever heat. He knew that, and it would have seemed absurd to him to yield to such a petty emotion. But he was curious to know how the Duke had discovered his secret. Certainly not through Piero; he had tried him and found him true. Serafina? He had been very careful and there was no possibility that she had an inkling of what had gone on. Monna Caterina and Aurelia were too deeply implicated in the plot to have betrayed him. Nina? No, they had taken care of her. On a sudden Machiavelli slapped his forehead. Fool that he was! It was plain as the nose on his face and he could have kicked himself for not having guessed at once. Fra Timoteo! He must be in the Duke’s pay; with his close association with Serafina and with Bartolomeo’s household he was in a position to spy on the Florentine envoy’s movements: and by him the Duke must have known all he did, who came to visit him, when he sent letters to Florence, and when the answers arrived. It gave Machiavelli a peculiar sense of discomfort to realize that he had been under surveillance. But this guess made everything clear. It was no coincidence that on the night when Bartolomeo was safely praying before the bones of San Vitale Il Valentino should have sent for him at the very hour appointed for him to knock at Aurelia’s door. Fra Timoteo knew the arrangements and had passed the information on. Rage seized Machiavelli and he would gladly have wrung the sleek monk’s neck. Cæsar Borgia, judging Machiavelli by himself, thought the disappointment would exacerbate his passion and so make him more malleable to his own designs. That was why Fra Timoteo had refused to help him further. It was certainly he who had persuaded Aurelia that Providence had prevented her from committing a sin and so she must refrain from it.

‘I wonder how much he got besides my twenty-five ducats,’ Machiavelli muttered, forgetting that he had borrowed them from Bartolomeo and Bartolomeo had got them from the Duke.

But for all that he could not but feel a certain complacency at the thought that the Duke was prepared to take so much trouble to inveigle him into his service. It was far from disagreeable to realize that he set so high a value on him. In Florence the Signory thought him an amusing fellow and his letters often made them laugh, but they had no great confidence in his judgment and never followed his advice.

‘A prophet is not without honour save in his own country,’ he sighed.

He knew that he had more brains in his little finger than all the rest of them put together. Piero Soderino, the head of the government, was a weak, shallow, amiable man, and it might have been of him that the Duke was thinking when he spoke of those who were more afraid of doing wrong than zealous to do right. The others, his immediate councillors, were timid, mediocre and irresolute. Their policy was to hesitate, to shilly-shally, to temporize. Machiavelli’s immediate superior, the Secretary of the Republic, was Marcello Virgilio. He owed his position to his handsome presence and his gift for oratory. Machiavelli was attached to him, but had no great opinion of his ability. How it would surprise those silly fellows to hear that the agent whom they had sent to Il Valentino just because he was of small consequence had been appointed governor of Imola and was the most trusted of the Duke’s advisers! Machiavelli hadn’t the least intention of accepting the Duke’s offers, but it amused him to play with the idea and imagine the consternation of the Signory and the wrath of his enemies.

And Imola would be merely a step. If Cæsar Borgia became King of Italy he might well become his first minister and occupy the same position as the Cardinal d’Amboise enjoyed with the King of France. Was it possible that in the Borgia Italy had found her redeemer? Even though it was personal ambition that spurred him on his purpose was lofty and worthy of his great spirit. He was wise and vigorous. He had made himself loved and feared by the people; he commanded the respect and confidence of the troops. Italy was enslaved and insulted, but surely her ancient valour was not dead. United under a strong ruler her people would enjoy the security they longed for to pursue their avocations and live in prosperity and happiness. What greater opportunity for glory could any man want than to give that suffering land the blessing of lasting peace?

But suddenly a notion struck Machiavelli with such force that he started violently, so that Piero, asleep by his side, was disturbed and made a restless movement. It had occurred to him that the whole thing might be nothing more than a practical joke that the Duke had played on him. He knew well enough that Il Valentino, notwithstanding his pretence of cordiality, was displeased with him because he felt that he had not exerted himself as much as he might have to persuade the Signory to grant the condotta which would enhance his prestige and augment his resources. This might be his revenge, and Machiavelli felt his whole body prickle as he thought that all that time at Imola the Duke and Agapito and the rest had watched his ingenious moves and guffawed as they devised ways to frustrate them. He tried to persuade himself that this was only an idle fancy which had better be quickly forgotten; but he couldn’t be sure, and the uncertainty tortured him. He spent a very troubled night.

CHAPTER 31

NEXT MORNING THE Duke, leaving a small force to garrison the town, set out with his army on the first lap to Perugia.

It was New Year’s Day.

The weather was bad, and the roads, poor at the best of times, were converted by the tramping horses, the baggage wagons and the marching soldiers into a slush of mud. The army halted at small towns in which there were no means of accommodation for so great a mass of men and those were lucky who found the shelter of a roof. Machiavelli liked his comfort. It affected his temper to sleep on the bare earth in a peasant’s hut cheek by jowl with as many as could find room in which to stretch their weary limbs. One had to eat what food there was, and Machiavelli, with his poor digestion, suffered miserably. At Sasso Ferrato news came that the surviving Vitelli had fled to Perugia, and at Gualdo citizens of Castello were waiting to offer the Duke the town and its territories. Then a messenger arrived to announce that Gian Paolo Baglioni, with the Orsini, the Vitelli and their men-at-arms, abandoning hope of defending Perugia, had fled to Siena, whereupon the people had risen and next day ambassadors came to surrender it. Thus the Duke gained possession of two important towns without striking a blow. He went on to Assisi. There envoys from Siena came to ask what reason he had for attacking their city as according to common report was his intention. The Duke told them that he was filled with amicable sentiments towards it but that he was determined to expel Pandolfo Petrucci, their lord and his enemy, and that if they would do this themselves they had nothing to fear from him; but if not he would come with his army and do it himself. He set out for Siena, but by a circuitous route so that the citizens might have time to reflect, and on the way captured various castles and villages. The soldiery plundered the country. The inhabitants had fled before them, but when they found any that had stayed behind, old men or old women too infirm to leave, they hung them up by their arms and lit fires under their feet so that they might tell where valuables had been hidden. When they would not, or could not because they didn’t know, they died under the torture.

Meanwhile good news arrived from Rome. On receipt of his son’s letter telling him what had occurred at Sinigaglia, His Holiness sent a message to Cardinal Orsini not, naturally enough, to inform him of what had happened to his friends and kinsmen, but to impart the glad tidings that the citadel had surrendered; and next day, as in duty bound, the Cardinal went to the Vatican to offer the Pope his congratulations. He was accompanied by relations and retainers. He was conducted to an antechamber and there together with the other members of his family put under arrest. It was safe then for the Duke to dispose of his captives, and Michelotto strangled Pagolo Orsini, the fool who had been taken in by the Duke’s smooth words, and his nephew the Duke of Gravina. The Cardinal was imprisoned in the Castle of San Angelo where after no long time he very obligingly died. The Pope and his son might congratulate themselves on having crippled the strength of the family that had been for so long a thorn in the flesh of the Vicars of Christ. It was indeed a cause for rejoicing that in disposing of their personal enemies they had done an important service to the Church. They proved thus that it was in point of fact possible to serve God and Mammon.

CHAPTER 32

WHEN THE DUKE arrived at a place called Città della Piave Machiavelli was relieved to learn that his successor was on the point of leaving Florence. Città della Piave was a town of some note, with a castle and a cathedral, and he had the luck to find a decent dwelling-place. The Duke proposed to stay there briefly to rest his troops, and by the time he set forth again Machiavelli hoped that Giacomo Salviati, the new ambassador, would have come. The long journeys on horseback had tired him, the bad food upset his stomach, and he had got little sleep in the wretched lodgings which at the day’s end he had been obliged to put up with.

After two or three days it happened that one afternoon he lay on his bed to rest his way-worn limbs, but uneasily, for he was not a little troubled in mind. Though he had written almost daily to the Signory to tell them what it behoved them to know, he had hesitated to inform them of the more important parts of his conversation with the Duke at Sinigaglia. The Duke had offered him wealth and power; the opportunity was prodigious, and it might well occur to the Signory that since he occupied already as important a position as he could ever aspire to he might find the temptation irresistible. They were small men with the low suspiciousness of pettifogging attorneys. They would ask themselves what there was between them to make Il Valentino think him susceptible to such advances. It would be a black mark against him. He would be a man whom perhaps it was wise not to trust too much and it would not be difficult to find a plausible reason for his dismissal. Why, Machiavelli asked himself, should they suppose he would put the interests of Florence above his own when it was just because they did not do that that they were jeopardizing her safety? It seemed prudent to keep silence, and yet if somehow the Signory got wind of the Duke’s proposals his very silence would condemn him. The situation was awkward. His reflections, however, were rudely interrupted by a booming voice asking the woman of the house whether Messer Niccolo Machiavelli lived there.

‘Messer Bartolomeo,’ cried Piero, who had been sitting at the window reading one of his master’s books.

‘What the devil does he want?’ asked Machiavelli irritably, as he got up.

In a moment the burly fellow burst into the room. He flung his arms round Machiavelli and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘It’s been the very deuce to find you. I’ve been to house after house.’

Machiavelli disengaged himself.

‘How is it you’re here?’

Bartolomeo greeted his young cousin after the same exuberant fashion and answered:

‘The Duke sent for me in connection with some business at Imola. I had to pass through Florence and I came with some of your ambassador’s servants. He’ll be here tomorrow. Niccolo, Niccolo, my dear friend, you have saved my life.’

He once more seized Machiavelli in his arms and again kissed him on both cheeks. Machiavelli once more extricated himself from this embrace.

‘I am delighted to see you, Bartolomeo,’ he began, somewhat frigidly.

But the merchant interrupted him.

‘A miracle, a miracle, and I have you to thank for it. Aurelia is pregnant.’

‘What!’

‘In seven months, my dear Niccolo, I shall be the father of a bouncing boy, and I owe it to you.’

If things had gone differently Machiavelli might have been embarrassed by this remark, but as it was he was stupefied.

‘Calm yourself, Bartolomeo, and tell me what you mean,’ said he crossly. ‘How do you owe it to me?’

‘How can I be calm when the dearest wish of my heart has been gratified? Now I can go to my grave in peace. Now I can leave my honours and my possessions to the issue of my own loins. Costanza, my sister, is beside herself with rage.’

He burst into a great bellow of laughter. Machiavelli gave Piero a puzzled look; he could make neither head nor tail of it; and he saw that Piero was as surprised as he.

‘Of course I owe it to you; I should never have gone to Ravenna and spent that cold night praying before the altar of San Vitale but for you. True, it was Fra Timoteo’s idea, but I didn’t trust him; he’d sent us on pilgrimages to the shrine of one saint after the other and nothing had come of it. Fra Timoteo is a good and saintly man, but with priests you have to be on your guard; you can never be quite sure that they haven’t some ulterior motive in their advice. I don’t blame them, they are faithful sons of our Holy Church; but I should have hesitated to go if you hadn’t told me about Messer Giuliano degli Albertelli. I could trust you, you had only my welfare at heart, you are my friend. I said to myself that what had happened to one of the most notable citizens of Florence might just as well happen to one who is not the least notable citizen of Imola. Aurelia conceived on the night of my return from Ravenna.’

His excitement and his flow of speech had brought him out into a profuse sweat and he wiped his glistening forehead with his sleeve. Machiavelli stared at him with perplexity, distaste and vexation.

‘Are you quite sure that Monna Aurelia is in this condition?’ he said acidly. ‘Women are inclined to make mistakes on these matters.’

‘Sure, as sure as I am of the articles of our faith. We had our suspicions before you left Imola, I wanted to tell you then, but Monna Caterina and Aurelia begged me not to. “Let us say nothing,” they said, “until we are certain.” Did you not notice how poorly she looked when I took you to say good-bye to her? She was angry with me afterwards; she said she couldn’t bear you to see her looking so hideous; she was afraid you’d suspect and she didn’t want anyone to know until all doubt was removed. I reasoned with her, but you know what women’s fancies are when they’re with child.’

‘I suspected nothing,’ said Machiavelli. ‘It’s true that I have only been married a few months and my experience in these things is limited.’

‘I wanted you to be the first person to know, since except for you I should never have been the happy father I now shall be.’

He gave every indication of being about to clasp Machiavelli in his arms again, but Machiavelli warded him off.

‘I congratulate you with all my heart, but if my ambassador is arriving tomorrow I have no time to waste; the information should be conveyed to the Duke at once.’

‘I will leave you, but you must sup with me tonight, you and Piero, to celebrate the occasion in style.’

‘It would be hard to do that here,’ said he ill-temperedly. ‘There is scarcely anything to eat and the wine if there is any will be as bad as it has been all along the way.’

‘I had thought of that,’ said Bartolomeo, with a bellow of laughter, rubbing his fat hands together, ‘and I brought wine with me from Florence, a hare and a sucking pig. We will feast and drink to the health of my first-born son.’

Though he was by now thoroughly out of humour, Machiavelli had fared too badly since leaving Imola to be able to resist the offer of a tolerable meal, and so with what amiability he could muster accepted.

‘I will call for you here,’ said Bartolomeo, ‘but before I go I want you to give me some advice. Of course you remember that I promised Fra Timoteo that I would give a picture to be placed over the altar of our miraculous Virgin, and though I know I owe my good fortune to San Vitale I don’t want to put an affront on her. She undoubtedly did her best. So I have decided to have a picture painted of Our Lady seated on a rich throne with her Blessed Son in her arms and with me and Aurelia kneeling on each side with our hands clasped like this.’ He put his great paws together and raised his eyes to the ceiling with an appropriate expression of devotion. ‘I shall have San Vitale standing on one side of the throne, and Fra Timoteo has suggested that on the other, since the church is dedicated to him, I should have St. Francis. Do you like the idea?’

‘Very choice,’ said Machiavelli.

‘You’re a Florentine and must know about such things: tell me to whom I should give the order.’

‘I really don’t know. They’re a very unreliable, dissipated lot, these painters, and I’ve never had any truck with them.’

‘I don’t blame you. But surely you can suggest someone.’

Machiavelli shrugged his shoulders.

‘When I was in Urbino last summer they talked to me about a young fellow, a pupil of Perugino, who they say already paints better than his master and who they expect will go far.’

‘What is his name?’

‘I have no idea. They told me, but it meant nothing to me and it went in at one ear and out of the other. But I dare say I could find out and I don’t suppose he’d be expensive.’

‘Expense is no object,’ said Bartolomeo with a grandiose wave of the arm. ‘I’m a business man and I know that if you want the best you must pay for it. And only the best is good enough for me. I want a big name and if I have to pay for it I’ll pay for it.’

‘Oh, well, when I get back to Florence I’ll make enquiries,’ Machiavelli answered impatiently.

When he had gone Machiavelli sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Piero with a look of complete bewilderment.

‘Did you ever hear the like?’ he said. ‘The man is sterile.’

‘It is evidently a miracle,’ said Piero.

‘Don’t talk such nonsense. We are bound to believe that miracles were performed by our Blessed Lord and by His apostles, and our Holy Church has accepted the authenticity of miracles performed by its saints, but the time of miracles is past, and in any case why in the name of heaven should San Vitale go out of his way to do one for a fat stupid fool like Bartolomeo?’

But even as he spoke he remembered that Fra Timoteo had said something to him to the effect that even though San Vitale’s singular power was an invention of Machiavelli’s, Bartolomeo’s absolute belief in it might effect the miracle he expected. Was it possible? At the time he had thought it only a hypocritical excuse on the man’s part to avoid giving him more assistance till he received more money.

Piero opened his mouth to speak.

‘Hold your tongue,’ said Machiavelli. ‘I’m thinking.’

He would never have described himself as a good Catholic. He had indeed often permitted himself to wish that the gods of Olympus still dwelt in their old abode. Christianity had shown men the truth and the way of salvation, but it asked men to suffer rather than to do. It had made the world feeble and given it over a helpless prey to the wicked, since the generality, in order to go to Heaven, thought more of enduring injuries than of defending themselves against them. It had taught that the highest good consisted in humility, lowliness, and contempt for the things of this world; the religion of the ancients taught that it consisted in greatness of spirit, courage, and strength.

But this was a strange thing that had happened. It shook him. Though his reason revolted he was aware within himself of an uneasy inclination to believe in the possibility of a supernatural intervention. His head refused to accept it, but in his bones, in his blood, in his nerves there was a doubt that he could not still. It was as though all those generations behind him that had believed took possession of his soul and forced their will upon him.

‘My grandfather suffered from his stomach too,’ he said suddenly.

Piero had no notion what he was talking about. Machiavelli sighed.

‘It may be that if men have grown soft it is because in their worthlessness they have interpreted our religion according to their sloth. They have forgotten that it enjoins upon us to love and honour our native land, and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend her.’

He burst out laughing when he saw the blankness of Piero’s face.

‘Never mind, my boy, pay no attention to my nonsense. I will get myself ready to announce to the Duke the arrival tomorrow of the ambassador, and in any case we’ll get a good supper out of that old fool.’

CHAPTER 33

THEY GOT IT. Under the influence of the first decent meal he had eaten since leaving Imola and the good Chianti Bartolomeo had brought from Florence, Machiavelli expanded. He made indecent jokes, he told obscene stories, he was lightly ribald, grossly coarse and gaily lewd. He made Bartolomeo laugh so much that his sides ached. All three of them got a little drunk.

The events at Sinigaglia had caused a stir in Italy and a multitude of imaginative Italians had related the story in their different ways. Bartolomeo was eager to hear the facts from an eye-witness, and Machiavelli, pleasantly mellow, was very willing to oblige him. He had written his account three or four times to the Signory, in part because of its importance and in part because at least one of his letters had not reached its destination. He had reflected upon the various incidents, he had had the opportunity to gather details from one or the other of those close to Il Valentino, and he had by now got to the bottom of much that at the time had puzzled him.

He made a thrilling story of it.

‘When Vitellozzo left Città di Castello for Sinigaglia he bade farewell to his family and friends as though he knew it was for the last time. To his friends he left the charge of his house and its fortunes and he admonished his nephews to remember the virtues of their ancestors.’

‘If he knew the danger he was running why did he leave the safety of his walled town?’ asked Bartolomeo.

‘How can man escape his destiny? We think to bend men to our will, we think to mould events to our purpose, we strive, we toil and sweat, but in the end we are nought but the playthings of fate. When the captains had been arrested and Pagolo Orsini was complaining of the Duke’s perfidy, the only reproach that Vitellozzo made him was this: “You see how wrong you were and in what a plight my friends and I have been placed by your folly.”’

‘He was a scoundrel and he deserved to die,’ said Bartolomeo. ‘I sold him some horses once and he never paid me for them. When I demanded the money he told me to come to Città di Castello and get it. I preferred to pocket my loss.’

‘You were wise.’

Machiavelli asked himself what had been the thoughts of that ruthless man, old, tired and sick, during the hours that passed between the time of his arrest and the time when tied to a chair, back to back with Oliverotto, Michelotto’s cruel hands had wrung the life out of him. Michelotto was a pleasant fellow to meet, he would drink a bottle of wine with you and crack a lewd joke, play strange Spanish tunes on a guitar and by the hour sing wild, sad songs of his country. It was hard then to believe that he was the murderous brute you knew him to be. What fearful satisfaction did he get out of doing his foul work with his own hands? Machiavelli smiled as he thought that one of these days the Duke, having finished with him, would have him killed with no more compunction than when he had killed his trusted and loyal lieutenant Ramiro de Lorqua.

‘A strange man,’ he muttered, ‘perhaps a great one.’

‘Of whom are you speaking?’ asked Bartolomeo.

‘Of the Duke of course. Of whom else could I have been speaking? He has rid himself of his enemies by the exercise of a duplicity so perfect that the onlooker can only wonder and admire. These painters with their colours and their brushes prate about the works of art they produce, but what are they in comparison with a work of art that is produced when your paints are living men and your brushes wit and cunning? The Duke is a man of action and impetuous, you would never have credited him with the wary patience that was needed to bring his beautiful stratagem to a successful issue. For four months he kept them guessing at his intentions; he worked on their fears, he traded on their jealousies, he confused them by his wiles, he fooled them with false promises; with infinite skill he sowed dissension among them, so that the Bentivogli in Bologna and the Baglioni in Perugia deserted them. You know how ill it has served Baglioni: the Bentivogli’s turn will come. As suited his purpose he was friendly and genial, stern and menacing; and at last they stepped into the trap he had set. It was a masterpiece of deceit which deserves to go down to posterity for the neatness of its planning and the perfection of its execution.’

Bartolomeo, a loquacious fellow, was about to speak, but Machiavelli had not yet said his say.

‘He has rid Italy of the petty tyrants that were its scourge. What will he do now? Others before him have seemed to be chosen by God to effect the redemption of Italy, and then in the full current of action have been cast off by fortune.’

He rose to his feet abruptly. He was tired of the party and did not want to listen to Bartolomeo’s platitudes. He thanked him for his entertainment and escorted by the faithful Piero went back to his lodging.

CHAPTER 34

NEXT DAY BARTOLOMEO, his business transacted, set off for Perugia on his way home. Later on Machiavelli, with Piero and his two servants, and a number of the Duke’s gentlemen, rode out to meet the Florentine ambassador. After Giacomo Salviati, for such was his name, had changed from his riding clothes to the dignified garb of a Florentine of rank, Machiavelli accompanied him to the castle to present his credentials. Machiavelli was eager to get back to Florence, but he could not leave till he had made known to the ambassador the various persons with whom it was necessary for him to be acquainted. Little was done at the Duke’s court for love, and Machiavelli had to inform his successor what services such a one could render and what payment he expected. He had to give his opinion of the trustworthiness of one and the unreliability of another. Though Giacomo Salviati had read the letters that Machiavelli had written to the Signory, there was much that he had not ventured to say, since the danger was constant that letters would be intercepted, and so he had to spend long hours recounting by word of mouth a multitude of facts that it behoved the ambassador to know.

It was in consequence six days before he could set out on the homeward journey. The road was long and bad and none too safe, and so that he might get as far as he could before nightfall he had decided to start early. He was out of bed by dawn and it did not take him long to dress. The saddle-bags, packed the night before, were taken down by the servants, and the woman of the house in a few minutes came up to tell him that all was ready for him to start.

‘Is Piero with the horses?’

‘No, Messere.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He went out.’

‘Out? Where? What for? Tiresome fellow, doesn’t he know yet that I hate being kept waiting? Send one of my servants to find him and be quick about it.’

She hurried to do his bidding and had hardly closed the door behind her when it was opened again and Piero came in.

Machiavelli stared at him in amazement: he was dressed, not in his own shabby riding clothes, but in the scarlet and yellow of the Duke’s soldiers. There was a mischievous smile on his lips, but it somewhat lacked assurance.

‘I’ve come to say good-bye to you, Messer Niccolo. I have enlisted in the Duke’s army.’

‘I did not imagine you had put on that gaudy costume just for fun.’

‘Don’t be angry with me, Messere. During the three months and more that I’ve been with you I’ve seen something of the world. I’ve been witness to great events and I’ve talked with men who were concerned in them. I’m strong and young and healthy. I can’t go back to Florence and spend the rest of my life driving a quill in the Second Chancery. I wasn’t made for that. I want to live.’

Machiavelli looked at him reflectively. The suspicion of a smile hovered on that razor-blade which was his mouth.

‘Why didn’t you tell me what you had in mind?’

‘I thought you would prevent me from doing it.’

‘I should have looked upon it as my duty to point out to you that a soldier’s life is hard, dangerous and ill-paid. He takes the risks and the commander gets the glory. He suffers from hunger and thirst and is exposed to the rigour of the elements. If he is captured by the enemy he is robbed of the very clothes on his back. If he is wounded he is left to die, and should he recover and be useless for combat little is left him but to beg his food in the streets. He spends his life among coarse, brutal and licentious men to the ruin of his morals and the peril of his soul. I should have felt it my duty to point out to you that in the Chancery of the Republic you would have a position at once respectable and secure in which by industry and subservience to the whims of your superiors you could earn a salary just enough to keep body and soul together, and after many years of faithful service, if you were adroit, slightly unscrupulous and very lucky, you could count on advancement if the brother-in-law or the nephew by marriage of an influential person did not at the moment happen to want a job. But having done my duty I should have taken no further steps to prevent you from doing what you wished.’

Piero laughed with relief, for though he was attached to Machiavelli and admired him, he was not a little afraid of him.

‘Then you are not vexed with me?’

‘No, my dear boy. You have served me well and I have found you honest, loyal and energetic. Fortune favours the Duke and I can’t blame you for wanting to follow his star.’

‘Then you will make it all right for me with my mother and Uncle Biagio?’

‘Your mother will be broken-hearted. She will think I have led you astray and will blame me, but Biagio is a sensible man and will do his best to console her. And now, my dear boy, I must be off.’

He took the boy in his arms to kiss him on both cheeks, but as he did so noticed the shirt he was wearing. He pulled up the heavily-embroidered collar.

‘Where did you get that shirt?’

Piero flushed to the roots of his hair.

‘Nina gave it to me.’

‘Nina?’

‘Monna Aurelia’s maid.’

Machiavelli recognized the fine linen he had brought Bartolomeo from Florence and he stared frowning at the elaborate needlework. Then he looked into Piero’s eyes. Beads of sweat stood on the boy’s forehead.

‘Monna Aurelia had more material than she needed for Messer Bartolomeo and she gave Nina what she didn’t want.’

‘And did Nina do that beautiful embroidery herself?’

‘Yes.’

It was a clumsy lie.

‘How many shirts did she give you?’

‘Only two. There wasn’t material for more.’

‘That will do very well. You will be able to wear one while the other is washed. You are a lucky young man. When I sleep with women they do not give me presents; they expect me to give them presents.’

‘I only did it to oblige you, Messer Niccolo,’ said Piero, with a disarming smile. ‘You urged me to make advances to her.’

Machiavelli knew very well that Aurelia would never have dreamt of giving her maid several yards of costly linen, and he knew that the maid could never have drawn that intricate design; and Monna Caterina herself had told him that only Aurelia could do that delicate handiwork. It was Aurelia who had given the boy the shirts. And why? Because he was her husband’s third cousin? Nonsense. The truth, the unpalatable truth stared him in the face. On the night of the assignation, when Machiavelli had been sent for by the Duke, it was not with the maid that Piero had slept, but with her mistress. It was by no miraculous intervention of San Vitale that Bartolomeo’s wife was about to bear a son, but by the very natural instrumentality of the young man who stood before him. That explained why Monna Caterina had given him ridiculous excuses for not arranging another opportunity for him to meet Aurelia, and why Aurelia had avoided all further communication with him. Machiavelli was seized with cold fury. They had made a pretty fool of him, those two abandoned women and the boy whom he had befriended. He stepped back a little to have a good look at him.

Machiavelli had never set great store on masculine beauty; he considered it of small importance compared with the pleasant manner, the easy conversation and the audacious approach which had enabled him to get all the women he wanted; and though he had recognized that Piero was a personable fellow he had never troubled to look closely at him. He examined him now with angry eyes. He was tall and well-made, with broad shoulders, a slim waist and shapely legs. The uniform set off his figure to advantage. He had brown curly hair that covered his head like a tight-fitting cap, large round brown eyes under well-marked brows, an olive skin as smooth and clear as a girl’s, a small straight nose, a red, sensual mouth, and ears that clung close to his skull. His expression was bold, frank, ingenuous and engaging.

‘Yes,’ reflected Machiavelli, ‘he has the beauty that would appeal to a silly woman. I never noticed it or I’d have been on my guard.’

He cursed himself for having been so stupid. But how could he suspect that Aurelia, cousin though he was of her husband, would give a thought to a lad who after all was no more than an errand-boy just out of school? Machiavelli had used him to fetch and carry, to run hither and thither at his beck and call; and if he had treated him with an indulgence he now regretted, it was because Biagio was his uncle. Piero was not unintelligent, but he had none of the graces you learn by living in the great world, and having little to say for himself for the most part kept quiet in the presence of his betters. Machiavelli knew very well that, as for himself, he had a way with women; he had never failed to charm when to charm was his object, and he thought there was little anyone could teach him in the art and science of gallantry. Piero was no more than a callow youth. Who in his senses could have supposed that Aurelia would cast so much as a glance of her fine eyes on him when she had at her feet a man of distinction, wordly wisdom and urbane conversation? It was preposterous.

Piero suffered his master’s long scrutiny with composure. He had recovered from his embarrassment and there was a wariness in his manner which suggested that he was alert.

‘I’ve been very fortunate,’ he remarked coolly, but as though he were somewhat inclined to take good luck as his due. ‘Count Lodovico Alvisi’s page fell ill on the way from Sinigaglia and had to go back to Rome, and he’s taken me in his place.’

This Count Lodovico, an intimate of Il Valentino’s, was one of the Roman gentlemen who had taken service under him as a lancer.

‘How did you manage that?’

‘Messer Bartolomeo spoke to the Duke’s treasurer about me and he arranged it.’

Machiavelli faintly raised his eyebrows. Not only had the boy seduced Bartolomeo’s wife, but he had used him to get a sought-after position with one of the Duke’s favourites. If he had not himself been so intimately concerned he would have found the situation humorous.

‘Fortune favours audacity and youth,’ he said. ‘You will go far. But let me give you some advice. Take care that like me you do not get a reputation for wit, since if you do no one will think you sensible, but notice men’s moods and adapt yourself to them; laugh with them when they are merry and pull a long face when they are solemn. It is absurd to be wise with fools and foolish with the wise: you must speak to each one in his own language. Be courteous; it costs little and helps much; to be of use and to know how to show yourself of use is to be doubly useful; it is idle to please yourself if you do not please others, and remember that you please them more by ministering to their vices than by encouraging their virtues. Never be so intimate with a friend that he may injure you should he become your enemy, and never use your enemy so ill that he can never become your friend. Be careful in your speech. There is always time to put in a word, never to withdraw one; truth is the most dangerous weapon a man can wield, and so he must wield it with caution. For years I have never said what I believed nor ever believed what I have said, and if it sometimes happens that I tell the truth I conceal it among so many lies that it is hard to find it.’

But while these old saws and homely commonplaces tripped off the end of his tongue Machiavelli’s thoughts were intent on something much more important, and he scarcely listened to what he said. For he knew that a public man can be corrupt, incompetent, cruel, vindictive, vacillating, self-seeking, weak and stupid and yet attain to the highest honours in the state; but if he is ridiculous he is undone. Slander he can refute; abuse he can despise; but against ridicule he has no defence. Strange as it may seem the Absolute has no sense of humour, and ridicule is the instrument the devil uses to hinder aspiring man in his arduous quest of perfection. Machiavelli valued the esteem of his fellow-citizens and the attention that was paid to his opinions by the heads of the Republic. He had confidence in his own judgment and was ambitious to be employed in affairs of consequence. He was too clear-sighted not to see that in this abortive affair with Aurelia he cut a comic figure. If the story were told in Florence he would become a laughing-stock, the helpless victim of brutal jest and cruel innuendo. A cold shiver ran down his spine at the thought of the pasquinades, the epigrams that his misadventure would suggest to the malicious wit of the Florentines. Even his friend Biagio, the easy butt of his jokes, would welcome the opportunity to pay off many an old score. He must stop Piero’s mouth or he was ruined. In a friendly way he put his hand on the lad’s shoulder and smiled pleasantly; but the eyes he fixed on Piero’s, the bright darting little eyes, were cold and hard.

‘There is only one more thing I would say to you, dear boy. Fortune is inconstant and restless. She may grant you power, honour and riches, but also afflict you with servitude, infamy and poverty. The Duke also is her plaything and with a turn of her wheel she may plunge him to destruction. Then you will need friends in Florence. It would be imprudent of you to make enemies of those who can help you in distress. The Republic is suspicious of those who leave her service to enter that of those whom she mistrusts. A few words whispered in the right ear might easily lead to the confiscation of your property so that your mother, driven from her house, would have to live on the unwilling charity of her relations. The Republic has a long arm; if she thought fit, it would not be hard to find a needy Gascon who for a few ducats would drive a dagger into your back. A letter might be allowed to fall into the Duke’s hands which would suggest that you were a Florentine spy, and the rack would force you to confess that it was true, and you would be hanged like a common thief. It would distress your mother. For your own sake then, and as you value your life, I recommend you to be secret. It is not wise to tell everything one knows.’

Machiavelli, his gaze fixed on Piero’s brown, liquid eyes, saw that he understood.

‘Have no fear, Messere. I will be as secret as the grave.’

Machiavelli laughed lightly.

‘I did not think you were a fool.’

Though it would leave him with only just enough money to get back to Florence, he thought this was a moment to be generous even to excess, so taking out his purse he gave Piero five ducats as a parting gift.

‘You have served me well and faithfully,’ he said, ‘and it will be a pleasure to me to give Biagio a good account of your zeal in my interests and in those of the Republic.’

He kissed him affectionately and they went downstairs hand in hand. Piero held the horse’s head while Machiavelli mounted. He walked by his side till they came to the city’s gate and there they parted.

CHAPTER 35

MACHIAVELLI GAVE HIS horse a touch of the spur and it broke into an easy canter The two servants followed close behind. He was in a vile temper. There was no denying it, they had made a perfect fool of him, Fra Timoteo, Aurelia, her mother and Piero; he didn’t know with which he was most angry. And the worst of it was that he didn’t see how he could settle his account with them; they had had a lot of fun at his expense and there was no way by which he could make them pay for it. Of course Aurelia was a fool, sly as all women were, but a fool; otherwise she wouldn’t have preferred a smooth-faced pretty boy to a man in the flower of his age, a man of affairs who was entrusted by his government with important negotiations. No intelligent person could deny that the comparison was all in his favour. No one could call him repulsive; Marietta had always told him she liked the way his hair grew on his head; it was like black velvet, she said. Thank God for Marietta: there was a woman you could trust; you could leave her for half a year and be certain that she would look neither to the right nor to the left. It was true that she had been rather troublesome of late, complaining through Biagio that he didn’t come back and didn’t write and had left her without money. Well, in her condition one must expect women to be peevish. He had been gone three and a half months, she must be getting quite big, he wondered when she would be delivered; they had already made up their minds that the boy should be called Bernardo after his own father now with God. And if she grumbled at his long absence it was because she loved him, poor slut; it would be well to get back to her; that was the advantage of a wife, she was always there when you wanted her. Of course she wasn’t the beauty that Aurelia was, but she was virtuous, and that was more than you could say for Monna Caterina’s daughter. He wished he had thought of bringing her back a present, but it hadn’t occurred to him till that moment and now he simply hadn’t the money.

He wished he hadn’t spent so much on Aurelia. There was the scarf, and the gloves and the attar of roses, and the gold chain, well, no, not gold, silver gilt, that he’d given to Monna Caterina; if she’d had a spark of decency she’d have returned that, it would have done very well to give to Marietta and would have pleased her. But when did women ever return the presents you made them?

An old procuress, that’s what she was, and not even honest. She knew quite well that the chain was the price he was paying her to arrange things for him, and when she didn’t deliver the goods surely the least she could do would have been to return the purchase price. But she was an abandoned old wanton, he’d guessed that from his first glance at her, and she got a filthy satisfaction out of helping others to the debaucheries which she could no longer herself indulge in. He was prepared to bet a ducat that she’d put Piero and Aurelia to bed herself. They must have had a fine laugh when they ate the capons and the pastries he’d sent in by Piero and drunk his wine while he was standing at the door in the pelting rain. If Bartolomeo hadn’t been the fool he was he’d have known it was madness to entrust a woman like that with the charge of his wife’s fidelity.

For a moment Machiavelli’s thoughts turned on that gross and stupid man. It was his fault really that all this had happened.

‘If he’d looked after her properly,’ said Machiavelli to himself, ‘it would never have occurred to me that there was anything doing and I shouldn’t have tried.’

Bartolomeo was to blame for the whole thing. But what a fool he’d been, he, Machiavelli, to send her that expensive scarf to excuse himself for not having kept the appointment; and he’d sent it round in the morning, by Piero of all people, when he was feeling like nothing on earth and his voice was a croak, so that she could get it before Bartolomeo’s return. How they must have sniggered! And did Piero take the opportunity to . . . they were a nice pair, he wouldn’t put anything past them.

And the exasperating thing was that he’d not only lavished presents upon her, he’d told his best stories to amuse her, he’d sung his best songs to charm her, he’dflattered her, in short he’d done everything a man can do to ingratiate himself with a woman; and then, then that wretched boy came along and just because he was eighteen and good-looking got for nothing what he’d spent a month’s time to get and much more money than he could afford. He would have liked to know how Piero had gone about it. Perhaps it was Monna Caterina, with her fear that Bartolomeo would adopt his nephews, who had suggested it. He invented her conversation.

‘Well, what are we going to do about it? We can’t wait all night for him. It seems a pity to waste the opportunity. In your place, Aurelia, I wouldn’t hesitate. Look at him with his sweet face and his curly hair; he’d like the Adonis in that picture in the Town Hall. I know if I had to choose between him and that Messer Niccolo with his sallow skin and his long nose and those little beady eyes – well, there’s no comparison, my dear. And I dare say he can do what you want much better than that skinny Secretary.’

A bad woman. A wicked woman. And why she should prefer that boy to father her daughter’s son rather than an intelligent man of the world was something he would never understand.

But perhaps there had been small need for Monna Caterina to put her word in. It’s true the boy looked so innocent and seemed even a trifle shy, but appearances were deceptive. He had a pretty power of dissimulation, for never had he given the smallest indication that there was anything between him and Aurelia; and he was a cool, brazen liar; the only embarrassment he had shown was when Machiavelli had noticed the shirt; but how quickly he had recovered himself and with what effrontery met his master’s unspoken accusations! He was quite impudent enough just to have kissed Aurelia frankly on the mouth and when he found she did not object, slip his hand down her open bodice between her breasts. Anyone could guess what would happen then and Machiavelli’s angry imagination followed them into Bartolomeo’s bedchamber and into Bartolomeo’s bed.

‘The ingratitude of the boy!’ he muttered.

He had taken him on this trip from sheer good nature, he had done everything for him, he had introduced him to persons worth knowing, he had done his best to form him, to show him how to behave, to civilize him in short; he had not spared his wit and wisdom to teach him the ways of the world, how to make friends and influence people. And this was his reward, to have his girl snatched away from him under his very nose.

‘Anyhow I put the fear of God into him.’

Machiavelli knew that when you have played a dirty trick on your benefactor half the savour of it is lost if you cannot tell your friends about it. He found some small comfort in that.

But all the anger he felt for Aurelia, Piero, Monna Caterina and Bartolomeo amounted to nothing compared with that which he felt for Fra Timoteo. That was the treacherous villain who had upset all his well-laid plans.

‘Much chance he has now of preaching the Lenten sermons in Florence,’ he hissed.

He had never had any intention of recommending the friar for that office, but it was a satisfaction to think that if he had had the intention he would now without hesitation discard it. The man was a rascal. No wonder Christianity was losing its hold on the people, and they were become wicked, licentious and corrupt, when there was no honesty, no sense of right and wrong in the religious by profession. Fooled, fooled, he’d been fooled by all of them, but by none so monstrously as by that rascally friar.

They stopped to eat at a wayside inn. The food was bad but the wine drinkable and Machiavelli drank a good deal of it, with the result that when he got into the saddle again to continue his journey the world looked a trifle less black to him. They passed peasants leading a cow or riding on the rump of a heavy-laden ass; they met travellers on foot or on horseback. For a while he pondered over the Duke’s participation in his disappointment; if it was a joke he had kept it to himself as he kept his designs to himself, and if it was part of a scheme to get him in his power, he knew by now that it had failed. Then his thoughts reverted to Aurelia. It was no good crying over spilt milk. Four months ago he had never seen her; it was silly to make such a fuss over a woman whom he had only seen half a dozen times and with whom he had only exchanged as many sentences. He wasn’t the first man whom a woman had led on only to let him down when it came to the point. That was the kind of thing a wise man took philosophically. Fortunately it was to the interest of the only people who knew the facts to say nothing about them. It was a humiliation certainly to have been made such a fool of, but anyone can put up with a humiliation that only he is aware of. The thing was to look at it from the outside as though it had happened to somebody else, and Machiavelli set himself deliberately to do this.

Suddenly with an exclamation he jerked his reins, and his horse, thinking he was meant to stop, pulled up so sharply that Machiavelli was thrown forward in his saddle. His servants rode up.

‘Is anything the matter, Messere?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

He rode on. Machiavelli’s exclamation and the instinctive movement had been caused by an idea that had flashed through his mind. At first he thought he was going to vomit and then he knew he’d had an inspiration: it had occurred to him that there was a play in the story. That was how he could revenge himself on those people who had mocked and robbed him; he would hold them up to contempt and ridicule. His ill-humour vanished and as he rode along, his imagination busy, his face beamed with malicious delight.

He would place the action in Florence, because he felt his invention would be more at home in those familiar streets. The characters were there and all he had to do was to emphasize their qualities a little in order to make them more effective on the stage. Bartolomeo, for instance, would have to be even sillier and more credulous than he was in fact, and Aurelia more ingenuous and more docile. He had already cast Piero for the pimp who was to engineer the deception by means of which the hero would achieve his ends, and a pretty scamp he proposed to make him. For the general outlines of the play were clear in his mind. He would himself be the hero and the name he would give himself came to him at once – Callimaco. He was a Florentine, handsome, young and rich, who had spent some years in Paris – this would give Machiavelli the chance to say some sharp things about the French whom he neither liked nor esteemed – and having come back to Florence had seen and fallen violently in love with Aurelia. What should he call her? Lucrezia. Machiavelli sniggered when he decided to give her the name of the Roman matron distinguished for her domestic virtues who had stabbed herself to death after having been outraged by Tarquinius. Of course the play would end happily and Callimaco would spend a night of love with the object of his desire.

The sun was shining from a blue sky, there was still snow in the fields, but the road was crisp under the horses’ hooves and Machiavelli, well wrapped up, was pleasantly exhilarated by the activity of his invention. He felt strangely exalted. There was in his mind as yet no more than a theme; the facts were too tame for his purpose, and he was aware that he needed to think of a comic stratagem that would give him a coherent plot on which he could string his scenes. What he was looking for was a fantastic idea that would make an audience laugh and not only lead naturally to the resolution of his intrigue, but allow him to show the simplicity of Aurelia, the foolishness of Bartolomeo, the rascality of Piero, the wantonness of Monna Caterina, and the knavery of Fra Timoteo. For the monk was to be an important character. In imagination Machiavelli rubbed his hands as he thought how he would show him in his true colours, with his avarice, his lack of scruple, his cunning and his hypocrisy. He would give false names to all of them, but he would leave Fra Timoteo his own so that all should know what a false and wicked man he was.

But he remained at a loss for the idea that should set his puppets in motion. It must be unexpected, outrageous even, for it was a comedy that he proposed to write, and so funny that people would gasp with astonishment and then burst into a roar of laughter. He knew his Plautus and his Terence well, and he surveyed them in his memory to see whether there was not in their plays some ingenious fancy that would serve his purpose. He could think of nothing. And what made it more difficult to apply his mind to the problem was that his thoughts willy-nilly presented odd scenes to him here and there, amusing bits of dialogue and ridiculous situations. The time passed so quickly that he was surprised when they arrived at the place where they had decided to spend the night.

‘To hell with love,’ he muttered as he got off his horse. ‘What is love beside art!’

CHAPTER 36

THE PLACE WAS called Castiglione Aretino, and there was an inn which at all events looked no worse than any of those he had slept at since leaving home. What with the exercise in the open air and his fancy running wild, he had developed a healthy appetite and the first thing he did on entering was to order his supper. Then he washed his feet, which, being a cleanly man, he liked to do every four or five days, and having dried them he wrote a short letter to the Signory which he sent off at once by a courier. The inn was full, but the innkeeper told him there would be room for him in the large bed he and his wife slept in. Machiavelli gave her a glance and said that if they could put a couple of sheepskins on the kitchen floor he would rest comfortably enough. Then he sat down to a great dish of macaroni.

‘What is love in comparison with art?’ he repeated. ‘Love is transitory, but art is eternal. Love is merely Nature’s device to induce us to bring into this vile world creatures who from the day of their birth to the day of their death will be exposed to hunger and thirst, sickness and sorrow, envy, hatred and malice. This macaroni is better cooked than I could have expected and the sauce is rich and succulent. Chicken livers and giblets. The creation of man was not even a tragic mistake, it was a grotesque mischance. What is its justification? Art, I suppose. Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, Dante and Petrarch. And perhaps they would never have been driven to write their divine works if their lives had not been full of tribulation, for there is no question that if I had gone to bed with Aurelia I should never have had the idea of writing a play. So when you come to look at it, it’s all turned out for the best. I lost a trinket and picked up a jewel fit for a king’s crown.’

The good meal and these reflections restored Machiavelli to his usual amiability. He played a game of cards with a travelling friar who was on his way from one monastery to another and lost a trifle to him with good grace. Then settling himself down on his sheepskins he quickly fell asleep and slept without a break till dawn.

The sun had only just risen when he set out again, and it looked as though it were going to be a fine day. He was in high spirits. It was good to think that in a few hours he would be once more in his own house, he hoped Marietta would be too glad to have him back to reproach him for his neglect of her, Biagio would come round to visit him after supper, dear kind Biagio, and tomorrow he would see Piero Soderini and the gentlemen of the Signory. Then he would go and call on his friends. Oh, what a joy it would be to be back in Florence, to have the Chancery to go to every day and to walk those streets he had known since childhood, knowing by name, if not to speak to, almost everyone he passed!

‘Welcome back, Messere,’ from one, and ‘Well, well, Niccolo, where have you sprung from?’ from another. ‘I suppose you’ve come back with your pockets bulging with money,’ from a third, and ‘When is the happy event to be?’ from a friend of his mother’s.

Home. Florence. Home.

And there was La Carolina, at a loose end now because the Cardinal who’d kept her had been too rich to die a natural death. She was a grand woman, with a clever tongue, whom it was a treat to talk to, and sometimes you could cajole her into giving you for nothing what others were prepared to pay good money for.

How pretty the Tuscan landscape was! In another month the almond-trees would be in flower.

He began once more to think of the play that was simmering in his head. It made him feel happy and young and as light-headed as though he had drunk wine on an empty stomach. He repeated to himself the cynical speeches he would put in the mouth of Fra Timoteo. Suddenly he pulled his horse up. The servants came up with him to see if there were anything he wanted and to their surprise saw that he was shaking with silent laughter. He saw the look on their faces and laughed all the more, then without a word clapped his spurs to the horse’s flanks and galloped hell for leather down the road till the poor brute, unaccustomed to such exuberance, slackened down to its usual steady amble. The Idea had come to him, the idea he had racked his brains to invent, and it had come on a sudden, he could not tell how or why or whence, and it was the very idea he wanted, ribald, extravagant and comic. It was almost a miracle. Everyone knew that credulous women bought the mandrake root to promote conception, it was a common superstition and many were the indecent stories told about its use. Now he would persuade Bartolomeo – to whom by then he had given the name of Messer Nicia – that his wife would conceive if she drank a potion made from it, but that the first man who had connection with her after she had done so would die. How to persuade him of that? It was easy. He, Callimaco, would disguise himself as a doctor who had studied in Paris, and prescribe the treatment. It was obvious that Messer Nicia would hesitate to give his life to become a father, and so a stranger must be found to take his place for one night. This stranger, under another disguise, would of course be Callimaco, that is to say Machiavelli.

Now that he had a plot the scenes succeeded one another with inevitability. They fell into place like the pieces of a puzzle. It was as though the play were writing itself and he, Machiavelli, were no more than an amanuensis. If he had been excited before, when the notion of making a play out of his misadventure had first come to him, he was doubly excited now that it all lay clear before his mind’s eye like a garden laid out with terraces and fountains, shady walks and pleasant arbours. When they stopped to dine, absorbed in his characters he paid no attention to what he ate; and when they started off again he was unconscious of the miles they travelled; they came nearer to Florence, and the countryside was as familiar to him, and as dear, as the street he was born in, but he had no eyes for it; the sun, long past its meridian, was making its westering way to where it met earth and sky, but he gave no heed to it. He was in a world of makebelieve that rendered the real world illusory. He felt more than himself. He was Callimaco, young, handsome, rich, audacious, gay; and the passion with which he burnt for Lucrezia was of a tempestuous violence that made the desire Machiavelli had had for Aurelia a pale slight thing. That was but a shadow, this was the substance. Machiavelli, had he only known it, was enjoying the supreme happiness that man is capable of experiencing, the activity of creation.

‘Look, Messere,’ cried his servant Antonio, riding up to come abreast of him. ‘Florence.’

Machiavelli looked. In the distance against the winter sky, paling now with the decline of day, he saw the dome, the proud dome that Bramante had built. He pulled up. There it was, the city he loved more than his soul; they were not idle words that he had spoken when he had said that to Il Valentino. Florence, the city of flowers, with her campanile and her baptistery, her churches and palaces, her gardens, her tortuous streets, the old bridge he crossed every day to go to the Palazzo, and his home, his brother Toto, Marietta, his friends, the city of which he knew every stone, the city with its great history, his birthplace and the birthplace of his ancestors, Florence, the city of Dante and Boccaccio, the city which had fought for its freedom through the centuries, Florence the well-beloved, the city of flowers.

Tears formed in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. He clenched his teeth to restrain the sobs that shook him. She was powerless now, governed by men who had lost their courage; corrupt; and the citizens who once had been quick to rise up against those who threatened their liberties, were concerned only to buy and sell. Free now only by the grace of the King of France, to whom she paid unworthy tribute, her only defence faithless mercenaries, how could she resist the onslaught of that desperate, audacious man who thought her of so little danger that he did not trouble to conceal his evil intentions? Florence was doomed. She might not fall to the arms of Cæsar Borgia, but if not to his, then to another’s, not that year perhaps, nor next, but before men now in their middle age were old.

‘To hell with art,’ he said. ‘What is art beside freedom! Men who lose their freedom lose everything.’

‘If we want to get in before dark we must push on, Messere,’ said Antonio.

With a shrug of the shoulders Machiavelli tightened his reins, and the tired horse ambled on.

EPILOGUE

Four years passed and in that period much happened. Alexander VI died. Il Valentino had provided for everything that might occur on his father’s death, but he had not foreseen that when it took place he would himself be at death’s door. Though ill, so desperately ill that only the strength of his constitution saved him, he managed to secure the election to the papacy of a cardinal, Pius III, whom he had no reason to fear; but the lords whom he had attacked and driven to flight seized the opportunity to regain their dominions, and he could do nothing to prevent them. Guidobaldo di Montefeltro returned to Urbino, the Vitellis recovered Città di Castello and Gian Paolo Baglioni captured Perugia. Only Romagna remained faithful to him. Then Pius III, an old man and a sick one, died, and Giuliano della Rovere, a bitter enemy of the Borgias, ascended the papal throne as Julius II. In order to obtain the votes of those cardinals whom Il Valentino controlled he had promised to reappoint him Captain General of the Church and confirm him in possession of his states. Cæsar thought that the promises of others were more likely to be kept than his own. He made a fatal error. Julius II was vindictive, crafty, unscrupulous and ruthless. It was not long before he found an excuse to put the Duke under arrest; he then forced him to surrender the cities of Romagna which his captains still held for him, and that accomplished, allowed him to escape to Naples. Here after a short while by order of King Ferdinand he was again thrown into prison and presently conveyed to Spain. He was taken first to a fortress in Murcia and then for greater safety to one at Medina del Campo in the heart of Old Castile. It looked as though Italy were rid at last and for good of the adventurer whose boundless ambition had for so long disturbed her peace.

But some months later the whole country was startled to hear that he had escaped, and after a hazardous journey, disguised as a merchant, had reached Pamplona, the capital of his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre. The news raised the spirits of his partisans and in the cities of Romagna there were wild scenes of rejoicing. The petty princelings of Italy trembled in their cities. The King of Navarre was at the time at war with his barons and he put Cæsar Borgia in command of his army.

During these four years Machiavelli was kept hard at work. He went on various missions. He was given the difficult task of constituting a militia so that Florence should not be altogether dependent on mercenaries, and when not otherwise occupied had handled the affairs of the Second Chancery. His digestion had always been poor and the journeys on horseback through the heat of summer, in the cold, wind, rain and snow of winter, the extreme discomfort of the inns, the poor food at irregular hours had exhausted him, and in February – February of the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and seven – he fell seriously ill. He was bled and purged and took his favourite remedy, a pill of his own concoction, which to his mind was a specific for every human ailment. He was convinced that it was to this, rather than to the doctors, that he owed his recovery, but his illness and its treatment had left him so weak that the Signory granted him a month’s leave of absence. He went down to his farm at San Casciano, which was some three miles from Florence, and there quickly regained his health.

Spring had come early that year, and the countryside, with the trees bursting into leaf, the wild flowers, the fresh green of the grass, the rich growth of wheat, was a joy to the eye. To Machiavelli the Tuscan scene had a friendly, intimate delight that appealed to the mind rather than to the senses. It had none of the sublimity of the Alps, nor the grandeur of the sea; it was a plot of earth, graceful, lightly gay and elegant, for men to live on who loved wit and intelligent argument, pretty women and good cheer. It reminded you not of the splendid solemn music of Dante, but rather of the light-hearted strains of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

One March morning Machiavelli, up with the sun, went to a grove on his small estate that he was having cut. He lingered there, looking over the previous day’s work, and talked with the woodmen; then he went to a spring and sat himself down on a bank with a book he had brought in his pocket. It was an Ovid, and with a smile on his thin lips he read the amiable and lively verses in which the poet described his amours and, remembering his own, thought of them for a while with pleasure.

‘How much better it is to sin and repent,’ he murmured, ‘than to repent for not having sinned!’

Then he strolled down the road to the inn and chatted with the passers-by. For he was a sociable creature and if he could not have good company was willing to put up with poor. When his hunger told him that it must be getting on towards dinner-time he sauntered home and sat down with his wife and the children to the modest fare his farm provided. After dinner he went back to the inn. The innkeeper was there, the butcher, the miller and the blacksmith. He sat down to play a game of cards with them, a noisy, quarrelsome game, and they flew into a passion over a penny, shouted at one another, flung insults across the table and shook their fists in one another’s face. Machiavelli shouted and shook his fist with the best of them. Evening drew near and he returned to his house. Marietta, pregnant for the third time, was about to give the two little boys their supper.

‘I thought you were never coming,’ said she.

‘We were playing cards.’

‘Who with?’

‘The usual lot, the miller, the butcher and Batista.’

‘Riff-raff.’

‘They keep my wits from growing mouldy, and when all’s said and done they’re no stupider than ministers of state, and on the whole not more rascally.’

He took his eldest son, Bernardo, now getting on for four, on his knees and began to feed him.

‘Don’t let your soup get cold,’ said Marietta.

They were eating in the kitchen, with the maid and the hired man, and when he had finished his soup the maid brought him half a dozen larks roasted on a skewer. He was surprised and pleased, for as a rule supper consisted of nothing but a bowl of soup and a salad.

‘What is this?’

‘Giovanni snared them and I thought you’d like them for your supper.’

‘Are they all for me?’

‘All.’

‘You’re a good woman, Marietta.’

‘I haven’t been married to you for five years without finding out that the way to your heart is through your stomach,’ she said dryly.

‘For that sound piece of observation you shall have a lark, dear,’ he answered, taking one of the tiny birds in his fingers and popping it, notwithstanding her remonstrance, into her mouth.

‘They fly towards heaven in their ecstasy, their hearts bursting with song, and then, caught by an idle boy, they’re cooked and eaten. So man, for all his soaring ideals, his vision of intellectual beauty and his yearning for the infinite, in the end is caught by the perversity of fate and serves no other purpose than to feed the worms.’

‘Eat your food while it’s hot, dear, you can talk afterwards.’

Machiavelli laughed. He slipped another lark off the skewer and while crunching it with strong teeth looked at Marietta with affection. It was true she was a good woman; she was thrifty and good-tempered. She was always sorry to see him go on one of his journeys and glad to see him come back. He wondered if she knew how unfaithful he was to her. If she did, she had never given a sign of it, which showed that she was sensible and good-natured; he might have gone farther and fared worse; he was very well pleased with his wife.

When they had finished and the maid was washing up, Marietta put the children to bed. Machiavelli went upstairs to take off the clothes, muddy and dirty, that he had worn all day, and put on what he liked to describe as courtly and regal garments; for it was his habit to spend the evening in his study reading the authors he loved. He was not yet dressed when he heard a horseman ride up and in a moment a voice he recognized asking the maid for him. It was Biagio, and he wondered what had brought him out from the city at that hour.

‘Niccolo,’ he shouted from below. ‘I have news for you.’

‘Wait a minute. I’ll come down as soon as I’m ready.’

Since it was still a trifle chilly as the day drew in he slipped his black damask robe over his tunic and opened the door. Biagio was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

‘Il Valentino is dead.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A courier arrived from Pamplona today. I thought you’d want to know so I rode out.’

‘Come into my study.’

They sat down, Machiavelli at his writing-table and Biagio in a carved chair which was part of Marietta’s dowry. Biagio told him the facts as he had learnt them. Caesar Borgia had established his headquarters at a village on the Ebro and planned to attack the castle of the Count of Lerin, the most powerful of the insurgent barons. Early in the morning, on the 12th of March, there was a skirmish between his men and the Count’s. Caesar Borgia was still in his rooms when the alarm sounded; he donned his armour, mounted his horse and flung himself into the fray. The rebels fled, and he, without looking round to see if he was followed, pursued them down into a deep ravine, and there, surrounded and alone, unhorsed, he fought fiercely till he was killed. Next day the King and his men found the body, naked, for they had stripped him of his armour and his clothes, and the King with his own cloak covered his nakedness.

Machiavelli listened to Biagio attentively, but when he had finished remained silent.

‘It is good that he is dead,’ said Biagio after a while.

‘He had lost his states, his money and his army, and yet all Italy feared him still.’

‘He was a terrible man.’

‘Secret and impenetrable. He was cruel, treacherous and unscrupulous, but he was able and energetic. He was temperate and self-controlled. He let nothing interfere with his chosen course. He liked women, but he used them only for his pleasure and never allowed himself to be swayed by them. He created an army that was loyal to him and trusted him. He never spared himself. On the march he was indifferent to cold and hunger, and the strength of his body made him immune to fatigue. He was brave and mettlesome in battle. He shared danger with the meanest of his soldiers. He was as competent in the arts of peace as in the arts of war. He chose his ministers with discrimination, but took care that they should remain dependent upon his good will. He did everything that a prudent and clever man should do to consolidate his power, and if his methods did not bring him success it was through no fault of his, but through the extraordinary and extreme malice of fortune. With his great spirit and lofty intentions he could not have conducted himself otherwise than he did. His designs were thwarted only by Alexander’s death and his own illness; if he had been in health he could have surmounted all his difficulties.’

‘He suffered the just punishment of his crimes,’ said Biagio.

Machiavelli shrugged his shoulders.

‘Had he lived, had fortune continued to favour him, he might have driven the barbarians out of this unhappy country and given it peace and plenty. Then men would have forgotten by what crimes he had achieved power and he would have gone down to posterity as a great and good man. Who cares now that Alexander of Macedon was cruel and ungrateful, who remembers that Julius Cæsar was perfidious? In this world it is only necessary to seize power and hold it, and the means you have used will be judged honourable and will be admired by all. If Cæsar Borgia is regarded as a scoundrel it is only because he didn’t succeed. One of these days I shall write a book about him and what I learnt from my observation of his actions.’

‘My dear Niccolo, you’re so impractical. Who d’you think would read it? You’re not going to achieve immortality by writing a book like that.’

‘I don’t aspire to it,’ laughed Machiavelli.

Biagio looked suspiciously at a pile of manuscript on his friend’s writing-table.

‘What have you there?’

Machiavelli gave him a disarming smile.

‘I had nothing much to do here and I thought I’d pass the time by writing a comedy. Would you like me to read it to you?’

‘A comedy?’ said Biagio doubtfully. ‘I presume it has political implications.’

‘Not at all. Its only purpose is to amuse.’

‘Oh, Niccolo, when will you take yourself seriously? You’ll have the critics down on you like a thousand of bricks.’

‘I don’t know why; no one can suppose that Apuleius wrote his Golden Ass or Petronius the Satyricon with any other object than to entertain.’

‘But they’re classics. That makes all the difference.’

‘You mean that works of entertainment, like loose women, become respectable with age. I’ve often wondered why it is that the critics can only see a joke when the fun has long since seeped out of it. They’ve never discovered that humour depends upon actuality.’

‘You used to say that not brevity, but pornography was the soul of wit. You’ve changed your mind?’

‘Not at all. For what can be more actual than pornography? Believe me, my good Biagio, when men cease to find it so they will have lost all interest in reproducing their kind, and that will be the end of the Creator’s most unfortunate experiment.’

‘Read your play, Niccolo. You know I don’t like to hear you say things like that.’

With a smile Machiavelli took his manuscript and began to read.

‘A Street in Florence.’

But then he was seized with the slight misgiving of an author who reads something for the first time to a friend and is not sure that it will please. He interrupted himself.

‘This is only a first draft and I dare say I shall make a good many changes when I go over it again.’

He flipped the pages uncertainly. The play had amused him to write, but one or two things had happened that he had not counted on. The characters had taken on a life of their own and had diverged a good deal from their models. Lucrezia had remained as shadowy as Aurelia had been, and he had not seen how to make her more substantial. The exigencies of the plot had obliged him to make her a virtuous woman induced by her mother and her confessor to submit to something her conscience disapproved of. Piero, whom he had called Ligurio, on the contrary played a much greater part than he had intended. It was he who suggested the scheme by which the foolish husband was taken in, he who got round Lucrezia’s mother and the monk, he in short who staged the intrigue and conducted it to a happy conclusion. He was astute, ingenious, quick-witted and pleasantly unprincipled. Machiavelli found it very easy to put himself into the rascal’s shoes, but by the time he had finished discovered that there was as much of himself in the artful schemer as in the lovesick gallant who was his hero.

Thinking how odd it was that he should play two parts in one play, he looked up and asked Biagio:

‘By the way, have your heard anything lately of your nephew Piero?’

‘In point of fact I have. I meant to tell you, but with all the excitement of Il Valentino’s death I quite forgot. He’s going to be married.’

‘Is he? Is it a good match?’

‘Yes, he’s marrying money. You remember Bartolomeo Martelli at Imola? He was some sort of relation of mine.’

Machiavelli nodded.

‘When Imola revolted he thought it safer to get away till he saw how things were going. You see, he’d been one of the Duke’s chief partisans and he was afraid he’d have to pay for it. He went to Turkey, where he had a business. The papal troops got to the city before there were any real disturbances, and as luck would have it Piero was with them. It seems he was well liked by some influential men who had the ear of the Pope and he managed to protect Bartolomeo’s property. But Bartolomeo was banished, and lately the news has arrived that he died in Smyrna, and so Piero is going to marry the widow.’

‘Very right and proper,’ said Machiavelli.

‘They tell me she’s young and good-looking; evidently she needed a man to protect her, and Piero has a head on his shoulders.’

‘That was the impression he gave me.’

‘There’s only one fly in the ointment. Bartolomeo had a little boy, between three and four years old, I think he is, and that won’t improve the prospects of any children Piero might have.’

‘I think you may be sure that he will cherish the little boy as if he were his own,’ said Machiavelli dryly.

He returned to his manuscript. He smiled with some complacency. he could not help thinking that he had succeeded with Fra Timoteo. His pen had been dipped in gall and as he wrote he chuckled with malice. Into that character he had put all the hatred and contempt he felt for the monks who fattened on the credulity of the ignorant. By that character his play would stand or fall. He began again.

‘A Street in Florence.’

He stopped and looked up.

‘What is the matter?’ asked Biagio.

‘You say that Cæsar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed, not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has better and bigger guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more ably led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on our side, but it is madness to forget that unless we have might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will, but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the result of their folly.’

He sighed, and for the third time started reading.

‘A Street in Florence.’

THE END

CATALINA

First published in 1948 by Heinemann, Maugham’s last novel was the third in his plan to end his career with four more works (the last, a family saga set in the East End, was never written). Whether because of increasing age, the continuing bereavement over Haxton’s death, or simply a change of genre, this novel is not regarded as one of Maugham’s canonical works, though it offers insights into his interest in Spanish history and culture and is still a pleasing product of a disciplined and talented writer. Maugham had previously declared that novelists should turn to historical fiction later in their career, and in this and Then and Now, he was obeying his own dictat. The author presented the manuscript of Catalina to his old school, King’s School, Canterbury.

The book reviewer in the Illustrated London News was somewhat bemused by the novel – describing the early scenes as “tight and promising, if not very profound satire, with a really admirable plot”, but then suggesting the novel loses direction: “there is no unity, no genuine point of view”. Despite this, the reviewer concludes that Maugham, even here, is “ more than readable.”

It is the beginning of the day of the Feast of the Assumption in the city of Castel Rodriguez. Two local men, the Bishop of Segovia and his brother, a soldier, are returning for the festivities that include a bull fight, a Te Deum in the collegiate church, a banquet and fireworks. A procession is sent to meet the brothers and escort them into the town, and the festivities go ahead as arranged.

However, one young girl was not a part of them. Catalina, a beautiful young woman that was disabled by a paralysed leg, spends her time praying in church and is upset that she is alone and apart from all the jollity. As she weeps on the steps of the church, a woman approaches her. The stranger is serene and beautiful, dressed in blue and white, and Catalina realises she is not a native of her home city. She feels she can pour out her story to the woman — Catalina’s disability was the result of an injury from a bull, and not only did she lose her mobility, her lover left her too. The woman tells Catalina that if she approaches the son of Juan Suarez de Valero, he can lay his hands upon Catalina and cure her, allowing her to run and walk just like anyone else. Without warning, the woman disappears and Catalina realises with a rush of emotion that she had been talking to the Virgin Mary. She tries to tell her mother what has happened, but her story is brushed aside as fantasy. Catalina’s mother is deeply uneasy, but agrees that the Bishop is indeed the son of de Valero, and that he is best placed to heal Catalina. However, she also knows that the church frowns upon people that claim to have had direct communication with the Virgin Mary. Catalina’s life is left in suspense. Will she be given a cure, and if so, what will happen to her after that?

Catalina is by far the strongest character and she elicits sympathy without being mawkish. This story is not so much historical novel, as pure story telling in a more traditional sense, and it may be better received if narrated to others rather than read to oneself. There are long descriptive passages about individual characters, which completely go against the first rule of fiction writing - “show, don’t tell.” It is through these long passages that one can see Maugham’s keen interest in Spanish history and culture. However, if one accepts the story as it is and does not compare it with Maugham in his prime, it is a pleasant enough tale with an old fashioned feel to it.

The author in later years

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

The first edition

CHAPTER 1

It was a great day for the city of Castel Rodriguez. The inhabitants, wearing their best clothes, were up by dawn. On the balconies of the grim old palaces of the nobles rich draperies were spread and their banners flapped lazily against the flagpoles. It was the Feast of the Assumption, August the fifteenth, and the sun beat down from an unclouded sky. There was a feeling of excitement in the air. For on this day two eminent persons, natives of the city, were arriving after an absence of many years, and great doings had been arranged in their honour. One was Friar Blasco de Valero, Bishop of Segovia, and the other his brother Don Manuel, a captain of renown in the King’s armies. There was to be a Te Deum in the Collegiate Church, a banquet at the Town Hall, a bull-fight and when night fell fireworks. As the morning wore on more and more people made their way to the Plaza Mayor. Here the procession was formed to go out and meet the distinguished visitors at a certain distance from the city. It was headed by the civil authorities, then came the dignitaries of the Church, and finally a string of gentlemen of rank. The throng lined the streets to watch it pass and then composed themselves to wait until the two brothers, followed by these important personages, should enter the city, when the bells of all the churches would ring out their welcome.

In the Lady Chapel of the church attached to the Convent of the Carmelite nuns a crippled girl was praying. She prayed with passionate devotion before the image of the Blessed Virgin. When at last she rose from her knees she fixed her crutch more comfortably under her arm and hobbled out of the church. It had been cool and dark there, but when she came out into the hot breathless day the sudden glare for a moment blinded her. She stood and looked down at the empty square. The shutters of the houses round it were closed to keep out the heat. It was very silent. Everyone had gone to see the festivities, and there was not even a mongrel dog to bark. You would have thought the city was dead. She glanced at her own home, a small house of two storeys wedged between its neighbours, and sighed despondently. Her mother and her uncle Domingo, who lived with them, had gone with all the rest and would not be back till after the bull-fight. She felt very lonely and very unhappy. She had not the heart to go home, so she sat down at the top of the steps that led from the church door to the plaza and put down her crutch. She began to cry. Then suddenly she was overcome with grief and with an abrupt gesture fell back on the stone platform and burying her face in her arms sobbed as though her heart would break. The movement had given the crutch a push, the steps were narrow and steep, and it clattered down to the bottom of them. That was the last misfortune; now she would have to crawl or slither down to fetch her crutch, for with her right leg paralysed she could not walk without it. She wept disconsolately.

Suddenly she heard a voice.

‘Why do you weep, child?’

She looked up, startled, for she had heard no one approach. She saw a woman standing behind her and it looked as though she had just come out of the church, but she had just done that herself and there had been no one there. The woman wore a long blue cloak that came down to her feet, and now she pushed back the hood that had covered her head. It looked as though she had indeed come out of the church, since it was a sin for women to enter the house of God with uncovered heads. She was fairly tall for a Spanish woman and she was young, for there were no lines under her dark eyes, and her skin was smooth and soft. Her hair was very simply done with a parting in the middle and tied in a loose knot on the nape of her neck. She had small delicate features and a kindly look. The girl could not decide whether she was a peasant, wife perhaps of a farmer in the neighbourhood, or a lady. There was in her air a sort of homeliness and at the same time a dignity that was somehow intimidating. The long cloak concealed the garment underneath, but as she withdrew her hood the girl caught a brief glimpse of white and guessed that that must be the colour of her dress.

‘Dry your tears, child, and tell me your name.’

‘Catalina.’

‘Why do you sit here alone and cry when all the world has gone forth to see the reception of the Bishop and his brother the captain?’

‘I am a cripple, I cannot walk far, Señora. And what have I to do with all those people who are well and happy?’

The lady stood behind her and Catalina had to turn round to speak to her. She gave a glance at the church door.

‘Where have you come from, Señora? I did not see you in the church.’

The lady smiled, and it was a smile of such sweetness that the bitterness seemed to fade from the girl’s heart.

‘I saw you, child. You were praying.’

‘I was praying as I have prayed night and day since my infirmity fell upon me to the Blessed Virgin to free me of it.’

‘And do you think she has the power to do that?’

‘If so she wills.’

There was something so benign and so friendly in the lady’s manner that Catalina felt impelled to tell her sad story. It had happened when they were bringing in the young bulls for the bull-fight on Easter Day and everyone in the town had collected to see them being driven in under the safe conduct of the oxen. Ahead of them on their prancing horses rode a group of young nobles. Suddenly one of the bulls escaped and charged down a side street. There was a panic and the crowd scattered to right and left. One man was tossed and the bull rushed on. Catalina running as fast as her legs would carry her slipped and fell just as the beast was reaching her. She screamed and fainted. When she came to they told her that the bull in his mad charge had trampled over her, but had run wildly on. She was bruised, but not wounded; they said that in a little while she would be none the worse, but in a day or two she complained that she could not move her leg. The doctors examined it and found it was paralyzed; they pricked it with needles, but she could feel nothing; they bled her and purged her and gave her draughts of nauseous medicine, but nothing helped. The leg was like a dead thing.

‘But you still have the use of your hands,’ said the lady.

‘Thanks be to God, for otherwise we should starve. You asked me why I cry. I cry because when I lost the use of my leg I lost the love of my lover.’

‘He could not have loved you very much if he abandoned you when you were stricken with an infirmity.’

‘He loved me with all his heart and I love him better than my soul. But we are poor people, Señora. He is Diego Martinez, the son of the tailor, and he follows his father’s trade. We were to be married when he was finished with his apprenticeship, but a poor man cannot afford to marry a wife who cannot struggle with the other women at the market place or run up and down stairs to do all the things that need to be done in a house. And men are but men. A man does not want a wife on crutches, and now Pedro Alvarez has offered him his daughter Francisca. She is as ugly as sin, but Pedro Alvarez is rich, so how can he refuse?’

Once more Catalina began to cry. The lady looked at her with a compassionate smile. On a sudden in the distance were heard the beating of drums and the blare of trumpets, and then all the bells began to ring.

‘They have entered the city, the Bishop and his brother the captain,’ said Catalina. ‘How is it that you are here when you might be watching them pass, Señora?’

‘I did not care to go.’

This seemed so strange to Catalina that she looked at the lady with suspicion.

‘You do not live in the city, Señora?’

‘No.’

‘I thought it strange that I had not seen you before. I thought there was no one here that I did not know at least by sight.’

The lady did not answer. Catalina was puzzled and under her eyelashes looked at her more closely. She could hardly be a Moor, for her complexion was not dark enough, but it was quite possible that she was one of the New Christians, that is to say, one of those Jews who had accepted baptism rather than be expelled from the country, but who, as everyone knew, still in secret practised Jewish rites, washed their hands before and after meals, fasted on Yom Kippur and ate meat on Fridays. The Inquisition was vigilant and, whether they were baptised Moors or New Christians, it was unsafe to have any communications with them; you could never know when they would fall into the hands of the Holy Office and under torture incriminate the innocent. Catalina asked herself anxiously whether she had said anything that could give rise to a charge, for at that time in Spain everyone went in terror of the Inquisition, and a careless word, a pleasantry, might be a sufficient reason for arrest, and then weeks, months, years even might go by before you could prove your innocence. Catalina thought it better to get away as quickly as possible.

‘It is time for me to go home, Señora,’ she said, and then, with the politeness that was natural to her, added: ‘So if you will excuse me I will leave you.’

She cast a glance at the crutch that was lying at the bottom of the steps and wondered if she dared ask the lady to fetch it for her. But the lady paid no attention to her remark.

‘Would you like to recover the use of your legs, child, so that you can walk and run as though you had never had anything the matter with you?’

Catalina went white. That question revealed the truth. She was no New Christian, the lady, she was a Moor, for it was well known that the Moors, Christian only in name, were in league with the devil and by magic arts could do evil things of all kinds. It was not so long ago that a pestilence had ravaged the city, and the Moors, accused of having caused it, confessed on the rack that they had done so. They perished at the stake. For a moment Catalina was too frightened to speak.

‘Well, child?’

‘I would give all I have in the world, and that is nothing, to be free of my infirmity, but even to regain the love of my Diego I would do nothing to imperil my immortal soul, for that is an offence to our Holy Church.’

Still looking at the lady she crossed herself as she spoke.

‘Then I will tell you how you may be cured. The son of Juan Suarez de Valero who has best served God has it in his power to heal you. He will lay his hands upon you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, bid you throw away your crutch and walk. You will throw down your crutch and you will walk.’

This was not at all what Catalina expected. What the lady said was surprising, but she spoke with such calm assurance that the girl was impressed. At once doubtful and hopeful, she stared at the mysterious stranger. She wanted a moment to collect her wits before she asked the questions that were already forming themselves in her mind. And then Catalina’s eyes nearly started out of her head and her mouth dropped open, for where the lady had been there was nothing. She couldn’t have gone into the church, for Catalina had had her eyes fixed on her, she couldn’t have moved, she had quite simply vanished into thin air. The girl gave a great cry, and more tears, but tears of a different kind, coursed down her cheeks.

‘It was the Blessed Virgin,’ she cried. ‘It was the Queen of Heaven, and I talked with her as I might have with my mother. Maria Santissima, and I took her for a Moor or a New Christian!’

She was so excited that she felt she must tell somebody at once, and without thinking she slithered down the stairs on her backside, helping herself with her hands, till she got her crutch. Then she hobbled back to her home. It was not till she got to the door that she remembered there was nobody there. But she let herself in, and discovering she was hungry, got herself a bit of bread and some olives and drank a glass of wine. It made her drowsy, but she sat up determined to keep awake till her mother and her uncle Domingo came back. She couldn’t think how she could wait to tell them her wonderful story. Her eyelids drooped and in a little while she was fast asleep.

CHAPTER 2

Catalina was a very beautiful girl. She was sixteen, tall for her age, with breasts already well developed, very small hands and feet, and before she was crippled walked with a sinuous grace that charmed all beholders. She had eyes that were large and dark, shining with the glow of youth, black hair naturally curling, and so long that she could sit on it, a brown soft skin, cheeks of a warm rose and a red moist mouth; and when she smiled or laughed, which before her accident she did often, she showed very white even small teeth. Her full name was Maria de los Dolores Catalina Orta y Perez. Her father, Pedro Orta, had sailed for the Americas to make his fortune soon after she was born and since then no news had been heard of him. His wife, Maria Perez by birth, did not know if he was dead or alive, but she still hoped that one day he would return with a coffer full of gold and make them all rich. She was a pious woman and every morning at Mass said a prayer for his safety. She grew angry with her brother Domingo when he said that if Pedro was not long since dead he was living with a native woman, or perhaps two or three, and had no intention of leaving the half-caste family he had undoubtedly produced to come back to a wife who had by now lost her youth and beauty.

Uncle Domingo was a sore trial to his virtuous sister, but she loved him, partly because it was her Christian duty, but also because notwithstanding his grave faults he was lovable and she could not help it. She remembered him too in her prayers, and she liked to think that it was due to their efficacy and not only to the fact that he was getting on in years that he had abandoned at least the worst of his wild ways. Domingo Perez had been destined to the priesthood, and at the seminary of Alcalá de Henares, whither his father sent him, took minor orders and received the tonsure. One of his fellow pupils was Blasco Suarez de Valero, the Bishop of Segovia, whose arrival in the city that day the inhabitants were celebrating. Maria Perez sighed when she thought how different the careers of the two had been. Domingo was a bad boy. He got into trouble at the seminary from the very beginning, for he was headstrong, turbulent and dissipated, and neither admonition, penance nor beating served to tame him. Even then he was fond of the bottle and when he had had too much to drink would sing lewd songs that were an offence to his fellow seminarists and to the masters whose business it was to instill into their young minds decency and decorum. Before he was twenty he had got a Moorish slave with child, and when it appeared that his misbehaviour must be exposed ran away and joined a troupe of strolling players. With them he wandered about the country for two years and then suddenly turned up at his father’s house.

He professed repentance for his sins and promised to amend his ways. He was evidently not meant by Providence to enter the priesthood, and he told his father that if he would give him enough money to keep him from starving he would go to a university and study law. His father was eager to believe that his only son had sown his wild oats, and indeed he had come back mere skin and bone, so it did not look as though the life he had led had been an easy one, and he let himself be persuaded. Domingo went to Salamanca and stayed there for eight years, but he pursued his studies in a very desultory fashion. The pittance he received from his father obliged him to live in a boardinghouse with a group of other students and the food was only just sufficient to keep them from dying of hunger. In after years he used to regale his boon companions at the taverns he frequented with stories of the horrors of that establishment and of the cunning shifts they were put to to supplement their meagre fare. But poverty did not prevent Domingo from enjoying life. He had a glib tongue and charm of manner, and he could sing a good song, so that he was welcome at any entertainment. It may be that the two years he had spent with the strolling players had not taught him to be a good actor, but they had taught him other things that now came in useful. They had taught him how to win at cards and dice, and when a young man of fortune came up to the University it did not take him long to scrape acquaintance with him. He constituted himself his guide and tutor in the ways of the town, and it was seldom that the newcomer was not a good deal poorer for the experience he acquired. Domingo at that time was a personable fellow and now and then was lucky enough to excite the passions of women addicted to venery. They were not in their first youth, but in comfortable circumstances, and Domingo thought it only just that they should relieve his necessities in return for the service he rendered them.

The period he had spent as a strolling player had inspired him with the desire to write plays, and every hour he could spare from his amusements he devoted to this occupation. He had considerable facility, and besides writing a number of comedies, would often indite a sonnet to the object of his profitable attentions or write a set of verses in honour of a person of note which he would then present in the hope of receiving in return a present in cash. It was this knack he had for stringing rhymes together that finally led to his undoing. The Rector of the University by some ordinance he had passed had aroused the anger of the students, and when a set of indecent and scurrilous verses at his expense was found on a tavern table it was hailed with delight. In a very short time copies were passed from hand to hand. It was bruited abroad that the author was Domingo Perez, and though he denied it, it was with such complacency that he might just as well have admitted it. Kind friends brought the verses to the attention of the Rector and at the same time told him who had written them. The original copy had disappeared, so that Domingo could not be convicted by his handwriting, but the Rector made discreet inquiries which convinced him that this bad and dissolute student was responsible for the insult. He was too astute to bring a charge that might be hard to prove, but, determined on revenge, took a more subtle course. It was not difficult to discover the scandal Domingo had caused as a seminarist at Alcalá, and the life he had led during the eight years he had spent at the University was notoriously profligate; Domingo was a gambler and it was well known that gambling was a common source of profanity; witnesses came forward who were prepared to swear that they had heard Domingo utter the most horrid blasphemies, and there were two who had heard him say that to believe in the Articles of Faith was first and foremost a matter of good breeding. This in itself was enough to make him a proper subject for inquiry by the Holy Office, and the Rector put the information he had received into the hands of the Inquisitors. The Holy Office never acted in haste. It collected evidence with secrecy and care and until the blow fell the victim seldom knew that he was suspect.

Late one night, when Domingo was in bed and asleep, the alguazil knocked on his door and when he opened it arrested him. He gave him just time to dress and pack his scanty baggage and his bedding roll, and conducted him, not to prison because he was in minor orders and the Inquisition took pains to avoid scandal to the Church, but to a monastery where he was incarcerated in a disciplinary cell. There under lock and key, allowed to see no one, allowed to read nothing, without even a candle to light the darkness, he remained for some weeks. Then he was brought up for trial before the Tribunal. It would have gone hard with him but for one fortunate circumstance. Not long before, the Rector, a vain and irascible man, had quarrelled violently with the Inquisitors over a question of precedence. They read Domingo’s verses and laughed with malicious delight. His misdeeds were evident and could not be passed over, but they perceived that by tempering mercy with justice they could put an affront on the indignant Rector that he would resent but would have to bear. Domingo admitted his guilt and professed repentance; he was then sentenced to hear Mass in the audience chamber and to be exiled from Salamanca and the immediate neighbourhood. He had had a fright. He thought it well to absent himself from Spain for a while, so he went soldiering in Italy and spent some years there gambling, cursing when the dice or the cards played him false, fornicating and drinking. He was forty when he returned to his birthplace, as penniless as when he left, with a scar or two which he had got in drunken brawls, but with many recollections to entertain his idle hours.

His father and mother were dead and his only kin were his sister Maria, abandoned by her husband, and his niece Catalina, then a pretty child of nine. Maria’s husband had dissipated the dowry she brought him on marriage and she had nothing but the little house in which she lived. She supported herself and her daughter by doing the difficult and skilful needlework in gold and silver thread which decorated the velvet cloaks of the images, images of Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin and patron saints, that were carried in the processions of Holy Week, and the copes, chasubles and stoles that were used in the ceremonies of the Church. Domingo had reached an age when he was ready to exchange the adventurous life he had led for twenty years for a settled one, and his sister, wanting the protection of a man in the house, offered him a home. When this story opens he had been living with her for seven years. He was not a financial burden on her since he earned money by writing letters for the illiterate, sermons for priests who were too lazy or too ignorant to write them for themselves, and affidavits for suitors before the law. He was ingenious also at making out the genealogies of persons who wanted declarations of purity of blood, by which was meant that for at least a hundred years their ancestors had not been tainted with Jewish or Moorish blood. The little family would thus have not been so badly off if Domingo had been able to break himself of his bad habits of drinking and gambling. He also spent good money on books, chiefly volumes of verse and plays, for on his return from Italy he had taken once more to writing for the stage, and though he never succeeded in getting anything produced he found adequate satisfaction in reading his compositions to fellow topers in his favourite tavern. Having become respectable he resumed the tonsure, which was a safeguard amid the perils of life in Spain at that time, and dressed in the sober habiliments which became a scholar in minor orders.

He grew very fond of Catalina, so gay, so vivacious and so pretty, and watched her grow into a beautiful girl with a satisfaction in which there was nothing of desire. He took her education upon himself and taught her to read and write. He taught her the Articles of Religion and attended her first communion with all the pride of a father; but for the rest he confined his teaching to reading verse to her, and when she was old enough to appreciate them the plays of the dramatists who were just then getting themselves so much talked about in Spain. Above all he admired Lope de Vega, who he declared was the greatest genius the world had ever seen, and before the accident that crippled her he and Catalina used to play the scenes they most admired. She had a quick memory and in course of time knew long passages by heart. Domingo had not forgotten that he was once an actor and he taught her how to say her lines, when to be temperate and when to tear a passion to tatters. He was by this time a skinny, loose-limbed man, with grey hair and a lined yellow face, but there was still fire in his eyes and resonance in his voice; and when he and Catalina, with Maria their only audience, acted a striking scene, he was no longer a withered, drunken, elderly ne’er-do-well, but a gallant youth, a prince of the blood, a lover, a hero or what you will. But all this ceased when Catalina was trampled by a bull. The shock kept her in bed for some weeks, during which the surgeons of the town did what their poor science suggested to bring life back to her paralyzed limb. At last they admitted that they could do nothing. It was an act of God. Her lover Diego no longer came to the window at night to make love to her through the iron grille, and it was not long before her mother brought home the rumour that he was going to marry the daughter of Pedro Alvarez. Domingo, to divert her, still read plays to her, but the love scenes made her cry so bitterly that he had to stop.

CHAPTER 3

Catalina slept for some hours and was awakened at last by the sound of her mother bustling about in the kitchen. She seized her crutch and hobbled in.

‘Where is Uncle Domingo?’ she asked, for she wanted him to listen to what she so urgently wanted to say.

‘Where do you suppose? At the tavern. But if I know him he’ll be back for supper.’

As a rule, like everyone else, they had their only hot meal of the day at noon, but they had eaten nothing since morning except a hunk of bread spread with garlic that Maria had taken with her, and she knew Domingo would be hungry; so she lit the fire and set about making the soup. Catalina could not wait a minute longer.

‘Mother, the Blessed Virgin has appeared to me.’

‘Yes, dear?’ Maria answered. ‘Clean the carrots for me, will you, and cut them up.’

‘But, mother, listen. The Blessed Virgin appeared to me. She spoke to me.’

‘Don’t be silly, child. I saw you were asleep when I came in and I thought I’d let you sleep on. If you had a nice dream all the better. But now you’re awake you can help me to get the supper ready.’

‘But I wasn’t dreaming. It was before I went to sleep.’

Then she related the extraordinary thing that had happened to her.

Maria Perez had been good-looking in her youth, but now in middle age she had grown stout as do many Spanish women with advancing years. She had known a lot of trouble, two children she had had before Catalina had died, but she had accepted this, as well as her husband’s desertion, as a mortification sent to try her, for she was extremely pious; and being a practical woman, not accustomed to cry over spilt milk, had found solace in hard work, the offices of the church, and the care of her daughter and of her wilful brother Domingo. She listened to Catalina’s story with dismay. It was so circumstantial, with such precise detail, that she would not have been unwilling to credit it if only it hadn’t been incredible. The only possible explanation was that the poor girl’s illness and the loss of her lover had turned her brain. She had been praying in the church and then had sat in the hot sun; it was only too probable that something had gone awry in her head and she had imagined the whole thing with such force that she was convinced of its reality.

‘The son of Don Juan de Valero who has served God best is the Bishop,’ said Catalina when she finished.

‘That is certain,’ said her mother. ‘He is a saint.’

‘Uncle Domingo knew him well when they were both young. He can take me to him.’

‘Be quiet, child, and let me think.’

The Church did not look with favour on persons who claimed to have had communication with Jesus Christ or His Mother, and discouraged these pretensions with all its authority. Some years before a Franciscan friar had caused a great to-do by healing the sick by supernatural means, and so many people had resorted to him that the Holy Office had been obliged to intervene. He was arrested and never heard of again. And through the gossip of the Carmelite Convent for which she did work now and again Maria Perez knew of a nun who asserted that Elias, the founder of the order, appeared to her in her cell and conferred singular favours upon her. The Lady Prioress had forthwith had her whipped until she confessed that she had invented the story to make herself important. If then friars and nuns suffered for making such claims it was only too likely that the Church would take a serious view of Catalina’s story. Maria was frightened.

‘Say nothing to anybody,’ she told Catalina, ‘not even to Uncle Domingo. I will talk to him after supper and he will decide what had better be done. Now in heaven’s name clean the carrots or we shall have no soup to eat.’

Catalina was not satisfied with this, but her mother bade her be quiet and do as she was told.

Presently Domingo came in. He was not drunk, but neither was he sober, and he was in high spirits. He was a man who liked to hear himself talk and, while they had supper, for Catalina’s benefit he held forth loquaciously on the events of the day. This affords a suitable opportunity to tell the reader how it came about that the city was in a turmoil of excitement.

CHAPTER 4

Don Juan Suarez de Valero was an Old Christian, and unlike many of the most noble families in Spain whose sons, before Ferdinand and Isabella united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, had married daughters of rich and powerful Jews, he could trace an ancestry unspotted by misalliance. But his ancestry was his only wealth. He owned a few poor acres a mile from the city near a hamlet called Valero, and it was to distinguish themselves from other persons called Suarez rather than to give themselves importance that he and his immediate forebears used the hamlet’s name as part of their own. He was very poor, and his marriage with the daughter of a gentleman of Castel Rodriguez brought him little to enlarge his circumstances. Doña Violante bore her lord a child every year for ten years, but of these only three, all sons, survived to adolescence. They were named respectively Blasco, Manuel and Martin.

Blasco, the eldest, from his infancy showed signs of unusual intelligence and fortunately of piety as well, and so was destined to the priesthood. He was sent at a suitable age to the seminary of Alcalá de Henares and in due course attended the University. He took his degrees of Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology at so early an age that it was evident he could look forward to high distinction in the secular clergy. Promise of high preferment was made him. But on a sudden, saying that he wished to live out of the world so that he might devote himself entirely to study, prayer and meditation, he announced his intention of entering the monastic order of the Dominicans. His friends sought to dissuade him, since the rule was austere, with a midnight office, perpetual abstinence from meat, frequent disciplines, prolonged fasting and silence; but nothing served and Blasco de Valero became a friar. His gifts were too great to be ignored by his superiors, and when it was discovered that besides a fine presence and great learning he had a voice both powerful and melodious, and a fiery eloquence, he was sent here and there to preach; for St. Dominic had been ordered by Pope Innocent III to preach to the heretics and ever since the Dominicans had been noted as missionaries and preachers. On one occasion he was sent to his old University of Alcalá de Henares. He had by then a considerable reputation and the whole city flocked to hear him. His sermon was sensational. He put forth all his resources to convince the vast congregation of the importance of preserving the faith in its purity and of utterly exterminating the heretics. In tones of thunder he commanded the laity, as they valued their souls and dreaded the rigour of the Holy Office, to report whatever came to their notice that might savour of the sin and crime of heresy, and he impressed upon them in menacing words that it was the religious duty of each one of them to inform against his neighbour, the son against his father, the wife against her husband, for no ties of natural affection could absolve a son of the Church from conniving at an evil which was a danger to the State and an offence to God. The result of the sermon was satisfactory. There were numerous delations and in the end three New Christians, convicted of having cut the fat off their meat and changing their linen on the Sabbath, were burnt; a goodly number were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, with confiscation of their possessions, and many more were scourged or subjected to penalties pecuniary or otherwise.

The friar’s forcible eloquence had made so deep an impression on the authorities of the University that he was shortly afterwards appointed Professor of Theology. He protested his unworthiness and wished to be excused from accepting this responsible position, but his superiors in the order commanded him to undertake it and he was obliged to obey. He acquitted himself of his duties with credit, and his lectures were so popular that though he lectured in the largest hall at the disposal of the University, there was not enough room for all who wanted to listen to him. His reputation grew to great heights and after some years, being then seven and thirty years of age, he was made Inquisitor of the Holy Office in Valencia.

Though still sincerely conscious of his unworthiness he accepted the post without demur. Valencia was a seaport where foreign ships, English, Dutch and French, often put in. Their crews were not seldom Protestants and so were proper objects for the Inquisition to deal with. Moreover they frequently attempted to smuggle in prohibited books, such as translations into Spanish of the Bible and the heretical works of Erasmus. Blasco de Valero saw that he could do much useful work there. But besides this, there were great numbers of Moriscos at Valencia and in the surrounding country; they had been forcibly converted to Christianity, but it was common knowledge that with the great majority their conversion was but skin deep, and they adhered to many of their Moorish customs. They would not eat pork, they wore in their homes clothes which they were forbidden to wear, and they refused to eat animals that had died a natural death. The Inquisition, supported by royal authority, had succeeded in stamping out Judaism, and though the New Christians might still be regarded with suspicion it was becoming more and more rare for the Holy Office to find occasion to prosecute them. But the Moriscos were a different matter. They were industrious, and not only was the agriculture of the country in their hands, but all the trading; for the Spaniards were too idle, too proud and too dissipated to engage in menial pursuits. The consequence was that the Moriscos were growing richer and richer, and since they were exceedingly prolific were increasing in numbers. Many thoughtful persons foresaw the time when the whole wealth of the country would be in their hands and they would outnumber the native population. It was natural to fear that then they would seize power and reduce the shiftless Spaniards to servitude. Somehow it was necessary to get rid of them at all costs and several plans were devised to effect this. One was to turn them over to the Holy Office and bring them to trial for their notorious heresies and then burn so many at the stake that the remainder would be harmless. Another, and less troublesome one, was to deport them; but the government had no wish to increase the power of the Moors across the Straits of Gibraltar by adding several hundred thousand hardy and industrious men to their population; and so the ingenious suggestion was made to send them to sea in unseaworthy ships under the pretence of landing them in Africa and then scuttle the ships so that all would be drowned.

No one was more concerned with this problem than Friar Blasco de Valero, and perhaps the most famous sermon he preached during his sojourn in Alcalá de Henares was that in which he proposed that the Moors should be transported en masse to Newfoundland, the males young and old having been previously castrated, so that in no long time they would all perish. It may be that it was this sermon which caused him to be given the high and honourable post of Inquisitor at the important city of Valencia.

Friar Blasco undertook his new duties with confidence, fortified by fervent prayer, that there was before him the opportunity to do great work to the honour of the Holy Office and the glory of God. He knew that he would have to contend against vested interests. The Moriscos were vassals of the nobles, to whom they paid tribute in money, kind or service, and it was to their advantage to protect them; but the friar was no respecter of persons and he decided that he would allow no one, however great, to interfere with his duties. Before he had been many weeks in Valencia it was reported to him that a powerful nobleman, Don Hernando de Belmonte, Duke of Terranova, had prevented the officials of the Holy Office from arresting some wealthy vassals who contrary to the law wore Moorish dress and used baths, so he sent his armed familiars to seize the Duke, fined him two thousand ducats and sentenced him to perpetual seclusion in a convent. It was a bold stroke to attack at once one so highly placed, and it terrified the most stout-hearted. When, however, it became evident that the Inquisitor was determined to exterminate the Moriscos the authorities of the city went in a body to remonstrate. They pointed out to him that the prosperity of the province depended upon them and it would be ruined if he continued in his course. But he berated them sharply, threatened them with excommunication, and so forced them to submission and humble apology. He succeeded before long by punishment and confiscation in reducing the Moriscos to misery and destitution. His spies were everywhere and it went ill with any Spaniard, lay or ecclesiastic, who laid himself open to suspicion. Since in his sermons he continued to impress upon the people of Valencia the obligation to denounce anyone who in jest or anger, ignorance or carelessness uttered a thoughtless expression, it was not long before everyone in the city lived in fear.

But the Inquisitor was just a man. He was careful to fit the punishment to the crime. For example, though as a theologian he condemned fornication between the unmarried as a mortal sin, it was only if people declared it was not a mortal sin that it concerned him as an inquisitor, and then he sentenced them to a hundred lashes. On the other hand he punished the assertion, equally heretical, that the married state was as good as celibacy with no more than a fine. He was also a merciful man. It was not the death of the heretic that he desired, but the salvation of his soul. On one occasion an Englishman, master of a ship, was arrested and confessed that he was a member of the reformed faith, whereupon his ship was seized and the cargo confiscated; he was tortured till his strength failed, and then consented to become a Catholic; it was with heartfelt satisfaction that the Inquisitor thus was able to condemn him to no more than ten years in the galleys and perpetual imprisonment. Two or three further instances may be given of his merciful disposition. Ever since the death of a penitent as the result of two hundred lashes, he had insisted on the scourging being limited to one hundred. When torture was to be applied on a pregnant woman he postponed its infliction till after her confinement, and it was his tender heart, rather than regard for the law, that made him take the utmost care that torture should cause neither permanent crippling nor broken bones, and if occasionally an accident happened and someone died as the result of its application no one could have more bitterly regretted it.

Friar Blasco’s term of office was highly successful. In the course of ten years he celebrated thirty-seven Autos de Fé at which some six hundred persons were penanced and over seventy burnt either alive or in effigy, thus not only rendering a service to God, but also edifying the people. A less humble man than he might have looked upon the last of these celebrations as the crowning glory of his career, for it was held in honour of Prince Philip, the King’s son. The various ceremonies were conducted so properly and provided the royal prince with so much entertainment that he sent Friar Blasco a present of two hundred ducats with a letter in which he congratulated him on the improving spectacle and exhorted him to continue thus to serve God to the glory of the Holy Office and the advantage of the State. The zeal and piety of the Inquisitor had evidently made a deep impression on him, for when shortly afterwards Philip the Second died and he ascended the throne he lost no time in appointing Blasco de Valero to the bishopric of Segovia.

He accepted this new dignity only after spending a whole night on his knees wrestling with the Lord, and left Valencia amid the lamentation of great and small. He had won the admiration of the highly placed by his zeal, the austerity of his life and his scrupulous honesty; and he was worshipped by the poor for his charity. He received a handsome salary as inquisitor, and the canonry at Malaga to which he had been appointed was accompanied by a considerable income; but he spent every penny on relieving the necessities of the needy. The confiscations of the wealth of convicted heretics and the fines inflicted on penitents brought large sums into the treasury of the Holy Office, and these moneys served to pay the great expenses of the organization, but it was not unusual for the inquisitors to keep considerable amounts for themselves. Even the saintly Torquemada thus accumulated an immense fortune, which he spent on building the monastery of St. Thomas Aquinas at Avila and enlarging that of Santa Cruz at Segovia. But Blasco de Valero never countenanced this practice and left Valencia as poor as when he arrived.

He never wore anything but the humble habit of his order, he never tasted flesh, nor wore linen or used it on his bed, and regularly disciplined himself, on occasion so severely that blood was splashed on the wall. His reputation for sanctity was such that when his habit became so worn that he was obliged to provide himself with a new one people paid his servants money to be given fragments of that which he had discarded so that they could wear them as a charm against the pox great and small. Before his departure several influential persons made so bold as to try to extract from him a promise that when at length the Almighty called him to Himself they should have the privilege of burying his body in the city where he had laboured so fruitfully. They were assured that they could bring enough influence to bear on Rome to obtain if not his canonization at least his beatification, and to have his bones in the Cathedral would be a glory to the city; but the friar, divining his thoughts, sternly refused to commit himself.

He was escorted for three miles beyond the city gates by a great company of ecclesiastical dignitaries, the magistrates and a number of fine gentlemen, and when they parted from him there was not a dry eye in all that distinguished gathering.

CHAPTER 5

It is unnecessary to deal at such length with the other sons of Don Juan de Valero.

The second son, Manuel, was several years younger than his brother and though far from stupid was neither so intelligent nor so industrious. He was more interested in the sports of the field than in the acquisition of learning. He grew into a handsome, stalwart man, with great strength of body and an uncommonly good opinion of himself. He had dash, courage and ambition. He was a great hunter and could ride horses which others found unmanageable. From his earliest youth he had played at bull-fighting with the other lads of the town and when he was old enough never missed a chance to jump into the ring and play the bull. At the age of sixteen he managed to be allowed to fight a bull on horseback, and to the admiration of the public killed it with one thrust of his lance. He had long decided upon a career of arms, for at chat time in Spain, if you did not go into the Church, there was no other way to advance yourself. Though poor, Don Juan de Valero was highly respected, and it chanced that one of the nobles of the city was distantly related to the great Duke of Alva; and so one fine day, with a letter of recommendation in his pocket, young Manuel rode off to seek his fortune. He reached the great man at a favourable moment, for, banished from Court, he was then confined to his Castle of Uzeda. He was taken with the gallant bearing of the youth who sought his favour when he was in disgrace, and when shortly afterwards he was recalled by Philip II to assume command in the war with Portugal he took him in his suite. The Duke defeated Don Antonio, the King, and drove him from his kingdom. He seized a great treasure at Lisbon and gave his soldiers permission to sack the city and its suburbs. Manuel acquitted himself bravely in battle, and later, in the looting, picked up a good many valuable objects which he promptly converted into ready money. But Alva was old and near his death, and since the young man was eager to continue his military career he gave him letters to such of his old captains as had served under him in the Low Countries and who were now under the command of Alexander Farnese.

For twenty years Manuel fought with distinction to regain the Northern Provinces for the King of Spain. He proved himself not only courageous but astute, and he was advanced first by Alexander Farnese and then by the generals who on his death replaced him. He was as unscrupulous as he was intrepid, as ruthless as he was able, and as devout as he was brutal, so that in due course he was given important commands. It had not taken him long to discover that when you serve your country you are unlikely to be rewarded for having deserved well of it unless you ask for what you want. This he had no hesitation in doing, and since by the loot he acquired in captured cities, by the extortion he practised on the merchants of the towns he administered, and by the granting of favours in return for hard cash he amassed considerable sums, he was able eventually to substantiate his claims in a manner that made it hard not to acknowledge them. He received the coveted order of Calatrava and proudly wore its green ribbon. Two years later he was created Count of San Costanzo in the Kingdom of Naples with the right to dispose of the title as he chose. It was the thrifty habit of the Spanish Kings so to reward the deserving, and since they could sell their titles to rich commoners who desired thus to ennoble themselves the Crown was able to provide financially for those that had served it well without expense to the treasury. But the Knight of Calatrava had invested his money judiciously and had no need to do this. He had been wounded several times, the last time so severely that only his strong constitution enabled him to survive. His wound gave him a reasonable excuse to leave the King’s service, and he determined to go home and marry into a family of the old aristocracy of his native town, which with his rank and fortune he had little doubt he could do, and then go to Madrid where he could use his energy and gifts for intrigue to achieve his inordinate ambition. Who knew but what, if he played his cards well, cultivating the right people, he might in the end rise to great heights? He was at this time forty years old, a fine figure of a man, with bold black eyes, a handsome moustache, an air of insolent virility and an agile tongue.

CHAPTER 6

Of the third son, Martin, even less need be said. Every family has its black sheep, and the family of Don Juan de Valero was no exception. Martin, the youngest of the three and the last child that Doña Violante bore her husband, had neither the fiery zeal that had enabled Blasco de Valero to reach eminence in the Church nor the ambition and dexterity that had brought fame and fortune to Don Manuel. He seemed content to devote himself to the cultivation of the few beggarly acres by the produce of which his father and mother kept body and soul together. At that time, owing to the constant wars and the attraction of America for the young and adventurous, there was a shortage of labour in Spain. The Moriscos, who were clever and industrious, had never been numerous in the region, and by then all but a very few had been forced to leave it. Martin was a sad disappointment to Don Juan, and though his wife urged that there was a certain advantage in having a son who was strong, active and willing to put his hand to any sort of work, he continued to chafe.

But a greater blow was in store for him. At twenty-three Martin married, and married beneath him. True, his bride was an Old Christian, the testimony was convincing that for four generations there had been no intermarriage with persons of Jewish or Moorish blood, but her father was a baker. Consuelo was his only child and would inherit whatever he had, but the fact remained that he was a tradesman. Some years passed, and Consuelo had children, and then still another blow befell Don Juan; the baker died; Don Juan heaved a sigh of relief, for now the bakery could be sold and the stigma of this connection with a menial occupation might be lived down. But no sooner was the baker decently buried than Martin informed his parents that he proposed to move into the city and run the shop himself. They could hardly believe their ears. Don Juan stormed, Doña Violante wept. Their son pointed out to them that if they had lived somewhat less meagerly than before it was owing to the dowry Consuelo had brought him; this was now spent; he had four children and there was no reason why he should not have four more; cash was scarce in Spain and he could not expect to get more for the business than would support them all for a few years, and then they would have nothing to look forward to but starvation. He put forward the ridiculous argument that there was nothing more disgraceful in baking bread than in ploughing a barren field or pressing olives.

Martin installed his family over the shop. He got up long before dawn to bake the bread and then rode out to the farm and worked there till dusk. He prospered, for his bread was good, and in a year or two was able to hire a man to take his place on the farm, but he never let a day pass without going to see his parents. He seldom came without bringing them something, and soon they were able to eat meat every day that the Church allowed it. They were getting on in years, and Don Juan could not deny that the presents his son brought were a comfort to his old age. Though there had been some surprise in the city when the son of Don Juan de Valero thus demeaned himself and the boys in the streets called after him mockingly Panadero, Panadero, which means Baker, Baker, his good nature and his unconsciousness that he had done anything odd presently disarmed everyone. He was charitable, and no poor person ever came to his door asking for alms without being sent away with a loaf of new bread. He was pious, went to Mass every Sunday, and confessed regularly four times a year. He was now a hale and hearty man, thirty-four years of age, somewhat corpulent, for he liked good food and good wine, with an open red face and a cheerful, happy look.

‘He’s a good fellow,’ people said of him, ‘not very intelligent and not very cultured, but kind and honest.’

He was pleasant of approach, fond of a joke, and in course of time, when he was able to take things more easily, men of respectability often came to his shop for a chat, and indeed it became a sort of meeting-place where one could see one’s friends and have a talk.

It was fortunate that he had taken upon himself the charge of his parents, since Friar Blasco had never in the twenty years he had been away sent any money to help them, for everything he had went in charity, while Don Manuel never sent them anything since it never occurred to him that anyone could make better use of his money than he could himself. They were thus in their old age entirely dependent on Martin. They were still ashamed of him and could not but regret that he had made such a miserable business of life. It was a constant irritation that he seemed quite content with it. They treated his plebeian wife with the stately courtesy which they felt their own self-respect demanded of them, and grew fond of their grandchildren. But their fondest thoughts went to the two sons who had brought honour and glory to their ancient name.

CHAPTER 7

It is not hard to imagine with what joy Don Juan and Doña Violante looked forward to seeing them after a separation of so many years. The friar had written at rare intervals, and since neither Don Juan nor his son the baker was handy with his pen, or would in any case have trusted himself to write with the elegance due to a learned ecclesiastic, they had got Domingo, Perez to answer his letters. This he had done with complete satisfaction both to them and to himself, for he took pride in the elegance of his style. Don Manuel, on the other hand, had never communicated with them except when he was intriguing to get the order of Calatrava and was obliged to offer proof of his unsullied ancestry. Here again the good offices of Domingo were requisitioned and he prepared a genealogy, duly sworn to by the magistrates of the city, in which he traced the origins of the family, without a single admixture of Jewish blood, to Alphonso VIII, King of Castile, who married Eleanora, daughter of King Henry II of England.

The occasion of the coming of Don Juan’s two sons was not only the return of Don Manuel, after his long service in the wars, and the elevation of Friar Blasco to the episcopacy, but also the celebrations of their parents’ golden wedding. The two brothers arranged to meet at a town some twenty miles from the city and make their solemn entry together. It was pleasing to Don Juan to think that the grandeur of the reception arranged for them would in some measure counterbalance the long disgrace of poor Martin’s degradation. It was of course impossible for him to house his two sons and their suite in his tumble-down grange, and it was arranged that the Bishop should be lodged in the Dominican convent, while the steward of the Duke of Castel Rodriguez, his master being absent in Madrid, offered Don Manuel an apartment in the ducal palace.

The great day arrived. The noblemen of the city rode forth on their horses, the magistrates and the clergy on mules; Don Juan and Doña Violante with Martin and his family followed in a carriage lent them by a person of rank; and presently the anxiously-expected visitors were seen making their way along the dusty, winding road. The Bishop in his Dominican habit, on a mule, rode side by side with his brother on a charger. Don Manuel wore a magnificent suit of armour inlaid with gold. After them came the Bishop’s two secretaries, members of his own order, and his servants, and then the captain’s in sumptuous livery. Having greeted the important personages who had come to meet them and listened to some eloquent speeches, the Bishop asked for his father and mother. They had been hanging back modestly, but now came forward. Doña Violante was about to kneel and kiss the episcopal ring, but the Bishop, to the admiration of the onlookers, prevented her and taking her in his arms kissed her on both cheeks. She began to weep and many of those present were so affected that tears coursed down their cheeks. He kissed his father and then, while the two old people turned to their second son, he asked for Martin.

‘El panadero,’ someone called. ‘The baker.’

Martin made his way through the crowd with his wife and children. They were all in their best clothes, and the jolly, red-faced, corpulent man looked well enough. The Bishop greeted him affectionately, Don Manuel with a certain condescension, and Consuelo and the children knelt on the ground and kissed the Bishop’s ring. He graciously congratulated his brother on the number and healthy appearance of his offspring. In their letters to him Don Juan and Doña Violante had told him of their youngest son’s marriage and of the children as they were born, but had never dared to inform him that he had become a tradesman. They watched the meeting with apprehension. They knew the truth would have to come out soon, but were anxious that nothing should happen to mar the joyful occasion. After much disputing it had been arranged who should ride on the right of the two distinguished sons of the city and who on the left, and though a good deal of ill feeling remained, the procession was formed and the cavalcade made an imposing entry into the city. As they passed through the gate the church bells were set ringing, crackers were exploded, trumpeters blew their trumpets and drummers beat their drums. The streets were crowded and there was a great shouting and a clapping of hands as they passed through on their way to the Collegiate Church where a Te Deum was to be sung.

The service was followed by a banquet, and the Bishop’s hosts noticed that though it was a Feast Day he neither ate meat nor drank wine. When it was over he intimated his desire to be for a short time alone with his immediate family, so Martin went to fetch his mother, who had gone with his wife and the children to the baker’s home. When he returned he found his brother Blasco alone with his father, but he had only just got into the room with Doña Violante when Don Manuel strode in. His brows were knit, his eyes black with anger.

‘Brother,’ he said, addressing the Bishop, ‘do you know that this Martin, son of a gentleman of ancient lineage, is a pastry-cook?’

Don Juan and his wife started, but the Bishop merely smiled.

‘Not a pastry-cook, brother. A baker.’

‘Do you mean to say that you knew?’

‘I have known it for years. Though my sacred duties prevented me from taking the care of my parents that I wished, I have watched over them from afar and have constantly remembered them in my prayers. The prior of our order in this city has kept me informed of their condition.’

‘Then how could you let him bring such shame upon our family?’

‘Our brother Martin is a virtuous and a pious man. He is a respected citizen and charitable to the poor. He has taken good care of our parents in their old age. I cannot blame him for taking a step which was forced upon him by circumstances.’

‘I am a soldier, brother, and I put my honour before my life. This has ruined my plans.’

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘How do you know?’ blustered Don Manuel. ‘You do not know what my plans are.’

The shadow of a smile lightened for an instant the Bishop’s austere features.

‘You cannot be very worldly-wise, brother,’ he replied, ‘if you are unaware that there is little of our personal affairs that remains hidden from our servants. You forget that we spent two days under the same roof on our way hither. It has reached my ears that you did not come here only to fulfil a filial duty, but also to choose a wife from among the nobility of the city. Notwithstanding the avocation which our brother has chosen to follow, with the title which His Majesty has been pleased to grant you and the money you have won in his service I think you will have no difficulty in achieving your object.’

Meanwhile Martin had listened without any sign that he was in the least ashamed. There was something very like a grin on his good-looking face.

‘Do not forget, Manuel,’ he said now, ‘that Domingo Perez has traced our descent from a King of Castile and a King of England. That should assuredly carry weight with the family whom you are proposing to honour by taking their daughter to your wife. Domingo told me that one of the Kings of England made cakes, so perhaps there is no great disgrace in a descendant of kings making bread, especially as it is by common consent the best bread in the city.’

‘Who is this Domingo Perez?’ the soldier asked sulkily.

That was not a very easy question to answer, but Martin did his best.

‘A man of learning and a poet.’

‘I remember him,’ said the Bishop. ‘We were at the seminary together.’

Don Manuel tossed his head impatiently and turned to his father.

‘Why did you allow him thus to disgrace us?’

‘I did not approve of it. I did everything in my power to prevent it.’

Don Manuel now turned sternly on his younger brother.

‘And you dared to go counter to your father’s wishes? They should have been a command to you. Give me one reason, only one, why, flinging decency to the winds, you demeaned yourself by becoming a baker.’

‘Hunger.’

The world seemed to crash to the floor like a pile of masonry. Don Manuel smothered an exclamation of angry disgust. Once more a faint smile trembled on the Bishop’s lips. Even saints retain some small measure of humanity, and during the two days they had spent together the Bishop had come to the conclusion that he had little love for his military brother. He blamed himself for it, but all his Christian charity was insufficient to overcome his feeling that Don Manuel was a coarse, brutal and domineering fellow.

Fortunately this family reunion was interrupted by persons who came in to tell them it was time to go to the bull-fight. The two brothers were placed in seats of honour. The municipality had spent enough money to get good bulls and the fight was worthy of the occasion. When it was over the Bishop with his attending friars retired to the Dominican convent and Don Manuel to the quarters that had been prepared for him. The people of the city wandered back to their homes, or to the taverns, to talk about the exciting day, and Domingo Perez eventually found his way back to his sister’s house.

CHAPTER 8

After supper, as was his habit, Domingo went upstairs to his room. In a little while Maria followed him. From the floor below she could hear him reading in loud and dramatic tones, and when she knocked at the door he did not answer. She went in. It was a small bare chamber containing nothing but a bed, a chest for his clothes, a table and a chair. There was a shelf filled with books, and books were lying on the table, on the floor, on the chest. The bed was unmade and on it he had flung his cassock. He was in shirt and breeches. The table was littered with papers and there was a great pile of manuscripts in one corner of the room. Maria sighed when she saw the untidiness which she had never been able to cope with. He took no notice of her entrance, but went on declaiming the speeches of a play.

‘Domingo, I want to speak to you,’ she said.

‘Don’t interrupt, woman. Listen to the glorious verses of the greatest genius of our day.’

He ranted on. Maria stamped her foot.

‘Put down that book, Domingo. I have something very important to say to you.’

‘Go away. What can you have to say to me that is more important than the divine inspiration of the phœnix of the age, the incomparable Lope de Vega?’

‘I will not go till you listen to me.’

Domingo threw down his book in vexation.

‘Then say what you have to say, say it quickly and begone.’

She told him then Catalina’s story, how the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her and told her that the Bishop, Don Juan’s son, had the power to cure her of her infirmity.

‘It was a dream, my poor Maria,’ he said when she had finished.

‘That is what I told her. She declared that she was wide awake. I cannot persuade her otherwise.’

Domingo was disturbed.

‘I will come downstairs with you and she shall tell me the story herself.’

For the second time Catalina narrated the incident. Domingo had but to look at her to be certain that she firmly believed every word she said.

‘What makes you so sure you were not asleep, child?’

‘How could I have fallen asleep at that hour of the morning? I had only just come out of the church. I cried, and when I came home my handkerchief was wet with my tears; could I have dried my eyes in my sleep? I heard the bells ringing when the Bishop and Don Manuel entered the city. I heard the trumpets and the drums and the shouts of the people.’

‘Satan has many wiles to beguile the unwary. Even Mother Teresa de Jesus, the nun who founded all those covents, was for long afraid that the visions she had were the work of the devil.’

‘Could a demon assume the mildness and the loving kindness of Our Lady when she spoke to me?’

‘The devil is a good actor,’ smiled Domingo. ‘When Lope de Rueda got impatient with the members of his troupe he would say that if he could only get the devil to play for him he would willingly give him in payment the souls of all his company. But listen, dear heart, we know that certain pious persons have received the grace of seeing with their own eyes the persons of Our Blessed Lord and His Virgin Mother, but they have received this grace as the reward of prayer, fasting, mortification and a life devoted to the service of God. What have you done to deserve a favour that others are accorded only as the result of long years of self-immolation?’

‘Nothing,’ said Catalina. ‘But I am poor and unhappy, I prayed the Blessed Virgin to succour me, and she took pity on me.’

Domingo was silent for a while. Catalina was determined and self-willed, and he was afraid. She had no notion of the risks she was incurring.

‘Our Holy Church does not regard with indulgence individuals who claim to have communications with heaven. The country is infested with persons who declare that they have been granted supernatural privileges. Some are poor deluded creatures who honestly believe what they say; many are impostors who make these pretensions either to gain notoriety or to make money. The Holy Office rightly concerns itself with them, for they cause disturbance among the ignorant and often lead them into heresy. Some the Holy Office imprisons, some it scourges, some it sends to the galleys and others to the stake. I beseech you as you love us not to divulge a word of what you have told us.’

‘But, uncle, dear uncle, all my happiness is at stake. Everyone knows that there is no more saintly man in the kingdom than the Bishop. It is common knowledge that even pieces of his habit have a miraculous power. How can I remain silent when the Blessed Mother of God herself told me that he can cure me of the infirmity that has robbed me of the love of my Diego?’

‘It is not only you that are concerned. If the Holy Office takes it upon itself to make an inquiry, it may well be that the case against me will be re-opened, for the Holy Office has a long memory, and if we are put into the prison of the Inquisition this house will be sold to pay for the cost of our maintenance and your mother will be thrown into the street to beg her bread. Promise me at least that you will say nothing till we have had time to reflect.’

There was so great a dismay, so deep an anxiety, in Domingo’s expression that Catalina yielded.

‘Yes, I will promise you that.’

‘You are a good girl. Now let your mother put you to bed, for we are all weary after the events of the day.’

He kissed her and left the two women to themselves, but from the stairs he called his sister. She went out.

‘Give her a purge,’ he whispered. ‘If she has a good movement of the bowels she will be more reasonable, and we can persuade her tomorrow that the whole thing was no more than a very unfortunate dream.’

CHAPTER 9

But the purge had no effect – at least not the desired one. Catalina continued to assert that she had seen the Blessed Virgin with her own eyes and had spoken with her. She described her attire with such accuracy that Maria Perez was filled with amazement. Now it happened that the next day was a Friday and Maria went to confession. She had had the same confessor, Father Vergara, for many years and had confidence both in his benevolence and his wisdom. So after she had received absolution she told him Catalina’s strange story and much of what Domingo had said.

‘Your brother has behaved with a discretion and good sense the more admirable because these qualities could hardly be expected in him. This is a matter that must be treated with caution. We must do nothing in haste. There must be no scandal and you must order your daughter not to speak to anyone of this thing. I will reflect upon it and if needful consult my superior.’

Maria’s confessor was also her daughter’s, and he knew them both as only a confessor can know his penitents. He knew that they were simple, honest, guileless and God-fearing. Even Domingo had not been able to corrupt their innocence or impair their candour. Catalina was a sensible girl, with a good head on her shoulders, and if she had not borne her injury with resignation, she had certainly borne it with courage. She was too ingenuous to invent such a story for any ulterior motive and, he was convinced, of too material a temper to imagine a spiritual event. Father Vergara was a Dominican and it was in his convent that the Bishop and his suite were lodging. He was a simple man of no great learning and Maria’s story of her daughter’s adventure troubled him so much that he felt bound to report it to his prior. The prior after some thought came to the conclusion that the Bishop should be informed of it, so he sent a novice to ask if it would be convenient for him to see him and Father Vergara on a matter that might be of importance. In a little while the novice came back to say that the Bishop would be pleased to receive them.

He had been given the most commodious cell in the convent. It was separated by a double archway with a supporting column into two parts, one of which served as a sleeping apartment and the other as an oratory. When the prior and Father Vergara entered they found the Bishop dictating letters to one of his secretaries. The prior explained on what errand they had come and then left Father Vergara to repeat exactly what his penitent had told him. The friar started by telling the Bishop how good and pious the two women were, how blameless their lives, then went on to describe the accident that had caused the unfortunate Catalina to lose the use of her leg and the attentions of her lover, and finished by repeating the story of how the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her and told her that the Bishop could cure her of her infirmity. As an afterthought he added that Domingo Perez, her uncle, had exacted a promise from her to keep the episode a secret until the matter had been well considered. By the time he had come to an end the Bishop’s face had assumed an expression of such severity that the friar, his voice faltering, sweated at every pore. Silence fell.

‘I know this Domingo,’ said the Bishop at length. ‘He is a man of evil life and one with whom no one who values his salvation should associate. But he is not a fool. When he exacted a promise of secrecy from his niece he acted with prudence. You are the child’s confessor, Father?’ The friar bowed. ‘You would be well advised to refuse to give her absolution until she promises that she will not speak of this affair to anybody.’

The poor friar stared at the Bishop in confusion. Was he not by common consent a saint? Father Vergara thought he would have welcomed the opportunity to exercise his miraculous powers and thereby not only glorify God, but bring many sinners to repentance. The Bishop’s eyes were cold. You might have thought that he was controlling his anger only by an effort of will.

‘And now if you will permit me I will go on with my work,’ he said, and then turning to the secretary: ‘Read over the last sentence I dictated.’

The two friars sidled away without another word.

‘Why is he vexed?’ asked Father Vergara.

‘We ought not to have spoken to him about it. I am to blame. We have offended his humility. He does not know how great a saint he is and does not look upon himself as worthy to perform a miracle.’

This seemed a very reasonable explanation and since it only redounded to the Bishop’s credit Father Vergara made haste to tell his brother friars all about it. Soon the convent was buzzing with excitement. Some praised the Bishop’s modesty, others regretted that he had not taken occasion to do something that would so greatly add to his renown and to the credit of the order.

Meanwhile, however, the story reached another quarter. The church in which Catalina had prayed and from which, if she was to be believed, the Blessed Virgin had come was attached, as has been mentioned, to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation. The convent was richly endowed and for a good many years the Lady Prioress had been in the habit of giving Maria Perez work to do, partly from charity and partly because she was very skilful in the difficult and laborious handicraft she exercised. Maria had thus come to be on friendly terms with many of the nuns. Since it was a convent of the mitigated order they enjoyed a good deal of freedom and it was not seldom that one of them came to her house for a meal and a talk. Two or three days after Maria’s confession she had occasion to go to the convent and after doing her errand began to chat with the nun who was her most intimate friend. Swearing her to secrecy she told her of her daughter’s strange experience. The nuns were great gossips and such a story was bound to be an event in the pious but monotonous routine of their lives, so that within twenty-four hours every inmate of the convent heard it and eventually it reached the ears of the Lady Prioress. Since this lady plays a not unimportant role in this narrative it is necessary here, even at the risk of boring the reader, to tell her history.

CHAPTER 10

Beatriz Henriquez y Braganza, in religion Beatriz de San Domingo, was the only daughter of the Duke of Castel Rodriguez, a grandee of Spain and a Knight of the Golden Fleece. He had great wealth and great power. He managed to retain the confidence of the morose and distrustful Philip II and filled with distinction important positions in Spain and Italy. He had vast estates in both countries, and though his duties forced him to sojourn here and there he loved nothing better than to dwell with his wife and children, for he had three sons and a daughter, in his native city with its salubrious air and noble prospects. It was from there his race had sprung, and it was through the successful repulse by one of his ancestors of the Moors who were besieging the city that his family had first become eminent. There none was greater than the Duke of Castel Rodriguez and he lived in a state that was almost royal. Throughout its history the members of his family had made great alliances, so that he was related to all the grandest nobles in Spain. When Beatriz, his daughter, was thirteen he looked round to find a suitable mate for her and after reviewing various possible candidates settled on the only son of the Duke of Antequera who was descended, on the wrong side of the blanket, from Ferdinand of Aragon. The Duke of Castel Rodriguez was prepared to give his daughter a magnificent dowry and so the matter was arranged without difficulty. The young people were betrothed, but since the boy was only fifteen it was decided that the marriage should not take place till he had reached a suitable age. Beatriz was allowed to see her future husband in the presence of the parents on both sides, their uncles and aunts and other more distant relatives. He was a squat little boy, no taller than herself, with a mass of coarse black hair, a snub nose and a sulky mouth. She took an instant dislike to him, but she knew it was useless to protest and so contented herself with making faces at him. He responded by putting out his tongue at her.

After the betrothal the Duke sent her to finish her education at the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Avila where his sister was prioress. She enjoyed herself. There were other girls, daughters of noblemen, in the same situation as herself, and a number of ladies who for one reason or another boarded in the convent, but were not subject to its discipline. The mitigated rule of the Carmelites was not strict and though some of the nuns devoted themselves to prayer and contemplation, many of them, while not neglecting their duties, went out and about to see their friends and sometimes stayed away for weeks at a time. The parlour was always filled with callers, male and female, so that there was a cheerful social life; matches were made, the state of the wars discussed, the gossip of the city exchanged. It was a peaceful, harmless existence, with modest diversions, and to the nuns a not too strenuous way to attain eternal happiness.

At the age of sixteen Beatriz was taken away from the convent and went down with her mother, and a host of attendants, to Castel Rodriguez. The Duchess was in poor health and had been ordered by the doctors to live in a climate less severe than that of Madrid. The Duke, occupied with affairs of state, unwillingly remained behind. The time was approaching when the marriage of Beatriz might take place, and her parents thought it well that she should learn something of the conduct of a great establishment. So for some months the Duchess devoted herself to teaching her daughter the social observations which she could not be expected to have learnt in the convent of the Carmelite nuns. Beatriz had grown to be a tall girl of great beauty, with a clear skin unblemished by smallpox, features of classical regularity and a lithe, slender figure. The Spaniards admired a greater opulence of form than she then possessed and some of the ladies who came to pay court to the Duchess lamented her thinness, but the proud mother promised them that marriage would soon remedy that defect.

Beatriz at that age was gay, passionately fond of dancing and aglow with animal spirits. She was mischievous and wilful. She was even then of an imperious temper, for she had been spoilt and had very much her own way all her life, and from her earliest years had realized that she was born to great station and that the rest of the world must submit to her caprice. Her confessor, not a little disturbed at this desire for domination, spoke to her mother of it, but the Duchess was somewhat cool toward his admonition.

‘My daughter was born to rule, Father,’ said she. ‘You cannot expect from her the servility of a laundress. If there is an excess of pride in her disposition her husband, if he has character, will doubtless modify it, and if he has not, then her sense of what is due to her will be of assistance to him.’

At the convent Beatriz had taken a great fancy to the novels of chivalry which some of the lady boarders were fond of, and though not permitted to read them by the nun who had charge of the pupils she managed now and then to snatch a glance at one or other of those interminable romances. On coming to Castel Rodriguez she found several in the palace and, with her mother often indisposed, her duenna complacent, she devoured them with avidity. Her young imagination was inflamed and she looked forward with distaste to her inevitable marriage with the boy whom she still saw as a scrubby, black-browed and uncouth urchin. She was well aware of her beauty and at High Mass with her mother missed none of the admiring glances that the young blades of the city cast on her. They would gather on the steps of the church to see her come out, and though she walked with eyes modestly cast down, the Duchess by her side, followed by two footmen in livery carrying the velvet pillows on which they had knelt, she was conscious of the excitement she caused and her ears caught the praises that the young men in the Spanish manner uttered as she passed. Though she never looked at them she knew them all by sight and it was not long before she found out their names, what families they belonged to, and in fact all there was to know about them. Once or twice the more venturesome serenaded her, but the Duchess immediately sent out her servants to drive them away. Once she found a letter on her pillow. She guessed that one of her maids had been bribed to place it there. She opened it and read it twice. Then she tore it into little pieces and burnt it in the flame of her candles. It was the first and only love letter she ever had in her life. It was unsigned and she could not tell from whom it came.

Owing to her bad health the Duchess thought it enough to go to Mass on Sundays and on feast days, but Beatriz went every morning with her duenna. It was very early and not many people attended, but there was a young seminarist who never failed. He was tall and thin, with decided features and dark passionate eyes. Sometimes, going on an errand of mercy with the duenna, she passed him in the street.

‘Who is that?’ asked Beatriz one day when she saw him slowly walking towards them reading a book.

‘That? Nobody. The eldest son of Juan Suarez de Valero. Hidalguía de Gutierra.’

That may be translated as gutter nobility, and was the scornful term applied to gentlemen by birth who had not the means to live according to their station. The duenna, a widow and vaguely related to the Duke, was proud, devout, censorious and penniless. She had lived at Castel Rodriguez all her life till, when Beatriz left the convent, the Duke had chosen her to attend his daughter. She knew all about everyone in the city, and though so pious was not above a tendency to speak evil of her neighbours.

‘What is he doing here at this time of year?’ Beatriz inquired.

The duenna shrugged her thin shoulders.

‘He fell ill at the seminary from overwork and his life was despaired of, so he was sent home to regain his health, which through the mercy of God he has done. He is said to be very talented. I presume that his parents hope that through the influence of the Duke your father he will obtain a benefice.’

Beatriz said no more.

Then for no reason that the doctors could discover she lost her appetite and her high spirits. She lost her fresh colour and grew pale. She was listless and would often be found bathed in tears. She, whose gaiety, charming wilfulness and irresponsibility had given life to that grim, magnificent palace, now was mopish and dejected. The Duchess was at her wits’ end, and fearing that the child was going into a decline wrote to her husband to ask him to visit them so that they might consider what was best to do. He came and was shocked at the change in his daughter. She had grown thinner than ever and there were dark smudges under her eyes. They came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to get her married at once, but when that was proposed to Beatriz she was seized with shrieking hysterics so that they were more alarmed than ever and for the time dropped the subject. They dosed her with medicine, fed her with asses’ milk and ox-blood, but though she obediently swallowed everything they gave her nothing served. She remained wan and despondent. They did what they could to distract her. They hired musicians to play for her; they took her to a religious play in the Collegiate Church; they took her to bull-fights; she continued to fail. The duenna had become greatly attached to her charge, and since Beatriz no longer cared to read the romances which had been her greatest entertainment, she knew no other way to amuse the sick girl than by telling her the gossip of the city. Beatriz listened politely, but without interest. On one occasion she happened to mention that the eldest son of Juan Suarez de Valero had entered the Dominican order. She went on chatting away about one person and another till suddenly Beatriz fainted. She called for help and Beatriz was put to bed.

A day or two later, when she was better, she asked permission to go to confession. She had for several weeks refused to go, saying she did not feel well enough, and the Duchess’s confessor, who was also hers, had agreed that it was better not to insist. Now, however, both her parents tried to dissuade her, but she was so urgent, she cried so bitterly, that at length they yielded; so the great carriage, used only on state occasions, was brought out, and accompanied by the duenna she went to the Dominican church. When she returned she looked more like her old self than she had looked for many weeks. There was a faint flush on her pale cheeks and her fine eyes shone with a new light. She knelt at her father’s feet and asked his permission to enter religion. This was a great shock to him, not only because he did not want to lose his only daughter to the Church, but because he was unwilling to forgo the important alliance which he had planned; he was, however, a kind and a devout man, and he answered without harshness that it was a manner not to be undertaken lightly, and in any case out of the question while she was in such poor health. She told him then that she had spoken of it with her confessor and that the scheme had his full approval.

‘Father Garcia is no doubt a very worthy and a very pious person,’ said the Duke, with something of a frown, ‘but his profession has perhaps prevented him from knowing how great are the responsibilities attached to noble birth and high rank. I will talk to him tomorrow.’

So next day the friar was summoned to the ducal palace and ushered into the presence of the Duke and Duchess. They knew of course that he would not reveal anything that Beatriz had said to him in the confessional, and they did not attempt to find out whether she had given him any reason for taking a step which was so unwelcome to them; but they told him that though she had always followed the observances of the Church she had been light-hearted, fond of every kind of amusement and had never shown any inclination to the life of a religious. They told him of the great marriage that had been arranged for her and the inconvenience it would be, the ill feeling it might cause, if it were broken off; and finally, with all due respect to his habit, they suggested that it was unwise of him to approve of her wish when it was so obviously due to her mysterious illness. She was young and her constitution was sound; there was no reason to suppose that when she regained her health she would be of the same mind. They found the Dominican strangely obstinate. he thought that Beatriz’s desire was too strong to be opposed, and that her vocation was real; he went so far as to tell these great personages that they had no right to prevent their daughter from taking a step that would bring her peace in this world and happiness in the next. This was the first of many discussions. Beatriz remained firm in her determination and her confessor supported her desire with every persuasive argument at his command. At last the Duke agreed that if at the end of three months she still wished to enter a convent he would give his consent.

From then on she grew better. Three months passed, and she joined the community of the Carmelites of Avila as a novice. Arrayed in all her finery of satin and velvet, wearing her jewels, she was accompanied to the convent by her family and a number of the noblest cavaliers of the city. At the door she bade them all a gay farewell and was admitted by the portress.

But the Duke had made plans of his own to deal with the situation. He decided for his own honour and to the glory of God to found a convent at Castel Rodriguez to which his daughter could come as soon as she had finished her novitiate and where in due course she would be prioress. He owned property in the city and he chose a site just within the wall which was suitable to his purpose. There he built a handsome church, a cloister, and suitable edifices for conventual life, and laid out a garden. He employed the best architect he could find, the best sculptors, the best painters, and when everything was ready Beatriz, now known as Doña Beatriz de Santo Domingo, came to stay at the palace, with several nuns from Avila who had been chosen for their virtue, intelligence and social consequence. The Duke had decided that no nun should be eligible unless she were of noble birth. A prioress was chosen with the understanding that as soon as Beatriz de Santo Domingo was of a suitable age to take her place she should retire. The duenna, on the Duke’s somewhat urgent persuasion, had entered a convent at Castel Rodriguez at the same time as Beatriz had gone to Avila, and was now ready to join her old charge. Mass was said by Father Garcia, the Blessed Sacrament was enthroned, and the nuns took up their abode in the new foundation.

At the time with which this narrative is concerned Doña Beatriz de San Domingo had been prioress for many years. She had won the respect of the citizens of Castel Rodriguez and the admiration, if not the love, of her nuns. She never forgot her great rank, but neither did she forget that her daughters were of noble birth. In the refectory they sat in their proper order of precedence, but when, as sometimes happened, there were disputes on this point Doña Beatriz dealt with them firmly. She was a strict disciplinarian and however well born a nun might be she did not hesitate to have her whipped if her orders were disobeyed. But so long as her authority was unquestioned she was affable and even indulgent. The convent was under the mitigated rule of Pope Eugenius IV, and provided that the nuns performed their religious duties she saw no reason to deprive them of the privileges they had been thus accorded. They were allowed to visit their friends in the city, and indeed, if the reason were good, to go and stay with their relations in other places for quite long periods. Many visitors, both lay and clerical, came to the convent; several ladies, as at Avila, lived there for their pleasure; so that there was a good deal of agreeable intercourse. Silence was only obligatory from Compline until Prime. Lay sisters did the menial work in order to give the nuns more time for their devotions and for occupations of more honour. But with all this liberty and with these temptations to worldliness no breath of scandal had ever tarnished the good name of these virtuous women. The reputation of the community was so great that there were more applicants for admission than the prioress could do with, so that she was able to be very particular in her examination of candidates.

She was a busy woman. Besides her religious duties she had to supervise the economy of the convent and keep an eye on the behaviour of the nuns, and on their health, bodily and spiritual; the foundation had been richly endowed both with houses in the city and with lands, and she had to deal with the factors who collected the rents and with the farmers who farmed the lands. She visited them frequently to see that everything was well and that the crops were in good condition. Since the rule allowed her to own private property the Duke had turned over to her several houses and a handsome estate, and on his death she had inherited much more. She managed it to such advantage that she was able to give away every year a considerable sum in charity. What remained over she spent on beautifying the church, the refectory and the parlour, and on building oratories in the garden to which the nuns could retire for meditation. The church was magnificent. The vessels for the sacred offices were of pure gold and the monstrance was studded with jewels. The paintings over the various altars were heavily framed in gilt wood elaborately carved, and the images of the Saviour and of the Blessed Virgin had great cloaks of velvet, richly embroidered with gold (by Maria Perez), and their crowns blazed with stones, precious and semiprecious.

To celebrate the twentieth year of her profession Doña Beatriz built a chapel to St. Dominic, for whom she had a special cult, and hearing from one of the sisters, a native of Toledo, that there was a Greek there who painted pictures that wonderfully exalted the devotion of the worshipper, she wrote to her brother, the present Duke, to order one for an altarpiece. Being a businesslike woman she gave him the exact dimensions. But her brother wrote back to tell her that the King had ordered from that very Greek a picture of St. Maurice and the Theban legion for his new church at the Escorial, but when it was delivered was so dissatisfied that he would not have it placed. In these circumstances the Duke thought it would be indiscreet of her to give that painter a commission, and so sent her as a gift a picture by Lodovico Caracci, an artist celebrated in Italy, which by a happy chance was of precisely the right size.

The late Duke, her father, when constructing the convent had arranged an apartment for her to occupy when she was lady prioress which was as elegant as was fitting to the office and her rank. There was a cell on one floor to which no one was admitted but the lay sister whose business it was to keep it clean and in order, and from it a small stair-way led to an oratory on the floor above. Here she performed her private devotions, attended to affairs and received visitors. It was severe, but stately. Above the little altar at which she prayed was a great crucifix with a figure of Christ, carved in wood, almost life-size and painted with great realism; while over the table at which she worked was a picture by a Catalan painter of the Virgin in glory. Doña Beatriz at this time was between forty and fifty, a tall, gaunt, pale woman, with hardly a line on her face, and great sombre eyes. Age had refined her features and thinned her lips so that she had the calm and severe beauty of a knight’s lady on a Gothic tomb. She held herself very erect. There was something imperious in her air which suggested that she looked upon no one as her superior and few as her equals. She had a grim, even a sardonic sense of humour, and though she often smiled it was with a sort of grave indulgence; when she laughed, which was seldom, you had the feeling that it was with pain.

Such then was the woman to whose ears it came that the Blessed Virgin had appeared to Catalina Perez on the steps of the Carmelite church.

CHAPTER 11

Doña Beatriz was not only a fine organizer with a good head for business, but also a highly intelligent and level-headed woman. She had always discouraged visions, raptures and special graces among her nuns. She did not allow them to indulge in excessive austerity or in mortifications other than the Rule provided for; nothing escaped her notice, and when one of them showed signs of a religiosity that the Lady Prioress thought excessive she was promptly purged, forbidden to fast, and if that did not serve sent away to pass a few pleasant weeks with friends or relations. The strictness of Doña Beatriz in this respect was caused by her recollection of the trouble and scandal that had been caused at the Convent of the Incarnation at Avila by a nun who asserted that she had seen Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin and various saints and had received special graces from them. The Prioress did not reject the possibility of such occurrences since it was certain that some saints had been the recipients of similar favours, but she could not bring herself to believe that the nun of Avila, Teresa de Cepeda, with whom she had herself often spoken when she was a pupil at the convent, was anything but the hysterical and deluded victim of a disordered fancy.

It was highly improbable that there was anything in Catalina’s queer story, but since the nuns were so excited about it that they could talk of nothing else, Doña Beatriz thought it advisable to send for the young woman and get it from her own lips. She called one of her nuns and told her to fetch the girl. In a little while the nun came back and informed her that Catalina was dutifully prepared to obey the Reverend Mother’s order, but her confessor had forbidden her to repeat her story to anyone. Doña Beatriz, unused to being crossed, frowned; and when she frowned everyone in the convent trembled.

‘Her mother is here, Your Reverence,’ said the nun, catching her breath.

‘What should I want with her?’

‘She had the story from the girl’s own lips immediately after Our Lady appeared to her. The Father did not think to forbid her to speak of it.’

A grim smile appeared on the Prioress’s pallid lips.

‘A worthy, but not a far-seeing man. You did well, my daughter. I will see the woman.’

Maria Perez was ushered into the oratory. She had often seen the Prioress, but had never spoken to her, and she was flustered. Doña Beatriz sat in a high chair, with a leather seat and a leather back, the top of which was decorated with acanthus leaves in gilt wood. Maria Perez could not imagine that a queen could look more remote, dignified and proud. She knelt and kissed the thin white hand that was offered her. Then, bidden to tell what she had come to say, she repeated word for word what Catalina had told her. When she had finished the Prioress gave a slight inclination of her distinguished head.

‘You may go.’

For some time she pondered. Then she sat down at the table and wrote a letter in which she begged the Bishop of Segovia to do her the honour of coming to see her since she wished to speak to him on a matter that seemed to have some importance. She sent the letter and within an hour received a reply. The Bishop with equal formality said that he would be pleased to obey the command of the Reverend Mother and would visit the convent on the following day.

The nuns were in a turmoil when they learnt that this eminent and saintly person was expected, and they instantly jumped to the right conclusion that his visit had to do with the miraculous appearance of the Blessed Virgin on the steps of their own beautiful church. He came in the afternoon, after the siesta which the nuns took in the heat of summer, accompanied by two friars who were his secretaries, and was received by the sub-prioress in the parlour. The nuns, much to their chagrin, had been told to keep to their cells. After the sub-prioress had kissed his ring she said that she would lead him to the Lady Prioress. The two friars started to go with him.

‘The Reverend Mother desires to speak with your lordship in private,’ she said humbly.

The Bishop hesitated for a second and then slightly inclined his head in assent. The friars fell back and the Bishop followed the nun through cool white passages and up a flight of stairs till he came to the oratory. She opened the door and fell back to allow him to enter. He went in. Doña Beatriz rose to meet him and falling to her knees kissed the episcopal ring; then she motioned him to a chair and sat down.

‘I was hoping your lordship would see fit to visit this convent,’ she said, ‘but since you did not come I ventured to invite you.’

‘My teacher of theology at Salamanca told me to have as little to do with women as possible, to be polite to them, but to keep them at a distance.’

She did not utter that tart reply that was at the tip of her tongue, but instead looked at him intently. He cast his eyes down and waited. She was in no hurry to speak. It was nearly thirty years since she had last seen him, and these were the first words they had ever exchanged. His habit was old and patched. His head was shaven except for a ring of black hair, only just touched with grey, that represented the Crown of Thorns. His temples were hollow, his cheeks sunken, his face, deeply lined, bore the mark of suffering; only the eyes, luminous with a strange light, darkly passionate, remained to remind her of the young seminarist she had known so long ago – known and loved so madly.

It had begun as a frolic. She had noticed him when first he served the Mass, as on occasion he did, at the church she attended with her duenna. He was thin even then, his hair was black and thick, for he wore only the tonsure of minor orders, his features were clean cut and there was a singular grace in his bearing. He looked like one of those saints who have received the call in their boyhood, so that they become an object of veneration to all, and die in youth and beauty. When he was not serving the Mass he knelt in the small chapel among the few who attended it at that early hour. He was attentive to his devotions and his eyes never left the altar. Beatriz in those days was light-hearted and full of fun. She knew the devastating power of her splendid eyes. She thought it would be a merry prank to make the serious young seminarist conscious of her, and she fixed him with her gaze, willing him with all her might to look at her. For days she gazed in vain and then a day came when she had an intuition that he was uneasy; she could not have told what gave her the impression, but she was certain of it; she waited, holding her breath; he looked up suddenly, as though he had heard an unexpected sound, and catching her eye turned quickly away. From then on she ceased to throw him even a glance, but a day or two later, though her head was bent as though she were praying, she was conscious that he was staring at her. She remained quite still, but she felt that he was looking at her, bewildered, with a look that he had never given anyone before. She knew a thrill of triumph and then, raising her head, deliberately met his eyes. He turned away as quickly as before and she saw his face suffused with a blush of shame.

Two or three times in the street with her duenna she saw him coming towards them, and though he passed them with his head averted she knew that he was shaken. Once indeed, catching sight of them, he turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come. Beatriz giggled so that the duenna asked what was amusing her and she had to tell the first lie she could think of. Then one morning it chanced that they entered the church just as the seminarist was dipping his fingers into the holy water to cross himself. Beatriz put out her hand to touch his fingers and thus receive the holy water on her own fingers. It was a common and a natural action and he could not refuse. He went very white and once more their eyes met. It was only for an instant, but in that instant Beatriz knew that he loved her with a human love, the love of a passionate boy for a beautiful girl, and at the same moment she felt a sharp pain in her heart, as though it were pierced with a sword, and she knew that she loved him with the same human love, the love of a passionate girl for a lovely youth. She was filled with joy. She had never known a happiness so great.

He was serving Mass that day. Her eyes never left him. Her heart beat so that she could hardly bear it, but the pain, if pain it was, was greater than any pleasure she had ever known. She had discovered before this that some errand or occupation took him every day past the Duke’s palace at a certain hour and she found means to sit at a window from which she could watch the street. She saw him come, she saw his steps linger, as though unwillingly, as he passed, and then she saw him hurry on as though flying temptation. She hoped he would look up, but he never did, and once, to tease him, she let a carnation fall just as he was approaching. Instinctively he glanced up then, but she drew back so that she could see him without him seeing her. He stopped and picked up the flower. He held it in both hands, as though it were a precious jewel, and for a moment stood looking at it like a man entranced. Then with a violent gesture he flung it to the ground, stamped it in the dust and ran, ran as fast as his legs would carry him. Beatriz broke out laughing and then on a sudden burst into tears.

When he did not come to the early Mass for several days running she could bear her anxiety no longer.

‘What has happened to that seminarist who used to serve Mass?’ she asked her duenna. ‘I haven’t seen him lately.’

‘How should I know? I suppose he’s gone back to his seminary.’

She never saw him again. She knew by then that what had started as a comedietta had turned into tragedy, and she bitterly regretted her folly. She loved him with all the passion of her young body. She had never been crossed in anything and it enraged her to think that now she could not have her will. The marriage that had been arranged for her was a marriage of convenience and she had accepted it as the consequence of her station. As was her duty, she had been prepared to bear her husband children, but was decided to be no more troubled by him otherwise than if he were a flunkey; but now the thought of being united to the dwarfish, dull-witted creature filled her with loathing. She knew that her love for young Blasco de Valero could result in nothing. True, he was only in minor orders and could be released from them, but she did not even have to remember that her father would never consent to such a misalliance; her own pride would not have allowed her to bestow her hand in marriage on the gutter nobleman that he was. And Blasco? He loved her, she was certain of that, but he loved God more. When he had stamped with rage on the flower she had dropped at his feet it was to stamp out the unworthy passion that horrified him. She had terrible, frightening dreams, dreams of lying in his arms, her mouth against his, his breast pressing against her, and she awoke with shame, anguish and despair. It was then she began to sicken. They could make nothing of her malady, but she knew what it was, she was dying of a broken heart. It was then she heard that he had entered a monastic order that she had her inspiration; she knew as if he had told her in so many words that in flying the world he was seeking to escape her, and it gave her a strange joy, a sense of triumphant power. She would do the same thing; to enter a convent would release her from a hateful marriage and in the love of God she might find peace. And at the back of her mind, hardly even hinted at in unspoken words, was the feeling that in that life, widely separated as they would be, each devoted to the service of the Highest, they would in some mystical way be united.

All this that has taken so long to tell passed through the mind of the grim, severe Prioress in a flash. She saw it as though it were one of those vast frescoes painted on the long wall of a cloister which yet you embrace in a comprehensive regard. All that passion that in her foolish youth she imagined would endure to the end, was long since dead. Time, the pious monotony of convent life, prayer and fasting, the multifarious duties of her position, had gradually dulled it till it was now no more than a bitter recollection. As she looked at the man now, so worn and haggard, with that look of suffering on his face, she wondered if he remembered that once he had loved against his will, yes, but with all his heart, a beautiful girl whom he had never even spoken to, but who tormented his dreams. The silence weighed upon the Bishop and he moved uneasily in his chair.

‘Your Reverence said that she had a matter of importance on which she wished to consult me,’ he said.

‘Yes, but first permit me to offer your lordship my felicitations on the dignity to which it has pleased His Majesty to advance you.’

‘I can only hope that I shall prove worthy to perform the duties of so great an office.’

‘There can be no doubt of that in the mind of anyone who knows with what zeal and discretion you acted during the ten years you spent at Valencia. Though this small city in the mountains is remote we managed to keep acquainted with what passes in the great world, and the fame of your lordship’s austerity, virtue and unremitting diligence in defence of the purity of our faith has not escaped us.’

The Bishop glanced at her for a moment from under beetling brows.

‘Madam, I am obliged to you for your courtesy, but I must beg you to spare me your compliments. It has never been to my liking that people should talk of me to my face. I shall be grateful if you will tell me without further delay for what reason you requested me to visit you.’

The Prioress was not at all abashed by this reproof. A bishop he might be, but as her duenna, now with God, had once said Hidalgo de Gutierra, a gutter nobleman; and she was the daughter of the Duke of Castle Rodriguez, a grandee of Spain and a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A word from her to her brother, confidant of King Philip the Third’s favourite, would relegate this prelate to an obscure bishopric in the Canaries.

‘I am sorry to offend your lordship’s modesty,’ she answered coolly, ‘but it is your virtue and your austerity, your sanctity, if I may say so, which are the immediate occasion for my requesting the honour of a visit from you. Have you been informed of the strange experience of a girl called Catalina Perez?’

‘I have. Her confessor, doubtless a worthy man, but neither learned nor intelligent, reported her story to me. I dismissed him. I have forbidden the friars in the convent to mention it to me or to talk about it among themselves. The girl is either an impostor, looking for notoriety, or a deluded fool.’

‘I do not know her, Señor, but from all accounts she is a good, sensible and pious girl. Persons of good judgment, who know her are convinced that she is incapable of inventing such a story. She is truthful and, I am told, far from fanciful.’

‘If she had such a vision as she describes it can only be by a machination of Satan. It is well known that demons have the power of disguising themselves in celestial forms in order to tempt the unwary to perdition.’

‘The child suffers from an unmerited misfortune. We must not ascribe to the devil more cleverness than he has. How could he be so stupid as to think her soul would be endangered by having a saintly man lay his hand on her in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?’

During this conversation the Bishop had kept his eyes on the floor, but now he glanced at the Prioress, and there was anguish in them.

‘Madam, Lucifer, son of the morning, fell through pride, and how could it be but through pride that I, a very wicked and a very sinful man, should take it upon myself to work miracles?’

‘It may be fitting that in your humility you should regard yourself as a sinful and wicked man, my lord, but the rest of the world is well aware of your great virtue. Listen, Señor, this story has been bruited abroad and the whole city is talking about it. Everyone is excited and expectant. In some way satisfaction must be given to the people.’

The Bishop sighed.

‘I know the people are disturbed, groups stand outside the convent as though they were waiting for something, and when I am forced to go out they kneel as I pass to ask me for my blessing. Something must be done to let them see reason.’

‘Would your lordship allow me to give you advice?’ the Prioress asked with great respect, but with a glint of ironical amusement in her eyes which somewhat modified it.

‘I should be grateful.’

‘I have not seen the girl because her confessor ordered her not to repeat her story, but you have the power to overrule his order. Wouldn’t it be well if you saw her? With your discernment, your knowledge of character and the skill you acquired in the Holy Office in the examination of suspects, you should be able to tell very quickly if she is an impostor, if she is deceived by the devil or if, finally, it was indeed the Blessed Virgin who condescended to appear to her.’

The Bishop raised his eyes and looked at the image of the Redeemer nailed to the Cross in the shrine at which the Prioress was wont to pray. His face was very sad. He was torn by indecision.

‘I need not remind you, Señor, that this convent is under the special protection of Our Lady of Carmel. We poor nuns are doubtless unworthy of the honour, but it may be that she regards with peculiar favour this church which my father the Duke built for her in this city. It would be a great grace and a great glory to our house if by your lordship’s intercession our heavenly patroness cured this poor child of her infirmity.’

For a long time the Bishop was sunk in thought. At last he sighed again.

‘Where can I see this girl?’

‘Can there be a better place than in the chapel of our church dedicated to the worship of the Blessed Virgin?’

‘What must be done had better be done quickly. Let her come tomorrow, madam, and I will be here.’ He rose from his seat and as he bowed to take his leave of the Prioress there was the shadow of a smile, but so rueful, on his lips. ‘A sorrowful night awaits me, Your Reverence.’ She knelt down once more and kissed his ring.

CHAPTER 12

Next day, at the appointed hour, the Bishop, accompanied by his two secretaries, entered the richly-decorated church. Catalina, with one of the nuns, was waiting in the Lady Chapel; with the help of her crutch she was standing, but when the Bishop appeared the nun touched her arm and she started to kneel. He prevented her.

‘You may leave us,’ he said to the nun, and then when she had gone he turned to the two friars. ‘You may withdraw, but remain close at hand. I will speak to this girl alone.’

They silently slid away. The Bishop watched them go. He knew they were curious and he did not wish them to hear what was said. Then he took a long look at the crippled girl. He had a tender heart and was always moved by distress, want or infirmity. She was trembling a little and she was very pale.

‘Do not be frightened, child,’ he said gently. ‘You have nothing to fear if you tell the truth.’

She looked very simple and very innocent. He saw that she had a singularly beautiful face, but he noticed it as indifferently as he might have noticed that a horse was roan or grey. He began asking her about herself. She answered at first very shyly, but as he continued to press her with questions, after a little with greater confidence. Her voice was soft and melodious and she expressed herself with correctness. She told him the simple little story of her life. It was the story of any poor girl, a story of hard work, of harmless amusements, of church-going, of falling in love; but she told it so naturally, with such an ingenuous air that the Bishop was touched. He could not think this was a girl who had invented something to make herself important. Her every word suggested modesty and humility. Then she told him about her accident and how her leg had become paralysed and how Diego, the tailor’s son, whom she was going to marry and whom she loved, had abandoned her.

‘I don’t blame him,’ she said. ‘Your lordship doesn’t know, perhaps, that the life of the poor is hard, and a man doesn’t want a wife who isn’t able to work for him.’

As tender a smile as the Bishop’s haggard features permitted flitted briefly across his face.

‘How is it you have learnt to speak so sensibly and so well, my daughter?’ he asked.

‘My uncle Domingo Perez taught me to read and write. He took great pains with me. He has been like a father to me.’

‘I knew him once.’

Catalina was well aware of her uncle’s bad reputation and she was afraid that her reference to him would do her little good in the eyes of that saintly man. There was a silence and for a moment she thought he was going to end the interview.

‘Now tell me in your own words the story you told your mother,’ he said, fixing her with searching eyes.

She hesitated and he remembered that she had been ordered by her confessor not to speak of it. He gravely told her that he had authority to override the confessor’s prohibition.

Then she repeated it exactly as she had told it to her mother. She told him she had been sitting on the steps weeping because everyone in the city was happy and she alone wretched, and how a lady had come out of the church and talked to her and how she had said that his lordship had the power to cure her infirmity, how she had vanished before her very eyes, and how then it had been borne in upon her that the lady was the Blessed Virgin herself.

She finished and there was a long silence. The Bishop was shaken, but at the same time distracted with indecision. The girl was no impostor, of that he was convinced, for her innocence, her sincerity were unmistakable; it could not have been a dream, for she had heard the bells ringing, the beating of drums and the blare of trumpets when he and his brother entered the city, and at that moment she was in speech with the lady who she had no reason then to suppose was more than she seemed; and how could Satan have the power to put on a false semblance when the girl had been pouring out her poor little heart to the Mother of God and beseeching her to succour her in her distress? She was a pious creature and there was no presumption in her. Others had had their prayers answered, others had received spiritual grace, others had been cured of their ills. If he refused to do what it looked as if he had been bidden to do, because he was afraid, might he not be committing a grave sin of omission?

‘A sign,’ he muttered to himself. ‘A sign.’

He took a step or two forwards till he came to the altar above which in a great cloak of blue velvet, all stitched in gold, with a golden crown on her head, stood an image of the Mother of God. He knelt and prayed for guidance. He prayed passionately, but his heart was dry and he felt that the darkness of night shrouded his soul. At last, with a sad sigh, he rose to his feet and stood, his arms outstretched in supplication, with his despairing gaze fixed on the mild eyes of the Blessed Virgin. Suddenly Catalina gave a little startled cry. The two friars had withdrawn out of sight but, though they could not hear what was said, not out of earshot, and when they heard this they scuttled forth as quickly as rabbits into their burrow; but what they saw rooted them to the ground. They uttered no sound. They stood, their mouths open, as if like Lot’s wife they had been turned to pillars of salt. Don Blasco de Valero, Bishop of Segovia, was slowly rising into the air, as slowly as oil slides down a plate ever so slightly inclined, rising with an even, almost imperceptible motion, as the water rises in a tidal river; the Bishop rose till he was face to face with the image over the altar and for a moment was suspended in the air for all the world like a falcon motionless on its outstretched wings. One of the friars, fearing he would fall, made as if to start forwards, but the other, Father Antonio, restrained him; and the Bishop, slowly, slowly, so that you were barely conscious of movement, descended till his feet once more touched the marble floor in front of the altar. His arms fell to his sides and he turned round. The two friars ran up and falling on their knees kissed the hem of his habit. He seemed not to be aware of their presence. He walked down the three steps that led from the altar, and like a man in a daze groped his way out of the chapel. The two friars, in case he stumbled, kept close to him. Catalina was forgotten. They emerged from the church. The Bishop paused at the top of the steps, the steps on which Catalina had sat when Our Lady appeared to her, and looked at the little plaza dazzling in the light of the August sun. The unclouded sky was so blue, so bright that it was blinding. The white houses, shuttered against the heat, seemed to sparkle with a gem-like brilliance of their own. The Bishop shuddered although the day had the heat of a furnace. He came to himself.

‘Have the girl told that she will hear from me.’

He descended the steps and the friars followed him at a respectful distance. He walked through the plaza, his head bent, and they dared not speak to him. When they arrived at the Dominican convent he stopped and turned to them.

‘Under pain of excommunication you will not utter a single word of what you have seen today.’

‘It was a miracle, Señor,’ said Father Antonio. ‘Is it fair that such a signal mark of divine favour should be kept secret from our brothers?’

‘When you made your profession, my son, you took the vow of obedience.’

Father Antonio had been the Bishop’s pupil when he taught theology at Alcalá and it was through the Bishop’s influence that he had entered the Dominican order. He was quick and intelligent, and when Father Blasco was made Inquisitor at Valencia he took him with him as his secretary. He was grateful for the young friar’s devotion, and though he often tried to reason him out of the inordinate admiration the youth had for him everything he said seemed to increase it. Father Antonio, though as devout and careful to observe his religious duties as the Bishop could desire, blameless in his life and industrious in the service of the Church, suffered from a disease which Juvenal called cacoethes scribendi: not content with acting as amanuensis for the Inquisitor’s great correspondence and writing the multitudinous reports, documents, decisions and so forth that were necessary in the conduct of the affairs of the Holy Office, he spent all his spare moments scribbling; and the Inquisitor discovered, as he discovered everything that concerned him or his office, that Father Antonio was keeping a minute record of his actions, of every word he said and of the various events of his career. He was humbly conscious that the secretary held him in exaggerated esteem, and in his self-examination often asked himself whether he should not put a stop to this work, for he could not but know with what purpose the friar was writing. He had got it into his clever, foolish head that he, Friar Blasco de Valero, was the stuff of which saints are made, and that such a document as he was producing would be of value to the Curia when after his death proceedings for his beatification were instituted. Though so well aware of his unworthiness the Inquisitor was human enough to feel a little thrill of pious exultation when he thought there was a possibility, however remote, that one day he might he counted among the saints of the Church. He scourged himself till the blood flowed for his presumption, but could not bring himself to deprive the good and pious creature of an employment that was certainly harmless. And who could tell? It might be that the writer’s simple piety would enable him to produce a work which, of however little account was the subject, might prove edifying to the faithful.

And now, looking into the friar’s heart, Bishop Blasco was positive that though no word of what had happened in the Carmelite church would cross his lips, a full account of it would be written in the book. The marvel, now known as levitation, of which he had been the instrument was familiar to him from his reading of the lives of various saints, and it was known throughout Spain that in recent years this sign of divine favour had been granted to Peter of Alcantara, Mother Teresa of Jesus and to more than one nun of the Discalced Carmelites. The Bishop could not expect Father Antonio to omit such a remarkable occurrence from his book, he did not even known if he had the right to do it, so without another word he entered the convent and went to his cell.

CHAPTER 13

But it had not occurred to him to bind Catalina to secrecy, and no sooner had the three religious left the church than she hurried home as fast as her disabled state allowed. Domingo had gone on an errand to one of the outlying villages and so only her mother was there. Catalina in awestruck tones told her the wonder of what she had been a witness, and when she had finished she told it over again.

Maria Perez had something of the dramatic sense which was apparently denied to the playwright her brother, and so, restraining her impatience with an effort, she waited for the recreation hour at the convent when she knew that most of the nuns would be assembled talking with the lady boarders and visitors from the city and she thus could relate the amazing occurrence to the greatest possible effect. She had quite an audience when she told her story and the astonishment it caused highly gratified her. The sub-prioress was so much impressed with it that she felt not a moment should be lost in telling it to Doña Beatriz. In a little while Maria Perez was summoned to the presence. She repeated her narrative. The Prioress listened with a satisfaction she saw no reason to conceal.

‘After this there can be no hesitation,’ she said. ‘It will be a great glory not only to this convent, but to the Order of Our Lady of Carmel.’

She dismissed the two women and taking up her quill wrote a letter to the Bishop in which she told him that she had learnt of the grace that had been accorded him that morning. No further proof was needed that what the girl Catalina Perez had said was true, to be ascribed to no machination of the Evil One, but to the compassion of Our Blessed Lady. She conjured him to put aside his doubts and uncertainties, for nothing could be plainer than that it was his Christian duty to accept the charge laid upon him. It was a good letter, succinct but well argued, respectful but firm, and she requested, with great humility, that he would deign to perform the miracle in the church in which he had been granted this divine favour and for which it was evident the Blessed Virgin had conceived a particular affection. She sent the letter by messenger.

Two of the gentlemen who were in the parlour when Maria Perez told her story were so much struck with it that they went at once to the Dominican convent to inquire into its truth. The friars there of course knew nothing of it, but when it was repeated to them were far from surprised. They knew very well that the Bishop was a man of great sanctity, and nothing was more likely than that God should have accorded him the signal honour of levitation. Meanwhile one of the lady boarders went to see friends in the city and told them of the miraculous event. In a couple of hours the whole city knew about it. More gentlemen came to the Dominican convent in order to get information at first hand. The friars were in a tremor of religious enthusiasm. At last Father Antonio was obliged to go to the Bishop and tell him that though neither he nor his fellow friar had opened his mouth the occurrence was now common knowledge. The Prioress’s letter was open on the table. The Bishop pointed to it.

‘These wretched women, they cannot hold their tongues,’ he said. ‘It is a great humiliation to me that this thing should have become known.’

‘Our brothers of this convent hope that your lordship will now consent to cure the unhappy girl of her infirmity.’

There was a knock at the door. Father Antonio opened it. A friar brought a message to ask if the Prior might see the Bishop.

‘Let him come.’

Father Antonio was present at the interview and he wrote an account of it at very tedious length. In the end the Bishop allowed himself to be convinced that it was the will of God that he should do what the Blessed Virgin required of him. He made conditions, however, which the Prior, much against his will, found himself obliged to accept. The Prior wanted a ceremony with all his friars assembled, in the presence of the notabilities of the city, both lay and clerical; but this the Bishop sternly refused to allow. He insisted on secrecy. He was prepared to go to the Carmelite church and say Mass there on the following morning. The doors must be closed so that no one should be admitted. He would himself be accompanied only by his secretaries. The Prior, not a little incensed at what he considered a slight on his dignity, left him. The Bishop then sent Father Antonio to inform Doña Beatriz of his decisions. He gave her permission to bring her nuns, but forbade the lady boarders to come. He instructed her to make Catalina prepare herself to partake of Holy Communion after Mass and requested her and her nuns to pray for him that night.

Within an hour an excited nun came to Maria Perez and asked to see Catalina since she had something very private and important to tell her. When Catalina was called the nun put her fingers to her lips to emphasize the silence that was required.

‘It’s a great secret,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone. His lordship is going to cure you and tomorrow you’ll be running about on your two feet like any other Christian.’

Catalina gasped and her heart began to beat like mad.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘You’re to take Holy Communion, so you mustn’t eat anything after midnight. You know that.’

‘Yes, I know that. But I never do eat anything after midnight.’

‘And you must put yourself in a state of grace. After you’ve received Communion he’ll make you whole just as Our Blessed Lord did the leper.’

‘Can Mamma and Uncle Domingo come?’

‘Nothing was said about them. Surely they can come. It may well turn your poor uncle from his evil ways.’

Domingo did not get back from the country till late that evening, but he was no sooner in the house than Catalina in a tremor of agitation told him her thrilling news. He stared at her with consternation.

‘Aren’t you glad, Uncle?’ she cried.

He did not speak. He began pacing the room. Catalina could not understand his strange behaviour.

‘What’s the matter with you, Uncle? Aren’t you pleased? I thought you’d be as happy as I am. Don’t you want me to be cured?’

He shrugged his shoulders irritably and went on pacing the room. He had never been quite sure that the apparition was not a construction of his niece’s distracted mind and he dreaded the consequences to her if the Bishop’s intervention were vain. The Holy office might well think then that the matter required investigation. That meant ruin. Suddenly he stopped and faced Catalina. He looked at her with a sternness she had never seen in him before.

‘Tell me exactly what it was that the Blessed Virgin said to you.’

She repeated her story.

‘And then the lady said: The son of Don Juan de Valero who has best served God has it in his power to cure you.’

Domingo interrupted her harshly.

‘But that is not what you told your mother. You told her that Blasco de Valero had it in his power to cure you.’

‘It’s the same thing. The Bishop is a saint; all the world knows that. Which of the sons of Don Juan has served God so well?’

‘You fool!’ he shouted. ‘You little fool!’

‘It’s you who are the fool,’ she answered hotly. ‘You never believed that the Blessed Virgin had appeared to me and spoken to me and then vanished from my sight. You thought it was a dream. Well, listen to this.’

She told him then how she had seen the Bishop rise from the floor and stay suspended in the air and then sink down once more to the floor.

‘That wasn’t a dream. The two friars who were with him saw it with their own eyes.’

‘Stranger things have happened,’ he muttered.

‘And yet you refuse to believe that Our Blessed Lady appeared to me.’

He looked at her now with a twinkle in his eyes.

‘I don’t. I didn’t believe it before, but I believe it now, not for what you saw this morning, but for the words the Blessed Virgin spoke to you. There is a meaning in them that convinces me.’

Catalina was perplexed. She could not understand how the insignificant difference between the two versions could make any odds. He gently patted her cheek.

‘I am a great sinner, my poor child, and what makes my situation desperate is that I have never yet succeeded in repenting of my sins. I have lived a hazardous and a worthless life, but I have read many books, ancient and modern, and I have learnt many things which perhaps it would be for my soul’s good if I did not know. Be of good heart, my dear, perhaps all may yet be well.’

He took up his hat.

‘Where are you going, Uncle?’

‘I have had a busy day and I am in want of relaxation. I am going to the tavern.’

In this he departed from the truth, for instead of going to the tavern he went to the Dominican convent. Though it was still light, the hour was advanced and the porter would not admit him. Domingo insisted that he must see the Bishop on a matter of grave importance, but the porter, speaking through the judas, would not even open the door. Domingo told him that he was the uncle of Catalina Perez and begged him at least to fetch one of his lordship’s secretaries. The porter was unwilling to do this, but Domingo was so urgent that at last he consented. In a few minutes Father Antonio came to the door. Domingo besought him to let him see the Bishop, since he had a communication to impart to him that it was vital for him to hear. The friar had evidently been informed who he was and of what a bad reputation, for he answered coldly. He said it was impossible to disturb his lordship, for he was spending the night in prayer and had given orders that he was on no account to be disturbed.

‘If you do not let me see him you will be responsible for a terrible mishap.’

‘Drunkard,’ said Father Antonio scornfully.

‘A drunkard I am, but now I am not drunk. You will bitterly regret it if you will not let me in.’

‘What is this message that you wish me to deliver?’

Domingo hesitated. He was at his wits’ end.

Tell him that for the love he bears him Domingo Perez sends him this message: The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.’

‘Hijo de puta,’ cried Father Antonio, in a rage that this dissolute scamp should quote scripture.

He slammed-to the shutter of the judas. Domingo turned away. He was in a black mood. Habit bent his steps to the tavern and he went in. He was a sociable creature and had, if not many friends, at least a goodly number of drinking companions. He got drunk, and when he was drunk his tongue was loosened. He liked to hear himself talk and it was on this occasion as on many others no difficult for him to find listeners.

CHAPTER 14

Next morning, when, as Domingo would have put it in a poem, Aurora rubbed the sleep from her eyes with rosy fingers and Phoebus harnessed to his golden chariot the swift coursers of the sun, or in plain language at break of day, three Dominican friars with their hoods drawn over their shaven heads, partly for concealment, partly to protect themselves from the noxious vapours of the lingering night, slipped out of the convent. But though it was so early the townspeople had gathered that there was something in the wind and there was already a group at the convent gate. In the tall cowled figure between the other two they at once recognized the saintly bishop. The three friars, followed at a respectful distance by the curious, walked swiftly to the Carmelite church. Here more persons were waiting. One of the friars knocked at the door. It was opened just enough to let them pass through one after the other, and closed behind them. When the onlookers tried to enter they found it locked, and though they knocked, they knocked in vain.

Catalina was waiting in the Lady Chapel. Maria Perez and Domingo had accompanied her, but had been refused admittance. Doña Beatriz received the Bishop at the church door with her nuns, twenty in all, for that was the limit the Duke of Castel Rodriguez in his foundation had set to their number. The Bishop, with his two attendants, went into the sacristy and donned the sacred vestments. They walked slowly to the Lady Chapel. The nuns were on their knees. Catalina, supporting herself on her crutch, knelt at the foot of the altar steps. The Bishop said Mass. The nuns joined in the responses in awed undertones. He administered Holy Communion to Catalina. After the benediction and the reading of the last Gospel he knelt at the altar and prayed in silence. Then he rose to his feet and with his great tragic eyes upon Catalina walked down the steps. He placed his thin, brown hand on her head.

‘I, the unworthy instrument of the Most High, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost bid you throw aside your crutch and walk.’

He had begun tremulously, in so low a voice that the nuns could hardly hear, but he spoke the last words loud and clear in a tone of command. Catalina, her face pale with emotion, her eyes shining, raised herself to her feet, cast the crutch aside, took a step forward and with a cry of anguish crashed to the floor. The miracle had failed.

Immediately there arose a hubbub among the nuns. Some of them screamed, two of them fainted. The Prioress stepped forward. She gave Catalina a glance and then her eyes met the Bishop’s. For a while they gazed intently at one another. Behind them the nuns were sobbing. Then the Bishop walked out of the chapel, the two friars at his heels, and returned to the sacristy. He did not utter a word. When they had discarded their vestments and wore once more their conventual habits they went back into the church. The portress was waiting to unlock the door. The Bishop, his cowl once more over his head, stepped out into the sunlight of the summer morning.

The news had spread that he was even then performing a miracle and the windows in the plaza were crowded with spectators. They were thick on the church steps and the square was filled with them. For a moment the Bishop was dismayed to see that great throng, but only for a moment; he pulled his habit close to him and drew himself up. He no sooner appeared than a shudder of consternation passed through the crowd, for in some strange way they knew at once, though they could not have said how, that the miracle had failed. Way was made and the Bishop, with the two friars following, walked down the steps. The people in the plaza pressed one another back, and as he passed along the path they thus made for him, his face hidden, his tall figure huddled in the black and white habit of his order, a dreadful silence fell upon them. You would have said that they were terrified as though some horrifying and unavoidable catastrophe impended.

CHAPTER 15

The friars of the Dominican convent had been angered because the Bishop had refused to allow them to attend the ceremony, and when, with his two attendants, he returned to it they were loitering about to look at him. The news had already reached them. He passed as though he did not see them.

On hearing that they were to lodge such a distinguished guest they had furnished his cell with such luxury as they thought suitable to his grandeur. But he had immediately had everything removed that offended his austerity. He forced them to change the soft mattress on the bed for one of straw no thicker than a blanket, and he had the two armchairs they had put in the oratory replaced with three-legged stools. They had given him a handsome teak table to write at, but he asked that he should be given instead one of unpainted deal. He would have nothing that appealed to the senses and turned out the pictures they had hung on the walls. They were bare now but for a plain black Cross, without the figure of Our Lord either painted or carved, and this was so that he might more exactly picture himself nailed to it and so in his body feel the pain that the Redeemer for the sake of mankind had suffered.

When the Bishop entered his cell he sank on to the hard wooden stool and stared at the stone floor. Slow, painful tears trickled down his sunken cheeks. Father Antonio’s heart was filled with compassion to see his master plunged in what looked very like despair. He whispered to his companion, who forthwith left the cell and in a few minutes returned with a bowl of soup. Father Antonio handed it to the Bishop.

‘Señor, here is something for you to eat.’

The Bishop turned his head away.

I could eat nothing.’

‘Oh, my lord, no food has passed your lips since the morning of yesterday. I beseech you to take at least a few mouthfuls.’

He knelt, filled a spoon with the steaming soup and held it to the Bishop’s lips.

‘You are very good to me, my son,’ he said. ‘I am not worthy of the care you take of me.’

Not to appear ungracious he swallowed the contents of the spoon, and then the monk fed the broken man as though he were a sick child. The Bishop was well aware of his faithful attendant’s deep attachment and had more than once warned him of its danger, for a religious should always be on his guard against conceiving affection for any one person, since it could not but hamper his whole-hearted devotion to God who was the only real object of love; and as for human beings, whether clerical or lay, he should regard them with good will, because they were God’s creatures, but since they were perishable with an indifference that made it of no moment if they were present or absent. But the affections are difficult to control, and however hard he tried, Father Antonio could not destroy the love, the ecstatic devotion, with which his poor heart was filled.

When the Bishop had eaten, Father Antonio put aside the bowl and, still on his knees, ventured to take his hand.

‘Do not take it so hard, Señor. The girl was deceived by demons.’

‘No, the fault was mine. I asked for a sign and the sign was given me. In my vainglory I thought myself not unfit to do what is vouchsafed to the saints whom God has chosen for His own. I am a sinner and I am justly punished for my presumption.’

The Bishop was so broken that the friar dared to speak to him as otherwise he would never have done.

‘We are all sinners, Señor, but I have been privileged to live close to you for many years and no one knows better than I your unfailing kindness to all men, your ceaseless charity and your loving kindness.’

‘It is your own goodness that speaks, my son. It is the affection you have for me which I have so often warned you against and which I so little deserve.’

Father Antonio gazed with pity on the Bishop’s agonized face. He still held his cold, emaciated hand.

‘Would it not distract your mind if I read to you a little, my lord?’ he said after a pause. ‘I have lately written something which I should value your opinion of.’

The Bishop knew how bitterly grieved the poor friar was that the miracle, which he had anticipated with complete assurance, had not been performed, and he was touched when the dear, simple man mastered his own terrible disappointment to minister to him and to console him. He had never before consented to listen to a word of the book his secretary was so industriously writing but now he had not the heart to refuse him a pleasure that he so ardently desired.

‘Read, my son. I will listen gladly.’

The Father, his cheeks flushed with delight, scrambled to his feet and took, from among the many papers his office required him to deal with, several sheets of manuscript. He sat down on a stool. The other friar, since there was no other place for him, sat on the floor. Father Antonio began to read.

He was an erudite and an elegant writer and none of the artifices of rhetoric was unfamiliar to him. His style was rich in simile and metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis. He never let a noun go by without an escort of two stalwart adjectives. Images sprang to his mind as profuse and fat as mushrooms after rain, and being well read in the Scriptures, the works of the Fathers and the Latin moralists, he was never at a loss for a recondite allusion. He was learned in sentence-structure, simple, complex, compound and compound-complex, and could not only compose a period, with clauses and sub-clauses, of the most choice elaboration, but bring it to a conclusion with a triumphant clang that had all the effect of a door slammed in your face. This manner of writing, to which an ingenious critic has given the name of Mandarin, is much admired by those who affect it, but it has the trifling disadvantage of taking a long time to say what can be said in brief; and in any case it would be discordant with the plain, blunt style in which this narrative is written; and so, instead of making a vain attempt to reproduce the good Father’s grandiloquence, the author of these pages has thought it better to give the gist of the matter in his own simple way.

Father Antonio, not without tact, had chosen to read his account of the great auto de fé, which had been the crown of Friar Blasco’s career in the Holy Office, and which, as before mentioned, had given so much pleasure to the Prince, now Philip III, and had in due course been at least the occasion for the saintly inquisitor’s elevation to the important See of Segovia.

The impressive ceremony, devised to inspire awe for the authority of the Inquisition and edify the people, took place on a Sunday, so that none should have an excuse not to attend it, since to do so was a pious duty; and to secure as large an attendance as possible an indulgence of forty days was granted to all who came. Three stagings had been erected in the great plaza of the city, one for the penitents with their spiritual attendants, one for the inquisitors, the officials of the Holy Office and the clergy, and a third for the civil authorities and the dignitaries of the city. The proceedings, however, began the night before with the procession of the Green Cross. First, with a standard of crimson damask embroidered with the royal arms, came a crowd of familiars and gentlemen; then the religious orders with the White Cross; the Cross of the parish church borne by the secular clergy; and finally the Green Cross carried by the Prior of the Dominicans, accompanied by his friars with torches. They sang the Miserere as they marched. The Green Cross was planted above the altar on the staging reserved for the inquisitors and it was guarded through the night by Dominicans. The White Cross was taken to the place of execution, where it was guarded by the soldiers of the Zarza, a body of men whose duty it was to keep watch over the quemadero or burning-place and provide wood for the bonfire.

One of the duties of the inquisitors was to visit during the night those condemned to death, inform them of their sentence, and assign two friars to each one to prepare him to meet his God. But on this occasion Father Baltasar, the junior inquisitor, was sick in bed of a colic, and so that he might be well enough to take part in the proceedings of the following day begged Friar Blasco to excuse him from accompanying him on this grim errand.

Dawn broke and Mass was celebrated in the audience chamber of the Holy Office and at the altar of the Green Cross. Breakfast was given to the prisoners and to the friars, doubtless glad of it by then, who had attended those about to die. They were then ranged in order according to the gravity of their offence against the Faith and dressed in sambenitos. The sambenito was a yellow tunic painted on one side with flames for those who were to be burnt, and on the other inscribed with their names, places of residence and crimes. Green crosses were given them to carry and yellow candles put in their hands.

Another procession was formed. The soldiers of the Zarza, who led it, were followed by a religious bearing a cross shrouded in black and an acolyte who from time to time tolled a bell. Then came the penitents one by one, with a familiar on either side; then the effigies and chests of bones of those whose flight or death had robbed the Holy Office of its rightful prey; then those who were to die, accompanied by the friars who had been with them throughout the night. Mounted officials followed, familiars in pairs, the magistrates of the city, and the ecclesiastical dignitaries, according to their official precedence. A noble of high rank bore a box of red velvet fringed with gold which contained the sentences of the condemned. Then came the standard of the Holy Office borne by the Prior of the Dominicans, followed by his friars and finally the inquisitors.

It was a fine, sunny day, the sort of day that elates the heart of young and old so that they feel it good to be alive.

The procession moved slowly through the tortuous streets till it reached the plaza. There was a vast concourse. People had streamed into the city from the fertile haciendas that surround it, from rice fields and olive groves; others had come from as far as Alicante with its vineyards and from Elche with its date trees. The windows of the surrounding houses were filled with nobility and gentry, and the Prince with his suite watched from a balcony in the town hall.

The culprits were seated on the staging created for them in the order in which they had marched, the least guilty on the lower benches and the most guilty on the highest. There were two pulpits on the staging that accommodated the tribunal, and from one of these a sermon was preached. Then a secretary in a voice so loud that he could be heard by all read the oath by which the officials and all present swore obedience to the Holy Office and pledged themselves to persecute heretics and heresy. Everyone said Amen. After this the two inquisitors went to the balcony in which sat the Prince, and on the Cross and Gospels administered to him an oath constraining him to obey the Catholic Faith and the Holy Office, to persecute heretics and apostates and help and assist the Inquisition to seize and punish, whatever their rank and station, the miscreants who rejected true religion.

‘This I swear and promise on my faith and royal word,’ solemnly replied the Prince.

There was a bench between the two pulpits to which the penitents were brought one by one; their sentences were read to them from alternate pulpits. With the exception of those condemned to the flames this was the first announcement of their fate, and since some fainted when they heard it the Holy Office in its mercy provided a rail to the bench in case they fell and hurt themselves. On this occasion one man, broken by torture, died there and then of the shock. The last sentence was read and the culprits were delivered to the secular arm. The Holy Office rendered no judgment that involved the shedding of blood and indeed went so far as to urge the civil authorities to spare the life of the criminal. They were, however, required by the canon law promptly to punish the heretics consigned to them by the Inquisition, and an indulgence was accorded to the pious who contributed wood to the bonfire that was to burn them.

This ended the work of the inquisitors and they retired. The soldiers of the Zarza marched into the plaza and discharged their muskets. They then surrounded the prisoners and marched with them to the place of execution to protect them from the fury of the populace who in their hatred of heresy would otherwise ill-treat and sometimes even kill them. The friars attended them and strove to the end to bring about their repentance and conversion. Among them were four Morisco women whose beauty excited the admiration of all, an impenitent Dutch merchant who had been caught smuggling into the country a Spanish translation of the New Testament, a Moor convicted of killing a chicken by cutting off its head, a bigamist, a merchant who had harboured a fugitive from the Holy Office, and a Greek found guilty of holding opinions condemned by the Church. An alguazil and a secretary went with the civil authorities to see that the sentences were duly executed. The secretary on this occasion was Father Antonio, so that he had an opportunity to make his account of the day’s proceedings complete.

The quemadero was outside the city. Garrottes were attached to the stakes so that those who had professed a desire to die in the Christian faith, even those who did so at the last moment, might be spared death by fire and killed by the more merciful method of strangulation. The crowd had surged after the soldiers and the prisoners, and a great many, in order to get a better view of the proceedings, had hurried beforehand to the open space where the final scene was to take place. There was a vast multitude. This was natural, for it was a sight well worth seeing, a very proper entertainment for a royal guest; and the spectator had besides the satisfaction of knowing that he was performing an act of piety and a service to God. Those who were to be garrotted were garrotted and then the flames were kindled and the quick and the dead were burnt to ashes so that their memory might perish for ever. The people shouted and clapped their hands as the flames soared, so that the shrieks of the victims were almost drowned, and here and there a woman broke into a shrill chant to the Blessed Virgin or to the crucified Christ. Night fell and the crowd streamed back into the city, tired with long standing and the excitement, but feeling that they had had a happy day. They flocked to the taverns. The brothels did a roaring trade and many a man that night put to the proof the efficacy of the fragment of Friar Blasco’s habit that he wore round his neck.

Father Antonio was tired too, but it was his first duty to report the proceedings to the two inquisitors, and then, notwithstanding his fatigue which tempted him to go to bed, since he was a conscientious man he sat down and wrote a circumstantial account of all that had happened that day while every detail was fresh in his mind. He wrote rapidly, with an eloquence that seemed inspired by heaven, and when he read over what he had written he found that there was not a word that needed to be altered. Then at last, happy in the consciousness of having done his duty and besides contributed his small share to a pious work, he went to bed and slept the innocent sleep of a child.

All this then, giving dramatic emphasis to the most significant episodes, he read to the despondent Bishop in a loud, sonorous voice. He read with his eyes glued to the script. He felt strangely exalted. Thus was God served and thus was the purity of the Catholic faith maintained. He finished. He could not but feel that he had done the great ceremony justice. He had himself been struck by the vividness of his description and the artful way in which he had built up the narrative, he himself did not know how, to an impressive climax. He looked up. Like many another author who submits his work to a listener he would have been pleased to be rewarded with a word of praise. But this was merely a passing wish; his main object was to dispel the sombre fancies of his revered and beloved superior by reminding him of the most glorious incident of his career. Saint though he was, he could not but feel a thrill of pride when there appeared before his mind’s eye that wonderful day when he had been the means of consigning to eternal torment so great a number of cursed heretics, thereby serving God, discharging his conscience and edifying the people. Father Antonio was surprised, more than surprised, aghast, to see that tears were coursing down the Bishop’s withered cheeks and that his hands were clenched to control the sobbing that tore his breast.

He threw aside his manuscript, and jumping up from his stool on which he had been sitting flung himself at his master’s feet.

‘My lord, what is it?’ he cried. ‘What have I done? I read only to distract your thoughts.’

The Bishop thrust him aside and rising to his feet stretched out his arms in supplication to the black Cross on the wall.

‘The Greek,’ he moaned. The Greek.’

And then able to contain himself no longer he broke into passionate weeping. The two friars gazed at him in consternation. They had never before seen that austere man exhibit emotion. The Bishop with the palm of his hand impatiently brushed the tears from his eyes.

‘I am to blame,’ he moaned, ‘terribly to blame. I have committed a fearful sin and my only hope of forgiveness is in the infinite mercy of God.’

‘My lord, for God’s sake explain. I am all confused. I am like a mariner in a storm when his bark is dismasted and he has lost his rudder.’ With his reading still ringing in his ears Father Antonio found it impossible not to speak like a book. ‘The Greek? Why does your lordship speak of the Greek? He was a heretic and suffered the just punishment of his crime.’

‘You do not know of what you speak. You do not know that my crime is greater than his. I asked for a sign and the sign was given me. I thought it was a mark of God’s grace; now I know it was a mark of His wrath. It is right that I should be humbled in the eyes of men, for I am a miserable sinner.’

He did not turn to his companions. He did not speak to them, but to the Cross on which he had so often pictured himself with nails in his hands and nails through his feet.

‘He was a good old man, in his poverty charitable to the poor, and in the many years I knew him I never heard him say an evil word. He looked upon all men with loving kindness. He had true nobility of soul.’

‘Many men, virtuous in their public and their private lives, have been justly condemned by the Holy Office, since moral rectitude weighs nothing in the balance against the mortal sin of heresy.’

The Bishop turned and looked at Father Antonio. His eyes wee tragic.

‘And the wages of sin is death,’ he whispered.

The Greek of whom they spoke, Demetrios Christopoulos, was a native of Cyprus, a man of some property, which had enabled him to devote himself to learning. When the Turks, under Selim II, invaded the island, they took Nicosia, the capital, and put twenty thousand of its inhabitants to the sword. Famagusta, where Demetrios Christopoulos lived, was besieged and surrendered after a year of bitter resistance. This was in 1571. He fled from the doomed city and hid in the hills till he managed to escape in a fishing-boat and after many an adventure landed in Italy. He was penniless, but in due course found enough work as a teacher of Greek and an expounder of the ancient philosophy to keep body and soul together. Then in an evil hour he attracted the attention of a Spanish nobleman attached to the embassy in Rome who during his sojourn in Italy had succumbed to the fashionable cult of Plato. The nobleman took him into his palace and they read together the immortal dialogues of the philosopher. After some years, however, he was recalled to Spain and he persuaded the Greek to go with him. He was appointed Viceroy for the Kingdom of Valencia and in the city of that name eventually died. The Greek, almost an old man by then, stranded, left the viceregal palace and found a modest dwelling in the house of a widow woman. He had acquired some reputation for his learning and eked out a meagre living by giving lessons in Greek to those who desired to acquire some knowledge of that noble tongue.

Friar Blasco de Valero had heard of him while he was still giving lectures in theology at Alcalá de Henares and soon after he took up his post as inquisitor at Valencia he made inquiries about the Greek, and hearing that he was a man of good repute and virtuous life sent for him. He was pleased with the old man’s gentle approach and modest bearing and asked him if he would teach him the language in which the New Testament was written so that he might read the words with greater devotion. For nine years, whenever his manifold duties allowed him leisure, the Inquisitor and the Greek worked together. Friar Blasco was an industrious and an apt pupil, and after some months the Greek, who had a passion for the great and ancient literature of his country, persuaded him to embark on the works of the classical writers. He was himself a fervent platonist and it was not long before they were reading the dialogues. From them they went on to Aristotle. The friar refused to read the Iliad which he thought brutal or the Odyssey which he thought frivolous, but in the dramatists found much to admire. In the end, however, they always returned to the dialogues.

The Inquisitor was a man of sensibility and he was charmed by the grace, piety and profundity of Plato. There was much in his writings that a Christian could approve. They were the occasion for the pair of them to discuss many serious subjects. It was a new world Friar Blasco thus entered, and he felt a singular exultation in his perusal of these great works and a blissful repose after the labours of the day. In their long and fruitful intercourse he had conceived something very like affection for the unworldly Greek, and all he heard of him, of his simple decent life, his kindliness and charity, increased his admiration for his character.

It was a terrible shock to him when a Dutchman, a Lutheran, arrested by the familiars of the Inquisition for bringing into Spain translations of the New Testament, admitted under torture that he had given a copy to the Greek. Under questioning, emphasized by another turn of the rack, he stated that they had often conversed on religion and on many points were in full agreement. This was enough to oblige the Holy Office to make an investigation. This as always was thorough and secret. The Greek was not allowed to know that he was suspect. When Friar Blasco read the final reports he was horrified. It had never occurred to him that the Greek, so good, so humble, had not during his long years in Italy, his long years in Spain, abjured his schismatic opinions and embraced the Catholic faith of Rome. Witnesses were brought forward who swore that they had heard him utter damnable heresies. He denied the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son, he rejected the supremacy of the Pope, and though he venerated the Virgin he refused to admit her immaculate conception. The woman of the house in which he lived had heard him say that indulgences were worthless and someone else testified that he did not accept the Roman doctrine of purgatory.

Friar Blasco’s fellow inquisitor, Don Baltasar Carmona, was a doctor of laws and a rigid moralist. He was a dried-up little man, with a long sharp nose, tight lips and small restless eyes. He suffered from some malady of the intestines which soured his temper. His situation gave him immense power and he took a savage pleasure in exercising it. When these damning facts were laid before him he insisted in the arrest of the Greek. Friar Blasco did what he could to save him. He claimed that as a schismatic he was no heretic, and therefore did not come under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but there was not only the evidence of the tortured Lutheran; a French Calvinist whom he had also incriminated stated that he had heard the Greek utter opinions that savoured of protestantism, and upon this Friar Blasco felt obliged to do his bounden duty at whatever cost to his feelings. Familiars went to the old man’s lodging and took him to the prison of the Inquisition. He was examined and freely admitted his charges. He was given the opportunity to abjure his false beliefs and be converted to Catholicism, but to Friar Blasco’s dismay he refused to do this. The offence was grave, but the evidence of protestantism was not decisive, and in order to give the Greek a chance of purging his offence Friar Blasco urged upon his fellow inquisitor who was all for condemning him out of hand that to induce his conversion and so save his soul he should be put to the torture.

When torture was applied both inquisitors were required by law to be present, with the episcopal representative and a notary to record the proceedings. It was an exhibition that always filled Friar Blasco with such horror that for nights afterwards he was harassed by fearful dreams.

The Greek was brought in, stripped and tied to the trestle. His feeble old body was emaciated. He was solemnly besought to tell the truth for the love of God, since the inquisitors did not wish to see him suffer. He remained silent. His ankles were tied to the sides of the rack, cords were passed round his arms, his thighs and his calves, and their ends were attached to a garrotte, a stick by which they could be twisted tight. The executioner gave a sharp turn of the garrotte and the Greek shrieked; another, and skin and muscle were cut through to the bone. On account of his great age Friar Blasco had insisted that not more than four turns should be given, since, though six or seven were the maximum, it was unusual even with strong men to exceed five. The Greek begged them to kill him at once and put him out of his agony. Though Friar Blasco was forced to be there, he was not forced to look, and he stared at the stone floor; but the shrieks of pain rang in his ears and tore his nerves to pieces. That was the voice with which his friend had recited those grave and noble passages of Sophocles; that was the voice in which with an emotion he could hardly control he had read the dying speech of Socrates. Before each turn of the garrotte, the Greek was ordered to tell the truth, but he clenched his teeth and would not speak. When he was released from the rack he could not stand and had to be carried back to the dungeon of the Holy Office.

Though he admitted nothing he was condemned on the strength of what he had previously confessed. Friar Blasco sought to save his life, but Don Baltasar, the doctor of laws, contended that he was as guilty as the other Lutherans who had been sentenced to the stake. The episcopal representative and the other officials who were consulted agreed with him. Since the auto de fé was not to take place for several weeks Friar Blasco had time to write to the Inquisitor General and put the case before him. The Inquisitor General replied that he saw no reason to interfere with the decision of the tribunal. Friar Blasco could do nothing more, but still the shrieks of the old man rang in his ears and he suffered without respite. He sent spiritual advisers to see him and attempt his conversion, for though nothing now could save his life, repentance, allowing him to be garrotted, might still spare him the agony of death by burning. But the Greek was contumacious. Nothwithstanding the torture and his long confinement in prison his mind remained clear and active. To the friars’ arguments he answered with arguments so subtle that they were incensed.

At last came the eve of the auto de fé. Previous celebrations of the same kind had not affected Friar Blasco, for the relapsed Judaizers, the Moriscos who continued their devilish practices, the Protestants, were criminals before God and man, and for the safety of Church and State there was every good reason that they should suffer. But no one knew better than he how good, how kind, how helpful to the needy was the Greek. Notwithstanding the authority of his fellow inquisitor, a cruel man with a dry, cold mind, he doubted the legality of the frightful punishment. Acrimonious words had passed and Don Baltasar had accused him of favouring the criminal because he was on friendly terms with him. In his heart Friar Blasco knew that there was at least a particle of truth in this; had he never known the Greek he would have accepted the verdict without protest. He could no longer save his life but he could still save his soul. Those friars he had sent to convince him of his error were not clever enough to deal with that man of learning. He decided to do an unprecedented thing. An hour before dawn he went to the prison of the Inquisition and had himself conducted to the Greek’s cell. Two friars were passing his last night on earth with him. Friar Blasco dismissed them.

‘He has refused to listen to our exhortations,’ said one of them.

A smile hovered over the Greek’s lips as they left the cell.

‘Your friars are doubtless worthy men, Señor,’ he said. ‘But their intelligence is not remarkable.’

He was calm and though so frail and old maintained an appearance of dignity.

‘Your Reverence will forgive me if I remain on my bed. The torture left me very weak and I wish to preserve my strength for this day’s ceremonies.’

‘Let us not waste time in idle speeches. In a few hours you must face a dreadful fate. God knows I would gladly give ten years of my life to save you from it. The evidence was damning and I should have been false to my oath if I had failed in my duty.’

‘I am the last man who would wish you to do that.’

‘Your life is forfeit and that I cannot save. But if you will recant and accept conversion I can at least spare you the agony of the flames. I have loved you, Demetrios, I can never repay the debt I owe you except by saving your immortal soul. Those friars are ignorant and narrow men. I have come here to make a last desperate attempt to persuade you of your error.’

‘You will only be wasting your time, Señor. We should employ it to better advantage if we talked as we have so often done before of the death of Socrates. They would not allow me to have books in this dungeon, but my memory is good and I have found solace in repeating to myself that speech in which he spoke so nobly of the soul.’

‘I do not command you now, Demetrios, I beseech you to listen to me.’

‘That last courtesy I am bound to grant you.’

The Inquisitor in earnest tones, with learning and discretion, point by point, expounded the arguments which the Church had devised to substantiate her own claims and to refute the opinions of heretics and schismatics. He was well accustomed to discourse of this nature and he expressed himself ably and with impressive conviction.

‘I should deserve little respect if for fear of a painful death I pretended to accept beliefs which I think erroneous,’ said the Greek when he had finished.

‘I do not ask you to do that. I ask you to believe the truth with all your heart.’

‘“What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate. A man can as little constrain his beliefs as he can constrain the sea to calm when stormy winds assail it. I thank Your Reverence for your kindness and believe me I bear you no ill will for the misfortune that has befallen me. You have acted according to your conscience, and no man can do more. I am an old man and whether I die today or in a year or two is no great matter. I have only one request to make of you. Do not because I am gone relinquish your studies of the sublime literature of ancient Greece. It cannot fail to enlarge your spirit and ennoble your mind.’

‘Do you not fear the just vengeance of God for your contumacious obstinacy?’

‘God has many names and infinite attributes. Men have called Him Jehovah, Zeus and Brahman. What does it signify what name you give Him? But among His infinite attributes the chief, as Socrates, pagan though he was, well saw, is justice. He must know that man does not believe what he would but what he can, and I cannot do Him so great a wrong as to suppose He will condemn His creatures for what is no fault of theirs. Your Reverence must not think I am wanting in respect if I beg you now to leave me to my own reflections.’

‘I cannot leave you thus. I might try to the end to save your immortal soul from the raging fires of hell. Say one word to give me hope that you may be saved. One word to show that you are not unrepentant so that I may at least mitigate your earthly punishment.’

The Greek smiled and it may be that there was in his smile a touch of irony.

‘You will do your part and I mine,’ he said. ‘It is yours to kill, mine to die without quailing.’

The Inquisitor was blinded by his tears so that he could scarcely find his way out.

Much of this, in halting tones, the Bishop told the two friars and at this point he covered his face as though to continue were a shame greater than he could bear. They had listened to him with pain, but with rapt attention, and Father Antonio in his mind carefully noted every speech and every reply so that he could write it in his book.

‘Then I did a dreadful thing. Don Baltasar was sick in bed and I knew he would stay there till the last moment, for he was mortally afraid of being too ill to attend the auto de fé. He is an ambitious man and wished to bring himself to the notice of the Prince. I was free to act on my own initiative. I could not bear the thought of that poor old man being burnt by those cruel flames. His screams when they tortured him still rang in my ears and I thought I should continue to hear them all my life. I told those it concerned that I had myself spoken with him and he had so far recanted as to accept the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son. I gave orders that he should be garrotted before he was burnt and I sent money by a servant to the executioner to induce him to do his work with dispatch.’

It should be explained that the executioner by tightening and loosening the iron collar round the victim’s neck could prolong the death-agony for hours and so had to be bribed to give the sufferer the quick release of death.

‘I knew it was a sin. I was distraught with grief. I hardly knew what I was doing. It was a sin for which I can never cease to reproach myself. I told it to my confessor and performed the penance he imposed upon me. I received absolution, but I cannot absolve myself, and the events of this day are my punishment.’

‘But, my lord, it was an act of mercy,’ said Father Antonio. ‘Who that has worked with you as long as I have does not know the tenderness of your heart and who can blame you because for once you allowed it to override your sense of justice?’

‘It was no act of mercy. Who knows but that the Greek was shaken by my reasoning and who knows but that when the fire licked his naked flesh the grace of God might have been vouchsafed to him and so moved his stubborn spirit to recant his errors? Many at that last dreadful moment when they are about to meet their Maker have thus saved their souls. I robbed him of the chance and so condemned him to eternal torment.’

A hoarse sob broke from his throat, a sound like the strangled, mysterious cry of a bird of the night in the dark silence of the forest.

‘Eternal torment! Who can picture to himself its pain? The damned writhe in a lake of fire from which rise noxious vapours which they breathe in agony. Their bodies are alive with worms. Raging thirst and ravenous hunger torment them. Their shrieks, wrung from them by the scorching flames, are a tumult and a confusion compared with which the crash of thunder, the howling of the storm-swept sea, are a deathly silence. Devils, frightful to look upon, mock and deride them beat them with insatiable rage, but remorse tears them with a pain more cruel than the tortures of those hideous fiends. The worm of conscience gnaws their vitals. Fire crucifies their souls, and it is a fire compared with which the fire of this world is like the fire of a picture, for it is the wrath of God that lights it and maintains it as the terrible instrument of His just vengeance to all eternity.

‘And eternity, how terrible is eternity! As many millions of years pass over the damned as drops of water have fallen upon the earth since the beginning of time; as many millions of years as there are drops of water in all the seas and all the rivers in the world; as many millions of years as there are leaves on all the trees that grow and as many millions of years as there are grains of sand on the shores of all the oceans; as many millions of years as all the tears that men have wept since God created our first parents. And after this incalculable number of years has passed, the anguish of those unhappy creatures shall continue as though it were but a beginning, as though it were the first day; and eternity will remain whole as though not one second had passed. And it is to that eternity of suffering that I have condemned that unhappy man. What punishment can make amends for such a frightful misdeed? Oh, I am afraid, afraid.’

He was a man distraught. Great sobs rent his breast. He stared at the two friars with eyes dark with horror and when they looked into them there was a redness in their depths as though they saw in them, as if from a vast distance, the red flames of hell.

‘Call the friars together and I will tell them I have sinned and for my soul’s sake command them to inflict upon me the circular discipline.’

This was degrading punishment of scourging in which all present used the lash on the offender. Father Antonio, appalled, flung himself down on his knees and with his hands together as if in prayer implored his master not to insist on such a fearful ordeal.

‘The brethren have no love for you, my lord, they are angry because you would not allow them to come to the church this morning. They will not spare you. They will use the lash with all their might. Friars have often died under their strokes.’

‘I do not wish them to spare me. If I die justice will have been administered. I command you under your vow of obedience to do as I tell you.’

The friar raised himself to his feet.

‘My lord, you have no right to expose yourself to such a mortal affront. You are the Bishop of Segovia. You will cast a slur on the whole episcopate of Spain. You will lessen the authority of all who have been appointed by God to your high station. Are you sure that there is not ostentation in the shame to which you would expose yourself?’

He had never dared to speak to his Father in God in such peremptory tones. The Bishop was taken aback. Was there some shadow of vainglory in his desire thus publicly to abase himself? He looked long at the friar.

‘I do not know,’ he said at last miserably. ‘I am like a man stumbling across an unknown country in the darkness of the night. Perhaps you are right. I was thinking only of myself, I did not think how it would affect others.’

Father Antonio gave a sigh of relief.

‘You two shall give me the discipline here and in private.’

‘No, no, no, I will not. I could not bear to do violence to your sacred body.’

‘Must I remind you of your vows then?’ asked the Bishop with all his old sternness. ‘Have you so little love for me that you can hesitate to inflict a trifling penance on me for my soul’s good? There are scourges under the bed.’

Silently, unhappily, the friar got them out. They were stained with blood. The Bishop slipped out of the upper part of his habit so that it fell to his waist. Then he removed his shirt; it was made of tin and pierced like a grater so that it should lacerate the flesh. Father Antonio knew that the Bishop was in the habit of wearing a hair shirt, not always, for then he would have grown used to it, but only so often as to make the torment of it ever fresh; he gasped when he saw that horrible shirt of tin, but at the same time was edified. This was indeed a saint. He would not fail to take notice of it in his book. The Bishop’s back was scarred with the scourging he had at least once a week inflicted on himself and there were open and suppurating sores.

He threw his arms round the thin column that upheld the two arches by which his apartment was divided and exposed his back to the two friars. Each of them in silence took a scourge and one after the other brought it down on the bleeding flesh. At each blow the Bishop shuddered, but not even a groan escaped his lips. They had not given him more then a dozen strokes when he fell to the floor in a swoon. They picked him up and carried him on to the hard bed. They threw water over him, but he did not regain consciousness and they were frightened. Father Antonio sent his fellow to tell a lay brother to hurry for a doctor, since the Bishop was ill, and at the same time he bade him let the brethren know that on no consideration was he to be disturbed. He bathed the lacerated back; he anxiously felt the wavering pulse. For a while he thought the Bishop was dying. But at length he opened his eyes. It took him a moment to gather his senses together. Then he forced a smile to his lips.

‘Poor creature that I am,’ he said. ‘I fainted.’

‘Do not speak, my lord. Lie still.’

But the Bishop raised himself on an elbow.

‘Give me my shirt.’

Father Antonio looked with a shudder at that instrument of torture.

‘Oh, my lord, you couldn’t bear it now.’

‘Give it to me.’

‘The doctor is coming. You would not want him to see you wear a garment of mortification.’

The Bishop sank back on the hard pallet.

‘Give me my Cross,’ he said.

At last the doctor came, ordered the patient to stay in bed and said he would send medicine. It was a soothing potion and after a while the Bishop fell asleep.

CHAPTER 16

Next day he insisted on getting up. He said his Mass. Though weak and shaken, he was calm and went about his affairs as though nothing had happened.

Towards evening a lay brother came to tell him that his brother Don Manuel was in the parlour and desired to see him. Supposing that he had heard of his sickness he sent back word that he thanked him for coming, but pressing business prevented him from receiving him. The lay brother returned to say that Don Manuel refused to go till the Bishop saw him, since he had a communication to make to him that was of moment. With a sigh the Bishop told the lay brother to show him in. Since their arrival at Castel Rodriguez he had seen no more of him then courtesy required. Though he chid himself for his lack of charity he could not overcome the dislike he felt for that vain, brutal and callous man.

He came in, very grandly dressed, plethoric, rudely healthy and full of an aggressive vitality. He carried himself with a swagger. His face bore a look of self-satisfaction, and if the Bishop did not deceive himself there was malice and cunning in his bold bright eyes. He smiled grimly when he looked round the bare and cheerless cell. The Bishop motioned him to a stool.

‘Have you nothing more comfortable for me to sit on than this, brother?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

‘I hear you were taken ill.’

‘It was a passing indisposition of no consequence. I am restored to my usual health.’

‘That is good.’

There was a silence between them. Don Manuel continued to look at him with a smile that was tinged with raillery.

‘You said that you had a communication to make to me,’ said the Bishop at last.

‘I have, brother. It appears that the ceremony of yesterday morning failed to realize your hopes.’

‘Be so good as to state your business, Manuel.’

‘What made you think that you were the chosen instrument to cure that girl of her disability?’

The Bishop hesitated. It was his inclination to refuse an answer, but, mortifying himself before the gross coarse man, he gave it.

‘I received an assurance that what the girl said was true, and though I knew myself unworthy I felt bound to act upon it.’

‘You made a mistake, brother. You should have examined her more carefully. The Blessed Virgin told her that the son of Don Juan de Valero who had best served God had the power to cure her. Why did you jump to the conclusion that you were meant? Were you not a trifle wanting in the Christian humility?’

The Bishop paled.

‘What do you mean?’ he cried. ‘She said to me that Our Lady had told her that it was I.’

‘She is an ignorant and foolish girl. She supposed that you must be designated because you are a bishop and, how I know not, the people of this city have heard much of your sanctity and mortifications.’

The Bishop prayed a short mental prayer so that he could master the anger and shame with which his brother’s words filled him.

‘How do you know this? Who told you that those were the words of the Blessed Virgin?’

Don Manuel chortled at what seemed to him an excellent joke.

‘It appears that the girl has an uncle called Domingo Perez. We used to know him when we were little. If I remember right you were at the seminary with him.’

The Bishop inclined his head in token of assent.

‘Domingo Perez is a toper. He goes to a tavern frequented by my servants, and he scraped acquaintance with them, doubtless in the hope of drinking wine at their expense. Last night he was in his cups. As was natural they were all talking of the events of the morning, for your fiasco, brother, is become the common talk of the city. Domingo told them he had expected nothing else and had sought to warn you, but was refused admission to the convent. He repeated then the exact words which Our Blessed Lady had spoken as his niece had reported them to him.’

The Bishop was confounded. He did not know what to say. Don Manuel continued and now there was in his eyes a look of frank mockery. The Bishop asked himself miserably what sort of a man this was who could find so cruel a pleasure in thus humiliating his brother.

‘Did it not occur to you, brother, that it was I that was meant?’

‘You?’ The Bishop could hardly believe his ears. If he had been capable of laughing, he would have laughed then.

‘Does it surprise you, brother? For four and twenty years I have served my King. I have risked my life a hundred times, I have fought in glorious battles and my body bears the scars of my honourable wounds. I have suffered from hunger and thirst, from the bitter cold of those accursed Low Countries and from the torrid heat of summer. You have burnt a few dozen heretics at the stake, and I, to the glory of God, have killed the damned heretics by the thousand. To the glory of God I have laid waste their fields and burnt their crops. I have besieged thriving towns and when they surrendered put all their inhabitants, men, women and children, to the sword.’

The Bishop shuddered.

‘The Holy Office condemns the accused only by process of law. It gives them the opportunity to repent and purge their sin. It is careful to do justice, and if it punishes the guilty it absolves the innocent.’

‘I know those Dutchmen too well to think they are capable of repentance. Heresy is in their blood. They are traitors to their faith and their King and they deserve death. No one that knows me can deny that I have served God well.’

The Bishop pondered. The brutality and boastfulness of his brother filled him with disgust. It seemed incredible that God could have chosen such an instrument for His work, yet it might be that He had done so just because he was the man he was, in order to put him, Blasco de Valero, to shame for his unforgiven sin. If so, it was his to kiss the rod.

‘Heaven knows, I am conscious of my unworthiness,’ he said at last. ‘Should you attempt this thing and fail it will cause a scandal in the city and give a cruel opportunity to the wicked to mock. I beseech you to do nothing rashly; it is a matter that demands anxious consideration.’

‘That it has already received, brother,’ said Don Manuel coolly. ‘I have consulted my friends and they are the most important men in the city. I have asked the opinion of the archpriest and the prior of this convent. One and all, they consent.’

Again the Bishop paused. He knew that there were many in the city who were envious of the positions he and his brother had achieved because, though gentlemen by birth, they were of small account. It might well be that they had agreed to his brother’s preposterous demand only to throw discredit on them both.

‘You must not forget that there is still the possibility that the girl Catalina Perez was deceived.’

‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If I fail it will be clear that the girl is a witch and should be handed over to the Inquisition for trial and punishment.’

‘If you have the consent of the authorities of the city and are determined to make the attempt I can do nothing to prevent you. But I beg you to do everything as secretly as may be so that greater scandal than has been caused already may be avoided.’

‘I am obliged to you for your advice, brother. I will give it the consideration it deserves.’

Upon this Don Manuel withdrew. The Bishop sighed deeply. It seemed to him that his cup of bitterness was filled to the brim. He knelt down before the black Cross on the wall and silently prayed. Then he called a lay brother and bade him fetch the man Domingo Perez.

‘If you cannot find him in his house, you will find him in the tavern near the palace in which my brother Don Manuel is staying. You will ask him to do me the favour of coming to see me without delay.

CHAPTER 17

After a little the lay brother ushered Domingo into the Bishop’s oratory. For a while the two men stared silently at one another. They had not met since they were young men, hardly more than boys, at the seminary of Alcalá de Henares. Both were now middle-aged, almost elderly, and both were emaciated and ravaged. But one was ravaged by austerity, long vigils, fasting and continuous labour; while the other was ravaged by drink and dissipation. Yet if there was a certain similarity in their appearance there was none in their expression: the Bishop’s was harassed and anxious while the scrivener’s was careless and good-humoured. As a clerk in minor orders he wore a cassock, and it was shabby, green with age and stained down the front with wine and food. But both wore an air of asceticism and of intellectual distinction.

‘Your lordship desired to see me,’ said Domingo.

A slight, yet gentle smile was outlined on the Bishop’s pale lips.

‘It is a long time since we last met, Domingo.’

‘Our paths have gone very different ways. I should have thought your lordship had long forgotten the existence of so poor and worthless a creature as Domingo Perez.’

‘We have known one another all our lives. I am ashamed that you should address me with such ceremony. It is many years since I have heard a friend call me Blasco.’

Domingo gave him his charming, disarming smile.

‘The great have no friends, dear Blasco. It is the price they must pay for their greatness.’

‘Let us for an hour forget this poor greatness of mine and talk with one another like the old and intimate comrades we once were. You were wrong in thinking I had ever forgotten you; we were too close to one another for that. I have kept myself informed of your life.’

‘It has not been an edifying one.’

The Bishop sat down on a stool and motioned to Domingo to take the other.

‘But more than that I have kept in touch with you through your letters.’

‘How can you have done that? I have never written to you.’

‘Not as from yourself, but I read too many of the poems you wrote when we were boys together not to know your handwriting. Do you think I did not recognize it in the letters my father and my brother Martin sent me? I knew very well that they could never have expressed themselves with such elegance and propriety. And there were expressions, turns of phrase, reflections, in which I recognized your wayward spirit.’

Domingo laughed lightly.

‘The literary gifts of Don Juan and your brother Martin are not remarkable. When they had said they were in good health and hoped you were also, and that the harvest was poor, they had said all they had to say. For my own credit and theirs I felt bound to enliven their bald statements with the gossip of the town and such conceits and flippant jests as occurred to me.’

‘How sad it is that you should have let your great gifts run to waste, Domingo. What I had to learn by application and industry you acquired as it were by intuition. Often you used to terrify me by the audacity of your thought, by that flow of unexpected ideas that seemed to flow from your brain with as little effort as water gushes from a spring, but I never doubted your brilliance. You were born to excel, and but for your restless temper you might by now be a shining ornament of our Holy Church.’

‘Instead of which,’ returned Domingo, ‘I am nothing but a poor scholar, a playwright who can find no actors to act his plays, a hack who writes sermons for priests too stupid to write their own, something of a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well. I lacked the vocation, my good Blasco. Life allured me. My place was neither the cloister nor the hearth, but the broad highway with its adventures and perils, its chance encounters and manifold variety. I have lived. I have suffered from hunger and thirst, I have been footsore, I have been beaten, I have suffered every mischance that can beset a man: I have lived. And even now when age is creeping upon me I have no regrets for the years I have wasted, for I too have slept on Parnassus; and when I walk to some distant village to write a paper for an illiterate clown, or when I sit in my little room surrounded by my books and rhyme the speeches in plays that will never be played, I am filled with such exultation that I would not change places with cardinal or pope.’

‘Do you not fear the wrath to come? The wages of sin is death.’

‘Is it the Bishop of Segovia who asks me that question or my old friend Blasco de Valero?’

‘I have never yet betrayed a friend or an enemy. So long as you say nothing to offend the Faith say what you will.’

‘Then this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had not desired men to enjoy it. Would He have given the stars their glory, the birds their sweet song and the flowers their fragrance if He had not wished us to delight in them? I have sinned before men and men have condemned me. God made me a man with the passions of a man, and did He give them to me only that I should suppress them? He gave me my adventurous spirit and my love of life. I have a humble hope that when I am face to face with my Maker He will condone my imperfections and I shall find mercy in His sight.’

The Bishop looked sorely troubled. He could have told the poor poet that we are placed on this earth to scorn its delights, to resist temptation, to conquer ourselves and to bear our cross; so that in the end, miserable sinners though we be, we may be found worthy of communion with the blessed. But would his words avail? He could only pray that before death claimed him the Grace of God might descend upon that wretched man so that he would repent of his misdeeds. Silence fell between them.

‘I did not send for you today in order to urge you to mend your ways,’ said the Bishop at last. ‘It would not be difficult for me to confute your wrongful opinions, but I know of old how ingenious you are to make the worse appear the better reason and I know too the pleasure you take in uttering sophisms to tease. I am ready to believe that much of what you said you said only to amuse yourself at my expense. You have a niece.’

‘I have.’

‘What do you make of this story that has brought unrest upon the city?’

‘She is a virtuous and truthful girl. She is a good Catholic, but no more than properly religious.’

‘Since I understand that she owes her education to you I can well credit that.’

‘Nor is she prone to idle fancies. She is indeed, as the poor are bound to be, somewhat matter-of-fact. No one could accuse her of possessing the unfortunately faculty of imagination.’

‘Do you believe then that the Blessed Virgin did in fact appear to her?’

‘I was in two minds until yesterday when she told me the exact words Our Lady had used. Then I was convinced. That is why I sought to see you. I knew at once what was meant and I wanted to spare you a useless intervention. They would not admit me.’

The Bishop sighed.

‘It is not the least of the crosses we are called upon to bear that the companions of our labours in their solicitude for our well-being prevent access to us of those whom it would be profitable for us to see.’

‘Time has not diminished the affection that bound me to you in my youth, for you see, I, a sinner, can afford to surrender to the blind impulses of my heart. I wished to save you from a humiliation which I knew would be very bitter to you. The moment the girl repeated to me the Blessed Virgin’s exact words I knew who was destined to cure her of infirmity.’

‘She told me that Our Lady had named me.’

‘That was a natural error for a girl to make who had heard of your mortifications, virtue and austerity. The Blessed Virgin told her that the power to cure her lay in the hands of that one of your father’s sons who has best served God.’

‘I have but just heard that.’

‘Do you not know then who has done that? It is as plain as a pike-staff.’

The Bishop paled. He gave Domingo an anxious glance.

‘My brother Martin?’

‘The baker.’

Beads of sweat stood on the Bishop’s brow. He shivered as though someone were walking over his grave.

‘It is impossible. He is no doubt a worthy man, but of the earth, earthy.’

‘Why is it impossible? Because he has no learning? It is one of the mysteries of our Faith that God Who gave man reason and thereby raised him above the brutes has never so far as we are told laid great store on intelligence. Your brother is a good and simple man. He has been a faithful husband to his wife and a loving father to his children. He has honoured his father and mother. He has fed them when they were hungry and tended them when they were sick. He bore with submission his father’s contempt and his mother’s distress because, a gentleman by birth, he followed a calling that lowered him in the estimation of fools. He suffered with good humour the scorn of the gentry and the gibes of the vulgar. Like our father Adam he earned his bread by the sweat of his brow and he took a modest pride in the knowledge that the bread was good. He accepted the joys of life with gratitude and its sorrows with resignation. He succoured the needy. He was pleasant in his discourse and cheerful in his mien. He was a friend to all men. The ways of God are inscrutable and it may well be that in His eyes by his industrious, honest life, his loving-kindness, his innocent gaiety, Martin the baker has served Him better than you who have sought salvation by prayer and penance or your brother Manuel who glories in the women and children he has killed and the thriving towns he has left in desolate ruin.’

The Bishop passed his hand wearily across his forehead. His face was anguished.

‘You know me too well, Domingo,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘to think that I understood to do the thing I did without anxious searching of heart. I knew I was unworthy and my soul was dismayed, but I took the sign that was granted me as a command to do what I believed to be the will of God. I was wrong. And now my brother Manuel is determined to attempt what I failed to do.’

‘Even as a boy he was more remarkable for the strength of his body than for the force of his understanding.’

‘He is as obstinate as he is wrong-headed. The notabilities of the town are encouraging him so that they may deride him after the event. He has obtained the approval of the archpriest and of the prior of this convent.’

‘At all costs you must prevent him.’

‘I have no authority to do so.’

‘If your brother should persist in his folly he will seek to avenge himself for his discomfiture on that wretched girl. The people will side with him. They will have no mercy. In the name of our old friendship I beseech you to protect her from his enmity and from the blind violence of the mob.’

‘By the Cross on which Our Lord was crucified I swear to you that I will give my life if need be to save the child from harm.’

Domingo rose to his feet.

‘I thank you with all my heart. Farewell, my dear. Our paths are different and we shall not meet again. Farewell for ever.’

‘Farewell. Oh, Domingo, I am an unhappy man. Pray for me, pray for me in all your prayers that God may vouchsafe to release me from the cruel burden of this life.’

He was so shattered, his mien so piteous, that the old toper was seized with compassion. On a sudden impulse he took the Bishop in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks. The sinner pressed the saint to his heart and was quickly gone.

CHAPTER 18

That night a very strange thing happened. The full moon, pursuing its appointed course, shone with such a dazzling brilliance that the cloudless sky shone blue like the velvet cloak that covered the white garment of the Blessed Virgin. The people of Castel Rodriguez slept. Suddenly all the bells in the city began to ring with such a clamour as might rouse the dead. It woke the sleepers and some rushed to their windows, while others half-dressed, snatching up clothes as they passed, ran down into the streets. The ringing of the church bells at that unwonted hour meant that fire had broken out in some part of the town and timorous housewives set about getting their valuables together, for when a fire started none could tell how far it would spread, and it was well to save what one could before the flames caught the house. Some in their panic went so far as to throw their bedding out of the windows and some carried out pieces of furniture and deposited them outside their doors.

People poured out of their houses and the streets were thronged with them. By a common impulse they crowded into the great plaza which was the pride of the city. Each one asked his neighbour where the fire was. Men cursed and women wrung their hands. They rushed to and fro to find where houses were aflame; they looked up to heaven to watch for the tell-tale glow that would mark the spot. There was nothing to be seen. People surging into the plaza from the various quarters of the town said there was no fire where they came from. There was no fire anywhere. Then as though a wind had suddenly blown over them the idea seized them one and all that foolish youths were playing a prank and had mischievously set the bells ringing to get the people out of their beds and frighten them out of their wits. Angry men, determined to beat them within an inch of their lives, rushed to the church towers. They were met, with an amazing sight. The ropes were jerking up and down and not a soul was pulling them. They stared for a moment with astonishment at the strange sight and then, with torches and lanterns, ran up the steep steps of the towers. When they reached the platform where the bells hung they were deafened by their clanging. The bells tossed from side to side in a furious oscillation and the clappers thundered against their brazen sides. No men were there. No men could have moved those heavy bells to such a violent din. You might have thought the bells had suddenly gone mad. They were ringing of themselves.

With short gasps, with terror in their hearts, scuttling down the stairways as though the devil were after them, they ran into the streets and with frantic words and wild gestures told what they had seen.

It was a miracle. It was God that had set the bells ringing and none knew whether it betokened good or ill to the city. Many fell to their knees and prayed aloud. Sinners remembered their sins and thought of the wrath to come. The parish priests had the doors of their churches unlocked and the crowd flocked in and followed the priests in their prayers, which besought the Almighty to have mercy on His creatures. It was long before they quieted down and slunk, silent and sober, back to their homes.

CHAPTER 19

None knew how it had started, whether the notion had occurred to one fanciful person or whether it had been independently conceived by many; it was like the cholera; you do not know if it has been brought into the city by a stranger from foreign parts or whether some ill wind has spread the disease; a man here falls sick, a woman there dies, and before you are aware of the danger pestilence sweeps through the streets and the grave-diggers can no longer dig graves fast enough to bury the dead. Before the day was well advanced the conviction had spread among all the people of Castel Rodriguez that the mysterious event of the night was bound up in some way with the appearance to Catalina Perez of the Blessed Virgin. They talked of nothing else. Magistrates discussed it in their council chambers, priests in their sacristies and nobles in their palaces. The common people in the streets, housewives in the market place, shopmen in their shops, spoke of it and wondered. Monks in their monasteries, nuns in their convents were distracted from their prayers.

And presently it was agreed that there could be no doubt who was designated by the Blessed Virgin’s enigmatic words. There were not a few, especially among the secular clergy, who asked whether God was not displeased with the extravagance of the Bishop’s austerity and whether a certain arrogance in his humility did not indeed merit a divine reproof. But on Don Manuel de Valero there was neither spot nor stain. He had given the best years of his life to the service of God and the King. His Majesty, vice-regent on earth of the Almighty, by conferring conspicuous honours upon him had set the seal of his approval on his valour and virtue. It was evident to all, cleric and lay, rich and poor, nobles and commoners, that Don Manuel was the man chosen to work the miracle ordained by the divine will. A deputation consisting of prominent ecclesiastics, members of the aristocracy and persons of authority in the city council, called upon him and announced their unanimous opinion. Don Manuel in his bluff, soldierly way told them that he was prepared to put himself at their disposal. It was decided that the ceremony should take place on the following day in the Collegiate Church. Don Manuel asked the archpriest to receive his confession that afternoon, and since he proposed to take Holy Communion in the morning, which he must take fasting, he called off the supper party he had arranged to give to his friends that evening. He was a conscientious man and was determined to omit nothing that might render his intervention efficacious on such a solemn occasion. Thrice armed is he, shriven and free from guilt, who puts his trust in God.

The Prior of the Dominican convent himself informed the Bishop of what had been decided and at the same time invited him to head the friars who were going in procession to attend the ceremony. Don Blasco discerned the malice in the Prior’s offer, but, thanking him for the honour, gravely accepted. He was helpless. He attached no importance to what Domingo had said about his brother Martin; he knew too well Domingo’s love of teasing and the pleasure he took in paradoxical conceits; but for all that he had a firm conviction that Don Manuel was not the man to perform a miracle. He would willingly have escaped the obligation of seeing his brother confounded, but knew that if he refused to go it would be ascribed to pique. It did not become his high office to give evil minds opportunity to think ill of him. But putting that aside there was his promise to Domingo to fulfil. He was well acquainted with the folly and brutality of the rabble, rabble if they were nobly born or basely, and it was only too probable that if they were disappointed of the wonder they expected they would wreak their vengeance on the hapless girl. If he were there he might be able to save her from their savagery.

So next day, heavy at heart, with his two faithful secretaries, he walked at the head of the friars from the convent to the church. It was thronged to the doors and still the people, eager to see a miracle performed before their very eyes, pressed in. Way was made and the Bishop, followed by the friars, proceeded slowly up the nave. He took his seat in a great chair beside, and a little in front of, the high altar. The choir was filled with the notabilities of the city. Presently Don Manuel came forward with a company of gentlemen and seated himself in a chair that had been placed for him on the other side of the altar. He was dressed in a parade suit of armour, his breastplate damascened with gold, and he wore the great cloak, with its green cross, of the Order of Calatrava. The nobles in the choir were in their best array. They were chatting and laughing. They exchanged nods and smiles with one another. In the nave the crowd were talking aloud and calling to one another as though they were at a bull-fight. The Bishop surveyed them with indignation. It was a mockery of religion, and he had it in mind to rise and denounce them for their irreverent levity.

At the foot of the steps, supporting herself with a crutch, knelt Catalina.

From the organ loft fell the first notes of a voluntary and the florid sounds swept blithely over the heads of the congregation. The church was in its architecture large and plain, but successive heads of the great house of Henriquez had enriched it with a plateresque ceiling of painted wood, framed the pictures over the altars with frames massive and gilt, and provided the images with gorgeous robes. The choir stalls were elaborately carved. In the chapels were the tombs, the early ones in stone, grim and austere, the later ones of marble richly sculptured, in which lay the mortal remains of the dead dukes and their consorts. A dim light filtered through the windows of stained glass and the air was heavy with incense.

The priests came in, clad in the costly vestments used on great occasions, which had been presented to the church by devout and noble ladies. The subdeacon held the chalice and the paten enveloped in the humeral veil. Mass was sung. A shiver of awe passed over the vast concourse as all fell to their knees at the thin tinkle of the bell that called attention to the elevation of the Host and Chalice. The archpriest, the celebrant, partook of Communion and administered it in turn to Don Manuel and to Catalina. At last the moment had arrived which the crowd had been impatiently awaiting. A strange sound came from them, not the sound of voices, not the sound exactly of restless movements, but a sound like the sighing of the wind in a wood of pine trees, as though their expectation itself was made audible.

Don Manuel rose to his feel and strode to the kneeling girl. In his armour, the great cloak of his order hanging from his shoulders, he made an imposing and even splendid figure. The scene, the moment had invested him with an unaccustomed dignity. He was confident in his power. He laid his hand on the girl’s head and in a loud voice, as though he were giving his regiment the order to charge, so that he was plainly heard to the remotest corners of the great church, he repeated the words he had been given to say.

‘In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost I command thee, Catalina Perez, to rise to thy feet, cast away thy useless crutch and walk.’

The girl, spell-bound by the awfulness of the occasion, frightened, staggered to her feet and dropped the crutch. She took a step forward and with a cry of terror fell headlong. Once more the miracle had failed.

Then a great uproar arose and it was as though a sudden madness had seized the crowd. Men shouted and women screamed. They yelled with rage.

‘A witch. A witch,’ they cried. ‘The stake. The stake. The stake. Burn her.’

Then with a sudden impulse they surged towards the sacristy and would have torn the girl limb from limb. In their passion they pushed one another aside. Some fell and were brutally trampled on, and their shrieks were added to the din.

The Bishop sprang to his feet and with a swift sweeping movement strode down the sacristy till he came face to face with the frenzied mob. He raised his arms above his head and his great dark eyes blazed.

‘Back, back,’ he cried in a voice of thunder. ‘Who are you to desecrate this holy place? Get back, I tell you. Get back.’

His aspect was so terrifying that a gasp of horror was wrung from a thousand throats. As though a great abyss had suddenly opened before them the crowd on a sudden stopped dead. They shrank back. For a moment the Bishop eyed them, his eyes black with indignation.

‘Vile, vile,’ he cried and then, clenching his fists, he flung out his arms as though he would fling at them the thunderbolt of his wrath. ‘Kneel, kneel and pray that you may be forgiven for the insult that you have offered to the house of God.’

At his words, dominated by his authority, many fell sobbing to their knees. Others, as though too dazed to move, stood and stared vacantly at that fearful figure. Slowly the Bishop looked from side to side till his gaze had taken in the whole of that vast concourse and each one felt that those angry eyes were fixed upon him alone. Silence fell except for the hysterical sobbing of a woman here and there.

‘Listen,’ said the Bishop at last. ‘Listen to what I say.’ And now his voice was no longer menacing, but grave, stern and authoritative. ‘Listen. You know the words Our Lady vouchsafed to the girl Catalina Perez and you know the wonders that have occurred in this city and have given rise to confusion and unrest in your minds. The Blessed Virgin told this girl that the son of Don Juan de Valero who had best served God had the power by God’s grace to cure her of her infirmity. In our sinful pride and vanity I who speak to you and Don Manuel my brother had the temerity to think that one or other of us was thus designated. We have been bitterly punished for our presumption. But Don Juan has still another son.’

The crowd interrupted him with shouts and laughter.

‘El panadero,’ they cried. ‘The baker.’

Then they began to sing derisively in a sort of rude rhythm.

‘El panadero. El panadero.’

‘Silence,’ cried the Bishop.

People hushed one another.

‘Laugh. As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools. What does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God? Hypocrites and blasphemers. Fornicators. Vile. Vile. Vile.’

He repeated the word each time with a more biting scorn so that they who heard him recoiled as a man would if a glass of icy water were thrown in his face. His wrath was terrible to see. He swept that multitude with a glance of withering contempt.

‘Are the familiars of the Holy Office here?’

A strange sound, like a startled sigh, swept through the crowd as one and all caught their breath, for these instruments of the Inquisition were terrifying to the people. They did not know what the sinister words portended, and each one shook in his shoes. Behind the Bishop several men started up.

‘Let them stand forth,’ he said.

Since the familiars of the Holy Office enjoyed power, influence and above all protection from its dread proceedings, theirs was a charge sought after by men of the highest rank. There were eight in Castel Rodriguez. There was a moment’s pause while they left their seats and took up positions behind the Bishop. He waited till he knew from the quiet of their shuffling feet that they were behind him.

‘Listen,’ he said again, and the index finger of his outstretched hand seemed to point in accusation at each one of those shivering creatures. ‘The Holy Office does nothing in anger nor in haste. It administers justice to the guilty, but is merciful to the repentant sinner.’

He paused and the silence was awful.

‘It is not for you, a generation of vipers, to lay hands on this wretched girl. If she is deceived or possessed of a devil it is for the Holy office to take cognizance of it. If she fails in the test the familiars are here to deliver her to the tribunal. But the test is not complete. Where is Martin de Valero?’

‘Here, here,’ cried several voices.

‘Let him come forward.’

‘No, no, no.’

It was the voice of Martin the baker.

‘If he will not come of his own free will, constrain him,’ said the Bishop sternly.

There was a scuffle as Martin struggled with the men who pushed and pulled him, but after a little the crowd parted and he was urged forward to the sanctuary steps. The men fell back and left him standing alone. He had come in from his shop to see the wonder of which everyone was talking, and he was in his working clothes. His face was red from the heat of the ovens and from his vain effort to escape from the rude hands that hustled him. The day was hot and pearls of sweat stood on his forehead. His plump good-humoured countenance was heavy with consternation.

‘Come,’ said the Bishop.

As though drawn by a force he could not withstand the baker ascended the sanctuary steps.

‘Brother, brother, what is it that you are doing to me?’ he cried. ‘How can I do what you could not? I am but a working man and no better a Christian than my neighbour.’

‘Be silent.’

The Bishop had not even a remote notion that the baker could work a miracle, and he had only thought of him on the spur of the moment as the sole means by which he could save Catalina from the fury of the rabble. He wanted a brief respite which would allow him to calm their passion. He knew now that the girl was safe. The familiars were there to protect her, and since there was in the city no prison of the Inquisition they would take her on his order to a convent and when she was there it would be time to consider what further steps should be taken. The Bishop once more addressed himself to the awed people.

‘Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel with honour and another with dishonour? There is no respect of persons with God. He that humbleth himself shall be exalted and the haughty shall be abased. Bring forward the girl.’

Catalina was lying where she had fallen, her face hidden in her arms, and sobs shook her thin little body. No one had paid more attention to her than if she were a dead dog by the roadside. Two familiars raised her to her feet and brought her face to face with the Bishop. As best she could, with the crutch under her armpit, she joined her hands together in supplication. Tears streamed down her face.

‘Oh, my lord, my lord, have pity on me,’ she cried. ‘Not again, I beseech you, it can come to nothing. Let me go home to my mother.’

‘Kneel,’ he ordered. ‘Kneel.’

With a despairing sob the child sank to her knees.

‘Lay your hands on her head,’ he bade his brother.

‘I cannot. I will not. I am afraid.’

‘Under pain of excommunication I command you to do as I tell you,’ said the Bishop harshly.

A shudder shook the unfortunate man, for he knew that his brother would not hesitate to carry into effect his dreadful threat. He timidly laid a trembling hand on the girl’s head. It was not even clean.

‘Now say the words that you heard your brother Manuel say.’

‘I cannot remember them.’

‘Then I will say them and you shall say them after me. I, Martin de Valero, son of Juan de Valero.’

Martin repeated the words.

‘I, Martin de Valero, son of Juan de Valero.’

The Bishop spoke the last fateful words in a loud strong voice, but Martin said them after him in a tone that was barely audible. Catalina, as she was bidden, scrambled to her feet and with a despairing gesture flung the crutch away from her. For an instant she wavered. She did not fall. She stood. Then, with a cry and a sob, forgetting the place and the occasion, she turned and ran down the sanctuary steps.

‘Mother, mother.’

Maria Perez, who was with Domingo, beside herself with joy, forced her way through the crowd and ran to meet her. Catalina threw herself into her arms and burst out crying.

The dense throng for a moment was too stunned to move. They gasped in amazement; then such a hullabaloo arose as never was heard.

‘The miracle. The miracle.’

They shouted. They clapped their hands. Women waved their handkerchiefs. The men cried olè, olè, as they would have done at a bull-fight when one of the toreros had made a dangerous pass; they flung their hats through the air as they flung them at the feet of the matador when with his cuadrilla behind him he walked round the ring to receive the plaudits of the public. Above the din rose the piercing tones of a woman here and there singing to a strange, half Moorish tune a hymn to the Blessed Virgin. It seemed as though the tumult would never cease. Strangers embraced one another. Men and women wept for joy. With their own eyes they had seen a miracle.

Suddenly a hush passed over that wild, madly-excited rout, and all eyes were turned upon the Bishop. Martin, in his shyness, hardly able to take in what had happened, had shrunk back, and the Dominican stood alone at the top of the sanctuary steps with his back to the High Altar. In his habit, patched and worn though it was, emaciated, but tall and erect, he made a figure that was awe-inspiring. But the marvellous thing was that he was bathed in light; it was not a halo that surrounded his head, but an aureole that seemed to clothe him from head to foot.

‘A saint, a saint,’ cried the people and they stared with all their eyes at the strange and thrilling sight. ‘Blessed be the woman that bore you,’ they cried. ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Oh, happy, happy day!’

The did not know what they said. They were beside themselves with joy and love and fear. Only Domingo noticed that a pane of one of the stained-glass windows was broken and by a fortunate chance a ray of sun passed through the aperture to hit the Bishop and suffuse him with glory.

The Bishop raised his hand for silence and immediately that great noise was stilled. He stood for a moment surveying the sea of faces before him, his face sad and stern, and then, raising his head, his tragic eyes rapt as though with the eyes of the spirit he saw the heavenly host, he began in slow and solemn tones to recite the Nicene Creed. The words were familiar to all his listeners, for they heard them every Sunday at Mass and there was a low buzz, like the distant sound of shuffling feet, as they repeated the words after him. He came to an end. He turned and walked towards the High Altar. The light that had shone upon him was seen no more, and Domingo, looking at the window, saw that the sun in its relentless journey across the sky had passed on and no ray sent its light through the broken pane. The Bishop prostrated himself before the altar and gave thanks to God in silent prayer. A great weight was lifted from his tortured heart, for it was borne in upon him without a possibility of doubt that though it was the hand of Martin that had rested on the girl’s head he was but an instrument, a tool as it were of which God had been pleased to make use, so that he, Blasco de Valero, might work a miracle to His glory. Moreover it was a sign, a sure and certain sign, that God forgave him for the grievous sin he had committed when in his weakness he had allowed the Greek to be garrotted before he was burnt. God Who knew all things, past, present and future, knew the hardness of the misbeliever’s heart and so condemned him to everlasting death. It was well to pity the damned in their torments, but to repine was to impugn the justice of God.

The Bishop rose and slowly walked down the sanctuary. He walked like a man in a dream. The two religious, his friends and secretaries, saw his intention and followed him, whereupon the Prior, making a sign to his friars to come after him, walked behind them. When the Bishop came to the top of the sanctuary steps, he paused.

‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.’

He descended. The crowd pushed back so as to leave a pathway for him and the religious who followed him. The friars broke in the Te Deum Laudamus and their strong deep voices rang through the church. The Bishop, as in a trance, passed through the kneeling multitude and gave the people his blessing as he went. He did not see Domingo’s ironical glance.

At that moment the bells in the belfry started to peal and in a little while all the bells in the city were ringing. But this was owing to no supernatural intervention. Don Manuel, like the well-trained soldier he was, paid attention to the smallest detail, and he had seen to it that when the bells of the Collegiate Church were set ringing in celebration of the miracle he was confident of working, the bells of all the other churches should be rung too.

The great doors were swung open as the Bishop approached and he passed out into the blazing sunshine of the August day. The crowd surged out after him and followed the procession of friars till it reached the Dominican convent. The Bishop was about to enter when a great outcry arose in the throng. They wanted him to speak to them. Against the wall of the convent was a pulpit used when a preacher came to the city so celebrated for his eloquence that the convent church was too small to hold the vast congregation that desired to hear him. The Prior advanced and telling the Bishop what the people wanted begged him to accede to their wish. The Bishop looked about him as though he did not know where he was. One might have thought he had not till then been aware of all those devout and anxious creatures that had dogged his steps. He paused for an instant to collect himself and then without a word mounted the pulpit.

His voice was magnificent, rich in tone, and with an infinite variety of inflection. He began.

‘Ye cannot find out the depth of the heart of man, neither can ye perceive the things that he thinketh; then how can ye search out God, that hath made all these things, and know His mind, or comprehend His purpose?’

His gestures were powerful and significant. His voice reached to the farthest confines of the serried throng, and when he lowered it in compassion such was the beauty of his delivery that his every word was audible. When in passionate denunciation of the sins of men he raised it to its full splendour it was like thunder rolling in the bleak Sierras. He would pause on a sudden and the silence in that torrent of speech was like the crack of doom. The people winced when he reminded them of the shortness of life, the accidents that beset the sons of Adam from the cradle to the grave, the transitoriness of its pleasures, the anguish of its sorrows; they trembled when he painted the horrors of hell and the endless torture of the damned; and they wept when, his voice melting with tenderness, he described in ecstatic strains the communion of saints and the eternal joy of heaven. Many repented of their sins and from then on were changed men. He ended with a great peroration in praise of the Blessed Virgin and to the glory of God. Never had he spoken with a more fiery eloquence nor with a more heartrending pathos.

When they conducted him to his cell he was so broken that he permitted his two faithful attendants to lay him on his hard bed. He was shattered with emotion and fatigue.

CHAPTER 20

That night there was great rejoicing in the city. In the taverns the tapsters could not fill cups and drinking-horns fast enough. Chattering crowds wandered round and round the plaza and talked of the wonderful event of the day. No one doubted but that it was the saintly Bishop who had performed the miracle and all were touched by his modesty in using his brother the baker as an instrument of his power. So he had taught then that in truth the humble would be exalted and the haughty abased. Many vowed that they had seen him rise in the air, two feet from the ground, said some, and four feet others, and remain there suspended in glory.

CHAPTER 21

When the multitude flocked out of the church in the Bishop’s train, Martin, who had shrunk within himself in the hope that no one would pay attention to him, remained so that in the end there was no one there but he. He waited in order to escape unseen, but with some impatience, since he knew that all this excitement would bring a lot of custom and he had left his shop in the charge of his two apprentices and he was afraid they would not be able to cope with the stream of customers. For he not only baked bread, but also meat for people who brought joints or pies which they could not cook at home. A lot of them would think this was an occasion for a treat. When at last he thought it safe to slip out he noticed Catalina’s crutch on the marble floor where she had thrown it, and since he was a tidy soul, who didn’t like to see things lying about, he picked it up and carried it away with him.

But when the archpriest got back to his house, as he sat down to a meal which he richly deserved and badly wanted, it occurred to him that the crutch had been left in the church and that it was an object that should not be lost sight of. He immediately sent a servant to fetch it and was vexed when the servant told him that he could not find it. It was too valuable an article to lose, so he had no sooner finished his dinner that he sent people to find out what had become of it; but it was not till next day that he was informed that it was standing in a corner of the baker’s shop. He dispatched someone to demand its return. The baker handed it over and the archpriest put it carefully away till he could decide how best to make use of it.

Now Doña Beatriz no sooner heard the great news than she sent two nuns to the house of Maria Perez to demand a circumstantial account of all that had occurred, see the girl for themselves, and if they fund her cured as was reported, make her a present of a gold chain, delicately worked, which she put in their hands, and in return ask for the crutch which she had used in her infirmity so that it might be placed as a votive offering in the Lady Chapel of the convent church. She as far from pleased when the nuns came back to tell her than neither Catalina, her mother nor her uncle had any idea what had become of the crutch. The Prioress was determined to get it, but since it was not a matter that she could entrust to her nuns she sent for the steward of her estates and ordered him to find out who had got possession of the precious object and in her name demand its delivery. It was a couple of days before the steward came back with the information that the archpriest had the crutch and would not give it up.

Doñ Beatriz gave way to a lively irritation and told the steward roundly that he was both a fool and a knave. But she was a woman of discretion. She sat down and wrote a polite and complimentary letter to the archpriest in which she asked him with honeyed words to let her have the crutch so that she might hang it in the church on whose steps the Blessed Virgin had appeared to Catalina. She pointed out to him that this was clearly the place where it should be preserved for the edification of future generations. The archpriest wrote back in terms as courteous as her own, but said that though for Christ’s sake he was only too willing to grant her any favour within his power, since the miracle had taken place within the Collegiate Church he felt it his duty to keep for its greater glory this visible sign of God’s grace. He pointed out further that the fact of its having been left in the sanctuary showed plainly that it was God’s intention that there it should remain. Upon this an exchange of letters passed between the two from which by degrees all expressions of politeness and esteem for one another’s virtue and piety were banished. The Prioress grew more and more peremptory, the archpriest more and more stubborn. Various persons took sides and what one said was repeated to the other. The Prioress described the archpriest as an insolent donkey, riddled with concupiscence, and the archpriest described the Prioress as an interfering old hag whose administration of her convent was a scandal to Christendom.

Doña Beatriz decided at last that she had kept her temper as long as Christian charity required and was now free to indulge in the righteous indignation which the archpriest’s impertinent behaviour justified. She sent for the steward again. She instructed him to call upon the archpriest and taking care to treat him with the respect due to the cloth make it clear to him that if he did not hand over the crutch forthwith he need not expect the protection of her brother the Duke in the law case he was then engaged in nor such advancement in the Church as her favour at Court might enable her to obtain for him, and that she could no longer ignore the scandalous rumours that circulated about his relations with a certain woman and would be constrained to lay the facts before the bishop of the diocese. The Prioress thus traded on his greed, his ambition and his incontinence. The archpriest through the influence of the reigning Duke of Castel Rodriguez had been appointed to a canonry in the Cathedral of Seville; and the chapter were bringing a suit against him to force his resignation owing to his non-residence. He did not wish to lose the handsome emoluments of the office, but since neither law was on his side he could only hope to win his case by the powerful intervention of his patron. He was besides not without a desire to serve the Church to greater advantage on the episcopal bench. For these reasons he could not afford to make an enemy of the Prioress; and, his bishop being of austere morals, he was uneasy at her threats to expose peccadilloes of which the weakness of his flesh had made him guilty. It did not take him long to see that he was beaten, and since he had to yield he was sensible enough to yield gracefully. He handed the crutch to her messenger and with it a letter in which with protestations of his deep regard for her virtue he said that on mature consideration he was obliged to agree with her that the proper place for the precious object was plainly the Church of Our Lady of Carmel.

The Prioress had it encased in silver and hung in the Lady Chapel for the edification of the faithful.

CHAPTER 22

In the confusion that ensued when the crowd streamed out of the church in pursuit of the Bishop, Domingo hustled his sister and his niece through a side door and taking unfrequented alleys brought them safely home. Maria Perez was all for putting her daughter to bed, giving her a purge and sending for a barber to bleed her, but Catalina, rejoicing in the free use of her limbs, would have none of it. Just for the fun of it she ran up and down stairs, and but that decency forbade would have turned cartwheels in the parlour. Neighbours came in to congratulate her and to marvel over and over again how the Blessed Virgin had looked when she appeared to her, what she wore and exactly what she had said. They in their turn told her of the wonderful sermon the Bishop had preached and how, such was his eloquence, they were unable to hold their water, so that their rapture was mingled with embarrassment. In the afternoon the great ladies of the city sent for Catalina and made her walk up and down, giving little cries of wonder as she did so, as if they had never seen anyone walk before. They gave her presents, handkerchiefs, silk scarves, stockings and even dresses which were only slightly worn; a gold pin, earrings of semi-precious stones and a bracelet. Catalina had never owned so many rich and beautiful things in her life. Finally, cautioning her not to become conceited because such a favour had been granted her, but to remember that she was a working girl and would do well not to forget her humble station, they sent her away.

Night fell. Maria Perez, Domingo and Catalina supped. They were tired after the adventures of the day, but restless too. Mother and daughter had talked till they had nothing more to say. Domingo urged them to go to bed, but Catalina said she was too excited to sleep, so to calm them both and at the same time by the magic of art to attune their minds to the contemplation of ideal beauty he started to read them a play he had lately finished. Catalina listened somewhat inattentively, with one ear as it were, but this, absorbed in the dramatic situation and enchanted with the mellifluous sound of his verse, its elegantly-varied pattern, Domingo did not notice. Suddenly she sprang to her feet.

‘There he is,’ she cried.

Domingo stopped and there was a frown of exasperation on his good-natured face. They heard the twanging of a guitar in the street.

‘Who is it?’ asked her uncle crossly, for no author likes to be interrupted when he is giving a reading of one of his own compositions.

‘Diego. Mother, I can go to the reja, can’t I?’

‘I should have thought you had more spirit.’

The reja was the frille that secured the window from the intrusion not so much of thieves as of too enterprising swains. As a well-behaved girl, who knew that men were lascivious and a woman’s virginity her crowning glory, it would never have occurred to Catalina to admit an admirer into the house, but it was the custom for a girl to sit at her window at night and with the grille between talk with the object of her affections of the mysterious things lovers are accustomed to entertain themselves with.

‘He abandoned you when you were crippled,’ Maria Perez went on, ‘and now that you are a celebrity and the whole city is talking about you he comes running back with his tail between his legs.’

‘Oh, mother, you don’t know men as well as I do,’ said Catalina. ‘They’re weak and easily led. How could the world go on if we did not make allowances for their foolishness? Naturally he didn’t want to marry me when I was a cripple. His mother and father had found a good match for him. He has told me a hundred times that he loves me better than his soul.’

‘You are a very silly girl. He is a shameless fellow and you should have more self-respect.’

‘Let her go,’ said Domingo. ‘She loves him and that is the end of it. I dare say he is no more worthless than any other young man of this degenerate day.’

With a shrug of her shoulders Maria Perez got up and taking the tallow candle by which Domingo had been reading, said:

‘Come into the kitchen and read your play to me there.’

‘I will do no such thing,’ he answered. ‘The thread is broken and I am out of the mood. You are a good woman, Maria, but you do not know a pentameter from a cow’s tail and I cannot do myself justice unless I have an appreciative audience.’

Catalina was left alone. She went to the window and against the darkness of the night saw a figure which made her heart beat.

‘Diego.’

‘Catalina.’

Thus at this late stage is introduced into this story a hero.

His father was a tailor in a very good way of business who made clothes for the most notable persons in the city, and from his earliest years Diego had learnt to ply a needle, to cut out breeches and to fit a doublet. He had grown into a tall, strapping lad, with a fine pair of legs, a slim waist and broad shoulders. He had a handsome head of hair, which shone with the oil he plentifully applied to it, an olive skin, bold black eyes, a sensual mouth and a straight nose. He was in short a youth of a comely presence and Catalina thought him more beautiful than the day. He was of gallant spirit and it irked him to sit cross-legged hour after hour stitching under his father’s captious eyes cloth, silk, velvet and damask to be worn by the more fortunate than he. He felt himself born for greater things and in his wayward reveries played many a splendid role on the stage of life.

He fell in love. It was a shock to his parents when he told them that unless they gave him permission to marry Catalina Perez he would go as a soldier to the Low Countries or work his way on a ship to seek adventure in the Americas. Catalina’s only fortune was the house she would inherit on the death of her mother, and her only prospects the unlikely possibility that her father would one day return laden with gold from the unknown lands in the west. But Diego’s parents were wily; he was but just eighteen and they thought his young man’s fancy would in due course lightly turn to a more suitable object for his affections; they temporized; they said very sensibly that it was absurd to enter upon the married state before he was out of his apprenticeship, but that if he was then still of the same mind they would be prepared to discuss the matter. They raised no objection to his going night after night to Catalina’s window and entertaining her with little tunes on his guitar and amorous conversation. But when a bull trampled on the girl and left her partly paralysed they could not look upon it as a special interposition of Providence. Diego was distraught with horror at the accident, but he was obliged to agree with his fond parents that it was out of the question to marry a cripple, and when presently his mother told him that according to the reliable information she had received the only daughter of a well-to-do haberdasher had taken a fancy to him and would not be averse to receiving his addresses, he was sufficiently flattered to pay her a good deal of attention. The respective fathers of the young people came together and decided in principle that the match would be mutually advantageous. It only remained to settle the terms and since they were both shrewd business men this led to protracted negotiations.

Such then was the state of affairs when Diego presented himself once more at Catalina’s window. Besides learning to measure, cut and sew he had learnt in the course of his short life that a man should never excuse himself, and she, young though she was, knew that it is vain to reproach a man. However heinous his offences, it only irritates him to have them thrown in his teeth. A sensible woman is content to let them weigh on his conscience if he has one, and if he hasn’t, recrimination is wasted. So they lost no time in chiding on her side or apology on his, but went straight to the point.

‘Heart of my soul,’ he said, ‘I adore you.’

‘My love, my precious love,’ she answered.

But it is unnecessary to repeat the sweet, foolish things they said to one another. They said what lovers say. Diego had a pretty gift of language, and phrases came unbidden to his lips that so enchanted Catalina that she felt it had been almost worth while to endure those long weeks of misery in order to enjoy at that moment such an ecstasy of bliss. The darkness of the room behind her hid her almost completely from his sight, but the sound of her voice, low and soft, and the ripple of her light laughter fired his blood.

‘Cursed be this grille that separates us. Oh, why cannot I take you into my arms and cover your face with kisses and press my beating heart to yours?’

She knew very well what that would lead to, and the idea did not in the least displease her. She knew that man was a creature of licentious passion, and it gave her a thrill of pride and at the same time a sort of heartache that Diego should so vehemently desire her. She was a little breathless.

‘Oh, my dear, what can you want of me that I do not want to give you? But if you love me you cannot ask me to do what would be a mortal sin and which in any case these iron bars make impracticable.’

‘Give me your hand then.’

The window at which she sat was at some little height from the street, so that in order to do this she had to kneel on the floor. She slipped her hand through the grille and he pressed it to his greedy lips. Her hands were very small, with tapering fingers, hands of a lady of high degree; she was proud of them, and in order to keep them soft and white washed them every night in her urine. She gently stroked his face and she blushed and laughed when he put her little thumb in his mouth.

‘Shameless one,’ she said. ‘What will you do next?’ She withdrew her hand. ‘Behave yourself and let us talk sense.’

‘How can I talk sense when you rob me of my senses? Woman, you might as well ask a river to run uphill.’

‘Then you had better take yourself off. It is growing late and I am tired. The haberdasher’s daughter must be waiting for you and you have no reason to offend her.’

This she said with perfidious sweetness and it brought the answer she wanted.

‘La Clara? What is she to me? She has a hump on her back, a squint in her eye and hair like a mangy dog’s.’

‘Liar,’ she answered cheerfully. ‘It is true that she is somewhat marked with smallpox and her teeth are a little yellow and one is missing, but except for that she is not a bad-looking girl and she has a nice nature. I cannot blame your father for wishing you to marry her.’

‘My father can go and . . .’

What he said his father could go and do was so coarse that a decorous writer cannot but leave it to the reader’s imagination. Catalina was not unused to the direct language of her day and she did not turn a hair. Indeed her lover’s emphatic utterance gave her a certain satisfaction.

‘I was in the church this morning,’ he went on, ‘and when I saw you stand there in all your beauty it was as if a sword pierced my heart and I knew that all the fathers in the world couldn’t separate me from you.’

‘I was in a daze. I didn’t know where I was nor what had happened to me. I was giddy. And then it was as if a million pins and needles were pricking my leg so that I couldn’t have borne the pain another minute, and I knew nothing more till I found myself in mother’s arms and she was laughing and crying and I burst into tears.’

‘You ran and as you ran we all shouted with joy and wonder. You ran like a doe that flees from the hunter, you ran like a nymph of the woods because she has heard the voices of me, you ran like . . .’ Here his invention failed him and he added rather tamely: ‘You ran like an angel of heaven. You were more beautiful than the dawn.’

Catalina listened to this with great content and was willing to hear much more to the same effect, but her mother’s voice broke in.

‘Come to bed, child,’ she said. ‘You don’t want all the neighbours talking and you should have a good night’s rest.’

‘Good night, my beloved.’

‘Light of my eyes, good night.’

Now it happened that Diego’s father and the haberdasher had been for some days at odds over a piece of land which the tailor desired as part of the girl’s dowry but which the haberdasher could not bring himself to part with. The matter would in all probability have been amicably settled by compromise if the tailor had not on a sudden shown an unreasonable and to the haberdasher’s mind churlish obstinacy. Angry words passed and in the end the marriage was abandoned. It was not without motive that the tailor refused to modify his demands: the miracle had given Catalina a distinction which he realized would be useful in his business; she was not only a good and honest girl, but a clever sempstress; and there was some talk that various ladies of the city, charmed with her modesty and good manners, were prepared to join with one another to give her an acceptable dowry. By consenting to the marriage of which he had formerly disapproved he decided that he could make his son happy and do a good stroke of business into the bargain. Thus the last impediment to the happiness of the fond lovers was removed.

CHAPTER 23

They little knew that while, with the iron grille between, they continued every night with little variety but to their mutual satisfaction to talk in the silly way above described, a great lady in her oratory, only a stone’s throw away, was contriving a scheme that very much concerned them.

Doña Beatriz was a devout woman who scrupulously performed her duties. The convent she ruled was a model to the community and the inspectors who visited it had never had occasion to find fault with her. She maintained perfect discipline. The services of the church were conducted with exemplary decorum. In conduct and piety she was irreproachable. But she carried in her heart a deadly hatred for a certain nun of Avila, Teresa de Cepeda by name, which neither the precepts of religion nor the repeated censures of her confessor could mitigate. This nun, known in religion as Mother Teresa of Jesus, but by the Prioress never referred to but as La Cepeda, had entered the Convent of the Incarnation at Avila where Doña Beatriz had been first a pupil and then a novice. She had aroused a good deal of indignation by claiming to receive special graces, raptures and the vision of Our Lord, His face blazing with glory; to say nothing of having driven away the devil who was sitting in her office book by throwing holy water at him; but the climax came when, dissatisfied with the laxity of the Carmelite rule, she had left the convent and established a new one where stricter rule was followed. The nuns she had left looked upon this as a slur on themselves and an insult to the order and they did everything in their power to have the new foundation suppressed. But Teresa de Cepeda was a woman of energy, determination and courage, and surmounting ceaseless opposition she founded convent after convent of Discalced Carmelites as they were called, since instead of the stout shoes worn by the other members of the order they wore sandals with rope soles; and before her death, some years before the time with which this narrative deals, she had seen the triumph of the Reform.

No one had fought it with greater tenacity than Doña Beatriz. She had never had any patience with the excessive mortifications, the visions and raptures, which the nuns of La Cepeda professed to have. There was a natural antagonism between these two women of strong will. Who was this proud, meddlesome, presumptuous and wicked creature to set herself up above everybody else? At one time she had gone so far as to ask the Bishop to allow her to make a foundation at Castel Rodriguez; she had by then gained many powerful friends, both at Court and among the clergy, and Doña Beatriz, determined not to allow the woman to gain a foothold in the city which she looked upon as her own domain, had been obliged to use all her influence to combat the scheme. A desperate struggle ensued and the issue was still in doubt when Teresa de Jesus died.

Though she prayed for her misguided soul, Doña Beatriz could not but heave a sigh of relief. She was convinced that now La Cepeda’s restless and dominating spirit was no longer active the Reform would soon be forgotten and the nuns in due course return to the old rule. She little knew how strong an impress she had left on her daughters and on the priests who had come in contact with her. In a little while stories began to be told of the miracles she had performed in her lifetime and the marvels that attended her death. As she expired so sweet a smell came from her body that the windows of her cell had to be opened to prevent those present from fainting, and when nine months afterwards it was exhumed the body was found to be intact and uncorrupt, and the whole convent was filled with the same sweet odour. Sick persons were cured by touching her remains. Already many influential people were urging her beatification and it was finally borne in upon Doña Beatriz that sooner or later La Cepeda would be canonized.

The thought of this had for some time gravely disquieted her. It would be, to put it profanely, a feather in the cap of the Discalced Order. It was true that there had been saints in the Carmelites of the mitigated rule; indeed both its founders were canonized; but that was a long time ago, and such was the frivolity of people, they were more inclined to pay their devotions to a saint who had recently achieved that sublime rank than to one who had been for centuries in possession of it. But if the Prioress could do nothing to prevent the upstart order from receiving an honour for which she could see no justification she could do something to restore the balance by providing her own order with a candidate for canonization. Providence had shown her a way and it would be a sin if she did not take it. Lazarus was a saint for no other reason that she knew of than he had been the occasion for one of Our Lord’s miracles. Catalina was a pious and a virtuous girl and the miracle by which she had recovered her health had been witnessed not by two or three emotional nuns or self-interested priests, but by a vast concourse. Having received so signal a mark of divine favour it seemed only proper that she should devote the rest of her life to the service of God. Doña Beatriz had heard that she fancied herself in love with a young man of the city, but she brushed this aside; she could not believe that a woman in her sense would think twice of marrying a tailor when she might enjoy the benefits, both spiritual and wordly, which she would have by entering the Convent of the Incarnation of which she was herself the Prioress. If the girl was what the nuns who knew her said she was, she could not fail to be a credit to the convent and the grace she had received would add a further distinction to the foundation. She was young enough to react to training and Doña Beatriz was confident that she could make her a worthy religious. There was no reason to suppose that the Blessed Virgin would cease to take an interest in her and it was far from impossible that she would be the recipient of further graces. Her fame would spread, and when in due course she was released from the martyrdom of life she would surely be as suitable a candidate for beatification as the turbulent nun of Avila.

Doña Beatriz brooded over her project for some days and the more she considered it the more it appealed to her; but being a woman of discretion, she thought it prudent not to embark upon it without the approval of her spiritual director. She sent for him. He was a worthy, simple man whose piety she esteemed, but of whose intelligence she had no high opinion. He applauded her wish to give to Our Lord a bride to whom His Mother had condescended to show so great a favour and who thus would be a credit to the community; and this was natural since, though the Prioress had dwelt on the gratitude which the girl must feel for her miraculous cure and the good disposition she surely had to spend the rest of her life in the service of God, she thought it unnecessary to impart to the good man the hidden motives that were the mainspring of her desire. But he raised an objection.

‘By the statutes laid down on the foundation of this convent admission to it is reserved to ladies of noble birth. Catalina Perez, though of untainted blood (de sangre limpia), is of modest extraction.’

The Prioress was prepared for this.

‘I regard the condescension Our Blessed Lady showed her as a patent of nobility. In my eyes it has made her the equal of the proudest in the land.’

Such an answer in the mouth of so great a lady filled the friar with admiration and if possible increased the veneration in which he held her. This settled, it only remained to consider ways and means. Her plan was to have the girl brought to see her and then put before her the utility to her spiritual welfare of making a retreat of some duration at the convent so that she could give due thanks to the Creator for the blessings that had been bestowed upon her; and since she foresaw that Catalina, owing to the unfortunate attachment she had contracted, might raise objection to this, she begged the friar to disclose her plan to the girl’s confessor and get him to urge her, or if necessary order her, to accept the proposition. This the Prioress’s director very willingly consented to do.

On the following day, therefore, the Prioress had Catalina brought to her. She had seen her but once before and then had hardly noticed her. She was immediately struck by her beauty, and with a smile, in which there was little of her habitual grimness, amiably remarked on it. She did not like ill-favoured nuns. It had always seemed to her unbecoming to offer the celestial bridegroom brides who did not combine spiritual grace with a comely presence. She was charmed with Catalina’s modest demeanour, her sweet voice and the distinction of her carriage. There was nothing vulgar in her manner, and her speech, owing to Domingo’s teaching, was not only correct, but elegant. The Prioress could not but be surprised that so fair a flower had grown in such humble earth. Any doubt she might have had of the wisdom of her project was dispelled: the girl was evidently destined to honour, and what honour could be greater than to serve God?

Catalina was very much in awe of the great lady with whose reputation both for virtue and severity she was well acquainted, but Doña Beatriz set herself to put the girl at her ease. Her face wore an expression of benignity which the nuns but rarely saw and Catalina began to wonder why they were all so much afraid of her. She was a voluble young person and, graciously encouraged to talk, she was soon telling her kindly listener the whole story of her short life with its hardship of poverty, its tribulations and joys, and she never suspected with what skill the Prioress guided her recital to make her disclose her disposition, honest nature and charm of character. Without a tremor, but with an indulgent benevolence, the Prioress heard her describe the merit and beauty of Diego, his sweetness and goodness; and tell how his parents, so unkind to her before, had relented so that now no obstacle remained to their happiness. The Prioress desired to hear from her own lips how the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her, the very words she had spoken, and how in the twinkling of an eye she had vanished from her sight. It was then that she gravely but mildly suggested that in common gratitude for the grace she had received Catalina should make a retreat in the convent in order to collect herself and for a little while surrender her spirit to the contemplation of heavenly things. Catalina was taken aback. But she was accustomed to say the first thing that came into her head and by now she had so much lost her fear of the Prioress that she did not hesitate to be frank.

‘Oh, Reverend Mother,’ she cried, ‘I couldn’t do that. We’ve been separated so long, it would break my Diego’s heart to be parted from me now. He says that he only lives for the hour when we talk to one another at my window. I should pine away if I didn’t see him then.’

‘I would not press you, child, to do anything that you do not wish. A retreat could only benefit you if you made it for the love of God and with a sincere desire to amend yourself. I confess I should be disappointed in you if you were so little grateful to the Blessed Virgin for her goodness to you that you grudged her a little time to give her thanks; and I cannot think that this young man, if he loves you as you say and is so good, could take it amiss if for a while, no more than two or three weeks perhaps, in return for the blessing that has reunited you, you devoted yourself to pray for his salvation as well as yours. But we will say no more about it; the only thing I would ask you is to consult your confessor on the matter. It may be that he will think my suggestion of no value and in that case your conscience will be at ease.’

She then dismissed her with the present of a rosary of amber beads.

CHAPTER 24

It was no surprise to the Prioress when two or three days later she was informed that Catalina was in the parlour and had come to beg permission to make a retreat. She sent for her, made her welcome, kissed her and put her in charge of the mistress of novices. Catalina was given a cell that looked over the nuns’ well-tended garden. Though austerely furnished, it was roomy, clean and cool.

There was no need of Doña Beatriz’s request – and her requests were orders – that Catalina should be treated with indulgence and kindness, for her beauty, modesty and charm immediately captivated all hearts. Nuns, novices, lay sisters and lady boarders, all joined in making much of her. They liked her gaiety; they spoilt her like a favourite child. Though the bed she slept in was such as the rule of the order directed, it was luxurious compared with that to which she was accustomed, and the food she ate, simple and unspiced as was proper, was such as in the poverty of her home she had never tasted. Fish, chickens, game were provided from the Prioress’s estates, and the lady boarders invited her to their rooms to partake of sweetmeats and other delicacies.

Doña Beatriz kept her own counsel; she was content to let the girl see for herself the delight of conventual life, with its peace, its pleasant activity and its security from the turmoil and trouble of the world. Its monotony was relieved by the visits during the recreation hour of distinguished ladies of the city and of worthy gentlemen, for the most part relations of the Prioress and her nuns, whose conversation was not entirely restricted to religious topics. Catalina was not a little flattered by the attentions they paid her. She had entered upon her retreat somewhat rebelliously on the order of her confessor reinforced by the persuasion of her mother, but she found it far from unpleasant. It would have been strange if she had not compared to its advantage the happy, ordered life of the nuns with that she led at at home, with its constant drudgery darkened always by the spectre of want. There had been periods when there was no call of the special work she and her mother did, and then they were saved from starvation only by the uncertain earnings of Domingo. She enjoyed the services which she attended with all the members of the community in the small but beautiful church attached to the convent. The Prioress had an ear for music and she had seen to it that the singing was good and the rites conducted not only with devoutness but with ceremony. Catalina, with her keen sensibilities, found in them not only a delight to her senses, but a spiritual enrichment. Very much to her surprise she found the life of the convent not an imprisonment as she had feared but a liberation. She liked to please, and she pleased; she wished to be loved, and loved she was. Although she missed Diego and thought of him constantly, she was obliged to admit to herself that she would look back later on her retreat as one of the most agreeable episodes of her life.

Every day, towards evening, Doña Beatriz sent for her and kept her for an hour. She never mentioned her wish that Catalina should enter the religious life; though soon she wished it not only for the motives that have already been related, but because with her insight into character she had quickly realized that besides being virtuous Catalina was intelligent and quick to learn, that she had personality and would be an ornament to the order. The Prioress talked to her, not as a great lady and the Mother Superior of a convent, but as a loving friend. She exerted herself to gain an influence over the girl, but she knew she must tread warily. She told her stories of the saints to edify her and stories of the Court to show her that even a religious could play a part in matters of state. She talked to her of the affairs of the convent and the management of her properties not without a notion that it might favourably affect Catalina to see what a responsible and important position it was to be the Prioress of the Carmelite convent at Castel Rodriquez. The possibility of attaining it might well dazzle the daughter of Maria Perez the sempstress.

But very little can be kept secret in a convent, and though Doña Beatriz had never told anyone of her plan, it was not long before it was generally known among the nuns and the lady boarders to what end tended the privileges Catalina enjoyed and the notice the awe-inspiring Mother Superior took of her. An effusive nun one day told her how much they all loved her and how much they wished that she would remain with them for good. A lady boarder who was staying at the convent because her husband was at the wars told her that she only wished she were free to become a religious.

‘If I were in your place, child,’ she said, ‘I would ask the Reverend Mother tomorrow to accept me as a novice.’

‘Oh, but I am going to be married.’

‘You will never cease to regret it. Men by their nature are brutal, neglectful and faithless.’

The lady was pasty-faced, lethargic and corpulent. Catalina could not but think that if her husband was as bad as that there were excuses for him.

‘How can you hesitate when the heavenly bridegroom holds out his arms to receive you?’ the lady went on as she put a sweet into her mouth.

On another occasion during the recreation hour a lady from the city pinched Catalina’s cheek and archly said:

‘Well, I hear that we are going to have a pretty little saint in the convent very soon. You must promise to remember me in your prayers, for I am a great sinner and I shall count on you to get me into paradise.’

Catalina was frightened. She had no wish to become a nun and much less a saint. She remembered a number of casual remarks to which at the time they were made she had paid no attention. On a sudden it became clear to her that they all expected her to enter the religious life. That evening when as usual she entered the Prioress’s oratory it was with a mind ill at ease. Doña Beatriz noticed that something was wrong. She was direct.

‘What is the matter, child?’ she asked, suddenly interrupting Catalina in what she was saying.

The girl started and flushed.

‘Nothing, Reverend Mother.’

‘Are you afraid to tell me? Do you not know that I love you as if you were my own daughter? I was hoping you had at least a little affection for me.’

Catalina burst into tears. The Prioress held out her arms in an affectionate gesture.

‘Come and sit here, child, and tell me what is troubling you.’

Catalina went and sat at the feet of the Prioress.

‘I want to go home,’ she sobbed.

Doña Beatriz stiffened, but in an instant recovered herself.

‘Are you not happy here, my dear? We have done all we could to make you so. You have gained the love of all.’

‘Their love imprisons me. I’m like a trapped hare. The nuns, the ladies, they seem to take it as a matter of course that I shall enter the convent. I don’t want to.’

The Prioress was seized with a sudden anger because those foolish women in their zeal had betrayed her, but she did not let a trace of it appear on her grave face. She answered gently.

‘No one can wish to force you to do what should only be an act of free will under the inspiration of God. You must not blame the ladies because in the attachment they have formed for you they do not want to lose you. For my own part I will not deny that I have permitted myself to wish that Our Blessed Lady might arouse in your heart the wish to become one of us in gratitude for the great mercy that has been shown you. You would be an honour and a glory to our convent. I know that not only are you humble and pious, but you have a clever head on your shoulders. Too many of our nuns, alas, fail to combine goodness with intelligence. I am an old woman, the burden of my office begins to be more than I can bear; perhaps it was a sin to indulge in idle dreams, but it would have been a great happiness to me if I could have had you by my side, with your tact, your natural kindliness and your good sense, to share my labours with me and to know that when in the fullness of time my Heavenly Father called me to Himself you would occupy my place.’

She paused and waited for a reply. She gently stroked the girl’s cheek.

‘You are very good to me, Reverend Mother. I cannot thank you enough for your kindness. It would break my heart if you thought me ungrateful. I am unworthy of the great honour you have in mind for me.’

Though in words there was no blunt refusal of the dazzling offer, the Prioress was too clear-sighted not to see that this was what they implied. She had the sensation that along with the fear she felt in the girl there was a stubbornness, and she had a notion that to try further persuasion would only increase her obstinacy. She was not beaten, but discretion suggested for the moment retreat was wise.

‘It is a matter for you to decide for yourself according to the dictates of your conscience and I am far from wishing to influence you.’

‘Then may I go home, Reverend Mother?’

‘You are free to go whenever you like. I ask you as a favour out of respect to your confessor to stay for the period he appointed. I am sure you cannot be so unkind as to deprive us of the charm and grace of your presence for the few days that remain.’

Catalina could do nothing but say that she would be happy to stay. The Prioress dismissed her with a fond kiss. Once more alone in her oratory she gave herself up to intensive thought. She was not the woman to accept defeat. She had a flash of impatience with Catalina, but since this was an emotion of no profit she immediately suppressed it. Her mind was strong and inventive and several plans suggested themselves to her. She deliberately weighed their advantages and disadvantages. She felt herself justified in using any means, so long as there was no sin in them, to secure the girl’s welfare in this world and salvation in the next and at the same time to achieve an object which would bring credit to the order. The first thing evidently was to try whether by persuasion more efficacious than her own Catalina could not be brought to a more proper state of mind. She could think of no one more capable of doing this than Don Blasco de Valero, Bishop of Segovia; he had performed the miracle that had cured her, his high office was impressive, his sanctity awe-inspiring. She sat down and wrote a letter in which she begged him to come and see her on a matter on which she needed advice.

CHAPTER 25

He sent back a message to say that he would come next day, and with a punctuality unusual in Spain presented himself at the appointed hour. The Prioress went straight to the point.

‘I desired to see your lordship about the girl Catalina Perez.’

The Bishop took the seat Doña Beatriz offered him, but he sat on the edge of it as though unwilling to surrender to its scant comfort. He waited in silence and with downcast eyes for the Prioress to go on.

‘On the advice of her confessor she has been making a retreat in our house. I have had occasion to talk with her. I have examined her character and dispostion. She has a better education than many ladies of noble birth. Her manners are excellent and her behaviour exemplary. She has a very sincere devotion to Our Lady. She is in every way fitted to the religious life, and after the signal mercy which God at your hands was so gracious as to show her it seems only common gratitude on her part to devote her life to His service. She would be an ornament to our order and I should have no hesitation notwithstanding her modest extraction in admitting her to this house.’

The Bishop made no reply. Without looking up he slightly inclined his head, but whether in approval or merely to indicate that he heard was not evident. The Prioress raised her eyebrows.

‘The girl is young, she does not know her own mind and perhaps it is only natural that she should be attracted by the vain delights of the world. I am an ignorant and a sinful woman, I have not thought that I could speak to her with profit on the matter; it has occurred to me that it would be a worthy act on your lordship’s part if you would see her and point out to her, as no one can do better than you, where her duty and at the same time her happiness lie.’

Then he spoke.

‘I do not choose to have commerce with women. I have made it a rule, which I have never broken, to refuse to receive their confessions.’

‘I am well aware of your lordship’s disinclinations to have any dealings with my sex, but this is an exceptional case. You brought her back to life, you cannot leave her now to endanger her soul for want of a word of admonition. It is as though you had saved a man from drowning and then left him to perish of cold and hunger on the shore.’

‘If she has no vocation for a religious life it can be no duty of mine to urge her to enter upon it.’

‘Your lordship must know that many women have done so on account of a bereavement, because for one cause or another it has been impossible to marry them suitably, or even because of a disappointment in love. It has not prevented them from becoming excellent nuns.’

‘I have no doubt of it, and I am bound to believe that God on occasion dashes the cup from the lips of the worldly in order to call them to His service, but in the case of this girl there is no reason to suppose that any of the grounds you have mentioned exist. I venture to remind Your Reverence that it is no less possible to achieve salvation in the world than in a convent.’

‘But more difficult and less safe. Why should Our Blessed Lady have granted you the power to work this miracle to her glory unless with the design of causing this girl’s light to shine before all men and lead them to repentance?’

‘It is not for us, sinful creatures, to inquire into the motives of God Almighty.’

‘But at least we may be sure that they are good.’

‘We may.’

Doña Beatriz was none too well pleased with the Bishop’s laconic brevity. She was more accustomed to an effusive volubility in those with whom she troubled to converse. There was some sharpness in her tone when she went on.

‘It is a very small return I ask for the favour and protection my family has always afforded your order. Will you refuse my request to see this girl, examine her disposition and if you form as high an opinion of it as I have, show her where her true happiness lies?’

The Bishop at last raised his eyes, not to meet those of the Prioress, but to gaze out of the window; it looked on to the garden, but in his preoccupation he saw neither the tall cypresses with which it was planted nor the oleanders in full flower.

He was puzzled by her insistence. He could not believe that this hard, proud woman had no more at heart than the welfare of a little sempstress. What was it that the Prior of the convent in which he was staying had told him about her? She had fought tooth and nail to prevent Mother Teresa of Jesus from founding a convent at Castel Rodriquez. The hatred the Carmelites of the old order bore for those of the new was common knowledge. A suspicion formed itself in his mind that it was for some reason connected with this that Doña Beatriz was trying to induce Catalina to enter the convent; and if she wished to enlist his aid it was because the girl was unwilling. He looked now for the first time at the Prioress and his dark, tragic eyes sought to pierce her innermost thoughts. She bore his gaze with a haughty composure.

‘Supposing I saw this young person and came to the conclusion that it was my duty with God’s help to persuade her to enter the life of a religious, I should be inclined to think that she would be more at ease in a convent of the Discalced Carmelites than in this house of noble ladies.’

The sudden flash of anger, immediately effaced, that he saw in the eyes of Doña Beatriz told him that he had hit upon something approaching the truth.

‘It would be hard on the girl’s mother to separate her entirely from her only child,’ answered the Prioress blandly. ‘The Discalced Carmelites have no house in this city.’

‘Only, if I am correctly informed, because Your Reverence persuaded the Bishop to refuse Mother Teresa of Jesus permission to make a foundation here.’

‘There are already too many convents in the city. La Cepeda would not accept an endowment, so that her community would have been a charge on the city which can ill afford it.’

‘Your Reverence speaks of a very holy woman with small respect.’

‘She was a woman of very humble origins.’

‘You are mistaken, Señora. She was of noble birth.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Prioress sharply. ‘Her father received his patent of nobility early this century. You must forgive me if I have no more patience than our late revered King with these people who without any justification assume a rank to which they are not entitled. The country is swarming with this gutter nobility.’

This was the order to which the Bishop belonged, and he smiled faintly.

‘Whatever her extraction, it can hardly be denied that Mother Teresa was a pious woman, who received many graces from on high, and whose labours in the cause of religion are worthy of the highest praise.’

Doña Beatriz was too angry to notice that the Bishop was watching every expression of her face, every impatient gesture of her delicate hands.

‘Your lordship must permit me to disagree with you. I knew her and had occasion to talk with her. She was an unquiet and restless creature who went about amusing herself with crazy pranks under a pretext of religion. What business had she to leave her convent and to the scandal of her fellow citizens found a new one? There were good and holy nuns at the Incarnation and the Rule was severe.’

This Rule, instituted by St Albert and mitigated by Pope Eugenius IV, ordained fasting from the Feast of Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September till Christmas on four days a week, and in Advent and Lent prohibited the eating of meat. Each nun had to take a scourging on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and silence had to be observed from Compline until Prime. The habits were black and no shoes were worn. The beds were without linen sheets.

‘I must be a very stupid woman,’ continued the Prioress, ‘but I cannot see how it conduces to greater spirituality to wear rope sandals rather than leather shoes nor why it is to the glory of God to wear habits of sack-cloth rather than of serge. La Cepeda pretended she broke away from our ancient order so that she might have greater opportunity for mental prayer and contemplation, and yet she spent her whole life gadding about from place to place. She enjoined silence on her nuns and was the greatest chatterbox I ever met in my life.’

‘If Your Reverence would read the life she wrote of herself you would surely be moved to regard that saintly creature with greater indulgence,’ said the Bishop icily.

‘I have read it. It was sent me by the Princess of Eboli. It is no business of women to write books; they should leave that to men who have more learning and a better understanding.’

‘Mother Teresa of Jesus wrote it in obedience to her confessor.’

The Prioress smiled grimly.

‘Is it not remarkable that her confessor never ordered her to do anything but what she had already made up her mind to do?’

‘I regret that Your Reverence should think so harshly of a woman who won the affection and esteem not only of her nuns but of everyone who was privileged to come into contact with her.’

‘She divided and threatened to destroy our ancient order with her innovations and it is impossible for me not to believe that she was actuated by ambition and spite.’

‘Your Reverence is undoubtedly aware that owing to the duly-attested miracles she performed during her life and the miracles that have been performed by her intercession since her death many influential and worthy persons are already urging His Holiness to declare her blessed.’

‘I am aware of it.’

‘And am I right in supposing that your reason for desiring the girl Catalina Perez to enter your order is that you have conceived the foolish notion that the notoriety which now surrounds her may in some way counterbalance the fame the Discalced Carmelites would acquire if their founder were beatified?’

If the Prioress was startled by the Bishop’s discernment no sign of it appeared on her face.

‘We have had enough saints in our order to maintain our equanimity if His Holiness should be so misguided by interested persons and superstitious nuns as to confer such an honour on a mischievous rebel.’

‘You have not answered my question, madam.’

Doña Beatriz was too proud to lie.

‘I should not look upon my life as misspent if in all humility I were enabled to help an aspiring soul to so great a perfection that she became worthy to join the company of saints. I could only look upon it as a good if she were thus enabled to undo the harm caused by Teresa de Cepeda. If you will not help me to do what I am assured is a meritorious service to a poor soul struggling with uncertainty I must help myself.’

The Bishop looked at her long and sternly.

‘It is my duty to remind Your Reverence that to compel anyone against his will to enter a religious institution is a crime which incurs a special censure and excommunication latae sententiae.’

The Prioress went deathly white, not with fear at the dreadful threat, but with anger that he should venture to make it, and yet it sent a cold shiver down her spine. For the first time in her life she felt the domination of the male. She maintained an offended silence. The Bishop rose to his feet and with the customary expressions of courtesy took his leave. She bowed her head in haughty acknowledgment, but remained seated in her chair.

CHAPTER 26

She took part in the offices of the day with decorum, but it may be surmised with a distracted mind. She had no intention of abandoning her project and had already considered what to do if the Bishop refused to use his persuasion and authority to help her. Though she thought it would be to the advantage and glory of her order that Catalina should enter religion in the convent her father had founded, she was sincerely convinced that it would be also to the girl’s welfare and to the edification of the faithful. The Prioress very well knew that the only real obstacle was the unfortunate attachment the foolish creature had contracted for the young tailor called Diego. It made her impatient to think that for such a trifling reason Catalina should be willing to forgo the great advantages, both here and hereafter, which the religious life offered her. But a wise person takes things as they are, and knowing the conditions proceeds to deal with them in such a manner as to achieve the desired result.

First, then, the Prioress sent for her mistress of novices. This nun, Doña Ana de San José, was discreet, intelligent and reliable, and she had the interests of the convent at heart. Her devotion to the Prioress was such, her obedience so perfect, that if she had ordered her to throw herself into a river she would have done so without a moment’s hesitation. The Prioress began by asking her what opinion she had formed of Catalina. Doña Ana sang her praises. She was devout, obedient, kindly and helpful. She had fallen into the conventual life as though she were made for it.

‘It is a pity that her modest extraction prevents her from joining our little community.’

‘God is no respecter of persons,’ said Doña Beatriz gravely. ‘In His sight there is no difference between the nobly and basely born. If the girl has the proper disposition that is a difficulty that may be overcome. There is no reason why the rule my father made should not be changed by my brother if the circumstances are exceptional.’

‘Your daughters would welcome her as a companion.’

‘It would be a source of satisfaction to me to number her among the worthy women over whom by God’s will I have the direction.’

The Prioress paused for a while to consider her words. Then she suggested to Doña Ana that it would be a good thing to spread it among the nuns, the lady boarders, damas de piso they were called, and among the visitors that she was prepared to accept Catalina as a novice. After the wonderful occurrence that had brought her a fame that would in due course become known throughout Spain it was natural that she should wish to embrace the religious life, and it would be a glory to the city that she should dwell in their midst and by her prayers acquire for it the special favour of the Deity. It would surely require more strength of will than a simple girl could be expected to have, to withstand the pressure of public opinion and to refuse the approbation, the admiration even, with which her decision to abandon the world, with its transitory pleasures, would be received. But Doña Beatriz was a practical woman and she was aware that practical advantages also have their weight. She instructed the obedient nun to see Maria Perez, tell her the good impression she, the Prioress, had formed of her daughter’s virtue and aptitude, and what in consequence she was prepared to do for her. She knew that she could trust Doña Ana to make Maria Perez understand how great an honour was thus conferred on her daughter, an honour that would redound to her credit, and how much better a life, materially as well as spiritually, it would offer Catalina than if she married a poor man’s son who might well turn out an idler, a drunkard and a gambler. Finally Doña Beatriz told the nun to say that she herself would pay the dowry which was necessary on entering the religious life, and since Maria Perez was growing old and without her daughter’s help might find herself in straitened circumstances she would be pleased to give her a pension large enough to keep her in comfort, without the necessity of working, for the rest of her life.

The offers were so handsome that Doña Ana was filled with admiration for her superior’s charity and munificience. That wonderful woman forgot nothing. The Prioress dismissed her with the injunction to choose a suitable moment to deliver the message and impress upon Maria Perez the need of absolute secrecy, for she had an inkling that if she talked about it to her brother, the dissolute Domingo, he might be wicked enough to persuade her to refuse her consent.

The mistress of novices executed the commission with dispatch and dexterity and within twenty-four hours was able to tell Doña Beatriz that Maria Perez had received her generous offers with humility and gratitude. Being a Spanish woman, and the age devout, she had no doubt that to serve God in a religious house was the worthiest life anyone could adopt. To have a daughter who was a nun, a son who was a monk, was an honour to a family, and gave it, moreover, as it were a claim on the indulgence of God. But such a distinction as to have a daughter of hers an inmate of a house of noble ladies was something she had never dreamt of. She had a little flutter of pride when her visitor told her that already they looked upon Catalina as a little saint, and half jokingly, for she was a merry, good-natured creature, that if she went on as she had begun, if the Blessed Virgin continued to show her favour, there was no reason why Maria Perez should not one day be the mother of a virgin canonized by the Pope. Then they would paint pictures of Catalina which would be placed over altars and people would come from far and near to be healed of their maladies by touching her relics. It was a prospect dazzling enough to inflame any woman’s ambition. Nor was Maria Perez insensible to the pension that was offered to her; the work by which she earned her living was laborious and cruel to the fingers, and it would be wonderful to have nothing to do from morning till night but to go to church and sit at her window watching the passers-by.

‘Did she say anything about this young man who, I seem to have heard, has been paying Catalina some attention?’ asked the Prioress, when she had listened with satisfaction to the nun’s report.

‘She doesn’t like him. She says he behaved very badly when the poor child had her accident. She thinks he is selfish and has much too good an opinion of himself.’

‘It would be difficult to find a man who does not suffer from both those defects,’ said the Prioress dryly. ‘It is their nature to be selfish and conceited.’

‘And she does not like his mother. It appears that when Maria’s husband ran away to America the young man’s mother told people that it served her right because she led him a dog’s life.’

‘I dare say she did. That is the sort of life most women lead their husbands. Did you happen to suggest to her that she would be wise to let Catalina know, as though it came from herself, how much she would approve of her deciding to enter religion?’

‘I thought there was no harm in it.’

‘On the contrary. You have done very well, Doña Ana, and I am pleased with your intelligent conduct of this matter.’

The nun flushed with pleasure. Doña Beatriz was more apt to chide than to praise.

CHAPTER 27

The Prioress allowed a few days to elapse so that the news might be spread that if Catalina was moved by the spirit of God to take the veil she would be well received into the convent of the Carmelites. It was received with gratification. There was a general agreement that such a step would redound to the glory of the city and it was eminently fitting that the girl should take it. It was scarcely decent that the recipient of such a prodigious grace should become the wife of a tailor. The mistress of novices accomplished her particular mission with success. She saw Maria Perez again and warned her to deal tactfully with her daughter, not to press her, but when occasion arose to compare the peace and security of the religious life with the dangers, hardships and toils of the married state.

Doña Beatriz had the gift of gaining the devotion and loyalty of her dependants, and of these none was more loyal and devoted than the steward of the convent’s properties and her own estates. He was a gentleman, Don Miguel de Becedas by name, and a distant connection of the Prioress’s. He knew her bounty, for he administered her charities, and he admired her capacity. She was a good business woman and could drive as hard a bargain as any man. She was prepared to listen to reason, but having once made up her mind never changed it. When this happened there was nothing for it but to obey her, and this Don Miguel was prepared to do blindly. She sent for him and instructed him to make searching inquiries, both in the city and in Madrid, into the antecedents and present circumstances of Don Manuel de Valero, the soldier, and at the same time to find out all that was to be known about the young man Diego Martinez and his father.

By the time Don Miguel brought back the required information the Prioress had sent Catalina home with a handsome present and with the assurance of her unfailing affection. Catalina bade her farewell with tears in her eyes.

‘Do not forget, child, that if ever you are in trouble or in any sort of difficulty you have only to come to see me and I will do everything in my power to help you.’

Doña Beatriz listened attentively to everything the steward had to tell her and she was well pleased with the results of his investigations. She then asked him to make an opportunity to see Don Manuel and in the course of a casual conversation tell him that she would be glad to receive a man of whom she had heard so much good.

After the fiasco in the Collegiate Church Don Manuel had shut himself up in his apartments for three days and refused to see anyone. He was vain and thus sensitive to ridicule. He knew too well the mocking spirit of his compatriots and was fully aware that they were making merry at his expense. He did not think anyone would venture to make an allusion to his misadventure to his face, for he was a good swordsman and it would be a brave man who would risk being run through the body for the sake of a quip, but he could not prevent them from talking behind his back. When at last he ventured to show himself in company there was a truculence in his manner that served as ample warning to those present. He was angry, moreover, not only because he had made a fool of himself, but because he had jeopardized his prospects. His intention in coming to Castel Rodriguez, as perhaps the reader will remember, was to find in one of the noble but impoverished families of the place a girl to marry, and he had good reason to think that his handsome fortune would make him an acceptable suitor. But the public humiliation to which he had been exposed greatly reduced his chances. The nobility of the city were proud, pride in those hard times was all they had left them, and they would refuse the hand of one of their daughters to a man who was a common laughing-stock. It looked to Don Manuel as though the only thing left him was to go to Madrid, hoping the lamentable story had not reached it, and see whether he could not find there a suitable bride.

He was not a little surprised when Don Miguel brought him the Prioress’s courteous message, and flattered, for it had never occurred to him that she would deign to receive him. She belonged to a world so much above his that she might have been an inhabitant of another planet. Don Manuel said he would look upon it as an honour to be allowed to pay his respects to the Prioress at whatever time was convenient to her. The steward replied that she saw few persons who were not members of her family, and mentioned an hour when her numerous duties left her free.

‘I will come and fetch you tomorrow, Señor, if it suits you, and take you to the convent myself,’ he said.

It suited Don Manuel very well.

He was ushered into the oratory and left alone with the great lady. She was at her table writing and did not rise to receive him. He looked about for a chair to sit on, but as she did not invite him to take one remained somewhat awkwardly standing. Though a bold, impudent man, he was awed by her dignity. She addressed him with graciousness.

‘I have heard much, sir, of the courage, devotion and capacity with which for so many years you have served His Majesty the King, and I was curious to see a fellow citizen who has by his own efforts raised himself to such distinction. I was hoping that you would find time to visit me so that I might congratulate you personally on your great exploits.’

‘I never dreamed that I might without offence intrude upon your privacy, madam,’ he stammered.

But he began to feel more at his ease. If the daughter of the Great Duke of Castel Rodriquez paid him compliments his state could not be so desperate after all. But her next remark, though made with a smile, somewhat disconcerted him.

‘You have gone a long way, Don Manuel, since you were a little barefoot boy running about the streets of your village and tending your father’s swine.’

He flushed, but not knowing what to answer, held his tongue. Doña Beatriz looked him up and down for all the world as though he were a lackey she was about to engage. If she noticed his embarrassment she was not concerned with it. She saw a well-set-up man, not unpleasing in appearance, with an erect carriage and an air of virility. She knew his age; it was forty-five but he carried his years well. He was a little taller than his brother the Bishop, who was not a small man, and though his bones were well covered he was far from fat. His eyes were handsome, and though there was some brutality in his face, that was natural enough in a man who had been so long at the wars, and it did not particularly offend the Prioress who had no patience with a milksop. He was doubtless arrogant, boastful and licentious, but these were defects common to her own relations, and though as a religious she deplored them, as a woman she accepted them as masculine traits with the same resignation as she accepted the biting cold of the Castilian winter. Altogether the first impression Don Manuel made on her was not unfavourable.

She appeared for the first time to notice that he was still on his feet.

‘Why do you stand, Señor?’ she asked. ‘Will you not do me the favour of taking a seat?’

‘You are very good, madam.’

He sat down.

‘I live a very retired life and my religious duties combined with the business of my office keep me fully occupied, but nevertheless from time to time a scrap of news reaches me from the world outside these walls. I have heard, for instance, that apart from performing a filial duty your object of visiting your native place was to choose a wife from among the noble families of this city.’

‘After serving my King and country for so many years it is true that I have the desire to make a home for myself and enjoy the delights of domesticity of which I have been hitherto deprived.’

‘Your desire is praiseworthy, Señor, and increases the esteem in which owing to your reputation I already hold you.’

‘I am strong and active, and my fortune is considerable. I cannot but think that such talents as I am possessed of will be as useful at Court as they have proved to be in battle.’

‘And if I understand you, you are aware that a wife with intelligence and important connections can be of service to you there.’

‘I will not deny it, madam.’

‘I have a widowed niece, the Marquesa de Caranera, whose husband has unfortunately left her ill provided for. She is at present living in this house. I had hoped that she would be moved to adopt the life of a religious so that when at last I lay down my arduous functions she might succeed me, as indeed, being the granddaughter of our founder, she would be entitled to. But she lacks the vocation, so I have come to the conclusion that a suitable marriage should be arranged for her.’

Don Manuel was suddenly alert. But he was a shrewd man; the possibility of being allied with so great a family as that of the Duke of Castel Rodriguez was so far beyond his hopes that he could not but suspect some chicanery. He answered with prudence.

‘The Marquesa is twenty-four, which is a very suitable age for a man of your years,’ the Prioress replied somewhat sharply. ‘She is not lacking in beauty, and since she had a son by her husband, who died of the same distemper as carried off his father, she is certainly not barren. The fact that I intended her to be Prioress of this convent after my death proves that I have a high opinion of her ability. I need not point out to you that a Don Manuel de Valero could never have aspired to marry the niece of the Duke of Castel Rodriguez. I should in fact have to use all my powers of persuasion to induce my brother to consent to it.’

Don Manuel had been thinking quickly. With the influence of that powerful family behind him there was no knowing to what heights he might rise. To make such a marriage would be a triumph over the fools who had held him up to ridicule.

‘The Marquis of Caranera died without heirs to his title. I do not think it impossible that the King might be persuaded to grant it to you. It would be more suitable than this wretched Italian title which you now have.’

That clinched it. Though the Marquesa was old, ten years older than the bride he had desired, and might be homely, the advantages of marrying her were too great for him to hesitate.

‘I don’t know how to show Your Reverence my gratitude for the honour you propose to confer on me.’

‘I will tell you,’ she said coolly, ‘and indeed it is only if you show your gratitude efficiently that I propose to enter into the matter further.’

Don Manuel smothered a sigh of relief. He was far too astute not to know that this unexpected suggestion was made to him for a better reason than his wealth and his military reputation. Being a coarse man, the idea flashed across his mind that the Marquesa was pregnant and he had been chosen to father an illegitimate child. He would hardly know then whether to accept or decline the invitation, and he waited with some anxiety for Doña Beatriz to continue.

‘I desire to enlist your influence on behalf of a young man of this city with the Archduke Albert. I should have no need to do this but for the unfortunate fact that my brother has had a violent quarrel with him and so cannot help me. I have been given to understand that you stand high in the Archduke’s favour.’

‘He has been good enough to think well of my capacity.’

The Archduke Albert, it should be explained, was at that time commander-in-chief of the Spanish forces in the Low Countries.

‘It would be to this young man’s advantage to enter the Archduke’s service. He is strong and brave and would certainly make a good soldier.’

Don Manuel was much relieved. The Archduke was in various ways indebted to him. He would surely be glad to oblige him by taking into his service anyone in whom he was interested.

‘I think there would be no difficulty in effecting Your Reverence’s desire. The young man is presumably of a good family.’

‘He is an Old Christian of pure blood.’

This of course only meant that there was no taint in him of Jew or Moor. Don Manuel noticed that the answer did not meet his question.

‘And what, madam, is the young man’s name?’

‘Diego Martinez.’

‘The tailor’s son? Then, madam, what you ask is impossible. The soldiers serving in the Archduke’s army are gentlemen, and I could not put such an affront on His Highness as to make the request you wish.’

‘I have foreseen that difficulty. I have a small estate some miles from this city which I am prepared to settle on the young man, and through my brother I can get letters of nobility given to him. You would recommend to the Archduke not the tailor’s son but the hidalgo Don Diego de Quintamilla.’

‘I cannot do it, Your Reverence.’

‘In that case there is nothing more to be said, and further discussion is useless on the matter or on that I previously mentioned.’

Don Manuel was a worried man. The marriage that the Prioress had proposed would give him the position that he hankered after to further his ambition and he had an inkling that if he refused to accede to her request he would make a dangerous enemy. On the other hand the consequences might be unfortunate for him if it were discovered that he had lent himself to a plan which the Archduke might very well regard as a personal insult. Doña Beatriz discerned his trouble.

‘You are a fool, Don Manuel. Don Diego will be a man of property and, believe me, his estate will compare not unfavourably with the barren acres belonging to your father Don Juan.’

Don Manuel was something of a bully. He cringed under the lash of the Prioress’s tongue. She could ruin him and would not hesitate to do it.

‘May I ask why Your Reverence takes an interest in this young man?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘My family have always looked upon it as a privilege as well as a duty to advance the fortunes of deserving persons in this city.’

The guarded answer so far restored his confidence that he smiled, but his glance was shrewd.

‘He is the lover of the girl Catalina Perez?’

Doña Beatriz was affronted by the question, his smile and the shrewdness of his glance. She had some difficulty in outwardly controlling her indignation.

‘He has been pestering the unhappy girl with his attentions.’

‘And is that why you wish him sent to the Low Countries?’

The Prioress considered for a moment. It was probable that he knew the circumstances and it was evident that he was a tactless fellow. There were many things that could be understood, but which it was better not to put into words. She answered him, however, with an impressive dignity.

‘The girl is young and does not know her own mind. She has admirable dispositions for the life of a religious and there are many reasons which make it highly desirable that she should adopt it. I have no doubt that were it not for the presence of this young man she would soon see the advisability of taking a step which would give so much satisfaction to myself, to the most important personages in the city, and to her mother.’

‘But, madam, would it not be more expeditious and less costly to dispose of the young man on the spot? It would be very easy to have his throat cut one dark night.’

‘It would be a mortal sin, sir, and I am shocked that you should venture to propose it. It would make a scandal in the city, give rise to unpleasant gossip, and there is no certainty that it would achieve the desired result.’

‘Then what would you have me do, madam?’

She looked at him reflectively. For the present at least she felt it necessary to her plan that neither she nor anyone connected with her should be known to be concerned in it; she had to entrust its execution to someone else, and she was not sure that this man had the necessary intelligence or subtlety. She had to risk that, and she answered without further hesitation.

‘Order a suit of clothes.’

Don Manuel was so surprised that, thinking she must be jesting, he looked for a smile to hover on her decided lips. Her face was grim. She explained.

‘Send for the tailor to take your measurements and to bring samples of materials. He will be flattered and impressed. You must make an opportunity to talk to him about his son and tell him that a person of consequence in the city has heard good reports of him and wishes to advance him. Then, binding him to secrecy, disclose to him the plan suggested for the boy’s welfare. Let him send the young man to you on some pretext and put it before him. I am assured he looks upon himself as born for better things than to sit on a tailor’s bench, and he will without doubt accept with alacrity.’

‘He will be a great fool if he doesn’t.’

‘Let me see you again when you have something to tell me. I trust you to be discreet and tactful.’

‘Never fear, madam. In two days at the utmost I shall be able to inform you that the business is satisfactorily concluded.’

‘You may rest assured that in that case I shall perform my part to your satisfaction.’

CHAPTER 28

Don Manuel sent for the tailor. He could be very affable when he chose, and when his measurements had been taken and various materials examined he set himself to be so. As natives of the same city they had certain common interests and Don Manuel talked to him good-humouredly of the changes that had taken place in it during his long absence. The tailor was a little dried-up man with a sharp nose and a querulous expression. But he was garrulous. Finding in Don Manuel a sympathetic listener he enlarged upon the hard times. The wars and the heavy taxation had impoverished everyone, and even gentlemen of the highest rank were content to wear their clothes till they were threadbare. It was not so easy to make a good living then as it had been thirty years before when the caravels were arriving regularly with their cargo of gold from America. A few well-directed questions brought out the fact that he was worried about his son. It was only right that he should follow in his father’s footsteps, but the boy had silly ideas and it had required the exercise of parental authority to force him to go into the business.

‘And now if you please, though he’s only eighteen, he wants to marry.’

‘That may settle him.’

‘That is the only reason I have consented.’

‘And I have no doubt the money of the girl’s dowry will be useful,’ said Don Manuel archly.

‘She has no money. There is some talk that certain ladies are prepared to give her a dowry, but how do I know that it will come to anything?’

The tailor then proceeded to tell Don Manuel who the girl was and how it had come about that he had at last yielded to his son’s insistence, all of which of course Don Manuel knew already.

‘I had another match in view for him, but the young person’s father would not accept my very reasonable conditions, so I agreed to let the boy marry Catalina. After all that has happened and the notice that has been taken of her, I think it will bring me a nice lot of custom. My wife blames me. She asks what is the use of making clothes for gentlemen who can’t afford to pay for them.’

‘A very sensible remark. But if business is so bad why don’t you let your son go for a soldier?’

‘The life is hard and ill paid. In the shop he can still earn enough to keep body and soul together.’

‘Listen friend,’ replied Manuel with a frankness that charmed the poor tailor, ‘you know that when I left this city I was as poor as a church mouse. Now I am a Knight of Calatrava and a rich man.’

‘Ah, but Your Excellency was a gentleman and had friends to help you.’

‘A gentleman, yes, but the only friends I had to count on were my youth, my strength, my courage and my intelligence.’

The tailor shrugged his shoulders despondently. Don Manuel from his greater height looked down upon him with benignity.

‘I have heard nothing but good of your son, and if what they tell me is true I cannot but suppose he is fitted for better things than you think. I too have been poor; we are citizens of the same town; I should be glad to give the boy a helping hand if I were sure it met with your approval.’

‘I don’t think I understand you, Señor.’

‘The Archduke Albert is my friend and will do anything for me. If I recommended a young man to him he would put him in his own regiment and would mark him out for advancement.’

The tailor looked at him with gaping mouth.

‘Of course we should have to provide him with certain advantages. There is a small estate not far from here of which I would give him the deeds, and with my influence in Madrid I can see that he gets letters of nobility. Your son will enter the service of the Archduke as Don Diego de Quintamilla.’

Since the Prioress had told him that she did not wish her name to be mentioned Don Manuel saw no reason why he should not himself get what credit he could from a generous action. The tailor was so overwhelmed that his face twitched and be began to cry. Don Manuel kindly patted his shoulder.

‘There, there, it’s nothing to make a fuss about. Go home now, say nothing of this to anyone, and send your son to me. You can tell him that you forgot to bring me a pattern of some stuff you think I may like.’

In a little while the boy came. Don Manuel noticed with relief that he was a youth of pleasing exterior. Suitably dressed he would certainly pass as a gentleman. He was neither pert nor shy. There was a confidence in his bearing which promised that he would be able to hold his own in any company. Already predisposed in his favour, after a few preliminary remarks Don Manuel broached the subject on account of which he had had Diego sent. They talked for an hour, after which they parted and Don Manuel went to see the Prioress.

‘I have wasted no time in obeying your commands, madam,’ he said. ‘I have seen both the boy and his father.’

‘You have indeed been prompt, Señor.’

‘I am a soldier, madam. The father is in full accord with our plan. He is indeed overwhelmed by the opportunity that the kindness of a benefactor proposes to give his son.’

‘He would be a fool to be anything else.’

Don Manuel moved uneasily from one foot to the other.

‘I had better tell Your Reverence word for word what passed between me and the boy.’

The Prioress gave him a quick look of inquiry and slightly frowned.

‘Go on.’

‘He is a very presentable lad and my first impression was good.’

‘Your impressions do not interest me.’

‘I very soon discovered that he dislikes and despises the trade to which his father has put him. He has only adopted it because there was no help for it.’

‘That I already knew.’

‘I told him that I could not understand how a young man of spirit and intelligence, endowed with all the qualities necessary for success in the world, could think of wasting his life in a humble occupation. He answered that he had often thought of running away to seek adventure, but was held back by the fact that he hadn’t a penny in his pocket. I then told him that the King wanted soldiers and that it was a career that might easily lead a man of courage and resource to position and wealth. After that I disclosed to him little by little exactly what was proposed to enable him to achieve his natural and laudable ambition.’

‘Very good.’

‘He took the prospect more calmly than I expected, but it was evident that it tempted him.’

‘Naturally. He accepted then?’

Don Manuel hesitated briefly, for he knew that what he had to say would not satisfy Doña Beatriz.

‘Conditionally,’ he answered.

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘He said he wanted to marry his sweetheart, but in a year, when she’d had a baby, he wouldn’t be unwilling to go to the Low Countries.’

The Prioress was enraged. What use could she make of a married woman with a squalling brat? Catalina’s virginity, her perpetual virginity, was essential to her purpose.

‘You’ve bungled the whole thing, you fool,’ she cried.

Don Manuel flushed angrily.

‘Is it my fault if the young idiot is head over ears in love with this girl?’

‘Hadn’t you the sense to tell him that it was madness to refuse such an opportunity?’

‘Yes, madam, I had. I told him that in this life when you get a chance to better yourself you must take it and take it quickly, because if you let it slip it may never come again. I told him that it was absurd at his age to hamper himself with a wife and that as an officer and a gentleman he could in due course do much better for himself than a penniless daughter of a sewing-woman. And if he wanted a girl to amuse himself with he would find plenty in the Low Countries who would be delighted to oblige a good-looking young man and not a few who would be prepared to show their gratitude in a substantial manner.’

‘And what did he say to that?’

‘He said he loved his sweetheart.’

‘No wonder the world is in a mess and the country is going to the dogs when it’s governed by men, and men haven’t the elements of common sense.’

Don Manuel did not know what to say to this and so said nothing. The Prioress gave him a look of cold disdain.

‘You have failed, Don Manuel, and I can see no profit in our further communication.’

He was acute enough to see that with these words she intimated to him that he need no longer entertain the hope of marrying the widowed marchioness. He was not prepared to give up the chance of so advantageous an alliance without a struggle.

‘Your Reverence is easily discouraged. The boy’s father is on our side. He does not like the idea of Diego marrying the girl Catalina and I have no doubt that I can get him to withdraw his consent. You can be sure that he will use every effort to persuade the boy to accept our proposition.’

Doña Beatriz made an impatient gesture.

‘You know little about human nature. Señor. Parental opposition has never made lovers love one another less. That is not the frame of mind in which I should be prepared to accept the girl into this house. If the boy had fallen in with my proposal she would have seen how worthless is a man’s love compared with the love of God. She would have been unhappy, but I should not have regretted it if it taught her where the only real happiness may be found.’

‘There are more ways than one of being rid of a troublesome fellow. I have men I can trust. The boy can be seized one night, taken to a sea port and put on a ship. Youth is fickle. Once in the Low Countries, with new sights to see, adventures to be encountered, with the standing of a gentleman and by the Archduke’s favour brilliant prospects, he will forget his love and in a short while thank his stars that he has been saved from an unfortunate entanglement.’

The Prioress did not answer for a while. She was a woman of robust conscience and the plan Don Manuel suggested did not outrage her. Unruly sons were often packed off to America just as daughters, unwilling to accede to their parents’ matrimonial designs, were placed in a convent until they were prepared to listen to reason. She was fully convinced that to part Diego from Catalina was to the advantage of both of them.

‘Your Reverence may be certain that the boy will tell Catalina of the offer that has been made him.’

‘Why?’

‘To make himself more precious in her sight by showing her what advantages he is prepared to forgo for her sake.’

‘You are shrewder than I took you for, Señor.’

‘When he is missing one morning she will naturally suppose that he found himself unable to resist the temptation.’

‘That is probable enough. There is still his father to consider. It would not do if he made trouble with the authorities.’

‘So that he should not do that I propose to take him into my confidence. He is ambitious for his son. He will agree to the plan without hesitation. He will hold his tongue and by the time the boy’s absence is noticed he will be safely aboard ship.’

The Prioress sighed.

‘I do not like the plan, but it is evident that the young are foolish and it is often better that their fate should be decided by older and wiser heads. I should require to be assured that no unnecessary violence would be used on the boy.’

‘I can promise Your Reverence that no harm shall come to him. I will have him accompanied by a man I can rely on to see that he is well treated.’

‘It will be to your interest,’ she said grimly.

‘Of that I am fully aware, madam. You can safely leave everything in my hands.’

‘When do you propose to act?’

‘As soon as I can make the necessary arrangements.’

For a moment Doña Beatriz was silent. It was evident that Diego’s disappearance would give rise to gossip and it was not unlikely that it would reach the Bishop’s ears. She had experienced his perspicacity. He might very well put two and two together and come to the conclusion that she was concerned in the matter. She bitterly regretted that during their interview she had been led by anger to speak without discretion. She did not quite know what he could do, but he was a determined man, and a powerful; she was not frightened of him, but was wise enough to see that it was better to avoid an open breach which would not only cause scandal but might also frustrate her design.

‘When does your brother leave the city, Don Manuel?’ she asked.

The question surprised him.

‘I do not know, Your Reverence, but if it interests you I can inquire.’

‘I do not wish anything to be done till after his departure.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is my pleasure. Let it be enough for you to know that such is my desire.’

‘It shall be as you will, madam. The boy shall be taken on the night of the day on which my brother leaves the city.’

‘That will do very well, Don Manuel,’ she said graciously.

She gave him her hand to kiss as he took his leave.

CHAPTER 29

But though her reason assured her that she was acting for the best and was fully justified, Doña Beatriz could not dispel the peculiar uneasiness that possessed her. It was so compelling that once or twice she was in mind to tell Don Manuel to abandon his scheme. But she chid herself for her weakness. Much was at stake. Yet she fretted and her nuns found her unaccountably irritable. Then one morning the sub-prioress informed her that the Bishop had gone. To avoid attention he had slipped away at crack of dawn with his secretaries and servants. An hour later Don Manuel conveyed a message to her that arrangements were complete and the plan would be carried into effect that night. That settled it. She examined her conscience and knew that her intentions were blameless.

Towards evening she was told that Catalina was asking to be allowed to see her. She was shown into the oratory. The Prioress noticed with dismay that she was violently agitated. She guessed that something had gone wrong.

‘What is it, my child?’ she asked.

‘Your Reverence told me that if ever I was in trouble I could come to you.’

She burst into tears. Doña Beatriz told her to calm herself and tell her what had happened. Sobbing, the girl told her that a principal gentleman of the city had offered to send Diego to the wars, with the promise of giving him an estate and getting the title of Don for him. He had refused for love of her and in consequence had had a violent quarrel with his father. His father had said at last that if he did not accept these magnificent offers as any sensible man would, if he did not go peacefully he should go by force, and added that he withdrew his consent to his marriage to Catalina. The Prioress frowned when she heard of the threat. The man was a fool to have made it. Now if Diego disappeared the girl would know that it was not of his own free will. The Prioress had counted on the effect it would have on her if she thought that he had succumbed to temptation and abandoned her.

‘He could never have hoped for such good fortune,’ she said, ‘It is a chance no young man would hesitate to seize. Men are vain and cowardly and though they act badly they take pains to be thought well of. How do you know that he is not deceiving you and talking of force being applied in order to make you think he has abandoned you through no fault of his own?’

‘How do I know? I know because he loves me. Ah, madam, you are a saintly woman, you don’t know what love is. If I don’t have my Diego I shall die.’

‘No one ever died of love yet,’ said the Prioress with a savage bitterness.

Catalina fell to her knees and put her hands together in passionate supplication.

‘Oh, Mother, Reverend Mother, have pity on us. Save him. Don’t let them take him away. I cannot live without him. Oh, madam, if you knew the anguish I suffered when I thought I’d lost him for ever and how night after night I cried until I thought I should go blind! Why did the Blessed Virgin cause me to be freed from my infirmity if not that I should be fit once more to be my lover’s wife? She had pity on me, and will you do nothing to help me?’

The Prioress clenched her hands on the arms of her chair, but said nothing.

‘All that time I longed for him. My heart was breaking. I am only a poor and ignorant girl. I have nothing in the world but my love. I love him with all my heart.’

‘He’s nobody. He’s only a boy like another,’ said Doña Beatriz hoarsely, so that her voice sounded like the croak of a raven.

‘Ah, madam, you say that because you have never known the pain and bliss of love. I want to feel his arms round me, I want to feel the warmth of his mouth on mine, the caress of his hands on my naked body. I want him to take me as a lover takes the woman he loves. I want his seed to flow into my womb and to create the child within it. I want to suckle his child at my breast.’

She put a hand to each breast and sensuality poured from her in a flame so fierce that the Prioress shrank back. It was like the heat of a furnace and she put up her hands as though to shield herself from it. She looked at the girl’s face and shuddered. It was strangely changed, pale, and one might have thought the features were swollen; it was a mask of desire. She was breathless for lust for the male. She was like one possessed. There was something not quite human about her, something even slightly horrible, but so powerful that it was terrifying. It was sex, nothing but sex, violent and irresistible, sex in its awful nakedness. Suddenly the Prioress’s face was contorted in a grimace, a grimace of unendurable agony, and tears poured down her cheeks. Catalina gave a cry of dismay.

‘Oh, Mother, what have I said? Forgive me. Forgive me.’

She clasped the knees of the Prioress. She was startled by this exhibition of emotion in one whom she had never seen but calm, grave and dignified. She was bewildered, She didn’t know what to do. She took the thin hands in hers and kissed them.

‘Madam, why do you cry? What have I done?’

Doña Beatriz withdrew her hands and clenched them in the effort to regain her self-control.

‘I am a wicked and unhappy woman,’ she moaned.

She leant back in her chair and covered her face with her hands. Memories of long ago crowded upon her and she gritted her teeth to choke back the sobs that tore her throat. The little fool, the silly little fool had said she had never known love. How cruel it was that after all these years that old wound should be so green! She gave the ghost of a bitter chuckle as the humour of it struck her that she had eaten her heart out for a boy who was now a wasted, haggard priest. She brushed away the tears that dimmed her eyes and taking Catalina’s face in her hands gazed at her as though she had never seen her before. There was no trace now of the carnality that for an instant had so hideously changed the comely features. She was all tenderness, solicitude and purity. The Prioress was entranced by her loveliness. So young, so beautiful and so passionately in love. How could she break that poor little heart as hers had been broken? She, who thought she had conquered every human weakness, felt weak, pitifully weak, and yet there was in the feeling something strange and uplifting, something that warmed her heart and at the same time, oh, so comfortingly, crippled her will; it was as though a knot had been loosened deep within her breast, and she rejoiced to be relieved of the aching pain. She bent down and kissed the girl’s red mouth.

‘Have no fear, my sweet,’ she said. ‘You shall marry your lover.’

Catalina gave a cry of joy and broke into voluble expressions of gratitude, but the Prioress harshly told her to be quiet. The situation was delicate and she had to think. In a few hours they were to spirit Diego away; it was true that she could send for Don Manuel and tell him that she had changed her mind; she could cut his expostulations short; but that would not solve the difficulties she had got herself into. The seed she had sown had been sown well. There was a feeling widespread in the city that it behoved Catalina to become a religious. Doña Beatriz knew well the passionate devotion the people had for the Faith; they would not only be disappointed if she did not do what was expected of her, they would look upon it as an indecency, almost as an insult to religion if after receiving such a grace she married a tailor. The worldly would laugh and make bawdy jokes; the pious would be incensed. Catalina was regarded now with admiration, even with awe, but that could easily change into indignation and contempt. The Prioress knew the violent nature of her countrymen; they were capable of burning down the house in which she lived, they were capable of stoning her as an abandoned wanton and driving a dagger into Diego’s back. There was but one thing to do and that must be done quickly.

‘You must leave the city, you and this boy, and you must go tonight. Fetch Domingo, your uncle, and come back here with him.’

The girl, inflamed with curiosity, wanted to know what the Prioress had in mind, but the Prioress very peremptorily told her not to ask questions, but do as she was told.

When Catalina in a few minutes came back with her uncle, the Prioress sent her down to wait in her own cell so that she could speak to him alone. She told him such of the facts of the situation as she thought it needful for him to know, gave him certain instructions and with them a short note which she had already written for her steward. She then told him to get hold of Diego, let him know what had been decided, and see that he followed the directions given him. Having dismissed him she called Catalina.

‘You will spend the evening with me, my child. At midnight I will let you out by a door in the city wall and you will find Domingo with a horse which I have ordered my steward to let him have. He will ride with you to a spot which has been arranged, and there Diego will be waiting. He will change places with Domingo and you are to ride South till you come to Seville. I will give you a letter to friends I have there and they will find suitable work for you and him.’

‘Oh, madam,’ cried Catalina, wild with excitement, ‘how can I show my gratitude for what you are doing?’

‘I will tell you,’ answered the Prioress with some severity. ‘Ride fast and on no account linger on the way. You have desperate men to deal with and it may be they will pursue you. Chastity is a woman’s crown, and you must preserve it till the Church has blessed your union. Intercourse between unmarried persons is a mortal sin. You will seek out a priest at the first village you come to after daybreak and ask him to join you to Diego in holy matrimony. Do you see what I have here?’

Catalina looked and saw a plain gold ring.

‘It is the ring I had destined for your consecration on your profession. It will be your wedding ring.’

She put it on the palm of Catalina’s hand. It made her heart beat nineteen to the dozen. The Prioress then proceeded to instruct her on the duties and responsibilities of married life. She listened with becoming gravity, but with some distraction, for she was in a flutter and her mind was more occupied with its delights. They prayed together. The hours passed slowly. At last the convent clock struck midnight.

‘It is time,’ said Doña Beatriz. She took a small bag from a drawer in her writing-table. ‘Here are some gold pieces. Put the bag in a place where you are sure you will not lose it and do not let Diego get hold of it. Men do not know the value of money and when they have any spend it on foolishness.’

Catalina modestly turning her back pulled up her skirt and put the bag inside her stocking, and tied the strings round her leg.

The Prioress lit a lantern and told the girl to follow her. They walked softly through silent passages till they came out into the garden. Then, in case some wakeful nun happened to see the light and wondered what it meant, she extinguished the lantern and taking Catalina’s hand led her along the pathways. They came to the small door that the Prioress had caused to be cut in the city wall so that if need be she could leave the city unobserved or receive persons whose visit for some reason had to be secret. She alone had the key. She unlocked the door. Domingo on horseback was waiting in the shadow of the wall, for the moon was shining and the night was bright.

‘Now go,’ said the Prioress. ‘God bless you, my child, and remember me in your prayers, for I am a sinful woman and I need them.’

Catalina slipped out of the door and the Prioress closed and locked it behind her. She listened till she heard the horse’s hoofs. They sounded very loud in the silence of the night. Doña Beatriz with lagging steps walked back to the convent building. She could hardly see her way, for she was almost blinded by her tears. She returned to her oratory and spent the rest of the night in prayer.

CHAPTER 30

Domingo gave Catalina his hand and helped her up on to the horse so that she could sit on the pillion behind him. It was still and warm, but high up in the heavens there was wind, and little clouds sped across the sky, black but edged with silver of the shining moon. The countryside was deserted and they might have been riding in a world of which they were the only inhabitants.

‘Uncle Domingo.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to be married.’

‘Make quite sure of it, child. It is a sacrament necessary to salvation, but one which men in general hesitate to avail themselves of.’

They passed a sleeping hamlet and beyond it was a clump of trees. As they came to it a figure detached itself from their shadow. Catalina slipped off the horse and flung herself into Diego’s arms. Domingo dismounted.

‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘You’ll have plenty of time for that sort of thing later. Get on the horse both of you and be off. There’s food and a bottle of wine in the saddlebags.’

He kissed Catalina and Diego, saw them start, and then, since the city gates were shut and he could not get in till dawn, settled himself down as comfortably as he could under a tree. He had taken the precaution to bring wine and he put the bottle to his mouth. It was the very place to compose poetry and he prepared to await daybreak in commerce with the Muse. But before he had made up his mind whether to indite a sonnet to the moon or an ode to love triumphant he fell sound asleep and did not wake till sunrise.

The lovers rode for an hour and Catalina talked her head off. It seemed that she had a thousand things to say, much to tell Diego, plans to divulge, and since she had a pretty way of putting things she made it all sound very delightful and amusing. Diego was so happy he was prepared to laugh at everything she said. And she was enraptured. She could not imagine anything more like heaven than to ride through the night in the open country with her arms clasped round her lover. They had to be, of course, for that was the only way to hold on, but it was very pleasant.

‘I could ride like this to the end of the world,’ she said.

‘I’m hungry,’ he answered. ‘Let us stop here and see what is in those saddlebags.’

They were passing a wood and he reined in the horse. Catalina was well aware that his appetite just then was not for food and drink, and a tremor of desire tingled down her body; but it needed the admonitions neither of the Prioress nor of Domingo to tell her that it was very imprudent to let a man have his will of you until the Church had sanctified the union. She knew that men have an instinctive disinclination to marry and she had known cases of girls who had yielded to their lovers only to have them refuse afterwards to fulfil their promises. Then nothing was left them but the brothel.

‘Let us ride on, dear,’ she said. ‘The Prioress said we might be pursued.’

‘I’m not frightened,’ he said.

He passed his leg over the horse’s head and slipping to the ground lifted Catalina off the horse’s back. She was in his arms and he kissed her on the eyes and on the mouth. He took hold of the bridle and with his arm still about Catalina’s waist made for the wood. But at that moment a sharp shower of rain fell upon them. They were both startled, for the night seemed fair and they had not noticed the black cloud over their heads. Now Diego was as brave as a lion and would have faced armed men with intrepidity, but he was terrified of rain. Moreover he had put on his best clothes before starting and could not bear to get them wet.

‘It’s not raining over there,’ he said, pointing a little way down to the other side of the road. ‘Let’s run.’

But they had no sooner reached the spot he indicated than the rain suddenly began to fall there too and more heavily. Diego gave an exclamation of annoyance.

‘It’s only a local shower,’ he said. ‘If we ride quickly we shall get out of it.’

He mounted, helped Catalina up, and clapping his spurs to the horse’s flanks galloped down the road. But no sooner had they got away from the wood than the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. He looked up at the sky. There were dark clouds behind them, but ahead the sky was blue and serene. They rode in silence. After a little while, perhaps half an hour, they came to a little copse.

‘This’ll do,’ said Diego, reining in the horse.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a heavy drop of rain fell on his nose.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, and once more swung his leg over the horse’s head; but he had no sooner done this, he had not even got to the ground, when the drops began to fall more and more frequently. ‘The devil’s in it.’

He put his foot back in the stirrup and rode on. The rain stopped. Catalina pondered.

‘It’s not the devil,’ she said.

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s the Blessed Virgin.’

‘You’re talking nonsense, woman, and in a little while I’ll prove it.’

He kept a sharp look-out. For some time they did not pass a tree to which he could tie up the horse.

‘I ought to have brought a rope to hobble him,’ said Diego.

‘One can’t think of everything,’ she answered.

‘The horse ought to have a rest. It wouldn’t hurt us to have a bit of a sleep by the roadside.’

‘I couldn’t sleep a wink.’

‘I dare say you wouldn’t want to,’ he grinned.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s going to rain again.’ And in fact several drops began to fall. ‘We shall only get wet through.’

‘A few drops of rain won’t do us any harm.’

As he spoke, the rain on a sudden fell heavily. He uttered a curse and spurred his horse.

‘This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he said.

‘Almost a miracle,’ she murmured.

Diego gave it up as a bad job. Though the rain stopped they were both pretty wet by then and Diego’s amorous ardour was sensibly mitigated by his concern for his clothes. In extenuation it should be stated that it was not only his best but his only suit that he wore, for Domingo had told him it would be unwise to leave his home with anything but what he stood up in. They went on through the night, passing no one, but occasionally in the moonlight catching a glimpse of a farmhouse or a few cottages. At last the sun rose. They were on the top of a little hill and looking down saw in the grey dimness of dawn a small village. There could not but be an inn there where they could get something to eat and drink, for by this time they were both quite honestly hungry and thirsty. They rode on and now encountered peasants going to work in their fields. They entered the village and suddenly the horse stopped dead.

‘What’s the matter with you, you brute? Get on with you,’ cried Diego, digging in his spurs.

The horse did not move. Diego hit him over the head with the ends of the reins and again sharply kicked him. It made no impression on the horse. He stood stock still. He might have been turned to stone.

‘You shall go, you brute.’

Diego was angry now and he slapped the horse’s neck as hard as he could. The horse reared up on his hind legs and Catalina gave a shriek. Diego hit him on the head with his closed fist and the horse got back on to his four legs, but still nothing Diego could do got him to move a step forwards. He stood as if rooted to the ground. Diego, red in the face, was sweating profusely.

‘I can’t make it out. Is the devil in the horse too?’ Catalina began to laugh and he turned on her furiously. ‘What is there to laugh at?’

‘Don’t be cross with me, my love. Don’t you see where we are? The church.’

Diego, frowning, looked and noticed for the first time that the horse had stopped in front of the church, which was on the very edge of the village.

‘What of it?’

‘The Prioress made me promise that we’d get married in the first church we came to. That’s it.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that later,’ he said.

Once more he dug his spurs savagely into the poor brute’s flanks and as he did so the horse humped its back, kicked up his hind legs, and before they knew what had happened the two riders were flying through the air. Fortunately they fell on a pile of hay and so were not hurt. They lay for a moment somewhat shaken and very much startled. The horse, after this strange show of spirit stood as still as before. Just as this happened the priest, who had been saying his Mass, came out of the church and seeing the accident hurried up to see if he could be of help. They got up, shook themselves, and finding that no harm had come to them brushed off their clothes the hay that stuck to them.

‘You’re lucky it was there,’ said the priest, a short, red-faced man on the plump side. ‘If you had come a little later it would have been in my barn.’

‘It’s providential that this should have occurred at the church door,’ said Catalina, ‘for we were looking for a priest to marry us.’

Diego gave her a glance of surprise, but did not say anything.

‘To marry you?’ cried the priest. ‘You are no parishioners of mine. I have never seen you before. I certainly will not marry you. I have had nothing to eat since my supper yesterday evening and I am going to my house now to get some food.’

‘Please wait, Father,’ said Catalina.

She turned her back on them, raised her skirt and quickly got a gold piece out of the bag the Prioress had given her. With her bewitching smile she showed it on the palm of her hand. The priest looked at it and grew redder in the face than ever.

‘But who are you?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘Why do you want to be married in a strange place and in such a hurry?’ He did not take his eyes off the glistening coin.

‘Have pity on two young lovers, Father. We have run away from Castel Rodriguez because my father wanted to force me to marry a rich old man for his money; and this youth, to whom I was betrothed, was being forced by his avaricious parents to marry a woman without a tooth in her head and only one eye.’

To make her story more convincing Catalina put the gold piece in the priest’s hand and firmly closed it upon the coin.

‘You have a very persuasive manner with you, young woman,’ said the priest, ‘and your story is touching enough to bring tears to my eyes.’

‘You will not only be doing a meritorious deed, Father,’ Catalina continued, ‘but you will be saving two virtuous young people from committing a mortal sin.’

‘Follow me,’ said the priest and re-entered the church. ‘Pepe,’ he called in a loud voice as he proceeded towards the high altar.

‘What is it?’ came back.

‘Come here, you idle scoundrel.’

A man, broom in hand, came out from the chapel beside the sanctuary.

‘Why can’t you let me get my sweeping done?’ he asked gruffly. ‘Never was a sacristan paid such a miserable wage and then you never give me a moment’s peace. How am I to get out to my field if you interfere with me in the middle of my work?’

‘Hold your impudent tongue, you son of a bitch. I am going to marry these young people. Ah, but there must be two witnesses.’ He turned to Catalina with a smirk on his fat face. ‘You will have to wait while this drunken ruffian goes down to the village to find someone and that will give me chance to get something to eat.’

‘I will be the second witness.’

It was a woman who spoke. They all turned round and saw her walking towards them. She wore a blue cloak and her head was covered with a great white scarf the ends of which were thrown over her shoulders. The priest looked at her with surprise, for he had not noticed that there was anyone in the church when he said his Mass, but he gave his shoulders an impatient shrug.

‘Very well. Let us get it over as quickly as possible. I want my breakfast.

Catalina gave a start when the stranger joined them and tremulously took Diego’s hand. The stranger, a faint smile in her eyes, put her finger to her lips enjoining Catalina to silence. The ceremony was speedily performed and Catalina Perez was joined in the bonds of matrimony to Diego Martinez. They went into the vestry to sign the book. The priest wrote down the names of the newly-married couple, and the names of their parents. Then the sacristan laboriously wrote his.

‘That’s the only thing he can write,’ said the priest, ‘and it took me six months to drive that into his thick head. Now, madam, it’s your turn.’

He dipped the quill into the ink and handed it to the strange lady.

‘I cannot write at all,’ she said.

‘Then make a cross and I will write your name.’

She took the quill and did as he directed. Catalina, her heart beating, watched her.

‘Well, I cannot write your name unless you tell it me,’ said the priest sharply.

‘Maria, daughter of the shepherd Joachim,’ she answered.

He wrote it.

‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘And now I am going to eat.’

They followed him out of the church, all but the sacristan, who took up his broom and with mutters of irritation resumed his sweeping. But the Spanish have always been a courteous people and the priest, with the gold piece safely tucked away, was no exception.

‘If, gentleman and ladies, you will do me the honour of coming to my humble dwelling next door I shall be happy to offer you such refreshment as my poverty can provide.’

Catalina who was well brought up, knew that such an offer should be declined with grace, but Diego was ravenous and did not give her time to speak.

‘Señor,’ he said, ‘neither I nor my wife have had anything to eat since yesterday, and however poor your fare, it will seem a feast to us.’

The priest was a little taken aback at this, but was too polite to say anything but that they would confer a favour on him. They walked the few steps to his house and he showed them into a small bare room which served as refectory, parlour and study. He set before them bread and wine, goat cheese and a dish of black olives. He cut four hunks of bread and filled four horn tumblers with wine. He set about the food greedily and Diego and Catalina followed his example. He looked up to help himself to an olive and noticed that the strange lady had touched nothing.

‘Pray eat, madam,’ he said. ‘It is simple fare, but good, and it is the best I can offer you.’

She gave the bread and wine a smile in which there was singular sadness and shook her head.

‘I will eat an olive,’ she said.

She took one and delicately nibbled it with white teeth. Catalina gave her a glance, their eyes met, and in the lady’s was a look of infinite kindness. At that moment the sacristan burst into the room.

‘Señor, Señor,’ he shouted, beside himself with excitement, ‘they’ve stolen the Virgin.’

‘I’m not deaf, you old fool,’ cried the priest. ‘What in heaven’s name do you mean?’

‘I tell you they’ve stolen our Virgin. I went in there to sweep and the pedestal on which she stood was empty.’

‘You’re mad or drunk, Pepe,’ the priest shouted back at him, jumping to his feet. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’

He flung out of the house and followed by the sacristan, Diego and Catalina, ran to the church.

‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,’ cried the sacristan, waving his hands distractedly. ‘They’ll all say I did it and put me in prison.’

They scrambled up the church steps, and ran to the Lady Chapel. The sacristan gave a great cry. The image of the Blessed Virgin stood in its accustomed place.

‘What do you mean?’ yelled the priest furiously.

‘It wasn’t there a minute ago. I swear by all the saints the pedestal was empty.’

‘You drunken swine. You old wineskin.’

The priest seized him by the neck and kicked the wretched man’s backside till he was exhausted and then for good measure slapped his face on both sides with all the strength he had left.

‘If I only had a stick I’d break every bone of your body.’

When the three of them got back to the priest’s house to finish their frugal repast they were surprised to find that the strange lady was nowhere to be seen.

‘Where can she have gone?’ the priest exclaimed. Then he slapped his forehead. ‘Fool that I am! Now I see it all. Of course she’s one of these Moriscos and when Pepe came in and said the Virgin had been stolen she thought she’d better make her escape. They’re all thieves and she thought some of her cursed infidels had taken the image. Did you notice she wouldn’t drink the wine? They’ve been baptised but they keep to their pagan customs. I had my suspicions when she gave me her name; that isn’t the name of a good Christian.’

‘We got rid of the Moriscos at Castel Rodriguez long ago,’ said Diego.

‘And quite right too. I pray every night that our good King may be brought to see his duty to the Faith and expel every one of these odious heretics from the kingdom.’

‘It will be a great day for Spain when he does.’

It is perhaps worthy of note to add that the worthy priest’s prayers were answered, for in 1609 all the Moriscos were driven out of the country.

It was now time for Diego and his bride to resume their journey to Seville, and thanking the priest for his hospitality, they took leave of him. The horse meanwhile had been making a good meal of the hay on to which he had pitched his riders. Diego watered him and as soon as they were on his back the horse without urging set out at a comfortable amble. It was a beautiful day and there was not a cloud in the sky. The priest had told them that some fifteen miles along the road was an inn, patronized by carters and muleteers, where they could get lodging, and there they decided to stay the night. They rode in silence for three or four miles.

‘Are you happy, dear?’ asked Catalina at last.

‘Of course.’

‘I will be a good wife to you. For love of you I will work my fingers to the bone.’

‘There will be no need for you to do that. There’s plenty of money to be made in Seville by a clever man and no one has ever taken me for a fool.’

‘I should think not indeed.’

They were silent again for a while and it was Catalina who spoke again.

‘Listen, my lover, that was no Moorish woman who came to our wedding.’

‘What are you talking about? One only had to look at her to tell that she was no Old Christian.’

‘But I’d seen her before.’

‘You? Where?’

‘On the steps of the church of the Carmelite nuns. It was she who told me how I could be cured of my infirmity.’

He stopped the horse and looked around.

‘My poor child, you’re crazy. The sun has addled your brains.’

‘I’m as sane as you are, my sweet. I tell you it was the Blessed Virgin, and when she refused to eat of the bread and wine I knew why. I knew she remembered her bitter, bitter sorrow.’

Diego stared at her with a puzzled frown.

‘The Reverend Mother told me a hundred times it was quite certain I was under the special protection of our most Holy Lady. That is why she pressed me so constantly to enter the convent. Those sudden showers last night and the horse stopping at the church door and refusing to move and then throwing us both. You must see that all that was no accident.’

He looked at her for the moment and Catalina to her distress throught there was some displeasure in his eyes. Without another word he turned round again and with a click of his tongue started the horse off. Somewhat timidly Catalina hazarded a casual remark now and then, but he either answered not at all or with a monosyllable.

‘What is the matter with you, darling?’ she said at last, trying not to cry.

‘Nothing.’

‘Look at me, sweetheart. I’m hungry for a glance of your eyes.’

‘How can I look at you when the road is full of ruts and holes? If the horse stumbled we might break our necks.’

‘You’re not angry with me because the Blessed Virgin saw fit to protect my virtue and was so gracious as to be a witness to our marriage?’

‘It is an honour to which I would never have ventured to aspire,’ he said dryly.

‘Then why are you vexed with me?’

He took some time to reply.

‘It does not augur well for our future happiness if whenever we have a difference of opinion a miracle will occur to let you have your own way. A man should be master in his own home. It is a wife’s duty to yield to her husband’s wishes, and it should be her pleasure.’

Catalina had her arms round him and he felt them shaking.

‘You won’t make it any better by crying,’ he said.

‘I’m not crying.’

‘What are you doing then?’

‘Laughing.’

‘Laughing? It is no laughing matter, woman. It’s very serious and I have the right to be disturbed.’

‘You are very sweet, my darling, and I love you with all my heart, but sometimes you are not very sensible.’

‘Explain,’ he said coldly.

‘The Prioress told me that I owed the favours I have received at the hands of Our Blessed Lady to my virginity. It appears that in heaven they set great store on that. It may be that when I have lost it I shall receive no more.’

Upon this Diego turned as far round in the saddle as he could and there was a sly smile on his handsome face.

‘Blessed be the mother that bore you,’ he cried. ‘We will put the matter to the test without delay.’

‘The sun is growing warm. It would be pleasant to rest for a while under the shade of trees till the heat of the day is past.’

‘That is the very thought that was passing through my head.’

‘And unless my eyes deceive me there is a wood not more than a mile away that will do very nicely.’

‘If your eyes deceive you my eyes are deceiving me too.’

He gave the horse a touch of his spurs and galloped hell for leather till they came to the wood. He jumped off and lifted Catalina down. While he tied the horse to a tree she got out what the forethought either of the Prioress or Domingo had provided. Bread and cheese, sausage, a cold chicken and a bulging skin of wine. Who could want a better wedding breakfast? It was cool and dark under the trees and a trickle of water flowed down the bed of a tiny, limpid stream. The spot was propitious.

CHAPTER 31

When they emerged from the wood, Diego leading the horse, the sunrays flamed less fiercely.

‘It was just as well to make assurance doubly sure,’ he said.

‘Trebly,’ she murmured, not without a certain smug self-satisfaction.

‘That is nothing, child,’ he returned with a very pardonable complacency. ‘You do not know yet of what I am capable.’

‘You are as shameless as you are adorable,’ she said.

‘I am as God made me,’ he answered modestly.

They rode on slowly, up hill and down dale, not talking very much, but chewing the cud as it were of their happiness; they rode for six or seven miles and then saw in the mellow light of the late afternoon a ramshackle building by the roadside. That was evidently the inn of which the priest had spoken.

‘We shall be there very soon. Are you tired, sweetheart?’

‘Tired?’ she answered. ‘Why should I be tired? I’m as fresh as a lark.’

They had ridden a good forty miles and since the day before she had not slept more than an hour. She was sixteen.

They were in the plain now and the country stretched widely on both sides of the road. The harvest had been gathered and the fields were brown and dry. Here and there grew a few gnarled oak trees; here and there a grove of age-old olives. They were less than a mile from the inn when they saw galloping towards them in a great cloud of dust a horseman of such a strange appearance that they were filled with amazement, for he was in full armour. He pulled up sharply as he came to them and posted himself in the middle of the road. Couching his lance he seated himself firmly in his saddle and in a haughty tone thus addressed Diego:

‘Stand and whoever you be tell me who you are, whence you come, whither you go, and who is the fair princess you carry pillion behind you. For I have every reason to believe that you are bearing her to your castle against her will and it is requisite that I should be informed of the matter to punish you for the wrong you have done her and return her to her sorrowing parents.’

For a moment Diego was so astonished that he had no answer to make. The horseman had a long cadaverous face, a short ragged beard and an immense moustache. His armour was rusty and old-fashioned and his helmet looked more like a barber’s basin than a knight’s helmet. His horse was a wretched jade fit for nothing but the knacker’s yard and so thin that you could count his ribs. His head drooped so that it seemed as though at any moment he would tumble down from sheer weakness.

‘Sir,’ said Diego, putting on a bold front to impress Catalina with his valour, ‘we are on our way to the inn we see from here and I see no reason to answer your impertinent questions.’

With this he clapped his spurs to his horse and moved forward, but the knight seized the bridle and stopped him.

‘Mind your manners, proud, discourteous knight, and give me instantly an account of yourself or I defy you to mortal combat.’

Just then a very fat little man, with an immense paunch, came scampering up on a dappled ass and significantly tapping his forehead sought to indicate to the travellers that the horseman so strangely accoutred was out of his senses. But on hearing those threatening words Diego had drawn his sword and seemed ready to defend himself. The little fat man pressed forward.

‘Contain your anger, Señor,’ he said to the knight. ‘These are inoffensive travellers and that young man has every appearance of being able to give a good account of himself should it come to blows.’

‘Peace, varlet,’ cried the horseman. ‘If the adventure is perilous it will give me greater occasion to exercise my strength and prove my courage.’

At this Catalina slipped off the horse and advanced to the stranger.

‘Señor, I will answer your questions,’ she said. ‘This youth is no knight, but an honest citizen of Castle Rodriguez and a tailor by trade. He is not carrying me by force to his castle, for he hasn’t got one, but of my own free will to Seville where we hope to find decent occupation. We have run away from our native city because enemies sought to prevent our marriage, and we were married this morning at a village some miles from here. We are making all the haste we can in case we are pursued, overtaken and obliged to return to our city.’

The knight looked from Catalina to Diego, then handed his lance to the little man on the ass, who grumbled but took it.

‘Put up your sword, young man,’ said the fantastic creature, with a grandiose gesture. ‘You have nothing to fear, though I am well aware from your appearance that fear is an unworthy emotion to which your noble heart is a stranger. It may suit you to assume the humble guise of a tailor, but your bearing and demeanour betray your illustrious lineage. It is fortunate for you that you have crossed my path. I am a Knight-errant and my employment is to visit all parts of the world in quest of adventure, to right the wrong, relieve injured innocence and punish oppression. I take you under my protection, and should your enemies come ten thousand strong and attempt to take you captive I, single-handed, will put them to fight. I will myself escort you to the inn where it so happens that I too am lodging. This my squire will ride with you. He is an ignorant, garrulous fellow, but well-meaning, and he will obey your commands as if they were my own. I will ride a little behind you so that if I see an army approaching I can attack it and you will be able to escape with this beauteous maiden to a place of safety.’

Catalina jumped up behind her husband and with the squire accompanying them they set out once more. He told them that his master was as mad as a hatter, to which conclusion his remarks had already led them, but added that for all that he was a good and worthy man.

‘And when the fit is not on him, poor gentleman, he can talk better sense in an hour than any sane man can talk in a month of Sundays.’

They reached the inn. A group of people were sitting on benches at the door; they gave the two travellers a glance of curiosity, but otherwise took no notice of them. They appeared sunk in a lethargy of gloom. The fat little man tumbled off his ass and called the landlord, but when he came and Diego asked for a room he told him in a surly tone that there wasn’t an unoccupied bed in the place. A troupe of actors had arrived the day before to give a performance at a neighbouring castle where its lord, a grandee of Spain, was celebrating the marriage of his son and heir. The people on the benches, evidently the actors of whom he spoke, stared at the young couple with a somewhat hostile indifference.

‘But you must find us something, mine host,’ said Diego. ‘We have ridden far and can ride no further.’

‘I tell you, I have no room, Señor. They are sleeping in the kitchen, they are sleeping in the stables.’

The knight now rode up.

‘What is this I hear?’ he cried. ‘You refuse to harbour these gentlefolk? Churlish fellow. Under pain of incurring my displeasure I command you to provide them with a decent lodging.’

‘The inn is full,’ the landlord shouted.

‘Then let them have my room.’

‘That they can have if it is your wish, Sir Knight, but where will you sleep?’

‘I shall not sleep,’ he answered grandly. ‘I shall keep guard. This is their wedding-day and the most solemn occasion of a maiden’s life. The apostle has taught that it is better to marry than burn. The end of marriage is not to satisfy the lusts of the flesh, but to effect the procreation of children, and for that purpose the blushing bride is called upon to abandon her natural modesty and in the arms of her lawful husband sacrifice the priceless pearl of her virginity. It is a duty of my calling not only to guard the privacy of the nuptial couch from the intrusion of the enemies who pursue these noble creatures with their malignity but also to prevent the horseplay with which the vulgar are apt on these occasions to exercise their humour.’

This speech covered Catalina with confusion, but whether from shame or modesty is uncertain.

In the Spain of that day innkeepers provided only lodging and the traveller had to bring his food with him. But on this occasion the great lord had sent the actors by his steward a kid and a hunk of pork; and the knight’s squire by methods of his own had acquired two brace of partridges; so that the company could look forward to a more sumptuous repast than usual, for their evening meal ordinarily consisted of no more than bread and garlic with sometimes a piece of cheese. The innkeeper announced that it would be ready in half an hour and the knight with elaborate courtesy asked the newly-married couple to do him the honour of being his guests. He told his squire to remove his belongings and conduct the bride and bridegroom to the chamber where in due course they would solemnize the sacred rites. The bedrooms were up a flight of stairs and the doors opened on to a gallery round the courtyard. When they had repaired as best they could the disorder of their toilet Diego and Catalina went down again to get a breath of the cool evening air. The actors were sitting as they had left them. They seemed a sullen lot, on edge, and when they spoke to one another it was with bitterness. Presently the knight joined them. He had removed his armour and now wore a pair of breeches and a doublet of chamois leather, stained with the rust of his breastplate, leggings and shoes. His trusty sword hung by his side from a belt of wolf’s skin.

The landlord called them in and they sat down to supper. The knight, putting Catalina on one side of him and Diego on the other, took the head of the table.

‘And where, pray, is Master Alonso?’ he asked, looking round. ‘Has he not been told that supper is ready?’

‘He will not come,’ said a middle-aged woman who played duennas, wicked stepmothers and widowed queens and was also the wardrobe-mistress. ‘He says he has no heart to eat.’

‘An empty stomach only makes misfortune doubly hard to bear. Go and fetch him. Tell him that I shall look upon it as a grave discourtesy to my honoured guests if he deprives me of the pleasure of his company. We shall not eat till he comes.’

‘Go and fetch him, Mateo,’ said the wardrobe-mistress.

A skinny little man with a long nose and a big loose mouth got up and went out. The wardrobe-mistress sighed.

‘It is a sad business,’ she said, ‘but as you wisely remark, Sir Knight, going without one’s supper will not help it.’

‘If you will not think me impertinent,’ said Catalina, ‘I should like to ask you what the trouble is.’

They were only too glad to tell her, for it was very much on their minds. The company belonged to Alonso Fuentes, who also wrote many of the plays they acted, and his wife Luisa was his leading woman. Early that morning she had run away with the leading man and taken with her all the cash she could lay hands on. It was a catastrophe. For Luisa Fuentes had been a great attraction and they were well aware that it was she that had brought the money into the box-office. Alonso was in despair. He had not only lost a wife, but an actress and a source of income. It was enough to upset any man. Now their tongues were loosened. The men reviled the perfidy of women and wondered how such a fine creature could throw herself away on the indifferent actor their leading man had been. The women on the other hand asked how any woman could be expected to stay with a bald fat man like Alonso when she had the chance of a handsome young fellow like Juanito Azuria. The conversation was interrupted by the appearance of the abandoned husband. He was small and plump, no longer young, with the rubber face of the actor of many parts. He sat down morosely and a great dish of olla podrida was set on the table.

‘I have come as a compliment to you, Sir Knight,’ he said. ‘This is my last meal on earth, for after supper I have every intention of hanging myself.’

‘I must insist on your waiting till tomorrow,’ answered the knight gravely. ‘This gentleman and his lady whom you see on either side of me were married this morning and I cannot allow their first night to be disturbed by such an unseemly incident as you suggest.’

‘I do not care a fig for this gentleman and his lady. I am going to hang myself.’

The knight sprang to his feet and drew his sword.

‘If you do not swear to me by all the saints that you will not hang yourself tonight I will cut you into a thousand pieces with my sword.’

Fortunately the sturdy little squire was standing behind his master to wait on him.

‘Have no fear, Señor,’ he said. ‘Alonso will not hang himself tonight because he has to give a performance tomorrow, and once an actor always an actor. He won’t disappoint his public. If he will reflect for a moment he will remember that it’s a long lane that has no turning, what can’t be cured must be endured and every cloud has a silver lining.’

‘Stop prattling your pointless proverbs,’ said the knight angrily, but he sheathed his sword and sat down. ‘It is not becoming to make so much of a misadventure that has happened to many a better man than this Alonso. With a little thought I could give both from Holy Writ and from profane history the names of many great men whose wives have made cuckolds of their husbands; but at the moment the only ones that occur to me are King Arthur whose wife Guinevere betrayed him for Sir Lancelot and King Mark whose wife Iseult deceived him with Sir Tristram of Lyonesse.’

‘It is not the injury to my honour that has driven me to desperation, Sir Knight,’ said the actor and playwright, ‘but the loss both of the money and the two most important members of my company. We have to play tomorrow, and the sum that has been promised me would to some extent compensate me financially, but how can I give a performance without actors?’

‘I could very well play the part of Don Ferdinand,’ said the skinny fellow who had gone to fetch Alonso.

‘You?’ cried the actor-manager scornfully. ‘How could you with your horse face and your shrill voice play the part of a gallant, audacious, headstrong and passionate prince? No, that is a part I could play, but who is going to take the part of the lovely Dorotea?’

‘I know the lines,’ said the wardrobe-mistress. ‘It is true that I am not so young as I was . . .’

‘Very true,’ Alonso interrupted, ‘and I beg to remind you that Dorotea is an innocent virgin of unsurpassed beauty and your mature figure suggests that you may at any moment give birth to a litter of pigs.’

‘Is is possible that you are referring to Truth with Zeal even Heaven can Move?’ asked Catalina, who had been following the conversation with attention.

‘It is,’ said Alonso, not without surprise. ‘But how did you know?’

‘It is one of my uncle’s favourite plays. We used to read it together. He often said that Dorotea’s speech when she indignantly rejects the dishonourable advances of Don Ferdinand is equal to anything that the great Lope de Vega has written.’

‘Do you know it?’

‘By heart.’

She began to recite, but then, noticing that the company were watching her with curiosity, was seized with shyness and, faltering, stopped.

‘Go on, go on,’ cried the actor.

She blushed, smiled, and plucking up her courage started again and spoke the long tirade to its end with so much grace, pathos and sincerity that they were all amazed. Several indeed were moved to tears.

‘Saved,’ cried Alonso. ‘You shall play Dorotea with me tomorrow and I will play Don Ferdinand.’

‘How could I?’ she said in a fright. ‘I should die. I have never acted. It is impossible. I should be struck dumb.’

‘Your youth and beauty will make up for any deficiences. I will help you. Listen, fair one, you alone can save us. If you refuse we cannot play and there is no money to pay for our lodging in this inn and for our food. We shall be reduced to begging our bread in the streets.’

Then the knight put in his word.

‘I can understand, gracious lady, that your modesty makes you hesitate to expose yourself on the stage to the gaze of a company of strangers and it would be unbecoming of you to do so without the permission of the lord your husband.’ For the knight had made up his mind that the young couple were of high degree and nothing they said could persuade him to the contrary. ‘But remember that it is the part of a noble nature to succour the distressed and relieve the necessities of the needy.’

The rest of the company joined their entreaties to those of Alonso Fuentes and in the end Catalina agreed, with Diego’s willing consent, to rehearse the play and if the rest thought she acquitted herself with credit to risk a performance; so after supper the table was pushed to one side and the rehearsal begun. She had a good memory and she had recited the scenes in which Dorotea appeared often enough with Domingo to be tolerably sure of her words. At first she was nervous, but the encouragement of the players helped her, and presently, losing herself in the part, she lost her self-consciousness. She profited then by the lessons she had received from her uncle and spoke her lines with point and sincerity. She did remarkably well and Alonso was confident that with another rehearsal next morning she would be competent to appear before an audience. She was flushed and happy and looked so beautiful that he felt certain her inexperience would pass unnoticed.

‘Go to bed, children,’ he said to his company, ‘and sleep in comfort. Our troubles are at an end.’

But now that they were relieved of their anxieties they were much too excited to do this and so, Calling for wine, settled down to make a night of it. The knight, comfortably seated in a chair, had watched the rehearsal with a critical eye. Now, rising somewhat stiffly to his feet, he called the duenna aside.

‘Lead the fair Catalina to the nuptial chamber,’ he said, and since she has no mother to tell her what on this grave occasion it behoves her to know, it is your part to explain to her in terms that will not offend her modesty the ordeal to which as an obedient wife it will be her duty to submit. You must in short prepare her for the mysteries of love which as an innocent virgin she must be unacquainted with.’

The duenna blinked, but promised to do her best.

‘Meanwhile,’ the knight went on, ‘I will explain to the young lord, her husband, that he must restrain his natural impetuosity, for the aversion a virtuous female must feel for the intimacies of sexual congress can only be overcome by patience. The depravity of the times is such that I cannot suppose he has maintained his innocence to this day.’

‘Saving your presence, Sir Knight,’ said the duenna, ‘it is better that the man should not be entirely without experience in the act of love, for in this no less than in the arts and handicrafts practice makes perfect.’

‘That is a matter on which I will not venture an opinion, madam. Suffice it to say that after a decent interval I will myself conduct the bridegroom to the threshold of the nuptial chamber and then, after donning my armour, mount guard on the balcony so that the marriage may be consummated in a style fitting the distinction of the parties concerned.’

He dismissed the duenna and called Diego.

‘You are now entering upon a state,’ he began, ‘in which few conduct themselves in such a way as to attain happiness themselves or bring happiness to their partners in life; and the circumstances of your marriage are of a nature that makes it incumbent upon me to give you the advice which otherwise would have been given you by your noble father.’ The knight then proceeded to speak to the young man on the lines that he had indicated to the duenna and finished as follows: ‘I do not condemn the necessary pleasures of the body, which refresh it in its exhaustion and hinder it from being importunate; but food and drink, and still more, sexual congress are no more than assuagements provided for the body lest the work of the soul be impeded. Yet the love that is sanctioned by marriage has its touch of upward striving, and in so far as it has this leads the souls of the young towards the Good. In the chaste love that has drawn you to this maiden there cannot but be in you a desire for such immortality as lies within mortal reach and, when you clasp her to your heart, through your own kinship with the beautiful, you will sow in beauty and thus sow towards eternity. For the eternal and the beautiful are one.’

Diego listened to this harangue with the politeness natural to him, but with a wandering attention, for he was impatient to be with Catalina. The knight took him by the hand and led him to what he was pleased to call the nuptial chamber; then, summoning his squire, he resumed his martial equipment and spent the night, tramping up and down, occupied with thoughts of the unapproachable object of his own devotion.

CHAPTER 32

Early next morning they rehearsed the play again and then carriages arrived to take them to the Duke’s castle. The knight and Diego mounted their horses and the squire his ass and set forth. But at the last moment Catalina’s heart failed her, and crying that she could never face the ordeal of appearing before an audience, she begged Alonso to let her stay behind; he flew into a passion and telling her it was now too late to withdraw bundled her into a carriage and seated himself beside her. She was in a flood of tears, but with the duenna to help him, he managed presently to calm her and by the time they arrived she was sufficiently composed. The players were honourably received and by the Duke’s instructions suitably entertained, but word had reached him of the knight’s extravagances, and thinking his conversation would divert his guests, he begged him to favour the Duchess and himself with his company at dinner. A stage had been erected in the courtyard and when the gentry had eaten their fill the actors were summoned to give their performance. The distinguished audience were not a little amused by Alonso in the part of a gay seducer, for it was not one that his appearance made plausible; but they were charmed by Catalina’s grace, the music of her voice and the elegance of her delivery, and when the play was over paid her many fine compliments. The knight had given them his own romantic version of the young couple’s elopement and this naturally increased their interest. The Duchess sent for them and all were astounded by their beauty, the modesty of their demeanour and their gallant bearing. The Duchess gave Catalina a gold chain and the Duke, not to be outdone, took a ring off his finger and gave it to Diego. Alonso was richly rewarded and the company, tired but happy, returned to the inn. Shortly afterwards the knight and his squire rode up. He dismounted somewhat stiffly and taking Catalina by the hand added his compliments to those she had already received.

‘You have come in the nick of time, Sir Knight,’ said Alonso, ‘to hear me make a proposition to these young people.’ He turned to Catalina. ‘I invite you to join my troupe.’

‘Me?’ said Catalina astounded.

‘Though you still have everything to learn, you have gifts that it would be a sin to waste. You do not know how to act. You say your lines as you would say them in real life. That is futile. The stage does not deal with truth, but with verisimilitude, and it is only by artifice that the actor can be natural. Your gestures want amplitude and you have yet to acquire authority. The good actor even by his silence dominates his audience. If you will place yourself in my hands I will make you the greatest actress in Spain.’

‘Your suggestion is such a surprise to me that I can hardly believe you mean it. I am a married woman and my husband and I are on our way to Seville where we have the assurance of honest occupation.’

Alonso Fuentes had caught the look she gave Diego and now with a smile turned to him.

‘You have good looks, young fellow, and a fine presence. There is no reason why with experience you should not be able to make yourself useful in suitable parts.’

The applause that had rewarded her performance and the compliments she had received had excited Catalina and she was not a little flattered by this unexpected offer; but she saw that her husband was displeased by he casual way in which Alonso proposed to include him in the arrangement and so hastened to say:

‘He can sing like an angel.’

‘All the better. There are few plays in which there is not a song or two to enliven the proceedings. Well, what do you say? The opportunity I offer you is surely more alluring than the occupation, honest perhaps, but certainly modest, that awaits you in Seville.’

During this time the knight had sat silent, listening, but now he spoke.

‘The proposition that Master Alonso has put before you is one that should not be hastily rejected, for consider: you are pursued by the rage of your outraged parents and they will stop at nothing to snatch you from one another’s arms. But time assuages wrath and the day will come when your respective parents will lament your loss and regret that from ambition or greed they wished you to contract distasteful alliances. You will be restored not only to their love but to the rank and station to which your high birth entitles you. But till this happens you will be wise to remain in concealment, and how better can you be better concealed than in a troupe of actors? Now must you think that you demean yourself by treading the boards. They who write plays and they who act them deserve our love and esteem, for they serve the good of the commonwealth. They set before our eyes a lively representation of human life and show us what we are and what we ought to be. They ridicule the vices and foibles of the times and give praise where praise is due, to honour, virtue and beauty. The playwrights improve our minds by their wit and wisdom and the actors refine our manners by the grace of their demeanour and the dignity of their carriage.’

He went on for some time in this strain and all were amazed that a man so crazy you couldn’t account for his actions should yet express himself with such good sense.

‘And let us not forget,’ he ended, ‘that just such a comedy as we see played on the stage of a theatre is played on the stage of the world. We are all actors in a play. To some it is allotted to play kings or prelates, to others merchants, soldiers or husbandmen, and each should see that he acts the part given to him; but to select it belongs to a greater power.’

‘What do you think, beloved?’ asked Catalina, with her most charming smile. ‘As the knight so truly says, it is not an offer to be lightly rejected.’

She had in point of fact by now made up her mind to accept it, but she well knew that men like to think they decide matters for themselves.

‘You will not only be helping me in my difficult situation,’ said Alonso, ‘but you will be benefiting yourselves, for you will visit with me the most famous cities of Spain.’

Diego’s eyes sparkled. He could not but see that this would be vastly more amusing than to sit for twelve hours a day on a tailor’s bench.

‘I’ve always wanted to see the world,’ he smiled.

‘And so you shall, my sweet,’ said Catalina. ‘Master Alonso, we will gladly join your troupe.’

‘And you shall be a great actress.’

‘Olé, olé!’ cried the other members of the company.

Alonso called for wine and they drank to the health of their new comrades.

CHAPTER 33

Next day, having courteously taken leave of the knight, the strolling players started off for the neighbouring town of Manzanares, where a fair was being held and where consequently they were confident of finding a good audience. Alonso had hired mules for the actors to ride and to carry the chests that contained their clothes and costumes. Catalina and Diego went on the horse Doña Beatriz had given them. Including Master Alonso himself and Diego there were now seven men in the company, and besides the duenna and Catalina there was a boy to play second women’s parts. He was also what is now called a barker, and when they reached a town where they wanted to play, while Alonso went to see the mayor to obtain permission, he walked the streets, beating a drum, and announced to all and sundry that the celebrated troupe of Alonso Fuentes would give a performance of the magnificent, witty and immortal play So and So.

Since at that time there were no theatres in Spain plays were given in courtyards where the windows and balconies of the surrounding houses could serve as boxes for the nobility and gentry. The ceiling was the blue heaven except in the height of summer, when awnings against the sun were drawn from roof to roof. In front of the stage were a few benches and round the courtyard others, arranged stepwise, for the respectable middle class. The common people stood on the bare ground, the men in front and the women, squeezed together in a boarded-off space, behind. Partly for fear of fire and partly for morality’s sake the performance took place in the afternoon. The scenery consisted of a single backcloth, and change of scene was indicated by the players’ words.

The elopement of Alonso’s wife with the leading man had caused him to change his route, and when they had played at Manzanares he set forth with his company for Seville, where he knew he would be able to engage an actor for the parts which his own age and appearance prevented him from playing himself. They went first to Ciudad Real, a rich city, and from there to Valdepeñas; they made the ascent of the Sierra Morena and entered Andalusia by the rocky defile called the Puerto de Despeñaperros. They crossed the Guadalquivir and at last reached Cordova, where they played for a week; then, after following for a while the noble river, they came to Carmona, where they gave one performance, and finally reached Seville. Master Alonso engaged the actor he wanted and they settled down for a month. After that they took to the road again. It was a hard life. The inns they slept in were miserable and the beds so bad and filthy that, tired though they were and exhausted by the heat of summer or chilled to the bone by the cold of winter, they often preferred to sleep on the floor. They were bitten by fleas, stung by mosquitoes, tormented by bugs and vexed by lice. When they were playing they rose at dawn to study their parts. They rehearsed from nine till twelve, dined and went to the theatre; they left it at seven; and then, however weary, if they were wanted by persons of consequence, the mayor, a judge, a nobleman who was giving a party, off they had to go and give another performance.

Alonso Fuentes was a slave-driver and as soon as he discovered that Catalina was skilful with her needle and Diego no mean tailor he set them, whenever they were not otherwise occupied, to making or altering the costumes needed for the repertory, which consisted of eighteen plays. It did not take him long to find out that Diego, notwithstanding his good looks and his self-assurance, would never be much of an actor, so he contented himself with letting him sing the songs with which the plays were interspersed, for his voice was pleasing, and giving him small parts. But on the other hand he took pains to make an actress of Catalina. He knew his business and had a lively sense for theatrical effect; she was an apt pupil and a quick study, so that under his tuition, which was intensive and sometimes brutal, she ceased in time to be a clever amateur and became a competent professional. Alonso was rewarded for his trouble, for she found favour with the public and brought prosperity for the company. He enlarged his troupe and extended his repertory. Among others he engaged a young actress called Rosalia Vazquez, partly to console himself for the loss of his wife and partly to play seconds, for the boy who had been used to play them had by then lost his treble voice and was starting to shave. Moreover Catalina had first one baby and then another, so that it was necessary to have a good enough actress to replace her when childbirth for a period kept her out of the bill.

Thus three happy, strenuous years passed. By then Catalina had learnt all that Alonso Fuentes could teach her, and with two young children to take care of she began to find it irksome to be constantly on the move. Her beauty and her talent had attracted the attention of influential persons and more than one had suggested that she and Diego should form their own company and establish themselves in Madrid. Some in their admiration for her gifts went so far as to offer financial assistance. Now Alonso Fuentes was not only manager, director and actor, but also author, and every year, mostly during Lent when play-acting was prohibited, he turned out two or three plays. It had not escaped Catalina’s notice that in the plays he wrote presumably to show her off to best advantage the parts he wrote Rosalia Vazquez tended to become more and more substantial. In his last the parts had been of almost equal length and only Catalina’s greater talent had enabled her to make it appear the more important. When she expressed her displeasure, which she did not hesitate to do, Alonso shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘when you sleep with a woman you have to keep her in a good humour.’

This, though obviously true, was unsatisfactory. Catalina was no prude, but it seemed to her only just that a respectably married woman should have better parts than one who was no more than a baggage.

‘Things can’t go on like this,’ she told Diego.

And he agreed they couldn’t. The notion of having a company of her own was tempting, but she was well aware of the difficulties she and Diego would have to cope with. Catalina was greatly loved in the company and she was pretty sure that several of the members would be glad to go to Madrid with her. With sufficient funds she could engage other actors there, buy the necessary costumes and acquire a number of plays. But Madrid audiences were well known to be hard to please: she would need the influence of her friends as well as their money. Diego was all for making the venture, but she knew that, dissatisfied with the small parts alotted to him by Alonso, he would, as manager, look upon it as his right to cast himself for whatever roles took his fancy. Though she loved him as passionately as ever she was not convinced that he was competent to play the leading parts he hankered after, and she guessed that she would have to exercise a great deal of tact to persuade him to engage a well-known actor to play them. She hesitated. They talked and talked, and could not arrive at a decision; then, one day, Catalina conceived the bright idea of sending for Domingo Perez and asking for his advice. He had been an actor himself, he was a playwright, and if they finally decided to go into management for themselves they might put on one or two of his plays and he would certainly be able to put them in touch with authors. Diego approved, so she wrote to him. She had already written three or four times, first to tell him that she was married, well and happy, and then to announce the birth of her children; but knowing how bitterly it would grieve her mother, she had thought it better not to say that she and Diego were becoming strolling players. She asked him now, but without giving any particular reason, to visit them at Segovia. They were spending Lent there, partly because it happened to be Alonso’s native city, but chiefly because his company had been engaged to play a religious drama in the Cathedral at Easter and it was not in rehearsal. It was Alonso’s latest play and he had chosen the life of Mary Magdalen as his subject.

CHAPTER 34

Domingo, always glad of a jaunt, no sooner received Catalina’s letter than he hired him a horse, packed food and a couple of shirts in the saddlebags and set out. He was pleased on his arrival at Segovia to find Catalina with her husband and children installed in a decent lodging, and delighted to see that she was even more beautiful than before. She was then nineteen. Success, happiness and maternity had combined to give her self-confidence and a certain dignity, but also a tender voluptuousness that was vastly alluring. Her face had lost its appealing childishness, but had gained perfection of line. Her figure was as slender as ever and she moved with an enchanting grace. She was a woman now, a very young woman certainly, but a woman of character, sure of herself and conscious of her beauty.

‘You look prosperous enough, my dear,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’

‘Oh, we’ll come to that later,’ said Catalina. ‘First tell me how my mother is and how is everyone at Castel Rodriguez and what happened after we ran away and how is Doña Beatriz.’

‘One thing at a time, child,’ he smiled. ‘And remember I have come a long way and I am thirsty.’

‘Run to Rodrigo’s and get a bottle of wine, dear,’ said Catalina, and Domingo smiled when he saw her dive into some recess of her petticoats and taking out a purse give Diego a few coins.

‘I shan’t be a minute,’ said Diego as he went out.

‘I see that you are prudent, sweetheart,’ grinned Domingo.

‘It didn’t take me long to discover that men can’t be trusted with money, and if a man has no money he can’t get into mischief,’ she laughed. ‘But now answer my questions.’

‘Your mother is in good health, she sends you her love, her piety is exemplary and it is doubtless for that reason that the Prioress gives her a pension so that she is no longer obliged to work.’

This he said with a twinkle in his eye and Catalina laughed again. Her laughter was so frank and at the same time so musical that Domingo in his poetic way likened it to the purling of water in a mountain stream.

‘There was quite a commotion in Castel Rodriguez after you disappeared,’ he went on. ‘My poor child, no one had a good word to say for you any more and your wretched mother was in despair. It was not till the nun Doña Ana came and told her that the Prioress proposed to come to her assistance pecuniarily that she was able to console herself for your abandoned behaviour. For ten days people talked of nothing else. The nuns were horrified that after all the kindness Doña Beatriz had shown you, after the great favour she was prepared to confer on you, you should have put such an affront on her. The principal persons of the city went to the convent to offer her proper expressions of sympathy, but she was evidently so upset that she refused to receive them. She did, however, consent to see Don Manuel, but what passed between them is unknown; the lay sister who waits upon her heard their voices raised in anger, but though she did her best she could not hear a word they said, and shortly afterwards Don Manuel left the city. I would have written to tell you all this long ago if you had given me an address.’

‘It was impossible to do that. You see, we were moving from place to place and I never knew where we should be going next till we were starting to go.’

‘Why were you doing that?’

‘Can’t you guess? How often have you told me of the days when you wandered over Spain under the burning sun of summer, in the bitter cold of winter, barefoot, not to save your boots but because you had worn out your only pair, and with but one shirt to your back.’

‘God in heaven, you’re not strolling players?’

‘My poor uncle, I am leading woman in the celebrated company of Alonso Fuentes and Diego sings and dances and is a much better actor than Alonso will allow.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ cried Domingo. ‘I would have brought half a dozen plays with me.’

At this moment Diego returned with the wine and while Domingo drank Catalina told him how it had come about that she and Diego had become actors.

‘And everyone agrees,’ she finished, ‘that I am now the greatest actress in Spain. Is it true, Diego of my soul, or is it not?’

‘I would cut the throat of any man who ventured to deny it.’

‘There can be no doubt that I am wasting my talent in the provinces.’

‘I have been telling the girl that our place is Madrid,’ said Diego. ‘Alonso is jealous of me and will not give me the parts in which I can distinguish myself.’

It will be seen that neither suffered from that false modesty which may well prove a bane to the artist. They proceeded then to tell Domingo what was on their minds. He was a prudent man and when they had finished said that he was not prepared to advise them one way or the other till he had seen them act.

‘Come to rehearsal tomorrow,’ said Catalina. ‘I am playing Mary Magdalen in Alonso’s new play.’

‘Are you pleased with your part?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Not altogether. It’s well enough at the beginning, but it falls off in the last act. I don’t appear in the last three scenes at all. I’ve told Alonso that as the play is about me I should be on at the end, but he says he must follow Holy Writ. The fact is, the poor man has no imagination.’

Diego took Domingo to the tavern to which Alonso Fuentes and other members of his troupe were in the habit of going and introduced him not only as Catalina’s uncle, but also as at one time an actor and now a playwright. Alonso received him with civility and the elderly scrivener quickly gained the good graces of the company by his wit, his good humour and his stories of the hardships in the old days of a strolling player’s life. Alonso consented to his attending a rehearsal and he went next day.

He was amazed by the naturalness of Catalina’s delivery, the eloquence of her gestures and the grace of her movements. Alonso had taught her well. She had an ear for verse and a lovely voice. She had gaiety and pathos. She had sincerity. She had power. It was astonishing that in three years she had learnt so completely the technique of her art. She seemed incapable of uttering a false note. And her native gifts, her acquired skill, the self-control she had learnt by experience, were all wonderfully enhanced by her great beauty.

When the rehearsal was over Domingo kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Dearest one, you are very nearly as good an actress as you think you are.’

She flung her arms round his neck.

‘Oh, uncle, uncle, who would have thought when I was a child and we used to recite those scenes of Lope de Vega’s that the day would come when people would fight to gain admission to see me play? And you have only seen me rehearse. Wait till you have seen me with an audience.’

Diego was playing John, the Beloved Disciple, and the part was small. He was good to look at, but colourless. When there was an opportunity Domingo asked Alonso what he thought of him.

‘He has a good appearance, but he’ll never be an actor. I only let him play to please Lina. If only actors and actresses wouldn’t marry one another! It is that that makes the life of a manager a burden.’

This did not prevent Domingo from advising Catalina and Diego to have no fear, but to leave Alonso and set up for themselves in Madrid. During the twenty-four hours he had been with them he had discovered that Catalina had good sense, and he was confident that she would not jeopardize her own success by letting Diego play parts that he could not do justice to. He felt sure that somehow or other she would arrange matters to their mutual satisfaction.

But it was not only his desire to see his niece and her husband that had led Domingo to undertake the somewhat arduous journey from Castel Rodriguez to Segovia; he hoped too to see his old friend Blasco de Valero. He was curious to know how he fared in his exalted station. So, for the next few days while Catalina and Diego were busy with their rehearsals, he wandered about the city and in one way and another, with his pleasant gift for social intercourse, managed to scrape acquaintance with a good many people. From them he learnt that the mass of the population looked upon their bishop with veneration. They were impressed by his piety and the austerity of his life. News of the miraculous events at Castel Rodriguez had reached them and filled them with wonder and awe. But Domingo learnt also that he had aroused the hostility of his chapter and of the city clergy. He had been shocked by the looseness of their lives and the negligence with which many of them performed their religious duties. With zeal but with little discretion he started upon a passionate campaign of reform. He had no mercy on those who would not mend their ways and as at Valencia was no respecter of persons. The clergy, with very few exceptions, bitterly resented his harsh intolerance and employed every method their subtlety could devise to hamper his activities. Those who dared were openly defiant, the rest contented themselves with passive resistance. The people approved his strictness, justified by his own virtue, and did what was in their power to support him. There had been in consequence unfortunate occurrences and the authorities had been obliged to intervene. He had brought not peace to the city, but a sword.

Domingo had arrived at Segovia at the beginning of Holy Week and he knew that during that period the duties of his office would prevent the Bishop from receiving him, so it was not till the following Tuesday that he presented himself at the episcopal palace. It was an imposing, but severe building with a granite façade. Domingo gave his name to a porter and after waiting some time was led up a flight of stone stairs, through cold, lofty rooms, sparsely furnished, and hung with pictures, dark and gloomy, of religious subjects; but the room into which he was at length shown was no larger than a cell. Its only furniture was a writing-table and two high-backed chairs. On the wall hung the black cross of the Dominicans. The Bishop rose and took Domingo in his arms and warmly embraced him.

‘I thought we should never meet again, brother,’ he said with an affectionate cordiality that surprised Domingo. ‘What has brought you to this city?’

‘I am a restless fellow. I love to wander.’

The Bishop, dressed as ever in the habit of his order, had aged. He was emaciated, his lined face was haggard, and his eyes had lost their fire. But notwithstanding these signs of decrepitude there was in his aspect something luminous, a change in his expression that Domingo was conscious of, but failed to interpret; and he could not tell why, it recalled to his mind the afterglow when the sun has set at last after the long hours of a summer day. The Bishop asked him to sit.

‘How long have you been here, Domingo?’

‘A week.’

‘And you have waited all this time to see me? That was not kind.’

‘I did not wish to intrude on you before, but I have seen you more than once. In the processions of Holy Week and in the Cathedral on Good Friday and again at Easter, and at the play.’

‘I have a horror of these performances they give in the House of God. In other cities of Spain they give them on the feasts of the Church in the plaza, and I do not disapprove them since they edify the people, but Aragon is tenacious of its old customs and notwithstanding my protests the chapter has insisted that they should be held in the Cathedral as has been done from time immemorial. I attended only because it was a duty of my office.’

‘The play was reverent, dear Blasco; there was nothing in it to offend you.’

A frown darkened the Bishop’s brow.

‘When I came here I found a terrible laxity in those whose charge it is to fulfil their function and give a good example to the people. Some of the canons of the Cathedral had not been near the city for years, too many of the secular clergy were living in open immorality, in the convents the rule was not obeyed with proper rigour and the Inquisition had renounced its vigilance. I was determined to put a stop to these abuses, but I was met with hatred, malice and obstruction. I have succeeded in restoring a certain decency, but I wanted them to behave well for the love of God: if they behave less scandalously than they did it is only for fear of me.’

‘I have heard something of this in the city,’ said Domingo. ‘I have heard even that efforts have been made to remove you.’

‘If they only knew how happy I should have been had they succeeded!’

‘But you have this consolation, dear friend; the people love you and reverence you.’

‘Poor creatures, they little know how unworthy I am of their reverence.’

‘They honour you for the asceticism of your life and your charity to the poor. They have heard of the miracle of Castel Rodriguez. They took upon you as a saint, brother, and who am I to blame them?’

‘Do not mock me, Domingo.’

‘Ah, dear friend, I have too much affection for you ever to do that.’

‘It would not be the first time,’ the Bishop said with a smile in which there was something of pathos. ‘During these three years I have thought often of our last meeting and of what you said to me. At the time I paid little attention to it. It seemed to me no more than the paradoxical, cynical talk in which you have always indulged. But since I came here, in the loneliness of this palace, your words have haunted me. I have been tortured by doubt. I have asked myself if it is possible that my brother the baker, modestly doing his duty in his lowly station has served God better than I who with prayer and mortification have given my life to His service. If so, whatever others think, whatever I myself thought for one rapt moment, it was not I that performed the miracle, but Martin.’

The Bishop was silent. He looked at Domingo with searching eyes.

‘Speak,’ he said. ‘Speak and by the love you once bore me tell me the truth.’

‘What is it you want me to tell you?’

‘You were certain then that it was my brother who was chosen to effect the cure of that poor girl. Are you certain of it now?’

‘As certain as I was then.’

‘Then why, why was I granted the sign that dispelled my trembling hesitations? Why did the Blessed Virgin use words that might so easily give rise to a mistaken interpretation?’

His distress was so great that Domingo, as once before, was moved to pity. He wanted to console him, but scrupled to say what was in his mind. He knew Don Blasco’s inflexible integrity, and it was far from improbable that his sense of duty would oblige him to report to the Holy Office things said, even by a friend, that seemed to require examination. The old seminarist had no wish to be a martyr to his opinions.

‘You are a difficult man to speak freely to, my dear,’ he said. ‘I do not want to say anything that may be an offence to you.’

‘Say on, say on,’ cried the Bishop with something like impatience.

‘Do you remember that on the occasion to which you just referred I told you how surprising it seemed to me that among the infinite attributes that men ascribe to God they have never thought of including common sense? But there is another that has even more completely escaped their attention, and yet, if a creature may venture to judge of these things, it is of even greater value. Omniscience would be incomplete without it and compassion repellent. A sense of humour.’

The Bishop gave a slight start, seemed about to speak, but stopped himself.

‘Do I shock you, brother?’ Domingo asked seriously, but with a faint twinkle in his eyes. ‘Laughter is not the least precious of the gifts that God has granted us. It lightens our burdens in this hard world and enables us to bear many of our troubles with fortitude. Why should we deny a sense of humour to God? Is it irreverent to suppose that He laughs lightly within Himself when He speaks in riddles so that men, deceived in their interpretation, may learn a salutary lesson?’

‘You put things strangely, Domingo, and yet I do not know that there is anything in what you say that a good Christian need reject.’

‘You are changed, brother. Is it possible that in your old age you have learned tolerance?’

The Bishop gave Domingo a quick, inquiring glance, as though, surprised by his remark, he wondered what he meant; and then looked down at the bare stone floor. He seemed to be plunged in thought. After a while he raised his eyes and gazed at Domingo as though he wanted to speak, yet could not quite manage it.

‘A very strange thing has happened to me,’ he said at last, ‘and I have dared to tell no one of it. Perhaps providence sent you here today so that I might tell you, for you, my poor Domingo, are the only man in the world that I can call my friend.’

Once more he hesitated. Domingo, watching him intently, waited.

‘As bishop of the diocese I was obliged to attend the play they gave in my Cathedral; someone told me it dealt with the life of St Mary Magdalen; but I was not obliged to listen or to look. I abstracted my mind. I prayed. But my soul was weary and disquieted. So it has been ever since I came to this city. I have suffered from distraction and dissipation of spirit. I have felt myself despoiled of everything, so that I could neither love nor hope. My understanding has been in darkness, my will dry, and I have found no comfort in the things of God. I prayed, as I had never prayed before, that He might see fit to succour me in my deep affliction. I was oblivious of my surroundings. I was alone with my sorrow. Suddenly I was startled by a cry and I remembered where I was. It was a cry, a cry so moving, so pregnant with significance that against my will I was compelled to listen. Then I remembered that they were acting a play. I do not know what had passed before, but, listening then, I understood that it had reached the point where Mary Magdalen and Mary the mother of James, bringing spices, came to the sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathæa had laid the body of Jesus and found the stone rolled away. And they entered in and found not the body of Jesus. And as they stood there perplexed a traveller, a follower of Jesus, came to them and Mary Magdalen told him what she and the other Mary had seen. And then, because he knew nothing of the terrible events that had taken place, she told him of the capture, the trial and the shameful death of the Son of God. The description was so vivid, the words so well chosen, the verse so mellifluous that even if I had not wanted I should have been forced to listen.’

Domingo, holding his breath, leant forward eagerly.

‘Ah, how right was our great emperor Charles when he said that Spanish was the only language in which to address God. The speech rolled on line after line. There was a fiery indignation in the voice of that woman who played the Magdalen when she told of the betrayal of Jesus, and a fierce anger seized the multitude in the Cathedral and they shouted curses on the traitor; her voice was broken with anguish when she told how they had scourged Our Lord, and the people gasped with horror; but when she told of the agony on the cross they beat their breasts and sobbed aloud. The pain in that golden voice, the heartrending pathos in it, were such that the tears ran down my cheeks. There was a tumult in my soul. My spirit quivered as the leaves of a tree quiver with a sudden flurry of wind. I felt something strange was about to happen to me and I was afraid. I raised my downcast eyes and gazed at the speaker of those lovely, cruel words. She was of a beauty I have never seen on earth. It was no woman who stood there, wringing her hands, with streaming eyes, it was no actress, but an angel from heaven. And as I looked, spell-bound, on a sudden a ray of light transfixed the dark night in which I had so long languished; it entered my heart and I was rapt in ecstasy. It was a pain so great that I thought I should die, but at the same time it was a delight so sweet; and I felt myself released from the body and a stranger to the flesh. At that happy moment I tasted of the wonderful peace that passeth all understanding, I drank of the wisdom of God and I knew His secrets. I felt myself filled with all good and emptied of all evil. I cannot describe that bliss. I have no words to tell what I saw and felt and knew. I possessed God and in possessing Him possessed everything.’

The Bishop sank back in his chair and his face shone with the recollection of his great experience.

‘The desires of hope no longer afflict my soul. It is satisfied in its union with God, so far as in this life it is possible, and it has now nothing of this world to hope for and nothing spiritual to desire. I have written a letter in which I have begged His Majesty to allow me to resign my ecclesiastical offices and dignities so that I may retire to a convent of my order and spend the remainder of my life in prayer and contemplation.’

Domingo could contain himself no longer.

‘Blasco, Blasco, the girl who took the part of Mary Magdalen is my niece, Catalina Perez. When she ran away from Castel Rodriguez she joined the troupe of Alonso Fuentes.’

The Bishop stared at him with amazement. He was dumbfounded. Then with a sweetness Domingo had never seen on his face before he smiled.

‘Truly the ways of God are inscrutable; how strange are those He has chosen to lead me to my goal! Through her He wounded me and through her He healed me. Blessed be the mother that bore her, and all glory to God, for when she spoke those heavenly words she was inspired by Him. I shall remember her in my grateful prayers to my dying day.’

At that moment Friar Antonio, still Don Blasco’s secretary, came into the room. He gave Domingo a glance, but gave no indication that he recognized him; he went up to the Bishop and whispered in his ear. The Bishop sighed.

‘Very well, I’ll see him.’ Then to Domingo: ‘I’m afraid I must ask you to leave me, dear friend, but I shall see you again.’

‘I’m afraid not. I leave for Castel Rodriguez tomorrow.’

‘I am sorry.’

Domingo knelt down to kiss the Bishop’s ring, but he raised him to his feet and kissed him on the cheek.

CHAPTER 35

Domingo walked back to his lodging, a skinny, elderly man, with great pouches under his eyes, a reddish nose and not a dozen teeth in his head, an old reprobate in a patched cassock green with age and spotted with wine-stains and the droppings of food; but he walked on air. He would then, as he had once told the Bishop, have changed places neither with emperor nor pope. He talked to himself aloud and waved his arms, so that passersby thought he was drunk: and drunk he was, though not with wine.

‘The magic of art,’ he chuckled gaily. ‘Art also can work its miracles. Et ego in Arcadia natus.’

For it was he, the despised playwright, the dissolute scapegoat, who had written those lines that had so profoundly affected the Bishop. It had come about after this wise:

Catalina had not been dissatisfied with the first two acts of the play Alonso had written for her. He had made her the mistress of Pontius Pilate and in the first act she appeared gorgeously arrayed, proud in her sinful life, extravagant, wilful, luxurious and mercenary. Her conversion took place in the second act, and there was a good scene when, knowing that Jesus sat at meat at a Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster box of ointment, washed His feet and anointed them with the ointment. The last act took place on the third day after the Crucifixion. There was a scene in which Pilate’s wife reproached him for having allowed a blameless man to be put to death, another in which the disciples mourned the death of their master, and still another in which Judas Iscariot went to the Elders of the Temple and flung down the thirty pieces of silver they had given him to betray Jesus; but Mary of Magdala did not appear till she and Mary the mother of James went to the sepulchre and found it empty. The play ended with the two disciples walking to Emmaus, when they were joined by a stranger whom they later discovered to be the risen Christ.

Catalina had not been a leading lady for three years for nothing, and when she discovered that she had so little to do in the last act she was incensed. She reproached Alonso with acrimony.

‘But what can I do?’ he cried. ‘You are on the stage almost all the time during the first two acts. In the third there is no occasion for you to appear except in that one scene.’

‘But this is out of the question. Is the play about me or is it not about me? The audience will want to see me and if they don’t it will simply ruin your play.’

‘But, my dear child, this isn’t a play in which I can give free rein to my imagination. I must stick to the facts.’

‘I don’t deny it, but you are an author. If you know your business you ought to be able to think of something that will bring me in. Now, for instance, there is no reason why I shouldn’t come on in the scene between Pontius Pilate and his wife. You have only to exercise a little ingenuity.’

Alonso began to get angry.

‘But, my poor Lina, you were Pilate’s mistress. Is it likely that you would be in his palace and present when he is having an intimate conversation with his wife?’

‘I don’t see why not. I could have had a scene with Pilate’s wife first and it is on account of what I have said to her that she reproaches Pilate.’

‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you had attempted to approach Pilate’s wife he would have had you whipped.’

‘Not when I threw myself on my knees, and begged her pardon for my past wickedness. I would be so moving that it would be impossible for her not to relent.’

‘No, no, no,’ he shouted.

‘Then why shouldn’t I be with the two disciples when they go to Emmaus? I, being a woman, would know who the stranger was, and he, knowing that I had recognized him, would put his finger to his lips to bid me be silent.’

‘I will tell you why you can’t be with the two disciples when they go to Emmaus,’ Alonso bellowed. ‘Because you weren’t, or it would have said so in the Gospel. And when I want you to write my plays for me I’ll tell you.’

They parted that day with some heat. Catalina was much inclined to refuse to play the part, but she knew that Alonso would then give it to Rosalia, and in the first two acts it was so fat that she might very well make a success in it.

‘If he had been writing the part for Rosalia he would never have dared give her so little to do in the last act,’ she told Diego.

‘There is no doubt about it,’ said he, ‘he is not treating you well. He doesn’t appreciate you.’

‘I have felt that ever since Rosalia joined the company.’

Catalina, full of her grievances, told her troubles to Domingo before he had even seen the play. He was properly sympathetic and asked to read it. The actors had only their parts and Alonso alone had a full manuscript which he kept jealously to himself in case one of them should copy it and sell it to another manager.

‘Alonso is as vain as a peacock,’ said Catalina. ‘Go to him after rehearsal tomorrow and tell him his play is so wonderful you will never have a moment’s peace till you read it. He won’t be able to resist letting you have it.’

This accordingly Domingo did and Alonso, flattered, but taking no risks, gave him the manuscript on his promising to return it in two hours. When Domingo had read it he went for a walk and on his return made a suggestion to Catalina. She threw herself in his arms and kissed him.

‘Uncle of my soul, you are a genius.’

‘But like many another, unrecognized,’ he grinned. ‘Now listen, child, don’t whisper to a living soul, not even to Diego, what I have in mind, and at rehearsal play with all the talent you have. Be as sweet and as friendly to Alonso as though you had never had a difference of opinion, and he will think you are willing to let bygones be bygones. You will rehearse so beautifully that he will be pleased with you.’

They were to have two rehearsals on the Saturday and a final one early on the morning of Easter Day. On the Saturday, after the first rehearsal, when the company were separating for dinner, Catalina detained Alonso. She addressed him in her most cajoling way.

‘You have written a beautiful play, my Alonso. The more I know it, the more astonishing do I find your genius. Even the great Lope de Vega does not excel you. You are a great, a very great poet.’

Alonso beamed.

‘I will admit that I am not entirely dissatisfied with it,’ he said.

‘There is only one little thing that I find amiss.’

Alonso started and frowned, for authors are such that a pennyweight of reservation put in the balance will far, far outweigh a pound of praise. But Catalina, at her most endearing, paid no attention.

‘The longer I rehearse the more convinced I am that you have made a mistake in not letting me appear to more advantage in the third act.’

Alonso gave a gesture of irritation.

‘We have gone into all that before. I have told you a dozen times that there is no place in the act where you can possibly be brought in.’

‘And you were right, you were a thousand times right, but listen to me. I am an actress and I feel it from the bottom of my heart that when I stand at the sepulchre of our risen Lord I should have more to say than you have given me.’

‘And what, pray?’ he asked indignantly.

‘Well, it has occurred to me that it would be wonderfully effective if I narrated the story of Our Lord’s betrayal, trial, crucifixion and death. It would only need a hundred lines.’

‘And who do you suppose will listen to a speech of a hundred lines at that stage of the play?’

‘Everyone if I say them,’ replied Catalina. ‘I shall have the audience beating their breasts, crying out and weeping. The dramatist that you are must see how striking such a scene would be just at that moment.’

‘It’s out of the question,’ he cried impatiently. ‘We play tomorrow. How could I write a hundred lines and rehearse them in that time? How could you learn them?’

Catalina smiled sweetly.

‘Well, it so happens that my uncle and I have talked it over and he was inspired by the beauty of your play to write the lines which he agreed with me the scene demanded. And I have learnt them by heart.’

‘You?’ cried the manager to Domingo.

‘The eloquence of your play excited me,’ said he, ‘and I was as one possessed, so that it was as if you were holding my pen.’

Alonso looked from one to the other. Catalina saw that he was undecided and she took his hand.

‘Won’t you let me say the speech to you, and then if you don’t like it, I promise to say no more about it. Oh, Alonso, do me this favour. I know how much I owe to you, but do not forget that I have never spared myself to please you.’

‘Say this cursed speech then,’ he cried angrily, ‘and let me get to my dinner.’

He sat down and with a scowl on his face prepared to listen. Catalina began. In three years her voice had gained in richness and she had a wonderful command over its modulations. The emotions proper to the narrative chased one another across her mobile face and she expressed apprehension, dismay, fear, indignation, horror, pain, anguish, grief without exaggeration; but with a telling truth. Angry though he was Alonso was too competent a dramatist not to realize very soon that the lines were well written and that as she spoke them, with the eloquence of her gestures, with the touching quality of her voice, an audience would be held. He leant forward and clasped his hands. Presently he listened spell-bound. Then, such was her pathos, so moving her sincerity, he could no longer control himself, he began to sob and great heavy tears coursed down his cheeks. She finished and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He saw that Domingo was crying too.

‘Well?’ said Catalina with a smile of triumph.

With the last line she had stepped out of her part and was as cool as if she had been reciting the alphabet. Alonso shrugged his shoulders. He tried to make his tone gruff and business-like.

‘The lines are tolerable for an amateur. We will rehearse the scene this afternoon and if I am satisfied with it you shall play it tomorrow.’

‘Soul of my heart, I adore you,’ said Catalina.

‘I shall have trouble with Rosalia,’ he muttered gloomily.

The scene was rehearsed and played, with the effect on the Bishop of which the reader has been apprised. But this was not its only effect. Rosalia violently upbraided Alonso for his partiality to Catalina and he was obliged to make a great many promises to pacify her, some of which he knew he would have to keep; this irked him, but for another reason he was none too pleased with what had happened, since many persons, naturally thinking he had written them, singled out Domingo’s hundred lines for special praise and told him that for language and versification they excelled anything else in the play. When Diego very indiscreetly let it be known by whom in fact they had been written Alonso was deeply mortifed. In retaliation he told friends that Catalina was nothing like the actress she thought she was and without him to coach her would prove to have had very little talent. This was no sooner repeated to Catalina than she decided finally to take the step she had been contemplating. As she said to Diego, a woman has her self-respect to think of. She severed her connection with the ungrateful manager and with her husband and her children set out for Madrid.

CHAPTER 36

Don Blasco, his resignation having been accepted, retired to a remote convent of his order with the intention of devoting the last of his years to the contemplation which Aristotle declared was the end of life and which the mystics have thought precious in the eyes of God. He refused to accept favours or privileges which, owing to the exalted positions he had held, were offered him, and insisted on having a cell similar to those occupied by the other friars and being in every way treated as they were. After some years his strength failed, and though he appeared to suffer from no definite disease it was plain to those about him that it would be no long time before he was released from the burden of the flesh. Friar Antonio, who had accompanied him to the convent, and the Prior begged him to relinquish the more severe of his austerities, but he refused; he persisted in observing the rule of the order in its utmost rigour and only consented to abstain from attending matins in the sharp cold of night when the Prior, exercising his authority, owing to Friar Blasco’s increasing frailty forbade him to do so. Gradually he became so weak that he was obliged to spend much of his day in bed, but he seemed to be in no imminent danger of death. His life was like a flickering candle that any breath of wind may extinguish, but, protected from it, still continues wanly to give light. The end was sudden.

One morning Friar Antonio, after he had performed his religious duties, went to his old master’s cell to see how he was. It was winter and snow was on the ground. The cell was bitterly cold. He was surprised to find him flushed, with bright eyes, and he rejoiced because he looked more like himself than for many weeks. The hope arose in his heart that the sick man had taken a turn for the better and might even then be restored to health. He uttered a short mental prayer of thanksgiving.

‘You have a good colour this morning, Señor,’ he said, for Friar Blasco had long since desired him never again to address him, as though he were still a bishop. ‘I haven’t seen you look so well for days.’

‘I am very well. I have just seen the Greek Demetrios.’

Friar Antonio repressed a start, for of course he knew that Demetrios had years before, as was only fitting, perished at the stake.

‘In a dream, Señor?’

‘No, no. He came through that door and stood by the side of my bed and spoke to me. He was exactly as he had always been, in that same threadbare robe he wore, and with the same benignity in his expression. I recognized him at once.’

‘It was a devil, my lord,’ cried Friar Antonio, forgetting the injunction his master had laid upon him. ‘You drove him from you?’

Friar Blasco smiled.

‘That would have been discourteous, my son. I do not think it was a devil. It was Demetrios himself.’

‘But he is in hell suffering the just punishment of his damnable heresy.’

‘That is what I thought, but it is not so.’

Friar Antonio listened with increasing dismay. It was likely enough that Don Blasco had had an infernal vision. Pedro of Alcantara and Mother Teresa of Jesus had often had encounters with devils and Mother Teresa kept Holy Water by her for the express purpose of driving them away by throwing it at them. But his old master’s attitude was so horrifying that he could only hope he was not in his right mind.

‘I asked him how he fared and he said well. When I told him what cruel pain I had suffered because he was in hell he laughed lightly and told me that before ever the flames had consumed his body his soul flew to the meadow at the parting of the ways and thence, because he had lived in holiness and truth, Rhadamanthus sent him to the Islands of the Blest. And there he found Socrates, surrounded as always by young men of a comely aspect, asking and answering questions; and he saw Plato and Aristotle walking together in amicable converse as though there were no longer any difference of opinion between them; but Æschylus and Sophocles were gently chiding Euripides for having ruined the drama by his innovations. And many more, too numerous to mention.’

Friar Antonio listened with consternation. It was evident that his old and revered friend was delirious. That was the meaning of those flushed cheeks and shining eyes. He did not know what he was saying, but the poor honest creature was thankful that there was no one but himself to hear. He trembled when he considered what the other friars would think if they heard him whom they regarded as saint utter words that were almost blasphemous. He racked his brains for something to say, but in his agitation could think of nothing.

‘And when he had talked for some time in the friendly way in which we used to talk long ago in Valencia the cock crew and he said that he must leave me.’

Friar Antonio thought it better to humour the invalid.

‘And did he say why he had come to see you?’ he faltered.

‘I asked him. He said he had come to bid me farewell since after this we should never meet again. “For tomorrow,” he said, “when it is no longer night and not yet day, when you can just see the shape of your hand, your soul will be released from your body.”’

‘That proves that it was an evil spirit that visited you, my lord,’ cried Friar Antonio. ‘The doctor says that you have no mortal illness and this morning you are better than you have been for many days. Let me give you the medicine he has sent and the barber shall bleed you.’

‘I will take no more medicine and I will not be bled. Why are you so eager to detain me when my soul yearns to escape from the prison in which it has dwelt for so long? Go, tell the dear Prior that I wish to make my confession and receive the Blessed Sacrament. For tomorrow, I tell you, when I can just see the shape of my hand I shall depart this life.’

‘It was a dream, Señor,’ cried the poor friar distraught. ‘I beseech you to believe it was a dream.’

Don Blasco made a sound which in anyone else you would have called a titter.

‘Don’t talk nonsense, son,’ he said. ‘It was no more a dream than it is a dream that I am talking to you now. It was no more a dream than that this life, with its sin and sorrow, its anguished questions and mysterious secrets, is a dream, a dream from which we shall awake to life eternal which alone is real. Now go and do what I tell you.’

Friar Antonio, with a sigh, turned and went. Don Blasco made his confession and received the Blessed Sacrament. After the last rites of the Church had been celebrated he bade farewell to the friars with whom he had lived for several years and gave them his blessing. By this time the day was far advanced. He desired then to be left alone, but Friar Antonio besought him so earnestly to be allowed to stay with him that with a gentle smile he consented on the condition that he should remain silent. Don Blasco lay on his back on the hard pallet with its thin mattress which the rule of the order required, covered, notwithstanding the piercing cold, by no more than one light blanket. Now and then he dozed. Friar Antonio was deeply distressed. The certainty that possessed Don Blasco had shaken him and he was by then more than half assured that death would come as his saintly master had said. The hours passed. The cell was dimly lit by a single taper and every now and then Friar Antonio snuffed it. The bell rang for matins. He was startled to hear Don Blasco break the long silence.

‘Go, my son. You may not neglect your religious duties on my account.’

‘I cannot leave you now, my lord,’ the friar answered.

‘Go. I shall still be here when you come back.’

The long habit of obedience was effectual and he did as he was told. When he returned Don Blasco had fallen asleep and for a moment Friar Antonio thought that he was dead. But he was breathing peacefully and a faint hope arose in the friar’s breast that he might thus be strengthened and perhaps even recover. He knelt down by the bed and prayed. The taper spluttered and went out. It was black night. The hours passed. At last Don Blasco made a slight movement. Friar Antonio in the heavy darkness could not see, but he had the intuition that his dear friend was feeling for the crucifix which hung by a cord round his neck. He placed it in the old man’s hands, but when he wanted to withdraw his own he felt it lightly held. A sob broke from his throat. In all those years this was the first time that Don Blasco had given him a sign of affection. He tried to look into the eyes that once had shone with so intense a light, and though he could not see, he knew that they were open. He looked down at the hand that gently clasped his over the crucifix and as he looked he was aware that the blackness of night was not so impenetrable; he looked, and was on a sudden terrifyingly aware of the shape of an emaciated hand. A faint sigh escaped Don Blasco’s lips and something, he did not know what, told the friar that his beloved master was dead. He burst into passionate weeping.

Don Manuel had by this time been for some years living in Madrid. Doña Beatriz had refused to go on with the plan she had been the first to propose that he should marry her niece, the Marquesa de Caranera; and since it had not been found possible to find her a suitable husband this widowed lady entered religion and was now sub-prioress of the Carmelite convent at Castel Rodriguez. Don Manuel felt that Doña Beatriz had treated him very badly, for the plot they had hatched between them had miscarried through no fault of his, but he was not one to cry over spilt milk; he went to Madrid and when he allowed his matrimonial designs and the extent of his fortune to be known it was not long before he was able to make a very satisfactory match. He attached himself to the Duke of Lerma, the favourite of King Philip III, and by the exercise of subservience, flattery, duplicity, unscrupulousness and venality finally succeeded in becoming highly respected. But his ambition was great. Don Blasco left behind him a saintly reputation, and Don Manuel was shrewd enough to see that it would increase his consequence if his brother were beatified, and the repute of his family (for heaven had blessed his union with two fine sons) if he were eventually canonized. He set about collecting the necessary evidence. No one could deny that the one-time Bishop of Segovia had been a man of exemplary piety; there were many witnesses who were prepared to declare that fragments of his habit worn round the neck had prevented them from catching the pox (great and small), and the various miraculous happenings at Castel Rodriguez were well authenticated; but the examining body at Rome demanded proof of two major miracles performed by the candidate’s remains after death and this could in no manner be provided. The lawyers Don Manuel had engaged were honest men, for though a rogue himself he was too astute to employ rogues, and they told him that though it might be possible to get his brother beatified the chance of having his name included in the roll of saints was small. He flew into a passion when they told him this and accused them of incompetence, but on consideration came to the conclusion that they were in all probability right. He had already spent a good deal on the preliminary inquiry and saw no object in throwing good money after bad. After thinking it over in cold blood therefore, he decided that the beatification of his brother would not be worth the expense, and so contented himself with having the Bishop’s remains transferred to the Collegiate Church at Castel Rodriguez, where he built a sumptuous monument, if not to perpetuate his memory of his father’s eldest son, at least to manifest his own munificence.

In passing it may possibly be of interest to mention that Martin de Valero, the third of Don Juan’s sons, sank back into the obscurity from which the exciting visit of his two distinguished brothers had momentarily raised him. He continued to bake bread, and that is all that can said of him. It never even occurred to him, as indeed it never occurred to his fellow citizens, that on one occasion the Blessed Virgin had vouchsafed him the power to work a miracle.

Doña Beatriz lived to a great age in full possession of her faculties and might have lived longer but for an untoward accident. On hearing of the beatification of her old enemy Mother Teresa of Jesus she had taken to her bed for three days, but when in 1622 she received news of her canonization she was seized with such rage that she had a stroke. She recovered consciousness, but on one side was completely paralysed, and it was evident that her end was near. Fear was an emotion unknown to her and she remained calm and collected. She sent for her favourite friar to hear her confession, after which she gathered her nuns around her and gave them suitable counsel for their future conduct. A few hours later she asked for the Blessed Sacrament. The priest was again sent for. She asked pardon for her sins and begged the weeping nuns to pray for her. For some time she lay in silence. Suddenly in a loud voice she said:

‘A woman of very humble origins.’

The nuns who heard her thought she referred to herself; and knowing that there flowed in her veins the royal blood of Castile and that her mother was of the illustrious house of Braganza, were deeply moved by this mark of humility. But her niece, the sub-prioress, knew better. She knew that the words referred to the rebellious nun who was become Saint Teresa of Avila. They were the last uttered by Doña Beatriz Henriquez y Braganza, in religion Beatriz de Santo Domingo. The Holy Oils were administered and shortly afterwards she died.

CHAPTER 37

When Catalina arrived in Madrid she still had the gold Doña Beatriz had given her and during the three years on the road, being a thrifty young woman, she had saved money, so that, notwithstanding Diego’s somewhat extravagant tastes, she could look forward to the immediate future without anxiety. They called upon the patrons who had promised their influence and money to help them to get started, and finding them prepared to fulfil their promises were able to form a company. They were successful even beyond their hopes and Catalina became the rage of the town. Many fine gentlemen sought to obtain her favours, but though she accepted their presents with gratitude they received in return no more than a smile of her beautiful eyes and a pretty speech. She became then as greatly admired for her virtue as for her beauty and genius. She sent for Domingo and he came with a dozen plays in his wallet. She produced two of them. They were hissed off the stage, and, as was the way then, the audience showed its displeasure by shrill whistles, cat-calls and scurrilous abuse. Domingo, angry and humiliated, went home and shortly afterwards died, but whether of drink or disappointment has never been definitely settled. Some years later Catalina, by then acknowledged to be the greatest actress in Spain, sure of her hold on the public, determined, out of piety to his memory, to put on yet another of Domingo’s plays; but, so that it should not suffer from the ill success of the first two, anonymously. It pleased; and indeed was so good that it was ascribed to the great Lope de Vega, and though he denied its authorship no one believed him, and in fact it has been printed among his works to this day; so poor Domingo was robbed even of that will-o’-the-wisp which has consoled many an author for the neglect of his contemporaries, posthumous fame.

Diego, notwithstanding his comely presence and his assurance, never succeeded in being anything but an indifferent actor. Fortunately, however, he proved himself a good business man and an efficient manager, so that with the years they became rich. They had long before agreed that it would be indiscreet to speak of the supernatural occurrences of which Catalina had been the occasion, and so, neither when they were with the strolling players, nor later, did anyone discover that she was in any way connected with events that for a time had been much talked about. Though, as she suspected, no more miracles took place to disturb the course of their married life, Diego was never, as he thought right and proper, master in his own house; but since Catalina was clever enough to let him think he was, he remained satisfied and happy. He was somewhat unfaithful to her, but, knowing that this is what you must expect of men, and so long as his amours were transitory and did not cost too much money, she accepted his infidelities with composure. Indeed it was a very happy marriage. She had six children by him, and being an actress with a conscience, rather than disappoint her public, would keep on playing persecuted virgins and austerely chaste princesses to the last possible moment of her successive pregnancies. She continued to play such parts to an advanced age, and a Dutch traveller who went to Spain in the latter part of the reign of Philip IV has left it on record that though she had grown corpulent and was several times a grandmother, such was her grace, the melody of her lovely voice and the magic of her personality, that before she had been on the stage five minutes you forgot her age and figure and accepted her without question as the passionate girl of sixteen she was representing.

So, with Catalina as it began, ends this strange, almost incredible, but edifying narrative.

25th January, 1947

The Short Stories

Maugham attended The King’s School, Canterbury, where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. Maugham developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life, although it was sporadic, being subject to his moods and circumstances. At sixteen he refused to continue at The King’s School. His uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORIES

Maugham wrote 122 short stories in his long career, and of these, 121 of the stories appeared in magazines before being published in collections. It was a genre he was very comfortable with, as he claimed it enabled him to distil his ideas and experiences into a purer form, for greater effect. The very first piece of writing that Maugham submitted to a publisher was a short story. It was rejected and he was told to try a longer piece; yet the short story was a genre that Maugham returned to repeatedly, and with success. After his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was published, he frequently submitted short stories to magazines. They were eventually organised into collections:

- Orientations, published 1899 by Fisher Unwin

- The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, published 1921 by Doran

- The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories, published 1926 by Heinemann

- Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, published 1931 by Doran

- The Book Bag, published in 1932 by Long and Smith

- Ah King, published in 1933 by Heinemann

- Judgement Seat, published in 1934 by Centaur Press

- Cosmopolitans, published in 1936 by Doubleday, Doran & Co

- The Mixture as Before, published in 1940 by Heinemann

- Creatures of Circumstance, published in 1947 by Heinemann

Maugham’s short stories are held in wide regard. As usual, he made blatant use of experiences he encountered and stories he was told on his travels — sometimes in confidence — and the tales and individuals appeared with the thinnest of disguises in his work. He was unrepentant — the fact that some people would not receive him after publication was of no consequence to him.

Maugham’s first collection, Orientations, was published early in his career, and expert reader Edward Garnett was not impressed. The only story he saw merit in was Daisy, in which a carpenter’s daughter from Maugham’s favourite fictional place, Blackstable, is rejected by her family for having an affair with a married man. Daisy has to make her own way in life, and some time later, her family are aghast to find that their errant daughter is starring in the title role of Dick Whittington in a nearby town.  Some time later, Daisy is able to turn the tables on her family when everyone’s fortunes are reversed. Despite Garnett’s reservations, the collection was critically well received.

Maugham’s biographer, Selina Hastings, states that the next collection, The Trembling of a Leaf, “marked the triumphant return to the genre of which he was to become a master.” There are six stories in this collection, and they all appeared first in magazines before being collated in this volume. They are set in the South Seas, and based on the experiences Maugham had in the region whilst travelling with his lover, Gerald Haxton. By far the most successful story here is Rain, a story of a clash of moralities that eventually leads to tragedy, played out against the backdrop of incessant tropical rainfall. It was so successful that it earned Maugham over one million dollars in royalties due to repeated reprints, and the key character of Sadie Thompson has been played on screen by Gloria Swanson (1928), Joan Crawford (1932) and Rita Hayworth (1953), whilst Marilyn Monroe would have played the part in an adaptation for television had she not died.

The Casuarina Tree and Ah King are both collections inspired by Maugham’s travels in the Far East, in particular Malaya, accompanied by Gerald Haxton. They are both examples of fine writing, with strong themes such as inter-racial relationships, adultery, snobbery and general frictions between people living in an “alien” environment. One story, The Letter, about a woman’s murder trial in which she is accused of killing a colonial man, was famously made into a film in 1940, starring Bette Davis as the deceptively cool Leslie Crosby. It had also been adapted for the stage by Maugham in 1927, and there had been an earlier film adaptation in 1929. The plot for this story was, as one would expect from Maugham, drawn from life – the trial of Ethel Proudlock in Kuala Lumpur in 1911. Another fine story in this collection, The Outstation, focuses on the tensions between two men thrown together in a remote region.

In Ah King, Maugham uses first person narration in The Book Bag, relating the story of an incestuous affair; whilst Maugham almost dips into comedy in The Vessel of Wrath.

The Mixture as Before took its title from the often used phrase used by doctors at the time for repeat prescriptions. It includes some excellent fiction, but despite his powers as a short story writer, Maugham announced in the preface that he would not write any more. In Three Fat Women of Antibes, three women compete to lose weight, but fail; other stories include gigolos, murderers, adulterers and affluent settings such as Monte Carlo.

In Creatures of Circumstance possibly the most powerful story is The Unconquered, a dark tale of abuse and its consequences, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War in France. This was adapted for television in 1970, starring  Michael Pennington and Caroline Mortimer.

In 1948, four of Maugham’s stories were adapted for the cinema and screened in one film, Quartet: The Facts of Life, The Alien Corn, The Kite and The Colonel’s Lady. Maugham himself was included, introducing the stories. It was a great success, and was followed by two more films with the same format, Trio and Encore.

There are hints of Maugham’s sexuality (variously described as bisexual or homosexual) and his interest in sexuality in the stories from time to time – in Three Fat Women of Antibes (1933, interestingly, the same year as The Narrow Corner was published, which had homosexual themes, according to some commentators), the character Frances Hickman is a very masculine woman, who likes to be addressed as Frank, smoking a long cigar and wearing clothes “as like a man as she could”, the implication being that she may be lesbian.

The first edition of the highly successful collection ‘The Trembling of a Leaf’

The first edition of ‘Ashenden: Or the British Agent’, a 1928 collection of loosely linked spy stories

THE SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

CONTENTS

THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN

A BAD EXAMPLE

DE AMICITIA

FAITH

THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS

DAISY

CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE

LADY HABART

PRO PATRIA

A POINT OF LAW

AN IRISH GENTLEMAN

FLIRTATION

THE FORTUNATE PAINTER

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)

GOOD MANNERS

COUSIN AMY

THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)

THE PACIFIC

ENVOI

RAIN

THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD

HONOLULU

THE LUNCHEON

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

HOME

THE POOL

MACKINTOSH

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF ANTIBES

THE FACTS OF LIFE

GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE

THE HAPPY COUPLE

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

THE LION’S SKIN

THE UNCONQUERED

THE ESCAPE

THE JUDGMENT SEAT

MR KNOW-ALL

THE HAPPY MAN

THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY

THE POINT OF HONOUR

THE POET

THE MOTHER

A MAN FROM GLASGOW

BEFORE THE PARTY

THE VESSEL OF WRATH

LOUISE

THE PROMISE

A STRING OF BEADS

THE YELLOW STREAK

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

THE ALIEN CORN

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

VIRTUE

THE MAN WITH THE SCAR

THE CLOSED SHOP

THE BUM

THE DREAM

THE TREASURE

THE COLONEL’S LADY

MISS KING

THE HAIRLESS MEXICAN

GIULIA LAZZARI

THE TRAITOR

HIS EXCELLENCY

MR HARRINGTON’S WASHING

LORD MOUNTDRAGO

SANATORIUM

THE SOCIAL SENSE

THE VERGER

IN A STRANGE LAND

THE TAIPAN

THE CONSUL

A FRIEND IN NEED

THE ROUND DOZEN

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

JANE

FOOTPRINTS IN THE JUNGLE

THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY

THE BOOK-BAG

FRENCH JOE

GERMAN HARRY

THE FOUR DUTCHMEN

THE BACK OF BEYOND

P. & O.

EPISODE

THE KITE

A WOMAN OF FIFTY

MAYHEW

THE LOTUS EATER

SALVATORE

THE WASH-TUB

A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE

AN OFFICIAL POSITION

WINTER CRUISE

MABEL

MASTERSON

PRINCESS SEPTEMBER

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

MIRAGE

THE LETTER

THE OUTSTATION

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

RAW MATERIAL

STRAIGHT FLUSH

THE END OF THE FLIGHT

A CASUAL AFFAIR

RED

NEIL MACADAM

THE SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

CONTENTS

A BAD EXAMPLE

A CASUAL AFFAIR

A FRIEND IN NEED

A MAN FROM GLASGOW

A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)

A POINT OF LAW

A STRING OF BEADS

A WOMAN OF FIFTY

AN IRISH GENTLEMAN

AN OFFICIAL POSITION

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

BEFORE THE PARTY

COUSIN AMY

CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE

DAISY

DE AMICITIA

ENVOI

EPISODE

FAITH

FLIRTATION

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

FOOTPRINTS IN THE JUNGLE

FRENCH JOE

GERMAN HARRY

GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE

GIULIA LAZZARI

GOOD MANNERS

HIS EXCELLENCY

HOME

HONOLULU

IN A STRANGE LAND

JANE

LADY HABART

LORD MOUNTDRAGO

LOUISE

MABEL

MACKINTOSH

MASTERSON

MAYHEW

MIRAGE

MISS KING

MR HARRINGTON’S WASHING

MR KNOW-ALL

NEIL MACADAM

P. & O.

PRINCESS SEPTEMBER

PRO PATRIA

RAIN

RAW MATERIAL

RED

SALVATORE

SANATORIUM

STRAIGHT FLUSH

THE ALIEN CORN

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

THE BACK OF BEYOND

THE BOOK-BAG

THE BUM

THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS

THE CLOSED SHOP

THE COLONEL’S LADY

THE CONSUL

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY

THE DREAM

THE END OF THE FLIGHT

THE ESCAPE

THE FACTS OF LIFE

THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

THE FORTUNATE PAINTER

THE FOUR DUTCHMEN

THE HAIRLESS MEXICAN

THE HAPPY COUPLE

THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)

THE HAPPY MAN

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

THE JUDGMENT SEAT

THE KITE

THE LETTER

THE LION’S SKIN

THE LOTUS EATER

THE LUNCHEON

THE MAN WITH THE SCAR

THE MOTHER

THE OUTSTATION

THE PACIFIC

THE POET

THE POINT OF HONOUR

THE POOL

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

THE PROMISE

THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN

THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY

THE ROUND DOZEN

THE SOCIAL SENSE

THE TAIPAN

THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF ANTIBES

THE TRAITOR

THE TREASURE

THE UNCONQUERED

THE VERGER

THE VESSEL OF WRATH

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

THE WASH-TUB

THE YELLOW STREAK

VIRTUE

WINTER CRUISE

THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN

I

Xiormonez is the most inaccessible place in Spain. Only one train arrives there in the course of the day, and that arrives at two o’clock in the morning; only one train leaves it, and that starts an hour before sunrise. No one has ever been able to discover what happens to the railway officials during the intermediate one-and-twenty hours. A German painter I met there, who had come by the only train, and had been endeavouring for a fortnight to get up in time to go away, told me that he had frequently gone to the station in order to clear up the mystery, but had never been able to do so; yet, from his inquiries, he was inclined to suspect — that was as far as he would commit himself, being a cautious man — that they spent the time in eating garlic and smoking execrable cigarettes. The guide-books tell you that Xiormonez possesses the eyebrows of Joseph of Arimathea, a cathedral of the greatest quaintness, and battlements untouched since their erection in the fourteenth century. And they strongly advise you to visit it, but recommend you before doing so to add Keating’s insect powder to your other toilet necessaries.

I was travelling to Madrid in an express train which had been rushing along at the pace of sixteen miles an hour, when suddenly it stopped. I leant out of the window, asking where we were.

‘Xiormonez!’ answered the guard.

‘I thought we did not stop at Xiormonez.’

‘We do not stop at Xiormonez,’ he replied impassively.

‘But we are stopping now!’

‘That may be; but we are going on again.’

I had already learnt that it was folly to argue with a Spanish guard, and, drawing back my head, I sat down. But, looking at my watch, I saw that it was only ten. I should never again have a chance of inspecting the eyebrows of Joseph of Arimathea unless I chartered a special train, so, seizing the opportunity and my bag, I jumped out.

The only porter told me that everyone in Xiormonez was asleep at that hour, and recommended me to spend the night in the waiting-room, but I bribed him heavily; I offered him two pesetas, which is nearly fifteenpence, and, leaving the train to its own devices, he shouldered my bag and started off.

Along a stony road we walked into the dark night, the wind blowing cold and bitter, and the clouds chasing one another across the sky. In front, I could see nothing but the porter hurrying along, bent down under the weight of my bag, and the wind blew icily. I buttoned up my coat. And then I regretted the warmth of the carriage, the comfort of my corner and my rug; I wished I had peacefully continued my journey to Madrid — I was on the verge of turning back as I heard the whistling of the train. I hesitated, but the porter hurried on, and fearing to lose him in the night, I sprang forwards. Then the puffing of the engine, and on the smoke the bright reflection of the furnace, and the train steamed away; like Abd-er-Rahman, I felt that I had flung my scabbard into the flames.

Still the porter hurried on, bent down under the weight of my bag, and I saw no light in front of me to announce the approach to a town. On each side, bordering the road, were trees, and beyond them darkness. And great black clouds hastened after one another across the heavens. Then, as we walked along, we came to a rough stone cross, and lying on the steps before it was a woman with uplifted hands. And the wind blew bitter and keen, freezing the marrow of one’s bones. What prayers had she to offer that she must kneel there alone in the night? We passed another cross standing up with its outstretched arms like a soul in pain. At last a heavier night rose before me, and presently I saw a great stone arch. Passing beneath it, I found myself immediately in the town.

The street was tortuous and narrow, paved with rough cobbles; and it rose steeply, so that the porter bent lower beneath his burden, panting. With the bag on his shoulders he looked like some hunchbacked gnome, a creature of nightmare. On either side rose tall houses, lying crooked and irregular, leaning towards one another at the top, so that one could not see the clouds, and their windows were great, black apertures like giant mouths. There was not a light, not a soul, not a sound — except that of my own feet and the heavy panting of the porter. We wound through the streets, round corners, through low arches, a long way up the steep cobbles, and suddenly down broken steps. They hurt my feet, and I stumbled and almost fell, but the hunchback walked along nimbly, hurrying ever. Then we came into an open space, and the wind caught us again, and blew through our clothes, so that I shrank up, shivering. And never a soul did we see as we walked on; it might have been a city of the dead. Then past a tall church: I saw a carved porch, and from the side grim devils grinning down upon me; the porter dived through an arch, and I groped my way along a narrow passage. At length he stopped, and with a sigh threw down the bag. He beat with his fists against an iron door, making the metal ring. A window above was thrown open, and a voice cried out. The porter answered; there was a clattering down the stairs, an unlocking, and the door was timidly held open, so that I saw a woman, with the light of her candle throwing a strange yellow glare on her face.

And so I arrived at the hotel of Xiormonez.

II

My night was troubled by the ghostly crying of the watchman: ‘Protect us, Mary, Queen of Heaven; protect us, Mary!’ Every hour it rang out stridently as soon as the heavy bells of the cathedral had ceased their clanging, and I thought of the woman kneeling at the cross, and wondered if her soul had found peace.

In the morning I threw open the windows and the sun came dancing in, flooding the room with gold. In front of me the great wall of the cathedral stood grim and grey, and the gargoyles looked savagely across the square.... The cathedral is admirable; when you enter you find yourself at once in darkness, and the air is heavy with incense; but, as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, you see the black forms of penitents kneeling by pillars, looking towards an altar, and by the light of the painted windows a reredos, with the gaunt saints of an early painter, and aureoles shining dimly.

But the gem of the Cathedral of Xiormonez is the Chapel of the Duke de Losas, containing, as it does, the alabaster monument of Don Sebastian Emanuel de Mantona, Duque de Losas, and of the very illustrious Señora Doña Sodina de Berruguete, his wife. Like everything else in Spain, the chapel is kept locked up, and the guide-book tells you to apply to the porter at the palace of the present duke. I sent a little boy to fetch that worthy, who presently came back, announcing that the porter and his wife had gone into the country for the day, but that the duke was coming in person.

And immediately I saw walking towards me a little, dark man, wrapped up in a big capa, with the red and blue velvet of the lining flung gaudily over his shoulder. He bowed courteously as he approached, and I perceived that on the crown his hair was somewhat more than thin. I hesitated a little, rather awkwardly, for the guide-book said that the porter exacted a fee of one peseta for opening the chapel — one could scarcely offer sevenpence-halfpenny to a duke. But he quickly put an end to all doubt, for, as he unlocked the door, he turned to me and said, —

‘The fee is one franc.’

As I gave it him he put it in his pocket and gravely handed me a little printed receipt. Baedeker had obligingly informed me that the Duchy of Losas was shorn of its splendour, but I had not understood that the present representative added to his income by exhibiting the bones of his ancestors at a franc a head....

We entered, and the duke pointed out the groining of the roof and the tracery of the windows.

‘This chapel contains some of the finest Gothic in Spain,’ he said.

When he considered that I had sufficiently admired the architecture, he turned to the pictures, and, with the fluency of a professional guide, gave me their subjects and the names of the artists.

‘Now we come to the tombs of Don Sebastian, the first Duke of Losas, and his spouse, Doña Sodina — not, however, the first duchess.’

The monument stood in the middle of the chapel, covered with a great pall of red velvet, so that no economical tourist should see it through the bars of the gate and thus save his peseta. The duke removed the covering and watched me silently, a slight smile trembling below his little, black moustache.

The duke and his wife, who was not his duchess, lay side by side on a bed of carved alabaster; at the corners were four twisted pillars, covered with little leaves and flowers, and between them bas-reliefs representing Love, and Youth, and Strength, and Pleasure, as if, even in the midst of death, death must be forgotten. Don Sebastian was in full armour. His helmet was admirably carved with a representation of the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapithæ; on the right arm-piece were portrayed the adventures of Venus and Mars, on the left the emotions of Vulcan; but on the breast-plate was an elaborate Crucifixion, with soldiers and women and apostles. The visor was raised, and showed a stern, heavy face, with prominent cheek bones, sensual lips and a massive chin.

‘It is very fine,’ I remarked, thinking the duke expected some remark.

‘People have thought so for three hundred years,’ he replied gravely.

He pointed out to me the hands of Don Sebastian.

‘The guide-books have said that they are the finest hands in Spain. Tourists especially admire the tendons and veins, which, as you perceive, stand out as in no human hand would be possible. They say it is the summit of art.’

And he took me to the other side of the monument, that I might look at Doña Sodina.

‘They say she was the most beautiful woman of her day,’ he said, ‘but in that case the Castilian lady is the only thing in Spain which has not degenerated.’

She was, indeed, not beautiful: her face was fat and broad, like her husband’s; a short, ungraceful nose, and a little, nobbly chin; a thick neck, set dumpily on her marble shoulders. One could not but hope that the artist had done her an injustice.

The Duke of Losas made me observe the dog which was lying at her feet.

‘It is a symbol of fidelity,’ he said.

‘The guide-book told me she was chaste and faithful.’

‘If she had been,’ he replied, smiling, ‘Don Sebastian would perhaps never have become Duque de Losas.’

‘Really!’

‘It is an old history which I discovered one day among some family papers.’

I pricked up my ears, and discreetly began to question him.

‘Are you interested in old manuscripts?’ said the duke. ‘Come with me and I will show you what I have.’

With a flourish of the hand he waved me out of the chapel, and, having carefully locked the doors, accompanied me to his palace. He took me into a Gothic chamber, furnished with worn French furniture, the walls covered with cheap paper. Offering me a cigarette, he opened a drawer and produced a faded manuscript.

‘This is the document in question,’ he said. ‘Those crooked and fantastic characters are terrible. I often wonder if the writers were able to read them.’

‘You are fortunate to be the possessor of such things,’ I remarked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘What good are they? I would sooner have fifty pesetas than this musty parchment.’

An offer! I quickly reckoned it out into English money. He would doubtless have taken less, but I felt a certain delicacy in bargaining with a duke over his family secrets....

‘Do you mean it? May I — er—’

He sprang towards me.

‘Take it, my dear sir, take it. Shall I give you a receipt?’

And so, for thirty-one shillings and threepence, I obtained the only authentic account of how the frailty of the illustrious Señora Doña Sodina was indirectly the means of raising her husband to the highest dignities in Spain.

III

Don Sebastian and his wife had lived together for fifteen years, with the entirest happiness to themselves and the greatest admiration of their neighbours. People said that such an example of conjugal felicity was not often seen in those degenerate days, for even then they prated of the golden age of their grandfathers, lamenting their own decadence.... As behoved good Castilians, burdened with such a line of noble ancestors, the fortunate couple conducted themselves with all imaginable gravity. No strange eye was permitted to witness a caress between the lord and his lady, or to hear an expression of endearment; but everyone could see the devotion of Don Sebastian, the look of adoration which filled his eyes when he gazed upon his wife. And people said that Doña Sodina was worthy of all his affection. They said that her virtue was only matched by her piety, and her piety was patent to the whole world, for every day she went to the cathedral at Xiormonez and remained long immersed in her devotions. Her charity was exemplary, and no beggar ever applied to her in vain.

But even if Don Sebastian and his wife had not possessed these conjugal virtues, they would have been in Xiormonez persons of note, since not only did they belong to an old and respected family, which was rich as well, but the gentleman’s brother was archbishop of the See, who, when he graced the cathedral city with his presence, paid the greatest attention to Don Sebastian and Doña Sodina. Everyone said that the Archbishop Pablo would shortly become a cardinal, for he was a great favourite with the king, and with the latter His Holiness the Pope was then on terms of quite unusual friendship.

And in those days, when the priesthood was more noticeable for its gallantry than for its good works, it was refreshing to find so high-placed a dignitary of the Church a pattern of Christian virtues, who, notwithstanding his gorgeous habit of life, his retinue, his palaces, recalled, by his freedom from at least two of the seven deadly sins, the simplicity of the apostles, which the common people have often supposed the perfect state of the minister of God.

Don Sebastian had been affianced to Doña Sodina when he was a boy of ten, and before she could properly pronounce the viperish sibilants of her native tongue. When the lady attained her sixteenth year, the pair were solemnly espoused, and the young priest Pablo, the bridegroom’s brother, assisted at the ceremony. In these days the union would have been instanced as a triumphant example of the success of the mariage de convenance, but at that time such arrangements were so usual that it never occurred to anyone to argue for or against them. Yet it was not customary for a young man of two-and-twenty to fall madly in love with the bride whom he saw for the first time a day or two before his marriage, and it was still less customary for the bride to give back an equal affection. For fifteen years the couple lived in harmony and contentment, with nothing to trouble the even tenor of their lives; and if there was a cloud in their sky, it was that a kindly Providence had vouchsafed no fruit to the union, notwithstanding the prayers and candles which Doña Sodina was known to have offered at the shrine of more than one saint in Spain who had made that kind of miracle particularly his own.

But even felicitous marriages cannot last for ever, since if the love does not die the lovers do. And so it came to pass that Doña Sodina, having eaten excessively of pickled shrimps, which the abbess of a highly respected convent had assured her were of great efficacy in the begetting of children, took a fever of the stomach, as the chronicle inelegantly puts it, and after a week of suffering was called to the other world, from which, as from the pickled shrimps, she had always expected much. There let us hope her virtues have been rewarded, and she rests in peace and happiness.

IV

When Don Sebastian walked from the cathedral to his house after the burial of his wife, no one saw a trace of emotion on his face, and it was with his wonted grave courtesy that he bowed to a friend as he passed him. Sternly and briefly, as usual, he gave orders that no one should disturb him, and went to the room of Doña Sodina; he knelt on the praying-stool which Doña Sodina had daily used for so many years, and he fixed his eyes on the crucifix hanging on the wall above it. The day passed, and the night passed, and Don Sebastian never moved — no thought or emotion entered him; being alive, he was like the dead; he was like the dead that linger on the outer limits of hell, with never a hope for the future, dull with the despair that shall last for ever and ever and ever. But when the woman who had nursed him in his childhood lovingly disobeyed his order and entered to give him food, she saw no tear in his eye, no sign of weeping.

‘You are right!’ he said, painfully rising from his knees. ‘Give me to eat.’

Listlessly taking the food, he sank into a chair and looked at the bed on which had lately rested the corpse of Doña Sodina; but a kindly nature relieved his unhappiness, and he fell into a weary sleep.

When he awoke, the night was far advanced; the house, the town were filled with silence; all round him was darkness, and the ivory crucifix shone dimly, dimly. Outside the door a page was sleeping; he woke him and bade him bring light.... In his sorrow, Don Sebastian began to look at the things his wife had loved; he fingered her rosary, and turned over the pages of the half-dozen pious books which formed her library; he looked at the jewels which he had seen glittering on her bosom; the brocades, the rich silks, the cloths of gold and silver that she had delighted to wear. And at last he came across an old breviary which he thought she had lost — how glad she would have been to find it, she had so often regretted it! The pages were musty with their long concealment, and only faintly could be detected the scent which Doña Sodina used yearly to make and strew about her things. Turning over the pages listlessly, he saw some crabbed writing; he took it to the light— ‘To-night, my beloved, I come.’ And the handwriting was that of Pablo, Archbishop of Xiormonez. Don Sebastian looked at it long. Why should his brother write such words in the breviary of Doña Sodina? He turned the pages and the handwriting of his wife met his eye and the words were the same— ‘To-night, my beloved, I come’ — as if they were such delight to her that she must write them herself. The breviary dropped from Don Sebastian’s hand.

The taper, flickering in the draught, threw glaring lights on Don Sebastian’s face, but it showed no change in it. He sat looking at the fallen breviary, and, in his mind, at the love which was dead. At last he passed his hand over his forehead.

‘And yet,’ he whispered, ‘I loved thee well!’

But as the day came he picked up the breviary and locked it in a casket; he knelt again at the praying-stool and, lifting his hands to the crucifix, prayed silently. Then he locked the door of Doña Sodina’s room, and it was a year before he entered it again.

That day the Archbishop Pablo came to his brother to offer consolation for his loss, and Don Sebastian at the parting kissed him on either cheek.

V

The people of Xiormonez said that Don Sebastian was heart-broken, for from the date of his wife’s interment he was not seen in the streets by day. A few, returning home from some riot, had met him wandering in the dead of the night, but he passed them silently by. But he sent his servants to Toledo and Burgos, to Salamanca, Cordova, even to Paris and Rome; and from all these places they brought him books — and day after day he studied in them, till the common folk asked if he had turned magician.

So passed eleven months, and nearly twelve, till it wanted but five days to the anniversary of the death of Doña Sodina. Then Don Sebastian wrote to his brother the letter which for months he had turned over in his mind, —

‘Seeing the instability of all human things, and the uncertain length of our exile upon earth, I have considered that it is evil for brothers to remain so separate. Therefore I implore you — who are my only relative in this world, and heir to all my goods and estates — to visit me quickly, for I have a presentiment that death is not far off, and I would see you before we are parted by the immense sea.’

The archbishop was thinking that he must shortly pay a visit to his cathedral city, and, as his brother had desired, came to Xiormonez immediately. On the anniversary of Doña Sodina’s interment, Don Sebastian entertained Archbishop Pablo to supper.

‘My brother,’ said he, to his guest, ‘I have lately received from Cordova a wine which I desire you to taste. It is very highly prized in Africa, whence I am told it comes, and it is made with curious art and labour.’

Glass cups were brought, and the wine poured in. The archbishop was a connoisseur, and held it between the light and himself, admiring the sparkling clearness, and then inhaled the odour.

‘It is nectar,’ he said.

At last he sipped it.

‘The flavour is very strange.’

He drank deeply. Don Sebastian looked at him and smiled as his brother put down the empty glass. But when he was himself about to drink, the cup fell between his hands and the steward’s, breaking into a hundred fragments, and the wine spilt on the floor.

‘Fool!’ cried Don Sebastian, and in his anger struck the servant.

But being a man of peace, the archbishop interposed.

‘Do not be angry with him; it was an accident. There is more wine in the flagon.’

‘No, I will not drink it,’ said Don Sebastian, wrathfully. ‘I will drink no more to-night.’

The archbishop shrugged his shoulders.

When they were alone, Don Sebastian made a strange request.

‘My brother, it is a year to-day that Sodina was buried, and I have not entered her room since then. But now I have a desire to see it. Will you come with me?’

The archbishop consented, and together they crossed the long corridor that led to Doña Sodina’s apartment, preceded by a boy with lights.

Don Sebastian unlocked the door, and, taking the taper from the page’s hand, entered. The archbishop followed. The air was chill and musty, and even now an odour of recent death seemed to pervade the room.

Don Sebastian went to a casket, and from it took a breviary. He saw his brother start as his eye fell on it. He turned over the leaves till he came to a page on which was the archbishop’s handwriting, and handed it to him.

‘Oh God!’ exclaimed the priest, and looked quickly at the door. Don Sebastian was standing in front of it. He opened his mouth to cry out, but Don Sebastian interrupted him.

‘Do not be afraid! I will not touch you.’

For a while they looked at one another silently; one pale, sweating with terror, the other calm and grave as usual. At last Don Sebastian spoke, hoarsely.

‘Did she — did she love you?’

‘Oh, my brother, forgive her. It was long ago — and she repented bitterly. And I — I!’

‘I have forgiven you.’

The words were said so strangely that the archbishop shuddered. What did he mean?

Don Sebastian smiled.

‘You have no cause for anxiety. From now it is finished. I will forget.’ And, opening the door, he helped his brother across the threshold. The archbishop’s hand was clammy as a hand of death.

When Don Sebastian bade his brother good-night, he kissed him on either cheek.

VI

The priest returned to his palace, and when he was in bed his secretary prepared to read to him, as was his wont, but the archbishop sent him away, desiring to be alone. He tried to think; but the wine he had drunk was heavy upon him, and he fell asleep. But presently he awoke, feeling thirsty; he drank some water.... Then he became strangely wide-awake, a feeling of uneasiness came over him as of some threatening presence behind him, and again he felt the thirst. He stretched out his hand for the flagon, but now there was a mist before his eyes and he could not see, his hand trembled so that he spilled the water. And the uneasiness was magnified till it became a terror, and the thirst was horrible. He opened his mouth to call out, but his throat was dry, so that no sound came. He tried to rise from his bed, but his limbs were heavy and he could not move. He breathed quicker and quicker, and his skin was extraordinarily dry. The terror became an agony; it was unbearable. He wanted to bury his face in the pillows to hide it from him; he felt the hair on his head hard and dry, and it stood on end! He called to God for help, but no sound came from his mouth. Then the terror took shape and form, and he knew that behind him was standing Doña Sodina, and she was looking at him with terrible, reproachful eyes. And a second Doña Sodina came and stood at the end of the bed, and another came by her side, and the room was filled with them. And his thirst was horrible; he tried to moisten his mouth with spittle, but the source of it was dry. Cramps seized his limbs, so that he writhed with pain. Presently a red glow fell upon the room and it became hot and hotter, till he gasped for breath; it blinded him, but he could not close his eyes. And he knew it was the glow of hell-fire, for in his ears rang the groans of souls in torment, and among the voices he recognised that of Doña Sodina, and then — then he heard his own voice. And, in the livid heat, he saw himself in his episcopal robes, lying on the ground, chained to Doña Sodina, hand and foot. And he knew that as long as heaven and earth should last, the torment of hell would continue.

When the priests came in to their master in the morning, they found him lying dead, with his eyes wide open, staring with a ghastly brilliancy into the unknown. Then there was weeping and lamentation, and from house to house the people told one another that the archbishop had died in his sleep. The bells were set tolling, and as Don Sebastian, in his solitude, heard them, referring to the chief ingredient of that strange wine from Cordova, he permitted himself the only jest of his life.

‘It was Belladonna that sent his body to the worms; and it was Belladonna that sent his soul to hell.’

VII

The chronicle does not state whether the thought of his brother’s heritage had ever entered Don Sebastian’s head; but the fact remains that he was sole heir, and the archbishop had gathered the loaves and fishes to such purpose during his life that his death made Don Sebastian one of the wealthiest men in Spain. The simplest actions in this world, oh Martin Tupper! have often the most unforeseen results.

Now, Don Sebastian had always been ambitious, and his changed circumstances made him realise more clearly than ever that his merit was worthy of a brilliant arena. The times were propitious, for the old king had just died, and the new one had sent away the army of priests and monks which had turned every day into a Sunday; people said that God Almighty had had His day, and that the heathen deities had come to rule in His stead. From all corners of Spain gallants were coming to enjoy the sunshine, and everyone who could make a compliment or a graceful bow was sure of a welcome.

So Don Sebastian prepared to go to Madrid. But before leaving his native town he thought well to appease a possibly vengeful Providence by erecting in the cathedral a chapel in honour of his patron saint; not that he thought the saints would trouble themselves about the death of his brother, even though the causes of it were not entirely natural, but Don Sebastian remembered that Pablo was an archbishop, and the fact caused him a certain anxiety. He called together architects and sculptors, and ordered them to erect an edifice befitting his dignity; and being a careful man, as all Spaniards are, thought he would serve himself as well as the saint, and bade the sculptors make an image of Doña Sodina and an image of himself, in order that he might use the chapel also as a burial-place.

To pay for this, Don Sebastian left the revenue of several of his brother’s farms, and then, with a peaceful conscience, set out for the capital.

At Madrid he laid himself out to gain the favour of his sovereign, and by dint of unceasing flattery soon received much of the king’s attention; and presently Philip deigned to ask his advice on petty matters. And since Don Sebastian took care to advise as he saw the king desired, the latter concluded that the courtier was a man of stamina and ability, and began to consult him on matters of state. Don Sebastian opined that the pleasure of the prince must always come before the welfare of the nation, and the king was so impressed with his sagacity that one day he asked his opinion on a question of precedence — to the indignation of the most famous councillors in the land.

But the haughty soul of Don Sebastian chafed because he was only one among many favourites. The court was full of flatterers as assiduous and as obsequious as himself; his proud Castilian blood could brook no companions.... But one day, as he was moodily waiting in the royal antechamber, thinking of these things, it occurred to him that a certain profession had always been in great honour among princes, and he remembered that he had a cousin of eighteen, who was being educated in a convent near Xiormonez. She was beautiful. With buoyant heart he went to his house and told his steward to fetch her from the convent at once. Within a fortnight she was at Madrid.... Mercia was presented to the queen in the presence of Philip, and Don Sebastian noticed that the royal eye lighted up as he gazed on the bashful maiden. Then all the proud Castilian had to do was to shut his eyes and allow the king to make his own opportunities. Within a week Mercia was created maid of honour to the queen, and Don Sebastian was seized with an indisposition which confined him to his room.

The king paid his court royally, which is, boldly; and Doña Mercia had received in the convent too religious an education not to know that it was her duty to grant the king whatever it graciously pleased him to ask....

When Don Sebastian recovered from his illness, he found the world at his feet, for everyone was talking of the king’s new mistress, and it was taken as a matter of course that her cousin and guardian should take a prominent part in the affairs of the country. But Don Sebastian was furious! He went to the king and bitterly reproached him for thus dishonouring him.... Philip was a humane and generous-minded man, and understood that with a certain temperament it might be annoying to have one’s ward philander with a king, so he did his best to console the courtier. He called him his friend and brother; he told him he would always love him, but Don Sebastian would not be consoled. And nothing would comfort him except to be made High Admiral of the Fleet. Philip was charmed to settle the matter so simply, and as he delighted in generosity when to be generous cost him nothing, he also created Don Sebastian Duke of Losas, and gave him, into the bargain, the hand of the richest heiress in Spain.

And that is the end of the story of the punctiliousness of Don Sebastian. With his second wife he lived many years, beloved of his sovereign, courted by the world, honoured by all, till he was visited by the Destroyer of Delights and the Leveller of the Grandeur of this World....

VIII

Towards evening, the Duke of Losas passed my hotel, and, seeing me at the door, asked if I had read the manuscript.

‘I thought it interesting,’ I said, a little coldly, for, of course, I knew no Englishman would have acted like Don Sebastian.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It is not half so interesting as a good dinner.’

At these words I felt bound to offer him such hospitality as the hotel afforded. I found him a very agreeable messmate. He told me the further history of his family, which nearly became extinct at the end of the last century, since the only son of the seventh duke had, unfortunately, not been born of any duchess. But Ferdinand, who was then King of Spain, was unwilling that an ancient family should die out, and was, at the same time, sorely in want of money; so the titles and honours of the house were continued to the son of the seventh duke, and King Ferdinand built himself another palace.

‘But now,’ said my guest, mournfully shaking his head, ‘it is finished. My palace and a few acres of barren rock are all that remain to me of the lands of my ancestors, and I am the last of the line.’

But I bade him not despair. He was a bachelor and a duke, and not yet forty. I advised him to go to the United States before they put a duty on foreign noblemen; this was before the war; and I recommended him to take Maida Vale and Manchester on his way. Personally, I gave him a letter of introduction to an heiress of my acquaintance at Hampstead; for even in these days it is not so bad a thing to be Duchess of Losas, and the present duke has no brother.

A BAD EXAMPLE

I

James Clinton was a clerk in the important firm of Haynes, Bryan & Co., and he held in it an important position. He was the very essence of respectability, and he earned one hundred and fifty-six pounds per annum. James Clinton believed in the Church of England and the Conservative party, in the greatness of Great Britain, in the need of more ships for the navy, and in the superiority of city men to other members of the commonweal.

‘It’s the man of business that makes the world go round,’ he was in the habit of saying. ‘D’you think, sir, that fifty thousand country squires could rule Great Britain? No; it’s the city man, the man who’s ‘ad a sound business training, that’s made England what it is. And that is why I ‘old the Conservative party most capable of governing this mighty empire, because it ‘as taken the business man to its ‘eart. The strength of the Conservative party lies in its brewers and its city men, its bankers and iron-founders and stockbrokers; and as long as the Liberal party is a nest of Socialists and Trades-Unionists and Anarchists, we city men cannot and will not give it our support.’

Except for the lamentable conclusion of his career, he would undoubtedly have become an Imperialist, and the Union of the Great Anglo-Saxon Races would have found in him the sturdiest of supporters!

Mr Clinton was a little, spindly-shanked man, with weak, myopic eyes, protruding fishlike behind his spectacles. His hair was scant, worn long to conceal the baldness of the crown — and Cæsar was pleased to wear a wreath of laurel for the same purpose.... Mr Clinton wore small side-whiskers, but was otherwise clean-shaven, and the lack of beard betrayed the weakness of his mouth; his teeth were decayed and yellow. He was always dressed in a black tail-coat, shiny at the elbows; and he wore a shabby, narrow black tie, with a false diamond stud in his dickey. His grey trousers were baggy at the knees and frayed at the edges; his boots had a masculine and English breadth of toe. His top hat, of antiquated shape, was kept carefully brushed, but always looked as if it were suffering from a recent shower. When he had deserted the frivolous byways in which bachelordom is wont to disport itself for the sober path of the married man, he had begun to carry to and from the city a small black bag to impress upon the world at large his eminent respectability. Mr Clinton was married to Amy, second daughter of John Rayner, Esquire, of Peckham Rye....

II

Every morning Mr Clinton left his house in Camberwell in time to catch the eight-fifty-five train for the city. He made his way up Ludgate Hill, walking sideways, with a projection of the left part of his body, a habit he had acquired from constantly slipping past and between people who walked less rapidly than himself. Such persons always annoyed him; if they were not in a hurry he was, and they had no right to obstruct the way; and it was improper for a city man to loiter in the morning — the luncheon-hour was the time for loitering, no one was then in haste; but in the morning and at night on the way back to the station, one ought to walk at the same pace as everybody else. If Mr Clinton had been head of a firm, he would never have had in his office a man who sauntered in the morning. If a man wanted to loiter, let him go to the West-end; there he could lounge about all day. But the city was meant for business, and there wasn’t time for West-end airs in the city.

Mr Clinton reached his office at a quarter to ten, except when the train, by some mistake, arrived up to time, when he arrived at nine-thirty precisely. On these occasions he would sit in his room with the door open, awaiting the coming of the office-boy, who used to arrive two minutes before Mr Clinton and was naturally much annoyed when the punctuality of the train prepared him a reprimand.

’Is that you, Dick?’ called Mr Clinton, when he heard a footstep.

‘Yes, sir,’ answered the boy, appearing.

Mr Clinton looked up from his nails, which he was paring with a pair of pocket scissors.

‘What is the meaning of this? You don’t call this ‘alf-past nine, do you?’

‘Very sorry,’ said the boy; ‘it wasn’t my fault, sir; train was late.’

‘It’s not the first time I’ve ‘ad to speak to you about this, Dick; you know quite well that the company is always unpunctual; you should come by an earlier train.’

The office-boy looked sulky and did not answer. Mr Clinton proceeded, ‘I ‘ad to open the office myself. As assistant-manager, you know quite well that it is not my duty to open the office. You receive sixteen shillings a week to be ’ere at ‘alf-past nine, and if you don’t feel yourself capable of performing the duties for which you was engaged, you should give notice.... Don’t let it occur again.’

But usually, on arriving, Mr Clinton took off his tail-coat and put on a jacket, manufactured from the office paper a pair of false cuffs to keep his own clean, and having examined the nibs in both his penholders and sharpened his pencil, set to work. From then till one o’clock he remained at his desk, solemnly poring over figures, casting accounts, comparing balance-sheets, writing letters, occasionally going for some purpose or another into the clerks’ office or into the room of one of the partners. At one he went to luncheon, taking with him the portion of his Daily Telegraph which he was in the habit of reading during that meal. He went to an A. B. C. shop and ordered a roll and butter, a cup of chocolate and a scone. He divided his pat of butter into two, one half being for the roll and the other for the scone; he drank one moiety of the cup of chocolate after eating the roll, and the other after eating the scone. Meanwhile he read pages three and four of the Daily Telegraph. At a quarter to two he folded the paper, put down sixpence in payment, and slowly walked back to the office. He returned to his desk and there spent the afternoon solemnly poring over figures, casting accounts, comparing balance-sheets, writing letters, occasionally going for some purpose or another into the clerks’ office or into the room of one of the partners. At ten minutes to six he wiped his pens and put them back in the tray, tidied his desk and locked his drawer. He took off his paper cuffs, washed his hands, wiped his face, brushed his hair, arranging the long whisps over the occipital baldness, and combed his whiskers. At six he left the office, caught the six-seventeen train from Ludgate Hill, and thus made his way back to Camberwell and the bosom of his family.

III

On Sunday, Mr Clinton put on Sunday clothes, and heading the little procession formed by Mrs Clinton and the two children, went to church, carrying in his hand a prayer book and a hymn book. After dinner he took a little walk with his wife along the neighbouring roads, avenues and crescents, examining the exterior of the houses, stopping now and then to look at a garden or a well-kept house, or trying to get a peep into some room. Mr and Mrs Clinton criticised as they went along, comparing the window curtains, blaming a door in want of paint, praising a well-whitened doorstep....

The Clintons lived in the fifth house down in the Adonis Road, and the house was distinguishable from its fellows by the yellow curtains with which Mrs Clinton had furnished all the windows. Mrs Clinton was a woman of taste. Before marriage, the happy pair, accompanied by Mrs Clinton’s mother, had gone house-hunting, and fixed on the Adonis Road, which was cheap, respectable and near the station. Mrs Clinton would dearly have liked a house on the right-hand side of the road, which had nooks and angles and curiously-shaped windows. But Mr Clinton was firm in his refusal, and his mother-in-law backed him up.

‘I dare say they’re artistic,’ he said, in answer to his wife’s argument, ‘but a man in my position don’t want art — he wants substantiality. If the governor’ — the governor was the senior partner of the firm— ‘if the governor was going to take a ‘ouse I’d ‘ave nothing to say against it, but in my position art’s not necessary.’

‘Quite right, James,’ said his mother-in-law; ‘I ‘old with what you say entirely.’

Even in his early youth Mr Clinton had a fine sense of the responsibility of life, and a truly English feeling for the fitness of things.

So the Clintons took one of the twenty-three similar houses on the left-hand side of the street, and there lived in peaceful happiness. But Mr Clinton always pointed the finger of scorn at the houses opposite, and he never rubbed the back of his hands so heartily as when he could point out to his wife that such-and-such a number was having its roof repaired; and when the builder went bankrupt, he cut out the notice in the paper and sent it to his spouse anonymously....

At the beginning of August, Mr Clinton was accustomed, with his wife and family, to desert the sultry populousness of London for the solitude and sea air of Ramsgate. He read the Daily Telegraph by the sad sea waves, and made castles in the sand with his children. Then he changed his pepper-and-salt trousers for white flannel, but nothing on earth would induce him to forsake his top hat. He entirely agreed with the heroes of England’s proudest epoch — of course I mean the middle Victorian — that the top hat was the sign-manual, the mark, the distinction of the true Englishman, the completest expression of England’s greatness. Mr Clinton despised all foreigners, and although he would never have ventured to think of himself in the same breath with an English lord, he felt himself the superior of any foreign nobleman.

‘I dare say they’re all right in their way, but with these foreigners you don’t feel they’re gentlemen. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something, you understand, don’t you? And I do like a man to be a gentleman. I thank God I’m an Englishman!’

IV

Now, it chanced one day that the senior partner of the firm was summoned to serve on a jury at a coroner’s inquest, and Mr Clinton, furnished with the excuse that Mr Haynes was out of town, was told to go in his stead. Mr Clinton had never performed that part of a citizen’s duties, for on becoming a householder he had hit upon the expedient of being summoned for his rates, so that his name should be struck off the coroner’s list; he was very indifferent to the implied dishonour. It was with some curiosity, therefore, that he repaired to the court on the morning of the inquest.

The weather was cold and grey, and a drizzling rain was falling. Mr Clinton did not take a ‘bus, since by walking he could put in his pocket the threepence which he meant to charge the firm for his fare. The streets were wet and muddy, and people walked close against the houses to avoid the splash of passing vehicles. Mr Clinton thought of the jocose solicitor who was in the habit of taking an articled clerk with him on muddy days, to walk on the outside of the street and protect his master from the flying mud. The story particularly appealed to Mr Clinton; that solicitor must have been a fine man of business. As he walked leisurely along under his umbrella, Mr Clinton looked without envy upon the city men who drove along in hansoms.

‘Some of us,’ he said, ‘are born great, others achieve greatness. A man like that’ — he pointed with his mind’s finger at a passing alderman— ‘a man like that can go about in ’is carriage and nobody can say anything against it. ‘E’s worked ‘imself up from the bottom.’

But when he came down Parliament Street to Westminster Abbey he felt a different atmosphere, and he was roused to Jeremiac indignation at the sight, in a passing cab, of a gilded youth in an opera hat, with his coat buttoned up to hide his dress clothes.

‘That’s the sort of young feller I can’t abide,’ said Mr Clinton. ‘And if I was a member of Parliament I’d stop it. That’s what comes of ‘aving too much money and nothing to do. If I was a member of the aristocracy I’d give my sons five years in an accountant’s office. There’s nothing like a sound business training for making a man.’ He paused in the road and waved his disengaged hand. ‘Now, what should I be if I ‘adn’t ‘ad a sound business training?’

Mr Clinton arrived at the mortuary, a gay red and white building, which had been newly erected and consecrated by a duke with much festivity and rejoicing. Mr Clinton was sworn with the other jurymen, and with them repaired to see the bodies on which they were to sit. But Mr Clinton was squeamish.

‘I don’t like corpses,’ he said. ‘I object to them on principle.’

He was told he must look at them.

‘Very well,’ said Mr Clinton. ‘You can take a ‘orse to the well but you can’t make ’im drink.’ When it came to his turn to look through the pane of glass behind which was the body, he shut his eyes.

‘I can’t say I’m extra gone on corpses,’ he said, as they walked back to the Court. ‘The smell of them ain’t what you might call eau-de-Cologne.’ The other jurymen laughed. Mr Clinton often said witty things like that.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the coroner, rubbing his hands, ‘we’ve only got three cases this morning, so I sha’n’t have to keep you long. And they all seem to be quite simple.’

V

The first was an old man of seventy; he had been a respectable, hard-working man till two years before, when a paralytic stroke had rendered one side of him completely powerless. He lost his work. He was alone in the world — his wife was dead, and his only daughter had not been heard of for thirty years — and gradually he had spent his little savings; one by one he sent his belongings to the pawn shop, his pots and pans, his clothes, his arm-chair, finally his bedstead, then he died. The doctor said the man was terribly emaciated, his stomach was shrivelled up for want of food, he could have eaten nothing for two days before death.... The jury did not trouble to leave the box; the foreman merely turned round and whispered to them a minute; they all nodded, and a verdict was returned in accordance with the doctor’s evidence!

The next inquiry was upon a child of two. The coroner leant his head wearily on his hand, such cases were so common! The babe’s mother came forward to give her evidence — a pale little woman, with thin and hollow cheeks, her eyes red and dim with weeping. She sobbed as she told the coroner that her husband had left her, and she was obliged to support herself and two children. She was out of work, and food had been rather scanty; she had suckled the dead baby as long as she could, but her milk dried up. Two days before, on waking up in the morning, the child she held in her arms was cold and dead. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. Want of food! And the jury returned their verdict, framed in a beautiful and elaborate sentence, in accordance with the evidence.

The last case was a girl of twenty. She had been found in the Thames; a bargee told how he saw a confused black mass floating on the water, and he put a boat-hook in the skirt, tying the body up to the boat while he called the police, he was so used to such things! In the girl’s pocket was found a pathetic little letter to the coroner, begging his pardon for the trouble she was causing, saying she had been sent away from her place, and was starving, and had resolved to put an end to her troubles by throwing herself in the river. She was pregnant. The medical man stated that there were signs on the body of very great privation, so the jury returned a verdict that the deceased had committed suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity!

The coroner stretched his arms and blew his nose, and the jury went their way.

But Mr Clinton stood outside the mortuary door, meditating, and the coroner’s officer remarked that it was a wet day.

‘Could I ‘ave another look at the bodies?’ timidly asked the clerk, stirring himself out of his contemplation.

The coroner’s officer looked at him with surprise, and laughed.

‘Yes, if you like.’

Mr Clinton looked through the glass windows at the bodies, and he carefully examined their faces; he looked at them one after another slowly, and it seemed as if he could not tear himself away. Finally he turned round, his face was very pale, and it had quite a strange expression on it; he felt very sick.

‘Thank you!’ he said to the coroner’s officer, and walked away. But after a few steps he turned back, touching the man on the arm. ‘D’you ‘ave many cases like that?’ he asked.

‘Why, you look quite upset,’ said the coroner’s officer, with amusement. ‘I can see you’re not used to such things. You’d better go to the pub. opposite and ‘ave three ‘aporth of brandy.’

‘They seemed rather painful cases,’ said Mr Clinton, in a low voice.

‘Oh, it was a slack day to-day. Nothing like what it is usually this time of year.’

‘They all died of starvation — starvation, and nothing else.’

‘I suppose they did, more or less,’ replied the officer.

‘D’you ‘ave many cases like that?’

‘Starvation cases? Lor’ bless you! on a ‘eavy day we’ll ‘ave ‘alf a dozen, easy.’

‘Oh!’ said Mr Clinton.

‘Well, I must be getting on with my work,’ said the officer — they were standing on the doorstep and he looked at the public-house opposite, but Mr Clinton paid no further attention to him. He began to walk slowly away citywards.

‘Well, you are a rummy old file!’ said the coroner’s officer.

But presently a mist came before Mr Clinton’s eyes, everything seemed suddenly extraordinary, he had an intense pain and he felt himself falling. He opened his eyes slowly, and found himself sitting on a doorstep; a policeman was shaking him, asking what his name was. A woman standing by was holding his top hat; he noticed that his trousers were muddy, and mechanically he pulled out his handkerchief and began to wipe them.

He looked vacantly at the policeman asking questions. The woman asked him if he was better. He motioned her to give him his hat; he put it feebly on his head and, staggering to his feet, walked unsteadily away.

The rain drizzled down impassively, and cabs passing swiftly splashed up the yellow mud....

VI

Mr Clinton went back to the office; it was his boast that for ten years he had never missed a day. But he was dazed; he did his work mechanically, and so distracted was he that, on going home in the evening, he forgot to remove his paper cuffs, and his wife remarked upon them while they were supping. Mrs Clinton was a short, stout person, with an appearance of immense determination; her black, shiny hair was parted in the middle — the parting was broad and very white — severely brushed back and gathered into a little knot at the back of the head; her face was red and strongly lined, her eyes spirited, her nose aggressive, her mouth resolute. Everyone has some one procedure which seems most exactly to suit him — a slim youth bathing in a shaded stream, an alderman standing with his back to the fire and his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat — and Mrs Clinton expressed her complete self, exhibiting every trait and attribute, on Sunday in church, when she sat in the front pew self-reliantly singing the hymns in the wrong key. It was then that she seemed more than ever the personification of a full stop. Her morals were above suspicion, and her religion Low Church.

‘They’ve moved into the second ‘ouse down,’ she remarked to her husband. ‘And Mrs Tilly’s taken ‘er summer curtains down at last.’ Mrs Clinton spent most of her time in watching her neighbours’ movements, and she and her husband always discussed at the supper-table the events of the day, but this time he took no notice of her remark. He pushed away his cold meat with an expression of disgust.

‘You don’t seem up to the mark to-night, Jimmy,’ said Mrs Clinton.

‘I served on a jury to-day in place of the governor, and it gave me rather a turn.’

‘Why, was there anything particular?’

Mr Clinton crumbled up his bread, rolling it about on the table.

‘Only some poor things starved to death.’

Mrs Clinton shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why couldn’t they go to the workhouse, I wonder? I’ve no patience with people like that.’

Mr Clinton looked at her for a moment, then rose from the table. ‘Well, dear, I think I’ll get to bed; I daresay I shall be all right in the morning.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Clinton; ‘you get to bed and I’ll bring you something ‘ot. I expect you’ve got a bit of a chill and a good perspiration’ll do you a world of good.’

She mixed bad whisky with harmless water, and stood over her husband while he patiently drank the boiling mixture. Then she piled a couple of extra blankets on him and went down stairs to have her usual nip, ‘Scotch and cold,’ before going to bed herself.

All night Mr Clinton tossed from side to side; the heat was unbearable, and he threw off the clothes. His restlessness became so great that he got out of bed and walked up and down the room — a pathetically ridiculous object in his flannel nightshirt, from which his thin legs protruded grotesquely. Going back to bed, he fell into an uneasy sleep; but waking or sleeping, he had before his eyes the faces of the three horrible bodies he had seen at the mortuary. He could not blot out the image of the thin, baby face with the pale, open eyes, the white face drawn and thin, hideous in its starved, dead shapelessness. And he saw the drawn, wrinkled face of the old man, with the stubbly beard; looking at it, he felt the long pain of hunger, the agony of the hopeless morrow. But he shuddered with terror at the thought of the drowned girl with the sunken eyes, the horrible discolouration of putrefaction; and Mr Clinton buried his face in his pillow, sobbing, sobbing very silently so as not to wake his wife....

The morning came at last and found him feverish and parched, unable to move. Mrs Clinton sent for the doctor, a slow, cautious Scotchman, in whose wisdom Mrs Clinton implicitly relied, since he always agreed with her own idea of her children’s ailments. This prudent gentleman ventured to assert that Mr Clinton had caught cold and had something wrong with his lungs. Then, promising to send medicine and come again next day, went off on his rounds. Mr Clinton grew worse; he became delirious. When his wife, smoothing his pillow, asked him how he felt, he looked at her with glassy eyes.

‘Lor’ bless you!’ he muttered, ‘on a ‘eavy day we’ll ‘ave ‘alf a dozen, easy.’

‘What’s this he’s talking about?’ asked the doctor, next day.

‘’E was serving on a jury the day before yesterday, and my opinion is that it’s got on ’is brain,’ answered Mrs Clinton.

‘Oh, that’s nothing. You needn’t worry about that. I daresay it’ll turn to clothes or religion before he’s done. People talk of funny things when they’re in that state. He’ll probably think he’s got two hundred pairs of trousers or a million pounds a year.’

A couple of days later the doctor came to the final conclusion that it was a case of typhoid, and pronounced Mr Clinton very ill. He was indeed; he lay for days, between life and death, on his back, looking at people with dull, unknowing eyes, clutching feebly at the bed-clothes. And for hours he would mutter strange things to himself so quietly that one could not hear. But at last Dame Nature and the Scotch doctor conquered the microbes, and Mr Clinton became better.

VII

One day Mrs Clinton was talking to a neighbour in the bedroom, the patient was so quiet that they thought him asleep.

‘Yes, I’ve ‘ad a time with ’im, I can tell you,’ said Mrs Clinton. ‘No one knows what I’ve gone through.’

‘Well, I must say,’ said the friend, ‘you haven’t spared yourself; you’ve nursed him like a professional nurse.’

Mrs Clinton crossed her hands over her stomach and looked at her husband with self-satisfaction. But Mr Clinton was awake, staring in front of him with wide-open, fixed eyes; various thoughts confusedly ran through his head.

‘Isn’t ’e looking strange?’ whispered Mrs Clinton.

The two women kept silence, watching him.

‘Amy, are you there?’ asked Mr Clinton, suddenly, without turning his eyes.

‘Yes, dear. Is there anything you want?’

Mr Clinton did not reply for several minutes; the women waited in silence.

‘Bring me a Bible, Amy,’ he said at last.

‘A Bible, Jimmy?’ asked Mrs Clinton, in astonishment.

‘Yes, dear!’

She looked anxiously at her friend.

‘Oh, I do ‘ope the delirium isn’t coming on again,’ she whispered, and, pretending to smooth his pillow, she passed her hand over his forehead to see if it was hot. ‘Are you quite comfortable, dear?’ she asked, without further allusion to the Bible.

‘Yes, Amy, quite!’

‘Don’t you think you could go to sleep for a little while?’

‘I don’t feel sleepy, I want to read; will you bring me the Bible?’

Mrs Clinton looked helplessly at her friend; she feared something was wrong, and she didn’t know what to do. But the neighbour, with a significant look, pointed to the Daily Telegraph, which was lying on a chair. Mrs Clinton brightened up and took it to her husband.

‘Here’s the paper, dear.’ Mr Clinton made a slight movement of irritation.

‘I don’t want it; I want the Bible.’ Mrs Clinton looked at her friend more helplessly than ever.

‘I’ve never known ’im ask for such a thing before,’ she whispered, ‘and ‘e’s never missed reading the Telegraph a single day since we was married.’

‘I don’t think you ought to read,’ she said aloud to her husband. ‘But the doctor’ll be here soon, and I’ll ask ’im then.’

The doctor stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think there’d be any harm in letting him have a Bible,’ he said, ‘but you’d better keep an eye on him.... I suppose there’s no insanity in the family?’

‘No, doctor, not as far as I know. I’ve always ‘eard that my mother’s uncle was very eccentric, but that wouldn’t account for this, because we wasn’t related before we married.’

Mr Clinton took the Bible, and, turning to the New Testament, began to read. He read chapter after chapter, pausing now and again to meditate, or reading a second time some striking passage, till at last he finished the first gospel. Then he turned to his wife.

‘Amy, d’you know, I think I should like to do something for my feller-creatures. I don’t think we’re meant to live for ourselves alone in this world.’

Mrs Clinton was quite overcome; she turned away to hide the tears which suddenly filled her eyes, but the shock was too much for her, and she had to leave the room so that her husband might not see her emotion; she immediately sent for the doctor.

‘Oh, doctor,’ she said, her voice broken with sobs, ‘I’m afraid — I’m afraid my poor ‘usband’s going off ’is ‘ead.’

And she told him of the incessant reading and the remark Mr Clinton had just made. The doctor looked grave, and began thinking.

‘You’re quite sure there’s no insanity in the family?’ he asked again.

‘Not to the best of my belief, doctor.’

‘And you’ve noticed nothing strange in him? His mind hasn’t been running on money or clothes?’

‘No, doctor; I wish it ‘ad. I shouldn’t ‘ave thought anything of that; there’s something natural in a man talking about stocks and shares and trousers, but I’ve never ‘eard ’im say anything like this before. He was always a wonderfully steady man.’

VIII

Mr Clinton became daily stronger, and soon he was quite well. He resumed his work at the office, and in every way seemed to have regained his old self. He gave utterance to no more startling theories, and the casual observer might have noticed no difference between him and the model clerk of six months back. But Mrs Clinton had received too great a shock to look upon her husband with casual eyes, and she noticed in his manner an alteration which disquieted her. He was much more silent than before; he would take his supper without speaking a word, without making the slightest sign to show that he had heard some remark of Mrs Clinton’s. He did not read the paper in the evening as he had been used to do, but would go upstairs to the top of the house, and stand by an open window looking at the stars. He had an enigmatical way of smiling which Mrs Clinton could not understand. Then he had lost his old punctuality — he would come home at all sorts of hours, and, when his wife questioned him, would merely shrug his shoulders and smile strangely. Once he told her that he had been wandering about looking at men’s lives.

Mrs Clinton thought that a very unsatisfactory explanation of his unpunctuality, and after a long consultation with the cautious doctor came to the conclusion that it was her duty to discover what her husband did during the long time that elasped between his leaving the office and returning home.

So one day, at about six, she stationed herself at the door of the big building in which were Mr Clinton’s offices, and waited. Presently he appeared in the doorway, and after standing for a minute or two on the threshold, ever with the enigmatical smile hovering on his lips, came down the steps and walked slowly along the crowded street. His wife walked behind him; and he was not difficult to follow, for he had lost his old, quick, business-like step, and sauntered along, looking to the right and to the left, carelessly, as if he had not awaiting him at home his duties as the father of a family.... After a while he turned down a side street, and his wife followed with growing astonishment; she could not imagine where he was going. Just then a little flower-girl passed by and offered him a yellow rose. He stopped and looked at her; Mrs Clinton could see that she was a grimy little girl, with a shock of unkempt brown hair and a very dirty apron; but Mr Clinton put his hand on her head and looked into her eyes; then he gave her a penny, and, stooping down, lightly kissed her hair.

‘Bless you, my dear!’ he said, and passed on.

‘Well, I never!’ said Mrs Clinton, quite aghast; and as she walked by the flower girl, snorted at her and looked so savagely that the poor little maiden quite started. Mr Clinton walked very slowly, stopping now and then to look at a couple of women seated on a doorstep, or the children round an ice-cream stall. Mrs Clinton saw him pay a penny and give an ice to a little child who was looking with longing eyes at its more fortunate companions as they licked out the little glass cups. He remained quite a long while watching half a dozen young girls dancing to the music of a barrel organ, and again, to his wife’s disgust, Mr Clinton gave money.

‘We shall end in the work’ouse if this goes on,’ muttered Mrs Clinton, and she pursed up her lips more tightly than ever, thinking of the explanation she meant to have when her mate came home.

At last Mr Clinton came to a narrow slum, down which he turned, and so filthy was it that the lady almost feared to follow. But indignation, curiosity, and a stern sense of duty prevailed. She went along with up-turned nose, making her way carefully between cabbages and other vegetable refuse, sidling up against a house to avoid a dead cat which lay huddled up in the middle of the way, with a great red wound in its head.

Mrs Clinton was disgusted to see her husband enter a public-house.

’Is this where he gets to?’ she said to herself, and, looking through the door, saw him talk with two or three rough men who were standing at the bar, drinking ‘four ‘arf.’

But she waited determinedly. She had made up her mind to see the matter to the end, come what might; she was willing to wait all night.

After a time he came out, and, going through a narrow passage made his way into an alley. Then he went straight up to a big-boned, coarse-featured woman in a white apron, who was standing at an open door, and when he had said a few words to her, the two entered the house and the door was closed behind them.

Mrs Clinton suddenly saw it all.

‘I am deceived!’ she said tragically, and she crackled with virtuous indignation.

Her first impulse was to knock furiously at the door and force her way in to bear her James away from the clutches of the big-boned siren. But she feared that her rival would meet her with brute force, and the possibility of defeat made her see the unladylikeness of the proceeding. So she turned on her heel, holding up her skirts and her nose against the moral contamination and made her way out of the low place. She walked tempestuously down to Fleet Street, jumped fiercely on a ‘bus, frantically caught the train to Camberwell, and, having reached her house in the Adonis Road, flung herself furiously down on a chair and gasped, —

‘Oh!’

Then she got ready for her husband’s return.

‘Well?’ she said, when he came in; and she looked daggers.... ‘Well?’

‘I’m afraid I’m later than usual, my dear.’ It was, in fact, past nine o’clock.

‘Don’t talk to me!’ she replied, with a vigorous jerk of her head. ‘I know what you’ve been up to.’

‘What do you mean, my love?’ he gently asked.

She positively snorted with indignation; she had rolled her handkerchief into a ball, and nervously dabbed the palms of her hands with it. ‘I followed you this afternoon, and I saw you go into that ‘ouse with that low woman. What now? Eh?’ She spoke with the greatest possible emphasis.

‘Woman!’ said Mr Clinton, with a smile, ‘What are you to me?’

‘Don’t call me woman!’ said Mrs Clinton, very angrily. ‘What am I to you? I’m your wife, and I’ve got the marriage certificate in my pocket at this moment.’ She slapped her pocket loudly. ‘I’m your wife, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Wife! You are no more to me than any other woman!’

‘And you ‘ave the audacity to tell me that to my face! Oh, you — you villain! I won’t stand it, I tell you; I won’t stand it. I know I can’t get a divorce — the laws of England are scandalous — but I’ll ‘ave a judicious separation.... I might have known it, you’re all alike, every one of you; that’s ‘ow you men treat women. You take advantage of their youth and beauty, and then.... Oh, you villain! Here ‘ave I worked myself to the bone for you and brought up your children, and I don’t know what I ‘aven’t done, and now you go and take on with some woman, and leave me. Oh!’ She burst into tears. Mr Clinton still smiled, and there was a curious look in his eyes.

‘Woman! woman!’ he said, ‘you know not what you say!’ He went up to his wife and laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Dry your tears,’ he said, ‘and I will tell you of these things.’

Mrs Clinton shook herself angrily, keeping her face buried in her pocket handkerchief, but he turned away without paying more attention to her; then, standing in front of the glass, he looked at himself earnestly and began to speak.

‘It was during my illness that my eyes were opened. Lying in bed through those long hours I thought of the poor souls whose tale I ‘ad ‘eard in the coroner’s court. And all night I saw their dead faces. I thought of the misery of mankind and of the ‘ardness of men’s ‘earts.... Then a ray of light came to me, and I called for a Bible, and I read, and read; and the light grew into a great glow, and I saw that man was not meant to live for ‘imself alone; that there was something else in life, that it was man’s duty to ‘elp his fellers; and I resolved, when I was well, to do all that in me lay to ‘elp the poor and the wretched, and faithfully to carry out those precepts which the Book ‘ad taught me.’

‘Oh, dear! oh, dear!’ sobbed Mrs Clinton, who had looked up and listened with astonishment to her husband’s speech. ‘Oh, dear! oh, dear! what is he talking about?’

Mr Clinton turned towards her and again put his hand on her shoulder.

‘And that is ‘ow I spend my time, Amy. I go into the most miserable ‘ouses, into the dirtiest ‘oles, the foulest alleys, and I seek to make men ‘appier. I do what I can to ‘elp them in their distress, and to show them that brilliant light which I see so gloriously lighting the way before me. And now good-night!’ He stretched out his arm, and for a moment let his hand rest above her head; then, turning on his heel, he left the room.

Next day Mrs Clinton called on the doctor, and told him of her husband’s strange behaviour. The doctor slowly and meditatively nodded, then he raised his eyebrows, and with his finger significantly tapped his head....

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you’d better wait a while and see how things go on. I’ll just write out a prescription, and you can give him the medicine three times a day after meals,’ and he ordered the unhappy Mr Clinton another tonic, which, if it had no effect on that gentleman, considerably reassured his wife.

IX

Mr Clinton, in fact, became worse. He came home later and later every night, and his wife was disgusted at the state of uncleanness which his curious wanderings brought about. He refused to take the baths which Mrs Clinton prepared for him. He was more silent than ever, but when he spoke it was in biblical language; and always hovered on his lips the enigmatical smile, and his eyes always had the strange, disconcerting look. Mrs Clinton perseveringly made him take his medicine, but she lost faith in its power when, one night at twelve, Mr Clinton brought home with him a very dirty, ragged man, who looked half-starved and smelt distinctly alcoholic.

‘Jim,’ she said, on seeing the miserable object slinking in behind her husband, ‘Jim, what’s that?’

‘That, Amy? That is your brother!’

‘My brother? What d’you mean?’ cried Mrs Clinton, firing up. ‘That’s no brother of mine. I ‘aven’t got a brother.’

‘It’s your brother and my brother. Be good to him.’

‘I tell you it isn’t my brother,’ repeated Mrs Clinton; ‘my brother Adolphus died when he was two years old, and that’s the only brother I ever ‘ad.’

Mr Clinton merely looked at her with his usual gentle expression, and she asked angrily, —

‘What ‘ave you brought ’im ’ere for?’

‘’E is ‘ungry, and I am going to give ’im food; ’e is ‘omeless, and I am going to give ’im shelter.’

‘Shelter? Where?’

‘Here, in my ‘ouse, in my bed.’

‘In my bed!’ screamed Mrs Clinton. ‘Not if I know it! ’Ere, you,’ she said, addressing the man, and pushing past her husband. ‘Out you get! I’m not going to ‘ave tramps and loafers in my ‘ouse. Get out!’ Mrs Clinton was an energetic woman, and a strong one. Catching hold of her husband’s stick, and flourishing it, she opened the front door.

‘Amy! Amy!’ expostulated Mr Clinton.

‘Now, then, you be quiet. I’ve ‘ad about enough of you! Get on out, will you?’

The man made a rush for the door, and as he scrambled down the steps she caught him a smart blow on the back, and slammed the door behind him. Then, returning to the sitting-room, she sank panting on a chair. Mr Clinton slowly recovered from his surprise.

‘Woman,’ he said, this being now his usual mode of address — he spoke solemnly and sadly— ‘you ‘ave cast out your brother, you ‘ave cast out your husband, you ‘ave cast out yourself.’

‘Don’t talk to me!’ said Mrs Clinton, very wrathfully. ‘It’s bed time now; come along upstairs.’

‘I will not come to your bed again. You ‘ave refused it to one who was better than I; and why should I ‘ave it? Go, woman; go and leave me.’

‘Now, then, don’t come trying your airs on me,’ said Mrs Clinton. ‘They won’t wash. Come up to bed.’

‘I tell you I will not,’ replied Mr Clinton, decisively. ‘Go, woman, and leave me!’

‘Well, if I do, I sha’n’t leave the light; so there!’ she said spitefully, and, taking the lamp, left Mr Clinton in darkness.

Mrs Clinton was not henceforth on the very best of terms with her husband, but he always treated her with his accustomed gentleness, though he insisted on spending his nights on the dining-room sofa.

But perhaps the most objectionable to Mrs Clinton of all her good man’s eccentricities, was that he no longer gave her his week’s money every Saturday afternoon as he had been accustomed to do; the coldness between them made her unwilling to say anything about it, but the approach of quarter day forced her to pocket her dignity and ask for the money.

‘Oh, James!’ — she no longer called him Jimmy— ‘will you give me the money for the rent?’

‘Money?’ he answered with the usual smile on his lips. ‘I ‘ave no money.’

‘What d’you mean? You’ve not given me a farthing for ten weeks.’

‘I ‘ave given it to those who want it more than I.’

‘You don’t mean to tell me that you’ve given your salary away?’

‘Yes, dear.’

Mrs Clinton groaned.

‘Oh, you’re dotty!... I can understand giving a threepenny bit, or even sixpence, at the offertory on Sunday at church, and of course one ‘as to give Christmas-boxes to the tradesmen; but to give your whole salary away! ‘Aven’t you got anything left?’

‘No!’

‘You — you aggravating fool! And I’ll be bound you gave it to lazy loafers and tramps and Lord knows what!’

Mr Clinton did not answer; his wife walked rapidly backwards and forwards, wringing her hands.

‘Well, look here, James,’ she said at last. ‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk; but from this day you just give me your salary the moment you receive it. D’you hear? I tell you I will not ‘ave any more of your nonsense.’

‘I shall get no more salaries,’ he quietly remarked.

Mrs Clinton looked at him; he was quite calm, and smilingly returned her glance.

‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked.

‘I am no longer at the office.’

‘James! You ‘aven’t been sacked?’ she screamed.

‘Oh, they said I did not any longer properly attend to my work. They said I was careless, and that I made mistakes; they complained that I was unpunctual, that I went late and came away early; and one day, because I ‘adn’t been there the day before, they told me to leave. I was watching at the bedside of a man who was dying and ‘ad need of me; so ‘ow could I go? But I didn’t really mind; the office ‘indered me in my work.’

‘But what are you going to do now?’ gasped Mrs Clinton.

‘I ‘ave my work; that is more important than ten thousand offices.’

‘But ‘ow are you going to earn your living? What’s to become of us?’

‘Don’t trouble me about those things. Come with me, and work for the poor.’

‘James, think of the children!’

‘What are your children to me more than any other children?’

‘But—’

‘Woman, I tell you not to trouble me about these things. ‘Ave we not money enough, and to spare?’

He waved his hand, and putting on his top hat, which looked more than ever in need of restoration, went out, leaving his wife in a perfect agony.

There was worse to follow. Coming home a few days later, Mr Clinton told his wife that he wished to speak with her.

‘I ‘ave been looking into my books,’ he said, ‘and I find that we have invested in various securities a sum of nearly seven ‘undred pounds.’

‘Thank ‘Eaven for that!’ answered his wife. ‘It’s the only thing that’ll save us from starvation now that you moon about all day, instead of working like a decent man.’

‘Well, I ‘ave been thinking, and I ‘ave been reading; and I ‘ave found it written — Give all and follow me.’

‘Well, there’s nothing new in that,’ said Mrs Clinton, viciously. ‘I’ve known that text ever since I was a child.’

‘And as it were a Spirit ‘as come to me and said that I too must give all. In short, I ‘ave determined to sell out my stocks and my shares; my breweries are seven points ‘igher than when I bought them; I knew it was a good investment. I am going to realise everything; I am going to take the money in my hand, and I am going to give it to the poor.’

Mrs Clinton burst into tears.

‘Do not weep,’ he said solemnly. ‘It is my duty, and it is a pleasant one. Oh, what joy to make a ‘undred people ‘appy; to relieve a poor man who is starving, to give a breath of country air to little children who are dying for the want of it, to ‘elp the poor, to feed the ‘ungry, to clothe the naked! Oh, if I only ‘ad a million pounds!’ He stretched out his arms in a gesture of embrace, and looked towards heaven with an ecstatic smile upon his lips.

It was too serious a matter for Mrs Clinton to waste any words on; she ran upstairs, put on her bonnet, and quickly walked to her friend, the doctor.

He looked graver than ever when she told him.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s very serious. I’ve never heard of anyone doing such a thing before.... Of course I’ve known of people who have left all their money to charities after their death, when they didn’t want it; but it couldn’t ever occur to a normal, healthy man to do it in his lifetime.’

‘But what shall I do, doctor?’ Mrs Clinton was almost in hysterics.

‘Well, Mrs Clinton, d’you know the clergyman of the parish?’

‘I know Mr Evans, the curate, very well; he’s a very nice gentleman.’

‘Perhaps you could get him to have a talk with your husband. The fact is, it’s a sort of religious mania he’s got, and perhaps a clergyman could talk him out of it. Anyhow, it’s worth trying.’

Mrs Clinton straightway went to Mr Evans’s rooms, explained to him the case, and settled that on the following day he should come and see what he could do with her husband.

X

In expectation of the curate’s visit, Mrs Clinton tidied the house and adorned herself. It has been said that she was a woman of taste, and so she was. The mantelpiece and looking glass were artistically draped with green muslin, and this she proceeded to arrange, tying and carefully forming the yellow satin ribbon with which it was relieved. The chairs were covered with cretonne which might have come from the Tottenham Court Road, and these she placed in positions of careless and artistic confusion, smoothing down the antimacassars which were now her pride, as the silk petticoat from which she had manufactured them had been once her glory. For the flower-pots she made fresh coverings of red tissue paper, re-arranged the ornaments gracefully scattered about on little Japanese tables; then, after pausing a moment to admire her work and see that nothing had been left undone, she went upstairs to perform her own toilet.... In less than half an hour she reappeared, holding herself in a dignified posture, with her head slightly turned to one side and her hands meekly folded in front of her, stately and collected as Juno, a goddess in black satin. Her dress was very elegant; it might have typified her own life, for in its original state of virgin whiteness it had been her wedding garment; then it was dyed purple, and might have betokened a sense of change and coming responsibilities; lastly it was black, to signify the burden of a family, and the seriousness of life. No one had realised so intensely as Mrs Clinton the truth of the poet’s words. Life is not an empty dream. She took out her handkerchief, redolent with lascivious patchouli, and placed it in her bosom — a spot of whiteness against the black.... She sat herself down to wait.

There was a knock and a ring at the door, timid, as befitted a clergyman; and the servant-girl showed in Mr Evans. He was a thin and short young man, red faced, with a long nose and weak eyes, looking underfed and cold, keeping his shoulders screwed up in a perpetual shiver. He was an earnest, God-fearing man, spending much money in charities, and waging constant war against the encroachments of the Scarlet Woman.

‘I think I’ll just take my coat off, if you don’t mind, Mrs Clinton,’ he said, after the usual greetings. He folded it carefully, and hung it over the back of a chair; then, coming forward, he sat down and rubbed the back of his hands.

‘I asked my ‘usband to stay in because you wanted to see ’im, but he would go out. ‘Owever’ — Mrs Clinton always chose her language on such occasions—’’owever, ‘e’s promised to return at four, and I will say this for ’im, he never breaks ’is word.’

‘Oh, very well!’

‘May I ‘ave the pleasure of offering you a cup of tea, Mr Evans?’

The curate’s face brightened up.

‘Oh, thank you so much!’ And he rubbed his hands more energetically than ever.

Tea was brought in, and they drank it, talking of parish matters, Mrs Clinton discreetly trying to pump the curate. Was it really true that Mrs Palmer of No. 17 Adonis Road drank so terribly?

At last Mr Clinton came, and his wife glided out of the room, leaving the curate to convert him. There was a little pause while Mr Evans took stock of the clerk.

‘Well, Mr Clinton,’ he said finally, ‘I’ve come to talk to you about yourself.... Your wife tells me that you have adopted certain curious views on religious matters; and she wishes me to have some conversation with you about them.’

‘You are a man of God,’ replied Mr Clinton; ‘I am at your service.’

Mr Evans, on principle, objected to the use of the Deity’s name out of church, thinking it a little blasphemous, but he said nothing.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘of course, religion is a very good thing; in fact, it is the very best thing; but it must not be abused, Mr Clinton,’ and he repeated gravely, as if his interlocutor were a naughty schoolboy— ‘it mustn’t be abused. Now, I want to know exactly what you views are.’

Mr Clinton smiled gently.

‘I ‘ave no views, sir. The only rule I ‘ave for guidance is this — love thy neighbour as thyself.’

‘Hum!’ murmured the curate; there was really nothing questionable in that, but he was just slightly prejudiced against a man who made such a quotation; it sounded a little priggish.

‘But your wife tells me that you’ve been going about with all sorts of queer people?’

‘I found that there was misery and un’appiness among people, and I tried to relieve it.’

‘Of course, I strongly approve of district visiting; I do a great deal of it myself; but you’ve been going about with public-house loafers and — bad women.’

’Is it not said: “I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”?’

‘No doubt,’ answered Mr Evans, slightly frowning. ‘But obviously one isn’t meant to do that to such an extent as to be dismissed from one’s place.’

‘My wife ‘as posted you well up in all my private affairs.’

‘Well, I don’t think you can have done well to be sent away from your office.’

’Is it not said: “Forsake all and follow me”?’

Decidedly this was bad form, and Mr Evans, pursing up his lips and raising his eyebrows, was silent. ‘That’s the worst of these half-educated people,’ he said to himself; ‘they get some idea in their heads which they don’t understand, and, of course, they do idiotic things....’

‘Well, to pass over all that,’ he added out loud, ‘apparently you’ve been spending your money on these people to such an extent that your wife and children are actually inconvenienced by it.’

‘I ‘ave clothed the naked,’ said Mr Clinton, looking into the curate’s eyes; ‘I ‘ave visited the sick; I ‘ave given food to ’im that was an ‘ungered, and drink to ’im that was athirst.’

‘Yes, yes, yes; that’s all very well, but you should always remember that charity begins at home.... I shouldn’t have anything to say to a rich man’s doing these things, but it’s positively wicked for you to do them. Don’t you understand that? And last of all, your wife tells me that you’re realising your property with the idea of giving it away.’

‘It’s perfectly true,’ said Mr Clinton.

Mr Evans’s mind was too truly pious for a wicked expletive to cross it; but a bad man expressing the curate’s feeling would have said that Mr Clinton was a damned fool.

‘Well, don’t you see that it’s a perfectly ridiculous and unheard-of thing?’ he asked emphatically.

‘“Sell all that thou ‘ast, and distribute unto the poor.” It is in the Gospel of St Luke. Do you know it?’

‘Of course I know it, but, naturally, these things aren’t to be taken quite literally.’

‘It is clearly written. What makes you say it is not to be taken literally?’

Mr Evans shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

‘Why, don’t you see it would be impossible? The world couldn’t go on. How do you expect your children to live if you give this money away?’

‘“Look at the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”’....

‘Oh, my dear sir, you make me lose my patience. You’re full of the hell-fire platitudes of a park spouter, and you think it’s religion.... I tell you all these things are allegorical. Don’t you understand that? You mustn’t carry them out to the letter. They are not meant to be taken in that way.’

Mr Clinton smiled a little pitifully at the curate.

‘And think of yourself — one must think of oneself. “God helps those who help themselves.” How are you going to exist when this little money of yours is gone? You’ll simply have to go to the workhouse.... It’s absurd, I tell you.’

Mr Clinton took no further notice of the curate, but he broke into a loud chant, —

‘“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”’ Then, turning on the unhappy curate, he stretched out his arm and pointed his finger at him. ‘Last Sunday,’ he said, ‘I ‘eard you read those very words from the chancel steps. Go! go! I tell you, go! You are a bad man, a wolf in sheep’s clothing — go!’ Mr Clinton walked up to him threateningly, and the curate, with a gasp of astonishment and indignation, fled from the room.

He met Mrs Clinton outside.

‘I can’t do anything with him at all,’ he said angrily. ‘I’ve never heard such things in my life. He’s either mad or he’s got into the hands of the Dissenters. That’s the only explanation I can offer.’

Then, to quiet his feelings, he called on a wealthy female parishioner, with whom he was a great favourite, because she thought him ‘such a really pious man,’ and it was not till he had drunk two cups of tea that he recovered his equilibrium.

XI

Mrs Clinton was at her wit’s end. Her husband had sold out his shares, and the money was lying at the bank ready to be put to its destined use. Visions of debt and bankruptcy presented themselves to her. She saw her black satin dress in the ruthless clutches of a pawnbroker, the house and furniture sold over her head, the children down at heel, and herself driven to work for her living — needlework, nursing, charing — what might not things come to? However, she went to the doctor and told him of the failure of their scheme.

‘I’ve come to the end of my tether, Mrs Clinton; I really don’t know what to do. The only thing I can suggest is that a mental specialist should examine into the state of his mind. I really think he’s wrong in his head, and, you know, it may be necessary for your welfare and his own that he be kept under restriction.’

‘Well, doctor,’ answered Mrs Clinton, putting her handkerchief up to her eyes and beginning to cry, ‘well, doctor, of course I shouldn’t like him to be shut up — it seems a terrible thing, and I shall never ‘ave a moment’s peace all the rest of my life; but if he must be shut up, for Heaven’s sake let it be done at once, before the money’s gone.’ And here she began to sob very violently.

The doctor said he would immediately write to the specialist, so that they might hold a consultation on Mr Clinton the very next day.

So, the following morning, Mrs Clinton again put on her black satin dress, and, further, sent to her grocer’s for a bottle of sherry, her inner consciousness giving her to understand that specialists expected something of the kind....

The specialist came. He was a tall, untidily-dressed man, with his hair wild and straggling, as if he had just got out of bed. He was very clever, and very impatient of stupid people, and he seldom met anyone whom he did not think in one way or another intensely stupid.

Mr Clinton, as before, had gone out, but Mrs Clinton did her best to entertain the two doctors. The specialist, who talked most incessantly himself, was extremely impatient of other people’s conversation.

‘Why on earth don’t people see that they’re much more interesting when they hold their tongues than when they speak?’ he was in the habit of saying, and immediately would pour out a deluge of words, emphasising and explaining the point, giving instances of its truth....

‘You must see a lot of strange things, doctor,’ said Mrs Clinton, amiably.

‘Yes,’ answered the specialist.

‘I think it must be very interesting to be a doctor,’ said Mrs Clinton.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘You must see a lot of strange things.’

‘Yes, yes,’ repeated the doctor, and as Mrs Clinton went on complacently, he frowned and drummed his fingers on the table and looked to the right and left. ‘When is the man coming in?’ he asked impatiently.

And at last he could not contain himself.

‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Clinton, I should like to talk to your doctor alone about the case. You can wait in the next room.’

‘I’m sure I don’t wish to intrude,’ said Mrs Clinton, bridling up, and she rose in a dignified manner from her chair. She thought his manners were distinctly queer. ‘But, of course,’ she said to a friend afterwards, ‘he’s a genius, there’s no mistaking it, and people like that are always very eccentric.’

‘What an insufferable woman!’ he began, when the lady had retired, talking very rapidly, only stopping to take an occasional breath. ‘I thought she was going on all night. She’s enough to drive the man mad. One couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Why on earth doesn’t this man come? Just like these people, they don’t think that my time’s valuable. I expect she drinks. Shocking, you know, these women, how they drink!’ And still talking, he looked at his watch for the eighth time in ten minutes.

‘Well, my man,’ he said, as Mr Clinton at last came in, ‘what are you complaining of?... One moment,’ he added, as Mr Clinton was about to reply. He opened his notebook and took out a stylographic pen. ‘Now, I’m ready for you. What are you complaining of?’

‘I’m complaining that the world is out of joint,’ answered Mr Clinton, with a smile.

The specialist raised his eyebrows and significantly looked at the family doctor.

‘It’s astonishing how much you can get by a well-directed question,’ he said to him, taking no notice of Mr Clinton. ‘Some people go floundering about for hours, but, you see, by one question I get on the track.’ Turning to the patient again, he said, ‘Ah! and do you see things?’

‘Certainly; I see you.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ impatiently said the specialist. ‘Distinctly stupid, you know,’ he added to his colleague. ‘I mean, do you see things that other people don’t see?’

‘Alas! yes; I see Folly stalking abroad on a ‘obby ‘orse.’

‘Do you really? Anything else?’ said the doctor, making a note of the fact.

‘I see Wickedness and Vice beating the land with their wings.’

‘Sees things beating with their wings,’ wrote down the doctor.

‘I see misery and un’appiness everywhere.’

‘Indeed!’ said the doctor. ‘Has delusions. Do you think your wife puts things in your tea?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah!’ joyfully uttered the doctor, ‘that’s what I wanted to get at — thinks people are trying to poison him. What is it they put in, my man?’

‘Milk and sugar,’ answered Mr Clinton.

‘Very dull mentally,’ said the specialist, in an undertone, to his colleague. ‘Well, I don’t think we need go into any more details. There’s no doubt about it, you know. That curious look in his eyes, and the smile — the smile’s quite typical. It all clearly points to insanity. And then that absurd idea of giving his money to the poor! I’ve heard of people taking money away from the poor, there’s nothing mad in that; but the other, why, it’s a proof of insanity itself. And then your account of his movements! His giving ice-creams to children. Most pernicious things, those ice-creams! The Government ought to put a stop to them. Extraordinary idea to think of reforming the world with ice-cream! Post-enteric insanity, you know. Mad as a hatter! Well, well, I must be off.’ Still talking, he put on his hat and talked all the way downstairs, and finally talked himself out of the house.

The family doctor remained behind to see Mrs Clinton.

‘Yes, it’s just as I said,’ he told her. ‘He’s not responsible for his actions. I think he’s been insane ever since his illness. When you think of his behaviour since then — his going among those common people and trying to reform them, and his ideas about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, and finally wanting to give his money to the poor — it all points to a completely deranged mind.’

Mrs Clinton heaved a deep sigh. ‘And what do you think ‘ad better be done now?’ she asked.

‘Well, I’m very sorry, Mrs Clinton; of course it’s a great blow to you; but really I think arrangements had better be made for him to be put under restraint.’

Mrs Clinton began to cry, and the doctor looked at her compassionately.

‘Ah, well,’ she said at last, ‘if it must be done, I suppose it ‘ad better be done at once; and I shall be able to save the money after all.’ At the thought of this she dried her tears.

The moral is plain.

DE AMICITIA

I

They were walking home from the theatre.

‘Well, Mr White,’ said Valentia, ‘I think it was just fine.’

‘It was magnificent!’ replied Mr White.

And they were separated for a moment by the crowd, streaming up from the Français towards the Opera and the Boulevards.

‘I think, if you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I’ll take your arm, so that we shouldn’t get lost.’

He gave her his arm, and they walked through the Louvre and over the river on their way to the Latin Quarter.

Valentia was an art student and Ferdinand White was a poet. Ferdinand considered Valentia the only woman who had ever been able to paint, and Valentia told Ferdinand that he was the only man she had met who knew anything about Art without being himself an artist. On her arrival in Paris, a year before, she had immediately inscribed herself, at the offices of the New York Herald, Valentia Stewart, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. She settled down in a respectable pension, and within a week was painting vigorously. Ferdinand White arrived from Oxford at about the same time, hired a dirty room in a shabby hotel, ate his meals at cheap restaurants in the Boulevard St Michel, read Stephen Mallarmé, and flattered himself that he was leading ‘la vie de Bohême.’

After two months, the Fates brought the pair together, and Ferdinand began to take his meals at Valentia’s pension. They went to the museums together; and in the Sculpture Gallery at the Louvre, Ferdinand would discourse on ancient Greece in general and on Plato in particular, while among the pictures Valentia would lecture on tones and values and chiaroscuro. Ferdinand renounced Ruskin and all his works; Valentia read the Symposium. Frequently in the evening they went to the theatre; sometimes to the Français, but more often to the Odéon; and after the performance they would discuss the play, its art, its technique — above all, its ethics. Ferdinand explained the piece he had in contemplation, and Valentia talked of the picture she meant to paint for next year’s Salon; and the lady told her friends that her companion was the cleverest man she had met in her life, while he told his that she was the only really sympathetic and intelligent girl he had ever known. Thus were united in bonds of amity, Great Britain on the one side and the United States of America and Ireland on the other.

But when Ferdinand spoke of Valentia to the few Frenchmen he knew, they asked him, —

‘But this Miss Stewart — is she pretty?’

‘Certainly — in her American way; a long face, with the hair parted in the middle and hanging over the nape of the neck. Her mouth is quite classic.’

‘And have you never kissed the classic mouth?’

‘I? Never!’

‘Has she a good figure?’

‘Admirable!’

‘And yet — Oh, you English!’ And they smiled and shrugged their shoulders as they said, ‘How English!’

‘But, my good fellow,’ cried Ferdinand, in execrable French, ‘you don’t understand. We are friends, the best of friends.’

They shrugged their shoulders more despairingly than ever.

II

They stood on the bridge and looked at the water and the dark masses of the houses on the Latin side, with the twin towers of Notre Dame rising dimly behind them. Ferdinand thought of the Thames at night, with the barges gliding slowly down, and the twinkling of the lights along the Embankment.

‘It must be a little like that in Holland,’ she said, ‘but without the lights and with greater stillness.’

‘When do you start?’

She had been making preparations for spending the summer in a little village near Amsterdam, to paint.

‘I can’t go now,’ cried Valentia. ‘Corrie Sayles is going home, and there’s no one else I can go with. And I can’t go alone. Where are you going?’

‘I? I have no plans.... I never make plans.’

They paused, looking at the reflections in the water. Then she said, —

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t come to Holland with me!’

He did not know what to think; he knew she had been reading the Symposium.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘there’s no reason why one shouldn’t go away with a man as well as with a woman.’

His French friends would have suggested that there were many reasons why one should go away with a woman rather than a man; but, like his companion, Ferdinand looked at it in the light of pure friendship.

‘When one comes to think of it, I really don’t see why we shouldn’t. And the mere fact of staying at the same hotel can make no difference to either of us. We shall both have our work — you your painting, and I my play.’

As they considered it, the idea was distinctly pleasing; they wondered that it had not occurred to them before. Sauntering homewards, they discussed the details, and in half an hour had decided on the plan of their journey, the date and the train.

Next day Valentia went to say good-bye to the old French painter whom all the American girls called Popper. She found him in a capacious dressing-gown, smoking cigarettes.

‘Well, my dear,’ he said, ‘what news?’

‘I’m going to Holland to paint windmills.’

‘A very laudable ambition. With your mother?’

‘My good Popper, my mother’s in Cincinnati. I’m going with Mr White.’

‘With Mr White?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You are very frank about it.’

‘Why — what do you mean?’

He put on his glasses and looked at her carefully.

‘Does it not seem to you a rather — curious thing for a young girl of your age to go away with a young man of the age of Mr Ferdinand White?’

‘Good gracious me! One would think I was doing something that had never been done before!’

‘Oh, many a young man has gone travelling with a young woman, but they generally start by a night train, and arrive at the station in different cabs.’

‘But surely, Popper, you don’t mean to insinuate — Mr White and I are going to Holland as friends.’

‘Friends!’

He looked at her more curiously than ever.

‘One can have a man friend as well as a girl friend,’ she continued. ‘And I don’t see why he shouldn’t be just as good a friend.’

‘The danger is that he become too good.’

‘You misunderstand me entirely, Popper; we are friends, and nothing but friends.’

‘You are entirely off your head, my child.’

‘Ah! you’re a Frenchman, you can’t understand these things. We are different.’

‘I imagine that you are human beings, even though England and America respectively had the intense good fortune of seeing your birth.’

‘We’re human beings — and more than that, we’re nineteenth century human beings. Love is not everything. It is a part of one — perhaps the lower part — an accessory to man’s life, needful for the continuation of the species.’

‘You use such difficult words, my dear.’

‘There is something higher and nobler and purer than love — there is friendship. Ferdinand White is my friend. I have the amplest confidence in him. I am certain that no unclean thought has ever entered his head.’

She spoke quite heatedly, and as she flushed up, the old painter thought her astonishingly handsome. Then she added as an afterthought, —

‘We despise passion. Passion is ugly; it is grotesque.’

The painter stroked his imperial and faintly smiled.

‘My child, you must permit me to tell you that you are foolish. Passion is the most lovely thing in the world; without it we should not paint beautiful pictures. It is passion that makes a woman of a society lady; it is passion that makes a man even of — an art critic.’

‘We do not want it,’ she said. ‘We worship Venus Urania. We are all spirit and soul.’

‘You have been reading Plato; soon you will read Zola.’

He smiled again, and lit another cigarette.

‘Do you disapprove of my going?’ she asked after a little silence.

He paused and looked at her. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

‘On the contrary, I approve. It is foolish, but that is no reason why you should not do it. After all, folly is the great attribute of man. No judge is as grave as an owl; no soldier fighting for his country flies as rapidly as the hare. You may be strong, but you are not so strong as a horse; you may be gluttonous, but you cannot eat like a boa-constrictor. But there is no beast that can be as foolish as man. And since one should always do what one can do best — be foolish. Strive for folly above all things. Let the height of your ambition be the pointed cap with the golden bells. So, bon voyage! I will come and see you off to-morrow.’

The painter arrived at the station with a box of sweets, which he handed to Valentia with a smile. He shook Ferdinand’s hand warmly and muttered under his breath, —

‘Silly fool! he’s thinking of friendship, too!’

Then, as the train steamed out, he waved his hand and cried, —

‘Be foolish! Be foolish!’

He walked slowly out of the station, and sat down at a café. He lit a cigarette, and, sipping his absinthe, said, —

‘Imbeciles!’

III

They arrived at Amsterdam in the evening, and, after dinner, gathered together their belongings and crossed the Ij as the moon shone over the waters; then they got into the little steam tram and started for Monnickendam. They stood side by side on the platform of the carriage and watched the broad meadows bathed in moonlight, the formless shapes of the cattle lying on the grass, and the black outlines of the mills; they passed by a long, sleeping canal, and they stopped at little, silent villages. At last they entered the dead town, and the tram put them down at the hotel door.

Next morning, when she was half dressed, Valentia threw open the window of her room, and looked out into the garden. Ferdinand was walking about, dressed as befitted the place and season — in flannels — with a huge white hat on his head. She could not help thinking him very handsome — and she took off the blue skirt she had intended to work in, and put on a dress of muslin all bespattered with coloured flowers, and she took in her hand a flat straw hat with red ribbons.

‘You look like a Dresden shepherdess,’ he said, as they met.

They had breakfast in the garden beneath the trees; and as she poured out his tea, she laughed, and with the American accent which he was beginning to think made English so harmonious, said, —

‘I reckon this about takes the shine out of Paris.’

They had agreed to start work at once, losing no time, for they wanted to have a lot to show on their return to France, that their scheme might justify itself. Ferdinand wished to accompany Valentia on her search for the picturesque, but she would not let him; so, after breakfast, he sat himself down in the summer-house, and spread out all round him his nice white paper, lit his pipe, cut his quills, and proceeded to the evolution of a masterpiece. Valentia tied the red strings of her sun-bonnet under her chin, selected a sketchbook, and sallied forth.

At luncheon they met, and Valentia told of a little bit of canal, with an old windmill on one side of it, which she had decided to paint, while Ferdinand announced that he had settled on the names of his dramatis personæ. In the afternoon they returned to their work, and at night, tired with the previous day’s travelling, went to bed soon after dinner.

So passed the second day; and the third day, and the fourth; till the end of the week came, and they had worked diligently. They were both of them rather surprised at the ease with which they became accustomed to their life.

‘How absurd all this fuss is,’ said Valentia, ‘that people make about the differences of the sexes! I am sure it is only habit.’

‘We have ourselves to prove that there is nothing in it,’ he replied. ‘You know, it is an interesting experiment that we are making.’

She had not looked at it in that light before.

‘Perhaps it is. We may be the fore-runners of a new era.’

‘The Edisons of a new communion!’

‘I shall write and tell Monsieur Rollo all about it.’

In the course of the letter, she said, —

‘Sex is a morbid instinct. Out here, in the calmness of the canal and the broad meadows, it never enters one’s head. I do not think of Ferdinand as a man—’

She looked up at him as she wrote the words. He was reading a book and she saw him in profile, with the head bent down. Through the leaves the sun lit up his face with a soft light that was almost green, and it occurred to her that it would be interesting to paint him.

‘I do not think of Ferdinand as a man; to me he is a companion. He has a wider experience than a woman, and he talks of different things. Otherwise I see no difference. On his part, the idea of my sex never occurs to him, and far from being annoyed as an ordinary woman might be, I am proud of it. It shows me that, when I chose a companion, I chose well. To him I am not a woman; I am a man.’

And she finished with a repetition of Ferdinand’s remark, —

‘We are the Edisons of a new communion!’

When Valentia began to paint her companion’s portrait, they were naturally much more together. And they never grew tired of sitting in the pleasant garden under the trees, while she worked at her canvas and green shadows fell on the profile of Ferdinand White. They talked of many things. After a while they became less reserved about their private concerns. Valentia told Ferdinand about her home in Ohio, and about her people; and Ferdinand spoke of the country parsonage in which he had spent his childhood, and the public school, and lastly of Oxford and the strange, happy days when he had learnt to read Plato and Walter Pater....

At last Valentia threw aside her brushes and leant back with a sigh.

‘It is finished!’

Ferdinand rose and stretched himself, and went to look at his portrait. He stood before it for a while, and then he placed his hand on Valentia’s shoulder.

‘You are a genius, Miss Stewart.’

She looked up at him.

‘Ah, Mr White, I was inspired by you. It is more your work than mine.’

IV

In the evening they went out for a stroll. They wandered through the silent street; in the darkness they lost the quaintness of the red brick houses, contrasting with the bright yellow of the paving, but it was even quieter than by day. The street was very broad, and it wound about from east to west and from west to east, and at last it took them to the tiny harbour. Two fishing smacks were basking on the water, moored to the side, and the Zuyder Zee was covered with the innumerable reflections of the stars. On one of the boats a man was sitting at the prow, fishing, and now and then, through the darkness, one saw the red glow of his pipe; by his side, huddled up on a sail, lay a sleeping boy. The other boat seemed deserted. Ferdinand and Valentia stood for a long time watching the fisher, and he was so still that they wondered whether he too were sleeping. They looked across the sea, and in the distance saw the dim lights of Marken, the island of fishers. They wandered on again through the street, and now the lights in the windows were extinguished one by one, and sleep came over the town; and the quietness was even greater than before. They walked on, and their footsteps made no sound. They felt themselves alone in the dead city, and they did not speak.

At length they came to a canal gliding towards the sea; they followed it inland, and here the darkness was equal to the silence. Great trees that had been planted when William of Orange was king in England threw their shade over the water, shutting out the stars. They wandered along on the soft earth, they could not hear themselves walk — and they did not speak.

They came to a bridge over the canal and stood on it, looking at the water and the trees above them, and the water and the trees below them — and they did not speak.

Then out of the darkness came another darkness, and gradually loomed forth the heaviness of a barge. Noiselessly it glided down the stream, very slowly; at the end of it a boy stood at the tiller, steering; and it passed beneath them and beyond, till it lost itself in the night, and again they were alone.

They stood side by side, leaning against the parapet, looking down at the water.... And from the water rose up Love, and Love fluttered down from the trees, and Love was borne along upon the night air. Ferdinand did not know what was happening to him; he felt Valentia by his side, and he drew closer to her, till her dress touched his legs and the silk of her sleeve rubbed against his arm. It was so dark that he could not see her face; he wondered of what she was thinking. She made a little movement and to him came a faint wave of the scent she wore. Presently two forms passed by on the bank and they saw a lover with his arm round a girl’s waist, and then they too were hidden in the darkness. Ferdinand trembled as he spoke.

‘Only Love is waking!’

‘And we!’ she said.

‘And — you!’

He wondered why she said nothing. Did she understand? He put his hand on her arm.

‘Valentia!’

He had never called her by her Christian name before. She turned her face towards him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, Valentia, I love you! I can’t help it.’

A sob burst from her.

‘Didn’t you understand,’ he said, ‘all those hours that I sat for you while you painted, and these long nights in which we wandered by the water?’

‘I thought you were my friend.’

‘I thought so too. When I sat before you and watched you paint, and looked at your beautiful hair and your eyes, I thought I was your friend. And I looked at the lines of your body beneath your dress. And when it pleased me to carry your easel and walk with you, I thought it was friendship. Only to-night I know I am in love. Oh, Valentia, I am so glad!’

She could not keep back her tears. Her bosom heaved, and she wept.

‘You are a woman,’ he said. ‘Did you not see?’

‘I am so sorry,’ she said, her voice all broken. ‘I thought we were such good friends. I was so happy. And now you have spoilt it all.’

‘Valentia, I love you.’

‘I thought our friendship was so good and pure. And I felt so strong in it. It seemed to me so beautiful.’

‘Did you think I was less a man than the fisherman you see walking beneath the trees at night?’

‘It is all over now,’ she sighed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t stay here with you alone.’

‘You’re not going away?’

‘Before, there was no harm in our being together at the hotel; but now—’

‘Oh, Valentia, don’t leave me. I can’t — I can’t live without you.’

She heard the unhappiness in his voice. She turned to him again and laid her two hands on his shoulders.

‘Why can’t you forget it all, and let us be good friends again? Forget that you are a man. A woman can remain with a man for ever, and always be content to walk and read and talk with him, and never think of anything else. Can you forget it, Ferdinand? You will make me so happy.’

He did not answer, and for a long time they stood on the bridge in silence. At last he sighed — a heartbroken sigh.

‘Perhaps you’re right. It may be better to pretend that we are friends. If you like, we will forget all this.’

Her heart was too full; she could not answer; but she held out her hands to him. He took them in his own, and, bending down, kissed them.

Then they walked home, side by side, without speaking.

V

Next morning Valentia received M. Rollo’s answer to her letter. He apologised for his delay in answering.

‘You are a philosopher,’ he said — she could see the little snigger with which he had written the words— ‘You are a philosopher, and I was afraid lest my reply should disturb the course of your reflections on friendship. I confess that I did not entirely understand your letter, but I gathered that the sentiments were correct, and it gave me great pleasure to know that your experiment has had such excellent results. I gather that you have not yet discovered that there is more than a verbal connection between Friendship and Love.’

The reference is to the French equivalents of those states of mind.

‘But to speak seriously, dear child. You are young and beautiful now, but not so very many years shall pass before your lovely skin becomes coarse and muddy, and your teeth yellow, and the wrinkles appear about your mouth and eyes. You have not so very many years before you in which to collect sensations, and the recollection of one’s loves is, perhaps, the greatest pleasure left to one’s old age. To be virtuous, my dear, is admirable, but there are so many interpretations of virtue. For myself, I can say that I have never regretted the temptations to which I succumbed, but often the temptations I have resisted. Therefore, love, love, love! And remember that if love at sixty in a man is sometimes pathetic, in a woman at forty it is always ridiculous. Therefore, take your youth in both hands and say to yourself, “Life is short, but let me live before I die!”’

She did not show the letter to Ferdinand.

Next day it rained. Valentia retired to a room at the top of the house and began to paint, but the incessant patter on the roof got on her nerves; the painting bored her, and she threw aside the brushes in disgust. She came downstairs and found Ferdinand in the dining-room, standing at the window looking at the rain. It came down in one continual steady pour, and the water ran off the raised brickwork of the middle of the street to the gutters by the side, running along in a swift and murky rivulet. The red brick of the opposite house looked cold and cheerless in the wet.... He did not turn or speak to her as she came in. She remarked that it did not look like leaving off. He made no answer. She drew a chair to the second window and tried to read, but she could not understand what she was reading. And she looked out at the pouring rain and the red brick house opposite. She wondered why he had not answered.

The innkeeper brought them their luncheon. Ferdinand took no notice of the preparations.

‘Will you come to luncheon, Mr White?’ she said to him. ‘It is quite ready.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gravely, as he took his seat.

He looked at her quickly, and then immediately dropping his eyes, began eating. She wished he would not look so sad; she was very sorry for him.

She made an observation and he appeared to rouse himself. He replied and they began talking, very calmly and coldly, as if they had not known one another five minutes. They talked of Art with the biggest of A’s, and they compared Dutch painting with Italian; they spoke of Rembrandt and his life.

‘Rembrandt had passion,’ said Ferdinand, bitterly, ‘and therefore he was unhappy. It is only the sexless, passionless creature, the block of ice, that can be happy in this world.’

She blushed and did not answer.

The afternoon Valentia spent in her room, pretending to write letters, and she wondered whether Ferdinand was wishing her downstairs.

At dinner they sought refuge in abstractions. They talked of dykes and windmills and cigars, the history of Holland and its constitution, the constitution of the United States and the edifying spectacle of the politics of that blessed country. They talked of political economy and pessimism and cattle rearing, the state of agriculture in England, the foreign policy of the day, Anarchism, the President of the French Republic. They would have talked of bi-metallism if they could. People hearing them would have thought them very learned and extraordinarily staid.

At last they separated, and as she undressed Valentia told herself that Ferdinand had kept his promise. Everything was just as it had been before, and the only change was that he used her Christian name. And she rather liked him to call her Valentia.

But next day Ferdinand did not seem able to command himself. When Valentia addressed him, he answered in monosyllables, with eyes averted; but when she had her back turned, she felt that he was looking at her. After breakfast she went away painting haystacks, and was late for luncheon.

She apologised.

‘It is of no consequence,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the ground. And those were the only words he spoke to her during the remainder of the day. Once, when he was looking at her surreptitiously, and she suddenly turned round, their eyes met, and for a moment he gazed straight at her, then walked away. She wished he would not look so sad. As she was going to bed, she held out her hand to him to say good-night, and she added, —

‘I don’t want to make you unhappy, Mr White. I’m very sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘You can’t help it, if you’re a stock and a stone.’

He went away without taking the proffered hand. Valentia cried that night.

In the morning she found a note outside her door: —

‘Pardon me if I was rude, but I was not master of myself. I am going to Volendam; I hate Monnickendam.’

VI

Ferdinand arrived at Volendam. It was a fishing village, only three miles across country from Monnickendam, but the route, by steam tram and canal, was so circuitous, that, with luggage, it took one two hours to get from place to place. He had walked over there with Valentia, and it had almost tempted them to desert Monnickendam. Ferdinand took a room at the hotel and walked out, trying to distract himself. The village consisted of a couple of score of houses, built round a semi-circular dyke against the sea, and in the semi-circle lay the fleet of fishing boats. Men and women were sitting at their doors mending nets. He looked at the fishermen, great, sturdy fellows, with rough, weather-beaten faces, huge earrings dangling from their ears. He took note of their quaint costume — black stockings and breeches, the latter more baggy than a Turk’s, and the crushed strawberry of their high jackets, cut close to the body. He remembered how he had looked at them with Valentia, and the group of boys and men that she had sketched. He remembered how they walked along, peeping into the houses, where everything was spick and span, as only a Dutch cottage can be, with old Delft plates hanging on the walls, and pots and pans of polished brass. And he looked over the sea to the island of Marken, with its masts crowded together, like a forest without leaf or branch. Coming to the end of the little town he saw the church of Monnickendam, the red steeple half-hidden by the trees. He wondered where Valentia was — what she was doing.

But he turned back resolutely, and, going to his room, opened his books and began reading. He rubbed his eyes and frowned, in order to fix his attention, but the book said nothing but Valentia. At last he threw it aside and took his Plato and his dictionary, commencing to translate a difficult passage, word for word. But whenever he looked up a word he could only see Valentia, and he could not make head or tail of the Greek. He threw it aside also, and set out walking. He walked as hard as he could — away from Monnickendam.

The second day was not quite so difficult, and he read till his mind was dazed, and then he wrote letters home and told them he was enjoying himself tremendously, and he walked till he felt his legs dropping off.

Next morning it occurred to him that Valentia might have written. Trembling with excitement, he watched the postman coming down the street — but he had no letter for Ferdinand. There would be no more post that day.

But the next day Ferdinand felt sure there would be a letter for him; the postman passed by the hotel door without stopping. Ferdinand thought he should go mad. All day he walked up and down his room, thinking only of Valentia. Why did she not write?

The night fell and he could see from his window the moon shining over the clump of trees about Monnickendam church — he could stand it no longer. He put on his hat and walked across country; the three miles were endless; the church and the trees seemed to grow no nearer, and at last, when he thought himself close, he found he had a bay to walk round, and it appeared further away than ever.

He came to the mouth of the canal along which he and Valentia had so often walked. He looked about, but he could see no one. His heart beat as he approached the little bridge, but Valentia was not there. Of course she would not come out alone. He ran to the hotel and asked for her. They told him she was not in. He walked through the town; not a soul was to be seen. He came to the church; he walked round, and then — right at the edge of the trees — he saw a figure sitting on a bench.

She was dressed in the same flowered dress which she had worn when he likened her to a Dresden shepherdess; she was looking towards Volendam.

He went up to her silently. She sprang up with a little shriek.

‘Ferdinand!’

‘Oh, Valentia, I cannot help it. I could not remain away any longer. I could do nothing but think of you all day, all night. If you knew how I loved you! Oh, Valentia, have pity on me! I cannot be your friend. It’s all nonsense about friendship; I hate it. I can only love you. I love you with all my heart and soul, Valentia.’

She was frightened.

‘Oh! how can you stand there so coldly and watch my agony? Don’t you see? How can you be so cold?’

‘I am not cold, Ferdinand,’ she said, trembling. ‘Do you think I have been happy while you were away?’

‘Valentia!’

‘I thought of you, too, Ferdinand, all day, all night. And I longed for you to come back. I did not know till you went that — I loved you.’

‘Oh, Valentia!’

He took her in his arms and pressed her passionately to him.

‘No, for God’s sake!’

She tore herself away. But again he took her in his arms, and this time he kissed her on the mouth. She tried to turn her face away.

‘I shall kill myself, Ferdinand!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In those long hours that I sat here looking towards you, I felt I loved you — I loved you as passionately as you said you loved me. But if you came back, and — anything happened — I swore that I would throw myself in the canal.’

He looked at her.

‘I could not — live afterwards,’ she said hoarsely. ‘It would be too horrible. I should be — oh, I can’t think of it!’

He took her in his arms again and kissed her.

‘Have mercy on me!’ she cried.

‘You love me, Valentia.’

‘Oh, it is nothing to you. Afterwards you will be just the same as before. Why cannot men love peacefully like women? I should be so happy to remain always as we are now, and never change. I tell you I shall kill myself.’

‘I will do as you do, Valentia.’

‘You?’

‘If anything happens, Valentia,’ he said gravely, ‘we will go down to the canal together.’

She was horrified at the idea; but it fascinated her.

‘I should like to die in your arms,’ she said.

For the second time he bent down and took her hands and kissed them. Then she went alone into the silent church, and prayed.

VII

They went home. Ferdinand was so pleased to be at the hotel again, near her. His bed seemed so comfortable; he was so happy, and he slept, dreaming of Valentia.

The following night they went for their walk, arm in arm; and they came to the canal. From the bridge they looked at the water. It was very dark; they could not hear it flow. No stars were reflected in it, and the trees by its side made the depth seem endless. Valentia shuddered. Perhaps in a little while their bodies would be lying deep down in the water. And they would be in one another’s arms, and they would never be separated. Oh, what a price it was to pay! She looked tearfully at Ferdinand, but he was looking down at the darkness beneath them, and he was intensely grave.

And they wandered there by day and looked at the black reflection of the trees. And in the heat it seemed so cool and restful....

They abandoned their work. What did pictures and books matter now? They sauntered about the meadows, along shady roads; they watched the black and white cows sleepily browsing, sometimes coming to the water’s edge to drink, and looking at themselves, amazed. They saw the huge-limbed milkmaids come along with their little stools and their pails, deftly tying the cow’s hind legs that it might not kick. And the steaming milk frothed into the pails and was poured into huge barrels, and as each cow was freed, she shook herself a little and recommenced to browse.

And they loved their life as they had never loved it before.

One evening they went again to the canal and looked at the water, but they seemed to have lost their emotions before it. They were no longer afraid. Ferdinand sat on the parapet and Valentia leaned against him. He bent his head so that his face might touch her hair. She looked at him and smiled, and she almost lifted her lips. He kissed them.

‘Do you love me, Ferdinand?’

He gave the answer without words.

Their faces were touching now, and he was holding her hands. They were both very happy.

‘You know, Ferdinand,’ she whispered, ‘we are very foolish.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Monsieur Rollo said that folly was the chief attribute of man.’

‘What did he say of love?’

‘I forget.’

Then, after a pause, he whispered in her ear, —

‘I love you!’

And she held up her lips to him again.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘we’re only human beings. We can’t help it. I think—’

She hesitated; what she was going to say had something of the anti-climax in it.

‘I think — it would be very silly if — if we threw ourselves in the horrid canal.’

‘Valentia, do you mean — ?’

She smiled charmingly as she answered, —

‘What you will, Ferdinand.’

Again he took both her hands, and, bending down, kissed them.... But this time she lifted him up to her and kissed him on the lips.

VIII

One night after dinner I told this story to my aunt.

‘But why on earth didn’t they get married?’ she asked, when I had finished.

‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘It never occurred to me.’

‘Well, I think they ought,’ she said.

‘Oh, I have no doubt they did. I expect they got on their bikes and rode off to the Consulate at Amsterdam there and then. I’m sure it would have been his first thought.’

‘Of course, some girls are very queer,’ said my aunt.

FAITH

I

The moon shone fitfully through the clouds on to the weary face of Brother Jasper kneeling in his cell. His hands were fervently clasped, uplifted to the crucifix that hung on the bare wall, and he was praying, praying as he had never prayed before. All through the hours of night, while the monks were sleeping, Brother Jasper had been supplicating his God for light; but in his soul remained a darkness deeper than that of the blackest night. At last he heard the tinkling of the bell that called the monks to prayers, and with a groan lifted himself up. He opened his cell door and went out into the cloister. With down-turned face he walked along till he came to the chapel, and, reaching his seat, sank again heavily to his knees.

The lights in the chapel were few enough, for San Lucido was nearly the poorest monastery in Spain; a few dim candles on the altar threw long shadows on the pavement, and in the choir their yellow glare lit up uncouthly the pale faces of the monks. When Brother Jasper stood up, the taper at his back cast an unnatural light over him, like a halo, making his great black eyes shine strangely from their deep sockets, while below them the dark lines and the black shadow of his shaven chin gave him an unearthly weirdness. He looked like a living corpse standing in the brown Franciscan cowl — a dead monk doomed for some sin to wander through the earth till the day, the Day of Judgment; and in the agony of that weary face one could almost read the terrors of eternal death.

The monks recited the service with their heavy drone, and the sound of the harsh men’s voices ascended to the vault, dragging along the roof. But Jasper heard not what they said; he rose and knelt as they did; he uttered the words; he walked out of the church in his turn, and through the cloister to his cell. And he threw himself on the floor and beat his head against the hard stones, weeping passionately. And he cried out, —

‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

For Brother Jasper did not believe.

II

Two days before, the monk, standing amid the stunted shrubs on the hill of San Lucido, had looked out on the arid plain before him. It was all brown and grey, the desolate ground strewn with huge granite boulders, treeless; and for the wretched sheep who fed there, thin and scanty grass; the shepherd, in his tattered cloak, sat on a rock, moodily, paying no heed to his flock, dully looking at the desert round him. Brother Jasper gazed at the scene as he had gazed for three years since he had come to San Lucido, filled with faith and great love for God. In those days he had thought nothing of the cold waste as his eyes rested on it; the light of heaven shed a wonderful glow on the scene, and when at sunset the heavy clouds were piled one above the other, like huge, fantastic mountains turned into golden fire, when he looked beyond them and saw the whole sky burning red and then a mass of yellow and gold, he could imagine that God was sitting there on His throne of fire, with Christ on His right hand in robes of light and glory, and Mary the Queen on His left. And above them the Dove with its outstretched wings, the white bird hovering in a sea of light! And it seemed so near! Brother Jasper felt in him almost the power to go there, to climb up those massy clouds of fire and attain the great joy — the joy of the presence of God.

The sun sank slowly, the red darkened into purple, and over the whole sky came a colour of indescribable softness, while in the east, very far away, shone out the star. And soon the soft faint blue sank before the night, and the stars in the sky were countless; but still in the west there was the shadow of the sun, a misty gleam. Over the rocky plain the heavens seemed so great, so high, that Brother Jasper sank down in his insignificance; yet he remembered the glories of the sunset, and felt that he was almost at the feet of God.

But now, when he looked at the clouds and the sun behind them, he saw no God; he saw the desert plain, the barrenness of the earth, the overladen, wretched donkey staggering under his pannier, and the broad-hatted peasant urging him on. He looked at the sunset and tried to imagine the Trinity that sat there, but he saw nothing. And he asked himself, —

‘Why should there be a God?’

He started up with a cry of terror, with his hands clasped to his head.

‘My God! what have I done?’

He sank to his knees, humiliating himself. What vengeance would fall on him? He prayed passionately. But again the thought came; he shrieked with terror, he invoked the Mother of God to help him.

‘Why should there be a God?’

He could not help it. The thought would not leave him that all this might exist without. How did he know? How could anyone be sure, quite sure? But he drove the thoughts away, and in his cell imposed upon himself a penance. It was Satan that stood whispering in his ear, Satan lying in wait for his soul; let him deny God and he would be damned for ever.

He prayed with all his strength, he argued with himself, he cried out, ‘I believe! I believe!’ but in his soul was the doubt. The terror made him tremble like a leaf in the wind, and great drops of sweat stood on his forehead and ran heavily down his cheek. He beat his head against the wall, and in his agony swayed from side to side.... But he could not believe.

III

And for two days he had endured the torments of hell-fire, battling against himself — in vain. The heavy lines beneath his eyes grew blacker than the night, his lips were pale with agony and fasting. He had not dared to speak to anyone, he could not tell them, and in him was the impulse to shout out, ‘Why should there be?’ Now he could bear it no longer. In the morning he went to the prior’s cell, and, falling on his knees, buried his face in the old man’s lap.

‘Oh, father, help me! help me!’

The prior was old and wasted; for fifty years he had lived in the desert Castilian plain in the little monastery — all through his youth and manhood, through his age; and now he was older than anyone at San Lucido. White haired and wrinkled, but with a clear, rosy skin like a boy’s; his soft blue eyes had shone with light, but a cataract had developed, and gradually his sight had left him till he could barely see the crucifix in his cell and the fingers of his hand; at last he could only see the light. But the prior did not lose the beautiful serenity of his life; he was always happy and kind; and feeling that his death could not now be very distant, he was filled with a heavenly joy that he would shortly see the face of God. Long hours he sat in his chair looking at the light with an indescribably charming smile hovering on his lips.

His voice broken by sobs, Brother Jasper told his story, while the prior gently stroked the young man’s hands and face.

‘Oh, father, make me believe!’

‘One cannot force one’s faith, my dear. It comes, it goes, and no man knows the wherefore. Faith does not come from reasoning; it comes from God.... Pray for it and rest in peace.’

‘I want to believe so earnestly. I am so unhappy!’

‘You are not the only one who has been tried, my son. Others have doubted before you and have been saved.’

‘But if I died to-night — I should die in mortal sin.’

‘Believe that God counts the attempt as worthy as the achievement.’

‘Oh, pray for me, father, pray for me! I cannot stand alone. Give me your strength.’

‘Go in peace, my son; I will pray for you, and God will give you strength!’

Jasper went away.

Day followed day, and week followed week; the spring came, and the summer; but there was no difference in the rocky desert of San Lucido. There were no trees to bud and burst into leaf, no flowers to bloom and fade; biting winds gave way to fiery heat, the sun beat down on the plain, and the sky was cloudless, cloudless — even the nights were so hot that the monks in their cells gasped for breath. And Brother Jasper brooded over the faith that was dead; and in his self-torment his cheeks became so hollow that the bones of his face seemed about to pierce the skin, the flesh shrunk from his hands, and the fingers became long and thin, like the claws of a vulture. He used to spend long hours with the prior, while the old man talked gently, trying to bring faith to the poor monk, that his soul might rest. But one day, in the midst of the speaking, the prior stopped, and Jasper saw an expression of pain pass over his face.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing, my son,’ he replied, smiling.... ‘We enter the world with pain, and with pain we leave it!’

‘What do you mean? Are you ill? Father! father!’

The prior opened his mouth and showed a great sloughing sore; he put Jasper’s fingers to his neck and made him feel the enlarged and hardened glands.

‘What is it? You must see a surgeon.’

‘No surgeon can help me, Brother Jasper. It is cancer, the Crab — it is the way that God has sent to call me to Himself.’

Then the prior began to suffer the agonies of the disease, terrible pains shot through his head and neck; he could not swallow. It was a slow starvation; the torment kept him awake through night after night, and only occasionally his very exhaustion gave him a little relief so that he slept. Thinner and thinner he became, and his whole mouth was turned into a putrid, horrible sore. But yet he never murmured. Brother Jasper knelt by his bed, looking at him pitifully.

‘How can you suffer it all? What have you done that God should give you this? Was it not enough that you were blind?’

‘Ah, I saw such beautiful things after I became blind — all heaven appeared before me.’

‘It is unjust — unjust!’

‘My son, all is just.’

‘You drive me mad!... Do you still believe in the merciful goodness of God?’

A beautiful smile broke through the pain on the old man’s face.

‘I still believe in the merciful goodness of God!’

There was a silence. Brother Jasper buried his face in his hands and thought brokenheartedly of his own affliction. How happy he could be if he had that faith.... But the silence in the room was more than the silence of people who did not speak. Jasper looked up suddenly.

The prior was dead.

Then the monk bent over the body and looked at the face into the opaque white eyes; there was no difference, the flesh was warm — everything was just the same, and yet ... and yet he was dead. What did they mean by saying the soul had fled? What had happened? Jasper understood nothing of it. And afterwards, before the funeral, when he looked at the corpse again, and it was cold and a horrible blackness stained the lips, he felt sure.

Brother Jasper could not believe in the resurrection of the dead. And the soul — what did they mean by the soul?

IV

Then a great loneliness came over him; the hours of his life seemed endless, and there was no one in whom he could find comfort. The prior had given him a ray of hope, but he was gone, and now Jasper was alone in the world.... And beyond? Oh! how could one be certain? It was awful this perpetual doubt, recurring more strongly than ever. Men had believed so long. Think of all the beautiful churches that had been made in the honour of God, and the pictures. Think of the works that had been done for his love, the martyrs who had cheerfully given up their lives. It seemed impossible that it should be all for nothing. But — but Jasper could not believe. And he cried out to the soul of the prior, resting in heaven, to come to him and help him. Surely, if he really were alive again, he would not let the poor monk whom he had loved linger in this terrible uncertainty. Jasper redoubled his prayers; for hours he remained on his knees, imploring God to send him light.... But no light came, and exhausted Brother Jasper sank into despair.

The new prior was a tall, gaunt man, with a great hooked nose and heavy lips; his keen, dark eyes shone fiercely from beneath his shaggy brows. He was still young, full of passionate energy. And with large gesture and loud, metallic voice he loved to speak of hell-fire and the pains of the damned, hating the Jews and heretics with a bitter personal hatred.

‘To the stake!’ he used to say. ‘The earth must be purged of this vermin, and it must be purged by fire.’

He exacted the most absolute obedience from the monks, and pitiless was the punishment for any infringement of his rules.... Brother Jasper feared the man with an almost unearthly terror; when he felt resting upon him the piercing black eyes, he trembled in his seat, and a cold sweat broke out over him. If the prior knew — the thought almost made him faint. And yet the fear of it seemed to drag him on; like a bird before a serpent, he was fascinated. Sometimes he felt sudden impulses to tell him — but the vengeful eyes terrified him.

One day he was in the cloister, looking out at the little green plot in the middle where the monks were buried, wondering confusedly whether all that prayer and effort had been offered up to empty images of what — of the fear of Man? Turning round, he started back and his heart beat, for the prior was standing close by, looking at him with those horrible eyes. Brother Jasper trembled so that he could scarcely stand; he looked down.

‘Brother Jasper!’ The prior’s voice seemed sterner than it had ever been before. ‘Brother Jasper!’

‘Father!’

‘What have you to tell me?’

Jasper looked up at him; the blood fled from his lips.

‘Nothing, my father!’ The prior looked at him firmly, and Jasper thought he read the inmost secrets of his heart.

‘Speak, Brother Jasper!’ said the prior, and his voice was loud and menacing.

Then hurriedly, stuttering in his anxiety, the monk confessed his misery.... A horror came over the prior’s face as he listened, and Jasper became so terrified that he could hardly speak; but the prior seemed to recover himself, and interrupted him with a furious burst of anger.

‘You look over the plain and do not see God, and for that you doubt Him? Miserable fool!’

‘Oh, father, have mercy on me! I have tried so hard. I want to believe. But I cannot.’

‘I cannot! I cannot! What is that? Have men believed for a thousand years — has God performed miracle after miracle — and a miserable monk dares to deny Him?’

‘I cannot believe!’

‘You must!’ His voice was so loud that it rang through the cloisters. He seized Jasper’s clasped hands, raised in supplication before him, and forced him to his knees. ‘I tell you, you shall believe!’

Quivering with wrath, he looked at the prostrate form at his feet, moved by convulsive weeping. He raised his hand as if to strike the monk, but with difficulty contained himself.

Then the prior bade Brother Jasper go to the church and wait. The monks were gathered together, all astonished. They stood in their usual places, but Jasper remained in the middle, away from them, with head cast down. The prior called out to them in his loud, clear voice, —

‘Pray, my brethren, pray for the soul of Brother Jasper, which lies in peril of eternal death.’

The monks looked at him suddenly, and Brother Jasper’s head sank lower, so that no one could see his face. The prior sank to his knees and prayed with savage fervour. Afterwards the monks went their ways; but when Jasper passed them they looked down, and when by chance he addressed a novice, the youth hurried from him without answering. They looked upon him as accursed. The prior spoke no more, but often Jasper felt his stern gaze resting on him, and a shiver would pass through him. In the services Jasper stood apart from the rest, like an unclean thing; he did not join in their prayers, listening confusedly to their monotonous droning; and when a pause came and he felt all eyes turn to him, he put his hands to his face to hide himself.

‘Pray, my brethren, pray for the soul of Brother Jasper, which lies in peril of eternal death.’

V

In his cell the monk would for days sit apathetically looking at the stone wall in front of him, sore of heart; the hours would pass by unnoticed, and only the ringing of the chapel bell awoke him from his stupor. And sometimes he would be seized with sudden passion and, throwing himself on his knees, pour forth a stream of eager, vehement prayer. He remembered the penances which the seraphic father imposed on his flesh — but he always had faith; and Jasper would scourge himself till he felt sick and faint, and, hoping to gain his soul by mortification of the body, refuse the bread and water which was thrust into his cell, and for a long while eat nothing. He became so weak and ill that he could hardly stand; and still no help came.

Then he took it into his head that God would pity him and send a miracle to drive away his uncertainty. Was he not anxious to believe, if only he could? — so anxious! God would not send a miracle to a poor monk.... Yet miracles had been performed for smaller folk than he — for shepherds and tenders of swine. But Christ himself had said that miracles only came by faith, but — Jasper remembered that often the profligate and the harlot had been brought to repentance by a vision. Even the Holy Francis had been but a loose gallant till Christ appeared to him. Yet, if Christ had appeared, it showed — ah! but how could one be sure? it might only have been a dream. Let a vision appear to him and he would believe. Oh, how enchanted he would be to believe, to rest in peace, to know that before him, however hard the life, were eternal joy and the kingdom of heaven.

But Brother Jasper put his hands to his head cruelly aching. He could not understand, he could not know — the doubt weighed on his brain like a sheet of lead; he felt inclined to tear his skull apart to relieve the insupportable pressure. How endless life was! Why could it not finish quickly and let him know? But supposing there really was a God, He would exact terrible vengeance. What punishment would He inflict on the monk who had denied Him — who had betrayed Him like a second Judas? Then a fantastic idea came into his crazy brain. Was it Satan that put all these doubts into his head? If it were, Satan must exist; and if he did, God existed too. He knew that the devil stood ready to appear to all who called. If Christ would not appear, let Satan show himself. It meant hell-fire; but if God were, the monk felt he was damned already — for the truth he would give his soul!

The idea sent a coldness through him, so that he shivered; but it possessed him, and he exulted, thinking that he would know at last. He rose from his bed — it was the dead of night and all the monks were sleeping — and, trembling with cold, began to draw with chalk strange figures on the floor. He had seen them long ago in an old book of magic, and their fantastic shapes, fascinating him, had remained in his memory.

In the centre of the strange confusion of triangles he stood and uttered in a husky voice the invocation. He murmured uncouth words in an unknown language, and bade Satan stand forth.... He expected a thunderclap, the flashing of lightning, sulphurous fumes — but the night remained silent and quiet; not a sound broke the stillness of the monastery; the snow outside fell steadily.

VI

Next day the prior sent for him and repeated his solemn question.

‘Brother Jasper, what have you to say to me?’

And absolutely despairing, Jasper answered, —

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing!’

Then the prior strode up to him in wrath and smote him on the cheek.

‘It is a devil within you — a devil of obstinacy and pride. You shall believe!’

He cried to monks to lay hold of him; they dragged him roughly to the cloisters, and stripping him of his cowl tied it round his waist, and bound him by the hands to a pillar.... And the prior ordered them to give Jasper eight-and-thirty strokes with the scourge — one less than Christ — that the devil might be driven out. The scourge was heavy and knotted, and the porter bared his arms that he might strike the better; the monks stood round in eager expectation. The scourge whizzed through the air and came down with a thud on Jasper’s bare shoulders; a tremor passed through him, but he did not speak. Again it came down, and as the porter raised it for the third time the monks saw great bleeding weals on Brother Jasper’s back. Then, as the scourge fell heavily, a terrible groan burst from him. The porter swung his arm, and this time a shriek broke from the wretched monk; the blows came pitilessly and Jasper lost all courage. He shrieked with agony, imploring them to stop.

But ferociously the prior cried, —

‘Did Christ bear in silence forty stripes save one, and do you cry out like a woman before you have had ten!’

The porter went on, and the prior’s words were interrupted by piercing shrieks.

‘It is the devil crying out within him,’ said the monks, gloating on the bleeding back and the face of agony.

Heavy drops of sweat ran off the porter’s face and his arm began to tire; but he seized the handle with both hands and swung the knotted ropes with all his strength.

Jasper fainted.

‘See!’ said the prior. ‘See the fate of him who has not faith in God!’

The cords with which he was tied prevented the monk from falling, and stroke after stroke fell on his back till the number was completed. Then they loosed him from the column, and he sank senseless and bleeding to the ground. They left him. Brother Jasper regained slowly his senses, lying out in the cold cloister with the snow on the graves in the middle; his hands and feet were stiff and blue. He shivered and drew himself together for warmth, then a groan burst from him, feeling the wounds of his back. Painfully he lifted himself up and crawled to the chapel door; he pushed it open, and, staggering forward, fell on his face, looking towards the altar. He remained there long, dazed and weary, pulling his cowl close round him to keep out the bitter cold. The pain of his body almost relieved the pain of his mind; he wished dumbly that he could lie there and die, and be finished with it all. He did not know the time; he wondered whether any service would soon bring the monks to disturb him. He took sad pleasure in the solitude, and in the great church the solitude seemed more intense. Oh, and he hated the monks! it was cruel, cruel, cruel! He put his hands to his face and sobbed bitterly.

But suddenly a warmth fell on him; he looked up, and the glow seemed to come from the crucified Christ in the great painted window by the altar. The monk started up with a cry and looked eagerly; the bell began to ring. The green colour of death was becoming richer, the glass gained the fulness of real flesh; now it was a soft round whiteness. And Brother Jasper cried out in ecstasy, —

‘It is Christ!’

Then the glow deepened, and from the Crucified One was shed a wonderful light like the rising of the sun behind the mountains, and the church was filled with its rich effulgence.

‘Oh, God, it is moving!’

The Christ seemed to look at Brother Jasper and bow His head.

Two by two the monks walked silently in, and Brother Jasper lifted up his arms, crying:

‘Behold a miracle! Christ has appeared to me!’

A murmur of astonishment broke from them, and they looked at Jasper gazing in ecstasy at the painted window.

‘Christ has appeared to me.... I am saved!’

Then the prior came up to him and took him in his arms and kissed him.

‘My son, praise be to God! you are whole again.’

But Jasper pushed him aside, so that he might not be robbed of the sight which filled him with rapture; the monks crowded round, questioning, but he took no notice of them. He stood with outstretched arms, looking eagerly, his face lighted up with joy. The monks began to kiss his cowl and his feet, and they touched his hands.

‘I am saved! I am saved!’

And the prior cried to them, —

‘Praise God, my brethren, praise God! for we have saved the soul of Brother Jasper from eternal death.’

But when the service was over and the monks had filed out, Brother Jasper came to himself — and he saw that the light had gone from the window; the Christ was cold and dead, a thing of the handicraft of man. What was it that had happened? Had a miracle occurred? The question flashing through his mind made him cry out. He had prayed for a miracle, and a miracle had been shown him — the poor monk of San Lucido....And now he doubted the miracle. Oh, God must have ordained the damnation of his soul to give him so little strength — perhaps He had sent the miracle that he might have no answer at the Day of Judgment.

‘Faith thou hadst not — I showed Myself to thee in flesh and blood, I moved My head; thou didst not believe thine own eyes.’...

VII

Next day, at vespers, Jasper anxiously fixed his gaze on the stained-glass window — again a glow came from it, and as he moved the head seemed to incline itself; but now Jasper saw it was only the sun shining through the window — only the sun! Then the heaviness descended into the deepest parts of Jasper’s soul, and he despaired.

The night came and Jasper returned to his cell.... He leant against the door, looking out through the little window, but he could only see the darkness. And he likened it to the darkness in his own soul.

‘What shall I do?’ he groaned.

He could not tell the monks that it was not a miracle he had seen; he could not tell them that he had lost faith again.... And then his thoughts wandering to the future, —

‘Must I remain all my life in this cold monastery? If there is no God, if I have but one life, what is the good of it? Why cannot I enjoy my short existence as other men? Am not I young — am not I of the same flesh and blood as they?’

Vague recollections came to him of those new lands beyond the ocean, those lands of sunshine and sweet odours. His mind became filled with a vision of broad rivers, running slow and cool, overshadowed by strange, luxuriant trees. And all was a wealth of beautiful colour.

‘Oh, I cannot stay!’ he cried; ‘I cannot stay!’

And it was a land of loving-kindness, a land of soft-eyed, gentle women.

‘I cannot stay! I cannot stay!’

The desire to go forth was overwhelming, the walls of his cell seemed drawing together to crush him; he must be free. Oh, for life! life! He started up, not seeing the madness of his adventure; he did not think of the snow-covered desert, the night, the distance from a town. He saw before him the glorious sunshine of a new life, and he went towards it like a blind man, with outstretched arms.

Everyone was asleep in the monastery. He crept out of his cell and silently opened the door of the porter’s lodge; the porter was sleeping heavily. Jasper took the keys and unlocked the gate. He was free. He took no notice of the keen wind blowing across the desert; he hurried down the hill, slipping on the frozen snow.... Suddenly he stopped; he had caught sight of the great crucifix which stood by the wayside at the bottom of the hill. Then the madness of it all occurred to him. Wherever he went he would find the crucifix, even beyond the sea, and nowhere would he be able to forget his God. Always the recollection, always the doubt, and he would never have rest till he was in the grave. He went close to it and looked up; it was one of those strange Spanish crucifixes — a wooden image with long, thin arms and legs and protruding ribs, with real hair hanging over the shoulders, and a true crown of thorns placed on the head; the ends of the tattered cloth fastened about the loins fluttered in the wind. In the night the lifelikeness was almost ghastly; it might have been a real man that hung there, with great nails through his feet. The common people paid superstitious reverence to it, and Jasper had often heard the peasants tell of the consolations they had received.

Why should not he too receive consolation? Was his soul not as worth saving as theirs? A last spark of hope filled him, and he lifted himself up on tip-toe to touch the feet.

‘Oh, Christ, come down to me! tell me whether Thou art indeed a God. Oh, Christ, help me!’

But the words lost themselves in the wind and night.... Then a great rage seized him that he alone should receive no comfort. He clenched his fists and beat passionately against the cross.

‘Oh, you are a cruel God! I hate you, I hate you!’

If he could have reached it he would have torn the image down, and beat it as he had been beaten. In his impotent rage he shrieked out curses upon it — he blasphemed.

But his strength spent itself and he sank to the foot of the cross, bursting into tears. In his self-pity he thought his heart was broken. Lifting himself to his knees, he clasped the wood with his hands and looked up for the last time at the dead face of Christ.

It was the end.... A strange peace came over him as the anguish of his mind fell away before the cold. His hands and his feet were senseless, he felt his heart turning to ice — and he felt nothing.

In a little while the snow began to fall, lightly covering his shoulders. Brother Jasper knew the secret of death at last.

VIII

The day broke slowly, dim and grey. There was a hurried knocking at the porter’s door, a peasant with white and startled face said that a brother was kneeling at the great cross in the snow, and would not speak.

The monks sallied forth anxiously, and came to the silent figure, clasping the cross in supplication.

‘Brother Jasper!’

The prior touched his hands; they were as cold as ice.

‘He is dead!’

The villagers crowded round in astonishment, whispering to one another. The monks tried to move him, but his hands, frozen to the cross, prevented them.

‘He died in prayer — he was a saint!’

But a woman with a paralysed arm came near him, and in her curiosity touched his ragged cowl.... Suddenly she felt a warmth pass through her, and the dead arm began to tingle. She cried out in astonishment, and as the people turned to look she moved the fingers.

‘He has restored my arm,’ she said. ‘Look!’

‘A miracle!’ they cried out. ‘A miracle! He is a saint!’

The news spread like fire; and soon they brought a youth lying on a bed, wasted by a mysterious illness, so thin that the bones protruding had formed angry sores on the skin. They touched him with the hem of the monk’s garment, and immediately he roused himself.

‘I am whole; give me to eat!’

A murmur of wonder passed through the crowd. The monks sank to their knees and prayed.

At last they lifted up the dead monk and bore him to the church. But people all round the country crowded to see him; the sick and the paralysed came from afar, and often went away sound as when they were born.

They buried him at last, but still to his tomb they came from all sides, rich and poor; and the wretched monk, who had not faith to cure the disease of his own mind, cured the diseases of those who had faith in him.

THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS

I

Often enough the lover of cities tires of their unceasing noise; the din of the traffic buzzes perpetually in his ears, and even in the silences of night he hears the footfalls on the pavement, the dull stamping of horses, the screeching of wheels; the fog chokes up the lungs so that he cannot breathe; he sees no longer any charms in the tall chimneys of the factory and the heavy smoke winding in curves against the leaden sky; then he flies to countries where the greenness is like cold spring water, where he can hear the budding of the trees and the stars tell him fantastic things, the silence is full of mysterious new emotions. And so the writer sometimes grows weary to death of the life he sees, and he presses his hands before his eyes, that he may hide from him the endless failure in the endless quest; then he too sets sail for Bohemia by the Sea, and the other countries of the Frankly Impossible, where men are always brave and women ever beautiful; there the tears of the morning are followed by laughter at night, trials are easily surmountable, virtue is always triumphant; there no illusions are lost, and lovers live ever happily in a world without end.

II

Once upon a time, very long ago, when the world was younger and more wicked than it is now, there lived in the West Country a man called Peter the Schoolmaster. But he was very different from ordinary schoolmasters, for he was a scholar and a man of letters; he was consequently very poor. All his life he had pored over old books and musty parchments; but from them he had acquired little wisdom, for one bright spring-time he fell in love with a farmer’s daughter — and married her. The farmer’s daughter was a buxom wench, and, to the schoolmaster’s delight — he had a careless, charming soul — she presented him in course of time with a round dozen of sturdy children. Peter compared himself with Priam of Troy, with Jacob, with King Solomon of Israel and with Queen Anne of England. Peter wrote a Latin ode to each offspring in turn, which he recited to the assembled multitude when the midwife put into his arms for the first time the new arrival. There was great rejoicing over the birth of every one of the twelve children; but, as was most proper in a land of primogeniture, the chiefest joy was the first-born; and to him Peter wrote an Horatian ode, which was two stanzas longer than the longest Horace ever wrote. Peter vowed that no infant had ever been given the world’s greeting in so magnificent a manner; certainly he had never himself surpassed that first essay. As he told the parson, to write twelve odes on paternity, twelve greetings to the new-born soul, is a severe tax even on the most fertile imagination.

But the object of all this eloquence was the cause of the first and only quarrel between the gentle schoolmaster and his spouse; for the learned man had dug out of one of his old books the name of Amyntas, and Amyntas he vowed should be the name of his son; so with that trisyllable he finished every stanza of his ode. His wife threw her head back, and, putting her hands on her hips, stood with arms akimbo; she said that never in all her born days had she heard of anyone being called by such a name, which was more fit for a heathen idol than for a plain, straightforward member of the church by law established. In its stead she suggested that the boy be called Peter, after his father, or John, after hers. The gentle schoolmaster was in the habit of giving way to his wife in all things, and it may be surmised that this was the reason why the pair had lived in happiest concord; but now he was firm! He said it was impossible to call the boy by any other name than Amyntas.

‘The name is necessary to the metre of my ode,’ he said. ‘It is its very life. How can I finish my stanzas with Petrus or Johannes? I would sooner die.’

His wife did not think the ode mattered a rap. Peter turned pale with emotion; he could scarcely express himself.

‘Every mother in England has had a child; children have been born since the days of Cain and Abel thicker than the sands of the sea. What is a child? But an ode — my ode! A child is but an ordinary product of man and woman, but a poem is a divine product of the Muses. My poem is sacred; it shall not be defiled by any Petrus or Johannes! Let my house fall about my head, let my household gods be scattered abroad, let the Fates with their serpent hair render desolate my hearth; but do not rob me of my verse. I would sooner lose the light of my eyes than the light of my verse! Ah! let me wander through the land like Homer, sightless, homeless; let me beg my bread from door to door, and I will sing the ode, the ode to Amyntas.’...

He said all this with so much feeling that Mrs Peter began to cry, and, with her apron up to her eyes, said that she didn’t want him to go blind; but even if he did, he should never want, for she would work herself to the bone to keep him. Peter waved his hand in tragic deprecation. No, he would beg his bread from door to door; he would sleep by the roadside in the bitter winter night.

Now, the parson was present during this colloquy, and he proposed an arrangement; and finally it was settled that Peter should have his way in this case, but that Mrs Peter should have the naming of all subsequent additions to the family. So, of the rest, one was called Peter, and one was called John, and there was a Mary, and a Jane, and a Sarah; but the eldest, according to agreement, was christened Amyntas, although to her dying day, notwithstanding the parson’s assurances, the mother was convinced in her heart of hearts that the name was papistical and not fit for a plain, straightforward member of the church by law established.

III

Now, it was as clear as a pikestaff to Peter the Schoolmaster that a person called Amyntas could not go through the world like any other ordinary being; so he devoted particular care to his son’s education, teaching him, which was the way of schoolmasters then as now, very many entirely useless things, and nothing that could be to him of the slightest service in earning his bread and butter.

But twelve children cannot be brought up on limpid air, and there were often difficulties when new boots were wanted; sometimes, indeed, there were difficulties when bread and meat and puddings were wanted. Such things did not affect Peter; he felt not the pangs of hunger as he read his books, and he vastly preferred to use the white and the yolk of an egg in the restoration of an old leather binding than to have it solemnly cooked and thrust into his belly. What cared he for the rantings of his wife and the crying of the children when he could wander in imagination on Mount Ida, clad only in his beauty, and the three goddesses came to him promising wonderful things? He was a tall, lean man, with thin, white hair and blue eyes, but his wrinkled cheeks were still rosy; incessant snuff-taking had given a special character to his nose. And sometimes, taking upon him the spirit of Catullus, he wrote verses to Lesbia, or, beneath the breast-plate of Marcus Aurelius, he felt his heart beat bravely as he marched against the barbarians; he was Launcelot, and he made charming speeches to Guinevere as he kissed her long white hand....

But now and then the clamour of the outer world became too strong, and he had to face seriously the question of his children’s appetite.

It was on one of these occasions that the schoolmaster called his son to his study and said to him, —

‘Amyntas, you are now eighteen years of age. I have taught you all I know, and you have profited by my teaching; you know Greek and Latin as well as I do myself; you are well acquainted with Horace and Tully; you have read Homer and Aristotle; and added to this, you can read the Bible in the original Hebrew. That is to say, you have all knowledge at your fingers’ ends, and you are prepared to go forth and conquer the world. Your mother will make a bundle of your clothes; I will give you my blessing and a guinea, and you can start to-morrow.’

Then he returned to his study of an oration of Isocrates. Amyntas was thunder-struck.

‘But, father, where am I to go?’

The schoolmaster raised his head in surprise, looking at his son over the top of his spectacles.

‘My son,’ he said, with a wave of the arm; ‘my son, you have the world before you — is that not enough?’

‘Yes, father,’ said Amyntas, who thought it was a great deal too much; ‘but what am I to do? I can’t get very far on a guinea.’

‘Amyntas,’ answered Peter, rising from his chair with great dignity, ‘have you profited so ill by the examples of antiquity, which you have had placed before you from your earliest years? Do you not know that riches consist in an equal mind, and happiness in golden mediocrity? Did the wise Odysseus quail before the unknown, because he had only a guinea in his pocket? Shame on the heart that doubts! Leave me, my son, and make ready.’

Amyntas, very crestfallen, left the room and went to his mother to acquaint her with the occurrence. She was occupied in the performance of the family’s toilet.

‘Well, my boy,’ she said, as she scrubbed the face of the last but one, ‘it’s about time that you set about doing something to earn your living, I must say. Now, if instead of learning all this popish stuff about Greek and Latin and Lord knows what, you’d learnt to milk a cow or groom a horse you’d be as right as a trivet now. Well, I’ll put you up a few things in a bundle as your father says and you can start early to-morrow morning.... Now then, darling,’ she added, turning to her Benjamin, ‘come and have your face washed, there’s a dear.’

IV

Amyntas scratched his head, and presently an inspiration came to him.

‘I will go to the parson,’ he said.

The parson had been hunting, and he was sitting in his study in a great oak chair, drinking a bottle of port; his huge body and his red face expressed the very completest satisfaction with the world in general; one felt that he would go to bed that night with the cheerful happiness of duty performed, and snore stentoriously for twelve hours. He was troubled by no qualms of conscience; the Thirty-nine Articles caused him never a doubt, and it had never occurred to him to concern himself with the condition of the working classes. He lived in a golden age, when the pauper was allowed to drink himself to death as well as the nobleman, and no clergyman’s wife read tracts by his bedside....

Amyntas told his news.

‘Well, my boy’ — he never spoke but he shouted— ‘so you’re going away? Well, God bless you!’

Amyntas looked at him expectantly, and the parson, wondering what he expected, came to the conclusion that it was a glass of port, for at that moment he was able to imagine nothing that man could desire more. He smiled benignly upon Amyntas, and poured him out a glass.

‘Drink that, my boy. Keep it in your memory. It’s the finest thing in the world. It’s port that’s made England what she is!’

Amyntas drank the port, but his face did not express due satisfaction.

‘Damn the boy!’ said the parson. ‘Port’s wasted on him.’... Then, thinking again what Amyntas might want, he rose slowly from his chair, stretching his legs. ‘I’m not so young as I used to be; I get stiff after a day’s hunting.’ He walked round his room, looking at his bookshelves; at last he picked out a book and blew the dust off the edges. ‘Here’s a Bible for you, Amyntas. The two finest things in the world are port and the Bible.’

Amyntas thanked him, but without great enthusiasm. Another idea struck the parson, and he shouted out another question.

‘Have you any money?’

Amyntas told him of the guinea.

‘Damn your father! What’s the good of a guinea?’ He went to a drawer and pulled out a handful of gold — the tithes had been paid a couple of days before. ‘Here are ten; a man can go to hell on ten guineas.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Amyntas, pocketing the money, ‘but I don’t think I want to go quite so far just yet.’

‘Then where the devil do you want to go?’ shouted the parson.

‘That’s just what I came to ask you about.’

‘Why didn’t you say so at once? I thought you wanted a glass of port. I’d sooner give ten men advice than one man port.’ He went to the door and called out, ‘Jane, bring me another bottle.’ He drank the bottle in silence, while Amyntas stood before him, resting now upon one leg now upon another, turning his cap round and round in his hands. At last the parson spoke.

‘You may look upon a bottle of port in two ways,’ he said; ‘you may take it as a symbol of a happy life or as a method of thought.... There are four glasses in a bottle. The first glass is full of expectation; you enter life with mingled feelings; you cannot tell whether it will be good or no. The second glass has the full savour of the grape; it is youth with vine-leaves in its hair and the passion of young blood. The third glass is void of emotion; it is grave and calm, like middle age; drink it slowly, you are in full possession of yourself, and it will not come again. The fourth glass has the sadness of death and the bitter sweetness of retrospect.’

He paused a moment for Amyntas to weigh his words.

‘But a bottle of port is a better method of thought than any taught by the school-men. The first glass is that of contemplation — I think of your case; the second is apprehension — an idea occurs to me; the third is elaboration — I examine the idea and weigh the pros and cons; the fourth is realisation — and here I give you the completed scheme. Look at this letter; it is from my old friend Van Tiefel, a Dutch merchant who lives at Cadiz, asking for an English clerk. One of his ships is sailing from Plymouth next Sunday, and it will put in at Cadiz on the way to Turkey.’

Amyntas thought the project could have been formed without a bottle of port, but he was too discreet to say so, and heartily thanked the parson. The good man lived in a time when teetotalism had not ruined the clergy’s nerves, and sanctity was not considered incompatible with a good digestion and common humanity....

V

Amyntas spent the evening bidding tender farewells to a round dozen of village beauties, whose susceptible hearts had not been proof against the brown eyes and the dimples of the youth. There was indeed woe when he spread the news of his departure; and all those maiden eyes ran streams of salt tears as he bade them one by one good-bye; and though he squeezed their hands and kissed their lips, vowing them one and all the most unalterable fidelity, they were perfectly inconsolable. It is an interesting fact to notice that the instincts of the true hero are invariably polygamic....

It was lucky for Amyntas that the parson had given him money, for his father, though he gave him a copy of the Ethics of Aristotle and his blessing, forgot the guinea; and Amyntas was too fearful of another reproach to remind him of it.

Amyntas was up with the lark, and having eaten as largely as he could in his uncertainty of the future, made ready to start. The schoolmaster had retired to his study to conceal his agitation; he was sitting like Agamemnon with a dishcloth over his head, because he felt his face unable to express his emotion. But the boy’s mother stood at the cottage door, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron, surrounded by her weeping children. She threw her arms about her son’s neck, giving him a loud kiss on either cheek, and Amyntas went the round of his brothers and sisters, kissing them and bidding them not forget him. To console them, he promised to bring back green parrots and golden bracelets, and embroidered satins from Japan. As he passed down the village street he shook hands with the good folk standing at their doors to bid him good-bye, and slowly made his way into the open country.

VI

The way of the hero is often very hard, and Amyntas felt as if he would choke as he walked slowly along. He looked back at every step, wondering when he would see the old home again. He loitered through the lanes, taking a last farewell of the nooks and corners where he had sat on summer evenings with some fair female friend, and he heartily wished that his name were James or John, and that he were an ordinary farmer’s son who could earn his living without going out for it into the wide, wide world. So may Dick Whittington have meditated as he trudged the London road, but Amyntas had no talismanic cat and no church bells rang him inspiring messages. Besides, Dick Whittington had in him from his birth the makings of a Lord Mayor — he had the golden mediocrity which is the surest harbinger of success. But to Amyntas the world seemed cold and grey, notwithstanding the sunshine of the morning; and the bare branches of the oak trees were gnarled and twisted like the fingers of evil fate. At last he came to the top of a little hill whence one had the last view of the village. He looked at the red-roofed church nestling among the trees, and in front of the inn he could still see the sign of the ‘Turk’s Head.’ A sob burst from him; he felt he could not leave it all; it would not be so bad if he could see it once more. He might go back at night and wander through the streets; he could stand outside his own home door and look up at his father’s light, perhaps seeing his father’s shadow bent over his books. He cared nothing that his name was Amyntas; he would go to the neighbouring farmers and offer his services as labourer — the village barber wanted an apprentice. Ah! he would ten times sooner be a village Hampden or a songless Milton than any hero! He hid his face in the grass and cried as if his heart were breaking.

Presently he cried himself to sleep, and when he awoke the sun was high in the heavens and he had the very healthiest of appetites. He repaired to a neighbouring inn and ordered bread and cheese and a pot of beer. Oh, mighty is the power of beer! Why am I not a poet, that I may stand with my hair dishevelled, one hand in my manly bosom and the other outstretched with splendid gesture, to proclaim the excellent beauty of beer? Avaunt! ye sallow teetotalers, ye manufacturers of lemonade, ye cocoa-drinkers! You only see the sodden wretch who hangs about the public-house door in filthy slums, blinking his eyes in the glaze of electric light, shivering in his scanty rags — and you do not know the squalor and the terrible despair of hunger which he strives to forget.... But above all, you do not know the glorious ale of the country, the golden brown ale, with its scent of green hops, its broad scents of the country; its foam is whiter than snow and lighter than the almond blossoms; and it is cold, cold.... Amyntas drank his beer, and he sighed with great content; the sun shone hopefully upon him now, and the birds twittered all sorts of inspiring things; still in his mouth was the delightful bitterness of the hops. He threw off care as a mantle, and he stepped forward with joyful heart. Spain was a wild country, the land of the grave hidalgo and the haughty princess. He felt in his strong right arm the power to fight and kill and conquer. Black-bearded villains should capture beautiful maidens on purpose for him to rescue. Van Tiefel was but a stepping-stone; he was not made for the desk of a counting-house. No heights dazzled him; he saw himself being made a peer or a prince, being granted wide domains by a grateful monarch. He was not too low to aspire to the hand of a king’s fair daughter; he was a hero, every inch a hero. Great is the power of beer. Avaunt! ye sallow teetotalers, ye manufacturers of lemonade, ye cocoa-drinkers!

At night he slept on a haystack, with the blue sky, star-bespangled, for his only roof, and dreamed luxurious dreams.... The mile-stones flew past one another as he strode along, two days, three days, four days. On the fifth, as he reached the summit of a little hill, he saw a great expanse of light shining in the distance, and the sea glittered before him like the bellies of innumerable little silver fishes. He went down the hill, up another, and thence saw Plymouth at his feet; the masts of the ships were like a great forest of leafless trees.... He thanked his stars, for one’s imagination is all very well for a while, and the thought of one’s future prowess certainly shortens the time; but roads are hard and hills are steep, one’s legs grow tired and one’s feet grow sore; and things are not so rose-coloured at the end of a journey as at the beginning. Amyntas could not for ever keep thinking of beautiful princesses and feats of arms, and after the second day he had exhausted every possible adventure; he had raised himself to the highest possible altitudes, and his aristocratic amours had had the most successful outcome.

He sat down by a little stream that ran along the roadside, and bathed his aching feet; he washed his face and hands; starting down the hill, he made his way towards the town and entered the gate.

VII

Amyntas discovered Captain Thorman of the good ship Calderon drinking rum punch in a tavern parlour. In those days all men were heroic.... He gave him the parson’s letter.

‘Well, my boy,’ said the captain, after twice reading it; ‘I don’t mind taking you to Cadiz; I daresay you’ll be able to make yourself useful on board. What can you do?’

‘Please, sir,’ answered Amyntas, with some pride, ‘I know Latin and Greek; I am well acquainted with Horace and Tully; I have read Homer and Aristotle; and added to this, I can read the Bible in the original Hebrew.’

The captain looked at him.

‘If you talk to me like that,’ he said, ‘I’ll shy my glass at your head.’ He shook with rage, and the redness of his nose emitted lightning sparks of indignation; when he had recovered his speech, he asked Amyntas why he stood there like an owl, and told him to get on board.

Amyntas bowed himself meekly out of the room, went down to the harbour, and bearing in mind what he had heard of the extreme wickedness of Plymouth, held tightly on to his money; he had been especially warned against the women who lure the unwary seaman into dark dens and rob him of money and life. But no adventure befell him, thanks chiefly to the swiftness of his heels, for when a young lady of prepossessing appearance came up to him and inquired after his health, affectionately putting her arm in his, he promptly took to his legs and fled.

Amyntas was in luck’s way, for it was not often that an English ship carried merchandise to Spain. As a rule, the two powers were at daggers drawn; but at this period they had just ceased cutting one another’s throats and sinking one another’s ships, joining together in fraternal alliance to cut the throats and sink the ships of a rival power, which, till the treaty, had been a faithful and brotherly ally to His Majesty of Great Britain, and which our gracious king had abandoned with unusual dexterity, just as it was preparing to abandon him....

As Amyntas stood on the deck of the ship and saw the grey cliffs of Albion disappear into the sea, he felt the emotions and sentiments which inevitably come to the patriotic Englishman who leaves his native shore; his melancholy became almost unbearable as the ship, getting out into the open sea, began to roll, and he drank to the dregs the bitter cup of leaving England, home, beauty — and terra firma. He went below, and, climbing painfully into his hammock, gave himself over to misery and mal-de-mer.

Two days he spent of lamentation and gnashing of teeth, wishing he had never been born, and not till the third day did he come on deck. He was pale and weak, feeling ever so unheroic, but the sky was blue and the ship bounded over the blue waves as if it were alive. Amyntas sniffed in the salt air and the rushing wind, and felt alive again. The days went by, the sun became hotter, and the sky a different, deeper blue, while its vault spread itself over the sea in a vaster expanse. They came in sight of land again; they coasted down a gloomy country with lofty cliffs going sheer into the sea; they passed magnificent galleons laden with gold from America; and one morning, when Amyntas came on deck at break of day, he saw before him the white walls and red roofs of a southern city. The ship slowly entered the harbour of Cadiz.

VIII

At last! Amyntas went on shore immediately. His spirit was so airy within him that he felt he could hover along in the air, like Mr Lang’s spiritualistic butlers, and it was only by a serious effort of will that he walked soberly down the streets like normal persons. His soul shouted with the joy of living. He took in long breaths as if to breathe in the novelty and the strangeness. He walked along, too excited to look at things, only conscious of a glare of light and colour, a thronging crowd, life and joyousness on every side.... He walked through street after street, almost sobbing with delight, through narrow alleys down which the sun never fell, into big squares hot as ovens and dazzling, up hill and down hill, past ragged slums, past the splendid palaces of the rich, past shops, past taverns. Finally he came on to the shore again and threw himself down in the shade of a little grove of orange trees to sleep.

When he awoke, he saw, standing motionless by his side, a Spanish lady. He looked at her silently, noting her olive skin, her dark and lustrous eyes, the luxuriance of her hair. If she had only possessed a tambourine she would have been the complete realisation of his dreams. He smiled.

‘Why do you lie here alone, sweet youth?’ she asked, with an answering smile. ‘And who and what are you?’

‘I lay down here to rest, lady,’ he replied. ‘I have this day arrived from England, and I am going to Van Tiefel, the merchant.’

‘Ah! a young English merchant. They are all very rich. Are you?’

‘Yes, lady,’ frankly answered Amyntas, pulling out his handful of gold.

The Spaniard smiled on him, and then sighed deeply.

‘Why do you sigh?’ he asked.

‘Ah! you English merchants are so fascinating.’ She took his hand and pressed it. Amyntas was not a forward youth, but he had some experience of English maidens, and felt that there was but one appropriate rejoinder. He kissed her.

She sighed again as she relinquished herself to his embrace.

‘You English merchants are so fascinating — and so rich.’

Amyntas thought the Spanish lady was sent him by the gods, for she took him to her house and gave him melons and grapes, which, being young and of lusty appetite, he devoured with great content. She gave him wine — strong, red, fiery wine, that burned his throat — and she gave him sundry other very delightful things, which it does not seem necessary to relate.

When Amyntas on his departure shyly offered some remuneration for his entertainment, it was with an exquisite southern grace that she relieved him of his ten golden guineas, and he almost felt she was doing him a favour as she carelessly rattled the coins into a silken purse. And if he was a little dismayed to see his treasure go so speedily, he was far too delicate-minded to betray any emotion; but he resolved to lose no time in finding out the offices of the wealthy Tiefel.

IX

But Van Tiefel was no longer in Cadiz! On the outbreak of the treaty, the Spanish authorities had given the Dutch merchant four-and-twenty hours to leave the country, and had seized his property, making him understand that it was only by a signal mercy that his life was spared. Amyntas rushed down to the harbour in dismay. The good ship Calderon had already sailed. Amyntas cursed his luck, he cursed himself; above all, he cursed the lovely Spanish lady whose charms had caused him to delay his search for Van Tiefel till the ship had gone on its eastward journey.

After looking long and wistfully at the sea, he turned back into the town and rambled melancholy through the streets, wondering what would become of him. Soon the pangs of hunger assailed him, and he knew the discomfort of a healthy English appetite. He hadn’t a single farthing, and even Scotch poets, when they come to London to set the Thames on fire, are wont to put a half-crown piece in their pockets. Amyntas meditated upon the folly of extravagance, the indiscretion of youth and the wickedness of woman.... He tightened his belt and walked on. At last, feeling weary and faint with hunger, he lay down on the steps of a church and there spent the night. When he awoke next morning, he soon remembered that he had slept supperless; he was ravenous. Suddenly his eye, looking across the square, caught sight of a book shop, and it occurred to him that he might turn to account the books which his father and the parson had given him. He blessed their foresight. The Bible fetched nothing, but the Aristotle brought him enough to keep him from starvation for a week. Having satisfied his hunger, he set about trying to find work. He went to booksellers and told them his accomplishments, but no one could see any use in a knowledge of Greek, Latin and the Hebrew Bible. He applied at shops. Growing bolder with necessity, he went into merchants’ offices, and to great men’s porters, but all with great civility sent him about his business, and poor Amyntas was no more able to get work than nowadays a professional tramp or the secretary of a trade’s union.

Four days he went on, trying here and trying there, eating figs and melons and bread, drinking water, sleeping beneath archways or on the steps of churches, and he dreamed of the home of roast beef and ale which he had left behind him. Every day he became more disheartened. But at last he rose up against Fate; he cursed it Byronically. Every man’s hand was against him; his hand should be against every man. He would be a brigand! He shook off his feet the dust of Cadiz, and boldly went into the country to find a band of free companions. He stopped herdsmen and pedlars and asked them where brigands were. They pointed to the mountains, and to the mountains he turned his face. He would join the band, provoke a quarrel with the chief, kill him and be made chief in his stead. Then he would scour the country in a velvet mask and a peaked hat with a feather in it, carrying fire and desolation everywhere. A price would be set on his head, but he would snap his fingers in the face of the Prime Minister. He would rule his followers with an iron hand. But now he was in the midst of the mountains, and there were not the smallest signs of lawless folk, not even a gibbet with a skeleton hanging in chains to show where lawless folk had been. He sought high and low, but he never saw a living soul besides a few shepherds clothed in skins. It was most disheartening! Once he saw two men crouching behind a rock, and approached them; but as soon as they saw him they ran away, and although he followed them, shouting that they were not to be afraid since he wanted to be a brigand too, they paid no attention, but only ran the faster, and at last he had to give up the chase for want of breath. One can’t be a robber chief all by oneself, nor is it given to everyone in this world to be a brigand. Amyntas found that even heroes have their limitations.

X

One day, making his way along a rocky path, he found a swineherd guarding his flock.

‘Good-morrow!’ said the man, and asked Amyntas whither he was bound.

‘God knows!’ answered Amyntas. ‘I am wandering at chance, and know not where I go.’

‘Well, youth, stay the night with me, and to-morrow you can set out again. In return for your company I will give you food and shelter.’

Amyntas accepted gratefully, for he had been feeding on herbs for a week, and the prospect of goat’s milk, cheese and black bread was like the feast of Trimalchion. When Amyntas had said his story, the herdsman told him that there was a rich man in the neighbouring village who wanted a swineherd, and in the morning showed him the way to the rich man’s house.

‘I will come a little way with you lest you take the wrong path.’...

They walked along the rocky track, and presently the way divided.

‘This path to the right leads to the village,’ said the man.

‘And this one to the left, swineherd?’

The swineherd crossed himself.

‘Ah! that is the path of evil fortune. It leads to the accursed cavern.’

A cold wind blew across their faces.

‘Come away,’ said the herdsman, shuddering. ‘Do you not feel on your face the cold breath of it?’

‘Tell me what it is,’ said Amyntas. He stood looking at the opening between the low trees.

‘It is a lake of death — a lake beneath the mountain — and the roof of it is held up by marble columns, which were never wrought by the hand of man. Come away! do you not feel on your face the cold breath of it?’

He dragged Amyntas away along the path that led to the village, and when the way was clear before him, turned back, returning to his swine. But Amyntas ran after him.

‘Tell me what they say of the accursed cavern.’

‘They say many things. Some say it is a treasure-house of the Moors, where they have left their wealth. Some say it is an entrance to the enchanted land; some say it is an entrance to hell itself.... Venturous men have gone in to discover the terrible secret, but none has returned to tell it.’

Amyntas wandered slowly towards the village. Were his dreams to end in the herding of swine? What was this cavern of which the herdsman spoke? He felt a strange impulse to go back and look at the dark opening between the little trees from which blew the cold wind.... But perhaps the rich man had a beauteous daughter; history is full of the social successes of swine herds. Amyntas felt a strange thrill as the dark lake came before his mind; he almost heard the lapping of the water.... Kings’ daughters had often looked upon lowly swineherds and raised them to golden thrones. But he could not help going to look again at the dark opening between the little trees. He walked back and again the cold breath blew against his face; he felt in it the icy coldness of the water. It drew him in; he separated the little trees on either side. He walked on as if a hidden power urged him. And now the path became less clear; trees and bushes grew in the way and hindered him, brambles and long creeping plants twisted about his legs and pulled him back. But the wind with its coldness of the black water drew him on.... The birds of the air were hushed, and not one of the thousand insects of the wood uttered a note. Great trees above him hid the light. The silence was ghastly; he felt as if he were the only person in the world.

Suddenly he gave a cry; he had come to the end of the forest, and before him he saw the opening of the cavern. He looked in; he saw black, stagnant water, motionless and heavy, and, as far as the eye could reach, sombre pillars, covered with green, moist slime; they stood half out of the water, supporting the roof, and from the roof oozed moisture which fell in heavy drops, in heavy drops continually. At the entrance was a little skiff with a paddle in it.

Amyntas stood at the edge. Dared he venture? What could there be behind that darkness? The darkness was blacker than the blackest night. He stepped into the boat. Should he go? With beating heart he untied the rope; he hardly dared to breathe. He pushed away.

XI

He looked to the right and left, paddling slowly; on all sides he saw the slimy columns stretching regularly into the darkness. The light of the open day grew dimmer as he advanced, the air became colder. He looked eagerly around him, paddling slowly. Already he half repented the attempt. The boat went along easily, and the black and heavy water hardly splashed as he drew his paddle through it. Still nothing could be seen but the even ranks of pillars. Then, all at once, the night grew blacker, and again the cold wind arose and blew in his face; everywhere was the ghastly silence and the darkness. A shiver went through him; he could not bear it; in an agony of terror he turned his paddle to go back. Whatever might be the secret of the cavern or the reward of the adventure, he dared go no further. He must get back quickly to the open air and the blue sky. He drew his paddle through the water. The boat did not turn. He gave a cry, he pulled with all his might, the boat only lurched a little and went on its way. He set his teeth and backed; his life depended upon it. The boat swam on. A cold sweat broke out over him; he put all his strength in his stroke. The boat went on into the darkness swiftly and silently. He paused a little to regain force; he stifled a sob of horror and despair. Then he made a last effort; the skiff whirled round into another avenue of columns, and the paddle shivered into atoms against a pillar. The little light of the cavern entrance was lost, and there was utter darkness.

Amyntas cowered down in the boat. He gave up hope of life, and lay there for long hours awaiting his end; the water carried the skiff along swiftly, silently. The darkness was so heavy that the columns were invisible, heavy drops fell into the water from the roof. How long would it last? Would the boat go on till he died, and then speed on for ever? He thought of the others who had gone into the cavern. Were there other boats hurrying eternally along the heavy waters, bearing cold skeletons?

He covered his face with his hands and moaned. But he started up, the night seemed less black; he looked intently; yes, he could distinguish the outlines of the pillars dimly, so dimly that he thought he saw them only in imagination. And soon he could see distinctly their massive shapes against the surrounding darkness. And as gradually the night thinned away into dim twilight, he saw that the columns were different from those at the entrance of the cavern; they were no longer covered with weed and slime, the marble was polished and smooth; and the water beneath him appeared less black. The skiff went on so swiftly that the perpetual sequence of the pillars tired his eyes; but their grim severity gave way to round columns less forbidding and more graceful; as the light grew clearer, there was almost a tinge of blue in the water. Amyntas was filled with wonder, for the columns became lighter and more decorated, surmounted by capitals, adorned with strange sculptures. Some were green and some were red, others were yellow or glistening white; they mirrored themselves in the sapphire water. Gradually the roof raised itself and the columns became more slender; from them sprang lofty arches, gorgeously ornamented, and all was gold and silver and rich colour. The water turned to a dazzling, translucent blue, so that Amyntas could see hundreds of feet down to the bottom, and the bottom was covered with golden sand. And the light grew and grew till it was more brilliant than the clearest day; gradually the skiff slowed down and it swam leisurely towards the light’s source, threading its way beneath the horse-shoe arches among the columns, and these gathered themselves into two lines to form a huge avenue surmounted by a vast span, and at the end, in a splendour of light, Amyntas saw a wondrous palace, with steps leading down to the water. The boat glided towards it and at the steps ceased moving.

XII

At the same moment the silver doors of the palace were opened, and from them issued black slaves, magnificently apparelled; they descended to Amyntas and with courteous gestures assisted him out of the boat. Then two other slaves, even more splendidly attired than their fellows, came down and led Amyntas slowly and with great state into the court of the palace, at the end of which was a great chamber; into this they motioned the youth to enter. They made him the lowest possible bows and retired, letting a curtain fall over the doorway. But immediately the curtain was raised and other slaves came in, bearing gorgeous robes and all kinds of necessaries for the toilet. With much ceremony they proceeded to bathe and scent the fortunate creature; they polished and dyed his finger nails; they pencilled his eyebrows and faintly darkened his long eyelashes; they put precious balsam on his hair; then they clothed him in silken robes glittering with gold and silver; they put the daintiest red morocco shoes on his feet, a jewelled chain about his neck, rings on his fingers, and in his turban a rich diamond. Finally they placed before him a gigantic mirror, and left him.

Everything had been conducted in complete silence, and Amyntas throughout had preserved the most intense gravity. But when he was alone he gave a little silent laugh of delight. It was obvious that at last he was to be rewarded according to his deserts. He looked at the rings on his fingers, resisting a desire to put one or two of them in his pocket in case of a future rainy day. Then, catching sight of himself in the mirror, he started. Was that really himself? How very delightful! He made sure that no one could see, and then began to make bows to himself in the mirror; he walked up and down the room, observing the stateliness of his gesture; he waved his hands in a lordly and patronising fashion; he turned himself round to look at his back; he was very annoyed that he could not see his profile. He came to the conclusion that he looked every inch a king’s son, and his inner consciousness told him that consequently the king’s daughter could not be far off.

But he would explore his palace! He girded his sword about him; it was a scimitar of beautiful workmanship, and the scabbard was incrusted with precious stones.... From the court he passed into many wonderful rooms, one leading out of the other; there were rich carpets on the marble floors, and fountains played softly in the centre, the walls were inlaid with rare marbles; but he never saw a living soul.

In the last hour Amyntas had become fully alive to his great importance, and carried himself accordingly. He took long, dignified steps, and held one hand on the jewelled hilt of his sword, with his elbows stuck out at right angles to his body; his head was thrown back proudly and his nostrils dilated with appropriate scorn. At last he came to a door closed by a curtain; he raised it. But he started back and was so surprised that he found no words to express his emotions. Four maidens were sitting in the room, more beautiful than he had thought possible in his most extravagant dreams. The gods had evidently not intended Amyntas for single blessedness.... The young persons appeared not to have noticed him. Two of them were seated on rugs playing a languid game of chess, the others were lazily smoking cigarettes.

‘Mate!’ murmured one of the players.

‘Oh!’ sighed the other, yawning, ‘another game finished! That makes five million and twenty-three games against your five million and seventy-nine.’

They all yawned.

But Amyntas felt he must give notice of his presence, and suddenly remembering an expression he had learnt on board ship, he put on a most ferocious look and cried out, —

‘Shiver my timbers!’

The maidens turned towards him with a little cry, but they quickly recovered themselves and one of them came towards him.

‘You speak like a king’s son, oh youth!’ she said.

There was a moment’s hesitation, and the lady, with a smile, added, ‘Oh, ardently expected one, you are a compendium of the seven excellences!’

Then they all began to pay him compliments, each one capping the other’s remark.

‘You have a face like the full moon, oh youth; your eyes are the eyes of the gazelle; your walk is like the gait of the mountain partridge; your chin is as an apple; your cheeks are pomegranates.’

But Amyntas interrupted them.

‘For God’s sake, madam,’ he said, ‘let us have no palavering, and if you love me give me some victuals!...’

Immediately female slaves came in with salvers laden with choice food, and the four maidens plied Amyntas with delicacies. At the end of the repast they sprinkled him with rose-water, and the eldest of them put a crown of roses on his hair. Amyntas thought that after all life was not an empty dream.

XIII

‘And now, may it please you, oh stranger, to hear our story.

‘Know then that our father was a Moor, one of the wealthiest of his people, and he dwelt with his fellows in Spain, honoured and beloved. Now, when Allah — whose name be exalted! — decreed that our nation should be driven from the country, he, unwilling to leave the land of his birth, built him, with the aid of magic arts, this palace. Here he brought us, his four daughters and all his riches; he peopled it with slaves and filled it with all necessary things, and here we lived in peace and prosperity for many years; but at last a great misfortune befell us, for our father, who was a very learned man and accustomed to busy himself with many abstruse matters, one day got lost in a metaphysical speculation — and has never been found again.’

Here she stopped, and they all sighed deeply.

‘We searched high and low, but in vain, and he has not been found to this day. So we took his will, and having broken the seal, read the following,— “My daughters, I know by my wisdom that the time will come when I shall be lost to you; then you will live alone enjoying the riches and the pleasures which I have put at your disposal; but I foresee that at the end of many years a youth will find his way to this your palace. And though my magic arts have been able to build this paradise for your habitation, though they have endowed you with perpetual youth and loveliness, and, greatest deed of all, have banished hence the dark shadow of Death, yet have they not the power to make four maidens live in happiness and unity with but one man! Therefore, I have given unto each of you certain gifts, and of you four the youth shall choose one to be his love; and to him and her shall belong this palace, and all my riches, and all my power; while the remaining three shall leave everything here to these two, and depart hence for ever.”

‘Now, gentle youth, it is with you to choose which of us four you will have remain.’

Amyntas looked at the four damsels standing before him, and his heart beat violently.

‘I,’ resumed the speaker— ‘I am the eldest of the four, and it is my right to speak first.’

She stepped forward and stood alone in front of Amyntas; her aspect was most queenly, her features beautiful and clear, her eyes proud and fiery; and masses of raven hair contrasted with the red flaming of her garments. With an imperious gesture she flung back her hair, and spoke thus, —

‘Know, youth, that the gift which my father gave me was the gift of war, and I have the power to make a great warrior of him whose love I am. I will make you a king, youth; you shall command mighty armies, and you shall lead them to battle on a prancing horse; your enemies shall quail before your face, and at last you shall die no sluggard’s death, but pierced by honourable wounds, and the field of battle shall be your deathbed; a nation shall mourn your loss, and your name shall go down famous to after ages.’

‘You are very beautiful,’ said Amyntas, ‘but I am not so eager for warlike exploits as when I wandered through the green lanes of my native land. Let me hear the others.’

A second stepped forward. She was clad most gorgeously of all; a crown of diamonds was on her head, and her robes were of cloth of gold sewn with rubies and emeralds and sapphires.

‘The gift I have to give is wealth, riches — riches innumerable, riches greater than man can dream of. Do you want to be a king, the riches I can give will make you one; do you want armies, riches can procure them; do you want victory, riches can buy it — all these that my sister offers you can I with my riches give you; and more than that, for everything in the world can be got with riches, and you shall be all-powerful. Take me to be your love and I will make you the Lord of Gold.’

Amyntas smiled.

‘You forget, lady, that I am but twenty.’

The third stepped forward. She was beautiful and pale and thoughtful. Her hair was yellow, like corn when the sun is shining on it; and her dress was green, like the young grass of the spring. She spoke without the animation of the others, mournfully rather than proudly, and she looked at Amyntas with melancholy eyes.

‘I am the Lady of Art; all that is beautiful and good and wise is in my province. Live with me; I will make you a poet, and you shall sing beautiful songs. You shall be wise; and in perfect wisdom, oh youth! is perfect happiness.’

‘The poet has said that wisdom is weariness, oh lady!’ said Amyntas. ‘My father is a poet; he has written ten thousand Latin hexameters, and a large number of Greek iambics.’...

Then came forward the last. As she stood before Amyntas a cry burst from him; he had never in his life seen anyone so ravishingly beautiful. She was looking down, and her long eyelashes prevented her eyes from being seen, but her lips were like a perfect rose, and her skin was like a peach; her hair fell to her waist in great masses of curls, and their sparkling auburn, many-hued and indescribable, changed in the sunbeams from richest brown to gold, tinged with deep red. She wore a simple tunic of thin silk, clasped at her waist with a jewelled belt of gold.

She stood before Amyntas, letting him gaze; then suddenly she lifted her eyes to his. Amyntas’s heart gave a mighty beat against his chest. Her eyes, her eyes were the very lights of love, carrying passionate kisses on their beams. A sob of ecstasy choked the youth, and he felt that he could kneel down and worship before them.

Slowly her lips broke into a smile, and her voice was soft and low.

‘I am the Lady of Love,’ she said. ‘Look!’ She raised her arms, and the thin, loose sleeves falling back displayed their roundness and exquisite shape; she lifted her head, and Amyntas thrilled to cover her neck with kisses. At last she loosened her girdle, and when the silken tunic fell to her feet she stood before him in perfect loveliness.

‘I cannot give you fame, or riches, or wisdom; I can only give you Love, Love, Love.... Oh, what an eternity of delight shall we enjoy in one another’s arms! Come, my beloved, come!’

‘Yes, I come, my darling!’ Amyntas stepped forward with outstretched arms, and took her hands in his. ‘I take you for my love; I want not wealth nor great renown, but only you. You will give me love-alluring kisses, and we will live in never-ending bliss.’

He drew her to him, and, with his arms around her, pressed back her head and covered her lips with kisses.

XIV

And while Amyntas lost his soul in the eyes of his beloved, the three sisters went sadly away. They ascended the stately barge which awaited them, and the water bore them down the long avenue of columns into the darkness. After a long time they reached the entrance of the cavern, and having placed a great stone against it, that none might enter more, they separated, wandering in different directions.

The Lady of War passed through Spain, finding none there worthy of her. She crossed the mountains, and presently she fell in love with a little artillery officer, and raised him to dignity and power; and together they ran through the lands, wasting and burning, making women widows and children orphans, ruthless, unsparing, caring for naught but the voluptuousness of blood. But she sickened of the man at last and left him; then the blood he had spilt rose up against him, and he was cast down and died an exile on a lonely isle. And now they say she dwells in the palaces of a youth with a withered hand; together they rule a mighty empire, and their people cry out at the oppression, but the ruler heeds nothing but the burning kisses of his love.

The Lady of Riches, too, passed out of Spain. But she was not content with one love, nor with a hundred. She gave her favours to the first comer, and everyone was welcome; she wandered carelessly through the world, but chiefly she loved an island in the north; and in its capital she has her palace, and the inhabitants of the isle have given themselves over, body and soul, to her domination; they pander and lie and cheat, and forswear themselves; to gain her smile they will shrink from no base deed, no meanness; and she, too, makes women widows and children orphans.... But her subjects care not; they are fat and well-content; the goddess smiles on them, and they are the richest in the world.

The Lady of Art has not found an emperor nor a mighty people to be her lovers. She wanders lonely through the world; now and then a youthful dreamer sees her in his sleep and devotes his life to her pursuit; but the way is hard, very hard; so he turns aside to worship at the throne of her sister of Riches, and she repays him for the neglect he has suffered; she showers gold upon him and makes him one of her knights. But sometimes the youth remains faithful, and goes through his life in the endless search; and at last, when his end has come, she comes down to the garret in which he lies cold and dead, and stooping down, kisses him gently — and lo! he is immortal.

But as for Amyntas, when the sisters had retired, he again took his bride in his arms, and covered her lips with kisses; and she, putting her arms round his neck, said with a smile, —

‘I have waited for you so long, my love, so long!’

And here it is fit that we should follow the example of the three sisters, and retire also.

The moral of this story is, that if your godfathers and godmothers at your baptism give you a pretty name, you will probably marry the most beautiful woman in the world and live happily ever afterwards.... And the platitudinous philosopher may marvel at the tremendous effects of the most insignificant causes, for if Amyntas had been called Peter or John, as his mother wished, William II. might be eating sauerkraut as peacefully as his ancestors, the Lord Mayor of London might not drive about in a gilded carriage, and possibly even — Mr Alfred Austin might not be Poet Laureate....

DAISY

I

It was Sunday morning — a damp, warm November morning, with the sky overhead grey and low. Miss Reed stopped a little to take breath before climbing the hill, at the top of which, in the middle of the churchyard, was Blackstable Church. Miss Reed panted, and the sultriness made her loosen her jacket. She stood at the junction of the two roads which led to the church, one from the harbour end of the town and the other from the station. Behind her lay the houses of Blackstable, the wind-beaten houses with slate roofs of the old fishing village and the red brick villas of the seaside resort which Blackstable was fast becoming; in the harbour were the masts of the ships, colliers that brought coal from the north; and beyond, the grey sea, very motionless, mingling in the distance with the sky.... The peal of the church bells ceased, and was replaced by a single bell, ringing a little hurriedly, querulously, which denoted that there were only ten minutes before the beginning of the service. Miss Reed walked on; she looked curiously at the people who passed her, wondering....

‘Good-morning, Mr Golding!’ she said to a fisherman who pounded by her, ungainly in his Sunday clothes.

‘Good-morning, Miss Reed!’ he replied. ‘Warm this morning.’

She wondered whether he knew anything of the subject which made her heart beat with excitement whenever she thought of it, and for thinking of it she hadn’t slept a wink all night.

‘Have you seen Mr Griffith this morning?’ she asked, watching his face.

‘No; I saw Mrs Griffith and George as I was walking up.’

‘Oh! they are coming to church, then!’ Miss Reed cried with the utmost surprise.

Mr Golding looked at her stupidly, not understanding her agitation. But they had reached the church. Miss Reed stopped in the porch to wipe her boots and pass an arranging hand over her hair. Then, gathering herself together, she walked down the aisle to her pew.

She arranged the hassock and knelt down, clasping her hands and closing her eyes; she said the Lord’s Prayer; and being a religious woman, she did not immediately rise, but remained a certain time in the same position of worship to cultivate a proper frame of mind, her long, sallow face upraised, her mouth firmly closed, and her eyelids quivering a little from the devotional force with which she kept her eyes shut; her thin bust, very erect, was encased in a black jacket as in a coat of steel. But when Miss Reed considered that a due period had elapsed, she opened her eyes, and, as she rose from her knees, bent over to a lady sitting just in front of her.

‘Have you heard about the Griffiths, Mrs Howlett?’

‘No!... What is it?’ answered Mrs Howlett, half turning round, intensely curious.

Miss Reed waited a moment to heighten the effect of her statement.

‘Daisy Griffith has eloped — with an officer from the dépôt at Tercanbury.’

Mrs Howlett gave a little gasp.

‘You don’t say so!’

‘It’s all they could expect,’ whispered Miss Reed. ‘They ought to have known something was the matter when she went into Tercanbury three or four times a week.’

Blackstable is six miles from Tercanbury, which is a cathedral city and has a cavalry dépôt.

‘I’ve seen her hanging about the barracks with my own eyes,’ said Mrs Howlett, ‘but I never suspected anything.’

‘Shocking! isn’t it?’ said Miss Reed, with suppressed delight.

‘But how did you find out?’ asked Mrs Howlett.

‘Ssh!’ whispered Miss Reed — the widow, in her excitement, had raised her voice a little and Miss Reed could never suffer the least irreverence in church.... ‘She never came back last night, and George Browning saw them get into the London train at Tercanbury.’

‘Well, I never!’ exclaimed Mrs Howlett.

‘D’you think the Griffiths’ll have the face to come to church?’

‘I shouldn’t if I was them,’ said Miss Reed.

But at that moment the vestry door was opened and the organ began to play the hymn.

‘I’ll see you afterwards,’ Miss Reed whispered hurriedly; and rising from their seats, both ladies began to sing, —

O Jesu, thou art standing

Outside the fast closed door,

In lowly patience waiting

To pass the threshold o’er;

We bear the name of Christians....

Miss Reed held the book rather close to her face, being shortsighted; but, without even lifting her eyes, she had become aware of the entrance of Mrs Griffith and George. She glanced significantly at Mrs Howlett. Mr Griffith hadn’t come, although he was churchwarden, and Mrs Howlett gave an answering look which meant that it was then evidently quite true. But they both gathered themselves together for the last verse, taking breath.

O Jesus, thou art pleading

In accents meek and low....

A — A — men! The congregation fell to its knees, and the curate, rolling his eyes to see who was in church, began gabbling the morning prayers— ‘Dearly beloved brethren.’...

II

At the Sunday dinner, the vacant place of Daisy Griffith stared at them. Her father sat at the head of the table, looking down at his plate, in silence; every now and then, without raising his head, he glanced up at the empty space, filled with a madness of grief.... He had gone into Tercanbury in the morning, inquiring at the houses of all Daisy’s friends, imagining that she had spent the night with one of them. He could not believe that George Browning’s story was true, he could so easily have been mistaken in the semi-darkness of the station. And even he had gone to the barracks — his cheeks still burned with the humiliation — asking if they knew a Daisy Griffith.

He pushed his plate away with a groan. He wished passionately that it were Monday, so that he could work. And the post would surely bring a letter, explaining.

‘The vicar asked where you were,’ said Mrs Griffith.

Robert, the father, looked at her with his pained eyes, but her eyes were hard and shining, her lips almost disappeared in the tight closing of the mouth. She was willing to believe the worst. He looked at his son; he was frowning; he looked as coldly angry as the mother. He, too, was willing to believe everything, and they neither seemed very sorry.... Perhaps they were even glad.

‘I was the only one who loved her,’ he muttered to himself, and pushing back his chair he got up and left the room. He almost tottered; he had aged twenty years in the night.

‘Aren’t you going to have any pudding?’ asked his wife.

He made no answer.

He walked out into the courtyard quite aimlessly, but the force of habit took him to the workshop, where, every Sunday afternoon, he was used to going after dinner to see that everything was in order, and to-day also he opened the window, put away a tool which the men had left about, examined the Saturday’s work....

Mrs Griffith and George, stiff and ill at ease in his clumsy Sunday clothes, went on with their dinner.

‘D’you think the vicar knew?’ he asked as soon as the father had closed the door.

‘I don’t think he’d have asked if he had. Mrs Gray might, but he’s too simple — unless she put him up to it.’

‘I thought I should never get round with the plate,’ said George. Mr Griffith, being a carpenter, which is respectable and well-to-do, which is honourable, had been made churchwarden, and part of his duty was to take round the offertory plate. This duty George performed in his father’s occasional absences, as when a coffin was very urgently required.

‘I wasn’t going to let them get anything out of me,’ said Mrs Griffith, defiantly.

All through the service a number of eyes had been fixed on them, eager to catch some sign of emotion, full of horrible curiosity to know what the Griffiths felt and thought; but Mrs Griffith had been inscrutable.

III

Next day the Griffiths lay in wait for the postman; George sat by the parlour window, peeping through the muslin curtains.

‘Fanning’s just coming up the street,’ he said at last. Until the post had come old Griffith could not work; in the courtyard at the back was heard the sound of hammering.

There was a rat-tat at the door, the sound of a letter falling on the mat, and Fanning the postman passed on. George leaned back quickly so that he might not see him. Mr Griffith fetched the letter, opened it with trembling hands.... He gave a little gasp of relief.

‘She’s got a situation in London.’

’Is that all she says?’ asked Mrs Griffith. ‘Give me the letter,’ and she almost tore it from her husband’s hand.

She read it through and uttered a little ejaculation of contempt — almost of triumph. ‘You don’t mean to say you believe that?’ she cried.

‘Let’s look, mother,’ said George. He read the letter and he too gave a snort of contempt.

‘She says she’s got a situation,’ repeated Mrs Griffith, with a sneer at her husband, ‘and we’re not to be angry or anxious, and she’s quite happy — and we can write to Charing Cross Post Office. I know what sort of a situation she’s got.’

Mr Griffith looked from his wife to his son.

‘Don’t you think it’s true?’ he asked helplessly. At the first moment he had put the fullest faith in Daisy’s letter, he had been so anxious to believe it; but the scorn of the others....

‘There’s Miss Reed coming down the street,’ said George. ‘She’s looking this way, and she’s crossing over. I believe she’s coming in.’

‘What does she want?’ asked Mrs Griffith, angrily.

There was another knock at the door, and through the curtains they saw Miss Reed’s eyes looking towards them, trying to pierce the muslin. Mrs Griffith motioned the two men out of the room, and hurriedly put antimacassars on the chairs. The knock was repeated, and Mrs Griffith, catching hold of a duster, went to the door.

‘Oh, Miss Reed! Who’d have thought of seeing you?’ she cried with surprise.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing,’ answered Miss Reed, with an acid smile.

‘Oh, dear no!’ said Mrs Griffith. ‘I was just doing the dusting in the parlour. Come in, won’t you? The place is all upside down, but you won’t mind that, will you?’

Miss Reed sat on the edge of a chair.

‘I thought I’d just pop in to ask about dear Daisy. I met Fanning as I was coming along and he told me you’d had a letter.’

‘Oh! Daisy?’ Mrs Griffith had understood at once why Miss Reed came, but she was rather at a loss for an answer.... ‘Yes, we have had a letter from her. She’s up in London.’

‘Yes, I knew that,’ said Miss Reed. ‘George Browning saw them get into the London train, you know.’

Mrs Griffith saw it was no good fencing, but an idea occurred to her.

‘Yes, of course her father and I are very distressed about — her eloping like that.’

‘I can quite understand that,’ said Miss Reed.

‘But it was on account of his family. He didn’t want anyone to know about it till he was married.’

‘Oh!’ said Miss Reed, raising her eyebrows very high.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Griffith, ‘that’s what she said in her letter; they were married on Saturday at a registry office.’

‘But, Mrs Griffith, I’m afraid she’s been deceiving you. It’s Captain Hogan.... and he’s a married man.’

She could have laughed outright at the look of dismay on Mrs Griffith’s face. The blow was sudden, and notwithstanding all her power of self-control, Mrs Griffith could not help herself. But at once she recovered, an angry flush appeared on her cheek bones.

‘You don’t mean it?’ she cried.

‘I’m afraid it’s quite true,’ said Miss Reed, humbly. ‘In fact I know it is.’

‘Then she’s a lying, deceitful hussy, and she’s made a fool of all of us. I give you my word of honour that she told us she was married; I’ll fetch you the letter.’ Mrs Griffith rose from her chair, but Miss Reed put out a hand to stop her.

‘Oh, don’t trouble, Mrs Griffith; of course I believe you,’ she said, and Mrs Griffith immediately sat down again.

But she burst into a storm of abuse of Daisy, for her deceitfulness and wickedness. She vowed she should never forgive her. She assured Miss Reed again and again that she had known nothing about it. Finally she burst into a perfect torrent of tears. Miss Reed was mildly sympathetic; but now she was anxious to get away to impart her news to the rest of Blackstable. Mrs Griffith sobbed her visitor out of the front door, but, when she had closed it, dried her tears. She went into the parlour and flung open the door that led to the back room. Griffith was sitting with his face hidden in his hands, and every now and then a sob shook his great frame. George was very pale, biting his nails.

‘You heard what she said,’ cried Mrs Griffith. ‘He’s married!’... She looked at her husband contemptuously. ‘It’s all very well for you to carry on like that now. It was you who did it; it was all your fault. If she’d been brought up as I wanted her to be, this wouldn’t ever have happened.’

Again there was a knock, and George, going out, ushered in Mrs Gray, the vicar’s wife. She rushed in when she heard the sound of voices.

‘Oh, Mrs Griffith, it’s dreadful! simply dreadful! Miss Reed has just told me all about it. What is to be done? And what’ll the dissenters make of it? Oh, dear, it’s simply dreadful!’

‘You’ve just come in time, Mrs Gray,’ said Mrs Griffith, angrily. ‘It’s not my fault, I can tell you that. It’s her father who’s brought it about. He would have her go into Tercanbury to be educated, and he would have her take singing lessons and dancing lessons. The Church school was good enough for George. It’s been Daisy this and Daisy that all through. Me and George have been always put by for Daisy. I didn’t want her brought up above her station, I can assure you. It’s him who would have her brought up as a lady; and see what’s come of it! And he let her spend any money she liked on her dress.... It wasn’t me that let her go into Tercanbury every day in the week if she wanted to. I knew she was up to no good. There you see what you’ve brought her to; it’s you who’s disgraced us all!’

She hissed out the words with intense malignity, nearly screaming in the bitterness she felt towards the beautiful daughter of better education than herself, almost of different station. It was all but a triumph for her that this had happened. It brought her daughter down; she turned the tables, and now, from the superiority of her virtue, she looked down upon her with utter contempt.

IV

On the following Sunday the people of Blackstable enjoyed an emotion; as Miss Reed said, —

‘It was worth going to church this morning, even for a dissenter.’

The vicar was preaching, and the congregation paid a very languid attention, but suddenly a curious little sound went through the church — one of those scarcely perceptible noises which no comparison can explain; it was a quick attraction of all eyes, an arousing of somnolent intelligences, a slight, quick drawing-in of the breath. The listeners had heeded very indifferently Mr Gray’s admonitions to brotherly love and charity as matters which did not concern them other than abstractedly; but quite suddenly they had realised that he was bringing his discourse round to the subject of Daisy Griffith, and they pricked up both ears. They saw it coming directly along the highways of Vanity and Luxuriousness; and everyone became intensely wide awake.

‘And we have in all our minds,’ he said at last, ‘the terrible fall which has almost broken the hearts of sorrowing parents and brought bitter grief — bitter grief and shame to all of us.’...

He went on hinting at the scandal in the manner of the personal columns in newspapers, and drawing a number of obvious morals. The Griffith family were sitting in their pew well in view of the congregation; and losing even the shadow of decency, the people turned round and stared at them, ghoul-like.... Robert Griffith sat in the corner with his head bent down, huddled up, his rough face speaking in all its lines the terrible humiliation; his hair was all dishevelled. He was not more than fifty, and he looked an old man. But Mrs Griffith sat next him, very erect, not leaning against the back, with her head well up, her mouth firmly closed, and she looked straight in front of her, her little eyes sparkling, as if she had not an idea that a hundred people were staring at her. In the other corner was George, very white, looking up at the roof in simulation of indifference. Suddenly a sob came from the Griffiths’ pew, and people saw that the father had broken down; he seemed to forget where he was, and he cried as if indeed his heart were broken. The great tears ran down his cheeks in the sight of all — the painful tears of men; he had not even the courage to hide his face in his hands. Still Mrs Griffith made no motion, she never gave a sign that she heard her husband’s agony; but two little red spots appeared angrily on her cheek bones, and perhaps she compressed her lips a little more tightly....

V

Six months passed. One evening, when Mr Griffith was standing at the door after work, smoking his pipe, the postman handed him a letter. He changed colour and his hand shook when he recognised the handwriting. He turned quickly into the house.

‘A letter from Daisy,’ he said. They had not replied to her first letter, and since then had heard nothing.

‘Give it me,’ said his wife.

He drew it quickly towards him, with an instinctive gesture of retention.

‘It’s addressed to me.’

‘Well, then, you’d better open it.’

He looked up at his wife; he wanted to take the letter away and read it alone, but her eyes were upon him, compelling him there and then to open it.

‘She wants to come back,’ he said in a broken voice.

Mrs Griffith snatched the letter from him.

‘That means he’s left her,’ she said.

The letter was all incoherent, nearly incomprehensible, covered with blots, every other word scratched out. One could see that the girl was quite distraught, and Mrs Griffith’s keen eyes saw the trace of tears on the paper.... It was a long, bitter cry of repentance. She begged them to take her back, repeating again and again the cry of penitence, piteously beseeching them to forgive her.

‘I’ll go and write to her,’ said Mr Griffith.

‘Write what?’

‘Why — that it’s all right and she isn’t to worry; and we want her back, and that I’ll go up and fetch her.’

Mrs Griffith placed herself between him and the door.

‘What d’you mean?’ she cried. ‘She’s not coming back into my house.’

Mr Griffith started back.

‘You don’t want to leave her where she is! She says she’ll kill herself.’

‘Yes, I believe that,’ she replied scornfully; and then, gathering up her anger, ‘D’you mean to say you expect me to have her in the house after what she’s done? I tell you I won’t. She’s never coming in this house again as long as I live; I’m an honest woman and she isn’t. She’s a—’ Mrs Griffith called her daughter the foulest name that can be applied to her sex.

Mr Griffith stood indecisively before his wife.

‘But think what a state she’s in, mother. She was crying when she wrote the letter.’

‘Let her cry; she’ll have to cry a lot more before she’s done. And it serves her right; and it serves you right. She’ll have to go through a good deal more than that before God forgives her, I can tell you.’

‘Perhaps she’s starving.’

‘Let her starve, for all I care. She’s dead to us; I’ve told everyone in Blackstable that I haven’t got a daughter now, and if she came on her bended knees before me I’d spit on her.’

George had come in and listened to the conversation.

‘Think what people would say, father,’ he said now; ‘as it is, it’s jolly awkward, I can tell you. No one would speak to us if she was back again. It’s not as if people didn’t know; everyone in Blackstable knows what she’s been up to.’

‘And what about George?’ put in Mrs Griffith. ‘D’you think the Polletts would stand it?’ George was engaged to Edith Pollett.

‘She’d be quite capable of breaking it off if Daisy came back,’ said George. ‘She’s said as much.’

‘Quite right too!’ cried his mother. ‘And I’m not going to be like Mrs Jay with Lottie. Everyone knows about Lottie’s goings-on, and you can see how people treat them — her and her mother. When Mrs Gray passes them in the street she always goes on the other side. No, I’ve always held my head high, and I’m always going to. I’ve never done anything to be ashamed of as far as I know, and I’m not going to begin now. Everyone knows it was no fault of mine what Daisy did, and all through I’ve behaved so that no one should think the worse of me.’

Mr Griffith sank helplessly into a chair, the old habit of submission asserted itself, and his weakness gave way as usual before his wife’s strong will. He had not the courage to oppose her.

‘What shall I answer, then?’ he asked.

‘Answer? Nothing.’

‘I must write something. She’ll be waiting for the letter, and waiting and waiting.’

‘Let her wait.’

VI

A few days later another letter came from Daisy, asking pitifully why they didn’t write, begging them again to forgive her and take her back. The letter was addressed to Mr Griffith; the girl knew that it was only from him she might expect mercy; but he was out when it arrived. Mrs Griffith opened it, and passed it on to her son. They looked at one another guiltily; the same thought had occurred to both, and each knew it was in the other’s mind.

‘I don’t think we’d better let father see it,’ Mrs Griffith said, a little uncertainly; ‘it’ll do no good and it’ll only distress him.’

‘And it’s no good making a fuss, because we can’t have her back.’

‘She’ll never enter this door as long as I’m in the world.... I think I’ll lock it up.’

‘I’d burn it, if I was you, mother. It’s safer.’

Then every day Mrs Griffith made a point of going to the door herself for the letters. Two more came from Daisy.

‘I know it’s not you; it’s mother and George. They’ve always hated me. Oh, don’t be so cruel, father! You don’t know what I’ve gone through. I’ve cried and cried till I thought I should die. For God’s sake write to me! They might let you write just once. I’m alone all day, day after day, and I think I shall go mad. You might take me back; I’m sure I’ve suffered enough, and you wouldn’t know me now, I’m so changed. Tell mother that if she’ll only forgive me I’ll be quite different. I’ll do the housework and anything she tells me. I’ll be a servant to you, and you can send the girl away. If you knew how I repent! Do forgive me and have me back. Oh, I know that no one would speak to me; but I don’t care about that, if I can only be with you!’

‘She doesn’t think about us,’ said George— ‘what we should do if she was back. No one would speak to us either.’

But the next letter said that she couldn’t bear the terrible silence; if her father didn’t write she’d come down to Blackstable. Mrs Griffith was furious.

‘I’d shut the door in her face; I wonder how she can dare to come.’

‘It’s jolly awkward,’ said George. ‘Supposing father found out we’d kept back the letters?’

‘It was for his own good,’ said Mrs Griffith, angrily. ‘I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done, and I’ll tell him so to his face if he says anything to me.’

‘Well, it is awkward. You know what father is; if he saw her.’...

Mrs Griffith paused a moment.

‘You must go up and see her, George!’

‘Me!’ he cried in astonishment, a little in terror.

‘You must go as if you came from your father, to say we won’t have anything more to do with her and she’s not to write.’

VII

Next day George Griffith, on getting out of the station at Victoria, jumped on a Fulham ‘bus, taking his seat with the self-assertiveness of the countryman who intends to show the Londoners that he’s as good as they are. He was in some trepidation and his best clothes. He didn’t know what to say to Daisy, and his hands sweated uncomfortably. When he knocked at the door he wished she might be out — but that would only be postponing the ordeal.

‘Does Mrs Hogan live here?’

‘Yes. Who shall I say?’

‘Say a gentleman wants to see her.’

He followed quickly on the landlady’s heels and passed through the door the woman opened while she was giving the message. Daisy sprang to her feet with a cry.

‘George!’

She was very pale, her blue eyes dim and lifeless, with the lids heavy and red; she was in a dressing gown, her beautiful hair dishevelled, wound loosely into a knot at the back of her head. She had not half the beauty of her old self.... George, to affirm the superiority of virtue over vice, kept his hat on.

She looked at him with frightened eyes, then her lips quivered, and turning away her head she fell on a chair and burst into tears. George looked at her sternly. His indignation was greater than ever now that he saw her. His old jealousy made him exult at the change in her.

‘She’s got nothing much to boast about now,’ he said to himself, noting how ill she looked.

‘Oh, George!’ ... she began, sobbing; but he interrupted her.

‘I’ve come from father,’ he said, ‘and we don’t want to have anything more to do with you, and you’re not to write.’

‘Oh!’ She looked at him now with her eyes suddenly quite dry. They seemed to burn her in their sockets. ‘Did he send you here to tell me that?’

‘Yes; and you’re not to come down.’

She put her hand to her forehead, looking vacantly before her.

‘But what am I to do? I haven’t got any money; I’ve pawned everything.’

George looked at her silently; but he was horribly curious.

‘Why did he leave you?’ he said.

She made no answer; she looked before her as if she were going out of her mind.

‘Has he left you any money?’ asked George.

Then she started up, her cheeks flaming red.

‘I wouldn’t touch a halfpenny of his. I’d rather starve!’ she screamed.

George shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, you understand?’ he said.

‘Oh, how can you! It’s all you and mother. You’ve always hated me. But I’ll pay you out, by God! I’ll pay you out. I know what you are, all of you — you and mother, and all the Blackstable people. You’re a set of damned hypocrites.’

‘Look here, Daisy! I’m not going to stand here and hear you talk like that of me and mother,’ he replied with dignity; ‘and as for the Blackstable people, you’re not fit to — to associate with them. And I can see where you learnt your language.’

Daisy burst into hysterical laughter. George became more angry — virtuously indignant.

‘Oh, you can laugh as much as you like! I know your repentance is a lot of damned humbug. You’ve always been a conceited little beast. And you’ve been stuck up and cocky because you thought yourself nice-looking, and because you were educated in Tercanbury. And no one was good enough for you in Blackstable. And I’m jolly glad that all this has happened to you; it serves you jolly well right. And if you dare to show yourself at Blackstable, we’ll send for the police.’

Daisy stepped up to him.

‘I’m a damned bad lot,’ she said, ‘but I swear I’m not half as bad as you are.... You know what you’re driving me to.’

‘You don’t think I care what you do,’ he answered, as he flung himself out of the door. He slammed it behind him, and he also slammed the front door to show that he was a man of high principles. And even George Washington when he said, ‘I cannot tell a lie; I did it with my little hatchet,’ did not feel so righteous as George Griffith at that moment.

Daisy went to the window to see him go, and then, throwing up her arms, she fell on her knees, weeping, weeping, and she cried, —

‘My God, have pity on me!’

VIII

‘I wouldn’t go through it again for a hundred pounds,’ said George, when he recounted his experience to his mother. ‘And she wasn’t a bit humble, as you’d expect.’

‘Oh! that’s Daisy all over. Whatever happens to her, she’ll be as bold as brass.’

‘And she didn’t choose her language,’ he said, with mingled grief and horror.

They heard nothing more of Daisy for over a year, when George went up to London for the choir treat. He did not come back till three o’clock in the morning, but he went at once to his mother’s room.

He woke her very carefully, so as not to disturb his father. She started up, about to speak, but he prevented her with his hand.

‘Come outside; I’ve got something to tell you.’

Mrs Griffith was about to tell him rather crossly to wait till the morrow, but he interrupted her, —

‘I’ve seen Daisy.’

She quickly got out of bed, and they went together into the parlour.

‘I couldn’t keep it till the morning,’ he said.... ‘What d’you think she’s doing now? Well, after we came out of the Empire, I went down Piccadilly, and — well, I saw Daisy standing there.... It did give me a turn, I can tell you; I thought some of the chaps would see her. I simply went cold all over. But they were on ahead and hadn’t noticed her.’

‘Thank God for that!’ said Mrs Griffith, piously.

‘Well, what d’you think I did? I went straight up to her and looked her full in the face. But d’you think she moved a muscle? She simply looked at me as if she’d never set eyes on me before. Well, I was taken aback, I can tell you. I thought she’d faint. Not a bit of it.’

‘No, I know Daisy,’ said Mrs Griffith; ‘you think she’s this and that, because she looks at you with those blue eyes of hers, as if she couldn’t say bo to a goose, but she’s got the very devil inside her.... Well, I shall tell her father that, just so as to let him see what she has come to.’...

The existence of the Griffith household went on calmly. Husband and wife and son led their life in the dull little fishing town, the seasons passed insensibly into one another, one year slid gradually into the next; and the five years that went by seemed like one long, long day. Mrs Griffith did not alter an atom; she performed her housework, went to church regularly, and behaved like a Christian woman in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had been pleased to put her. George got married, and on Sunday afternoons could be seen wheeling an infant in a perambulator along the street. He was a good husband and an excellent father. He never drank too much, he worked well, he was careful of his earnings, and he also went to church regularly; his ambition was to become churchwarden after his father. And even in Mr Griffith there was not so very much change. He was more bowed, his hair and beard were greyer. His face was set in an expression of passive misery, and he was extremely silent. But as Mrs Griffith said, —

‘Of course, he’s getting old. One can’t expect to remain young for ever’ — she was a woman who frequently said profound things— ‘and I’ve known all along he wasn’t the sort of man to make old bones. He’s never had the go in him that I have. Why, I’d make two of him.’

The Griffiths were not so well-to-do as before. As Blackstable became a more important health resort, a regular undertaker opened a shop there; and his window, with two little model coffins and an arrangement of black Prince of Wales’s feathers surrounded by a white wreath, took the fancy of the natives, so that Mr Griffith almost completely lost the most remunerative part of his business. Other carpenters sprang into existence and took away much of the trade.

‘I’ve no patience with him,’ said Mrs Griffith, of her husband. ‘He lets these newcomers come along and just take the bread out of his hands. Oh, if I was a man, I’d make things different, I can tell you! He doesn’t seem to care.’...

At last, one day George came to his mother in a state of tremendous excitement.

‘I say, mother, you know the pantomime they’ve got at Tercanbury this week?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, the principal boy’s Daisy.’

Mrs Griffith sank into a chair, gasping.

‘Harry Ferne’s been, and he recognised her at once. It’s all over the town.’

Mrs Griffith, for the first time in her life, was completely at a loss for words.

‘To-morrow’s the last night,’ added her son, after a little while, ‘and all the Blackstable people are going.’

‘To think that this should happen to me!’ said Mrs Griffith, distractedly. ‘What have I done to deserve it? Why couldn’t it happen to Mrs Garman or Mrs Jay? If the Lord had seen fit to bring it upon them — well, I shouldn’t have wondered.’

‘Edith wants us to go,’ said George — Edith was his wife.

‘You don’t mean to say you’re going, with all the Blackstable people there?’

‘Well, Edith says we ought to go, just to show them we don’t care.’

‘Well, I shall come too!’ cried Mrs Griffith.

IX

Next evening half Blackstable took the special train to Tercanbury, which had been put on for the pantomime, and there was such a crowd at the doors that the impresario half thought of extending his stay. The Rev. Charles Gray and Mrs Gray were there, also James, their nephew. Mr Gray had some scruples about going to a theatre, but his wife said a pantomime was quite different; besides, curiosity may gently enter even a clerical bosom. Miss Reed was there in black satin, with her friend Mrs Howlett; Mrs Griffith sat in the middle of the stalls, flanked by her dutiful son and her daughter-in-law; and George searched for female beauty with his opera-glass, which is quite the proper thing to do on such occasions....

The curtain went up, and the villagers of Dick Whittington’s native place sang a chorus.

‘Now she’s coming,’ whispered George.

All those Blackstable hearts stood still. And Daisy, as Dick Whittington, bounded on the stage — in flesh-coloured tights, with particularly scanty trunks, and her bodice — rather low. The vicar’s nephew sniggered, and Mrs Gray gave him a reproachful glance; all the other Blackstable people looked pained; Miss Reed blushed. But as Daisy waved her hand and gave a kick, the audience broke out into prolonged applause; Tercanbury people have no moral sense, although Tercanbury is a cathedral city.

Daisy began to sing, —

I’m a jolly sort of boy, tol, lol,

And I don’t care a damn who knows it.

I’m fond of every joy, tol, lol,

As you may very well suppose it.

Tol, lol, lol,

Tol, lol, lol.

Then the audience, the audience of a cathedral city, as Mr Gray said, took up the refrain, —

Tol, lol, lol,

Tol, lol, lol.

However, the piece went on to the bitter end, and Dick Whittington appeared in many different costumes and sang many songs, and kicked many kicks, till he was finally made Lord Mayor — in tights.

Ah, it was an evening of bitter humiliation for Blackstable people. Some of them, as Miss Reed said, behaved scandalously; they really appeared to enjoy it. And even George laughed at some of the jokes the cat made, though his wife and his mother sternly reproved him.

‘I’m ashamed of you, George, laughing at such a time!’ they said.

Afterwards the Grays and Miss Reed got into the same railway carriage with the Griffiths.

‘Well, Mrs Griffith,’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘what do you think of your daughter now?’

‘Mrs Gray,’ replied Mrs Griffith, solemnly, ‘I haven’t got a daughter.’

‘That’s a very proper spirit in which to look at it,’ answered the lady.... ‘She was simply covered with diamonds.’

‘They must be worth a fortune,’ said Miss Reed.

‘Oh, I daresay they’re not real,’ said Mrs Gray; ‘at that distance and with the lime-light, you know, it’s very difficult to tell.’

‘I’m sorry to say,’ said Mrs Griffith, with some asperity, feeling the doubt almost an affront to her— ‘I’m sorry to say that I know they’re real.’

The ladies coughed discreetly, scenting a little scandalous mystery which they must get out of Mrs Griffith at another opportunity.

‘My nephew James says she earns at least thirty or forty pounds a week.’

Miss Reed sighed at the thought of such depravity.

‘It’s very sad,’ she remarked, ‘to think of such things happening to a fellow-creature.’...

‘But what I can’t understand,’ said Mrs Gray, next morning, at the breakfast-table, ’is how she got into such a position. We all know that at one time she was to be seen in — well, in a very questionable place, at an hour which left no doubt about her — her means of livelihood. I must say I thought she was quite lost.’...

‘Oh, well, I can tell you that easily enough,’ replied her nephew. ‘She’s being kept by Sir Somebody Something, and he’s running the show for her.’

‘James, I wish you would be more careful about your language. It’s not necessary to call a spade a spade, and you can surely find a less objectionable expression to explain the relationship between the persons.... Don’t you remember his name?’

‘No; I heard it, but I’ve really forgotten.’

‘I see in this week’s Tercanbury Times that there’s a Sir Herbert Ously-Farrowham staying at the “George” just now.’

‘That’s it. Sir Herbert Ously-Farrowham.’

‘How sad! I’ll look him out in Burke.’

She took down the reference book, which was kept beside the clergy list.

‘Dear me, he’s only twenty-nine.... And he’s got a house in Cavendish Square and a house in the country. He must be very well-to-do; and he belongs to the Junior Carlton and two other clubs.... And he’s got a sister who’s married to Lord Edward Lake.’ Mrs Gray closed the book and held it with a finger to mark the place, like a Bible. ‘It’s very sad to think of the dissipation of so many members of the aristocracy. It sets such a bad example to the lower classes.’

X

They showed old Griffith a portrait of Daisy in her theatrical costume.

‘Has she come to that?’ he said.

He looked at it a moment, then savagely tore it in pieces and flung it in the fire.

‘Oh, my God!’ he groaned; he could not get out of his head the picture, the shamelessness of the costume, the smile, the evident prosperity and content. He felt now that he had lost his daughter indeed. All these years he had kept his heart open to her, and his heart had bled when he thought of her starving, ragged, perhaps dead. He had thought of her begging her bread and working her beautiful hands to the bone in some factory. He had always hoped that some day she could return to him, purified by the fire of suffering.... But she was prosperous and happy and rich. She was applauded, worshipped; the papers were full of her praise. Old Griffith was filled with a feeling of horror, of immense repulsion. She was flourishing in her sin, and he loathed her. He had been so ready to forgive her when he thought her despairing and unhappy; but now he was implacable.

Three months later Mrs Griffith came to her husband, trembling with excitement, and handed him a cutting from a paper, —

‘We hear that Miss Daisy Griffith, who earned golden opinions in the provinces last winter with her Dick Whittington, is about to be married to Sir Herbert Ously-Farrowham. Her friends, and their name is legion, will join with us in the heartiest congratulations.’

He returned the paper without answering.

‘Well?’ asked his wife.

‘It is nothing to me. I don’t know either of the parties mentioned.’

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and Mrs Gray and Miss Reed entered, having met on the doorstep. Mrs Griffith at once regained her self-possession.

‘Have you heard the news, Mrs Griffith?’ said Miss Reed.

‘D’you mean about the marriage of Sir Herbert Ously-Farrowham?’ She mouthed the long name.

‘Yes,’ replied the two ladies together.

‘It is nothing to me.... I have no daughter, Mrs Gray.’

‘I’m sorry to hear you say that, Mrs Griffith,’ said Mrs Gray very stiffly. ‘I think you show a most unforgiving spirit.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Reed; ‘I can’t help thinking that if you’d treated poor Daisy in a — well, in a more Christian way, you might have saved her from a great deal.’

‘Yes,’ added Mrs Gray. ‘I must say that all through I don’t think you’ve shown a nice spirit at all. I remember poor, dear Daisy quite well, and she had a very sweet character. And I’m sure that if she’d been treated a little more gently, nothing of all this would have happened.’

Mrs Gray and Miss Reed looked at Mrs Griffith sternly and reproachfully; they felt themselves like God Almighty judging a miserable sinner. Mrs Griffith was extremely angry; she felt that she was being blamed most unjustly, and, moreover, she was not used to being blamed.

‘I’m sure you’re very kind, Mrs Gray and Miss Reed, but I must take the liberty of saying that I know best what my daughter was.’

‘Mrs Griffith, all I say is this — you are not a good mother.’

‘Excuse me, madam.’ ... said Mrs Griffith, having grown red with anger; but Mrs Gray interrupted.

‘I am truly sorry to have to say it to one of my parishioners, but you are not a good Christian. And we all know that your husband’s business isn’t going at all well, and I think it’s a judgment of Providence.’

‘Very well, ma’am,’ said Mrs Griffith, getting up. ‘You’re at liberty to think what you please, but I shall not come to church again. Mr Friend, the Baptist minister, has asked me to go to his chapel, and I’m sure he won’t treat me like that.’

‘I’m sure we don’t want you to come to church in that spirit, Mrs Griffith. That’s not the spirit with which you can please God, Mrs Griffith. I can quite imagine now why dear Daisy ran away. You’re no Christian.’

‘I’m sure I don’t care what you think, Mrs Gray, but I’m as good as you are.’

‘Will you open the door for me, Mrs Griffith?’ said Mrs Gray, with outraged dignity.

‘Oh, you can open it yourself, Mrs Gray!’ replied Mrs Griffith.

XI

Mrs Griffith went to see her daughter-in-law.

‘I’ve never been spoken to in that way before,’ she said. ‘Fancy me not being a Christian! I’m a better Christian than Mrs Gray, any day. I like Mrs Gray, with the airs she gives herself — as if she’d got anything to boast about!... No, Edith, I’ve said it, and I’m not the woman to go back on what I’ve said — I’ll not go to church again. From this day I go to chapel.’

But George came to see his mother a few days later.

‘Look here, mother, Edith says you’d better forgive Daisy now.’

‘George,’ cried his mother, ‘I’ve only done my duty all through, and if you think it’s my duty to forgive my daughter now she’s going to enter the bonds of holy matrimony, I will do so. No one can say that I’m not a Christian, and I haven’t said the Lord’s Prayer night and morning ever since I remember for nothing.’

Mrs Griffith sat down to write, looking up to her son for inspiration.

‘Dearest Daisy!’ he said.

‘No, George,’ she replied, ‘I’m not going to cringe to my daughter, although she is going to be a lady; I shall simply say, “Daisy.”’

The letter was very dignified, gently reproachful, for Daisy had undoubtedly committed certain peccadilloes, although she was going to be a baronet’s wife; but still it was completely forgiving, and Mrs Griffith signed herself, ‘Your loving and forgiving mother, whose heart you nearly broke.’

But the letter was not answered, and a couple of weeks later the same Sunday paper contained an announcement of the date of the marriage and the name of the church. Mrs Griffith wrote a second time.

‘My darling Daughter, — I am much surprised at receiving no answer to my long letter. All is forgiven. I should so much like to see you again before I die, and to have you married from your father’s house. All is forgiven. — Your loving mother,

‘Mary Ann Griffith.’

This time the letter was returned unopened.

‘George,’ cried Mrs Griffith, ‘she’s got her back up.’

‘And the wedding’s to-morrow,’ he replied.

‘It’s most awkward, George. I’ve told all the Blackstable people that I’ve forgiven her and that Sir Herbert has written to say he wants to make my acquaintance. And I’ve got a new dress on purpose to go to the wedding. Oh! she’s a cruel and exasperating thing, George; I never liked her. You were always my favourite.’

‘Well, I do think she’s not acting as she should,’ replied George. ‘And I’m sure I don’t know what’s to be done.’

But Mrs Griffith was a woman who made up her mind quickly.

‘I shall go up to town and see her myself, George; and you must come too.’

‘I’ll come up with you, mother, but you’d better go to her alone, because I expect she’s not forgotten the last time I saw her.’

They caught a train immediately, and having arrived at Daisy’s house, Mrs Griffith went up the steps while George waited in a neighbouring public-house. The door was opened by a smart maid — much smarter than the Vicarage maid at Blackstable, as Mrs Griffith remarked with satisfaction. On finding that Daisy was at home, she sent up a message to ask if a lady could see her.

The maid returned.

‘Would you give your name, madam? Miss Griffith cannot see you without.’

Mrs Griffith had foreseen the eventuality, and, unwilling to give her card, had written another little letter, using Edith as amanuensis, so that Daisy should at least open it. She sent it up. In a few minutes the maid came down again.

‘There’s no answer,’ and she opened the door for Mrs Griffith to go out.

That lady turned very red. Her first impulse was to make a scene and call the housemaid to witness how Daisy treated her own mother; but immediately she thought how undignified she would appear in the maid’s eyes. So she went out like a lamb....

She told George all about it as they sat in the private bar of the public-house, drinking a little Scotch whisky.

‘All I can say,’ she remarked, ’is that I hope she’ll never live to repent it. Fancy treating her own mother like that!

‘But I shall go to the wedding; I don’t care. I will see my own daughter married.’

That had been her great ambition, and she would have crawled before Daisy to be asked to the ceremony.... But George dissuaded her from going uninvited. There were sure to be one or two Blackstable people present, and they would see that she was there as a stranger; the humiliation would be too great.

‘I think she’s an ungrateful girl,’ said Mrs Griffith, as she gave way and allowed George to take her back to Blackstable.

XII

But the prestige of the Griffiths diminished. Everyone in Blackstable came to the conclusion that the new Lady Ously-Farrowham had been very badly treated by her relatives, and many young ladies said they would have done just the same in her place. Also Mrs Gray induced her husband to ask Griffith to resign his churchwardenship.

‘You know, Mr Griffith,’ said the vicar, deprecatingly, ‘now that your wife goes to chapel I don’t think we can have you as churchwarden any longer; and besides, I don’t think you’ve behaved to your daughter in a Christian way.’

It was in the carpenter’s shop; the business had dwindled till Griffith only kept one man and a boy; he put aside the saw he was using.

‘What I’ve done to my daughter, I’m willing to take the responsibility for; I ask no one’s advice and I want no one’s opinion; and if you think I’m not fit to be churchwarden you can find someone else better.’

‘Why don’t you make it up with your daughter, Griffith?’

‘Mind your own business!’

The carpenter had brooded and brooded over his sorrow till now his daughter’s name roused him to fury. He had even asserted a little authority over his wife, and she dared not mention her daughter before him. Daisy’s marriage had seemed like the consummation of her shame; it was vice riding triumphant in a golden chariot....

But the name of Lady Ously-Farrowham was hardly ever out of her mother’s lips; and she spent a good deal more money in her dress to keep up her dignity.

‘Why, that’s another new dress you’ve got on!’ said a neighbour.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Griffith, complacently, ‘you see we’re in quite a different position now. I have to think of my daughter, Lady Ously-Farrowham. I don’t want her to be ashamed of her mother. I had such a nice long letter from her the other day. She’s so happy with Sir Herbert. And Sir Herbert’s so good to her.’...

‘Oh, I didn’t know you were.’...

‘Oh, yes! Of course she was a little — well, a little wild when she was a girl, but I’ve forgiven that. It’s her father won’t forgive her. He always was a hard man, and he never loved her as I did. She wants to come and stay with me, but he won’t let her. Isn’t it cruel of him? I should so like to have Lady Ously-Farrowham down here.’...

XIII

But at last the crash came. To pay for the new things which Mrs Griffith felt needful to preserve her dignity, she had drawn on her husband’s savings in the bank; and he had been drawing on them himself for the last four years without his wife’s knowledge. For, as his business declined, he had been afraid to give her less money than usual, and every week had made up the sum by taking something out of the bank. George only earned a pound a week — he had been made clerk to a coal merchant by his mother, who thought that more genteel than carpentering — and after his marriage he had constantly borrowed from his parents. At last Mrs Griffith learnt to her dismay that their savings had come to an end completely. She had a talk with her husband, and found out that he was earning almost nothing. He talked of sending his only remaining workman away and moving into a smaller place. If he kept his one or two old customers, they might just manage to make both ends meet.

Mrs Griffith was burning with anger. She looked at her husband, sitting in front of her with his helpless look.

‘You fool!’ she said.

She thought of herself coming down in the world, living in a pokey little house away from the High Street, unable to buy new dresses, unnoticed by the chief people of Blackstable — she who had always held up her head with the best of them!

George and Edith came in, and she told them, hurling contemptuous sarcasms at her husband. He sat looking at them with his pained, unhappy eyes, while they stared back at him as if he were some despicable, noxious beast.

‘But why didn’t you say how things were going before, father?’ George asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I didn’t like to,’ he said hoarsely; those cold, angry eyes crushed him; he felt the stupid, useless fool he saw they thought him.

‘I don’t know what’s to be done,’ said George.

His wife looked at old Griffith with her hard, grey eyes; the sharpness of her features, the firm, clear complexion, with all softness blown out of it by the east winds, expressed the coldest resolution.

‘Father must get Daisy to help; she’s got lots of money. She may do it for him.’

Old Griffith broke suddenly out of his apathy.

‘I’d sooner go to the workhouse; I’ll never touch a penny of hers!’

‘Now then, father,’ said Mrs Griffith, quickly understanding, ‘you drop that, you’ll have to.’

George at the same time got pen and paper and put them before the old man. They stood round him angrily. He stared at the paper; a look of horror came over his face.

‘Go on! don’t be a fool!’ said his wife. She dipped the pen in the ink and handed it to him.

Edith’s steel-grey eyes were fixed on him, coldly compelling.

‘Dear Daisy,’ she began.

‘Father always used to call her Daisy darling,’ said George; ‘he’d better put that so as to bring back old times.’

They talked of him strangely, as if he were absent or had not ears to hear.

‘Very well,’ replied Edith, and she began again; the old man wrote bewilderedly, as if he were asleep. ‘Daisy Darling, — ... Forgive me!... I have been hard and cruel towards you.... On my knees I beg your forgiveness.... The business has gone wrong ... and I am ruined.... If you don’t help me ... we shall have the brokers in ... and have to go to the workhouse.... For God’s sake ... have mercy on me! You can’t let me starve.... I know I have sinned towards you. — Your broken-hearted ... Father.’

She read through the letter. ‘I think that’ll do; now the envelope,’ and she dictated the address.

When it was finished, Griffith looked at them with loathing, absolute loathing — but they paid no more attention to him. They arranged to send a telegram first, in case she should not open the letter, —

‘Letter coming; for God’s sake open! In great distress. — Father.’

George went out immediately to send the wire and post the letter.

XIV

The letter was sent on a Tuesday, and on Thursday morning a telegram came from Daisy to say she was coming down. Mrs Griffith was highly agitated.

‘I’ll go and put on my silk dress,’ she said.

‘No, mother, that is a silly thing; be as shabby as you can.’

‘How’ll father be?’ asked George. ‘You’d better speak to him, Edith.’

He was called, the stranger in his own house.

‘Look here, father, Daisy’s coming this morning. Now, you’ll be civil, won’t you?’

‘I’m afraid he’ll go and spoil everything,’ said Mrs Griffith, anxiously.

At that moment there was a knock at the door. ‘It’s her!’

Griffith was pushed into the back room; Mrs Griffith hurriedly put on a ragged apron and went to the door.

‘Daisy!’ she cried, opening her arms. She embraced her daughter and pressed her to her voluminous bosom. ‘Oh, Daisy!’

Daisy accepted passively the tokens of affection, with a little sad smile. She tried not to be unsympathetic. Mrs Griffith led her daughter into the sitting-room where George and Edith were sitting. George was very white.

‘You don’t mean to say you walked here!’ said Mrs Griffith, as she shut the front door. ‘Fancy that, when you could have all the carriages in Blackstable to drive you about!’

‘Welcome to your home again,’ said George, with somewhat the air of a dissenting minister.

‘Oh, George!’ she said, with the same sad, half-ironical smile, allowing herself to be kissed.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ said Edith, coming forward. ‘I’m George’s wife; I used to be Edith Pollett.’

‘Oh, yes!’ Daisy put out her hand.

They all three looked at her, and the women noticed the elegance of her simple dress. She was no longer the merry girl they had known, but a tall, dignified woman, and her great blue eyes were very grave. They were rather afraid of her; but Mrs Griffith made an effort to be cordial and at the same time familiar.

‘Fancy you being a real lady!’ she said.

Daisy smiled again.

‘Where’s father?’ she asked.

‘In the next room.’ They moved towards the door and entered. Old Griffith rose as he saw his daughter, but he did not come towards her. She looked at him a moment, then turned to the others.

‘Please leave me alone with father for a few minutes.’

They did not want to, knowing that their presence would restrain him; but Daisy looked at them so firmly that they were obliged to obey. She closed the door behind them.

‘Father!’ she said, turning towards him.

‘They made me write the letter,’ he said hoarsely.

‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘Won’t you kiss me?’

He stepped back as if in replusion. She looked at him with her beautiful eyes full of tears.

‘I’m so sorry I’ve made you unhappy. But I’ve been unhappy too — oh, you don’t know what I’ve gone through!... Won’t you forgive me?’

‘I didn’t write the letter,’ he repeated hoarsely; ‘they stood over me and made me.’

Her lips trembled, but with an effort she commanded herself. They looked at one another steadily, it seemed for a very long time; in his eyes was the look of a hunted beast.... At last she turned away without saying anything more, and left him.

In the next room the three were anxiously waiting. She contemplated them a moment, and then, sitting down, asked about the affairs. They explained how things were.

‘I talked to my husband about it,’ she said; ‘he’s proposed to make you an allowance so that you can retire from business.’

‘Oh, that’s Sir Herbert all over,’ said Mrs Griffith, greasily — she knew nothing about him but his name!

‘How much do you think you could live on?’ asked Daisy.

Mrs Griffith looked at George and then at Edith. What should they ask? Edith and George exchanged a glance; they were in agonies lest Mrs Griffith should demand too little.

‘Well,’ said that lady, at last, with a little cough of uncertainty, ‘in our best years we used to make four pounds a week out of the business — didn’t we, George?’

‘Quite that!’ answered he and his wife, in a breath.

‘Then, shall I tell my husband that if he allows you five pounds a week you will be able to live comfortably?’

‘Oh, that’s very handsome!’ said Mrs Griffith.

‘Very well,’ said Daisy, getting up.

‘You’re not going?’ cried her mother.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that is hard. After not seeing you all these years. But you know best, of course!’

‘There’s no train up to London for two hours yet,’ said George.

‘No; I want to take a walk through Blackstable.’

‘Oh, you’d better drive, in your position.’

‘I prefer to walk.’

‘Shall George come with you?’

‘I prefer to walk alone.’

Then Mrs Griffith again enveloped her daughter in her arms, and told her she had always loved her and that she was her only daughter; after which, Daisy allowed herself to be embraced by her brother and his wife. Finally they shut the door on her and watched her from the window walk slowly down the High Street.

‘If you’d asked it, I believe she’d have gone up to six quid a week,’ said George.

XV

Daisy walked down the High Street slowly, looking at the houses she remembered, and her lips quivered a little; at every step smells blew across to her full of memories — the smell of a tannery, the blood smell of a butcher’s shop, the sea-odour from a shop of fishermen’s clothes.... At last she came on to the beach, and in the darkening November day she looked at the booths she knew so well, the boats drawn up for the winter, whose names she knew, whose owners she had known from her childhood; she noticed the new villas built in her absence. And she looked at the grey sea; a sob burst from her; but she was very strong, and at once she recovered herself. She turned back and slowly walked up the High Street again to the station. The lamps were lighted now, and the street looked as it had looked in her memory through the years; between the ‘Green Dragon’ and the ‘Duke of Kent’ were the same groups of men — farmers, townsfolk, fishermen — talking in the glare of the rival inns, and they stared at her curiously as she passed, a tall figure, closely veiled. She looked at the well-remembered shops, the stationery shop with its old-fashioned, fly-blown knick-knacks, the milliner’s with cheap, gaudy hats, the little tailor’s with his antiquated fashion plates. At last she came to the station, and sat in the waiting-room, her heart full of infinite sadness — the terrible sadness of the past....

And she could not shake it off in the train; she could only just keep back the tears.

At Victoria she took a cab and finally reached home. The servants said her husband was in his study.

‘Hulloa!’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect you to-night.’

‘I couldn’t stay; it was awful.’ Then she went up to him and looked into his eyes. ‘You do love me, Herbert, don’t you?’ she said, her voice suddenly breaking. ‘I want your love so badly.’

‘I love you with all my heart!’ he said, putting his arms round her.

But she could restrain herself no longer; the strong arms seemed to take away the rest of her strength, and she burst into tears.

‘I will try and be a good wife to you, Herbert,’ she said, as he kissed them away.

THE END

CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE

Swale is a place of many advantages. It is strikingly picturesque and eminently respectable; the people who live in it excite the admiration of the world in general, not only by their affluence, but by their gentility also, and in these degenerate days the one does not always accompany the other. They inhabit mansions overgrown with creepers, and they all keep a carriage. Here and there a few poor people live in artistic cottages for the special conveniences of the young ladies, who paint in water-colours. But the poor people, even, are of the nicest class, the class that looks so pleasant in Academy pictures. Alas! it is a type that is fast disappearing in England. Now the labourer is an independent creature with no feelings of gratitude; he does not touch his hat to the parson, and his wife drops no curtsey to the squire; he is full of new-fangled Radical notions, and neither looks nice in pictures nor in reality. He has become distinctly vulgar. But Swale is still different, and long may it keep free from the corruption of external influence! As I said, the cottages are delightful, with little leaded windows admitting neither light nor air — but that is a detail; they are most pleasing to the fair sketcher; honeysuckle and roses climb about the doorway, many of the roofs are thatched, and the whole appearance is exquisitely dilapidated.

One landlord, in a thoughtless moment, decided to pull down those on his own estate, and erect new ones with sanitary conveniences, and all kinds of modern improvements; but an indignation meeting was held, and a deputation of ladies called upon him to protest against the desecration. Being quite a plebeian creature, the only person in Swale history whose breeding was not irreproachable, he would not listen to their arguments on abstract beauty, and they did not even convince him by showing that he would utterly ruin the type of good honest English peasant. They appealed to his patriotism: the English countryman was the backbone of the British Army, and how could he be expected to retain his native candour, his obedience and deference to his betters, if he were born and bred, not in a picturesque old cottage covered with honeysuckle, but in a new-fangled place with a bath-room? But fortunately, Mr. Simpson, the owner of the estate in question, was called to a world where it is to be hoped horrid Radicals are in the minority, and his daughters were comparatively innocuous. The poor of Swale were left in peace and quietness, to their own content, for they looked upon it as somehow a merciful dispensation of Providence that every winter their children should die of diphtheria or typhoid. For many centuries they had been used to look upon themselves as different beings from the gentry, and they were not going to begin now to give themselves airs. The gentry were the gentry: they were only common people whose part in life it was to minister to their betters’ needs, and there was an end of it. It must be said that the richer inhabitants of Swale behaved very well in any calamity. They showered jellies and port-wine and coals upon the indigent, and read the Bible to them for hours.

Now, when the old Vicar of Swale departed the life which he had thoroughly enjoyed for hard upon eighty years, there was much perturbation in the parish over the choice of his successor.

“We don’t want somebody too strenuous,” said Lady Proudfoot, the widow of Sir George Proudfoot, who had been given his K.C.B. after bungling some important affair in the Colonies.

Mrs. Strong was taking a cup of tea with Lady Proudfoot, while the latter’s daughters were playing tennis. Mrs. Strong, having arrived perilously near the age of forty, had given up violent exercise; she thought it ugly enough for a young girl to get red in the face, but for a woman of her years, unpardonable. Besides, she did not take heat becomingly. In her youth Mrs. Strong had been rather overpowering. Her six feet of height and her generally massive proportions made her seem almost mountainous, and when she gambolled, she reminded one of a young elephant. But years had brought their chastening influence. She was still massive, but the effect now was magnificent. She was sedate, admirably self-possessed, a type of the British matron. The literary young ladies of Swale said she reminded them of Boadicea. She was undoubtedly a very fine woman, with well-cut features and clear, steady eyes. The only fault to be found with her was that, though her teeth were obviously perfect, she need not have shown them quite so much; but as she was a very good-natured creature, with an uncommon sense of humour, her constant smiles may have been due to a cause other than vanity.

“Of course,” said Lady Proudfoot, “there are so many different sorts of clergymen.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Strong, smiling, “there are the parsons who are Christians, the parsons who are gentlemen, and the parsons who are neither.”

“Well, the chief thing is that he should be a gentleman,” said Lady Proudfoot. “If he’s been to Oxford and taken his degree he’ll be quite Christian enough for us.”

“It would certainly be terrible if we had an eager little man with a wife and a red nose.”

“To say nothing of fifteen children, my dear,” cried Lady Proudfoot. “And the wives that those sort of clergymen choose are too impossible; Heaven only knows where they find them! No, the fact is, Edith, that if we have a horrid creature who wants to reform everything, it will simply be the ruin of Swale. We get along very well as we are, and I’m certain that no one could find anything seriously wrong with us.”

“We go to church regularly in the newest of bonnets,” interrupted Mrs. Strong, “and when we call ourselves miserable sinners we know it’s merely a façon de parler.”

“If we have a vicar who wants to have Mothers’ Meetings and Bands of Hope and all that rubbish, I really don’t know what will become of us.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Strong, with a drawl which might have been sarcastic, “as long as he can play tennis and behave decently at a dinner-party, our souls can take care of themselves.”

“Well, the living’s worth six hundred a year and the house is in excellent condition, so I really think we ought to get some one nice.”

Lady Proudfoot, and the inhabitants of Swale in general, had every reason to be pleased with the bishop’s choice. The Rev. Robert Branscombe was evidently a gentleman — he was, indeed, second cousin to a peer, which necessarily inspired his parishioners with confidence. He was a bachelor, and forty years of age, tall, good-looking, with a fine presence. In ten years his presence would perhaps be a little too fine, already he gave signs of future corpulence; but at the period of which I write it was most striking. He was clean-shaven, and dressed in the latest clerical fashion. I need only add that he was High Church, as befitted so respectable a place as Swale, and had charming manners. He talked a great deal, in a loud voice and in a slightly magisterial manner. His conversation was easy, and could be understood by a child. The latest novel, the local rose-show, dances, and dinner-parties formed sufficient ground for the display of his powers. He rarely spoke of parish matters, considering it bad form to talk shop. Finally, he had a passion for Tennyson, which in a person of his cloth is a proof of much candour and purity of soul. The ladies pronounced him charming, and when an unsympathetic man suggested that his conceit was phenomenal, waxed mighty wroth in the vicar’s defence.

“What I like in him,” said Lady Proudfoot, “is that except for the clothes he wears, you’d never think he was a clergyman.”

It was obvious that the Vicar of Swale ought to marry, and during the two years of his incumbency, the parishioners had done nothing but concoct schemes to that end. Mr. Branscombe was to the tips of his fingers a marrying man. But the choice in Swale was limited, and lay, in fact, between Mrs. Strong and Jane Simpson. The latter was the eldest daughter of the horrid Radical whom death only had prevented from disfiguring the landscape in the manner I have related. She was a rather homely young woman of nine and twenty, and harmless enough to have gained the sufferance of the other inhabitants of Swale, though they could not be expected to forget that her father had made his money in the city. Her matrimonial desires were obvious, and Lady Proudfoot was disgusted at the way in which she behaved with Mr. Branscombe. Of course she did nothing indecorous — she was the quietest and most modest of young persons — but she turned pale at his approach, and blushed at every word he said to her. She was evidently dying of love, and every one knew that he need only ask to be accorded her hand and fortune, which was at least one hundred thousand pounds in solid securities.

But the match was looked upon with disfavour, and his parishioners found much comfort in the thought that Mr. Branscombe was not mercenary. Yet though he would not marry Jane Simpson for her money, he was, after all, only human, and could not be expected to remain insensible to her evident adoration. The hopes of the ladies of Swale were centred entirely upon Mrs. Strong, whom the Fates had not favoured only in looks. Mrs. Strong was not only handsome, but a widow with fifteen hundred a year as well. Her age, appearance, and station made her appear designed by higher powers to share with Mr. Branscombe this life of woe. She was a fascinating woman, and the vicar harboured for her the sincerest admiration. The matter would doubtless have been settled in the first year of his residence at Swale, if Miss Simpson, by her sighs and blushes, had not a little disconcerted him. He was really a kind man, and did not wish to break the poor thing’s heart. And the attitude of Mrs. Strong was a little embarrassing. She smiled at him, asked him to dinner, and callers found him constantly taking a cup of tea with her. She seemed to think it quite natural that amiable hostesses at luncheon parties should always pair them off together. The difficulty was that Mrs. Strong was equally amiable with every one she met, and though she evidently liked the Vicar of Swale, she had given no particular signs of desiring him to be her husband. The Rev. Robert Branscombe had too much dignity and too fine a presence to undergo the humiliation of a refusal — so he hesitated. Of course the ladies of Swale saw how things were, and they did everything to help him — but still he hesitated.

“Upon my word,” said Lady Proudfoot, “I don’t know what more encouragement he can want. He can’t expect Edith to propose to him herself.”

Lady Proudfoot, more than any one else in Swale, was concerned with the matrimonial affairs of Robert Branscombe. She was of the opinion that it was as improper for a clergyman to be unmarried as for a doctor, and, besides that, Mrs. Strong was her bosom friend. She knew very well in what state of mind the vicar was, and decided at length to speak with Mrs. Strong on the subject. One day she attacked her by leading the conversation to Jane Simpson.

“I really don’t see why she shouldn’t marry Mr. Branscombe if she wants to, poor thing,” said Mrs. Strong. “She’s a nice quiet girl, and she’d make an admirable wife for a clergyman.”

“My dear Edith,” rejoined Lady Proudfoot, “I think it would be most disagreeable for all of us. You know she’s inclined to be frightfully religious already.”

“Oh, six months of marriage with the vicar would quite cure her of that.”

“Besides, I don’t think she’s the sort of wife for Mr. Branscombe. He likes to have everything so nice, and she’s terribly homely. I noticed last time I called there that she — that she wore knitted stockings, my dear.”

Mrs. Strong laughed, showing her beautiful teeth. “I dare say the poor girl’s circulation is bad and she has cold feet.”

“I have no patience with you, Edith,” said Lady Proudfoot, abruptly coming to the point. “Can’t you see that he wants to marry you?’

Mrs. Strong was not at all disconcerted. “He has never said so.”

“I wish you would make up your mind. I think it’s absurd for a woman like you, without any encumbrances, to remain unmarried.” Mrs. Strong made no answer, and Lady Proudfoot added, “I wonder if you’d accept him if he proposed?”

“Has he commissioned you to find out?”

“Not directly,” said Lady Proudfoot; “I know he thinks you very charming.”

“I’m afraid I don’t think him very courageous.”

“That sounds like encouragement.”

“It does a little,” agreed Mrs. Strong, smiling.

Lady Proudfoot rose to go, and kissed her friend.

“I dare say he’ll come and see you to-morrow,” she added.

Mrs. Strong was not particularly anxious to get married. The Vicar of Swale was rather a pleasant man, and it was flattering to know that he wished to make her his wife. She wondered that he had not already become engaged to Jane Simpson. Anyhow, he might come; she had committed herself to nothing, and would listen to what he had to say.

Next day at three o’clock the Rev. Robert Branscombe was shown into her boudoir. Mrs. Strong received him with her usual easy amiability, and his self-assurance did not desert him. There was nothing in their behaviour to show that either was love-sick; so far as concerned the man, his presence was the only sign that Lady Proudfoot had delivered any message. His confidence slightly irritated Mrs. Strong. She wished he were a little less at ease. She offered him some tea, which he refused.

“Of course,” she thought, “he has too much humour to be sentimental with a cup of tea in his hand.”

Meanwhile Mr. Branscombe talked of the weather.

“It really is very hot,” he said. “Everything in the vicarage garden is quite parched. You’ve not seen it since I altered the path on the west side, have you?”

Mrs. Strong divined at once that he was leading the conversation to the vicarage in order to suggest that she should become its mistress. She took a malicious pleasure in veering away. Mr. Branscombe was very self-assured, and she felt it her duty to show him it was not so easy as he thought to win such a charming woman as herself.

“Oh yes,” she replied. “Miss Simpson told me you’d been making alterations. I see they’re rebuilding the lodge at Manor House.” She plunged into a description of the operations.

But Mr. Branscombe did not lose his self-possession. He conversed fluently of the lodge at Manor House.

“It’s a charming old place,” he said, when the conversation of itself gave him the opportunity. “But of course I like nothing better than my own vicarage.”

He had brought his own house up again. Mrs. Strong commented upon the unoriginality of man; but with a beautiful smile, like a hare doubling, broke into an account of a delightful vicarage she had taken one summer at Blackstable. It was rather exciting to see Mr. Branscombe driving steadfastly to one point, while she did her best to keep away from it. But at last she was cornered.

“Are you fond of vicarages?” he asked.

The question was inane, but required an answer.

“Passably.”

“How do you like mine,” he asked.

Such an inquiry insisted on a civil answer. “Of course it’s charming.” It amused her to know herself caught.

“It would be ten times more charming if — if you adorned it.” He was distinctly clumsy. Mrs. Strong expected better things of clerical gentlemen of forty.

“Would you put me in a niche in the wall like an Italian saint?”

“You wilfully misunderstand me,” he replied with a gently patronising smile.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

He looked at her for one moment, and Mrs. Strong thought that his appearance was too impressive for any one less than an archdeacon.

“Lady Proudfoot sent for me yesterday,” he said. “And — she told me I might call upon you.”

“I didn’t know you required permission to do that,” she said with her frank smile, looking steadily at him without the least embarrassment. He was not embarrassed either. He smiled back upon her benignly.

“Will you share my vicarage with me, Mrs. Strong?”

He had evidently made up his mind beforehand how to express himself, and he could not allow the accidents of social chatter to disturb his ordered course. “I’ve come here to-day,” he added, raising his voice a little and speaking with the same solemnity as he used in church on Sundays— “I have come here to-day to ask you to become my wife.”

Mrs. Strong looked down. After what Lady Proudfoot had told him it would be ridiculous to seem surprised. She was not certain that so matter-of-fact a proposal pleased her. Notwithstanding her massive proportions, she had a certain tenderness for sentiment, and she would have liked him to hesitate bashfully. A spark of poetry would not have been out of place, nor even some indication of suppressed passion. His certainty of success in the suit was irritating. She felt inclined to refuse him to see how he would take it.

“I feel very much flattered, Mr. Branscombe,” she said slowly, to gain time.

“Won’t you call me Robert?” he said, patting her hand.

Mrs. Strong looked up quickly, and, bending over, the clergyman kissed her on the cheek.

“I thank you with all my heart,” he said. “I will endeavour to perform my duty to you as a Christian husband.”

Mrs. Strong was surprised. He evidently was under the impression that she had accepted him, and she was still considering whether she should or not. Surely when you tell a man that his offer flatters you, it is not equivalent to an acceptance? But there was no doubt in Mr. Branscombe’s mind. He even asked her to name the day upon which he would become the happiest of men. He vowed he must immediately impart the good news to Lady Proudfoot.

“What an excitement it will cause in the parish,” he said, laughing. When he was going away he urged her again to fix a day for the ceremony.

“Till then,” he said, “you will find me a most impatient man.”

“It’s nice of you to be so eager,” she said, showing her beautiful teeth. “But you know there is no end of legal things which will want settling.” It seemed as if she had definitely surrendered.

“If there is anything I can do to help you,” he replied gallantly, “command me.”

“How kind you are! You know I have an income of fifteen hundred a year.”

“My dear Edith!” He waved his hand in deprecation. He was not the man to listen to gross monetary details.

“I think it right to tell you at once,” she said, in answer to his gesture. “My income — is contingent on my widowhood.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

She smiled. “It ceases on my marrying again.”

She watched him closely as she made the statement. Mr. Branscombe started; but his discomposure was momentary.

“My dear Edith,” he said, “you will be more precious to me with the thought that I alone am providing for you. If I have hesitated to ask you to become my wife, it was because your greater income might have — cast suspicion on the purity of my motives.”

He kissed her gravely on the forehead and went away.

“I wonder,” said Mrs. Strong, “how he’ll get out of it?”

Next day Mr. Branscombe came to luncheon. He advanced to Mrs. Strong solemnly and kissed her forehead. He was not a very ardent lover.

“Did you pass a good night?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she replied, smiling. “I always do.”

“Ah!” He paused, and then with a slight effort broke into ecstasies with the view from Mrs. Strong’s windows.

“I can never be sufficiently grateful to you for abandoning all this for my humble vicarage.”

“I’m not cynical,” said Mrs. Strong. “I believe in love in a cottage.”

“Ah well, it has its disadvantages.”

Mrs. Strong had never realised before that her fiancé’s conversation was sometimes painfully obvious. They went in to luncheon, and the presence of the butler confined them to commonplaces. But Mrs. Strong was in high spirits. She saw that Mr. Branscombe was somewhat embarrassed. She had never seen him in such a condition before, and it delighted her.

“You know,” he said, when they returned to the drawing-room, “life will be very different for you as chatelaine of Swale Vicarage. I’m afraid we shall not be able to afford a carriage.”

“Oh, a pony-cart fulfils all my aspirations.”

“What a charming character you have,” he said.

He was becoming more and more ill at ease. Mrs. Strong’s humourous eyes were upon him, and he was afraid of looking foolish. He made an effort to be gallant.

“I’ve never seen any one with such beautiful hair as you have,” he said.

She laughed, and he felt his remark absurd.

“Have you told Lady Proudfoot of our engagement?” she asked.

At last he positively blushed. “No. On second thoughts I fancied I had better not. After all, it’s no business of hers. And besides, the date of our marriage is so very uncertain, isn’t it?” Mrs. Strong had the charity not to look at him. But he took his courage in both hands. “I won’t conceal from you that what you told me yesterday has made some alteration in the matter — not in my feelings, of course; your poverty can only make my love the greater.”

Now Mrs. Strong looked at him, and he faltered. She at last had seen the Rev. Robert Branscombe lose his self-assurance.

“Of course,” he said, “I know my behaviour is liable to misconstruction. It looks as if — as if I were mercenary. Yesterday I asked you to marry me as quickly as possible. I know it sounds funny when I ask you to-day to wait.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Mrs. Strong, encouragingly.

He took her hands, but Mrs. Strong gently withdrew them. He was talking very quickly, nervously.

“I feel,” he said, “that my duty to you counterbalances everything. I hope you understand that it’s entirely for your sake that I want you to wait.”

“Oh, you want me to wait?”

“In three or four years all sorts of things may happen. I have a good deal of influence in clerical quarters, and I have been given to understand that I’m my Uncle George’s sole heir. Of course he’s only sixty-five. He may live another ten years; but even then I should only be fifty.” He took her hand again. “I know I’m asking a great deal; but will you wait for me, Edith, say five years? I’m certain to get a better living by then.”

“Are you sure,” she asked quietly, “that you wouldn’t prefer not to be bound by an engagement? As you suggest, so much may happen in five years.”

“Oh, Edith, surely you have not so poor an opinion of me as to suppose me capable of breaking off our engagement because — because—”

“You know, Robert, you are a young man, and in ten years you’ll only be fifty; but I shall be fifty too! And you have a great future before you. I’m sure you’ll end up as a bishop. A man of your calibre is wasted on a little country parish. I don’t feel myself justified in hampering you.”

“I should be contemptible if I asked you to give me back my word.” The Vicar of Swale was genuinely disturbed; he was a gentleman, and he could not stoop to a discreditable action.

“But it is I who ask you, Robert. I do not feel myself justified in standing in your way. It is no sacrifice to me when I think of your future.”

“I can’t accept your sacrifice,” he said solemnly. “I should feel such a — such a cad.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Strong, changing her tone. “We will forget our interview of yesterday. You may be quite certain that I will say nothing about it.”

“Ah, Mrs. Strong, you are a truly Christian woman.”

The Vicar of Swale was humbled, but Mrs. Strong was a woman, and she could not let him go without a small revenge.

“I hope,” she murmured with a smile, as she shook his hand, “I hope I haven’t made you feel very ridiculous? I really haven’t tried to.”

Next morning Lady Proudfoot rushed into Mrs. Strong’s drawing-room.

“Oh, Edith, what have you done?”

“Good Heavens! what’s the matter?”

“I’ve just had a letter from Mr. Branscombe, and he tells me—”

“What?” Surely the Vicar of Swale had not betrayed their secret.

“He tells me that he’s engaged to Jane Simpson.”

Mrs. Strong did not move a muscle.

“Oh, is that all?” she said. “I knew he meant to propose to her. He came to see me two days ago, and I told him she’d make a pattern wife.”

“But he wanted to propose to you.”

“Oh, dear no. You’re completely mistaken,” she replied, calmly. “He thinks I’m really too Low Church.”

She smiled her most fascinating smile.

“You certainly have got beautiful teeth,” said Lady Proudfoot, rather sourly.

LADY HABART

I

Ever since Lady Habart had been able to look in a mirror, and she was a precocious child, she had been a warm admirer of her personal appearance; and long before mastering the multiplication table she had become convinced of her own abnormal cleverness. She was indeed excessively clever; she was one of those persons who can multiply by thirteen as easily as the common herd by two; but a gift for mathematics is fatal to a woman, her skill in the manipulation of figures and her jugglery with accounts invariably land her in the Bankruptcy Court. Lady Habart was no exception to the rule, and of late her thoughts had often wandered to future interviews with the Official Receiver; she had considered the explanations she would offer to that most pertinacious of enquirers. This was the first occasion in her life upon which she had shunned publicity, and she came to the conclusion that it was scandalous to allow the newspapers to publish details about the private affairs of widowed gentlewomen. Her mind was also disturbed by the vague prospect of dreadful penalties if she contracted debts for more than twenty pounds; it seemed so vulgar not to get one’s discharge.

The most casual observer would have noticed how distressed was Lady Habart, for she had overpowdered her nose; and she was too true a gentlewoman ever to commit such an enormity, except when suffering from the very greatest perturbation of spirit.... Lady Habart had realised early in life that woman is essentially artificial, and consequently that artifice can always heighten the charms of even the most beautiful; so she lent a delightful wave to the straightness of her hair, and altered the cold brown with which Nature had endowed her to a delicate reddish gold that exactly suited her great blue eyes and her rose-like mouth. She had never seen a mouth she preferred to her own. She was a consummate artist, and few men noticed that the lady’s pencilled eyebrows and long black lashes owed half their beauty to her exquisite taste; and if they did they cared not. They saw that Lady Habart was charming and did not mind how she came by her advantages; when pressed by their womankind, they acknowledged that she was made-up; but so were many other people, and she certainly made up uncommonly well. Lady Habart’s enemies said her clothes were outrageous, but that was solely her misfortune, for she was the type of woman who would have looked overdressed apparelled in nothing more elaborate than fig-leaves. She was exactly the woman whom one would suspect of wearing artificial jewellery, and her bosom friends whispered that the suspicion had grounds — but this was generally disbelieved. It is best to keep to solid fact, and it was as plain as a pikestaff that Lady Habart was very delightful when she liked, that she was beautiful and under thirty.

Lady Habart was in her boudoir reading Mrs. Humphry Ward’s latest novel. Being a widow, she thought it the proper thing to do. She was also dining that very evening with some literary people — there are literary folk who give dinner-parties to which quite nice persons go — and her inner consciousness told her that this particular work would undoubtedly be discussed. Now, one can never feign such ignorance of a book as when one has read it, and she understood that the men who talked would be much annoyed if she knew all about it.... But it was impossible for her to fix her attention, her heart beat uncomfortably, and at every sound she started. She put her book down, and, taking out her handkerchief, withdrew from it a little flat powder-puff and passed it over her face.... At last the door opened and a young man entered, tall, good-looking, fair, and resembling Lady Habart. He was her brother. He was one of those men whom one sees everywhere, and who always have ample ready money, although no one can imagine where the deuce they get it. Guy Cherriton was the son of a general on half pay who had left a very small fortune, and Guy appeared every year to spend at least half his capital. He was always well dressed, well groomed, and well behaved. People supposed he would eventually marry an heiress and settle down.

“Well?” said Lady Habart eagerly.

“He won’t hear of it,” answered her brother.

“Oh!” she cried. “You are so hopelessly stupid!”

As I have hinted, Lady Habart was up to her eyes in debt; her brother, Guy, had been to a money-lender, trying to get time for the payment of old debts, and if possible to contract a new one. But money-lenders have lost their faith in countesses.

“Did you tell him that I simply couldn’t pay?” she asked distractedly.

“He said you’d have to. If you don’t fork out within a week he’ll make you bankrupt.”

“What a loathsome brute he is! I wish I’d never had anything to do with him. I wish I’d gone to a Jew instead of to a Christian. Christians always swindle one more.”

She walked up and down the room, and in her agitation put more powder on her face. She stopped suddenly in front of her brother.

“Why d’you stand there like an owl? Why on earth don’t you do something?”

“What the dickens can I do!” he said crossly. “I haven’t got any damned money.”

“Oh, it’s no good beginning to swear — that won’t help me. And besides, it’s bad form.”

“How about your diamonds?”

“Oh, really, Guy, you are really too idiotic. You must know that I’ve been wearing paste for the last two years.... What’s to be done! Nobody will trust me now. I can’t get any clothes unless I pay ready money — tradesmen nowadays are so disgustingly independent.... Did you tell Smithson that I’d sign anything?”

Smithson was the Christian money-lender.

“Oh, I said we’d both sign anything, and he told me it was no good wasting clean paper on such a pair as us.”

“Why didn’t you knock him down?”

Brother Guy shrugged his shoulders, while Lady Habart stood in front of a looking-glass, frowning.

“I do look frightful,” she said. She arranged the curls of her fringe; then her features relaxed and she slowly smiled at herself.

Her teeth were perfect. She assumed a languorous expression, and her blue eyes became very caressing.

“I think,” she said softly, “I’ll go and see him myself.”

“Oh, you won’t be able to bamboozle him,” said her brother, immediately divining.

She assumed an air of great dignity. “I shall merely state the facts, and I have no doubt that he’ll be reasonable. He’s a very gentlemanly man really.”

Her brother shrugged his shoulders again. Lady Habart was not a woman with whom one could argue; reason is always the undoing of her sex, and she was too clever to listen to it.

She rang the bell to order the carriage, and, going to her room, began to dress. She discussed within herself whether she should go in the simplest costume possible to show the disordered state of her mind, or whether she should clothe herself magnificently to prove her great importance. It was a very difficult question, but eventually she decided on the latter, thinking to impress the money-lender. She dressed as carefully as if she were about to visit her dearest enemy, and finally surveyed herself in the glass. But then she changed her mind.

“He’s sure to have lots of actresses who go to him frightfully dressed up. It’ll be far nicer to be quite simple.”

She was very pleased with the idea and smiled contentedly as she caused her maid to robe her in a gown the simplicity of which was only equalled by its costliness. And it was grey, that which no colour suited her better. In her carriage she looked at herself in a little mirror.

“I really don’t look more than three and twenty,” she murmured.

II

Lady Habart was shown into a gorgeous waiting-room.

“Captain Smithson will see you in two minutes,” said an attendant, who looked like a butler in a family that came over with the Conqueror.

Once upon a time money-lenders were unwashed Hebrews in shabby clothes, malodorous, speaking English with an abominable accent; and the newspapers tell us that even now there flourishes a worthy Pole who answers more or less to this description. But Captain Smithson — of the Militia — was a gentleman to the tips of his fingers. He had been to a public school and afterwards to Oxford, where he had distinguished himself by his classical attainments. He always had a box at the opera for the season, and every morning could be seen in the park riding a horse which had obviously cost a fortune. He once thought of taking over the Exshire hounds, for he was as sportsman-like as he was gentlemanly. He was the sort of man of whom one might swear that he would invariably do the right thing at the right moment. Captain Smithson did not use a poky and ill-smelling office in the city, but received his clients in a palatial suite of chambers not three minutes’ walk from Piccadilly.

After a very short time Lady Habart was invited to step into Captain Smithson’s private room. It was decorated with priceless china, with mezzotints and Chippendale furniture; nothing could be more chastely elegant. He came to the door to meet her — a handsome man of thirty with an excessively military appearance; his fine moustache was carefully waxed, he wore an eyeglass, and his clothes fitted perfectly. He was dressed with the absolute irreproachableness of a tailor in Savile Row and an haberdasher in Bond Street. He was justly proud of his figure.

“I’m so sorry I kept you waiting,” he said with a slight drawl, shaking Lady Habart’s hand. “So good of you to take the trouble to come and see me.”

“Oh,” she replied, with her most gracious smile, “I’m always pleased to come here, you have such lovely things; I simply adore china.”

“Yes, I know you do,” he replied enthusiastically. “Now just look at these two plates that I got at Christie’s yesterday — look at the drawing of those figures and the colour.”

“Perfectly exquisite,” replied Lady Habart, whom nothing bored so much as porcelain. “How clever of you to have picked them up.”

“But do sit down.”

“You’re very kind.”

Captain Smithson stroked his moustache, waiting for the lady to speak.

“I expected to find my brother with you,” she said, with her usual air of veracity. “We arranged to meet here, you know.”

“I’m sorry, he left an hour ago.”

“Did he really,” cried Lady Habart, with the utmost surprise, rising from her seat. “How very annoying!”

“Oh, don’t go, Lady Habart. Do sit down.”

Lady Habart seated herself immediately. “Did he talk to you about — about that loan of mine?” she asked.

“Let me see,” said the money-lender, as if he were thinking. “I think he did. I dare say you remember that the money is due on Monday next.”

“Oh, well, Captain Smithson,” said Lady Habart, with a sweetly innocent laugh, “I can’t pay it.”

Captain Smithson smiled, but his smile was merely a clever facial contortion; his eyes were quite grim, no one could have seen in them the least trace of amusement.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to, dear Lady Habart,” he said.

“Come now,” she said, putting her pretty hand on his arm. “You’re not an ordinary business man, you’re one of us, aren’t you?”

“I must have the money next Monday,” he replied shortly. He was becoming grave.

Lady Habart began to think him singularly ill-bred.

“I think you’re very unkind,” she murmured, and looked at him languishingly. “You know I’m absolutely in your power.... I think you might treat me as a friend.”

There was a sofa in the room, and Lady Habart wished they were sitting on it side by side. It is impossible for a woman to be really nice to a man who is ensconced in a writing-chair two feet away from her. A writing-chair is a very chilling thing. She drew her seat a little closer to his. Captain Smithson watched her with amusement. She could not guess that fair ladies went through the same pantomine seven times a day.

“I wish you’d come and see me and talk about it comfortably over a cup of tea,” she said. She smiled bewitchingly. “There are many men who’d give their heads to get such an invitation out of me.”

Captain Smithson looked at his nails, thinking he must go to the manicurist when he had dismissed his visitor.

“I don’t think that would be any use,” he remarked gently. “I must have the money on Monday.”

“Beast!” said Lady Habart under her breath, and aloud: “But my dear Mr. Smithson, I haven’t got three thousand pounds in the world!” Her voice broke and her eyes filled with tears.

“A woman in your position can always get money.”

“You are cruel!” she cried, putting her handkerchief to her eyes. “I feel so faint,” she sobbed.

Captain Smithson smiled.

“If you put your head down — between your legs — the faintness will pass off immediately. It’s merely a question of driving the blood back to the brain.”

Then Lady Habart lost her temper. She had been as seductive as she knew how, and the vulgar creature had declined to be seduced. She was about to put her handkerchief away, and tell the wretch in sarcastic language what she thought of him; but she restrained herself. It was no good making an enemy. She lowered her veil and in faltering accents bade him farewell.

“When are you going to file the petition?” she asked.

“Oh, you’ll find the money,” he said.

III

Lady Habart’s carriage was waiting half-a-dozen doors lower down at a very smart dressmaker’s. People recognising it would naturally suppose the owner within, trying on expensive costumes. Lady Habart stepped in and ordered the coachman to drive her home. She was furious. She was clever enough to see that the money-lender had been laughing at her, and she saw now that she had made herself ridiculous. She felt no particular humiliation, but she could not make up her mind whether Captain Smithson was a brute or a fool.

“I should have thought any man would see that I’m not exactly hideous. Perhaps he’s got some odious wife hidden away somewhere. I dare say Jews are better after all.”

The remarks that Lady Habart made to herself often sounded inconsequential, but in her own mind the meaning was always clear.... She drove along in a storm of indignation, railing against the fate which had caused her invariably to come across in this world persons of egregious stupidity. If her husband had not been a drivelling fool he would never have broken his silly neck in the hunting-field. Thousands of men rode to hounds every winter, and it was so unnecessary for a man who practically could not leave his wife a penny to go and kill himself. She got on so well with her spouse that it was most irritating of him to come to a premature end: for a month the defunct earl had adored his countess, for six months he had loathed her, and for the remainder of their two years of married life had been completely indifferent, which is the most comfortable situation for married couples. She had looked upon him as a rather disagreeable acquaintance, but except when she was not feeling very well had always treated him politely.

Her only consolation in the fact that Lord Habart had been unable to will away a penny of his property was that at all events he had not enjoyed the spiteful pleasure of leaving it to a charity, and cutting her off with his blessing. She knew that such a form of humour would have thoroughly appealed to his limited intelligence.

But her carriage was blocked in Piccadilly, and quite close was a man in a hansom, looking at her. She seemed to know the face, but for the moment could not recollect who the creature was; she had not decided whether she should bow when her horses moved on. Then she remembered.

“Good Heavens, how lucky I was not to recognise him — he might have cut me!”

She looked at herself hurriedly in the mirror and was pleased to see that, notwithstanding her past emotions, she did not appear at all discomposed. On getting home she telephoned at once for her brother.

“It’s no good,” she cried. “I can’t get anything out of Smithson. It was absurd of you to make me go to him. He’s simply a vulgar beast.”

“I told you it was no good going.”

“You always say, T told you so’; you can never help bringing that in.... I want to know how I’m going to live?”

It is rather a bore, when you have preyed all your life on society, that society should eventually turn upon you. In the five years of her widowhood Lady Habart had mortgaged her annuity, and for the last eighteen months had lived entirely on usurers and confiding tradesmen. She loathed them for wanting their money.

“It’s some comfort that they’ll only get about sixpence in the pound,” she said. “I shall be even with them there.”

It never occurred to Her that they had any legitimate cause for complaint against her.... She looked at her brother reading a paper.

“I wish you wouldn’t read that odious sporting rag,” she remarked. “You never get the least good out of it — all the horses that you tell me to back come in nowhere, or break their legs or do anything but win.”

She smelt her salts, then the bottle in which they were reminded her of the giver.

“Oh, Guy, d’you know whom I saw to-day? Freddy Ramsden.”

“He’s been in town some time.”

“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

Guy shrugged his shoulders. The fact was that Freddy Ramsden had been engaged to Lady Habart when she was nothing more than pretty Dolly Cherriton, and she had jilted him as soon as the late lamented Habart hove in sight. One does not by preference talk to women either of the lovers they have jilted or the husbands they have divorced.

“Oh, of course I jilted him. He was only the younger son of a country squire with twopence halfpenny a year, and Habart had twenty thousand. I didn’t know it was all tied up in that ridiculous fashion.”

“You’d have been better off if you had married Freddy,” said Guy.

“Don’t be odiously moral, Guy, for Heaven’s sake! How could I know his eldest brother was going to die and leave him the estate; you do irritate me.... I’ve been frightfully unfortunate; it’s always the people I wanted to live who died, and those who might do me some good by dying simply live on forever.... I rather wish I hadn’t cut him. I really didn’t recognise him at first, he’s frightfully altered.”

“You’d better marry him now,” said her brother.

“My boots are so pointed,” he replied, “they rather amused me.”

“Don’t be brutal, Guy; I can never forget poor Habart.”

Guy lit a cigarette with a smile.

“What are you sniggering for in that idiotic manner,” asked Lady Habart sharply. “One would think you had good teeth.”

“You needn’t tell lies. I hate people who are not frank. You know quite well that I was awfully cut up when they brought poor Habart home on a stretcher. It was on the very day of the St. Olphert’s ball.”

For a moment Lady Habart gave herself up to the painfulness of her recollections, then passed the cunning powder-puff over her nose.

“I wore mourning for longer than any one I know,” she murmured, “and black doesn’t suit me a bit.... Is he still unmarried?”

“Who — Freddy Ramsden?”

“D’you think I’m talking of the Emperor of China?” replied the lady with asperity.

“I say, Dolly, your temper to-day is angelic; no wonder Habart took to riding bolters.”

“I wish you’d answer my questions, instead of trying to say silly smart things. Can’t you see that I’m perfectly distracted? What am I to do? They’ll make me bankrupt, and I shall have to go and live in poky lodgings in the country on two hundred a year; and I sha’n’t see any one except a lot of disgusting country people. Fancy me drinking a dish of tea with the wife of the local doctor and having to go to church every Sunday.” She smelt her salts. “Why don’t you tell me if Freddy’s married?”

“No, of course he isn’t.” He looked at his sister a little and said quietly: “Your only chance is to get married again. If you were engaged Smithson would let the matter stand over.”

“It wasn’t my fault that I got into debt,” she said plaintively. “Decent people have to keep up appearances, and it’s simply impossible to do that without going bankrupt, unless you’re a soapboiler, or something equally horrible.”

“My dear girl, I’m not reproaching you.”

To reproach her was the last thing her brother would think of doing — but Lady Habart was in a quarrelsome mood.

“Oh no, you’re not reproaching me in so many words,” she said, “but you look as if you thought I was to blame. I’d much sooner you said it outright than keep hinting at it, and looking at me like a dissenting minister. You look perfectly awful to-day; you’re as yellow as a Chinaman; you look as if you took too much to drink last night.”

She began to cry, for she felt miserable, and the world was treating her very harshly.

“You’re awfully unkind,” she said to her brother. Then, after a pause: “But it’s no good making myself look frightful. Haven’t you got anything to say?”

She had an idea in her mind, but she had no wish to utter it, and waited for Guy to do so. The idea was Freddy Ramsden. But her brother appeared to have entirely forgotten her old lover, and again she inveighed against the stupidity of man.

“I believe Freddy will come and call,” she said at last, driven for once into frankness; “I don’t think he could keep away.”

Guy sprang up. “If you can get engaged to him before next Monday, you’re saved.”

A flush came over Lady Habart’s face, and she clenched her pretty hand. “I can’t make him call. I don’t care if he hates me or loves me, if he’ll only come and see me.”

“I don’t believe Freddy Ramsden is the sort of man to get over anything of that sort.”

“He always used to say he’d love me forever,” she murmured pensively, “but then — so used I.”

“He was terribly cut up when you — er, chucked him over for Habart.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk of it like that, you know I wasn’t to blame. I was a wretchedly innocent girl and he’d only got twopence halfpenny a year. You all insisted on my giving him up. Papa wouldn’t hear of it.... I was perfectly heart-broken.”

Guy did not think his sister expressed the facts very exactly, but he was far too discreet to remind her of past events. She had a truly feminine way of putting on other people the blame of all her mistakes, of all her actions which seemed discreditable; and she invariably took to herself the whole credit of the good deeds with which she was at all connected. For much that she did was highly creditable to her sex and station; she was deeply interested in the reclaiming of bad characters, and her name was printed in large type on the prospectus of many charitable institutions. Now that certain ill-considered individuals are beginning to cast aspersions upon the press, suggesting (most unjustly, of course) that it is slanderous, narrow-minded, and stupid, that it panders to all the worst instincts of the mob — it must be counted for righteousness in Lady Habart that she recognised its profound usefulness, and constantly sent to the papers details of her comings and goings, of the functions she gave, and the various deeds of mercy she performed.

“It shows what sort of a chap Freddy is that he should have spent five years abroad,” said Guy after a pause.

“It shows that, like all men, he’s very unoriginal. How absurd it is for a man to go and shoot things in the Rockies just because his engagement’s broken off. It’s such bad taste.”

“What would you have him do?” asked Guy.

“Announce it in the Morning Post and behave reasonably. They say women have no sense for comedy — men have only the sense for melodrama.”

“I’m afraid I must go,” said Guy. “I’ve got to dine with some people, and I must get home to dress.”

“Oh, but it’s not six yet!” replied Lady Habart.

“I have a long way to get, they live at Dulwich.”

“Oh! I shouldn’t have thought it was worth your while to know people who live in the suburbs. I thought in those parts they always dined in the middle of the day. Can’t you wire that you’re ill? You see that I’m not in a fit state to be left alone.”

“Well, I hardly know the people.”

“Oh, of course, I can’t expect you to show the least indulgence to me. If you’re going, go at once and let me have a little peace.”

“If you really wish me to stay—”

“No, I don’t! I shouldn’t dine with you in any case, I’m far too ill to sit up. I shall go to bed and have dinner in my room. I only thought it might be convenient to have you in the house in case I wanted anything.”

Lady Habart looked at herself in the glass when her brother had gone. She felt sure Freddy Ramsden would come.... People said his father had fifteen thousand a year, and all that was his now; of course men’s incomes were always exaggerated. She knew that by sad experience in the case of her lamented husband; he had not half the fortune attributed to him; but then the Ramsdens were bankers, and Habart had been merely a landowner.

“I wonder if he loves me still,” she said. There was a look in his eyes when he gazed at her that betokened something. But what was it? She did not care so long as he came, and she felt certain he would be unable to stay away. He had loved her too passionately to forget her; in those days she had been the mistress of his whole soul. He would have done anything for her sake, he adored her like a goddess... She brushed a little fluff off the end of her nose.

“I hate new powder-puffs,” she muttered, “they always come off on you.”

She arranged a wisp of hair at the back of her head and passed a hand over her ear. She knew her ears were not good, and covered as much of them as possible with her hair.

“I wish I had really beautiful ears,” she said, looking at them for a moment; they were too large, the lobe was not detached from the face. She gave a little shudder and hid them again. She took up her book and began to read — but still her mind wandered.

“If I can get engaged by Monday, I’m saved.” The thought seized her that he might be no longer free. “He’s the sort of man to fall in love with the typical creamy English girl. Thank God I was never that.”

The butler opened the door, and even before his announcement, before she saw the incomer, she knew who it was.

“Mr. Ramsden.”

He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow, with grayish hair and a heavy moustache; he was deeply bronzed, and his swartness was emphasized by the whiteness of his collar. He wore his frock-coat a little uneasily, as if he were used to freer things. Lady Habart noticed at once that he gave as little attention to his clothes as when she had known him years before. He had always the look of the countryman, and mentally she decided that such a man should never go to places where he could not wear knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket. He was the sort of man of whose gentility dowagers are not perfectly assured till they know he has a very handsome fortune; he was the sort of man whom everybody else would have called at once a thoroughly good sort.

Ramsden came forward, and Lady Habart rose from her chair.

“How nice of you to come and see me,” she said. “I felt sure you would.”

“How strange,” he answered. “I felt sure you would not expect me.”

His reply was a little disconcerting, but Lady Habart remembered that it was an old habit of his to say unnecessarily frank things, and ignored it.

“Do have some tea,” she murmured. “Do you still take it without sugar?”

The tea had stood some time, but Lady Habart supposed Freddy’s agitation such that he would not notice the difference.

The very suddenness of Ramsden’s arrival upon her thoughts had a little embarrassed the charming woman, but she was recovering herself; she assumed her armour of bewitching glances and sugary smiles; she asked herself why he came and what were his sentiments. She watched him like a cat, but there was nothing in her exterior to betray the excitement of her mind; she was playing admirably the part of the accomplished hostess. It could not fail to strike him after his long sojourn in foreign lands.

“Do you still take tea without sugar?” she repeated, as he watched her pour it out and did not reply.

“It is very polite of you to remember,” he said dryly.

“After so long?” she gave a little silvery laugh and turned upon him the light of her blue eyes. She knew how caressing they were. Years ago, their glance would have made his heart beat strangely.... “You’ve been away shooting, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been in Africa,” he replied.

“Yes, so Guy told me.” She mentally reviled her brother for telling her that Ramsden was in America: she might have made so awkward a slip. “That’s why you’re so brown,” she added with another smile. “But you haven’t changed a bit. You’re just the same Freddy Ramsden I used to know.”

“Why did you cut me to-day?” he asked with what Lady Habart considered a rather disagreeable smile.

“I thought you didn’t recognise me,” she replied promptly. “You looked at me in exactly the way people look when they’re wondering who on earth you are. And I should have felt so ridiculous if I’d bowed and you’d taken no notice.”

He paused, looking at her somewhat critically. Lady Habart was pleased to think her frock fitted so perfectly, and she was sitting with her back to the light, so the closest scrutiny was supportable.

“Are you very surprised that I should call on you, Lady Habart?” he asked.

The lady’s heart gave a little beat; at last it was coming; she set all her nerves taut for the fray. The approaching battle exhilarated her; for all her delicate exterior, she was a fighting woman, and never felt herself living so intensely as when she had to martial the whole array of her wits against those of another.

“Oh no; I’m not a bit surprised. I’m very pleased.”

“I imagined that you would not greatly care to see me,” he answered. “One naturally dislikes the person one has treated vilely.”

“I really don’t understand what you mean,” she cried, with a pretty expression of injured innocence.

“If you remember that I take my tea without sugar, you can hardly have forgotten that — that once you were engaged to marry me.

She vaguely thought it was rather bad taste in Freddy to put the matter so brusquely; but he was always rather abrupt. She looked down at the tips of her shoes as she had seen actresses look down on the stage when they were representing high-born damsels of three and twenty: that was her favourite age.

“Are you still angry?” she asked in a low and effective voice — it should, perhaps, have been a little more husky.

“Not in the slightest,” he answered, smiling.

Lady Habart looked at him quickly — he seemed amused.

“Why have you come here to-day if you don’t care for me any more?”

“How do you know that I no longer care for you?”

“If you did, you would still be angry.” She came to the conclusion that a semblance of perfect frankness would be most useful.

“One gets over things, you know,” he replied, with a shrug of the shoulders.

“I’m sorry I made you suffer.” Her heart was beating, and she with difficulty repressed her delight; she knew she was acting the comedy perfectly — her voice and manner came to her without the smallest effort. Like every great actress, she almost felt the emotions she represented, and the pathos of her voice very nearly brought tears to her eyes. “I’m sorry I made you suffer.”

“It was salutary,” he said, smiling, but she noticed that the smile was a little painful. “If you had not behaved as you did, I might have gone on loving you to the end of my life. And that, I feel, would have been the most intense degradation that I could suffer.”

“You are hardly polite.”

“Shall I go?”

“No!”

“Oh, I can’t be polite,” he cried. “I have suffered too much. D’you know that out in Africa in my solitude, for months I thought of you. I remembered every word you had ever said, every look of your eyes, and I saw that you were selfish, and cold-hearted, and cruel. At first I hated you with all the strength with which I’d loved you. But afterwards — afterwards, I saw how paltry and mean you were, and I only despised you. I longed to be face to face with you so that I might tell you how I loathed you.”

“Is that why you came to-day?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He rose to go, but she took no notice of his movement.

“You don’t despise me one half so much as I despise myself.”

He looked at her in silence, with a look of contempt upon his face.

“D’you think I was happy after I married?”

“You were a countess, and had twenty thousand a year. What more could you want?”

“He puts things in such an inexpressibly vulgar way,” said Lady Habart mentally, while out loud she murmured: “You have a right to be hard upon me.”

“You made me fall in love with you; and you know how passionately I adored you. You promised to marry me, and when you met Habart you threw me over without a thought but of yourself.”

“I am very sorry,” she said.

Ramsden gave a laugh. “What is the good of being sorry? Do you know what you made me suffer? Can you imagine my bitter agony while I tried to forget you? Oh, I hate you with all my heart.”

Lady Habart gave a little cry, not of pain, or horror, but of exultation; for she knew suddenly that he still loved her; she had been right in all her suppositions. Her heart swelled with pride and pleasure, with keen appreciation of her own cleverness. He was looking at her with flaming eyes, and he muttered again: “I hate you.”

Then she tried a bold stroke. “But I — I love you all the same, Freddy.”

“You are excessively clever, Lady Habart.” His passion was dissipated, and he spoke now with the calm appreciation of the dilettante. Lady Habart considered him neither clever nor polite.

“Oh, it is you who are heartless now,” she cried, with a finely dramatic gesture. “I suffered also — I suffered too much for my fault.” She put her hands to her head and her voice trembled; perhaps she forced the note a little. “I was mad. Of course I was wrong. I know I behaved vilely to you. When Habart came down to Blueriver he turned my head. I was so young then, I was only a child. I didn’t love him. I confess I married him for — oh, it’s too horrible to think of, it’s too inexpressibly vulgar. But I loved you, Freddy,” she concluded, with a heart-rending sigh. “I can’t call you Mr. Ramsden; I’ve always thought of you as Freddy.”

“I’m glad you suffered.”

If the note was forced, Ramsden had not perceived it.

“I used to be always thinking of you, Freddy. And the more I was with him the more I loathed him, the more I regretted what I had lost. Don’t you believe I love you, Freddy?”

“No!” He looked at her angrily; she knew she was stirring in his heart all the old emotions; the passion of the old days was returning to him like an overwhelming flood.

“And then I knew you were unhappy, and I knew it was my fault. I repented bitterly.”

“I should have thought your house in Park Lane and your castle in the country would have silenced the qualms of your conscience. It must be more obstinate than I suspected.”

“If he only knew,” she murmured to herself in the same distracted tones, “how out of repair the town-house was, and how old-fashioned the furniture.... I had looked forward to it all so much,” she cried; “and then when I had it — Oh, I longed to be back again in the country, in your arms, Freddy; and I longed for your simple, frank old smile.”

They paused, buried in contemplation. Lady Habart had forgotten that she was acting a part, and now believed every word she said. It would have been wonderful if her passionate accents had not affected Ramsden, for her they touched profoundly. She felt herself the most ill-used of distressed females, and she had not much ground to traverse before thinking Freddy Ramsden vastly to blame for leaving her to the tender mercies of her late husband. Lady Habart turned towards her visitor the best side of her profile. “Was Habart good to you?” asked Ramsden at last.

“He loved me very much,” replied Lady Habart, heaving a sigh. But that was so frank a misrepresentation of her husband’s feelings that she almost smiled; she was a woman of humour. “Oh, Freddy, my life was awful; sometimes I felt I couldn’t go on with it. I was so unhappy. Often I was on the verge of running away and following you.”

“You have lied to me so much.”

Immediately she spoke her last words she knew that they did not ring true. He withdrew himself into his shell.

“Don’t you believe what I say?” she sighed. “But why should you? I know you’ll never believe in me again — I don’t deserve that you should.... Oh, but forgive me, Freddy.” She put out in supplication her bejewelled hands: as she had told her brother, the rings were mostly paste. “Forgive me before we part forever.”

“Would my forgiveness do you any good?”

“You’re going to be married soon, aren’t you? I do hope you’ll be happy — I’d willingly give my life to know you completely happy.”

“I shall never get married,” he replied.

Lady Habart looked up quickly.

“Oh, but Guy told me you were engaged to a Miss — I forget the name. I thought you’d only come from abroad to get married.”

“I have only been engaged once.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad. I don’t want you to get married; I don’t want you to forget me.... Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying — I wish you didn’t hate me!”

“Do you think I have no cause, Lady Habart?”

“You used to call me Dolly — don’t you remember?”

“I have no right to, now.”

“It would make me a little happier, if you did.” She had again lost herself in her part and she was living, not acting. She really felt very miserable and the strain upon her nerves began to tell on her. She could not restrain the real tears that came to her eyes, and she put her handkerchief up, sobbing quietly. It was tremendously effective, and she could not help perceiving it. “I’m so unhappy — I want some one so badly in whom I can trust.”

“I will do anything I can to help you,” he whispered; he could not trust himself to speak aloud. Few men can stand a woman’s tears.

“What can you do! I’m so frightfully unhappy. You don’t know what it is to be utterly alone in the world with nobody to stand by one — with nobody to love one.”

“Ah, Dolly, I would have loved you all my life if you had let me.”

“It’s too late now,” she sighed, drying her tears. “I feel that my life is finished — I’m quite young and I feel so old.” She remembered that in artificial light she did not look more than twenty-three.

“Sometimes I think I should like to lie down and die.... I used to be beautiful when you knew me, Freddy.”

“To me you are always beautiful.”

She smiled at him painfully, thinking the style of his remark more applicable to a woman of at least forty. Her eyes, wandering over Freddy’s head, caught sight of one of the water-colours of her school-days.

“Do you remember how we used to wander about the fields together at home, when we were boy and girl? And on Sunday evenings when we walked home from church you used to put your arm round my waist. And we used to sit under the big trees and smoke cigarettes.”

“Ah, Dolly,” he cried, as the recollections crowded back upon him, “how could you treat me as you did!”

“And we used to play tennis together. D’you remember how frightfully cross you used to get when I beat you?”

He laughed in his old boyish manner, forgetting suddenly all that had gone between. “You only won when I didn’t play up.”

“Oh, what nonsense! You always used to say that just to aggravate me, but it wasn’t true.... And afterwards you used to lie down on the grass and smoke, while I made you lemon-squashes.”

“D’you remember how sick your first cigarette made you?”

“Oh, it was horrible!”

“You wouldn’t speak to me for days afterwards, and you made me give you my knife to make it up.”

“But you took it back again next day,” she said, laughing.

“It seems to me that then there were no rainy days. Our whole life was warm and sunny and beautiful.”

“And d’you remember that day I nearly fell in the lake? I was so frightened and you kissed me. You were always kissing me.”

“You drive me perfectly mad,” he said. “Oh, I know you loved me then, Dolly. Why didn’t you let that sweet life go on forever!” She put her hands to her eyes. Surely now he would spring forward and clasp her in his arms, vowing he adored her; she would sink her beautiful head upon his bosom and burst into another flood of tears; she would offer her rose-like mouth to his kisses.

But he uttered a cry and it made Lady Habart start and look rapidly at him.

“What a fool I am!” he said. “You took me in like a child. You’ve been humbugging me all through.”

“Freddy,” she cried, springing up. “What d’you mean? You’re mad.”

She could not understand the sudden change. What error had she committed? It was incomprehensible.

“You humbug!” he repeated.

“Freddy!” A look of genuine horror came into her eyes. How had he seen?

He took up his hat and walked out of the room without another word. Lady Habart sank back into her chair, half-fainting. Had she lost him? But why, why? Oh, it was impossible.

“Oh no, he’ll come back,” she muttered. At the first moment she was overcome, but her confidence quickly returned. She knew he loved her passionately, he couldn’t help himself; he was like a fish with the hook in its mouth, struggling to get free. Every toss and turn forced the steel deeper in, and she smiled at the thought of the bleeding gills. She looked at the time. She had intended to send a note to the people with whom she was dining to say she was seriously indisposed and could not possibly come; but the matter had gone out of her head and now it was, perhaps, a little late. She was restless and excited, inclined to go out, experiencing a need for speech and admiration. She was so sure of her triumph that she could afford to dismiss the subject from her thoughts. There was now really nothing to ruffle her temper, and already she began to feel herself looking more beautiful than an hour ago.

She went to her room in the highest of good humours, and chose to wear her most extravagant costume. Looking at herself in the glass, she thought she had never appeared more fascinating. For once she did not ask herself whether her hair should not be golden red rather than reddish gold — a momentous question which had given her many troubled moments. Her neck was adorable, her eyes flashed, and she felt sure of repeating in a different way her triumph of the afternoon. Finally she descended to her carriage; certainly she was overdressed, but then no one could have been more fashionable. She wondered whether after dinner Freddy Ramsden would walk up and down beneath her windows; he was a sentimental creature, and she thought it very probable. Her absence, however, made such a performance distinctly ridiculous.

“Poor Freddy,” she murmured, “he’s so naïf.”

Next day Lady Habart was somewhat meditative. She sat in her boudoir awaiting Freddy’s inevitable visit; her old knowledge of him told her that he had been counting the hours which passed before he could decently present himself again. She had closed her door to every one but him, even to her brother; for she felt certain that Ramsden had prepared some speech or other with which to break in upon her, and the presence of a third party would possibly be disastrous. Poor Freddy was so melodramatic; Lady Habart had a very low opinion of masculine good taste; judged by the standard of her own exquisite savoir faire, all men were just a little vulgar.

A servant brought her coffee — it was after luncheon — and said that Captain Smithson had called.

“What on earth can he want?” she asked herself. The servant added that the money-lender had particularly asked to see her, and on being told she was out had inquired when she would be at home, and then said he would come again a couple of hours later. Lady Habart was still wondering why Captain Smithson should want so particularly to see her, when Ramsden was shown in. Lady Habart sprang up.

“Freddy!” she cried with astonishment. “I expected never to see you again.”

“I ought not to have come. I am not — I am not worthy to see you. I have come to beg your pardon.”

Lady Habart looked at the pattern of her carpet. “It is not you who should do that — I beg your pardon, Freddy, with all my heart for all I have done.”

“I spoke to you like a cad yesterday; I had thought out long ago what I wanted to say to you. When I saw you I felt I couldn’t, but — I forced myself.”

“You said nothing that I did not deserve,” she replied in a low voice, with a humble bend of the head.

“I’ve come to-day to ask you to forgive me. And,” he hesitated, colouring, then with an obvious effort, “and I’ve come to ask you to marry me. Yesterday I accused you of being insincere, I thought you were humbugging me; but when I accused you — forgive me, I was mad — a look of horror came over your face that has been haunting me all the night. That look showed me that I wronged you.” He came forward and took her hands, pleading. “Will you marry me, Dolly?”

Then an inspiration came to her. She restrained the joyful “Yes” that was forcing itself from her lips against her will. If she accepted him, and he discovered her penniless condition, he would understand that she had been indeed playing the fool with him. She dared not risk it; he would surely make inquiries about her. It was safer to tell him first. She disengaged her hands.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “Oh! God help me! I can’t. I thank you all with my heart for what you have said; but it’s impossible, Freddy. I’m so sorry; I think I could have made you happy.”

“What do you mean?” he cried. “Yesterday you swore you loved me.”

She passed her hand over her forehead. “Don’t you know? I thought all the world knew. I’m hopelessly in debt, and I’m going to be made bankrupt.”

“What! But Habart—”

“He left me nothing. Everything was tied up. I had a little, but — oh, I don’t know what happened. I got into the hands of the money-lenders. One of them has just been here clamouring for his money. Oh, God, I don’t know what I shall do. Everything will be sold, and I shall be a beggar.”

“Oh, Dolly, I love you with all my heart.”

He clasped her in his arms, but she pushed him away.

“Oh no,” she cried, “don’t humiliate me. Don’t you see that I can’t marry you; it wouldn’t be honourable. My name will be dragged through the dust. People will say that I married you for your money.”

“What does it matter what people say!”

“Oh, I couldn’t bear it. I love you too much.”

“But if you’re in trouble let me stand by you. Oh, now, you must marry me. You owe it to me, I have suffered and loved so much.”

“I daren’t. Don’t tempt me. I should like to so much, but I’m afraid. Afterwards, when you thought of it, you’d believe also that I married you for your money. And if I saw that thought in your eyes I’d kill myself. If I don’t marry you it means hopeless ruin and disgrace. You’d think I inveigled you into marriage. I’ve got to pay Smithson four thousand pounds next Monday, and I can’t, I can’t.”

She finished by burying her head on his bosom, while he kissed her repeatedly.

“Say ‘Yes,’” he said; “say ‘Yes.’”

And at last she cried: “Oh, I can’t help it, I love you too much. Take me and do what you will with me.”

Freddy Ramsden had not enjoyed such bliss for many years. He pressed her to marry him quickly, and she did not resist.

“And now I want you to do something for me,” he said at last. “Will you promise — on your word of honour?”

“Yes,” she replied, smiling through her tears.

“I want you to let me give you a cheque to pay that moneylender with. You promised,” he added, as she started, and he saw she meant to tell him such a thing was impossible. “You promised.”

“You are too good to me,” she murmured. She thought herself very clever for having put an extra thousand on to the sum; it would be mightily useful for incidental expenses. She quickly ran up in her mind which bills she was bound to pay immediately. It seemed as if Freddy could not tear himself away; but at last he left her, promising to return for dinner, and then Lady Habart hurriedly slipped the cheque into an envelope and sent it to her bank. Four thousand pounds! She gave a little cry of delight. She telephoned for her brother.

The moment he appeared she burst into a torrent of explanation. Never in her whole life had she felt more pleased with herself; the triumph of Habart’s proposal had been nothing to this, for he had been but a second and better string to her bow. Ramsden never knew that she had written him his letter of dismissal two hours after accepting the earl.... Lady Habart had never felt herself so entirely spiritual as at this moment; never had she been more convinced of the superiority of mind over matter, of man over beast, of herself over everybody else. Though she was a pious woman and fervently thanked her Maker for her success, she thanked her own intelligence more.

“Oh, I was splendid,” she cried to her brother. “If I weren’t going to be married, I’d go on the stage. What a success I should be!”

She could not contain herself, and she repeated half-a-dozen times every detail of the two interviews with Ramsden. She could scarcely understand that her mind should be so remarkable — she wondered whence her talent came; certainly neither her father nor her mother had ever shown such diabolical cleverness. It flattered her to think herself Mephistophelian. Then in unwonted generosity she began telling Guy all she would do for him — his circumstances had been no better than hers, but his debts were infinitesimal, since no one had ever been so foolish as to trust him. She said she would find him a rich wife — that was self-help after the most approved pattern of the excellent Samuel Smiles; it would provide for him also without any expense to herself or dear Freddy. Dear Freddy’s money she now looked upon as her own and meant to be careful with it. Of course, Freddy would go into Parliament — it would give him something to do, and keep him out of the way, and he’d be quite at home among all those old fogies. She would write his speeches herself; she had always had an inclination for public life, and henceforward she would go in for problems, model dwelling-houses, old-age pensions, temperance, and all that sort of thing. Guy listened meekly to all she was going to do for him, for Freddy, and for Freddy’s wife. In his heart of hearts he did not greatly believe in any one benefiting enormously by her efforts besides herself. He had for her a very great affection, but few illusions.

But the butler interrupted Lady Habart with the announcement that Captain Smithson was again below, insisting on seeing Her Ladyship.

“What a rude man he is,” said Lady Habart. “Isn’t it a shame that I should have to pay him the money!”

“I’d better go and see what he wants, hadn’t I?” said Guy.

“Yes, do go; and be as rude to him as you possibly can. Treat him like the cad he is. If you get the ghost of a chance, kick him downstairs.”

Guy laughed, and was proceeding to carry out the lady’s gentle wish, when she stopped him.

“No, don’t go: I want to be rude to him myself. He was simply insolent when I called on him.”

“Well, I’ll get out of the way,” said Guy.

“No, stop here and read the paper. Take no notice either of him or me,” she replied, touching the bell for the captain to be sent up.

Lady Habart sat down at a writing-table, and began writing a note to a duchess of her acquaintance. The expression on her face was not amiable. The door was opened, and the butler announced the name. Captain Smithson stalked forward with his fashionable gesture, holding the shiniest of top-hats. He stopped as Lady Habart did not rise to take his outstretched hand, and for once was a little embarrassed. Laby Habart had been right in supposing Guy’s presence would add to the humiliation. A man can sometimes bear a woman’s snub, but never if a second man is present. Guy went on reading his paper and Lady Habart continued her letter.

“Er — Lady Habart”; he thought that they possibly had not heard his entrance.

Lady Habart half-turned her head. “Oh, is that you, Smithson?” she said. “I’ll attend to you in one minute.”

Captain Smithson looked at her quickly and then glanced at Guy; he could not understand. They did not offer him a chair, but he sat down to show he was at his ease; but then, sitting away from the others, he felt himself ridiculous, and he marched up to Guy.

“Anything in the paper?” he asked in as natural a tone as he could assume.

“What?” said Guy, looking up.

Captain Smithson repeated his question.

“Absolutely nothing,” answered Guy, and at once buried his head behind it again. Captain Smithson frowned; he was not a patient man and he was quite unused to such treatment.

“I would be obliged if you could give me your attention immediately, Lady Habart; I’m very busy.”

“Really?” said Lady Habart, looking at him for one moment, contemptuously.

He could think of nothing further to say and he waited. He swore he would make her pay for her behaviour; of course, she had the money, otherwise she would never have altered her behaviour so markedly. Lady Habart finished the letter with great deliberation.

“Now, my good man, what can I do for you?” she said at last. She left him standing, as being more menial and humiliating. Captain Smithson was in rather an awkward position. He had come to her with a proposition to delay calling in his money for another three months, on terms extremely advantageous to himself. He knew that if the worst came to worst the present holder of the title would pay the lady’s debts and there was no need to press her too hard. But evidently she had the money and his errand had lost its object. Lady Habart impatiently tapped the ground with her foot.

“Please state your business at once.”

“I came to see you about our conversation of yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“Well, the fact is—”

“But really, I don’t understand what right you have to come to my house and insist on being shown in. I look upon it as a piece of the grossest impertinence.”

“You forget that you invited me to take tea with you, Lady Habart,” he said, flushing.

“I?” said Lady Habart indignantly. “The man’s mad. Did you ever hear such a thing, Guy!”

Guy raised his eyebrows and looked at the money-lender as if he were some wonderful beast.

“Your Ladyship has a very bad memory,” said the captain sarcastically.

“You are very impertinent. Please ring the bell, Guy.”

“You know what to expect if you don’t pay me my money, Lady Habart.”

“I am under the impression that it is not due till Monday. Oh, Russell,” she added to the butler, “you will show this man to the door, and if he comes again you will call the police.”

Captain Smithson was going to speak, but there were three pairs of eyes upon him; also Guy was obviously athletic and would love an opportunity to throw him downstairs. He walked out like a lamb. When the door was closed behind him, Lady Habart smiled and kissed her brother.

PRO PATRIA

I

Mr. John Porter-Smith was a “carpet-bagger” — which means, of course, a candidate who has no connection with the place he wishes to represent; and arrives to catch the electors’ votes with no more unwieldy luggage than a carpet bag. But Mr. PorterSmith, though his constituency had certainly heard nothing of him till he was sent down from headquarters to contest the seat, came by no means with exiguous baggage. On the contrary, he brought with him a reassuring quantity of personal effects, a motor-car, and postilions in handsome red coats. These, it should be added, he did not use with the motor-car, but in a magnificent and highly varnished carriage, which dashed continually up and down the streets behind four equally magnificent horses. An election is perhaps the only occasion on which an ordinarily modest Englishman may give rein to his tastes for eccentricity and grandiloquence; and these are qualities which fifty years of repression have done little to extinguish. It is only the mortal fear of ridicule which has bullied the Briton of to-day out of the bottle-green frock-coat of Disraeli and the pompous phrases of Bulwer-Lytton: when he can offer his patriotism as an excuse, even the quietest will rival the Salvation Army in the gaudiness of his costume and of his rhetoric. Mr. Porter-Smith, indeed, went on further than to exhibit in every shop-window his photograph as an Imperial Yeoman, but outriders and postilions sufficiently made up for the deficiency; and his speeches were models of rodomontade. The fact that he was perfectly unknown to the electors was counterbalanced by the happy circumstance that Mr. Porter-Smith had not only fought for his king in South Africa, but had even shed his red blood for that gracious personage. He had been scratched on the hand and obliged for three days to wear a bandage; but the exact nature of his injury was by himself and by his more enthusiastic supporters rightly considered a matter of no consequence. The latter drew lurid pictures of Mr. Porter-Smith lying wounded on the field of battle, silent, uncomplaining, heroic, bleeding his life’s blood, ready to die for his country; and when the candidate himself unassumingly said it was nothing, that he had only done his duty, the electors cheered to the echo at such a noble mingling of manly sentiment and of intrepid modesty.

II

A couple of days before the election Mr. Porter-Smith went to his committee-rooms in the morning, overflowing with high spirits. He had driven up with his four horses; and the attention he created, with the scarlet outriders and the postilions, always elated him.

“Well,” said he, “they seem more enthusiastic than ever.”

“Enthusiasm be hanged!” said Major Long, a jovial, red-faced man, who, with the Reverend Septimus Cameron, was Porter-Smith’s most influential supporter.

And the agent, who was sitting with him, looked as if he fully agreed with the rather forcible expression.

“What’s the matter?” asked Porter-Smith, looking with surprise at their gloomy faces.

“Cameron has been here.”

“What, the worthy Septimus?” replied the candidate, flippantly. “Has he had his hair cut?”

The Rev. Septimus Cameron was the leader of the Low Church Party in the constituency; and a man not only of irreproachable character, which might have been unimportant, but of overpowering influence as well, which made his principles things to be treated with respect. The Radical candidate was a Roman Catholic, and the Rev. Septimus looked upon him consequently as little better than Satan. Porter-Smith, who knew nothing about the questions which agitated the Low Church Party and the Nonconformists, and cared less, cheerfully pledged himself to support the measures favoured by those respectable factions. Likewise, when they set him a long string of questions about his beliefs and his attitude towards certain matters, he did not hesitate to answer them all in the way his agent suggested.

“If you get the Low Church vote and the Nonconformists, the election is yours,” said the agent: and that for Mr. Porter-Smith settled the matter.

But this morning neither the agent nor Major Long was inclined to take things lightly.

“The fact is,” said the agent, “that Mr. Cameron has been here this morning to say he can’t vote for you. He’s going over to the other side. He’ll take all the Low Churchmen, and the Dissenters will go with him.”

“And you won’t have a ghost of a chance of getting in,” added Long.

Porter-Smith for a moment was speechless. “Good Lord,” he said, “the old chap must be off his head! Haven’t I given enough pledges? What does he want now? I’ll give him more pledges, if he likes.”

“It’s not pledges he’s after now,” said Major Long, “it’s morals.”

“Well, ain’t I moral enough?” said Porter-Smith. “After all, I have fought for my country, and been wounded. For us who have lain on the field of battle—”

“Yes, I know, I know,” interrupted Long impatiently, recognising the candidate’s favourite point with an unruly audience. “Where’s your wife, man?”

“My wife? What does old Cameron want with my wife?”

“I think you should know that certain reports are being circulated,” said the agent.

“And they’ve got to old Cameron; and he came here in a towering rage, said you’d deceived him, and that you weren’t fit to go into Parliament. And he’s going to write a public letter to you explaining his reasons for not voting for you. And it’s something about a governess.”

“It’s an infernal lie!” said Porter-Smith, indignantly.

“That’s what we told him; and he promised to wait till to-night to give you a chance of clearing yourself.”

There was to be a great meeting that evening in the Town Hall, and it was for this, apparently, that the excellent clergyman was laying his plans.

“How the dickens am I to clear myself?” said Porter-Smith, walking up and down. “I think it’s disgusting to bring personalities into elections; besides, there’s no truth in the story.”

“Well, now, how are you going to prove that?”

Porter-Smith looked at his supporter helplessly. “The fact is,” he said at last, “there is a certain amount of truth.”

“Ah!” said the agent and Major Long in one breath.

“You needn’t look as if you knew it all along. And besides, I did nothing I’m ashamed of. It was only a little mistake.”

“If it loses us the election, you’ll find it a very big mistake,” said Long, grimly.

“It wasn’t my fault at all.” Porter-Smith looked from one of his auditors to the other; then, in a burst of confidence: “The fact is, my wife and I were staying at her sister’s, and she had a governess. Well, one day when I was taking a stroll with the governess she slipped, and I put out my arm — to save her from falling. And somehow she fell into my arms, and then, without thinking what I was doing, I kissed her. My wife happened to come along at the very moment, and of course she misconstrued the whole thing. She wouldn’t let me explain. I told her it was the first time, but he said it was very unlikely.”

“It was — very. It sounds fishy.”

“It’s an accident that might happen to any one,” said Porter-Smith, in an aggrieved tone. “It was idiotic of her to go up to London and say she wasn’t coming back. I said I was sorry, and that it shouldn’t occur again. Women are so beastly unreasonable.”

“How old was the governess — middle-aged?”

“No, of course not.”

“And how long ago did this take place?”

“Why, just before the war. I thought if I volunteered it would bring Fanny to her knees. But I don’t believe she cared a straw. I shall never forgive her now.”

The agent considered a moment. “There’s only one thing Mr. Porter-Smith can do. He must produce his wife, and she must deny the whole story.”

“Oh, but that’s impossible,” the candidate said hurriedly. “Where’s your wife?” asked Major Long.

“I don’t know. Besides, I refuse to bring private matters into the contest. What have my relations with my wife got to do with the beastly voters? I’ve not seen my wife for more than a year; and she’s behaved shamefully to me.”

“If you don’t contradict the story authoritatively this evening, you may as well pack up your things and retire,” said the agent. “And you might have consideration upon us! How many meetings have I harrowed by saying that you separated yourself from all you loved — even from your wife — to fight the enemies of your country; and now you tell us that you and your wife are not upon speaking terms! You must go and see her at once, and bring her down here.”

“She won’t come,” said Porter-Smith irritably. “You don’t know her; and I tell you I don’t know where she is.”

“You say she went to her mother’s; she’s probably there still. You must go up and eat humble pie, and ask her to forgive you.”

“I wouldn’t for a thousand pounds,” cried Porter-Smith.

“It will cost you more than that if you don’t,” said the agent. “You’re very much mistaken if you think you’ll get out of the election under fifteen hundred.”

“Parliamentary candidates shouldn’t kiss governesses,” said Major Long.

Meanwhile the indispensable agent had been looking out the trains, and announced that Mr. Porter-Smith could catch one to London within half an hour. Major Long elicited the address of Mrs. Porter-Smith’s mother, and wrote out a telegram: Must see wife, matter of life and death, arriving 2.30. And between them they bustled the unlucky husband to the station; for greater safety Long accompanied him to town.

“You might have given me time to change my clothes,” said Porter-Smith, looking at his irreproachable suit: “I’m not fit to be seen.”

“Nonsense! You look as if you’d come out of a bandbox.”

“I wish the train didn’t go so quickly,” said Porter-Smith presently; then, looking nervously at his supporter: “I say, Long, you won’t leave me, will you?”

“Bless you, I’ll put a string on to you if you like.”

III

They arrived at the house of the candidate’s mother-in-law, a well-set-up mansion in South Kensington, exuding respectability from every brick. The peccant husband was as white as a sheet, and all his jauntiness had deserted him.

“She won’t even see me,” he said, standing irresolutely on the doorstep.

“Don’t be a fool!” said Long, brushing past and ringing the bell.

They were shown into the drawing-room, and Porter-Smith introduced his friend to a tall, buxom woman of fifty, with fair hair and a comfortable smile.

“Major Long — Mrs. Mahon.”

Porter-Smith had usually a ready flow of conversation, but at the present moment his brain was painfully blank; and he looked at his supporter with beseeching eyes.

“Is Mrs. Porter-Smith quite well?” asked Long.

“Quite well.”

“I hope she’ll be able to see us.”

“She declares that nothing on earth shall induce her to do so,” replied Mrs. Mahon, smiling. “And she’s gone to put a new frock on!”

Major Long then explained the circumstances to Mrs. Mahon, who replied that she had no influence on her daughter.

“I knew she wouldn’t see me,” said Porter-Smith.

“I only know that she says she won’t see you,” replied Mrs. Mahon.

“She never changes her mind,” said the husband.

“Then she’s the most extraordinary woman in the world,” said the mother.

At that moment the door opened, and Mrs. Porter-Smith came in: quite a ravishing person, slender, delicate, dressed with the utmost care. She made a slight bow to her husband, and sat down with an assumption of complete indifference. Major Long and the mother noticed that her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone. There was a momentary silence, and Mrs. Mahon suggested: “Major Long and I will go and look at the conservatory; I dare say you two have plenty to talk about.”

“Oh no, that’s not necessary at all,” said the married couple with one breath; and while Mrs. Porter-Smith suddenly became perfectly white, her husband blushed a deep and healthy red.

“I’m sure John and I have nothing to say to one another that can’t be said before witnesses.”

Long and Mrs. Mahon resumed their seats. Mrs. Porter-Smith sat as far as possible from her husband, and, although she pretended not to look at him, turned to his inspection the best side of her face. She knew he had always admired her profile; and the position gave her the opportunity of looking at him very carefully without the least appearance of so doing. Mrs. Mahon now took up the matter, and explained to her daughter the circumstances.

“When people do shameful things,” said Mrs. Porter-Smith, “they mustn’t complain when they’re found out.”

The candidate opened his mouth to make a somewhat heated rejoinder, when Long broke in with a long plea; but Mrs. Porter-Smith interrupted him.

“Do you mean to say you want me to go down and tell this Cameron man that the story isn’t true?”

“Precisely!”

“I shall do no such thing,” replied the lady, rising from her chair.

“Don’t be unreasonable, Fanny,” said her mother.

“Mamma,” replied Mrs. Porter-Smith, indignantly, “he’s asking me to tell a lie!”

“Only a very little one,” interrupted Major Long, impetuously. “And for a good cause. Think of your husband going out to fight for his country. Don’t you think that he has made up for a momentary lapse? He was severely wounded, you know.”

“It said ‘slightly’ in the paper,” replied Mrs. Porter-Smith, stiffly.

“It bled a great deal,” said the candidate.

Mrs. Porter-Smith looked at him sideways, from under her long eyelashes, and she really thought that he looked uncommonly pale and thin. Major Long caught the glance, and pursued his advantage.

“Think of him lying on the battlefield all the night through, silent, uncomplaining, heroic, bleeding his life’s blood, ready to die for his country.” Long quoted the most effective passage of his speech.

“I only did my duty,” said Mr. Porter-Smith.

“Do you know he might have been killed?” asked Major Long, with hushed voice.

“He behaved shamefully with the governess,” said Mrs. Porter-

Smith, after a pause. “I could never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. And then he tried to make me believe it was an accident. I shouldn’t have minded so much if he’d frankly confessed everything.”

“But there was nothing to confess,” said Porter-Smith.

“I shall never believe that.”

Then Major Long played his last card. “Have you no patriotism?” he cried indignantly. “Your husband fought for his country like a man; and you stay at home at ease. When you’re asked to do the smallest thing for your country, you refuse.”

And in reply to Mrs. Porter-Smith’s look of astonishment he added: “Don’t you see that if you won’t come down we shall lose the election? It means a dreadful blow to the Unionist cause; one can’t tell what effects it may have on the country. Of course the loss of a seat counts only two on a division, but the moral effect is incalculable. Do you take no interest in your country’s welfare?”

“I’m a Primrose Dame,” answered Mrs. Porter-Smith, with pardonable satisfaction.

“And yet you throw a seat into the hands of the Little Englanders! It’s your duty to sacrifice your private feelings. Surely your king and your country come before a wretched family difference?”

Major Long wiped his brow, overcome by his own eloquence. Mrs. Porter-Smith sat bolt upright, and a noble quiver passed through her as she saw herself in the character of a Roman matron.

“It shall never be said that I shrink from doing my duty,” she said at last. “If every one were as scrupulous as I, this difficulty wouldn’t have arisen.”

“You’ll come?” asked Long eagerly. The candidate himself wisely held his tongue.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Porter-Smith, with a freezing look at her husband. “But on the condition that John lays no claim to me afterwards. Until the election is over I will live in the same house with him: of course Mamma will come; but the day after I shall come back to town. What I do is for the sake of my country, and John isn’t to look upon it as a condonation of his behaviour. His conduct was scandalous, and I shall never forgive him.”

IV

Mrs. Porter-Smith aggressively read the papers during the journey, sitting, of course, as far from her husband as the size of the carriage permitted; and when they arrived eventually at the Unionist committee rooms they found the Rev. Septimus Cameron waiting to see the candidate.

“He has assured me,” said the agent, “that unless you give him full satisfaction he will make a complete explanation at the meeting to-night. He’s going to say that no honest man can decently vote for you.”

Porter-Smith muttered words of wrath in his moustache, but Major Long was jubilant.

“Come alone,” he said: “we’ll sit on him for all we’re worth.”

Porter-Smith went into the private room, and the reverend gentleman bowed coldly to him, resolutely keeping his hands behind his back. The candidate by now had regained his breezy good-humour.

“Well, Mr. Cameron, what’s all this I hear? You surely don’t believe every scandal that the Rads, invent!”

“I tried not to, Mr. Porter-Smith, but I’m afraid the evidence is overwhelming.”

“But here is my wife.” And Mrs. Porter-Smith, accompanied by her mother, was ushered in by Major Long.

Mrs. Porter-Smith stared coldly at Mr. Cameron in answer to his bow, and sat down. “I understand,” she said, “that certain reports have arisen concerning the relations between my husband and myself?”

The Rev. Septimus Cameron bowed.

“Well, I think it’s scandalous,” she said, her cheeks flushing brightly. “I adore my husband, and he’s the best man that ever lived, and I’m the last woman to suffer disloyalty. If he had done what you suggest, I would never speak to him again. Oh, it’s too cruel to sully the purity of our married life with such base insinuations.”

“That ought to satisfy you, Mr. Cameron,” said Major Long.

“And if you knew what I suffered when he went to South Africa, and I thought he might be killed!” Mrs. Porter-Smith’s voice broke, and she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“‘I could not love you, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,’” quoted Major Long.

Mrs. Porter-Smith’s sobs became audible, and the clergyman went up to the candidate and shook his hand. “Of course, after this there’s nothing more to be said,” he added. “I need not tell you how glad I am to find these charges untrue.”

Mrs. Porter-Smith removed her handkerchief. “I think it’s shameful that you should ever have believed them. You’re a clergyman, and you ought to set a better example.”

The others were aghast at this vehement little speech, for Mr. Cameron was influential and he was unused to reproof.

“Fanny, Fanny!” said Porter-Smith: “Mr. Cameron was only doing his duty. He acted from the highest motives.”

But Mr. Cameron was disposed to be magnanimous, even though he had proved himself to be in the wrong. “My dear lady, you’re quite right: I humbly beg your pardon and your husband’s. And since there have been rumours in the constituency, I will make it my business to-night at the meeting to give them the very strongest contradiction.”

Mrs. Porter-Smith rose and stretched out her hand, smiling. “I’ll forgive you,” she said, “and you must get my husband elected.”

“I’ll do my best.”

But immediately the clergyman had gone, Porter-Smith sprang forward gratefully. “You are a brick, Fanny!” he said.

Mrs. Porter-Smith drew herself to her full height. “You need not thank me,” she said icily. “I did it for my country.”

V

Mrs. Porter-Smith, vowing that the election did not in the least interest her, stayed reading a book at home while the count was being made. But presently she heard a great noise, and, springing to the window, saw her husband waving his hat from the carriage, which was drawn by a band of zealous supporters: cheer upon cheer rang through the air.

“He’s won,” she said to herself, and her heart began to beat rapidly. But, hearing the front door open, she quickly returned to her chair and began unconcernedly to read her book. Porter-Smith rushed in, wildly excited. “We’ve won, Fanny! We’ve won!”

“Have you?” she said coolly.

“Come to the balcony,” he cried.

He took her by the arm, notwithstanding her slight resistance, and they stepped out. They were met by rapturous cheers.

“Three cheers for Mrs. Porter-Smith!” cried some one, and the air was rent by the yells of enthusiasm.

Mrs. Porter-Smith bowed and smiled, and the beating of her heart became tumultuous; the excitement was gaming upon her, and, looking round to her husband, she found him gazing at her with manifest pleasure. The crowd withdrew at last, and the happy couple returned to the drawing-room.

“Why, where’s your mother, Fanny?” he asked. It was the first time he had found himself alone with her since the reunion.

Mrs. Porter-Smith hesitated a moment. “She’s gone up to town,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“She says — she says I’m a ridiculous fool.”

Porter-Smith began to laugh.

“I don’t see anything to laugh at,” remarked his wife. “I shall go up tomorrow. I suppose you’ll take a house in town now?”

“Yes; I thought of Grosvenor Square. Of course I shall have to entertain a great deal.”

Mrs. Porter-Smith glanced at him, but said nothing.

“There’s a very nice house in Grosvenor Square to be let now,” she murmured, after a pause.

He was standing very close to her, and his eyes were fixed upon her with singular intensity.

“I suppose you wouldn’t come and play hostess sometimes, when I’m giving a function?” he asked.

“It’s quite out of the question,” she said, but very indecisively. She could not help thinking that it would be pleasant to give large parties in Grosvenor Square.

“I’m thinking of going to Paris for a fortnight to rest,” he said.

“Are you?” she replied. “I’ve been thinking of going to Paris to get some new things.”

“Of course I shan’t be able to do much. I’m rather exhausted after the election, and I’ve been so seedy lately.”

She turned her eyes on him again, and he approached a little closer.

“Were you very bad in South Africa?” she asked.

“I was bad because I hadn’t you with me,” he said.

“If you’d really cared for me you wouldn’t have gone.”

Her voice broke, and when her husband put his arm round her waist she had not strength to resist.

“I thought you’d be glad,” he said.

“You knew I should be miserable. When I saw you had volunteered I knew you were pleased to have got rid of me.”

“You said you would never come back to me; or I shouldn’t have gone.”

“You might have given me time to change my mind.”

“Fanny!”

He put both arms round her now, and unreasonably she began to cry.

“Your behaviour was scandalous, wasn’t it?” she asked tearfully, as if she were no longer quite certain.

“Utterly!”

“Well, if you’ll confess that, I’ll confess that I behaved like a fool. When I’d got to Mamma’s I was ashamed to come back again; and you wouldn’t own that you were wrong.”

“Then you’ll forgive me everything?”

“I’m not sure that there was anything to forgive.” She raised her face, and when he kissed her she whispered: “You know it was quite true when I told old Cameron that I adored you, and you were the best man in the world.”

“We’ll never quarrel again, will we?”

“Never!”

And so far they haven’t; but then the election only took place the other day.

A POINT OF LAW

When I feel more than usually poor, (on a rainy day, for instance, when opulent stockbrokers roll swiftly in electric broughams, or when some friend in bleak March weather tells me he is starting that very night for Monte Carlo), I make my will; it gives me a peculiar satisfaction to leave my worldly goods, such as they are, to persons who will not in the least care to receive them, and I like the obsequious air of the clerk who blows my name up a tube to the family solicitor. It is an amusement which costs me nothing, for Mr. Addishaw, the senior partner in the eminently respectable firm of Addishaw, Jones, and Braham, knows my foible; he is aware also that a solicitor’s bill is the last I should ever pay, and I have warned him that if ever he sends it I will write a satiric story which shall hold him up to the ridicule of all his neighbours on Brixton Hill. What accounts he prepares after my demise do not in the smallest degree perturb me; my executors and he may fight it out between them.

One day, then, I walked down the Strand, feeling very wretched after a cheap luncheon in a crowded Italian restaurant (a crust of bread and a glass of water may be rendered appetizing by hunger and a keen sense of the romantic, but who can survey without despondency a cut off the joint, half cold and ill-cooked, and boiled potatoes?), and, jostled by hurrying persons, I meditated on the hollowness and the folly of the world. I felt certain that Mr. Addishaw at this hour would be disengaged, and it seemed an occasion upon which his services were eminently desirable; it would comfort me just then to prepare for the inevitable dissolution. I turned the corner and soon found myself at the handsome edifice, with its array of polished brass plates and its general look of prosperity, wherein the firm for many years had rented offices.

“Can I see Mr. Addishaw?” I inquired.

And in a moment I was shown upstairs into the sumptuous apartment which the good gentleman inhabited. He had evidently just lunched, and with him the meal had without doubt been satisfactory; for he sat in the arm-chair generally reserved for clients, toasting his toes at the cheerful fire, and with great content smoked his cigar. There was so much self-satisfaction about his red face that the mere sight of him cheered me; and the benevolence of his snowy whiskers impressed me more than ever before with a sense of his extreme worth.

“You look as if you read the Lessons in church every Sunday morning, Mr. Addishaw,” I said, when I shook hands with him. “I’ve come to make my will.”

“Ah, well,” he answered, “I have nothing to do for ten minutes. I don’t mind wasting a little time.”

“You must sit at your desk,” I insisted, “or I shan’t feel that I’m getting my money’s worth.”

Patiently he changed his seat, and with some elaboration I gave a list of all the bequests I wished to make.

“And now,” said I, “we come to my wines, spirits, and liqueurs.”

“Good gracious me!” he cried. “I didn’t know that you had started a cellar. You are becoming a man of substance. I will tell my wife to ask for your new book at Mudie’s.”

“Your generosity overwhelms me,” I retorted. “Some day, I venture to hope, you will go so far as to buy a second-hand copy of one of my works. But I have no cellar. The wine in my flat is kept in a cupboard along with the coats and hats, the electric meter, my priceless manuscripts, and several pairs of old boots. I have no wines, spirits, and liqueurs, but I wish to leave them to somebody, so that future generations may imagine that writers in the twentieth century lived as luxuriously as butchers and peers of the realm and mountebanks.”

Somewhat astonished at this harangue, Mr. Addishaw wrote as I desired; then a pale young clerk was sent for and together the legal gentlemen witnessed my signature.

“And now,” said I, “I will light a cigar to complete the illusion that I am a man of means, and bid you good afternoon.” Mr. Addishaw returned to his arm-chair by the fire and, feeling apparently very good-humoured, asked me to remain for a few minutes; he had taken the only comfortable seat in the room, but I drew up the writing-chair and sat down.

“Wills are odd things,” said Mr. Addishaw, in a meditative manner. “Only the other day I had to deal with the testament of the late Lord Justice Drysden; and it was so ill-composed that no one could make head or tail of it. But his eldest son happened to be a solicitor, and he said to the rest of the family: ‘I’m going to arrange this matter as I consider right, and if you don’t agree I’ll throw the whole thing into Chancery and you’ll none of you get a penny!’ The family were not too pleased, for their brother thought fit to order the affair in a manner not altogether disadvantageous to himself; but I advised them to submit. My father and my grandfather were solicitors before me, so I think I have law more or less in the blood; and I’ve always taught my children two things. I think if they know them they can’t come to much harm in the world.”

“And what are they?” I asked.

“Never tell a lie and never go to law.”

Mr. Addishaw rose slowly from his chair and went to the door.

“If anyone wishes to see me, Drayton, say that I shall be disengaged in a quarter of an hour,” he called to his clerk.

Then, with a little smile which sent his honest red face into a number of puckers, he took from a cupboard a bottle, well coated with dust, and two wine-glasses.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Well, I’m an old man,” he answered, “and I keep to some customs of the profession which these young sparks of to-day have given up. I always have a bottle of port in my room, and sometimes when I don’t feel very well I drink a glass or two.”

He poured out the wine and looked at it with a smile of infinite content. He lifted it to his nose and closed his eyes as though he were contemplating some pious mystery. He sipped it and then nodded to me three times with a look full of meaning.

“And yet there are total abstainers in the world!” he exclaimed.

He emptied the glass, sighed, refilled it, and sat down.

“Talking of wills, I said the last word in a matter this morning which has interested me a good deal; and, if you like, I will tell you the story, because it shows how sometimes by pure chance that ass, the law, may work so as to protect the innocent and punish the contriving.

“One of the oldest clients of my firm is the family of Daubernoon, North Country squires, who have held immense estates in Westmorland since the good old days of King Henry VIII. They were not a saving race, so that in personality they never left anything worth speaking of, but they always took care to keep the property unencumbered; and even now, when land is worth so little and the landlord finds it as difficult as the farmer to make both ends meet, their estates bring in the goodly income of six thousand a year.

“Roger Daubernoon, the late squire, injured his spine in a hunting accident, and it would have been a mercy if he had killed himself outright, since he lingered for twenty years, a cripple and an invalid who required incessant care. His wife died shortly afterwards and he was left with an only daughter, in whose charge he placed himself. A man used to an active, busy life, in illness he grew querulous and selfish, and it seemed to him quite natural that Kate Daubernoon, then a girl of twenty, should devote her life to his comfort. A skilful nurse, she became so necessary to him that he could not face the thought that one day she might leave him; he was devoured by the fear that she would marry, and he refused, pretexting his ill-health, to have visitors at the manor. He grew petulant and angry if to go to some party she abandoned him for a couple of hours, and finally Miss Daubernoon resigned herself to a cloistral life. Year in, year out, she remained in close attendance on her father, partly from affection, but more for duty’s sake; she looked after the house, walked by the squire’s bath-chair, read to him, and never once left home. She saw no one but the villagers, by whom for her charitable kindness she was adored, the parson and his wife, the doctor, and twice a year myself.

“And she grew old. Miss Daubernoon had never been beautiful, she had never been even pretty; and the stealthy years, the monotonous life, robbed her of the country freshness which in early youth had made up for other deficiencies. As year by year I went up to Westmorland to see Mr. Daubernoon, I was distressed to note the difference in his daughter; and before her time she grew prim and old-maidish. She ceased to regret the joyous life of the world, growing so accustomed to the narrow circle wherein vegetably she existed that I think nothing at last would have induced her to withdraw from it. Finally, when I was staying in the house at Christmas, two years ago, the village doctor came privately to see me. He told me that Miss Daubernoon had been ill through the autumn and now, to his dismay, he had discovered that she was phthisical.

“‘You know what our winters are here,’ he said to me; ‘if she does not go away it will probably kill her.’

“I went to her at the doctor’s request, and used the persuasions which with him had been quite useless. But she would listen to nothing.

“‘I know that I am ill,’ she answered, ‘but I cannot leave my father. Do you see no change in him since you were last here?’

“I was obliged to confess that I did; the long years of suffering had broken down at last that iron frame, and even the most inexperienced could see that now the end could not be far off.

“‘It would kill my father at once to move him. It would kill him also if I went away.’

“‘But do you think you have a right to place your own life in such danger?’

“‘I am willing to take the risk.’

“I knew her obstinate character, and I felt I could never induce her to change her mind, so I went straight to Mr. Daubernoon himself.

“‘I think you should know that Kate is dangerously ill,’ I said. ‘She has consumption, and the only thing that can save her is to winter abroad.’

“‘Who says so?’ he asked.

“There was no astonishment in his manner, so that I wondered whether he had divined the illness of Miss Daubernoon, or whether in his utter selfishness he was indifferent to it. I mentioned Dr. Hobley’s name.

“‘Twenty years ago he said I couldn’t live six months,’ answered Mr. Daubernoon. ‘He’s a nervous old woman. Kate’s as strong and well as you are.’

“‘Would you like a specialist to come from Liverpool to see her?’

“‘Oh, those doctors always back one another up. A specialist would only frighten Kate.’

“I saw that he would never allow himself to be persuaded that his daughter needed attention, and I spoke more sternly to him.

“‘Mr. Daubernoon,’ I said, ‘if your daughter dies the responsibility will be yours.’

“Then a cruel look came into his worn, thin face — a look I had never seen before — and a hardness filled his eyes that was horrible.

“‘After all, I can only last six months. When I’m dead she can do what she likes. “Après moi le déluge.”’

“I did not answer, appalled by the sick man’s cruel selfishness; the poor girl had sacrificed her youth to him, her hopes of being wife and mother; and now he wanted her very life. And she was ready to give it.

“Mr. Daubernoon lived four months longer than he said, for the autumn had arrived when a telegram came saying that he was dead. It was sent by Dr. Hobley, who bade me come to Westmorland at once.

“But when I arrived it was the change in Miss Daubernoon that shocked me most. Those final months had worked havoc with her, so that it was impossible not to see that she was very ill. She was thin and haggard, her hair was streaked with grey, and she coughed constantly. She seemed ten years older than when I had last seen her, and, though she was no more than forty, looked almost an elderly woman.

“‘I’m very much alarmed at the change in Miss Daubernoon,’ I told the doctor. ‘What do you think?’

“‘She’s dying, Mr. Addishaw,’ he answered; ‘she can’t live another year.’

“‘Fortunately, now she can go away.’

“‘She can do that, but it won’t save her. It’s too late.’

“After the funeral Miss Daubernoon came to me and said she wished to have a talk on business matters.

“‘Never mind about business,’ I said; T can arrange all that. What you must do is to get down to Italy before the cold weather comes.’

“‘That is what I mean to do,’ she answered. T think I should tell you’ — she hesitated and looked down, a faint blush colouring her pallid cheeks — T think I should tell you that I am going to be married at once.’

“‘What!’ I cried. ‘But you’re not fit to marry; you’re as ill as you can be.’

“‘I think I have six months to live. I want to be happy. It’s only because I’m so ill that I cannot wait. We are to be married in London in a week.’

“For a moment I was silent, not knowing what to say. Then I asked to whom she was engaged.

“‘Mr. Ralph Mason,’ she answered, shortly. ‘You met him last time you were here. We have been devoted to one another for the last two years.’

“I could not remember anyone of that name, and I inquired, somewhat curtly, when I should have the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with this gentleman.

“‘He’s now coming towards us,’ she said, and a look of radiant happiness came into her face.

“I saw walking along the garden path, through which we sauntered, a tall young man in a frock-coat, a tall hat, and patent-leather boots. In a moment I recognised him.

“‘But that is the land-agent’s clerk?’

“‘Yes,’ she said.

“He was certainly a very handsome man, with a beautiful moustache and the dashing air of a counter-jumper trying to ape the gentleman. I should think he was fifteen years younger than Miss Daubernoon, and this was enough to surprise me; but the most amazing part of it all was that her pride — you know what the pride is of people in that particular class of life — should have allowed her to think of marriage with such a person. And when I knew him better I found to my dismay that there was in him no redeeming trait; he was merely a very ordinary, common, provincial tradesman, with nothing but his rather vulgar good looks to recommend him. And when I compared his strapping vigour with Miss Daubernoon’s old, sickly weakness, I could not doubt that he was merely an adventurer of the very worst class. I said nothing at the time, but later, finding myself alone with her, I did not hesitate to speak plainly.

“‘Why do you suppose Mr. Mason wishes to marry you?’ I asked.

“A painful, timid look came into her eyes, so that I almost repented my words, but it seemed a duty to be outspoken at all costs to save her much future pain.

“‘I think he loves me,’ she answered.

“‘My dear, I don’t want to hurt you, but I must tell you the truth. You can’t believe that this young man really cares for you. You’re very ill.’

“‘I’m dying,’ she interrupted.

“‘You’re ever so much older than he is. Good Heavens! look at yourself in the glass. Ask yourself if he can possibly have fallen in love with you. And there’s one palpable reason why he wishes to marry you. Can’t you see that it’s your money he wants, and for your money’s sake he’s willing to — to put up with you?’ “Hot tears ran down her cheeks, so that I felt hatefully cruel, but something had to be done to stop such an insane marriage.

“‘Don’t remind me that I’m old and plain,’ she said. ‘Do you think I can’t feel it? But I know he loves me for myself, and even if he doesn’t I will marry him. The only thing that has kept me alive is my love for him, and, after all, I have such a little while to live that you might let me spend it as happily as I can.’

“‘And do you think you can be happy with him? Do you think he’ll have the patience to wait for your death? My poor lady, you don’t know what may be in store for you. At present he’s nice enough to you, and apparently you don’t mind if he’s common and vulgar; but when you’re once safely married do you think he’ll take the trouble to pretend he loves you? You must be mad.’ “She began to cry, silently, so that for the life of me I could not go on, and I resolved instead to speak with Ralph Mason himself. I made inquiries in the neighbouring market-town, and I was scarcely surprised to discover that his character was thoroughly bad. He was known to be a hard drinker, violent in temper, unscrupulous; his friends said he was a good sportsman, which meant, apparently, that he attended all the race-meetings he could and betted more heavily than his means allowed. A sort of provincial Lothario, various tales were brought me of his exploits; and his good looks, his supercilious charm of manner, appeared to make women an easy conquest. I cannot tell you how alarmed I was when I learnt for what sort of a man it was that Miss Daubernoon had conceived such a passionate infatuation; but his very depravity made it just possible that he would accept certain proposals that I had in mind. I telegraphed to Robert Daubernoon, an officer on half-pay with a large family, a cousin of the late squire’s, and Kate’s only relative and natural heir; and on receiving his answer invited Ralph Mason to call on me.

“‘I want to talk to you as a business man,’ I said. ‘When Miss Daubernoon told me she wished to marry you, I ventured to make certain inquiries; and I have heard a good deal about you.’

“He was going to speak, but I begged him to listen quietly till I had finished. With scoundrels I have always found it best to speak to the point; a certain cynical frankness often puts them at their ease, so that much time and verbiage are spared.

“‘You know as well as I do that Miss Daubernoon is dying, and I dare say you will not think it necessary to pretend to me that you are in love with her. You cannot seriously wish to marry her, and I am authorized to offer you an annuity of two thousand a year if you will put off your marriage indefinitely.’

“He looked at me and stroked his handsome moustache, and presently he gave a mocking smile.

“‘You are a solicitor, Mr. Addishaw?’ he asked.

“‘Yes.’

‘“And presumably a man of business?’

“I was inclined to call him an impertinent jackanapes, but refrained.

“‘And granting that all you say is true, and I don’t love Kate Daubernoon, and wish to marry her solely because I think she can only live a few months, at the end of which I shall find myself a rich man — do you think I should be such a fool as to accept your offer?’

“‘I thought it possible, when you considered that the money was as safe as the Bank of England, while otherwise you are dependent on your wife’s will, which may be altered.’

“‘I’m not afraid of that.’

“‘And also that you would be behaving more or less like a gentleman. Her own doctor has told me that marriage is bound to kill her almost at once. Don’t you think what you’re doing is very cruel?’

“‘I’m a business man too, Mr. Addishaw,’ he answered.

“He broke off the conversation abruptly, and I felt I had done harm rather than good, for soon I found that Miss Daubernoon knew what I had said. I do not know what account of the affair Ralph Mason gave her, but I can imagine that my behaviour was painted in the darkest colours, while his own shone with all the heroic virtues. Miss Daubernoon, harassed by her father’s death and funeral, for two or three days was too ill to leave her room, and only Ralph Mason was allowed to see her. She wrote me a note.

“‘I did not mind what you said to me,’ she wrote, ‘but I am indignant and deeply distressed that you should have attempted to turn Ralph from me. I think your interference impertinent. I address you now no longer as a friend, but merely as my solicitor, and I beg you to prepare at once, for my signature, a will leaving absolutely everything of which I die possessed to Ralph Mason.’

“I dare say I am not a man of very easy temper, and with some heat I replied that she might get another solicitor to prepare this will for her; I would have nothing to do with it. And that evening, without seeing her again, I started for London.

“Three days later I heard from Dr. Hobley that they had left Daubernoon, though Kate was much too ill to travel; they were married at a registry office in Marylebone, and next day crossed the Channel on their way to Italy.

“There was a good deal of work connected with the estate of the late Roger Daubernoon. He had left rather a large legacy to his cousin Robert and smaller sums to various servants and dependents, so that practically all his personality was absorbed. Stocks and shares had to be sold; consequently I was in somewhat frequent correspondence with Mrs. Mason, but her letters were always very short, referring merely to the business on hand, so that I could not tell whether she was ill or well, happy or wretched. I hoped with all my heart that these last months of her life went smoothly, I hoped the man was kind to her, and at least took the trouble to conceal from his wife that he waited impatiently for her death. Poor thing, I trust she preserved to the last the illusion which had given her the only joy her life had known; I was no longer angry with her, but very, very sorry.

“Then one day, in the spring, my clerk whistled up that Mr. Ralph Mason wished to see me. I knew at once that the poor woman was dead. He came in; and though in the country he had dressed himself preposterously in a frock-coat and a tall hat, now he wore a rather loud check suit and a bowler; a black tie was his only sign of mourning. And I had never felt such an antipathy for this swell-mobsman. I hated his handsome military bearing, his smart counter-jumper looks, and the scent on his handkerchief. There was a superciliousness in his manner which told me I should have to pay for all I had said of him; he, of course, was now the squire, and I was a humble solicitor. I knew I should not long keep the business of the house of Daubernoon, and upon my word I was not sorry. I had no wish to deal with a man of that stamp.

“I did not rise from my chair as he came in.

“‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Pray be seated.’

“T have come to see you on business,’ he answered, insolently. ‘My wife died in Rome on the twenty-fourth of last March, and you are executor of her will.’

“I felt expressions of regret would be out of place, and I could imagine the satisfaction the man took in his freedom.

“‘I hope you were not unkind to her,’ I said.

“‘I told you I’d come solely on business. I have brought the will in my pocket. It was by my wish that you were appointed executor.’

“I understood what a revengeful pleasure he took in the thought that I must deliver over to him the vast estates of the Daubernoons. Silently I took the will, which was very short, written on a sheet of note-paper.

“‘I, Kate Daubernoon, of the Manor, Daubernoon, hereby revoke all former wills and testamentary dispositions made by me, and declare this to be my last will and testament. I appoint James Addishaw, of 103, Lancaster Place, London, to be the executor of this my will. I give all my real and personal property whatsoever to Ralph Mason. In witness whereof I have set my hand to this my will the 10th day of September, 1902.

KATE DAUBERNOON

“It was written in her own hand and duly witness by two servants at the manor. I could hardly believe my eyes.

“‘How did you get the form?’ I asked.

“‘I have some knowledge of law,’ he answered.

“‘That I can scarcely believe.’ My heart beat with excitement, but I did not wish to let him see my triumph too quickly. ’Is this the only will your wife made?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Are you sure there is no later one?’

“‘Absolutely positive.’

“‘Have you observed the date? Three days before your marriage.’

“‘The will was made on the very day that you sent for me and offered me two thousand a year to give her up.’

“There was a ring of exultation in his voice, but I answered very quietly, ‘You would have been wise to accept it.’

“‘Do you think so?’ he laughed.

“‘Because this will is invalid. Marriage annuls all testamentary dispositions previously made, and this piece of paper is absolutely worthless.’

“I shall never forget the look that came into his face, the green pallor that spread across his cheeks, discolouring his very lips; at first he could not understand, the blow was too unexpected.

“‘What do you mean?’ he cried. ‘It’s not true.’

“‘You may take the will to any solicitor you choose.’

‘“You old wretch!’ he hissed.

“‘If you’re not civil I shall send for my clerks to kick you downstairs.’

“He reached out his hand for the will and I handed it to him; he read it through once more.

“‘Do you mean to say I get nothing?’

“‘Not exactly. Your wife died intestate; her real property goes to Robert Daubernoon, the heir-at-law. You, as her husband, get the personality.’

“‘But she meant to leave me everything.’

“‘I dare say. But the fact remains that she left you nothing at all.’

“‘I get the money and the furniture of the manor. I shall go there at once.’

“‘Pardon me; I shall telegraph to the servants not to admit you. The house has no longer anything to do with you. And as for the furniture, I should remind you that there your wife had only a life interest; her father never expected her to marry, and, anxious that it should not be disturbed, left it to Robert Daubernoon.’

“As I spoke I thought how Ralph Mason must have looked at the old pictures and seen them going one by one under the hammer at Christie’s; they would have fetched a goodly sum. I think this last shock broke him, for he asked me in quite another tone how much money there was.

“‘You know that as well as I do,’ was my reply. ‘Mr. Daubernoon’s legacies took a great deal. There can be very little left. You may feel sure that what there is shall be duly handed to you.’

“I stood up and opened the door for him to go out. He looked up defiantly.

“‘Well, I’ll fight you,’ he said.

“‘You’ll find no one fool enough to take up the case,’ I answered scornfully.

“He looked at me as though gladly he would have seized me by the throat; he glanced round the room for something on which to wreak his passion, but apparently nothing offered, and with a kind of stifled groan he went out. And he departed to think over the utter frustration of all his schemes, a bad man and a clever man, and that ass, the law, had beaten him.

“I settled up everything as quickly as I could. I found a good many bills owing, and these I paid; the journey to Italy had cost a great deal, and my own account was not a small one. There was even less money due to the estate than I expected, for Mrs. Mason had died immediately before quarter-day. This morning I was able to write to her husband, sending him a cheque for the amount, less legacy duty, to which he was entitled. I can imagine his feelings when he looked at it, for the exact sum was forty-three pounds seven shillings and threepence halfpenny.”

AN IRISH GENTLEMAN

I

When mine host of the Golden Eagle took the visitors’ book to a foreigner lately arrived by diligence in the little capital of the Principality of Wartburg-Hochstein, the newcomer, in a flourishing hand, described himself as Robert O’Donnel, gentleman, aged twenty-eight; and when the innkeeper, curious to know his guest’s history, made discreet inquiries, he added to these brief facts the information that he travelled through Germany in pursuit of artistic emotion, had visited the galleries of Dresden and Berlin, and now, on his way to Munich and Italy, proposed in the town of Wartburg to sort his ideas and bring his journal up to date. For in those early years of Queen Victoria’s reign no person of culture went abroad without a copious note-book; and Mr. O’Donnel had already covered a vast number of pages with the ecstasies occasioned in his enthusiastic bosom by the palaces of Potsdam, the Madonna Sistina, the castles of the Rhine; and for his own edification had added thereto sundry philosophic reflections and poetical ideas.

He was a handsome man, with a florid complexion, white teeth, and bold eyes; the Byronic frenzy still reigned supreme, and his hair was worn in admired but careful disorder; of his whiskers he was inordinately vain. His dress, flamboyant even for those days, when young bloods sought systematically to astound the vulgar, excited a flattering attention; his loose collar exhibited the fine contour of his neck, his satin stock contrasted vehemently with the extravagance of his waistcoat, and his tall hat was worn with a rakish swagger achieved by none but him. The innkeeper thought him a surprising creature, but was charmed by the assurance with which in a rich brogue he discoursed fluently in abominable German; and his good-humoured, gallant ease made the German suspect that he must be some English noblemen of great wealth, till Mr. O’Donnel assured him he was greater than that, bedad, for he was an Irish gentleman in whose veins ran the blood of innumerable kings. It never occurred to him to add that his family had fallen upon evil days, and the five notes in his pocket-book formed the entire capital of this scion of an ancient race.

For many years Mr. O’Donnel had lived adventurously on his wits, turning his quick intelligence to whatever offered the chance of honest gain; he had taught ignorant boys Latin, played the grave-digger in Hamlet, written for booksellers, gambled, enjoyed every minute of his life; and now, having by lucky chance made a hundred pounds by backing an outsider, was carrying out an old-cherished dream to visit the romantic lands whereon his fancy had so long battened. His good spirits had borne him through many vicissitudes, his sense of honour had kept him, even in the direst straits, from any action unbecoming his royal forebears, and his charm of manner had secured him a multitude of friends from whom, at an extremity, he could always borrow a guinea.

Things looked brighter for him in London at last, and it seemed possible that he could attain a position of some ease; but a life of humdrum prosperity was the last to attract him, and no sooner had he this round sum in his pocket than he flung his prospects to the wind, and with Virgil in one pocket and Childe Harold in the other set out on a tour of adventure. He reckoned that his money would last till he came to Rome, where he had friends and could wait till something happened; there perhaps some cardinal might want a secretary, a war would break out wherein volunteers were needed, an expedition might be formed to discover the North Pole, some nobleman might desire a tutor for his son. Anyhow, the future must look after itself; Mr. O’Donnel could only attend to the present.

The day after his arrival at Wartburg he set out to visit the castle, celebrated for its romantic history and its dungeons; he observed everything with eager eyes, and afterwards, wandering in the princely forest, his imagination all aflame, invented thrilling adventures wherein he, a gallant hero, rescued from those dark walls fair damsels in distress.

Suddenly he saw coming towards him a young girl on horseback, at terrific speed. She pulled the reins with all her might, obviously terrified, but with no effect; and he saw that she had entirely lost control over the steed she rode. Mr. O’Donnel was strong in the arm and brave; he flung himself in the way, seized the bridle, for some yards was dragged along, but succeeded eventually in stopping the horse. The lady slipped from the saddle and fainted in his arms; he was sufficiently versed in the literature of the day to know how to revive her, and, carrying her to the neighbouring brook, bathed her temples with cold water. Presently she opened her eyes, smiled gently, and blushed.

“I think you’ve saved my life,” she murmured.

“Madam, for that I would willingly have given mine own,” he replied, gallantly.

But before the conversation could proceed an older lady and two gentlemen cantered up, dismounted quickly, and surrounded the fair equestrian with anxious demands.

“I’m not hurt, I’m not frightened,” she said. “This gentleman came to my rescue.”

The elder woman thanked him elaborately, and one of the gentlemen stepped forward, a wizened man with a skin of parchment.

“Sir, allow me to present myself — Count Peter von Graban.”

“My name is Robert O’Donnel, your very humble servant.”

“You have done an inestimable service to Her Serene Highness the Princess Mary of Wartburg-Hochstein.”

Mr. O’Donnel swept the ground with his tall hat, and the girl, with a smile, held out her hand.

“How can I thank you?”

He kissed the proffered hand and placed his own on his heart.

“Madam, it is I who owe you thanks.”

II

A few hours later Mr. O’Donnel was writing in his journal a glowing account of the whole affair, with such information as he had gathered concerning the hereditary prince whose daughter he had so romantically assisted. It appeared that John-Adolphus of Wartburg-Hochstein was a most despotic ruler, and Mr. O’Donnel’s liberal soul revolted against the accounts of his tyranny; feared by all that came in contact with him, seldom seen to smile, he rarely spoke save to command. He seemed altogether a person of few amenities. Mr. O’Donnel drew a flowery picture of this martinet chastising his people with scorpions, of the constant terror wherein they lived, and asked in flowing periods when the spirit of liberty would awake these sluggard Teutons to a sense of the nobility of man.

There was a knock at the door and the innkeeper, with wondering visage, announced that the court chamberlain, Count Peter von Graban, desired to see him.

“Show him in,” said Mr. O’Donnel.

“I am commanded by His Serene Highness to thank you for the service you rendered the princess this morning and to give you this small return.”

The little old man produced a pocket-book and counted a number of bank-notes.

“In English money you will find it amounts to fifty pounds.”

Mr. O’Donnel reddened to the very roots of his hair, for such an insult had never been offered him before; then grew extremely pale. He paused for one moment to consider his reply.

“I beg you to tender my most respectful thanks to His Serene Highness. I am extremely grateful for this mark of his favour. At the same time, may I ask you whether there is not in the town some charity in which the princess is interested?”

“Certainly. The orphanage for daughters of poor noblemen is under her special protection.”

“Then perhaps she will permit me to subscribe to so admirable an object this sum, and to add thereto another fifty pounds of my own.”

Mr. O’Donnel unlocked his box, took out his five English notes, and gravely handed the whole to the astonished chamberlain.

“You will be so good as to see to this matter for me.”

“But, sir, I do not know what the prince will say to such a proceeding. You still leave His Serene Highness under a great obligation to you.”

Mr. O’Donnel raised himself to his full height and struck a magnificent gesture.

“Sir, King William IV, before he ascended the throne, once borrowed a guinea from your humble servant and never repaid it. I shall be charmed to add the name of your master to the sovereigns in my debt.”

“The prince will never permit it.”

“Then let Her Serene Highness his daughter give me the glove which I had the honour to touch with my lips this morning, and I shall feel myself amply repaid.”

The court chamberlain stared at him with helpless amazement; in his long experience he had never come across anyone whose manner was so magnificent, whose glance was so haughty, and whose German so imperfect.

“But you don’t know what sort of a man the prince is. If I go back to him with such a message, he’s capable of hitting me with his riding-whip. He’ll look upon this reply as an insult — his temper is ungovernable. I won’t answer for the consequences to yourself.”

Then Mr. O’Donnel held his tongue no longer.

“And how dare he insult me! Who does he think I am that he should send me fifty pounds as though I were a lackey? Go, sir, and tell your master that he must have the soul of a flunkey to use an Irish gentleman with such indignity.”

Mr. O’Donnel flung open the door, and the Count Peter von Graban was so taken aback that, without another word, he walked out. Then the Irishman rubbed his hands.

“Robert, me boy, you acted with spirit,” he said to himself, contentedly. “I’m proud of ye.”

But then he sat down to think, for his generosity, though apposite to the occasion, had left him — penniless. His wanderings in North Germany had cost half the sum at his disposal, and the fifty pounds he had just given away were all he had. He did not regret his munificence, but it forced upon him a hateful subject, the future; the most he could do was to get away decently from Wartburg, and then he must trust to luck. For one hour he was immensely despondent, but then an idea struck him; he would get as far as Baden, and then it was strange if he found no one from whom he could borrow ten guineas to try his luck at the tables. Already he saw a shining pile of gold in front of him, and, feeling that his journey to Italy was after all assured, he went down to dinner in the highest spirits. The state of his finances was such that economy was entirely out of the question, and he ordered the innkeeper to bring the best bottle of wine in his cellar. The news of his adventure had quickly spread, and the various persons at the table d’hôte were anxious to hear details; but with a wave of the hand Mr. O’Donnel put them off, giving them to understand that it was his habit to stop runaway horses every day of his life. He had not finished dinner when the maid entered to say that the chamberlain was again desirous to see him.

“Will no one rid me of this pestilent fellow?” cried Mr. O’Donnel, with irritation. “Say that I’m dining, but shall be glad if he will drink a glass of wine with me.”

The innkeeper, marvelling at his guest’s independent spirit, himself carried the message, and Count Peter walked in. Somewhat curtly he signified his desire to speak with the Irishman alone, and in a moment the pair were left to themselves. For a while he hesitated awkwardly, sipping the wine which Mr. O’Donnel insisted he should take.

“You must wonder why I intrude myself upon you again to-day,” he said at last, abruptly.

“Not at all. I can quite understand that the pleasure of my company has drawn you hither.”

The count frowned, unused to such flippancy, and irritably drummed the table with his fingers.

“I am the bearer of an apology. His Serene Highness commands me to express his regrets and my own for the insult that was offered you.”

Mr. O’Donnel nodded.

“Was he in a passion?”

“The saints preserve us!” cried the old man, throwing up his hands. “He raged and stormed and fumed. You don’t know what a man he is; he was within an ace of having me arrested.... He wishes to know how he can acknowledge the great service you have done him.”

“Let him do me the honour of dining with me to-morrow,” answered Mr. O’Donnel, without hesitation.

“Are you mad, sir? Do you not know that John-Adolphus is the proudest prince in Germany? He would no more eat with you in an inn than — than—”

The chamberlain sought for some monstrous comparison, but found nothing. He repeated that such a thing was impossible; the prince would look upon the invitation as the height of impudence; he might very well cause the Irishman to be conducted across the frontier.

“Which would certainly save the expense of the diligence,” interrupted Mr. O’Donnel, with a smile.

The count reasoned, argued, persuaded, but the other was immovable. He wanted nothing on this earth save the company at dinner of His Serene Highness Prince John-Adolphus of Wartburg-Hochstein. At length the chamberlain departed, saying, grimly, that the answer would be brought next day by a troop of soldiers. Mr. O’Donnel shrugged his shoulders, and, presently going out, composed the first verses of a ballad suggested by the dungeons of Wartburg-Hochstein. In the morning an equerry brought the reply that His Serene Highness would be pleased to dine with Mr. O’Donnel that afternoon.

III

Mr. O’Donnel told his landlord that he expected a distinguished person to dinner, and himself went to the cellar to choose the wines that pleased him. He interviewed the cook, and impressed her vastly by the subtlety of his knowledge. He was something of an artist in culinary affairs, and with his own hands prepared a dish which the greatest epicures of London had pronounced incomparable. At the appointed hour, to the innkeeper’s confusion and amazement, the prince himself drove up in full uniform, blazing with decorations. He was a huge man, with grey hair and a grey moustache, with bushy eyebrows and scowling eyes. He gave the impression of imperious temper and of violent disposition. Mr. O’Donnel received him with courteous ease, and, as though he had known him for years, led him into the private room made ready for their meal.

“I thought you wanted to show me off at the table d’hôte,” said the prince, grimly.

“By no means. Had it been possible I should have begged you to come incognito.”

They sat down and dinner was served. Mr. O’Donnel was always good company, but on this occasion he surpassed himself; he was humorous, fantastical, witty; he would have kept a whole table in a roar of laughter, but the prince never smiled. He watched his companion gravely, apparently indifferent both to the brilliant conversation and the excellent dinner. Still Mr. O’Donnel was not put out of countenance, and exerted himself to amuse and divert his royal guest. At last the prince rose to his feet.

“Now we are quits,” he said.

“On the contrary, I am eternally your debtor for the entertainment you have given me in these two hours.”

The prince looked at him grimly, and perhaps the shadow of a smile twinkled behind his heavy eyebrows; but he said nothing, and, turning to the door, ordered his carriage.

“I do not understand you,” he said, as he stepped in. “What have you gained by this?”

“The pleasure of a brief acquaintance with Your Serene Highness.”

The prince grunted fiercely and drove off. Mr. O’Donnel went to his room, flung himself on the bed, and cried: “Now, how the deuce am I going to pay the bill?”

Somewhat ruefully he counted the loose change in his pocket, which formed the entire capital at his command. Nothing was left but to pawn his ring, which he valued immensely, since it was a present from the great Count d’Orsay, and when it grew dark he set out to find a jeweller. On second thoughts, considering it unlikely that he would ever again set foot in this unlucky town, Mr. O’Donnel offered it for sale, and though the man was willing to give but half its value he had not the face to haggle. The sum suggested was large enough to get him safely to Baden, and he accepted thankfully. Next morning he paid his bill and set out with the diligence.

Mr. O’Donnel, light of heart once more, observed the scenery with as much enthusiasm as though there were no uncertainty about his dinner on the following day. At the frontier horses for the second time were changed and, somewhat to the passengers’ surprise, passports demanded. An officer carefully examined the Irishman’s and looked at him with great suspicion.

“Have you any fault to find with this important document?”

“You did not have it visé when you arrived at Wartburg.”

“Upon my soul I had better things to do than to trouble myself with needless formalities.”

“I can’t allow you to leave the principality. You must go back to Wartburg.”

“What do you mean, sir?” cried Mr. O’Donnel, in a fury. “I shall do no such thing, and I’ll see you — further.”

The officer briefly motioned to his men, and before the other knew what they were about he found himself seized and pinioned. He struggled with all his might, but they had taken him unawares and he was helpless; he could only vent his wrath in a copious flow of language, and he expressed himself with a force and vigour which would have astonished a Billingsgate fishwife. The officer was entirely indifferent, and ordered him to be taken into a room of the inn at which the diligence had stopped till a carriage could be got ready to take him back to Wartburg. In half an hour all arrangements were complete, and Mr. O’Donnel, fuming and mystified, found himself traversing the country he had admired during the day.

“Will you undo my arms?” he asked, savagely. “If I’ve got to spend the night in this jolting carriage I may as well make myself as comfortable as possible.”

This was accordingly done, and Mr. O’Donnel, having come to the conclusion that he had been arrested by some mistake which would be explained as soon as he got to Wartburg, soon recovered his equanimity. He was in search of adventure, and here was one which would make an admirable story for his friends in London; he began already to surround it with humorous details. So passed the night, and in the morning the carriage seemed to ascend a steep hill, and it flashed across the Irishman’s mind that he was being taken to the castle of Wartburg. He chuckled when he thought of meeting the prince again under such different circumstances. The carriage stopped.

“Now I must blindfold you,” said the officer.

“What ridiculous folly is this?” cried Mr. O’Donnel, losing his temper again. “I’ve never been treated so ignominiously in my life. I shouldn’t like to stand in your shoes when I tell the prince how you have used me.”

“Everything that has happened to you is by express command of His Serene Highness.”

The Irishman was too staggered by this to answer, and helplessly allowed his eyes to be bandaged. He was led along passages, through courtyards, down stairs, till a greater chill told him he was underground. The handkerchief was removed, and with a cry Mr.

O’Donnel saw he was in one of those historic dungeons which two days before had so excited his romantic fancy.

“Upon my soul,” he cried, “this is beyond a joke.”

IV

With creaking of locks and drawing of rusty bolts the heavy door was closed and the Irishman was left in absolute darkness; for a while he could see nothing, and it seemed to him the dungeon was darker than the darkest night he had ever known. But presently through a narrow chink he discerned a faint glimmer of light, and, his eyes growing used to the obscurity, he saw that he was in a small chamber with stone walls, slimy and wet. In one corner was a plank bed, and opposite the light was dimly seen a crucifix. He started when something crossed his foot, and with beating heart recognised the scampering of rats. Besides this, all that broke the oppressive silence was a continual drip, drip, as water fell slowly from the damp roof.

Mr. O’Donnel sat on the bed to think what this might mean; the whole thing was so improbable that he was utterly dumfounded; a hundred explanations ran through his mind, but each seemed absurd. He passed from amazement to despondency, from terror to rage. At last, growing desperately hungry, he made the tour of his cell, and discovered in a recess a jug of water and some coarse black bread. This assuaged his hunger, but scarcely his passion, and the more he thought of what had happened the more indignant he grew. Then he heard sounds; the door was ponderously unlocked and two soldiers entered with candles, which they set on a ledge, thus illuminating for the prisoner’s edification all the discomfort of that place. They retired, and in a moment there appeared — John-Adolphus, Hereditary Prince of Wartburg-Hochstein.

“Good morning, my friend,” he said, coolly. “I hope you’ve made yourself at home.”

For an instant Mr. O’Donnel was too much taken aback to reply, but, recovering himself, broke forthwith into an indignant harangue, wherein he threatened the prince with the most horrid revenge, and demanded explanations for the infamous treatment to which he had been subjected. John-Adolphus shrugged his shoulders.

“You entertained me so well that I desired to continue our acquaintance. It seemed the only way to gain once more the pleasure of your conversation was to arrest you before you crossed the frontier.”

“But I will never suffer such an indignity. I will appeal to the English Ambassador, and you shall learn what it means to trifle with the liberty of an English subject.”

“Nonsense, my dear sir. It will never get to the ears of your ambassador that I have taken you prisoner. I can detain you for thirty years without the smallest risk to myself.”

“My disappearance will be remarked and commented upon.”

“I doubt it. I can scarcely think anyone will much trouble himself with the whereabouts of an obscure Irishman who travels with ten thalers in his pocket.”

“How do you know that?”

“You forget that you were searched. Your luggage was examined, and I arrived at the conclusion that you were nearly penniless. By the way, that was a singularly unflattering description you drew of me in your journal — and somewhat treasonable to boot.”

“Treasonable it may have been,” returned Mr. O’Donnel, “but by all the saints of Heaven it was not unflattering.”

“I am anxious to know why you gave your entire fortune to a charitable institution and then sold your ring to pay for my dinner.” With a grim smile the prince held out his hand, on the little finger of which Mr. O’Donnel observed the ring which two days before he had left with the jeweller. He was about to burst out again angrily when the twinkling eyes of the prince suggested to him that the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke.

“Upon my soul,” he cried, “Your Serene Highness has the oddest sense of humour that ever I saw.”

The prince chuckled: it was the first time Mr. O’Donnel had seen in him any signs of amusement.

“You had your little jest with me, Mr. O’Donnel — you must not mind if I have mine. I could not resist the temptation to see how you would like the dungeons about which you raved so poetically when you only knew them from the outside. Let us make friends and go to our dinner, which is just now ready.”

“Faith, I shall be able to do justice to it,” answered the other, still very sore, but determined to make the best of things, “for your prison fare is not calculated to stay a man’s appetite.”

It seemed like a story from the Arabian Nights when Mr. O’Donnel found himself half an hour later seated at table between John-Adolphus and his daughter the Princess Mary. The prince was quite a different creature from the sullen, haughty officer who came to the Golden Eagle, and evidently could enjoy a joke as well as any man. The Irishman, flushed with wine, finding his audience appreciative, gave of his best, and poured forth the full stream of his rollicking fun; there was no restraint to his audacity, to the quaint turns of his humour, to his boisterous anecdote. The prince and his daughter held their sides with laughter. Tears streamed from their eyes, and the grim stone walls of Wartburg had not for years heard such loud hilarity.

But with his spirits Mr. O’Donnel had recovered his sense of the effective; he knew his success was unparalleled, and he did not mean to spoil it by lingering on the scene of his triumph. Admirable actor as he was, he knew the value of a striking exit. No sooner was dinner ended than he rose to his feet.

“It grows late, and I must reach Baden quickly. Have! Your Serene Highness’s permission to retire?”

“To-night?” cried the prince. “Of course, if you wish it, I say nothing; but is there not something I can do before you go to show my appreciation of your wit and good-humour?”

“Certainly,” returned Mr. O’Donnel, promptly. “Your Serene Highness remembers that my means are small. If the carriage that brought me back here may take me again to the frontier you will overwhelm me with benefits.”

“But you have no money at all. Surely now you will accept something from me?”

“The saints preserve me!” cried Mr. O’Donnel, with a wave of the hand. “Have you more charities that you want to benefit?” The prince shook his head, more mystified than ever by this eccentricity. He could not understand that to the Irishman, rollicking and romantic, feather-brained and heroic, a fine phrase or a striking attitude was more than all the treasure of this world. At length he had a sensible idea.

“Mr. O’Donnel, I am going to keep this ring with which you paid for my dinner. In return I crave your acceptance of mine.”

He took a splendid diamond from his finger.

“But beside this mine is quite worthless,” cried Mr. O’Donnel.

“Pray take it. You may find it useful when next you entertain royal personages at dinner.”

Mr. O’Donnel hesitated no longer, but with profuse thanks slipped the ring on his finger. Then the princess stepped forward.

“I, too, have a present for you. I wish you to keep it in remembrance of the service you did me. It is of no value at all.”

She handed him the glove which he had before gallantly asked for.

“On the contrary,” he said. “It is ten times more valuable than the ring, for you have worn it.”

He bent down and kissed her hand. The carriage was at the door, and, waiting only to launch one parting jest, Mr. O’Donnel took advantage of their laughter to bow and retire. From the window, laughing still, the prince and his daughter watched him drive out into the night, with ten thalers in his pocket and on his hand a ring worth two hundred pounds.

“Is he a mountebank or is he a hero?” she asked. “I’ve never met such a man.”

“English and Irish, they’re all mad,” answered John-Adolphus; “that’s why they conquer the world.”

Meanwhile, Mr. O’Donnel, immensely pleased with himself, without a thought of the difficult future, composed himself to sleep as comfortably as though he lay on a feather bed.

FLIRTATION

I

At the age of forty Bertie Shenton was still a young man about town, and flattered himself that with the light behind him he could yet pass for five and twenty; clean-shaven and slight of build, with a quick eye and a laughing mouth, there was nothing to betray advancing years.

He felt younger than ever, and looked without envy at the youths of twenty who seemed in every way vastly older than himself; he saw no reason why he should ever give way to middle age, for his income was sufficient, his desires easily attainable, and his digestion perfect.

He knew a host of people, whom he kept perpetually amused by his flippant conversation and his good nature; he was the sort of man whom everyone after half-an-hour’s acquaintance calls by his Christian name, and he had scores of intimate friends whom he did not even know by sight.

When he drove to Lady Mereston’s party he was as usual in the best of spirits, and the world seemed an excellent place; the night was warm, the house he was bound for pleasant, and the women without doubt would be pretty. With a smile he greeted the little lady who stepped out of her carriage immediately before himself, and, having given up his hat and coat, waited for her on the stairs.

“I’m lying in wait for you, Mrs. Parnaby,” he cried when she appeared.

He noticed with discreet admiration the beauty of her gown, and he thought the pretty widow had never looked better than that evening. She gave him a quick glance.

“Make it,” she said, imperiously.

“What?”

“The compliment that’s on the tip of your tongue.”

He laughed and asked her to give him that dance.

“Very well,” she answered, “but we must sit down. I’m perfectly exhausted. I’ve just come on from the Lemaines. Let’s go somewhere and talk sensibly.”

“Ah, you want to flirt with me,” he laughed, as they went into the conservatory. “It’s what a woman always means when she asks you to talk sensibly.”

She looked at him calmly. “The only reason I like you, Bertie, is that you don’t make love to me. When you’re an eligible widow you get so tired of it. Men are such bores; I can’t think why they want to make things worse by becoming husbands.”

“You have such odd ideas about my sex.”

“Not at all — only it must be obvious to you that man is an inferior creature. He’s so weak. He has no wiles. When a male thing sees a brick wall it never occurs to him that there’s anything on the other side.”

“You mean he has certain elementary ideas about truthfulness.”

“Poor thing, he has to be truthful, he lies so badly,” returned Mrs. Parnaby, with a shrug of her dainty shoulders. “You know, I’m longing to find the man that I can’t turn round my little finger.”

Bertie Shenton got up and made an elaborate bow. “Madam, your very humble servant.”

“My dear Bertie! I could make you do anything I like,” she laughed. “I could make you propose to me in five minutes.”

“My dear lady, it’s been tried too often. I flatter myself I’m a difficult fish to catch.”

“I detest a man who thinks every woman is in love with him.”

“Bless you, I don’t think that. I only think a great many want to marry me. After all, with the sort of people we know, marriage is still the only respectable means of livelihood for a really nice girl. However old, ugly, and generally undesirable a man is, he’ll find heaps of charming girls who are willing to share with him a house in Portman Square and a comfortable income.”

“But, my dear Bertie, if a woman really makes up her mind to marry a man nothing on earth can save him.”

“Don’t say that,” cried he, “you terrify me.”

She looked at him for one moment and smiled. “You need not be in the least alarmed, because I shall refuse you.”

“Thanks,” he answered; “it’s a bargain, but I don’t think I’ll risk a proposal.”

“Oh yes, you will. I feel absolutely certain. I’ll give you a fortnight.”

He shook his head, laughing. “I’m not at all nervous.”

“My dear man, your only safety is in instant flight. You’re doomed. I’ve made up my mind that you shall propose to me.”

“I bet you a pair of gloves I don’t.”

“Very well.”

Mrs. Parnaby nodded to a young man who passed them, and eagerly he came up.

“I’ve been hunting for you everywhere,” he said. “I was hoping to get a chance of speaking to you.”

“That’s the beauty of a crowd,” she answered, “it gives such opportunities for a tête-à-tête.”

Mrs. Parnaby directed these words to Bertie Shenton with such mockery in her eyes, such a malicious curl of the lip, that he could not help taking the hint.

“Let me give up my seat,” he said. Oddly enough, to do so made him rather cross.

“Remember that the gloves are sixes,” she remarked as he went.

“I fancy there are others to whom that information will be more useful,” he retorted, with a glance of some annoyance at the intruder.

Mrs. Parnaby laughed. She knew very well that Bertie Shenton was devoted to her, but their relations were so pleasant that it had never occurred to her till that moment to make any change in them. He had never shown the least inclination to marry her, and each loved liberty too well to give it up freely. But the thoughtless bet, made lightly on the spur of the moment, set her thinking, and she chuckled to herself at the idea of winning it.

II

Her plan of campaign was quickly made, and for the rest of the evening she avoided Bertie systematically; but whenever his eyes rested upon her pretended to be much engrossed in her partner.

A dozen young men found her more charming than ever before, and each one concluded that he had made something of an impression; in their vanity it never struck them that these charms and graces were displayed only for the purpose of vexing a gentleman of forty, who watched irritably from the other side of the room. These tactics were apparently successful, for Bertie called upon her next day while she was out. She gave orders that he was not to be admitted, and when next he came he had the satisfaction of hearing her play the piano, while a third time on looking up he saw her calmly watching from the window. He smiled drily to himself, and with a little shrug of resignation went to a milliner’s to buy a pair of gloves.

After a week he met her at luncheon, and though he was rather sulky she greeted him with the most malicious good humour; but during the meal, though they sat together, she addressed her conversation exclusively to her other neighbour in a manner which Bertie Shenton thought was as marked as it was disagreeable. When she bade her hostess farewell he rose also.

“Shall I drive you home?” he asked.

“I’m not going home. But if you like to drive me to Curzon Street you may; I have an appointment there at four.”

“Very well.”

They went out, stepped into a cab, and quite coolly Bertie told the driver to go to Hammersmith.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“I want to have a talk with you.”

“I’m sure that’s charming of you,” she answered, “but I shall miss my appointment.”

“That’s a matter of complete indifference to me.” He paused, smiled, and took from his pocket the gloves he had bought. “You’ll find they’re sixes. If you’re going to make yourself systematically disagreeable unless I marry you — I suppose I must marry you.”

“Is that the proposal?” she asked gaily.

“Name the day, Mrs. Parnaby, and the lamb shall be ready for the slaughter.”

“But that won’t do at all. I must have it in proper terms. First you go on your bended knees.”

“I really can’t in a hansom cab.”

“Then you say you’re entirely unworthy of me.”

“Women have such a passion for the commonplace,” he sighed; “besides, I’m not at all unworthy of you. After all, only four words are needed: Will you marry me?”

She was putting on the gloves he had given her, and held out her hand for him to do up the buttons.

“Then I give you my answer in one: No.”

“I beg your pardon?” he cried in surprise.

“The reply is in the negative.... I promised I’d refuse you.’? “Oh, but I’ll absolve you from your promise.”

“The answer is still the same. I will be a sister to you.”

“But good Heavens, why?”

“I don’t want to marry you in the least. D’you want to marry me?”

“I suppose I do — more or less,” he returned doubtfully. “It’s a chance that will never recur, you know.”

“I hope you agree now that any woman can make any man propose to her within a fortnight.”

“D’you mean to say you’ve been trifling with my feelings?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her, and broke into a smile. “Well, then, we’re square, aren’t we? I thought you’d be so amused if I proposed.” He saw the look of surprise that came over her face. “I’ve not taken you in, have I? By Jove! I was awfully afraid that you’d accept.”

“Didn’t you want me to?” she cried.

“I don’t know what I should have done if you had. It was rather risky, wasn’t it?”

“You absolute brute,” she exclaimed. She looked at him doubtfully, and then, seeing his amusement, “You did mean it, Bertie — I know you did.”

“I will be a brother to you, Mrs. Parnaby.”

“Oh, I will punish you for this,” she answered, laughing in spite of herself.

“I shall be on my guard.”

She opened the trap and told the cabman to drive back to Curzon Street. It was very hard to bear Bertie’s triumph, for she had meant to give him a fall, and it looked much as though she had suffered one instead.

“Good-bye,” she said, when they arrived at the door of the house into which she was going. “When shall I see you again?”

“Oh, very soon, I hope.”

III

Somewhat to her surprise she heard him direct the cabman to Cook’s office in Piccadilly, and when she was told two days later that he was gone to Homburg, Mrs. Parnaby wondered what he meant. His journey did not much disturb her, for she soon concluded he had done it merely to annoy, and within a week would be home again clamouring at her door. But the week passed, and there was no sign of him. Mrs. Parnaby asked herself if he had taken her refusal seriously. A second week went by, and she missed him more than she would have thought possible; a third week, and she grew very cross; a month, and she discovered to her consternation that she could think of nothing but Bertie Shenton. She had meant to amuse herself, and, behold, she was head over ears in love; it was very inconvenient and very absurd, and she did not know what to do. She tormented herself with all sorts of reasons to explain his absence, and once or twice, like the spoilt child she was, cried. But Mrs. Parnaby was a sensible woman, and soon made up her mind that if she could not live without the man she had better take steps to procure his presence. She wired to ask if she might come to tea at his house on the following Friday; he answered that he would be away; but, nothing daunted, she telegraphed again, more peremptorily this time, to announce her fixed determination to drink tea with him on the day mentioned. She duly went, and, of course, found him waiting for her. “So you’ve come back,” she said, as she shook hands with him.

“I was just passing through town,” he answered coldly.

“From where to where?”

“From Homburg to the Italian Lakes.”

“Rather out of your way, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “If I were going from Liverpool to Manchester I should break the journey in London. That’s one of my hobbies.”

“Why d’you think I telegraphed to you the other day?”

“Because you’re the most disgraceful flirt I’ve ever seen in my life,” he answered promptly.

She opened her eyes very wide. “My dear Bertie, have you never contemplated yourself in a looking-glass?”

“You’re not a bit repentant of the harm you’ve wrought.”

She did not answer, but looked at him with a smile so entirely delightful that he cried out irritably: “I wish you wouldn’t look like that.”

“How am I looking?”

“To my innocent and inexperienced gaze very much as if you wanted to be kissed.”

“You brute! I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Why d’you make such rash statements? You know you couldn’t hold your tongue for two minutes together.”

“I never can get a word in edgeways when I’m with you. You’re such a chatterbox,” she answered, crossly.

“Upon my word, I don’t see why you should pretend to have a grievance,” he said. “It’s I who ought to be furious.”

“You behaved very unkindly to me a month ago,” she complained, trying to prevent a smile.

“You don’t think of my injured feelings. You forget that for the last four weeks I’ve been laboriously piecing together the fragments of a broken heart.”

“It was entirely your fault,” she laughed. “If you hadn’t been so conceited and certain that I was going to accept you I should never have refused. I couldn’t resist the temptation of saying no just to see what you did.”

“I flatter myself that I took it very well.”

“You didn’t,” she answered. “You showed an entire lack of humour. You might have known that a nice woman doesn’t accept a man the first time he asks her. It was very silly of you to go off to Homburg as if you didn’t care. How was I to know that you meant to wait a month before asking me again?”

“I haven’t the least intention of asking you again.”

“Then why on earth did you invite me to come and have tea?”

“May I respectfully remind you that you invited yourself?” he protested.

“Don’t go into irrelevant details,” she commanded.

“Now, don’t be cross with me.”

“I shall be cross. You’re not being at all nice.”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a little while, and his eyes twinkled.

“Do you know what I’d do if I were you?”

“No, what?”

“Well, I can’t suffer the humiliation of another refusal. Why don’t you propose to me — just for a change?”

“What cheek!” Their eyes met, and she smiled. “What will you say if I do?”

“That depends on how you do it.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “You gave me an admirable lesson. First you go on your bended knees and then you say you’re quite unworthy of me.”

“You are the most spiteful creature I’ve ever known. You’re just the sort of man who’d beat his wife.”

“Every Saturday night regularly,” he agreed.

She hesitated, but saw in him no signs of yielding.

“Bertie, I am a widow, twenty-nine years of age, extremely eligible. My maid is a treasure, my dressmaker is charming, I’m clever enough to laugh at your jokes, and not so learned as to know where they come from.”

“Really you’re very long-winded. I said it all in four words.”

“So could I if I might write it down.” She stretched out her hands and he took her in his arms. “You might let me off, Bertie.”

“No, I won’t,” he laughed.

“You know I don’t really want to marry you a bit. I’m only doing it to please you....You will say yes if I ask you, won’t you?”

“I’ll see when the time comes.”

“Will you marry me?”

She said it quite indifferently as though she were asking what o’clock it was.

“Of course, I will, you silly,” he answered.

“I never saw any one make such a fuss about so insignificant a detail as marriage.”

She tried to draw away from him, but he held her fast, and, smiling, took a ring from his pocket.

“I’ve got a little present for you. I bought it this morning.” She looked at him.

“Then you meant to ask me all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I wish I’d known that before.”

He laughed, and the rest of their conversation concerns nobody.

THE FORTUNATE PAINTER

“Let the great book of the world be your principal study.” — Chesterfield.

There were times when Charlie Bartle could take his straitened circumstances with a light heart. When the sky was blue and the air of Paris, keen yet balmy, was more exhilarating than wine, his studio in the Rue Breda lost its shabbiness. On such days as these he went down into the street and watched gay ladies make their purchases for luncheon. The disarray of their costume in the morning contrasted with the splendour with which he had seen them emerge from their houses the night before. They lingered on the door of greengrocers, bargaining for their vegetables with the strenuousness of model housewives. Several had sat for him, and with these he exchanged the gossip of the quarter. Then, his eyes filled with the vivacity of that scene, he returned to his studio, and sought to place on canvas the dancing sunlight of the Parisian street. He felt in him the courage to paint masterpieces. But when grey clouds and rain made the colours on his palette scarcely distinguishable from one another, his mood changed. He could scarcely bear the dingy shabbiness of his studio. He looked with distaste at the picture on which he had been working for a month, and saw that it was bad. His poverty appalled him.

It was on such an occasion that Charles Bartle sat, pipe in mouth, contemplating with deep discouragement the work of his hands. He smoked gloomily. Presently, with a sigh, he took a palette-knife and prepared to scrape down all that he had done. There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” cried Charlie, looking round.

It was slowly opened by a little old man, with a bald head, a hooked nose of immense size, and a grey beard. He was shabbily dressed, but the rings on his finger, the diamond in his tie, and his massive watch-chain suggested that it was not from poverty.

“Monsieur Leir!” said Charlie, with a smile. “Come in. I’m delighted to see you.”

“I knew you couldn’t paint in this weather, so I thought I shouldn’t be in your way.”

He came into the room and looked at Bartle’s unfinished canvas. The painter watched him anxiously, but no change in the Frenchman’s expression betrayed his opinion.

“Do you think it’s utterly rotten?” asked Charlie.

“My dear fellow, you young men are so impatient. You buy a canvas, and you buy paints, and you think you can produce marvels immediately. You won’t give time to it, and you won’t give patience. The old masters weren’t in such a hurry. Read Vasari and you’ll see how they worked.”

Charles Bartle impatiently threw aside his palette-knife.

“I wish I’d been a crossing-sweeper rather than a painter. It’s a dog’s life that I lead. I do without everything that gives happiness, and I don’t even do work that’s fit to look at.”

Monsieur Leir sat down, took from his waistcoat pocket the stump of an unfinished cigar, rubbed the charred end with his finger, and lit it. He smoked this with apparent satisfaction. In his day he had known many painters. Some had succeeded, but most had failed, and he knew that the profession, even for the fortunate, was very hard. Genius itself starved at times, and recognition often did not arrive till a man was too embittered to enjoy it. But he liked artists, and found a peculiar satisfaction in their society. And this was only natural, for they had made his fortune. Monsieur Leir was a dealer. He had early seen the merit of the impressionists, had bought their pictures systematically, thus saving many of them from disaster and, at the same, benefiting himself, and finally sold them when the world discovered that Manet, Monet, and Sisley were great painters. His only daughter had married Rudolf Kuhn, a dealer in New York, so Monsieur Leir felt justified in spending the years that remained to him in a condition of opulent idleness. But he flattered himself that the painters whose works he had bought for a song were his friends as well as his customers, and it pleased him still to potter about the studios of those who yet lived. When Charlie Bartle settled in the house in which he himself had an apartment, Monsieur Leir gladly made his acquaintance. The young man was delighted to hear stories of the wild life they led in Montmartre in the ‘seventies, and he was taken, too, by the kindliness of the retired dealer. There was an unaffected amiability in Monsieur Leir’s manner, which led the foreigner quickly to pour into his sympathetic ear his troubles and his ambitions. The dealer was a lonely man, and he soon began to feel a certain affection for the young painter. Now that he was no longer in the trade, he could afford to put charms of manner before talent, and the mediocrity of his friend’s work touched his gentle old heart.

“It’s one of your bad days, mon vieux,” said the dealer.

“I wish to goodness I was a dealer, like you,” laughed Charlie. “At least I shouldn’t be worried to death by the approach of quarter-day.”

“The picture-trade is no place for an honest man now,” returned Monsieur Leir, reflectively. “It was all very well in the old days, when we had it in our own hands. We drove hard bargains, but it was all above-board. But now the Christians have taken to it, there’s a good deal too much hocus-pocus.”

“I simply can’t go on this way. I have to pay three hundred francs for my rent to-morrow, and I shan’t have a penny left to buy myself bread and butter for the next month. No one will buy a picture.”

Monsieur Leir looked at him with good-natured eyes, but he said nothing. Charlie glanced at the portrait of a very pretty girl, which stood in solitary splendour, magnificently framed, on the chimney-piece.

“I had a letter from Rosie this morning. Her people want her to give me up. They say there’s not the least chance of my ever earning any money.”

“But will she do that?” asked the dealer.

“No, of course not,” answered Charlie, with decision. “She’s a good girl. But it means waiting, waiting, waiting; and our youth is going, and we shall grow sore with hope deferred. When at last we marry we shall be disillusionised and bitter.”

He sighed deeply. He brooded with despair on the future, and the old man did not venture to disturb him. He watched the painter with compassion. At last, however, he spoke.

“What are the exact conditions on which the father of your fiancée will allow you to marry her?”

“They’re insane. You see, she has five thousand pounds of her own. He refuses to consent to our marriage unless I can produce the same sum or show that I am earning two hundred and fifty a year. And the worst of it is that I can’t help acknowledging he’s right. I don’t want Rosie to endure hardships.”

“You know that my daughter’s husband is a dealer in New York,” returned Monsieur Leir, presently. “I vowed when I sold off my stock that I would never deal in pictures again, but I’m fond of you, my friend, and I should like to help you. Show me your stuff, and I’ll send it to Rudolf; he may be able to sell it in America.”

“That would be awfully good of you,” cried Charlie.

The dealer sat down while Bartle placed on his easel one after the other his finished pictures. There were, perhaps, a dozen, and Monsieur Leir looked at them without a word. For the moment he had gone back to his old state, and he allowed no expression to betray his feelings. No one could have told from that inscrutable gaze whether he thought the painting good or bad.

“That’s the lot,” said Charlie, at length. “D’you think the American public will seize their opportunity, and allow us to marry?”

“What is that?” asked the dealer quietly, pointing to the last canvas, its face against the wall, which Bartle had not shown him.

Without a word the painter produced it and fixed it on the easel. Monsieur Leir gave a slight start, and the indifference of his expression vanished.

“Watteau!” he cried. “But, my dear fellow, how did you get that? You talk of poverty and you have a Watteau. Why, I can sell that for you in America for double the sum you want.”

“Look at it carefully,” smiled Charlie.

The dealer went up to the picture and peered into it. His eyes glittered with delight. It represented a group of charming persons by the side of a lake. It was plain that the ladies, so decadent and dainty, discussed preciously with swains, all gallant in multi-coloured satins, the verses of Racine or the letters of Madame de Sévigné. The placid water reflected white clouds, and the trees were russet already with approaching autumn. It was a stately scene, with its green woodland distance, and the sober opulence of oak and elm; and it suggested ease and long tending. Those yellows and greens and reds glowed with mellow light.

“It’s one of the few Watteaus I’ve ever seen with a signature,” said the dealer.

“You flatter me,” said Charlie. “Of course, it’s only a copy. The original belonged to some old ladies in England whom I knew; and last summer, when it rained, I spent my days in copying it. I suppose chance guided my hand happily; everyone agreed it was not badly done.”

“A copy?” cried Monsieur Leir. “A copy? Where is the original? Would your friends sell it?”

“The ruling instinct is as strong as ever,” laughed the painter. “Unfortunately, a month after I finished this the house was burnt down, and everything was destroyed.”

The dealer drew a deep breath, and for a moment meditated. He looked at Charlie sharply.

“Didn’t you say you wanted three hundred francs for your rent?” he asked, very quietly. “I’ll buy that copy off you.”

“Nonsense, I’ll give it you. You’re taking no end of trouble for me, and you’ve been awfully kind.”

“You’re a fool, my friend,” answered Monsieur Leir. “Write me out a receipt for the money.”

He took from his pocket-book three bank-notes and laid them on the table. Bartle hesitated for an instant, but he wanted the money badly. He shrugged his shoulders. He sat down and wrote the receipt. But as he was about to give it, an idea came to him and he quickly drew it back.

“Look here, you’re not going to try any hanky-panky tricks, are you? I won’t sell you the copy unless you give me your word that you won’t try and pass it off as an original.”

A quiet smile passed across the dealer’s lips.

“You can easily reassure yourself. Just paint out the signature and put your name on the top of it.”

Without a word, Bartle did as the old man suggested, and presently his own name was neatly painted in place of the master’s.

“I don’t mistrust you,” he said, as he handed the receipt, “but it’s well not to put temptation in the way of wily dealers.”

Monsieur Leir laughed as he pocketed the document and took the Watteau in his hand. He pointed with a slightly disdainful finger at Bartle’s pictures.

“I’m going to take the copy along with me, and I’ll send my femme de ménage for the others,” he said. But at the door he stopped. “I like your pictures, my friend, and when Rudolf knows that I take an interest in you, I dare say he’ll be able to sell them. Don’t be surprised if in another month I come and tell you that you can marry your fiancée.”

Monsieur Leir packed the Watteau with his own hands, and despatched it without delay. He wrote a discreet little letter to his son-in-law announcing its immediate arrival, and suggesting that they should share the profits of its sale. It was growing late, so he went to his café and drank the absinthe with which he invariably prepared for the evening meal. Then, with a chuckle, he wrote the following note:

To the Chief Officer, U.S.A. Customs, New York.

Sir,

An attempt will shortly be made to pass through the Customs a copy of a picture by Watteau. It is signed Charles Bartle. If, moreover, you scrape away the name, you will find the signature of the French painter. I leave you to make what inferences you choose.

Yours faithfully,

AN HONEST MAN

Less than this was necessary to excite the suspicions of the least trusting section of mankind. It was scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that when Rudolf Kuhn went to the Customs House at New York to pass the picture that had been sent him, he was received with incredulity. He asserted with conviction that it was only a copy, and produced the receipt which Monsieur Leir had been so cautious as to send him. But the official who saw him merely laughed in his face. He was quite accustomed to the tricks whereby astute dealers in works of art sought to evade the duty.

“I suppose you’d be surprised if I told you that the picture was signed by Antoine Watteau,” he said, with a dry smile.

“More than that. I should be amazed beyond words,” answered Rudolf Kuhn, confidently.

Silently the customs officer took a palette-knife, scraped away the name of Charles Bartle, and there, sure enough, was the French artist’s signature.

“What have you got to say now?” he asked in triumph.

A curious light passed through the dealer’s eyes as he stared at the canvas, but he made no other sign that Monsieur Leir’s astuteness had suddenly flashed across him.

“Nothing,” he replied.

With meekness he paid duty on the estimated value of an original Watteau, and a very heavy fine into the bargain for his attempt to defraud the customs. He took the picture away. But when he reached home that night he kissed his wife on both cheeks with unusual warmth.

“Your father’s still the smartest dealer in Europe, Rachel,” he said. But when she asked for some explanation of his words, he merely shook his head and smiled.

In New York the newspapers learn everything, and perhaps it was not strange that within four and twenty hours of these events, an important journal had an amusing account of how Rudolf Kuhn, the well-known dealer, had been foiled in his attempt to pass through the customs, as a copy by some obscure painter, a very perfect example of the art of Watteau. It was a triumph for the officials, and the newspaper gibed freely because they had got the better of a wily Hebrew. Now Rudolph Kuhn had a client who chose to spend much of his vast wealth in the acquisition of Old Masters; and no sooner had he read these entertaining paragraphs than he hurried to the dealer’s shop. When he saw the picture he burst out laughing.

“I like your darned impudence, trying to pass that off as a copy.”

“I showed them the receipt,” smiled Rudolph, with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. “I propose to sell it as a copy. It was sold to my representative in Paris as such.”

The millionaire looked at the dealer and chuckled. “Well, Uncle Sam’s customs are good enough guarantee for me. I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars for it.”

“I’ll take sixty,” answered the other, quietly.

“Not bad for a copy,” smiled the buyer. “I’ll have it at that.”

He carried the picture off, and with it the various documents which the Customs House had delivered to Rudolf Kuhn in proof that he had paid both duty and fine. In face of these it would have been a sceptic indeed who doubted the authenticity of so delightful a work.

* * * * *

Some weeks later Monsieur Leir again knocked at Charlie Bartle’s door. He advanced into the middle of the studio, and without a word counted out fifty English bank-notes of a hundred pounds each.

“What the dickens are you doing?” cried Bartle, who thought he had suddenly taken leave of his senses.

“Five thousand pounds,” said the old man. “I thought you’d like to see the money actually before you, so I changed it into these notes.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s your share of the profit on the sale of your pictures, and you may marry your Rosie whenever you choose.”

Bartle stared at Monsieur Leir, helplessly. He thought it must be some heartless jest, but the old man’s eyes gleamed with their usual kindliness. He rubbed his hands joyfully as he gloated over the painter’s utter consternation. At last he vouchsafed to explain. Bartle understood vaguely that a California millionaire had bought his picture, all his pictures, and this money was the result. He wanted to write to this amiable and discerning patron, but Monsieur Leir hastily told him that was impossible. The Californian had bought the pictures and taken them away without leaving his address. Monsieur Leir assured him that the American millionaires were notoriously eccentric. Bartle drew a long breath and looked at the pile of notes.

“Take them to the bank, my boy,” said the old dealer, enchanted with the young man’s pleasure, “and send a wire to a certain lady.”

He made the notes into a bundle, and put them in Bartle’s pocket, and led him out of the house. The painter walked as though he were in a dream. But when Monsieur Leir had seen the young man safely on his way to the bank, he went to his own apartment. He took out Charlie’s pictures, which had remained in the safe obscurity of a well-locked cupboard. One by one he ripped them off their stretchers, and one by one he put them in the fire.

He laughed as he saw them crackle in the flames. Then he took a hatchet and cut up the stretchers neatly.

“Here is some excellent firewood,” he chuckled, as he gave the bundle to his maid.

He rubbed his hands when he thought that thus he saved several coppers. It had slipped his memory completely that he had just made his friend a present of five thousand pounds.

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)

I don’t know why the desire seized me once, in my youth, to take a voyage on a Spanish cargo-boat. I was staying at Cadiz, with nothing in the world to do — O most delectable condition! — and, going down one day to the harbour, saw a rather shabby steamer loading vast bales of merchandise. I began to talk with a sailor-man who lounged idly on the quay, and learned that she was bound for Valencia, Tarragona, and Tunis. The blue of the sea was as deep as the blue of the heavens, and Romance, that jade of flattering insincerity, put out a beckoning finger. Before I knew what had happened my soul was aflame with the desire for unknown lands, and when the second mate — for such I discovered was the garrulous seaman — told me they sometimes took passangers, I made up my mind to take the journey. My traps were soon gathered together, my passage booked, and next morning we started on our leisurely tour of the Spanish coast. For some time things went well enough. I spent the day reading such books as I had, and the evening playing cards with the skipper. We stopped at one port after another, loading and unloading with truly Spanish deliberation. Presently, leaving the shores of Spain, we crossed to Africa, and one morning, very early, when I got up I found that we had cast anchor in the harbour of an island off the coast of Tunis. The sun shone with dazzling brilliancy upon the white houses of a little town, and here and there tall palm-trees rose into the air. We were to stay but a few hours, for the place was not on the steamer’s route; and the captain called there only by chance, to execute some commission. I had determined not to go on shore, but I know not what there was in the smiling, sunny town that exerted on me an odd fascination; the more I looked at it the greater was my desire not only to visit it, but to stay there. In all probability the immortal gods would never again bring me to that island, and I dared not risk the regrets which must be mine if I missed the present opportunity. I discussed the matter with the captain, who assured me I should only be disappointed: the town had nothing to attract travellers, and the only Europeans were the French Consul with his wife, a sergeant, and a dozen soldiers. I looked across the harbour once more, and the white houses seemed to whisper a welcome to me; I felt on a sudden that I was transported to the Arabian Nights, and this was a magic isle from which wonderful things might be expected. Hitherto my journey had been very barren of the romance I sought, for nothing could be more matter-of-fact than the cargo-boat in which for three weeks I had lived; but here surely was the real thing: here lived enchanted damsels singing sadly to their lutes, and the very beggars were kings fallen from their high estate. I shut my ears to the skipper’s admonitions, packed my things hastily, and summoned a boat from the shore. My friends on board, thinking me mad, shook my hand, with solemn warnings that I should regret my folly, and in a quarter-of-an-hour I found myself landed, with all my belongings, on the beach.

I was at once surrounded by a score of swarthy Arabs, who apparently discussed me and my concerns with considerable interest, and one, who spoke broken French, asked if I wished to see the consul.

“No,” I said; “I want to go to the hotel.”

I confess I was a little dismayed when he answered that there was no such thing in the place, but now I would not for worlds have returned, crest-fallen, to the steamer; and I asked if I could nowhere get lodgings. The Arab, with much gesticulation, talked the matter over with his friends, and presently suggested the house of a certain lady whose name I have forgotten. He shouldered my bag, and I followed him down one winding, narrow street after another till we arrived at a little white house at which he stopped. He knocked repeatedly, and at last a woman opened. When he explained what I wanted, she looked at me curiously, but in due course agreed to let me have a room. I bargained for the price and entered.

Having made myself as comfortable as possible — which was not much — I sauntered down to the shore and watched my good cargo-boat set out to sea. I was alone on a foreign island, where I knew no soul, and the weekly packet that ran between the little town and the mainland was not due for five days. Presently, while I watched the sea, smoking a cigarette, I saw my friend of the morning in conversation with a Frenchman, who, I surmised at once, was the sergeant of whom I had heard. They came up to me, and the sergeant, saluting politely, began to talk. Somewhat to my amusement, I found that he regarded me with considerable suspicion, and he asked me question after question. I did not gather the general drift of his inquiries, but answered everything readily enough.

“But frankly,” he asked for the tenth time, “why have you come here at all?”

“A mere whim, cher monsieur,” I answered. “Curiosity, nothing else.”

He evidently found my explanations unsatisfactory, and I cannot say that I took much trouble to make my motives clear. He informed me at last that he would report my presence to Monsieur le Consul.

“By all means,” said I. “And pray add that I shall give myself the pleasure of calling on him tomorrow if my throat is not cut tonight in the unsavoury den which appears to be your only substitute for a hotel.”

He left me, and I spent the rest of the day in wandering about the Arab streets, looking at the people, and feeling, indeed, something of that thrill I had expected. At night my hostess provided me with food, of which it could only be said that it performed the first office of edible substances — it allayed the pangs of hunger. But beside it the dinners on the cargo-boat, and they had seemed bad enough in all conscience, were toothsome and sumptuous. I was very tired, and, going to my little dark room, surveyed, not without misgiving, the bed on which I was to spend five nights. I was just beginning to undress when I heard a great knocking at the street door. In a moment my room was burst violently into, and before I had realised what on earth was happening, I found myself seized by two soldiers, while the sergeant, so friendly and polite in the day, looked upon me with triumph. I was really so taken aback that for a moment I had nothing to say; then with some irritation I asked him what in Heaven’s name he was up to.

“Monsieur le Consul has ordered me to arrest you. You will be lodged in the goal to-night, and to-morrow morning he will examine you himself.”

“But it’s absurd,” I answered, and I could not help laughing at my ridiculous situation.

“It’s no laughing matter, monsieur,” he said sternly.

“You need not be disagreeable about it,” I remarked. “Tell these men to let go of me and I will accompany you wherever you like. I am quite willing to spend the night in your prison if it amuses you, and I feel sure the bed with which you intend to provide me will be no more objectionable than this.”

The sergeant hesitated for an instant, and then seemed to make up his mind that I did not look a very dangerous ruffian.

“Very well,” he said. “Take your hands off Monsieur. Follow me.”

There was no one about to see the edifying spectacle which I presented as I marched through the streets, thus escorted, to the local gaol. They put me in quite an agreeable little cell, locked the door ponderously, and so left me to my own reflections. I admit that the night seemed endless. It was very dark, and I felt that horrible things were crawling over me. There was a fetid, oppressive smell. I sought in vain for the diverting side of the incident, but I was too uncomfortable, and I freely cursed my craving for the romantic, which had driven me to this inhospitable place. I cared no longer for the lovely damsels whom my fancy had presented plaiting their long black tresses or darkening their eyes with kohl; and if there were any in the neighbourhood I only wished they would free me from the cruel beasts that were biting, biting. But in the morning a soldier brought me some excellent coffee, and I induced him to get me also the wherewithal to wash and a barber to shave me. These things performed, feeling fresher and more contented, I looked forward to my interview with the consul with curiosity and interest. I was told this official would see me at half-past ten, and then I should discover for what monstrous crime I was thus evilly entreated.

In due course the sergeant came with two soldiers and told me I must now go to the consulate. Between them, doing my best to look accustomed to the process, I stalked through the winding alleys till we came to a long, low, handsome building with a verandah, neat iron railings, and a charming garden. At the gate stood a sentry, and above waved the tricolour; upon my word, except for the Arab gardener busily at work, I might have been suddenly transported to France. I was taken into a large, cool room, barely furnished, but with masses of flowers everywhere. They suggested a woman’s taste and forethought. At a desk, littered with papers, sat a little man with grey hair, cut very short, and a large grey moustache, excessively fierce and bristling; he was dressed in white, dapperly, and his figure was trim and neat. I found afterwards that his eyes were very alert, and he gesticulated in conversation with much vivacity. He was writing as I entered, and did not look up when the sergeant duly announced me. He passed his hands impatiently through the many papers, looking for the sergeant’s official account of my arrival and arrest.

“Approchezhe said, then glanced at me quickly. But the glance lengthened into a stare, his face fell; and then, recovering himself, his eyes began to twinkle.

“But Monsieur isn’t a spy, sergeant,” he cried.

“Is that it?” I said, and began to chuckle.

I don’t know why my amusement should have had such an effect on the consul, but immediately he burst into a roar of laughter; he threw himself back in his chair and held his sides. But though he evidently found it a huge joke, the sergeant’s face grew longer and longer. “Monsieur’s conduct has been most suspicious,” he said. “He walked round the town yesterday and was seen to make notes of all he saw.”

The sergeant produced my note-book and gravely handed it to the consul.

“Will you allow me to look at it?” asked he politely.

“By all means,” I answered, somewhat surprised that he understood English.

And while he turned over the pages the sergeant repeated every one of my movements on the preceding day. It was unheard of that an Englishman should arrive in a Spanish ship and come on the island to stay. What could be my motives except to discover whether it was fortified and if men-o’-war could enter the harbour with safety. Without the shadow of a doubt I was a spy of the most dangerous class, and Monsieur le Consul would regret that he had not listened to the sergeant when the British fleet bombarded the town.

“But, Sergeant,” answered the consul, “it will not assist the English admiral in the least to learn from this gentleman’s notes that the women here have magnificent eyes and that the Jews are as picturesque as they are dirty.”

“Monsieur has, no doubt, written his observations in cypher,” said the sergeant.

The consul turned to me.

“Would you be so obliging as to tell me your name?”

I said it, and he repeated it thoughtfully.

“I wonder where I’ve heard that? Ah!” He gave a cry and seized a number of the Journal des Débats which lay on the table. “Is this you?” He passed over the paper, and, to my great joy, I saw an article on a little book of mine.

I acknowledged that I was the blushing author of that work, and, with a bound, the consul sprang up, dashed round the table, and, seizing both my hands, wrung them violently.

“But I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. My wife is devoted to English novels — she’s Swiss, you know, she comes from Geneva — the best place in the world to find a wife, a hive of young ladies, my dear fellow — and she loves your English novels because they’re so pure. She will be charmed to see you and you shall talk English to her. My wife is a linguist, monsieur, a wonderful linguist. And there is the luncheon bell. Excellent! Come to luncheon.”

I was perfectly overwhelmed by this stream of verbosity hurled at me in one breath, and before I could answer the consul had turned to the sergeant, who stood helplessly by.

“You are an idiot. You, with your mania for finding spies all over the place. Monsieur is not a spy any more than you are. He is a man of letters, and my wife has read a book that he has written. You are an imbecile, Sergeant. Come, monsieur, or the eggs will be cold.”

He seized my arm and dragged me away, leaving the sergeant and his myrmidons astounded and perplexed. The consul led me to a charming dining-room where stood a tall, rather stout lady of forty-five. Her hair, of a pleasant brown, was very simply arranged; her features were placid and handsome; her soft grey eyes suggested infinite good nature. She was by no means beautiful, but gave one the impression that advancing years had only added to her attractiveness, and there was about her a staid gracefulness which was very comforting and restful.

“Allow me to present you to my wife, Madame de Pomichet,” said the consul with a flourish.

In one breath, voluble as ever, he related the whole story of my misadventure, told her who I was, and added that he had asked me to stay at the consulate for the rest of my visit to the island. This was the first I had heard of such an invitation, but when it was seconded by the amiable, stately lady, I made no difficulty in gratefully accepting. It was as delightful as it was unexpected to eat in that distant spot an admirable French luncheon; and everything was so fresh, so clean, so dainty, that I felt amply rewarded for my trivial sufferings. My hostess was not talkative, nor was this strange, since her husband monopolised the conversation; but now and then she put in a little kindly word, whereupon he stopped suddenly and looked at her as though some precious feast of wit had fallen from her lips. And while he rolled out anecdote after anecdote, fact upon fact (all of which I discovered later was highly unreliable), with regard to the island he governed, her eyes rested upon him with a tender smile of almost maternal affection.

Coffee and liqueurs were brought in, and we lit our cigars.

“I’m sure it’s very good of you to be so hospitable,” I said. “I was looking forward to abominable discomfort on this island.”

“Good!” cried the consul. “You don’t know how pleased I am to have a civilised man to entertain my wife. I always fear that she will be bored to death, for there is no one here to amuse her but myself.”

“And I’m sure you do it very well,” I answered.

Madame de Pornichet gave me a radiant smile of gratitude.

“Ah, you are right,” she said. “No one could be bored in Lucien’s company.”

“Come, come, my dear,” said the consul, deprecatingly but delighted.

She stretched out her hand, and most gallantly he kissed it.

“Mon petit chou,” she said, and tears of happy love actually glistened in her eyes. She turned to me. “You see, love sometimes comes before marriage, and sometimes after. But when it comes after it lasts till death.”

“Sophie, ma chère enfant” said the consul, and it was rather amusing that he should so address her, for she was a great deal bigger and more imposing than he. “I must tell Monsieur how I had the good fortune to make your acquaintance.”

“It is insupportable,” she answered, to me, smiling. “He tells this story to everyone he meets.”

It was evident, however, that Madame de Pornichet was not unwilling I also should hear it, and the consul settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

“Well, you must know that the best years of my life were spent with our Colonial Army in Algeria, in Senegal, in Tonquin; and I was successively lieutenant, captain, and major. But, my dear friend, I succumbed at last to a pestiferous climate, and at the age of forty-five my health forced me to leave the service. That was twelve years ago, and I am still an active man, not unfit for work nor unused to it. I applied for a colonial appointment, I had some influence, and in due course the minister sent for me to offer the governorship of this island. The post was one that exactly suited me, the salary was adequate, and it was not so far from civilisation that I should feel myself cut off from all my friends. I accepted there and then, and told the minister I was ready to start whenever he chose.

“‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You will take up your duties in six weeks from now. That will allow your wife time to make all needful preparations.’

“‘But I have no wife,’ I said. ‘I am a bachelor.’

“‘What?’ cried the minister. ‘But that is very unfortunate, for I make a point of never sending an unmarried man to such a place. For a hundred reasons it is essential that you should be married.’

“‘I regret enormously,’ I answered.

“‘I am afraid I cannot break an important and salutary rule. You must marry at once.’

“‘I?’

“You can imagine my consternation, for nothing of the sort had ever entered my head, and I ventured mildly to expostulate. But the minister would not listen to a word.

Voyons,’ he said, ‘you have six weeks. In that time you can easily find a wife.’

“He dismissed me and I walked away sorely troubled. On the one hand I was delighted with my good fortune in getting precisely the post of all others which I should have chosen: on the other I was dismayed at the thought of marriage. An old bachelor of my age would have great difficulty in changing his habits to those of a matrimonial life. Fortunately, I met an old friend of mine, a professor at the Sorbonne, a native of Geneva, and I told him at once of my great perplexity.

“‘But don’t hesitate, my friend,’ he said. ‘Of course you must marry. Du reste, at your age it is fit that a man should settle down and live a respectable life.’

“‘But, mon Dieu, where am I to find a wife in six weeks? You cannot expect me to advertise in the Figaro’

“‘Why not? It is as good a way as another.’

“The result of this conversation was that within twenty-four hours an advertisement appeared in that widely circulated paper, stating my age and position, income, and giving as flattering an account as I honestly could, of my personal attractions. Then began my troubles. I went to the office of the Figaro next day to call for any replies that might have come, and the clerk brought me a sack — a large sack, sir.

“‘Here are the answers to your advertisement, monsieur,’ he said, with a malicious grin.

“I staggered, and gave a cry of horror. However, in a moment I regained my self-possession, seized the sack, and, laden like a coal-heaver, hailed a cab. I drove to my hotel, and once in my room emptied it out on the floor. Monsieur, seven hundred and forty-eight ladies desired to marry me. I spent two days reading the letters, in which they described their charms, and examining the photographs, which, according to my request, they had sent me. They were of all years, from sixteen to those who described themselves as of a certain age; they were fat, they were thin, they were dark or blond, they were of every station, from sempstresses to the widows of noblemen. They were single, or divorced, or widows; and some were betwixt and between. But all offered a loving heart and a sincere devotion. At the end my brain reeled. My Swiss friend came to see me, and when he saw the piles of letters, the piles of photographs, he laughed as though he would never stop.

“‘But it is a serious matter,’ I said. ‘Time is flying and I have but five weeks and four days to marry a wife. You cannot expect me to interview seven hundred and forty-eight blushing ladies. I cannot raise hopes, only to crush them, in seven hundred and forty-seven palpitating hearts.’

“‘What will you do, then?’

‘“I will send back all their photographs, and write to the minister that what he asks is impossible. I must lose my island.’ “‘Now listen,’ answered the professor. ‘You know I was born in Geneva, and I have relations living there. It has suddenly occurred to me that my cousin Sophie Vienqué would exactly suit you. She is no longer quite young; nor are you, my friend; she is thirty, of pleasing appearance, and unmarried.’

“‘But what makes you think she would marry me?’

“He shrugged his shoulders.

“‘I do not see why she shouldn’t. She has had time to grow bored with a single life, and I dare say will be pleased with the thought of an establishment of her own. You have much to offer. I can say without flattery that you are an agreeable man, robust still, and not lacking in intelligence. Anyhow, you can try.’

“‘But, mon cher, how can I see her? On what pretext? I cannot call upon your cousin and take stock of her as though I were buying a horse.’

“The professor meditated for two minutes.

“‘I have it. You will go to Geneva and offer her a box of chocolates from me. That will be an introduction. You can talk to her, and if she does not please you, all you have to do is to go your way. She will think you have merely come to make a trifling present on my behalf, and no harm will be done. On the other hand, if you like her it is easy for you to prosecute the acquaintance.’

“I was delighted with the idea. We went out at once, bought the chocolates, and I took the next train to Geneva. I assure you a lover of eighteen could not have been more excited than I was. I arrived early in the morning, and, having attended to my appearance at the hotel, went about ten o’clock, the box of chocolates in my hand, to the address my friend had given. I was so fortunate as to learn that Mademoiselle Vienqué was at home, and, being shown into the drawing-room, found myself in the presence of a very fine young woman. Tenez — I need not describe her, for there she sits before you; and, though twelve years have passed since then, she has altered only to become more ravishing each day.”

“Voyons, Lucien,” expostulated Madame de Pornichet. “Monsieur will think you perfectly ridiculous.”

“Well, I executed my commission, received her thanks, and told her the professor was in the best of health. We began to chat, and the conversation went so easily that I was astounded when the clock struck eleven. I said to myself at once that if’ this charming lady was able to talk for an hour to a perfect stranger so that it seemed to him no more than five minutes, on closer acquaintance she could not fail to be entertaining during a lifetime. Everything about her pleased me. She was evidently fitted for the duties of a consul’s wife: her attractive person, her amiable conversation—”

“How often have I told you, Lucien,” interrupted his wife, “that you talked so incessantly on that occasion that I was not able to make one observation?”

He smiled and patted her hand.

“I rose to my feet,” he continued, “and addressed her as follows: ‘Mademoiselle, it will have occurred to you that I did not take the long journey from Paris to Geneva merely to present you with a box of chocolates.’

“‘Evidently,’ said she.

“‘I came, in point of fact, to make you an offer of marriage.’ “Before she recovered from her astonishment I explained the circumstances, told her my position, and so far as possible sketched my character and my idiosyncrasies. Finally, I proposed that we should be married in a week from that day.

“‘But, monsieur, I don’t know you,’ she said.

“‘You will have abundant opportunities of making my acquaintance when we are settled on our island. There will be nothing else to do.’

“I saw that she did not dislike the idea, and I ventured a little to insist.

“‘Well, I will consult my father,’ she said at last.

“‘But, mademoiselle, though Monsieur your father is without doubt an excellent man, it is not he whom I wish to marry, but you. Do I displease you?’

“‘No,’ she admitted, ‘not precisely.’

“‘Then why should you refuse me?’

“‘Give me till to-morrow to think it over.’

“T regret infinitely, dear lady, but as I tell you, my time is excessively limited. I beseech you to give me an answer now.’ “‘This minute?’

“‘This very minute.’

“She smiled and reached out her hand. ‘Very well, monsieur, since you insist — I accept.’”

The consul drank a glass of wine.

“Monsieur, fourteen days after my visit to the minister, I was a married man, and I discovered that I had never known happiness before. My wife is a treasure, a jewel, and I think she loves me.”

“Mon petit chou” said Madame de Pornichet tenderly. “And if you are a bachelor, monsieur, go to Geneva. I assure you it is a beehive, a veritable beehive of young ladies.”

The consul thus ended his story; and, I who had come to this curious island searching for romance, felt that I had found it, and, of all places, in a marriage of convenience.

GOOD MANNERS

I

Most people thoroughly enjoyed the little dinners which Augustus Breton gave to his friends, for the company was always well chosen, the meats carefully ordered, and the wines unparalleled in the county. He was an epicure without grossness, who cultivated a delightful urbanity far from towns, living a hermit life by aid of the resources of civilisation and the consolations of philosophy. He was a recluse, dwelling among his books on the land he had inherited from his fathers, a student of men who prosecuted his inquiries by preference among the Kentish yokels and the squireens of that fertile county. A man with a certain ironic taste for self-analysis, he liked to observe himself against the background of the unsophisticated; and he practised, as a contrast to rustic manners, a courtesy which reminded you of the elaborate breeding of the eighteenth century. Augustus Breton’s peculiar standpoint might be imagined by the stately air of his Georgian house, filled with the graceful furniture of Chippendale and of Sheraton, with mezzotints, and with exquisite silver; and his appearance fitted the frame with a perfection that suggested the studied pose. He was a man of scarcely middle size, slender notwithstanding his fifty years, with small hands and small feet, of which perhaps he was immoderately proud; he wore his grey beard cut in the fashion of gentlemen in the reign of Elizabeth, and his well-shaped aquiline nose, his pale blue eyes recalled the ancestral portraits which adorned his walls. He preferred, without actually stating it as a fact, to give the impression that all the beautiful things in his house had been handed down to him, but in truth he himself had bought the great majority; he was an enthusiastic collector, talking most willingly of the great masters of mezzotint, of the marks and style of silver, of various cabinet-makers dead but still remembered; and during his rare visits to London, most of his time was spent where such things are bought and sold.

One evening I dined with him, to meet the rector, a youngish man with iron-grey hair and an ascetic manner, whom my host treated always with a peculiar deference; and a lieutenant in the Navy, who appeared to me to have been asked for his breezy ways and his adventurous air of having surpassed many strange perils. I felt sure Augustus Breton saw in him no ordinary young seaman, but an Elizabethan sailor who had passionate tales to tell of exploits on the Spanish Main. Our host liked to keep the conversation well in hand, and, with his exquisite politeness, took care that each guest in turn should speak of what most concerned him; he managed us with a lightness of touch that was admirable, talking himself but little, and then with a kind of grave wit, merely to change a topic that seemed to have been long enough debated, or to throw out a suggestion which might revive a languishing interest. We dealt with the rector, of vacant bishoprics and the influence of the Church in rural parts; with the sailor, of British armaments and the chance of war; and at last the admirable dinner was ended and port was set upon the table. Politely as ever at this stage, Augustus Breton inquired after the rector’s wife; he could never forget that at the beginning of the acquaintance, when dining with him, she had ventured to eat an orange while drinking her port; and though he had borne the affront with unexampled civility, the lady had not again been invited to his house.

“This is an admirable wine,” said the parson, who, for all his ascetic look, knew good port from bad.

“Yes,” said his host, holding it meditatively to the light, “I have only just now begun to drink it. It has been in my cellar for some years, and this, in point of fact, is the first bottle I have tried. I will acknowledge that, besides wishing for the pleasure of your company, I asked you to be so good as to dine with me so that you might give me your opinion.”

The rector, flattered that such a master in these affairs should challenge his praise, slowly inhaled the exquisite aroma.

“It is something really most remarkable,” he said.

“My dear Rector,” answered Augustus Breton, “your virtues are so signal that I am quite overwhelmed.”

“How did you get hold of it?” I interrupted, to stop the interchange of compliments which I foresaw.

“Ah, that is a story which may interest you.”

We begged him to tell it, and, evidently not unwilling, he began in these words.

II

“Of course you know Graveney Hall, the largest house in this neighbourhood, a magnificent place which even an auctioneer could scarcely describe in exaggerated terms. But it was very much too fine for its owners, who have been going downhill steadily for a century and a half; the beautiful gardens were neglected, and even the most needful repairs were left undone; and at length, with a remnant of good sense, they made up their minds that it must be let. They put it in the hands of various agents; but it was not an easy place to deal with, since it is so far from a station that none but a man of leisure would care to live there, and none but a man of means could afford it. Finally, however, they discovered a certain Baron von Bernheim, who came to see the house, fell in love with it there and then, and at once arranged to take it on a long lease. The Graveneys were in the seventh heaven of delight. He was a millionaire, currently reported to have made a vast fortune in South Africa, and without doubt his liberality with the Graveneys pointed to wealth easily acquired: he was ready to do all they asked and to pay all they demanded.

“The arrival of Herr von Bernheim made a certain stir in the neighbourhood, partly owing to the disappearance of the Graveneys, who, after all, have been the chief persons in this part for more than four hundred years; but still more because in every surrounding village is abject poverty, and it was generally felt that this new wealth would be freely scattered. The dormant countryside woke up, and a feverishness seized all and sundry at the thought of this amassed gold; in a smaller way it resembled those manias that took hold of people in the days of the South Sea Bubble, when nothing in life seemed desirable but money. When the German arrived, already half the quietness of this Kentish corner was gone, and, from squire to ploughman, everyone was on the alert for gain. I hated the stranger. I am a lover of ancient ways, and I was ashamed that the Graveneys should live in future in a villa at Regent’s Park, while this interloper occupied their stately home; and I felt that the old-world air I had striven so hard to maintain in this bit of country would vanish before the vulgar opulence of the upstart baron.

“My neighbours thought it civil to call upon him, but I, notwithstanding the entreaties of my old friend, Lady Elizabeth, refused to go. I would not know this man for whom the old-fashioned carriages of the Graveneys did not suffice, but who scoured the country in a new-fangled brake, painted bright yellow, behind horses whose value was preposterously obvious. And when I found he was taking great interest in village affairs, I hated him still more. I heard he was getting the postal service improved — in the old days we were content to receive letters once a day. He laid the first stone for a cottage hospital, and, worst of all, headed a deputation to the railway directors to make a station near Graveney; he subsidised schools — before his arrival it had been my boast that, notwithstanding all the laws they made at Westminster, not half the population could read or write; and consequently our people were better mannered, better workmen, and better satisfied.”

The rector opened his mouth to combat this heresy, but good-humouredly Augustus Breton begged to be allowed to continue his story; and the parson held his tongue.

“Lady Elizabeth asked me why I would not make acquaintance with a man whom everyone thought charming.

“‘I’m sure you’d like him,’ she said. ‘Of course, he’s fabulously rich, but not in the least purse-proud. He’s very amusing. I believe you dislike him because he gives better dinners than you do.’

“Now, I will confess that it is my pride to treat my guests so that they may be pleased to come to me. With a little care it is possible to devise in the country a pleasanter meal than anyone can get in London, and I have no sympathy with certain neighbours of mine who give you slovenly viands with the excuse that nothing better can be got in this distant village; and it is possible that when Lady Elizabeth, with her accustomed enthusiasm, described the banquets that Baron von Bernheim gave at Graveney Hall, a faint tinge of jealousy did pass through me.

“But, at all events, I was content to do without the millionaire’s lavish hospitality. It appeared that everyone found him as charming as Lady Elizabeth, for the county took him to its bosom, and wherever I went, his praises were dinned into my ears. The pleasure which all took in his friendship, the callous way in which people congratulated themselves that he had taken the Graveneys’ place — for the Graveneys were too poor to take any part in the festivities of the county — irritated me still more, and I even went out of my way to avoid him. But I cannot deny that I was a little flattered when I heard that the German, at whose head the whole countryside with indecent haste had thrown itself, was making every endeavour to strike up an acquaintance with me. He went so far as to send a message through Lady Elizabeth, our common neighbour, to ask whether he might call on me, and I was obliged to pretext indifferent health to avoid the honour. Lady Elizabeth in her sprightly way called me all manner of things, but I was determined not to be forced into friendship.

“When he found his efforts were useless, Baron von Bernheim adopted a bold course. He came to my house one morning, just before luncheon, and asked whether I would subscribe to the restoration of the church. I refused somewhat curtly, for in the first place I hate this modern craze for meddling with old buildings, and I will never give a penny to restore anything — I know too well what it means; and secondly, I thought it impertinent that Herr von Bernheim should himself come to me. He took my refusal good-naturedly and walked towards the door; I had not asked him to sit down.

“‘You have some very charming things here,’ he said.

“‘It is kind of you to say so,’ I answered drily.

“He was passing out when his eye caught a mezzotint which has a peculiar history. It is the portrait of a lady, of great beauty and of exquisite workmanship. I had paid one hundred and fifty pounds for it, but on bringing it home was seized with an odd misgiving that it was counterfeit. No expert had discovered it.

“If a forgery, it was wonderfully done, and I tried to persuade myself that it was nothing of the kind, for all the evidence was in favour of its genuineness; but still I had an uneasy suspicion. I saw the baron stop in front of this picture, look quickly at me; and then the shadow of a smile played on his lips. I was astounded, for evidently he had no doubt that this was a reprint; but that he should have discovered it with one rapid glance proved not only that he was a connoisseur, but that he had an innate genius in these things. A man who could tell real from false as if by intuition was remarkable. But I could not let him go without a word; for it was as bad as wearing false pearls, to hang on my walls a picture which was valuable if genuine, but otherwise worthless.

“‘You’re looking at my reprint,’ I said, casting all doubt behind me. ‘I keep it because I think it such a wonderful example.’

“‘It is so good,’ he replied, smiling, ‘that I wondered if you knew it was not authentic. Of course, you know the man in Paris who makes these things?’

“I felt I had escaped a great peril, and to make sure that he did not think I had been foolishly deceived, I insisted on taking down the picture and bringing it to the window. We discussed it, and the baron for the second time took his leave. I had looked at him closely while he examined my hapless mezzotint, and was surprised to find his appearance not unattractive. His dress was very simple, and his manner restrained and unaffected; he was almost a good-looking man, with slightly mournful brown eyes and a singularly persuasive voice, which gave all he said a peculiar charm. I could well understand why women found him so fascinating. But as he shook hands with me, his eye fell on my greatest treasure, a jar in famille verte of such beauty that, though it has been always in my possession, I can never see it without a thrill of delight and of surprise. The sight of it makes my heart beat as might the sight of a beloved woman; but no human being had ever that exquisite grace of form, that soft brilliancy of colour.

“The baron took it in his hands. ‘But about this there is no doubt,’ he said, and he looked at it with dilated pupils. And when I saw him handle the jar, when I saw the caress of his fingers, the delicate, loving way with which he held it — as a proud mother might pass her hands over the silken hair of an only child — I knew, notwithstanding all my petulant complaints, that this was a kindred soul. Here was a man with whom I could talk of all my treasures, and who would understand me.

“‘It is just luncheon-time,’ I said, somewhat confused, I admit. ‘It would give me very great pleasure if you would stay and share my modest meal.’

“He seemed not in the least astonished, but very naturally, as though we were already old friends, accepted. Perhaps it is one of my failings to imagine that at my own table I arrange the conversation so that my guests may speak of things that specially concern them; but on this occasion I found that I myself was led; and with infinite tact the baron arranged our talk so that I was carried away, and spoke not only more than is decent in a host, but of topics which I am unaccustomed to discuss with all and sundry. The German knew human nature, and in consequence I found him a most agreeable fellow. With quiet humour he bantered me good-naturedly on my opposition to his many schemes, and at length I was forced to confess that I had looked upon him always with great disfavour.

‘“On acquaintance, I hope you will alter your opinion,’ he said.

“And I, embarrassed: T have altered it already. And I feel bound to ask your pardon for my bearishness.’

“Then he asked to what I particularly objected; and when I told him it was the proposed station, he offered to take no further steps to secure it. I was a little overwhelmed, for I dared not prevent an innovation which might bring a new prosperity to these parts; but when he said he did not himself much care for the railway to come so near Graveney, I felt a great load fall from my mind. A few days later, I received an invitation to dine at the Hall, and with alacrity — anxious to atone for past impoliteness — I accepted.

“In truth, Von Bernheim’s hospitality was lavish, and I freely acknowledged to Lady Elizabeth, who teased me because I had succumbed at last to the millionaire’s fascination, that I was able to offer my guests nothing to equal it. I found the Graveneys’ precious things arranged with ten times more taste than they had ever had, and the house, instead of being a sad mixture of beauty and tawdriness, was now wholly delightful. Herr von Bernheim had put few of his own things there, but these were so exquisite that any museum would have been proud to possess them.

“Lady Elizabeth drove me home afterwards, and when we were comfortably settled in the carriage, she cried: ‘Now, honestly, don’t you think he’s perfectly enchanting?’

“T do,’ I answered. ‘I withdraw all I said against him. He is an excellent host, and he has every virtue. But there is one thing which is quite beyond praise — I have never drunk better port in my life. Good Heavens! where did the man get it? I would give my soul to own a wine half as good.’

“Lady Elizabeth laughed, and evidently repeated what I said to the German, for two days later, to my amazement, I received six bottles of this priceless wine, with a very civil note saying that he had noticed my appreciation, and begged I would accept those few bottles. To me, who fancy myself something of a judge in such matters, the gift was magnificent, and I knew not how adequately to express my gratitude. I went into my garden and cut some dahlias.

“‘My dear Baron,’ I wrote, ‘you were so good the other day as to say that Graveney Hall could not show such dahlias as grew in my poor little garden, and I venture to send you some in return for your gift of wine.’

“The little present pleased him apparently, for next time we met, he thanked me as profusely as if my flowers had been of serious value, and he apologised for sending so few bottles of port, saying that he had only five dozen left. And from this beginning we grew into fast friends. I found his knowledge of the arts was deep and enthusiastic; he was able to tell me a thousand things I did not know before, and never a week passed when he was in the country that he did not lunch at my house, or that I did not dine at his. But the Baron von Bernheim was a singular man; we never heard of his doings in London, knowing vaguely only that he was concerned in vast undertakings. For all his friendliness, everyone was kept at a certain distance, and even I, after three years of constant communication, knew not a whit more of him than I had learnt on the first day of our acquaintance. He seemed to me the subtlest observer, but also the most careful, impenetrable man that I had ever met; he must have known every detail concerning every important inhabitant of the county, but of himself no one knew anything.

III

“His influence in this part of the country increased rapidly. The place awoke from its dull sleepiness, and everyone became strangely alert and active. Even I, though now I am ashamed to confess it, felt that I had somehow wasted the peaceful years spent happily in my little house, and that I should have done more with my life. Lady Elizabeth was quite carried away, and under the baron’s direction launched into such small speculations as she could afford. It was imagined that the baron, now a naturalised Englishman, would stand for Parliament; and the farmers, at the thought of all he would do for them, dreamed pleasant dreams of a new prosperity.

“One morning I was taking a walk along the road that runs past my house, when I met Lady Elizabeth in her dog-cart. She stopped, and I saw at once that something extraordinary had happened.

“‘I was just coming to see you,’ she cried. ‘I’ve been to Tercanbury this morning and I’ve heard the most awful thing.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“She looked quickly at her groom, gave him the reins, and stepped down. We walked till we were out of earshot, and then very anxiously she spoke.

“‘Everyone in Tercanbury is full of Baron von Bernheim. They say he isn’t a baron at all, but a well-known Continental swindler called Johann Herz. He’s been carrying on some gigantic swindle in England, and now a warrant is out for his arrest. Isn’t it dreadful? And he has five hundred pounds of mine.’

“I turned pale.

“‘It can’t be true!’

“‘I’ve been to the bank, and the manager tells me he’s arrested by now. There seems no doubt about it.’

“‘But he was engaged to lunch with me to-day,’ I said.

“‘Well, he won’t come,’ she answered. ‘Come to luncheon with me, and we’ll talk it over.’

“‘No,’ I said, T must go in. He may come, and I should be there to receive him.’

“‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to give him luncheon. He’s a most desperate criminal. You must be mad. But of course he won’t come. He’s either arrested or fled.’

‘“If he comes, I shall remember he’s my guest, and I shall take care in no way to show that I have heard anything to his discredit.’

‘“You’re an old fool, Mr. Breton!’ exclaimed Lady Elizabeth almost angrily. ‘Of course he won’t come; but if he does, you must send for the police.’

“I went home, more distressed by the news than I can possibly say. Lady Elizabeth seemed so positive that I could not doubt it was true, and somehow I was scarcely surprised; the German had been always so silent about his antecedents; and for all his apparent heartiness, there had ever seemed in him something that he concealed. But, after all, I had invited him to luncheon, and I determined to make no change in my arrangements.

“‘I shall not wait for Herr von Bernheim after ten minutes past two,’ I told my servant, without giving any explanation.

“I looked at the clock with some nervousness, and in a moment it struck the hour.

“‘Am I too punctual?’ cried a voice through my open window, and, turning around with a start, I saw Baron von Bernheim himself.

“‘I came round by the garden,’ he added, walking in. ‘I thought you would not mind.’

“For a moment I was taken aback. He was as calm and self-assured as ever I had seen him, immaculately dressed; and I had never been more impressed by his perfect ease of manner. He saw my confusion and asked whether I expected him.

“‘Of course,’ I said, recovering myself. ‘Let us go in to luncheon.’

“I cannot say I enjoyed the meal. I was very nervous. I wondered whether the whole story were untrue. I watched the windows anxiously for detectives. It would be horrible if the man were arrested at my very table. Then I asked myself whether the German did not know that a warrant was issued for his arrest, and almost with agony I wondered what I should do. But he was imperturbable. With his accustomed brilliant knowledge, he spoke of early Italian art, criticising the various schools with the acumen of a connoisseur and the enthusiasm of an artist. My own powers of conversation failed me, and all my efforts were centred on preserving the politeness due to a guest; but the baron did not seem to observe my awkward silence; he went on eloquently discoursing, till at last it was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out: ‘Good Heavens, man! is it true? Don’t you know that all the police in Kent are on your track?’ Since then it has always been my consolation that I bore myself to the end courteously, and none could have seen that my guest was most unwelcome and I in a pitiful state of anxiety. We had just finished when I heard wheels on the gravel outside my door, and I started.

“‘What is that?’ I cried, disconcerted.

“He looked at me calmly, and an ironic smile broke on his lips.

‘“It must be my trap,’ he said. ‘I gave orders that I was to be fetched at three. You will forgive me if I run away so quickly, but I must go to Scotland to-night, and the trains are so inconvenient from here, I can only just manage it.’

“He shook hands with me and, without the slightest sign of haste or anxiety, walked out. I watched him take the reins and drive away.

“Next morning the whole thing was in the papers. It was a most heartless, cruel swindle that the baron had devised, and for three years it had gone successfully; hundreds of people were ruined, and the sensation throughout the whole country was immense. But Johann Herz — for that indeed was his real name — had entirely disappeared; I was the last person who had seen him. He had gone off in the little sailing-boat he kept, none knew whither; all the ports on the Continent were watched, but he was not found. Then long accounts appeared of his previous history, and it appeared that he had gone under a dozen names, all somewhat high-sounding, for a pretence of nobility appeared his chief weakness; and it was known that, wherever he settled, he loved to adopt the airs of the country gentleman. But what interested me most was that he seemed notorious as a forger of works of art; nearly every high-priced imitation of oil-paintings, mezzotints, or porcelain had come from his workshops. He set his great talents to work on every artistic thing that became fashionable, and in this it appeared his keen sense of beauty, his vast knowledge, were extremely valuable. He had so much ability that he could have earned an honest livelihood with the greatest ease, but apparently there was some kink in his nature which made him unable to resist the strange fascination of crime. And even when I knew his whole history, I could not help admiring the bravado with which he had come to my luncheon; it was really magnificent, the coolness he had shown and the consummate daring. I confess I hoped he would escape — this was too picturesque a ruffian to fall into the law’s iron hands; he was a hero living out of his time. In the fifteenth century, with such courage, resource, and wit, he would have founded a dynasty.

“And my heart sank when I read in the paper, fully three months after the flight, that Johann Herz had been arrested in Naples. It was by the merest chance; all his precautions had been carefully thought out, and it seemed as if Fortune alone had been against him. He was brought to England, tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years penal servitude.”

Augustus Breton sank back in his chair and sighed.

“But how is this connected with your port?” I asked, at length.

“There was a sale at Graveney Hall of the baron’s effects,” answered our host, “and sadly I went to it. The curious had assembled in numbers, wishing to see where the notorious criminal had lived, but the bidding was bad. We were all very much ashamed of ourselves, and I noticed that those who had profited most by the German’s splendid hospitality were most bitter in their denunciation of his character. They all said that they had never liked him, and had always thought there was something shady about him. I watched the scene with a certain melancholy, hardly attending to the bidding, when suddenly, by chance, I heard the auctioneer put up a small quantity of port. This must be the celebrated wine of which the Baron had given me six bottles at the beginning of our acquaintance. I thought I would buy it as a memento of my friend. I bid, and in a minute the wine was mine.”

“But why have you kept it so long?”

“Ah, my friend, I hadn’t the heart to drink it while the possessor of so delicate a palate was living on convict fare in Portland Prison. It would have been really in very bad taste. So I waited till his sentence had expired. I found out that to-day the convict was to be released, and I asked you all to come here so that the port might be solemnly drunk. Gentlemen, I ask you to drink to the health of Herr Johann Herz.”

COUSIN AMY

Amy is the daughter of my grandmother’s nephew by marriage.

I cannot imagine that she is any relative of mine; but she insists that we are cousins, and we call one another by our Christian names. Her idea of the connection is that she should treat me with all the unpleasant frankness of a close relation, while on my side there should be the extreme politeness, the flattering attentiveness, of a distant acquaintance. This was all very well when I was eighteen and Cousin Amy twenty-six; but now I am five and thirty, and Cousin Amy has ceased to count her birthdays. She does not realise that this makes all the difference in the world; and I have never been able to find the exact words in which to frame so delicate a statement. Cousin Amy lives in the country, and I was much surprised to meet her face to face in Piccadilly. She shook me warmly by the hand.

“How nice to see you after all these ages! We must have a talk, mustn’t we?”

I replied that it would be very agreeable.

“Well, I’m only here for twenty-four hours,” she pursued. “Are you doing anything this evening?”

“No, I’m not,” I replied with alacrity.

I thought it would be pleasant to dine for once in a way at Cousin Amy’s expense. In years gone by she had been apt to presume too far on the privilege (which her sex has never shown any wish to dispute with mine) of paying the bill.

“That’s capital!” she said. “Then you can take me out to dinner.”

“The prospect fills me with enthusiasm,” I retorted icily.

“You know I’ve become a food reformer?”

“This is nuts,” I murmured softly to myself, considering that the fruit in question was reported to be not only nutritious, but cheap. I went on with more earnestness: “And where does one eat reformed food?”

“Oh! anywhere,” she answered airily. “I’m not a faddist, you know. Now I’m going to tell you something extraordinary: I’ve never dined at the Ritz.”

There was a pause, during which you might have heard a pin drop in Piccadilly. But Amy broke it gaily.

“Well, I’ll meet you there at eight, shall I? And don’t order anything beforehand, since I eat next to nothing, you know.”

This, at any rate, was consoling, for I had been saving up my money in order to spend a week in Paris and improve my mind. Amy tripped lightly away; and I, finding I had but a couple of pounds in my pocket, thought it would be wise in case of emergency to change a cheque.

When we sat down in the evening, Cousin Amy put her gloves on the table and looked round with a happy smile. “I know we’re going to have a charming dinner,” she said.

The waiter handed me the menu; but Cousin Amy is a practical woman.

“Now, you’d far better let me order my own dinner,” she said. “I only want a snack; and you see, as I can’t eat dead beasts, I’d better choose what I can eat.”

The proposal seemed eminently reasonable.

Amy cast her eyes down the menu. “At all events, we can start with some hors d’oeuvres,” she said. “Oh! and how delicious! There’s potage bisque.”

I had observed in my glance at the bill-of-fare that this was the most expensive soup on the list; but Cousin Amy never noticed these things. I wondered acidly how she had reached the quite mature age which I positively knew was hers without acquiring the elements of common decency. I ordered the hors d’oeuvres and the potage bisque.

“What fish, sir?” said the waiter.

Cousin Amy frowned at the menu. “It seems very extraordinary that you have no salmon,” she said, in the arrogant way in which women generally address their inferiors. “It must be in season.”

“Well, we have some, madam, but we haven’t put it on the card. This is the first we’ve had.”

“There!” said Cousin Amy in triumph. “You see, you can always get things if you ask for them.”

I shuddered to think of the price I should have to pay for salmon which had only come on the London market that morning. I made up my mind that I should have to choose a cheaper hotel in Paris than the one upon which I had fixed. I pointed out to Amy that no woman who respected herself could eat a red fish after a red soup.

“Yes, I know that. I do feel rather a barbarian; but I must eat salmon, as it’s full of proteids.”

“But surely,” I protested, “you told me that you never ate horrible dead beasts.”

Amy opened her eyes wide. “Oh! that only applies to warmblooded creatures; otherwise I couldn’t have eaten the soup.”

“It’s lucky there’s not whale on the menu,” I murmured, as I meekly ordered the salmon.

I was beginning to think that one did oneself rather well on reformed food.

The hors d’oeuvres were set on the table; and Amy, explaining that she had to eat what she could, emptied the entire contents of three dishes on her plate. I thought they looked rather nice myself, but I hadn’t the face to ask the waiter for more.

Then another waiter brought me a list of wines. This was my opportunity, and I seized it like a man. Cousin Amy was certainly growing uncommonly stout; and it is well known that obesity is best treated by abstention from liquid for two hours after the repast.

“As a food reformer, I take it that you only have a cup of coffee after eating,” I said. “I shall have a whisky-and-soda.”

“How did you get such a ridiculous idea into your head?” she answered briskly. “On the contrary, my doctor has ordered me to drink wine. You see, I have to keep myself up.”

“Ah! what will you have?” I said gloomily.

“Oh! I don’t really mind, so long as it’s very dry.”

I looked at Cousin Amy. “Do you remember the story of the man who was taking a pretty American out to dinner? He asked her what she would drink. T guess I’ll have champagne,’ she said. ‘Guess again,’ he answered.”

“What a sell!” cried Amy, laughing merrily.

I have read somewhere that women have a greater delicacy of perception than men. I certainly never knew any one slower than Cousin Amy to take a hint.

She watched me turn over the pages. “If you really have no preference,” she said, “I think I would like Veuve Cliquot. I always feel that we women ought to stand together.”

It appeared that Cousin Amy was a suffragist as well as a food reformer; and after I had ordered the champagne which accorded with her principles, she favoured me with her views on the cause. Amy thoroughly enjoyed the potage bisque, and she positively gloated over the salmon. The obsequious waiter came for further orders.

“Now you see what an economical person I am to have to dinner,” said Amy. “Any one else would ask for entrées and roasts and all kinds of abominations like that. But I only want a couple of vegetables, and I’ve done.”

“I remember your saying you only wanted a snack.”

She turned to the waiter. She thinks it is so nice to get on friendly terms with a waiter. She likes him to take an intelligent interest in her food.

“Now I’ll tell you what I want: you know those great big asparagus, as large round as your arm? Well, I want some of them.”

“Very good, madam,” said he.

“It’s so lucky I came up to town just when things I really like are in season,” she reflected. “In the country we shall have to wait another three months for asparagus and green peas. You will order some peas, won’t you?”

“Certainly, if you think you can eat them,” I said politely.

“Ah! now you see what a difference it makes to eat in a rational manner. I can eat anything, my dear boy — anything!”

“I’m quite willing to believe it,” I retorted.

She looked at me and smiled broadly.

“But I don’t want you to sacrifice yourself on my account. I’m not narrow-minded, and if you want some flesh I have no objection to your having it.”

A pile of asparagus and a great many green peas were set before us, and I knew they were worth their weight in gold.

I began to feel more than doubtful about my trip to Paris.

“It’s very kind of you,” I answered; “but I seldom have more than a steak for dinner; and after devouring the meal you’ve ordered I shall feel like a boa-constrictor.”

“You see, one has to get the proper amount of proteids in,” Amy replied calmly, as she ate the giant asparagus.

I ate one or two myself, but I was no match for Amy. I no longer wondered that she was growing stout; and I thought that if anybody did marry her, he should be warned in time that to feed a food reformer is no joking matter.

When there was one long monster left on the dish, she seized it deliberately.

“I must eat that one,” she said. “It means a handsome husband and five thousand a year.”

“He’ll want it,” I replied.

“I thought I should only spoil my dinner if I had tea,” she murmured reflectively.

“That was very considerate of you,” I answered.

She leaned back with a sigh and looked at me.

“How pleased I am to have caught you before you went to Paris!”

“I very much doubt whether I shall be able to afford to go,” I said.

Cousin Amy is an optimist.

“After all, there’s no place like home,” she answered cheerily. “If you go to Paris you’ll probably get typhoid, and you’ll certainly spend much more money than you can afford.”

Cousin Amy has often besought me to be economical. She takes a cousinly interest in my finances.

At last she finished the peas; and I felt that I could eat nothing more for a week. Amy was in high spirits.

“Now a little sweet and a little dessert, and I’m done.”

I began to admire Amy. I should have liked to introduce the fat boy of Peckham to her.

“Poires à la Melba,” she ordered, with one glance at the menu.

With unerring instinct she had hit upon the specialty of the house. I decided definitely not to go to Paris after all.

“Delicious, aren’t they?” she said.

We reached the dessert, and I became weak and silly when she said she had not had strawberries and cream that year. Neither had many other people. Strawberries and cream were brought, mixed together in a huge bowl, and for a fixed sum — a rather large sum, it seemed to me — you could eat as many as you liked.

It was some consolation to me that Amy certainly had her money’s worth. When she had done, she leaned back.

“After all one misses a great deal if one is a food reformer; but one has the consciousness that one is advancing a good cause. And besides, in Lent one has the advantage of killing two birds with one stone.”

We had coffee, and I discovered that Amy had a fine taste in liqueur brandy. She told me her doctor wouldn’t let her drink it unless it was very old. When the bill came — I congratulated myself on the fact that Amy had only wanted a snack, for if she had been really hungry I don’t know what I should have done.

When we parted, she shook hands with me. “I have enjoyed myself,” she said. “I’m so sorry I’m not staying in town longer, but you must come and lunch with me to-morrow. My system is chop for chop you know.”

This was new in Cousin Amy, and I put the change down to the advance of years, which have a soft logic of their own.

“I shall be delighted!” I answered promptly. “Where shall we go?”

She looked at me with the utmost effrontery.

“What do you say to the Eustace Miles Restaurant? I should so much like to show you what a vegetarian restaurant is really like.”

I have no presence of mind in emergencies, and I accepted Cousin Amy’s invitation. But as I wandered away in the rain (I really couldn’t afford a hansom) a sadder, poorer, wiser, and much overeaten man, I murmured to myself:

“She may call it chop for chop, if she likes. I call it carrot soup for potage bisque.”

THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)

Miss Ley, the most delightful of old maids, having no engagements on hand, took a cottage on the river for the fortnight round Whitsuntide. The weather promised to be fine, and she had found a secluded spot in which she could enjoy the beauties of early summer to her heart’s content. She was a woman who loved cities, but it pleased her at times to bury herself in the country, where, apart from men, she could collect herself and set her ideas in order. She was exhausted after a winter in London, and looked forward with pleasure to the peacefulness of the Valley of the Thames. With more books than she could possibly read in six months there was no chance of dulness, and the roses in the cottage garden offered all the companionship she needed. But her interest in her fellow-creatures was overwhelming, and she made the discovery in a day or two, not without satisfaction, that her neighbours in the next cottage were worthy of study. She had no wish to know them, since it amused her far more to divine what sort of folk they were from their appearance, and she did not want to be bothered with the trivialities of social intercourse. But they were plainly as disinclined as herself to strike up the acquaintance which was almost indicated by the fact that they lived constantly in one another’s sight and met half a dozen times a day; and Miss Ley’s mind, momentarily perturbed by the fear of an attempt upon her privacy, regained its usual serenity. She set herself to weave fancies about them. Miss Ley was not inquisitive and preferred to draw her imaginary portraits without the aid of disturbing information, and the details gathered by her maid were sufficiently scanty to leave scope for any amount of invention. The neighbours were a Mr and Mrs. Craig, persons apparently of some means, who had taken the cottage for the whole summer. It was evident that the man had no calling, for he spent all day at home. Miss Ley surmised that they had not been long married; they had a baby which was little more than a year old; and this surprised her, since both were middle-aged.

Craig was a handsome man, with a red, honest face, a grey moustache, and thin grey hair. He held himself well, and there was a bluff heartiness about him which suggested that he might be a retired soldier. His wife was a woman hard of visage, tall, and of a masculine appearance, with unattractive fair hair, a large nose, a large mouth, and a weather-beaten skin. She was not only plain, but grim. Her clothes were pretty, flimsy, and graceful. But they sat oddly upon her, for they would better have befitted a girl of eighteen; and Mrs. Craig was certainly forty. Miss Ley noticed that they were the work of an excellent dressmaker.

But though her appearance was unprepossessing and her manner hard, Miss Ley was curiously drawn towards her by the affection which she lavished upon her husband and her child. From her verandah Miss Ley could see the pair constantly walking up and down the lawn of their garden, arm in arm; they did not talk, but it was because they were happy to be together; and it was touching to observe the submissiveness with which the dour, unsympathetic woman treated her good-natured husband. She seemed to take a pleasure in doing his bidding. She looked for occasions to prove that she was his willing slave. And because they were no longer young, their mutual devotion seemed all the more charming. It was a pretty sight to observe Mrs. Craig brush an invisible speck of dust off the man’s coat, and Miss Ley was convinced that she purposely made holes in his socks in order to have the pleasure of darning them. To watch this matrimonial felicity made the old maid more contented with herself and with the world in general. She christened the couple forthwith Edwin and Angelina.

But the most agreeable thing of all was to watch them with their baby. A nurse took it out every morning in a perambulator, but before this father and mother spent an ecstatic quarter of an hour in teaching it to walk. They stood a few yards apart and urged the child to flounder from one to the other, and each time it tumbled into the parental arms it was lifted up and rapturously embraced. And when finally it was tucked up in the smart little cart, they hung over it with charming baby talk, and watched it out of sight as though they could not bear to let it go. Miss Ley had never seen a pair so devoted to one another, and so enchanted with their offspring.

She made up a little story about them. She was certain that they had fallen in love with one another years before — perhaps twenty years — when Angelina, a young girl then, had the fresh grace of her teens, and Edwin was a brave youth setting out joyously on the journey of life. And since the gods habitually ignore practical matters, it was evident that they had not a penny between them. To marry at once was impossible, but they had courage, hope, and confidence. The young man made up his mind to go out to the Colonies, make his fortune, and return to marry the girl who had patiently waited. It could not take him more than two or three years, and what is that when one is twenty and the whole of life is before one?

Angelina meanwhile would live with her widowed mother.

But things did not pass exactly as they had expected. Edwin found it more difficult than he thought to make a fortune. It was hard enough to keep himself from sheer starvation, and only Angelina’s love and her tender letters gave him the heart to go on. The three years passed which he had given himself, and he was no more able to marry than before. Angelina’s mother lived still, and it was impossible for the dutiful daughter to leave her. They must put aside all thought of marriage for the present. And so the years passed slowly; and Edwin’s hair grew grey, and Angelina became grim and haggard. Hers was the harder lot, for she could do nothing but wait. The cruel glass showed such charms as she had once possessed slip away from her one by one, and at last she discovered that youth, with a mocking laugh and a pirouette, had left her for good; her sweetness grew bitter from long tending of a querulous invalid; her mind was narrowed by the society of the small manufacturing town in which she lived. Her friends married and had children; but she remained a solitary prisoner.

Often she despaired. She wondered if Edwin still loved her. She wondered if he would ever come back. Ten years went by, and fifteen, and twenty. At last Edwin wrote to say that his affairs were settled, he had made enough for them to live on at their ease, and if she were still willing to marry him he would return at once. When they met after the long separation Angelina saw with dismay that Edwin, apparently no older, was as handsome as ever; the good-looking youth was become a good-looking man, and that was all. He was in the flower of his age. She felt suddenly very old. She was conscious of her narrowness compared with the breadth long sojourn in foreign countries had given him. He was joyous and breezy as of old, but all her spirit was crushed. The bitterness of life had warped her soul. She could not do otherwise than offer him his release; it seemed monstrous to bind that charming creature to her by a promise twenty years old. For a moment he thought she had ceased to care for him, and she saw the utter dismay of his face. She realised on a sudden — O rapture! — that to him, too, she was just the same as she had ever been. He had thought of her always as she was; her portrait had been, as it were, stamped on his heart, so that now, when the real woman stood before him, he did not see her. To him she was still eighteen. So Edwin and Angelina were married.

“I’m sure it’s all true,” Miss Ley said to herself. “And I’m convinced they’ll live happily to the end of their days. Their love was founded on illusion, perhaps, but since it had to them all the appearances of reality, what did it matter?”

Now Miss Ley’s greatest friend was Frank Hurrell, a man of half her age, who was assistant physician at St. Luke’s Hospital; and when he suggested coming to see her on Whit Sunday she was very willing to forego for a while the delights of solitude. He arrived in time for luncheon, and they discussed, with pleasure at seeing one another again after a week’s separation, the many interests they had in common. Frank was amused with Miss Ley’s rural attitude, and asked her, smiling, how on earth she occupied her time. Miss Ley immediately gave him a catalogue of the various pursuits which filled the day, and she did not omit to mention her interest in the Craigs. She told him the story which she had invented to account for their middle-aged affection, and bore with equanimity his laughter. But while they were talking of him Miss Ley was able to point out Edwin in the flesh, for, apparently having finished his luncheon, he came out to smoke a pipe in the garden. Miss Ley and Frank were sitting on the verandah and had a full view of their neighbour’s lawn.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen him in the garden without Angelina hanging on his arm,” smiled Miss Ley. Frank looked at him carelessly, but in a moment his glance grew more intent.

“I seem to know his face,” he said.

“If you say he’s a widower with seventeen children and this is his second wife, I’ll never forgive you.”

“I can’t remember anything about him. I’m convinced I’ve seen the man somewhere, but I can’t put a name to him.”

Then the nurse brought the baby out, and the happy father’s face lit up.

“Come along, youngster,” he said, as he took it from the nurse’s arms.

He began to lift it as high as he could in the air, while the baby crowed gleefully; and when it had the chance, tugged at his moustache.

“He has such kind, good eyes,” said Miss Ley. “I’m sure he’s a perfectly charming creature.”

Presently she proposed that they should take a stroll, and they wandered along the tow path, watching the gay crowds on the river. They talked of many things. But at last Miss Ley, looking at her watch, suggested that they should turn back. They had not gone far when she espied suddenly Edwin and Angelina walking towards them. It was the obvious walk for a Sunday afternoon, and it was not strange that the Craigs had chosen it as well as themselves.

“Now you’ll be able to see her,” said Miss Ley, quite interested in her little romance. “Their devotion is all the more touching because the poor thing’s so plain.”

They came closer, and Frank watched them with smiling eyes. In a moment they were face to face. Frank uttered a low exclamation, but it was enough to attract to him the glance of the happy couple. They stared at him for a moment. Then an extraordinary thing happened. They stood stock still and instinctively came close together, as though seeking for mutual protection. The man’s red face was suddenly darkened by a purple flush, his eyes appeared almost to start out of his head; he seemed to have a difficulty to get his breath. All the colour fled from Mrs. Craig’s sallow cheeks; her face in a moment grew drawn and haggard. And her eyes, too, were filled with indescribable terror. A convulsive trembling seized them, and Frank thought the woman would faint. He had never seen such frightful dread expressed on a human countenance.

They lost all semblance of mankind; they wore the look of hunted beasts. It was horrible to behold them. Suddenly, with a jerk, Craig seized his wife’s arm and dragged her on. Miss Ley walked a few steps, filled with blank amazement. When she looked back she saw that Angelina had fainted.

“Won’t you go to her?” she asked Frank.

“Goodness, no! She doesn’t want me. Besides, the man’s a doctor. He’ll do all that’s necessary.”

“What on earth does it mean?” asked Miss Ley.

“Well, I do know them. As soon as I saw the woman I recognised her, and it’s obvious enough that they recognised me.”

“And who are they?”

Frank gave a grim little laugh.

“I’m afraid the story you made up about them is rather far from the truth. Do you remember the Wingfield murder?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you were abroad at the time. It stirred the whole country.” Frank paused a moment. “Miss Wingfield was a rich spinster of mature age, who lived in the country with a companion. Presently she died and was buried. It was found that she had left everything to this companion. She had been a strong, healthy woman, and no one expected her death. Various rumours were spread abroad, and at last the authorities ordered the body to be exhumed. The result of this was that the companion was arrested and charged with poisoning her employer. I was one of the medical experts called in by the prosecution. The chief witness in her favour was Miss Wingfield’s doctor, a man called Brownley. The things that came out during the trial are indescribable. The accused woman must have been a monster of wickedness and cruelty. Personally I had no doubt about her guilt, but she was cleverly defended, and the jury disagreed. A new trial was ordered.

“In the meanwhile, the police gathered fresh evidence, and next time Dr. Brownley was put beside her in the dock. The prosecution sought to prove that the companion and the doctor were madly in love with one another, and had done the poor old lady to death so that they might marry on the fortune which the companion had caused to be left to her. The whole case hung together in such a way that it seemed impossible they should get off, and the judge summed up dead against them. But they were defended by the same man — that trial made his name for him, and he’ll be Lord Chief Justice before he dies — and he managed somehow to instil a doubt in the jury’s minds. I shall never forget the suspense of waiting for the verdict. I was so interested in the case that I remained in court. At last the jury came in, and to the consternation of everyone, said that again they couldn’t agree. The authorities decided not to prosecute a third time and the scoundrels — for that’s what they are — were let out. A week afterwards an evening paper got hold of the news that they had been married that morning.”

Frank stopped, and a shiver passed through Miss Ley.

“The real names of Edwin and Angelina are Dr and Mrs. Brownley, and I haven’t the shadow of a doubt that they committed between them a particularly cruel and heartless murder.”

“But — good Heavens! How can they be so happy?” said Miss Ley.

“I don’t think they’re very happy at this moment,” said Frank, quietly.

The friends returned to the cottage, and in the evening Frank went back to London. Miss Ley saw nothing of her neighbours. The night was beautiful and warm, but they did not appear as usual on their lawn; and the windows of the house were kept shut. Miss Ley wondered what they were feeling.

Next day her maid came to her in great excitement. The neighbouring cottage was empty. Its inhabitants had disappeared in the night, without a sound, without a word to anyone. They had fled like thieves, but nothing in the furnished house was missing. Their boxes were gone, heaven only knew how they had been taken away, and there was no trace of them. A pile of tradesmen’s books had been left on a table, with money to pay them. No one had heard them go. No one had seen them. They had vanished like persons in a dream. And that for Miss Ley was the end of Edwin and Angelina.

THE PACIFIC

THE Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The billows, magnificently rolling, stretch widely on all sides of you, and you forget your vanished youth, with its memories, cruel and sweet, in a restless, intolerable desire for life. On such a sea as this Ulysses sailed when he sought the Happy Isles. But there are days also when the Pacific is like a lake. The sea is flat and shining. The flying fish, a gleam of shadow on the brightness of a mirror, make little fountains of sparkling drops when they dip. There are fleecy clouds on the horizon, and at sunset they take strange shapes so that it is impossible not to believe that you see a range of lofty mountains. They are the mountains of the country of your dreams. You sail through an unimaginable silence upon a magic sea. Now and then a few gulls suggest that land is not far off, a forgotten island hidden in a wilderness of waters; but the gulls, the melancholy gulls, are the only sign you have of it. You see never a tramp, with its friendly smoke, no stately bark or trim schooner, not a fishing boat even: it is an empty desert; and presently the emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding.

ENVOI

WHEN your ship leaves Honolulu they hang leis round your neck, garlands of sweet smelling flowers. The wharf is crowded and the band plays a melting Hawaiian tune. The people on board throw coloured streamers to those standing below, and the side of the ship is gay with the thin lines of paper, red and green and yellow and blue. When the ship moves slowly away the streamers break softly, and it is like the breaking of human ties. Men and women are joined together for a moment by a gaily coloured strip of paper, red and blue and green and yellow, and then life separates them and the paper is sundered, so easily, with a little sharp snap. For an hour the fragments trail down the hull and then they blow away. The flowers of your garlands fade and their scent is oppressive. You throw them overboard.

RAIN

It was nearly bed–time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the Southern Cross. After two years at the front and a wound that had taken longer to heal than it should, he was glad to settle down quietly at Apia for twelve months at least, and he felt already better for the journey. Since some of the passengers were leaving the ship next day at Pago–Pago they had had a little dance that evening and in his ears hammered still the harsh notes of the mechanical piano. But the deck was quiet at last. A little way off he saw his wife in a long chair talking with the Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very low, quiet voice.

Between the Macphails and the Davidsons, who were missionaries, there had arisen the intimacy of shipboard, which is due to propinquity rather than to any community of taste. Their chief tie was the disapproval they shared of the men who spent their days and nights in the smoking–room playing poker or bridge and drinking. Mrs Macphail was not a little flattered to think that she and her husband were the only people on board with whom the Davidsons were willing to associate, and even the doctor, shy but no fool, half unconsciously acknowledged the compliment. It was only because he was of an argumentative mind that in their cabin at night he permitted himself to carp.

‘Mrs Davidson was saying she didn’t know how they’d have got through the journey if it hadn’t been for us,’ said Mrs Macphail as she neatly brushed out her transformation. ‘She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to know.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought a missionary was such a big bug that he could afford to put on frills.’

‘It’s not frills. I quite understand what she means. It wouldn’t have been very nice for the Davidsons to have to mix with all that rough lot in the smoking– room.’

‘The founder of their religion wasn’t so exclusive,’ said Dr Macphail with a chuckle.

‘I’ve asked you over and over again not to joke about religion,’ answered his wife. ‘I shouldn’t like to have a nature like yours, Alec. You never look for the best in people.’

He gave her a sidelong glance with his pale, blue eyes, but did not reply. After many years of married life he had learned that it was more conducive to peace to leave his wife with the last word. He was undressed before she was, and climbing into the upper bunk he settled down to read himself to sleep.

When he came on deck next morning they were close to land. He looked at it with greedy eyes. There was a thin strip of silver beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation. The coconut trees, thick and green, came nearly to the water’s edge, and among them you saw the grass houses of the Samoans; and here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Mrs Davidson came and stood beside him. She was dressed in black and wore round her neck a gold chain, from which dangled a small cross. She was a little woman, with brown, dull hair very elaborately arranged, and she had prominent blue eyes behind invisible pince–nez. Her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness; she had the quick movements of a bird. The most remarkable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflexion; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating to the nerves like the pitiless clamour of the pneumatic drill.

‘This must seem like home to you,’ said Dr Macphail, with his thin, difficult smile.

‘Ours are low islands, you know, not like these. Coral. These are volcanic. We’ve got another ten days’ journey to reach them.’

‘In these parts that’s almost like being in the next street at home,’ said Dr Macphail facetiously.

‘Well, that’s rather an exaggerated way of putting it, but one does look at distances differently in the South Seas. So far you’re right.’

Dr Macphail sighed faintly.

‘I’m glad we’re not stationed here,’ she went on. ‘They say this is a terribly difficult place to work in. The steamers’ touching makes the people unsettled; and then there’s the naval station; that’s bad for the natives. In our district we don’t have difficulties like that to contend with. There are one or two traders, of course, but we take care to make them behave, and if they don’t we make the place so hot for them they’re glad to go.’

Fixing the glasses on her nose she looked at the green island with a ruthless stare.

‘It’s almost a hopeless task for the missionaries here. I can never be sufficiently thankful to God that we are at least spared that.’

Davidson’s district consisted of a group of islands to the North of Samoa; they were widely separated and he had frequently to go long distances by canoe. At these times his wife remained at their headquarters and managed the mission. Dr Macphail felt his heart sink when he considered the efficiency with which she certainly managed it. She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice which nothing could hush, but with a vehemently unctuous horror. Her sense of delicacy was singular. Early in their acquaintance she had said to him:

‘You know, their marriage customs when we first settled in the islands were so shocking that I couldn’t possibly describe them to you. But I’ll tell Mrs Macphail and she’ll tell you.’

Then he had seen his wife and Mrs Davidson, their deck–chairs close together, in earnest conversation for about two hours. As he walked past them backwards and forwards for the sake of exercise, he had heard Mrs Davidson’s agitated whisper, like the distant flow of a mountain torrent, and he saw by his wife’s open mouth and pale face that she was enjoying an alarming experience. At night in their cabin she repeated to him with bated breath all she had heard.

‘Well, what did I say to you?’ cried Mrs Davidson, exultant next morning. ‘Did you ever hear anything more dreadful? You don’t wonder that I couldn’t tell you myself, do you? Even though you are a doctor.’

Mrs Davidson scanned his face. She had a dramatic eagerness to see that she had achieved the desired effect.

‘Can you wonder that when we first went there our hearts sank? You’ll hardly believe me when I tell you it was impossible to find a single good girl in any of the villages.’

She used the word good in a severely technical manner.

‘Mr Davidson and I talked it over, and we made up our minds the first thing to do was to put down the dancing. The natives were crazy about dancing.’

‘I was not averse to it myself when I was a young man,’ said Dr Macphail.

‘I guessed as much when I heard you ask Mrs Macphail to have a turn with you last night. I don’t think there’s any real harm if a man dances with his wife, but I was relieved that she wouldn’t. Under the circumstances I thought it better that we should keep ourselves to ourselves.’

‘Under what circumstances?’

Mrs Davidson gave him a quick look through her pince–nez, but did not answer his question.

‘But among white people it’s not quite the same,’ she went on, ‘though I must say I agree with Mr Davidson, who says he can’t understand how a husband can stand by and see his wife in another man’s arms, and as far as I’m concerned I’ve never danced a step since I married. But the native dancing is quite another matter. It’s not only immoral in itself, but it distinctly leads to immorality. However, I’m thankful to God that we stamped it out, and I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that no one has danced in our district for eight years.’

But now they came to the mouth of the harbour and Mrs Macphail joined them. The ship turned sharply and steamed slowly in. It was a great landlocked harbour big enough to hold a fleet of battleships; and all around it rose, high and steep, the green hills. Near the entrance, getting such breeze as blew from the sea, stood the governor’s house in a garden. The Stars and Stripes dangled languidly from a flagstaff. They passed two or three trim bungalows, and a tennis court, and then they came to the quay with its warehouses. Mrs Davidson pointed out the schooner, moored two or three hundred yards from the side, which was to take them to Apia. There was a crowd of eager, noisy, and good–humoured natives come from all parts of the island, some from curiosity, others to barter with the travellers on their way to Sydney; and they brought pineapples and huge bunches of bananas, tapa cloths, necklaces of shells or sharks’ teeth, kava–bowls, and models of war canoes. American sailors, neat and trim, clean–shaven and frank of face, sauntered among them, and there was a little group of officials. While their luggage was being landed the Macphails and Mrs Davidson watched the crowd. Dr Macphail looked at the yaws from which most of the children and the young boys seemed to suffer, disfiguring sores like torpid ulcers, and his professional eyes glistened when he saw for the first time in his experience cases of elephantiasis, men going about with a huge, heavy arm or dragging along a grossly disfigured leg. Men and women wore the lava–lava.

‘It’s a very indecent costume,’ said Mrs Davidson. ‘Mr Davidson thinks it should be prohibited by law. How can you expect people to be moral when they wear nothing but a strip of red cotton round their loins?’

‘It’s suitable enough to the climate,’ said the doctor, wiping the sweat off his head.

Now that they were on land the heat, though it was so early in the morning, was already oppressive. Closed in by its hills, not a breath of air came in to Pago–Pago.

‘In our islands,’ Mrs Davidson went on in her high–pitched tones, ‘we’ve practically eradicated the lava–lava. A few old men still continue to wear it, but that’s all. The women have all taken to the Mother Hubbard, and the men wear trousers and singlets. At the beginning of our stay Mr Davidson said in one of his reports: the inhabitants of these islands will never be thoroughly Christianized till every boy of more than ten years is made to wear a pair of trousers.’

But Mrs Davidson had given two or three of her birdlike glances at heavy grey clouds that came floating over the mouth of the harbour. A few drops began to fall.

‘We’d better take shelter,’ she said.

They made their way with all the crowd to a great shed of corrugated iron, and the rain began to fall in torrents. They stood there for some time and then were joined by Mr Davidson. He had been polite enough to the Macphails during the journey, but he had not his wife’s sociability, and had spent much of his time reading. He was a silent, rather sullen man, and you felt that his affability was a duty that he imposed upon himself Christianly; he was by nature reserved and even morose. His appearance was singular. He was very tall and thin, with long limbs loosely jointed; hollow cheeks, and curiously high cheek–bones; he had so cadaverous an air that it surprised you to notice how full and sensual were his lips. He wore his hair very long. His dark eyes, set deep in their sockets, were large and tragic; and his hands with their big, long fingers, were finely shaped; they gave him a look of great strength. But the most striking thing about him was the feeling he gave you of suppressed fire. It was impressive and vaguely troubling. He was not a man with whom any intimacy was possible.

He brought now unwelcome news. There was an epidemic of measles, a serious and often fatal disease among the Kanakas, on the island, and a case had developed among the crew of the schooner which was to take them on their journey. The sick man had been brought ashore and put in hospital on the quarantine station, but telegraphic instructions had been sent from Apia to say that the schooner would not be allowed to enter the harbour till it was certain no other member of the crew was affected.

‘It means we shall have to stay here for ten days at least.’

‘But I’m urgently needed at Apia,’ said Dr Macphail.

‘That can’t be helped. If no more cases develop on board, the schooner will be allowed to sail with white passengers, but all native traffic is prohibited for three months.’

’Is there a hotel here?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

Davidson gave a low chuckle.

‘There’s not.’

‘What shall we do then?’

‘I’ve been talking to the governor. There’s a trader along the front who has rooms that he rents, and my proposition is that as soon as the rain lets up we should go along there and see what we can do. Don’t expect comfort. You’ve just got to be thankful if we get a bed to sleep on and a roof over our heads.’

But the rain showed no signs of stopping, and at length with umbrellas and waterproofs they set out. There was no town, but merely a group of official buildings, a store or two, and at the back, among the coconut trees and plantains, a few native dwellings. The house they sought was about five minutes’ walk from the wharf. It was a frame house of two storeys, with broad verandas on both floors and a roof of corrugated iron. The owner was a half–caste named Horn, with a native wife surrounded by little brown children, and on the ground–floor he had a store where he sold canned goods and cottons. The rooms he showed them were almost bare of furniture. In the Macphails’ there was nothing but a poor, worn bed with a ragged mosquito net, a rickety chair, and a washstand. They looked round with dismay. The rain poured down without ceasing.

‘I’m not going to unpack more than we actually need,’ said Mrs Macphail.

Mrs Davidson came into the room as she was unlocking a portmanteau. She was very brisk and alert. The cheerless surroundings had no effect on her.

‘If you’ll take my advice you’ll get a needle and cotton and start right in to mend the mosquito net,’ she said, ‘or you’ll not be able to get a wink of sleep tonight.’

‘Will they be very bad?’ asked Dr Macphail.

‘This is the season for them. When you’re asked to a party at Government House at Apia you’ll notice that all the ladies are given a pillowslip to put their–their lower extremities in.’

‘I wish the rain would stop for a moment,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘I could try to make the place comfortable with more heart if the sun were shining.’

‘Oh, if you wait for that, you’ll wait a long time. Pago–Pago is about the rainiest place in the Pacific. You see, the hills, and that bay, they attract the water, and one expects rain at this time of year anyway.’

She looked from Macphail to his wife, standing helplessly in different parts of the room, like lost souls, and she pursed her lips. She saw that she must take them in hand. Feckless people like that made her impatient, but her hands itched to put everything in the order which came so naturally to her.

‘Here, you give me a needle and cotton and I’ll mend that net of yours, while you go on with your unpacking. Dinner’s at one. Dr Macphail, you’d better go down to the wharf and see that your heavy luggage has been put in a dry place. You know what these natives are, they’re quite capable of storing it where the rain will beat in on it all the time.’

The doctor put on his waterproof again and went downstairs. At the door Mr Horn was standing in conversation with the quartermaster of the ship they had just arrived in and a second–class passenger whom Dr Macphail had seen several times on board. The quartermaster, a little, shrivelled man, extremely dirty, nodded to him as he passed.

‘This is a bad job about the measles, doc,’ he said. ‘I see you’ve fixed yourself up already.’

Dr Macphail thought he was rather familiar, but he was a timid man and he did not take offence easily.

‘Yes, we’ve got a room upstairs.’

‘Miss Thompson was sailing with you to Apia, so I’ve brought her along here.’

The quartermaster pointed with his thumb to the woman standing by his side. She was twenty–seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the tops of long white boots in glace kid. She gave Macphail an ingratiating smile.

‘The feller’s tryin’ to soak me a dollar and a half a day for the meanest–sized room,’ she said in a hoarse voice.

‘I tell you she’s a friend of mine, Jo,’ said the quartermaster. ‘She can’t pay more than a dollar, and you’ve sure got to take her for that.’

The trader was fat and smooth and quietly smiling.

‘Well, if you put it like that, Mr Swan, I’ll see what I can do about it. I’ll talk to Mrs Horn and if we think we can make a reduction we will.’

‘Don’t try to pull that stuff with me,’ said Miss Thompson. ‘We’ll settle this right now. You get a dollar a day for the room and not one bean more.’

Dr Macphail smiled. He admired the effrontery with which she bargained. He was the sort of man who always paid what he was asked. He preferred to be over–charged than to haggle. The trader sighed.

‘Well, to oblige Mr Swan I’ll take it.’

‘That’s the goods,’ said Miss Thompson. ‘Come right in and have a shot of hooch. I’ve got some real good rye in that grip if you’ll bring it along, Mr Swan. You come along too, doctor.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I will, thank you,’ he answered.’ I’m just going down to see that our luggage is all right.’

He stepped out into the rain. It swept in from the opening of the harbour in sheets and the opposite shore was all blurred. He passed two or three natives clad in nothing but the lava–lava, with huge umbrellas over them. They walked finely, with leisurely movements, very upright; and they smiled and greeted him in a strange tongue as they went by.

It was nearly dinner–time when he got back, and their meal was laid in the trader’s parlour. It was a room designed not to live in but for purposes of prestige, and it had a musty, melancholy air. A suite of stamped plush was arranged neatly round the walls, and from the middle of the ceiling, protected from the flies by yellow tissue–paper, hung a gilt chandelier. Davidson did not come.

‘I know he went to call on the governor,’ said Mrs Davidson, ‘and I guess he’s kept him to dinner.’

A little native girl brought them a dish of Hamburger steak, and after a while the trader came up to see that they had everything they wanted.

‘I see we have a fellow lodger, Mr Horn,’ said Dr Macphail.

‘She’s taken a room, that’s all,’ answered the trader. ‘She’s getting her own board.’

He looked at the two ladies with an obsequious air.

‘I put her downstairs so she shouldn’t be in the way. She won’t be any trouble to you.’

’Is it someone who was on the boat?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

‘Yes, ma’am, she was in the second cabin. She was going to Apia. She has a position as cashier waiting for her.’

‘Oh!’

When the trader was gone Macphail said:

‘I shouldn’t think she’d find it exactly cheerful having her meals in her room.’

‘If she was in the second cabin I guess she’d rather,’ answered Mrs Davidson. ‘I don’t exactly know who it can be.’

‘I happened to be there when the quartermaster brought her along. Her name’s Thompson.’

‘It’s not the woman who was dancing with the quartermaster last night?’ asked Mrs Davidson.

‘That’s who it must be,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘I wondered at the time what she was. She looked rather fast to me.’

‘Not good style at all,’ said Mrs Davidson.

They began to talk of other things, and after dinner, tired with their early rise, they separated and slept. When they awoke, though the sky was still grey and the clouds hung low, it was not raining and they went for a walk on the high road which the Americans had built along the bay.

On their return they found that Davidson had just come in.

‘We may be here for a fortnight,’ he said irritably. ‘I’ve argued it out with the governor, but he says there is nothing to be done.’

‘Mr Davidson’s just longing to get back to his work,’ said his wife, with an anxious glance at him.

‘We’ve been away for a year,’ he said, walking up and down the veranda. ‘The mission has been in charge of native missionaries and I’m terribly nervous that they’ve let things slide. They’re good men, I’m not saying a word against them, God–fearing, devout, and truly Christian men–their Christianity would put many so–called Christians at home to the blush–but they’re pitifully lacking in energy. They can make a stand once, they can make a stand twice, but they can’t make a stand all the time. If you leave a mission in charge of a native missionary, no matter how trustworthy he seems, in course of time you’ll find he’s let abuses creep in.’

Mr Davidson stood still. With his tall, spare form, and his great eyes flashing out of his pale face, he was an impressive figure. His sincerity was obvious in the fire of his gestures and in his deep, ringing voice.

‘I expect to have my work cut out for me. I shall act and I shall act promptly. If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast into the flames.’

And in the evening after the high tea which was their last meal, while they sat in the stiff parlour, the ladies working and Dr Macphail smoking his pipe, the missionary told them of his work in the islands.

‘When we went there they had no sense of sin at all,’ he said. ‘They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of sin.’

The Macphails knew already that Davidson had worked in the Solomons for five years before he met his wife. She had been a missionary in China, and they had become acquainted in Boston, where they were both spending part of their leave to attend a missionary congress. On their marriage they had been appointed to the islands in which they had laboured ever since.

In the course of all the conversations they had had with Mr Davidson one thing had shone out clearly and that was the man’s unflinching courage. He was a medical missionary, and he was liable to be called at any time to one or other of the islands in the group. Even the whaleboat is not so very safe a conveyance in the stormy Pacific of the wet season, but often he would be sent for in a canoe, and then the danger was great. In cases of illness or accident he never hesitated. A dozen times he had spent the whole night baling for his life, and more than once Mrs Davidson had given him up for lost.

‘I’d beg him not to go sometimes,’ she said, ‘or at least to wait till the weather was more settled, but he’d never listen. He’s obstinate, and when he’s once made up his mind, nothing can move him.’

‘How can I ask the natives to put their trust in the Lord if I am afraid to do so myself?’ cried Davidson. ‘And I’m not, I’m not. They know that if they send for me in their trouble I’ll come if it’s humanly possible. And do you think the Lord is going to abandon me when I am on his business? The wind blows at his bidding and the waves toss and rage at his word.’

Dr Macphail was a timid man. He had never been able to get used to the hurtling of the shells over the trenches, and when he was operating in an advanced dressing–station the sweat poured from his brow and dimmed his spectacles in the effort he made to control his unsteady hand. He shuddered a little as he looked at the missionary.

‘I wish I could say that I’ve never been afraid,’ he said.

‘I wish you could say that you believed in God,’ retorted the other.

But for some reason, that evening the missionary’s thoughts travelled back to the early days he and his wife had spent on the islands.

‘Sometimes Mrs Davidson and I would look at one another and the tears would stream down our cheeks. We worked without ceasing, day and night, and we seemed to make no progress. I don’t know what I should have done without her then. When I felt my heart sink, when I was very near despair, she gave me courage and hope.’

Mrs Davidson looked down at her work, and a slight colour rose to her thin cheeks. Her hands trembled a little. She did not trust herself to speak.

‘We had no one to help us. We were alone, thousands of miles from any of our own people, surrounded by darkness. When I was broken and weary she would put her work aside and take the Bible and read to me till peace came and settled upon me like sleep upon the eyelids of a child, and when at last she closed the book she’d say: “We’ll save them in spite of themselves.” And I felt strong again in the Lord, and I answered: “Yes, with God’s help I’ll save them. I must save them.”’

He came over to the table and stood in front of it as though it were a lectern.

‘You see, they were so naturally depraved that they couldn’t be brought to see their wickedness. We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions. We had to make it a sin, not only to commit adultery and to lie and thieve, but to expose their bodies, and to dance and not to come to church. I made it a sin for a girl to show her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear trousers.’

‘How?’ asked Dr Macphail, not without surprise.

‘I instituted fines. Obviously the only way to make people realize that an action is sinful is to punish them if they commit it. I fined them if they didn’t come to church, and I fined them if they danced. I fined them if they were improperly dressed. I had a tariff, and every sin had to be paid for either in money or work. And at last I made them understand.’

‘But did they never refuse to pay?’

‘How could they?’ asked the missionary.

‘It would be a brave man who tried to stand up against Mr Davidson,’ said his wife, tightening her lips.

Dr Macphail looked at Davidson with troubled eyes. What he heard shocked him, but he hesitated to express his disapproval.

‘You must remember that in the last resort I could expel them from their church membership.’

‘Did they mind that?’

Davidson smiled a little and gently rubbed his hands.

‘They couldn’t sell their copra. When the men fished they got no share of the catch. It meant something very like starvation. Yes, they minded quite a lot.’

‘Tell him about Fred Ohlson,’ said Mrs Davidson.

The missionary fixed his fiery eyes on Dr Macphail.

‘Fred Ohlson was a Danish trader who had been in the islands a good many years. He was a pretty rich man as traders go and he wasn’t very pleased when we came. You see, he’d had things very much his own way. He paid the natives what he liked for their copra, and he paid in goods and whisky. He had a native wife, but he was flagrantly unfaithful to her. He was a drunkard. I gave him a chance to mend his ways, but he wouldn’t take it. He laughed at me.’

Davidson’s voice fell to a deep bass as he said the last words, and he was silent for a minute or two. The silence was heavy with menace.

‘In two years he was a ruined man. He’d lost everything he’d saved in a quarter of a century. I broke him, and at last he was forced to come to me like a beggar and beseech me to give him a passage back to Sydney.’

‘I wish you could have seen him when he came to see Mr Davidson,’ said the missionary’s wife. ‘He had been a fine, powerful man, with a lot of fat on him, and he had a great big voice, but now he was half the size, and he was shaking all over. He’d suddenly become an old man.’

With abstracted gaze Davidson looked out into the night. The rain was falling again.

Suddenly from below came a sound, and Davidson turned and looked questioningly at his wife. It was the sound of a gramophone, harsh and loud, wheezing out a syncopated tune.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

Mrs Davidson fixed her pince–nez more firmly on her nose.

‘One of the second–class passengers has a room in the house. I guess it comes from there.’

They listened in silence, and presently they heard the sound of dancing. Then the music stopped, and they heard the popping of corks and voices raised in animated conversation.

‘I daresay she’s giving a farewell party to her friends on board,’ said Dr Macphail. ‘The ship sails at twelve, doesn’t it?’

Davidson made no remark, but he looked at his watch.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked his wife.

She got up and folded her work.

‘Yes, I guess I am,’ she answered.

‘It’s early to go to bed yet, isn’t it?’ said the doctor.

‘We have a good deal of reading to do,’ explained Mrs Davidson. ‘Wherever we are, we read a chapter of the Bible before retiring for the night and we study it with the commentaries, you know, and discuss it thoroughly. It’s a wonderful training for the mind.’

The two couples bade one another good night. Dr and Mrs Macphail were left alone. For two or three minutes they did not speak.

‘I think I’ll go and fetch the cards,’ the doctor said at last.

Mrs Macphail looked at him doubtfully. Her conversation with the Davidsons had left her a little uneasy, but she did not like to say that she thought they had better not play cards when the Davidsons might come in at any moment. Dr Macphail brought them and she watched him, though with a vague sense of guilt, while he laid out his patience. Below the sound of revelry continued.

It was fine enough next day, and the Macphails, condemned to spend a fortnight of idleness at Pago–Pago, set about making the best of things. They went down to the quay and got out of their boxes a number of books. The doctor called on the chief surgeon of the naval hospital and went round the beds with him. They left cards on the governor. They passed Miss Thompson on the road. The doctor took off his hat, and she gave him a ‘Good morning doc,’ in a loud, cheerful voice. She was dressed as on the day before, in a white frock, and her shiny white boots with their high heels, her fat legs bulging over the tops of them, were strange things on that exotic scene.

‘I don’t think she’s very suitably dressed, I must say,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘She looks extremely common to me.’

When they got back to their house, she was on the veranda playing with one of the trader’s dark children.

‘Say a word to her,’ Dr Macphail whispered to his wife. ‘She’s all alone here, and it seems rather unkind to ignore her.’

Mrs Macphail was shy, but she was in the habit of doing what her husband bade her.

‘I think we’re fellow lodgers here,’ she said, rather foolishly.

‘Terrible, ain’t it, bein’ cooped up in a one–horse burg like this?’ answered Miss Thompson. ‘And they tell me I’m lucky to have gotten a room. I don’t see myself livin’ in a native house, and that’s what some have to do. I don’t know why they don’t have a hotel.’

They exchanged a few more words. Miss Thompson, loud–voiced and garrulous, was evidently quite willing to gossip, but Mrs Macphail had a poor stock of small talk and presently she said:

‘Well, I think we must go upstairs.’

In the evening when they sat down to their high tea, Davidson on coming in said:

‘I see that woman downstairs has a couple of sailors sitting there. I wonder how she’s gotten acquainted with them.’

‘She can’t be very particular,’ said Mrs Davidson.

They were all rather tired after the idle, aimless day.

‘If there’s going to be a fortnight of this I don’t know what we shall feel like at the end of it,’ said Dr Macphail.

‘The only thing to do is to portion out the day to different activities,’ answered the missionary. ‘I shall set aside a certain number of hours to study and a certain number to exercise, rain or fine–in the wet season you can’t afford to pay any attention to the rain–and a certain number to recreation.’

Dr Macphail looked at his companion with misgiving. Davidson’s programme oppressed him. They were eating Hamburger steak again. It seemed the only dish the cook knew how to make. Then below the gramo– phone began. Davidson started nervously when he heard it, but said nothing. Men’s voices floated up. Miss Thompson’s guests were joining in a well–known song and presently they heard her voice too, hoarse and loud. There was a good deal of shouting and laughing. The four people upstairs, trying to make conversation, listened despite themselves to the clink of glasses and the scrape of chairs. More people had evidently come. Miss Thompson was giving a party.

‘I wonder how she gets them all in,’ said Mrs Macphail suddenly breaking into a medical conversation between the missionary and her husband.

It showed whither her thoughts were wandering. The twitch of Davidson’s face proved that, though he spoke of scientific things, his mind was busy in the same direction. Suddenly, while the doctor was giving some experience of practice on the Flanders front, rather prosily, he sprang to his feet with a cry.

‘What’s the matter, Alfred?’ asked Mrs Davidson.

‘Of course! It never occurred to me. She’s out of Iwelei.’

‘She can’t be.’

‘She came on board at Honolulu. It’s obvious. And she’s carrying on her trade here. Here.’

He uttered the last word with a passion of indignation.

‘What’s Iwelei?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

He turned his gloomy eyes on her and his voice trembled with horror.

‘The plague spot of Honolulu. The Red Light district. It was a blot on our civilization.’

Iwelei was on the edge of the city. You went down side streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, till you came to a deserted road, all ruts and holes, and then suddenly you came out into the light. There was parking room for motors on each side of the road, and there were saloons, tawdry and bright, each one noisy with its mechanical piano, and there were barbers’ shops and tobacconists. There was a stir in the air and a sense of expectant gaiety. You turned down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, for the road divided Iwelei into two parts, and you found yourself in the district. There were rows of little bungalows, trim and neatly painted in green, and the pathway between them was broad and straight. It was laid out like a garden–city. In its respectable regularity, its order and spruceness, it gave an impression of sardonic horror; for never can the search for love have been so systematized and ordered. The pathways were lit by a rare lamp, but they would have been dark except for the lights that came from the open windows of the bungalows. Men wandered about, looking at the women who sat at their windows, reading or sewing, for the most part taking no notice of the passers–by; and like the women they were of all nationalities. There were Americans, sailors from the ships in port, enlisted men off the gunboats, sombrely drunk, and soldiers from the regiments, white and black, quartered on the island; there were Japanese, walking in twos and threes; Hawaiians, Chinese in long robes, and Filipinos in preposterous hats. They were silent and as it were oppressed. Desire is sad.

‘It was the most crying scandal of the Pacific,’ exclaimed Davidson vehemently. ‘The missionaries had been agitating against it for years, and at last the local press took it up. The police refused to stir. You know their argument. They say that vice is inevitable and consequently the best thing is to localize and control it. The truth is, they were paid. Paid. They were paid by the saloon–keepers, paid by the bullies, paid by the women themselves. At last they were forced to move.’

‘I read about it in the papers that came on board in Honolulu,’ said Dr Macphail.

Iwelei, with its sin and shame, ceased to exist on the very day we arrived. The whole population was brought before the justices. I don’t know why I didn’t understand at once what that woman was.’

‘Now you come to speak of it,’ said Mrs Macphail, ‘I remember seeing her come on board only a few minutes before the boat sailed. I remember thinking at the time she was cutting it rather fine.’

‘How dare she come here!’ cried Davidson indignantly. ‘I’m not going to allow it.’

He strode towards the door.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Macphail.

‘What do you expect me to? I’m going to stop it. I’m not going to have this house turned into–into...’

He sought for a word that should not offend the ladies’ ears. His eyes were flashing and his pale face was paler still in his emotion.

‘It sounds as though there were three or four men down there,’ said the doctor. ‘Don’t you think it’s rather rash to go in just now?’

The missionary gave him a contemptuous look and without a word flung out of the room.

‘You know Mr Davidson very little if you think the fear of personal danger can stop him in the performance of his duty,’ said his wife.

She sat with her hands nervously clasped, a spot of colour on her high cheek–bones, listening to what was about to happen below. They all listened. They heard him clatter down the wooden stairs and throw open the door. The singing stopped suddenly, but the gramophone continued to bray out its vulgar tune. They heard Davidson’s voice and then the noise of something heavy falling. The music stopped. He had hurled the gramophone on the floor. Then again they heard Davidson’s voice, they could not make out the words, then Miss Thompson’s, loud and shrill, then a confused clamour as though several people were shouting together at the top of their lungs. Mrs Davidson gave a little gasp, and she clenched her hands more tightly. Dr Macphail looked uncertainly from her to his wife. He did not want to go down, but he wondered if they expected him to. Then there was something that sounded like a scuffle. The noise now was more distinct. It might be that Davidson was being thrown out of the room. The door was slammed. There was a moment’s silence and they heard Davidson come up the stairs again. He went to his room.

‘I think I’ll go to him,’ said Mrs Davidson.

She got up and went out.

‘If you want me, just call,’ said Mrs Macphail, and then when the other was gone: ‘I hope he isn’t hurt.’

‘Why couldn’t he mind his own business?’ said Dr Macphail.

They sat in silence for a minute or two and then they both started, for the gramophone began to play once more, defiantly, and mocking voices shouted hoarsely the words of an obscene song.

Next day Mrs Davidson was pale and tired. She complained of headache, and she looked old and wizened. She told Mrs Macphail that the missionary had not slept at all; he had passed the night in a state of frightful agitation and at five had got up and gone out. A glass of beer had been thrown over him and his clothes were stained and stinking. But a sombre fire glowed in Mrs Davidson’s eyes when she spoke of Miss Thompson.

‘She’ll bitterly rue the day when she flouted Mr Davidson,’ she said. ‘Mr Davidson has a wonderful heart and no one who is in trouble has ever gone to him without being comforted, but he has no mercy for sin, and when his righteous wrath is excited he’s terrible.’

‘Why, what will he do?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

‘I don’t know, but I wouldn’t stand in that creature’s shoes for anything in the world.’

Mrs Macphail shuddered. There was something positively alarming in the triumphant assurance of the little woman’s manner. They were going out together that morning, and they went down the stairs side by side. Miss Thompson’s door was open, and they saw her in a bedraggled dressing–gown, cooking something in a chafing–dish.

‘Good morning,’ she called. ’Is Mr Davidson better this morning?’

They passed her in silence, with their noses in the air, as if she did not exist. They flushed, however, when she burst into a shout of derisive laughter. Mrs Davidson turned on her suddenly.

‘Don’t you dare to speak to me,’ she screamed. ‘If you insult me I shall have you turned out of here.’

‘Say, did I ask Mr Davidson to visit with me?’

‘Don’t answer her,’ whispered Mrs Macphail hurriedly.

They walked on till they were out of earshot.

‘She’s brazen, brazen,’ burst from Mrs Davidson.

Her anger almost suffocated her.

And on their way home they met her strolling towards the quay. She had all her finery on. Her great white hat with its vulgar, showy flowers was an affront. She called out cheerily to them as she went by, and a couple of American sailors who were standing there grinned as the ladies set their faces to an icy stare. They got in just before the rain began to fall again.

‘I guess she’ll get her fine clothes spoilt,’ said Mrs Davidson with a bitter sneer.

Davidson did not come in till they were half–way through dinner. He was wet through, but he would not change. He sat, morose and silent, refusing to eat more than a mouthful, and he stared at the slanting rain. When Mrs Davidson told him of their two encounters with Miss Thompson he did not answer. His deepening frown alone showed that he had heard.

‘Don’t you think we ought to make Mr Horn turn her out of here?’ asked Mrs Davidson. ‘We can’t allow her to insult us.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be any other place for her to go,’ said Macphail.

‘She can live with one of the natives.’

‘In weather like this a native hut must be a rather uncomfortable place to live in.’

‘I lived in one for years,’ said the missionary.

When the little native girl brought in the fried bananas which formed the sweet they had every day, Davidson turned to her.

‘Ask Miss Thompson when it would be convenient for me to see her,’ he said.

The girl nodded shyly and went out.

‘What do you want to see her for, Alfred?’ asked his wife.

‘It’s my duty to see her. I won’t act till I’ve given her every chance.’ ‘You don’t know what she is. She’ll insult you.’

‘Let her insult me. Let her spit on me. She has an immortal soul, and I must do all that is in my power to save it.’

Mrs Davidson’s ears rang still with the harlot’s mocking laughter.

‘She’s gone too far.’

‘Too far for the mercy of God?’ His eyes lit up suddenly and his voice grew mellow and soft. ‘Never. The sinner may be deeper in sin than the depth of hell itself, but the love of the Lord Jesus can reach him still.’

The girl came back with the message.

‘Miss Thompson’s compliments and as long as Rev Davidson don’t come in business hours she’ll be glad to see him any time.’

The party received it in stony silence, and Dr Macphail quickly effaced from his lips the smile which had come upon them. He knew his wife would be vexed with him if he found Miss Thompson’s effrontery amusing.

They finished the meal in silence. When it was over the two ladies got up and took their work. Mrs Macphail was making another of the innumerable comforters which she had turned out since the beginning of the war, and the doctor lit his pipe. But Davidson remained in his chair and with abstracted eyes stared at the table. At last he got up and without a word went out of the room. They heard him go down and they heard Miss Thompson’s defiant ‘Come in’ when he knocked at the door. He remained with her for an hour. And Dr Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.

Macphail turned his head when the missionary came back. The two women looked up.

‘I’ve given her every chance. I have exhorted her to repent. She is an evil woman.’

He paused, and Dr Macphail saw his eyes darken and his pale face grow hard and stern.

‘Now I shall take the whips with which the Lord Jesus drove the usurers and the money changers out of the Temple of the Most High.’

He walked up and down the room. His mouth was close set, and his black brows were frowning.

‘If she fled to the uttermost parts of the earth I should pursue her.’

With a sudden movement he turned round and strode out of the room. They heard him go downstairs again.

‘What is he going to do?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

‘I don’t know.’ Mrs Davidson took off her pince–nez and wiped them. ‘When he is on the Lord’s work I never ask him questions.’

She sighed a little.

‘What is the matter?’

‘He’ll wear himself out. He doesn’t know what it is to spare himself.’

Dr Macphail learnt the first results of the missionary’s activity from the half– caste trader in whose house they lodged. He stopped the doctor when he passed the store and came out to speak to him on the stoop. His fat face was worried.

‘The Rev Davidson has been at me for letting Miss Thompson have a room here,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know what she was when I rented it to her. When people come and ask if I can rent them a room all I want to know is if they’ve the money to pay for it. And she paid me for hers a week in advance.’

Dr Macphail did not want to commit himself.

‘When all’s said and done it’s your house. We’re very much obliged to you for taking us in at all.’

Horn looked at him doubtfully. He was not certain yet how definitely Macphail stood on the missionary’s side.

‘The missionaries are in with one another,’ he said, hesitatingly. ‘If they get it in for a trader he may just as well shut up his store and quit.’

‘Did he want you to turn her out?’

‘No, he said so long as she behaved herself he couldn’t ask me to do that. He said he wanted to be just to me. I promised she shouldn’t have no more visitors. I’ve just been and told her.’

‘How did she take it?’

‘She gave me Hell.’

The trader squirmed in his old ducks. He had found Miss Thompson a rough customer.

‘Oh, well, I daresay she’ll get out. I don’t suppose she wants to stay here if she can’t have anyone in.’

‘There’s nowhere she can go, only a native house, and no native’ll take her now, not now that the missionaries have got their knife in her.’

Dr Macphail looked at the falling rain.

‘Well, I don’t suppose it’s any good waiting for it to clear up.’

In the evening when they sat in the parlour Davidson talked to them of his early days at college. He had had no means and had worked his way through by doing odd jobs during the vacations. There was silence downstairs. Miss Thompson was sitting in her little room alone. But suddenly the gramophone began to play. She had set it on in defiance, to cheat her loneliness, but there was no one to sing, and it had a melancholy note. It was like a cry for help. Davidson took no notice. He was in the middle of a long anecdote and without change of expression went on. The gramophone continued. Miss Thompson put on one reel after another. It looked as though the silence of the night were getting on her nerves. It was breathless and sultry. When the Macphails went to bed they could not sleep. They lay side by side with their eyes wide open, listening to the cruel singing of the mosquitoes outside their curtain.

‘What’s that?’ whispered Mrs Macphail at last.

They heard a voice, Davidson’s voice, through the wooden partition. It went on with a monotonous, earnest insistence. He was praying aloud. He was praying for the soul of Miss Thompson.

Two or three days went by. Now when they passed Miss Thompson on the road she did not greet them with ironic cordiality or smile; she passed with her nose in the air, a sulky look on her painted face, frowning, as though she did not see them. The trader told Macphail that she had tried to get lodging elsewhere, but had failed. In the evening she played through the various reels of her gramophone, but the pretence of mirth was obvious now. The ragtime had a cracked, heart–broken rhythm as though it were a one–step of despair. When she began to play on Sunday Davidson sent Horn to beg her to stop at once since it was the Lord’s day. The reel was taken off and the house was silent except for the steady pattering of the rain on the iron roof.

‘I think she’s getting a bit worked up,’ said the trader next day to Macphail. ‘She don’t know what Mr Davidson’s up to and it makes her scared.’

Macphail had caught a glimpse of her that morning and it struck him that her arrogant expression had changed. There was in her face a hunted look. The half–caste gave him a sidelong glance.

‘I suppose you don’t know what Mr Davidson is doing about it?’ he hazarded.

‘No, I don’t.’

It was singular that Horn should ask him that question, for he also had the idea that the missionary was mysteriously at work.

He had an impression that he was weaving a net around the woman, carefully, systematically, and suddenly, when everything was ready, would pull the strings tight.

‘He told me to tell her,’ said the trader, ‘that if at any time she wanted him she only had to send and he’d come.’

‘What did she say when you told her that?’

‘She didn’t say nothing. I didn’t stop. I just said what he said I was to and then I beat it. I thought she might be going to start weepin’.’

‘I have no doubt the loneliness is getting on her nerves,’ said the doctor. ‘And the rain–that’s enough to make anyone jumpy,’ he continued irritably. ‘Doesn’t it ever stop in this confounded place?’

‘It goes on pretty steady in the rainy season. We have three hundred inches in the year. You see, it’s the shape of the bay. It seems to attract the rain from all over the Pacific.’

‘Damn the shape of the bay,’ said the doctor.

He scratched his mosquito bites. He felt very short–tempered. When the rain stopped and the sun shone, it was like a hot–house, seething, humid, sultry, breathless, and you had a strange feeling that everything was growing with a savage violence. The natives, blithe and childlike by reputation, seemed then, with their tattooing and their dyed hair, to have something sinister in their appearance; and when they pattered along at your heels with their naked feet you looked back instinctively. You felt they might at any moment come behind you swiftly and thrust a long knife between your shoulder–blades. You could not tell what dark thought lurked behind their wide–set eyes. They had a little the look of ancient Egyptians painted on a temple wall, and there was about them the terror of what is immeasurably old.

The missionary came and went. He was busy, but the Macphails did not know what he was doing. Horn told the doctor that he saw the governor every day, and once Davidson mentioned him.

‘He looks as if he had plenty of determination,’ he said, ‘but when you come down to brass tacks he has no backbone.’

‘I suppose that means he won’t do exactly what you want,’ suggested the doctor facetiously.

The missionary did not smile.

‘I want him to do what’s right. It shouldn’t be necessary to persuade a man to do that.’

‘But there may be differences of opinion about what is right.’

‘If a man had a gangrenous foot would you have patience with anyone who hesitated to amputate it?’

‘Gangrene is a matter of fact.’

‘And Evil?’

What Davidson had done soon appeared. The four of them had just finished their midday meal, and they had not yet separated for the siesta which the heat imposed on the ladies and on the doctor. Davidson had little patience with the slothful habit. The door was suddenly flung open and Miss Thompson came in. She looked round the room and then went up to Davidson.

‘You low–down skunk, what have you been saying about me to the governor?’

She was spluttering with rage. There was a moment’s pause. Then the missionary drew forward a chair.

‘Won’t you be seated, Miss Thompson? I’ve been hoping to have another talk with you.’

‘You poor low–life bastard.’

She burst into a torrent of insult, foul and insolent. Davidson kept his grave eyes on her.

‘I’m indifferent to the abuse you think fit to heap on me, Miss Thompson,’ he said, ‘but I must beg you to remember that ladies are present.’

Tears by now were struggling with her anger. Her face was red and swollen as though she were choking.

‘What has happened?’ asked Dr Macphail.

‘A feller’s just been in here and he says I gotter beat it on the next boat.’

Was there a gleam in the missionary’s eyes? His face remained impassive.

‘You could hardly expect the governor to let you stay here under the circumstances.’

‘You done it,’ she shrieked. ‘You can’t kid me. You done it.’

‘I don’t want to deceive you. I urged the governor to take the only possible step consistent with his obligations.’

‘Why couldn’t you leave me be? I wasn’t doin’ you no harm.’

‘You may be sure that if you had I should be the last man to resent it.’

‘Do you think I want to stay on in this poor imitation of a burg? I don’t look no busher, do I?’

‘In that case I don’t see what cause of complaint you have,’ he answered.

She gave an inarticulate cry of rage and flung out of the room. There was a short silence.

‘It’s a relief to know that the governor has acted at last,’ said Davidson finally. ‘He’s a weak man and he shilly–shallied. He said she was only here for a fortnight anyway, and if she went on to Apia, that was under British jurisdiction and had nothing to do with him.’

The missionary sprang to his feet and strode across the room.

‘It’s terrible the way the men who are in authority seek to evade their responsibility. They speak as though evil that was out of sight ceased to be evil. The very existence of that woman is a scandal and it does not help matters to shift it to another of the islands. In the end I had to speak straight from the shoulder.’

Davidson’s brow lowered, and he protruded his firm chin. He looked fierce and determined.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Our mission is not entirely without influence at Washington. I pointed out to the governor that it wouldn’t do him any good if there was a complaint about the way he managed things here.’

‘When has she got to go?’ asked the doctor, after a pause.

‘The San Francisco boat is due here from Sydney next Tuesday. She’s to sail on that.’

That was in five days’ time. It was next day, when he was coming back from the hospital where for want of something better to do Macphail spent most of his mornings, that the half–caste stopped him as he was going upstairs.

‘Excuse me, Dr Macphail, Miss Thompson’s sick. Will you have a look at her?’

‘Certainly.’

Horn led him to her room. She was sitting in a chair idly, neither reading nor sewing, staring in front of her. She wore her white dress and the large hat with the flowers on it. Macphail noticed that her skin was yellow and muddy under her powder, and her eyes were heavy.

‘I’m sorry to hear you’re not well,’ he said.

‘Oh, I ain’t sick really. I just said that, because I just had to see you. I’ve got to clear on a boat that’s going to ‘Frisco.’

She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were suddenly startled. She opened and clenched her hands spasmodically. The trader stood at the door, listening.

‘So I understand,’ said the doctor.

She gave a little gulp.

‘I guess it ain’t very convenient for me to go to ‘Frisco just now. I went to see the governor yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t get to him. I saw the secretary, and he told me I’d got to take that boat and that was all there was to it. I just had to see the governor, so I waited outside his house this morning, and when he came out I spoke to him. He didn’t want to speak to me, I’ll say, but I wouldn’t let him shake me off, and at last he said he hadn’t no objection to my staying here till the next boat to Sydney if the Rev Davidson will stand for it.’

She stopped and looked at Dr Macphail anxiously.

‘I don’t know exactly what I can do,’ he said.

‘Well, I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind asking him. I swear to God I won’t start anything here if he’ll just only let me stay. I won’t go out of the house if that’ll suit him. It’s no more’n a fortnight.’

‘I’ll ask him.’

‘He won’t stand for it,’ said Horn. ‘He’ll have you out on Tuesday, so you may as well make up your mind to it.’

‘Tell him I can get work in Sydney, straight stuff, I mean. ‘Tain’t asking very much.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘And come and tell me right away, will you? I can’t set down to a thing till I get the dope one way or the other.’

It was not an errand that much pleased the doctor, and, characteristically perhaps, he went about it indirectly. He told his wife what Miss Thompson had said to him and asked her to speak to Mrs Davidson. The missionary’s attitude seemed rather arbitrary and it could do no harm if the girl were allowed to stay in Pago–Pago another fortnight. But he was not prepared for the result of his diplomacy. The missionary came to him straightway.

‘Mrs Davidson tells me that Thompson has been speaking to you.’

Dr Macphail, thus directly tackled, had the shy man’s resentment at being forced out into the open. He felt his temper rising, and he flushed.

‘I don’t see that it can make any difference if she goes to Sydney rather than to San Francisco, and so long as she promises to behave while she’s here it’s dashed hard to persecute her.’

The missionary fixed him with his stern eyes.

‘Why is she unwilling to go back to San Francisco?’

‘I didn’t inquire,’ answered the doctor with some asperity. ‘And I think one does better to mind one’s own business.’

Perhaps it was not a very tactful answer.

‘The governor has ordered her to be deported by the first boat that leaves the island. He’s only done his duty and I will not interfere. Her presence is a peril here.’

‘I think you’re very harsh and tyrannical.’

The two ladies looked up at the doctor with some alarm, but they need not have feared a quarrel, for the missionary smiled gently.

‘I’m terribly sorry you should think that of me, Dr Macphail. Believe me, my heart bleeds for that unfortunate woman, but I’m only trying to do my duty.’

The doctor made no answer. He looked out of the window sullenly. For once it was not raining and across the bay you saw nestling among the trees the huts of a native village.

‘I think I’ll take advantage of the rain stopping to go out,’ he said.

‘Please don’t bear me malice because I can’t accede to your wish,’ said Davidson, with a melancholy smile. ‘I respect you very much, doctor, and I should be sorry if you thought ill of me.’

‘I have no doubt you have a sufficiently good opinion of yourself to bear mine with equanimity,’ he retorted.

‘That’s one on me,’ chuckled Davidson.

When Dr Macphail, vexed with himself because he had been uncivil to no purpose, went downstairs, Miss Thompson was waiting for him with her door ajar.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘have you spoken to him?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, he won’t do anything,’ he answered, not looking at her in his embarrassment.

But then he gave her a quick glance, for a sob broke from her. He saw that her face was white with fear. It gave him a shock of dismay. And suddenly he had an idea.

‘But don’t give up hope yet. I think it’s a shame the way they’re treating you and I’m going to see the governor myself.’

‘Now?’

He nodded. Her face brightened.

‘Say, that’s real good of you. I’m sure he’ll let me stay if you speak for me. I just won’t do a thing I didn’t ought all the time I’m here.’

Dr Macphail hardly knew why he had made up his mind to appeal to the governor. He was perfectly indifferent to Miss Thompson’s affairs, but the missionary had irritated him, and with him temper was a smouldering thing. He found the governor at home. He was a large, handsome man, a sailor, with a grey toothbrush moustache; and he wore a spotless uniform of white drill.

‘I’ve come to see you about a woman who’s lodging in the same house as we are,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Thompson.’

‘I guess I’ve heard nearly enough about her, Dr Macphail,’ said the governor, smiling. ‘I’ve given her the order to get out next Tuesday and that’s all I can do.’

‘I wanted to ask you if you couldn’t stretch a point and let her stay here till the boat comes in from San Francisco so that she can go to Sydney. I will guarantee her good behaviour.’

The governor continued to smile, but his eyes grew small and serious.

‘I’d be very glad to oblige you, Dr Macphail, but I’ve given the order and it must stand.’

The doctor put the case as reasonably as he could, but now the governor ceased to smile at all. He listened sullenly, with averted gaze. Macphail saw that he was making no impression.

‘I’m sorry to cause any lady inconvenience, but she’ll have to sail on Tuesday and that’s all there is to it.’

‘But what difference can it make?’

‘Pardon me, doctor, but I don’t feel called upon to explain my official actions except to the proper authorities.’

Macphail looked at him shrewdly. He remembered Davidson’s hint that he had used threats, and in the governor’s attitude he read a singular embarrassment.

‘Davidson’s a damned busybody,’ he said hotly.

‘Between ourselves, Dr Macphail, I don’t say that I have formed a very favourable opinion of Mr Davidson, but I am bound to confess that he was within his rights in pointing out to me the danger that the presence of a woman of Miss Thompson’s character was to a place like this where a number of enlisted men are stationed among a native population.’

He got up and Dr Macphail was obliged to do so too.

‘I must ask you to excuse me. I have an engagement. Please give my respects to Mrs Macphail.’

The doctor left him crestfallen. He knew that Miss Thompson would be waiting for him, and unwilling to tell her himself that he had failed, he went into the house by the back door and sneaked up the stairs as though he had something to hide.

At supper he was silent and ill–at–ease, but the missionary was jovial and animated. Dr Macphail thought his eyes rested on him now and then with triumphant good–humour. It struck him suddenly that Davidson knew of his visit to the governor and of its ill success. But how on earth could he have heard of it? There was something sinister about the power of that man. After supper he saw Horn on the veranda and, as though to have a casual word with him, went out.

‘She wants to know if you’ve seen the governor,’ the trader whispered.

‘Yes. He wouldn’t do anything. I’m awfully sorry, I can’t do anything more.’

‘I knew he wouldn’t. They daren’t go against the missionaries.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Davidson affably, coming out to join them.

‘I was just saying there was no chance of your getting over to Apia for at least another week,’ said the trader glibly.

He left them, and the two men returned into the parlour. Mr Davidson devoted one hour after each meal to recreation. Presently a timid knock was heard at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Mrs Davidson, in her sharp voice.

The door was not opened. She got up and opened it. They saw Miss Thompson standing at the threshold. But the change in her appearance was extraordinary. This was no longer the flaunting hussy who had jeered at them in the road, but a broken, frightened woman. Her hair, as a rule so elaborately arranged, was tumbling untidily over her neck. She wore bedroom slippers and a skirt and blouse. They were unfresh and bedraggled. She stood at the door with the tears streaming down her face and did not dare to enter. ‘What do you want?’ said Mrs Davidson harshly.

‘May I speak to Mr Davidson?’ she said in a choking voice.

The missionary rose and went towards her.

‘Come right in, Miss Thompson,’ he said in cordial tones. ‘What can I do for you?’

She entered the room.

‘Say, I’m sorry for what I said to you the other day an’ for–for everythin’ else. I guess I was a bit lit up. I beg pardon.’

‘Oh, it was nothing. I guess my back’s broad enough to bear a few hard words.’

She stepped towards him with a movement that was horribly cringing.

‘You’ve got me beat. I’m all in. You won’t make me go back to ‘Frisco?’

His genial manner vanished and his voice grew on a sudden hard and stern.

‘Why don’t you want to go back there?’

She cowered before him.

‘I guess my people live there. I don’t want them to see me like this. I’ll go anywhere else you say.’

‘Why don’t you want to go back to San Francisco?’

‘I’ve told you.’

He leaned forward, staring at her, and his great, shining eyes seemed to try to bore into her soul. He gave a sudden gasp.

‘The penitentiary.’

She screamed, and then she fell at his feet, clasping his legs.

‘Don’t send me back there. I swear to you before God I’ll be a good woman. I’ll give all this up.’

She burst into a torrent of confused supplication and the tears coursed down her painted cheeks. He leaned over her and, lifting her face, forced her to look at him.

’Is that it, the penitentiary?’

‘I beat it before they could get me,’ she gasped. ‘If the bulls grab me it’s three years for me.’

He let go his hold of her and she fell in a heap on the floor, sobbing bitterly. Dr Macphail stood up.

‘This alters the whole thing,’ he said. ‘You can’t make her go back when you know this. Give her another chance. She wants to turn over a new leaf.’

‘I’m going to give her the finest chance she’s ever had. If she repents let her accept her punishment.’

She misunderstood the words and looked up. There was a gleam of hope in her heavy eyes.

‘You’ll let me go?’

‘No. You shall sail for San Francisco on Tuesday.’

She gave a groan of horror and then burst into low, hoarse shrieks which sounded hardly human, and she beat her head passionately on the ground. Dr Macphail sprang to her and lifted her up.

‘Come on, you mustn’t do that. You’d better go to your room and lie down. I’ll get you something.’

He raised her to her feet and partly dragging her, partly carrying her, got her downstairs. He was furious with Mrs Davidson and with his wife because they made no effort to help. The half–caste was standing on the landing and with his assistance he managed to get her on the bed. She was moaning and crying. She was almost insensible. He gave her a hypodermic injection. He was hot and exhausted when he went upstairs again.

‘I’ve got her to lie down.’

The two women and Davidson were in the same positions as when he had left them. They could not have moved or spoken since he went.

‘I was waiting for you,’ said Davidson, in a strange, distant voice. ‘I want you all to pray with me for the soul of our erring sister.’

He took the Bible off a shelf, and sat down at the table at which they had supped. It had not been cleared, and he pushed the tea–pot out of the way. In a powerful voice, resonant and deep, he read to them the chapter in which is narrated the meeting of Jesus Christ with the woman taken in adultery.

‘Now kneel with me and let us pray for the soul of our dear sister, Sadie Thompson.’

He burst into a long, passionate prayer in which he implored God to have mercy on the sinful woman. Mrs Macphail and Mrs Davidson knelt with covered eyes. The doctor, taken by surprise, awkward and sheepish, knelt too. The missionary’s prayer had a savage eloquence. He was extraordinarily moved, and as he spoke the tears ran down his cheeks. Outside, the pitiless rain fell, fell steadily, with a fierce malignity that was all too human.

At last he stopped. He paused for a moment and said:

‘We will now repeat the Lord’s prayer.’

They said it and then, following him, they rose from their knees. Mrs Davidson’s face was pale and restful. She was comforted and at peace, but the Macphails felt suddenly bashful. They did not know which way to look.

‘I’ll just go down and see how she is now,’ said Dr Macphail.

When he knocked at her door it was opened for him by Horn. Miss Thompson was in a rocking–chair, sobbing quietly.

‘What are you doing there?’ exclaimed Macphail. ‘I told you to lie down.’

‘I can’t lie down. I want to see Mr Davidson.’

‘My poor child, what do you think is the good of it? You’ll never move him.’

‘He said he’d come if I sent for him.’

Macphail motioned to the trader.

‘Go and fetch him.’

He waited with her in silence while the trader went upstairs. Davidson came in.

‘Excuse me for asking you to come here,’ she said, looking at him sombrely.

‘I was expecting you to send for me. I knew the Lord would answer my prayer.’

They stared at one another for a moment and then she looked away. She kept her eyes averted when she spoke.

‘I’ve been a bad woman. I want to repent.’

‘Thank God! Thank God! He has heard our prayers.’

He turned to the two men.

‘Leave me alone with her. Tell Mrs Davidson that our prayers have been answered.’

They went out and closed the door behind them.

‘Gee whizz,’ said the trader.

That night Dr Macphail could not get to sleep till late, and when he heard the missionary come upstairs he looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. But even then he did not go to bed at once, for through the wooden partition that separated their rooms he heard him praying aloud, till he himself, exhausted, fell asleep.

When he saw him next morning he was surprised at his appearance. He was paler than ever, tired, but his eyes shone with inhuman fire. It looked as though he were filled with an overwhelming joy.

‘I want you to go down presently and see Sadie,’ he said. ‘I can’t hope that her body is better, but her soul–her soul is transformed.’

The doctor was feeling wan and nervous.

‘You were with her very late last night,’ he said.

‘Yes, she couldn’t bear to have me leave her.’

‘You look as pleased as Punch,’ the doctor said irritably.

Davidson’s eyes shone with ecstasy.

‘A great mercy has been vouchsafed me. Last night I was privileged to bring a lost soul to the loving arms of Jesus.’

Miss Thompson was again in the rocking–chair. The bed had not been made. The room was in disorder. She had not troubled to dress herself, but wore a dirty dressing–gown, and her hair was tied in a sluttish knot. She had given her face a dab with a wet towel, but it was all swollen and creased with crying. She looked a drab.

She raised her eyes dully when the doctor came in. She was cowed and broken.

‘Where’s Mr Davidson?’ she asked.

‘He’ll come presently if you want him,’ answered Macphail acidly. ‘I came here to see how you were.’

‘Oh, I guess I’m O.K. You needn’t worry about that.’

‘Have you had anything to eat?’

‘Horn brought me some coffee.’

She looked anxiously at the door.

‘D’you think he’ll come down soon? I feel as if it wasn’t so terrible when he’s with me.’

‘Are you still going on Tuesday?’

‘Yes, he says I’ve got to go. Please tell him to come right along. You can’t do me any good. He’s the only one as can help me now.’

‘Very well,’ said Dr Macphail.

During the next three days the missionary spent almost all his time with Sadie Thompson. He joined the others only to have his meals. Dr Macphail noticed that he hardly ate.

‘He’s wearing himself out,’ said Mrs Davidson pitifully. ‘He’ll have a breakdown if he doesn’t take care, but he won’t spare himself.’

She herself was white and pale. She told Mrs Macphail that she had no sleep. When the missionary came upstairs from Miss Thompson he prayed till he was exhausted, but even then he did not sleep for long. After an hour or two he got up and dressed himself, and went for a tramp along the bay. He had strange dreams.

‘This morning he told me that he’d been dreaming about the mountains of Nebraska,’ said Mrs Davidson.

‘That’s curious,’ said Dr Macphail.

He remembered seeing them from the windows of the train when he crossed America. They were like huge mole–hills, rounded and smooth, and they rose from the plain abruptly. Dr Macphail remembered how it struck him that they were like a woman’s breasts.

Davidson’s restlessness was intolerable even to himself. But he was buoyed up by a wonderful exhilaration. He was tearing out by the roots the last vestiges of sin that lurked in the hidden corners of that poor woman’s heart. He read with her and prayed with her.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he said to them one day at supper. ‘It’s a true rebirth. Her soul, which was black as night, is now pure and white like the new–fallen snow. I am humble and afraid. Her remorse for all her sins is beautiful. I am not worthy to touch the hem of her garment.’

‘Have you the heart to send her back to San Francisco?’ said the doctor. ‘Three years in an American prison. I should have thought you might have saved her from that.’

‘Ah, but don’t you see? It’s necessary. Do you think my heart doesn’t bleed for her? I love her as I love my wife and my sister. All the time that she is in prison I shall suffer all the pain that she suffers.’

‘Bunkum,’ cried the doctor impatiently.

‘You don’t understand because you’re blind. She’s sinned, and she must suffer. I know what she’ll endure. She’ll be starved and tortured and humiliated. I want her to accept the punishment of man as a sacrifice to God. I want her to accept it joyfully. She has an opportunity which is offered to very few of us. God is very good and very merciful.’

Davidson’s voice trembled with excitement. He could hardly articulate the words that tumbled passionately from his lips.

‘All day I pray with her and when I leave her I pray again, I pray with all my might and main, so that Jesus may grant her this great mercy. I want to put in her heart the passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she would refuse. I want her to feel that the bitter punishment of prison is the thank–offering that she places at the feet of our Blessed Lord, who gave his life for her.’

The days passed slowly. The whole household, intent on the wretched, tortured woman downstairs, lived in a state of unnatural excitement. She was like a victim that was being prepared for the savage rites of a bloody idolatry. Her terror numbed her. She could not bear to let Davidson out of her sight; it was only when he was with her that she had courage, and she hung upon him with a slavish dependence. She cried a great deal, and she read the Bible, and prayed. Sometimes she was exhausted and apathetic. Then she did indeed look forward to her ordeal, for it seemed to offer an escape, direct and concrete, from the anguish she was enduring. She could not bear much longer the vague terrors which now assailed her. With her sins she had put aside all personal vanity, and she slopped about her room, unkempt and dishevelled, in her tawdry dressing–gown. She had not taken off her night–dress for four days, nor put on stockings. Her room was littered and untidy. Meanwhile the rain fell with a cruel persistence. You felt that the heavens must at last be empty of water, but still it poured down, straight and heavy, with a maddening iteration, on the iron roof. Everything was damp and clammy. There was mildew on the walls and on the boots that stood on the floor. Through the sleepless nights the mosquitoes droned their angry chant.

‘If it would only stop raining for a single day it wouldn’t be so bad,’ said Dr Macphail.

They all looked forward to the Tuesday when the boat for San Francisco was to arrive from Sydney. The strain was intolerable. So far as Dr Macphail was concerned, his pity and his resentment were alike extinguished by his desire to be rid of the unfortunate woman. The inevitable must be accepted. He felt he would breathe more freely when the ship had sailed. Sadie Thompson was to be escorted on board by a clerk in the governor’s office. This person called on the Monday evening and told Miss Thompson to be prepared at eleven in the morning. Davidson was with her.

‘I’ll see that everything is ready. I mean to come on board with her myself.’ Miss Thompson did not speak.

When Dr Macphail blew out his candle and crawled cautiously under his mosquito curtains, he gave a sigh of relief.

‘Well, thank God that’s over. By this time tomorrow she’ll be gone.’

‘Mrs Davidson will be glad too. She says he’s wearing himself to a shadow,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘She’s a different woman.’

‘Who?’

‘Sadie. I should never have thought it possible. It makes one humble.’

Dr Macphail did not answer, and presently he fell asleep. He was tired out, and he slept more soundly than usual.

He was awakened in the morning by a hand placed on his arm, and, starting up, saw Horn by the side of his bed. The trader put his finger on his mouth to prevent any exclamation from Dr Macphail and beckoned to him to come. As a rule he wore shabby ducks, but now he was barefoot and wore only the lava–lava of the natives. He looked suddenly savage, and Dr Macphail, getting out of bed, saw that he was heavily tattooed. Horn made him a sign to come on to the veranda. Dr Macphail got out of bed and followed the trader out.

‘Don’t make a noise,’ he whispered. ‘You’re wanted. Put on a coat and some shoes. Quick.’

Dr Macphail’s first thought was that something had happened to Miss Thompson.

‘What is it? Shall I bring my instruments?’

‘Hurry, please, hurry.’

Dr Macphail crept back into the bedroom, put on a waterproof over his pyjamas, and a pair of rubber–soled shoes. He rejoined the trader, and together they tiptoed down the stairs. The door leading out to the road was open and at it were standing half a dozen natives.

‘What is it?’ repeated the doctor.

‘Come along with me,’ said Horn.

He walked out and the doctor followed him. The natives came after them in a little bunch. They crossed the road and came on to the beach. The doctor saw a group of natives standing round some object at the water’s edge. They hurried along, a couple of dozen yards perhaps, and the natives opened out as the doctor came up. The trader pushed him forwards. Then he saw, lying half in the water and half out, a dreadful object, the body of Davidson. Dr Macphail bent down–he was not a man to lose his head in an emergency–and turned the body over. The throat was cut from ear to ear, and in the right hand was still the razor with which the deed was done.

‘He’s quite cold,’ said the doctor. ‘He must have been dead some time.’

‘One of the boys saw him lying there on his way to work just now and came and told me. Do you think he did it himself?’

‘Yes. Someone ought to go for the police.’

Horn said something in the native tongue, and two youths started off.

‘We must leave him here till they come,’ said the doctor.

‘They mustn’t take him into my house. I won’t have him in my house.’

‘You’ll do what the authorities say,’ replied the doctor sharply. ‘In point of fact I expect they’ll take him to the mortuary.’

They stood waiting where they were. The trader took a cigarette from a fold in his lava–lava and gave one to Dr Macphail. They smoked while they stared at the corpse. Dr Macphail could not understand.

‘Why do you think he did it?’ asked Horn.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. In a little while native police came along, under the charge of a marine, with a stretcher, and immediately afterwards a couple of naval officers and a naval doctor. They managed everything in a businesslike manner.

‘What about the wife?’ said one of the officers.

‘Now that you’ve come I’ll go back to the house and get some things on. I’ll see that it’s broken to her. She’d better not see him till he’s been fixed up a little.’

‘I guess that’s right,’ said the naval doctor.

When Dr Macphail went back he found his wife nearly dressed.

‘Mrs Davidson’s in a dreadful state about her husband,’ she said to him as soon as he appeared. ‘He hasn’t been to bed all night. She heard him leave Miss Thompson’s room at two, but he went out. If he’s been walking about since then he’ll be absolutely dead.’

Dr Macphail told her what had happened and asked her to break the news to Mrs Davidson.

‘But why did he do it?’ she asked, horror–stricken.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But I can’t. I can’t.’

‘You must.’

She gave him a frightened look and went out. He heard her go into Mrs Davidson’s room. He waited a minute to gather himself together and then began to shave and wash. When he was dressed he sat down on the bed and waited for his wife. At last she came.

‘She wants to see him,’ she said.

‘They’ve taken him to the mortuary. We’d better go down with her. How did she take it?’

‘I think she’s stunned. She didn’t cry. But she’s trembling like a leaf.’

‘We’d better go at once.’

When they knocked at her door Mrs Davidson came out. She was very pale, but dry–eyed. To the doctor she seemed unnaturally composed. No word was exchanged, and they set out in silence down the road. When they arrived at the mortuary Mrs Davidson spoke.

‘Let me go in and see him alone.’

They stood aside. A native opened a door for her and closed it behind her. They sat down and waited. One or two white men came and talked to them in undertones. Dr Macphail told them again what he knew of the tragedy. At last the door was quietly opened and Mrs Davidson came out. Silence fell upon them.

‘I’m ready to go back now,’ she said.

Her voice was hard and steady. Dr Macphail could not understand the look in her eyes. Her pale face was very stern. They walked back slowly, never saying a word, and at last they came round the bend on the other side of which stood their house. Mrs Davidson gave a gasp, and for a moment they stopped still. An incredible sound assaulted their ears. The gramophone which had been silent for so long was playing, playing ragtime loud and harsh.

‘What’s that?’ cried Mrs Macphail with horror.

‘Let’s go on,’ said Mrs Davidson.

They walked up the steps and entered the hall. Miss Thompson was standing at her door, chatting with a sailor. A sudden change had taken place in her. She was no longer the cowed drudge of the last days. She was dressed in all her finery, in her white dress, with the high shiny boots over which her fat legs bulged in their cotton stockings; her hair was elaborately arranged; and she wore that enormous hat covered with gaudy flowers. Her face was painted, her eyebrows were boldly black, and her lips were scarlet. She held herself erect. She was the flaunting queen that they had known at first. As they came in she broke into a loud, jeering laugh; and then, when Mrs Davidson involuntarily stopped, she collected the spittle in her mouth and spat. Mrs Davidson cowered back, and two red spots rose suddenly to her cheeks. Then, covering her face with her hands, she broke away and ran quickly up the stairs. Dr Macphail was outraged. He pushed past the woman into her room.

‘What the devil are you doing?’ he cried. ‘Stop that damned machine.’

He went up to it and tore the record off. She turned on him.

‘Say, doc, you can that stuff with me. What the hell are you doin’ in my room?’

‘What do you mean?’ he cried. ‘What d’you mean?’

She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer.

‘You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!’

Dr Macphail gasped. He understood.

THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD

Bateman Hunter slept badly. For a fortnight on the boat that brought him from Tahiti to San Francisco he had been thinking of the story he had to tell, and for three days on the train he had repeated to himself the words in which he meant to tell it. But in a few hours now he would be in Chicago, and doubts assailed him. His conscience, always very sensitive, was not at ease. He was uncertain that he had done all that was possible, it was on his honour to do much more than the possible, and the thought was disturbing that, in a matter which so nearly touched his own interest, he had allowed his interest to prevail over his quixotry. Self–sacrifice appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten per cent which rewards the bread he had cast upon the waters, but he has an awkward feeling that it detracts somewhat from the savour of his virtue. Bateman Hunter knew that his heart was pure, but he was not quite sure how steadfastly, when he told her his story, he would endure the scrutiny of Isabel Longstaffe’s cool grey eyes. They were far–seeing and wise. She measured the standards of others by her own meticulous uprightness and there could be no greater censure than the cold silence with which she expressed her disapproval of a conduct that did not satisfy her exacting code. There was no appeal from her judgement, for, having made up her mind, she never changed it. But Bateman would not have had her different. He loved not only the beauty of her person, slim and straight, with the proud carriage of her head, but still more the beauty of her soul. With her truthfulness, her rigid sense of honour, her fearless outlook, she seemed to him to collect in herself all that was most admirable in his country–women. But he saw in her something more than the perfect type of the American girl, he felt that her exquisiteness was peculiar in a way to her environment, and he was assured that no city in the world could have produced her but Chicago. A pang seized him when he remembered that he must deal so bitter a blow to her pride, and anger flamed up in his heart when he thought of Edward Barnard.

But at last the train steamed in to Chicago and he exulted when he saw the long streets of grey houses. He could hardly bear his impatience at the thought of State and Wabash with their crowded pavements, their hustling traffic, and their noise. He was at home. And he was glad that he had been born in the most important city in the United States. San Francisco was provincial, New York was effete; the future of America lay in the development of its economic possibilities, and Chicago, by its position and by the energy of its citizens, was destined to become the real capital of the country.

‘I guess I shall live long enough to see it the biggest city in the world,’ Bateman said to himself as he stepped down to the platform.

His father had come to meet him, and after a hearty handshake, the pair of them, tall, slender, and well–made, with the same fine, ascetic features and thin lips, walked out of the station. Mr Hunter’s automobile was waiting for them and they got in. Mr Hunter caught his son’s proud and happy glance as he looked at the street.

‘Glad to be back, son?’ he asked.

‘I should just think I was,’ said Bateman.

His eyes devoured the restless scene.

‘I guess there’s a bit more traffic here than in your South Sea island,’ laughed Mr Hunter. ‘Did you like it there?’

‘Give me Chicago, dad,’ answered Bateman.

‘You haven’t brought Edward Barnard back with you.’

‘No.’

‘How was he?’

Bateman was silent for a moment, and his handsome, sensitive face darkened.

‘I’d sooner not speak about him, dad,’ he said at last.

‘That’s all right, my son. I guess your mother will be a happy woman today.’

They passed out of the crowded streets in the Loop and drove along the lake till they came to the imposing house, an exact copy of a chateau on the Loire, which Mr Hunter had built himself some years before. As soon as Bateman was alone in his room he asked for a number on the telephone. His heart leaped when he heard the voice that answered him.

‘Good morning, Isabel,’ he said gaily.

‘Good morning, Bateman.’

‘How did you recognize my voice?’

‘It is not so long since I heard it last. Besides, I was expecting you.’

‘When may I see you?’

‘Unless you have anything better to do perhaps you’ll dine with us tonight.’

‘You know very well that I couldn’t possibly have anything better to do.’

‘I suppose that you’re full of news?’

He thought he detected in her voice a note of apprehension.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Well, you must tell me tonight. Good–bye.’

She rang off. It was characteristic of her that she should be able to wait so many unnecessary hours to know what so immensely concerned her. To Bateman there was an admirable fortitude in her restraint.

At dinner, at which beside himself and Isabel no one was present but her father and mother, he watched her guide the conversation into the channels of an urbane small–talk, and it occurred to him that in just such a manner would a marquise under the shadow of the guillotine toy with the affairs of a day that would know no morrow. Her delicate features, the aristocratic shortness of her upper lip, and her wealth of fair hair suggested the marquise again, and it must have been obvious, even if it were not notorious, that in her veins flowed the best blood in Chicago. The dining–room was a fitting frame to her fragile beauty, for Isabel had caused the house, a replica of a palace on the Grand Canal at Venice, to be furnished by an English expert in the style of Louis XV; and the graceful decoration linked with the name of that amorous monarch enhanced her loveliness and at the same time acquired from it a more profound significance. For Isabel’s mind was richly stored, and her conversation, however light, was never flippant. She spoke now of the Musicale to which she and her mother had been in the afternoon, of the lectures which an English poet was giving at the Auditorium, of the political situation, and of the Old Master which her father had recently bought for fifty thousand dollars in New York. It comforted Bateman to hear her. He felt that he was once more in the civilized world, at the centre of culture and distinction; and certain voices, troubling and yet against his will refusing to still their clamour, were at last silent in his heart.

‘Gee, but it’s good to be back in Chicago,’ he said.

At last dinner was over, and when they went out of the dining–room Isabel said to her mother:

‘I’m going to take Bateman along to my den. We have various things to talk about.’

‘Very well, my dear,’ said Mrs Longstaffe. ‘You’ll find your father and me in the Madame du Barry room when you’re through.’

Isabel led the young man upstairs and showed him into the room of which he had so many charming memories. Though he knew it so well he could not repress the exclamation of delight which it always wrung from him. She looked round with a smile.

‘I think it’s a success,’ she said. ‘The main thing is that it’s right. There’s not even an ash–tray that isn’t of the period.’

‘I suppose that’s what makes it so wonderful. Like all you do it’s so superlatively right.’

They sat down in front of a log fire and Isabel looked at him with calm grave eyes.

‘Now what have you to say to me?’ she asked.

‘I hardly know how to begin.’

’Is Edward Barnard coming back?’

‘No.’

There was a long silence before Bateman spoke again, and with each of them it was filled with many thoughts. It was a difficult story he had to tell, for there were things in it which were so offensive to her sensitive ears that he could not bear to tell them, and yet in justice to her, no less than in justice to himself, he must tell her the whole truth.

It had all begun long ago when he and Edward Barnard, still at college, had met Isabel Longstaffe at the tea–party given to introduce her to society. They had both known her when she was a child and they long–legged boys, but for two years she had been in Europe to finish her education and it was with a surprised delight that they renewed acquaintance with the lovely girl who returned. Both of them fell desperately in love with her, but Bateman saw quickly that she had eyes only for Edward, and, devoted to his friend, he resigned himself to the role of confidant. He passed bitter moments, but he could not deny that Edward was worthy of his good fortune, and, anxious that nothing should impair the friendship he so greatly valued, he took care never by a hint to disclose his own feelings. In six months the young couple were engaged. But they were very young and Isabel’s father decided that they should not marry at least till Edward graduated. They had to wait a year. Bateman remembered the winter at the end of which Isabel and Edward were to be married, a winter of dances and theatre–parties and of informal gaieties at which he, the constant third, was always present. He loved her no less because she would shortly be his friend’s wife; her smile, a gay word she flung him, the confidence of her affection, never ceased to delight him; and he congratulated himself, somewhat complacently, because he did not envy them their happiness. Then an accident happened. A great bank failed, there was a panic on the exchange, and Edward Barnard’s father found himself a ruined man. He came home one night, told his wife he was penniless, and after dinner, going into his study, shot himself.

A week later, Edward Barnard, with a tired, white face, went to Isabel and asked her to release him. Her only answer was to throw her arms round his neck and burst into tears.

‘Don’t make it harder for me, sweet,’ he said.

‘Do you think I can let you go now? I love you.’

‘How can I ask you to marry me? The whole thing’s hopeless. Your father would never let you. I haven’t a cent.’

‘What do I care? I love you.’

He told her his plans. He had to earn money at once, and George Braunschmidt, an old friend of his family, had offered to take him into his own business. He was a South Sea merchant, and he had agencies in many of the islands of the Pacific. He had suggested that Edward should go to Tahiti for a year or two, where under the best of his managers he could learn the details of that varied trade, and at the end of that time he promised the young man a position in Chicago. It was a wonderful opportunity, and when he had finished his explanations Isabel was once more all smiles.

‘You foolish boy, why have you been trying to make me miserable?’

His face lit up at her words and his eyes flashed.

‘Isabel, you don’t mean to say you’ll wait for me?’

‘Don’t you think you’re worth it?’ she smiled.

‘Ah, don’t laugh at me now. I beseech you to be serious. It may be for two years.’

‘Have no fear. I love you, Edward. When you come back I will marry you.’

Edward’s employer was a man who did not like delay and he had told him that if he took the post he offered he must sail that day week from San Francisco. Edward spent his last evening with Isabel. It was after dinner that Mr Longstaffe, saying he wanted a word with Edward, took him into the smoking–room. Mr Longstaffe had accepted good–naturedly the arrangement which his daughter had told him of and Edward could not imagine what mysterious communication he had now to make. He was not a little perplexed to see that his host was embarrassed. He faltered. He talked of trivial things. At last he blurted it out.

‘I guess you’ve heard of Arnold Jackson,’ he said, looking at Edward with a frown.

Edward hesitated. His natural truthfulness obliged him to admit a knowledge he would gladly have been able to deny.

‘Yes, I have. But it’s a long time ago. I guess I didn’t pay very much attention.’

‘There are not many people in Chicago who haven’t heard of Arnold Jackson,’ said Mr Longstaffe bitterly, ‘and if there are they’ll have no difficulty in finding someone who’ll be glad to tell them. Did you know he was Mrs Longstaffe’s brother?’

‘Yes, I knew that.’

‘Of course we’ve had no communication with him for many years. He left the country as soon as he was able to, and I guess the country wasn’t sorry to see the last of him. We understand he lives in Tahiti. My advice to you is to give him a wide berth, but if you do hear anything about him Mrs Longstaffe and I would be very glad if you’d let us know.’

‘Sure.’

‘That was all I wanted to say to you. Now I daresay you’d like to join the ladies.’

There are few families that have not among their members one whom, if their neighbours permitted, they would willingly forget, and they are fortunate when the lapse of a generation or two has invested his vagaries with a romantic glamour. But when he is actually alive, if his peculiarities are not of the kind that can be condoned by the phrase, ‘he is nobody’s enemy but his own’, a safe one when the culprit has no worse to answer for than alcoholism or wandering affections, the only possible course is silence. And it was this which the Longstaffes had adopted towards Arnold Jackson. They never talked of him. They would not even pass through the street in which he had lived. Too kind to make his wife and children suffer for his misdeeds, they had supported them for years, but on the understanding that they should live in Europe. They did everything they could to blot out all recollection of Arnold Jackson and yet were conscious that the story was as fresh in the public mind as when first the scandal burst upon a gaping world. Arnold Jackson was as black a sheep as any family could suffer from. A wealthy banker, prominent in his church, a philanthropist, a man respected by all, not only for his connexions (in his veins ran the blue blood of Chicago), but also for his upright character, he was arrested one day on a charge of fraud; and the dishonesty which the trial brought to light was not the sort which could be explained by a sudden temptation; it was deliberate and systematic. Arnold Jackson was a rogue. When he was sent to the penitentiary for seven years there were few who did not think he had escaped lightly.

When at the end of this last evening the lovers separated it was with many protestations of devotion. Isabel, all tears, was consoled a little by her certainty of Edward’s passionate love. It was a strange feeling that she had. It made her wretched to part from him and yet she was happy because he adored her.

This was more than two years ago.

He had written to her by every mail since then, twenty–four letters in all, for the mail went but once a month, and his letters had been all that a lover’s letters should be. They were intimate and charming, humorous sometimes, especially of late, and tender. At first they suggested that he was homesick, they were full of his desire to get back to Chicago and Isabel; and, a little anxiously, she wrote begging him to persevere. She was afraid that he might throw up his opportunity and come racing back. She did not want her lover to lack endurance and she quoted to him the lines:

I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more. But presently he seemed to settle down and it made Isabel very happy to observe his growing enthusiasm to introduce American methods into that forgotten corner of the world. But she knew him, and at the end of the year, which was the shortest time he could possibly stay in Tahiti, she expected to have to use all her influence to dissuade him from coming home. It was much better that he should learn the business thoroughly, and if they had been able to wait a year there seemed no reason why they should not wait another. She talked it over with Bateman Hunter, always the most generous of friends (during those first few days after Edward went she did not know what she would have done without him), and they decided that Edward’s future must stand before everything. It was with relief that she found as the time passed that he made no suggestion of returning.

‘He’s splendid, isn’t he?’ she exclaimed to Bateman.

‘He’s white, through and through.’

‘Reading between the lines of his letter I know he hates it over there, but he’s sticking it out because...’ She blushed a little and Bateman, with the grave smile which was so attractive in him, finished the sentence for her.

‘Because he loves you.’

‘It makes me feel so humble,’ she said.

‘You’re wonderful, Isabel, you’re perfectly wonderful.’

But the second year passed and every month Isabel continued to receive a letter from Edward, and presently it began to seem a little strange that he did not speak of coming back. He wrote as though he were settled definitely in Tahiti, and what was more, comfortably settled. She was surprised. Then she read his letters again, all of them, several times; and now, reading between the lines indeed, she was puzzled to notice a change which had escaped her. The later letters were as tender and as delightful as the first, but the tone was different. She was vaguely suspicious of their humour, she had the instinctive mistrust of her sex for that unaccountable quality, and she discerned in them now a flippancy which perplexed her. She was not quite certain that the Edward who wrote to her now was the same Edward that she had known. One afternoon, the day after a mail had arrived from Tahiti, when she was driving with Bateman he said to her:

‘Did Edward tell you when he was sailing?’

‘No, he didn’t mention it. I thought he might have said something to you about it.’

‘Not a word.’

‘You know what Edward is,’ she laughed in reply, ‘he has no sense of time. If it occurs to you next time you write you might ask him when he’s thinking of coming.’

Her manner was so unconcerned that only Bateman’s acute sensitiveness could have discerned in her request a very urgent desire. He laughed lightly.

‘Yes. I’ll ask him. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking about.’

A few days later, meeting him again, she noticed that something troubled him. They had been much together since Edward left Chicago; they were both devoted to him and each in his desire to talk of the absent one found a willing listener; the consequence was that Isabel knew every expression of Bateman’s face, and his denials now were useless against her keen instinct. Something told her that his harassed look had to do with Edward and she did not rest till she had made him confess.

‘The fact is,’ he said at last, ‘I heard in a roundabout way that Edward was no longer working for Braunschmidt and Co., and yesterday I took the opportunity to ask Mr Braunschmidt himself.’

‘Well?’

‘Edward left his employment with them nearly a year ago.’

‘How strange he should have said nothing about it!’

Bateman hesitated, but he had gone so far now that he was obliged to tell the rest. It made him feel dreadfully embarrassed. ‘He was fired.’

‘In heaven’s name what for?’

‘It appears they warned him once or twice, and at last they told him to get out. They say he was lazy and incompetent.’

‘Edward?’

They were silent for a while, and then he saw that Isabel was crying. Instinctively he seized her hand.

‘Oh, my dear, don’t, don’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to see it.’

She was so unstrung that she let her hand rest in his. He tried to console her.

‘It’s incomprehensible, isn’t it? It’s so unlike Edward. I can’t help feeling there must be some mistake.’

She did not say anything for a while, and when she spoke it was hesitatingly.

‘Has it struck you that there was anything queer in his letters lately?’ she asked, looking away, her eyes all bright with tears.

He did not quite know how to answer.

‘I have noticed a change in them,’ he admitted. ‘He seems to have lost that high seriousness which I admired so much in him. One would almost think that the things that matter–well, don’t matter.’

Isabel did not reply. She was vaguely uneasy.

‘Perhaps in his answer to your letter he’ll say when he’s coming home. All we can do is to wait for that.’

Another letter came from Edward for each of them, and still he made no mention of his return; but when he wrote he could not have received Bateman’s inquiry. The next mail would bring them an answer to that. The next mail came, and Bateman brought Isabel the letter he had just received; but the first glance of his face was enough to tell her that he was disconcerted. She read it through carefully and then, with slightly tightened lips, read it again.

‘It’s a very strange letter,’ she said. ‘I don’t quite understand it.’

‘One might almost think that he was joshing me,’ said Bateman, flushing.

‘It reads like that, but it must be unintentional. That’s so unlike Edward.’

‘He says nothing about coming back.’

‘If I weren’t so confident of his love I should think ... I hardly know what I should think.’

It was then that Bateman had broached the scheme which during the afternoon had formed itself in his brain. The firm, founded by his father, in which he was now a partner, a firm which manufactured all manner of motor vehicles, was about to establish agencies in Honolulu, Sydney, and Wellington; and Bateman proposed that himself should go instead of the manager, who had been suggested. He could return by Tahiti; in fact, travelling from Wellington, it was inevitable to do so; and he could see Edward.

‘There’s some mystery and I’m going to clear it up. That’s the only way to do it.’

‘Oh, Bateman, how can you be so good and kind?’ she exclaimed.

‘You know there’s nothing in the world I want more than your happiness, Isabel.’

She looked at him and she gave him her hands.

‘You’re wonderful, Bateman. I didn’t know there was anyone in the world like you. How can I ever thank you?’

‘I don’t want your thanks. I only want to be allowed to help you.’

She dropped her eyes and flushed a little. She was so used to him that she had forgotten how handsome he was. He was as tall as Edward and as well made, but he was dark and pale of face, while Edward was ruddy. Of course she knew he loved her. It touched her. She felt very tenderly towards him.

It was from this journey that Bateman Hunter was now returned.

The business part of it took him somewhat longer than he expected and he had much time to think of his two friends. He had come to the conclusion that it could be nothing serious that prevented Edward from coming home, a pride, perhaps, which made him determined to make good before he claimed the bride he adored; but it was a pride that must be reasoned with. Isabel was unhappy. Edward must come back to Chicago with him and marry her at once. A position could be found for him in the works of the Hunter Motor Traction and Automobile Company. Bateman, with a bleeding heart, exulted at the prospect of giving happiness to the two persons he loved best in the world at the cost of his own. He would never marry. He would be godfather to the children of Edward and Isabel, and many years later when they were both dead he would tell Isabel’s daughter how long, long ago he had loved her mother. Bateman’s eyes were veiled with tears when he pictured this scene to himself.

Meaning to take Edward by surprise he had not cabled to announce his arrival, and when at last he landed at Tahiti he allowed a youth, who said he was the son of the house, to lead him to the Hôtel de la Fleur. He chuckled when he thought of his friend’s amazement on seeing him, the most unexpected of visitors, walk into his office.

‘By the way,’ he asked, as they went along, ‘can you tell me where I shall find Mr Edward Barnard?’

‘Barnard?’ said the youth. ‘I seem to know the name.’

‘He’s an American. A tall fellow with light brown hair and blue eyes. He’s been here over two years.’

‘Of course. Now I know who you mean. You mean Mr Jackson’s nephew.’

‘Whose nephew?’

‘Mr Arnold Jackson.’

‘I don’t think we’re speaking of the same person,’ answered Bateman, frigidly.

He was startled. It was queer that Arnold Jackson, known apparently to all and sundry, should live here under the disgraceful name in which he had been convicted. But Bateman could not imagine whom it was that he passed off as his nephew. Mrs Longstaffe was his only sister and he had never had a brother. The young man by his side talked volubly in an English that had something in it of the intonation of a foreign tongue, and Bateman, with a sidelong glance, saw, what he had not noticed before, that there was in him a good deal of native blood. A touch of hauteur involuntarily entered into his manner. They reached the hotel. When he had arranged about his room Bateman asked to be directed to the premises of Braunschmidt and Co. They were on the front, facing the lagoon, and, glad to feel the solid earth under his feet after eight days at sea, he sauntered down the sunny road to the water’s edge. Having found the place he sought, Bateman sent in his card to the manager and was led through a lofty barn–like room, half store and half warehouse, to an office in which sat a stout, spectacled, bald–headed man.

‘Can you tell me where I shall find Mr Edward Barnard? I understand he was in this office for some time.’

‘That is so. I don’t know just where he is.’

‘But I thought he came here with a particular recommendation from Mr Braunschmidt. I know Mr Braunschmidt very well.’

The fat man looked at Bateman with shrewd, suspicious eyes. He called to one of the boys in the warehouse.

‘Say, Henry, where’s Barnard now, d’you know?’

‘He’s working at Cameron’s, I think,’ came the answer from someone who did not trouble to move. The fat man nodded.

‘If you turn to your left when you get out of here you’ll come to Cameron’s in about three minutes.’

Bateman hesitated.

‘I think I should tell you that Edward Barnard is my greatest friend. I was very much surprised when I heard he’d left Braunschmidt and Co.’

The fat man’s eyes contracted till they seemed like pin–points, and their scrutiny made Bateman so uncomfortable that he felt himself blushing.

‘I guess Braunschmidt and Co. and Edward Barnard didn’t see eye to eye on certain matters,’ he replied.

Bateman did not quite like the fellow’s manner, so he got up, not without dignity, and with an apology for troubling him bade him good day. He left the place with a singular feeling that the man he had just interviewed had much to tell him, but no intention of telling it. He walked in the direction indicated and soon found himself at Cameron’s. It was a trader’s store, such as he had passed half a dozen of on his way, and when he entered the first person he saw, in his shirt–sleeves, measuring out a length of trade cotton, was Edward. It gave him a start to see him engaged in so humble an occupation. But he had scarcely appeared when Edward, looking up, caught sight of him, and gave a joyful cry of surprise.

‘Bateman! Who ever thought of seeing you here?’

He stretched his arm across the counter and wrung Bateman’s hand. There was no self–consciousness in his manner and the embarrassment was all on Bateman’s side.

‘Just wait till I’ve wrapped this package.’

With perfect assurance he ran his scissors across the stuff, folded it, made it into a parcel, and handed it to the dark–skinned customer.

‘Pay at the desk, please.’

Then, smiling, with bright eyes, he turned to Bateman.

‘How did you show up here? Gee, I am delighted to see you. Sit down, old man. Make yourself at home.’

‘We can’t talk here. Come along to my hotel. I suppose you can get away?’

This he added with some apprehension.

‘Of course I can get away. We’re not so business–like as all that in Tahiti.’ He called out to a Chinese who was standing behind the opposite counter. ‘Ah–Ling, when the boss comes tell him a friend of mine’s just arrived from America and I’ve gone out to have a dram with him.’

‘All–light,’ said the Chinese, with a grin.

Edward slipped on a coat and, putting on his hat, accompanied Bateman out of the store. Bateman attempted to put the matter facetiously.

‘I didn’t expect to find you selling three and a half yards of rotten cotton to a greasy nigger,’ he laughed.

‘Braunschmidt fired me, you know, and I thought that would do as well as anything else.’

Edward’s candour seemed to Bateman very surprising, but he thought it indiscreet to pursue the subject.

‘I guess you won’t make a fortune where you are,’ he answered, somewhat dryly.

‘I guess not. But I earn enough to keep body and soul together, and I’m quite satisfied with that.’

‘You wouldn’t have been two years ago.’

‘We grow wiser as we grow older,’ retorted Edward, gaily.

Bateman took a glance at him. Edward was dressed in a suit of shabby white ducks, none too clean, and a large straw hat of native make. He was thinner than he had been, deeply burned by the sun, and he was certainly better–looking than ever. But there was something in his appearance that disconcerted Bateman. He walked with a new jauntiness; there was a carelessness in his demeanour, a gaiety about nothing in particular, which Bateman could not precisely blame, but which exceedingly puzzled him.

‘I’m blest if I can see what he’s got to be so darned cheerful about,’ he said to himself.

They arrived at the hotel and sat on the terrace. A Chinese boy brought them cocktails. Edward was most anxious to hear all the news of Chicago and bombarded his friend with eager questions. His interest was natural and sincere. But the odd thing was that it seemed equally divided among a multitude of subjects. He was as eager to know how Bateman’s father was as what Isabel was doing. He talked of her without a shade of embarrassment, but she might just as well have been his sister as his promised wife; and before Bateman had done analysing the exact meaning of Edward’s remarks he found that the conversation had drifted to his own work and the buildings his father had lately erected. He was determined to bring the conversation back to Isabel and was looking for the occasion when he saw Edward wave his hand cordially. A man was advancing towards them on the terrace, but Bateman’s back was turned to him and he could not see him.

‘Come and sit down,’ said Edward gaily.

The new–comer approached. He was a very tall, thin man, in white ducks, with a fine head of curly white hair. His face was thin too, long, with a large, hooked nose and a beautiful, expressive mouth.

‘This is my old friend Bateman Hunter. I’ve told you about him,’ said Edward, his constant smile breaking on his lips.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Hunter. I used to know your father.’

The stranger held out his hand and took the young man’s in a strong, friendly grasp. It was not till then that Edward mentioned the other’s name. ‘Mr Arnold Jackson.’

Bateman turned white and he felt his hands grow cold. This was the forger, the convict, this was Isabel’s uncle. He did not know what to say. He tried to conceal his confusion. Arnold Jackson looked at him with twinkling eyes.

‘I daresay my name is familiar to you.’

Bateman did not know whether to say yes or no, and what made it more awkward was that both Jackson and Edward seemed to be amused. It was bad enough to have forced on him the acquaintance of the one man on the island he would rather have avoided, but worse to discern that he was being made a fool of. Perhaps, however, he had reached this conclusion too quickly, for Jackson, without a pause, added:

‘I understand you’re very friendly with the Longstaffes. Mary Longstaffe is my sister.’

Now Bateman asked himself if Arnold Jackson could think him ignorant of the most terrible scandal that Chicago had ever known. But Jackson put his hand on Edward’s shoulder.

‘I can’t sit down, Teddie,’ he said. ‘I’m busy. But you two boys had better come up and dine tonight.’

‘That’ll be fine,’ said Edward.

‘It’s very kind of you, Mr Jackson,’ said Bateman, frigidly, ‘but I’m here for so short a time; my boat sails tomorrow, you know; I think if you’ll forgive me, I won’t come.’

‘Oh, nonsense. I’ll give you a native dinner. My wife’s a wonderful cook. Teddie will show you the way. Come early so as to see the sunset. I can give you both a shake–down if you like.’

‘Of course we’ll come,’ said Edward. ‘There’s always the devil of a row in the hotel on the night a boat arrives and we can have a good yarn up at the bungalow.’

‘I can’t let you off, Mr Hunter,’ Jackson continued with the utmost cordiality. ‘I want to hear all about Chicago and Mary.’

He nodded and walked away before Bateman could say another word.

‘We don’t take refusals in Tahiti,’ laughed Edward. ‘Besides, you’ll get the best dinner on the island.’

‘What did he mean by saying his wife was a good cook? I happen to know his wife’s in Geneva.’

‘That’s a long way off for a wife, isn’t it?’ said Edward. ‘And it’s a long time since he saw her. I guess it’s another wife he’s talking about.’

For some time Bateman was silent. His face was set in grave lines. But looking up he caught the amused look in Edward’s eyes, and he flushed darkly.

‘Arnold Jackson is a despicable rogue,’ he said.

‘I greatly fear he is,’ answered Edward, smiling.

‘I don’t see how any decent man can have anything to do with him.’

‘Perhaps I’m not a decent man.’

‘Do you see much of him, Edward?’

‘Yes, quite a lot. He’s adopted me as his nephew.’

Bateman leaned forward and fixed Edward with his searching eyes.

‘Do you like him?’

‘Very much.’

‘But don’t you know, doesn’t everyone here know, that he’s a forger and that he’s been a convict? He ought to be hounded out of civilized society.’

Edward watched a ring of smoke that floated from his cigar into the still, scented air.

‘I suppose he is a pretty unmitigated rascal,’ he said at last. ‘And I can’t flatter myself that any repentance for his misdeeds offers one an excuse for condoning them. He was a swindler and a hypocrite. You can’t get away from it. I never met a more agreeable companion. He’s taught me everything I know.’

‘What has he taught you?’ cried Bateman in amazement.

‘How to live.’

Bateman broke into ironical laughter.

‘A fine master. Is it owing to his lessons that you lost the chance of making a fortune and earn your living now by serving behind a counter in a ten–cent store?’

‘He has a wonderful personality,’ said Edward, smiling good–naturedly. ‘Perhaps you’ll see what I mean tonight.’

‘I’m not going to dine with him if that’s what you mean. Nothing would induce me to set foot within that man’s house.’

‘Come to oblige me, Bateman. We’ve been friends for so many years, you won’t refuse me a favour when I ask it.’

Edward’s tone had in it a quality new to Bateman. Its gentleness was singularly persuasive.

‘If you put it like that, Edward, I’m bound to come,’ he smiled.

Bateman reflected, moreover, that it would be as well to learn what he could about Arnold Jackson. It was plain that he had a great ascendancy over Edward, and if it was to be combated it was necessary to discover in what exactly it consisted. The more he talked with Edward the more conscious he became that a change had taken place in him. He had an instinct that it behoved him to walk warily, and he made up his mind not to broach the real purport of his visit till he saw his way more clearly. He began to talk of one thing and another, of his journey and what he had achieved by it, of politics in Chicago, of this common friend and that, of their days together at college.

At last Edward said he must get back to his work and proposed that he should fetch Bateman at five so that they could drive out together to Arnold Jackson’s house.

‘By the way, I rather thought you’d be living at this hotel,’ said Bateman, as he strolled out of the garden with Edward. ‘I understand it’s the only decent one here.’

‘Not I,’ laughed Edward. ‘It’s a deal too grand for me. I rent a room just outside the town. It’s cheap and clean.’

‘If I remember right those weren’t the points that seemed most important to you when you lived in Chicago.’

‘Chicago!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, Edward. It’s the greatest city in the world.’

‘I know,’ said Edward.

Bateman glanced at him quickly, but his face was inscrutable. ‘When are you coming back to it?’

‘I often wonder,’ smiled Edward.

This answer, and the manner of it, staggered Bateman, but before he could ask for an explanation Edward waved to a half–caste who was driving a passing motor.

‘Give us a ride down, Charlie,’ he said.

He nodded to Bateman, and ran after the machine that had pulled up a few yards in front. Bateman was left to piece together a mass of perplexing impressions.

Edward called for him in a rickety trap drawn by an old mare, and they drove along a road that ran by the sea. On each side of it were plantations, coconut and vanilla; and now and then they saw a great mango, its fruit yellow and red and purple among the massy green of the leaves, now and then they had a glimpse of the lagoon, smooth and blue, with here and there a tiny islet graceful with tall palms. Arnold Jackson’s house stood on a little hill and only a path led to it, so they unharnessed the mare and tied her to a tree, leaving the trap by the side of the road. To Bateman it seemed a happy–go–lucky way of doing things. But when they went up to the house they were met by a tall, handsome native woman, no longer young, with whom Edward cordially shook hands. He introduced Bateman to her.

‘This is my friend Mr Hunter. We’re going to dine with you, Lavina.’

‘All right,’ she said, with a quick smile. ‘Arnold ain’t back yet.’

‘We’ll go down and bathe. Let us have a couple of pareos.’

The woman nodded and went into the house.

‘Who is that?’ asked Bateman.

‘Oh, that’s Lavina. She’s Arnold’s wife.’

Bateman tightened his lips, but said nothing. In a moment the woman returned with a bundle, which she gave to Edward; and the two men, scrambling down a steep path, made their way to a grove of coconut trees on the beach. They undressed and Edward showed his friend how to make the strip of red trade cotton which is called a pareo into a very neat pair of bathing–drawers. Soon they were splashing in the warm, shallow water. Edward was in great spirits. He laughed and shouted and sang. He might have been fifteen. Bateman had never seen him so gay, and afterwards when they lay on the beach, smoking cigarettes, in the limpid air, there was such an irresistible light–heartedness in him that Bateman was taken aback.

‘You seem to find life mighty pleasant,’ said he.

‘I do.’

They heard a soft movement and looking round saw that Arnold Jackson was coming towards them.

‘I thought I’d come down and fetch you two boys back,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy your bathe, Mr Hunter?’

‘Very much,’ said Bateman.

Arnold Jackson, no longer in spruce ducks, wore nothing but a pareo round his loins and walked barefoot. His body was deeply browned by the sun. With his long, curling white hair and his ascetic face he made a fantastic figure in the native dress, but he bore himself without a trace of self–consciousness.

‘If you’re ready we’ll go right up,’ said Jackson.

‘I’ll just put on my clothes,’ said Bateman.

‘Why, Teddie, didn’t you bring a pareo for your friend?’

‘I guess he’d rather wear clothes,’ smiled Edward.

‘I certainly would,’ answered Bateman, grimly, as he saw Edward gird himself in the loincloth and stand ready to start before he himself had got his shirt on.

‘Won’t you find it rough walking without your shoes?’ he asked Edward. ‘It struck me the path was a trifle rocky.’

‘Oh, I’m used to it.’

‘It’s a comfort to get into a pareo when one gets back from town,’ said Jackson. ‘If you were going to stay here I should strongly recommend you to adopt it. It’s one of the most sensible costumes I have ever come across. It’s cool, convenient, and inexpensive.’

They walked up to the house, and Jackson took them into a large room with white–washed walls and an open ceiling in which a table was laid for dinner. Bateman noticed that it was set for five.

‘Eva, come and show yourself to Teddie’s friend, and then shake us a cocktail,’ called Jackson.

Then he led Bateman to a long low window.

‘Look at that,’ he said, with a dramatic gesture. ‘Look well.’

Below them coconut trees tumbled down steeply to the lagoon, and the lagoon in the evening light had the colour, tender and varied, of a dove’s breast. On a creek, at a little distance, were the clustered huts of a native village, and towards the reef was a canoe, sharply silhouetted, in which were a couple of natives fishing. Then, beyond, you saw the vast calmness of the Pacific and twenty miles away, airy and unsubstantial like the fabric of a poet’s fancy, the unimaginable beauty of the island which is called Murea. It was all so lovely that Bateman stood abashed.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said at last.

Arnold Jackson stood staring in front of him, and in his eyes was a dreamy softness. His thin, thoughtful face was very grave. Bateman, glancing at it, was once more conscious of its intense spirituality.

‘Beauty,’ murmured Arnold Jackson. ‘You seldom see beauty face to face. Look at it well, Mr Hunter, for what you see now you will never see again, since the moment is transitory, but it will be an imperishable memory in your heart. You touch eternity.’

His voice was deep and resonant. He seemed to breathe forth the purest idealism, and Bateman had to urge himself to remember that the man who spoke was a criminal and a cruel cheat. But Edward, as though he heard a sound, turned round quickly.

‘Here is my daughter, Mr Hunter.’

Bateman shook hands with her. She had dark, splendid eyes and a red mouth tremulous with laughter; but her skin was brown, and her curling hair, rippling down her shoulders, was coal–black. She wore but one garment, a Mother Hubbard of pink cotton, her feet were bare, and she was crowned with a wreath of white scented flowers. She was a lovely creature. She was like a goddess of the Polynesian spring.

She was a little shy, but not more shy than Bateman, to whom the whole situation was highly embarrassing, and it did not put him at ease to see this sylph–like thing take a shaker and with a practised hand mix three cocktails.

‘Let us have a kick in them, child,’ said Jackson.

She poured them out and smiling delightfully handed one to each of the men. Bateman flattered himself on his skill in the subtle art of shaking cocktails and he was not a little astonished, on tasting this one, to find that it was excellent. Jackson laughed proudly when he saw his guest’s involuntary look of appreciation.

‘Not bad, is it? I taught the child myself, and in the old days in Chicago I considered that there wasn’t a bar–tender in the city that could hold a candle to me. When I had nothing better to do in the penitentiary I used to amuse myself by thinking out new cocktails, but when you come down to brass tacks there’s nothing to beat a dry Martini.’

Bateman felt as though someone had given him a violent blow on the funny–bone and he was conscious that he turned red and then white. But before he could think of anything to say a native boy brought in a great bowl of soup and the whole party sat down to dinner. Arnold Jackson’s remark seemed to have aroused in him a train of recollections, for he began to talk of his prison days. He talked quite naturally, without malice, as though he were relating his experiences at a foreign university. He addressed himself to Bateman and Bateman was confused and then confounded. He saw Edward’s eyes fixed on him and there was in them a flicker of amusement. He blushed scarlet, for it struck him that Jackson was making a fool of him, and then because he felt absurd–and knew there was no reason why he should–he grew angry. Arnold Jackson was impudent–there was no other word for it–and his callousness, whether assumed or not, was outrageous. The dinner proceeded. Bateman was asked to eat sundry messes, raw fish and he knew not what, which only his civility induced him to swallow, but which he was amazed to find very good eating. Then an incident happened which to Bateman was the most mortifying experience of the evening. There was a little circlet of flowers in front of him, and for the sake of conversation he hazarded a remark about it.

‘It’s a wreath that Eva made for you,’ said Jackson, ‘but I guess she was too shy to give it to you.’

Bateman took it up in his hand and made a polite little speech of thanks to the girl.

‘You must put it on,’ she said, with a smile and a blush.

‘I? I don’t think I’ll do that.’

‘It’s the charming custom of the country,’ said Arnold Jackson.

There was one in front of him and he placed it on his hair. Edward did the same.

‘I guess I’m not dressed for the part,’ said Bateman, uneasily.

‘Would you like a pareo?’ said Eva quickly. ‘I’ll get you one in a minute.’

‘No, thank you. I’m quite comfortable as I am.’

‘Show him how to put it on, Eva,’ said Edward.

At that moment Bateman hated his greatest friend. Eva got up from the table and with much laughter placed the wreath on his black hair.

‘It suits you very well,’ said Mrs Jackson. ‘Don’t it suit him, Arnold?’

‘Of course it does.’

Bateman sweated at every pore.

‘Isn’t it a pity it’s dark?’ said Eva. ‘We could photograph you all three together.’

Bateman thanked his stars it was. He felt that he must look prodigiously foolish in his blue serge suit and high collar–very neat and gentlemanly– with that ridiculous wreath of flowers on his head. He was seething with indignation, and he had never in his life exercised more self–control than now when he presented an affable exterior. He was furious with that old man, sitting at the head of the table, half–naked, with his saintly face and the flowers on his handsome white locks. The whole position was monstrous.

Then dinner came to an end, and Eva and her mother remained to clear away while the three men sat on the veranda. It was very warm and the air was scented with the white flowers of the night. The full moon, sailing across an unclouded sky, made a pathway on the broad sea that led to the boundless realms of Forever. Arnold Jackson began to talk. His voice was rich and musical. He talked now of the natives and of the old legends of the country. He told strange stories of the past, stories of hazardous expeditions into the unknown, of love and death, of hatred and revenge. He told of the adventurers who had discovered those distant islands, of the sailors who, settling in them, had married the daughters of great chieftains, and of the beach–combers who had led their varied lives on those silvery shores. Bateman, mortified and exasperated, at first listened sullenly, but presently some magic in the words possessed him and he sat entranced. The mirage of romance obscured the light of common day. Had he forgotten that Arnold Jackson had a tongue of silver, a tongue by which he had charmed vast sums out of the credulous public, a tongue which very nearly enabled him to escape the penalty of his crimes? No one had a sweeter eloquence, and no one had a more acute sense of climax. Suddenly he rose.

‘Well, you two boys haven’t seen one another for a long time. I shall leave you to have a yarn. Teddie will show you your quarters when you want to go to bed.’

‘Oh, but I wasn’t thinking of spending the night, Mr Jackson,’ said Bateman.

‘You’ll find it more comfortable. We’ll see that you’re called in good time.’

Then with a courteous shake of the hand, stately as though he were a bishop in canonicals, Arnold Jackson took leave of his guest.

‘Of course I’ll drive you back to Papeete if you like,’ said Edward, ‘but I advise you to stay. It’s bully driving in the early morning.’

For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Bateman wondered how he should begin on the conversation which all the events of the day made him think more urgent.

‘When are you coming back to Chicago?’ he asked, suddenly.

For a moment Edward did not answer. Then he turned rather lazily to look at his friend and smiled.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps never.’

‘What in heaven’s name do you mean?’ cried Bateman.

‘I’m very happy here. Wouldn’t it be folly to make a change?’

‘Man alive, you can’t live here all your life. This is no life for a man. It’s a living death. Oh, Edward, come away at once, before it’s too late. I’ve felt that something was wrong. You’re infatuated with the place, you’ve succumbed to evil influences, but it only requires a wrench, and when you’re free from these surroundings you’ll thank all the gods there be. You’ll be like a dope–fiend when he’s broken from his drug. You’ll see then that for two years you’ve been breathing poisoned air. You can’t imagine what a relief it will be when you fill your lungs once more with the fresh pure air of your native country.’

He spoke quickly, the words tumbling over one another in his excitement, and there was in his voice sincere and affectionate emotion. Edward was touched.

‘It is good of you to care so much, old friend.’

‘Come with me tomorrow, Edward. It was a mistake that you ever came to this place. This is no life for you.’

‘You talk of this sort of life and that. How do you think a man gets the best out of life?’

‘Why, I should have thought there could be no two answers to that. By doing his duty, by hard work, by meeting all the obligations of his state and station.’

‘And what is his reward?’

‘His reward is the consciousness of having achieved what he set out to do.’

‘It all sounds a little portentous to me,’ said Edward, and in the lightness of the night Bateman could see that he was smiling. ‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’ve degenerated sadly. There are several things I think now which I daresay would have seemed outrageous to me three years ago.’

‘Have you learnt them from Arnold Jackson?’ asked Bateman, scornfully.

‘You don’t like him? Perhaps you couldn’t be expected to. I didn’t when I first came. I had just the same prejudice as you. He’s a very extraordinary man. You saw for yourself that he makes no secret of the fact that he was in a penitentiary. I do not know that he regrets it or the crimes that led him there. The only complaint he ever made in my hearing was that when he came out his health was impaired. I think he does not know what remorse is. He is completely unmoral. He accepts everything and he accepts himself as well. He’s generous and kind.’

‘He always was,’ interrupted Bateman, ‘on other people’s money.’

‘I’ve found him a very good friend. Is it unnatural that I should take a man as I find him?’

‘The result is that you lose the distinction between right and wrong.’

‘No, they remain just as clearly divided in my mind as before, but what has become a little confused in me is the distinction between the bad man and the good one. Is Arnold Jackson a bad man who does good things or a good man who does bad things? It’s a difficult question to answer. Perhaps we make too much of the difference between one man and another. Perhaps even the best of us are sinners and the worst of us are saints. Who knows?’

‘You will never persuade me that white is black and that black is white,’ said Bateman.

‘I’m sure I shan’t, Bateman.’

Bateman could not understand why the flicker of a smile crossed Edward’s lips when he thus agreed with him. Edward was silent for a minute.

‘When I saw you this morning, Bateman,’ he said then, ‘I seemed to see myself as I was two years ago. The same collar, and the same shoes, the same blue suit, the same energy. The same determination. By God, I was energetic. The sleepy methods of this place made my blood tingle. I went about and everywhere I saw possibilities for development and enterprise. There were fortunes to be made here. It seemed to me absurd that the copra should be taken away from here in sacks and the oil extracted in America. It would be far more economical to do all that on the spot, with cheap labour, and save freight, and I saw already the vast factories springing up on the island. Then the way they extracted it from the coconut seemed to me hopelessly inadequate and I invented a machine which divided the nut and scooped out the meat at the rate of two hundred and forty an hour. The harbour was not large enough. I made plans to enlarge it, then to form a syndicate to buy land, put up two or three large hotels, and bungalows for occasional residents; I had a scheme for improving the steamer service in order to attract visitors from California. In twenty years, instead of this half–French, lazy little town of Papeete I saw a great American city with ten–storey buildings and street–cars, a theatre and an opera house, a stock exchange and a mayor.’

‘But go ahead, Edward,’ cried Bateman, springing up from the chair in excitement. ‘You’ve got the ideas and the capacity. Why, you’ll become the richest man between Australia and the States.’

Edward chuckled softly.

‘But I don’t want to,’ he said.

‘Do you mean to say you don’t want money, big money, money running into millions? Do you know what you can do with it? Do you know the power it brings? And if you don’t care about it for yourself think what you can do, opening new channels for human enterprise, giving occupation to thousands. My brain reels at the visions your words have conjured up.’

‘Sit down, then, my dear Bateman,’ laughed Edward. ‘My machine for cutting the coconuts will always remain unused, and so far as I’m concerned street–cars shall never run in the idle streets of Papeete.’

Bateman sank heavily into his chair.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said.

‘It came upon me little by little. I came to like the life here, with its ease and its leisure, and the people, with their good nature and their happy smiling faces. I began to think. I’d never had time to do that before. I began to read.’

‘You always read.’

‘I read for examinations. I read in order to be able to hold my own in conversation. I read for instruction. Here I learned to read for pleasure. I learned to talk. Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure. I’d always been too busy before. And gradually all the life that had seemed so important to me began to seem rather trivial and vulgar. What is the use of all this hustle and this constant striving? I think of Chicago now and I see a dark, grey city, all stone–it is like a prison–and a ceaseless turmoil. And what does all that activity amount to? Does one get there the best out of life? Is that what we come into the world for, to hurry to an office, and work hour after hour till night, then hurry home and dine and go to a theatre? Is that how I must spend my youth? Youth lasts so short a time, Bateman. And when I am old, what have I to look forward to? To hurry from my home in the morning to my office and work hour after hour till night, and then hurry home again, and dine and go to a theatre? That may be worth while if you make a fortune; I don’t know, it depends on your nature; but if you don’t, is it worth while then? I want to make more out of my life than that, Bateman.’

‘What do you value in life then?’

‘I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me. Beauty, truth, and goodness.’

‘Don’t you think you can have those in Chicago?’

‘Some men can, perhaps, but not I.’ Edward sprang up now. ‘I tell you when I think of the life I led in the old days I am filled with horror,’ he cried violently. ‘I tremble with fear when I think of the danger I have escaped. I never knew I had a soul till I found it here. If I had remained a rich man I might have lost it for good and all.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ cried Bateman indignantly. ‘We often used to have discussions about it.’

‘Yes, I know. They were about as effectual as the discussions of deaf mutes about harmony. I shall never come back to Chicago, Bateman.’

‘And what about Isabel?’

Edward walked to the edge of the veranda and leaning over looked intently at the blue magic of the night. There was a slight smile on his face when he turned back to Bateman.

‘Isabel is infinitely too good for me. I admire her more than any woman I have ever known. She has a wonderful brain and she’s as good as she’s beautiful. I respect her energy and her ambition. She was born to make a success of life. I am entirely unworthy of her.’

‘She doesn’t think so.’

‘But you must tell her so, Bateman.’

‘I?’ cried Bateman. ‘I’m the last person who could ever do that.’

Edward had his back to the vivid light of the moon and his face could not be seen. Is it possible that he smiled again?

‘It’s no good your trying to conceal anything from her, Bateman. With her quick intelligence she’ll turn you inside out in five minutes. You’d better make a clean breast of it right away.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. Of course I shall tell her I’ve seen you.’ Bateman spoke in some agitation. ‘Honestly I don’t know what to say to her.’

‘Tell her that I haven’t made good. Tell her that I’m not only poor, but that I’m content to be poor. Tell her I was fired from my job because I was idle and inattentive. Tell her all you’ve seen tonight and all I’ve told you.’

The idea which on a sudden flashed through Bateman’s brain brought him to his feet and in uncontrollable perturbation he faced Edward.

‘Man alive, don’t you want to marry her?’

Edward looked at him gravely.

‘I can never ask her to release me. If she wishes to hold me to my word I will do my best to make her a good and loving husband.’

‘Do you wish me to give her that message, Edward? Oh, I can’t. It’s terrible. It’s never dawned on her for a moment that you don’t want to marry her. She loves you. How can I inflict such a mortification on her?’

Edward smiled again.

‘Why don’t you marry her yourself, Bateman? You’ve been in love with her for ages. You’re perfectly suited to one another. You’ll make her very happy.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that. I can’t bear it.’

‘I resign in your favour, Bateman. You are the better man.’

There was something in Edward’s tone that made Bateman look up quickly, but Edward’s eyes were grave and unsmiling. Bateman did not know what to say. He was disconcerted. He wondered whether Edward could possibly suspect that he had come to Tahiti on a special errand. And though he knew it was horrible he could not prevent the exultation in his heart.

‘What will you do if Isabel writes and puts an end to her engagement with you?’ he said, slowly.

‘Survive,’ said Edward.

Bateman was so agitated that he did not hear the answer.

‘I wish you had ordinary clothes on,’ he said, somewhat irritably. ‘It’s such a tremendously serious decision you’re taking. That fantastic costume of yours makes it seem terribly casual.’

‘I assure you, I can be just as solemn in a pareo and a wreath of roses, as in a high hat and a cut–away coat.’

Then another thought struck Bateman.

‘Edward, it’s not for my sake you’re doing this? I don’t know, but perhaps this is going to make a tremendous difference to my future. You’re not sacrificing yourself for me? I couldn’t stand for that, you know.’

‘No, Bateman, I have learnt not to be silly and sentimental here. I should like you and Isabel to be happy, but I have not the least wish to be unhappy myself.’

The answer somewhat chilled Bateman. It seemed to him a little cynical. He would not have been sorry to act a noble part.

‘Do you mean to say you’re content to waste your life here? It’s nothing less than suicide. When I think of the great hopes you had when we left college it seems terrible that you should be content to be no more than a salesman in a cheap–John store.’

‘Oh, I’m only doing that for the present, and I’m gaining a great deal of valuable experience. I have another plan in my head. Arnold Jackson has a small island in the Paumotas, about a thousand miles from here, a ring of land round a lagoon. He’s planted coconut there. He’s offered to give it me.’

‘Why should he do that?’ asked Bateman.

‘Because if Isabel releases me I shall marry his daughter.’

‘You?’ Bateman was thunderstruck. ‘You can’t marry a half–caste. You wouldn’t be so crazy as that.’

‘She’s a good girl, and she has a sweet and gentle nature. I think she would make me very happy.’

‘Are you in love with her?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Edward reflectively. ‘I’m not in love with her as I was in love with Isabel. I worshipped Isabel. I thought she was the most wonderful creature I had ever seen. I was not half good enough for her. I don’t feel like that with Eva. She’s like a beautiful exotic flower that must be sheltered from bitter winds. I want to protect her. No one ever thought of protecting Isabel. I think she loves me for myself and not for what I may become. Whatever happens to me I shall never disappoint her. She suits me.’

Bateman was silent.

‘We must turn out early in the morning,’ said Edward at last. ‘It’s really about time we went to bed.’

Then Bateman spoke and his voice had in it a genuine distress.

‘I’m so bewildered, I don’t know what to say. I came here because I thought something was wrong. I thought you hadn’t succeeded in what you set out to do and were ashamed to come back when you’d failed. I never guessed I should be faced with this. I’m so desperately sorry, Edward. I’m so disappointed. I hoped you would do great things. It’s almost more than I can bear to think of you wasting your talents and your youth and your chance in this lamentable way.’

‘Don’t be grieved, old friend,’ said Edward. ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve succeeded. You can’t think with what zest I look forward to life, how full it seems to me and how significant. Sometimes, when you are married to Isabel, you will think of me. I shall build myself a house on my coral island and I shall live there, looking after my trees–getting the fruit out of the nuts in the same old way that they have done for unnumbered years–I shall grow all sorts of things in my garden, and I shall fish. There will be enough work to keep me busy and not enough to make me dull. I shall have my books and Eva, children, I hope, and above all, the infinite variety of the sea and the sky, the freshness of the dawn and the beauty of the sunset, and the rich magnificence of the night. I shall make a garden out of what so short a while ago was a wilderness. I shall have created something. The years will pass insensibly, and when I am an old man I hope I shall be able to look back on a happy, simple, peaceful life. In my small way I too shall have lived in beauty. Do you think it is so little to have enjoyed contentment? We know that it will profit a man little if he gain the whole world and lose his soul. I think I have won mine.’

Edward led him to a room in which there were two beds and he threw himself on one of them. In ten minutes Bateman knew by his regular breathing, peaceful as a child’s, that Edward was asleep. But for his part he had no rest, he was disturbed in mind, and it was not till the dawn crept into the room, ghostlike and silent, that he fell asleep.

Bateman finished telling Isabel his long story. He had hidden nothing from her except what he thought would wound her or what made himself ridiculous. He did not tell her that he had been forced to sit at dinner with a wreath of flowers round his head and he did not tell her that Edward was prepared to marry her uncle’s half–caste daughter the moment she set him free. But perhaps Isabel had keener intuitions than he knew, for as he went on with his tale her eyes grew colder and her lips closed upon one another more tightly. Now and then she looked at him closely, and if he had been less intent on his narrative he might have wondered at her expression.

‘What was this girl like?’ she asked when he finished. ‘Uncle Arnold’s daughter. Would you say there was any resemblance between her and me?’

Bateman was surprised at the question.

‘It never struck me. You know I’ve never had eyes for anyone but you and I could never think that anyone was like you. Who could resemble you?’

‘Was she pretty?’ said Isabel, smiling slightly at his words.

‘I suppose so. I daresay some men would say she was very beautiful.’

‘Well, it’s of no consequence. I don’t think we need give her any more of our attention.’

‘What are you going to do, Isabel?’ he asked then.

Isabel looked down at the hand which still bore the ring Edward had given her on their betrothal.

‘I wouldn’t let Edward break our engagement because I thought it would be an incentive to him. I wanted to be an inspiration to him. I thought if anything could enable him to achieve success it was the thought that I loved him. I have done all I could. It’s hopeless. It would only be weakness on my part not to recognize the facts. Poor Edward, he’s nobody’s enemy but his own. He was a dear, nice fellow, but there was something lacking in him, I suppose it was backbone. I hope he’ll be happy.’

She slipped the ring off her finger and placed it on the table. Bateman watched her with a heart beating so rapidly that he could hardly breathe.

‘You’re wonderful, Isabel, you’re simply wonderful.’

She smiled, and, standing up, held out her hand to him.

‘How can I ever thank you for what you’ve done for me?’ she said. ‘You have done me a great service. I knew I could trust you.’

He took her hand and held it. She had never looked more beautiful.

‘Oh, Isabel, I would do so much more for you than that. You know that I only ask to be allowed to love and serve you.’

‘You’re so strong, Bateman,’ she sighed. ‘It gives me such a delicious feeling of confidence.’

‘Isabel, I adore you.’

He hardly knew how the inspiration had come to him, but suddenly he clasped her in his arms; she, all unresisting, smiled into his eyes.

‘Isabel, you know I wanted to marry you the very first day I saw you,’ he cried passionately.

‘Then why on earth didn’t you ask me?’ she replied.

She loved him. He could hardly believe it was true. She gave him her lovely lips to kiss. And as he held her in his arms he had a vision of the works of the Hunter Motor Traction and Automobile Company growing in size and importance till they covered a hundred acres, and of the millions of motors they would turn out, and of the great collection of pictures he would form which should beat anything they had in New York. He would wear horn spectacles. And she, with the delicious pressure of his arms about her, sighed with happiness, for she thought of the exquisite house she would have, full of antique furniture, and of the concerts she would give, and of the thés dansants, and the dinners to which only the most cultured people would come.

‘Poor Edward,’ she sighed.

HONOLULU

The wise traveller travels only in imagination. An old Frenchman (he was really a Savoyard) once wrote a book called Voyage autour de ma Chambre. I have not read it and do not even know what it is about, but the title stimulates my fancy. In such a journey I could circumnavigate the globe. An eikon by the chimneypiece can take me to Russia with its great forests of birch and its white, domed churches. The Volga is wide, and at the end of a straggling village, in the wine–shop, bearded men in rough sheepskin coats sit drinking. I stand on the little hill from which Napoleon first saw Moscow and I look upon the vastness of the city. I will go down and see the people whom I know more intimately than so many of my friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more. But my eyes fall on a piece of porcelain and I smell the acrid odours of China. I am borne in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields, or else I skirt a tree–clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and mysterious, I hear the deep sound of a monastery bell. In the streets of Peking there is a motley crowd and it scatters to allow passage to a string of camels, stepping delicately, that bring skins and strange drugs from the stony deserts of Mongolia. In England, in London, there are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and the light is so bleak that your heart sinks, but then you can look out of your window, and you see the coconut trees crowded upon the beach of a coral island. The strand is silvery and when you walk along in the sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it. Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to–do, and the surf beats ceaselessly against the reef. Those are the best journeys, the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions.

But there are people who take salt in their coffee. They say it gives it a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment which you must experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is like the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly makes him more interesting.

Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu. It is so far away from Europe, it is reached after so long a journey from San Francisco, so strange and so charming associations are attached to the name, that at first I could hardly believe my eyes. I do not know that I had formed in my mind any very exact picture of what I expected, but what I found caused me a great surprise. It is a typical western city. Shacks are cheek by jowl with stone mansions: dilapidated frame houses stand next door to smart stores with plate–glass windows; electric cars rumble noisily along the streets; and motors, Fords, Buicks, Packards, line the pavement. The shops are filled with all the necessities of American civilization. Every third house is a bank and every fifth the agency of a steamship company.

Along the streets crowd an unimaginable assortment of people. The Americans, ignoring the climate, wear black coats and high, starched collars, straw hats, soft hats, and bowlers. The Kanakas, pale brown, with crisp hair, have nothing on but a shirt and a pair of trousers; but the half–breeds are very smart with flaring ties and patent–leather boots. The Japanese, with their obsequious smile, are neat and trim in white duck, while their women walk a step or two behind them, in native dress, with a baby on their backs. The Japanese children, in bright coloured frocks, their little heads shaven, look like quaint dolls. Then there are the Chinese. The men, fat and prosperous, wear their American clothes oddly, but the women are enchanting with their tightly–dressed black hair, so neat that you feel it can never be disarranged, and they are very clean in their tunics and trousers, white, or powder–blue, or black. Lastly there are the Filipinos, the men in huge straw hats, the women in bright yellow muslin with great puffed sleeves.

It is the meeting–place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you expected you have come upon something singularly intriguing. All these strange people live close to each other, with different languages and different thoughts; they believe in different gods and they have different values; two passions alone they share, love and hunger. And somehow as you watch them you have an impression of extraordinary vitality. Though the air is so soft and the sky so blue, you have, I know not why, a feeling of something hotly passionate that beats like a throbbing pulse through the crowd. Though the native policeman at the corner, standing on a platform, with a white club to direct the traffic, gives the scene an air of respectability, you cannot but feel that it is a respectability only of the surface; a little below there is darkness and mystery. It gives you just that thrill, with a little catch at the heart, that you have when at night in the forest the silence trembles on a sudden with the low, insistent beating of a drum. You are all expectant of I know not what.

If I have dwelt on the incongruity of Honolulu, it is because just this, to my mind, gives its point to the story I want to tell. It is a story of primitive superstition, and it startles me that anything of the sort should survive in a civilization which, if not very distinguished, is certainly very elaborate. I cannot get over the fact that such incredible things should happen, or at least be thought to happen, right in the middle, so to speak, of telephones, tramcars, and daily papers. And the friend who showed me Honolulu had the same incongruity which I felt from the beginning was its most striking characteristic.

He was an American named Winter and I had brought a letter of introduction to him from an acquaintance in New York. He was a man between forty and fifty, with scanty black hair, grey at the temples, and a sharp–featured, thin face. His eyes had a twinkle in them and his large horn spectacles gave him a demureness which was not a little diverting. He was tall rather than otherwise and very spare. He was born in Honolulu and his father had a large store which sold hosiery and all such goods, from tennis racquets to tarpaulins, as a man of fashion could require. It was a prosperous business and I could well understand the indignation of Winter père when his son, refusing to go into it, had announced his determination to be an actor. My friend spent twenty years on the stage, sometimes in New York, but more often on the road, for his gifts were small; but at last, being no fool, he came to the conclusion that it was better to sell sock–suspenders in Honolulu than to play small parts in Cleveland, Ohio. He left the stage and went into the business. I think after the hazardous existence he had lived so long, he thoroughly enjoyed the luxury of driving a large car and living in a beautiful house near the golf–course, and I am quite sure, since he was a man of parts, he managed the business competently. But he could not bring himself entirely to break his connexion with the arts and since he might no longer act he began to paint. He took me to his studio and showed me his work. It was not at all bad, but not what I should have expected from him. He painted nothing but still life, very small pictures, perhaps eight by ten; and he painted very delicately, with the utmost finish. He had evidently a passion for detail. His fruit pieces reminded you of the fruit in a picture by Ghirlandajo. While you marvelled a little at his patience, you could not help being impressed by his dexterity. I imagine that he failed as an actor because his effects, carefully studied, were neither bold nor broad enough to get across the footlights.

I was entertained by the proprietary, yet ironical air with which he showed me the city. He thought in his heart that there was none in the United States to equal it, but he saw quite clearly that his attitude was comic. He drove me round to the various buildings and swelled with satisfaction when I expressed a proper admiration for their architecture. He showed me the houses of rich men.

‘That’s the Stubbses’ house,’ he said. ‘It cost a hundred thousand dollars to build. The Stubbses are one of our best families. Old man Stubbs came here as a missionary more than seventy years ago.’

He hesitated a little and looked at me with twinkling eyes through his big round spectacles.

‘All our best families are missionary families,’ he said. ‘You’re not very much in Honolulu unless your father or your grandfather converted the heathen.’

’Is that so?’

‘Do you know your Bible?’

‘Fairly,’ I answered.

‘There is a text which says: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. I guess it runs differently in Honolulu. The fathers brought Christianity to the Kanaka and the children jumped his land.’

‘Heaven helps those who help themselves,’ I murmured.

‘It surely does. By the time the natives of this island had embraced Christianity they had nothing else they could afford to embrace. The kings gave the missionaries land as a mark of esteem, and the missionaries bought land by way of laying up treasure in heaven. It surely was a good investment. One missionary left the business–I think one may call it a business without offence–and became a land agent, but that is an exception. Mostly it was their sons who looked after the commercial side of the concern. Oh, it’s a fine thing to have a father who came here fifty years ago to spread the faith.’

But he looked at his watch.

‘Gee, it’s stopped. That means it’s time to have a cocktail.’

We sped along an excellent road, bordered with red hibiscus, and came back into the town.

‘Have you been to the Union Saloon?’

‘Not yet.’

‘We’ll go there.’

I knew it was the most famous spot in Honolulu and I entered it with a lively curiosity. You get to it by a narrow passage from King Street, and in the passage are offices, so that thirsty souls may be supposed bound for one of these just as well as for the saloon. It is a large square room, with three entrances, and opposite the bar, which runs the length of it, two corners have been partitioned off into little cubicles. Legend states that they were built so that King Kalakaua might drink there without being seen by his subjects, and it is pleasant to think that in one or other of these he may have sat over his bottle, a coal–black potentate, with Robert Louis Stevenson. There is a portrait of him, in oils, in a rich gold frame; but there are also two prints of Queen Victoria. On the walls, besides, are old line engravings of the eighteenth century, one of which, and heaven knows how it got there, is after a theatrical picture by De Wilde; and there are oleographs from the Christmas supplements of the Graphic and the Illustrated London News of twenty years ago. Then there are advertisements of whisky, gin, champagne, and beer; and photographs of baseball teams and of native orchestras.

The place seemed to belong not to the modern, hustling world that I had left in the bright street outside, but to one that was dying. It had the savour of the day before yesterday. Dingy and dimly lit, it had a vaguely mysterious air and you could imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. It suggested a more lurid time, when ruthless men carried their lives in their hands, and violent deeds diapered the monotony of life.

When I went in, the saloon was fairly full. A group of business men stood together at the bar, discussing affairs, and in a corner two Kanakas were drinking. Two or three men who might have been store–keepers were shaking dice. The rest of the company plainly followed the sea; they were captains of tramps, first mates, and engineers. Behind the bar, busily making the Honolulu cocktail for which the place was famous, served two large half–castes, in white, fat, clean–shaven and dark–skinned, with thick, curly hair and large bright eyes.

Winter seemed to know more than half the company, and when we made our way to the bar a little fat man in spectacles, who was standing by himself, offered him a drink.

‘No, you have one with me, Captain,’ said Winter.

He turned to me.

‘I want you to know Captain Butler.’

The little man shook hands with me. We began to talk, but, my attention distracted by my surroundings, took small notice of him, and after we had each ordered a cocktail we separated. When we had got into the motor again and were driving away, Winter said to me:

‘I’m glad we ran up against Butler. I wanted you to meet him. What did you think of him?’

‘I don’t know that I thought very much of him at all,’ I answered.

‘Do you believe in the supernatural?’

‘I don’t exactly know that I do,’ I smiled.

‘A very queer thing happened to him a year or two ago. You ought to have him tell you about it.’

‘What sort of thing?’ Winter did not answer my question.

‘I have no explanation of it myself,’ he said. ‘But there’s no doubt about the facts. Are you interested in things like that?’

‘Things like what?’

‘Spells and magic and all that.’

‘I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t.’

Winter paused for a moment.

‘I guess I won’t tell you myself. You ought to hear it from his own lips so that you can judge. How are you fixed up for tonight?’

‘I’ve got nothing on at all.’

‘Well, I’ll get hold of him between now and then and see if we can’t go down to his ship.’

Winter told me something about him. Captain Butler had spent all his life on the Pacific. He had been in much better circumstances than he was now, for he had been first officer and then captain of a passenger–boat plying along the coast of California, but he had lost his ship and a number of passengers had been drowned.

‘Drink, I guess,’ said Winter.

Of course there had been an inquiry, which had cost him his certificate, and then he drifted further afield. For some years he had knocked about the South Seas, but he was now in command of a small schooner which sailed between Honolulu and the various islands of the group. It belonged to a Chinese to whom the fact that his skipper had no certificate meant only that he could be had for lower wages, and to have a white man in charge was always an advantage.

And now that I had heard this about him I took the trouble to remember more exactly what he was like. I recalled his round spectacles and the round blue eyes behind them, and so gradually reconstructed him before my mind. He was a little man, without angles, plump, with a round face like the full moon and a little fat round nose. He had fair short hair, and he was red–faced and clean–shaven. He had plump hands, dimpled on the knuckles, and short fat legs. He was a jolly soul, and the tragic experience he had gone through seemed to have left him unscarred. Though he must have been thirty–four or thirty–five he looked much younger. But after all I had given him but a superficial attention, and now that I knew of this catastrophe, which had obviously ruined his life, I promised myself that when I saw him again I would take more careful note of him. It is very curious to observe the differences of emotional response that you find in different people. Some can go through terrible battles, the fear of imminent death and unimaginable horrors, and preserve their soul unscathed, while with others the trembling of the moon on a solitary sea or the song of a bird in a thicket will cause a convulsion great enough to transform their entire being. Is it due to strength or weakness, want of imagination or instability of character? I do not know. When I called up in my fancy that scene of shipwreck, with the shrieks of the drowning and the terror, and then later, the ordeal of the inquiry, the bitter grief of those who sorrowed for the lost, and the harsh things he must have read of himself in the papers, the shame and the disgrace, it came to me with a shock to remember that Captain Butler had talked with the frank obscenity of a schoolboy of the Hawaiian girls and of Iwelei, the Red Light district, and of his successful adventures. He laughed readily, and one would have thought he could never laugh again. I remembered his shining, white teeth; they were his best feature. He began to interest me, and thinking of him and of his gay insouciance I forgot the particular story, to hear which I was to see him again. I wanted to see him rather to find out if I could a little more what sort of man he was.

Winter made the necessary arrangements and after dinner we went down to the water front. The ship’s boat was waiting for us and we rowed out. The schooner was anchored some way across the harbour, not far from the breakwater. We came alongside, and I heard the sound of a ukulele. We clambered up the ladder.

‘I guess he’s in the cabin,’ said Winter, leading the way.

It was a small cabin, bedraggled and dirty, with a table against one side and a broad bench all round upon which slept, I supposed, such passengers as were ill–advised enough to travel in such a ship. A petroleum lamp gave a dim light. The ukulele was being played by a native girl and Butler was lolling on the seat, half lying, with his head on her shoulder and an arm round her waist.

‘Don’t let us disturb you, Captain,’ said Winter, facetiously.

‘Come right in,’ said Butler, getting up and shaking hands with us. ‘What’ll you have?’

It was a warm night, and through the open door you saw countless stars in a heaven that was still almost blue. Captain Butler wore a sleeveless undershirt, showing his fat white arms, and a pair of incredibly dirty trousers. His feet were bare, but on his curly head he wore a very old, a very shapeless felt hat.

‘Let me introduce you to my girl. Ain’t she a peach?’

We shook hands with a very pretty person. She was a good deal taller than the captain, and even the Mother Hubbard, which the missionaries of a past generation had, in the interests of decency, forced on the unwilling natives, could not conceal the beauty of her form. One could not but suspect that age would burden her with a certain corpulence, but now she was graceful and alert. Her brown skin had an exquisite translucency and her eyes were magnificent. Her black hair, very thick and rich, was coiled round her head in a massive plait. When she smiled in a greeting that was charmingly natural, she showed teeth that were small, even, and white. She was certainly a most attractive creature. It was easy to see that the captain was madly in love with her. He could not take his eyes off her; he wanted to touch her all the time. That was very easy to understand; but what seemed to me stranger was that the girl was apparently in love with him. There was a light in her eyes that was unmistakable, and her lips were slightly parted as though in a sigh of desire. It was thrilling. It was even a little moving, and I could not help feeling somewhat in the way. What had a stranger to do with this lovesick pair? I wished that Winter had not brought me. And it seemed to me that the dingy cabin was transfigured and now it seemed a fit and proper scene for such an extremity of passion. I thought I should never forget that schooner in the harbour of Honolulu, crowded with shipping, and yet, under the immensity of the starry sky, remote from all the world. I liked to think of those lovers sailing off together in the night over the empty spaces of the Pacific from one green, hilly island to another. A faint breeze of romance softly fanned my cheek.

And yet Butler was the last man in the world with whom you would have associated romance, and it was hard to see what there was in him to arouse love. In the clothes he wore now he looked podgier than ever, and his round spectacles gave his round face the look of a prim cherub. He suggested rather a curate who had gone to the dogs. His conversation was peppered with the quaintest Americanisms, and it is because I despair of reproducing these that, at whatever loss of vividness, I mean to narrate the story he told me a little later in my own words. Moreover he was unable to frame a sentence without an oath, though a good–natured one, and his speech, albeit offensive only to prudish ears, in print would seem coarse. He was a mirth–loving man, and perhaps that accounted not a little for his successful amours; since women, for the most part frivolous creatures, are excessively bored by the seriousness with which men treat them, and they can seldom resist the buffoon who makes them laugh. Their sense of humour is crude, Diana of Ephesus is always prepared to fling prudence to the winds for the red–nosed comedian who sits on his hat. I realized that Captain Butler had charm. If I had not known the tragic story of the shipwreck I should have thought he had never had a care in his life.

Our host had rung the bell on our entrance and now a Chinese cook came in with more glasses and several bottles of soda. The whisky and the captain’s empty glass stood already on the table. But when I saw the Chinese I positively started, for he was certainly the ugliest man I had ever seen. He was very short, but thick–set, and he had a bad limp. He wore a singlet and a pair of trousers that had been white, but were now filthy, and, perched on a shock of bristly, grey hair, an old tweed deer–stalker. It would have been grotesque on any Chinese, but on him it was outrageous. His broad, square face was very flat as though it had been bashed in by a mighty fist, and it was deeply pitted with smallpox; but the most revolting thing in him was a very pronounced harelip which had never been operated on, so that his upper lip, cleft, went up in an angle to his nose, and in the opening was a huge yellow fang. It was horrible. He came in with the end of a cigarette at the corner of his mouth and this, I do not know why, gave him a devilish expression.

He poured out the whisky and opened a bottle of soda.

‘Don’t drown it, John,’ said the captain.

He said nothing, but handed a glass to each of us. Then he went out.

‘I saw you lookin’ at my Chink,’ said Butler, with a grin on his fat, shining face.

‘I should hate to meet him on a dark night,’ I said.

‘He sure is homely,’ said the captain, and for some reason he seemed to say it with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘But he’s fine for one thing, I’ll tell the world; you just have to have a drink every time you look at him.’

But my eyes fell on a calabash that hung against the wall over the table, and I got up to look at it. I had been hunting for an old one and this was better than any I had seen outside the museum.

‘It was given me by a chief over on one of the islands,’ said the captain, watching me. ‘I done him a good turn and he wanted to give me something good.’

‘He certainly did,’ I answered.

I was wondering whether I could discreetly make Captain Butler an offer for it, I could not imagine that he set any store on such an article, when, as though he read my thoughts, he said:

‘I wouldn’t sell that for ten thousand dollars.’

‘I guess not,’ said Winter. ‘It would be a crime to sell it.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘That comes into the story,’ returned Winter. ‘Doesn’t it, Captain?’

‘It surely does.’

‘Let’s hear it then.’

‘The night’s young yet,’ he answered.

The night distinctly lost its youth before he satisfied my curiosity, and meanwhile we drank a great deal too much whisky while Captain Butler narrated his experiences of San Francisco in the old days and of the South Seas. At last the girl fell asleep. She lay curled up on the seat, with her face on her brown arm, and her bosom rose and fell gently with her breathing. In sleep she looked sullen, but darkly beautiful.

He had found her on one of the islands in the group among which, whenever there was cargo to be got, he wandered with his crazy old schooner. The Kanakas have little love for work, and the laborious Chinese, the cunning Japs, have taken the trade out of their hands. Her father had a strip of land on which he grew taro and bananas and he had a boat in which he went fishing. He was vaguely related to the mate of the schooner, and it was he who took Captain Butler up to the shabby little frame house to spend an idle evening. They took a bottle of whisky with them and the ukulele. The captain was not a shy man and when he saw a pretty girl he made love to her. He could speak the native language fluently and it was not long before he had overcome the girl’s timidity. They spent the evening singing and dancing, and by the end of it she was sitting by his side and he had his arm round her waist. It happened that they were delayed on the island for several days and the captain, at no time a man to hurry, made no effort to shorten his stay. He was very comfortable in the snug little harbour and life was long. He had a swim round his ship in the morning and another in the evening. There was a chandler’s shop on the water front where sailormen could get a drink of whisky, and he spent the best part of the day there, playing cribbage with the half–caste who owned it. At night the mate and he went up to the house where the pretty girl lived and they sang a song or two and told stories. It was the girl’s father who suggested that he should take her away with him. They discussed the matter in a friendly fashion, while the girl, nestling against the captain, urged him by the pressure of her hands and her soft smiling glances. He had taken a fancy to her and he was a domestic man. He was a little dull sometimes at sea and it would be very pleasant to have a pretty little creature like that about the old ship. He was of a practical turn too, and he recognized that it would be useful to have someone around to darn his socks and look after his linen. He was tired of having his things washed by a Chink who tore everything to pieces; the natives washed much better, and now and then when the captain went ashore at Honolulu he liked to cut a dash in a smart duck suit. It was only a matter of arranging a price. The father wanted two hundred and fifty dollars, and the captain, never a thrifty man, could not put his hand on such a sum. But he was a generous one, and with the girl’s soft face against his, he was not inclined to haggle. He offered to give a hundred and fifty dollars there and then and another hundred in three months. There was a good deal of argument and the parties could not come to any agreement that night, but the idea had fired the captain, and he could not sleep as well as usual. He kept dreaming of the lovely girl and each time he awoke it was with the pressure of her soft, sensual lips on his. He cursed himself in the morning, because a bad night at poker the last time he was at Honolulu had left him so short of ready money. And if the night before he had been in love with the girl, this morning he was crazy about her.

‘See here, Bananas,’ he said to the mate, ‘I’ve got to have that girl. You go and tell the old man I’ll bring the dough up tonight and she can get fixed up. I figure we’ll be ready to sail at dawn.’

I have no idea why the mate was known by that eccentric name. He was called Wheeler, but though he had that English surname there was not a drop of white blood in him. He was a tall man, and well–made though inclined to stoutness, but much darker than is usual in Hawaii. He was no longer young, and his crisply curling, thick hair was grey. His upper front teeth were cased in gold. He was very proud of them. He had a marked squint and this gave him a saturnine expression. The captain, who was fond of a joke, found in it a constant source of humour and hesitated the less to rally him on the defect because he realized that the mate was sensitive about it. Bananas, unlike most of the natives, was a taciturn fellow and Captain Butler would have disliked him if it had been possible for a man of his good nature to dislike anyone. He liked to be at sea with someone he could talk to, he was a chatty, sociable creature, and it was enough to drive a missionary to drink to live there day after day with a chap who never opened his mouth. He did his best to wake the mate up, that is to say, he chaffed him without mercy, but it was poor fun to laugh by oneself, and he came to the conclusion that, drunk or sober, Bananas was no fit companion for a white man. But he was a good seaman and the captain was shrewd enough to know the value of a mate he could trust. It was not rare for him to come aboard, when they were sailing, fit for nothing but to fall into his bunk, and it was worth something to know that he could stay there till he had slept his liquor off, since Bananas could be relied on. But he was an unsociable devil, and it would be a treat to have someone he could talk to. That girl would be fine. Besides, he wouldn’t be so likely to get drunk when he went ashore if he knew there was a little girl waiting for him when he came on board again.

He went to his friend the chandler and over a peg of gin asked him for a loan. There were one or two useful things a ship’s captain could do for a ship’s chandler, and after a quarter of an hour’s conversation in low tones (there is no object in letting all and sundry know your business), the captain crammed a wad of notes in his hip–pocket, and that night, when he went back to his ship the girl went with him.

What Captain Butler, seeking for reasons to do what he had already made up his mind to, had anticipated, actually came to pass. He did not give up drinking, but he ceased to drink to excess. An evening with the boys, when he had been away from town two or three weeks, was pleasant enough, but it was pleasant too to get back to his little girl; he thought of her, sleeping so softly, and how, when he got into his cabin and leaned over her, she would open her eyes lazily and stretch out her arms for him: it was as good as a full hand. He found he was saving money, and since he was a generous man he did the right thing by the little girl: he gave her some silver–backed brushes for her long hair, and a gold chain, and a reconstructed ruby for her finger. Gee, but it was good to be alive.

A year went by, a whole year, and he was not tired of her yet. He was not a man who analysed his feelings, but this was so surprising that it forced itself upon his attention. There must be something very wonderful about that girl. He couldn’t help seeing that he was more wrapped up in her than ever, and sometimes the thought entered his mind that it might not be a bad thing if he married her.

Then, one day the mate did not come in to dinner or to tea. Butler did not bother himself about his absence at the first meal, but at the second he asked the Chinese cook:

‘Where’s the mate? He no come tea?’

‘No wantchee,’ said the Chink.

‘He ain’t sick?’

‘No savvy.’

Next day Bananas turned up again, but he was more sullen than ever, and after dinner the captain asked the girl what was the matter with him. She smiled and shrugged her pretty shoulders. She told the captain that Bananas had taken a fancy to her and he was sore because she had told him off. The captain was a good–humoured man and he was not of a jealous nature; it struck him as exceeding funny that Bananas should be in love. A man who had a squint like that had a precious poor chance. When tea came round he chaffed him gaily. He pretended to speak in the air, so that the mate should not be certain that he knew anything, but he dealt him some pretty shrewd blows. The girl did not think him as funny as he thought himself, and afterwards she begged him to say nothing more. He was surprised at her seriousness. She told him he did not know her people. When their passion was aroused they were capable of anything. She was a little frightened. This was so absurd to him that he laughed heartily.

‘If he comes bothering round you, you just threaten to tell me. That’ll fix him.’

‘Better fire him, I think.’

‘Not on your sweet life. I know a good sailor when I see one. But if he don’t leave you alone I’ll give him the worst licking he’s ever had.’

Perhaps the girl had a wisdom unusual in her sex. She knew that it was useless to argue with a man when his mind was made up, for it only increased his stubbornness, and she held her peace. And now on the shabby schooner, threading her way across the silent sea, among those lovely islands, was enacted a dark, tense drama of which the fat little captain remained entirely ignorant. The girl’s resistance fired Bananas so that he ceased to be a man, but was simply blind desire. He did not make love to her gently or gaily, but with a black and savage ferocity. Her contempt now was changed to hatred and when he besought her she answered him with bitter, angry taunts. But the struggle went on silently, and when the captain asked her after a little while whether Bananas was bothering her, she lied.

But one night, when they were in Honolulu, he came on board only just in time. They were sailing at dawn. Bananas had been ashore, drinking some native spirit, and he was drunk. The captain, rowing up, heard sounds that surprised him. He scrambled up the ladder. He saw Bananas, beside himself, trying to wrench open the cabin door. He was shouting at the girl. He swore he would kill her if she did not let him in.

‘What in hell are you up to?’ cried Butler.

The mate let go the handle, gave the captain a look of savage hate, and without a word turned away.

‘Stop here. What are you doing with that door?’

The mate still did not answer. He looked at him with sullen, bootless rage.

‘I’ll teach you not to pull any of your queer stuff with me, you dirty, crosseyed nigger,’ said the captain.

He was a good foot shorter than the mate and no match for him, but he was used to dealing with native crews, and he had his knuckle–duster handy. Perhaps it was not an instrument that a gentleman would use, but then Captain Butler was not a gentleman. Nor was he in the habit of dealing with gentlemen. Before Bananas knew what the captain was at, his right arm had shot out and his fist, with its ring of steel, caught him fair and square on the jaw. He fell like a bull under the pole–axe.

‘That’ll learn him,’ said the captain.

Bananas did not stir. The girl unlocked the cabin door and came out.

’Is he dead?’

‘He ain’t.’

He called a couple of men and told them to carry the mate to his bunk. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction and his round blue eyes gleamed behind his spectacles. But the girl was strangely silent. She put her arms round him as though to protect him from invisible harm.

It was two or three days before Bananas was on his feet again, and when he came out of his cabin his face was torn and swollen. Through the darkness of his skin you saw the livid bruise. Butler saw him slinking along the deck and called him. The mate went to him without a word.

‘See here, Bananas,’ he said to him, fixing his spectacles on his slippery nose, for it was very hot. ‘I ain’t going to fire you for this, but you know now that when I hit, I hit hard. Don’t forget it and don’t let me have any more funny business.’

Then he held out his hand and gave the mate that good–humoured, flashing smile of his which was his greatest charm. The mate took the outstretched hand and twitched his swollen lips into a devilish grin. The incident in the captain’s mind was so completely finished that when the three of them sat at dinner he chaffed Bananas on his appearance. He was eating with difficulty and, his swollen face still more distorted by pain, he looked truly a repulsive object.

That evening, when he was sitting on the upper deck, smoking his pipe, a shiver passed through the captain.

‘I don’t know what I should be shiverin’ for on a night like this,’ he grumbled. ‘Maybe I’ve gotten a dose of fever. I’ve been feelin’ a bit queer all day.’

When he went to bed he took some quinine, and next morning he felt better, but a little washed out, as though he were recovering from a debauch.

‘I guess my liver’s out of order,’ he said, and he took a pill.

He had not much appetite that day and towards evening he began to feel very unwell. He tried the next remedy he knew, which was to drink two or three hot whiskies, but that did not seem to help him much, and when in the morning he surveyed himself in the glass he thought he was not looking quite the thing.

‘If I ain’t right by the time we get back to Honolulu I’ll just give Dr Denby a call. He’ll sure fix me up.’

He could not eat. He felt a great lassitude in all his limbs. He slept soundly enough, but he awoke with no sense of refreshment; on the contrary he felt a peculiar exhaustion. And the energetic little man, who could not bear the thought of lying in bed, had to make an effort to force himself out of his bunk. After a few days he found it impossible to resist the languor that oppressed him, and he made up his mind not to get up.

‘Bananas can look after the ship,’ he said. ‘He has before now.’

He laughed a little to himself as he thought how often he had lain speechless in his bunk after a night with the boys. That was before he had his girl. He smiled at her and pressed her hand. She was puzzled and anxious. He saw that she was concerned about him and tried to reassure her. He had never had a day’s illness in his life and in a week at the outside he would be as right as rain.

‘I wish you’d fired Bananas,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a feeling that he’s at the bottom of this.’

‘Damned good thing I didn’t, or there’d be no one to sail the ship. I know a good sailor when I see one.’ His blue eyes, rather pale now, with the whites all yellow, twinkled. ‘You don’t think he’s trying to poison me, little girl?’

She did not answer, but she had one or two talks with the Chinese cook, and she took great care with the captain’s food. But he ate little enough now, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that she persuaded him to drink a cup of soup two or three times a day. It was clear that he was very ill, he was losing weight quickly, and his chubby face was pale and drawn. He suffered no pain, but merely grew every day weaker and more languid. He was wasting away. The round trip on this occasion lasted about four weeks and by the time they came to Honolulu the captain was a little anxious about himself. He had not been out of his bed for more than a fortnight and really he felt too weak to get up and go to the doctor. He sent a message asking him to come on board. The doctor examined him, but could find nothing to account for his condition. His temperature was normal.

‘See here, Captain,’ he said, ‘I’ll be perfectly frank with you. I don’t know what’s the matter with you, and just seeing you like this don’t give me a chance. You come into the hospital so that we can keep you under observation. There’s nothing organically wrong with you, I know that, and my impression is that a few weeks in hospital ought to put you to rights.’

‘I ain’t going to leave my ship.’

Chinese owners were queer customers, he said; if he left his ship because he was sick, his owner might fire him, and he couldn’t afford to lose his job. So long as he stayed where he was his contract safeguarded him, and he had a first–rate mate. Besides, he couldn’t leave his girl. No man could want a better nurse; if anyone could pull him through she would. Every man had to die once and he only wished to be left in peace. He would not listen to the doctor’s expostulations, and finally the doctor gave in.

‘I’ll write you a prescription,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and see if it does you any good. You’d better stay in bed for a while.’

‘There ain’t much fear of my getting up, doc,’ answered the captain. ‘I feel as weak as a cat.’

But he believed in the doctor’s prescription as little as did the doctor himself, and when he was alone amused himself by lighting his cigar with it. He had to get amusement out of something, for his cigar tasted like nothing on earth, and he smoked only to persuade himself that he was not too ill to. That evening a couple of friends of his, masters of tramp steamers, hearing he was sick came to see him. They discussed his case over a bottle of whisky and a box of Philippine cigars. One of them remembered how a mate of his had been taken queer just like that and not a doctor in the United States had been able to cure him. He had seen in the paper an advertisement of a patent medicine, and thought there’d be no harm in trying it. That man was as strong as ever he’d been in his life after two bottles. But his illness had given Captain Butler a lucidity which was new and strange, and while they talked he seemed to read their minds. They thought he was dying. And when they left him he was afraid.

The girl saw his weakness. This was her opportunity. She had been urging him to let a native doctor see him, and he had stoutly refused; but now she entreated him. He listened with harassed eyes. He wavered. It was very funny that the American doctor could not tell what was the matter with him. But he did not want her to think that he was scared. If he let a damned nigger come along and look at him, it was to comfort her. He told her to do what she liked.

The native doctor came the next night. The captain was lying alone, half awake, and the cabin was dimly lit by an oil lamp. The door was softly opened and the girl came in on tip–toe. She held the door open and someone slipped in silently behind her. The captain smiled at this mystery, but he was so weak now, the smile was no more than a glimmer in his eyes. The doctor was a little, old man, very thin and very wrinkled, with a completely bald head, and the face of a monkey. He was bowed and gnarled like an old tree. He looked hardly human, but his eyes were very bright, and in the half darkness they seemed to glow with a reddish light. He was dressed filthily in a pair of ragged dungarees, and the upper part of his body was naked. He sat down on his haunches and for ten minutes looked at the captain. Then he felt the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. The girl watched him with frightened eyes. No word was spoken. Then he asked for something that the captain had worn. The girl gave him the old felt hat which the captain used constantly and taking it he sat down again on the floor, clasping it firmly with both hands; and rocking backwards and forwards slowly he muttered some gibberish in a very low tone.

At last he gave a little sigh and dropped the hat. He took an old pipe out of his trouser pocket and lit it. The girl went over to him and sat by his side. He whispered something to her, and she started violently. For a few minutes they talked in hurried undertones, and then they stood up. She gave him money and opened the door for him. He slid out as silently as he had come in. Then she went over to the captain and leaned over him so that she could speak into his ear.

‘It’s an enemy praying you to death.’

‘Don’t talk fool stuff, girlie,’ he said impatiently.

‘It’s truth. It’s God’s truth. That’s why the American doctor couldn’t do anything. Our people can do that. I’ve seen it done. I thought you were safe because you were a white man.’

‘I haven’t an enemy.’

‘Bananas.’

‘What’s he want to pray me to death for?’

‘You ought to have fired him before he had a chance.’

‘I guess if I ain’t got nothing more the matter with me than Bananas’ hoodoo I shall be sitting up and taking nourishment in a very few days.’

She was silent for a while and she looked at him intently.

‘Don’t you know you’re dying?’ she said to him at last.

That was what the two skippers had thought, but they hadn’t said it. A shiver passed across the captain’s wan face.

‘The doctor says there ain’t nothing really the matter with me. I’ve only to lie quiet for a bit and I shall be all right.’

She put her lips to his ear as if she were afraid that the air itself might hear.

‘You’re dying, dying, dying. You’ll pass out with the old moon.’

‘That’s something to know.’

‘You’ll pass out with the old moon unless Bananas dies before.’

He was not a timid man and he had recovered already from the shock her words, and still more her vehement, silent manner, had given him. Once more a smile flickered in his eyes.

‘I guess I’ll take my chance, girlie.’

‘There’s twelve days before the new moon.’

There was something in her tone that gave him an idea.

‘See here, my girl, this is all bunk. I don’t believe a word of it. But I don’t want you to try any of your monkey tricks with Bananas. He ain’t a beauty, but he’s a first–rate mate.’

He would have said a good deal more, but he was tired out. He suddenly felt very weak and faint. It was always at that hour that he felt worse. He closed his eyes. The girl watched him for a minute and then slipped out of the cabin. The moon, nearly full, made a silver pathway over the dark sea. It shone from an unclouded sky. She looked at it with terror, for she knew that with its death the man she loved would die. His life was in her hands. She could save him, she alone could save him, but the enemy was cunning, and she must be cunning too. She felt that someone was looking at her, and without turning, by the sudden fear that seized her, knew that from the shadow the burning eyes of the mate were fixed upon her. She did not know what he could do; if he could read her thoughts she was defeated already, and with a desperate effort she emptied her mind of all content. His death alone could save her lover, and she could bring his death about. She knew that if he could be brought to look into a calabash in which was water so that a reflection of him was made, and the reflection were broken by hurtling the water, he would die as though he had been struck by lightning; for the reflection was his soul. But none knew better than he the danger, and he could be made to look only by a guile which had lulled his least suspicion. He must never think that he had an enemy who was on the watch to cause his destruction. She knew what she had to do. But the time was short, the time was terribly short. Presently she realized that the mate had gone. She breathed more freely.

Two days later they sailed, and there were ten now before the new moon. Captain Butler was terrible to see. He was nothing but skin and bone, and he could not move without help. He could hardly speak. But she dared do nothing yet. She knew that she must be patient. The mate was cunning, cunning. They went to one of the smaller islands of the group and discharged cargo, and now there were only seven days more. The moment had come to start. She brought some things out of the cabin she shared with the captain and made them into a bundle. She put the bundle in the deck cabin where she and Bananas ate their meals, and at dinner time, when she went in, he turned quickly and she saw that he had been looking at it. Neither of them spoke, but she knew what he suspected. She was making her preparations to leave the ship. He looked at her mockingly. Gradually, as though to prevent the captain from knowing what she was about, she brought everything she owned into the cabin, and some of the captain’s clothes, and made them all into bundles. At last Bananas could keep silence no longer. He pointed to a suit of ducks.

‘What are you going to do with that?’ he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I’m going back to my island.’

He gave a laugh that distorted his grim face. The captain was dying and she meant to get away with all she could lay hands on.

‘What’ll you do if I say you can’t take those things? They’re the captain’s.’ ‘They’re no use to you,’ she said.

There was a calabash hanging on the wall. It was the very calabash I had seen when I came into the cabin and which we had talked about. She took it down. It was all dusty, so she poured water into it from the water–bottle, and rinsed it with her fingers.

‘What are you doing with that?’

‘I can sell it for fifty dollars,’ she said.

‘If you want to take it you’ll have to pay me.’

‘What d’you want?’

‘You know what I want.’

She allowed a fleeting smile to play on her lips. She flashed a quick look at him and quickly turned away. He gave a gasp of desire. She raised her shoulders in a little shrug. With a savage bound he sprang upon her and seized her in his arms. Then she laughed. She put her arms, her soft, round arms, about his neck, and surrendered herself to him voluptuously.

When the morning came she roused him out of a deep sleep. The early rays of the sun slanted into the cabin. He pressed her to his heart. Then he told her that the captain could not last more than a day or two, and the owner wouldn’t so easily find another white man to command the ship. If Bananas offered to take less money he would get the job and the girl could stay with him. He looked at her with love–sick eyes. She nestled up against him. She kissed his lips, in the foreign way, in the way the captain had taught her to kiss. And she promised to stay. Bananas was drunk with happiness.

It was now or never.

She got up and went to the table to arrange her hair. There was no mirror and she looked into the calabash, seeking for her reflection. She tidied her beautiful hair. Then she beckoned to Bananas to come to her. She pointed to the calabash.

‘There’s something in the bottom of it,’ she said.

Instinctively, without suspecting anything, Bananas looked full into the water. His face was reflected in it. In a flash she beat upon it violently, with both her hands, so that they pounded on the bottom and the water splashed up. The reflection was broken in pieces. Bananas started back with a sudden hoarse cry and he looked at the girl. She was standing there with a look of triumphant hatred on her face. A horror came into his eyes. His heavy features were twisted in agony, and with a thud, as though he had taken a violent poison, he crumpled up on the ground. A great shudder passed through his body and he was still. She leaned over him callously. She put her hand on his heart and then she pulled down his lower eye–lid. He was quite dead.

She went into the cabin in which lay Captain Butler. There was a faint colour in his cheeks and he looked at her in a startled way.

‘What’s happened?’ he whispered.

They were the first words he had spoken for forty–eight hours.

‘Nothing’s happened,’ she said.

‘I feel all funny.’

Then his eyes closed and he fell asleep. He slept for a day and a night, and when he awoke he asked for food. In a fortnight he was well.

It was past midnight when Winter and I rowed back to shore and we had drunk innumerable whiskies and sodas.

‘What do you think of it all?’ asked Winter.

‘What a question! II you mean, have I any explanation to suggest, I haven’t.’ ‘The captain believes every word of it.’

‘That’s obvious; but, you know, that’s not the part that interests me most: whether it’s true or not, and what it all means; the part that interests me is that such things should happen to such people. I wonder what there is in that common–place little man to arouse such a passion in that lovely creature. As I watched her, asleep there, while he was telling the story I had some fantastic idea about the power of love being able to work miracles.’

‘But that’s not the girl,’ said Winter.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Didn’t you notice the cook?’

‘Of course I did. He’s the ugliest man I ever saw.’

‘That’s why Butler took him. The girl ran away with the Chinese cook last year. This is a new one. He’s only had her there about two months.’

‘Well, I’m hanged.’

‘He thinks this cook is safe. But I wouldn’t be too sure in his place. There’s something about a Chink, when he lays himself out to please a woman she can’t resist him.’

THE LUNCHEON

I CAUGHT sight of her at the play and in answer to her beckoning I went over during the interval and sat down beside her. It was long since I had last seen her and if someone had not mentioned her name I hardly think I would have recognised her. She addressed me brightly.

“Well, it’s many years since we first met. How time does fly! We’re none of us getting any younger. Do you remember the first time I saw you? You asked me to luncheon.”

Did I remember?

It was twenty years ago and I was living in Paris. I had a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarter overlooking a cemetery and I was earning barely enough money to keep body and soul together. She had read a book of mine and had written to me about it. I answered, thanking her, and presently I received from her another letter saying that she was passing through Paris and would like to have a chat with me; but her time was limited and the only free moment she had was on the following Thursday; she was spending the morning at the Luxembourg and would I give her a little luncheon at Foyot’s afterwards? Foyot’s is a restaurant at which the French senators eat and it was so far beyond my means that I had never even thought of going there. But I was flattered and I was too young to have learned to say no to a woman. (Few men, I may add, learn this until they are too old to make it of any consequence to a woman what they say.) I had eighty francs (gold francs) to last me the rest of the month and a modest luncheon should not cost more than fifteen. If I cut out coffee for the next two weeks I could manage well enough.

I answered that I would meet my friend — by correspondence — at Foyot’s on Thursday at half-past twelve. She was not so young as I expected and in appearance imposing rather than attractive. She was in fact a woman of forty (a charming age, but not one that excites a sudden and devastating passion at first sight), and she gave me the impression of having more teeth, white and large and even, than were necessary for any practical purpose. She was talkative, but since she seemed inclined to talk about me I was prepared to be an attentive listener.

I was startled when the bill of fare was brought, for the prices were a great deal higher than I had anticipated. But she reassured me.

“I never eat anything for luncheon,” she said.

“Oh, don’t say that!” I answered generously.

“I never eat more than one thing. I think people eat far too much nowadays. A little fish, perhaps. I wonder if they have any salmon.”

Well, it was early in the year for salmon and it was not on the bill of fare, but I asked the waiter if there was any. Yes, a beautiful salmon had just come in, it was the first they had had. I ordered it for my guest. The waiter asked her if she would have something while it was being cooked.

“No,” she answered, “I never eat more than one thing. Unless you had a little caviare. I never mind caviare.”

My heart sank a little. I knew I could not afford caviare, but I could not very well tell her that. I told the waiter by all means to bring caviare. For myself I chose the cheapest dish on the menu and that was a mutton chop.

“I think you’re unwise to eat meat,” she said. “I don’t know how you can expect to work after eating heavy things like chops. I don’t believe in overloading my stomach.”

Then came the question of drink.

“I never drink anything for luncheon,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I answered promptly.

“Except white wine,” she proceeded as though I had not spoken. “These French white wines are so light. They’re wonderful for the digestion.”

“What would you like?” I asked, hospitable still, but not exactly effusive.

She gave me a bright and amicable flash of her white teeth.

“My doctor won’t let me drink anything but champagne.”

I fancy I turned a trifle pale. I ordered half a bottle. I mentioned casually that my doctor had absolutely forbidden me to drink champagne.

“What are you going to drink, then?”

“Water.”

She ate the caviare and she ate the salmon. She talked gaily of art and literature and music. But I wondered what the bill would come to. When my mutton chop arrived she took me quite seriously to task.

“I see that you’re in the habit of eating a heavy luncheon. I’m sure it’s a mistake. Why don’t you follow my example and just eat one thing? I’m sure you’d feel ever so much better for it.”

“I am only going to eat one thing,” I said, as the waiter came again with the bill of fare.

She waved him aside with an airy gesture.

“No, no, I never eat anything for luncheon. Just a bite, I never want more than that, and I eat that more as an excuse for conversation than anything else. I couldn’t possibly eat anything more — unless they had some of those giant asparagus. I should be sorry to leave Paris without having some of them.”

My heart sank. I had seen them in the shops and I knew that they were horribly expensive. My mouth had often watered at the sight of them.

“Madame wants to know if you have any of those giant asparagus,” I asked the waiter.

I tried with all my might to will him to say no. A happy smile spread over his broad, priest-like face, and he assured me that they had some so large, so splendid, so tender, that it was a marvel.

“I’m not in the least hungry,” my guest sighed, “but if you insist I don’t mind having some asparagus.”

I ordered them.

“Aren’t you going to have any?”

“No, I never eat asparagus.”

“I know there are people who don’t like them. The fact is, you ruin your palate by all the meat you eat.”

We waited for the asparagus to be cooked. Panic seized me. It was not a question now how much money I should have left over for the rest of the month, but whether I had enough to pay the bill. It would be mortifying to find myself ten francs short and be obliged to borrow from my guest. I could not bring myself to do that. I knew exactly how much I had and if the bill came to more I made up my mind that I would put my hand in my pocket and with a dramatic cry start up and say it had been picked. Of course it would be awkward if she had not money enough either to pay the bill. Then the only thing would be to leave my watch and say I would come back and pay later.

The asparagus appeared. They were enormous, succulent and appetising. The smell of the melted butter tickled my nostrils as the nostrils of Jehovah were tickled by the burned offerings of the virtuous Semites. I watched the abandoned woman thrust them down her throat in large voluptuous mouthfuls and in my polite way I discoursed on the condition of the drama in the Balkans. At last she finished.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Yes, just an ice-cream and coffee,” she answered.

I was past caring now, so I ordered coffee for myself and an ice-cream and coffee for her.

“You know, there’s one thing I thoroughly believe in,” she said, as she ate the ice-cream. “One should always get up from a meal feeling one could eat a little more.”

“Are you still hungry?” I asked faintly.

“Oh, no, I’m not hungry; you see, I don’t eat luncheon. I have a cup of coffee in the morning and then dinner, but I never eat more than one thing for luncheon. I was speaking for you.”

“Oh, I see!”

Then a terrible thing happened. While we were waiting for the coffee, the head waiter, with an ingratiating smile on his false face, came up to us bearing a large basket full of huge peaches. They had the blush of an innocent girl; they had the rich tone of an Italian landscape. But surely peaches were not in season then? Lord knew what they cost. I knew too — a little later, for my guest, going on with her conversation, absentmindedly took one.

“You see, you’ve filled your stomach with a lot of meat” — my one miserable little chop— “and you can’t eat any more. But I’ve just had a snack and I shall enjoy a peach.”

The bill came and when I paid it I found that I had only enough for a quite inadequate tip. Her eyes rested for an instant on the three francs I left for the waiter and I knew that she thought me mean. But when I walked out of the restaurant I had the whole month before me and not a penny in my pocket.

“Follow my example,” she said as we shook hands, “and never eat more than one thing for luncheon.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I retorted. “I’ll eat nothing for dinner to-night.”

“Humorist!” she cried gaily, jumping into a cab. “You’re quite a humorist!”

But I have had my revenge at last. I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the result with complacency. To-day she weighs twenty-one stone.

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

When I was a very small boy I was made to learn by heart certain of the fables of La Fontaine, and the moral of each was carefully explained to me. Among those I learnt was The Ant and The Grasshopper which is devised to bring home to the young the useful lesson that in an imperfect world industry is rewarded and giddiness punished. In this admirable fable (I apologize for telling something which everyone is politely, but inexactly, supposed to know) the ant spends a laborious summer gathering its winter store, while the grasshopper sits on a blade of grass singing to the sun. Winter comes and the ant is comfortably provided for, but the grasshopper has an empty larder: he goes to the ant and begs for a little food. Then the ant gives him her classic answer:

‘What were you doing in the summer time?’

‘Saving your presence, I sang, I sang all day, all night.’

‘You sang. Why, then go and dance.’

I do not ascribe it to perversity on my part, but rather to the inconsequence of childhood, which is deficient in moral sense, that I could never quite reconcile myself to the lesson. My sympathies were with the grasshopper and for some time I never saw an ant without putting my foot on it. In this summary (and as I have discovered since, entirely human) fashion I sought to express my disapproval of prudence and common sense.

I could not help thinking of this fable when the other day I saw George Ramsay lunching by himself in a restaurant. I never saw anyone wear an expression of such deep gloom. He was staring into space. He looked as though the burden of the whole world sat on his shoulders. I was sorry for him: I suspected at once that his unfortunate brother had been causing trouble again. I went up to him and held out my hand.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m not in hilarious spirits,’ he answered.

’Is it Tom again?’

He sighed.

‘Yes, it’s Tom again.’

‘Why don’t you chuck him? You’ve done everything in the world for him. You must know by now that he’s quite hopeless.’

I suppose every family has a black sheep. Tom had been a sore trial to his for twenty years. He had begun life decently enough: he went into business, married, and had two children. The Ramsays were perfectly respectable people and there was every reason to suppose that Tom Ramsay would have a useful and honourable career. But one day, without warning, he announced that he didn’t like work and that he wasn’t suited for marriage. He wanted to enjoy himself. He would listen to no expostulations. He left his wife and his office. He had a little money and he spent two happy years in the various capitals of Europe. Rumours of his doings reached his relations from time to time and they were profoundly shocked. He certainly had a very good time. They shook their heads and asked what would happen when his money was spent. They soon found out: he borrowed. He was charming and unscrupulous. I have never met anyone to whom it was more difficult to refuse a loan. He made a steady income from his friends and he made friends easily. But he always said that the money you spent on necessities was boring; the money that was amusing to spend was the money you spent on luxuries. For this he depended on his brother George. He did not waste his charm on him. George was a serious man and insensible to such enticements. George was respectable. Once or twice he fell to Tom’s promises of amendment and gave him considerable sums in order that he might make a fresh start. On these Tom bought a motor–car and some very nice jewellery. But when circumstances forced George to realize that his brother would never settle down and he washed his hands of him, Tom, without a qualm, began to blackmail him. It was not very nice for a respectable lawyer to find his brother shaking cocktails behind the bar of his favourite restaurant or to see him waiting on the box–seat of a taxi outside his club. Tom said that to serve in a bar or to drive a taxi was a perfectly decent occupation, but if George could oblige him with a couple of hundred pounds he didn’t mind for the honour of the family giving it up. George paid.

Once Tom nearly went to prison. George was terribly upset. He went into the whole discreditable affair. Really Tom had gone too far. He had been wild, thoughtless, and selfish, but he had never before done anything dishonest, by which George meant illegal; and if he were prosecuted he would assuredly be convicted. But you cannot allow your only brother to go to gaol. The man Tom had cheated, a man called Cronshaw, was vindictive. He was determined to take the matter into court; he said Tom was a scoundrel and should be punished. It cost George an infinite deal of trouble and five hundred pounds to settle the affair. I have never seen him in such a rage as when he heard that Tom and Cronshaw had gone off together to Monte Carlo the moment they cashed the cheque. They spent a happy month there.

For twenty years Tom raced and gambled, philandered with the prettiest girls, danced, ate in the most expensive restaurants, and dressed beautifully. He always looked as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox. Though he was forty–six you would never have taken him for more than thirty–five. He was a most amusing companion and though you knew he was perfectly worthless you could not but enjoy his society. He had high spirits, an unfailing gaiety, and incredible charm. I never grudged the contributions he regularly levied on me for the necessities of his existence. I never lent him fifty pounds without feeling that I was in his debt. Tom Ramsay knew everyone and everyone knew Tom Ramsay. You could not approve of him, but you could not help liking him.

Poor George, only a year older than his scapegrace brother, looked sixty. He had never taken more than a fortnight’s holiday in the year for a quarter of a century. He was in his office every morning at nine–thirty and never left it till six. He was honest, industrious, and worthy. He had a good wife, to whom he had never been unfaithful even in thought, and four daughters to whom he was the best of fathers. He made a point of saving a third of his income and his plan was to retire at fifty–five to a little house in the country where he proposed to cultivate his garden and play golf. His life was blameless. He was glad that he was growing old because Tom was growing old too. He rubbed his hands and said:

‘It was all very well when Tom was young and good–looking, but he’s only a year younger than I am. In four years he’ll be fifty. He won’t find life so easy then. I shall have thirty thousand pounds by the time I’m fifty. For twenty–five years I’ve said that Tom would end in the gutter. And we shall see how he likes that. We shall see if it really pays best to work or be idle.’

Poor George! I sympathized with him. I wondered now as I sat down beside him what infamous thing Tom had done. George was evidently very much upset.

‘Do you know what’s happened now?’ he asked me. I was prepared for the worst. I wondered if Tom had got into the hands of the police at last. George could hardly bring himself to speak.

‘You’re not going to deny that all my life I’ve been hardworking, decent, respectable, and straightforward. After a life of industry and thrift I can look forward to retiring on a small income in gilt–edged securities. I’ve always done my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Providence to place me.’

‘True.’

‘And you can’t deny that Tom has been an idle, worthless, dissolute, and dishonourable rogue. If there were any justice he’d be in the workhouse.’

‘True.’

George grew red in the face.

‘A few weeks ago he became engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother. And now she’s died and left him everything she had. Half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London, and a house in the country.’

George Ramsay beat his clenched fist on the table.

‘It’s not fair, I tell you, it’s not fair. Damn it, it’s not fair.’

I could not help it. I burst into a shout of laughter as I looked at George’s wrathful face, I rolled in my chair, I very nearly fell on the floor. George never forgave me. But Tom often asks me to excellent dinners in his charming house in Mayfair, and if he occasionally borrows a trifle from me, that is merely from force of habit. It is never more than a sovereign.

HOME

THE farm lay in a hollow among the Somersetshire hills, an old- fashioned stone house surrounded by barns and pens and out-houses. Over the doorway the date when it was built had been carved in the elegant figures of the period, 1673, and the house, grey and weather-beaten, looked as much a part of the landscape as the trees that sheltered it. An avenue of splendid elms that would have been the pride of many a squire’s mansion led from the road to the trim garden. The people who lived here were as stolid, sturdy and unpretentious as the house; their only boast was that ever since it was built from father to son in one unbroken line they had been born and died in it. For three hundred years they had farmed the surrounding land. George Meadows was now a man of fifty, and his wife was a year or two younger. They were both fine, upstanding people in the prime of life; and their children, two sons and three girls, were handsome and strong. They had no newfangled notions about being gentlemen and ladies; they knew their place and were proud of it. I have never seen a more united household. They were merry, industrious and kindly. Their life was patriarchal. It had a completeness that gave it a beauty as definite as that of a symphony by Beethoven or a picture by Titian. They were happy and they deserved their happiness. But the master of the house was not George Meadows (not by a long chalk, they said in the village); it was his mother. She was twice the man her son was, they said. She was a woman of seventy, tall, upright and dignified, with grey hair, and though her face was much wrinkled, her eyes were bright and shrewd. Her word was law in the house and on the farm; but she had humour, and if her rule was despotic it was also kindly. People laughed at her jokes and repeated them. She was a good business woman and you had to get up very early in the morning to best her in a bargain. She was a character. She combined in a rare degree good will with an alert sense of the ridiculous.

One day Mrs. George stopped me on my way home. She was all in a flutter. (Her mother-in-law was the only Mrs. Meadows we knew; George’s wife was only known as Mrs. George.)

“Whoever do you think is coming here to-day?” she asked me. “Uncle George Meadows. You know, him as was in China.”

“Why, I thought he was dead.”

“We all thought he was dead.”

I had heard the story of Uncle George Meadows a dozen times, and it had amused me because it had the savour of an old ballad: it was oddly touching to come across it in real life. For Uncle George Meadows and Tom, his younger brother, had both courted Mrs. Meadows when she was Emily Green, fifty years and more ago, and when she married Tom, George had gone away to sea.

They heard of him on the China coast. For twenty years now and then he sent them presents; then there was no more news of him; when Tom Meadows died his widow wrote and told him, but received no answer; and at last they came to the conclusion that he must be dead. But two or three days ago to their astonishment they had received a letter from the matron of the sailors’ home at Portsmouth. It appeared that for the last ten years George Meadows, crippled with rheumatism, had been an inmate and now, feeling that he had not much longer to live, wanted to see once more the house in which he was born. Albert Meadows, his great-nephew, had gone over to Portsmouth in the Ford to fetch him and he was to arrive that afternoon.

“Just fancy,” said Mrs. George, “he’s not been here for more than fifty years. He’s never even seen my George, who’s fifty-one next birthday.”

“And what does Mrs. Meadows think of it?” I asked.

“Well, you know what she is. She sits there and smiles to herself. All she says is, ‘He was a good-looking young fellow when he left, but not so steady as his brother.’ That’s why she chose my George’s father. ‘But he’s probably quietened down by now,’ she says.”

Mrs. George asked me to look in and see him. With the simplicity of a country woman who had never been further from her home than London, she thought that because we had both been in China we must have something in common. Of course I accepted. I found the whole family assembled when I arrived; they were sitting in the great old kitchen, with its stone floor, Mrs. Meadows in her usual chair by the fire, very upright, and I was amused to see that she had put on her best silk dress, while her son and his wife sat at the table with their children. On the other side of the fireplace sat an old man, bunched up in a chair. He was very thin and his skin hung on his bones like an old suit much too large for him; his face was wrinkled and yellow and he had lost nearly all his teeth.

I shook hands with him.

“Well, I’m glad to see you’ve got here safely, Mr. Meadows,” I said.

“Captain,” he corrected.

“He walked here,” Albert, his great-nephew, told me. “When he got to the gate he made me stop the car and said he wanted to walk.”

“And mind you, I’ve not been out of my bed for two years. They carried me down and put me in the car. I thought I’d never walk again, but when I see them elm trees, I remember my father set a lot of store by them elm trees, I felt I could walk. I walked down that drive fifty-two years ago when I went away and now I’ve walked back again.”

“Silly, I call it,” said Mrs. Meadows.

“It’s done me good. I feel better and stronger than I have for ten years. I’ll see you out yet, Emily.”

“Don’t you be too sure,” she answered.

I suppose no one had called Mrs. Meadows by her first name for a generation. It gave me a little shock, as though the old man were taking a liberty with her. She looked at him with a shrewd smile in her eyes and he, talking to her, grinned with his toothless gums. It was strange to look at them, these two old people who had not seen one another for half a century, and to think that all that long time ago he had loved her and she had loved another. I wondered if they remembered what they had felt then and what they had said to one another. I wondered if it seemed to him strange now that for that old woman he had left the home of his fathers, his lawful inheritance, and lived an exile’s life.

“Have you ever been married, Captain Meadows?” I asked.

“Not me,” he said, in his quavering voice, with a grin. “I know too much about women for that.”

“That’s what you say,” retorted Mrs. Meadows. “If the truth was known I shouldn’t be surprised to hear as how you’d had half a dozen black wives in your day.”

“They’re not black in China, Emily, you ought to know better than that, they’re yellow.”

“Perhaps that’s why you’ve got so yellow yourself When I saw you, I said to myself, why, he’s got jaundice.”

“I said I’d never marry anyone but you, Emily, and I never have.”

He said this not with pathos or resentment, but as a mere statement of fact, as a man might say, “I said I’d walk twenty miles and I’ve done it.” There was a trace of satisfaction in the speech.

“Well, you might have regretted it if you had,” she answered.

I talked a little with the old man about China.

“There’s not a port in China that I don’t know better than you know your coat pocket. Where a ship can go I’ve been. I could keep you sitting here all day long for six months and not tell you half the things I’ve seen in my day.”

“Well, one thing you’ve not done, George, as far as I can see,” said Mrs. Meadows, the mocking but not unkindly smile still in her eyes, “and that’s to make a fortune.”

“I’m not one to save money. Make it and spend it; that’s my motto. But one thing I can say for myself: if I had the chance of going through my life again I’d take it. And there’s not many as’ll say that.”

“No, indeed,” I said.

I looked at him with admiration and respect. He was a toothless, crippled, penniless old man, but he had made a success of life, for he had enjoyed it. When I left him he asked me to come and see him again next day. If I was interested in China he would tell me all the stories I wanted to hear.

Next morning I thought I would go and ask if the old man would like to see me. I strolled down the magnificent avenue of elm trees and when I came to the garden saw Mrs. Meadows picking flowers. I bade her good-morning and she raised herself. She had a huge armful of white flowers. I glanced at the house and I saw that the blinds were drawn: I was surprised, for Mrs. Meadows liked the sunshine.

“Time enough to live in the dark when you’re buried,” she always said.

“How’s Captain Meadows?” I asked her.

“He always was a harum-scarum fellow,” she answered. “When Lizzie took him a cup of tea this morning she found he was dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. Died in his sleep. I was just picking these flowers to put in the room. Well, I’m glad he died in that old house. It always means a lot to them Meadows to do that.”

They had had a good deal of difficulty in persuading him to go to bed. He had talked to them of all the things that had happened to him in his long life. He was happy to be back in his old home. He was proud that he had walked up the drive without assistance, and he boasted that he would live for another twenty years. But fate had been kind: death had written the full-stop in the right, place.

Mrs. Meadows smelt the white flowers that she held in her arms. “Well, I’m glad he came back,” she said. “After I married Tom Meadows and George went away, the fact is I was never quite sure that I’d married the right one.”

THE POOL

When I was introduced to Lawson by Chaplin, the owner of the Hotel Metropole at Apia, I paid no particular attention to him. We were sitting in the lounge over an early cocktail and I was listening with amusement to the gossip of the island.

Chaplin entertained me. He was by profession a mining engineer and perhaps it was characteristic of him that he had settled in a place where his professional attainments were of no possible value. It was, however, generally reported that he was an extremely clever mining engineer. He was a small man, neither fat nor thin, with black hair, scanty on the crown, turning grey, and a small, untidy moustache; his face, partly from the sun and partly from liquor, was very red. He was but a figurehead, for the hotel, though so grandly named but a frame building of two storeys, was managed by his wife, a tall, gaunt Australian of five–and–forty, with an imposing presence and a determined air. The little man, excitable and often tipsy, was terrified of her, and the stranger soon heard of domestic quarrels in which she used her fist and her foot in order to keep him in subjection. She had been known after a night of drunkenness to confine him for twenty–four hours to his own room, and then he could be seen, afraid to leave his prison, talking somewhat pathetically from his veranda to people in the street below.

He was a character, and his reminiscences of a varied life, whether true or not, made him worth listening to, so that when Lawson strolled in I was inclined to resent the interruption. Although not midday, it was clear that he had had enough to drink, and it was without enthusiasm that I yielded to his persistence and accepted his offer of another cocktail. I knew already that Chaplin’s head was weak. The next round which in common politeness I should be forced to order would be enough to make him lively, and then Mrs Chaplin would give me black looks.

Nor was there anything attractive in Lawson’s appearance. He was a little thin man, with a long, sallow face and a narrow, weak chin, a prominent nose, large and bony, and great shaggy black eyebrows. They gave him a peculiar look. His eyes, very large and very dark, were magnificent. He was jolly, but his jollity did not seem to me sincere; it was on the surface, a mask which he wore to deceive the world, and I suspected that it concealed a mean nature. He was plainly anxious to be thought a ‘good sport’ and he was hail–fellow–well–met; but, I do not know why, I felt that he was cunning and shifty. He talked a great deal in a raucous voice, and he and Chaplin capped one another’s stories of beanos which had become legendary, stories of ‘wet’ nights at the English Club, of shooting expeditions where an incredible amount of whisky had been consumed, and of jaunts to Sydney of which their pride was that they could remember nothing from the time they landed till the time they sailed. A pair of drunken swine. But even in their intoxication, for by now, after four cocktails each, neither was sober, there was a great difference between Chaplin, rough and vulgar, and Lawson: Lawson might be drunk, but he was certainly a gentleman.

At last he got out of his chair, a little unsteadily.

‘Well, I’ll be getting along home,’ he said. ‘See you before dinner.’ ‘Missus all right?’ said Chaplin.

‘Yes.’

He went out. There was a peculiar note in the monosyllable of his answer which made me look up.

‘Good chap,’ said Chaplin flatly, as Lawson went out of the door into the sunshine. ‘One of the best. Pity he drinks.’

This from Chaplin was an observation not without humour.

‘And when he’s drunk he wants to fight people.’

’Is he often drunk?’

‘Dead drunk, three or four days a week. It’s the island done it, and Ethel.’ ‘Who’s Ethel?’

‘Ethel’s his wife. Married a half–caste. Old Brevald’s daughter. Took her away from here. Only thing to do. But she couldn’t stand it, and now they’re back again. He’ll hang himself one of these days, if he don’t drink himself to death.

Good chap. Nasty when he’s drunk.’

Chaplin belched loudly.

‘I’ll go and put my head under the shower. I oughtn’t to have had that last cocktail. It’s always the last one that does you in.’

He looked uncertainly at the staircase as he made up his mind to go to the cubby hole in which was the shower, and then with unnatural seriousness got up.

‘Pay you to cultivate Lawson,’ he said. ‘A well–read chap. You’d be surprised when he’s sober. Clever too. Worth talking to.’

Chaplin had told me the whole story in these few speeches.

When I came in towards evening from a ride along the seashore Lawson was again in the hotel. He was heavily sunk in one of the cane chairs in the lounge and he looked at me with glassy eyes. It was plain that he had been drinking all the afternoon. He was torpid, and the look on his face was sullen and vindictive. His glance rested on me for a moment, but I could see that he did not recognize me. Two or three other men were sitting there, shaking dice, and they took no notice of him. His condition was evidently too usual to attract attention. I sat down and began to play.

‘You’re a damned sociable lot,’ said Lawson suddenly.

He got out of his chair and waddled with bent knees towards the door. I do not know whether the spectacle was more ridiculous than revolting. When he had gone one of the men sniggered.

‘Lawson’s fairly soused today,’ he said.

‘If I couldn’t carry my liquor better than that,’ said another, ‘I’d climb on the waggon and stay there.’

Who would have thought that this wretched object was in his way a romantic figure or that his life had in it those elements of pity and terror which the theorist tells us are necessary to achieve the effect of tragedy?

I did not see him again for two or three days.

I was sitting one evening on the first floor of the hotel on a veranda that overlooked the street when Lawson came up and sank into a chair beside me.

He was quite sober. He made a casual remark and then, when I had replied somewhat indifferently, added with a laugh which had in it an apologetic tone: ‘I was devilish soused the other day.’

I did not answer. There was really nothing to say. I pulled away at my pipe in the vain hope of keeping the mosquitoes away, and looked at the natives going home from their work. They walked with long steps, slowly, with care and dignity, and the soft patter of their naked feet was strange to hear. Their dark hair, curling or straight, was often white with lime, and then they had a look of extraordinary distinction. They were tall and finely built. Then a gang of Solomon Islanders, indentured labourers, passed by, singing; they were shorter and slighter than the Samoans, coal–black, with great heads of fuzzy hair dyed red. Now and then a white man drove past in his buggy or rode into the hotel yard. In the lagoon two or three schooners reflected their grace in the tranquil water.

‘I don’t know what there is to do in a place like this except to get soused,’ said Lawson at last.

‘Don’t you like Samoa?’ I asked casually, for something to say. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’

The word he chose seemed so inadequate to describe the unimaginable beauty of the island that I smiled, and smiling I turned to look at him. I was startled by the expression in those fine sombre eyes of his, an expression of intolerable anguish; they betrayed a tragic depth of emotion of which I should never have thought him capable. But the expression passed away and he smiled. His smile was simple and a little naïve. It changed his face so that I wavered in my first feeling of aversion from him.

‘I was all over the place when I first came out,’ he said.

He was silent for a moment.

‘I went away for good about three years ago, but I came back.’ He hesitated.

‘My wife wanted to come back. She was born here, you know.’

‘Oh yes.’

He was silent again, and then hazarded a remark about Robert Louis Stevenson. He asked me if I had been up to Vailima. For some reason he was making an effort to be agreeable to me. He began to talk of Stevenson’s books, and presently the conversation drifted to London.

‘I suppose Covent Garden’s still going strong,’ he said. ‘I think I miss the opera as much as anything here. Have you seen Tristan and Isolde?’ He asked me the question as though the answer was really important to him, and when I said, a little casually I daresay, that I had, he seemed pleased. He began to speak of Wagner, not as a musician, but as the plain man who received from him an emotional satisfaction that he could not analyse. ‘I suppose Bayreuth was the place to go really,’ he said. ‘I never had the money, worse luck. But of course one might do worse than Covent Garden, all the lights and the women dressed up to the nines, and the music. The first act of the Walküre’s all right, isn’t it? And the end of Tristan. Golly!’ His eyes were flashing now and his face was lit up so that he hardly seemed the same man. There was a flush on his sallow, thin cheeks, and I forgot that his voice was harsh and unpleasant. There was even a certain charm about him.

‘By George, I’d like to be in London tonight. Do you know the Pall Mall restaurant? I used to go there a lot. Piccadilly Circus with the shops all lit up, and the crowd. I think it’s stunning to stand there and watch the buses and taxis streaming along as though they’d never stop. And I like the Strand too.

What are those lines about God and Charing Cross?’

I was taken aback.

‘Thompson’s, d’you mean?’ I asked.

I quoted them:

‘But when so sad, thou canst not sadder, Cry, and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.’

He gave a faint sigh.

‘I’ve read The Hound of Heaven. It’s a bit of all right.’

‘It’s generally thought so,’ I murmured.

‘You don’t meet anybody here who’s read anything. They think it’s swank.’ There was a wistful look on his face, and I thought I divined the feeling that made him come to me. I was a link with the world he regretted and a life that he would know no more. Because not so very long before I had been in the London which he loved, he looked upon me with awe and envy. He had not spoken for five minutes perhaps when he broke out with words that startled me by their intensity.

‘I’m fed up,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up.’

‘Then why don’t you clear out?’ I asked.

His face grew sullen.

‘My lungs are a bit dicky. I couldn’t stand an English winter now.’ At that moment another man joined us on the veranda and Lawson sank into a moody silence. ‘It’s about time for a dram,’ said the newcomer. ‘Who’ll have a drop of Scotch with me? Lawson?’

Lawson seemed to arise from a distant world. He got up.

‘Let’s go down to the bar,’ he said.

When he left me I remained with a more kindly feeling towards him than I should have expected. He puzzled and interested me. And a few days later I met his wife. I knew they had been married for five or six years, and I was surprised to see that she was still extremely young. When he married her she could not have been more than sixteen. She was adorably pretty. She was no darker than a Spaniard, small and very beautifully made, with tiny hands and feet, and a slight, lithe figure. Her features were lovely; but I think what struck me most was the delicacy of her appearance; the half–castes as a rule have a certain coarseness, they seem a little roughly formed, but she had an exquisite daintiness which took your breath away. There was something extremely civilized about her, so that it surprised you to see her in those surroundings, and you thought of those famous beauties who had set all the world talking at the Court of the Emperor Napoleon III. Though she wore but a muslin frock and a straw hat she wore them with an elegance that suggested the woman of fashion. She must have been ravishing when Lawson first saw her.

He had but lately come out from England to manage the local branch of an English bank, and, reaching Samoa at the beginning of the dry season, he had taken a room at the hotel. He quickly made the acquaintance of all and sundry. The life of the island is pleasant and easy. He enjoyed the long idle talks in the lounge of the hotel and the gay evenings at the English Club when a group of fellows would play pool. He liked Apia straggling along the edge of the lagoon, with its stores and bungalows, and its native village. Then there were weekends when he would ride over to the house of one planter or another and spend a couple of nights on the hills. He had never before known freedom or leisure. And he was intoxicated by the sunshine. When he rode through the bush his head reeled a little at the beauty that surrounded him. The country was indescribably fertile. In parts the forest was still virgin, a tangle of strange trees, luxuriant undergrowth, and vine; it gave an impression that was mysterious and troubling.

But the spot that entranced him was a pool a mile or two away from Apia to which in the evenings he often went to bathe. There was a little river that bubbled over the rocks in a swift stream, and then, after forming the deep pool, ran on, shallow and crystalline, past a ford made by great stones where the natives came sometimes to bathe or to wash their clothes. The coconut trees, with their frivolous elegance, grew thickly on the banks, all clad with trailing plants, and they were reflected in the green water. It was just such a scene as you might see in Devonshire among the hills and yet with a difference, for it had a tropical richness, a passion, a scented languor which seemed to melt the heart. The water was fresh, but not cold; and it was delicious after the heat of the day. To bathe there refreshed not only the body but the soul.

At the hour when Lawson went, there was not a soul and he lingered for a long time, now floating idly in the water, now drying himself in the evening sun, enjoying the solitude and the friendly silence. He did not regret London then, nor the life that he had abandoned, for life as it was seemed complete and exquisite.

It was here that he first saw Ethel.

Occupied till late by letters which had to be finished for the monthly sailing of the boat next day, he rode down one evening to the pool when the light was almost failing. He tied up his horse and sauntered to the bank. A girl was sitting there. She glanced round as he came and noiselessly slid into the water. She vanished like a naiad startled by the approach of a mortal. He was surprised and amused. He wondered where she had hidden herself. He swam downstream and presently saw her sitting on a rock. She looked at him with uncurious eyes. He called out a greeting in Samoan.

‘Talofa.’

She answered him, suddenly smiling, and then let herself into the water again. She swam easily and her hair spread out behind her. He watched her cross the pool and climb out on the bank. Like all the natives she bathed in a Mother Hubbard, and the water had made it cling to her slight body. She wrung out her hair, and as she stood there, unconcerned, she looked more than ever like a wild creature of the water or the woods. He saw now that she was half–caste. He swam towards her and, getting out, addressed her in English.

‘You’re having a late swim.’

She shook back her hair and then let it spread over her shoulders in luxuriant curls.

‘I like it when I’m alone,’ she said.

‘So do I.’

She laughed with the childlike frankness of the native. She slipped a dry Mother Hubbard over her head and, letting down the wet one, stepped out of it. She wrung it out and was ready to go. She paused a moment irresolutely and then sauntered off. The night fell suddenly.

Lawson went back to the hotel and, describing her to the men who were in the lounge shaking dice for drinks, soon discovered who she was. Her father was a Norwegian called Brevald who was often to be seen in the bar of the Hotel Metropole drinking rum and water. He was a little old man, knotted and gnarled like an ancient tree, who had come out to the islands forty years before as mate of a sailing vessel. He had been a blacksmith, a trader, a planter, and at one time fairly well–to–do; but, ruined by the great hurricane of the nineties, he had now nothing to live on but a small plantation of coconut trees. He had had four native wives and, as he told you with a cracked chuckle, more children than he could count. But some had died and some had gone out into the world, so that now the only one left at home was Ethel.

‘She’s a peach,’ said Nelson, the super–cargo of the Moana. ‘I’ve given her the glad eye once or twice, but I guess there’s nothing doing.’

‘Old Brevald’s not that sort of a fool, sonny,’ put in another, a man called Miller. ‘He wants a son–in–law who’s prepared to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life.’

It was distasteful to Lawson that they should speak of the girl in that fashion. He made a remark about the departing mail and so distracted their attention. But next evening he went again to the pool. Ethel was there; and the mystery of the sunset, the deep silence of the water, the lithe grace of the coconut trees, added to her beauty, giving it a profundity, a magic, which stirred the heart to unknown emotions. For some reason that time he had the whim not to speak to her. She took no notice of him. She did not even glance in his direction. She swam about the green pool. She dived, she rested on the bank, as though she were quite alone: he had a queer feeling that he was invisible. Scraps of poetry, half forgotten, floated across his memory, and vague recollections of the Greece he had negligently studied in his school days. When she had changed her wet clothes for dry ones and sauntered away he found a scarlet hibiscus where she had been. It was a flower that she had worn in her hair when she came to bathe and, having taken it out on getting into the water, had forgotten or not cared to put in again. He took it in his hands and looked at it with a singular emotion. He had an instinct to keep it, but his sentimentality irritated him, and he flung it away. It gave him quite a little pang to see it float down the stream.

He wondered what strangeness it was in her nature that urged her to go down to this hidden pool when there was no likelihood that anyone should be there. The natives of the islands are devoted to the water. They bathe, somewhere or other, every day, once always, and often twice; but they bathe in bands, laughing and joyous, a whole family together; and you often saw a group of girls, dappled by the sun shining through the trees, with the half–castes among them, splashing about the shallows of the stream. It looked as though there were in this pool some secret which attracted Ethel against her will.

Now the night had fallen, mysterious and silent, and he let himself down in the water softly, in order to make no sound, and swam lazily in the warm darkness. The water seemed fragrant still from her slender body. He rode back to the town under the starry sky. He felt at peace with the world.

Now he went every evening to the pool and every evening he saw Ethel. Presently he overcame her timidity. She became playful and friendly. They sat together on the rocks above the pool, where the water ran fast, and they lay side by side on the ledge that overlooked it, watching the gathering dusk envelop it with mystery. It was inevitable that their meetings should become known–in the South Seas everyone seems to know everyone’s business–and he was subjected to much rude chaff by the men at the hotel. He smiled and let them talk. It was not even worth while to deny their coarse suggestions. His feelings were absolutely pure. He loved Ethel as a poet might love the moon. He thought of her not as a woman but as something not of this earth. She was the spirit of the pool.

One day at the hotel, passing through the bar, he saw that old Brevald, as ever in his shabby blue overalls, was standing there. Because he was Ethel’s father he had a desire to speak to him, so he went in, nodded and, ordering his own drink, casually turned and invited the old man to have one with him. They chatted for a few minutes of local affairs, and Lawson was uneasily conscious that the Norwegian was scrutinizing him with sly blue eyes. His manner was not agreeable. It was sycophantic, and yet behind the cringing air of an old man who had been worsted in his struggle with fate was a shadow of old truculence. Lawson remembered that he had once been captain of a schooner engaged in the slave trade, a blackbirder they call it in the Pacific, and he had a large hernia in the chest which was the result of a wound received in a scrap with Solomon Islanders. The bell rang for luncheon.

‘Well, I must be off,’ said Lawson.

‘Why don’t you come along to my place one time?’ said Brevald, in his wheezy voice. ‘It’s not very grand, but you’ll be welcome. You know Ethel.’

‘I’ll come with pleasure.’

‘Sunday afternoon’s the best time.’

Brevald’s bungalow, shabby and bedraggled, stood among the coconut trees of the plantation, a little away from the main road that ran up to Vailima. Immediately around it grew huge plantains. With their tattered leaves they had the tragic beauty of a lovely woman in rags. Everything was slovenly and neglected. Little black pigs, thin and high–backed, rooted about, and chickens clucked noisily as they picked at the refuse scattered here and there. Three or four natives were lounging about the veranda. When Lawson asked for Brevald the old man’s cracked voice called out to him, and he found him in the sitting–room smoking an old briar pipe.

‘Sit down and make yerself at home,’ he said. ‘Ethel’s just titivating.’

She came in. She wore a blouse and skirt and her hair was done in the European fashion. Although she had not the wild, timid grace of the girl who came down every evening to the pool, she seemed now more usual and consequently more approachable. She shook hands with Lawson. It was the first time he had touched her hand.

‘I hope you’ll have a cup of tea with us,’ she said.

He knew she had been at a mission school, and he was amused, and at the same time touched, by the company manners she was putting on for his benefit. Tea was already set out on the table and in a minute old Brevald’s fourth wife brought in the tea–pot. She was a handsome native, no longer very young, and she spoke but a few words of English. She smiled and smiled. Tea was rather a solemn meal, with a great deal of bread and butter and a variety of very sweet cakes, and the conversation was formal. Then a wrinkled old woman came in softly.

‘That’s Ethel’s granny,’ said old Brevald, noisily spitting on the floor.

She sat on the edge of a chair, uncomfortably, so that you saw it was unusual for her and she would have been more at ease on the ground, and remained silently staring at Lawson with fixed, shining eyes. In the kitchen behind the bungalow someone began to play the concertina and two or three voices were raised in a hymn. But they sang for the pleasure of the sounds rather than from piety.

When Lawson walked back to the hotel he was strangely happy. He was touched by the higgledy–piggledy way in which those people lived; and in the smiling good–nature of Mrs Brevald, in the little Norwegian’s fantastic career, and in the shining mysterious eyes of the old grandmother he found something unusual and fascinating. It was a more natural life than any he had known, it was nearer to the friendly, fertile earth; civilization repelled him at that moment, and by mere contact with these creatures of a more primitive nature he felt a greater freedom.

He saw himself rid of the hotel which already was beginning to irk him, settled in a little bungalow of his own, trim and white, in front of the sea so that he had before his eyes always the multi–coloured variety of the lagoon. He loved the beautiful island. London and England meant nothing to him any more, he was content to spend the rest of his days in that forgotten spot, rich in the best of the world’s goods, love and happiness. He made up his mind that whatever the obstacles nothing should prevent him from marrying Ethel.

But there were no obstacles. He was always welcome at the Brevalds’ house. The old man was ingratiating and Mrs Brevald smiled without ceasing. He had brief glimpses of natives who seemed somehow to belong to the establishment, and once he found a tall youth in a lava–lava, his body tattooed, his hair white with lime, sitting with Brevald, and was told he was Mrs Brevald’s brother’s son; but for the most part they kept out of his way. Ethel was delightful with him. The light in her eyes when she saw him filled him with ecstasy. She was charming and naïve. He listened enraptured when she told him of the mission school at which she was educated, and of the sisters. He went with her to the cinema which was given once a fortnight and danced with her at the dance which followed it. They came from all parts of the island for this, since gaieties are few in Upolu; and you saw there all the society of the place, the white ladies keeping a good deal to themselves, the half–castes very elegant in American clothes, the natives, strings of dark girls in white Mother Hubbards and young men in unaccustomed ducks and white shoes. It was all very smart and gay. Ethel was pleased to show her friends the white admirer who did not leave her side. The rumour was soon spread that he meant to marry her and her friends looked at her with envy. It was a great thing for a half–caste to get a white man to marry her, even the less regular relation was better than nothing, but one could never tell what it would lead to; and Lawson’s position as manager of the bank made him one of the catches of the island. If he had not been so absorbed in Ethel he would have noticed that many eyes were fixed on him curiously, and he would have seen the glances of the white ladies and noticed how they put their heads together and gossiped.

Afterwards, when the men who lived at the hotel were having a whisky before turning in, Nelson burst out with:

‘Say, they say Lawson’s going to marry that girl.’

‘He’s a damned fool then,’ said Miller.

Miller was a German–American who had changed his name from Müller, a big man, fat and bald–headed, with a round, clean–shaven face. He wore large gold–rimmed spectacles, which gave him a benign look, and his ducks were always clean and white. He was a heavy drinker, invariably ready to stay up all night with the ‘boys’, but he never got drunk; he was jolly and affable, but very shrewd. Nothing interfered with his business; he represented a firm in San Francisco, jobbers of the goods sold in the islands, calico, machinery and what not; and his good–fellowship was part of his stock–in–trade.

‘He don’t know what he’s up against,’ said Nelson. ‘Someone ought to put him wise.’

‘If you’ll take my advice you won’t interfere in what don’t concern you,’ said Miller. ‘When a man’s made up his mind to make a fool of himself, there’s nothing like letting him.’

‘I’m all for having a good time with the girls out here, but when it comes to marrying them–this child ain’t taking any, I’ll tell the world.’

Chaplin was there, and now he had his say.

‘I’ve seen a lot of fellows do it, and it’s no good.’

‘You ought to have a talk with him, Chaplin,’ said Nelson. ‘You know him better than anyone else does.’

‘My advice to Chaplin is to leave it alone,’ said Miller.

Even in those days Lawson was not popular and really no one took enough interest in him to bother. Mrs Chaplin talked it over with two or three of the white ladies, but they contented themselves with saying that it was a pity; and when he told her definitely that he was going to be married it seemed too late to do anything.

For a year Lawson was happy. He took a bungalow at the point of the bay round which Apia is built, on the borders of a native village. It nestled charmingly among the coconut trees and faced the passionate blue of the Pacific. Ethel was lovely as she went about the little house, lithe and graceful like some young animal of the woods, and she was gay. They laughed a great deal. They talked nonsense. Sometimes one or two of the men at the hotel would come over and spend the evening, and often on a Sunday they would go for a day to some planter who had married a native; now and then one or other of the half–caste traders who had a store in Apia would give a party and they went to it. The half–castes treated Lawson quite differently now. His marriage had made him one of themselves and they called him Bertie. They put their arms through his and smacked him on the back. He liked to see Ethel at these gatherings. Her eyes shone and she laughed. It did him good to see her radiant happiness. Sometimes Ethel’s relations would come to the bungalow, Old Brevald of course, and her mother, but cousins too, vague native women in Mother Hubbards and men and boys in lava–lavas, with their hair dyed red and their bodies elaborately tattooed. He would find them sitting there when he got back from the bank. He laughed indulgently.

‘Don’t let them eat us out of hearth and home,’ he said.

‘They’re my own family. I can’t help doing something for them when they ask me.’

He knew that when a white man marries a native or a half–caste he must expect her relations to look upon him as a gold mine. He took Ethel’s face in his hands and kissed her red lips. Perhaps he could not expect her to understand that the salary which had amply sufficed for a bachelor must be managed with some care when it had to support a wife and a house. Then Ethel was delivered of a son.

It was when Lawson first held the child in his arms that a sudden pang shot through his heart. He had not expected it to be so dark. After all it had but a fourth part of native blood, and there was no reason really why it should not look just like an English baby; but, huddled together in his arms, sallow, its head covered already with black hair, with huge black eyes, it might have been a native child. Since his marriage he had been ignored by the white ladies of the colony. When he came across men in whose houses he had been accustomed to dine as a bachelor, they were a little self–conscious with him; and they sought to cover their embarrassment by an exaggerated cordiality.

‘Mrs Lawson well?’ they would say. ‘You’re a lucky fellow. Damned pretty girl.’

But if they were with their wives and met him and Ethel they would feel it awkward when their wives gave Ethel a patronizing nod. Lawson had laughed.

‘They’re as dull as ditch water, the whole gang of them,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to disturb my night’s rest if they don’t ask me to their dirty parties.’

But now it irked him a little.

The little dark baby screwed up its face. That was his son. He thought of the half–caste children in Apia. They had an unhealthy look, sallow and pale, and they were odiously precocious. He had seen them on the boat going to school in New Zealand, and a school had to be chosen which took children with native blood in them; they were huddled together, brazen and yet timid, with traits which set them apart strangely from white people. They spoke the native language among themselves. And when they grew up the men accepted smaller salaries because of their native blood; girls might marry a white man, but boys had no chance; they must marry a half–caste like themselves, or a native. Lawson made up his mind passionately that he would take his son away from the humiliation of such a life. At whatever cost he must get back to Europe. And when he went in to see Ethel, frail and lovely in her bed, surrounded by native women, his determination was strengthened. If he took her away among his own people she would belong more completely to him. He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.

He went to work quietly, urged by an obscure instinct of secrecy, and wrote to a cousin who was a partner in a shipping firm in Aberdeen, saying that his health (on account of which like so many more he had come out to the islands) was so much better, there seemed no reason why he should not return to Europe. He asked him to use what influence he could to get him a job, no matter how poorly paid, on Deeside, where the climate was particularly suitable to such as suffered from diseases of the lungs. It takes five or six weeks for letters to get from Aberdeen to Samoa, and several had to be exchanged. He had plenty of time to prepare Ethel. She was as delighted as a child. He was amused to see how she boasted to her friends that she was going to England; it was a step up for her; she would be quite English there; and she was excited at the interest the approaching departure gave her. When at length a cable came offering him a post in a bank in Kincardineshire she was beside herself with joy.

When, their long journey over, they were settled in the little Scots town with its granite houses Lawson realized how much it meant to him to live once more among his own people. He looked back on the three years he had spent in Apia as exile, and returned to the life that seemed the only normal one with a sigh of relief. It was good to play golf once more, and to fish–to fish properly, that was poor fun in the Pacific when you just threw in your line and pulled out one big sluggish fish after another from the crowded sea–and it was good to see a paper every day with that day’s news, and to meet men and women of your own sort, people you could talk to; and it was good to eat meat that was not frozen and to drink milk that was not canned. They were thrown upon their own resources much more than in the Pacific, and he was glad to have Ethel exclusively to himself. After two years of marriage he loved her more devotedly than ever, he could hardly bear her out of his sight, and the need in him grew urgent for a more intimate communion between them. But it was strange that after the first excitement of arrival she seemed to take less interest in the new life than he had expected. She did not accustom herself to her surroundings. She was a little lethargic. As the fine autumn darkened into winter she complained of the cold. She lay half the morning in bed and the rest of the day on a sofa, reading novels sometimes, but more often doing nothing. She looked pinched.

‘Never mind, darling,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it very soon. And wait till the summer comes. It can be almost as hot as in Apia.’

He felt better and stronger than he had done for years.

The carelessness with which she managed her house had not mattered in Samoa, but here it was out of place. When anyone came he did not want the place to look untidy; and, laughing, chaffing Ethel a little, he set about putting things in order. Ethel watched him indolently. She spent long hours playing with her son. She talked to him in the baby language of her own country. To distract her, Lawson bestirred himself to make friends among the neighbours, and now and then they went to little parties where the ladies sang drawing–room ballads and the men beamed in silent good nature. Ethel was shy. She seemed to sit apart. Sometimes Lawson, seized with a sudden anxiety, would ask her if she was happy.

‘Yes, I’m quite happy,’ she answered.

But her eyes were veiled by some thought he could not guess. She seemed to withdraw into herself so that he was conscious that he knew no more of her than when he had first seen her bathing in the pool. He had an uneasy feeling that she was concealing something from him, and because he adored her it tortured him.

‘You don’t regret Apia, do you?’ he asked her once.

‘Oh, no–I think it’s very nice here.’

An obscure misgiving drove him to make disparaging remarks about the island and the people there. She smiled and did not answer. Very rarely she received a bundle of letters from Samoa and then she went about for a day or two with a set, pale face.

‘Nothing would induce me ever to go back there,’ he said once. ‘It’s no place for a white man.’

But he grew conscious that sometimes, when he was away, Ethel cried. In Apia she had been talkative, chatting volubly about all the little details of their common life, the gossip of the place; but now she gradually became silent, and, though he increased his efforts to amuse her, she remained listless. It seemed to him that her recollections of the old life were drawing her away from him, and he was madly jealous of the island and of the sea, of Brevald, and all the dark–skinned people whom he remembered now with horror. When she spoke of Samoa he was bitter and satirical. One evening late in the spring when the birch trees were bursting into leaf, coming home from a round of golf, he found her not as usual lying on the sofa, but at the window, standing. She had evidently been waiting for his return. She addressed him the moment he came into the room. To his amazement she spoke in Samoan.

‘I can’t stand it. I can’t live here any more. I hate it. I hate it.’

‘For God’s sake speak in a civilized language,’ he said irritably.

She went up to him and clasped her arms around his body awkwardly, with a gesture that had in it something barbaric.

‘Let’s go away from here. Let’s go back to Samoa. If you make me stay here I shall die. I want to go home.’

Her passion broke suddenly and she burst into tears. His anger vanished and he drew her down on his knees. He explained to her that it was impossible for him to throw up his job, which after all meant his bread and butter. His place in Apia was long since filled. He had nothing to go back to there. He tried to put it to her reasonably, the inconveniences of life there, the humiliation to which they must be exposed, and the bitterness it must cause their son.

‘Scotland’s wonderful for education and that sort of thing. Schools are good and cheap, and he can go to the University at Aberdeen. I’ll make a real Scot of him.’

They had called him Andrew. Lawson wanted him to become a doctor. He would marry a white woman.

‘I’m not ashamed of being half native,’ Ethel said sullenly.

‘Of course not, darling. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

With her soft cheek against his he felt incredibly weak.

‘You don’t know how much I love you,’ he said. ‘I’d give anything in the world to be able to tell you what I’ve got in my heart.’

He sought her lips.

The summer came. The highland valley was green and fragrant and the hills were gay with the heather. One sunny day followed another in that sheltered spot, and the shade of the birch trees was grateful after the glare of the high road. Ethel spoke no more of Samoa and Lawson grew less nervous. He thought that she was resigned to her surroundings, and he felt that his love for her was so passionate that it could leave no room in her heart for any longing. One day the local doctor stopped him in the street.

‘I say, Lawson, your missus ought to be careful how she bathes in our highland streams. It’s not like the Pacific, you know.’

Lawson was surprised, and had not the presence of mind to conceal the fact.

‘I didn’t know she was bathing.’

The doctor laughed.

‘A good many people have seen her. It makes them talk a bit, you know, because it seems a rum place to choose, the pool up above the bridge, and bathing isn’t allowed there, but there’s no harm in that. I don’t know how she can stand the water.’

Lawson knew the pool the doctor spoke of, and suddenly it occurred to him that in a way it was just like that pool at Upolu where Ethel had been in the habit of bathing every evening. A clear highland stream ran down a sinuous course, rocky, splashing gaily, and then formed a deep, smooth pool, with a little sandy beach. Trees overshadowed it thickly, not coconut trees, but beeches, and the sun played fitfully through the leaves on the sparkling water. It gave him a shock. With his imagination he saw Ethel go there every day and undress on the bank and slip into the water, cold, colder than that of the pool she loved at home, and for a moment regain the feeling of the past. He saw her once more as the strange, wild spirit of the stream, and it seemed to him fantastically that the running water called her. That afternoon he went along to the river. He made his way cautiously among the trees and the grassy path deadened the sound of his steps. Presently he came to a spot from which he could see the pool. Ethel was sitting on the bank, looking down at the water. She sat quite still. It seemed as though the water drew her irresistibly. He wondered what strange thoughts wandered through her head. At last she got up, and for a minute or two she was hidden from his gaze; then he saw her again, wearing a Mother Hubbard, and with her little bare feet she stepped delicately over the mossy bank. She came to the water’s edge, and softly, without a splash, let herself down. She swam about quietly, and there was something not quite of a human being in the way she swam. He did not know why it affected him so queerly. He waited till she clambered out. She stood for a moment with the wet folds of her dress clinging to her body, so that its shape was outlined, and then, passing her hands slowly over her breasts, gave a little sigh of delight. Then she disappeared. Lawson turned away and walked back to the village. He had a bitter pain in his heart, for he knew that she was still a stranger to him and his hungry love was destined ever to remain unsatisfied.

He did not make any mention of what he had seen. He ignored the incident completely, but he looked at her curiously, trying to divine what was in her mind. He redoubled the tenderness with which he used her. He sought to make her forget the deep longing of her soul by the passion of his love.

Then one day, when he came home, he was astonished to find her not in the house.

‘Where’s Mrs Lawson?’ he asked the maid.

‘She went into Aberdeen, Sir, with the baby,’ the maid answered, a little surprised at the question. ‘She said she would not be back till the last train.’

‘Oh, all right.’

He was vexed that Ethel had said nothing to him about the excursion, but he was not disturbed, since of late she had been in now and again to Aberdeen, and he was glad that she should look at the shops and perhaps visit a cinema. He went to meet the last train, but when she did not come he grew suddenly frightened. He went up to the bedroom and saw at once that her toilet things were no longer in their place. He opened the wardrobe and the drawers. They were half empty. She had bolted.

He was seized with a passion of anger. It was too late that night to telephone to Aberdeen and make inquiries, but he knew already all that his inquiries might have taught him. With fiendish cunning she had chosen a time when they were making up their periodical accounts at the bank and there was no chance that he could follow her. He was imprisoned by his work. He took up a paper and saw that there was a boat sailing for Australia next morning. She must be now well on the way to London. He could not prevent the sobs that were wrung painfully from him.

‘I’ve done everything in the world for her,’ he cried, ‘and she had the heart to treat me like this. How cruel, how monstrously cruel!’

After two days of misery he received a letter from her. It was written in her school–girl hand. She had always written with difficulty:

Dear Bertie

I couldn’t stand it any more. I’m going home. Good–bye. Ethel

She did not say a single word of regret. She did not even ask him to come too. Lawson was prostrated. He found out where the ship made its first stop, and, though he knew very well she would not come, sent a cable beseeching her to return. He waited with pitiful anxiety. He wanted her to send him just one word of love; she did not even answer. He passed through one violent phase after another. At one moment he told himself that he was well rid of her, and at the next that he would force her to return by withholding money. He was lonely and wretched. He wanted his boy and he wanted her. He knew that, whatever he pretended to himself, there was only one thing to do and that was to follow her. He could never live without her now. All his plans for the future were like a house of cards and he scattered them with angry impatience. He did not care whether he threw away his chances for the future, for nothing in the world mattered but that he should get Ethel back again. As soon as he could he went into Aberdeen and told the manager of his bank that he meant to leave at once. The manager remonstrated. The short notice was inconvenient. Lawson would not listen to reason. He was determined to be free before the next boat sailed; and it was not until he was on board of her, having sold everything he possessed, that in some measure he regained his calm. Till then to those who had come in contact with him he seemed hardly sane. His last action in England was to cable to Ethel at Apia that he was joining her.

He sent another cable from Sydney, and when at last with the dawn his boat crossed the bar at Apia and he saw once more the white houses straggling along the bay he felt an immense relief. The doctor came on board, and the agent. They were both old acquaintances and he felt kindly towards their familiar faces. He had a drink or two with them for old times’ sake, and also because he was desperately nervous. He was not sure if Ethel would be glad to see him. When he got into the launch and approached the wharf he scanned anxiously the little crowd that waited. She was not there and his heart sank, but then he saw Brevald, in his old blue clothes, and his heart warmed towards him.

‘Where’s Ethel?’ he said, as he jumped on shore.

‘She’s down at the bungalow. She’s living with us.’

Lawson was dismayed, but he put on a jovial air.

‘Well, have you got room for me? I daresay it’ll take a week or two to fix ourselves up.’

‘Oh, yes, I guess we can make room for you.’

After passing through the custom–house they went to the hotel and there Lawson was greeted by several of his old friends. There were a good many rounds of drinks before it seemed possible to get away and when they did go at last to Brevald’s house they were both rather gay. He clasped Ethel in his arms. He had forgotten all his bitter thoughts in the joy of beholding her once more. His mother–in–law was pleased to see him, and so was the old, wrinkled beldame, her mother; natives and half–castes came in, and they all sat round, beaming on him. Brevald had a bottle of whisky and everyone who came was given a nip. Lawson sat with his little dark–skinned boy on his knees, they had taken his English clothes off him and he was stark, with Ethel by his side in a Mother Hubbard. He felt like a returning prodigal. In the afternoon he went down to the hotel again and when he got back he was more than gay, he was drunk. Ethel and her mother knew that white men got drunk now and then, it was what you expected of them, and they laughed good–naturedly as they helped him to bed.

But in a day or two he set about looking for a job. He knew that he could not hope for such a position as that which he had thrown away to go to England; but with his training he could not fail to be useful to one of the trading firms, and perhaps in the end he would not lose by the change.

‘After all, you can’t make money in a bank,’ he said. ‘Trade’s the thing.’

He had hopes that he would soon make himself so indispensable that he would get someone to take him into partnership, and there was no reason why in a few years he should not be a rich man.

‘As soon as I’m fixed up we’ll find ourselves a shack,’ he told Ethel. ‘We can’t go on living here.’

Brevald’s bungalow was so small that they were all piled on one another, and there was no chance of ever being alone. There was neither peace nor privacy.

‘Well, there’s no hurry. We shall be all right here till we find just what we want.’

It took him a week to get settled and then he entered the firm of a man called Bain. But when he talked to Ethel about moving she said she wanted to stay where she was till her baby was born, for she was expecting another child. Lawson tried to argue with her.

‘If you don’t like it,’ she said, ‘go and live at the hotel.’

He grew suddenly pale.

‘Ethel, how can you suggest that!’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘What’s the good of having a house of our own when we can live here.’

He yielded.

When Lawson, after his work, went back to the bungalow he found it crowded with natives. They lay about smoking, sleeping, drinking kava; and they talked incessantly. The place was grubby and untidy. His child crawled about, playing with native children, and it heard nothing spoken but Samoan. He fell into the habit of dropping into the hotel on his way home to have a few cocktails, for he could only face the evening and the crowd of friendly natives when he was fortified with liquor. And all the time, though he loved her more passionately than ever, he felt that Ethel was slipping away from him. When the baby was born he suggested that they should get into a house of their own, but Ethel refused. Her stay in Scotland seemed to have thrown her back on her own people, now that she was once more among them, with a passionate zest, and she turned to her native ways with abandon. Lawson began to drink more. Every Saturday night he went to the English Club and got blind drunk.

He had the peculiarity that as he grew drunk he grew quarrelsome and once he had a violent dispute with Bain, his employer. Bain dismissed him, and he had to look out for another job. He was idle for two or three weeks and during these, sooner than sit in the bungalow, he lounged about in the hotel or at the English Club, and drank. It was more out of pity than anything else that Miller, the German–American, took him into his office; but he was a businessman, and though Lawson’s financial skill made him valuable, the circumstances were such that he could hardly refuse a smaller salary than he had had before, and Miller did not hesitate to offer it to him. Ethel and Brevald blamed him for taking it, since Pedersen, the half–caste, offered him more. But he resented bitterly the thought of being under the orders of a half–caste. When Ethel nagged him he burst out furiously:

‘I’ll see myself dead before I work for a nigger.’

‘You may have to,’ she said.

And in six months he found himself forced to this final humiliation. The passion for liquor had been gaining on him, he was often heavy with drink, and he did his work badly. Miller warned him once or twice and Lawson was not the man to accept remonstrance easily. One day in the midst of an altercation he put on his hat and walked out. But by now his reputation was well known and he could find no one to engage him. For a while he idled, and then he had an attack of delirium tremens. When he recovered, shameful and weak, he could no longer resist the constant pressure and he went to Pedersen and asked him for a job. Pedersen was glad to have a white man in his store and Lawson’s skill at figures made him useful.

From that time his degeneration was rapid. The white people gave him the cold shoulder. They were only prevented from cutting him completely by disdainful pity and by a certain dread of his angry violence when he was drunk. He became extremely susceptible and was always on the lookout for affront.

He lived entirely among the natives and half–castes, but he had no longer the prestige of the white man. They felt his loathing for them and they resented his attitude of superiority. He was one of themselves now and they did not see why he should put on airs. Brevald, who had been ingratiating and obsequious, now treated him with contempt. Ethel had made a bad bargain. There were disgraceful scenes and once or twice the two men came to blows. When there was a quarrel Ethel took the part of her family. They found he was better drunk than sober, for when he was drunk he would lie on the bed or on the floor, sleeping heavily.

Then he became aware that something was being hidden from him.

When he got back to the bungalow for the wretched, half–native supper which was his evening meal, often Ethel was not in. If he asked where she was Brevald told him she had gone to spend the evening with one or other of her friends. Once he followed her to the house Brevald had mentioned and found she was not there. On her return he asked her where she had been and she told him her father had make a mistake; she had been to so–and–so’s. But he knew that she was lying. She was in her best clothes; her eyes were shining, and she looked lovely.

‘Don’t try any monkey tricks on me, my girl,’ he said, ‘or I’ll break every bone in your body.’

‘You drunken beast,’ she said, scornfully.

He fancied that Mrs Brevald and the old grandmother looked at him maliciously and he ascribed Brevald’s good humour with him, so unusual those days, to his satisfaction at having something up his sleeve against his son–in–law. And then, his suspicions aroused, he imagined that the white men gave him curious glances. When he came into the lounge of the hotel the sudden silence which fell upon the company convinced him that he had been the subject of the conversation. Something was going on and everyone knew it but himself. He was seized with furious jealousy. He believed that Ethel was carrying on with one of the white men, and he looked at one after the other with scrutinizing eyes; but there was nothing to give him even a hint. He was helpless. Because he could find no one on whom definitely to fix his suspicions, he went about like a raving maniac, looking for someone on whom to vent his wrath. Chance caused him in the end to hit upon the man who of all others least deserved to suffer from his violence. One afternoon, when he was sitting in the hotel by himself, moodily, Chaplin came in and sat down beside him. Perhaps Chaplin was the only man on the island who had any sympathy for him. They ordered drinks and chatted a few minutes about the races that were shortly to be run. Then Chaplin said:

‘I guess we shall all have to fork out money for new dresses.’

Lawson sniggered. Since Mrs Chaplin held the purse–strings, if she wanted a new frock for the occasion she would certainly not ask her husband for the money.

‘How is your missus?’ asked Chaplin, desiring to be friendly.

‘What the hell’s that got to do with you?’ said Lawson, knitting his dark brows.

‘I was only asking a civil question.’

‘Well, keep your civil questions to yourself.’

Chaplin was not a patient man; his long residence in the tropics, the whisky bottle, and his domestic affairs had given him a temper hardly more under control than Lawson’s.

‘Look here, my boy, when you’re in my hotel you behave like a gentleman or you’ll find yourself in the street before you can say knife.’

Lawson’s lowering face grew dark and red.

‘Let me just tell you once for all and you can pass it on to the others,’ he said, panting with rage. ‘If any of you fellows come messing round with my wife he’d better look out.’

‘Who do you think wants to mess around with your wife?’

‘I’m not such a fool as you think. I can see a stone wall in front of me as well as most men, and I warn you straight, that’s all. I’m not going to put up with any hanky–panky, not on your life.’

‘Look here, you’d better clear out of here, and come back when you’re sober.’

‘I shall clear out when I choose and not a minute before,’ said Lawson.

It was an unfortunate boast, for Chaplin in the course of his experience as a hotel–keeper had acquired a peculiar skill in dealing with gentlemen whose room he preferred to their company, and the words were hardly out of Lawson’s mouth before he found himself caught by the collar and arm and hustled not without force into the street. He stumbled down the steps into the blinding glare of the sun.

It was in consequence of this that he had his first violent scene with Ethel. Smarting with humiliation and unwilling to go back to the hotel, he went home that afternoon earlier than usual. He found Ethel dressing to go out. As a rule she lay about in a Mother Hubbard, barefoot, with a flower in her dark hair; but now, in white silk stockings and high–heeled shoes, she was doing up a pink muslin dress which was the newest she had.

‘You’re making yourself very smart,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to the Crossleys.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Why?’ she asked coolly.

‘I don’t want you to gad about by yourself all the time.’

‘You’re not asked.’

‘I don’t care a damn about that. You’re not going without me.’

‘You’d better lie down till I’m ready.’

She thought he was drunk and if he once settled himself on the bed would quickly drop off to sleep. He sat down on a chair and began to smoke a cigarette. She watched him with increasing irritation. When she was ready he got up. It happened by an unusual chance that there was no one in the bungalow. Brevald was working on the plantation and his wife had gone into Apia. Ethel faced him.

‘I’m not going with you. You’re drunk.’

‘That’s a lie. You’re not going without me.’

She shrugged her shoulders and tried to pass him, but he caught her by the arm and held her.

‘Let me go, you devil,’ she said, breaking into Samoan.

‘Why do you want to go without me? Haven’t I told you I’m not going to put up with any monkey tricks?’

She clenched her fist and hit him in the face. He lost all control of himself. All his love, all his hatred, welled up in him and he was beside himself.

‘I’ll teach you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll teach you.’

He seized a riding–whip which happened to be under his hand, and struck her with it. She screamed, and the scream maddened him so that he went on striking her, again and again. Her shrieks rang through the bungalow and he cursed her as he hit. Then he flung her on the bed. She lay there sobbing with pain and terror. He threw the whip away from him and rushed out of the room. Ethel heard him go and she stopped crying. She looked round cautiously, then she raised herself. She was sore, but she had not been badly hurt, and she looked at her dress to see if it was damaged. The native women are not unused to blows. What he had done did not outrage her. When she looked at herself in the glass and arranged her hair, her eyes were shining. There was a strange look in them. Perhaps then she was nearer loving him than she had ever been before.

But Lawson, driven forth blindly, stumbled through the plantation and suddenly exhausted, weak as a child, flung himself on the ground at the foot of a tree. He was miserable and ashamed. He thought of Ethel, and in the yielding tenderness of his love all his bones seemed to grow soft within him. He thought of the past, and of his hopes, and he was aghast at what he had done. He wanted her more than ever. He wanted to take her in his arms. He must go to her at once. He got up. He was so weak that he staggered as he walked. He went into the house and she was sitting in their cramped bedroom in front of her looking–glass.

‘Oh, Ethel, forgive me. I’m so awfully ashamed of myself. I didn’t know what I was doing.’

He fell on his knees before her and timidly stroked the skirt of her dress.

‘I can’t bear to think of what I did. It’s awful. I think I was mad. There’s no one in the world I love as I love you. I’d do anything to save you from pain and I’ve hurt you. I can never forgive myself, but for God’s sake say you forgive me.’

He heard her shrieks still. It was unendurable. She looked at him silently. He tried to take her hands and the tears streamed from his eyes. In his humiliation he hid his face in her lap and his frail body shook with sobs. An expression of utter contempt came over her face. She had the native woman’s disdain of a man who abased himself before a woman. A weak creature! And for a moment she had been on the point of thinking there was something in him. He grovelled at her feet like a cur. She gave him a little scornful kick.

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘I hate you.’

He tried to hold her, but she pushed him aside. She stood up. She began to take off her dress. She kicked off her shoes and slid the stockings off her feet, then she slipped on her old Mother Hubbard.

‘Where are you going?’

‘What’s that got to do with you? I’m going down to the pool.’

‘Let me come too,’ he said.

He asked as though he were a child.

‘Can’t you even leave me that?’

He hid his face in his hands, crying miserably, while she, her eyes hard and cold, stepped past him and went out.

From that time she entirely despised him; and though, herded together in the small bungalow, Lawson and Ethel with her two children, Brevald, his wife and her mother, and the vague relations and hangers–on who were always in and about, they had to live cheek by jowl, Lawson, ceasing to be of any account, was hardly noticed. He left in the morning after breakfast, and came back only to have supper. He gave up the struggle, and when for want of money he could not go to the English Club he spent the evening playing hearts with old Brevald and the natives. Except when he was drunk he was cowed and listless. Ethel treated him like a dog. She submitted at times to his fits of wild passion, and she was frightened by the gusts of hatred with which they were followed; but when, afterwards, he was cringing and lachrymose she had such a contempt for him that she could have spat in his face. Sometimes he was violent, but now she was prepared for him, and when he hit her she kicked and scratched and bit. They had horrible battles in which he had not always the best of it. Very soon it was known all over Apia that they got on badly. There was little sympathy for Lawson, and at the hotel the general surprise was that old Brevald did not kick him out of the place.

‘Brevald’s a pretty ugly customer,’ said one of the men. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he put a bullet into Lawson’s carcass one of these days.’

Ethel still went in the evenings to bathe in the silent pool. It seemed to have an attraction for her that was not quite human, just that attraction you might imagine that a mermaid who had won a soul would have for the cool salt waves of the sea; and sometimes Lawson went also. I do not know what urged him to go, for Ethel was obviously irritated by his presence; perhaps it was because in that spot he hoped to regain the clean rapture which had filled his heart when first he saw her; perhaps only, with the madness of those who love them that love them not, from the feeling that his obstinacy could force love. One day he strolled down there with a feeling that was rare with him now. He felt suddenly at peace with the world. The evening was drawing in and the dusk seemed to cling to the leaves of the coconut trees like a little thin cloud. A faint breeze stirred them noiselessly. A crescent moon hung just over their tops. He made his way to the bank. He saw Ethel in the water floating on her back. Her hair streamed out all round her, and she was holding in her hand a large hibiscus. He stopped a moment to admire her; she was like Ophelia.

‘Hullo, Ethel,’ he cried joyfully.

She made a sudden movement and dropped the red flower. It floated idly away. She swam a stroke or two till she knew there was ground within her depth and then stood up.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

He laughed.

‘Don’t be selfish. There’s plenty of room for both of us.’

‘Why can’t you leave me alone? I want to be by myself.’

‘Hang it all, I want to bathe,’ he answered, good–humouredly. ‘Go down to the bridge. I don’t want you here.’

‘I’m sorry for that,’ he said, smiling still.

He was not in the least angry, and he hardly noticed that she was in a passion. He began to take off his coat.

‘Go away,’ she shrieked. ‘I won’t have you here. Can’t you even leave me this? Go away.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling.’

She bent down and picked up a sharp stone and flung it quickly at him. He had no time to duck. It hit him on the temple. With a cry he put his hand to his head and when he took it away it was wet with blood. Ethel stood still, panting with rage. He turned very pale, and without a word, taking up his coat, went away. Ethel let herself fall back into the water and the stream carried her slowly down to the ford.

The stone had made a jagged wound and for some days Lawson went about with a bandaged head. He had invented a likely story to account for the accident when the fellows at the club asked him about it, but he had no occasion to use it. No one referred to the matter. He saw them cast surreptitious glances at his head, but not a word was said. The silence could only mean that they knew how he came by his wound. He was certain now that Ethel had a lover, and they all knew who it was. But there was not the smallest indication to guide him. He never saw Ethel with anyone; no one showed a wish to be with her, or treated him in a manner that seemed strange. Wild rage seized him, and having no one to vent it on he drank more and more heavily. A little while before I came to the island he had had another attack of delirium tremens.

I met Ethel at the house of a man called Caster, who lived two or three miles from Apia with a native wife. I had been playing tennis with him and when we were tired he suggested a cup of tea. We went into the house and in the untidy living–room found Ethel chatting with Mrs Caster.

‘Hullo, Ethel,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

I could not help looking at her with curiosity. I tried to see what there was in her to have excited in Lawson such a devastating passion. But who can explain these things? It was true that she was lovely; she reminded one of the red hibiscus, the common flower of the hedgerow in Samoa, with its grace and its languor and its passion; but what surprised me most, taking into consideration the story I knew even then a good deal of, was her freshness and simplicity. She was quiet and a little shy. There was nothing coarse or loud about her; she had not the exuberance common to the half–caste; and it was almost impossible to believe that she could be the virago that the horrible scenes between husband and wife, which were now common knowledge, indicated. In her pretty pink frock and high–heeled shoes she looked quite European. You could hardly have guessed at that dark background of native life in which she felt herself so much more at home. I did not imagine that she was at all intelligent, and I should not have been surprised if a man, after living with her for some time, had found the passion which had drawn him to her sink into boredom. It suggested itself to me that in her elusiveness, like a thought that presents itself to consciousness and vanishes before it can be captured by words, lay her peculiar charm; but perhaps that was merely fancy, and if I had known nothing about her I should have seen in her only a pretty little half–caste like another.

She talked to me of the various things which they talk of to the stranger in Samoa, of the journey, and whether I had slid down the water rock at Papaseea, and if I meant to stay in a native village. She talked to me of Scotland, and perhaps I noticed in her a tendency to enlarge on the sumptuousness of her establishment there. She asked me naïvely if I knew Mrs This and Mrs That, with whom she had been acquainted when she lived in the north.

Then Miller, the fat German–American, came in. He shook hands all round very cordially and sat down, asking in his loud, cheerful voice for a whisky and soda. He was very fat and he sweated profusely. He took off his gold–rimmed spectacles and wiped them; you saw then that his little eyes, benevolent behind the large round glasses, were shrewd and cunning; the party had been somewhat dull till he came, but he was a good story–teller and a jovial fellow. Soon he had the two women, Ethel and my friend’s wife, laughing delightedly at his sallies. He had a reputation on the island of a lady’s man, and you could see how this fat, gross fellow, old and ugly, had yet the possibility of fascination. His humour was on a level with the understanding of his company, an affair of vitality and assurance, and his Western accent gave a peculiar point to what he said. At last he turned to me:

‘Well, if we want to get back for dinner we’d better be getting. I’ll take you along in my machine if you like.’

I thanked him and got up. He shook hands with the others, went out of the room, massive and strong in his walk, and climbed into his car.

‘Pretty little thing, Lawson’s wife,’ I said, as we drove along.

‘Too bad the way he treats her. Knocks her about. Gets my dander up when I hear of a man hitting a woman.’

We went on a little. Then he said:

‘He was a darned fool to marry her. I said so at the time. If he hadn’t, he’d have had the whip hand over her. He’s yaller, that’s what he is, yaller.’

The year was drawing to its end and the time approached when I was to leave Samoa. My boat was scheduled to sail for Sydney on the fourth of January. Christmas Day had been celebrated at the hotel with suitable ceremonies, but it was looked upon as no more than a rehearsal for New Year, and the men who were accustomed to foregather in the lounge determined on New Year’s Eve to make a night of it. There was an uproarious dinner, after which the party sauntered down to the English Club, a simple little frame house, to play pool. There was a great deal of talking, laughing, and betting, but some very poor play, except on the part of Miller, who had drunk as much as any of them, all far younger than he, but had kept unimpaired the keenness of his eye and the sureness of his hand. He pocketed the young men’s money with humour and urbanity. After an hour of this I grew tired and went out. I crossed the road and came to the beach. Three coconut trees grew there, like three moon maidens waiting for their lovers to ride out of the sea, and I sat at the foot of one of them, watching the lagoon and the nightly assemblage of the stars.

I do not know where Lawson had been during the evening, but between ten and eleven he came along to the club. He shambled down the dusty, empty road, feeling dull and bored, and when he reached the club, before going into the billiard–room, went into the bar to have a drink by himself. He had a shyness now about joining the company of white men when there were a lot of them together and needed a stiff dose of whisky to give him confidence. He was standing with the glass in his hand when Miller came in to him. He was in his shirt–sleeves and still held his cue. He gave the bar–tender a glance.

‘Get out, Jack,’ he said.

The bar–tender, a native in a white jacket and a red lava–lava, without a word slid out of the small room.

‘Look here, I’ve been wanting to have a few words with you, Lawson,’ said the big American.

‘Well, that’s one of the few things you can have free, gratis, and for nothing on this damned island.’

Miller fixed his gold spectacles more firmly on his nose and held Lawson with his cold determined eyes.

‘See here, young fellow, I understand you’ve been knocking Mrs Lawson about again. I’m not going to stand for that. If you don’t stop it right now I’ll break every bone of your dirty little body.’

Then Lawson knew what he had been trying to find out so long. It was Miller. The appearance of the man, fat, bald–headed, with his round bare face and double chin and the gold spectacles, his age, his benign, shrewd look, like that of a renegade priest, and the thought of Ethel, so slim and virginal, filled him with a sudden horror. Whatever his faults Lawson was no coward, and without a word he hit out violently at Miller. Miller quickly warded the blow with the hand that held the cue, and then with a great swing of his right arm brought his fist down on Lawson’s ear. Lawson was four inches shorter than the American and he was slightly built, frail and weakened not only by illness and the enervating tropics, but by drink. He fell like a log and lay half dazed at the foot of the bar. Miller took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handkerchief.

‘I guess you know what to expect now. You’ve had your warning and you’d better take it.’

He took up his cue and went back into the billiard–room. There was so much noise there that no one knew what had happened. Lawson picked himself up. He put his hand to his ear, which was singing still. Then he slunk out of the club.

I saw a man cross the road, a patch of white against the darkness of the night, but did not know who it was. He came down to the beach, passed me sitting at the foot of the tree, and looked down. I saw then that it was Lawson, but since he was doubtless drunk, did not speak. He went on, walked irresolutely two or three steps, and turned back. He came up to me and bending down stared in my face.

‘I thought it was you,’ he said.

He sat down and took out his pipe.

‘It was hot and noisy in the club,’ I volunteered.

‘Why are you sitting here?’

‘I was waiting about for the midnight mass at the Cathedral.’

‘If you like I’ll come with you.’

Lawson was quite sober. We sat for a while smoking in silence. Now and then in the lagoon was the splash of some big fish, and a little way out towards the opening in the reef was the light of a schooner.

‘You’re sailing next week, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘It would be jolly to go home once more. But I could never stand it now. The cold, you know.’

‘It’s odd to think that in England now they’re shivering round the fire,’ I said.

There was not even a breath of wind. The balminess of the night was like a spell. I wore nothing but a thin shirt and a suit of ducks. I enjoyed the exquisite languor of the night, and stretched my limbs voluptuously.

‘This isn’t the sort of New Year’s Eve that persuades one to make good resolutions for the future,’ I smiled.

He made no answer, but I do not know what train of thought my casual remark had suggested in him, for presently he began to speak. He spoke in a low voice, without any expression, but his accents were educated, and it was a relief to hear him after the twang and the vulgar intonations which for some time had wounded my ears.

‘I’ve made an awful hash of things. That’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m right down at the bottom of the pit and there’s no getting out for me. “Black as the pit from pole to pole.”’ I felt him smile as he made the quotation. ‘And the strange thing is that I don’t see how I went wrong.’

I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe–inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul. Then you see that no one is so trivial or debased but that in him is a spark of something to excite compassion.

‘It wouldn’t be so rotten if I could see that it was all my own fault. It’s true I drink, but I shouldn’t have taken to that if things had gone differently. I wasn’t really fond of liquor. I suppose I ought not to have married Ethel. If I’d kept her it would be all right. But I did love her so.’

His voice faltered.

‘She’s not a bad lot, you know, not really. It’s just rotten luck. We might have been as happy as lords. When she bolted I suppose I ought to have let her go, but I couldn’t do that–I was dead stuck on her then; and there was the kid.’

‘Are you fond of the kid?’ I asked.

‘I was. There are two, you know. But they don’t mean so much to me now. You’d take them for natives anywhere. I have to talk to them in Samoan.’

’Is it too late for you to start fresh? Couldn’t you make a dash for it and leave the place?’

‘I haven’t the strength. I’m done for.’

‘Are you still in love with your wife?’

‘Not now. Not now.’ He repeated the two words with a kind of horror in his voice. ‘I haven’t even got that now. I’m down and out.’

The bells of the Cathedral were ringing.

‘If you really want to come to the midnight mass we’d better go along,’ I said.

‘Come on.’

We got up and walked along the road. The Cathedral, all white, stood facing the sea not without impressiveness, and beside it the Protestant chapels had the look of meeting–houses. In the road were two or three cars, and a great number of traps, and traps were put up against the walls at the side. People had come from all parts of the island for the service, and through the great open doors we saw that the place was crowded. The high altar was all ablaze with light. There were a few whites and a good many half–castes, but the great majority were natives. All the men wore trousers, for the Church had decided that the lava–lava is indecent. We found chairs at the back, near the open door, and sat down. Presently, following Lawson’s eyes, I saw Ethel come in with a party of half–castes. They were all very much dressed up, the men in high, stiff collars and shiny boots, the women in large, gay hats. Ethel nodded and smiled to her friends as she passed up the aisle. The service began.

When it was over Lawson and I stood on one side for a while to watch the crowd stream out, then he held out his hand.

‘Good night,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ll have a pleasant journey home.’ ‘Oh, but I shall see you before I go.’

He sniggered.

‘The question is if you’ll see me drunk or sober.’

He turned and left me. I had a recollection of those very large black eyes, shining wildly under the shaggy brows. I paused irresolutely. I did not feel sleepy and I thought I would at all events go along to the club for an hour before turning in. When I got there I found the billiard–room empty, but half–a–dozen men were sitting round a table in the lounge, playing poker. Miller looked up as I came in.

‘Sit down and take a hand,’ he said.

‘All right.’

I bought some chips and began to play. Of course it is the most fascinating game in the world and my hour lengthened out to two, and then to three. The native bar–tender, cheery and wide–awake notwithstanding the time, was at our elbow to supply us with drinks and from somewhere or other he produced a ham and a loaf of bread. We played on. Most of the party had drunk more than was good for them and the play was high and reckless. I played modestly, neither wishing to win nor anxious to lose, but I watched Miller with a fascinated interest. He drank glass for glass with the rest of the company, but remained cool and level–headed. His pile of chips increased in size and he had a neat little paper in front of him on which he had marked various sums lent to players in distress. He beamed amiably at the young men whose money he was taking. He kept up interminably his stream of jest and anecdotes, but he never missed a draw, he never let an expression of the face pass him. At last the dawn crept into the windows, gently, with a sort of deprecating shyness, as though it had no business there, and then it was day.

‘Well,’ said Miller. ‘I reckon we’ve seen the old year out in style. Now let’s have a round of jackpots and me for my mosquito net. I’m fifty, remember, I can’t keep these late hours.’

The morning was beautiful and fresh when we stood on the veranda, and the lagoon was like a sheet of multicoloured glass. Someone suggested a dip before going to bed, but none cared to bathe in the lagoon, sticky and treacherous to the feet. Miller had his car at the door and he offered to take us down to the pool. We jumped in and drove along the deserted road. When we reached the pool it seemed as though the day had hardly risen there yet. Under the trees the water was all in shadow and the night had the effect of lurking still. We were in great spirits. We had no towels or any costume and in my prudence I wondered how we were going to dry ourselves. None of us had much on and it did not take us long to snatch off our clothes. Nelson, the little super–cargo, was stripped first.

‘I’m going down to the bottom,’ he said.

He dived and in a moment another man dived too, but shallow, and was out of the water before him. Then Nelson came up and scrambled to the side.

‘I say, get me out,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

Something was evidently the matter. His face was terrified. Two fellows gave him their hands and he slithered up. ‘I say, there’s a man down there.’

‘Don’t be a fool. You’re drunk.’

‘Well, if there isn’t I’m in for D.T.s. But I tell you there’s a man down there. It just scared me out of my wits.’

Miller looked at him for a moment. The little man was all white. He was actually trembling.

‘Come on, Caster,’ said Miller to the big Australian, ‘we’d better go down and see.’

‘He was standing up,’ said Nelson, ‘all dressed. I saw him. He tried to catch hold of me.’

‘Hold your row,’ said Miller. ‘Are you ready?’

They dived in. We waited on the bank, silent. It really seemed as though they were underwater longer than any men could breathe. Then Caster came up, and immediately after him, red in the face as though he were going to have a fit, Miller. They were pulling something behind them. Another man jumped in to help them, and the three together dragged their burden to the side. They shoved it up. Then we saw that it was Lawson, with a great stone tied up in his coat and bound to his feet.

‘He was set on making a good job of it,’ said Miller, as he wiped the water from his short–sighted eyes.

MACKINTOSH

He splashed about for a few minutes in the sea; it was too shallow to swim in and for fear of sharks he could not go out of his depth; then he got out and went into the bath–house for a shower. The coldness of the fresh water was grateful after the heavy stickiness of the salt Pacific, so warm, though it was only just after seven, that to bathe in it did not brace you but rather increased your languor; and when he had dried himself, slipping into a bath–gown, he called out to the Chinese cook that he would be ready for breakfast in five minutes. He walked barefoot across the patch of coarse grass which Walker, the administrator, proudly thought was a lawn, to his own quarters and dressed. This did not take long, for he put on nothing but a shirt and a pair of duck trousers and then went over to his chiefs house on the other side of the compound. The two men had their meals together, but the Chinese cook told him that Walker had set out on horseback at five and would not be back for another hour.

Mackintosh had slept badly and he looked with distaste at the paw–paw and the eggs and bacon which were set before him. The mosquitoes had been maddening that night; they flew about the net under which he slept in such numbers that their humming, pitiless and menacing, had the effect of a note, infinitely drawn out, played on a distant organ, and whenever he dozed off he awoke with a start in the belief that one had found its way inside his curtains. It was so hot that he lay naked. He turned from side to side. And gradually the dull roar of the breakers on the reef, so unceasing and so regular that generally you did not hear it, grew distinct on his consciousness, its rhythm hammered on his tired nerves and he held himself with clenched hands in the effort to bear it. The thought that nothing could stop that sound, for it would continue to all eternity, was almost impossible to bear, and, as though his strength were a match for the ruthless forces of nature, he had an insane impulse to do some violent thing. He felt he must cling to his self–control or he would go mad. And now, looking out of the window at the lagoon and the strip of foam which marked the reef, he shuddered with hatred of the brilliant scene. The cloudless sky was like an inverted bowl that hemmed it in. He lit his pipe and turned over the pile of Auckland papers that had come over from Apia a few days before. The newest of them was three weeks old. They gave an impression of incredible dullness.

Then he went into the office. It was a large, bare room with two desks in it and a bench along one side. A number of natives were seated on this, and a couple of women. They gossiped while they waited for the administrator, and when Mackintosh came in they greeted him.

‘Talofa–li.’

He returned their greeting and sat down at his desk. He began to write, working on a report which the governor of Samoa had been clamouring for and which Walker, with his usual dilatoriness, had neglected to prepare. Mackintosh as he made his notes reflected vindictively that Walker was late with his report because he was so illiterate that he had an invincible distaste for anything to do with pens and paper; and now when it was at last ready, concise and neatly official, he would accept his subordinate’s work without a word of appreciation, with a sneer rather or a gibe, and send it on to his own superior as though it were his own composition. He could not have written a word of it. Mackintosh thought with rage that if his chief pencilled in some insertion it would be childish in expression and faulty in language. If he remonstrated or sought to put his meaning into an intelligible phrase, Walker would fly into a passion and cry:

‘What the hell do I care about grammar? That’s what I want to say and that’s how I want to say it.’

At last Walker came in. The natives surrounded him as he entered, trying to get his immediate attention, but he turned on them roughly and told them to sit down and hold their tongues. He threatened that if they were not quiet he would have them all turned out and see none of them that day. He nodded to Mackintosh.

‘Hullo, Mac; up at last? I don’t know how you can waste the best part of the day in bed. You ought to have been up before dawn like me. Lazy beggar.’

He threw himself heavily into his chair and wiped his face with a large bandana.

‘By heaven, I’ve got a thirst.’

He turned to the policeman who stood at the door, a picturesque figure in his white jacket and lava–lava, the loincloth of the Samoan, and told him to bring kava. The kava bowl stood on the floor in the corner of the room, and the policeman filled a half coconut shell and brought it to Walker. He poured a few drops on the ground, murmured the customary words to the company, and drank with relish. Then he told the policeman to serve the waiting natives, and the shell was handed to each one in order of birth or importance and emptied with the same ceremonies.

Then he set about the day’s work. He was a little man, considerably less than of middle height, and enormously stout; he had a large, fleshy face, clean– shaven, with the cheeks hanging on each side in great dew–laps, and three vast chins; his small features were all dissolved in fat; and, but for a crescent of white hair at the back of his head, he was completely bald. He reminded you of Mr Pickwick. He was grotesque, a figure of fun, and yet, strangely enough, not without dignity. His blue eyes, behind large gold–rimmed spectacles, were shrewd and vivacious, and there was a great deal of determination in his face. He was sixty, but his native vitality triumphed over advancing years. Notwithstanding his corpulence his movements were quick, and he walked with a heavy, resolute tread as though he sought to impress his weight upon the earth. He spoke in a loud, gruff voice.

It was two years now since Mackintosh had been appointed Walker’s assistant. Walker, who had been for a quarter of a century administrator of Talua, one of the larger islands in the Samoan group, was a man known in person or by report through the length and breadth of the South Seas; and it was with lively curiosity that Mackintosh looked forward to his first meeting with him. For one reason or another he stayed a couple of weeks at Apia before he took up his post and both at Chaplin’s hotel and at the English Club he heard innumerable stories about the administrator. He thought now with irony of his interest in them. Since then he had heard them a hundred times from Walker himself. Walker knew that he was a character and, proud of his reputation, deliberately acted up to it. He was jealous of his ‘legend’ and anxious that you should know the exact details of any of the celebrated stories that were told of him. He was ludicrously angry with anyone who had told them to the stranger incorrectly.

There was a rough cordiality about Walker which Mackintosh at first found not unattractive, and Walker, glad to have a listener to whom all he said was fresh, gave of his best. He was good–humoured, hearty, and considerate. To Mackintosh, who had lived the sheltered life of a government official in London till at the age of thirty–four an attack of pneumonia, leaving him with the threat of tuberculosis, had forced him to seek a post in the Pacific, Walker’s existence seemed extraordinarily romantic. The adventure with which he started on his conquest of circumstance was typical of the man. He ran away to sea when he was fifteen and for over a year was employed in shovelling coal on a collier. He was an undersized boy and both men and mates were kind to him, but the captain for some reason conceived a savage dislike of him. He used the lad cruelly so that, beaten and kicked, he often could not sleep for the pain that racked his limbs. He loathed the captain with all his soul. Then he was given a tip for some race and managed to borrow twenty–five pounds from a friend he had picked up in Belfast. He put it on the horse, an outsider, at long odds. He had no means of repaying the money if he lost, but it never occurred to him that he could lose. He felt himself in luck. The horse won and he found himself with something over a thousand pounds in hard cash. Now his chance had come. He found out who was the best solicitor in the town–the collier lay then somewhere on the Irish coast–went to him, and, telling him that he heard the ship was for sale, asked him to arrange the purchase for him. The solicitor was amused at his small client, he was only sixteen and did not look so old, and, moved perhaps by sympathy, promised not only to arrange the matter for him but to see that he made a good bargain. After a little while Walker found himself the owner of the ship. He went back to her and had what he described as the most glorious moment of his life when he gave the skipper notice and told him that he must get off his ship in half an hour. He made the mate captain and sailed on the collier for another nine months, at the end of which he sold her at a profit.

He came out to the islands at the age of twenty–six as a planter. He was one of the few white men settled in Talua at the time of the German occupation and had then already some influence with the natives. The Germans made him administrator, a position which he occupied for twenty years, and when the island was seized by the British he was confirmed in his post. He ruled the island despotically, but with complete success. The prestige of this success was another reason for the interest that Mackintosh took in him.

But the two men were not made to get on. Mackintosh was an ugly man, with ungainly gestures, a tall thin fellow, with a narrow chest and bowed shoulders. He had sallow, sunken cheeks, and his eyes were large and sombre. He was a great reader, and when his books arrived and were unpacked Walker came over to his quarters and looked at them. Then he turned to Mackintosh with a coarse laugh.

‘What in Hell have you brought all this muck for?’ he asked.

Mackintosh flushed darkly.

‘I’m sorry you think it muck. I brought my books because I want to read them.’

‘When you said you’d got a lot of books coming I thought there’d be something for me to read. Haven’t you got any detective stories?’

‘Detective stories don’t interest me.’

‘You’re a damned fool then.’

‘I’m content that you should think so.’

Every mail brought Walker a mass of periodical literature, papers from New Zealand and magazines from America, and it exasperated him that Mackintosh showed his contempt for these ephemeral publications. He had no patience with the books that absorbed Mackintosh’s leisure and thought it only a pose that he read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. And since he had never learned to put any restraint on his tongue, he expressed his opinion of his assistant freely. Mackintosh began to see the real man, and under the boisterous good–humour he discerned a vulgar cunning which was hateful; he was vain and domineering, and it was strange that he had notwithstanding a shyness which made him dislike people who were not quite of his kidney. He judged others, naïvely, by their language, and if it was free from the oaths and the obscenity which made up the greater part of his own conversation, he looked upon them with suspicion. In the evening the two men played piquet. He played badly but vaingloriously, crowing over his opponent when he won and losing his temper when he lost. On rare occasions a couple of planters or traders would drive over to play bridge, and then Walker showed himself in what Mackintosh considered a characteristic light. He played regardless of his partner, calling up in his desire to play the hand, and argued interminably, beating down opposition by the loudness of his voice. He constantly revoked, and when he did so said with an ingratiating whine: ‘Oh, you wouldn’t count it against an old man who can hardly see.’ Did he know that his opponents thought it as well to keep on the right side of him and hesitated to insist on the rigour of the game? Mackintosh watched him with an icy contempt. When the game was over, while they smoked their pipes and drank whisky, they would begin telling stories. Walker told with gusto the story of his marriage. He had got so drunk at the wedding feast that the bride had fled and he had never seen her since. He had had numberless adventures, commonplace and sordid, with the women of the island and he described them with a pride in his own prowess which was an offence to Mackintosh’s fastidious ears. He was a gross, sensual old man. He thought Mackintosh a poor fellow because he would not share his promiscuous amours and remained sober when the company was drunk.

He despised him also for the orderliness with which he did his official work. Mackintosh liked to do everything just so. His desk was always tidy, his papers were always neatly docketed, he could put his hand on any document that was needed, and he had at his fingers’ ends all the regulations that were required for the business of their administration.

‘Fudge, fudge,’ said Walker. I’ve run this island for twenty years without red tape, and I don’t want it now.’

‘Does it make it any easier for you that when you want a letter you have to hunt half an hour for it?’ answered Mackintosh.

‘You’re nothing but a damned official. But you’re not a bad fellow; when you’ve been out here a year or two you’ll be all right. What’s wrong about you is that you won’t drink. You wouldn’t be a bad sort if you got soused once a week.’

The curious thing was that Walker remained perfectly unconscious of the dislike for him which every month increased in the breast of his subordinate. Although he laughed at him, as he grew accustomed to him, he began almost to like him. He had a certain tolerance for the peculiarities of others, and he accepted Mackintosh as a queer fish. Perhaps he liked him, unconsciously, because he could chaff him. His humour consisted of coarse banter and he wanted a butt. Mackintosh’s exactness, his morality, his sobriety, were all fruitful subjects; his Scots name gave an opportunity for the usual jokes about Scotland; he enjoyed himself thoroughly when two or three men were there and he could make them all laugh at the expense of Mackintosh. He would say ridiculous things about him to the natives, and Mackintosh, his knowledge of Samoan still imperfect, would see their unrestrained mirth when Walker had made an obscene reference to him. He smiled good–humouredly.’

‘I’ll say this for you, Mac,’ Walker would say in his gruff loud voice, ‘you can take a joke.’

‘Was it a joke?’ smiled Mackintosh. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Scots wha hae!’ shouted Walker, with a bellow of laughter. ‘There’s only one way to make a Scotchman see a joke and that’s by a surgical operation.’

Walker little knew that there was nothing Mackintosh could stand less than chaff. He would wake in the night, the breathless night of the rainy season, and brood sullenly over the gibe that Walker had uttered carelessly days before. It rankled. His heart swelled with rage, and he pictured to himself ways in which he might get even with the bully. He had tried answering him, but Walker had a gift of repartee, coarse and obvious, which gave him an advantage. The dullness of his intellect made him impervious to a delicate shaft. His self–satisfaction made it impossible to wound him. His loud voice, his bellow of laughter, were weapons against which Mackintosh had nothing to counter, and he learned that the wisest thing was never to betray his irritation. He learned to control himself. But his hatred grew till it was a monomania. He watched Walker with an insane vigilance. He fed his own self–esteem by every instance of meanness on Walker’s part, by every exhibition of childish vanity, of cunning, and of vulgarity. Walker ate greedily, noisily, filthily, and Mackintosh watched him with satisfaction. He took note of the foolish things he said and of his mistakes in grammar. He knew that Walker held him in small esteem, and he found a bitter satisfaction in his chiefs opinion of him; it increased his own contempt for the narrow, complacent old man. And it gave him a singular pleasure to know that Walker was entirely unconscious of the hatred he felt for him. He was a fool who liked popularity, and he blandly fancied that everyone admired him. Once Mackintosh had overheard Walker speaking of him.

‘He’ll be all right when I’ve licked him into shape,’ he said. ‘He’s a good dog and he loves his master.’

Mackintosh silently, without a movement of his long, sallow face, laughed long and heartily.

But his hatred was not blind; on the contrary, it was peculiarly clear–sighted, and he judged Walker’s capabilities with precision. He ruled his small kingdom with efficiency. He was just and honest. With opportunities to make money he was a poorer man than when he was first appointed to his post, and his only support for his old age was the pension which he expected when at last he retired from official life. His pride was that with an assistant and a half–caste clerk he was able to administer the island more competently than Upolu, the island of which Apia is the chief town, was administered with its army of functionaries. He had a few native policemen to sustain his authority, but he made no use of them. He governed by bluff and his Irish humour.

‘They insisted on building a jail for me,’ he said. ‘What the devil do I want a jail for? I’m not going to put the natives in prison. If they do wrong I know how to deal with them.’

One of his quarrels with the higher authorities at Apia was that he claimed entire jurisdiction over the natives of his island. Whatever their crimes he would not give them up to courts competent to deal with them, and several times an angry correspondence had passed between him and the governor at Upolu. For he looked upon the natives as his children. And that was the amazing thing about this coarse, vulgar, selfish man; he loved the island on which he had lived so long with passion, and he had for the natives a strange rough tenderness which was quite wonderful.

He loved to ride about the island on his old grey mare and he was never tired of its beauty. Sauntering along the grassy roads among the coconut trees he would stop every now and then to admire the loveliness of the scene. Now and then he would come upon a native village and stop while the headman brought him a bowl of kava. He would look at the little group of bell–shape huts with their high thatched roofs, like beehives, and a smile would spread over his fat face. His eyes rested happily on the spreading green of the bread–fruit trees.

‘By George, it’s like the garden of Eden.’

Sometimes his rides took him along the coast and through the trees he had a glimpse of the wide sea, empty, with never a sail to disturb the loneliness; sometimes he climbed a hill so that a great stretch of country, with little villages nestling among the tall trees was spread out before him like the kingdom of the world, and he would sit there for an hour in an ecstasy of delight. But he had no words to express his feelings and to relieve them would utter an obscene jest; it was as though his emotion was so violent that he needed vulgarity to break the tension.

Mackintosh observed this sentiment with an icy disdain. Walker had always been a heavy drinker, he was proud of his capacity to see men half his age under the table when he spent a night in Apia, and he had the sentimentality of the toper. He could cry over the stories he read in his magazines and yet would refuse a loan to some trader in difficulties whom he had known for twenty years. He was close with his money. Once Mackintosh said to him:

‘No one could accuse you of giving money away.’

He took it as a compliment. His enthusiasm for nature was but the drivelling sensibility of the drunkard. Nor had Mackintosh any sympathy for his chief’s feelings towards the natives. He loved them because they were in his power, as a selfish man loves his dog, and his mentality was on a level with theirs. Their humour was obscene and he was never at a loss for the lewd remark. He understood them and they understood him. He was proud of his influence over them. He looked upon them as his children and he mixed himself in all their affairs. But he was very jealous of his authority; if he ruled them with a rod of iron, brooking no contradiction, he would not suffer any of the white men on the island to take advantage of them. He watched the missionaries suspiciously and, if they did anything of which he disapproved, was able to make life so unendurable to them that if he could not get them removed they were glad to go of their own accord. His power over the natives was so great that on his word they would refuse labour and food to their pastor. On the other hand he showed the traders no favour. He took care that they should not cheat the natives; he saw that they got a fair reward for their work and their copra and that the traders made no extravagant profit on the wares they sold them. He was merciless to a bargain that he thought unfair. Sometimes the traders would complain at Apia that they did not get fair opportunities. They suffered for it. Walker then hesitated at no calumny, at no outrageous lie, to get even with them, and they found that if they wanted not only to live at peace, but to exist at all, they had to accept the situation on his own terms. More than once the store of a trader obnoxious to him had been burned down, and there was only the appositeness of the event to show that the administrator had instigated it. Once a Swedish half–caste, ruined by the burning, had gone to him and roundly accused him of arson. Walker laughed in his face.

‘You dirty dog. Your mother was a native and you try to cheat the natives. If your rotten old store is burned down it’s a judgement of Providence; that’s what it is, a judgement of Providence. Get out.’

And as the man was hustled out by two native policemen the administrator laughed fatly.

‘A judgement of Providence.’

And now Mackintosh watched him enter upon the day’s work. He began with the sick, for Walker added doctoring to his other activities, and he had a small room behind the office full of drugs. An elderly man came forward, a man with a crop of curly grey hair, in a blue lava–lava, elaborately tattooed, with the skin of his body wrinkled like a wine–skin.

‘What have you come for?’ Walker asked him abruptly.

In a whining voice the man said that he could not eat without vomiting and that he had pains here and pains there.

‘Go to the missionaries,’ said Walker. ‘You know that I only cure children.’

‘I have been to the missionaries and they do me no good.’

‘Then go home and prepare yourself to die. Have you lived so long and still want to go on living? You’re a fool.’

The man broke into querulous expostulation, but Walker, pointing to a woman with a sick child in her arms, told her to bring it to his desk. He asked her questions and looked at the child.

‘I will give you medicine,’ he said. He turned to the half–caste clerk. ‘Go into the dispensary and bring me some calomel pills.’

He made the child swallow one there and then and gave another to the mother.

‘Take the child away and keep it warm. Tomorrow it will be dead or better.’

He leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe.

‘Wonderful stuff, calomel. I’ve saved more lives with it than all the hospital doctors at Apia put together.’

Walker was very proud of his skill, and with the dogmatism of ignorance had no patience with the members of the medical profession.

‘The sort of case I like,’ he said, ’is the one that all the doctors have given up as hopeless. When the doctors have said they can’t cure you, I say to them, “come to me”. Did I ever tell you about the fellow who had a cancer?’

‘Frequently,’ said Mackintosh.

‘I got him right in three months.’

‘You’ve never told me about the people you haven’t cured.’

He finished this part of the work and went on to the rest. It was a queer medley. There was a woman who could not get on with her husband and a man who complained that his wife had run away from him.

‘Lucky dog,’ said Walker. ‘Most men wish their wives would too.’

There was a long complicated quarrel about the ownership of a few yards of land. There was a dispute about the sharing out of a catch of fish. There was a complaint against a white trader because he had given short measure. Walker listened attentively to every case, made up his mind quickly, and gave his decision. Then he would listen to nothing more; if the complainant went on he was hustled out of the office by a policeman. Mackintosh listened to it all with sullen irritation. On the whole, perhaps, it might be admitted that rough justice was done, but it exasperated the assistant that his chief trusted his instinct rather than the evidence. He would not listen to reason. He browbeat the witnesses and when they did not see what he wished them to called them thieves and liars.

He left to the last a group of men who were sitting in the corner of the room. He had deliberately ignored them. The party consisted of an old chief, a tall, dignified man with short, white hair, in a new lava–lava, bearing a huge fly wisp as a badge of office, his son, and half a dozen of the important men of the village. Walker had had a feud with them and had beaten them. As was characteristic of him he meant now to rub in his victory, and because he had them down to profit by their helplessness. The facts were peculiar. Walker had a passion for building roads. When he had come to Talua there were but a few tracks here and there, but in course of time he had cut roads through the country, joining the villages together, and it was to this that a great part of the island’s prosperity was due. Whereas in the old days it had been impossible to get the produce of the land, copra chiefly, down to the coast where it could be put on schooners or motor launches and so taken to Apia, now transport was easy and simple. His ambition was to make a road right round the island and a great part of it was already built.

‘In two years I shall have done it, and then I can die or they can fire me, I don’t care.’

His roads were the joy of his heart and he made excursions constantly to see that they were kept in order. They were simple enough, wide tracks, grass–covered, cut through the scrub or through the plantations; but trees had to be rooted out, rocks dug up or blasted, and here and there levelling had been necessary. He was proud that he had surmounted by his own skill such difficulties as they presented. He rejoiced in his disposition of them so that they were not only convenient, but showed off the beauties of the island which his soul loved. When he spoke of his roads he was almost a poet. They meandered through those lovely scenes, and Walker had taken care that here and there they should run in a straight line, giving you a green vista through the tall trees, and here and there should turn and curve so that the heart was rested by the diversity. It was amazing that this coarse and sensual man should exercise so subtle an ingenuity to get the effects which his fancy suggested to him. He had used in making his roads all the fantastic skill of a Japanese gardener. He received a grant from headquarters for the work but took a curious pride in using but a small part of it, and the year before had spent only a hundred pounds of the thousand assigned to him.

‘What do they want money for?’ he boomed. ‘They’ll only spend it on all kinds of muck they don’t want; what the missionaries leave them, that is to say.’

For no particular reason, except perhaps pride in the economy of his administration and the desire to contrast his efficiency with the wasteful methods of the authorities at Apia, he got the natives to do the work he wanted for wages that were almost nominal. It was owing to this that he had lately had difficulty with the village whose chief men now were come to see him. The chief’s son had been in Upolu for a year and on coming back had told his people of the large sums that were paid at Apia for the public works. In long, idle talks he had inflamed their hearts with the desire for gain. He held out to them visions of vast wealth and they thought of the whisky they could buy–it was dear, since there was a law that it must not be sold to natives, and so it cost them double what the white man had to pay for it–they thought of the great sandalwood boxes in which they kept their treasures, and the scented soap and potted salmon, the luxuries for which the Kanaka will sell his soul; so that when the administrator sent for them and told them he wanted a road made from their village to a certain point along the coast and offered them twenty pounds, they asked him a hundred. The chief ‘s son was called Manuma. He was a tall, handsome fellow, copper–coloured, with his fuzzy hair dyed red with lime, a wreath of red berries round his neck, and behind his ear a flower like a scarlet flame against his brown face. The upper part of his body was naked, but to show that he was no longer a savage, since he had lived in Apia, he wore a pair of dungarees instead of a lava–lava. He told them that if they held together the administrator would be obliged to accept their terms. His heart was set on building the road and when he found they would not work for less he would give them what they asked. But they must not move; whatever he said they must not abate their claim; they had asked a hundred and that they must keep to. When they mentioned the figure, Walker burst into a shout of his long, deep–voiced laughter. He told them not to make fools of themselves, but to set about the work at once. Because he was in a good humour that day he promised to give them a feast when the road was finished. But when he found that no attempt was made to start work, he went to the village and asked the men what silly game they were playing. Manuma had coached them well. They were quite calm, they did not attempt to argue–and argument is a passion with the Kanaka–they merely shrugged their shoulders: they would do it for a hundred pounds, and if he would not give them that they would do no work. He could please himself. They did not care. Then Walker flew into a passion. He was ugly then. His short fat neck swelled ominously, his red face grew purple, he foamed at the mouth. He set upon the natives with invective. He knew well how to wound and how to humiliate. He was terrifying. The older men grew pale and uneasy. They hesitated. If it had not been for Manuma, with his knowledge of the great world, and their dread of his ridicule, they would have yielded. It was Manuma who answered Walker.

‘Pay us a hundred pounds and we will work.’

Walker, shaking his fist at him, called him every name he could think of. He riddled him with scorn. Manuma sat still and smiled. There may have been more bravado than confidence in his smile, but he had to make a good show before the others. He repeated his words.

‘Pay us a hundred pounds and we will work.’

They thought that Walker would spring on him. It would not have been the first time that he had thrashed a native with his own hands; they knew his strength, and though Walker was three times the age of the young man and six inches shorter they did not doubt that he was more than a match for Manuma. No one had ever thought of resisting the savage onslaught of the administrator. But Walker said nothing. He chuckled.

‘I am not going to waste my time with a pack of fools,’ he said. ‘Talk it over again. You know what I have offered. If you do not start in a week, take care.’

He turned round and walked out of the chief’s hut. He untied his old mare and it was typical of the relations between him and the natives that one of the elder men hung on to the off stirrup while Walker from a convenient boulder hoisted himself heavily into the saddle.

That same night when Walker according to his habit was strolling along the road that ran past his house, he heard something whizz past him and with a thud strike a tree. Something had been thrown at him. He ducked instinctively. With a shout, ‘Who’s that?’ he ran towards the place from which the missile had come and he heard the sound of a man escaping through the bush. He knew it was hopeless to pursue in the darkness, and besides he was soon out of breath, so he stopped and made his way back to the road. He looked about for what had been thrown, but could find nothing. It was quite dark. He went quickly back to the house and called Mackintosh and the Chinese boy.

‘One of those devils has thrown something at me. Come along and let’s find out what it was.’

He told the boy to bring a lantern and the three of them made their way back to the place. They hunted about the ground, but could not find what they sought. Suddenly the boy gave a guttural cry. They turned to look. He held up the lantern, and there, sinister in the light that cut the surrounding darkness, was a long knife sticking into the trunk of a coconut tree. It had been thrown with such force that it required quite an effort to pull it out.

‘By George, if he hadn’t missed me I’d have been in a nice state.’

Walker handled the knife. It was one of those knives, made in imitation of the sailor knives brought to the islands a hundred years before by the first white men, used to divide the coconuts in two so that the copra might be dried. It was a murderous weapon, and the blade, twelve inches long, was very sharp. Walker chuckled softly.

‘The devil, the impudent devil.’

He had no doubt it was Manuma who had flung the knife. He had escaped death by three inches. He was not angry. On the contrary, he was in high spirits; the adventure exhilarated him, and when they got back to the house, calling for drinks, he rubbed his hands gleefully.

‘I’ll make them pay for this!’

His little eyes twinkled. He blew himself out like a turkey–cock, and for the second time within half an hour insisted on telling Mackintosh every detail of the affair. Then he asked him to play piquet, and while they played he boasted of his intentions. Mackintosh listened with tightened lips.

‘But why should you grind them down like this?’ he asked. ‘Twenty pounds is precious little for the work you want them to do.’

‘They ought to be precious thankful I give them anything.’

‘Hang it all, it’s not your own money. The government allots you a reasonable sum. They won’t complain if you spend it.’

‘They’re a bunch of fools at Apia.’

Mackintosh saw that Walker’s motive was merely vanity. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It won’t do you much good to score off the fellows at Apia at the cost of your life.’

‘Bless you, they wouldn’t hurt me, these people. They couldn’t do without me. They worship me. Manuma is a fool. He only threw that knife to frighten me.’

The next day Walker rode over again to the village. It was called Matautu. He did not get off his horse. When he reached the chief’s house he saw that the men were sitting round the floor in a circle, talking, and he guessed they were discussing again the question of the road. The Samoan huts are formed in this way: trunks of slender trees are placed in a circle at intervals of perhaps five or six feet; a tall tree is set in the middle and from this downwards slopes the thatched roof. Venetian blinds of coconut leaves can be pulled down at night or when it is raining. Ordinarily the hut is open all round so that the breeze can blow through freely. Walker rode to the edge of the hut and called out to the chief.

‘Oh, there, Tangatu, your son left his knife in a tree last night. I have brought it back to you.’

He flung it down on the ground in the midst of the circle, and with a low burst of laughter ambled off.

On Monday he went out to see if they had started work. There was no sign of it. He rode through the village. The inhabitants were about their ordinary avocations. Some were weaving mats of the pandanus leaf, one old man was busy with a kava bowl, the children were playing, the women went about their household chores. Walker, a smile on his lips, came to the chief’s house.

‘Talofa–li,’ said the chief.

‘Talofa,’ answered Walker.

Manuma was making a net. He sat with a cigarette between his lips and looked up at Walker with a smile of triumph.

‘You have decided that you will not make the road?’

The chief answered.

‘Not unless you pay us one hundred pounds.’

‘You will regret it.’ He turned to Manuma. ‘And you, my lad, I shouldn’t wonder if your back was very sore before you’re much older.’

He rode away chuckling. He left the natives vaguely uneasy. They feared the fat sinful old man, and neither the missionaries’ abuse of him nor the scorn which Manuma had learnt in Apia made them forget that he had a devilish cunning and that no man had ever braved him without in the long run suffering for it. They found out within twenty–four hours what scheme he had devised. It was characteristic. For next morning a great band of men, women, and children came into the village and the chief men said that they had made a bargain with Walker to build the road. He had offered them twenty pounds and they had accepted. Now, the cunning lay in this, that the Polynesians have rules of hospitality which have all the force of laws; an etiquette of absolute rigidity made it necessary for the people of the village not only to give lodging to the strangers, but to provide them with food and drink as long as they wished to stay. The inhabitants of Matautu were outwitted. Every morning the workers went out in a joyous band, cut down trees, blasted rocks, levelled here and there and then in the evening tramped back again, and ate and drank, ate heartily, danced, sang hymns, and enjoyed life. For them it was a picnic. But soon their hosts began to wear long faces; the strangers had enormous appetites, and the plantains and the bread–fruit vanished before their rapacity; the alligator–pear trees, whose fruit sent to Apia might sell for good money, were stripped bare. Ruin stared them in the face. And then they found that the strangers were working very slowly. Had they received a hint from Walker that they might take their time? At this rate by the time the road was finished there would not be a scrap of food in the village. And worse than this, they were a laughing–stock; when one or other of them went to some distant hamlet on an errand he found that the story had got there before him, and he was met with derisive laughter. There is nothing the Kanaka can endure less than ridicule. It was not long before much angry talk passed among the sufferers. Manuma was no longer a hero; he had to put up with a good deal of plain speaking, and one day what Walker had suggested came to pass: a heated argument turned into a quarrel and half a dozen of the young men set upon the chief’s son and gave him such a beating that for a week he lay bruised and sore on the pandanus mats. He turned from side to side and could find no ease. Every day or two the administrator rode over on his old mare and watched the progress of the road. He was not a man to resist the temptation of taunting the fallen foe, and he missed no opportunity to rub into the shamed inhabitants of Matautu the bitterness of their humiliation. He broke their spirit. And one morning, putting their pride in their pockets–a figure of speech, since pockets they had not–they all set out with the strangers and started working on the road. It was urgent to get it done quickly if they wanted to save any food at all, and the whole village joined in. But they worked silently, with rage and mortification in their hearts, and even the children toiled in silence. The women wept as they carried away bundles of brushwood. When Walker saw them he laughed so much that he almost rolled out of his saddle. The news spread quickly and tickled the people of the island to death. This was the greatest joke of all, the crowning triumph of that cunning old white man whom no Kanaka had ever been able to circumvent; and they came from distant villages, with their wives and children, to look at the foolish folk who had refused twenty pounds to make the road and now were forced to work for nothing. But the harder they worked the more easily went the guests. Why should they hurry, when they were getting good food for nothing and the longer they took about the job the better the joke became? At last the wretched villagers could stand it no longer, and they were come this morning to beg the administrator to send the strangers back to their own homes. If he would do this they promised to finish the road themselves for nothing. For him it was a victory complete and unqualified. They were humbled. A look of arrogant complacence spread over his large, naked face, and he seemed to swell in his chair like a great bullfrog. There was something sinister in his appearance, so that Mackintosh shivered with disgust. Then in his booming tones he began to speak.

’Is it for my good that I make the road? What benefit do you think I get out of it? It is for you, so that you can walk in comfort and carry your copra in comfort. I offered to pay you for your work, though it was for your own sake the work was done. I offered to pay you generously. Now you must pay. I will send the people of Manua back to their homes if you will finish the road and pay the twenty pounds that I have to pay them.’

There was an outcry. They sought to reason with him. They told him they had not the money. But to everything they said he replied with brutal gibes. Then the clock struck.

‘Dinner time,’ he said. ‘Turn them all out.’

He raised himself heavily from his chair and walked out of the room. When Mackintosh followed him, he found him already seated at table, a napkin tied round his neck, holding his knife and fork in readiness for the meal the Chinese cook was about to bring. He was in high spirits.

‘I did ’em down fine,’ he said, as Mackintosh sat down. ‘I shan’t have much trouble with the roads after this.’

‘I suppose you were joking,’ said Mackintosh icily.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You’re not really going to make them pay twenty pounds?’

‘You bet your life I am.’

‘I’m not sure you’ve got any right to.’

‘Ain’t you? I guess I’ve got the right to do any damned thing I like on this island.’

‘I think you’ve bullied them quite enough.’

Walker laughed fatly. He did not care what Mackintosh thought.

‘When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.’

Mackintosh grew very white. He knew by bitter experience that he could do nothing but keep silence, and the violent effort at self–control made him sick and faint. He could not eat the food that was before him and with disgust he watched Walker shovel meat into his vast mouth. He was a dirty feeder, and to sit at table with him needed a strong stomach. Mackintosh shuddered. A tremendous desire seized him to humiliate that gross and cruel man; he would give anything in the world to see him in the dust, suffering as much as he had made others suffer. He had never loathed the bully with such loathing as now.

The day wore on. Mackintosh tried to sleep after dinner, but the passion in his heart prevented him; he tried to read, but the letters swam before his eyes. The sun beat down pitilessly, and he longed for rain; but he knew that rain would bring no coolness; it would only make it hotter and more steamy. He was a native of Aberdeen and his heart yearned suddenly for the icy winds that whistled through the granite streets of that city. Here he was a prisoner, imprisoned not only by that placid sea, but by his hatred for that horrible old man. He pressed his hands to his aching head. He would like to kill him. But he pulled himself together. He must do something to distract his mind, and since he could not read he thought he would set his private papers in order. It was a job which he had long meant to do and which he had constantly put off. He unlocked the drawer of his desk and took out a handful of letters. He caught sight of his revolver. An impulse, no sooner realized than set aside, to put a bullet through his head and so escape from the intolerable bondage of life flashed through his mind. He noticed that in the damp air the revolver was slightly rusted, and he got an oil–rag and began to clean it. It was while he was thus occupied that he grew aware of someone slinking round the door. He looked up and called:

‘Who is there?’

There was a moment’s pause, then Manuma showed himself.

‘What do you want?’

The chief’s son stood for a moment, sullen and silent, and when he spoke it was with a strangled voice.

‘We can’t pay twenty pounds. We haven’t the money.’

‘What am I to do?’ said Mackintosh. ‘You heard what Mr Walker said.’

Manuma began to plead, half in Samoan and half in English. It was a sing–song whine, with the quavering intonations of a beggar, and it filled Mackintosh with disgust. It outraged him that the man should let himself be so crushed. He was a pitiful object.

‘I can do nothing,’ said Mackintosh irritably. ‘You know that Mr Walker is master here.’

Manuma was silent again. He still stood in the doorway.

‘I am sick,’ he said at last. ‘Give me some medicine.’

‘What is the matter with you?’

‘I do not know. I am sick. I have pains in my body.’

‘Don’t stand there,’ said Mackintosh sharply. ‘Come in and let me look at you.’

Manuma entered the little room and stood before the desk.

‘I have pains here and here.’

He put his hands to his loins and his face assumed an expression of pain. Suddenly Mackintosh grew conscious that the boy’s eyes were resting on the revolver which he had laid on the desk when Manuma appeared in the doorway. There was a silence between the two which to Mackintosh was endless. He seemed to read the thoughts which were in the Kanaka’s mind. His heart beat violently. And then he felt as though something possessed him so that he acted under the compulsion of a foreign will. Himself did not make the movements of his body, but a power that was strange to him. His throat was suddenly dry, and he put his hand to it mechanically in order to help his speech. He was impelled to avoid Manuma’s eyes.

‘Just wait here,’ he said, his voice sounded as though someone had seized him by the windpipe, ‘and I’ll fetch you something from the dispensary.’

He got up. Was it his fancy that he staggered a little? Manuma stood silently, and though he kept his eyes averted, Mackintosh knew that he was looking dully out of the door. It was this other person that possessed him that drove him out of the room, but it was himself that took a handful of muddled papers and threw them on the revolver in order to hide it from view. He went to the dispensary. He got a pill and poured out some blue draught into a small bottle, and then came out into the compound. He did not want to go back into his own bungalow, so he called to Manuma.

‘Come here.’

He gave him the drugs and instructions how to take them. He did not know what it was that made it impossible for him to look at the Kanaka. While he was speaking to him he kept his eyes on his shoulder. Manuma took the medicine and slunk out of the gate,

Mackintosh went into the dining–room and turned over once more the old newspapers. But he could not read them. The house was very still. Walker was upstairs in his room asleep, the Chinese cook was busy in the kitchen, the two policemen were out fishing. The silence that seemed to brood over the house was unearthly, and there hammered in Mackintosh’s head the question whether the revolver still lay where he had placed it. He could not bring himself to look. The uncertainty was horrible, but the certainty would be more horrible still. He sweated. At last he could stand the silence no longer, and he made up his mind to go down the road to the trader’s, a man named Jervis, who had a store about a mile away. He was a half–caste, but even that amount of white blood made him possible to talk to. He wanted to get away from his bungalow, with the desk littered with untidy papers, and underneath them something, or nothing. He walked along the road. As he passed the fine hut of a chief a greeting was called out to him. Then he came to the store. Behind the counter sat the trader’s daughter, a swarthy broad–featured girl in a pink blouse and a white drill skirt. Jervis hoped he would marry her. He had money, and he had told Mackintosh that his daughter’s husband would be well–to–do. She flushed a little when she saw Mackintosh.

‘Father’s just unpacking some cases that have come in this morning. I’ll tell him you’re here.’

He sat down and the girl went out behind the shop. In a moment her mother waddled in, a huge old woman, a chiefess, who owned much land in her own right; and gave him her hand. Her monstrous obesity was an offence, but she managed to convey an impression of dignity. She was cordial without obsequiousness; affable, but conscious of her station.

‘You’re quite a stranger, Mr Mackintosh. Teresa was saying only this morning: “Why, we never see Mr Mackintosh now.”’

He shuddered a little as he thought of himself as that old native’s son–in–law. It was notorious that she ruled her husband, notwithstanding his white blood, with a firm hand. Hers was the authority and hers the business head. She might be no more than Mrs Jervis to the white people, but her father had been a chief of the blood royal, and his father and his father’s father had ruled as kings. The trader came in, small beside his imposing wife, a dark man with a black beard going grey, in ducks, with handsome eyes and flashing teeth. He was very British, and his conversation was slangy, but you felt he spoke English as a foreign tongue; with his family he used the language of his native mother. He was a servile man, cringing and obsequious.

‘Ah, Mr Mackintosh, this is a joyful surprise. Get the whisky, Teresa; Mr Mackintosh will have a gargle with us.’

He gave all the latest news of Apia, watching his guest’s eyes the while, so that he might know the welcome thing to say.

‘And how is Walker? We’ve not seen him just lately. Mrs Jervis is going to send him a sucking–pig one day this week.’

‘I saw him riding home this morning,’ said Teresa.

‘Here’s how,’ said Jervis, holding up his whisky.

Mackintosh drank. The two women sat and looked at him, Mrs Jervis in her black Mother Hubbard, placid and haughty, and Teresa anxious to smile whenever she caught his eye, while the trader gossiped insufferably.

‘They were saying in Apia it was about time Walker retired. He ain’t so young as he was. Things have changed since he first come to the islands and he ain’t changed with them.’

‘He’ll go too far,’ said the old chiefess. ‘The natives aren’t satisfied.’

‘That was a good joke about the road,’ laughed the trader. ‘When I told them about it in Apia they fair split their sides with laughing. Good old Walker.’

Mackintosh looked at him savagely. What did he mean by talking of him in that fashion? To a half–caste trader he was Mr Walker. It was on his tongue to utter a harsh rebuke for the impertinence. He did not know what held him back.

‘When he goes I hope you’ll take his place, Mr Mackintosh,’ said Jervis. ‘We all like you on the island. You understand the natives. They’re educated now, they must be treated differently to the old days. It wants an educated man to be administrator now. Walker was only a trader same as I am.’

Teresa’s eyes glistened.

‘When the time comes if there’s anything anyone can do here, you bet your bottom dollar we’ll do it. I’d get all the chiefs to go over to Apia and make a petition.’

Mackintosh felt horribly sick. It had not struck him that if anything happened to Walker it might be he who would succeed him. It was true that no one in his official position knew the island so well. He got up suddenly and scarcely taking his leave walked back to the compound. And now he went straight to his room. He took a quick look at his desk. He rummaged among the papers.

The revolver was not there.

His heart thumped violently against his ribs. He looked for the revolver everywhere. He hunted in the chairs and in the drawers. He looked desperately, and all the time he knew he would not find it. Suddenly he heard Walker’s gruff, hearty voice.

‘What the devil are you up to, Mac?’

He started. Walker was standing in the doorway and instinctively he turned round to hide what lay upon his desk.

‘Tidying up?’ quizzed Walker. ‘I’ve told ’em to put the grey in the trap. I’m going down to Tafoni to bathe. You’d better come along.’

‘All right,’ said Mackintosh.

So long as he was with Walker nothing could happen. The place they were bound for was about three miles away, and there was a fresh–water pool, separated by a thin barrier of rock from the sea, which the administrator had blasted out for the natives to bathe in. He had done this at spots round the island, wherever there was a spring; and the fresh water, compared with the sticky warmth of the sea, was cool and invigorating. They drove along the silent grassy road, splashing now and then through fords, where the sea had forced its way in, past a couple of native villages, the bell–shaped huts spaced out roomily and the white chapel in the middle, and at the third village they got out of the trap, tied up the horse, and walked down to the pool. They were accompanied by four or five girls and a dozen children. Soon they were all splashing about, snouting and laughing, while Walker, in a lava–lava, swam to and fro like an unwieldy porpoise. He made lewd jokes with the girls, and they amused themselves by diving under him and wriggling away when he tried to catch them. When he was tired he lay down on a rock, while the girls and the children surrounded him; it was a happy family; and the old man, huge, with his crescent of white hair and his shining bald crown, looked like some old sea god. Once Mackintosh caught a queer soft look in his eyes.

‘They’re dear children,’ he said. ‘They look upon me as their father.’

And then without a pause he turned to one of the girls and made an obscene remark which sent them all into fits of laughter. Mackintosh started to dress. With his thin legs and thin arms he made a grotesque figure, a sinister Don Quixote, and Walker began to make coarse jokes about him. They were acknowledged with little smothered laughs. Mackintosh struggled with his shirt. He knew he looked absurd, but he hated being laughed at. He stood silent and glowering.

‘If you want to get back in time for dinner you ought to come soon.’

‘You’re not a bad fellow, Mac. Only you’re a fool. When you’re doing one thing you always want to do another. That’s not the way we live.’

But all the same he raised himself slowly to his feet and began to put on his clothes. They sauntered back to the village, drank a bowl of kava with the chief, and then, after a joyful farewell from all the lazy villagers, drove home.

After dinner, according to his habit, Walker, lighting his cigar, prepared to go for a stroll. Mackintosh was suddenly seized with fear.

‘Don’t you think it’s rather unwise to go out at night by yourself just now?’

Walker stared at him with his round blue eyes.

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘Remember the knife the other night. You’ve got those fellows’ backs up.’

‘Pooh! They wouldn’t dare.’

‘Someone dared before.’

‘That was only a bluff. They wouldn’t hurt me. They look upon me as a father. They know that whatever I do is for their own good.’

Mackintosh watched him with contempt in his heart. The man’s self–complacency outraged him, and yet something, he knew not what, made him insist.

‘Remember what happened this morning. It wouldn’t hurt you to stay at home just tonight. I’ll play piquet with you.’

‘I’ll play piquet with you when I come back. The Kanaka isn’t born yet who can make me alter my plans.’

‘You’d better let me come with you.’

‘You stay where you are.’

Mackintosh shrugged his shoulders. He had given the man full warning. If he did not heed it that was his own lookout. Walker put on his hat and went out. Mackintosh began to read; but then he thought of something; perhaps it would be as well to have his own whereabouts quite clear. He crossed over to the kitchen and, inventing some pretext, talked for a few minutes with the cook. Then he got out the gramophone and put a record on it, but while it ground out its melancholy tune, some comic song of a London music–hall, his ear was strained for a sound away there in the night. At his elbow the record reeled out its loudness, the words were raucous, but notwithstanding he seemed to be surrounded by an unearthly silence. He heard the dull roar of the breakers against the reef. He heard the breeze sigh, far up, in the leaves of the coconut trees. How long would it be? It was awful.

He heard a hoarse laugh.

‘Wonders will never cease. It’s not often you play yourself a tune, Mac’

Walker stood at the window, red–faced, bluff and jovial.

‘Well, you see I’m alive and kicking. What were you playing for?’

Walker came in.

‘Nerves a bit dicky, eh? Playing a tune to keep your pecker up?’

‘I was playing your requiem.’

‘What the devil’s that?’

‘‘Alf o’ bitter an’ a pint of stout.’

‘A rattling good song too. I don’t mind how often I hear it. Now I’m ready to take your money off you at piquet.’

They played and Walker bullied his way to victory, bluffing his opponent, chaffing him, jeering at his mistakes, up to every dodge, browbeating him, exulting. Presently Mackintosh recovered his coolness, and standing outside himself, as it were, he was able to take a detached pleasure in watching the overbearing old man and in his own cold reserve. Somewhere Manuma sat quietly and awaited his opportunity.

Walker won game after game and pocketed his winnings at the end of the evening in high good–humour.

‘You’ll have to grow a little bit older before you stand much chance against me, Mac. The fact is I have a natural gift for cards.’

‘I don’t know that there’s much gift about it when I happen to deal you fourteen aces.’

‘Good cards come to good players,’ retorted Walker. ‘I’d have won if I’d had your hands.’

He went on to tell long stories of the various occasions on which he had played cards with notorious sharpers and to their consternation had taken all their money from them. He boasted. He praised himself. And Mackintosh listened with absorption. He wanted now to feed his hatred; and everything Walker said, every gesture, made him more detestable. At last Walker got up.

‘Well, I’m going to turn in,’ he said with a loud yawn. ‘I’ve got a long day tomorrow.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m driving over to the other side of the island. I’ll start at five, but I don’t expect I shall get back to dinner till late.’

They generally dined at seven.

‘We’d better make it half past seven then.’

‘I guess it would be as well.’

Mackintosh watched him knock the ashes out of his pipe. His vitality was rude and exuberant. It was strange to think that death hung over him. A faint smile flickered in Mackintosh’s cold, gloomy eyes.

‘Would you like me to come with you?’

‘What in God’s name should I want that for? I’m using the mare and she’ll have enough to do to carry me; she don’t want to drag you over thirty miles of road.’

‘Perhaps you don’t quite realize what the feeling is at Matautu. I think it would be safer if I came with you.’

Walker burst out into contemptuous laughter.

‘You’d be a fine lot of use in a scrap. I’m not a great hand at getting the wind up.’

Now the smile passed from Mackintosh’s eyes to his lips. It distorted them painfully.

‘Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.’

‘What the hell is that?’ said Walker.

‘Latin,’ answered Mackintosh as he went out.

And now he chuckled. His mood had changed. He had done all he could and the matter was in the hands of fate. He slept more soundly than he had done for weeks. When he awoke next morning he went out. After a good night he found a pleasant exhilaration in the freshness of the early air. The sea was a more vivid blue, the sky more brilliant, than on most days, the trade wind was fresh, and there was a ripple on the lagoon as the breeze brushed over it like velvet brushed the wrong way. He felt himself stronger and younger. He entered upon the day’s work with zest. After luncheon he slept again, and as evening drew on he had the bay saddled and sauntered through the bush. He seemed to see it all with new eyes. He felt more normal. The extraordinary thing was that he was able to put Walker out of his mind altogether. So far as he was concerned he might never have existed.

He returned late, hot after his ride, and bathed again. Then he sat on the veranda, smoking his pipe, and looked at the day declining over the lagoon. In the sunset the lagoon, rosy and purple and green, was very beautiful. He felt at peace with the world and with himself. When the cook came out to say that dinner was ready and to ask whether he should wait, Mackintosh smiled at him with friendly eyes. He looked at his watch.

‘It’s half past seven. Better not wait. One can’t tell when the boss’ll be back.’

The boy nodded, and in a moment Mackintosh saw him carry across the yard a bowl of steaming soup. He got up lazily, went into the dining–room, and ate his dinner. Had it happened? The uncertainty was amusing and Mackintosh chuckled in the silence. The food did not seem so monotonous as usual, and even though there was Hamburger steak, the cook’s invariable dish when his poor invention failed him, it tasted by some miracle succulent and spiced. After dinner he strolled over lazily to his bungalow to get a book. He liked the intense stillness, and now that the night had fallen the stars were blazing in the sky. He shouted for a lamp and in a moment the Chink pattered over on his bare feet, piercing the darkness with a ray of light. He put the lamp on the desk and noiselessly slipped out of the room. Mackintosh stood rooted to the floor, for there, half hidden by untidy papers, was his revolver. His heart throbbed painfully, and he broke into a sweat. It was done then.

He took up the revolver with a shaking hand. Four of the chambers were empty. He paused a moment and looked suspiciously out into the night, but there was no one there. He quickly slipped four cartridges into the empty chambers and locked the revolver in his drawer.

He sat down to wait.

An hour passed, a second hour passed. There was nothing. He sat at his desk as though he were writing, but he neither wrote nor read. He merely listened. He strained his ears for a sound travelling from a far distance. At last he heard hesitating footsteps and knew it was the Chinese cook.

‘Ah–Sung,’ he called.

The boy came to the door.

‘Boss velly late,’ he said. ‘Dinner no good.’

Mackintosh stared at him, wondering whether he knew what had happened, and whether, when he knew, he would realize on what terms he and Walker had been. He went about his work, sleek, silent, and smiling, and who could tell his thoughts?

‘I expect he’s had dinner on the way, but you must keep the soup hot at all events.’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when the silence was suddenly broken into by a confusion, cries, and a rapid patter of naked feet. A number of natives ran into the compound, men and women and children; they crowded round Mackintosh and they all talked at once. They were unintelligible. They were excited and frightened and some of them were crying. Mackintosh pushed his way through them and went to the gateway. Though he had scarcely understood what they said he knew quite well what had happened. And as he reached the gate the dog–cart arrived. The old mare was being led by a tall Kanaka, and in the dog–cart crouched two men, trying to hold Walker up. A little crowd of natives surrounded it.

The mare was led into the yard and the natives surged in after it. Mackintosh shouted to them to stand back and the two policemen, appearing suddenly from God knows where, pushed them violently aside. By now he had managed to understand that some lads, who had been fishing, on their way back to their village had come across the cart on the home side of the ford. The mare was nuzzling about the herbage and in the darkness they could just see the great white bulk of the old man sunk between the seat and the dashboard. At first they thought he was drunk and they peered in, grinning, but then they heard him groan, and guessed that something was amiss. They ran to the village and called for help. It was when they returned, accompanied by half a hundred people, that they discovered Walker had been shot.

With a sudden thrill of horror Mackintosh asked himself whether he was already dead. The first thing at all events was to get him out of the cart, and that, owing to Walker’s corpulence, was a difficult job. It took four strong men to lift him. They jolted him and he uttered a dull groan. He was still alive. At last they carried him into the house, up the stairs, and placed him on his bed. Then Mackintosh was able to see him, for in the yard, lit only by half a dozen hurricane lamps, everything had been obscured. Walker’s white ducks were stained with blood, and the men who had carried him wiped their hands, red and sticky, on their lava–lavas. Mackintosh held up the lamp. He had not expected the old man to be so pale. His eyes were closed. He was breathing still, his pulse could be just felt but it was obvious that he was dying. Mackintosh had not bargained for the shock of horror that convulsed him. He saw that the native clerk was there, and in a voice hoarse with fear told him to go into the dispensary and get what was necessary for a hypodermic injection. One of the policemen had brought up the whisky, and Mackintosh forced a little into the old man’s mouth. The room was crowded with natives. They sat about the floor, speechless now and terrified, and every now and then one wailed aloud. It was very hot, but Mackintosh felt cold, his hands and his feet were like ice, and he had to make a violent effort not to tremble in all his limbs. He did not know what to do. He did not know if Walker was bleeding still, and if he was, how he could stop the bleeding.

The clerk brought the hypodermic needle.

‘You give it to him,’ said Mackintosh. ‘You’re more used to that sort of thing than I am.’

His head ached horribly. It felt as though all sorts of little savage things were beating inside it, trying to get out. They watched for the effect of the injection. Presently Walker opened his eyes slowly. He did not seem to know where he was.

‘Keep quiet,’ said Mackintosh. ‘You’re at home. You’re quite safe.’

Walker’s lips outlined a shadowy smile.

‘They’ve got me,’ he whispered.

‘I’ll get Jervis to send his motor–boat to Apia at once. We’ll get a doctor out by tomorrow afternoon.’

There was a long pause before the old man answered.

‘I shall be dead by then.’

A ghastly expression passed over Mackintosh’s pale face. He forced himself to laugh.

‘What rot! You keep quiet and you’ll be as right as rain.’

‘Give me a drink,’ said Walker. ‘A stiff one.’

With shaking hand Mackintosh poured out whisky and water, half and half, and held the glass while Walker drank greedily. It seemed to restore him. He gave a long sigh and a little colour came into his great fleshy face. Mackintosh felt extraordinarily helpless. He stood and stared at the old man. ‘If you’ll tell me what to do I’ll do it,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to do. Just leave me alone. I’m done for.’

He looked dreadfully pitiful as he lay on the great bed, a huge, bloated, old man; but so wan, so weak, it was heart–rending. As he rested, his mind seemed to grow clearer.

‘You were right, Mac,’ he said presently. ‘You warned me.’

‘I wish to God I’d come with you.’

‘You’re a good chap, Mac, only you don’t drink.’

There was another long silence, and it was clear that Walker was sinking. There was an internal haemorrhage and even Mackintosh in his ignorance could not fail to see that his chief had but an hour or two to live. He stood by the side of the bed stock–still. For half an hour perhaps Walker lay with his eyes closed, then he opened them.

‘They’ll give you my job,’ he said, slowly. ‘Last time I was in Apia I told them you were all right. Finish my road. I want to think that’ll be done. All round the island.’

‘I don’t want your job. You’ll get all right.’

Walker shook his head wearily.

‘I’ve had my day. Treat them fairly, that’s the great thing. They’re children. You must always remember that. You must be firm with them, but you must be kind. And you must be just. I’ve never made a bob out of them. I haven’t saved a hundred pounds in twenty years. The road’s the great thing. Get the road finished.’

Something very like a sob was wrung from Mackintosh.

‘You’re a good fellow, Mac. I always liked you.’

He closed his eyes, and Mackintosh thought that he would never open them again. His mouth was so dry that he had to get himself something to drink. The Chinese cook silently put a chair for him. He sat down by the side of the bed and waited. He did not know how long a time passed. The night was endless. Suddenly one of the men sitting there broke into uncontrollable sobbing, loudly, like a child, and Mackintosh grew aware that the room was crowded by this time with natives. They sat all over the floor on their haunches, men and women, staring at the bed.

‘What are all these people doing here?’ said Mackintosh. ‘They’ve got no right. Turn them out, turn them out, all of them.’

His words seemed to rouse Walker, for he opened his eyes once more, and now they were all misty. He wanted to speak, but he was so weak that Mackintosh had to strain his ears to catch what he said.

‘Let them stay. They’re my children. They ought to be here.’

Mackintosh turned to the natives.

‘Stay where you are. He wants you. But be silent.’

A faint smile came over the old man’s white face.

‘Come nearer,’ he said.

Mackintosh bent over him. His eyes were closed and the words he said were like a wind sighing through the fronds of the coconut trees.

‘Give me another drink. I’ve got something to say.’

This time Mackintosh gave him his whisky neat. Walker collected his strength in a final effort of will.

‘Don’t make a fuss about this. In ninety–five when there were troubles white men were killed, and the fleet came and shelled the villages. A lot of people were killed who’d had nothing to do with it. They’re damned fools at Apia. If they make a fuss they’ll only punish the wrong people. I don’t want anyone punished.’

He paused for a while to rest.

‘You must say it was an accident. No one’s to blame. Promise me that.’ ‘I’ll do anything you like,’ whispered Mackintosh.

‘Good chap. One of the best. They’re children. I’m their father. A father don’t let his children get into trouble if he can help it.’

A ghost of a chuckle came out of his throat. It was astonishingly weird and ghastly.

‘You’re a religious chap, Mac. What’s that about forgiving them? You know.’

For a while Mackintosh did not answer. His lips trembled.

‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do?’

‘That’s right. Forgive them. I’ve loved them, you know, always loved them.’

He sighed. His lips faintly moved, and now Mackintosh had to put his ears quite close to them in order to hear.

‘Hold my hand,’ he said.

Mackintosh gave a gasp. His heart seemed wrenched. He took the old man’s hand, so cold and weak, a coarse, rough hand, and held it in his own. And thus he sat until he nearly started out of his seat, for the silence was suddenly broken by a long rattle. It was terrible and unearthly. Walker was dead. Then the natives broke out with loud cries. The tears ran down their faces, and they beat their breasts.

Mackintosh disengaged his hand from the dead man’s and staggering like one drunk with sleep he went out of the room. He went to the locked drawer in his writing–desk and took out the revolver. He walked down to the sea and walked into the lagoon; he waded out cautiously, so that he should not trip against a coral rock, till the water came to his arm–pits. Then he put a bullet through his head.

An hour later half a dozen slim brown sharks were splashing and struggling at the spot where he fell.

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

I DO not vouch for the truth of this story, but it was told me by a professor of French literature at an English university, and he was a man of too high a character, I think, to have told it to me unless it were true. His practice was to draw the attention of his students to three French writers who in his opinion combined the qualities that are the mainsprings of the French character. By reading them, he said, you could learn so much about the French people that, if he had the power, he would not trust such of our rulers as have to deal with the French nation to enter upon their offices till they had passed a pretty stiff examination on their works. They are Rabelais, with his gauloiserie, which may be described as the ribaldry that likes to call a spade something more than a bloody shovel; La Fontaine, with his bon sens, which is just horse sense; and finally Corneille, with his panache. This is translated in the dictionaries as the plume, the plume the knight at arms wore on his helmet, but metaphorically it seems to signify dignity and bravado, display and heroism, vainglory and pride. It was le panache that made the French gentlemen at Fontenoy say to the officers of King George II, fire first, gentlemen; it was le panache that wrung from Cambronne’s bawdy lips at Waterloo the phrase: the guard dies but never surrenders; and it is le panache that urges an indigent French poet, awarded the Nobel prize, with a splendid gesture to give it all away. My professor was not a frivolous man and to his mind the story I am about to tell brought out so distinctly the three master qualities of the French that it had a high educational value.

I have called it Appearance and Reality. This is the title of what I suppose may be looked upon as the most important philosophical work that my country (right or wrong) produced in the nineteenth century. It is stiff, but stimulating reading. It is written in excellent English, with considerable humour, and even though the lay reader is unlikely to follow with understanding some of its very subtle arguments he has nevertheless the thrilling sensation of walking a spiritual tight-rope over a metaphysical abyss, and he ends the book with a comfortable feeling that nothing matters a hang anyway. There is no excuse for my making use of the title of so celebrated a book except that it so admirably suits my story. Though Lisette was a philosopher only in the sense in which we are all philosophers, that she exercised thought in dealing with the problems of existence, her feeling for reality was so strong and her sympathy for appearance so genuine that she might almost claim to have established that reconciliation of irreconcilables at which the philosophers have for so many centuries been aiming. Lisette was French, and she passed several hours of every working day dressing and undressing herself at one of the most expensive and fashionable establishments in Paris. A pleasant occupation for a young woman who was well aware that she had a lovely figure. She was in short a mannequin. She was tall enough to be able to wear a train with elegance and her hips were so slim that in sports clothes she could bring the scent of heather to your nostrils. Her long legs enabled her to wear pyjamas with distinction, and her slim waist, her little breasts, made the simplest bathing dress a ravishment. She could wear anything. She had a way of huddling herself in a chinchilla coat that made the most sensible persons admit that chinchilla was worth all the money it cost. Fat women, gross women, stumpy women, bony women, shapeless women, old women, plain women, sat in the spacious arm-chairs and because Lisette looked so sweet bought the clothes that so admirably suited her. She had large brown eyes, a large red mouth and a very clear but slightly freckled skin. It was difficult for her to preserve that haughty, sullen and coldly indifferent demeanour that appears to be essential to the mannequin as she sails in with deliberate steps, turns round slowly and, with an air of contempt for the universe equalled only by the camel’s, sails out. There was the suspicion of a twinkle in Lisette’s large brown eyes and her red lips seemed to tremble as though on the smallest provocation they would break into a smile. It was the twinkle that attracted the attention of Monsieur Raymond Le Sueur.

He was sitting in a spurious Louis XVI chair by the side of his wife (in another) who had induced him to come with her to see the private view of the spring fashions. This was a proof of Monsieur Le Sueur’s amiable disposition, for he was an extremely busy man who, one would have thought, had many more important things to do than to sit for an hour and watch a dozen beautiful young women parade themselves in a bewildering variety of costumes. He could not have thought that any of them could possibly make his wife other than she was, and she was a tall, angular woman of fifty, with features considerably larger than life- size. He had not indeed married her for her looks, and she had never, even in the first delirious days of their honeymoon, imagined that he had. He had married her in order to combine the flourishing steel works of which she was the heiress with his equally flourishing manufactory of locomotives. The marriage had been a success. She had provided him with a son who could play tennis nearly as well as a professional, dance quite as well as a gigolo, and hold his own at bridge with any of the experts; and a daughter whom he had been able to dower sufficiently to marry to a very nearly authentic prince. He had reason to be proud of his children. By perseverance and a reasonable integrity he had prospered sufficiently to gain the controlling interest in a sugar refinery, a movie company, a firm that built motor-cars and a newspaper; and finally he had been able to spend enough money to persuade the free and independent electorate of a certain district to send him to the Senate. He was a man of a dignified presence, a pleasing corpulence and a sanguine complexion, with a neat grey beard cut square, a bald head and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. You had no need to look at the red button that adorned his black coat to surmise that he was a person of consequence. He was a man who made up his mind quickly and when his wife left the dressmaker’s to go and play bridge he parted from her, saying that for the sake of exercise he would walk to the Senate, where his duty to his country called him. He did not however go as far as this, but contented himself with taking his exercise up and down a back street into which he rightly surmised the young ladies of the dressmaker’s establishment would emerge at the close of business hours. He had barely waited for a quarter of an hour when the appearance of a number of women in groups, some young and pretty, some not so young and far from pretty, apprised him that the moment for which he had been waiting was come, and in two or three minutes Lisette tripped into the street. The Senator was well aware that his appearance and his age made it unlikely that young women would find him attractive at first sight, but he had found that his wealth and his position counterbalanced these disadvantages. Lisette had a companion with her, which would possibly have embarrassed a man of less importance, but did not cause the Senator to hesitate for an instant; he went up to her, raising his hat politely but not so much as to show how bald he was, and bade her good evening.

“Bon soir, Mademoiselle,” he said with an ingratiating smile.

She gave him the shortest possible look and, her full red lips just trembling with a smile, stiffened; she turned her head away and breaking into conversation with her friend, walked on with a very good assumption of supreme indifference. Far from disconcerted, the Senator turned round and followed the two girls at a distance of a few yards. They walked along the little back street, turned into the boulevard and at the Place de la Madeleine took a bus. The Senator was well satisfied. He had drawn a number of correct conclusions. The fact that she was obviously going home with a girl friend proved that she had no accredited admirer. The fact that she had turned away when he had accosted her showed that she was discreet and modest and well behaved, which he liked young women to be when they were pretty; and her coat and skirt, the plain black hat and the rayon stockings proclaimed that she was poor and therefore virtuous. In those clothes she looked just as attractive as in the splendid garments he had seen her wearing before. He had a funny little feeling in his heart. He had not had that peculiar sensation, pleasurable and yet oddly painful, for several years, but he recognised it at once.

“It’s love, by blue,” he muttered.

He had never expected to feel it again, and squaring his shoulders he walked on with a confident step. He walked to the offices of a private detective and there left instructions that inquiries should be made about a young person called Lisette, who worked as a mannequin at such and such an address; and then, remembering that at the Senate they were discussing the American Debt, took a cab to the impressive building, entered the library, where there was an arm-chair he very much liked, and had a pleasant nap. The information he had asked for reached him three days later. It was cheap at the price. Mademoiselle Lisette Larion lived with a widowed aunt in a two-room apartment in the district of Paris known as the Batignolles. Her father, a wounded hero of the great war, had a bureau de tabac in a small country town in the southwest of France. The rent of the flat was two thousand francs. She led a regular life, but was fond of going to the pictures, was not known to have a lover, and was nineteen years old. She was well spoken of by the concierge of the apartments and well liked by her companions at the shop. Obviously she was a very respectable young woman and the Senator could not but think that she was eminently suited to solace the leisure moments of a man who wanted relaxation from the cares of state and the exacting pressure of Big Business.

It is unnecessary to relate in detail the steps that Monsieur Le Sueur took to achieve the end he had in view. He was too important and too busy to occupy himself with the matter personally, but he had a confidential secretary who was very clever at dealing with electors who had not made up their minds how to vote, and who certainly knew how to put before a young woman who was honest but poor the advantages that might ensue if she were lucky enough to secure the friendship of such a man as his employer. The confidential secretary paid the widowed aunt, Madame Saladin by name, a visit and told her that Monsieur Le Sueur, always abreast of the time, had lately begun to take an interest in films and was indeed about to engage in the production of a picture. (This shows how much a clever brain can make use of a fact that an ordinary person would have passed over as insignificant.) Monsieur Le Sueur had been struck by the appearance of Mademoiselle Lisette at the dressmaker’s and the brilliant way she wore her clothes, and it had occurred to him that she might very well suit a part he had it in mind for her to play. (Like all intelligent people the Senator always stuck as close to the truth as he could.) The confidential secretary then invited Madame Saladin and her niece to a dinner where they could make one another’s further acquaintance and the Senator could judge whether Mademoiselle Lisette had the aptitude for the screen that he suspected. Madame Saladin said she would ask her niece, but for her part seemed to think the suggestion quite reasonable.

When Madame Saladin put the proposition before Lisette and explained the rank, dignity and importance of their generous host, that young person shrugged her pretty shoulders disdainfully.

“Cette vieille carpe,” she said, of which the not quite literal translation is: that old trout.

“What does it matter if he’s an old trout if he gives you a part?” said Madame Saladin.

“Et ta soeur,” said Lisette.

This phrase, which of course means: and your sister, and sounds harmless enough, and even pointless, is a trifle vulgar and is used by well-brought-up young women, I think, only if they want to shock. It expresses the most forcible unbelief, and the only correct translation into the vernacular is too coarse for my chaste pen.

“Anyhow we should get a slap-up dinner,” said Madame Saladin. “After all, you’re not a child any more.”

“Where did he say we should dine?”

“The Château de Madrid. Everyone knows it’s the most expensive restaurant in the world.”

There is no reason why it should not be. The food is very good, the cellar is famous, and its situation makes it on a fine evening of early summer an enchanting place to eat at. A very pretty dimple appeared on Lisette’s cheek and a smile on her large red mouth. She had perfect teeth.

“I can borrow a dress from the shop,” she murmured.

A few days later the Senator’s confidential secretary fetched them in a taxi and drove Madame Saladin and her engaging niece to the Bois de Boulogne. Lisette looked ravishing in one of the firm’s most successful models and Madame Saladin extremely respectable in her own black satin, and a hat that Lisette had made for the occasion. The secretary introduced the ladies to Monsieur Le Sueur, who greeted them with the benign dignity of the politician who is behaving graciously to the wife and daughter of a valued constituent; and this is exactly what in his astute way he thought people at adjacent tables who knew him would imagine his guests to be. The dinner passed off very agreeably, and less than a month later Lisette moved into a charming little flat at a convenient distance both from her place of business and from the Senate. It was decorated in the modern style by a fashionable upholsterer. Monsieur Le Sueur wished Lisette to continue to work. It suited him very well that she should have something to do during the hours that he was obliged to devote to affairs, for it would keep her out of mischief, and he very well knew that a woman who has nothing to do all day spends much more money than one who has an occupation. An intelligent man thinks of these things.

But extravagance was a vice to which Lisette was strange. The Senator was fond and generous. It was a source of satisfaction to him that Lisette began very soon to save money. She ran her apartment with thrift and bought her clothes at trade prices, and every month sent a certain sum home to her heroic father, who purchased little plots of land with it. She continued to lead a quiet and modest life and Monsieur Le Sueur was pleased to learn from the concierge, who had a son she wanted to place in a government office, that Lisette’s only visitors were her aunt and one or two girls from the shop.

The Senator had never been happier in his life. It was very satisfactory to him to think that even in this world a good action had its reward, for was it not from pure kindness that he had accompanied his wife to the dressmaker’s on that afternoon when they were discussing the American Debt at the Senate and thus seen for the first time the charming Lisette? The more he knew her the more he doted on her. She was a delightful companion. She was gay and debonair. Her intelligence was respectable and she could listen cleverly when he discussed business matters or affairs of state with her. She rested him when he was weary and cheered him when he was depressed. She was glad to see him when he came, and he came frequently, generally from five till seven, and sorry when he went away. She gave him the impression that he was not only her lover but her friend. Sometimes they dined together in her apartment, and the well-appointed meal, the genial comfort, gave him a keen appreciation of the charm of domesticity. His friends told the Senator he looked twenty years younger. He felt it. He was conscious of his good fortune. He could not but feel, however, that after a life of honest toil and public service it was only his due.

It was thus a shock to him, after things had been proceeding so happily for nearly two years, on coming back to Paris early one Sunday morning unexpectedly after a visit to his constituency which was to last over the week-end, when he let himself into the apartment with his latchkey, thinking since it was the day of rest to find Lisette in bed, to discover her having breakfast in her bedroom tête-à-tête with a young gentleman he had never seen before who was wearing his (the Senator’s) brand new pyjamas. Lisette was surprised to see him. Indeed she gave a distinct start.

“Tiens,” she said. “Where have you sprung from? I didn’t expect you till to-morrow.”

“The Ministry has fallen,” he answered mechanically. “I have been sent for. I am to be offered the Ministry of the Interior.” But that was not what he wanted to say at all. He gave the gentleman who was wearing his pyjamas a furious look. “Who is that young man?” he cried.

Lisette’s large red mouth broke into a most alluring smile.

“My lover,” she answered.

“Do you think I’m a fool?” shouted the Senator. “I know he’s your lover.”

“Why do you ask then?”

Monsieur Le Sueur was a man of action. He went straight up to Lisette and smacked her hard on her right cheek with his left hand and then smacked her hard on the left cheek with his right hand.

“Brute,” screamed Lisette.

He turned to the young man, who had watched this scene of violence with some embarrassment, and, drawing himself to his full height, flung out his arm and with a dramatic finger pointed to the door.

“Get out,” he cried. “Get out.”

One would have thought, such was the commanding aspect of a man who was accustomed to sway a crowd of angry tax-payers and who could dominate with his frown an annual meeting of disappointed shareholders, that the young man would have made a bolt for the door; but he stood his ground, irresolutely it is true, but he stood his ground; he gave Lisette an appealing look and slightly shrugged his shoulders.

“What are you waiting for?” shouted the Senator. “Do you want me to use force?”

“He can’t go out in his pyjamas,” said Lisette.

“They’re not his pyjamas, they’re my pyjamas.”

“He’s waiting for his clothes.”

Monsieur Le Sueur looked round and on the chair behind him, flung down in a disorderly fashion, was a variety of masculine garments. The Senator gave the young man a look of contempt.

“You may take your clothes, Monsieur,” he said with cold disdain.

The young man picked them up in his arms, gathered up the shoes that were lying about the floor, and quickly left the room. Monsieur Le Sueur had a considerable gift of oratory. Never had he made better use of it than now. He told Lisette what he thought of her. It was not flattering. He painted her ingratitude in the blackest colours. He ransacked an extensive vocabulary in order to find opprobrious names to call her. He called all the powers of heaven to witness that never had a woman repaid with such gross deception an honest man’s belief in her. In short he said everything that anger, wounded vanity and disappointment suggested to him. Lisette did not seek to defend herself. She listened in silence, looking down and mechanically crumbling the roll which the Senator’s appearance had prevented her from finishing. He flung an irritated glance at her plate.

“I was so anxious that you should be the first to hear my great news that I came straight here from the station. I was expecting to have my petit déjeuner with you, sitting at the end of your bed.”

“My poor dear, haven’t you had your breakfast? I’ll order some for you at once.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Nonsense. With the great responsibility you are about to assume you must keep up your strength.”

She rang and when the maid came told her to bring in hot coffee. It was brought and Lisette poured it out. He would not touch it. She buttered a roll. He shrugged his shoulders and began to eat. Meanwhile he uttered a few remarks on the perfidy of women. She remained silent.

“At all events it is something,” he said, “that you have not the effrontery to attempt to excuse yourself. You know that I am not a man who can be ill-used with impunity. The soul of generosity when people behave well to me I am pitiless when they behave badly. The very moment I have drunk my coffee I shall leave this apartment for ever.”

Lisette sighed.

“I will tell you now that I had prepared a surprise for you. I had made up my mind to celebrate the second anniversary of our union by settling a sum of money on you sufficient to give you a modest independence if anything happened to me.”

“How much?” asked Lisette sombrely.

“A million francs.”

She sighed again. Suddenly something soft hit the Senator on the back of the head and he gave a start.

“What is that?” he cried.

“He’s returning your pyjamas.”

The young man had opened the door, flung the pyjamas at the Senator’s head, and quickly closed it again. The Senator disengaged himself from the silk trousers that clung round his neck.

“What a way to return them! It is obvious that your friend has no education.”

“Of course he has not your distinction,” murmured Lisette.

“And has he my intelligence?”

“Oh, no.”

“Is he rich?”

“Penniless.”

“Then, name of a name, what is it you see in him?”

“He’s young,” smiled Lisette.

The Senator looked down at his plate and a tear rose in his eyes and rolled down his cheek into the coffee. Lisette gave him a kindly look.

“My poor friend, one can’t have everything in this life,” she said.

“I knew I was not young. But my situation, my fortune, my vitality. I thought it made up. There are women who only like men of a certain age. There are celebrated actresses who look upon it as an honour to be the little friend of a Minister. I am too well brought up to throw your origins in your face, but the fact remains that you are a mannequin and I took you out of an apartment of which the rent is only two thousand francs a year. It was a step up for you.”

“The daughter of poor but honest parents, I have no reason to be ashamed of my origins, and it is not because I have earned my living in a humble sphere that you have the right to reproach me.

“Do you love this boy?”

“Yes.”

“And not me?”

“You too. I love you both, but I love you differently. I love you because you are so distinguished and your conversation is instructive and interesting. I love you because you are kind and generous. I love him because his eyes are so big and his hair waves and he dances divinely. It’s very natural.”

“You know that in my position I cannot take you to places where they dance and I daresay when he’s as old as I am he’ll have no more hair than I have.”

“That may well be true,” Lisette agreed, but she did not think it much mattered.

“What will your aunt, the respectable Madame Saladin, say to you when she hears what you have done?”

“It will not be exactly a surprise to her.”

“Do you mean to say that worthy woman countenances your conduct? O tempora, o mores! How long then has this been going on?”

“Since I first went to the shop. He travels for a big silk firm in Lyons. He came in one day with his samples. We liked the look of one another.”

“But your aunt was there to defend you from the temptations to which a young girl is exposed in Paris. She should never have allowed you to have anything to do with this young man.”

“I did not ask her permission.”

“It is enough to bring the grey hairs of your poor father to the grave. Had you no thought of that wounded hero whose services to his country have been rewarded with a licence to sell tobacco? Do you forget that as Minister of the Interior the department is under my control? I should be within my rights if I revoked the licence on account of your flagrant immorality.”

“I know you are too great a gentleman to do a dastardly thing like that.”

He waved his hand in an impressive, though perhaps too dramatic a manner.

“Don’t be afraid, I will never stoop so low as to revenge myself on one who has deserved well of his country for the misdeeds of a creature my sense of dignity forces me to despise.”

He went on with his interrupted breakfast. Lisette did not speak and there was silence between them. But his appetite satisfied, his mood changed; he began to feel sorry for himself rather than angry with her, and with a strange ignorance of woman’s heart he thought to arouse Lisette’s remorse by exhibiting himself as an object of pity.

“It is hard to break a habit to which one has grown accustomed. It was a relief and a solace to me to come here when I could snatch a moment from my many occupations. Will you regret me a little, Lisette?”

“Of course.”

He gave a deep sigh.

“I should never have thought you capable of so much deception.”

“It is the deception that rankles,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Men are funny in that way. They cannot forgive being made fools of. It is because they are so vain. They attach importance to things that are of no consequence.”

“Do you call it a matter of no consequence that I should find you having breakfast with a young man wearing my pyjamas?”

“If he were my husband and you were my lover you would think it perfectly natural.”

“Obviously. For then I should be deceiving him and my honour would be secure.”

“In short, I have only to marry him to make the situation perfectly regular.”

For a moment he did not understand. Then her meaning flashed across his clever brain and he gave her a quick look. Her lovely eyes had the twinkle he always found so alluring and on her large red mouth was the suspicion of a roguish smile.

“Do not forget that as a member of the Senate I am by all the traditions of the Republic the authorised mainstay of morality and good behaviour.”

“Does that weigh very heavily with you?”

He stroked his handsome square beard with a composed and dignified gesture.

“Not a row of beans,” he replied, but the expression he used had a Gallic breadth that would perhaps have given his more conservative supporters something of a shock.

“Would he marry you?” he asked.

“He adores me. Of course he would marry me. If I told him I had a dot of a million francs he would ask nothing better.”

Monsieur Le Sueur gave her another look. When in a moment of anger he told her it had been his intention to settle a million francs on her he had exaggerated a good deal in the desire to make her see how much her treachery was costing her. But he was not the man to draw back when his dignity was concerned.

“It is much more than a young man in his position of life could aspire to. But if he adores you he would be always at your side.”

“Didn’t I tell you that he was a commercial traveller? He can only come to Paris for the week-end.”

“That of course is a horse of another colour,” said the Senator. “It would naturally be a satisfaction to him to know that during his absence I should be there to keep an eye on you.”

“A considerable satisfaction,” said Lisette.

To facilitate the conversation she rose from her seat and made herself comfortable on the Senator’s knees. He pressed her hand tenderly.

“I am very fond of you, Lisette,” he said. “I should not like you to make a mistake. Are you sure he will make you happy?”

“I think so.”

“I will have proper enquiries made. I would never consent to your marrying anyone not of exemplary character and unimpeachable morality. For all our sakes we must make quite sure about this young man whom we are preparing to bring into our lives.”

Lisette raised no objection. She was aware that the Senator liked to do things with order and method. He now prepared to leave her. He wanted to break his important news to Madame Le Sueur, and he had to get in touch with various persons in the parliamentary group to which he belonged.

“There is only one more thing,” he said, as he bade Lisette an affectionate farewell, “if you marry I must insist on your giving up your work. The place of a wife is the home, and it is against all my principles that a married woman should take the bread out of a man’s mouth.”

Lisette reflected that a strapping young man would look rather funny walking round the room, with his hips swaying, to show off the latest models, but she respected the Senator’s principles.

“It shall be as you wish, darling,” she said.

The enquiries he made were satisfactory and the marriage took place on a Saturday morning as soon as the legal formalities were completed. Monsieur Le Sueur, Minister of the Interior, and Madame Saladin were witnesses. The bridegroom was a slim young man with a straight nose, fine eyes and black waving hair brushed straight back from his forehead. He looked more like a tennis-player than a traveller in silk. The Mayor, impressed by the august presence of the Minister of the Interior, made according to French practice a speech which he sought to render eloquent. He began by telling the married couple what presumably they knew already. He informed the bridegroom that he was the son of worthy parents and was engaged in an honourable profession. He congratulated him on entering the bonds of matrimony at an age when many young men thought only of their pleasures. He reminded the bride that her father was a hero of the great war, whose glorious wounds had been rewarded by a concession to sell tobacco, and he told her that she had earned a decent living since her arrival in Paris in an establishment that was one of the glories of French taste and luxury. The Mayor was of a literary turn and he briefly mentioned various celebrated lovers of fiction, Romeo and Juliet whose short but legitimate union had been interrupted by a regrettable misunderstanding, Paul and Virginia who had met her death at sea rather than sacrifice her modesty by taking off her clothes, and finally Daphnis and Chloe who had not consummated their marriage till it was sanctioned by the legitimate authority.

He was so moving that Lisette shed a few tears. He paid a compliment to Madame Saladin whose example and precept had preserved her young and beautiful niece from the dangers that are likely to befall a young girl alone in a great city, and finally he congratulated the happy pair on the honour that the Minister of the Interior had done them in consenting to be a witness at the ceremony. It was a testimony to their own probity that this captain of industry and eminent statesman should find time to perform a humble office to persons in their modest sphere, and it proved not only the excellence of his heart but his lively sense of duty. His action showed that he appreciated the importance of early marriage, affirmed the security of the family and emphasised the desirability of producing offspring to increase the power, influence and consequence of the fair land of France. A very good speech indeed.

The wedding breakfast was held at the Château de Madrid, which had sentimental associations for Monsieur Le Sueur. It has been mentioned already that among his many interests the Minister (as we must now call him) was interested in a firm of motor-cars. His wedding present to the bridegroom was a very nice two-seater of his own manufacture, and in this, when lunch was over, the young couple started off for their honeymoon. This could only last over the week-end since the young man had to get back to his work, which would take him to Marseilles, Toulon and Nice. Lisette kissed her aunt and she kissed Monsieur Le Sueur.

“I shall expect you at five on Monday,” she whispered to him.

“I shall be there,” he answered.

They drove away and for a moment Monsieur Le Sueur and Madame Saladin looked at the smart yellow roadster.

“As long as he makes her happy,” sighed Madame Saladin, who was not used to champagne at lunch and felt unreasonably melancholy.

“If he does not make her happy he will have me to count with,” said Monsieur Le Sueur impressively.

His car drove up.

“Au revoir, chère Madame. You will get a bus at the Avenue de Neuilly.”

He stepped into his car and as he thought of the affairs of state that awaited his attention he sighed with content. It was evidently much more fitting to his situation that his mistress should be, not just a little mannequin in a dressmaker’s shop, but a respectable married woman.

THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF ANTIBES

One was called Mrs Richman and she was a widow. The second was called Mrs Sutcliffe; she was American and she had divorced two husbands. The third was called Miss Hickson and she was a spinster. They were all in the comfortable forties and they were all well off. Mrs Sutcliffe had the odd first name of Arrow. When she was young and slender she had liked it well enough. It suited her and the jests it occasioned though too often repeated were very flattering; she was not disinclined to believe that it suited her character too: it suggested directness, speed, and purpose. She liked it less now that her delicate features had grown muzzy with fat, that her arms and shoulders were so substantial and her hips so massive. It was increasingly difficult to find dresses to make her look as she liked to look. The jests her name gave rise to now were made behind her back and she very well knew that they were far from obliging. But she was by no means resigned to middle age. She still wore blue to bring out the colour of her eyes and, with the help of art, her fair hair had kept its lustre. What she liked about Beatrice Richman and Frances Hickson was that they were both so much fatter than she, it made her look quite slim; they were both of them older and much inclined to treat her as a little young thing. It was not disagreeable. They were good–natured women and they chaffed her pleasantly about her beaux; they had both given up the thought of that kind of nonsense, indeed Miss Hickson had never given it a moment’s consideration, but they were sympathetic to her flirtations. It was understood that one of these days Arrow would make a third man happy.

‘Only you mustn’t get any heavier, darling,’ said Mrs Richman.

‘And for goodness’ sake make certain of his bridge,’ said Miss Hickson. They saw for her a man of about fifty, but well–preserved and of distinguished carriage, an admiral on the retired list and a good golfer, or a widower without encumbrances, but in any case with a substantial income. Arrow listened to them amiably, and kept to herself the fact that this was not at all her idea. It was true that she would have liked to marry again, but her fancy turned to a dark slim Italian with flashing eyes and a sonorous title or to a Spanish don of noble lineage; and not a day more than thirty. There were times when, looking at herself in her mirror, she was certain she did not look any more than that herself.

They were great friends, Miss Hickson, Mrs Richman, and Arrow Sutcliffe. It was their fat that had brought them together and bridge that had cemented their alliance. They had met first at Carlsbad, where they were staying at the same hotel and were treated by the same doctor who used them with the same ruthlessness. Beatrice Richman was enormous. She was a handsome woman, with fine eyes, rouged cheeks, and painted lips. She was very well content to be a widow with a handsome fortune. She adored her food. She liked bread and butter, cream, potatoes, and suet puddings, and for eleven months of the year ate pretty well everything she had a mind to, and for one month went to Carlsbad to reduce. But every year she grew fatter. She upbraided the doctor, but got no sympathy from him. He pointed out to her various plain and simple facts.

‘But if I’m never to eat a thing I like, life isn’t worth living,’ she expostulated. He shrugged his disapproving shoulders. Afterwards she told Miss Hickson that she was beginning to suspect he wasn’t so clever as she had thought. Miss Hickson gave a great guffaw. She was that sort of woman. She had a deep bass voice, a large flat sallow face from which twinkled little bright eyes; she walked with a slouch, her hands in her pockets, and when she could do so without exciting attention smoked a long cigar. She dressed as like a man as she could. ‘What the deuce should I look like in frills and furbelows?’ she said. ‘When you’re as fat as I am you may just as well be comfortable.’

She wore tweeds and heavy boots and whenever she could went about bareheaded. But she was as strong as an ox and boasted that few men could drive a longer ball than she. She was plain of speech, and she could swear more variously than a stevedore. Though her name was Frances she preferred to be called Frank. Masterful, but with tact, it was her jovial strength of character that held the three together. They drank their waters together, had their baths at the same hour, they took their strenuous walks together, pounded about the tennis court with a professional to make them run, and ate at the same table their sparse and regulated meals. Nothing impaired their good humour but the scales, and when one or other of them weighed as much on one day as she had the day before neither Frank’s coarse jokes, the bonhomie of Beatrice, nor Arrow’s pretty kittenish ways sufficed to dispel the gloom. Then drastic measures were resorted to, the culprit went to bed for twenty–four hours and nothing passed her lips but the doctor’s famous vegetable soup which tasted like hot water in which a cabbage had been well rinsed.

Never were three women greater friends. They would have been independent of anyone else if they had not needed a fourth at bridge. They were fierce, enthusiastic players and the moment the day’s cure was over, they sat down at the bridge table. Arrow, feminine as she was, played the best game of the three, a hard, brilliant game, in which she showed no mercy and never conceded a point or failed to take advantage of a mistake. Beatrice was solid and reliable. Frank was dashing; she was a great theorist, and had all the authorities at the tip of her tongue. They had long arguments over the rival systems. They bombarded one another with Culbertson and Sims. It was obvious that not one of them ever played a card without fifteen good reasons, but it was also obvious from the subsequent conversation that there were fifteen equally good reasons why she should not have played it. Life would have been perfect, even with the prospect of twenty–four hours of that filthy soup when the doctor’s rotten (Beatrice) bloody (Frank) lousy (Arrow) scales pretended one hadn’t lost an ounce in two days, if only there had not been this constant difficulty of finding someone to play with them who was in their class.

It was for this reason that on the occasion with which this narrative deals Frank invited Lena Finch to come and stay with them at Antibes. They were spending some weeks there on Frank’s suggestion. It seemed absurd to her, with her common sense, that immediately the cure was over Beatrice who always lost twenty pounds should be giving way to her ungovernable appetite put it all on again. Beatrice was weak. She needed a person of strong will to watch her diet. She proposed then that on leaving Carlsbad they should take a house at Antibes, where they could get plenty of exercise–everyone knew that nothing slimmed you like swimming–and as far as possible could go on with the cure. With a cook of their own they could at least avoid things that were obviously fattening. There was no reason why they should not all lose several pounds more. It seemed a very good idea. Beatrice knew what was good for her, and she could resist temptation well enough if temptation was not put right under her nose. Besides, she liked gambling, and a flutter at the Casino two or three times a week would pass the time very pleasantly. Arrow adored Antibes, and she would be looking her best after a month at Carlsbad. She could just pick and choose among the young Italians, the passionate Spaniards, the gallant Frenchmen, and the long–limbed English who sauntered about all day in bathing trunks and gay–coloured dressing–gowns. The plan worked very well. They had a grand time. Two days a week they ate nothing but hard–boiled eggs and raw tomatoes and they mounted the scales every morning with light hearts. Arrow got down to eleven stone and felt just like a girl; Beatrice and Frank by standing in a certain way just avoided the thirteen. The machine they had bought registered kilogrammes, and they got extraordinarily clever at translating them in the twinkling of an eye to pounds and ounces.

But the fourth at bridge continued to be the difficulty. This person played like a fool, the other was so slow that it drove you frantic, one was quarrelsome, another was a bad loser, a third was next door to a crook. It was strange how hard it was to find exactly the player you wanted.

One morning when they were sitting in pyjamas on the terrace overlooking the sea, drinking their tea (without milk or sugar) and eating a rusk prepared by Dr Hudebert and guaranteed not to be fattening, Frank looked up from her letters.

‘Lena Finch is coming down to the Riviera,’ she said.

‘Who’s she?’ asked Arrow.

‘She married a cousin of mine. He died a couple of months ago and she’s just recovering from a nervous breakdown. What about asking her to come here for a fortnight?’

‘Does she play bridge?’ asked Beatrice.

‘You bet your life she does,’ boomed Frank in her deep voice. ‘And a damned good game too. We should be absolutely independent of outsiders.’

‘How old is she?’ asked Arrow.

‘Same age as I am.’

‘That sounds all right.’

It was settled. Frank, with her usual decisiveness, stalked out as soon as she had finished her breakfast to send a wire, and three days later Lena Finch arrived. Frank met her at the station. She was in deep but not obtrusive mourning for the recent death of her husband. Frank had not seen her for two years. She kissed her warmly and took a good look at her.

‘You’re very thin, darling,’ she said.

Lena smiled bravely.

‘I’ve been through a good deal lately. I’ve lost a lot of weight.’

Frank sighed, but whether from sympathy with her cousin’s sad loss, or from envy, was not obvious.

Lena was not, however, depressed, and after a quick bath was quite ready to accompany Frank to Eden Roc. Frank introduced the stranger to her two friends and they sat down in what was known as the Monkey House. It was an enclosure covered with glass overlooking the sea, with a bar at the back, and it was crowded with chattering people in bathing costumes, pyjamas, or dressing–gowns, who were seated at the tables having drinks. Beatrice’s soft heart went out to the lorn window, and Arrow, seeing that she was pale, quite ordinary to look at, and probably forty–eight, was prepared to like her very much. A waiter approached them.

‘What will you have, Lena dear?’ Frank asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know, what you all have, a dry Martini or a White Lady.’

Arrow and Beatrice gave her a quick look. Everyone knows how fattening cocktails are.

‘I daresay you’re tired after your journey,’ said Frank kindly.

She ordered a dry Martini for Lena and a mixed lemon and orange juice for herself and her two friends.

‘We find alcohol isn’t very good in all this heat,’ she explained.

‘Oh, it never affects me at all,’ Lena answered airily. ‘I like cocktails.’

Arrow went very slightly pale under her rouge (neither she nor Beatrice ever wet their faces when they bathed and they thought it absurd of Frank, a woman of her size, to pretend she liked diving) but she said nothing. The conversation was gay and easy, they all said the obvious things with gusto, and presently they strolled back to the villa for luncheon.

In each napkin were two little antifat rusks. Lena gave a bright smile as she put them by the side of her plate.

‘May I have some bread?’ she asked.

The grossest indecency would not have fallen on the ears of those three women with such a shock. Not one of them had eaten bread for ten years. Even Beatrice, greedy as she was, drew the line there. Frank, the good hostess, recovered herself first.

‘Of course, darling,’ she said and turning to the butler asked him to bring some.

‘And some butter,’ said Lena in that pleasant easy way of hers.

There was a moment’s embarrassed silence.

‘I don’t know if there’s any in the house,’ said Frank, ‘but I’ll inquire. There may be some in the kitchen.’

‘I adore bread and butter, don’t you?’ said Lena, turning to Beatrice.

Beatrice gave a sickly smile and an evasive reply. The butler brought a long crisp roll of French bread. Lena slit it in two and plastered it with the butter which was miraculously produced. A grilled sole was served.

‘We eat very simply here,’ said Frank. ‘I hope you won’t mind.’

‘Oh, no, I like my food very plain,’ said Lena as she took some butter and spread it over her fish. ‘As long as I can have bread and butter and potatoes and cream I’m quite happy.’

The three friends exchanged a glance. Frank’s great sallow face sagged a little and she looked with distaste at the dry, insipid sole on her plate. Beatrice came to the rescue.

‘It’s such a bore, we can’t get cream here,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the things one has to do without on the Riviera.’

‘What a pity,’ said Lena.

The rest of the luncheon consisted of lamb cutlets, with the fat carefully removed so that Beatrice should not be led astray, and spinach boiled in water, with stewed pears to end up with. Lena tasted her pears and gave the butler a look of inquiry. That resourceful man understood her at once and though powdered sugar had never been served at that table before handed her without a moment’s hesitation a bowl of it. She helped herself liberally. The other three pretended not to notice. Coffee was served and Lena took three lumps of sugar in hers.

‘You have a very sweet tooth,’ said Arrow in a tone which she struggled to keep friendly.

‘We think saccharine so much more sweetening,’ said Frank, as she put a tiny tablet of it into her coffee.

‘Disgusting stuff,’ said Lena.

Beatrice’s mouth drooped at the corners, and she gave the lump sugar a yearning look.

‘Beatrice,’ boomed Frank sternly.

Beatrice stifled a sigh, and reached for the saccharine.

Frank was relieved when they could sit down to the bridge table. It was plain to her that Arrow and Beatrice were upset. She wanted them to like Lena and she was anxious that Lena should enjoy her fortnight with them. For the first rubber Arrow cut with the newcomer.

‘Do you play Vanderbilt or Culbertson?’ she asked her.

‘I have no conventions,’ Lena answered in a happy–go–lucky way, ‘I play by the light of nature.’

‘I play strict Culbertson,’ said Arrow acidly.

The three fat women braced themselves to the fray. No conventions indeed! They’d learn her. When it came to bridge even Frank’s family feeling was forgotten and she settled down with the same determination as the others to trim the stranger in their midst. But the light of nature served Lena very well. She had a natural gift for the game and great experience. She played with imagination, quickly, boldly, and with assurance. The other players were in too high a class not to realize very soon that Lena knew what she was about, and since they were all thoroughly good–natured, generous women, they were gradually mollified. This was real bridge. They all enjoyed themselves. Arrow and Beatrice began to feel more kindly towards Lena, and Frank, noticing this, heaved a fat sigh of relief. It was going to be a success.

After a couple of hours they parted, Frank and Beatrice to have a round of golf, and Arrow to take a brisk walk with a young Prince Roccamare whose acquaintance she had lately made. He was very sweet and young and good–looking. Lena said she would rest.

They met again just before dinner.

‘I hope you’ve been all right, Lena dear,’ said Frank. ‘I was rather conscience–stricken at leaving you with nothing to do all this time.’

‘Oh, don’t apologize. I had a lovely sleep and then I went down to Juan and had a cocktail. And d’you know what I discovered? You’ll be so pleased. I found a dear little tea–shop where they’ve got the most beautiful thick fresh cream. I’ve ordered half a pint to be sent every day. I thought it would be my little contribution to the household.’

Her eyes were shining. She was evidently expecting them to be delighted.

‘How very kind of you,’ said Frank, with a look that sought to quell the indignation that she saw on the faces of her two friends. ‘But we never eat cream. In this climate it makes one so bilious.’

‘I shall have to eat it all myself then,’ said Lena cheerfully.

‘Don’t you ever think of your figure?’ Arrow asked with icy deliberation.

‘The doctor said I must eat.’

‘Did he say you must eat bread and butter and potatoes and cream?’

‘Yes. That’s what I thought you meant when you said you had simple food.’

‘You’ll get simply enormous,’ said Beatrice. Lena laughed gaily.

‘No, I shan’t. You see, nothing ever makes me fat. I’ve always eaten everything I wanted to and it’s never had the slightest effect on me.’

The stony silence that followed this speech was only broken by the entrance of the butler.

‘Mademoiselle est servie,’ he announced.

They talked the matter over late that night, after Lena had gone to bed, in Frank’s room. During the evening they had been furiously cheerful, and they had chaffed one another with a friendliness that would have taken in the keenest observer. But now they dropped the mask. Beatrice was sullen, Arrow was spiteful and Frank was unmanned.

‘It’s not very nice for me to sit there and see her eat all the things I particularly like,’ said Beatrice plaintively.

‘It’s not very nice for any of us,’ Frank snapped back.

‘You should never have asked her here,’ said Arrow.

‘How was I to know?’ cried Frank.

‘I can’t help thinking that if she really cared for her husband she would hardly eat so much.’ said Beatrice. ‘He’s only been buried two months. I mean, I think you ought to show some respect for the dead.’

‘Why can’t she eat the same as we do?’ asked Arrow viciously. ‘She’s a guest.’

‘Well, you heard what she said. The doctor told her she must eat.’

‘Then she ought to go to a sanatorium.’

‘It’s more than flesh and blood can stand, Frank,’ moaned Beatrice. ‘If I can stand it you can stand it.’

‘She’s your cousin, she’s not our cousin,’ said Arrow. ‘I’m not going to sit there for fourteen days and watch that woman make a hog of herself.’

‘It’s so vulgar to attach all this importance to food,’ Frank boomed, and her voice was deeper than ever. ‘After all the only thing that counts really is spirit.’

‘Are you calling me vulgar, Frank?’ asked Arrow with flashing eyes.

‘No, of course she isn’t,’ interrupted Beatrice.

‘I wouldn’t put it past you to go down in the kitchen when we’re all in bed and have a good square meal on the sly.’

Frank sprang to her feet.

‘How dare you say that, Arrow! I’d never ask anybody to do what I’m not prepared to do myself. Have you known me all these years and do you think me capable of such a mean thing?’

‘How is it you never take off any weight then?’

Frank gave a gasp and burst into a flood of tears.

‘What a cruel thing to say! I’ve lost pounds and pounds.’

She wept like a child. Her vast body shook and great tears splashed on her mountainous bosom.

‘Darling, I didn’t mean it,’ cried Arrow.

She threw herself on her knees and enveloped what she could of Frank in her own plump arms. She wept and the mascara ran down her cheeks.

‘D’you mean to say I don’t look thinner?’ Frank sobbed. ‘After all I’ve gone through.’

‘Yes, dear, of course you do,’ cried Arrow through her tears. ‘Everybody’s noticed it.’

Beatrice, though naturally of a placid disposition, began to cry gently. It was very pathetic. Indeed, it would have been a hard heart that failed to be moved by the sight of Frank, that lion–hearted woman, crying her eyes out. Presently, however, they dried their tears and had a little brandy and water, which every doctor had told them was the least fattening thing they could drink, and then they felt much better. They decided that Lena should have the nourishing food that had been ordered her and they made a solemn resolution not to let it disturb their equanimity. She was certainly a first–rate bridge player and after all it was only for a fortnight. They would do whatever they could to make her stay enjoyable. They kissed one another warmly and separated for the night feeling strangely uplifted. Nothing should interfere with the wonderful friendship that had brought so much happiness into their three lives.

But human nature is weak. You must not ask too much of it. They ate grilled fish while Lena ate macaroni sizzling with cheese and butter; they ate grilled cutlets and boiled spinach while Lena ate pâté de foie gras; twice a week they ate hard–boiled eggs and raw tomatoes, while Lena ate peas swimming in cream and potatoes cooked in all sorts of delicious ways. The chef was a good chef and he leapt at the opportunity afforded him to send up one dish more rich, tasty and succulent than the other.

‘Poor Jim,’ sighed Lena, thinking of her husband, ‘he loved French cooking.’

The butler disclosed the fact that he could make half a dozen kinds of cocktail and Lena informed them that the doctor had recommended her to drink burgundy at luncheon and champagne at dinner. The three fat women persevered. They were gay, chatty and even hilarious (such is the natural gift that women have for deception) but Beatrice grew limp and forlorn, and Arrow’s tender blue eyes acquired a steely glint. Frank’s deep voice grew more raucous. It was when they played bridge that the strain showed itself. They had always been fond of talking over their hands, but their discussion had been friendly. Now a distinct bitterness crept in and sometimes one pointed out a mistake to another with quite unnecessary frankness. Discussion turned to argument and argument to altercation. Sometimes the session ended in angry silence. Once Frank accused Arrow of deliberately letting her down. Two or three times Beatrice, the softest of the three, was reduced to tears. On another occasion Arrow flung down her cards and swept out of the room in a pet. Their tempers were getting frayed. Lena was the peacemaker.

‘I think it’s such a pity to quarrel over bridge,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s only a game.’

It was all very well for her. She had had a square meal and half a bottle of champagne. Besides, she had phenomenal luck. She was winning all their money. The score was put down in a book after each session, and hers mounted up day after day with unfailing regularity. Was there no justice in the world? They began to hate one another. And though they hated her too they could not resist confiding in her. Each of them went to her separately and told her how detestable the others were. Arrow said she was sure it was bad for her to see so much of women so much older than herself. She had a good mind to sacrifice her share of the lease and go to Venice for the rest of the summer. Frank told Lena that with her masculine mind it was too much to expect that she could be satisfied with anyone so frivolous as Arrow and so frankly stupid as Beatrice.

‘I must have intellectual conversation,’ she boomed. ‘When you have a brain like mine you’ve got to consort with your intellectual equals.’

Beatrice only wanted peace and quiet.

‘Really I hate women,’ she said. ‘They’re so unreliable; they’re so malicious.’

By the time Lena’s fortnight drew to its close the three fat women were barely on speaking terms. They kept up appearances before Lena, but when she was not there made no pretences. They had got past quarrelling. They ignored one another, and when this was not possible treated each other with icy politeness.

Lena was going to stay with friends on the Italian Riviera and Frank saw her off by the same train as that by which she had arrived. She was taking away with her a lot of their money.

‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said, as she got into the carriage. ‘I’ve had a wonderful visit.’

If there was one thing that Frank Hickson prided herself on more than on being a match for any man it was that she was a gentlewoman, and her reply was perfect in its combination of majesty and graciousness.

‘We’ve all enjoyed having you here, Lena,’ she said. ‘It’s been a real treat.’

But when she turned away from the departing train she heaved such a vast sigh of relief that the platform shook beneath her. She flung back her massive shoulders and strode home to the villa.

‘Ouf!’ she roared at intervals. ‘Ouf!’

She changed into her one–piece bathing–suit, put on her espadrilles and a man’s dressing–gown (no nonsense about it), and went to Eden Roc. There was still time for a bathe before luncheon. She passed through the Monkey House, looking about her to say good morning to anyone she knew, for she felt on a sudden at peace with mankind, and then stopped dead still. She could not believe her eyes. Beatrice was sitting at one of the tables, by herself; she wore the pyjamas she had bought at Molyneux’s a day or two before, she had a string of pearls round her neck, and Frank’s quick eyes saw that she had just had her hair waved; her cheeks, her eyes, her lips were made up. Fat, nay vast, as she was, none could deny that she was an extremely handsome woman. But what was she doing? With the slouching gait of the Neanderthal man which was Frank’s characteristic walk she went up to Beatrice. In her black bathing–dress Frank looked like the huge cetacean which the Japanese catch in the Torres Straits and which the vulgar call a sea–cow.

‘Beatrice, what are you doing?’ she cried in her deep voice.

It was like the roll of thunder in the distant mountains. Beatrice looked at her coolly.

‘Eating,’ she answered.

‘Damn it, I can see you’re eating.’

In front of Beatrice was a plate of croissants and a plate of butter, a pot of strawberry jam, coffee, and a jug of cream. Beatrice was spreading butter thick on the delicious hot bread, covering this with jam, and then pouring the thick cream over all.

‘You’ll kill yourself,’ said Frank.

‘I don’t care,’ mumbled Beatrice with her mouth full.

‘You’ll put on pounds and pounds.’

‘Go to hell!’

She actually laughed in Frank’s face. My God, how good those croissants smelt!

‘I’m disappointed in you, Beatrice. I thought you had more character.’

‘It’s your fault. That blasted woman. You would have her down. For a fortnight I’ve watched her gorge like a hog. It’s more than flesh and blood can stand. I’m going to have one square meal if I bust.’

The tears welled up to Frank’s eyes. Suddenly she felt very weak and womanly. She would have liked a strong man to take her on his knee and pet her and cuddle her and call her little baby names. Speechless she sank down on a chair by Beatrice’s side. A waiter came up. With a pathetic gesture she waved towards the coffee and croissants.

‘I’ll have the same,’ she sighed.

She listlessly reached out her hand to take a roll, but Beatrice snatched away the plate.

‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘You wait till you get your own.’

Frank called her a name which ladies seldom apply to one another in affection. In a moment the waiter brought her croissants, butter, jam, and coffee.

‘Where’s the cream, you fool?’ she roared like a lioness at bay.

She began to eat. She ate gluttonously. The place was beginning to fill up with bathers coming to enjoy a cocktail or two after having done their duty by the sun and the sea. Presently Arrow strolled along with Prince Roccamare. She had on a beautiful silk wrap which she held tightly round her with one hand in order to look as slim as possible and she bore her head high so that he should not see her double chin. She was laughing gaily. She felt like a girl. He had just told her (in Italian) that her eyes made the blue of the Mediterranean look like pea–soup. He left her to go into the men’s room to brush his sleek black hair and they arranged to meet in five minutes for a drink. Arrow walked on to the women’s room to put a little more rouge on her cheeks and a little more red on her lips. On her way she caught sight of Frank and Beatrice. She stopped. She could hardly believe her eyes.

‘My God!’ she cried. ‘You beasts. You hogs.’ She seized a chair. ‘Waiter.’

Her appointment went clean out of her head. In the twinkling of an eye the waiter was at her side.

‘Bring me what these ladies are having,’ she ordered.

Frank lifted her great heavy head from her plate.

‘Bring me some pâté de foie gras, she boomed.

‘Frank!’ cried Beatrice.

‘Shut up.’

‘All right. I’ll have some too.’

The coffee was brought and the hot rolls and cream and the pâté de foie gras and they set to. They spread the cream on the pâté and they ate it. They devoured great spoonfuls of jam. They crunched the delicious crisp bread voluptuously. What was love to Arrow then? Let the Prince keep his palace in Rome and his castle in the Apennines. They did not speak. What they were about was much too serious. They ate with solemn, ecstatic fervour.

‘I haven’t eaten potatoes for twenty–five years,’ said Frank in a far–off brooding tone.

‘Waiter,’ cried Beatrice, ‘bring fried potatoes for three.’

‘Très bien, Madame.’

The potatoes were brought. Not all the perfumes of Arabia smelt so sweet. They ate them with their fingers.

‘Bring me a dry Martini,’ said Arrow.

‘You can’t have a dry Martini in the middle of a meal, Arrow,’ said Frank.

‘Can’t I? You wait and see.’

‘All right then. Bring me a double dry Martini,’ said Frank.

‘Bring three double dry Martinis,’ said Beatrice.

They were brought and drunk at a gulp. The women looked at one another and sighed. The misunderstandings of the last fortnight dissolved and the sincere affection each had for the others welled up again in their hearts. They could hardly believe that they had ever contemplated the possibility of severing a friendship that had brought them so much solid satisfaction. They finished the potatoes.

‘I wonder if they’ve got any chocolate éclairs,’ said Beatrice.

‘Of course they have.’

And of course they had. Frank thrust one whole into her huge mouth, swallowed it and seized another, but before she ate it she looked at the other two and plunged a vindictive dagger into the heart of the monstrous Lena.

‘You can say what you like, but the truth is she played a damned rotten game of bridge, really.’

‘Lousy,’ agreed Arrow.

But Beatrice suddenly thought she would like a meringue.

THE FACTS OF LIFE

It was Henry Garnet’s habit on leaving the city of an afternoon to drop in at his club and play bridge before going home to dinner. He was a pleasant man to play with. He knew the game well and you could be sure that he would make the best of his cards. He was a good loser; and when he won was more inclined to ascribe his success to his luck than to his skill. He was indulgent, and if his partner made a mistake could be trusted to find an excuse for him. It was surprising then on this occasion to hear him telling his partner with unnecessary sharpness that he had never seen a hand worse played; and it was more surprising still to see him not only make a grave error himself, an error of which you would never have thought him capable, but when his partner, not unwilling to get a little of his own back, pointed it out, insist against all reason and with considerable heat that he was perfectly right. But they were all old friends, the men he was playing with, and none of them took his ill–humour very seriously. Henry Garnet was a broker, a partner in a firm of repute, and it occurred to one of them that something had gone wrong with some stock he was interested in.

‘How’s the market today?’ he asked.

‘Booming. Even the suckers are making money.’

It was evident that stocks and shares had nothing to do with Henry Garnet’s vexation; but something was the matter; that was evident too. He was a hearty fellow, who enjoyed excellent health; he had plenty of money; he was fond of his wife, and devoted to his children. As a rule he had high spirits, and he laughed easily at the nonsense they were apt to talk while they played; but today he sat glum and silent. His brows were crossly puckered and there was a sulky look about his mouth. Presently, to ease the tension, one of the others mentioned a subject upon which they all knew Henry Garnet was glad to speak.

‘How’s your boy, Henry? I see he’s done pretty well in the tournament.’ Henry Garnet’s frown grew darker.

‘He’s done no better than I expected him to.’

‘When does he come back from Monte?’

‘He got back last night.’

‘Did he enjoy himself?’

‘I suppose so; all I know is that he made a damned fool of himself.’ ‘Oh. How?’

‘I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind.’

The three men looked at him with curiosity. Henry Garnet scowled at the green baize.

‘Sorry, old boy. You call.’

The game proceeded in a strained silence. Garnet got his bid, and when he played his cards so badly that he went three down not a word was said. Another rubber was begun and in the second game Garnet denied a suit. ‘Having none?’ his partner asked him.

Garnet’s irritability was such that he did not even reply, and when at the end of the hand it appeared that he had revoked, and that his revoke cost the rubber, it was not to be expected that his partner should let his carelessness go without remark.

‘What’s the devil’s the matter with you, Henry?’ he said. ‘You’re playing like a fool.’

Garnet was disconcerted. He did not so much mind losing a big rubber himself, but he was sore that his inattention should have made his partner lose too. He pulled himself together.

‘I’d better not play any more. I thought a few rubbers would calm me, but the fact is I can’t give my mind to the game. To tell you the truth I’m in a hell of a temper.’

They all burst out laughing.

‘You don’t have to tell us that, old boy. It’s obvious.’

Garnet gave them a rueful smile.

‘Well, I bet you’d be in a temper if what’s happened to me had happened to you. As a matter of fact I’m in a damned awkward situation, and if any of you fellows can give me any advice how to deal with it I’d be grateful.’

‘Let’s have a drink and you tell us all about it. With a K.C., a Home Office official and an eminent surgeon–if we can’t tell you how to deal with a situation, nobody can.’

The K.C. got up and rang the bell for a waiter.

‘It’s about that damned boy of mine,’ said Henry Garnet.

Drinks were ordered and brought. And this is the story that Henry Garnet told them.

The boy of whom he spoke was his only son. His name was Nicholas and of course he was called Nicky. He was eighteen. The Garnets had two daughters besides, one of sixteen and the other of twelve, but however unreasonable it seemed, for a father is generally supposed to like his daughters best, and though he did all he could not to show his preference, there was no doubt that the greater share of Henry Garnet’s affection was given to his son. He was kind, in a chaffing, casual way, to his daughters, and gave them handsome presents on their birthdays and at Christmas; but he doted on Nicky. Nothing was too good for him. He thought the world of him. He could hardly take his eyes off him. You could not blame him, for Nicky was a son that any parent might have been proud of. He was six foot two, lithe but muscular, with broad shoulders and a slim waist, and he held himself gallantly erect; he had a charming head, well placed on the shoulders, with pale brown hair that waved slightly, blue eyes with long dark lashes under well–marked eyebrows, a full red mouth, and a tanned, clean skin. When he smiled he showed very regular and very white teeth. He was not shy, but there was a modesty in his demeanour that was attractive. In social intercourse he was easy, polite, and quietly gay. He was the offspring of nice, healthy, decent parents, he had been well brought up in a good home, he had been sent to a good school, and the general result was as engaging a specimen of young manhood as you were likely to find in a long time. You felt that he was as honest, open, and virtuous as he looked. He had never given his parents a moment’s uneasiness. As a child he was seldom ill and never naughty. As a boy he did everything that was expected of him. His school reports were excellent. He was wonderfully popular, and he ended his career, with a creditable number of prizes, as head of the school and captain of the football team. But this was not all. At the age of fourteen Nicky had developed an unexpected gift for lawn tennis. This was a game that his father not only was fond of, but played very well, and when he discerned in the boy the promise of a tennis–player he fostered it. During the holidays he had him taught by the best professionals and by the time he was sixteen he had won a number of tournaments for boys of his age. He could beat his father so badly that only parental affection reconciled the older player to the poor show he put up. At eighteen Nicky went to Cambridge and Henry Garnet conceived the ambition that before he was through with the university he should play for it. Nicky had all the qualifications for becoming a great tennis–player. He was tall, he had a long reach, he was quick on his feet, and his timing was perfect. He realized instinctively where the ball was coming and, seemingly without hurry, was there to take it. He had a powerful serve, with a nasty break that made it difficult to return, and his forehand drive, low, long, and accurate, was deadly. He was not so good on the backhand and his volleying was wild, but all through the summer before he went to Cambridge Henry Garnet made him work on these points under the best teacher in England. At the back of his mind, though he did not even mention it to Nicky, he cherished a further ambition, to see his son play at Wimbledon, and who could tell, perhaps be chosen to represent his country in the Davis Cup. A great lump came into Henry Garnet’s throat as he saw in fancy his son leap over the net to shake hands with the American champion whom he had just defeated, and walk off the court to the deafening plaudits of the multitude.

As an assiduous frequenter of Wimbledon Henry Garnet had a good many friends in the tennis world, and one evening he found himself at a City dinner sitting next to one of them, a Colonel Brabazon, and in due course began talking to him of Nicky and what chance there might be of his being chosen to play for his university during the following season.

‘Why don’t you let him go down to Monte Carlo and play in the spring tournament there?’ said the Colonel suddenly.

‘Oh, I don’t think he’s good enough for that. He’s not nineteen yet, he only went up to Cambridge last October; he wouldn’t stand a chance against all those cracks.’

‘Of course, Austin and von Cramm and so on would knock spots off him, but he might snatch a game or two; and if he got up against some of the smaller fry there’s no reason why he shouldn’t win two or three matches. He’s never been up against any of the first–rate players and it would be wonderful practice for him. He’d learn a lot more than he’ll ever learn in the seaside tournaments you enter him for.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m not going to let him leave Cambridge in the middle of a term. I’ve always impressed upon him that tennis is only a game and it mustn’t interfere with work.’

Colonel Brabazon asked Garnet when the term ended.

‘That’s all right. He’d only have to cut about three days. Surely that could be arranged. You see, two of the men we were depending on have let us down, and we’re in a hole. We want to send as good a team as we can. The Germans are sending their best players and so are the Americans.’

‘Nothing doing, old boy. In the first place Nicky’s not good enough, and secondly, I don’t fancy the idea of sending a kid like that to Monte Carlo without anyone to look after him. If I could get away myself I might think of it, but that’s out of the question.’

‘I shall be there. I’m going as the non–playing captain of the English team. I’ll keep an eye on him.’

‘You’ll be busy, and besides, it’s not a responsibility I’d like to ask you to take. He’s never been abroad in his life, and to tell you the truth, I shouldn’t have a moment’s peace all the time he was there.’

They left it at that and presently Henry Garnet went home. He was so flattered by Colonel Brabazon’s suggestion that he could not help telling his wife.

‘Fancy his thinking Nicky’s as good as that. He told me he’d seen him play and his style was fine. He only wants more practice to get into the first flight. We shall see the kid playing in the semi–finals at Wimbledon yet, old girl.’

To his surprise Mrs Garnet was not so much opposed to the notion as he would have expected.

‘After all the boy’s eighteen. Nicky’s never got into mischief yet and there’s no reason to suppose he will now.’

‘There’s his work to be considered; don’t forget that. I think it would be a very bad precedent to let him cut the end of term.’

‘But what can three days matter? It seems a shame to rob him of a chance like that. I’m sure he’d jump at it if you asked him.’

‘Well, I’m not going to. I haven’t sent him to Cambridge just to play tennis. I know he’s steady, but it’s silly to put temptation in his way. He’s much too young to go to Monte Carlo by himself.’

‘You say he won’t have a chance against these crack players, but you can’t tell.’

Henry Garnet sighed a little. On the way home in the car it had struck him that Austin’s health was uncertain and that von Cramm had his off–days. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Nicky had a bit of luck like that–then there would be no doubt that he would be chosen to play for Cambridge. But of course that was all nonsense.

‘Nothing doing, my dear. I’ve made up my mind and I’m not going to change it.’

Mrs Garnet held her peace. But next day she wrote to Nicky, telling him what had happened, and suggested to him what she would do in his place if, wanting to go, he wished to get his father’s consent. A day or two later Henry Garnet received a letter from his son. He was bubbling over with excitement. He had seen his tutor, who was a tennis–player himself, and the Provost of his college, who happened to know Colonel Brabazon, and no objection would be made to his leaving before the end of term; they both thought it an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. He didn’t see what harm he could come to, and if only, just this once, his father would stretch a point, well, next term, he promised faithfully, he’d work like blazes. It was a very pretty letter. Mrs Garnet watched her husband read it at the breakfast table; she was undisturbed by the frown on his face. He threw it over to her.

‘I don’t know why you thought it necessary to tell Nicky something I told you in confidence. It’s too bad of you. Now you’ve thoroughly unsettled him.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought it would please him to know that Colonel Brabazon had such a high opinion of him. I don’t see why one should only tell people the disagreeable things that are said about them. Of course I made it quite clear that there could be no question of his going.’

‘You’ve put me in an odious position. If there’s anything I hate it’s for the boy to look upon me as a spoil–sport and a tyrant.’

‘Oh, he’ll never do that. He may think you rather silly and unreasonable, but I’m sure he’ll understand that it’s only for his own good that you’re being so unkind.’

‘Christ,’ said Henry Garnet.

His wife had a great inclination to laugh. She knew the battle was won. Dear, oh dear, how easy it was to get men to do what you wanted. For appearance sake Henry Garnet held out for forty–eight hours, but then he yielded, and a fortnight later Nicky came to London. He was to start for Monte Carlo next morning, and after dinner, when Mrs Garnet and her elder daughter had left them, Henry took the opportunity to give his son some good advice.

‘I don’t feel quite comfortable about letting you go off to a place like Monte Carlo at your age practically by yourself,’ he finished, ‘but there it is and I can only hope you’ll be sensible. I don’t want to play the heavy father, but there are three things especially that I want to warn you against: one is gambling, don’t gamble; the second is money, don’t lend anyone money; and the third is women, don’t have anything to do with women. If you don’t do any of those three things you can’t come to much harm, so remember them well.’

‘All right, father,’ Nicky smiled.

‘That’s my last word to you. I know the world pretty well and believe me, my advice is sound.’

‘I won’t forget it. I promise you.’

‘That’s a good chap. Now let’s go up and join the ladies.’

Nicky beat neither Austin nor von Cramm in the Monte Carlo tournament, but he did not disgrace himself. He snatched an unexpected victory over a Spanish player and gave one of the Austrians a closer match than anyone had thought possible. In the mixed doubles he got into the semi–finals. His charm conquered everyone and he vastly enjoyed himself. It was generally allowed that he showed promise, and Colonel Brabazon told him that when he was a little older and had had more practice with first–class players he would be a credit to his father. The tournament came to an end and the day following he was to fly back to London. Anxious to play his best he had lived very carefully, smoking little and drinking nothing, and going to bed early; but on his last evening he thought he would like to see something of the life in Monte Carlo of which he had heard so much. An official dinner was given to the tennis–players and after dinner with the rest of them he went into the Sporting Club. It was the first time he had been there. Monte Carlo was very full and the rooms were crowded. Nicky had never before seen roulette played except in the pictures; in a maze he stopped at the first table he came to; chips of different sizes were scattered over the green cloth in what looked like a hopeless muddle; the croupier gave the wheel a sharp turn and with a flick threw in the little white ball. After what seemed an endless time the ball stopped and another croupier with a broad, indifferent gesture raked in the chips of those who had lost.

Presently Nicky wandered over to where they were playing trente et quarante, but he couldn’t understand what it was all about and he thought it dull. He saw a crowd in another room and sauntered in. A big game of baccarat was in progress and he was immediately conscious of the tension. The players were protected from the thronging bystanders by a brass rail; they sat round the table, nine on each side, with the dealer in the middle and the croupier facing him. Big money was changing hands. The dealer was a member of the Greek Syndicate. Nicky looked at his impassive face. His eyes were watchful, but his expression never changed whether he won or lost. It was a terrifying, strangely impressive sight. It gave Nicky, who had been thriftily brought up, a peculiar thrill to see someone risk a thousand pounds on the turn of a card and when he lost make a little joke and laugh. It was all terribly exciting. An acquaintance came up to him.

‘Been doing any good?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t been playing.’

‘Wise of you. Rotten game. Come and have a drink.’

‘All right.’

While they were having it Nicky told his friends that this was the first time he had ever been in the rooms.

‘Oh, but you must have one little flutter before you go. It’s idiotic to leave Monte without having tried your luck. After all it won’t hurt you to lose a hundred francs or so.’

‘I don’t suppose it will, but my father wasn’t any too keen on my coming at all and one of the three things he particularly advised me not to do was to gamble.’

But when Nicky left his companion he strolled back to one of the tables where they were playing roulette. He stood for a while looking at the losers’ money being raked–in by the croupier and the money that was won paid out to the winners. It was impossible to deny that it was thrilling. His friend was right, it did seem silly to leave Monte without putting something on the table just once. It would be an experience, and at his age you had to have all the experience you could get. He reflected that he hadn’t promised his father not to gamble, he’d promised him not to forget his advice. It wasn’t quite the same, was it? He took a hundred–franc note out of his pocket and rather shyly put it on number eighteen. He chose it because that was his age. With a wildly beating heart he watched the wheel turn; the little white ball whizzed about like a small demon of mischief; the wheel went round more slowly, the little white ball hesitated, it seemed about to stop, it went on again; Nicky could hardly believe his eyes when it fell into number eighteen. A lot of chips were passed over to him and his hands trembled as he took them. It seemed to amount to a lot of money. He was so confused that he never thought of putting anything on the following round; in fact he had no intention of playing any more, once was enough; and he was surprised when eighteen again came up. There was only one chip on it.

‘By George, you’ve won again,’ said a man who was standing near to him.

‘Me? I hadn’t got anything on.’

‘Yes, you had. Your original stake. They always leave it on unless you ask for it back. Didn’t you know?’

Another packet of chips was handed over to him. Nicky’s head reeled. He counted his gains: seven thousand francs. A queer sense of power seized him; he felt wonderfully clever. This was the easiest way of making money that he had ever heard of. His frank, charming face was wreathed in smiles. His bright eyes met those of a woman standing by his side. She smiled.

‘You’re in luck,’ she said.

She spoke English, but with a foreign accent.

‘I can hardly believe it. It’s the first time I’ve ever played.’

‘That explains it. Lend me a thousand francs, will you? I’ve lost everything I’ve got. I’ll give it you back in half an hour.’

‘All right.’

She took a large red chip from his pile and with a word of thanks disappeared. The man who had spoken to him before grunted.

‘You’ll never see that again.’

Nicky was dashed. His father had particularly advised him not to lend anyone money. What a silly thing to do! And to somebody he’d never seen in his life. But the fact was, he felt at that moment such a love for the human race that it had never occurred to him to refuse. And that big red chip, it was almost impossible to realize that it had any value. Oh well, it didn’t matter, he still had six thousand francs, he’d just try his luck once or twice more and if he didn’t win he’d go home. He put a chip on sixteen, which was his elder sister’s age, but it didn’t come up; then on twelve, which was his younger sister’s, and that didn’t come up either; he tried various numbers at random, but without success. It was funny, he seemed to have lost his knack. He thought he would try just once more and then stop; he won. He had made up all his losses and had something over. At the end of an hour, after various ups and downs, having experienced such thrills as he had never known in his life, he found himself with so many chips that they would hardly go in his pockets. He decided to go. He went to the changers’ office and he gasped when twenty thousand–franc notes were spread out before him. He had never had so much money in his life. He put it in his pocket and was turning away when the woman to whom he had lent the thousand francs came up to him.

‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you’d gone. I was in a fever, I didn’t know what you’d think of me. Here’s your thousand francs and thank you so much for the loan.’

Nicky, blushing scarlet, stared at her with amazement. How he had misjudged her! His father had said, don’t gamble; well, he had, and he’d made twenty thousand francs; and his father had said, don’t lend anyone money; well, he had, he’d lent quite a lot to a total stranger, and she’d returned it. The fact was that he wasn’t nearly such a fool as his father thought: he’d had an instinct that he could lend her money with safety, and you see, his instinct was right. But he was so obviously taken aback that the little lady was forced to laugh.

‘What is the matter with you?’ she asked.

‘To tell you the truth I never expected to see the money back.’

‘What did you take me for? Did you think I was a–cocotte?’

Nicky reddened to the roots of his wavy hair.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Do I look like one?’

‘Not a bit.’

She was dressed very quietly, in black, with a string of gold beads round her neck; her simple frock showed off a neat, slight figure; she had a pretty little face and a trim head. She was made up, but not excessively, and Nicky supposed that she was not more than three or four years older than himself. She gave him a friendly smile.

‘My husband is in the administration in Morocco, and I’ve come to Monte Carlo for a few weeks because he thought I wanted a change.’

‘I was just going,’ said Nicky because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘Already!’

‘Well, I’ve got to get up early tomorrow. I’m going back to London by air.’

‘Of course. The tournament ended today, didn’t it? I saw you play, you know, two or three times.’

‘Did you? I don’t know why you should have noticed me.’

‘You’ve got a beautiful style. And you looked very sweet in your shorts.’

Nicky was not an immodest youth, but it did cross his mind that perhaps she had borrowed that thousand francs in order to scrape acquaintance with him.

‘Do you ever go to the Knickerbocker?’ she asked.

‘No. I never have.’

‘Oh, but you mustn’t leave Monte Carlo without having been there. Why don’t you come and dance a little? To tell you the truth, I’m starving with hunger and I should adore some bacon and eggs.’

Nicky remembered his father’s advice not to have anything to do with women, but this was different; you had only to look at the pretty little thing to know at once that she was perfectly respectable. Her husband was in what corresponded, he supposed, to the Civil Service. His father and mother had friends who were Civil Servants and they and their wives sometimes came to dinner. It was true that the wives were neither so young nor so pretty as this one, but she was just as ladylike as they were. And after winning twenty thousand francs he thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a little fun.

‘I’d love to go with you,’ he said. ‘But you won’t mind if I don’t stay very long. I’ve left instructions at my hotel that I’m to be called at seven.’

‘We’ll leave as soon as ever you like.’

Nicky found it very pleasant at the Knickerbocker. He ate his bacon and eggs with appetite. They shared a bottle of champagne. They danced, and the little lady told him he danced beautifully. He knew he danced pretty well, and of course she was easy to dance with. As light as a feather. She laid her cheek against his and when their eyes met there was in hers a smile that made his heart go pit–a–pat. A coloured woman sang in a throaty, sensual voice. The floor was crowded.

‘Have you ever been told that you’re very good–looking?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ he laughed. ‘Gosh,’ he thought, ‘I believe she’s fallen for me.’

Nicky was not such a fool as to be unaware that women often liked him, and when she made that remark he pressed her to him a little more closely. She closed her eyes and a faint sigh escaped her lips.

‘I suppose it wouldn’t be quite nice if I kissed you before all these people,’ he said.

‘What do you think they would take me for?’

It began to grow late and Nicky said that really he thought he ought to be going.

‘I shall go too,’ she said. ‘Will you drop me at my hotel on your way?’

Nicky paid the bill. He was rather surprised at its amount, but with all that money he had in his pocket he could afford not to care, and they got into a taxi. She snuggled up to him and he kissed her. She seemed to like it.

‘By Jove,’ he thought, ‘I wonder if there’s anything doing.’

It was true that she was a married woman, but her husband was in Morocco, and it certainly did look as if she’d fallen for him. Good and proper. It was true also that his father had warned him to have nothing to do with women, but, he reflected again, he hadn’t actually promised he wouldn’t, he’d only promised not to forget his advice. Well, he hadn’t; he was bearing it in mind that very minute. But circumstances alter cases. She was a sweet little thing; it seemed silly to miss the chance of an adventure when it was handed to you like that on a tray. When they reached the hotel he paid off the taxi.

‘I’ll walk home,’ he said. ‘The air will do me good after the stuffy atmosphere of that place.’

‘Come up a moment,’ she said. ‘I’d like to show you the photo of my little boy.’

‘Oh, have you got a little boy?’ he exclaimed, a trifle dashed.

‘Yes, a sweet little boy.’

He walked upstairs after her. He didn’t in the least want to see the photograph of her little boy, but he thought it only civil to pretend he did. He was afraid he’d made a fool of himself; it occurred to him that she was taking him up to look at the photograph in order to show him in a nice way that he’d made a mistake. He’d told her he was eighteen.

‘I suppose she thinks I’m just a kid.’

He began to wish he hadn’t spent all that money on champagne at the nightclub.

But she didn’t show him the photograph of her little boy after all. They had no sooner got into her room than she turned to him, flung her arms round his neck, and kissed him full on the lips. He had never in all his life been kissed so passionately.

‘Darling,’ she said.

For a brief moment his father’s advice once more crossed Nicky’s mind and then he forgot it.

Nicky was a light sleeper and the least sound was apt to wake him. Two or three hours later he awoke and for a moment could not imagine where he was. The room was not quite dark, for the door of the bathroom was ajar, and the light in it had been left on. Suddenly he was conscious that someone was moving about the room. Then he remembered. He saw that it was his little friend, and he was on the point of speaking when something in the way she was behaving stopped him. She was walking very cautiously, as though she were afraid of waking him; she stopped once or twice and looked over at the bed. He wondered what she was after. He soon saw. She went over to the chair on which he had placed his clothes and once more looked in his direction. She waited for what seemed to him an interminable time. The silence was so intense that Nicky thought he could hear his own heart beating. Then, very slowly, very quietly, she took up his coat, slipped her hand into the inside pocket and drew out all those beautiful thousand–franc notes that Nicky had been so proud to win. She put the coat back and placed some other clothes on it so that it should look as though it had not been disturbed, then, with the bundle of notes in her hand, for an appreciable time stood once more stock–still. Nicky had repressed an instinctive impulse to jump up and grab her, it was partly surprise that had kept him quiet, partly the notion that he was in a strange hotel, in a foreign country, and if he made a row he didn’t know what might happen. She looked at him. His eyes were partly closed and he was sure that she thought he was asleep. In the silence she could hardly fail to hear his regular breathing. When she had reassured herself that her movements had not disturbed him she stepped, with infinite caution, across the room. On a small table in the window a cineraria was growing in a pot. Nicky watched her now with his eyes wide open. The plant was evidently placed quite loosely in the pot, for taking it by the stalks she lifted it out; she put the banknotes in the bottom of the pot and replaced the plant. It was an excellent hiding–place. No one could have guessed that anything was concealed under that richly–flowering plant. She pressed the earth down with her fingers and then, very slowly, taking care not to make the smallest noise, crept across the room and slipped back into bed.

‘Chéri,’ she said, in a caressing voice.

Nicky breathed steadily, like a man immersed in deep sleep. The little lady turned over on her side and disposed herself to slumber. But though Nicky lay so still his thoughts worked busily. He was extremely indignant at the scene he had just witnessed, and to himself he spoke his thoughts with vigour. ‘She’s nothing but a damned tart. She and her dear little boy and her husband in Morocco. My eye! She’s a rotten thief, that’s what she is. Took me for a mug.

If she thinks she’s going to get away with anything like that, she’s mistaken.’ He had already made up his mind what he was going to do with the money he had so cleverly won. He had long wanted a car of his own, and had thought it rather mean of his father not to have given him one. After all, a feller doesn’t always want to drive about in the family bus. Well, he’d just teach the old man a lesson and buy one himself. For twenty thousand francs, two hundred pounds roughly, he could get a very decent second–hand car. He meant to get the money back, but just then he didn’t quite know how. He didn’t like the idea of kicking up a row, he was a stranger, in a hotel he knew nothing of; it might very well be that the beastly woman had friends there, he didn’t mind facing anyone in a fair fight, but he’d look pretty foolish if someone pulled a gun on him. He reflected besides, very sensibly, that he had no proof the money was his. If it came to a showdown and she swore it was hers, he might very easily find himself hauled off to a police–station. He really didn’t know what to do.

Presently by her regular breathing he knew that the little lady was asleep. She must have fallen asleep with an easy mind, for she had done her job without a hitch. It infuriated Nicky that she should rest so peacefully while he lay awake worried to death. Suddenly an idea occurred to him. It was such a good one that it was only by the exercise of all his self–control that he prevented himself from jumping out of bed and carrying it out at once. Two could play at her game. She’d stolen his money; well, he’d steal it back again, and they’d be all square. He made up his mind to wait quite quietly until he was sure that deceitful woman was sound asleep. He waited for what seemed to him a very long time. She did not stir. Her breathing was as regular as a child’s. ‘Darling,’ he said at last.

No answer. No movement. She was dead to the world. Very slowly, pausing after every movement, very silently, he slipped out of bed. He stood still for a while, looking at her to see whether he had disturbed her. Her breathing was as regular as before. During the time he was waiting he had taken note carefully of the furniture in the room so that in crossing it he should not knock against a chair or a table and make a noise. He took a couple of steps and waited, he took a couple of steps more; he was very light on his feet and made no sound as he walked; he took fully five minutes to get to the window, and here he waited again. He started, for the bed slightly creaked, but it was only because the sleeper turned in her sleep. He forced himself to wait till he had counted one hundred. She was sleeping like a log. With infinite care he seized the cineraria by the stalks and gently pulled it out of the pot; he put his other hand in, his heart beat nineteen to the dozen as his fingers touched the notes, his hand closed on them and he slowly drew them out. He replaced the plant and in turn carefully pressed down the earth. While he was doing all this he had kept one eye on the form lying in the bed. It remained still. After another pause he crept softly to the chair on which his clothes were lying. He first put the bundle of notes in his coat pocket and then proceeded to dress. It took him a good quarter of an hour, because he could afford to make no sound. He had been wearing a soft shirt with his dinner jacket, and he congratulated himself on this, because it was easier to put on silently than a stiff one. He had some difficulty in tying his tie without a looking–glass, but he very wisely reflected that it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t tied very well. His spirits were rising. The whole thing now began to seem rather a lark. At length he was completely dressed except for his shoes, which he took in his hand; he thought he would put them on when he got into the passage. Now he had to cross the room to get to the door. He reached it so quietly that he could not have disturbed the lightest sleeper. But the door had to be unlocked. He turned the key very slowly; it creaked.

‘Who’s that?’

The little woman suddenly sat up in bed. Nicky’s heart jumped to his mouth.

He made a great effort to keep his head.

‘It’s only me. It’s six o’clock and I’ve got to go. I was trying not to wake you.’ ‘Oh, I forgot.’

She sank back on to the pillow.

‘Now that you’re awake I’ll put on my shoes.’

He sat down on the edge of the bed and did this.

‘Don’t make a noise when you go out. The hotel people don’t like it. Oh, I’m so sleepy.’

‘You go right off to sleep again.’

‘Kiss me before you go.’ He bent down and kissed her. ‘You’re a sweet boy and a wonderful lover. Bon voyage.’

Nicky did not feel quite safe till he got out of the hotel. The dawn had broken.

The sky was unclouded, and in the harbour the yachts and the fishing–boats lay motionless on the still water. On the quay fishermen were getting ready to start on their day’s work. The streets were deserted. Nicky took a long breath of the sweet morning air. He felt alert and well. He also felt as pleased as Punch.

With a swinging stride, his shoulders well thrown back, he walked up the hill and along the gardens in front of the Casino–the flowers in that clear light had a dewy brilliance that was delicious–till he came to his hotel. Here the day had already begun. In the hall porters with mufflers round their necks and berets on their heads were busy sweeping. Nicky went up to his room and had a hot bath. He lay in it and thought with satisfaction that he was not such a mug as some people might think. After his bath he did his exercises, dressed, packed, and went down to breakfast. He had a grand appetite. No continental breakfast for him! He had grapefruit, porridge, bacon and eggs, rolls fresh from the oven, so crisp and delicious they melted in your mouth, marmalade, and three cups of coffee. Though feeling perfectly well before, he felt better after that. He lit the pipe he had recently learnt to smoke, paid his bill and stepped into the car that was waiting to take him to the aerodrome on the other side of Cannes. The road as far as Nice ran over the hills and below him was the blue sea and the coastline. He couldn’t help thinking it damned pretty. They passed through Nice, so gay and friendly in the early morning, and presently they came to a long stretch of straight road that ran by the sea. Nicky had paid his bill, not with the money he had won the night before, but with the money his father had given him; he had changed a thousand francs to pay for supper at the Knickerbocker, but that deceitful little woman had returned him the thousand francs he had lent her, so that he still had twenty thousand–franc notes in his pocket. He thought he would like to have a look at them. He had so nearly lost them that they had a double value for him. He took them out of his hip–pocket into which for safety’s sake he had stuffed them when he put on the suit he was travelling in, and counted them one by one. Something very strange had happened to them. Instead of there being twenty notes as there should have been there were twenty–six. He couldn’t understand it at all. He counted them twice more. There was no doubt about it; somehow or other he had twenty–six thousand francs instead of the twenty he should have had. He couldn’t make it out. He asked himself if it was possible that he had won more at the Sporting Club than he had realized. But no, that was out of the question; he distinctly remembered the man at the desk laying the notes out in four rows of five, and he had counted them himself. Suddenly the explanation occurred to him; when he had put his hand into the flower–pot, after taking out the cineraria, he had grabbed everything he felt there. The flower–pot was the little hussy’s money–box and he had taken out not only his own money, but her savings as well. Nicky leant back in the car and burst into a roar of laughter. It was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his life. And when he thought of her going to the flower–pot some time later in the morning when she awoke, expecting to find the money she had so cleverly got away with, and finding, not only that it wasn’t there, but that her own had gone too, he laughed more than ever. And so far as he was concerned there was nothing to do about it; he neither knew her name, nor the name of the hotel to which she had taken him. He couldn’t return her money even if he wanted to.

‘It serves her damned well right,’ he said.

This then was the story that Henry Garnet told his friends over the bridge–table, for the night before, after dinner when his wife and daughter had left them to their port, Nicky had narrated it in full.

‘And you know what infuriated me is that he’s so damned pleased with himself. Talk of a cat swallowing a canary. And d’you know what he said to me when he’d finished? He looked at me with those innocent eyes of his and said: “You know, father, I can’t help thinking there was something wrong about the advice you gave me. You said, don’t gamble; well, I did, and I made a packet; you said, don’t lend money; well, I did, and I got it back; and you said, don’t have anything to do with women; well, I did, and made six thousand francs on the deal.”’

It didn’t make it any better for Henry Garnet that his three companions burst out laughing.

‘It’s all very well for you fellows to laugh, but you know, I’m in a damned awkward position. The boy looked up to me, he respected me, he took whatever I said as gospel truth, and now, I saw it in his eyes, he just looks upon me as a drivelling old fool. It’s no good my saying one swallow doesn’t make a summer; he doesn’t see that it was just a fluke, he thinks the whole thing was due to his own cleverness. It may ruin him.’

‘You do look a bit of a damned fool, old man,’ said one of the others. ‘There’s no denying that, is there?’

‘I know I do, and I don’t like it. It’s so dashed unfair. Fate has no right to play one tricks like that. After all, you must admit that my advice was good.’

‘Very good.’

‘And the wretched boy ought to have burnt his fingers. Well, he hasn’t. You’re all men of the world, you tell me how I’m to deal with the situation now.’

But they none of them could.

‘Well, Henry, if I were you I wouldn’t worry,’ said the lawyer. ‘My belief is that your boy’s born lucky, and in the long run that’s better than to be born clever or rich.’

GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE

The bar was crowded. Sandy Westcott had had a couple of cocktails and he was beginning to feel hungry. He looked at his watch. He had been asked to dinner at half past nine and it was nearly ten. Eva Barrett was always late and he would be lucky if he got anything to eat by ten–thirty. He turned to the barman to order another cocktail and caught sight of a man who at that moment came up to the bar.

‘Hullo, Cotman,’ he said. ‘Have a drink?’

‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’

Cotman was a nice–looking fellow, of thirty perhaps, short, but with so good a figure that he did not look it, very smartly dressed in a double–breasted dinner jacket, a little too much waisted, and a butterfly tie a good deal too large. He had a thick mat of black, wavy hair, very sleek and shiny, brushed straight back from his forehead, and large flashing eyes. He spoke with great refinement, but with a Cockney accent.

‘How’s Stella?’ asked Sandy.

‘Oh, she’s all right. Likes to have a lay–down before the show, you know. Steadies the old nerves, she says.’

‘I wouldn’t do that stunt of hers for a thousand pounds.’

‘I don’t suppose you would. No one can do it but her, not from that height, I

mean, and only five foot of water.’

‘It’s the most sick–making thing I’ve ever seen.’

Cotman gave a little laugh. He took this as a compliment. Stella was his wife.

Of course she did the trick and took the risk, but it was he who had thought of the flames, and it was the flames that had taken the public fancy and made the turn the huge success it was. Stella dived into a tank from the top of a ladder sixty feet high, and as he said, there were only five feet of water in the tank. Just before she dived they poured enough petrol on to cover the surface and he set it alight; the flames soared up and she dived straight into them.

‘Paco Espinel tells me it’s the biggest draw the Casino has ever had,’ said Sandy.

‘I know. He told me they’d served as many dinners in July as they generally do in August. And that’s you, he says to me.’

‘Well, I hope you’re making a packet.’

‘Well, I can’t exactly say that. You see, we’ve got our contract and naturally we didn’t know it was going to be a riot, but Mr Espinel’s talking of booking us for next month, and I don’t mind telling you he’s not going to get us on the same terms or anything like it. Why, had a letter from an agent only this morning saying they wanted us to go to Deauville.’

‘Here are my people,’ said Sandy.

He nodded to Cotman and left him. Eva Barrett sailed in with the rest of her guests. She had gathered them together downstairs. It was a party of eight. ‘I knew we should find you here, Sandy,’ she said. ‘I’m not late, am I?’ ‘Only half an hour.’

‘Ask them what cocktails they want and then we’ll dine.’

While they were standing at the bar, emptying now, for nearly everyone had gone down to the terrace for dinner, Paco Espinel passed through and stopped to shake hands with Eva Barrett. Paco Espinel was a young man who had run through his money and now made his living by arranging the turns with which the Casino sought to attract visitors. It was his duty to be civil to the rich and great. Mrs Chaloner Barrett was an American widow of vast wealth; she not only entertained expensively, but also gambled. And after all, the dinners and suppers and the two cabaret shows that accompanied them were only provided to induce people to lose their money at the tables.

‘Got a good table for me, Paco?’ said Eva Barrett.

‘The best.’ His eyes, fine, dark Argentine eyes, expressed his admiration of Mrs Barrett’s opulent, ageing charms. This also was business. ‘You’ve seen Stella?’

‘Of course. Three times. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Sandy comes every night.’

‘I want to be in at the death. She’s bound to kill herself one of these nights and I don’t want to miss that if I can help it.’

Paco laughed.

‘She’s been such a success, we’re going to keep her on another month. All I ask is that she shouldn’t kill herself till the end of August. After that she can do as she likes.’

‘Oh, God, have I got to go on eating trout and roast chicken every night till the end of August?’ cried Sandy.

‘You brute, Sandy,’ said Eva Barrett. ‘Come on, let’s go in to dinner. I’m starving.’

Paco Espinel asked the barman if he’d seen Cotman. The barman said he’d had a drink with Mr Westcott.

‘Oh, well, if he comes in here again, tell him I want a word with him.’ Mrs Barrett paused at the top of the steps that led down to the terrace long enough for the press representative, a little haggard woman with an untidy head, to come up with her note–book. Sandy whispered the names of the guests. It was a representative Riviera party. There was an English Lord and his Lady, long and lean both of them, who were prepared to dine with anyone who would give them a free meal. They were certain to be as tight as drums before midnight. There was a gaunt Scotch woman, with a face like a Peruvian mask that has been battered by the storms of ten centuries, and her English husband. Though a broker by profession, he was bluff, military, and hearty. He gave you an impression of such integrity that you were almost more sorry for him than for yourself when the good thing he had put you on to as a special favour turned out to be a dud. There was an Italian countess who was neither Italian nor a countess, but played a beautiful game of bridge, and there was a Russian prince who was ready to make Mrs Barrett a princess and in the meantime sold champagne, motor–cars, and Old Masters on commission. A dance was in progress, and Mrs Barrett, waiting for it to end, surveyed with a look which her short upper lip made scornful the serried throng on the dance floor. It was a gala night and the dining tables were crowded together. Beyond the terrace the sea was calm and silent. The music stopped and the head waiter, affably smiling, came up to guide her to her table. She swept down the steps with majestic gait.

‘We shall have quite a good view of the dive,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I like to be next door to the tank,’ said Sandy, ‘so that I can see her face.’ ’Is she pretty?’ asked the Countess.

‘It’s not that. It’s the expression of her eyes. She’s scared to death every time she does it.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe that,’ said the City gentleman, Colonel Goodhart by name, though no one had ever discovered how he came by the title. ‘I mean, the whole bally stunt’s only a trick. There’s no danger really, I mean.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Diving from that height in as little water as that, she’s got to turn like a flash the moment she touches the water.

And if she doesn’t do it right she’s bound to bash her head against the bottom and break her back.’

‘That’s just what I’m telling you, old boy,’ said the Colonel, ‘it’s a trick. I mean, there’s no argument.’

‘If there’s no danger there’s nothing to it, anyway,’ said Eva Barrett. ‘It’s over in a minute. Unless she’s risking her life it’s the biggest fraud of modern times.

Don’t say we’ve come to see this over and over again and it’s only a fake.’ ‘Pretty well everything is. You can take my word for that.’

‘Well, you ought to know,’ said Sandy.

If it occurred to the Colonel that this might be a nasty dig he admirably concealed it. He laughed.

‘I don’t mind saying I know a thing or two,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, I’ve got my eyes peeled all right. You can’t put much over on me.’

The tank was on the far left of the terrace, and behind it, supported by stays, was an immensely tall ladder at the top of which was a tiny platform. After two or three dances more, when Eva Barrett’s party were eating asparagus, the music stopped and the lights were lowered. A spot was turned on the tank.

Cotman was visible in the brilliance. He ascended half a dozen steps so that he was on a level with the top of the tank.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he cried out, in a loud clear voice, ‘you are now going to see the most marvellous feat of the century. Madam Stella, the greatest diver in the world, is about to dive from a height of sixty feet into a lake of flames five foot deep. This is a feat that has never been performed before, and Madam Stella is prepared to give one hundred pounds to anyone who will attempt it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honour to present Madam Stella.’ A little figure appeared at the top of the steps that led on to the terrace, ran quickly up to the tank, and bowed to the applauding audience. She wore a man’s silk dressing–gown and on her head a bathing–cap. Her thin face was made up as if for the stage. The Italian countess looked at her through her face–à–main.

‘Not pretty,’ she said.

‘Good figure,’ said Eva Barrett. ‘You’ll see.’

Stella slipped out of her dressing–gown and gave it to Cotman. He went down the steps. She stood for a moment and looked at the crowd. They were in darkness and she could only see vague white faces and white shirt–fronts. She was small, beautifully made, with legs long for her body and slim hips. Her bathing costume was very scanty.

‘You’re quite right about the figure, Eva,’ said the Colonel. ‘Bit undeveloped, of course, but I know you girls think that’s quite the thing.’

Stella began to climb the ladder and the spot–light followed her. It seemed an incredible height. An attendant poured petrol on the surface of the water.

Cotman was handed a flaming torch. He watched Stella reach the top of the ladder and settle herself on the platform.

‘Ready?’ he cried.

‘Yes.’

‘Go,’ he shouted.

And as he shouted he seemed to plunge the burning torch into the water. The flames sprang up, leaping high, and really terrifying to look at. At the same moment Stella dived. She came down like a streak of lightning and plunged through the flames, which subsided a moment after she had reached the water.

A second later she was at the surface and jumped out to a roar, a storm of applause. Cotman wrapped the dressing–gown round her. She bowed and bowed. The applause went on. Music struck up. With a final wave of the hand she ran down the steps and between the tables to the door. The lights went up and the waiters hurried along with their neglected service.

Sandy Westcott gave a sigh. He did not know whether he was disappointed or relieved.

‘Top hole,’ said the English peer.

‘It’s a bally fake,’ said the Colonel, with his British pertinacity. ‘I bet you anything you like.’

‘It’s over so quickly,’ said her English ladyship. ‘I mean, you don’t get your money’s worth really.’

Anyhow it wasn’t her money. That it never was. The Italian countess leaned forward. She spoke fluent English, but with a strong accent.

‘Eva, my darling, who are those extraordinary people at the table near the door under the balcony?’

‘Packet of fun, aren’t they?’ said Sandy. ‘I simply haven’t been able to take my eyes off them.’

Eva Barrett glanced at the table the Countess indicated, and the Prince, who sat with his back to it, turned round to look.

‘They can’t be true,’ cried Eva. ‘I must ask Angelo who they are.’ Mrs Barrett was the sort of woman who knew the head waiters of all the principal restaurants in Europe by their first names. She told the waiter who was at that moment filling her glass to send Angelo to her.

It was certainly an odd pair. They were sitting by themselves at a small table.

They were very old. The man was big and stout, with a mass of white hair, great bushy white eyebrows, and an enormous white moustache. He looked like the late King Humbert of Italy, but much more like a king. He sat bolt upright. He wore full evening dress, with a white tie and a collar that has been out of fashion for hard on thirty years. His companion was a little old lady in a black satin ball dress, cut very low, and tight at the waist. Round her neck were several chains of coloured beads. She wore what was obviously a wig, and a very ill–fitting one at that; it was very elaborate, all curls and sausages, and raven black. She was outrageously made–up, bright blue under the eyes and on the eyelids, the eyebrows heavily black, a great patch of very pink rouge on each cheek, and the lips a livid scarlet. The skin hung loosely on her face in deep wrinkles. She had large bold eyes and they darted eagerly from table to table. She was taking everything in, and every other minute called the old man’s attention to someone or other. The appearance of the couple was so fantastic in that fashionable crowd, the men in dinner jackets, the women in thin, pale–coloured frocks, that many eyes were turned on them. The staring did not seem to incommode the old lady. When she felt certain persons were looking at her she raised her eyebrows archly, smiled and rolled her eyes. She seemed on the point of acknowledging applause.

Angelo hurried up to the good customer that Eva Barrett was. ‘You wished to see me, my lady?’

‘Oh, Angelo, we’re simply dying to know who those absolutely marvellous people are at the next table to the door.’

Angelo gave a look and then assumed a deprecating air. The expression of his face, the movement of his shoulders, the turn of his spine, the gesture of his hands, probably even the twiddle of his toes, all indicated a half–humorous apology.

‘You must overlook them, my lady.’ He knew of course that Mrs Barrett had no right to be thus addressed, just as he knew that the Italian countess was neither Italian nor a countess and that the English lord never paid for a drink if anyone else would pay for it, but he also knew that to be thus addressed did not displease her. ‘They begged me to give them a table because they wanted to see Madam Stella do her dive. They were in the profession themselves once. I know they’re not the sort of people one expects to see dining here, but they made such a point of it I simply hadn’t the heart to refuse.’

‘But I think they’re a perfect scream. I adore them.’

‘I’ve known them for many years. The man indeed is a compatriot of mine.’

The head waiter gave a condescending little laugh. ‘I told them I’d give them a table on the condition that they didn’t dance. I wasn’t taking any risks, my lady.’ ‘Oh, but I should have loved to see them dance.’

‘One has to draw the line somewhere, my lady,’ said Angelo gravely. He smiled, bowed again and withdrew.

‘Look,’ cried Sandy, ‘they’re going.’

The funny old couple were paying their bill. The old man got up and put round his wife’s neck a large white, but not too clean, feather boa. She rose. He gave her his arm, holding himself very erect, and she, small in comparison, tripped out beside him. Her black satin dress had a long train, and Eva Barrett (who was well over fifty) screamed with joy.

‘Look, I remember my mother wearing a dress like that when I was in the schoolroom.’

The comic pair walked, still arm in arm, through the spacious rooms of the Casino till they came to the door. The old man addressed a commissionaire. ‘Be so good as to direct me to the artistes’ dressing–rooms. We wish to pay our respects to Madam Stella.’

The commissionaire gave them a look and summed them up. They were not people with whom it was necessary to be very polite.

‘You won’t find her there.’

‘She has not gone? I thought she gave a second performance at two?’ ‘That’s true. They might be in the bar.’

‘It won’t ‘urt us just to go an’ ‘ave a look, Carlo,’ said the old lady. ‘Right–o, my love,’ he answered with a great roll of the R.

They walked slowly up the great stairs and entered the bar. It was empty but for the deputy–barman and a couple sitting in two arm–chairs in the corner.

The old lady released her husband’s arm and tripped up with outstretched hands.

‘‘Ow are you, dear? I felt I just ‘ad to come and congratulate you, bein’ English same as you are. And in the profession meself. It’s a grand turn, my dear, it deserves to be a success.’ She turned to Cotman. ‘And this is your ‘usband?’ Stella got out of her arm–chair and a shy smile broke on her lips as she listened with some confusion to the voluble old lady.

‘Yes, that’s Syd.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.

‘And this is mine,’ said the old lady, with a little dig of the elbow in the direction of the tall white–haired man. ‘Mr Penezzi. ‘E’s a count really, and I’m the Countess Penezzi by rights, but when we retired from the profession we dropped the title.’

‘Will you have a drink?’ said Cotman.

‘No, you ‘ave one with us,’ said Mrs Penezzi, sinking into an arm–chair. ‘Carlo, you order.’

The barman came, and after some discussion three bottles of beer were ordered. Stella would not have anything.

‘She never has anything till after the second show,’ explained Cotman. Stella was slight and small, about twenty–six, with light brown hair, cut short and waved, and grey eyes. She had reddened her lips, but wore little rouge on her face. Her skin was pale. She was not very pretty, but she had a neat little face. She wore a very simple evening frock of white silk. The beer was brought and Mr Penezzi, evidently not very talkative, took a long swig.

‘What was your line?’ asked Syd Cotman, politely.

Mrs Penezzi gave him a rolling glance of her flashing, made–up eyes and turned to her husband.

‘Tell ’em who I am, Carlo,’ she said.

‘The ‘uman cannon–ball,’ he announced.

Mrs Penezzi smiled brightly and with a quick, birdlike glance looked from one to the other. They stared at her in dismay.

‘Flora,’ she said. ‘The ‘uman cannon–ball.’

She so obviously expected them to be impressed that they did not quite know what to do. Stella gave her Syd a puzzled look. He came to the rescue. ‘It must have been before our time.’

‘Naturally it was before your time. Why, we retired from the profession definitely the year poor Queen Victoria died. It made quite a sensation when we did too. But you’ve ‘eard of me, of course.’ She saw the blank look on their faces; her tone changed a little. ‘But I was the biggest draw in London. At the Old Aquarium, that was. All the swells came to see me. The Prince of Wales and I don’t know who all. I was the talk of the town. Isn’t that true, Carlo?’ ‘She crowded the Aquarium for a year.’

‘It was the most spectacular turn they’d ever ‘ad there. Why, only a few years ago I went up and introduced meself to Lady de Bathe. Lily Langtry, you know.

She used to live down ’ere. She remembered me perfectly. She told me she’d seen me ten times.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Stella.

‘I was fired out of a cannon. Believe me, it was a sensation. And after London I went all over the world with it. Yes, my dear, I’m an old woman now and I won’t deny it. Seventy–eight Mr Penezzi is and I shall never see seventy again, but I’ve ‘ad me portrait on every ‘oardin’ in London. Lady de Bathe said to me:

My dear, you was as celebrated as I was. But you know what the public is, give ’em a good thing and they go mad over it, only they want change; ‘owever good it is, they get sick of it and then they won’t go and see it any more. It’ll ‘appen to you, my dear, same as it ‘appened to me. It comes to all of us. But Mr Penezzi always ‘ad ’is ‘ead screwed on ’is shoulders the right way. Been in the business since ’e was so ‘igh. Circus, you know. Ringmaster. That’s ‘ow I first knew ’im.

I was in a troupe of acrobacks. Trapeze act, you know. ‘E’s a fine–lookin’ man now, but you should ‘ave seen ’im then, in ’is Russian boots, and ridin’ breeches, and a tight–fittin’ coat with frogs all down the front of it, crackin’ ’is long whip as ’is ‘orses galloped round the ring, the ‘andsomest man I ever see in my life.’

Mr Penezzi did not make any remark, but thoughtfully twisted his immense white moustache.

‘Well, as I was tellin’ you, ’e was never one to throw money about and when the agents couldn’t get us bookin’s any more ’e said, let’s retire. An ’e was quite right, after ‘avin’ been the biggest star in London, we couldn’t go back to circus work any more, I mean, Mr Penezzi bein’ a count really, ’e ‘ad ’is dignity to think of, so we come down ’ere and we bought a ‘ouse and started a pension. It always ‘ad been Mr Penezzi’s ambition to do something like that. Thirty–five years we been ’ere now. We ‘aven’t done so badly not until the last two or three years, and the slump came, though visitors are very different from what they was when we first started, the things they want, electric–light and runnin’ water in their bedrooms and I don’t know what all. Give them a card, Carlo. Mr Penezzi does the cookin’ ‘imself, and if ever you want a real ‘ome from ‘ome, you’ll know where to find it. I like professional people and we’d ‘ave a rare lot to talk about, you and me, dearie. Once a professional always a professional, I say.’

At that moment the head barman came back from his supper. He caught sight of Syd.

‘Oh, Mr Cotman, Mr Espinel was looking for you, wants to see you particularly.’

‘Oh, where is he?’

‘You’ll find him around somewhere.’

‘We’ll be going,’ said Mrs Penezzi, getting up. ‘Come and ‘ave lunch with us one day, will you? I’d like to show you my old photographs and me press cuttin’s. Fancy you not ‘avin’ ‘eard of the ‘uman cannon–ball. Why, I was as well known as the Tower of London.’

Mrs Penezzi was not vexed at finding that these young people had never even heard of her. She was simply amused.

They bade one another good–bye, and Stella sank back again into her chair. ‘I’ll just finish my beer,’ said Syd, ‘and then I’ll go and see what Paco wants.

Will you stay here, ducky, or would you like to go to your dressing–room?’ Stella’s hands were tightly clenched. She did not answer. Syd gave her a look and then quickly glanced away.

‘Perfect riot, that old girl,’ he went on, in his hearty way. ‘Real figure of fun.

I suppose it’s true what she said. It’s difficult to believe, I must say. Fancy ‘er drawing all London, what, forty years ago? And the funny thing is, her thinking anybody remembered. Seemed as though she simply couldn’t understand us not having heard of her even.’

He gave Stella another glance, from the corner of his eye so that she should not see he was looking at her, and he saw she was crying. He faltered. The tears were rolling down her pale face. She made no sound.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’

‘Syd, I can’t do it again tonight,’ she sobbed.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I’m afraid.’

He took her hand.

‘I know you better than that,’ he said. ‘You’re the bravest little woman in the world. Have a brandy, that’ll pull you together.’

‘No, that’d only make it worse.’

‘You can’t disappoint your public like that.’

‘That filthy public. Swine who eat too much and drink too much. A pack of chattering fools with more money than they know what to do with. I can’t stick them. What do they care if I risk my life?’

‘Of course, it’s the thrill they come for, there’s no denying that,’ he replied uneasily. ‘But you know and I know, there’s no risk, not if you keep your nerve.’ ‘But I’ve lost my nerve, Syd. I shall kill myself.’

She had raised her voice a little, and he looked round quickly at the barman.

But the barman was reading the Éclaireur de Nice and paying no attention. ‘You don’t know what it looks like from up there, the top of the ladder, when I look down at the tank. I give you my word, tonight I thought I was going to faint. I tell you I can’t do it again tonight, you’ve got to get me out of it, Syd.’ ‘If you funk it tonight it’ll be worse tomorrow.’

‘No, it won’t. It’s having to do it twice kills me. The long wait and all that. You go and see Mr Espinel and tell him I can’t give two shows a night. It’s more than my nerves’ll stand.’

‘He’ll never stand for that. The whole supper trade depends on you. It’s only to see you they come in then at all.’

‘I can’t help it, I tell you I can’t go on.’

He was silent for a moment. The tears still streamed down her pale little face, and he saw that she was quickly losing control of herself. He had felt for some days that something was up and he had been anxious. He had tried not to give her an opportunity to talk. He knew obscurely that it was better for her not to put into words what she felt. But he had been worried. For he loved her. ‘Anyhow Espinel wants to see me,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll tell him you can’t give the show more than once a night and see what he says. Will you wait here?’

‘No, I’ll go along to the dressing–room.’

Ten minutes later he found her there. He was in great spirits and his step was jaunty. He burst open the door.

‘I’ve got grand news for you, honey. They’re keeping us on next month at twice the money.’

He sprang forward to take her in his arms and kiss her, but she pushed him away.

‘Have I got to go on again tonight?’

‘I’m afraid you must. I tried to make it only one show a night, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He says it’s quite essential you should do the supper turn. And after all, for double the money, it’s worth it.’

She flung herself down on the floor and this time burst into a storm of tears. ‘I can’t, Syd, I can’t. I shall kill myself.’

He sat down on the floor and raised her head and took her in his arms and petted her.

‘Buck up, darling. You can’t refuse a sum like that. Why, it’ll keep us all the winter and we shan’t have to do a thing. After all there are only four more days to the end of July and then it’s only August.’

‘No, no, no. I’m frightened. I don’t want to die, Syd. I love you.’ ‘I know you do, darling, and I love you. Why, since we married I’ve never looked at another woman. We’ve never had money like this before and we shall never get it again. You know what these things are, we’re a riot now, but we can’t expect it to go on for ever. We’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot.’ ‘D’you want me to die, Syd?’

‘Don’t talk so silly. Why, where should I be without you? You mustn’t give way like this. You’ve got your self–respect to think of. You’re famous all over the world.’

‘Like the human cannon–ball was,’ she cried with a laugh of fury. ‘That damned old woman,’ he thought.

He knew that was the last straw. Bad luck, Stella taking it like that. ‘That was an eye–opener to me,’ she went on. ‘What do they come and see me over and over again for? On the chance they’ll see me kill myself. And a week after I’m dead they’ll have forgotten even my name. That’s what the public is.

When I looked at that painted old hag I saw it all. Oh, Syd, I’m so miserable.’

She threw her arms round his neck and pressed her face to his. ‘Syd, it’s no good, I can’t do it again.’

‘Tonight, d’you mean? If you really feel like that about it, I’ll tell Espinel you’ve had a fainting fit. I daresay it’ll be all right just for once.’

‘I don’t mean tonight, I mean never.’

She felt him stiffen a little.

‘Syd dear, don’t think I’m being silly. It’s not just today, it’s been growing on me. I can’t sleep at night thinking of it, and when I do drop off I see myself standing at the top of the ladder and looking down. Tonight I could hardly get up it, I was trembling so, and when you lit the flames and said go, something seemed to be holding me back. I didn’t even know I’d jumped. My mind was a blank till I found myself on the platform and heard them clapping. Syd, if you loved me you wouldn’t want me to go through such torture.’

He sighed. His own eyes were wet with tears. For he loved her devotedly. ‘You know what it means,’ he said. ‘The old life. Marathons and all.’ ‘Anything’s better than this.’

The old life. They both remembered it. Syd had been a dancing gigolo since he was eighteen, he was very good–looking in his dark Spanish way and full of life, old women and middle–aged women were glad to pay to dance with him, and he was never out of work. He had drifted from England to the Continent and there he had stayed, going from hotel to hotel, to the Riviera in the winter, to watering–places in France in the summer. It wasn’t a bad life they led, there were generally two or three of them together, the men, and they shared a room in cheap lodgings. They didn’t have to get up till late and they only dressed in time to go to the hotel at twelve to dance with stout women who wanted to get their weight down. Then they were free till five, when they went to the hotel again and sat at a table, the three of them together, keeping a sharp eye open for anyone who looked a likely client. They had their regular customers. At night they went to the restaurant and the house provided them with quite a decent meal. Between the courses they danced. It was good money. They generally got fifty or a hundred francs from anyone they danced with. Sometimes a rich woman, after dancing a good deal with one of them for two or three nights, would give him as much as a thousand francs. Sometimes a middle–aged woman would ask one to spend a night with her, and he would get two hundred and fifty francs for that. There was always the chance of a silly old fool losing her head, and then there were platinum and sapphire rings, cigarette–cases, clothes, and a wristwatch to be got. One of Syd’s friends had married one of them, who was old enough to be his mother, but she gave him a car and money to gamble with, and they lived in a beautiful villa at Biarritz. Those were the good days when everybody had money to burn. The slump came and hit the gigolos hard. The hotels were empty, and the clients didn’t seem to want to pay for the pleasure of dancing with a nice–looking young fellow. Often and often Syd passed a whole day without earning the price of a drink, and more than once a fat old girl who weighed a ton had had the nerve to give him ten francs. His expenses didn’t go down, for he had to be smartly dressed or the manager of the hotel made remarks, washing cost a packet, and you’d be surprised the amount of linen he needed; then shoes, those floors were terribly hard on shoes, and they had to look new. He had his room to pay for and his lunch.

It was then he met Stella. It was at Evian, and the season was disastrous. She was a swimming instructress. She was Australian, and a beautiful diver. She gave exhibitions every morning and afternoon. At night she was engaged to dance at the hotel. They dined together at a little table in the restaurant apart from the guests, and when the band began to play they danced together to induce the customers to come on to the floor. But often no one followed them and they danced by themselves. Neither of them got anything much in the way of paying partners. They fell in love with one another, and at the end of the season got married.

They had never regretted it. They had gone through hard times. Even though for business reasons (elderly ladies didn’t so much like the idea of dancing with a married man when his wife was there) they concealed their marriage, it was not so easy to get a hotel job for the pair of them, and Syd was far from being able to earn enough to keep Stella, even in the most modest pension, without working. The gigolo business had gone to pot. They went to Paris and learnt a dancing act, but the competition was fearful and cabaret engagements were very hard to get. Stella was a good ballroom dancer, but the rage was for acrobatics, and however much they practised she never managed to do anything startling. The public was sick of the apache turn. They were out of a job for weeks at a time. Syd’s wrist–watch, his gold cigarette–case, his platinum ring, all went up the spout. At last they found themselves in Nice reduced to such straits that Syd had to pawn his evening clothes. It was a catastrophe. They were forced to enter for the Marathon that an enterprising manager was starting. Twenty–four hours a day they danced, resting every hour for fifteen minutes. It was frightful. Their legs ached, their feet were numb. For long periods they were unconscious of what they were doing. They just kept time to the music, exerting themselves as little as possible. They made a little money, people gave them sums of a hundred francs, or two hundred, to encourage them, and sometimes to attract attention they roused themselves to give an exhibition dance. If the public was in a good humour this might bring in a decent sum. They grew terribly tired. On the eleventh day Stella fainted and had to give up. Syd went on by himself, moving, moving without pause, grotesquely, without a partner. That was the worst time they had ever had. It was the final degradation. It had left with them a recollection of horror and misery.

But it was then that Syd had his inspiration. It had come to him while he was slowly going round the hall by himself. Stella always said she could dive in a saucer. It was just a trick.

‘Funny how ideas come,’ he said afterwards. ‘Like a flash of lightning.’ He suddenly remembered having seen a boy set fire to some petrol that had been spilt on the pavement, and the sudden blaze–up. For of course it was the flames on the water and the spectacular dive into them that had caught the public fancy. He stopped dancing there and then; he was too excited to go on.

He talked it over with Stella, and she was enthusiastic. He wrote to an agent who was a friend of his; everyone liked Syd, he was a nice little man, and the agent put up the money for the apparatus. He got them an engagement at a circus in Paris, and the turn was a success. They were made. Engagements followed here and there, Syd bought himself an entire outfit of new clothes, and the climax came when they got a booking for the summer casino on the coast. It was no exaggeration of Syd’s when he said that Stella was a riot. ‘All our troubles are over, old girl,’ he said fondly. ‘We can put a bit by now for a rainy day, and when the public’s sick of this I’ll just think of something else.’ And now, without warning, at the top of their boom, Stella wanted to chuck it. He didn’t know what to say to her. It broke his heart to see her so unhappy.

He loved her more now even than when he had married her. He loved her because of all they’d gone through together; after all, for five days once they’d had nothing to eat but a hunk of bread each and a glass of milk, and he loved her because she’d taken him out of all that; he had good clothes to wear again and his three meals a day. He couldn’t look at her; the anguish in her dear grey eyes was more than he could bear. Timidly she stretched out her hand and touched his. He gave a deep sigh.

‘You know what it means, honey. Our connexion in the hotels has gone west, and the business is finished, anyway. What there is’ll go to people younger than us. You know what these old women are as well as I do; it’s a boy they want, and besides, I’m not tall enough really. It didn’t matter so much when I was a kid. It’s no good saying I don’t look my age because I do.’

‘Perhaps we can get into pictures.’

He shrugged his shoulders. They’d tried that before when they were down and out.

‘I wouldn’t mind what I did. I’d serve in a shop.’

‘D’you think jobs can be had for the asking?’

She began to cry again.

‘Don’t, honey. It breaks my heart.’

‘We’ve got a bit put by.’

‘I know we have. Enough to last us six months. And then it’ll mean starvation.

First popping the bits and pieces, and then the clothes’ll have to go, same as they did before. And then dancing in lowdown joints for our supper and fifty francs a night. Out of a job for weeks together. And Marathons whenever we hear of one. And how long will the public stand for them?’

‘I know you think I’m unreasonable, Syd.’

He turned and looked at her now. There were tears in her eyes. He smiled, and the smile he gave her was charming and tender.

‘No, I don’t, ducky. I want to make you happy. After all, you’re all I’ve got.

I love you.’

He took her in his arms and held her. He could feel the beating of her heart. If Stella felt like that about it, well, he must just make the best of it. After all, supposing she were killed? No, no, let her chuck it and be damned to the money. She made a little movement.

‘What is it, honey?’

She released herself and stood up. She went over to the dressing–table. ‘I expect it’s about time for me to be getting ready,’ she said.

He started to his feet.

‘You’re not going to do a show tonight?’

‘Tonight, and every night till I kill myself. What else is there? I know you’re right, Syd. I can’t go back to all that other, stinking rooms in fifth–rate hotels and not enough to eat. Oh, that Marathon. Why did you bring that up? Being tired and dirty for days at a time and then having to give up because flesh and blood just couldn’t stand it. Perhaps I can go on another month and then there’ll be enough to give you a chance of looking round.’

‘No, darling. I can’t stand for that. Chuck it. We’ll manage somehow. We starved before; we can starve again.’

She slipped out of her clothes, and for a moment stood naked but for her stockings, looking at herself in the glass. She gave her reflection a hard smile. ‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.

THE HAPPY COUPLE

I DON’T know that I very much liked Landon. He was a member of a club I belonged to, and I had often sat next to him at lunch. He was a judge at the Old Bailey, and it was through him I was able to get a privileged seat in court when there was an interesting trial that I wanted to attend. He was an imposing figure on the bench in his great full-bottomed wig, his red robes and his ermine tippet; and with his long, white face, thin lips and pale blue eyes, a somewhat terrifying one. He was just, but harsh; and sometimes it made me uncomfortable to hear the bitter scolding he gave a convicted prisoner whom he was about to sentence to a long term of imprisonment. But his acid humour at the lunch-table and his willingness to discuss the cases he had tried made him sufficiently good company for me to disregard the slight malaise I felt in his presence. I asked him once whether he did not feel a certain uneasiness of mind after he had sent a man to the gallows. He smiled as he sipped his glass of port.

“Not at all. The man’s had a fair trial; I’ve summed up as fairly as I could, and the jury has found him guilty. When I condemn him to death, I sentence him to a punishment he richly deserves; and when the court rises, I put the case out of my head. Nobody but a sentimental fool would do anything else.”

I knew he liked to talk to me, but I never thought he looked upon me as anything but a club acquaintance, so I was not a little surprised when one day I received a telegram from him saying that he was spending his vacation on the Riviera, and would like to stay with me for two or three days on his way to Italy. I wired that I should be glad to see him. But it was with a certain trepidation that I met him at the station.

On the day of his arrival, to help me out, I asked Miss Gray, a neighbour and an old friend of mine, to dinner. She was of mature age, but charming, and she had a flow of lively conversation which I knew nothing could discourage. I gave them a very good dinner, and though I had no port to offer the judge, I was able to provide him with a good bottle of Montrachet and an even better bottle of Mouton Rothschild. He enjoyed them both; and I was glad of that, because when I had offered him a cocktail, he had refused with indignation.

“I have never understood,” he said, “how people presumably civilised can indulge in a habit that is not only barbarous but disgusting.”

I may state that this did not deter Miss Gray and me from having a couple of dry Martinis, though it was with impatience and distaste that he watched us drink them.

But the dinner was a success. The good wine and Miss Gray’s sprightly chatter combined to give Landon a geniality I had never before seen in him. It was plain to me that notwithstanding his austere appearance he liked feminine society; and Miss Gray in a becoming dress, with her neat head only just touched with grey and her delicate features, her sparkling eyes, was still alluring. After dinner the judge, with some old brandy still further to mellow him, let himself go, and for a couple of hours held us entranced while he told us of celebrated trials in which he had been concerned. I was not surprised therefore that when Miss Gray asked us to lunch with her next day, Landon, even before I could answer, accepted with alacrity.

“A very nice woman,” he said when she had left us. “And a head on her shoulders. She must have been very pretty as a girl. She’s not bad now. Why isn’t she married?”

“She always says nobody asked her.”

“Stuff and nonsense! Women ought to marry. Too many of these women about who want their independence. I have no patience with them.”

Miss Gray lived in a little house facing the sea at St. Jean, which is a couple of miles from my own house at Cap Ferrât. We drove down next day at one and were shown into her sitting-room.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said to me, as we shook hands. “The Craigs are coming.”

“You’ve got to know them at last.”

“Well, I thought it was too absurd that we should live next door to one another, and bathe from the same beach every day and not speak. So I forced myself on them, and they’ve promised to come to lunch to-day. I wanted you to meet them, to see what you make of them.” She turned to Landon. “I hope you don’t mind.”

But he was on his best behaviour.

“I’m sure I shall be delighted to meet any friends of yours, Miss Gray,” he said.

“But they’re not friends of mine. I’ve seen a lot of them, but I never spoke to them till yesterday. It’ll be a treat for them to meet an author and a celebrated judge.”

I had heard a good deal of the Craigs from Miss Gray during the previous three weeks. They had taken the cottage next to hers, and at first she feared they would be a nuisance. She liked her own company and did not want to be bothered with the trivialities of social intercourse. But she very quickly discovered that the Craigs were as plainly disinclined to strike up an acquaintance with her as she with them. Though in that little place they could not but meet two or three times a day, the Craigs never by so much a glance gave an indication that they had ever seen her before. Miss Gray told me she thought it very tactful of them to make no attempt to intrude upon her privacy, but I had an idea that she was not affronted, a little puzzled rather, that they apparently wanted to know her as little as she wanted to know them. I had guessed some time before that she would not be able to resist making the first advance. On one occasion, while we were walking, we passed them, and I was able to have a good look at them. Craig was a handsome man, with a red, honest face, a grey moustache and thick strong grey hair. He held himself well, and there was a bluff heartiness of manner about him that suggested a broker who had retired on a handsome fortune. His wife was a woman hard of visage, tall and of masculine appearance, with dull, fair hair too elaborately dressed, a large nose, a large mouth and a weatherbeaten skin. She was not only plain but grim. Her clothes, pretty, flimsy and graceful, sat oddly upon her, for they would better have suited a girl of eighteen, and Mrs. Craig was certainly forty. Miss Gray told me they were well cut and expensive. I thought he looked commonplace and she looked disagreeable, and I told Miss Gray she was lucky that they were obviously disposed to keep themselves to themselves.

“There’s something rather sweet about them,” she answered.

“What?”

“They love one another. And they adore the baby.”

For they had a child that was not more than a year old; and from this Miss Gray had concluded that they had not long been married. She liked to watch them with their baby. A nurse took it out every morning in a pram, but before this, father and mother spent an ecstatic quarter of an hour teaching it to walk. They stood a few yards apart and urged the child to flounder from one to the other; and each time it tumbled into the parental arms it was lifted up and rapturously embraced. And when finally it was tucked up in the smart pram, they hung over it with charming baby talk and watched it out of sight as though they couldn’t bear to let it go.

Miss Gray used often to see them walking up and down the lawn of their garden arm in arm; they did not talk, as though they were so happy to be together that conversation was unnecessary; and it warmed her heart to observe the affection which that dour, unsympathetic woman so obviously felt for her tall, handsome husband. It was a pretty sight to see Mrs. Craig brush an invisible speck of dust off his coat, and Miss Gray was convinced that she purposely made holes in his socks in order to have the pleasure of darning them. And it looked as though he loved her as much as she loved him. Every now and then he would give her a glance, and she would look up at him and smile, and he gave her cheek a little pat. Because they were no longer young, their mutual devotion was peculiarly touching.

I never knew why Miss Gray had never married; I felt as certain as the judge that she had had plenty of chances; and I asked myself, when she talked to me about the Craigs, whether the sight of this matrimonial felicity didn’t give her a slight pang. I suppose complete happiness is very rare in this world, but these two people seemed to enjoy it, and it may be that Miss Gray was so strangely interested in them only because she could not quite suppress the feeling in her heart that by remaining single she had missed something.

Because she didn’t know what their first names were, she called them Edwin and Angelina. She made up a story about them. She told it to me one day; and when I ridiculed it, she was quite short with me. This, as far as I can remember, is how it went: They had fallen in love with one another years before — perhaps twenty years — when Angelina, a young girl then, had the fresh grace of her teens and Edwin was a brave youth setting out joyously on the journey of life. And since the gods, who are said to look upon young love with kindliness, nevertheless do not bother their heads with practical matters, neither Edwin nor Angelina had a penny. It was impossible for them to marry, but they had courage, hope and confidence. Edwin made up his mind to go out to South America or Malaya or where you like, make his fortune and return to marry the girl who had patiently waited for him. It couldn’t take more than two or three years, five at the utmost; and what is that, when you’re twenty and the whole of life is before you? Meanwhile of course Angelina would live with her widowed mother.

But things didn’t pan out according to schedule. Edwin found it more difficult than he had expected to make a fortune; in fact, he found it hard to earn enough money to keep body and soul together, and only Angelina’s love and her tender letters gave him the heart to continue the struggle. At the end of five years he was not much better off than when he started. Angelina would willingly have joined him and shared his poverty, but it was impossible for her to leave her mother, bed-ridden as she was, poor thing, and there was nothing for them to do but have patience. And so the years passed slowly, and Edwin’s hair grew grey, and Angelina became grim and haggard. Hers was the harder lot, for she could do nothing but wait. The cruel glass showed such charms as she had possessed slipping away from her one by one; and at last she discovered that youth, with a mocking laugh and a pirouette, had left her for good. Her sweetness turned sour from long tending of a querulous invalid; her mind was narrowed by the society of the small town in which she lived. Her friends married and had children, but she remained a prisoner to duty.

She wondered if Edwin still loved her. She wondered if he would ever come back. She often despaired. Ten years went by, and fifteen, and twenty. Then Edwin wrote to say that his affairs were settled, and he had made enough money for them to live upon in comfort, and if she were still willing to marry him, he would return at once. By a merciful interposition of providence, Angelina’s mother chose that very moment to abandon a world in which she had made herself a thorough nuisance. But when after so long a separation they met, Angelina saw with dismay that Edwin was as young as ever. It’s true his hair was grey, but it infinitely became him. He had always been good-looking, but now he was a very handsome man in the flower of his age. She felt as old as the hills. She was conscious of her narrowness, her terrible provincialism, compared with the breadth he had acquired by his long sojourn in foreign countries. He was gay and breezy as of old, but her spirit was crushed. The bitterness of life had warped her soul. It seemed monstrous to bind that alert and active man to her by a promise twenty years old, and she offered him his release. He went deathly pale.

“Don’t you care for me any more?” he cried brokenly.

And she realised on a sudden — oh, the rapture, oh, the relief! — that to him she was just the same as she had ever been. He had thought of her always as she was; her portrait had been, as it were, stamped on his heart, so that now, when the real woman stood before him, she was, to him, still eighteen.

So they were married.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” I said when Miss Gray had brought her story to its happy ending.

“I insist on your believing it,” she said. “I’m convinced it’s true, and I haven’t the smallest doubt that they’ll live happily together to a ripe old age.” Then she made a remark that I thought rather shrewd. “Their love is founded on an illusion, perhaps; but since it has to them all the appearance of reality, what does it matter?”

While I have told you this idyllic story of Miss Gray’s invention, the three of us, our hostess, Landon and myself, waited for the Craigs to come.

“Have you ever noticed that if people live next door to you, they’re invariably late?” Miss Gray asked the judge.

“No, I haven’t,” he answered acidly. “I’m always punctual myself, and I expect other people to be punctual.”

“I suppose it’s no good offering you a cocktail?”

“None whatever, madam.”

“But I have some sherry that they tell me isn’t bad.”

The judge took the bottle out of her hands and looked at the label. A faint smile broke on his thin lips.

“This is a civilised drink, Miss Gray. With your permission I will help myself. I never knew a woman yet who knew how to pour out a glass of wine. One should hold a woman by the waist, but a bottle by the neck.”

While he was sipping the old sherry with every sign of satisfaction, Miss Gray glanced out of the window.

“Oh, that’s why the Craigs are late. They were waiting for the baby to come back.”

I followed her eyes and saw that the nurse had just pushed the pram past Miss Gray’s house on her way home. Craig took the baby out of the pram and lifted it high in the air. The baby, trying to tug at his moustache, crowed gleefully. Mrs. Craig stood by, watching, and the smile on her face made her harsh features almost pleasant. The window was open, and we heard her speak.

“Come along, darling,” she said, “we’re late.”

He put the baby back in the pram, and they came up to the door of Miss Gray’s house and rang the bell. The maid showed them in. They shook hands with Miss Gray, and because I was standing near, she introduced me to them. Then she turned to the judge.

“And this is Sir Edward Landon — Mr and Mrs. Craig.”

One would have expected the judge to move forward with an outstretched hand, but he remained stock-still. He put his eyeglass up to his eye, that eyeglass that I had on more than one occasion seen him use with devastating effect in court, and stared at the newcomers.

“Gosh, what a dirty customer,” I said to myself.

He let the glass drop from his eye.

“How do you do,” he said. “Am I mistaken in thinking that we’ve met before?”

The question turned my eyes to the Craigs. They stood side by side close to one another, as though they had drawn together for mutual protection. They did not speak. Mrs. Craig looked terrified. Craig’s red face was darkened by a purple flush, and his eyes appeared almost to start out of his head. But that only lasted a second.

“I don’t think so,” he said in a rich, deep voice. “Of course I’ve heard of you, Sir Edward.”

“More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows,” said he.

Miss Gray meanwhile had been giving the cocktail-shaker a shake, and now she handed cocktails to her two guests. She had noticed nothing. I didn’t know what it all meant; in fact, I wasn’t sure it meant anything. The incident, if incident there was, passed so quickly that I was half inclined to think that I had read into the strangers’ momentary embarrassment on being introduced to a celebrated man something for which there was no foundation. I set about making myself pleasant. I asked them how they liked the Riviera and if they were comfortable in their house. Miss Gray joined in, and we chatted, as one does with strangers, of commonplace things. They talked easily and pleasantly. Mrs. Craig said how much they enjoyed the bathing and complained of the difficulty of getting fish at the seaside. I was aware that the judge did not join in the conversation, but looked down at his feet as though he were unconscious of the company.

Lunch was announced. We went into the dining-room. We were only five, and it was a small round table, so the conversation could not be anything but general. I must confess that it was carried on chiefly by Miss Gray and myself. The judge was silent, but he often was, for he was a moody creature, and I paid no attention. I noticed that he ate the omelette with good appetite, and when it was passed round again took a second helping. The Craigs struck me as a little shy, but that didn’t surprise me, and as the second course was produced they began to talk more freely. It didn’t strike me that they were very amusing people; they didn’t seem interested in very much besides their baby, the vagaries of the two Italian maids they had, and an occasional flutter at Monte Carlo; and I couldn’t help thinking that Miss Gray had erred in making their acquaintance. Then suddenly something happened: Craig rose abruptly from his chair and fell headlong to the floor. We jumped up. Mrs. Craig threw herself down, over her husband, and took his head in her hands.

“It’s all right, George,” she cried in an agonised tone. “It’s all right!”

“Put his head down,” I said. “He’s only fainted.”

I felt his pulse and could feel nothing. I said he had fainted, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a stroke. He was the sort of heavy, plethoric man who might easily have one. Miss Gray dipped her napkin into water and dabbed his forehead. Mrs. Craig seemed distraught. Then I noticed that Landon had remained quietly sitting in his chair.

“If he’s fainted, you’re not helping him to recover by crowding round him”, he said acidly.

Mrs. Craig turned her head and gave him a look of bitter hatred.

“I’ll ring up the doctor,” said Miss Gray.

“No, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “He’s coming to.”

I could feel his pulse growing stronger, and in a minute or two he opened his eyes. He gasped when he realised what had happened, and tried to struggle to his feet.

“Don’t move,” I said. “Lie still a little longer.”

I got him to drink a glass of brandy, and the colour came back to his face.

“I feel all right now,” he said.

“We’ll get you into the next room, and you can lie on the sofa for a bit.”

“No, I’d sooner go home. It’s only a step.”

He got up from the floor.

“Yes, let’s go back,” said Mrs. Craig. She turned to Miss Gray. “I’m so sorry; he’s never done anything like this before.”

They were determined to go, and I thought myself it was the best thing for them to do.

“Put him to bed and keep him there, and he’ll be as right as rain to-morrow.”

Mrs. Craig took one of his arms and I took the other; Miss Gray opened the door, and though still a bit shaky, he was able to walk. When we arrived at the Craig’s home, I offered to go in and help undress him; but they would neither of them hear of it. I went back to Miss Gray’s and found them at dessert.

“I wonder why he fainted,” Miss Gray was saying. “All the windows are open, and it’s not particularly hot to-day.”

“I wonder,” said the judge.

I noticed that his thin pale face bore an expression of some complacency. We had our coffee; and then, since the judge and I were going to play golf, we got into the car and drove up the hill to my house.

“How did Miss Gray get to know those people?” Landon asked me. “They struck me as rather second-rate. I shouldn’t have thought they were very much her mark.”

“You know women. She likes her privacy, and when they settled in next door, she was quite decided that she wouldn’t have anything to do with them; but when she discovered that they didn’t want to have anything to do with her, she couldn’t rest till she’d made their acquaintance.”

I told him the story she had invented about her neighbours. He listened with an expressionless face.

“I’m afraid your friend Miss Gray is a sentimental donkey, my dear fellow,” he said when I had come to an end. “I tell you, women ought to marry. She’d soon have had all that nonsense knocked out of her if she’d had half a dozen brats.”

“What do you know about the Craigs?” I asked.

He gave me a frigid glance.

“I? Why should I know anything about them? I thought they were very ordinary people.”

I wish I knew how to describe the strong impression he gave me, both by the glacial austerity of his look and by the rasping finality of his tone, that he was not prepared to say anything more. We finished the drive in silence.

Landon was well on in his sixties, and he was the kind of golfer who never hits a long ball but is never off the straight, and he was a deadly putter, so, though he gave me strokes, he beat me handsomely. After dinner I took him in to Monte Carlo, where he finished the evening by winning a couple of thousand francs at the roulette table. These successive events put him into a remarkably good humour.

“A very pleasant day,” he said when we parted for the night. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.”

I spent the next morning at work, and we did not meet till lunch. We were just finishing when I was called to the telephone.

When I came back, my guest was drinking a second cup of coffee.

“That was Miss Gray,” I said.

“Oh? What had she to say?”

“The Craigs have done a bolt. They disappeared last night. The maids live in the village; and when they came this morning, they found the house empty. They’d skipped — the Craigs, the nurse and the baby — and taken their luggage with them. They left money on the table for the maids’ wages, the rent to the end of their tenancy and the tradesmen’s bills.”

The judge said nothing. He took a cigar from the box, examined it carefully and then lit it with deliberation.

“What have you got to say about that?” I asked.

“My dear fellow, are you obliged to use these American phrases? Isn’t English good enough for you?”

“Is that an American phrase? It expresses exactly what I mean. You can’t imagine I’m such a fool as not to have noticed that you and the Craigs had met before; and if they’ve vanished into thin air like figments of the imagination, it’s a fairly reasonable conclusion that the circumstances under which you met were not altogether pleasant.”

The judge gave a little chuckle, and there was a twinkle in his cold blue eyes.

“That was a very good brandy you gave me last night,” he said. “It’s against my principles to drink liqueurs after lunch; but it’s a very dull man who allows his principles to enslave him, and for once I think I should enjoy one.”

I sent for the brandy and watched the judge while he poured himself out a generous measure. He took a sip with obvious satisfaction.

“Do you remembered the Wingford murder?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Perhaps you weren’t in England at the time. Pity — you might have come to the trial. You’d have enjoyed it. It caused a lot of excitement; the papers were full of it.

“Miss Wingford was a rich spinster of mature age who lived in the country with a companion. She was a healthy woman for her age; and when she died rather suddenly, her friends were surprised. Her physician, a fellow called Brandon, signed the certificate and she was duly buried. The will was read, and it appeared that she had left everything she had, something between sixty and seventy thousand pounds, to her companion. The relations were very sore, but there was nothing they could do about it. The will had been drawn up by her lawyer and witnessed by his clerk and Dr. Brandon.

“But Miss Wingford had a maid who had been with her for thirty years and had always understood that she would be remembered in the will; she claimed that Miss Wingford had promised to leave her well provided for, and when she found that she wasn’t even mentioned, she flew into a passion. She told the nephew and the two nieces who had come down for the funeral that she was sure Miss Wingford had been poisoned, and she said that if they didn’t go to the police, she’d go herself. Well, they didn’t do that, but they went to see Dr. Brandon. He laughed. He said that Miss Wingford had had a weak heart and he’d been treating her for years. She died just as he had always expected her to die, peacefully in her sleep; and he advised them not to pay any attention to what the maid said. She had always hated the companion, a Miss Starling, and been jealous of her. Dr. Brandon was highly respected; he had been Miss Wingford’s doctor for a long time, and the two nieces, who’d stayed with her often, knew him well. He was not profiting by the will, and there seemed no reason to doubt his word, so the family thought there was nothing to do but make the best of a bad job and went back to London.

“But the maid went on talking; she talked so much that at last the police, much against their will, I must admit, were obliged to take notice, and an order to exhume the body was made. There was an inquest, and it was found that Miss Wingford had died from an overdose of veronal. The coroner’s jury found that it had been administered by Miss Starling, and she was arrested. A detective was sent down from Scotland Yard, and he got together some unexpected evidence. It appeared that there’d been a good deal of gossip about Miss Starling and Dr. Brandon. They’d been seen a lot together in places in which there was no reason for them to be except that they wanted to be together, and the general impression in the village was that they were only waiting for Miss Wingford to die to get married. That put a very different complexion on the case. To make a long story short, the police got enough evidence in their opinion to justify them in arresting the doctor and charging him and. Miss Starling with the murder of the old lady.”

The judge took another sip of brandy.

“The case came up for trial before me. The case for the prosecution was that the accused were madly in love with one another and had done the poor old lady to death so that they could marry on the fortune Miss Starling had wheedled her employer into leaving her. Miss Wingford always had a cup of cocoa when she went to bed, which Miss Starling prepared for her; and the counsel for the prosecution claimed that it was in this that Miss Starling had dissolved the tablets that caused Miss Wingford’s death. The accused elected to give evidence on their own behalf, and they made a miserable showing in the witness- box. They lied their heads off. Though witnesses testified they had seen them walking together at night with their arms round one another’s waists, though Brandon’s maid testified she had seen them kissing one another in the doctor’s house, they swore they were no more than friends. And oddly enough, medical evidence proved that Miss Starling was virgo intacta.

“Brandon admitted that he had given Miss Wingford a bottle of veronal tablets because she complained of sleeplessness, but declared he had warned her never to take more than one, and then only when absolutely necessary. The defence sought to prove that she had taken the tablets either by accident or because she wanted to commit suicide. That didn’t hold water for a moment. Miss Wingford was a jolly, normal old lady who thoroughly enjoyed life; and her death occurred two days before the expected arrival of an old friend for a week’s visit. She hadn’t complained to the maid of sleeping badly — in fact, her maid had always thought her a very good sleeper. It was impossible to believe that she had accidentally taken a sufficient number of tablets to kill herself. Personally, I had no doubt that it was a put-up job between the doctor and the companion. The motive was obvious and sufficient. I summed up and I hope summed up fairly; but it was my duty to put the facts before the jury, and to my mind the facts were damning. The jury filed out. I don’t suppose you know that when you are sitting on the bench, you somehow get the feeling of the court. You have to be on your guard against it, to be sure it doesn’t influence you. I never had it more strongly than on that day that there wasn’t a soul in court who wasn’t convinced that those two people had committed the crime with which they were charged. I hadn’t the shadow of a doubt that the jury would bring in a verdict of guilty. Juries are incalculable. They were out for three hours, and when they came back I knew at once that I was mistaken. In a murder case, when a jury is going to bring in a verdict of guilty they won’t look at the prisoner; they look away. I noticed that three or four of the jurymen glanced at the two prisoners in the dock. They brought in a verdict of not guilty. The real names of Mr and Mrs. Craig are Dr and Mrs. Brandon. I’m just as certain as I am that I’m sitting here that they committed between them a cruel and heartless murder and richly deserved to be hanged.”

“What do you think made the jury find them not guilty?”

“I’ve asked myself that; and do you know the only explanation I can give? The fact that it was conclusively proved that they had never been lovers. And if you come to think of it, that’s one of the most curious features of the whole case. That woman was prepared to commit murder to get the man she loved, but she wasn’t prepared to have an illicit love-affair with him.”

“Human nature is very odd, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Landon, helping himself to another glass of brandy.

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

For some time I could not make up my mind if I liked Peter Melrose or not. He had had a novel published that had caused some stir among the rather dreary but worthy people who are always on the lookout for new talent. Elderly gentlemen with nothing much to do but go to luncheon parties praised it with girlish enthusiasm, and wiry little women who didn’t get on with their husbands thought it showed promise. I read a few reviews. They contradicted one another freely. Some of the critics claimed that with this first novel the author had sprung into the front rank of English novelists: others reviled it. I did not read it. I have learnt by experience that when a book makes a sensation it is just as well to wait a year before you read it. It is astonishing how many books then you need not read at all. But it chanced that one day I met Peter Melrose. With some misgiving I had accepted an invitation to a sherry party. It was in the top flat of a converted house in Bloomsbury, and I was a trifle out of breath when I had climbed four flights of stairs. My hostesses were two women, much over life–size, in early middle life, the sort of women who know all about the insides of motor–cars and like a good tramp in the rain, but very feminine for all that, fond of eating out of paper bags. The drawing–room, which they called ‘our workshop’, though being of independent means neither had ever done a stroke of work in her life, was large and bare, furnished with rustless–steel chairs, which looked as though they could with difficulty support the very substantial weight of their owners, glass–topped tables, and a vast divan covered with zebra–skin. On the walls were book–shelves, and pictures by the better–known English imitators of Cezanne, Braque, and Picasso. In the shelves, besides a number of ‘curious’ books of the eighteenth century (for pornography is ageless) there were only the works of living authors, mostly first editions, and it was indeed to sign some of my own that I had been asked to the party.

It was quite small. There was but one other woman, who might have been a younger sister of my hostesses, for, though stout, she was not quite so stout, though tall, not quite so tall, and though hearty, not quite so hearty. I did not catch her name, but she answered to that of Boofuls. The only man besides myself was Peter Melrose. He was quite young, twenty–two or twenty–three, of the middle height, but with an ungainly figure that made him look squat. He had a reddish skin that seemed to fit over the bones of his face too tightly, a rather large Semitic nose, though he was not a Jew, and alert green eyes under bushy eyebrows. His brown hair, cut very short, was scurfy. He was dressed in the brown Norfolk jacket and grey flannel trousers that are worn by the art students who wander hatless along King’s Road, Chelsea. An uncouth young man. Nor was there much to attract in his manner. He was self–assertive, disputatious and intolerant. He had a hearty contempt for his fellow–writers which he expressed with zest. The satisfaction he gave me by his breezy attacks on reputations which for my part I considered exaggerated, but prudently held my tongue about, was only lessened by the conviction that no sooner was my back turned than he would tear my own to shreds. He talked well. He was amusing and sometimes witty. I should have laughed at his sallies more easily if those three ladies had not been so unreasonably convulsed by them. They roared with laughter at what he said, whether it was funny or whether it was inept. He said many silly things, for he talked without stopping, but he also said some very clever ones. He had a point of view, crude and not so original as he thought, but sincere. But the most striking thing about him was his eager, impetuous vitality; it was like a hot flame that burnt him with an unendurable fury. It even shed a glow on those about him. He had something, if only that, and when I left it was with a slight sense of curiosity at what would come of him. I did not know if he had talent; so many young things can write a clever novel–that means nothing; but it seemed to me that as a man he was not quite like everybody else. He was the sort of person who at thirty, when time had softened his asperity and experience had taught him that he was not quite so intelligent as he thought, would turn into an interesting and agreeable fellow. But I never expected to see him again.

It was with surprise that I received two or three days later a copy of his novel with a very flattering dedication. I read it. It was obviously autobiographical. The scene was a small town in Sussex, and the characters of the upper middle class that strives to keep up appearances on an inadequate income. The humour was rather brutal and rather vulgar. It grated on me, for it consisted chiefly of mockery at people because they were old and poor. Peter Melrose did not know how hard those misfortunes are to bear, and that the efforts made to cope with them are more deserving of sympathy than of derision. But there were descriptions of places, little pictures of a room or impressions of the countryside, which were excellently done. They showed tenderness and a sense of the spiritual beauty of material things. The book was written easily, without affectation, and with a pleasant feeling for the sound of words. But what made it indeed somewhat remarkable, so that I understood why it had attracted attention, was the passion that quivered in the love story of which the plot, such as it was, consisted. It was, as is the modern fashion, more than a trifle coarse and, again in the modern fashion, it tailed off vaguely, without any particular result, so that everything was left in the end pretty much as it had been in the beginning; but you did get the impression of young love, idealistic and yet vehemently sexual; it was so vivid and so deeply felt that it took your breath away. It seemed to throb on the printed page like the pulse of life. It had no reticence. It was absurd, scandalous, and beautiful. It was like a force of nature. That was passion all right. There is nothing, anywhere, so moving and so awe–inspiring.

I wrote to Peter Melrose and told him what I thought of his book, then suggested that we might lunch together. He rang me up next day and we made a date.

I found him unaccountably shy when we sat down opposite one another at a table in a restaurant. I gave him a cocktail. He talked glibly enough, but I could not help seeing that he was ill at ease. I gained the impression that his self–assurance was a pose assumed to conceal, from himself, maybe, a diffidence that tortured him. His manners were brusque and awkward. He would say a rude thing and then laugh nervously to cover his own embarrassment. Though he pretended to be so sure of himself he wanted all the time to be reassured by you. By irritating you, by saying the things he thought would annoy, he tried to force from you some admission, tacit it might be, that he was as wonderful as he longed to think himself. He wanted to despise the opinion of his fellows, and nothing was more important to him. I thought him rather an odious young man, but I did not mind that. It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due. No, I do not mind odious young men; it is when they are charming that I button up the pockets of my sympathy.

Peter Melrose was extremely modest about his book. He blushed through his reddish skin when I praised what I liked in it, and accepted my strictures with a humility that was almost embarrassing. He had made very little money out of it, and his publishers were giving him a small monthly allowance in advance of royalties on the next one. This he had just started, but he wanted to get away to write it in peace, and knowing I lived on the Riviera he asked me if I could tell him of a quiet place where he could bathe and live cheaply. I suggested that he should come and spend a few days with me so that he could look about till he found something to suit him. His green eyes sparkled when I proposed this and he flushed.

‘Shouldn’t I be an awful nuisance?’

‘No. I shall be working. All I can offer you is three meals a day and a room to sleep in. It’ll be very dull, but you can do exactly what you like.’

‘It sounds grand. May I let you know if I decide to come?’

‘Of course.’

We separated, and a week or two later I went home. This was in May. Early in June I received a letter from Peter Melrose asking, if I had really meant what I said when I invited him to spend a few days with me, whether he might arrive on such and such a date. Well, at the time I had meant it, but now, a month later, I remembered that he was an arrogant and ill–bred youth, whom I had seen but twice and wasn’t in the least interested in, and I didn’t mean it any longer. It seemed to me very likely that he would be bored stiff. I lived a very quiet life and saw few people. And I thought it would be a great strain on my nerves if he were as rude as I knew he could be, and I as his host felt it behoved me to keep my temper. I saw myself driven beyond endurance, and ringing the bell to have his clothes packed and the car brought round to take him away within half an hour. But there was nothing to do about it. It would save him the cost of board and lodging to spend a short period with me, and if he was tired and unhappy as he said in his letter it might be that it would do him good. I sent him a wire and shortly afterwards he arrived.

He looked very hot and grubby in his grey flannel trousers and brown tweed coat when I met him at the station, but after a swim in the pool he changed into white shorts and a Cochet shirt. He looked then quite absurdly young. He had never been out of England before. He was excited. It was touching to see his delight. He seemed, amid those unaccustomed surroundings, to lose his sense of himself, and he was simple, boyish and modest. I was agreeably surprised. In the evening, after dinner, sitting in the garden, with only the croaking of the little green frogs to break the silence, he began talking to me of his novel. It was a romantic story about a young writer and a celebrated prima donna. The theme was reminiscent of Ouida, the last thing I should have expected this hard–boiled youth to write, and I was tickled; it was odd how the fashion completed the circle and returned generation after generation to the same themes. I had no doubt that Peter Melrose would treat it in a very modern way, but there it was, the same old story as had entranced sentimental readers in the three–volume novels of the eighties. He proposed to set it in the beginning of the Edwardian era, which to the young has already acquired the fantastic, far–away feeling of a past age. He talked and talked. He was not unpleasant to listen to. He had no notion that he was putting into fiction his own day–dreams, the comic and touching day–dreams of a rather unattractive, obscure young man who sees himself beloved, to the admiration of the whole world, by an incredibly beautiful, celebrated, and magnificent woman. I always enjoyed the novels of Ouida, and Peter’s idea did not at all displease me. With his charming gift of description, his vivid, ingenuous way of looking at material things, fabrics, pieces of furniture, walls, trees, flowers, and his power of representing the passion of life, the passion of love, that thrilled every fibre of his own uncouth body, I had a notion that he might well produce something exuberant, absurd, and poetical. But I asked him a question.

‘Have you ever known a prima donna?’

‘No, but I’ve read all the autobiographies and memoirs that I could find. I’ve gone into it pretty thoroughly. Not only the obvious things, you know, but I’ve hunted around in all sorts of byways to get the revealing touch or the suggestive anecdote.’

‘And have you got what you wanted?’

‘I think so.’

He began to describe his heroine to me. She was young and beautiful, wilful it is true and with a quick temper, but magnanimous. A woman on the grand scale. Music was her passion; there was music not only in her voice, but in her gestures and in her inmost thoughts. She was devoid of envy, and her appreciation of art was such that when another singer had done her an injury she forgave her when she heard her sing a role beautifully. She was of a wonderful generosity, and would give away everything she possessed when a story of misfortune touched her soft heart. She was a great lover, prepared to sacrifice the world for the man she loved. She was intelligent and well–read. She was tender, unselfish, and disinterested. In fact she was much too good to be true.

‘I think you’d better meet a prima donna, I said at last.

‘How can I?’

‘Have you ever heard of La Falterona?’

‘Of course I have. I’ve read her memoirs.’

‘She lives just along the coast. I’ll ring her up and ask her to dinner.’ ‘Will you really? It would be wonderful.’

‘Don’t blame me if you don’t find her quite what you expect.’

‘It’s the truth I want.’

Everyone has heard of La Falterona. Not even Melba had a greater reputation. She had ceased now to sing in opera, but her voice was still lovely, and she could fill a concert hall in any part of the world. She went for long tours every winter, and in summer rested in a villa by the sea. On the Riviera people are neighbours if they live thirty miles from one another, and for some years I had seen a good deal of La Falterona. She was a woman of ardent temperament, and she was celebrated not only for her singing, but for her love affairs: she never minded talking about them, and I had often sat entranced for hours while with the humour which to me was her most astonishing characteristic she regaled me with lurid tales of royal or very opulent adorers. I was satisfied that there was at least a measure of truth in them. She had been married, for short periods, three or four times, and in one of these unions had annexed a Neapolitan prince. Thinking that to be known as La Falterona was grander than any title, she did not use his name (to which indeed she had no right, since after divorcing him she had married somebody else) but her silver, her cutlery, and her dinner–service were heavily decorated with a coat of arms and a crown, and her servants invariably addressed her as madame la princesse. She claimed to be a Hungarian, but her English was perfect; she spoke it with a slight accent (when she remembered), but with an intonation suggestive, I had been told, of Kansas City. This she explained by saying that her father was a political exile who had fled to America when she was no more than a child; but she did not seem quite sure whether he was a distinguished scientist who had got into trouble for his liberal views, or a Magyar of high rank who had brought down on his head the imperial wrath because he had had a love affair with an Archduchess. It depended on whether she was just an artist among artists, or a great lady among persons of noble birth.

With me she was not natural, for that she could never have been if she had tried, but franker than with anyone else. She had a natural and healthy contempt for the arts. She genuinely looked upon the whole thing as a gigantic bluff, and deep down in her heart was an amused sympathy for all the people who were able to put it over on the public. I will admit that I looked forward to the encounter between Peter Melrose and La Falterona with a good deal of sardonic amusement.

She liked coming to dine with me because she knew the food was good. It was the only meal she ate in the day, for she took great care of her figure, but she liked that one to be succulent and ample. I asked her to come at nine, knowing that was the earliest hour she dreamt of eating, and ordered dinner for half past. She turned up at a quarter to ten. She was dressed in apple–green satin, cut very low in front, with no back at all, and she wore a string of huge pearls, a number of expensive–looking rings, and on her left arm diamond and emerald bracelets from the wrist to the elbow. Two or three of them were certainly real. On her raven–black hair was a thin circlet of diamonds. She could not have looked more splendid if she had been going to a ball at Stafford House in the old days. We were in white ducks.

‘How grand you are,’ I said. ‘I told you it wasn’t a party.’

She flashed a look of her magnificent black eyes at Peter.

‘Of course it’s a party. You told me your friend was a writer of talent. I am only an interpreter.’ She ran one finger down her flashing bracelets. ‘This is the homage I pay to the creative artist.’

I did not utter the vulgar monosyllable that rose to my lips, but offered her what I knew was her favourite cocktail. I was privileged to call her Maria, and she always called me Master. This she did, first because she knew it made me feel a perfect fool, and secondly because, though she was in point of fact not more than two or three years younger than I, it made it quite clear that we belonged to different generations. Sometimes, however, she also called me you dirty swine. This evening she certainly might very well have passed for thirty–five. She had those rather large features which somehow do not seem to betray age. On the stage she was a beautiful woman, and even in private life, notwithstanding her big nose, large mouth, and fleshy face, a good–looking one. She wore a brown make–up, with dark rouge, and her lips were vividly scarlet. She looked very Spanish and, I suspected, felt it, for her accent at the beginning of dinner was quite Sevillian. I wanted her to talk so that Peter should get his money’s worth, and I knew there was but one subject in the world that she could talk about. She was in point of fact a stupid woman who had acquired a line of glib chatter which made people on first meeting her think she was as brilliant as she looked; but it was merely a performance she gave, and you soon discovered that she not only did not know what she was talking about, but was not in the least interested in it. I do not think she had ever read a book in her life. Her knowledge of what was going on in the world was confined to what she was able to gather by looking at the pictures in the illustrated press. Her passion for music was complete bunkum. Once at a concert to which I went with her she slept all through the Fifth Symphony, and I was charmed to hear her during the interval telling people that Beethoven stirred her so much that she hesitated to come and hear him, for with those glorious themes singing through her head, it meant that she wouldn’t sleep a wink all night. I could well believe she would lie awake, for she had had so sound a nap during the Symphony that it could not but interfere with her night’s rest.

But there was one subject in which her interest never failed. She pursued it with indefatigable energy. No obstacle prevented her from returning to it; no chance word was so remote that she could not use it as a stepping–stone to come back to it, and in effecting this she displayed a cleverness of which one would never have thought her capable. On this subject she could be witty, vivacious, philosophic, tragic and inventive. It enabled her to exhibit all the resources of her ingenuity. There was no end to its ramifications, and no limit to its variety. This subject was herself. I gave her an opening at once and then all I had to do was to make suitable interjections. She was in great form. We were dining on the terrace and a full moon was obligingly shining on the sea in front of us. Nature, as though she knew what was proper to the occasion, had set just the right scene. The view was framed by two tall black cypresses, and all round us on the terrace the orange trees in full flower exhaled their heady perfume. There was no wind, and the candles on the table flamed with a steady softness. It was a light that exactly suited La Falterona. She sat between us, eating heartily and thoroughly appreciating the champagne, and she was enjoying herself. She gave the moon a glance. On the sea was a broad pathway of silver.

‘How beautiful nature is,’ she said. ‘My God, the scenery one has to play in. How can they expect one to sing? You know, really, the sets at Covent Garden are a disgrace. The last time I sang Juliet I just told them I wouldn’t go on unless they did something about the moon.’

Peter listened to her in silence. He ate her words. She was better value than I had dared to hope. She got a little tight not only on the champagne but on her own loquaciousness. To listen to her you would have thought she was a meek and docile creature against whom the whole world was in conspiracy. Her life had been one long bitter struggle against desperate odds. Managers treated her vilely, impresarios played foul tricks on her, singers combined to ruin her, critics bought by the money of her enemies wrote scandalous things about her, lovers for whom she had sacrificed everything used her with base ingratitude; and yet, by the miracle of her genius and her quick wits, she had discomfited them all. With joyous glee, her eyes flashing, she told us how she had defeated their machinations and what disaster had befallen the wretches who stood in her way. I wondered how she had the nerve to tell the disgraceful stories she told. Without the smallest consciousness of what she was doing she showed herself vindictive and envious, hard as nails, incredibly vain, cruel, selfish, scheming, and mercenary. I stole a glance now and then at Peter. I was tickled at the confusion he must be experiencing when he compared his ideal picture of the prima donna with the ruthless reality. She was a woman without heart. When at last she left us I turned to Peter with a smile.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘at all events you’ve got some good material.’

‘I know, and it all fits in so beautifully,’ he said with enthusiasm.

‘Does it?’ I exclaimed, taken aback.

‘She’s exactly like my woman. She’ll never believe that I’d sketched out the main lines of the character before I’d ever seen her.’ I stared at him in amazement.

‘The passion for art. The disinterestedness. She had that same nobility of soul that I saw in my mind’s eye. The small–minded, the curious, the vulgar put every obstacle in her way and she sweeps them all aside by the greatness of her purpose and the purity of her ends.’ He gave a little happy laugh. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how nature copies art? I swear to you, I’ve got her to the life.’

I was about to speak; I held my tongue; though I shrugged a spiritual shoulder I was touched. Peter had seen in her what he was determined to see. There was something very like beauty in his illusion. In his own way he was a poet. We went to bed, and two or three days later, having found a pension to his liking, he left me.

In course of time his book appeared, and like most second novels by young people it had but a very moderate success. The critics had overpraised his first effort and now were unduly censorious. It is of course a very different thing to write a novel about yourself and the people you have known from childhood and to write one about persons of your own invention. Peter’s was too long. He had allowed his gift for word–painting to run away with him, the humour was still rather vulgar; but he had reconstructed the period with skill, and the romantic story had that same thrill of real passion which in his first book had so much impressed me.

After the dinner at my house I did not see La Falterona for more than a year. She went for a long tour in South America and did not come down to the Riviera till late in the summer. One night she asked me to dine with her. We were alone but for her companion–secretary, an Englishwoman, Miss Glaser by name, whom La Falterona bullied and ill–treated, hit and swore at, But whom she could not do without. Miss Glaser was a haggard person of fifty, with grey hair and a sallow, wrinkled face. She was a queer creature. She knew everything there was to be known about La Falterona. She both adored and hated her. Behind her back she could be extremely funny at her expense, and the imitation she gave in secret of the great singer with her admirers was the most richly comic thing I have ever heard. But she watched over her like a mother. It was she who, sometimes by wheedling, sometimes by sheer plainness of speech, caused La Falterona to behave herself something like a human being. It was she who had written the singer’s exceedingly inaccurate memoirs.

La Falterona wore pale–blue satin pyjamas (she liked satin) and, presumably to rest her hair, a green silk wig; except for a few rings, a pearl necklace, a couple of bracelets, and a diamond brooch at her waist, she wore no jewellery. She had much to tell me of her triumphs in South America. She talked on and on. She had never been in more superb voice and the ovations she had received were unparalleled. The concert halls were sold out for every performance, and she had made a packet.

’Is it true or is it not true, Glaser?’ cried Maria with a strong South American accent.

‘Most of it,’ said Miss Glaser.

La Falterona had the objectionable habit of addressing her companion by her surname. But it must long since have ceased to annoy the poor woman, so there was not much point in it.

‘Who was that man we met in Buenos Aires?’

‘Which man?’

‘You fool, Glaser. You remember perfectly. The man I was married to once.’

‘Pepe Zapata,’ Miss Glaser replied without a smile.

‘He was broke. He had the impudence to ask me to give him back a diamond necklace he’d given me. He said it had belonged to his mother.’

‘It wouldn’t have hurt you to give it him,’ said Miss Glaser. ‘You never wear it.’

‘Give it him back?’ cried La Falterona, and her astonishment was such that she spoke the purest English. ‘Give it him back? You’re crazy.’

She looked at Miss Glaser as though she expected her there and then to have an attack of acute mania. She got up from the table, for we had finished our dinner.

‘Let us go outside,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t the patience of an angel I’d have sacked that woman long ago.’

La Falterona and I went out, but Miss Glaser did not come with us. We sat on the veranda. There was a magnificent cedar in the garden, and its dark branches were silhouetted against the starry sky. The sea, almost at our feet, was marvellously still. Suddenly La Falterona gave a start.

‘I almost forgot. Glaser, you fool,’ she shouted, ‘why didn’t you remind me?’ And then again to me: ‘I’m furious with you.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t remember till after dinner,’ I answered.

‘That friend of yours and his book.’

I didn’t immediately grasp what she was talking about.

‘What friend and what book?’

‘Don’t be so stupid. An ugly little man with a shiny face and a bad figure. He wrote a book about me.’

‘Oh! Peter Melrose. But it’s not about you.’

‘Of course it is. Do you take me for a fool? He had the impudence to send it me.’

‘I hope you had the decency to acknowledge it.’

‘Do you think I have the time to acknowledge all the books twopenny– halfpenny authors send me? I expect Glaser wrote to him. You had no right to ask me to dinner to meet him. I came to oblige you, because I thought you liked me for myself, I didn’t know I was just being made use of. It’s awful that one can’t trust one’s oldest friends to behave like gentlemen. I’ll never dine with you again so long as I live. Never, never, never.’

She was working herself into one of her tantrums, so I interrupted her before it was too late.

‘Come off it, my dear,’ I said. ‘In the first place the character of the singer in that book, which I suppose is the one you’re referring to...’

‘You don’t suppose I’m referring to the charwoman, do you?’

‘Well, the character of the singer was roughed out before he’d even seen you, and besides, it isn’t in the least like you.’

‘How d’you mean, it’s not like me? All my friends have recognized me. I mean, it’s the most obvious portrait.’

‘Mary,’ I expostulated.

‘My name is Maria and no one knows it better than you, and if you can’t call me Maria you can call me Madame Falterona or Princess.’

I paid no attention to this.

‘Did you read the book?’

‘Of course I read it. When everyone told me it was about me.’

‘But the boy’s heroine, the prima donna, is twenty–five.’

‘A woman like me is ageless.’

‘She’s musical to her finger–tips, gentle as a dove, and a miracle of unselfishness; she’s frank, loyal, and disinterested. Is that the opinion you have of yourself?’

‘And what is your opinion of me?’

‘Hard as nails, absolutely ruthless, a born intriguer, and as self–centred as they make ’em.’

She then called me a name which a lady does not habitually apply to a gentleman who, whatever his faults, has never had his legitimacy called in question. But though her eyes flashed I could see that she was not in the least angry. She accepted my description of her as complimentary.

‘And what about the emerald ring? Are you going to deny that I told him that?’

The story of the emerald ring was this: La Falterona was having a passionate love–affair with the Crown Prince of a powerful state and he had made her a present of an emerald of immense value. One night they had a quarrel, high words passed, and some reference being made to the ring she tore it off her finger and flung it in the fire. The Crown Prince, being a man of thrifty habit, with a cry of consternation, threw himself on his knees and began raking out the coals till he recovered the ring. La Falterona watched him scornfully as he grovelled on the floor. She didn’t give much away herself, but she could not bear economy in others. She finished the story with these splendid words:

‘After that I couldn’t love him.’

The incident was picturesque and had taken Peter’s fancy. He had used it very neatly.

‘I told you both about that in the greatest confidence and I’ve never told it to a soul before. It’s a scandalous breach of confidence to have to put it into a book. There are no excuses either for him or for you.’

‘But I’ve heard you tell the story dozens of times. And it was told me by Florence Montgomerie about herself and the Crown Prince Rudolf. It was one of her favourite stories too. Lola Montez used to tell it about herself and the King of Bavaria. I have little doubt that Nell Gwyn told it about herself and Charles II. It’s one of the oldest stories in the world.’

She was taken aback, but only for an instant.

‘I don’t see anything strange in its having happened more than once. Everyone knows that women are passionate and that men are as mean as cat’s–meat. I could show you the emerald if you liked. I had to have it reset, of course.’

‘With Lola Montez it was pearls,’ I said ironically. ‘I believe they were considerably damaged.’

‘Pearls?’ She gave that brilliant smile of hers. ‘Have I ever told you about Benjy Riesenbaum and the pearls? You might make a story out of it.’

Benjy Riesenbaum was a person of great wealth, but it was common knowledge that for a long time he had been the Falterona’s lover. In fact it was he who had bought her the luxurious little villa in which we were now sitting.

‘He’d given me a very handsome string in New York. I was singing at the Metropolitan, and at the end of the season we travelled back to Europe together. You never knew him, did you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, he wasn’t bad in some ways, but he was insanely jealous. We had a row on the boat because a young Italian officer was paying me a good deal of attention. Heaven knows, I’m the easiest woman in the world to get on with, but I will not be bullied by any man. After all, I have my self–respect to think of. I told him where he got off, if you understand what I mean, and he slapped my face. On deck if you please. I don’t mind telling you I was mad. I tore the string of pearls off my neck and flung it in the sea. “They cost fifty thousand dollars,” he gasped. He went white. I drew myself up to my full height. “I only valued them because I loved you,” I said. And I turned on my heel.’

‘You were a fool,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t speak to him for twenty–four hours. At the end of that time I had him eating out of my hand. When we got to Paris the first thing he did was to go to Cartier’s and buy me another just as good.’

She began to giggle.

‘Did you say I was a fool? I’d left the real string in the bank in New York, because I knew I was going back next season. It was an imitation one that I threw in the sea.’

She started to laugh, and her laugh was rich and joyous and like a child’s. That was the sort of trick that thoroughly appealed to her. She chortled with glee.

‘What fools men are,’ she gasped. ‘And you, you thought I’d throw a real string into the sea.’

She laughed and laughed. At last she stopped. She was excited.

‘I want to sing. Glaser, play an accompaniment.’

A voice came from the drawing–room.

‘You can’t sing after all that food you walloped down.’

‘Shut up, you old cow. Play something, I tell you.’

There was no reply, but in a moment Miss Glaser began to play the opening bars of one of Schumann’s songs. It was no strain on the voice, and I guessed that Miss Glaser knew what she was doing when she chose it. La Falterona began to sing, in an undertone, but as she heard the sounds come from her lips and found that they were clear and pure she let herself go. The song finished. There was silence. Miss Glaser had heard that La Falterona was in magnificent voice, and she sensed that she wished to sing again. The prima donna was standing in the window, with her back to the lighted room, and she looked out at the darkly shining sea. The cedar made a lovely pattern against the sky. The night was soft and balmy. Miss Glaser played a couple of bars. A cold shiver ran down my spine. La Falterona gave a little start as she recognized the music, and I felt her gather herself together:

Mild und leise wie er lächelt Wie das Auge er öffnet. It was Isolde’s death song. She had never sung in Wagner, fearing the strain on her voice, but this, I suppose, she had often sung in concerts. It did not matter now that instead of an orchestral accompaniment she had only the thin tinkle of a piano. The notes of the heavenly melody fell upon the still air and travelled over the water. In that too romantic scene, in that starry night, the effect was shattering. La Falterona’s voice, even now, was exquisite in its quality, mellow and crystalline; and she sang with wonderful emotion, so tenderly, with such tragic, beautiful anguish that my heart melted within me. I had a most awkward lump in my throat when she finished, and looking at her I saw that tears were streaming down her face. I did not want to speak. She stood quite still looking out at that ageless sea.

What a strange woman! I thought then that I would sooner have her as she was, with her monstrous faults, than as Peter Melrose saw her, a pattern of all the virtues. But then people blame me because I rather like people who are a little worse than is reasonable. She was hateful, of course, but she was irresistible.

THE LION’S SKIN

A GOOD many people were shocked when they read that Captain Forestier had met his death in a forest fire when trying to save his wife’s dog, which had been accidentally shut up in the house. Some said they never knew he had it in him; others said it was exactly what they would have expected of him, but of these some meant it in one way and some in another. After the tragic occurrence Mrs. Forestier found shelter in the villa of some people called Hardy, whose acquaintance she and her husband had but lately made. Captain Forestier had not liked them, at any rate he had not liked Fred Hardy, but she felt that if he had lived through that terrible night he would have changed his mind. He would have realised how much good there was in Hardy notwithstanding his reputation, and like the great gentleman he was he would not have hesitated to admit that he had been mistaken. Mrs. Forestier did not know how she could ever have kept her reason after the loss of the man who was everything in the world to her but for the Hardys’ wonderful kindness. In her immense distress their unfailing sympathy had been her only consolation. They, who had been almost eye-witnesses of her husband’s great sacrifice, knew as did no one else how wonderful he had been. She could never forget the words dear Fred Hardy had used when he was breaking the dreadful news to her. It was these words that had enabled her not only to bear the frightful disaster, but to face the desolate future with the courage with which she well knew that brave man, that gallant gentleman, whom she had loved so well, would have wished her to face it.

Mrs. Forestier was a very nice woman. Kindly people often say that of a woman when they can say nothing about her, and it has come to be looked upon as cold praise. I do not mean it as such. Mrs. Forestier was neither charming, beautiful nor intelligent; on the contrary she was absurd, homely and foolish; yet the more you knew her, the more you liked her, and when asked why, you found yourself forced to repeat that she was a very nice woman. She was as tall as the average man; she had a large mouth and a great hooked nose, pale-blue short-sighted eyes and big ugly hands. Her skin was lined and weather-beaten, but she made up heavily, and her hair, which she wore long, was dyed golden, tightly marcelled and elaborately dressed. She did everything she could to counteract the aggressive masculinity of her appearance, and succeeded only in looking like a vaudeville artist doing a female impersonation. Her voice was a woman’s voice, but you were always expecting her, at the end of the number as it were, to break into a deep bass, and tearing off that golden wig, discover a man’s bald pate. She spent a great deal of money on her clothes, which she got from the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris, but though a woman of fifty she had an unfortunate taste for choosing dresses that looked exquisite on pretty little mannequins in the flower of their youth. She always wore a great quantity of rich jewels. Her movements were awkward and her gestures clumsy. If she went into a drawing-room where there was a valuable piece of jade she managed to sweep it on the floor; if she lunched with you and you had a set of glasses you treasured she was almost certain to smash one of them to atoms.

Yet this ungainly exterior sheltered a tender, romantic and idealistic soul. It took you some time to discover this, for when first you knew her you took her for a figure of fun, and then when you knew her better (and had suffered from her clumsiness) she exasperated you; but when you did discover it, you thought yourself very stupid not to have known it all the time, for then it looked out at you through those pale-blue, near-sighted eyes, rather shyly, but with a sincerity that only a fool could miss. Those dainty muslins and spring-like organdies, those virginal silks, clothed not the uncouth body but the fresh, girlish spirit. You forgot that she broke your china and looked like a man dressed up as a woman, you saw her as she saw herself, as indeed she really was if reality were visible, as a dear little thing with a heart of gold. When you came to know her you found her as simple as a child; she was touchingly grateful for any attention you paid her; her own kindness was infinite, you could ask her to do anything for you, however tiresome, and she would do it as though by giving her the opportunity to put herself out you rendered her a service. She had a rare capacity for disinterested love. You knew that never an unkind nor a malicious thought had once passed through her head. And having granted all that you said over again that Mrs. Forestier was a very nice woman.

Unfortunately she was also a damned fool. This you discovered when you met her husband. Mrs. Forestier was American and Captain Forestier was English. Mrs. Forestier was born in Portland, Oregon, and had never been to Europe till the war of 1914, when, her first husband having recently died, she joined a hospital unit and came to France. She was not rich by American standards, but by our English ones in affluent circumstances. From the way the Forestiers lived I should guess that she had something like thirty thousand dollars a year. Except that she undoubtedly gave the wrong medicines to the wrong men, put on their bandages so that they were worse than useless, and broke every utensil that was breakable, I am sure that she was an admirable nurse. I do not think she ever found work too revolting for her to do it without hesitation; she certainly never spared herself and was surely never out of temper; I have a notion that many a poor wretch had cause to bless the tenderness of her heart, and it may be that not a few took the last bitter step into the unknown with more courage because of the loving-kindness of her golden soul. It was during the last year of the war that Captain Forestier came under her care, and soon after peace was declared they married. They settled down in a handsome villa on the hills behind Cannes, and in a short time became conspicuous in the social life of the Riviera. Captain Forestier played bridge well and was a keen golfer. He was not a bad tennis player either. He had a sailing boat, and in the summer the Forestiers gave very nice parties between the islands. After seventeen years of marriage Mrs. Forestier still adored her good- looking husband, and you were unlikely to know her long without being told in that slow Western drawl of hers the full story of their courtship.

“It was a case of love at first sight,” she said. “He was brought in when I happened to be off duty, and when I came on and found him lying in one of my beds, oh, my dear, I felt such a pang in my heart, for a moment I thought I’d been overworking and had strained it. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen in my life.”

“Was he badly wounded?”

“Well, he wasn’t exactly wounded. You know, it’s a most extraordinary thing, he went all through the war, he was under fire for months at a time, and of course he risked his life twenty times a day, he’s one of those men who simply doesn’t know what fear is; but he never even got a scratch. He had carbuncles.”

It seemed an unromantic ailment on which to start a passionate attachment. Mrs. Forestier was a trifle prudish, and though Captain Forestier’s carbuncles greatly interested her she always found it a little difficult to tell you exactly where they were.

“They were right down at the bottom of his back, even farther really, and he hated to have me dress them. Englishmen are curiously modest, I’ve noticed that over and over again, and it mortified him terribly. You’d have thought being on those terms, if you know what I mean, from our first acquaintance it would have made us more intimate. But somehow it didn’t. He was very stand-offish with me. When I used to get to his bed on my round I was so breathless and my heart beat so I couldn’t make out what was the matter with me. I’m not naturally a clumsy woman, I never drop things or break anything; but you wouldn’t believe it, when I had to give Robert his medicine I used to drop the spoon and break the glass, I couldn’t imagine what he must be thinking of me.

It was almost impossible not to laugh when Mrs. Forestier told you this. She smiled rather sweetly.

“I suppose it sounds very absurd to you, but you see I’d never felt that way before. When I married my first husband — well, he was a widower with grown-up children, he was a fine man and one of the most prominent citizens in the state, but somehow it was different.”

“And how did you eventually discover that you were in love with Captain Forestier?”

“Well, I don’t ask you to believe me, I know it sounds funny, but the fact is that one of the other nurses told me, and as soon as she did of course I knew it was true. I was terribly upset at first. You see, I knew nothing about him. Like all Englishmen he was very reserved and for all I knew he had a wife and half a dozen children.”

“How did you find out he hadn’t?”

“I asked him. The moment he told me he was a bachelor I made up my mind that by hook or by crook I was going to marry him. He suffered agonies, poor darling; you see, he had to lie on his face almost all the time, lying on his back was torture, and as to sitting down — well, of course he couldn’t even think of that. But I don’t believe his agonies were worse than mine. Men like clinging silks and soft, fluffy things, you know what I mean, and I was at such a disadvantage in my nurse’s uniform. The matron, one of those New England spinsters, couldn’t bear make-up, and in those days I didn’t make-up anyway; my first husband never liked it; and then my hair wasn’t as pretty as it is now. He used to look at me with those wonderful blue eyes of his, and I felt he must be thinking I looked a perfect sight. He was very low and I thought I ought to do all I could to cheer him up, so whenever I had a few minutes to spare I’d go and talk to him. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of a strong, husky chap like he was lying in bed week after week while all his pals were in the trenches. You couldn’t talk to him without realising that he was one of those men who never feel the joy of life so intensely as when the bullets are whistling all round them, and the next moment may be their last. Danger was a stimulant to him. I don’t mind telling you that when I used to write down his temperature on the chart I added a point or two so that the doctors should think him a little worse than he was. I knew he was doing his damnedest to get them to discharge him, and I thought it only fair to him to make sure that they wouldn’t. He used to look at me thoughtfully while I talked away and I know he looked forward to our little chats. I told him that I was a widow and had no one dependent on me, and I told him that I was thinking of settling down in Europe after the war. Gradually he thawed a little. He didn’t say much about himself, but he began to chaff me, he has a great sense of humour, you know, and sometimes I really began to think he rather liked me. At last they reported him fit for duty. To my surprise he asked me to dine with him on his last evening. I managed to get leave from the matron and we drove in to Paris. You can’t imagine how handsome he looked in his uniform. I’ve never seen anyone look so distinguished. Aristocratic to his finger-tips. Somehow or other he wasn’t in such good spirits as I’d expected. He’d been crazy to get back to the front.

“‘Why are you so down to-night?’ I asked him. ‘After all, you’ve got your wish at last.’

“‘I know I have,’ he said. ‘If for all that I’m a bit blue, can’t you guess why?’

“I simply dared not think what he meant. I thought I’d better make a little joke.

“‘I’m not very good at guessing,’ I said, with a laugh. ‘If you want me to know you’d better tell me.’

“He looked down and I could see he was nervous.

“‘You’ve been most awfully good to me,’ he said. ‘I can never begin to thank you for all your kindness. You’re the grandest woman I’ve ever known.’

“It upset me terribly to hear him say that. You know how funny Englishmen are; he’d never paid me a compliment before.

“‘I’ve only done what any competent nurse would have,’ I said.

“‘Shall I ever see you again?’ he said.

“‘That’s up to you,’ I said.

“I hoped he didn’t hear the tremble in my voice.

“‘I hate leaving you,’ he said.

“I really could hardly speak.

“‘Need you?’ I said.

“‘So long as my King and Country want me I am at their service.’”

When Mrs. Forestier reached this point her pale blue eyes filled with tears.

“‘But the war can’t last for ever,’ I said.

“‘When the war ends,’ he answered, ‘supposing a bullet hasn’t put an end to me, I shan’t have a penny. I don’t even know how I shall set about earning my living. You’re a very rich woman; I’m a pauper.’

“‘You’re an English gentleman,’ I said.

“‘Will that matter very much when the world has been made safe for democracy?’ he said bitterly.

“I was just crying my eyes out by then. Everything he said was so beautiful. Of course I saw what he meant. He didn’t think it honourable to ask me to marry him. I felt he’d sooner die than let me think he was after my money. He was a fine man. I knew that I wasn’t worthy of him, but I saw that if I wanted him I must go out and get him myself.

“‘It’s no good pretending I’m not crazy about you, because I am,’ I said.

“‘Don’t make it harder for me,’ he said hoarsely.

“I thought I should die, I loved him so much when he said that. It told me all I wanted to know. I stretched out my hand.

“‘Will you marry me, Robert?’ I said, very simply.

“‘Eleanor,’ he said.

“It was then he told me that he’d loved me from the first day he ever saw me. At first he hadn’t taken it seriously, he thought I was just a nurse and perhaps he’d have an affair with me, and then when he found out that I wasn’t that sort of woman and had a certain amount of money, he made up his mind that he must conquer his love. You see, he thought that marriage was quite out of the question.”

Probably nothing flattered Mrs. Forestier more than the idea that Captain Forestier had wanted to have a slap and tickle with her. It was certain that no one else had ever made dishonourable proposals to her, and though Forestier hadn’t either, the conviction that he had entertained the notion was a never-failing source of satisfaction to her. When they were married Eleanor’s relations, hard-bitten Western people, had suggested that her husband should go to work rather than live on her money, and Captain Forestier was all for it. The only stipulation he made was this:

“There are some things a gentleman can’t do, Eleanor. Anything else I’ll do gladly. God knows, I don’t attach any importance to that sort of thing, but if one’s a sahib one can’t help it, and damn it all, especially in these days, one does owe something to one’s class.”

Eleanor thought he had done enough in risking his life for his country in one bloody battle after another during four long years, but she was too proud of him to let it be said that he was a fortune- hunter who had married her for her money, and she made up her mind not to object if he found something to do that was worth his while. Unfortunately, the only jobs that offered were not very important. But he did not turn them down on his own responsibility.

“It’s up to you, Eleanor,” he told her. “You’ve only got to say the word and I’ll take it. It would make my poor old governor turn in his grave to see me do it, but that can’t be helped. My first duty is to you.”

Eleanor wouldn’t hear of it, and gradually the idea of his working was dropped. The Forestiers lived most of the year in their villa on the Riviera. They seldom went to England; Robert said it was no place for a gentleman since the war, and all the good fellows, white men every one of them, that he used to go about with when he was “one of the boys”, had been killed. He would have liked to spend his winters in England, three days a week with the Quorn, that was the life for a man, but poor Eleanor, she would be so out of it in that hunting set, he couldn’t ask her to make the sacrifice. Eleanor was prepared to make any sacrifice, but Captain Forestier shook his head. He wasn’t as young as he had been, and his hunting days were over. He was quite satisfied to breed Sealyhams and raise Buff Orpingtons. They had a good deal of land; the house stood on the top of a hill, on a plateau, surrounded on three sides by forest, and in front they had a garden. Eleanor said he was never so happy as when he was walking round the estate in an old tweed suit with the kennel-man, who also looked after the chickens. It was then you saw in him all those generations of country squires that he had behind him. It touched and amused Eleanor to see the long talks he had with the kennel-man about the Buff Orpingtons; it was for all the world as if he were discussing the pheasants with his head keeper: and he fussed over the Sealyhams as much as if they had been the pack of hounds you couldn’t help feeling he would have been so much more at home with. Captain Forestier’s great-grandfather had been one of the bucks of the Regency. It was he who had ruined the family so that the estates had to be sold. They had a wonderful old place in Shropshire, they’d had it for centuries, and Eleanor, even though it no longed belonged to them, would have liked to go and see it; but Captain Forestier said it would be too painful to him and would never take her.

The Forestiers entertained a good deal. Captain Forestier was a connoisseur of wines and was proud of his cellar.

“His father was well known to have the best palate in England,” said Eleanor, “and he’s inherited it.”

Most of their friends were Americans, French and Russians. Robert found them on the whole more interesting than the English, and Eleanor liked everybody he liked. Robert did not think the English quite up to their mark. Most of the people he had known in the old days belonged to the shooting, hunting, and fishing set; they, poor devils, were all broke now, and though, thank God, he wasn’t a snob, he didn’t half like the idea of his wife getting herself mixed up with a lot of nouveaux riches no one had ever heard of. Mrs. Forestier was not nearly so particular, but she respected his prejudices and admired his exclusiveness.

“Of course he has his whims and fancies,” she said, “but I think it’s only loyal on my part to defer to them. When you know the sort of people he comes from you can’t help seeing how natural it is he should have them. The only time I’ve ever seen him vexed in all the years we’ve been married was when once a gigolo came up to me in the Casino and asked me to dance. Robert nearly knocked him down. I told him the poor little thing was only doing his job, but he said he wasn’t going to have a damned swine like that even asking his wife to dance.”

Captain Forestier had high moral standards. He thanked God that he wasn’t narrow-minded, but one had to draw the line somewhere; and just because he lived on the Riviera he didn’t see why he should hob-nob with drunks, wastrels and perverts. He had no indulgence for sexual irregularities and would not allow Eleanor to frequent women of doubtful reputation.

“You see,” said Eleanor, “he’s a man of complete integrity; he’s the cleanest man I’ve ever known; and if sometimes he seems a little intolerant you must always remember that he never asks of others what he isn’t prepared to do himself. After all, one can’t help admiring a man whose principles are so high and who’s prepared to stick to them at any cost.”

When Captain Forestier told Eleanor that such and such a man, whom you met everywhere, and who you thought was rather pleasant, wasn’t a pukkah sahib, she knew it was no good insisting. She knew that in her husband’s judgment that finished him, and she was prepared to abide by it. After nearly twenty years of marriage she was sure of one thing, if of no other, and this was that Robert Forestier was the perfect type of an English gentleman.

“And I don’t know that God has ever created anything finer than that,” she said.

The trouble was that Captain Forestier was almost too perfect a type of the English gentleman. He was at forty-five (he was two or three years younger than Eleanor) still a very handsome man, with his wavy, abundant grey hair and his handsome moustache; he had the weather-beaten, healthy, tanned skin of a man who is much in the open air. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered. He looked every inch a soldier. He had a bluff, hearty way with him and a loud, frank laugh. In his conversation, in his manner, in his dress he was so typical that you could hardly believe it. He was so much of a country gentleman that he made you think rather of an actor giving a marvellous performance of the part. When you saw him walking along the Croisette, a pipe in his mouth, in plus-fours and just the sort of tweed coat he would have worn on the moors, he looked so like an English sportsman that it gave you quite a shock. And his conversation, the way he dogmatised, the platitudinous inanity of his statements, his amiable, well-bred stupidity, were all so characteristic of the retired officer that you could hardly help thinking he was putting it on.

When Eleanor heard that the house at the bottom of their hill had been taken by a Sir Frederick and Lady Hardy she was much pleased. It would be nice for Robert to have as a near neighbour someone of his own class. She made enquiries about them from her friends in Cannes. It appeared that Sir Frederick had lately come into the baronetcy on the death of an uncle and was come to the Riviera for two or three years while he was paying off the death duties. He was said to have been very wild in his youth, he was well on in the fifties when he came to Cannes, but now he was respectably married, to a very nice little woman, and had two small boys. It was a pity that Lady Hardy had been an actress, for Robert was apt to be a little stuffy about actresses, but everyone said that she was very well-mannered and ladylike, and you would never have guessed she had been on the stage. The Forestiers met her first at a tea-party to which Sir Frederick did not go, and Robert acknowledged that she seemed a very decent sort of person; so Eleanor, wishing to be neighbourly, invited them both to luncheon. A day was arranged. The Forestiers had asked a good many people to meet them, and the Hardys were rather late. Eleanor took an immediate fancy to Sir Frederick. He looked much younger than she expected, he hadn’t a white hair on his close- cropped head; indeed there was about him something boyish that was rather attractive. He was slightly built, not as tall as she was; and he had bright friendly eyes and a ready smile. She noticed that he wore the same Guards tie that Robert sometimes wore; he was not nearly so well-dressed as Robert, who always looked as though he had stepped out of a show-window, but he wore his old clothes as though it didn’t much matter what one wore. Eleanor could quite believe he had been a trifle wild as a young man. She was not inclined to blame him.

“I must introduce my husband to you,” she said.

She called him. Robert was talking to some of the other guests on the terrace, and hadn’t noticed the Hardys come in. He came forward and in his affable, hearty way, with a grace that always charmed Eleanor, shook hands with Lady Hardy. Then he turned to Sir Frederick. Sir Frederick gave him a puzzled look.

“Haven’t we met before?” he said.

Robert looked at him coolly.

“I don’t think so.”

“I could have sworn I knew your face.”

Eleanor felt her husband stiffen and at once realised that something was going wrong. Robert laughed.

“It sounds terribly rude, but to the best of my belief I’ve never set eyes on you in my life. We may have run across one another in the war. One met such hosts of fellers, then, didn’t one? Will you have a cocktail, Lady Hardy?”

During luncheon Eleanor noticed that Hardy kept looking at Robert. He was evidently trying to place him. Robert was busy with the women on either side of him and did not catch the glances. He was making efforts to entertain his neighbours; and his loud, ringing laugh rang through the room. He was a wonderful host. Eleanor had always admired his sense of social duty; however dull the women were he was sitting next to he gave them of his best. But when their guests had gone Robert’s gaiety dropped from him like a cloak from his shoulders. She had a feeling that he was upset.

“Was the princess very boring?” she asked kindly.

“She’s a malignant old cat, but otherwise she was all right.”

“Funny that Sir Frederick thought he knew you.”

“I’ve never set eyes on him in my life. But I know all about him. I wouldn’t have more to do with him than you can help if I were you, Eleanor. I don’t think he’s quite our mark.”

“But it’s one of the oldest baronetcies in England. We looked it out in Who’s Who.”

“He’s a disreputable scamp. I didn’t dream that the Captain Hardy,” Robert corrected himself, “the Fred Hardy I used to know about in the old days was now Sir Frederick. I would never have allowed you to ask him to my house.”

“Why, Robert? I’m bound to tell you that I thought him very attractive.”

For once Eleanor thought her husband rather unreasonable.

“A great many women have found him so, and a pretty penny it’s cost them.”

“You know how people talk. One really can’t believe everything one hears.”

He took one of her hands in his and looked earnestly into her eyes.

“Eleanor, you know I’m not the sort of chap to say anything against another chap behind his back, and I’d rather not tell you what I know about Hardy; I can only ask you to take my word for it that he isn’t a proper person for you to know.”

This was an appeal to which Eleanor was incapable of turning a deaf ear. It thrilled her to know that Robert placed such confidence in her; he knew that in a crisis he had only to call on her loyalty and she would not fail him.

“No one can be better aware than I, Robert,” she answered gravely, “of your perfect integrity; I know that if you could tell me you would, but even if you wanted to now I wouldn’t let you; it would look as if I had less confidence in you than you have in me. I am willing to abide by your judgment. I promise you that the Hardys shall never darken these doors again.”

But Eleanor often lunched out without Robert, when he was playing golf, and so frequently met the Hardys. She was very stiff with Sir Frederick, because if Robert disapproved of him, she must too; but he either did not notice or did not care. He went out of his way to be nice to her and she found him easy to get on with. It was difficult to dislike a man who plainly thought that no woman was better than she should be, but very sweet for all that, and who had such delightful manners. It might be that he was an improper man for her to know, but she couldn’t help liking the look in his brown eyes. It was a mocking look, which put you on your guard, and yet so caressing that you could not think he meant you harm. But the more Eleanor heard about him, the more she realised how right Robert was. He was an unprincipled rascal. They mentioned the names of women who had sacrificed everything for his sake and whom he had thrown aside without ceremony the moment he was tired of them. He seemed to have settled down now, and to be devoted to his wife and children; but can the leopard change his spots? It was only too probable that Lady Hardy had more to put up with than anyone suspected.

Fred Hardy was a bad lot. Pretty women, chemin de fer, and an unlucky knack for backing the wrong horse had landed him in the bankruptcy court by the time he was twenty-five, and he had been forced to resign his commission. He had seen no shame then in allowing women no longer in their first youth, who found his charm irresistible, to supply his wants. But the war came, he rejoined his regiment, and got a D.S.O. Then he went out to Kenya, where he found occasion to become co-respondent in a notorious divorce case; he left Kenya over some trouble with a cheque. His ideas of honesty were lax. It was unsafe to buy a car or a horse off him, and you did much better to keep away from the champagnes he warmly recommended to you. When with his persuasive charm he put before you a speculation by which you and he would make a fortune, you could only be sure that whatever he made out of it you would make nothing. He was in turn a motor-salesman, an outside broker, a commission agent and an actor. Were there any justice in the world he should have ended if not in gaol at least in the gutter. But by one of fate’s monstrous tricks, having at last inherited his baronetcy and an adequate income, having married when well over forty a pretty, clever wife to whom were in due course born two healthy and handsome children, the future offered him affluence, position and respectability. He had never taken life any more seriously than he took women, and life had been as kind to him as women. If he thought of his past it was with complacency; he had had a good time, he had enjoyed his ups and downs; and now, with good health and a clear conscience, he was prepared to settle down as a country gentleman, damn it, bring up the kids as kids should be brought up; and when the old buffer who sat for his constituency pegged out, by George, go into Parliament himself.

“I could tell them a thing or two they don’t know,” he said.

He was probably right, but he did not stop to reflect that perhaps they were not things they much wanted to know.

One afternoon, about sunset, Fred Hardy went into one of the bars on the Croisette. He was a sociable creature and did not care to drink alone, so he looked around to see if there were anyone he knew. He caught sight of Robert, who had been playing golf and was waiting there for Eleanor.

“Hulloa, Bob, what about having a tiddly?”

Robert gave a start. No one on the Riviera called him Bob. When he saw who it was he answered stiffly:

“I’ve got a drink, thanks.”

“Have another. My old lady don’t approve of my drinking between meals, but when I can manage to get away from her I generally slip in and have one about this time. I don’t know what you think about it, but my feeling is that God made six o’clock for man to have a drink at.”

He flung himself into a great leather arm-chair next to the one Robert was sitting in and called a waiter. He gave Robert his good- natured, engaging smile.

“A lot of water has passed under the bridges since first we met, old boy, hasn’t it?”

Robert, frowning a little, shot a look at him which an observer might have described as wary.

“I don’t know exactly what you mean. To the best of my belief we met for the first time three or four weeks ago when you and your wife were good enough to come and have lunch with us.”

“Come off it, Bob. I knew I’d seen you before. I was puzzled at first and then it flashed across me. You were the car-washer at that garage off Bruton Street where I used to keep my car.” Captain Forestier gave a hearty laugh.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve made a mistake. I never heard anything so ridiculous.”

“I’ve got a damned good memory and I never forget a face. I bet you haven’t forgotten me either. Many’s the half-crown I’ve given you for fetching the car away from my flat when I didn’t want to be bothered to bring it round to the garage myself.”

“You’re talking absolute rot. I’d never seen you in my life till you came to my house.”

Hardy grinned cheerfully.

“You know I’ve always been a Kodak-fiend. I’ve got albums of snaps that I’ve taken at one time and another. Would it surprise you to learn that I’ve found a snap of you standing by a two-seater I’d just bought? A damned good-looking fellow you were in those days even though you had overalls on and your face was none too clean. Of course you’ve broadened out, your hair’s grey and you’ve got a moustache, but it’s the same chap. Unmistakably.” Captain Forestier looked at him coolly.

“You must have been misled by an accidental resemblance. It was somebody else you gave your half-crowns to.”

“Well, where were you then, if you weren’t a car-washer at the Bruton Garage between 1913 and 1914?”

“I was in India.”

“With your regiment?” asked Fred Hardy with another grin.

“I was shooting.”

“You liar.”

Robert flushed deeply.

“This isn’t quite the place to choose for a scrap, but if you think I’m going to stay here to be insulted by a drunken swine like you, you’re mistaken.”

“Wouldn’t you like to hear what else I know about you? You know how things come back to one, and I’ve remembered quite a lot.”

“I’m not in the least interested. I tell you that you’re making an absolute mistake. You’re confusing me with somebody else.” But he made no attempt to go.

“You were a bit of a slacker even in those days. I remember once, when I was going into the country early, I’d told you to have my car washed by nine and it wasn’t ready, so I kicked up a row and old Thompson told me then your father had been a pal of his and he’d taken you on out of charity because you were down and out. Your father had been a wine waiter at one of the clubs, White’s or Brooks’s, I forget which, and you’d been a page-boy there yourself. You enlisted in the Coldstream Guards, if I remember right, and some chap bought you out and made you his valet.”

“It’s too fantastic,” said Robert scornfully.

“And I remember, when I was home on leave once and went to the garage, old Thompson told me you’d enlisted in the A.S.C. You weren’t going to take any more risks than you could help, were you? You’ve been drawing the long bow a bit, haven’t you, with all those stories I hear of your gallantry in the trenches? I suppose you did get a commission, or is that a fake too?”

“Of course I got a commission.”

“Well, a lot of funny people did in those days, but you know, old boy, if it was in the A.S.C. I wouldn’t wear a Guards tie if I were you.”

Captain Forestier instinctively put his hand up to his tie, and Fred Hardy, watching him with his mocking eyes, was pretty sure that notwithstanding his tan he went white.

“It’s no business of yours what tie I wear.”

“Don’t get snotty, old boy. There’s no reason to get up on your hind legs. I’ve got the goods on you, but I’m not going to give you away, so why don’t you come clean?”

“I’ve got nothing to come clean about. I tell you it’s all an absurd mistake. And I should tell you that if I find that you’ve been spreading these lying stories about me, I shall immediately start proceedings for slander.”

“Stow it„ Bob. I’m not going to spread any stories. You don’t think I care? I think the whole thing’s rather a lark. I’ve got no ill-feeling towards you. I’ve been a bit of an adventurer myself; I admire you for carrying off such a stupendous bluff. Starting as a page-boy and then being a trooper, a valet and a car-washer; and there you are, a fine gentleman, with a grand house, entertaining all the big bugs of the Riviera, winning golf tournaments, vice- president of the Sailing. Club, and I don’t know what all. You’re It in Cannes and no mistake. It’s stupendous. I’ve done some pretty rum things in my day, but the nerve you must have; old boy, I take off my hat to you.”

“I wish I deserved your compliments. I don’t. My father was in the Indian cavalry and I was at least born a gentleman. I may not have had a very distinguished career, but I certainly have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Oh, come off it, Bob. I shan’t split, you know, not even to my old lady. I never tell women anything that they don’t know already. Believe me, I’d have got into even worse scrapes than I have if I hadn’t made a rule of that. I should have thought you’d be glad to have someone around that you could be yourself with. Isn’t it a strain never to let up? Silly of you to keep me at arm’s length. I haven’t got anything on you, old boy. It’s true I’m a bart and a landed proprietor now, but I’ve been in some pretty tight places in my time, and it’s a wonder to me that I’ve kept out of gaol.”

“It’s a wonder to a good many other people.”

Fred Hardy broke into a guffaw.

“That’s one on me, old boy. All the same, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think it was a bit thick your telling your wife I wasn’t a proper person for her to associate with.”

“I never said anything of the sort.”

“Oh yes, you did. She’s a grand old girl, but a bit garrulous, or am I mistaken?”

“I’m not prepared to discuss my wife with a man like you,” said Captain Forestier, coldly.

“Oh, don’t be so damned gentlemanly with me, Bob. We’re a couple of burns and that’s all there is to it. We could have some grand times together if you’d only have a little sense. You’re a liar, a humbug and a cheat, but you seem to be very decent to your wife, and that’s something in your favour. She just dotes upon you, doesn’t she? Funny, women are. She’s a very nice woman, Bob.”

Robert’s face grew red, he clenched his fist and half rose from his chair.

“Damn you, stop talking about my wife. If you mention her name again I swear I’ll knock you down.”

“Oh no, you won’t. You’re too great a gentleman to hit a feller smaller than yourself.”

Hardy had said these words mockingly, watching Robert, and quite ready to dodge if that great fist struck out; he was astounded at their effect. Robert sank back into his chair and unclenched his fist.

“You’re right. But only a mean hound would trade on it.”

The reply was so theatrical that Fred Hardy began to chuckle, but then he saw that the man meant it. He was deadly serious. Fred Hardy was no fool; he could hardly have lived for twenty- five years on his wits in tolerable comfort unless he had had them all about him. And now, in amazement, staring at that heavy, powerful man, who looked so like the typical English sportsman, sunk back in the chair, he had a sudden flash of comprehension. He was no common swindler who had got hold of a silly woman to keep him in luxury and idleness. She was only a means to a greater end. He had been captivated by an ideal and in pursuit of it had stuck at nothing. Perhaps the notion had come to him when he was a page-boy in a smart club; the members, with their lounging ease, their casual manner, may have seemed very wonderful to him; and afterwards as a trooper, as a valet, as a car-washer, the many men he ran across, belonging to a different world and seen through a haze of hero-worship, had filled him perhaps with admiration and envy. He wanted to be like them. He wanted to be one of them. That was the ideal that haunted his dreams. He wanted — it was grotesque, it was pathetic — he wanted to be a gentleman. The war, with the commission it brought him, gave him his chance. Eleanor’s money provided the means. That wretched fellow had spent twenty years pretending to be something the only value of which was that it wasn’t a pretence. That was grotesque too; that was pathetic. Without meaning to, Fred Hardy uttered the thought that passed through his head.

“Poor old chap,” he said.

Forestier looked at him quickly. He could not understand what those words meant nor the tone in which they were said. He flushed.

“What d’you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“I don’t think we need continue this conversation. Apparently there’s nothing I can say to persuade you that you’re mistaken. I can only repeat that there’s not a word of truth in it. I am not the fellow you think I am.”

“All right, old boy, have it your own way.”

Forestier called the waiter.

“D’you want me to pay for your drink?” he asked icily.

“Yes, old boy.”

Forestier somewhat grandly gave the waiter a note and told him to keep the change, then without a word, without giving Fred Hardy another look, stalked out of the bar.

They did not meet again till the night on which Robert Forestier lost his life.

The winter passed into spring, and the gardens on the Riviera were ablaze with colour. The hillsides were primly gay with wild flowers. The spring passed into summer. In the towns along the Riviera the streets were hot with a bright, eager heat that made the blood run faster; and women walked about in great straw hats and pyjamas. The beaches were crowded. Men in trunks and women almost naked lay in the sun. In the evening the bars on the Croisette were thronged by a restless, chattering crowd as many- coloured as the flowers of spring. It had not rained for weeks. There had been several forest fires along the coast, and Robert Forestier in his hearty, joking way had several times said that they would stand a pretty thin chance if they had a fire in their woods. One or two people had advised him to cut down some of the trees at the back of his house; but he couldn’t bear to: they had been in poor condition when the Forestiers bought the place, but now that the dead wood had been cut away year by year, that they had been given air and kept clean of pests, they were magnificent.

“Why, it would be like having my leg chopped off to cut one of ’em down. They must be the best part of a hundred years old.”

On the fourteenth of July the Forestiers went over to a gala dinner at Monte Carlo, and they gave their staff leave to go to Cannes. It was the national holiday, and in Cannes they danced in the open air under the plane trees, there were fireworks, and from far and near the people came in to have a good time. The Hardys had sent their servants out too, but they were sitting at home, and their two little boys were in bed. Fred was playing patience and Lady Hardy was working at a piece of tapestry to cover a chair. Suddenly there was a ring of the bell and a loud knocking on the door.

“Who the devil’s that?”

Hardy went to the door and found a boy who told him that fire had broken out in the Forestiers’ woods. Some men had gone up from the village and were fighting it, but they needed all the help they could get, and would he come.

“Of course I’ll come.” He hurried back to his wife and told her. “Wake the kids and let them come up and see the fun. By George, after all this drought it’ll be a blaze.”

He bolted out. The boy told him they had telephoned to the police station and they were going to send along the soldiers. Someone was trying to get through to Monte Carlo and let Captain Forestier know.

“It’ll take him an hour to get here,” said Hardy.

As they ran they saw the glow in the sky, and when they came to the top of the hill, the leaping flames. There was no water and the only thing was to try to beat them out. Already a number of men were at work. Hardy joined them. But you had no sooner beat out the flames in one bush than another began to crackle and before you could look had turned into a fiery torch. The heat was terrific, and the workers, unable to support it, were slowly driven back. A breeze was blowing, and the sparks were carried from tree to bush. After weeks of drought everything was as dry as tinder, and the moment a spark fell the tree, the bush, went up in flames. If it had not been terrifying, it would have been awe-inspiring to see a great fir-tree, sixty feet high, blazing like match- wood. The fire roared like the fire in a factory furnace. The best way to put a stop to it was by cutting down trees and brushwood, but the men were few, and but two or three had axes. The only hope was in the troops, who were used to dealing with the forest fires, and the troops did not come.

“Unless they get here soon we shall never save the house,” said Hardy.

He caught sight of his wife, who had come up with the two boys, and waved to them. Already he was black with grime, and the sweat was pouring down his face. Lady Hardy ran up.

“Oh, Fred, the dogs and the chickens.”

“By George, yes.”

The kennels and the chicken-run were at the back of the house, in a clearing that had been cut in the woods, and the wretched animals were already frantic with terror. Hardy let them out and they rushed to safety. They could only be left to shift for themselves. They must be rounded up later. The blaze could be seen now from far away. But the troops did not come, and the small body of helpers were powerless against the advancing flames.

“If those damned soldiers don’t get here soon the house is for it,” said Hardy. “I think we’d better get what we can out of it.”

It was a stone house, but there were wooden verandahs all round it, and they would burn like kindling. The Forestiers’ servants had come by now. He got them together, his wife gave a hand, and the two boys; they carried out on to the lawn in front such things as were portable, linen and silver, clothes, ornaments, pictures, pieces of furniture. At last the troops came, two lorryloads of them, and set about systematically digging trenches and felling trees. There was an officer in charge and Hardy, pointing out the danger to the house, begged him first of all to cut down the trees that surrounded it.

“The house must look after itself,” he said. “I’ve got to prevent the fire spreading beyond the hill.”

The lights of a car were seen speeding along the winding road, and a few minutes later Forestier and his wife sprang out of it.

“Where are the dogs?” he cried.

“I’ve let them out,” said Hardy.

“Oh, it’s you.”

At first in that filthy fellow, his face begrimed with soot and sweat, he had not recognised Fred Hardy. He frowned angrily.

“I thought the house might catch. I’ve got everything out I could.”

Forestier looked at the blazing forest.

“Well, that’s the end of my trees,” he said.

“The soldiers are working on the side of the hill. They’re trying to save the next property. We’d better go along and see if we can save anything.”

“I’ll go. You needn’t,” Forestier cried irritably.

On a sudden Eleanor gave an anguished cry.

“Oh, look. The house.”

From where they stood they could see a verandah at the back suddenly burst into flames.

“That’s all right, Eleanor. The house can’t burn. It’ll only get the woodwork. Take my coat; I’m going along to help the soldiers.”

He took off his dinner jacket and handed it to his wife.

“I’ll come with you,” said Hardy. “Mrs. Forestier, you’d better go along to where your things are. I think we’ve got everything out that’s valuable.”

“Thank heaven, I was wearing most of my jewellery.”

Lady Hardy was a woman of sense.

“Mrs. Forestier, let’s get the servants together and carry what we can down to our house.”

The two men walked towards where the soldiers were at work.

“It’s very decent of you to have got that stuff out of my house,” said Robert, stiffly.

“Not at all,” answered Fred Hardy.

They had not gone far when they heard somebody calling. They looked round and vaguely saw a woman running after them.

“Monsieur, Monsieur.”

They stopped and the woman, her arms outstretched, rushed up. It was Eleanor’s maid. She was distraught.

“La petite Judy. Judy. I shut her up when we went out. She’s on heat. I put her in the servants’ bathroom.”

“My God!” cried Forestier.

“What is it?”

“Eleanor’s dog. I must save her at any cost.”

He turned round and started to run back to the house. Hardy caught hold of his arm to hold him.

“Don’t be a damned fool, Bob. The house is burning. You can’t go into it.”

Forestier struggled to release himself.

“Let me go, damn you. D’you think I’m going to let a dog be burned alive?”

“Oh, shut up. This is no time for play-acting!”

Forestier shook Hardy off, but Hardy sprang on him and seized him round the middle. Forestier with his clenched fist hit Hardy in the face as hard as he could. Hardy staggered, releasing his hold, and Forestier hit him again; Hardy fell to the ground.

“You rotten bounder. I’ll show you how a gentleman behaves.”

Fred Hardy picked himself up slowly and felt his face. It hurt him.

“God, the black eye I’m going to have to-morrow.” He was shaken and a trifle dazed. The maid suddenly broke into a storm of hysterical tears. “Shut up, you slut,” he cried crossly. “And don’t say a word to your mistress.”

Forestier was nowhere to be seen. It was more than an hour before they were able to get at him. They found him lying on the landing outside the bathroom, dead, with the dead Sealyham in his arms. Hardy looked at him for a long time before speaking.

“You fool,” he muttered between his teeth, angrily. “You damned fool!”

That imposture of his had paid him out at last. Like a man who cherishes a vice till it gets a stranglehold on him so that he is its helpless slave, he had lied so long that he had come to believe his own lies. Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism. But Fred Hardy had to break the news to Mrs. Forestier. She was with his wife, in their villa at the bottom of the hill, and she still thought that Robert was with the soldiers cutting down trees and clearing the brushwood. He told her as gently as he could, but he had to tell her, and he had to tell her everything. At first it seemed as though she could not grasp the sense of what he said.

“Dead?” she cried. “Dead? My Robert?”

Then Fred Hardy, the rip, the cynic, the unscrupulous ruffian, took her hands in his and said the words that alone enabled her to bear her anguish.

“Mrs. Forestier, he was a very gallant gentleman.”

THE UNCONQUERED

He came back into the kitchen. The man was still on the floor, lying where he had hit him, and his face was bloody. He was moaning. The woman had backed against the wall and was staring with terrified eyes at Willi, his friend, and when he came in she gave a gasp and broke into loud sobbing. Willi was sitting at the table, his revolver in his hand, with a half empty glass of wine beside him. Hans went up to the table, filled his glass and emptied it at a gulp.

‘You look as though you’d had trouble, young fellow,’ said Willi with a grin. Hans’s face was blood–stained and you could see the gashes of five sharp finger–nails. He put his hand gingerly to his cheek.

‘She’d have scratched my eyes out if she could, the bitch. I shall have to put some iodine on. But she’s all right now. You go along.’

‘I don’t know. Shall I? It’s getting late.’

‘Don’t be a fool. You’re a man, aren’t you? What if it is getting late? We lost our way.’

It was still light and the westering sun streamed into the kitchen windows of the farm–house. Willi hesitated a moment. He was a little fellow, dark and thin–faced, a dress designer in civil life, and he didn’t want Hans to think him a cissy. He got up and went towards the door through which Hans had come. When the woman saw what he was going to do she gave a shriek and sprang forwards.

‘Non, non,’ she cried.

With one step Hans was in front of her. He seized her by the shoulders and flung her violently back. She tottered and fell. He took Willi’s revolver.

‘Stop still, both of you,’ he rasped in French, but with his guttural German accent. He nodded his head towards the door. ‘Go on. I’ll look after them.’

Willi went out, but in a moment was back again.

‘She’s unconscious.’

‘Well, what of it?’

‘I can’t. It’s no good.’

‘Stupid, that’s what you are. Ein Weibchen. A woman.’

Willi flushed.

‘We’d better be getting on our way.’

Hans shrugged a scornful shoulder.

‘I’ll just finish the bottle of wine and then we’ll go.’

He was feeling at ease and it would have been pleasant to linger. He had been on the job since morning and after so many hours on his motor–cycle his limbs ached. Luckily they hadn’t far to go, only to Soissons–ten or fifteen kilometres. He wondered if he’d have the luck to get a bed to sleep in. Of course all this wouldn’t have happened if the girl hadn’t been a fool. They had lost their way, he and Willi, they had stopped a peasant working in a field and he had deliberately misled them, and they found themselves on a side road. When they came to the farm they stopped to ask for a direction. They’d asked very politely, for orders were to treat the French population well as long as they behaved themselves. The door was opened for them by the girl and she said she didn’t know the way to Soissons, so they pushed in; then the woman, her mother, Hans guessed, told them. The three of them, the farmer, his wife and daughter, had just finished supper and there was a bottle of wine on the table. It reminded Hans that he was as thirsty as the devil. The day had been sweltering and he hadn’t had a drink since noon. He asked them for a bottle of wine and Willi had added that they would pay them well for it. Willi was a good little chap, but soft. After all, they were the victors. Where was the French army? In headlong flight. And the English, leaving everything behind, had scuttled like rabbits back to their island. The conquerors took what they wanted, didn’t they? But Willi had worked at a Paris dressmaker’s for two years. It’s true he spoke French well, that’s why he had his present job, but it had done something to him. A decadent people. It did a German no good to live among them.

The farmer’s wife put a couple of bottles of wine on the table and Willi took twenty francs out of his pocket and gave it to her. She didn’t even say thank you. Hans’s French wasn’t as good as Willi’s, but he could make himself understood, and he and Willi spoke it together all the time. Willi corrected his mistakes. It was because Willi was so useful to him in this way that he had made him his friend, and he knew that Willi admired him. He admired him because he was so tall, slim, and broad–shouldered, because his curly hair was so fair and his eyes so blue. He never lost an opportunity to practise his French, and he tried to talk now, but those three French people wouldn’t meet him half–way. He told them that he was a farmer’s son himself and when the war was over was going back to the farm. He had been sent to school in Munich because his mother wanted him to go into business, but his heart wasn’t in it, and so after matriculating he had gone to an agricultural college.

‘You came here to ask your way and now you know it,’ said the girl. ‘Drink up your wine and go.’

He had hardly looked at her before. She wasn’t pretty, but she had fine dark eyes and a straight nose. Her face was very pale. She was plainly dressed, but somehow she didn’t look quite like what she evidently was. There was a sort of distinction about her. Ever since the war started he’d heard fellows talk about the French girls. They had something the German girls hadn’t. Chic, Willi said it was, but when he asked him just what he meant by that Willi could only say that you had to see it to understand. Of course he’d heard others say that they were mercenary and hard as nails. Well, they’d be in Paris in a week and he’d find out for himself. They said the High Command had already arranged for houses for the men to go to.

‘Finish your wine and let’s go,’ said Willi.

But Hans was feeling comfortable and didn’t want to be hurried.

‘You don’t look like a farmer’s daughter,’ he said to the girl.

‘And so what?’ she answered.

‘She’s a teacher,’ said her mother.

‘Then you’ve had a good education.’ She shrugged her shoulders, but he went on good–humouredly in his bad French. ‘You ought to understand that this is the best thing that has ever happened to the French people. We didn’t declare war. You declared war. And now we’re going to make France a decent country. We’re going to put order into it. We’re going to teach you to work. You’ll learn obedience and discipline.’

She clenched her fists and looked at him, her eyes black with hatred. But she did not speak.

‘You’re drunk, Hans,’ said Willi.

‘I’m as sober as a judge. I’m only telling them the truth and they may just as well know it at once.’

‘He’s right,’ she cried out, unable any longer to contain herself. ‘You’re drunk. Now go. Go.’

‘Oh, you understand German, do you? All right, I’ll go. But you must give me a kiss first.’

She took a step back to avoid him, but he seized her wrist.

‘Father,’ she cried. ‘Father.’

The farmer flung himself on the German. Hans let go of her and with all his might hit him in the face. He crumpled up on the floor. Then, before she could escape him, he caught the girl in his arms. She gave him a swinging blow on the cheek.... He chuckled grimly.

’Is that how you take it when a German soldier wants to kiss you? You’ll pay for this.’

With his great strength he pinioned her arms and was dragging her out of the door, but her mother rushed at him and catching him by the clothes tried to pull him away. With one arm holding the girl close to him, with the flat of his other hand he gave the woman a great push and she staggered back to the wall.

‘Hans, Hans,’ cried Willi.

‘Shut up, damn you.’

He put his hands over the girl’s mouth to stop her shrieking and carried her out of the room. That was how it had happened and you had to admit that she’d brought it on herself. She shouldn’t have slapped him. If she’d given him the kiss he’d asked for he’d have gone away. He gave a glance at the farmer still lying where he had fallen and he could hardly help laughing at his funny face. There was a smile in his eyes when he looked at the woman cowering against the wall. Was she afraid it was her turn next? Not likely. He remembered a French proverb.

‘C’est le premier pas qui coûte. There’s nothing to cry about, old woman. It had to come sooner or later.’ He put his hand to his hip pocket and pulled out a wallet. ‘Look, here’s a hundred francs so that mademoiselle can buy herself a new dress. There’s not much left of that one.’ He placed the note on the table and put his helmet back on his head. ‘Let’s go.’

They slammed the door behind them and got on their motor–cycles. The woman went into the parlour. Her daughter was lying on the divan. She was lying as he had left her and she was weeping bitterly.

Three months later Hans found himself in Soissons again. He had been in Paris with the conquering army and had ridden through the Arc de Triomphe on his motor–cycle. He had advanced with the army first to Tours and then to Bordeaux. He’d seen very little fighting. The only French soldiers he’d seen were prisoners. The campaign had been the greatest spree he could ever have imagined. After the armistice he had spent a month in Paris. He’d sent picture postcards to his family in Bavaria and bought them all presents. Willi, because he knew the city like the palm of his hand, had stayed on, but he and the rest of his unit were sent to Soissons to join the force that was holding it. It was a nice little town and he was comfortably billeted. Plenty to eat and champagne for less than a mark a bottle in German money. When he was ordered to proceed there it had occurred to him that it would be fun to go and have a look at the girl he’d had. He’d take her a pair of silk stockings to show there was no ill–feeling. He had a good bump of locality and he thought he would be able to find the farm without difficulty. So one afternoon, when he had nothing to do, he put the silk stockings in his pocket and got on his machine. It was a lovely autumn day, with hardly a cloud in the sky, and it was pretty, undulating country that he rode through. It had been fine and dry for so long that, though it was September, not even the restless poplars gave sign that the summer was drawing to an end. He took one wrong turning, which delayed him, but for all that he got to the place he sought in less than half an hour. A mongrel dog barked at him as he walked up to the door. He did not knock, but turned the handle and stepped in. The girl was sitting at the table peeling potatoes. She sprang to her feet when she saw the uniformed man.

‘What d’you want?’ Then she recognized him. She backed to the wall, clutching the knife in her hands. ‘It’s you. Cochon’

‘Don’t get excited. I’m not going to hurt you. Look. I’ve brought you some silk stockings.’

‘Take them away and take yourself off with them.’

‘Don’t be silly. Drop that knife. You’ll only get hurt if you try to be nasty. You needn’t be afraid of me.’

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ she said.

She let the knife fall to the floor. He took off his helmet and sat down. He reached out with his foot and drew the knife towards him.

‘Shall I peel some of your potatoes for you?’ She did not answer. He bent down for the knife and then took a potato out of the bowl and went to work on it. Her face hard, her eyes hostile, she stood against the wall and watched him. He smiled at her disarmingly. ‘Why do you look so cross? I didn’t do you much harm, you know. I was excited, we all were, they’d talked of the invincible French army and the Maginot line...’ he finished the sentence with a chuckle. ‘And the wine went to my head. You might have fared worse. Women have told me that I’m not a bad–looking fellow.’

She looked him up and down scornfully.

‘Get out of here.’

‘Not until I choose.’

‘If you don’t go my father will go to Soissons and complain to the general.’

‘Much he’ll care. Our orders are to make friends with the population. What’s your name?’

‘That’s not your business.’

There was a flush in her cheeks now and her angry eyes were blazing. She was prettier than he remembered her. He hadn’t done so badly. She had a refinement that suggested the city–dweller rather than the peasant. He remembered her mother saying she was a teacher. Because she was almost a lady it amused him to torment her. He felt strong and healthy. He passed his hand through his curly blond hair, and giggled when he thought that many girls would have jumped at the chance she had had. His face was so deeply tanned by the summer that his eyes were startlingly blue.

‘Where are your father and mother?’

‘Working in the fields.’

‘I’m hungry. Give me a bit of bread and cheese and a glass of wine. I’ll pay.’

She gave a harsh laugh.

‘We haven’t seen cheese for three months. We haven’t enough bread to stay our hunger. The French took our horses a year ago and now the Boches have taken our cows, our pigs, our chickens, everything.’

‘Well, they paid you for them.’

‘Can we eat the worthless paper they gave us?’

She began to cry.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Oh, no,’ she answered bitterly, ‘we can eat like kings on potatoes and bread and turnips and lettuce. Tomorrow my father’s going to Soissons to see if he can buy some horse meat.’

‘Listen, Miss. I’m not a bad fellow. I’ll bring you a cheese, and I think I can get hold of a bit of ham.’

‘I don’t want your presents. I’ll starve before I touch the food you swine have stolen from us.’

‘We’ll see,’ he said good–humouredly.

He put on his hat, got up, and with an Au revoir, mademoiselle, walked out.

He wasn’t supposed to go joy–riding round the country and he had to wait to be sent on an errand before he was able to get to the farm again. It was ten days later. He walked in as unceremoniously as before and this time he found the farmer and his wife in the kitchen. It was round about noon and the woman was stirring a pot on the stove. The man was seated at table. They gave him a glance when he came in, but there was no surprise in it. Their daughter had evidently told them of his visit. They did not speak. The woman went on with her cooking, and the man, a surly look on his face, stared at the oil–cloth on the table. But it required more than this to disconcert the good–humoured Hans.

‘Bonjour, la compagnie,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve brought you a present.’

He undid the package he had with him and set out a sizeable piece of Gruyere cheese, a piece of pork, and a couple of tins of sardines. The woman turned round and he smiled when he saw the light of greed in her eyes. The man looked at the foodstuff sullenly. Hans gave him his sunny grin.

‘I’m sorry we had a misunderstanding the first time I came here. But you shouldn’t have interfered.’

At that moment the girl came in.

‘What are you doing here?’ she cried harshly. Then her eyes fell on the things he had brought. She swept them together and flung them at him. ‘Take them away. Take them.’

But her mother sprang forward.

‘Annette, you’re crazy.’

‘I won’t take his presents.’

‘It’s our own food that they’ve stolen from us. Look at the sardines. They’re Bordeaux sardines.’

She picked the things up. Hans looked at the girl with a mocking smile in his light blue eyes.

‘Annette’s your name, is it? A pretty name. Do you grudge your parents a little food? You said you hadn’t had cheese for three months. I couldn’t get any ham; I did the best I could.’

The farmer’s wife took the lump of meat in her hands and pressed it to her bosom. You felt that she could have kissed it. Tears ran down Annette’s cheeks.

‘The shame of it,’ she groaned.

‘Oh, come now, there’s no shame in a bit of Gruyere and a piece of pork.’

Hans sat down and lit a cigarette. Then he passed the packet over to the old man. The farmer hesitated for a moment, but the temptation was too strong for him; he took one and handed back the packet.

‘Keep it,’ said Hans. ‘I can get plenty more.’ He inhaled the smoke and blew a cloud of it from his nostrils. ‘Why can’t we be friends? What’s done can’t be undone. War is war, and, well, you know what I mean. I know Annette’s an educated girl and I want her to think well of me. I expect we shall be in Soissons for quite a while and I can bring you something now and then to help out. You know, we do all we can to make friends with the townspeople, but they won’t let us. They won’t even look at us when we pass them in the street. After all, it was an accident, what happened that time I came here with Willi. You needn’t be afraid of me. I’ll respect Annette as if she was my own sister.’

‘Why do you want to come here? Why can’t you leave us alone?’ asked Annette.

He really didn’t know. He didn’t like to say that he wanted a little human friendship. The silent hostility that surrounded them all at Soissons got on his nerves so that sometimes he wanted to go up to a Frenchman who looked at him as if he wasn’t there and knock him down, and sometimes it affected him so that he was almost inclined to cry. It would be nice if he had some place to go where he was welcome. He spoke the truth when he said he had no desire for Annette. She wasn’t the sort of woman he fancied. He liked women to be tall and full–breasted, blue–eyed, and fair–haired like himself; he liked them to be strong and hefty and well–covered. That refinement which he couldn’t account for, that thin fine nose and those dark eyes, the long pale face–there was something intimidating about the girl, so that if he hadn’t been excited by the great victories of the German armies, if he hadn’t been so tired and yet so elated, if he hadn’t drunk all that wine on an empty stomach, it would never have crossed his mind that he could have anything to do with her.

For a fortnight after that Hans couldn’t get away. He’d left the food at the farm and he had no doubt that the old people had wolfed it. He wondered if Annette had eaten it too; he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the moment his back was turned she had set to with the others. These French people, they couldn’t resist getting something for nothing. They were weak and decadent. She hated him, yes, God, how she hated him, but pork was pork, and cheese was cheese. He thought of her quite a lot. It tantalized him that she should have such a loathing for him. He was used to being liked by women. It would be funny if one of these days she fell in love with him. He’d been her first lover and he’d heard the students at Munich over their beer saying that it was her first lover a woman loved, after that it was love. When he’d set his mind on getting a girl he’d never failed yet. Hans laughed to himself and a sly look came into his eyes.

At last he got his chance to go to the farm. He got hold of cheese and butter, sugar, a tin of sausages, and some coffee, and set off on his motor–cycle. But that time he didn’t see Annette. She and her father were at work in the fields. The old woman was in the yard and her face lit up when she saw the parcel he was bringing. She led him into the kitchen. Her hands trembled a little as she untied the string and when she saw what he had brought her eyes filled with tears.

‘You’re very good,’ she said.

‘May I sit down?’ he asked politely.

‘Of course.’ She looked out of the window and Hans guessed that she wanted to make sure that Annette was not coming. ‘Can I offer you a glass of wine.’

‘I’d be glad of it.’

He was sharp enough to see that her greed for food had made her, if not friendly to him, at least willing to come to terms with him. That look out of the window made them almost fellow conspirators.

‘Did you like the pork?’ he asked.

‘It was a treat.’

‘I’ll try to bring you some more next time I come. Did Annette like it?’

‘She wouldn’t touch a thing you’d left. She said she’d rather starve.’

‘Silly.’

‘That’s what I said to her. As long as the food is there, I said, there’s nothing to be gained by not eating it.’

They chatted quite amicably while Hans sipped his wine. He discovered that she was called Madame Périer. He asked her whether there were any other members of the family. She sighed. No, they’d had a son, but he’d been mobilized at the beginning of the war and he’d died. He hadn’t been killed, he’d got pneumonia and died in the hospital at Nancy.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hans.

‘Perhaps he’s better off than if he’d lived. He was like Annette in many ways. He could never have borne the shame of defeat.’ She sighed again. ‘Oh, my poor friend, we’ve been betrayed.’

‘Why did you want to fight for the Poles? What were they to you?’

‘You’re right. If we had let your Hitler take Poland he would have left us alone.’

When Hans got up to go he said he would come again soon.

‘I shan’t forget the pork.’

Then Hans had a lucky break; he was given a job that took him twice a week to a town in the vicinity so that he was able to get to the farm much oftener. He took care never to come without bringing something. But he made no headway with Annette. Seeking to ingratiate himself with her, he used the simple wiles that he had discovered went down with women; but they only excited her derision. Thin–lipped and hard, she looked at him as though he were dirt. On more than one occasion she made him so angry that he would have liked to take her by the shoulders and shake the life out of her. Once he found her alone, and when she got up to go he barred her passage.

‘Stop where you are. I want to talk to you.’

‘Talk. I am a woman and defenceless.’

‘What I want to say is this: for all I know I may be here for a long time. Things aren’t going to get easier for you French, they’re going to get harder. I can be useful to you. Why don’t you be reasonable like your father and mother?’

It was true that old Périer had come round. You couldn’t say that he was cordial, he was indeed cold and gruff, but he was civil. He had even asked Hans to bring him some tobacco, and when he wouldn’t accept payment for it had thanked him. He was pleased to hear the news of Soissons and grabbed the paper that Hans brought him. Hans, a farmer’s son, could talk about the farm as one who knew. It was a good farm, not too big and not too small, well watered, for a sizeable brook ran through it, and well wooded, with arable land and pasture. Hans listened with understanding sympathy when the old man bewailed himself because without labour, without fertilizers, his stock taken from him, it was all going to rack and ruin.

‘You ask me why I can’t be reasonable like my father and mother,’ said Annette.

She pulled her dress tight and showed herself to him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. What he saw caused such a convulsion in his soul as he had never known. The blood rushed to his cheeks.

‘You’ re pregnant.’

She sank back on her chair and leaning her head on her hands began to weep as though her heart would break.

‘The shame of it. The shame.’

He sprang towards her to take her in his arms.

‘My sweet,’ he cried.

But she sprang to her feet and pushed him away.

‘Don’t touch me. Go away. Go away. Haven’t you done me enough harm already?’

She flung out of the room. He waited by himself for a few minutes. He was bewildered. His thoughts in a whirl, he rode slowly back to Soissons, and when he went to bed he couldn’t get to sleep for hours. He could think of nothing but Annette and her swollen body. She had been unbearably pathetic as she sat there at the table crying her eyes out. It was his child she bore in her womb. He began to feel drowsy, and then with a start he was once more wide awake, for suddenly it came to him, it came to him with the shattering suddenness of gun–fire: he was in love with her. It was such a surprise, such a shock that he couldn’t cope with it. Of course he’d thought of her a lot, but never in that way, he’d thought it would be a great joke if he made her fall in love with him, it would be a triumph if the time came when she offered what he had taken by force; but not for a moment had it occurred to him that she was anything to him but a woman like another. She wasn’t his type. She wasn’t very pretty. There was nothing to her. Why should he have all of a sudden this funny feeling for her? It wasn’t a pleasant feeling either, it was a pain. But he knew what it was all right; it was love, and it made him feel happier than he had ever felt in his life. He wanted to take her in his arms, he wanted to pet her, he wanted to kiss those tear–stained eyes of hers. He didn’t desire her, he thought, as a man desires a woman, he wanted to comfort her, wanted her to smile at him–strange, he had never seen her smile, he wanted to see her eyes–fine eyes they were, beautiful eyes–soft with tenderness.

For three days he could not leave Soissons and for three days, three days and three nights, he thought of Annette and the child she would bear. Then he was able to go to the farm. He wanted to see Madame Périer by herself, and luck was with him, for he met her on the road some way from the house. She had been gathering sticks in the wood and was going home with a great bundle on her back. He stopped his motor–cycle. He knew that the friendliness she showed him was due only to the provisions he brought with him, but he didn’t care; it was enough that she was mannerly, and that she was prepared to be so as long as she could get something out of him. He told her he wanted to talk to her and asked her to put her bundle down. She did as he bade. It was a grey, cloudy day, but not cold.

‘I know about Annette,’ he said.

She started.

‘How did you find out? She was set on your not knowing.’

‘She told me.’

‘That was a pretty job of work you did that evening.’

‘I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

She began to talk, not bitterly, not blaming him even, but as though it were a misfortune of nature, like a cow dying in giving birth to a calf or a sharp spring frost nipping the fruit trees and ruining the crop, a misfortune that human kind must accept with resignation and humility. After that dreadful night Annette had been in bed for days with a high fever. They thought she was going out of her mind. She would scream for hours on end. There were no doctors to be got. The village doctor had been called to the colours. Even in Soissons there were only two doctors left, old men both of them, and how could they get to the farm even if it had been possible to send for them? They weren’t allowed to leave the town. Even when the fever went down Annette was too ill to leave her bed, and when she got up she was so weak, so pale, it was pitiful. The shock had been terrible, and when a month went by, and another month, without her being unwell she paid no attention. She had always been irregular. It was Madame Périer who first suspected that something was wrong. She questioned Annette. They were terrified, both of them, but they weren’t certain and they said nothing to Périer. When the third month came it was impossible to doubt any longer. Annette was pregnant.

They had an old Citroen in which before the war Madame Périer had taken the farm produce into the market at Soissons two mornings a week, but since the German occupation they had had nothing to sell that made the journey worth while. Petrol was almost unobtainable. But now they got it out and drove into town. The only cars to be seen were the military cars of the Germans. German soldiers lounged about. There were German signs in the streets, and on public buildings proclamations in French signed by the Officer Commanding. Many shops were closed. They went to the old doctor they knew, and he confirmed their suspicions. But he was a devout Catholic and would not help them. When they wept he shrugged his shoulders.

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said. ‘Il faut souffrir.’

They knew about the other doctor too and went to see him. They rang the bell and for a long time no one answered. At last the door was opened by a sad–faced woman in black, but when they asked to see the doctor she began to cry. He had been arrested by the Germans because he was a freemason, and was held as a hostage. A bomb had exploded in a café frequented by German officers and two had been killed and several wounded. If the guilty were not handed over before a certain date he was to be shot. The woman seemed kindly and Madame Périer told her of their trouble.

‘The brutes,’ she said. She looked at Annette with compassion ‘My poor child.’

She gave them the address of a midwife in the town and told them to say that they had come from her. The midwife gave them some medicine. It made Annette so ill that she thought she was going to die, but it had no further effect. Annette was still pregnant.

That was the story that Madame Périer told Hans. For a while he was silent.

‘It’s Sunday tomorrow,’ he said then. ‘I shall have nothing to do. I’ll come and we’ll talk. I’ll bring something nice.’

‘We have no needles. Can you bring some?’

‘I’ll try.’

She hoisted the bundle of sticks on her back and trudged down the road. Hans went back to Soissons. He dared not use his motor–cycle, so next day he hired a push–bike. He tied his parcel of food on the carrier. It was a larger parcel than usual because he had put a bottle of champagne into it. He got to the farm when the gathering darkness made it certain that they would all be home from work. It was warm and cosy in the kitchen when he walked in. Madame Périer was cooking and her husband was reading a Paris–Soir. Annette was darning stockings.

‘Look, I’ve brought you some needles,’ he said, as he undid his parcel. ‘And here’s some material for you, Annette.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Don’t you?’ he grinned. ‘You’ll have to begin making things for the baby.’

‘That’s true, Annette,’ said her mother, ‘and we have nothing.’ Annette did not look up from her sewing. Madame Périer’s greedy eyes ran over the contents of the parcel. ‘A bottle of champagne.’

Hans chuckled.

‘I’ll tell you what that’s for presently. I’ve had an idea.’ He hesitated for a moment, then drew up a chair and sat down facing Annette. ‘I don’t know quite how to begin. I’m sorry for what I did that night, Annette. It wasn’t my fault, it was the circumstances. Can’t you forgive me?’

She threw him a look of hatred.

‘Never. Why don’t you leave me alone? Isn’t it enough that you’ve ruined my life?’

‘Well, that’s just it. Perhaps I haven’t. When I knew you were going to have a baby it had a funny effect on me. It’s all different now. It’s made me so proud.’

‘Proud?’ she flung at him viciously.

‘I want you to have the baby, Annette. I’m glad you couldn’t get rid of it.’

‘How dare you say that?’

‘But listen to me. I’ve been thinking of nothing else since I knew. The war will be over in six months. We shall bring the English to their knees in the spring. They haven’t got a chance. And then I shall be demobilized and I’ll marry you.’

‘You? Why?’

He blushed under his tan. He could not bring himself to say it in French, so he said it in German. He knew she understood it.

‘Ich liebe dich.’

‘What does he say?’ asked Madame Périer.

‘He says he loves me.’

Annette threw back her head and broke into a peal of harsh laughter. She laughed louder and louder and she couldn’t stop and tears streamed from her eyes. Madame Périer slapped her sharply on both cheeks.

‘Don’t pay any attention,’ she said to Hans. ‘It’s hysteria. Her condition, you know.’

Annette gasped. She gained control over herself.

‘I brought the bottle of champagne to celebrate our engagement,’ said Hans.

‘That’s the bitterest thing of all,’ said Annette, ‘that we were beaten by fools, by such fools.’

Hans went on speaking in German.

‘I didn’t know I loved you till that day when I found out that you were going to have a baby. It came like a clap of thunder, but I think I’ve loved you all the time.’

‘What does he say?’ asked Madame Périer.

‘Nothing of importance.’

He fell back into French. He wanted Annette’s parents to hear what he had to say.

‘I’d marry you now, only they wouldn’t let me. And don’t think I’m nothing at all. My father’s well–to–do and we’re well thought of in our commune. I’m the eldest son and you’d want for nothing.’

‘Are you a Catholic?’ asked Madame Périer.

‘Yes, I’m a Catholic’

‘That’s something.’

‘It’s pretty, the country where we live and the soil’s good. There’s not better farming land between Munich and Innsbruck, and it’s our own. My grandfather bought it after the war of ‘70. And we’ve got a car and a radio, and we’re on the telephone.’

Annette turned to her father.

‘He has all the tact in the world, this gentleman,’ she cried ironically. She eyed Hans. ‘It would be a nice position for me, the foreigner from the conquered country with a child born out of wedlock. It offers me a chance of happiness, doesn’t it? A fine chance.’

Périer, a man of few words, spoke for the first time.

‘No. I don’t deny that it’s a fine gesture you’re making. I went through the last war and we all did things we wouldn’t have done in peace time. Human nature is human nature. But now that our son is dead, Annette is all we have. We can’t let her go.’

‘I thought you might feel that way,’ said Hans, ‘and I’ve got my answer to that. I’ll stay here.’

Annette gave him a quick look.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Madame Périer.

‘I’ve got another brother. He can stay and help my father. I like this country. With energy and initiative a man could make a good thing of your farm. When the war’s over a lot of Germans will be settling here. It’s well known that you haven’t got enough men in France to work the land you’ve got. A fellow gave us a lecture the other day at Soissons. He said that a third of the farms were left uncultivated because there aren’t the men to work them.’

Périer and his wife exchanged glances and Annette saw that they were wavering. That was what they’d wanted since their son had died, a son–in–law who was strong and hefty and could take over when they grew too old to do more than potter about.

‘That changes the case,’ said Madame Périer. ‘It’s a proposition to consider.’

‘Hold your tongue,’ cried Annette roughly. She leant forward and fixed her burning eyes on the German. ‘I’m engaged to a teacher who worked in the boys’ school in the town where I taught, we were to be married after the war. He’s not strong and big like you, or handsome; he’s small and frail. His only beauty is the. intelligence that shines in his face, his only strength is the greatness of his soul. He’s not a barbarian, he’s civilized; he has a thousand years of civilization behind him. I love him. I love him with all my heart and soul.’

Hans’s face grew sullen. It had never occurred to him that Annette might care for anyone else.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Where do you suppose he is? In Germany. A prisoner and starving. While you eat the fat of our land. How many times have I got to tell you that I hate you? You ask me to forgive you. Never. You want to make reparation. You fool.’ She threw her head back and there was a look of intolerable anguish on her face. ‘Ruined. Oh, he’ll forgive me. He’s tender. But I’m tortured by the thought that one day the suspicion may come to him that perhaps I hadn’t been forced–that perhaps I’d given myself to you for butter and cheese and silk stockings. I shouldn’t be the only one. And what would our life be with that child between us, your child, a German child? Big like you, and blond like you, and blue–eyed like you. Oh, my God, why do I have to suffer this?’

She got up and went swiftly out of the kitchen. For a minute the three were left in silence. Hans looked ruefully at his bottle of champagne. He sighed and rose to his feet. When he went out Madame Périer accompanied him.

‘Did you mean it when you said you would marry her?’ she asked him, speaking in a low voice.

‘Yes. Every word. I love her.’

‘And you wouldn’t take her away? You’d stay here and work on the farm?’

‘I promise you.’

‘Evidently my old man can’t last for ever. At home you’d have to share with your brother. Here you’d share with nobody.’

‘There’s that too.’

‘We never were in favour of Annette marrying that teacher, but our son was alive then and he said, if she wants to marry him, why shouldn’t she? Annette was crazy about him. But now that our son’s dead, poor boy, it’s different. Even if she wanted to, how could she work the farm alone?’

‘It would be a shame if it was sold. I know how one feels about one’s own land.’

They had reached the road. She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze.

‘Come again soon.’

Hans knew that she was on his side. It was a comfort to him to think that as he rode back to Soissons. It was a bother that Annette was in love with somebody else. Fortunately he was a prisoner; long before he was likely to be released the baby would be born. That might change her: you could never tell with a woman. Why, in his village there’d been a woman who was so much in love with her husband that it had been a joke, and then she had a baby and after that she couldn’t bear the sight of him. Well, why shouldn’t the contrary happen too? And now that he’d offered to marry her she must see that he was a decent sort of fellow. God, how pathetic she’d looked with her head flung back, and how well she’d spoken! What language! An actress on the stage couldn’t have expressed herself better, and yet it had all sounded so natural. You had to admit that, these French people knew how to talk. Oh, she was clever. Even when she lashed him with that bitter tongue it was a joy to listen to her. He hadn’t had a bad education himself, but he couldn’t hold a candle to her. Culture, that’s what she had.

‘I’m a donkey,’ he said out loud as he rode along. She’d said he was big and strong and handsome. Would she have said that if it hadn’t meant something to her? And she’d talked of the baby having fair hair and blue eyes like his own. If that didn’t mean that his colouring had made an impression on her he was a Dutchman. He chuckled. ‘Give me time. Patience, and let nature go to work.’

The weeks went by. The CO. at Soissons was an elderly, easy–going fellow and in view of what the spring had in store for them he was content not to drive his men too hard. The German papers told them that England was being wrecked by the Luftwaffe and the people were in a panic. Submarines were sinking British ships by the score and the country was starving. Revolution was imminent. Before summer it would be all over and the Germans would be masters of the world. Hans wrote home and told his parents that he was going to marry a French girl and with her a fine farm. He proposed that his brother should borrow money to buy him out of his share of the family property so that he could increase the size of his own holding while land, owing to the war and the exchange, could still be bought for a song. He went over the farm with Périer. The old man listened quietly when Hans told him his ideas: the farm would have to be restocked and as a German he would have a pull; the motor tractor was old, he would get a fine new one from Germany, and a motor plough. To make a farm pay you had to take advantage of modern inventions. Madame Périer told him afterwards that her husband had said he wasn’t a bad lad and seemed to know a lot. She was very friendly with him now and insisted that he should share their midday meal with them on Sundays. She translated his name into French and called him Jean. He was always ready to give a hand, and as time went on and Annette could do less and less it was useful to have a man about who didn’t mind doing a job of work.

Annette remained fiercely hostile. She never spoke to him except to answer his direct questions and as soon as it was possible went to her own room. When it was so cold that she couldn’t stay there she sat by the side of the kitchen stove, sewing or reading, and took no more notice of him than if he hadn’t been there. She was in radiant health. There was colour in her cheeks and in Hans’s eyes she was beautiful. Her approaching maternity had given her a strange dignity and he was filled with exultation when he gazed upon her. Then one day when he was on his way to the farm he saw Madame Périer in the road waving to him to stop. He put his brakes on hard.

‘I’ve been waiting for an hour. I thought you’d never come. You must go back. Pierre is dead.’

‘Who’s Pierre?’

‘Pierre Gavin. The teacher Annette was going to marry.’

Hans’s heart leapt. What luck! Now he’d have his chance.

’Is she upset?’

‘She’s not crying. When I tried to say something she bit my head off. If she saw you today she’s capable of sticking a knife into you.’

‘It’s not my fault if he died. How did you hear?’

‘A prisoner, a friend of his, escaped through Switzerland and he wrote to Annette. We got the letter this morning. There was a mutiny in the camp because they weren’t given enough to eat, and the ringleaders were shot. Pierre was one of them.’

Hans was silent. He could only think it served the man right. What did they think that a prison camp was–the Ritz?

‘Give her time to get over the shock,’ said Madame Périer. ‘When she’s calmer I’ll talk to her. I’ll write you a letter when you can come again.’

‘All right. You will help me, won’t you?’

‘You can be sure of that. My husband and I, we’re agreed. We talked it over and we came to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to accept the situation. He’s no fool, my husband, and he says the best chance for France now is to collaborate. And take it all in all I don’t dislike you. I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t make Annette a better husband than that teacher. And with the baby coming and all.’

‘I want it to be a boy,’ said Hans.

‘It’s going to be a boy. I know for certain. I’ve seen it in the coffee grounds and I’ve put out the cards. The answer is a boy every time.’

‘I almost forgot, here are some papers for you,’ said Hans, as he turned his cycle and prepared to mount.

He handed her three numbers of Paris–Soir. Old Périer read every evening. He read that the French must be realistic and accept the new order that Hitler was going to create in Europe. He read that the German submarines were sweeping the sea. He read that the General Staff had organized to the last detail the campaign that would bring England to her knees and that the Americans were too unprepared, too soft and too divided to come to her help. He read that France must take the heaven–sent opportunity and by loyal collaboration with the Reich regain her honoured position in the new Europe. And it wasn’t Germans who wrote it all; it was Frenchmen. He nodded his head with approval when he read that the plutocrats and the Jews would be destroyed and the poor man in France would at last come into his own. They were quite right, the clever fellows who said that France was essentially an agricultural country and its backbone was its industrious farmers. Good sense, that was.

One evening, when they were finishing their supper, ten days after the news had come of Pierre Gavin’s death, Madame Périer, by arrangement with her husband, said to Annette:

‘I wrote a letter to Hans a few days ago telling him to come here tomorrow.’

‘Thank you for the warning. I shall stay in my room.’

‘Oh, come, daughter, the time has passed for foolishness. You must be realistic. Pierre is dead. Hans loves you and wants to marry you. He’s a fine–looking fellow. Any girl would be proud of him as a husband. How can we restock the farm without his help? He’s going to buy a tractor and a plough with his own money. You must let bygones be bygones.’

‘You’re wasting your breath, Mother. I earned my living before, I can earn my living again. I hate him. I hate his vanity and his arrogance. I could kill him: his death wouldn’t satisfy me. I should like to torture him as he’s tortured me. I think I should die happy if I could find a way to wound him as he’s wounded me.’

‘You’re being very silly, my poor child.’

‘Your mother’s right, my girl,’ said Périer. ‘We’ve been defeated and we must accept the consequences. We’re got to make the best arrangement we can with the conquerors. We’re cleverer than they are and if we play our cards well we shall come out on top. France was rotten. It’s the Jews and the plutocrats who ruined the country. Read the papers and you’ll see for yourself!’

‘Do you think I believe a word in that paper? Why do you think he brings it to you except that it’s sold to the Germans? The men who write in it–traitors, traitors. Oh God, may I live to see them torn to pieces by the mob. Bought, bought every one of them–bought with German money. The swine.’

Madame Périer was getting exasperated.

‘What have you got against the boy? He took you by force–yes, he was drunk at the time. It’s not the first time that’s happened to a woman and it won’t be the last time. He hit your father and he bled like a pig, but does your father bear him malice?’

‘It was an unpleasant incident, but I’ve forgotten it,’ said Périer.

Annette burst into harsh laughter.

‘You should have been a priest. You forgive injuries with a spirit truly Christian.’

‘And what is there wrong about that?’ asked Madame Périer angrily. ‘Hasn’t he done everything he could to make amends? Where would your father have got his tobacco all these months if it hadn’t been for him? If we haven’t gone hungry it’s owing to him.’

‘If you’d had any pride, if you’d had any sense of decency, you’d have thrown his presents in his face.’

‘You’ve profited by them, haven’t you?’

‘Never. Never.’

‘It’s a lie and you know it. You’ve refused to eat the cheese he brought and the butter and the sardines. But the soup you’ve eaten, you know I put the meat in it that he brought; and the salad you ate tonight, if you didn’t have to eat it dry, it’s because he brought me oil.’

Annette sighed deeply. She passed her hand over her eyes.

‘I know. I tried not to, I couldn’t help myself, I was so hungry. Yes, I knew his meat went into the soup and I ate it. I knew the salad was made with his oil. I wanted to refuse it; I had such a longing for it, it wasn’t I that ate it, it was a ravenous beast within me.’

‘That’s neither here nor there. You ate it.’

‘With shame. With despair. They broke our strength first with their tanks and their planes, and now when we’re defenceless they’re breaking our spirit by starving us.’

‘You get nowhere by being theatrical, my girl. For an educated woman you have really no sense. Forget the past and give a father to your child, to say nothing of a good workman for the farm who’ll be worth two hired men. That is sense.’

Annette shrugged her shoulders wearily and they lapsed into silence. Next day Hans came. Annette gave him a sullen look, but neither spoke nor moved. Hans smiled.

‘Thank you for not running away,’ he said.

‘My parents asked you to come and they’ve gone down to the village. It suits me because I want to have a definite talk with you. Sit down.’

He took off his coat and his helmet and drew a chair to the table.

‘My parents want me to marry you. You’ve been clever; with your presents, with your promises, you’ve got round them. They believe all they read in the papers you bring them. I want to tell you that I will never marry you. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that I could hate a human being as I hate you.’

‘Let me speak in German. You understand enough to know what I’m saying.’

‘I ought to. I taught it. For two years I was governess to two little girls in Stuttgart.’

He broke into German, but she went on speaking French.

‘It’s not only that I love you, I admire you. I admire your distinction and your grace. There’s something about you I don’t understand. I respect you. Oh, I can see that you don’t want to marry me now even if it were possible. But Pierre is dead.’

‘Don’t speak of him,’ she cried violently. ‘That would be the last straw.’ ‘I only want to tell you that for your sake I’m sorry he died.’

‘Shot in cold blood by his German jailers.’

‘Perhaps in time you’ll grieve for him less. You know, when someone you love dies, you think you’ll never get over it, but you do. Won’t it be better then to have a father for your child?’

‘Even if there were nothing else do you think I could ever forget that you are a German and I’m a Frenchwoman? If you weren’t as stupid as only a German can be you’d see that that child must be a reproach to me as long as I live. Do you think I have no friends? How could I ever look them in the face with the child I had with a German soldier? There’s only one thing I ask you; leave me alone with my disgrace. Go, go–for God’s sake go and never come again.’

‘But he’s my child too. I want him.’

‘You?’ she cried in astonishment. ‘What can a by–blow that you got in a moment of savage drunkenness mean to you?’

‘You don’t understand. I’m so proud and so happy. It was when I knew you were going to have a baby that I knew I loved you. At first I couldn’t believe it; it was such a surprise to me. Don’t you see what I mean? That child that’s going to be born means everything in the world to me. Oh, I don’t know how to put it; it’s put feelings in my heart that I don’t understand myself.’

She looked at him intently and there was a strange gleam in her eyes. You would have said it was a look of triumph. She gave a short laugh.

‘I don’t know whether I more loathe the brutality of you Germans or despise your sentimentality.’

He seemed not to have heard what she said.

‘I think of him all the time.’

‘You’ve made up your mind it’ll be a boy?’

‘I know it’ll be a boy. I want to hold him in my arms and I want to teach him to walk. And then when he grows older I’ll teach him all I know. I’ll teach him to ride and I’ll teach him to shoot. Are there fish in your brook? I’ll teach him to fish. I’m going to be the proudest father in the world.’

She stared at him with hard, hard eyes. Her face was set and stern. An idea, a terrible idea was forming itself in her mind. He gave her a disarming smile.

‘Perhaps when you see how much I love our boy, you’ll come to love me too. I’ll make you a good husband, my pretty.’

She said nothing. She merely kept on gazing at him sullenly.

‘Haven’t you one kind word for me?’ he said.

She flushed. She clasped her hands tightly together.

‘Others may despise me. I will never do anything that can make me despise myself. You are my enemy and you will always be my enemy. I only live to see the deliverance of France. It’ll come, perhaps not next year or the year after, perhaps not for thirty years, but it’ll come. The rest of them can do what they like, I will never come to terms with the invaders of my country. I hate you and I hate this child that you’ve given me. Yes, we’ve been defeated. Before the end comes you’ll see that we haven’t been conquered. Now go. My mind’s made up and nothing on God’s earth can change it.’

He was silent for a minute or two.

‘Have you made arrangements for a doctor? I’ll pay all the expenses.’

‘Do you suppose we want to spread our shame through the whole countryside? My mother will do all that’s necessary.’

‘But supposing there’s an accident?’

‘And supposing you mind your own business!’

He sighed and rose to his feet. When he closed the door behind him she watched him walk down the pathway that led to the road. She realized with rage that some of the things he said had aroused in her heart a feeling that she had never felt for him before.

‘O God, give me strength,’ she cried.

Then, as he walked along, the dog, an old dog they’d had for years, ran up to him barking angrily. He had tried for months to make friends with the dog, but it had never responded to his advances; when he tried to pat it, it backed away growling and showing its teeth. And now as the dog ran towards him, irritably giving way to his feeling of frustration, Hans gave it a savage brutal kick and the dog was flung into the bushes and limped yelping away.

‘The beast,’ she cried. ‘Lies, lies, lies. And I was weak enough to be almost sorry for him.’

There was a looking–glass hanging by the side of the door and she looked at herself in it. She drew herself up and smiled at her reflection. But rather than a smile it was a fiendish grimace.

It was now March. There was a bustle of activity in the garrison at Soissons. There were inspections and there was intensive training. Rumour was rife. There was no doubt they were going somewhere, but the rank and file could only guess where. Some thought they were being got ready at last for the invasion of England, others were of opinion that they would be sent to the Balkans, and others again talked of the Ukraine. Hans was kept busy. It was not till the second Sunday afternoon that he was able to get out to the farm. It was a cold grey day, with sleet that looked as though it might turn to snow falling in sudden windy flurries. The country was grim and cheerless.

‘You!’ cried Madame Périer when he went in. ‘We thought you were dead.’

‘I couldn’t come before. We’re off any day now. We don’t know when.’

‘The baby was born this morning. It’s a boy.’

Hans’s heart gave a great leap in his breast. He hung his arms round the old woman and kissed her on both cheeks.

‘A Sunday child, he ought to be lucky. Let’s open the bottle of champagne. How’s Annette?’

‘She’s as well as can be expected. She had a very easy time. She began to have pains last night and by five o’clock this morning it was all over.’

Old Périer was smoking his pipe sitting as near the stove as he could get. He smiled quietly at the boy’s enthusiasm.

‘One’s first child, it has an effect on one,’ he said.

‘He has quite a lot of hair and it’s as fair as yours; and blue eyes just like you said he’d have,’ said Madame Périer. ‘I’ve never seen a lovelier baby. He’ll be just like his papa.’

‘Oh, my God, I’m so happy,’ cried Hans. ‘How beautiful the world is! I want to see Annette.’

‘I don’t know if she’ll see you. I don’t want to upset her on account of the milk.’

‘No, no, don’t upset her on my account. If she doesn’t want to see me it doesn’t matter. But let me see the baby just for a minute.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try to bring it down.’

Madame Périer went out and they heard her heavy tread clumping up the stairs. But in a moment they heard her clattering down again. She burst into the kitchen.

‘They’re not there. She isn’t in her room. The baby’s gone.’

Périer and Hans cried out and without thinking what they were doing all three of them scampered upstairs. The harsh light of the winter afternoon cast over the shabby furniture, the iron bed, the cheap wardrobe, the chest of drawers, a dismal squalor. There was no one in the room.

‘Where is she?’ screamed Madame Périer. She ran into the narrow passage, opening doors, and called the girl’s name. ‘Annette, Annette. Oh, what madness!’

‘Perhaps in the sitting–room.’

They ran downstairs to the unused parlour. An icy air met them as they opened the door. They opened the door of a storeroom.

‘She’s gone out. Something awful has happened.’

‘How could she have got out?’ asked Hans sick with anxiety.

‘Through the front door, you fool.’

Périer went up to it and looked.

‘That’s right. The bolt’s drawn back.’

‘Oh, my God, my God, what madness,’ cried Madame Périer. ‘It’ll kill her.’

‘We must look for her,’ said Hans. Instinctively, because that was the way he always went in and out, he ran back into the kitchen and the others followed him. ‘Which way?’

‘The brook,’ the old woman gasped.

He stopped as though turned to stone with horror. He stared at the old woman aghast.

‘I’m frightened,’ she cried. ‘I’m frightened.’

Hans flung open the door, and as he did so Annette walked in. She had nothing on but her nightdress and a flimsy rayon dressing–gown. It was pink, with pale blue flowers. She was soaked, and her hair, dishevelled, clung damply to her head and hung down her shoulders in bedraggled wisps. She was deathly white. Madame Périer sprang towards her and took her in her arms.

‘Where have you been? Oh, my poor child, you’re wet through. What madness!’

But Annette pushed her away. She looked at Hans.

‘You’ve come at the right moment, you.’

‘Where’s the baby?’ cried Madame Périer.

‘I had to do it at once. I was afraid if I waited I shouldn’t have the courage.’

‘Annette, what have you done?’

‘I’ve done what I had to do. I took it down to the brook and held it under water till it was dead.’

Hans gave a great cry, the cry of an animal wounded to death; he covered his face with his hands, and staggering like a drunken man flung out of the door. Annette sank into a chair, and leaning her forehead on her two fists burst into passionate weeping.

THE ESCAPE

I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him. Not always that; for once a friend of mine, seeing the inevitable loom menacingly before him, took ship from a certain port (with a tooth–brush for all his luggage, so conscious was he of his danger and the necessity for immediate action) and spent a year travelling round the world; but when, thinking himself safe (women are fickle, he said, and in twelve months she will have forgotten all about me), he landed at the selfsame port the first person he saw gaily waving to him from the quay was the little lady from whom he had fled. I have only once known a man who in such circumstances managed to extricate himself. His name was Roger Charing. He was no longer young when he fell in love with Ruth Barlow and he had had sufficient experience to make him careful; but Ruth Barlow had a gift (or should I call it a quality?) that renders most men defenceless, and it was this that dispossessed Roger of his commonsense, his prudence, and his worldly wisdom. He went down like a row of ninepins. This was the gift of pathos. Mrs Barlow, for she was twice a widow, had splendid dark eyes and they were the most moving I ever saw; they seemed to be ever on the point of filling with tears; they suggested that the world was too much for her, and you felt that, poor dear, her sufferings had been more than anyone should be asked to bear. If, like Roger Charing, you were a strong, hefty fellow with plenty of money, it was almost inevitable that you should say to yourself: I must stand between the hazards of life and this helpless little thing, oh, how wonderful it would be to take the sadness out of those big and lovely eyes! I gathered from Roger that everyone had treated Mrs Barlow very badly. She was apparently one of those unfortunate persons with whom nothing by any chance goes right. If she married a husband he beat her; if she employed a broker he cheated her; if she engaged a cook she drank. She never had a little lamb but it was sure to die.

When Roger told me that he had at last persuaded her to marry him, I wished him joy.

‘I hope you’ll be good friends,’ he said. ‘She’s a little afraid of you, you know; she thinks you’re callous.’

‘Upon my word I don’t know why she should think that.’

‘You do like her, don’t you?’

‘Very much.’

‘She’s had a rotten time, poor dear. I feel so dreadfully sorry for her.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

I couldn’t say less. I knew she was stupid and I thought she was scheming. My own belief was that she was as hard as nails.

The first time I met her we had played bridge together and when she was my partner she twice trumped my best card. I behaved like an angel, but I confess that I thought if the tears were going to well up into anybody’s eyes they should have been mine rather than hers. And when, having by the end of the evening lost a good deal of money to me, she said she would send me a cheque and never did, I could not but think that I and not she should have worn a pathetic expression when next we met.

Roger introduced her to his friends. He gave her lovely jewels. He took her here, there, and everywhere. Their marriage was announced for the immediate future. Roger was very happy. He was committing a good action and at the same time doing something he had very much a mind to. It is an uncommon situation and it is not surprising if he was a trifle more pleased with himself than was altogether becoming.

Then, on a sudden, he fell out of love. I do not know why. It could hardly have been that he grew tired of her conversation, for she had never had any conversation. Perhaps it was merely that this pathetic look of hers ceased to wring his heart–strings. His eyes were opened and he was once more the shrewd man of the world he had been. He became acutely conscious that Ruth Barlow had made up her mind to marry him and he swore a solemn oath that nothing would induce him to marry Ruth Barlow. But he was in a quandary. Now that he was in possession of his senses he saw with clearness the sort of woman he had to deal with and he was aware that, if he asked her to release him, she would (in her appealing way) assess her wounded feelings at an immoderately high figure. Besides, it is always awkward for a man to jilt a woman. People are apt to think he has behaved badly.

Roger kept his own counsel. He gave neither by word nor gesture an indication that his feelings towards Ruth Barlow had changed. He remained attentive to all her wishes; he took her to dine at restaurants, they went to the play together, he sent her flowers; he was sympathetic and charming. They had made up their minds that they would be married as soon as they found a house that suited them, for he lived in chambers and she in furnished rooms; and they set about looking at desirable residences. The agents sent Roger orders to view and he took Ruth to see a number of houses. It was very hard to find anything that was quite satisfactory. Roger applied to more agents. They visited house after house. They went over them thoroughly, examining them from the cellars in the basement to the attics under the roof. Sometimes they were too large and sometimes they were too small; sometimes they were too far from the centre of things and sometimes they were too close; sometimes they were too expensive and sometimes they wanted too many repairs; sometimes they were too stuffy and sometimes they were too airy; sometimes they were too dark and sometimes they were too bleak. Roger always found a fault that made the house unsuitable. Of course he was hard to please; he could not bear to ask his dear Ruth to live in any but the perfect house, and the perfect house wanted finding. House–hunting is a tiring and a tiresome business and presently Ruth began to grow peevish. Roger begged her to have patience; somewhere, surely, existed the very house they were looking for, and it only needed a little perseverance and they would find it. They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs; they inspected innumerable kitchens. Ruth was exhausted and more than once lost her temper.

‘If you don’t find a house soon,’ she said, ‘I shall have to reconsider my position. Why, if you go on like this we shan’t be married for years.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he answered, ‘I beseech you to have patience. I’ve just received some entirely new lists from agents I’ve only just heard of. There must be at least sixty houses on them.’

They set out on the chase again. They looked at more houses and more houses. For two years they looked at houses. Ruth grew silent and scornful: her pathetic, beautiful eyes acquired an expression that was almost sullen. There are limits to human endurance. Mrs Barlow had the patience of an angel, but at last she revolted.

‘Do you want to marry me or do you not?’ she asked him.

There was an unaccustomed hardness in her voice, but it did not affect the gentleness of his reply.

‘Of course I do. We’ll be married the very moment we find a house. By the way, I’ve just heard of something that might suit us.’

‘I don’t feel well enough to look at any more houses just yet.’

‘Poor dear, I was afraid you were looking rather tired.’

Ruth Barlow took to her bed. She would not see Roger and he had to content himself with calling at her lodgings to inquire and sending her flowers. He was as ever assiduous and gallant. Every day he wrote and told her that he had heard of another house for them to look at. A week passed and then he received the following letter:

Roger

I do not think you really love me. I have found someone who is anxious to take care of me and I am going to be married to him today.

Ruth

He sent back his reply by special messenger:

Ruth, your news shatters me. I shall never get over the blow, but of course your happiness must be my first consideration. I send you herewith seven orders to view; they arrived by this morning’s post and I am quite sure you will find among them a house that will exactly suit you.

ROGER

THE JUDGMENT SEAT

THEY awaited their turn patiently, but patience was no new thing to them; they had practised it, all three of them, with grim determination, for thirty years. Their lives had been a long preparation for this moment and they looked forward to the issue now, if not with self-confidence, for that on so awful an occasion would have been misplaced, at all events with hope and courage. They had taken the strait and narrow path when the flowery meads of sin stretched all too invitingly before them; with heads held high, though with breaking hearts, they had resisted temptation; and now, their arduous journey done, they expected their reward. There was no need for them to speak, since each knew the others’ thoughts, and they felt that in all three of them the same emotion of relief filled their bodiless souls with thanksgiving. With what anguish now would they have been wrung if they had yielded to the passion which then had seemed so nearly irresistible and what a madness it would have been if for a few short years of bliss they had sacrificed that Life Everlasting which with so bright a light at long last shone before them! They felt like men who with the skin of their teeth have escaped a sudden and violent death and touch their feet and hands and, scarce able to believe that they are still alive, look about them in amazement. They had done nothing with which they could reproach themselves and when presently their angels came and told them that the moment was come, they would advance, as they had passed through the world that was now so far behind, happily conscious that they had done their duty. They stood a little on one side, for the press was great. A terrible war was in progress and for years the soldiers of all nations, men in the full flush of their gallant youth, had marched in an interminable procession to the Judgment Seat; women and children too, their lives brought to a wretched end by violence or, more unhappily, by grief, disease and starvation; and there was in the courts of heaven not a little confusion.

It was on account of this war, too, that these three wan, shivering ghosts stood in expectation of their doom. For John and Mary had been passengers on a ship which was sunk by the torpedo of a submarine; and Ruth, broken in health by the arduous work to which she had so nobly devoted herself, hearing of the death of the man whom she had loved with all her heart, sank beneath the blow and died. John, indeed, might have saved himself if he had not tried to save his wife; he hated her; he had hated her to the depths of his soul for thirty years; but he had always done his duty by her and now, in the moment of dreadful peril, it never occurred to him that he could do otherwise.

At last their angels took them by the hand and led them to the Presence For a little while the Eternal took not the slightest notice of them. If the truth must be told he was in a bad humour. A moment before there had come up for judgment a philosopher, deceased full of years and honours, who had told the Eternal to his face that he did not believe in him. It was not this that would have disturbed the serenity of the Kings of Kings, this could only have made him smile; but the philosopher, taking perhaps an unfair advantage of the regrettable happenings just then upon Earth, had asked him how, considering them dispassionately, it was possible to reconcile his All-Power with his All-Goodness.

“No one can deny the fact of Evil,” said the philosopher, sententiously. “Now, if God cannot prevent Evil he is not all-powerful, and if he can prevent it and will not, he is not all-good.”

This argument was of course not new to the Omniscient, but he had always refused to consider the matter; for the fact is, though he knew everything, he did not know the answer to this. Even God cannot make two and two five. But the philosopher, pressing his advantage, and, as philosophers often will, drawing from a reasonable premise an un justifiable inference — the philosopher had finished with a statement that in the circumstances was surely preposterous.

“I will not believe,” he said, “in a God who is not All-Powerful and All-Good.”

It was not then perhaps without relief that the Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility. But this in brief is the story that these three recounted. John and Mary had been happily married for five years and till John met Ruth they loved each other, as married couples for the most part do, with sincere affection and mutual respect. Ruth was eighteen, ten years younger than he was, a charming, graceful animal, with a sudden and all-conquering loveliness; she was as healthy in mind as she was in body, and, eager for the natural happiness of life, was capable of achieving that greatness which is beauty of soul. John fell in love with her and she with him. But it was no ordinary passion that seized them; it was something so overwhelming that they felt as if the whole long history of the world signified only because it had led to the time and place that had brought them together. They loved as Daphnis and Chloe or as Paolo and Francesca. But after that first moment of ecstasy when each discovered the other’s love they were seized with dismay. They were decent people and they respected themselves, the beliefs in which they had been bred, and the society in which they lived. How could he betray an innocent girl, and what had she to do with a married man? Then they grew conscious that Mary was aware of their love. The confident affection with which she had regarded her husband was shaken; and there arose in her feelings of which she would never have thought herself capable, jealousy and the fear that he would desert her, anger because her possession of his heart was threatened, and a strange hunger of the soul which was more painful than love. She felt that she would die if he left her; and yet she knew that if he loved it was because love had come to him, not because he had sought it. She did not blame him. She prayed for strength; she wept silent, bitter tears. John and Ruth saw her pine away before their eyes. The struggle was long and bitter. Sometimes their hearts failed them and they felt that they could not resist the passion that burned the marrow of their bones. They resisted. They wrestled with evil as Jacob wrestled with the angel of God and at last they conquered. With breaking hearts, but proud in their innocence, they parted. They offered up to God, as it were a sacrifice, their hopes of happiness, the joy of life and the beauty of the world.

Ruth had loved too passionately ever to love again and with a stony heart she turned to God and to good works. She was indefatigable. She tended the sick and assisted the poor. She founded orphanages and managed charitable institutions. And little by little her beauty which she cared for no longer left her and her face grew as hard as her heart. Her religion was fierce and narrow; her very kindness was cruel because it was founded not on love but on reason; she became domineering, intolerant and vindictive. And John resigned, but sullen and angry, dragged himself along the weary years waiting for the release of death. Life lost its meaning to him; he had made his effort and in conquering was conquered; the only emotion that remained with him was the unceasing, secret hatred with which he looked upon his wife. He used her with kindness and consideration; he did everything that could be expected of a man who was a Christian and a gentleman. He did his duty. Mary, a good, faithful and (it must be confessed) exceptional wife, never thought to reproach her husband for the madness that had seized him; but all the same she could not forgive him for the sacrifice he had made for her sake. She grew acid and querulous. Though she hated herself for it, she could not refrain from saying the things that she knew would wound him. She would willingly have sacrificed her life for him, but she could not bear that he should enjoy a moment’s happiness when she was so wretched that a hundred times she had wished she was dead. Well, now she was and so were they; grey and drab had life been, but that was passed; they had not sinned and now their reward was at hand.

They finished and there was silence. There was silence in all the courts of heaven. Go to hell were the words that came to the Eternal’s lips, but he did not utter them, for they had a colloquial association that he rightly thought unfitting to the solemnity of the occasion. Nor indeed would such a decree have met the merits of the case. But his brows darkened. He asked himself if it was for this that he had made the rising sun shine on the boundless sea and the snow glitter on the mountain tops; was it for this that the brooks sang blithely as they hastened down the hillsides and the golden corn waved in the evening breeze?

“I sometimes think,” said the Eternal, “that the stars never shine more brightly than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch.”

But the three shades stood before him and now that they had unfolded their unhappy story they could not but feel a certain satisfaction. It had been a bitter struggle, but they had done their duty. The Eternal blew lightly, he blew as a man might blow out a lighted match, and, behold! where the three poor souls had stood — was nothing. The Eternal annihilated them.

“I have often wondered why men think I attach so much importance to sexual irregularity,” he said. “If they read my works more attentively they would see that I have always been sympathetic to that particular form of human frailty.”

Then he turned to the philosopher, who was still waiting for a reply to his remarks.

“You cannot but allow,” said the Eternal, “that on this occasion I have very happily combined my All-Power with my All-Goodness.”

MR KNOW-ALL

I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him. The war had just finished and the passenger traffic in the ocean–going liners was heavy. Accommodation was very hard to get and you had to put up with whatever the agents chose to offer you. You could not hope for a cabin to yourself and I was thankful to be given one in which there were only two berths. But when I was told the name of my companion my heart sank. It suggested closed port–holes and the night air rigidly excluded. It was bad enough to share a cabin for fourteen days with anyone (I was going from San Francisco to Yokohama), but I should have looked upon it with less dismay if my fellow–passenger’s name had been Smith or Brown.

When I went on board I found Mr Kelada’s luggage already below. I did not like the look of it; there were too many labels on the suitcases, and the wardrobe trunk was too big. He had unpacked his toilet things, and I observed that he was a patron of the excellent Monsieur Coty; for I saw on the washing–stand his scent, his hair–wash, and his brilliantine. Mr Kelada’s brushes, ebony with his monogram in gold, would have been all the better for a scrub. I did not at all like Mr Kelada. I made my way into the smoking–room. I called for a pack of cards and began to play patience. I had scarcely started before a man came up to me and asked me if he was right in thinking my name was so–and–so.

‘I am Mr Kelada,’ he added, with a smile that showed a row of flashing teeth, and sat down.

‘Oh, yes, we’re sharing a cabin, I think.’

‘Bit of luck, I call it. You never know who you’re going to be put in with. I was jolly glad when I heard you were English. I’m all for us English sticking together when we’re abroad, if you understand what I mean.’

I blinked.

‘Are you English?’ I asked, perhaps tactlessly.

‘Rather. You don’t think I look an American, do you? British to the backbone, that’s what I am.’

To prove it, Mr Kelada took out of his pocket a passport and airily waved it under my nose.

King George has many strange subjects. Mr Kelada was short and of a sturdy build, clean–shaven and dark–skinned, with a fleshy, hooked nose and very large, lustrous and liquid eyes. His long black hair was sleek and curly. He spoke with a fluency in which there was nothing English and his gestures were exuberant. I felt pretty sure that a closer inspection of that British passport would have betrayed the fact that Mr Kelada was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England.

‘What will you have?’ he asked me.

I looked at him doubtfully. Prohibition was in force and to all appearances the ship was bone–dry. When I am not thirsty I do not know which I dislike more, ginger–ale or lemon–squash. But Mr Kelada flashed an oriental smile at me.

‘Whisky and soda or a dry Martini, you have only to say the word.’

From each of his hip–pockets he fished a flask and laid them on the table before me. I chose the Martini, and calling the steward he ordered a tumbler of ice and a couple of glasses.

‘A very good cocktail,’ I said.

‘Well, there are plenty more where that came from, and if you’ve got any friends on board, you tell them you’ve got a pal who’s got all the liquor in the world.’

Mr Kelada was chatty. He talked of New York and of San Francisco. He discussed plays, pictures, and politics. He was patriotic. The Union Jack is an impressive piece of drapery, but when it is flourished by a gentleman from Alexandria or Beirut, I cannot but feel that it loses somewhat in dignity. Mr Kelada was familiar. I do not wish to put on airs, but I cannot help feeling that it is seemly in a total stranger to put mister before my name when he addresses me. Mr Kelada, doubtless to set me at my ease, used no such formality. I did not like Mr Kelada. I had put aside the cards when he sat down, but now, thinking that for this first occasion our conversation had lasted long enough, I went on with my game.

‘The three on the four,’ said Mr Kelada.

There is nothing more exasperating when you are playing patience than to be told where to put the card you have turned up before you have had a chance to look for yourself.

‘It’s coming out, it’s coming out,’ he cried. ‘The ten on the knave.’

With rage and hatred in my heart I finished. Then he seized the pack.

‘Do you like card tricks?’

‘No, I hate card tricks,’ I answered.

‘Well, I’ll just show you this one.’

He showed me three. Then I said I would go down to the dining–room and get my seat at table.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve already taken a seat for you. I thought that as we were in the same state–room we might just as well sit at the same table.’

I did not like Mr Kelada.

I not only shared a cabin with him and ate three meals a day at the same table, but I could not walk round the deck without his joining me. It was impossible to snub him. It never occurred to him that he was not wanted. He was certain that you were as glad to see him as he was to see you. In your own house you might have kicked him downstairs and slammed the door in his face without the suspicion dawning on him that he was not a welcome visitor. He was a good mixer, and in three days knew everyone on board. He ran everything. He managed the sweeps, conducted the auctions, collected money for prizes at the sports, got up quoit and golf matches, organized the concert, and arranged the fancy–dress ball. He was everywhere and always. He was certainly the best–hated man in the ship. We called him Mr Know–All, even to his face. He took it as a compliment. But it was at meal times that he was most intolerable. For the better part of an hour then he had us at his mercy. He was hearty, jovial, loquacious and argumentative. He knew everything better than anybody else, and it was an affront to his overweening vanity that you should disagree with him. He would not drop a subject, however unimportant, till he had brought you round to his way of thinking. The possibility that he could be mistaken never occurred to him. He was the chap who knew. We sat at the doctor’s table. Mr Kelada would certainly have had it all his own way, for the doctor was lazy and I was frigidly indifferent, except for a man called Ramsay who sat there also. He was as dogmatic as Mr Kelada and resented bitterly the Levantine’s cocksureness. The discussions they had were acrimonious and interminable.

Ramsay was in the American Consular Service, and was stationed at Kobe. He was a great heavy fellow from the Middle West, with loose fat under a tight skin, and he bulged out of his ready–made clothes. He was on his way back to resume his post, having been on a flying visit to New York to fetch his wife, who had been spending a year at home. Mrs Ramsay was a very pretty little thing, with pleasant manners and a sense of humour. The Consular Service is ill paid, and she was dressed always very simply; but she knew how to wear her clothes. She achieved an effect of quiet distinction. I should not have paid any particular attention to her but that she possessed a quality that may be common enough in women, but nowadays is not obvious in their demeanour. You could not look at her without being struck by her modesty. It shone in her like a flower on a coat.

One evening at dinner the conversation by chance drifted to the subject of pearls. There had been in the papers a good deal of talk about the culture pearls which the cunning Japanese were making, and the doctor remarked that they must inevitably diminish the value of real ones. They were very good already; they would soon be perfect. Mr Kelada, as was his habit, rushed the new topic. He told us all that was to be known about pearls. I do not believe Ramsay knew anything about them at all, but he could not resist the opportunity to have a fling at the Levantine, and in five minutes we were in the middle of a heated argument. I had seen Mr Kelada vehement and voluble before, but never so voluble and vehement as now. At last something that Ramsay said stung him, for he thumped the table and shouted:

‘Well, I ought to know what I am talking about. I’m going to Japan just to look into this Japanese pearl business. I’m in the trade and there’s not a man in it who won’t tell you that what I say about pearls goes. I know all the best pearls in the world, and what I don’t know about pearls isn’t worth knowing.’

Here was news for us, for Mr Kelada, with all his loquacity, had never told anyone what his business was. We only knew vaguely that he was going to Japan on some commercial errand. He looked round the table triumphantly.

‘They’ll never be able to get a culture pearl that an expert like me can’t tell with half an eye.’ He pointed to a chain that Mrs Ramsay wore. ‘You take my word for it, Mrs Ramsay, that chain you’re wearing will never be worth a cent less than it is now.’

Mrs Ramsay in her modest way flushed a little and slipped the chain inside her dress. Ramsay leaned forward. He gave us all a look and a smile flickered in his eyes.

‘That’s a pretty chain of Mrs Ramsay’s, isn’t it?’

‘I noticed it at once,’ answered Mr Kelada. ‘Gee, I said to myself, those are pearls all right.’

‘I didn’t buy it myself, of course. I’d be interested to know how much you think it cost.’

‘Oh, in the trade somewhere round fifteen thousand dollars. But if it was bought on Fifth Avenue I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that anything up to thirty thousand was paid for it.’

Ramsay smiled grimly.

‘You’ll be surprised to hear that Mrs Ramsay bought that string at a department store the day before we left New York, for eighteen dollars.’ Mr Kelada flushed.

‘Rot. It’s not only real, but it’s as fine a string for its size as I’ve ever seen.’

‘Will you bet on it? I’ll bet you a hundred dollars it’s imitation.’

‘Done.’

‘Oh, Elmer, you can’t bet on a certainty,’ said Mrs Ramsay.

She had a little smile on her lips and her tone was gently deprecating.

‘Can’t I? If I get a chance of easy money like that I should be all sorts of a fool not to take it.’

‘But how can it be proved?’ she continued. ‘It’s only my word against Mr Kelada’s.’

‘Let me look at the chain, and if it’s imitation I’ll tell you quickly enough. I can afford to lose a hundred dollars,’ said Mr Kelada.

‘Take it off, dear. Let the gentleman look at it as much as he wants.’

Mrs Ramsay hesitated a moment. She put her hands to the clasp.

‘I can’t undo it,’ she said. ‘Mr Kelada will just have to take my word for it.’

I had a sudden suspicion that something unfortunate was about to occur, but I could think of nothing to say.

Ramsay jumped up.

‘I’ll undo it.’

He handed the chain to Mr Kelada. The Levantine took a magnifying glass from his pocket and closely examined it. A smile of triumph spread over his smooth and swarthy face. He handed back the chain. He was about to speak. Suddenly he caught sight of Mrs Ramsay’s face. It was so white that she looked as though she were about to faint. She was staring at him with wide and terrified eyes. They held a desperate appeal; it was so clear that I wondered why her husband did not see it.

Mr Kelada stopped with his mouth open. He flushed deeply. You could almost see the effort he was making over himself.

‘I was mistaken,’ he said.’ It’s a very good imitation, but of course as soon as I looked through my glass I saw that it wasn’t real. I think eighteen dollars is just about as much as the damned thing’s worth.’

He took out his pocket–book and from it a hundred–dollar note. He handed it to Ramsay without a word.

‘Perhaps that’ll teach you not to be so cocksure another time, my young friend,’ said Ramsay as he took the note.

I noticed that Mr Kelada’s hands were trembling.

The story spread over the ship as stories do, and he had to put up with a good deal of chaff that evening. It was a fine joke that Mr Know–All had been caught out. But Mrs Ramsay retired to her state–room with a headache.

Next morning I got up and began to shave. Mr Kelada lay on his bed smoking a cigarette. Suddenly there was a small scraping sound and I saw a letter pushed under the door. I opened the door and looked out. There was nobody there. I picked up the letter and saw that it was addressed to Max Kelada. The name was written in block letters. I handed it to him.

‘Who’s this from?’ He opened it. ‘Oh!’

He took out of the envelope, not a letter, but a hundred–dollar note. He looked at me and again he reddened. He tore the envelope into little bits and gave them to me.

‘Do you mind just throwing them out of the port–hole?’

I did as he asked, and then I looked at him with a smile.

‘No one likes being made to look a perfect damned fool,’ he said.

‘Were the pearls real?’

‘If I had a pretty little wife I shouldn’t let her spend a year in New York while I stayed at Kobe,’ said he.

At that moment I did not entirely dislike Mr Kelada. He reached out for his pocket–book and carefully put in it the hundred–dollar note.

THE HAPPY MAN

IT is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the self-confidence of politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits and points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. And life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable, and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should do with his. But there are men who flounder at the journey’s start, the way before them is confused and hazardous, and on occasion, however unwillingly, I have been forced to point the finger of fate. Sometimes men have said to me, what shall I do with my life? and I have seen myself for a moment wrapped in the dark cloak of Destiny.

Once I know that I advised well.

I was a young man and I lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria Station. Late one afternoon, when I was beginning to think that I had worked enough for that day, I heard a ring at the bell. I opened the door to a total stranger. He asked me my name; I told him. He asked if he might come in.

“Certainly.”

I led him into my sitting-room and begged him to sit down. He seemed a trifle embarrassed. I offered him a cigarette and he had some difficulty in lighting it without letting go of his hat. When he had satisfactorily achieved this feat I asked him if I should not put it on a chair for him. He quickly did this and while doing it dropped his umbrella.

“I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you like this,” he said. “My name is Stephens and I am a doctor. You’re in the medical, I believe?”

“Yes, but I don’t practise.”

“No, I know. I’ve just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask you about it.”

“It’s not a very good book, I’m afraid.”

“The fact remains that you know something about Spain and there’s no one else I know who does. And I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me some information.”

“I shall be very glad.”

He was silent for a moment. He reached out for his hat and holding it in one hand absent-mindedly stroked it with the other. I surmised that it gave him confidence.

“I hope you won’t think it very odd for a perfect stranger to talk to you like this.” He gave an apologetic laugh. “I’m not going to tell you the story of my life.”

When people say this to me I always know that it is precisely what they are going to do. I do not mind. In fact I rather like it.

“I was brought up by two old aunts. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done anything. I’ve been married for six years. I have no children. I’m a medical officer at the Camberwell Infirmary. I can’t stick it any more.”

There was something very striking in the short, sharp sentences he used. They had a forcible ring. I had not given him more than a cursory glance, but now I looked at him with curiosity. He was a little man, thick-set and stout, of thirty perhaps, with a round red face from which shone small, dark and very bright eyes. His black hair was cropped close to a bullet-shaped head. He was dressed in a blue suit a good deal the worse for wear. It was baggy at the knees and the pockets bulged untidily.

“You know what the duties are of a medical officer in an infirmary. One day is pretty much like another. And that’s all I’ve got to look forward to for the rest of my life. Do you think it’s worth it?”

“It’s a means of livelihood,” I answered.

“Yes, I know. The money’s pretty good.”

“I don’t exactly know why you’ve come to me.”

“Well, I wanted to know whether you thought there would be any chance for an English doctor in Spain?”

“Why Spain?”

“I don’t know, I just have a fancy for it.”

“It’s not like Carmen, you know.”

“But there’s sunshine there, and there’s good wine, and there’s colour, and there’s air you can breathe. Let me say what I have to say straight out. I heard by accident that there was no English doctor in Seville. Do you think I could earn a living there? Is it madness to give up a good safe job for an uncertainty?”

“What does your wife think about it?”

“She’s willing.”

“It’s a great risk.”

“I know. But if you say take it, I will: if you say stay where you are, I’ll stay.”

He was looking at me intently with those bright dark eyes of his and I knew that he meant what he said. I reflected for a moment.

“Your whole future is concerned: you must decide for yourself. But this I can tell you: if you don’t want money but are content to earn just enough to keep body and soul together, then go. For you will lead a wonderful life.”

He left me, I thought about him for a day or two, and then forgot. The episode passed completely from my memory.

Many years later, fifteen at least, I happened to be in Seville and having some trifling indisposition asked the hotel porter whether there was an English doctor in the town. He said there was and gave me the address. I took a cab and as I drove up to the house a little fat man came out of it. He hesitated when he caught sight of me.

“Have you come to see me?” he said. “I’m the English doctor.” I explained my errand and he asked me to come in. He lived in an ordinary Spanish house, with a patio, and his consulting room which led out of it was littered with papers, books, medical appliances, and lumber. The sight of it would have startled a squeamish patient. We did our business and then I asked the doctor what his fee was. He shook his head and smiled.

“There’s no fee.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Don’t you remember me? Why, I’m here because of something you said to me. You changed my whole life for me. I’m Stephens.”

I had hot the least notion what he was talking about. He reminded me of our interview, he repeated to me what we had said, and gradually, out of the night, a dim recollection of the incident came back to me.

“I was wondering if I’d ever see you again,” he said, “I was wondering if ever I’d have a chance of thanking you for all you’ve, done for me.”

“It’s been a success then?”

I looked at him. He was very fat now and bald, but his eyes twinkled gaily and his fleshy, red face bore an expression of perfect good-humour. The clothes he wore, terribly shabby they were, had been made obviously by a Spanish tailor and his hat was the wide-brimmed sombrero of the Spaniard. He looked to me as though he knew a good bottle of wine when he saw it. He had a dissipated, though entirely sympathetic, appearance. You might have hesitated to let him remove your appendix, but you could not have imagined a more delightful creature to drink a glass of wine with.

“Surely you were married?” I said.

“Yes. My wife didn’t like Spain, she went back to Camberwell, she was more at home there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that.”

His black eyes flashed a bacchanalian smile. He really had somewhat the look of a young Silenus.

“Life is full of compensations,” he murmured.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Spanish woman, no longer in her first youth, but still boldly and voluptuously beautiful, appeared at the door. She spoke to him in Spanish, and I could not fail to perceive that she was the mistress of the house.

As he stood at the door to let me out he said to me:

“You told me when last I saw you that if I came here I should earn just enough money to keep body and soul together, but that I should lead a wonderful life. Well, I want to tell you that you were right. Poor I have been and poor I shall always be, but by heaven I’ve enjoyed myself. I wouldn’t exchange the life I’ve had with that of any king in the world.”

THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY

One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who are concerned in it are in the devil’s own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you foresaw wasn’t inevitable after all, and high tragedy, without any regard to artistic decency, dwindles into drawing–room comedy. Now, growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter.

These reflections occurred to me when, having escorted the Marquesa de San Esteban to her car, I went back into the hotel and sat down again in the lounge. I ordered a cocktail, lit a cigarette, and composed myself to order my recollections. The hotel was new and splendid, it was like every other first–class hotel in Europe, and I had been regretting that for the sake of its modern plumbing I had deserted the old–fashioned, picturesque Hotel de Madrid to which I generally went when I stayed in Seville. It was true that from my hotel I had a view of the noble river, the Guadalquivir, but that did not make up for the thés dansants that filled the bar–lounge two or three days a week with a fashionable crowd whose exuberant conversation almost drowned the strident din of a jazz orchestra.

I had been out all the afternoon, and coming in found myself in the midst of a seething mob. I went to the desk and asked for my key so that I might go straight up to my room. But the porter, handing it to me, said that a lady had been asking for me.

‘For me?’

‘She wants to see you very much. It’s the Marquesa de San Esteban.’ I knew no one of that name.

‘It must be some mistake.’

As I said the words, looking rather vaguely around, a lady came up to me with outstretched hands and a bright smile on her lips. To the best of my knowledge I had never seen her before in my life. She seized my hands, both of them, and shook them warmly. She spoke in fluent French.

‘How very nice to see you again after all these years. I saw by the paper that you were staying here and I said to myself: I must look him up. How many years is it since we danced together? I daren’t think. Do you still dance? I do. And I’m a grandmother. I’m fat of course, I don’t care, and it keeps me from getting fatter.’

She talked with such a rush that it took my breath away to listen to her. She was a stout, more than middle–aged woman, very much made up, with dark red hair, obviously dyed, cut short; and she was dressed in the height of Parisian fashion, which never suits Spanish women very well. But she had a gay, fruity laugh that made you feel you wanted to laugh too. It was quite obvious that she thoroughly enjoyed life. She was a fine figure of a woman and I could well believe that in youth she had been beautiful. But I could not place her.

‘Come and drink a glass of champagne with me and we will talk of old times. Or will you have a cocktail? Our dear old Seville had changed, you see. Thés dansants and cocktails. It’s just like Paris and London now. We’ve caught up. We’re a civilized people.’

She led me to a table near the space where they were dancing and we sat down. I could not go on pretending I was at ease; I thought I should only get into a fearful mess.

‘It’s terribly stupid of me, I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘but I don’t seem able to remember ever having known anyone of your name in the old days in Seville.’

‘San Esteban?’ she interrupted before I could go on. ‘Naturally. My husband came from Salamanca. He was in the diplomatic service. I’m a widow. You knew me as Pilar Carreon. Of course having my hair red changes me a little, but otherwise I don’t think I’ve altered much.’

‘Not at all,’ I said quickly. ‘It was only the name that bothered me.’

Of course now I remembered her, but I was concerned at the moment only with the effort to conceal from her the mingled consternation and amusement that filled me as I realized that the Pilar Carreon I had danced with at the Countess de Marbella’s parties and at the Fair had turned into this stout, flaunting dowager. I could not get over it. But I had to watch my step. I wondered if she knew how well I recollected the story that had shaken Seville to its foundations, and I was glad when after she had finally bidden me an effusive farewell I was able to recall it at ease.

In those days, forty years ago, Seville had not become a prosperous commercial city. It had quiet, white streets, paved with cobbles, with a multitude of churches on the belfries of which storks built their nests. Bull–fighters, students, and loungers sauntered in the Sierpes all day long. Life was easy. This of course, was before the time of motor–cars, and the Sevillan would live in penury, practising every possible economy, in order to have a carriage. For this luxury he was willing to sacrifice the necessities of life. Everyone who had any claim to gentility drove up and down the Delicias, the park–like gardens by the Guadalquivir, every blessed afternoon from five till seven. You saw carriages of all sorts, from fashionable London victorias to old broken–down shays that seemed as though they would fall to pieces, magnificent horses and wretched hacks whose tragic end in the bull–ring was near at hand. But there was one equipage that could not fail to attract the stranger’s attention. It was a victoria, very smart and new, drawn by two beautiful mules; and the coachman and the footman wore the national costume of Andalusia in pale grey. It was the most splendid turn–out Seville had ever known, and it belonged to the Countess de Marbella. She was a Frenchwoman married to a Spaniard, who had enthusiastically adopted the manners and customs of her husband’s country, but with a Parisian elegance that gave them a peculiar distinction. The rest of the carriages went at a snail’s pace so that their occupants could see and be seen, but the countess, behind her mules, dashed up between the two crawling lines at a fast trot, went to the end of the Delicias and back twice and then drove away. The proceeding savoured somewhat of royalty. When you looked at her gracefully seated in that swift victoria, her head handsomely poised, her hair of too brilliant a gold to be natural, you did not wonder that her French vivacity and determination had given her the position she held. She made the fashion. Her decrees were law. But the countess had too many adorers not to have as many enemies, and the most determined of these was the widowed Duchess de Dos Palos, whose birth and social consequence made her claim as a right the first place in Society which the Frenchwoman had won by grace, wit and character.

Now the duchess had an only daughter. This was Doña Pilar. She was twenty when I first knew her and she was very beautiful. She had magnificent eyes and a skin that, however hard you tried to find a less hackneyed way to describe it, you could only call peach–like. She was very slim, rather tall for a Spanish girl, with a red mouth and dazzlingly white teeth. She wore her abundant, shining black hair dressed very elaborately in the Spanish style of the period. She was infinitely alluring. The fire in her black eyes, the warmth of her smile, the seductiveness of her movements suggested so much passion that it really wasn’t quite fair. She belonged to the generation which was straining to break the old conventions that had kept the Spanish girl of good family hidden away till it was time for her to be married. I often played tennis with her and I used to dance with her at the Countess de Marbella’s parties. The duchess considered the Frenchwoman’s parties, with champagne and a sit–down supper, ostentatious, and when she opened her own great house to Society, which was only twice a year, it was to give them lemonade and biscuits. But she bred fighting–bulls, as her husband had done, and on the occasions when the young bulls were tried out, she gave picnic luncheons to which her friends were asked, very gay and informal, but with a sort of feudal state which fascinated my romantic imagination. Once, when the duchess’s bulls were to fight at a corrida in Seville, I rode in with them at night as one of the men escorting Doña Pilar, dressed in a costume that reminded one of a picture by Goya, who headed the cavalcade. It was a charming experience to ride through the night, on those prancing Andalusian horses, with the six bulls, surrounded by oxen, thundering along behind.

A good many men, rich or noble and sometimes both, had asked Doña Pilar’s hand in marriage, but, notwithstanding her mother’s remonstrances, she had refused them. The duchess had been married at fifteen and it seemed to her really indecent that her daughter at twenty should be still single. The duchess asked her what she was waiting for; it was absurd to be too difficult. It was her duty to marry. But Pilar was stubborn. She found reasons to reject every one of her suitors.

Then the truth came out.

During the daily drives in the Delicias which the duchess, accompanied by her daughter, took in a great old–fashioned landau, they passed the countess as she was twice swiftly driven up and down the promenade. The ladies were on such bad terms that they pretended not to see one another, but Pilar could not keep her eyes off that smart carriage and the two beautiful grey mules and, not wishing to catch the countess’s somewhat ironic glance, her own fell on the coachman who drove her. He was the handsomest man in Seville and in his beautiful uniform he was a sight to see. Of course no one knew exactly what happened, but apparently the more Pilar looked at the coachman the more she liked the look of him, and somehow or other, for all this part of the story remained a mystery, the pair met. In Spain the classes are strangely mingled and the butler may have in his veins much nobler blood than the master. Pilar learnt, not I think without satisfaction, that the coachman belonged to the ancient family of León, than which there is none in Andalusia more distinguished; and really so far as birth went there was little to choose between them. Only her life had been passed in a ducal mansion, while fate had forced him to earn his living on the box of a victoria. Neither could regret this, since only in that exalted place could he have attracted the attention of the most difficult young woman in Seville. They fell madly in love with one another. It so happened that just then a young man called the Marqués de San Esteban, whom they had met at San Sebastian the summer before, wrote to the duchess and asked for Pilar’s hand in marriage. He was extremely eligible and the two families had formed alliances from time to time ever since the reign of Philip II. The duchess was determined not to stand any more nonsense, and when she told Pilar of the proposal added that she had shilly–shallied long enough. She must either marry him or she should go into a convent.

‘I’m not going to do either the one or the other,’ said Pilar.

‘What are you going to do then? I have given you a home long enough.’

‘I’m going to marry José León.’

‘Who is he?’

Pilar hesitated for a moment and it may be, it is indeed to be hoped, that she blushed a little.

‘He’s the countess’s coachman.’

‘What countess?’

‘The Countess de Marbella.’

I remembered the duchess well and I am sure that when roused she stuck at little. She raged, she implored, she cried, she argued. There was a terrific scene. People said that she slapped her daughter and pulled her hair, but I have an impression that Pilar in such a pass was capable of hitting back. She repeated that she loved José León and he loved her. She was determined to marry him. The duchess called a family council. The matter was put before them and it was decided that to save them all from disgrace Pilar should be taken away to the country and kept there till she had recovered from her infatuation. Pilar got wind of the scheme and put a stop to it by slipping out of the window of her room one night when everyone was asleep and going to live with her lover’s parents. They were respectable persons who inhabited a small apartment on the unfashionable side of the Guadalquivir, in the quarter called Triana.

After that no concealment was possible. The fat was in the fire and the clubs along the Sierpes buzzed with the scandal. Waiters were kept busy bringing trays of little glasses of Manzanilla to the members from the neighbouring wine–shops. They gossiped and laughed over the scandal, and Pilar’s rejected suitors were the recipients of many congratulations. What an escape! The duchess was in despair. She could think of nothing better to do than go to the Archbishop, her trusted friend and former confessor, and beg him himself to reason with the infatuated girl. Pilar was summoned to the episcopal palace, and the good old man, used to intervening in family quarrels, did his utmost to show her the folly of her course. But she would not be persuaded. Nothing that anyone could say would induce her to forsake the man she loved. The duchess, waiting in an adjoining room, was sent for and made a final appeal to her daughter. In vain. Pilar returned to her humble lodging and the duchess in tears was left alone with the Archbishop. The Archbishop was no less astute than he was pious, and when he saw that the distracted woman was in a fit state to listen to him, advised her as a last resource to go to the Countess de Marbella. She was the cleverest woman in Seville and it might be that she could do something.

At first the duchess indignantly refused. She would never suffer the humiliation of appealing to her greatest enemy. Sooner might the ancient house of Dos Palos fall in ruin. The Archbishop was accustomed to dealing with tiresome women. He set himself with gentle cunning to induce her to change her mind and presently she consented to throw herself on the Frenchwoman’s mercy. With rage in her heart she sent a message asking if she might see her, and that afternoon was ushered into her drawing–room. The countess of course had been one of the first to hear the story, but she listened to the unhappy mother as though she had not known a thing about it. She relished the situation enormously. It was the crowning triumph to have the vindictive duchess on her knees before her. But she was at heart a good–natured woman and she had a sense of humour.

‘It’s a most unfortunate situation,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry that one of my servants should be the occasion of it. But I don’t exactly see what I can do.’

The duchess would have liked to slap her painted face and her voice trembled a little with the effort she made to control her anger.

‘It is not for my own sake I’m asking you to help. It’s for Pilar’s. I know, we all know, that you are the cleverest woman in the city. It seemed to me, it seemed to the Archbishop, that if there was a way out, your quick wit would find it.’

The countess knew she was being grossly flattered. She did not mind. She liked it.

‘You must let me think.’

‘Of course, if he’d been a gentleman I could have sent for my son and he would have killed him, but the Duke of Dos Palos cannot fight a duel with the Countess de Marbella’s coachman.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘In the old days it would have been so simple. I should merely have hired a couple of ruffians and had the brute’s throat cut one night in the street. But with all these laws they have nowadays decent people have no way of protecting themselves from insult.’

‘I should deplore any method of settling the difficulty that deprived me of the services of an excellent coachman,’ murmured the countess.

‘But if he married my daughter he cannot continue to be your coachman,’ cried the duchess indignantly.

‘Are you going to give Pilar an income for them to live on?’

‘Me? Not a peseta. I told Pilar at once that she should get nothing from me. They can starve for all I care.’

‘Well, I should think rather than do that he will prefer to stay on as my coachman. There are very nice rooms over my stables.’

The duchess went pale. The duchess went red.

‘Forget all that has passed between us. Let us be friends. You can’t expose me to such a humiliation. If I’ve ever done things to affront you I ask you on my knees to forgive me.’

The duchess cried.

‘Dry your eyes, Duchess,’ the Frenchwoman said at last. ‘I will do what I can.’

’Is there anything you can do?’

‘Perhaps. Is it true that Pilar has and will have no money of her own?’

‘Not a penny if she marries without my consent.’

The countess gave her one of her brightest smiles.

‘There is a common impression that southern people are romantic and northern people matter–of–fact. The reverse is true. It is the northerners who are incurably romantic. I have lived long enough among you Spaniards to know that you are nothing if not practical.’

The duchess was too broken to resent openly these unpleasant remarks, but, oh, how she hated the woman! The Countess de Marbella rose to her feet.

‘You shall hear from me in the course of the day.’

She firmly dismissed her visitor.

The carriage was ordered for five o’clock and at ten minutes to, the countess, dressed for her drive, sent for José. When he came into the drawing–room, wearing his pale grey livery with such an air, she could not deny that he was very good to look upon. If he had not been her own coachman–well, it was not the moment for ideas of that sort. He stood before her, holding himself easily, but with a gallant swagger. There was nothing servile in his bearing.

‘A Greek god,’ the countess murmured to herself. ‘It is only Andalusia that can produce such types.’ And then aloud: ‘I hear that you are going to marry the daughter of the Duchess of Dos Palos.’

‘If the countess does not object.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Whoever you marry is a matter of complete indifference to me. You know of course that Doña Pilar will have no fortune.’

‘Yes, madam. I have a good place and I can keep my wife. I love her.’

‘I can’t blame you for that. She is a beautiful girl. But I think it only right to tell you that I have a rooted objection to married coachmen. On your wedding– day you leave my service. That is all I had to say to you. You can go.’

She began to look at the daily paper that had just arrived from Paris, but José, as she expected, did not stir. He stared down at the floor. Presently the countess looked up.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I never knew madam would send me away,’ he answered in a troubled tone.

‘I have no doubt you’ll find another place.’

‘Yes, but...’

‘Well, what is it?’ she asked sharply.

He sighed miserably.

‘There’s not a pair of mules in the whole of Spain to come up to ours. They’re almost human beings. They understand every word I say to them.’

The countess gave him a smile that would have turned the head of anyone who was not madly in love already.

‘I’m afraid you must choose between me and your betrothed.’

He shifted from one foot to the other. He put his hand to his pocket to get himself a cigarette, but then, remembering where he was, restrained the gesture. He glanced at the countess and that peculiar shrewd smile came over his face which those who have lived in Andalusia know so well.

‘In that case, I can’t hesitate. Pilar must see that this alters my position entirely. One can get a wife any day of the week, but a place like this is found only once in a lifetime. I should be a fool to throw it up for a woman.’

That was the end of the adventure. José León continued to drive the Countess de Marbella, but she noticed when they sped up and down the Delicias that henceforward as many eyes were turned on her handsome coachman as on her latest hat: and a year later Pilar married the Marqués de San Esteban.

THE POINT OF HONOUR

SOME years ago, being engaged on writing a book about Spain in the Golden Age, I had occasion to read again the plays of Calderon. Among others I read one called El Medico de su Honra, which means the Physician of his Honour. It is a cruel play and you can hardly read it without a shudder. But re-reading it, I was reminded of an encounter I had had many years before which has always remained in my memory as one of the strangest I have ever known. I was quite young then and I had gone to Seville on a short visit to see the celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi. It was the height of summer and the heat was terrific. Great sail-cloths were drawn across the narrow streets, giving a grateful shade, but in the squares the sun beat down mercilessly. In the morning I watched the procession. It was splendid and impressive. The crowd knelt down as the Host was solemnly carried past, and the Civil Guards in full uniform stood at salute to do homage to the heavenly King. And in the afternoon I joined the dense throng which was making its way to the bull-ring. The cigarette girls and the sewing girls wore carnations in their dark hair and their young men were dressed in all their best. It was just after the Spanish-American war, and the short, embroidered jacket, the skin-tight trousers and the broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat were still worn. Sometimes the crowd was scattered by a picador on the wretched hack that would never survive the afternoon, and the rider, with conscious pride in his picturesque costume, exchanged pleasantries with the facetious. A long line of carriages, dilapidated and shabby, overfilled with aficionados, drove noisily along.

I went early, for it amused me to see the people gradually filling the vast arena. The cheaper seats in the sun were already packed, and it was a curious effect that the countless fans made, like the fluttering of a host of butterflies, as men and women restlessly fanned themselves. In the shade, where I was sitting, the places were taken more slowly, but even there, an hour before the fight began, one had to look rather carefully for a seat. Presently a man stopped in front of me and with a pleasant smile asked if I could make room for him. When he had settled down, I took a sidelong glance at him and noticed that he was well-dressed, in English clothes, and looked like a gentleman. He had beautiful hands, small but resolute, with thin, long fingers. Wanting a cigarette, I took out my case and thought it would be polite to offer him one. He accepted. He had evidently seen that I was a foreigner, for he thanked me in French.

“You are English?” he went on.

“Yes.”

“How is it you haven’t run away from the heat?”

I explained that I had come on purpose to see the Feast of Corpus Christi.

“After all, it’s something you must come to Seville for.”

Then I made some casual remark about the vast concourse of people.

“No one would imagine that Spain was bleeding from the loss of all that remained of her Empire and that her ancient glory is now nothing but a name.”

“There’s a great deal left.”

“The sunshine, the blue sky, and the future.”

He spoke dispassionately, as though the misfortunes of his fallen country were no concern of his. Not knowing what to reply, I remained silent. We waited. The boxes began to fill up. Ladies in their mantillas of black or white lace entered them and spread their Manila shawls over the balustrade so as to form a gay and many-coloured drapery. Now and then, when one of them was of particular beauty, a round of applause would greet her appearance and she would smile and bow without embarrassment. At last the president of the bull-fight made his entry, the band struck up, and the fighters, all glittering in their satin and gold and silver, marched swaggering across the ring. A minute later a great black bull charged in. Carried away by the horrible excitement of the contest, I noticed, notwithstanding, that my neighbour remained cool. When a man fell and only escaped by a miracle the horns of the furious beast, and with a gasp thousands sprang to their feet, he remained motionless. The bull was killed and the mules dragged out the huge carcass. I sank back exhausted.

“Do you like bull-fighting?” he asked me. “Most English do, though I have noticed that in their own country they say hard enough things about it.”

“Can one like something that fills one with horror and loathing?

Each time I come to a fight I swear I will never go to another. And yet I do.”

“It’s a curious passion that leads us to delight in the peril of others. Perhaps it’s natural to the human race. The Romans had their gladiators and the modems have their melodramas. It may be that it is an instinct in man to find pleasure in bloodshed and torture.”

I did not answer directly.

“Don’t you think that the bull-fight is the reason why human life is of so little account in Spain?”

“And do you think human life is of any great account?” he asked.

I gave him a quick look, for there was an ironical tone in his voice that no one could have missed, and I saw that his eyes were full of mockery. I flushed a little, for he made me on a sudden feel very young. I was surprised at the change of his expression. He had seemed rather an amiable man, with his large soft friendly eyes, but now his face bore a look of sardonic hauteur which was a trifle disquieting. I shrank back into my shell. We said little to one another during the rest of the afternoon, but when the last bull was killed and we all rose to our feet he shook hands with me and expressed the hope that we might meet again. It was a mere politeness and neither of us, I imagine, thought that there was even a remote possibility of it.

But quite by chance, two or three days later, we did. I was in a quarter of Seville that I did not know very well. I had been that afternoon to the palace of the Duke of Alba, which I knew had a fine garden and in one of the rooms a magnificent ceiling reputed to have been made by Moorish captives before the fall of Granada. It was not easy to gain admittance, but I wanted very much to see it and thought that now, in the height of summer when there were no tourists, with two or three pesetas I might be allowed in. I was disappointed. The man in charge told me that the house was under repair and no stranger could visit it without a written permission from the Duke’s agent. So, having nothing else to do, I went to the royal garden of the Alcazar, the old palace of Don Pedro the Cruel, whose memory lives still among the people of Seville. It was very pleasant among the orange trees and cypresses. I had a book with me, a volume of Calderon, and I sat there for a while and read. Then I went for a stroll. In the older parts of Seville the streets are narrow and tortuous. It is delicious to wander along them under the awnings that stretch above, but not easy to find one’s way. I lost mine. When I had just made up my mind that I had no notion in which direction to turn I saw a man walking towards me and recognised my acquaintance of the bullring. I stopped him and asked whether he could direct me. He remembered me.

“You’ll never find your way,” he smiled, turning round. “I’ll walk a little with you until you can’t mistake it.”

I protested, but he would not listen. He assured me it was no trouble.

“You haven’t gone away then?” he said.

“I’m leaving to-morrow. I’ve just been to the Duke of Alba’s house. I wanted to see that Moorish ceiling of his, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

“Are you interested in Arabic art?”

“Well, yes. I’ve heard that that ceiling is one of the finest things in Seville.”

“I think I could show you one as good.”

“Where?”

He looked at me for a moment reflectively as though wondering what sort of a person I was. If he was, he evidently came to a satisfactory decision.

“If you have ten minutes to spare I will take you to it.”

I thanked him warmly and we turned back and retraced our steps. We chatted of indifferent things till we came to a large house, washed in pale green, with the Arabic look of a prison, the windows on the street heavily barred, which so many houses in Seville have. My guide clapped his hands at the gateway and a servant looked out from a window into the patio, and pulled a cord.

“Whose house is this?”

“Mine.”

I was surprised, for I knew how jealously Spaniards guarded their privacy and how little inclined they were to admit strangers into their houses. The heavy iron gate swung open and we walked into the courtyard; we crossed it and went through a narrow passage. Then I found myself suddenly in an enchanted garden. It was walled on three sides, with walls as high as houses; and their old red brick, softened by time, was covered with roses. They clad every inch in wanton, scented luxuriance. In the garden, growing wildly, as if the gardeners had striven in vain to curb the exuberance of nature, were palm-trees rising high into the air in their passionate desire for the sun, dark orange-trees and trees in flower whose names I did not know, and among them roses and more roses. The fourth wall was a Moorish loggia, with horseshoe arches heavily decorated with tracery, and when we entered this I saw the magnificent ceiling. It was like a little bit of the Alcazar, but it had not suffered the restorations that have taken all the charm from that palace, and the colours were exquisitely tender. It was a gem.

“Believe me, you need not regret that you have not been able to see the duke’s house. Further, you can say that you have seen something that no other foreigner has seen within living memory.”

“It’s very kind of you to have shown it to me. I’m infinitely grateful.”

He looked about him with a pride with which I could sympathise.

“It was built by one of my own ancestors in the time of Don Pedro the Cruel. It is very likely that the King himself more than once caroused under this ceiling with my ancestor.”

I held out the book I was carrying.

“I’ve just been reading a play in which Don Pedro is one of the important characters.”

“What is the book?”

I handed it to him and he glanced at the title. I looked about me.

“Of course, what adds to the beauty is that wonderful garden,” I said. “The whole impression is awfully romantic.”

The Spaniard was evidently pleased with my enthusiasm. He smiled. I had already noticed how grave his smile was. It hardly dispelled the habitual melancholy of his expression.

“Would you like to sit down for a few minutes and smoke a cigarette?”

“I should love to.”

We walked out into the garden and came upon a lady sitting on a bench of Moorish tiles like those in the gardens of the Alcazar. She was working at some embroidery. She looked up quickly, evidently taken aback to see a stranger, and gave my companion an enquiring stare.

“Allow me to present you to my wife,” he said.

The lady gravely bowed. She was very beautiful, with magnificent eyes, a straight nose with delicate nostrils, and a pale smooth skin. In her black hair, abundant as with most Spanish women, there was a broad white streak. Her face was quite unlined and she could not have been more than thirty.

“You have a very lovely garden, Senora,” I said because I had to say something.

She gave it an indifferent glance.

“Yes, it is pretty.”

I felt suddenly embarrassed. I did not expect her to show me any cordiality, and I could not blame her if she thought my intrusion merely a nuisance. There was something about her that I could not quite make out. It was not an active hostility. Absurd as it seemed, since she was a young woman and beautiful, I felt that there was something dead in her.

“Are you going to sit here?” she asked her husband.

“With your permission. Only for a few minutes.”

“I won’t disturb you.”

She gathered her silks and the canvas on which she had been working and rose to her feet. When she stood up I saw that she was taller than Spanish women generally are. She gave me an unsmiling bow. She carried herself with a sort of royal composure and her gait was stately. I was flippant in those days, and I remember saying to myself that she was not the sort of girl you could very well think of being silly with. We sat down on the multi-coloured bench and I gave my host a cigarette. I held a match to it. He still had my volume of Calderon in his hands, and now he idly turned the pages.

“Which of the plays have you been reading?”

“El Medico de su Honra.”

He gave me a look, and I thought I discerned in his large eyes a sardonic glint.

“And what do you think of it?”

“I think it’s revolting. The fact is, of course, that the idea is so foreign to our modern notions.”

“What idea?”

“The point of honour and all that sort of thing.”

I should explain that the point of honour is the mainspring of much of the Spanish drama. It is the nobleman’s code that impels a man to kill his wife, in cold blood, not only if she has been unfaithful to him, but even if, however little she was to blame, her conduct has given rise to scandal. In this particular play there is an example of this more deliberate than any I have ever read: the physician of his honour takes vengeance on his wife, though aware that she is innocent, simply as a matter of decorum.

“It’s in the Spanish blood,” said my friend. “The foreigner must just take it or leave it.”

“Oh, come, a lot of water has flowed down the Guadalquivir since Calderon’s day. You’re not going to pretend that any man would behave like that now.”

“On the contrary I pretend that even now a husband who finds himself in such a humiliating and ridiculous position can only regain his self-respect by the offender’s death.”

I did not answer. It seemed to me that he was pulling a romantic gesture, and within me I murmured, Bosh. He gave me an ironic smile.

“Have you ever heard of Don Pedro Aguria?”

“Never.”

“The name is not unknown in Spanish history. An ancestor was Admiral of Spain under Philip II and another was bosom friend to Philip IV. By royal command he sat for his portrait to Velasquez.”

My host hesitated a moment. He gave me a long, reflective stare before he went on.

“Under the Philips the Agurias were rich, but by the time my friend Don Pedro succeeded his father their circumstances were much reduced. But still he was not poor, he had estates between Cordova and Aguilar, and in Seville his house retained at least traces of its ancient splendour. The little world of Seville was astonished when he announced his engagement to Soledad, the daughter of the ruined Count of Acaba, for though her family was distinguished her father was an old scamp. He was crippled with debts, and the shifts he resorted to in order to keep his head above water were none too nice. But Soledad was beautiful and Don Pedro in love with her. They were married. He adored her with the vehement passion of which perhaps only a Spaniard is capable. But he discovered to his dismay that she did not love him. She was kind and gentle. She was a good wife and a good housekeeper. She was grateful to him. But that was all. He thought that when she had a child she would change, but the child came, and it made no difference. The barrier between them that he had felt from the beginning was still there. He suffered. At last he told himself that she had a character too noble, a spirit too delicate, to descend to earthly passion, and he resigned himself. She was too high above him for mortal love.”

I moved a little uneasily in my seat. I thought the Spaniard was unduly rhetorical. He went on.

“You know that here in Seville the Opera House is open only for the six weeks after Easter, and since the Sevillans don’t care very much for European music we go more to meet our friends than to listen to the singers. The Agurias had a box, like everybody else, and they went on the opening night of the season. Tannhaüser was being given. Don Pedro and his wife, like typical Spaniards, with nothing to do all day but always late, did not arrive till nearly the end of the first act. In the interval the Count of Acaba, Soledad’s father, came into the box accompanied by a young officer of artillery whom Don Pedro had never seen before. But Soledad seemed to know him well.

“‘Here is Pepe Alvarez,’ said the Count. ‘He’s just come back from Cuba and I insisted on bringing him to see you.’

“Soledad smiled and held out her hand, then introduced the newcomer to her husband.

“‘Pete is the son of the attorney at Carmona. We used to play together when we were children.’

“Carmona is a small town near Seville, and it was here that the Count had retired when his creditors in the city grew too troublesome. The house he owned there was almost all that was left him of the fortune he had squandered. He lived in Seville now through Don Pedro’s generosity. But Don Pedro did not like him and he bowed stiffly to the young officer. He guessed that his father the attorney and the count had been concerned together in transactions that were none too reputable. In a minute he left the box to talk with his cousin, the Duchess of Santaguador, whose box was opposite his own. A few days later he met Pepe Alvarez at his club in the Sierpes and had a chat with him. To his surprise he found him a very pleasant young fellow. He was full of his exploits in Cuba and he related them with humour.

“The six weeks about Easter and the great Fair are the gayest in Seville, and the world meets to exchange gossip and laughter, at one festivity after another. Pepe Alvarez with his good nature and high spirits was in great request and the Agurias met him constantly. Don Pedro saw that he amused Soledad. She was more vivacious when he was there, and her laughter, which he had so seldom heard, was a delight to him. Like other members of the aristocracy he took a booth for the Fair, where they danced, supped and drank champagne till dawn. Pepe Alvarez was always the life and soul of the parties.

“One night Don Pedro was dancing with the Duchess of Santaguador and they passed Soledad with Pepe Alvarez.

“‘Soledad is looking very beautiful this evening,’ she remarked.

“‘And happy,’ he replied.

“’Is it true that once she was engaged to be married to Pepe Alvarez?’

“‘Of course not.’

“But the question startled him. He had known that Soledad and Pepe had known one another when they were children, but it had never crossed his mind that there could have been anything between them. The Count of Acaba, though a rogue, was a gentleman by birth, and it was inconceivable that he could have thought of marrying his daughter to the son of a provincial attorney. When they got home Don Pedro told his wife what the duchess had said and what he had replied.

“‘But I was engaged to Pepe,’ she said.

“‘Why did you never tell me?’

“‘It was finished and done with. He was in Cuba. I never expected to see him again.’

“‘There must be people who know you were engaged to him.’

“‘I daresay. Does it matter?’

“‘Very much. You shouldn’t have renewed your acquaintance with him when he returned.’

“‘Does that mean that you have no confidence in me?’

“‘Of course not. I have every confidence in you. All the same I wish you to discontinue it now.’

“‘And if I refuse?’

“‘I shall kill him.’

“They looked long into one another’s eyes. Then she gave him a little bow and went to her room. Don Pedro sighed. He wondered whether she still loved Pepe Alvarez and whether it was on account of this that she had never loved him. But he would not allow himself to give way to the unworthy emotion of jealousy. He looked into his heart and was sure that it harboured no feeling of hatred for the young artilleryman. On the contrary, he liked him. This was not an affair of love or hate, but of honour. On a sudden he remembered that a few days before when he went to his club he noticed that the conversation suddenly failed, and, looking back, he seemed to remember that several of the group who were sitting there and chatting eyed him curiously. Was it possible that he had been the subject of their conversation? He shivered a little at the thought.

“The Fair was drawing to its end, and when it was over the Agurias had arranged to go to Cordova, where Don Pedro had an estate which it was necessary for him to visit from time to time. He looked forward to the peace of a country life after the turmoil of Seville. The day after this conversation Soledad, saying she was not well, stayed in the house, and she did the same the day following. Don Pedro visited her in her room morning and evening and they talked of indifferent things. But on the third day his cousin Conchita de Santaguador was giving a ball. It was the last of the season and everyone in her exclusive set would be there. Soledad, saying she was still indisposed, announced that she would stay at home.

“‘Are you refusing to go because of our conversation of the other night?’ Don Pedro asked.

“‘I have been thinking over what you said. I think your demand unreasonable, but I shall accede to it. The only way I can cease my friendship with Pepe is by not going to places where I am likely to meet him.’ A tremor of pain passed over her lovely face. ‘Perhaps it is best.’

“‘Do you love him still?’

“‘Yes.’

“Don Pedro felt himself go cold with anguish.

“‘Then why did you marry me?’

“‘Pepe was away, in Cuba, no one knew when he would come back. Perhaps never. My father said that I must marry you.’

“‘To save him from ruin?’

“‘From worse than ruin.’

“‘I am very sorry for you.’

“‘You have been kind to me. I have done everything in my power to prove to you that I am grateful.’

“‘And does Pepe love you?’

“She shook her head and smiled sadly.

“‘Men are different. He’s young. He’s too gay to love anyone very long. No, to him I’m just the friend whom he used to play with when he was a child and flirt with when he was a boy. He can make jokes about the love he once had for me.’

“He took her hand and pressed it, then kissed it and left her.

He went to the ball by himself. His friends were sorry to hear of Soledad’s indisposition, but after expressing a proper sympathy devoted themselves to the evening’s amusement. Don Pedro drifted into the card-room. There was room at a table, and he sat down to play chemin de fer. He played with extraordinary luck and made a good deal of money. One of the players laughingly asked where Soledad was that evening. Don Pedro saw another give him a startled glance, but he laughed and answered that she was safely in bed and asleep. Then an unlucky incident occurred. Some young man came into the room, and addressing an artillery officer who was playing asked where Pepe Alvarez was.

“‘Isn’t he here?’ said the officer.

“‘No.’

“An odd silence fell upon the party. Don Pedro exercised all his self-control to prevent his face from showing what he suddenly felt. The thought flashed through his mind that those men at the table suspected that Pepe was with Soledad, his wife. Oh, the shame! The indignity! He forced himself to go on playing for another hour and still he won. He could not go wrong. The game broke up and he returned to the ballroom. He went up to his cousin.

“‘I’ve hardly had a word with you,’ he said. ‘Come into another room and let us sit down for a little.’

“‘If you like.’

“The room, Conchita’s boudoir, was empty.

“‘Where is Pepe Alvarez to-night?’ he asked casually.

“‘I can’t think.’

“‘You were expecting him?’

“‘Of course.’

“She was smiling as he was, but he noticed that she looked at him sharply. He dropped his mask of casualness and, though they were alone, lowered his voice.

“‘Conchita, I beseech you to tell me the truth. Are they saying that he is Soledad’s lover?’

“‘Pedrito, what a monstrous question to put to me!’

“But he had seen the terror in her eyes and the sudden instinctive movement of her hand to her face.

“‘You’ve answered it.’

“He got up and left her. He went home and looking up from the patio saw a light in his wife’s room. He went upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no answer, but he went in. To his surprise, for it was late, she was sitting up working at the embroidery upon which much of her time was spent.

“‘Why are you working at this hour?’

“‘I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I thought it would distract my mind if I worked.’

“He did not sit down.

“‘Soledad, I have something to tell you that must cause you pain. I must ask you to be brave. Pepe Alvarez was not at Conchita’s to-night.’

“‘What is that to me?’

“‘It is unfortunate that you were not there either. Everyone at the ball thought that you were together.’

“‘That’s preposterous.’

“‘I know, but that doesn’t help matters. You could have opened the gate for him yourself and let him out, or you could have slipped out yourself without anyone seeing you go or come.’

“‘But do you believe it?’

“‘No. I agreed with you that the thing was preposterous. Where was Pepe Alvarez?’

“‘How do I know? How should I know?’

“‘It is very strange that he should not have come to the most brilliant party, the last party, of the season.’

“She was silent for a minute.

“‘The night after you spoke to me about him I wrote and told him that in view of the circumstances I thought it would be better if in future we saw no more of one another than could be helped. It may be that he did not go to the ball for the same reason that I did not.’

“They were silent for a while. He looked down at the ground, but he felt that her eyes were fixed on him. I should have told you before that Don Pedro possessed one accomplishment which raised him above his fellows, but at the same time was a drawback. He was the best shot in Andalusia. Everyone knew this and it would have been a brave man who ventured to offend him. A few days earlier there had been pigeon-shooting at Tablada, the wide common outside Seville along the Guadalquivir, and Don Pedro had carried all before him. Pepe Alvarez on the other hand had shown himself so indifferent a marksman that everyone had laughed at him. The young artilleryman had borne the chaff with good-humour. Cannon were his weapon, he said.

“‘What are you going to do?’ Soledad asked.

“‘You know that there is only one thing I can do.’

“She understood. But she tried to treat what he said as a pleasantry.

“‘You’re childish. We’re not living any more in the sixteenth century.’

“‘I know. That is why I am talking to you now. If I have to challenge Pepe I shall kill him. I don’t want to do that. If he will resign his commission and leave Spain I will do nothing.”

“‘How can he? Where is he to go?’

“‘He can go to South America. He may make his fortune.’

“‘Do you expect me to tell him that?’

“‘If you love him.’

“‘I love him too much to ask him to run away like a coward. How could he face life without honour?’

“Don Pedro laughed.

“‘What has Pepe Alvarez, the son of the attorney at Carmona, to do with honour?’

“She did not answer, but in her eyes he saw the fierce hatred she bore him. That look stabbed his heart, for he loved her, he loved her as passionately as ever.

“Next day he went to his club and joined a group who were sitting at the window looking out at the crowd passing up and down the Sierpes. Pepe Alvarez was in it. They were talking of last night’s party.

“‘Where were you, Pepe?’ someone asked.

“‘My mother was ill. I had to go to Carmona,” he answered. ‘I was dreadfully disappointed, but perhaps it was all for the best.’ He turned laughingly to Don Pedro. ‘I hear you were in luck and won everybody’s money.’

“‘When are you going to give us our revenge, Pedrito?’ asked another.

“‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for that,’ he answered. ‘I have to go to Cordova. I find that my attorney has been robbing me. I know that all attorneys are thieves, but I stupidly thought this one was honest.’

“He seemed to speak quite lightly, and it was as lightly that Pepe Alvarez put in his word.

“‘I think you exaggerate, Pedrito. Don’t forget that my father is an attorney and he at least is honest.’

“‘I don’t believe it for a minute,’ laughed Don Pedro. ‘I have no doubt that your father is as big a thief as any.’

“The insult was so unexpected and so unprovoked that for a moment Pepe Alvarez was staggered. The others were startled into sudden seriousness.

“‘What do you mean, Pedrito?’

“‘Exactly what I say.’

“‘It’s a lie and you know it’s a lie. You must withdraw that at once.’

“Don Pedro laughed.

“‘Of course I shall not withdraw. Your father is a thief and a rascal.’

“Pepe did the only thing he could do. He sprang from his chair and with his open hand hit Don Pedro in the face. The outcome was inevitable. Next day the two men met on the frontier of Portugal. Pepe Alvarez, the attorney’s son, died like a gentleman with a bullet in his heart.”

The Spaniard ended his story on such a casual note that for the first moment I hardly took it in. But when I did I was profoundly shocked.

“Barbarous,” I said. “It was just cold-blooded murder.”

My host got up.

“You’re talking nonsense, my young friend. Don Pedro did the only thing he could do in the circumstances.”

I left Seville next day, and from then till now have never been able to discover the name of the man who told me this strange story. I have often wondered whether the lady I saw, the lady with the pale face and the lock of white hair, was the unhappy Soledad.

THE POET

I AM not much interested in the celebrated and I have never had patience with the passion that afflicts so many to shake hands with the great ones of the earth. When it is proposed to me to meet some person distinguished above his fellows by his rank or his attainments, I seek for a civil excuse that may enable me to avoid the honour; and when my friend Diego Torre suggested giving me an introduction to Santa Ana I declined. But for once the excuse I made was sincere; Santa Ana was not only a great poet but also a romantic figure and it would have amused me to see in his decrepitude a man whose adventures (in Spain at least) were legendary; but I knew that he was old and ill and I could not believe that it would be anything but a nuisance to him to meet a stranger and a foreigner. Calisto de Santa Ana was the last descendant of the Grand School; in a world unsympathetic to Byronism he had led a Byronic existence and he had narrated his hazardous life in a series of poems that had brought him a fame unknown to his contemporaries. I am no judge of their value, for I read them first when I was three-and-twenty and then was enraptured by them; they had a passion, a heroic arrogance and a multi-coloured vitality that swept me off my feet, and to this day, so intermingled are those ringing lines and haunting cadences with the charming memories of my youth, I cannot read them without a beating heart. I am inclined to think that Calisto de Santa Ana deserves the reputation he enjoys among the Spanish-speaking peoples. In those days his verses were on the lips of all young men and my friends would talk to me endlessly of his wild ways, his vehement speeches (for he was a politician as well as a poet), his incisive wit and his amours. He was a rebel and sometimes an outlaw, daring and adventurous; but above all he was a lover. We knew all about his passion for this great actress or that divine singer — had we not read till we knew them by heart the burning sonnets in which he described his love, his anguish and his wrath? — and we were aware that an infanta of Spain, the proudest descendant of the Bourbons, having yielded to his entreaties, had taken the veil when he ceased to love her. When the Philips, her royal ancestors, tired of a mistress she entered a convent, for it was unfitting that one whom the King had loved should be loved by another, and was not Calisto de Santa Ana greater than any earthly king? We applauded the lady’s romantic gesture; it was creditable to her and flattering to our poet.

But all this took place many years ago and for a quarter of a century Don Calisto, disdainfully withdrawing from a world that had nothing more to offer, had lived in seclusion in his native town of Ecija. It was when I announced my intention of going there (I had been spending a week or two in Seville) not because of him, but because it is a charming little Andalusian town with associations that endear it to me, that Diego Torre offered me this introduction. It appeared that Don Calisto allowed the younger men of letters occasionally to visit him and now and then would talk to them with the fire that had electrified his hearers in the great days of his prime.

“What does he look like now?” I asked.

“Magnificent.”

“Have you a photograph of him?”

“I wish I had. He has refused to face the camera since he was thirty-five. He says he does not wish posterity to know him other than young.”

I confess that I found this suggestion of vanity not a little touching. I knew that in early manhood he was of extraordinary beauty, and that moving sonnet of his written when he grew conscious that youth had for ever left him shows with what a bitter and sardonic pang he must have watched the passing of those looks that had been so fantastically admired.

But I refused my friend’s offer; I was quite satisfied to read once more the poems I had known so well and for the rest I preferred to wander about the silent and sunswept streets of Ecija in freedom. It was with some consternation therefore that on the evening of my arrival I received a note from the great man himself. Diego Torre had written to him of my visit, he said, and it would give him great pleasure if I would call on him at eleven next morning. In the circumstances there was nothing for me to do but to present myself at his house at the appointed hour.

My hotel was in the Plaza and on that spring morning it was animated, but as soon as I left it I might have walked in a deserted city. The streets, the tortuous white streets, were empty but for a woman in black now and then who returned with measured steps from her devotions. Ecija is a town of churches and you can seldom go far without seeing a crumbling façade or a tower in which storks have built their nests. Once I paused to watch a string of little donkeys pass by. Their red caparisons were faded and they carried I know not what in their panniers. But Ecija has been a place of consequence in its day and many of these white houses have gateways of stone surmounted by imposing coats of arms, for to this remote spot flowed the riches of the New World and adventurers who had gathered wealth in the Americas spent here their declining years. It was in one of these houses that Don Calisto lived and as I stood at the reja after pulling the bell, I was pleased to think that he lived in such a fitting style. There was a dilapidated grandeur about the massive gateway that suited my impression of the flamboyant poet. Though I heard the bell peal through the house no one answered it and I rang a second and then a third time: at last an old woman with a heavy moustache, came to the gate.

“What do you want?” she said.

She had fine black eyes, but a sullen look, and I supposed that it was she who took care of the old man. I gave her my card.

“I have an appointment with your master.”

She opened the iron gateway and bade me enter. Asking me to wait she left me and went upstairs. The patio was pleasantly cool after the street. Its proportions were noble and you surmised that it had been built by some follower of the conquistadores; but the paint was tarnished, the tiles on the floor broken, and here and there great flakes of plaster had fallen away. There was about everything an air of poverty but not of squalor. I knew that Don Calisto was poor. Money had come to him easily at times but he had never attached any importance to it and had spent it profusely. It was plain that he lived now in a penury that he disdained to notice. In the middle of the patio was a table with a rocking-chair on each side of it, and on the table newspapers a fortnight old. I wondered what dreams occupied his fancy as he sat there on the warm summer nights, smoking cigarettes. On the walls under the colonnade were Spanish pictures, dark and bad, and here and there stood an ancient dusty bargueno and on it a mended lustre plate. By the side of a door hung a pair of old pistols, and I had a pleasant fancy that they were the weapons he had used when in the most celebrated of his many duels, for the sake of Pepa Montanez the dancer (now, I suppose, a toothless and raddled hag), he had killed the Duke of Dos Hermanos.

The scene, with its associations which I vaguely divined, so aptly fitted the romantic poet that I was overcome by the spirit of the place. Its noble indigence surrounded him with a glory as great as the magnificence of his youth; in him too there was the spirit of the old conquistadores, and it was becoming that he should finish his famous life in that ruined and magnificent house. Thus surely should a poet live and die. I had arrived cool enough and even somewhat bored at the prospect of my meeting, but now I began to grow a trifle nervous. I lit a cigarette. I had come at the time appointed and wondered what detained the old man. The silence was strangely disturbing. Ghosts of the past thronged the silent patio and an age dead and gone gained a sort of shadowy life for me. The men of that day had a passion and a wildness of spirit that are gone out of the world for ever. We are no longer capable of their reckless deeds or their theatrical heroics.

I heard a sound and my heart beat quickly. I was excited now and when at last I saw him coming slowly down the stairs I caught my breath. He held my card in his hand. He was a tall old man and exceedingly thin, with a skin the colour of old ivory; his hair was abundant and white, but his bushy eyebrows were dark still; they made his great eyes flash with a more sombre fire. It was wonderful that at his age those black eyes should still preserve their brilliance. His nose was aquiline, his mouth close-set. His unsmiling eyes rested on me as he approached and there was in them a look of cool appraisal. He was dressed in black and in one hand held a broad- brimmed hat. There was in his bearing assurance and dignity. He was as I should have wished him to be and as I watched him I understood how he had swayed men’s minds and touched their hearts. He was every inch a poet.

He had reached the patio and came slowly towards me. He had really the eyes of an eagle. It seemed to a tremendous moment, for there he stood, the heir of the great old Spanish poets, the magnificent Herrera, the nostalgic and moving Fray Luis, Juan de la Cruz, the mystic, and the crabbed and obscure Gongora. He was the last of that long line and he trod in their steps not unworthily. Strangely in my heart sang the lovely and tender song which is the most famous of Don Calisto’s lyrics.

I was abashed. It was fortunate for me that I had prepared beforehand the phrase with which I meant to greet him.

“It is a wonderful honour, Maestro, for a foreigner such as I to make the acquaintance of so great a poet.”

A flicker of amusement passed through those piercing eyes and a smile for an instant curved the lines of that stem mouth.

“I am not a poet, Senor, but a bristle merchant. You have made a mistake, Don Calisto lives next door.”

I had come to the wrong house.

THE MOTHER

Two or three people, hearing sounds of a quarrel in the patio, came out of their rooms and listened.

“It’s the new lodger,” said a woman. “She’s having a row with the porter who brought her things.”

It was a tenement house of two storeys, built round a patio, in a back street of La Macarena, which is the roughest quarter in Seville. The rooms were let to working men and the small functionaries with whom Spain is overrun, postmen, policemen, or tram-conductors, and the place swarmed with children. There were twenty families there. They squabbled and made it up; they chattered their heads off; they helped one another when help was needed; for the Andalusians are good-natured people, and on the whole they got on well enough together. One room had been for some time unlet. A woman had taken it that morning, and an hour later had brought her bits and pieces, carrying as much as she could herself, a gallego — the Galicians are the general porters of Spain — laden with the rest.

But the quarrel was growing more violent, and the two women above, on the first floor, anxious not to miss a word, leant over the balcony.

They heard the newcomer’s shrill voice raised in a torrent of abuse and the man’s sullen interjections. The two women nudged one another.

“I shan’t go till you pay me,” he kept on saying.

“But I’ve paid you already. You said you’d do it for three reales.”

“Never! You promised me four.”

They were haggling over rather less than twopence halfpenny. “Four reales for moving those few things? You’re crazy.”

She tried to push him away.

“I shan’t go till you pay me,” he repeated.

“I’ll give you a penny more.”

“I won’t take it.”

The dispute grew more and more noisy. The woman screamed at the porter and cursed him. She shook her fist in his face. At last he lost patience.

“Oh, all right, give me the penny and I’ll go. I’m not going to waste time on a slut like you.”

She paid him, and the man, throwing down her mattress, left her. She flung a filthy word at him as he went. She came out of the room to drag the things in, and the two women in the balcony saw her face.

“Carai, what an evil face! She looks like a murderess.”

A girl came up the stairs at that moment, and her mother called out: “Did you see her, Rosalia?”

“I asked the gallego where she came from, he says he brought the things from Triana. She promised him four reales and then wouldn’t pay.”

“Did he tell you her name?”

“He didn’t know. But in Triana they called her La Cachirra.”

The vixen appeared again to fetch a bundle she had forgotten. She glanced at the women in the balcony watching her unconcernedly, but said nothing. Rosalia shuddered.

“She frightens me.”

La Cachirra was forty, haggard and very thin, with bony hands and fingers like a vulture’s claws. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin wrinkled and yellow. When she opened her mouth, with its pale, heavy lips, she showed teeth that were pointed like those of a beast of prey. Her hair was black and coarse; she wore it in a clumsy knot, which seemed on the point of falling over her shoulders, and in front of each ear fell a straight wisp. Her eyes, deep-set in their sockets, large and black, shone fiercely. Her face bore an expression of such ferocity that no one dared come near to speak with her. She kept entirely to herself. The curiosity of the neighbours was aroused. They knew she was very poor, for her clothes were wretched. She went out every morning at six and did not return till night; but they could not even find out how she earned her living. They urged a policeman who lived in the house to make inquiries.

“As long as she doesn’t break the peace, I have nothing to do with her,” said he.

But in Seville scandal travels quickly and in a few days a mason who lived in an upper room brought the news that a friend in Triana knew her story. La Cachirra had only come out of prison one month before, and she had spent seven years there — for murder.

She had lodged in a house in Triana, but the children, finding out what had happened, threw stones at her and called her names; and she, turning upon them with foul words and with blows, had filled the whole place with such tumult that the landlord gave her notice. Cursing him and all who had turned her out, La Cachirra one morning suddenly disappeared.

“And whom did she murder?” asked Rosalia.

“They say it was her lover,” replied the mason.

“She can never have had one,” said Rosalia, with a laugh of scorn.

“Santa Maria!” cried Pilar, her mother, “I hope she won’t kill any of us. I said she looked like a murderess!”

Rosalia, shivering, crossed herself. At that moment La Cachirra came in from her day’s work and a sudden oppression fell upon the talkers. They made a movement as if to huddle together and looked nervously at the wild-eyed woman. She seemed to see something ominous in their silence and gave them a rapid, suspicious glance. The policeman, to make conversation, bade her goodevening.

“Buena sera,” she replied, with a scowl, and, passing quickly into her room, slammed the door.

They heard her lock it. The evil, sullen eyes had cast a gloom over them and they talked in whispers as if under a mischievous spell.

“She has the devil in her,” said Rosalia.

“I’m glad you’re here to protect us, Manuel,” added her mother to the policeman.

But La Cachirra seemed indisposed to give trouble. She went her way, unbending, never addressing so much as a word to anyone, and brusquely cut short every attempt at friendliness. She felt that the neighbours had discovered her secret, the homicide and the long years of imprisonment; and the lines in her face grew sterner, the expression of her deep-set eyes more inhuman. But gradually the anxiety she had caused was dispelled. Even the garrulous Pilar ceased to pay attention to the silent gaunt figure who occasionally passed through the group sitting in the patio.

“I dare say the prison has sent her mad, they say it often does.”

But one day an event occurred to revive the gossip. A youth came to the reja — the wrought-iron gate that serves as front door to the Sevillan house — and asked for Antonia Sanchez. Pilar, who was mending a skirt in the patio, looked up at her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.

“No one of that names lives here,” she said.

“Yes, she does,” the young man answered; then, after a pause: “They call her La Cachirra.”

“Ah!” Rosalia opened the gate and pointed to the door. “She’s in there.”

“Thank you.”

The youth gave her a smile. She was a pretty girl, with a high colour and fine bold eyes. A red carnation threw up the glossy blackness of her hair. Her breasts were full and the nipples were prominent under her blouse.

“Blessed be the mother that bore you,” he said, using a hackneyed phrase.

“Vaya Usted con Dios, go you with God,” answered Pilar.

He passed on and knocked at the door. The two women looked after him curiously.

“Who can he be?” asked Pilar. “La Cachirra’s never had a visitor before.”

There was no reply to his knocking, and he knocked again. They heard La Cachirra’s rasping voice ask who was there.

“Madre!” he cried. “Mother.”

There was a shriek. The door was burst open.

“Currito!”

The woman threw her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately. She fondled him and with a loving gesture stroked his face with both her hands. The girl and her mother who watched would never have thought her capable of such tenderness. At last, with little sobs of joy, she dragged him into her room.

“He’s her son,” said Rosalia, with surprise. “Who’d have thought it! And a fine fellow like that.”

Currito had a lean face and white, even teeth; his hair was cut very close, shaved on the temples, and set on the scalp with a truly Andalusian perfection. The shadow of his precocious beard showed blue beneath his brown skin. And of course he was a dandy. He had the national love of fine clothes and his trousers were skin-tight; his short jacket and his frilled shirt were as new as new could be. He wore a broad-brimmed hat.

At last the door of La Cachirra’s room was opened and she appeared, hanging on her son’s arm.

“You’ll come again next Sunday?” she asked.

“If nothing stops me.”

He glanced at Rosalia and, having bidden his mother good-night, nodded to her also.

“Vaya Usted con Dios!” said she.

She gave him a smile and a flash of her dark eyes. La Cachirra intercepted the look; and the sullenness which her intense joy had driven away suddenly darkened her face like a thunder-cloud. She scowled fiercely at the handsome girl.

“Is that your son?” asked Pilar, when the youth was gone.

“Yes, he’s my son,” answered La Cachirra gruffly, going back to her room.

Nothing could soften her, and even when her heart was brimming over with happiness she repelled the overtures of friendship.

“He’s a good-looking fellow,” said Rosalia; and she thought of him more than once during the next few days.

It was a terrible love that La Cachirra had for her son. He was all she had in the world and she adored him with a fiery, jealous passion that demanded in return impossible devotion. She wished to be all in all to him. On account of his work they could not live together and it tortured her to imagine what he did when he was away from her. She could not bear him to look at a woman and she writhed at the bare idea that he might pay court to some girl. No amusement is more common in Seville than the long flirtation in which the maid sits at her window half the night long, guarded by iron bars, or stands at the gate, while her lover in the street pours his rapture into her willing ear. La Cachirra asked the boy if he had a novia, a sweetheart, aware that so attractive a youth must enjoy the smiles of women, and she knew he lied when he swore he spent his evenings at work. But his denials gave her a fierce delight.

When she saw Rosalia’s provoking glance and Currito’s answering smile, rage leapt to her throat. She had hated her neighbours before, because they were happy and she was wretched, because they knew her terrible secret; but now she hated them more, already fancying, half crazily, that they were conspiring to rob her of her son. On the following Sunday, in the afternoon, La Cachirra came out of her room, crossed the patio and stood at the gate. This was a proceeding so unusual that the neighbours commented upon it.

“Don’t you know why she’s there?” said Rosalia, with a stifled laugh. “Her precious son is coining, and she doesn’t want us to see him.”

“Does she think we’ll eat him?”

Currito arrived and his mother took him quickly to her room.

“She’s as jealous of him as if he was her lover,” said Pilar.

Rosalia looked at the closed door, laughing again, and her shining eyes were filled with mischief. It occurred to her that it would be very amusing to have a word with Currito. Rosalia’s white teeth gleamed at the thought of La Cachirra’s anger. She stationed herself at the gate, so that the pair, when they came out, could not help crossing her; but La Cachirra, seeing the girl, moved to the other side of her son so that not even a glance should pass between them. Rosalia shrugged her shoulders.

“You won’t beat me so easily as that,” she thought.

The Sunday after, when La Cachirra took up her place at the gate, Rosalia went out into the street and strolled along in the direction from which she guessed he would come. In a minute she saw Currito, and walked on, elaborately ignoring him.

“Hola!” said he, stopping.

“Is it you? I thought you were afraid to speak to me.”

“I’m afraid of nothing,” he answered boastingly.

“Except mamma!”

She walked on, as if she wanted him to leave her; but she knew very well he would do no such thing.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“What has that to do with you, Currito? Go to your mother, my son, or she’ll beat you. You’re afraid to look at me when she’s with you.”

“What nonsense.”

“Well, vaya Usted con Dios! I have commissions.”

He went off rather sheepishly, and Rosalia laughed to herself. She was in the courtyard once more when he passed through with La Cachirra on his way out; and this time, shamed into courage, he stopped and said good-night. La Cachirra turned red with anger.

“Come, Currito,” she cried, with a rasping voice, “what are you waiting for?”

He went away, and the woman stopped a moment in front of Rosalia as if she were going to speak, but, with a visible effort, she restrained herself, and went back to her dark, silent room.

A few days later was the feast of San Isidoro, the patron saint of Seville, and to celebrate the holiday the mason and one or two others had put a string of Chinese lanterns in the patio. They glowed warmly in the clear summer night. The sky was soft against the shining stars. The people of the house were gathered in the middle of the patio, sitting on chairs; and the women, some with babies at their breasts, fanned themselves with little paper fans, interrupting their ceaseless chattering to fling a word of abuse at some older child who was making a nuisance of himself. The cool air was very pleasant after the day’s breathless heat. Those who had been to the bull-fight were telling the less fortunate all about it. They described with precise detail a wonderful feat that Belmonte, the famous matador, had performed. With their vivid imaginations, the particulars gained every minute in variety and colour, so that it appeared that never in the history of Seville had there been a more excellent corrida. Everyone was present but La Cachirra, and in her room they saw the light of a solitary candle.

“And her son?”

“He’s in there,” answered Pilar. “I saw him pass an hour ago.”

“He must be amusing himself,” said Rosalia, with a laugh.

“Oh, don’t bother about La Cachirra,” said another. “Give us a dance, Rosalia.”

“Yes, yes,” they cried. “Go on, my girl. You dance.”

In Spain they love dancing and they love to look at dancing. Years and years ago it was said that there was never a Spanish woman that was not born to dance.

The chairs were quickly set in a ring. The mason and the tram conductor fetched their guitars. Rosalia got her castanets, and stepping forward with another girl, began.

Currito, in the poky room, pricked up his ears when he heard the music.

“They’re dancing,” he said, and an itching shot down his limbs.

He looked through the curtain and saw the group in the mellow light of the Chinese lanterns. He saw the two girls dancing. Rosalia wore her Sunday clothes, and, as is customary, she was heavily powdered. A splendid carnation gleamed in her hair. Currito’s heart beat quickly. Love in Spain grows fast, and he had thought often of the handsome girl since that day on which he first spoke to her. He moved towards the door.

“What are you doing?” asked La Cachirra.

“I’m going to look at them dance. You never wish me to amuse myself.”

“It’s Rosalia you want to see.”

He pushed her away as she tried to stop him, and joined the group that watched the dancers. La Cachirra followed a step or two, and then stood, half hidden by the gloom, with fury gnawing at her heart. Rosalia saw him.

“Aren’t you frightened to look at me?” she whispered, as she passed him.

The dancing had made her light-headed and she felt no fear of La Cachirra. When the measure ended and her partner sank into a chair, Rosalia marched up to Currito and stood in front of him, upright, with her head thrown back and her breast heaving with the rapid motion.

“Of course, you don’t know how to dance,” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, come then.”

She smiled provokingly, but he hesitated. He looked over his shoulder at his mother, whom he divined, rather than saw, in the darkness. Rosalia caught the glance and its meaning.

“Are you afraid?”

“What should I be afraid of?” he asked with a shrug of the shoulders.

He stepped into the ring. The guitarists strummed away and the onlookers rhythmically clapped their hands, punctuating the time with an occasional cry of Olé. A girl gave Currito a pair of castanets and the pair began to dance. They heard a little hiss, as of a serpent in the darkness, and Rosalia, quite reckless now, looked with a laugh at the face, ghastly white, that gleamed from the shadows. La Cachirra did not move. She watched the movements of the dance, the swaying of the bodies, the intricate steps; she saw Rosalia lean back with a graceful gesture and smile in Currito’s face as he wound about her, clapping his castanets. Her eyes glowed like coals of fire and she felt them burning in the sockets; but no one noticed her, and she gave a groan of rage. The dance came to an end, and Rosalia, smiling with pleasure at the applause, told Currito she did not know he could dance so well.

La Cachirra flung herself into her room and bolted the door. She gave no answer when Currito came and bade her open.

“Well, I shall go home,” he said.

Her heart bled with pain, but she would not speak. He was all she had, all she loved in the world; and yet she hated him. She could not sleep that night, but lay thinking, half-madly, that they were robbing her of her son. In the morning she did not go to work, but lay in wait for Rosalia. The girl came out at last, rather bedraggled after the night’s festivities, and she started when La Cachirra suddenly faced her.

“What do you want with my son?”

“What do you mean?” replied Rosalia, assuming an expression of surprise.

La Cachirra quivered with passion and she bit her hand to keep herself quiet.

“Oh, you know what I mean. You’re stealing him from me.”

“Do you think I want your son? Keep him away from me. I can’t he p it if he runs after me wherever I go.”

“That’s a lie!”

“Ask him!” And now Rosalia’s voice was so scornful that La Cachirra could hard y contain herself. “He waits an hour in the street to see me. Why don’t you keep him to yourself?”

“You lie, you lie! You throw yourself in his way.”

“If I wanted lovers I could get them without asking. I don’t want the son of a murderess.”

Then everything grew confused to La Cachirra; the blood leaped to her head and choked her eyes. She sprang at Rosalia and tore her hair. The girl gave a shrill cry and sought to defend herself, but immediately a passer-by wrenched them apart.

“If you don’t leave Currito alone, I’ll kill you!” cried La Cachirra.

“Do you think I’m frightened? Keep him from me if you can. You fool, don’t you see that he loves me better than his eyes?”

“Now then, go away,” said the man. “Don’t answer her, Rosalia.”

La Cachirra gave a little roar of passion, like a wild beast baulked of its prey, and pushed past into the street.

But the dance had left Currito madly in love with Rosalia, and all next day he thought of her red lips; the light of her eyes shone in his heart and filled him with enchantment. He passionately desired her. At nightfall he wandered towards the Macarena and presently found himself at her house. He waited in the darkness of the porch till he saw her in the patio. At the other end burned his mother’s lonely light.

“Rosalia,” he called in a low voice.

She turned, stifling a cry of surprise.

“Why are you here to-day?” she whispered, going towards him.

“I couldn’t keep away from you.”

“Why?” she smiled.

“Because I love you.”

“Do you know your mother nearly killed me this morning?”

And with the embellishments necessary to the Andalusian temperament, she related the occurrence, omitting, however, the final taunt which had enraged La Cachirra beyond endurance.

“She’s got the temper of the devil,” said Currito; and then, with bravado: “I shall tell her that you’re my sweetheart.”

“She will be pleased,” said Rosalia ironically.

“Will you come to the reja to-morrow?”

“Perhaps,” she answered.

He gave a little chuckle, for he knew by her tone that she would. He swaggered even more than usual when he walked through the Sierpes on his way home. She was waiting for him when he came next day and, as is the way with lovers in Seville, they talked for hours under their breath, with the iron gate between them, and it never even occurred to Currito that it was a needless impediment. When he asked Rosalia if she loved him she answered with a little amorous sigh. They tried to see the passion that burnt hotly in one another’s eyes. Then he went every night.

But fearing that his mother knew of his visits, Currito did not go to see her on the following Sunday. The wretched woman waited for him with an aching heart. She was ready to fall on her knees and beg him to forgive her, but then, when he did not come, she hated him; she would have liked to see him dead at her feet. Her heart sank when she thought that another week must pass before she could even hope to see him.

The week passed and still he did not come. She could not bear it. Anguish, anguish! She loved him as no sweetheart could ever love him. She told herself that this was Rosalia’s doing and when she thought of her, rage filled her heart. At last Currito plucked up his courage and went to see his mother; but she had waited too long. It seemed as though her love was dead. She pushed him away when he wanted to kiss her.

“Why haven’t you come before?”

“You locked the door on me. I thought you didn’t want me!”

“Was it only that? Had you no other reason?”

“I’ve been busy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Busy? An idle loafer like you. What have you been doing? You wouldn’t have been too busy to come and Rosalia.”

“Why did you hit her?”

“How do you know I hit her? Have you seen her?” La Cachirra - strode up to her son; her eyes flashed. “She called me a murderess.”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it?” she screamed, so that they heard her in the patio. “And if I am a murderess — it was for you. Yes, I killed Pepe Santi; but it was because he was beating you. It was for your sake that I lay in prison for seven years — for seven years. Oh, you fool, you think she cares for you, and every night she spends hours at the gate.”

“I know,” Currito answered with a grin.

La Cachirra started violently. She shot a puzzled look at him and then she understood. She gasped with pain and wrath; she clutched at her heart as though the agony were too intense to bear.

“You’ve been coming every night to the reja and you never came near me? Oh, how cruel! I’ve done everything in the world for you. Do you think I loved Pepe Santi? I endured his blows so that I could give you bread; and I killed him when he beat you. Oh, God, I only lived for you. But for the thought of you I would have died rather than suffer those years of prison.”

“Come, woman, be reasonable. I’m twenty. What d’you expect? If it wasn’t Rosalia it would be another.”

“You beast. I hate you. Get out.”

She pushed him violently to the door. Currito shrugged his shoulders.

“You needn’t think I want to stay.”

He walked jauntily through the patio and slammed the iron gate behind him. La Cachirra stalked to and fro in her tiny room. The hours passed slowly. For a long while she remained at the window, watching with the horrible steadfastness of a savage beast ready to spring. She stood motionless, repressing the convulsive restlessness that tore at her heart-strings. There was a clapping of hands at the reja as a signal that someone was without, and she peered forward with panting mouth, her fiery eyes almost starting from her head. But it was only the mason. She waited longer, and Pilar, Rosalia’s mother, came in and walked slowly up the stairs to her room. La Cachirra clutched at her throat to relieve the intolerable oppression of her breath. Still she waited. Now and then an extraordinary quiver travelled through all her limbs.

At last! There was a clap of light hands at the gate, and a voice above called out: “Who is it?”

“Peace!”

La Cachirra recognised Rosalia’s voice. She gave a gasp of triumph. The door was opened from above, and Rosalia, entering, crossed the courtyard with a buoyant and easy step. The joy of life was in her every motion. She was about to put her foot on the stair when La Cachirra sprang forward and stopped her. She caught hold of her arm and the girl could not shake herself free. “What do you want?” said Rosalia. “Let me pass.”

“What have you been doing with my son?”

“Let me pass, or I shall call out.”

“Is it true that you meet at the reja every night?”

“Mother, help! Antonio!” Rosalia cried out shrilly.

“Answer me.”

“Well, if you want the truth, you can have it. He’s going to marry me. He loves me, and I — I love him with all my heart.” She turned on La Cachirra, trying to free herself from the vicious grip. “D’you think you can prevent us? D’you think he’s frightened of you? He hates you, he told me so. He wishes you’d never come out of prison.”

“He told you that?”

La Cachirra shrank back. Rosalia pursued the advantage.

“Yes, he told me that; and he told me much more. He told me that you murdered Pepe Santi; and that you were in prison for seven years; and he wished you were dead.”

Rosalia hissed the words venomously, laughing with shrill voice when she saw the wretched woman shrink as though struck by palpable blows.

“And you ought to be proud that I don’t refuse to marry the son of a murderess.”

Then, giving La Cachirra a push, she leapt to the stairs; but the movement revived the woman, stunned by the horrible taunts, and with a cry of brutal rage she sprang upon Rosalia and caught her by the shoulders and dragged her down. Rosalia turned and hit her in the face. La Cachirra drew a knife from her bosom, and with an oath buried it in the girl’s neck. Rosalia shrieked. “Mother, she’s killed me.”

She fell to the bottom of the stairs and lay huddled up on the stones. Blood made a little pool on the ground.

Half a dozen doors were flung open at the despairing cry, and people rushed to seize La Cachirra; but she backed against the wall and faced them, with an expression of such ferocity on her face that no one dared approach her. The hesitation was momentary, but Pilar ran from the balcony shrieking, and the common attention for an instant was distracted. La Cachirra saw the opportunity and ran forward. She reached her room and locked and bolted the door behind her.

Suddenly the court was filled with people. Pilar with loud dreadful cries flung herself down on her daughter and would not let herself be dragged away. Someone rushed for a doctor and someone else went for the police. The crowd surged in from the street and collected round the door. The doctor hurried in with a black bag in his hand. When the police came a dozen people at once excitedly explained what had happened. They pointed to the door of La Cachirra’s room, and the police broke in. There was a scuffle and they came out with La Cachirra handcuffed. The mob rushed forward, but the police surrounded her and with their scabbards beat the people off; but they shook their fists and hurled curses at her. She looked at them scornfully. She deigned to make no answer. Her eyes shone with triumph. The policemen led her through the patio and they passed by the body of Rosalia.

“Is she dead?” asked La Cachirra.

“Yes,” the doctor answered gravely.

“Thanks be to God!” she said.

A MAN FROM GLASGOW

It is not often that anyone entering a great city for the first time has the luck to witness such an incident as engaged Shelley’s attention when he drove into Naples. A youth ran out of a shop pursued by a man armed with a knife. The man overtook him and with one blow in the neck laid him dead on the road. Shelley had a tender heart. He didn’t look upon it as a bit of local colour; he was seized with horror and indignation. But when he expressed his emotions to a Calabrian priest who was travelling with him, a fellow of gigantic strength and stature, the priest laughed heartily and attempted to quiz him. Shelley says he never felt such an inclination to beat anyone.

I have never seen anything so exciting as that, but the first time I went to Algeciras I had an experience that seemed to me far from ordinary. Algeciras was then an untidy, neglected town. I arrived somewhat late at night and went to an inn on the quay. It was rather shabby, but it had a fine view of Gibraltar, solid and matter–of–fact, across the bay. The moon was full. The office was on the first floor, and a slatternly maid, when I asked for a room, took me upstairs. The landlord was playing cards. He seemed little pleased to see me. He looked me up and down, curtly gave me a number, and then, taking no further notice of me, went on with his game.

When the maid had shown me to my room I asked her what I could have to eat.

‘What you like,’ she answered.

I knew well enough the unreality of the seeming profusion.

‘What have you got in the house?’

‘You can have eggs and ham.’

The look of the hotel had led me to guess that I should get little else. The maid led me to a narrow room with white–washed walls and a low ceiling in which was a long table laid already for the next day’s luncheon. With his back to the door sat a tall man, huddled over a brasero, the round brass dish of hot ashes which is erroneously supposed to give sufficient warmth for the temperate winter of Andalusia. I sat down at table and waited for my scanty meal. I gave the stranger an idle glance. He was looking at me, but meeting my eyes he quickly turned away. I waited for my eggs. When at last the maid brought them he looked up again.

‘I want you to wake me in time for the first boat,’ he said.

‘Si, señor.’

His accent told me that English was his native tongue, and the breadth of his build, his strongly marked features, led me to suppose him a northerner. The hardy Scot is far more often found in Spain than the Englishman. Whether you go to the rich mines of Rio Tinto, or to the bodegas of Jerez, to Seville or to Cadiz, it is the leisurely speech of beyond the Tweed that you hear. You will meet Scotsmen in the olive groves of Carmona, on the railway between Algeciras and Bobadilla, and even in the remote cork woods of Merida.

I finished eating and went over to the dish of burning ashes. It was midwinter and the windy passage across the bay had chilled my blood. The man pushed his chair away as I drew mine forwards.

‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘There’s heaps of room for two.’

I lit a cigar and offered one to him. In Spain the Havana from Gib is never unwelcome.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ he said, stretching out his hand.

I recognized the singing speech of Glasgow. But the stranger was not talkative, and my efforts at conversation broke down before his monosyllables. We smoked in silence. He was even bigger than I had thought, with great broad shoulders and ungainly limbs; his face was sunburned, his hair short and grizzled. His features were hard; mouth, ears and nose were large and heavy and his skin much wrinkled. His blue eyes were pale. He was constantly pulling his ragged, grey moustache. It was a nervous gesture that I found faintly irritating. Presently I felt that he was looking at me, and the intensity of his stare grew so irksome that I glanced up expecting him, as before, to drop his eyes. He did, indeed, for a moment, but then raised them again. He inspected me from under his long, bushy eyebrows.

‘Just come from Gib?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going tomorrow–on my way home. Thank God.’

He said the last two words so fiercely that I smiled.

‘Don’t you like Spain?’

‘Oh, Spain’s all right.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Too long. Too long.’

He spoke with a kind of gasp. I was surprised at the emotion my casual inquiry seemed to excite in him. He sprang to his feet and walked backwards and forwards. He stamped to and fro like a caged beast pushing aside a chair that stood in his way, and now and again repeated the words in a groan. ‘Too long. Too long.’ I sat still. I was embarrassed. To give myself countenance I stirred the brasero to bring the hotter ashes to the top, and he stood suddenly still, towering over me, as though my movement had brought back my existence to his notice. Then he sat down heavily in his chair.

‘D’you think I’m queer?’ he asked.

‘Not more than most people,’ I smiled.

‘You don’t see anything strange in me?’

He leant forward as he spoke so that I might see him well.

‘No.’

‘You’d say so if you did, wouldn’t you?’

‘I would.’

I couldn’t quite understand what all this meant. I wondered if he was drunk. For two or three minutes he didn’t say anything and I had no wish to interrupt the silence.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked suddenly. I told him.

‘Mine’s Robert Morrison.’

‘Scotch?’

‘Glasgow. I’ve been in this blasted country for years. Got any baccy?’

I gave him my pouch and he filled his pipe. He lit it from a piece of burning charcoal.

‘I can’t stay any longer. I’ve stayed too long. Too long.’

He had an impulse to jump up again and walk up and down, but he resisted it, clinging to his chair. I saw on his face the effort he was making. I judged that his restlessness was due to chronic alcoholism. I find drunks very boring, and I made up my mind to take an early opportunity of slipping off to bed.

‘I’ve been managing some olive groves,’ he went on. ‘I’m here working for the Glasgow and South of Spain Olive Oil Company Limited.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘We’ve got a new process for refining oil, you know. Properly treated, Spanish oil is every bit as good as Lucca. And we can sell it cheaper.’

He spoke in a dry, matter–of–fact, business–like way. He chose his words with Scotch precision. He seemed perfectly sober.

‘You know, Ecija is more or less the centre of the olive trade, and we had a Spaniard there to look after the business. But I found he was robbing us right and left, so I had to turn him out. I used to live in Seville; it was more convenient for shipping the oil. However, I found I couldn’t get a trustworthy man to be at Ecija, so last year I went there myself. D’you know it?’

‘No.’

‘The firm has got a big estate two miles from the town, just outside the village of San Lorenzo, and it’s got a fine house on it. It’s on the crest of a hill, rather pretty to look at, all white, you know, and straggling, with a couple of storks perched on the roof. No one lived there, and I thought it would save the rent of a place in town if I did.’

‘It must have been a bit lonely,’ I remarked.

‘It was.’

Robert Morrison smoked on for a minute or two in silence. I wondered whether there was any point in what he was telling me.

I looked at my watch.

‘In a hurry?’ he asked sharply.

‘Not particularly. It’s getting late.’

‘Well, what of it?’

‘I suppose you didn’t see many people?’ I said, going back.

‘Not many. I lived there with an old man and his wife who looked after me, and sometimes I used to go down to the village and play tresillo with Fernández, the chemist, and one or two men who met at his shop. I used to shoot a bit and ride.’

‘It doesn’t sound such a bad life to me.’

‘I’d been there two years last spring. By God, I’ve never known such heat as we had in May. No one could do a thing. The labourers just lay about in the shade and slept. Sheep died and some of the animals went mad. Even the oxen couldn’t work. They stood around with their backs all humped up and gasped for breath. That blasted sun beat down and the glare was so awful, you felt your eyes would shoot out of your head. The earth cracked and crumbled, and the crops frizzled. The olives went to rack and ruin. It was simply hell. One couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I went from room to room, trying to get a breath of air. Of course I kept the windows shut and had the floors watered, but that didn’t do any good. The nights were just as hot as the days. It was like living in an oven.

‘At last I thought I’d have a bed made up for me downstairs on the north side of the house in a room that was never used because in ordinary weather it was damp. I had an idea that I might get a few hours’ sleep there at all events. Anyhow it was worth trying. But it was no damned good; it was a washout. I turned and tossed and my bed was so hot that I couldn’t stand it. I got up and opened the doors that led to the veranda and walked out. It was a glorious night. The moon was so bright that I swear you could read a book by it. Did I tell you the house was on the crest of a hill? I leant against the parapet and looked at the olive–trees. It was like the sea. I suppose that’s what made me think of home. I thought of the cool breeze in the fir–trees and the racket of the streets in Glasgow. Believe it or not, I could smell them, and I could smell the sea. By God, I’d have given every bob I had in the world for an hour of that air. They say it’s a foul climate in Glasgow. Don’t you believe it. I like the rain and the grey sky and that yellow sea and the waves. I forgot that I was in Spain, in the middle of the olive country, and I opened my mouth and took a long breath as though I were breathing in the sea–fog.

‘And then all of a sudden I heard a sound. It was a man’s voice. Not loud, you know, low. It seemed to creep through the silence like–well, I don’t know what it was like. It surprised me. I couldn’t think who could be down there in the olives at that hour. It was past midnight. It was a chap laughing. A funny sort of laugh. I suppose you’d call it a chuckle. It seemed to crawl up the hill–disjointedly.’

Morrison looked at me to see how I took the odd word he used to express a sensation that he didn’t know how to describe.

‘I mean, it seemed to shoot up in little jerks, something like shooting stones out of a pail. I leant forward and stared. With the full moon it was almost as light as day, but I’m dashed if I could see a thing. The sound stopped, but I kept on looking at where it had come from in case somebody moved. And in a minute it started off again, but louder. You couldn’t have called it a chuckle any more, it was a real belly laugh. It just rang through the night. I wondered it didn’t wake my servants. It sounded like someone who was roaring drunk.

‘“Who’s there?” I shouted.

‘The only answer I got was a roar of laughter. I don’t mind telling you I was getting a bit annoyed. I had half a mind to go down and see what it was all about. I wasn’t going to let some drunken swine kick up a row like that on my place in the middle of the night. And then suddenly there was a yell. By God, I was startled. Then cries. The man had laughed with a deep bass voice, but his cries were–shrill, like a pig having his throat cut.

‘“My God,” I cried.

‘I jumped over the parapet and ran down towards the sound. I thought somebody was being killed. There was silence and then one piercing shriek. After that sobbing and moaning. I’ll tell you what it sounded like, it sounded like someone at the point of death. There was a long groan and then nothing. Silence. I ran from place to place. I couldn’t find anyone. At last I climbed the hill again and went back to my room.

‘You can imagine how much sleep I got that night. As soon as it was light, I looked out of the window in the direction from which the row had come and I was surprised to see a little white house in a sort of dale among the olives. The ground on that side didn’t belong to us and I’d never been through it. I hardly ever went to that part of the house and so I’d never seen the house before. I asked José who lived there. He told me that a madman had inhabited it, with his brother and a servant.’

‘Oh, was that the explanation?’ I said. ‘Not a very nice neighbour.’

The Scot bent over quickly and seized my wrist. He thrust his face into mine and his eyes were starting out of his head with terror.

‘The madman had been dead for twenty years,’ he whispered.

He let go my wrist and leant back in his chair panting.

‘I went down to the house and walked all round it. The windows were barred and shuttered and the door was locked. I knocked. I shook the handle and rang the bell. I heard it tinkle, but no one came. It was a two–storey house and I looked up. The shutters were tight closed, and there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.’

‘Well, what sort of condition was the house in?’ I asked.

‘Oh, rotten. The whitewash had worn off the walls and there was practically no paint left on the door or the shutters. Some of the tiles off the roof were lying on the ground. They looked as though they’d been blown away in a gale.’

‘Queer,’ I said.

‘I went to my friend Fernández, the chemist, and he told me the same story as José. I asked about the madman and Fernández said that no one ever saw him. He was more or less comatose ordinarily, but now and then he had an attack of acute mania and then he could be heard from ever so far laughing his head off and then crying. It used to scare people. He died in one of his attacks and his keepers cleared out at once. No one had ever dared to live in the house since.

‘I didn’t tell Fernández what I’d heard. I thought he’d only laugh at me. I stayed up that night and kept watch. But nothing happened. There wasn’t a sound. I waited about till dawn and then I went to bed.’

‘And you never heard anything more?’

‘Not for a month. The drought continued and I went on sleeping in the lumber–room at the back. One night I was fast asleep, when something seemed to happen to me; I don’t exactly know how to describe it, it was a funny feeling as though someone had given me a little nudge, to warn me, and suddenly I was wide awake. I lay there in my bed and then in the same way as before I heard a long, low gurgle, like a man enjoying an old joke. It came from away down in the valley and it got louder. It was a great bellow of laughter. I jumped out of bed and went to the window. My legs began to tremble. It was horrible to stand there and listen to the shouts of laughter that rang through the night. Then there was the pause, and after that a shriek of pain and that ghastly sobbing. It didn’t sound human. I mean, you might have thought it was an animal being tortured. I don’t mind telling you I was scared stiff. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. After a time the sounds stopped, not suddenly, but dying away little by little. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I crept back to bed and hid my face.

‘I remembered then that Fernández had told me that the madman’s attacks only came at intervals. The rest of the time he was quite quiet. Apathetic, Fernández said. I wondered if the fits of mania came regularly. I reckoned out how long it had been between the two attacks I’d heard. Twenty–eight days. It didn’t take me long to put two and two together; it was quite obvious that it was the full moon that set him off. I’m not a nervous man really and I made up my mind to get to the bottom of it, so I looked out in the calendar which day the moon would be full next and that night I didn’t go to bed. I cleaned my revolver and loaded it. I prepared a lantern and sat down on the parapet of my house to wait. I felt perfectly cool. To tell you the truth, I was rather pleased with myself because I didn’t feel scared. There was a bit of a wind, and it whistled about the roof. It rustled over the leaves of the olive trees like waves swishing on the pebbles of the beach. The moon shone on the white walls of the house in the hollow. I felt particularly cheery.

‘At last I heard a little sound, the sound I knew, and I almost laughed. I was right; it was the full moon and the attacks came as regular as clockwork. That was all to the good. I threw myself over the wall into the olive grove and ran straight to the house. The chuckling grew louder as I came near. I got to the house and looked up. There was no light anywhere. I put my ears to the door and listened. I heard the madman simply laughing his bloody head off. I beat on the door with my fist and I pulled the bell. The sound of it seemed to amuse him. He roared with laughter. I knocked again, louder and louder, and the more I knocked the more he laughed. Then I shouted at the top of my voice.

‘“Open the blasted door, or I’ll break it down.”

‘I stepped back and kicked the latch with all my might. I flung myself at the door with the whole weight of my body. It cracked. Then I put all my strength into it and the damned thing smashed open.

‘I took the revolver out of my pocket and held my lantern in the other hand. The laughter sounded louder now that the door was opened. I stepped in. The stink nearly knocked me down. I mean, just think, the windows hadn’t been opened for twenty years. The row was enough to raise the dead, but for a moment I didn’t know where it was coming from. The walls seemed to throw the sound backwards and forwards. I pushed open a door by my side and went into a room. It was bare and white and there wasn’t a stick of furniture in it. The sound was louder and I followed it. I went into another room, but there was nothing there. I opened a door and found myself at the foot of a staircase. The madman was laughing just over my head. I walked up, cautiously, you know, I wasn’t taking any risks, and at the top of the stairs there was a passage. I walked along it, throwing my light ahead of me, and I came to a room at the end. I stopped. He was in there. I was only separated from the sound by a thin door.

‘It was awful to hear it. A shiver passed through me and I cursed myself because I began to tremble. It wasn’t like a human being at all. By Jove, I very nearly took to my heels and ran. I had to clench my teeth to force myself to stay. But I simply couldn’t bring myself to turn the handle. And then the laughter was cut, cut with a knife you’d have said, and I heard a hiss of pain. I hadn’t heard that before, it was too low to carry to my place, and then a gasp.

‘“Ay!” I heard the man speak in Spanish. “You’re killing me. Take it away. O God, help me!”

‘He screamed. The brutes were torturing him. I flung open the door and burst in. The draught blew a shutter back and the moon streamed in so bright that it dimmed my lantern. In my ears, as clearly as I hear you speak and as close, I heard the wretched chap’s groans. It was awful, moaning and sobbing, and frightful gasps. No one could survive that. He was at the point of death. I tell you I heard his broken, choking cries right in my ears. And the room was empty.’

Robert Morrison sank back in his chair. That huge solid man had strangely the look of a lay figure in a studio. You felt that if you pushed him he would fall over in a heap on to the floor.

‘And then?’ I asked.

He took a rather dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead.

‘I felt I didn’t much want to sleep in that room on the north side, so, heat or no heat, I moved back to my own quarters. Well, exactly four weeks later, about two in the morning, I was waked up by the madman’s chuckle. It was almost at my elbow. I don’t mind telling you that my nerve was a bit shaken by then, so next time the blighter was due to have an attack, next time the moon was full, I mean, I got Fernández to come and spend the night with me. I didn’t tell him anything. I kept him up playing cards till two in the morning, and then I heard it again. I asked him if he heard anything. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s somebody laughing,” I said. “You’re drunk, man,” he said, and he began laughing too. That was too much. “Shut up, you fool,” I said. The laughter grew louder and louder. I cried out. I tried to shut it out by putting my hands to my ears, but it wasn’t a damned bit of good. I heard it and I heard the scream of pain. Fernández thought I was mad. He didn’t dare say so, because he knew I’d have killed him. He said he’d go to bed, and in the morning I found he’d slunk away. His bed hadn’t been slept in. He’d taken himself off when he left me.

‘After that I couldn’t stop in Ecija. I put a factor there and went back to Seville. I felt myself pretty safe there, but as the time came near I began to get scared. Of course I told myself not to be a damned fool, but, you know, I damned well couldn’t help myself. The fact is, I was afraid the sounds had followed me, and I knew if I heard them in Seville I’d go on hearing them all my life. I’ve got as much courage as any man, but damn it all, there are limits to everything. Flesh and blood couldn’t stand it. I knew I’d go stark staring mad. I got in such a state that I began drinking, the suspense was so awful, and I used to lie awake counting the days. And at last I knew it’d come. And it came. I heard those sounds in Seville–sixty miles away from Ecija.’

I didn’t know what to say. I was silent for a while.

‘When did you hear the sounds last?’ I asked.

‘Four weeks ago.’

I looked up quickly. I was startled.

‘What d’you mean by that? It’s not full moon tonight?’

He gave me a dark, angry look. He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped as though he couldn’t. You would have said his vocal cords were paralysed, and it was with a strange croak that at last he answered.

‘Yes, it is.’

He stared at me and his pale blue eyes seemed to shine red. I have never seen in a man’s face a look of such terror. He got up quickly and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

I must admit that I didn’t sleep any too well that night myself.

BEFORE THE PARTY

Mrs Skinner liked to be in good time. She was already dressed, in black silk as befitted her age and the mourning she wore for her son–in–law, and now she put on her toque. She was a little uncertain about it, since the egrets’ feathers which adorned it might very well arouse in some of the friends she would certainly meet at the party acid expostulations; and of course it was shocking to kill those beautiful white birds, in the mating season too, for the sake of their feathers; but there they were, so pretty and stylish, and it would have been silly to refuse them, and it would have hurt her son–in–law’s feelings. He had brought them all the way from Borneo and he expected her to be so pleased with them. Kathleen had made herself rather unpleasant about them, she must wish she hadn’t now, after what had happened, but Kathleen had never really liked Harold. Mrs Skinner, standing at her dressing–table, placed the toque on her head, it was after all the only nice hat she had, and put in a pin with a large jet knob. If anybody spoke to her about the ospreys she had her answer.

‘I know it’s dreadful,’ she would say, ‘and I wouldn’t dream of buying them, but my poor son–in–law brought them back the last time he was home on leave.’

That would explain her possession of them and excuse their use. Everyone had been very kind. Mrs Skinner took a clean handkerchief from a drawer and sprinkled a little eau de Cologne on it. She never used scent, and she had always thought it rather fast, but eau de Cologne was so refreshing. She was very nearly ready now, and her eyes wandered out of the window behind her looking–glass. Canon Hey wood had a beautiful day for his garden–party. It was warm and the sky was blue; the trees had not yet lost the fresh green of the spring. She smiled as she saw her little granddaughter in the strip of garden behind the house busily raking her very own flower–bed. Mrs Skinner wished Joan were not quite so pale, it was a mistake to have kept her so long in the tropics; and she was so grave for her age, you never saw her run about; she played quiet games of her own invention and watered her garden. Mrs Skinner gave the front of her dress a little pat, took up her gloves, and went downstairs.

Kathleen was at the writing–table in the window busy with lists she was making, for she was honorary secretary of the Ladies’ Golf Club, and when there were competitions had a good deal to do. But she too was ready for the party.

‘I see you’ve put on your jumper after all,’ said Mrs Skinner.

They had discussed at luncheon whether Kathleen should wear her jumper or her black chiffon. The jumper was black and white, and Kathleen thought it rather smart, but it was hardly mourning. Millicent, however, was in favour of it.

‘There’s no reason why we should all look as if we’d just come from a funeral,’ she said. ‘Harold’s been dead eight months.’

To Mrs Skinner it seemed rather unfeeling to talk like that. Millicent was strange since her return from Borneo.

‘You’re not going to leave off your weeds yet, darling?’ she asked.

Millicent did not give a direct answer.

‘People don’t wear mourning in the way they used,’ she said. She paused a little and when she went on there was a tone in her voice which Mrs Skinner thought quite peculiar. It was plain that Kathleen noticed it too, for she gave her sister a curious look. ‘I’m sure Harold wouldn’t wish me to wear mourning for him indefinitely.’

‘I dressed early because I wanted to say something to Millicent,’ said Kathleen in reply to her mother’s observation.

‘Oh?’

Kathleen did not explain. But she put her lists aside and with knitted brows read for the second time a letter from a lady who complained that the committee had most unfairly marked down her handicap from twenty–four to eighteen. It requires a good deal of tact to be honorary secretary to a ladies’ golf club. Mrs Skinner began to put on her new gloves. The sun–blinds kept the room cool and dark. She looked at the great wooden hornbill, gaily painted, which Harold had left in her safekeeping; and it seemed a little odd and barbaric to her, but he had set much store on it. It had some religious significance and Canon Heywood had been greatly struck by it. On the wall, over the sofa, were Malay weapons, she forgot what they were called, and here and there on occasional tables pieces of silver and brass which Harold at various times had sent to them. She had liked Harold and involuntarily her eyes sought his photograph which stood on the piano with photographs of her two daughters, her grandchild, her sister, and her sister’s son.

‘Why, Kathleen, where’s Harold’s photograph?’ she asked.

Kathleen looked round. It no longer stood in its place.

‘Someone’s taken it away,’ said Kathleen.

Surprised and puzzled, she got up and went over to the piano. The photographs had been rearranged so that no gap should show.

‘Perhaps Millicent wanted to have it in her bedroom,’ said Mrs Skinner.

‘I should have noticed it. Besides, Millicent has several photographs of Harold. She keeps them locked up.’

Mrs Skinner had thought it very peculiar that her daughter should have no photographs of Harold in her room. Indeed she had spoken of it once, but Millicent had made no reply. Millicent had been strangely silent since she came back from Borneo, and had not encouraged the sympathy Mrs Skinner would have been so willing to show her. She seemed unwilling to speak of her great loss. Sorrow took people in different ways. Her husband had said the best thing was to leave her alone. The thought of him turned her ideas to the party they were going to.

‘Father asked if I thought he ought to wear a top–hat,’ she said. ‘I said I thought it was just as well to be on the safe side.’

It was going to be quite a grand affair. They were having ices, strawberry and vanilla, from Boddy, the confectioner, but the Hey woods were making the iced coffee at home. Everyone would be there. They had been asked to meet the Bishop of Hong Kong, who was staying with the Canon, an old college friend of his, and he was going to speak on the Chinese missions. Mrs Skinner, whose daughter had lived in the East for eight years and whose son–in–law had been Resident of a district in Borneo, was in a flutter of interest. Naturally it meant more to her than to people who had never had anything to do with the Colonies and that sort of thing.

‘What can they know of England who only England know?’ as Mr Skinner said.

He came into the room at that moment. He was a lawyer, as his father had been before him, and he had offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He went up to London every morning and came down every evening. He was only able to accompany his wife and daughters to the Canon’s garden–party because the Canon had very wisely chosen a Saturday to have it on. Mr Skinner looked very well in his tail–coat and pepper–and–salt trousers. He was not exactly dressy, but he was neat. He looked like a respectable family solicitor, which indeed he was; his firm never touched work that was not perfectly above board, and if a client went to him with some trouble that was not quite nice, Mr Skinner would look grave.

‘I don’t think this is the sort of case that we very much care to undertake,’ he said. ‘I think you’d do better to go elsewhere.’

He drew towards him his writing–block and scribbled a name and address on it. He tore off a sheet of paper and handed it to his client.

‘If I were you I think I would go and see these people. If you mention my name I believe they’ll do anything they can for you.’

Mr Skinner was clean–shaven and very bald. His pale lips were tight and thin, but his blue eyes were shy. He had no colour in his cheeks and his face was much lined.

‘I see you’ve put on your new trousers,’ said Mrs Skinner.

‘I thought it would be a good opportunity,’ he answered. ‘I was wondering if I should wear a buttonhole.’

‘I wouldn’t, father,’ said Kathleen. ‘I don’t think it’s awfully good form.’

‘A lot of people will be wearing them,’ said Mrs Skinner.

‘Only clerks and people like that,’ said Kathleen. ‘The Heywoods have had to ask everybody, you know. And besides, we are in mourning.’

‘I wonder if there’ll be a collection after the Bishop’s address,’ said Mr Skinner.

‘I should hardly think so,’ said Mrs Skinner.

‘I think it would be rather bad form,’ agreed Kathleen.

‘It’s as well to be on the safe side,’ said Mr Skinner. ‘I’ll give for all of us. I was wondering if ten shillings would be enough or if I must give a pound.’

‘If you give anything I think you ought to give a pound, father,’ said Kathleen.

‘I’ll see when the time comes. I don’t want to give less than anyone else, but on the other hand I see no reason to give more than I need.’

Kathleen put away her papers in the drawer of the writing–table and stood up. She looked at her wrist–watch.

’Is Millicent ready?’ asked Mrs Skinner.

‘There’s plenty of time. We’re only asked at four, and I don’t think we ought to arrive much before half past. I told Davis to bring the car round at four–fifteen.’

Generally Kathleen drove the car, but on grand occasions like this Davis, who was the gardener, put on his uniform and acted as chauffeur. It looked better when you drove up, and naturally Kathleen didn’t much want to drive herself when she was wearing her new jumper. The sight of her mother forcing her fingers one by one into her new gloves reminded her that she must put on her own. She smelt them to see if any odour of the cleaning still clung to them. It was very slight. She didn’t believe anyone would notice.

At last the door opened and Millicent came in. She wore her widow’s weeds. Mrs Skinner never could get used to them, but of course she knew that Millicent must wear them for a year. It was a pity they didn’t suit her; they suited some people. She had tried on Millicent’s bonnet once, with its white band and long veil, and thought she looked very well in it. Of course she hoped dear Alfred would survive her, but if he didn’t she would never go out of weeds. Queen Victoria never had. It was different for Millicent; Millicent was a much younger woman; she was only thirty–six: it was very sad to be a widow at thirty–six. And there wasn’t much chance of her marrying again. Kathleen wasn’t very likely to marry now, she was thirty–five; last time Millicent and Harold had come home she had suggested that they should have Kathleen to stay with them; Harold had seemed willing enough, but Millicent said it wouldn’t do. Mrs Skinner didn’t know why not. It would give her a chance. Of course they didn’t want to get rid of her, but a girl ought to marry, and somehow all the men they knew at home were married already. Millicent said the climate was trying. It was true she was a bad colour. No one would think now that Millicent had been the prettier of the two. Kathleen had fined down as she grew older, of course some people said she was too thin, but now that she had cut her hair, with her cheeks red from playing golf in all weathers, Mrs Skinner thought her quite pretty. No one could say that of poor Millicent; she had lost her figure completely; she had never been tall, and now that she had filled out she looked stocky. She was a good deal too fat; Mrs Skinner supposed it was due to the tropical heat that prevented her from taking exercise. Her skin was sallow and muddy; and her blue eyes, which had been her best feature, had gone quite pale.

‘She ought to do something about her neck,’ Mrs Skinner reflected. ‘She’s becoming dreadfully jowly.’

She had spoken of it once or twice to her husband. He remarked that Millicent wasn’t as young as she was; that might be, but she needn’t let herself go altogether. Mrs Skinner made up her mind to talk to her daughter seriously, but of course she must respect her grief, and she would wait till the year was up. She was just as glad to have this reason to put off a conversation the thought of which made her slightly nervous. For Millicent was certainly changed. There was something sullen in her face which made her mother not quite at home with her. Mrs Skinner liked to say aloud all the thoughts that passed through her head, but Millicent when you made a remark (just to say something, you know) had an awkward habit of not answering, so that you wondered whether she had heard. Sometimes Mrs Skinner found it so irritating, that not to be quite sharp with Millicent she had to remind herself that poor Harold had only been dead eight months.

The light from the window fell on the widow’s heavy face as she advanced silently, but Kathleen stood with her back to it. She watched her sister for a moment.

‘Millicent, there’s something I want to say to you,’ she said. ‘I was playing golf with Gladys Hey wood this morning.’

‘Did you beat her?’ asked Millicent.

Gladys Hey wood was the Canon’s only unmarried daughter.

‘She told me something about you which I think you ought to know.’

Millicent’s eyes passed beyond her sister to the little girl watering flowers in the garden.

‘Have you told Annie to give Joan her tea in the kitchen, mother?’ she said.

‘Yes, she’ll have it when the servants have theirs.’ Kathleen looked at her sister coolly.

‘The Bishop spent two or three days at Singapore on his way home,’ she went on. ‘He’s very fond of travelling. He’s been to Borneo, and he knows a good many of the people that you know.’

‘He’ll be interested to see you, dear,’ said Mrs Skinner. ‘Did he know poor Harold?’

‘Yes, he met him at Kuala Solor. He remembers him very well. He says he was shocked to hear of his death.’

Millicent sat down and began to put on her black gloves. It seemed strange to Mrs Skinner that she received these remarks with complete silence.

‘Oh, Millicent,’ she said, ‘Harold’s photo has disappeared. Have you taken it?’

‘Yes, I put it away.’

‘I should have thought you’d like to have it out.’

Once more Millicent said nothing. It really was an exasperating habit.

Kathleen turned slightly in order to face her sister.

‘Millicent, why did you tell us that Harold died of fever?’

The widow made no gesture, she looked at Kathleen with steady eyes, but her sallow skin darkened with a flush. She did not reply.

‘What do you mean, Kathleen?’ asked Mr Skinner, with surprise.

‘The Bishop says that Harold committed suicide.’

Mrs Skinner gave a startled cry, but her husband put out a deprecating hand.

’Is it true, Millicent?’

‘It is.’

‘But why didn’t you tell us?’

Millicent paused for an instant. She fingered idly a piece of Brunei brass which stood on the table by her side. That too had been a present from Harold.

‘I thought it better for Joan that her father should be thought to have died of fever. I didn’t want her to know anything about it.’

‘You’ve put us in an awfully awkward position,’ said Kathleen, frowning a little. ‘Gladys Hey wood said she thought it rather nasty of me not to have told her the truth. I had the greatest difficulty in getting her to believe that I knew absolutely nothing about it. She said her father was rather put out. He says, after all the years we’ve known one another, and considering that he married you, and the terms we’ve been on, and all that, he does think we might have had confidence in him. And at all events, if we didn’t want to tell him the truth we needn’t have told him a lie.’

‘I must say I sympathize with him there,’ said Mr Skinner, acidly.

‘Of course I told Gladys that we weren’t to blame. We only told them what you told us.’

‘I hope it didn’t put you off your game,’ said Millicent.

‘Really, my dear, I think that is a most improper observation,’ exclaimed her father.

He rose from his chair, walked over to the empty fireplace, and from force of habit stood in front of it with parted coat–tails.

‘It was my business,’ said Millicent, ‘and if I chose to keep it to myself I didn’t see why I shouldn’t.’

‘It doesn’t look as if you had any affection for your mother if you didn’t even tell her,’ said Mrs Skinner.

Millicent shrugged her shoulders.

‘You might have known it was bound to come out,’ said Kathleen.

‘Why? I didn’t expect that two gossiping old parsons would have nothing else to talk about than me.’

‘When the Bishop said he’d been to Borneo it’s only natural that the Hey woods should ask him if he knew you and Harold.’

‘All that’s neither here nor there,’ said Mr Skinner. ‘I think you should certainly have told us the truth, and we could have decided what was the best thing to do. As a solicitor I can tell you that in the long run it only makes things worse if you attempt to hide them.’

‘Poor Harold,’ said Mrs Skinner, and the tears began to trickle down her raddled cheeks. ‘It seems dreadful. He was always a good son–in–law to me. Whatever induced him to do such a dreadful thing?’

‘The climate.’

‘I think you’d better give us all the facts, Millicent,’ said her father.

‘Kathleen will tell you.’

Kathleen hesitated. What she had to say really was rather dreadful. It seemed terrible that such things should happen to a family like theirs.

‘The Bishop says he cut his throat.’

Mrs Skinner gasped and she went impulsively up to her bereaved daughter. She wanted to fold her in her arms.

‘My poor child,’ she sobbed.

But Millicent withdrew herself.

‘Please don’t fuss me, mother. I really can’t stand being mauled about.’

‘Really, Millicent,’ said Mr Skinner, with a frown.

He did not think she was behaving very nicely.

Mrs Skinner dabbed her eyes carefully with her handkerchief and with a sigh and a little shake of the head returned to her chair. Kathleen fidgeted with the long chain she wore round her neck.

‘It does seem rather absurd that I should have to be told the details of my brother–in–law’s death by a friend. It makes us all look such fools. The Bishop wants very much to see you, Millicent; he wants to tell you how much he feels for you.’ She paused, but Millicent did not speak. ‘He says that Millicent had been away with Joan and when she came back she found poor Harold lying dead on his bed.’

‘It must have been a great shock,’ said Mr Skinner.

Mrs Skinner began to cry again, but Kathleen put her hand gently on her shoulder.

‘Don’t cry, mother,’ she said. ‘It’ll make your eyes red and people will think it so funny.’

They were all silent while Mrs Skinner, drying her eyes, made a successful effort to control herself. It seemed very strange to her that this very moment she should be wearing in her toque the ospreys that poor Harold had given her.

‘There’s something else I ought to tell you,’ said Kathleen.

Millicent looked at her sister again, without haste, and her eyes were steady, but watchful. She had the look of a person who is waiting for a sound which he is afraid of missing.

‘I don’t want to say anything to wound you, dear,’ Kathleen went on, ‘but there’s something else and I think you ought to know it. The Bishop says that Harold drank.’

‘Oh, my dear, how dreadful!’ cried Mrs Skinner. ‘What a shocking thing to say. Did Gladys Heywood tell you? What did you say?’

‘I said it was entirely untrue.’

‘This is what comes of making secrets of things,’ said Mr Skinner, irritably. ‘It’s always the same. If you try and hush a thing up all sorts of rumours get about which are ten times worse than the truth.’

‘They told the Bishop in Singapore that Harold had killed himself while he was suffering from delirium tremens. I think for all our sakes you ought to deny that, Millicent.’

‘It’s such a dreadful thing to have said about anyone who’s dead,’ said Mrs Skinner. ‘And it’ll be so bad for Joan when she grows up.’

‘But what is the foundation of this story, Millicent?’ asked her father. ‘Harold was always very abstemious.’

‘Here,’ said the widow.

‘Did he drink?’

‘Like a fish.’

The answer was so unexpected, and the tone so sardonic, that all three of them were startled.

‘Millicent, how can you talk like that of your husband when he’s dead?’ cried her mother, clasping her neatly gloved hands. ‘I can’t understand you. You’ve been so strange since you came back. I could never have believed that a girl of mine could take her husband’s death like that.’

‘Never mind about that, mother,’ said Mr Skinner. ‘We can go into all that later.’

He walked to the window and looked out at the sunny little garden, and then walked back into the room. He took his pince–nez out of his pocket, and though he had no intention of putting them on, wiped them with his handkerchief. Millicent looked at him and in her eyes, unmistakably, was a look of irony which was quite cynical. Mr Skinner was vexed. He had finished his week’s work and he was a free man till Monday morning. Though he had told his wife that this garden–party was a great nuisance and he would much sooner have tea quietly in his own garden, he had been looking forward to it. He did not care very much about Chinese missions, but it would be interesting to meet the Bishop. And now this! It was not the kind of thing he cared to be mixed up in; it was most unpleasant to be told on a sudden that his son–in–law was a drunkard and a suicide. Millicent was thoughtfully smoothing her white cuffs. Her coolness irritated him; but instead of addressing her he spoke to his younger daughter.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Kathleen? Surely there are plenty of chairs in the room.’

Kathleen drew forward a chair and without a word seated herself. Mr Skinner stopped in front of Millicent and faced her.

‘Of course I see why you told us Harold had died of fever. I think it was a mistake, because that sort of thing is bound to come out sooner or later. I don’t know how far what the Bishop has told the Heywoods coincides with the facts, but if you will take my advice you will tell us everything as circumstantially as you can, then we can see. We can’t hope that it will go no further now that Canon Heywood and Gladys know. In a place like this people are bound to talk. It will make it easier for all of us if we at all events know the exact truth.’

Mrs Skinner and Kathleen thought he put the matter very well. They waited for Millicent’s reply. She had listened with an impassive face; that sudden flush had disappeared and it was once more, as usual, pasty and sallow.

‘I don’t think you’ll much like the truth if I tell it you,’ she said.

‘You must know that you can count on our sympathy and understanding,’ said Kathleen gravely.

Millicent gave her a glance and the shadow of a smile flickered across her set mouth. She looked slowly at the three of them. Mrs Skinner had an uneasy impression that she looked at them as though they were mannequins at a dressmaker’s. She seemed to live in a different world from theirs and to have no connexion with them.

‘You know, I wasn’t in love with Harold when I married him,’ she said reflectively.

Mrs Skinner was on the point of making an exclamation when a rapid gesture of her husband, barely indicated, but after so many years of married life perfectly significant, stopped her. Millicent went on. She spoke with a level voice, slowly, and there was little change of expression in her tone.

‘I was twenty–seven, and no one else seemed to want to marry me. It’s true he was forty–four, and it seemed rather old, but he had a very good position, hadn’t he? I wasn’t likely to get a better chance.’

Mrs Skinner felt inclined to cry again, but she remembered the party.

‘Of course I see now why you took his photograph away,’ she said dolefully.

‘Don’t, mother,’ exclaimed Kathleen.

It had been taken when he was engaged to Millicent and was a very good photograph of Harold. Mrs Skinner had always thought him quite a fine man. He was heavily built, tall and perhaps a little too fat, but he held himself well, and his presence was imposing. He was inclined to be bald, even then, but men did go bald very early nowadays, and he said that topees, sun–helmets, you know, were very bad for the hair. He had a small dark moustache, and his face was deeply burned by the sun. Of course his best feature was his eyes; they were brown and large, like Joan’s. His conversation was interesting. Kathleen said he was pompous, but Mrs Skinner didn’t think him so, she didn’t mind it if a man laid down the law; and when she saw, as she very soon did, that he was attracted by Millicent she began to like him very much. He was always very attentive to Mrs Skinner, and she listened as though she were really interested when he spoke of his district, and told her of the big game he had killed. Kathleen said he had a pretty good opinion of himself, but Mrs Skinner came of a generation which accepted without question the good opinion that men had of themselves. Millicent saw very soon which way the wind blew, and though she said nothing to her mother, her mother knew that if Harold asked her she was going to accept him.

Harold was staying with some people who had been thirty years in Borneo and they spoke well of the country. There was no reason why a woman shouldn’t live there comfortably; of course the children had to come home when they were seven; but Mrs Skinner thought it unnecessary to trouble about that yet. She asked Harold to dine, and she told him they were always in to tea. He seemed to be at a loose end, and when his visit to his old friends was drawing to a close, she told him they would be very much pleased if he would come and spend a fortnight with them. It was towards the end of this that Harold and Millicent became engaged. They had a very pretty wedding, they went to Venice for their honeymoon, and then they started for the East. Millicent wrote from various ports at which the ship touched. She seemed happy.

‘People were very nice to me at Kuala Solor,’ she said. Kuala Solor was the chief town of the state of Sembulu. ‘We stayed with the Resident and everyone asked us to dinner. Once or twice I heard men ask Harold to have a drink, but he refused; he said he had turned over a new leaf now he was a married man. I didn’t know why they laughed. Mrs Gray, the Resident’s wife, told me they were all so glad Harold was married. She said it was dreadfully lonely for a bachelor on one of the outstations. When we left Kuala Solor Mrs Gray said good–bye to me so funnily that I was quite surprised. It was as if she was solemnly putting Harold in my charge.’

They listened to her in silence. Kathleen never took her eyes off her sister’s impassive face; but Mr Skinner stared straight in front of him at the Malay arms, krises and parangs, which hung on the wall above the sofa on which his wife sat.

‘It wasn’t till I went back to Kuala Solor a year and a half later, that I found out why their manner had seemed so odd.’ Millicent gave a queer little sound like the echo of a scornful laugh. ‘I knew then a good deal that I hadn’t known before. Harold came to England that time in order to marry. He didn’t much mind who it was. Do you remember how we spread ourselves out to catch him, mother? We needn’t have taken so much trouble.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Millicent,’ said Mrs Skinner, not without acerbity, for the insinuation of scheming did not please her. ‘I saw he was attracted by you.’

Millicent shrugged her heavy shoulders.

‘He was a confirmed drunkard. He used to go to bed every night with a bottle of whisky and empty it before morning. The Chief Secretary told him he’d have to resign unless he stopped drinking. He said he’d give him one more chance. He could take his leave then and go to England. He advised him to marry so that when he got back he’d have someone to look after him. Harold married me because he wanted a keeper. They took bets in Kuala Solor on how long I’d make him stay sober.’

‘But he was in love with you,’ Mrs Skinner interrupted. ‘You don’t know how he used to speak to me about you, and at that time you’re speaking of, when you went to Kuala Solor to have Joan, he wrote me such a charming letter about you.’

Millicent looked at her mother again and a deep colour dyed her sallow skin. Her hands, lying on her lap, began to tremble a little. She thought of those first months of her married life. The government launch took them to the mouth of the river, and they spent the night at the bungalow which Harold said jokingly was their seaside residence. Next day they went up–stream in a prahu. From the novels she had read she expected the rivers of Borneo to be dark and strangely sinister, but the sky was blue, dappled with little white clouds, and the green of the mangroves and the nipahs, washed by the flowing water, glistened in the sun. On each side stretched the pathless jungle, and in the distance, silhouetted against the sky, was the rugged outline of a mountain. The air in the early morning was fresh and buoyant. She seemed to enter upon a friendly, fertile land, and she had a sense of spacious freedom. They watched the banks for monkeys sitting on the branches of the tangled trees, and once Harold pointed out something that looked like a log and said it was a crocodile. The Assistant Resident, in ducks and a topee, was at the landing–stage to meet them, and a dozen trim little soldiers were lined up to do them honour. The Assistant Resident was introduced to her. His name was Simpson.

‘By Jove, sir,’ he said to Harold. ‘I’m glad to see you back. It’s been deuced lonely without you.’

The Resident’s bungalow, surrounded by a garden in which grew wildly all manner of gay flowers, stood on the top of a low hill. It was a trifle shabby and the furniture was sparse, but the rooms were cool and of generous size.

‘The kampong is down there,’ said Harold, pointing.

Her eyes followed his gesture, and from among the coconut trees rose the beating of a gong. It gave her a queer little sensation in the heart.

Though she had nothing much to do the days passed easily enough. At dawn a boy brought them their tea and they lounged about the veranda, enjoying the fragrance of the morning (Harold in a singlet and a sarong, she in a dressing–gown) till it was time to dress for breakfast. Then Harold went to his office and she spent an hour or two learning Malay. After tiffin he went back to his office while she slept. A cup of tea revived them both, and they went for a walk or played golf on the nine–hole links which Harold had made on a level piece of cleared jungle below the bungalow. Night fell at six and Mr Simpson came along to have a drink. They chatted till their late dinner hour, and sometimes Harold and Mr Simpson played chess. The balmy evenings were enchanting. The fireflies turned the bushes just below the veranda into coldly–sparkling, tremulous beacons, and flowering trees scented the air with sweet odours. After dinner they read the papers which had left London six weeks before and presently went to bed. Millicent enjoyed being a married woman, with a house of her own, and she was pleased with the native servants, in their gay sarongs, who went about the bungalow, with bare feet, silent but friendly. It gave her a pleasant sense of importance to be the wife of the Resident. Harold impressed her by the fluency with which he spoke the language, by his air of command, and by his dignity. She went into the court–house now and then to hear him try cases. The multifariousness of his duties and the competent way in which he performed them aroused her respect. Mr Simpson told her that Harold understood the natives as well as any man in the country. He had the combination of firmness, tact, and good–humour which was essential in dealing with that timid, revengeful, and suspicious race. Millicent began to feel a certain admiration for her husband.

They had been married nearly a year when two English naturalists came to stay with them for a few days on their way to the interior. They brought a pressing recommendation from the governor, and Harold said he wanted to do them proud. Their arrival was an agreeable change. Millicent asked Mr Simpson to dinner (he lived at the Fort and only dined with them on Sunday nights) and after dinner the men sat down to play bridge. Millicent left them presently and went to bed, but they were so noisy that for some time she could not get to sleep. She did not know at what hour she was awakened by Harold staggering into the room. She kept silent. He made up his mind to have a bath before getting into bed; the bath–house was just below their room, and he went down the steps that led to it. Apparently he slipped, for there was a great clatter, and he began to swear. Then he was violently sick. She heard him sluice the buckets of water over himself and in a little while, walking very cautiously this time, he crawled up the stairs and slipped into bed. Millicent pretended to be asleep. She was disgusted. Harold was drunk. She made up her mind to speak about it in the morning. What would the naturalists think of him? But in the morning Harold was so dignified that she hadn’t quite the determination to refer to the matter. At eight Harold and she, with their two guests, sat down to breakfast. Harold looked round the table.

‘Porridge,’ he said. ‘Millicent, your guests might manage a little Worcester sauce for breakfast, but I don’t think they’ll much fancy anything else. Personally I shall content myself with a whisky and soda.’

The naturalists laughed, but shamefacedly.

‘Your husband’s a terror,’ said one of them.

‘I should not think I had properly performed the duties of hospitality if I sent you sober to bed on the first night of your visit,’ said Harold, with his round, stately way of putting things.

Millicent, smiling acidly, was relieved to think that her guests had been as drunk as her husband. The next evening she sat up with them and the party broke up at a reasonable hour. But she was glad when the strangers went on with their journey. Their life resumed its placid course. Some months later Harold went on a tour of inspection of his district and came back with a bad attack of malaria. This was the first time she had seen the disease of which she had heard so much, and when he recovered it did not seem strange to her that Harold was very shaky. She found his manner peculiar. He would come back from the office and stare at her with glazed eyes; he would stand on the veranda, swaying slightly, but still dignified, and make long harangues about the political situation in England; losing the thread of his discourse, he would look at her with an archness which his natural stateliness made somewhat disconcerting and say:

‘Pulls you down dreadfully, this confounded malaria. Ah, little woman, you little know the strain it puts upon a man to be an empire builder.’

She thought that Mr Simpson began to look worried, and once or twice, when they were alone, he seemed on the point of saying something to her which his shyness at the last moment prevented. The feeling grew so strong that it made her nervous, and one evening when Harold, she knew not why, had remained later than usual at the office she tackled him.

‘What have you got to say to me, Mr Simpson?’ she broke out suddenly.

He blushed and hesitated.

‘Nothing. What makes you think I have anything in particular to say to you?’

Mr Simpson was a thin, weedy youth of four and twenty, with a fine head of waving hair which he took great pains to plaster down very flat. His wrists were swollen and scarred with mosquito bites. Millicent looked at him steadily.

‘If it’s something to do with Harold don’t you think it would be kinder to tell me frankly?’

He grew scarlet now. He shuffled uneasily on his rattan chair. She insisted.

‘I’m afraid you’ll think it awful cheek,’ he said at last. ‘It’s rotten of me to say anything about my chief behind his back. Malaria’s a rotten thing, and after one’s had a bout of it one feels awfully down and out.’

He hesitated again. The corners of his mouth sagged as if he were going to cry. To Millicent he seemed like a little boy.

‘I’ll be as silent as the grave,’ she said with a smile, trying to conceal her apprehension. ‘Do tell me.’

‘I think it’s a pity your husband keeps a bottle of whisky at the office. He’s apt to take a nip more often than he otherwise would.’

Mr Simpson’s voice was hoarse with agitation. Millicent felt a sudden coldness shiver through her. She controlled herself, for she knew that she must not frighten the boy if she were to get out of him all there was to tell. He was unwilling to speak. She pressed him, wheedling, appealing to his sense of duty, and at last she began to cry. Then he told her that Harold had been drunk more or less for the last fortnight, the natives were talking about it, and they said that soon he would be as bad as he had been before his marriage. He had been in the habit of drinking a good deal too much then, but details of that time, notwithstanding all her attempts, Mr Simpson resolutely declined to give her.

‘Do you think he’s drinking now?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

Millicent felt herself on a sudden hot with shame and anger. The Fort, as it was called because the rifles and the ammunition were kept there, was also the court–house. It stood opposite the Resident’s bungalow in a garden of its own. The sun was just about to set and she did not need a hat. She got up and walked across. She found Harold sitting in the office behind the large hall in which he administered justice. There was a bottle of whisky in front of him. He was smoking cigarettes and talking to three or four Malays who stood in front of him listening with obsequious and at the same time scornful smiles. His face was red.

The natives vanished.

‘I came to see what you were doing,’ she said.

He rose, for he always treated her with elaborate politeness, and lurched. Feeling himself unsteady he assumed an elaborate stateliness of demeanour.

‘Take a seat, my dear, take a seat. I was detained by press of work.’

She looked at him with angry eyes.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said.

He stared at her, his eyes bulging a little, and a haughty look gradually traversed his large and fleshy face.

‘I haven’t the remotest idea what you mean,’ he said.

She had been ready with a flow of wrathful expostulation, but suddenly she burst into tears. She sank into a chair and hid her face. Harold looked at her for an instant, then the tears began to trickle down his own cheeks; he came towards her with outstretched arms and fell heavily on his knees. Sobbing, he clasped her to him.

‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ he said. ‘I promise you it shall not happen again. It was that damned malaria.’

‘It’s so humiliating,’ she moaned.

He wept like a child. There was something very touching in the self–abasement of that big dignified man. Presently Millicent looked up. His eyes, appealing and contrite, sought hers.

‘Will you give me your word of honour that you’ll never touch liquor again?’ ‘Yes, yes. I hate it.’

It was then she told him that she was with child. He was overjoyed. ‘That is the one thing I wanted. That’ll keep me straight.’

They went back to the bungalow. Harold bathed himself and had a nap. After dinner they talked long and quietly. He admitted that before he married her he had occasionally drunk more than was good for him; in outstations it was easy to fall into bad habits. He agreed to everything that Millicent asked. And during the months before it was necessary for her to go to Kuala Solor for her confinement, Harold was an excellent husband, tender, thoughtful, proud, and affectionate; he was irreproachable. A launch came to fetch her, she was to leave him for six weeks, and he promised faithfully to drink nothing during her absence. He put his hands on her shoulders.

‘I never break a promise,’ he said in his dignified way. ‘But even without it, can you imagine that while you are going through so much, I should do anything to increase your troubles?’

Joan was born. Millicent stayed at the Resident’s, and Mrs Gray, his wife, a kindly creature of middle age, was very good to her. The two women had little to do during the long hours they were alone but to talk, and in course of time Millicent learnt everything there was to know of her husband’s alcoholic past. The fact which she found most difficult to reconcile herself to was that Harold had been told that the only condition upon which he would be allowed to keep his post was that he should bring back a wife. It caused in her a dull feeling of resentment. And when she discovered what a persistent drunkard he had been, she felt vaguely uneasy. She had a horrid fear that during her absence he would not have been able to resist the craving. She went home with her baby and a nurse. She spent a night at the mouth of the river and sent a messenger in a canoe to announce her arrival. She scanned the landing–stage anxiously as the launch approached it. Harold and Mr Simpson were standing there. The trim little soldiers were lined up. Her heart sank, for Harold was swaying slightly, like a man who seeks to keep his balance on a rolling ship, and she knew he was drunk.

It wasn’t a very pleasant home–coming. She had almost forgotten her mother and father and her sister who sat there silently listening to her. Now she roused herself and became once more aware of their presence. All that she spoke of seemed very far away.

‘I knew that I hated him then,’ she said. ‘I could have killed him.’

‘Oh, Millicent, don’t say that,’ cried her mother. ‘Don’t forget that he’s dead, poor man.’

Millicent looked at her mother, and for a moment a scowl darkened her impassive face. Mr Skinner moved uneasily.

‘Go on,’ said Kathleen.

‘When he found out that I knew all about him he didn’t bother very much more. In three months he had another attack of D.T.s.’

‘Why didn’t you leave him?’ said Kathleen.

‘What would have been the good of that? He would have been dismissed from the service in a fortnight. Who was to keep me and Joan? I had to stay. And when he was sober I had nothing to complain of. He wasn’t in the least in love with me, but he was fond of me; I hadn’t married him because I was in love with him, but because I wanted to be married. I did everything I could to keep liquor from him; I managed to get Mr Gray to prevent whisky being sent from Kuala Solor, but he got it from the Chinese. I watched him as a cat watches a mouse. He was too cunning for me. In a little while he had another outbreak. He neglected his duties. I was afraid complaints would be made. We were two days from Kuala Solor and that was our safeguard, but I suppose something was said, for Mr Gray wrote a private letter of warning to me. I showed it to Harold. He stormed and blustered, but I saw he was frightened, and for two or three months he was quite sober. Then he began again. And so it went on till our leave became due.

‘Before we came to stay here I begged and prayed him to be careful. I didn’t want any of you to know what sort of a man I had married. All the time he was in England he was all right and before we sailed I warned him. He’d grown to be very fond of Joan, and very proud of her, and she was devoted to him. She always liked him better than she liked me. I asked him if he wanted to have his child grow up, knowing that he was a drunkard, and I found out that at last I’d got a hold on him. The thought terrified him. I told him that I wouldn’t allow it, and if he ever let Joan see him drunk I’d take her away from him at once. Do you know, he grew quite pale when I said it. I fell on my knees that night and thanked God, because I’d found a way of saving my husband.

‘He told me that if I would stand by him he would have another try. We made up our minds to fight the thing together. And he tried so hard. When he felt as though he must drink he came to me. You know he was inclined to be rather pompous; with me he was so humble, he was like a child; he depended on me. Perhaps he didn’t love me when he married me, but he loved me then, me and Joan. I’d hated him, because of the humiliation, because when he was drunk and tried to be dignified and impressive he was loathsome; but now I got a strange feeling in my heart. It wasn’t love, but it was a queer, shy tenderness. He was something more than my husband, he was like a child that I’d carried under my heart for long and weary months. He was so proud of me and, you know, I was proud too. His long speeches didn’t irritate me any more, and I only thought his stately ways rather funny and charming. At last we won. For two years he never touched a drop. He lost his craving entirely. He was even able to joke about it.

‘Mr Simpson had left us then and we had another young man called Francis.

‘“I’m a reformed drunkard, you know, Francis,” Harold said to him once. “If it hadn’t been for my wife I’d have been sacked long ago. I’ve got the best wife in the world, Francis.”

‘You don’t know what it meant to me to hear him say that. I felt that all I’d gone through was worth while. I was so happy.’

She was silent. She thought of the broad, yellow and turbid river on whose banks she had lived so long. The egrets, white and gleaming in the tremulous sunset, flew down the stream in a flock, flew low and swift, and scattered. They were like a ripple of snowy notes, sweet and pure and spring–like, which an unseen hand drew forth, a divine arpeggio, from an unseen harp. They fluttered along between the green banks, wrapped in the shadows of evening, like the happy thoughts of a contented mind.

‘Then Joan fell ill. For three weeks we were very anxious. There was no doctor nearer than Kuala Solor and we had to put up with the treatment of a native dispenser. When she grew well again I took her down to the mouth of the river in order to give her a breath of sea air. We stayed there a week. It was the first time I had been separated from Harold since I went away to have Joan. There was a fishing village, on piles, not far from us, but really we were quite alone. I thought a great deal about Harold, so tenderly, and all at once I knew that I loved him. I was so glad when the prahu came to fetch us back, because I wanted to tell him. I thought it would mean a good deal to him. I can’t tell you how happy I was. As we rowed up–stream the headman told me that Mr Francis had had to go up–country to arrest a woman who had murdered her husband. He had been gone a couple of days.

‘I was surprised that Harold was not on the landing–stage to meet me; he was always very punctilious about that sort of thing; he used to say that husband and wife should treat one another as politely as they treated acquaintances; and I could not imagine what business had prevented him. I walked up the little hill on which the bungalow stood. The ayah brought Joan behind me. The bungalow was strangely silent. There seemed to be no servants about, and I could not make it out; I wondered if Harold hadn’t expected me so soon and was out. I went up the steps. Joan was thirsty and the ayah took her to the servants’ quarters to give her something to drink. Harold was not in the sitting–room. I called him, but there was no answer. I was disappointed because I should have liked him to be there. I went into our bedroom. Harold wasn’t out after all; he was lying on the bed asleep. I was really very much amused, because he always pretended he never slept in the afternoon. He said it was an unnecessary habit that we white people got into. I went up to the bed softly. I thought I would have a joke with him. I opened the mosquito curtains. He was lying on his back, with nothing on but a sarong, and there was an empty whisky bottle by his side. He was drunk.

‘It had begun again. All my struggles for so many years were wasted. My dream was shattered. It was all hopeless. I was seized with rage.’

Millicent’s face grew once again darkly red and she clenched the arms of the chair she sat in.

‘I took him by the shoulders and shook him with all my might. “You beast,” I cried, “you beast.” I was so angry I don’t know what I did, I don’t know what I said. I kept on shaking him. You don’t know how loathsome he looked, that large fat man, half naked; he hadn’t shaved for days, and his face was bloated and purple. He was breathing heavily. I shouted at him, but he took no notice. I tried to drag him out of bed, but he was too heavy. He lay there like a log. “Open your eyes,” I screamed. I shook him again. I hated him. I hated him all the more because for a week I’d loved him with all my heart. He’d let me down. He’d let me down. I wanted to tell him what a filthy beast he was. I could make no impression on him. “You shall open your eyes,” I cried. I was determined to make him look at me.’

The widow licked her dry lips. Her breath seemed hurried. She was silent.

‘If he was in that state I should have thought it best to have let him go on sleeping,’ said Kathleen.

‘There was a parang on the wall by the side of the bed. You know how fond Harold was of curios.’

‘What’s a parang?’ said Mrs Skinner.

‘Don’t be silly, mother,’ her husband replied irritably. ‘There’s one on the wall immediately behind you.’

He pointed to the Malay sword on which for some reason his eyes had been unconsciously resting. Mrs Skinner drew quickly into the corner of the sofa, with a little frightened gesture, as though she had been told that a snake lay curled up beside her.

‘Suddenly the blood spurted out from Harold’s throat. There was a great red gash right across it.’

‘Millicent,’ cried Kathleen, springing up and almost leaping towards her, ‘what in God’s name do you mean?’

Mrs Skinner stood staring at her with wide startled eyes, her mouth open.

‘The parang wasn’t on the wall any more. It was on the bed. Then Harold opened his eyes. They were just like Joan’s.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mr Skinner. ‘How could he have committed suicide if he was in the state you describe?’

Kathleen took her sister’s arm and shook her angrily.

‘Millicent, for God’s sake explain.’

Millicent released herself.

‘The parang was on the wall, I told you. I don’t know what happened. There was all the blood, and Harold opened his eyes. He died almost at once. He never spoke, but he gave a sort of gasp.’

At last Mr Skinner found his voice.

‘But, you wretched woman, it was murder.’

Millicent, her face mottled with red, gave him such a look of scornful hatred that he shrank back. Mrs Skinner cried out.

‘Millicent, you didn’t do it, did you?’

Then Millicent did something that made them all feel as though their blood were turned to ice in their veins. She chuckled.

‘I don’t know who else did,’ she said.

‘My God,’ muttered Mr Skinner.

Kathleen had been standing bolt upright with her hands to her heart, as though its beating were intolerable.

‘And what happened then?’ she said.

‘I screamed. I went to the window and flung it open. I called for the ayah. She came across the compound with Joan. “Not Joan,” I cried. “Don’t let her come.” She called the cook and told him to take the child. I cried to her to hurry. And when she came I showed her Harold. “The Tuan’s killed himself!” I cried. She gave a scream and ran out of the house.

‘No one would come near. They were all frightened out of their wits. I wrote a letter to Mr Francis, telling him what had happened and asking him to come at once.’

‘How do you mean you told him what had happened?’

‘I said, on my return from the mouth of the river, I’d found Harold with his throat cut. You know, in the tropics you have to bury people quickly. I got a Chinese coffin, and the soldiers dug a grave behind the Fort. When Mr Francis came, Harold had been buried for nearly two days. He was only a boy. I could do anything I wanted with him. I told him I’d found the parang in Harold’s hand and there was no doubt he’d killed himself in an attack of delirium tremens. I showed him the empty bottle. The servants said he’d been drinking hard ever since I left to go to the sea. I told the same story at Kuala Solor. Everyone was very kind to me, and the government granted me a pension.’

For a little while nobody spoke. At last Mr Skinner gathered himself together.

‘I am a member of the legal profession. I’m a solicitor. I have certain duties. We’ve always had a most respectable practice. You’ve put me in a monstrous position.’

He fumbled, searching for the phrases that played at hide and seek in his scattered wits. Millicent looked at him with scorn.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘It was murder, that’s what it was; do you think I can possibly connive at it?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, father,’ said Kathleen sharply. ‘You can’t give up your own daughter.’

‘You’ve put me in a monstrous position,’ he repeated.

Millicent shrugged her shoulders again.

‘You made me tell you. And I’ve borne it long enough by myself. It was time that all of you bore it too.’

At that moment the door was opened by the maid.

‘Davis has brought the car round, sir,’ she said.

Kathleen had the presence of mind to say something, and the maid withdrew.

‘We’d better be starting,’ said Millicent.

‘I can’t go to the party now,’ cried Mrs Skinner, with horror. ‘I’m far too upset. How can we face the Heywoods? And the Bishop will want to be introduced to you.’

Millicent made a gesture of indifference. Her eyes held their ironical expression.

‘We must go, mother,’ said Kathleen. ‘It would look so funny if we stayed away.’ She turned on Millicent furiously. ‘Oh, I think the whole thing is such frightfully bad form.’

Mrs Skinner looked helplessly at her husband. He went to her and gave her his hand to help her up from the sofa.

‘I’m afraid we must go, mother,’ he said.

‘And me with the ospreys in my toque that Harold gave me with his own hands,’ she moaned.

He led her out of the room, Kathleen followed close on their heels, and a step or two behind came Millicent.

‘You’ll get used to it, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘At first I thought of it all the time, but now I forget it for two or three days together. It’s not as if there was any danger.’

They did not answer. They walked through the hall and out of the front door. The three ladies got into the back of the car and Mr Skinner seated himself beside the driver. They had no self–starter; it was an old car, and Davis went to the bonnet to crank it up. Mr Skinner turned round and looked petulantly at Millicent.

‘I ought never to have been told,’ he said. ‘I think it was most selfish of you.’

Davis took his seat and they drove off to the Canon’s garden–party.

THE VESSEL OF WRATH

There are few books in the world that contain more meat than the Sailing Directions published by the Hydrographic Department by order of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. They are handsome volumes, bound (very flimsily) in cloth of different colours, and the most expensive of them is cheap. For four shillings you can buy the Yangtse Kiang Pilot, ‘containing a description of, and sailing directions for, the Yangtse Kiang from the Wusung river to the highest navigable point, including the Han Kiang, the Kialing Kiang, and the Min Kiang’; and for three shillings you can get Part III of the Eastern Archipelago Pilot, ‘comprising the N.E. end of Celebes, Molucca and Gilolo passages, Banda and Arafura Seas, and North, West, and South–West coasts of New Guinea’. But it is not very safe to do so if you are a creature of settled habits that you have no wish to disturb or if you have an occupation that holds you fast to one place. These business–like books take you upon enchanted journeys of the spirit; and their matter–of–fact style, the admirable order, the concision with which the material is set before you, the stern sense or the practical that informs every line, cannot dim the poetry that, like the spice–laden breeze that assails your senses with a more than material languor when you approach some of those magic islands of the Eastern seas, blows with so sweet a fragrance through the printed pages. They tell you the anchorages and the landing places, what supplies you can get at each spot, and where you can get water; they tell you the lights and buoys, tides, winds, and weather that you will find there. They give you brief information about the population and the trade. And it is strange when you think how sedately it is all set down, with no words wasted, that so much else is given you besides. What? Well, mystery and beauty, romance and the glamour of the unknown. It is no common book that offers you casually turning its pages such a paragraph as this: ‘Supplies. A few jungle fowl are preserved, the island is also the resort of vast numbers of sea birds. Turtle are found in the lagoon, as well as quantities of various fish, including grey mullet, shark, and dog–fish; the seine cannot be used with any effect; but there is a fish which may be taken on a rod. A small store of tinned provisions and spirits is kept in a hut for the relief of shipwrecked persons. Good water may be obtained from a well near the landing–place.’ Can the imagination want more material than this to go on a journey through time and space?

In the volume from which I have copied this passage, the compilers with the same restraint have described the Alas Islands. They are composed of a group or chain of islands, ‘for the most part low and wooded, extending about 75 miles east and west, and 40 miles north and south’. The information about them, you are told, is very slight; there are channels between the different groups, and several vessels have passed through them, but the passages have not been thoroughly explored, and the positions of many of the dangers not yet determined; it is therefore advisable to avoid them. The population of the group is estimated at about 8,000, of whom 200 are Chinese and 400 Mohammedans. The rest are heathen. The principal island is called Baru, it is surrounded by a reef, and here lives a Dutch Contrôleur. His white house with its red roof on the top of a little hill is the most prominent object that the vessels of the Royal Netherlands Steam Packet Company see when every other month on their way up to Macassar and every four weeks on their way down to Merauke in Dutch New Guinea they touch at the island.

At a certain moment of the world’s history the Contrôleur was Mynheer Evert Gruyter and he ruled the people who inhabited the Alas Islands with firmness tempered by a keen sense of the ridiculous. He had thought it a very good joke to be placed at the age of twenty–seven in a position of such consequence, and at thirty he was still amused by it. There was no cable communication between his islands and Batavia, and the mail arrived after so long a delay that even if he asked advice, by the time he received it, it was useless, and so he equably did what he thought best and trusted to his good fortune to keep out of trouble with the authorities. He was very short, not more than five feet four in height, and extremely fat; he was of a florid complexion. For coolness’ sake he kept his head shaved and his face was hairless. It was round and red. His eyebrows were so fair that you hardly saw them; and he had little twinkling blue eyes. He knew that he had no dignity, but for the sake of his position made up for it by dressing very dapperly. He never went to his office, nor sat in court, nor walked abroad but in spotless white. His stengahshifter, with its bright brass buttons, fitted him very tightly and displayed the shocking fact that, young though he was, he had a round and protruding belly. His good–humoured face shone with sweat and he constantly fanned himself with a palm–leaf fan.

But in his house Mr Gruyter preferred to wear nothing but a sarong and then with his white podgy little body he looked like a fat funny boy of sixteen. He was an early riser and his breakfast was always ready for him at six. It never varied. It consisted of a slice of papaia, three cold fried eggs, Edam cheese, sliced thin, and a cup of black coffee. When he had eaten it, he smoked a large Dutch cigar, read the papers if he had not read them through and through already, and then dressed to go down to his office.

One morning while he was thus occupied his head boy came into his bedroom and told him that Tuan Jones wanted to know if he could see him. Mr Gruyter was standing in front of a looking–glass. He had his trousers on and was admiring his smooth chest. He arched his back in order to throw it out and throw in his belly and with a good deal of satisfaction gave his breast three or four resounding slaps. It was a manly chest. When the boy brought the message he looked at his own eyes in the mirror and exchanged a slightly ironic smile with them. He asked himself what the devil his visitor could want. Evert Gruyter spoke English, Dutch, and Malay with equal facility, but he thought in Dutch. He liked to do this. It seemed to him a pleasantly ribald language.

‘Ask the tuan to wait and say I shall come directly.’ He put on his tunic, over his naked body, buttoned it up, and strutted into the sitting–room. The Rev. Owen Jones got up.

‘Good morning, Mr Jones,’ said the Contrôleur. ‘Have you come in to have a peg with me before I start my day’s work?’

Mr Jones did not smile.

‘I’ve come to see you upon a very distressing matter, Mr Gruyter,’ he answered.

The Contrôleur was not disconcerted by his visitor’s gravity nor depressed by his words. His little blue eyes beamed amiably.

‘Sit down, my dear fellow, and have a cigar.’

Mr Gruyter knew quite well that the Rev. Owen Jones neither drank nor smoked, but it tickled something prankish in his nature to offer him a drink and a smoke whenever they met. Mr Jones shook his head.

Mr Jones was in charge of the Baptist Mission on the Alas Islands. His headquarters were at Baru, the largest of them, with the greatest population, but he had meeting–houses under the care of native helpers in several other islands of the group. He was a tall, thin, melancholy man, with a long face, sallow and drawn, of about forty. His brown hair was already white on the temples and it receded from the forehead. This gave him a look of somewhat vacuous intellectuality. Mr Gruyter both disliked and respected him. He disliked him because he was narrow–minded and dogmatic. Himself a cheerful pagan who liked the good things of the flesh and was determined to get as many of them as his circumstances permitted, he had no patience with a man who disapproved of them all. He thought the customs of the country suited its inhabitants and had no patience with the missionary’s energetic efforts to destroy a way of life that for centuries had worked very well. He respected him because he was honest, zealous, and good. Mr Jones, an Australian of Welsh descent, was the only qualified doctor in the group and it was a comfort to know that if you fell ill you need not rely only on a Chinese practitioner, and none knew better than the Contrôleur how useful to all Mr Jones’s skill had been and with what charity he had given it. On the occasion of an epidemic of influenza the missionary had done the work of ten men and no storm short of a typhoon could prevent him from crossing to one island or another if his help was needed.

He lived with his sister in a little white house about half a mile from the village, and when the Contrôleur had arrived came on board to meet him and begged him to stay till he could get his own house in order. The Contrôleur had accepted and soon saw for himself with what simplicity the couple lived. It was more than he could stand. Tea at three sparse meals a day, and when he lit his cigar Mr Jones politely but firmly asked him to be good enough not to smoke, since both his sister and he strongly disapproved of it. In twenty–four hours Mr Gruyter moved into his own house. He fled, with panic in his heart, as though from a plague–stricken city. The Contrôleur was fond of a joke and he liked to laugh; to be with a man who took your nonsense in deadly earnest and never even smiled at your best story was more than flesh and blood could stand. The Rev. Owen Jones was a worthy man, but as a companion he was impossible. His sister was worse. Neither had a sense of humour, but whereas the missionary was of a melancholy turn, doing his duty so conscientiously, with the obvious conviction that everything in the world was hopeless, Miss Jones was resolutely cheerful. She grimly looked on the bright side of things. With the ferocity of an avenging angel she sought out the good in her fellow–men. Miss Jones taught in the mission school and helped her brother in his medical work. When he did operations she gave the anaesthetic and was matron, dresser, and nurse of the tiny hospital which on his own initiative Mr Jones had added to the mission. But the Contrôleur was an obstinate little fellow and he never lost his capacity of extracting amusement from the Rev. Owen’s dour struggle with the infirmities of human nature, and Miss Jones’s ruthless optimism. He had to get his fun where he could. The Dutch boats came in three times in two months for a few hours and then he could have a good old crack with the captain and chief engineer, and once in a blue moon a pearling lugger came in from Thursday Island or Port Darwin and for two or three days he had a grand time. They were rough fellows, the pearlers, for the most part, but they were full of guts, and they had plenty of liquor on board, and good stories to tell, and the Contrôleur had them up to his house and gave them a fine dinner, and the party was only counted a success if they were all too drunk to get back on the lugger again that night. But beside the missionary the only white man who lived on Baru was Ginger Ted, and he, of course, was a disgrace to civilization. There was not a single thing to be said in his favour. He cast discredit on the white race. All the same, but for Ginger Ted the Contrôleur sometimes thought he would find life on the island of Baru almost more than he could bear.

Oddly enough it was on account of this scamp that Mr Jones, when he should have been instructing the pagan young in the mysteries of the Baptist faith, was paying Mr Gruyter this early visit.

‘Sit down, Mr Jones,’ said the Contrôleur. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, I’ve come to see you about the man they call Ginger Ted. What are you going to do now?’

‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘Haven’t you heard? I thought the sergeant would have told you.’

‘I don’t encourage the members of my staff to come to my private house unless the matter is urgent,’ said the Contrôleur rather grandly. ‘I am unlike you, Mr Jones, I only work in order to have leisure, and I like to enjoy my leisure without disturbance.’

But Mr Jones did not care much for small talk and he was not interested in general reflections.

‘There was a disgraceful row in one of the Chinese shops last night. Ginger Ted wrecked the place and half killed a Chinaman.’

‘Drunk again, I suppose,’ said the Contrôleur placidly.

‘Naturally. When is he anything else? They sent for the police and he assaulted the sergeant. They had to have six men to get him to the jail.’

‘He’s a hefty fellow,’ said the Contrôleur.

‘I suppose you’ll send him to Macassar.’

Evert Gruyter returned the missionary’s outraged look with a merry twinkle. He was no fool and he knew already what Mr Jones was up to. It gave him considerable amusement to tease him a little.

‘Fortunately my powers are wide enough to enable me to deal with the situation myself,’ he answered.

‘You have power to deport anyone you like, Mr Gruyter, and I’m sure it would save a lot of trouble if you got rid of the man altogether.’

‘I have the power of course, but I am sure you would be the last person to wish me to use it arbitrarily.’

‘Mr Gruyter, the man’s presence here is a public scandal. He’s never sober from morning till night; it’s notorious that he has relations with one native woman after another.’

‘That is an interesting point, Mr Jones. I had always heard that alcoholic excess, though it stimulated sexual desire, prevented its gratification. What you tell me about Ginger Ted does not seem to bear out this theory.’

The missionary flushed a dull red.

‘These are physiological matters which at the moment I have no wish to go into,’ he said, frigidly. ‘The behaviour of this man does incalculable damage to the prestige of the white race, and his example seriously hampers the efforts that are made in other quarters to induce the people of these islands to lead a less vicious life. He’s an out–and–out bad lot.’

‘Pardon my asking, but have you made any attempts to reform him?’

‘When he first drifted here I did my best to get in touch with him. He repelled all my advances. When there was that first trouble I went to him and talked to him straight from the shoulder. He swore at me.’

‘No one has a greater appreciation than I of the excellent work that you and other missionaries do on these islands, but are you sure that you always exercise your calling with all the tact possible?’

The Contrôleur was rather pleased with this phrase. It was extremely courteous and yet contained a reproof that he thought worth administering. The missionary looked at him gravely. His sad brown eyes were full of sincerity.

‘Did Jesus exercise tact when he took a whip and drove the money–changers from the Temple? No, Mr Gruyter. Tact is the subterfuge the lax avail themselves of to avoid doing their duty.’

Mr Jones’s remark made the Contrôleur feel suddenly that he wanted a bottle of beer. The missionary leaned forward earnestly.

‘Mr Gruyter, you know this man’s transgressions just as well as I do. It’s unnecessary for me to remind you of them. There are no excuses for him. Now he really has overstepped the limit. You’ll never have a better chance than this. I beg you to use the power you have and turn him out once for all.’

The Contrôleur’s eyes twinkled more brightly than ever. He was having a lot of fun. He reflected that human beings were much more amusing when you did not feel called upon in dealing with them to allot praise or blame.

‘But, Mr Jones, do I understand you right? Are you asking me to give you an assurance to deport this man before I’ve heard the evidence against him and listened to his defence?’

‘I don’t know what his defence can be.’

The Contrôleur rose from his chair and really he managed to get quite a little dignity into his five feet four inches.

‘I am here to administer justice according to the laws of the Dutch Government. Permit me to tell you that I am exceedingly surprised that you should attempt to influence me in my judicial functions.’

The missionary was a trifle flustered. It had never occurred to him that this little whipper–snapper of a boy, ten years younger than himself, would dream of adopting such an attitude. He opened his mouth to explain and apologize, but the Contrôleur raised a podgy little hand.

‘It is time for me to go to my office, Mr Jones. I wish you good morning.’

The missionary, taken aback, bowed and without another word walked out of the room. He would have been surprised to see what the Contrôleur did when his back was turned. A broad grin broke on his lips and he put his thumb to his nose and cocked a snook at the Rev. Owen Jones.

A few minutes later he went down to his office. His head clerk, who was a Dutch half–caste, gave him his version of the previous night’s row. It agreed pretty well with Mr Jones’s. The court was sitting that day.

‘Will you take Ginger Ted first, sir?’ asked the clerk.

‘I see no reason to do that. There are two or three cases held over from the last sitting. I will take him in his proper order.’

‘I thought perhaps as he was a white man you would like to see him privately, sir.’

‘The majesty of the law knows no difference between white and coloured, my friend,’ said Mr Gruyter, somewhat pompously.

The court was a big square room with wooden benches on which, crowded together, sat natives of all kinds, Polynesians, Bugis, Chinese, Malays, and they all rose when a door was opened and a sergeant announced the arrival of the Contrôleur. He entered with his clerk and took his place on a little dais at a table of varnished pitch pine. Behind him was a large engraving of Queen Wilhelmina. He dispatched half a dozen cases and then Ginger Ted was brought in. He stood in the dock, handcuffed, with a warder on either side of him. The Contrôleur looked at him with a grave face, but he could not keep the amusement out of his eyes.

Ginger Ted was suffering from a hang–over. He swayed a little as he stood and his eyes were vacant. He was a man still young, thirty perhaps, of somewhat over the middle height, rather fat, with a bloated red face and a shock of curly red hair. He had not come out of the tussle unscathed. He had a black eye and his mouth was cut and swollen. He wore khaki shorts, very dirty and ragged, and his singlet had been almost torn off his back. A great rent showed the thick mat of red hair with which his chest was covered, but showed also the astonishing whiteness of his skin. The Contrôleur looked at the charge sheet. He called the evidence. When he had heard it, when he had seen the Chinaman whose head Ginger Ted had broken with a bottle, when he had heard the agitated story of the sergeant who had been knocked flat when he tried to arrest him, when he had listened to the tale of the havoc wrought by Ginger Ted who in his drunken fury had smashed everything he could lay hands on, he turned and addressed the accused in English.

‘Well, Ginger, what have you got to say for yourself?’

‘I was blind. I don’t remember a thing about it. If they say I half killed ’im I suppose I did. I’ll pay the damage if they’ll give me time.’

‘You will, Ginger,’ said the Contrôleur, ‘but it’s me who’ll give you time.’

He looked at Ginger Ted for a minute in silence. He was an unappetizing object. A man who had gone completely to pieces. He was horrible. It made you shudder to look at him and if Mr Jones had not been so officious, at that moment the Contrôleur would certainly have ordered him to be deported.

‘You’ve been a trouble ever since you came to the islands, Ginger. You’re a disgrace. You’re incorrigibly idle. You’ve been picked up in the street dead drunk time and time again. You’ve kicked up row after row. You’re hopeless. I told you the last time you were brought here that if you were arrested again I should deal with you severely. You’ve gone the limit this time and you’re for it. I sentence you to six months’ hard labour.’

‘Me?’

‘You .’

‘By God, I’ll kill you when I come out.’

He burst into a string of oaths both filthy and blasphemous. Mr Gruyter listened scornfully. You can swear much better in Dutch than in English and there was nothing that Ginger Ted said that he could not have effectively capped.

‘Be quiet,’ he ordered. ‘You make me tired.’

The Contrôleur repeated his sentence in Malay and the prisoner was led struggling away.

Mr Gruyter sat down to tiffin in high good–humour. It was astonishing how amusing life could be if you exercised a little ingenuity. There were people in Amsterdam and even in Batavia and Surabaya, who looked upon his island home as a place of exile. They little knew how agreeable it was and what fun he could extract from unpromising material. They asked him whether he did not miss the club and the races and the cinema, the dances that were held once a week at the Casino and the society of Dutch ladies. Not at all. He liked comfort. The substantial furniture of the room in which he sat had a satisfying solidity. He liked reading French novels of a frivolous nature and he appreciated the sensation of reading one after the other without the uneasiness occasioned by the thought that he was wasting his time. It seemed to him a great luxury to waste time. When his young man’s fancy turned to thoughts of love his head boy brought to the house a little dark–skinned bright–eyed creature in a sarong. He took care to form no connexion of a permanent nature. He thought that change kept the heart young. He enjoyed freedom and was not weighed down by a sense of responsibility. He did not mind the heat. It made a sluice over with cold water half a dozen times a day a pleasure that had almost an aesthetic quality. He played the piano. He wrote letters to his friends in Holland. He felt no need for the conversation of intellectual persons. He liked a good laugh, but he could get that out of a fool just as well as out of a professor of philosophy. He had a notion that he was a very wise little man.

Like all good Dutchmen in the Far East he began his lunch with a small glass of Hollands gin. It has a musty acrid flavour, and the taste for it must be acquired, but Mr Gruyter preferred it to any cocktail. When he drank it he felt besides that he was upholding the traditions of his race. Then he had rijsttafel. He had it every day. He heaped a soup–plate high with rice, and then, his three boys waiting on him, helped himself to the curry that one handed him, to the fried egg that another brought, and to the condiment presented by the third. Then each one brought another dish, of bacon, or bananas, or pickled fish, and presently his plate was piled high in a huge pyramid. He stirred it all together and began to eat. He ate slowly and with relish. He drank a bottle of beer.

He did not think while he was eating. His attention was applied to the mass in front of him and he consumed it with a happy concentration. It never palled on him. And when he had emptied the great plate it was a compensation to think that next day he would have rijsttafel again. He grew tired of it as little as the rest of us grow tired of bread. He finished his beer and lit his cigar. The boy brought him a cup of coffee. He leaned back in his chair then and allowed himself the luxury of reflection.

It tickled him to have sentenced Ginger Ted to the richly deserved punishment of six months’ hard labour, and he smiled when he thought of him working on the roads with the other prisoners. It would have been silly to deport from the island the one man with whom he could occasionally have a heart–to–heart talk, and besides, the satisfaction it would have given the missionary would have been bad for that gentleman’s character. Ginger Ted was a scamp and a scallywag, but the Contrôleur had a kindly feeling for him. They had drunk many a bottle of beer in one another’s company, and when the pearl fishers from Port Darwin came in and they all made a night of it, they had got gloriously tight together. The Contrôleur liked the reckless way in which Ginger Ted squandered the priceless treasure of life.

Ginger Ted had wandered in one day on the ship that was going up from Merauke to Macassar. The captain did not know how he had found his way there, but he had travelled steerage with the natives, and he stopped off at the Alas Islands because he liked the look of them. Mr Gruyter had a suspicion that their attraction consisted perhaps in their being under the Dutch flag and so out of British jurisdiction. But his papers were in order, so there was no reason why he should not stay. He said that he was buying pearl–shell for an Australian firm, but it soon appeared that his commercial undertakings were not serious. Drink, indeed, took up so much of his time that he had little left over for other pursuits. He was in receipt of two pounds a week, paid monthly, which came regularly to him from England. The Contrôleur guessed that this sum was paid only so long as he kept well away from the persons who sent it. It was anyway too small to permit him any liberty of movement. Ginger Ted was reticent. The Contrôleur discovered that he was an Englishman, this he learnt from his passport, which described him as Edward Wilson, and that he had been in Australia. But why he had left England and what he had done in Australia he had no notion. Nor could he ever quite tell to what class Ginger Ted belonged. When you saw him in a filthy singlet and a pair of ragged trousers, a battered topee on his head, with the pearl fishers and heard his conversation, coarse, obscene, and illiterate, you thought he must be a sailor before the mast who had deserted his ship, or a labourer, but when you saw his handwriting you were surprised to find that it was that of a man not without at least some education, and on occasion when you got him alone, if he had had a few drinks but was not yet drunk, he would talk of matters that neither a sailor nor a labourer would have been likely to know anything about. The Contrôleur had a certain sensitiveness and he realized that Ginger Ted did not speak to him as an inferior to a superior but as an equal. Most of his remittance was mortgaged before he received it, and the Chinamen to whom he owed money were standing at his elbow when the monthly letter was delivered to him, but with what was left he proceeded to get drunk. It was then that he made trouble, for when drunk he grew violent and was then likely to commit acts that brought him into the hands of the police. Hitherto Mr Gruyter had contented himself with keeping him in jail till he was sober and giving him a talking to. When he was out of money he cadged what drink he could from anyone who would give it him. Rum, brandy, arak, it was all the same to him. Two or three times Mr Gruyter had got him work on plantations run by Chinese in one or other of the islands, but he could not stick to it, and in a few weeks was back again at Baru on the beach. It was a miracle how he kept body and soul together. He had, of course, a way with him. He picked up the various dialects spoken on the islands, and knew how to make the natives laugh. They despised him, but they respected his physical strength, and they liked his company. He was as a result never at a loss for a meal or a mat to sleep on. The strange thing was, and it was this that chiefly outraged the Rev. Owen Jones, that he could do anything he liked with a woman. The Contrôleur could not imagine what it was they saw in him. He was casual with them and rather brutal. He took what they gave him, but seemed incapable of gratitude. He used them for his pleasure and then flung them indifferently away. Once or twice this had got him into trouble, and Mr Gruyter had had to sentence an angry father for sticking a knife in Ginger Ted’s back one night, and a Chinese woman had sought to poison herself by swallowing opium because he had deserted her. Once Mr Jones came to the Contrôleur in a great state because the beachcomber had seduced one of his converts. The Contrôleur agreed that it was very deplorable, but could only advise Mr Jones to keep a sharp eye on these young persons. The Contrôleur liked it less when he discovered that a girl whom he fancied a good deal himself and had been seeing for several weeks had all the time been according her favours also to Ginger Ted. When he thought of this particular incident he smiled again at the thought of Ginger Ted doing six months’ hard labour. It is seldom in this life that in the process of doing your bounden duty you can get back on a fellow who has played you a dirty trick.

A few days later Mr Gruyter was taking a walk, partly for exercise and partly to see that some job he wanted done was being duly proceeded with, when he passed a gang of prisoners working under the charge of a warder. Among them he saw Ginger Ted. He wore the prison sarong, a dingy tunic called in Malay a baju, and his own battered topee. They were repairing the road, and Ginger Ted was wielding a heavy pick. The way was narrow and the Contrôleur saw that he must pass within a foot of him. He remembered his threats. He knew that Ginger Ted was a man of violent passion, and the language he had used in the dock made it plain that he had not seen what a good joke it was of the Contrôleur’s to sentence him to six months’ hard labour. If Ginger Ted suddenly attacked him with the pick, nothing on God’s earth could save him. It was true that the warder would immediately shoot him down, but meanwhile the Contrôleur’s head would be bashed in. It was with a funny little feeling in the pit of his stomach that Mr Gruyter walked through the gang of prisoners. They were working in pairs a few feet from one another. He set his mind on neither hastening his pace nor slackening it. As he passed Ginger Ted, the man swung his pick into the ground and looked up at the Contrôleur and as he caught his eye winked. The Contrôleur checked the smile that rose to his lips and with official dignity strode on. But that wink, so lusciously full of sardonic humour, filled him with satisfaction. If he had been the Caliph of Bagdad instead of a junior official in the Dutch Civil Service, he could forthwith have released Ginger Ted, sent slaves to bath and perfume him, and having clothed him in a golden robe entertained him to a sumptuous repast.

Ginger Ted was an exemplary prisoner and in a month or two the Contrôleur, having occasion to send a gang to do some work on one of the outlying islands, included him in it. There was no jail there, so the ten fellows he sent, under the charge of a warder, were billeted on the natives and after their day’s work lived like free men. The job was sufficient to take up the rest of Ginger Ted’s sentence. The Contrôleur saw him before he left.

‘Look here, Ginger,’ he said to him, ‘here’s ten guilder for you so that you can buy yourself tobacco when you’re gone.’

‘Couldn’t you make it a bit more? There’s eight pounds a month coming in regularly.’

‘I think that’s enough. I’ll keep the letters that come for you, and when you get back you’ll have a tidy sum. You’ll have enough to take you anywhere you want to go.’

‘I’m very comfortable here,’ said Ginger Ted.

‘Well, the day you come back, clean yourself up and come over to my house. We’ll have a bottle of beer together.’

‘That’ll be fine. I guess I’ll be ready for a good crack then.’

Now chance steps in. The island to which Ginger Ted had been sent was called Maputiti, and like all the rest of them it was rocky, heavily wooded, and surrounded by a reef. There was a village among coconuts on the sea–shore opposite the opening of the reef and another village on a brackish lake in the middle of the island. Of this some of the inhabitants had been converted to Christianity. Communication with Baru was effected by a launch that touched at the various islands at irregular intervals. It carried passengers and produce. But the villagers were seafaring folk, and if they had to communicate urgently with Baru, manned a prahu and sailed the fifty miles or so that separated them from it. It happened that when Ginger Ted’s sentence had but another fortnight to run the Christian headman of the village on the lake was taken suddenly ill. The native remedies availed him nothing and he writhed in agony. Messengers were sent to Baru imploring the missionary’s help; but as ill luck would have it Mr Jones was suffering at the moment from an attack of malaria. He was in bed and unable to move. He talked the matter over with his sister.

‘It sounds like acute appendicitis,’ he told her.

‘You can’t go, Owen,’ she said.

‘I can’t let the man die.’

Mr Jones had a temperature of a hundred and four. His head was aching like mad. He had been delirious all night. His eyes were shining strangely and his sister felt that he was holding on to his wits by a sheer effort of will.

‘You couldn’t operate in the state you’re in.’

‘No, I couldn’t. Then Hassan must go.’

Hassan was the dispenser.

‘You couldn’t trust Hassan. He’d never dare to do an operation on his own responsibility. And they’d never let him. I’ll go. Hassan can stay here and look after you.’

‘You can’t remove an appendix.’

‘Why not? I’ve seen you do it. I’ve done lots of minor operations.’

Mr Jones felt he didn’t quite understand what she was saying.

’Is the launch in?’

‘No, it’s gone to one of the islands. But I can go in the prahu the men came in.’

‘You? I wasn’t thinking of you. You can’t go.’

‘I’m going, Owen.’

‘Going where?’ he said.

She saw that his mind was wandering already. She put her hand soothingly on his dry forehead. She gave him a dose of medicine. He muttered something and she realized that he did not know where he was. Of course she was anxious about him, but she knew that his illness was not dangerous, and she could leave him safely to the mission boy who was helping her nurse him and to the native dispenser. She slipped out of the room. She put her toilet things, a night–dress, and a change of clothes into a bag. A little chest with surgical instruments, bandages, and antiseptic dressings was kept always ready. She gave them to the two natives who had come over from Maputiti, and telling the dispenser what she was going to do gave him instructions to inform her brother when he was able to listen. Above all he was not to be anxious about her. She put on her topee and sallied forth. The mission was about half a mile from the village. She walked quickly. At the end of the jetty the prahu was waiting. Six men manned it. She took her place in the stern and they set off with a rapid stroke. Within the reef the sea was calm, but when they crossed the bar they came upon a long swell. But this was not the first journey of the sort Miss Jones had taken and she was confident of the seaworthiness of the boat she was in. It was noon and the sun beat down from a sultry sky. The only thing that harassed her was that they could not arrive before dark, and if she found it necessary to operate at once she could count only on the light of hurricane lamps.

Miss Jones was a woman of hard on forty. Nothing in her appearance would have prepared you for such determination as she had just shown. She had an odd drooping gracefulness, which suggested that she might be swayed by every breeze; it was almost an affectation; and it made the strength of character which you soon discovered in her seem positively monstrous. She was flat–chested, tall, and extremely thin. She had a long sallow face and she was much afflicted with prickly heat. Her lank brown hair was drawn back straight from her forehead. She had rather small eyes, grey in colour, and because they were somewhat too close they gave her face a shrewish look. Her nose was long and thin and a trifle red. She suffered a good deal from indigestion. But this infirmity availed nothing against her ruthless determination to look upon the bright side of things. Firmly persuaded that the world was evil and men unspeakably vicious, she extracted any little piece of decency she could find in them with the modest pride with which a conjurer extracts a rabbit from a hat. She was quick, resourceful, and competent. When she arrived on the island she saw that there was not a moment to lose if she was to save the headman’s life. Under the greatest difficulties, showing a native how to give the anaesthetic, she operated, and for the next three days nursed the patient with anxious assiduity. Everything went very well and she realized that her brother could not have made a better job of it. She waited long enough to take out the stitches and then prepared to go home. She could flatter herself that she had not wasted her time. She had given medical attention to such as needed it, she had strengthened the small Christian community in its faith, admonished such as were lax, and cast the good seed in places where it might be hoped under divine providence to take root.

The launch, coming from one of the other islands, put in somewhat late in the afternoon, but it was full moon and they expected to reach Baru before midnight. They brought her things down to the wharf and the people who were seeing her off stood about repeating their thanks. Quite a little crowd collected. The launch was loaded with sacks of copra, but Miss Jones was used to its strong smell and it did not incommode her. She made herself as comfortable a place to sit in as she could, and waiting for the launch to start, chatted with her grateful flock. She was the only passenger. Suddenly a group of natives emerged from the trees that embowered the little village on the lagoon and she saw that among them was a white man. He wore a prison sarong and a baju. He had long red hair. She at once recognized Ginger Ted. A policeman was with him. They shook hands and Ginger Ted shook hands with the villagers who accompanied him. They bore bundles of fruit and a jar which Miss Jones guessed contained native spirit, and these they put in the launch. She discovered to her surprise that Ginger Ted was coming with her. His term was up and instructions had arrived that he was to be returned to Baru in the launch. He gave her a glance, but did not nod –indeed Miss Jones turned away her head–and stepped in. The mechanic started his engine and in a moment they were jug–jugging through the channel in the lagoon. Ginger Ted clambered on to a pile of sacks and lit a cigarette.

Miss Jones ignored him. Of course she knew him very well. Her heart sank when she thought that he was going to be once more in Baru, creating a scandal and drinking, a peril to the women and a thorn in the flesh of all decent people. She knew the steps her brother had taken to have him deported and she had no patience with the Contrôleur, who would not see a duty that stared him so plainly in the face. When they had crossed the bar and were in the open sea Ginger Ted took the stopper out of the jar of arak and putting his mouth to it took a long pull. Then he handed the jar to the two mechanics who formed the crew. One was a middle–aged man and the other a youth.

‘I do not wish you to drink anything while we are on the journey,’ said Miss Jones sternly to the elder one.

He smiled at her and drank.

‘A little arak can do no one any harm,’ he answered. He passed the jar to his companion, who drank also.

‘If you drink again I shall complain to the Contrôleur,’ said Miss Jones.

The elder man said something she could not understand, but which she suspected was very rude, and passed the jar back to Ginger Ted. They went along for an hour or more. The sea was like glass and the sun set radiantly. It set behind one of the islands and for a few minutes changed it into a mystic city of the skies. Miss Jones turned round to watch it and her heart was filled with gratitude for the beauty of the world.

‘And only man is vile,’ she quoted to herself.

They went due east. In the distance was a little island which she knew they passed close by. It was uninhabited. A rocky islet thickly grown with virgin forest. The boatman lit his lamps. The night fell and immediately the sky was thick with stars. The moon had not yet risen. Suddenly there was a slight jar and the launch began to vibrate strangely. The engine rattled. The head mechanic calling to his mate to take the helm, crept under the housing. They seemed to be going more slowly. The engine stopped. She asked the youth what was the matter, but he did not know. Ginger Ted got down from the top of the copra sacks and slipped under the housing. When he reappeared she would have liked to ask him what had happened, but her dignity prevented her. She sat still and occupied herself with her thoughts. There was a long swell and the launch rolled slightly. The mechanic emerged once more into view and started the engine. Though it rattled like mad they began to move. The launch vibrated from stem to stern. They went very slowly. Evidently something was amiss, but Miss Jones was exasperated rather than alarmed. The launch was supposed to do six knots, but now it was just crawling along; at that rate they would not get into Baru till long, long after midnight. The mechanic, still busy under the housing, shouted out something to the man at the helm. They spoke in Bugi, of which Miss Jones knew very little. But after a while she noticed that they had changed their course and seemed to be heading for the little uninhabited island a good deal to the lee of which they should have passed. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked the helmsman with sudden misgiving.

He pointed to the islet. She got up and went to the housing and called to the man to come out.

‘You’re not going there? Why? What’s the matter?’

‘I can’t get to Baru,’ he said.

‘But you must. I insist. I order you to go to Baru.’

The man shrugged his shoulders. He turned his back on her and slipped once more under the housing. Then Ginger Ted addressed her.

‘One of the blades of the propeller has broken off. He thinks he can get as far as that island. We shall have to stay the night there and he’ll put on a new propeller in the morning when the tide’s out.’

‘I can’t spend the night on an uninhabited island with three men,’ she cried.

‘A lot of women would jump at it.’

‘I insist on going to Baru. Whatever happens we must get there tonight.’

‘Don’t get excited, old girl. We’ve got to beach the boat to put a new propeller on, and we shall be all right on the island.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that! I think you’re very insolent.’

‘You’ll be O.K. We’ve got plenty of grub and we’ll have a snack when we land. You have a drop of arak and you’ll feel like a house on fire.’

‘You’re an impertinent man. If you don’t go to Baru I’ll have you all put in prison.’

‘We’re not going to Baru. We can’t. We’re going to that island and if you don’t like it you can get out and swim.’

‘Oh, you’ll pay for this.’

‘Shut up, you old cow,’ said Ginger Ted.

Miss Jones gave a gasp of anger. But she controlled herself. Even out there, in the middle of the ocean, she had too much dignity to bandy words with that vile wretch. The launch, the engine rattling horribly, crawled on. It was pitch dark now, and she could no longer see the island they were making for. Miss Jones, deeply incensed, sat with lips tight shut and a frown on her brow; she was not used to being crossed. Then the moon rose and she could see the bulk of Ginger Ted sprawling on the top of the piled sacks of copra. The glimmer of his cigarette was strangely sinister. Now the island was vaguely outlined against the sky. They reached it and the boatman ran the launch on to the beach. Suddenly Miss Jones gave a gasp. The truth had dawned on her and her anger changed to fear. Her heart beat violently. She shook in every limb. She felt dreadfully faint. She saw it all. Was the broken propeller a put–up job or was it an accident? She could not be certain; anyhow, she knew that Ginger Ted would seize the opportunity. Ginger Ted would rape her. She knew his character. He was mad about women. That was what he had done, practically, to the girl at the mission, such a good little thing she was and an excellent sempstress; they would have prosecuted him for that and he would have been sentenced to years of imprisonment only very unfortunately the innocent child had gone back to him several times and indeed had only complained of his ill usage when he left her for somebody else. They had gone to the Contrôleur about it, but he had refused to take any steps, saying in that coarse way of his that even if what the girl said was true, it didn’t look very much as though it had been an altogether unpleasant experience. Ginger Ted was a scoundrel. And she was a white woman. What chance was there that he would spare her? None. She knew men. But she must pull herself together. She must keep her wits about her. She must have courage. She was determined to sell her virtue dearly, and if he killed her–well, she would rather die than yield. And if she died she would rest in the arms of Jesus. For a moment a great light blinded her eyes and she saw the mansions of her Heavenly Father. They were a grand and sumptuous mixture of a picture palace and a railway station. The mechanics and Ginger Ted jumped out of the launch and, waist–deep in water, gathered round the broken propeller. She took advantage of their preoccupation to get her case of surgical instruments out of the box. She took out the four scalpels it contained and secreted them in her clothing. If Ginger Ted touched her she would not hesitate to plunge a scalpel in his heart.

‘Now then, miss, you’d better get out,’ said Ginger Ted. ‘You’ll be better off on the beach than in the boat.’

She thought so too. At least here she would have freedom of action. Without a word she clambered over the copra sacks. He offered her his hand.

‘I don’t want your help,’ she said coldly.

‘You can go to hell,’ he answered.

It was a little difficult to get out of the boat without showing her legs, but by the exercise of considerable ingenuity she managed it.

‘Damned lucky we’ve got something to eat. We’ll make a fire and then you’d better have a snack and a nip of arak.’

‘I want nothing. I only want to be left alone.’

‘It won’t hurt me if you go hungry.’

She did not answer. She walked, with head erect, along the beach. She held the largest scalpel in her closed fist. The moon allowed her to see where she was going. She looked for a place to hide. The thick forest came down to the very edge of the beach; but, afraid of its darkness (after all, she was but a woman), she dared not plunge into its depth. She did not know what animals lurked there or what dangerous snakes. Besides, her instinct told her that it was better to keep those three bad men in sight; then if they came towards her she would be prepared. Presently she found a little hollow. She looked round. They seemed to be occupied with their own efforts and they could not see her. She slipped in. There was a rock between them and her so that she was hidden from them and yet could watch them. She saw them go to and from the boat carrying things. She saw them build a fire. It lit them luridly and she saw them sit around it and eat, and she saw the jar of arak passed from one to the other. They were all going to get drunk. What would happen to her then? It might be that she could cope with Ginger Ted, though his strength terrified her, but against three she would be powerless. A mad idea came to her to go to Ginger Ted and fall on her knees before him and beg him to spare her. He must have some spark of decent feeling in him and she had always been so convinced that there was good even in the worst of men. He must have had a mother. Perhaps he had a sister. Ah, but how could you appeal to a man blinded with lust and drunk with arak? She began to feel terribly weak. She was afraid she was going to cry. That would never do. She needed all her self–control. She bit her lip. She watched them, like a tiger watching his prey; no, not like that, like a lamb watching three hungry wolves. She saw them put more wood on the fire, and Ginger Ted, in his sarong, silhouetted by the flames. Perhaps after he had had his will of her he would pass her on to the others. How could she go back to her brother when such a thing had happened to her? Of course he would be sympathetic, but would he ever feel quite the same to her again? It would break his heart. And perhaps he would think that she ought to have resisted more. For his sake perhaps it would be better if she said nothing about it. Naturally the men would say nothing. It would mean twenty years in prison for them. But then supposing she had a baby. Miss Jones instinctively clenched her hands with horror and nearly cut herself with the scalpel. Of course it would only infuriate them if she resisted.

‘What shall I do?’ she cried. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

She flung herself down on her knees and prayed to God to save her. She prayed long and earnestly. She reminded God that she was a virgin and just mentioned, in case it had slipped the divine memory, how much St Paul had valued that excellent state. And then she peeped round the rock again. The three men appeared to be smoking and the fire was dying down. Now was the time that Ginger Ted’s lewd thoughts might be expected to turn to the woman who was at his mercy. She smothered a cry, for suddenly he got up and walked in her direction. She felt all her muscles grow taut, and though her heart was beating furiously she clenched the scalpel firmly in her hand. But it was for another purpose that Ginger Ted had got up. Miss Jones blushed and looked away. He strolled slowly back to the others and sitting down again raised the jar of arak to his lips. Miss Jones, crouching behind the rock, watched with straining eyes. The conversation round the fire grew less and presently she divined, rather than saw, that the two natives wrapped themselves in blankets and composed themselves to slumber. She understood. This was the moment Ginger Ted had been waiting for. When they were fast asleep he would get up cautiously and without a sound, in order not to wake the others, creep stealthily towards her. Was it that he was unwilling to share her with them or did he know that his deed was so dastardly that he did not wish them to know of it? After all, he was a white man and she was a white woman. He could not have sunk so low as to allow her to suffer the violence of natives. But his plan, which was so obvious to her, had given her an idea; when she saw him coming she would scream, she would scream so loudly that it would wake the two mechanics. She remembered now that the elder, though he had only one eye, had a kind face. But Ginger Ted did not move. She was feeling terribly tired. She began to fear that she would not have the strength now to resist him. She had gone through too much. She closed her eyes for a minute.

When she opened them it was broad daylight. She must have fallen asleep and, so shattered was she by emotion, have slept till long after dawn. It gave her quite a turn. She sought to rise, but something caught in her legs. She looked and found that she was covered with two empty copra sacks. Someone had come in the night and put them over her. Ginger Ted! She gave a little scream. The horrible thought flashed through her mind that he had outraged her in her sleep. No. It was impossible. And yet he had had her at his mercy. Defenceless. And he had spared her. She blushed furiously. She raised herself to her feet, feeling a little stiff, and arranged her disordered dress. The scalpel had fallen from her hand and she picked it up. She took the two copra sacks and emerged from her hiding–place. She walked towards the boat. It was floating in the shallow water of the lagoon.

‘Come on, Miss Jones,’ said Ginger Ted. ‘We’ve finished. I was just going to wake you up.’

She could not look at him, but she felt herself as red as a turkey cock.

‘Have a banana?’ he said.

Without a word she took it. She was very hungry, and ate it with relish.

‘Step on this rock and you’ll be able to get in without wetting your feet.’

Miss Jones felt as though she could sink into the ground with shame, but she did as he told her. He took hold of her arm–good heavens his hand was like an iron vice, never, never could she have struggled with him–and helped her into the launch. The mechanic started the engine and they slid out of the lagoon. In three hours they were at Baru.

That evening, having been officially released, Ginger Ted went to the Contrôleur’s house. He wore no longer the prison uniform but the ragged singlet and the khaki shorts in which he had been arrested. He had had his hair cut and it fitted his head now like a little curly red cap. He was thinner. He had lost his bloated flabbiness and looked younger and better. Mr Gruyter, a friendly grin on his round face, shook hands with him and asked him to sit down. The boy brought two bottles of beer.

‘I’m glad to see you hadn’t forgotten my invitation, Ginger,’ said the Contrôleur.

‘Not likely. I’ve been looking forward to this for six months.’

‘Here’s luck, Ginger Ted.’

‘Same to you, Contrôleur.’

They emptied their glasses and the Contrôleur clapped his hands. The boy brought two more bottles.

‘Well, you don’t bear me any malice for the sentence I gave you, I hope.’

‘No bloody fear. I was mad for a minute, but I got over it. I didn’t have half a bad time, you know. Nice lot of girls on that island, Contrôleur. You ought to give ’em a look over one of these days.’

‘You’re a bad lot, Ginger.’

‘Terrible.’

‘Good beer, isn’t it?’

‘Fine.’

‘Let’s have some more.’

Ginger Ted’s remittance had been arriving every month and the Contrôleur now had fifty pounds for him. When the damage he had done to the Chinaman’s shop was paid for there would still be over thirty.

‘That’s quite a lot of money, Ginger. You ought to do something useful with it.’

‘I mean to,’ answered Ginger. ‘Spend it.’

The Contrôleur sighed.

‘Well, that’s what money’s for, I guess.’

The Contrôleur gave his guest the news. Not much had happened during the last six months. Time on the Alas Islands did not matter very much and the rest of the world did not matter at all.

‘Any wars anywhere?’ asked Ginger Ted.

‘No. Not that I’ve noticed. Harry Jervis found a pretty big pearl. He says he’s going to ask a thousand quid for it.’

‘I hope he gets it.’

‘And Charlie McCormack’s married.’

‘He always was a bit soft.’

Suddenly the boy appeared and said Mr Jones wished to know if he might come in. Before the Contrôleur could give an answer Mr Jones walked in.

‘I won’t detain you long,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of this good man all day and when I heard he was here I thought you wouldn’t mind my coming.’

‘How is Miss Jones?’ asked the Contrôleur politely. ‘None the worse for her night in the open, I trust.’

‘She’s naturally a bit shaken. She had a temperature and I’ve insisted on her going to bed, but I don’t think it’s serious.’

The two men had got up on the missionary’s entrance, and now the missionary went up to Ginger Ted and held out his hand.

‘I want to thank you. You did a great and noble thing. My sister is right, one should always look for the good in their fellow–men; I am afraid I misjudged you in the past; I beg your pardon.’

He spoke very solemnly. Ginger Ted looked at him with amazement. He had not been able to prevent the missionary taking his hand. He still held it.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You had my sister at your mercy and you spared her. I thought you were all evil and I am ashamed. She was defenceless. She was in your power. You had pity on her. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Neither my sister nor I will ever forget. God bless and guard you always.’

Mr Jones’s voice shook a little and he turned his head away. He released Ginger Ted’s hand and strode quickly to the door. Ginger Ted watched him with a blank face.

‘What the blazes does he mean?’ he asked.

The Contrôleur laughed. He tried to control himself, but the more he did the more he laughed. He shook and you saw the folds of his fat belly ripple under the sarong. He leaned back in his long chair and rolled from side to side. He did not laugh only with his face, he laughed with his whole body, and even the muscles of his podgy legs shook with mirth. He held his aching ribs. Ginger Ted looked at him frowning, and because he did not understand what the joke was he grew angry. He seized one of the empty beer bottles by the neck.

‘If you don’t stop laughing, I’ll break your bloody head open,’ he said.

The Contrôleur mopped his face. He swallowed a mouthful of beer. He sighed and groaned because his sides were hurting him.

‘He’s thanking you for having respected the virtue of Miss Jones,’ he spluttered at last.

‘Me?’ cried Ginger Ted.

The thought took quite a long time to travel through his head, but when at last he got it he flew into a violent rage. There flowed from his mouth such a stream of blasphemous obscenities as would have startled a marine.

‘That old cow,’ he finished. ‘What does he take me for?’

‘You have the reputation of being rather hot stuff with the girls, Ginger,’ giggled the little Contrôleur.

‘I wouldn’t touch her with the fag–end of a barge–pole. It never entered my head. The nerve. I’ll wring his blasted neck. Look here, give me my money, I’m going to get drunk.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ said the Contrôleur.

‘That old cow,’ repeated Ginger Ted. ‘That old cow.’

He was shocked and outraged. The suggestion really shattered his sense of decency.

The Contrôleur had the money at hand and having got Ginger Ted to sign the necessary papers gave it to him.

‘Go and get drunk, Ginger Ted,’ he said, ‘but I warn you, if you get into mischief it’ll be twelve months next time.’

‘I shan’t get into mischief,’ said Ginger Ted sombrely. He was suffering from a sense of injury. ‘It’s an insult,’ he shouted at the Contrôleur. ‘That’s what it is, it’s a bloody insult.’

He lurched out of the house, and as he went he muttered to himself: ‘Dirty swine, dirty swine.’ Ginger Ted remained drunk for a week. Mr Jones went to see the Contrôleur again.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that poor fellow has taken up his evil course again,’ he said. ‘My sister and I are dreadfully disappointed. I’m afraid it wasn’t very wise to give him so much money at once.’

‘It was his own money. I had no right to keep it back.’

‘Not a legal right, perhaps, but surely a moral right.’

He told the Contrôleur the story of that fearful night on the island. With her feminine instinct, Miss Jones had realized that the man, inflamed with lust, was determined to take advantage of her, and, resolved to defend herself to the last, had armed herself with a scalpel. He told the Contrôleur how she had prayed and wept and how she had hidden herself. Her agony was indescribable, and she knew that she could never have survived the shame. She rocked to and fro and every moment she thought he was coming. And there was no help anywhere and at last she had fallen asleep; she was tired out, poor thing, she had undergone more than any human being could stand, and then when she awoke she found that he had covered her with copra sacks. He had found her asleep, and surely it was her innocence, her very helplessness that had moved him, he hadn’t the heart to touch her; he covered her gently with two copra sacks and crept silently away.

‘It shows you that deep down in him there is something sterling. My sister feels it’s our duty to save him. We must do something for him.’

‘Well, in your place I wouldn’t try till he’s got through all his money,’ said the Contrôleur, ‘and then if he’s not in jail you can do what you like.’

But Ginger Ted didn’t want to be saved. About a fortnight after his release from prison he was sitting on a stool outside a Chinaman’s shop looking vacantly down the street when he saw Miss Jones coming along. He stared at her for a minute and once more amazement seized him. He muttered to himself and there can be little doubt that his mutterings were disrespectful. But then he noticed that Miss Jones had seen him and he quickly turned his head away; he was conscious, notwithstanding, that she was looking at him. She was walking briskly, but she sensibly diminished her pace as she approached him. He thought she was going to stop and speak to him. He got up quickly and went into the shop. He did not venture to come out for at least five minutes. Half an hour later Mr Jones himself came along and he went straight up to Ginger Ted with outstretched hand.

‘How do you do, Mr Edward? My sister told me I should find you here.’

Ginger Ted gave him a surly look and did not take the proffered hand. He made no answer.

‘We’d be so very glad if you’d come to dinner with us next Sunday. My sister’s a capital cook and she’ll make you a real Australian dinner.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Ginger Ted.

‘That’s not very gracious,’ said the missionary, but with a little laugh to show that he was not affronted. ‘You go and see the Contrôleur from time to time, why shouldn’t you come and see us? It’s pleasant to talk to white people now and then. Won’t you let bygones be bygones? I can assure you of a very cordial welcome.’

‘I haven’t got clothes fit to go out in,’ said Ginger Ted sulkily.

‘Oh, never mind about that. Come as you are.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Why not? You must have a reason.’

Ginger Ted was a blunt man. He had no hesitation in saying what we should all like to when we receive unwelcome invitations. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘I’m sorry. My sister will be very disappointed.’

Mr Jones, determined to show that he was not in the least offended, gave him a breezy nod and walked on. Forty–eight hours later there mysteriously arrived at the house in which Ginger Ted lodged a parcel containing a suit of ducks, a tennis shirt, a pair of socks, and some shoes. He was unaccustomed to receiving presents and next time he saw the Contrôleur asked him if it was he who had sent the things.

‘Not on your life,’ replied the Contrôleur. ‘I’m perfectly indifferent to the state of your wardrobe.’

‘Well, then, who the hell can have?’

‘Search me.’

It was necessary from time to time for Miss Jones to see Mr Gruyter on business and shortly after this she came to see him one morning in his office. She was a capable woman and though she generally wanted him to do something he had no mind to, she did not waste his time. He was a little surprised then to discover that she had come on a very trivial errand. When he told her that he could not take cognizance of the matter in question, she did not as was her habit try to convince him, but accepted his refusal as definite. She got up to go and then as though it were an afterthought said:

‘Oh, Mr Gruyter, my brother is very anxious that we should have the man they call Ginger Ted to supper with us and I’ve written him a little note inviting him for the day after tomorrow. I think he’s rather shy, and I wonder if you’d come with him.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘My brother feels that we ought to do something for the poor fellow.’

‘A woman’s influence and all that sort of thing,’ said the Contrôleur demurely.

‘Will you persuade him to come? I’m sure he will if you make a point of it, and when he knows the way he’ll come again. It seems such a pity to let a young man like that go to pieces altogether.’

The Contrôleur looked up at her. She was several inches taller than he. He thought her very unattractive. She reminded him strangely of wet linen hung on a clothes–line to dry. His eyes twinkled, but he kept a straight face.

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said.

‘How old is he?’ she asked.

‘According to his passport he’s thirty–one.’

‘And what is his real name?’

‘Wilson.’

‘Edward Wilson,’ she said softly.

‘It’s astonishing that after the life he’s led he should be so strong,’ murmured the Contrôleur. ‘He has the strength of an ox.’

‘Those red–headed men sometimes are very powerful,’ said Miss Jones, but spoke as though she were choking.

‘Quite so,’ said the Contrôleur.

Then for no obvious reason Miss Jones blushed. She hurriedly said goodbye to the Contrôleur and left his office.

‘Godverdomme!’ said the Contrôleur.

He knew now who had sent Ginger Ted the new clothes.

He met him during the course of the day and asked him whether he had heard from Miss Jones. Ginger Ted took a crumpled ball of paper out of his pocket and gave it to him. It was the invitation. It ran as follows:

Dear Mr Wilson

My brother and I would be so very glad if you would come and have supper with us next Thursday at 7.30. The Contrôleur has kindly promised to come. We have some new records from Australia which I am sure you will like. I am afraid I was not very nice to you last time we met, but I did not know you so well then, and I am big enough to admit it when I have committed an error. I hope you will forgive me and let me be your friend,

Yours sincerely, Martha JonesThe Contrôleur noticed that she addressed him as Mr Wilson and referred to his own promise to go, so that when she told him she had already invited Ginger Ted she had a little anticipated the truth.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m not going, if that’s what you mean. Damned nerve.’

‘You must answer the letter.’

‘Well, I won’t.’

‘Now look here, Ginger, you put on those new clothes and you come as a favour to me. I’ve got to go and, damn it all, you can’t leave me in the lurch. It won’t hurt you just once.’ Ginger Ted looked at the Contrôleur suspiciously, but his face was serious and his manner sincere: he could not guess that within him the Dutchman bubbled with laughter.

‘What the devil do they want me for?’

‘I don’t know. The pleasure of your society, I suppose.’

‘Will there be any booze?’

‘No, but come up to my house at seven, and we’ll have a tiddly before we go.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ said Ginger Ted sulkily.

The Contrôleur rubbed his little fat hands with joy. He was expecting a great deal of amusement from the party. But when Thursday came and seven o’clock, Ginger Ted was dead drunk and Mr Gruyter had to go alone. He told the missionary and his sister the plain truth. Mr Jones shook his head.

‘I’m afraid it’s no good, Martha, the man’s hopeless.’

For a moment Miss Jones was silent and the Contrôleur saw two tears trickle down her long thin nose. She bit her lip.

‘No one is hopeless. Everyone has some good in him. I shall pray for him every night. It would be wicked to doubt the power of God.’

Perhaps Miss Jones was right in this, but the divine providence took a very funny way of effecting its ends. Ginger Ted began to drink more heavily than ever. He was so troublesome that even Mr Gruyter lost patience with him. He made up his mind that he could not have the fellow on the island any more and resolved to deport him on the next boat that touched at Baru. Then a man died under mysterious circumstances after having been for a trip to one of the islands and the Contrôleur learnt that there had been several deaths on the same island. He sent the Chinese who was the official doctor of the group to look into the matter, and very soon received intelligence that the deaths were due to cholera. Two more took place at Baru and the certainty was forced upon him that there was an epidemic.

The Contrôleur cursed freely. He cursed in Dutch, he cursed in English, and he cursed in Malay. Then he drank a bottle of beer and smoked a cigar. After that he took thought. He knew the Chinese doctor would be useless. He was a nervous little man from Java and the natives would refuse to obey his orders. The Contrôleur was efficient and knew pretty well what must be done, but he could not do everything single–handed. He did not like Mr Jones, but just then he was thankful that he was at hand, and he sent for him at once. He was accompanied by his sister.

‘You know what I want to see you about, Mr Jones,’ he said abruptly.

‘Yes. I’ve been expecting a message from you. That is why my sister has come with me. We are ready to put all our resources at your disposal. I need not tell you that my sister is as competent as a man.’

‘I know. I shall be very glad of her assistance.’

They set to without further delay to discuss the steps that must be taken. Hospital huts would have to be erected and quarantine stations. The inhabitants of the various villages on the islands must be forced to take proper precautions. In a good many cases the infected villages drew their water from the same well as the uninfected, and in each case this difficulty would have to be dealt with according to circumstances. It was necessary to send round people to give orders and make sure that they were carried out. Negligence must be ruthlessly punished. The worst of it was that the natives would not obey other natives, and orders given by native policemen, themselves unconvinced of their efficacy, would certainly be disregarded. It was advisable for Mr Jones to stay at Baru, where the population was largest and his medical attention most wanted; and what with the official duties that forced him to keep in touch with headquarters, it was impossible for Mr Gruyter to visit all the other islands himself. Miss Jones must go; but the natives of some of the outlying islands were wild and treacherous; the Contrôleur had had a good deal of trouble with them. He did not like the idea of exposing her to danger.

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said.

‘I daresay. But if you have your throat cut I shall get into trouble, and besides, we’re so short–handed I don’t want to risk losing your help.’

‘Then let Mr Wilson come with me. He knows the natives better than anyone and can speak all their dialects.’

‘Ginger Ted?’ The Contrôleur stared at her. ‘He’s just getting over an attack of D.T.s.’

‘I know,’ she answered.

‘You know a great deal, Miss Jones.’

Even though the moment was so serious Mr Gruyter could not but smile. He gave her a sharp look, but she met it coolly.

‘There’s nothing like responsibility for bringing out what there is in a man, and I think something like this may be the making of him.’

‘Do you think it would be wise to trust yourself for days at a time to a man of such infamous character?’ said the missionary.

‘I put my trust in God,’ she answered gravely.

‘Do you think he’d be any use?’ asked the Contrôleur. ‘You know what he is.’

‘I’m convinced of it.’ Then she blushed. ‘After all, no one knows better than I that he’s capable of self–control.’

The Contrôleur bit his lip.

‘Let’s send for him.’

He gave a message to the sergeant and in a few minutes Ginger Ted stood before them. He looked ill. He had evidently been much shaken by his recent attack and his nerves were all to pieces. He was in rags and he had not shaved for a week. No one could have looked more disreputable.

‘Look here, Ginger,’ said the Contrôleur, ‘it’s about this cholera business. We’ve got to force the natives to take precautions and we want you to help us.’

‘Why the hell should I?’

‘No reason at all. Except philanthropy.’

‘Nothing doing, Contrôleur. I’m not a philanthropist.’

‘That settles that. That was all. You can go.’

But as Ginger Ted turned to the door Miss Jones stopped him.

‘It was my suggestion, Mr Wilson. You see, they want me to go to Labobo and Sakunchi, and the natives there are so funny I was afraid to go alone. I thought if you came I should be safer.’

He gave her a look of extreme distaste.

‘What do you suppose I care if they cut your throat?’

Miss Jones looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. She began to cry. He stood and watched her stupidly.

‘There’s no reason why you should.’ She pulled herself together and dried her eyes. ‘I’m being silly. I shall be all right. I’ll go alone.’

‘It’s damned foolishness for a woman to go to Labobo.’

She gave him a little smile.

‘I daresay it is, but you see, it’s my job and I can’t help myself. I’m sorry if I offended you by asking you. You must forget about it. I daresay it wasn’t quite fair to ask you to take such a risk.’

For quite a minute Ginger Ted stood and looked at her. He shifted from one foot to the other. His surly face seemed to grow black.

‘Oh, hell, have it your own way,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll come with you. When d’you want to start?’

They set out next day, with drugs and disinfectants, in the Government launch. Mr Gruyter as soon as he had put the necessary work in order was to start off in a prahu in the other direction. For four months the epidemic raged. Though everything possible was done to localize it, one island after another was attacked. The Contrôleur was busy from morning to night. He had no sooner got back to Baru from one or other of the islands to do what was necessary there than he had to set off again. He distributed food and medicine. He cheered the terrified people. He supervised everything. He worked like a dog. He saw nothing of Ginger Ted, but he heard from Mr Jones that the experiment was working out beyond all hopes. The scamp was behaving himself. He had a way with the natives; and by cajolery, firmness, and on occasion the use of his fist, managed to make them take the steps necessary for their own safety. Miss Jones could congratulate herself on the success of the scheme. But the Contrôleur was too tired to be amused. When the epidemic had run its course he rejoiced because out of a population of eight thousand only six hundred had died.

Finally he was able to give the district a clean bill of health.

One evening he was sitting in his sarong on the veranda of his house and he read a French novel with the happy consciousness that once more he could take things easy. His head boy came in and told him that Ginger Ted wished to see him. He got up from his chair and shouted to him to come in. Company was just what he wanted. It had crossed the Contrôleur’s mind that it would be pleasant to get drunk that night, but it is dull to get drunk alone, and he had regretfully put the thought aside. And heaven had sent Ginger Ted in the nick of time. By God, they would make a night of it. After four months they deserved a bit of fun. Ginger Ted entered. He was wearing a clean suit of white ducks. He was shaved. He looked another man.

‘Why, Ginger, you look as if you’d been spending a month at a health resort instead of nursing a pack of natives dying of cholera. And look at your clothes. Have you just stepped out of a band–box?’

Ginger Ted smiled rather sheepishly. The head boy brought two bottles of beer and poured them out.

‘Help yourself, Ginger,’ said the Contrôleur as he took his glass.

‘I don’t think I’ll have any, thank you.’

The Contrôleur put down his glass and looked at Ginger Ted with amazement.

‘Why, what’s the matter? Aren’t you thirsty?’

‘I don’t mind having a cup of tea.’

‘A cup of what?’

‘I’m on the wagon. Martha and I are going to be married.’

‘Ginger!’

The Contrôleur’s eyes popped out of his head. He scratched his shaven pate.

‘You can’t marry Miss Jones,’ he said. ‘No one could marry Miss Jones.’

‘Well, I’m going to. That’s what I’ve come to see you about. Owen’s going to marry us in chapel, but we want to be married by Dutch law as well.’

‘A joke’s a joke, Ginger. What’s the idea?’

‘She wanted it. She fell for me that night we spent on the island when the propeller broke. She’s not a bad old girl when you get to know her. It’s her last chance, if you understand what I mean, and I’d like to do something to oblige her. And she wants someone to take care of her, there’s no doubt about that.’

‘Ginger, Ginger, before you can say knife she’ll make you into a damned missionary.’

‘I don’t know that I’d mind that so much if we had a little mission of our own. She says I’m a bloody marvel with the natives. She says I can do more with a native in five minutes than Owen can do in a year. She says she’s never known anyone with the magnetism I have. It seems a pity to waste a gift like that.’

The Contrôleur looked at him without speaking and slowly nodded his head three or four times. She’d nobbled him all right.

‘I’ve converted seventeen already,’ said Ginger Ted.

‘You? I didn’t know you believed in Christianity.’

‘Well, I don’t know that I did exactly, but when I talked to ’em and they just came into the fold like a lot of blasted sheep, well, it gave me quite a turn. Blimey, I said, I daresay there’s something in it after all.’

‘You should have raped her, Ginger. I wouldn’t have been hard on you. I wouldn’t have given you more than three years and three years is soon over.’

‘Look here, Contrôleur, don’t you ever let on that the thought never entered my head. Women are touchy, you know, and she’d be as sore as hell if she knew that.’

‘I guessed she’d got her eye on you, but I never thought it would come to this.’ The Contrôleur in an agitated manner walked up and down the veranda. ‘Listen to me, old boy,’ he said after an interval of reflection, ‘we’ve had some grand times together and a friend’s a friend. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll lend you the launch and you can go and hide on one of the islands till the next ship comes along and then I’ll get ’em to slow down and take you on board. You’ve only got one chance now and that’s to cut and run.’ Ginger Ted shook his head.

‘It’s no good, Contrôleur, I know you mean well, but I’m going to marry the blasted woman, and that’s that. You don’t know the joy of bringing all them bleeding sinners to repentance, and Christ! that girl can make a treacle pudding. I haven’t eaten a better one since I was a kid.’

The Contrôleur was very much disturbed. The drunken scamp was his only companion on the islands and he did not want to lose him. He discovered that he had even a certain affection for him. Next day he went to see the missionary.

‘What’s this I hear about your sister marrying Ginger Ted?’ he asked him. ‘It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘It’s true nevertheless.’

‘You must do something about it. It’s madness.’

‘My sister is of full age and entitled to do as she pleases.’

‘But you don’t mean to tell me you approve of it. You know Ginger Ted. He’s a bum and there are no two ways about it. Have you told her the risk she’s running? I mean, bringing sinners to repentance and all that sort of thing’s all right, but there are limits. And does the leopard ever change his spots?’

Then for the first time in his life the Contrôleur saw a twinkle in the missionary’s eye.

‘My sister is a very determined woman, Mr Gruyter,’ he replied. ‘From that night they spent on the island he never had a chance.’

The Contrôleur gasped. He was as surprised as the prophet when the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? Perhaps Mr Jones was human after all.

‘Allejezus!’ muttered the Contrôleur.

Before anything more could be said Miss Jones swept into the room. She was radiant. She looked ten years younger. Her cheeks were flushed and her nose was hardly red at all.

‘Have you come to congratulate me, Mr Gruyter?’ she cried, and her manner was sprightly and girlish. ‘You see, I was right after all. Everyone has some good in them. You don’t know how splendid Edward has been all through this terrible time. He’s a hero. He’s a saint. Even I was surprised.’

‘I hope you’ll be very happy, Miss Jones.’

‘I know I shall. Oh, it would be wicked of me to doubt it. For it is the Lord who has brought us together.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I know it. Don’t you see? Except for the cholera Edward would never have found himself. Except for the cholera we should never have learnt to know one another. I have never seen the hand of God more plainly manifest.’

The Contrôleur could not but think that it was rather a clumsy device to bring those two together that necessitated the death of six hundred innocent persons, but not being well versed in the ways of omnipotence he made no remark.

‘You’ll never guess where we’re going for our honeymoon,’ said Miss Jones, perhaps a trifle archly. ‘Java.’

‘No, if you’ll lend us the launch, we’re going to that island where we were marooned. It has very tender recollections for both of us. It was there that I first guessed how fine and good Edward was. It’s there I want him to have his reward.’

The Contrôleur caught his breath. He left quickly, for he thought that unless he had a bottle of beer at once he would have a fit. He was never so shocked in his life.

LOUISE

I could never understand why Louise bothered with me. She disliked me and I knew that behind my back, in that gentle way of hers, she seldom lost the opportunity of saying a disagreeable thing about me. She had too much delicacy ever to make a direct statement, but with a hint and a sigh and a little flutter of her beautiful hands she was able to make her meaning plain. She was a mistress of cold praise. It was true that we had known one another almost intimately, for five–and–twenty years, but it was impossible for me to believe that she could be affected by the claims of old association. She thought me a coarse, brutal, cynical, and vulgar fellow. I was puzzled at her not taking the obvious course and dropping me. She did nothing of the kind; indeed, she would not leave me alone; she was constantly asking me to lunch and dine with her and once or twice a year invited me to spend a week–end at her house in the country. At last I thought that I had discovered her motive. She had an uneasy suspicion that I did not believe in her; and if that was why she did not like me, it was also why she sought my acquaintance: it galled her that I alone should look upon her as a comic figure and she could not rest till I acknowledged myself mistaken and defeated. Perhaps she had an inkling that I saw the face behind the mask and because I alone held out was determined that sooner or later I too should take the mask for the face. I was never quite certain that she was a complete humbug. I wondered whether she fooled herself as thoroughly as she fooled the world or whether there was some spark of humour at the bottom of her heart. If there was it might be that she was attracted to me, as a pair of crooks might be attracted to one another, by the knowledge that we shared a secret that was hidden from everybody else.

I knew Louise before she married. She was then a frail, delicate girl with large and melancholy eyes. Her father and mother worshipped her with an anxious adoration, for some illness, scarlet fever I think, had left her with a weak heart and she had to take the greatest care of herself. When Tom Maitland proposed to her they were dismayed, for they were convinced that she was much too delicate for the strenuous state of marriage. But they were not too well off and Tom Maitland was rich. He promised to do everything in the world for Louise and finally they entrusted her to him as a sacred charge. Tom Maitland was a big, husky fellow, very good–looking and a fine athlete. He doted on Louise. With her weak heart he could not hope to keep her with him long and he made up his mind to do everything he could to make her few years on earth happy. He gave up the games he excelled in, not because she wished him to, she was glad that he should play golf and hunt, but because by a coincidence she had a heart attack whenever he proposed to leave her for a day. If they had a difference of opinion she gave in to him at once, for she was the most submissive wife a man could have, but her heart failed her and she would be laid up, sweet and uncomplaining, for a week. He would not be such a brute as to cross her. Then they would have quite a little tussle about which should yield and it was only with difficulty that at last he persuaded her to have her own way. On one occasion seeing her walk eight miles on an expedition that she particularly wanted to make, I suggested to Tom Maitland that she was stronger than one would have thought. He shook his head and sighed.

‘No, no, she’s dreadfully delicate. She’s been to all the best heart specialists in the world and they all say that her life hangs on a thread. But she has an unconquerable spirit.’

He told her that I had remarked on her endurance.’I shall pay for it tomorrow,’ she said to me in her plaintive way. ‘I shall be at death’s door.’

‘I sometimes think that you’re quite strong enough to do the things you want to,’ I murmured.

I had noticed that if a party was amusing she could dance till five in the morning, but if it was dull she felt very poorly and Tom had to take her home early. I am afraid she did not like my reply, for though she gave me a pathetic little smile I saw no amusement in her large blue eyes.

‘You can’t very well expect me to fall down dead just to please you,’ she answered.

Louise outlived her husband. He caught his death of cold one day when they were sailing and Louise needed all the rugs there were to keep her warm. He left her a comfortable fortune and a daughter. Louise was inconsolable. It was wonderful that she managed to survive the shock. Her friends expected her speedily to follow poor Tom Maitland to the grave. Indeed they already felt dreadfully sorry for Iris, her daughter, who would be left an orphan. They redoubled their attentions towards Louise. They would not let her stir a finger; they insisted on doing everything in the world to save her trouble. They had to, because if she was called upon to do anything tiresome or inconvenient her heart went back on her and there she was at death’s door. She was entirely lost without a man to take care of her, she said, and she did not know how, with her delicate health, she was going to bring up her dear Iris. Her friends asked why she did not marry again. Oh, with her heart it was out of the question, though of course she knew that dear Tom would have wished her to, and perhaps it would be the best thing for Iris if she did; but who would want to be bothered with a wretched invalid like herself? Oddly enough more than one young man showed himself quite ready to undertake the charge and a year after Tom’s death she allowed George Hobhouse to lead her to the altar. He was a fine, upstanding fellow and he was not at all badly off. I never saw anyone so grateful as he for the privilege of being allowed to take care of this frail little thing.

‘I shan’t live to trouble you long,’ she said.

He was a soldier and an ambitious one, but he resigned his commission. Louise’s health forced her to spend the winter at Monte Carlo and the summer at Deauville. He hesitated a little at throwing up his career, and Louise at first would not hear of it; but at last she yielded as she always yielded, and he prepared to make his wife’s last few years as happy as might be.

‘It can’t be very long now,’ she said. ‘I’ll try not to be troublesome.’

For the next two or three years Louise managed, notwithstanding her weak heart, to go beautifully dressed to all the most lively parties, to gamble very heavily, to dance and even to flirt with tall slim young men. But George Hobhouse had not the stamina of Louise’s first husband and he had to brace himself now and then with a stiff drink for his day’s work as Louise’s second husband. It is possible that the habit would have grown on him, which Louise would not have liked at all, but very fortunately (for her) the war broke out. He rejoined his regiment and three months later was killed. It was a great shock to Louise. She felt, however, that in such a crisis she must not give way to a private grief; and if she had a heart attack nobody heard of it. In order to distract her mind she turned her villa at Monte Carlo into a hospital for convalescent officers. Her friends told her that she would never survive the strain.

‘Of course it will kill me,’ she said, ‘I know that. But what does it matter? I must do my bit.’

It didn’t kill her. She had the time of her life. There was no convalescent home in France that was more popular. I met her by chance in Paris. She was lunching at the Ritz with a tall and very handsome young Frenchman. She explained that she was there on business connected with the hospital. She told me that the officers were too charming to her. They knew how delicate she was and they wouldn’t let her do a single thing. They took care of her, well–as though they were all her husbands. She sighed.

‘Poor George, who would ever have thought that I with my heart should survive him?’

‘And poor Tom!’ I said.

I don’t know why she didn’t like my saying that. She gave me her plaintive smile and her beautiful eyes filled with tears.

‘You always speak as though you grudged me the few years that I can expect to live.’

‘By the way, your heart’s much better, isn’t it?’

‘It’ll never be better. I saw a specialist this morning and he said I must be prepared for the worst.’

‘Oh, well, you’ve been prepared for that for nearly twenty years now, haven’t you?’

When the war came to an end Louise settled in London. She was now a woman of over forty, thin and frail still, with large eyes and pale cheeks, but she did not look a day more than twenty–five. Iris, who had been at school and was now grown up, came to live with her.

‘She’ll take care of me,’ said Louise. ‘Of course, it’ll be hard on her to live with such a great invalid as I am, but it can only be for such a little while, I’m sure she won’t mind.’

Iris was a nice girl. She had been brought up with the knowledge that her mother’s health was precarious. As a child she had never been allowed to make a noise. She had always realized that her mother must on no account be upset. And though Louise told her now that she would not hear of her sacrificing herself for a tiresome old woman the girl simply would not listen. It wasn’t a question of sacrificing herself, it was a happiness to do what she could for her poor dear mother. With a sigh her mother let her do a great deal.

‘It pleases the child to think she’s making herself useful,’ she said.

‘Don’t you think she ought to go out and about more?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I’m always telling her. I can’t get her to enjoy herself. Heaven knows, I never want anyone to put themselves out on my account.’

And Iris, when I remonstrated with her, said: ‘Poor dear mother, she wants me to go and stay with friends and go to parties, but the moment I start off anywhere she has one of her heart attacks, so I much prefer to stay at home.’

But presently she fell in love. A young friend of mine, a very good lad, asked her to marry him and she consented. I liked the child and was glad that she was to be given at last the chance to lead a life of her own. She had never seemed to suspect that such a thing was possible. But one day the young man came to me in great distress and told me that his marriage was indefinitely postponed. Iris felt that she could not desert her mother. Of course it was really no business of mine, but I made the opportunity to go and see Louise. She was always glad to receive her friends at tea–time and now that she was older she cultivated the society of painters and writers.

‘Well, I hear that Iris isn’t going to be married,’ I said after a little.

‘I don’t know about that. She’s not going to be married quite as soon as I could have wished. I’ve begged her on my bended knees not to consider me, but she absolutely refuses to leave me.’

‘Don’t you think it’s rather hard on her?’

‘Dreadfully. Of course it can only be for a few months, but I hate the thought of anyone sacrificing themselves for me.’

‘My dear Louise, you’ve buried two husbands, I can’t see the least reason why you shouldn’t bury at least two more.’

‘Do you think that’s funny?’ she asked me in a tone that she made as offensive as she could.

‘I suppose it’s never struck you as strange that you’re always strong enough to do anything you want to and that your weak heart only prevents you from doing things that bore you?’

‘Oh, I know, I know what you’ve always thought of me. You’ve never believed that I had anything the matter with me, have you?’

I looked at her full and square.

‘Never. I think you’ve carried out for twenty–five years a stupendous bluff. I think you’re the most selfish and monstrous woman I have ever known. You ruined the lives of those two wretched men you married and now you’re going to ruin the life of your daughter.’

I should not have been surprised if Louise had had a heart attack then. I fully expected her to fly into a passion. She merely gave me a gentle smile.

‘My poor friend, one of these days you’ll be so dreadfully sorry you said this to me.’

‘Have you quite determined that Iris shall not marry this boy?’

‘I’ve begged her to marry him. I know it’ll kill me, but I don’t mind. Nobody cares for me. I’m just a burden to everybody.’

‘Did you tell her it would kill you?’

‘She made me.’

‘As if anyone ever made you do anything that you were not yourself quite determined to do.’

‘She can marry her young man tomorrow if she likes. If it kills me, it kills me.’

‘Well, let’s risk it, shall we?’

‘Haven’t you got any compassion for me?’

‘One can’t pity anyone who amuses one as much as you amuse me,’ I answered.

A faint spot of colour appeared on Louise’s pale cheeks and though she smiled still her eyes were hard and angry.

‘Iris shall marry in a month’s time,’ she said, ‘and if anything happens to me I hope you and she will be able to forgive yourselves.’

Louise was as good as her word. A date was fixed, a trousseau of great magnificence was ordered, and invitations were issued. Iris and the very good lad were radiant. On the wedding–day, at ten o’clock in the morning, Louise, that devilish woman, had one of her heart attacks–and died. She died gently forgiving Iris for having killed her.

THE PROMISE

My wife is a very unpunctual woman, so when, having arranged to lunch with her at Claridge’s, I arrived there ten minutes late and did not find her I was not surprised. I ordered a cocktail. It was the height of the season and there were but two or three vacant tables in the lounge. Some of the people after an early meal were drinking their coffee, others like myself were toying with a dry Martini; the women in their summer frocks looked gay and charming and the men debonair; but I could see no one whose appearance sufficiently interested me to occupy the quarter of an hour I was expecting to wait. They were slim and pleasant to look upon, well dressed and carelessly at ease, but they were for the most part of a pattern and I observed them with tolerance rather than with curiosity. But it was two o’clock and I felt hungry. My wife tells me that she can wear neither a turquoise nor a watch, for the turquoise turns green and the watch stops; and this she attributes to the malignity of fate. I have nothing to say about the turquoise, but I sometimes think the watch might go if she wound it. I was engaged with these reflections when an attendant came up and with that hushed significance that hotel attendants affect (as though their message held a more sinister meaning than their words suggested) told me that a lady had just telephoned to say that she had been detained and could not lunch with me.

I hesitated. It is not very amusing to eat in a crowded restaurant by oneself, but it was late to go to a club and I decided that I had better stay where I was. I strolled into the dining–room. It has never given me any particular satisfaction (as it appears to do to so many elegant persons) to be known by name to the head waiters of fashionable restaurants, but on this occasion I should certainly have been glad to be greeted by less stony an eye. The maître d’hôtel with a set and hostile face told me that every table was occupied. I looked helplessly round the large and stately room and on a sudden to my pleasure caught sight of someone I knew. Lady Elizabeth Vermont was an old friend. She smiled and noticing that she was alone I went up to her.

‘Will you take pity on a hungry man and let me sit with you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, do. But I’ve nearly finished.’

She was at a little table by the side of a massive column and when I took my place I found that notwithstanding the crowd we sat almost in privacy. ‘This is a bit of luck for me,’ I said. ‘I was on the point of fainting from hunger.’

She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm. It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly travelled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered. No one surely could say that Elizabeth Vermont was cast in the common mould. I never knew her when she was a girl, but many have told me that then she was so lovely, it brought the tears to one’s eyes, and I could well believe it; for now, though fifty, she was still incomparable. Her ravaged beauty made the fresh and blooming comeliness of youth a trifle insipid. I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick. But Elizabeth Vermont painted not to imitate nature, but to improve it; you did not question the means but applauded the result. The flaunting boldness with which she used cosmetics increased rather than diminished the character of that perfect face. I suppose her hair was dyed; it was black and sleek and shining. She held herself upright as though she had never learned to loll and she was very slim. She wore a dress of black satin, the lines and simplicity of which were admirable, and about her neck was a long rope of pearls. Her only other jewel was an enormous emerald which guarded her wedding–ring, and its sombre fire emphasized the whiteness of her hand.

But it was in her hands with their reddened nails that she most clearly betrayed her age; they had none of a girl’s soft and dimpled roundness; and you could not but look at them with a certain dismay. Before very long they would look like the talons of a bird of prey.

Elizabeth Vermont was a remarkable woman. Of great birth, for she was the daughter of the seventh Duke of St Erth, she married at the age of eighteen a very rich man and started at once upon a career of astounding extravagance, lewdness, and dissipation. She was too proud to be cautious, too reckless to think of consequences, and within two years her husband in circumstances of appalling scandal divorced her. She married then one of the three co– respondents named in the case and eighteen months later ran away from him.

Then followed a succession of lovers. She became notorious for her profligacy.

Her startling beauty and her scandalous conduct held her in the public eye and it was never very long but that she gave the gossips something to talk about.

Her name stank in the nostrils of decent people. She was a gambler, a spendthrift, and a wanton. But though unfaithful to her lovers she was constant to her friends and there always remained a few who would never allow, whatever she did, that she was anything but a very nice woman. She had candour, high spirits, and courage. She was never a hypocrite. She was generous and sincere. It was at this period of her life that I came to know her; for great ladies, now that religion is out of fashion, when they are very much blown upon take a flattering interest in the arts. When they receive the cold shoulder from members of their own class they condescend sometimes to the society of writers, painters, and musicians. I found her an agreeable companion. She was one of those blessed persons who say quite fearlessly what they think (thus saving much useful time), and she had a ready wit. She was always willing to talk (with a diverting humour) of her lurid past. Her conversation, though uninstructed, was good, because, notwithstanding everything, she was an honest woman.

Then she did a very surprising thing. At the age of forty, she married a boy of twenty–one. Her friends said it was the maddest act of all her life, and some who had stuck to her through thick and thin, now for the boy’s sake, because he was nice and it seemed shameful thus to take advantage of his inexperience, refused to have anything more to do with her. It really was the limit. They prophesied disaster, for Elizabeth Vermont was incapable of sticking to any man for more than six months, nay, they hoped for it, since it seemed the only chance for the wretched youth that his wife should behave so scandalously that he must leave her. They were all wrong. I do not know whether time was responsible for a change of heart in her, or whether Peter Vermont’s innocence and simple love touched her, but the fact remains that she made him an admirable wife. They were poor, and she was extravagant, but she became a thrifty housewife; she grew on a sudden so careful of her reputation that the tongue of scandal was silenced. His happiness seemed her only concern. No one could doubt that she loved him devotedly. After being the subject of so much conversation for so long Elizabeth Vermont ceased to be talked about. It looked as though her story were told. She was a changed woman, and I amused myself with the notion that when she was a very old lady, with many years of perfect respectability behind her, the past, the lurid past, would seem to belong not to her but to someone long since dead whom once she had vaguely known. For women have an enviable faculty of forgetting. But who can tell what the fates have in store? In the twinkling of an eye all was changed. Peter Vermont, after ten years of an ideal marriage, fell madly in love with a girl called Barbara Canton. She was a nice girl, the youngest daughter of Lord Robert Canton who was at one time Under–Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and she was pretty in a fair and fluffy way. Of course she was not for a moment to be compared with Lady Elizabeth. Many people knew what had happened, but no one could tell whether Elizabeth Vermont had any inkling of it, and they wondered how she would meet a situation that was so foreign to her experience. It was always she who had discarded her lovers; none had deserted her. For my part I thought she would make short work of little Miss Canton; I knew her courage and her adroitness. All this was in my mind now while we chatted over our luncheon. There was nothing in her demeanour, as gay, charming, and frank as usual, to suggest that anything troubled her. She talked as she always talked, lightly but with good sense and a lively perception of the ridiculous, of the various topics which the course of conversation brought forward. I enjoyed myself. I came to the conclusion that by some miracle she had no notion of Peter’s changed feelings, and I explained this to myself by the supposition that her love for him was so great, she could not conceive that his for her might be less.

We drank our coffee and smoked a couple of cigarettes, and she asked me the time.

‘A quarter to three.’

‘I must ask for my bill.’

‘Won’t you let me stand you lunch?’

‘Of course,’ she smiled.

‘Are you in a hurry?’

‘I’m meeting Peter at three.’

‘Oh, how is he?’

‘He’s very well.’

She gave a little smile, that tardy and delightful smile of hers, but I seemed to discern in it a certain mockery. For an instant she hesitated and she looked at me with deliberation.

‘You like curious situations, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’d never guess the errand I’m bound on. I rang up Peter this morning and asked him to meet me at three. I’m going to ask him to divorce me.’

‘You’re not,’ I cried. I felt myself flush and did not know what to say. ‘I thought you got on so well together.’

‘Do you think it’s likely that I shouldn’t know what all the world knows? I’m really not such a fool as all that.’

She was not a woman to whom it was possible to say what one did not believe and I could not pretend that I did not know what she meant. I remained silent for a second or two.

‘Why should you allow yourself to be divorced?’

‘Robert Canton is a stuffy old thing. I very much doubt if he’d let Barbara marry Peter if I divorced him. And for me, you know, it isn’t of the smallest consequence: one divorce more or less...’

She shrugged her pretty shoulders.

‘How do you know he wants to marry her?’

‘He’s head over ears in love with her.’

‘Has he told you so?’

‘No. He doesn’t even know that I know. He’s been so wretched, poor darling.

He’s been trying so hard not to hurt my feelings.’

‘Perhaps it’s only a momentary infatuation,’ I hazarded. ‘It may pass.’ ‘Why should it? Barbara’s young and pretty. She’s quite nice. They’re very well suited to one another. And besides, what good would it do if it did pass? They love each other now and the present in love is all that matters. I’m nineteen years older than Peter. If a man stops loving a woman old enough to be his mother do you think he’ll ever come to love her again? You’re a novelist, you must know more about human nature than that.’

‘Why should you make this sacrifice?’

‘When he asked me to marry him ten years ago I promised him that when he wanted his release he should have it. You see there was so great a disproportion between our ages I thought that was only fair.’

‘And are you going to keep a promise that he hasn’t asked you to keep?’ She gave a little flutter of those long thin hands of hers and now I felt that there was something ominous in the dark glitter of that emerald. ‘Oh, I must, you know. One must behave like a gentleman. To tell you the truth, that’s why I’m lunching here today. It was at this table that he proposed to me; we were dining together, you know, and I was sitting just where I am now. The nuisance is that I’m just as much in love with him now as I was then.’

She paused for a minute and I could see that she clenched her teeth. ‘Well, I suppose I ought to go. Peter hates one to keep him waiting.’

She gave me a sort of little helpless look and it struck me that she simply could not bring herself to rise from her chair. But she smiled and with an abrupt gesture sprang to her feet.

‘Would you like me to come with you?’

‘As far as the hotel door,’ she smiled.

We walked through the restaurant and the lounge and when we came to the entrance a porter swung round the revolving doors. I asked if she would like a taxi.

‘No, I’d sooner walk, it’s such a lovely day.’ She gave me her hand. ‘It’s been so nice to see you. I shall go abroad tomorrow, but I expect to be in London all the autumn. Do ring me up.’

She smiled and nodded and turned away. I watched her walk up Davies Street. The air was still bland and springlike, and above the roofs little white clouds were sailing leisurely in a blue sky. She held herself very erect and the poise of her head was gallant. She was a slim and lovely figure so that people looked at her as they passed. I saw her bow graciously to some acquaintance who raised his hat, and I thought that never in a thousand years would it occur to him that she had a breaking heart. I repeat, she was a very honest woman.

A STRING OF BEADS

WHAT a bit of luck that I’m placed next to you,” said Laura, as we sat down to dinner.

“For me,” I replied politely.

“That remains to be seen. I particularly wanted to have the chance of talking to you. I’ve got a story to tell you.”

At this my heart sank a little.

“I’d sooner you talked about yourself,” I answered. “Or even about me.”

“Oh, but I must tell you the story. I think you’ll be able to use it.”

“If you must, you must. But let’s look at the menu first.”

“Don’t you want me to?” she said, somewhat aggrieved. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I am. You might have written a play and wanted to read me that.”

“It happened to some friends of mine. It’s perfectly true.”

“That’s no recommendation. A true story is never quite so true as an invented one.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing very much,” I admitted. “But I thought it sounded well.”

“I wish you’d let me get on with it.”

“I’m all attention. I’m not going to eat the soup. It’s fattening.” She gave me a pinched look and then glanced at the menu. She uttered a little sigh.

“Oh, well, if you’re going to deny yourself I suppose I must too. Heaven knows, I can’t afford to take liberties with my figure.”

“And yet is there any soup more heavenly than the sort of soup in which you put a great dollop of cream?”

“Bortsch,” she sighed. “It’s the only soup I really like.”

“Never mind. Tell me your story and we’ll forget about food till the fish comes.”

“Well, I was actually there when it happened. I was dining with the Livingstones. Do you know the Livingstones?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

“Well, you can ask them and they’ll confirm every word I say. They’d asked their governess to come in to dinner because some woman had thrown them over at the last moment — you know how inconsiderate people are — and they would have been thirteen at table. Their governess was a Miss Robinson, quite a nice girl, young, you know, twenty or twenty-one, and rather pretty. Personally I would never engage a governess who was young and pretty. One never knows.”

“But one hopes for the best.”

Laura paid no attention to my remark.

“The chances are that she’ll be thinking of young men instead of attending to her duties and then, just when she’s got used to your ways, she’ll want to go and get married. But Miss Robinson had excellent references, and I must allow that she was a very nice, respectable person. I believe in point of fact she was a clergyman’s daughter.

“There was a man at dinner whom I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of, but who’s quite a celebrity in his way. He’s a Count Borselli and he knows more about precious stones than anyone in the world. He was sitting next to Mary Lyngate, who rather fancies herself on her pearls, and in the course of conversation she asked him what he thought of the string she was wearing. He said it was very pretty. She was rather piqued at this and told him it was valued at eight thousand pounds.

“‘Yes, it’s worth that,’ he said.

“Miss Robinson was sitting opposite to him. She was looking rather nice that evening. Of course I recognised her dress, it was one of Sophie’s old ones; but if you hadn’t known Miss Robinson was the governess you would never have suspected it.

“‘That’s a very beautiful necklace that young lady has on,’ said Borselli.

“‘Oh, but that’s Mrs. Livingstone’s governess,’ said Mary Lyngate.

“‘I can’t help that,’ he said. ‘She’s wearing one of the finest strings of pearls for its size that I’ve ever seen in my life. It must be worth fifty thousand pounds.’

“‘Nonsense.’

“‘I give you my word it is.’

“Mary Lyngate leant over. She has rather a shrill voice.

“‘Miss Robinson, do you know what Count Borselli says?’ she exclaimed. ‘He says that string of pearls you’re wearing is worth fifty thousand pounds.’

“Just at that moment there was a sort of pause in the conversation so that everybody heard. We all turned and looked at Miss Robinson. She flushed a little and laughed.

“‘Well, I made a very good bargain,’ she said, ‘because I paid fifteen shillings for it.’

“‘You certainly did.’

“We all laughed. It was of course absurd. We’ve all heard of wives palming off on their husbands as false a string of pearls that was real and expensive. That story is as old as the hills.”

“Thank you,” I said, thinking of a little narrative of my own.

“But it was too ridiculous to suppose that a governess would remain a governess if she owned a string of pearls worth fifty thousand pounds. It was obvious that the Count had made a bloomer. Then an extraordinary thing happened. The long arm of coincidence came in.”

“It shouldn’t,” I retorted. “It’s had too much exercise. Haven’t you seen that charming book called A Dictionary of English Usage?”

“I wish you wouldn’t interrupt just when I’m really getting to the exciting point.”

But I had to do so again, for just then a young grilled salmon was insinuated round my left elbow.

“Mrs. Livingstone is giving us a heavenly dinner,” I said.

“Is salmon fattening?” asked Laura.

“Very,” I answered as I took a large helping.

“Bunk,” she said.

“Go on,” I begged her. “The long arm of coincidence was about to make a gesture.”

“Well, at that very moment the butler bent over Miss Robinson and whispered something in her ear. I thought she turned a trifle pale. It’s such a mistake not to wear rouge; you never know what tricks nature will play on you. She certainly looked startled. She leant forwards.

“‘Mrs. Livingstone, Dawson says there are two men in the hall who want to speak to me at once.’

“‘Well, you’d better go,’ said Sophie Livingstone.

“Miss Robinson got up and left the room. Of course the same thought flashed through all our minds, but I said it first.

“‘I hope they haven’t come to arrest her,’ I said to Sophie. ‘It would be too dreadful for you, my dear.’

“‘Are you sure it was a real necklace, Borselli?’ she asked.

“‘Oh, quite.’

“‘She could hardly have had the nerve to wear it to-night if it were stolen,’ I said.

“Sophie Livingstone turned as pale as death under her make-up, and I saw she was wondering if everything was all right in her jewel case. I only had on a little chain of diamonds, but instinctively I put my hand up to my neck to feel if it was still there.

“‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Mr. Livingstone. ‘How on earth would Miss Robinson have had the chance of sneaking a valuable string of pearls?’

“‘She may be a receiver,’ I said.

“‘Oh, but she had such wonderful references,’ said Sophie “‘They always do,’ I said.”

I was positively forced to interrupt Laura once more.

“You don’t seem to have been determined to take a very bright view of the case,” I remarked.

“Of course I knew nothing against Miss Robinson, and I had every reason to think her a very nice girl, but it would have been rather thrilling to find out that she was a notorious thief and a well- known member of a gang of international crooks.”

“Just like a film. I’m dreadfully afraid that it’s only in films that exciting things like that happen.”

“Well, we waited in breathless suspense. There was not a sound. I expected to hear a scuffle in the hall or at least a smothered shriek. I thought the silence very ominous. Then the door opened and Miss Robinson walked in. I noticed at once that the necklace was gone. I could see that she was pale and excited. She came back to the table, sat down and with a smile threw on it..”

“On what?”

“On the table, you fool. A string of pearls.”

“‘There’s my necklace,’ she said.

“Count Borselli leant forwards.

“‘Oh, but those are false,’ he said.

“‘I told you they were,’ she laughed.

“‘That’s not the same string that you had on a few moment ago,’ he said.

“She shook her head and smiled mysteriously. We were all intrigued. I don’t know that Sophie Livingstone was so very much pleased at her governess making herself the centre of interest like that and I thought there was a suspicion of tartness in her manner when she suggested that Miss Robinson had better explain. Well, Miss Robinson said that when she went into the hall she found two men who said they’d come from Jarrot’s Stores. She’d bought her string there, as she said, for fifteen shillings, and she’d taken it back because the clasp was loose and had only fetched it that afternoon. The men said they had given her the wrong string. Someone had left a string of real pearls to be re-strung and the assistant had made a mistake. Of course I can’t understand how anyone could be so stupid as to take a really valuable string to Jarrot’s, they aren’t used to dealing with that sort of thing, and they wouldn’t know real pearls from false; but you know what fools some women are. Anyhow, it was the string Miss Robinson was wearing, and it was valued at fifty thousand pounds. She naturally gave it back to them — she couldn’t do anything else, I suppose, though it must have been a wrench — and they returned her own string to her; then they said that although of course they were under no obligation — you know the silly, pompous way men talk when they’re trying to be businesslike — they were instructed, as a solatium or whatever you call it, to offer her a cheque for three hundred pounds. Miss Robinson actually showed it to us. She was as pleased as Punch.”

“Well, it was a piece of luck, wasn’t it?”

“You’d have thought so. As it turned out it was the ruin of her.”

“Oh, how was that?”

“Well, when the time came for her to go on her holiday she told Sophie Livingstone that she’d made up her mind to go to Deauville for a month and blue the whole three hundred pounds. Of course Sophie tried to dissuade her, and begged her to put the money in the savings bank, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d never had such a chance before and would never have it again and she meant for at least four weeks to live like a duchess. Sophie couldn’t really do anything and so she gave way. She sold Miss Robinson a lot of clothes that she didn’t want; she’d been wearing them all through the season and was sick to death of them; she says she gave them to her, but I don’t suppose she quite did that — I dare say she sold them very cheap — and Miss Robinson started off, entirely alone, for Deauville. What do you think happened then?”

“I haven’t a notion,” I replied. “I hope she had the time of her life.”

“Well, a week before she was due to come back she wrote to Sophie and said that she’d changed her plans and had entered another profession, and hoped that Mrs. Livingstone would forgive her if she didn’t return. Of course poor Sophie was furious. What had actually happened was that Miss Robinson had picked up a rich Argentine in Deauville and had gone off to Paris with him. She’s been in Paris ever since. I’ve seen her myself at Florence’s, with bracelets right up to her elbow and ropes of pearls round her neck. Of course I cut her dead. They say she has a house in the Bois de Boulogne and I know she has a Rolls. She threw over the Argentine in a few months and then got hold of a Greek; I don’t know who she’s with now, but the long and short of it is that she’s far and away the smartest cocotte in Paris.”

“When you say she was ruined you use the word in a purely technical sense, I conclude,” said I.

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Laura. “But don’t you think you could make a story out of it?”

“Unfortunately I’ve already written a story about a pearl necklace. One can’t go on writing stories about pearl necklaces.”

“I’ve got half a mind to write it myself. Only, of course, I should change the end.”

“Oh, how would you end it?”

“Well, I should have had her engaged to a bank clerk who had been badly knocked about in the war, with only one leg, say, or half his face shot away; and they’d be dreadfully poor and there would be no prospect of their marriage for years, and he would be putting all his savings into buying a little house in the suburbs, and they’d have arranged to marry when he had saved the last instalment. And then she takes him the three hundred pounds and they can hardly believe it, they’re so happy, and he cries on her shoulder. He just cries like a child. And they get the little house in the suburbs and they marry, and they have his old mother to live with them, and he goes to the bank every day, and if she’s careful not to have babies she can still go out as a daily governess, and he’s often ill — with his wound, you know — and she nurses him, and it’s all very pathetic and sweet and lovely.”

“It sounds rather dull to me,” I ventured.

“Yes, but moral,” said Laura.

THE YELLOW STREAK

The two prahus were dropping easily down–stream, one a few yards ahead of the other, and in the first sat the two white men. After seven weeks on the rivers they were glad to know that they would lodge that night in a civilized house. To Izzart, who had been in Borneo since the war, the Dyak houses and their feasts were of course an old story; but Campion, though new to the country and at first amused by the strangeness, hankered too now for chairs to sit on and a bed to sleep in. The Dyaks were hospitable, but no one could say that there was much comfort to be found in their houses, and there was a monotony in the entertainment they offered a guest which presently grew somewhat wearisome. Every evening, as the travellers reached the landing–place, the headman, bearing a flag, and the more important members of the household came down to the river to fetch them. They were led up to the long–house–a village really under one roof, built on piles, to which access was obtained by climbing up the trunk of a tree rudely notched into steps–and to the beating of drums and gongs walked up and down the whole length of it in long procession. On both sides serried throngs of brown people sat on their haunches and stared silently as the white men passed. Clean mats were unrolled and the guests seated themselves. The headman brought a live chicken and, holding it by the legs, waved it three times over their heads, called the spirits loudly to witness and uttered an invocation. Then various persons brought eggs. Arak was drunk. A girl, a very small shy thing with the grace of a flower but with something hieratic in her immobile face, held a cup to the white man’s lips till it was empty and then a great shout arose. The men began to dance, one after the other, each treading his little measure, with his shield and his parang, to the accompaniment of drum and gong. After this had gone on for some time the visitors were taken into one of the rooms that led off the long platform on which was led the common life of the household and found their supper prepared for them. The girls fed them with Chinese spoons. Then everyone grew a little drunk and they all talked till the early hours of the morning.

But now their journey was done and they were on their way to the coast.

They had started at dawn. The river then was very shallow and ran clear and bright over a shingly bottom; the trees leaned over it so that above there was only a strip of blue sky; but now it had broadened out, and the men were poling no longer but paddling. The trees, bamboos, wild sago like huge bunches of ostrich feathers, trees with enormous leaves and trees with feathery foliage like the acacia, coconut trees and areca palms, with their long straight white stems, the trees on the banks were immensely and violently luxuriant. Here and there, gaunt and naked, was the bare skeleton of a tree struck by lightning or dead of old age, and its whiteness against all that green was vivid. Here and there, rival kings of the forest, tall trees soared above the common level of the jungle. Then there were the parasites; in the fork of two branches great tufts of lush green leaves, or flowering creepers that covered the spreading foliage like a bride’s veil; sometimes they wound round a tall trunk, a sheath of splendour, and threw long flowering arms from branch to branch. There was something thrilling in the passionate wildness of that eager growth; it had the daring abandon of the maenad rioting in the train of the god.

The day wore on, and now the heat was no longer so oppressive. Campion looked at the shabby silver watch on his wrist. It could not be long now before they reached their destination.

‘What sort of a chap is Hutchinson?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know him. I believe he’s a very good sort.’

Hutchinson was the Resident in whose house they were to spend the night,

and they had sent on a Dyak in a canoe to announce their arrival. ‘Well, I hope he’s got some whisky. I’ve drunk enough arak to last me a lifetime.’

Campion was a mining engineer whom the Sultan on his way to England had met at Singapore, and finding him at a loose end had commissioned to go to Sembulu and see whether he could discover any mineral which might be profitably worked. He sent Willis, the Resident at Kuala Solor, instructions to afford him every facility, and Willis had put him in the care of Izzart because Izzart spoke both Malay and Dyak like a native. This was the third trip they had made into the interior, and now Campion was to go home with his reports.

They were to catch the Sultan Ahmed, which was due to pass the mouth of the river at dawn on the next day but one, and with any luck they should reach Kuala Solor on the same afternoon. They were both glad to get back to it. There was tennis and golf there, and the club with its billiard tables, food which was relatively good, and the comforts of civilization. Izzart was glad, too, that he would have other society than Campion’s. He gave him a sidelong glance. He was a little man with a big, bald head, and though certainly fifty, strong and wiry; he had quick, shining blue eyes and a stubbly, grey moustache. He was seldom without an old briar pipe between his broken and discoloured teeth.

He was neither clean nor neat, his khaki shorts were ragged and his singlet torn; he was wearing now a battered topee. He had knocked about the world since he was eighteen and had been in South Africa, in China and in Mexico.

He was good company; he could tell a story well, and he was prepared to drink and drink again with anyone he met. They had got on very well together, but Izzart had never felt quite at home with him. Though they joked and laughed together, got drunk together, Izzart felt that there was no intimacy between them; for all the cordiality of their relations they remained nothing but acquaintances. He was very sensitive to the impression he made on others, and behind Campion’s joviality he had felt a certain coolness; those shining blue eyes had summed him up; and it vaguely irritated Izzart that Campion had formed an opinion of him, and he did not quite know what it was. He was exasperated by the possibility that this common little man did not think entirely well of him. He desired to be liked and admired. He wanted to be popular. He wished the people he met to take an inordinate fancy to him, so that he could either reject them or a trifle condescendingly bestow his friendship on them. His inclination was to be familiar with all and sundry, but he was held back by the fear of a rebuff; sometimes he had been uneasily conscious that his effusiveness surprised the persons he lavished it on. By some chance he had never met Hutchinson, though of course he knew all about him just as Hutchinson knew all about him, and they would have many common friends to talk of. Hutchinson had been at Winchester, and Izzart was glad that he could tell him that he had been at Harrow....

The prahu rounded a bend in the river and suddenly, standing on a slight eminence, they saw the bungalow. In a few minutes they caught sight of the landing–stage and on it, among a little group of natives, a figure in white waving to them.

Hutchinson was a tall, stout man with a red face. His appearance led you to expect that he was breezy and self–confident, so that it was not a little surprising to discover quickly that he was diffident and even a trifle shy. When he shook hands with his guests–Izzart introduced himself and then Campion–and led them up the pathway to the bungalow, though he was plainly anxious to be civil it was not hard to see that he found it difficult to make conversation. He took them out on to the veranda and here they found on the table glasses and whisky and soda. They made themselves comfortable on long chairs. Izzart, conscious of Hutchinson’s slight embarrassment with strangers, expanded; he was very hearty and voluble. He began to speak of their common acquaintances at Kuala Solor, and he managed very soon to slip in casually the information that he had been at Harrow.

‘You were at Winchester, weren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder if you knew George Parker. He was in my regiment. He was at Winchester. I daresay he was younger than you.’

Izzart felt that it was a bond between them that they had been at these particular schools, and it excluded Campion, who obviously had enjoyed no such advantage. They drank two or three whiskies. Izzart in half an hour began to call his host Hutchie. He talked a good deal about ‘my regiment’ in which he had got his company during the war, and what good fellows his brother officers were. He mentioned two or three names which could hardly be unknown to Hutchinson. They were not the sort of people that Campion was likely to have come across, and he was not sorry to administer to him a neat snub when he claimed acquaintance with someone he spoke of. ‘Billie Meadows? I knew a fellow called Billie Meadows in Sinaloa many years ago,’ said Campion.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think it could be the same,’ said Izzart, with a smile. ‘Billie’s by way of being a peer of the realm. He’s the Lord Meadows who races. Don’t you remember, he owned Spring Carrots?’

Dinner time was approaching, and after a wash and brush–up they drank a couple of gin pahits. They sat down. Hutchinson had not been to Kuala Solor for the best part of a year, and had not seen another white man for three months. He was anxious to make the most of his visitors. He could give them no wine, but there was plenty of whisky and after dinner he brought out a precious bottle of Benedictine. They were very gay. They laughed and talked a great deal. Izzart was getting on famously. He thought he had never liked a fellow more than Hutchinson, and he pressed him to come down to Kuala Solor as soon as he could. They would have a wonderful beano. Campion was left out of the conversation by Izzart with the faintly malicious intention of putting him in his place, and by Hutchinson through shyness; and presently, after yawning a good deal, he said he would go to bed. Hutchinson showed him to his room, and when he returned Izzart said to him:

‘You don’t want to turn in yet, do you?’

‘Not on your life. Let’s have another drink.’

They sat and talked. They both grew a little drunk. Presently Hutchinson told Izzart that he lived with a Malay girl, and had a couple of children by her. He had told them to keep out of sight while Campion was there.

‘I expect she’s asleep now,’ said Hutchinson, with a glance at the door which Izzart knew led into his room, ‘but I’d like you to see the kiddies in the morning.’

Just then a faint wail was heard and Hutchinson with a ‘Hullo, the little devil’s awake’, went to the door and opened it. In a moment or two he came out of the room with a child in his arms. A woman followed him.

‘He’s cutting his teeth,’ said Hutchinson. ‘It makes him restless.’ The woman wore a sarong and a thin white jacket and she was barefoot. She was young, with fine dark eyes, and she gave Izzart when he spoke to her a bright and pleasant smile. She sat down and lit a cigarette. She answered the civil questions Izzart put to her without embarrassment, but also without effusion. Hutchinson asked her if she would have a whisky and soda, but she refused. When the two men began to talk again in English she sat on quite quietly, faintly rocking herself in her chair, and occupied with none could tell what calm thoughts.

‘She’s a very good girl,’ said Hutchinson.’ She looks after the house and she’s no trouble. Of course it’s the only thing to do in a place like this.’ ‘I shall never do it myself,’ said Izzart. ‘After all, one may want to get married and then it means all sorts of botherations.’

‘But who wants to get married? What a life for a white woman. I wouldn’t ask a white woman to live here for anything in the world.’

‘Of course it’s a matter of taste. If I have any kiddies I’m going to see that they have a white mother.’

Hutchinson looked down at the little dark–skinned child he held in his arms.

He gave a faint smile.

‘It’s funny how you get to like them,’ he said. ‘When they’re your own it doesn’t seem to matter that they’ve got a touch of the tar–brush.’ The woman gave the child a look, and getting up said she would take it back to bed.

‘I should think we’d better all turn in,’ said Hutchinson. ‘God knows what the time is.’

Izzart went to his room and threw open the shutters which his boy Hassan, whom he was travelling with, had closed. Blowing out the candle so that it should not attract the mosquitoes, he sat down at the window and looked at the soft night. The whisky he had drunk made him feel very wide awake, and he was not inclined to go to bed. He took off his ducks, put on a sarong and lit a cheroot. His good–humour was gone. It was the sight of Hutchinson looking fondly at the half–caste child which had upset him.

‘They’ve got no right to have them,’ he said to himself. ‘They’ve got no chance in the world. Ever.’

He passed his hands reflectively along his bare and hairy legs. He shuddered a little. Though he had done everything he could to develop the calves, his legs were like broomsticks. He hated them. He was uneasily conscious of them all the time. They were like a native’s. Of course they were the very legs for a top–boot. In his uniform he had looked very well. He was a tall, powerful man, over six feet high, and he had a neat black moustache and neat black hair. His dark eyes were fine and mobile. He was a good–looking fellow and he knew it, and he dressed well, shabbily when shabbiness was good form, and smartly when the occasion demanded. He had loved the army, and it was a bitter blow to him when, at the end of the war, he could not remain in it. His ambitions were simple. He wanted to have two thousand a year, give smart little dinners, go to parties, and wear a uniform. He hankered after London.

Of course his mother lived there, and his mother cramped his style. He wondered how on earth he could produce her if ever he got engaged to the girl of good family (with a little money) whom he was looking for to make his wife.

Because his father had been dead so long and during the later part of his career was stationed in the most remote of the Malay States, Izzart felt fairly sure that no one in Sembulu knew anything about her, but he lived in terror lest someone, running across her in London, should write over to tell people that she was a half–caste. She had been a beautiful creature when Izzart’s father, an engineer in the government service, had married her; but now she was a fat old woman with grey hair who sat about all day smoking cigarettes. Izzart was twelve years old when his father died and then he could speak Malay much more fluently than English. An aunt offered to pay for his education and Mrs Izzart accompanied her son to England. She lived habitually in furnished apartments, and her rooms with their Oriental draperies and Malay silver were overheated and stuffy. She was for ever in trouble with her landladies because she would leave cigarette–ends about. Izzart hated the way she made friends with them: she would be shockingly familiar with them for a time, then there would be a falling–out, and after a violent scene she would flounce out of the house. Her only amusement was the pictures, and to these she went every day in the week. At home she wore an old and tawdry dressing–gown, but when she went out she dressed herself–but, oh, how untidily–in extravagant colours, so that it was a mortification to her dapper son. He quarrelled with her frequently, she made him impatient and he was ashamed of her; and yet he felt for her a deep tenderness; it was almost a physical bond between them, something stronger than the ordinary feeling of mother and son, so that notwithstanding the failings that exasperated him she was the only person in the world with whom he felt entirely at home.

It was owing to his father’s position and his own knowledge of Malay, for his mother always spoke it to him, that after the war, finding himself with nothing to do, he had managed to enter the service of the Sultan of Sembulu. He had been a success. He played games well, he was strong and a good athlete; in the rest–house at Kuala Solor were the cups which he had won at Harrow for running and jumping, and to these he had added since others for golf and tennis. With his abundant fund of small–talk he was an asset at parties and his cheeriness made things go. He ought to have been happy and he was wretched. He wanted so much to be popular, and he had an impression, stronger than ever at this moment, that popularity escaped him. He wondered whether by any chance the men at Kuala Solor with whom he was so hail–fellow–well–met suspected that he had native blood in him. He knew very well what to expect if they ever found out. They wouldn’t say he was gay and friendly then, they would say he was damned familiar; and they would say he was inefficient and careless, as the half–castes were, and when he talked of marrying a white woman they would snigger. Oh, it was so unfair! What difference could it make, that drop of native blood in his veins, and yet because of it they would always be on the watch for the expected failure at the critical moment. Everyone knew that you couldn’t rely on Eurasians, sooner or later they would let you down; he knew it too, but now he asked himself whether they didn’t fail because failure was expected of them. They were never given a chance, poor devils.

But a cock crew loudly. It must be very late and he was beginning to feel chilly. He got into bed. When Hassan brought him his tea next morning he had a racking headache, and when he went into breakfast he could not look at the porridge and the bacon and eggs which were set before him. Hutchinson too was feeling none too well.

‘I fancy we made rather a night of it,’ said his host, with a smile to conceal his faint embarrassment.

‘I feel like hell,’ said Izzart.

‘I’m going to breakfast off a whisky and soda myself,’ added Hutchinson. Izzart asked for nothing better, and it was with distaste that they watched Campion eat with healthy appetite a substantial meal. Campion chaffed them. ‘By God, Izzart, you’re looking green about the gills,’ he said. ‘I never saw such a filthy colour.’

Izzart flushed. His swarthiness was always a sensitive point with him. But he forced himself to give a cheery laugh.

‘You see, I had a Spanish grandmother,’ he answered, ‘and when I’m under the weather it always comes out. I remember at Harrow I fought a boy and licked him, because he called me a damned half–caste.’

‘You are dark,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Do Malays ever ask you if you have any native blood in you?’

‘Yes, damn their impudence.’

A boat with their kit had started early in the morning in order to get to the mouth of the river before them, and tell the skipper of the Sultan Ahmed, if by chance he arrived before he was due, that they were on their way. Campion and Izzart were to set out immediately after tiffin in order to arrive at the place where they were to spend the night before the Bore passed. A Bore is a tidal wave that, by reason of a peculiarity in the lie of the land, surges up certain rivers, and there happened to be one on the river on which they were travelling.

Hutchinson had talked to them of it the night before and Campion, who had never seen such a thing, was much interested.

‘This is one of the best in Borneo. It’s worth looking at,’ said Hutchinson. He told them how the natives, waiting the moment, rode it and were borne up the river on its crest at a breathless and terrifying speed. He had done it once himself.

‘Never no more for me,’ he said. ‘I was scared out of my wits.’

‘I should like to try it once,’ said Izzart.

‘It’s exciting enough, but my word, when you’re in a flimsy dug–out and you know that if the native doesn’t get the right moment you’ll be flung in that seething torrent and you won’t have a chance in a million... no, it’s not my idea of sport.’

‘I’ve shot a good many rapids in my day,’ said Campion.

‘Rapids be damned. You wait till you see the Bore. It’s one of the most terrifying things I know. D’you know that at least a dozen natives are drowned in it in this river alone every year?’

They lounged about on the veranda most of the morning and Hutchinson showed them the court–house. Then gin pahits were served. They drank two or three. Izzart began to feel himself, and when at length tiffin was ready he found that he had an excellent appetite. Hutchinson had boasted of his Malay curry and when the steaming, succulent dishes were placed before them they all set to ravenously. Hutchinson pressed them to drink.

‘You’ve got nothing to do but sleep. Why shouldn’t you get drunk?’ He could not bear to let them go so soon, it was good after so long to have white men to talk to, and he lingered over the meal. He urged them to eat. They would have a filthy meal that night at the long–house and nothing to drink but arak. They had better make hay while the sun shone. Campion suggested once or twice that they should start, but Hutchinson, and Izzart too, for now he was feeling very happy and comfortable, assured him there was plenty of time.

Hutchinson sent for his precious bottle of Benedictine. They had made a hole in it last night; they might as well finish it before they went.

When at last he walked down with them to the river they were all very merry and none of them was quite steady on his legs. Over the middle of the boat was an attap awning, and under this Hutchinson had had a mattress laid. The crew were prisoners who had been marched down from the jail to row the white men, and they wore dingy sarongs with the prison mark. They waited at their oars. Izzart and Campion shook hands with Hutchinson and threw themselves down on the mattress. The boat pushed off. The turbid river, wide and placid, glistened in the heat of that brilliant afternoon like polished brass. In the distance ahead of them they could see the bank with its tangle of green trees.

They felt drowsy, but Izzart at least found a curious enjoyment in resisting for a little while the heaviness that was creeping over him, and he made up his mind that he would not let himself fall asleep till he had finished his cheroot. At last the stub began to burn his fingers and he flung it into the river.

‘I’m going to have a wonderful snooze,’ he said.

‘What about the Bore?’ asked Campion.

‘Oh, that’s all right. We needn’t worry about that.’

He gave a long and noisy yawn. His limbs felt like lead. He had one moment in which he was conscious of his delicious drowsiness and then he knew nothing more. Suddenly he was awakened by Campion shaking him. ‘I say, what’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

He spoke irritably, for sleep was still heavy upon him, but with his eyes he followed Campion’s gesture. He could hear nothing, but a good way off he saw two or three white–crested waves following one another. They did not look very alarming.

‘Oh, I suppose that’s the Bore.’

‘What are we going to do about it?’ cried Campion.

Izzart was scarcely yet quite awake. He smiled at the concern in Campion’s voice.

‘Don’t worry. These fellows know all about it. They know exactly what to do.

We may get a bit splashed.’

But while they were saying these few words the Bore came nearer, very quickly, with a roar like the roar of an angry sea, and Izzart saw that the waves were much higher than he had thought. He did not like the look of them and he tightened his belt so that his shorts should not slip down if the boat were upset. In a moment the waves were upon them. It was a great wall of water that seemed to tower over them, and it might have been ten or twelve feet high, but you could measure it only with your horror. It was quite plain that no boat could weather it. The first wave dashed over them, drenching them all, half filling the boat with water, and then immediately another wave struck them.

The boatman began to shout. They pulled madly at their oars and the steersman yelled an order. But in that surging torrent they were helpless, and it was frightening to see how soon they lost all control of the boat. The force of the water turned it broadside on and it was carried along, helter skelter, upon the crest of the Bore. Another great wave dashed over them and the boat began to sink. Izzart and Campion scrambled out of the covered place in which they had been lying and suddenly the boat gave way under their feet and they found themselves struggling in the water. It surged and stormed around them. Izzart’s first impulse was to swim for the shore, but his boy, Hassan, shouted to him to cling to the boat. For a minute or two they all did this.

‘Are you all right?’ Campion shouted to him.

‘Yes, enjoying the bath,’ said Izzart.

He imagined that the waves would pass by as the Bore ascended the river, and in a few minutes at the outside they would find themselves in calm water once more. He forgot that they were being carried along on its crest. The waves dashed over them. They clung to the gunwale and the base of the structure which supported the attap awning. Then a larger wave caught the boat as it turned over, falling upon them so that they lost their hold; there seemed nothing but a slippery bottom to cling to and Izzart’s hands slithered helplessly on the greasy surface. But the boat continued to turn and he made a desperate grab at the gunwale, only to feel it slip out of his hands as the turn went on, then he caught the framework of the awning, and still it turned, turned slowly right round and once more he sought for a hand–hold on the bottom. The boat went round and round with a horrible regularity. He thought this must be because everyone was clinging to one side of it, and he tried to make the crew go round to the other. He could not make them understand. Everyone was shouting and the waves beat against them with a dull and angry roar. Each time the boat rolled over on them Izzart was pushed under water, only to come up again as the gunwale and the framework of the awning gave him something to cling to. The struggle was awful. Presently he began to get terribly out of breath, and he felt his strength leaving him. He knew that he could not hold on much longer, but he did not feel frightened, for his fatigue by now was so great that he did not very much care what happened. Hassan was by his side and he told him he was growing very tired. He thought the best thing was to make a dash for the shore, it did not look more than sixty yards away, but Hassan begged him not to. Still they were being carried along amid those seething, pounding waves. The boat went round and round and they scrambled over it like squirrels in a cage. Izzart swallowed a lot of water. He felt he was very nearly done. Hassan could not help him, but it was a comfort that he was there, for Izzart knew that his boy, used to the water all his life, was a powerful swimmer. Then, Izzart did not know why, for a minute or two the boat held bottom downwards, so that he was able to hold on to the gunwale. It was a precious thing to be able to get his breath. At that moment two dug–outs, with Malays in them riding the Bore, passed swiftly by them. They shouted for help, but the Malays averted their faces and went on. They saw the white men, and did not want to be concerned in any trouble that might befall them. It was agonizing to see them go past, callous and indifferent in their safety. But on a sudden the boat rolled round again, round and round slowly, and the miserable, exhausting scramble repeated itself. It took the heart out of you. But the short respite had helped Izzart, and he was able to struggle a little longer. Then once more he found himself so terribly out of breath that he thought his chest would burst. His strength was all gone, and he did not know now whether he had enough to try to swim for the shore. Suddenly he heard a cry. ‘Izzart, Izzart. Help. Help.’

It was Campion’s voice. It was a scream of agony. It sent a shock all through Izzart’s nerves. Campion, Campion, what did he care for Campion? Fear seized him, a blind animal fear,’ and it gave him a new strength. He did not answer. ‘Help me, quick, quick,’ he said to Hassan.

Hassan understood him at once. By a miracle one of the oars was floating quite close to them and he pushed it into Izzart’s reach. He placed a hand under Izzart’s arm and they struck away from the boat. Izzart’s heart was pounding and his breath came with difficulty. He felt horribly weak. The waves beat in his face. The bank looked dreadfully far away. He did not think he could ever reach it. Suddenly the boy cried that he could touch bottom and Izzart put down his legs; but he could feel nothing; he swam a few more exhausted strokes, his eyes fixed on the bank, and then, trying again, felt his feet sink into thick mud. He was thankful. He floundered on and there was the bank within reach of his hands, black mud in which he sank to his knees; he scrambled up, desperate to get out of the cruel water, and when he came to the top he found a little flat with tall rank grass all about it. He and Hassan sank down on it and lay for a while stretched out like dead men. They were so tired that they could not move. They were covered with black mud from head to foot. But presently Izzart’s mind began to work, and a pang of anguish on a sudden shook him. Campion was drowned. It was awful. He did not know how he was going to explain the disaster when he got back to Kuala Solor. They would blame him for it; he ought to have remembered the Bore and told the steersman to make for the bank and tie up the boat when he saw it coming. It wasn’t his fault, it was the steersman’s, he knew the river; why in God’s name hadn’t he had the sense to get into safety? How could he have expected that it was possible to ride that horrible torrent? Izzart’s limbs shook as he remembered the wall of seething water that rushed down upon them. He must get the body and take it back to Kuala Solor. He wondered whether any of the crew were drowned too. He felt too weak to move, but Hassan now rose and wrung the water out of his sarong; he looked over the river and quickly turned to Izzart.

‘Tuan, a boat is coming.’

The lalang grass prevented Izzart from seeing anything.

‘Shout to them,’ he said.

Hassan slipped out of view and made his way along the branch of a tree thatoverhung the water; he cried out and waved. Presently Izzart heard voices.

There was a rapid conversation between the boy and the occupants of the boat, and then the boy came back.

‘They saw us capsize, Tuan,’ he said, ‘and they came as soon as the Bore passed. There’s a long–house on the other side. If you will cross the river they will give us sarongs and food and we can sleep there.’

Izzart for a moment felt that he could not again trust himself on the face of the treacherous water.

‘What about the other tuan?’ he asked.

‘They do not know.’

‘If he’s drowned they must find the body.’

‘Another boat has gone up–stream.’

Izzart did not know what to do. He was numb. Hassan put his arm round his shoulder and raised him to his feet. He made his way through the thick grass to the edge of the water, and there he saw a dug–out with two Dyaks in it. The river now once more was calm and sluggish; the great wave had passed on and no one would have dreamed that so short a while before the placid surface was like a stormy sea. The Dyaks repeated to him what they had already told the boy. Izzart could not bring himself to speak. He felt that if he said a word he would burst out crying. Hassan helped him to get in, and the Dyaks began to pull across. He fearfully wanted something to smoke, but his cigarettes and his matches, both in a hip–pocket, were soaking. The passage of the river seemed endless. The night fell and when they reached the bank the first stars were shining. He stepped ashore and one of the Dyaks took him up to the long–house. But Hassan seized the paddle he had dropped and with the other pushed out into the stream. Two or three men and some children came down to meet Izzart and he climbed to the house amid a babel of conversation. He went up the ladder and was led with greetings and excited comment to the space where the young men slept. Rattan mats were hurriedly laid to make him a couch and he sank down on them. Someone brought him a jar of arak and he took a long drink; it was rough and fiery, burning his throat, but it warmed his heart. He slipped off his shirt and trousers and put on a dry sarong which someone lent him. By chance he caught sight of the yellow new moon lying on her back, and it gave him a keen, almost a sensual, pleasure. He could not help thinking that he might at that moment be a corpse floating up the river with the tide. The moon had never looked to him more lovely. He began to feel hungry and he asked for rice. One of the women went into a room to prepare it. He was more himself now, and he began to think again of the explanations he would make at Kuala Solor. No one could really blame him because he had gone to sleep; he certainly wasn’t drunk, Hutchinson would bear him out there, and how was he to suspect that the steersman would be such a damned fool? It was just rotten luck. But he couldn’t think of Campion without a shudder. At last a platter of rice was brought him, and he was just about to start eating when a man ran hurriedly along and came up to him. ‘The tuan’s come,’ he cried.

‘What tuan?’

He jumped up. There was a commotion about the doorway and he stepped forward. Hassan was coming quickly towards him out of the darkness, and then he heard a voice.

‘Izzart. Are you there?’

Campion advanced towards him.

‘Well, here we are again. By God, that was a pretty near thing, wasn’t it? You seem to have made yourself nice and comfortable. My heavens, I could do with a drink.’

His dank clothes clung round him, and he was muddy and dishevelled. But he was in excellent spirits.

‘I didn’t know where the hell they were bringing me. I’d made up my mind that I should have to spend the night on the bank. I thought you were drowned.’

‘Here’s some arak,’ said Izzart.

Campion put his mouth to the jar and drank and spluttered and drank again. ‘Muck, but by God it’s strong.’ He looked at Izzart with a grin of his broken and discoloured teeth.’ I say, old man, you look as though you’d be all the better for a wash.’

‘I’ll wash later.’

‘All right, so will I. Tell them to get me a sarong. How did you get out?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘I thought I was done for. I owe my life to these two sportsmen here.’ He indicated with a cheery nod two of the Dyak prisoners whom Izzart vaguely recognized as having been part of their crew. ‘They were hanging on to that blasted boat on each side of me and somehow they cottoned on to it that I was down and out. I couldn’t have lasted another minute.

They made signs to me that we could risk having a shot at getting to the bank, but I didn’t think I had the strength. By George, I’ve never been so blown in all my life. I don’t know how they managed it, but somehow they got hold of the mattress we’d been lying on, and they made it into a roll. They’re sportsmen they are. I don’t know why they didn’t just save themselves without bothering about me. They gave it me. I thought it a damned poor lifebelt, but I saw the force of the proverb about a drowning man clutching at a straw. I caught hold of the damned thing and between them somehow or other they dragged me ashore.’

The danger from which he had escaped made Campion excited and voluble; but Izzart hardly listened to what he said. He heard once more, as distinctly as though the words rang now through the air, Campion’s agonized cry for help, and he felt sick with terror. The blind panic raced down his nerves. Campion was talking still, but was he talking to conceal his thoughts? Izzart looked into those bright blue eyes and sought to read the sense behind the flow of words.

Was there a hard glint in them or something of cynical mockery? Did he know that Izzart, leaving him to his fate, had cut and run? He flushed deeply. After all, what was there that he could have done? At such a moment it was each for himself and the devil take the hindmost. But what would they say in Kuala Solor if Campion told them that Izzart had deserted him? He ought to have stayed, he wished now with all his heart that he had, but then, then it was stronger than himself, he couldn’t. Could anyone blame him? No one who had seen that fierce and seething torrent. Oh, the water and the exhaustion, so that he could have cried!

‘If you’re as hungry as I am you’d better have a tuck in at this rice,’ he said. Campion ate voraciously, but when Izzart had taken a mouthful or two he found that he had no appetite. Campion talked and talked. Izzart listened suspiciously. He felt that he must be alert and he drank more arak. He began to feel a little drunk.

‘I shall get into the devil of a row at K. S.’ he said tentatively.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘I was told off to look after you. They won’t think it was very clever of me to let you get nearly drowned.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. It was the fault of the damned fool of a steersman. After all, the important thing is that we’re saved. By George, I thought I was finished once. I shouted out to you. I don’t know if you heard me.’

‘No, I didn’t hear anything. There was such a devil of a row, wasn’t there?’ ‘Perhaps you’d got away before. I don’t know exactly when you did get away.’ Izzart looked at him sharply. Was it his fancy that there was an odd look in Campion’s eyes?

‘There was such an awful confusion,’ he said. ‘I was just about down and out.

My boy threw me over an oar. He gave me to understand you were all right.

He told me you’d got ashore.’

The oar! He ought to have given Campion the oar and told Hassan, the strong swimmer, to give him his help. Was it his fancy again that Campion gave him a quick and searching glance?

‘I wish I could have been of more use to you,’ said Izzart.

‘Oh, I’m sure you had enough to do to look after yourself,’ answered Campion.

The headman brought them cups of arak, and they both drank a great deal.

Izzart’s head began to spin and he suggested that they should turn in. Beds had been prepared for them and mosquito nets fixed. They were to set out at dawn on the rest of their journey down the river. Campion’s bed was next to his, and in a few minutes he heard him snoring. He had fallen asleep the moment he lay down. The young men of the long–house and the prisoners of the boat’s crew went on talking late into the night. Izzart’s head now was aching horribly and he could not think. When Hassan roused him as day broke it seemed to him that he had not slept at all. Their clothes had been washed and dried, but they were bedraggled objects as they walked along the narrow pathway to the river where the prahu was waiting for them. They rowed leisurely. The morning was lovely and the great stretch of placid water gleamed in the early light.

‘By George, it’s fine to be alive,’ said Campion.

He was grubby and unshaved. He took long breaths, and his twisted mouth was half open with a grin. You could tell that he found the air singularly good to breathe. He was delighted with the blue sky and the sunshine and the greenness of the trees. Izzart hated him. He was sure that this morning there was a difference in his manner. He did not know what to do. He had a mind to throw himself on his mercy. He had behaved like a cad, but he was sorry, he would give anything to have the chance again, but anyone might have done what he did, and if Campion gave him away he was ruined. He could never stay in Sembulu; his name would be mud in Borneo and the Straits Settlements. If he made his confession to Campion he could surely get Campion to promise to hold his tongue. But would he keep his promise? He looked at him, a shifty little man: how could he be relied on? Izzart thought of what he had said the night before. It wasn’t the truth, of course, but who could know that? At all events who could prove that he hadn’t honestly thought that Campion was safe? Whatever Campion said, it was only his word against Izzart’s; he could laugh and shrug his shoulders and say that Campion had lost his head and didn’t know what he was talking about. Besides, it wasn’t certain that Campion hadn’t accepted his story; in that frightful struggle for life he could be very sure of nothing. He had a temptation to go back to the subject, but he was afraid if he did that he would excite suspicion in Campion’s mind. He must hold his tongue. That was his only chance of safety. And when they got to K. S. he would get in his story first.

‘I should be completely happy now,’ said Campion, ‘if I only had something to smoke.’

‘We shall be able to get some stinkers on board.’

Campion gave a little laugh.

‘Human beings are very unreasonable,’ he said. ‘At the first moment I was so glad to be alive that I thought of nothing else, but now I’m beginning to regret the loss of my notes and my photographs and my shaving tackle.’ Izzart formulated the thought which had lurked at the back of his mind, but which all through the night he had refused to admit into his consciousness. ‘I wish to God he’d been drowned. Then I’d have been safe.’

‘There she is,’ cried Campion suddenly.

Izzart looked round. They were at the mouth of the river and there was the Sultan Ahmed waiting for them. Izzart’s heart sank: he had forgotten that she had an English skipper and that he would have to be told the story of their adventure. What would Campion say? The skipper was called Bredon, and Izzart had met him often at Kuala Solor. He was a little bluff man, with a black moustache, and a breezy manner.

‘Hurry up,’ he called out to them, as they rowed up, ‘I’ve been waiting for you since dawn.’ But when they climbed on board his face fell. ‘Hullo, what’s the matter with you?’

‘Give us a drink and you shall hear all about it,’ said Campion, with his crooked grin.

‘Come along.’

They sat down under the awning. On a table were glasses, a bottle of whisky and soda–water. The skipper gave an order and in a few minutes they were noisily under way.

‘We were caught in the Bore,’ said Izzart.

He felt he must say something. His mouth was horribly dry notwithstanding the drink.

‘Were you, by Jove? You’re lucky not to have been drowned. What happened?’ He addressed himself to Izzart because he knew him, but it was Campion who answered. He related the whole incident, accurately, and Izzart listened with strained attention. Campion spoke in the plural when he told the early part of the story, and then, as he came to the moment when they were thrown into the water, changed to the singular. At first it was what they had done and now it was what happened to him. He left Izzart out of it. Izzart did not know whether to be relieved or alarmed. Why did he not mention him? Was it because in that mortal struggle for life he had thought of nothing but himself or–did he know?

‘And what happened to you?’ said Captain Bredon, turning to Izzart. Izzart was about to answer when Campion spoke.

‘Until I got over to the other side of the river I thought he was drowned.

I don’t know how he got out. I expect he hardly knows himself.’ ‘It was touch and go,’ said Izzart with a laugh.

Why had Campion said that? He caught his eye. He was sure now that there was a gleam of amusement in it. It was awful not to be certain. He was frightened. He was ashamed. He wondered if he could not so guide the conversation, either now or later, as to ask Campion whether that was the story he was going to tell in Kuala Solor. There was nothing in it to excite anyone’s suspicions. But if nobody else knew, Campion knew. He could have killed him. ‘Well, I think you’re both of you damned lucky to be alive,’ said the skipper. It was but a short run to Kuala Solor, and as they steamed up the Sembulu river Izzart moodily watched the banks. On each side were the mangroves and the nipahs washed by the water, and behind, the dense green of the jungle; here and there, among fruit trees, were Malay houses on piles. Night fell as they docked. Goring, of the police, came on board and shook hands with them.

He was living at the rest–house just then, and as he set about his work of seeing the native passengers he told them they would find another man, Porter by name, staying there too. They would all meet at dinner. The boys took charge of their kit, and Campion and Izzart strolled along. They bathed and changed, and at half past eight the four of them assembled in the common–room for gin pahits.

‘I say, what’s this Bredon tells me about your being nearly drowned?’ said Goring as he came in.

Izzart felt himself flush, but before he could answer Campion broke in, and it seemed certain to Izzart that he spoke in order to give the story as he chose. He felt hot with shame. Not a word was spoken in disparagement of him, not a word was said of him at all; he wondered if those two men who listened,

Goring and Porter, thought it strange that he should be left out. He looked at Campion intently as he proceeded with his narration; he told it rather humorously; he did not disguise the danger in which they had been, but he made a joke of it, so that the two listeners laughed at the quandary in which they found themselves.

‘A thing that’s tickled me since,’ said Campion, ’is that when I got over to the other bank I was black with mud from head to foot. I felt I really ought to jump in the river and have a wash, but you know I felt I’d been in that damned river as much as ever I wanted, and I said to myself; No, by George, I’ll go dirty. And when I got into the long–house and saw Izzart as black as I was, I knew he’d felt just like I did.’

They laughed and Izzart forced himself to laugh too. He noticed that Campion had told the story in precisely the same words as he had used when he told it to the skipper of the Sultan Ahmed. There could be only one explanation of that; he knew, he knew everything, and had made up his mind exactly what story to tell. The ingenuity with which Campion gave the facts and yet left out what must be to Izzart’s discredit was devilish. But why was he holding his hand? It wasn’t in him not to feel contempt and resentment for the man who had callously deserted him in that moment of dreadful peril.

Suddenly, in a flash of inspiration Izzart understood: he was keeping the truth to tell to Willis, the Resident. Izzart had gooseflesh as he thought of confronting Willis. He could deny, but would his denials serve him? Willis was no fool, and he would get at Hassan; Hassan could not be trusted to be silent;

Hassan would give him away. Then he would be done for. Willis would suggest that he had better go home.

He had a racking headache, and after dinner he went to his room, for he wanted to be alone so that he could devise a plan of action. And then a thought came to him which made him go hot and cold: he knew that the secret which he had guarded so long was a secret to nobody. He was on a sudden certain of it. Why should he have those bright eyes and that swarthy skin? Why should he speak Malay with such ease and have learned Dyak so quickly? Of course they knew. What a fool he was ever to think that they believed that story of his, about the Spanish grandmother! They must have laughed up their sleeves when he told it, and behind his back they had called him a damned nigger. And now another thought came to him, torturing, and he asked himself whether it was on account of that wretched drop of native blood in him that when he heard Campion cry out his nerve failed him. After all, anyone might at that moment have been seized with panic; and why in God’s name should he sacrifice his life to save a man’s whom he cared nothing for? It was insane. But of course in K. S. they would say it was only what they expected; they would make no allowances.

At last he went to bed, but when, after tossing about recklessly for God knows how long, he fell asleep, he was awakened by a fearful dream; he seemed to be once more in that raging torrent, with the boat turning, turning; and then there was the desperate clutching at the gunwale, and the agony as it slipped out of his hands, and the water that roared over him. He was wide awake before dawn. His only chance was to see Willis and get his story in first; and he thought over carefully what he was going to say, and chose the very words he meant to use.

He got up early, and in order not to see Campion went out without breakfast.

He walked along the high road till such time as he knew the Resident would be in his office, and then walked back again. He sent in his name and was ushered into Willis’s room. He was a little elderly man with thin grey hair and a long yellow face.

‘I’m glad to see you back safe and sound,’ he said shaking hands with Izzart.

‘What’s this I hear about your being nearly drowned?’

Izzart, in clean ducks, his topee spotless, was a fine figure of a man. His black hair was neatly brushed, and his moustache was trimmed. He had an upright and soldierly bearing.

‘I thought I’d better come and tell you at once, sir, as you told me to look after Campion.’

‘Fire away.’

Izzart told his story. He made light of the danger. He gave Willis to understand that it had not been very great. They would never have been upset if they had not started so late.

‘I tried to get Campion away earlier, but he’d had two or three drinks and the fact is, he didn’t want to move.’

‘Was he tight?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ smiled Izzart good–humouredly. ‘I shouldn’t say he was cold sober.’

He went on with his story. He managed to insinuate that Campion had lost his head a little. Of course it was a very frightening business to a man who wasn’t a decent swimmer: he, Izzart, had been more concerned for Campion than for himself; he knew the only chance was to keep cool, and the moment they were upset he saw that Campion had got the wind up.

‘You can’t blame him for that,’ said the Resident.

‘Of course I did everything I possibly could for him, sir, but the fact is, there wasn’t anything much I could do.’

‘Well, the great thing is that you both escaped. It would have been very awkward for all of us if he’d been drowned.’

‘I thought I’d better come and tell you the facts before you saw Campion, sir.

I fancy he’s inclined to talk rather wildly about it. There’s no use exaggerating.’ ‘On the whole your stories agree pretty well,’ said Willis, with a little smile. Izzart looked at him blankly.

‘Haven’t you seen Campion this morning? I heard from Goring that there’d been some trouble, and I looked in last night on my way home from the Fort after dinner. You’d already gone to bed.’

Izzart felt himself trembling, and he made a great effort to preserve his composure.

‘By the way, you got away first, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t really know, sir. You see, there was a lot of confusion.’

‘You must have if you got over to the other side before he did.’ ‘I suppose I did then.’

‘Well, thanks for coming to tell me,’ said Willis, rising from his chair. As he did so he knocked some books on the floor. They fell with a sudden thud. The unexpected sound made Izzart start violently, and he gave a gasp.

The Resident looked at him quickly.

‘I say, your nerves are in a pretty state.’

Izzart could not control his trembling.

‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ he murmured.

‘I expect it’s been a shock. You’d better take it easy for a few days. Why don’t you get the doctor to give you something?’

‘I didn’t sleep very well last night.’

The Resident nodded as though he understood. Izzart left the room, and as he passed out some man he knew stopped and congratulated him on his escape. They all knew of it. He walked back to the rest–house. And as he walked, he repeated to himself the story he had told the Resident. Was it really the same story that Campion had told? He had never suspected that the Resident had already heard it from Campion. What a fool he had been to go to bed! He should never have let Campion out of his sight. Why had the Resident listened without telling him that he already knew? Now Izzart cursed himself for having suggested that Campion was drunk and had lost his head. He had said this in order to discredit him, but he knew now that it was a stupid thing to do. And why had Willis said that about his having got away first? Perhaps he was holding his hand too; perhaps he was going to make inquiries; Willis was very shrewd. But what exactly had Campion said? He must know that; at whatever cost he must know. Izzart’s mind was seething, so that he felt he could hardly keep a hold on his thoughts, but he must keep calm. He felt like a hunted animal. He did not believe that Willis liked him; once or twice in the office he had blamed him because he was careless; perhaps he was just waiting till he got all the facts. Izzart was almost hysterical.

He entered the rest–house and there, sitting on a long chair, with his legs stretched out, was Campion. He was reading the papers which had arrived during their absence in the jungle. Izzart felt a blind rush of hatred well up in him as he looked at the little, shabby man who held him in the hollow of his hand.

‘Hullo,’ said Campion, looking up. ‘Where have you been?’

To Izzart it seemed that there was in his eyes a mocking irony. He clenched his hands, and his breath came fast.

‘What have you been saying to Willis about me?’ he asked abruptly. The tone in which he put the unexpected question was so harsh that Campion gave him a glance of faint surprise.

‘I don’t think I’ve been saying anything very much about you. Why?’ ‘He came here last night.’

Izzart looked at him intently. His brows were drawn together in an angry frown as he tried to read Campion’s thoughts.

‘I told him you’d gone to bed with a headache. He wanted to know about our mishap.’

‘I’ve just seen him.’

Izzart walked up and down the large and shaded room; now, though it was still early, the sun was hot and dazzling. He felt himself in a net. He was blind with rage; he could have seized Campion by the throat and strangled him, and yet, because he did not know what he had to fight against, he felt himself powerless. He was tired and ill, and his nerves were shaken. On a sudden the anger which had given him a sort of strength left him, and he was filled with despondency. It was as though water and not blood ran through his veins; his heart sank and his knees seemed to give way. He felt that if he did not take care, he would begin to cry. He was dreadfully sorry for himself.

‘Damn you, I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you,’ he cried pitifully. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ asked Campion, with astonishment. ‘Oh, don’t pretend. We’ve been pretending for two days, and I’m fed up with it.’ His voice rose shrilly, it sounded odd in that robust and powerful man. ‘I’m fed up with it. I cut and run. I left you to drown. I know I behaved like a skunk.

I couldn’t help it.’

Campion rose slowly from his chair.

‘What are you talking about?’

His tone was so genuinely surprised that it gave Izzart a start. A cold shiver ran down his spine.

‘When you called for help I was panic–stricken. I just caught hold of an oar and got Hassan to help me get away.’

‘That was the most sensible thing you could do.’

‘I couldn’t help you. There wasn’t a thing I could do.’

‘Of course not. It was damned silly of me to shout. It was waste of breath, and breath was the very thing I wanted.’

‘Do you mean to say you didn’t know?’

‘When those fellows got me the mattress, I thought you were still clinging to the boat. I had an idea that I got away before you did.’

Izzart put both his hands to his head, and gave a hoarse cry of despair. ‘My God, what a fool I’ve been.’

The two men stood for a while staring at one another. The silence seemed endless.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Izzart at last.

‘Oh, my dear fellow, don’t worry. I’ve been frightened too often myself to blame anyone who shows the white feather. I’m not going to tell a soul.’ ‘Yes, but you know.’

‘I promise you, you can trust me. Besides, my job’s done here and I’m going home. I want to catch the next boat to Singapore.’ There was a pause, and Campion looked for a while reflectively at Izzart. ‘There’s only one thing I’d like to ask you: I’ve made a good many friends here, and there are one or two things I’m a little sensitive about; when you tell the story of our upset, I should be grateful if you wouldn’t make out that I had behaved badly. I wouldn’t like the fellows here to think that I’d lost my nerve.’

Izzart flushed darkly. He remembered what he had said to the Resident. It almost looked as though Campion had been listening over his shoulder. He cleared his throat.

‘I don’t know why you think I should do that.’

Campion chuckled good–naturedly, and his blue eyes were gay with amusement.

‘The yellow streak,’ he replied, and then, with a grin that showed his broken and discoloured teeth: ‘Have a cheroot, dear boy.’

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

She was sitting on the veranda waiting for her husband to come in for luncheon. The Malay boy had drawn the blinds when the morning lost its freshness, but she had partly raised one of them so that she could look at the river. Under the breathless sun of midday it had the white pallor of death. A native was paddling along in a dug–out so small that it hardly showed above the surface of the water. The colours of the day were ashy and wan. They were but the various tones of the heat. (It was like an Eastern melody, in the minor key, which exacerbates the nerves by its ambiguous monotony; and the ear awaits impatiently a resolution, but waits in vain.) The cicadas sang their grating song with a frenzied energy; it was as continual and monotonous as the rustling of a brook over the stones; but on a sudden it was drowned by the loud singing of a bird, mellifluous and rich; and for an instant, with a catch at her heart, she thought of the English blackbird.

Then she heard her husband’s step on the gravel path behind the bungalow, the path that led to the court–house in which he had been working, and she rose from her chair to greet him. He ran up the short flight of steps, for the bungalow was built on piles, and at the door the boy was waiting to take his topee. He came into the room which served them as a dining–room and parlour, and his eyes lit up with pleasure as he saw her.

‘Hulloa, Doris. Hungry?’

‘Ravenous.’

‘It’ll only take me a minute to have a bath and then I’m ready.’ ‘Be quick,’ she smiled.

He disappeared into his dressing–room and she heard him whistling cheerily while, with the carelessness with which she was always remonstrating, he tore off his clothes and flung them on the floor. He was twenty–nine, but he was still a school–boy; he would never grow up. That was why she had fallen in love with him, perhaps, for no amount of affection could persuade her that he was good–looking. He was a little round man, with a red face like the full moon, and blue eyes. He was rather pimply. She had examined him carefully and had been forced to confess to him that he had not a single feature which she could praise. She had told him often that he wasn’t her type at all.

‘I never said I was a beauty,’ he laughed.

‘I can’t think what it is I see in you.’

But of course she knew perfectly well. He was a gay, jolly little man, who took nothing very solemnly, and he was constantly laughing. He made her laugh too. He found life an amusing rather than a serious business, and he had a charming smile. When she was with him she felt happy and good–tempered. And the deep affection which she saw in those merry blue eyes of his touched her. It was very satisfactory to be loved like that. Once, sitting on his knees, during their honeymoon she had taken his face in her hands and said to him:

‘You’re an ugly, little fat man, Guy, but you’ve got charm. I can’t help loving you.’

A wave of emotion swept over her and her eyes filled with tears. She saw his face contorted for a moment with the extremity of his feeling and his voice was a little shaky when he answered.

‘It’s a terrible thing for me to have married a woman who’s mentally deficient,’ he said.

She chuckled. It was the characteristic answer which she would have liked him to make.

It was hard to realize that nine months ago she had never even heard of him. She had met him at a small place by the seaside where she was spending a month’s holiday with her mother. Doris was a secretary to a Member of Parliament. Guy was home on leave. They were staying at the same hotel, and he quickly told her all about himself. He was born in Sembulu, where his father had served for thirty years under the second Sultan, and on leaving school he had entered the same service. He was devoted to the country.

‘After all, England’s a foreign land to me,’ he told her. ‘My home’s Sembulu.’

And now it was her home too. He asked her to marry him at the end of the month’s holiday. She had known he was going to, and had decided to refuse him. She was her widowed mother’s only child and she could not go so far away from her, but when the moment came she did not quite know what happened to her, she was carried off her feet by an unexpected emotion, and she accepted him. They had been settled now for four months in the little outstation of which he was in charge. She was very happy.

She told him once that she had quite made up her mind to refuse him.

‘Are you sorry you didn’t?’ he asked, with a merry smile in his twinkling blue eyes.

‘I should have been a perfect fool if I had. What a bit of luck that fate or chance or whatever it was stepped in and took the matter entirely out of my hands!’

Now she heard Guy clatter down the steps to the bath–house. He was a noisy fellow and even with bare feet he could not be quiet. But he uttered an exclamation. He said two or three words in the local dialect and she could not understand. Then she heard someone speaking to him, not aloud, but in a sibilant whisper. Really it was too bad of people to waylay him when he was going to have his bath. He spoke again and though his voice was low she could hear that he was vexed. The other voice was raised now; it was a woman’s. Doris supposed it was someone who had a complaint to make. It was like a Malay woman to come in that surreptitious way. But she was evidently getting very little from Guy, for she heard him say: Get out. That at all events she understood, and then she heard him bolt the door. There was a sound of the water he was throwing over himself (the bathing arrangements still amused her, the bath–houses were under the bedrooms, on the ground; you had a large tub of water and you sluiced yourself with a little tin pail) and in a couple of minutes he was back again in the dining–room. His hair was still wet. They sat down to luncheon.

‘It’s lucky I’m not a suspicious or a jealous person,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t know that I should altogether approve of your having animated conversations with ladies while you’re having your bath.’

His face, usually so cheerful, had borne a sullen look when he came in, but now it brightened.

‘I wasn’t exactly pleased to see her.’

‘So I judged by the tone of your voice. In fact, I thought you were rather short with the young person.’

‘Damned cheek, waylaying me like that!’

‘What did she want?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s a woman from the kampong. She’s had a row with her husband or something.’

‘I wonder if it’s the same one who was hanging about this morning.’

He frowned a little.

‘Was there someone hanging about?’

‘Yes, I went into your dressing–room to see that everything was nice and tidy, and then I went down to the bath–house. I saw someone slink out of the door as I went down the steps and when I looked out I saw a woman standing there.’

‘Did you speak to her?’

‘I asked her what she wanted and she said something, but I couldn’t understand.’

‘I’m not going to have all sorts of stray people prowling about here,’ he said. ‘They’ve got no right to come.’

He smiled, but Doris, with the quick perception of a woman in love, noticed that he smiled only with his lips, not as usual with his eyes also, and wondered what it was that troubled him.

‘What have you been doing this morning?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing much. I went for a little walk.’

‘Through the kampong?’

‘Yes. I saw a man send a chained monkey up a tree to pick coconuts, which rather thrilled me.’

‘It’s rather a lark, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, Guy, there were two little boys watching him who were much whiter than the others. I wondered if they were half–castes. I spoke to them, but they didn’t know a word of English.’

‘There are two or three half–caste children in the kampong,’ he answered.

‘Who do they belong to?’

‘Their mother is one of the village girls.’

‘Who is their father?’

‘Oh, my dear, that’s the sort of question we think it a little dangerous to ask out here.’ He paused. ‘A lot of fellows have native wives, and then when they go home or marry they pension them off and send them back to their village.’

Doris was silent. The indifference with which he spoke seemed a little callous to her. There was almost a frown on her frank, open, pretty English face when she replied.

‘But what about the children?’

‘I have no doubt they’re properly provided for. Within his means, a man generally sees that there’s enough money to have them decently educated. They get jobs as clerks in a government office, you know; they’re all right.’

She gave him a slightly rueful smile.

‘You can’t expect me to think it’s a very good system.’

‘You mustn’t be too hard,’ he smiled back.

‘I’m not hard. But I’m thankful you never had a Malay wife. I should have hated it. Just think if those two little brats were yours.’

The boy changed their plates. There was never much variety in their menu. They started luncheon with river fish, dull and insipid, so that a good deal of tomato ketchup was needed to make it palatable, and then went on to some kind of stew. Guy poured Worcester Sauce over it.

‘The old Sultan didn’t think it was a white woman’s country,’ he said presently. ‘He rather encouraged people to–keep house with native girls. Of course things have changed now. The country’s perfectly quiet and I suppose we know better how to cope with the climate.’

‘But, Guy, the eldest of those boys wasn’t more than seven or eight and the other was about five.’

‘It’s awfully lonely on an outstation. Why, often one doesn’t see another white man for six months on end. A fellow comes out here when he’s only a boy.’ He gave her that charming smile of his which transfigured his round, plain face. ‘There are excuses, you know.’

She always found that smile irresistible. It was his best argument. Her eyes grew once more soft and tender.

‘I’m sure there are.’ She stretched her hand across the little table and put it on his. ‘I’m very lucky to have caught you so young. Honestly, it would upset me dreadfully if I were told that you had lived like that.’

He took her hand and pressed it.

‘Are you happy here, darling?’

‘Desperately.’

She looked very cool and fresh in her linen frock. The heat did not distress her. She had no more than the prettiness of youth, though her brown eyes were fine; but she had a pleasing frankness of expression, and her dark, short hair was neat and glossy. She gave you the impression of a girl of spirit and you felt sure that the Member of Parliament for whom she worked had in her a very competent secretary.

‘I loved the country at once,’ she said. ‘Although I’m alone so much I don’t think I’ve ever once felt lonely.’

Of course she had read novels about the Malay Archipelago and she had formed an impression of a sombre land with great ominous rivers and a silent, impenetrable jungle. When a little coasting steamer set them down at the mouth of the river, where a large boat, manned by a dozen Dyaks, was waiting to take them to the station, her breath was taken away by the beauty, friendly rather than awe–inspiring, of the scene. It had a gaiety, like the joyful singing Of birds in the trees, which she had never expected. On each bank of the river were mangroves and nipah palms, and behind them the dense green of the forest. In the distance stretched blue mountains, range upon range, as far as the eye could see. She had no sense of confinement nor of gloom, but rather of openness and wide spaces where the exultant fancy could wander with delight. The green glittered in the sunshine and the sky was blithe and cheerful. The gracious land seemed to offer her a smiling welcome.

They rowed on, hugging a bank, and high overhead flew a pair of doves. A flash of colour, like a living jewel, dashed across their path. It was a kingfisher. Two monkeys, with their dangling tails, sat side by side on a branch. On the horizon, over there on the other side of the broad and turbid river, beyond the jungle, was a row of little white clouds, the only clouds in the sky, and they looked like a row of ballet–girls, dressed in white, waiting at the back of the stage, alert and merry, for the curtain to go up. Her heart was filled with joy; and now, remembering it all, her eyes rested on her husband with a grateful, assured affection.

And what fun it had been to arrange their living–room! It was very big. On the floor, when she arrived, was torn and dirty matting; on the walls of unpainted wood hung (much too high up) photogravures of Academy pictures, Dyak shields, and parangs. The tables were covered with Dyak cloth in sombre colours, and on them stood pieces of Brunei brass–ware, much in need of cleaning, empty cigarette tins, and bits of Malay silver. There was a rough wooden shelf with cheap editions of novels and a number of old travel books in battered leather; and another shelf was crowded with empty bottles. It was a bachelor’s room, untidy but stiff; and though it amused her she found it intolerably pathetic. It was a dreary, comfortless life that Guy had led there, and she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.

‘You poor darling,’ she laughed.

She had deft hands and she soon made the room habitable. She arranged this and that, and what she could not do with she turned out. Her wedding–presents helped. Now the room was friendly and comfortable. In glass vases were lovely orchids and in great bowls huge masses of flowering shrubs. She felt an inordinate pride because it was her house (she had never in her life lived in anything but a poky flat) and she had made it charming for him.

‘Are you pleased with me?’ she asked when she had finished.

‘Quite,’ he smiled.

The deliberate understatement was much to her mind. How jolly it was that they should understand each other so well! They were both of them shy of displaying emotion, and it was only at rare moments that they used with one another anything but ironic banter.

They finished luncheon and he threw himself into a long chair to have a sleep. She went towards her room. She was a little surprised that he drew her to him as she passed and, making her bend down, kissed her lips. They were not in the habit of exchanging embraces at odd hours of the day.

‘A full tummy is making you sentimental, my poor lamb,’ she chaffed him.

‘Get out and don’t let me see you again for at least two hours.’

‘Don’t snore.’

She left him. They had risen at dawn and in five minutes were fast asleep.

Doris was awakened by the sound of her husband’s splashing in the bathhouse. The walls of the bungalow were like a sounding board and not a thing that one of them did escaped the other. She felt too lazy to move, but she heard the boy bring the tea things in, so she jumped up and ran down into her own bath–house. The water, not cold but cool, was deliciously refreshing. When she came into the sitting–room Guy was taking the rackets out of the press, for they played tennis in the short cool of the evening. The night fell at six.

The tennis–court was two or three hundred yards from the bungalow and after tea, anxious not to lose time, they strolled down to it.

‘Oh, look’ said Doris, ‘there’s that girl that I saw this morning.’

Guy turned quickly. His eyes rested for a moment on a native woman, but he did not speak.

‘What a pretty sarong she’s got,’ said Doris. ‘I wonder where it comes from.’

They passed her. She was slight and small, with the large, dark, starry eyes of her race and a mass of raven hair. She did not stir as they went by, but stared at them strangely. Doris saw then that she was not quite so young as she had at first thought. Her features were a trifle heavy and her skin was dark, but she was very pretty. She held a small child in her arms. Doris smiled a little as she saw it, but no answering smile moved the woman’s lips. Her face remained impassive. She did not look at Guy, she looked only at Doris, and he walked on as though he did not see her. Doris turned to him.

‘Isn’t that baby a duck?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

She was puzzled by the look of his face. It was deathly white, and the pimples which not a little distressed her were more than commonly red.

‘Did you notice her hands and feet? She might be a duchess.’

‘All natives have good hands and feet,’ he answered, but not jovially as was his wont; it was as though he forced himself to speak.

But Doris was intrigued.

‘Who is she, d’you know?’

‘She’s one of the girls in the kampong.’

They had reached the court now. When Guy went up to the net to see that it was taut he looked back. The girl was still standing where they had passed her. Their eyes met.

‘Shall I serve?’ said Doris.

‘Yes, you’ve got the balls on your side.’

He played very badly. Generally he gave her fifteen and beat her, but today she won easily. And he played silently. Generally he was a noisy player, shouting all the time, cursing his foolishness when he missed a ball and chaffing her when he placed one out of her reach.

‘You’re off your game, young man,’ she cried.

‘Not a bit,’ he said.

He began to slam the balls, trying to beat her, and sent one after the other into the net. She had never seen him with that set face. Was it possible that he was a little out of temper because he was not playing well? The light fell, and they ceased to play. The woman whom they had passed stood in exactly the same position as when they came and once more, with expressionless face, she watched them go.

The blinds on the veranda were raised now, and on the table between their two long chairs were bottles and soda–water. This was the hour at which they had the first drink of the day and Guy mixed a couple of gin slings. The river stretched widely before them, and on the further bank the jungle was wrapped in the mystery of the approaching night. A native was silently rowing upstream, standing at the bow of the boat, with two oars.

‘I played like a fool,’ said Guy, breaking a silence. ‘I’m feeling a bit under the weather.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re not going to have fever, are you?’

‘Oh, no. I shall be all right tomorrow.’

Darkness closed in upon them. The frogs croaked loudly and, now and then they heard a few short notes from some singing bird of the night. Fireflies flitted across the veranda and they made the trees that surrounded it look like Christmas trees lit with tiny candles. They sparkled softly. Doris thought she heard a little sigh. It vaguely disturbed her. Guy was always so full of gaiety.

‘What is it, old man?’ she said gently. ‘Tell mother.’

‘Nothing. Time for another drink,’ he answered breezily.

Next day he was as cheerful as ever and the mail came. The coasting steamer passed the mouth of the river twice a month, once on its way to the coalfields and once on its way back. On the outward journey it brought mail, which Guy sent a boat down to fetch. Its arrival was the excitement of their uneventful lives. For the first day or two they skimmed rapidly all that had come, letters, English papers and papers from Singapore, magazines and books, leaving for the ensuing weeks a more exact perusal. They snatched the illustrated papers from one another. If Doris had not been so absorbed she might have noticed that there was a change in Guy. She would have found it hard to describe and harder still to explain. There was in his eyes a sort of watchfulness and in his mouth a slight droop of anxiety.

Then, perhaps a week later, one morning when she was sitting in the shaded room studying a Malay grammar (for she was industriously learning the language) she heard a commotion in the compound. She heard the house boy’s voice, he was speaking angrily, the voice of another man, perhaps it was the water–carrier’s, and then a woman’s, shrill and vituperative. There was a scuffle. She went to the window and opened the shutters. The water–carrier had hold of a woman’s arm and was dragging her along, while the house boy was pushing her from behind with both hands. Doris recognized her at once as the woman she had seen one morning loitering in the compound and later in the day outside the tennis–court. She was holding a baby against her breast. All three were shouting angrily.

‘Stop,’ cried Doris. ‘What are you doing?’

At the sound of her voice the water–carrier let go suddenly and the woman, still pushed from behind, fell to the ground. There was a sudden silence and the house boy looked sullenly into space. The water–carrier hesitated a moment and then slunk away. The woman raised herself slowly to her feet, arranged the baby on her arm, and stood impassive, staring at Doris. The boy said something to her which Doris could not have heard even if she had understood: the woman by no change of face showed that his words meant anything to her; but she slowly strolled away. The boy followed her to the gate of the compound. Doris called to him as he walked back, but he pretended not to hear. She was growing angry now and she called more sharply.

‘Come here at once,’ she cried.

Suddenly, avoiding her wrathful glance, he came towards the bungalow. He came in and stood at the door. He looked at her sulkily.

‘What were you doing with that woman?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Tuan say she no come here.’

‘You mustn’t treat a woman like that. I won’t have it. I shall tell the tuan exactly what I saw.’

The boy did not answer. He looked away, but she felt that he was watching her through his long eyelashes. She dismissed him.

‘That’ll do.’

Without a word he turned and went back to the servants’ quarters. She was exasperated and she found it impossible to give her attention once more to the Malay exercises. In a little while the boy came in to lay the cloth for luncheon. On a sudden he went to the door.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Tuan just coming.’

He went out to take Guy’s hat from him. His quick ears had caught the footsteps before they were audible to her. Guy did not as usual come up the steps immediately; he paused, and Doris at once surmised that the boy had gone down to meet him in order to tell him of the morning’s incident. She shrugged her shoulders. The boy evidently wanted to get his story in first. But she was astonished when Guy came in. His face was ashy.

‘Guy, what on earth’s the matter?’

He flushed a sudden hot red.

‘Nothing. Why?’

She was so taken aback that she let him pass into his room without a word of what she had meant to speak of at once. It took him longer than usual to have his bath and change his clothes and luncheon was served when he came in.

‘Guy,’ she said, as they sat down, ‘that woman we saw the other day was here again this morning.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ he answered.

‘The boys were treating her brutally. I had to stop them. You must really speak to them about it.’

Though the Malay understood every word she said, he made no sign that he heard. He handed her the toast.

‘She’s been told not to come here. I gave instructions that if she showed herself again she was to be turned out.’

‘Were they obliged to be so rough?’

‘She refused to go. I don’t think they were any rougher than they could help.’

‘It was horrible to see a woman treated like that. She had a baby in her arms.’

‘Hardly a baby. It’s three years old.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I know all about her. She hasn’t the least right to come here pestering everybody.’

‘What does she want?’

‘She wants to do exactly what she did. She wants to make a disturbance.’

For a little while Doris did not speak. She was surprised at her husband’s tone. He spoke tersely. He spoke as though all this were no concern of hers. She thought him a little unkind. He was nervous and irritable.

‘I doubt if we shall be able to play tennis this afternoon,’ he said. ‘It looks to me as though we were going to have a storm.’

The rain was falling when she awoke and it was impossible to go out. During tea Guy was silent and abstracted. She got her sewing and began to work. Guy sat down to read such of the English papers as he had not yet gone through from cover to cover; but he was restless; he walked up and down the large room and then went out on the veranda. He looked at the steady rain. What was he thinking of? Doris was vaguely uneasy.

It was not till after dinner that he spoke. During the simple meal he had exerted himself to be his usual gay self, but the exertion was apparent. The rain had ceased and the night was starry. They sat on the veranda. In order not to attract insects they had put out the lamp in the sitting–room. At their feet, with a mighty, formidable sluggishness, silent, mysterious, and fatal, flowed the river. It had the terrible deliberation and the relentlessness of destiny.

‘Doris, I’ve got something to say to you,’ he said suddenly.

His voice was very strange. Was it her fancy that he had difficulty in keeping it quite steady? She felt a little pang in her heart because he was in distress, and she put her hand gently into his. He drew it away.

‘It’s rather a long story. I’m afraid it’s not a very nice one and I find it rather difficult to tell. I’m going to ask you not to interrupt me, or to say anything, till I’ve finished.’

In the darkness she could not see his face, but she felt that it was haggard. She did not answer. He spoke in a voice so low that it hardly broke the silence of the night.

‘I was only eighteen when I came out here. I came straight from school. I spent three months in Kuala Solor, and then I was sent to a station up the Sembulu river. Of course there was a Resident there and his wife. I lived in the court–house, but I used to have my meals with them and spend the evening with them. I had an awfully good time. Then the fellow who was here fell ill and had to go home. We were short of men on account of the war and I was put in charge of this place. Of course I was very young, but I spoke the language like a native, and they remembered my father. I was as pleased as punch to be on my own.’

He was silent while he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and refilled it. When he lit a match Doris, without looking at him, noticed that his hand was unsteady.

‘I’d never been alone before. Of course at home there’d been father and mother and generally an assistant. And then at school naturally there were always fellows about. On the way out on the boat, there were people all the time, and at K.S., and the same at my first post. The people there were almost like my own people. I seemed always to live in a crowd. I like people. I’m a noisy blighter. I like to have a good time. All sorts of things make me laugh and you must have somebody to laugh with. But it was different here. Of course it was all right in the day time; I had my work and I could talk to the Dyaks. Although they were head–hunters in those days and now and then I had a bit of trouble with them, they were an awfully decent lot of fellows. I got on very well with them. Of course I should have liked a white man to gas to, but they were better than nothing, and it was easier for me because they didn’t look upon me quite as a stranger. I liked the work too. It was rather lonely in the evening to sit on the veranda and drink a gin and bitters by myself, but I could read. And the boys were about. My own boy was called Abdul. He’d known my father. When I got tired of reading I could give him a shout and have a bit of a jaw with him.

‘It was the nights that did for me. After dinner the boys shut up and went away to sleep in the kampong. I was all alone. There wasn’t a sound in the bungalow except now and then the croak of the chik–chak. It used to come out of the silence, suddenly, so that it made me jump. Over in the kampong I heard the sound of a gong or fire–crackers. They were having a good time, they weren’t so far away, but I had to stay where I was. I was tired of reading. I couldn’t have been more of a prisoner if I’d been in jail. Night after night it was the same. I tried drinking three or four whiskies, but it’s poor fun drinking alone, and it didn’t cheer me up; it only made me feel rather rotten next day. I tried going to bed immediately after dinner, but I couldn’t sleep. I used to lie in bed, getting hotter and hotter, and more wide awake, till I didn’t know what to do with myself. By George, those nights were long. D’you know, I got so low, I was so sorry for myself that sometimes–it makes me laugh now when I think of it, but I was only nineteen and a half–sometimes I used to cry.

‘Then, one evening, after dinner, Abdul had cleared away and was just going off, when he gave a little cough. He said, wasn’t I lonely in the house all night by myself? “Oh, no, that’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want him to know what a damned fool I was, but I expect he knew all right. He stood there without speaking, and I knew he wanted to say something to me. “What is it?” I said. ‘‘Spit it out.’’ Then he said that if I’d like to have a girl to come and live with me he knew one who was willing. She was a very good girl and he could recommend her. She’d be no trouble and it would be someone to have about the bungalow. She’d mend my things for me.... I felt awfully low. It had been raining all day and I hadn’t been able to get any exercise. I knew I shouldn’t sleep for hours. It wouldn’t cost me very much money, he said, her people were poor and they’d be quite satisfied with a small present. Two hundred Straits dollars. “You look,” he said. “If you don’t like her you send her away.” I asked him where she was. “She’s here,” he said. “I call her.” He went to the door. She’d been waiting on the steps with her mother. They came in and sat down on the floor. I gave them some sweets. She was shy, of course, but cool enough, and when I said something to her she gave me a smile. She was very young, hardly more than a child, they said she was fifteen. She was awfully pretty, and she had her best clothes on. We began to talk. She didn’t say much, but she laughed a lot when I chaffed her. Abdul said I’d find she had plenty to say for herself when she got to know me. He told her to come and sit by me. She giggled and refused, but her mother told her to come, and I made room for her on the chair. She blushed and laughed, but she came, and then she snuggled up to me. The boy laughed too. “You see, she’s taken to you already,” he said. “Do you want her to stay?” he asked. “Do you want to?” I said to her. She hid her face, laughing, on my shoulder. She was very soft and small. “Very well,” I said, “let her stay.”’

Guy leaned forward and helped himself to a whisky and soda.

‘May I speak now?’ asked Doris.

‘Wait a minute, I haven’t finished yet. I wasn’t in love with her, not even at the beginning. I only took her so as to have somebody about the bungalow. I think I should have gone mad if I hadn’t, or else taken to drink. I was at the end of my tether. I was too young to be quite alone. I was never in love with anyone but you.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘She lived here till I went home last year on leave. It’s the woman you’ve seen hanging about.’

‘Yes, I guessed that. She had a baby in her arms. Is that your child?’

‘Yes. It’s a little girl.’

’Is it the only one?’

‘You saw the two small boys the other day in the kampong. You mentioned them.’

‘She has three children then?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s quite a family you’ve got.’

She felt the sudden gesture which her remark forced from him, but she did not speak.

‘Didn’t she know that you were married till you suddenly turned up here with a wife?’ asked Doris.

‘She knew I was going to be married.’

‘When?’

‘I sent her back to the village before I left here. I told her it was all over. I gave her what I’d promised. She always knew it was only a temporary arrangement. I was fed up with it. I told her I was going to marry a white woman.’

‘But you hadn’t even seen me then.’

‘No, I know. But I’d made up my mind to marry when I was home.’ He chuckled in his old manner. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I was getting rather despondent about it when I met you. I fell in love with you at first sight and then I knew it was either you or nobody.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you think it would have been only fair to give me a chance of judging for myself? It might have occurred to you that it would be rather a shock to a girl to find out that her husband had lived for ten years with another girl and had three children.’

‘I couldn’t expect you to understand. The circumstances out here are peculiar. It’s the regular thing. Five men out of six do it. I thought perhaps it would shock you and I didn’t want to lose you. You see, I was most awfully in love with you. I am now, darling. There was no reason that you should ever know. I didn’t expect to come back here. One seldom goes back to the same station after home leave. When we came here I offered her money if she’d go to some other village. First she said she would and then she changed her mind.’

‘Why have you told me now?’

‘She’s been making the most awful scenes. I don’t know how she found out that you knew nothing about it. As soon as she did she began to blackmail me. I’ve had to give her an awful lot of money. I gave orders that she wasn’t to be allowed in the compound. This morning she made that scene just to attract your attention. She wanted to frighten me. It couldn’t go on like that. I thought the only thing was to make a clean breast of it.’

There was a long silence as he finished. At last he put his hand on hers.

‘You do understand, Doris, don’t you? I know I’ve been to blame.’

She did not move her hand. He felt it cold beneath his.

’Is she jealous?’

‘I daresay there were all sorts of perks when she was living here, and I don’t suppose she much likes not getting them any longer. But she was never in love with me any more than I was in love with her. Native women never do really care for white men, you know.’

‘And the children?’

‘Oh, the children are all right. I’ve provided for them. As soon as the boys are old enough I shall send them to school at Singapore.’

‘Do they mean nothing to you at all?’

He hesitated.

‘I want to be quite frank with you. I should be sorry if anything happened to them. When the first one was expected I thought I’d be much fonder of it than I ever had been of its mother. I suppose I should have been if it had been white. Of course, when it was a baby it was rather funny and touching, but I had no particular feeling that it was mine. I think that’s what it is; you see, I have no sense of their belonging to me. I’ve reproached myself sometimes, because it seemed rather unnatural, but the honest truth is that they’re no more to me than if they were somebody else’s children. Of course a lot of slush is talked about children by people who haven’t got any.’

Now she had heard everything. He waited for her to speak, but she said nothing. She sat motionless.

’Is there anything more you want to ask me, Doris?’ he said at last.

‘No I’ve got rather a headache. I think I shall go to bed.’ Her voice was as steady as ever. ‘I don’t quite know what to say. Of course it’s been all very unexpected. You must give me a little time to think.’

‘Are you very angry with me?’

‘No. Not at all. Only–only I must be left to myself for a while. Don’t move. I’m going to bed.’

She rose from her long chair and put her hand on his shoulder.

‘It’s so very hot tonight. I wish you’d sleep in your dressing–room. Good night.’

She was gone. He heard her lock the door of her bedroom.

She was pale next day and he could see that she had not slept. There was no bitterness in her manner, she talked as usual, but without ease; she spoke of this and that as though she were making conversation with a stranger. They had never had a quarrel, but it seemed to Guy that so would she talk if they had had a disagreement and the subsequent reconciliation had left her still wounded. The look in her eyes puzzled him; he seemed to read in them a strange fear. Immediately after dinner she said:

‘I’m not feeling very well tonight. I think I shall go straight to bed.’

‘Oh, my poor darling, I’m so sorry,’ he cried.

‘It’s nothing. I shall be all right in a day or two.’

‘I shall come in and say good night to you later.’

‘No, don’t do that. I shall try and get straight off to sleep.’

‘Well, then, kiss me before you go.’

He saw that she flushed. For an instant she seemed to hesitate; then, with averted eyes, she leaned towards him. He took her in his arms and sought her lips, but she turned her face away and he kissed her cheek. She left him quickly and again he heard the key turn softly in the lock of her door. He flung himself heavily on the chair. He tried to read, but his ear was attentive to the smallest sound in his wife’s room. She had said she was going to bed, but he did not hear her move. The silence in there made him unaccountably nervous. Shading the lamp with his hand he saw that there was a glimmer under her door; she had not put out her light. What on earth was she doing? He put down his book. It would not have surprised him if she had been angry and had made a scene, or if she had cried; he could have coped with that; but her calmness frightened him. And then what was that fear which he had seen so plainly in her eyes? He thought once more over all he had said to her on the previous night. He didn’t know how else he could have put it. After all, the chief point was that he’d done the same as everybody else, and it was all over long before he met her. Of course as things turned out he had been a fool, but anyone could be wise after the event. He put his hand to his heart. Funny how it hurt him there.

‘I suppose that’s the sort of thing people mean when they say they’re heartbroken,’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder how long it’s going on like this?’

Should he knock at the door and tell her he must speak to her? It was better to have it out. He must make her understand. But the silence scared him. Not a sound! Perhaps it was better to leave her alone. Of course it had been a shock. He must give her as long as she wanted. After all, she knew how devotedly he loved her. Patience, that was the only thing; perhaps she was fighting it out with herself; he must give her time; he must have patience. Next morning he asked her if she had slept better.

‘Yes, much,’ she said.

‘Are you very angry with me?’ he asked piteously.

She looked at him with candid, open eyes.

‘Not a bit.’

‘Oh my dear, I’m so glad. I’ve been a brute and a beast. I know it’s been hateful for you. But do forgive me. I’ve been so miserable.’

‘I do forgive you. I don’t even blame you.’

He gave her a little rueful smile, and there was in his eyes the look of a whipped dog.

‘I haven’t much liked sleeping by myself the last two nights.’

She glanced away. Her face grew a trifle paler.

‘I’ve had the bed in my room taken away. It took up so much space. I’ve had a little camp bed put there instead.’

‘My dear, what are you talking about?’

Now she looked at him steadily.

‘I’m not going to live with you as your wife again.’

‘Never?’

She shook her head. He looked at her in a puzzled way. He could hardly believe he had heard aright and his heart began to beat painfully.

‘But that’s awfully unfair to me, Doris.’

‘Don’t you think it was a little unfair to me to bring me out here in the circumstances?’

‘But you just said you didn’t blame me.’

‘That’s quite true. But the other’s different. I can’t do it.’

‘But how are we going to live together like that?’

She stared at the floor. She seemed to ponder deeply.

‘When you wanted to kiss me on the lips last night I–it almost made me sick.’

‘Doris.’

She looked at him suddenly and her eyes were cold and hostile.

‘That bed I slept on, is that the bed in which she had her children?’ She saw him flush deeply. ‘Oh, it’s horrible. How could you?’ She wrung her hands, and her twisting, tortured fingers looked like little writhing snakes. But she made a great effort and controlled herself. ‘My mind is quite made up. I don’t want to be unkind to you, but there are some things that you can’t ask me to do. I’ve thought it all over. I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you told me, night and day, till I’m exhausted. My first instinct was to get up and go. At once. The steamer will be here in two or three days.’

‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I love you?’

‘Oh, I know you love me. I’m not going to do that. I want to give us both a chance. I have loved you so, Guy.’ Her voice broke, but she did not cry. ‘I don’t want to be unreasonable. Heaven knows, I don’t want to be unkind. Guy, will you give me time?’

‘I don’t know quite what you mean.’

‘I just want you to leave me alone. I’m frightened by the feelings that I have.’

He had been right then; she was afraid. ‘What feelings?’

‘Please don’t ask me. I don’t want to say anything to wound you. Perhaps I shall get over them. Heaven knows, I want to. I’ll try, I promise you. I’ll try. Give me six months. I’ll do everything in the world for you, but just that one thing.’ She made a little gesture of appeal. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be happy enough together. If you really love me you’ll–you’ll have patience.’

He sighed deeply.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Naturally I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t like. It shall be as you say.’

He sat heavily for a little, as though, on a sudden grown old, it was an effort to move; then he got up.

‘I’ll be getting along to the office.’

He took his topee and went out.

A month passed. Women conceal their feelings better than men and a stranger visiting them would never have guessed that Doris was in any way troubled. But in Guy the strain was obvious; his round, good–natured face was drawn, and in his eyes was a hungry, harassed look. He watched Doris. She was gay and she chaffed him as she had been used to do; they played tennis together; they chatted about one thing and another. But it was evident that she was merely playing a part, and at last, unable to contain himself, he tried to speak again of his connexions with the Malay woman.

‘Oh, Guy, there’s no object in going back on all that,’ she answered breezily. ‘We’ve said all we had to say about it and I don’t blame you for anything.’

‘Why do you punish me then?’

‘My poor boy, I don’t want to punish you. It’s not my fault if...’ she shrugged her shoulders. ‘Human nature is very odd.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t try.’

The words might have been harsh, but she softened them with a pleasant, friendly smile. Every night when she went to bed she leaned over Guy and lightly kissed his cheek. Her lips only touched it. It was as though a moth had just brushed his face in its flight.

A second month passed, then a third, and suddenly the six months which had seemed so interminable were over. Guy asked himself whether she remembered. He gave a strained attention now to everything she said, to every look on her face and to every gesture of her hands. She remained impenetrable. She had asked him to give her six months; well, he had.

The coasting steamer passed the mouth of the river, dropped their mail, and went on its way. Guy busily wrote the letters which it would pick up on the return journey. Two or three days passed by. It was a Tuesday and the prahu was to start at dawn on Thursday to await the steamer. Except at meal time when Doris exerted herself to make conversation they had not of late talked very much together; and after dinner as usual they took their books and began to read; but when the boy had finished clearing away and was gone for the night Doris put down hers.

‘Guy, I have something I want to say to you,’ she murmured.

His heart gave a sudden thud against his ribs and he felt himself change colour.

‘Oh, my dear, don’t look like that, it’s not so very terrible,’ she laughed.

But he thought her voice trembled a little.

‘Well?’

‘I want you to do something for me.’

‘My darling, I’ll do anything in the world for you.’

He put out his hand to take hers, but she drew it away.

‘I want you to let me go home.’

‘You?’ he cried, aghast. ‘When? Why?’

‘I’ve borne it as long as I can. I’m at the end of my tether.’

‘How long do you want to go for? For always?’

‘I don’t know. I think so.’ She gathered determination. ‘Yes, for always.’ ‘Oh, my God!’

His voice broke and she thought he was going to cry.

‘Oh, Guy, don’t blame me. It really is not my fault. I can’t help myself.’

‘You asked me for six months. I accepted your terms. You can’t say I’ve made a nuisance of myself.’

‘No, no.’

‘I’ve tried not to let you see what a rotten time I was having.’

‘I know. I’m very grateful to you. You’ve been awfully kind to me. Listen, Guy, I want to tell you again that I don’t blame you for a single thing you did. After all, you were only a boy, and you did no more than the others; I know what the loneliness is here. Oh, my dear, I’m so dreadfully sorry for you. I knew all that from the beginning. That’s why I asked you for six months. My common sense tells me that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. I’m unreasonable; I’m being unfair to you. But, you see, common sense has nothing to do with it; my whole soul is in revolt. When I see the woman and her children in the village I just feel my legs shaking. Everything in this house; when I think of that bed I slept in it gives me goose–flesh.... You don’t know what I’ve endured.’

‘I think I’ve persuaded her to go away. And I’ve applied for a transfer.’

‘That wouldn’t help. She’ll be there always. You belong to them, you don’t belong to me. I think perhaps I could have stood it if there’d only been one child, but three; and the boys are quite big boys. For ten years you lived with her.’ And now she came out with what she had been working up to. She was desperate. ‘It’s a physical thing, I can’t help it, it’s stronger than I am. I think of those thin black arms of hers round you and it fills me with a physical nausea. I think of you holding those little black babies in your arms. Oh, it’s loathsome. The touch of you is odious to me. Each night, when I’ve kissed you, I’ve had to brace myself up to it. I’ve had to clench my hands and force myself to touch your cheek.’ Now she was clasping and unclasping her fingers in a nervous agony, and her voice was out of control. ‘I know it’s I who am to blame now. I’m a silly, hysterical woman. I thought I’d get over it. I can’t, and now I never shall. I’ve brought it all on myself; I’m willing to take the consequences; if you say I must stay here, I’ll stay, but if I stay I shall die. I beseech you to let me go.’

And now the tears which she had restrained so long overflowed and she wept broken–heartedly. He had never seen her cry before.

‘Of course I don’t want to keep you here against your will,’ he said hoarsely.

Exhausted, she leaned back in her chair. Her features were all twisted and awry. It was horribly painful to see the abandonment of grief on that face which was habitually so placid.

‘I’m so sorry, Guy. I’ve broken your life, but I’ve broken mine too. And we might have been so happy.’

‘When do you want to go? On Thursday?’

‘Yes.’

She looked at him piteously. He buried his face in his hands. At last he looked up.

‘I’m tired out,’ he muttered.

‘May I go?’

‘Yes.’

For two minutes perhaps they sat there without a word. She started when the chik–chak gave its piercing, hoarse, and strangely human cry. Guy rose and went out on to the veranda. He leaned against the rail and looked at the softly flowing water. He heard Doris go into her room.

Next morning, up earlier than usual, he went to her door and knocked.

‘Yes?’

‘I have to go up–river today. I shan’t be back till late.’

‘All right.’

She understood. He had arranged to be away all day in order not to be about while she was packing. It was heartbreaking work. When she had packed her clothes she looked round the sitting–room at the things that belonged to her. It seemed dreadful to take them. She left everything but the photograph of her mother. Guy did not come in till ten o’clock at night.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to dinner,’ he said. ‘The headman at the village I had to go to had a lot of things for me to attend to.’

She saw his eyes wander about the room and notice that her mother’s photograph no longer stood in its place.

’Is everything quite ready?’ he asked. ‘I’ve ordered the boatman to be at the steps at dawn.’

‘I told the boy to wake me at five.’

‘I’d better give you some money.’ He went to his desk and wrote out a cheque. He took some notes from a drawer. ‘Here’s some cash to take you as far as Singapore and at Singapore you’ll be able to change the cheque.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Would you like me to come to the mouth of the river with you?’

‘Oh, I think it would be better if we said good–bye here.’

‘All right. I think I shall turn in. I’ve had a long day and I’m dead beat.’

He did not even touch her hand. He went into his room. In a few minutes she heard him throw himself on his bed. For a little while she sat looking for the last time round that room in which she had been so happy and so miserable. She sighed deeply. She got up and went into her own room. Everything was packed except the one or two things she needed for the night.

It was dark when the boy awakened them. They dressed hurriedly and when they were ready breakfast was waiting for them. Presently they heard the boat row up to the landing–stage below the bungalow, and then the servants carried down her luggage. It was a poor pretence they made of eating. The darkness thinned away and the river was ghostly. It was not yet day, but it was no longer night. In the silence the voices of the natives at the landing–stage were very clear. Guy glanced at his wife’s untouched plate.

‘If you’ve finished we might stroll down. I think you ought to be starting.’

She did not answer. She rose from the table. She went into her room to see that nothing had been forgotten and then side by side with him walked down the steps. A little winding path led them to the river. At the landing–stage the native guards in their smart uniform were lined up and they presented arms as Guy and Doris passed. The head boatman gave her his hand as she stepped into the boat. She turned and looked at Guy. She wanted desperately to say one last word of comfort, once more to ask for his forgiveness, but she seemed to be struck dumb.

He stretched out his hand.

‘Well, good–bye, I hope you’ll have a jolly journey.’

They shook hands.

Guy nodded to the head boatman and the boat pushed off. The dawn now was creeping along the river mistily, but the night lurked still in the dark trees of the jungle. He stood at the landing–stage till the boat was lost in the shadows of the morning. With a sigh he turned away. He nodded absent–mindedly when the guard once more presented arms. But when he reached the bungalow he called the boy. He went round the room picking out everything that had belonged to Doris.

Tack all these things up,’ he said. ‘It’s no good leaving them about.’

Then he sat down on the veranda and watched the day advance gradually like a bitter, an unmerited, and an overwhelming sorrow. At last he looked at his watch. It was time for him to go to the office.

In the afternoon he could not sleep, his head ached miserably, so he took his gun and went for a tramp in the jungle. He shot nothing, but he walked in order to tire himself out. Towards sunset he came back and had two or three drinks, and then it was time to dress for dinner. There wasn’t much use in dressing now; he might just as well be comfortable; he put on a loose native jacket and a sarong. That was what he had been accustomed to wear before Doris came. He was barefoot. He ate his dinner listlessly and the boy cleared away and went. He sat down to read the Tatler. The bungalow was very silent. He could not read and let the paper fall on his knees. He was exhausted. He could not think and his mind was strangely vacant. The chik–chak was noisy that night and its hoarse and sudden cry seemed to mock him. You could hardly believe that this reverberating sound came from so small a throat. Presently he heard a discreet cough.

‘Who’s there?’ he cried.

There was a pause. He looked at the door. The chik–chak laughed harshly. A small boy sidled in and stood on the threshold. It was a little half–caste boy in a tattered singlet and a sarong. It was the elder of his two sons.

‘What do you want?’ said Guy.

The boy came forward into the room and sat down, tucking his legs away under him.

‘Who told you to come here?’

‘My mother sent me. She says, do you want anything?’

Guy looked at the boy intently. The boy said nothing more. He sat and waited, his eyes cast down shyly. Then Guy in deep and bitter reflection buried his face in his hands. What was the use? It was finished. Finished! He surrendered. He sat back in his chair and sighed deeply.

‘Tell your mother to pack up her things and yours. She can come back.’

‘When?’ asked the boy, impassively.

Hot tears trickled down Guy’s funny, round spotty face.

‘Tonight.’

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

Norman Grange was a rubber–planter. He was up before daybreak to take the roll–call of his labour and then walked over the estate to see that the tapping was properly done. This duty performed, he came home, bathed and changed, and now with his wife opposite him he was eating the substantial meal, half breakfast and half luncheon, which in Borneo is called brunch. He read as he ate. The dining–room was dingy. The worn electro–plate, the shabby cruet, the chipped dishes betokened poverty, but a poverty accepted with apathy. A few flowers would have brightened the table, but there was apparently no one to care how things looked. When Grange had finished he belched, filled his pipe and lit it, rose from the table and went out on to the veranda. He took no more notice of his wife than if she had not been there. He lay down in a long rattan chair and went on reading. Mrs Grange reached over for a tin of cigarettes and smoked while she sipped her tea. Suddenly she looked out, for the house boy came up the steps and accompanied by two men went up to her husband. One was a Dyak and the other Chinese. Strangers seldom came and she could not imagine what they wanted. She got up and went to the door to listen. Though she had lived in Borneo for so many years she knew no more Malay than was necessary to get along with the boys, and she only vaguely understood what was said. She gathered from her husband’s tone that something had happened to annoy him. He seemed to be asking questions first of the Chink and then of the Dyak; it looked as though they were pressing him to do something he didn’t want to do; at length, however, with a frown on his face he raised himself from his chair and followed by the men walked down the steps. Curious to see where he was going she slipped out on to the veranda. He had taken the path that led down to the river. She shrugged her thin shoulders and went to her room. Presently she gave a violent start, for she heard her husband call her. ‘Vesta.’

She came out.

‘Get a bed ready. There’s a white man in a prahu at the landing–stage. He’s damned ill.’

‘Who is he?’

‘How the hell should I know? They’re just bringing him up.’

‘We can’t have anyone to stay here.’

‘Shut up and do as I tell you.’

He left her on that and again went down to the river. Mrs Grange called the boy and told him to put sheets on the bed in the spare room. Then she stood at the top of the steps and waited. In a little while she saw her husband coming back and behind him a huddle of Dyaks carrying a man on a mattress. She stood aside to let them pass and caught a glimpse of a white face.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked her husband.

‘Get out and keep quiet.’

‘Polite, aren’t you?’

The sick man was taken into the room, and in two or three minutes the Dyaks and Grange came out.

‘I’m going to see about his kit. I’ll have it brought up. His boy’s looking after him and there’s no cause for you to butt in!’

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Malaria. His boatmen are afraid he’s going to die and won’t take him on. His name’s Skelton.’

‘He isn’t going to die, is he?’

‘If he does we’ll bury him.’

But Skelton didn’t die. He woke next morning to find himself in a room, in bed and under a mosquito–net. He couldn’t think where he was. It was a cheap iron bed and the mattress was hard, but to lie on it was a relief after the discomfort of the prahu. He could see nothing of the room but a chest of drawers, roughly made by a native carpenter, and a wooden chair. Opposite was a doorway, with a blind down, and this he guessed led on to a veranda. ‘Kong,’ he called.

The blind was drawn aside and his boy came in. The Chinaman’s face broke into a grin when he saw that his master was free from fever.

‘You more better, Tuan. Velly glad.’

‘Where the devil am I?’

Kong explained.

‘Luggage all right?’ asked Skelton.

‘Yes, him all light.’

‘What’s the name of this fellow–the tuan whose house this is?’ ‘Mr Norman Grange.’

To confirm what he said he showed Skelton a little book in which the owner’s name was written. It was Grange. Skelton noticed that the book was Bacon’s Essays. It was curious to find it in a planter’s house away up a river in Borneo. ‘Tell him I’d be glad to see him.’

‘Tuan out. Him come presently.’

‘What about my having a wash? And by God, I want a shave.’

He tried to get out of bed, but his head swam and with a bewildered cry he sank back. But Kong shaved and washed him, and changed the shorts and singlet in which he had been lying ever since he fell ill for a sarong and a baju.

After that he was glad to lie still. But presently Kong came in and said that the tuan of the house was back. There was a knock on the door and a large stoutish man stepped in.

‘I hear you’re better,’ he said.

‘Oh, much. It’s terribly kind of you to have taken me in like this. It seems awful, planting myself on you.’

Grange answered a trifle harshly.

‘That’s all right. You were pretty bad, you know. No wonder those Dyaks wanted to get rid of you.’

‘I don’t want to impose myself on you longer than I need. If I could hire a launch here, or a prahu, I could get off this afternoon.’

‘There’s no launch to hire. You’d better stay a bit. You must be as weak as a rat.’

‘I’m afraid I shall be a frightful bother.’

‘I don’t see why. You’ve got your own boy and he’ll look after you.’ Grange had just come in from his round of the estate and wore dirty shorts, a khaki shirt open at the neck, and an old, battered terai hat. He looked as shabby as a beachcomber. He took off his hat to wipe his sweating brow; he had close–cropped grey hair; his face was red, a broad, fleshy face, with a large mouth under a stubble of grey moustache, a short, pugnacious nose and small, mean eyes.

‘I wonder if you could let me have something to read,’ said Skelton. ‘What sort of thing?’

‘I don’t mind so long as it’s lightish.’

‘I’m not much of a novel reader myself, but I’ll send you in two or three books. My wife can provide you with novels. They’ll be trash, because that’s all she reads. But it may suit you.’

With a nod he withdrew. Not a very likeable man. But he was obviously very poor, the room in which Skelton lay, something in Grange’s appearance, indicated that; he was probably manager of an estate on a cut salary, and it was not unlikely that the expense of a guest and his servant was unwelcome. Living in that remote spot, and so seeing white men but seldom, it might be that he was ill at ease with strangers. Some people improve unbelievably on acquaintance. But his hard, shifty little eyes were disconcerting; they gave the lie to the red face and the massive frame which otherwise might have persuaded you that this was a jolly sort of fellow with whom you could quickly make friends.

After a while, the house boy came in with a parcel of books. There were half a dozen novels by authors he had never heard of, and a glance told him they were slop; these must be Mrs Grange’s; and then there was a Boswell’s Johnson,

Borrow’s Lavengro, and Lamb’s Essays. It was an odd choice. They were not the books you would have expected to find in a planter’s house. In most planters’ houses there is not more than a shelf or two of books and for the most part they’re detective stories. Skelton had a disinterested curiosity in human creatures, and he amused himself now by trying to make out from the books Norman Grange had sent, from the look of him, and from the few words they had exchanged, what sort of a man he could be. Skelton was a little surprised that his host did not come to see him again that day; it looked as though he were going to content himself with giving his uninvited guest board and lodging, but were not sufficiently interested in him to seek his company. Next morning he felt well enough to get up, and with Kong’s help settled himself in a long chair on the veranda. It badly needed a coat of paint. The bungalow stood on the brow of a hill, about fifty yards from the river; and on the opposite bank, looking very small across that great stretch of water, you could see native houses on piles nestling among the greenery. Skelton had not yet the activity of mind to read steadily, and after a page or two, his thoughts wandering, he found himself content to watch idly the sluggish flow of the turbid stream. Suddenly he heard a step. He saw the little elderly woman come towards him, and knowing that this must be Mrs Grange tried to get up.

‘Don’t move,’ she said.’ I only came to see if you had everything you wanted.’ She wore a blue cotton dress, simple enough, but more suited to a young girl than to a woman of her age; her short hair was tousled, as though on getting out of bed she had scarcely troubled to pass a comb through it, and dyed a vivid yellow, but badly, and the roots showed white. Her skin was raddled and dry, and there was a great dab of rouge on each cheek–bone, put on however so clumsily that you could not for a moment take it for a natural colour, and a smear of lipstick on her mouth. But the strangest thing about her was a tic she had that made her jerk her head as though she were beckoning you to an inner room. It seemed to come at regular intervals, perhaps three times a minute, and her left hand was in almost constant movement; it was not quite a tremble, it was a rapid twirl as though she wanted to draw your attention to something behind her back. Skelton was startled by her appearance and embarrassed by her tic.

‘I hope I’m not making myself too great a nuisance,’ he said. ‘I think I shall be well enough to make a move tomorrow or the day after.’

‘It’s not often we see anybody in a place like this, you know. It’s a treat to have someone to talk to.’

‘Won’t you sit down? I’ll tell my boy to bring you a chair.’

‘Norman said I was to leave you alone.’

‘I haven’t spoken to a white person for two years. I’ve been longing for a good old talk.’

Her head twitched violently, more quickly than usual, and her hand gave that queer spasmodic gesture.

‘He won’t be back for another hour. I’ll get a chair.’

Skelton told her who he was and what he had been doing, but he discovered that she had questioned his boy and already knew all about him. ‘You must be crazy to get back to England?’ she asked.

‘I shan’t be sorry.’

Suddenly Mrs Grange seemed to be attacked by what one could only describe as a nerve storm. Her head twitched so madly, her hand shook with such fury, that it was disconcerting. You could only look away.

‘I haven’t been to England for sixteen years,’ she said.

‘You don’t mean that? Why, I thought all you planters went home every five years at the longest.’

‘We can’t afford it; we’re broke to the wide. Norman put all the money he had into this plantation, and it hasn’t really paid for years. It only just brings in enough to keep us from starvation. Of course it doesn’t matter to Norman. He isn’t English really.’

‘He looks English enough.’

‘He was born in Sarawak. His father was in the government service. If he’s anything he’s a native of Borneo.’

Then, without warning, she began to cry. It was horribly painful to see the tears running down the raddled, painted cheeks of that woman with the constant tic. Skelton knew neither what to say nor what to do. He did what was probably the best thing, he kept silent. She dried her eyes.

‘You must think me a silly old fool. I sometimes wonder that after all these years I can still cry. I suppose it’s in my nature. I always could cry very easy when I was on the stage.’

‘Oh, were you on the stage?’

‘Yes, before I married. That’s how I met Norman. We were playing in Singapore and he was there on holiday. I don’t suppose I shall ever see England any more. I shall stay here till I die and every day of my life I shall look at that beastly river. I shall never get away now. Never.’

‘How did you happen to find yourself in Singapore?’

‘Well, it was soon after the war, I couldn’t get anything to suit me in London,

I’d been on the stage a good many years and I was fed up with playing small parts: the agents told me a fellow called Victor Palace was taking a company out East. His wife was playing lead, but I could play seconds. They’d got half a dozen plays, comedies, you know, and farces. The salary wasn’t much, but they were going to Egypt and India, the Malay States and China and then down to Australia. It was a chance to see the world and I accepted. We didn’t do badly in Cairo and I think we made money in India, but Burma wasn’t much good, and Siam was worse; Penang was a disaster and so were the rest of the Malay States.

Well, one day Victor called us together and said he was bust, he hadn’t got the money for our fares to Hong Kong, and the tour was a wash–out and he was very sorry but we’d have to get back home as best we could. Of course we told him he couldn’t do that to us. You never heard such a row. Well, the long and short of it was that he said we could have the scenery and the props if we thought they was any good to us, but as to money it was no use asking for it because he damned well hadn’t got it. And next day we found out that him and his wife, without saying a word to anybody, had got on a French boat and skipped. I was in a rare state, I can tell you. I had a few pounds I’d saved out of me salary, and that was all; somebody told me if we was absolutely stranded the government would have to send us home, but only steerage, and I didn’t much fancy that. We got the Press to put our plight before the public and someone came along with the proposition that we should give a benefit performance. Well, we did, but it wasn’t much without Victor or his wife, and by the time we’d paid the expenses we weren’t any better off than we’d been before. I was at my wits’ end, I don’t mind telling you. It was then that Norman proposed to me. The funny thing is that I hardly knew him. He’d taken me for a drive round the island and we’d had tea two or three times at the Europe and danced. Men don’t often do things for you without wanting something in return, and I thought he expected to get a little bit of fun, but I’d had a good deal of experience and I thought he’d be clever if he got round me. But when he asked me to marry him, well, I was so surprised, I couldn’t hardly believe me own ears. He said he’d got his own estate in Borneo and it only wanted a little patience and he’d make a packet. And it was on the banks of a fine river and all round was the jungle. He made it sound very romantic. I was getting on, you know, I was thirty, it wasn’t going to be any easier to get work as time went on, and it was tempting to have a house of me own and all that. Never to have to hang around agents’ offices no more. Never to have to lay awake no more and wonder how you was going to pay next week’s rent. He wasn’t a bad–looking chap in those days, brown and big and virile. No one could say I was willing to marry anybody just to...’ Suddenly she stopped. ‘There he is. Don’t say you’ve seen me.’

She picked up the chair she had been sitting in and quickly slipped away with it into the house. Skelton was bewildered. Her grotesque appearance, the painful tears, her story told with that incessant twitching; and then her obvious fear when she heard her husband’s voice in the compound, and her hurried escape; he could make nothing of it.

In a few minutes Norman Grange stumped along the veranda. ‘I hear you’re better,’ he said.

‘Much, thanks.’

‘If you care to join us at brunch I’ll have a place laid for you.’

‘I’d like it very much.’

‘All right. I’m just going to have a bath and a change.’

He walked away. Presently a boy came along and told Skelton his tuan was waiting for him. Skelton followed him into a small sitting–room, with the jalousies drawn to keep out the heat, an uncomfortable, overcrowded room with a medley of furniture, English and Chinese, and occasional tables littered with worthless junk. It was neither cosy nor cool. Grange had changed into a sarong and baju and in the native dress looked coarse but powerful. He introduced Skelton to his wife. She shook hands with him as though she had never seen him before and uttered a few polite words of greeting. The boy announced that their meal was ready and they went into the dining–room. ‘I hear that you’ve been in this bloody country for some time,’ said Grange. ‘Two years. I’m an anthropologist and I wanted to study the manners and customs of tribes that haven’t had any contact with civilization.’

Skelton felt that he should tell his host how it had come about that he had been forced to accept a hospitality which he could not but feel was grudgingly offered. After leaving the village that had been his headquarters he had journeyed by land for ten days till he reached the river. There he had engaged a couple of prahus, one for himself and his luggage and the other for Kong, his Chinese servant, and the camp equipment, to take him to the coast. The long trek across country had been hard going and he found it very comfortable to lie on a mattress under an awning of rattan matting and take his ease. All the time he had been away Skelton had been in perfect health, and as he travelled down the river he could not but think that he was very lucky; but even as the thought passed through his mind, it occurred to him that if he happened just then to congratulate himself on his good fortune in this respect, it was because he did not feel quite so well as usual. It was true that he had been forced to drink a great deal of arak the night before at the long–house where he had put up, but he was used to it and that hardly accounted for his headache. He had a general sense of malaise. He was wearing nothing but shorts and a singlet, and he felt chilly; it was curious because the sun was shining fiercely and when he put his hand on the gunwale of the prahu the heat was hardly bearable. If he had had a coat handy he would have put it on. He grew colder and colder and presently his teeth began to chatter; he huddled up on his mattress, shivering all over in a desperate effort to get warm. He could not fail to guess what was the matter. ‘Christ,’ he groaned. ‘Malaria.’

He called the headman, who was steering the prahu.

‘Get Kong.’

The headman shouted to the second prahu and ordered his own paddlers to stop. In a moment the two boats were side by side and Kong stepped in. ‘I’ve got fever, Kong,’ gasped Skelton. ‘Get me the medicine chest and, for God’s sake, blankets. I’m freezing to death.’

Kong gave his master a big dose of quinine and piled on him what coverings they had. They started off again.

Skelton was too ill to be taken ashore when they tied up for the night and so passed it in the prahu. All next day and the day after he was very ill. Sometimes one or other of the crew came and looked at him, and often the headman stayed for quite a long while staring at him thoughtfully.

‘How many days to the coast?’ Skelton asked the boy.

‘Four, five.’ He paused for a minute. ‘Headman, he no go coast. He say, he wantchee go home.’

‘Tell him to go to hell.’

‘Headman say, you velly sick, you die. If you die and he go coast he catchee trouble.’

‘I’m not thinking of dying,’ said Skelton. ‘I shall be all right. It’s just an ordinary go of malaria.’

Kong did not answer. The silence irritated Skelton. He knew that the Chinese had something in mind that he did not like to say.

‘Spit it out, you fool,’ he cried.

Skelton’s heart sank when Kong told him the truth. When they reached their resting–place that night the headman was going to demand his money and slip away with the two prahus before dawn. He was too frightened to carry a dying man farther. Skelton had no strength to take the determined attitude that might have availed him; he could only hope by the offer of more money to persuade the headman to carry out his agreement. The day passed in long arguments between Kong and the headman, but when they tied up for the night the headman came to Skelton and told him sulkily that he would go no farther. There was a long–house near by where he might get lodging till he grew better. He began to unload the baggage. Skelton refused to move. He got Kong to give him his revolver and swore to shoot anyone who came near him. Kong, the crew, and the headman went up to the long–house and Skelton was left alone. Hour after hour he lay there, the fever burning his body and his mouth parched, while muddled thoughts hammered away in his brain. Then there were lights and the sound of men talking. The Chinese boy came with the headman and another man, whom Skelton had not yet seen, from the neighbouring long–house. He did his best to understand what Kong was telling him. It appeared that a few hours down–stream there lived a white man, and to his house, if that would satisfy Skelton, the headman was willing to take him. ‘More better you say yes,’ said Kong. ‘Maybe white man has launch, then we go down to coast chop–chop.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Planter,’ said Kong. ‘This fellow say, him have rubber estate.’

Skelton was too tired to argue further. All he wanted just then was to sleep.

He accepted the compromise.

‘To tell you the truth,’ he finished, ‘I don’t remember much more till I woke up yesterday morning to find myself an uninvited guest in your house.’ ‘I don’t blame those Dyaks, you know,’ said Grange. ‘When I came down to the prahu and saw you, I thought you were for it.’

Mrs Grange sat silent while Skelton told his story, her head and her hand twitching regularly, as though by the action of some invisible clockwork, but when her husband addressed her, asking for the Worcester Sauce, and that was the only time he spoke to her, she was seized with such a paroxysm of involuntary movement that it was horrible to see. She passed him what he asked for without a word. Skelton got an uncomfortable impression that she was terrified of Grange. It was odd, because to all appearance he was not a bad sort. He was knowledgeable and far from stupid; and though you could not have said that his manner was cordial, it was plain that he was ready to be of what service he could.

They finished their meal and separated to rest through the heat of the day. ‘See you again at six for a sun–downer,’ said Grange.

When Skelton had had a good sleep, a bath, and a read, he went out on to the veranda. Mrs Grange came up to him. It looked as though she had been waiting.

‘He’s back from the office. Don’t think it’s funny if I don’t speak to you. If he thought I liked having you here he’d turn you out tomorrow.’

She said these words in a whisper and slipped back into the house. Skelton was startled. It was a strange house he had come into in a strange manner. He went into the overcrowded sitting–room and there found his host. He had been worried by the evident poverty of the establishment and he felt that the Granges could ill afford even the small expense he must be putting them to.

But he had already formed the impression that Grange was a quick–tempered, susceptible man and he did not know how he would take an offer to help. He made up his mind to risk it.

‘Look here,’ he said to him, ‘it looks as though I might have to inflict myself on you for several days. I’d be so much more comfortable if you’d let me pay for my board and lodging.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, your lodging costs nothing, the house belongs to the mortgagees, and your board doesn’t come to much.’

‘Well, there are drinks anyway and I’ve had to come down on your stores of tobacco and cigarettes.’

‘It’s not more than once a year that anyone comes up here, and then it’s only the D.O. or someone like that–besides, when one’s as broke as I am nothing matters much.’

‘Well, then, will you take my camp equipment? I shan’t be wanting it any more, and if you’d like one of my guns, I’d be only too glad to leave it with you.’ Grange hesitated. There was a glimmer of cupidity in those small, cunning eyes of his.

‘If you’d let me have one of your guns you’d pay for your board and lodging over and over again.’

‘That’s settled, then.’

They began to talk over the whisky and sparkler with which, following the Eastern habit, they celebrated the setting of the sun. Discovering that they both played chess they had a game. Mrs Grange did not join them till dinner. The meal was dull. An insipid soup, a tasteless river fish, a tough piece of steak, and a caramel pudding. Norman Grange and Skelton drank beer; Mrs Grange water. She never of her own will uttered a word. Skelton had again the uncomfortable impression that she was scared to death of her husband. Once or twice, Skelton from common politeness sought to bring her into the conversation, addressing himself to her, telling her a story or asking her a question, but it evidently distressed her so much, her head twitched so violently, her hand was agitated by gestures so spasmodic that he thought it kinder not to insist. When the meal was over she got up. ‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to your port,’ she said.

Both the men got up as she left the room. It was rather absurd, and somehow sinister, to see this social pretence in those poverty–stricken surroundings on a Borneo river.

‘I may add that there is no port. There might be a little Benedictine left.’ ‘Oh, don’t bother.’

They talked for a while and Grange began to yawn. He got up every morning before sunrise and by nine o’clock at night could hardly keep his eyes open. ‘Well, I’m going to turn in,’ he said.

He nodded to Skelton and without further ceremony left him. Skelton went to bed, but he could not sleep. Though the heat was oppressive, it was not the heat that kept him awake. There was something horrible about that house and those two people who lived in it. He didn’t know what it was that affected him with this peculiar uneasiness, but this he knew, that he would be heartily thankful to be out of it and away from them. Grange had talked a good deal about himself, but he knew no more of him than he had learned at the first glance. To all appearances he was just the commonplace planter who had fallen upon evil days. He had bought his land immediately after the war and had planted trees; but by the time they were bearing the slump had come and since then it had been a constant struggle to keep going. The estate and the house were heavily mortgaged, and now that rubber was once more selling profitably all he made went to the mortgagees. That was an old story in Malaya. What made Grange somewhat unusual was that he was a man without a country.

Born in Borneo, he had lived there with his parents till he was old enough to go to school in England; at seventeen he had come back and had never left it since except to go to Mesopotamia during the war. England meant nothing to him.

He had neither relations nor friends there. Most planters, like civil servants, have come from England, go back on leave now and then, and look forward to settling down there when they retire. But what had England to offer Norman Grange?

‘I was born here,’ he said, ‘and I shall die here. I’m a stranger in England.

I don’t like their ways over there and I don’t understand the things they talk about. And yet I’m a stranger here too. To the Malays and the Chinese I’m a white man, though I speak Malay as well as they do, and a white man I shall always be.’ Then he said a significant thing. ‘Of course if I’d had any sense I’d have married a Malay girl and had half a dozen half–caste kids. That’s the only solution really for us chaps who were born and bred here.’

Grange’s bitterness was greater than could be explained by his financial embarrassment. He had little good to say of any of the white men in the colony.

He seemed to think that they despised him because he was native–born. He was a sour, disappointed fellow, and a conceited one. He had shown Skelton his books. There were not many of them, but they were the best on the whole that English literature can show; he had read them over and over again; but it looked as though he had learnt from them neither charity nor loving–kindness, it looked as though their beauty had left him unmoved; and to know them so well had only made him self–complacent. His exterior, which was so hearty and English, seemed to have little relation to the man within; you could not resist the suspicion that it masked a very sinister being. Early next morning, to enjoy the cool of the day, Skelton, with his pipe and a book, was sitting on the veranda outside his room. He was still very weak, but felt much better. In a little while Mrs Grange joined him. She held in her hand a large album.

‘I thought I’d like to show you some of me old photos and me notices. You mustn’t think I always looked like what I do now. He’s off on his round and he won’t be back for two or three hours yet.’

Mrs Grange, in the same blue dress she had worn the day before, her hair as untidy, appeared strangely excited.

‘It’s all I have to remind me of the past. Sometimes when I can’t bear life any more I look at my album.’

She sat by Skelton’s side as he turned the pages. The notices were from provincial papers, and the references to Mrs Grange, whose stage name had been apparently Vesta Blaise, were carefully underlined. From the photographs, you could see that she had been pretty enough in an undistinguished way. She had acted in musical comedy and revue, in farce and comedy, and taking the photographs and the notices together it was easy to tell that here had been the common, dreary, rather vulgar career of the girl with no particular talent who has taken to the stage on the strength of a pretty face and a good figure. Her head twitching, her hand shaking, Mrs Grange looked at the photographs and read the notices with as much interest as if she had never seen them before.

‘You’ve got to have influence on the stage, and I never had any,’ she said. ‘If I’d only had my chance I know I’d have made good. I had bad luck, there’s no doubt about that.’

It was all sordid and somewhat pathetic.

‘I daresay you’re better off as you are,’ said Skelton.

She snatched the book from him and shut it with a bang. She had a paroxysm so violent that it was really frightening to look at her.

‘What d’you mean by that? What d’you know about the life I lead here? I’d have killed myself years ago only I know he wants me to die. That’s the only way I can get back on him, by living, and I’m going to live; I’m going to live as long as he does. Oh, I hate him. I’ve often thought I’d poison him, but I was afraid. I didn’t know how to do it really, and if he died the Chinks would foreclose and I’d be turned out. And where should I go then? I haven’t a friend in the world.’

Skelton was aghast. It flashed through his mind that she was crazy. He hadn’t a notion what to say. She gave him a keen look.

‘I suppose it surprises you to hear me talk like that. I mean it, you know, every word of it. He’d like to kill me too, but he daren’t either. And he knows how to do it all right. He knows how the Malays kill people. He was born here.

There’s nothing he doesn’t know about the country.’

Skelton forced himself to speak.

‘You know, Mrs Grange, I’m a total stranger. Don’t you think it’s rather unwise to tell me all sorts of things there’s no need for me to know? After all, you live a very solitary life. I daresay you get on one another’s nerves. Now that things are looking up perhaps you’ll be able to take a trip to England.’ ‘I don’t want to go to England. I’d be ashamed to let them see me like I am now. D’you know how old I am? Forty–six. I look sixty and I know it. That’s why I showed you those photos, so as you might see I wasn’t always like what I am now. Oh, my God, how I’ve wasted my life! They talk of the romance of the East. They can have it. I’d rather be a dresser in a provincial theatre, I’d rather be one of the sweepers that keep it clean, than what I am now. Until I came here I’d never been alone in my life, I’d always lived in a crowd; you don’t know what it is to have nobody to talk to from year’s end to year’s end. To have to keep it all bottled up. How would you like to see no one, week in and week out, day after day for sixteen years, except the man you hate most in the world?

How would you like to live for sixteen years with a man who hates you so he can’t bear to look at you?’

‘Oh, come, it can’t be as bad as that.’

‘I’m telling you the truth. Why should I tell you a lie? I shall never see you again; what do I care what you think of me? And if you tell them what I’ve said when you get down to the coast, what’s the odds? They’ll say: “God, you don’t mean to say you stayed with those people? I pity you. He’s an outsider and she’s crazy; got a tic; they say it looks as if she was always trying to wipe the blood off her dress. They were mixed up in a damned funny business, but no one ever really knew the ins and outs of it; it all happened a long time ago and the country was pretty wild in those days.” A damned funny business and no mistake. I’d tell you for two pins. That would be a bit of dirt for them at the club. You wouldn’t have to pay for a drink for days. Damn them. Oh, Christ, how I hate this country. I hate that river. I hate this house. I hate that damned rubber. I loathe the filthy natives. And that’s all I’ve got to look forward to till I die–till I die without a doctor to take care of me, without a friend to hold me hand.’

She began to cry hysterically. Mrs Grange had spoken with a dramatic intensity of which Skelton would never have thought her capable. Her coarse irony was as painful as her anguish. Skelton was young, he was not yet thirty, and he did not know how to deal with the difficult situation. But he could not keep silent.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Grange. I wish I could do something to help you.’ ‘I’m not asking for your help. No one can help me.’

Skelton was distressed. From what she said he could not but suspect that she had been concerned in a mysterious and perhaps dreadful occurrence, and it might be that to tell him about it without fear of consequences was just the relief she needed.

‘I don’t want to butt into what’s no business of mine, but, Mrs Grange, if you think it would ease your mind to tell me–what you were referring to just now,

I mean what you said was a damned funny business, I promise you on my word of honour that I’ll never repeat it to a living soul.’

She stopped crying quite suddenly and gave him a long, intent look. She hesitated. He had an impression that the desire to speak was almost irresistible.

But she shook her head and sighed.

‘It wouldn’t do any good. Nothing can do me any good.’

She got up and abruptly left him.

The two men sat down to brunch by themselves.

‘My wife asks you to excuse her,’ said Grange. ‘She’s got one of her sick headaches and she’s staying in bed today.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

Skelton had a notion that in the searching look that Grange gave him was mistrust and animosity. It flashed through his mind that somehow he had discovered that Mrs Grange had been talking to him and perhaps had said things that should have been left unsaid. Skelton made an effort at conversation, but his host was taciturn, and they ended the meal in a silence that was only broken by Grange when he got up.

‘You seem pretty fit today and I don’t suppose you want to stay in this God–forsaken place longer than you must. I’ve sent over the river to arrange for a couple of prahus to take you down to the coast. They’ll be here at six tomorrow morning.’

Skelton felt sure then that he was right; Grange knew or guessed that his wife had spoken too freely, and he wanted to be rid as soon as possible of the dangerous visitor.

‘That’s terribly kind of you,’ Skelton answered, smiling. ‘I’m as fit as a fiddle.’ But in Grange’s eyes was no answering smile. They were coldly hostile. ‘We might have another game of chess later on,’ said he.

‘All right. When d’you get back from your office?’

‘I haven’t got much to do there today. I shall be about the house.’ Skelton wondered if it were only his fancy that there was something very like a threat in the tone in which Grange uttered these words. It looked as though he were going to make sure that his wife and Skelton should not again be left alone. Mrs Grange did not come to dinner. They drank their coffee and smoked their cheroots. Then Grange, pushing back his chair, said:

‘You’ve got to make an early start tomorrow. I daresay you’d like to turn in.

I shall have started out on my round by the time you go, so I’ll say good–bye to you now.’

‘Let me get my guns. I want you to take the one you like best.’ ‘I’ll tell the boy to fetch them.’

The guns were brought and Grange made his choice. He gave no sign that he was pleased with the handsome gift.

‘You quite understand that this gun’s worth a damned sight more than what your food and drink and smoke have run me into?’ he said.

‘For all I know you saved my life. I don’t think an old gun is an over–generous return for that.’

‘Oh, well, if you like to look at it that way, I suppose it’s your own business.

Thank you very much all the same.’

They shook hands and parted.

Next morning, while the baggage was being stowed away in the prahus,

Skelton asked the house boy whether, before starting, he could say good–bye to Mrs Grange. The house boy said he would go and see. He waited a little while. Mrs Grange came out of her room on to the veranda. She was wearing a pink dressing–gown, shabby, rumpled, and none too clean, of Japanese silk, heavily trimmed with cheap lace. The powder was thick on her face, her cheeks were rouged and her lips scarlet with lipstick. Her head seemed to twitch more violently than usual and her hand was agitated by that strange gesture. When first Skelton saw it he had thought that it suggested a wish to call attention to something behind her back, but now, after what she had told him yesterday, it did indeed look as though she was constantly trying to brush something off her dress. Blood, she had said.

‘I didn’t want to go without thanking you for all your kindness to me,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s all right.’

‘Well, good–bye.’

‘I’ll walk down with you to the landing–stage.’

They hadn’t far to go. The boatmen were still arranging the luggage. Skelton looked across the river where you could see some native houses. ‘I suppose these men come from over there. It looks quite a village.’ ‘No, only those few houses. There used to be a rubber estate there, but the company went broke and it was abandoned.’

‘D’you ever go over there?’

‘Me?’ cried Mrs Grange. Her voice rose shrill and her head, her hand, were on a sudden convulsed by a paroxysm of involuntary movement. ‘No. Why should I?’

Skelton could not imagine why that simple question, asked merely for something to say, should so greatly upset her. But by now all was in order and he shook hands with her. He stepped into the boat and comfortably settled down. They pushed off. He waved to Mrs Grange. As the boat slid into the current she cried out with a harsh, strident scream:

‘Give my regards to Leicester Square.’

Skelton heaved a great sigh of relief as with their powerful strokes the paddlers took him farther and farther away from that dreadful house and from those two unhappy and yet repellent people. He was glad now that Mrs Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell. He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape. He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream. But Mrs Grange watched the two prahus till a bend of the river took them out of sight. She walked slowly up to the house and went into her bedroom. The light was dim because the blinds were drawn to keep out the heat, but she sat down at her dressing–table and stared at herself in the glass. Norman had had the dressing–table made for her soon after they were married. It had been made by a native carpenter, of course, and they had had the mirror sent from Singapore, but it was made to her own design, of the exact size and shape she wanted, with plenty of room for all her toilet things and her make–up. It was the dressing–table she had hankered after for donkey’s years and had never had. She remembered still how pleased she was when first she had it. She threw her arms round her husband’s neck and kissed him.

‘Oh, Norman, you are good to me,’ she said. ‘I’m a lucky little girl to have caught a chap like you, aren’t I?’

But then everything delighted her. She was amused by the river life and the life of the jungle, the teeming growth of the forest, the birds with their gay plumage and the brilliant butterflies. She set about giving the house a woman’s touch; she put out all her own photographs and she got vases to put flowers in; she routed around and got a lot of knick–knacks to place here and there. ‘They make a room look homey,’ she said. She wasn’t in love with Norman, but she liked him all right; and it was lovely to be married; it was lovely to have nothing to do from morning till night, except play the gramophone, or patience, and read novels. It was lovely to think one hadn’t got to bother about one’s future.

Of course it was a bit lonely sometimes, but Norman said she’d get used to that, and he’d promised that in a year, or two at the outside, he’d take her to England for three months. It would be a lark to show him off to her friends. She felt that what had caught him was the glamour of the stage and she’d made herself out a good deal more successful than she really had been. She wanted him to realize that she’d made a sacrifice when she’d thrown up her career to become a planter’s wife. She’d claimed acquaintance with a good many stars that in point of fact she’d never even spoken to. That would need a bit of handling when they went home, but she’d manage it; after all, poor Norman knew no more about the stage than a babe unborn, if she couldn’t cod a simple fellow like that, after twelve years on the stage, well, she’d wasted her time, that’s all she could say. Things went all right the first year. At one moment she thought she was going to have a baby. They were both disappointed when it turned out not to be true. Then she began to grow bored. It seemed to her that she’d done the same damned thing day after day for ever and it frightened her to think that she’d have to go on doing the same damned thing day after day for ever more.

Norman said he couldn’t leave the plantation that year. They had a bit of a scene. It was then that he’d said something that scared her.

‘I hate England,’ he said. ‘If I had my way I’d never set foot in the damned country again.’

Living this lonely life Mrs Grange got into the habit of talking out loud to herself. Shut up in her room she could be heard chattering away hour after hour; and now, dipping the puff in her powder and plastering her face with it, she addressed her reflection in the mirror exactly as though she were talking to another person.

‘That ought to have warned me. I should have insisted on going by myself, and who knows, I might have got a job when I got to London. With all the experience I had and everything. Then I’d have written to him and said I wasn’t coming back.’ Her thoughts turned to Skelton. ‘Pity I didn’t tell him,’ she continued. ‘I had half a mind to. P’raps he was right, p’raps it would have eased me mind. I wonder what he’d have said.’ She imitated his Oxford accent. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, Mrs Grange. I wish I could help you.’ She gave a chuckle which was almost a sob. ‘I’d have liked to tell him about Jack. Oh, Jack.’ It was when they had been married for two years that they got a neighbour.

The price of rubber at that time was so high that new estates were being put under cultivation and one of the big companies had bought a great tract of land on the opposite bank of the river. It was a rich company and everything was done on a lavish scale. The manager they had put in had a launch at his disposal so that it was no trouble for him to pop over and have a drink whenever he felt inclined. Jack Carr his name was. He was quite a different sort of chap from Norman; for one thing he was a gentleman, he’d been to a public school and a university; he was about thirty–five, tall, not beefy like Norman, but slight, he had the sort of figure that looked lovely in evening dress; and he had crisply curling hair and a laughing look in his eyes. Just her type. She took to him at once. It was a treat, having someone you could talk about London to, and the theatre. He was gay and easy. He made the sort of jokes you could understand. In a week or two she felt more at home with him than she did with her husband after two years. There had always been something about Norman that she hadn’t quite been able to get to the bottom of. He was crazy about her, of course, and he’d told her a lot about himself, but she had a funny feeling that there was something he kept from her, not because he wanted to, but–well, you couldn’t hardly explain it, because it was so alien, you might say, that he couldn’t put it into words. Later, when she knew Jack better, she mentioned it to him, and Jack said it was because he was country–born; even though he hadn’t a drop of native blood in his veins, something of the country had gone to the making of him so that he wasn’t white really; he had an Eastern streak in him. However hard he tried he could never be quite English.

She chattered away aloud, in that empty house, for the two boys, the cook and the house boy, were in their own quarters, and the sound of her voice, ringing along the wooden floors, piercing the wooden walls, was like the uncanny, unhuman gibber of new wine fermenting in a vat. She spoke just as though Skelton were there, but so incoherently that if he had been, he would have had difficulty in following the story she told. It did not take her long to discover that Jack Carr wanted her. She was excited. She’d never been promiscuous, but in all those years she’d been on the stage naturally there’d been episodes. You couldn’t hardly have put up with being on tour month after month if you didn’t have a bit of fun sometimes. Of course now she wasn’t going to give in too easily, she didn’t want to make herself cheap, but what with the life she led, she’d be a fool if she missed the chance; and as far as Norman was concerned, well, what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over. They understood one another all right, Jack and her; they knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, it was only a matter of waiting for the opportunity; and the opportunity came. But then something happened that they hadn’t bargained for: they fell madly in love with one another. If Mrs Grange really had been telling the story to Skelton it might have seemed as unlikely to him as it did to them. They were two very ordinary people, he a jolly, good–natured, commonplace planter, and she a small–part actress far from clever, not even very young, with nothing to recommend her but a neat figure and a prettyish face. What started as a casual affair turned without warning into a devastating passion, and neither of them was of a texture to sustain its exorbitant compulsion. They longed to be with one another; they were restless and miserable apart. She’d been finding Norman a bore for some time, but she’d put up with him because he was her husband; now he irritated her to frenzy because he stood between her and Jack. There was no question of their going off together, Jack Carr had nothing but his salary, and he couldn’t throw up a job he’d been only too glad to get. It was difficult for them to meet. They had to run awful risks. Perhaps the chances they had to take, the obstacles they had to surmount, were fuel to their love; a year passed and it was as overwhelming as at the beginning; it was a year of agony and bliss, of fear and thrill. Then she discovered that she was pregnant. She had no doubt that Jack Carr was the father and she was wildly happy. It was true life was difficult, so difficult sometimes that she felt she just couldn’t cope with it, but there’d be a baby, his baby, and that would make everything easy. She was going to Kuching for her confinement. It happened about then that Jack Carr had to go to Singapore on business and was to be away for several weeks; but he promised to get back before she left and he said he’d send word by a native the moment he arrived. When at last the message came she felt sick with the anguish of her joy. She had never wanted him so badly.

‘I hear that Jack is back,’ she told her husband at dinner. ‘I shall go over tomorrow morning and get the things he promised to bring me.’ ‘I wouldn’t do that. He’s pretty sure to drop in towards sundown and he’ll bring them himself.’

‘I can’t wait. I’m crazy to have them.’

‘All right. Have it your own way.’

She couldn’t help talking about him. For some time now they had seemed to have little to say to one another, Norman and she, but that night, in high spirits, she chattered away as she had done during the first months of their marriage.

She always rose early, at six, and next morning she went down to the river and had a bathe. There was a little dent in the bank just there, with a tiny sandy beach, and it was delicious to splash about in the cool, transparent water.

A kingfisher stood on the branch of a tree overhanging the pool and its reflection was brilliantly blue in the water. Lovely. She had a cup of tea and then stepped into a dug–out. A boy paddled her across the river. It took a good half–hour. As they got near she scanned the bank; Jack knew she would come at the earliest opportunity; he must be on the lookout. Ah, there he was. The delicious pain in her heart was almost unbearable. He came down to the landing–stage and helped her to get out of the boat. They walked hand in hand up the pathway and when they were out of sight of the boy who had paddled her over and of prying eyes from the house, they stopped. He put his arms round her and she yielded with ecstasy to his embrace. She clung to him. His mouth sought hers. In that kiss was all the agony of their separation and all the bliss of their reunion. The miracle of love transfused them so that they were unconscious of time and place. They were not human any more, but two spirits united by a divine fire. No thought passed through their minds. No words issued from their lips. Suddenly there was a brutal shock, like a blow, and immediately, almost simultaneously, a deafening noise. Horrified, not understanding, she clung to Jack more tightly and his grip on her was spasmodic, so that she gasped; then she felt that he was bearing her over. ‘Jack.’

She tried to hold him up. His weight was too great for her and as he fell to the ground she fell with him. Then she gave a great cry, for she felt a gush of heat, and his blood sputtered over her. She began to scream. A rough hand seized her and dragged her to her feet. It was Norman. She was distraught. She could not understand.

‘Norman, what have you done?’

‘I’ve killed him.’

She stared at him stupidly. She pushed him aside.

‘Jack. Jack.’

‘Shut up. I’ll go and get help. It was an accident.’

He walked quickly up the pathway. She fell to her knees and took Jack’s head in her arms.

‘Darling,’ she moaned. ‘Oh, my darling.’

Norman came back with some coolies and they carried him up to the house.

That night she had a miscarriage and was so ill that for days it looked as if she would die. When she recovered she had the nervous tic that she’d had ever since. She expected that Norman would send her away; but he didn’t, he had to keep her to allay suspicion. There was some talk among the natives, and after a while the District Officer came up and asked a lot of questions; but the natives were frightened of Norman, and the D.O. could get nothing out of them. The Dyak boy who paddled her over had vanished. Norman said something had gone wrong with his gun and Jack was looking at it to see what was the matter and it went off. They bury people quickly in that country and by the time they might have dug him up there wouldn’t have been much left to show that Norman’s story wasn’t true. The D.O. hadn’t been satisfied.

‘It all looks damned fishy to me,’ he said, ‘but in the absence of any evidence, I suppose I must accept your version.’

She would have given anything to get away, but with that nervous affliction she had no ghost of a chance any longer of earning a living. She had to stay–or starve; and Norman had to keep her–or hang. Nothing had happened since then and now nothing ever would happen. The endless years one after another dragged out their weary length.

Mrs Grange on a sudden stopped talking. Her sharp ears had caught the sound of a footstep on the path and she knew that Norman was back from his round. Her head twitching furiously, her hand agitated by that sinister, uncontrollable gesture, she looked in the untidy mess of her dressing–table for her precious lipstick. She smeared it on her lips, and then, she didn’t know why, on a freakish impulse daubed it all over her nose till she looked like a red–nose comedian in a music–hall. She looked at herself in the glass and burst out laughing.

‘To hell with life!’ she shouted.

THE ALIEN CORN

I had known the Blands a long time before I discovered that they had any connexion with Ferdy Rabenstein. Ferdy must have been nearly fifty when I first knew him and at the time of which I write he was well over seventy. He had altered little. His hair, coarse but abundant and curly, was white, but he had kept his figure and held himself as gallantly as ever. It was not hard to believe that in youth he had been as beautiful as people said. He had still his fine Semitic profile and the lustrous black eyes that had caused havoc in so many a Gentile breast. He was very tall, lean, with an oval face and a clear skin. He wore his clothes very well and in evening dress, even now, he was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. He wore then large black pearls in his shirt–front and platinum and sapphire rings on his fingers. Perhaps he was rather flashy, but you felt it was so much in character that it would have ill become him to be anything else.

‘After all, I am an Oriental,’ he said. ‘I can carry a certain barbaric magnificence.’ I have often thought that Ferdy Rabenstein would make an admirable subject for a biography. He was not a great man, but within the limits he set himself he made of his life a work of art. It was a masterpiece in little, like a Persian miniature, and derived its interest from its perfection. Unfortunately the materials are scanty. They would consist of letters that may very well have been destroyed and the recollections of people who are old now and will soon be dead. His memory is extraordinary, but he would never write his memoirs, for he looks upon his past as a source of purely private entertainment; and he is a man of the most perfect discretion. Nor do I know anyone who could do justice to the subject but Max Beerbohm. There is no one else in this hard world of today who can look upon the trivial with such tender sympathy and wring such a delicate pathos from futility. I wonder that Max, who must have known Ferdy much better than I, and long before, was never tempted to exercise his exquisite fancy on such a theme. He was born for Max to write about. And who should have illustrated the elegant book that I see in my mind’s eye but Aubrey Beardsley? Thus would have been erected a monument of triple brass and the ephemera imprisoned to succeeding ages in the amber’s translucency.

Ferdy’s conquests were social and his venue was the great world. He was born in South Africa and did not come to England till he was twenty. For some time he was on the Stock Exchange, but on the death of his father he inherited a considerable fortune, and retiring from business devoted himself to the life of a man about town. At that period English society was still a closed body and it was not easy for a Jew to force its barriers, but to Ferdy they fell like the walls of Jericho. He was handsome, he was rich, he was a sportsman and he was good company. He had a house in Curzon Street, furnished with the most beautiful French furniture, and a French chef, and a brougham. It would be interesting to know the first steps in his wonderful career: they are lost in the dark abysm of time. When I first met him he had been long established as one of the smartest men in London: this was at a very grand house in Norfolk to which I had been asked as a promising young novelist by the hostess who took an interest in letters, but the company was very distinguished and I was over–awed. We were sixteen, and I felt shy and alone among these Cabinet Ministers, great ladies, and peers of the realm who talked of people and things of which I knew nothing. They were civil to me, but indifferent, and I was conscious that I was somewhat of a burden to my hostess. Ferdy saved me. He sat with me, walked with me, and talked with me. He discovered that I was a writer and we discussed the drama and the novel: he learnt that I had lived much on the Continent and he talked to me pleasantly of France, Germany, and Spain. He seemed really to seek my society. He gave me the flattering impression that he and I stood apart from the other members of the company and by our conversation upon affairs of the spirit made that of the rest of them, the political situation, the scandal of somebody’s divorce, and the growing disinclination of pheasants to be killed, seem a little ridiculous. But if Ferdy had at the bottom of his heart a feeling of ever so faint a contempt for the hearty British gentry that surrounded us I am sure that it was only to me that he allowed an inkling of it to appear, and looking back I cannot but wonder whether it was not after all a suave and very delicate compliment that he paid me. I think of course that he liked to exercise his charm and I dare say the obvious pleasure his conversation gave me gratified him, but he could have had no motive for taking so much trouble over an obscure novelist other than his real interest in art and letters. I felt that he and I at bottom were equally alien in that company, I because I was a writer and he because he was a Jew, but I envied the ease with which he bore himself. He was completely at home. Everyone called him Ferdy. He seemed to be always in good spirits. He was never at a loss for a quip, a jest, or a repartee. They liked him in that house because he made them laugh, but never made them uncomfortable by talking over their heads. He brought a faint savour of Oriental romance into their lives, but so cleverly that they only felt more English. You could never be dull when he was by and with him present you were safe from the fear of the devastating silences that sometimes overwhelm a British company. A pause looked inevitable and Ferdy Rabenstein had broken into a topic that interested everyone. An invaluable asset to any party. He had an inexhaustible fund of Jewish stories. He was a very good mimic and he assumed the Yiddish accent and reproduced the Jewish gestures to perfection; his head sank into his body, his face grew cunning, his voice oily, and he was a rabbi or an old clothes merchant or a smart commercial traveller or a fat procuress in Frankfort. It was as good as a play. Because he was himself a Jew and insisted on it you laughed without reserve, but for my own part not without an under–current of discomfort. I was not quite sure of a sense of humour that made such cruel fun of his own race. I discovered afterwards that Jewish stories were his speciality and I seldom met him anywhere without hearing him tell sooner or later the last he had heard.

But the best story he told me on this occasion was not a Jewish one. It struck me so that I have never forgotten it, but for one reason or another I have never had occasion to tell it again. I give it here because it is a curious little incident concerning persons whose names at least will live in the social history of the Victorian Era and I think it would be a pity if it were lost. He told me then that once when quite a young man he was staying in the country in a house where Mrs Langtry, at that time at the height of her beauty and astounding reputation, was also a guest. It happened to be within driving distance of that in which lived the Duchess of Somerset, who had been Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament, and knowing her slightly, it occurred to him that it would be interesting to bring the two women together. He suggested it to Mrs Langtry, who was willing, and forthwith wrote to the Duchess asking if he might bring the celebrated beauty to call on her. It was fitting, he said, that the loveliest women of this generation (this was in the eighties) should pay her respects to the loveliest woman of the last. ‘Bring her by all means,’ answered the Duchess, ‘but I warn you that it will be a shock to her.’ They drove over in a carriage and pair, Mrs Langtry in a close–fitting blue bonnet with long satin strings, which showed the fine shape of her head and made her blue eyes even bluer, and were received by a little ugly old hag who looked with irony out of her beady eyes at the radiant beauty who had come to see her. They had tea, they talked, and they drove home again. Mrs Langtry was very silent and when Ferdy looked at her he saw that she was quietly weeping. When they got back to the house she went to her room and would not come down to dinner that night. For the first time she had realized that beauty dies.

Ferdy asked me for my address and a few days after I got back to London invited me to dinner. There were only six of us, an American woman married to an English peer, a Swedish painter, an actress, and a well–known critic. We ate very good food and drank excellent wine. The conversation was easy and intelligent. After dinner Ferdy was persuaded to play the piano. He only played Viennese waltzes, I discovered later that they were his speciality, and the light, tuneful, and sensual music seemed to accord well with his discreet flamboyance. He played without affectation, with a lilt, and he had a graceful touch. This was the first of a good many dinners I had with him, he would ask me two or three times a year, and as time passed I met him more and more frequently at other people’s houses. I rose in the world and perhaps he came down a little. Of late years I had sometimes found him at parties where other Jews were and I fancied that I read in his shining liquid eyes, resting for a moment on these members of his race, a certain good–natured amusement at the thought of what the world was coming to. There were people who said he was a snob, but I do not think he was; it just happened that in his early days he had never met any but the great. He had a real passion for art and in his commerce with those that produced it was at his best. With them he had never that faint air of persiflage which when he was with very grand persons made you suspect that he was never quite the dupe of their grandeur. His taste was perfect and many of his friends were glad to avail themselves of his knowledge. He was one of the first to value old furniture and he rescued many a priceless piece from the attics of ancestral mansions and gave it an honourable place in the drawing–room. It amused him to saunter round the auction rooms and he was always willing to give his advice to great ladies who desired at once to acquire a beautiful thing and make a profitable investment. He was rich and good–natured. He liked to patronize the arts and would take a great deal of trouble to get commissions for some young painter whose talent he admired or an engagement to play at a rich man’s house for a violinist who could in no other way get a hearing. But he never let his rich man down. His taste was too good to deceive and civil though he might be to the mediocre he would not lift a finger to help them. His own musical parties, very small and carefully chosen, were a treat.

He never married.

‘I am a man of the world,’ he said, ‘and I flatter myself that I have no prejudices, tous les goûts sont dans la nature, but I do not think I could bring myself to marry a Gentile. There’s no harm in going to the opera in a dinner jacket, but it just would never occur to me to do so.’

‘Then why didn’t you marry a Jewess?’

(I did not hear this conversation, but the lively and audacious creature who thus tackled him told me of it.)

‘Oh, my dear, our women are so prolific. I could not bear the thought of peopling the world with a little Ikey and a little Jacob and a little Rebecca and a little Leah and a little Rachel.’

But he had had affairs of note and the glamour of past romance still clung to him. He was in his youth of an amorous complexion. I have met old ladies who told me that he was irresistible, and when in reminiscent mood they talked to me of this woman and that who had completely lost her head over him, I divined that, such was his beauty, they could not find it in their hearts to blame them. It was interesting to hear of great ladies that I had read of in the memoirs of the day or had met as respectable dowagers garrulous over their grandsons at Eton or making a mess of a hand at bridge and bethink myself that they had been consumed with sinful passion for the handsome Jew. Ferdy’s most notorious amour was with the Duchess of Hereford, the loveliest, the most gallant and dashing of the beauties of the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. It lasted for twenty years. He had doubtless flirtations meanwhile, but their relations were stable and recognized. It was proof of his marvellous tact that when at last they ended he exchanged an ageing mistress for a loyal friend. I remember meeting the pair not so very long ago at luncheon. She was an old woman, tall and of a commanding presence, but with a mask of paint on a ravaged face. We were lunching at the Carlton and Ferdy, our host, came a few minutes late. He offered us a cocktail and the Duchess told him we had already had one.

‘Ah, I wondered why your eyes were so doubly bright,’ he said.

The old raddled woman flushed with pleasure.

My youth passed, I grew middle–aged, I wondered how soon I must begin to describe myself as elderly; I wrote books and plays, I travelled, I underwent experiences, I fell in love and out of it; and still I kept meeting Ferdy at parties. War broke out and was waged, millions of men were killed, and the face of the world was changed. Ferdy did not like the war. He was too old to take part in it, and his German name was awkward, but he was discreet and took care not to expose himself to humiliation. His old friends were faithful to him and he lived in a dignified but not too strict seclusion. But then peace came and with courage he set himself to making the best of changed conditions. Society was mixed now, parties were rowdy, but Ferdy fitted himself to the new life. He still told his funny Jewish stories, he still played charmingly the waltzes of Strauss, he still went round auction rooms and told the new rich what they ought to buy. I went to live abroad, but whenever I was in London I saw Ferdy and now there was something a little uncanny in him. He did not give in. He had never known a day’s illness. He seemed never to grow tired. He still dressed beautifully. He was interested in everybody. His mind was alert and people asked him to dinner, not for old times’ sake, but because he was worth his salt. He still gave charming little concerts at his house in Curzon Street.

It was when he invited me to one of these that I made the discovery that started the recollections of him I have here set down. We were dining at a house in Hill Street, a large party, and the women having gone upstairs Ferdy and I found ourselves side by side. He told me that Lea Makart was coming to play for him on the following Friday evening and he would be glad if I would come.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m going down to the Blands.’

‘What Blands?’

‘They live in Sussex at a place called Tilby.’

‘I didn’t know you knew them.’

He looked at me rather strangely. He smiled. I didn’t know what amused him.

‘Oh, yes, I’ve known them for years. It’s a very nice house to stay at.’

‘Adolf is my nephew.’

‘Sir Adolphus?’

‘It suggests one of the bucks of the Regency, doesn’t it? But I will not conceal from you that he was named Adolf.’

‘Everyone I know calls him Freddy.’

‘I know, and I understand that Miriam, his wife, only answers to the name of Muriel.’

‘How does he happen to be your nephew?’

‘Because Hannah Rabenstein, my sister, married Alfons Bleikogel, who ended life as Sir Alfred Bland, first Baronet, and Adolf, their only son, in due course became Sir Adolphus Bland, second Baronet.’

‘Then Freddy Bland’s mother, the Lady Bland who lives in Portland Place, is your sister?’

‘Yes, my sister Hannah. She was the eldest of the family. She’s eighty, but in full possession of her faculties and a remarkable woman.’

‘I’ve never met her.’

‘I think your friends the Blands would just as soon you didn’t. She has never lost her German accent.’

‘Do you never see them?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t spoken to them for twenty years. I am such a Jew and they are so English.’ He smiled. ‘I could never remember that their names were Freddy and Muriel. I used to come out with an Adolf or a Miriam at awkward moments. And they didn’t like my stories. It was better that we should not meet. When the war broke out and I would not change my name it was the last straw. It was too late, I could never have accustomed my friends to think of me as anything but Ferdy Rabenstein; I was quite content. I was not ambitious to be a Smith, a Brown or a Robinson.’

Though he spoke facetiously, there was in his tone the faintest possible derision and I felt, hardly felt even, the sensation was so shadowy, that, as it had often vaguely seemed to me before, there was in the depth of his impenetrable heart a cynical contempt for the Gentiles he had conquered.

‘Then you don’t know the two boys?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘The eldest is called George, you know. I don’t think he’s so clever as Harry, the other one, but he’s an engaging youth. I think you’d like him.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Well, he’s just been sent down from Oxford. I suppose he’s at home. Harry’s still at Eton.’

‘Why don’t you bring George to lunch with me?’

‘I’ll ask him. I should think he’d love to come.’

‘It has reached my ears that he’s been a little troublesome.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He wouldn’t go into the army, which is what they wanted. They rather fancied the Guards. And so he went to Oxford instead. He didn’t work and he spent a great deal of money and he painted the town red. It was all quite normal.’

‘What was he sent down for?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing of any consequence.’

At that moment our host rose and we went upstairs. When Ferdy bade me good night he asked me not to forget about his great–nephew.

‘Ring me up,’ he said. ‘Wednesday would suit me. Or Friday.’

Next day I went down to Tilby. It was an Elizabethan mansion standing in a spacious park, in which roamed fallow deer, and from its windows you had wide views of rolling downs. It seemed to me that as far as the eye could reach the land belonged to the Blands. His tenants must have found Sir Adolphus a wonderful landlord, for I never saw farms kept in such order, the barns and cow–sheds were spick and span and the pigsties were a picture; the public– houses looked like Old English water–colours and the cottages he had built on the estate combined admirably picturesqueness and convenience. It must have cost him a pot of money to run the place on these lines. Fortunately he had it. The park with its grand old trees (and its nine–hole golf course) was tended like a garden, and the wide–stretching gardens were the pride of the neighbourhood. The magnificent house, with its steep roofs and mullioned windows, had been restored by the most celebrated architect in England and furnished by Lady Bland, with taste and knowledge, in a style that perfectly fitted it.

‘Of course it’s very simple,’ she said. ‘Just an English house in the country.’

The dining–room was adorned with old English sporting pictures and the Chippendale chairs were of incredible value. In the drawing–room were portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough and landscapes by Old Crome and Richard Wilson. Even in my bedroom with its four–post bed were water–colours by Birket Foster. It was very beautiful and a treat to stay there, but though it would have distressed Muriel Bland beyond anything to know it, it entirely missed oddly enough the effect she had sought. It did not give you for a moment the impression of an English house. You had the feeling that every object had been bought with a careful eye to the general scheme. You missed the full Academy portraits that hung in the dining–room beside a Carlo Dolci that an ancestor had brought back from the Grand Tour, and the water–colours painted by a great–aunt that cluttered up the drawing–room so engagingly. There was no ugly Victorian sofa that had always been there and that it never occurred to anybody to take away and no needlework chairs that an unmarried daughter had so painstakingly worked at about the time of the Great Exhibition. There was beauty but no sentiment.

And yet how comfortable it was and how well looked after you were! And what a cordial greeting the Blands gave you! They seemed really to like people. They were generous and kindly. They were never happier than when they were entertaining the county, and though they had not owned the property for more than twenty years they had established themselves firmly in the favour of their neighbours. Except perhaps in their splendour and the competent way in which the estate was run there was nothing to suggest that they had not been settled there for centuries.

Freddy had been at Eton and Oxford. He was now in the early fifties. He was quiet in manner, courtly, very clever, I imagine, but a trifle reserved. He had great elegance, but it was not an English elegance; he had grey hair and a short pointed grey beard, fine dark eyes and an aquiline nose. He was just above middle height; I don’t think you would have taken him for a Jew, but rather for a foreign diplomat of some distinction. He was a man of character, but gave you, strangely enough, notwithstanding the success he had had in life, an impression of faint melancholy. His successes had been financial and political; in the world of sport, for all his perseverance, he had never shone. For many years he had followed hounds, but he was a bad rider and I think it must have been a relief to him when he could persuade himself that middle age and pressure of business forced him to give up hunting. He had excellent shooting and gave grand parties for it, but he was a poor shot; and despite the course in his park he never succeeded in being more than an indifferent golfer. He knew only too well how much these things meant in England and his incapacity was a bitter disappointment to him. However George would make up for it.

George was scratch at golf, and though tennis was not his game he played much better than the average; the Blands had had him taught to shoot as soon as he was old enough to hold a gun and he was a fine shot; they had put him on a pony when he was two, and Freddy, watching him mount his horse, knew that out hunting when the boy came to a fence he felt exhilaration and not that sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, which, though he had chased the fox with such grim determination, had always made the sport a torture to him. George was so tall and slim, his curly hair, of a palish brown, was so fine, his eyes were so blue, he was the perfect type of the young Englishman. He had the engaging candour of the breed. His nose was straight, though perhaps a trifle fleshy, and his lips were perhaps a little full and sensual, but he had beautiful teeth, and his smooth skin was like ivory. George was the apple of his father’s eye. He did not like Harry, his second son, so well. He was rather stocky, broad–shouldered and strong for his age, but his black eyes, shining with cleverness, his coarse dark hair, and his big nose revealed his race. Freddy was severe with him, and often impatient, but with George he was all indulgence. Harry would go into the business, he had brains and push, but George was the heir. George would be an English gentleman.

George had offered to motor me down in the roadster his father had given him as a birthday present. He drove very fast and we arrived before the rest of the guests. The Blands were sitting on the lawn and tea was laid out under a magnificent cedar.

‘By the way,’ I said presently, ‘I saw Ferdy Rabenstein the other day and he wants me to bring George to lunch with him.’

I had not mentioned the invitation to George on the way because I thought that if there had been a family coldness I had better address his parents as well.

‘Who in God’s name is Ferdy Rabenstein?’ said George.

How brief is human glory! A generation back such a question would have seemed grotesque.

‘He’s by way of being your great–uncle,’ I replied.

A glance had passed from father to mother when I first spoke.

‘He’s a horrid old man,’ said Muriel.

‘I don’t think it’s in the least necessary for George to resume relationships that were definitely severed before he was born,’ said Freddy with decision.

‘Anyhow I’ve delivered the message,’ said I, feeling somewhat snubbed.

‘I don’t want to see the old blighter,’ said George.

The conversation was broken off by the arrival of other guests and in a little while George went off to play golf with one of his Oxford friends.

It was not till next day that the matter was referred to again. I had played an unsatisfactory round with Freddy Bland in the morning and several sets of what is known as country–house tennis in the afternoon and was sitting alone with Muriel on the terrace. In England we have so much bad weather that it is only fair that a beautiful day should be more beautiful than anywhere in the world and this June evening was perfect. The blue sky was cloudless and the air was balmy; before us stretched green rolling downs, and woods, and in the distance you saw the red roofs of a little village church. It was a day when to be alive was sufficient happiness. Detached lines of poetry hovered vaguely in my memory. Muriel and I had been chatting desultorily.

‘I hope you didn’t think it rather horrid of us to refuse to let George lunch with Ferdy,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s such a fearful snob, isn’t he?’

‘D’you think so? He’s always been very nice to me.’

‘We haven’t been on speaking terms for twenty years. Freddy never forgave him for his behaviour during the war. So unpatriotic, I thought, and one really must draw the line somewhere. You know, he absolutely refused to drop his horrible German name. With Freddy in Parliament and running munitions and all that sort of thing it was quite impossible. I don’t know why he should want to see George. He can’t mean anything to him.’

‘He’s an old man. George and Harry are his great–nephews. He must leave his money to someone.’

‘We’d rather not have his money,’ said Muriel coldly.

Of course I didn’t care a row of pins whether George went to lunch with Ferdy Rabenstein, and I was quite willing to let the matter drop, but evidently the Blands had talked it over and Muriel felt that some explanation was due to me.

‘Of course you know that Freddy has Jewish blood in him,’ she said.

She looked at me sharply. Muriel was rather a big blonde woman and she spent a great deal of time trying to keep down the corpulence to which she was predisposed. She had been very pretty when young, and even now was a comely person; but her round blue eyes, slightly prominent, her fleshy nose, the shape of her face and the back of her neck, her exuberant manner, betrayed her race. No Englishwoman, however fair–haired, ever looked like that. And yet her observation was designed to make me take it for granted that she was a Gentile. I answered discreetly:

‘So many people have nowadays.’

‘I know. But there’s no reason to dwell on it, is there? After all, we’re absolutely English; no one could be more English than George, in appearance and manner and everything; I mean, he’s such a fine sportsman and all that sort of thing, I can’t see any object of his knowing Jews just because they happen to be distant connexions of his.’

‘It’s very difficult in England now not to know Jews, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, I know, in London one does meet a good many, and I think some of them are very nice. They’re so artistic. I don’t go so far as to say that Freddy and I deliberately avoid them, of course I wouldn’t do that, but it just happens that we don’t really know any of them very well. And down here, there simply aren’t any to know.’

I could not but admire the convincing manner in which she spoke. It would not have surprised me to be told that she really believed every word she said.

‘You say that Ferdy might leave George his money. Well, I don’t believe it’s so very much anyway; it was quite a comfortable fortune before the war, but that’s nothing nowadays. Besides we’re hoping that George will go in for politics when he’s a little older, and I don’t think it would do him any good in the constituency to inherit money from a Mr Rabenstein.’

’Is George interested in politics?’ I asked, to change the conversation.

‘Oh, I do hope so. After all, there’s the family constituency waiting for him. It’s a safe Conservative seat and one can’t expect Freddy to go on with the grind of the House of Commons indefinitely.’

Muriel was grand. She talked already of the constituency as though twenty generations of Blands had sat for it. Her remark, however, was my first intimation that Freddy’s ambition was not satisfied.

‘I suppose Freddy would go to the House of Lords when George was old enough to stand.’

‘We’ve done a good deal for the party,’ said Muriel.

Muriel was a Catholic and she often told you that she had been educated in a convent–’

Such sweet women, those nuns, I always said that if I had a daughter I should have sent her to a convent too’–but she liked her servants to be Church of England, and on Sunday evenings we had what was called supper because the fish was cold and there was ice–cream, so that they could go to church, and we were waited on by two footmen instead of four. It was still light when we finished and Freddy and I, smoking our cigars, walked up and down the terrace in the gloaming. I suppose Muriel had told him of her conversation with me, and it may be that his refusal to let George see his great–uncle still troubled him, but being subtler than she he attacked the question more indirectly. He told me that he had been very much worried about George. It had been a great disappointment that he had refused to go into the army.

‘I should have thought he’d have loved the life,’ he said.

‘And he would certainly have looked marvellous in his Guards uniform.’

‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ returned Freddy, ingenuously. ‘I wonder he could resist that.’

He had been completely idle at Oxford; although his father had given him a very large allowance, he had got monstrously into debt; and now he had been sent down. But though he spoke so tartly I could see that he was not a little proud of his scapegrace son, he loved him with oh, such an unEnglish love, and in his heart it flattered him that George had cut such a dash.

‘Why should you worry?’ I said. ‘You don’t really care if George has a degree or not.’

Freddy chuckled.

‘No, I don’t suppose I do really. I always think the only important thing about Oxford is that people know you were there, and I dare say that George isn’t any wilder than the other young men in his set. It’s the future I’m thinking of. He’s so damned idle. He doesn’t seem to want to do anything but have a good time.’

‘He’s young, you know.’

‘He’s not interested in politics, and though he’s so good at games he’s not even very keen on sport. He seems to spend most of his time strumming the piano.’

‘That’s a harmless amusement.’

‘Oh, yes, I don’t mind that, but he can’t go on loafing indefinitely. You see, all this will be his one day.’ Freddy gave a sweeping gesture that seemed to embrace the whole county, but I knew that he did not own it all yet. ‘I’m very anxious that he should be fit to assume his responsibilities. His mother is very ambitious for him, but I only want him to be an English gentleman.’

Freddy gave me a sidelong glance as though he wanted to say something but hesitated in case I thought it ridiculous; but there is one advantage in being a writer that, since people look upon you as of no account, they will often say things to you that they would not to their equals. He thought he would risk it.

‘You know, I’ve got an idea that nowhere in the world now is the Greek ideal of life so perfectly cultivated as by the English country gentleman living on his estates. I think his life has the beauty of a work of art.’

I could not but smile when I reflected that it was impossible for the English country gentleman in these days to do anything of the sort without a packet of money safely invested in American Bonds, but I smiled with sympathy. I thought it rather touching that this Jewish financier should cherish so romantic a dream.

‘I want him to be a good landlord. I want him to take his part in the affairs of the country. I want him to be a thorough sportsman.’

‘Poor mutt,’ I thought, but said: ‘Well, what are your plans for George now?’

‘I think he has a fancy for the diplomatic service. He’s suggested going to Germany to learn the language.’

‘A very good idea, I should have thought.’

‘For some reason he’s got it into his head that he wants to go to Munich.’

‘A nice place.’

Next day I went back to London and shortly after my arrival rang up Ferdy. ‘I’m sorry, but George isn’t able to come to lunch on Wednesday.’ ‘What about Friday?’

‘Friday’s no good either.’ I thought it useless to beat about the bush. ‘The fact is, his people aren’t keen on his lunching with you.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then:

‘I see. Well, will you come on Wednesday anyway?’

‘Yes, I’d like to,’ I answered.

So on Wednesday at half past one I strolled round to Curzon Street. Ferdy received me with the somewhat elaborate graciousness that he cultivated. He made no reference to the Blands. We sat in the drawing–room and I could not help reflecting what an eye for beautiful objects that family had. The room was more crowded than the fashion of today approves, and the gold snuff–boxes in vitrines, the French china, appealed to a taste that was not mine; but they were no doubt choice pieces; and the Louise XV suite, with its beautiful petit point, must have been worth an enormous lot of money. The pictures on the walls by Lancret, Pater, and Watteau did not greatly interest me, but I recognized their intrinsic excellence. It was a proper setting for this aged man of the world. It fitted his period. Suddenly the door opened and George was announced. Ferdy saw my surprise and gave me a little smile of triumph.

‘I’m very glad you were able to come after all,’ he said as he shook George’s hand.

I saw him in a glance take in his great–nephew whom he saw today for the first time. George was very well dressed. He wore a short black coat, striped trousers, and the grey double–breasted waistcoat which at that time was the mode. You could only wear it with elegance if you were tall and thin and your belly was slightly concave. I felt sure that Ferdy knew exactly who George’s tailor was and what haberdasher he went to and approved of them. George, so smart and trim, wearing his clothes so beautifully, certainly looked very handsome. We went down to luncheon. Ferdy had the social graces at his fingers’ ends and he put the boy at his ease, but I saw that he was carefully appraising him; then, I do not know why, he began to tell some of his Jewish stories. He told them with gusto and with all his wonderful mimicry. I saw George flush, and though he laughed at them, I could see that it was with embarrassment. I wondered what on earth had induced Ferdy to be so tactless. But he was watching George and he told story after story. It looked as though he would never stop. I wondered if for some reason I could not grasp he was taking a malicious pleasure in the boy’s obvious discomfiture. At last we went upstairs and to make things easier I asked Ferdy to play the piano. He played us three or four little waltzes. He had lost none of his exquisite lightness nor his sense of their lilting rhythm. Then he turned to George.

‘Do you play?’ he asked him.

‘A little.’

‘Won’t you play something?’

‘I’m afraid I only play classical music. I don’t think it would interest you.’

Ferdy smiled slightly, but did not insist. I said it was time for me to go and George accompanied me.

‘What a filthy old Jew,’ he said as soon as we were in the street. ‘I hated those stories of his.’

‘They’re his great stunt. He always tells them.’

‘Would you if you were a Jew?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘How is it you came to lunch after all?’ I asked George.

He chuckled. He was a light–hearted creature, with a sense of humour, and he shook off the slight irritation his great–uncle had caused him.

‘He went to see Granny. You don’t know Granny, do you?’

‘No.’

‘She treats daddy like a kid in Etons. Granny said I was to go to lunch with great–uncle Ferdy and what Granny says goes.’

‘I see.’

A week or two later George went to Munich to learn German. I happened then to go on a journey and it was not till the following spring that I was again in London. Soon after my arrival I found myself sitting next to Muriel Bland at dinner. I asked after George.

‘He’s still in Germany,’ she said.

‘I see in the papers that you’re going to have a great beano at Tilby for his coming of age.’

‘We’re going to entertain the tenants and they’re making George a presentation.’

She was less exuberant than usual, but I did not pay much attention to the fact. She led a strenuous life and it might be that she was tired. I knew she liked to talk of her son, so I continued.

‘I suppose George has been having a grand time in Germany,’ I said.

She did not answer for a moment and I gave her a glance. I was surprised to see that her eyes were filled with tears.

‘I’m afraid George has gone mad,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve been so frightfully worried. Freddy’s so angry, he won’t even discuss it. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

Of course it immediately occurred to me that George, who, I supposed, like most young Englishmen sent to learn the language, had been put with a German family, had fallen in love with the daughter of the house and wanted to marry her. I had a pretty strong suspicion that the Blands were intent on his making a very grand marriage.

‘Why, what’s happened?’ I asked.

‘He wants to become a pianist.’

‘A what?’

‘A professional pianist.’

‘What on earth put that idea in his head?’

‘Heaven knows. We didn’t know anything about it. We thought he was working for his exam. I went out to see him. I thought I’d like to know that he was getting on all right. Oh, my dear. He looks like nothing on earth. And he used to be so smart; I could have cried. He told me he wasn’t going in for the exam, and had never had any intention of doing so; he’d only suggested the diplomatic service so that we’d let him go to Germany and he’d be able to study music’

‘But has he any talent?’

‘Oh, that’s neither here nor there. Even if he had the genius of Paderewski we couldn’t have George traipsing around the country playing at concerts. No one can deny that I’m very artistic, and so is Freddy, we love music and we’ve always known a lot of artists, but George will have a very great position, it’s out of the question. We’ve set our hearts on his going into Parliament. He’ll be very rich one day. There’s nothing he can’t aspire to.’

‘Did you point all that out to him?’

‘Of course I did. He laughed at me. I told him he’d break his father’s heart. He said his father could always fall back on Harry. Of course I’m devoted to Harry, and he’s as clever as a monkey, but it was always understood that he was to go into the business; even though I am his mother I can see that he hasn’t got the advantages that George has. Do you know what he said to me? He said that if his father would settle five pounds a week on him he would resign everything in Harry’s favour and Harry could be his father’s heir and succeed to the baronetcy and everything. It’s too ridiculous. He said that if the Crown Prince of Roumania could abdicate a throne he didn’t see why he couldn’t abdicate a baronetcy. But you can’t do that. Nothing can prevent him from being third baronet and if Freddy should be granted a peerage from succeeding to it at Freddy’s death. Do you know, he even wants to drop the name of Bland and take some horrible German name.’ I could not help asking what. ‘Bleikogel or something like that,’ she answered.

That was a name I recognized. I remembered Ferdy telling me that Hannah Rabenstein had married Alfons Bleikogel who became eventually Sir Alfred Bland, first Baronet. It was all very strange. I wondered what had happened to the charming, so typically English boy I had seen only a few months before.

‘Of course when I came home and told Freddy he was furious. I’ve never seen him so angry. He foamed at the mouth. He wired to George to come back immediately and George wired back to say he couldn’t on account of his work.’

’Is he working?’

‘From morning till night. That’s the maddening part of it. He never did a stroke of work in his life. Freddy used to say he was born idle.’

‘H’m.’

‘Then Freddy wired to say that if he didn’t come he’d stop his allowance and George wired back: “Stop it.” That put the lid on. You don’t know what Freddy can be when his back is up.’

I knew that Freddy had inherited a large fortune, but I knew also that he had immensely increased it, and I could well imagine that behind the courteous and amiable Squire of Tilby there was a ruthless man of affairs. He had been used to having his own way and I could believe that when crossed he would be hard and cruel.

‘We’d been making George a very handsome allowance, but you know how frightfully extravagant he was. We didn’t think he’d be able to hold out long and in point of fact within a month he wrote to Ferdy and asked him to lend him a hundred pounds. Ferdy went to my mother–in–law, she’s his sister, you know, and asked her what it meant. Though they hadn’t spoken for twenty years Freddy went to see him and begged him not to send George a penny, and he promised he wouldn’t. I don’t know how George has been making both ends meet. I’m sure Freddy’s right, but I can’t help being rather worried. If I hadn’t given Freddy my word of honour that I wouldn’t send him anything I think I’d have slipped a few notes in a letter in case of accident. I mean, it’s awful to think that perhaps he hasn’t got enough to eat.’

‘It’ll do him no harm to go short for a bit.’

‘We were in an awful hole, you know. We’d made all sorts of preparations for his coming of age, and I’d issued hundreds of invitations. Suddenly George said he wouldn’t come. I was simply frantic. I wrote and wired. I would have gone over to Germany only Freddy wouldn’t let me. I practically went down on my bended knees to George. I begged him not to put us in such a humiliating position. I mean, it’s the sort of thing it’s so difficult to explain. Then my mother–in–law stepped in. You don’t know her, do you? She’s an extraordinary old woman. You’d never think she was Freddy’s mother. She was German originally, but of very good family.’

‘Oh?’

‘To tell you the truth I’m rather frightened of her. She tackled Freddy and then she wrote to George herself. She said that if he’d come home for his twenty–first birthday she’d pay any debts he had in Munich and we’d all give a patient hearing to anything he had to say. He agreed to that and we’re expecting him one day next week. But I’m not looking forward to it, I can tell you.’

She gave a deep sigh. When we were walking upstairs after dinner Freddy addressed me.

‘I see Muriel has been telling you about George. The damned fool! I have no patience with him. Fancy wanting to be a pianist. It’s so ungentlemanly.’

‘He’s very young, you know,’ I said soothingly.

‘He’s had things too easy for him. I’ve been much too indulgent. There’s never been a thing he wanted that I haven’t given him. I’ll learn him.’

The Blands had a discreet apprehension of the uses of advertisement and I gathered from the papers that the celebrations at Tilby of George’s twenty–first birthday were conducted in accordance with the usage of English county families. There was a dinner–party and a ball for the gentry and a collation and a dance in marquees on the lawn for the tenants. Expensive bands were brought down from London. In the illustrated papers were pictures of George surrounded by his family being presented with a solid silver tea–set by the tenantry. They had subscribed to have his portrait painted, but since his absence from the country had made it impossible for him to sit, the tea–service had been substituted. I read in the columns of the gossip writers that his father had given him a hunter, his mother a gramophone that changed its own records, his grandmother the dowager Lady Bland an Encyclopaedia Britannica, and his great–uncle Ferdinand Rabenstein a Virgin and Child by Pellegrino da Modena. I could not help observing that these gifts were bulky and not readily convertible into cash. From Ferdy’s presence at the festivities I concluded that George’s unaccountable vagary had effected a reconciliation between uncle and nephew. I was right. Ferdy did not at all like the notion of his great–nephew becoming a professional pianist. At the first hint of danger to its prestige the family drew together and a united front was presented to oppose George’s designs. Since I was not there I only know from hearsay what happened when the birthday celebrations were over. Ferdy told me something and so did Muriel, and later George gave me his version. The Blands had very much the impression that when George came home and found himself occupying the centre of the stage, when, surrounded by splendour, he saw for himself once more how much it meant to be the heir of a great estate, he would weaken. They surrounded him with love. They flattered him. They hung on his words. They counted on the goodness of his heart and thought that if they were very kind to him he would not have the courage to cause them pain. They seemed to take it for granted that he had no intention of going back to Germany and in conversation included him in all their plans. George did not say very much. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He did not open a piano. Things looked as though they were going very well. Peace descended on the troubled house. Then one day at luncheon when they were discussing a garden–party to which they had all been asked for one day of the following week, George said pleasantly:

‘Don’t count on me. I shan’t be here.’

‘Oh, George, why not?’ asked his mother.

‘I must get back to my work. I’m leaving for Munich on Monday.’ There was an awful pause. Everyone looked for something to say, but was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and at last it seemed impossible to break it. Luncheon was finished in silence. Then George went into the garden and the others, old Lady Bland and Ferdy, Muriel and Sir Adolphus, into the morning–room. There was a family council. Muriel wept. Freddy flew into a temper. Presently from the drawing–room they heard the sound of someone playing a nocturne of Chopin. It was George. It was as though now he had announced his decision he had gone for comfort, rest, and strength to the instrument he loved. Freddy sprang to his feet.

‘Stop that noise,’ he cried. ‘I won’t have him play the piano in my house.’ Muriel rang for a servant and gave him a message.

‘Will you tell Mr Bland that her ladyship has a bad headache and would he mind not playing the piano.’

Ferdy, the man of the world, was deputed to have a talk with George. He was authorized to make him certain promises if he would give up the idea of becoming a pianist. If he did not wish to go into the diplomatic service his father would not insist, but if he would stand for Parliament he was prepared to pay his election expenses, give him a flat in London, and make him an allowance of five thousand a year. I must say it was a handsome offer. I do not know what Ferdy said to the boy. I suppose he painted to him the life that a young man could lead in London on such an income. I am sure he made it very alluring. It availed nothing. All George asked was five pounds a week to be able to continue his studies and to be left alone. He was indifferent to the position that he might some day enjoy. He didn’t want to hunt. He didn’t want to shoot. He didn’t want to be a Member of Parliament. He didn’t want to be a millionaire. He didn’t want to be a baronet. He didn’t want to be a peer. Ferdy left him defeated and in a state of considerable exasperation.

After dinner that evening there was a battle royal. Freddy was a quick– tempered man, unused to opposition, and he gave George the rough side of his tongue. I gather that it was very rough indeed. The women who sought to restrain his violence were sternly silenced. Perhaps for the first time in his life Freddy would not listen to his mother. George was obstinate and sullen. He had made up his mind and if his father didn’t like it he could lump it. Freddy was peremptory. He forbade George to go back to Germany. George answered that he was twenty–one and his own master. He would go where he chose. Freddy swore he would not give him a penny.

‘All right, I’ll earn money.’’You! You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life. What do you expect to do to earn money?’

‘Sell old clothes,’ grinned George.

There was a gasp from all of them. Muriel was so taken aback that she said a stupid thing.

‘Like a Jew?’

‘Well, aren’t I a Jew? And aren’t you a Jewess and isn’t daddy a Jew? We’re all Jews, the whole gang of us, and everyone knows it and what the hell’s the good of pretending we’re not?’

Then a very dreadful thing happened. Freddy burst suddenly into tears. I’m afraid he didn’t behave very much like Sir Adolphus Bland, Bart, M.P., and the good old English gentleman he so much wanted to be, but like an emotional Adolf Bleikogel who loved his son and wept with mortification because the great hopes he had set on him were brought to nothing and the ambition of his life was frustrated. He cried noisily with great loud sobs and pulled his beard and beat his breast and rocked to and fro. Then they all began to cry, old Lady Bland and Muriel, and Ferdy, who sniffed and blew his nose and wiped the tears streaming down his face, and even George cried. Of course it was very painful, but to our rough Anglo–Saxon temperament I am afraid it must seem also a trifle ridiculous. No one tried to console anybody else. They just sobbed and sobbed. It broke up the party.

But it had no result on the situation. George remained obdurate. His father would not speak to him. There were more scenes. Muriel sought to excite his pity; he was deaf to her piteous entreaties, he did not seem to mind if he broke her heart, he did not care two hoots if he killed his father. Ferdy appealed to him as a sportsman and a man of the world. George was flippant and indeed personally offensive. Old Lady Bland with her guttural German accent and strong common sense argued with him, but he would not listen to reason. It was she, however, who at last found a way out. She made George acknowledge that it was no use to throw away all the beautiful things the world laid at his feet unless he had talent. Of course he thought he had, but he might be mistaken. It was not worth while to be a second–rate pianist. His only excuse, his only justification, was genius. If he had genius his family had no right to stand in his way.

‘You can’t expect me to show genius already,’ said George. ‘I shall have to work for years.’

‘Are you sure you are prepared for that?’

‘It’s my only wish in the world. I’ll work like a dog. I only want to be given my chance.’

This was the proposition she made. His father was determined to give him nothing and obviously they could not let the boy starve. He had mentioned five pounds a week. Well, she was willing to give him that herself. He could go back to Germany and study for two years. At the end of that time he must come back and they would get some competent and disinterested person to hear him play, and if then that person said he showed promise of becoming a first–rate pianist no further obstacles would be placed in his way. He would be given every advantage, help, and encouragement. If on the other hand that person decided that his natural gifts were not such as to ensure ultimate success he must promise faithfully to give up all thoughts of making music his profession and in every way accede to his father’s wishes. George could hardly believe his ears.

‘Do you mean that, Granny?’

‘I do.’

‘But will daddy agree?’

‘I vill see dat he does,’ she answered.

George seized her in his arms and impetuously kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Darling,’ he cried. ‘Ah, but de promise?’

He gave her his solemn word of honour that he would faithfully abide by the terms of the arrangement. Two days later he went back to Germany. Though his father consented unwillingly to his going, and indeed could not help doing so, he would not be reconciled to him and when he left refused to say good–bye to him.

I imagine that in no manner could he have caused himself such pain. I permit myself a trite remark. It is strange that men, inhabitants for so short a while of an alien and inhuman world, should go out of their way to cause themselves so much unhappiness.

George had stipulated that during his two years of study his family should not visit him, so that when Muriel heard some months before he was due to come home that I was passing through Munich on my way to Vienna, whither business called me, it was not unnatural that she should ask me to look him up. She was anxious to have first–hand information about him. She gave me George’s address and I wrote ahead, telling him I was spending a day in Munich, and asked him to lunch with me. His answer awaited me at the hotel. He said he worked all day and could not spare the time to lunch with me, but if I would come to his studio about six he would like to show me that and if I had nothing better to do would love to spend the evening with me. So soon after six I went to the address he gave me. He lived on the second floor of a large block of flats and when I came to his door I heard the sound of piano–playing. It stopped when I rang and George opened the door for me. I hardly recognized him. He had grown very fat. His hair was extremely long, it curled all over his head in picturesque confusion; and he had certainly not shaved for three days. He wore a grimy pair of Oxford bags, a tennis shirt, and slippers. He was not very clean and his finger–nails were rimmed with black. It was a startling change from the spruce, slim youth so elegantly dressed in such beautiful clothes that I had last seen. I could not but think it would be a shock to Ferdy to see him now. The studio was large and bare; on the walls were three or four unframed canvases of a highly cubist nature, there were several arm–chairs much the worse for wear, and a grand piano. Books were littered about and old newspapers and art magazines. It was dirty and untidy and there was a frowzy smell of stale beer and stale smoke.

‘Do you live here alone?’ I asked.’Yes, I have a woman who comes in twice a week and cleans up. But I make my own breakfast and lunch.’

‘Can you cook?’

‘Oh, I only have bread and cheese and a bottle of beer for lunch. I dine at a Bierstube.’

It was pleasant to discover that he was very glad to see me. He seemed in great spirits and extremely happy. He asked after his relations and we talked of one thing and another. He had a lesson twice a week and for the rest of the time practised. He told me that he worked ten hours a day.

‘That’s a change,’ I said.

He laughed.

‘Daddy said I was born tired. I wasn’t really lazy. I didn’t see the use of working at things that bored me.’

I asked him how he was getting on with the piano. He seemed to be satisfied with his progress and I begged him to play to me.

‘Oh, not now, I’m all in, I’ve been at it all day. Let’s go out and dine and come back here later and then I’ll play. I generally go to the same place, there are several students I know there, and it’s rather fun.’

Presently we set out. He put on socks and shoes and a very old golf coat, and we walked together through the wide quiet streets. It was a brisk cold day. His step was buoyant. He looked round him with a sigh of delight.

‘I love Munich,’ he said. ‘It’s the only city in the world where there’s art in the very air you breathe. After all, art is the only thing that matters, isn’t it? I loathe the idea of going home.’

‘All the same I’m afraid you’ll have to.’

‘I know. I’ll go all right, but I’m not going to think about it till the time comes.’

‘When you do, you might do worse than get a haircut. If you don’t mind my saying so you look almost too artistic to be convincing.’

‘You English, you’re such Philistines,’ he said.

He took me to a rather large restaurant in a side street, crowded even at that early hour with people dining, and furnished heavily in the German medieval style. A table covered with a red cloth, well away from the air, was reserved for George and his friends and when we went to it four or five youths were at it. There was a Pole studying Oriental languages, a student of philosophy, a painter (I suppose the author of George’s cubist pictures), a Swede, and a young man who introduced himself to me, clicking his heels, as Hans Reiting, Dichter, namely Hans Reiting, poet. Not one of them was more than twenty–two and I felt a trifle out of it. They all addressed George as du and I noticed that his German was extremely fluent. I had not spoken it for some time and mine was rusty, so that I could not take much part in the lively conversation. But nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed myself. They ate sparingly, but drank a good deal of beer. They talked of art and women. They were very revolutionary and though gay very much in earnest. They were contemptuous of everyone you had ever heard of, and the only point on which they all agreed was that in this topsy–turvy world only the vulgar could hope for success. They argued points of technique with animation, and contradicted one another, and shouted and were obscene. They had a grand time.

At about eleven George and I walked back to his studio. Munich is a city that frolics demurely and except about the Marienplatz the streets were still and empty. When we got in he took off his coat and said:

‘Now I’ll play to you.’

I sat in one of the dilapidated arm–chairs and a broken spring stuck into my behind, but I made myself as comfortable as I could. George played Chopin. I know very little of music and that is one of the reasons for which I have found this story difficult to write. When I go to a concert at the Queen’s Hall and in the intervals read the programme it is all Greek to me. I know nothing of harmony and counterpoint. I shall never forget how humiliated I felt once when, having come to Munich for a Wagner festival, I went to a wonderful performance of Tristan und Isolde and never heard a note of it. The first few bars sent me off and I began to think of what I was writing, my characters leapt into life and I heard their long conversations, I suffered their pains and was a party to their joy; the years swept by and all sorts of things happened to me, the spring brought me its rapture and in the winter I was cold and hungry; and I loved and I hated and I died. I suppose there were intervals in which I walked round and round the garden and probably ate Schinken–Brödchen and drank beer, but I have no recollection of them. The only thing I know is that when the curtain for the last time fell I woke with a start. I had had a wonderful time, but I could not help thinking it was very stupid of me to come such a long way and spend so much money if I couldn’t pay attention to what I heard and saw.

I knew most of the things George played. They were the familiar pieces of concert programmes. He played with a great deal of dash. Then he played Beethoven’s Appassionata. I used to play it myself when I played the piano (very badly) in my far distant youth and I still knew every note of it. Of course it is a classic and a great work, it would be foolish to deny it, but I confess that at this time of day it leaves me cold. It is like Paradise Lost, splendid, but a trifle stolid. This too George played with vigour. He sweated profusely. At first I could not make out what was the matter with his playing, something did not seem to me quite right, and then it struck me that the two hands did not exactly synchronize, so that there was ever so slight an interval between the bass and the treble; but I repeat, I am ignorant of these things; what disconcerted me might have been merely the effect of his having drunk a good deal of beer that evening or indeed only my fancy. I said all I could think of to praise him.

‘Of course I know I need a lot more work. I’m only a beginner, but I know I can do it. I feel it in my bones. It’ll take me ten years, but then I shall be a pianist.’

He was tired and came away from the piano. It was after midnight and I suggested going, but he would not hear of it. He opened a couple of bottles of beer and lit his pipe. He wanted to talk.

‘Are you happy here?’ I asked him.

‘Very,’ he answered gravely. ‘I’d like to stay for ever. I’ve never had such fun in my life. This evening, for instance. Wasn’t it grand?’

‘It was very jolly. But one can’t go on leading the student’s life. Your friends here will grow older and go away.’

‘Others’ll come. There are always students here and people like that.’

‘Yes, but you’ll grow older too. Is there anything more lamentable than the middle–aged man who tries to go on living the undergraduate’s life? The old fellow who wants to be a boy among boys, and tries to persuade himself that they’ll accept him as one of themselves–how ridiculous he is. It can’t be done.’

‘I feel so at home here. My poor father wants me to be an English gentleman. It gives me gooseflesh. I’m not a sportsman. I don’t care a damn for hunting and shooting and playing cricket. I was only acting.’

‘You gave a very natural performance.’

‘It wasn’t till I came here that I knew it wasn’t real. I loved Eton, and Oxford was a riot, but all the same I knew I didn’t belong. I played the part all right, because acting’s in my blood, but there was always something in me that wasn’t satisfied. The house in Grosvenor Square is a freehold and daddy paid a hundred and eighty thousand pounds for Tilby; I don’t know if you understand what I mean, I felt they were just furnished houses we’d taken for the season and one of these days we’d pack up and the real owners would come back.’

I listened to him attentively, but I wondered how much he was describing what he had obscurely felt and how much he imagined now in his changed circumstances that he had felt.

‘I used to hate hearing great–uncle Ferdy tell his Jewish stories. I thought it so damned mean. I understand now; it was a safety valve. My God, the strain of being a man about town. It’s easier for daddy, he can play the old English squire at Tilby, but in the City he can be himself. He’s all right. I’ve taken the make–up off and my stage clothes and at last I can be my real self too. What a relief! You know, I don’t like English people. I never really know where I am with you. You’re so dull and conventional. You never let yourselves go. There’s no freedom in you, freedom of the soul, and you’re such funks. There’s nothing in the world you’re so frightened of as doing the wrong thing.’

‘Don’t forget that you’re English yourself, George,’ I murmured.

He laughed.

‘I? I’m not English. I haven’t got a drop of English blood in me. I’m a Jew and you know it, and a German Jew into the bargain. I don’t want to be English. I want to be a Jew. My friends are Jews. You don’t know how much more easy I feel with them. I can be myself. We did everything we could to avoid Jews at home; Mummy, because she was blonde, thought she could get away with it and pretended she was a Gentile. What rot! D’you know, I have a lot of fun wandering about the Jewish parts of Munich and looking at the people. I went to Frankfort once, there are a lot of them there, and I walked about and looked at the frowzy old men with their hooked noses and the fat women with their false hair. I felt such a sympathy for them, I felt I belonged to them, I could have kissed them. When they looked at me I wondered if they knew that I was one of them. I wish to God I knew Yiddish. I’d like to become friends with them, and go into their houses and eat Kosher food and all that sort of thing. I wanted to go to a synagogue, but I was afraid I’d do the wrong thing and be kicked out. I like the smell of the Ghetto and the sense of life, and the mystery and the dust and the squalor and the romance. I shall never get the longing for it out of my head now. That’s the real thing. All the rest is only pretence.’

‘You’ll break your father’s heart,’ I said.

‘It’s his or mine. Why can’t he let me go? There’s Harry. Harry would love to be squire of Tilby. He’d be an English gentleman all right. You know, mummy’s set her heart on my marrying a Christian. Harry would love to. He’ll found the good old English family all right. After all, I ask so little. I only want five pounds a week, and they can keep the title and the park and the Gainsboroughs and the whole bag of tricks.’

‘Well, the fact remains that you gave your solemn word of honour to go back after two years.’

‘I’ll go back all right,’ he said sullenly. ‘Lea Makart has promised to come and hear me play.’

‘What’ll you do if she says you’re no good?’

‘Shoot myself,’ he said gaily.

‘What nonsense,’ I answered in the same tone.

‘Do you feel at home in England?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but then I don’t feel at home anywhere else.’

But he was quite naturally not interested in me.

‘I loathe the idea of going back. Now that I know what life has to offer I wouldn’t be an English country gentleman for anything in the world. My God, the boredom of it!’

‘Money’s a very nice thing and I’ve always understood it’s very pleasant to be an English peer.’

‘Money means nothing to me. I want none of the things it can buy, and I don’t happen to be a snob.’

It was growing very late and I had to get up early next day. It seemed unnecessary for me to pay too much attention to what George said. It was the sort of nonsense a young man might very well indulge in when thrown suddenly among painters and poets. Art is strong wine and needs a strong head to carry it. The divine fire burns most efficiently in those who temper its fury with horse sense. After all, George was not twenty–three yet. Time teaches. And when all was said and done his future was no concern of mine. I bade him good night and walked back to my hotel. The stars were shining in the indifferent sky. I left Munich in the morning.

I did not tell Muriel on my return to London what George had said to me, or what he looked like, but contented myself with assuring her that he was well and happy, working very hard, and seemed to be leading a virtuous and sober life. Six months later he came home. Muriel asked me to go down to Tilby for the week–end; Ferdy was bringing Lea Makart to hear George play and he particularly wished me to be there. I accepted. Muriel met me at the station. ‘How did you find George?’ I asked.

‘He’s very fat, but he seems in great spirits. I think he’s pleased to be back again. He’s been very sweet to his father.’

‘I’m glad of that.’

‘Oh, my dear, I do hope Lea Makart will say he’s no good. It’ll be such a relief to all of us.’

‘I’m afraid it’ll be a terrible disappointment to him.’

‘Life is full of disappointments,’ said Muriel crisply. ‘But one learns to put up with them.’

I gave her a smile of amusement. We were sitting in a Rolls, and there was a footman as well as a chauffeur on the box. She wore a string of pearls that had probably cost forty thousand pounds. I recollected that in the birthday honours Sir Adolphus Bland had not been one of the three gentlemen on whom the King had been pleased to confer a peerage.

Lea Makart was able to make only a flying visit. She was playing that evening at Brighton and would motor over to Tilby on the Sunday morning for luncheon. She was returning to London the same day because she had a concert in Manchester on the Monday. George was to play in the course of the afternoon.

He’s practising very hard,’ his mother told me. ‘That’s why he didn’t come with me to meet you.’

We turned in at the park gates and drove up the imposing avenue of elms that led to the house. I found that there was no party.

I met the dowager Lady Bland for the first time. I had always been curious to see her. I had had in my mind’s eye a somewhat sensational picture of an old, old Jewish woman who lived alone in her grand house in Portland Place, and, with a finger in every pie, ruled her family with a despotic hand. She did not disappoint me. She was of commanding presence, rather tall, and stout without being corpulent. Her countenance was markedly Hebraic. She wore a rather heavy moustache and a wig of a peculiarly metallic brown. Her dress was very grand, of black brocade, and she had a row of large diamond stars on her breast and round her neck a chain of diamonds. Diamond rings gleamed on her wrinkled hands. She spoke in a rather harsh voice and with a strong German accent. When I was introduced to her she fixed me with shining eyes. She summed me up with dispatch and to my fancy at all events made no attempt to conceal from me that the judgement she formed was unfavourable.

‘You have known my brother Ferdinand for many years, is it not so?’ she said, rolling a guttural R. ‘My brother Ferdinand has always moved in very good society. Where is Sir Adolphus, Muriel? Does he know your guest is arrived? And will you not send for George? If he does not know his pieces by now he will not know them by tomorrow.’

Muriel explained that Freddy was finishing a round of golf with his secretary and that she had had George told I was there. Lady Bland looked as though she thought Muriel’s replies highly unsatisfactory and turned again to me.

‘My daughter–in–law tells me you have been in Italy?’

‘Yes, I’ve only just come back.’

‘It is a beautiful country. How is the King?’

I said I did not know.

‘I used to know him when he was a little boy. He was not very strong then. His mother, Queen Margherita, was a great friend of mine. They thought he would never marry. The Duchess of Aosta was very angry when he fell in love with that Princess of Montenegro.’

She seemed to belong to some long–past period of history, but she was very alert and I imagine that little escaped her beady eyes. Freddy, very spruce in plus–fours, presently came in. It was amusing and yet a little touching to see this grey–bearded man, as a rule somewhat domineering, so obviously on his best behaviour with the old lady. He called her Mamma. Then George came in. He was as fat as ever, but he had taken my advice and had his hair cut; he was losing his boyish looks, but he was a powerful and well–set–up young man. It was good to see the pleasure he took in his tea. He ate quantities of sandwiches and great hunks of cake. He had still a boy’s appetite. His father watched him with a tender smile and as I looked at him I could not be surprised at the attachment which they all so obviously felt for him. He had an ingenuousness, a charm, and an enthusiasm which were certainly very pleasant. There was about him a generosity of demeanour, a frankness, and a natural cordiality which could not but make people take to him. I do not know whether it was owing to a hint from his grandmother or merely of his own good nature, but it was plain that he was going out of his way to be nice to his father; and in his father’s soft eyes, in the way he hung upon the boy’s words, in his pleased, proud, and happy look, you felt how bitterly the estrangement of the last two years had weighed on him. He adored George.

We played golf in the morning, a three–ball match, since Muriel, having to go to Mass, could not join us, and at one Ferdy arrived in Lea Makart’s car. We sat down to luncheon. Of course Lea Makart’s reputation was well known to me. She was acknowledged to be the greatest woman pianist in Europe. She was a very old friend of Ferdy’s, who with his interest and patronage had greatly helped her at the beginning of her career, and it was he who had arranged for her to come and give her opinion of George’s chances. At one time I went as often as I could to hear her play. She had no affectations; she played as a bird sings, without any appearance of effort, very naturally, and the silvery notes dripped from her light fingers in a curiously spontaneous manner, so that it gave you the impression that she was improvising those complicated rhythms. They used to tell me that her technique was wonderful. I could never make up my mind how much the delight her playing gave me was due to her person. In those days she was the most ethereal thing you could imagine, and it was surprising that a creature so sylphlike should be capable of so much power. She was very slight, pale, with enormous eyes and magnificent black hair, and at the piano she had a childlike wistfulness that was most appealing. She was very beautiful in a hardly human way and when she played, a little smile on her closed lips, she seemed to be remembering things she had heard in another world. Now, however, a woman in the early forties, she was sylphlike no more; she was stout and her face had broadened; she had no longer that lovely remoteness, but the authority of her long succession of triumphs. She was brisk, business–like, and somewhat overwhelming. Her vitality lit her with a natural spotlight as his sanctity surrounds the saint with a halo. She was not interested in anything very much but her own affairs, but since she had humour and knew the world she was able to invest them with gaiety. She held the conversation, but did not absorb it. George talked little. Every now and then she gave him a glance, but did not try to draw him in. I was the only Gentile at the table. All but old Lady Bland spoke perfect English, yet I could not help feeling that they did not speak like English people; I think they rounded their vowels more than we do, they certainly spoke louder, and the words seemed not to fall, but to gush from their lips. I think if I had been in another room where I could hear the tone but not the words of their speech I should have thought it was in a foreign language that they were conversing. The effect was slightly disconcerting.

Lea Makart wished to set out for London at about six, so it was arranged that George should play at four. Whatever the result of the audition, I felt that I, a stranger in the circle which her departure must render exclusively domestic, would be in the way and so, pretending an early engagement in town next morning, I asked her if she would take me with her in her car.

At a little before four we all wandered into the drawing–room. Old Lady Bland sat on a sofa with Ferdy; Freddy, Muriel, and I made ourselves comfortable in arm–chairs; and Lea Makart sat by herself. She chose instinctively a high–backed Jacobean chair that had somewhat the air of a throne, and in a yellow dress, with her olive skin, she looked very handsome. She had magnificent eyes. She was very much made up and her mouth was scarlet.

George gave no sign of nervousness. He was already seated at the piano when I went in with his father and mother, and he watched us quietly settling ourselves down. He gave me the shadow of a smile. When he saw that we were all at our ease he began to play. He played Chopin. He played two waltzes that were familiar to me, a polonaise and an étude. He played with a great deal of brio. I wish I knew music well enough to give an exact description of his playing. It had strength, and a youthful exuberance, but I felt that he missed what to me is the peculiar charm of Chopin, the tenderness, the nervous melancholy, the wistful gaiety and the slightly faded romance that reminds me always of an Early Victorian keepsake. And again I had the vague sensation, so slight that it almost escaped me, that the two hands did not quite synchronize. I looked at Ferdy and saw him give his sister a look of faint surprise. Muriel’s eyes were fixed on the pianist, but presently she dropped them and for the rest of the time stared at the floor. His father looked at him too, and his eyes were steadfast, but unless I was much mistaken he went pale and his face betrayed something like dismay. Music was in the blood of all of them, all their lives they had heard the greatest pianists in the world, and they judged with instinctive precision. The only person whose face betrayed no emotion was Lea Makart. She listened very attentively. She was as still as an image in a niche.

At last he stopped and turning round on his seat faced her. He did not speak. ‘What is it you want me to tell you?’ she asked.

They looked into one another’s eyes.

‘I want you to tell me whether I have any chance of becoming in time a pianist in the first rank.’

‘Not in a thousand years.’

For a moment there was dead silence. Freddy’s head sank and he looked down at the carpet at his feet. His wife put out her hand and took his. But George continued to look steadily at Lea Makart.’Ferdy has told me the circumstances,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t think I’m influenced by them. Nothing of this is very important.’ She made a great sweeping gesture that took in the magnificent room with the beautiful things it contained and all of us. ‘If I thought you had in you the makings of an artist I shouldn’t hesitate to beseech you to give up everything for art’s sake. Art is the only thing that matters. In comparison with art, wealth and rank and power are not worth a straw.’ She gave us a look so sincere that it was void of insolence. ‘We are the only people who count. We give the world significance. You are only our raw material.’

I was not too pleased to be included with the rest under that heading, but that is neither here nor there.

‘Of course I can see that you’ve worked very hard. Don’t think it’s been wasted. It will always be a pleasure to you to be able to play the piano and it will enable you to appreciate great playing as no ordinary person can hope to do. Look at your hands. They’re not a pianist’s hands.’

Involuntarily I glanced at George’s hands. I had never noticed them before. I was astounded to see how podgy they were and how short and stumpy the fingers.

‘Your ear is not quite perfect. I don’t think you can ever hope to be more than a very competent amateur. In art the difference between the amateur and the professional is immeasurable.’

George did not reply. Except for his pallor no one would have known that he was listening to the blasting of all his hopes. The silence that fell was quite awful. Lea Makart’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

‘But don’t take my opinion alone,’ she said. ‘After all, I’m not infallible. Ask somebody else. You know how good and generous Paderewski is. I’ll write to him about you and you can go down and play to him. I’m sure he’ll hear you.’

George now gave a little smile. He had very good manners and whatever he was feeling did not want to make the situation too difficult for others.

‘I don’t think that’s necessary, I am content to accept your verdict. To tell you the truth it’s not so very different from my master’s in Munich.’

He got up from the piano and lit a cigarette. It eased the strain. The others moved a little in their chairs. Lea Makart smiled at George.

‘Shall I play to you?’ she said.

‘Yes, do.’

She got up and went to the piano. She took off the rings with which her fingers were laden. She played Bach. I do not know the names of the pieces, but I recognized the stiff ceremonial of the frenchified little German courts and the sober, thrifty comfort of the burghers, and the dancing on the village green, the green trees that looked like Christmas trees, and the sunlight on the wide German country, and a tender cosiness; and in my nostrils there was a warm scent of the soil and I was conscious of a sturdy strength that seemed to have its roots deep in mother earth, and of an elemental power that was timeless and had no home in space. She played beautifully, with a soft brilliance that made you think of the full moon shining at dusk in the summer sky. With another part of me I watched the others and I saw how intensely they were conscious of the experience. They were rapt. I wished with all my heart that I could get from music the wonderful exaltation that possessed them. She stopped, a smile hovered on her lips, and she put on her rings. George gave a little chuckle.

‘That clinches it, I fancy,’ he said.

The servants brought in tea and after tea Lea Makart and I bade the company farewell and got into the car. We drove up to London. She talked all the way, if not brilliantly at all events with immense gusto; she told me of her early years in Manchester and of the struggle of her beginnings. She was very interesting. She never even mentioned George; the episode was of no consequence, it was finished and she thought of it no more.

We little knew what was happening at Tilby. When we left George went out on the terrace and presently his father joined him. Freddy had won the day, but he was not happy. With his more than feminine sensitiveness he felt all that George was feeling, and George’s anguish simply broke his heart. He had never loved his son more than then. When he appeared George greeted him with a little smile. Freddy’s voice broke. In a sudden and overwhelming emotion he found it in him to surrender the fruits of his victory.

‘Look here, old boy,’ he said, ‘I can’t bear to think that you’ve had such a disappointment. Would you like to go back to Munich for another year and then see?’

George shook his head.

‘No, it wouldn’t be any good. I’ve had my chance. Let’s call it a day.’

‘Try not to take it too hard.’

‘You see, the only thing in the world I want is to be a pianist. And there’s nothing doing. It’s a bit thick if you come to think of it.’

George, trying so hard to be brave, smiled wanly.

‘Would you like to go round the world? You can get one of your Oxford pals to go with you and I’ll pay all the expenses. You’ve been working very hard for a long time.’

‘Thanks awfully, daddy, we’ll talk about it. I’m just going for a stroll now.’

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘I’d rather go alone.’

Then George did a strange thing. He put his arm round his father’s neck, and kissed him on the lips. He gave a funny little moved laugh and walked away. Freddy went back to the drawing–room. His mother, Ferdy, and Muriel were sitting there.

‘Freddy, why don’t you marry the boy?’ said the old lady. ‘He is twenty–three. It would take his mind off his troubles and when he is married and has a baby he will soon settle down like everybody else.’

‘Whom is he to marry, mamma?’ asked Sir Adolphus, smiling.

‘That’s not so difficult. Lady Frielinghausen came to see me the other day with her daughter Violet. She is a very nice maiden and she will have money of her own. Lady Frielinghausen gave me to understand that her Sir Jacob would come down very handsome if Violet made a good match.’

Muriel flushed.

‘I hate Lady Frielinghausen. George is much too young to marry. He can afford to marry anyone he likes.’

Old Lady Bland gave her daughter a strange look.

‘You are a very foolish girl, Miriam,’ she said, using the name Muriel had long discarded. ‘As long as I am here I shall not allow you to commit a foolishness.’

She knew as well as if Muriel had said it in so many words that she wanted George to marry a Gentile, but she knew also that so long as she was alive neither Freddy nor his wife would dare to suggest it.

But George did not go for a walk. Perhaps because the shooting season was about to open he took it into his head to go into the gun–room. He began to clean the gun that his mother had given him on his twentieth birthday. No one had used it since he went to Germany. Suddenly the servants were startled by a report. When they went into the gun–room they found George lying on the floor shot through the heart. Apparently the gun had been loaded and George while playing about with it had accidentally shot himself. One reads of such accidents in the paper often.

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

I suppose that very few people know how Mrs Albert Forrester came to write The Achilles Statue; and since it has been acclaimed as one of the great novels of our time I cannot but think that a brief account of the circumstances that gave it birth must be of interest to all serious students of literature; and indeed, if, as the critics say, this is a book that will live, the following narrative, serving a better purpose than to divert an idle hour, may be regarded by the historian of the future as a curious footnote to the literary annals of our day.

Everyone of course remembers the success that attended the publication of The Achilles Statue. Month after month printers were kept busy printing, binders were kept busy binding, edition after edition; and the publishers, both in England and America, were hard put to it to fulfil the pressing orders of the booksellers. It was promptly translated into every European tongue and it has been recently announced that it will soon be possible to read it in Japanese and in Urdu. But it had previously appeared serially in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and from the editors of these Mrs Albert Forrester’s agent had wrung a sum that can only be described as thumping. A dramatization of the work was made, which ran for a season in New York, and there is little doubt that when the play is produced in London it will have an equal success. The film rights have been sold at a great price. Though the amount that Mrs Albert Forrester is reputed (in literary circles) to have made is probably exaggerated, there can be no doubt that she will have earned enough money from this one book to save her for the rest of her life from any financial anxiety.

It is not often that a book meets with equal favour from the public and the critics, and that she, of all persons, had (if I may so put it) squared the circle must have proved the more gratifying to Mrs Albert Forrester, since, though she had received the commendation of the critics in no grudging terms (and indeed had come to look upon it as her due) the public had always remained strangely insensible to her merit. Each work she published, a slender volume beautifully printed and bound in white buckram, was hailed as a masterpiece, always to the length of a column, and in the weekly reviews which you see only in the dusty library of a very long–established club even to the extent of a page; and well–read persons read and praised it. But well–read persons apparently do not buy books, and she did not sell. It was indeed a scandal that so distinguished an author, with an imagination so delicate and a style so exquisite, should remain neglected of the vulgar. In America she was almost completely unknown; and though Mr Carl van Vechten had written an article berating the public for its obtuseness, the public remained callous. Her agent, a warm admirer of her genius, had blackmailed an American publisher into taking two of her books by refusing, unless he did so, to let him have others (trashy novels doubtless) that he badly wanted, and they had been duly published. The reception they received from the press was flattering and showed that in America the best minds were sensitive to her talent; but when it came to the third book the American publisher (in the coarse way publishers have) told the agent that any money he had to spare he preferred to spend on synthetic gin.

Since The Achilles Statue Mrs Albert Forrester’s previous books have been republished (and Mr Carl van Vechten has written another article pointing out sadly, but firmly, that he had drawn the attention of the reading world to the merits of this exceptional writer fully fifteen years ago), and they have been so widely advertised that they can scarcely have escaped the cultured reader’s attention. It is unnecessary, therefore, for me to give an account of them; and it would certainly be no more than cold potatoes after those two subtle articles by Mr Carl van Vechten. Mrs Albert Forrester began to write early. Her first work (a volume of elegies) appeared when she was a maiden of eighteen; and from then on she published, every two or three years, for she had too exalted a conception of her art to hurry her production, a volume either of verse or prose. When The Achilles Statue was written she had reached the respectable age of fifty–seven, so that it will be readily surmised that the number of her works was considerable. She had given the world half a dozen volumes of verse, published under Latin titles, such as Felicitas, Pax Maris, and Aes Triplex, all of the graver kind, for her muse, disinclined to skip on a light, fantastic toe, trod a somewhat solemn measure. She remained faithful to the Elegy, and the Sonnet claimed much of her attention; but her chief distinction was to revive the Ode, a form of poetry that the poets of the present day somewhat neglect; and it may be asserted with confidence that her Ode to President Fallières will find a place in every anthology of English verse. It is admirable not only for the noble sonority of its rhythms, but also for its felicitous description of the pleasant land of France. Mrs Albert Forrester wrote of the valley of the Loire with its memories of du Bellay, of Chartres and the jewelled windows of its cathedral, of the sun–swept cities of Provence, with a sympathy all the more remarkable since she had never penetrated further into France than Boulogne, which she visited shortly after her marriage on an excursion steamer from Margate. But the physical mortification of being extremely seasick and the intellectual humiliation of discovering that the inhabitants of that popular seaside resort could not understand her fluent and idiomatic French made her determine not to expose herself a second time to experiences that were at once undignified and unpleasant; and she never again embarked on the treacherous element which she, however, sang (Pax Maris) in numbers both grave and sweet.

There are some fine passages too in the Ode to Woodrow Wilson, and I regret that, owing to a change in her sentiments towards that no doubt excellent man, the author decided not to reprint it. But I think it must be admitted that Mrs Albert Forrester’s most distinguished work was in prose. She wrote several volumes of brief, but perfectly constructed, essays on such subjects as Autumn in Sussex, Queen Victoria, Death, Spring in Norfolk, Georgian Architecture, Monsieur de Diaghileff, and Dante; she also wrote works, both erudite and whimsical, on the Jesuit Architecture of the Seventeenth Century and on the Literary Aspect of the Hundred Years War. It was her prose that gained her that body of devoted admirers, fit though few, as with her rare gift of phrase she herself put it that proclaimed her the greatest master of the English language that this century has seen. She admitted herself that it was her style, sonorous yet racy, polished yet eloquent, that was her strong point; and it was only in her prose that she had occasion to exhibit the delicious, but restrained, humour that her readers found so irresistible. It was not a humour of ideas, nor even a humour of words; it was much more subtle than that, it was a humour of punctuation: in a flash of inspiration she had discovered the comic possibilities of the semi–colon, and of this she had made abundant and exquisite use. She was able to place it in such a way that if you were a person of culture with a keen sense of humour, you did not exactly laugh through a horse–collar, but you giggled delightedly, and the greater your culture the more delightedly you giggled. Her friends said that it made every other form of humour coarse and exaggerated. Several writers had tried to imitate her; but in vain: whatever else you might say about Mrs Albert Forrester you were bound to admit that she was able to get every ounce of humour out of the semi–colon and no one else could get within a mile of her.

Mrs Albert Forrester lived in a flat not far from the Marble Arch, which combined the advantage of a good address and a moderate rent. It had a handsome drawing–room on the street and a large bedroom for Mrs Albert Forrester, a darkish dining–room at the back, and a small poky bedroom, next door to the kitchen, for Mr Albert Forrester, who paid the rent. It was in the handsome drawing–room that Mrs Albert Forrester every Tuesday afternoon received her friends. It was a severe and chaste apartment. On the walls was a paper designed by William Morris himself, and on this, in plain black frames, mezzotints collected before mezzotints grew expensive; the furniture was of the Chippendale period, but for the roll–top desk, vaguely Louis XVI in character, at which Mrs Albert Forrester wrote her works. This was pointed out to visitors the first time they came to see her, and there were few who looked at it without emotion. The carpet was thick and the lights discreet. Mrs Albert Forrester sat in a straight–backed grandfather’s chair covered with red damask. There was nothing ostentatious about it, but since it was the only comfortable chair in the room it set her apart as it were and above her guests. Tea was dispensed by a female of uncertain age, silent and colourless, who was never introduced to anyone but who was known to look upon it as a privilege to be allowed to save Mrs Albert Forrester from the irksome duty of pouring out tea. She was thus able to devote herself entirely to conversation, and it must be admitted that her conversation was excellent. It was not sprightly; and since it is difficult to indicate punctuation in speech it may have seemed to some slightly lacking in humour, but it was of wide range, solid, instructive, and interesting. Mrs Albert Forrester was well acquainted with social science, jurisprudence, and theology. She had read much and her memory was retentive. She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit, and having for thirty years known more or less intimately a great many distinguished people she had a great many interesting anecdotes to tell, which she placed with tact and which she did not repeat more than was pardonable. Mrs Albert Forrester had the gift of attracting the most varied persons and you were liable at one and the same time to meet in her drawing–room an ex–Prime Minister, a newspaper proprietor, and the ambassador of a First Class Power. I always imagined that these great people came because they thought that here they rubbed shoulders with Bohemia, but with a Bohemia sufficiently neat and clean for them to be in no danger that the dirt would come off on them. Mrs Albert Forrester was deeply interested in politics and I myself heard a Cabinet Minister tell her frankly that she had a masculine intelligence. She had been opposed to Female Suffrage, but when it was at last granted to women she began to dally with the idea of going into Parliament. Her difficulty was that she did not know which party to choose.

‘After all,’ she said, with a playful shrug of her somewhat massive shoulders, ‘I cannot form a party of one.’

Like many serious patriots, in her inability to know for certain which way the cat would jump she held her political opinions in suspense; but of late she had been definitely turning towards Labour as the best hope of the country, and if a safe seat were offered her it was felt fairly certain that she would not hesitate to come out into the open as a champion of the oppressed proletariat.

Her drawing–room was always open to foreigners, to Czecho–Slovaks, Italians, and Frenchmen, if they were distinguished, and to Americans even if they were obscure. But she was not a snob and you seldom met there a duke unless he was of a peculiarly serious turn and a peeress only if in addition to her rank she had the passport of some small social solecism such as having been divorced, written a novel, or forged a cheque, which might give her claim to Mrs Albert Forrester’s catholic sympathies. She did not much care for painters, who were shy and silent; and musicians did not interest her: even if they consented to play, and if they were celebrated they were too often reluctant, their music was a hindrance to conversation: if people wanted music they could go to a concert; for her part she preferred the more subtle music of the soul. But her hospitality to writers, especially if they were promising and little known, was warm and constant. She had an eye for budding talent and there were few of the famous writers who from time to time drank a dish of tea with her whose first efforts she had not encouraged and whose early steps she had not guided. Her own position was too well assured for her to be capable of envy, and she had heard the word genius attached to her name too often to feel a trace of jealousy because the talents of others brought them a material success that was denied to her.

Mrs Albert Forrester, confident in the judgement of posterity, could afford to be disinterested. With these elements then it is no wonder that she had succeeded in creating something as near the French salon of the eighteenth century as our barbarous nation has ever reached. To be invited to ‘eat a bun and drink a cup of tea on Tuesday’ was a privilege that few failed to recognize; and when you sat on your Chippendale chair in the discreetly lit but austere room, you could not but feel that you were living literary history. The American Ambassador once said to Mrs Albert Forrester:

‘A cup of tea with you, Mrs Forrester, is one of the richest intellectual treats which it has ever been my lot to enjoy.’

It was indeed on occasion a trifle overwhelming. Mrs Albert Forrester’s taste was so perfect, she so inevitably admired the right thing and made the just observation about it, that sometimes you almost gasped for air. For my part I found it prudent to fortify myself with a cocktail or two before I exposed myself to the rarefied atmosphere of her society. Indeed, I very nearly found myself for ever excluded from it, for one afternoon, presenting myself at the door, instead of asking the maid who opened it: ’Is Mrs Forrester at home?’ I asked: ’Is there Divine Service today?’

Of course it was said in pure inadvertence, but it was unfortunate that the maid sniggered, and one of Mrs Albert Forrester’s most devoted admirers, Ellen Hannaway, happened to be at the moment in the hall taking off her goloshes. She told my hostess what I had said before I got into the drawing–room, and as I entered Mrs Albert Forrester fixed me with an eagle eye.

‘Why did you ask if there was Divine Service today?’ she inquired.

I explained that I was absent–minded, but Mrs Albert Forrester held me with a gaze that I can only describe as compelling.

‘Do you mean to suggest that my parties are...’ she searched for a word. ‘Sacramental?’

I did not know what she meant, but did not like to show my ignorance before so many clever people, and I decided that the only thing was to seize my trowel and the butter.

‘Your parties are like you, dear lady, perfectly beautiful and perfectly divine.’

A little tremor passed through Mrs Albert Forrester’s substantial frame. She was like a man who enters suddenly a room filled with hyacinths; the perfume is so intoxicating that he almost staggers. But she relented.

‘If you were trying to be facetious,’ she said, ‘I should prefer you to exercise your facetiousness on my guests rather than on my maids.... Miss Warren will give you some tea.’

Mrs Albert Forrester dismissed me with a wave of the hand, but she did not dismiss the subject, since for the next two or three years whenever she introduced me to someone she never failed to add:

‘You must make the most of him, he only comes here as a penance. When he comes to the door he always asks: Is there Divine Service today? So amusing, isn’t he?’

But Mrs Albert Forrester did not confine herself to weekly tea–parties: every Saturday she gave a luncheon of eight persons; this according to her opinion being the perfect number for general conversation and her dining–room conveniently holding no more. If Mrs Albert Forrester flattered herself upon anything it was not that her knowledge of English prosody was unique, but that her luncheons were celebrated. She chose her guests with care, and an invitation to one of them was more than a compliment, it was a consecration. Over the luncheon–table it was possible to keep the conversation on a higher level than in the mixed company of a tea–party and few can have left her dining–room without taking away with them an enhanced belief in Mrs Albert Forrester’s ability and a brighter faith in human nature. She only asked men, since, stout enthusiast for her sex as she was and glad to see women on other occasions, she could not but realize that they were inclined at table to talk exclusively to their next–door neighbours and thus hinder the general exchange of ideas that made her own parties an entertainment not only of the body but of the soul. For it must be said that Mrs Albert Forrester gave you uncommonly good food, excellent wine, and a first–rate cigar. Now to anyone who has partaken of literary hospitality this must appear very remarkable, since literary persons for the most part think highly and live plainly; their minds are occupied with the things of the spirit and they do not notice that the roast mutton is underdone and the potatoes cold: the beer is all right, but the wine has a sobering effect, and it is unwise to touch the coffee. Mrs Albert Forrester was pleased enough to receive compliments on the fare she provided.

‘If people do me the honour to break bread with me,’ she said, ‘it is only fair that I should give them as good food as they can get at home.’

But if the flattery was excessive she deprecated it.

‘You really embarrass me when you give me a meed of praise which is not my due. You must praise Mrs Bulfinch.’

‘Who is Mrs Bulfinch?’

‘My cook.’

‘She’s a treasure then, but you’re not going to ask me to believe that she’s responsible for the wine.’

’Is it good? I’m terribly ignorant of such things; I put myself entirely in the hands of my wine merchant.’

But if mention was made of the cigars Mrs Albert Forrester beamed.

‘Ah, for them you must compliment Albert. It is Albert who chooses the cigars and I am given to understand that no one knows more about a cigar than Albert.’

She looked at her husband, who sat at the end of the table, with the proud bright eyes of a pedigree hen (a Buff Orpington for choice) looking at her only chick. Then there was a quick flutter of conversation as the guests, anxious to be civil to their host and relieved at length to find an occasion, expressed their appreciation of his peculiar merit.

‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you like them.’

Then he would give a little discourse on cigars, explaining the excellencies he sought and regretting the deterioration in quality which had followed on the commercialization of the industry. Mrs Albert Forrester listened to him with a complacent smile, and it was plain that she enjoyed this little triumph of his. Of course you cannot go on talking of cigars indefinitely and as soon as she perceived that her guests were growing restive she broached a topic of more general, and it may be of more significant, interest. Albert subsided into silence. But he had had his moment.

It was Albert who made Mrs Forrester’s luncheons to some less attractive than her tea–parties, for Albert was a bore; but though without doubt perfectly conscious of the fact, she made a point that he should come to them and in fact had fixed upon Saturdays (for the rest of the week he was busy) in order that he should be able to. Mrs Albert Forrester felt that her husband’s presence on these festive occasions was an unavoidable debt that she paid to her own self–respect. She would never by a negligence admit to the world that she had married a man who was not spiritually her equal, and it may be that in the silent watches of the nights she asked herself where indeed such could have been found. Mrs Albert Forrester’s friends were troubled by no such reticence and they said it was dreadful that such a woman should be burdened with such a man. They asked each other how she had ever come to marry him and (being mostly celibate) answered despairingly that no one ever knew why anybody married anybody else.

It was not that Albert was a verbose and aggressive bore; he did not button– hole you with interminable stories or pester you with pointless jokes; he did not crucify you on a platitude or hamstring you with a commonplace; he was just dull. A cipher. Clifford Boyleston, for whom the French Romantics had no secrets and who was himself a writer of merit, had said that when you looked into a room into which Albert had just gone there was nobody there. This was thought very clever by Mrs Albert Forrester’s friends, and Rose Waterford, the well–known novelist and the most fearless of women, had ventured to repeat it to Mrs Albert Forrester. Though she pretended to be annoyed, she had not been able to prevent the smile that rose to her lips. Her behaviour towards Albert could not but increase the respect in which her friends held her. She insisted that whatever in their secret hearts they thought of him, they should treat him with the decorum that was due to her husband. Her own demeanour was admirable. If he chanced to make an observation she listened to him with a pleasant expression and when he fetched her a book that she wanted or gave her his pencil to make a note of an idea that had occurred to her, she always thanked him. Nor would she allow her friends pointedly to neglect him, and though, being a woman of tact, she saw that it would be asking too much of the world if she took him about with her always, and she went out much alone, yet her friends knew that she expected them to ask him to dinner at least once a year. He always accompanied her to public banquets when she was going to make a speech, and if she delivered a lecture she took care that he should have a seat on the platform.

Albert was, I believe, of average height, but perhaps because you never thought of him except in connexion with his wife (of imposing dimensions) you only thought of him as a little man. He was spare and frail and looked older than his age. This was the same as his wife’s. His hair, which he kept very short, was white and meagre, and he wore a stubby white moustache; his was a face, thin and lined, without a noticeable feature; and his blue eyes, which once might have been attractive, were now pale and tired. He was always very neatly dressed in pepper–and–salt trousers, which he chose always of the same pattern, a black coat, and a grey tie with a small pearl pin in it. He was perfectly unobtrusive, and when he stood in Mrs Albert Forrester’s drawing–room to receive the guests whom she had asked to luncheon you noticed him as little as you noticed the quiet and gentlemanly furniture. He was well mannered and it was with a pleasant, courteous smile that he shook hands with them.

‘How do you do? I’m very glad to see you,’ he said if they were friends of some standing. ‘Keeping well, I hope?’

But if they were strangers of distinction coming for the first time to the house, he went to the door as they entered the drawing–room, and said:

‘I am Mrs Albert Forrester’s husband. I will introduce you to my wife.’

Then he led the visitor to where Mrs Albert Forrester stood with her back to the light, and she with a glad and eager gesture advanced to make the stranger welcome.

It was agreeable to see the demure pride he took in his wife’s literary reputation and the self–effacement with which he furthered her interests. He was always there when he was wanted and never when he wasn’t. His tact, if not deliberate, was instinctive. Mrs Albert Forrester was the first to acknowledge his merits.

‘I really don’t know what I should do without him,’ she said. ‘He’s invaluable to me. I read him everything I write and his criticisms are often very useful.’ ‘Molière and his cook,’ said Miss Waterford.

’Is that funny, dear Rose?’ asked Mrs Forrester, somewhat acidly.

When Mrs Albert Forrester did not approve of a remark, she had a way that put many persons to confusion of asking you whether it was a joke which she was too dense to see. But it was impossible to embarrass Miss Waterford. She was a lady who in the course of a long life had had many affairs, but only one passion, and this was for printer’s ink. Mrs Albert Forrester tolerated rather than approved her.

‘Come, come, my dear,’ she replied, ‘you know very well that he wouldn’t exist without you. He wouldn’t know us. It must be wonderful to him to come in contact with all the best brains and the most distinguished people of our day.’

‘It may be that the bee would perish without the hive which shelters it, but the bee nevertheless has a significance of its own.’

And since Mrs Albert Forrester’s friends, though they knew all about art and literature, knew little about natural history, they had no reply to this observation. She went on:

‘He doesn’t interfere with me. He knows subconsciously when I don’t want to be disturbed and, indeed, when I am following out a train of thought I find his presence in the room a comfort rather than a hindrance to me.’

‘Like a Persian cat,’ said Miss Waterford.

‘But like a very well–trained, well–bred, and well–mannered Persian cat,’ answered Mrs Forrester severely, thus putting Miss Waterford in her place.

But Mrs Albert Forrester had not finished with her husband.

‘We who belong to the intelligentsia,’ she said, ‘are apt to live in a world too exclusively our own. We are interested in the abstract rather than in the concrete, and sometimes I think that we survey the bustling world of human affairs in too detached a manner and from too serene a height. Do you not think that we stand in danger of becoming a little inhuman? I shall always be grateful to Albert because he keeps me in contact with the man in the street.’

It was on account of this remark, to which none of her friends could deny the rare insight and subtlety that characterized so many of her utterances, that for some time Albert was known in her immediate circle as The Man in the Street. But this was only for a while, and it was forgotten. He then became known as The Philatelist. It was Clifford Boyleston, with his wicked wit, who invented the name. One day, his poor brain exhausted by the effort to sustain a conversation with Albert, he had asked in desperation:

‘Do you collect stamps?’

‘No,’ answered Albert mildly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

But Clifford Boyleston had no sooner asked the question than he saw its possibilities. He had written a book on Baudelaire’s aunt by marriage, which had attracted the attention of all who were interested in French literature, and was well known in his exhaustive studies of the French spirit to have absorbed a goodly share of the Gallic quickness and the Gallic brilliancy. He paid no attention to Albert’s disclaimer, but at the first opportunity informed Mrs Albert Forrester’s friends that he had at last discovered Albert’s secret. He collected stamps. He never met him afterwards without asking him:

‘Well, Mr Forrester, how is the stamp collection?’ Or: ‘Have you been buying any stamps since I saw you last?’

It mattered little that Albert continued to deny that he collected stamps, the invention was too apt not to be made the most of; Mrs Albert Forrester’s friends insisted that he did, and they seldom spoke to him without asking him how he was getting on. Even Mrs Albert Forrester, when she was in a specially gay humour, would sometimes speak of her husband as The Philatelist. The name really did seem to fit Albert like a glove. Sometimes they spoke of him thus to his face and they could not but appreciate the good nature with which he took it; he smiled unresentfully and presently did not even protest that they were mistaken.

Of course Mrs Albert Forrester had too keen a social sense to jeopardize the success of her luncheons by allowing her more distinguished guests to sit on either side of Albert. She took care that only her older and more intimate friends should do this, and when the appointed victims came in she would say to them:

‘I know you won’t mind sitting by Albert, will you?’

They could only say that they would be delighted, but if their faces too plainly expressed their dismay she would pat their hands playfully and add:

‘Next time you shall sit by me. Albert is so shy with strangers and you know so well how to deal with him.’

They did: they simply ignored him. So far as they were concerned the chair in which he sat might as well have been empty. There was no sign that it annoyed him to be taken no notice of by persons who after all were eating food he paid for, since the earnings of Mrs Forrester could certainly not have provided her guests with spring salmon and forced asparagus. He sat quiet and silent, and if he opened his mouth it was only to give a direction to one of the maids. If a guest were new to him he would let his eyes rest on him in a stare that would have been embarrassing if it had not been so childlike. He seemed to be asking himself what this strange creature was; but what answer his mild scrutiny gave him he never revealed. When the conversation grew animated he would look from one speaker to the other, but again you could not tell from his thin, lined face what he thought of the fantastic notions that were bandied across the table.

Clifford Boyleston said that all the wit and wisdom he heard passed over his head like water over a duck’s back. He had given up trying to understand and now only made a semblance of listening. But Harry Oakland, the versatile critic, said that Albert was taking it all in; he found it all too, too marvellous, and with his poor, muddled brain he was trying desperately to make head or tail of the wonderful things he heard. Of course in the City he must boast of the distinguished persons he knew, perhaps there he was a light of learning and letters, an authority on the ideal; it would be perfectly divine to hear what he made of it all. Harry Oakland was one of Mrs Albert Forrester’s staunchest admirers, and had written a brilliant and subtle essay on her style. With his refined and even beautiful features he looked like a San Sebastian who had had an accident with a hair–restorer; for he was uncommonly hirsute. He was a very young man, not thirty, but he had been in turn a dramatic critic, and a critic of fiction, a musical critic, and a critic of painting. But he was getting a little tired of art and threatened to devote his talents in future to the criticism of sport.

Albert, I should explain, was in the city and it was a misfortune that Mrs Forrester’s friends thought she bore with meritorious fortitude that he was not even rich. There would have been something romantic in it if he had been a merchant prince who held the fate of nations in his hand or sent argosies, laden with rare spices, to those ports of the Levant the names of which have provided many a poet with so rich and rare a rhyme. But Albert was only a currant merchant and was supposed to make no more than just enabled Mrs Albert Forrester to conduct her life with distinction and even with liberality. Since his occupation kept him in his office till six o’clock he never managed to get to Mrs Albert Forrester’s Tuesdays till the most important visitors were gone. By the time he arrived, there were seldom more than three or four of her more intimate friends in the drawing–room, discussing with freedom and humour the guests who had departed, and when they heard Albert’s key in the front door they realized with one accord that it was late. In a moment he opened the door in his hesitating way and looked mildly in. Mrs Albert Forrester greeted him with a bright smile.

‘Come in, Albert, come in. I think you know everybody here.’

Albert entered and shook hands with his wife’s friends.

‘Have you just come from the City?’ she asked eagerly, though she knew there was nowhere else he could have come from. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you, my dear. I had tea in my office.’

Mrs Albert Forrester smiled still more brightly and the rest of the company thought she was perfectly wonderful with him.

‘Ah, but I know you like a second cup. I will pour it out for you myself.’

She went to the tea–table and, forgetting that the tea had been stewing for an hour and a half and was stone cold, poured him out a cup and added milk and sugar. Albert took it with a word of thanks, and meekly stirred it, but when Mrs Forrester resumed the conversation which his appearance had interrupted, without tasting it put it quietly down. His arrival was the signal for the party finally to break up, and one by one the remaining guests took their departure. On one occasion, however, the conversation was so absorbing and the point at issue so important that Mrs Albert Forrester would not hear of their going.

‘It must be settled once for all. And after all,’ she remarked in a manner that for her was almost arch, ‘this is a matter on which Albert may have something to say. Let us have the benefit of his opinion.’

It was when women were beginning to cut their hair and the subject of discussion was whether Mrs Albert Forrester should or should not shingle. Mrs Albert Forrester was a woman of authoritative presence. She was large–boned and her bones were well covered; had she not been so tall and strong it might have suggested itself to you that she was corpulent. But she carried her weight gallantly. Her features were a little larger than life–size and it was this that gave her face doubtless the look of virile intellectuality that it certainly possessed. Her skin was dark and you might have thought that she had in her veins some trace of Levantine blood: she admitted that she could not but think there was in her a gypsy strain and that would account, she felt, for the wild and lawless passion that sometimes characterized her poetry. Her eyes were large and black and bright, her nose like the great Duke of Wellington’s, but more fleshy, and her chin square and determined. She had a big mouth, with full red lips, which owed nothing to cosmetics, for of these Mrs Albert Forrester had never deigned to make use; and her hair, thick, solid, and grey, was piled on top of her head in such a manner as to increase her already commanding height. She was in appearance an imposing, not to say an alarming, female.

She was always very suitably dressed in rich materials of sombre hue and she looked every inch a woman of letters; but in her discreet way (being after all human and susceptible to vanity) she followed the fashions and the cut of her gowns was modish. I think for some time she had hankered to shingle her hair, but she thought it more becoming to do it at the solicitation of her friends than on her own initiative.

‘Oh, you must, you must,’ said Harry Oakland, in his eager, boyish way. ‘You’d look too, too wonderful.’

Clifford Boyleston, who was now writing a book on Madame de Maintenon, was doubtful. He thought it a dangerous experiment.

‘I think,’ he said, wiping his eye–glasses with a cambric handkerchief, ‘I think when one has made a type one should stick to it. What would Louis XIV have been without his wig?’

‘I’m hesitating,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘After all, we must move with the times. I am of my day and I do not wish to lag behind. America, as Wilhelm Meister said, is here and now.’ She turned brightly to Albert. ‘What does my lord and master say about it? What is your opinion, Albert? To shingle or not to shingle, that is the question.’

‘I’m afraid my opinion is not of great importance, my dear,’ he answered mildly.

‘To me it is of the greatest importance,’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, flatteringly.

She could not but see how beautifully her friends thought she treated The Philatelist.

‘I insist,’ she proceeded, ‘I insist. No one knows me a you do, Albert. Will it suit me?’

‘It might,’ he answered. ‘My only fear is that with your–statuesque appearance short hair would perhaps suggest–well, shall we say, the Isle of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.’

There was a moment’s embarrassed pause. Rose Waterford smothered a giggle, but the others preserved a stony silence. Mrs Forrester’s smile froze on her lips. Albert had dropped a brick.

‘I always thought Byron a very mediocre poet,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester at last.

The company broke up. Mrs Albert Forrester did not shingle, nor indeed was the matter ever again referred to.

It was towards the end of another of Mrs Albert Forrester’s Tuesdays that the event occurred that had so great an influence on her literary career.It had been one of her most successful parties. The leader of the Labour Party had been there and Mrs Albert Forrester had gone as far as she could without definitely committing herself to intimate to him that she was prepared to throw in her lot with Labour. The time was ripe and if she was ever to adopt a political career she must come to a decision. A member of the French Academy had been brought by Clifford Boyleston and, though she knew he was wholly unacquainted with English, it had gratified her to receive his affable compliment on her ornate and yet pellucid style. The American Ambassador had been there and a young Russian prince whose authentic Romanoff blood alone prevented him from looking a gigolo. A duchess who had recently divorced her duke and married a jockey had been very gracious; and her strawberry leaves, albeit sere and yellow, undoubtedly added tone to the assembly. There had been quite a galaxy of literary lights. But now all, all were gone but Clifford Boyleston, Harry Oakland, Rose Waterford, Oscar Charles, and Simmons. Oscar Charles was a little, gnome–like creature, young but with the wizened face of a cunning monkey, with gold spectacles, who earned his living in a government office but spent his leisure in the pursuit of literature. He wrote little articles for the sixpenny weeklies and had a spirited contempt for the world in general. Mrs Albert Forrester liked him, thinking he had talent, but though he always expressed the keenest admiration for her style (it was indeed he who had named her the mistress of the semi–colon), his acerbity was so general that she also somewhat feared him. Simmons was her agent; a round–faced man who wore glasses so strong that his eyes behind them looked strange and misshapen. They reminded you of the eyes of some uncouth crustacean that you had seen in an aquarium. He came regularly to Mrs Albert Forrester’s parties, partly because he had the greatest admiration for her genius and partly because it was convenient for him to meet prospective clients in her drawing–room.

Mrs Albert Forrester, for whom he had long laboured with but a trifling recompense, was not sorry to put him in the way of earning an honest penny, and she took care to introduce him, with warm expressions of gratitude, to anyone who might be supposed to have literary wares to sell. It was not without pride that she remembered that the notorious and vastly lucrative memoirs of Lady St Swithin had been first mooted in her drawing–room.

They sat in a circle of which Mrs Albert Forrester was the centre and discussed brightly and, it must be confessed, somewhat maliciously the various persons who had been that day present. Miss Warren, the pallid female who had stood for two hours at the tea–table, was walking silently round the room collecting cups that had been left here and there. She had some vague employment, but was always able to get off in order to pour out tea for Mrs Albert Forrester, and in the evening she typed Mrs Albert Forrester’s manuscripts. Mrs Albert Forrester did not pay her for this, thinking quite rightly that as it was she did a great deal for the poor thing; but she gave her the seats for the cinema that were sent her for nothing and often presented her with articles of clothing for which she had no further use.

Mrs Albert Forrester in her rather deep, full voice was talking in a steady flow and the rest were listening to her with attention. She was in good form and the words that poured from her lips could have gone straight down on paper without alteration. Suddenly there was a noise in the passage as though something heavy had fallen and then the sound of an altercation.

Mrs Albert Forrester stopped and a slight frown darkened her really noble brow.

‘I should have thought they knew by now that I will not have this devastating racket in the flat. Would you mind ringing the bell, Miss Warren, and asking what is the reason of this tumult?’

Miss Warren rang the bell and in a moment the maid appeared. Miss Warren at the door, in order not to interrupt Mrs Albert Forrester, spoke to her in undertones. But Mrs Albert Forrester somewhat irritably interrupted herself.

‘Well, Carter, what is it? Is the house falling down or has the Red Revolution at last broken out?’

‘If you please, ma’am, it’s the new cook’s box,’ answered the maid. ‘The porter dropped it as he was bringing it in and the cook got all upset about it.’

‘What do you mean by “the new cook”?’

‘Mrs Bulfinch went away this afternoon, ma’am,’ said the maid.

Mrs Albert Forrester stared at her.

‘This is the first I’ve heard of it. Had Mrs Bulfinch given notice? The moment Mr Forrester comes in tell him that I wish to speak to him.’

‘Very good, ma’am.’

The maid went out and Miss Warren slowly returned to the tea–table. Mechanically, though nobody wanted them, she poured out several cups of tea.

‘What a catastrophe!’ cried Miss Waterford.

‘You must get her back,’ said Clifford Boyleston. ‘She’s a treasure, that woman, a remarkable cook, and she gets better and better every day.’

But at that moment the maid came in again with a letter on a small plated salver and handed it to her mistress.

‘What is this?’ said Mrs Albert Forrester.

‘Mr Forrester said I was to give you this letter when you asked for him, ma’am,’ said the maid.

‘Where is Mr Forrester then?’

‘Mr Forrester’s gone, ma’am,’ answered the maid as though the question surprised her.

‘Gone? That’ll do. You can go.’

The maid left the room and Mrs Albert Forrester, with a look of perplexity on her large face, opened the letter. Rose Waterford has told me that her first thought was that Albert, fearful of his wife’s displeasure at the departure of Mrs Bulfinch, had thrown himself in the Thames. Mrs Albert Forrester read the letter and a look of consternation crossed her face.

‘Oh, monstrous,’ she cried. ‘Monstrous! Monstrous!’

‘What is it, Mrs Forrester?’

Mrs Albert Forrester pawed the carpet with her foot like a restive, high–spirited horse pawing the ground, and crossing her arms with a gesture that is indescribable (but that you sometimes see in a fishwife who is going to make the very devil of a scene) bent her looks upon her curious and excessively startled friends.

‘Albert has eloped with the cook.’

There was a gasp of dismay. Then something terrible happened. Miss Warren, who was standing behind the tea–table, suddenly choked. Miss Warren, who never opened her mouth and whom no one ever spoke to, Miss Warren, whom not one of them, though he had seen her every week for three years, would have recognized in the street, Miss Warren suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter. With one accord, aghast, they turned and stared at her. They felt as Balaam must have felt when his ass broke into speech. She positively shrieked with laughter. There was a nameless horror about the sight, as though something had on a sudden gone wrong with a natural phenomenon, and you were just as startled as though the chairs and tables without warning began to skip about the floor in an antic dance. Miss Warren tried to contain herself, but the more she tried the more pitilessly the laughter shook her, and seizing a handkerchief she stuffed it in her mouth and hurried from the room. The door slammed behind her.

‘Hysteria,’ said Clifford Boyleston.

‘Pure hysteria, of course,’ said Harry Oakland.

But Mrs Albert Forrester said nothing.

The letter had dropped at her feet and Simmons, the agent, picked it up and handed it to her. She would not take it ‘Read it,’ she said. ‘Read it aloud.’

Mr Simmons pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and holding the letter very close to his eyes read as follows:

My Dear — Mrs Bulfinch is in need of a change and has decided to leave, and as I do not feel inclined to stay on here without her I am going too. I have had all the literature I can stand and I am fed up with art.

Mrs Bulfinch does not care about marriage, but if you care to divorce me she is willing to marry me. I hope you will find the new cook satisfactory. She has excellent references. It may save you trouble if I inform you that Mrs Bulfinch and I are living at 411Kennington Road, S.E.

AlbertNo one spoke. Mr Simmons slipped his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose. The fact was that none of them, brilliant as they were and accustomed to find topics of conversation to suit every occasion, could think of an appropriate remark. Mrs Albert Forrester was not the kind of woman to whom you could offer condolences and each was too much afraid of the other’s ridicule to venture upon the obvious. At last Clifford Boyleston came bravely to the rescue.

‘One doesn’t know what to say,’ he observed.

There was another silence and then Rose Waterford spoke.

‘What does Mrs Bulfinch look like?’ she asked.

‘How should I know?’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, somewhat peevishly.

‘I never looked at her. Albert always engaged the servants, she just came in for a moment so that I could see if her aura was satisfactory.’

‘But you must have seen her every morning when you did the housekeeping.’

‘Albert did the housekeeping. It was his own wish, so that I might be free to devote myself to my work. In this life one has to limit oneself.’

‘Did Albert order your luncheons?’ asked Clifford Boyleston.

‘Naturally. It was his province.’

Clifford Boyleston slightly raised his eyebrows. What a fool he had been never to guess that it was Albert who was responsible for Mrs Forrester’s beautiful food! And of course it was owing to him that the excellent Chablis was always just sufficiently chilled to run coolly over the tongue, but never so cold as to lose its bouquet and its savour.

‘He certainly knew good food and good wine.’

‘I always told you he had his points,’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, as though he were reproaching her. ‘You all laughed at him. You would not believe me when I told you that I owed a great deal to him.’

There was no answer to this and once more silence, heavy and ominous, fell on the party. Suddenly Mr Simmons flung a bombshell.

‘You must get him back.’

So great was her surprise that if Mrs Albert Forrester had not been standing against the chimney–piece she would undoubtedly have staggered two paces to the rear.

‘What on earth do you mean?’ she cried. ‘I will never see him again as long as I live. Take him back? Never. Not even if he came and begged me on his bended knees.’

‘I didn’t say take him back; I said, get him back.’

But Mrs Albert Forrester paid no attention to the misplaced interruption.

‘I have done everything for him. What would he be without me? I ask you. I have given him a position which never in his remotest dreams could he have aspired to.’

None could deny that there was something magnificent in the indignation of Mrs Albert Forrester, but it appeared to have little effect on Mr Simmons. ‘What are you going to live on?’

Mrs Albert Forrester flung him a glance totally devoid of amiability. ‘God will provide,’ she answered in freezing tones.

‘I think it very unlikely,’ he returned.

Mrs Albert Forrester shrugged her shoulders. She wore an outraged expression. But Mr Simmons made himself as comfortable as he could on his chair and lit a cigarette.

‘You know you have no warmer admirer of your art than me,’ he said.

‘Than I,’ corrected Clifford Boyleston.

‘Or than you,’ went on Mr Simmonds blandly. ‘We all agree that there is no one writing now whom you need fear comparison with. Both in prose and verse you are absolutely first class. And your style–well, everyone knows your style.’

‘The opulence of Sir Thomas Browne with the limpidity of Cardinal Newman,’ said Clifford Boyleston. ‘The raciness of John Dryden with the precision of Jonathan Swift.’

The only sign that Mrs Albert Forrester heard was the smile that hesitated for a brief moment at the corners of her tragic mouth.

‘And you have humour.’

’Is there anyone in the world,’ cried Miss Waterford, ‘who can put such a wealth of wit and satire and comic observation into a semi–colon?’

‘But the fact remains that you don’t sell,’ pursued Mr Simmons imperturbably. ‘I’ve handled your work for twenty years and I tell you frankly that I shouldn’t have grown fat on my commission, but I’ve handled it because now and again I like to do what I can for good work. I’ve always believed in you and I’ve hoped that sooner or later we might get the public to swallow you. But if you think you can make your living by writing the sort of stuff you do I’m bound to tell you that you haven’t a chance.’

‘I have come into the world too late,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I should have lived in the eighteenth century when the wealthy patron rewarded a dedication with a hundred guineas.’

‘What do you suppose the currant business brings in?’

Mrs Albert Forrester gave a little sigh.

‘A pittance. Albert always told me he made about twelve hundred a year.’

‘He must be a very good manager. But you couldn’t expect him on that income to allow you very much. Take my word for it, there’s only one thing for you to do and that’s to get him back.’

‘I would rather live in a garret. Do you think I’m going to submit to the affront he has put upon me? Would you have me battle for his affections with my cook? Do not forget that there is one thing which is more valuable to a woman like me than her ease and that is her dignity.’

‘I was just coming to that,’ said Mr Simmons coldly.

He glanced at the others and those strange, lopsided eyes of his looked more than ever monstrous and fish–like.

‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ he went on, ‘that you have a very distinguished and almost unique position in the world of letters. You stand for something quite apart. You never prostituted your genius for filthy lucre and you have held high the banner of pure art. You’re thinking of going into Parliament. I don’t think much of politics myself, but there’s no denying that it would be a good advertisement and if you get in I daresay we could get you a lecture tour in America on the strength of it. You have ideals and this I can say, that even the people who’ve never read a word you’ve written respect you. But in your position there’s one thing you can’t afford to be and that’s a joke.’ Mrs Albert Forrester gave a distinct start.

‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

‘I know nothing about Mrs Bulfinch and for all I know she’s a very respectable woman, but the fact remains that a man doesn’t run away with his cook without making his wife ridiculous. If it had been a dancer or a lady of title I daresay it wouldn’t have done you any harm, but a cook would finish you. In a week you’d have all London laughing at you, and if there’s one thing that kills an author or a politician it is ridicule. You must get your husband back and you must get him back pretty damned quick.’

A dark flush settled on Mrs Albert Forrester’s face, but she did not immediately reply. In her ears there rang on a sudden the outrageous and unaccountable laughter that had sent Miss Warren flying from the room.

‘We’re all friends here and you can count on our discretion.’

Mrs Forrester looked at her friends and she thought that in Rose Waterford’s eyes there was already a malicious gleam. On the wizened face of Oscar Charles was a whimsical look. She wished that in a moment of abandon she had not betrayed her secret. Mr Simmons, however, knew the literary world and allowed his eyes to rest on the company.

‘After all you are the centre and head of their set. Your husband has not only run away from you but also from them. It’s not too good for them either. The fact is that Albert Forrester has made you all look a lot of damned fools.’

‘All,’ said Clifford Boyleston. ‘We’re all in the same boat. He’s quite right, Mrs Forrester. The Philatelist must come back.’

‘Et tu, Brute.’

Mr Simmons did not understand Latin and if he had would probably not have been moved by Mrs Albert Forrester’s exclamation. He cleared his throat.

‘My suggestion is that Mrs Albert Forrester should go and see him tomorrow, fortunately we have his address, and beg him to reconsider his decision. I don’t know what sort of things a woman says on these occasions, but Mrs Forrester has tact and imagination and she must say them. If Mr Forrester makes any conditions she must accept them. She must leave no stone unturned.’

‘If you play your cards well there is no reason why you shouldn’t bring him back here with you tomorrow evening,’ said Rose Waterford lightly.

‘Will you do it, Mrs Forrester?’

For two minutes, at least, turned away from them, she stared at the empty fireplace; then, drawing herself to her full height, she faced them.

‘For my art’s sake, not for mine. I will not allow the ribald laughter of the Philistine to besmirch all that I hold good and true and beautiful.’

‘Capital,’ said Mr Simmons, rising to his feet. ‘I’ll look in on my way home tomorrow and I hope to find you and Mr Forrester billing and cooing side by side like a pair of turtle–doves.’

He took his leave, and the others, anxious not to be left alone with Mrs Albert Forrester and her agitation, in a body followed his example.

It was latish in the afternoon next day when Mrs Albert Forrester, imposing in black silk and a velvet toque, set out from her flat in order to get a bus from the Marble Arch that would take her to Victoria Station. Mr Simmons had explained to her by telephone how to reach the Kennington Road with expedition and economy. She neither felt nor looked like Delilah. At Victoria she took the tram that runs down the Vauxhall Bridge Road. When she crossed the river she found herself in a part of London more noisy, sordid, and bustling than that to which she was accustomed, but she was too much occupied with her thoughts to notice the varied scene. She was relieved to find that the tram went along the Kennington Road and asked the conductor to put her down a few doors from the house she sought. When it did and rumbled on leaving her alone in the busy street, she felt strangely lost, like a traveller in an Eastern tale set down by a djinn in an unknown city. She walked slowly, looking to right and left, and notwithstanding the emotions of indignation and embarrassment that fought for the possession of her somewhat opulent bosom, she could not but reflect that here was the material for a very pretty piece of prose. The little houses held about them the feeling of a bygone age when here it was still almost country, and Mrs Albert Forrester registered in her retentive memory a note that she must look into the literary associations of the Kennington Road. Number four hundred and eleven was one of a row of shabby houses that stood some way back from the street; in front of it was a narrow strip of shabby grass, and a paved way led up to a latticed wooden porch that badly needed a coat of paint. This and the straggling, stunted creeper that grew over the front of the house gave it a falsely rural air which was strange and even sinister in that road down which thundered a tumultuous traffic. There was something equivocal about the house that suggested that here lived women to whom a life of pleasure had brought an inadequate reward.

The door was opened by a scraggy girl of fifteen with long legs and a tousled head.

‘Does Mrs Bulfinch live here, do you know?’

‘You’ve rung the wrong bell. Second floor.’ The girl pointed to the stairs and at the same time screamed shrilly: ‘Mrs Bulfinch, a party to see you. Mrs Bulfinch.’

Mrs Albert Forrester walked up the dingy stairs. They were covered with torn carpet. She walked slowly, for she did not wish to get out of breath. A door opened as she reached the second floor and she recognized her cook.

‘Good afternoon, Bulfinch,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester, with dignity. ‘I wish to see your master.’

Mrs Bulfinch hesitated for the shadow of a second, then held the door wide open.

‘Come in, ma’am.’ She turned her head. ‘Albert, here’s Mrs Forrester to see you.’

Mrs Forrester stepped by quickly and there was Albert sitting by the fire in a leather–covered, but rather shabby, arm–chair, with his feet in slippers, and in shirtsleeves. He was reading the evening paper and smoking a cigar. He rose to his feet as Mrs Albert Forrester came in. Mrs Bulfinch followed her visitor into the room and closed the door.

‘How are you, my dear?’ said Albert cheerfully. ‘Keeping well, I hope.’

‘You’d better put on your coat, Albert,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘What will Mrs Forrester think of you, finding you like that? I never.’

She took the coat, which was hanging on a peg, and helped him into it; and like a woman familiar with the peculiarities of masculine dress pulled down his waistcoat so that it should not ride over his collar.

‘I received your letter, Albert,’ said Mrs Forrester.

‘I supposed you had, or you wouldn’t have known my address, would you?’

‘Won’t you sit down, ma’am?’ said Mrs Bulfinch, deftly dusting a chair, part of a suite covered in plum–covered velvet, and pushing it forwards. Mrs Albert Forrester with a slight bow seated herself.

‘I should have preferred to see you alone, Albert,’ she said.

His eyes twinkled.

‘Since anything you have to say concerns Mrs Bulfinch as much as it concerns me I think it much better that she should be present.’

‘As you wish.’

Mrs Bulfinch drew up a chair and sat down. Mrs Albert Forrester had never seen her but with a large apron over a print dress. She was wearing now an open–work blouse of white silk, a black skirt, and high–heeled, patent–leather shoes with silver buckles. She was a woman of about five–and–forty, with reddish hair and a reddish face, not pretty, but with a good–natured look, and buxom. She reminded Mrs Albert Forrester of a serving–wench, somewhat overblown, in a jolly picture by an old Dutch master.

‘Well, my dear, what have you to say to me?’ asked Albert.

Mrs Albert Forrester gave him her brightest and most affable smile. Her great black eyes shone with tolerant good–humour.

‘Of course you know that this is perfectly absurd, Albert. I think you must be out of your mind.’

‘Do you, my dear? Fancy that.’

‘I’m not angry with you, I’m only amused, but a joke’s a joke and should not be carried too far. I’ve come to take you home.’

‘Was my letter not quite clear?’

‘Perfectly. I ask no questions and I will make no reproaches. We will look upon this as a momentary aberration and say no more about it.’

‘Nothing will induce me ever to live with you again, my dear,’ said Albert in, however, a perfectly friendly fashion.

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Quite.’

‘Do you love this woman?’

Mrs Albert Forrester still smiled with an eager and somewhat metallic brightness. She was determined to take the matter lightly. With her intimate sense of values she realized that the scene was comic. Albert looked at Mrs Bulfinch and a smile broke out on his withered face.

‘We get on very well together, don’t we, old girl?’

‘Not so bad,’ said Mrs Bulfinch.

Mrs Albert Forrester raised her eyebrows; her husband had never in all their married life called her ‘old girl’: nor indeed would she have wished it.

‘If Bulfinch has any regard or respect for you she must know that the thing is impossible. After the life you’ve led and the society you’ve moved in she can hardly expect to make you permanently happy in miserable furnished lodgings.’

‘They’re not furnished lodgings, ma’am,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘It’s all me own furniture. You see, I’m very independent–like and I’ve always liked to have a home of me own. So I keep these rooms on whether I’m in a situation or whether I’m not, and so I always have some place to go back to.’

‘And a very nice cosy little place it is,’ said Albert.

Mrs Albert Forrester looked about her. There was a kitchen range in the fireplace on which a kettle was simmering and on the mantelshelf was a black marble clock flanked by black marble candelabra. There was a large table covered with a red cloth, a dresser, and a sewing–machine. On the walls were photographs and framed pictures from Christmas supplements. A door at the back, covered with a red plush portière, led into what, considering the size of the house, Mrs Albert Forrester (who in her leisure moments had made a somewhat extensive study of architecture) could not but conclude was the only bedroom. Mrs Bulfinch and Albert lived in a contiguity that allowed no doubt about their relations.

‘Have you not been happy with me, Albert?’ asked Mrs Forrester in a deeper tone.

‘We’ve been married for thirty–five years, my dear. It’s too long. It’s a great deal too long. You’re a good woman in your way, but you don’t suit me. You’re literary and I’m not. You’re artistic and I’m not.’

‘I’ve always taken care to make you share in all my interests. I’ve taken great pains that you shouldn’t be overshadowed by my success. You can’t say that I’ve ever left you out of things.’

‘You’re a wonderful writer, I don’t deny it for a moment, but the truth is I don’t like the books you write.’

‘That, if I may be permitted to say so, merely shows that you have very bad taste. All the best critics admit their power and their charm.’

‘And I don’t like your friends. Let me tell you a secret, my dear. Often at your parties I’ve had an almost irresistible impulse to take off all my clothes just to see what would happen.’

‘Nothing would have happened,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester with a slight frown. ‘I should merely have sent for the doctor.’

‘Besides you haven’t the figure for that, Albert,’ said Mrs Bulfinch.

Mr Simmons had hinted to Mrs Albert Forrester that if the need arose she must not hesitate to use the allurements of her sex in order to bring back her erring husband to the conjugal roof, but she did not in the least know how to do this. It would have been easier, she could not but reflect, had she been in evening dress.

‘Does the fidelity of five–and–thirty years count for nothing? I have never looked at another man, Albert. I’m used to you. I shall be lost without you.’

‘I’ve left all my menus with the new cook, ma’am. You’ve only got to tell her how many to luncheon and she’ll manage,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘She’s very reliable and she has as light a hand with pastry as anyone I ever knew.’

Mrs Albert Forrester began to be discouraged. Mrs Bulfinch’s remark, well meant no doubt, made it difficult to bring the conversation on to the plane on which emotion could be natural.

‘I’m afraid you’re only wasting your time, my dear,’ said Albert. ‘My decision is irrevocable. I’m not very young any more and I want someone to take care of me. I shall of course make you as good an allowance as I can. Corinne wants me to retire.’

‘Who is Corinne?’ asked Mrs Forrester with the utmost surprise.

‘It’s my name,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘My mother was half French.’

‘That explains a great deal,’ replied Mrs Forrester, pursing her lips, for though she admired the literature of our neighbours she knew that their morals left much to be desired.

‘What I say is, Albert’s worked long enough, and it’s about time he started enjoying himself. I’ve got a little bit of property at Clacton–on–Sea. It’s a very healthy neighbourhood and the air is wonderful. We could live there very comfortable. And what with the beach and the pier there’s always something to do. They’re a very nice lot of people down there. If you don’t interfere with nobody, nobody’ll interfere with you.’

‘I discussed the matter with my partners today and they’re willing to buy me out. It means a certain sacrifice. When everything is settled I shall have an income of nine hundred pounds a year. There are three of us, so it gives us just three hundred a year apiece.’

‘How am I to live on that?’ cried Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I have my position to keep up.’

‘You have a fluent, a fertile, and a distinguished pen, my dear.’

Mrs Albert Forrester impatiently shrugged her shoulders.

‘You know very well that my books don’t bring me in anything but reputation. The publishers always say that they lose by them and in fact they only publish them because it gives them prestige.’

It was then that Mrs Bulfinch had the idea that was to have consequences of such magnitude.

‘Why don’t you write a good thrilling detective story?’ she asked.

‘Me?’ exclaimed Mrs Albert Forrester, for the first time in her life regardless of grammar.

‘It’s not a bad idea,’ said Albert. ‘It’s not a bad idea at all.’

‘I should have the critics down on me like a thousand bricks.’

‘I’m not so sure of that. Give the highbrow the chance of being lowbrow without demeaning himself and he’ll be so grateful to you, he won’t know what to do.’

‘For this relief much thanks,’ murmured Mrs Albert Forrester reflectively.

‘My dear, the critics’ll eat it. And written in your beautiful English they won’t be afraid to call it a masterpiece.’

‘The idea is preposterous. It’s absolutely foreign to my genius. I could never hope to please the masses.’

‘Why not? The masses want to read good stuff, but they dislike being bored. They all know your name, but they don’t read you, because you bore them. The fact is, my dear, you’re dull.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that, Albert,’ replied Mrs Albert Forrester, with as little resentment as the equator might feel if someone called it chilly. ‘Everyone knows and acknowledges that I have an exquisite sense of humour and there is nobody who can extract so much good wholesome fun from a semicolon as I can.’

‘If you can give the masses a good thrilling story and let them think at the same time that they are improving their minds you’ll make a fortune.’

‘I’ve never read a detective story in my life,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I once heard of a Mr Barnes of New York and I was told that he had written a book called The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. But I never read it.’

‘Of course you have to have the knack,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘The first thing to remember is that you don’t want any lovemaking, it’s out of place in a detective story, what you want is murder, and sleuth–hounds, and you don’t want to be able to guess who done it till the last page.’

‘But you must play fair with your reader, my dear,’ said Albert. ‘It always annoys me when suspicion has been thrown on the secretary or the lady of the title and it turns out to be the second footman who’s never done more than say, “The carriage is at the door.” Puzzle your reader as much as you can, but don’t make a fool of him.’

‘I love a good detective story,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘Give me a lady in evening dress, just streaming with diamonds, lying on the library floor with a dagger in her heart, and I know I’m going to have a treat.’

‘There’s no accounting for tastes,’ said Albert. ‘Personally, I prefer a respectable family solicitor, with side–whiskers, gold watch–chain, and a benign appearance, lying dead in Hyde Park.’

‘With his throat cut?’ asked Mrs Bulfinch eagerly.

‘No, stabbed in the back. There’s something peculiarly attractive to the reader in the murder of a middle–aged gentleman of spotless reputation. It is pleasant to think that the most apparently blameless of us have a mystery in our lives.’

‘I see what you mean, Albert,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘He was the repository of a fatal secret.’

‘We can give you all the tips, my dear,’ said Albert, smiling mildly at Mrs Albert Forrester. ‘I’ve read hundreds of detective stories.’

‘You!’

‘That’s what first brought Corinne and me together. I used to pass them on to her when I’d finished them.’

‘Many’s the time I’ve heard him switch off the electric light as the dawn was creeping through the window and I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I said: “There, he’s finished it at last, now he can have a good sleep.”’

Mrs Albert Forrester rose to her feet. She drew herself up.

‘Now I see what a gulf separates us,’ she said, and her fine contralto shook a little. ‘You have been surrounded for thirty years with all that was best in English literature and you read hundreds of detective novels.’

‘Hundreds and hundreds,’ interrupted Albert with a smile of satisfaction.

‘I came here willing to make any reasonable concession so that you should come back to your home, but now I wish it no longer. You have shown me that we have nothing in common and never had. There is an abyss between us.’

‘Very well, my dear,’ said Albert gently, ‘I will submit to your decision. But you think over the detective story.’

‘I will arise and go now,’ she murmured, ‘and go to Innisfree.’

‘I’ll just show you downstairs,’ said Mrs Bulfinch. ‘One has to be careful of the carpet if one doesn’t exactly know where the holes are.’

With dignity, but not without circumspection, Mrs Albert Forrester walked downstairs and when Mrs Bulfinch opened the door and asked her if she would like a taxi she shook her head.

‘I shall take the tram.’

‘You need not be afraid that I won’t take good care of Mr Forrester, ma’am,’ said Mrs Bulfinch pleasantly. ‘He shall have every comfort. I nursed Mr Bulfinch for three years during his last illness and there’s very little I don’t know about invalids. Not that Mr Forrester isn’t very strong and active for his years. And of course he’ll have a hobby. I always think a man should have a hobby. He’s going to collect postage–stamps.’

Mrs Albert Forrester gave a little start of surprise. But just then a tram came in sight and, as a woman (even the greatest of them) will, she hurried at the risk of her life into the middle of the road and waved frantically. It stopped and she climbed in. She did not know how she was going to face Mr Simmons. He would be waiting for her when she got home. Clifford Boyleston would probably be there too. They would all be there and she would have to tell them that she had miserably failed. At that moment she had no warm feeling of friendship for her little group of devoted admirers. Wondering what the time was, she looked up at the man sitting opposite her to see whether he was the kind of person she could modestly ask, and suddenly started; for sitting there was a middle–aged gentleman of the most respectable appearance, with side–whiskers, a benign expression, and a gold watch–chain. It was the very man whom Albert had described lying dead in Hyde Park and she could not but jump to the conclusion that he was a family solicitor. The coincidence was extraordinary and really it looked as though the hand of fate were beckoning to her. He wore a silk hat, a black coat, and pepper–and–salt trousers, he was somewhat corpulent, of a powerful build, and by his side was a despatch–case. When the tram was half–way down the Vauxhall Bridge Road he asked the conductor to stop and she saw him go down a small, mean street. Why? Ah, why? When it reached Victoria, so deeply immersed in thought was she, until the conductor somewhat roughly told her where she was, she did not move. Edgar Allan Poe had written detective stories. She took a bus. She sat inside, buried in reflection, but when it arrived at Hyde Park Corner she suddenly made up her mind to get out. She couldn’t sit still any longer. She felt she must walk. She entered the gates, walking slowly, and looked about her with an air that was at once intent and abstracted. Yes, there was Edgar Allan Poe; no one could deny that. After all he had invented the genre, and everyone knew how great his influence had been on the Parnassians. Or was it the Symbolists? Never mind. Baudelaire and all that. As she passed the Achilles Statue she stopped for a minute and looked at it with raised eyebrows.

At length she reached her flat and opening the door saw several hats in the hall. They were all there. She went into the drawing–room.

‘Here she is at last,’ cried Miss Waterford.

Mrs Albert Forrester advanced, smiling with animation, and shook the proffered hands. Mr Simmons and Clifford Boyleston were there, Harry Oakland and Oscar Charles.

‘Oh, you poor things, have you had no tea?’ she cried brightly. ‘I haven’t an idea what the time is, but I know I’m fearfully late.’

‘Well?’ they said. ‘Well?’

‘My dears, I’ve got something quite wonderful to tell you. I’ve had an inspiration. Why should the devil have all the best tunes?’

‘What do you mean?’

She paused in order to give full effect to the surprise she was going to spring upon them. Then she flung it at them without preamble.

‘I’M GOING TO WRITE A DETECTIVE STORY.’

They stared at her with open mouths. She held up her hand to prevent them from interrupting her, but indeed no one had the smallest intention of doing so.

‘I am going to raise the detective story to the dignity of Art. It came to me suddenly in Hyde Park. It’s a murder story and I shall give the solution on the very last page. I shall write it in an impeccable English, and since it’s occurred to me lately that perhaps I’ve exhausted the possibilities of the semi–colon, I am going to take up the colon. No one yet has explored its potentialities. Humour and mystery are what I aim at. I shall call it The Achilles Statue.’

‘What a title!’ cried Mr Simmons, recovering himself before any of the others. ‘I can sell the serial rights on the title and your name alone.’

‘But what about Albert?’ asked Clifford Boyleston.

‘Albert?’ echoed Mrs Forrester. ‘Albert?’

She looked at him as though for the life of her she could not think what he was talking about. Then she gave a little cry as if she had suddenly remembered.

‘Albert! I knew I’d gone out on some errand and it absolutely slipped my memory. I was walking through Hyde Park and I had this inspiration. What a fool you’ll all think me!’

‘Then you haven’t seen Albert?’

‘My dear, I forgot all about him.’ She gave an amused laugh. ‘Let Albert keep his cook. I can’t bother about Albert now. Albert belongs to the semicolon period. I am going to write a detective story.’

‘My dear, you’re too, too wonderful,’ said Harry Oakland.

VIRTUE

There are few things better than a good Havana. When I was young and very poor and smoked a cigar only when somebody gave me one, I determined that if ever I had money I would smoke a cigar every day after luncheon and after dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept. It is the only ambition I have achieved that has never been embittered by disillusion. I like a cigar that is mild, but full–flavoured, neither so small that it is finished before you have become aware of it nor so large as to be irksome, rolled so that it draws without consciousness of effort on your part, with a leaf so firm that it doesn’t become messy on your lips, and in such condition that it keeps its savour to the very end. But when you have taken the last pull and put down the shapeless stump and watched the final cloud of smoke dwindle blue in the surrounding air it is impossible, if you have a sensitive nature, not to feel a certain melancholy at the thought of all the labour, the care and pains that have gone, the thought, the trouble, the complicated organization that have been required to provide you with half an hour’s delight. For this men have sweltered long years under tropical suns and ships have scoured the seven seas. These reflections become more poignant still when you are eating a dozen oysters (with half a bottle of dry white wine), and they become almost unbearable when it comes to a lamb cutlet. For these are animals and there is something that inspires awe in the thought that since the surface of the earth became capable of supporting life from generation to generation for millions upon millions of years creatures have come into existence to end at last upon a plate of crushed ice or on a silver grill. It may be that a sluggish fancy cannot grasp the dreadful solemnity of eating an oyster and evolution has taught us that the bivalve has through the ages kept itself to itself in a manner that inevitably alienates sympathy. There is an aloofness in it that is offensive to the aspiring spirit of man and a self–complacency that is obnoxious to his vanity. But I do not know how anyone can look upon a lamb cutlet without thoughts too deep for tears: here man himself has taken a hand and the history of the race is bound up with the tender morsel on your plate.

And sometimes even the fate of human beings is curious to consider. It is strange to look upon this man or that, the quiet ordinary persons of every day, the bank clerk, the dustman, the middle–aged girl in the second row of the chorus, and think of the interminable history behind them and of the long, long series of hazards by which from the primeval slime the course of events has brought them at this moment to such and such a place. When such tremendous vicissitudes have been needed to get them here at all one would have thought some huge significance must be attached to them; one would have thought that what befell them must matter a little to the Life Spirit or whatever else it is that has produced them. An accident befalls them. The thread is broken. The story that began with the world is finished abruptly and it looks as though it meant nothing at all. A tale told by an idiot. And is it not odd that this event, of an importance so dramatic, may be brought about by a cause so trivial?

An incident of no moment, that might easily not have happened, has consequences that are incalculable. It looks as though blind chance ruled all things. Our smallest actions may affect profoundly the whole lives of people who have nothing to do with us. The story I have to tell would never have happened if one day I had not walked across the street. Life is really very fantastic and one has to have a peculiar sense of humour to see the fun of it.

I was strolling down Bond Street one spring morning and having nothing much to do till lunch–time thought I would look in at Sotheby’s, the auction rooms, to see whether there was anything on show that interested me. There was a block in the traffic and I threaded my way through the cars. When I reached the other side I ran into a man I had known in Borneo coming out of a hatter’s.

‘Hullo, Morton,’ I said. ‘When did you come home?’

‘I’ve been back about a week.’

He was a District Officer. The Governor had given me a letter of introduction to him and I wrote and told him I meant to spend a week at the place he lived at and should like to put up at the government rest–house. He met me on the ship when I arrived and asked me to stay with him. I demurred. I did not see how I could spend a week with a total stranger, I did not want to put him to the expense of my board, and besides I thought I should have more freedom if I were on my own. He would not listen to me.

‘I’ve got plenty of room,’ he said, ‘and the rest–house is beastly. I haven’t spoken to a white man for six months and I’m fed to the teeth with my own company.’

But when Morton had got me and his launch had landed us at the bungalow and he had offered me a drink he did not in the least know what to do with me. He was seized on a sudden with shyness, and his conversation, which had been fluent and ready, ran dry. I did my best to make him feel at home (it was the least I could do, considering that it was his own house) and asked him if he had any new records. He turned on the gramophone and the sound of rag–time gave him confidence.

His bungalow overlooked the river and his living–room was a large veranda. It was furnished in the impersonal fashion that characterized the dwellings of government officials who were moved here and there at little notice according to the exigencies of the service. There were native hats as ornaments on the walls and the horns of animals, blow–pipes, and spears. In the book–shelf were detective novels and old magazines. There was a cottage piano with yellow keys. It was very untidy, but not uncomfortable.

Unfortunately I cannot very well remember what he looked like. He was young, twenty–eight, I learnt later, and he had a boyish and attractive smile. I spent an agreeable week with him. We went up and down the river and we climbed a mountain. We had tiffin one day with some planters who lived twenty miles away and every evening we went to the club. The only members were the manager of a kutch factory and his assistants, but they were not on speaking terms with one another and it was only on Morton’s representations that they must not let him down when he had a visitor that we could get up a rubber of bridge. The atmosphere was strained. We came back to dinner, listened to the gramophone, and went to bed. Morton had little office work and one would have thought the time hung heavy on his hands, but he had energy and high spirits; it was his first post of the sort and he was happy to be independent. His only anxiety was lest he should be transferred before he had finished a road he was building. This was the joy of his heart. It was his own idea and he had wheedled the government into giving him the money to make it; he had surveyed the country himself and traced the path. He had solved unaided the technical problems that presented themselves. Every morning, before he went to his office, he drove out in a rickety old Ford to where the coolies were working and watched the progress that had been made since the day before. He thought of nothing else. He dreamt of it at night. He reckoned that it would be finished in a year and he did not want to take his leave till then. He could not have worked with more zest if he had been a painter or a sculptor creating a work of art. I think it was this eagerness that made me take a fancy to him. I liked his zeal. I liked his ingenuousness. And I was impressed by the passion for achievement that made him indifferent to the solitariness of his life, to promotion, and even to the thought of going home. I forget how long the road was, fifteen or twenty miles, I think, and I forget what purpose it was to serve. I don’t believe Morton cared very much. His passion was the artist’s and his triumph was the triumph of man over nature. He learnt as he went along. He had the jungle to contend against, torrential rains that destroyed the labour of weeks, accidents of topography; he had to collect his labour and hold it together; he had inadequate funds. His imagination sustained him. His labours gained a sort of epic quality and the vicissitudes of the work were a great saga that unrolled itself with an infinity of episodes.

His only complaint was that the day was too short. He had office duties, he was judge and tax collector, father and mother (at twenty–eight) of the people in his district; he had now and then to make tours that took him away from home. Unless he was on the spot nothing was done. He would have liked to be there twenty–four hours a day driving the reluctant coolies to further effort. It so happened that shortly before I arrived an incident had occurred that filled him with jubilation. He had offered a contract to a Chinese to make a certain section of the road and the Chinese had asked more than Morton could afford to pay. Notwithstanding interminable discussions they had been unable to arrive at an agreement and Morton with rage in his heart saw his work held up. He was at his wits’ end. Then going down to his office one morning, he heard that there had been a row in one of the Chinese gambling houses the night before. A coolie had been badly wounded and his assailant was under arrest. This assailant was the contractor. He was brought into court, the evidence was clear, and Morton sentenced him to eighteen months’ hard labour.

‘Now he’ll have to build the blasted road for nothing,’ said Morton, his eyes glistening when he told me the story.

We saw the fellow at work one morning, in the prison sarong, unconcerned. He was taking his misfortune in good part.

‘I’ve told him I’ll remit the rest of his sentence when the road’s finished,’ said Morton, ‘and he’s as pleased as Punch. Bit of a snip for me, eh, what?’

When I left Morton I asked him to let me know when he came to England and he promised to write to me as soon as he landed. On the spur of the moment one gives these invitations and one is perfectly sincere about them. But when one is taken at one’s word a slight dismay seizes one. People are so different at home from what they are abroad. There they are easy, cordial, and natural. They have interesting things to tell you. They are immensely kind. You are anxious when your turn comes to do something in return for the hospitality you have received. But it is not easy. The persons who were so entertaining in their own surroundings are very dull in yours. They are constrained and shy. You introduce them to your friends and your friends find them a crashing bore. They do their best to be civil, but sigh with relief when the strangers go and the conversation can once more run easily in its accustomed channels. I think the residents in far places early in their careers understand the situation pretty well, as the result maybe of bitter and humiliating experiences, for I have found that they seldom take advantage of the invitation which on some outstation on the edge of the jungle has been so cordially extended to them and by them as cordially accepted. But Morton was different. He was a young man and single. It is generally the wives that are the difficulty; other women look at their drab clothes, in a glance take in their provincial air, and freeze them with their indifference. But a man can play bridge and tennis, and dance. Morton had charm. I had had no doubt that in a day or two he would find his feet.

‘Why didn’t you let me know you were back?’ I asked him.

‘I thought you wouldn’t want to be bothered with me,’ he smiled.

‘What nonsense!’

Of course now as we stood in Bond Street on the kerb and chatted for a minute he looked strange to me. I had never seen him in anything but khaki shorts and a tennis shirt, except when we got back from the club at night and he put on a pyjama jacket and a sarong for dinner. It is as comfortable a form of evening dress as has ever been devised. He looked a bit awkward in his blue serge suit. His face against a white collar was very brown.

‘How about the road?’ I asked him.

‘Finished. I was afraid I’d have to postpone my leave, we struck one or two snags towards the end, but I made ’em hustle and the day before I left I drove the Ford to the end and back without stopping.’

I laughed. His pleasure was charming.

‘What have you been doing with yourself in London?’

‘Buying clothes.’

‘Been having a good time?’

‘Marvellous. A. bit lonely, you know, but I don’t mind that. I’ve been to a show every night. The Palmers, you know, I think you met them in Sarawak, were going to be in town and we were going to do the play together, but they had to go to Scotland because her mother’s ill.’

His words, said so breezily, cut me to the quick. His was the common experience. It was heartbreaking. For months, for long months before it was due, these people planned their leave, and when they got off the ship they were in such spirits they could hardly contain themselves. London. Shops and clubs and theatres and restaurants. London. They were going to have the time of their lives. London. It swallowed them. A strange turbulent city, not hostile but indifferent, and they were lost in it. They had no friends. They had nothing in common with the acquaintances they made. They were more lonely than in the jungle. It was a relief when at a theatre they ran across someone they had known in the East (and perhaps been bored stiff by or disliked) and they could fix up an evening together and have a good laugh and tell one another what a grand time they were having and talk of common friends and at last confide to one another a little shyly that they would not be sorry when their leave was up and they were once again in harness. They went to see their families and of course they were glad to see them, but it wasn’t the same as it had been, they did feel a bit out of it, and when you came down to brass tacks the life people led in England was deadly. It was grand fun to come home, but you couldn’t live there any more, and sometimes you thought of your bungalow overlooking the river and your tours of the district and what a lark it was to run over once in a blue moon to Sandakan or Kuching or Singapore.

And because I remembered what Morton had looked forward to when, the road finished and off his chest, he went on leave, I could not but feel a pang when I thought of him dining by himself in a dismal club where he knew nobody or alone in a restaurant in Soho and then going off to see a play with no one by his side with whom he could enjoy it and no one to have a drink with during the interval. And at the same time I reflected that even if I had known he was in London I could have done nothing much for him, for during the last week I had not had a moment free. That very evening I was dining with friends and going to a play, and the next day I was going abroad.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked him.

‘I’m going to the Pavilion. It’s packed jammed full, but there’s a fellow over the road who’s wonderful and he’s got me a ticket that had been returned. You can often get one seat, you know, when you can’t get two.’

‘Why don’t you come and have supper with me? I’m taking some people to the Haymarket and we’re going on to Ciro’s afterwards.’

‘I’d love to.’

We arranged to meet at eleven and I left him to keep an engagement.

I was afraid the friends I had asked him to meet would not amuse Morton very much, for they were distinctly middle–aged, but I could not think of anyone young that at this season of the year I should be likely to get hold of at the last moment. None of the girls I knew would thank me for asking her to supper to dance with a shy young man from Malaya. I could trust the Bishops to do their best for him, and after all it must be jollier for him to have supper in a club with a good band where he could see pretty women dancing than to go home to bed at eleven because he had nowhere else in the world to go. I had known Charlie Bishop first when I was a medical student. He was then a thin fellow with sandy hair and blunt features; he had fine eyes, dark and gleaming, but he wore spectacles. He had a round, merry, red face. He was very fond of the girls. I suppose he had a way with him, for, with no money and no looks, he managed to pick up a succession of young persons who gratified his roving desires. He was clever and bumptious, argumentative and quick–tempered. He had a caustic tongue. Looking back, I should say he was a rather disagreeable young man, but I do not think he was a bore. Now, half–way through the fifties, he was inclined to be stout and he was very bald, but his eyes behind the gold–rimmed spectacles were still bright and alert. He was dogmatic and somewhat conceited, argumentative still and caustic, but he was good–natured and amusing. After you have known a person so long his idiosyncrasies cease to trouble you. You accept them as you accept your own physical defects. He was by profession a pathologist and now and then he sent me a slim book he had just published. It was severe and extremely technical and grimly illustrated with photographs of bacteria. I did not read it. I gathered from what I sometimes heard that Charlie’s views on the subjects with which he dealt were unsound. I do not believe that he was very popular with the other members of his profession, he made no secret of the fact that he looked upon them as a set of incompetent idiots; but he had his job, it brought him in six or eight hundred a year, I think, and he was completely indifferent to other people’s opinion of him.

I liked Charlie Bishop because I had known him for thirty years, but I liked Margery, his wife, because she was very nice. I was extremely surprised when he told me he was going to be married. He was hard on forty at the time and so fickle in his affections that I had made up my mind he would remain single. He was very fond of women, but he was not in the least sentimental, and his aims were loose. His views on the female sex would in these idealistic days be thought crude. He knew what he wanted and he asked for it, and if he couldn’t get it for love or money he shrugged his shoulders and went his way. To be brief, he did not look to women to gratify his ideal but to provide him with fornication. It was odd that though small and plain he found so many who were prepared to grant his wishes. For his spiritual needs he found satisfaction in unicellular organisms. He had always been a man who spoke to the point, and when he told me he was going to marry a young woman called Margery Hobson I did not hesitate to ask him why. He grinned.

‘Three reasons. First, she won’t let me go to bed with her without. Second, she makes me laugh like a hyena. And third, she’s alone in the world, without a single relation, and she must have someone to take care of her.’

‘The first reason is just swank and the second is eyewash. The third is the real one and it means that she’s got you by the short hairs.’

His eyes gleamed softly behind his large spectacles.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t dead right.’

‘She’s not only got you by the short hairs but you’re as pleased as Punch that she has.’

‘Come and lunch tomorrow and have a look at her. She’s easy on the eye.’

Charlie was a member of a cock–and–hen club which at that time I used a good deal and we arranged to lunch there. I found Margery a very attractive young woman. She was then just under thirty. She was a lady. I noticed the fact with satisfaction, but with a certain astonishment, for it had not escaped my notice that Charlie was attracted as a rule by women whose breeding left something to be desired. She was not beautiful, but comely, with fine dark hair and fine eyes, a good colour and a look of health. She had a pleasant frankness and an air of candour that were very taking. She looked honest, simple, and dependable. I took an immediate liking to her. She was easy to talk to and though she did not say anything very brilliant she understood what other people were talking about; she was quick to see a joke and she was not shy. She gave you the impression of being competent and business–like. She had a happy placidity that suggested a good temper and an excellent digestion.

They seemed extremely pleased with one another. I had asked myself when I first saw her why Margery was marrying this irritable little man, baldish already and by no means young, but I discovered very soon that it was because she was in love with him. They chaffed one another a good deal and laughed a lot and every now and then their eyes met more significantly and they seemed to exchange a little private message. It was really rather touching.

A week later they were married at a registrar’s office. It was a very successful marriage. Looking back now after sixteen years I could not but chuckle sympathetically at the thought of the lark they had made of their life together. I had never known a more devoted couple. They had never had very much money. They never seemed to want any. They had no ambitions. Their life was a picnic that never came to an end. They lived in the smallest flat I ever saw, in Panton Street, a small bedroom, a small sitting–room, and a bathroom that served also as a kitchen. But they had no sense of home, they ate their meals in restaurants, and only had breakfast in the flat. It was merely a place to sleep in. It was comfortable, though a third person coming in for a whisky and soda crowded it, and Margery with the help of a charwoman kept it as neat as Charlie’s untidiness permitted, but there was not a single thing in it that had a personal note. They had a tiny car and whenever Charlie had a holiday they took it across the Channel and started off, with a bag each for all their luggage, to drive wherever the fancy took them. Breakdowns never disturbed them, bad weather was part of the fun, a puncture was no end of a joke, and if they lost their way and had to sleep out in the open they thought they were having the time of their lives.

Charlie continued to be irascible and contentious, but nothing he did ever disturbed Margery’s lovely placidity. She could calm him with a word. She still made him laugh. She typed his monographs on obscure bacteria and corrected the proofs of his articles in the scientific magazines. Once I asked them if they ever quarrelled.

‘No,’ she said, ‘we never seem to have anything to quarrel about. Charlie has the temper of an angel.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘he’s an overbearing, aggressive, and cantankerous fellow. He always has been.’

She looked at him and giggled and I saw that she thought I was being funny.

‘Let him rave,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s an ignorant fool and he uses words of whose meaning he hasn’t the smallest idea.’

They were sweet together. They were very happy in one another’s company and were never apart if they could help it. Even after the long time they had been married Charlie used to get into the car every day at luncheon–time to come west and meet Margery at a restaurant. People used to laugh at them, not unkindly, but perhaps with a little catch in the throat, because when they were asked to go and spend a week–end in the country Margery would write to the hostess and say they would like to come if they could be given a double bed. They had slept together for so many years that neither of them could sleep alone. It was often a trifle awkward. Husbands and wives as a rule not only demanded separate rooms, but were inclined to be peevish if asked to share the same bathroom. Modern houses were not arranged for domestic couples, but among their friends it became an understood thing that if you wanted the Bishops you must give them a room with a double bed. Some people of course thought it a little indecent, and it was never convenient, but they were a pleasant pair to have to stay and it was worth while to put up with their crankiness. Charlie was always full of spirits and in his caustic way extremely amusing, and Margery was peaceful and easy. They were no trouble to entertain. Nothing pleased them more than to be left to go out together for a long ramble in the country.

When a man marries, his wife sooner or later estranges him from his old friends, but Margery on the contrary increased Charlie’s intimacy with them. By making him more tolerant she made him a more agreeable companion. They gave you the impression not of a married couple, but, rather amusingly, of two middle–aged bachelors living together; and when Margery, as was the rule, found herself the only woman among half a dozen men, ribald, argumentative, and gay, she was not a bar to good–fellowship but an asset. Whenever I was in England I saw them. They generally dined at the club of which I have spoken and if I happened to be alone I joined them.

When we met that evening for a snack before going to the play I told them I had asked Morton to come to supper.

‘I’m afraid you’ll find him rather dull,’ I said. ‘But he’s a very decent sort of boy and he was awfully kind to me when I was in Borneo.’

‘Why didn’t you let me know sooner?’ cried Margery. ‘I’d have brought a girl along.’

‘What do you want a girl for?’ said Charlie. ‘There’ll be you.’

‘I don’t think it can be much fun for a young man to dance with a woman of my advanced years,’ said Margery.

‘Rot. What’s your age got to do with it?’ He turned to me. ‘Have you ever danced with anyone who danced better?’

I had, but she certainly danced very well. She was light on her feet and she had a good sense of rhythm.

‘Never,’ I said heartily.

Morton was waiting for us when we reached Ciro’s. He looked very sunburned in his evening clothes. Perhaps it was because I knew that they had been wrapped away in a tin box with mothballs for four years that I felt he did not look quite at home in them. He was certainly more at ease in khaki shorts. Charlie Bishop was a good talker and liked to hear himself speak. Morton was shy. I gave him a cocktail and ordered some champagne. I had a feeling that he would be glad to dance, but was not quite sure whether it would occur to him to ask Margery. I was acutely conscious that we all belonged to another generation.

‘I think I should tell you that Mrs Bishop is a beautiful dancer,’ I said.

’Is she?’ He flushed a little. ‘Will you dance with me?’

She got up and they took the floor. She was looking peculiarly nice that evening, not at all smart, and I do not think her plain black dress had cost more than six guineas, but she looked a lady. She had the advantage of having extremely good legs and at that time skirts were still being worn very short. I suppose she had a little make–up on, but in contrast with the other women there she looked very natural. Shingled hair suited her; it was not even touched with white and it had an attractive sheen. She was not a pretty woman, but her kindliness, her wholesome air, her good health gave you, if not the illusion that she was, at least the feeling that it didn’t at all matter. When she came back to the table her eyes were bright and she had a heightened colour.

‘How does he dance?’ asked her husband.

‘Divinely.’

‘You’re very easy to dance with,’ said Morton.

Charlie went on with his discourse. He had a sardonic humour and he was interesting because he was himself so interested in what he said. But he spoke of things that Morton knew nothing about and though he listened with a civil show of interest I could see that he was too much excited by the gaiety of the scene, the music, and the champagne to give his attention to conversation. When the music struck up again his eyes immediately sought Margery’s. Charlie caught the look and smiled.

‘Dance with him, Margery. Good for my figure to see you take exercise.’

They set off again and for a moment Charlie watched her with fond eyes.

‘Margery’s having the time of her life. She loves dancing and it makes me puff and blow. Not a bad youth.’

My little party was quite a success and when Morton and I, having taken leave of the Bishops, walked together towards Piccadilly Circus he thanked me warmly. He had really enjoyed himself. I said good–bye to him. Next morning I went abroad.

I was sorry not to have been able to do more for Morton and I knew that when I returned he would be on his way back to Borneo. I gave him a passing thought now and then, but by the autumn when I got home he had slipped my memory. After I had been in London a week or so I happened to drop in one night at the club to which Charlie Bishop also belonged. He was sitting with three or four men I knew and I went up. I had not seen any of them since my return. One of them, a man called Bill Marsh, whose wife, Janet, was a great friend of mine, asked me to have a drink.

‘Where have you sprung from?’ asked Charlie. ‘Haven’t seen you about lately.’ I noticed at once that he was drunk. I was astonished. Charlie had always liked his liquor, but he carried it well and never exceeded. In years gone by, when we were very young, he got tight occasionally, but probably more than anything to show what a great fellow he was, and it is unfair to bring up against a man the excesses of his youth. But I remembered that Charlie had never been very nice when he was drunk: his natural aggressiveness was exaggerated then and he talked too much and too loud; he was very apt to be quarrelsome. He was very dogmatic now, laying down the law and refusing to listen to any of the objections his rash statements called forth. The others knew he was drunk and were struggling between the irritation his cantankerousness aroused in them and the good–natured tolerance which they felt his condition demanded. He was not an agreeable object. A man of that age, bald and fattish, with spectacles, is disgusting drunk. He was generally rather dapper, but he was untidy now and there was tobacco ash all over him. Charlie called the waiter and ordered another whisky. The waiter had been at the club for thirty years. ‘You’ve got one in front of you, sir.’

‘Mind your own damned business,’ said Charlie Bishop. ‘Bring me a double whisky right away or I’ll report you to the secretary for insolence.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said the waiter.

Charlie emptied his glass at a gulp, but his hand was unsteady and he spilled some of the whisky over himself.

‘Well, Charlie, old boy, we’d better be toddling along,’ said Bill Marsh. He turned to me. ‘Charlie’s staying with us for a bit.’

I was more surprised still. But I felt that something was wrong and thought it safer not to say anything.

‘I’m ready,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ll just have another drink before I go. I shall have a better night if I do.’

It did not look to me as though the party would break up for some time, so I got up and announced that I meant to stroll home.

‘I say,’ said Bill, as I was about to go, ‘you wouldn’t come and dine with us tomorrow night, would you, just me and Janet and Charlie?’

‘Yes, I’ll come with pleasure,’ I said.

It was evident that something was up.

The Marshes lived in a terrace on the East side of Regent’s Park. The maid who opened the door for me asked me to go in to Mr Marsh’s study. He was waiting for me there.

‘I thought I’d better have a word with you before you went upstairs,’ he said as he shook hands with me. ‘You know Margery’s left Charlie?’

‘No!’

‘He’s taken it very hard. Janet thought it was so awful for him alone in that beastly little flat that we asked him to stay here for a bit. We’ve done everything we could for him. He’s been drinking like a fish. He hasn’t slept a wink for a fortnight.’

‘But she hasn’t left him for good?’

I was astounded.

‘Yes. She’s crazy about a fellow called Morton.’

‘Morton. Who’s he?’

It never struck me it was my friend from Borneo.

‘Damn it all, you introduced him and a pretty piece of work you did. Let’s go upstairs. I thought I’d better put you wise.’

He opened the door and we went out. I was thoroughly confused.

‘But look here,’ I said.

‘Ask Janet. She knows the whole thing. It beats me. I’ve got no patience with Margery, and he must be a mess.’

He preceded me into the drawing–room. Janet Marsh rose as I entered and came forward to greet me. Charlie was sitting at the window, reading the evening paper; he put it aside as I went up to him and shook his hand. He was quite sober and he spoke in his usual rather perky manner, but I noticed that he looked very ill. We had a glass of sherry and went down to dinner. Janet was a woman of spirit. She was tall and fair and good to look at. She kept the conversation going with alertness. When she left us to drink a glass of port it was with instructions not to stay more than ten minutes. Bill, as a rule somewhat taciturn, exerted himself now to talk. I tumbled to the game. I was hampered by my ignorance of what exactly had happened, but it was plain that the Marshes wanted to prevent Charlie from brooding, and I did my best to interest him. He seemed willing to play his part, he was always fond of holding forth, and he discussed, from the pathologist’s standpoint, a murder that was just then absorbing the public. But he spoke without life. He was an empty shell, and one had the feeling that though for the sake of his host he forced himself to speak, his thoughts were elsewhere. It was a relief when a knocking on the floor above indicated to us that Janet was getting impatient. This was an occasion when a woman’s presence eased the situation. We went upstairs and played family bridge. When it was time for me to go Charlie said he would walk with me as far as the Marylebone Road.

‘Oh, Charlie, it’s so late, you’d much better go to bed,’ said Janet.

‘I shall sleep better if I have a stroll before turning in,’ he replied.

She gave him a worried look. You cannot forbid a middle–aged professor of pathology from going for a little walk if he wants to. She glanced brightly at her husband.

‘I daresay it’ll do Bill no harm.’

I think the remark was tactless. Women are often a little too managing. Charlie gave her a sullen look.

‘There’s absolutely no need to drag Bill out,’ he said with some firmness.

‘I haven’t the smallest intention of coming,’ said Bill, smiling. ‘I’m tired out and I’m going to hit the hay.’

I fancy we left Bill Marsh and his wife to a little argument.

‘They’ve been frightfully kind to me,’ said Charlie, as we walked along by the railings. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without them. I haven’t slept for a fortnight.’

I expressed regret but did not ask the reason, and we walked for a little in silence. I presumed that he had come with me in order to talk to me of what had happened, but I felt that he must take his own time. I was anxious to show my sympathy, but afraid of saying the wrong things; I did not want to seem eager to extract confidences from him. I did not know how to give him a lead. I was sure he did not want one. He was not a man given to beating about the bush. I imagined that he was choosing his words. We reached the corner.

‘You’ll be able to get a taxi at the church,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk on a bit further. Good night.’

He nodded and slouched off. I was taken aback. There was nothing for me to do but to stroll on till I found a cab. I was having my bath next morning when a telephone call dragged me out of it, and with a towel round my wet body I took up the receiver. It was Janet.

‘Well, what do you think of it all?’ she said. ‘You seem to have kept Charlie up pretty late last night. I heard him come home at three.’

‘He left me at the Marylebone Road,’ I answered. ‘He said nothing to me at all.’

‘Didn’t he?’

There was something in Janet’s voice that suggested that she was prepared to have a long talk with me. I suspected she had a telephone by the side of her bed.

‘Look here,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m having my bath.’

‘Oh, have you got a telephone in your bathroom?’ she answered eagerly, and I think with envy.

‘No, I haven’t.’ I was abrupt and firm. ‘And I’m dripping all over the carpet.’

‘Oh!’ I felt disappointment in her tone and a trace of irritation. ‘Well, when can I see you? Can you come here at twelve?’

It was inconvenient, but I was not prepared to start an argument.

‘Yes, good–bye.’

I rang off before she could say anything more. In heaven when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word beside.

I was devoted to Janet, but I knew that there was nothing that thrilled her more than the misfortunes of her friends. She was only too anxious to help them, but she wanted to be in the thick of their difficulties. She was the friend in adversity. Other people’s business was meat and drink to her. You could not enter upon a love affair without finding her somehow your confidante nor be mixed up in a divorce case without discovering that she too had a finger in the pie. Withal she was a very nice woman. I could not help then chuckling in my heart when at noon I was shown into Janet’s drawing–room and observed the subdued eagerness with which she received me. She was very much upset by the catastrophe that had befallen the Bishops, but it was exciting, and she was tickled to death to have someone fresh whom she could tell all about it. Janet had just that business–like expectancy that a mother has when she is discussing with the family doctor her married daughter’s first confinement. Janet was conscious that the matter was very serious, and she would not for a moment have been thought to regard it flippantly, but she was determined to get every ounce of value out of it.

‘I mean, no one could have been more horrified than I was when Margery told me she’d finally made up her mind to leave Charlie,’ she said, speaking with the fluency of a person who has said the same thing in the same words a dozen times at least. ‘They were the most devoted couple I’d ever known. It was a perfect marriage. They got on like a house on fire. Of course Bill and I are devoted to one another, but we have awful rows now and then. I mean, I could kill him sometimes.’

‘I don’t care a hang about your relations with Bill,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the Bishops. That’s what I’ve come here for.’

‘I simply felt I must see you. After all you’re the only person who can explain it.’

‘Oh, God, don’t go on like that. Until Bill told me last night I didn’t know a thing about it.’

‘That was my idea. It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps you didn’t know and I thought you might put your foot in it too awfully.’

‘Supposing you began at the beginning,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re the beginning. After all you started the trouble. You introduced the young man. That’s why I was so crazy to see you. You know all about him. I never saw him. All I know is what Margery has told me about him.’

‘At what time are you lunching?’ I asked.

‘Half past one.’

‘So am I. Get on with the story.’

But my remark had given Janet an idea.

‘Look here, will you get out of your luncheon if I get out of mine? We could have a snack here. I’m sure there’s some cold meat in the house, and then we needn’t hurry. I don’t have to be at the hairdresser’s till three.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘I hate the notion of that. I shall leave here at twenty minutes past one at the latest.’

‘Then I shall just have to race through it. What do you think of Gerry?’

‘Who’s Gerry?’

‘Gerry Morton. His name’s Gerald.’

‘How should I know that?’

‘You stayed with him. Weren’t there any letters lying about?’

‘I daresay, but I didn’t happen to read them,’ I answered somewhat tartly.

‘Oh, don’t be so stupid. I meant the envelopes. What’s he like?’

‘All right. Rather the Kipling type, you know. Very keen on his work. Hearty. Empire–builder and all that sort of thing.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ cried Janet, not without impatience. ‘I mean, what does he look like?’

‘More or less like everybody else, I think. Of course I should recognize him if I saw him again, but I can’t picture him to myself very distinctly. He looks clean.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Janet. ‘Are you a novelist or are you not? What’s the colour of his eyes?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must know. You can’t spend a week with anyone without knowing if their eyes are blue or brown. Is he fair or dark?’

‘Neither.’

’Is he tall or short?’

‘Average, I should say.’

‘Are you trying to irritate me?’

‘No. He’s just ordinary. There’s nothing in him to attract your attention. He’s neither plain nor good–looking. He looks quite decent. He looks a gentleman.’

‘Margery says he has a charming smile and a lovely figure.’

‘I dare say.’

‘He’s absolutely crazy about her.’

‘What makes you think that?’ I asked dryly.

‘I’ve seen his letters.’

‘Do you mean to say she’s shown them to you?’

‘Why, of course.’

It is always difficult for a man to stomach the want of reticence that women betray in their private affairs. They have no shame. They will talk to one another without embarrassment of the most intimate matters. Modesty is a masculine virtue. But though a man may know this theoretically, each time he is confronted with women’s lack of reserve he suffers a new shock. I wondered what Morton would think if he knew that not only were his letters read by Janet Marsh as well as by Margery, but that she had been kept posted from day to day with the progress of his infatuation. According to Janet he had fallen in love with Margery at first sight. The morning after they had met at my little supper party at Ciro’s he had rung up and asked her to come and have tea with him at some place where they could dance. While I listened to Janet’s story I was conscious of course that she was giving me Margery’s view of the circumstances and I kept an open mind. I was interested to observe that Janet’s sympathies were with Margery. It was true that when Margery left her husband it was her idea that Charlie should come to them for two or three weeks rather than stay on in miserable loneliness in the deserted flat and she had been extraordinarily kind to him. She lunched with him almost every day, because he had been accustomed to lunch every day with Margery; she took him for walks in Regent’s Park and made Bill play golf with him on Sundays. She listened with wonderful patience to the story of his unhappiness and did what she could to console him. She was terribly sorry for him. But all the same she was definitely on Margery’s side and when I expressed my disapproval of her she came down on me like a thousand of bricks. The affair thrilled her. She had been in it from the beginning when Margery, smiling, flattered, and a little doubtful, came and told her that she had a young man to the final scene when Margery, exasperated and distraught, announced that she could not stand the strain any more and had packed her things and moved out of the flat.

‘Of course, at first I couldn’t believe my ears,’ she said. ‘You know how Charlie and Margery were. They simply lived in one another’s pockets. One couldn’t help laughing at them, they were so devoted to one another. I never thought him a very nice little man and heaven knows he wasn’t very attractive physically, but one couldn’t help liking him because he was so awfully nice to Margery. I rather envied her sometimes. They had no money and they lived in a hugger–mugger sort of way, but they were frightfully happy. Of course I never thought anything would come of it. Margery was rather amused. “Naturally I don’t take it very seriously,” she told me, “but it is rather fun to have a young man at my time of life. I haven’t had any flowers sent me for years. I had to tell him not to send any more because Charlie would think it so silly. He doesn’t know a soul in London and he loves dancing and he says I dance like a dream. It’s miserable for him going to the theatre by himself all the time and we’ve done two or three matinees together. It’s pathetic to see how grateful he is when I say I’ll go out with him.” “I must say,” I said, “he sounds rather a lamb.” “He is,” she said. “I knew you’d understand. You don’t blame me, do you?” “Of course not, darling,” I said, “surely you know me better than that. I’d do just the same in your place.”’

Margery made no secret of her outings with Morton and her husband chaffed her good–naturedly about her beau. But he thought him a very civil, pleasant–spoken young man and was glad that Margery had someone to play with while he was busy. It never occurred to him to be jealous. The three of them dined together several times and went to a show. But presently Gerry Morton begged Margery to spend an evening with him alone; she said it was impossible, but he was persuasive, he gave her no peace; and at last she went to Janet and asked her to ring up Charlie one day and ask him to come to dinner and make a fourth at bridge. Charlie would never go anywhere without his wife, but the Marshes were old friends, and Janet made a point of it. She invented some cock–and–bull story that made it seem important that he should consent. Next day Margery and she met. The evening had been wonderful. They had dined at Maidenhead and danced there and then had driven home through the summer night.

‘He says he’s crazy about me,’ Margery told her.

‘Did he kiss you?’ asked Janet.

‘Of course,’ Margery chuckled. ‘Don’t be silly, Janet. He is awfully sweet and, you know, he has such a nice nature. Of course I don’t believe half the things he says to me.’

‘My dear, you’re not going to fall in love with him.’

‘I have,’ said Margery.

‘Darling, isn’t it going to be rather awkward?’

‘Oh, it won’t last. After all he’s going back to Borneo in the autumn.’

‘Well, one can’t deny that it’s made you look years younger.’

‘I know, and I feel years younger.’

Soon they were meeting every day. They met in the morning and walked in the Park together or went to a picture gallery. They separated for Margery to lunch with her husband and after lunch met again and motored into the country or to some place on the river. Margery did not tell her husband. She very naturally thought he would not understand.

‘How was it you never met Morton?’ I asked Janet.

‘Oh, she didn’t want me to. You see, we belong to the same generation, Margery and I. I can quite understand that.’

‘I see.’

‘Of course I did everything I could. When she went out with Gerry she was always supposed to be with me.’

I am a person who likes to cross a ‘t’ and dot an ‘i’.

‘Were they having an affair?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. Margery isn’t that sort of woman at all.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She would have told me.’

‘I suppose she would.’

‘Of course I asked her. But she denied it point–blank and I’m sure she was telling me the truth. There’s never been anything of that sort between them at all.’

‘It seems rather odd to me.’

‘Well, you see, Margery is a very good woman.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘She was absolutely loyal to Charlie. She wouldn’t have deceived him for anything in the world. She couldn’t bear the thought of having any secret from him. As soon as she knew she was in love with Gerry she wanted to tell Charlie. Of course I begged her not to. I told her it wouldn’t do any good and it would only make Charlie miserable. And after all, the boy was going away in a couple of months, it didn’t seem much good to make a lot of fuss about a thing that couldn’t possibly last.’

But Gerry’s imminent departure was the cause of the crash. The Bishops had arranged to go abroad as usual and proposed to motor through Belgium, Holland, and the North of Germany. Charlie was busy with maps and guides. He collected information from friends about hotels and roads. He looked forward to his holiday with the bubbling excitement of a schoolboy. Margery listened to him discussing it with a sinking heart. They were to be away four weeks and in September Gerry was sailing. She could not bear to lose so much of the short time that remained to them and the thought of the motor tour filled her with exasperation. As the interval grew shorter and shorter she grew more and more nervous. At last she decided that there was only one thing to do.

‘Charlie, I don’t want to come on this trip,’ she interrupted him suddenly, one day when he was talking to her of some restaurant he had just heard of. ‘I wish you’d get someone else to go with you.’

He looked at her blankly. She was startled at what she had said and her lips trembled a little.

‘Why, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter. I don’t feel like it. I want to be by myself for a bit.’

‘Are you ill?’

She saw the sudden fear in his eyes. His concern drove her beyond her endurance.

‘No. I’ve never been better in my life. I’m in love.’

‘You? Whom with?’

‘Gerry.’

He looked at her in amazement. He could not believe his ears. She mistook his expression.

‘It’s no good blaming me. I can’t help it. He’s going away in a few weeks. I’m not going to waste the little time he has left.’ He burst out laughing.

‘Margery, how can you make such a damned fool of yourself? You’re old enough to be his mother.’ She flushed.

‘He’s just as much in love with me as I am with him.’

‘Has he told you so?’

‘A thousand times.’

‘He’s a bloody liar, that’s all.’

He chuckled. His fat stomach rippled with mirth. He thought it a huge joke. I daresay Charlie did not treat his wife in the proper way. Janet seemed to think he should have been tender and compassionate. He should have understood. I saw the scene that was in her mind’s eye, the stiff upper lip, the silent sorrow, and the final renunciation. Women are always sensitive to the beauty of the self–sacrifice of others. Janet would have sympathized also if he had flown into a violent passion, broken one or two pieces of furniture (which he would have had to replace), or given Margery a sock in the jaw. But to laugh at her was unpardonable. I did not point out that it is very difficult for a rather stout and not very tall professor of pathology, aged fifty–five, to act all of a sudden like a cave–man. Anyhow, the excursion to Holland was given up and the Bishops stayed in London through August. They were not very happy. They lunched and dined together every day because they had been in the habit of doing so for so many years and the rest of the time Margery spent with Gerry. The hours she passed with him made up for all she had to put up with and she had to put up with a good deal. Charlie had a ribald and sarcastic humour and he made himself very funny at her expense and at Gerry’s. He persisted in refusing to take the matter seriously. He was vexed with Margery for being so silly, but apparently it never occurred to him that she might have been unfaithful to him. I commented upon this to Janet.

‘He never suspected it even,’ she said. ‘He knew Margery much too well.’

The weeks passed and at last Gerry sailed. He went from Tilbury and Margery saw him off. When she came back she cried for forty–eight hours. Charlie watched her with increasing exasperation. His nerves were much frayed.

‘Look here, Margery,’ he said at last, ‘I’ve been very patient with you, but now you must pull yourself together. This is getting past a joke.’

‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ she cried. ‘I’ve lost everything that made life lovely to me.’

‘Don’t be such a fool,’ he said.

I do not know what else he said. But he was unwise enough to tell her what he thought of Gerry and I gather that the picture he drew was virulent. It started the first violent scene they had ever had. She had borne Charlie’s jibes when she knew that she would see Gerry in an hour or next day, but now that she had lost him for ever she could bear them no longer. She had held herself in for weeks: now she flung her self–control to the winds. Perhaps she never knew exactly what she said to Charlie. He had always been irascible and at last he hit her. They were both frightened when he had. He seized a hat and flung out of the flat. During all that miserable time they had shared the same bed, but when he came back, in the middle of the night, he found that she had made herself up a shake–down on the sofa in the sitting–room.

‘You can’t sleep there,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so silly. Come to bed.’

‘No, I won’t, let me alone.’

For the rest of the night they wrangled, but she had her way and now made up her bed every night on the sofa. But in that tiny flat they could not get away from one another; they could not even get out of sight or out of hearing of one another. They had lived in such intimacy for so many years that it was an instinct for them to be together. He tried to reason with her. He thought her incredibly stupid and argued with her interminably in the effort to show her how wrong–headed she was. He could not leave her alone. He would not let her sleep, and he talked half through the night till they were both exhausted. He thought he could talk her out of love. For two or three days at a time they would not speak to one another. Then one day, coming home, he found her crying bitterly; the sight of her tears distracted him; he told her how much he loved her and sought to move her by the recollection of all the happy years they had spent together. He wanted to let bygones be bygones. He promised never to refer to Gerry again. Could they not forget the nightmare they had been through? But the thought of all that a reconciliation implied revolted her. She told him she had a racking headache and asked him to give her a sleeping draught. She pretended to be still asleep when he went out next morning, but the moment he was gone she packed up her things and left. She had a few trinkets that she had inherited and by selling them she got a little money. She took a room at a cheap boarding–house and kept her address a secret from Charlie.

It was when he found she had left him that he went all to pieces. The shock of her flight broke him. He told Janet that his loneliness was intolerable. He wrote to Margery imploring her to come back, and asked Janet to intercede for him; he was willing to promise anything; he abased himself. Margery was obdurate.

‘Do you think she’ll ever go back?’ I asked Janet.

‘She says not.’

I had to leave then, for it was nearly half past one and I was bound for the other end of London.

Two or three days later I got a telephone message from Margery asking if I could see her. She suggested coming to my rooms. I asked her to tea. I tried to be nice to her; her affairs were no business of mine, but in my heart I thought her a very silly woman and I dare say my manner was cold. She had never been handsome and the passing years had changed her little. She had still those fine dark eyes and her face was astonishingly unlined. She was very simply dressed and if she wore make–up it was so cunningly put on that I did not perceive it. She had still the charm she had always had of perfect naturalness and of a kindly humour.

‘I want you to do something for me if you will,’ she began without beating about the bush.

‘What is it?’

‘Charlie is leaving the Marshes today and going back to the flat. I’m afraid his first few days there will be rather difficult; it would be awfully nice of you if you’d ask him to dinner or something.’

‘I’ll have a look at my book.’

‘I’m told he’s been drinking heavily. It’s such a pity. I wish you could give him a hint.’

‘I understand he’s had some domestic worries of late,’ I said, perhaps acidly.

Margery flushed. She gave me a pained look. She winced as though I had struck her.

‘Of course you’ve known him ever so much longer than you’ve known me. It’s natural that you should take his part.’

‘My dear, to tell you the truth I’ve known him all these years chiefly on your account. I have never very much liked him, but I thought you were awfully nice.’

She smiled at me and her smile was very sweet. She knew that I meant what I said.

‘Do you think I was a good wife to him?’

‘Perfect.’

‘He used to put people’s backs up. A lot of people didn’t like him, but I never found him difficult.’

‘He was awfully fond of you.’

‘I know. We had a wonderful time together. For sixteen years we were perfectly happy.’ She paused and looked down. ‘I had to leave him. It became quite impossible. That cat–and–dog life we were leading was too awful.’

‘I never see why two persons should go on living together if they don’t want to.’

‘You see, it was awful for us. We’d always lived in such close intimacy. We could never get away from one another. At the end I hated the sight of him.’

‘I don’t suppose the situation was easy for either of you.’

‘It wasn’t my fault that I fell in love. You see, it was quite a different love from the one I’d felt for Charlie. There was always something maternal in that and protective. I was so much more reasonable than he was. He was unmanageable, but I could always manage him. Gerry was different.’ Her voice grew soft and her face was transfigured with glory. ‘He gave me back my youth. I was a girl to him and I could depend on his strength and be safe in his care.’

‘He seemed to me a very nice lad,’ I said slowly. ‘I imagine he’ll do well. He was very young for the job he had when I ran across him. He’s only twenty–nine now, isn’t he?’

She smiled softly. She knew quite well what I meant.

‘I never made any secret of my age to him. He says it doesn’t matter.’

I knew this was true. She was not the woman to have lied about her age. She had found a sort of fierce delight in telling him the truth about herself.

‘How old are you?’

‘Forty–four.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’ve written to Gerry and told him I’ve left Charlie. As soon as I hear from him I’m going out to join him.’ I was staggered.

‘You know, it’s a very primitive little colony he’s living in. I’m afraid you’ll find your position rather awkward.’

‘He made me promise that if I found my life impossible after he left I’d go to him.’

‘Are you sure you’re wise to attach so much importance to the things a young man says when he’s in love?’

Again that really beautiful look of exaltation came into her face. ‘Yes, when the young man happens to be Gerry.’

My heart sank. I was silent for a moment. Then I told her the story of the road Gerry Morton had built. I dramatized it, and I think I made it rather effective.

‘What did you tell me that for?’ she asked when I finished.

‘I thought it rather a good story.’

She shook her head and smiled.

‘No, you wanted to show me that he was very young and enthusiastic, and so keen on his work that he hadn’t much time to waste on other interests. I wouldn’t interfere with his work. You don’t know him as I do. He’s incredibly romantic. He looks upon himself as a pioneer. I’ve caught from him something of his excitement at the idea of taking part in the opening up of a new country. It is rather splendid, isn’t it? It makes life here seem very humdrum and commonplace. But of course it’s very lonely there. Even the companionship of a middle–aged woman may be worth having.’

‘Are you proposing to marry him?’ I asked.

‘I leave myself in his hands. I want to do nothing that he does not wish.’

She spoke with so much simplicity, there was something so touching in her self–surrender, that when she left me I no longer felt angry with her. Of course I thought her very foolish, but if the folly of men made one angry one would pass one’s life in a state of chronic ire. I thought all would come right. She said Gerry was romantic. He was, but the romantics in this workaday world only get away with their nonsense because they have at bottom a shrewd sense of reality: the mugs are the people who take their vapourings at their face value. The English are romantic; that is why other nations think them hypocritical; they are not: they set out in all sincerity for the Kingdom of God, but the journey is arduous and they have reason to pick up any gilt–edged investment that offers itself by the way. The British soul, like Wellington’s armies, marches on its belly. I supposed that Gerry would go through a bad quarter of an hour when he received Margery’s letter. My sympathies were not deeply engaged in the matter and I was only curious to see how he would extricate himself from the pass he was in. I thought Margery would suffer a bitter disappointment; well, that would do her no great harm, and then she would go back to her husband and I had no doubt the pair of them, chastened, would live in peace, quiet, and happiness for the rest of their lives.

The event was different. It happened that it was quite impossible for me to make any sort of engagement with Charlie Bishop for some days, but I wrote to him and asked him to dine with me one evening in the following week. I proposed, though with misgiving, that we should go to a play; I knew he was drinking like a fish, and when tight he was noisy. I hoped he would not make a nuisance of himself in the theatre. We arranged to meet at our club and dine at seven because the piece we were going to began at a quarter past eight. I arrived. I waited. He did not come. I rang up his flat, but could get no reply, so concluded that he was on his way. I hate missing the beginning of a play and I waited impatiently in the hall so that when he came we could go straight upstairs. To save time I had ordered dinner. The clock pointed to half past seven, then a quarter to eight; I did not see why I should wait for him any longer, so walked up to the dining–room and ate my dinner alone. He did not appear. I put a call through from the dining–room to the Marshes and presently was told by a waiter that Bill Marsh was at the end of the wire.

‘I say, do you know anything about Charlie Bishop?’ I said. ‘We were dining together and going to a play and he hasn’t turned up.’

‘He died this afternoon.’

‘What?’

My exclamation was so startled that two or three people within earshot looked up. The dining–room was full and the waiters were hurrying to and fro. The telephone was on the cashier’s desk and a wine waiter came up with a bottle of hock and two long–stemmed glasses on a tray and gave the cashier a chit. The portly steward showing two men to a table jostled me.

‘Where are you speaking from?’ asked Bill.

I suppose he heard the clatter that surrounded me. When I told him he asked me if I could come round as soon as I had finished my dinner. Janet wanted to speak to me.

‘I’ll come at once,’ I said.

I found Janet and Bill sitting in the drawing–room. He was reading the paper and she was playing patience. She came forward swiftly when the maid showed me in. She walked with a sort of spring, crouching a little, on silent feet, like a panther stalking his prey. I saw at once that she was in her element. She gave me her hand and turned her face away to hide her eyes brimming with tears. Her voice was low and tragic.

‘I brought Margery here and put her to bed. The doctor has given her a sedative. She’s all in. Isn’t it awful?’ She gave a sound that was something between a gasp and a sob. ‘I don’t know why these things always happen to me.’

The Bishops had never kept a servant but a charwoman went in every morning, cleaned the flat, and washed up the breakfast things. She had her own key. That morning she had gone in as usual and done the sitting–room. Since his wife had left him Charlie’s hours had been irregular and she was not surprised to find him asleep. But the time passed and she knew he had his work to go to. She went to the bedroom door and knocked. There was no answer. She thought she heard him groaning. She opened the door softly. He was lying in bed, on his back, and was breathing stertorously. He did not wake. She called him. Something about him frightened her. She went to the flat on the same landing. It was occupied by a journalist. He was still in bed when she rang, and opened the door to her in pyjamas.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ she said, ‘but would you just come and ‘ave a look at my gentleman. I don’t think he’s well.’

The journalist walked across the landing and into Charlie’s flat. There was an empty bottle of veronal by the bed.

‘I think you’d better fetch a policeman,’ he said.

A policeman came and rang through to the police station for an ambulance. They took Charlie to Charing Cross Hospital. He never recovered consciousness. Margery was with him at the end.

‘Of course there’ll have to be an inquest,’ said Janet. ‘But it’s quite obvious what happened. He’d been sleeping awfully badly for the last three or four weeks and I suppose he’d been taking veronal. He must have taken an overdose by accident.’

’Is that what Margery thinks?’ I asked.

‘She’s too upset to think anything, but I told her I was positive he hadn’t committed suicide. I mean, he wasn’t that sort of a man. Am I right, Bill?’

‘Yes, dear,’ he answered.

‘Did he leave any letter?’

‘No, nothing. Oddly enough Margery got a letter from him this morning, well, hardly a letter, just a line. “I’m so lonely without you, darling.” That’s all. But of course that means nothing and she’s promised to say nothing about it at the inquest. I mean, what is the use of putting ideas in people’s heads? Everyone knows that you never can tell with veronal, I wouldn’t take it myself for anything in the world, and it was quite obviously an accident. Am I right, Bill?’

‘Yes, dear,’ he answered.

I saw that Janet was quite determined to believe that Charlie Bishop had not committed suicide, but how far in her heart she believed what she wanted to believe I was not sufficiently expert in female psychology to know. And of course it might be that she was right. It is unreasonable to suppose that a middle–aged scientist should kill himself because his middle–aged wife leaves him and it is extremely plausible that, exasperated by sleeplessness, and in all probability far from sober, he took a larger dose of the sleeping–draught than he realized. Anyhow that was the view the coroner took of the matter. It was indicated to him that of late Charles Bishop had given way to habits of intemperance which had caused his wife to leave him, and it was quite obvious that nothing was further from his thoughts than to put an end to himself. The coroner expressed his sympathy with the widow and commented very strongly on the dangers of sleeping–draughts.

I hate funerals, but Janet begged me to go to Charlie’s. Several of his colleagues at the hospital had intimated their desire to come, but at Margery’s wish they were dissuaded; and Janet and Bill, Margery and I were the only persons who attended it. We were to fetch the hearse from the mortuary and they offered to call for me on their way. I was on the look–out for the car and when I saw it drive up went downstairs, but Bill got out and met me just inside the door.

‘Half a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to say to you. Janet wants you to come back afterwards and have tea. She says it’s no good Margery moping and after tea we’ll play a few rubbers of bridge. Can you come?’

‘Like this?’ I asked.

I had a tail coat on and a black tie and my evening dress trousers.

‘Oh, that’s all right. It’ll take Margery’s mind off.’

‘Very well.’

But we did not play bridge after all. Janet, with her fair hair, was very smart in her deep mourning and she played the part of the sympathetic friend with amazing skill. She cried a little, wiping her eyes delicately so as not to disturb the black on her eyelashes, and when Margery sobbed broken–heartedly put her arm tenderly through hers. She was a very present help in trouble. We returned to the house. There was a telegram for Margery. She took it and went upstairs. I presumed it was a message of condolence from one of Charlie’s friends who had just heard of his death. Bill went to change and Janet and I went up to the drawing–room and got the bridge table out. She took off her hat and put it on the piano.

‘It’s no good being hypocritical.’ she said. ‘Of course Margery has been frightfully upset, but she must pull herself together now. A rubber of bridge will help her to get back to her normal state. Naturally I’m dreadfully sorry about poor Charlie, but as far as he was concerned I don’t believe he’d ever have got over Margery’s leaving him and one can’t deny that it has made things much easier for her. She wired to Gerry this morning.’

‘What about?’

‘To tell him about poor Charlie.’

At that moment the maid came to the room.

‘Will you go up to Mrs Bishop, please, ma’am? She wants to see you.’

‘Yes, of course.’

She went out of the room quickly and I was left alone. Bill joined me presently and we had a drink. At last Janet came back. She handed a telegram to me. It read as follows:

For God’s sake await letter. Gerry’What do you think it means?’ she asked me. ‘What it says,’ I replied. ‘Idiot! Of course I’ve told Margery that it doesn’t mean anything, but she’s rather worried. It must have crossed her cable telling him that Charles was dead. I don’t think she feels very much like bridge after all. I mean, it would be rather bad form to play on the very day her husband has been buried.’ ‘Quite,’ I said.

‘Of course he may wire in answer to the cable. He’s sure to do that, isn’t he? The only thing we can do now is to sit tight and wait for his letter.’

I saw no object in continuing the conversation. I left. In a couple of days Janet rang me up to tell me that Margery had received a telegram of condolence from Morton. She repeated it to me:

Dreadfully distressed to hear sad news. Deeply sympathize with your great grief.Love. Gerry’What do you think of it?’ she asked me.

‘I think it’s very proper.’

‘Of course he couldn’t say he was as pleased as Punch, could he?’ ‘Not with any delicacy.’

‘And he did put in love.’

I imagined how those women had examined the two telegrams from every point of view and scrutinized every word to press from it every possible shade of meaning. I almost heard their interminable conversations.’I don’t know what’ll happen to Margery if he lets her down now,’ Janet went on. ‘Of course it remains to be seen if he’s a gentleman.’

‘Rot,’ I said and rang off quickly.

In the course of the following days I dined with the Marshes a couple of times. Margery looked tired. I guessed that she awaited the letter that was on the way with sickening anxiety. Grief and fear had worn her to a shadow, she seemed very fragile now and she had acquired a spiritual look that I had never seen in her before. She was very gentle, very grateful for every kindness shown her, and in her smile, unsure and a little timid, was an infinite pathos. Her helplessness was very appealing. But Morton was several thousand miles away. Then one morning Janet rang me up.

‘The letter has come. Margery says I can show it to you. Will you come round?’

Her tense voice told me everything. When I arrived Janet gave it to me. I read it. It was a very careful letter and I guessed that Morton had written it a good many times. It was very kind and he had evidently taken great pains to avoid saying anything that could possibly wound Margery; but what transpired was his terror. It was obvious that he was shaking in his shoes. He had felt apparently that the best way to cope with the situation was to be mildly facetious and he made very good fun of the white people in the colony. What would they say if Margery suddenly turned up? He would be given the order of the boot pretty damn quick. People thought the East was free and easy; it wasn’t, it was more suburban than Clapham. He loved Margery far too much to bear the thoughts of those horrible women out there turning up their noses at her. And besides he had been sent to a station ten days from anywhere; she couldn’t live in his bungalow exactly and of course there wasn’t a hotel, and his work took him out into the jungle for days at a time. It was no place for a woman anyhow. He told her how much she meant to him, but she mustn’t bother about him and he couldn’t help thinking it would be better if she went back to her husband. He would never forgive himself if he thought he had come between her and Charlie. Yes, I am quite sure it had been a difficult letter to write.

‘Of course he didn’t know then that Charlie was dead. I’ve told Margery that changes everything.’

‘Does she agree with you?’

‘I think she’s being rather unreasonable. What do you make of the letter?’ ‘Well, it’s quite plain that he doesn’t want her.’

‘He wanted her badly enough two months ago.’

‘It’s astonishing what a change of air and a change of scene will do for you. It must seem to him already like a year since he left London. He’s back among his old friends and his old interests. My dear, it’s no good Margery kidding herself; the life there has taken him back and there’s no place for her.’

‘I’ve advised her to ignore the letter and go straight out to him.’

‘I hope she’s too sensible to expose herself to a very terrible rebuff.’

‘But then what’s to happen to her? Oh, it’s too cruel. She’s the best woman in the world. She has real goodness.’

‘It’s funny if you come to think of it, it’s her goodness that has caused all the trouble. Why on earth didn’t she have an affair with Morton? Charlie would have known nothing about it and wouldn’t have been a penny the worse. She and Morton could have had a grand time and when he went away they could have parted with the consciousness that a pleasant episode had come to a graceful end. It would have been a jolly recollection, and she could have gone back to Charlie satisfied and rested and continued to make him the excellent wife she had always been.’

Janet pursed her lips. She gave me a look of disdain.

‘There is such a thing as virtue, you know.’

‘Virtue be damned. A virtue that only causes havoc and unhappiness is worth nothing. You can call it virtue if you like. I call it cowardice.’

‘The thought of being unfaithful to Charlie while she was living with him revolted her. There are women like that, you know.’

‘Good gracious, she could have remained faithful to him in spirit while she was being unfaithful to him in the flesh. That is a feat of legerdemain that women find it easy to accomplish.’

‘What an odious cynic you are.’

‘If it’s cynical to look truth in the face and exercise common sense in the affairs of life, then certainly I’m a cynic and odious if you like. Let’s face it, Margery’s a middle–aged woman, Charlie was fifty–five and they’d been married for sixteen years. It was natural enough that she should lose her head over a young man who made a fuss of her. But don’t call it love. It was physiology. She was a fool to take anything he said seriously. It wasn’t himself speaking, it was his starved sex, he’d suffered from sexual starvation, at least as far as white women are concerned, for four years; it’s monstrous that she should seek to ruin his life by holding him to the wild promises he made then. It was an accident that Margery took his fancy; he wanted her, and because he couldn’t get her wanted her more. I dare say he thought it love; believe me, it was only letch. If they’d gone to bed together Charlie would be alive today. It’s her damned virtue that caused the whole trouble.’

‘How stupid you are. Don’t you see that she couldn’t help herself? She just doesn’t happen to be a loose woman.’

‘I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.’

‘Oh, shut up. I didn’t ask you to come here in order to make yourself absolutely beastly.’

‘What did you ask me to come here for?’

‘Gerry is your friend. You introduced him to Margery. If she’s in the soup it’s on his account. But you are the cause of the whole trouble. It’s your duty to write to him and tell him he must do the right thing by her.’

‘I’m damned if I will,’ I said.

‘Then you’d better go.’

I started to do so.

‘Well, at all events it’s a mercy that Charlie’s life was insured,’ said Janet. Then I turned on her.

‘And you have the nerve to call me a cynic’

I will not repeat the opprobious word I flung at her as I slammed the door behind me. But Janet is all the same a very nice woman. I often think it would be great fun to be married to her.

THE MAN WITH THE SCAR

IT was on account of the scar that I first noticed him, for it ran, broad and red, in a great crescent from his temple to his chin. It must have been due to a formidable wound and I wondered whether this had been caused by a sabre or by a fragment of shell. It was unexpected on that round, fat and good-humoured face. He had small and undistinguished features, and his expression was artless. His face went oddly with his corpulent body. He was a powerful man of more than common height. I never saw him in anything but a very shabby grey suit, a khaki shirt and a battered sombrero. He was far from clean. He used to come into the Palace Hotel at Guatemala City every day at cocktail time and strolling leisurely round the bar offer lottery tickets for sale. If this was the way he made his living it must have been a poor one for I never saw anyone buy, but now and then I saw him offered a drink. He never refused it. He threaded his way among the tables with a sort of rolling walk as though he were accustomed to traverse long distances on foot, paused at each table, with a little smile mentioned the numbers he had for sale and then, when no notice was taken of him, with the same smile passed on. I think he was for the most part a trifle the worse for liquor.

I was standing at the bar one evening, my foot on the rail, with an acquaintance — they make a very good dry Martini at the Palace Hotel in Guatemala City — when the man with the scar came up. I shook my head as for the twentieth time since my arrival he held out for my inspection his lottery tickets. But my companion nodded affably.

“Que tal, general? How is life?”

“Not so bad. Business is none too good, but it might be worse.”

“What will you have, general?”

“A brandy.”

He tossed it down and put the glass back on the bar. He nodded to my acquaintance.

“Gracias. Hasta luego.”

Then he turned away and offered his tickets to the men who were standing next to us.

“Who is your friend?” I asked. “That’s a terrific scar on his face.”

“It doesn’t add to his beauty, does it? He’s an exile from Nicaragua. He’s a ruffian of course and a bandit, but not a bad fellow. I give him a few pesos now and then. He was a revolutionary general, and if his ammunition hadn’t given out he’d have upset the government and be Minister of War now instead of selling lottery tickets in Guatemala. They captured him, along with his staff, such as it was, and tried him by court-martial. Such things are rather summary in these countries, you know, and he was sentenced to be shot at dawn. I guess he knew what was coming to him when he was caught. He spent the night in gaol and he and the others, there were five of them altogether, passed the time playing poker. They used matches for chips. He told me he’d never had such a run of bad luck in his life; they were playing with a short pack, Jacks to open, but he never held a card; he never improved more than half a dozen times in the whole sitting and no sooner did he buy a new stack than he lost it. When day broke and the soldiers came into the cell to fetch them for execution he had lost more matches than a reasonable man could use in a lifetime.

“They were led into the patio of the gaol and placed against a wall, the five of them side by side, with the firing party facing them. There was a pause and our friend asked the officer in charge of them what the devil they were keeping him waiting for. The officer said that the general commanding the government troops wished to attend the execution and they awaited his arrival.

“‘Then I have time to smoke another cigarette,’ said our friend. ‘He was always unpunctual.’

“But he had barely lit it when the general — it was San Ignacio, by the way: I don’t know whether you ever met him — followed by his A.D.C. came into the patio. The usual formalities were performed and San Ignacio asked the condemned men whether there was anything they wished before the execution took place. Four of the five shook their heads, but our friend spoke.

“‘Yes, I should like to say good-bye to my wife.’

“‘Bueno,’ said the general, ‘I have no objection to that. Where is she?’

“‘She is waiting at the prison door.’

“‘Then it will not cause a delay of more than five minutes.’

“‘Hardly that, Senor General,’ said our friend.

“‘Have him placed on one side.’

“Two soldiers advanced and between them the condemned rebel walked to the spot indicated. The officer in command of the firing squad on a nod from the general gave an order, there was a ragged report, and the four men fell. They fell strangely, not together, but one after the other, with movements that were almost grotesque, as though they were puppets in a toy theatre. The officer went up to them and into one who was still alive emptied two barrels of his revolver. Our friend finished his cigarette and threw away the stub.

“There was a little stir at the gateway. A woman came into the patio, with quick steps, and then, her hand on her heart, stopped suddenly. She gave a cry and with outstretched arms ran forward.

“‘Caramba,’ said the General.

“She was in black, with a veil over her hair, and her face was dead white. She was hardly more than a girl, a slim creature, with little regular features and enormous eyes. But they were distraught with anguish. Her loveliness was such that as she ran, her mouth slightly open and the agony of her face beautiful, a gasp of surprise was wrung from those indifferent soldiers who looked at her.

“The rebel advanced a step or two to meet her. She flung herself into his arms and with a hoarse cry of passion: alma de mi corazôn, soul of my heart, he pressed his lips to hers. And at the same moment he drew a knife from his ragged shirt — I haven’t a notion how he managed to retain possession of it — and stabbed her in the neck. The blood spurted from the cut vein and dyed his shirt. Then he flung his arms round her and once more pressed his lips to hers.

“It happened so quickly that many did not know what had occurred, but from the others burst a cry of horror; they sprang forward and seized him. They loosened his grasp and the girl would have fallen if the A.D.C. had not caught her. She was unconscious. They laid her on the ground and with dismay on their faces stood round watching her. The rebel knew where he was striking and it was impossible to staunch the blood. In a moment the A.D.C. who had been kneeling by her side rose.

“‘She’s dead,’ he whispered.

“The rebel crossed himself.

“‘Why did you do it?” asked the general.

“‘I loved her.’

“A sort of sigh passed through those men crowded together and they looked with strange faces at the murderer. The general stared at him for a while in silence.

“‘It was a noble gesture,’ he said at last. T cannot execute this man. Take my car and have him led to the frontier. Senor, I offer you the homage which is due from one brave man to another.’ “A murmur of approbation broke from those who listened. The A.D.C. tapped the rebel on the shoulder, and between the two soldiers without a word he marched to the waiting car.”

My friend stopped and for a little I was silent. I must explain that he was a Guatemalecan and spoke to me in Spanish. I have translated what he told me as well as I could, but I have made no attempt to tone down his rather high-flown language. To tell the truth I think it suits the story.

“But how then did he get the scar?” I asked at length.

“Oh, that was due to a bottle that burst when I was opening it. A bottle of ginger ale.”

“I never liked it,” said I.

THE CLOSED SHOP

Nothing would induce me to tell the name of the happy country in which the incidents occurred that I am constrained to relate; but I see no harm in admitting that it is a free and independent state on the continent of America. This is vague enough in all conscience and can give rise to no diplomatic incident. Now the president of this free and independent state had an eye to a pretty woman and there came to his capital, a wide and sunny town with a plaza, a cathedral that was not without dignity, and a few old Spanish houses, a young person from Michigan of such a pleasing aspect that his heart went out to her. He lost no time in declaring his passion and was gratified to learn that it was returned, but he was mortified to discover that the young person regarded his possession of a wife and her possession of a husband as a bar to their union. She had a feminine weakness for marriage. Though it seemed unreasonable to the president, he was not the man to refuse a pretty woman the gratification of her whim and promised to make such arrangements as would enable him to offer her wedlock. He called his attorneys together and put the matter before them. He had long thought, he said, that for a progressive country their marriage laws were remarkably out of date and he proposed therefore radically to amend them. The attorneys retired and after a brief interval devised a divorce law that was satisfactory to the president. But the state of which I write was always careful to do things in a constitutional way, for it was a highly civilized, democratic, and reputable country. A president who respects himself and his oath of office cannot promulgate a law, even if it is to his own interest, without adhering to certain forms, and these things take time; the president had barely signed the decree that made the new divorce law valid when a revolution broke out and he was very unfortunately hanged on a lamp–post in the plaza in front of the cathedral that was not without dignity. The young person of pleasing aspect left town in a hurry, but the law remained. Its terms were simple. On the payment of one hundred dollars gold and after a residence of thirty days a man could divorce his wife or a wife her husband without even apprising the other party of the intended step. Your wife might tell you that she was going to spend a month with her aged mother and one morning at breakfast when you looked through your mail you might receive a letter from her informing you that she had divorced you and was already married to another.

Now it was not long before the happy news spread here and there that at a reasonable distance from New York was a country, the capital of which had an equable climate and tolerable accommodation, where a woman could release herself, expeditiously and with economy, from the irksome bonds of matrimony. The fact that the operation could be performed without the husband’s knowledge saved her from those preliminary and acrimonious discussions that are so wearing to the nerves. Every woman knows that however much a man may argue about a proposition he will generally accept a fact with resignation. Tell him you want a Rolls–Royce and he will say he can’t afford it, but buy it and he will sign his cheque like a lamb. So in a very short time beautiful women in considerable numbers began to come down to the pleasant, sunny town; tired business women and women of fashion, women of pleasure and women of leisure; they came from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, they came from Georgia and they came from Dakota, they came from all the states in the Union. The passenger accommodation on the ships of the United Fruit Line was only just adequate to the demand, and if you wanted a stateroom to yourself you had to engage it six months in advance. Prosperity descended upon the capital of this enterprising state and in a very little while there was not a lawyer in it who did not own a Ford car. Don Agosto, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, went to the expense of building several bathrooms, but he did not grudge it; he was making a fortune, and he never passed the lamp–post on which the outgoing president had been hanged without giving it a jaunty wave of his hand.

‘He was a great man,’ he said. ‘One day they will erect a statue to him.’ I have spoken as though it were only women who availed themselves of this convenient and reasonable law, and this might indicate that in the United States it is they rather than men who desire release from the impediment of Holy Matrimony. I have no reason to believe that this is so. Though it was women in great majority who travelled to this country to get a divorce, I ascribe this to the fact that it is always easy for them to get away for six weeks (a week there, a week back, and thirty days to establish a domicile) but it is difficult for men to leave their affairs so long. It is true that they could go there during their summer holidays, but then the heat is somewhat oppressive; and besides, there are no golf links; it is reasonable enough to suppose that many a man will hesitate to divorce his wife when he can only do it at the cost of a month’s golf. There were of course two or three males spending their thirty days at the Grand Hotel, but they were generally, for a reason that is obscure, commercial travellers. I can but imagine that by the nature of their avocations they were able at one and the same time to pursue freedom and profit.

Be this as it may, the fact remains that the inmates of the Grand Hotel were for the most part women, and very gay it was in the patio at luncheon and at dinner when they sat at little square tables under the arches discussing their matrimonial troubles and drinking champagne. Don Agosto did a roaring trade with the generals and colonels (there were more generals than colonels in the army of this state), the lawyers, bankers, merchants, and the young sparks of the town who came to look at these beautiful creatures. But the perfect is seldom realized in this world. There is always something that is not quite right and women engaged in getting rid of their husbands are very properly in an agitated condition. It makes them at times hard to please. Now it must be confessed that this delightful little city, notwithstanding its manifold advantages, somewhat lacked places of amusement. There was but one cinema and this showed films that had been wandering too long from their happy home in Hollywood. In the daytime you could have consultations with your lawyer, polish your nails, and do a little shopping, but the evenings were intolerable. There were many complaints that thirty days was a long time and more than one impatient young thing asked her lawyer why they didn’t put a little pep into their law and do the whole job in eight and forty hours. Don Agosto, however, was a man of resource, and presently he had an inspiration: he engaged a troupe of wandering Guatemalecans who played the marimba. There is no music in the world that sets the toes so irresistibly tingling and in a little while everyone in the patio began dancing. It is of course obvious that twenty–five beautiful women cannot dance with three commercial travellers, but there were all these generals and colonels and there were all the young sparks of the town. They danced divinely and they had great liquid black eyes. The hours flew, the days tripped one upon the heels of the other so quickly that the month passed before you realized it, and more than one of Don Agosto’s guests when she bade him farewell confessed that she would willingly have stayed longer. Don Agosto was radiant. He liked to see people enjoy themselves. The marimba band was worth twice the money he paid for it, and it did his heart good to see his ladies dance with the gallant officers and the young men of the town. Since Don Agosto was thrifty he always turned off the electric light on the stairs and in the passages at ten o’clock at night and the gallant officers and the young men of the town improved their English wonderfully.

Everything went as merrily as a marriage bell, if I may use a phrase that, however hackneyed, in this connexion is irresistible, till one day Madame Coralie came to the conclusion that she had had enough of it. For one man’s meat is another man’s poison. She dressed herself and went to call on her friend Carmencita. After she had in a few voluble words stated the purpose of her visit, Carmencita called a maid and told her to run and fetch La Gorda. They had a matter of importance which they wished to discuss with her. La Gorda, a woman of ample proportions with a heavy moustache, soon joined them, and over a bottle of Malaga the three of them held a momentous conversation. The result of it was that they indited a letter to the president asking for an audience. The new president was a hefty young man in the early thirties who, a few years before, had been a stevedore in the employment of an American firm, and he had risen to his present exalted station by a natural eloquence and an effective use of his gun when he wanted to make a point or emphasize a statement. When one of his secretaries placed the letter before him he laughed.

‘What do those three old faggots want with me?’

But he was a good–natured fellow and accessible. He did not forget that he had been elected by the people, as one of the people, to protect the people. He had also during his early youth been employed for some months by Madame Coralie to run errands. He told his secretary that he would see them at ten o’clock next morning. They went at the appointed hour to the palace and were led up a noble stairway to the audience chamber; the official who conducted them knocked softly on the door; a barred judas was opened and a suspicious eye appeared. The president had no intention of suffering the fate of his predecessor if he could help it and no matter who his visitors were did not receive them without precaution. The official gave the three ladies’ names, the door was opened, but not too wide, and they slipped in. It was a handsome room and various secretaries at little tables, in their shirtsleeves and with a revolver on each hip, were busy typing. One or two other young men, heavily armed, were lying on sofas reading the papers and smoking cigarettes. The president, also in his shirtsleeves, with a revolver in his belt, was standing with his thumbs in the sleeve–holes of his waistcoat. He was tall and stout, of a handsome and even dignified presence.

‘Qué tal?’ he cried, jovially, with a flash of his white teeth. ‘What brings you here, señoras?’

‘How well you’re looking, Don Manuel,’ said La Gorda. ‘You are a fine figure of a man.’

He shook hands with them, and his staff, ceasing their strenuous activity, leaned back and cordially waved their hands to the three ladies. They were old friends, and the greetings, if a trifle sardonic, were hearty. I must disclose the fact now (which I could without doubt do in a manner so discreet that I might be misunderstood; but if you have to say something you may just as well say it plainly as not) that these three ladies were the Madams of the three principal brothels in the capital of this free and independent state. La Gorda and Carmencita were of Spanish origin and were very decently dressed in black, with black silk shawls over their heads, but Madame Coralie was French and she wore a toque. They were all of mature age and of modest demeanour.

The president made them sit down, and offered them madeira and cigarettes, but they refused.

‘No, thank you, Don Manuel,’ said Madame Coralie. ‘It is on business that we have come to see you.’

‘Well, what can I do for you?’

La Gorda and Carmencita looked at Madame Coralie and Madame Coralie looked at La Gorda and Carmencita. They nodded and she saw that they expected her to be their spokeswoman.

‘Well, Don Manuel, it is like this. We are three women who have worked hard for many years and not a breath of scandal has ever tarnished our good names. There are not in all the Americas three more distinguished houses than ours and they are a credit to this beautiful city. Why, only last year I spent five hundred dollars to supply my sala principal with plate–glass mirrors. We have always been respectable and we have paid our taxes with regularity. It is hard now that the fruits of our labours should be snatched away from us. I do not hesitate to say that after so many years of honest and conscientious attention to business it is unjust that we should have to submit to such treatment.’

The president was astounded.

‘But, Coralie, my dear, I do not know what you mean. Has anyone dared to claim money from you that the law does not sanction or that I know nothing about?’

He gave his secretaries a suspicious glance. They tried to look innocent, but though they were, only succeeded in looking uneasy.

‘It is the law we complain of. Ruin stares us in the face.’

‘Ruin?’

‘So long as this new divorce law is in existence we can do no business and we may just as well shut up our beautiful houses.’

Then Madame Coralie explained in a manner so frank that I prefer to paraphrase her speech that owing to this invasion of the town by beautiful ladies from a foreign land the three elegant houses on which she and her two friends paid rates and taxes were utterly deserted. The young men of fashion preferred to spend their evenings at the Grand Hotel where they received for soft words entertainment which at the regular establishments they could only have got for hard cash.

‘You cannot blame them,’ said the president.

‘I don’t,’ cried Madame Coralie. ‘I blame the women. They have no right to come and take the bread out of our mouths. Don Manuel, you are one of the people, you are not one of these aristocrats; what will the country say if you allow us to be driven out of business by blacklegs? I ask you is it just, is it honest?’

‘But what can I do?’ said the president. ‘I cannot lock them up in their rooms for thirty days. How am I to blame if these foreigners have no sense of decency?’

‘It’s different for a poor girl,’ said La Gorda. ‘She has her way to make. But that these women do that sort of thing when they’re not obliged to, no, that I shall never understand.’

‘It is a bad and wicked law,’ said Carmencita.

The president sprang to his feet and threw his arms akimbo.

‘You are not going to ask me to abrogate a law that has brought peace and plenty to this country. I am of the people and I was elected by the people, and the prosperity of my fatherland is very near my heart. Divorce is our staple industry and the law shall be repealed only over my dead body.’

‘Oh, Maria Santisima, that it should come to this,’ said Carmencita. ‘And me with two daughters in a convent in New Orleans. Ah, in this business one often has unpleasantness, but I always consoled myself by thinking that my daughters would marry well, and when the time came for me to retire they would inherit my business. Do you think I can keep them in a convent in New Orleans for nothing?’

‘And who is going to keep my son at Harvard if I have to close my house, Don Manuel?’ asked La Gorda.

‘As for myself,’ said Madame Coralie, ‘I do not care. I shall return to France. My dear mother is eighty–seven years of age and she cannot live very much longer. It will be a comfort to her if I spend her last remaining years by her side. But it is the injustice of it that hurts. You have spent many happy evenings in my house, Don Manuel, and I am wounded that you should let us be treated like this. Did you not tell me yourself that it was the proudest day of your life when you entered as an honoured guest the house in which you had once been employed as errand boy?’

‘I do not deny it. I stood champagne all round.’ Don Manuel walked up and down the large hall, shrugging his shoulders as he went, and now and then, deep in thought, he gesticulated. ‘I am of the people, elected by the people,’ he cried, ‘and the fact is, these women are blacklegs.’ He turned to his secretaries with a dramatic gesture. ‘It is a stain on my administration. It is against all my principles to allow unskilled foreign labour to take the bread out of the mouths of honest and industrious people. These ladies are quite right to come to me and appeal for my protection. I will not allow the scandal to continue.’

It was of course a pointed and effective speech, but all who heard it knew that it left things exactly where they were. Madame Coralie powdered her nose and gave it, a commanding organ, a brief look in her pocket mirror.

‘Of course I know what human nature is,’ she said, ‘and I can well understand that time hangs heavily on the hands of these creatures.’

‘We could build a golf–course,’ hazarded one of the secretaries. ‘It is true that this would only occupy them by day.’

‘If they want men why can’t they bring them with them?’ said La Gorda.

‘Caramba!’ cried the president, and with that stood on a sudden quite still. ‘There is the solution.’

He had not reached his exalted station without being a man of insight and resource. He beamed.

‘We will amend the law. Men shall come in as before without let or hindrance, but women only accompanied by their husbands or with their written consent.’ He saw the look of consternation which his secretaries gave him, and he waved his hand. ‘But the immigration authorities shall receive instructions to interpret the word husband with the widest latitude.’

‘Maria Santisima!’ cried Madame Coralie. ‘If they come with a friend he will take care that no one else interferes with them and our customers will return to the houses where for so long they have been so hospitably entertained. Don Manuel, you are a great man and one of these days they will erect a statue to you.’

It is often the simplest expedients that settle the most formidable difficulties. The law was briefly amended according to the terms of Don Manuel’s suggestion and, whereas prosperity continued to pour its blessings on the wide and sunny capital of this free and independent state, Madame Coralie was enabled profitably to pursue her useful avocations, Carmencita’s two daughters completed their expensive education in the convent at New Orleans, and La Gorda’s son successfully graduated at Harvard.

THE BUM

GOD knows how often I had lamented that I had not half the time I needed to do half the things I wanted. I could not remember when last I had had a moment to myself. I had often amused my fancy with the prospect of just one week’s complete idleness. Most of us when not busy working are busy playing; we ride, play tennis or golf, swim or gamble; but I saw myself doing nothing at all. I would lounge through the morning, dawdle through the afternoon and loaf through the evening. My mind would be a slate and each passing hour a sponge that wiped out the scribblings written on it by the world of sense. Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. Cleopatra dissolved in wine a priceless pearl, but she gave it to Antony to drink; when you waste the brief golden hours you take the beaker in which the gem is melted and dash its contents to the ground. The gesture is grand and like all grand gestures absurd. That of course is its excuse. In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. But the professional writer is seldom a disinterested reader. I wished my reading to be but another form of idleness. I made up my mind that if ever the happy day arrived when I could enjoy untroubled leisure I would complete an enterprise that had always tempted me, but which hitherto, like an explorer making reconnaissances into an undiscovered country, I had done little more than enter upon: I would read the entire works of Nick Carter.

But I had always fancied myself choosing my moment with surroundings to my liking, not having it forced upon me; and when I was suddenly faced with nothing to do and had to make the best of it (like a steamship acquaintance whom in the wide waste of the Pacific Ocean you have invited to stay with you in London and who turns up without warning and with all his luggage) I was not a little taken aback. I had come to Vera Cruz from Mexico City to catch one of the Ward Company’s white cool ships to Yucatan; and found to my dismay that, a dock strike having been declared over-night, my ship would not put in. I was stuck in Vera Cruz. I took a room in the Hotel Diligencias overlooking the plaza, and spent the morning looking at the sights of the town. I wandered down side streets and peeped into quaint courts. I sauntered through the parish church; it is picturesque with its gargoyles and flying buttresses, and the salt wind and the blazing sun have patined its harsh and massive walls with the mellowness of age; its cupola is covered with white and blue tiles. Then I found that I had seen all that was to be seen and I sat down in the coolness of the arcade that surrounded the square and ordered a drink. The sun beat down on the plaza with a merciless splendour. The coco-palms drooped dusty and bedraggled. Great black buzzards perched on them for a moment uneasily, swooped to the ground to gather some bit of offal, and then with lumbering wings flew up to the church tower. I watched the people crossing the square; negroes, Indians, Creoles and Spanish, the motley people of the Spanish Main; and they varied in colour from ebony to ivory. As the morning wore on, the tables around me filled up, chiefly with men, who had come to have a drink before luncheon, for the most part in white ducks, but some notwithstanding the heat in the dark clothes of professional respectability. A small band, a guitarist, a blind fiddler and a harpist, played rag-time and after every other tune the guitarist came round with a plate. I had already bought the local paper and I was adamant to the newsvendors who pertinaciously sought to sell me more copies of the same sheet. I refused, oh, twenty times at least, the solicitations of grimy urchins who wanted to shine my spotless shoes; and having come to the end of my small change I could only shake my head at the beggars who importuned me. They gave one no peace. Little Indian women, in shapeless rags, each one with a baby tied in the shawl on her back, held out skinny hands and in a whimper recited a dismal screed; blind men were led up to my table by small boys; the maimed, the halt, the deformed exhibited the sores and the monstrosities with which nature or accident had afflicted them; and half naked, underfed children whined endlessly their demand for coppers. But these kept their eyes open for the fat policeman who would suddenly dart out on them with a thong and give them a sharp cut on the back or over the head. Then they would scamper, only to return again when, exhausted by the exercise of so much energy, he relapsed into lethargy.

But suddenly my attention was attracted by a beggar who, unlike the rest of them and indeed the people sitting round me, swarthy and black-haired, had hair and beard of a red so vivid that it was startling. His beard was ragged and his long mop of hair looked as though it had not been brushed for months. He wore only a pair of trousers and a cotton singlet, but they were tatters, grimy and foul, that barely held together. I have never seen anyone so thin; his legs, his naked arms were but skin and bone and through the rents of his singlet you saw every rib of his wasted body; you could count the bones of his dust-covered feet. Of that starveling band he was easily the most abject. He was not old, he could not well have been more than forty, and I could not but ask myself what had brought him to this pass. It was absurd to think that he would not have worked if work he had been able to get. He was the only one of the beggars who did not speak. The rest of them poured forth their litany of woe and if it did not bring the alms they asked continued until an impatient word from you chased them away. He said nothing. I suppose he felt that his look of destitution was all the appeal he needed. He did not even hold out his hand, he merely looked at you, but with such wretchedness in his eyes, such despair in his attitude, it was dreadful; he stood on and on, silent and immobile, gazing steadfastly, and then, if you took no notice of him, he moved slowly to the next table. If he was given nothing he showed neither disappointment nor anger. If someone offered him a coin he stepped forward a little, stretched out his claw-like hand, took it without a word of thanks and impassively went his way. I had nothing to give him and when he came to me, so that he should not wait in vain, I shook my head.

“Dispense Usted por Dios,” I said, using the polite Castillian formula with which the Spaniards refuse a beggar.

But he paid no attention to what I said. He stood in front of me, for as long as he stood at the other tables, looking at me with tragic eyes. I have never seen such a wreck of humanity. There was something terrifying in his appearance. He did not look quite sane. At length he passed on.

It was one o’clock and I had lunch. When I awoke from my siesta? it was still very hot, but towards evening a breath of air coming in through the windows which I had at last ventured to open tempted me into the plaza. I sat down under my arcade and ordered a long drink. Presently people in greater numbers filtered into the open space from the surrounding streets, the tables in the restaurants round it filled up, and in the kiosk in the middle the band began to play. The crowd grew thicker. On the free benches people sat huddled together like dark grapes clustered on a stalk. There was a lively hum of conversation. The big black buzzards flew screeching overhead, swooping down when they saw something to pick up, or scurrying away from under the feet of the passers-by. As twilight descended they swarmed, it seemed from all parts of the town, towards the church tower; they circled heavily about it and hoarsely crying, squabbling and jangling, settled themselves uneasily to roost. And again bootblacks begged me to have my shoes cleaned, newsboys pressed dank papers upon me, beggars whined their plaintive demand for alms. I saw once more that strange, red-bearded fellow and watched him stand motionless, with the crushed and piteous air, before one table after another. He did not stop before mine. I supposed he remembered me from the morning and having failed to get anything from me then thought it useless to try again. You do not often see a red-haired Mexican, and because it was only in Russia that I had seen men of so destitute a mien I asked myself if he was by chance a Russian. It accorded well enough with the Russian fecklessness that he should have allowed himself to sink to such a depth of degradation. Yet he had not a Russian face; his emaciated features were clear-cut, and his blue eyes were not set in the head in a Russian manner; I wondered if he could be a sailor, English, Scandinavian or American, who had deserted his ship and by degrees sunk to this pitiful condition. He disappeared. Since there was nothing else to do, I stayed on till I got hungry, and when I had eaten came back. I sat on till the thinning crowd suggested it was bed-time. I confess that the day had seemed long and I wondered how many similar days I should be forced to spend there.

But I woke after a little while and could not get to sleep again. My room was stifling. I opened the shutters and looked out at the church. There was no moon, but the bright stars faintly lit its outline. The buzzards were closely packed on the cross above the cupola and on the edges of the tower, and now and then they moved a little. The effect was uncanny. And then, I have no notion why, that red scarecrow recurred to my mind and I had suddenly a strange feeling that I had seen him before. It was so vivid that it drove away from me the possibility of sleep. I felt sure that I had come across him, but when and where I could not tell. I tried to picture the surroundings in which he might take his place, but I could see no more than a dim figure against a background of fog. As the dawn approached it grew a little cooler and I was able to sleep.

I spent my second day at Vera Cruz as I had spent the first. But I watched for the coming of the red-haired beggar, and as he stood at the tables near mine I examined him with attention. I felt certain now that I had seen him somewhere. I even felt certain that I had known him and talked to him, but I still could recall none of the circumstances. Once more he passed my table without stopping and when his eyes met mine I looked in them for some gleam of recollection. Nothing. I wondered if I had made a mistake and thought I had seen him in the same way as sometimes, by some queer motion of the brain, in the act of doing something you are convinced that you are repeating an action that you have done at some past time. I could not get out of my head the impression that at some moment he had entered into my life. I racked my brains. I was sure now that he was either English or American. But I was shy of addressing him. I went over in my mind the possible occasions when I might have met him. Not to be able to place him exasperated me as it does when you try to remember a name that is on the tip of your tongue and yet eludes you. The day wore on.

Another day came, another morning, another evening. It was Sunday and the plaza was more crowded than ever. The tables under the arcade were packed. As usual the red-haired beggar came along, a terrifying figure in his silence, his threadbare rags and his pitiful distress. He was standing in front of a table only two from mine, mutely beseeching, but without a gesture. Then I saw the policeman who at intervals tried to protect the public from the importunities of all these beggars sneak round a column and give him a resounding whack with his thong. His thin body winced, but he made no protest and showed no resentment; he seemed to accept the stinging blow as in the ordinary course of things and with his slow movements slunk away into the gathering night of the plaza. But the cruel stripe had whipped my memory and suddenly I remembered.

Not his name, that escaped me still, but everything else. He must have recognised me, for I have not changed very much in twenty years, and that was why after that first morning he had never paused in front of my table. Yes, it was twenty years since I had known him. I was spending a winter in Rome and every evening I used to dine in a restaurant in the Via Sistina where you got excellent macaroni and a good bottle of wine. It was frequented by a little band of English and American art students, and one or two writers; and we used to stay late into the night engaged in interminable arguments upon art and literature. He used to come in with a young painter who was a friend of his. He was only a boy then, he could not have been more than twenty-two; and with his blue eyes, straight nose and red hair he was pleasing to look at. I remembered that he spoke a great deal of Central America, he had had a job with the American Fruit Company, but had thrown it over because he wanted to be a writer. He was not popular among us because he was arrogant and we were none of us old enough to take the arrogance of youth with tolerance. He thought us poor fish and did not hesitate to tell us so. He would not show us his work, because our praise meant nothing to him and he despised our censure. His vanity was enormous. It irritated us; but some of us were uneasily aware that it might perhaps be justified. Was it possible that the intense consciousness of genius that he had, rested on no grounds? He had sacrificed everything to be a writer. He was so certain of himself that he infected some of his friends with his own assurance.

I recalled his high spirits, his vitality, his confidence in the future and his disinterestedness. It was impossible that it was the same man, and yet I was sure of it. I stood up, paid for my drink and went out into the plaza to find him. My thoughts were in a turmoil. I was aghast. I had thought of him now and then and idly wondered what had become of him. I could never have imagined that he was reduced to this frightful misery. There are hundreds, thousands of youths who enter upon the hard calling of the arts with extravagant hopes; but for the most part they come to terms with their mediocrity and find somewhere in life a niche where they can escape starvation. This was awful. I asked myself what had happened. What hopes deferred had broken his spirit, what disappointments shattered him and what lost illusions ground him to the dust? I ashed myself if nothing could be done. I walked round the plaza. He was not in the arcades. There was no hope of finding him in the crowd that circled round the bandstand. The light was waning and I was afraid I had lost him. Then I passed the church and saw him sitting on the steps. I cannot describe what a lamentable object he looked. Life had taken him, rent him on its racks, torn him limb from limb, and then flung him, a bleeding wreck, on the stone steps of that church. I went up to him.

“Do you remember Rome?” I said.

He did not move. He did not answer. He took no more notice of me than if I were not standing before him. He did not look at me. His vacant blue eyes rested on the buzzards that were screaming and tearing at some object at the bottom of the steps. I did not know what to do. I took a yellow-backed note out of my pocket and pressed it in his hand. He did not give it a glance. But his hand moved a little, the thin claw-like fingers closed on the note and scrunched it up; he made it into a little ball and then edging it on to his thumb flicked it into the air so that it fell among the jangling buzzards. I turned my head instinctively and saw one of them seize it in his beak and fly off followed by two others screaming behind it. When I looked back the man was gone.

I stayed three more days in Vera Cruz. I never saw him again.

THE DREAM

It chanced that in August 1917 the work upon which I was then engaged obliged me to go from New York to Petrograd, and I was instructed for safety’s sake to travel by way of Vladivostok. I landed there in the morning and passed an idle day as best I could. The trans–Siberian train was due to start, so far as I remember, at about nine in the evening. I dined at the station restaurant by myself. It was crowded and I shared a small table with a man whose appearance entertained me. He was a Russian, a tall fellow, but amazingly stout, and he had so vast a paunch that he was obliged to sit well away from the table. His hands, small for his size, were buried in rolls of fat. His hair, long, dark, and thin, was brushed carefully across his crown in order to conceal his baldness, and his huge sallow face, with its enormous double chin, clean–shaven, gave you an impression of indecent nakedness. His nose was small, a funny little button upon that mass of flesh, and his black shining eyes were small too. But he had a large, red, and sensual mouth. He was dressed neatly enough in a black suit. It was not worn but shabby; it looked as if it had been neither pressed nor brushed since he had had it.

The service was bad and it was almost impossible to attract the attention of a waiter. We soon got into conversation. The Russian spoke good and fluent English. His accent was marked but not tiresome. He asked me many questions about myself and my plans, which–my occupation at the time making caution necessary–I answered with a show of frankness but with dissimulation. I told him I was a journalist. He asked me whether I wrote fiction and when I confessed that in my leisure moments I did, he began to talk of the later Russian novelists. He spoke intelligently. It was plain that he was a man of education.

By this time we had persuaded the waiter to bring us some cabbage soup, and my acquaintance pulled a small bottle of vodka from his pocket which he invited me to share. I do not know whether it was the vodka or the natural loquaciousness of his race that made him communicative, but presently he told me, unasked, a good deal about himself. He was of noble birth, it appeared, a lawyer by profession, and a radical. Some trouble with the authorities had made it necessary for him to be much abroad, but now he was on his way home. Business had detained him at Vladivostok, but he expected to start for Moscow in a week and if I went there he would be charmed to see me.

‘Are you married?’ he asked me.I did not see what business it was of his, but I told him that I was. He sighed a little.

‘I am a widower,’ he said. ‘My wife was a Swiss, a native of Geneva. She was a very cultivated woman. She spoke English, German, and Italian perfectly. French, of course, was her native tongue. Her Russian was much above the average for a foreigner. She had scarcely the trace of an accent.’

He called a waiter who was passing with a tray full of dishes and asked him, I suppose–for then I knew hardly any Russian–how much longer we were going to wait for the next course. The waiter, with a rapid but presumably reassuring exclamation, hurried on, and my friend sighed.

‘Since the revolution the waiting in restaurants has become abominable.’

He lighted his twentieth cigarette and I, looking at my watch, wondered whether I should get a square meal before it was time for me to start.

‘My wife was a very remarkable woman,’ he continued. ‘She taught languages at one of the best schools for the daughters of noblemen in Petrograd. For a good many years we lived together on perfectly friendly terms. She was, however, of a jealous temperament and unfortunately she loved me to distraction.’

It was difficult for me to keep a straight face. He was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. There is sometimes a certain charm in the rubicund and jovial fat man, but this saturnine obesity was repulsive.

‘I do not pretend that I was faithful to her. She was not young when I married her and we had been married for ten years. She was small and thin, and she had a bad complexion. She had a bitter tongue. She was a woman who suffered from a fury of possession, and she could not bear me to be attracted to anyone but her. She was jealous not only of the women I knew, but of my friends, my cat, and my books. On one occasion in my absence she gave away a coat of mine merely because I liked none of my coats so well. But I am of an equable temperament. I will not deny that she bored me, but I accepted her acrimonious disposition as an act of God and no more thought of rebelling against it than I would against bad weather or a cold in the head. I denied her accusations as long as it was possible to deny them, and when it was impossible I shrugged my shoulders and smoked a cigarette.

‘The constant scenes she made me did not very much affect me. I led my own life. Sometimes, indeed, I wondered whether it was passionate love she felt for me or passionate hate. It seemed to me that love and hate were very near allied.

‘So we might have continued to the end of the chapter if one night a very curious thing had not happened. I was awakened by a piercing scream from my wife. Startled, I asked her what was the matter. She told me that she had had a fearful nightmare; she had dreamt that I was trying to kill her. We lived at the top of a large house and the well round which the stairs climbed was broad. She had dreamt that just as we had arrived at our own floor I had caught hold of her and attempted to throw her over the balusters. It was six storeys to the stone floor at the bottom and it meant certain death.

‘She was much shaken. I did my best to soothe her. But next morning, and for two or three days after, she referred to the subject again and, notwithstanding my laughter, I saw that it dwelt in her mind. I could not help thinking of it either, for this dream showed me something that I had never suspected. She thought I hated her, she thought I would gladly be rid of her; she knew of course that she was insufferable, and at some time or other the idea had evidently occurred to her that I was capable of murdering her. The thoughts of men are incalculable and ideas enter our minds that we should be ashamed to confess. Sometimes I had wished that she might run away with a lover, sometimes that a painless and sudden death might give me my freedom; but never, never had the idea come to me that I might deliberately rid myself of an intolerable burden.

‘The dream made an extraordinary impression upon both of us. It frightened my wife, and she became for a little less bitter and more tolerant. But when I walked up the stairs to our apartment it was impossible for me not to look over the balusters and reflect how easy it would be to do what she had dreamt. The balusters were dangerously low. A quick gesture and the thing was done. It was hard to put the thought out of my mind. Then some months later my wife awakened me one night. I was very tired and I was exasperated. She was white and trembling. She had had the dream again. She burst into tears and asked me if I hated her. I swore by all the saints of the Russian calendar that I loved her. At last she went to sleep again. It was more than I could do. I lay awake. I seemed to see her falling down the well of the stairs, and I heard her shriek and the thud as she struck the stone floor. I could not help shivering.’

The Russian stopped and beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He had told the story well and fluently so that I had listened with attention. There was still some vodka in the bottle; he poured it out and swallowed it at a gulp.

‘And how did your wife eventually die?’ I asked after a pause.

He took out a dirty handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

‘By an extraordinary coincidence she was found late one night at the bottom of the stairs with her neck broken.’

‘Who found her?’

‘She was found by one of the lodgers who came in shortly after the catastrophe.’

‘And where were you?’

I cannot describe the look he gave me of malicious cunning. His little black eyes sparkled.

‘I was spending the evening with a friend of mine. I did not come in till an hour later.’

At that moment the waiter brought us the dish of meat that we had ordered, and the Russian fell upon it with good appetite. He shovelled the food into his mouth in enormous mouthfuls.

I was taken aback. Had he really been telling me in this hardly veiled manner that he had murdered his wife? That obese and sluggish man did not look like a murderer; I could not believe that he would have had the courage. Or was he making a sardonic joke at my expense?

In a few minutes it was time for me to go and catch my train. I left him and I have not seen him since. But I have never been able to make up my mind whether he was serious or jesting.

THE TREASURE

RICHARD HARENGER was a happy man. Notwithstanding what the pessimists, from Ecclesiastes onwards, have said, this is not so rare a thing to find in this unhappy world, but Richard Harenger knew it, and that is a very rare thing indeed. The golden mean which the ancients so highly prized is out of fashion, and those who follow it must put up with polite derision from those who see no merit in self-restraint and no virtue in common-sense. Richard Harenger shrugged a polite and amused shoulder. Let others live dangerously, let others burn with a hard gemlike flame, let others stake their fortunes on the turn of a card, walk the tightrope that leads to glory or the grave, or hazard their lives for a cause, a passion or an adventure. He neither envied the fame their exploits brought them nor wasted his pity on them when their efforts ended in disaster.

But it must not be inferred from this that Richard Harenger was a selfish or a callous man. He was neither. He was considerate and of a generous disposition. He was always ready to oblige a friend and he was sufficiently well off to be able to indulge himself in the pleasure of helping others. He had some money of his own and he occupied in the Home Office a position that brought him an adequate stipend. The work suited him. It was regular, responsible and pleasant. Every day when he left the office he went to his club to play bridge for a couple of hours, and on Saturdays and Sundays he played golf. He went abroad for his holidays, staying at good hotels, and visited churches, galleries and museums. He was a regular first-nighter. He dined out a good deal. His friends liked him. He was easy to talk to. He was well-read, knowledgeable and amusing. He was besides of a personable exterior, not remarkably handsome, but tall, slim and erect of carriage, with a lean, intelligent face; his hair was growing thin, for he was now approaching the age of fifty, but his brown eyes retained their smile and his teeth were all his own. He had from nature a good constitution and he had always taken care of himself. There was no reason in the world why he should not be a happy man, and if there had been in him a trace of self-complacency he might have claimed that he deserved to be.

He had the good fortune even to sail safely through those perilous, unquiet straits of marriage in which so many wise and good men have made shipwreck. Married for love in the early twenties, his wife and he, after some years of almost perfect felicity, had drifted gradually apart. Neither of them wished to marry anyone else, so there was no question of divorce (which indeed Richard Harenger’s situation in the government service made undesirable), but for convenience sake, with the help of the family lawyer, they arranged a separation which left them free to lead their lives as each one wished without interference from the other. They parted with mutual expressions of respect and good will.

Richard Harenger sold his house in St. John’s Wood and took a flat within convenient walking distance of Whitehall. It had a sitting-room which he lined with his books, a dining-room into which his Chippendale furniture just fitted, a nice-sized bedroom for himself, and beyond the kitchen a couple of maids’ rooms. He brought his cook, whom he had had for many years, from St. John’s Wood, but needing no longer so large a staff dismissed the rest of the servants and applied at a registry office for a house-parlourmaid. He knew exactly what he wanted and he explained his needs to the superintendent of the agency with precision. He wanted a maid who was not too young, first because young women are flighty and secondly because, though he was of mature age and a man of principle, people would talk, the porter and the tradesmen if nobody else, and both for the sake of his own reputation and that of the young person he considered that the applicant should have reached years of discretion. Besides that he wanted a maid who could clean silver well. He had always had a fancy for old silver, and it was reasonable to demand that the forks and spoons that had been used by a woman of quality under the reign of Queen Anne should be treated with tenderness and respect. He was of a hospitable nature and liked to give at least once a week little dinners of not less than four people and not more than eight. He could trust his cook to send in a meal that his guests would take pleasure in eating and he desired his parlourmaid to wait with neatness and dispatch. Then he needed a perfect valet. He dressed well, in a manner that suited his age and condition, and he liked his clothes to be properly looked after. The parlourmaid he was looking for must be able to press trousers and iron a tie, and he was very particular that his shoes should be well shone. He had small feet and he took a good deal of trouble to have well-cut shoes. He had a large supply and he insisted that they should be treed up the moment he took them off. Finally the flat must be kept clean and tidy. It was of course understood that any applicant for the post must be of irreproachable character, sober, honest, reliable and of a pleasing exterior. In return for this he was prepared to offer good wages, reasonable liberty and ample holidays. The superintendent listened without batting an eyelash and, telling him that she was quite sure she could suit him, sent him a string of candidates which proved that she had not paid the smallest attention to a word he said. He saw them all personally. Some were obviously inefficient, some looked fast, some were too old, others too young, some lacked the presence he thought essential; there was not one to whom he was inclined even to give a trial. He was a kindly, polite man and he declined their services with a smile and a pleasant expression of regret. He did not lose patience. He was prepared to interview house-parlourmaids till he found one who was suitable.

Now it is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want. It is as though fate said, this man’s a perfect fool, he’s asking for perfection, and then just out of her feminine wilfulness flung it in his lap. One day the porter of the flats said to Richard Harenger out of a blue sky:

“I hear you’re lookin’ for a house-parlourmaid, sir. There’s someone I know lookin’ for a situation as might do.”

“Can you recommend her personally?”

Richard Harenger had the sound opinion that one servant’s recommendation of another was worth much more than that of an employer.

“I can vouch for her respectability. She’s been in some very good situations.”

“I shall be coming in to dress about seven. If that’s convenient to her I could see her then.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll see that she’s told.”

He had not been in more than five minutes when the cook, having answered a ring at the front door, came in and told him that the person the porter had spoken to him about had called.

“Show her in,” he said.

He turned on some more light so that he could see what the applicant looked like and, getting up, stood with his back to the fireplace. A woman came in and stood just inside the door in a respectful attitude.

“Good-evening,” he said. “What is your name!”

“Pritchard, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

“Well, that’s a reasonable age.”

He gave his cigarette a puff and looked at her reflectively. She was on the tall side, nearly as tall as he, but he guessed that she wore high heels. Her black dress fitted her station. She held herself well. She had good features and a rather high colour.

“Will you take off your hat?” he asked.

She did so and he saw that she had pale brown hair. It was neatly and becomingly dressed. She looked strong and healthy. She was neither fat nor thin. In a proper uniform she would look very presentable. She was not inconveniently handsome, but she was certainly a comely, in another class of life you might almost have said a handsome, woman. He proceeded to ask her a number of questions. Her answers were satisfactory. She had left her last place for an adequate reason. She had been trained under a butler and appeared to be well acquainted with her duties. In her last place she had been head parlourmaid of three, but she did not mind undertaking the work of the flat single-handed. She had valeted a gentleman before who had sent her to a tailor’s to learn how to press clothes. She was a little shy, but neither timid nor ill-at-ease. Richard asked her his questions in his amiable, leisurely way and she answered them with modest composure. He was considerably impressed. He asked her what references she could give. They seemed extremely satisfactory.

“Now look here,” he said, “I’m very much inclined to engage you. But I hate changes, I’ve had my cook for twelve years: if you suit me and the place suits you I hope you’ll stay. I mean, I don’t want you to come to me in three or four months and say that you’re leaving to get married.”

“There’s not much fear of that, sir. I’m a widow. I don’t believe marriage is much catch for anyone in my position, sir. My husband never did a stroke of work from the day I married him to the day he died, and I had to keep him. What I want now is a good home.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” he smiled. “Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it.”

She very properly made no reply to this, but waited for him to announce his decision. She did not seem anxious about it. He reflected that if she was as competent as she appeared she must be well aware that she would have no difficulty in finding a place. He told her what wages he was offering and these seemed to be satisfactory to her. He gave her the necessary information about the place, but she gave him to understand that she was already apprised of this, and he received the impression, which amused rather than disconcerted him, that she had made certain enquiries about him before applying for the situation. It showed prudence on her part and good sense.

“When would you be able to come in if I engaged you? I haven’t got anybody at the moment. The cook’s managing as best she can with a char, but I should like to get settled as soon as possible.”

“Well, sir, I was going to give myself a week’s holiday, but if it’s a matter of obliging a gentleman I don’t mind giving that up. I could come in to-morrow if it was convenient.”

Richard Harenger gave her his attractive smile.

“I shouldn’t like you to do without a holiday that I dare say you’ve been looking forward to. I can very well go on like this for another week. Go and have your holiday and come to me when it’s over.”

“Thank you very much, sir. Would it do if I came in to-morrow week?”

“Quite well.”

When she left, Richard Harenger felt he had done a good day’s work. It looked as though he had found exactly what he was after. He rang for the cook and told her he had engaged a house-parlourmaid at last.

“I think you’ll like her, sir,” she said “She came in and ‘ad a talk with me this afternoon. I could see at once she knew her duties. And she’s not one of them flighty ones.”

“We can but try, Mrs. Jeddy. I hope you gave me a good character.”

“Well, I said you was particular, sir. I said you was a gentleman as liked things just so.”

“I admit that.” —

“She said she didn’t mind that. She said she liked a gentleman as knew what was what. She said there’s no satisfaction in doing things proper if nobody notices. I expect you’ll find she’ll take a rare lot of pride in her work.”

“That’s what I want her to do. I think we might go farther, and fare worse.”

“Well, sir, there is that to it, of course. And the proof of the pudding’s the eating. But if you ask my opinion I think she’s going to be a real treasure.”

And that is precisely what Pritchard turned out. No man was ever better served. The way she shone shoes was marvellous, and he set out of a fine morning for his walk to the office with a more jaunty step because you could almost see yourself reflected in them. She looked after his clothes with such attention that his colleagues began to chaff him about being the best-dressed man in the Civil Service. One day, coming home unexpectedly, he found a line of socks and handkerchiefs hung up to dry in the bathroom. He called Pritchard.

“D’you wash my socks and handkerchiefs yourself, Pritchard? I should have thought you had enough to do without that.”

“They do ruin them so at the laundry, sir. I prefer to do them at home if you have no objection.”

She knew exactly what he should wear on every occasion, and without asking him was aware whether she should put out a dinner jacket and a black tie in the evening or a dress coat and a white one. When he was going to a party where decorations were to be worn he found his neat little row of medals automatically affixed to the lapel of his coat. He soon ceased to choose every morning from his wardrobe the tie he wanted, for he found that she put out for him without fail the one he would have himself selected. Her taste was perfect. He supposed she read his letters, for she always knew what his movements were, and if he had forgotten at what hour he had an engagement he had no need to look in his book, for Pritchard could tell him. She knew exactly what tone to use with persons with whom she conversed on the telephone. Except with tradesmen, with whom she was apt to be peremptory, she was always polite, but there was a distinct difference in her manner if she was addressing one of Mr. Harenger’s literary friends or the wife of a Cabinet Minister. She knew by instinct with whom he wished to speak and with whom he didn’t. From his sitting-room he sometimes heard her with placid sincerity assuring a caller that he was out, and then she would come in and tell him that So-and-So had rung up, but she thought he wouldn’t wish to be disturbed.

“Quite right, Pritchard,” he smiled.

“I knew she only wanted to bother you about that concert,” said Pritchard.

His friends made appointments with him through her, and she would tell him what she had done on his return in the evening.

“Mrs. Soames rang up, sir, and asked if you would lunch with her on Thursday, the eighth, but I said you were very sorry but you were lunching with Lady Versinder. Mr. Oakley rang up and asked if you’d go to a cocktail party at the Savoy next Tuesday at six. I said you would if you possibly could, but you might have to go to the dentist’s.”

“Quite right.”

“I thought you could see when the time came, sir.”

She kept the flat like a new pin. On one occasion soon after she entered his service, Richard coming back from a holiday took out a book from his shelves and at once noticed that it had been dusted. He rang the bell.

“I forgot to tell you when I went away under no circumstances ever to touch my books. When books are taken out to be dusted they’re never put back in the right place. I don’t mind my books being dirty, but I hate not being able to find them.”

“I’m very sorry, sir,” said Pritchard. “I know some gentlemen are very particular and I took care to put back every book exactly where I took it from.”

Richard Harenger gave his books a glance. So far as he could see every one was in its accustomed place. He smiled.

“I apologise, Pritchard.”

“They were in a muck, sir. I mean, you couldn’t open one without getting your hands black with dust.”

She certainly kept his silver as he had never had it kept before. He felt called upon to give her a special word of praise.

“Most of it’s Queen Anne and George I, you know,” he explained.

“Yes, I know, sir. When you’ve got something good like that to look after it’s a pleasure to keep it like it should be.”

“You certainly have a knack for it. I never knew a butler who kept his silver as well as you do.”

“Men haven’t the patience women have,” she replied modestly.

As soon as he thought Pritchard had settled down in the place he resumed the little dinners he was fond of giving once a week. He had already discovered that she knew how to wait at table, but it was with a warm sense of complacency that he realised then how competently she could manage a party. She was quick, silent and watchful. A guest had hardly felt the need of something before Pritchard was at his elbow offering him what he wanted. She soon learned the tastes of his more intimate friends and remembered that one liked water instead of soda with his whisky and that another particularly fancied the knuckle end of a leg of lamb. She knew exactly how cold a hock should be not to ruin its taste and how long claret should have stood in the room to bring out its bouquet. It was a pleasure to see her pour out a bottle of burgundy in such a fashion as not to disturb the grounds. On one occasion she did not serve the wine Richard had ordered. He somewhat sharply pointed this out to her.

“I opened the bottle sir, and it was slightly corked. So I got the Chambertin, as I thought it was safer.”

“Quite right, Pritchard.”

Presently he left this matter entirely in her hands, for he discovered that she knew perfectly what wines his guests would like. Without orders from him she would provide the best in his cellar and his oldest brandy if she thought they were the sort of people who knew what they were drinking. She had no belief in the palate of women, and when they were of the party was apt to serve the champagne which had to be drunk before it went off. She had the English servant’s instinctive knowledge of social differences and neither rank nor money blinded her to the fact that someone was not a gentleman, but she had favourites among his friends, and when someone she particularly liked was dining, with the air of a cat that has swallowed a canary she would pour out for him a bottle of a wine that Harenger kept for very special occasions. It amused him.

“You’ve got on the right side of Pritchard, old boy,” he exclaimed. “There aren’t many people she gives this wine to.”

Pritchard became an institution. She was known very soon to be the perfect parlourmaid. People envied Harenger the possession of her as they envied nothing else that he had. She was worth her weight in gold. Her price was above rubies. Richard Harenger beamed with self-complacency when they praised her.

“Good masters make good servants,” he said gaily.

One evening, when they were sitting over their port and she had left the room, they were talking about her.

“It’ll be an awful blow when she leaves you.”

“Why should she leave me? One or two people have tried to get her away from me, but she turned them down. She knows where she’s well off.”

“She’ll get married one of these days.”

“I don’t think she’s that sort.”

“She’s a good-looking woman.”

“Yes, she has quite a decent presence.”

“What are you talking about? She’s a very handsome creature. In another class of life she’d be a well-known society beauty with her photograph in all the papers.”

At that moment Pritchard came in with the coffee. Richard Harenger looked at her. After seeing her every day, off and on, for four years it was now — my word, how time flies — he had really forgotten what she looked like. She did not seem to have changed much since he had first seen her. She was no stouter than then, she still had the high colour, and her regular features bore the same expression which was at once intent and vacuous. The black uniform suited her. She left the room.

“She’s a paragon and there’s no doubt about it.”

“I know she is,” answered Harenger. “She’s perfection. I should be lost without her. And the strange thing is that I don’t very much like her.”

“Why not?”

“I think she bores me a little. You see, she has no conversation. I’ve often tried to talk to her. She answers when I speak to her, but that’s all. In four years she’s never volunteered a remark of her own. I know absolutely nothing about her. I don’t know if she likes me or if she’s completely indifferent to me. She’s an automaton. I respect her, I appreciate her, I trust her. She has every quality in the world and I’ve often wondered why it is that with all that I’m so completely indifferent to her. I think it must be that she is entirely devoid of charm.”

They left it at that.

Two or three days after this, since it was Pritchard’s night out and he had no engagement, Richard Harenger dined by himself at his club. A page-boy came to him and told him that they had just rung up from his flat to say that he had gone out without his keys and should they be brought along to him in a taxi? He put his hand to his pocket. It was a fact. By a singular chance he had forgotten to replace them when he had changed into a blue serge suit before coming out to dinner. His intention had been to play bridge, but it was an off-night at the club and there seemed little chance of a decent game; it occurred to him that it would be a good opportunity to see a picture that he had heard talked about, so he sent back the message by the page that he would call for the keys himself in half an hour.

He rang at the door of his flat and it was opened by Pritchard. She had the keys in her hand.

“What are you doing here, Pritchard?” he asked. “It’s your night out, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. But I didn’t care about going, so I told Mrs. Jeddy she could go instead.”

“You ought to get out when you have the chance,” he said, with his usual thoughtfulness. “It’s not good for you to be cooped up here all the time.”

“I get out now and then on an errand, but I haven’t been out in the evening for the last month.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Well, it’s not very cheerful going out by yourself, and somehow I don’t know anyone just now that I’m particularly keen on going out with.”

“You ought to have a bit of fun now and then. It’s good for you.”

“I’ve got out of the habit of it somehow.”

“Look here, I’m just going to the cinema. Would you like to come along with me?”

He spoke in kindliness, on the spur of the moment, and the moment he had said the words half regretted them.

“Yes, sir, I’d like to,” said Pritchard.

“Rim along then and put on a hat.”

“I shan’t be a minute.”

She disappeared and he went into the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. He was a little amused at what he was doing, and pleased too; it was nice to be able to make someone happy with so little trouble to himself. It was characteristic of Pritchard that she had shown neither surprise nor hesitation. She kept him waiting about five minutes, and when she came back he noticed that she had changed her dress. She wore a blue frock in what he supposed was artificial silk, a small black hat with a blue brooch on it, and a silver fox round her neck. He was a trifle relieved to see that she looked neither shabby nor showy. It would never occur to anyone who happened to see them that this was a distinguished official in the Home Office taking his housemaid to the pictures.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir.”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” he said graciously.

He opened the front door for her and she went out before him. He remembered the familiar anecdote of Louis XIV and the courtier and appreciated the fact that she had not hesitated to precede him. The cinema for which they were bound was at no great distance from Mr. Harenger’s flat and they walked there. He talked about the weather and the state of the roads and Adolf Hitler. Pritchard made suitable replies. They arrived just as Mickey the Mouse was starting and this put them in a good humour. During the four years she had been in his service Richard Harenger had hardly ever seen Pritchard even smile, and now it diverted him vastly to hear her peal upon peal of joyous laughter. He enjoyed her pleasure. Then the principal attraction was thrown on the screen. It was a good picture and they both watched it with breathless excitement. Taking his cigarette-case out to help himself he automatically offered it to Pritchard.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, taking one.

He lit it for her. Her eyes were on the screen and she was almost unconscious of his action. When the picture was finished they streamed out with the crowd into the street. They walked back towards the flat. It was a fine starry night.

“Did you like it?” he said.

“Like anything, sir. It was a real treat.”

A thought occurred to him.

“By the way, did you have any supper to-night?”

“No, sir, I didn’t have time.”

“Aren’t you starving?”

“I’ll have a bit of bread and cheese when I get in and I’ll make meself a cup of cocoa.”

“That sounds rather grim.” There was a feeling of gaiety in the air, and the people who poured past them, one way and another, seemed filled with a pleasant elation. In for a penny, in for a pound, he said to himself. “Look here, would you like to come and have a bit of supper with me somewhere?”

“If you’d like to, sir.”

“Come on.”

He hailed a cab. He was feeling very philanthropic and it was not a feeling that he disliked at all. He told the driver to go to a restaurant in Oxford Street which was gay, but at which he was confident there was no chance of meeting anyone he knew. There was an orchestra and people danced. It would amuse Pritchard to see them. When they sat down a waiter came up to them.

“They’ve got a set supper here,” he said, thinking that was what she would like. “I suggest we have that. What would you like to drink? A little white wine?”

“What I really fancy is a glass of ginger beer,” she said.

Richard Harenger ordered himself a whisky and soda. She ate the supper with hearty appetite, and though Harénger was not hungry, to put her at her ease he ate too. The picture they had just seen gave them something to talk about. It was quite true what they had said the other night, Pritchard was not a bad-looking woman, and even if someone had seen them together he would not have minded. It would make rather a good story for his friends when he told them how he had taken the incomparable Pritchard to the cinema and then afterwards to supper. Pritchard was looking at the dancers with a faint smile on her lips.

“Do you like dancing?” he said.

“I used to be a rare one for it when I was a girl. I never danced much after I was married. My husband was a bit shorter than me and somehow I never think it looks well unless the gentleman’s taller, if you know what I mean. I suppose I shall be getting too old for it soon.”

Richard was certainly taller than his parlourmaid. They would look all right. He was fond of dancing and he danced well. But he hesitated. He did not want to embarrass Pritchard by asking her to dance with him. It was better not to go too far perhaps. And yet what did it matter? It was a drab life she led. She was so sensible, if she thought it a mistake he was pretty sure she would find a decent excuse.

“Would you like to take a turn, Pritchard?” he said, as the band struck up again.

“I’m terribly out of practice, sir.”

“What does that matter?”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” she answered coolly, rising from her seat.

She was not in the least shy. She was only afraid that she would not be able to follow his step. They moved on to the floor. He found she danced very well.

“Why, you dance perfectly, Pritchard,” he said.

“It’s coming back to me.”

Although she was a big woman she was light on her feet and she had a natural sense of rhythm. She was very pleasant to dance with. He gave a glance at the mirrors that lined the walls and he could not help reflecting that they looked very well together. Their eyes met in the mirror; he wondered whether she was thinking that too. They had two more dances and then Richard Harenger suggested that they should go. He paid the bill and they walked out. He noticed that she threaded her way through the crowd without a trace of self-consciousness. They got into a taxi and in ten minutes were at home.

“I’ll go up the back way, sir,” said Pritchard.

“There’s no need to do that. Come up in the lift with me.”

He took her up, giving the night-porter an icy glance, so that he should not think it strange that he came back at that somewhat late hour with his parlourmaid, and with his latch-key let her into the flat.

“Well, good-night, sir,” she said. “Thank you very much. It’s been a real treat for me.”

“Thank you Pritchard. I should have had a very dull evening by myself. I hope you’ve enjoyed your outing.”

“That I have, sir, more than I can say.”

It had been a success. Richard Harenger was satisfied with himself. It was a kindly thing for him to have done. It was a very agreeable sensation to give anyone so much real pleasure. His benevolence warmed him and for a moment he felt a great love in his heart for the whole human race.

“Good-night, Pritchard,” he said, and because he felt happy and good he put his arm round her waist and kissed her on the lips.

Her lips were very soft. They lingered on his and she returned his kiss. It was the warm, hearty embrace of a healthy woman in the prime of life. He found it very pleasant and he held her to him a little more closely. She put her arms round his neck.

As a general rule he did not wake till Pritchard came in with his letters, but next morning he woke at half-past seven. He had a curious sensation that he did not recognise. He was accustomed to sleep with two pillows under his head and he suddenly grew aware of the fact that he had only one. Then he remembered and with a start looked round. The other pillow was beside his own. Thank God, no sleeping head rested there, but it was plain that one had. His heart sank. He broke out into a cold sweat.

“My God, what a fool I’ve been!” he cried out loud.

How could he have done anything so stupid? What on earth had come over him? He was the last man to play about with servant girls. What a disgraceful thing to do! At his age and in his position. He had not heard Pritchard slip away. He must have been asleep. It wasn’t even as if he’d liked her very much. She wasn’t his type. And, as he had said the other night, she rather bored him. Even now he only knew her as Pritchard. He had no notion what her first name was. What madness! And what was to happen now? The position was impossible. It was obvious he couldn’t keep her, and yet to send her away for what was his fault as much as hers seemed shockingly unfair. How idiotic to lose the best parlourmaid a man ever had just for an hour’s folly!

“It’s that damned kindness of heart of mine,” he groaned.

He would never find anyone else to look after his clothes so admirably or clean the silver so well. She knew all his friends’ telephone numbers and she understood wine. But of course she must go. She must see for herself that after what had happened things could never be the same. He would make her a handsome present and give her an excellent reference. At any minute she would be coming in now. Would she be arch, would she be familiar? Or would she put on airs? Perhaps even she wouldn’t trouble to come in with his letters. It would be awful if he had to ring the bell and Mrs. Jeddy came in and said: Pritchard’s not up yet, sir, she’s having a lie in after last night.

“What a fool I’ve been! What a contemptible cad!”

There was a knock at the door. He was sick with anxiety.

“Come in.”

Richard Harenger was a very unhappy man.

Pritchard came in as the clock struck. She wore the print dress she was in the habit of wearing during the early part of the day.

“Good-morning, sir,” she said.

“Good-morning.”

She drew the curtains and handed him his letters and the papers. Her face was impassive. She looked exactly as she always looked. Her movements had the same competent deliberation that they always had. She neither avoided Richard’s glance nor sought it.

“Will you wear your grey, sir? It came back from the tailor’s yesterday.”

“Yes.”

He pretended to read his letters, but he watched her from under his eyelashes. Her back was turned to him. She took his vest and drawers and folded them over a chair. She took the studs out of the shirt he had worn the day before and studded a clean one. She put out some clean socks for him and placed them on the seat of a chair with the suspenders to match by the side. Then she put out his grey suit and attached the braces to the back buttons of the trousers. She opened his wardrobe and after a moment’s reflection chose a tie to go with the suit. She collected on her arm the suit of the day before and picked up the shoes.

“Will you have breakfast now, sir, or will you have your bath first?”

“I’ll have breakfast now,” he said.

“Very good, sir.”

With her slow quiet movements, unruffled, she left the room. Her face bore that rather serious, deferential, vacuous look it always bore. What had happened might have been a dream. Nothing in Pritchard’s demeanour suggested that she had the smallest recollection of the night before. He gave a sigh of relief. It was going to be all right. She need not go, she need not go. Pritchard was the perfect parlourmaid. He knew that never by word nor gesture would she ever refer to the fact that for a moment their relations had been other than those of master and servant. Richard Harenger was a very happy man.

THE COLONEL’S LADY

All this happened two or three years before the outbreak of the war.The Peregrines were having breakfast. Though they were alone and the table was long they sat at opposite ends of it. From the walls George Peregrine’s ancestors, painted by the fashionable painters of the day, looked down upon them. The butler brought in the morning post. There were several letters for the colonel, business letters, The Times, and a small parcel for his wife Evie. He looked at his letters and then, opening The Times, began to read it. They finished breakfast and rose from the table. He noticed that his wife hadn’t opened the parcel.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Only some books.’

‘Shall I open it for you?’

‘If you like.’

He hated to cut string and so with some difficulty untied the knots. ‘But they’re all the same,’ he said when he had unwrapped the parcel. ‘What on earth d’you want six copies of the same book for?’ He opened one of them. ‘Poetry.’ Then he looked at the title–page. When Pyramids Decay, he read, by E. K. Hamilton. Eva Katherine Hamilton: that was his wife’s maiden name. He looked at her with smiling surprise. ‘Have you written a book, Evie? You are a slyboots.’

‘I didn’t think it would interest you very much. Would you like a copy?’’Well, you know poetry isn’t much in my line, but–yes, I’d like a copy; I’ll read it. I’ll take it along to my study. I’ve got a lot to do this morning.’

He gathered up The Times, his letters, and the book, and went out. His study was a large and comfortable room, with a big desk, leather arm–chairs, and what he called ‘trophies of the chase’ on the walls. On the bookshelves were works of reference, books on farming, gardening, fishing, and shooting, and books on the last war, in which he had won an M.C. and a D.S.O. For before his marriage he had been in the Welsh Guards. At the end of the war he retired and settled down to the life of a country gentleman in the spacious house, some twenty miles from Sheffield, which one of his forebears had built in the reign of George III. George Peregrine had an estate of some fifteen hundred acres which he managed with ability; he was a Justice of the Peace and performed his duties conscientiously. During the season he rode to hounds two days a week. He was a good shot, a golfer, and though now a little over fifty could still play a hard game of tennis. He could describe himself with propriety as an all–round sportsman.

He had been putting on weight lately, but was still a fine figure of a man; tall, with grey curly hair, only just beginning to grow thin on the crown, frank blue eyes, good features, and a high colour. He was a public–spirited man, chairman of any number of local organizations and, as became his class and station, a loyal member of the Conservative Party. He looked upon it as his duty to see to the welfare of the people on his estate and it was a satisfaction to him to know that Evie could be trusted to tend the sick and succour the poor. He had built a cottage hospital on the outskirts of the village and paid the wages of a nurse out of his own pocket. All he asked of the recipients of his bounty was that at elections, county or general, they should vote for his candidate. He was a friendly man, affable to his inferiors, considerate with his tenants, and popular with the neighbouring gentry. He would have been pleased and at the same time slightly embarrassed if someone had told him he was a jolly good fellow. That was what he wanted to be. He desired no higher praise.

It was hard luck that he had no children. He would have been an excellent father, kindly but strict, and would have brought up his sons as gentlemen’s sons should be brought up, sent them to Eton, you know, taught them to fish, shoot, and ride. As it was, his heir was a nephew, son of his brother killed in a motor accident, not a bad boy, but not a chip off the old block, no, sir, far from it; and would you believe it, his fool of a mother was sending him to a co– educational school. Evie had been a sad disappointment to him. Of course she was a lady, and she had a bit of money of her own; she managed the house uncommonly well and she was a good hostess. The village people adored her. She had been a pretty little thing when he married her, with a creamy skin, light brown hair, and a trim figure, healthy too, and not a bad tennis player; he couldn’t understand why she’d had no children; of course she was faded now, she must be getting on for five and forty; her skin was drab, her hair had lost its sheen, and she was as thin as a rail. She was always neat and suitably dressed, but she didn’t seem to bother how she looked, she wore no make–up and didn’t even use lipstick; sometimes at night when she dolled herself up for a party you could tell that once she’d been quite attractive, but ordinarily she was–well, the sort of woman you simply didn’t notice. A nice woman, of course, a good wife, and it wasn’t her fault if she was barren, but it was tough on a fellow who wanted an heir of his own loins; she hadn’t any vitality, that’s what was the matter with her. He supposed he’d been in love with her when he asked her to marry him, at least sufficiently in love for a man who wanted to marry and settle down, but with time he discovered that they had nothing much in common. She didn’t care about hunting, and fishing bored her. Naturally they’d drifted apart. He had to do her the justice to admit that she’d never bothered him. There’d been no scenes. They had no quarrels. She seemed to take it for granted that he should go his own way. When he went up to London now and then she never wanted to come with him. He had a girl there, well, she wasn’t exactly a girl, she was thirty–five if she was a day, but she was blonde and luscious and he only had to wire ahead of time and they’d dine, do a show, and spend the night together. Well, a man, a healthy normal man had to have some fun in his life. The thought crossed his mind that if Evie hadn’t been such a good woman she’d have been a better wife; but it was not the sort of thought that he welcomed and he put it away from him.

George Peregrine finished his Times and being a considerate fellow rang the bell and told the butler to take it to Evie. Then he looked at his watch. It was half past ten and at eleven he had an appointment with one of his tenants. He had half an hour to spare.

‘I’d better have a look at Evie’s book,’ he said to himself.

He took it up with a smile. Evie had a lot of highbrow books in her sitting–room, not the sort of books that interested him, but if they amused her he had no objection to her reading them. He noticed that the volume he now held in his hand contained no more than ninety pages. That was all to the good. He shared Edgar Allan Poe’s opinion that poems should be short. But as he turned the pages he noticed that several of Evie’s had long lines of irregular length and didn’t rhyme. He didn’t like that. At his first school, when he was a little boy, he remembered learning a poem that began: The boy stood on the burning deck, and later, at Eton, one that started: Ruin seize thee, ruthless king; and then there was Henry V; they’d had to take that, one half. He stared at Evie’s pages with consternation.

‘That’s not what I call poetry,’ he said.

Fortunately it wasn’t all like that. Interspersed with the pieces that looked so odd, lines of three or four words and then a line of ten or fifteen, there were little poems, quite short, that rhymed, thank God, with the lines all the same length. Several of the pages were just headed with the word Sonnet, and out of curiosity he counted the lines; there were fourteen of them. He read them. They seemed all right, but he didn’t quite know what they were all about. He repeated to himself: Ruin seize thee, ruthless king.

‘Poor Evie,’ he sighed.

At that moment the farmer he was expecting was ushered into the study, and putting the book down he made him welcome. They embarked on their business.

‘I read your book, Evie,’ he said as they sat down to lunch. ‘Jolly good. Did it cost you a packet to have it printed?’

‘No, I was lucky. I sent it to a publisher and he took it.’

‘Not much money in poetry, my dear,’ he said in his good–natured, hearty way.

‘No, I don’t suppose there is. What did Bannock want to see you about this morning?’

Bannock was the tenant who had interrupted his reading of Evie’s poems.

‘He’s asked me to advance the money for a pedigree bull he wants to buy. He’s a good man and I’ve half a mind to do it.’

George Peregrine saw that Evie didn’t want to talk about her book and he was not sorry to change the subject. He was glad she had used her maiden name on the title–page; he didn’t suppose anyone would ever hear about the book, but he was proud of his own unusual name and he wouldn’t have liked it if some damned penny–a–liner had made fun of Evie’s effort in one of the papers.

During the few weeks that followed he thought it tactful not to ask Evie any questions about her venture into verse, and she never referred to it. It might have been a discreditable incident that they had silently agreed not to mention. But then a strange thing happened. He had to go to London on business and he took Daphne out to dinner. That was the name of the girl with whom he was in the habit of passing a few agreeable hours whenever he went to town.

‘Oh, George,’ she said, ’is that your wife who’s written a book they’re all talking about?’

‘What on earth d’you mean?’

‘Well, there’s a fellow I know who’s a critic. He took me out to dinner the other night and he had a book with him. “Got anything for me to read?” I said. “What’s that?” “Oh, I don’t think that’s your cup of tea,” he said. “It’s poetry. I’ve just been reviewing it.” “No poetry for me,” I said. “It’s about the hottest stuff I ever read,” he said. “Selling like hot cakes. And it’s damned good.”’

‘Who’s the book by?’ asked George.

‘A woman called Hamilton. My friend told me that wasn’t her real name. He said her real name was Peregrine. “Funny,” I said, “I know a fellow called Peregrine.” “Colonel in the army,” he said. “Lives near Sheffield.”’

‘I’d just as soon you didn’t talk about me to your friends,’ said George with a frown of vexation.

‘Keep your shirt on, dearie. Who d’you take me for? I just said: “It’s not the same one.”’ Daphne giggled. ‘My friend said: “They say he’s a regular Colonel Blimp.”’

George had a keen sense of humour.

‘You could tell them better than that,’ he laughed. ‘If my wife had written a book I’d be the first to know about it, wouldn’t I?’

‘I suppose you would.’

Anyhow the matter didn’t interest her and when the colonel began to talk of other things she forgot about it. He put it out of his mind too. There was nothing to it, he decided, and that silly fool of a critic had just been pulling Daphne’s leg. He was amused at the thought of her tackling that book because she had been told it was hot stuff and then finding it just a lot of bosh cut up into unequal lines.

He was a member of several clubs and next day he thought he’d lunch at one in St James’s Street. He was catching a train back to Sheffield early in the afternoon. He was sitting in a comfortable arm–chair having a glass of sherry before going into the dining–room when an old friend came up to him.

‘Well, old boy, how’s life?’ he said. ‘How d’you like being the husband of a celebrity?’

George Peregrine looked at his friend. He thought he saw an amused twinkle in his eyes.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he answered.

‘Come off it, George. Everyone knows E. K. Hamilton is your wife. Not often a book of verse has a success like that. Look here, Henry Dashwood is lunching with me. He’d like to meet you.’

‘Who the devil is Henry Dashwood and why should he want to meet me?’

‘Oh, my dear fellow, what do you do with yourself all the time in the country? Henry’s about the best critic we’ve got. He wrote a wonderful review of Evie’s book. D’you mean to say she didn’t show it you?’

Before George could answer his friend had called a man over. A tall, thin man, with a high forehead, a beard, a long nose, and a stoop, just the sort of man whom George was prepared to dislike at first sight. Introductions were effected. Henry Dashwood sat down.

’Is Mrs Peregrine in London by any chance? I should very much like to meet her,’ he said.

‘No, my wife doesn’t like London. She prefers the country,’ said George stiffly.

‘She wrote me a very nice letter about my review. I was pleased. You know, we critics get more kicks than halfpence. I was simply bowled over by her book. It’s so fresh and original, very modern without being obscure. She seems to be as much at her ease in free verse as in the classical metres.’ Then because he was a critic he thought he should criticize. ‘Sometimes her ear is a trifle at fault, but you can say the same of Emily Dickinson. There are several of those short lyrics of hers that might have been written by Landor.’

All this was gibberish to George Peregrine. The man was nothing but a disgusting highbrow. But the colonel had good manners and he answered with proper civility: Henry Dashwood went on as though he hadn’t spoken.

‘But what makes the book so outstanding is the passion that throbs in every line. So many of these young poets are so anaemic, cold, bloodless, dully intellectual, but here you have real naked, earthy passion; of course deep, sincere emotion like that is tragic–ah, my dear Colonel, how right Heine was when he said that the poet makes little songs out of his great sorrows. You know, now and then, as I read and re–read those heart–rending pages I thought of Sappho.’

This was too much for George Peregrine and he got up.

‘Well, it’s jolly nice of you to say such nice things about my wife’s little book. I’m sure she’ll be delighted. But I must bolt, I’ve got to catch a train and I want to get a bite of lunch.’

‘Damned fool,’ he said irritably to himself as he walked upstairs to the dining–room.

He got home in time for dinner and after Evie had gone to bed he went into his study and looked for her book. He thought he’d just glance through it again to see for himself what they were making such a fuss about, but he couldn’t find it. Evie must have taken it away.

‘Silly,’ he muttered.

He’d told her he thought it jolly good. What more could a fellow be expected to say? Well, it didn’t matter. He lit his pipe and read the Field till he felt sleepy. But a week or so later it happened that he had to go into Sheffield for the day. He lunched there at his club. He had nearly finished when the Duke of Haverel came in. This was the great local magnate and of course the colonel knew him, but only to say how d’you do to; and he was surprised when the Duke stopped at his table.

‘We’re so sorry your wife couldn’t come to us for the week–end,’ he said, with a sort of shy cordiality. ‘We’re expecting rather a nice lot of people.’

George was taken aback. He guessed that the Haverels had asked him and Evie over for the week–end and Evie, without saying a word to him about it, had refused. He had the presence of mind to say he was sorry too.

‘Better luck next time,’ said the Duke pleasantly and moved on.

Colonel Peregrine was very angry and when he got home he said to his wife:

‘Look here, what’s this about our being asked over to Haverel? Why on earth did you say we couldn’t go? We’ve never been asked before and it’s the best shooting in the county.’

‘I didn’t think of that. I thought it would only bore you.’

‘Damn it all, you might at least have asked me if I wanted to go.’ ‘I’m sorry.’

He looked at her closely. There was something in her expression that he didn’t quite understand. He frowned.

‘I suppose I was asked?’ he barked.

Evie flushed a little.

‘Well, in point of fact you weren’t.’

‘I call it damned rude of them to ask you without asking me.’

‘I suppose they thought it wasn’t your sort of party. The Duchess is rather fond of writers and people like that, you know. She’s having Henry Dashwood, the critic, and for some reason he wants to meet me.’

‘It was damned nice of you to refuse, Evie.’

‘It’s the least I could do,’ she smiled. She hesitated a moment. ‘George, my publishers want to give a little dinner party for me one day towards the end of the month and of course they want you to come too.’

‘Oh, I don’t think that’s quite my mark. I’ll come up to London with you if you like. I’ll find someone to dine with.’

Daphne.

‘I expect it’ll be very dull, but they’re making rather a point of it. And the day after, the American publisher who’s taken my book is giving a cocktail party at Claridge’s. I’d like you to come to that if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Sounds like a crashing bore, but if you really want me to come I’ll come.’

‘It would be sweet of you.’

George Peregrine was dazed by the cocktail party. There were a lot of people. Some of them didn’t look so bad, a few of the women were decently turned out, but the men seemed to him pretty awful. He was introduced to everyone as Colonel Peregrine, E. K. Hamilton’s husband, you know. The men didn’t seem to have anything to say to him, but the women gushed.

‘You must be proud of your wife. Isn’t it wonderful? You know, I read it right through at a sitting, I simply couldn’t put it down, and when I’d finished I started again at the beginning and read it right through a second time. I was simply thrilled.’

The English publisher said to him:

‘We’ve not had a success like this with a book of verse for twenty years. I’ve never seen such reviews.’

The American publisher said to him:

‘It’s swell. It’ll be a smash hit in America. You wait and see.’

The American publisher had sent Evie a great spray of orchids. Damned ridiculous, thought George. As they came in, people were taken up to Evie, and it was evident that they said flattering things to her, which she took with a pleasant smile and a word or two of thanks. She was a trifle flushed with the excitement, but seemed quite at her ease. Though he thought the whole thing a lot of stuff and nonsense George noted with approval that his wife was carrying it off in just the right way.

‘Well, there’s one thing,’ he said to himself, ‘you can see she’s a lady and that’s a damned sight more than you can say of anyone else here.’

He drank a good many cocktails. But there was one thing that bothered him. He had a notion that some of the people he was introduced to looked at him in rather a funny sort of way, he couldn’t quite make out what it meant, and once when he strolled by two women who were sitting together on a sofa he had the impression that they were talking about him and after he passed he was almost certain they tittered. He was very glad when the party came to an end.

In the taxi on their way back to their hotel Evie said to him:

‘You were wonderful, dear. You made quite a hit. The girls simply raved about you: they thought you so handsome.’

‘Girls,’ he said bitterly. ‘Old hags.’

‘Were you bored, dear?’

‘Stiff.’

She pressed his hand in a gesture of sympathy.

‘I hope you won’t mind if we wait and go down by the afternoon train. I’ve got some things to do in the morning.’

‘No, that’s all right. Shopping?’

‘I do want to buy one or two things, but I’ve got to go and be photographed. I hate the idea, but they think I ought to be. For America, you know.’

He said nothing. But he thought. He thought it would be a shock to the American public when they saw the portrait of the homely, desiccated little women who was his wife. He’d always been under the impression that they liked glamour in America.

He went on thinking, and next morning when Evie had gone out he went to his club and up to the library. There he looked up recent numbers of The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and the Spectator. Presently he found reviews of Evie’s book. He didn’t read them very carefully, but enough to see that they were extremely favourable. Then he went to the bookseller’s in Piccadilly where he occasionally bought books. He’d made up his mind that he had to read this damned thing of Evie’s properly, but he didn’t want to ask her what she’d done with the copy she’d given him. He’d buy one for himself. Before going in he looked in the window and the first thing he saw was a display of When Pyramids Decay. Damned silly title! He went in. A young man came forward and asked if he could help him.

‘No, I’m just having a look round.’ It embarrassed him to ask for Evie’s book and he thought he’d find it for himself and then take it to the salesman. But he couldn’t see it anywhere and at last, finding the young man near him, he said in a carefully casual tone: ‘By the way, have you got a book called When Pyramids Decay?’

‘The new edition came in this morning. I’ll get a copy.’

In a moment the young man returned with it. He was a short, rather stout young man, with a shock of untidy carroty hair and spectacles. George Peregrine, tall, upstanding, very military, towered over him.

’Is this a new edition then?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. The fifth. It might be a novel the way it’s selling.’

George Peregrine hesitated a moment.

‘Why d’you suppose it’s such a success? I’ve always been told no one reads poetry.’

‘Well, it’s good, you know. I’ve read it meself.’ The young man, though obviously cultured, had a slight Cockney accent, and George quite instinctively adopted a patronizing attitude. ‘It’s the story they like. Sexy, you know, but tragic’

George frowned a little. He was coming to the conclusion that the young man was rather impertinent. No one had told him anything about there being a story in the damned book and he had not gathered that from reading the reviews. The young man went on:

‘Of course it’s only a flash in the pan, if you know what I mean. The way I look at it, she was sort of inspired like by a personal experience, like Housman was with The Shropshire Lad. She’ll never write anything else.’

‘How much is the book?’ said George coldly to stop his chatter. ‘You needn’t wrap it up, I’ll just slip it into my pocket.’

The November morning was raw and he was wearing a greatcoat.

At the station he bought the evening papers and magazines and he and Evie settled themselves comfortably in opposite corners of a first–class carriage and read. At five o’clock they went along to the restaurant car to have tea and chatted a little. They arrived. They drove home in the car which was waiting for them. They bathed, dressed for dinner, and after dinner Evie, saying she was tired out, went to bed. She kissed him, as was her habit, on the forehead. Then he went into the hall, took Evie’s book out of his greatcoat pocket and going into the study began to read it. He didn’t read verse very easily and though he read with attention, every word of it, the impression he received was far from clear. Then he began at the beginning again and read it a second time. He read with increasing malaise, but he was not a stupid man and when he had finished he had a distinct understanding of what it was all about. Part of the book was in free verse, part in conventional metres, but the story it related was coherent and plain to the meanest intelligence. It was the story of a passionate love affair between an older woman, married, and a young man. George Peregrine made out the steps of it as easily as if he had been doing a sum in simple addition.

Written in the first person, it began with the tremulous surprise of the woman, past her youth, when it dawned upon her that the young man was in love with her. She hesitated to believe it. She thought she must be deceiving herself. And she was terrified when on a sudden she discovered that she was passionately in love with him. She told herself it was absurd; with the disparity of age between them nothing but unhappiness could come to her if she yielded to her emotion. She tried to prevent him from speaking but the day came when he told her that he loved her and forced her to tell him that she loved him too. He begged her to run away with him. She couldn’t leave her husband, her home; and what life could they look forward to, she an ageing woman, he so young? How could she expect his love to last? She begged him to have mercy on her. But his love was impetuous. He wanted her, he wanted her with all his heart, and at last trembling, afraid, desirous, she yielded to him. Then there was a period of ecstatic happiness. The world, the dull, humdrum world of every day, blazed with glory. Love songs flowed from her pen. The woman worshipped the young, virile body of her lover. George flushed darkly when she praised his broad chest and slim flanks, the beauty of his legs and the flatness of his belly.

Hot stuff, Daphne’s friend had said. It was that all right. Disgusting.

There were sad little pieces in which she lamented the emptiness of her life when as must happen he left her, but they ended with a cry that all she had to suffer would be worth it for the bliss that for a while had been hers. She wrote of the long, tremulous nights they passed together and the languor that lulled them to sleep in one another’s arms. She wrote of the rapture of brief stolen moments when, braving all danger, their passion overwhelmed them and they surrendered to its call.

She thought it would be an affair of a few weeks, but miraculously it lasted. One of the poems referred to three years having gone by without lessening the love that filled their hearts. It looked as though he continued to press her to go away with him, far away, to a hill town in Italy, a Greek island, a walled city in Tunisia, so that they could be together always, for in another of the poems she besought him to let things be as they were. Their happiness was precarious. Perhaps it was owing to the difficulties they had to encounter and the rarity of their meetings that their love had retained for so long its first enchanting ardour. Then on a sudden the young man died. How, when or where George could not discover. There followed a long, heartbroken cry of bitter grief, grief she could not indulge in, grief that had to be hidden. She had to be cheerful, give dinner–parties and go out to dinner, behave as she had always behaved, though the light had gone out of her life and she was bowed down with anguish. The last poem of all was a set of four short stanzas in which the writer, sadly resigned to her loss, thanked the dark powers that rule man’s destiny that she had been privileged at least for a while to enjoy the greatest happiness that we poor human beings can ever hope to know.

It was three o’clock in the morning when George Peregrine finally put the book down. It had seemed to him that he heard Evie’s voice in every line, over and over again he came upon turns of phrase he had heard her use, there were details that were as familiar to him as to her: there was no doubt about it; it was her own story she had told, and it was as plain as anything could be that she had had a lover and her lover had died. It was not anger so much that he felt, nor horror or dismay, though he was dismayed and he was horrified, but amazement. It was as inconceivable that Evie should have had a love affair, and a wildly passionate one at that, as that the trout in a glass case over the chimney–piece in his study, the finest he had ever caught, should suddenly wag its tail. He understood now the meaning of the amused look he had seen in the eyes of that man he had spoken to at the club, he understood why Daphne when she was talking about the book had seemed to be enjoying a private joke, and why those two women at the cocktail party had tittered when he strolled past them.

He broke out into a sweat. Then on a sudden he was seized with fury and he jumped up to go and awake Evie and ask her sternly for an explanation. But he stopped at the door. After all, what proof had he? A book. He remembered that he’d told Evie he thought it jolly good. True, he hadn’t read it, but he’d pretended he had. He would look a perfect fool if he had to admit that.

‘I must watch my step,’ he muttered.

He made up his mind to wait for two or three days and think it all over. Then he’d decide what to do. He went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep for a long time.

‘Evie,’ he kept on saying to himself. ‘Evie, of all people.’

They met at breakfast next morning as usual. Evie was as she always was, quiet, demure, and self–possessed, a middle–aged woman who made no effort to look younger than she was, a woman who had nothing of what he still called It. He looked at her as he hadn’t looked at her for years. She had her usual placid serenity. Her pale blue eyes were untroubled. There was no sign of guilt on her candid brow. She made the same little casual remarks she always made.

‘It’s nice to get back to the country again after those two hectic days in London. What are you going to do this morning?’

It was incomprehensible.

Three days later he went to see his solicitor. Henry Blane was an old friend of George’s as well as his lawyer. He had a place not far from Peregrine’s and for years they had shot over one another’s preserves. For two days a week he was a country gentleman and for the other five a busy lawyer in Sheffield. He was a tall, robust fellow, with a boisterous manner and a jovial laugh, which suggested that he liked to be looked upon essentially as a sportsman and a good fellow and only incidentally as a lawyer. But he was shrewd and wordly–wise.

‘Well, George, what’s brought you here today?’ he boomed as the colonel was shown into his office. ‘Have a good time in London? I’m taking my missus up for a few days next week. How’s Evie?’

‘It’s about Evie I’ve come to see you,’ said Peregrine, giving him a suspicious look. ‘Have you read her book?’

His sensitivity had been sharpened during those last days of troubled thought and he was conscious of a faint change in the lawyer’s expression. It was as though he were suddenly on his guard.

‘Yes, I’ve read it. Great success, isn’t it? Fancy Evie breaking out into poetry. Wonders will never cease.’

George Peregrine was inclined to lose his temper.

‘It’s made me look a perfect damned fool.’

‘Oh, what nonsense, George! There’s no harm in Evie’s writing a book. You ought to be jolly proud of her.’

‘Don’t talk such rot. It’s her own story. You know it and everyone else knows it. I suppose I’m the only one who doesn’t know who her lover was.’

‘There is such a thing as imagination, old boy. There’s no reason to suppose the whole thing isn’t made up.’

‘Look here, Henry, we’ve known one another all our lives. We’ve had all sorts of good times together. Be honest with me. Can you look me in the face and tell me you believe it’s a made–up story?’

Harry Blane moved uneasily in his chair. He was disturbed by the distress in old George’s voice.

‘You’ve got no right to ask me a question like that. Ask Evie.’

‘I daren’t,’ George answered after an anguished pause. ‘I’m afraid she’d tell me the truth.’

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘Who was the chap?’

Harry Blane looked at him straight in the eye.

‘I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.’

‘You swine. Don’t you see what a position I’m in? Do you think it’s very pleasant to be made absolutely ridiculous?’

The lawyer lit a cigarette and for some moments silently puffed it.

‘I don’t see what I can do for you,’ he said at last.

‘You’ve got private detectives you employ, I suppose. I want you to put them on the job and let them find everything out.’

‘It’s not very pretty to put detectives on one’s wife, old boy; and besides, taking for granted for a moment that Evie had an affair, it was a good many years ago and I don’t suppose it would be possible to find out a thing. They seem to have covered their tracks pretty carefully.’

‘I don’t care. You put the detectives on. I want to know the truth.’

‘I won’t, George. If you’re determined to do that you’d better consult someone else. And look here, even if you got evidence that Evie had been unfaithful to you what would you do with it? You’d look rather silly divorcing your wife because she’d committed adultery ten years ago.’

‘At all events I could have it out with her.’

‘You can do that now, but you know just as well as I do that if you do she’ll leave you. D’you want her to do that?’

George gave him an unhappy look.

‘I don’t know. I always thought she’d been a damned good wife to me. She runs the house perfectly, we never have any servant trouble; she’s done wonders with the garden and she’s splendid with all the village people. But damn it, I have my self–respect to think of. How can I go on living with her when I know that she was grossly unfaithful to me?’

‘Have you always been faithful to her?’

‘More or less, you know. After all, we’ve been married for nearly twenty–four years and Evie was never much for bed.’

The solicitor slightly raised his eyebrows, but George was too intent on what he was saying to notice.

‘I don’t deny that I’ve had a bit of fun now and then. A man wants it. Women are different.’

‘We only have men’s word for that,’ said Harry Blane, with a faint smile.

‘Evie’s absolutely the last woman I’d have suspected of kicking over the traces. I mean, she’s a very fastidious, reticent woman. What on earth made her write the damned book?’

‘I suppose it was a very poignant experience and perhaps it was a relief to her to get it off her chest like that.’

‘Well, if she had to write it why the devil didn’t she write it under an assumed name?’

‘She used her maiden name. I suppose she thought that was enough, and it would have been if the book hadn’t had this amazing boom.’

George Peregrine and the lawyer were sitting opposite one another with a desk between them. George, his elbow on the desk, his cheek on his hand, frowned at his thought.

‘It’s so rotten not to know what sort of a chap he was. One can’t even tell if he was by way of being a gentleman. I mean, for all I know he may have been a farm–hand or a clerk in a lawyer’s office.’

Harry Blane did not permit himself to smile and when he answered there was in his eyes a kindly, tolerant look.

‘Knowing Evie so well I think the probabilities are that he was all right. Anyhow I’m sure he wasn’t a clerk in my office.’

‘It’s been a shock to me,’ the colonel sighed. ‘I thought she was fond of me. She couldn’t have written that book unless she hated me.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe that. I don’t think she’s capable of hatred.’

‘You’re not going to pretend that she loves me.’

‘No.’

‘Well, what does she feel for me?’

Harry Blane leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at George reflectively.

‘Indifference, I should say.’

The colonel gave a little shudder and reddened.

‘After all, you’re not in love with her, are you?’

George Peregrine did not answer directly.

‘It’s been a great blow to me not to have any children, but I’ve never let her see that I think she’s let me down. I’ve always been kind to her. Within reasonable limits I’ve tried to do my duty by her.’

The lawyer passed a large hand over his mouth to conceal the smile that trembled on his lips.

‘It’s been such an awful shock to me,’ Peregrine went on. ‘Damn it all, even ten years ago Evie was no chicken and God knows, she wasn’t much to look at. It’s so ugly.’ He sighed deeply. ‘What would you do in my place?’

‘Nothing.’

George Peregrine drew himself bolt upright in his chair and he looked at Harry with the stern set face that he must have worn when he inspected his regiment.

‘I can’t overlook a thing like this. I’ve been made a laughing–stock. I can never hold up my head again.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the lawyer sharply, and then in a pleasant, kindly manner, ‘Listen, old boy: the man’s dead; it all happened a long while back. Forget it. Talk to people about Evie’s book, rave about it, tell ’em how proud you are of her. Behave as though you had so much confidence in her, you knew she could never have been unfaithful to you. The world moves so quickly and people’s memories are so short. They’ll forget.’

‘I shan’t forget.’

‘You’re both middle–aged people. She probably does a great deal more for you than you think and you’d be awfully lonely without her. I don’t think it matters if you don’t forget. It’ll be all to the good if you can get it into that thick head of yours that there’s a lot more in Evie than you ever had the gumption to see.’

‘Damn it all, you talk as if I was to blame.’

‘No, I don’t think you were to blame, but I’m not so sure that Evie was either. I don’t suppose she wanted to fall in love with this boy. D’you remember those verses right at the end? The impression they gave me was that though she was shattered by his death, in a strange sort of way she welcomed it. All through she’d been aware of the fragility of the tie that bound them. He died in the full flush of his first love and had never known that love so seldom endures; he’d only known its bliss and beauty. In her own bitter grief she found solace in the thought that he’d been spared all sorrow.’

‘All that’s a bit above my head, old boy. I see more or less what you mean.’

George Peregrine stared unhappily at the inkstand on the desk. He was silent and the lawyer looked at him with curious, yet sympathetic, eyes.

‘Do you realize what courage she must have had never by a sign to show how dreadfully unhappy she was?’ he said gently.

Colonel Peregrine sighed.

‘I’m broken, I suppose you’re right; it’s no good crying over spilt milk and it would only make things worse if I made a fuss.’

‘Well?’

George Peregrine gave a pitiful little smile.

‘I’ll take your advice. I’ll do nothing. Let them think me a damned fool and to hell with them. The truth is, I don’t know what I’d do without Evie. But I’ll tell you what, there’s one thing I shall never understand till my dying day: What in the name of heaven did the fellow ever see in her?’

MISS KING

It was not till the beginning of September that Ashenden, a writer by profession, who had been abroad at the outbreak of the war, managed to get back to England. He chanced soon after his arrival to go to a party and was there introduced to a middle–aged colonel whose name he did not catch. He had some talk with him. As he was about to leave, this officer came up to him and asked:

‘I say, I wonder if you’d mind coming to see me. I’d rather like to have a chat with you.’

‘Certainly,’ said Ashenden. ‘Whenever you like.’

‘What about tomorrow at eleven?’

‘All right.’

‘I’ll just write down my address. Have you a card on you?’

Ashenden gave him one and on this the colonel scribbled in pencil the name of a street and the number of a house. When Ashenden walked along next morning to keep his appointment he found himself in a street of rather vulgar red–brick houses in a part of London that had once been fashionable, but was now fallen in the esteem of the house–hunter who wanted a good address. On the house at which Ashenden had been asked to call there was a board up to announce that it was for sale, the shutters were closed, and there was no sign that anyone lived in it. He rang the bell and the door was opened by a non–commissioned officer so promptly that he was startled. He was not asked his business, but led immediately into a long room at the back, once evidently a dining–room, the florid decoration of which looked oddly out of keeping with the office furniture, shabby and sparse, that was in it. It gave Ashenden the impression of a room in which the brokers had taken possession. The colonel, who was known in the Intelligence Department, as Ashenden later discovered, by the letter R. rose when he came in and shook hands with him. He was a man somewhat above the middle height, lean, with a yellow, deeply lined face, thin grey hair, and a toothbrush moustache. The thing immediately noticeable about him was the closeness with which his blue eyes were set. He only just escaped a squint. They were hard and cruel eyes, and very wary; and they gave him a cunning, shifty look. Here was a man that you could neither like nor trust at first sight. His manner was pleasant and cordial.

He asked Ashenden a good many questions and then, without further to–do, suggested that he had particular qualifications for the secret service. Ashenden was acquainted with several European languages and his profession was excellent cover; on the pretext that he was writing a book he could without attracting attention visit any neutral country. It was while they were discussing this point that R. said:

‘You know, you ought to get material that would be very useful to you in your work.’

‘I shouldn’t mind that,’ said Ashenden.

‘I’ll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day and I can vouch for its truth. I thought at the time it would make a damned good story. One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a cold and he had some very important documents with him that he kept in a dispatch–case. They were very important indeed. Well, a day or two after he arrived he picked up a yellow–haired lady at some restaurant or other where there was dancing, and he got friendly with her. To cut a long story short, he took her back to his hotel–of course it was a very imprudent thing to do–and when he came to himself in the morning the lady and the dispatch–case had disappeared. They had one or two drinks up in his room and his theory is that when his back was turned the woman slipped a drug into his glass.’

R. finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close–set eyes.

‘Dramatic, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Do you mean to say that happened the other day?’

‘The week before last.’

‘Impossible,’ cried Ashenden. ‘Why, we’ve been putting that incident on the stage for sixty years, we’ve written it in a thousand novels. Do you mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?’

R. was a trifle disconcerted.

‘Well, if necessary, I could give you names and dates, and believe me, the Allies have been put to no end of trouble by the loss of the documents that the dispatch–case contained.’

‘Well, sir, if you can’t do better than that in the secret service,’ sighed Ashenden, ‘I’m afraid that as a source of inspiration to the writer of fiction it’s a wash–out. We really can’t write that story much longer.’

It did not take them long to settle things and when Ashenden rose to go he had already made careful note of his instructions. He was to start for Geneva next day. The last words that R. said to him, with a casualness that made them impressive, were:

‘There’s just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job. And don’t forget it. If you do well you’ll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help. Does that suit you?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Then I’ll wish you good afternoon.’

Ashenden was on his way back to Geneva. The night was stormy and the wind blew cold from the mountains, but the stodgy little steamer plodded sturdily through the choppy waters of the lake. A scudding rain, just turning into sleet, swept the deck in angry gusts, like a nagging woman who cannot leave a subject alone. Ashenden had been to France in order to write and dispatch a report. A day or two before, about five in the afternoon, an Indian agent of his had come to see him in his rooms; it was only by a lucky chance that he was in, for he had no appointment with him, and the agent’s instructions were to come to the hotel only in a case of urgent importance. He told Ashenden that a Bengali in the German service had recently come from Berlin with a black cane trunk in which were a number of documents interesting to the British Government. At that time the Central Powers were doing their best to foment such an agitation in India as would make it necessary for Great Britain to keep her troops in the country and perhaps send others from France. It had been found possible to get the Bengali arrested in Berne on a charge that would keep him out of harm’s way for a while, but the black cane trunk could not be found. Ashenden’s agent was a very brave and very clever fellow and he mixed freely with such of his countrymen as were disaffected to the interests of Great Britain. He had just discovered that the Bengali before going to Berne had, for greater safety, left the trunk in the cloak–room at Zürich station, and now that he was in gaol, awaiting trial, was unable to get the bulletin by which it might be obtained into the hands of any of his confederates. It was a matter of great urgency for the German Intelligence Department to secure the contents of the trunk without delay, and since it was impossible for them to get hold of it by the ordinary official means, they had decided to break into the station that very night and steal it. It was a bold and ingenious scheme and Ashenden felt a pleasant exhilaration (for a great deal of his work was uncommonly dull) when he heard of it. He recognized the dashing and unscrupulous touch of the head of the German secret service at Berne. But the burglary was arranged for two o’clock on the following morning and there was not a moment to lose. He could trust neither the telegraph nor the telephone to communicate with the British officer at Berne, and since the Indian agent could not go (he was taking his life in his hands by coming to see Ashenden and if he were noticed leaving his room it might easily be that he would be found one day floating in the lake with a knife–thrust in his back), there was nothing for it but to go himself.

There was a train to Berne that he could just catch and he put on his hat and coat as he ran downstairs. He jumped into a cab. Four hours later he rang the bell of the headquarters of the Intelligence Department. His name was known there but to one person, and it was for him that Ashenden asked. A tall tired–looking man, whom he had not met before, came out and without a word led him into an office. Ashenden told him his errand. The tall man looked at his watch.

‘It’s too late for us to do anything ourselves. We couldn’t possibly get to Zürich in time.’

He reflected.

‘We’ll put the Swiss authorities on the job. They can telephone, and when your friends attempt their little burglary, I have no doubt they’ll find the station well guarded. Anyhow, you had better get back to Geneva.’

He shook hands with Ashenden and showed him out. Ashenden was well aware that he would never know what happened then. Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, he never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.

Notwithstanding his fur coat and his muffler, Ashenden was chilled to the bone. It was warm in the saloon and there were good lights to read by, but he thought it better not to sit there in case some habitual traveller, recognizing him, wondered why he made these constant journeys between Geneva in Switzerland and Thonon in France; and so, making the best of what shelter could be found, he passed the tedious time in the darkness of the deck. He looked in the direction of Geneva, but could see no lights, and the sleet, turning into snow, prevented him from recognizing the landmarks. Lake Leman, on fine days so trim and pretty, artificial like a piece of water in a French garden, in this tempestuous weather was as secret and as menacing as the sea. He made up his mind that, on getting back to his hotel, he would have a fire lit in his sitting–room, a hot bath, and dinner comfortably by the fireside in pyjamas and a dressing–gown. The prospect of spending an evening by himself with his pipe and a book was so agreeable that it made the misery of that journey across the lake positively worth while. Two sailors tramped past him heavily, their heads bent down to save themselves from the sleet that blew in their faces, and one of them shouted to him: Nous arrivons; they went to the side and withdrew a bar to allow passage for the gangway, and looking again Ashenden through the howling darkness saw mistily the lights of the quay. A welcome sight. In two or three minutes the steamer was made fast and Ashenden, muffled to the eyes, joined himself to the little knot of passengers that waited to step ashore. Though he made the journey so often–it was his duty to cross the lake into France once a week to deliver his reports and to receive instructions–he had always a faint sense of trepidation when he stood among the crowd at the gangway and waited to land. There was nothing on his passport to show that he had been in France; the steamer went round the lake touching French soil at two places, but going from Switzerland to Switzerland, so that his journey might have been to Vevey or to Lausanne; but he could never be sure that the secret police had not taken note of him, and if he had been followed and seen to land in France, the fact that there was no stamp on his passport would be difficult to explain. Of course he had his story ready, but he well knew that it was not a very convincing one, and though it might be impossible for the Swiss authorities to prove that he was anything but a casual traveller, he might nevertheless spend two or three days in gaol, which would be uncomfortable, and then be firmly conducted to the frontier, which would be mortifying. The Swiss knew well that their country was the scene of all manner of intrigues; agents of the secret service, spies, revolutionaries, and agitators infested the hotels of the principal towns and, jealous of their neutrality, they were determined to prevent conduct that might embroil them with any of the belligerent powers.

There were as usual two police officers on the quay to watch the passengers disembark and Ashenden, walking past them with as unconcerned an air as he could assume, was relieved when he had got safely by. The darkness swallowed him up and he stepped out briskly for his hotel. The wild weather with a scornful gesture had swept all the neatness from the trim promenade. The shops were closed and Ashenden passed only an occasional pedestrian who sidled along, scrunched up, as though he fled from the blind wrath of the unknown. You had a feeling in that black and bitter night that civilization, ashamed of its artificiality, cowered before the fury of elemental things. It was hail now that blew in Ashenden’s face, and the pavement was wet and slippery so that he had to walk with caution. The hotel faced the lake. When he reached it and a page–boy opened the door for him, he entered the hall with a flurry of wind that sent the papers on the porter’s desk flying into the air. Ashenden was dazzled by the light. He stopped to ask the porter if there were letters for him. There was nothing, and he was about to get into the lift when the porter told him that two gentlemen were waiting in his room to see him. Ashenden had no friends in Geneva.

‘Oh?’ he answered, not a little surprised. ‘Who are they?’

He had taken care to get on friendly terms with the porter and his tips for trifling services had been generous. The porter gave a discreet smile.

‘There is no harm in telling you. I think they are members of the police.’

‘What do they want?’ asked Ashenden.

‘They did not say. They asked me where you were, and I told them you had gone for a walk. They said they would wait till you came back.’

‘How long have they been there?’

‘An hour.’

Ashenden’s heart sank, but he took care not to let his face betray his concern.

‘I’ll go up and see them,’ he said. The liftman stood aside to let him step into the lift, but Ashenden shook his head. ‘I’m so cold,’ he said, ‘I’ll walk up.’

He wished to give himself a moment to think, but as he ascended the three flights slowly his feet were like lead. There could be small doubt why two police officers were so bent upon seeing him. He felt on a sudden dreadfully tired. He did not feel he could cope with a multitude of questions. And if he were arrested as a secret agent he must spend at least the night in a cell. He longed more than ever for a hot bath and a pleasant dinner by his fireside. He had half a mind to turn tail and walk out of the hotel, leaving everything behind him; he had his passport in his pocket and he knew by heart the hours at which trains started for the frontier: before the Swiss authorities had made up their minds what to do he would be in safety. But he continued to trudge upstairs. He did not like the notion of abandoning his job so easily; he had been sent to Geneva, knowing the risks, to do work of a certain kind, and it seemed to him that he had better go through with it. Of course it would not be very nice to spend two years in a Swiss prison, but the chance of this was, like assassination to kings, one of the inconveniences of his profession. He reached the landing of the third floor and walked to his room. Ashenden had in him, it seems, a strain of flippancy (on account of which, indeed, the critics had often reproached him) and as he stood for a moment outside the door his predicament appeared to him on a sudden rather droll. His spirits went up and he determined to brazen the thing out. It was with a genuine smile on his lips that he turned the handle and entering the room faced his visitors.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ said he.

The room was brightly lit, for all the lights were on, and a fire burned in the hearth. The air was grey with smoke, since the strangers, finding it long to wait for him, had been smoking strong and inexpensive cigars. They sat in their greatcoats and bowler–hats as though they had only just that moment come in; but the ashes in the little tray on the table would alone have suggested that they had been long enough there to make themselves familiar with their surroundings. They were two powerful men, with black moustaches, on the stout side, heavily built, and they reminded Ashenden of Fafner and Fasolt, the giants in The Rhinegold; their clumsy boots, the massive way they sat in their chairs, and the ponderous alertness of their expression made it obvious that they were members of the detective force. Ashenden gave his room an enveloping glance. He was a neat creature and saw at once that his things, though not in disorder, were not as he had left them. He guessed that an examination had been made of his effects. That did not disturb him, for he kept in his room no document that would compromise him; his code he had learned by heart and destroyed before leaving England, and such communications as reached him from Germany were handed to him by third parties and transmitted without delay to the proper places. There was nothing he need fear in a search, but the impression that it had been made confirmed his suspicion that he had been denounced to the authorities as a secret agent.

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ he asked affably. ‘It’s warm in here, wouldn’t you like to take off your coats–and hats?’

It faintly irritated him that they should sit there with their hats on.

‘We’re only staying a minute,’ said one of them. ‘We were passing and as the concierge said you would be in at once, we thought we would wait.’

He did not remove his hat. Ashenden unwrapped his scarf and disem– barrassed himself of his heavy coat.

‘Won’t you have a cigar?’ he asked, offering the box to the two detectives in turn.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said the first, Fafner, taking one, upon which the second, Fasolt, helped himself without a word, even of thanks.

The name on the box appeared to have a singular effect on their manners, for both now took off their hats.

‘You must have had a very disagreeable walk in this bad weather,’ said Fafner, as he bit half an inch off the end of his cigar and spat it in the fire–place.

Now it was Ashenden’s principle (a good one in life as well as in the Intelligence Department) always to tell as much of the truth as he conveniently could; so he answered as follows:

‘What do you take me for? I wouldn’t go out in such weather if I could help it. I had to go to Vevey today to see an invalid friend and I came back by boat. It was bitter on the lake.’

‘We come from the police,’ said Fafner casually.

Ashenden thought they must consider him a perfect idiot if they imagined he had not guessed that, but it was not a piece of information to which it was discreet to reply with a pleasantry.

‘Oh, really,’ he said.

‘Have you your passport on you?’

‘Yes. In these war–times I think a foreigner is wise always to keep his passport on him.’

‘Very wise.’

Ashenden handed the man the nice new passport, which gave no information about his movements other than that he had come from London three months before and had since then crossed no frontier. The detective looked at it carefully and passed it on to his colleague.

‘It appears to be all in order,’ he said.

Ashenden, standing in front of the fire to warm himself, a cigarette between his lips, made no reply. He watched the detectives warily, but with an expression, he flattered himself, of amiable unconcern. Fasolt handed back the passport to Fafner, who tapped it reflectively with a thick forefinger.

‘The chief of police told us to come here,’ he said, and Ashenden was conscious that both of them now looked at him with attention, ‘to make a few inquiries of you.’

Ashenden knew that when you have nothing apposite to say it is better to hold your tongue; and when a man has made a remark that calls to his mind for an answer, he is apt to find silence a trifle disconcerting. Ashenden waited for the detective to proceed. He was not quite sure, but it seemed to him that he hesitated.

‘It appears that there have been a good many complaints lately of the noise that people make when they come out of the Casino late at night. We wish to know if you personally have been troubled by the disturbance. It is evident that as your rooms look on the lake and the revellers pass your windows, if the noise is serious, you must have heard it.’

For an instant Ashenden was dumbfounded. What balderdash was this the detective was talking to him (boom, boom, he heard the big drum as the giant lumbered on the scene), and why on earth should the chief of police send to him to find out if his beauty sleep had been disturbed by vociferous gamblers? It looked very like a trap. But nothing is so foolish as to ascribe profundity to what on the surface is merely inept; it is a pitfall into which many an ingenuous reviewer has fallen headlong. Ashenden had a confident belief in the stupidity of the human animal, which in the course of his life had stood him in good stead. It flashed across him that if the detective asked him such a question it was because he had no shadow of proof that he was engaged in any illegal practice. It was clear that he had been denounced, but no evidence had been offered, and the search of his rooms had been fruitless. But what a silly excuse was this to make for a visit and what a poverty of invention it showed! Ashenden immediately thought of three reasons the detectives might have given for seeking an interview with him and he wished that he were on terms sufficiently familiar with them to make the suggestions. This was really an insult to the intelligence. These men were even stupider than he thought; but Ashenden had always a soft corner in his heart for the stupid and now he looked upon them with a feeling of unexpected kindliness. He would have liked to pat them gently. But he answered the question with gravity.

‘To tell you the truth, I am a very sound sleeper (the result doubtless of a pure heart and an easy conscience), and I have never heard a thing.’

Ashenden looked at them for the faint smile that he thought his remark deserved, but their countenances remained stolid. Ashenden, as well as an agent of the British Government, was a humorist, and he stifled the beginnings of a sigh. He assumed a slightly imposing air and adopted a more serious tone.

‘But even if I had been awakened by noisy people I should not dream of complaining. At a time when there is so much trouble, misery, and unhappiness in the world, I cannot but think it very wrong to disturb the amusement of persons who are lucky enough to be able to amuse themselves.’

‘En effet,’ said the detective. ‘But the fact remains that people have been disturbed and the chief of police thought the matter should be inquired into.’

His colleague, who had hitherto preserved a silence that was positively sphinx–like, now broke it.

‘I noticed by your passport that you are an author, monsieur,’ he said.

Ashenden in reaction from his previous perturbation was feeling exceedingly debonair and he answered with good–humour:

‘It is true. It is a profession full of tribulation, but it has now and then its compensations.’

‘La gloire,’ said Fafner politely.

‘Or shall we say notoriety?’ hazarded Ashenden.

‘And what are you doing in Geneva?’

The question was put so pleasantly that Ashenden felt it behoved him to be on his guard. A police officer amiable is more dangerous to the wise than a police officer aggressive.

‘I am writing a play,’ said Ashenden.

He waved his hand to the papers on his table. Four eyes followed his gesture. A casual glance told him that the detectives had looked and taken note of his manuscripts.

‘And why should you write a play here rather than in your own country?’

Ashenden smiled upon them with even more affability than before, since this was a question for which he had long been prepared, and it was a relief to give the answer. He was curious to see how it would go down.

‘Mais, monsieur, there is the war. My country is in turmoil, it would be impossible to sit there quietly and write a play.’

’Is it a comedy or a tragedy?’

‘Oh, a comedy, and a light one at that,’ replied Ashenden. ‘The artist needs peace and quietness. How do you expect him to preserve that detachment of spirit that is demanded by creative work unless he can have perfect tranquillity? Switzerland has the good fortune to be neutral, and it seemed to me that in Geneva I should find the very surroundings I wanted.’

Fafner nodded slightly to Fasolt, but whether to indicate that he thought Ashenden an imbecile or whether in sympathy with his desire for a safe retreat from a turbulent world, Ashenden had no means of knowing. Anyhow the detective evidently came to the conclusion that he could learn nothing more from talking to Ashenden, for his remarks grew now desultory and in a few minutes he rose to go.

When Ashenden, having warmly shaken their hands, closed the door behind the pair he heaved a great sigh of relief. He turned on the water for his bath, as hot as he thought he could possibly bear it, and as he undressed reflected comfortably over his escape.

The day before, an incident had occurred that had left him on his guard There was in his service a Swiss, known in the Intelligence Department as Bernard, who had recently come from Germany, and Ashenden, desiring to see him, had instructed him to go to a certain café at a certain time. Since he had not seen him before, so that there might be no mistake he had informed him through an intermediary what question he himself would ask and what reply he was to give. He chose the luncheon hour for the meeting, since the café was unlikely to be crowded, and it chanced that on entering he saw but one man of about the age he knew Bernard to be. He was by himself, and going up to him Ashenden casually put to him the pre–arranged question. The pre–arranged answer was given, and sitting down beside him, Ashenden ordered himself a Dubonnet. The spy was a stocky little fellow, shabbily dressed, with a bullet–shaped head, close–cropped, fair, with shifty blue eyes and a sallow skin. He did not inspire confidence, and but that Ashenden knew by experience how hard it was to find men willing to go into Germany he would have been surprised that his predecessor had engaged him. He was a German–Swiss and spoke French with a strong accent. He immediately asked for his wages and these Ashenden passed over to him in an envelope. They were in Swiss francs. He gave a general account of his stay in Germany and answered Ashenden’s careful questions. He was by calling a waiter and had found a job in a restaurant near one of the Rhine bridges, which gave him good opportunity to get information that was required of him. His reasons for coming to Switzerland for a few days were plausible and there could apparently be no difficulty in his crossing the frontier on his return. Ashenden expressed his satisfaction with his behaviour, gave him his orders and was prepared to finish the interview.

‘Very good,’ said Bernard. ‘But before I go back to Germany I want two thousand francs.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, and I want them now, before you leave this café. It’s a sum I have to pay, and I’ve got to have it.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t give it to you.’

A scowl made the man’s face even more unpleasant to look at than it was before.

‘You’ve got to.’

‘What makes you think that?’

The spy leaned forward and, not raising his voice, but speaking so that only Ashenden could hear, burst out angrily:

‘Do you think I’m going on risking my life for that beggarly sum you give me? Not ten days ago a man was caught at Mainz and shot. Was that one of your men?’

‘We haven’t got anyone at Mainz,’ said Ashenden, carelessly, and for all he knew it was true. He had been puzzled not to receive his usual communications from that place and Bernard’s information might afford the explanation. ‘You knew exactly what you were to get when you took on the job, and if you weren’t satisfied you needn’t have taken it. I have no authority to give you a penny more.’

‘Do you see what I’ve got here?’ said Bernard.

He took a small revolver out of his pocket and fingered it significantly. ‘What are you going to do with it? Pawn it?’

With an angry shrug of the shoulders he put it back in his pocket. Ashenden reflected that had he known anything of the technique of the theatre Bernard would have been aware that it was useless to make a gesture that had no ulterior meaning.

‘You refuse to give me the money?’

‘Certainly.’

The spy’s manner, which at first had been obsequious, was now somewhat truculent, but he kept his head and never for a moment raised his voice. Ashenden could see that Bernard, however big a ruffian, was a reliable agent, and he made up his mind to suggest to R. that his salary should be raised. The scene diverted him. A little way off two fat citizens of Geneva, with black beards, were playing dominoes, and on the other side a young man with spectacles was with great rapidity writing sheet after sheet of an immensely long letter. A Swiss family (who knows, perhaps Robinson by name), consisting of a father and mother and four children, were sitting round a table making the best of two small cups of coffee. The caissière behind the counter, an imposing brunette with a large bust encased in black silk, was reading the local paper. The surroundings made the melodramatic scene in which Ashenden was engaged perfectly grotesque. His own play seemed to him much more real. Bernard smiled. His smile was not engaging.

‘Do you know that I have only to go to the police and tell them about you to have you arrested? Do you know what a Swiss prison is like?’

‘No, I’ve often wondered lately. Do you?’

‘Yes, and you wouldn’t much like it.’

One of the things that had bothered Ashenden was the possibility that he would be arrested before he finished his play. He disliked the notion of leaving it half done for an indefinite period. He did not know whether he would be treated as a political prisoner or as a common criminal and he had a mind to ask Bernard whether in the latter case (the only one Bernard was likely to know anything about) he would be allowed writing materials. He was afraid Bernard would think the inquiry an attempt to laugh at him. But he was feeling comparatively at ease and was able to answer Bernard’s threat without heat.

‘You could of course get me sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.’

‘At least.’

‘No, that is the maximum, I understand, and I think it is quite enough. I won’t conceal from you that I should find it extremely disagreeable. But not nearly so disagreeable as you would.’

‘What could you do?’

‘Oh, we’d get you somehow. And after all, the war won’t last for ever. You are a waiter, you want your freedom of action. I promise you that if I get into any trouble, you will never be admitted into any of the Allied countries for the rest of your life. I can’t help thinking it would cramp your style.’

Bernard did not reply, but looked down sulkily at the marble–topped table. Ashenden thought this was the moment to pay for the drinks and go.

‘Think it over, Bernard,’ he said. ‘If you want to go back to your job, you have your instructions, and your usual wages shall be paid through the usual channels.’

The spy shrugged his shoulders, and Ashenden, though not knowing in the least what was the result of their conversation, felt that it behoved him to walk out with dignity. He did so.

And now as he carefully put one foot into the bath, wondering if he could bear it, he asked himself what Bernard had in the end decided on. The water was just not scalding and he gradually let himself down into it. On the whole it seemed to him that the spy had thought it would be as well to go straight, and the source of his denunciation must be looked for elsewhere. Perhaps in the hotel itself. Ashenden lay back, and as his body grew used to the heat of the water gave a sigh of satisfaction.

‘Really,’ he reflected, ‘there are moments in life when all this to–do that has led from the primeval slime to myself seems almost worth while.’

Ashenden could not but think he was lucky to have wriggled out of the fix he had found himself in that afternoon. Had he been arrested and in due course sentenced, R., shrugging his shoulders, would merely have called him a damned fool and set about looking for someone to take his place. Already Ashenden knew his chief well enough to be aware that when he had told him that if he got into trouble he need look for no help he meant exactly what he said.

Ashenden, lying comfortably in his bath, was glad to think that in all probability he would be able to finish his play in peace. The police had drawn a blank and though they might watch him from now on with some care, it was unlikely that they would take a further step until he had at least roughed out his third act. It behoved him to be prudent (only a fortnight ago his colleague at Lausanne had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment), but it would be foolish to be alarmed: his predecessor in Geneva, seeing himself, with an exaggerated sense of his own importance, shadowed from morning till night, had been so affected by the nervous strain that it had been found necessary to withdraw him. Twice a week Ashenden had to go to the market to receive instructions that were brought to him by an old peasant woman from French Savoy who sold butter and eggs. She came in with the other market–women and the search at the frontier was perfunctory. It was barely dawn when they crossed and the officials were only too glad to have done quickly with these chattering noisy women and get back to their warm fires and their cigars. Indeed this old lady looked so bland and innocent, with her corpulence, her fat red face, and her smiling good–natured mouth, it would have been a very astute detective who could imagine that if he took the trouble to put his hand deep down between those voluminous breasts of hers, he would find a little piece of paper that would land in the dock an honest old woman (who kept her son out of the trenches by taking this risk) and an English writer approaching middle age. Ashenden went to the market about nine when the housewives of Geneva for the most part had done their provisioning, stopped in front of the basket by the side of which, rain or wind, hot or cold, sat that indomitable creature and bought half a pound of butter. She slipped the note into his hand when he was given change for ten francs and he sauntered away. His only moment of risk was when he walked back to his hotel with the paper in his pocket, and after this scare he made up his mind to shorten as much as possible the period during which it could be found on him.

Ashenden sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether. On the other hand he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find himself the will–power to step out of it like a man. He had often –heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on insufficient evidence: they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot, bath. His mind, however, wandered back to his play, and telling himself jokes and repartees that he knew by bitter experience would never look so neat on paper nor sound so well on the stage as they did then, he abstracted his mind from the fact that his bath was growing almost tepid, when he heard a knock at the door. Since he did not want anyone to enter, he had the presence of mind not to say come in, but the knocking was repeated.

‘Who is it?’ he cried irascibly.

‘A letter.’

‘Come in then. Wait a minute.’

Ashenden heard his bedroom door open and getting out of the bath flung a towel round him and went in. A page–boy was waiting with a note. It needed only a verbal answer. It was from a lady staying in the hotel asking him to play bridge after dinner and was signed in the continental fashion Baronne de Higgins. Ashenden, longing for a cosy meal in his own room, in slippers and with a book leaned up against a reading–lamp, was about to refuse when it occurred to him that in the circumstances it might be discreet to show himself in the dining–room that night. It was absurd to suppose that in that hotel the news would not have spread that he had been visited by the police and it would be as well to prove to his fellow guests that he was not disconcerted. It had passed through his mind that it might be someone in the hotel who had denounced him and indeed the name of the sprightly baroness had not failed to suggest itself to him. If it was she who had given him away there would be a certain humour in playing bridge with her. He gave the boy a message that he would be pleased to come and proceeded slowly to don his evening clothes.

The Baroness von Higgins was an Austrian, who on settling in Geneva during the first winter of the war had found it convenient to make her name look as French as possible. She spoke English and French perfectly. Her surname, so far from Teutonic, she owed to her grandfather, a Yorkshire stable–boy, who had been taken over to Austria by a Prince Blankenstein early in the nineteenth century. He had had a charming and romantic career; a very good–looking man, he attracted the attention of one of the archduchesses and then made such good use of his opportunities that he ended his life as a baron and minister plenipotentiary to an Italian court. The baroness, his only descendant, after an unhappy marriage, the particulars of which she was fond of relating to her acquaintance, had resumed her maiden name. She mentioned not infrequently the fact that her grandfather had been an ambassador, but never that he had been a stable–boy and Ashenden had learned this interesting detail from Vienna; for as he grew friendly with her he had thought it necessary to get a few particulars about her past, and he knew among other things that her private income did not permit her to live on the somewhat lavish scale on which she was living in Geneva. Since she had so many advantages for espionage, it was fairly safe to suppose that an alert secret service had enlisted her services and Ashenden took it for granted that she was engaged somehow on the same kind of work as himself. It increased if anything the cordiality of his relations with her.

When he went into the dining–room it was already full. He sat down at his table and feeling jaunty after his adventure ordered himself (at the expense of the British Government) a bottle of champagne. The baroness gave him a flashing, brilliant smile. She was a woman of more than forty, but in a hard and glittering manner extremely beautiful. She was a high–coloured blonde with golden hair of a metallic lustre, lovely no doubt but not attractive, and Ashenden had from the first reflected that it was not the sort of hair you would like to find in your soup. She had fine features, blue eyes, a straight nose, and a pink and white skin, but her skin was stretched over her bones a trifle tightly; she was generously décolletée and her white and ample bosom had the quality of marble. There was nothing in her appearance to suggest the yielding tenderness that the susceptible find so alluring. She was magnificently gowned, but scantily bejewelled, so that Ashenden, who knew something of these matters, concluded that the superior authority had given her carte blanche at a dressmaker’s but had not thought it prudent or necessary to provide her with rings or pearls. She was notwithstanding so showy that but for R.’s story of the minister, Ashenden would have thought the sight of her alone must have aroused in anyone on whom she desired to exercise her wiles the sense of prudence.

While he waited for his dinner to be served, Ashenden cast his eyes over the company. Most of the persons gathered were old friends by sight. At that time Geneva was a hot–bed of intrigue and its home was the hotel at which Ashenden was staying. There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks, and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it. There was a Bulgarian, an agent of Ashenden, whom for greater safety he had never even spoken to in Geneva; he was dining that night with two fellow countrymen and in a day or so, if he was not killed in the interval, might have a very interesting communication to make. Then there was a little German prostitute, with china–blue eyes and a doll–like face, who made frequent journeys along the lake and up to Berne, and in the exercise of her profession got little titbits of information over which doubtless they pondered with deliberation in Berlin. She was of course of a different class from the baroness and hunted much easier game. But Ashenden was surprised to catch sight of Count von Holzminden and wondered what on earth he was doing there. This was the German agent in Vevey and he came over to Geneva only on occasion. Once Ashenden had seen him in the old quarter of the city, with its silent houses and deserted streets, talking at a corner to a man whose appearance very much suggested the spy and he would have given a great deal to hear what they said to one another. It had amused him to come across the Count, for in London before the war he had known him fairly well. He was of great family and indeed related to the Hohenzollerns. He was fond of England; he danced well, rode well, and shot well; people said he was more English than the English. He was a tall, thin fellow, in well–cut clothes, with a close–cropped Prussian head, and that peculiar bend of the body–as though he were just about to bow to a royalty–that you feel, rather than see, in those who have spent their lives about a court. He had charming manners and was much interested in the Fine Arts. But now Ashenden and he pretended they had never seen one another before. Each of course knew on what work the other was engaged and Ashenden had had a mind to chaff him about it–it seemed absurd when he had dined with a man off and on for years and played cards with him, to act as though he did not know him from Adam–but refrained in case the German looked upon his behaviour as further proof of the British frivolity in face of war. Ashenden was perplexed: Holzminden had never set foot in that hotel before and it was unlikely that he had done so now without good reason.

Ashenden asked himself whether this event had anything to do with the unusual presence in the dining–room of Prince Ali. At that juncture it was imprudent to ascribe any occurrence, however accidental it looked, to the hazard of coincidence. Prince Ali was an Egyptian, a near relation of the Khedive, who had fled his country when the Khedive was deposed. He was a bitter enemy of the English and was known to be actively engaged in stirring up trouble in Egypt. The week before, the Khedive in great secrecy had passed three days at the hotel and the pair of them had held constant meetings in the prince’s apartments. He was a little fat man with a heavy black moustache. He was living with his two daughters and a certain pasha, Mustapha by name, who was his secretary and managed his affairs. The four of them were now dining together; they drank a great deal of champagne, but sat in a stolid silence. The two princesses were emancipated young women who spent their nights dancing in restaurants with the bloods of Geneva. They were short and stout, with fine black eyes and heavy sallow faces; and they were dressed with a rich loudness that suggested the Fish–market at Cairo rather than the Rue de la Paix. His Highness usually ate upstairs but the princesses dined every evening in the public dining–room: they were chaperoned vaguely by a little old Englishwoman, a Miss King, who had been their governess; but she sat at a table by herself and they appeared to pay no attention to her. Once Ashenden, going along a corridor, had come upon the elder of the two fat princesses berating the governess in French with a violence that took his breath away. She was shouting at the top of her voice and suddenly smacked the old woman’s face. When she caught sight of Ashenden she gave him a furious look and flinging into her room slammed the door. He walked on as though he had noticed nothing.

On his arrival Ashenden had tried to scrape acquaintance with Miss King, but she had received his advances not merely with frigidity but with churlishness. He had begun by taking off his hat when he met her, and she had given him a stiff bow, then he had addressed her and she had answered with such brevity that it was evident that she wished to have nothing much to do with him. But it was not his business to be discouraged, so with what assurance he could muster he took the first opportunity to enter into conversation with her. She drew herself up and said in French, but with an English accent:

‘I don’t wish to make acquaintance with strangers.’

She turned her back on him and, next time he saw her, cut him dead.

She was a tiny woman, just a few little bones in a bag of wrinkled skin, and her face was deeply furrowed. It was obvious that she wore a wig, it was of a mousy brown, very elaborate and not always set quite straight, and she was heavily made up, with great patches of scarlet on her withered cheeks and brilliantly red lips. She dressed fantastically in gay clothes that looked as though they had been bought higgledy–piggledy from an old–clothes shop and in the day–time she wore enormous, extravagantly girlish hats. She tripped along in very small smart shoes with very high heels. Her appearance was so grotesque that it created consternation rather than amusement. People turned in the street and stared at her with open mouths.

Ashenden was told that Miss King had not been to England since she was first engaged as governess of the prince’s mother and he could not but be amazed to think of all she must have seen during those long years in the harems of Cairo. It was impossible to guess how old she was. How many of those short Eastern lives must have run their course under her eyes and what dark secrets must she have known! Ashenden wondered where she came from; an exile from her own country for so long, she must possess in it neither family nor friends: he knew that her sentiments were anti–English and if she had answered him so rudely he surmised that she had been told to be on her guard against him. She never spoke anything but French. Ashenden wondered what it was she thought of as she sat there, at luncheon and dinner by herself. He wondered if ever she read. After meals she went straight upstairs and was never seen in the public sitting–rooms. He wondered what she thought of those two emancipated princesses who wore garish frocks and danced with strange men in second–rate cafés. But when Miss King passed him on her way out of the dining–room it seemed to Ashenden that her mask of a face scowled. She appeared actively to dislike him. Her gaze met his and the pair of them looked at one another for a moment: he imagined that she tried to put into her stare an unspoken insult. It would have been pleasantly absurd in that painted, withered visage if it had not been for some reason rather oddly pathetic.

But now the Baroness de Higgins, having finished her dinner, gathered up her handkerchief and her bag, and with waiters bowing on either side sailed down the spacious room. She stopped at Ashenden’s table. She looked magnificent.

‘I’m so glad you can play bridge tonight,’ she said in perfect English, with no more than a trace of German accent. ‘Will you come to my sitting–room when you are ready and have your coffee?’

‘What a lovely dress,’ said Ashenden.

‘It is frightful. I have nothing to wear, I don’t know what I shall do now that I cannot go to Paris. Those horrible Prussians,’ and her r’s grew guttural as she raised her voice, ‘why did they want to drag my poor country into this terrible war?’

She gave a sigh, and a flashing smile, and sailed on. Ashenden was among the last to finish and when he left the dining–room it was almost empty. As he walked past Count Holzminden, Ashenden feeling very gay hazarded the shadow of a wink. The German agent could not be quite sure of it and if he suspected it might rack his brains to discover what mystery it portended. Ashenden walked up to the second floor and knocked at the baroness’s door.

‘Entrez, entrez,’ she said and flung it open.

She shook both his hands with cordiality and drew him into the room. He saw that the two persons who were to make the four had already arrived. They were Prince Ali and his secretary. Ashenden was astounded.

‘Allow me to introduce Mr Ashenden to Your Highness,’ said the baroness, speaking in her fluent French.

Ashenden bowed and took the proffered hand. The prince gave him a quick look, but did not speak. Madame de Higgins went on:

‘I do not know if you have met the Pasha.’

‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Ashenden,’ said the prince’s secretary, warmly shaking his hand. ‘Our beautiful baroness has talked to us of your bridge and His Highness is devoted to the game. N’est–ce pas, Altesse?’

‘Oui, oui,’ said the prince.

Mustapha Pasha was a huge fat fellow, of forty–five perhaps, with large mobile eyes and a big black moustache. He wore a dinner jacket with a large diamond in his shirt–front and the tarboosh of his country. He was exceedingly voluble, and the words tumbled out of his mouth tumultuously, like marbles out of a bag. He took pains to be extremely civil to Ashenden. The prince sat in silence, looking at Ashenden quietly from under his heavy eyelids. He seemed shy.

‘I have not seen you at the club, Monsieur,’ said the pasha. ‘Do you not like baccarat?’

‘I play but seldom.’

‘The baroness, who has read everything, tells me that you are a remarkable writer. Unfortunately I do not read English.’

The baroness paid Ashenden some very fulsome compliments to which he listened with a proper and grateful politeness, and then, having provided her guests with coffee and liqueurs, she produced the cards. Ashenden could not but wonder why he had been asked to play. He had (he flattered himself) few illusions about himself, and so far as bridge was concerned none. He knew that he was a good player of the second class, but he had played often enough with the best players in the world to know that he was not in the same street with them. The game played now was contract, with which he was not very familiar, and the stakes were high; but the game was obviously but a pretext and Ashenden had no notion what other game was being played under the rose. It might be that knowing he was a British agent the prince and his secretary had desired to see him in order to find out what sort of person he was. Ashenden had felt for a day or two that something was in the air and this meeting confirmed his suspicions, but he had not the faintest notion of what nature this something was. His spies had told him of late nothing that signified. He was now persuaded that he owed that visit of the Swiss police to the kindly intervention of the baroness and it looked as though the bridge–party had been arranged when it was discovered that the detectives had been able to do nothing. The notion was mysterious, but diverting, and as Ashenden played one rubber after another, joining in the incessant conversation, he watched what was said by himself no less closely than what was said by the others. The war was spoken of a good deal and the baroness and the pasha expressed very anti–German sentiments. The baroness’s heart was in England whence her family (the stable–boy from Yorkshire) had sprung, and the pasha looked upon Paris as his spiritual home. When the pasha talked of Montmartre and its life by night the prince was roused from his silence.

‘C’est une bien belle ville, Paris, he said.

‘The Prince has a beautiful apartment there,’ said his secretary, ‘with beautiful pictures and life–sized statues.’

Ashenden explained that he had the greatest sympathy for the national aspirations of Egypt and that he looked upon Vienna as the most pleasing capital in Europe. He was as friendly to them as they were to him. But if they were under the impression that they would get any information out of him that they had not already seen in the Swiss papers he had a notion that they were mistaken. At one moment he had a suspicion that he was being sounded upon the possibility of selling himself. It was done so discreetly that he could not be quite sure, but he had a feeling that a suggestion floated in the air that a clever writer could do his country a good turn and make a vast amount of money for himself if he cared to enter into an arrangement that would bring to a troubled world the peace that every humane man must so sincerely desire. It was plain that nothing very much would be said that first evening, but Ashenden as evasively as he could, more by general amiability than by words, tried to indicate that he was willing to hear more of the subject. While he talked with the pasha and the beautiful Austrian he was conscious that the watchful eyes of Prince Ali were upon him, and had an uneasy suspicion that they read too much of his thoughts. He felt rather than knew that the prince was an able and astute man. It was possible that after he left them the prince would tell the other two that they were wasting their time and there was nothing to be done with Ashenden.

Soon after midnight, a rubber having been finished, the prince rose from the table.

‘It is getting late,’ he said, ‘and Mr Ashenden has doubtless much to do tomorrow. We must not keep him up.’

Ashenden looked upon this as a signal to take himself off. He left the three together to discuss the situation and retired not a little mystified. He could only trust that they were no less puzzled than he. When he got to his room he suddenly realized that he was dog–tired. He could hardly keep his eyes open while he undressed, and the moment he flung himself into bed he fell asleep.

He would have sworn that he had not been asleep five minutes when he was dragged back to wakefulness by a knocking at the door. He listened for a moment.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s the maid. Open. I have something to say to you.’

Cursing, Ashenden turned on his light, ran a hand through his thinning and rumpled hair (for like Julius Caesar he disliked exposing an unbecoming baldness) and unlocked and opened the door. Outside it stood a tousled Swiss maid. She wore no apron and looked as though she had thrown on her clothes in a hurry.

‘The old English lady, the governess of the Egyptian princesses, is dying and she wants to see you.’

‘Me?’ said Ashenden. ‘It’s impossible. I don’t know her. She was all right this evening.’

He was confused and spoke his thoughts as they came to him.

‘She asks for you. The doctor says, will you come. She cannot last much longer.’

‘It must be a mistake. She can’t want me.’

‘She said your name and the number of your room. She says quick, quick.’

Ashenden shrugged his shoulders. He went back into his room to put on slippers and a dressing–gown, and as an afterthought dropped a small revolver into his pocket. Ashenden believed much more in his acuteness than in a firearm, which is apt to go off at the wrong time and make a noise, but there are moments when it gives you confidence to feel your fingers round its butt, and this sudden summons seemed to him exceedingly mysterious. It was ridiculous to suppose that those two cordial stout Egyptian gentlemen were laying some sort of trap for him, but in the work upon which Ashenden was engaged the dullness of routine was apt now and again to slip quite shamelessly into the melodrama of the sixties. Just as passion will make use brazenly of the hackneyed phrase, so will chance show itself insensitive to the triteness of the literary convention.

Miss King’s room was two floors higher than Ashenden’s, and as he accompanied the chamber–maid along the corridor and up the stairs he asked her what was the matter with the old governess. She was flurried and stupid.

‘I think she has had a stroke. I don’t know. The night–porter woke me and said Monsieur Bridet wanted me to get up at once.’

Monsieur Bridet was the assistant–manager.

‘What is the time?’ asked Ashenden.

‘It must be three o’clock.’

They arrived at Miss King’s door and the maid knocked. It was opened by Monsieur Bridet. He had evidently been roused from his sleep; he wore slippers on his bare feet, grey trousers and a frock–coat over his pyjamas. He looked absurd. His hair as a rule plastered neatly on his head stood on end. He was extremely apologetic.

‘A thousand excuses for disturbing you, Monsieur Ashenden, but she kept asking for you and the doctor said you should be sent for.’

‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

Ashenden walked in. It was a small back room and all the lights were on. The windows were closed and the curtains drawn. It was intensely hot. The doctor, a bearded, grizzled Swiss, was standing at the bedside. Monsieur Bridet, notwithstanding his costume and his evident harassment, found in himself the presence of mind to remain the attentive manager, and with ceremony effected the proper introduction.

‘This is Mr Ashenden, for whom Miss King has been asking. Dr Arbos of the Faculty of Medicine of Geneva.’

Without a word the doctor pointed to the bed. On it lay Miss King. It gave Ashenden a shock to look at her. She wore a large white cotton nightcap (on entering Ashenden had noticed the brown wig on a stand on the dressing–table) tied under the chin, and a white, voluminous nightdress that came high up in the neck. Nightcap and nightdress belonged to a past age and reminded you of Cruikshank’s illustrations to the novels of Charles Dickens. Her face was greasy still with the cream she had used before going to bed to remove her make–up, but she had removed it summarily and there were streaks of black on her eyebrows and of red on her cheeks. She looked very small, lying in the bed, no larger than a child, and immensely old.

‘She must be well over eighty,’ thought Ashenden.

She did not look human, but like a doll, the caricature of an old, old witch that an ironic toymaker had amused himself with modelling. She lay perfectly still on her back, the tiny little body hardly marked under the flatness of the blanket, her face even smaller than usual because she had removed her teeth; and you would have thought she was dead but for the black eyes, strangely large in the shrunken mask, that stared unblinkingly. Ashenden thought their expression changed when she saw him.

‘Well, Miss King, I’m sorry to see you like this,’ he said with forced cheerfulness.

‘She cannot speak,’ said the doctor. ‘She had another little stroke when the maid went to fetch you. I have just given her an injection. She may partly recover the use of her tongue in a little while. She has something to say to you.’

‘I will gladly wait,’ said Ashenden.

He fancied that in those dark eyes he saw a look of relief. For a moment or two the four of them stood round the bed and stared at the dying woman.

‘Well, if there is nothing I can do I may just as well go back to bed,’ said Monsieur Bridet then.

‘Allez, mon ami,’ said the doctor. ‘You can do nothing.’

Monsieur Bridet turned to Ashenden.

‘May I have a word with you?’ he asked.

‘Certainly.’

The doctor noticed a sudden fear in Miss King’s eyes.

‘Do not be alarmed,’ he said kindly. ‘Monsieur Ashenden is not going. He will stay as long as you wish.’

The assistant–manager took Ashenden to the door and partly closed it so that those within should not hear his undertones.

‘I can count on your discretion, Monsieur Ashenden, can I not? It is a very disagreeable thing to have anyone die in a hotel. The other guests do not like it and we must do all we can to prevent their knowing. I shall have the body removed the first possible moment and I shall be extremely obliged if you will not say that there has been a death.’

‘You can have every confidence in me,’ said Ashenden.

‘It is very unfortunate that the manager should be away for the night. I am afraid he will be exceedingly displeased. Of course if it had been possible I would have sent for an ambulance and had her taken to the hospital, but the doctor said she might die before we got her downstairs and absolutely refused to let me. It is not my fault if she dies in the hotel.’

‘Death so often chooses its moments without consideration,’ murmured Ashenden.

‘After all she is an old woman, she should have died years ago. What did this Egyptian prince want to have a governess of that age for? He ought to have sent her back to her own country. These Orientals, they are always giving trouble.’

‘Where is the prince now?’ asked Ashenden. ‘She has been in his service for many years. Ought you not to wake him?’

‘He is not in the hotel. He went out with his secretary. He may be playing baccarat. I do not know. Anyhow I cannot send all over Geneva to find him.’

‘And the princesses?’

‘They have not come in. They seldom return to the hotel till dawn. They are mad about dancing. I do not know where they are; in any case they would not thank me for dragging them away from their diversions because their governess has had a stroke. I know what they are. The night–porter will tell them when they arrive and then they can please themselves. She does not want them. When the night–porter fetched me and I went into her room I asked where His Highness was and she cried with all her strength: no, no.’

‘She could talk then?’

‘Yes, after a fashion, but the thing that surprised me was that she spoke in English. She always insisted on talking French. You know, she hated the English.’

‘What did she want with me?’

‘That I cannot tell you. She said she had something that she must say to you at once. It is funny, she knew the number of your room. At first when she asked for you I would not let them send. I cannot have my clients disturbed in the middle of the night because a crazy old woman asks for them. You have the right to your sleep, I imagine. But when the doctor came he insisted. She gave us no peace and when I said she must wait till morning she cried.’

Ashenden looked at the assistant–manager. He seemed to find nothing at all touching in the scene he related.

‘The doctor asked who you were and when I told him he said that perhaps she wished to see you because you were a compatriot.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Ashenden dryly.

‘Well, I shall try to get a little sleep. I shall give the night–porter orders to wake me when everything is over. Fortunately the nights are long now and if everything goes well we may be able to get the body away before it is light.’

Ashenden went back into the room and immediately the dark eyes of the dying woman fixed upon him. He felt that it was incumbent upon him to say something, but as he spoke he reflected on the foolish way in which one speaks to the sick.

‘I’m afraid you’re feeling very ill, Miss King.’

It seemed to him that a flash of anger crossed her eyes and Ashenden could not but imagine that she was exasperated by his futile words.

‘You do not mind waiting?’ asked the doctor.

‘Of course not.’

It appeared that the night–porter had been roused by the ringing of the telephone from Miss King’s room, but on listening could get no one to speak. The bell continued to ring, so he went upstairs and knocked at the door. He entered with his pass–key and found Miss King lying on the floor. The telephone had fallen too. It looked as though, feeling ill, she had taken off the receiver to call for help and then collapsed. The night–porter hurried to fetch the assistant–manager and together they had lifted her back into bed. Then the maid was wakened and the doctor sent for. It gave Ashenden a queer feeling to listen to the doctor giving him these facts in Miss King’s hearing. He spoke as though she could not understand his French. He spoke as though she were already dead.

Then the doctor said:

‘Well, there is really nothing more that I can do. It is useless for me to stay. I can be rung up if there is any change.’

Ashenden, knowing that Miss King might remain in that condition for hours, shrugged his shoulders.

‘Very well.’

The doctor patted her raddled cheek as though she were a child.

‘You must try to sleep. I will come back in the morning.’

He packed up the dispatch–case in which he had his medical appliances, washed his hands, and shuffled himself into a heavy coat. Ashenden accompanied him to the door and as he shook hands the doctor gave his prognosis in a pout of his bearded mouth. Ashenden, coming back, looked at the maid. She sat on the edge of a chair, uneasily, as though in the presence of death she feared to presume. Her broad, ugly face was bloated with fatigue.

‘There’s no use in your staying up,’ Ashenden said to her. ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

‘Monsieur wouldn’t like to remain here alone. Somebody must stay with him.’

‘But good heavens, why? You have your day’s work to do tomorrow.’

‘In any case I have to get up at five.’

‘Then try to get a little sleep now. You can give me a look in when you get up. Allez.’

She rose heavily to her feet.

‘As the gentleman wishes. But I will stay very willingly.’

Ashenden smiled and shook his head.

‘Bonsoir, ma pauvre mademoiselle,’ said the maid.

She went out and Ashenden was left alone. He sat by the bedside and again his eyes met Miss King’s. It was embarrassing to encounter that unshrinking stare.

‘Don’t worry yourself, Miss King. You’ve had a slight stroke. I’m sure your speech will come back to you in a minute.’

He felt certain then that he saw in those dark eyes a desperate effort to speak. He could not be mistaken. The mind was shaken by desire, but the paralysed body was incapable of obedience. For her disappointment expressed itself quite plainly, tears came to her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Ashenden took out his handkerchief and dried them.

‘Don’t distress yourself, Miss King. Have a little patience and I’m sure you’ll be able to say anything you want.’

He did not know if it was his fancy that he read in her eyes now the despairing thought that she had not the time to wait. Perhaps it was only that he ascribed to her the notions that came to himself. On the dressing–table were the governess’s poor little toilet things, silver–backed embossed brushes and a silver mirror, in a corner stood a shabby black trunk, and on the top of the wardrobe a large hat–box in shiny leather. It all looked poor and mean in that trim hotel room, with its suite in highly varnished rosewood. The glare was intolerable.

‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if I turned out some of the lights?’ asked Ashenden.

He put out all the lamps but the one by the bedside and then sat down again. He had a longing to smoke. Once more his eyes were held by those other eyes in which was all that remained alive of that old, old woman. He felt certain that she had something that she wanted urgently to say to him. But what was it? What was it? Perhaps she had asked him only because feeling death near, she had had a sudden yearning, she the exile of so many years, to die with someone of her own people, so long forgotten, by her side. That was what the doctor thought. But why should she have sent for him? There were other English people in the hotel. There was an old pair, a retired Indian Civilian and his wife, to whom it seemed more natural that she should turn. No one could be more of a stranger to her than Ashenden.

‘Have you got something to say to me, Miss King?’

He tried to read an answer in her eyes. They continued to stare at him meaningly, but what the meaning was he had no notion.

‘Don’t be afraid I shall go. I will stay as long as you want me.’

Nothing, nothing. The black eyes, and as he looked at them they seemed to glow mysteriously as though there were fire behind them, the eyes continued to hold him with that insistent stare. Then Ashenden asked himself if she had sent for him because she knew that he was a British agent. Was it possible that at that last moment she had had some unexpected revulsion of feeling from everything that had signified to her for so many years? Perhaps at the moment of death a love for her country, a love that had been dead for half a century, awakened again in her–(‘I’m silly to fancy these idiotic things,’ thought Ashenden, ‘it’s cheap and tawdry fiction’)–and she had been seized with a desire to do something for what was after all her own. No one was quite himself just then and patriotism (in peace–time an attitude best left to politicians, publicists, and fools, but in the dark days of war an emotion that can wring the heart–strings), patriotism made one do odd things. It was curious that she had been unwilling to see the prince and his daughters. Did she on a sudden hate them? Did she feel herself a traitor on their account and now at the last hour wish to make amends? (‘It’s all very improbable, she’s just a silly old maid who ought to have died years ago.’) But you couldn’t ignore the improbable. Ashenden, his common sense protesting, became strangely convinced that she had some secret that she wished to impart to him. She had sent for him knowing who he was because he could make use of it. She was dying and feared nothing. But was it really important? Ashenden leaned forward trying more eagerly to read what her eyes had to say. Perhaps it was only some trivial thing that was important only in her addled old brain. Ashenden was sick of the people who saw spies in every inoffensive passer–by and plots in the most innocent combination of circumstances. It was a hundred to one that if Miss King recovered her speech she would tell him something that could be of no use to anybody.

But how much must that old woman know! With her sharp eyes and sharp ears she must have had the chance to discover matters that were closely hidden from persons that seemed less insignificant. Ashenden thought again how he had the impression that something of real consequence was being prepared round about him. It was curious that Holzminden should have come to the hotel that day; and why had Prince Ali and the pasha, those wild gamblers, wasted an evening in playing contract–bridge with him? It might be that some new plan was in question, it might be that the very greatest affairs were afoot, and perhaps what the old woman had to say might make all the difference in the world. It might mean defeat or victory. It might mean anything. And there she lay powerless to speak. For a long time Ashenden stared at her in silence.

‘Has it got anything to do with the war, Miss King?’ he said on a sudden, loudly.

Something passed through her eyes and a tremor shot across her little old face. It was a distinct movement. Something strange and horrible was happening and Ashenden held his breath. The tiny frail body was suddenly convulsed and that old woman, as though by a final desperate effort of will, raised herself up in the bed. Ashenden sprang forward to support her.

‘England,’ she said, just that one word, in a harsh cracked voice, and fell back in his arms.

When he laid her down on the pillow, he saw that she was dead.

THE HAIRLESS MEXICAN

‘Do you like macaroni?’ said R.

‘What do you mean by macaroni?’ answered Ashenden. ‘It is like asking me if I like poetry. I like Keats and Wordsworth and Verlaine and Goethe. When you say macaroni, do you mean spaghetti, tagliatelli, vermicelli, fettuccini, tufali, farfalli, or just macaroni?’

‘Macaroni,’ replied R., a man of few words.

‘I like all simple things, boiled eggs, oysters and caviare, truite au bleu, grilled salmon, roast lamb (the saddle by preference), cold grouse, treacle tart, and rice pudding. But of all simple things the only one I can eat day in and day out, not only without disgust but with the eagerness of an appetite unimpaired by excess, is macaroni.’

‘I am glad of that because I want you to go down to Italy.’

Ashenden had come from Geneva to meet R. at Lyons and having got there before him had spent the afternoon wandering about the dull, busy and prosaic streets of that thriving city. They were sitting now in a restaurant on the place to which Ashenden had taken R. on his arrival because it was reputed to give you the best food in that part of France. But since in so crowded a resort (for the Lyonese like a good dinner) you never knew what inquisitive ears were pricked up to catch any useful piece of information that might fall from your lips, they had contented themselves with talking of indifferent things. They had reached the end of an admirable repast.

‘Have another glass of brandy?’ said R.

‘No, thank you,’ answered Ashenden, who was of an abstemious turn. ‘One should do what one can to mitigate the rigours of war,’ remarked R. as he took the bottle and poured out a glass for himself and another for Ashenden.

Ashenden, thinking it would be affectation to protest, let the gesture pass, but felt bound to remonstrate with his chief on the unseemly manner in which he held the bottle.

‘In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck,’ he murmured.

‘I am glad you told me. I shall continue to hold a bottle by the waist and give women a wide berth.’

Ashenden did not know what to reply to this and so remained silent.

He sipped his brandy and R. called for his bill. It was true that he was an important person, with power to make or mar quite a large number of his fellows, and his opinions were listened to by those who held in their hands the fate of empires; but he could never face the business of tipping a waiter without an embarrassment that was obvious in his demeanour. He was tortured by the fear of making a fool of himself by giving too much or of exciting the waiter’s icy scorn by giving too little. When the bill came he passed some hundred– franc notes over to Ashenden and said:

‘Pay him, will you? I can never understand French figures.’

The groom brought them their hats and coats.

‘Would you like to go back to the hotel?’ asked Ashenden.

‘We might as well.’

It was early in the year, but the weather had suddenly turned warm, and they walked with their coats over their arms. Ashenden knowing that R. liked a sitting–room had engaged one for him, and to this, when they reached the hotel, they went. The hotel was old–fashioned and the sitting–room was vast. It was furnished with a heavy mahogany suite upholstered in green velvet and the chairs were set primly round a large table. On the walls, covered with a dingy paper, were large steel engravings of the battles of Napoleon, and from the ceiling hung an enormous chandelier once used for gas, but now fitted with electric bulbs. It flooded the cheerless room with a cold, hard light. ‘This is very nice,’ said R., as they went in.

‘Not exactly cosy,’ suggested Ashenden.

‘No, but it looks as though it were the best room in the place. It all looks very good to me.’

He drew one of the green velvet chairs away from the table and, sitting down, lit a cigar. He loosened his belt and unbuttoned his tunic.

‘I always thought I liked a cheroot better than anything,’ he said, ‘but since the war I’ve taken quite a fancy to Havanas. Oh well, I suppose it can’t last for ever.’

The corners of his mouth flickered with the beginning of a smile. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.’

Ashenden took two chairs, one to sit on and one for his feet, and when R. saw him he said: ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ and swinging another chair out from the table with a sigh of relief put his boots on it.

‘What room is that next door?’ he asked.

‘That’s your bedroom.’

‘And on the other side?’

‘A banqueting hall.’

R. got up and strolled slowly about the room and when he passed the windows, as though in idle curiosity, peeped through the heavy rep curtains that covered them, and then returning to his chair once more comfortably put his feet up.

‘It’s just as well not to take any more risk than one need,’ he said. He looked at Ashenden reflectively. There was a slight smile on his thin lips, but the pale eyes, too closely set together, remained cold and steely. R.’s stare would have been embarrassing if Ashenden had not been used to it. He knew that R. was considering how he would broach the subject that he had in mind.

The silence must have lasted for two or three minutes.

‘I’m expecting a fellow to come and see me tonight,’ he said at last. ‘His train gets in about ten.’ He gave his wrist–watch a glance. ‘He’s known as the Hairless Mexican.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s hairless and because he’s a Mexican.’

‘The explanation seems perfectly satisfactory,’ said Ashenden.

‘He’ll tell you all about himself. He talks nineteen to the dozen. He was on his uppers when I came across him. It appears that he was mixed up in some revolution in Mexico and had to get out with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. They were rather the worse for wear when I found him. If you want to please him you call him General. He claims to have been a general in Huerta’s army, at least I think it was Huerta; anyhow he says that if things had gone right he would be Minister of War now and no end of a big bug. I’ve found him very useful. Not a bad chap. The only thing I really have against him is that he will use scent.’

‘And where do I come in?’ asked Ashenden.

‘He’s going down to Italy. I’ve got rather a ticklish job for him to do and I want you to stand by. I’m not keen on trusting him with a lot of money. He’s a gambler and he’s a bit too fond of the girls. I suppose you came from Geneva on your Ashenden passport?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got another for you, a diplomatic one, by the way, in the name of Somerville with visas for France and Italy. I think you and he had better travel together. He’s an amusing cove when he gets going, and I think you ought to know one another.’

‘What is the job?’

‘I haven’t yet quite made up my mind how much it’s desirable for you to know about it.’

Ashenden did not reply. They eyed one another in a detached manner, as though they were strangers who sat together in a railway carriage and each wondered who and what the other was.

‘In your place I’d leave the General to do most of the talking. I wouldn’t tell him more about yourself than you find absolutely necessary. He won’t ask you any questions, I can promise you that, I think he’s by way of being a gentleman after his own fashion.’

‘By the way, what is his real name?’

‘I always call him Manuel. I don’t know that he likes it very much, his name is Manuel Carmona.’

‘I gather by what you have not said that he’s an unmitigated scoundrel.’ R. smiled with his pale blue eyes.

‘I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as that. He hasn’t had the advantages of a public–school education. His ideas of playing the game are not quite the same as yours or mine. I don’t know that I’d leave a gold cigarette–case about when he was in the neighbourhood, but if he lost money to you at poker and had pinched your cigarette–case he would immediately pawn it to pay you. If he had half a chance he’d seduce your wife, but if you were up against it he’d share his last crust with you. The tears will run down his face when he hears Gounod’s Ave Maria on the gramophone, but if you insult his dignity he’ll shoot you like a dog. It appears that in Mexico it’s an insult to get between a man and his drink and he told me himself that once when a Dutchman who didn’t know passed between him and the bar he whipped out his revolver and shot him dead.’

‘Did nothing happen to him?’

‘No, it appears that he belongs to one of the best families. The matter was hushed up and it was announced in the papers that the Dutchman had committed suicide. He did practically. I don’t believe the Hairless Mexican has a great respect for human life.’

Ashenden, who had been looking intently at R., started a little and he watched more carefully than ever his chiefs tired, lined, and yellow face. He knew that he did not make this remark for nothing.

‘Of course a lot of nonsense is talked about the value of human life. You might just as well say that the counters you use at poker have an intrinsic value.

Their value is what you like to make it; for a general giving battle, men are merely counters and he’s a fool if he allows himself for sentimental reasons to look upon them as human beings.’

‘But, you see, they’re counters that feel and think and if they believe they’re being squandered they are quite capable of refusing to be used any more.’ ‘Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. We’ve had information that a man called Constantine Andreadi is on his way from Constantinople with certain documents that we want to get hold of. He’s a Greek. He’s an agent of Enver Pasha and Enver has great confidence in him. He’s given him verbal messages that are too secret and too important to be put on paper. He’s sailing from the Piraeus, on a boat called the Ithaca, and will land at Brindisi on his way to Rome. He’s to deliver his dispatches at the German Embassy and impart what he has to say personally to the ambassador.’

‘I see.’

At this time Italy was still neutral; the Central Powers were straining every nerve to keep her so; the Allies were doing what they could to induce her to declare war on their side.

‘We don’t want to get into trouble with the Italian authorities, it might be fatal, but we’ve got to prevent Andreadi from getting to Rome.’

‘At any cost?’ asked Ashenden.

‘Money’s no object,’ answered R., his lips twisting into a sardonic smile. ‘What do you propose to do?’

‘I don’t think you need bother your head about that.’

‘I have a fertile imagination,’ said Ashenden.

‘I want you to go down to Naples with the Hairless Mexican. He’s very keen on getting back to Cuba. It appears that his friends are organizing a show and he wants to be as near at hand as possible so that he can hop over to Mexico when things are ripe. He needs cash. I’ve brought money down with me, in American dollars, and I shall give it to you tonight. You’d better carry it on your person.’

’Is it much?’

‘It’s a good deal, but I thought it would be easier for you if it wasn’t bulky, so I’ve got it in thousand–dollar notes. You will give the Hairless Mexican the notes in return for the documents that Andreadi is bringing.’

A question sprang to Ashenden’s lips, but he did not ask it. He asked another instead.

‘Does this fellow understand what he has to do?’

‘Perfectly.’

There was a knock at the door. It opened and the Hairless Mexican stood before them.

‘I have arrived. Good evening, Colonel. I am enchanted to see you.’ R. got up.

‘Had a nice journey, Manuel? This is Mr Somerville, who’s going to Naples with you, General Carmona.’

‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’

He shook Ashenden’s hand with such force that he winced.

‘Your hands are like iron, General,’ he murmured. The Mexican gave them a glance.

‘I had them manicured this morning. I do not think they were very well done.

I like my nails much more highly polished.’

They were cut to a point, stained bright red, and to Ashenden’s mind shone like mirrors. Though it was not cold the General wore a fur coat with an astrakhan collar and with his every movement a wave of perfume was wafted to your nose.

‘Take off your coat, General, and have a cigar,’ said R.

The Hairless Mexican was a tall man, and though thinnish gave you the impression of being very powerful; he was smartly dressed in a blue serge suit, with a silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket of his coat, and he wore a gold bracelet on his wrist. His features were good, but a little larger than life–size, and his eyes were brown and lustrous. He was quite hairless. His yellow skin had the smoothness of a woman’s and he had no eyebrows nor eyelashes; he wore a pale brown wig, rather long, and the locks were arranged in artistic disorder. This and the unwrinkled sallow face, combined with his dandified dress, gave him an appearance that was at first glance a trifle horrifying. He was repulsive and ridiculous, but you could not take your eyes from him. There was a sinister fascination in his strangeness.

He sat down and hitched up his trousers so that they should not bag at the knee.

‘Well, Manuel, have you been breaking any hearts today?’ said R. with his sardonic joviality.

The General turned to Ashenden.

‘Our good friend, the Colonel, envies me my successes with the fair sex. I tell him he can have just as many as I if he will only listen to me. Confidence, that is all you need. If you never fear a rebuff you will never have one.’

‘Nonsense, Manuel, one has to have your way with the girls. There’s something about you that they can’t resist.’

The Hairless Mexican laughed with a self–satisfaction that he did not try to disguise. He spoke English very well, with a Spanish accent, but with an American intonation.

‘But since you ask me, Colonel, I don’t mind telling you that I got into conversation on the train with a little woman who was coming to Lyons to see her mother–in–law. She was not very young and she was thinner than I like a woman to be, but she was possible, and she helped me to pass an agreeable hour,’

‘Well, let’s get to business,’ said R.

‘I am at your service, Colonel.’ He gave Ashenden a glance. ’Is Mr Somerville a military man?’

‘No,’ said R., ‘he’s an author.’

‘It takes all sorts to make a world, as you say. I am happy to make your acquaintance, Mr Somerville. I can tell you many stories that will interest you; I am sure that we shall get on well together. You have a sympathetic air. I am very sensitive to that. To tell you the truth I am nothing but a bundle of nerves and if I am with a person who is antipathetic to me I go all to pieces.’

‘I hope we shall have a pleasant journey,’ said Ashenden.

‘When does our friend arrive at Brindisi?’ asked the Mexican, turning to R. ‘He sails from the Piraeus in the Ithaca on the fourteenth. It’s probably some old tub, but you’d better get down to Brindisi in good time.’

‘I agree with you.’

R. got up and with his hands in his pockets sat on the edge of the table. In his rather shabby uniform, his tunic unbuttoned, he looked a slovenly creature beside the neat and well–dressed Mexican.

‘Mr Somerville knows practically nothing of the errand on which you are going and I do not desire to tell him anything. I think you had much better keep your own counsel. He is instructed to give you the funds you need for your work, but your actions are your own affair. If you need his advice of course you can ask for it.’

‘I seldom ask other people’s advice and never take it.’

‘And should you make a mess of things I trust you to keep Mr Somerville out of it. He must on no account be compromised.’

‘I am a man of honour, Colonel,’ answered the Hairless Mexican with dignity,

‘and I would sooner let myself be cut in a thousand pieces than betray my friends.’

‘That is what I have already told Mr Somerville. On the other hand, if everything pans out O.K. Mr Somerville is instructed to give you the sum we agreed on in return for the papers I spoke to you about. In what manner you get them is no business of his.’

‘That goes without saying. There is only one thing I wish to make quite plain;

Mr Somerville understands of course that I have not accepted the mission with which you have entrusted me on account of the money?’

‘Quite,’ replied R. gravely, looking him straight in the eyes.

‘I am with the Allies body and soul, I cannot forgive the Germans for outraging the neutrality of Belgium, and if I accept the money that you have offered me it is because I am first and foremost a patriot. I can trust Mr Somerville implicitly, I suppose?’

R. nodded. The Mexican turned to Ashenden.

‘An expedition is being arranged to free my unhappy country from the tyrants that exploit and ruin it and every penny that I receive will go on guns and cartridges. For myself I have no need of money; I am a soldier and I can live on a crust and a few olives. There are only three occupations that befit a gentleman, war, cards, and women; it costs nothing to sling a rifle over your shoulder and take to the mountains–and that is real warfare, not this manoeuvring of battalions and firing of great guns–women love me for myself, and I generally win at cards.’

Ashenden found the flamboyance of this strange creature, with his scented handkerchief and his gold bracelet, very much to his taste. This was far from being just the man in the street (whose tyranny we rail at but in the end submit to) and to the amateur of the baroque in human nature he was a rarity to be considered with delight. He was a purple patch on two legs. Notwithstanding his wig and his hairless big face, he had undoubtedly an air; he was absurd, but he did not give you the impression that he was a man to be trifled with. His self–complacency was magnificent.

‘Where is your kit, Manuel?’ asked R.

It was possible that a frown for an instant darkened the Mexican’s brow at the abrupt question that seemed a little contemptuously to brush to one side his eloquent statement, but he gave no other sign of displeasure. Ashenden suspected that he thought the Colonel a barbarian insensitive to the finer emotions.

‘I left it at the station.’

‘Mr Somerville has a diplomatic passport so that he can get it through with his own things at the frontier without examination if you like.’

‘I have very little, a few suits and some linen, but perhaps it would be as well if Mr Somerville would take charge of it. I bought half a dozen suits of silk pyjamas before I left Paris.’

‘And what about you?’ asked R., turning to Ashenden.

‘I’ve only got one bag. It’s in my room.’

‘You’d better have it taken to the station while there’s someone about. Your train goes at one ten.’

‘Oh?’

This was the first Ashenden had heard that they were to start that night. ‘I think you’d better get down to Naples as soon as possible.’

‘Very well.’

R. got up.

‘I’m going to bed. I don’t know what you fellows want to do.’

‘I shall take a walk about Lyons,’ said the Hairless Mexican. ‘I am interested in life. Lend me a hundred francs, Colonel, will you? I have no change on me.’ R. took out his pocket–book and gave the General the note he asked for. Then to Ashenden:

‘What are you going to do? Wait here?’

‘No,’ said Ashenden, ‘I shall go to the station and read.’

‘You’d both of you better have a whisky and soda before you go, hadn’t you?

What about it, Manuel?’

‘It is very kind of you, but I never drink anything but champagne and brandy.’ ‘Mixed?’ asked R. dryly.

‘Not necessarily,’ returned the other with gravity.

R. ordered brandy and soda and when it came, whereas he and Ashenden helped themselves to both, the Hairless Mexican poured himself out three parts of a tumbler of neat brandy and swallowed it in two noisy gulps. He rose to his feet and put on his coat with the astrakhan collar, seized in one hand his bold black hat and, with the gesture of a romantic actor giving up the girl he loves to one more worthy of her, held out the other to R.

‘Well, Colonel, I will bid you good night and pleasant dreams. I do not expect that we shall meet again so soon.’

‘Don’t make a hash of things, Manuel, and if you do, keep your mouth shut.’ ‘They tell me that in one of your colleges where the sons of gentlemen are trained to become naval officers it is written in letters of gold: There is no such word as impossible in the British Navy. I do not know the meaning of the word failure.’

‘It has a good many synonyms,’ retorted R.

‘I will meet you at the station, Mr Somerville,’ said the Hairless Mexican, and with a flourish left them.

R. looked at Ashenden with that little smile of his that always made his face look so dangerously shrewd.

‘Well, what d’you think of him?’

‘You’ve got me beat,’ said Ashenden. ’Is he a mountebank? He seems as vain as a peacock. And with that frightful appearance can he really be the lady’s man he pretends? What makes you think you can trust him?’

R. gave a low chuckle and he washed his thin, old hands with imaginary soap. ‘I thought you’d like him. He’s quite a character, isn’t he? I think we can trust him.’ R.’s eyes suddenly grew opaque. ‘I don’t believe it would pay him to double–cross us.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Anyhow we’ve got to risk it. I’ll give you the tickets and the money and then you can take yourself off; I’m all in and I want to go to bed.’

Ten minutes later Ashenden set out for the station with his bag on a porter’s shoulder.

Having nearly two hours to wait he made himself comfortable in the waiting–room. The light was good and he read a novel. When the time drew near for the arrival of the train from Paris that was to take them direct to Rome, and the Hairless Mexican did not appear, Ashenden, beginning to grow a trifle anxious, went out on the platform to look for him. Ashenden suffered from that distressing malady known as train fever: an hour before his train was due he began to have apprehensions lest he should miss it; he was impatient with the porters who would never bring his luggage down from his room in time and he could not understand why the hotel bus cut it so fine; a block in the street would drive him to frenzy and the languid movements of the station porters infuriate him. The whole world seemed in a horrid plot to delay him; people got in his way as he passed through the barriers; others, a long string of them, were at the ticket–office getting tickets for other trains than his and they counted their change with exasperating care; his luggage took an interminable time to register; and then if he was travelling with friends they would go to buy newspapers, or would take a walk along the platform, and he was certain they would be left behind, they would stop to talk to a casual stranger or suddenly be seized with a desire to telephone and disappear at a run. In fact the universe conspired to make him miss every train he wanted to take and he was not happy unless he was settled in his corner, his things on the rack above him, with a good half–hour to spare. Sometimes by arriving at the station too soon he had caught an earlier train than the one he had meant to, but that was nerve–racking and caused him all the anguish of very nearly missing it. The Rome express was signalled and there was no sign of the Hairless Mexican; it came in and he was not to be seen. Ashenden became more and more harassed. He walked quickly up and down the platform, looked in all the waiting–rooms, went to the consigne where the luggage was left; he could not find him. There were no sleeping–cars, but a number of people got out and he took two seats in a first–class carriage. He stood by the door, looking up and down the platform and up at the clock; it was useless to go if his travelling companion did not turn up, and Ashenden made up his mind to take his things out of the carriage as the porter cried en voiture; but, by George! he would give the brute hell when he found him. There were three minutes more, then two minutes, then one; at that late hour there were few persons about and all who were travelling had taken their seats. Then he saw the Hairless Mexican, followed by two porters with his luggage and accompanied by a man in a bowler–hat, walk leisurely on to the platform. He caught sight of Ashenden and waved to him.

‘Ah, my dear fellow, there you are, I wondered what had become of you.’ ‘Good God, man, hurry up or we shall miss the train.’

‘I never miss a train. Have you got good seats? The chef de gare has gone for the night; this is his assistant.’

The man in the bowler–hat took it off when Ashenden nodded to him. ‘But this is an ordinary carriage. I am afraid I could not travel in that.’ He turned to the stationmaster’s assistant with an affable smile. ‘You must do better for me than that, mon cher.’

‘Certainement, mon général, I will put you into a salon–lit. Of course.’ The assistant stationmaster led them along the train and opened the door of an empty compartment where there were two beds. The Mexican eyed it with satisfaction and watched the porters arrange the luggage.

‘That will do very well. I am much obliged to you.’ He held out his hand to the man in the bowler–hat. ‘I shall not forget you and next time I see the Minister I will tell him with what civility you have treated me.’

‘You are too good, General. I shall be very grateful.’

A whistle was blown and the train started.

‘This is better than an ordinary first–class carriage, I think, Mr Somerville,’ said the Mexican. ‘A good traveller should learn how to make the best of things.’

But Ashenden was still extremely cross.

‘I don’t know why the devil you wanted to cut it so fine. We should have looked a pair of damned fools if we’d missed the train.’

‘My dear fellow, there was never the smallest chance of that. When I arrived I told the stationmaster that I was General Carmona, Commander–in–Chief of the Mexican Army, and that I had to stop off in Lyons for a few hours to hold a conference with the British Field–Marshal. I asked him to hold the train for me if I was delayed and suggested that my government might see its way to conferring an order on him. I have been to Lyons before, I like the girls here; they have not the chic of the Parisians, but they have something, there is no denying that they have something. Will you have a mouthful of brandy before you go to sleep?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Ashenden morosely.

‘I always drink a glass before going to bed, it settles the nerves.’ He looked in his suit–case and without difficulty found a bottle. He put it to his lips and had a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lit a cigarette. Then he took off his boots and lay down. Ashenden dimmed the light.

‘I have never yet made up my mind,’ said the Hairless Mexican reflectively,

‘whether it is pleasanter to go to sleep with the kisses of a beautiful woman on your mouth or with a cigarette between your lips. Have you ever been to Mexico? I will tell you about Mexico tomorrow. Good night.’

Soon Ashenden heard from his steady breathing that he was asleep and in a little while himself dozed off. Presently he woke. The Mexican, deep in slumber, lay motionless; he had taken off his fur coat and was using it as a blanket; he still wore his wig. Suddenly there was a jolt and the train with a noisy grinding of brakes stopped; in the twinkling of an eye, before Ashenden could realize that anything had happened, the Mexican was on his feet with his hand to his hip.

‘What is it?’ he cried.

‘Nothing. Probably only a signal against us.’

The Mexican sat down heavily on his bed. Ashenden turned on the light. ‘You wake quickly for such a sound sleeper,’ he said.

‘You have to in my profession.’

Ashenden would have liked to ask him whether this was murder, conspiracy, or commanding armies, but was not sure that it would be discreet. The General opened his bag and took out the bottle.

‘Will you have a nip?’ he asked. ‘There is nothing like it when you wake suddenly in the night.’

When Ashenden refused he put the bottle once more to his lips and poured a considerable quantity of liquor down his throat. He sighed and lit a cigarette.

Although Ashenden had seen him now drink nearly a bottle of brandy, and it was probable that he had had a good deal more when he was going about the town, he was certainly quite sober. Neither in his manner nor in his speech was there any indication that he had drunk during the evening anything but lemonade.

The train started and Ashenden again fell asleep. When he awoke it was morning and turning round lazily he saw that the Mexican was awake too. He was smoking a cigarette. The floor by his side was strewn with burnt–out butts and the air was thick and grey. He had begged Ashenden not to insist on opening a window, for he said the night air was dangerous.

‘I did not get up, because I was afraid of waking you. Will you do your toilet first or shall I?’

‘I’m in no hurry,’ said Ashenden.

‘I am an old campaigner, it will not take me long. Do you wash your teeth every day?’

‘Yes,’ said Ashenden.

‘So do I. It is a habit I learned in New York. I always think that a fine set of teeth are an adornment to a man.’

There was a wash–basin in the compartment and the General scrubbed his teeth, with gurglings and garglings, energetically. Then he got a bottle of eau–de–Cologne from his bag, poured some of it on a towel and rubbed it over his face and hands. He took a comb and carefully arranged his wig; either it had not moved in the night or else he had set it straight before Ashenden awoke.

He got another bottle out of his bag, with a spray attached to it, and squeezing a bulb covered his shirt and coat with a fine cloud of scent, did the same to his handkerchief, and then with a beaming face, like a man who has done his duty by the world and is well pleased, turned to Ashenden and said:

‘Now I am ready to brave the day. I will leave my things for you, you need not be afraid of the eau–de–Cologne, it is the best you can get in Paris.’ ‘Thank you very much,’ said Ashenden. ‘All I want is soap and water.’ ‘Water? I never use water except when I have a bath. Nothing can be worse for the skin.’

When they approached the frontier, Ashenden, remembering the General’s instinctive gesture when he was suddenly awakened in the night, said to him: ‘If you’ve got a revolver on you I think you’d better give it to me. With my diplomatic passport they’re not likely to search me, but they might take it into their heads to go through you and we don’t want to have any bothers.’ ‘It is hardly a weapon, it is only a toy,’ returned the Mexican, taking out of his hip–pocket a fully loaded revolver of formidable dimensions. ‘I do not like parting with it even for an hour, it gives me the feeling that I am not fully dressed. But you are quite right, we do not want to take any risks; I will give you my knife as well. I would always rather use a knife than a revolver; I think it is a more elegant weapon.’

‘I dare say it is only a matter of habit,’ answered Ashenden. ‘Perhaps you are more at home with a knife.’

‘Anyone can pull a trigger, but it needs a man to use a knife.’

To Ashenden it looked as though it were in a single movement that he tore open his waistcoat and from his belt snatched and opened a long knife of murderous aspect. He handed it to Ashenden with a pleased smile on his large, ugly, and naked face.

‘There’s a pretty piece of work for you, Mr Somerville. I’ve never seen a better bit of steel in my life, it takes an edge like a razor and it’s strong; you can cut a cigarette–paper with it and you can hew down an oak. There is nothing to get out of order and when it is closed it might be the knife a schoolboy uses to cut notches in his desk.’

He shut it with a click and Ashenden put it along with the revolver in his pocket.

‘Have you anything else?’

‘My hands,’ replied the Mexican with arrogance, ‘but those I dare say the Custom officials will not make trouble about.’

Ashenden remembered the iron grip he had given him when they shook hands and slightly shuddered. They were large and long and smooth; there was not a hair on them or on the wrists, and with the pointed, rosy, manicured nails there was really something sinister about them.

Ashenden and General Carmona went through the formalities at the frontier independently and when they returned to their carriage Ashenden handed back to his companion the revolver and the knife. He sighed.

‘Now I feel more comfortable. What do you say to a game of cards?’ ‘I should like it,’ said Ashenden.

The Hairless Mexican opened his bag again and from a corner extracted a greasy pack of French cards. He asked Ashenden whether he played écarté and when Ashenden told him that he did not suggested piquet. This was a game that Ashenden was not unfamiliar with, so they settled the stakes and began. Since both were in favour of quick action, they played the game of four hands, doubling the first and last. Ashenden had good enough cards, but the General seemed notwithstanding always to have better. Ashenden kept his eyes open and he was not careless of the possibility that his antagonist might correct the inequalities of chance, but he saw nothing to suggest that everything was not above board. He lost game after game. He was capoted and rubiconed. The score against him mounted up and up till he had lost something like a thousand francs, which at that time was a tidy sum. The General smoked innumerable cigarettes. He made them himself with a twist of the finger, a lick of his tongue and incredible celerity. At last he flung himself against the back of his seat.

‘By the way, my friend, does the British Government pay your card losses when you are on a mission?’ he asked.

‘It certainly doesn’t.’

‘Well, I think you have lost enough. If it went down on your expense account I would have proposed playing till we reached Rome, but you are sympathetic to me. If it is your own money I do not want to win any more of it.’

He picked up the cards and put them aside. Ashenden somewhat ruefully took out a number of notes and handed them to the Mexican. He counted them and with his usual neatness put them carefully folded into his pocket–book. Then, leaning forward, he patted Ashenden almost affectionately on the knee.

‘I like you, you are modest and unassuming, you have not the arrogance of your countrymen, and I am sure that you will take my advice in the spirit in which it is meant. Do not play piquet with people you don’t know.’

Ashenden was somewhat mortified and perhaps his face showed it, for the Mexican seized his hand.

‘My dear fellow, I have not hurt your feelings? I would not do that for the world. You do not play piquet worse than most piquet players. It is not that. If we were going to be together longer I would teach you how to win at cards. One plays cards to win money and there is no sense in losing.’

‘I thought it was only in love and war that all things were fair,’ said Ashenden, with a chuckle.

‘Ah, I am glad to see you smile. That is the way to take a loss. I see that you have good humour and good sense. You will go far in life. When I get back to Mexico and am in possession of my estates again you must come and stay with me. I will treat you like a king. You shall ride my best horses, we will go to bullfights together, and if there are girls you fancy you have only to say the word and you shall have them.’

He began telling Ashenden of the vast territories, the haciendas and the mines in Mexico, of which he had been dispossessed. He told him of the feudal state in which he lived. It did not matter whether what he said was true or not, for those sonorous phrases of his were fruity with the rich–distilled perfumes of romance. He described a spacious life that seemed to belong to another age and his eloquent gestures brought before the mind’s eye tawny distances and vast green plantations, great herds of cattle and in the moonlit night the song of the blind singers that melted in the air and the twanging of guitars.

‘Everything I lost, everything. In Paris I was driven to earn a pittance by giving Spanish lessons or showing Americans–Americanos del Norte, I mean–the night life of the city. I who have flung away a thousand duros on a dinner have been forced to beg my bread like a blind Indian. I who have taken pleasure in clasping a diamond bracelet round the wrist of a beautiful woman have been forced to accept a suit of clothes from a hag old enough to be my mother. Patience. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but misfortune cannot last for ever. The time is ripe and soon we shall strike our blow.’

He took up the greasy pack of cards and set them out in a number of little piles.

‘Let us see what the cards say. They never lie. Ah, if I had only had greater faith in them I should have avoided the only action of my life that has weighed heavily on me. My conscience is at ease. I did what any man would do under the circumstances, but I regret that necessity forced upon me an action that I would willingly have avoided.’

He looked through the cards, set some of them on one side on a system Ashenden did not understand, shuffled the remainder and once more put them in little piles.

‘The cards warned me, I will never deny that, their warning was clear and definite. Love and a dark woman, danger, betrayal and death. It was as plain as the nose on your face. Any fool would have known what it meant and I have been using the cards all my life. There is hardly an action that I make without consulting them. There are no excuses. I was besotted. Ah, you of the Northern races do not know what love means, you do not know how it can prevent you from sleeping, how it can take your appetite for food away so that you dwindle as if from a fever, you do not understand what a frenzy it is so that you are like a mad–man and you will stick at nothing to satisfy your desire. A man like me is capable of every folly and every crime when he is in love, si, Señor, and of heroism. He can scale mountains higher than Everest and swim seas broader than the Atlantic. He is god, he is devil. Women have been my ruin.’

Once more the Hairless Mexican glanced at the cards, took some out of the little piles and left others in. He shuffled them again.

‘I have been loved by multitudes of women. I do not say it in vanity. I offer no explanation. It is mere matter of fact. Go to Mexico City and ask them what they know of Manuel Carmona and of his triumphs. Ask them how many women have resisted Manuel Carmona.’

Ashenden, frowning a little, watched him reflectively. He wondered whether R., that shrewd fellow who chose his instruments with such a sure instinct, had not this time made a mistake, and he was uneasy. Did the Hairless Mexican really believe that he was irresistible or was he merely a blatant liar? In the course of his manipulations he had thrown out all the cards in the pack but four, and these now lay in front of him face downwards and side by side. He touched them one by one but did not turn them up.

‘There is fate,’ he said, ‘and no power on earth can change it. I hesitate. This is a moment that ever fills me with apprehension and I have to steel myself to turn over the cards that may tell me that disaster awaits me. I am a brave man, but sometimes I have reached this stage and not had the courage to look at the four vital cards.’

Indeed now he eyed the backs of them with an anxiety he did not try to hide.

‘What was I saying to you?’

‘You were telling me that women found your fascinations irresistible,’ replied Ashenden dryly.

‘Once all the same I found a woman who resisted me. I saw her first in a house, a casa de mujeres in Mexico City, she was going down the stairs as I went up; she was not very beautiful, I had had a hundred more beautiful, but she had something that took my fancy and I told the old woman who kept the house to send her to me. You will know her when you go to Mexico City; they call her La Marqueza. She said that the girl was not an inmate, but came there only from time to time and had left. I told her to have her there next evening and not to let her go till I came. But I was delayed and when I arrived La Marqueza told me that the girl had said she was not used to being kept waiting and had gone. I am a good–natured fellow and I do not mind if women are capricious and teasing, that is part of their charm, so with a laugh I sent her a note of a hundred duros and promised that on the following day I would be punctual. But when I went, on the minute, La Marqueza handed me back my hundred duros and told me the girl did not fancy me. I laughed at her impertinence. I took off the diamond ring I was wearing and told the old woman to give her that and see whether it would induce her to change her mind. In the morning La Marqueza brought me in return for my ring–a red carnation. I did not know whether to be amused or angry. I am not used to being thwarted in my passions, I never hesitate to spend money (what is it for but to squander on pretty women?), and I told La Marqueza to go to the girl and say that I would give her a thousand duros to dine with me that night. Presently she came back with the answer that the girl would come on the condition that I allowed her to go home immediately after dinner. I accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. I did not think she was serious. I thought that she was saying that only to make herself more desired. She came to dinner at my house. Did I say she was not beautiful? She was the most beautiful, the most exquisite creature I had ever met. I was intoxicated. She had charm and she had wit. She had all the gracia of the Andalusian. In one word she was adorable. I asked her why she had treated me so casually and she laughed in my face. I laid myself out to be agreeable. I exercised all my skill. I surpassed myself. But when we finished dinner she rose from her seat and bade me good night. I asked her where she was going. She said I had promised to let her go and she trusted me as a man of honour to keep my word. I expostulated, I reasoned, I raved, I stormed. She held me to my word. All I could induce her to do was to consent to dine with me the following night on the same terms.

‘You will think I was a fool, I was the happiest man alive; for seven days I paid her a thousand silver duros to dine with me. Every evening I waited for her with my heart in my mouth, as nervous as a novillero at his first bull–fight, and every evening she played with me, laughed at me, coquetted with me and drove me frantic. I was madly in love with her. I have never loved anyone so much before or since. I could think of nothing else. I was distracted. I neglected everything. I am a patriot and I love my country. A small band of us had got together and made up our minds that we could no longer put up with the misrule from which we were suffering. All the lucrative posts were given to other people, we were being made to pay taxes as though we were tradesmen, and we were exposed to abominable affronts. We had money and men. Our plans were made and we were ready to strike. I had an infinity of things to do, meetings to go to, ammunition to get, orders to give, I was so besotted over this woman that I could attend to nothing.

‘You would have thought that I should be angry with her for making such a fool of me, me who had never known what it was not to gratify my smallest whim; I did not believe that she refused me to inflame my desires, I believed that she told the plain truth when she said that she would not give herself to me until she loved me. She said it was for me to make her love me. I thought her an angel. I was ready to wait. My passion was so consuming that sooner or later, I felt, it must communicate itself to her; it was like a fire on the prairie that devours everything around it; and at last–at last she said she loved me. My emotion was so terrific that I thought I should fall down and die. Oh, what rapture! Oh, what madness! I would have given her everything I possessed in the world, I would have torn down the stars from heaven to deck her hair; I wanted to do something to prove to her the extravagance of my love, I wanted to do the impossible, the incredible, I wanted to give her myself, my soul, my honour, all, all I had and all I was; and that night when she lay in my arms I told her of our plot and who we were that were concerned in it. I felt her body stiffen with attention, I was conscious of a flicker of her eyelids, there was something, I hardly knew what, the hand that stroked my face was dry and cold; a sudden suspicion seized me and all at once I remembered what the cards had told me: love and a dark woman, danger, betrayal, and death. Three times they’d said it and I wouldn’t heed. I made no sign that I had noticed anything. She nestled up against my heart and told me that she was frightened to hear such things and asked me if So–and–so was concerned. I answered her. I wanted to make sure. One after the other, with infinite cunning, between her kisses she cajoled me into giving every detail of the plot, and now I was certain, as certain as I am that you sit before me, that she was a spy. She was a spy of the President’s and she had been set to allure me with her devilish charm and now she had wormed out of me all our secrets. The lives of all of us were in her hands and I knew that if she left that room in twenty–four hours we should be dead men. And I loved her, I loved her; oh, words cannot tell you the agony of desire that burned my heart; love like that is no pleasure; it is pain, pain, but the exquisite pain that transcends all pleasure. It is that heavenly anguish that the saints speak of when they are seized with a divine ecstasy. I knew that she must not leave the room alive and I feared that if I delayed my courage would fail me.

‘“I think I shall sleep,” she said.

‘“Sleep, my dove,” I answered.

‘“Alma de mi corazon” she called me. “Soul of my heart.” They were the last words she spoke. Those heavy lids of hers, dark like a grape and faintly humid, those heavy lids of hers closed over her eyes and in a little while I knew by the regular movement of her breast against mine that she slept. You see, I loved her, I could not bear that she should suffer; she was a spy, yes, but my heart bade me spare her the terror of knowing what must happen. It is strange, I felt no anger because she had betrayed me, I should have hated her because of her vileness; I could not, I only felt that my soul was enveloped in night. Poor thing, poor thing. I could have cried in pity for her. I drew my arm very gently from around her, my left arm that was, my right was free, and raised myself on my hand. But she was so beautiful, I turned my face away when I drew the knife with all my strength across her lovely throat. Without awaking she passed from sleep to death.’

He stopped and stared frowning at the four cards that still lay, their backs upward, waiting to be turned up.

‘It was in the cards. Why did I not take their warning? I will not look at them. Damn them. Take them away.’

With a violent gesture he swept the whole pack on to the floor.

‘Though I am a free–thinker I had masses said for her soul.’ He leaned back and rolled himself a cigarette. He inhaled a long breathful of smoke. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The Colonel said you were a writer. What do you write?’

‘Stories,’ replied Ashenden.

‘Detective stories?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? They are the only ones I read. If I were a writer I should write detective stories.’

‘They are very difficult. You need an incredible amount of invention. I devised a murder story once, but the murder was so ingenious that I could never find a way of bringing it home to the murderer, and, after all, one of the conventions of the detective story is that the mystery should in the end be solved and the criminal brought to justice.’

‘If your murder is as ingenious as you think the only means you have of proving the murderer’s guilt is by the discovery of his motives. When once you have found a motive the chances are that you will hit upon evidence that till then had escaped you. If there is no motive the most damning evidence will be inconclusive. Imagine for instance that you went up to a man in a lonely street on a moonless night and stabbed him to the heart. Who would ever think of you? But if he was your wife’s lover, or your brother, or had cheated or insulted you, then a scrap of paper, a bit of string or a chance remark would be enough to hang you. What were your movements at the time he was killed? Are there not a dozen people who saw you before and after? But if he was a total stranger you would never for a moment be suspected. It was inevitable that Jack the Ripper should escape unless he was caught in the act.’

Ashenden had more than one reason to change the conversation. They were parting at Rome and he thought it necessary to come to an understanding with his companion about their respective movements. The Mexican was going to Brindisi and Ashenden to Naples. He meant to lodge at the Hotel de Belfast, which was a large second–rate hotel near the harbour frequented by commercial travellers and the thriftier kind of tripper. It would be as well to let the General have the number of his room so that he could come up if necessary without inquiring of the porter, and at the next stopping–place Ashenden got an envelope from the station–buffet and made him address it in his own writing to himself at the post–office in Brindisi. All Ashenden had to do then was to scribble a number on a sheet of paper and post it.

The Hairless Mexican shrugged his shoulders.

‘To my mind all these precautions are rather childish. There is absolutely no risk. But whatever happens you may be quite sure that I will not compromise you.’

‘This is not the sort of job which I’m very familiar with,’ said Ashenden. ‘I’m content to follow the Colonel’s instructions and know no more about it than it’s essential I should.’

‘Quite so. Should the exigencies of the situation force me to take a drastic step and I get into trouble I shall of course be treated as a political prisoner. Sooner or later Italy is bound to come into the war on the side of the Allies and I shall be released. I have considered everything. But I beg you very seriously to have no more anxiety about the outcome of our mission than if you were going for a picnic on the Thames.’

But when at last they separated and Ashenden found himself alone in a carriage on the way to Naples he heaved a great sigh of relief. He was glad to be rid of that chattering, hideous, and fantastic creature. He was gone to meet Constantine Andreadi at Brindisi and if half of what he had told Ashenden was true, Ashenden could not but congratulate himself that he did not stand in the Greek spy’s shoes. He wondered what sort of man he was. There was a grimness in the notion of his coming across the blue Ionian, with his confidential papers and his dangerous secrets, all unconscious of the noose into which he was putting his head. Well, that was war, and only fools thought it could be waged with kid gloves on.

Ashenden arrived in Naples and, having taken a room at the hotel, wrote its number on a sheet of paper in block letters and posted it to the Hairless Mexican. He went to the British Consulate, where R. had arranged to send any instructions he might have for him, and found that they knew about him and everything was in order. Then he put aside these matters and made up his mind to amuse himself. Here in the South the spring was well advanced and in the busy streets the sun was hot. Ashenden knew Naples pretty well. The Piazza di San Ferdinando, with its bustle, the Piazza del Plebiscito, with its handsome church, stirred in his heart pleasant recollections. The Strada di Chiara was as noisy as ever. He stood at corners and looked up the narrow alleys that climbed the hill precipitously, those alleys of high houses with the washing set out to dry on lines across the streets like pennants flying to mark a feast–day: and he sauntered along the shore, looking at the burnished sea with Capri faintly outlined against the bay, till he came to Posilippo, where there was an old, rambling, and bedraggled palazzo in which in his youth he had spent many a romantic hour. He observed the curious little pain with which the memories of the past wrung his heart–strings. Then he took a fly drawn by a small and scraggy pony and rattled back over the stones to the Galleria, where he sat in the cool and drank an americano and looked at the people who loitered there, talking, for ever talking with vivacious gestures, and, exercising his fancy sought from their appearance to divine their reality.

For three days Ashenden led the idle life that fitted so well the fantastical, untidy, and genial city. He did nothing from morning till night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom whatever happens is absolute. He went to the museum to look at the statue of Agrippina the Younger, which he had particular reasons for remembering with affection, and took the opportunity to see once more the Titian and the Brueghel in the picture gallery. But he always came back to the church of Santa Chiara. Its grace, its gaiety, the airy persiflage with which it seemed to treat religion and at the back of this its sensual emotion; its extravagance, its elegance of line; to Ashenden it seemed to express, as it were in one absurd and grandiloquent metaphor, the sunny, dusty, lovely city and its bustling inhabitants. It said that life was charming and sad; it’s a pity one hadn’t any money but money wasn’t everything, and anyway why bother when we are here today and gone tomorrow, and it was all very exciting and amusing, and after all we must make the best of things: facciamo una piccola combinazione.

But on the fourth morning, when Ashenden, having just stepped out of his bath, was trying to dry himself on a towel that absorbed no moisture, his door was quickly opened and a man slipped into his room.

‘What d’you want?’ cried Ashenden.

‘It’s all right. Don’t you know me?’

‘Good Lord, it’s the Mexican. What have you done to yourself?’ He had changed his wig and wore now a black one, close–cropped, that fitted on his head like a cap. It entirely altered the look of him and though this was still odd enough, it was quite different from that which he had borne before. He wore a shabby grey suit.

‘I can only stop a minute. He’s getting shaved.’

Ashenden felt his cheeks suddenly redden.

‘You found him then?’

‘That wasn’t difficult. He was the only Greek passenger on the ship. I went on board when she got in and asked for a friend who had sailed from the Piraeus. I said I had come to meet a Mr George Diogenidis. I pretended to be much puzzled at his not coming, and I got into conversation with Andreadi. He’s travelling under a false name. He calls himself Lombardos. I followed him when he landed and do you know the first thing he did? He went into a barber’s and had his beard shaved. What do you think of that?’

‘Nothing. Anyone might have his beard shaved.’

‘That is not what I think. He wanted to change his appearance. Oh, he’s cunning. I admire the Germans, they leave nothing to chance, he’s got his whole story pat, but I’ll tell you that in a minute.’

‘By the way, you’ve changed your appearance too.’

‘Ah, yes, this is a wig I’m wearing; it makes a difference, doesn’t it?’ ‘I should never have known you.’

‘One has to take precautions. We are bosom friends. We had to spend the day in Brindisi and he cannot speak Italian. He was glad to have me help him and we travelled up together. I have brought him to this hotel. He says he is going to Rome tomorrow, but I shall not let him out of my sight; I do not want him to give me the slip. He says that he wants to see Naples and I have offered to show him everything there is to see.’

‘Why isn’t he going to Rome today?’

‘That is part of the story. He pretends he is a Greek business man who has made money during the war. He says he was the owner of two coasting steamers and has just sold them. Now he means to go to Paris and have his fling. He says he has wanted to go to Paris all his life and at last has the chance. He is close. I tried to get him to talk. I told him I was a Spaniard and had been to Brindisi to arrange communications with Turkey about war material. He listened to me and I saw he was interested, but he told me nothing and of course I did not think it wise to press him. He has the papers on his person.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He is not anxious about his grip, but he feels every now and then round his middle. They’re either in a belt or in the lining of his vest.’

‘Why the devil did you bring him to this hotel?’

‘I thought it would be more convenient. We may want to search his luggage.’

‘Are you staying here too?’

‘No, I am not such a fool as that. I told him I was going to Rome by the night train and would not take a room. But I must go, I promised to meet him outside the barber’s in fifteen minutes.’

‘All right.’

‘Where shall I find you tonight if I want you?’

Ashenden for an instant eyed the Hairless Mexican, then with a slight frown looked away.

‘I shall spend the evening in my room.’

‘Very well. Will you just see that there’s nobody in the passage?’

Ashenden opened the door and looked out. He saw no one. The hotel in point of fact at that season was nearly empty. There were few foreigners in Naples and trade was bad.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ashenden.

The Hairless Mexican walked boldly out. Ashenden closed the door behind him. He shaved and slowly dressed. The sun was shining as brightly as usual on the square and the people who passed, the shabby little carriages with their scrawny horses, had the same air as before, but they did not any longer fill Ashenden with gaiety. He was not comfortable. He went out and called as was his habit at the Consulate to ask if there was a telegram for him. Nothing. Then he went to Cook’s and looked out the trains to Rome: there was one soon after midnight and another at five in the morning. He wished he could catch the first. He did not know what were the Mexican’s plans; if he really wanted to get to Cuba he would do well to make his way to Spain, and, glancing at the notices in the office, Ashenden saw that next day there was a ship sailing from Naples to Barcelona.

Ashenden was bored with Naples. The glare in the streets tired his eyes, the dust was intolerable, the noise was deafening. He went to the Galleria and had a drink. In the afternoon he went to a cinema. Then, going back to his hotel, he told the clerk that since he was starting so early in the morning he preferred to pay his bill at once, and he took his luggage to the station, leaving in his room only a dispatch–case in which were the printed part of his code and a book or two. He dined. Then returning to the hotel he sat down to wait for the Hairless Mexican. He could not conceal from himself the fact that he was exceedingly nervous. He began to read, but the book was tiresome, and he tried another; his attention wandered and he glanced at his watch. It was desperately early; he took up his book again, making up his mind that he would not look at his watch till he had read thirty pages, but though he ran his eyes conscientiously down one page after another he could not tell more than vaguely what it was he read. He looked at the time again. Good God, it was only half past ten. He wondered where the Hairless Mexican was, and what he was doing; he was afraid he would make a mess of things. It was a horrible business. Then it struck him that he had better shut the window and draw the curtains. He smoked innumerable cigarettes. He looked at his watch and it was a quarter past eleven. A thought struck him and his heart began to beat against his chest; out of curiosity he counted his pulse and was surprised to find that it was normal. Though it was a warm night and the room was stuffy his hands and feet were icy. What a nuisance it was, he reflected irritably, to have an imagination that conjured up pictures of things that you didn’t in the least want to see! From his standpoint as a writer he had often considered murder, and his mind went to that fearful description of one in Crime and Punishment. He did not want to think of this topic, but it forced itself upon him; his book dropped to his knees and staring at the wall in front of him (it had a brown wall–paper with a pattern of dingy roses) he asked himself how, if one had to, one would commit a murder in Naples. Of course there was the Villa, the great leafy garden facing the bay in which stood the aquarium; that was deserted at night and very dark; things happened there that did not bear the light of day and prudent persons after dusk avoided its sinister paths. Beyond Posilippo the road was very solitary and there were byways that led up the hill in which by night you would never meet a soul, but how would you induce a man who had any nerves to go there? You might suggest a row in the bay, but the boatman who hired the boat would see you; it was doubtful indeed if he would let you go on the water alone; there were disreputable hotels down by the harbour where no questions were asked of persons who arrived late at night without luggage; but here again the waiter who showed you your room had the chance of a good look at you and you had on entering to sign an elaborate questionnaire.

Ashenden looked once more at the time. He was very tired. He sat now not even trying to read, his mind a blank.

Then the door opened softly and he sprang to his feet. His flesh crept. The Hairless Mexican stood before him.

‘Did I startle you?’ he asked smiling. ‘I thought you would prefer me not to knock.’

‘Did anyone see you come in?’

‘I was let in by the night–watchman; he was asleep when I rang and didn’t even look at me. I’m sorry I’m so late, but I had to change.’

The Hairless Mexican wore now the clothes he had travelled down in and his fair wig. It was extraordinary how different he looked. He was bigger and more flamboyant; the very shape of his face was altered. His eyes were shining and he seemed in excellent spirits. He gave Ashenden a glance.

‘How white you are, my friend! Surely you’re not nervous?’

‘Have you got the documents?’

‘No. He hadn’t got them on him. This is all he had.’

He put down on the table a bulky pocket–book and a passport. ‘I don’t want them,’ said Ashenden quickly. ‘Take them.’

With a shrug of the shoulders the Hairless Mexican put the things back in his pocket.

‘What was in his belt? You said he kept feeling round his middle.’

‘Only money. I’ve looked through the pocket–book. It contains nothing but private letters and photographs of women. He must have locked the documents in his grip before coming out with me this evening.’

‘Damn,’ said Ashenden.

‘I’ve got the key of his room. We’d better go and look through his luggage.’

Ashenden felt a sensation of sickness in the pit of his stomach. He hesitated. The Mexican smiled not unkindly.

‘There’s no risk, amigo,’ he said, as though he were reassuring a small boy, ‘but if you don’t feel happy, I’ll go alone.’

‘No, I’ll come with you,’ said Ashenden.

‘There’s no one awake in the hotel and Mr Andreadi won’t disturb us. Take off your shoes if you like.’

Ashenden did not answer. He frowned because he noticed that his hands were slightly trembling. He unlaced his shoes and slipped them off. The Mexican did the same.

‘You’d better go first,’ he said. ‘Turn to the left and go straight along the corridor. It’s number thirty–eight.’

Ashenden opened the door and stepped out. The passage was dimly lit. It exasperated him to feel so nervous when he could not but be aware that his companion was perfectly at ease. When they reached the door the Hairless Mexican inserted the key, turned the lock, and went in. He switched on the light. Ashenden followed him and closed the door. He noticed that the shutters were shut.

‘Now we’re all right. We can take our time.’

He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket, tried one or two and at last hit upon the right one. The suitcase was filled with clothes.

‘Cheap clothes,’ said the Mexican contemptuously as he took them out. ‘My own principle is that it’s always cheaper in the end to buy the best. After all one is a gentleman or one isn’t a gentleman.’

‘Are you obliged to talk?’ said Ashenden.

‘A spice of danger affects people in different ways. It only excites me, but it puts you in a bad temper, amigo.’

‘You see, I’m scared and you’re not,’ replied Ashenden with candour.

‘It’s merely a matter of nerves.’

Meanwhile he felt the clothes, rapidly but with care, as he took them out. There were no papers of any sort in the suitcase. Then he took out his knife and slit the lining. It was a cheap piece and the lining was gummed to the material of which the suitcase was made. There was no possibility of anything being concealed in it.

‘They’re not here. They must be hidden in the room.’

‘Are you sure he didn’t deposit them in some office? At one of the consulates, for example?’

‘He was never out of my sight for a moment except when he was getting shaved.’

The Hairless Mexican opened the drawers and the cupboard. There was no carpet on the floor. He looked under the bed, in it, and under the mattress. His dark eyes shot up and down the room, looking for a hiding–place, and Ashenden felt that nothing escaped him.

‘Perhaps he left them in charge of the clerk downstairs?’

‘I should have known it. And he wouldn’t dare. They’re not here. I can’t understand it.’

He looked about the room irresolutely. He frowned in the attempt to guess at a solution of the mystery.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Ashenden.

‘In a minute.’

The Mexican went down on his knees, quickly and neatly folded the clothes, and packed them up again. He locked the bag and stood up. Then, putting out the light, he slowly opened the door and looked out. He beckoned to Ashenden and slipped into the passage. When Ashenden had followed him he stopped and locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and walked with Ashenden to his room. When they were inside it and the bolt drawn Ashenden wiped his clammy hands and his forehead.

‘Thank God, we’re out of that!’

‘There wasn’t really the smallest danger. But what are we to do now? The Colonel will be angry that the papers haven’t been found.’

‘I’m taking the five o’clock train to Rome. I shall wire for instructions there.’

‘Very well, I will come with you.’

‘I should have thought it would suit you better to get out of the country more quickly. There’s a boat tomorrow that goes to Barcelona. Why don’t you take that and if necessary I can come to see you there?’

The Hairless Mexican gave a little smile.

‘I see that you are anxious to be rid of me. Well, I won’t thwart a wish that your inexperience in these matters excuses. I will go to Barcelona. I have a visa for Spain.’

Ashenden looked at his watch. It was a little after two. He had nearly three hours to wait. His companion comfortably rolled himself a cigarette.

‘What do you say to a little supper?’ he asked. ‘I’m as hungry as a wolf.’

The thought of food sickened Ashenden, but he was terribly thirsty. He did not want to go out with the Hairless Mexican, but neither did he want to stay in that hotel by himself.

‘Where could one go at this hour?’

‘Come along with me. I’ll find you a place.’

Ashenden put on his hat and took his dispatch–case in his hand. They went downstairs. In the hall the porter was sleeping soundly on a mattress on the floor. As they passed the desk, walking softly in order not to wake him, Ashenden noticed in the pigeon–hole belonging to his room a letter. He took it out and saw that it was addressed to him. They tiptoed out of the hotel and shut the door behind them. They then walked quickly away. Stopping after a hundred yards or so under a lamp–post Ashenden took the letter out of his pocket and read; it came from the Consulate and said: The enclosed telegram arrived tonight and in case it is urgent I am sending it round to your hotel by messenger. It had apparently been left some time before midnight while Ashenden was sitting in his room. He opened the telegram and saw that it was in code.

‘Well, it’ll have to wait,’ he said, putting it back in his pocket.

The Hairless Mexican walked as though he knew his way through the deserted streets and Ashenden walked by his side. At last they came to a tavern in a blind alley, noisome and evil, and this the Mexican entered.

‘It’s not the Ritz,’ he said, ‘but at this hour of the night it’s only in a place like this that we stand a chance of getting something to eat.’

Ashenden found himself in a long sordid room at one end of which a wizened young man sat at a piano; there were tables standing out from the wall on each side and against them benches. A number of persons, men and women, were sitting about. They were drinking beer and wine. The women were old, painted, and hideous; and their harsh gaiety was at once noisy and lifeless. When Ashenden and the Hairless Mexican came in they all stared and when they sat down at one of the tables Ashenden looked away in order not to meet the leering eyes, just ready to break into a smile, that sought his insinuatingly. The wizened pianist strummed a tune and several couples got up and began to dance. Since there were not enough men to go round some of the women danced together. The General ordered two plates of spaghetti and a bottle of Capri wine. When the wine was brought he drank a glassful greedily and then waiting for the pasta eyed the women who were sitting at the other tables.

‘Do you dance?’ he asked Ashenden. ‘I’m going to ask one of these girls to have a turn with me.’

He got up and Ashenden watched him go up to one who had at least flashing eyes and white teeth to recommend her; she rose and he put his arm round her. He danced well. Ashenden saw him begin talking; the woman laughed and presently the look of indifference with which she had accepted his offer changed to one of interest. Soon they were chatting gaily. The dance came to an end and putting her back at her table he returned to Ashenden and drank another glass of wine.

‘What do you think of my girl?’ he asked. ‘Not bad, is she? It does one good to dance. Why don’t you ask one of them? This is a nice place, is it not? You can always trust me to find anything like this. I have an instinct.’

The pianist started again. The woman looked at the Hairless Mexican and when with his thumb he pointed to the floor she jumped up with alacrity. He buttoned up his coat, arched his back, and standing up by the side of the table waited for her to come to him. He swung her off, talking smiling, and already he was on familiar terms with everyone in the room. In fluent Italian, with his Spanish accent, he exchanged badinage with one and the other. They laughed at his sallies. Then the waiter brought two heaped platefuls of macaroni and when the Mexican saw them he stopped dancing without ceremony and, allowing his partner to get back to her table as she chose, hurried to his meal.

‘I’m ravenous,’ he said. ‘And yet I ate a good dinner. Where did you dine? You’re going to eat some macaroni, aren’t you?’

‘I have no appetite,’ said Ashenden.

But he began to eat and to his surprise found that he was hungry. The Hairless Mexican ate with huge mouthfuls, enjoying himself vastly; his eyes shone and he was loquacious. The woman he had danced with had in that short time told him all about herself and he repeated now to Ashenden what she had said. He stuffed huge pieces of bread into his mouth. He ordered another bottle of wine.

‘Wine?’ he cried scornfully. ‘Wine is not a drink, only champagne; it does not even quench your thirst. Well, amigo, are you feeling better?’

‘I’m bound to say I am,’ smiled Ashenden.

‘Practice, that is all you want, practice.’

He stretched out his hand to pat Ashenden on the arm.

‘What’s that?’ cried Ashenden with a start. ‘What’s that stain on your cuff?’ The Hairless Mexican gave his sleeve a glance.

‘That? Nothing. It’s only blood. I had a little accident and cut myself.’ Ashenden was silent. His eyes sought the clock that hung over the door.

‘Are you anxious about your train? Let me have one more dance and then I’ll accompany you to the station.’

The Mexican got up and with his sublime self–assurance seized in his arms the woman who sat nearest to him and danced away with her. Ashenden watched him moodily. He was a monstrous, terrible figure, with that blond wig and his hairless face, but he moved with a matchless grace; his feet were small and seemed to hold the ground like the pads of a cat or a tiger; his rhythm was wonderful and you could not but see that the bedizened creature he danced with was intoxicated by his gestures. There was music in his toes and in the long arms that held her so firmly, and there was music in those long legs that seemed to move strangely from the hips. Sinister and grotesque though he was, there was in him now a feline elegance, even something of beauty, and you felt a secret, shameful fascination. To Ashenden he suggested one of those sculptures of the pre–Aztec hewers of stone, in which there is barbarism and vitality, something terrible and cruel, and yet withal a brooding and significant loveliness. All the same he would gladly have left him to finish the night by himself in that sordid dance–hall, but he knew that he must have a business conversation with him. He did not look forward to it without misgiving. He had been instructed to give Manuel Carmona certain sums in return for certain documents. Well, the documents were not forthcoming, and as for the rest–Ashenden knew nothing about that; it was no business of his. The Hairless Mexican waved gaily as he passed him.

‘I will come the moment the music stops. Pay the bill and then I shall be ready.’

Ashenden wished he could have seen into his mind. He could not even make a guess at its workings. Then the Mexican, with his scented handkerchief wiping the sweat from his brow, came back.

‘Have you had a good time, General?’ Ashenden asked him.

‘I always have a good time. Poor white trash, but what do I care? I like to feel the body of a woman in my arms and see her eyes grow languid and her lips part as her desire for me melts the marrow in her bones like butter in the sun. Poor white trash, but women.’

They sallied forth. The Mexican proposed that they should walk and in that quarter, at that hour, there would have been little chance of finding a cab; but the sky was starry. It was a summer night and the air was still. The silence walked beside them like the ghost of a dead man. When they neared the station the houses seemed on a sudden to take on a greyer, more rigid line, and you felt that the dawn was at hand. A little shiver trembled through the night. It was a moment of apprehension and the soul for an instant was anxious; it was as though, inherited down the years in their countless millions, it felt a witless fear that perhaps another day would not break. But they entered the station and the night once more enwrapped them. One or two porters lolled about like stagehands after the curtain has rung down and the scene is struck. Two soldiers in dim uniforms stood motionless.

The waiting–room was empty, but Ashenden and the Hairless Mexican went to sit in the most retired part of it.

‘I still have an hour before my train goes. I’ll just see what this cable’s about.’

He took it out of his pocket and from the dispatch–case got his code. He was not then using a very elaborate one. It was in two parts, one contained in a slim book, and the other, given him on a sheet of paper and destroyed by him before he left allied territory, committed to memory. Ashenden put on his spectacles and set to work. The Hairless Mexican sat in a corner of the seat, rolling himself cigarettes and smoking; he sat there placidly, taking no notice of what Ashenden did, and enjoyed his well–earned repose. Ashenden deciphered the groups of numbers one by one and as he got it out jotted down each word on a piece of paper. His method was to abstract his mind from the sense till he had finished, since he had discovered that if you took notice of the words as they came along you often jumped to a conclusion and sometimes were led into error. So he translated quite mechanically, without paying attention to the words as he wrote them one after the other. When at last he had done he read the complete message. It ran as follows:

Constantine Andreadi has been detained by illness at Piraeus. He will be unable to sail. Return Geneva and await instructions.At first Ashenden could not understand. He read it again. He shook from head to foot. Then, for once robbed of his self–possession, he blurted out, in a hoarse, agitated, and furious whisper:

‘You bloody fool, you’ve killed the wrong man.’

GIULIA LAZZARI

ASHENDEN was in the habit of asserting that he was never bored, was one of his notions that only such persons were as had no resources in themselves and it was but the stupid that depended on the outside world for their amusement. Ashenden had no illusions about himself and such success in current letters as had come to him had left his head unturned. He distinguished acutely between fame and the notoriety that rewards the author of a successful novel or a popular play; and he was indifferent to this except in so far as it was attended with tangible benefits. He was perfectly ready to take advantage of his familiar name to get a better state-room in a ship than he had paid for, and if a Customs-house officer passed his luggage unopened because he had read his short stories Ashenden was pleased to admit that the pursuit of literature had its compensations. He sighed when eager young students of the drama sought to discuss its technique with him, and when gushing ladies tremulously whispered in his ear their admiration of his books he often wished he was dead. But he thought himself intelligent and so it was absurd that he should be bored. It was a fact that he could talk with interest to persons commonly thought so excruciatingly dull that their fellows fled from them as though they owed them money. It may be that here he was but indulging the professional instinct that was seldom dormant in him; they, his raw material, did not bore him any more than fossils bore the geologist. And now he had everything that a reasonable man could want for his entertainment. He had pleasant rooms in a good hotel and Geneva is one of the most agreeable cities in Europe to live in. He hired a boat and rowed on the lake or hired a horse and trotted sedately, for in that neat and orderly canton it is difficult to find a stretch of turf where you can have a good gallop, along the macadamised roads in the environs of the town. He wandered on foot about its old streets, trying among those grey stone houses, so quiet and dignified, to recapture the spirit of a past age. He read again with delight Rousseau’s Confessions, and for the second or third time tried in vain to get on with La Nouvelle Héloïse. He wrote. He knew few people, for it was his business to keep in the background, but he had picked up a chatting acquaintance with several persons living in his hotel and he was not lonely. His life was sufficiently filled, it was varied, and when he had nothing else to do he could enjoy his own reflections; it was absurd to think that under these circumstances he could possibly be bored, and yet, like a little lonely cloud in the sky, he did see in the offing the possibility of boredom. There is a story that Louis XIV, having summoned a courtier to attend him on a ceremonial occasion, found himself ready to go as the courtier appeared; he turned to him and with icy majesty said, J’ai failli attendre, of which the only translation I can give, but a poor one, is, I have but just escaped waiting: so Ashenden might have admitted that he now but just escaped being bored.

It might be, he mused, as he rode along the lake on a dappled horse with a great rump and a short neck, like one of those prancing steeds that you see in old pictures, but this horse never pranced and he needed a firm jab with the spur to break even into a smart trot — it might be, he mused, that the great chiefs of the secret service in their London offices, their hands on the throttle of this great machine, led a life full of excitement; they moved their pieces here and there, they saw the pattern woven by the multitudinous threads (Ashenden was lavish with his metaphors), they made a picture out of the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle; but it must be confessed that for the small fry like himself to be a member of the secret service was not as adventurous an affair as the public thought. Ashenden’s official existence was as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk’s. He saw his spies at stated intervals and paid them their wages; when he could get hold of a new one he engaged him, gave him his instructions and sent him off to Germany; he waited for the information that came through and despatched it; he went into France once a week to confer with his colleague over the frontier and to receive his orders from London; he visited the market-place on market-day to get any message the old butter-woman had brought him from the other side of the lake; he kept his eyes and ears open; and he wrote long reports which he was convinced no one read, till having inadvertently slipped a jest into one of them he received a sharp reproof for his levity. The work he was doing was evidently necessary, but it could not be called anything but monotonous. At one moment for something better to do he had considered the possibility of a flirtation with the Baroness von Higgins. He was confident now that she was an agent in the service of the Austrian Government and he looked forward to a certain entertainment in the duel he foresaw. It would be amusing to set his wits against hers. He was quite aware that she would lay snares for him and to avoid them would give him something to keep his mind from rusting. He found her not unwilling to play the game. She wrote him gushing little notes when he sent her flowers. She went for a row with him on the lake and letting her long white hand drag through the water talked of Love and hinted at a Broken Heart. They dined together and went to see a performance, in French and in prose, of Romeo and Juliet. Ashenden had not made up his mind how far he was prepared to go when he received a sharp note from R. to ask him what he was playing at: information “had come to hand” that he (Ashenden) was much in the society of a woman calling herself the Baroness de Higgins, who was known to be an agent of the Central Powers and it was most undesirable that he should be on any terms with her but those of frigid courtesy. Ashenden shrugged his shoulders. R. did not think him as clever as he thought himself. But he was interested to discover, what he had not known before, that there was someone in Geneva part of whose duties at all events was to keep an eye on him. There was evidently someone who had orders to see that he did not neglect his work or get into mischief. Ashenden was not a little amused. What a shrewd, unscrupulous old thing was R. He took no risks; he trusted nobody; he made use of his instruments, but, high or low, had no opinion of them. Ashenden looked about to see whether he could spot the person who had told R. what he was doing. He wondered if it was one of the waiters in the hotel. He knew that R. had a great belief in waiters; they had the chance of seeing so much and could so easily get into places where information was lying about to be picked up. He even wondered whether R. had got his news from the Baroness herself; it would not be so strange if after all she was employed by the secret service of one of the Allied nations. Ashenden continued to be polite to the Baroness, but ceased to be attentive.

He turned his horse and trotted gently back to Geneva. An ostler from the riding-stables was waiting at the hotel door and slipping out of the saddle Ashenden went into the hotel. At the desk the porter handed him a telegram. It was to the following effect:

Aunt Maggie not at all well. Staying at Hôtel Lotti, Paris. If possible please go and see her. Raymond.

Raymond was one of R.’s facetious noms de guerre, and since Ashenden was not so fortunate as to possess an Aunt Maggie he concluded that this was an order to go to Paris. It had always seemed to Ashenden that R. had spent much of his spare time in reading detective fiction and especially when he was in a good humour he found a fantastic pleasure in aping the style of the shilling shocker. If R. was in a good humour it meant that he was about to bring off a coup, for when he had brought one off he was filled with depression and then vented his spleen on his subordinates.

Ashenden, leaving his telegram with deliberate carelessness on the desk, asked at what time the express left for Paris. He glanced at the clock to see whether he had time to get to the Consulate before it closed and secure his visa. When he went upstairs to fetch his passport the porter, just as the lift doors were closed, called him.

“Monsieur has forgotten his telegram,” he said.

“How stupid of me,” said Ashenden.

Now Ashenden knew that if an Austrian baroness by any chance wondered why he had so suddenly gone to Paris she would discover that it was owing to the indisposition of a female relative. In those troublous times of war it was just as well that everything should be clear and above board. He was known at the French Consulate and so lost little time there. He had told the porter to get him a ticket and on his return to the hotel bathed and changed. He was not a little excited at the prospect of this unexpected jaunt. He liked the journey. He slept well in a sleeping-car and was not disturbed if a sudden jolt waked him; it was pleasant to lie a while smoking a cigarette and to feel oneself in one’s little cabin so enchantingly alone; the rhythmical sound as the wheels rattled over the points was an agreeable background to the pattern of one’s reflections, and to speed through the open country and the night made one feel like a star speeding through space. And at the end of the journey was the unknown.

When Ashenden arrived in Paris it was chilly and a light rain was falling; he felt unshaved and he wanted a bath and clean linen; but he was in excellent spirits. He telephoned from the station to R. and asked how Aunt Maggie was.

“I’m glad to see that your affection for her was great enough to allow you to waste no time in getting here,” answered R., with the ghost of a chuckle in his voice. “She’s very low, but I’m sure it’ll do her good to see you.”

Ashenden reflected that this was the mistake the amateur humorist, as opposed to the professional, so often made; when he made a joke he harped on it. The relations of the joker to his joke should be as quick and desultory as those of a bee to its flower.

He should make his joke and pass on. There is of course no harm if, like the bee approaching the flower, he buzzes a little; for it is just as well to announce to a thick-headed world that a joke is intended. But Ashenden, unlike most professional humorists, had a kindly tolerance for other people’s humour and now he answered R. on his own lines.

“When would she like to see me, do you think?” he asked. “Give her my love, won’t you?”

Now R. quite distinctly chuckled. Ashenden sighed.

“She’ll want to titivate a little before you come, I expect. You know what she is, she likes to make the best of herself. Shall we say half-past ten, and then when you’ve had a talk to her we might go out and lunch together somewhere.”

“All right,” said Ashenden. “I’ll come to the Lotti at ten-thirty.”

When Ashenden, dean and refreshed, reached the hotel an orderly whom he recognised met him in the hall and took him up to R.’s apartment. He opened the door and showed Ashenden in.

R. was standing with his back to a bright log fire dictating to his secretary.

“Sit down,” said R. and went on with his dictation.

It was a nicely furnished sitting-room and a bunch of roses in a bowl gave the impression of a woman’s hand. On a large table was a litter of papers. R. looked older than when last Ashenden had seen him. His thin yellow face was more lined and his hair was greyer. The work was telling on him. He did not spare himself.

He was up at seven every morning and he worked late into the night. His uniform was spick and span, but he wore it shabbily.

“That’ll do,” he said. “Take all this stuff away and get on with the typing. I’ll sign before I go out to lunch.” Then he turned to the orderly. “I don’t want to be disturbed.”

The secretary, a second-lieutenant in the thirties, obviously a civilian with a temporary commission, gathered up a mass of papers and left the room. As the orderly was following, R. said; “Wait outside. If I want you I’ll call.”

“Very good, sir.”

When they were alone R. turned to Ashenden with what for him was cordiality.

“Have a nice journey up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think of this?” he asked, looking round the room. “Not bad, is it? I never see why one shouldn’t do what one can to mitigate the hardships of war.”

While he was idly chatting R. gazed at Ashenden with a singular fixity. The stare of those pale eyes of his, too closely set together, gave you the impression that he looked at your naked brain and had a very poor opinion of what he saw there. R. in rare moments of expansion made no secret of the fact that he looked upon his fellow-men as fools or knaves. That was one of the obstacles he had to contend with in his calling. On the whole he preferred them knaves; you knew then what you were up against and could take steps accordingly. He was a professional soldier and had spent his career in India and the Colonies. At the outbreak of the war he was stationed in Jamaica and someone in the War Office who had had dealings with him, remembering him, brought him over and put him in the Intelligence Department. His astuteness was so great that he very soon occupied an important post. He had an immense energy and a gift for organisation, no scruples, but resource, courage and determination. He had perhaps but one weakness. Throughout his life he had never come in contact with persons, especially women, of any social consequence; the only women he had ever known were the wives of his brother officers, the wives of government officials and of business men; and when, coming to London at the beginning of the war, his work brought him into contact with brilliant, beautiful and distinguished women he was unduly dazzled. They made him feel shy, but he cultivated their society; he became quite a lady’s man, and to Ashenden, who knew more about him than R. suspected, that bowl of roses told a story.

Ashenden knew that R. had not sent for him to talk about the weather and the crops, and wondered when he was coming to the point. He did not wonder long.

“You’ve been doing pretty well in Geneva,” he said.

“I’m glad you think that, sir,” replied Ashenden.

Suddenly R. looked very cold and stem. He had done with idle talk.

“I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

Ashenden made no reply, but he felt a happy little flutter somewhere about the pit of his stomach.

“Have you ever heard of Chandra Lai?”

“No, sir.”

A frown of impatience for an instant darkened the Colonel’s brow. He expected his subordinates to know everything he wished them to know.

“Where have you been living all these years?”

“At 36, Chesterfield Street, Mayfair,” returned Ashenden.

The shadow of a smile crossed R.’s yellow face. The somewhat impertinent reply was after his own sardonic heart. He went over to the big table and opened a despatch-case that lay upon it. He took out a photograph and handed it to Ashenden.

“That’s him.”

To Ashenden, unused to Oriental faces, it looked like any of a hundred Indians that he had seen. It might have been the photograph of one or other of the rajahs who come periodically to England and are portrayed in the illustrated papers. It showed a fat-faced, swarthy man, with full lips and a fleshy nose; his hair was black, thick and straight, and his very large eyes even in the photograph were liquid and cow-like. He looked ill-at-ease in European clothes.

“Here he is in native dress,” said R., giving Ashenden another photograph.

This was full-length, whereas the first had shown only the head and shoulders, and it had evidently been taken some years earlier. He was thinner and his great, serious eyes seemed to devour his face. It was done by a native photographer in Calcutta and the surroundings were naively grotesque. Chandra Lal stood against a background on which had been painted a pensive palm tree and a view of the sea. One hand rested on a heavily carved table on which was a rubber-plant in a flower-pot. But in his turban and long, pale tunic he was not without dignity.

“What d’you think of him?” asked R.

“I should have said he was a man not without personality. There is a certain force there.”

“Here’s his dossier. Read it, will you?”

R. gave Ashenden a couple of typewritten pages and Ashenden sat down. R. put on his spectacles and began to read the letters that awaited his signature. Ashenden skimmed the report and then read it a second time more attentively. It appeared that Chandra Lai was a dangerous agitator. He was a lawyer by profession, but had taken up politics and was bitterly hostile to the British rule in India. He was a partisan of armed force and had been on more than one occasion responsible for riots in which life had been lost. He was once arrested, tried and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment; but he was at liberty at the beginning of the war and seizing his opportunity began to foment active rebellion. He was at the heart of plots to embarrass the British in India and so prevent them from transferring troops to the seat of war and with the help of immense sums given to him by German agents he was able to cause a great deal of trouble. He was concerned in two or three bomb outrages which, though beyond killing a few innocent bystanders they did little harm, yet shook the nerves of the public and so damaged its morale. He evaded all attempts to arrest him, his activity was formidable, he was here and there; but the police could never lay hands on him, and they only learned that he had been in some city when, having done his work, he had left it. At last a high reward was offered for his arrest on a charge of murder, but he escaped the country, got to America, from there went to Sweden and eventually reached Berlin. Here he busied himself with schemes to create disaffection among the native troops that had been brought to Europe. All this was narrated dryly, without comment or explanation, but from the very frigidity of the narrative you got a sense of mystery and adventure, of hairbreadth escapes and dangers dangerously encountered. The report ended as follows:

“C. has a wife in India and two children. He is not known to have anything to do with women. He neither drinks nor smokes. He is said to be honest. Considerable sums of money have passed through his hands and there has never been any question as to his not having made a proper (!) use of them. He has undoubted courage and is a hard worker. He is said to pride himself on keeping his word.”

Ashenden returned the document to R.

“Well?”

“A fanatic.” Ashenden thought there was about the man something rather romantic and attractive, but he knew that R. did not want any nonsense of that sort from him. “He looks like a very dangerous fellow.”

“He is the most dangerous conspirator in or out of India. He’s done more harm than all the rest of them put together. You know that there’s a gang of these Indians in Berlin; well, he’s the brains of it. If he could be got out of the way I could afford to ignore the others; he’s the only one who has any guts. I’ve been trying to catch him for a year, I thought there wasn’t a hope; but now at last I’ve got a chance and, by God, I’m going to take it.”

“And what’ll you do then?”

R. chuckled grimly.

“Shoot him and shoot him damn quick.”

Ashenden did not answer. R. walked once or twice across the small room and then, again with his back to the fire, faced Ashenden. His thin mouth was twisted by a sarcastic smile.

“Did you notice at the end of that report I gave you it said he wasn’t known to have anything to do with women? Well, that was true, but it isn’t any longer. The damned fool has fallen in love.”

R. stepped over to his despatch-case and took out a bundle tied up with pale blue ribbon.

“Look, here are his love-letters. You’re a novelist, it might amuse you to read them. In fact you should read them, it will help you to deal with the situation. Take them away with you.”

R. flung the neat little bundle back into the despatch-case.

“One wonders how an able man like that can allow himself to get besotted over a woman. It was the last thing I ever expected of him.”

Ashenden’s eyes travelled to the bowl of beautiful roses that stood on the table, but he said nothing. R., who missed little, saw the glance and his look suddenly darkened. Ashenden knew that he felt like asking him what the devil he was staring at. At that moment R. had no friendly feelings towards his subordinate, but he made no remark. He went back to the subject in hand.

“Anyhow that’s neither here nor there. Chandra has fallen madly in love with a woman called Giulia Lazzari. He’s crazy about her.”

“Do you know how he picked her up?”

“Of course I do. She’s a dancer, and she does Spanish dances, but she happens to be an Italian. For stage purposes she calls herself La Malaguena. You know the kind of thing. Popular Spanish music and a mantilla, a fan and a high comb. She’s been dancing all over Europe for the last ten years.”

“Is she any good?”

“No, rotten. She’s been in the provinces in England and she’s had a few engagements in London. She never got more than ten pounds a week. Chandra met her in Berlin in a Tingel-tangel, you know what that is, a cheap sort of music-hall. I take it that on the Continent she looked upon her dancing chiefly as a means to enhance her value as a prostitute.”

“How did she get to Berlin during the war?”

“She’s been married to a Spaniard at one time; I think she still is though they don’t live together, and she travelled on a Spanish passport. It appears Chandra made a dead set for her.” R. took up the Indian’s photograph again and looked at it thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t have thought there was anything very attractive in that greasy little nigger. God, how they run to fat! The fact remains that she fell very nearly as much in love with him as he did with her. I’ve got her letters too, only copies, of course, he’s got the originals and I dare say he keeps them tied up in pink ribbon. She’s mad about him. I’m not a literary man, but I think I know when a thing rings true; anyhow you’ll be reading them, and you can tell me what you think. And then people say there’s no such thing as love at first sight.”

R. smiled with faint irony. He was certainly in a good humour this morning.

“But how did you get hold of all these letters?”

“How did I get hold of them? How do you imagine? Owing to her Italian nationality Giulia Lazzari was eventually expelled from Germany. She was put over the Dutch frontier. Having an engagement to dance in England she was granted a visa and” — R. looked up a date among the papers— “and on the twenty-fourth of October last sailed from Rotterdam to Harwich. Since then she has danced in London, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other places. She was arrested a fortnight ago at Hull.”

“What for?”

“Espionage. She was transferred to London and I went to see her myself at Holloway.”

Ashenden and R. looked at one another for a moment without speaking and it may be that each was trying his hardest to read the other’s thoughts. Ashenden was wondering where the truth in all this lay and R. wondered how much of it he could advantageously tell him.

“How did you get on to her?”

“I thought it odd that the Germans should allow her to dance quite quietly in Berlin for weeks and then for no particular reason decide to put her out of the country. It would be a good introduction for espionage. And a dancer who was not too careful of her virtue might make opportunities of learning things that it would be worth somebody’s while in Berlin to pay a good price for. I thought it might be as well to let her come to England and see what she was up to. I kept track of her. I discovered that she was sending letters to an address in Holland two or three times a week and two or three times a week was receiving answers from Holland. Hers were written in a queer mixture of French, German and English; she speaks English a little and French quite well, but the answers were written entirely in English; it was good English, but not an Englishman’s English, flowery and rather grandiloquent; I wondered who was writing them. They seemed to be just ordinary love-letters, but they were by way of being rather hot stuff. It was plain enough that they were coming from Germany and the writer was neither English, French nor German. Why did he write in English? The only foreigners who know English better than any continental language are Orientals, and not Turks or Egyptians either; they know French. A Jap would write English and so would an Indian. I came to the conclusion that Giulia’s lover was one of that gang of Indians that were making trouble for us in Berlin. I had no idea it was Chandra Lai till I found the photograph.”

“How did you get that?”

“She carried it about with her. It was a pretty good bit of work, that. She kept it locked up in her trunk, with a lot of theatrical photographs, of comic singers and clowns and acrobats; it might easily have passed for the picture of some music-hall artiste in his stage dress. In fact, later, when she was arrested and asked who the photograph represented she said she didn’t know, it was an Indian conjuror who had given it her and she had no idea what his name was. Anyhow I put a very smart lad on the job and he thought it queer that it should be the only photograph in the lot that came from Calcutta. He noticed that there was a number on the back, and he took it, the number, I mean; of course the photograph was replaced in the box.”

“By the way, just as a matter of interest how did your very smart lad get at the photograph at all?”

R.’s eyes twinkled.

“That’s none of your business. But I don’t mind telling you that he was a good-looking boy. Anyhow it’s of no consequence. When we got the number of the photograph we cabled to Calcutta and in a little while I received the grateful news that the object of Giulia’s affections was no less a person than the incorruptible Chandra Lai. Then I thought it my duty to have Giulia watched a little more carefully. She seemed to have a sneaking fondness for naval officers. I couldn’t exactly blame her for that; they are attractive, but it is unwise for ladies of easy virtue and doubtful nationality to cultivate their society in war-time. Presently I got a very pretty little body of evidence against her.”

“How was she getting her stuff through?”

“She wasn’t getting it through. She wasn’t trying to. The Germans had turned her out quite genuinely; she wasn’t working for them, she was working for Chandra. After her engagement was through in England she was planning to go to Holland again and meet him. She wasn’t very clever at the work; she was nervous, but it looked easy; no one seemed to bother about her, it grew rather exciting; she was getting all sorts of interesting information without any risk. In one of her letters she said: ‘I have so much to tell you, mon petit chou darling, and what you will be extrêmement intéressé to know,’ and she underlined the French words.”

R. paused and rubbed his hands together. His tired face bore a look of devilish enjoyment of his own cunning.

“It was espionage made easy. Of course I didn’t care a damn about her, it was him I was after. Well, as soon as I’d got the goods on her I arrested her. I had enough evidence to convict a regiment of spies.”

R. put his hands in his pockets and his pale lips twisted to a smile that was almost a grimace.

“Holloway’s not a very cheerful place, you know.”

“I imagine no prison is,” remarked Ashenden.

“I left her to stew in her own juice for a week before I went to see her. She was in a very pretty state of nerves by then. The wardress told me she’d been in violent hysterics most of the time. I must say she looked like the devil.”

“Is she handsome?”

“You’ll see for yourself. She’s not my type. I dare say she’s better when she’s made up and that kind of thing. I talked to her like a Dutch uncle. I put the fear of God into her. I told her she’d get ten years. I think I scared her, I know I tried to. Of course she denied everything, but the proofs were there, I assured her she hadn’t got a chance. I spent three hours with her. She went all to pieces and at last she confessed everything. Then I told her that I’d let her go scot-free if she’d get Chandra to come to France. She absolutely refused, she said she’d rather die; she was very hysterical and tiresome, but I let her rave. I told her to think it over and said I’d see her in a day or two and we’d have another talk about it. In point of fact I left her for a week. She’d evidently had time to reflect, because when I came again she asked me quite calmly what it was exactly that I proposed. She’d been in a gaol a fortnight then and I expect she’d had about enough of it. I put it to her as plainly as I could and she accepted.”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” said Ashenden.

“Don’t you? I should have thought it was clear to the meanest intelligence. If she can get Chandra to cross the Swiss frontier and come into France she’s to go free, either to Spain or to South America, with her passage paid.”

“And how the devil is she to get Chandra to do that?”

“He’s madly in love with her. He’s longing to see her. His letters are almost crazy. She’s written to him to say that she can’t get a visa to Holland (I told you she was to join him there when her tour was over), but she can get one for Switzerland. That’s a neutral country and he’s safe there. He jumped at the chance. They’ve arranged to meet at Lausanne.”

“Yes.”

“When he reaches Lausanne he’ll get a letter from her to say that the French authorities won’t let her cross the frontier and that she’s going to Thonon, which is just on the other side of the lake from Lausanne, in France, and she’s going to ask him to come there.”

“What makes you think he will?”

R. paused for an instant. He looked at Ashenden with a pleasant expression.

“She must make him if she doesn’t want to go to penal servitude for ten years.”

“I see.”

“She’s arriving from England this evening in custody and I should like you to take her down to Thonon by the night train.”

“Me?” said Ashenden.

“Yes, I thought it the sort of job you could manage very well. Presumably you know more about human nature than most people. It’ll be a pleasant change for you to spend a week or two at Thonon.

I believe it’s a pretty little place, fashionable too — in peace-time. You might take the baths there.”

“And what do you expect me to do when I get the lady down to Thonon?”

“I leave you a free hand. I’ve made a few notes that may be useful to you. I’ll read them to you, shall I?”

Ashenden listened attentively. R.’s plan was simple and explicit, Ashenden could not but feel unwilling admiration for the brain that had so neatly devised it.

Presently R. suggested that they should have luncheon and he asked Ashenden to take him to some place where they could see smart people. It amused Ashenden to see R., so sharp, sure of himself and alert in his office, seized as he walked into the restaurant with shyness. He talked a little too loud in order to show that lie was at his ease and made himself somewhat unnecessarily at home. You saw in his manner the shabby and commonplace life he had led till the hazards of war raised him to a position of consequence. He was glad to be in that fashionable restaurant cheek by jowl with persons who bore great or distinguished names, but he felt like a schoolboy in his first top-hat, and he quailed before the steely eye of the maître d’hôtel. His quick glance darted here and there and his sallow face beamed with a self-satisfaction of which he was slightly ashamed. Ashenden drew his attention to an ugly woman in black, with a lovely figure, wearing a long row of pearls.

“That is Madame de Brides. She is the mistress of the Grand Duke Theodore. She’s probably one of the most influential women in Europe, she’s certainly one of the cleverest.”

R.’s clever eyes rested on her and he flushed a little.

“By George, this is life,” he said.

Ashenden watched him curiously. Luxury is dangerous to people who have never known it and to whom its temptations are held out too suddenly. R., that shrewd, cynical man, was captivated by the vulgar glamour and the shoddy brilliance of the scene before him. Just as the advantage of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction, so the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with a proper contumely.

But when they had eaten their luncheon and were drinking their coffee Ashenden, seeing that R. was mellowed by the good meal and his surroundings, went back to the subject that was in his thoughts.

“That Indian fellow must be a rather remarkable chap,” he said.

“He’s got brains, of course.”

“One can’t help being impressed by a man who had the courage to take on almost single-handed the whole British power in India.”

“I wouldn’t get sentimental about him if I were you. He’s nothing but a dangerous criminal.”

“I don’t suppose he’d use bombs if he could command a few batteries and half a dozen battalions. He uses what weapons he can. You can hardly blame him for that. After all, he’s aiming at nothing for himself, is he? He’s aiming at freedom for his country. On the face of it it looks as though he were justified in his actions.”

But R. had no notion of what Ashenden was talking.

“That’s very far-fetched and morbid,” he said. “We can’t go into all that. Our job is to get him and when we’ve got him to shoot him.”

“Of course. He’s declared war and he must take his chance. I shall carry out your instructions, that’s what I’m here for, but I see no harm in realising that there’s something to be admired and respected in him.”

R. was once more the cool and astute judge of his fellows.

“I’ve not yet made up my mind whether the best men for this kind of job are those who do it with passion or those who keep their heads. Some of them are filled with hatred for the people we’re up against and when we down them it gives them a sort of satisfaction like satisfying a personal grudge. Of course they’re very keen on their work. You’re different, aren’t you? You look at it like a game of chess and you don’t seem to have any feeling one way or the other. I can’t quite make it out. Of course for some sort of jobs it’s just what one wants.”

Ashenden did not answer. He called for the bill and walked back with R. to the hotel.

The train started at eight. When he had disposed of his bag Ashenden walked along the platform. He found the carriage in which Giulia Lazzari was, but she sat in a corner, looking away from the light, so that he could not see her face. She was in charge of two detectives who had taken her over from English police at Boulogne. One of them worked with Ashenden on the French side of the Lake Geneva and as Ashenden came up he nodded to him.

“I’ve asked the lady if she will dine in the restaurant-car, but she prefers to have dinner in the carriage, so I’ve ordered a basket. Is that quite correct?”

“Quite,” said Ashenden.

“My companion and I will go into the diner in turn so that she will not remain alone.”

“That is very considerate of you. I will come along when we’ve started and have a chat with her.”

“She’s not disposed to be very talkative,” said the detective.

“One could hardly expect it,” replied Ashenden.

He walked on to get his ticket for the second service and then returned to his own carriage. Giulia Lazzari was just finishing her meal when he went back to her. From a glance at the basket he judged that she had not eaten with too poor an appetite. The detective who was guarding her opened the door when Ashenden appeared and at Ashenden’s suggestion left them alone.

Giulia Lazzari gave him a sullen look.

“I hope you’ve had what you wanted for dinner,” he said as he sat down in front of her.

She bowed slightly, but did not speak. He took out his case.

“Will you have a cigarette?”

She gave him a glance, seemed to hesitate, and then, still without a word, took one. He struck a match and, lighting it, looked at her. He was surprised. For some reason he had expected her to be fair, perhaps from some notion that an Oriental would be more likely to fall for a blonde; but she was almost swarthy. Her hair was hidden by a close-fitting hat, but her eyes were coal-black. She was far from young, she might have been thirty-five, and her skin was lined and sallow. She had at the moment no make-up on and she looked haggard. There was nothing beautiful about her but her magnificent eyes. She was big, and Ashenden thought she must be too big to dance gracefully; it might be that in Spanish costume she was a bold and flaunting figure, but there in the train, shabbily dressed, there was nothing to explain the Indian’s infatuation. She gave Ashenden a long, appraising stare. She wondered evidently what sort of man he was. She blew a cloud of smoke through her nostrils and gave it a glance, then looked back at Ashenden. He could see that her sullenness was only a mask, she was nervous and frightened. She spoke in French with an Italian accent.

“Who are you?”

“My name would mean nothing to you, madame. I am going to Thonon. I have taken a room for you at the Hotel de la Place. It is the only one open now. I think you will find it quite comfortable.”

‘Ah, it is you the Colonel spoke to me of. You are my gaoler.”

“Only as a matter of form. I shall not intrude upon you.”

“All the same you are my gaoler.”

“I hope not for very long. I have in my pocket your passport with all the formalities completed to permit you to go to Spain.”

She threw herself back into the corner of the carriage. White with those great black eyes, in the poor light, her face was suddenly a mask of despair.

“It’s infamous. Oh, I think I could die happy if I could only kill that old Colonel. He has no heart. I’m so unhappy.”

“I am afraid you have got yourself into a very unfortunate situation. Did you not know that espionage was a dangerous game?”

“I never sold any of the secrets. I did no harm.”

“Surely only because you had no opportunity. I understand that you signed a full confession.”

Ashenden spoke to her as amiably as he could, a little as though he were talking to a sick person, and there was no harshness in his voice.

“Oh, yes, I made a fool of myself. I wrote the letter the Colonel said I was to write. Why isn’t that enough? What is to happen to me if he does not answer? I cannot force him to come if he does not want to.”

“He has answered,” said Ashenden. “I have the answer with me.

She gave a gasp and her voice broke.

“Oh, show it to me, I beseech you to let me see it.”

“I have no objection to doing that. But you must return it to me.

He took Chandra’s letter from his pocket and gave it to her. She snatched it from his hand. She devoured it with her eyes, there were eight pages of it, and as she read the tears streamed down her cheeks. Between her sobs she gave little exclamations of love, calling the writer by pet names French and Italian. This was the letter that Chandra had written in reply to hers telling him, on R.’s instructions, that she would meet him in Switzerland. He was mad with joy at the prospect. He told her in passionate phrases how long the time had seemed to him since they were parted, and how he had yearned for her, and now that he was to see her again so soon he did not know how he was going to bear his impatience. She finished it and let it drop to the floor.

“You can see he loves me, can’t you? There’s no doubt about that. I know something about it, believe me.”

“Do you really love him?” asked Ashenden.

“He’s the only man who’s ever been kind to me. It’s not very gay, the life one leads in these music-halls, all over Europe, never resting, and men — they are not much, the men who haunt those places. At first I thought he was just like the rest of them.”

Ashenden picked up the letter and replaced it in his pocket-book.

“A telegram was sent in your name to the address in Holland to say that you would be at the Hotel Gibbons at Lausanne on the 14th.”

“That is to-morrow.”

“Yes.”

She threw up her head and her eyes flashed.

“Oh, it is an infamous thing that you are forcing me to do. It is shameful.”

“You are not obliged to do it,” said Ashenden.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’m afraid you must take the consequences.”

“I can’t go to prison,” she cried out suddenly, “I can’t, I can’t; I have such a short time before me; he said ten years. Is it possible I could be sentenced to ten years?”

“If the Colonel told you so it is very possible.”

“Oh, I know him. That cruel face. He would have no mercy. And what should I be in ten years? Oh, no no.”

At that moment the train stopped at a station and the detective waiting in the corridor tapped on the window. Ashenden opened the door and the man gave him a picture-postcard. It was a dull little view of Pontarlier, the frontier station between France and Switzerland, and showed a dusty place with a statue in the middle and a few plane-trees. Ashenden handed her a pencil.

“Will you write this postcard to your lover. It will be posted at Pontarlier. Address it to the hotel at Lausanne.”

She gave him a glance, but without answering took it and wrote as he directed.

“Now on the other side write: ‘Delayed at frontier but everything all right. Wait at Lausanne.’ Then add whatever you like, tendresses, if you lie.”

He took the postcard from her, read it to see that she had done as he directed and then reached for his hat.

“Well, I shall leave you now, I hope you will have a sleep. I will fetch you in the morning when we arrive at Thonon.”

The second detective had now returned from his dinner and as Ashenden came out of the carriage the two men went in. Giulia Lazzari huddled back into her corner. Ashenden gave the postcard to an agent who was waiting to take it to Pontarlier and then made his way along the crowded train to his sleeping-car.

It was bright and sunny, though cold, next morning when they reached their destination. Ashenden, having given his bags to a porter, walked along the platform to where Giulia Lazzari and the two detectives were standing. Ashenden nodded to them.

“Well, good-morning. You need not trouble to wait.”

They touched their hats, gave a word of farewell to the woman, and walked away.

“Where are they going?” she asked.

“Off. You will not be bothered with them any more.”

“Am I in your custody then?”

“You’re in nobody’s custody. I’m going to permit myself to take you to your hotel and then I shall leave you. You must try to get a good rest.”

Ashenden’s porter took her hand-luggage and she gave him the ticket for her trunk. They walked out of the station. A cab was waiting for them and Ashenden begged her to get in. It was a longish drive to the hotel and now and then Ashenden felt that she gave him a sidelong glance. She was perplexed. He sat without a word. When they reached the hotel the proprietor — it was a small hotel, prettily situated at the corner of a little promenade and it had a charming view — showed them the room that had been prepared for Madame Lazzari. Ashenden turned to him.

“That’ll do very nicely, I think. I shall come down in a minute.”

The proprietor bowed and withdrew.

“I shall do my best to see that you are comfortable, madame,” said Ashenden. “You are here absolutely your own mistress and you may order pretty well anything you like. To the proprietor you are just a guest of the hotel like any other. You are absolutely free.”

“Free to go out?” she asked quickly.

“Of course.”

“With a policeman on either side of me, I suppose.”

“Not at all. You are as free in the hotel as though you were in your own house and you are free to go out and come in when you choose. I should like an assurance from you that you will not write letters without my knowledge or attempt to leave Thonon without my permission.”

She gave Ashenden a long stare. She could not make it out at all. She looked as though she thought it a dream.

“I am in a position that forces me to give you any assurance you ask. I give you my word of honour that I will not write a letter without showing it to you or attempt to leave this place.”

“Thank you. Now I will leave you. I will do myself the pleasure of coming to see you to-morrow morning.”

Ashenden nodded and went out. He stopped for five minutes at the police-station to see that everything was in order and then took the cab up the hill to a little secluded house on the outskirts of the town at which on his periodical visits to this place he stayed. It was pleasant to have a bath and a shave and get into slippers. He felt lazy and spent the rest of the morning reading a novel.

Soon after dark, for even at Thonon, though it was in France, it was thought desirable to attract attention to Ashenden as little as possible, an agent from the police-station came to see him. His name was Felix. He was a little dark Frenchman with sharp eyes and an unshaven chin, dressed in a shabby grey suit and rather down at heel, so that he looked like a lawyer’s clerk out of work. Ashenden offered him a glass of wine and they sat down by the fire.

“Well, your lady lost no time,” he said. “Within a quarter of an hour of her arrival she was out of the hotel with a bundle of clothes and trinkets that she sold in a shop near the market. When the afternoon boat came in she went down to the quay and bought a ticket to Evian.”

Evian, it should be explained, was the next place along the lake in France and from there, crossing over, the boat went to Switzerland.

“Of course she hadn’t a passport, so permission to embark was denied her.”

“How did she explain that she had no passport?”

“She said she’d forgotten it. She said she had an appointment to see friends in Evian and tried to persuade the official in charge to let her go. She attempted to slip a hundred francs into his hand.”

“She must be a stupider woman than I thought,” said Ashenden.

But when next day he went about eleven in the morning to see her he made no reference to her attempt to escape. She had had time to arrange herself, and now, her hair elaborately done, her lips and cheeks painted, she looked less haggard than when he had first seen her.

“I’ve brought you some books,” said Ashenden. “I’m afraid the time hangs heavy on your hands.”

“What does that matter to you?”

“I have no wish that you should suffer anything that can be avoided. Anyhow, I will leave them and you can read them or not as you choose.”

“If you only knew how I hated you.”

“It would doubtless make me very uncomfortable. But I really don’t know why you should. I am only doing what I have been ordered to do.”

“What do you want of me now? I do not suppose you have come only to ask after my health.”

Ashenden smiled.

“I want you to write a letter to your lover telling him that owing to some irregularity in your passport the Swiss authorities would not let you cross the frontier, so you have come here where it is very nice and quiet, so quiet that one can hardly realise there is a war, and you propose that Chandra should join you.”

“Do you think he is a fool? He will refuse.”

“Then you must do your best to persuade him.”

She looked at Ashenden a long time before she answered. He suspected that she was debating within herself whether by writing the letter and so seeming docile she could not gain time. “Well, dictate and I will write what you say.”

“I should prefer you to put it in your own words.”

“Give me half an hour and the letter shall be ready.”

“I will wait here,” said Ashenden.

“Why?”

“Because I prefer to.”

Her eyes flashed angrily, but controlling herself she said nothing. On the chest of drawers were writing materials. She sat down at the dressing-table and began to write. When she handed Ashenden the letter he saw that even through her rouge she was very pale. It was the letter of a person not much used to expressing herself by means of pen and ink, but it was well enough, and when towards the end, starting to say how much she loved the man, she had been carried away and wrote with all her heart, it had really a certain passion.

“Now add: The man who is bringing this is Swiss, you can trust him absolutely. I didn’t want the censor to see it.”

She hesitated an instant, but then wrote as he directed.

“How do you spell, absolutely?”

“As you like. Now address an envelope and I will relieve you of my unwelcome presence.”

He gave the letter to the agent who was waiting to take it across the lake. Ashenden brought her the reply the same evening. She snatched it from his hands and for a moment pressed it to her heart. When she read it she uttered a little cry of relief.

“He won’t come.”

The letter, in the Indian’s flowery, stilted English, expressed his bitter disappointment. He told her how intensely he had looked forward to seeing her and implored her to do everything in the world to smooth the difficulties that prevented her from crossing the frontier. He said that it was impossible for him to come, impossible, there was a price on his head, and it would be madness for him to think of risking it. He attempted to be jocular, she did not want her little fat lover to be shot, did she? “He won’t come,” she repeated, “he won’t come.”

“You must write and tell him that there is no risk. You must say that if there were you would not dream of asking him. You must say that if he loves you he will not hesitate.”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“Don’t be a fool. You can’t help yourself.”

She burst into a sudden flood of tears. She flung herself on the floor and seizing Ashenden’s knees implored him to have mercy on her.

“I will do anything in the world for you if you will let me go.”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Ashenden. “Do you think I want to become your lover? Come, come, you must be serious. You know the alternative.”

She raised herself to her feet and changing on a sudden to fury flung at Ashenden one foul name after another.

“I like you much better like that,” he said. “Now will you write or shall I send for the police?”

“He will not come. It is useless.”

“It is very much to your interest to make him come.”

“What do you mean by that? Do you mean that if I do everything in my power and fail, that...”

She looked at Ashenden with wild eyes.

‘‘Yes, it means either you or him.”

She staggered. She put her hand to her heart. Then without a word she reached for pen and paper. But the letter was not to Ashenden’s liking and he made her write it again. When she had finished she flung herself on the bed and burst once more into passionate weeping. Her grief was real, but there was something theatrical in the expression of it that prevented it from being peculiarly moving to Ashenden. He felt his relation to her as impersonal as a doctor’s in the presence of a pain that he cannot alleviate. He saw now why R. had given him this peculiar task; it needed a cool head and an emotion well under control.

He did not see her next day. The answer to the letter was not delivered to him till after dinner, when it was brought to Ashenden’s little house by Felix.

“Well, what news have you?”

“Our friend is getting desperate,” smiled the Frenchman. “This afternoon she walked up to the station just as a train was about to start for Lyons. She was looking up and down uncertainly so I went to her and asked if there was anything I could do. I introduced myself as an agent of the Sûreté. If looks could kill I should not be standing here now.”

“Sit down, mon ami,” said Ashenden.

“Merci. She walked away, she evidently thought it was no use to try to get on the train, but I have something more interesting to tell you. She has offered a boatman on the lake a thousand francs to take her across to Lausanne.”

“What did he say to her?”

“He said he couldn’t risk it.”

“Yes?”

The little agent gave his shoulders a slight shrug and smiled. “She’s asked him to meet her on the road that leads to Evian at ten o’clock to-night so that they can talk of it again, and she’s given him to understand that she will not repulse too fiercely the advances of a lover. I have told him to do what he likes so long as he comes and tells me everything that is of importance.”

“Are you sure you can trust him?” asked Ashenden.

“Oh, quite. He knows nothing, of course, but that she is under surveillance. You need have no fear about him. He is a good boy. I have known him all his life.”

Ashenden read Chandra’s letter. It was eager and passionate. It throbbed strangely with the painful yearning of his heart.

Love? Yes, if Ashenden knew anything of it there was the real thing. He told her how he spent the long hours walking by the lakeside and looking towards the coast of France. How near they were and yet so desperately parted! He repeated again and again that he could not come, and begged her-not to ask him, he would do everything in the world for her, but that he dared not do, and yet if she insisted how could he resist her? He besought her to have mercy on him. And then he broke into a long wail at the thought that he must go away without seeing her, he asked her if there were not some means by which she could slip over, he swore that if he could ever hold her in his arms again he would never let her go. Even the forced and elaborate language in which it was written could not dim the hot fire that burned the pages; it was the letter of a madman.

“When will you hear the result of her interview with the boatman?” asked Ashenden.

“I have arranged to meet him at the landing-stage between eleven and twelve.”

Ashenden looked at his watch.

“I will come with you.”

They walked down the hill and reaching the quay for shelter from the cold wind stood in the lea of the custom-house. At last they saw a man approaching and Felix stepped out of the shadow that hid them.

“Antoine.”

“Monsieur Félix? I have a letter for you; I promised to take it to Lausanne by the first boat to-morrow.”

Ashenden gave the man a brief glance, but did not ask what had passed between him and Giulia Lazzari. He took the letter and by the light of Felix’s electric torch read it. It was in faulty German.

“On no account come. Pay no attention to my letters. Danger. I love you. Sweetheart. Don’t come.”

He put it in his pocket, gave the boatman fifty francs, and went home to bed. But the next day when he went to see Giulia Lazzari he found her door locked. He knocked for some time, there was no answer. He called her.

“Madame Lazzari, you must open the door. I want to speak to you.”

“I am in bed. I am ill and can see no one.”

“I am sorry, but you must open the door. If you are ill I will send for a doctor.”

“No, go away. I will see no one.”

“If you do not open the door I shall send for a locksmith and have it broken open.”

There was a silence and then he heard the key turned in the lock. He went in. She was in a dressing-gown and her hair was dishevelled. She had evidently just got out of bed.

“I am at the end of my strength. I can do nothing more. You have only to look at me to see that I am ill. I have been sick all night.”

“I shall not keep you long. Would you like to see a doctor?”

“What good can a doctor do me?”

He took out of his pocket the letter she had given the boatman and handed it to her.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.

She gave a gasp at the sight of it and her sallow face went green.

“You gave me your word that you would neither attempt to escape nor write a letter without my knowledge.”

“Did you think I would keep my word?” she cried, her voice ringing with scorn.

“No. To tell you the truth it was not entirely for your convenience that you were placed in a comfortable hotel rather than in the local gaol, but I think I should tell you that though you have your freedom to go in and out as you like you have no more chance of getting away from Thonon than if you were chained by the leg in a prison cell. It is silly to waste your time writing letters that will never be delivered.

“Cochon.”

She flung the opprobrious word at him with all the violence that was in her.

“But you must sit down and write a letter that will be delivered.”

“Never. I will do nothing more. I will not write another word.”

“You came here on the understanding that you would do certain things.”

“I will not do them. It is finished.”

“You had better reflect a little.”

“Reflect! I have reflected. You can do what you like; I don’t care.”

“Very well, I will give you five minutes to change your mind.”

Ashenden took out his watch and looked at it. He sat down on the edge of the unmade bed.

“Oh, it has got on my nerves, this hotel. Why did you not put me in the prison? Why, why? Everywhere I went I felt that spies were on my heels. It is infamous what you are making me do. Infamous! What is my crime? I ask you, what have I done? Am I not a woman? It is infamous what you are asking me to do. Infamous.”

She spoke in a high shrill voice. She went on and on. At last the five minutes were up. Ashenden had not said a word. He rose.

“Yes, go, go,” she shrieked at him.

She flung foul names at him.

“I shall come back,” said Ashenden.

He took the key out of the door as he went out of the room and locked it behind him. Going downstairs he hurriedly scribbled a note, called the boots and dispatched him with it to the police-station. Then he went up again. Giulia Lazzari had thrown herself on her bed and turned her face to the wall. Her body was shaken with hysterical sobs. She gave no sign that she heard him come in. Ashenden sat down on the chair in front of the dressing-table and looked idly at the odds and ends that littered it. The toilet things were cheap and tawdry and none too clean. There were little shabby pots of rouge and cold-cream and little bottles of black for the eyebrows and eyelashes. The hairpins were horrid and greasy. The room was untidy and the air was heavy with the smell of cheap scent. Ashenden thought of the hundreds of rooms she must have occupied in third-rate hotels in the course of her wandering life from provincial town to provincial town in one country after another. He wondered what had been her origins. She was a coarse and vulgar woman, but what had she been when young? She was not the type he would have expected to adopt that career, for she seemed to have no advantages that could help her, and he asked himself whether she came of a family of entertainers (there are all over the world families in which for generations the members have become dancers or acrobats or comic singers) or whether she had fallen into the life accidentally through some lover in the business who had for a time made her his partner. And what men must she have known in all these years, the comrades of the shows she was in, the agents and managers who looked upon it as a perquisite of their position that they should enjoy her favours, the merchants or well-to-do tradesmen, the young sparks of the various towns she played in, who were attracted for the moment by the glamour of the dancer or the blatent sensuality of the woman! To her they were the paying customers and she accepted them indifferently as the recognised and admitted supplement to her miserable salary, but to them perhaps she was romance. In her bought arms they caught sight for a moment of the brilliant world of the capitals, and ever so distantly and however shoddily of the adventure and the glamour of a more spacious life.

There was a sudden knock at the door and Ashenden immediately cried out:

“Encrez.”

Giulia Lazzari sprang up in bed to a sitting posture.

“Who is it?” she called.

She gave a gasp as she saw the two detectives who had brought her from Boulogne and handed her over to Ashenden at Thonon.

“You! What do you want?” she shrieked.

“Allons, levez vous,” said one of them, and his voice had a sharp abruptness that suggested that he would put up with no nonsense.

“I’m afraid you must get up, Madame Lazzari,” said Ashenden. “I am delivering you once more to the care of these gentlemen.”

“How can I get up! I’m ill, I tell you. I cannot stand. Do you want to kill me?”

“If you won’t dress yourself, we shall have to dress you, and I’m afraid we shouldn’t do it very cleverly. Come, come, it’s no good making a scene.”

“Where are you going to take me?”

“They’re going to take you back to England.”

One of the detectives took hold of her arm.

“Don’t touch me, don’t come near me,” she screamed furiously.

“Let her be,” said Ashenden. “I’m sure she’ll see the necessity of making as little trouble as possible.”

“I’ll dress myself.”

Ashenden watched her as she took off her dressing-gown and slipped a dress over her head. She forced her feet into shoes obviously too small for her. She arranged her hair. Every now and then she gave’ the detectives a hurried, sullen glance. Ashenden wondered if she would have the nerve to go through with it. R. would call him a damned fool, but he almost wished she would. She went up to the dressing-table and Ashenden stood up in order to let her sit down. She greased her face quickly and then rubbed off the grease with a dirty towel, she powdered herself and made up her eyes. But her hand shook. The three men watched her in silence. She rubbed the rouge on her cheeks and painted her mouth. Then she crammed a hat down on her head. Ashenden made a gesture to the first detective and he took a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and advanced towards her.

At the sight of them she started back violently and flung her arms wide.

“Non, non, non, Je ne veux pas. No, not them. No. No.”

“Come, ma fille, don’t be silly,” said the detective roughly.

As though for protection (very much to his surprise) she flung her arms round Ashenden.

“Don’t let them take me, have mercy on me, I can’t, I can’t.” Ashenden extricated himself as best he could.

“I can do nothing more for you.”

The detective seized her wrists and was about to affix the handcuffs when with a great cry she threw herself down on the floor. “I will do what you wish. I will do everything.”

On a sign from Ashenden the detectives left the room. He waited for a little till she had regained a certain calm. She was lying on the floor, sobbing passionately. He raised her to her feet and made her sit down “What do you want me to do?” she gasped.

“I want you to write another letter to Chandra.”

“My head is in a whirl. I could not put two phrases together. You must give me time.”

But Ashenden felt that it was better to get her to write a letter while she was under the effect of her terror. He did not want to give her time to collect herself.

“I will dictate the letter to you. All you have to do is to write exactly what I tell you.”

She gave a deep sigh, but took the pen and the paper and sat down before them at the dressing-table.

“If I do this and... and you succeed, how do I know that I shall be allowed to go free?”

“The Colonel promised that you should. You must take my word for it that I shall carry out his instructions.”

“I should look a fool if I betrayed my friend and then went to prison for ten years.”

“I’ll tell you your best guarantee of our good faith. Except by reason of Chandra you are not of the smallest importance to us.

Why should we put ourselves to the bother and expense of keeping you in prison when you can do us no harm?”

She reflected for an instant. She was composed now. It was as though, having exhausted her emotion, she had become on a sudden a sensible and practical woman.

“Tell me what you want me to write.”

Ashenden hesitated. He thought he could put the letter more or less in the way she would naturally have put it, but he had to give it consideration. It must be neither fluent nor literary. He knew that in moments of emotion people are inclined to be melodramatic and stilted. In a book or on the stage this always rings false and the author has to make his people speak more simply and with less emphasis than in fact they do. It was a serious moment, but Ashenden felt that there were in it elements of the comic.

“I didn’t know I loved a coward,” he started. “If you loved me you couldn’t hesitate when I ask you to come.... Underline couldn’t twice.” He went on. “When I promise you there is no danger. If you don’t love me, you are right not to come. Don’t come. Go back to Berlin where you are in safety. I am sick of it. I am alone here. I have made myself ill by waiting for you and every day I have said he is coming. If you loved me you would not hesitate so much. It is quite clear to me that you do not love me. I am sick and tired of you. I have no money. This hotel is impossible. There is nothing for me to stay for. I can get an engagement in Paris. I have a friend there who has made me serious propositions. I have wasted long enough over you and look what I have got from it. It is finished. Good-bye. You will never find a woman who will love you as I have loved you. I cannot afford to refuse the proposition of my friend, so I have telegraphed to him and as soon as I shall receive his answer I go to Paris. I do not blame you because you do not love me, that is not your fault, but you must see that I should be a stupid to go on wasting my life. One is not young for ever. Good-bye. Giulia.”

When Ashenden read over the letter he was not altogether satisfied. But it was the best he could do. It had an air of verisimilitude which the words lacked because, knowing little English, she had written phonetically, the spelling was atrocious and the handwriting like a child’s; she had crossed out words and written them over again. Some of the phrases he had put in French.

Once or twice tears had fallen on the pages and blurred the ink.

“I leave you now,” said Ashenden. “It may be that when next you see me I shall be able to tell you that you are free to go where you choose. Where do you want to go?”

“Spain.”

“Very well, I will have everything prepared.”

She shrugged her shoulders. He left her.

There was nothing now for Ashenden to do but wait. He sent a messenger to Lausanne in the afternoon, and next morning went down to the quay to meet the boat. There was a waiting-room next to the ticket-office and here he told the detectives to hold themselves in readiness. When a boat arrived the passengers advanced along the pier in line and their passports were examined before they were allowed to go ashore. If Chandra came and showed his passport, and it was very likely that he was travelling with a false one, issued probably by a neutral nation, he was to be asked to wait and Ashenden was to identify him. Then he would be arrested. It was with some excitement that Ashenden watched the boat come in and the little group of people gathered at the gangway. He scanned them closely but saw no one who looked in the least like an Indian. Chandra had not come. Ashenden did not know what to do. He had played his last card. There were not more than half a dozen passengers for Thonon, and when they had been examined and gone their way he strolled along the pier.

“Well, it’s no go,” he said to Felix, who had been examining the passports. “The gentleman I expected hasn’t turned up.”

“I have a letter for you.”

He handed Ashenden an envelope addressed to Madame Lazzari on which he immediately recognized the spidery handwriting of Chandra Lai. At that moment the steamer from Geneva which was going to Lausanne and the end of the lake hove in sight. It arrived at Thonon every morning twenty minutes after the steamer going in the opposite direction had left. Ashenden had an inspiration.

“Where is the man who brought it?”

“He’s in the ticket-office.”

“Give him the letter and tell him to return to the person who gave it to him. He is to say that he took it to the lady and she sent it back. If the person asks him to take another letter he is to say that it is not much good as she is packing her trunk and leaving Thonon.”

He saw the letter handed over and the instructions given and then walked back to his little house in the country.

The next boat on which Chandra could possibly come arrived about five and having at that hour an important engagement with an agent working in Germany he warned Felix that he might be a few minutes late. But if Chandra came he could easily be detained; there was no great hurry since the train in which he was to be taken to Paris did not start till shortly after eight. When Ashenden had finished his business he strolled leisurely down to the lake. It was light still and from the top of the hill he saw the steamer pulling out. It was an anxious moment and instinctively he quickened his steps. Suddenly he saw someone running towards him and recognised the man who had taken the letter.

“Quick, quick,” he cried. “He’s there.”

Ashenden’s heart gave a great thud against his chest.

“At last.”

He began to run too and as they ran the man, panting, told him how he had taken back the unopened letter. When he put it in the Indian’s hand he turned frightfully pale (“I should never have thought an Indian could turn that colour,” he said), and turned it over and over in his hand as though he could not understand what his own letter was doing there. Tears sprang to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. (“It was grotesque, he’s fat, you know.”) He said something in a language the man did not understand and then in French asked him when the boat went to Thonon. When he got on board he looked about, but did not see him, then he caught sight of him, huddled up in an ulster with his hat drawn down over his eyes, standing alone in the bows. During the crossing he kept his eyes fixed on Thonon.

“Where is he now?” asked Ashenden.

“I got off first and Monsieur Felix told me to come for you.”

“I suppose they’re holding him in the waiting-room.”

Ashenden was out of breath when they reached the pier. He burst into the waiting-room. A group of men, talking at the top of their voices and gesticulating wildly, were clustered round a man lying on the ground.

“What’s happened?” he cried.

“Look,” said Monsieux Felix.

Chandra Lal lay there, his eyes wide open and a thin line of foam on his lips, dead. His body was horribly contorted.

“He’s killed himself. We’ve sent for the doctor. He was too quick for us.”

A sudden thrill of horror passed through Ashenden.

When the Indian landed Felix recognised from the description that he was the man they wanted. There were only four passengers. He was the last. Felix took an exaggerated time to examine the passports of the first three, and then took the Indian’s. It was a Spanish one and it was all in order. Felix asked the regulation questions and noted them on the official sheet. Then he looked at him pleasantly and said:

“Just come into the waiting-room for a moment. There are one or two formalities to fulfil.”

“Is my passport not in order?” the Indian asked.

“Perfectly.”

Chandra hesitated, but then followed the official to the door of the waiting-room. Felix opened it and stood aside.

“Entrez.”

Chandra went in and the two detectives stood up. He must have suspected at once that they were police-officers and realised that he had fallen into a trap.

“Sit down,” said Felix. “I have one or two questions to put to you.”

“It is hot in here,” he said, and in point of fact they had a little stove there that kept the place like an oven. “I will take off my coat if you permit.”

“Certainly,” said Felix graciously.

He took off his coat, apparently with some effort, and he turned to put it on a chair, and then before they realised what had happened they were startled to see him stagger and fall heavily to the ground. While taking off his coat Chandra had managed to swallow the contents of a bottle that was still clasped in his hand. Ashenden put his nose to it. There was a very distinct odour of almonds.

For a little while they looked at the man who lay on the floor. Felix was apologetic.

“Will they be very angry?” he asked nervously.

“I don’t see that it was your fault,” said Ashenden. “Anyhow, he can do no more harm. For my part I am just as glad he killed himself. The notion of his being executed did not make me very comfortable.”

In a few minutes the doctor arrived and pronounced life extinct.

“Prussic acid,” he said to Ashenden.

Ashenden nodded.

“I will go and see Madame Lazzari,” he said. “If she wants to stay a day or two longer I shall let her. But if she wants to go tonight of course she can. Will you give the agents at the station instructions to let her pass?”

“I shall be at the station myself,” said Felix.

Ashenden once more climbed the hill. It was night now, a cold, bright night with an unclouded sky and the sight of the new moon, a white shining thread, made him turn three times the money in his pocket. When he entered the hotel he was seized on a sudden with distaste for its cold banality. It smelt of cabbage and boiled mutton. On the walls of the hall were coloured posters of railway companies advertising Grenoble, Carcassonne and the bathing places of Normandy. He went upstairs and after a brief knock opened the door of Giulia Lazzari’s room. She was sitting in front of her dressing-table, looking at herself in the glass, just idly, despairingly, apparently doing nothing, and it was in this that she saw Ashenden as he came in. Her face changed suddenly as she caught sight of his and she sprang up so vehemently that the chair fell over.

“What is it? Why are you so white?” she cried.

She turned round and stared at him and her features were gradually twisted to a look of horror.

“Il est pris,” she gasped.

“Il est mort,” said Ashenden.

“Dead! He took the poison. He had the time for that. He’s escaped you after all.”

“What do you mean? How did you know about the poison?”

“He always carried it with him. He said that the English should never take him alive.”

Ashenden reflected for an instant. She had kept that secret well. He supposed the possibility of such a thing should have occurred to him. How was he to anticipate these melodramatic devices?

“Well, now you are free. You can go wherever you like and no obstacle shall be put in your way. Here are your ticket and your passport and here is the money that was in your possession when you were arrested. Do you wish to see Chandra?”

She started.

“No, no.”

“There is no need. I thought you might care to.”

She did not weep. Ashenden supposed that she had exhausted all her emotion. She seemed apathetic.

“A telegram will be sent to-night to the Spanish frontier to instruct the authorities to put no difficulties in your way. If you will take my advice you will get out of France as soon as you can.”

She said nothing, and since Ashenden had no more to say he made ready to go.

“I am sorry that I have had to show myself so hard to you. I am glad to think that now the worst of your troubles are over and I hope that time will assuage the grief that I know you must feel for the death of your friend.”

Ashenden gave her a little bow and turned to the door. But she stopped him.

“One little moment,” she said. “There is one thing I should like to ask. I think you have some heart.”

“Whatever I can do for you, you may be sure I will.”

“What are they going to do with his things?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

Then she said something that confounded Ashenden. It was the last thing he expected.

“He had a wrist-watch that I gave him last Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Can I have it back?”

THE TRAITOR

When Ashenden, given charge of a number of spies working from Switzerland, was first sent there, R., wishing him to see the sort of reports that he would be required to obtain, handed him the communications, a sheaf of typewritten documents, of a man known in the secret service as Gustav.

‘He’s the best fellow we’ve got,’ said R. ‘His information is always very full and circumstantial. I want you to give his reports your very best attention. Of course Gustav is a clever little chap, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get just as good reports from the other agents. It’s merely a question of explaining exactly what we want.’

Gustav, who lived at Basle, represented a Swiss firm with branches at Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Cologne, and by virtue of his business was able to go in and out of Germany without risk. He travelled up and down the Rhine, and gathered material about the movement of troops, the manufacture of munitions, the state of mind of the country (a point on which R. laid stress), and other matters upon which the Allies desired information. His frequent letters to his wife hid an ingenious code and the moment she received them in Basle she sent them to Ashenden in Geneva, who extracted from them the important facts and communicated these in the proper quarter. Every two months Gustav came home and prepared one of the reports that served as models to the other spies in this particular section of the secret service.

His employers were pleased with Gustav and Gustav had reason to be pleased with his employers. His services were so useful that he was not only paid more highly than the others, but for particular scoops had received from time to time a handsome bonus.

This went on for more than a year. Then something aroused R.’s quick suspicions; he was a man of an amazing alertness, not so much of mind, as of instinct, and he had suddenly a feeling that some hanky–panky was going on. He said nothing definite to Ashenden (whatever R. surmised he was disposed to keep to himself), but told him to go to Basle, Gustav being then in Germany, and have a talk with Gustav’s wife. He left it to Ashenden to decide the tenor of the conversation.

Having arrived at Basle, and leaving his bag at the station, for he did not yet know whether he would have to stay or not, he took a tram to the corner of the street in which Gustav lived and, with a quick look to see that he was not followed, walked along to the house he sought. It was a block of flats that gave you the impression of decent poverty and Ashenden conjectured that they were inhabited by clerks and small tradespeople. Just inside the door was a cobbler’s shop and Ashenden stopped.

‘Does Herr Grabow live here?’ he asked in his none too fluent German. ‘Yes, I saw him go up a few minutes ago. You’ll find him in.’

Ashenden was startled, for he had but the day before received through Gustav’s wife a letter addressed from Mannheim in which Gustav by means of his code gave the numbers of certain regiments that had just crossed the Rhine. Ashenden thought it unwise to ask the cobbler the question that rose to his lips, so thanked him and went up to the third floor, on which he knew already that Gustav lived. He rang the bell and heard it tinkle within. In a moment the door was opened by a dapper little man with a close shaven round head and spectacles. He wore carpet slippers.

‘Herr Grabow?’ asked Ashenden.

‘At your service,’ said Gustav.

‘May I come in?’

Gustav was standing with his back to the light and Ashenden could not see the look on his face. He felt a momentary hesitation and gave the name under which he received Gustav’s letters from Germany.

‘Come in, come in. I am very glad to see you.’

Gustav led the way into the stuffy little room, heavy with carved oak furniture, and on the large table covered with a table–cloth of green velveteen was a typewriter. Gustav was apparently engaged in composing one of his invaluable reports. A woman was sitting at the open window darning socks, but at a word from Gustav rose, gathered up her things and left. Ashenden had disturbed a pretty picture of connubial bliss.

‘Sit down, please. How very fortunate that I was in Basle! I have long wanted to make your acquaintance. I have only just this minute returned from Germany.’ He pointed to the sheets of paper by the typewriter. ‘I think you will be pleased with the news I bring. I have some very valuable information.’ He chuckled. ‘One is never sorry to earn a bonus.’

He was very cordial, but to Ashenden his cordiality rang false. Gustav kept his eyes, smiling behind the glasses, fixed watchfully on Ashenden, and it was possible that they held a trace of nervousness.

‘You must have travelled quickly to get here only a few hours after your letter, sent here and then sent on by your wife, reached me in Geneva.’

‘That is very probable. One of the things I had to tell you is that the Germans suspect that information is getting through by means of commercial letters and so they have decided to hold up all mail at the frontier for eight–and–forty hours.’

‘I see,’ said Ashenden amiably. ‘And was it on that account that you took the precaution of dating your letter forty–eight hours after you sent it?’

‘Did I do that? That was very stupid of me. I must have mistaken the day of the month.’

Ashenden looked at Gustav with a smile. That was very thin; Gustav, a business man, knew too well how important in his particular job was the exactness of a date. The circuitous routes by which it was necessary to get information from Germany made it difficult to transmit news quickly and it was essential to know precisely on what days certain events had taken place.

‘Let me look at your passport a minute,’ said Ashenden.

‘What do you want with my passport?’

‘I want to see when you went into Germany and when you came out.’

‘But you do not imagine that my comings and goings are marked on my passport? I have methods of crossing the frontiers.’

Ashenden knew a good deal of this matter. He knew that both the Germans and the Swiss guarded the frontier with severity.

‘Oh? Why should you not cross in the ordinary way? You were engaged because your connexion with a Swiss firm supplying necessary goods to Germany made it easy for you to travel backwards and forwards without suspicion. I can understand that you might get past the German sentries with the connivance of the Germans, but what about the Swiss?’

Gustav assumed a look of indignation.

‘I do not understand you. Do you mean to suggest that I am in the service of the Germans? I give you my word of honour ... I will not allow my integrity to be impugned.’

‘You would not be the only one to take money from both sides and provide information of value to neither.’

‘Do you pretend that my information is of no value? Why then have you given me more bonuses than any other agent has received? The Colonel has repeatedly expressed the highest satisfaction with my services.’

It was Ashenden’s turn now to be cordial.

‘Come, come, my dear fellow, do not try to ride the high horse. You do not wish to show me your passport and I will not insist. You are not under the impression that we leave the statements of our agents without corroboration or that we are so foolish as not to keep track of their movements? Even the best of jokes cannot bear an indefinite repetition. I am in peace–time a humorist by profession and I tell you that from bitter experience.’ Now Ashenden thought the moment had arrived to attempt his bluff; he knew something of the excellent but difficult game of poker. ‘We have information that you have not been to Germany now, nor since you were engaged by us, but have sat here quietly in Basle, and all your reports are merely due to your fertile imagination.’

Gustav looked at Ashenden and saw a face expressive of nothing but tolerance and good–humour. A smile slowly broke on his lips and he gave his shoulders a little shrug.

‘Did you think I was such a fool as to risk my life for fifty pounds a month? I love my wife.’

Ashenden laughed outright.

‘I congratulate you. It is not everyone who can flatter himself that he has made a fool of our secret service for a year.’

‘I had the chance of earning money without any difficulty. My firm stopped sending me into Germany at the beginning of the war, but I learned what I could from the other travellers. I kept my ears open in restaurants and beercellars, and I read the German papers. I got a lot of amusement out of sending you reports and letters.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ said Ashenden.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing. What can we do? You are not under the impression that we shall continue to pay you a salary?’

‘No, I cannot expect that.’

‘By the way, if it is not indiscreet, may I ask if you have been playing the same game with the Germans?’

‘Oh, no,’ Gustav cried vehemently. ‘How can you think it? My sympathies are absolutely pro–Ally. My heart is entirely with you.’

‘Well, why not?’ asked Ashenden. ‘The Germans have all the money in the world and there is no reason why you should not get some of it. We could give you information from time to time that the Germans would be prepared to pay for.’

Gustav drummed his fingers on the table. He took up a sheet of the now useless report.

‘The Germans are dangerous people to meddle with.’

‘You are a very intelligent man. And after all, even if your salary is stopped, you can always earn a bonus by bringing us news that can be useful to us. But it will have to be substantiated; in future we pay only by results.’

‘I will think of it.’

For a moment or two Ashenden left Gustav to his reflections. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke he had inhaled fade into the air. He thought too.

’Is there anything particular you want to know?’ asked Gustav suddenly.

Ashenden smiled.

‘It would be worth a couple of thousand Swiss francs to you if you could tell me what the Germans are doing with a spy of theirs in Lucerne. He is an Englishman and his name is Grantley Caypor.’

‘I have heard the name,’ said Gustav. He paused a moment. ‘How long are you staying here?’

‘As long as necessary. I will take a room at the hotel and let you know the number. If you have anything to say to me you can be sure of finding me in my room at nine every morning and at seven every night.’

‘I should not risk coming to the hotel. But I can write.’

‘Very well.’

Ashenden rose to go and Gustav accompanied him to the door.

‘We part without ill–feeling then?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Your reports will remain in our archives as models of what a report should be.’

Ashenden spent two or three days visiting Basle. It did not much amuse him. He passed a good deal of time in the book–shops turning over the pages of books that would have been worth reading if life were a thousand years long. Once he saw Gustav in the street. On the fourth morning a letter was brought up with his coffee. The envelope was that of a commercial firm unknown to him and inside it was a typewritten sheet. There was no address and no signature. Ashenden wondered if Gustav was aware that a typewriter could betray its owner as certainly as a handwriting. Having twice carefully read the letter, he held the paper up to the light to see the watermark (he had no reason for doing this except that the sleuths of detective novels always did it), then struck a match and watched it burn. He scrunched up the charred fragments in his hand.

He got up, for he had taken advantage of his situation to breakfast in bed, packed his bag and took the next train to Berne. From there he was able to send a code telegram to R. His instructions were given to him verbally two days later, in the bedroom of his hotel at an hour when no one was likely to be seen walking along a corridor, and within twenty–four hours, though by a circuitous route, he arrived at Lucerne.

Having taken a room at the hotel at which he had been instructed to stay, Ashenden went out; it was a lovely day, early in August, and the sun shone in an unclouded sky. He had not been to Lucerne since he was a boy and but vaguely remembered a covered bridge, a great stone lion and a church in which he had sat, bored yet impressed, while they played an organ; and now, wandering along a shady quay (and the lake looked just as tawdry and unreal as it looked on the picture–postcards) he tried not so much to find his way about a half–forgotten scene as to re–form in his mind some recollection of the shy and eager lad, so impatient for life (which he saw not in the present of his adolescence but only in the future of his manhood) who so long ago had wandered there. But it seemed to him that the most vivid of his memories was not of himself, but of the crowd; he seemed to remember sun and heat and people; the train was crowded and so was the hotel, the lake steamers were packed and on the quays and in the streets you threaded your way among the throng of holiday–makers. They were fat and old and ugly and odd, and they stank. Now, in war–time, Lucerne was as deserted as it must have been before the world at large discovered that Switzerland was the playground of Europe. Most of the hotels were closed, the streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked idly at the water’s edge and there was none to take them, and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them. Ashenden felt exhilarated by the solitude and, sitting down on a bench that faced the water, surrendered himself deliberately to the sensation. It was true that the lake was absurd, the water was too blue, the mountains too snowy, and its beauty, hitting you in the face, exasperated rather than thrilled; but all the same there was something pleasing in the prospect, an artless candour, like one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, that made Ashenden smile with complacency. Lucerne reminded him of wax flowers under glass cases and cuckoo clocks and fancy–work in Berlin wool. So long at all events as the fine weather lasted he was prepared to enjoy himself. He did not see why he should not at least try to combine pleasure to himself with profit to his country. He was travelling with a brand–new passport in his pocket, under a borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new personality. He was often slightly tired of himself and it diverted him for a while to be merely a creature of R.’s facile invention. The experience he had just enjoyed appealed to his acute sense of the absurd. R., it is true, had not seen the fun of it: what humour R. possessed was of a sardonic turn and he had no facility for taking in good part a joke at his own expense. To do that you must be able to look at yourself from the outside and be at the same time spectator and actor in the pleasant comedy of life. R. was a soldier and regarded introspection as unhealthy, un–English, and unpatriotic.

Ashenden got up and strolled slowly to his hotel. It was a small German hotel, of the second class, spotlessly clean, and his bed–room had a nice view; it was furnished with brightly varnished pitch–pine, and though on a cold wet day it would have been wretched, in that warm and sunny weather it was gay and pleasing. There were tables in the hall and he sat down at one of these and ordered a bottle of beer. The landlady was curious to know why in that dead season he had come to stay and he was glad to satisfy her curiosity. He told her that he had recently recovered from an attack of typhoid and had come to Lucerne to get back his strength. He was employed in the Censorship Department and was taking the opportunity to brush up his rusty German. He asked her if she could recommend to him a German teacher. The landlady was a blonde and blowzy Swiss, good–humoured and talkative, so that Ashenden felt pretty sure that she would repeat in the proper quarter the information he gave her. It was his turn now to ask a few questions. She was voluble on the subject of the war on account of which the hotel, usually in that month so full that rooms had to be found for visitors in neighbouring houses, was nearly empty. A few people came in from outside to eat their meals en pension but she had only two lots of resident guests. One was an old Irish couple who lived in Vevey and passed their summers in Lucerne and the other was an Englishman and his wife. She was a German and they were obliged on that account to live in a neutral country. Ashenden took care to show little curiosity about them–he recognized in the description Grantley Caypor–but of her own accord she told him that they spent most of the day walking about the mountains. Herr Caypor was a botanist and much interested in the flora of the country. His lady was a very nice woman and she felt her position keenly. Ah, well, the war could not last for ever. The landlady bustled away and Ashenden went upstairs.

Dinner was at seven, and, wishing to be in the dining–room before anyone else so that he could take stock of his fellow–guests as they entered, he went down as soon as he heard the bell. It was a very plain, stiff, white–washed room, with chairs of the same shiny pitch–pine as in his bedroom, and on the walls were oleographs of Swiss lakes. On each little table was a bunch of flowers. It was all neat and clean and presaged a bad dinner. Ashenden would have liked to make up for it by ordering a bottle of the best Rhine wine to be found in the hotel, but did not venture to draw attention to himself by extravagance (he saw on two or three tables half–empty bottles of table hock, which made him surmise that his fellow guests drank thriftily), and so contented himself with ordering a pint of lager. Presently one or two persons came in, single men with some occupation in Lucerne and obviously Swiss, and sat down each at his own little table and untied the napkins that at the end of luncheon they had neatly tied up. They propped newspapers against their water–jugs and read while they somewhat noisily ate their soup. Then entered a very old tall bent man, with white hair and a drooping white moustache, accompanied by a little old white–haired lady in black. These were certainly the Irish colonel and his wife of whom the landlady had spoken. They took their seats and the colonel poured out a thimbleful of wine for his wife and a thimbleful for himself. They waited in silence for their dinner to be served to them by the buxom, hearty maid.

At last the persons arrived for whom Ashenden had been waiting. He was doing his best to read a German book and it was only by an exercise of self–control that he allowed himself only for one instant to raise his eyes as they came in. His glance showed him a man of about forty–five with short dark hair, somewhat grizzled, of middle height, but corpulent, with a broad red cleanshaven face. He wore a shirt open at the neck, with a wide collar, and a grey suit. He walked ahead of his wife, and of her Ashenden only caught the impression of a German woman self–effaced and dusty. Grantley Caypor sat down and began in a loud voice explaining to the waitress that they had taken an immense walk. They had been up some mountain the name of which meant nothing to Ashenden, but which excited in the maid expressions of astonishment and enthusiasm. Then Caypor, still in fluent German but with a marked English accent, said that they were so late they had not even gone up to wash, but had just rinsed their hands outside. He had a resonant voice and a jovial manner.

‘Serve me quick, we’re starving with hunger, and bring beer, bring three bottles. Lieber Gott, what a thirst I have!’

He seemed to be a man of exuberant vitality. He brought into that dull, overclean dining–room the breath of life, and everyone in it appeared on a sudden more alert. He began to talk to his wife, in English, and everything he said could be heard by all; but presently she interrupted him with a remark made in an undertone. Caypor stopped and Ashenden felt that his eyes were turned in his direction. Mrs Caypor had noticed the arrival of a stranger and had drawn her husband’s attention to it. Ashenden turned the page of the book he was pretending to read, but he felt that Caypor’s gaze was fixed intently upon him. When he addressed his wife again it was in so low a tone that Ashenden could not even tell what language he used, but when the maid brought them their soup Caypor, his voice still low, asked her a question. It was plain that he was inquiring who Ashenden was. Ashenden could catch of the maid’s reply but the one word länder.

One or two people finished their dinner and went out picking their teeth. The old Irish colonel and his old wife rose from their table and he stood aside to let her pass. They had eaten their meal without exchanging a word. She walked slowly to the door; but the colonel stopped to say a word to a Swiss who might have been a local attorney, and when she reached it she stood there, bowed and with a sheep–like look, patiently waiting for her husband to come and open it for her. Ashenden realized that she had never opened a door for herself. She did not know how to. In a minute the colonel with his old, old gait came to the door and opened it; she passed out and he followed. The little incident offered a key to their whole lives, and from it Ashenden began to reconstruct their histories, circumstances, and characters; but he pulled himself up; he could not allow himself the luxury of creation. He finished his dinner.

When he went into the hall he saw tied to the leg of a table a bull–terrier and in passing mechanically put down his hand to fondle the dog’s drooping, soft ears. The landlady was standing at the foot of the stairs.

‘Whose is this lovely beast?’ asked Ashenden.

‘He belongs to Herr Caypor. Fritzi, he is called. Herr Caypor says he has a longer pedigree than the King of England.’

Fritzi rubbed himself against Ashenden’s leg and with his nose sought the palm of his hand. Ashenden went upstairs to fetch his hat, and when he came down saw Caypor standing at the entrance of the hotel talking with the landlady. From the sudden silence and their constrained manner he guessed that Caypor had been making inquiries about him. When he passed between them, into the street, out of the corner of his eye he saw Caypor give a suspicious stare. That frank, jovial red face bore then a look of shifty cunning.

Ashenden strolled along till he found a tavern where he could have his coffee in the open and to compensate himself for the bottle of beer that his sense of duty had urged him to drink at dinner ordered the best brandy the house provided. He was pleased at last to have come face to face with the man of whom he had heard so much and in a day or two hoped to become acquainted with him. It is never very difficult to get to know anyone who has a dog. But he was in no hurry; he would let things take their course; with the object he had in view he could not afford to be hasty.

Ashenden reviewed the circumstances. Grantley Caypor was an Englishman, born according to his passport in Birmingham, and he was forty–two years of age. His wife, to whom he had been married for eleven years, was of German birth and parentage. That was public knowledge. Information about his antecedents was contained in a private document. He had started life, according to this, in a lawyer’s office in Birmingham and then had drifted into journalism. He had been connected with an English paper in Cairo and with another in Shanghai. There he got into trouble for attempting to get money on false pretences and was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment. All trace of him was lost for two years after his release, when he reappeared in a shipping office in Marseilles. From there, still in the shipping business, he went to Hamburg, where he married, and to London. In London he set up for himself in the export business, but after some time failed and was made a bankrupt. He returned to journalism. At the outbreak of war he was once more in the shipping business, and in August 1914 was living quietly with his German wife at Southampton. In the beginning of the following year he told his employers that owing to the nationality of his wife the position was intolerable; they had no fault to find with him and, recognizing that he was in an awkward fix, granted his request that he should be transferred to Genoa. Here he remained till Italy entered the war, but then gave notice and with his papers in perfect order crossed the border and took up his residence in Switzerland.

All this indicated a man of doubtful honesty and unsettled disposition, with no background and of no financial standing; but the facts were of no importance to anyone till it was discovered that Caypor, certainly from the beginning of the war and perhaps sooner, was in the service of the German Intelligence Department. He had a salary of forty pounds a month. But though dangerous and wily no steps would have been taken to deal with him if he had contented himself with transmitting such news as he was able to get in Switzerland. He could do no great harm there and it might even be possible to make use of him to convey information that it was desirable to let the enemy have. He had no notion that anything was known of him. His letters, and he received a good many, were closely censored; there were few codes that the people who dealt with such matters could not in the end decipher and it might be that sooner or later through him it would be possible to lay hands on the organization that still flourished in England. But then he did something that drew R.’s attention to him. Had he known it none could have blamed him for shaking in his shoes: R. was not a very nice man to get on the wrong side of. Caypor scraped acquaintance in Zürich with a young Spaniard, Gomez by name, who had lately entered the British secret service, by his nationality inspired him with confidence, and managed to worm out of him the fact that he was engaged in espionage. Probably the Spaniard, with a very human desire to seem important, had done no more than talk mysteriously; but on Caypor’s information he was watched when he went to Germany and one day caught just as he was posting a letter in a code that was eventually deciphered. He was tried, convicted, and shot. It was bad enough to lose a useful and disinterested agent, but it entailed besides the changing of a safe and simple code. R. was not pleased. But R. was not the man to let any desire of revenge stand in the way of his main object, and it occurred to him that if Caypor was merely betraying his country for money it might be possible to get him to take more money to betray his employers. The fact that he had succeeded in delivering into their hands an agent of the Allies must seem to them an earnest of his good faith. He might be very useful. But R. had no notion what kind of man Caypor was, he had lived his shabby, furtive life obscurely, and the only photograph that existed of him was one taken for a passport. Ashenden’s instructions were to get acquainted with Caypor and see whether there was any chance that he would work honestly for the British: if he thought there was, he was entitled to sound him and if his suggestions were met with favour to make certain propositions. It was a task that needed tact and a knowledge of men. If on the other hand Ashenden came to the conclusion that Caypor could not be bought, he was to watch and report his movements. The information he had obtained from Gustav was vague, but important; there was only one point in it that was interesting, and this was that the head of the German Intelligence Department in Berne was growing restive at Caypor’s lack of activity. Caypor was asking for a higher salary and Major von P. had told him that he must earn it. It might be that he was urging him to go to England. If he could be induced to cross the frontier Ashenden’s work was done.

‘How the devil do you expect me to persuade him to put his head in a noose?’ asked Ashenden.

‘It won’t be a noose, it’ll be a firing squad,’ said R. ‘Caypor’s clever.’

‘Well, be cleverer, damn your eyes.’

Ashenden made up his mind that he would take no steps to make Caypor’s acquaintance, but allow the first advances to be made by him. If he was being pressed for results it must surely occur to him that it would be worth while to get into conversation with an Englishman who was employed in the Censorship Department. Ashenden was prepared with a supply of information that it could not in the least benefit the Central Powers to possess. With a false name and a false passport he had little to fear that Caypor would guess that he was a British agent.

Ashenden did not have to wait long. Next day he was sitting in the doorway of the hotel, drinking a cup of coffee and already half asleep after a substantial Mittagessen, when the Caypors came out of the dining–room. Mrs Caypor went upstairs and Caypor released his dog. The dog bounded along and in a friendly fashion leaped up against Ashenden.

‘Come here, Fritzi,’ cried Caypor, and then to Ashenden: ‘I’m so sorry. But he’s quite gentle.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. He won’t hurt me.’

Caypor stopped at the doorway.

‘He’s a bull–terrier. You don’t often see them on the Continent.’ He seemed while he spoke to be taking Ashenden’s measure; he called to the maid: ‘A coffee please, Fräulein. You’ve just arrived, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I came yesterday.’

‘Really? I didn’t see you in the dining–room last night. Are you making a stay?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been ill and I’ve come here to recuperate.’

The maid came with the coffee and seeing Caypor talking to Ashenden put the tray on the table at which he was sitting. Caypor gave a laugh of faint embarrassment.

‘I don’t want to force myself upon you. I don’t know why the maid put my coffee on your table.’

‘Please sit down,’ said Ashenden.

‘It’s very good of you. I’ve lived so long on the Continent that I’m always forgetting that my countrymen are apt to look upon it as confounded cheek if you talk to them. Are you English, by the way, or American?’

‘English,’ said Ashenden.

Ashenden was by nature a very shy person, and he had in vain tried to cure himself of a failing that at his age was unseemly, but on occasion he knew how to make effective use of it. He explained now in a hesitating and awkward manner the facts that he had the day before told the landlady and that he was convinced she had already passed on to Caypor.

‘You couldn’t have come to a better place than Lucerne. It’s an oasis of peace in this war–weary world. When you’re here you might almost forget that there is such a thing as a war going on. That is why I’ve come here. I’m a journalist by profession.’

‘I couldn’t help wondering if you wrote,’ said Ashenden, with an eagerly timid smile.

It was clear that he had not learnt that ‘oasis of peace in a war–weary world’ at the shipping office.

‘You see, I married a German lady,’ said Caypor gravely.

‘Oh, really?’

‘I don’t think anyone could be more patriotic than I am. I’m English through and through and I don’t mind telling you that in my opinion the British Empire is the greatest instrument for good that the world has ever seen, but having a German wife I naturally see a good deal of the reverse of the medal. You don’t have to tell me that the Germans have faults, but frankly I’m not prepared to admit that they’re devils incarnate. At the beginning of the war my poor wife had a very rough time in England and I for one couldn’t have blamed her if she’d felt rather bitter about it. Everyone thought she was a spy. It’ll make you laugh when you know her. She’s the typical German Hausfrau who cares for nothing but her house and her husband and our only child Fritzi.’ Caypor fondled his dog and gave a little laugh. ‘Yes, Fritzi, you are our child, aren’t you? Naturally it made my position very awkward. I was connected with some very important papers, and my editors weren’t quite comfortable about it. Well, to cut a long story short I thought the most dignified course was to resign and come to a neutral country till the storm blew over. My wife and I never discuss the war, though I’m bound to tell you that it’s more on my account than hers, she’s much more tolerant than I am and she’s more willing to look upon this terrible business from my point of view than I am from hers.’

‘That is strange,’ said Ashenden. ‘As a rule women are so much more rabid than men.’

‘My wife is a very remarkable person. I should like to introduce you to her. By the way, I don’t know if you know my name. Grantley Caypor.’

‘My name is Somerville,’ said Ashenden.

He told him then of the work he had been doing in the Censorship Department, and he fancied that into Caypor’s eyes came a certain intentness. Presently he told him that he was looking for someone to give him conversation–lessons in German so that he might rub up his rusty knowledge of the language; and as he spoke a notion flashed across his mind; he gave Caypor a look and saw that same notion had come to him. It had occurred to them at the same instant that it would be a very good plan for Ashenden’s teacher to be Mrs Caypor.

‘I asked our landlady if she could find me someone and she said she thought she could. I must ask her again. It ought not be very hard to find a man who is prepared to come and talk German to me for an hour a day.’

‘I wouldn’t take anyone on the landlady’s recommendation,’ said Caypor. ‘After all you want someone with a good North–German accent and she only talks Swiss. I’ll ask my wife if she knows anyone. My wife’s a very highly educated woman and you could trust her recommendation.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

Ashenden observed Grantley Caypor at his ease. He noticed how the small, grey–green eyes, which last night he had not been able to see, contradicted the red good–humoured frankness of the face. They were quick and shifty, but when the mind behind them was seized by an unexpected notion they were suddenly still. It gave one a peculiar feeling of the working of the brain. They were not eyes that inspired confidence; Caypor did that with his jolly, good–natured smile, the openness of his broad, weather–beaten face, his comfortable obesity and the cheeriness of his loud deep voice. He was doing his best now to be agreeable. While Ashenden talked to him, a little shyly still but gaining confidence from that breezy, cordial manner, capable of putting anyone at his ease, it intrigued him to remember that the man was a common spy. It gave a tang to his conversation to reflect that he had been ready to sell his country for no more than forty pounds a month. Ashenden had known Gomez, the young Spaniard whom Caypor had betrayed. He was a high–spirited youth, with a love of adventure, and he had undertaken his dangerous mission not for the money he earned by it, but from a passion for romance. It amused him to outwit the clumsy German’ and it appealed to his sense of the absurd to play a part in a shilling shocker. It was not very nice to think of him now six feet underground in a prison yard. He was young and he had a certain grace of gesture. Ashenden wondered whether Caypor had felt a qualm when he delivered him up to destruction.

‘I suppose you know a little German?’ asked Caypor, interested in the stranger.

‘Oh, yes, I was a student in Germany, and I used to talk it fluently, but that is long ago and I have forgotten. I can still read it very comfortably.’

‘Oh, yes, I noticed you were reading a German book last night.’

Fool! It was only a little while since he had told Ashenden that he had not seen him at dinner. He wondered whether Caypor had observed the slip. How difficult it was never to make one! Ashenden must be on his guard; the thing that made him most nervous was the thought that he might not answer readily enough to his assumed name of Somerville. Of course there was always the chance that Caypor had made the slip on purpose to see by Ashenden’s face whether he noticed anything. Caypor got up.

‘There is my wife. We go for a walk up one of the mountains every afternoon. I can tell you some charming walks. The flowers even now are lovely.’

‘I’m afraid I must wait till I’m a bit stronger,’ said Ashenden, with a little sigh.

He had naturally a pale face and never looked as robust as he was. Mrs Caypor came downstairs and her husband joined her. They walked down the road, Fritzi bounding round them, and Ashenden saw that Caypor immediately began to speak with volubility. He was evidently telling his wife the results of his interview with Ashenden. Ashenden looked at the sun shining so gaily on the lake; the shadow of a breeze fluttered the green leaves of the trees; everything invited a stroll: he got up, went to his room and throwing himself on his bed had a very pleasant sleep.

He went in to dinner that evening as the Caypors were finishing, for he had wandered melancholy about Lucerne in the hope of finding a cocktail that would enable him to face the potato salad that he foresaw, and on their way out of the dining–room Caypor stopped and asked him if he would drink coffee with them. When Ashenden joined them in the hall Caypor got up and introduced him to his wife. She bowed stiffly and no answering smile came to her face to respond to Ashenden’s civil greeting. It was not hard to see that her attitude was definitely hostile. It put Ashenden at his ease. She was a plainish woman, nearing forty, with a muddy skin and vague features; her drab hair was arranged in a plait round her head like that of Napoleon’s Queen of Prussia; and she was squarely built, plump rather than fat, and solid. But she did not look stupid; she looked on the contrary, a woman of character, and Ashenden, who had lived enough in Germany to recognize the type, was ready to believe that though capable of doing the housework, cooking the dinner, and climbing a mountain, she might be also prodigiously well–informed. She wore a white blouse that showed a sunburned neck, a black skirt and heavy walking boots. Caypor addressing her in English told her in his jovial way, as though she did not know it already, what Ashenden had told him about himself. She listened grimly.

‘I think you told me you understood German,’ said Caypor, his big red face wreathed in polite smiles but his little eyes darting about restlessly.

‘Yes, I was for some time a student in Heidelberg.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs Caypor in English, an expression of faint interest for a moment chasing away the sullenness from her face. ‘I know Heidelberg very well. I was at school there for one year.’

Her English was correct, but throaty, and the mouthing emphasis she gave her words was disagreeable. Ashenden was diffuse in praise of the old university town and the beauty of the neighbourhood. She heard him, from the standpoint of her Teutonic superiority, with toleration rather than with enthusiasm.

‘It is well known that the valley of the Neckar is one of the beauty places of the whole world,’ she said.

‘I have not told you, my dear,’ said Caypor then, ‘that Mr Somerville is looking for someone to give him conversation lessons while he is here. I told him that perhaps you could suggest a teacher.’

‘No, I know no one whom I could conscientiously recommend,’ she answered. ‘The Swiss accent is hateful beyond words. It could do Mr Somerville only harm to converse with a Swiss.’

‘If I were in your place, Mr Somerville, I would try and persuade my wife to give you lessons. She is, if I may say so, a very cultivated and highly educated woman.’

‘Ach, Grantley, I have not the time. I have my own work to do.’

Ashenden saw that he was being given his opportunity. The trap was prepared and all he had to do was to fall in. He turned to Mrs Caypor with a manner that he tried to make shy, deprecating and modest.

‘Of course it would be too wonderful if you would give me lessons. I should look upon it as a real privilege. Naturally I wouldn’t want to interfere with your work. I am just here to get well, with nothing in the world to do, and I would suit my time entirely to your convenience.’

He felt a flash of satisfaction pass from one to the other and in Mrs Caypor’s blue eyes he fancied that he saw a dark glow.

‘Of course it would be a purely business arrangement,’ said Caypor. ‘There’s no reason that my good wife shouldn’t earn a little pin–money. Would you think ten francs an hour too much?’

‘No,’ said Ashenden. ‘I should think myself lucky to get a first–rate teacher for that.’

‘What do you say, my dear? Surely you can spare an hour, and you would be doing this gentleman a kindness. He would learn that all Germans are not the devilish fiends that they think them in England.’

On Mrs Caypor’s brow was an uneasy frown and Ashenden could not but think with apprehension of that hour’s conversation a day that he was going to exchange with her. Heaven only knew how he would have to rack his brain for subjects of discourse with that heavy and morose woman. Now she made a visible effort.

‘I shall be very pleased to give Mr Somerville conversation lessons.’

‘I congratulate you, Mr Somerville,’ said Caypor noisily. ‘You’re in for a treat. When will you start, tomorrow at eleven?’

‘That would suit me very well if it suits Mrs Caypor.’

‘Yes, that is as good an hour as another,’ she answered.

Ashenden left them to discuss the happy outcome of their diplomacy. But when, punctually at eleven next morning, he heard a knock at his door (for it had been arranged that Mrs Caypor should give him his lesson in his room) it was not without trepidation that he opened it. It behoved him to be frank, a trifle indiscreet, but obviously wary of a German woman, sufficiently intelligent, and impulsive. Mrs Caypor’s face was dark and sulky. She plainly hated having anything to do with him. But they sat down and she began, somewhat peremptorily, to ask him questions about his knowledge of German literature. She corrected his mistakes with exactness and when he put before her some difficulty in German construction explained it with clearness and precision. It was obvious that though she hated giving him a lesson she meant to give it conscientiously. She seemed to have not only an aptitude for teaching, but a love of it, and as the hour went on she began to speak with greater earnestness. It was already only by an effort that she remembered that he was a brutal Englishman. Ashenden, noticing the unconscious struggle within her, found himself not a little entertained; and it was with truth that, when later in the day Caypor asked him how the lesson had gone, he answered that it was highly satisfactory; Mrs Caypor was an excellent teacher and a most interesting person.

‘I told you so. She’s the most remarkable woman I know.’

And Ashenden had a feeling that when in his hearty, laughing way Caypor said this he was for the first time entirely sincere.

In a day or two Ashenden guessed that Mrs Caypor was giving him lessons only in order to enable Caypor to arrive at a closer intimacy with him, for she confined herself strictly to matters of literature, music, and painting; and when Ashenden, by way of experiment, brought the conversation round to the war, she cut him short.

‘I think that is a topic that we had better avoid, Herr Somerville,’ she said.

She continued to give her lessons with the greatest thoroughness, and he had his money’s worth, but every day she came with the same sullen face and it was only in the interest of teaching that she lost for a moment her instinctive dislike of him. Ashenden exercised in turn, but in vain, all his wiles. He was ingratiating, ingenuous, humble, grateful, flattering, simple, and timid. She remained coldly hostile. She was a fanatic. Her patriotism was aggressive, but disinterested, and obsessed with the notion of the superiority of all things German she loathed England with a virulent hatred because in that country she saw the chief obstacle to their diffusion. Her ideal was a German world in which the rest of the nations under a hegemony greater than that of Rome should enjoy the benefits of German science and German art and German culture. There was in the conception a magnificent impudence that appealed to Ashenden’s sense of humour. She was no fool. She had read much, in several languages, and she could talk of the books she had read with good sense. She had a knowledge of modern painting and modern music that not a little impressed Ashenden. It was amusing once to hear her before luncheon play one of those silvery little pieces of Debussy; she played it disdainfully because it was French and so light, but with an angry appreciation of its grace and gaiety. When Ashenden congratulated her she shrugged her shoulders.

‘The decadent music of a decadent nation,’ she said. Then with powerful hands she struck the first resounding chords of a sonata by Beethoven; but she stopped. ‘I cannot play, I am out of practice, and you English, what do you know of music? You have not produced a composer since Purcell!’

‘What do you think of that statement?’ Ashenden, smiling, asked Caypor, who was standing near.

‘I confess its truth. The little I know of music my wife taught me. I wish you could hear her play when she is in practice.’ He put his fat hand, with its square, stumpy fingers, on her shoulder. ‘She can wring your heartstrings with pure beauty.’

‘Dummer Kerl,’ she said, in a soft voice, ‘Stupid fellow,’ and Ashenden saw her mouth for a moment quiver, but she quickly recovered. ‘You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write music’

‘Some of us can at times write pleasing verses,’ said Ashenden, with good–humour, for it was not his business to be put out, and, he did not know why, two lines occurring to him he said them:

‘Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Caypor, with a strange gesture, ‘you can write poetry. I wonder why.’

And to Ashenden’s surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted.

‘Come, Grantley, Mittagessen is ready, let us go into the dining–room.’

They left Ashenden reflective.

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness. People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them, and even in the few to whom he was attached his eyes saw with equal clearness the merits and the defects. When he liked people it was not because he was blind to their faults, he did not mind their faults but accepted them with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders, or because he ascribed to them excellencies that they did not possess; and since he judged his friends with candour they never disappointed him and so he seldom lost one. He asked from none more than he could give. He was able to pursue his study of the Caypors without prejudice and without passion. Mrs Caypor seemed to him more of a piece and therefore the easier of the two to understand; she obviously detested him; though it was necessary for her to be civil to him her antipathy was strong enough to wring from her now and then an expression of rudeness; and had she been safely able to do so she would have killed him without a qualm. But in the pressure of Caypor’s chubby hand on his wife’s shoulder and in the fugitive trembling of her lips Ashenden had divined that this unprepossessing woman and that mean fat man were joined together by a deep and sincere love. It was touching. Ashenden assembled the observations that he had been making for the past few days and little things that he had noticed but to which he had attached no significance returned to him. It seemed to him that Mrs Caypor loved her husband because she was of a stronger character than he and because she felt his dependence on her; she loved him for his admiration of her, and you might guess that till she met him this dumpy, plain woman with her dullness, good sense, and want of humour could not have much enjoyed the admiration of men; she enjoyed his heartiness and his noisy jokes, and his high spirits stirred her sluggish blood; he was a great big bouncing boy and he would never be anything else and she felt like a mother towards him; she had made him what he was, and he was her man and she was his woman, and she loved him, notwithstanding his weakness (for with her clear head she must always have been conscious of that), she loved him, ach, was, as Isolde loved Tristan. But then there was the espionage. Even Ashenden with all his tolerance for human frailty could not but feel that to betray your country for money is not a very pretty proceeding. Of course she knew of it, indeed it was probably through her that Caypor had first been approached; he would never have undertaken such work if she had not urged him to it. She loved him and she was an honest and an upright woman. By what devious means had she persuaded herself to force her husband to adopt so base and dishonourable a calling? Ashenden lost himself in a labyrinth of conjecture as he tried to piece together the actions of her mind.

Grantley Caypor was another story. There was little to admire in him, but at that moment Ashenden was not looking for an object of admiration; but there was much that was singular and much that was unexpected in that gross and vulgar fellow. Ashenden watched with entertainment the suave manner in which the spy tried to inveigle him in his toils. It was a couple of days after his first lesson that Caypor after dinner, his wife having gone upstairs, threw himself heavily into a chair by Ashenden’s side. His faithful Fritzi came up to him and put his long muzzle with its black nose on his knee.

‘He has no brain,’ said Caypor, ‘but a heart of gold. Look at those little pink eyes. Did you ever see anything so stupid? And what an ugly face, but what incredible charm!’

‘Have you had him long?’ asked Ashenden.

‘I got him in 1914 just before the outbreak of war. By the way, what do you think of the news today? Of course my wife and I never discuss the war. You can’t think what a relief to me it is to find a fellow–countryman to whom I can open my heart.’

He handed Ashenden a cheap Swiss cigar and Ashenden, making a rueful sacrifice to duty, accepted it.

‘Of course they haven’t got a chance, the Germans,’ said Caypor, ‘not a dog’s chance. I knew they were beaten the moment we came in.’

His manner was earnest, sincere, and confidential. Ashenden made a commonplace rejoinder.

‘It’s the greatest grief of my life that owing to my wife’s nationality I was unable to do any war work. I tried to enlist the day war broke out, but they wouldn’t have me on account of my age, but I don’t mind telling you, if the war goes on much longer, wife or no wife, I’m going to do something. With my knowledge of languages I ought to be of some service in the Censorship Department. That’s where you were, wasn’t it?’

That was the mark at which he had been aiming and in answer now to his well–directed questions Ashenden gave him the information that he had already prepared. Caypor drew his chair a little nearer and dropped his voice.

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me anything that anyone shouldn’t know, but after all these Swiss are absolutely pro–German and we don’t want to give anyone the chance of overhearing.’

Then he went on another tack. He told Ashenden a number of things that were of a certain secrecy.

‘I wouldn’t tell this to anybody else, you know, but I have one or two friends who are in pretty influential positions, and they know they can trust me.’

Thus encouraged, Ashenden was a little more deliberately indiscreet and when they parted both had reason to be satisfied. Ashenden guessed that Caypor’s typewriter would be kept busy next morning and that extremely energetic Major in Berne would shortly receive a most interesting report.

One evening, going upstairs after dinner, Ashenden passed an open bathroom. He caught sight of the Caypors.

‘Come in,’ cried Caypor in his cordial way. ‘We’re washing our Fritzi.’

The bull–terrier was constantly getting himself very dirty, and it was Caypor’s pride to see him clean and white. Ashenden went in. Mrs Caypor with her sleeves turned up and a large white apron was standing at one end of the bath, while Caypor, in a pair of trousers and a singlet, his fat, freckled arms bare, was soaping the wretched hound.

‘We have to do it at night,’ he said, ‘because the Fitzgeralds use this bath and they’d have a fit if they knew we washed the dog in it. We wait till they go to bed. Come along, Fritzi, show the gentleman how beautifully you behave when you have your face scrubbed.’

The poor brute, woebegone but faintly wagging his tail to show that however foul was this operation performed on him he bore no malice to the god who did it, was standing in the middle of the bath in six inches of water. He was soaped all over and Caypor, talking the while, shampooed him with his great fat hands.

‘Oh, what a beautiful dog he’s going to be when he’s as white as the driven snow. His master will be as proud as Punch to walk out with him and all the little lady–dogs will say: Good gracious, who’s that beautiful aristocratic–looking bull–terrier walking as though he owned the whole of Switzerland? Now stand still while you have your ears washed. You couldn’t bear to go out into the street with dirty ears, could you? like a nasty little Swiss schoolboy. Noblesse oblige. Now the black nose. Oh, and all the soap is going into his little pink eyes and they’ll smart.’

Mrs Caypor listened to this nonsense with a good–humoured sluggish smile on her broad, plain face, and presently gravely took a towel.

‘Now he’s going to have a ducking. Upsie–daisy.’

Caypor seized the dog by the fore–legs and ducked him once and ducked him twice. There was a struggle, a flurry and a splashing. Caypor lifted him out of the bath.

‘Now go to mother and she’ll dry you.’

Mrs Caypor sat down and taking the dog between her strong legs rubbed him till the sweat poured off her forehead. And Fritzi, a little shaken and breathless, but happy it was all over, stood, with his sweet stupid face, white and shining.

‘Blood will tell,’ cried Caypor exultantly. ‘He knows the names of no less than sixty–four of his ancestors, and they were all nobly born.’

Ashenden was faintly troubled. He shivered a little as he walked upstairs.

Then, one Sunday, Caypor told him that he and his wife were going on an excursion and would eat their luncheon at some little mountain restaurant; and he suggested that Ashenden, each paying his share, should come with them. After three weeks at Lucerne Ashenden thought that his strength would permit him to venture the exertion. They started early, Mrs Caypor businesslike in her walking boots and Tyrolese hat and alpenstock, and Caypor in stockings and plus–fours looking very British. The situation amused Ashenden and he was prepared to enjoy his day; but he meant to keep his eyes open; it was not inconceivable that the Caypors had discovered what he was and it would not do to go too near a precipice; Mrs Caypor would not hesitate to give him a push and Caypor for all his jolliness was an ugly customer. But on the face of it there was nothing to mar Ashenden’s pleasure in the golden morning. The air was fragrant. Caypor was full of conversation. He told funny stories. He was gay and jovial. The sweat rolled off his great red face and he laughed at himself because he was so fat. To Ashenden’s astonishment he showed a peculiar knowledge of the mountain flowers. Once he went out of the way to pick one he saw a little distance from the path and brought it back to his wife. He looked at it tenderly.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ he cried, and his shifty grey–green eyes for a moment were as candid as a child’s. ‘It’s like a poem by Walter Savage Landor.’

‘Botany is my husband’s favourite science,’ said Mrs Caypor. ‘I laugh at him sometimes. He is devoted to flowers. Often when we have hardly had enough money to pay the butcher he has spent everything in his pocket to bring me a bunch of roses.’

‘Qui fleurit sa maison fleurit son cœur,’ said Grantley Caypor.

Ashenden had once or twice seen Caypor, coming in from a walk, offer Mrs Fitzgerald a nosegay of mountain flowers with an elephantine courtesy that was not entirely displeasing; and what he had just learned added a certain significance to the pretty little action. His passion for flowers was genuine and when he gave them to the old Irish lady he gave her something he valued. It showed a real kindness of heart. Ashenden had always thought botany a tedious science, but Caypor, talking exuberantly as they walked along, was able to impart to it life and interest. He must have given it a good deal of study.

‘I’ve never written a book,’ he said. ‘There are too many books already and any desire to write I have is satisfied by the more immediately profitable and quite ephemeral composition of an article for a daily paper. But if I stay here much longer I have half a mind to write a book about the wild flowers of Switzerland. Oh, I wish you’d been here a little earlier. They were marvellous. But one wants to be a poet for that, and I’m only a poor newspaper–man.’

It was curious to observe how he was able to combine real emotion with false fact.

When they reached the inn, with its view of the mountains and the lake, it was good to see the sensual pleasure with which he poured down his throat a bottle of ice–cold beer. You could not but feel sympathy for a man who took so much delight in simple things. They lunched deliciously off scrambled eggs and mountain trout. Even Mrs Caypor was moved to an unwonted gentleness by her surroundings; the inn was in an agreeably rural spot, it looked like a picture of a Swiss chalet in a book of early nineteenth–century travels; and she treated Ashenden with something less than her usual hostility. When they arrived she had burst into loud German exclamations on the beauty of the scene, and now, softened perhaps too by food and drink, her eyes, dwelling on the grandeur before her, filled with tears. She stretched out her hand.

‘It is dreadful and I am ashamed, notwithstanding this horrible and unjust war I can feel in my heart at the moment nothing but happiness and gratitude.’

Caypor took her hand and pressed it and, an unusual thing with him, addressing her in German, called her little pet–names. It was absurd, but touching. Ashenden, leaving them to their emotions, strolled through the garden and sat down on a bench that had been prepared for the comfort of the tourist. The view was of course spectacular, but it captured you; it was like a piece of music that was obvious and meretricious, but for the moment shattered your self–control.

And as Ashenden lingered idly in that spot he pondered over the mystery of Grantley Caypor’s treachery. If he liked strange people he had found in him one who was strange beyond belief. It would be foolish to deny that he had amiable traits. His joviality was not assumed, he was without pretence a hearty fellow, and he had real good nature. He was always ready to do a kindness. Ashenden had often watched him with the old Irish colonel and his wife who were the only other residents of the hotel; he would listen good–humouredly to the old man’s tedious stories of the Egyptian war, and he was charming with her. Now that Ashenden had arrived at terms of some familiarity with Caypor he found that he regarded him less with repulsion than with curiosity. He did not think that he had become a spy merely for the money; he was a man of modest tastes and what he had earned in a shipping–office must have sufficed to so good a manager as Mrs Caypor; and after war was declared there was no lack of remunerative work for men over the military age. It might be that he was one of those men who prefer devious, ways to straight for some intricate pleasure they get in fooling their fellows; and that he had turned spy, not from hatred of the country that had imprisoned him, not even from love of his wife, but from a desire to score off the big–wigs who never even knew of his existence. It might be that it was vanity that impelled him, a feeling that his talents had not received the recognition they merited, or just a puckish, impish desire to do mischief. He was a crook. It is true that only two cases of dishonesty had been brought home to him, but if he had been caught twice it might be surmised that he had often been dishonest without being caught. What did Mrs Caypor think of this? They were so united that she must be aware of it. Did it make her ashamed, for her own uprightness surely none could doubt, or did she accept it as an inevitable kink in the man she loved? Did she do all she could to prevent it or did she close her eyes to something she could not help?

How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white and how much simpler it would be to act in regard to them! Was Caypor a good man who loved evil or a bad man who loved good? And how could such unreconcilable elements exist side by side and in harmony within the same heart? For one thing was clear, Caypor was disturbed by no gnawing of conscience; he did his mean and despicable work with gusto. He was a traitor who enjoyed his treachery. Though Ashenden had been studying human nature more or less consciously all his life, it seemed to him that he knew as little about it now in middle age as he had done when he was a child. Of course R. would have said to him: Why the devil do you waste your time with such nonsense? The man’s a dangerous spy and your business is to lay him by the heels.

That was true enough. Ashenden had decided that it would be useless to attempt to make any arrangement with Caypor. Though doubtless he would have no feeling about betraying his employers he could certainly not be trusted. His wife’s influence was too strong. Besides, notwithstanding what he had from time to time told Ashenden, he was in his heart convinced that the Central Powers must win the war, and he meant to be on the winning side. Well, then Caypor must be laid by the heels, but how he was to effect that Ashenden had no notion. Suddenly he heard a voice.

‘There you are. We’ve been wondering where you had hidden yourself.’

He looked around and saw the Caypors strolling towards him. They were walking hand in hand.

‘So this is what has kept you so quiet,’ said Caypor as his eyes fell on the view. ‘What a spot!’

Mrs Caypor clasped her hands.

‘Ach Gott wie schön’ she cried.’ Wie schön. When I look at that blue lake and those snowy mountains I feel inclined, like Goethe’s Faust, to cry to the passing moment: Tarry.’

‘This is better than being in England with the excursions and alarums of war, isn’t it?’ said Caypor.

‘Much,’ said Ashenden.

‘By the way, did you have any difficulty in getting out?’

‘No, not the smallest.’

‘I’m told they make rather a nuisance of themselves at the frontier nowadays.’

‘I came through without the smallest difficulty. I don’t fancy they bother much about the English. I thought the examination of passports was quite perfunctory.’

A fleeting glance passed between Caypor and his wife. Ashenden wondered what it meant. It would be strange if Caypor’s thoughts were occupied with the chances of a journey to England at the very moment when he was himself reflecting on its possibility. In a little while Mrs Caypor suggested that they had better be starting back and they wandered together in the shade of trees down the mountain paths.

Ashenden was watchful. He could do nothing (and his inactivity irked him) but wait with his eyes open to seize the opportunity that might present itself. A couple of days later an incident occurred that made him certain something was in the wind. In the course of his morning lesson Mrs Caypor remarked:

‘My husband has gone to Geneva today. He had some business to do there.’

‘Oh,’ said Ashenden, ‘will he be gone long?’

‘No, only two days.’

It is not everyone who can tell a lie and Ashenden had the feeling, he hardly knew why, that Mrs Caypor was telling one then. Her manner perhaps was not quite as indifferent as you would have expected when she was mentioning a fact that could be of no interest to Ashenden. It flashed across his mind that Caypor had been summoned to Berne to see the redoubtable head of the German secret service. When he had the chance he said casually to the waitress:

‘A little less work for you to do, Fräulein. I hear that Herr Caypor has gone to Berne.’

‘Yes. But he’ll be back tomorrow.’

That proved nothing, but it was something to go upon. Ashenden knew in Lucerne a Swiss who was willing in emergency to do odd jobs, and looking him up, asked him to take a letter to Berne. It might be possible to pick up Caypor and trace his movements. Next day Caypor appeared once more with his wife at the dinner–table, but merely nodded to Ashenden and afterwards both went straight upstairs. They looked troubled. Caypor, as a rule so animated, walked with bowed shoulders and looked neither to the right nor to the left. Next morning Ashenden received a reply to his letter: Caypor had seen Major von P. It was possible to guess what the Major had said to him. Ashenden well knew how rough he could be; he was a hard man and brutal, clever and unscrupulous, and he was not accustomed to mince his words. They were tired of paying Caypor a salary to sit still in Lucerne and do nothing; the time was come for him to go to England. Guess–work? Of course it was guess–work, but in that trade it mostly was; you had to deduce the animal from its jaw–bone. Ashenden knew from Gustav that the Germans wanted to send someone to England. He drew a long breath; if Caypor went he would have to get busy.

When Mrs Caypor came in to give him his lesson she was dull and listless. She looked tired and her mouth was set obstinately. It occurred to Ashenden that the Caypors had spent most of the night talking. He wished he knew what they had said. Did she urge him to go or did she try to dissuade him? Ashenden watched them again at luncheon. Something was the matter, for they hardly spoke to one another and as a rule they found plenty to talk about. They left the room early, but when Ashenden went out he saw Caypor sitting in the hall by himself.

‘Hullo,’ he cried jovially, but surely the effort was patent, ‘how are you getting on? I’ve been to Geneva.’

‘So I heard,’ said Ashenden.

‘Come and have your coffee with me. My poor wife’s got a headache. I told her she’d better go and lie down.’ In his shifty green eyes was an expression that Ashenden could not read. ‘The fact is, she’s rather worried, poor dear; I’m thinking of going to England.’

Ashenden’s heart gave a sudden leap against his ribs, but his face remained impassive:

‘Oh, are you going for long? We shall miss you.’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m fed up with doing nothing. The war looks as though it were going on for years and I can’t sit here indefinitely. Besides, I can’t afford it, I’ve got to earn my living. I may have a German wife, but I am an Englishman, hang it all, and I want to do my bit. I could never face my friends again if I just stayed here in ease and comfort till the end of the war and never attempted to do a thing to help the country. My wife takes her German point of view and I don’t mind telling you that she’s a bit upset. You know what women are.’

Now Ashenden knew what it was that he saw in Caypor’s eyes. Fear. It gave him a nasty turn. Caypor didn’t want to go to England, he wanted to stay safely in Switzerland; Ashenden knew now what the major had said to him when he went to see him in Berne. He had got to go or lose his salary. What was it that his wife had said when he told her what had happened? He had wanted her to press him to stay, but, it was plain, she hadn’t done that; perhaps he had not dared tell her how frightened he was; to her he had always been gay, bold, adventurous, and devil–may–care; and now, the prisoner of his own lies, he had not found it in him to confess himself the mean and sneaking coward he was.

‘Are you going to take your wife with you?’ asked Ashenden.

‘No, she’ll stay here.’

It had been arranged very neatly. Mrs Caypor would receive his letters and forward the information they contained to Berne.

‘I’ve been out of England so long that I don’t quite know how to set about getting war–work. What would you do in my place?’

‘I don’t know; what sort of work are you thinking of?’

‘Well, you know, I imagine I could do the same thing as you did. I wonder if there’s anyone in the Censorship Department that you could give me a letter of introduction to.’

It was only by a miracle that Ashenden saved himself from showing by a smothered cry or by a broken gesture how startled he was; but not by Caypor’s request, but what had just dawned upon him. What an idiot he had been! He had been disturbed by the thought that he was wasting his time at Lucerne, he was doing nothing, and though in fact, as it turned out, Caypor was going to England it was due to no cleverness of his. He could take to himself no credit for the result. And now he saw that he had been put in Lucerne, told how to describe himself and given the proper information, so that what actually had occurred should occur. It would be a wonderful thing for the German secret service to get an agent into the Censorship Department; and by a happy accident there was Grantley Caypor, the very man for the job, on friendly terms with someone who had worked there. What a bit of luck! Major von P. was a man of culture and, rubbing his hands, he must surely have murmured: stultum facit fortuna quem vult perdere. It was a trap of that devilish R. and the grim major at Berne had fallen into it. Ashenden had done his work just by sitting still and doing nothing. He almost laughed as he thought what a fool R. had made of him.

‘I was on very good terms with the chief of my department, I could give you a note to him if you liked.’

‘That would be just the thing.’

‘But of course I must give the facts. I must say I’ve met you here and only known you a fortnight.’

‘Of course. But you’ll say what else you can for me, won’t you?’

‘Oh, certainly.’

‘I don’t know yet if I can get a visa. I’m told they’re rather fussy.’

‘I don’t see why. I shall be very sick if they refuse me one when I want to go back.’

‘I’ll go and see how my wife is getting on,’ said Caypor suddenly, getting up. ‘When will you let me have that letter?’

‘Whenever you like. Are you going at once?’

‘As soon as possible.’

Caypor left him. Ashenden waited in the hall for a quarter of an hour so that there should appear in him no sign of hurry. Then he went upstairs and prepared various communications. In one he informed R. that Caypor was going to England; in another he made arrangements through Berne that wherever Caypor applied for a visa it should be granted to him without question; and these he dispatched forthwith. When he went down to dinner he handed Caypor a cordial letter of introduction.

Next day but one Caypor left Lucerne.

Ashenden waited. He continued to have his hour’s lesson with Mrs Caypor and under her conscientious tuition began now to speak German with ease.

They talked of Goethe and Winckelmann, of art and life and travel. Fritzi sat quietly by her chair.

‘He misses his master,’ she said, pulling his ears. ‘He only really cares for him, he suffers me only as belonging to him.’

After his lesson Ashenden went every morning to Cook’s to ask for his letters. It was here that all communications were addressed to him. He could not move till he received instructions, but R. could be trusted not to leave him idle long; and meanwhile there was nothing for him to do but have patience. Presently he received a letter from the consul in Geneva to say that Caypor had there applied for his visa and had set out for France. Having read this Ashenden went on for a little stroll by the lake and on his way back happened to see Mrs Caypor coming out of Cook’s office. He guessed that she was having her letters addressed there too. He went up to her.

‘Have you had news of Herr Caypor?’ he asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose I could hardly expect to yet.’

He walked along by her side. She was disappointed, but not yet anxious; she knew how irregular at that time was the post. But next day during the lesson he could not but see that she was impatient to have done with it. The post was delivered at noon and at five minutes to she looked at her watch and him. Though Ashenden knew very well that no letter would ever come for her he had not the heart to keep her on tenter–hooks.

‘Don’t you think that’s enough for the day? I’m sure you want to go down to Cook’s,’ he said.

‘Thank you. That is very amiable of you.’

When a little later he went there himself he found her standing in the middle of the office. Her face was distraught. She addressed him wildly.

‘My husband promised to write from Paris. I am sure there is a letter for me, but these stupid people say there’s nothing. They’re so careless, it’s a scandal.’

Ashenden did not know what to say. While the clerk was looking through the bundle to see if there was anything for him she came up to the desk again.

‘When does the next post come in from France?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes there are letters about five.’

‘I’ll come then.’

She turned and walked rapidly away. Fritzi followed her with his tail between his legs. There was no doubt of it, already the fear had seized her that something was wrong. Next morning she looked dreadful; she could not have closed her eyes all night; and in the middle of the lesson she started up from her chair.

‘You must excuse me, Herr Somerville. I cannot give you a lesson today. I am not feeling well.’

Before Ashenden could say anything she had flung nervously from the room, and in the evening he got a note from her to say that she regretted that she must discontinue giving him conversation lessons. She gave no reason. Then Ashenden saw no more of her; she ceased coming in to meals; except to go morning and afternoon to Cook’s she spent apparently the whole day in her room. Ashenden thought of her sitting there hour after hour with that hideous fear gnawing at her heart. Who could help feeling sorry for her? The time hung heavy on his hands too. He read a good deal and wrote a little, he hired a canoe and went for long leisurely paddles on the lake; and at last one morning the clerk at Cook’s handed him a letter. It was from R. It had all the appearance of a business communication, but between the lines he read a good deal.

Dear Sir, [it began] The goods, with accompanying letter, dispatched by you from Lucerne have been duly delivered. We are obliged to you for executing our instructions with such promptness.

It went on in this strain. R. was exultant. Ashenden guessed that Caypor had been arrested and by now had paid the penalty of his crime. He shuddered. He remembered a dreadful scene. Dawn. A cold grey dawn, with a drizzling rain falling. A man, blindfolded, standing against a wall, an officer very pale giving an order, a volley, and then a young soldier, one of the firing–party, turning round and holding on to his gun for support, vomiting. The officer turning paler still, and he, Ashenden, feeling dreadfully faint. How terrified Caypor must have been! It was awful when the tears ran down their faces. Ashenden shook himself. He went to the ticket–office and obedient to his orders bought himself a ticket for Geneva.

As he was waiting for his change Mrs Caypor came in. He was shocked at the sight of her. She was blowzy and dishevelled and there were heavy rings round her eyes. She was deathly pale. She staggered up to the desk and asked for a letter. The clerk shook his head.

‘I’m sorry, madam, there’s nothing yet.’

‘But look, look. Are you sure? Please look again.’

The misery in her voice was heartrending. The clerk with a shrug of the shoulders took out the letters from a pigeon–hole and sorted them once more. ‘No, there’s nothing, madam.’

She gave a hoarse cry of despair and her face was distorted with anguish. ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ she moaned.

She turned away, the tears streaming from her weary eyes, and for a moment she stood there like a blind man groping and not knowing which way to go. Then a fearful thing happened. Fritzi, the bull–terrier, sat down on his haunches and threw back his head and gave a long, long melancholy howl. Mrs Caypor looked at him with terror; her eyes seemed really to start from her head. The doubt, the gnawing doubt that had tortured her during those dreadful days of suspense, was a doubt to her no longer. She knew. She staggered blindly into the street.

HIS EXCELLENCY

When Ashenden was sent to X and looked about him he could not but see that his situation was equivocal. X was the capital of an important belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not imminent. Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances could best be done; he was to suggest a policy and, if it was approved by the exalted personages who had sent him, to carry it out. A vast amount of money was put at his disposal. The Ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States had been directed to afford him such facilities as were at their command, but Ashenden had been told privately to keep himself to himself; he was not to make difficulties for the official representatives of the two powers by divulging to them facts that might be inconvenient for them to know; and since it might be necessary for him to give support under cover to a party that was at daggers drawn with that in office and with which the relations of the United States and Great Britain were extremely cordial it was just as well that Ashenden should keep his own counsel. The exalted personages did not wish the ambassadors to suffer the affront of discovering that an obscure agent had been sent to work at cross–purposes with them. On the other hand it was thought just as well to have a representative in the opposite camp, who in the event of a sudden upheaval would be at hand with adequate funds and in the confidence of the new leaders of the country.

But ambassadors are sticklers for their dignity and they have a keen nose to scent any encroachment on their authority. When Ashenden on his arrival at X paid an official call on Sir Herbert Witherspoon, the British ambassador, he was received with a politeness to which no exception could be taken, but with a frigidity that would have sent a little shiver down the spine of a polar bear. Sir Herbert was a diplomat de carrière and he cultivated the manner of his profession to a degree that filled the observer with admiration. He did not ask Ashenden anything about his mission because he knew that Ashenden would reply evasively, but he allowed him to see that it was a perfectly foolish one. He talked with acidulous tolerance of the exalted personages who had sent Ashenden to X. He told Ashenden that he had instructions to meet any demands for help that he made and stated that if Ashenden at any time desired to see him he had only to say so.

‘I have received the somewhat singular request to dispatch telegrams for you in a private code which I understand has been given to you and to hand over to you telegrams in code as they arrive.’

‘I hope they will be few and far between, sir,’ answered Ashenden. ‘I know nothing so tedious as coding and decoding.’

Sir Herbert paused for an instant. Perhaps that was not quite the answer he expected. He rose.

‘If you will come into the Chancellery I will introduce you to the Counsellor and to the Secretary to whom you can take your telegrams.’

Ashenden followed him out of the room, and after handing him over to the Counsellor the ambassador gave him a limp hand to shake.

‘I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again one of these days,’ he said, and with a curt nod left him.

Ashenden bore his reception with composure. It was his business to remain in obscurity and he did not wish any official attentions to attract notice to him. But when on the afternoon of the same day he made his call at the American Embassy he discovered why Sir Herbert Witherspoon had shown him so much coldness. The American ambassador was Mr Wilbur Schafer; he came from Kansas City and had been given his post when few suspected that a war was on the point of breaking out, as a reward for political services. He was a big stout man, no longer young, for his hair was white, but well–preserved and exceedingly robust. He had a square, red face, clean–shaven, with a little snub nose and a determined chin. His face was very mobile and he twisted it continually into odd and amusing grimaces. It looked as though it were made out of the red india–rubber from which they make hot–water bottles. He greeted Ashenden with cordiality. He was a hearty fellow.

‘I suppose you’ve seen Sir Herbert. I reckon you’ve got his dander up. What do they mean in Washington and London by telling us to dispatch your code telegrams without knowing what they’re all about? You know, they’ve got no right to do that.’

‘Oh, Your Excellency, I think it was only done to save time and trouble,’ said Ashenden.

‘Well, what is this mission anyway?’

This of course was a question that Ashenden was not prepared to answer, but not thinking it politic to say so, he determined to give a reply from which the ambassador could learn little. He had already made up his mind from the look of him that Mr Schafer, though doubtless possessed of the gifts that enable a man to swing a presidential election this way or that, had not, at least nakedly for all men to see, the acuteness that his position perhaps demanded. He gave you the impression of a bluff, good–humoured creature who liked good cheer. Ashenden would have been wary when playing poker with him, but where the matter in hand was concerned felt himself fairly safe. He began to talk in a loose, vague way of the world at large and before he had gone far managed to ask the ambassador his opinion of the general situation. It was as the sound of the trumpet to the war–horse: Mr Schafer made him a speech that lasted without a break for twenty–five minutes, and when at last he stopped in exhaustion, Ashenden with warm thanks for his friendly reception was able to take his leave.

Making up his mind to give both the ambassadors a wide berth, he set about his work and presently devised a plan of campaign. But by chance he was able to do Sir Herbert Witherspoon a good turn and so was thrown again into contact with him. It has been suggested that Mr Schafer was more of a politician than a diplomat and it was his position rather than his personality that gave weight to his opinions. He looked upon the eminence to which he had risen as an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life and his enthusiasm led him to lengths that his constitution could ill support. His ignorance of foreign affairs would in any case have made his judgement of doubtful value, but his state at meetings of the Allied ambassadors so often approached the comatose that he seemed hardly capable of forming a judgement at all. He was known to have succumbed to the fascination of a Swedish lady of undoubted beauty, but of antecedents that from the point of view of a secret service agent were suspect. Her relations with Germany were such as to make her sympathy with the Allies dubious. Mr Schafer saw her every day and was certainly much under her influence. Now it was noticed that there was from time to time a leakage of very secret information and the question arose whether Mr Schafer did not in these daily interviews inadvertently say things that were promptly passed on to the headquarters of the enemy. No one could have doubted Mr Schafer’s honesty and patriotism, but it was permissible to be uncertain of his discretion. It was an awkward matter to deal with, but the concern was as great in Washington as in London and Paris, and Ashenden was instructed to deal with it. He had of course not been sent to X without help to do the work he was expected to do, and among his assistants was an astute, powerful, and determined man, a Galician Pole, named Herbartus. After consultation with him it happened by one of those fortunate coincidences that occasionally come about in the secret service that a maid in the service of the Swedish lady fell ill and in her place the countess (for such she was) was very luckily able to engage an extremely respectable person from the neighbourhood of Cracow. The fact that before the war she had been secretary to an eminent scientist made her doubtless no less competent a housemaid.

The result of this was that Ashenden received every two or three days a neat report upon the goings–on at this charming lady’s apartment, and though he learned nothing that could confirm the vague suspicions that had arisen he learned something else of no little importance. From conversations held at the cosy little tête–à–tête dinners that the countess gave the ambassador it appeared that His Excellency was harbouring a bitter grievance against his English colleague. He complained that the relations between himself and Sir Herbert were deliberately maintained on a purely official level. In his blunt way he said he was sick of the frills that damned Britisher put on. He was a he–man and a hundred–per–cent American and he had no more use for protocol and etiquette than for a snowball in hell. Why didn’t they get together, like a couple of regular fellows, and have a good old crack? Blood was thicker than water, he’d say, and they’d do more towards winning the war by sitting down in their shirtsleeves and talking things out over a bottle of rye than by all their diplomacy and white spats. Now it was obviously very undesirable that there should not exist between the two ambassadors a perfect cordiality, so Ashenden thought it well to ask Sir Herbert whether he might see him. He was ushered into Sir Herbert’s library.

‘Well, Mr Ashenden, what can I do for you? I hope you’re quite satisfied with everything. I understand that you’ve been keeping the telegraph lines busy.’

Ashenden, as he sat down, gave the ambassador a glance. He was beautifully dressed in a perfectly cut tail–coat that fitted his slim figure like a glove, in his black silk tie was a handsome pearl, there was a perfect line in his grey trousers, with their quiet and distinguished stripe, and his neat, pointed shoes looked as though he had never worn them before. You could hardly imagine him sitting in his shirt–sleeves over a whisky highball. He was a tall, thin man, with exactly the figure to show off modern clothes, and he sat in his chair, rather upright, as though he were sitting for an official portrait. In his cold and uninteresting way he was really a very handsome fellow. His neat grey hair was parted on one side, his pale face was clean–shaven, he had a delicate, straight nose and grey eyes under grey eyebrows, his mouth in youth might have been sensual and well–shaped, but now it was set to an expression of sarcastic determination and the lips were pallid. It was the kind of face that suggested centuries of good breeding, but you could not believe it capable of expressing emotion. You would never expect to see it break into the hearty distortion of laughter, but at the most be for a moment frigidly kindled by an ironic smile.

Ashenden was uncommonly nervous.

‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’m meddling in what doesn’t concern me, sir. I’m quite prepared to be told to mind my own business.’

‘We’ll see. Pray go on.’

Ashenden told his story and the ambassador listened attentively. He did not turn his cold, grey eyes from Ashenden’s face, and Ashenden knew that his embarrassment was obvious.

‘How did you find out all this?’

‘I have means of getting hold of little bits of information that are sometimes useful,’ said Ashenden.

‘I see.’

Sir Herbert maintained his steady gaze, but Ashenden was surprised to see on a sudden in the steely eyes a little smile. The bleak, supercilious face became for an instant quite attractive.

‘There is another little bit of information that perhaps you’d be good enough to give me. What does one do to be a regular fellow?’

‘I am afraid one can do nothing, Your Excellency,’ replied Ashenden gravely. ‘I think it is a gift of God.’

The light vanished from Sir Herbert’s eyes, but his manner was slightly more urbane than when Ashenden was brought into the room. He rose and held out his hand.

‘You did quite right to come and tell me this, Mr Ashenden. I have been very remiss. It is inexcusable on my part to offend that inoffensive old gentleman. But I will do my best to repair my error. I will call at the American Embassy this afternoon.’

‘But not in too great state, sir, if I may venture a suggestion.’

The ambassador’s eyes twinkled. Ashenden began to think him almost human.

‘I can do nothing but in state, Mr Ashenden. That is one of the misfortunes of my temperament.’ Then as Ashenden was leaving he added: ‘Oh, by the way, I wonder if you’d care to come to dinner with me tomorrow night. Black tie. At eight–fifteen.’

He did not wait for Ashenden’s assent, but took it for granted, and with a nod of dismissal sat down once more at his great writing–table.

Ashenden looked forward with misgiving to the dinner to which Sir Herbert Witherspoon had invited him. The black tie suggested a small party, perhaps only Lady Anne, the ambassador’s wife, whom Ashenden did not know, or one or two young secretaries. It did not presage a hilarious evening. It was possible that they might play bridge after dinner, but Ashenden knew that professional diplomats do not play bridge with skill: it may be supposed that they find it difficult to bend their great minds to the triviality of a parlour game. On the other hand he was interested to see a little more of the ambassador in circumstances of less formality. For it was evident that Sir Herbert Witherspoon was not an ordinary person. He was in appearance and manner a perfect specimen of his class and it is always entertaining to come upon good examples of a well–known type. He was exactly what you expected an ambassador to be. If any of his characteristics had been ever so slightly exaggerated he would have been a caricature. He escaped being ridiculous only by a hair’s breadth and you watched him with a kind of breathlessness as you might watch a tight–rope dancer doing perilous feats at a dizzy height. He was certainly a man of character. His rise in the diplomatic service had been rapid and though doubtless it helped him to be connected by marriage with powerful families his rise had been due chiefly to his merit. He knew how to be determined when determination was necessary and conciliatory when conciliation was opportune. His manners were perfect; he could speak half a dozen languages with ease and accuracy; he had a clear and logical brain. He was never afraid to think out his thoughts to the end, but was wise enough to suit his actions to the exigencies of the situation. He had reached his post at X at the early age of fifty–three and had borne himself in the exceedingly difficult conditions created by the war and contending parties within the state with tact, confidence, and once at least with courage. For on one occasion, a riot having arisen, a band of revolutionaries forced their way into the British Embassy and Sir Herbert from the head of his stairs had harangued them and notwithstanding revolvers flourished at him had persuaded them to go to their homes. He would end his career in Paris. That was evident. He was a man whom you could not but admire but whom it was not easy to like. He was a diplomat of the school of those Victorian ambassadors to whom could confidently be entrusted great affairs and whose self–reliance, sometimes it must be admitted tinctured with arrogance, was justified by its results.

When Ashenden drove up to the doors of the Embassy they were flung open and he was received by a stout and dignified English butler and three footmen. He was ushered up that magnificent flight of stairs on which had taken place the dramatic incident just related and shown into an immense room, dimly lit with shaded lamps, in which at the first glance he caught sight of large pieces of stately furniture and over the chimney–piece an immense portrait in coronation robes of King George IV. But there was a bright fire blazing on the hearth and from a deep sofa by the side of it his host, as his name was announced, slowly rose. Sir Herbert looked very elegant as he came towards him. He wore his dinner jacket, the most difficult costume for a man to look well in, with notable distinction.

‘My wife has gone to a concert, but she’ll come in later. She wants to make your acquaintance. I haven’t asked anybody else. I thought I would give myself the pleasure of enjoying your company en tête–à–tête.’

Ashenden murmured a civil rejoinder, but his heart sank. He wondered how he was going to pass at least a couple of hours alone with this man who made him he was bound to confess, feel extremely shy.

The door was opened again and the butler and a footman entered bearing very heavy silver salvers.

‘I always have a glass of sherry before my dinner,’ said the ambassador, ‘but in case you have acquired the barbarous custom of drinking cocktails I can offer you what I believe is called a dry Martini.’

Shy though he might be, Ashenden was not going to give in to this sort of thing with complete tameness.

‘I move with the times,’ he replied. ‘To drink a glass of sherry when you can get a dry Martini is like taking a stage–coach when you can travel by the Orient Express.’

A little desultory conversation after this fashion was interrupted by the throwing open of two great doors and the announcement that His Excellency’s dinner was served. They went into the dining–room. This was a vast apartment in which sixty people might have comfortably dined, but there was now only a small round table in it so that Sir Herbert and Ashenden sat intimately. There was an immense mahogany sideboard on which were massive pieces of gold plate, and above it, facing Ashenden, was a fine picture by Canaletto. Over the chimney–piece was a threequarter–length portrait of Queen Victoria as a girl with a little gold crown on her small, prim head. Dinner was served by the corpulent butler and the three very tall English footmen. Ashenden had the impression that the ambassador enjoyed in his well–bred way the sensation of ignoring the pomp in which he lived. They might have been dining in one of the great country houses of England; it was a ceremony they performed, sumptuous without ostentation, and it was saved from a trifling absurdity only because it was in a tradition; but the experience gained for Ashenden a kind of savour from the thought that dwelt with him that on the other side of the wall was a restless, turbulent population that might at any moment break into bloody revolution, while not two hundred miles away men in the trenches were sheltering in their dug–outs from the bitter cold and the pitiless bombardment.

Ashenden need not have feared that the conversation would proceed with difficulty and the notion he had had that Sir Herbert had asked him in order to question him about his secret mission was quickly dispelled. The ambassador behaved to him as though he were a travelling Englishman who had presented a letter of introduction and to whom he desired to show civility. You would hardly have thought that a war was raging, for he made to it only such references as showed that he was not deliberately avoiding a distressing subject. He spoke of art and literature, proving himself to be a diligent reader of catholic taste, and when Ashenden talked to him, from personal acquaintance, of the writers whom Sir Herbert knew only through their works, he listened with the friendly condescension which the great ones of the earth affect towards the artist. (Sometimes, however, they paint a picture or write a book, and then the artist gets a little of his own back.) He mentioned in passing a character in one of Ashenden’s novels, but did not make any other reference to the fact that his guest was a writer. Ashenden admired his urbanity. He disliked people to talk to him of his books, in which indeed, once written, he took small interest, and it made him self–conscious to be praised or blamed to his face. Sir Herbert Witherspoon flattered his self–esteem by showing that he had read him, but spared his delicacy by withholding his opinion of what he had read. He spoke too of the various countries in which during his career he had been stationed and of various persons, in London and elsewhere, that he and Ashenden knew in common. He talked well, not without a pleasant irony that might very well have passed for humour, and intelligently. Ashenden did not find his dinner dull, but neither did he find it exhilarating. He would have been more interested if the ambassador had not so invariably said the right, wise, and sensible thing upon every topic that was introduced. Ashenden was finding it something of an effort to keep up with this distinction of mind and he would have liked the conversation to get into its shirt–sleeves, so to speak, and put its feet on the table. But of this there was no chance and Ashenden once or twice caught himself wondering how soon after dinner he could decently take his leave. At eleven he had an appointment with Herbartus at the Hotel de Paris.

The dinner came to an end and coffee was brought in. Sir Herbert knew good food and good wine and Ashenden was obliged to admit that he had fared excellently. Liqueurs were served with the coffee, and Ashenden took a glass of brandy.

‘I have some very old Benedictine,’ said the ambassador. ‘Won’t you try it?’

‘To tell you the honest truth I think brandy is the only liqueur worth drinking.’

‘I’m not sure that I don’t agree with you. But in that case I must give you something better than that.’

He gave an order to the butler, who presently brought in a cobwebbed bottle and two enormous glasses.

‘I don’t really want to boast,’ said the ambassador as he watched the butler pour the golden liquid into Ashenden’s glass, ‘but I venture to think that if you like brandy you’ll like this. I got it when I was counsellor for a short time in Paris.’

‘I’ve had a good deal to do lately with one of your successors then.’

‘By ring?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think of the brandy?’

‘I think it’s marvellous.’

‘And of Byring?’

The question came so oddly on the top of the other that it sounded faintly comic.

‘Oh, I think he’s a damned fool.’

Sir Herbert leaned back in his chair, holding the huge glass with both hands in order to bring out the aroma, and looked slowly round the stately and spacious room. The table had been cleared of superfluous things. There was a bowl of roses between Ashenden and his host. The servants switched off the electric light as they finally left the room and it was lit now only by the candles that were on the table and by the fire. Notwithstanding its size it had an air of sober comfort. The ambassador’s eyes rested on the really distinguished portrait of Queen Victoria that hung over the chimney–piece.

‘I wonder,’ he said at last.

‘He’ll have to leave the diplomatic service.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Ashenden gave him a quick glance of inquiry. He was the last man from whom he would have expected sympathy for Byring.

‘Yes, in the circumstances,’ he proceeded, ‘I suppose it’s inevitable that he should leave the service. I’m sorry. He’s an able fellow and he’ll be missed. I think he had a career before him.’

‘Yes, that is what I’ve heard. I’m told that at the F.O. they thought very highly of him.’

‘He has many of the gifts that are useful in this rather dreary trade,’ said the ambassador, with a slight smile, in his cold and judicial manner. ‘He’s handsome, he’s a gentleman, he has nice manners, he speaks excellent French, and he has a good head on his shoulders. He’d have done well.’

‘It seems a pity that he should waste such golden opportunities.’

‘I understand he’s going into the wine business at the end of the war. Oddly enough he’s going to represent the very firm from whom I got this brandy.’

Sir Herbert raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the fragrance. Then he looked at Ashenden. He had a way of looking at people, when he was thinking of something else perhaps, that suggested that he thought them somewhat peculiar but rather disgusting insects.

‘Have you ever seen the woman?’ he asked.

‘I dined with her and Byring at Larue’s.’

‘How very interesting. What is she like?’

‘Charming.’

Ashenden tried to describe her to his host, but meanwhile with another part of his mind he recollected the impression she had made on him at the restaurant when Byring had introduced him to her. He had been not a little interested to meet a woman of whom for some years he had heard so much. She called herself Rose Auburn, but what her real name was few knew. She had gone to Paris originally as one of a troupe of dancers, called the Glad Girls, who performed at the Moulin Rouge, but her astonishing beauty had soon caused her to be noticed and a wealthy French manufacturer fell in love with her. He gave her a house and loaded her with jewels, but could not long meet the demands she made upon him, and she passed in rapid succession from lover to lover. She became in a short time the best–known courtesan in France. Her expenditure was prodigal and she ruined her admirers with cynical unconcern. The richest men found themselves unable to cope with her extravagance. Ashenden, before the war, had seen her once at Monte Carlo lose a hundred and eighty thousand francs at a sitting and that then was an important sum. She sat at the big table, surrounded by curious onlookers, throwing down packets of thousand–franc notes with a self–possession that would have been admirable if it had been her own money that she was losing.

When Ashenden met her she had been leading this riotous life, dancing and gambling all night, racing most afternoons a week, for twelve or thirteen years and she was no longer very young; but there was hardly a line on that lovely brow, scarcely a crow’s–foot round those liquid eyes, to betray the fact. The most astonishing thing about her was that notwithstanding this feverish and unending round of senseless debauchery she had preserved an air of virginity. Of course she cultivated the type. She had an exquisitely graceful and slender figure, and her innumerable frocks were always made with a perfect simplicity. Her brown hair was very plainly done. With her oval face, charming little nose, and large blue eyes she had all the air of one or other of Anthony Trollope’s charming heroines. It was the keepsake style raised to such rareness that it made you catch your breath. She had a lovely skin, very white and red, and if she painted it was not from necessity but from wantonness. She irradiated a sort of dewy innocence that was as attractive as it was unexpected.

Ashenden had heard of course that Byring for a year or more had been her lover. Her notoriety was such that a hard light of publicity was shed on everyone with whom she had any affair, but in this instance the gossips had more to say than usual because Byring had no money to speak of and Rose Auburn had never been known to grant her favours for anything that did not in some way represent hard cash. Was it possible that she loved him? It seemed incredible and yet what other explanation was there? Byring was a young man with whom any woman might have fallen in love. He was somewhere in the thirties, very tall and good–looking with a singular charm of manner and of an appearance so debonair that people turned round in the street to look at him; but unlike most handsome men he seemed entirely unaware of the impression he created. When it became known that Byring was the amant de coeur (a prettier phrase than our English fancy man) of this famous harlot he became an object of admiration to many women and of envy to many men; but when a rumour spread abroad that he was going to marry her consternation seized his friends and ribald laughter everyone else. It became known that Byring’s chief had asked him if it was true and he had admitted it. Pressure was put upon him to relinquish a plan that could only end in disaster. It was pointed out to him that the wife of a diplomat has social obligations that Rose Auburn could not fulfil. Byring replied that he was prepared to resign his post whenever by so doing he would not cause inconvenience. He brushed aside every expostulation and every argument; he was determined to marry.

When first Ashenden met Byring he did not very much take to him. He found him slightly aloof. But as the hazards of his work brought him from time to time into contact with him he discerned that the distant manner was due merely to shyness and as he came to know him better he was charmed by the uncommon sweetness of his disposition. Their relations, however, remained purely official so that it was a trifle unexpected when Byring one day asked him to dinner to meet Miss Auburn, and he could not but wonder whether it was because already people were beginning to turn the cold shoulder on him. When he went he discovered that the invitation was due to the lady’s curiosity. But the surprise he got on learning that she had found time to read (with admiration, it appeared) two or three of his novels was not the only surprise he got that evening. Leading on the whole a quiet and studious life he had never had occasion to penetrate into the world of the higher prostitution and the great courtesans of the period were known to him only by name. It was somewhat astonishing to Ashenden to discover that Rose Auburn differed so little in air and manner from the smart women of Mayfair with whom through his books he had become more or less intimately acquainted. She was perhaps a little more anxious to please (indeed one of her agreeable traits was the interest she took in whomever she was talking to), but she was certainly no more made–up and her conversation was as intelligent. It lacked only the coarseness that society has lately affected. Perhaps she felt instinctively that those lovely lips should never disfigure themselves with foul words; perhaps only she was at heart still a trifle suburban. It was evident that she and Byring were madly in love with one another. It was really moving to see their mutual passion. When Ashenden took his leave of them, as he shook hands with her (and she held his hand a moment and with her blue, starry eyes looked into his) she said to him:

‘You will come and see us when we’re settled in London, won’t you? You know we’re going to be married.’

‘I heartily congratulate you,’ said Ashenden.

‘And him?’ she smiled, and her smile was like an angel’s; it had the freshness of dawn and the tender rapture of a southern spring.

‘Have you never looked at yourself in the glass?’

Sir Herbert Witherspoon watched him intently while Ashenden (he thought not without a trace of humour) was describing the dinner–party. No flicker of a smile brightened his cold eyes.

‘Do you think it’ll be a success?’ he asked now.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

The question took Ashenden aback.

‘A man not only marries his wife, he marries her friends. Do you realize the sort of people Byring will have to mix with, painted women of tarnished reputation and men who’ve gone down in the social scale, parasites and adventurers? Of course they’ll have money, her pearls must be worth a hundred thousand pounds, and they’ll be able to cut a dash in the smart Bohemia of London. Do you know the gold fringe of society? When a woman of bad character marries she earns the admiration of her set, she has worked the trick, she’s caught a man and become respectable, but he, the man, only earns its ridicule. Even her own friends, the old hags with their gigolos and the abject men who earn a shabby living by introducing the unwary to tradesmen on a ten per cent commission, even they despise him. He is the mug. Believe me, to conduct yourself gracefully in such a position you need either great dignity of character or an unparalleled effrontery. Besides, do you think there’s a chance of its lasting? Can a woman who’s led that wild career settle down to domestic life? In a little while she’ll grow bored and restless. And how long does love last? Don’t you think Byring’s reflections will be bitter when, caring for her no longer, he compares what he is with what he might have been?’

Witherspoon helped himself to another drop of his old brandy. Then he looked up at Ashenden with a curious expression.

‘I’m not sure if a man isn’t wiser to do what he wants very much to do and let the consequences take care of themselves.’

‘It must be very pleasant to be an ambassador,’ said Ashenden.

Sir Herbert smiled thinly.

‘Byring rather reminds me of a fellow I knew when I was a very junior clerk at the F.O. I won’t tell you his name because he’s by way of being very well–known now and highly respected. He’s made a great success of his career. There is always something a little absurd in success.’

Ashenden slightly raised his eyebrows at this statement, somewhat unexpected in the mouth of Sir Herbert Witherspoon, but did not say anything.

‘He was one of my fellow–clerks. He was a brilliant creature, I don’t think anyone ever denied that, and everyone prophesied from the beginning that he would go far. I venture to say that he had pretty well all the qualifications necessary for a diplomatic career. He was of a family of soldiers and sailors, nothing very grand, but eminently respectable, and he knew how to behave in the great world without bumptiousness or timidity. He was well–read. He took an interest in painting. I dare say he made himself a trifle ridiculous; he wanted to be in the movement, he was very anxious to be modern, and at a time when little was known of Gauguin and Cezanne he raved over their pictures. There was perhaps a certain snobbishness in his attitude, a desire to shock and astonish the conventional, but at heart his admiration of the arts was genuine and sincere. He adored Paris and whenever he had the chance ran over and put up at a little hotel in the Latin Quarter, where he could rub shoulders with painters and writers. As is the habit with gentry of that sort they patronized him a little because he was nothing but a diplomat and laughed at him a little because he was evidently a gentleman. But they liked him because he was always ready to listen to their speeches, and when he praised their works they were even willing to admit that, although a philistine, he had a certain instinct for the Right Stuff.’

Ashenden noted the sarcasm and smiled at the fling at his own profession. He wondered what this long description was leading to. The ambassador seemed to linger over it partly because he liked it, but also because for some reason he hesitated to come to the point.

‘But my friend was modest. He enjoyed himself enormously and he listened open–mouthed when these young painters and unknown scribblers tore to pieces established reputations and talked with enthusiasm of persons of whom the sober but cultured secretaries in Downing Street had never even heard. At the back of his mind he knew that they were rather a common, second–rate lot, and when he went back to his work in London it was with no regret, but with the feeling that he had been witnessing an odd and diverting play; now the curtain had fallen he was quite ready to go home. I haven’t told you that he was ambitious. He knew that his friends expected him to do considerable things and he had no notion of disappointing them. He was perfectly conscious of his abilities. He meant to succeed. Unfortunately he was not rich, he had only a few hundreds a year, but his father and mother were dead and he had neither brother nor sister. He was aware that this freedom from close ties was an asset. His opportunity to make connexions that would be of use to him was unrestricted. Do you think he sounds a very disagreeable young man?’

‘No,’ said Ashenden in answer to the sudden question. ‘Most clever young men are aware of their cleverness, and there is generally a certain cynicism in their calculations with regard to the future. Surely young men should be ambitious.’

‘Well, on one of these little trips to Paris my friend became acquainted with a talented young Irish painter called O’Malley. He’s an R.A. now and paints highly–paid portraits of Lord Chancellors and Cabinet Ministers. I wonder if you remember one he did of my wife, which was exhibited a couple of years ago.’

‘No, I don’t. But I know his name.’

‘My wife was delighted with it. His art always seems to me very refined and agreeable. He’s able to put on canvas the distinction of his sitters in a very remarkable way. When he paints a woman of breeding, you know that it is a woman of breeding and not a trollop.’

‘It is a charming gift,’ said Ashenden. ‘Can he also paint a slut and make her look like one?’

‘He could. Now doubtless he would scarcely wish to. He was living then in a small and dirty studio in the rue du Cherche Midi with a little Frenchwoman of the character you describe and he painted several portraits of her which were extremely like.’

It seemed to Ashenden that Sir Herbert was going into somewhat excessive detail, and he asked himself whether the friend of whom he was telling a story that till now seemed to lead no–whither was in point of fact himself. He began to give it more of his attention.

‘My friend liked O’Malley. He was good company, the type of the agreeable rattle, and he had a truly Irish gift of the gab. He talked incessantly and in my friend’s opinion brilliantly. He found it very amusing to go and sit in the studio while O’Malley was painting and listen to him chattering away about the technique of his art. O’Malley was always saying that he would paint a portrait of him and his vanity was tickled. O’Malley thought him far from plain and said it would do him good to exhibit the portrait of someone who at least looked like a gentleman.’

‘By the way, when was all this?’ asked Ashenden.

‘Oh, thirty years ago.... They used to talk of their future and when O’Malley said the portrait he was going to paint of my friend would look very well in the National Portrait Gallery, my friend had small doubt in the back of his mind, whatever he modestly said, that it would eventually find its way there. One evening when my friend–shall we call him Brown?–was sitting in the studio and O’Malley, desperately taking advantage of the last light of day, was trying to get finished for the Salon that portrait of his mistress which is now in the Tate Gallery, O’Malley asked him if he would like to come and dine with them. He was expecting a friend of hers, she was called Yvonne by the way, and he would be glad if Brown would make a fourth. This friend of Yvonne’s was an acrobat and O’Malley was anxious to get her to pose for him in the nude. Yvonne said she had a marvellous figure. She had seen O’Malley’s work and was willing enough to sit and dinner was to be devoted to settling the matter. She was not performing then, but was about to open at the Gaietés Montparnasses and with her days free was not disinclined to oblige a friend and earn a little money. The notion amused Brown, who had never met an acrobat, and he accepted. Yvonne suggested that he might find her to his taste and if he did she could promise him that he would not find her very difficult to persuade. With his grand air and English clothes she would take him for a milord anglais. My friend laughed. He did not take the suggestion very seriously. “On ne sait jamais,” he said. Yvonne looked at him with mischievous eyes. He sat on. It was Easter time and cold, but the studio was comfortably warm, and though it was small and everything was higgledy–piggledy and the dust lay heavy on the rim of the window, it was most friendly and cosy. Brown had a tiny flat in Waverton Street, in London, with very good mezzotints on the walls and several pieces of early Chinese pottery here and there, and he wondered to himself why his tasteful sitting–room had none of the comforts of home nor the romance that he found in that disorderly studio.

‘Presently there was a ring at the door and Yvonne ushered in her friend. Her name, it appeared, was Alix, and she shook hands with Brown, uttering a stereotyped phrase, with the mincing politeness of a fat woman in a bureau de tabac. She wore a long cloak in imitation mink and an enormous scarlet hat. She looked incredibly vulgar. She was not even pretty. She had a broad flat face, a wide mouth and an upturned nose. She had a great deal of hair, golden, but obviously dyed, and large china–blue eyes. She was heavily made–up.’

Ashenden began to have no doubt that Witherspoon was narrating an experience of his own, for otherwise he could never have remembered after thirty years what hat the young woman wore and what coat, and he was amused at the ambassador’s simplicity in thinking that so thin a subterfuge could disguise the truth. Ashenden could not but guess how the story would end and it tickled him to think that this cold, distinguished, and exquisite person should ever have had anything like an adventure.

‘She began to talk away to Yvonne, and my friend noticed that she had one feature that oddly enough he found very attractive: she had a deep and husky voice as though she were just recovering from a bad cold and, he didn’t know why, it seemed to him exceedingly pleasant to listen to. He asked O’Malley if that was her natural voice and O’Malley said she had had it as long as ever he had known her. He called it a whisky voice. He told her what Brown said about it and she gave him a smile of her wide mouth and said it wasn’t due to drink, it was due to standing so much on her head. That was one of the inconveniences of her profession. Then the four of them went to a beastly little restaurant off the boulevard St Michel where for two francs fifty including wine my friend ate a dinner that seemed to him more delicious than any he had ever eaten at the Savoy or Claridge’s. Alix was a very chatty young person and Brown listened with amusement, with amazement even, while in her rich, throaty voice she talked of the varied incidents of the day. She had a great command of slang, and, though he could not understand half of it, he was immensely tickled with its picturesque vulgarity. It was pungent of the heated asphalt, the zinc bars of cheap taverns, and racy of the crowded squares in the poorer districts of Paris. There was an energy in those apt and vivid metaphors that went like champagne to his anaemic head. She was a guttersnipe, yes, that’s what she was, but she had a vitality that warmed you like a blazing fire. He was conscious that Yvonne had told her that he was an unattached Englishman, with plenty of money; he saw the appraising glance she gave him and then, pretending that he had noticed nothing, he caught the phrase, il n’est pas mal. It faintly amused him: he had a notion himself that he was not so bad. There were places, indeed, where they went farther than that. She did not pay much attention to him, in point of fact they were talking of things of which he was ignorant and he could do little more than show an intelligent interest, but now and again she gave him a long look, passing her tongue quickly round her lips, that suggested to him that he only had to ask for her to give. He shrugged a mental shoulder. She looked healthy and young, she had an agreeable vivacity, but beyond her husky voice there was nothing particularly attractive in her. But the notion of having a little affair in Paris did not displease him, it was life, and the thought that she was a music–hall artiste was mildly diverting: in middle age it would doubtless amuse him to remember that he had enjoyed the favours of an acrobat. Was it la Rochefoucauld or Oscar Wilde who said that you should commit errors in youth in order to have something to regret in old age? At the end of dinner (and they sat over their coffee and brandy till late), they went out into the street and Yvonne proposed that he should take Alix home. He said he would be delighted. Alix said it was not far and they walked. She told him that she had a little apartment, of course mostly she was on tour, but she liked to have a place of her own, a woman, you know, had to be in her furniture, without that she received no consideration; and presently they reached a shabby house in a bedraggled street. She rang the bell for the concierge to open the door. She did not press him to enter. He did not know if she looked upon it as a matter of course. He was seized with timidity. He racked his brains, but could not think of a single thing to say. Silence fell upon them. It was absurd. With a little click the door opened; she looked at him expectantly; she was puzzled; a wave of shyness swept over him. Then she held out her hand, thanked him for bringing her to the door, and bade him good night. His heart beat nervously. If she had asked him to come in he would have gone. He wanted some sign that she would like him to. He shook her hand, said good night, raised his hat and walked away. He felt a perfect fool. He could not sleep; he tossed from side to side of his bed, thinking what a noodle she must take him for, and he could hardly wait for the day that would permit him to take steps to efface the contemptible impression he must have made on her. His pride was lacerated. Wanting to lose no time he went round to her house at eleven to ask her to lunch with him, but she was out; he sent round some flowers and later in the day called again. She had been in, but was gone out once more. He went to see O’Malley on the chance of finding her, but she was not there, and O’Malley facetiously asked him how he had fared. To save his face he told him that he had come to the conclusion that she did not mean very much to him and so like a perfect gentleman he had left her. But he had an uneasy feeling that O’Malley saw through his story. He sent her a pneumatique asking her to dine with him next day. She did not answer. He could not understand it, he asked the porter of his hotel a dozen times if there was nothing for him, and at last, almost in desperation, just before dinner went to her house. The concierge told him she was in and he went up. He was very nervous, inclined to be angry because she had treated his invitation so cavalierly, but at the same time anxious to appear at his ease. He climbed the four flights of stairs, dark and smelly, and rang at the door to which he had been directed. There was a pause, he heard sounds within and rang again. Presently she opened. He had an absolute certitude that she did not in the least know who he was. He was taken aback, it was a blow to his vanity; but he assumed a cheerful smile.

‘“I came to find out if you were going to dine with me tonight. I sent you a pneumatique.”

‘Then she recognized him. But she stood at the door and did not ask him in.

‘“Oh, no, I can’t dine with you tonight. I have a terrible megrim and I am going to bed. I couldn’t answer your pneumatique, I mislaid it, and I’d forgotten your name. Thank you for the flowers. It was nice of you to send them.”

‘“Then won’t you come and dine with me tomorrow night?”

‘“Justement, I have an engagement tomorrow night. I’m sorry.”

‘There was nothing more to say. He had not the nerve to ask her anything else and so bade her good night and went. He had the impression that she was not vexed with him, but that she had entirely forgotten him. It was humiliating. When he went back to London without having seen her again, it was with a curious sense of dissatisfaction. He was not in the least in love with her, he was annoyed with her, but he could not get her quite out of his mind. He was honest enough to realize that he was suffering from nothing more than a wounded vanity.

‘During that dinner at the little restaurant off the Boul’ Mich’ she had mentioned that her troupe was going to London in the spring, and in one of his letters to O’Malley he slipped in casually a phrase to the effect that if his young friend Alix happened to be coming to town he (O’Malley) might let him know and he would look her up. He would like to hear from her own ingenuous lips what she thought of the nude O’Malley had painted of her. When the painter some time afterwards wrote and told him that she was appearing a week later at the Metropolitan in the Edgware Road, he felt a sudden rush of blood to his head. He went to see her play. If he had not taken the precaution to go earlier in the day and look at the programme he would have missed her, for her turn was the first on the list. There were two men, a stout one and a thin one, with large black moustaches, and Alix. They were dressed in ill–fitting pink tights with green satin trunks. The men did various exercises on twin trapezes while Alix tripped about the stage, giving them handkerchiefs to wipe their hands on, and occasionally turned a somersault. When the fat man raised the thin one on his shoulders she climbed up and stood on the shoulders of the second, kissing her hand to the audience. They did tricks with safety bicycles. There is often grace, and even beauty, in the performance of clever acrobats, but this one was so crude, so vulgar that my friend felt positively embarrassed. There is something shameful in seeing grown men publicly make fools of themselves. Poor Alix, with a fixed and artificial smile on her lips, in her pink tights and green satin trunks, was so grotesque that he wondered how he could have let himself feel a moment’s annoyance because when he went to her apartment she had not recognized him. It was with a shrug of the shoulders, condescendingly, that he went round to the stage door afterwards and gave the doorkeeper a shilling to take her his card. In a few minutes she came out. She seemed delighted to see him.

‘“Oh, how good it is to see the face of someone you know in this sad city,” she said. “Ah, now you can give me that dinner you asked me to in Paris. I’m dying of hunger. I never eat before the show. Imagine that they should have given us such a bad place on the programme. It’s an insult. But we shall see the agent tomorrow. If they think they can put upon us like that they are mistaken. Ah, non, non et non! And what an audience! No enthusiasm, no applause, nothing.”

‘My friend was staggered. Was it possible that she took her performance seriously? He almost burst out laughing. But she still spoke with that throaty voice that had such a queer effect on his nerves. She was dressed all in red and wore the same red hat in which he had first seen her. She looked so flashy that he did not fancy the notion of asking her to a place where he might be seen, and so suggested Soho. There were hansoms still in those days, and the hansom was more conducive to love–making, I imagine, than is the taxi of the present time. My friend put his arm round Alix’s waist and kissed her. It left her calm, but on the other hand did not wildly excite him. While they ate a late dinner he made himself very gallant and she played up to him agreeably; but when they got up to go and he proposed that she should come round to his rooms in Waverton Street she told him that a friend had come over from Paris with her and that she had to meet him at eleven: she had only been able to dine with Brown because her companion had a business engagement. Brown was exasperated, but did not want to show it, and when, as they walked down Wardour Street (for she said she wanted to go to the Café Monico), pausing in front of a pawnbroker’s to look at the jewellery in the window, she went into ecstasies over a bracelet of sapphires and diamonds that Brown thought incredibly vulgar, he asked her if she would like it.

‘“But it’s marked fifteen pounds,” she said.

‘He went in and bought it for her. She was delighted. She made him leave her just before they came to Piccadilly Circus.

‘“Now listen, mon petit,” she said, “I cannot see you in London because of my friend, he is jealous as a wolf, that is why I think it is more prudent for you to go now, but I am playing at Boulogne next week, why do you not come over? I shall be alone there. My friend has to go back to Holland, where he lives.”

‘“All right,” said Brown, “I’ll come.”

‘When he went to Boulogne–he had two days’ leave–it was with the one idea of salving the wound to his pride. It was odd that he should care. I dare say to you it seems inexplicable. He could not bear the notion that Alix looked upon him as a fool, and he felt that when once he had removed that impression from her he would never bother about her again. He thought of O’Malley too, and of Yvonne. She must have told them, and it galled him to think that people whom in his heart he despised should laugh at him behind his back. Do you think he was very contemptible?’

‘Good gracious, no,’ said Ashenden. ‘All sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal, and the most ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it is only vanity that makes him deny its power. It is more consuming than love. With advancing years, mercifully, you can snap your fingers at the terror and the servitude of love, but age cannot free you from the thraldom of vanity. Time can assuage the pangs of love, but only death can still the anguish of wounded vanity. Love is simple and seeks no subterfuge, but vanity cozens you with a hundred disguises. It is part and parcel of every virtue: it is the mainspring of courage and the strength of ambition; it gives constancy to the lover and endurance to the stoic; it adds fuel to the fire of the artist’s desire for fame and is at once the support and the compensation of the honest man’s integrity; it leers even cynically in the humility of the saint. You cannot escape it, and should you take pains to guard against it, it will make use of those very pains to trip you up. You are defenceless against its onslaught because you know not on what unprotected side it will attack you. Sincerity cannot protect you from its snare nor humour from its mockery.’

Ashenden stopped, not because he had said all he had to say, but because he was out of breath. He noticed also that the ambassador, desiring to talk rather than to listen, heard him with a politeness that was strained. But he had made this speech not so much for his host’s edification as for his own entertainment.

‘It is vanity finally that makes man support his abominable lot.’

For a minute Sir Herbert was silent. He looked straight in front of him as though his thoughts lingered distressfully on some far horizon of memory.

‘When my friend came back from Boulogne he knew that he was madly in love with Alix and he had arranged to meet her again in a fortnight’s time when she would be performing at Dunkirk. He thought of nothing else in the interval, and the night before he was to start, he only had thirty–six hours this time, he could not sleep, so devouring was the passion that consumed him. Then he went over for a night to Paris to see her, and once when she was disengaged for a week he persuaded her to come to London. He knew that she did not love him. He was just a man among a hundred others and she made no secret of the fact that he was not her only lover. He suffered agonies of jealousy but knew that it would only excite her ridicule or her anger if he showed it. She had not even a fancy for him. She liked him because he was a gentleman and well dressed. She was quite willing to be his mistress so long as the claims he made on her were not irksome. But that was all. His means were not large enough to enable him to make her any serious offers, but even if they had been, liking her freedom, she would have refused.’

‘But what about the Dutchman?’ asked Ashenden.

‘The Dutchman? He was a pure invention. She made him up on the spur of the moment because for one reason or another she did not just then want to be bothered with Brown. What should one lie more or less matter to her? Don’t think he didn’t struggle against his passion. He knew it was madness; he knew that a permanent connexion between them could only lead to disaster for him. He had no illusions about her; she was common, coarse, and vulgar. She could talk of none of the things that interested him, nor did she try, she took it for granted that he was concerned with her affairs and told him interminable stories of her quarrels with fellow–performers, her disputes with managers, and her wrangles with hotel–keepers. What she said bored him to death, but the sound of her throaty voice made his heart beat so that sometimes he thought he would suffocate.’

Ashenden sat uneasily in his chair. It was a Sheraton chair very good to look at, but hard and straight; and he wished that Sir Herbert had had the notion of going back to the other room where there was a comfortable sofa. It was quite plain now that the story he was telling was about himself, and Ashenden felt a certain indelicacy in the man’s stripping his soul before him so nakedly. He did not desire this confidence to be forced upon him. Sir Herbert Witherspoon meant nothing to him. By the light of the shaded candles Ashenden saw that he was deathly pale and there was a wildness in his eyes that in that cold and composed man was strangely disconcerting. He poured himself out a glass of water; his throat was dry so that he could hardly speak. But he went on pitilessly.

‘At last my friend managed to pull himself together. He was disgusted by the sordidness of his intrigue; there was no beauty in it, nothing but shame; and it was leading to nothing. His passion was as vulgar as the woman for whom he felt it. Now it happened that Alix was going to spend six months in the North of Africa with her troupe and for that time at least it would be impossible for him to see her. He made up his mind that he must seize the opportunity and make a definite break. He knew bitterly that it would mean nothing to her. In three weeks she would have forgotten him.

‘And then there was something else. He had come to know very well some people, a man and his wife, whose social and political connexions were extremely important. They had an only daughter and, I don’t know why, she fell in love with him. She was everything that Alix was not, pretty in the real English way, with blue eyes and pink and white cheeks, tall and fair; she might have stepped out of one of du Maurier’s pictures in Punch. She was clever and well–read, and since she had lived all her life in political circles she could talk intelligently of the sort of things that interested him. He had reason to believe that if he asked her to marry him she would accept. I have told you that he was ambitious. He knew that he had great abilities and he wanted the chance to use them. She was related to some of the greatest families in England and he would have been a fool not to realize that a marriage of this kind must make his path infinitely easier. The opportunity was golden. And what a relief to think that he could put behind him definitely that ugly little episode, and what a happiness, instead of that wall of cheerful indifference and matter–of–fact good nature against which in his passion for Alix he had vainly battered his head, what a happiness to feel that to someone else he really meant something! How could he help being flattered and touched when he saw her face light up as he came into the room? He wasn’t in love with her, but he thought her charming, and he wanted to forget Alix and the vulgar life into which she had led him. At last he made up his mind. He asked her to marry him and was accepted. Her family was delighted. The marriage was to take place in the autumn, since her father had to go on some political errand to South America and was taking his wife and daughter with him. They were to be gone the whole summer. My friend Brown was transferring from the F.O. to the diplomatic service and had been promised a post at Lisbon. He was to go there immediately.

‘He saw his fiancée off. Then it happened that owing to some hitch the man whom Brown was going to replace was kept at Lisbon three months longer and so for that period my friend found himself at a loose end. And just when he was making up his mind what to do with himself he received a letter from Alix. She was coming back to France and had a tour booked; she gave him a long list of the places she was going to, and in her casual, friendly way said that they would have fun if he could manage to run over for a day or two. An insane, a criminal notion seized him. If she had shown any eagerness for him to come he might have resisted, it was her airy, matter–of–fact indifference that took him. On a sudden he longed for her. He did not care if she was gross and vulgar, he had got her in his bones, and it was his last chance. In a little while he was going to be married. It was now or never. He went down to Marseilles and met her as she stepped off the boat that had brought her from Tunis. His heart leaped at the pleasure she showed on seeing him. He knew he loved her madly. He told her that he was going to be married in three months and asked her to spend the last of his freedom with him. She refused to abandon her tour. How could she leave her companions in the lurch? He offered to compensate them, but she would not hear of it; they could not find someone to take her place at a moment’s notice, nor could they afford to throw over a good engagement that might lead to others in the future; they were honest people, and they kept their word, they had their duty to their managers and their duty to their public. He was exasperated; it seemed absurd that his whole happiness should be sacrificed to that wretched tour. And at the end of the three months? What was to happen to her then? Oh, no, he was asking something that wasn’t reasonable. He told her that he adored her. He did not know till then how insanely he loved her. Well, then, she said, why did he not come with her and make the tour with them? She would be glad of his company; they could have a good time together and at the end of three months he could go and marry his heiress and neither of them would be any the worse. For a moment he hesitated, but now that he saw her again he could not bear the thought of being parted from her so soon. He accepted. And then she said:

‘“But listen, my little one, you mustn’t be silly, you know. The managers won’t be too pleased with me if I make a lot of chichi, I have to think of my future, and they won’t be so anxious to have me back if I refuse to please old customers of the house. It won’t be very often, but it must be understood that you are not to make me scenes if now and then I give myself to someone whose fancy I take. It will mean nothing, that is business, you will be my amant de coeur.”

‘He felt a strange, excruciating pain in his heart, and I think he went so pale that she thought he was going to faint. She looked at him curiously.

‘“Those are the terms,” she said. “You can either take them or leave them.”

‘He accepted.’

Sir Herbert Witherspoon leaned forward in his chair and he was so white that Ashenden thought too that he was going to faint. His skin was drawn over his skull so that his face looked like a death’s head, but the veins on his forehead stood out like knotted cords. He had lost all reticence. And Ashenden once more wished that he would stop, it made him shy and nervous to see the man’s naked soul: no one has the right to show himself to another in that destitute state. He was inclined to cry:

‘Stop, stop. You mustn’t tell me any more. You’ll be so ashamed.’

But the man had lost all shame.

‘For three months they travelled together from one dull provincial town to another, sharing a filthy little bedroom in frowzy hotels; Alix would not let him take her to good hotels, she said she had not the clothes for them and she was more comfortable in the sort of hotel she was used to; she did not want her companions in the business to say that she was putting on side. He sat interminable hours in shabby cafés. He was treated as a brother by members of the troupe, they called him by his Christian name and chaffed him coarsely and slapped him on the back. He ran errands for them when they were busy with their work. He saw the good–humoured contempt in the eyes of managers and was obliged to put up with the familiarity of stagehands. They travelled third–class from place to place and he helped to carry the luggage. He with whom reading was a passion never opened a book because Alix was bored by reading and thought that anyone who did was just giving himself airs. Every night he went to the music–hall and watched her go through that grotesque and ignoble performance. He had to fall in with her pathetic fancy that it was artistic. He had to congratulate her when it had gone well and condole with her when some feat of agility had gone amiss. When she had finished he went to a café and waited for her while she changed, and sometimes she would come in rather hurriedly and say:

‘“Don’t wait for me tonight, mon chou, I’m busy.”

‘And then he would undergo agonies of jealousy. He would suffer as he never knew a man could suffer. She would come back to the hotel at three or four in the morning. She wondered why he was not asleep. Sleep! How could he sleep with that misery gnawing at his heart? He had promised he would not interfere with her. He did not keep his promise. He made her terrific scenes. Sometimes he beat her. Then she would lose her patience and tell him she was sick of him, she would pack her things to go, and then he would go grovelling to her, promising anything, any submission, vowing to swallow any humiliation, if she would not leave him. It was horrible and degrading. He was miserable. Miserable? No, he was happier than he’d ever been in his life. It was the gutter that he wallowed in, but he wallowed in it with delight. Oh, he was so bored with the life he’d led hitherto, and this one seemed to him amazing and romantic. This was reality. And that frowzy, ugly woman with the whisky voice, she had such a splendid vitality, such a zest for life that she seemed to raise his own to some more vivid level. It really did seem to him to burn with a pure, gem–like flame. Do people still read Pater?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ashenden. ‘I don’t.’

‘There was only three months of it. Oh, how short the time seemed and how quickly the weeks sped by! Sometimes he had wild dreams of abandoning everything and throwing in his lot with the acrobats. They had come to have quite a liking for him and they said he could easily train himself to take a part in the turn. He knew they said it more in jest than in earnest, but the notion vaguely tickled him. But these were only dreams and he knew that nothing would come of them. He never really chaffered with the thought that when the three months came to an end he would not return to his own life with its obligations. With his mind, that cold, logical mind of his, he knew it would be absurd to sacrifice everything for a woman like Alix; he was ambitious, he wanted power; and besides, he could not break the heart of that poor child who loved and trusted him. She wrote to him once a week. She was longing to get back, the time seemed endless to her and he, he had a secret wish that something would happen to delay her arrival. If he could only have a little more time! Perhaps if he had six months he would have got over his infatuation. Already sometimes he hated Alix.

‘The last day came. They seemed to have little to say to one another. They were both sad; but he knew that Alix only regretted the breaking of an agreeable habit, in twenty–four hours she would be as gay and full of spirits with her stray companion as though he had never crossed her path; he could only think that next day he was going to Paris to meet his fiancée and her family. They spent their last night in one another’s arms weeping. If she’d asked him then not to leave her it may be that he would have stayed; but she didn’t, it never occurred to her, she accepted his going as a settled thing, and she wept not because she loved him, she wept because he was unhappy.

‘In the morning she was sleeping so soundly that he had not the heart to wake her to say good–bye. He slipped out very quietly, with his bag in his hand, and took the train to Paris.’

Ashenden turned away his head, for he saw two tears form themselves in Witherspoon’s eyes and roll down his cheeks. He did not even try to hide them. Ashenden lit another cigar.

‘In Paris they cried out when they saw him. They said he looked like a ghost. He told them he’d been ill and hadn’t said anything about it in order not to worry them. They were very kind. A month later he was married. He did very well for himself. He was given opportunities to distinguish himself and he distinguished himself. His rise was spectacular. He had the well–ordered and distinguished establishment that he had wanted. He had the power for which he had craved. He was loaded with honours. Oh, he made a success of life and there were hundreds who envied him. It was all ashes. He was bored, bored to distraction, bored by that distinguished, beautiful lady he had married, bored by the people his life forced him to live with; it was a comedy he was playing and sometimes it seemed intolerable to live for ever and ever behind a mask, sometimes he felt he couldn’t bear it. But he bore it. Sometimes he longed for Alix so fiercely that he felt it would be better to shoot himself than to suffer such anguish. He never saw her again. Never. He heard from O’Malley that she had married and left her troupe. She must be a fat old woman now and it doesn’t matter any more. But he had wasted his life. And he never even made that poor creature whom he married happy. How could he go on hiding from her year after year that he had nothing to give her but pity? Once in his agony he told her about Alix and she tortured him ever after with her jealousy. He knew that he should never have married her; in six months she would have got over her grief if he had told her he could not bear to, and in the end would have happily married somebody else. So far as she was concerned his sacrifice was vain. He was terribly conscious that he had only one life and it seemed so sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. He laughed when people spoke of him as a strong man: he was as weak and unstable as water. And that’s why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage of his ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.’

At that moment the door opened and a lady came in. The ambassador glanced at her and for an instant a look of cold hatred crossed his face, but it was only for an instant; then, rising from the table, he composed his ravaged features to an expression of courteous suavity. He gave the incomer a haggard smile.

‘Here is my wife. This is Mr Ashenden.’

‘I couldn’t imagine where you were. Why didn’t you go and sit in your study? I’m sure Mr Ashenden’s been dreadfully uncomfortable.’

She was a tall, thin woman of fifty, rather drawn and faded, but she looked as though she had once been pretty. It was obvious that she was very well–bred. She vaguely reminded you of an exotic plant, reared in a hot–house, that had begun to lose its bloom. She was dressed in black.

‘What was the concert like?’ asked Sir Herbert.

‘Oh, not bad at all. They gave a Brahms Concerto and the Fire–music from the Walküre, and some Hungarian dances of Dvorák. I thought them rather showy.’ She turned to Ashenden. ‘I hope you haven’t been bored all alone with my husband. What have you been talking about? Art and Literature?’

‘No, its raw material,’ said Ashenden.

He took his leave.

MR HARRINGTON’S WASHING

When Ashenden went on deck and saw before him a low–lying coast and a white town he felt a pleasant flutter of excitement. It was early and the sun had not long risen, but the sea was glassy and the sky was blue; it was warm already and one knew that the day would be sweltering. Vladivostok. It really gave one the sensation of being at the end of the world. It was a long journey that Ashenden had made from New York to San Francisco, across the Pacific in a Japanese boat to Yokohama, then from Tsuruki in a Russian boat, he the only Englishman on board, up the Sea of Japan. From Vladivostok he was to take the Trans–Siberian to Petrograd. It was the most important mission that he had ever had and he was pleased with the sense of responsibility that it gave him. He had no one to give him orders, unlimited funds (he carried in a belt next to his skin bills of exchange for a sum so enormous that he was staggered when he thought of them), and though he had been set to do something that was beyond human possibility he did not know this and was prepared to set about his task with confidence. He believed in his own astuteness. Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.

Ashenden did not much look forward to ten days on a Russian train, and in Yokohama he had heard rumours that in one or two places bridges had been blown up and the line cut. He was told that the soldiers, completely out of hand, would rob him of everything he possessed and turn him out on the steppe to shift for himself. It was a cheerful prospect. But the train was certainly starting and whatever happened later (and Ashenden had always a feeling that things never turned out as badly as you expected) he was determined to get a place on it. His intention on landing was to go at once to the British Consulate and find out what arrangements had been made for him; but as they neared the shore and he was able to discern the untidy and bedraggled town he felt not a little forlorn. He knew but a few words of Russian. The only man on the ship who spoke English was the purser and though he promised Ashenden to do anything he could to help him, Ashenden had the impression that he must not too greatly count upon him. It was a relief then, when they docked, to have a young man, small and with a mop of untidy hair, obviously a Jew, come up to him and ask if his name was Ashenden.

‘Mine is Benedict. I’m the interpreter at the British Consulate. I’ve been told to look after you. We’ve got a place on the train tonight.’

Ashenden’s spirits went up. They landed. The little Jew looked after his luggage and had his passport examined and then, getting into a car that waited for them, they drove off to the Consulate.

‘I’ve had instructions to offer you every facility,’ said the Consul, ‘and you’ve only got to tell me what you want. I’ve fixed you up all right on the train, but God knows if you’ll ever get to Petrograd. Oh, by the way, I’ve got a travelling companion for you. He’s a man called Harrington, an American, and he’s going to Petrograd for a firm in Philadelphia. He’s trying to fix up some deal with the Provisional Government.’

‘What’s he like?’ asked Ashenden.

‘Oh, he’s all right. I wanted him to come with the American Consul to luncheon, but they’ve gone for an excursion in the country. You must get to the station a couple of hours before the train starts. There’s always an awful scrimmage and if you’re not there in good time someone will pinch your seat.’

The train started at midnight and Ashenden dined with Benedict at the station restaurant, which was, it appeared, the only place in that slatternly town where you could get a decent meal. It was crowded. The service was intolerably slow. Then they went on to the platform, where, though they had still two hours to spare, there was already a seething mob. Whole families, sitting on piles of luggage, seemed to be camped there. People rushed to and fro, or stood in little groups violently arguing. Women screamed. Others were silently weeping. Here two men were engaged in a fierce quarrel. It was a scene of indescribable confusion. The light in the station was wan and cold and the white faces of all those people were like the white faces of the dead waiting, patient or anxious, distraught or penitent, for the judgement of the last day. The train was made up and most of the carriages were already filled to overflowing. When at last Benedict found that in which Ashenden had his place a man sprang out of it excitedly.

‘Come in and sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the greatest difficulty in keeping your seat. A fellow wanted to come in here with a wife and two children. My Consul has just gone off with him to see the stationmaster.’

‘This is Mr Harrington,’ said Benedict.

Ashenden stepped into the carriage. It had two berths in it. The porter stowed his luggage away. He shook hands with his travelling companion.

Mr John Quincy Harrington was a very thin man of somewhat less than middle height. He had a yellow, bony face, with large, pale–blue eyes, and when he took off his hat to wipe his brow wet from perturbation he had endured he showed a large, bald skull; it was very bony and the ridges and protuberances stood out disconcertingly. He wore a bowler–hat, a black coat and waistcoat, and a pair of striped trousers; a very high white collar, and a neat, unobtrusive tie. Ashenden did not know precisely how you should dress in order to take a ten days’ journey across Siberia, but he could not but think that Mr Harrington’s costume was eccentric. He spoke with precision in a high–pitched voice and in an accent that Ashenden recognized as that of New England.

In a minute the stationmaster came accompanied by a bearded Russian, suffering evidently from profound emotion, and followed by a lady holding two children by the hand. The Russian, tears running down his face, was talking with quivering lips to the stationmaster, and his wife between her sobs was apparently telling him the story of her life. When they arrived at the carriage the altercation became more violent and Benedict joined in with his fluent Russian. Mr Harrington did not know a word of the language, but being obviously of an excitable turn broke in and explained in voluble English that these seats had been booked by the Consuls of Great Britain and the United States respectively, and though he didn’t know about the King of England, he could tell them straight and they could take it from him that the President of the United States would never permit an American citizen to be done out of a seat on the train that he had duly paid for. He would yield to force, but to nothing else, and if they touched him he would register a complaint with the Consul at once. He said all this and a great deal more to the stationmaster, who of course had no notion what he was talking about, but with much emphasis and a good deal of gesticulation made him in reply a passionate speech. This roused Mr Harrington to the utmost pitch of indignation, for shaking his fist in the stationmaster’s face, his own pale with fury, he cried out:

‘Tell him I don’t understand a word he says and I don’t want to understand. If the Russians want us to look upon them as a civilized people, why don’t they talk a civilized language? Tell him that I am Mr John Quincy Harrington and I’m travelling on behalf of Messrs Crew and Adams of Philadelphia with a special letter of introduction to Mr Kerensky and if I’m not left in peaceful possession of this carriage Mr Crewe will take the matter up with the Administration in Washington.’

Mr Harrington’s manner was so truculent and his gestures so menacing that the stationmaster, throwing up the sponge, turned on his heel without another word and walked moodily away. He was followed by the bearded Russian and his wife arguing heatedly with him and the two apathetic children. Mr Harrington jumped back into the carriage.

‘I’m terribly sorry to have to refuse to give up my seat to a lady with two children,’ he said. ‘No one knows better than I the respect due to a woman and a mother, but I’ve got to get to Petrograd by this train if I don’t want to lose a very important order and I’m not going to spend ten days in a corridor for all the mothers in Russia.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Ashenden.

‘I am a married man and I have two children myself. I know that travelling with your family is a difficult matter, but there’s nothing that I know to prevent you from staying at home.’

When you are shut up with a man for ten days in a railway carriage you can hardly fail to learn most of what there is to know about him, and for ten days (for eleven to be exact) Ashenden spent twenty–four hours a day with Mr Harrington. It is true that they went into the dining–room three times a day for their meals, but they sat opposite to one another; it is true that the train stopped for an hour morning and afternoon so that they were able to have a tramp up and down the platform, but they walked side by side. Ashenden made acquaintance with some of his fellow–travellers and sometimes they came into the compartment to have a chat, but if they only spoke French or German Mr Harrington would watch them with acidulous disapproval and if they spoke English he would never let them get a word in. For Mr Harrington was a talker. He talked as though it were a natural function of the human being, automatically, as men breathe or digest their food; he talked not because he had something to say, but because he could not help himself, in a high–pitched, nasal voice, without inflexion, at one dead level of tone. He talked with precision, using a copious vocabulary and forming his sentences with deliberation; he never used a short word when a longer one would do; he never paused. He went on and on. It was not a torrent, for there was nothing impetuous about it, it was like a stream of lava pouring irresistibly down the side of a volcano. It flowed with a quiet and steady force that overwhelmed everything that was in its path.

Ashenden thought he had never known as much about anyone as he knew about Mr Harrington, and not only about him, with all his opinions, habits, and circumstances, but about his wife and his wife’s family, his children and their schoolfellows, his employers and the alliances they had made for three or four generations with the best families in Philadelphia. His own family had come from Devonshire early in the eighteenth century and Mr Harrington had been to the village where the graves of his forebears were still to be seen in the churchyard. He was proud of his English ancestry, but proud too of his American birth, though to him America was a little strip of land along the Atlantic coast and Americans were a small number of persons of English or Dutch origin whose blood had never been sullied by foreign admixture. He looked upon the Germans, Swedes, Irish, and the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe who for the last hundred years have descended upon the United States, as interlopers. He turned his attention away from them as a maiden lady who lived in a secluded manor might avert her eyes from the factory chimneys that had trespassed upon her retirement.

When Ashenden mentioned a man of vast wealth who owned some of the finest pictures in America Mr Harrington said:

‘I’ve never met him. My great–aunt Maria Penn Warrington always said his grandmother was a very good cook. My great–aunt Maria was terribly sorry when she left her to get married. She said she never knew anyone who could make an apple pancake as she could.’

Mr Harrington was devoted to his wife, and he told Ashenden at unbelievable length how cultivated and what a perfect mother she was. She had delicate health and had undergone a great number of operations all of which he described in detail. He had had two operations himself, one on his tonsils and one to remove his appendix and he took Ashenden day by day through his experiences. All his friends had had operations and his knowledge of surgery was encyclopedic. He had two sons, both at school, and he was seriously considering whether he would not be well–advised to have them operated on. It was curious that one of them should have enlarged tonsils, and he was not at all happy about the appendix of the other. They were more devoted to one another than he had ever seen two brothers be, and a very good friend of his, the brightest surgeon in Philadelphia, had offered to operate on them both together so that they should not be separated. He showed Ashenden photographs of the boys and their mother. This journey of his to Russia was the first time in their lives that he had been separated from them, and every morning he wrote a long letter to his wife telling her everything that had happened and a good deal of what he had said during the day. Ashenden watched him cover sheet after sheet of paper with his neat, legible, and precise handwriting.

Mr Harrington had read all the books on conversation and knew its technique to the last detail. He had a little book in which he noted down the stories he heard and he told Ashenden that when he was going out to dinner he always looked up half a dozen so that he should not be at a loss. They were marked with a G if they could be told in general society and with an M (for men) if they were more fit for rough masculine ears. He was a specialist in that peculiar form of anecdote that consists in narrating a long serious incident, piling detail upon detail, till a comic end is reached. He spared you nothing, and Ashenden, foreseeing the point long before it arrived, would clench his hands and knit his brows in the strenuous effort not to betray his impatience and at last force from his unwilling mouth a grim and hollow laugh. If someone came into the compartment in the middle Mr Harrington would greet him with cordiality.

‘Come right in and sit down. I was just telling my friend a story. You must listen to it, it’s one of the funniest things you ever heard.’

Then he would begin again from the very beginning and repeat it word for word, without altering a single apt epithet, till he reached the humorous end. Ashenden suggested once that they should see whether they could find two people on the train who played cards so that they might while away the time with a game of bridge, but Mr Harrington said he never touched cards and when Ashenden in desperation began to play patience he pulled a wry face.

‘It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card–playing, and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse.’

‘There is a certain elegance in wasting time,’ said Ashenden. ‘Any fool can waste money, but when you waste time you waste what is priceless. Besides,’ he added with bitterness, ‘you can still talk.’

‘How can I talk when your attention is taken up by whether you are going to get a black seven to put on a red eight? Conversation calls forth the highest powers of the intellect and if you have made a study of it you have the right to expect that the person you’re talking to will give you the fullest attention he is capable of.’

He did not say this acrimoniously, but with the good–humoured patience of a man who has been much tried. He was just stating a plain fact and Ashenden could take it or leave it. It was the claim of the artist to have his work taken seriously.

Mr Harrington was a diligent reader. He read pencil in hand, underlining passages that attracted his attention, and on the margin making in his neat writing comments on what he read. This he was fond of discussing and when Ashenden himself was reading and felt on a sudden that Mr Harrington, book in one hand and pencil in the other, was looking at him with his large pale eyes he began to have violent palpitations of the heart. He dared not look up, he dared not even turn the page, for he knew that Mr Harrington would regard this as ample excuse to break into a discourse, but remained with his eyes fixed desperately on a single word, like a chicken with its beak to a chalk line, and only ventured to breathe when he realized that Mr Harrington, having given up the attempt, had resumed his reading. He was then engaged on a History of the American Constitution in two volumes, and for recreation was perusing a stout volume that purported to contain all the great speeches of the world. For Mr Harrington was an after–dinner speaker and had read all the best books on speaking in public. He knew exactly how to get on good terms with his audience, just where to put in the serious words that touched their hearts, how to catch their attention by a few apt stories, and finally with what degree of eloquence, suiting the occasion, to deliver his peroration.

Mr Harrington was very fond of reading aloud. Ashenden had had frequent occasion to observe the distressing propensity of Americans for this pastime. In hotel drawing–rooms at night after dinner he had often seen the father of a family seated in a retired corner and surrounded by his wife, his two sons, and his daughter, reading to them. On ships crossing the Atlantic he had sometimes watched with awe the tall, spare gentleman of commanding aspect who sat in the centre of fifteen ladies no longer in their first youth and in a resonant voice read to them the history of Art. Walking up and down the promenade deck he had passed honeymooning couples lying on deck–chairs and caught the unhurried tones of the bride as she read to her young husband the pages of a popular novel. It had always seemed to him a curious way of showing affection. He had had friends who had offered to read to him and he had known women who had said they loved being read to, but he had always politely refused the invitation and firmly ignored the hint. He liked neither reading aloud nor being read aloud to. In his heart he thought the national predilection for this form of entertainment the only flaw in the perfection of the American character. But the immortal gods love a good laugh at the expense of human beings and now delivered him, bound and helpless, to the knife of the high priest. Mr Harrington flattered himself that he was a very good reader and he explained to Ashenden the theory and practice of the art. Ashenden learned that there were two schools, the dramatic and the natural: in the first you imitated the voices of those who spoke (if you were reading a novel), and when the heroine wailed you wailed and when emotion choked her you choked too; but in the other you read as impassively as though you were reading the price–list of a mail–order house in Chicago. This was the school Mr Harrington belonged to. In the seventeen years of his married life he had read aloud to his wife, and to his sons as soon as they were old enough to appreciate them, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thackeray, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and W. D. Howells. Ashenden came to the conclusion that it was second nature with Mr Harrington to read aloud, and to prevent him from doing so made him as uneasy as cutting off his tobacco made the confirmed smoker. He would take you unawares.

‘Listen to this,’ he would say, ‘you must listen to this,’ as though he were suddenly struck by the excellence of a maxim or the neatness of a phrase. ‘Now just tell me if you don’t think this is remarkably well put. It’s only three lines.’

He read them and Ashenden was willing to give him a moment’s attention, but having finished them, without pausing for a moment to take breath, he went on. He went right on and on. In his measured high–pitched voice, without emphasis or expression, he read page after page. Ashenden fidgeted, crossed and uncrossed his legs, lit cigarettes and smoked them, sat first in one position, then in another. Mr Harrington went on and on. The train went leisurely through the interminable steppes of Siberia. They passed villages and crossed rivers. Mr Harrington went on and on. When he finished a great speech by Edmund Burke he put down the book in triumph.

‘Now that in my opinion is one of the finest orations in the English language.

It is certainly a part of our common heritage that we can look upon with genuine pride.’

‘Doesn’t it seem to you a little ominous that the people to whom Edmund Burke made that speech are all dead?’ asked Ashenden gloomily.

Mr Harrington was about to reply that this was hardly to be wondered at since the speech was made in the eighteenth century, when it dawned upon him that Ashenden (bearing up wonderfully under affliction as any unprejudiced person could not fail to admit) was making a joke. He slapped his knee and laughed heartily.

‘Gee, that’s a good one,’ he said. ‘I’ll write that down in my little book. I see exactly how I can bring it in one time when I have to speak at our luncheon club.’

Mr Harrington was a highbrow; but that appellation, invented by the vulgar as a term of abuse, he had accepted like the instrument of a saint’s martyrdom, the gridiron of Saint Laurence for instance or the wheel of Saint Catherine, as an honorific title. He gloried in it.

‘Emerson was a highbrow,’ he said. ‘Longfellow was a highbrow. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a highbrow. James Russell Lowell was a highbrow.’

Mr Harrington’s study of American literature had taken him no farther down the years than the period during which those eminent, but not precisely thrilling, authors flourished.

Mr Harrington was a bore. He exasperated Ashenden, and enraged him; he got on his nerves, and drove him to frenzy. But Ashenden did not dislike him. His self–satisfaction was enormous but so ingenuous that you could not resent it; his conceit was so childlike that you could only smile at it. He was so well–meaning, so thoughtful, so deferential, so polite that though Ashenden would willingly have killed him he could not but own that in that short while he had conceived for Mr Harrington something very like affection. His manners were perfect, formal, a trifle elaborate perhaps (there is no harm in that, for good manners are the product of an artificial state of society and so can bear a touch of the powdered wig and the lace ruffle), but though natural to his good breeding they gained a pleasant significance from his good heart. He was ready to do anyone a kindness and seemed to find nothing too much trouble if he could thereby oblige his fellow–man. He was eminently serviable. And it may be that this is a word for which there is no exact translation because the charming quality it denotes is not very common among our practical people. When Ashenden was ill for a couple of days Mr Harrington nursed him with devotion. Ashenden was embarrassed by the care he took of him and though racked with pain could not help laughing at the fussy attention with which Mr Harrington took his temperature, from his neatly packed valise extracted a whole regiment of tabloids and firmly doctored him; and he was touched by the trouble he gave himself to get from the dining–car the things that he thought Ashenden could eat. He did everything in the world for him but stop talking.

It was only when he was dressing that Mr Harrington was silent, for then his maidenly mind was singly occupied with the problem of changing his clothes before Ashenden without indelicacy. He was extremely modest. He changed his linen every day, neatly taking it out of his suitcase and neatly putting back what was soiled; but he performed miracles of dexterity in order during the process not to show an inch of bare skin. After a day or two Ashenden gave up the struggle to keep neat and clean in that dirty train, with one lavatory for the whole carriage, and soon was as grubby as the rest of the passengers; but Mr Harrington refused to yield to the difficulties. He performed his toilet with deliberation notwithstanding the impatient persons who rattled the door– handle, and returned from the lavatory every morning washed, shining, and smelling of soap. Once dressed, in his black coat, striped trousers, and well–polished shoes, he looked as spruce as though he had just stepped out of his tidy little red–brick house in Philadelphia and was about to board the street–car that would take him downtown to his office. At one point of the journey it was announced that an attempt had been made to blow up a bridge and that there were disturbances at the next station over the river; it might be that the train would be stopped and the passengers turned adrift or taken prisoner. Ashenden, thinking he might be separated from his luggage, took the precaution to change into his thickest clothes so that if he had to pass the winter in Siberia he need suffer as little as necessary from the cold; but Mr Harrington would not listen to reason; he made no preparations for the possible experience and Ashenden had the conviction that if he spent three months in a Russian prison he would still preserve that smart and natty appearance. A troop of Cossacks boarded the train and stood on the platform of each carriage with their guns loaded, and the train rattled gingerly over the damaged bridge; then they came to the station at which they had been warned of danger, put on steam and dashed straight through it. Mr Harrington was mildly satirical when Ashenden changed back into a light summer suit.

Mr Harrington was a keen business man. It was obvious that it would need someone very astute to overreach him, and Ashenden was sure that his employers had been well–advised to send him on this errand. He would safeguard their interests with all his might and if he succeeded in driving a bargain with the Russians it would be a hard one. His loyalty to his firm demanded that. He spoke of the partners with affectionate reverence. He loved them and was proud of them; but he did not envy them because their wealth was great. He was quite content to work on a salary and thought himself adequately paid; so long as he could educate his boys and leave his widow enough to live on, what was money to him? He thought it a trifle vulgar to be rich. He looked upon culture as more important than money. He was careful of it and after every meal put down in his note–book exactly what it had cost him. His firm might be certain that he would not charge a penny more for his expenses than he had spent. But having discovered that poor people came to the station at the stopping places of the train to beg and seeing that the war had really brought them to destitution he took care before each halt to supply himself with ample small change and in a shame–faced way, mocking himself for being taken in by such impostors, distributed everything in his pocket.

‘Of course I know they don’t deserve it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t do it for them. I do it entirely for my own peace of mind. I should feel so terribly badly if I thought some man really was hungry and I’d refused to give him the price of a meal.’

Mr Harrington was absurd, but lovable. It was inconceivable that anyone should be rude to him, it would have seemed as dreadful as hitting a child; and Ashenden, chafing inwardly but with a pretence of amiability, suffered meekly and with a truly Christian spirit the affliction of the gentle, ruthless creature’s society. It took eleven days at that time to get from Vladivostok to Petrograd, and Ashenden felt that he could not have borne another day. If it had been twelve he would have killed Mr Harrington.

When at last (Ashenden tired and dirty, Mr Harrington neat, sprightly and sententious) they reached the outskirts of Petrograd and stood at the windowlooking at the crowded houses of the city, Mr Harrington turned to Ashenden and said:

‘Well, I never would have thought that eleven days in the train would pass so quickly. We’ve had a wonderful time. I’ve enjoyed your company and I know you’ve enjoyed mine. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know that I’m a pretty good conversationalist. But now we’ve come together like this we must take care to stay together. We must see as much of one another as we can while I’m in Petrograd.’

‘I shall have a great deal to do,’ said Ashenden. ‘I’m afraid my time won’t be altogether my own.’

‘I know,’ answered Mr Harrington cordially. ‘I expect to be pretty busy myself, but we can have breakfast together anyway and we’ll meet in the evening and compare notes. It would be too bad if we drifted apart now.’

‘Too bad,’ sighed Ashenden.

When Ashenden found himself alone in his bedroom for the first time, he sat down and looked about him. It had seemed an age. He had not the energy to start immediately to unpack. How many of these hotel bedrooms had he known since the beginning of the war, grand or shabby, in one place and one land after another! It seemed to him that he had been living in his luggage for as long as he could remember. He was weary. He asked himself how he was going to set about the work that he had been sent to do. He felt lost in the immensity of Russia and very solitary. He had protested when he was chosen for this mission, it looked too large an order, but his protests were ignored. He was chosen not because those in authority thought him particularly suited for the job, but because there was no one to be found who was more suited. There was a knock at the door and Ashenden, pleased to make use of the few words of the language he knew, called out in Russian. The door was opened. He sprang to his feet.

‘Come in, come in,’ he cried. ‘I’m awfully glad to see you.’

Three men entered. He knew them by sight, since they had travelled in the same ship with him from San Francisco to Yokohama, but following their instructions no communications had passed between them and Ashenden. They were Czechs, exiled from their country for their revolutionary activity and long settled in America, who had been sent over to Russia to help Ashenden in his mission and put him in touch with Professor Z., whose authority over the Czechs in Russia was absolute. Their chief was a certain Dr Egon Orth, a tall thin man, with a little grey head; he was minister to some church in the Middle West and a doctor of divinity; but had abandoned his cure to work for the liberation of his country, and Ashenden had the impression that he was an intelligent fellow who would not put too fine a point on matters of conscience. A parson with a fixed idea has this advantage over common men, that he can persuade himself of the Almighty’s approval for almost any goings–on. Dr Orth had a merry twinkle in his eye and a dry humour.

Ashenden had had two secret interviews with him in Yokohama and had learnt that Professor Z., though eager to free his country from the Austrian rule and, since he knew that this could only come about by the downfall of the Central Powers, with the Allies, body and soul, yet had scruples; he would not do things that outraged his conscience, all must be straightforward and above board, and so some things that it was necessary to do had to be done without his knowledge. His influence was so great that his wishes could not be disregarded, but on occasion it was felt better not to let him know too much of what was going on.

Dr Orth had arrived in Petrograd a week before Ashenden and now put before him what he had learned of the situation. It seemed to Ashenden that it was critical and if anything was to be done it must be done quickly. The army was dissatisfied and mutinous, the Government under the weak Kerensky was tottering and held power only because no one else had the courage to seize it, famine was staring the country in the face, and already the possibility had to be considered that the Germans would march on Petrograd. The Ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States had been apprised of Ashenden’s coming, but his mission was secret even from them, and there were particular reasons why he could demand no assistance from them. He arranged with Dr Orth to make an appointment with Professor Z. so that he could learn his views and explain to him that he had the financial means to support any scheme that • seemed likely to prevent the catastrophe that the Allied governments foresaw of Russia’s making a separate peace. But he had to get in touch with influential persons in all classes. Mr Harrington with his business proposition and his letters to Ministers of State would be thrown in contact with members of the Government and Mr Harrington wanted an interpreter. Dr Orth spoke Russian almost as well as his own language and it struck Ashenden that he would be admirably suited to the post. He explained the circumstances to him and it was arranged that while Ashenden and Mr Harrington were at luncheon Dr Orth should come in, greeting Ashenden as though he had not seen him before, and be introduced to Mr Harrington; then Ashenden, guiding the conversation, would suggest to Mr Harrington that the heavens had sent in Dr Orth the ideal man for his purpose.

But there was another person on whom Ashenden had fixed as possibly useful to him and now he said:

‘Have you ever heard of a woman called Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov? She’s the daughter of Alexander Denisiev.’

‘I know all about him of course.’

‘I have reason to believe she’s in Petrograd. Will you find out where she lives and what she’s doing?’

‘Certainly.’

Dr Orth spoke in Czech to one of the two men who accompanied him. They were sharp–looking fellows, both of them, one was tall and fair and the other was short and dark, but they were younger than Dr Orth, and Ashenden understood that they were there to do as he bade them. The man nodded, got up, shook hands with Ashenden and went out.

‘You shall have all the information possible this afternoon.’

‘Well, I think there’s nothing more we can do for the present,’ said Ashenden. ‘To tell you the truth I haven’t had a bath for eleven days and I badly want one.’

Ashenden had never quite made up his mind whether the pleasure of reflection was better pursued in a railway carriage or in a bath. So far as the act of invention was concerned he was inclined to prefer a train that went smoothly and not too fast, and many of his best ideas had come to him when he was thus traversing the plains of France; but for the delight of reminiscence or the entertainment of embroidery upon a theme already in his head he had no doubt that nothing could compare with a hot bath. He considered now, wallowing in soapy water like a water–buffalo in a muddy pond, the grim pleasantry of his relations with Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov.

In these stories no more than the barest suggestion has been made that Ashenden was capable on occasions of the passion ironically called tender. The specialists in this matter, those charming creatures who make a business of what philosophers know is but a diversion, assert that writers, painters, and musicians, all in short who are connected with the arts, in the relation of love cut no very conspicuous figure. There is much cry but little wool. They rave or sigh, make phrases and strike many a romantic attitude, but in the end, loving art or themselves (which with them is one and the same thing) better than the object of their emotion, offer a shadow when the said object, with the practical common sense of the sex, demands a substance. It may be so and this may be the reason (never before suggested) why women in their souls look upon art with such a virulent hatred. Be this as it may Ashenden in the last twenty years had felt his heart go pit–a–pat because of one charming person after another. He had had a good deal of fun and had paid for it with a great deal of misery, but even when suffering most acutely from the pangs of unrequited love he had been able to say to himself, albeit with a wry face, after all, it’s grist to the mill.

Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov was the daughter of a revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia after being sentenced to penal servitude for life and had settled in England. He was an able man and had supported himself for thirty years by the activity of a restless pen and had even made himself a distinguished position in English letters. When Anastasia Alexandrovna reached a suitable age she married Vladimir Semenovich Leonidov, also an exile from his native country, and it was after she had been married to him for some years that Ashenden made her acquaintance. It was at the time when Europe discovered Russia. Everyone was reading the Russian novelists, the Russian dancers captivated the civilized world, and the Russian composers set shivering the sensibility of persons who were beginning to want a change from Wagner. Russian art seized upon Europe with the virulence of an epidemic of influenza. New phrases became the fashion, new colours, new emotions, and the highbrows described themselves without a moment’s hesitation as members of the intelligentsia. It was a difficult word to spell but an easy one to say. Ashenden fell like the rest, changed the cushions of his sitting–room, hung an icon on the wall, read Chekhov and went to the ballet.

Anastasia Alexandrovna was by birth, circumstances, and education very much a member of the intelligentsia. She lived with her husband in a tiny house near Regent’s Park and here all the literary folk in London might gaze with humble reverence at pale–faced bearded giants who leaned against the wall like caryatids taking a day off; they were revolutionaries to a man and it was a miracle that they were not in the mines of Siberia. Women of letters tremulously put their lips to a glass of vodka. If you were lucky and greatly favoured you might shake hands there with Diaghilev, and now and again, like a peach–blossom wafted by the breeze, Pavlova herself hovered in and out. At this time Ashenden’s success had not been so great as to affront the highbrows, he had very distinctly been one of them in his youth, and though some already looked askance, others (optimistic creatures with a faith in human nature) still had hopes of him. Anastasia Alexandrovna told him to his face that he was a member of the intelligentsia. Ashenden was quite ready to believe it. He was in a state when he was ready to believe anything. He was thrilled and excited. It seemed to him that at last he was about to capture that illusive spirit of romance that he had so long been chasing. Anastasia Alexandrovna had fine eyes and a good, though for these days too voluptuous, figure, high cheek–bones and a snub nose (this was very Tartar), a wide mouth full of large square teeth, and a pale skin. She dressed somewhat flamboyantly. In her dark melancholy eyes Ashenden saw the boundless steppes of Russia, and the Kremlin with its pealing bells, and the solemn ceremonies of Easter at St Isaac’s, and forests of silver beeches, and the Nevsky Prospekt; it was astonishing how much he saw in her eyes. They were round and shining and slightly protuberant like those of a Pekinese. They talked together of Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov, of Natasha in War and Peace, of Anna Karenina, and of Fathers and Sons.

Ashenden soon discovered that her husband was quite unworthy of her and presently learned that she shared his opinion. Vladimir Semenovich was a little man with a large, long head that looked as though it had been pulled like a piece of liquorice, and he had a great shock of unruly Russian hair. He was a gentle, unobtrusive creature and it was hard to believe that the Czarist government had really feared his revolutionary activities. He taught Russian and wrote for papers in Moscow. He was amiable and obliging. He needed these qualities, for Anastasia Alexandrovna was a woman of character: when she had a toothache Vladimir Semenovich suffered the agonies of the damned, and when her heart was wrung by the suffering of her unhappy country Vladimir Semenovich might well have wished he had never been born. Ashenden could not help admitting that he was a poor thing, but he was so harmless that he conceived quite a liking for him, and when in due course he had disclosed his passion to Anastasia Alexandrovna and to his joy found it was returned he was puzzled to know what to do about Vladimir Semenovich. Neither Anastasia Alexandrovna nor he felt that they could live another minute out of one another’s pockets, and Ashenden feared that, with her revolutionary views and all that, she would never consent to marry him; but somewhat to his surprise, and very much to his relief, she accepted the suggestion with alacrity.

‘Would Vladimir Semenovich let himself be divorced, do you think?’ he asked, as he sat on the sofa, leaning against cushions the colour of which reminded him of raw meat just gone bad, and held her hand.

‘Vladimir adores me,’ she answered. ‘It’ll break his heart.’

‘He’s a nice fellow, I shouldn’t like him to be very unhappy. I hope he’ll get over it.’

‘He’ll never get over it. That is the Russian spirit. I know that when I leave him he’ll feel that he has lost everything that made life worth living for him. I’ve never known anyone so wrapped up in a woman as he is in me. But of course he wouldn’t want to stand in the way of my happiness. He’s far too great for that. He’ll see that when it’s a question of my own self–development I haven’t the right to hesitate. Vladimir will give me my freedom without question.’

At that time the divorce law in England was even more complicated and absurd than it is now and in case she was not acquainted with its peculiarities Ashenden explained to Anastasia Alexandrovna the difficulties of the case. She put her hand gently on his.

‘Vladimir would never expose me to the vulgar notoriety of the divorce court. When I tell him that I have decided to marry you he will commit suicide.’

‘That would be terrible,’ said Ashenden.

He was startled, but thrilled. It was really very much like a Russian novel and he saw the moving and terrible pages, pages and pages, in which Dostoyevsky would have described the situation. He knew the lacerations his characters would have suffered, the broken bottles of champagne, the visits to the gipsies, the vodka, the swoonings, the catalepsy, and the long, long speeches everyone would have made. It was all very dreadful and wonderful and shattering.

‘It would make us horribly unhappy,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna, ‘but I don’t know what else he could do. I couldn’t ask him to live without me. He would be like a ship without a rudder or a car without a carburettor. I know Vladimir so well. He will commit suicide.’

‘How?’ asked Ashenden, who had the realist’s passion for the exact detail.

‘He will blow his brains out.’

Ashenden remembered Rosmersholm. In his day he had been an ardent Ibsenite and had even flirted with the notion of learning Norwegian so that he might, by reading the master in the original, get at the secret essence of his thought. He had once seen Ibsen in the flesh drink a glass of Munich beer.

‘But do you think we could ever pass another easy hour if we had the death of that man on our conscience?’ he asked. ‘I have a feeling that he would always be between us.’

‘I know we shall suffer, we shall suffer dreadfully,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna, ‘but how can we help it? Life is like that. We must think of Vladimir. There is his happiness to be considered too. He will prefer to commit suicide.’

She turned her face away and Ashenden saw that the heavy tears were coursing down her cheeks. He was much moved. For he had a soft heart and it was dreadful to think of poor Vladimir lying there with a bullet in his brain.

These Russians, what fun they have!

But when Anastasia Alexandrovna had mastered her emotion she turned to him gravely. She looked at him with her humid, round, and slightly protuberant eyes.

‘We must be quite sure that we’re doing the right thing,’ she said. ‘I should never forgive myself if I’d allowed Vladimir to commit suicide and then found I’d made a mistake. I think we ought to make sure that we really love one another.’

‘But don’t you know?’ exclaimed Ashenden in a low, tense voice. ‘I know.’

‘Let’s go over to Paris for a week and see how we get on. Then we shall know.’

Ashenden was a trifle conventional and the suggestion took him by surprise. But only for a moment. Anastasia was wonderful. She was very quick and she saw the hesitation that for an instant troubled him.

‘Surely you have no bourgeois prejudices?’ she said.

‘Of course not,’ he assured her hurriedly, for he would much sooner have been thought knavish than bourgeois, ‘I think it’s a splendid idea.’

‘Why should a woman hazard her whole life on a throw? It’s impossible to know what a man is really like till you’ve lived with him. It’s only fair to give her the opportunity to change her mind before it’s too late.’

‘Quite so,’ said Ashenden.

Anastasia Alexandrovna was not a woman to let the grass grow under her feet and so having made their arrangements forthwith on the following Saturday they started for Paris.

‘I shall not tell Vladimir that I am going with you,’ she said. ‘It would only distress him.’

‘It would be a pity to do that,’ said Ashenden.

‘And if at the end of the week I come to the conclusion that we’ve made a mistake he need never know anything about it.’

‘Quite so,’ said Ashenden. They met at Victoria Station. ‘What class have you got?’ she asked him. ‘First.’

‘I’m glad of that. Father and Vladimir travel third on account of their principles, but I always feel sick on a train and I like to be able to lean my head on somebody’s shoulder. It’s easier in a first–class carriage.’

When the train started Anastasia Alexandrovna said she felt dizzy, so she took off her hat and leaned her head on Ashenden’s shoulder. He put his arm round her waist.

‘Keep quite still, won’t you?’ she said.

When they got on to the boat she went down to the ladies’ cabin and at Calais was able to eat a very hearty meal, but when they got into the train she took off her hat again and rested her head on Ashenden’s shoulder. He thought he would like to read and took up a book.

‘Do you mind not reading?’ she said.’ I have to be held and when you turn the pages it makes me feel all funny.’

Finally they reached Paris and went to a little hotel on the Left Bank that Anastasia Alexandrovna knew of. She said it had atmosphere. She could not bear those great big grand hotels on the other side; they were hopelessly vulgar and bourgeois.

‘I’ll go anywhere you like,’ said Ashenden, ‘as long as there’s a bathroom.’ She smiled and pinched his cheek.

‘How adorably English you are. Can’t you do without a bathroom for a week? My dear, my dear, you have so much to learn.’

They talked far into the night about Maxim Gorki and Karl Marx, human destiny, love, and the brotherhood of man; and drank innumerable cups of Russian tea, so that in the morning Ashenden would willingly have breakfasted in bed and got up for luncheon; but Anastasia Alexandrovna was an early riser. When life was so short and there was so much to do it was a sinful thing to have breakfast a minute after half past eight. They sat down in a dingy little dining–room the windows of which showed no signs of having been opened for a month. It was full of atmosphere. Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

‘Scrambled eggs,’ she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath–bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comédie Française; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight–thirty they took their places in the dining–room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

‘Scrambled eggs.’

‘But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,’ he expostulated.

‘Let’s have them again today,’ she smiled.

‘All right.’

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musée Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden’s inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank. ‘But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think that’s a very good reason to have them again today?’ ‘No, I don’t.’

’Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?’ she asked. ‘I eat scrambled eggs every day. It’s the only way I like them.’

‘Oh, very well. In that case of course we’ll have scrambled eggs.’

But the following morning he could not face them.

‘Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?’ he asked her.

‘Of course,’ she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

‘All right, I’ll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’ The smile vanished from her lips.

‘Oh?’ She paused a moment. ‘Don’t you think that’s rather inconsiderate? Do you think it’s fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you’re all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?’

‘Do you really think that there’ll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?’

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

‘You don’t understand. It’s the principle of the thing. You think it’s a jest, of course I know you’re being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well–known in Russia as a humorist; but don’t you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It’s a lack of feeling. You wouldn’t talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.’

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden’s hand.

‘I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won’t say anything more about it. You have imagination. You’re very sensitive. I know. You’ll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said: ‘Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.’ At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

‘We’ve had a wonderful time, haven’t we?’ she said.

‘Wonderful.’

‘I’ve quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I’m quite willing to marry you whenever you like.’

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.

Some years had passed since then and Ashenden had not seen Anastasia Alexandrovna again. He knew that on the outbreak of the revolution in March she and Vladimir Semenovich had gone to Russia. It might be that they would be able to help him, in a way Vladimir Semenovich owed him his life, and he made up his mind to write to Anastasia Alexandrovna to ask if he might come to see her.

When Ashenden went down to lunch he felt somewhat rested. Mr Harrington was waiting for him and they sat down. They ate what was put before them.

‘Ask the waiter to bring us some bread,’ said Mr Harrington.

‘Bread?’ replied Ashenden. ‘There’s no bread.’

‘I can’t eat without bread,’ said Mr Harrington.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to. There’s no bread, no butter, no sugar, no eggs, no potatoes. There’s fish and meat and green vegetables, and that’s all.’

Mr Harrington’s jaw dropped.

‘But this is war,’ he said.

‘It looks very much like it.’

Mr Harrington was for a moment speechless; then he said: ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to get through with my business as quick as I can and then I’m going to get out of this country. I’m sure Mrs Harrington wouldn’t like me to go without sugar or butter. I’ve got a very delicate stomach. The firm would never have sent me here if they’d thought I wasn’t going to have the best of everything.’

In a little while Dr Egon Orth came in and gave Ashenden an envelope. On it was written Anastasia Alexandrovna’s address. He introduced him to Mr Harrington. It was soon clear that he was pleased with Dr Egon Orth and so without further to–do he suggested that here was the perfect interpreter for him.

‘He talks Russian like a Russian. But he’s an American citizen so that he won’t do you down. I’ve known him a considerable time and I can assure you that he’s absolutely trustworthy.’

Mr Harrington was pleased with the notion and after luncheon Ashenden left them to settle the matter by themselves. He wrote a note to Anastasia Alexandrovna and presently received an answer to say that she was going to a meeting, but would look in at his hotel about seven. He awaited her with apprehension. Of course he knew now that he had not loved her, but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Rimsky–Korsakov, Stravinsky, and Bakst; but he was not quite sure if the point had occurred to her. When between eight and half past she arrived he suggested that she should join Mr Harrington and him at dinner. The presence of a third party, he thought, would prevent any awkwardness their meeting might have; but he need not have had any anxiety, for five minutes after they had sat down to a plate of soup it was borne in upon him that the feelings of Anastasia Alexandrovna towards him were as cool as were his towards her. It gave him a momentary shock. It is very hard for a man, however modest, to grasp the possibility that a woman who has once loved him may love him no longer, and though of course he did not imagine that Anastasia Alexandrovna had languished for five years with a hopeless passion for him, he did think that by a heightening of colour, a flutter of the eyelashes, or a quiver of the lips’ she would betray the fact that she had still a soft place in her heart for him. Not at all. She talked to him as though he were a friend she was very glad to see again after an absence of a few days, but whose intimacy with her was purely social. He asked after Vladimir Semenovich.

‘He has been a disappointment to me,’ she said. ‘I never thought he was a clever man, but I thought he was an honest one. He’s going to have a baby.’

Mr Harrington who was about to put a piece of fish into his mouth, stopped, his fork in the air, and stared at Anastasia Alexandrovna with astonishment. In extenuation it must be explained that he had never read a Russian novel in his life. Ashenden, slightly perplexed too, gave her a questioning look.

‘I’m not the mother,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I am not interested in that sort of thing. The mother is a friend of mine and a well–known writer on Political Economy. I do not think her views are sound, but I should be the last to deny that they deserve consideration. She has a good brain, quite a good brain.’ She turned to Mr Harrington. ‘Are you interested in Political Economy?’

For once in his life Mr Harrington was speechless. Anastasia Alexandrovna gave them her views on the subject and they began to speak on the situation in Russia. She seemed to be on intimate terms with the leaders of the various political parties and Ashenden made up his mind to sound her on the possibility of her working with him. His infatuation had not blinded him to the fact that she was an extremely intelligent woman. After dinner he told Mr Harrington that he wished to talk business with Anastasia Alexandrovna and took her to a retired corner of the lounge. He told her all he thought necessary and found her interested and anxious to help. She had a passion for intrigue and a desire for power. When he hinted that he had command of large sums of money she saw at once that through him she might acquire an influence in the affairs of Russia. It tickled her vanity. She was immensely patriotic, but like many patriots she had an impression that her own aggrandizement tended to the good of her country. When they parted they had come to a working agreement.

‘That was a very remarkable woman,’ said Mr Harrington next morning when they met at breakfast.

‘Don’t fall in love with her,’ smiled Ashenden.

This, however, was not a matter on which Mr Harrington was prepared to jest.

‘I have never looked at a woman since I married Mrs Harrington,’ he said. ‘That husband of hers must be a bad man.’

‘I could do with a plate of scrambled eggs,’ said Ashenden, irrelevantly, for their breakfast consisted of a cup of tea without milk and a little jam instead of sugar.

With Anastasia Alexandrovna to help him and Dr Orth in the background, Ashenden set to work. Things in Russia were going from bad to worse. Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, was devoured by vanity and dismissed any minister who gave evidence of a capacity that might endanger his own position. He made speeches. He made endless speeches. At one moment there was a possibility that the Germans would make a dash for Petrograd. Kerensky made speeches. The food shortage grew more serious, the winter was approaching and there was no fuel. Kerensky made speeches. In the background the Bolsheviks were active, Lenin was hiding in Petrograd, it was said that Kerensky knew where he was, but dared not arrest him. He made speeches.

It amused Ashenden to see the unconcern with which Mr Harrington wandered through this turmoil. History was in the making and Mr Harrington minded his own business. It was uphill work. He was made to pay bribes to secretaries and underlings under the pretence that the ear of great men would be granted to him. He was kept waiting for hours in antechambers and then sent away without ceremony. When at last he saw the great men he found they had nothing to give him but idle words. They made him promises and in a day or two he discovered that the promises meant nothing. Ashenden advised him to throw in his hand and return to America; but Mr Harrington would not hear of it; his firm had sent him to do a particular job, and by gum, he was going to do it or perish in the attempt. Then Anastasia Alexandrovna took him in hand. A singular friendship had arisen between the pair. Mr Harrington thought her a very remarkable and deeply wronged woman; he told her all about his wife and two sons, he told her all about the Constitution of the United States; she on her side told him all about Vladimir Semenovich, and she told him about Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. They had great times together. He said he couldn’t manage to call her Anastasia Alexandrovna, it was too much of a mouthful; so he called her Delilah. And now she placed her inexhaustible energy at his service and they went together to the persons who might be useful to him. But things were coming to a head. Riots broke out and the streets were growing dangerous. Now and then armoured cars filled with discontented reservists careered wildly along the Nevsky Prospekt and in order to show that they were not happy took pot–shots at the passers by. On one occasion when Mr Harrington and Anastasia Alexandrovna were in a tram together shots peppered the windows and they had to lie down on the floor for safety. Mr Harrington was highly indignant.

‘An old fat woman was lying right on top of me and when I wriggled to get out Delilah caught me a clip on the side of the head and said: Stop still, you fool. I don’t like your Russian ways, Delilah.’

‘Anyhow you stopped still,’ she giggled.

‘What you want in this country is a little less art and a little more civilization.’

‘You are bourgeoisie, Mr Harrington, you are not a member of the intelligentsia.’

‘You are the first person who’s ever said that, Delilah. If I’m not a member of the intelligentsia I don’t know who is,’ retorted Mr Harrington with dignity.

Then one day when Ashenden was working in his room there was a knock at the door and Anastasia Alexandrovna stalked in, followed somewhat sheepishly by Mr Harrington. Ashenden saw that she was excited.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Unless this man goes back to America he’ll get killed. You really must talk to him. If I hadn’t been there something very unpleasant might have happened to him.’

‘Not at all, Delilah,’ said Mr Harrington, with asperity. ‘I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself and I wasn’t in the smallest danger.’

‘What is it all about?’ asked Ashenden.

‘I’d taken Mr Harrington to the Lavra of Alexander Nevsky to see Dostoyevsky’s grave,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna, ‘and on our way back we saw a soldier being rather rough with an old woman.’

‘Rather rough!’ cried Mr Harrington. ‘There was an old woman walking along the pavement with a basket of provisions on her arm. Two soldiers came up behind her and one of them snatched the basket from her and walked off with it.

She burst out screaming and crying. I don’t know what she was saying, but I can guess, and the other soldier took his gun and with the butt–end of it hit her over the head. Isn’t that right, Delilah?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, unable to help smiling. ‘And before I could prevent it Mr Harrington jumped out of the cab and ran up to the soldier who had the basket, wrenched it from him and began to abuse the pair of them like pickpockets. At first they were so taken aback they didn’t know what to do and then they got in a rage. I ran after Mr Harrington and explained to them that he was a foreigner and drunk.’

‘Drunk?’ cried Mr Harrington.

‘Yes, drunk. Of course a crowd collected. It looked as though it wasn’t going to be very nice.’

Mr Harrington smiled with those large, pale–blue eyes of his.

‘It sounded to me as though you were giving them a piece of your mind, Delilah. It was as good as a play to watch you.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Mr Harrington,’ cried Anastasia, in a sudden fury, stamping her foot. ‘Don’t you know that those soldiers might very easily have killed you and me too, and not one of the bystanders would have raised a finger to help us?’

‘Me? I’m an American citizen, Delilah. They wouldn’t dare touch a hair of my head.’

‘They’d have difficulty in finding one,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna, who when she was in a temper had no manners. ‘But if you think Russian soldiers are going to hesitate to kill you because you’re an American citizen you’ll get a big surprise one of these days.’

‘Well, what happened to the old woman?’ asked Ashenden.

‘The soldiers went off after a little and we went back to her.’

‘Still with the basket?’

‘Yes. Mr Harrington clung on to that like grim death. She was lying on the ground with the blood pouring from her head. We got her into the cab and when she could speak enough to tell us where she lived we drove her home. She was bleeding dreadfully and we had some difficulty in staunching the blood.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna gave Mr Harrington an odd look and to his surprise Ashenden saw him turn scarlet.

‘What’s the matter now?’

‘You see, we had nothing to bind her up with. Mr Harrington’s handkerchief was soaked. There was only one thing about me that I could get off quickly and so I took off my...’

But before she could finish Mr Harrington interrupted her.

‘You need not tell Mr Ashenden what you took off. I’m a married man and I know ladies wear them, but I see no need to refer to them in general society.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna giggled.

‘Then you must kiss me, Mr Harrington. If you don’t I shall say.’

Mr Harrington hesitated a moment, considering evidently the pros and cons of the matter, but saw that Anastasia Alexandrovna was determined.

‘Go on then, you may kiss me, Delilah, though I’m bound to say I don’t see what pleasure it can be to you.’

She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on both cheeks, then without a word of warning burst into a flood of tears.

‘You’re a brave little man, Mr Harrington. You’re absurd but magnificent,’ she sobbed.

Mr Harrington was less surprised than Ashenden would have expected him to be. He looked at Anastasia with a thin, quizzical smile and gently patted her.

‘Come, come, Delilah, pull yourself together. It gave you a nasty turn, didn’t it? You’re quite upset. I shall have terrible rheumatism in my shoulder if you go on weeping all over it.’

The scene was ridiculous and touching. Ashenden laughed, but he had the beginnings of a lump in his throat.

When Anastasia Alexandrovna had left them Mr Harrington sat in a brown study.

‘They’re very queer, these Russians. Do you know what Delilah did?’ he said, suddenly. ‘She stood up in the cab, in the middle of the street, with people passing on both sides, and took her pants off. She tore them in two and gave me one to hold while she made a bandage of the other. I was never so embarrassed in my life.’

‘Tell me what gave you the idea of calling her Delilah?’ smiled Ashenden.

Mr Harrington reddened a little.

‘She’s a very fascinating woman, Mr Ashenden. She’s been deeply wronged by her husband and I naturally felt a great deal of sympathy for her. These Russians are very emotional people and I did not want her to mistake my sympathy for anything else. I told her I was very much attached to Mrs Harrington.’

‘You’re not under the impression that Delilah was Potiphar’s wife?’ asked Ashenden.

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, Mr Ashenden,’ replied Mr Harrington. ‘Mrs Harrington has always given me to understand that I’m very fascinating to women, and I thought if I called our little friend Delilah it would make my position quite clear.’

‘I don’t think Russia’s any place for you, Mr Harrington,’ said Ashenden smiling. ‘If I were you I’d get out of it as quick as I could.’

‘I can’t go now. I’ve got them to agree to my terms at last and we’re going to sign next week. Then I shall pack my grip and go.’

‘I wonder if your signatures will be worth the paper they’re written on,’ said Ashenden.

He had at length devised a plan of campaign. It took him twenty–four hours’ hard work to code a telegram in which he put his scheme before the persons who had sent him to Petrograd. It was accepted and he was promised all the money he needed. Ashenden knew he could do nothing unless the Provisional Government remained in power for another three months; but winter was at hand and food was getting scarcer every day. The army was mutinous. The people clamoured for peace. Every evening at the Europe Ashenden drank a cup of chocolate with Professor Z. and discussed with him how best to make use of his devoted Czechs. Anastasia Alexandrovna had a flat in a retired spot and here he had meetings with all manner of persons. Plans were drawn up. Measures were taken. Ashenden argued, persuaded, promised. He had to overcome the vacillation of one and wrestle with the fatalism of another. He had to judge who was resolute and who was self–sufficient, who was honest and who was infirm of purpose. He had to curb his impatience with the Russian verbosity; he had to be good–tempered with people who were willing to talk of everything but the matter in hand; he had to listen sympathetically to ranting and rodomontade. He had to beware of treachery. He had to humour the vanity of fools and elude the greed of the ambitious. Time was pressing. The rumours grew hot and many of the activities of the Bolsheviks. Kerensky ran hither and thither like a frightened hen.

Then the blow fell. On the night of 7 November 1917 the Bolsheviks rose. Kerensky’s ministers were arrested, and the Winter Palace was sacked by the mob; the reins of power were seized by Lenin and Trotsky.

Anastasia Alexandrovna came to Ashenden’s room at the hotel early in the morning. Ashenden was coding a telegram. He had been up all night, first at the Smolny, and then at the Winter Palace. He was tired out. Her face was white and her shining brown eyes were tragic.

‘Have you heard?’ she asked Ashenden.

He nodded.

‘It’s all over then. They say Kerensky has fled. They never even showed fight.’ Rage seized her. ‘The buffoon!’ she screamed.

At that moment there was a knock at the door and Anastasia Alexandrovna looked at it with sudden apprehension.

‘You know the Bolsheviks have got a list of people they’ve decided to execute. My name is on it, and it may be that yours is too.’

‘If it’s they and they want to come in they only have to turn the handle,’ said Ashenden, smiling, but with ever so slightly odd a feeling at the pit of his stomach. ‘Come in.’

The door was opened and Mr Harrington stepped into the room. He was as dapper as ever, in his short black coat and striped trousers, his shoes neatly polished and a derby on his bald head. He took it off when he saw Anastasia Alexandrovna.

‘Oh, fancy finding you here so early. I looked in on my way out, I wanted to tell you my news. I tried to find you yesterday evening, but couldn’t. You didn’t come in to dinner.’

‘No, I was at a meeting,’ said Ashenden.

‘You must both congratulate me, I got my signatures yesterday, and my business is done.’

Mr Harrington beamed on them, the picture of self–satisfaction, and he arched himself like a bantam–cock who has chased away all rivals. Anastasia Alexandrovna burst into a sudden shriek of hysterical laughter. He stared at her in perplexity.

‘Why, Delilah, what is the matter?’ he said.

Anastasia laughed till the tears ran from her eyes and then began to sob in earnest. Ashenden explained.

‘The Bolsheviks have overthrown the Government. Kerensky’s ministers are in prison. The Bolsheviks are out to kill. Delilah says her name is on the list. Your minister signed your documents yesterday because he knew it did not matter what he did then. Your contracts are worth nothing. The Bolsheviks are going to make peace with Germany as soon as they can.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna had recovered her self–control as quickly as she had lost it.

‘You had better get out of Russia as soon as you can, Mr Harrington. It’s no place for a foreigner now and it may be that in a few days you won’t be able to.’

Mr Harrington looked from one to the other.

‘O my,’ he said. ‘O my!’ It seemed inadequate. ‘Are you going to tell me that that Russian minister was just making a fool of me?’

Ashenden shrugged his shoulders.

‘How can one tell what he was thinking of? He may have a keen sense of humour and perhaps he thought it funny to sign a fifty–million–dollar contract yesterday when there was every chance of his being stood against the wall and shot today. Anastasia Alexandrovna’s right, Mr Harrington, you’d better take the first train that’ll get you to Sweden.’

‘And what about you?’

‘There’s nothing for me to do here any more. I’m cabling for instructions and I shall go as soon as I get leave. The Bolsheviks have got ahead of us and the people I was working with will have their work cut out to save their lives.’

‘Boris Petrovich was shot this morning,’ said Anastasia Alexandrovna with a frown.

They both looked at Mr Harrington and he stared at the floor. His pride in this achievement of his was shattered and he sagged like a pricked balloon. But in a minute he looked up. He gave Anastasia Alexandrovna a little smile and for the first time Ashenden noticed how attractive and kindly his smile was. There was something peculiarly disarming about it.

‘If the Bolsheviks are after you, Delilah, don’t you think you’d better come with me? I’ll take care of you and if you like to come to America I’m sure Mrs Harrington would be glad to do anything she could for you.’

‘I can see Mrs Harrington’s face if you arrived in Philadelphia with a Russian refugee,’ laughed Anastasia Alexandrovna. ‘I’m afraid it would need more explaining than you could ever manage. No, I shall stay here.’

‘But if you’re in danger?’

‘I’m a Russian. My place is here. I will not leave my country when most my country needs me.’

‘That is bunk, Delilah,’ said Mr Harrington very quietly.

Anastasia Alexandrovna had spoken with deep emotion, but now with a little start she shot a sudden quizzical look at him.

‘I know it is, Samson,’ she answered. ‘To tell you the truth I think we’re all going to have a hell of a time, God knows what’s going to happen, but I want to see; I wouldn’t miss a minute of it for the world.’

Mr Harrington shook his head.

‘Curiosity is the bane of your sex, Delilah,’ he said.

‘Go along and do your packing, Mr Harrington,’ said Ashenden, smiling, ‘and then we’ll take you to the station. The train will be besieged.

‘Very well, I’ll go. And I shan’t be sorry either. I haven’t had a decent meal since I came here and I’ve done a thing I never thought I should have to do in my life, I’ve drunk my coffee without sugar and when I’ve been lucky enough to get a little piece of black bread I’ve had to eat it without butter. Mrs Harrington will never believe me when I tell her what I’ve gone through. What this country wants is organization.’

When he left them Ashenden and Anastasia Alexandrovna talked over the situation. Ashenden was depressed because all his careful schemes had come to nothing, but Anastasia Alexandrovna was excited and she hazarded every sort of guess about the outcome of this new revolution. She pretended to be very serious, but in her heart she looked upon it all very much as a thrilling play. She wanted more and more things to happen. Then there was another knock at the door and before Ashenden could answer Mr Harrington burst in.

‘Really the service at this hotel is a scandal,’ he cried heatedly, ‘I’ve been ringing my bell for fifteen minutes and I can’t get anyone to pay the smallest attention to me.’

‘Service?’ exclaimed Anastasia Alexandrovna. ‘There is not a servant left in the hotel.’

‘But I want my laundry. They promised to let me have it back last night.’

‘I’m afraid you haven’t got much chance of getting it now,’ said Ashenden.

‘I’m not going to leave without my laundry. Four shirts, two union suits, a pair of pyjamas, and four collars. I wash my handkerchiefs and socks in my room. I want my laundry and I’m not going to leave this hotel without it.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ cried Ashenden. ‘What you’ve got to do is to get out of here while the going’s good. If there are no servants to get it you’ll just have to leave your washing behind you.’

‘Pardon me, sir, I shall do nothing of the kind. I’ll go and fetch it myself. I’ve suffered enough at the hands of this country and I’m not going to leave four perfectly good shirts to be worn by a lot of dirty Bolsheviks. No, sir, I do not leave Russia till I have my laundry.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna stared at the floor for a moment; then with a little smile looked up. It seemed to Ashenden that there was something in her that responded to Mr Harrington’s futile obstinacy. In her Russian way she understood that Mr Harrington could not leave Petrograd without his washing. His insistence had given it the value of a symbol.

‘I’ll go downstairs and see if I can find anybody about who knows where the laundry is, and if I can I’ll go with you and you can bring your washing away with you.’

Mr Harrington unbent. He answered with that sweet and disarming smile of his.

‘That’s terribly kind of you, Delilah. I don’t mind if it’s ready or not, I’ll take it just as it is.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna left them.

‘Well, what do you think of Russia and the Russians now, Mr Harrington?’ asked Ashenden.

‘I’m fed up with them. I’m fed up with Tolstoy, I’m fed up with Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, I’m fed up with Chekhov. I’m fed up with the Intelligentsia. I hanker after people who know their mind from one minute to another, who mean what they say an hour after they’ve said it, whose word you can rely on; I’m sick of fine phrases, and oratory and attitudinizing.’

Ashenden, bitten by the prevailing ill, was about to make a speech when he was interrupted by a rattle as of peas on a drum. In the city, so strangely silent, it sounded abrupt and odd.

‘What’s that?’ asked Mr Harrington.

‘Rifle–firing. On the other side of the river, I should think.’

Mr Harrington gave a funny little look. He laughed, but his face was a trifle pale; he did not like it, and Ashenden did not blame him.

‘I think it’s high time I got out. I shouldn’t so much mind for myself, but I’ve got a wife and children to think of. I haven’t had a letter from Mrs Harrington for so long I’m a bit worried.’ He paused an instant. ‘I’d like you to know Mrs Harrington, she’s a very wonderful woman. She’s the best wife a man ever had. Until I came here I’d not been separated from her for more than three days since we were married.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna came back and told them that she had found the address.

‘It’s about forty minutes’ walk from here and if you’ll come now I’ll go with you,’ she said.

‘I’m ready.’

‘You’d better look out,’ said Ashenden. ‘I don’t believe the streets are very healthy today.’

Anastasia Alexandrovna looked at Mr Harrington.

‘I must have my laundry, Delilah,’ he said. ‘I should never rest in peace if I left it behind me and Mrs Harrington would never let me hear the last of it.’

‘Come on then.’

They set out and Ashenden went on with the dreary business of translating into a very complicated code the shattering news he had to give. It was a long message, and then he had to ask for instructions upon his own movements. It was a mechanical job and yet it was one in which you could not allow your attention to wander. The mistake of a single figure might make a whole sentence incomprehensible.

Suddenly his door was burst open and Anastasia Alexandrovna flung into the room. She had lost her hat and was dishevelled. She was panting. Her eyes were starting out of her head and she was obviously in a state of great excitement.

‘Where’s Mr Harrington?’ she cried. ‘Isn’t he here?’

‘No.’

’Is he in his bedroom?’

‘I don’t know. Why, what’s the matter? We’ll go and look if you like. Why didn’t you bring him along with you?’

They walked down the passage and knocked at Mr Harrington’s door; there was no answer; they tried the handle; the door was locked.

‘He’s not there.’

They went back to Ashenden’s room. Anastasia Alexandrovna sank into a chair.

‘Give me a glass of water, will you? I’m out of breath. I’ve been running.’

She drank the water Ashenden poured out for her. She gave a sudden sob.

‘I hope he’s all right. I should never forgive myself if he was hurt. I was hoping he would have got here before me. He got his washing all right. We found the place. There was only an old woman there and they didn’t want to let us take it, but we insisted. Mr Harrington was furious because it hadn’t been touched. It was exactly as he had sent it. They’d promised it last night and it was still in the bundle that Mr Harrington had made himself. I said that was Russia and Mr Harrington said he preferred coloured people. I’d led him by side streets because I thought it was better, and we started to come back again. We passed at the top of a street and at the bottom of it I saw a little crowd. There was a man addressing them.

‘“Let’s go and hear what he’s saying,” I said.

‘I could see they were arguing. It looked exciting. I wanted to know what was happening.

‘“Come along, Delilah,” he said. “Let us mind our own business.”

‘“You go back to the hotel and do your packing. I’m going to see the fun,” I said.

‘I ran down the street and he followed me. There were about two or three hundred people there and a student was addressing them. There were some working–men and they were shouting at him. I love a row and I edged my way into the crowd. Suddenly we heard the sound of shots and before you could realize what was happening two armoured cars came dashing down the street. There were soldiers in them and they were firing as they went. I don’t know why. For fun, I suppose, or because they were drunk. We all scattered like a lot of rabbits. We just ran for our lives. I lost Mr Harrington. I can’t make out why he isn’t here. Do you think something has happened to him?’ Ashenden was silent for a while.

‘We’d better go out and look for him,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why the devil he couldn’t leave his washing.’

‘I understand, I understand so well.’

‘That’s a comfort,’ said Ashenden irritably. ‘Let’s go.’

He put on his hat and coat, and they walked downstairs. The hotel seemed strangely empty. They went out into the street. There was hardly anyone to be seen. They walked along. The trams were not running and the silence in the great city was uncanny. The shops were closed. It was quite startling when a motor–car dashed by at breakneck speed. The people they passed looked frightened and downcast. When they had to go through a main thoroughfare they hastened their steps. A lot of people were there and they stood about irresolutely as though they did not know what to do next. Reservists in their shabby grey were walking down the middle of the roadway in little bunches. They did not speak. They looked like sheep looking for their shepherd. Then they came to the street down which Anastasia Alexandrovna had run, but they entered it from the opposite end. A number of windows had been broken by the wild shooting. It was quite empty. You could see where the people had scattered, for strewn about were articles they had dropped in their haste, books, a man’s hat, a lady’s bag, and a basket. Anastasia Alexandrovna touched Ashenden’s arm to draw his attention: sitting on the pavement, her head bent right down to her lap, was a woman and she was dead. A little way on two men had fallen together. They were dead too. The wounded, one supposed, had managed to drag themselves away or their friends had carried them. Then they found Mr Harrington. His derby had rolled in the gutter. He lay on his face, in a pool of blood, his bald head, with its prominent bones, very white; his neat black coat smeared and muddy. But his hand was clenched tight on the parcel that contained four shirts, two union suits, a pair of pyjamas, and four collars. Mr Harrington had not let his washing go.

LORD MOUNTDRAGO

Dr Audlin looked at the clock on his desk. It was twenty minutes to six. He was surprised that his patient was late, for Lord Mountdrago prided himself on his punctuality; he had a sententious way of expressing himself which gave the air of an epigram to a commonplace remark, and he was in the habit of saying that punctuality is a compliment you pay to the intelligent and a rebuke you administer to the stupid. Lord Mountdrago’s appointment was for five–thirty.

There was in Dr Audlin’s appearance nothing to attract attention. He was tall and spare, with narrow shoulders and something of a stoop; his hair was grey and thin; his long, sallow face deeply lined. He was not more than fifty, but he looked older. His eyes, pale–blue and rather large, were weary. When you had been with him for a while you noticed that they moved very little; they remained fixed on your face, but so empty of expression were they that it was no discomfort. They seldom lit up. They gave no clue to his thoughts nor changed with the words he spoke. If you were of an observant turn it might have struck you that he blinked much less often than most of us. His hands were on the large side, with long, tapering fingers; they were soft, but firm, cool but not clammy. You could never have said what Dr Audlin wore unless you had made a point of looking. His clothes were dark. His tie was black. His dress made his sallow lined face paler, and his pale eyes more wan. He gave you the impression of a very sick man.

Dr Audlin was a psycho–analyst. He had adopted the profession by accident and practised it with misgiving. When the war broke out he had not been long qualified and was getting experience at various hospitals; he offered his services to the authorities, and after a time was sent out to France. It was then that he discovered his singular gift. He could allay certain pains by the touch of his cool, firm hands, and by talking to them often induce sleep in men who were suffering from sleeplessness. He spoke slowly. His voice had no particular colour, and its tone did not alter with the words he uttered, but it was musical, soft, and lulling. He told the men that they must rest, that they mustn’t worry, that they must sleep; and rest stole into their jaded bones, tranquillity pushed their anxieties away, like a man finding a place for himself on a crowded bench, and slumber fell on their tired eyelids like the light rain of spring upon the fresh–turned earth. Dr Audlin found that by speaking to men with that low, monotonous voice of his, by looking at them with his pale, quiet eyes, by stroking their weary foreheads with his long firm hands, he could soothe their perturbations, resolve the conflicts that distracted them, and banish the phobias that made their lives a torment. Sometimes he effected cures that seemed miraculous. He restored speech to a man who, after being buried under the earth by a bursting shell, had been struck dumb, and he gave back the use of his limbs to another who had been paralysed after a crash in a plane. He could not understand his powers; he was of a sceptical turn, and though they say that in circumstances of this kind the first thing is to believe in yourself, he never quite succeeded in doing that; and it was only the outcome of his activities, patent to the most incredulous observer, that obliged him to admit that he had some faculty, coming from he knew not where, obscure and uncertain, that enabled him to do things for which he could offer no explanation. When the war was over he went to Vienna and studied there, and afterwards to Zürich; and then settled down in London to practise the art he had so strangely acquired. He had been practising now for fifteen years, and had attained, in the speciality he followed, a distinguished reputation. People told one another of the amazing things he had done, and though his fees were high, he had as many patients as he had time to see. Dr Audlin knew that he had achieved some very extraordinary results; he had saved men from suicide, others from the lunatic asylum, he had assuaged griefs that embittered useful lives, he had turned unhappy marriages into happy ones, he had eradicated abnormal instincts and thus delivered not a few from a hateful bondage, he had given health to the sick in spirit; he had done all this, and yet at the back of his mind remained the suspicion that he was little more than a quack.

It went against his grain to exercise a power that he could not understand, and it offended his honesty to trade on the faith of the people he treated when he had no faith in himself. He was rich enough now to live without working, and the work exhausted him; a dozen times he had been on the point of giving up practice. He knew all that Freud and Jung and the rest of them had written. He was not satisfied; he had an intimate conviction that all their theory was hocus–pocus, and yet there the results were, incomprehensible, but manifest. And what had he not seen of human nature during the fifteen years that patients had been coming to his dingy back room in Wimpole Street? The revelations that had been poured into his ears, sometimes only too willingly, sometimes with shame, with reservations, with anger, had long ceased to surprise him. Nothing could shock him any longer. He knew by now that men were liars, he knew how extravagant was their vanity; he knew far worse than that about them; but he knew that it was not for him to judge or to condemn. But year by year as these terrible confidences were imparted to him his face grew a little greyer, its lines a little more marked, and his pale eyes more weary. He seldom laughed, but now and again when for relaxation he read a novel he smiled. Did their authors really think the men and women they wrote of were like that? If they only knew how much more complicated they were, how much more unexpected, what irreconcilable elements coexisted within their souls and what dark and sinister contentions afflicted them!

It was a quarter to six. Of all the strange cases he had been called upon to deal with Dr Audlin could remember none stranger than that of Lord Mountdrago. For one thing the personality of his patient made it singular. Lord Mountdrago was an able and a distinguished man. Appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs when still under forty, now after three years in office he had seen his policy prevail. It was generally acknowledged that he was the ablest politician in the Conservative Party and only the fact that his father was a peer, on whose death he would no longer be able to sit in the House of Commons, made it impossible for him to aim at the premiership. But if in these democratic times it is out of the question for a Prime Minister of England to be in the House of Lords, there was nothing to prevent Lord Mountdrago from continuing to be Secretary for Foreign Affairs in successive Conservative administrations and so for long directing the foreign policy of his country.

Lord Mountdrago had many good qualities. He had intelligence and industry. He was widely travelled, and spoke several languages fluently. From early youth he had specialized in foreign affairs, and had conscientiously made himself acquainted with the political and economic circumstances of other countries. He had courage, insight, and determination. He was a good speaker, both on the platform and in the House, clear, precise, and often witty. He was a brilliant debater and his gift of repartee was celebrated. He had a fine presence: he was a tall, handsome man, rather bald and somewhat too stout, but this gave him solidity and an air of maturity that were of service to him. As a young man he had been something of an athlete and had rowed in the Oxford boat, and he was known to be one of the best shots in England. At twenty–four he had married a girl of eighteen whose father was a duke and her mother a great American heiress, so that she had both position and wealth, and by her he had had two sons. For several years they had lived privately apart, but in public united, so that appearances were saved, and no other attachment on either side had given the gossips occasion to whisper. Lord Mountdrago indeed was too ambitious, too hard–working, and it must be added too patriotic, to be tempted by any pleasures that might interfere with his career. He had, in short, a great deal to make him a popular and successful figure. He had unfortunately great defects.

He was a fearful snob. You would not have been surprised at this if his father had been the first holder of the title. That the son of an ennobled lawyer, a manufacturer, or a distiller should attach an inordinate importance to his rank is understandable. The earldom held by Lord Mountdrago’s father was created by Charles II, and the barony held by the first Earl dated from the Wars of the Roses. For three hundred years the successive holders of the title had allied themselves with the noblest families of England. But Lord Mountdrago was as conscious of his birth as a nouveau riche is conscious of his money. He never missed an opportunity of impressing it upon others. He had beautiful manners when he chose to display them, but this he did only with people whom he regarded as his equals. He was coldly insolent to those whom he looked upon as his social inferiors. He was rude to his servants and insulting to his secretaries. The subordinate officials in the government offices to which he had been successively attached feared and hated him. His arrogance was horrible. He knew that he was a great deal cleverer than most of the persons he had to do with, and never hesitated to apprise them of the fact. He had no patience with the infirmities of human nature. He felt himself born to command and was irritated with people who expected him to listen to their arguments or wished to hear the reasons for his decisions. He was immeasurably selfish. He looked upon any service that was rendered him as a right due to his rank and intelligence and therefore deserving of no gratitude. It never entered his head that he was called upon to do anything for others. He had many enemies: he despised them. He knew no one who merited his assistance, his sympathy, or his compassion. He had no friends. He was distrusted by his chiefs, because they doubted his loyalty; he was unpopular with his party, because he was overbearing and discourteous; and yet his merit was so great, his patriotism so evident, his intelligence so solid, and his management of affairs so brilliant that they had to put up with him. And what made it possible to do this was that on occasion he could be enchanting; when he was with persons whom he considered his equals, or whom he wished to captivate, in the company of foreign dignitaries or women of distinction, he could be gay, witty, and debonair; his manners then reminded you that in his veins ran the same blood as had run in the veins of Lord Chesterfield; he could tell a story with point, he could be natural, sensible, and even profound. You were surprised at the extent of his knowledge and the sensitiveness of his taste. You thought him the best company in the world; you forgot that he had insulted you the day before and was quite capable of cutting you dead the next.

Lord Mountdrago almost failed to become Dr Audlin’s patient. A secretary rang up the doctor and told him that his lordship, wishing to consult him, would be glad if he would come to his house at ten o’clock on the following morning. Dr Audlin answered that he was unable to go to Lord Mountdrago’s house, but would be pleased to give him an appointment at his consulting–room at five o’clock on the next day but one. The secretary took the message and presently rang back to say that Lord Mountdrago insisted on seeing Dr Audlin in his own house and the doctor could fix his own fee. Dr Audlin replied that he only saw patients in his consulting–room and expressed his regret that unless Lord Mountdrago was prepared to come to him he could not give him his attention. In a quarter of an hour a brief message was delivered to him that his lordship would come not next day but one, but next day, at five.

When Lord Mountdrago was then shown in he did not come forward, but stood at the door and insolently looked the doctor up and down. Dr Audlin perceived that he was in a rage; he gazed at him, silently, with still eyes. He saw a big heavy man, with greying hair, receding on the forehead so that it gave nobility to his brow, a puffy face with bold regular features and an expression of haughtiness. He had somewhat the look of one of the Bourbon sovereigns of the eighteenth century.

‘It seems that it is as difficult to see you as a Prime Minister, Dr Audlin. I’m an extremely busy man.’

‘Won’t you sit down?’ said the doctor.

His face showed no sign that Lord Mountdrago’s speech in any way affected him. Dr Audlin sat in his chair at the desk. Lord Mountdrago still stood and his frown darkened.

‘I think I should tell you that I am His Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs,’ he said acidly.

‘Won’t you sit down?’ the doctor repeated.

Lord Mountdrago made a gesture, which might have suggested that he was about to turn on his heel and stalk out of the room; but if that was his intentionhe apparently thought better of it. He seated himself. Dr Audlin opened a large book and took up his pen. He wrote without looking at his patient.

‘How old are you?’

‘Forty–two.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Eighteen years.’

‘Have you any children?’

‘I have two sons.’

Dr Audlin noted down the facts as Lord Mountdrago abruptly answered his questions. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked at him. He did not speak; he just looked, gravely, with pale eyes that did not move.

‘Why have you come to see me?’ he asked at length.

‘I’ve heard about you. Lady Canute is a patient of yours, I understand. She tells me you’ve done her a certain amount of good.’

Dr Audlin did not reply. His eyes remained fixed on the other’s face, but they were so empty of expression that you might have thought he did not even see him.

‘I can’t do miracles,’ he said at length. Not a smile, but the shadow of a smile flickered in his eyes. ‘The Royal College of Physicians would not approve of it if I did.’

Lord Mountdrago gave a brief chuckle. It seemed to lessen his hostility. He spoke more amiably.

‘You have a very remarkable reputation. People seem to believe in you.’

‘Why have you come to me?’ repeated Dr Audlin.

Now it was Lord Mountdrago’s turn to be silent. It looked as though he found it hard to answer. Dr Audlin waited. At last Lord Mountdrago seemed to make an effort. He spoke.

‘I’m in perfect health. Just as a matter of routine I had myself examined by my own doctor the other day, Sir Augustus Fitzherbert, I dare say you’ve heard of him, and he tells me I have the physique of a man of thirty. I work hard, but I’m never tired, and I enjoy my work. I smoke very little and I’m an extremely moderate drinker. I take a sufficiency of exercise and I lead a regular life. I am a perfectly sound, normal, healthy man. I quite expect you to think it very silly and childish of me to consult you.’

Dr Audlin saw that he must help him.

‘I don’t know if I can do anything to help you. I’ll try. You’re distressed?’

Lord Mountdrago frowned.

‘The work that I’m engaged in is important. The decisions I am called upon to make can easily affect the welfare of the country and even the peace of the world. It is essential that my judgement should be balanced and my brain clear. I look upon it as my duty to eliminate any cause of worry that may interfere with my usefulness.’

Dr Audlin had never taken his eyes off him. He saw a great deal. He saw behind his patient’s pompous manner and arrogant pride an anxiety that he could not dispel.

‘I asked you to be good enough to come here because I know by experience that it’s easier for someone to speak openly in the dingy surroundings of a doctor’s consulting–room than in his accustomed environment.’

‘They’re certainly dingy,’ said Lord Mountdrago acidly. He paused. It was evident that this man who had so much self–assurance, so quick and decided a mind that he was never at a loss, at this moment was embarrassed. He smiled in order to show the doctor that he was at his ease, but his eyes betrayed his disquiet. When he spoke again it was with unnatural heartiness.

‘The whole thing’s so trivial that I can hardly bring myself to bother you with it. I’m afraid you’ll just tell me not to be a fool and waste your valuable time.’

‘Even things that seem very trivial may have their importance. They can be a symptom of a deep–seated derangement. And my time is entirely at your disposal.’

Dr Audlin’s voice was low and grave. The monotone in which he spoke was strangely soothing. Lord Mountdrago at length made up his mind to be frank.

‘The fact is I’ve been having some very tiresome dreams lately. I know it’s silly to pay any attention to them, but–well, the honest truth is that I’m afraid they’ve got on my nerves.’

‘Can you describe any of them to me?’

Lord Mountdrago smiled, but the smile that tried to be careless was only rueful.

‘They’re so idiotic, I can hardly bring myself to narrate them.’

‘Never mind.’

‘Well, the first I had was about a month ago. I dreamt that I was at a party at Connemara House. It was an official party. The King and Queen were to be there and of course decorations were worn. I was wearing my ribbon and my star. I went into a sort of cloakroom they have to take off my coat. There was a little man there called Owen Griffiths, who’s a Welsh Member of Parliament, and to tell you the truth, I was surprised to see him. He’s very common, and I said to myself: “Really, Lydia Connemara is going too far, whom will she ask next?” I thought he looked at me rather curiously, but I didn’t take any notice of him; in fact I cut the little bounder and walked upstairs. I suppose you’ve never been there?’

‘Never.’

‘No, it’s not the sort of house you’d ever be likely to go to. It’s a rather vulgar house, but it’s got a very fine marble staircase, and the Connemaras were at the top receiving their guests. Lady Connemara gave me a look of surprise when I shook hands with her, and began to giggle; I didn’t pay much attention, she’s a very silly, ill–bred woman and her manners are no better than those of her ancestor whom King Charles II made a duchess. I must say the reception rooms at Connemara House are stately. I walked through, nodding to a number of people and shaking hands; then I saw the German Ambassador talking with one of the Austrian Archdukes. I particularly wanted to have a word with him, so I went up and held out my hand. The moment the Archduke saw me he burst into a roar of laughter. I was deeply affronted. I looked him up and down sternly, but he only laughed the more. I was about to speak to him rather sharply, when there was a sudden hush and I realized that the King and Queen had come. Turning my back on the Archduke, I stepped forward, and then, quite suddenly, I noticed that I hadn’t got any trousers on. I was in short silk drawers, and I wore scarlet sock–suspenders. No wonder Lady Connemara had giggled; no wonder the Archduke had laughed! I can’t tell you what that moment was. An agony of shame. I awoke in a cold sweat. Oh, you don’t know the relief I felt to find it was only a dream.’

‘It’s the kind of dream that’s not so very uncommon,’ said Dr Audlin.

‘I dare say not. But an odd thing happened next day. I was in the lobby of the House of Commons, when that fellow Griffiths walked slowly past me. He deliberately looked down at my legs and then he looked me full in the face and I was almost certain he winked. A ridiculous thought came to me. He’d been there the night before and seen me make that ghastly exhibition of myself and was enjoying the joke. But of course I knew that was impossible because it was only a dream. I gave him an icy glare and he walked on. But he was grinning his head off.’

Lord Mountdrago took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the palms of his hands. He was making no attempt now to conceal his perturbation. Dr Audlin never took his eyes off him.

‘Tell me another dream.’

‘It was the night after, and it was even more absurd than the first one. I dreamt that I was in the House. There was a debate on foreign affairs which not only the country, but the world, had been looking forward to with the gravest concern. The government had decided on a change in their policy which vitally affected the future of the Empire. The occasion was historic. Of course the House was crowded. All the ambassadors were there. The galleries were packed. It fell to me to make the important speech of the evening. I had prepared it carefully. A man like me has enemies, there are a lot of people who resent my having achieved the position I have at an age when even the cleverest men are content with situations of relative obscurity, and I was determined that my speech should not only be worthy of the occasion, but should silence my detractors. It excited me to think that the whole world was hanging on my lips. I rose to my feet. If you’ve ever been in the House you’ll know how members chat to one another during a debate, rustle papers and turn over reports. The silence was the silence of the grave when I began to speak. Suddenly I caught sight of that odious little bounder on one of the benches opposite, Griffiths the Welsh member; he put out his tongue at me. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a vulgar music–hall song called A Bicycle Made for Two. It was very popular a great many years ago. To show Griffiths how completely I despised him I began to sing it. I sang the first verse right through. There was a moment’s surprise, and when I finished they cried “Hear, hear,” on the opposite benches. I put up my hand to silence them and sang the second verse. The House listened to me in stony silence and I felt the song wasn’t going down very well. I was vexed, for I have a good baritone voice, and I was determined that they should do me justice. When I started the third verse the members began to laugh; in an instant the laughter spread; the ambassadors, the strangers in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, the ladies in the Ladies’ Gallery, the reporters, they shook, they bellowed, they held their sides, they rolled in their seats; everyone was overcome with laughter except the ministers on the Front Bench immediately behind me. In that incredible, in that unprecedented uproar, they sat petrified. I gave them a glance, and suddenly the enormity of what I had done fell upon me. I had made myself the laughing–stock of the whole world. With misery I realized that I should have to resign. I woke and knew it was only a dream.’

Lord Mountdrago’s grand manner had deserted him as he narrated this, and now having finished he was pale and trembling. But with an effort he pulled himself together. He forced a laugh to his shaking lips.

‘The whole thing was so fantastic that I couldn’t help being amused. I didn’t give it another thought, and when I went into the House on the following afternoon I was feeling in very good form. The debate was dull, but I had to be there, and I read some documents that required my attention. For some reason I chanced to look up and I saw that Griffiths was speaking. He has an unpleasant Welsh accent and an unprepossessing appearance. I couldn’t imagine that he had anything to say that it was worth my while to listen to, and I was about to return to my papers when he quoted two lines from A Bicycle Made for Two. I couldn’t help glancing at him and I saw that his eyes were fixed on me with a grin of bitter mockery. I faintly shrugged my shoulders. It was comic that a scrubby little Welsh member should look at me like that. It was an odd coincidence that he should quote two lines from that disastrous song that I’d sung all through in my dream. I began to read my papers again, but I don’t mind telling you that I found it difficult to concentrate on them. I was a little puzzled. Owen Griffiths had been in my first dream, the one at Connemara House, and I’d received a very definite impression afterwards that he knew the sorry figure I’d cut. Was it a mere coincidence that he had just quoted those two lines? I asked myself if it was possible that he was dreaming the same dreams as I was. But of course the idea was preposterous and I determined not to give it a second thought.’

There was a silence. Dr Audlin looked at Lord Mountdrago and Lord Mountdrago looked at Dr Audlin.

‘Other people’s dreams are very boring. My wife used to dream occasionally and insist on telling me her dreams next day with circumstantial detail. I found it maddening.’

Dr Audlin faintly smiled.

‘You’re not boring me.’

‘I’ll tell you one more dream I had a few days later. I dreamt that I went into a public–house at Limehouse. I’ve never been to Limehouse in my life and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a public–house since I was at Oxford, and yet I saw the street and the place I went into as exactly as if I were at home there. I went into a room, I don’t know whether they call it the saloon bar or the private bar; there was a fireplace and a large leather arm–chair on one side of it, and on the other a small sofa; a bar ran the whole length of the room and over it you could see into the public bar. Near the door was a round marble–topped table and two arm–chairs beside it. It was a Saturday night and the place was packed. It was brightly lit, but the smoke was so thick that it made my eyes smart. I was dressed like a rough, with a cap on my head and a handkerchief round my neck. It seemed to me that most of the people there were drunk. I thought it rather amusing. There was a gramophone going, or the radio, I don’t know which, and in front of the fireplace two women were doing a grotesque dance. There was a little crowd round them, laughing, cheering, and singing. I went up to have a look and some man said to me: “‘Ave a drink, Bill?” There were glasses on the table full of a dark liquid which I understand is called brown ale. He gave me a glass and not wishing to be conspicuous I drank it. One of the women who were dancing broke away from the other and took hold of the glass. “’Ere, what’s the idea?” she said. “That’s my beer you’re putting away.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, “this gentleman offered it me and I very naturally thought it was his to offer.” “All right, mate,” she said, “I don’t mind. You come an’ ‘ave a dance with me.” Before I could protest she’d caught hold of me and we were dancing together. And then I found myself sitting in the arm–chair with the woman on my lap and we were sharing a glass of beer. I should tell you that sex has never played any great part in my life. I married young because in my position it was desirable that I should marry, but also in order to settle once for all the question of sex. I had the two sons I had made up my mind to have, and then I put the whole matter on one side. I’ve always been too busy to give much thought to that kind of thing, and living so much in the public eye as I do it would have been madness to do anything that might give rise to scandal. The greatest asset a politician can have is a blameless record as far as women are concerned. I have no patience with the men who smash up their careers for women. I only despise them. The woman I had on my knees was drunk; she wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t young; in fact, she was just a blowsy old prostitute. She filled me with disgust, and yet when she put her mouth to mine and kissed me, though her breath stank of beer and her teeth were decayed, though I loathed myself, I wanted her–I wanted her with all my soul. Suddenly I heard a voice. “That’s right, old boy, have a good time.” I looked up and there was Owen Griffiths. I tried to spring out of the chair, but that horrible woman wouldn’t let me. “Don’t you pay no attention to ’im,” she said, “‘e’s only one of them nosy–parkers.” “You go to it,” he said. “I know Moll. She’ll give you your money’s worth all right.” You know, I wasn’t so much annoyed at his seeing me in that absurd situation as angry that he should address me as “old boy”. I pushed the woman aside and stood up and faced him. “I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you,” I said. “I know you all right,” he said. “And my advice to you, Molly, is, see that you get your money, he’ll bilk you if he can.” There was a bottle of beer on the table close by. Without a word I seized it by the neck and hit him over the head with it as hard as I could. I made such a violent gesture that it woke me up.’

‘A dream of that sort is not incomprehensible,’ said Dr Audlin. ‘It is the revenge nature takes on persons of unimpeachable character.’

‘The story’s idiotic. I haven’t told it you for its own sake. I’ve told it you for what happened next day. I wanted to look up something in a hurry and I went into the library of the House. I got the book and began reading. I hadn’t noticed when I sat down that Griffiths was sitting in a chair close by me. Another of the Labour Members came in and went up to him. “Hullo, Owen,” he said to him, “you’re looking pretty dicky today.” “I’ve got an awful headache,” he answered. “I feel as if I’d been cracked over the head with a bottle.”’

Now Lord Mountdrago’s face was grey with anguish.

‘I knew then that the idea I’d had and dismissed as preposterous was true. I knew that Griffiths was dreaming my dreams and that he remembered them as well as I did.’

‘It may also have been a coincidence.’

‘When he spoke he didn’t speak to his friend, he deliberately spoke to me. He looked at me with sullen resentment.’

‘Can you offer any suggestion why this same man should come into your dreams?’

‘None.’

Dr Audlin’s eyes had not left his patient’s face and he saw that he lied. He had a pencil in his hand and he drew a straggling line or two on his blotting–paper. It often took a long time to get people to tell the truth, and yet they knew that unless they told it he could do nothing for them.

‘The dream you’ve just described to me took place just over three weeks ago. Have you had any since?’

‘Every night.’

‘And does this man Griffiths come into them all?’

‘Yes.’

The doctor drew more lines on his blotting–paper. He wanted the silence, the drabness, the dull light of that little room to have its effect on Lord Mountdrago’s sensibility. Lord Mountdrago threw himself back in his chair and turned his head away so that he should not see the other’s grave eyes.

‘Dr Audlin, you must do something for me. I’m at the end of my tether. I shall go mad if this goes on. I’m afraid to go to sleep. Two or three nights I haven’t. I’ve sat up reading and when I felt drowsy put on my coat and walked till I was exhausted. But I must have sleep. With all the work I have to do I must be at concert pitch; I must be in complete control of all my faculties. I need rest; sleep brings me none. I no sooner fall asleep than my dreams begin, and he’s always there, that vulgar little cad, grinning at me, mocking me, despising me. It’s a monstrous persecution. I tell you, doctor, I’m not the man of my dreams; it’s not fair to judge me by them. Ask anyone you like. I’m an honest, upright, decent man. No one can say anything against my moral character either private or public. My whole ambition is to serve my country and maintain its greatness. I have money, I have rank, I’m not exposed to many of the temptations of lesser men, so that it’s no credit to me to be incorruptible; but this I can claim, that no honour, no personal advantage, no thought of self would induce me to swerve by a hair’s breadth from my duty. I’ve sacrificed everything to become the man I am. Greatness is my aim. Greatness is within my reach and I’m losing my nerve. I’m not that mean, despicable, cowardly, lewd creature that horrible little man sees. I’ve told you three of my dreams; they’re nothing; that man has seen me do things that are so beastly, so horrible, so shameful, that even if my life depended on it I wouldn’t tell them. And he remembers them. I can hardly meet the derision and disgust I see in his eyes and I even hesitate to speak because I know my words can seem to him nothing but utter humbug. He’s seen me do things that no man with any self–respect would do, things for which men are driven out of the society of their fellows and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; he’s heard the foulness of my speech; he’s seen me not only ridiculous, but revolting. He despises me and he no longer pretends to conceal it. I tell you that if you can’t do something to help me I shall either kill myself or kill him.’

‘I wouldn’t kill him if I were you,’ said Dr Audlin, coolly, in that soothing voice of his. ‘In this country the consequences of killing a fellow–creature are awkward.’

‘I shouldn’t be hanged for it, if that’s what you mean. Who would know that I’d killed him? That dream of mine has shown me how. I told you, the day after I’d hit him over the head with a beer–bottle he had such a headache that he couldn’t see straight. He said so himself. That shows that he can feel with his waking body what happens to his body asleep. It’s not with a bottle I shall hit him next time. One night, when I’m dreaming, I shall find myself with a knife in my hand or a revolver in my pocket, I must because I want to so intensely, and then I shall seize my opportunity. I’ll stick him like a pig; I’ll shoot him like a dog. In the heart. And then I shall be free of this fiendish persecution.’

Some people might have thought that Lord Mountdrago was mad; after all the years during which Dr Audlin had been treating the diseased souls of men he knew how thin a line divides those whom we call sane from those whom we call insane. He knew how often in men who to all appearance were healthy and normal, who were seemingly devoid of imagination, and who fulfilled the duties of common life with credit to themselves and with benefit to their fellows, when you gained their confidence, when you tore away the mask they wore to the world, you found not only hideous abnormality, but kinks so strange, mental extravagances so fantastic, that in that respect you could call them lunatic. If you put them in an asylum not all the asylums in the world would be large enough. Anyhow, a man was not certifiable because he had strange dreams and they had shattered his nerve. The case was singular, but it was only an exaggeration of others that had come under Dr Audlin’s observation; he was doubtful, however, whether the methods of treatment that he had so often found efficacious would here avail.

‘Have you consulted any other member of my profession?’ he asked.

‘Only Sir Augustus. I merely told him that I suffered from nightmares. He said I was overworked and recommended me to go for a cruise. That’s absurd. I can’t leave the Foreign Office just now when the international situation needs constant attention. I’m indispensable, and I know it. On my conduct at the present juncture my whole future depends. He gave me sedatives. They had no effect. He gave me tonics. They were worse than useless. He’s an old fool.’

‘Can you give any reason why it should be this particular man who persists in coming into your dreams?’

‘You asked me that question before. I answered it.’

That was true. But Dr Audlin had not been satisfied with the answer.

‘Just now you talked of persecution. Why should Owen Griffiths want to persecute you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Lord Mountdrago’s eyes shifted a little. Dr Audlin was sure that he was not speaking the truth.

‘Have you ever done him an injury?’

‘Never.’

Lord Mountdrago made no movement, but Dr Audlin had a queer feeling that he shrank into his skin. He saw before him a large, proud man who gave the impression that the questions put to him were an insolence, and yet for all that, behind that facade, was something shifting and startled that made you think of a frightened animal in a trap. Dr Audlin leaned forward and by the power of his eyes forced Lord Mountdrago to meet them.

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Quite sure . You don’t seem to understand that our ways lead along different paths. I don’t wish to harp on it, but I must remind you that I am a Minister of the Crown and Griffiths is an obscure member of the Labour Party. Naturally there’s no social connection between us; he’s a man of very humble origin, he’s not the sort of person I should be likely to meet at any of the houses I go to; and politically our respective stations are so far separated that we could not possibly have anything in common.’

‘I can do nothing for you unless you tell me the complete truth.’

Lord Mountdrago raised his eyebrows. His voice was rasping.

‘I’m not accustomed to having my word doubted, Dr Audlin. If you’re going to do that I think to take up any more of your time can only be a waste of mine. If you will kindly let my secretary know what your fee is he will see that a cheque is sent to you.’

For all the expression that was to be seen on Dr Audlin’s face you might have thought that he simply had not heard what Lord Mountdrago said. He continued to look steadily into his eyes and his voice was grave and low. ‘Have you done anything to this man that he might look upon as an injury?’

Lord Mountdrago hesitated. He looked away, and then, as though there were in Dr Audlin’s eyes a compelling force that he could not resist, looked back. He answered sulkily:

‘Only if he was a dirty, second–rate little cad.’

‘But that is exactly what you’ve described him to be.’

Lord Mountdrago sighed. He was beaten. Dr Audlin knew that the sigh meant he was going at last to say what he had till then held back. Now he had no longer to insist. He dropped his eyes and began again drawing vague geometrical figures on his blotting–paper. The silence lasted two or three minutes.

‘I’m anxious to tell you everything that can be of any use to you. If I didn’t mention this before, it’s only because it was so unimportant that I didn’t see how it could possibly have anything to do with the case. Griffiths won a seat at the last election and he began to make a nuisance of himself almost at once. His father’s a miner, and he worked in a mine himself when he was a boy; he’s been a schoolmaster in the board schools and a journalist. He’s that half–baked, conceited intellectual, with inadequate knowledge, ill–considered ideas, and impracticable plans, that compulsory education has brought forth from the working–classes. He’s a scrawny, grey–faced man, who looks half–starved, and he’s always very slovenly in appearance; heaven knows members nowadays don’t bother much about their dress, but his clothes are an outrage to the dignity of the House. They’re ostentatiously shabby, his collar’s never clean and his tie’s never tied properly; he looks as if he hadn’t had a bath for a month and his hands are filthy. The Labour Party have two or three fellows on the Front Bench who’ve got a certain ability, but the rest of them don’t amount to much. In the kingdom of the blind the one–eyed man is king: because Griffiths is glib and has a lot of superficial information on a number of subjects, the Whips on his side began to put him up to speak whenever there was a chance. It appeared that he fancied himself on foreign affairs, and he was continually asking me silly, tiresome questions. I don’t mind telling you that I made a point of snubbing him as soundly as I thought he deserved. From the beginning I hated the way he talked, his whining voice and his vulgar accent; he had nervous mannerisms that intensely irritated me. He talked rather shyly, hesitatingly, as though it were torture to him to speak and yet he was forced on by some inner passion, and often he used to say some very disconcerting things. I’ll admit that now and again he had a sort of tub–thumping eloquence. It had a certain influence over the ill–regulated minds of the members of his party. They were impressed by his earnestness and they weren’t, as I was, nauseated by his sentimentality. A certain sentimentality is the common coin of political debate. Nations are governed by self–interest, but they prefer to believe that their aims are altruistic, and the politician is justified if with fair words and fine phrases he can persuade the electorate that the hard bargain he is driving for his country’s advantage tends to the good of humanity. The mistake people like Griffiths make is to take these fair words and fine phrases at their face value. He’s a crank, and a noxious crank. He calls himself an idealist. He has at his tongue’s end all the tedious blather that the intelligentsia have been boring us with for years. Non–resistance. The brotherhood of man. You know the hopeless rubbish. The worst of it was that it impressed not only his own party, it even shook some of the sillier, more sloppy–minded members of ours. I heard rumours that Griffiths was likely to get office when a Labour Government came in; I even heard it suggested that he might get the Foreign Office. The notion was grotesque but not impossible. One day I had occasion to wind up a debate on foreign affairs which Griffiths had opened. He’d spoken for an hour. I thought it a very good opportunity to cook his goose, and by God, sir, I cooked it. I tore his speech to pieces. I pointed out the faultiness of his reasoning and emphasized the deficiency of his knowledge. In the House of Commons the most devastating weapon is ridicule: I mocked him; I bantered him; I was in good form that day and the House rocked with laughter. Their laughter excited me and I excelled myself. The Opposition sat glum and silent, but even some of them couldn’t help laughing once or twice; it’s not intolerable, you know, to see a colleague, perhaps a rival, made a fool of. And if ever a man was made a fool of I made a fool of Griffiths. He shrank down in a seat, I saw his face go white, and presently he buried it in his hands. When I sat down I’d killed him. I’d destroyed his prestige for ever; he had no more chance of getting office when a Labour Government came in than the policeman at the door. I heard afterwards that his father, the old miner, and his mother had come up from Wales, with various supporters of his in the constituency, to watch the triumph they expected him to have. They had seen only his utter humiliation. He’d won the constituency by the narrowest margin. An incident like that might very easily lose him his seat. But that was no business of mine.’

‘Should I be putting it too strongly if I said you had ruined his career?’ asked Dr Audlin.

‘I don’t suppose you would.’

‘That is a very serious injury you’ve done him.’

‘He brought it on himself.’

‘Have you never felt any qualms about it?’

‘I think perhaps if I’d known that his father and mother were there I might have let him down a little more gently.’

There was nothing further for Dr Audlin to say, and he set about treating his patient in such a manner as he thought might avail. He sought by suggestion to make him forget his dreams when he awoke; he sought to make him sleep so deeply that he would not dream. He found Lord Mountdrago’s resistance impossible to break down. At the end of an hour he dismissed him. Since then he had seen Lord Mountdrago half a dozen times. He had done him no good. The frightful dreams continued every night to harass the unfortunate man, and it was clear that his general condition was growing rapidly worse. He was worn out. His irritability was uncontrollable. Lord Mountdrago was angry because he received no benefit from his treatment, and yet continued it, not only because it seemed his only hope, but because it was a relief to him to have someone with whom he could talk openly. Dr Audlin came to the conclusion at last that there was only one way in which Lord Mountdrago could achieve deliverance, but he knew him well enough to be assured that of his own free will he would never, never take it. If Lord Mountdrago was to be saved from the breakdown that was threatening he must be induced to take a step that must be abhorrent to his pride of birth and his self–complacency. Dr Audlin was convinced that to delay was impossible. He was treating his patient by suggestion, and after several visits found him more susceptible to it. At length he managed to get him into a condition of somnolence. With his low, soft, monotonous voice he soothed his tortured nerves. He repeated the same words over and over again. Lord Mountdrago lay quite still, his eyes closed; his breathing was regular, and his limbs were relaxed. Then Dr Audlin in the same quiet tone spoke the words he had prepared.

‘You will go to Owen Griffiths and say that you are sorry that you caused him that great injury. You will say that you will do whatever lies in your power to undo the harm that you have done him.’

The words acted on Lord Mountdrago like the blow of a whip across his face. He shook himself out of his hypnotic state and sprang to his feet. His eyes blazed with passion and he poured forth upon Dr Audlin a stream of angry vituperation such as even he had never heard. He swore at him. He cursed him. He used language of such obscenity that Dr Audlin, who had heard every sort of foul word, sometimes from the lips of chaste and distinguished women, was surprised that he knew it.

‘Apologize to that filthy little Welshman? I’d rather kill myself.’

‘I believe it to be the only way in which you can regain your balance.’

Dr Audlin had not often seen a man presumably sane in such a condition of uncontrollable fury. He grew red in the face and his eyes bulged out of his head. He did really foam at the mouth. Dr Audlin watched him coolly, waiting for the storm to wear itself out, and presently he saw that Lord Mountdrago, weakened by the strain to which he had been subjected for so many weeks, was exhausted.

‘Sit down,’ he said then, sharply.

Lord Mountdrago crumpled up into a chair.

‘Christ, I feel all in. I must rest a minute and then I’ll go.’

For five minutes perhaps they sat in complete silence. Lord Mountdrago was a gross, blustering bully, but he was also a gentleman. When he broke the silence he had recovered his self–control.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been very rude to you. I’m ashamed of the things I’ve said to you and I can only say you’d be justified if you refused to have anything more to do with me. I hope you won’t do that. I feel that my visits to you do help me. I think you’re my only chance.’

‘You mustn’t give another thought to what you said. It was of no consequence.’

‘But there’s one thing you mustn’t ask me to do, and that is to make excuses to Griffiths.’

‘I’ve thought a great deal about your case I don’t pretend to understand it, but I believe that your only chance of release is to do what I proposed. I have a notion that we’re none of us one self, but many, and one of the selves in you has risen up against the injury you did Griffiths and has taken on the form of Griffiths in your mind and is punishing you for what you cruelly did. If I were a priest I should tell you that it is your conscience that has adopted the shape and lineaments of this man to scourge you to repentance and persuade you to reparation.’

‘My conscience is clear. It’s not my fault if I smashed the man’s career. I crushed him like a slug in my garden. I regret nothing.’

It was on these words that Lord Mountdrago had left him. Reading through his notes, while he waited, Dr Audlin considered how best he could bring his patient to the state of mind that, now that his usual methods of treatment had failed, he thought alone could help him. He glanced at his clock. It was six. It was strange that Lord Mountdrago did not come. He knew he had intended to because a secretary had rung up that morning to say that he would be with him at the usual hour. He must have been detained by pressing work. This notion gave Dr Audlin something else to think of: Lord Mountdrago was quite unfit for work and in no condition to deal with important matters of state. Dr Audlin wondered whether it behoved him to get in touch with someone in authority, the Prime Minister or the Permanent Under–Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and impart to him his conviction that Lord Mountdrago’s mind was so unbalanced that it was dangerous to leave affairs of moment in his hands. It was a ticklish thing to do. He might cause needless trouble and get roundly snubbed for his pains. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘After all,’ he reflected, ‘the politicians have made such a mess of the world during the last five–and–twenty years, I don’t suppose it makes much odds if they’re mad or sane.’

He rang the bell.

‘If Lord Mountdrago comes now will you tell him that I have another appointment at six–fifteen and so I’m afraid I can’t see him.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘Has the evening paper come yet?’

‘I’ll go and see.’

In a moment the servant brought it in. A huge headline ran across the front page: Tragic Death of Foreign Minister.

‘My God!’ cried Dr Audlin.

For once he was wrenched out of his wonted calm. He was shocked, horribly shocked, and yet he was not altogether surprised. The possibility that Lord Mountdrago might commit suicide had occurred to him several times, for that it was suicide he could not doubt. The paper said that Lord Mountdrago had been waiting in a Tube station, standing on the edge of the platform, and as the train came in was seen to fall on the rail. It was supposed that he had had a sudden attack of faintness. The paper went on to say that Lord Mountdrago had been suffering for some weeks from the effects of overwork, but had felt it impossible to absent himself while the foreign situation demanded his unremitting attention. Lord Mountdrago was another victim of the strain that modern politics placed upon those who played the more important parts in it. There was a neat little piece about the talents and industry, the patriotism and vision, of the deceased statesman, followed by various surmises upon the Prime Minister’s choice of his successor. Dr Audlin read all this. He had not liked Lord Mountdrago. The chief emotion that his death caused in him was dissatisfaction with himself because he had been able to do nothing for him.

Perhaps he had done wrong in not getting into touch with Lord Mountdrago’s doctor. He was discouraged, as always when failure frustrated his conscientious efforts, and repulsion seized him for the theory and practice of this empiric doctrine by which he earned his living. He was dealing with dark and mysterious forces that it was perhaps beyond the powers of the human mind to understand. He was like a man blindfold trying to feel his way to he knew not whither. Listlessly he turned the pages of the paper. Suddenly he gave a great start, and an exclamation once more was forced from his lips. His eyes had fallen on a small paragraph near the bottom of a column. Sudden Death of an M.P., he read. Mr Owen Griffiths, member for so–and–so, had been taken ill in Fleet Street that afternoon and when he was brought to Charing Cross Hospital life was found to be extinct. It was supposed that death was due to natural causes, but an inquest would be held. Dr Audlin could hardly believe his eyes. Was it possible that the night before Lord Mountdrago had at last in his dream found himself possessed of the weapon, knife or gun, that he had wanted, and had killed his tormentor, and had that ghostly murder, in the same way as the blow with the bottle had given him a racking headache on the following day, taken effect a certain number of hours later on the waking man? Or was it, more mysterious and more frightful, that when Lord Mountdrago sought relief in death, the enemy he had so cruelly wronged, unappeased, escaping from his own mortality, had pursued him to some other sphere there to torment him still? It was strange. The sensible thing was to look upon it merely as an odd coincidence. Dr Audlin rang the bell.

‘Tell Mrs Milton that I’m sorry I can’t see her this evening. I’m not well.’

It was true; he shivered as though of an ague. With some kind of spiritual sense he seemed to envisage a bleak, a horrible void. The dark night of the soul engulfed him, and he felt a strange, primeval terror of he knew not what.

SANATORIUM

For the first six weeks that Ashenden was at the sanatorium he stayed in bed. He saw nobody but the doctor who visited him morning and evening, the nurses who looked after him, and the maid who brought him his meals. He had contracted tuberculosis of the lungs, and since at the time there were reasons that made it difficult for him to go to Switzerland the specialist he saw in London had sent him up to a sanatorium in the north of Scotland. At last the day came that he had been patiently looking forward to when the doctor told him he could get up; and in the afternoon his nurse, having helped him to dress, took him down to the veranda, placed cushions behind him, wrapped him up in rugs, and left him to enjoy the sun that was streaming down from a cloudless sky. It was mid–winter. The sanatorium stood on the top of a hill and from it you had a spacious view of the snow–clad country. There were people lying all along the veranda in deck–chairs, some chatting with their neighbours and some reading. Every now and then one would have a fit of coughing and you noticed that at the end of it he looked anxiously at his handkerchief. Before the nurse left Ashenden she turned with a kind of professional briskness to the man who was lying in the next chair.

‘I want to introduce Mr Ashenden to you,’ she said. And then to Ashenden: ‘This is Mr McLeod. He and Mr Campbell have been here longer than anyone else.’

On the other side of Ashenden was lying a pretty girl, with red hair and bright blue eyes; she had on no make–up, but her lips were very red and the colour on her cheeks was high. It emphasized the astonishing whiteness of her skin. It was lovely even when you realized that its delicate texture was due to illness. She wore a fur coat and was wrapped up in rugs, so that you could see nothing of her body, but her face was extremely thin, so thin that it made her nose, which wasn’t really large, look a trifle prominent. She gave Ashenden a friendly look, but did not speak, and Ashenden, feeling rather shy among all those strange people, waited to be spoken to.

‘First time they’ve let you get up, is it?’ said McLeod.

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s your room?’ Ashenden told him.

‘Small. I know every room in the place. I’ve been here for seventeen years. I’ve got the best room here and so I damned well ought to have. Campbell’s been trying to get me out of it, he wants it himself, but I’m not going to budge; I’ve got a right to it, I came here six months before he did.’

McLeod lying there, gave you the impression that he was immensely tall; his skin was stretched tight over his bones, his cheeks and temples hollow, so that you could see the formation of his skull under it; and in that emaciated face, with its great bony nose, the eyes were preternaturally large.

‘Seventeen years is a long time,’ said Ashenden, because he could think of nothing else to say.

‘Time passes very quickly. I like it here. At first, after a year or two, I went away in the summer, but I don’t any more. It’s my home now. I’ve got a brother and two sisters; but they’re married and now they’ve got families; they don’t want me. When you’ve been here a few years and you go back to ordinary life, you feel a bit out of it, you know. Your pals have gone their own ways and you’ve got nothing in common with them any more. It all seems an awful rush. Much ado about nothing, that’s what it is. It’s noisy and stuffy. No, one’s better off here. I shan’t stir again till they carry me out feet first in my coffin.’

The specialist had told Ashenden that if he took care of himself for a reasonable time he would get well, and he looked at McLeod with curiosity.

‘What do you do with yourself all day long?’ he asked.

‘Do? Having T.B. is a whole–time job, my boy. There’s my temperature to take and then I weigh myself. I don’t hurry over my dressing. I have breakfast, I read the papers and go for a walk. Then I have my rest. I lunch and play bridge. I have another rest and then I dine. I play a bit more bridge and I go to bed. They’ve got quite a decent library here, we get all the new books, but I don’t really have much time for reading. I talk to people. You meet all sorts here, you know. They come and they go. Sometimes they go because they think they’re cured, but a lot of them come back, and sometimes they go because they die. I’ve seen a lot of people out and before I go I expect to see a lot more.’

The girl sitting on Ashenden’s other side suddenly spoke.

‘I should tell you that few persons can get a heartier laugh out of a hearse than Mr McLeod,’ she said.

McLeod chuckled.

‘I don’t know about that, but it wouldn’t be human nature if I didn’t say to myself: Well, I’m just as glad it’s him and not me they’re taking for a ride.’

It occurred to him that Ashenden didn’t know the pretty girl, so he introduced him.

‘By the way, I don’t think you’ve met Mr Ashenden–Miss Bishop. She’s English, but not a bad girl.’

‘How long have you been here?’ asked Ashenden.

‘Only two years. This is my last winter. Dr Lennox says I shall be all right in a few months and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go home.’

‘Silly, I call it,’ said McLeod. ‘Stay where you’re well off, that’s what I say.’

At that moment a man, leaning on a stick, came walking slowly along the veranda.

‘Oh, look, there’s Major Templeton,’ said Miss Bishop, a smile lighting up her blue eyes; and then, as he came up: ‘I’m glad to see you up again.’ ‘Oh, it was nothing. Only a bit of a cold. I’m quite all right now.’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when he began to cough. He leaned heavily on his stick. But when the attack was over he smiled gaily.

‘Can’t get rid of this damned cough,’ he said. ‘Smoking too much. Dr Lennox says I ought to give it up, but it’s no good–I can’t.’

He was a tall fellow, good–looking in a slightly theatrical way, with a dusky, sallow face, fine very dark eyes, and a neat black moustache. He was wearing a fur coat with an astrakhan collar. His appearance was smart and perhaps a trifle showy. Miss Bishop made Ashenden known to him. Major Templeton said a few civil words in an easy, cordial way, and then asked the girl to go for a stroll with him; he had been ordered to walk to a certain place in the wood behind the sanatorium and back again. McLeod watched them as they sauntered off.

‘I wonder if there’s anything between those two,’ he said. ‘They do say Templeton was a devil with the girls before he got ill.’

‘He doesn’t look up to much in that line just now,’ said Ashenden.

‘You never can tell. I’ve seen a lot of rum things here in my day. I could tell you no end of stories if I wanted to.’

‘You evidently do, so why don’t you?’

McLeod grinned.

‘Well, I’ll tell you one. Three or four years ago there was a woman here who was pretty hot stuff. Her husband used to come and see her every other week–end, he was crazy about her, used to fly up from London; but Dr Lennox was pretty sure she was carrying on with somebody here, but he couldn’t find out who. So one night when we’d all gone to bed he had a thin coat of paint put down just outside her room and next day he had everyone’s slippers examined. Neat, wasn’t it? The fellow whose slippers had paint on them got the push. Dr Lennox has to be particular, you know. He doesn’t want the place to get a bad name.’

‘How long has Templeton been here?’

‘Three or four months. He’s been in bed most of the time. He’s for it all right. Ivy Bishop’ll be a damned fool if she gets stuck on him. She’s got a good chance of getting well. I’ve seen so many of them, you know, I can tell. When I look at a fellow I make up my mind at once whether he’ll get well or whether he won’t, and if he won’t I can make a pretty shrewd guess how long he’ll last. I’m very seldom mistaken. I give Templeton about two years myself.’

McLeod gave Ashenden a speculative look, and Ashenden, knowing what he was thinking, though he tried to be amused, could not help feeling somewhat concerned. There was a twinkle in McLeod’s eyes. He plainly knew what was passing through Ashenden’s mind.

‘You’ll get all right. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I hadn’t been pretty sure of that. I don’t want Dr Lennox to hoof me out for putting the fear of God into his bloody patients.’

Then Ashenden’s nurse came to take him back to bed. Even though he had only sat out for an hour, he was tired, and was glad to find himself once more between the sheets. Dr Lennox came in to see him in the course of the evening. He looked at his temperature chart.

‘That’s not so bad,’ he said.

Dr Lennox was small, brisk, and genial. He was a good enough doctor, an excellent business man, and an enthusiastic fisherman. When the fishing season began he was inclined to leave the care of his patients to his assistants; the patients grumbled a little, but were glad enough to eat the young salmon he brought back to vary their meals. He was fond of talking, and now, standing at the end of Ashenden’s bed, he asked him, in his broad Scots, whether he had got into conversation with any of the patients that afternoon. Ashenden told him the nurse had introduced him to McLeod. Dr Lennox laughed.

‘The oldest living inhabitant. He knows more about the sanatorium and its inmates than I do. How he gets his information I haven’t an idea, but there’s not a thing about the private lives of anyone under this roof that he doesn’t know. There’s not an old maid in the place with a keener nose for a bit of scandal. Did he tell you about Campbell?’

‘He mentioned him.’

‘He hates Campbell, and Campbell hates him. Funny, when you come to think of it, those two men, they’ve been here for seventeen years and they’ve got about one sound lung between them. They loathe the sight of one another. I’ve had to refuse to listen to the complaints about one another that they come to me with. Campbell’s room is just below McLeod’s and Campbell plays the fiddle. It drives McLeod wild. He says he’s been listening to the same tunes for fifteen years, but Campbell says McLeod doesn’t know one tune from another. McLeod wants me to stop Campbell playing, but I can’t do that, he’s got a perfect right to play so long as he doesn’t play in the silence hours. I’ve offered to change McLeod’s room, but he won’t do that. He says Campbell only plays to drive him out of the room because it’s the best in the house, and he’s damned if he’s going to have it. It’s queer, isn’t it, that two middle–aged men should think it worth while to make life hell for one another? Neither can leave the other alone. They have their meals at the same table, they play bridge together; and not a day passes without a row. Sometimes I’ve threatened to turn them both out if they don’t behave like sensible fellows. That keeps them quiet for a bit. They don’t want to go. They’ve been here so long, they’ve got no one any more who gives a damn for them, and they can’t cope with the world outside. Campbell went away for a couple of months’ holiday some years ago. He came back after a week; he said he couldn’t stand the racket, and the sight of so many people in the streets scared him.’

It was a strange world into which Ashenden found himself thrown when, his health gradually improving, he was able to mix with his fellow patients. One morning Dr Lennox told him he could thenceforward lunch in the dining–room. This was a large, low room, with great window space; the windows were always wide open and on fine days the sun streamed in. There seemed to be a great many people and it took him some time to sort them out. They were of all kinds, young, middle–aged, and old. There were some, like McLeod and Campbell, who had been at the sanatorium for years and expected to die there. Others had only been there for a few months. There was one middle–aged spinster called Miss Atkin who had been coming every winter for a long time and in the summer went to stay with friends and relations. She had nothing much the matter with her any more, and might just as well have stayed away altogether, but she liked the life. Her long residence had given her a sort of position, she was honorary librarian and hand in glove with the matron. She was always ready to gossip with you, but you were soon warned that everything you said was passed on. It was useful to Dr Lennox to know that his patients were getting on well together and were happy, that they did nothing imprudent and followed his instructions. Little escaped Miss Atkin’s sharp eyes, and from her it went to the matron and so to Dr Lennox. Because she had been coming for so many years, she sat at the same table as McLeod and Campbell, together with an old general who had been put there on account of his rank. The table was in no way different from any other, and it was not more advantageously placed, but because the oldest residents sat there it was looked upon as the most desirable place to sit, and several elderly women were bitterly resentful because Miss Atkin, who went away for four or five months every summer, should be given a place there while they who spent the whole year in the sanatorium sat at other tables. There was an old Indian Civilian who had been at the sanatorium longer than anyone but McLeod and Campbell; he was a man who in his day had ruled a province, and he was waiting irascibly for either McLeod or Campbell to die so that he might take his place at the first table. Ashenden made the acquaintance of Campbell. He was a long, big–boned fellow with a bald head, so thin that you wondered how his limbs held together; and when he sat crumpled in an arm–chair he gave you the uncanny impression of a manikin in a puppet–show. He was brusque, touchy, and bad–tempered. The first thing he asked Ashenden was:

‘Are you fond of music?’

‘Yes.’

‘No one here cares a damn for it. I play the violin. But if you like it, come to my room one day and I’ll play to you.’

‘Don’t you go,’ said McLeod, who heard him. ‘It’s torture.’

‘How can you be so rude?’ cried Miss Atkin. ‘Mr Campbell plays very nicely.’

‘There’s no one in this beastly place that knows one note from another,’ said Campbell.

With a derisive chuckle McLeod walked off. Miss Atkin tried to smooth things down.

‘You mustn’t mind what McLeod said.’

‘Oh, I don’t. I’ll get back on him all right.’

He played the same tune over and over again all that afternoon. McLeod banged on the floor, but Campbell went on. He sent a message by a maid to say that he had a headache and would Mr Campbell mind not playing; Campbell replied that he had a perfect right to play and if Mr McLeod didn’t like it he could lump it. When next they met high words passed.

Ashenden was put at a table with the pretty Miss Bishop, with Templeton, and with a London man, an accountant, called Henry Chester. He was a stocky, broad–shouldered, wiry little fellow, and the last person you would ever have thought would be attacked by T.B. It had come upon him as a sudden and unexpected blow. He was a perfectly ordinary man, somewhere between thirty and forty, married, with two children. He lived in a decent suburb. He went up to the City every morning and read the morning paper; he came down from the City every evening and read the evening paper. He had no interests except his business and his family. He liked his work; he made enough money to live in comfort, he put by a reasonable sum every year, he played golf on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday, he went every August for a three weeks’ holiday to the same place on the east coast; his children would grow up and marry, then he would turn his business over to his son and retire with his wife to a little house in the country where he could potter about till death claimed him at a ripe old age. He asked nothing more from life than that, and it was a life that thousands upon thousands of his fellow–men lived with satisfaction. He was the average citizen. Then this thing happened. He had caught cold playing golf, it had gone to his chest, and he had had a cough that he couldn’t shake off. He had always been strong and healthy, and had no opinion of doctors; but at last at his wife’s persuasion he had consented to see one. It was a shock to him, a fearful shock, to learn that there was tubercle in both his lungs and that his only chance of life was to go immediately to a sanatorium. The specialist he saw then told him that he might be able to go back to work in a couple of years, but two years had passed and Dr Lennox advised him not to think of it for at least a year more. He showed him the bacilli in his sputum, and in an X–ray photograph the actively–diseased patches in his lungs. He lost heart. It seemed to him a cruel and unjust trick that fate had played upon him. He could have understood it if he had led a wild life, if he had drunk too much, played around with women, or kept late hours. He would have deserved it then. But he had done none of these things. It was monstrously unfair. Having no resources in himself, no interest in books, he had nothing to do but think of his health. It became an obsession. He watched his symptoms anxiously. They had to deprive him of a thermometer because he took his temperature a dozen times a day. He got it into his head that the doctors were taking his case too indifferently, and in order to force their attention used every method he could devise to make the thermometer register a temperature that would alarm; and when his tricks were foiled he grew sulky and querulous. But he was by nature a jovial, friendly creature, and when he forgot himself he talked and laughed gaily; then on a sudden he remembered that he was a sick man and you would see in his eyes the fear of death.

At the end of every month his wife came up to spend a day or two in a lodging house near by. Dr Lennox did not much like the visits that relatives paid the patients, it excited and unsettled them. It was moving to see the eagerness with which Henry Chester looked forward to his wife’s arrival; but it was strange to notice that once she had come he seemed less pleased than one would have expected. Mrs Chester was a pleasant, cheerful little woman, not pretty, but neat, as commonplace as her husband, and you only had to look at her to know that she was a good wife and mother, a careful housekeeper, a nice, quiet body who did her duty and interfered with nobody. She had been quite happy in the dull, domestic life they had led for so many years, her only dissipation a visit to the pictures, her great thrill the sales in the big London shops; and it had never occurred to her that it was monotonous. It completely satisfied her. Ashenden liked her. He listened with interest while she prattled about her children and her house in the suburbs, her neighbours and her trivial occupations. On one occasion he met her in the road. Chester for some reason connected with his treatment had stayed in and she was alone. Ashenden suggested that they should walk together. They talked for a little of indifferent things. Then she suddenly asked him how he thought her husband was.

‘I think he seems to be getting on all right.’

‘I’m so terribly worried.’

‘You must remember it’s a slow, long business. One has to have patience.’

They walked on a little and then he saw she was crying.

‘You mustn’t be unhappy about him,’ said Ashenden gently.

‘Oh, you don’t know what I have to put up with when I come here. I know I ought not to speak about it, but I must. I can trust you, can’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘I love him. I’m devoted to him. I’d do anything in the world I could for him. We’ve never quarrelled, we’ve never even differed about a single thing. He’s beginning to hate me and it breaks my heart.’

‘Oh, I can’t believe that. Why, when you’re not here he talks of you all the time. He couldn’t talk more nicely. He’s devoted to you.’

‘Yes, that’s when I’m not here. It’s when I’m here, when he sees me well and strong, that it comes over him. You see, he resents it so terribly that he’s ill and I’m well. He’s afraid he’s going to die and he hates me because I’m going to live. I have to be on my guard all the time; almost everything I say, if I speak of the children, if I speak of the future, exasperates him, and he says bitter, wounding things. When I speak of something I’ve had to do to the house or a servant I’ve had to change it irritates him beyond endurance. He complains that I treat him as if he didn’t count any more. We used to be so united, and now I feel there’s a great wall of antagonism between us. I know I shouldn’t blame him, I know it’s only his illness, he’s a dear good man really, and kindness itself, normally he’s the easiest man in the world to get on with; and now I simply dread coming here and I go with relief. He’d be terribly sorry if I had T.B. but I know that in his heart of hearts it would be a relief. He could forgive me, he could forgive fate, if he thought I was going to die too. Sometimes he tortures me by talking about what I shall do when he’s dead, and when I get hysterical and cry out to him to stop, he says I needn’t grudge him a little pleasure when he’ll be dead so soon and I can go on living for years and years and have a good time. Oh, it’s so frightful to think that this love we’ve had for one another all these years should die in this sordid, miserable way.’

Mrs Chester sat down on a stone by the roadside and gave way to passionate weeping. Ashenden looked at her with pity, but could find nothing to say that might comfort her. What she had told him did not come quite as a surprise.

‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said at last. ‘I mustn’t let my eyes get all red and swollen, or Henry’ll know I’ve been crying and he’ll think I’ve had bad news about him. Is death so horrible? Do we all fear death like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ashenden.

‘When my mother was dying she didn’t seem to mind a bit. She knew it was coming and she even made little jokes about it. But she was an old woman.’

Mrs Chester pulled herself together and they set off again. They walked for a while in silence.

‘You won’t think any the worse of Henry for what I’ve told you?’ she said at last.

‘Of course not.’

‘He’s been a good husband and a good father. I’ve never known a better man in my life. Until this illness I don’t think an unkind or ungenerous thought ever passed through his head.’

The conversation left Ashenden pensive. People often said he had a low opinion of human nature. It was because he did not always judge his fellows by the usual standards. He accepted, with a smile, a tear, or a shrug of the shoulders, much that filled others with dismay. It was true that you would never have expected that good–natured, commonplace little chap to harbour such bitter and unworthy thoughts; but who has ever been able to tell to what depths man may fall or to what heights rise? The fault lay in the poverty of his ideals. Henry Chester was born and bred to lead an average life, exposed to the normal vicissitudes of existence, and when an unforeseeable accident befell him he had no means of coping with it. He was like a brick made to take its place with a million others in a huge factory, but by chance with a flaw in it so that it is inadequate to its purpose. And the brick too, if it had a mind, might cry: What have I done that I cannot fulfil my modest end, but must be taken away from all these other bricks that support me and thrown on the dust–heap? It was no fault of Henry Chester’s that he was incapable of the conceptions that might have enabled him to bear his calamity with resignation. It is not everyone who can find solace in art or thought. It is the tragedy of our day that these humble souls have lost their faith in God, in whom lay hope, and their belief in a resurrection that might bring them the happiness that has been denied them on earth; and have found nothing to put in their place.

There are people who say that suffering ennobles. It is not true. As a general rule it makes man petty, querulous, and selfish; but here in this sanatorium there was not much suffering. In certain stages of tuberculosis the slight fever that accompanies it excites rather than depresses, so that the patient feels alert and, upborne by hope, faces the future blithely; but for all that the idea of death haunts the subconscious. It is a sardonic theme song that runs through a sprightly operetta. Now and again the gay, melodious arias, the dance measures, deviate strangely into tragic strains that throb menacingly down the nerves; the petty interests of every day, the small jealousies and trivial concerns are as nothing; pity and terror make the heart on a sudden stand still and the awfulness of death broods as the silence that precedes a tropical storm broods over the tropical jungle. After Ashenden had been for some time at the sanatorium there came a boy of twenty. He was in the navy, a sub–lieutenant in a submarine, and he had what they used to call in novels galloping consumption. He was a tall, good–looking youth, with curly brown hair, blue eyes, and a very sweet smile. Ashenden saw him two or three times lying on the terrace in the sun and passed the time of day with him. He was a cheerful lad. He talked of musical shows and film stars; and he read the paper for the football results and the boxing news. Then he was put to bed and Ashenden saw him no more. His relations were sent for and in two months he was dead. He died uncomplaining. He understood what was happening to him as little as an animal. For a day or two there was the same malaise in the sanatorium as there is in a prison when a man has been hanged; and then, as though by universal consent, in obedience to an instinct of self–preservation, the boy was put out of mind: life, with its three meals a day, its golf on the miniature course, its regulated exercise, its prescribed rests, its quarrels and jealousies, its scandal–mongering and petty vexations, went on as before. Campbell, to the exasperation of McLeod, continued to play the prize–song and ‘Annie Laurie’ on his fiddle. McLeod continued to boast of his bridge and gossip about other people’s health and morals. Miss Atkin continued to backbite. Henry Chester continued to complain that the doctors gave him insufficient attention and railed against fate because, after the model life he had led, it had played him such a dirty trick. Ashenden continued to read, and with amused tolerance to watch the vagaries of his fellow–creatures.

He became intimate with Major Templeton. Templeton was perhaps a little more than forty years of age. He had been in the Grenadier Guards, but had resigned his commission after the war. A man of ample means, he had since then devoted himself entirely to pleasure. He raced in the racing season, shot in the shooting season, and hunted in the hunting season. When this was over he went to Monte Carlo. He told Ashenden of the large sums he had made and lost at baccarat. He was very fond of women and if his stories could be believed they were very fond of him. He loved good food and good drink. He knew by their first names the head waiters of every restaurant in London where you ate well. He belonged to half a dozen clubs. He had led for years a useless, selfish, worthless life, the sort of life which maybe it will be impossible for anyone to live in the future, but he had lived it without misgiving and had enjoyed it. Ashenden asked him once what he would do if he had his time over again and he answered that he would do exactly what he had done. He was an amusing talker, gay and pleasantly ironic, and he dealt with the surface of things, which was all he knew, with a light, easy, and assured touch. He always had a pleasant word for the dowdy spinsters in the sanatorium and a joking one for the peppery old gentlemen, for he combined good manners with a natural kindliness. He knew his way about the superficial world of the people who have more money than they know what to do with as well as he knew his way about Mayfair. He was the kind of man who would always have been willing to take a bet, to help a friend, and to give a tenner to a rogue. If he had never done much good in the world he had never done much harm. He amounted to nothing. But he was a more agreeable companion than many of more sterling character and of more admirable qualities. He was very ill now. He was dying and he knew it. He took it with the same easy, laughing nonchalance as he had taken all the rest. He’d had a thundering good time, he regretted nothing, it was rotten tough luck getting T.B. but to hell with it, no one can live for ever, and when you came to think of it, he might have been killed in the war or broken his bloody neck in a point–to–point. His principle all through life had been, when you’ve made a bad bet, pay up and forget about it. He’d had a good run for his money and he was ready to call it a day. It had been a damned good party while it lasted, but every party’s got to come to an end, and next day it doesn’t matter much if you went home with the milk or if you left while the fun was in full swing.

Of all those people in the sanatorium he was probably from the moral standpoint the least worthy, but he was the only one who genuinely accepted the inevitable with unconcern. He snapped his fingers in the face of death, and you could choose whether to call his levity unbecoming or his insouciance gallant.

The last thing that ever occurred to him when he came to the sanatorium was that he might fall more deeply in love there than he had ever done before. His amours had been numerous, but they had been light; he had been content with the politely mercenary love of chorus girls and with ephemeral unions with women of easy virtue whom he met at house parties. He had always taken care to avoid any attachment that might endanger his freedom. His only aim in life had been to get as much fun out of it as possible, and where sex was concerned he found every advantage and no inconvenience in ceaseless variety. But he liked women. Even when they were quite old he could not talk to them without a caress in his eyes and a tenderness in his voice. He was prepared to do anything to please them. They were conscious of his interest in them and were agreeably flattered, and they felt, quite mistakenly, that they could trust him never to let them down. He once said a thing that Ashenden thought showed insight:

‘You know, any man can get any woman he wants if he tries hard enough, there’s nothing in that, but once he’s got her, only a man who thinks the world of women can get rid of her without humiliating her.’

It was simply from habit that he began to make love to Ivy Bishop. She was the prettiest and the youngest girl in the sanatorium. She was in point of fact not so young as Ashenden had first thought her, she was twenty–nine, but for the last eight years she had been wandering from one sanatorium to another, in Switzerland, England, and Scotland, and the sheltered invalid life had preserved her youthful appearance so that you might easily have taken her for twenty. All she knew of the world she had learnt in these establishments, so that she combined rather curiously extreme innocence with extreme sophistication. She had seen a number of love affairs run their course. A good many men, of various nationalities, had made love to her; she accepted their attentions with self–possession and humour, but she had at her disposal plenty of firmness when they showed an inclination to go too far. She had a force of character unexpected in anyone who looked so flower–like, and when it came to a showdown knew how to express her meaning in plain, cool, and decisive words. She was quite ready to have a flirtation with George Templeton. It was a game she understood, and though always charming to him, it was with a bantering lightness that showed quite clearly that she had summed him up and had no mind to take the affair more seriously than he did. Like Ashenden, Templeton went to bed every evening at six and dined in his room, so that he saw Ivy only by day. They went for little walks together, but otherwise were seldom alone. At lunch the conversation between the four of them, Ivy, Templeton, Henry Chester, and Ashenden, was general, but it was obvious that it was for neither of the two men that Templeton took so much trouble to be entertaining. It seemed to Ashenden that he was ceasing to flirt with Ivy to pass the time, and that his feeling for her was growing deeper and more sincere; but he could not tell whether she was conscious of it nor whether it meant anything to her. Whenever Templeton hazarded a remark that was more intimate than the occasion warranted she countered it with an ironic one that made them all laugh. But Templeton’s laugh was rueful. He was no longer content to have her take him as a play–boy. The more Ashenden knew Ivy Bishop the more he liked her. There was something pathetic in her sick beauty, with that lovely transparent skin, the thin face in which the eyes were so large and so wonderfully blue; and there was something pathetic in her plight, for like so many others in the sanatorium she seemed to be alone in the world. Her mother led a busy social life, her sisters were married; they took but a perfunctory interest in the young woman from whom they had been separated now for eight years. They corresponded, they came to see her occasionally, but there was no longer very much between them. She accepted the situation without bitterness. She was friendly with everyone and prepared always to listen with sympathy to the complaints and the distress of all and sundry. She went out of her way to be nice to Henry Chester and did what she could to cheer him.

‘Well, Mr Chester,’ she said to him one day at lunch, ‘it’s the end of the month, your wife will be coming tomorrow. That’s something to look forward to.’

‘No, she’s not coming this month,’ he said quietly, looking down at his plate.

‘Oh, I am sorry. Why not? The children are all right, aren’t they?’

‘Dr Lennox thinks it’s better for me that she shouldn’t come.’

There was a silence. Ivy looked at him with troubled eyes.

‘That’s tough luck, old man,’ said Templeton in his hearty way. ‘Why didn’t you tell Lennox to go to hell?’

‘He must know best,’ said Chester.

Ivy gave him another look and began to talk of something else.

Looking back, Ashenden realized that she had at once suspected the truth. For next day he happened to walk with Chester.

‘I’m awfully sorry your wife isn’t coming,’ he said. ‘You’ll miss her visit dreadfully.’

‘Dreadfully.’

He gave Ashenden a sidelong glance. Ashenden felt that he had something he wanted to say, but could not bring himself to say it. He gave his shoulders an angry shrug.

‘It’s my fault if she’s not coming. I asked Lennox to write and tell her not to. I couldn’t stick it any more. I spend the whole month looking forward to her coming and then when she’s here I hate her. You see, I resent so awfully having this filthy disease. She’s strong and well and full of beans. It maddens me when I see the pain in her eyes. What does it matter to her really? Who cares if you’re ill? They pretend to care, but they’re jolly glad it’s you and not them. I’m a swine, aren’t I?’

Ashenden remembered how Mrs Chester had sat on a stone by the side of the road and wept.

‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll make her very unhappy, not letting her come?’

‘She must put up with that. I’ve got enough with my own unhappiness without bothering with hers.’

Ashenden did not know what to say and they walked on in silence. Suddenly Chester broke out irritably.

‘It’s all very well for you to be disinterested and unselfish, you’re going to live. I’m going to die, and God damn it, I don’t want to die. Why should I? It’s not fair.’

Time passed. In a place like the sanatorium where there was little to occupy the mind it was inevitable that soon everyone should know that George Templeton was in love with Ivy Bishop. But it was not so easy to tell what her feelings were. It was plain that she liked his company, but she did not seek it, and indeed it looked as though she took pains not to be alone with him. One or two of the middle–aged ladies tried to trap her into some compromising admission, but ingenuous as she was, she was easily a match for them. She ignored their hints and met their straight questions with incredulous laughter. She succeeded in exasperating them.

‘She can’t be so stupid as not to see that he’s mad about her.’

‘She has no right to play with him like that.’

‘I believe she’s just as much in love with him as he is with her.’

‘Dr Lennox ought to tell her mother.’

No one was more incensed than McLeod.

‘Too ridiculous. After all, nothing can come of it. He’s riddled with T.B. and she’s not much better.’

Campbell on the other hand was sardonic and gross.

‘I’m all for their having a good time while they can. I bet there’s a bit of hanky–panky going on if one only knew, and I don’t blame ’em.’

‘You cad,’ said McLeod.

‘Oh, come off it. Templeton isn’t the sort of chap to play bumble–puppy bridge with a girl like that unless he’s getting something out of it, and she knows a thing or two, I bet.’

Ashenden, who saw most of them, knew them better than any of the others. Templeton at last had taken him into his confidence. He was rather amused at himself.

‘Rum thing at my time of life, falling in love with a decent girl. Last thing I’d ever expected of myself. And it’s no good denying it, I’m in it up to the neck; if I were a well man I’d ask her to marry me tomorrow. I never knew a girl could be as nice as that. I’ve always thought girls, decent girls, I mean, damned bores. But she isn’t a bore, she’s as clever as she can stick. And pretty too. My God, what a skin! And that hair: but it isn’t any of that that’s bowled me over like a row of ninepins. D’you know what’s got me? Damned ridiculous when you come to think of it. An old rip like me. Virtue. Makes me laugh like a hyena. Last thing I’ve ever wanted in a woman, but there it is, no getting away from it, she’s good, and it makes me feel like a worm. Surprises you, I suppose?’

‘Not a bit,’ said Ashenden. ‘You’re not the first rake who’s fallen to innocence. It’s merely the sentimentality of middle age.’

‘Dirty dog,’ laughed Templeton.

‘What does she say to it?’

‘Good God, you don’t suppose I’ve told her. I’ve never said a word to her that I wouldn’t have said before anyone else. I may be dead in six months, and besides, what have I got to offer a girl like that?’

Ashenden by now was pretty sure that she was just as much in love with Templeton as he was with her. He had seen the flush that coloured her cheeks when Templeton came into the dining–room and he had noticed the soft glance she gave him now and then when he was not looking at her. There was a peculiar sweetness in her smile when she listened to him telling some of his old experiences. Ashenden had the impression that she basked comfortably in his love as the patients on the terrace, facing the snow, basked in the hot sunshine; but it might very well be that she was content to leave it at that, and it was certainly no business of his to tell Templeton what perhaps she had no wish that he should know.

Then an incident occurred to disturb the monotony of life. Though McLeod and Campbell were always at odds they played bridge together because, till Templeton came, they were the best players in the sanatorium. They bickered incessantly, their post–mortems were endless, but after so many years each knew the other’s game perfectly and they took a keen delight in scoring off one another. As a rule Templeton refused to play with them; though a fine player he preferred to play with Ivy Bishop, and McLeod and Campbell were agreed on this, that she ruined the game. She was the kind of player who, having made a mistake that lost the rubber, would laugh and say: Well, it only made the difference of a trick. But one afternoon, since Ivy was staying in her room with a headache, Templeton consented to play with Campbell and McLeod. Ashenden was the fourth. Though it was the end of March there had been heavy snow for several days, and they played, in a veranda open on three sides to the wintry air, in fur coats and caps, with mittens on their hands. The stakes were too small for a gambler like Templeton to take the game seriously and his bidding was overbold, but he played so much better than the other three that he generally managed to make his contract or at least to come near it. But there was much doubling and redoubling. The cards ran high, so that an inordinate number of small slams were bid; it was a tempestuous game, and McLeod and Campbell lashed one another with their tongues. Half past five arrived and the last rubber was started, for at six the bell rang to send everyone to rest. It was a hard–fought rubber, with sets on both sides, for McLeod and Campbell were opponents and each was determined that the other should not win. At ten minutes to six it was game all and the last hand was dealt. Templeton was McLeod’s partner and Ashenden Campbell’s. The bidding started with two clubs from McLeod; Ashenden said nothing; Templeton showed that he had substantial help, and finally McLeod called a grand slam. Campbell doubled and McLeod redoubled. Hearing this, the players at other tables who had broken off gathered round and the hands were played in deadly silence to a little crowd of onlookers. McLeod’s face was white with excitement and there were beads of sweat on his brow. His hands trembled. Campbell was very grim. McLeod had to take two finesses and they both came off. He finished with a squeeze and got the last of the thirteen tricks. There was a burst of applause from the onlookers. McLeod, arrogant in victory, sprang to his feet. He shook his clenched fist at Campbell.

‘Play that off on your blasted fiddle,’ he shouted. ‘Grand slam doubled and redoubled. I’ve wanted to get it all my life and now I’ve got it. By God. By God.’

He gasped. He staggered forward and fell across the table. A stream of blood poured from his mouth. The doctor was sent for. Attendants came. He was dead.

He was buried two days later, early in the morning so that the patients should not be disturbed by the sight of a funeral. A relation in black came from Glasgow to attend it. No one had liked him. No one regretted him. At the end of a week so far as one could tell, he was forgotten. The Indian Civilian took his place at the principal table and Campbell moved into the room he had so long wanted.

‘Now we shall have peace,’ said Dr Lennox to Ashenden. ‘When you think that I’ve had to put up with the quarrels and complaints of those two men for years and years... Believe me, one has to have patience to run a sanatorium. And to think that after all the trouble he’s given me he had to end up like that and scare all those people out of their wits.’

‘It was a bit of a shock, you know,’ said Ashenden.

‘He was a worthless fellow and yet some of the women have been quite upset about it. Poor little Miss Bishop cried her eyes out.’

‘I suspect that she was the only one who cried for him and not for herself.’

But presently it appeared that there was one person who had not forgotten him. Campbell went about like a lost dog. He wouldn’t play bridge. He wouldn’t talk. There was no doubt about it, he was moping for McLeod. For several days he remained in his room, having his meals brought to him, and then went to Dr Lennox and said he didn’t like it as well as his old one and wanted to be moved back. Dr Lennox lost his temper, which he rarely did, and told him he had been pestering him to give him that room for years and now he could stay there or get out of the sanatorium. He returned to it and sat gloomily brooding.

‘Why don’t you play your violin?’ the matron asked him at length. ‘I haven’t heard you play for a fortnight.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s no fun any more. I used to get a kick out of playing because I knew it maddened McLeod. But now nobody cares if I play or not. I shall never play again.’

Nor did he for all the rest of the time that Ashenden was at the sanatorium. It was strange, now that McLeod was dead, life had lost its savour for him. With no one to quarrel with, no one to infuriate, he had lost his incentive and it was plain that it would not be long before he followed his enemy to the grave.

But on Templeton McLeod’s death had another effect, and one which was soon to have unexpected consequences. He talked to Ashenden about it in his cool, detached way.

‘Grand, passing out like that in his moment of triumph. I can’t make out why everyone got in such a state about it. He’d been here for years, hadn’t he?’

‘Eighteen, I believe.’

‘I wonder if it’s worth it. I wonder if it’s not better to have one’s fling and take the consequences.’

‘I suppose it depends on how much you value life.’

‘But is this life?’

Ashenden had no answer. In a few months he could count on being well, but you only had to look at Templeton to know that he was not going to recover. The death–look was on his face.

‘D’you know what I’ve done?’ asked Templeton. ‘I’ve asked Ivy to marry me.’

Ashenden was startled.

‘What did she say?’

‘Bless her little heart, she said it was the most ridiculous idea she’d ever heard in her life and I was crazy to think of such a thing.’

‘You must admit she was right.’

‘Quite. But she’s going to marry me.’

‘It’s madness.’

‘I dare say it is; but anyhow, we’re going to see Lennox and ask him what he thinks about it.’

The winter had broken at last; there was still snow on the hills, but in the valleys it was melted and on the lower slopes the birch–trees were in bud all ready to burst into delicate leaf. The enchantment of spring was in the air. The sun was hot. Everyone felt alert and some felt happy. The old stagers who came only for the winter were making their plans to go south. Templeton and Ivy went to see Dr Lennox together. They told him what they had in mind. He examined them; they were X–rayed and various tests were taken. Dr Lennox fixed a day when he would tell them the results and in the light of this discuss their proposal. Ashenden saw them just before they went to keep the appointment. They were anxious, but did their best to make a joke of it. Dr Lennox showed them the results of his examinations and explained to them in plain language what their condition was.

‘All that’s very fine and large,’ said Templeton then, ‘but what we want to know is whether we can get married.’

‘It would be highly imprudent.’

‘We know that, but does it matter?’

‘And criminal if you had a child.’

‘We weren’t thinking of having one,’ said Ivy.

‘Well, then I’ll tell you in very few words how the matter stands. Then you must decide for yourselves.’

Templeton gave Ivy a little smile and took her hand. The doctor went on.

‘I don’t think Miss Bishop will ever be strong enough to lead a normal life, but if she continues to live as she has been doing for the last eight years...’

‘In sanatoriums?’

‘Yes. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t live very comfortably, if not to a ripe old age, as long as any sensible person wants to live. The disease is quiescent. If she marries, if she attempts to live an ordinary life, the foci of infection may very well light up again, and what the results of that may be no one can foretell. So far as you are concerned, Templeton, I can put it even more shortly. You’ve seen the X–ray photos yourself. Your lungs are riddled with tubercle. If you marry you’ll be dead in six months.’

‘And if I don’t how long can I live?’

The doctor hesitated.

‘Don’t be afraid. You can tell me the truth.’

‘Two or three years.’

‘Thank you, that’s all we wanted to know.’

They went as they had come, hand in hand; Ivy was crying softly. No one knew what they said to one another; but when they came in to luncheon they were radiant. They told Ashenden and Chester that they were going to be married as soon as they could get a licence. Then Ivy turned to Chester.

‘I should so much like your wife to come up for my wedding. D’you think she would?’

‘You’re not going to be married here?’

‘Yes. Our respective relations will only disapprove, so we’re not going to tell them until it’s all over. We shall ask Dr Lennox to give me away.’

She looked mildly at Chester, waiting for him to speak, for he had not answered her. The other two men watched him. His voice shook a little when he spoke.

‘It’s very kind of you to want her. I’ll write and ask her.’

When the news spread among the patients, though everyone congratulated them, most of them privately told one another that it was very injudicious; but when they learnt, as sooner or later everything that happened in the sanatorium was learnt, that Dr Lennox had told Templeton that if he married he would be dead in six months, they were awed to silence. Even the dullest were moved at the thought of these two persons who loved one another so much that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. A spirit of kindliness and good will descended on the sanatorium: people who hadn’t been speaking spoke to one another again; others forgot for a brief space their own anxieties. Everyone seemed to share in the happiness of the happy pair. And it was not only the spring that filled those sick hearts with new hope, the great love that had taken possession of the man and the girl seemed to spread its effulgence on all that came near them. Ivy was quietly blissful; the excitement became her and she looked younger and prettier. Templeton seemed to walk on air. He laughed and joked as if he hadn’t a care in the world. You would have said that he looked forward to long years of uninterrupted felicity. But one day he confided in Ashenden.

‘This isn’t a bad place, you know,’ he said. ‘Ivy’s promised me that when I hand in my checks she’ll come back here. She knows the people and she won’t be so lonely.’

‘Doctors are often mistaken,’ said Ashenden. ‘If you live reasonably I don’t see why you shouldn’t go on for a long time yet.’

‘I’m only asking for three months. If I can have that it’ll be worth it.’

Mrs Chester came up two days before the wedding. She had not seen her husband for several months and they were shy with one another. It was easy to guess that when they were alone they felt awkward and constrained. Yet Chester did his best to shake off the depression that was now habitual and at all events at meal–times showed himself the jolly, hearty little fellow that he must have been before he fell ill. On the eve of the wedding day they all dined together, Templeton and Ashenden both sitting up for dinner; they drank champagne and stayed up till ten joking, laughing, and enjoying themselves. The wedding took place next morning in the kirk. Ashenden was best man. Everyone in the sanatorium who could stand on his feet attended it. The newly married couple were setting out by car immediately after lunch. Patients, doctors, and nurses assembled to see them off. Someone had tied an old shoe on the back of the car, and as Templeton and his wife came out of the door of the sanatorium rice was flung over them. A cheer was raised as they drove away, as they drove away to love and death. The crowd separated slowly. Chester and his wife went silently side by side. After they had gone a little way he shyly took her hand. Her heart seemed to miss a beat. With a sidelong glance she saw that his eyes were wet with tears.

‘Forgive me, dear,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very unkind to you.’

‘I knew you didn’t mean it,’ she faltered.

‘Yes, I did. I wanted you to suffer because I was suffering. But not any more. All this about Templeton and Ivy Bishop–I don’t know how to put it, it’s made me see everything differently. I don’t mind dying any more. I don’t think death’s very important, not so important as love. And I want you to live and be happy. I don’t grudge you anything any more and I don’t resent anything. I’m glad now it’s me that must die and not you. I wish for you everything that’s good in the world. I love you.’

THE SOCIAL SENSE

I do not like long–standing engagements. How can you tell whether on a certain day three or four weeks ahead you will wish to dine with a certain person? The chances are that in the interval something will turn up that you would much sooner do and so long a notice presages a large and formal party. But what help is there? The date has been fixed thus far away so that the guests bidden may be certainly disengaged and it needs a very adequate excuse to prevent your refusal from seeming churlish. You accept, and for a month the engagement hangs over you with gloomy menace. It interferes with your cherished plans. It disorganizes your life. There is really only one way to cope with the situation and that is to put yourself off at the last moment. But it is one that I have never had the courage or the want of scruple to adopt.

It was with a faint sense of resentment then that one June evening towards half past eight I left my lodging in Half Moon Street to walk round the corner to dine with the Macdonalds. I liked them. Many years ago I made up my mind not to eat the food of persons I disliked or despised, and though I have on this account enjoyed the hospitality of far fewer people than I otherwise should have done I still think the rule a good one. The Macdonalds were nice, but their parties were a toss–up. They suffered from the delusion that if they asked six persons to dine with them who had nothing in the world to say to one another the party would be a failure, but if they multiplied it by three and asked eighteen it must be a success. I arrived a little late, which is almost inevitable when you live so near the house you are going to that it is not worth while to take a taxi, and the room into which I was shown was filled with people. I knew few of them and my heart sank as I saw myself laboriously making conversation through a long dinner with two total strangers. It was a relief to me when I saw Thomas and Mary Warton come in and an unexpected pleasure when I found on going in to dinner that I had been placed next to Mary.

Thomas Warton was a portrait–painter who at one time had had considerable success, but he had never fulfilled the promise of his youth and had long ceased to be taken seriously by the critics. He made an adequate income, but at the Private View of the Royal Academy no one gave more than a passing glance at the dull but conscientious portraits of fox–hunting squires and prosperous merchants which with unfailing regularity he sent to the annual exhibition. One would have liked to admire his work because he was an amiable and kindly man. If you happened to be a writer he was so genuinely enthusiastic over anything you had done, so charmed with any success you might have had, that you wished your conscience would allow you to speak with decent warmth of his own productions. It was impossible and you were driven to the last refuge of the portrait painter’s friend.

‘It looks as if it were a marvellous likeness,’ you said.

Mary Warton had been in her day a well–known concert singer and she had still the remains of a lovely voice. She must in her youth have been very handsome. Now, at fifty–three, she had a haggard look. Her features were rather mannish and her skin was weather–beaten; but her short grey hair was thick and curly and her fine eyes were bright with intelligence. She dressed picturesquely rather than fashionably and she had a weakness for strings of beads and fantastic ear–rings. She had a blunt manner, a quick sense of human folly, and a sharp tongue, so that many people did not like her. But no one could deny that she was clever. She was not only an accomplished musician, but she was a great reader and she was passionately interested in painting. She had a very rare feeling for art. She liked the modern, not from pose but from natural inclination, and she had bought for next to nothing the pictures of unknown painters who later became famous. You heard at her house the most recent and difficult music and no poet or novelist in Europe could offer the world something new and strange without her being ready to fight on his behalf the good fight against the philistines. You might say she was a highbrow; she was; but her taste was almost faultless, her judgement sound, and her enthusiasm honest.

No one admired her more than Thomas Warton. He had fallen in love with her when she was still a singer and had pestered her to marry him. She had refused him half a dozen times and I had a notion that she had married him in the end with hesitation. She thought that he would become a great painter and when he turned out to be no more than a decent craftsman, without originality or imagination, she felt that she had been cheated. She was mortified by the contempt with which the connoisseurs regarded him. Thomas Warton loved his wife. He had the greatest respect for her judgement and would sooner have had a word of praise from her than columns of eulogy in all the papers in London. She was too honest to say what she did not think. It wounded him bitterly that she held his work in such poor esteem, and though he pretended to make a joke of it you could see that at heart he resented her outspoken comments. Sometimes his long, horse–like face grew red with the anger he tried to control and his eyes dark with hatred. It was notorious among their friends that the couple did not get on. They had the distressing habit of fripping in public. Warton never spoke to others of Mary but with admiration, but she was less discreet and her confidants knew how exasperating she found him. She admitted his goodness, his generosity, his unselfishness; she admitted them ungrudgingly; but his defects were of the sort that make a man hard to live with, for he was narrow, argumentative, and conceited. He was not an artist and Mary Warton cared more for art than for anything in the world. It was a matter on which she could not compromise. It blinded her to the fact that the faults in Warton that maddened her were due in large part to his hurt feelings. She wounded him continually and he was dogmatic and intolerant in self–protection. There cannot be anything much worse than to be despised by the one person whose approval is all in all to you; and though Thomas Warton was intolerable it was impossible not to feel sorry for him. But if I have given the impression that Mary was a discontented, rather tiresome, pretentious woman I have been unjust to her. She was a loyal friend and a delightful companion. You could talk to her of any subject under the sun. Her conversation was humorous and witty. Her vitality was immense.

She was sitting now on the left hand of her host and the talk around her was general. I was occupied with my next–door neighbour, but I guessed by the laughter with which Mary’s sallies were greeted that she was at her brilliant best. When she was in the vein no one could approach her.

‘You’re in great form tonight,’ I remarked, when at last she turned to me. ‘Does it surprise you?’

‘No, it’s what I expect of you. No wonder people tumble over one another to get you to their houses. You have the inestimable gift of making a party go.’ ‘I do my little best to earn my dinner.’

‘By the way, how’s Manson? Someone told me the other day that he was going into a nursing–home for an operation. I hope it’s nothing serious.’ Mary paused for a moment before answering, but she still smiled brightly. ‘Haven’t you seen the paper tonight?’

‘No, I’ve been playing golf. I only got home in time to jump into a bath and change.’

‘He died at two o’clock this afternoon.’ I was about to make an exclamation of horrified surprise, but she stopped me. ‘Take care. Tom is watching me like a lynx. They’re all watching me. They all know I adored him, but they none of them know for certain if he was my lover, even Tom doesn’t know; they want to see how I’m taking it. Try to look as if you were talking of the Russian Ballet.’ At that moment someone addressed her from the other side of the table, and throwing back her head a little with a gesture that was habitual with her, a smile on her large mouth, she flung at the speaker so quick and apt an answer that everyone round her burst out laughing. The talk once more became general and I was left to my consternation.

I knew, everyone knew, that for five and twenty years there had existed between Gerrard Manson and Mary Warton a passionate attachment. It had lasted so long that even the more strait–laced of their friends, if ever they had been shocked by it, had long since learnt to accept it with tolerance. They were middle–aged people, Manson was sixty and Mary not much younger, and it was absurd that at their age they should not do what they liked. You met them sometimes sitting in a retired corner of an obscure restaurant or walking together in the Zoo and you wondered why they still took care to conceal an affair that was nobody’s business but their own. But of course there was Thomas. He was insanely jealous of Mary. He made many violent scenes and indeed, at the end of one tempestuous period, not so very long ago, he forced her to promise never to see Manson again. Of course she broke the promise, and though she knew that Thomas suspected this, she took precautions to prevent him from discovering it for a fact.

It was hard on Thomas. I think he and Mary would have jogged on well enough together and she would have resigned herself to the fact that he was a second–rate painter if her intercourse with Manson had not embittered her judgement. The contrast between her husband’s mediocrity and her lover’s brilliance was too galling.

‘With Tom I feel as if I were stifling in a closed room full of dusty knick–knacks,’ she told me. ‘With Gerrard I breathe the pure air of the mountain tops.’

’Is it possible for a woman to fall in love with a man’s mind?’ I asked in a pure spirit of inquiry.

‘What else is there in Gerrard?’

That, I admit, was a poser. For my part I thought, nothing; but the sex is extraordinary and I was quite ready to believe that Mary saw in Gerrard Manson a charm and a physical attractiveness to which most people were blind. He was a shrivelled little man, with a pale intellectual face, faded blue eyes behind his spectacles, and a high dome of shiny bald head. He had none of the appearance of a romantic lover. On the other hand he was certainly a very subtle critic and a felicitous essayist. I resented somewhat his contemptuous attitude towards English writers unless they were safely dead and buried; but this was only to his credit with the intelligentsia, who are ever ready to believe that there can be no good in what is produced in their own country, and with them his influence was great. On one occasion I told him that one had only to put a commonplace in French for him to mistake it for an epigram and he had thought well enough of the joke to use it as his own in one of his essays. He reserved such praise as he was willing to accord his contemporaries to those who wrote in a foreign tongue. The exasperating thing was that no one could deny that he was himself a brilliant writer. His style was exquisite. His knowledge was vast. He could be profound without pomposity, amusing without frivolity, and polished without affectation. His slightest article was readable. His essays were little masterpieces. For my part I did not find him a very agreeable companion. Perhaps I did not get the best out of him. Though I knew him a great many years I never heard him say an amusing thing. He was not talkative and when he made a remark it was oracular. The prospect of spending an evening alone with him would have filled me with dismay. It never ceased to puzzle me that this dull and mannered little man should be able to write with so much grace, wit, and gaiety.

It puzzled me even more that a gallant and vivacious creature like Mary Warton should have cherished for him so consuming a passion. These things are inexplicable and there was evidently something in that odd, crabbed, irascible creature that appealed to women. His wife adored him. She was a fat, frowsy, boring person. She had led Gerrard a dog’s life, but had always refused to give him his freedom. She swore to kill herself if he left her and since she was unbalanced and hysterical he was never quite certain that she would not carry out her threat. One day, when I was having tea with Mary, I saw that she was distraught and nervous and when I asked her what was the matter she burst into tears. She had been lunching with Manson and had found him shattered after a terrific scene with his wife.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ Mary cried. ‘It’s ruining his life. It’s ruining all our lives.’

‘Why don’t you take the plunge?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve been lovers so long, you know the best and the worst of one another by now; you’re getting old and you can’t count on many more years of life; it seems a pity to waste a love that has endured so long. What good are you doing to Mrs Manson or to Tom? Are they happy because you two are making yourselves miserable?’

‘No.’

‘Then why don’t you chuck everything and just go off together and let come what may?’

Mary shook her head.

‘We’ve talked that over endlessly. We’ve talked it over for a quarter of a century. It’s impossible. For years Gerrard couldn’t on account of his daughters.

Mrs Manson may have been a very fond mother, but she was a very bad one, and there was no one to see the girls were properly brought up but Gerrard.

And now that they’re married off he’s set in his habits. What should we do? Go to France or Italy? I couldn’t tear Gerrard away from his surroundings. He’d be wretched. He’s too old to make a fresh start. And besides, though Thomas nags me and makes scenes and we frip and get on one another’s nerves, he loves me.

When it came to the point I simply shouldn’t have the heart to leave him. He’d be lost without me.’

‘It’s a situation without an issue. I’m dreadfully sorry for you.’

On a sudden Mary’s haggard, weather–beaten face was lit by a smile that broke on her large red mouth; and upon my word at that moment she was beautiful.

‘You need not be. I was rather low a little while ago, but now I’ve had a good cry I feel better. Notwithstanding all the pain, all the unhappiness this affair has caused me, I wouldn’t have missed it for all the world. For those few moments of ecstasy my love has brought me I would be willing to live all my life over again. And I think he’d tell you the same thing. Oh, it’s been so infinitely worth while.’

I could not help but be moved.

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ I said. ‘That’s love all right.’

‘Yes, it’s love, and we’ve just got to go through with it. There’s no way out.’ And now with this tragic suddenness the way out had come. I turned a little to look at Mary and she, feeling my eyes upon her, turned too. There was a smile on her lips.

‘Why did you come here tonight? It must be awful for you.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘What could I do? I read the news in the evening paper while I was dressing.

He’d asked me not to ring up the nursing–home on account of his wife. It’s death to me. Death. I had to come. We’d been engaged for a month. What excuse could I give Tom? I’m not supposed to have seen Gerrard for two years.

Do you know that for twenty years we’ve written to one another every day?’

Her lower lip trembled a little, but she bit it and for a moment her face was twisted to a strange grimace; then with a smile she pulled herself together. ‘He was everything I had in the world, but I couldn’t let the party down, could I? He always said I had a social sense.’

‘Happily we shall break up early and you can go home.’

‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone. I daren’t cry because my eyes will get red and swollen, and we’ve got a lot of people lunching with us tomorrow. Will you come, by the way? I want an extra man. I must be in good form; Tom expects to get a commission for a portrait out of it.’

‘By George, you’ve got courage.’

‘D’you think so? I’m heartbroken, you know. I suppose that’s what makes it easier for me. Gerrard would have liked me to put a good face on it. He would have appreciated the irony of the situation. It’s the sort of thing he always thought the French novelists described so well.’

THE VERGER

There had been a christening that afternoon at St Peter’s, Neville Square, and Albert Edward Foreman still wore his verger’s gown. He kept his new one, its folds as full and stiff as though it were made not of alpaca but of perennial bronze, for funerals and weddings (St Peter’s, Neville Square, was a church much favoured by the fashionable for these ceremonies) and now he wore only his second–best. He wore it with complacence, for it was the dignified symbol of his office, and without it (when he took it off to go home) he had the disconcerting sensation of being somewhat insufficiently clad. He took pains with it; he pressed it and ironed it himself. During the sixteen years he had been verger of this church he had had a succession of such gowns, but he had never been able to throw them away when they were worn out and the complete series, neatly wrapped up in brown paper, lay in the bottom drawers of the wardrobe in his bedroom.

The verger busied himself quietly, replacing the painted wooden cover on the marble font, taking away a chair that had been brought for an infirm old lady, and waited for the vicar to have finished in the vestry so that he could tidy up in there and go home. Presently he saw him walk across the chancel, genuflect in front of the high altar, and come down the aisle; but he still wore his cassock.

‘What’s he ‘anging about for?’ the verger said to himself. ‘Don’t ’e know I want my tea?’

The vicar had been but recently appointed, a red–faced energetic man in the early forties, and Albert Edward still regretted his predecessor, a clergyman of the old school who preached leisurely sermons in a silvery voice and dined out a great deal with his more aristocratic parishioners. He liked things in church to be just so, but he never fussed; he was not like this new man who wanted to have his finger in every pie. But Albert Edward was tolerant. St Peter’s was in a very good neighbourhood and the parishioners were a very nice class of people. The new vicar had come from the East End and he couldn’t be expected to fall in all at once with the discreet ways of his fashionable congregation.

‘All this ‘ustle,’ said Albert Edward. ‘But give ’im time, he’ll learn.’

When the vicar had walked down the aisle so far that he could address the verger without raising his voice more than was becoming in a place of worship he stopped.

‘Foreman, will you come into the vestry for a minute. I have something to say to you.’

‘Very good, sir.’

The vicar waited for him to come up and they walked up the church together.

‘A very nice christening, I thought, sir. Funny ‘ow the baby stopped cryin’ the moment you took him.’

‘I’ve noticed they very often do,’ said the vicar, with a little smile. ‘After all I’ve had a good deal of practice with them.’

It was a source of subdued pride to him that he could nearly always quiet a whimpering infant by the manner in which he held it and he was not unconscious of the amused admiration with which mothers and nurses watched him settle the baby in the crook of his surpliced arm. The verger knew that it pleased him to be complimented on his talent.

The vicar preceded Albert Edward into the vestry. Albert Edward was a trifle surprised to find the two churchwardens there. He had not seen them come in. They gave him pleasant nods.

‘Good afternoon, my lord. Good afternoon, sir,’ he said to one after the other.

They were elderly men, both of them, and they had been churchwardens almost as long as Albert Edward had been verger. They were sitting now at a handsome refectory table that the old vicar had brought many years before from Italy and the vicar sat down in the vacant chair between them. Albert Edward faced them, the table between him and them, and wondered with slight uneasiness what was the matter. He remembered still the occasion on which the organist had got into trouble and the bother they had all had to hush things up. In a church like St Peter’s, Neville Square, they couldn’t afford a scandal. On the vicar’s red face was a look of resolute benignity, but the others bore an expression that was slightly troubled.

‘He’s been naggin’ them, he ‘as,’ said the verger to himself. ‘He’s jockeyed them into doin’ something, but they don’t ‘alf like it. That’s what it is, you mark my words.’

But his thoughts did not appear on Albert Edward’s clean–cut and distinguished features. He stood in a respectful but not obsequious attitude. He had been in service before he was appointed to his ecclesiastical office, but only in very good houses, and his deportment was irreproachable. Starting as a page–boy in the household of a merchant–prince, he had risen by due degrees from the position of fourth to first footman, for a year he had been single–handed butler to a widowed peeress, and, till the vacancy occurred at St Peter’s, butler with two men under him in the house of a retired ambassador. He was tall, spare, grave, and dignified. He looked, if not like a duke, at least like an actor of the old school who specialized in dukes’ parts. He had tact, firmness, and self–assurance. His character was unimpeachable.

The vicar began briskly.

‘Foreman, we’ve got something rather unpleasant to say to you. You’ve been here a great many years and I think his lordship and the general agree with me that you’ve fulfilled the duties of your office to the satisfaction of everybody concerned.’

The two churchwardens nodded.

‘But a most extraordinary circumstance came to my knowledge the other day and I felt it my duty to impart it to the churchwardens. I discovered to my astonishment that you could neither read nor write.’

The verger’s face betrayed no sign of embarrassment.

‘The last vicar knew that, sir,’ he replied. ‘He said it didn’t make no difference. He always said there was a great deal too much education in the world for ’is taste.’

‘It’s the most amazing thing I ever heard,’ cried the general. ‘Do you mean to say that you’ve been verger of this church for sixteen years and never learned to read or write?’

‘I went into service when I was twelve, sir. The cook in the first place tried to teach me once, but I didn’t seem to ‘ave the knack for it, and then what with one thing and another I never seemed to ‘ave the time. I’ve never really found the want of it. I think a lot of these young fellows waste a rare lot of time readin’ when they might be doin’ something useful.’

‘But don’t you want to know the news?’ said the other churchwarden. ‘Don’t you ever want to write a letter?’

‘No, me lord, I seem to manage very well without. And of late years now they’ve all these pictures in the papers I get to know what’s goin’ on pretty well. Me wife’s quite a scholar and if I want to write a letter she writes it for me. It’s not as if I was a bettin’ man.’

The two churchwardens gave the vicar a troubled glance and then looked down at the table.

‘Well, Foreman, I’ve talked the matter over with these gentlemen and they quite agree with me that the situation is impossible. At a church like St Peter’s, Neville Square, we cannot have a verger who can neither read nor write.’

Albert Edward’s thin, sallow face reddened and he moved uneasily on his feet, but he made no reply.

‘Understand me, Foreman, I have no complaint to make against you. You do your work quite satisfactorily; I have the highest opinion both of your character and of your capacity; but we haven’t the right to take the risk of some accident that might happen owing to your lamentable ignorance. It’s a matter of prudence as well as of principle.’

‘But couldn’t you learn, Foreman?’ asked the general.

‘No, sir, I’m afraid I couldn’t, not now. You see, I’m not as young as I was and if I couldn’t seem able to get the letters in me ‘ead when I was a nipper I don’t think there’s much chance of it now.’

‘We don’t want to be harsh with you, Foreman,’ said the vicar. ‘But the churchwardens and I have quite made up our minds. We’ll give you three months and if at the end of that time you cannot read and write I’m afraid you’ll have to go.’

Albert Edward had never liked the new vicar. He’d said from the beginning that they’d made a mistake when they gave him St Peter’s. He wasn’t the type of man they wanted with a classy congregation like that. And now he straightened himself a little. He knew his value and he wasn’t going to allow himself to be put upon.

‘I’m very sorry, sir, I’m afraid it’s no good. I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. I’ve lived a good many years without knowin’ ‘ow to read and write, and without wishin’ to praise myself, self–praise is no recommendation, I don’t mind sayin’ I’ve done my duty in that state of life in which it ‘as pleased a merciful providence to place me, and if I could learn now I don’t know as I’d want to.’

‘In that case, Foreman, I’m afraid you must go.’

‘Yes, sir, I quite understand. I shall be ‘appy to ‘and in my resignation as soon as you’ve found somebody to take my place.’

But when Albert Edward with his usual politeness had closed the church door behind the vicar and the two churchwardens he could not sustain the air of unruffled dignity with which he had borne the blow inflicted upon him and his lips quivered. He walked slowly back to the vestry and hung up on its proper peg his verger’s gown. He sighed as he thought of all the grand funerals and smart weddings it had seen. He tidied everything up, put on his coat, and hat in hand walked down the aisle. He locked the church door behind him. He strolled across the square, but deep in his sad thoughts he did not take the street that led him home, where a nice strong cup of tea awaited him; he took the wrong turning. He walked slowly along. His heart was heavy. He did not know what he should do with himself. He did not fancy the notion of going back to domestic service; after being his own master for so many years, for the vicar and churchwardens could say what they liked, it was he that had run St Peter’s, Neville Square, he could scarcely demean himself by accepting a situation. He had saved a tidy sum, but not enough to live on without doing something, and life seemed to cost more every year. He had never thought to be troubled with such questions. The vergers of St Peter’s, like the popes of Rome, were there for life. He had often thought of the pleasant reference the vicar would make in his sermon at evensong the first Sunday after his death to the long and faithful service, and the exemplary character of their late verger, Albert Edward Foreman. He sighed deeply. Albert Edward was a non–smoker and a total abstainer, but with a certain latitude; that is to say he liked a glass of beer with his dinner and when he was tired he enjoyed a cigarette. It occurred to him now that one would comfort him and since he did not carry them he looked about him for a shop where he could buy a packet of Gold Flake. He did not at once see one and walked on a little. It was a long street, with all sorts of shops in it, but there was not a single one where you could buy cigarettes.

‘That’s strange,’ said Albert Edward.

To make sure he walked right up the street again. No, there was no doubt about it. He stopped and looked reflectively up and down.

‘I can’t be the only man as walks along this street and wants a fag,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder but what a fellow might do very well with a little shop here. Tobacco and sweets, you know.’

He gave a sudden start.

‘That’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Strange ‘ow things come to you when you least expect it.’

He turned, walked home, and had his tea.

‘You’re very silent this afternoon, Albert,’ his wife remarked.

‘I’m thinkin’,’ he said.

He considered the matter from every point of view and next day he went along the street and by good luck found a little shop to let that looked as though it would exactly suit him. Twenty–four hours later he had taken it, and when a month after that he left St Peter’s, Neville Square, for ever, Albert Edward Foreman set up in business as a tobacconist and newsagent. His wife said it was a dreadful come–down after being verger of St Peter’s, but he answered that you had to move with the times, the church wasn’t what it was, and ‘enceforward he was going to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. Albert Edward did very well. He did so well that in a year or so it struck him that he might take a second shop and put a manager in. He looked for another long street that hadn’t got a tobacconist in it and when he found it, and a shop to let, took it and stocked it. This was a success too. Then it occurred to him that if he could run two he could run half a dozen, so he began walking about London, and whenever he found a long street that had no tobacconist and a shop to let he took it. In the course of ten years he had acquired no less than ten shops and he was making money hand over fist. He went round to all of them himself every Monday, collected the week’s takings, and took them to the bank.

One morning when he was there paying in a bundle of notes and a heavy bag of silver the cashier told him that the manager would like to see him. He was shown into an office and the manager shook hands with him.

‘Mr Foreman, I wanted to have a talk to you about the money you’ve got on deposit with us. D’you know exactly how much it is?’

‘Not within a pound or two, sir; but I’ve got a pretty rough idea.’

‘Apart from what you paid in this morning it’s a little over thirty thousand pounds. That’s a very large sum to have on deposit and I should have thought you’d do better to invest it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to take no risk, sir. I know it’s safe in the bank.’

‘You needn’t have the least anxiety. We’ll make you out a list of absolutely gilt–edged securities. They’ll bring you in a better rate of interest than we can possibly afford to give you.’

A troubled look settled on Mr Foreman’s distinguished face. ‘I’ve never ‘ad anything to do with stocks and shares and I’d ‘ave to leave it all in your ‘ands,’ he said.

The manager smiled. ‘We’ll do everything. All you’ll have to do next time you come in is just to sign the transfers.’

‘I could do that all right,’ said Albert uncertainly. ‘But ‘ow should I know what I was signin’?’

‘I suppose you can read,’ said the manager a trifle sharply.

Mr Foreman gave him a disarming smile.

‘Well, sir, that’s just it. I can’t. I know it sounds funny–like, but there it is, I can’t read or write, only me name, an’ I only learnt to do that when I went into business.’

The manager was so surprised that he jumped up from his chair.

‘That’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard.’

‘You see, it’s like this, sir, I never ‘ad the opportunity until it was too late and then some’ow I wouldn’t. I got obstinate–like.’

The manager stared at him as though he were a prehistoric monster.

‘And do you mean to say that you’ve built up this important business and amassed a fortune of thirty thousand pounds without being able to read or write? Good God, man, what would you be now if you had been able to?’

‘I can tell you that, sir,’ said Mr Foreman, a little smile on his still aristocratic features. ‘I’d be verger of St Peter’s, Neville Square.’

IN A STRANGE LAND

I AM of a roving disposition; but I travel not to see imposing monuments, which indeed somewhat bore me, nor beautiful scenery, of which I soon tire; I travel to see men. I avoid the great. I would not cross the road to meet a president or a king; I am content to know the writer in the pages of his book and the painter in his picture; but I have journeyed a hundred leagues to see a missionary of whom I had heard a strange story and I have spent a fortnight in a vile hotel in order to improve my acquaintance with a billiard-marker. I should be inclined to say that I am not surprised to meet any sort of person were it not that there is one sort that I am constantly running against and that never fails to give me a little shock of amused astonishment. This is the elderly Englishwoman, generally of adequate means, who is to be found living alone, up and down the world, in unexpected places. You do not wonder when you hear of her living in a villa on a hill outside a small Italian town, the only Englishwoman in the neighbourhood, and you are almost prepared for it when a lonely hacienda is pointed out to you in Andalusia and you are told that there has dwelt for many years an English lady. But it is more surprising when you hear that the only white person in a Chinese city is an Englishwoman, not a missionary, who lives there none knows why; and there is another who inhabits an island in the South Seas and a third who has a bungalow on the outskirts of a large village in the centre of Java. They live solitary lives, these women, without friends, and they do not welcome the stranger. Though they may not have seen one of their own race for months they will pass you on the road as though they did not see you, and if, presuming on your nationality, you should call, as likely as not they will decline to see you; but if they do, they will give you a cup of tea from a silver teapot and on a plate of Old Worcester you will find Scotch scones. They will talk to you politely, as though they were entertaining you in a Kentish vicarage, but when you take your leave will show no particular desire to continue the acquaintance. One wonders in vain what strange instinct it is that has driven them to separate themselves from their kith and kin and thus to live apart from all their natural interests in an alien land. Is it romance they have sought or freedom?

But of all these Englishwomen whom I have met or perhaps only heard of (for as I have said they are difficult of access) the one who remains most vividly in my memory is an elderly person who lived in Asia Minor. I had arrived after a tedious journey at a little town from which I proposed to make the ascent of a celebrated mountain and I was taken to a rambling hotel that stood at its foot. I arrived late at night and signed my name in the book. I went up to my room. It was cold and I shivered as I undressed, but in a moment there was a knock at the door and the dragoman came in.

“Signora Niccolini’s compliments,” he said.

To my astonishment he handed me a hot-water bottle. I took it with grateful hands.

“Who is Signora Niccolini?” I asked.

“She is the proprietor of this hotel,” he answered.

I sent her my thanks and he withdrew. The last thing I expected in a scrubby hotel in Asia Minor kept by an old Italian woman was a beautiful hot-water bottle. There is nothing I like more (if we were not all sick to death of the war I would tell you the story of how six men risked their lives to fetch a hot-water bottle from a château in Flanders that was being bombarded); and next morning, so that I might thank her in person, I asked if I might see the Signora Niccolini. While I waited for her I racked my brains to think what hot-water bottle could possibly be in Italian. In a moment she came in. She was a little stout woman, not without dignity, and she wore a black apron trimmed with lace and a small black lace cap. She stood with her hands crossed. I was astonished at her appearance for she looked exactly like a housekeeper in a great English house.

“Did you wish to speak to me, sir?”

She was an Englishwoman and in those few words I surely recognised the trace of a cockney accent.

“I wanted to thank you for the hot-water bottle,” I replied in some confusion.

“I saw by the visitors’ book that you were English, sir, and I always send up a ‘ot-water bottle to English gentlemen.”

“Believe me, it was very welcome.”

“I was for many years in the service of the late Lord Ormskirk, sir. He always used to travel with a ‘ot-water bottle. Is there anything else, sir?”

“Not at the moment, thank you.”

She gave me a polite little nod and withdrew. I wondered how on earth it came about that a funny old Englishwoman like that should be the landlady of a hotel in Asia Minor. It was not easy to make her acquaintance, for she knew her place, as she would herself have put it, and she kept me at a distance. It was not for nothing that she had been in service in a noble English family. But I was persistent and I induced her at last to ask me to have a cup of tea in her own little parlour. I learnt that she had been lady’s maid to a certain Lady Ormskirk, and Signor Niccolini (for she never alluded to her deceased husband in any other way) had been his lordship’s chef. Signor Niccolini was a very handsome man and for some years there had been an “understanding” between them. When they had both saved a certain amount of money they were married, retired from service, and looked about for a hotel. They had bought this one on an advertisement because Signor Niccolini thought he would like to see something of the world. That was nearly thirty years ago and Signor Niccolini had been dead for fifteen. His widow had not once been back to England. I asked her if she was never homesick.

“I don’t say as I wouldn’t like to go back on a visit, though I expect I’d find many changes. But my family didn’t like the idea of me marrying a foreigner and I ‘aven’t spoken to them since. Of course there are many things here that are not the same as what they ‘ave at ‘ome, but it’s surprising what you get used to. I see a lot of life. I don’t know as I should care to live the ‘umdrum life they do in a place like London.”

I smiled. For what she said was strangely incongruous with her manner. She was a pattern of decorum. It was extraordinary that she could have lived for thirty years in this wild and almost barbaric country without its having touched her. Though I knew no Turkish and she spoke it with ease I was convinced that she spoke it most incorrectly and with a cockney accent. I suppose she had remained the precise, prim English lady’s-maid, knowing her place, through all these vicissitudes because she had no faculty of surprise. She took everything that came as a matter of course. She looked upon everyone who wasn’t English as a foreigner and therefore as someone, almost imbecile, for whom allowances must be made. She ruled her staff despotically — for did she not know how an upper servant in a great house should exercise his authority over the under servants? — and everything about the hotel was clean and neat.

“I do my best,” she said, when I congratulated her on this, standing, as always when she spoke to me, with her hands respectfully crossed. “Of course one can’t expect foreigners to ‘ave the same ideas what we ‘ave, but as his lordship used to say to me, what we’ve got to do, Parker, he said to me, what we’ve got to do in this life is to make the best of our raw material.”

But she kept her greatest surprise for the eve of my departure. “I’m glad you’re not going before you’ve seen my two sons, sir.”

“I didn’t know you had any.”

“They’ve been away on business, but they’ve just come back. You’ll be surprised when you’ve seen them. I’ve trained them with me own ‘ands so to speak, and when I’m gone they’ll carry on the ‘otel between them.”

In a moment two tall, swarthy, strapping young fellows entered the hall. Her eyes lit up with pleasure. They went up to her and took her in their arms and gave her resounding kisses.

“They don’t speak English, sir, but they understand a little, and of course they speak Turkish like natives, and Greek and Italian.” I shook hands with the pair and then Signora Niccolini said something to them and they went away.

“They’re handsome fellows, Signora,” I said. “You must be very proud of them.”

“I am, sir, and they’re good boys, both of them. They’ve never give me a moment’s trouble from the day they was born and they’re the very image of Signor Niccolini.”

“I must say no one would think they had an English mother.”

“I’m not exactly their mother, sir. I’ve just sent them along to say ‘ow do you do to ‘er.”

I dare say I looked a little confused.

“They’re the sons that Signor Niccolini ‘ad by a Greek girl that used to work in the ‘otel, and ‘aving no children of me own I adopted them.” I sought for some remark to make.

“I ‘ope you don’t think that there’s any blame attaches to Signor Niccolini,” she said, drawing herself up a little. “I shouldn’t like you to think that, sir.” She folded her hands again and with a mixture of pride, primness and satisfaction added the final word: “Signor Niccolini was a very full-blooded man.”

THE TAIPAN

No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion, with its wide verandas and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school (he was at St Paul’s), with his father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate his evening meal. He always dressed and whether he was alone or not he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entree, roast, sweet, and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he had a guest.

He had indeed gone far. That was why he did not care to go home now, he had not been to England for ten years, and he took his leave in Japan or Vancouver, where he was sure of meeting old friends from the China coast. He knew no one at home. His sisters had married in their own station, their husbands were clerks and their sons were clerks; there was nothing between him and them; they bored him. He satisfied the claims of relationship by sending them every Christmas a piece of fine silk, some elaborate embroidery, or a case of tea. He was not a mean man and as long as his mother lived he had made her an allowance. But when the time came for him to retire he had no intention of going back to England, he had seen too many men do that and he knew how often it was a failure; he meant to take a house near the racecourse in Shanghai: what with bridge and his ponies and golf he expected to get through the rest of his life very comfortably. But he had a good many years before he need think of retiring. In another five or six Higgins would be going home and then he would take charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile he was very happy where he was, he could save money, which you couldn’t do in Shanghai, and have a good time into the bargain. This place had another advantage over Shanghai: he was the most prominent man in the community and what he said went. Even the consul took care to keep on the right side of him. Once a consul and he had been at loggerheads and it was not he who had gone to the wall. The taipan thrust out his jaw pugnaciously as he thought of the incident.

But he smiled, for he felt in an excellent humour. He was walking back to his office from a capital luncheon at the Hong–Kong and Shanghai Bank. They did you very well there. The food was first–rate and there was plenty of liquor. He had started with a couple of cocktails, then he had some excellent sauterne and he had finished up with two glasses of port and some fine old brandy. He felt good. And when he left he did a thing that was rare with him; he walked. His bearers with his chair kept a few paces behind him in case he felt inclined to slip into it, but he enjoyed stretching his legs. He did not get enough exercise these days. Now that he was too heavy to ride it was difficult to get exercise. But if he was too heavy to ride he could still keep ponies, and as he strolled along in the balmy air he thought of the spring meeting. He had a couple of griffins that he had hopes of and one of the lads in his office had turned out a fine jockey (he must see they didn’t sneak him away, old Higgins in Shanghai would give a pot of money to get him over there) and he ought to pull off two or three races. He flattered himself that he had the finest stable in the city. He pouted his broad chest like a pigeon. It was a beautiful day, and it was good to be alive.

He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood there, neat and orderly, as an evident sign of the community’s opulence. He never passed the cemetery without a little glow of pride. He was pleased to be an Englishman. For the cemetery stood in a place, valueless when it was chosen, which with the increase of the city’s affluence was now worth a great deal of money. It had been suggested that the graves should be moved to another spot and the land sold for building, but the feeling of the community was against it. It gave the taipan a sense of satisfaction to think that their dead rested on the most valuable site on the island. It showed that there were things they cared for more than money. Money be blowed! When it came to ‘the things that mattered’ (this was a favourite phrase with the taipan), well, one remembered that money wasn’t everything.

And now he thought he would take a stroll through. He looked at the graves. They were neatly kept and the pathways were free from weeds. There was a look of prosperity. And as he sauntered along he read the names on the tombstones. Here were three side by side: the captain, the first mate, and the second made of the barque Mary Baxter, who had all perished together in the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well. There was a little group of two missionaries, their wives and children, who had been massacred during the Boxer troubles. Shocking thing that had been! Not that he took much stock in missionaries; but, hang it all, one couldn’t have these damned Chinese massacring them. Then he came to a cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap, Edward Mulock, but he couldn’t stand his liquor, drank himself to death, poor devil, at twenty–five; the taipan had known a lot of them do that; there were several more neat crosses with a man’s name on them and the age, twenty–five, twenty–six, or twenty–seven; it was always the same story: they had come out to China; they had never seen so much money before, they were good fellows and they wanted to drink with the rest: they couldn’t stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You had to have a strong head and a fine constitution to drink drink for drink on the China coast. Of course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly help a smile when he thought how many of those young fellows he had drunk underground. And there was a death that had been useful, a fellow in his own firm, senior to him and a clever chap too: if that fellow had lived he might not have been taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs Turner, Violet Turner, she had been a pretty little thing, he had had quite an affair with her; he had been devilish cut up when she died. He looked at her age on the tombstone. She’d be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought of all those dead people a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He had beaten them all. They were dead and he was alive, and by George he’d scored them off. His eyes collected in one picture all those crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his hands.

‘No one ever thought I was a fool,’ he muttered.He had a feeling of good–natured contempt for the gibbering dead. Then, as he strolled along, he came suddenly upon two coolies digging a grave. He was astonished, for he had not heard that anyone in the community was dead.

‘Who the devil’s that for?’ he said aloud.The coolies did not even look at him, they went on with their work, standing in the grave, deep down, and they shovelled up heavy clods of earth. Though he had been so long in China he knew no Chinese, in his day it was not thought necessary to learn the damned language, and he asked the coolies in English whose grave they were digging. They did not understand. They answered him in Chinese and he cursed them for ignorant fools. He knew that Mrs Broome’s child was ailing and it might have died, but he would certainly have heard of it, and besides, that wasn’t a child’s grave, it was a man’s and a big man’s too. It was uncanny. He wished he hadn’t gone into that cemetery; he hurried out and stepped into his chair. His good–humour had all gone and there was an uneasy frown on his face. The moment he got back to his office he called to his number two:

‘I say, Peters, who’s dead, d’you know?’ But Peters knew nothing. The taipan was puzzled. He called one of the native clerks and sent him to the cemetery to ask the coolies. He began to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said the coolies had gone and there was no one to ask. The taipan began to feel vaguely annoyed: he did not like things to happen of which he knew nothing. His own boy would know, his boy always knew everything, and he sent for him; but the boy had heard of no death in the community.

‘I knew no one was dead,’ said the taipan irritably. ‘But what’s the grave for?’ He told the boy to go to the overseer of the cemetery and find out what the devil he had dug a grave for when no one was dead.

‘Let me have a whisky and soda before you go,’ he added, as the boy was leaving the room.

He did not know why the sight of the grave had made him uncomfortable. But he tried to put it out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk the whisky, and he finished his work. He went upstairs and turned over the pages of Punch In a few minutes he would go to the club and play a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it would ease his mind to hear what his boy had to say and he waited for his return. In a little while the boy came back and he brought the overseer with him.

‘What are you having a grave dug for?’ he asked the overseer point–blank. ‘Nobody’s dead.’

‘I no dig glave,’ said the man.

‘What the devil do you mean by that? There were two coolies digging a grave this afternoon.’

The two Chinese looked at one another. Then the boy said they had been to the cemetery together. There was no new grave there.

The taipan only just stopped himself from speaking.

‘But damn it all, I saw it myself,’ were the words on the tip of his tongue.

But he did not say them. He grew very red as he choked them down. The two Chinese looked at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his breath failed him.

‘All right. Get out,’ he gasped.

But as soon as they were gone he shouted for the boy again, and when he came, maddeningly impassive, he told him to bring some whisky. He rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief. His hand trembled when he lifted the glass to his lips. They could say what they liked, but he had seen the grave. Why, he could hear still the dull thud as the coolies threw the spadefuls of earth on the ground above them. What did it mean? He could feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at ease. But he pulled himself together. It was all nonsense. If there was no grave there it must have been a hallucination. The best thing he could do was to go the club, and if he ran across the doctor he would ask him to give him a look over.

Everyone in the club looked just the same as ever. He did not know why he should have expected them to look different. It was a comfort. These men, living for many years with one another lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little idiosyncrasies–one of them hummed incessantly while he played bridge, another insisted on drinking beer through a straw–and these tricks which had so often irritated the taipan now gave him a sense of security. He needed it, for he could not get out of his head that strange sight he had seen; he played bridge very badly; his partner was censorious, and the taipan lost his temper. He thought the men were looking at him oddly. He wondered what they saw in him that was unaccustomed.

Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in the club any longer. As he went out he saw the doctor reading The Times in the reading–room, but he could not bring himself to speak to him. He wanted to see for himself whether that grave was really there, and stepping into his chair he told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You couldn’t have a hallucination twice, could you? And besides, he would take the overseer in with him and if the grave was not there he wouldn’t see it, and if it was he’d give the overseer the soundest thrashing he’d ever had. But the overseer was nowhere to be found. He had gone out and taken the keys with him. When the taipan found he could not get into the cemetery he felt suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair and told his bearers to take him home. He would lie down for half an hour before dinner. He was tired out. That was it. He had heard that people had hallucinations when they were tired. When his boy came in to put out his clothes for dinner it was only by an effort of will that he got up. He had a strong inclination not to dress that evening, but he resisted it: he made it a rule to dress, he had dressed every evening for twenty years and it would never do to break his rule. But he ordered a bottle of champagne with his dinner and that made him feel more comfortable. Afterwards he told the boy to bring him the best brandy. When he had drunk a couple of glasses of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be damned! He went to the billiard–room and practised a few difficult shots. There could not be much the matter with him when his eye was so sure. When he went to bed he sank immediately into a sound sleep.

But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely. He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it was a hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the night–watchman going his rounds. It broke upon the stillness of the night so harshly that it made him jump out of his skin. And then terror seized him. He felt a horror of the winding multitudinous streets of the Chinese city, and there was something ghastly and terrible in the convoluted roofs of the temples with their devils grimacing and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted his nostrils. And the people. Those myriads of blue–clad coolies, and the beggars in their filthy rags, and the merchants and the magistrates, sleek, smiling, and inscrutable, in their long black gowns. They seemed to press upon him with menace. He hated the country. China. Why had he ever come? He was panic–stricken now. He must get out. He would not stay another year, another month. What did he care about Shanghai?

‘Oh, my God,’ he cried, ‘if I were only safely back in England.’

He wanted to go home. If he had to die he wanted to die in England. He could not bear to be buried among all these yellow men, with their slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted to be buried at home, not in that grave he had seen that day. He could never rest there. Never. What did it matter what people thought? Let them think what they liked. The only thing that mattered was to get away while he had the chance.

He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the firm and said he had discovered he was dangerously ill. He must be replaced. He could not stay longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go home at once.

They found the letter in the morning clenched in the taipan’s hand. He had slipped down between the desk and the chair. He was stone dead.

THE CONSUL

Mr Pete was in a state of the liveliest exasperation. He had been in the consular service for more than twenty years and he had had to deal with all manner of vexatious people, officials who would not listen to reason, merchants who took the British Government for a debt–collecting agency, missionaries who resented as gross injustice any attempt at fair play; but he never recollected a case which had left him more completely at a loss. He was a mild–mannered man, but for no reason he flew into a passion with his writer and he very nearly sacked the Eurasian clerk because he had wrongly spelt two words in a letter placed before him for his official signature. He was a conscientious man and he could not persuade himself to leave his office before the clock struck four; the moment it did he jumped up and called for his hat and stick. Because his boy did not bring them at once he abused him roundly. They say that the consuls all grow a little odd; and the merchants who can live for thirty–five years in China without learning enough of the language to ask their way in the street say that it is because they have to study Chinese; and there was no doubt that Mr Pete was decidedly odd. He was a bachelor and on that account had been sent to a series of posts which by reason of their isolation were thought unsuited to married men. He had lived so much alone that his natural tendency to eccentricity had developed to an extravagant degree, and he had habits which surprised the stranger. He was very absent–minded. He paid no attention to his house, which was always in great disorder, nor to his food; his boys gave him to eat what they liked and for everything he had made him pay through the nose. He was untiring in his efforts to suppress the opium traffic, but he was the only person in the city who did not know that his servants kept opium in the consulate itself, and a busy traffic in the drug was openly conducted at the back door of the compound. He was an ardent collector and the house provided for him by the government was filled with the various things which he had collected one after the other, pewter, brass, carved wood; these were his more legitimate enterprises; but he also collected stamps, birds’ eggs, hotel labels, and postmarks: he boasted that he had a collection of postmarks which was unequalled in the Empire. During his long sojourning in lonely places he had read a great deal, and though he was no sinologue he had a greater knowledge of China, its history, literature, and people, than most of his colleagues; but from his wide reading he had acquired not toleration but vanity. He was a man of a singular appearance. His body was small and frail and when he walked he gave you the idea of a dead leaf dancing before the wind; and then there was something extraordinarily odd in the small Tyrolese hat, with a cock’s feather in it, very old and shabby, which he wore perched rakishly on the side of his large head. He was exceedingly bald. You saw that his eyes, blue and pale, were weak behind the spectacles, and a drooping, ragged, dingy moustache did not hide the peevishness of his mouth. And now, turning out of the street in which was the consulate, he made his way on to the city wall, for there only in the multitudinous city was it possible to walk with comfort.

He was a man who took his work hardly, worrying himself to death over every trifle, but as a rule a walk on the wall soothed and rested him. The city stood in the midst of a great plain and often at sundown from the wall you could see in the distance the snow–capped mountains, the mountains of Tibet; but now he walked quickly, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and his fat spaniel frisked about him unobserved. He talked to himself rapidly in a low monotone. The cause of his irritation was a visit that he had that day received from a lady who called herself Mrs Yü and whom he with a consular passion for precision insisted on calling Miss Lambert. This in itself sufficed to deprive their intercourse of amenity. She was an Englishwoman married to a Chinese. She had arrived two years before with her husband from England, where he had been studying at the University of London; he had made her believe that he was a great personage in his own country and she had imagined herself to be coming to a gorgeous palace and a position of consequence. It was a bitter surprise when she found herself brought to a shabby Chinese house crowded with people: there was not even a foreign bed in it, nor a knife or fork: everything seemed to her very dirty and smelly. It was a shock to find that she had to live with her husband’s father and mother and he told her that she must do exactly what his mother bade her; but in her complete ignorance of Chinese it was not till she had been two or three days in the house that she realized that she was not her husband’s only wife. He had been married as a boy before he left his native city to acquire the knowledge of the barbarians. When she bitterly upbraided him for deceiving her he shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing to prevent a Chinese from having two wives if he wanted them and, he added with some disregard to truth, no Chinese woman looked upon it as a hardship. It was upon making this discovery that she paid her first visit to the consul. He had already heard of her arrival–in China everyone knows everything about everyone–and he received her without surprise. Nor had he much sympathy to show her. That a foreign woman should marry a Chinese at all filled him with indignation, but that she should do so without making proper inquiries vexed him like a personal affront. She was not at all the sort of woman whose appearance led you to imagine that she would be guilty of such a folly. She was a solid, thick–set, young person, short, plain, and matter– of–fact. She was cheaply dressed in a tailor–made suit and she wore a tam–o’–shanter. She had bad teeth and a muddy skin. Her hands were large and red and ill–cared–for. You could tell that she was not unused to hard work. She spoke English with a cockney whine.

‘How did you meet Mr Yü?’ asked the consul frigidly.

‘Well, you see, it’s like this,’ she answered. ‘Dad was in a very good position,

and when he died mother said: “Well, it seems a sinful waste to keep all these rooms empty, I’ll put a card in the window.”’

The consul interrupted her.

‘He had lodgings with you?’

‘Well, they weren’t exactly lodgings,’ she said.

‘Shall we say apartments then?’ replied the consul, with his thin, slightly vain smile.

That was generally the explanation of these marriages. Then because he thought her a very foolish vulgar woman he explained bluntly that according to English law she was not married to Yü and that the best thing she could do was to go back to England at once. She began to cry and his heart softened a little to her. He promised to put her in the charge of some missionary ladies who would look after her on the long journey, and indeed, if she liked, he would see if meanwhile she could not live in one of the missions. But while he talked Miss Lambert dried her tears.

‘What’s the good of going back to England?’ she said at last. ‘I ‘aven’t got nowhere to go to.’

‘You can go to your mother.’

‘She was all against my marrying Mr Yü. I should never hear the last of it if I was to go back now.’

The consul began to argue with her, but the more he argued the more determined she became, and at last he lost his temper.

‘If you like to stay here with a man who isn’t your husband it’s your own look–out, but I wash my hands of all responsibility.’

Her retort had often rankled.

‘Then you’ve got no cause to worry,’ she said, and the look on her face returned to him whenever he thought of her.

That was two years ago and he had seen her once or twice since then. It appeared that she got on very badly both with her mother–in–law and with her husband’s other wife, and she had come to the consul with preposterous questions about her rights according to Chinese law. He repeated his offer to get her away, but she remained steadfast in her refusal to go, and their interview always ended in the consul’s flying into a passion. He was almost inclined to pity the rascally Yü who had to keep the peace between three warring women. According to his English wife’s account he was not unkind to her. He tried to act fairly by both his wives. Miss Lambert did not improve. The consul knew that ordinarily she wore Chinese clothes, but when she came to see him she put on European dress. She had become extremely blowsy. Her health suffered from the Chinese food she ate and she was beginning to look wretchedly ill. But really he was shocked when she had been shown into his office that day. She wore no hat and her hair was dishevelled. She was in a highly hysterical state.

‘They’re trying to poison me,’ she screamed and she put before him a bowl of some foul–smelling food. ‘It’s poisoned,’ she said. ‘I’ve been ill for the last ten days, it’s only by a miracle I’ve escaped.’

She gave him a long story, circumstantial and probable enough, enough to convince him: after all, nothing was more likely than that the Chinese women should use familiar methods to get rid of an intruder who was hateful to them.

‘Do they know you’ve come here?’

‘Of course they do; I told them I was going to show them up.’

Now at last was the moment for decisive action. The consul looked at her in his most official manner.

‘Well, you must never go back there. I refuse to put up with your nonsense any longer. I insist on your leaving this man who isn’t your husband.’

But he found himself helpless against the woman’s insane obstinacy. He repeated all the arguments he had used so often, but she would not listen, and as usual he lost his temper. It was then, in answer to his final, desperate question, that she had made the remark which had entirely robbed him of his calm.

‘But what on earth makes you stay with the man?’ he cried.

She hesitated for a moment and a curious look came into her eyes.

‘There’s something in the way his hair grows on his forehead that I can’t help liking,’ she answered.

The consul had never heard anything so outrageous. It really was the last straw. And now while he strode along, trying to walk off his anger, though he was not a man who often used bad language he really could not restrain himself, and he said fiercely:

‘Women are simply bloody.’

A FRIEND IN NEED

For thirty years now I have been studying my fellow–men. I do not know very much about them. I should certainly hesitate to engage a servant on his face, and yet I suppose it is on the face that for the most part we judge the persons we meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self–contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self–contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. In books on logic they will tell you that it is absurd to say that yellow is tubular or gratitude heavier than air; but in that mixture of incongruities that makes up the self yellow may very well be a horse and cart and gratitude the middle of next week. I shrug my shoulders when people tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right. I think they must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer I know people the more they puzzle me: my oldest friends are just those of whom I can say that I don’t know the first thing about them.

These reflections have occurred to me because I read in this morning’s paper that Edward Hyde Burton had died at Kobe. He was a merchant and he had been in business in Japan for many years. I knew him very little, but he interested me because once he gave me a great surprise. Unless I had heard the story from his own lips I should never have believed that he was capable of such an action. It was more startling because both in appearance and manner he suggested a very definite type. Here if ever was a man all of a piece. He was a tiny little fellow, not much more than five feet four in height, and very slender, with white hair, a red face much wrinkled, and blue eyes. I suppose he was about sixty when I knew him. He was always neatly and quietly dressed in accordance with his age and station.

Though his offices were in Kobe, Burton often came down to Yokohama. I happened on one occasion to be spending a few days there, waiting for a ship, and I was introduced to him at the British Club. We played bridge together. He played a good game and a generous one. He did not talk very much, either then or later when we were having drinks, but what he said was sensible. He had a quiet, dry humour. He seemed to be popular at the club and afterwards, when he had gone, they described him as one of the best. It happened that we were both staying at the Grand Hotel and next day he asked me to dine with him. I met his wife, fat, elderly, and smiling, and his two daughters. It was evidently a united and affectionate family. I think the chief thing that struck me about Burton was his kindliness. There was something very pleasing in his mild blue eyes. His voice was gentle; you could not imagine that he could possibly raise it in anger; his smile was benign. Here was a man who attracted you because you felt in him a real love for his fellows. He had charm. But there was nothing mawkish in him: he liked his game of cards and his cocktail, he could tell with point a good and spicy story, and in his youth he had been something of an athlete. He was a rich man and he had made every penny himself. I suppose one thing that made you like him was that he was so small and frail; he aroused your instincts of protection. You felt that he could not bear to hurt a fly.

One afternoon I was sitting in the lounge of the Grand Hotel. This was before the earthquake and they had leather arm–chairs there. From the windows you had a spacious view of the harbour with its crowded traffic. There were great liners on their way to Vancouver and San Francisco or to Europe by way of Shanghai, Hong–Kong, and Singapore; there were tramps of all nations, battered and sea–worn, junks with their high sterns and great coloured sails, and innumerable sampans. It was a busy, exhilarating scene, and yet, I know not why, restful to the spirit. Here was romance and it seemed that you had but to stretch out your hand to touch it.

Burton came into the lounge presently and caught sight of me. He seated himself in the chair next to mine.

‘What do you say to a little drink?’

He clapped his hands for a boy and ordered two gin fizzes. As the boy brought them a man passed along the street outside and seeing me waved his hand.

‘Do you know Turner?’ said Burton as I nodded a greeting.

‘I’ve met him at the club. I’m told he’s a remittance man.’

‘Yes, I believe he is. We have a good many here.’

‘He plays bridge well.’

‘They generally do. There was a fellow here last year, oddly enough a namesake of mine, who was the best bridge player I ever met. I suppose you never came across him in London. Lenny Burton he called himself. I believe he’d belonged to some very good clubs.’

‘No, I don’t believe I remember the name.’

‘He was quite a remarkable player. He seemed to have an instinct about the cards. It was uncanny. I used to play with him a lot. He was in Kobe for some time.’

Burton sipped his gin fizz.

‘It’s rather a funny story,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t a bad chap. I liked him. He was always well–dressed and smart–looking. He was handsome in a way with curly hair and pink–and–white cheeks. Women thought a lot of him. There was no harm in him, you know, he was only wild. Of course he drank too much. Those sort of fellows always do. A bit of money used to come in for him once a quarter and he made a bit more by card–playing. He won a good deal of mine, I know that.’

Burton gave a kindly chuckle. I knew from my own experience that he could lose money at bridge with a good grace. He stroked his shaven chin with his thin hand; the veins stood out on it and it was almost transparent.

‘I suppose that is why he came to me when he went broke, that and the fact that he was a namesake of mine. He came to see me in my office one day and asked me for a job. I was rather surprised. He told me that there was no more money coming from home and he wanted to work. I asked him how old he was.

‘“Thirty–five,” he said.

‘“And what have you been doing hitherto?” I asked him.

‘“Well, nothing very much,” he said.

‘I couldn’t help laughing.

‘“I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you just yet,” I said. “Come back and see me in another thirty–five years, and I’ll see what I can do.”

‘He didn’t move. He went rather pale. He hesitated for a moment and then he told me that he had had bad luck at cards for some time. He hadn’t been willing to stick to bridge, he’d been playing poker, and he’d got trimmed. He hadn’t a penny. He’d pawned everything he had. He couldn’t pay his hotel bill and they wouldn’t give him any more credit. He was down and out. If he couldn’t get something to do he’d have to commit suicide.

‘I looked at him for a bit. I could see now that he was all to pieces. He’d been drinking more than usual and he looked fifty. The girls wouldn’t have thought so much of him if they’d seen him then.

‘“Well, isn’t there anything you can do except play cards?” I asked him.

‘“I can swim,” he said.

‘“Swim!”

‘I could hardly believe my ears; it seemed such an insane answer to give.

‘“I swam for my university.”

‘I got some glimmering of what he was driving at, I’ve known too many men who were little tin gods at their university to be impressed by it.

‘“I was a pretty good swimmer myself when I was a young man,” I said.

‘Suddenly I had an idea.’

Pausing in his story, Burton turned to me.

‘Do you know Kobe?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I passed through it once, but I only spent a night there.’

‘Then you don’t know the Shioya Club. When I was a young man I swam from there round the beacon and landed at the creek of Tarumi. It’s over three miles and it’s rather difficult on account of the currents round the beacon. Well, I told my young namesake about it and I said to him that if he’d do it I’d give him a job.

‘I could see he was rather taken aback.

‘“You say you’re a swimmer,” I said.

‘“I’m not in very good condition,” he answered.

‘I didn’t say anything. I shrugged my shoulders. He looked at me for a moment and then he nodded.

‘“All right,” he said. “When do you want me to do it?”

‘I looked at my watch. It was just after ten.

‘“The swim shouldn’t take you much over an hour and a quarter. I’ll drive round to the creek at half past twelve and meet you. I’ll take you back to the club to dress and then we’ll have lunch together.”

‘“Done,” he said.

‘We shook hands. I wished him good luck and he left me. I had a lot of work to do that morning and I only just managed to get to the creek at Tarumi at half past twelve. But I needn’t have hurried; he never turned up.’

‘Did he funk it at the last moment?’ I asked.

‘No, he didn’t funk it. He started all right. But of course he’d ruined his constitution by drink and dissipation. The currents round the beacon were more than he could manage. We didn’t get the body for about three days.’

I didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I was a trifle shocked. Then I asked Burton a question.

‘When you made him that offer of a job, did you know he’d be drowned?’

He gave a little mild chuckle and he looked at me with those kind and candid blue eyes of his. He rubbed his chin with his hand.

‘Well, I hadn’t got a vacancy in my office at the moment.’

THE ROUND DOZEN

I like Elsom. It is a seaside resort in the South of England, not very far from Brighton, and it has something of the late Georgian charm of that agreeable town. But it is neither bustling nor garish. Ten years ago, when I used to go there not infrequently, you might still see here and there an old house, solid and pretentious in no unpleasing fashion (like a decayed gentlewoman of good family whose discreet pride in her ancestry amuses rather than offends you), which was built in the reign of the First Gentleman in Europe and where a courtier of fallen fortunes may well have passed his declining years. The main street had a lackadaisical air and the doctor’s motor seemed a trifle out of place. The housewives did their housekeeping in a leisurely manner. They gossiped with the butcher as they watched him cut from his great joint of South Down a piece of the best end of the neck, and they asked amiably after the grocer’s wife as he put half a pound of tea and a packet of salt into their string bag. I do not know whether Elsom was ever fashionable: it certainly was not so then; but it was respectable and cheap. Elderly ladies, maiden and widowed, lived there, Indian Civilians and retired soldiers: they looked forward with little shudders of dismay to August and September which would bring holiday–makers; but did not disdain to let them their houses and on the proceeds spend a few worldly weeks in a Swiss pension. I never knew Elsom at that hectic time when the lodging–houses were full and young men in blazers sauntered along the front, when Pierrots performed on the beach and in the billiard–room at the Dolphin you heard the click of balls till eleven at night. I only knew it in winter. Then in every house on the seafront, stucco houses with bow–windows built a hundred years ago, there was a sign to inform you that apartments were to let; and the guests of the Dolphin were waited on by a single waiter and the boots. At ten o’clock the porter came into the smoking–room and looked at you in so marked a manner that you got up and went to bed. Then Elsom was a restful place and the Dolphin a very comfortable inn. It was pleasing to think that the Prince Regent drove over with Mrs Fitzherbert more than once to drink a dish of tea in its coffee–room. In the hall was a framed letter from Mr Thackeray ordering a sitting–room and two bedrooms overlooking the sea and giving instructions that a fly should be sent to the station to meet him.

One November, two or three years after the war, having had a bad attack of influenza, I went down to Elsom to regain my strength. I arrived in the afternoon and when I had unpacked my things went for a stroll on the front. The sky was overcast and the calm sea grey and cold. A few seagulls flew close to the shore. Sailing–boats, their masts taken down for the winter, were drawn up high on the shingly beach, and the bathing–huts stood side by side in a long, grey, and tattered row. No one was sitting on the benches that the town council had put here and there, but a few people were trudging up and down for exercise. I passed an old colonel with a red nose who stamped along in plus–fours followed by a terrier, two elderly women in short skirts and stout shoes, and a plain girl in a tam–o’–shanter. I had never seen the front so deserted. The lodging–houses looked like bedraggled old maids waiting for lovers who would never return, and even the friendly Dolphin seemed wan and desolate. My heart sank. Life on a sudden seemed very drab. I returned to the hotel, drew the curtains of my sitting–room, poked the fire, and with a book sought to dispel my melancholy. But I was glad enough when it was time to dress for dinner. I went into the coffee–room and found the guests of the hotel already seated. I gave them a casual glance. There was one lady of middle age by herself and there were two elderly gentlemen, golfers probably, with red faces and baldish heads, who ate their food in moody silence. The only other persons in the room were a group of three who sat in the bow–window, and they immediately attracted my surprised attention. The party consisted of an old gentleman and two ladies, one of whom was old and probably his wife, while the other was younger and possibly his daughter. It was the old lady who first excited my interest. She wore a voluminous dress of black silk and a black lace cap; on her wrists were heavy gold bangles and round her neck a substantial gold chain from which hung a large gold locket; at her neck was a large gold brooch. I did not know that anyone still wore jewellery of that sort. Often, passing second–hand jewellers and pawnbrokers, I had lingered for a moment to look at these strangely old–fashioned articles, so solid, costly, and hideous, and thought with a smile in which there was a tinge of sadness, of the women long since dead who had worn them. They suggested the period when the bustle and the flounce were taking the place of the crinoline and the pork–pie hat was ousting the poke–bonnet. The British people liked things solid and good in those days. They went to church on Sunday morning and after church walked in the Park. They gave dinner–parties of twelve courses where the master of the house carved the beef and the chickens, and after dinner the ladies who could play favoured the company with Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words and the gentleman with the fine baritone voice sang an old English ballad.

The younger woman had her back turned to me and at first I could see only that she had a slim and youthful figure. She had a great deal of brown hair which seemed to be elaborately arranged. She wore a grey dress. The three of them were chatting in low tones and presently she turned her head so that I saw her profile. It was astonishingly beautiful. The nose was straight and delicate, the line of the cheek exquisitely modelled; I saw then that she wore her hair after the manner of Queen Alexandra. The dinner proceeded to its close and the party got up. The old lady sailed out of the room, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and the young one followed her. Then I saw with a shock that she was old. Her frock was simple enough, the skirt was longer than was at that time worn, and there was something slightly old–fashioned in the cut, I dare say the waist was more clearly indicated than was then usual, but it was a girl’s frock. She was tall, like a heroine of Tennyson’s, slight, with long legs and a graceful carriage. I had seen the nose before, it was the nose of a Greek goddess, her mouth was beautiful, and her eyes were large and blue. Her skin was of course a little tight on the bones and there were wrinkles on her forehead and about her eyes, but in youth it must have been lovely. She reminded you of those Roman ladies with features of an exquisite regularity whom Alma–Tadema used to paint, but who, notwithstanding their antique dress, were so stubbornly English. It was a type of cold perfection that one had not seen for five–and–twenty years. Now it is as dead as the epigram. I was like an archaeologist who finds some long–buried statue and I was thrilled in so unexpected a manner to hit upon this survival of a past era. For no day is so dead as the day before yesterday.

The gentleman rose to his feet when the two ladies left, and then resumed his chair. A waiter brought him a glass of heavy port. He smelt it, sipped it, and rolled it round his tongue. I observed him. He was a little man, much shorter than his imposing wife, well–covered without being stout, with a fine head of curling grey hair. His face was much wrinkled and it bore a faintly humorous expression. His lips were tight and his chin was square. He was, according to our present notions, somewhat extravagantly dressed. He wore a black velvet jacket, a frilled shirt with a low collar and a large black tie, and very wide evening trousers. It gave you vaguely the effect of costume. Having drunk his port with deliberation, he got up and sauntered out of the room.

When I passed through the hall, curious to know who these singular people were, I glanced at the visitors’ book. I saw written in an angular feminine hand, the writing that was taught to young ladies in modish schools forty years or so ago, the names: Mr and Mrs Edwin St Clair and Miss Porchester. Their address was given as 68 Leinster Square, Bayswater, London. These must be the names and this the address of the persons who had so much interested me. I asked the manageress who Mr St Clair was and she told me that she believed he was something in the City. I went into the billiard–room and knocked the balls about for a little while and then on my way upstairs passed through the lounge. The two red–faced gentlemen were reading the evening paper and the elderly lady was dozing over a novel. The party of three sat in a corner. Mrs St Clair was knitting, Miss Porchester was busy with embroidery, and Mr St Clair was reading aloud in a discreet but resonant tone. As I passed I discovered that he was reading Bleak House.

I read and wrote most of the next day, but in the afternoon I went for a walk and on my way home I sat down for a little on one of those convenient benches on the sea–front. It was not quite so cold as the day before and the air was pleasant. For want of anything better to do I watched a figure advancing towards me from a distance. It was a man and as he came nearer I saw that it was rather a shabby little man. He wore a thin black greatcoat and a somewhat battered bowler. He walked with his hands in his pockets and looked cold. He gave me a glance as he passed by, went on a few steps, hesitated, stopped and turned back. When he came up once more to the bench on which I sat he took A hand out of his pocket and touched his hat. I noticed that he wore shabby black gloves, and surmised that he was a widower in straitened circumstances. Or he might have been a mute recovering, like myself, from influenza.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but could you oblige me with a match?’ ‘Certainly.’

He sat down beside me and while I put my hand in my pocket for matches he hunted in his for cigarettes. He took out a small packet of Gold Flake and his face fell.

‘Dear, dear, how very annoying! I haven’t got a cigarette left.’

‘Let me offer you one,’ I replied, smiling.

I took out my case and he helped himself.

‘Gold?’ he asked, giving the case a tap as I closed it. ‘Gold? That’s a thing I never could keep. I’ve had three. All stolen.’

His eyes rested in a melancholy way on his boots, which were sadly in need of repair. He was a wizened little man with a long thin nose and pale–blue eyes. His skin was sallow and he was much lined. I could not tell what his age was; he might have been five–and–thirty or he might have been sixty. There was nothing remarkable about him except his insignificance. But though evidently poor he was neat and clean. He was respectable and he clung to respectability. No, I did not think he was a mute, I thought he was a solicitor’s clerk who had lately buried his wife and been sent to Elsom by an indulgent employer to get over the first shock of his grief.

‘Are you making a long stay, sir?’ he asked me.

‘Ten days or a fortnight.’

’Is this your first visit to Elsom, sir?’

‘I have been here before.’

‘I know it well, sir. I flatter myself there are very few seaside resorts that I have not been to at one time or another. Elsom is hard to beat, sir. You get a very nice class of people here. There’s nothing noisy or vulgar about Elsom, if you understand what I mean. Elsom has very pleasant recollections for me, sir. I knew Elsom well in bygone days. I was married in St Martin’s Church, sir.’

‘Really,’ I said feebly.

‘It was a very happy marriage, sir.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ I returned.

‘Nine months, that one lasted,’ he said reflectively.

Surely the remark was a trifle singular. I had not looked forward with any enthusiasm to the probability which I so clearly foresaw that he would favour me with an account of his matrimonial experiences, but now I waited if not with eagerness at least with curiosity for a further observation. He made none. He sighed a little. At last I broke the silence.

‘There don’t seem to be very many people about,’ I remarked.

‘I like it so. I’m not one for crowds. As I was saying just now, I reckon I’ve spent a good many years at one seaside resort after the other, but I never came in the season. It’s the winter I like.’

‘Don’t you find it a little melancholy?’

He turned towards me and placed his black–gloved hand for an instant on my arm.

‘It is melancholy. And because it’s melancholy a little ray of sunshine is very welcome.’

The remark seemed to me perfectly idiotic and I did not answer. He withdrew his hand from my arm and got up.

‘Well, I mustn’t keep you, sir. Pleased to have made your acquaintance.’

He took off his dingy hat very politely and strolled away. It was beginning now to grow chilly and I thought I would return to the Dolphin. As I reached its broad steps a landau drove up, drawn by two scraggy horses, and from it stepped Mr St Clair. He wore a hat that looked like the unhappy result of a union between a bowler and a top–hat. He gave his hand to his wife and then to his niece. The porter carried in after them rugs and cushions. As Mr St Clair paid the driver I heard him tell him to come at the usual time next day and I understood that the St Clairs took a drive every afternoon in a landau. It would not have surprised me to learn that none of them had ever been in a motor–car.

The manageress told me that they kept very much to themselves and sought no acquaintance among the other persons staying at the hotel. I rode my imagination on a loose rein. I watched them eat three meals a day. I watched Mr and Mrs St Clair sit at the top of the hotel steps in the morning. He read The Times and she knitted. I suppose Mrs St Clair had never read a paper in her life, for they never took anything but The Times and Mr St Clair of course took it with him every day to the City. At about twelve Miss Porchester joined them.

‘Have you enjoyed your walk, Eleanor?’ asked Mrs St Clair.

‘It was very nice, Aunt Gertrude,’ answered Miss Porchester.

And I understand that just as Mrs St Clair took ‘her drive’ every afternoon Miss Porchester took ‘her walk’ every morning.

‘When you have come to the end of your row, my dear,’ said Mr St Clair, with a glance at his wife’s knitting, ‘we might go for a constitutional before luncheon.’

‘That will be very nice,’ answered Mrs St Clair. She folded up her work and gave it to Miss Porchester. ‘If you’re going upstairs, Eleanor, will you take my work?’

‘Certainly, Aunt Gertrude.’

‘I dare say you’re a little tired after your walk, my dear.’

‘I shall have a little rest before luncheon.’

Miss Porchester went into the hotel and Mr and Mrs St Clair walked slowly along the sea–front, side by side, to a certain point, and then walked slowly back.

When I met one of them on the stairs I bowed and received an unsmiling, polite bow in return, and in the morning I ventured upon a ‘good day’ but there the matter ended. It looked as though I should never have a chance to speak to any of them. But presently I thought that Mr St Clair gave me now and then a glance, and thinking he had heard my name I imagined, perhaps vainly, that he looked at me with curiosity. And a day or two after that I was sitting in my room when the porter came in with a message.

‘Mr St Clair presents his compliments and could you oblige him with the loan of Whitaker’s Almanack.’

I was astonished.

‘Why on earth should he think that I have a Whitaker’s Almanack?’

‘Well, sir, the manageress told him you wrote.’

I could not see the connexion.

‘Tell Mr St Clair that I’m very sorry that I haven’t got a Whitaker’s Almanack, but if I had I would very gladly lend it to him.’

Here was my opportunity. I was by now filled with eagerness to know these fantastic persons more closely. Now and then in the heart of Asia I have come upon a lonely tribe living in a little village among an alien population. No one knows how they came there or why they settled in that spot. They live their own lives, speak their own language, and have no communication with their neighbours. No one knows whether they are the descendants of a band that was left behind when their nation swept in a vast horde across the continent or whether they are the dying remnant of some great people that in that country once held empire. They are a mystery. They have no future and no history. This odd little family seemed to me to have something of the same character. They were of an era that is dead and gone. They reminded me of persons in one of those leisurely, old–fashioned novels that one’s father read. They belonged to the eighties and they had not moved since then. How extraordinary it was that they could have lived through the last forty years as though the world stood still! They took me back to my childhood and I recollected people who are long since dead. I wonder if it is only distance that gives me the impression that they were more peculiar than anyone is now. When a person was described then as ‘quite a character,’ by heaven, it meant something.

So that evening after dinner I went into the lounge and boldly addressed Mr St Clair.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t got a Whitaker’s Almanack,’ I said, ‘but if I have any other book that can be of service to you I shall be delighted to lend it to you.’

Mr St Clair was obviously startled. The two ladies kept their eyes on their work. There was an embarrassed hush.

‘It does not matter at all, but I was given to understand by the manageress that you were a novelist.’

I racked my brain. There was evidently some connexion between my profession and Whitaker’s Almanack that escaped me.

‘In days gone by Mr Trollope used often to dine with us in Leinster Square and I remember him saying that the two most useful books to a novelist were the Bible and Whitaker’s Almanack.’

‘I see that Thackeray once stayed in this hotel,’ I remarked, anxious not to let the conversation drop.

‘I never very much cared for Mr Thackeray, though he dined more than once with my wife’s father, the late Mr Sargeant Saunders. He was too cynical for me. My niece has not read Vanity Fair to this day.’

Miss Porchester blushed slightly at this reference to herself. A waiter brought in the coffee and Mrs St Clair turned to her husband.

‘Perhaps, my dear, this gentleman would do us the pleasure to have his coffee with us.’

Although not directly addressed I answered promptly: ‘Thank you very much.’ I sat down.

‘Mr Trollope was always my favourite novelist,’ said Mr St Clair. ‘He was so essentially a gentleman. I admire Charles Dickens. But Charles Dickens could never draw a gentleman. I am given to understand that young people nowadays find Mr Trollope a little low. My niece, Miss Porchester, prefers the novels of Mr William Black.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never read any,’ I said.

‘Ah, I see that you are like me; you are not up to date. My niece once persuaded me to read a novel by a Miss Rhoda Broughton, but I could not manage more than a hundred pages of it.’

‘I did not say I liked it, Uncle Edwin,’ said Miss Porchester, defending herself, with another blush, ‘I told you it was rather fast, but everybody was talking about it.’

‘I’m quite sure it is not the sort of book your Aunt Gertrude would have wished you to read, Eleanor.’

‘I remember Miss Broughton telling me once that when she was young people said her books were fast and when she was old they said they were slow, and it was very hard since she had written exactly the same sort of book for forty years.’

‘Oh, did you know Miss Broughton?’ asked Miss Porchester, addressing me for the first time. ‘How very interesting! And did you know Ouida?’

‘My dear Eleanor, what will you say next! I’m quite sure you’ve never read anything by Ouida.’

‘Indeed, I have, Uncle Edwin. I’ve read Under Two Flags and I liked it very much.’

‘You amaze and shock me. I don’t know what girls are coming to nowadays.’

‘You always said that when I was thirty you gave me complete liberty to read anything I liked.’

‘There is a difference, my dear Eleanor, between liberty and licence,’ said Mr St Clair, smiling a little in order not to make his reproof offensive, but with a certain gravity.

I do not know if in recounting this conversation I have managed to convey the impression it gave me of a charming and old–fashioned air. I could have listened all night to them discussing the depravity of an age that was young in the eighteen–eighties. I would have given a good deal for a glimpse of their large and roomy house in Leinster Square. I should have recognized the suite covered in red brocade that stood stiffly about the drawing–room, each piece in its appointed place; and the cabinets filled with Dresden china would have brought me back my childhood. In the dining–room, where they habitually sat, for the drawing–room was used only for parties, was a Turkey carpet and a vast mahogany sideboard ‘groaning’ with silver. On the walls were the pictures that had excited the admiration of Mrs Humphrey Ward and her uncle Matthew in the Academy of eighteen–eighty.

Next morning, strolling through a pretty lane at the back of Elsom, I met Miss Porchester, who was taking ‘her walk’. I should have liked to go a little way with her, but felt certain that it would embarrass this maiden of fifty to saunter alone with a man even of my respectable years. She bowed as I passed her and blushed. Oddly enough, a few yards behind her I came upon the funny shabby little man in black gloves with whom I had spoken for a few minutes on the front. He touched his old bowler hat.

‘Excuse me, sir, but could you oblige me with a match?’ he said.

‘Certainly,’ I retorted, ‘but I’m afraid I have no cigarettes on me.’

‘Allow me to offer you one of mine,’ he said, taking out the paper case. It was empty. ‘Dear, dear, I haven’t got one either. What a curious coincidence!’

He went on and I had a notion that he a little hastened his steps. I was beginning to have my doubts about him. I hoped he was not going to bother Miss Porchester. For a moment I thought of walking back, but I did not. He was a civil little man and I did not believe he would make a nuisance of himself to a single lady.

I saw him again that very afternoon. I was sitting on the front. He walked towards me with little, halting steps. There was something of a wind and he looked like a dried leaf being driven before it. This time he did not hesitate, but sat down beside me.

‘We meet again, sir. The world is a small place. If it will not inconvenience you perhaps you will allow me to rest a few minutes. I am a wee bit tired.’

‘This is a public bench, and you have just as much right to sit on it as I.’

I did not wait for him to ask me for a match, but at once offered him a cigarette.

‘How very kind of you, sir! I have to limit myself to so many cigarettes a day, but I enjoy those I smoke. As one grows older the pleasures of life diminish, but my experience is that one enjoys more those that remain.’

‘That is a very consoling thought.’

‘Excuse me, sir, but am I right in thinking that you are the well–known author?’

‘I am an author,’ I replied. ‘But what made you think it?’

‘I have seen your portrait in the illustrated papers. I suppose you don’t recognize me?’

I looked at him again, a weedy little man in neat but shabby black clothes, with a long nose and watery blue eyes.

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘I dare say I’ve changed,’ he sighed. ‘There was a time when my photograph was in every paper in the United Kingdom. Of course, those press photographers never do you justice. I give you my word, sir, that if I hadn’t seen my name underneath I should never have guessed that some of them were meant for me.’

He was silent for a while. The tide was out and beyond the shingle of the beach was a strip of yellow mud. The breakwaters were half buried in it like the backbones of prehistoric beasts.

‘It must be a wonderfully interesting thing to be an author, sir. I’ve often thought I had quite a turn for writing myself. At one time and another I’ve done a rare lot of reading. I haven’t kept up with it much lately. For one thing my eyes are not so good as they used to be. I believe I could write a book if I tried.’

‘They say anybody can write one,’ I answered.

‘Not a novel, you know. I’m not much of a one for novels; I prefer histories and that–like. But memoirs. If anybody was to make it worth my while I wouldn’t mind writing my memoirs.’

‘It’s very fashionable just now.’

‘There are not many people who’ve had the experiences I’ve had in one way and another. I did write to one of the Sunday papers about it some little while back, but they never answered my letter.’

He gave me a long, appraising look. He had too respectable an air to be about to ask me for half a crown.

‘Of course you don’t know who I am, sir, do you?’

‘I honestly don’t.’

He seemed to ponder for a moment, then he smoothed down his black gloves on his fingers, looked for a moment at a hole in one of them, and then turned to me not without self–consciousness.

‘I am the celebrated Mortimer Ellis,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

I did not know what other ejaculation to make, for to the best of my belief I had never heard the name before. I saw a look of disappointment come over his face, and I was a trifle embarrassed.

‘Mortimer Ellis,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not going to tell me you don’t know.’ ‘I’m afraid I must. I’m very often out of England.’

I wondered to what he owed his celebrity. I passed over in my mind various possibilities. He could never have been an athlete, which alone in England gives a man real fame, but he might have been a faith–healer or a champion billiard–player. There is of course no one so obscure as a Cabinet Minister out of office and he might have been the President of the Board of Trade in a defunct administration. But he had none of the look of a politician.

‘That’s fame for you,’ he said bitterly. ‘Why, for weeks I was the most talked–about man in England. Look at me. You must have seen my photograph in the papers. Mortimer Ellis.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, shaking my head.

He paused a moment to give his disclosure effectiveness.

‘I am the well–known bigamist.’

Now what are you to reply when a person who is practically a stranger to you informs you that he is a well–known bigamist? I will confess that I have sometimes had the vanity to think that I am not as a rule at a loss for a retort, but here I found myself speechless.

‘I’ve had eleven wives, sir,’ he went on.

‘Most people find one about as much as they can manage.’

‘Ah, that’s want of practice. When you’ve had eleven there’s very little you don’t know about women.’

‘But why did you stop at eleven?’

‘There now, I knew you’d say that. The moment I set eyes on you I said to myself, he’s got a clever face. You know, sir, that’s the thing that always grizzles me. Eleven does seem a funny number, doesn’t it? There’s something unfinished about it. Now three anyone might have, and seven’s all right, they say nine’s lucky, and there’s nothing wrong with ten. But eleven! That’s the one thing I regret. I shouldn’t have minded anything if I could have brought it up to the Round Dozen.’

He unbuttoned his coat and from an inside pocket produced a bulging and very greasy pocket–book. From this he took a large bundle of newspaper cuttings; they were worn and creased and dirty. But he spread out two or three.

‘Now just you look at those photographs. I ask you, are they like me? It’s an outrage. Why, you’d think I was a criminal to look at them.’

The cuttings were of imposing length. In the opinion of sub–editors Mortimer Ellis had obviously been a news item of value. One was headed, A Much Married Man; another, Heartless Ruffian Brought to Book; a third, Contemptible Scoundrel Meets his Waterloo.

‘Not what you would call a good press,’ I murmured.

‘I never pay any attention to what the newspapers say,’ he answered, with a shrug of his thin shoulders. ‘I’ve known too many journals myself for that. No, it’s the judge I blame. He treated me shocking and it did him no good, mind you; he died within the year.’

I ran my eyes down the report I held.

‘I see he gave you five years.’

‘Disgraceful, I call it, and see what it says.’ He pointed to a place with his forefinger.

‘“Three of his victims pleaded for mercy to be shown to him.” That shows what they thought of me. And after that he gave me five years. And just look what he called me, a heartless scoundrel–me, the best–hearted man that ever lived–a pest of society and a danger to the public. Said he wished he had the power to give me the cat. I don’t so much mind his giving me five years, though you’ll never get me to say it wasn’t excessive, but I ask you, had he the right to talk to me like that? No, he hadn’t, and I’ll never forgive him, not if I live to be a hundred.’

The bigamist’s cheeks flushed and his watery eyes were filled for a moment with fire. It was a sore subject with him.

‘May I read them?’ I asked him.

‘That’s what I gave them you for. I want you to read them, sir. And if you can read them without saying that I’m a much wronged man, well, you’re not the man I took you for.’

As I glanced through one cutting after another I saw why Mortimer Ellis had so wide an acquaintance with the seaside resorts of England. They were his hunting–ground. His method was to go to some place when the season was over and take apartments in one of the empty lodging–houses. Apparently it did not take him long to make acquaintance with some woman or other, widow or spinster, and I noticed that their ages at the time were between thirty–five and fifty. They stated in the witness–box that they had met him first on the sea–front. He generally proposed marriage to them within a fortnight of this and they were married shortly after. He induced them in one way or another to entrust him with their savings and in a few months, on the pretext that he had to go to London on business, he left them never to return. Only one had ever seen him again till, obliged to give evidence, they saw him in the dock. They were women of a certain respectability; one was the daughter of a doctor and another of a clergyman; there was a lodging–house keeper, there was the widow of a commercial traveller, and there was a retired dressmaker. For the most part, their fortunes ranged from five hundred to a thousand pounds, but whatever the sum the misguided women were stripped of every penny. Some of them told really pitiful stories of the destitution to which they had been reduced. But they all acknowledged that he had been a good husband to them. Not only had three actually pleaded for mercy to be shown him, but one said in the witness–box that, if he was willing to come, she was ready to take him back. He noticed that I was reading this.

‘And she’d have worked for me,’ he said, ‘there’s no doubt about that. But I said, better let bygones be bygones. No one likes a cut off the best end of the neck better than I do, but I’m not much of a one for cold roast mutton, I will confess.’

It was only by an accident that Mortimer Ellis did not marry his twelfth wife and so achieve the Round Dozen which I understand appealed to his love of symmetry. For he was engaged to be married to a Miss Hubbard–’two thousand pounds she had, if she had a penny, in war–loan,’ he confided to me–and the banns had been read, when one of his former wives saw him, made inquiries, and communicated with the police. He was arrested on the very day before his twelfth wedding.

‘She was a bad one, she was,’ he told me. ‘She deceived me something cruel.’

‘How did she do that?’

‘Well, I met her at Eastbourne, one December it was, on the pier, and she told me in course of conversation that she’d been in the millinery business and had retired. She said she’d made a tidy bit of money. She wouldn’t say exactly how much it was, but she gave me to understand it was something like fifteen hundred pounds. And when I married her, would you believe it, she hadn’t got three hundred. And that’s the one who gave me away. And mind you, I’d never blamed her. Many a man would have cut up rough when he found out he’d been made a fool of. I never showed her that I was disappointed even, I just went away without a word.’

‘But not without the three hundred pounds, I take it.’

‘Oh come, sir, you must be reasonable,’ he returned in an injured tone. ‘You can’t expect three hundred pounds to last for ever and I’d been married to her for months before she confessed the truth.’

‘Forgive my asking,’ I said, ‘and pray don’t think my question suggests a disparaging view of your personal attractions, but–why did they marry you?’

‘Because I asked them,’ he answered, evidently very much surprised at my inquiry.

‘But did you never have any refusals?’

‘Very seldom. Not more than four or five in the whole course of my career. Of course I didn’t propose till I was pretty sure of my ground and I don’t say I didn’t draw a blank sometimes. You can’t expect to click every time, if you know what I mean, and I’ve often wasted several weeks making up to a woman before I saw there was nothing doing.’

I surrendered myself for a time to my reflections. But I noticed presently that a broad smile spread over the mobile features of my friend.

‘I understand what you mean,’ he said. ‘It’s my appearance that puzzles you. You don’t know what it is they see in me. That’s what comes of reading novels and going to the pictures. You think what women want is the cowboy type, or the romance of old Spain touch, flashing eyes, an olive skin, and a beautiful dancer. You make me laugh.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said.

‘Are you a married man, sir?’

‘I am. But I only have one wife.’

‘You can’t judge by that. You can’t generalize from a single instance, if you know what I mean. Now, I ask you, what would you know about dogs if you’d never had anything but one bull–terrier?’

The question was rhetorical and I felt sure did not require an answer. He paused for an effective moment and went on.

‘You’re wrong, sir. You’re quite wrong. They may take a fancy to a good–looking young fellow, but they don’t want to marry him. They don’t really care about looks.’

‘Douglas Jerrold, who was as ugly as he was witty, used to say that if he was given ten minutes’ start with a woman he could cut out the handsomest man in the room.’

‘They don’t want wit. They don’t want a man to be funny; they think he’s not serious. They don’t want a man who’s too handsome; they think he’s not serious either. That’s what they want, they want a man who’s serious. Safety first. And then–attention. I may not be handsome and I may not be amusing, but believe me, I’ve got what every woman wants. Poise. And the proof is, I’ve made every one of my wives happy.’

‘It certainly is much to your credit that three of them pleaded for mercy to be shown to you and that one was willing to take you back.’

‘You don’t know what an anxiety that was to me all the time I was in prison. I thought she’d be waiting for me at the gate when I was released and I said to the Governor: “For God’s sake, sir, smuggle me out so as no one can see me.”’

He smoothed his gloves again over his hands and his eye once more fell upon the hole in the first finger.

‘That’s what comes of living in lodgings, sir. How’s a man to keep himself neat and tidy without a woman to look after him? I’ve been married too often to be able to get along without a wife. There are men who don’t like being married. I can’t understand them. The fact is, you can’t do a thing really well unless you’ve got your heart in it, and I like being a married man. It’s no difficulty to me to do the little things that women like and that some men can’t be bothered with. As I was saying just now, it’s attention a woman wants. I never went out of the house without giving my wife a kiss and I never came in without giving her another. And it was very seldom I came in without bringing her some chocolates or a few flowers. I never grudged the expense.’

‘After all, it was her money you were spending,’ I interposed.

‘And what if it was? It’s not the money that you’ve paid for a present that signifies, it’s the spirit you give it in. That’s what counts with women. No, I’m not one to boast, but I will say this of myself, I am a good husband.’

I looked desultorily at the reports of the trial which I still held.

‘I’ll tell you what surprises me,’ I said. ‘All these women were very respectable, of a certain age, quiet, decent persons. And yet they married you without any inquiry after the shortest possible acquaintance.’

He put his hand impressively on my arm.

‘Ah, that’s what you don’t understand, sir. Women have got a craving to be married. It doesn’t matter how young they are or how old they are, if they’re short or tall, dark or fair, they’ve all got one thing in common: they want to be married. And mind you, I married them in church. No woman feels really safe unless she’s married in church. You say I’m no beauty, well, I never thought I was, but if I had one leg and a hump on my back I could find any number of women who’d jump at the chance of marrying me. It’s a mania with them. It’s a disease. Why, there’s hardly one of them who wouldn’t have accepted me the second time I saw her only I like to make sure of my ground before I commit myself. When it all came out there was a rare to–do because I’d married eleven times. Eleven times? Why, it’s nothing, it’s not even a Round Dozen. I could have married thirty times if I’d wanted to. I give you my word, sir, when I consider my opportunities, I’m astounded at my moderation.’

‘You told me you were very fond of reading history.’

‘Yes, Warren Hastings said that, didn’t he? It struck me at the time I read it. It seemed to fit me like a glove.’

‘And you never found these constant courtships a trifle monotonous?’

‘Well, sir, I think I’ve got a logical mind, and it always gave me a rare lot of pleasure to see how the same effects followed on the same causes, if you know what I mean. Now, for instance, with a woman who’d never been married before I always passed myself off as a widower. It worked like a charm. You see, a spinster likes a man who knows a thing or two. But with a widow I always said I was a bachelor: a widow’s afraid a man who’s been married before knows too much.’

I gave him back his cuttings; he folded them up neatly and replaced them in his greasy pocket–book.

‘You know, sir, I always think I’ve been misjudged. Just see what they say about me: a pest of society, unscrupulous villain, contemptible scoundrel. Now just look at me. I ask you, do I look that sort of man? You know me, you’re a judge of character, I’ve told you all about myself; do you think me a bad man?’

‘My acquaintance with you is very slight,’ I answered with what I thought considerable tact.

‘I wonder if the judge, I wonder if the jury, I wonder if the public ever thought about my side of the question. The public booed me when I was taken into the court and the police had to protect me from their violence. Did any of them think what I’d done for these women?’

‘You took their money.’

‘Of course I took their money. I had to live the same as anybody has to live. But what did I give them in exchange for their money?’

This was another rhetorical question and though he looked at me as though he expected an answer I held my tongue. Indeed I did not know the answer. His voice was raised and he spoke with emphasis. I could see that he was serious.

‘I’ll tell you what I gave them in exchange for their money. Romance. Look at this place.’ He made a wide, circular gesture that embraced the sea and the horizon. ‘There are a hundred places in England like this. Look at that sea and that sky; look at these lodging–houses; look at that pier and the front. Doesn’t it make your heart sink? It’s dead as mutton. It’s all very well for you who come down here for a week or two because you’re run down. But think of all those women who live here from one year’s end to another. They haven’t a chance. They hardly know anyone. They’ve just got enough money to live on and that’s all. I wonder if you know how terrible their lives are. Their lives are just like the front, a long, straight, cemented walk that goes on and on from one seaside resort to another. Even in the season there’s nothing for them. They’re out of it. They might as well be dead. And then I come along. Mind you, I never made advances to a woman who wouldn’t have gladly acknowledged to thirty–five. And I give them love. Why, many of them had never known what it was to have a man do them up behind. Many of them had never known what it was to sit on a bench in the dark with a man’s arm round their waist. I bring them change and excitement. I give them a new pride in themselves. They were on the shelf and I come along quite quietly and I deliberately take them down. A little ray of sunshine in those drab lives, that’s what I was. No wonder they jumped at me, no wonder they wanted me to go back to them. The only one who gave me away was the milliner; she said she was a widow, my private opinion is that she’d never been married at all. You say I did the dirty on them; why, I brought happiness and glamour into eleven lives that never thought they had even a dog’s chance of it again. You say I’m a villain and a scoundrel, you’re wrong. I’m a philanthropist. Five years, they gave me; they should have given me the medal of the Royal Humane Society.’

He took out his empty packet of Gold Flake and looked at it with a melancholy shake of the head. When I handed him my cigarette case he helped himself without a word. I watched the spectacle of a good man struggling with his emotion.

‘And what did I get out of it, I ask you?’ he continued presently. ‘Board and lodging and enough to buy cigarettes. But I never was able to save, and the proof is that now, when I’m not so young as I was, I haven’t got half a crown in my pocket.’ He gave me a sidelong glance. ‘It’s a great come–down for me to find myself in this position. I’ve always paid my way and I’ve never asked a friend for a loan in all my life. I was wondering, sir, if you could oblige me with a trifle. It’s humiliating to me to have to suggest it, but the fact is, if you could oblige me with a pound it would mean a great deal to me.’

Well, I had certainly had a pound’s worth of entertainment out of the bigamist and I dived for my pocket–book.

‘I shall be very glad,’ I said.

He looked at the notes I took out.

‘I suppose you couldn’t make it two, sir?’

‘I think I could.’

I handed him a couple of pound notes and he gave a little sigh as he took them.

‘You don’t know what it means to a man who’s used to the comforts of home life not to know where to turn for a night’s lodging.’

‘But there is one thing I should like you to tell me,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t like you to think me cynical, but I had a notion that women on the whole take the maxim, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” as applicable exclusively to our sex. How did you persuade these respectable, and no doubt thrifty, women to entrust you so confidently with all their savings?’

An amused smile spread over his undistinguished features.

‘Well, sir, you know what Shakespeare said about ambition o’erleaping itself. That’s the explanation. Tell a woman you’ll double her capital in six months if she’ll give it you to handle and she won’t be able to give you the money quick enough. Greed, that’s what it is. Just greed.’

It was a sharp sensation, stimulating to the appetite (like hot sauce with ice cream), to go from this diverting ruffian to the respectability, all lavender bags and crinolines, of the St Clairs and Miss Porchester. I spent every evening with them now. No sooner had the ladies left him than Mr St Clair sent his compliments to my table and asked me to drink a glass of port with him. When we had finished it we went into the lounge and drank coffee. Mr St Clair enjoyed his glass of old brandy. The hour I thus spent with them was so exquisitely boring that it had for me a singular fascination. They were told by the manageress that I had written plays.

‘We used often to go to the theatre when Sir Henry Irving was at the Lyceum,’ said Mr St Clair. ‘I once had the pleasure of meeting him. I was taken to supper at the Garrick Club by Sir Everard Millais and I was introduced to Mr Irving, as he then was.’

‘Tell him what he said to you, Edwin,’ said Mrs St Clair.

Mr St Clair struck a dramatic attitude and gave not at all a bad imitation ofHenry Irving.

‘“You have the actor’s face, Mr St Clair,” he said to me. “If you ever think of going on the stage, come to me and I will give you a part.”’ Mr St Clair resumed his natural manner. ‘It was enough to turn a young man’s head.’ ‘But it didn’t turn yours,’ I said.

‘I will not deny that if I had been otherwise situated I might have allowed myself to be tempted. But I had my family to think of. It would have broken my father’s heart if I had not gone into the business.’

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘I am a tea merchant, sir. My firm is the oldest in the City of London. I have spent forty years of my life in combating to the best of my ability the desire of my fellow–countrymen to drink Ceylon tea instead of the China tea which was universally drunk in my youth.’

I thought it charmingly characteristic of him to spend a lifetime in persuading the public to buy something they didn’t want rather than something they did.

‘But in his younger days my husband did a lot of amateur acting and he was thought very clever,’ said Mrs St Clair.

‘Shakespeare, you know, and sometimes The School for Scandal I would never consent to act trash. But that is a thing of the past. I had a gift, perhaps it was a pity to waste it, but it’s too late now. When we have a dinner–party I sometimes let the ladies persuade me to recite the great soliloquies of Hamlet. But that is all I do.’

Oh! Oh! Oh! I thought with shuddering fascination of those dinner–parties and wondered whether I should ever be asked to one of them. Mrs St Clair gave me a little smile, half shocked, half prim.

‘My husband was very Bohemian as a young man,’ she said.

‘I sowed my wild oats. I knew quite a lot of painters and writers, Wilkie Collins, for instance, and even men who wrote for the papers. Watts painted a portrait of my wife, and I bought a picture of Millais. I knew a number of the Pre–Raphaelites.’

‘Have you a Rossetti?’ I asked.

‘No. I admired Rossetti’s talent, but I could not approve of his private life.

I would never buy a picture by an artist whom I should not care to ask to dinner at my house.’

My brain was reeling when Miss Porchester, looking at her watch, said: ‘Are you not going to read to us tonight, Uncle Edwin?’

I withdrew.

It was while I was drinking a glass of port with Mr St Clair one evening that he told me the sad story of Miss Porchester. She was engaged to be married to a nephew of Mrs St Clair, a barrister, when it was discovered that he had had an intrigue with the daughter of his laundress.

‘It was a terrible thing,’ said Mr St Clair. ‘A terrible thing. But of course my niece took the only possible course. She returned him his ring, his letters, and his photograph, and said that she could never marry him. She implored him to marry the young person he had wronged and said she would be a sister to her.

It broke her heart. She has never cared for anyone since.’

‘And did he marry the young person?’

Mr St Clair shook his head and sighed.

‘No, we were greatly mistaken in him. It has been a sore grief to my dear wife to think that a nephew of hers should behave in such a dishonourable manner.

Some time later we heard that he was engaged to a young lady in a very good position with ten thousand pounds of her own. I considered it my duty to write to her father and put the facts before him. He answered my letter in a most insolent fashion. He said he would much rather his son–in–law had a mistress before marriage than after.’

‘What happened then?’

‘They were married and now my wife’s nephew is one of His Majesty’s Judges of the High Court, and his wife is My Lady. But we’ve never consented to receive them. When my wife’s nephew was knighted Eleanor suggested that we should ask them to dinner, but my wife said that he should never darken our doors and I upheld her.’

‘And the laundress’s daughter?’

‘She married in her own class of life and has a public–house at Canterbury.

My niece, who has a little money of her own, did everything for her and is godmother to her eldest child.’

Poor Miss Porchester. She had sacrificed herself on the altar of Victorian morality and I am afraid the consciousness that she had behaved beautifully was the only benefit she had got from it.

‘Miss Porchester is a woman of striking appearance,’ I said. ‘When she was younger she must have been perfectly lovely. I wonder she never married somebody else.’

‘Miss Porchester was considered a great beauty. Alma–Tadema admired her so much that he asked her to sit as a model for one of his pictures, but of course we couldn’t very well allow that.’ Mr St Clair’s tone conveyed that the suggestion had deeply outraged his sense of decency. ‘No, Miss Porchester never cared for anyone but her cousin. She never speaks of him and it is now thirty years since they parted, but I am convinced that she loves him still. She is a true woman, my dear sir, one life, one love, and though perhaps I regret that she has been deprived of the joys of marriage and motherhood I am bound to admire her fidelity.’

But the heart of woman is incalculable and rash is the man who thinks she will remain in one stay. Rash, Uncle Edwin. You have known Eleanor for many years, for when, her mother having fallen into a decline and died, you brought the orphan to your comfortable and even luxurious house in Leinster Square, she was but a child; but what, when it comes down to brass tacks, Uncle Edwin, do you really know of Eleanor?

It was but two days after Mr St Clair had confided to me the touching story which explained why Miss Porchester had remained a spinster that, coming back to the hotel in the afternoon after a round of golf, the manageress came up to me in an agitated manner.

‘Mr St Clair’s compliments and will you go up to number twenty–seven the moment you come in.’

‘Certainly. But why?’

‘Oh, there’s a rare upset. They’ll tell you.’

I knocked at the door. I heard a ‘Come in, come in,’ which reminded me that Mr St Clair had played Shakespearean parts in probably the most refined amateur dramatic company in London. I entered and found Mrs St Clair lying on the sofa with a handkerchief soaked in eau–de–Cologne on her brow and a bottle of smelling–salts in her hand. Mr St Clair was standing in front of the fire in such a manner as to prevent anyone else in the room from obtaining any benefit from it.

‘I must apologize for asking you to come up in this unceremonious fashion, but we are in great distress, and we thought you might be able to throw some light on what has happened.’

His perturbation was obvious.

‘What has happened?’

‘Our niece, Miss Porchester, has eloped. This morning she sent in a message to my wife that she had one of her sick headaches. When she has one of her sick headaches she likes to be left absolutely alone and it wasn’t till this afternoon that my wife went to see if there was anything she could do for her. The room was empty. Her trunk was packed. Her dressing–case with silver fittings was gone. And on the pillow was a letter telling us of her rash act.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly what I can do.’

‘We were under the impression that you were the only gentleman at Elsom with whom she had any acquaintance.’

His meaning flashed across me.

‘I haven’t eloped with her,’ I said. ‘I happen to be a married man.’

‘I see you haven’t eloped with her. At the first moment we thought perhaps... but if it isn’t you, who is it?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

‘Show him the letter, Edwin,’ said Mrs St Clair from the sofa.

‘Don’t move, Gertrude. It will bring on your lumbago.’

Miss Porchester had ‘her’ sick headaches and Mrs St Clair had ‘her’ lumbago. What had Mr St Clair? I was willing to bet a fiver that Mr St Clair had ‘his’ gout. He gave me the letter and I read it with an air of decent commiseration.

Dearest Uncle Edwin and Aunt GertrudeWhen you receive this I shall be far away. I am going to be married this morning to a gentleman who is very dear to me. I know I am doing wrong in running away like this, but I was afraid you would endeavour to set obstacles in the way of my marriage and since nothing would induce me to change my mind I thought it would save us all much unhappiness if I did it without telling you anything about it. My fiancé is a very retiring man, owing to his long residence in tropical countries not in the best of health, and he thought it much better that we should be married quite privately. When you know how radiantly happy I am I hope you will forgive me. Please send my box to the luggage office at Victoria Station.

Your loving niece, Eleanor’I will never forgive her,’ said Mr St Clair as I returned him the letter. ‘She shall never darken my doors again. Gertrude, I forbid you ever to mention Eleanor’s name in my hearing.’

Mrs St Clair began to sob quietly.’Aren’t you rather hard?’ I said. ’Is there any reason why Miss Porchester shouldn’t marry?’

‘At her age,’ he answered angrily. ‘It’s ridiculous. We shall be the laughing– stock of everyone in Leinster Square. Do you know how old she is? She’s fifty–one.’

‘Fifty–four,’ said Mrs St Clair through her sobs.

‘She’s been the apple of my eye. She’s been like a daughter to us. She’s been an old maid for years. I think it’s positively improper for her to think of marriage.’

‘She was always a girl to us, Edwin,’ pleaded Mrs St Clair.

‘And who is this man she’s married? It’s the deception that rankles. She must have been carrying on with him under our very noses. She does not even tell us his name. I fear the very worst.’

Suddenly I had an inspiration. That morning after breakfast I had gone out to buy myself some cigarettes and at the tobacconist’s I ran across Mortimer Ellis. I had not seen him for some days.

‘You’re looking very spruce,’ I said.

His boots had been repaired and were neatly blacked, his hat was brushed, he was wearing a clean collar and new gloves. I thought he had laid out my two pounds to advantage.

‘I have to go to London this morning on business,’ he said.

I nodded and left the shop.

I remembered that a fortnight before, walking in the country, I had met Miss Porchester and, a few yards behind, Mortimer Ellis. Was it possible that they had been walking together and he had fallen back as they caught sight of me? By heaven, I saw it all.

‘I think you said that Miss Porchester had money of her own,’ I said.

‘A trifle. She has three thousand pounds.’

Now I was certain. I looked at them blankly. Suddenly Mrs St Clair, with a cry, sprang to her feet.

‘Edwin, Edwin, supposing he doesn’t marry her?’

Mr St Clair at this put his hand to his head and in a state of collapse sank into a chair.

‘The disgrace would kill me,’ he groaned.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ I said. ‘He’ll marry her all right. He always does. He’ll marry her in church.’

They paid no attention to what I said. I suppose they thought I’d suddenly taken leave of my senses. I was quite sure now. Mortimer Ellis had achieved his ambition after all. Miss Porchester completed the Round Dozen.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

I seem never to find myself in Rome but at the dead season. I pass through in August or September on my way somewhere or other and spend a couple of days revisiting places or pictures that are endeared to me by old associations. It is very hot then and the inhabitants of the city spend their day interminably strolling up and down the Corso. The Caffé Nazionale is crowded with people sitting at little tables for long hours with an empty cup of coffee in front of them and a glass of water. In the Sistine Chapel you see blond and sunburned Germans, in knickerbockers and shirts open at the neck, who have walked down the dusty roads of Italy with knapsacks on their shoulders; and in St Peter’s little groups of the pious, tired but eager, who have come on pilgrimage (at an inclusive rate) from some distant country. They are under the charge of a priest and they speak strange tongues. The Hotel Plaza then is cool and restful. The public rooms are dark, silent and spacious. In the lounge at tea–time the only persons are a young, smart officer and a woman with fine eyes, drinking iced lemonade, and they talk intimately, in low tones, with the unwearying fluency of their race. You go up to your room and read and write letters and come down again two hours later and they are still talking. Before dinner a few people saunter into the bar, but for the rest of the day it is empty and the barman has time to tell you of his mother in Switzerland and his experiences in New York. You discuss life and love and the high cost of liquor.

And on this occasion too I found that I had the hotel almost to myself. When the reception clerk took me to my room he told me that they were pretty full, but when, having bathed and changed, I came down again to the hall, the liftman, an old acquaintance, informed me that there were not more than a dozen people staying there. I was tired after a long and hot journey down Italy and had made up my mind to dine quietly in the hotel and go to bed early. It was late when I went into the dining–room, vast and brightly lit, but not more than three or four tables were occupied. I looked round me with satisfaction. It is very agreeable to find yourself alone in a great city which is yet not quite strange to you and in a large empty hotel. It gives you a delectable sense of freedom. I felt the wings of my spirit give a little flutter of delight. I had paused for ten minutes in the bar and had a dry Martini. I ordered myself a bottle of good red wine. My limbs were weary, but my soul responded wonderfully to food and drink and I began to feel a singular lightness of heart. I ate my soup and my fish and pleasant thoughts filled my mind. Scraps of dialogue occurred to me and my fancy played happily with the persons of a novel I was then at work on. I rolled a phrase on my tongue and it tasted better than the wine. I began to think of the difficulty of describing the looks of people in such a way as to make the reader see them as you see them. To me it has always been one of the most difficult things in fiction. What does the reader really get when you describe a face feature by feature? I should think nothing. And yet the plan some writers adopt of taking a salient characteristic, a crooked smile or shifty eyes, and emphasizing that, though effective, avoids rather than solves the problem. I looked about me and wondered how I would describe the people at the tables round me. There was one man by himself just opposite and for practice I asked myself in what way I should treat him. He was a tall, spare fellow, and what I believe is generally called loose–limbed. He wore a dinner jacket and a boiled shirt. He had a rather long face and pale eyes; his hair was fairish and wavy, but it was growing thin, and the baldness of his temples gave him a certain nobility of brow. His features were undistinguished. His mouth and nose were like everybody else’s; he was clean–shaven; his skin was naturally pale, but at the moment sunburned. His appearance suggested an intellectual but slightly commonplace distinction. He looked as though he might have been a lawyer or a don who played a pretty game of golf. I felt that he had good taste and was well–read and would be a very agreeable guest at a luncheon–party in Chelsea. But how the devil one was to describe him so as in a few lines to give a vivid, interesting, and accurate picture I could not imagine. Perhaps it would be better to let all the rest go and dwell only on that rather fatigued distinction which on the whole was the most definite impression he gave. I looked at him reflectively. Suddenly he leaned forwards and gave me a stiff but courtly little bow. I have a ridiculous habit of flushing when I am taken aback and now I felt my cheeks redden. I was startled. I had been staring at him for several minutes as though he were a dummy. He must have thought me extremely rude. I nodded with a good deal of embarrassment and looked away. Fortunately at that moment the waiter was handing me a dish. To the best of my belief I had never seen the fellow before. I asked myself whether his bow was due to my insistent stare, which made him think that he had met me somewhere, or whether I had really run across him and completely forgotten. I have a bad memory for faces and I had in this case the excuse that he looked exactly like a great many other people. You saw a dozen of him at every golf course round London on a fine Sunday.

He finished his dinner before me. He got up, but on his way out stopped at my table. He stretched out his hand.

‘How d’you do?’ he said. ‘I didn’t recognize you when you first came in. I wasn’t meaning to cut you.’

He spoke in a pleasant voice with the tones cultivated at Oxford and copied by many who have never been there. It was evident that he knew me and evident too that he had no notion that I did not also know him. I had risen and since he was a good deal taller than I he looked down on me. He held himself with a sort of languor. He stooped a little, which added to the impression he gave me of having about him an air that was vaguely apologetic. His manner was a trifle condescending and at the same time a trifle shy.

‘Won’t you come and have your coffee with me?’ he said. ‘I’m quite alone.’

‘Yes, I shall be glad to.’

He left me and I still had no notion who he was or where I had met him. I had noticed one curious thing about him. Not once during the few sentences we exchanged, when we shook hands, or when with a nod he left me, did even the suspicion of a smile cross his face. Seeing him more closely I observed that he was in his way good–looking; his features were regular, his grey eyes were handsome, he had a slim figure; but it was a way that I found uninteresting. A silly woman would say he looked romantic. He reminded you of one of the knights of Burne–Jones though he was on a larger scale and there was no suggestion that he suffered from the chronic colitis that afflicted those unfortunate creatures. He was the sort of man whom you expected to look wonderful in fancy dress till you saw him in it and then you found that he looked absurd.

Presently I finished my dinner and went into the lounge. He was sitting in a large arm–chair and when he saw me he called a waiter. I sat down. The waiter came up and he ordered coffee and liqueurs. He spoke Italian very well. I was wondering by what means I could find out who he was without offending him. People are always a little disconcerted when you do not recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. The excellence of his Italian recalled him to me. I remembered who he was and remembered at the same time that I did not like him. His name was Humphrey Carruthers. He was in the Foreign Office and he had a position of some importance. He was in charge of I know not what department. He had been attached to various embassies and I supposed that a sojourn in Rome accounted for his idiomatic Italian. It was stupid of me not to have seen at once that he was connected with the diplomatic service. He had all the marks of the profession. He had the supercilious courtesy that is so well calculated to put up the backs of the general public and the aloofness due to the consciousness the diplomat has that he is not as other men are, joined with the shyness occasioned by his uneasy feeling that other men do not quite realize it. I had known Carruthers for a good many years, but had met him infrequently, at luncheon–parties where I said no more than how do you do to him and at the opera where he gave me a cool nod. He was generally thought intelligent; he was certainly cultured. He could talk of all the right things. It was inexcusable of me not to have remembered him, for he had lately acquired a very considerable reputation as a writer of short stories. They had appeared first in one or other of those magazines that are founded now and then by well–disposed persons to give the intelligent reader something worthy of his attention and that die when their proprietors have lost as much money as they want to; and in their discreet and handsomely printed pages had excited as much attention as an exiguous circulation permitted. Then they were published in book form. They created a sensation. I have seldom read such unanimous praise in the weekly papers. Most of them gave the book a column and the Literary Supplement of The Times reviewed it not among the common ruck of novels but in a place by itself cheek by jowl with the memoirs of a distinguished statesman. The critics welcomed Humphrey Carruthers as a new star in the firmament. They praised his distinction, his subtlety, his delicate irony, and his insight. They praised his style, his sense of beauty, and his atmosphere. Here at last was a writer who had raised the short story from the depths into which in English–speaking countries it had fallen and here was work to which an Englishman could point with pride; it bore comparison with the best compositions in this manner of Finland, Russia, and Czecho–Slovakia.

Three years later Humphrey Carruthers brought out his second book and the critics commented on the interval with satisfaction. Here was no hack prostituting his talent for money! The praise it received was perhaps a little cooler than that which welcomed his first volume, the critics had had time to collect themselves, but it was enthusiastic enough to have delighted any common writer who earns his living by his pen and there was no doubt that his position in the world of letters was secure and honourable. The story that attracted most commendation was called The Shaving Mop and all the best critics pointed out with what beauty the author in three or four pages had laid bare the tragic soul of a barber’s assistant.

But his best–known story, which was also his longest, was called Week End. It gave its title to his first book. It narrated the adventures of a number of people who left Paddington Station on Saturday afternoon to stay with friends at Taplow and on Monday morning returned to London. It was so delicate that it was a little difficult to know exactly what happened. A young man, parliamentary secretary to a Cabinet Minister, very nearly proposed to a baronet’s daughter, but didn’t. Two or three others went on the river in a punt. They all talked a great deal in an allusive way, but none of them ever finished a sentence and what they meant was very subtly indicated by dots and dashes. There were a good many descriptions of flowers in the garden and a sensitive picture of the Thames under the rain. It was all seen through the eyes of the German governess and everyone agreed that Carruthers had conveyed her outlook on the situation with quite delicious humour.

I read both Humphrey Carruthers’s books. I think it part of the writer’s business to make himself aware of what is being written by his contemporaries. I am very willing to learn and I thought I might discover in them something that would be useful to me. I was disappointed. I like a story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have a weakness for a point. I think atmosphere is all very well, but atmosphere without anything else is like a frame without a picture; it has not much significance. But it may be that I could not see the merit of Humphrey Carruthers on account of defects in myself, and if I have described his two most successful stories without enthusiasm the cause perhaps lies in my own wounded vanity. For I was perfectly conscious that Humphrey Carruthers looked upon me as a writer of no account. I am convinced that he had never read a word I had written. The popularity I enjoyed was sufficient to persuade him that there was no occasion for him to give me any of his attention. For a moment, such was the stir he created, it looked as though he might himself be faced with that ignominy, but it soon appeared that his exquisite work was above the heads of the public. One can never tell how large the intelligentsia is, but one can tell fairly well how many of its members are prepared to pay money to patronize the arts they cherish. The plays that are of too fine a quality to attract the patrons of the commercial theatre can count on an audience of ten thousand, and the books that demand from their readers more comprehension than can be expected from the common herd sell twelve hundred copies. For the intelligentsia, notwithstanding their sensitiveness to beauty, prefer to go to the theatre on the nod and to get a book from the library.

I am sure this did not distress Carruthers. He was an artist. He was also a clerk in the Foreign Office. His reputation as a writer was distinguished; he was not interested in the vulgar, and to sell well would possibly have damaged his career. I could not surmise what had induced him to invite me to have coffee with him. It is true he was alone, but I should have supposed he found his thoughts excellent company, and I could not believe he imagined that I had anything to say that would interest him. Nevertheless I could not but see that he was doing his dreary best to be affable. He reminded me of where we had last met and we talked for a moment of common friends in London. He asked me how I came to be in Rome at this season and I told him. He volunteered the information that he had arrived that morning from Brindisi. Our conversation did not go easily and I made up my mind that as soon as I civilly could I would get up and leave him. But presently I had an odd sensation, I hardly know what caused it, that he was conscious of this and was desperately anxious not to give me the opportunity. I was surprised. I gathered my wits about me. I noticed that whenever I paused he broke in with a new topic. He was trying to find something to interest me so that I should stay. He was straining every nerve to be agreeable. Surely he could not be lonely; with his diplomatic connexions he must know plenty of people with whom he could have spent the evening. I wondered indeed that he was not dining at the Embassy; even though it was summer there must be someone there he knew. I noticed also that he never smiled. He talked with a sort of harsh eagerness as though he were afraid of a moment’s silence and the sound of his voice shut out of his mind something that tortured him. It was very strange. Though I did not like him, though he meant nothing to me and to be with him irked me somewhat, I was against my will a trifle interested. I gave him a searching glance. I wondered if it was my fancy that I saw in those pale eyes of his the cowed look of a hunted dog and, notwithstanding his neat features and his expression so civilly controlled, in his aspect something that suggested the grimace of a soul in pain. I could not understand. A dozen absurd notions flashed through my mind. I was not particularly sympathetic: like an old war horse scenting the fray I roused myself. I had been feeling very tired, but now I grew alert. My sensibilities put out tentacles. I was suddenly alive to every expression of his face and every gesture. I put aside the thought that had come to me that he had written a play and wanted my advice. These exquisite persons succumb strangely to the glamour of the footlights and they are not averse from getting a few tips from the craftsman whose competence they superciliously despise. No, it was not that. A single man in Rome, of aesthetic leanings, is liable to get into trouble, and I asked myself whether Carruthers had got into some difficulty to extricate himself from which the Embassy was the last place he could go to. The idealist, I have noticed, is apt at times to be imprudent in the affairs of the flesh. He sometimes finds love in places which the police inconveniently visit. I tittered in my heart. Even the gods laugh when a prig is caught in an equivocal situation.

Suddenly Carruthers said something that staggered me.

‘I’m so desperately unhappy,’ he muttered.

He said it without warning. He obviously meant it. There was in his tone a sort of gasp. It might very well have been a sob. I cannot describe what a shock it was to me to hear him say those words. I felt as you do when you turn a corner of the street and on a sudden a great blast of wind meets you, takes your breath away, and nearly blows you off your feet. It was so unexpected. After all I hardly knew the fellow. We were not friends. I did not like him; he did not like me. I have never looked on him as quite human. It was amazing that a man so self–controlled, so urbane, accustomed to the usages of polite society, should break in upon a stranger with such a confession. I am naturally reticent. I should be ashamed, whatever I was suffering, to disclose my pain to another. I shivered. His weakness outraged me. For a moment I was filled with a passion of anger. How dared he thrust the anguish of his soul on me? I very nearly cried:

‘What the hell do I care?’

But I didn’t. He was sitting huddled up in the big arm–chair. The solemn nobility of his features, which reminded one of the marble statue of a Victorian statesman, had strangely crumpled and his face sagged. He looked almost as though he were going to cry. I hesitated. I faltered. I had flushed when he spoke and now I felt my face go white. He was a pitiable object.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said.

‘Do you mind if I tell you about it?’

‘No.’

It was not the moment for many words. I suppose Carruthers was in the early forties. He was a well–made man, athletic in his way, and with a confident bearing. Now he looked twenty years older and strangely shrivelled. He reminded me of the dead soldiers I had seen during the war and how oddly small death had made them. I was embarrassed and looked away, but I felt his eyes claiming mine and I looked back.

‘Do you know Betty Welldon–Burns?’ he asked me.

‘I used to meet her sometimes in London years ago. I’ve not seen her lately.’

‘She lives in Rhodes now, you know. I’ve just come from there. I’ve been staying with her.’

‘Oh?’

He hesitated.

‘I’m afraid you’ll think it awfully strange of me to talk to you like this. I’m at the end of my tether. If I don’t talk to somebody I shall go off my head.’

He had ordered double brandies with the coffee and now calling the waiter he ordered himself another. We were alone in the lounge. There was a little shaded lamp on the table between us. Because it was a public room he spoke in a low voice. The place gave one oddly enough a sense of intimacy. I cannot repeat all that Carruthers said to me in the words he said it; it would be impossible for me to remember them; it is more convenient for me to put it in my own fashion. Sometimes he could not bring himself to say a thing right out and I had to guess at what he meant. Sometimes he had not understood, and it seemed to me that in certain ways I saw the truth more clearly than he. Betty Welldon–Burns had a very keen sense of humour and he had none. I perceived a good deal that had escaped him.

I had met her a good many times, but I knew her chiefly from hearsay. In her day she had made a great stir in the little world of London and I had heard of her often before I met her. This was at a dance in Portland Place soon after the war. She was then already at the height of her celebrity. You could not open an illustrated paper without seeing in it a portrait of her, and her mad pranks were a staple of conversation. She was twenty–four. Her mother was dead, her father, the Duke of St Erth, old and none too rich, spent most of the year in his Cornish castle and she lived in London with a widowed aunt. At the outbreak of the war she went to France. She was just eighteen. She was a nurse in a hospital at the Base and then drove a car. She acted in a theatrical tour designed to amuse the troops; she posed in tableaux at home for charitable purposes, held auctions for this object and that, and sold flags in Piccadilly. Every one of her activities was widely advertised and in every new role she was profusely photographed. I suppose that she managed to have a very good time. But now that the war was over she was having her fling with a vengeance. Just then everybody a little lost his head. The young, relieved of the burden that for five years had oppressed them, indulged in one wild escapade after another. Betty took part in them all. Sometimes, for one reason or another, an account of them found its way into the newspapers and her name was always in the headlines. At that time night clubs were in the first flush of their success and she was to be seen at them every night. She lived a life of hectic gaiety. It can only be described in a hackneyed phrase, because it was a hackneyed thing. The British public in its odd way took her to its heart and Lady Betty was a sufficient description of her throughout the British islands. Women mobbed her when she went to a wedding and the gallery applauded her at first nights as though she were a popular actress. Girls copied the way she did her hair and manufacturers of soap and face cream paid her money to use her photograph to advertise their wares.

Of course dull, stodgy people, the people who remembered and regretted the old order, disapproved of her. They sneered at her constant appearance in the limelight. They said she had an insane passion for self–advertisement. They said she was fast. They said she drank too much. They said she smoked too much. I will admit that nothing I had heard of her had predisposed me to think very well of her. I held cheap the women who seemed to look upon the war as an occasion to enjoy themselves and be talked about. I am bored by the papers in which you see photographs of persons in society walking in Cannes or playing golf at St Andrews. I have always found the Bright Young People extremely tedious. The gay life seems dull and stupid to the onlooker, but the moralist is unwise to judge it harshly. It is as absurd to be angry with the young things who lead it as with a litter of puppies scampering aimlessly around, rolling one another over and chasing their tails. It is well to bear it with fortitude if they cause havoc in the flower beds or break a piece of china. Some of them will be drowned because their points are not up to the mark and the rest will grow up into well–behaved dogs. Their unruliness is due only to the vitality of youth.

And it was vitality that was Betty’s most shining characteristic. The urge of life flowed through her with a radiance that dazzled you. I do not think I shall ever forget the impression she made on me at the party at which I first saw her. She was like a maenad. She danced with an abandon that made you laugh, so obvious was her intense enjoyment of the music and the movement of her young limbs. Her hair was brown, slightly disordered by the vigour of her gestures, but her eyes were deep blue, and her skin was milk and roses. She was a great beauty, but she had none of the coldness of great beauty. She laughed constantly and when she was not laughing she smiled and her eyes danced with the joy of living. She was like a milkmaid on the farmstead of the gods. She had the strength and health of the people; and yet the independence of her bearing, a sort of noble frankness of carriage, suggested the great lady. I do not quite know how to put the feeling she gave me, that though so simple and unaffected she was not unconscious of her station. I fancied that if occasion arose she could get on her dignity and be very grand indeed. She was charming to everybody because, probably without being quite aware of it, in the depths of her heart she felt that the rest of the world was perfectly insignificant. I understood why the factory girls in the East End adored her and why half a million people who had never seen her except in a photograph looked upon her with the intimacy of personal friendship. I was introduced to her and she spent a few minutes talking to me. It was extraordinarily flattering to see the interest she showed in you; you knew she could not really be so pleased to meet you as she seemed or so delighted with what you said, but it was very attractive. She had the gift of being able to jump over the first difficult phases of acquaintance and you had not known her for five minutes before you felt you had known her all her life. She was snatched away from me by someone who wanted to dance with her and she surrendered herself to her partner’s arms with just the same eager happiness as she had shown when she sank into a chair by my side. I was surprised when I met her at luncheon a fortnight later to find that she remembered exactly what we had talked about during those noisy ten minutes at the dance. A young woman with all the social graces.

I mentioned the incident to Carruthers.

‘She was no fool,’ he said. ‘Very few people knew how intelligent she was. She wrote some very good poetry. Because she was so gay, because she was so reckless and never cared a damn for anybody, people thought she was scatter– brained. Far from it. She was as clever as a monkey. You would never have thought she’d had the time to read all the things she had. I don’t suppose anyone knew that side of her as well as I did. We used to take walks together, in the country at week–ends, and in London we’d drive out to Richmond Park and walk there, and talk. She loved flowers and trees and grass. She was interested in everything. She had a lot of information and a lot of sense. There was nothing she couldn’t talk about. Sometimes when we’d been for a walk in the afternoon and we met at a night club and she’d had a couple of glasses of champagne, that was enough to make her completely buffy, you know, and she was the life and soul of the party, I couldn’t help thinking how amazed the rest of them would be if they knew how seriously we’d been talking only a few hours before. It was an extraordinary contrast. There seemed to be two entirely different women in her.’

Carruthers said all this without a smile. He spoke with the melancholy he might have used if he had been speaking of some person snatched from the pleasant company of the living by untimely death. He gave a deep sigh.

‘I was madly in love with her. I proposed to her half a dozen times. Of course I knew I hadn’t a chance. I was only a very junior clerk at the F.O., but I couldn’t help myself. She refused me, but she was always frightfully nice about it. It never made any difference to our friendship. You see, she really liked me. I gave her something that other people didn’t. I always thought that she was really fonder of me than of anybody. I was crazy about her.’

‘I don’t suppose you were the only one,’ I said, having to say something.

‘Far from it. She used to get dozens of love letters from men she’d never seen or heard of, farmers in Africa, miners, and policemen in Canada. All sorts of people proposed to her. She could have married anyone she liked.’

‘Even royalty, one heard.’

‘Yes, she said she couldn’t stand the life. And then she married Jimmie Welldon–Burns.’

‘People were rather surprised, weren’t they?’

‘Did you ever know him?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I may have met him, but he left no impression on me.’

‘He wouldn’t. He was the most insignificant fellow that ever breathed. His father was a big manufacturer up in the North. He’d made a lot of money during the war and bought a baronetcy. I believe he hadn’t an aitch to his name. Jimmy was at Eton with me, they’d tried hard to make a gentleman of him, and in London after the war he was about a good deal. He was always willing to throw a party. No one ever paid any attention to him. He just paid the bill. He was the most crashing bore. You know, rather prim, terribly polite; he made you rather uncomfortable because he was so anxious not to do the wrong thing. He always wore his clothes as though he’d just put them on for the first time and they were a little too tight for him.’

When Carruthers innocently opened his Times one morning and casting his eyes down the fashionable intelligence of the day saw that a marriage had been arranged between Elizabeth, only daughter of the Duke of St Erth, and James, eldest son of Sir John Welldon–Burns, Bart, he was dumbfounded. He rang Betty up and asked if it was true.

‘Of course,’ she said.

He was so shocked that for the moment he found nothing to say. She went on speaking.

‘He’s bringing his family to luncheon today to meet father. I dare say it’ll be a bit grim. You might stand me a cocktail at Claridge’s to fortify me, will you?’

‘At what time?’ he asked.

‘One.’

‘All right. I’ll meet you there.’

He was waiting for her when she came in. She walked with a sort of spring as though her eager feet itched to break into a dance. She was smiling. Her eyes shone with the joy that suffused her because she was alive and the world was such a pleasant place to live in. People recognizing her whispered to one another as she came in. Carruthers really felt that she brought sunshine and the scent of flowers into the sober but rather overwhelming splendour of Claridge’s lounge. He did not wait to say how do you do to her.

‘Betty, you can’t do it,’ he said. ‘It’s simply out of the question.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s awful.’

‘I don’t think he is. I think he’s rather nice.’

A waiter came up and took their order. Betty looked at Carruthers with those beautiful blue eyes of hers that managed to be at the same time so gay and so tender.

‘He’s such a frightful bounder, Betty.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Humphrey. He’s just as good as anybody else. I think you’re rather a snob.’

‘He’s so dull.’

‘No, he’s rather quiet. I don’t know that I want a husband who’s too brilliant. I think he’ll make a very good background. He’s quite good–looking and he has nice manners.’

‘My God, Betty.’

‘Oh, don’t be idiotic, Humphrey.’

‘Are you going to pretend you’re in love with him?’

‘I think it would be tactful, don’t you?’

‘Why are you going to marry him?’

She looked at him coolly.

‘He’s got pots of money. I’m nearly twenty–six.’

There was nothing much more to be said. He drove her back to her aunt’s house. She had a very grand marriage, with dense crowds lining the approach to St Margaret’s, Westminster, presents from practically all the royal family, and the honeymoon was passed on the yacht her father–in–law had lent them. Carruthers applied for a post abroad and was sent to Rome (I was right in guessing that he had thus acquired his admirable Italian) and later to Stockholm. Here he was counsellor and here he wrote the first of his stories.

Perhaps Betty’s marriage had disappointed the British public who expected much greater things of her, perhaps only that as a young married woman she no longer appealed to the popular sense of romance; the fact was plain that she soon lost her place in the public eye. You ceased to hear very much about her. Not long after the marriage it was rumoured that she was going to have a baby and a little later that she had had a miscarriage. She did not drop out of society, I suppose she continued to see her friends, but her activities were no longer spectacular. She was certainly but seldom seen any more in those raffish assemblies where the members of a tarnished aristocracy hob–nob with the hangers–on of the arts and flatter themselves that they are being at once smart and cultured. People said she was settling down. They wondered how she was getting on with her husband and no sooner did they do this than they concluded that she was not getting on very well. Presently gossip said that Jimmie was drinking too much and then, a year or two later, one heard that he had contracted tuberculosis. The Welldon–Burnses spent a couple of winters in Switzerland. Then the news spread that they had separated and Betty had gone to live in Rhodes. An odd place to choose.

‘It must be deadly,’ her friends said.

A few of them went to stay with her now and then and came back with reports of the beauty of the island and the leisurely charm of the life. But of course it was very lonely. It seemed strange that Betty, with her brilliance and her energy, should be content to settle there. She had bought a house. She knew no one but a few Italian officials, there was indeed no one to know; but she seemed perfectly happy. Her visitors could not make it out. But the life of London is busy and memories are short. People ceased to concern themselves with her. She was forgotten. Then, a few weeks before I met Humphrey Carruthers in Rome, The Times announced the death of Sir James Welldon–Burns, second baronet. His younger brother succeeded him in the title. Betty had never had a child.

Carruthers continued to see her after the marriage. Whenever he came to London they lunched together. She had the ability to take up a friendship after a long separation as though no passage of time had intervened, so that there was never any strangeness in their meetings. Sometimes she asked him when he was going to marry.

‘You’re getting on, you know, Humphrey. If you don’t marry soon you’ll get rather old–maidish.’

‘D’you recommend marriage?’

It was not a very kindly thing to say, because like everyone else he had heard that she was not getting on too well with her husband, but her remark piqued him.

‘On the whole. I think probably an unsatisfactory marriage is better than no marriage at all.’

‘You know quite well that nothing would induce me to marry and you know why.’

‘Oh, my dear, you’re not going to pretend that you’re still in love with me?’

‘I am.’

‘You are a damned fool.’

‘I don’t care.’

She smiled at him. Her eyes always had that look, partly bantering, partly tender, that gave him such a happy pain in his heart. Funny, he could almost localize it.

‘You’re rather sweet, Humphrey. You know I’m devoted to you, but I wouldn’t marry you even if I were free.’

When she left her husband and went to live in Rhodes Carruthers ceased to see her. She never came to England. They maintained an active correspondence.

He suggested coming to Rhodes for a few days, but she thought he had better not. He understood why. Everyone knew he had been madly in love with her. Everyone knew he was still. He did not know in what circumstances exactly the Welldon–Burnses had separated. It might be that there had been a good deal of bad feeling. Betty might think that his presence on the island would compromise her.

‘She wrote a charming letter to me when my first book came out. You know I dedicated it to her. She was surprised that I had done anything so good. Everyone was very nice about it, and she was delighted with that. I think her pleasure was the chief thing that pleased me. After all I’m not a professional writer, you know: I don’t attach much importance to literary success.’

Fool, I thought, and liar. Did he think I had not noticed the self–satisfaction that consumed him on account of the favourable reception of his books? I did not blame him for feeling that, nothing could be more pardonable, but why be at such pains to deny it. But it was doubtless true that it was mostly for Betty’s sake that he relished the notoriety they had brought him. He had a positive achievement to offer her. He could lay at her feet now not only his love, but a distinguished reputation. Betty was not very young any more, she was thirty–six; her marriage, her sojourn abroad, had changed things; she was no longer surrounded by suitors; she had lost the halo with which the public admiration had surrounded her. The distance between them was no longer insuperable. He alone had remained faithful through the years. It was absurd that she should continue to bury her beauty, her wit, her social grace in an island in the corner of the Mediterranean. He knew she was fond of him. She could hardly fail to be touched by his long devotion. And the life he had to offer her now was one that he knew would appeal to her. He made up his mind to ask her once more to marry him. He was able to get away towards the end of July. He wrote and said that he was going to spend his leave in the Greek islands and if she would be glad to see him he would stop off at Rhodes for a day or two where he had heard the Italians had opened a very good hotel. He put his suggestion in this casual way out of delicacy. His training at the Foreign Office had taught him to eschew abruptness. He never willingly put himself in a position from which he could not if necessary withdraw with tact. Betty sent him a telegram in reply. She said it was too marvellous that he was coming to Rhodes and of course he must come and stay with her, for at least a fortnight, and he was to wire what boat he was coming by.

He was in a state of wild excitement when at last the ship he had taken at Brindisi steamed, soon after sunrise, into the neat and pretty harbour of Rhodes. He had hardly slept a wink all night and getting up early had watched the island loom grandly out of the dawn and the sun rise over the summer sea. Boats came out as the ship dropped her anchor. The gangway was lowered. Humphrey, leaning over the rail, watched the doctor and the port officials and the hotel couriers swarm up it. He was the only Englishman on board. His nationality was obvious. A man came on deck and immediately walked up to him.

‘Are you Mr Carruthers?’

‘Yes.’

He was about to smile and put out his hand, but he perceived in the twinkling of an eye that the person who addressed him, an Englishman like himself, was not a gentleman. Instinctively his manner, remaining exceedingly polite, became a trifle stiff. Of course Carruthers did not tell me this, but I see the scene so clearly that I have no hesitation in describing it.

‘Her ladyship hopes you don’t mind her not coming to meet you, but the boat got in so early and it’s more than an hour’s drive to where we live.’

‘Oh, of course. Her ladyship well?’

‘Yes, thank you. Got your luggage ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you’ll show me where it is I’ll tell one of these fellows to put it in a boat. You won’t have any difficulty at the Customs. I’ve fixed that up all right, and then we’ll get off. Have you had breakfast?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

The man was not quite sure of his aitches. Carruthers wondered who he was. You could not say he was uncivil, but he was certainly a little offhand. Carruthers knew that Betty had rather a large estate; perhaps he was her agent. He seemed very competent. He gave the porters instructions in fluent Greek and when they got in the boat and the boatmen asked for more money than he gave them, he said something that made them laugh and they shrugged their shoulders satisfied. The luggage was passed through the Customs without examination, Humphrey’s guide shaking hands with the officials, and they went into a sunny place where a large yellow car was standing.

‘Are you going to drive me?’ asked Carruthers.

‘I’m her ladyship’s chauffeur.’

‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know.’

He was not dressed like a chauffeur. He wore white duck trousers and espadrilles on his bare feet, a white tennis shirt, with no tie and open at the neck, and a straw hat. Carruthers frowned. Betty oughtn’t to let her chauffeur drive the car like that. It was true that he had had to get up before daybreak and it looked like being a hot drive up to the villa. Perhaps under ordinary conditions he wore uniform. Though not so tall as Carruthers, who was six feet one in his socks, he was not short; but he was broad–shouldered and squarely built, so that he looked stocky. He was not fat, but plump rather; he looked as though he had a hearty appetite and ate well. Young still, thirty perhaps or thirty–one, he had already a massive look and one day would be very beefy. Now he was a hefty fellow. He had a broad face deeply sun–burned, a short thickish nose, and a somewhat sullen look. He wore a short fair moustache. Oddly enough Carruthers had a vague feeling that he had seen him before.

‘Have you been with her ladyship long?’ he asked.

‘Well, I have, in a manner of speaking.’

Carruthers became a trifle stiffer. He did not quite like the manner in which the chauffeur spoke. He wondered why he did not say ‘sir’ to him. He was afraid Betty had let him get a little above himself. It was like her to be a bit careless about such things. But it was a mistake. He’d give her a hint when he got a chance. Their eyes met for an instant and he could have sworn that there was a twinkle of amusement in the chauffeur’s. Carruthers could not imagine why. He was not aware that there was anything amusing in him.

‘That, I suppose, is the old city of the Knights,’ he said distantly, pointing to the battlemented walls.

‘Yes. Her ladyship’ll take you over. We get a rare lot of tourists here in the season.’

Carruthers wished to be affable. He thought it would be nicer of him to offer to sit by the chauffeur rather than behind by himself and was just going to suggest it when the matter was taken out of his hands. The chauffeur told the porters to put Carruthers’ bags at the back, and settling himself at the wheel said:

‘Now if you’ll hop in we’ll get along.’

Carruthers sat down beside him and they set off along a white road that ran by the sea. In a few minutes they were in the open country. They drove in silence. Carruthers was a little on his dignity. He felt that the chauffeur was inclined to be familiar and he did not wish to give him occasion to be so. He nattered himself that he had a manner with him that puts his inferiors in their place. He thought with sardonic grimness that it would not be long before the chauffeur would be calling him ‘sir’. But the morning was lovely; the white road ran between olive groves and the farmhouses they passed now and then, with their white walls and flat roofs, had an Oriental look that took the fancy. And Betty was waiting for him. The love in his heart disposed him to kindliness towards all men and lighting himself a cigarette he thought it would be a generous act to offer the chauffeur one too. After all, Rhodes was very far away from England and the age was democratic. The chauffeur accepted the gift and stopped the car to light up.

‘Have you got the baccy?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Have I got what?’

The chauffeur’s face fell.

‘Her ladyship wired to you to bring two pounds of Player’s Navy Cut. That’s why I fixed it up with the Customs people not to open your luggage.’

‘I never got the wire.’

‘Damn!’

‘What on earth does her ladyship want with two pounds of Player’s Navy Cut?’

He spoke with hauteur. He did not like the chauffeur’s exclamation. The fellow gave him a sidelong glance in which Carruthers read a certain insolence.

‘We can’t get it here,’ he said briefly.

He threw away with what looked very like exasperation the Egyptian cigarette Carruthers had given him and started off again. He looked sulky. He said nothing more. Carruthers felt that his efforts at sociability had been a mistake. For the rest of the journey he ignored the chauffeur. He adopted the frigid manner that he had used so successfully as secretary at the Embassy when a member of the British public came to him for assistance. For some time they had been running up hill and now they came to a long low wall and then to an open gate. The chauffeur turned in.

‘Have we arrived?’ cried Carruthers.

‘Sixty–five kilometres in fifty–seven minutes,’ said the chauffeur, a smile suddenly showing his fine white teeth. ‘Not so bad considering the road.’

He sounded his klaxon shrilly. Carruthers was breathless with excitement. They drove up a narrow road through an olive grove, and came to a low, white, rambling house. Betty was standing at the door. He jumped out of the car and kissed her on both cheeks. For a moment he could not speak. But subconsciously he noticed that at the door stood an elderly butler in white ducks and a couple of footmen in the fustanellas of their country. They were smart and picturesque. Whatever Betty permitted her chauffeur it was evident that the house was run in the civilized style suited to her station. She led him through the hall, a large apartment with whitewashed walls in which he was vaguely conscious of handsome furniture, into the drawing–room. This was also large and low, with the same whitewashed walls, and he had immediately an impression of comfort and luxury.

‘The first thing you must do is to come and look at my view,’ she said.

‘The first thing I must do is to look at you.’

She was dressed in white. Her arms, her face, her neck, were deeply burned by the sun; her eyes were bluer than he had ever seen them and the whiteness of her teeth was startling. She looked extremely well. She was very trim and neat. Her hair was waved, her nails were manicured; he had had a moment’s anxiety that in the easy life she led on this romantic isle she had let herself go.

‘Upon my word you look eighteen, Betty. How do you manage it?’

‘Happiness,’ she smiled.

It gave him a momentary pang to hear her say this. He did not want her to be too happy. He wanted to give her happiness. But now she insisted on taking him out on the terrace. The drawing–room had five long windows that led out to it and from the terrace the olive–clad hill tumbled steeply to the sea. There was a tiny bay below in which a white boat, mirrored on the calm water, lay at anchor. On a further hill, round the corner, you saw the white houses of a Greek village and beyond it a huge grey crag surmounted by the battlements of a medieval castle.

‘It was one of the strongholds of the Knights,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you up there this evening.’

The scene was quite lovely. It took your breath away. It was peaceful and yet it had a strange air of life. It moved you not to contemplation, but stirred you to activity.

‘You’ve got the tobacco all right, I suppose.’ He started.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I never got your wire.’

‘But I wired to the Embassy and I wired to the Excelsior.’

‘I stayed at the Plaza.’

‘What a bore! Albert’ll be furious.’

‘Who is Albert?’

‘He drove you out. Player’s is the only tobacco he likes and he can’t get it here.’

‘Oh, the chauffeur.’ He pointed to the boat that lay gleaming beneath them. ’Is that the yacht I’ve heard about?’

‘Yes.’

It was a large caïque that Betty had bought, fitted with a motor auxiliary and smartened up. In it she wandered about the Greek islands. She had been as far north as Athens and as far south as Alexandria.

‘We’ll take you for a trip if you can spare the time,’ she said. ‘You ought to see Cos while you’re here.’

‘Who runs it for you?’

‘Of course I have a crew, but Albert chiefly. He’s very clever with motors and all that.’

He did not know why it gave him a vague discomfort to hear her speak of the chauffeur again. Carruthers wondered if she did not leave too much in his hands. It was a mistake to give a servant too much leeway.

‘You know, I couldn’t help thinking I’d seen Albert before somewhere. But I can’t place him.’

She smiled brightly, her eyes shining, with that sudden gaiety of hers that gave her face its delightful frankness.

‘You ought to remember him. He was the second footman at Aunt Louise’s. He must have opened the door to you hundreds of times.’

Aunt Louise was the aunt with whom Betty had lived before her marriage.

‘Oh, is that who he is? I suppose I must have seen him there without noticing him. How does he happen to be here?’

‘He comes from our place at home. When I married he wanted to come with me, so I took him. He was Jimmie’s valet for some time and then I sent him to some motor works, he was mad about cars, and eventually I took him on as my chauffeur. I don’t know what I should do without him now.’

‘Don’t you think it’s rather a mistake to get too dependent on a servant?’

‘I don’t know. It never occurred to me.’

Betty showed him the rooms that had been got ready for him, and when he had changed they strolled down to the beach. A dinghy was waiting for them and they rowed out to the caïque and bathed from there. The water was warm and they sunned themselves on the deck. The caïque was roomy, comfortable, and luxurious. Betty showed him over and they came upon Albert tinkering with the engines. He was in filthy overalls, his hands were black and his face was smeared with grease.

‘What’s the matter, Albert?’ said Betty.

He raised himself and faced her respectfully.

‘Nothing, m’lady. I was just ‘aving a look round.’

‘There are only two things Albert loves in the world. One is the car and the other’s the yacht. Isn’t that true, Albert?’

She gave him a gay smile and Albert’s rather stolid face lit up. He showed his beautiful white teeth.

‘That’s true, m’lady.’

‘He sleeps on board, you know. We rigged up a very nice cabin for him aft.’

Carruthers fell into the life very easily. Betty had bought the estate from a Turkish pasha exiled to Rhodes by Abdul Hamid and she had added a wing to the picturesque house. She had made a wild garden of the olive grove that surrounded it. It was planted with rosemary and lavender and asphodel, broom that she had sent from England and the roses for which the island was famous. In the spring, she told him, the ground was carpeted with anemones. But when she showed him her property, telling him her plans and what alterations she had in mind, Carruthers could not help feeling a little uneasy.

‘You talk as though you were going to live here all your life,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am,’ she smiled.

‘What nonsense! At your age.’

‘I’m getting on for forty, old boy,’ she answered lightly.

He discovered with satisfaction that Betty had an excellent cook and it gratified his sense of propriety to dine with her in the splendid dining–room, with its Italian furniture, and be waited on by the dignified Greek butler and the two handsome footmen in their flamboyant uniforms. The house was furnished with taste; the rooms contained nothing that was not essential, but every piece was good. Betty lived in considerable state. When, the day after his arrival, the Governor with several members of his staff came over to dinner she displayed all the resources of the household. The Governor entering the house passed between a double row of flunkeys magnificent in their starched petticoats, embroidered jackets, and velvet caps. It was almost a bodyguard. Carruthers liked the grand style. The dinner–party was very gay. Betty’s Italian was fluent and Carruthers spoke it perfectly. The young officers in the Governor’s suite were uncommonly smart in their uniforms. They were very attentive to Betty and she treated them with easy cordiality. She chaffed them. After dinner the gramophone was turned on and they danced with her one after the other.

When they were gone Carruthers asked her: ‘Aren’t they all madly in love with you?’

‘I don’t know about that. They hint occasionally at alliances permanent or otherwise, but they take it very good–naturedly when I decline with thanks.’

They were not serious. The young ones were callow and the not so young were fat and bald. Whatever they might feel about her Carruthers could not for a moment believe that Betty would make a fool of herself with a middle–class Italian. But a day or two later a curious thing happened. He was in his rooms dressing for dinner; he heard a man’s voice outside in the passage, he could not hear what was said or what language was spoken, and then ringing out suddenly Betty’s laughter. It was a charming laugh, rippling and gay, like a young girl’s, and it had a joyous abandon that was infectious. But whom could she be laughing with? It was not the way you would laugh with a servant. It had a curious intimacy. It may seem strange that Carruthers read all this into a peal of laughter, but it must be remembered that Carruthers was very subtle. His stories were remarkable for such touches.

When they met presently on the terrace and he was shaking a cocktail he sought to gratify his curiosity.

‘What were you laughing your head off over just now? Has anyone been here?’

‘No.’

She looked at him with genuine surprise.

‘I thought one of your Italian officers had come to pass the time of day.’

‘No.’

Of course the passage of years had had its effect on Betty. She was beautiful, but her beauty was mature. She had always had assurance, but now she had repose; her serenity was a feature, like her blue eyes and her candid brow, that was part of her beauty. She seemed to be at peace with all the world; it rested you to be with her as it rested you to lie among the olives within sight of the wine–coloured sea. Though she was as gay and witty as ever, the seriousness which once he had been alone to know was now patent. No one could accuse her any longer of being scatter–brained; it was impossible not to perceive the fineness of her character. It had even nobility. That was not a trait it was usual to find in the modern woman and Carruthers said to himself that she was a throw back; she reminded him of the great ladies of the eighteenth century. She had always had a feeling for literature, the poems she wrote as a girl were graceful and melodious, and he was more interested than surprised when she told him that she had undertaken a solid historical work. She was getting materials together for an account of the Knights of St John in Rhodes. It was a story of romantic incidents. She took Carruthers to the city and showed him the noble battlements and together they wandered through austere and stately buildings. They strolled up the silent Street of the Knights with the lovely stone facades and the great coats of arms that recalled a dead chivalry. She had a surprise for him there. She had bought one of the old houses and with affectionate care had restored it to its old state. When you entered the little courtyard, with its carved stone stairway, you were taken back into the middle ages. It had a tiny walled garden in which a fig–tree grew and roses. It was small and secret and silent. The old knights had been in contact with the East long enough to have acquired Oriental ideas of privacy.

‘When I’m tired of the villa I come here for two or three days and picnic. It’s a relief sometimes not to be surrounded by people.’

‘But you’re not alone here?’

‘Practically.’

There was a little parlour austerely furnished.

‘What is this?’ said Carruthers pointing with a smile to a copy of the Sporting Times that lay on a table.

‘Oh, that’s Albert’s. I suppose he left it here when he came to meet you. He has the Sporting Times and the News of the World sent him every week. That is how he keeps abreast of the great world.’

She smiled tolerantly. Next to the parlour was a bedroom with nothing much in it but a large bed.

‘The house belonged to an Englishman. That’s partly why I bought it. He was a Sir Giles Quern, and one of my ancestors married a Mary Quern who was a cousin of his. They were Cornish people.’

Finding that she could not get on with her history without such a knowledge of Latin as would enable her to read the medieval documents with ease, Betty had set about learning the classical language. She troubled to acquire only the elements of grammar and then started, with a translation by her side, to read the authors that interested her. It is a very good method of learning a language and I have often wondered that it is not used in schools. It saves all the endless turning over of dictionaries and the fumbling search for meaning. After nine months Betty could read Latin as fluently as most of us can read French. It seemed a trifle ridiculous to Carruthers that this lovely, brilliant creature should take her work so seriously and yet he was moved; he would have liked to snatch her in his arms and kiss her, not at that moment as a woman, but as a precocious child whose cleverness suddenly enchants you. But later he reflected upon what she had told him. He was of course a very clever man, otherwise he could not have attained the position he held in the Foreign Office, and it would be silly to claim that those two books of his could have made so much stir without some merit; if I have made him look a bit of a fool it is only because I did not happen to like him, and if I have derided his stories it is merely because stories of that sort seem to me rather silly. He had tact and insight. He had a conviction that there was but one way to win her. She was in a groove and happy in it, her plans were definite; but her life at Rhodes was so well–ordered, so complete and satisfying, that for that very reason its hold over her could be combated. His chance was to arouse in her the restlessness that lies deep in the heart of the English. So he talked to Betty of England and London, their common friends and the painters, writers, and musicians with whom his literary success had brought him acquaintance. He talked of the Bohemian parties in Chelsea, and of the opera, of trips to Paris en bande for a fancy–dress ball, or to Berlin to see the new plays. He recalled to her imagination a life rich and easy, varied, cultured, intelligent, and highly civilized. He tried to make her feel that she was stagnating in a backwater. The world was hurrying on, from one new and interesting phase to another, and she was standing still. They were living in a thrilling age and she was missing it. Of course he did not tell her this; he left her to infer it. He was amusing and spirited, he had an excellent memory for a good story, he was whimsical and gay. I know I have not made Humphrey Carruthers witty any more than I have shown Lady Betty brilliant. The reader must take my word for it that they were. Carruthers was generally reckoned an entertaining companion, and that is half the battle; people were willing to find him amusing and they vowed the things he said were marvellous. Of course his wit was social. It needed a particular company, who understood his allusions and shared his exclusive sense of humour. There are a score of journalists in Fleet Street who could knock spots off the most famous of the society wits; it is their business to be witty and brilliance is in their day’s work. There are a few of the society beauties whose photographs appear in the papers who could get a job at three pounds a week in the chorus of a song–and–dance show. Amateurs must be judged with tolerance. Carruthers knew that Betty enjoyed his society. They laughed a great deal together. The days passed in a flash.

‘I shall miss you terribly when you go,’ she said in her frank way. ‘It’s been a treat having you here. You are a sweet, Humphrey.’

‘Have you only just discovered it?’

He patted himself on the back. His tactics had been right. It was interesting to see how well his simple plan had worked. Like a charm. The vulgar might laugh at the Foreign Office, but there was no doubt it taught you how to deal with difficult people. Now he had but to choose his opportunity. He felt that Betty had never been more attached to him. He would wait till the end of his visit. Betty was emotional. She would be sorry that he was going. Rhodes would seem very dull without him. Whom would she have to talk to when he was gone? After dinner they usually sat on the terrace looking at the starry sea; the air was warm and balmy and vaguely scented: it was then he would ask her to marry him, on the eve of his departure. He felt it in his bones that she would accept him.

One morning when he had been in Rhodes a little over a week, he happened to be coming upstairs as Betty was walking along the passage.

‘You’ve never shown me your room, Betty,’ he said.

‘Haven’t I? Come in and have a look now. It’s rather nice.’

She turned back and he followed her in. It was over the drawing–room and nearly as large. It was furnished in the Italian style, and as is the present way more like a sitting–room than a bedroom. There were fine Paninis on the walls and one or two handsome cabinets. The bed was Venetian and beautifully painted.

‘That’s a couch of rather imposing dimensions for a widow lady,’ he said facetiously.

‘It is enormous, isn’t it? But it was so lovely, I had to buy it. It cost a fortune.’ His eye took in the bed–table by the side. There were two or three books on it, a box of cigarettes, and on an ash–tray a briar pipe. Funny! What on earth had Betty got a pipe by her bed for?

‘Do look at this cassone. Isn’t the painting marvellous? I almost cried when I found it.’

‘I suppose that cost a fortune too.’

‘I daren’t tell you what I paid.’

When they were leaving the room he cast another glance at the bed–table. The pipe had vanished.

It was odd that Betty should have a pipe in her bedroom, she certainly didn’t smoke one herself, and if she had would have made no secret of it, but of course there were a dozen reasonable explanations. It might be a present she was making to somebody, one of the Italians or even Albert, he had not been able to see if it was new or old, or it might be a pattern that she was going to ask him to take home to have others of the same sort sent out to her. After the moment’s perplexity, not altogether unmingled with amusement, he put the matter out of his mind. They were going for a picnic that day, taking their luncheon with them, and Betty was driving him herself. They had arranged to go for a cruise of a couple of days before he left so that he should see Patmos and Cos, and Albert was busy with the engines of the caïque. They had a wonderful day. They visited a ruined castle and climbed a mountain on which grew asphodel, hyacinth, and narcissus, and returned dead beat. They separated not long after dinner and Carruthers went to bed. He read for a little and then turned out his light. But he could not sleep. It was hot under his mosquito–net. He turned and tossed. Presently he thought he would go down to the little beach at the foot of the hill and bathe. It was not more than three minutes’ walk. He put on his espadrilles and took a towel. The moon was full and he saw it shining on the sea through the olive–trees. But he was not alone to have thought that this radiant night would be lovely to bathe in, for just before he came out on to the beach sounds reached his ears. He muttered a little damn of vexation, some of Betty’s servants were bathing, and he could not very well disturb them. The olive–trees came almost to the water’s edge and undecided he stood in their shelter. He heard a voice that gave him a sudden start.

‘Where’s my towel?’

English. A woman waded out of the water and stood for a moment at its edge. From the darkness a man came forward with nothing but a towel round his loins. The woman was Betty. She was stark naked. The man wrapped a bath– robe round her and began drying her vigorously. She leaned on him while she put on first one shoe and then the other and to support her he placed his arm round her shoulders. The man was Albert.

Carruthers turned and fled up the hill. He stumbled blindly. Once he nearly fell. He was gasping like a wounded beast. When he got into his room he flung himself on the bed and clenched his fists and the dry, painful sobs that tore his chest broke into tears. He evidently had a violent attack of hysterics. It was all clear to him, clear with the ghastly vividness with which on a stormy night a flash of lightning can disclose a ravaged landscape, clear, horribly clear. The way the man had dried her and the way she leaned against him pointed not to passion, but to a long–continued intimacy, and the pipe by the bedside, the pipe had a hideously conjugal air. It suggested the pipe a man might smoke while he was reading in bed before going to sleep. The Sporting Times! That was why she had that little house in the Street of the Knights, so that they could spend two or three days together in domestic familiarity. They were like an old married couple. Humphrey asked himself how long the hateful thing had lasted and suddenly he knew the answer: for years. Ten, twelve, fourteen; it had started when the young footman first came to London, he was a boy then and it was obvious enough that it was not he who had made the advances; all through those years when she was the idol of the British public, when everyone adored her and she could have married anyone she liked, she was living with the second footman at her aunt’s house. She took him with her when she married. Why had she made that surprising marriage? And the still–born child that came before its time. Of course that was why she had married Jimmie Welldon–Burns, because she was going to have a child by Albert. Oh, shameless, shameless! And then, when Jimmie’s health broke down she had made him take Albert as his valet. And what had Jimmie known and what had he suspected? He drank, that was what had started his tuberculosis; but why had he started drinking? Perhaps it was to still a suspicion that was so ugly that he could not face it. And it was to live with Albert that she had left Jimmie and it was to live with Albert that she had settled in Rhodes. Albert, his hands with their broken nails stained by his work on the motors, coarse of aspect and stocky, rather like a butcher with his high colour and clumsy strength, Albert not even very young any more and running to fat, uneducated and vulgar, with his common way of speaking. Albert, Albert, how could she?

Carruthers got up and drank some water. He threw himself into a chair. He could not bear his bed. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. He was a wreck in the morning. He had not slept at all. They brought him in his breakfast; he drank the coffee but could eat nothing. Presently there was a brisk knock on his door.

‘Coming down to bathe, Humphrey?’

That cheerful voice sent the blood singing through his head. He braced himself and opened the door.

‘I don’t think I will today. I don’t feel very well.’ She gave him a look.

‘Oh, my dear, you look all in. What’s the matter with you?’

‘I don’t know. I think I must have got a touch of the sun.’

His voice was dead and his eyes were tragic. She looked at him more closely. She did not say anything for a moment. He thought she went pale. He knew. Then a faintly mocking smile crossed her eyes; she thought the situation comic.

‘Poor old boy, go and lie down, I’ll send you in some aspirin. Perhaps you’ll feel better at luncheon.’

He lay in his darkened room. He would have given anything to get away then so that he need not set eyes on her again, but there was no means of that, the ship that was to take him back to Brindisi did not touch at Rhodes till the end of the week. He was a prisoner. And the next day they were to go to the islands. There was no escape from her there; in the caïque they would be in one another’s pockets all day long. He couldn’t face that. He was so ashamed. But she wasn’t ashamed. At that moment when it had been plain to her that nothing was hidden from him any longer she had smiled. She was capable of telling him all about it. He could not bear that. That was too much. After all she couldn’t be certain that he knew, at best she could only suspect; if he behaved as if nothing had happened, if at luncheon and during the days that remained he was as gay and jolly as usual she would think she had been mistaken. It was enough to know what he knew, he would not suffer the crowning humiliation of hearing from her own lips the disgraceful story. But at luncheon the first thing she said was:

‘Isn’t it a bore. Albert says something’s gone wrong with the motor, we shan’t be able to go on our trip after all. I daren’t trust to sail at this time of the year. We might be becalmed for a week.’

She spoke lightly and he answered in the same casual fashion.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, but still I don’t really care. It’s so lovely here, I really didn’t much want to go.’

He told her that the aspirin had done him good and he felt much better; to the Greek butler and the two footmen in fustanellas it must have seemed that they talked as vivaciously as usual. That night the British consul came to dinner and the night after some Italian officers. Carruthers counted the days, he counted the hours. Oh, if the moment would only come when he could step on the ship and be free from the horror that every moment of the day obsessed him! He was growing so tired. But Betty’s manner was so self–possessed that sometimes he asked himself if she really knew that he was aware of her secret. Was it the truth that she had told about the caïque and not, as had at once struck him, an excuse; and was it an accident that a succession of visitors prevented them from ever being alone together? The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. When he looked at her, so easy and calm, so obviously happy, he could not believe the odious truth. And yet he had seen with his own eyes. And the future. What would her future be? It was horrible to think of. Sooner or later the truth must become notorious. And to think of Betty a mock and an outcast, in the power of a coarse and common man, growing older, losing her beauty; and the man was five years younger than she. One day he would take a mistress, one of her own maids, perhaps, with whom he would feel at home as he had never felt with the great lady, and what could she do then? What humiliation then must she be prepared to put up with! He might be cruel to her. He might beat her. Betty. Betty.

Carruthers wrung his hands. And on a sudden an idea came to him that filled him with a painful exaltation; he put it away from him, but it returned; it would not let him be. He must save her, he had loved her too much and too long to let her sink, sink as she was sinking; a passion of self–sacrifice welled up in him. Notwithstanding everything, though his love now was dead and he felt for her an almost physical repulsion, he would marry her. He laughed mirthlessly. What would his life be? He couldn’t help that. He didn’t matter. It was the only thing to do. He felt wonderfully uplifted, and yet very humble, for he was awed at the thoughts of the heights which the divine spirit of man could reach.

His ship was to sail on Saturday and on Thursday when the guests who had been dining left them, he said:

‘I hope we’re going to be alone tomorrow.’

‘As a matter of fact I’ve asked some Egyptians who spend the summer here. She’s a sister of the ex–Khedive and very intelligent. I’m sure you’ll like her.’

‘Well, it’s my last evening. Couldn’t we spend it alone?’

She gave him a glance. There was a faint amusement in her eyes, but his were grave.

‘If you like. I can put them off.’

‘Then do.’

He was to start early in the morning and his luggage was packed. Betty had told him not to dress, but he had answered that he preferred to. For the last time they sat down to dinner facing one another. The dining–room, with its shaded lights, was bare and formal, but the summer night flooding in through the great open windows gave it a sober richness. It had the effect of the private refectory in a convent to which a royal lady had retired in order to devote the remainder of her life to a piety not too austere. They had their coffee on the terrace. Carruthers drank a couple of liqueurs. He was feeling very nervous.

‘Betty, my dear, I’ve got something I want to say to you,’ he began. ‘Have you? I wouldn’t say it if I were you.’

She answered gently. She remained perfectly calm, watching him shrewdly,

but with the glimmer of a smile in her blue eyes.

‘I must.’

She shrugged her shoulders and was silent. He was conscious that his voice trembled a little and he was angry with himself ‘You know I’ve been madly in love with you for many years. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to marry me. But, after all, things change and people change too, don’t they? We’re neither of us so young as we were. Won’t you marry me now, Betty?’

She gave him the smile that had always been such an attractive thing in her; it was so kindly, so frank, and still, still so wonderfully innocent.

‘You’re very sweet, Humphrey. It’s awfully nice of you to ask me again. I can’t tell you how touched I am. But you know, I’m a creature of habit, I’ve got in the habit of saying no to you now, and I can’t change it.’

‘Why not?’

There was something aggressive in his tone, something almost ominous, that made her give him a quick look. Her face blanched with sudden anger, but she immediately controlled herself.

‘Because I don’t want to,’ she smiled.

‘Are you going to marry anyone else?’

‘I? No. Of course not.’

For a moment she seemed to draw herself up as though a wave of ancestral pride swept through her and then she began to laugh. But whether she laughed at the thought that had passed through her mind or because something in Humphrey’s proposal had amused her none but she could have told. ‘Betty. I implore you to marry me.’

‘Never.’

‘You can’t go on living this life.’

He put into his voice all the anguish of his heart and his face was drawn and tortured. She smiled affectionately.

‘Why not? Don’t be such a donkey. You know I adore you, Humphrey, but you are rather an old woman.’

‘Betty. Betty.’

Did she not see that it was for her sake that he wanted it? It was not love that made him speak, but human pity and shame. She got up.

‘Don’t be tiresome, Humphrey. You’d better go to bed, you know you have to be up with the lark. I shan’t see you in the morning. Good–bye and God bless you. It’s been wonderful having you here.’

She kissed him on both cheeks.

Next morning, early, for he had to be on board at eight, when Carruthers stepped out of the front door he found Albert waiting for him in the car. He wore a singlet, duck trousers, and a beret basque. Carruthers’ luggage was in the back. He turned to the butler.

‘Put my bags beside the chauffeur,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit behind.’

Albert made no remark. Carruthers got in and they drove off. When they arrived at the harbour, porters ran up. Albert got out of the car. Carruthers looked down at him from his greater height.

‘You need not see me on board. I can manage perfectly well by myself. Here’s a tip for you.’

He gave him a five–pound note. Albert flushed. He was taken aback, he would have liked to refuse it, but did not know how to and the servility of years asserted itself. Perhaps he did not know what he said.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Carruthers gave him a curt nod and walked away. He had forced Betty’s lover to call him ‘sir’. It was as though he had struck her a blow across that smiling mouth of hers and flung in her face an opprobrious word. It filled him with a bitter satisfaction.

He shrugged his shoulders and I could see that even this small triumph now seemed vain. For a little while we were silent. There was nothing for me to say. Then he began again.

‘I dare say you think it’s very strange that I should tell you all this. I don’t care. You know, I feel as if nothing mattered any more. I feel as if decency no longer existed in the world. Heaven knows, I’m not jealous. You can’t be jealous unless you love and my love is dead. It was killed in a flash. After all those years. I can’t think of her now without horror. What destroys me, what makes me so frightfully unhappy is to think of her unspeakable degradation.’

So it has been said that it was not jealousy that caused Othello to kill Desdemona, but an agony that the creature that he believed angelic should be proved impure and worthless. What broke his noble heart was that virtue should so fall.

‘I thought there was no one like her. I admired her so much. I admired her courage and her frankness, her intelligence and her love of beauty. She’s just a sham and she’s never been anything else.’

‘I wonder if that’s true. Do you think any of us are all of a piece? Do you know what strikes me? I should have said that Albert was only the instrument, her toll to the solid earth, so to speak; that left her soul at liberty to range the empyrean. Perhaps the mere fact that he was so far below her gave her a sense of freedom in her relations with him that she would have lacked with a man of her own class. The spirit is very strange, it never soars so high as when the body has wallowed for a period in the gutter.’

‘Oh, don’t talk such rot,’ he answered angrily.

‘I don’t think it is rot. I don’t put it very well, but the idea’s sound.’ ‘Much good it does me. I’m broken and done for. I’m finished.’ ‘Oh, nonsense. Why don’t you write a story about it?’

‘I?’

‘You know, that’s the great pull a writer has over other people. When something has made him terribly unhappy, and he’s tortured and miserable, he can put it all into a story and it’s astonishing what a comfort and relief it is.’ ‘It would be monstrous. Betty was everything in the world to me. I couldn’t do anything so caddish.’

He paused for a little and I saw him reflect. I saw that notwithstanding the horror that my suggestion caused him he did for one minute look at the situation from the standpoint of the writer. He shook his head.

‘Not for her sake, for mine. After all I have some self–respect. Besides, there’s no story there.’

JANE

I remember very well the occasion on which I first saw Jane Fowler. It is indeed only because the details of the glimpse I had of her then are so clear that I trust my recollection at all, for, looking back, I must confess that I find it hard to believe that it has not played me a fantastic trick. I had lately returned to London from China and was drinking a dish of tea with Mrs Tower. Mrs Tower had been seized with the prevailing passion for decoration; and with the ruthlessness of her sex had sacrificed chairs in which she had comfortably sat for years, tables, cabinets, ornaments on which her eyes had dwelt in peace since she was married, pictures that had been familiar to her for a generation; and delivered herself into the hands of an expert. Nothing remained in her drawing–room with which she had any association, or to which any sentiment was attached; and she had invited me that day to see the fashionable glory in which she now lived. Everything that could be pickled was pickled and what couldn’t be pickled was painted. Nothing matched, but everything harmonized.

‘Do you remember that ridiculous drawing–room suite that I used to have?’ asked Mrs Tower.

The curtains were sumptuous yet severe; the sofa was covered with Italian brocade; the chair on which I sat was in petit point. The room was beautiful, opulent without garishness, and original without affectation; yet to me it lacked something; and while I praised with my lips I asked myself why I so much preferred the rather shabby chintz of the despised suite, the Victorian watercolours that I had known so long, and the ridiculous Dresden china that had adorned the chimney–piece. I wondered what it was that I missed in all these rooms that the decorators were turning out with a profitable industry. Was it heart? But Mrs Tower looked about her happily.

‘Don’t you like my alabaster lamps?’ she said. ‘They give such a soft light.’ ‘Personally I have a weakness for a light that you can see by,’ I smiled.

‘It’s so difficult to combine that with a light that you can’t be too much seen by,’ laughed Mrs Tower.

I had no notion what her age was. When I was quite a young man she was a married woman a good deal older than I, but now she treated me as her contemporary. She constantly said that she made no secret of her age, which was forty, and then added with a smile that all women took five years off. She never sought to conceal the fact that she dyed her hair (it was a very pretty brown with reddish tints), and she said she did this because hair was hideous while it was going grey; as soon as hers was white she would cease to dye it.

‘Then they’ll say what a young face I have.’

Meanwhile it was painted, though with discretion, and her eyes owed not a little of their vivacity to art. She was a handsome woman, exquisitely gowned, and in the sombre glow of the alabaster lamps did not look a day more than the forty she gave herself.

‘It is only at my dressing–table that I can suffer the naked brightness of a thirty–two–candle electric bulb,’ she added with smiling cynicism. ‘There I need it to tell me the first hideous truth and then to enable me to take the necessary steps to correct it.’

We gossiped pleasantly about our common friends and Mrs Tower brought me up to date in the scandal of the day. After roughing it here and there it was very agreeable to sit in a comfortable chair, the fire burning brightly on the hearth, charming tea–things set out on a charming table, and talk with this amusing, attractive woman. She treated me as a prodigal returned from his husks and was disposed to make much of me. She prided herself on her dinnerparties; she took no less trouble to have her guests suitably assorted than to give them excellent food; and there were few persons who did not look upon it as a treat to be bidden to one of them. Now she fixed a date and asked me whom I would like to meet.

‘There’s only one thing I must tell you. If Jane Fowler is still here I shall have to put it off.’

‘Who is Jane Fowler?’ I asked.

Mrs Tower gave a rueful smile.

‘Jane Fowler is my cross.’

‘Oh!’

‘Do you remember a photograph that I used to have on the piano before I had my room done, of a woman in a tight dress with tight sleeves and a gold locket, with her hair drawn back from a broad forehead and her ears showing and spectacles on a rather blunt nose? Well, that was Jane Fowler.’

‘You had so many photographs about the room in your unregenerate days,’ I said, vaguely.

‘It makes me shudder to think of them. I’ve made them into a huge brown–paper parcel and hidden them in an attic’

‘Well, who is Jane Fowler?’ I asked again, smiling.

‘She’s my sister–in–law. She was my husband’s sister and she married a manufacturer in the North. She’s been a widow for many years, and she’s very well–to–do.’

‘And why is she your cross?’

‘She’s worthy, she’s dowdy, she’s provincial. She looks twenty years older than I do and she’s quite capable of telling anyone she meets that we were at school together. She has an overwhelming sense of family affection and because I am her only living connexion she’s devoted to me. When she comes to London it never occurs to her that she should stay anywhere but here–she thinks it would hurt my feelings–and she’ll pay me visits of three or four weeks. We sit here and she knits and reads. And sometimes she insists on taking me to dine at Claridge’s and she looks like a funny old charwoman and everyone I particularly don’t want to be seen by is sitting at the next table. When we are driving home she says she loves giving me a little treat. With her own hands she makes me tea–cosies that I am forced to use when she is here and doilies and centrepieces for the dining–room table.’

Mrs Tower paused to take breath.

‘I should have thought a woman of your tact would find a way to deal with a situation like that.’

‘Ah, but don’t you see, I haven’t a chance. She’s so immeasurably kind. She has a heart of gold. She bores me to death, but I wouldn’t for anything let her suspect it.’

‘And when does she arrive?’

‘Tomorrow.’

But the answer was hardly out of Mrs Tower’s mouth when the bell rang. There were sounds in the hall of a slight commotion and in a minute or two the butler ushered in an elderly lady.

‘Mrs Fowler,’ he announced.

‘Jane,’ cried Mrs Tower, springing to her feet. ‘I wasn’t expecting you today.’

‘So your butler has just told me. I certainly said today in my letter.’

Mrs Tower recovered her wits.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m very glad to see you whenever you come. Fortunately I’m doing nothing this evening.’

‘You mustn’t let me give you any trouble. If I can have a boiled egg for my dinner, that’s all I shall want.’

A faint grimace for a moment distorted Mrs Tower’s handsome features. A boiled egg!

‘Oh, I think we can do a little better than that.’

I chuckled inwardly when I recollected that the two ladies were contemporaries. Mrs Fowler looked a good fifty–five. She was a rather big woman; she wore a black straw hat with a wide brim and from it a black lace veil hung over her shoulders, a cloak that oddly combined severity with fussiness, a long black dress, voluminous as though she wore several petticoats under it, and stout boots. She was evidently short–sighted, for she looked at you through large gold–rimmed spectacles.

‘Won’t you have a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Tower.

‘If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’ll take off my mantle.’

She began by stripping her hands of the black gloves she wore, and then took off her cloak. Round her neck was a solid gold chain from which hung a large gold locket in which I felt certain was a photograph of her deceased husband. Then she took off her hat and placed it neatly with her gloves and cloak on the sofa corner. Mrs Tower pursed her lips. Certainly those garments did not go very well with the austere but sumptuous beauty of Mrs Tower’s redecorated drawing–room. I wondered where on earth Mrs Fowler had found the extraordinary clothes she wore. They were not old and the materials were expensive. It was astounding to think that dressmakers still made things that had not been worn for a quarter of a century. Mrs Fowler’s grey hair was very plainly done, showing all her forehead and her ears, with a parting in the middle. It had evidently never known the tongs of Monsieur Marcel. Now her eyes fell on the tea–table with its teapot of Georgian silver and its cups in Old Worcester.

‘What have you done with the tea–cosy I gave you last time I came up, Marion?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you use it?’

‘Yes, I used it every day, Jane,’ answered Mrs Tower glibly. ‘Unfortunately we had an accident with it a little while ago. It got burnt.’

‘But the last one I gave you got burnt.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll think us very careless.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ smiled Mrs Fowler. ‘I shall enjoy making you another. I’ll go to Liberty’s tomorrow and buy some silks.’

Mrs Tower kept her face bravely.

‘I don’t deserve it, you know. Doesn’t your vicar’s wife need one?’

‘Oh, I’ve just made her one,’ said Mrs Fowler brightly.

I noticed that when she smiled she showed white, small, and regular teeth. They were a real beauty. Her smile was certainly very sweet.

But I felt it high time for me to leave the two ladies to themselves, so I took my leave.

Early next morning Mrs Tower rang me up and I heard at once from her voice that she was in high spirits.

‘I’ve got the most wonderful news for you,’ she said. ‘Jane is going to be married.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Her fiancé is coming to dine here tonight to be introduced to me and I want you to come too.’

‘Oh, but I shall be in the way.’

‘No, you won’t. Jane suggested herself that I should ask you. Do come.’

She was bubbling over with laughter.

‘Who is he?’

‘I don’t know. She tells me he’s an architect. Can you imagine the sort of man Jane would marry?’

I had nothing to do and I could trust Mrs Tower to give me a good dinner.

When I arrived Mrs Tower, very splendid in a tea–gown a little too young for her, was alone.

‘Jane is putting the finishing touches to her appearance. I’m longing for you to see her. She’s all in a flutter. She says he adores her. His name is Gilbert and when she speaks of him her voice gets all funny and tremulous. It makes me want to laugh.’

‘I wonder what he’s like.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I know. Very big and massive, with a bald head and an immense gold chain across an immense tummy. A large, fat, clean–shaven, red face and a booming voice.’

Mrs Fowler came in. She wore a very stiff black silk dress with a wide skirt and a train. At the neck it was cut into a timid V and the sleeves came down to the elbows. She wore a necklace of diamonds set in silver. She carried in her hands a long pair of black gloves and a fan of black ostrich feathers. She managed (as so few people do) to look exactly what she was. You could never have thought her anything in the world but the respectable relict of a North–country manufacturer of ample means.

‘You’ve really got quite a pretty neck, Jane,’ said Mrs Tower with a kindly smile.

It was indeed astonishingly young when you compared it with her weather–beaten face. It was smooth and unlined and the skin was white. And I noticed then that her head was very well placed on her shoulders.

‘Has Marion told you my news?’ she said, turning to me with that really charming smile of hers as if we were already old friends.

‘I must congratulate you,’ I said.

‘Wait to do that till you’ve seen my young man.’

‘I think it’s too sweet to hear you talk of your young man,’ smiled Mrs Tower.

Mrs Fowler’s eyes certainly twinkled behind her preposterous spectacles.

‘Don’t expect anyone too old. You wouldn’t like me to marry a decrepit old gentleman with one foot in the grave, would you?’

This was the only warning she gave us. Indeed there was no time for any further discussion, for the butler flung open the door and in a loud voice announced:

‘Mr Gilbert Napier.’

There entered a youth in a very well–cut dinner jacket. He was slight, not very tall, with fair hair in which there was a hint of a natural wave, cleanshaven, and blue–eyed. He was not particularly good–looking, but he had a pleasant, amiable face. In ten years he would probably be wizened and sallow; but now, in extreme youth, he was fresh and clean and blooming. For he was certainly not more than twenty–four. My first thought was that this was the son of Jane Fowler’s fiancé (I had not known he was a widower) come to say that his father was prevented from dining by a sudden attack of gout. But his eyes fell immediately on Mrs Fowler, his face lit up, and he went towards her with both hands outstretched. Mrs Fowler gave him hers, a demure smile on her lips, and turned to her sister–in–law.

‘This is my young man, Marion,’ she said.

He held out his hand.

‘I hope you’ll like me, Mrs Tower,’ he said. ‘Jane tells me you’re the only relation she has in the world.’

Mrs Tower’s face was wonderful to behold. I saw then to admiration how bravely good breeding and social usage could combat the instincts of the natural woman. For the astonishment and then the dismay that for an instant she could not conceal were quickly driven away, and her face assumed an expression of affable welcome. But she was evidently at a loss for words. It was not unnatural if Gilbert felt a certain embarrassment and I was too busy preventing myself from laughing to think of anything to say. Mrs Fowler alone kept perfectly calm.

‘I know you’ll like him, Marion. There’s no one enjoys good food more than he does.’ She turned to the young man. ‘Marion’s dinners are famous.’

‘I know,’ he beamed.

Mrs Tower made some quick rejoinder and we went downstairs. I shall not soon forget the exquisite comedy of that meal. Mrs Tower could not make up her mind whether the pair of them were playing a practical joke on her or whether Jane by wilfully concealing her fiancé’s age had hoped to make her look foolish. But then Jane never jested and she was incapable of doing a malicious thing. Mrs Tower was amazed, exasperated, and perplexed. But she had recovered her self–control, and for nothing would she have forgotten that she was a perfect hostess whose duty it was to make her party go. She talked vivaciously; but I wondered if Gilbert Napier saw how hard and vindictive was the expression of her eyes behind the mask of friendliness that she turned to him. She was measuring him. She was seeking to delve into the secret of his soul. I could see that she was in a passion, for under her rouge her cheeks glowed with an angry red.

‘You’ve got a very high colour, Marion,’ said Jane, looking at her amiably through her great round spectacles.

‘I dressed in a hurry. I dare say I put on too much rouge.’

‘Oh, is it rouge? I thought it was natural. Otherwise I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ She gave Gilbert a shy little smile. ‘You know, Marion and I were at school together. You would never think it to look at us now, would you? But of course I’ve lived a very quiet life.’

I do not know what she meant by these remarks; it was almost incredible that she made them in complete simplicity; but anyhow they goaded Mrs Tower to such a fury that she flung her own vanity to the winds. She smiled brightly.

‘We shall neither of us see fifty again, Jane,’ she said.

If the observation was meant to discomfit the widow it failed.

‘Gilbert says I mustn’t acknowledge to more than forty–nine for his sake,’ she answered blandly.

Mrs Tower’s hands trembled slightly, but she found a retort.

‘There is of course a certain disparity of age between you,’ she smiled.

‘Twenty–seven years,’ said Jane. ‘Do you think it’s too much? Gilbert says I’m very young for my age. I told you I shouldn’t like to marry a man with one foot in the grave.’

I was really obliged to laugh and Gilbert laughed too. His laughter was frank and boyish. It looked as though he were amused at everything Jane said. But Mrs Tower was almost at the end of her tether and I was afraid that unless relief came she would for once forget that she was a woman of the world. I came to the rescue as best I could.

‘I suppose you’re very busy buying your trousseau,’ I said.

‘No. I wanted to get my things from the dressmaker in Liverpool I’ve been to ever since I was first married. But Gilbert won’t let me. He’s very masterful, and of course he has wonderful taste.’

She looked at him with a little affectionate smile, demurely, as though she were a girl of seventeen.

Mrs Tower went quite pale under her make–up.

‘We’re going to Italy for our honeymoon. Gilbert has never had a chance of studying Renaissance architecture and of course it’s important for an architect to see things for himself. And we shall stop in Paris on the way and get my clothes there.’

‘Do you expect to be away long?’

‘Gilbert has arranged with his office to stay away for six months. It will be such a treat for him, won’t it? You see, he’s never had more than a fortnight’s holiday before.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mrs Tower in a tone that no effort of will could prevent from being icy.

‘He’s never been able to afford it, poor dear.’

‘Ah!’ said Mrs Tower, and into the exclamation put volumes.

Coffee was served and the ladies went upstairs. Gilbert and I began to talk in the desultory way in which men talk who have nothing whatever to say to one another; but in two minutes a note was brought in to me by the butler. It was from Mrs Tower and ran as follows:

Come upstairs quickly and then go as soon as you can. Take him with you. Unless I have it out with Jane at once I shall have a fit.

I told a facile lie.’Mrs Tower has a headache and wants to go to bed. I think if you don’t mind we’d better clear out.’

‘Certainly,’ he answered.

We went upstairs and five minutes later were on the doorstep. I called a taxi and offered the young man a lift.

‘No, thanks,’ he answered. ‘I’ll just walk to the corner and jump on a bus.’

Mrs Tower sprang to the fray as soon as she heard the front door close behind us.

‘Are you crazy, Jane?’ she cried.

‘Not more than most people who don’t habitually live in a lunatic asylum, I trust,’ Jane answered blandly.

‘May I ask why you’re going to marry this young man?’ asked Mrs Tower with formidable politeness.

‘Partly because he won’t take no for an answer. He’s asked me five times. I grew positively tired of refusing him.’

‘And why do you think he’s so anxious to marry you?’

‘I amuse him.’

Mrs Tower gave an exclamation of annoyance.

‘He’s an unscrupulous rascal. I very nearly told him so to his face.’

‘You would have been wrong, and it wouldn’t have been very polite.’

‘He’s penniless and you’re rich. You can’t be such a besotted fool as not to see that he’s marrying you for your money.’

Jane remained perfectly composed. She observed her sister–in–law’s agitation with detachment.

‘I don’t think he is, you know,’ she replied. ‘I think he’s very fond of me.’

‘You’re an old woman, Jane.’

‘I’m the same age as you are, Marion,’ she smiled.

‘I’ve never let myself go. I’m very young for my age. No one would think I was more than forty. But even I wouldn’t dream of marrying a boy twenty years younger than myself.’

‘Twenty–seven,’ corrected Jane.

‘Do you mean to tell me that you can bring yourself to believe that it’s possible for a young man to care for a woman old enough to be his mother?’

‘I’ve lived very much in the country for many years. I dare say there’s a great deal about human nature that I don’t know. They tell me there’s a man called Freud, an Austrian, I believe...’

But Mrs Tower interrupted her without any politeness at all.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jane. It’s so undignified. It’s so ungraceful. I always thought you were a sensible woman. Really you’re the last person I should ever have thought likely to fall in love with a boy.’

‘But I’m not in love with him. I’ve told him that. Of course I like him very much or I wouldn’t think of marrying him. I thought it only fair to tell him quite plainly what my feelings were towards him.’

Mrs Tower gasped. The blood rushed to her head and her breathing oppressed her. She had no fan, but she seized the evening paper and vigorously fanned herself with it.

‘If you’re not in love with him why do you want to marry him?’

‘I’ve been a widow a very long time and I’ve led a very quiet life. I thought I’d like a change.’

‘If you want to marry just to be married why don’t you marry a man of your own age?’

‘No man of my own age has asked me five times. In fact no man of my own age has asked me at all.’

Jane chuckled as she answered. It drove Mrs Tower to the final pitch of frenzy.

‘Don’t laugh, Jane, I won’t have it. I don’t think you can be right in your mind. It’s dreadful.’

It was altogether too much for her and she burst into tears. She knew that at her age it was fatal to cry, her eyes would be swollen for twenty–four hours and she would look a sight. But there was no help for it. She wept. Jane remained perfectly calm. She looked at Marion through her large spectacles and reflectively smoothed the lap of her black silk dress.

‘You’re going to be so dreadfully unhappy,’ Mrs Tower sobbed, dabbing her eyes cautiously in the hope that the black on her lashes would not smudge.

‘I don’t think so, you know,’ Jane answered in those equable, mild tones of hers, as if there were a little smile behind the words. ‘We’ve talked it over very thoroughly. I always think I’m a very easy person to live with. I think I shall make Gilbert very happy and comfortable. He’s never had anyone to look after him properly. We’re only marrying after mature consideration. And we’ve decided that if either of us wants his liberty the other will place no obstacles in the way of his getting it.’

Mrs Tower had by now recovered herself sufficiently to make a cutting remark.

‘How much has he persuaded you to settle on him?’

‘I wanted to settle a thousand a year on him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was quite upset when I made the suggestion. He says he can earn quite enough for his own needs.’

‘He’s more cunning than I thought,’ said Mrs Tower acidly.

Jane paused a little and looked at her sister–in–law with kindly but resolute eyes.

‘You see, my dear, it’s different for you,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been so very much a widow, have you?’

Mrs Tower looked at her. She blushed a little. She even felt slightly uncomfortable. But of course Jane was much too simple to intend an innuendo. Mrs Tower gathered herself together with dignity.

‘I’m so upset that I really must go to bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll resume the conversation tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be very convenient, dear. Gilbert and I are going to get the licence tomorrow morning.’

Mrs Tower threw up her hands in a gesture of dismay, but she found nothing more to say.

The marriage took place at a registrar’s office. Mrs Tower and I were the witnesses. Gilbert in a smart blue suit looked absurdly young and he was obviously nervous. It is a trying moment for any man. But Jane kept her admirable composure. She might have been in the habit of marrying as frequently as a woman of fashion. Only a slight colour on her cheeks suggested that beneath her calm was some faint excitement. It is a thrilling moment for any woman. She wore a very full dress of silvery grey velvet in the cut of which I recognized the hand of the dressmaker in Liverpool (evidently a widow of unimpeachable character) who had made her gowns for so many years; but she had so far succumbed to the frivolity of the occasion as to wear a large picture hat covered with blue ostrich feathers. Her gold–rimmed spectacles made it extraordinarily grotesque. When the ceremony was over the registrar (somewhat taken aback, I thought, by the difference of age between the pair he was marrying) shook hands with her, tendering his strictly official congratulations; and the bridegroom, blushing slightly, kissed her. Mrs Tower, resigned but implacable, kissed her; and then the bride looked at me expectantly. It was evidently fitting that I should kiss her too. I did. I confess that I felt a little shy as we walked out of the registrar’s office past loungers who waited cynically to see the bridal pairs, and it was with relief that I stepped into Mrs Tower’s car. We drove to Victoria Station, for the happy couple were to go over to Paris by the two o’clock train, and Jane had insisted that the wedding–breakfast should be eaten at the station restaurant. She said it always made her nervous not to be on the platform in good time. Mrs Tower, present only from a strong sense of family duty, was able to do little to make the party go off well; she ate nothing (for which I could not blame her, since the food was execrable, and anyway I hate champagne at luncheon) and talked in a strained voice. But Jane went through the menu conscientiously.

‘I always think one should make a hearty meal before starting out on a journey,’ she said.

We saw them off, and I drove Mrs Tower back to her house.

‘How long do you give it?’ she said. ‘Six months?’

‘Let’s hope for the best,’ I smiled.

‘Don’t be so absurd. There can be no “best”. You don’t think he’s marrying her for anything but her money, do you? Of course it can’t last. My only hope is that she won’t have to go through as much suffering as she deserves.’

I laughed. The charitable words were spoken in such a tone as to leave me in small doubt of Mrs Tower’s meaning.

‘Well, if it doesn’t last you’ll have the consolation of saying: “I told you so”,’ I said.

‘I promise you I’ll never do that.’

‘Then you’ll have the satisfaction of congratulating yourself on your self–control in not saying: “I told you so”.’

‘She’s old and dowdy and dull.’

‘Are you sure she’s dull?’ I said. ‘It’s true she doesn’t say very much, but when she says anything it’s very much to the point.’

‘I’ve never heard her make a joke in my life.’

I was once more in the Far East when Gilbert and Jane returned from their honeymoon and this time I remained away for nearly two years. Mrs Tower was a bad correspondent and though I sent her an occasional picture–postcard I received no news from her. But I met her within a week of my return to London; I was dining out and found that I was seated next to her. It was an immense party, I think we were four–and–twenty, like the blackbirds in the pie, and, arriving somewhat late, I was too confused by the crowd in which I found myself to notice who was there. But when we sat down, looking round the long table I saw that a good many of my fellow–guests were well known to the public from their photographs in the illustrated papers. Our hostess had a weakness for the persons technically known as celebrities and this was an unusually brilliant gathering. When Mrs Tower and I had exchanged the conventional remarks that two people make when they have not seen one another for a couple of years I asked about Jane.

‘She’s very well,’ said Mrs Tower with a certain dryness.

‘How has the marriage turned out?’

Mrs Tower paused a little and took a salted almond from the dish in front of her.

‘It appears to be quite a success.’

‘You were wrong then?’

‘I said it wouldn’t last and I still say it won’t last. It’s contrary to human nature.’

’Is she happy?’

‘They’re both happy.’

‘I suppose you don’t see very much of them.’

‘At first I saw quite a lot of them. But now...’ Mrs Tower pursed her lips a little. ‘Jane is becoming very grand.’

‘What do you mean?’ I laughed.

‘I think I should tell you that she’s here tonight.’

‘Here?’

I was startled. I looked round the table again. Our hostess was a delightful and an entertaining woman, but I could not imagine that she would be likely to invite to a dinner such as this the elderly and dowdy wife of an obscure architect. Mrs Tower saw my perplexity and was shrewd enough to see what was in my mind. She smiled thinly.

‘Look on the left of our host.’

I looked. Oddly enough the woman who sat there had by her fantastic appearance attracted my attention the moment I was ushered into the crowded drawing–room. I thought I noticed a gleam of recognition in her eye, but to the best of my belief I had never seen her before. She was not a young woman, for her hair was iron–grey; it was cut very short and clustered thickly round her well–shaped head in tight curls. She made no attempt at youth, for she was conspicuous in that gathering by using neither lipstick, rouge, nor powder. Her face, not a particularly handsome one, was red and weather–beaten; but because it owed nothing to artifice had a naturalness that was very pleasing. It contrasted oddly with the whiteness of her shoulders. They were really magnificent. A woman of thirty might have been proud of them. But her dress was extraordinary. I had not often seen anything more audacious. It was cut very low, with short skirts, which were then the fashion, in black and yellow; it had almost the effect of fancy–dress and yet so became her that though on anyone else it would have been outrageous, on her it had the inevitable simplicity of nature. And to complete the impression of an eccentricity in which there was no pose and of an extravagance in which there was no ostentation she wore, attached by a broad black ribbon, a single eyeglass.

‘You’re not going to tell me that is your sister–in–law,’ I gasped.

‘That is Jane Napier,’ said Mrs Tower icily.

At that moment she was speaking. Her host was turned towards her with an anticipatory smile. A baldish white–haired man, with a sharp, intelligent face, who sat on her left, was leaning forward eagerly, and the couple who sat opposite, ceasing to talk with one another, listened intently. She said her say and they all, with a sudden movement, threw themselves back in their chairs and burst into vociferous laughter. From the other side of the table a man addressed Mrs Tower: I recognized a famous statesman.

‘Your sister–in–law has made another joke, Mrs Tower,’ he said. Mrs Tower smiled.

‘She’s priceless, isn’t she?’

‘Let me have a long drink of champagne and then for heaven’s sake tell me all about it,’ I said.

Well, this is how I gathered it had all happened. At the beginning of their honeymoon Gilbert took Jane to various dressmakers in Paris and he made no objection to her choosing a number of ‘gowns’ after her own heart; but he persuaded her to have a ‘frock’ or two made according to his own design. It appeared that he had a knack for that kind of work. He engaged a smart French maid. Jane had never had such a thing before. She did her own mending and when she wanted ‘doing up’ was in the habit of ringing for the housemaid. The dresses Gilbert had devised were very different from anything she had worn before; but he had been careful not to go too far too quickly, and because it pleased him she persuaded herself, though not without misgivings, to wear them in preference to those she had chosen herself. Of course she could not wear them with the voluminous petticoats she had been in the habit of using, and these, though it cost her an anxious moment, she discarded.

‘Now if you please,’ said Mrs Tower, with something very like a sniff of disapproval, ‘she wears nothing but thin silk tights. It’s a wonder to me she doesn’t catch her death of cold at her age.’

Gilbert and the French maid taught her how to wear her clothes, and, unexpectedly enough, she was very quick at learning. The French maid was in raptures over Madame’s arms and shoulders. It was a scandal not to show anything so fine.

‘Wait a little, Alphonsine,’ said Gilbert. ‘The next lot of clothes I design for Madame we’ll make the most of her.’

The spectacles of course were dreadful. No one could look really well in gold–rimmed spectacles. Gilbert tried some with tortoiseshell rims. He shook his head.

‘They’d look all right on a girl,’ he said. ‘You’re too old to wear spectacles, Jane.’ Suddenly he had an inspiration. ‘By George, I’ve got it. You must wear an eyeglass.’

‘Oh, Gilbert, I couldn’t.’

She looked at him and his excitement, the excitement of the artist, made her smile. He was so sweet to her she wanted to do what she could to please him.

‘I’ll try,’ she said.

When they went to an optician and, suited with the right size, she placed an eyeglass jauntily in her eye Gilbert clapped his hands. There and then, before the astonished shopman, he kissed her on both cheeks.

‘You look wonderful,’ he cried.

So they went down to Italy and spent happy months studying Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Jane not only grew accustomed to her changed appearance, but found she liked it. At first she was a little shy when she went into the dining–room of an hotel and people turned round to stare at her, no one had ever raised an eyelid to look at her before, but presently she found that the sensation was not disagreeable. Ladies came up to her and asked her where she got her dress.

‘Do you like it?’ she answered demurely. ‘My husband designed it for me.’ ‘I should like to copy it if you don’t mind.’

Jane had certainly for many years lived a very quiet life, but she was by no means lacking in the normal instincts of her sex. She had her answer ready.

‘I’m so sorry, but my husband’s very particular and he won’t hear of anyone copying my frocks. He wants me to be unique.’

She had an idea that people would laugh when she said this, but they didn’t; they merely answered:

‘Oh, of course I quite understand. You are unique.’

But she saw them making mental notes of what she wore, and for some reason this quite ‘put her about’. For once in her life that she wasn’t wearing what everybody else did, she reflected, she didn’t see why everybody else should want to wear what she did.

‘Gilbert,’ said she, quite sharply for her, ‘next time you’re designing dresses for me I wish you’d design things that people can’t copy.’

‘The only way to do that is to design things that only you can wear.’

‘Can’t you do that?’

‘Yes, if you’ll do something for me.’

‘What is it?’

‘Cut off your hair.’

I think this was the first time that Jane jibbed. Her hair was long and thick and as a girl she had been quite vain of it; to cut it off was a very drastic proceeding. This really was burning her boats behind her. In her case it was not the first step that cost so much, it was the last; but she took it (‘I know Marion will think me a perfect fool, and I shall never be able to go to Liverpool again,’ she said), and when they passed through Paris on their way home Gilbert led her (she felt quite sick, her heart was beating so fast) to the best hairdresser in the world. She came out of this shop with a jaunty, saucy, impudent head of crisp grey curls. Pygmalion had finished his fantastic masterpiece: Galatea was come to life.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but that isn’t enough to explain why Jane is here tonight amid this crowd of duchesses, Cabinet Ministers, and suchlike; nor why she is sitting on one side of her host with an Admiral of the Fleet on the other.’

‘Jane is a humorist,’ said Mrs Tower. ‘Didn’t you see them all laughing at what she said?’

There was no doubt now of the bitterness in Mrs Tower’s heart.

‘When Jane wrote and told me they were back from their honeymoon I thought I must ask them both to dinner. I didn’t much like the idea, but I felt it had to be done. I knew the party would be deadly and I wasn’t going to sacrifice any of the people who really mattered. On the other hand I didn’t want Jane to think I hadn’t any nice friends. You know I never have more than eight, but on this occasion I thought it would make things go better if I had twelve. I’d been too busy to see Jane until the evening of the party. She kept us all waiting a little–that was Gilbert’s cleverness–and at last she sailed in. You could have knocked me down with a feather. She made the rest of the women look dowdy and provincial. She made me feel like a painted old trollop.’

Mrs Tower drank a little champagne.

‘I wish I could describe the frock to you. It would have been quite impossible on anyone else; on her it was perfect. And the eyeglass! I’d known her for thirty–five years and I’d never seen her without spectacles.’

‘But you knew she had a good figure.’

‘How should I? I’d never seen her except in the clothes you first saw her in. Did you think she had a good figure? She seemed not to be unconscious of the sensation she made but to take it as a matter of course. I thought of my dinner and I heaved a sigh of relief. Even if she was a little heavy in hand, with that appearance it didn’t so very much matter. She was sitting at the other end of the table and I heard a good deal of laughter. I was glad to think that the other people were playing up well; but after dinner I was a good deal taken aback when no less than three men came up to me and told me that my sister–in–law was priceless, and did I think she would allow them to call on her? I didn’t quite know whether I was standing on my head or my heels. Twenty–four hours later our hostess of tonight rang me up and said she had heard my sister–in–law was in London and she was priceless and would I ask her to luncheon to meet her? She has an infallible instinct, that woman: in a month everyone was talking about Jane. I am here tonight, not because I’ve known our hostess for twenty years and have asked her to dinner a hundred times, but because I’m Jane’s sister–in–law.’

Poor Mrs Tower. The position was galling, and though I could not help being amused, for the tables were turned on her with a vengeance, I felt that she deserved my sympathy.

‘People never can resist those who make them laugh,’ I said, trying to console her.

‘She never makes me laugh.’

Once more from the top of the table I heard a guffaw and guessed that Jane had said another amusing thing.

‘Do you mean to say that you are the only person who doesn’t think her funny?’ I asked, smiling.

‘Had it struck you that she was a humorist?’

‘I’m bound to say it hadn’t.’

‘She says just the same things as she’s said for the last thirty–five years, I laugh when I see everyone else does because I don’t want to seem a perfect fool, but I am not amused.’

‘Like Queen Victoria,’ I said.

It was a foolish jest and Mrs Tower was quite right sharply to tell me so. I tried another tack.

’Is Gilbert here?’ I asked, looking down the table.

‘Gilbert was asked because she won’t go out without him, but tonight he’s at a dinner of the Architects’ Institute or whatever it’s called.’

‘I’m dying to renew my acquaintance with her.’

‘Go and talk to her after dinner. She’ll ask you to her Tuesdays.’

‘Her Tuesdays?’

‘She’s at home every Tuesday evening. You’ll meet there everyone you ever heard of. They’re the best parties in London. She’s done in one year what I’ve failed to do in twenty.’

‘But what you tell me is really miraculous. How has it been done?’

Mrs Tower shrugged her handsome but adipose shoulders.

‘I shall be glad if you’ll tell me,’ she replied.

After dinner I tried to make my way to the sofa on which Jane was sitting, but I was intercepted and it was not till a little later that my hostess came up to me and said:

‘I must introduce you to the star of my party. Do you know Jane Napier? She’s priceless. She’s much more amusing than your comedies.’

I was taken up to the sofa. The admiral who had been sitting beside her at dinner was with her still. He showed no sign of moving and Jane, shaking hands with me, introduced me to him.

‘Do you know Sir Reginald Frobisher?’

We began to chat. It was the same Jane as I had known before, perfectly simple, homely and unaffected, but her fantastic appearance certainly gave a peculiar savour to what she said. Suddenly I found myself shaking with laughter. She had made a remark, sensible and to the point, but not in the least witty, which her manner of saying and the bland look she gave me through her eyeglass made perfectly irresistible. I felt light–hearted and buoyant. When I left her she said to me:

‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, come and see us on Tuesday evening. Gilbert will be so glad to see you.’

‘When he’s been a month in London he’ll know that he can have nothing better to do,’ said the admiral.

So, on Tuesday but rather late, I went to Jane’s. I confess I was a little surprised at the company. It was quite a remarkable collection of writers, painters and politicians, actors, great ladies and great beauties: Mrs Tower was right, it was a grand party; I had seen nothing like it in London since Stafford House was sold. No particular entertainment was provided. The refreshments were adequate without being luxurious. Jane in her quiet way seemed to be enjoying herself; I could not see that she took a great deal of trouble with her guests, but they seemed to like being there and the gay, pleasant party did not break up till two in the morning. After that I saw much of her. I not only went often to her house, but seldom went out to luncheon or to dinner without meeting her. I am an amateur of humour and I sought to discover in what lay her peculiar gift. It was impossible to repeat anything she said, for the fun, like certain wines, would not travel. She had no gift for epigram. She never made a brilliant repartee. There was no malice in her remarks nor sting in her rejoinders. There are those who think that impropriety, rather than brevity, is the soul of wit; but she never said a thing that could have brought a blush to a Victorian cheek. I think her humour was unconscious and I am sure it was unpremeditated. It flew like a butterfly from flower to flower, obedient only to its own caprice and pursuivant of neither method nor intention. It depended on the way she spoke and on the way she looked. Its subtlety gained by the flaunting and extravagant appearance that Gilbert had achieved for her; but her appearance was only an element in it. Now of course she was the fashion and people laughed if she but opened her mouth. They no longer wondered that Gilbert had married a wife so much older than himself. They saw that Jane was a woman with whom age did not count. They thought him a devilish lucky young fellow. The admiral quoted Shakespeare to me: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.’ Gilbert was delighted with her success. As I came to know him better I grew to like him. It was quite evident that he was neither a rascal nor a fortune–hunter. He was not only immensely proud of Jane but genuinely devoted to her. His kindness to her was touching. He was a very unselfish and sweet–tempered young man.

‘Well, what do you think of Jane now?’ he said to me once, with boyish triumph.

‘I don’t know which of you is more wonderful,’ I said. ‘You or she.’

‘Oh, I’m nothing.’

‘Nonsense. You don’t think I’m such a fool as not to see that it’s you, and you only, who’ve made Jane what she is.’

‘My only merit is that I saw what was there when it wasn’t obvious to the naked eye,’ he answered.

‘I can understand your seeing that she had in her the possibility of that remarkable appearance, but how in the world have you made her into a humorist?’

‘But I always thought the things she said a perfect scream. She was always a humorist.’

‘You’re the only person who ever thought so.’

Mrs Tower, not without magnanimity, acknowledged that she had been mistaken in Gilbert. She grew quite attached to him. But notwithstanding appearances she never faltered in her opinion that the marriage could not last. I was obliged to laugh at her.

‘Why, I’ve never seen such a devoted couple,’ I said.

‘Gilbert is twenty–seven now. It’s just the time for a pretty girl to come along. Did you notice the other evening at Jane’s that pretty little niece of Sir Reginald’s? I thought Jane was looking at them both with a good deal of attention, and I wondered to myself.’

‘I don’t believe Jane fears the rivalry of any girl under the sun.’

‘Wait and see,’ said Mrs Tower.

‘You gave it six months.’

‘Well, now I give it three years.’

When anyone is very positive in an opinion it is only human nature to wish him proved wrong. Mrs Tower was really too cocksure. But such a satisfaction was not mine, for the end that she had always and confidently predicted to the ill–assorted match did in point of fact come. Still, the fates seldom give us what we want in the way we want it, and though Mrs Tower could flatter herself that she had been right, I think after all she would sooner have been wrong. For things did not happen at all in the way she expected.

One day I received an urgent message from her and fortunately went to see her at once. When I was shown into the room Mrs Tower rose from her chair and came towards me with the stealthy swiftness of a leopard stalking his prey. I saw that she was excited.

‘Jane and Gilbert have separated,’ she said.

‘Not really? Well, you were right after all.’

Mrs Tower looked at me with an expression I could not understand.

‘Poor Jane,’ I muttered.

‘Poor Jane!’ she repeated, but in tones of such derision that I was dumbfounded.

She found some difficulty in telling me exactly what had occurred.

Gilbert had left her a moment before she leaped to the telephone to summon me. When he entered the room, pale and distraught, she saw at once that something terrible–had happened. She knew what he was going to say before he said it.

‘Marion, Jane has left me.’

She gave him a little smile and took his hand.

‘I knew you’d behave like a gentleman. It would have been dreadful for her for people to think that you had left her.’

‘I’ve come to you because I knew I could count on your sympathy.’

‘Oh, I don’t blame you, Gilbert,’ said Mrs Tower, very kindly. ‘It was bound to happen.’ He sighed.

‘I suppose so. I couldn’t hope to keep her always. She was too wonderful and I’m a perfectly commonplace fellow.’

Mrs Tower patted his hand. He was really behaving beautifully. ‘And what’s going to happen now?’

‘Well, she’s going to divorce me.’

‘Jane always said she’d put no obstacle in your way if ever you wanted to marry a girl.’

‘You don’t think it’s likely I should ever be willing to marry anyone else after being Jane’s husband,’ he answered. Mrs Tower was puzzled. ‘Of course you mean that you’ve left Jane.’

‘I? That’s the last thing I should ever do.’

‘Then why is she divorcing you?’

‘She’s going to marry Sir Reginald Frobisher as soon as the decree is made absolute.’

Mrs Tower positively screamed. Then she felt so faint that she had to get her smelling salts.

‘After all you’ve done for her?’

‘I’ve done nothing for her.’

‘Do you mean to say you’re going to allow yourself to be made use of like that?’

‘We arranged before we married that if either of us wanted his liberty the other should put no hindrance in the way.’

‘But that was done on your account. Because you were twenty–seven years younger that she was.’

‘Well, it’s come in very useful for her,’ he answered bitterly.

Mrs Tower expostulated, argued, and reasoned; but Gilbert insisted that no rules applied to Jane, and he must do exactly what she wanted. He left Mrs Tower prostrate. It relieved her a good deal to give me a full account of this interview. It pleased her to see that I was as surprised as herself and if I was not so indignant with Jane as she was she ascribed that to the criminal lack of morality incident to my sex. She was still in a state of extreme agitation when the door was opened and the butler showed in–Jane herself. She was dressed in black and white as no doubt befitted her slightly ambiguous position, but in a dress so original and fantastic, in a hat so striking, that I positively gasped at the sight of her. But she was as ever bland and collected. She came forward to kiss Mrs Tower, but Mrs Tower withdrew herself with icy dignity.

‘Gilbert has been here,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ smiled Jane. ‘I told him to come and see you. I’m going to Paris tonight and I want you to be very kind to him while I’m away. I’m afraid just at first he’ll be rather lonely and I shall feel more comfortable if I can count on your keeping an eye on him.’

Mrs Tower clasped her hands.

‘Gilbert has just told me something that I can hardly bring myself to believe. He tells me that you’re going to divorce him to marry Reginald Frobisher.’

‘Don’t you remember, before I married Gilbert you advised me to marry a man of my own age? The admiral is fifty–three.’

‘But, Jane, you owe everything to Gilbert,’ said Mrs Tower indignantly. ‘You wouldn’t exist without him. Without him to design your clothes, you’ll be nothing.’

‘Oh, he’s promised to go on designing my clothes,’ Jane answered blandly.

‘No woman could want a better husband. He’s always been kindness itself to you.’

‘Oh, I know he’s been sweet.’

‘How can you be so heartless?’

‘But I was never in love with Gilbert,’ said Jane. ‘I always told him that. I’m beginning to feel the need of the companionship of a man of my own age. I think I’ve probably been married to Gilbert long enough. The young have no conversation.’ She paused a little and gave us both a charming smile. ‘Of course I shan’t lose sight of Gilbert. I’ve arranged that with Reginald. The admiral has a niece that would just suit him. As soon as we’re married we’ll ask them to stay with us at Malta–you know that the admiral is to have the Mediterranean Command–and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they fell in love with one another.’

Mrs Tower gave a little sniff.

‘And have you arranged with the admiral that if you want your liberty neither should put any hindrance in the way of the other?’

‘I suggested it,’ Jane answered with composure. ‘But the admiral says he knows a good thing when he sees it and he won’t want to marry anyone else, and if anyone wants to marry me–he has eight twelve–inch guns on his flagship and he’ll discuss the matter at short range.’ She gave us a look through her eyeglass which even the fear of Mrs Tower’s wrath could not prevent me from laughing at. ‘I think the admiral’s a very passionate man.’

Mrs Tower gave me an angry frown.

‘I never thought you funny, Jane,’ she said. ‘I never understood why people laughed at the things you said.’

‘I never thought I was funny myself, Marion,’ smiled Jane, showing her bright, regular teeth. ‘I am glad to leave London before too many people come round to our opinion.’

‘I wish you’d tell me the secret of your astonishing success,’ I said.

She turned to me with that bland, homely look I knew so well.

‘You know, when I married Gilbert and settled in London and people began to laugh at what I said no one was more surprised than I was. I’d said the same things for thirty years and no one ever saw anything to laugh at. I thought it must be my clothes or my bobbed hair or my eyeglass. Then I discovered it was because I spoke the truth. It was so unusual that people thought it humorous. One of these days someone else will discover the secret and when people habitually tell the truth of course there’ll be nothing funny in it.’

‘And why am I the only person not to think it funny?’ asked Mrs Tower.

Jane hesitated a little as though she were honestly searching for a satisfactory explanation.

‘Perhaps you don’t know the truth when you see it, Marion dear,’ she answered in her mild good–natured way.

It certainly gave her the last word. I felt that Jane would always have the last word. She was priceless.

FOOTPRINTS IN THE JUNGLE

There is no place in Malaya that has more charm than Tanah Merah. It lies on the sea, and the sandy shore is fringed with casuarinas. The government offices are still in the old Raad Huis that the Dutch built when they owned the land, and on the hill stand the grey ruins of the fort by aid of which the Portuguese maintained their hold over the unruly natives. Tanah Merah has a history and in the vast labyrinthine houses of the Chinese merchants, backing on the sea so that in the cool of the evening they may sit in their loggias and enjoy the salt breeze, families dwell that have been settled in the country for three centuries. Many have forgotten their native language and hold intercourse with one another in Malay and pidgin English. The imagination lingers here gratefully, for in the Federated Malay States the only past is within the memory for the most part of the fathers of living men.

Tanah Merah was for long the busiest mart of the Middle East and its harbour was crowded with shipping when the clipper and the junk still sailed the China seas. But now it is dead. It has the sad and romantic air of all places that have once been of importance and live now on the recollection of a vanished grandeur. It is a sleepy little town and strangers that come to it, losing their native energy, insensibly drop into its easy and lethargic ways. Successive rubber booms bring it no prosperity and the ensuing slumps hasten its decay.

The European quarter is very silent. It is trim and neat and clean. The houses of the white men–government servants and agents of companies–stand round an immense padang, agreeable and roomy bungalows shaded by great cassias, and the padang is vast and green and well cared for, like the lawn of a cathedral close, and indeed there is in the aspect of this corner of Tanah Merah something quiet and delicately secluded that reminds you of the precincts of Canterbury.

The club faces the sea; it is a spacious but shabby building; it has an air of neglect and when you enter you feel that you intrude. It gives you the impression that it is closed really, for alterations and repairs, and that you have taken indiscreet advantage of an open door to go where you are not wanted. In the morning you may find there a couple of planters who have come in from their estates on business and are drinking a gin–sling before starting back again; and latish in the afternoon a lady or two may perhaps be seen looking with a furtive air through old numbers of the Illustrated London News. At nightfall a few men saunter in and sit about the billiard–room watching the play and drinking sukas. But on Wednesdays there is a little more animation. On that day the gramophone is set going in the large room upstairs and people come in from the surrounding country to dance. There are sometimes no less than a dozen couples and it is even possible to make up two tables of bridge.

It was on one of these occasions that I met the Cartwrights. I was staying with a man called Gaze who was head of the police and he came into the billiard–room, where I was sitting, and asked me if I would make up a four. The Cartwrights were planters and they came in to Tanah Merah on Wednesdays because it gave their girl a chance of a little fun. They were very nice people, said Gaze, quiet and unobtrusive, and played a very pleasant game of bridge. I followed Gaze into the card–room and was introduced to them. They were already seated at a table and Mrs Cartwright was shuffling the cards. It inspired me with confidence to see the competent way in which she did it. She took half the pack in each hand, and her hands were large and strong, deftly inserted the corners of one half under the corners of the other, and with a click and a neat bold gesture cascaded the cards together.

It had all the effect of a conjuring trick. The card–player knows that it can be done perfectly only after incessant practice. He can be fairly sure that anyone who can so shuffle a pack of cards loves cards for their own sake.

‘Do you mind if my husband and I play together?’ asked Mrs Cartwright. ‘It’s no fun for us to win one another’s money.’

‘Of course not.’

We cut for deal and Gaze and I sat down.

Mrs Cartwright drew an ace and while she dealt, quickly and neatly, chatted with Gaze of local affairs. But I was aware that she took stock of me. She looked shrewd, but good–natured.

She was a woman somewhere in the fifties (though in the East, where people age quickly, it is difficult to tell their ages), with white hair very untidily arranged, and a constant gesture with her was an impatient movement of the hand to push back a long wisp of hair that kept falling over her forehead. You wondered why she did not, by the use of a hairpin or two, save herself so much trouble. Her blue eyes were large, but pale and a little tired; her face was lined and sallow; I think it was her mouth that gave it the expression which I felt was characteristic of caustic but tolerant irony. You saw that here was a woman who knew her mind and was never afraid to speak it. She was a chatty player (which some people object to strongly, but which does not disconcert me, for I do not see why you should behave at the card–table as though you were at a memorial service) and it was soon apparent that she had an effective knack of badinage. It was pleasantly acid, but it was amusing enough to be offensive only to a fool. If now and then she uttered a remark so sarcastic that you wanted all your sense of humour to see the fun in it, you could not but quickly see that she was willing to take as much as she gave. Her large, thin mouth broke into a dry smile and her eyes shone brightly when by a lucky chance you brought off a repartee that turned the laugh against her.

I thought her a very agreeable person. I liked her frankness. I liked her quick wit. I liked her plain face. I never met a woman who obviously cared so little how she looked. It was not only her head that was untidy, everything about her was slovenly; she wore a high–necked silk blouse, but for coolness had unbuttoned the top buttons and showed a gaunt and withered neck; the blouse was crumpled and none too clean, for she smoked innumerable cigarettes and covered herself with ash. When she got up for a moment to speak to somebody I saw that her blue skirt was rather ragged at the hem and badly needed a brush, and she wore heavy, low–heeled boots. But none of this mattered. Everything she wore was perfectly in character.

And it was a pleasure to play bridge with her. She played very quickly, without hesitation, and she had not only knowledge but flair. Of course she knew Gaze’s game, but I was a stranger and she soon took my measure. The team–work between her husband and herself was admirable; he was sound and cautious, but knowing him, she was able to be bold with assurance and brilliant with safety. Gaze was a player who founded a foolish optimism on the hope that his opponents would not have the sense to take advantage of his errors, and the pair of us were no match for the Cartwrights. We lost one rubber after another, and there was nothing to do but smile and look as if we liked it.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the cards,’ said Gaze at last, plaintively. ‘Even when we have every card in the pack we go down.’

‘It can’t be anything to do with your play,’ answered Mrs Cartwright, looking him full in the face with those pale blue eyes of hers, ‘it must be bad luck pure and simple. Now if you hadn’t had your hearts mixed up with your diamonds in that last hand you’d have saved the game.’

Gaze began to explain at length how the misfortune, which had cost us dear, occurred, but Mrs Cartwright, with a deft flick of the hand, spread out the cards in a great circle so that we should cut for deal. Cartwright looked at the time.

‘This will have to be the last, my dear,’ he said.

‘Oh, will it?’ She glanced at her watch and then called to a young man who was passing through the room. ‘Oh, Mr Bullen, if you’re going upstairs tell Olive that we shall be going in a few minutes.’ She turned to me. ‘It takes us the best part of an hour to get back to the estate and poor Theo has to be up at the crack of dawn.’

‘Oh, well, we only come in once a week,’ said Cartwright, ‘and it’s the one chance Olive gets of being gay and abandoned.’

I thought Cartwright looked tired and old. He was a man of middle height, with a bald, shiny head, a stubbly grey moustache, and gold–rimmed spectacles. He wore white ducks and a black–and–white tie. He was rather neat and you could see he took much more pains with his clothes than his untidy wife. He talked little, but it was plain that he enjoyed his wife’s caustic humour and sometimes he made quite a neat retort. They were evidently very good friends. It was pleasing to see so solid and tolerant an affection between two people who were almost elderly and must have lived together for so many years.

It took but two hands to finish the rubber and we had just ordered a final gin and bitters when Olive came down.

‘Do you really want to go already, Mumsey?’ she asked.

Mrs Cartwright looked at her daughter with fond eyes.

‘Yes, darling. It’s nearly half past eight. It’ll be ten before we get our dinner.’

‘Damn our dinner,’ said Olive gaily.

‘Let her have one more dance before we go,’ suggested Cartwright. ‘Not one. You must have a good night’s rest.’

Cartwright looked at Olive with a smile.

‘If your mother has made up her mind, my dear, we may just as well give in without any fuss.’

‘She’s a determined woman,’ said Olive, lovingly stroking her mother’s wrinkled cheek.

Mrs Cartwright patted her daughter’s hand, and kissed it.

Olive was not very pretty, but she looked extremely nice. She was nineteen or twenty, I suppose, and she had still the plumpness of her age; she would be more attractive when she had fined down a little. She had none of the determination that gave her mother’s face so much character, but resembled her father; she had his dark eyes and slightly aquiline nose, and his look of rather weak good nature. It was plain that she was strong and healthy. Her cheeks were red and her eyes bright. She had a vitality that he had long since lost. She seemed to be the perfectly normal English girl, with high spirits, a great desire to enjoy herself, and an excellent temper.

When we separated. Gaze and I set out to walk to his house.

‘What did you think of the Cartwrights?’ he asked me.

‘I liked them. They must be a great asset in a place like this.’

‘I wish they came oftener. They live a very quiet life.’

‘It must be dull for the girl. The father and mother seem very well satisfied with one another’s company.’

‘Yes, it’s been a great success.’

‘Olive is the image of her father, isn’t she?’

Gaze gave me a sidelong glance.

‘Cartwright isn’t her father. Mrs Cartwright was a widow when he married her. Olive was born four months after her father’s death.’

‘Oh!’

I drew out the sound in order to put in it all I could of surprise, interest, and curiosity. But Gaze said nothing and we walked the rest of the way in silence. The boy was waiting at the door as we entered the house and after a last gin pahit we sat down to dinner.

At first Gaze was inclined to be talkative. Owing to the restriction of the output of rubber there had sprung up a considerable activity among the smugglers and it was part of his duty to circumvent their knavishness. Two junks had been captured that day and he was rubbing his hands over his success. The go–downs were full of confiscated rubber and in a little while it was going to be solemnly burnt. But presently he fell into silence and we finished without a word. The boys brought in coffee and brandy and we lit our cheroots. Gaze leaned back in his chair. He looked at me reflectively and then looked at his brandy. The boys had left the room and we were alone.

‘I’ve known Mrs Cartwright for over twenty years,’ he said slowly. ‘She wasn’t a bad–looking woman in those days. Always untidy, but when she was young it didn’t seem to matter so much. It was rather attractive. She was married to a man called Bronson. Reggie Bronson. He was a planter. He was manager of an estate up in Selantan and I was stationed at Alor Lipis. It was a much smaller place than it is now; I don’t suppose there were more than twenty people in the whole community, but they had a jolly little club, and we used to have a very good time. I remember the first time I met Mrs Bronson as though it was yesterday. There were no cars in those days and she and Bronson had ridden in on their bicycles. Of course then she didn’t look so determined as she looks now. She was much thinner, she had a nice colour, and her eyes were very pretty–blue, you know–and she had a lot of dark hair. If she’d only taken more trouble with herself she’d have been rather stunning. As it was she was the best–looking woman there.’

I tried to construct in my mind a picture of what Mrs Cartwright–Mrs Bronson as she was then–looked like from what she was now and from Gaze’s not very graphic description. In the solid woman, with her well–covered bones, who sat rather heavily at the bridge–table, I tried to see a slight young thing with buoyant movements and graceful, easy gestures. Her chin now was square and her nose decided, but the roundness of youth must have masked this: she must have been charming with a pink–and–white skin and her hair, carelessly dressed, brown and abundant. At that period she wore a long skirt, a tight waist, and a picture hat. Or did women in Malaya still wear the topees that you see in old numbers of the illustrated papers?

‘I hadn’t seen her for–oh, nearly twenty years,’ Gaze went on. ‘I knew she was living somewhere in the F.M.S., but it was a surprise when I took this job and came here to run across her in the club just as I had up in Selantan so many years before. Of course she’s an elderly woman now and she’s changed out of all recognition. It was rather a shock to see her with a grown–up daughter, it made me realize how the time had passed; I was a young fellow when I met her last and now, by Jingo, I’m due to retire on the age limit in two or three years. Bit thick, isn’t it?’

Gaze, a rueful grin on his ugly face, looked at me with faint indignation, as though I could help the hurrying march of the years as they trod upon one another’s heels.

‘I’m no chicken myself,’ I replied.

‘You haven’t lived out East all your life. It ages one before one’s time. One’s an elderly man at fifty and at fifty–five one’s good for nothing but the scrap–heap.’

But I did not want Gaze to wander off into a disquisition on old age.

‘Did you recognize Mrs Cartwright when you saw her again?’ I asked.

‘Well, I did and I didn’t. At the first glance I thought I knew her, but couldn’t quite place her. I thought perhaps she was someone I’d met on board ship when I was going on leave and had known only by sight. But the moment she spoke I remembered at once. I remembered the dry twinkle in her eyes and the crisp sound of her voice. There was something in her voice that seemed to mean: You’re a bit of a damned fool, my lad, but you’re not a bad sort and upon my soul I rather like you.’

‘That’s a good deal to read into the sound of a voice,’ I smiled.

‘She came up to me in the club and shook hands with me. “How do you do, Major Gaze? Do you remember me?” she said.

‘“Of course I do.”

‘“A lot of water has passed under the bridge since we met last. We’re none of us as young as we were. Have you seen Theo?”

‘For a moment I couldn’t think whom she meant. I suppose I looked rather stupid, because she gave a little smile, that chaffing smile that I knew so well, and explained.

‘“I married Theo, you know. It seemed the best thing to do. I was lonely and he wanted it.”

‘“I heard you married him,” I said. “I hope you’ve been very happy.”

‘“Oh, very. Theo’s a perfect duck. He’ll be here in a minute. He’ll be so glad to see you.”

‘I wondered. I should have thought I was the last man Theo would wish to see. I shouldn’t have thought she would wish it very much either. But women are funny.’

‘Why shouldn’t she wish to see you?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to that later,’ said Gaze. ‘Then Theo turned up. I don’t know why I call him Theo; I never called him anything but Cartwright, I never thought of him as anything but Cartwright. Theo was a shock. You know what he looks like now; I remembered him as a curly–headed youngster, very fresh and clean–looking. He was always neat and dapper, he had a good figure, and he held himself well, like a man who’s used to taking a lot of exercise. Now I come to think of it he wasn’t bad–looking, not in a big, massive way, but graceful, you know, and lithe. When I saw this bowed, cadaverous, bald–headed old buffer with spectacles I could hardly believe my eyes. I shouldn’t have known him from Adam. He seemed pleased to see me, at least, interested; he wasn’t effusive, but he’d always been on the quiet side and I didn’t expect him to be.

‘“Are you surprised to find us here?” he asked me.

‘“Well, I hadn’t the faintest notion where you were.”

‘“We’ve kept track of your movements more or less. We’ve seen your name in the paper every now and then. You must come out one day and have a look at our place. We’ve been settled there a good many years, and I suppose we shall stay there till we go home for good. Have you ever been back to Alor Lipis?”

‘“No, I haven’t,” I said.

‘“It was a nice little place. I’m told it’s grown. I’ve never been back.”

‘“It hasn’t got the pleasantest recollections for us,” said Mrs Cartwright.

‘I asked them if they’d have a drink and we called the boy. I dare say you noticed that Mrs Cartwright likes her liquor; I don’t mean that she gets tight or anything like that, but she drinks her stengah like a man. I couldn’t help looking at them with a certain amount of curiosity. They seemed perfectly happy; I gathered that they hadn’t done at all badly, and I found out later that they were quite well off. They had a very nice car, and when they went on leave they denied themselves nothing. They were on the best of terms with one another. You know how jolly it is to see two people who’ve been married a great many years obviously better pleased with their own company than anyone else’s. Their marriage had evidently been a great success. And they were both of them devoted to Olive and very proud of her. Theo especially.’

‘Although she was only his step–daughter?’ I said.

‘Although she was only his step–daughter,’ answered Gaze. ‘You’d think that she would have taken his name. But she hadn’t. She called him Daddy, of course, he was the only father she’d ever known, but she signed her letters, Olive Bronson.’

‘What was Bronson like, by the way?’

‘Bronson? He was a great big fellow, very hearty, with a loud voice and a bellowing laugh, beefy, you know, and a fine athlete. There was not very much to him, but he was as straight as a die. He had a red face and red hair. Now I come to think of it I remember that I never saw a man sweat as much as he did. Water just poured off him, and when he played tennis he always used to bring a towel on the court with him.’

‘It doesn’t sound very attractive.’

‘He was a handsome chap. He was always fit. He was keen on that. He hadn’t much to talk about but rubber and games, tennis, you know, and golf and shooting; and I don’t suppose he read a book from year’s end to year’s end. He was the typical public–school boy. He was about thirty–five when I first knew him, but he had the mind of a boy of eighteen. You know how many fellows when they come out East seem to stop growing.’

I did indeed. One of the most disconcerting things to the traveller is to see stout, middle–aged gentlemen, with bald heads, speaking and acting like schoolboys. You might almost think that no idea has entered their heads since they first passed through the Suez Canal. Though married and the fathers of children, and perhaps in control of a large business, they continue to look upon life from the standpoint of the sixth form.

‘But he was no fool,’ Gaze went on. ‘He knew his work from A to Z. His estate was one of the best managed in the country and he knew how to handle his labour. He was a damned good sort, and if he did get on your nerves a little you couldn’t help liking him. He was generous with his money, and always ready to do anybody a good turn. That’s how Cartwright happened to turn up in the first instance.’

‘Did the Bronsons get on well together?’

‘Oh, yes, I think so. I’m sure they did. He was good–natured and she was very jolly and gay. She was very outspoken, you know. She can be damned amusing when she likes even now, but there’s generally a sting lurking in the joke; when she was a young woman and married to Bronson it was just pure fun. She had high spirits and liked having a good time. She never cared a hang what she said, but it went with her type, if you understand what I mean; there was something so open and frank and careless about her that you didn’t care what she said to you. They seemed very happy.

‘Their estate was about five miles from Alor Lipis. They had a trap and they used to drive in most evenings about five. Of course it was a very small community and men were in the majority. There were only about six women. The Bronsons were a god–send. They bucked things up the moment they arrived. We used to have very jolly times in that little club. I’ve often thought of them since and I don’t know that on the whole I’ve ever enjoyed myself more than I did when I was stationed there. Between six and eight–thirty the club at Alor Lipis twenty years ago was about as lively a place as you could find between Aden and Yokohama.

‘One day Mrs Bronson told us that they were expecting a friend to stay with them and a few days later they brought Cartwright along. It appeared that he was an old friend of Bronson’s, they’d been at school together, Marlborough, or some place like that, and they’d first come out East on the same ship. Rubber had taken a toss and a lot of fellows had lost their jobs. Cartwright was one of them. He’d been out of work for the greater part of a year and he hadn’t anything to fall back on. In those days planters were even worse paid than they are now and a man had to be very lucky to put by something for a rainy day. Cartwright had gone to Singapore. They all go there when there’s a slump, you know. It’s awful then, I’ve seen it; I’ve known of planters sleeping in the street because they hadn’t the price of a night’s lodging. I’ve known them stop strangers outside the Europe and ask for a dollar to get a meal, and I think Cartwright had had a pretty rotten time.

‘At last he wrote to Bronson and asked him if he couldn’t do something for him. Bronson asked him to come and stay till things got better, at least it would be free board and lodging, and Cartwright jumped at the chance, but Bronson had to send him the money to pay his railway fare. When Cartwright arrived at Alor Lipis he hadn’t ten cents in his pocket. Bronson had a little money of his own, two or three hundred a year, I think, and though his salary had been cut, he’d kept his job, so that he was better off than most planters. When Cartwright came Mrs Bronson told him that he was to look upon the place as his home and stay as long as he liked.’

‘It was very nice of her, wasn’t it?’ I remarked.

‘Very.’

Gaze lit himself another cheroot and filled his glass. It was very still and but for the occasional croak of the chik–chak the silence was intense. We seemed to be alone in the tropical night and heaven only knows how far from the habitations of men. Gaze did not speak for so long that at last I was forced to say something.

‘What sort of a man was Cartwright at that time?’ I asked. ‘Younger, of course, and you told me rather nice–looking; but in himself?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I never paid much attention to him. He was pleasant and unassuming. He’s very quiet now, as I dare say you noticed; well, he wasn’t exactly lively then. But he was perfectly inoffensive. He was fond of reading and he played the piano rather nicely. You never minded having him about, he was never in the way, but you never bothered very much about him. He danced well and the women rather liked that, but he also played billiards quite decently and he wasn’t bad at tennis. He fell into our little groove very naturally. I wouldn’t say that he ever became wildly popular, but everyone liked him. Of course we were sorry for him, as one is for a man who’s down and out, but there was nothing we could do, and, well, we just accepted him and then forgot that he hadn’t always been there. He used to come in with the Bronsons every evening and pay for his drinks like everyone else, I suppose Bronson had lent him a bit of money for current expenses, and he was always very civil. I’m rather vague about him, because really he didn’t make any particular impression on me; in the East one meets such a lot of people, and he seemed very much like anybody else. He did everything he could to get something to do, but he had no luck; the fact is, there were no jobs going, and sometimes he seemed rather depressed about it. He was with the Bronsons for over a year. I remember his saying to me once:

‘“After all I can’t live with them for ever. They’ve been most awfully good to me, but there are limits.”

‘“I should think the Bronsons would be very glad to have you,” I said. “It’s not particularly gay on a rubber estate, and as far as your food and drink go, it must make precious little difference if you’re there or not.”’

Gaze stopped once more and looked at me with a sort of hesitation.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid I’m telling you this story very badly,’ he said. ‘I seem to be just rambling on. I’m not a damned novelist, I’m a policeman, and I’m just telling you the facts as I saw them at the time; and from my point of view all the circumstances are important; it’s important, I mean, to realize what sort of people they were.’

‘Of course. Fire away.’

‘I remember someone, a woman, I think it was, the doctor’s wife, asking Mrs Bronson if she didn’t get tired sometimes of having a stranger in the house. You know, in places like Alor Lipis there isn’t very much to talk about, and if you didn’t talk about your neighbours there’d be nothing to talk about at all.’

‘“Oh, no,” she said, “Theo’s no trouble.” She turned to her husband, who was sitting there mopping his face. “We like having him, don’t we?”

‘“He’s all right,” said Bronson.

‘“What does he do with himself all day long?”

‘“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs Bronson. “He walks round the estate with Reggie sometimes, and he shoots a bit. He talks to me.”

‘“He’s always glad to make himself useful,” said Bronson. “The other day when I had a go of fever, he took over my work and I just lay in bed and had a good time.”’

‘Hadn’t the Bronsons any children?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Gaze answered. ‘I don’t know why, they could well have afforded it.’

Gaze leant back in his chair. He took off his glasses and wiped them. They were very strong and hideously distorted his eyes. Without them he wasn’t so homely. The chik–chak on the ceiling gave its strangely human cry. It was like the cackle of an idiot child.

‘Bronson was killed,’ said Gaze suddenly.

‘Killed?’

‘Yes, murdered. I shall never forget that night. We’d been playing tennis, Mrs Bronson and the doctor’s wife, Theo Cartwright and I; and then we played bridge. Cartwright had been off his game and when we sat down at the bridge–table Mrs Bronson said to him: “Well, Theo, if you play bridge as rottenly as you played tennis we shall lose our shirts.”

‘We’d just had a drink, but she called the boy and ordered another round.

‘“Put that down your throat,” she said to him, “and don’t call without top honours and an outside trick.”

‘Bronson hadn’t turned up, he’d cycled in to Kabulong to get the money to pay his coolies their wages and was to come along to the club when he got back. The Bronsons’ estate was nearer Alor Lipis than it was to Kabulong, but Kabulong was a more important place commercially, and Bronson banked there.

‘“Reggie can cut in when he turns up,” said Mrs Bronson.

‘“He’s late, isn’t he?” said the doctor’s wife.

‘“Very. He said he wouldn’t get back in time for tennis, but would be here for a rubber. I have a suspicion that he went to the club at Kabulong instead of coming straight home and is having drinks, the ruffian.”

‘“Oh, well, he can put away a good many without their having much effect on him,” I laughed.

‘“He’s getting fat, you know. He’ll have to be careful.”

‘We sat by ourselves in the card–room and we could hear the crowd in the billiard–room talking and laughing. They were all on the merry side. It was getting on to Christmas Day and we were all letting ourselves go a little. There was going to be a dance on Christmas Eve.

‘I remembered afterwards that when we sat down the doctor’s wife asked Mrs Bronson if she wasn’t tired.

‘“Not a bit,” she said. “Why should I be?”.

‘I didn’t know why she flushed.

‘“I was afraid the tennis might have been too much for you,” said the doctor’s wife.

‘“Oh, no,” answered Mrs Bronson, a trifle abruptly, I thought, as though she didn’t want to discuss the matter.

‘I didn’t know what they meant, and indeed it wasn’t till later that I remembered the incident.

‘We played three or four rubbers and still Bronson didn’t turn up.

‘“I wonder what’s happened to him,” said his wife. “I can’t think why he should be so late.”

‘Cartwright was always silent, but this evening he had hardly opened his mouth. I thought he was tired and asked him what he’d been doing.

‘“Nothing very much,” he said. “I went out after tiffin to shoot pigeon.”

‘“Did you have any luck?” I asked.

‘“Oh, I got half a dozen. They were very shy.”

‘But now he said: “If Reggie got back late, I dare say he thought it wasn’t worth while to come here. I expect he’s had a bath and when we get in we shall find him asleep in his chair.”

‘“It’s a good long ride from Kabulong,” said the doctor’s wife.

‘“He doesn’t take the road, you know,” Mrs Bronson explained. “He takes the short cut through the jungle.”

‘“Can he get along on his bicycle?” I asked.

‘“Oh, yes, it’s a very good track. It saves about a couple of miles.”

‘We had just started another rubber when the bar–boy came in and said there was a police–sergeant outside who wanted to speak to me.

‘“What does he want?” I asked.

‘The boy said he didn’t know, but he had two coolies with him.

‘“Curse him,” I said.

‘“I’ll give him hell if I find he’s disturbed me for nothing.”

‘I told the boy I’d come and I finished playing the hand. Then I got up.

‘“I won’t be a minute,” I said. “Deal for me, will you?” I added to Cartwright.

‘I went out and found the sergeant with two Malays waiting for me on the steps. I asked him what the devil he wanted. You can imagine my consternation when he told me that the Malays had come to the police–station and said there was a white man lying dead on the path that led through the jungle to Kabulong. I immediately thought of Bronson.

‘“Dead?” I cried.

‘“Yes, shot. Shot through the head. A white man with red hair.”

‘Then I knew it was Reggie Bronson, and indeed, one of them naming his estate said he’d recognized him as the man. It was an awful shock. And there was Mrs Bronson in the card–room waiting impatiently for me to sort my cards and make a bid. For a moment I really didn’t know what to do. I was frightfully upset. It was dreadful to give her such a terrible and unexpected blow without a word of preparation, but I found myself quite unable to think of any way to soften it. I told the sergeant and the coolies to wait and went back into the club. I tried to pull myself together. As I entered the card–room Mrs Bronson said: “You’ve been an awful long time.” Then she caught sight of my face. “Is anything the matter?” I saw her clench her fists and go white. You’d have thought she had a presentiment of evil.

‘“Something dreadful has happened,” I said, and my throat was all closed up so that my voice sounded even to myself hoarse and uncanny. “There’s been an accident. Your husband’s been wounded.”

‘She gave a long gasp, it was not exactly a scream, it reminded me oddly of a piece of silk torn in two.

‘“Wounded?”

‘She leapt to her feet and with her eyes starting from her head stared at Cartwright. The effect on him was ghastly, he fell back in his chair and went as white as death.

‘“Very, very badly, I’m afraid,” I added.

‘I knew that I must tell her the truth, and tell it then, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell it all at once.

‘“Is he,” her lips trembled so that she could hardly form the words, “is he–conscious?”

‘I looked at her for a moment without answering. I’d have given a thousand pounds not to have to.

‘“No, I’m afraid he isn’t.”

‘Mrs Bronson stared at me as though she were trying to see right into my brain.

‘“Is he dead?”

‘I thought the only thing was to get it out and have done with it.

‘“Yes, he was dead when they found him.”

‘Mrs Bronson collapsed into her chair and burst into tears.

‘“Oh, my God,” she muttered. “Oh, my God.”

‘The doctor’s wife went to her and put her arms round her. Mrs Bronson with her face in her hands swayed to and fro weeping hysterically. Cartwright, with that livid face, sat quite still, his mouth open, and stared at her. You might have thought he was turned to stone.

‘“Oh, my dear, my dear,” said the doctor’s wife, “you must try and pull yourself together.” Then, turning to me, “Get her a glass of water and fetch Harry.”

‘Harry was her husband and he was playing billiards. I went in and told him what had happened.

‘“A glass of water be damned,” he said. “What she wants is a good long peg of brandy.”

‘We took it in to her and forced her to drink it and gradually the violence of her emotion exhausted itself. In a few minutes the doctor’s wife was able to take her into the ladies’ lavatory to wash her face. I’d made up my mind now what had better be done. I could see that Cartwright wasn’t good for much; he was all to pieces. I could understand that it was a fearful shock to him, for after all Bronson was his greatest friend and had done everything in the world for him.

‘“You look as though you’d be all the better for a drop of brandy yourself, old man,” I said to him.

‘He made an effort.

‘“It’s shaken me, you know,” he said. “I... I didn’t...” He stopped as though his mind was wandering; he was still fearfully pale; he took out a packet of cigarettes and struck a match, but his hand was shaking so that he could hardly manage it.

‘“Yes, I’ll have a brandy.”

‘“Boy,” I shouted, and then to Cartwright: “Now, are you fit to take Mrs Bronson home?”

‘“Oh, yes,” he answered.

‘“That’s good. The doctor and I will go along with the coolies and some police to where the body is.”

‘“Will you bring him back to the bungalow?” asked Cartwright.

‘“I think he’d better be taken straight to the mortuary,” said the doctor before I could answer. “I shall have to do a P.M.”

‘When Mrs Bronson, now so much calmer that I was amazed, came back, I told her what I suggested. The doctor’s wife, kind woman, offered to go with her and spend the night at the bungalow, but Mrs Bronson wouldn’t hear of it. She said she would be perfectly all right, and when the doctor’s wife insisted–you know how bent some people are on forcing their kindness on those in trouble–she turned on her almost fiercely.

‘“No, no, I must be alone,” she said. “I really must. And Theo will be there.”

‘They got into the trap. Theo took the reins and they drove off. We started after them, the doctor and I, while the sergeant and the coolies followed. I had sent my seis to the police–station with instructions to send two men to the place where the body was lying. We soon passed Mrs Bronson and Cartwright.

‘“All right?” I called.

‘“Yes,” he answered.

‘For some time the doctor and I drove without saying a word; we were both of us deeply shocked. I was worried as well. Somehow or other I’d got to find the murderers and I foresaw that it would be no easy matter.

‘“Do you suppose it was gang robbery?” said the doctor at last.

‘He might have been reading my thoughts.

‘“I don’t think there’s a doubt of it,” I answered. “They knew he’d gone into Kabulong to get the wages and lay in wait for him on the way back. Of course he should never have come alone through the jungle when everyone knew he had a packet of money with him.”

‘“He’d done it for years,” said the doctor. “And he’s not the only one.”

‘“I know. The question is, how we’re going to get hold of the fellows that did it.”

‘“You don’t think the two coolies who say they found him could have had anything to do with it?”

‘“No. They wouldn’t have the nerve. I think a pair of Chinks might think out a trick like that, but I don’t believe Malays would. They’d be much too frightened. Of course we’ll keep an eye on them. We shall soon see if they seem to have any money to fling about.”

‘“It’s awful for Mrs Bronson,” said the doctor. “It would have been bad enough at any time, but now she’s going to have a baby...”

‘“I didn’t know that,” I said, interrupting him.

‘“No, for some reason she wanted to keep it dark. She was rather funny about it, I thought.”

‘I recollected then that little passage between Mrs Bronson and the doctor’s wife. I understood why that good woman had been so anxious that Mrs Bronson should not overtire herself.

‘“It’s strange her having a baby after being married so many years.”

‘“It happens, you know. But it was a surprise to her. When first she came to see me and I told her what was the matter she fainted, and then she began to cry. I should have thought she’d be as pleased as Punch. She told me that Bronson didn’t like children and he’d be awfully bored at the idea, and she made me promise to say nothing about it till she had had a chance of breaking it to him gradually.”

‘I reflected for a moment.

‘“He was the kind of breezy, hearty cove whom you’d expect to be as keen as mustard on having kids.”

‘“You never can tell. Some people are very selfish and just don’t want the bother.”

‘“Well, how did he take it when she did tell him? Wasn’t he rather bucked?”

‘“I don’t know that she ever told him. Though she couldn’t have waited much longer; unless I’m very much mistaken she ought to be confined in about five months.”

‘“Poor devil,” I said. “You know, I’ve got a notion that he’d have been most awfully pleased to know.”

‘We drove in silence for the rest of the way and at last came to the point at which the short cut to Kabulong branched off from the road. Here we stopped and in a minute or two my trap, in which were the police–sergeant and the two Malays, came up. We took the head–lamps to light us on our way. I left the doctor’s seis to look after the ponies and told him that when the policemen came they were to follow the path till they found us. The two coolies, carrying the lamps, walked ahead, and we followed them. It was a fairly broad track, wide enough for a small cart to pass, and before the road was built it had been the highway between Kabulong and Alor Lipis. It was firm to the foot and good walking. The surface here and there was sandy and in places you could see quite plainly the mark of a bicycle wheel. It was the track Bronson had left on his way to Kabulong.

‘We walked twenty minutes, I should think, in single file, and on a sudden the coolies, with a cry, stopped sharply. The sight had come upon them so abruptly that notwithstanding they were expecting it they were startled. There, in the middle of the pathway lit dimly by the lamps the coolies carried, lay Bronson; he’d fallen over his bicycle and lay across it in an ungainly heap. I was too shocked to speak, and I think the doctor was, too. But in our silence the din of the jungle was deafening; those damned cicadas and the bull–frogs were making enough row to wake the dead. Even under ordinary circumstances the noise of the jungle at night is uncanny; because you feel that at that hour there should be utter silence it has an odd effect on you, that ceaseless and invisible uproar that beats upon your nerves. It surrounds you and hems you in. But just then, believe me, it was terrifying. That poor fellow lay dead and all round him the restless life of the jungle pursued its indifferent and ferocious course.

‘He was lying face downwards. The sergeant and the coolies looked at me as though awaiting an order. I was a young fellow then and I’m afraid I felt a little frightened. Though I couldn’t see the face I had no doubt that it was Bronson, but I felt that I ought to turn the body over to make sure. I suppose we all have our little squeamishnesses; you know, I’ve always had a horrible distaste for touching dead bodies. I’ve had to do it fairly often now, but it still makes me feel slightly sick.

‘“It’s Bronson, all right,” I said.

‘The doctor–by George, it was lucky for me he was there–the doctor bent down and turned the head. The sergeant directed the lamp on the dead face.

‘“My God, half his head’s been shot away,” I cried.

‘“Yes.”

‘The doctor stood up straight and wiped his hands on the leaves of a tree that grew beside the path.

‘“Is he quite dead?” I asked.

‘“Oh, yes. Death must have been instantaneous. Whoever shot him must have fired at pretty close range.”

‘“How long has he been dead, d’you think?”

‘“Oh, I don’t know, several hours.”

‘“He would have passed here about five o’clock, I suppose, if he was expecting to get to the club for a rubber at six.”

‘“There’s no sign of any struggle,” said the doctor.

‘“No, there wouldn’t be. He was shot as he was riding along.”

‘I looked at the body for a little while. I couldn’t help thinking how short a time ago it was since Bronson, noisy and loud–voiced, had been so full of hearty life.

‘“You haven’t forgotten that he had the coolies’ wages on him,” said the doctor.

‘“No, we’d better search him.”

‘“Shall we turn him over?”

‘“Wait a minute. Let us just have a look at the ground first.”

‘I took the lamp and as carefully as I could looked all about me. Just where he had fallen the sandy pathway was trodden and confused; there were our footprints and the footprints of the coolies who had found him. I walked two or three paces and then saw quite clearly the mark of his bicycle wheels; he had been riding straight and steadily. I followed it to the spot where he had fallen, to just before that, rather, and there saw very distinctly the prints on each side of the wheels of his heavy boots. He had evidently stopped there and put his feet to the ground, then he’d started off again, there was a great wobble of the wheel, and he’d crashed.

‘“Now let’s search him,” I said.

‘The doctor and the sergeant turned the body over and one of the coolies dragged the bicycle away. They laid Bronson on his back. I supposed he would have had the money partly in notes and partly in silver. The silver would have been in a bag attached to the bicycle and a glance told me that it was not there. The notes he would have put in a wallet. It would have been a good thick bundle. I felt him all over, but there was nothing; then I turned out the pockets, they were all empty except the right trouser pocket, in which there was a little small change.

‘“Didn’t he always wear a watch?” asked the doctor.

‘“Yes, of course he did.”

‘I remembered that he wore the chain through the buttonhole in the lapel of his coat and the watch and some seals and things in his handkerchief pocket. But watch and chain were gone.

‘“Well, there’s not much doubt now, is there?” I said.

‘It was clear that he had been attacked by gang robbers who knew he had money on him. After killing him they had stripped him of everything. I suddenly remembered the footprints that proved that for a moment he had stood still. I saw exactly how it had been done. One of them had stopped him on some pretext and then, just as he started off again, another, slipping out of the jungle behind him, had emptied the two barrels of a gun into his head.

‘“Well,” I said to the doctor, “it’s up to me to catch them, and I’ll tell you what, it’ll be a real pleasure to me to see them hanged.”

‘Of course there was an inquest. Mrs Bronson gave evidence, but she had nothing to say that we didn’t know already. Bronson had left the bungalow about eleven, he was to have tiffin at Kabulong and was to be back between five and six. He asked her not to wait for him, he said he would just put the money in the safe and come straight to the club. Cartwright confirmed this. He had lunched alone with Mrs Bronson and after a smoke had gone out with a gun to shoot pigeon. He had got in about five, a little before perhaps, had a bath and changed to play tennis. He was shooting not far from the place where Bronson was killed, but never heard a shot. That, of course, meant nothing; what with the cicadas and the frogs and the other sounds of the jungle, he would have had to be very near to hear anything; and besides, Cartwright was probably back in the bungalow before Bronson was killed. We traced Bronson’s movements. He had lunched at the club, he had got money at the bank just before it closed, had gone back to the club and had one more drink, and then started off on his bicycle. He had crossed the river by the ferry; the ferryman remembered distinctly seeing him, but was positive that no one else with a bicycle had crossed. That looked as though the murderers were not following, but lying in wait for him. He rode along the main road for a couple of miles and then took the path which was a short cut to his bungalow.

‘It looked as though he had been killed by men who knew his habits, and suspicion, of course, fell immediately on the coolies of his estate. We examined them all–pretty carefully–but there was not a scrap of evidence to connect any of them with the crime. In fact, most of them were able satisfactorily to account for their actions and those who couldn’t seemed to me for one reason and another out of the running. There were a few bad characters among the Chinese at Alor Lipis and I had them looked up. But somehow I didn’t think it was the work of the Chinese; I had a feeling that Chinese would have used revolvers and not a shotgun. Anyhow, I could find out nothing there. So then we offered a reward of a thousand dollars to anyone who could put us in the way of discovering the murderers. I thought there were a good many people to whom it would appeal to do a public service and at the same time earn a tidy sum. But I knew that an informer would take no risks, he wouldn’t want to tell what he knew till he knew he could tell it safely, and I armed myself with patience. The reward had brightened the interest of my police and I knew they would use every means they had to bring the criminals to trial. In a case like this they could do more than I.

‘But it was strange, nothing happened; the reward seemed to tempt no one. I cast my net a little wider. There were two or three kampongs along the road and I wondered if the murderers were there; I saw the headmen, but got no help from them. It was not that they would tell me nothing, I was sure they had nothing to tell. I talked to the bad hats, but there was absolutely nothing to connect them with the murder. There was not the shadow of a clue.

‘“Very well, my lads,” I said to myself, as I drove back to Alor Lipis, “there’s no hurry; the rope won’t spoil by keeping.”

‘The scoundrels had got away with a considerable sum, but money is no good unless you spend it. I felt I knew the native temperament enough to be sure that the possession of it was a constant temptation. The Malays are an extravagant race, and a race of gamblers, and the Chinese are gamblers, too; sooner or later someone would start flinging his money about, and then I should want to know where it came from. With a few well–directed questions I thought I could put the fear of God into the fellow and then, if I knew my business, it shouldn’t be hard to get a full confession.

‘The only thing now was to sit down and wait till the hue and cry had died down and the murderers thought the affair was forgotten. The itch to spend those ill–gotten dollars would grow more and more intolerable till at last it could be resisted no longer. I would go about my business, but I meant never to relax my watch, and one day, sooner or later, my time must come.

‘Cartwright took Mrs Bronson down to Singapore. The company Bronson had worked for asked him if he would care to take Bronson’s place, but he said, very naturally, that he didn’t like the idea of it; so they put another man in and told Cartwright that he could have the job that Bronson’s successor had vacated. It was the management of the estate that Cartwright lives on now. He moved in at once. Four months after this Olive was born at Singapore, and a few months later, when Bronson had been dead just over a year, Cartwright and Mrs Bronson were married. I was surprised; but on thinking it over I couldn’t help confessing that it was very natural. After the trouble Mrs Bronson had leant much on Cartwright and he had arranged everything for her; she must have been lonely, and rather lost, and I dare say she was grateful for his kindness, he did behave like a brick; and so far as he was concerned I imagined he was sorry for her, it was a dreadful position for a woman, she had nowhere to go, and all they’d gone through must have been a tie between them. There was every reason for them to marry and it was probably the best thing for them both.

‘It looked as though Bronson’s murderers would never be caught, for that plan of mine didn’t work; there was no one in the district who spent more money than he could account for, and if anyone had that hoard buried away under his floor he was showing a self–control that was superhuman. A year had passed and to all intents and purposes the thing was forgotten. Could anyone be so prudent as after so long not to let a Little money dribble out? It was incredible. I began to think that Bronson had been killed by a couple of wandering Chinese who had got away, to Singapore perhaps, where there would be small chance of catching them. At last I gave it up. If you come to think of it, as a rule, it’s just those crimes, crimes of robbery, in which there is least chance of getting the culprit; for there’s nothing to attach suspicion to him, and if he’s caught it can only be by his own carelessness. It’s different with crimes of passion or vengeance, then you can find out who had a motive to put the victim out of the way.

‘It’s no use grizzling over one’s failures, and bringing my common sense to bear I did my best to put the matter out of my mind. No one likes to be beaten, but beaten I was and I had to put as good a face on it as I could. And then a Chinaman was caught trying to pawn poor Bronson’s watch.

‘I told you that Bronson’s watch and chain had been taken, and of course Mrs Bronson was able to give us a fairly accurate description of it. It was a half–hunter, by Benson, there was a gold chain, three or four seals, and a sovereign purse. The pawnbroker was a smart fellow and when the Chinaman brought the watch he recognized it at once. On some pretext he kept the man waiting and sent for a policeman. The man was arrested and immediately brought to me. I greeted him like a long–lost brother. I was never so pleased to see anyone in my life. I have no feeling about criminals, you know; I’m rather sorry for them, because they’re playing a game in which their opponents hold all the aces and kings; but when I catch one it gives me a little thrill of satisfaction, like bringing off a neat finesse at bridge. At last the mystery was going to be cleared up, for if the Chinaman hadn’t done the thing himself we were pretty sure through him to trace the murderers. I beamed on him.

‘I asked him to account for his possession of the watch. He said he had bought it from a man he didn’t know. That was very thin. I explained the circumstances briefly and told him he would be charged with murder. I meant to frighten him and I did. He said then that he’d found the watch. ‘“Found it?” I said. “Fancy that. Where?”

‘His answer staggered me; he said he’d found it in the jungle. I laughed at him; I asked him if he thought watches were likely to be left lying about in the jungle; then he said he’d been coming along the pathway that led from Kabulong to Alor Lipis, and had gone into the jungle and caught sight of something gleaming and there was the watch. That was odd. Why should he have said he found the watch just there? It was either true or excessively astute. I asked him where the chain and the seals were, and he produced them immediately. I’d got him scared, and he was pale and shaking; he was a knock–kneed little fellow and I should have been a fool not to see that I hadn’t got hold of the murderer there. But his terror suggested that he knew something.

‘I asked him when he’d found the watch.

‘“Yesterday,” he said.

‘I asked him what he was doing on the short–cut from Kabulong to Alor Lipis. He said he’d been working in Singapore and had gone to Kabulong because his father was ill, and that he himself had come to Alor Lipis to work. A friend of his father, a carpenter by trade, had given him a job. He gave me the name of the man with whom he had worked in Singapore and the name of the man who had engaged him at Alor Lipis. All he said seemed plausible and could so easily be verified that it was hardly likely to be false. Of course it occurred to me that if he had found the watch as he said, it must have been lying in the jungle for more than a year. It could hardly be in very good condition; I tried to open it, but couldn’t. The pawnbroker had come to the police–station and was waiting in the next room. Luckily he was also something of a watchmaker. I sent for him and asked him to look at the watch; when he opened it he gave a little whistle, the works were thick with rust.

‘“This watch no good,” he said, shaking his head. “Him never go now.”

‘I asked him what had put it in such a state, and without a word from me he said that it had been long exposed to wet. For the moral effect I had the prisoner put in a cell and I sent for his employer. I sent a wire to Kabulong and another to Singapore. While I waited I did my best to put two and two together. I was inclined to believe the man’s story true; his fear might be ascribed to no more guilt than consisted in his having found something and tried to sell it. Even quite innocent persons are apt to be nervous when they’re in the hands of the police; I don’t know what there is about a policeman, people are never very much at their ease in his company. But if he really had found the watch where he said, someone had thrown it there. Now that was funny. Even if the murderers had thought the watch a dangerous thing to possess, one would have expected them to melt down the gold case; that would be a very simple thing for any native to do; and the chain was of so ordinary a pattern they could hardly have thought it possible to trace that. There were chains like it in every jeweller’s shop in the country. Of course there was the possibility that they had plunged into the jungle and having dropped the watch in their hurry had been afraid to go back and look for it. I didn’t think that very likely: the Malays are used to keeping things tucked away in their sarongs, and the Chinese have pockets in their coats. Besides, the moment they got into the jungle they knew there was no hurry; they probably waited and divided the swag then and there.

‘In a few minutes the man I had sent for came to the police–station and confirmed what the prisoner had said, and in an hour I got an answer from Kabulong. The police had seen his father, who told them that the boy had gone to Alor Lipis to get a job with a carpenter. So far everything he had said seemed true. I had him brought in again, and told him I was going to take him to the place where he said he had found the watch and he must show me the exact spot. I handcuffed him to a policeman, though it was hardly necessary, for the poor devil was shaking with fright, and took a couple of men besides. We drove out to where the track joined the road and walked along it; within five yards of the place where Bronson was killed the Chinaman stopped.

‘“Here,” he said.

‘He pointed to the jungle and we followed him in. We went in about ten yards and he pointed to a chink between two large boulders and said that he found the watch there. It could only have been by the merest chance that he noticed it, and if he really had found it there it looked very much as though someone had put it there to hide it.’

Gaze stopped and gave me a reflective look.

‘What would you have thought then?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought that if the watch was there the money might be there, too. It seemed worth while having a look. Of course, to look for something in the jungle makes looking for a needle in a bundle of hay a drawing–room pastime. I couldn’t help that. I released the Chinaman, I wanted all the help I could get, and set him to work. I set my three men to work, and I started in myself. We made a line–there were five of us–and we searched from the road; for fifty yards on each side of the place at which Bronson was murdered and for a hundred yards in we went over the ground foot by foot. We routed among dead leaves and peered in bushes, we looked under boulders and in the hollows of trees. I knew it was a foolish thing to do, for the chances against us were a thousand to one; my only hope was that anyone who had just committed a murder would be rattled and if he wanted to hide anything would hide it quickly; he would choose the first obvious hiding–place that offered itself. That is what he had done when he hid the watch. My only reason for looking in so circumscribed an area was that as the watch had been found so near the road, the person who wanted to get rid of the things must have wanted to get rid of them quickly.

‘We worked on. I began to grow tired and cross. We were sweating like pigs. I had a maddening thirst and nothing in the world to drink. At last I came to the conclusion that we must give it up as a bad job, for that day at least, when suddenly the Chinaman–he must have had sharp eyes, that young man–uttered a guttural cry. He stooped down and from under the winding root of a tree drew out a messy, mouldering, stinking thing. It was a pocket–book that had been out in the rain for a year, that had been eaten by ants and beetles and God knows what, that was sodden and foul, but it was a pocket–book all right, Bronson’s, and inside were the shapeless, mushed–up, fetid remains of the Singapore notes he had got from the bank at Kabulong. There was still the silver and I was convinced that it was hidden somewhere about, but I wasn’t going to bother about that. I had found out something very important; whoever had murdered Bronson had made no money out of it.

‘Do you remember my telling you that I’d noticed the print of Bronson’s feet on each side of the broad line of the pneumatic tyre, where he had stopped, and presumably spoken to someone? He was a heavy man and the prints were well marked. He hadn’t just put his feet on the soft sand and taken them off, but must have stopped at least for a minute or two. My explanation was that he had stopped to chat with a Malay or a Chinaman, but the more I thought of it the less I liked it. Why the devil should he? Bronson wanted to get home, and though a jovial chap, he certainly was not hail–fellow–well–met with the natives. His relations towards them were those of master and servants. Those footprints had always puzzled me. And now the truth flashed across me. Whoever had murdered Bronson hadn’t murdered him to rob and if he’d stopped to talk with someone it could only be with a friend. I knew at last who the murderer was.’

I have always thought the detective story a most diverting and ingenious variety of fiction, and have regretted that I never had the skill to write one, but I have read a good many, and I flatter myself it is rarely that I have not solved the mystery before it was disclosed to me; and now for some time I had foreseen what Gaze was going to say, but when at last he said it I confess that it gave me, notwithstanding, somewhat of a shock.

‘The man he met was Cartwright. Cartwright was pigeon–shooting. He stopped and asked him what sport he had had, and as he rode on Cartwright raised his gun and discharged both barrels into his head. Cartwright took the money and the watch in order to make it look like the work of gang robbers and hurriedly hid them in the jungle, then made his way along the edge till he got to the road, went back to the bungalow, changed into his tennis things, and drove with Mrs Bronson to the club.

‘I remembered how badly he’d played tennis, and how he’d collapsed when, in order to break the news more gently to Mrs Bronson, I said Bronson was wounded and not dead. If he was only wounded he might have been able to speak. By George, I bet that was a bad moment. The child was Cartwright’s. Look at Olive: why, you saw the likeness yourself. The doctor had said that Mrs Bronson was upset when he told her she was going to have a baby and made him promise not to tell Bronson. Why? Because Bronson knew that he couldn’t be the father of the child.’

‘Do you think that Mrs Bronson knew what Cartwright had done?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure of it. When I look back on her behaviour that evening at the club I am convinced of it. She was upset, but not because Bronson was killed; she was upset because I said he was wounded; on my telling her that he was dead when they found him she burst out crying, but from relief. I know that woman. Look at that square chin of hers and tell me that she hasn’t got the courage of the devil. She has a will of iron. She made Cartwright do it. She planned every detail and every move. He was completely under her influence; he is now.’

‘But do you mean to tell me that neither you nor anyone else ever suspected that there was anything between them?’

‘Never. Never.’

‘If they were in love with one another and knew that she was going to have a baby, why didn’t they just bolt?’

‘How could they? It was Bronson who had the money; she hadn’t a bean and neither had Cartwright. He was out of a job. Do you think he would have got another with that story round his neck? Bronson had taken him in when he was starving and he’d stolen his wife from him. They wouldn’t have had a dog’s chance. They couldn’t afford to let the truth come out, their only chance was to get Bronson out of the way, and they got him out of the way.’

‘They might have thrown themselves on his mercy.’

‘Yes, but I think they were ashamed. He’d been so good to them, he was such a decent chap, I don’t think they had the heart to tell him the truth. They preferred to kill him.’

There was a moment’s silence while I reflected over what Gaze said.

‘Well, what did you do about it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. What was there to do? What was the evidence? That the watch and notes had been found? They might easily have been hidden by someone who was afterwards afraid to come and get them. The murderer might have been quite content to get away with the silver. The footprints? Bronson might have stopped to light a cigarette or there might have been a tree–trunk across the path and he waited while the coolies he met there by chance moved it away. Who could prove that the child that a perfectly decent, respectable woman had had four months after her husband’s death was not his child? No jury would have convicted Cartwright. I held my tongue and the Bronson murder was forgotten.’

‘I don’t suppose the Cartwrights have forgotten,’ I suggested.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Human memory is astonishingly short and if you want my professional opinion I don’t mind telling you that I don’t believe remorse for a crime ever sits very heavily on a man when he’s absolutely sure he’ll never be found out.’

I thought once more of the pair I had met that afternoon, the thin, elderly, bald man with gold–rimmed spectacles, and that white–haired untidy woman with her frank speech and kindly, caustic smile. It was almost impossible to imagine that in the distant past they had been swayed by so turbulent a passion, for that alone made their behaviour explicable, that it had brought them in the end to such a pass that they could see no other issue than a cruel and coldblooded murder.

‘Doesn’t it make you feel a little uncomfortable to be with them?’ I asked Gaze. ‘For, without wishing to be censorious, I’m bound to say that I don’t think they can be very nice people.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. They are very nice people; they’re about the pleasantest people here. Mrs Cartwright is a thoroughly good sort and a very amusing woman. It’s my business to prevent crime and to catch the culprit when crime is committed, but I’ve known far too many criminals to think that on the whole they’re worse than anybody else. A perfectly decent fellow may be driven by circumstances to commit a crime and if he’s found out he’s punished; but he may very well remain a perfectly decent fellow. Of course society punishes him if he breaks its laws, and it’s quite right, but it’s not always his actions that indicate the essential man. If you’d been a policeman as long as I have, you’d know it’s not what people do that really matters, it’s what they are. Luckily a policeman has nothing to do with their thoughts, only with their deeds; if he had, it would be a very different, a much more difficult matter.’

Gaze flicked the ash from his cheroot and gave me his wry, sardonic, but agreeable smile.

‘I’ll tell you what, there’s one job I shouldn’t like,’ he said.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘God’s at the Judgement Day,’ said Gaze. ‘No, sir.’

THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY

They got a first–class carriage to themselves. It was lucky, because they were taking a good deal in with them, Alban’s suit–case and a hold–all, Anne’s dressing–case and her hat–box. They had two trunks in the van, containing what they wanted immediately, but all the rest of their luggage Alban had put in the care of an agent who was to take it up to London and store it till they had made up their minds what to do. They had a lot, pictures and books, curios that Alban had collected in the East, his guns and saddles. They had left Sondurah for ever. Alban, as was his way, tipped the porter generously and then went to the bookstall and bought papers. He bought the New Statesman and the Nation, and the Tatler and the Sketch, and the last number of the London Mercury. He came back to the carriage and threw them on the seat.

‘It’s only an hour’s journey,’ said Anne.

‘I know, but I wanted to buy them. I’ve been starved so long. Isn’t it grand to think that tomorrow morning we shall have tomorrow’s Times, and the Express and the Mail?’

She did not answer and he turned away, for he saw coming towards them two persons, a man and his wife, who had been fellow–passengers from Singapore.

‘Get through the Customs all right?’ he cried to them cheerily.

The man seemed not to hear, for he walked straight on, but the woman answered.

‘Yes, they never found the cigarettes.’

She saw Anne, gave her a friendly little smile, and passed on. Anne flushed. ‘I was afraid they’d want to come in here,’ said Alban. ‘Let’s have the carriage to ourselves if we can.’

She looked at him curiously.

‘I don’t think you need worry,’ she answered. ‘I don’t think anyone will come in.’

He lit a cigarette and lingered at the carriage door. On his face was a happy smile. When they had passed through the Red Sea and found a sharp wind in the Canal, Anne had been surprised to see how much the men who had looked presentable enough in the white ducks in which she had been accustomed to see them, were changed when they left them off for warmer clothes. They looked like nothing on earth then. Their ties were awful and their shirts all wrong. They wore grubby flannel trousers and shabby old golf–coats that had too obviously been bought off the nail, or blue serge suits that betrayed the provincial tailor. Most of the passengers had got off at Marseilles, but a dozen or so, either because after a long period in the East they thought the trip through the Bay would do them good, or, like themselves, for economy’s sake, had gone all the way to Tilbury, and now several of them walked along the platform. They wore solar topees or double–brimmed terais, and heavy greatcoats, or else shapeless soft hats or bowlers, not too well brushed, that looked too small for them. It was a shock to see them. They looked suburban and a trifle second–rate. But Alban had already a London look. There was not a speck of dust on his smart greatcoat, and his black Homburg hat looked brand–new. You would never have guessed that he had not been home for three years. His collar fitted closely round his neck and his foulard tie was neatly tied. As Anne looked at him she could not but think how good–looking he was. He was just under six feet tall, and slim, and he wore his clothes well, and his clothes were well cut. He had fair hair, still thick, and blue eyes and the faintly yellow skin common to men of that complexion after they have lost the pink–and–white freshness of early youth. There was no colour in his cheeks. It was a fine head, well–set on rather a long neck, with a somewhat prominent Adam’s apple; but you were more impressed with the distinction than with the beauty of his face. It was because his features were so regular, his nose so straight, his brow so broad that he photographed so well. Indeed, from his photographs you would have thought him extremely handsome. He was not that, perhaps because his eyebrows and his eyelashes were pale, and his lips thin, but he looked very intellectual. There was refinement in his face and a spirituality that was oddly moving. That was how you thought a poet should look; and when Anne became engaged to him she told her girl friends who asked her about him that he looked like Shelley. He turned to her now with a little smile in his blue eyes. His smile was very attractive.

‘What a perfect day to land in England!’

It was October. They had steamed up the Channel on a grey sea under a grey sky. There was not a breath of wind. The fishing boats seemed to rest on the placid water as though the elements had for ever forgotten their old hostility:

The coast was incredibly green, but with a bright cosy greenness quite unlike the luxuriant, vehement verdure of Eastern jungles. The red towns they passed here and there were comfortable and homelike. They seemed to welcome the exiles with a smiling friendliness. And when they drew into the estuary of the Thames they saw the rich levels of Essex and in a little while Chalk Church on the Kentish shore, lonely in the midst of weather–beaten trees, and beyond it the woods of Cobham. The sun, red in a faint mist, set on the marshes, and night fell. In the station the arc–lamps shed a light that spotted the darkness with cold hard patches. It was good to see the porters lumbering about in their grubby uniforms and the station–master fat and important in his bowler hat.

The station–master blew a whistle and waved his arm. Alban stepped into the carriage and seated himself in the corner opposite to Anne. The train started. ‘We’re due in London at six–ten,’ said Alban. ‘We ought to get to Jermyn Street by seven. That’ll give us an hour to bath and change and we can get to the Savoy for dinner by eight–thirty. A bottle of pop tonight, my pet, and a slap–up dinner.’ He gave a chuckle. ‘I heard the Strouds and the Maundrys arranging to meet at the Trocadero Grill–Room.’

He took up the papers and asked if she wanted any of them. Anne shook her head.

‘Tired?’ he smiled.

‘No.’

‘Excited?’

In order not to answer she gave a little laugh. He began to look at the papers, starting with the publishers’ advertisements, and she was conscious of the intense satisfaction it was to him to feel himself through them once more in the middle of things. They had taken in those same papers in Sondurah, but they arrived six weeks old, and though they kept them abreast of what was going on in the world that interested them both, they emphasized their exile.

But these were fresh from the press. They smelt different. They had a crispness that was almost voluptuous. He wanted to read them all at once. Anne looked out of the window. The country was dark, and she could see little but the lights of their carriage reflected on the glass, but very soon the town encroached upon it, and then she saw little sordid houses, mile upon mile of them, with a light in a window here and there, and the chimneys made a dreary pattern against the sky. They passed through Barking and East Ham and Bromley–it was silly that the name on the platform as they went through the station should give her such a tremor–and then Stepney. Alban put down his papers. ‘We shall be there in five minutes now.’

He put on his hat and took down from the racks the things the porter had put in them. He looked at her with shining eyes and his lips twitched. She saw that he was only just able to control his emotion. He looked out of the window, too, and they passed over brightly lighted thoroughfares, close packed with tram–cars, buses, and motor–vans, and they saw the streets thick with people.

What a mob! The shops were all lit up. They saw the hawkers with their barrows at the kerb.

‘London,’ he said.

He took her hand and gently pressed it. His smile was so sweet that she had to say something. She tried to be facetious.

‘Does it make you feel all funny inside?’

‘I don’t know if I want to cry or if I want to be sick.’

Fenchurch Street. He lowered the window and waved his arm for a porter.

With a grinding of brakes the train came to a standstill. A porter opened the door and Alban handed him out one package after another. Then in his polite way, having jumped out, he gave his hand to Anne to help her down to the platform. The porter went to fetch a barrow and they stood by the pile of their luggage. Alban waved to two passengers from the ship who passed them. The man nodded stiffly.

‘What a comfort it is that we shall never have to be civil to those awful people any more,’ said Alban lightly.

Anne gave him a quick glance. He was really incomprehensible. The porter came back with his barrow, the luggage was put on, and they followed him to collect their trunks. Alban took his wife’s arm and pressed it.

‘The smell of London. By God, it’s grand.’

He rejoiced in the noise and the bustle, and the crowd of people who jostled them; the radiance of the arc–lamps and the black shadows they cast, sharp but full–toned, gave him a sense of elation. They got out into the street and the porter went off to get them a taxi. Alban’s eyes glittered as he looked at the buses and the policemen trying to direct the confusion. His distinguished face bore a look of something like inspiration. The taxi came. Their luggage was stowed away and piled up beside the driver, Alban gave the porter half–a–crown, and they drove off. They turned down Gracechurch Street and in Cannon Street were held up by a block in the traffic. Alban laughed out loud. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Anne.

‘I’m so excited.’

They went along the Embankment. It was relatively quiet there. Taxis and cars passed them. The bells of the trams were music in his ears. At Westminster Bridge they cut across Parliament Square and drove through the green silence of St James’s Park. They had engaged a room at a hotel just off Jermyn Street. The reception clerk took them upstairs and a porter brought up their luggage. It was a room with twin beds and a bathroom.

‘This looks all right,’ said Alban. ‘It’ll do us till we can find a flat or something.’ He looked at his watch.

‘Look here, darling, we shall only fall over one another if we try to unpack together. We’ve got oodles of time and it’ll take you longer to get straight and dress than me. I’ll clear out. I want to go to the club and see if there’s any mail for me. I’ve got my dinner jacket in my suit–case and it’ll only take me twenty minutes to have a bath and dress. Does that suit you?’

‘Yes. That’s all right.’

‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

‘Very well.’

He took out of his pocket the little comb he always carried and passed it through his long fair hair. Then he put on his hat. He gave himself a glance in the mirror.

‘Shall I turn on the bath for you?’

‘No, don’t bother.’

‘All right. So long.’

He went out.

When he was gone Anne took her dressing–case and her hat–box and put them on the top of her trunk. Then she rang the bell. She did not take off her hat. She sat down and lit a cigarette. When a servant answered the bell she asked for the porter. He came. She pointed to the luggage.

‘Will you take those things and leave them in the hall for the present. I’ll tell you what to do with them presently.’

‘Very good, ma’am.’

She gave him a florin. He took the trunk out and the other packages and closed the door behind him. A few tears slid down Anne’s cheeks, but she shook herself; she dried her eyes and powdered her face. She needed all her calm. She was glad that Alban had conceived the idea of going to his club. It made things easier and gave her a little time to think them out.

Now that the moment had come to do what she had for weeks determined, now that she must say the terrible things she had to say, she quailed. Her heart sank. She knew exactly what she meant to say to Alban, she had made up her mind about that long ago, and had said the very words to herself a hundred times, three or four times a day every day of the long journey from Singapore, but she was afraid that she would grow confused. She dreaded an argument. The thought of a scene made her feel slightly sick. It was something at all events to have an hour in which to collect herself. He would say she was heartless and cruel and unreasonable. She could not help it.

‘No, no, no,’ she cried aloud.

She shuddered with horror. And all at once she saw herself again in the bungalow, sitting as she had been sitting when the whole thing started. It was getting on towards tiffin time and in a few minutes Alban would be back from the office. It gave her pleasure to reflect that it was an attractive room for him to come back to, the large veranda which was their parlour, and she knew that though they had been there eighteen months he was still alive to the success she had made of it. The jalousies were drawn now against the midday sun, and the mellowed light filtering through them gave an impression of cool silence.

Anne was house–proud, and though they were moved from district to district according to the exigencies of the Service and seldom stayed anywhere very long, at each new post she started with new enthusiasm to make their house cosy and charming. She was very modern. Visitors were surprised because there were no knick–knacks. They were taken aback by the bold colour of her curtains and could not at all make out the tinted reproductions of pictures by Marie Laurencin and Gauguin in silvered frames which were placed on the walls with such cunning skill. She was conscious that few of them quite approved, and the good ladies of Port Wallace and Pemberton thought such arrangements odd, affected, and out of place; but this left her calm. They would learn. It did them good to get a bit of a jolt. And now she looked round the long, spacious veranda with the complacent sigh of the artist satisfied with his work. It was gay. It was bare. It was restful. It refreshed the spirit and gently excited the fancy. Three immense bowls of yellow cannas completed the colour scheme. Her eyes lingered for a moment on the book–shelves filled with books; that was another thing that disconcerted the colony, all the books they had, and strange books too, heavy they thought them for the most part and she gave them a little affectionate look as though they were living things. Then she gave the piano a glance. A piece of music was still open on the rack, it was something of Debussy, and Alban had been playing it before he went to the office.

Her friends in the colony had condoled with her when Alban was appointed D.O. at Daktar, for it was the most isolated district in Sondurah. It was connected with the town which was the headquarters of the Government neither by telegraph nor telephone. But she liked it. They had been there for some time and she hoped they would remain till Alban went home on leave in another twelve months. It was as large as an English county, with a long coastline, and the sea was dotted with little islands. A broad, winding river ran through it, and on each side of this stretched hills densely covered with virgin forest. The station, a good way up the river, consisted of a row of Chinese shops and a native village nestling amid coconut trees, the District Office, the D.O.’s bungalow, the clerk’s quarters, and the barracks. Their only neighbours were the manager of a rubber estate a few miles up the river, and the manager and his assistant, Dutchmen both, of a timber camp on one of the river’s tributaries. The rubber estate’s launch went up and down twice a month and was their only means of regular communication with the outside world.

But though they were lonely they were not dull. Their days were full. Their ponies waited for them at dawn and they rose while the day was still fresh and in the bridle–paths through the jungle lingered the mystery of the tropical night. They came back, bathed, changed, and had breakfast, and Alban went to the office. Anne spent the morning writing letters and working. She had fallen in love with the country from the first day she arrived in it and had taken pains to master the common language spoken. Her imagination was inflamed by the stories she heard of love and jealousy and death. She was told romantic tales of a time that was only just past. She sought to steep herself in the lore of those strange people. Both she and Alban read a great deal. They had for the country a considerable library and new books came from London by nearly every mail. Little that was noteworthy escaped them. Alban was fond of playing the piano. For an amateur he played very well. He had studied rather seriously, and he had an agreeable touch and a good ear; he could read music with ease, and it was always a pleasure to Anne to sit by him and follow the score when he tried something new. But their great delight was to tour the district. Sometimes they would be away for a fortnight at a time. They would go down the river in a prahu and then sail from one little island to another, bathe in the sea, and fish, or else row upstream till it grew shallow and the trees on either bank were so close to one another that you only saw a slim strip of sky between. Here the boatmen had to pole and they would spend the night in a native house. They bathed in a river pool so clear that you could see the sand shining silver at the bottom; and the spot was so lovely, so peaceful and remote, that you felt you could stay there for ever. Sometimes, on the other hand, they would tramp for days along the jungle paths, sleeping under canvas, and notwithstanding the mosquitoes that tormented them and the leeches that sucked their blood, enjoy every moment. Whoever slept so well as on a camp bed? And then there was the gladness of getting back, the delight in the comfort of the well–ordered establishment, the mail that had arrived with letters from home and all the papers, and the piano.

Alban would sit down to it then, his fingers itching to feel the keys, and in what he played, Stravinsky, Ravel, Darius Milhaud, she seemed to feel that he put in something of his own, the sounds of the jungle at night, dawn over the estuary, the starry nights, and the crystal clearness of the forest pools. Sometimes the rain fell in sheets for days at a time. Then Alban worked at Chinese. He was learning it so that he could communicate with the Chinese of the country in their own language, and Anne did the thousand–and–one things for which she had not had time before. Those days brought them even more closely together; they always had plenty to talk about, and when they were occupied with their separate affairs they were pleased to feel in their bones that they were near to one another. They were wonderfully united. The rainy days that shut them up within the walls of the bungalow made them feel as if they were one body in face of the world.

On occasion they went to Port Wallace. It was a change, but Anne was always glad to get home. She was never quite at her ease there. She was conscious that none of the people they met liked Alban. They were very ordinary people, middle–class and suburban and dull, without any of the intellectual interests that made life so full and varied to Alban and her, and many of them were narrow–minded and ill–natured; but since they had to pass the better part of their lives in contact with them, it was tiresome that they should feel so unkindly towards Alban. They said he was conceited. He was always very pleasant with them, but she was aware that they resented his cordiality. When he tried to be jovial they said he was putting on airs, and when he chaffed them they thought he was being funny at their expense.

Once they stayed at Government House, and Mrs Hannay, the Governor’s wife, who liked her, talked to her about it. Perhaps the Governor had suggested that she should give Anne a hint.

‘You know, my dear, it’s a pity your husband doesn’t try to be more come–hither with people. He’s very intelligent; don’t you think it would be better if he didn’t let others see he knows it quite so clearly? My husband said to me only yesterday: Of course I know Alban Torel is the cleverest young man in the Service, but he does manage to put my back up more than anyone I know. I am the Governor, but when he talks to me he always gives me the impression that he looks upon me as a damned fool.’

The worst of it was that Anne knew how low an opinion Alban had of the Governor’s parts.

‘He doesn’t mean to be superior,’ Anne answered, smiling. ‘And he really isn’t in the least conceited. I think it’s only because he has a straight nose and high cheek–bones.’

‘You know, they don’t like him at the club. They call him Powder–Puff Percy.’ Anne flushed. She had heard that before and it made her very angry. Her eyes filled with tears.

‘I think it’s frightfully unfair.’

Mrs Hannay took her hand and gave it an affectionate little squeeze. ‘My dear, you know I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Your husband can’t help rising very high in the Service. He’d make things so much easier for himself if he were a little more human. Why doesn’t he play football?’ ‘It’s not his game. He’s always only too glad to play tennis.’

‘He doesn’t give that impression. He gives the impression that there’s no one here who’s worth his while to play with.’

‘Well, there isn’t,’ said Anne stung.

Alban happened to be an extremely good tennis–player. He had played a lot of tournaments in England and Anne knew that it gave him a grim satisfaction to knock those beefy, hearty men all over the court. He could make the best of them look foolish. He could be maddening on the tennis court and Anne was aware that sometimes he could not resist the temptation.

‘He does play to the gallery, doesn’t he?’ said Mrs Hannay.

‘I don’t think so. Believe me, Alban has no idea he isn’t popular. As far as I can see he’s always pleasant and friendly with everybody.’

‘It’s then he’s most offensive,’ said Mrs Hannay dryly.

‘I know people don’t like us very much,’ said Anne, smiling a little. ‘I’m very sorry, but really I don’t know what we can do about it.’

‘Not you, my dear,’ cried Mrs Hannay. ‘Everybody adores you. That’s why they put up with your husband. My dear, who could help liking you?’ ‘I don’t know why they should adore me,’ said Anne.

But she did not say it quite sincerely. She was deliberately playing the part of the dear little woman and within her she bubbled with amusement. They disliked Alban because he had such an air of distinction, and because he was interested in art and literature; they did not understand these things and so thought them unmanly; and they disliked him because his capacity was greater than theirs. They disliked him because he was better bred than they. They thought him superior; well, he was superior, but not in the sense they meant.

They forgave her because she was an ugly little thing. That was what she called herself, but she wasn’t that, or if she was it was with an ugliness that was most attractive. She was like a little monkey, but a very sweet little monkey and very human. She had a neat figure. That was her best point. That and her eyes. They were very large, of a deep brown, liquid and shining; they were full of fun, but they could be tender on occasion with a charming sympathy. She was dark, her frizzy hair was almost black, and her skin was swarthy; she had a small fleshy nose, with large nostrils, and much too big a mouth. But she was alert and vivacious. She could talk with a show of real interest to the ladies of the colony about their husbands and their servants and their children in England, and she could listen appreciatively to the men who told her stories that she had often heard before. They thought her a jolly good sort. They did not know what clever fun she made of them in private. It never occurred to them that she thought them narrow, gross, and pretentious. They found no glamour in the East because they looked at it vulgarly with material eyes. Romance lingered at their threshold and they drove it away like an importunate beggar. She was aloof. She repeated to herself Landor’s line:

‘Nature I loved, and next to nature, art.’

She reflected on her conversation with Mrs Hannay, but on the whole it left her unconcerned. She wondered whether she should say anything about it to Alban; it had always seemed a little odd to her that he should be so little aware of his unpopularity; but she was afraid that if she told him of it he would become self–conscious. He never noticed the coldness of the men at the club.

He made them feel shy and therefore uncomfortable. His appearance then caused a sort of awkwardness, but he, happily insensible, was breezily cordial to all and sundry. The fact was that he was strangely unconscious of other people. She was in a class by herself, she and a little group of friends they had in London, but he could never quite realize that the people of the colony, the government officials and the planters and their wives, were human beings.

They were to him like pawns in a game. He laughed with them, chaffed them, and was amiably tolerant of them; with a chuckle Anne told herself that he was rather like the master of a preparatory school taking little boys out on a picnic and anxious to give them a good time.

She was afraid it wasn’t much good telling Alban. He was incapable of the dissimulation which, she happily realized, came so easily to her. What was one to do with these people? The men had come out to the colony as lads from second–rate schools, and life had taught them nothing. At fifty they had the outlook of hobbledehoys. Most of them drank a great deal too much. They read nothing worth reading. Their ambition was to be like everybody else.

Their highest praise was to say that a man was a damned good sort. If you were interested in the things of the spirit you were a prig. They were eaten up with envy of one another and devoured by petty jealousies. And the women, poor things, were obsessed by petty rivalries. They made a circle that was more provincial than any in the smallest town in England. They were prudish and spiteful. What did it matter if they did not like Alban? They would have to put up with him because his ability was so great. He was clever and energetic. They could not say that he did not do his work well. He had been successful in every post he had occupied. With his sensitiveness and his imagination he understood the native mind and he was able to get the natives to do things that no one in his position could. He had a gift for languages, and he spoke all the local dialects. He not only knew the common tongue that most of the government officials spoke, but was acquainted with the niceties of the language and on occasion could make use of a ceremonial speech that flattered and impressed the chiefs. He had a gift for organization. He was not afraid of responsibility. In due course he was bound to be made a Resident. Alban had some interest in England; his father was a brigadier–general killed in the war, and though he had no private means he had influential friends. He spoke of them with pleasant irony.

‘The great advantage of democratic government,’ he said, ’is that merit, with influence to back it, can be pretty sure of receiving its due reward.’ Alban was so obviously the ablest man in the Service that there seemed no reason why he should not eventually be made Governor. Then, thought Anne, his air of superiority, of which they complained, would be in place. They would accept him as their master and he would know how to make himself respected and obeyed. The position she foresaw did not dazzle her. She accepted it as a right. It would be fun for Alban to be Governor and for her to be the Governor’s wife. And what an opportunity! They were sheep, the government servants and the planters; when Government House was the seat of culture they would soon fall into line. When the best way to the Governor’s favour was to be intelligent, intelligence would become the fashion. She and Alban would cherish the native arts and collect carefully the memorials of a vanished past.

The country would make an advance it had never dreamed of. They would develop it, but along lines of order and beauty. They would instil into their subordinates a passion for that beautiful land and a loving interest in these romantic races. They would make them realize what music meant. They would cultivate literature. They would create beauty. It would be the golden age. Suddenly she heard Alban’s footstep. Anne awoke from her day–dream. All that was far away in the future. Alban was only a District Officer yet and what was important was the life they were living now. She heard Alban go into the bath–house and splash water over himself. In a minute he came in. He had changed into a shirt and shorts. His fair hair was still wet.

‘Tiffin ready?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

He sat down at the piano and played the piece that he had played in the morning. The silvery notes cascaded coolly down the sultry air. You had an impression of a formal garden with great trees and elegant pieces of artificial water and of leisurely walks bordered with pseudo–classical statues. Alban played with a peculiar delicacy. Lunch was announced by the head boy. He rose from the piano. They walked into the dining–room hand in hand. A punkah lazily fanned the air. Anne gave the table a glance. With its bright–coloured tablecloth and the amusing plates it looked very gay.

‘Anything exciting at the office this morning?’ she asked.

‘No, nothing much. A buffalo case. Oh, and Prynne has sent along to ask me to go up to the estate. Some coolies have been damaging the trees and he wants me to come along and look into it.’

Prynne was manager of the rubber estate up the river and now and then they spent a night with him. Sometimes when he wanted a change he came down to dinner and slept at the D.O.’s bungalow. They both liked him. He was a man of five–and–thirty, with a red face, with deep furrows in it, and very black hair. He was quite uneducated, but cheerful and easy, and being the only Englishman within two days’ journey they could not but be friendly with him. He had been a little shy of them at first. News spreads quickly in the East and long before they arrived in the district he heard that they were highbrows. He did not know what he would make of them. He probably did not know that he had charm, which makes up for many more commendable qualities, and Alban with his almost feminine sensibilities was peculiarly susceptible to this. He found Alban much more human than he expected, and of course Anne was stunning. Alban played ragtime for him, which he would not have done for the Governor, and played dominoes with him. When Alban was making his first tour of the district with Anne, and suggested that they would like to spend a couple of nights on the estate, he had thought it as well to warn him that he lived with a native woman and had two children by her. He would do his best to keep them out of Anne’s sight, but he could not send them away, there was nowhere to send them. Alban laughed.

‘Anne isn’t that sort of woman at all. Don’t dream of hiding them. She loves children.’

Anne quickly made friends with the shy, pretty little native woman and soon was playing happily with the children. She and the girl had long confidential chats. The children took a fancy to her. She brought them lovely toys from Port Wallace. Prynne, comparing her smiling tolerance with the disapproving acidity of the other white women of the colony, described himself as knocked all of a heap. He could not do enough to show his delight and gratitude. ‘If all highbrows are like you,’ he said, ‘give me highbrows every time.’ He hated to think that in another year they would leave the district for good and the chances were that, if the next D.O. was married, his wife would think it dreadful that, rather than live alone, he had a native woman to live with him and, what was more, was much attached to her.

But there had been a good deal of discontent on the estate of late. The coolies were Chinese and infected with communist ideas. They were disorderly. Alban had been obliged to sentence several of them for various crimes to terms of imprisonment.

‘Prynne tells me that as soon as their term is up he’s going to send them all back to China and get Javanese instead,’ said Alban. ‘I’m sure he’s right. They’re much more amenable.’

‘You don’t think there’s going to be any serious trouble?’

‘Oh, no. Prynne knows his job and he’s a pretty determined fellow. He wouldn’t put up with any nonsense and with me and our policemen to back him up I don’t imagine they’ll try any monkey tricks.’ He smiled. ‘The iron hand in the velvet glove.’

The words were barely out of his mouth when a sudden shouting arose.

There was a commotion and the sound of steps. Loud voices and cries. ‘Tuan, Tuan.’

‘What the devil’s the matter?’

Alban sprang from his chair and went swiftly on to the veranda. Anne followed him. At the bottom of the steps was a group of natives. There was the sergeant, and three or four policemen, boatmen, and several men from the kampong.

‘What is it?’ called Alban.

Two or three shouted back in answer. The sergeant pushed others aside and Alban saw lying on the ground a man in a shirt and khaki shorts. He ran down the steps. He recognized the man as the assistant manager of Prynne’s estate.

He was a half–caste. His shorts were covered with blood and there was clotted blood all over one side of his face and head. He was unconscious. ‘Bring him up here,’ called Anne.

Alban gave an order. The man was lifted up and carried on to the veranda.

They laid him on the floor and Anne put a pillow under his head. She sent for water and for the medicine–chest in which they kept things for emergency. ’Is he dead?’ asked Alban.

‘No.’

‘Better try to give him some brandy.’

The boatmen brought ghastly news. The Chinese coolies had risen suddenly and attacked the manager’s office. Prynne was killed, and the assistant manager, Oakley by name, had escaped only by the skin of his teeth. He had come upon the rioters when they were looting the office, he had seen Prynne’s body thrown out of the window, and had taken to his heels. Some of the Chinese saw him and gave chase. He ran for the river and was wounded as he jumped into the launch. The launch managed to put off before the Chinese could get on board and they had come down–stream for help as fast as they could go. As they went they saw flames rising from the office buildings. There was no doubt that the coolies had burned down everything that would burn. Oakley gave a groan and opened his eyes. He was a little, dark–skinned man, with flattened features and thick coarse hair. His great native eyes were filled with terror.

‘You’re all right,’ said Anne. ‘You’re quite safe.’

He gave a sigh and smiled. Anne washed his face and swabbed it with antiseptics. The wound on his head was not serious.

‘Can you speak yet?’ said Alban.

‘Wait a bit,’ she said. ‘We must look at his leg.’

Alban ordered the sergeant to get the crowd out of the veranda. Anne ripped up one leg of the shorts. The material was clinging to the coagulated wound. ‘I’ve been bleeding like a pig,’ said Oakley.

It was only a flesh wound. Alban was clever with his fingers, and though the blood began to flow again they staunched it. Alban put on a dressing and a bandage. The sergeant and a policeman lifted Oakley on to a long chair. Alban gave him a brandy and soda, and soon he felt strong enough to speak. He knew no more than the boatmen had already told. Prynne was dead and the estate was in flames.

‘And the girl and the children?’ asked Anne.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, Alban.’

‘I must turn out the police. Are you sure Prynne is dead?’

‘Yes, sir. I saw him.’

‘Have the rioters got fire–arms?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘How d’you mean, you don’t know?’ Alban cried irritably. ‘Prynne had a gun, hadn’t he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There must have been more on the estate. You had one, didn’t you? The head overseer had one.’

The half–caste was silent. Alban looked at him sternly.

‘How many of those damned Chinese are there?’

‘A hundred and fifty.’

Anne wondered that he asked so many questions. It seemed waste of time.

The important thing was to collect coolies for the transport up–river, prepare the boats, and issue ammunition to the police.

‘How many policemen have you got, sir?’ asked Oakley.

‘Eight and the sergeant.’

‘Could I come too? That would make ten of us. I’m sure I shall be all right now I’m bandaged.’

‘I’m not going,’ said Alban.

‘Alban, you must,’ cried Anne. She could not believe her ears.

‘Nonsense. It would be madness. Oakley’s obviously useless. He’s sure to have a temperature in a few hours. He’d only be in the way. That leaves nine guns.

There are a hundred and fifty Chinese and they’ve got fire–arms and all the ammunition in the world.’

‘How do’you know?’

‘It stands to reason they wouldn’t have started a show like this unless they had. It would be idiotic to go.’

Anne stared at him with open mouth. Oakley’s eyes were puzzled. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Well, fortunately we’ve got the launch. I’ll send it to Port Wallace with a request for reinforcements.’

‘But they won’t be here for two days at least.’

‘Well, what of it? Prynne’s dead and the estate burned to the ground. We couldn’t do any good by going up now. I shall send a native to reconnoitre so that we can find out exactly what the rioters are doing.’ He gave Anne his charming smile. ‘Believe me, my pet, the rascals won’t lose anything by waiting a day or two for what’s coming to them.’

Oakley opened his mouth to speak, but perhaps he hadn’t the nerve. He was a half–caste assistant manager and Alban, the D.O., represented the power of the Government. But the man’s eyes sought Anne’s and she thought she read in them an earnest and personal appeal.

‘But in two days they’re capable of committing the most frightful atrocities,’ she cried. ‘It’s quite unspeakable what they may do.’

‘Whatever damage they do they’ll pay for. I promise you that.’

‘Oh, Alban, you can’t sit still and do nothing. I beseech you to go yourself at once.’

‘Don’t be so silly. I can’t quell a riot with eight policemen and a sergeant.

I haven’t got the right to take a risk of that sort. We’d have to go in boats. You don’t think we could get up unobserved. The lalang along the banks is perfect cover and they could just take pot shots at us as we came along. We shouldn’t have a chance.’

‘I’m afraid they’ll only think it weakness if nothing is done for two days, sir,’ said Oakley.

‘When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,’ said Alban acidly. ‘So far as I can see when there was danger the only thing you did was to cut and run. I can’t persuade myself that your assistance in a crisis would be very valuable.’ The half–caste reddened. He said nothing more. He looked straight in front of him with troubled eyes.

‘I’m going down to the office,’ said Alban. ‘I’ll just write a short report and send it down the river by launch at once.’

He gave an order to the sergeant, who had been standing all this time stiffly at the top of the steps. He saluted and ran off. Alban went into a little hall they had to get his topee. Anne swiftly followed him.

‘Alban, for God’s sake listen to me a minute,’ she whispered.

‘I don’t want to be rude to you, darling, but I am pressed for time. I think you’d much better mind your own business.’

‘You can’t do nothing, Alban. You must go. Whatever the risk.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool,’ he said angrily.

He had never been angry with her before. She seized his hand to hold him back.

‘I tell you I can do no good by going.’

‘You don’t know. There’s the woman and Prynne’s children. We must do something to save them. Let me come with you. They’ll kill them.’ ‘They’ve probably killed them already.’

‘Oh, how can you be so callous! If there’s a chance of saving them it’s your duty to try.’

‘It’s my duty to act like a reasonable human being. I’m not going to risk my life and my policemen’s for the sake of a native woman and her half–caste brats. What sort of a damned fool do you take me for?’

‘They’ll say you were afraid.’

‘Who?’

‘Everyone in the colony.’

He smiled disdainfully.

‘If you only knew what a complete contempt I have for the opinion of everyone in the colony.’

She gave him a long searching look. She had been married to him for eight years and she knew every expression of his face and every thought in his mind.

She stared into his blue eyes as if they were open windows. She suddenly went quite pale. She dropped his hand and turned away. Without another word she went back on to the veranda. Her ugly little monkey face was a mask of horror. Alban went to his office, wrote a brief account of the facts, and in a few minutes the motor launch was pounding down the river.

The next two days were endless. Escaped natives brought them news of happenings on the estate. But from their excited and terrified stories it was impossible to get an exact impression of the truth. There had been a good deal of bloodshed. The head overseer had been killed. They brought wild tales of cruelty and outrage. Anne could hear nothing of Prynne’s woman and the two children. She shuddered when she thought of what might have been their fate.

Alban collected as many natives as he could. They were armed with spears and swords. He commandeered boats. The situation was serious, but he kept his head. He felt that he had done all that was possible and nothing remained but for him to carry on normally. He did his official work. He played the piano a great deal. He rode with Anne in the early morning. He appeared to have forgotten that they had had the first serious difference of opinion in the whole of their married life. He took it that Anne had accepted the wisdom of his decision. He was as amusing, cordial, and gay with her as he had always been.

When he spoke of the rioters it was with grim irony: when the time came to settle matters a good many of them would wish they had never been born. ‘What’ll happen to them?’ asked Anne.

‘Oh, they’ll hang.’ He gave a shrug of distaste. ‘I hate having to be present at executions. It always makes me feel rather sick.’

He was very sympathetic to Oakley, whom they had put to bed and whom Anne was nursing. Perhaps he was sorry that in the exasperation of the moment he had spoken to him offensively, and he went out of his way to be nice to him.

Then on the afternoon of the third day, when they were drinking their coffee after luncheon, Alban’s quick ears caught the sound of a motor boat approaching. At the same moment a policeman ran up to say that the government launch was sighted.

‘At last,’ cried Alban.

He bolted out of the house. Anne raised one of the jalousies and looked out at the river. Now the sound was quite loud and in a moment she saw the boat come round the bend. She saw Alban on the landing–stage. He got into a prahu and as the launch dropped her anchor he went on board. She told Oakley that the reinforcements had come.

‘Will the D.O. go up with them when they attack?’ he asked her. ‘Naturally,’ said Anne coldly.

‘I wondered.’

Anne felt a strange feeling in her heart. For the last two days she had had to exercise all her self–control not to cry. She did not answer. She went out of the room.

A quarter of an hour later Alban returned to the bungalow with the captain of constabulary who had been sent with twenty Sikhs to deal with the rioters.

Captain Stratton was a little red–faced man with a red moustache and bow legs, very hearty and dashing, whom she had met often at Port Wallace. ‘Well, Mrs Torel, this is a pretty kettle of fish,’ he cried, as he shook hands with her, in a loud jolly voice. ‘Here I am, with my army all full of pep and ready for a scrap. Up, boys, and at ’em. Have you got anything to drink in this benighted place?’

‘Boy,’ she cried, smiling.

‘Something long and cool and faintly alcoholic, and then I’m ready to discuss the plan of campaign.’

His breeziness was very comforting. It blew away the sullen apprehension that had seemed ever since the disaster to brood over the lost peace of the bungalow. The boy came in with a tray and Stratton mixed himself a stengah.

Alban put him in possession of the facts. He told them clearly, briefly, and with precision.

‘I must say I admire you,’ said Stratton. ‘In your place I should never have been able to resist the temptation to take my eight cops and have a whack at the blighters myself.’

‘I thought it was a perfectly unjustifiable risk to take.’

‘Safety first, old boy, eh, what?’ said Stratton jovially. ‘I’m jolly glad you didn’t.

It’s not often we get the chance of a scrap. It would have been a dirty trick to keep the whole show to yourself.’

Captain Stratton was all for steaming straight up the river and attacking at once, but Alban pointed out to him the inadvisability of such a course. The sound of the approaching launch would warn the rioters. The long grass at the river’s edge offered them cover and they had enough guns to make a landing difficult. It seemed useless to expose the attacking force to their fire. It was silly to forget that they had to face a hundred and fifty desperate men and it would be easy to fall into an ambush. Alban expounded his own plan. Stratton listened to it. He nodded now and then. The plan was evidently a good one. It would enable them to take the rioters in the rear, surprise them, and in all probability finish the job without a single casualty. He would have been a fool not to accept it.

‘But why didn’t you do that yourself?’ asked Stratton.

‘With eight men and a sergeant?’

Stratton did not answer.

‘Anyhow, it’s not a bad idea and we’ll settle on it. It gives us plenty of time, so with your permission, Mrs Torel, I’ll have a bath.’

They set out at sunset, Captain Stratton and his twenty Sikhs, Alban with his policemen and the natives he had collected. The night was dark and moonless.

Trailing behind them were the dug–outs that Alban had gathered together and into which after a certain distance they proposed to transfer their force. It was important that no sound should give warning of their approach. After they had gone for about three hours by launch they took to the dug–outs and in them silently paddled up–stream. They reached the border of the vast estate and landed. Guides led them along a path so narrow that they had to march in single file. It had been long unused and the going was heavy. They had twice to ford a stream. The path led them circuitously to the rear of the coolie lines, but they did not wish to reach them till nearly dawn and presently Stratton gave the order to halt. It was a long cold wait. At last the night seemed to be less dark; you did not see the trunks of the trees, but were vaguely sensible of them against its darkness. Stratton had been sitting with his back to a tree. He gave a whispered order to a sergeant and in a few minutes the column was once more on the march. Suddenly they found themselves on a road. They formed fours.

The dawn broke and in the ghostly light the surrounding objects were wanly visible. The column stopped on a whispered order. They had come in sight of the coolie lines. Silence reigned in them. The column crept on again and again halted. Stratton, his eyes shining, gave Alban a smile.

‘We’ve caught the blighters asleep.’

He lined up his men. They inserted cartridges in their guns. He stepped forward and raised his hand. The carbines were pointed at the coolie lines. ‘Fire.’

There was a rattle as the volley of shots rang out. Then suddenly there was a tremendous din and the Chinese poured out, shouting and waving their arms, but in front of them, to Alban’s utter bewilderment, bellowing at the top of his voice and shaking his fists at them, was a white man.

‘Who the hell’s that?’ cried Stratton.

A very big, very fat man, in khaki trousers and a singlet, was running towards them as fast as his fat legs would carry him and as he ran shaking both fists at them and yelling:

‘Smerige flikkers! Vervloekte ploerten!’

‘My God, it’s Van Hasseldt,’ said Alban.

This was the Dutch manager of the timber camp which was situated on a considerable tributary of the river about twenty miles away.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he puffed as he came up to them. ‘How the hell did you get here?’ asked Stratton in turn.

He saw that the Chinese were scattering in all directions and gave his men instructions to round them up. Then he turned again to Van Hasseldt. ‘What’s it mean?’

‘Mean? Mean?’ shouted the Dutchman furiously. ‘That’s what I want to know.

You and your damned policemen. What do you mean by coming here at this hour in the morning and firing a damned volley. Target practice? You might have killed me. Idiots!’

‘Have a cigarette,’ said Stratton.

‘How did you get here, Van Hasseldt?’ asked Alban again, very much at sea.

‘This is the force they’ve sent from Port Wallace to quell the riot.’ ‘How did I get here? I walked. How did you think I got here? Riot be damned.

I quelled the riot. If that’s what you came for you can take your damned policemen home again. A bullet came within a foot of my head.’ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Alban.

‘There’s nothing to understand,’ spluttered Van Hasseldt, still fuming. ‘Some coolies came to my estate and said the Chinks had killed Prynne and burned the bally place down, so I took my assistant and my head overseer and a Dutch friend I had staying with me and came over to see what the trouble was.’ Captain Stratton opened his eyes wide.

‘Did you just stroll in as if it was a picnic?’ he asked.

‘Well, you don’t think after all the years I’ve been in this country I’m going to let a couple of hundred Chinks put the fear of God into me? I found them all scared out of their lives. One of them had the nerve to pull a gun on me and I blew his bloody brains out. And the rest surrendered. I’ve got the leaders tied up. I was going to send a boat down to you this morning to come up and get them.’

Stratton stared at him for a minute and then burst into a shout of laughter,

He laughed till the tears ran down his face. The Dutchman looked at him angrily, then began to laugh too; he laughed with the big belly laugh of a very fat man and his coils of fat heaved and shook. Alban watched them sullenly. He was very angry.

‘What about Prynne’s girl and the kids?’ he asked.

‘Oh, they got away all right.’

It just showed how wise he had been not to let himself be influenced by Anne’s hysteria. Of course the children had come to no harm. He never thought they would.

Van Hasseldt and his little party started back for the timber camp, and as soon after as possible Stratton embarked his twenty Sikhs and leaving Alban with his sergeant and his policemen to deal with the situation departed for Port Wallace. Alban gave him a brief report for the Governor. There was much for him to do. It looked as though he would have to stay for a considerable time; but since every house on the estate had been burned to the ground and he was obliged to install himself in the coolie lines he thought it better that Anne should not join him. He sent her a note to that effect. He was glad to be able to reassure her of the safety of poor Prynne’s girl. He set to work at once to make his preliminary inquiry. He examined a host of witnesses. But a week later he received an order to go to Port Wallace at once. The launch that brought it was to take him and he was able to see Anne on the way down for no more than an hour. Alban was a trifle vexed.

‘I don’t know why the Governor can’t leave me to get things straight without dragging me off like this. It’s extremely inconvenient.’

‘Oh, well, the Government never bothers very much about the convenience of its subordinates, does it?’ smiled Anne.

‘It’s just red–tape. I would offer to take you along, darling, only I shan’t stay a minute longer than I need. I want to get my evidence together for the Sessions Court as soon as possible. I think in a country like this it’s very important that justice should be prompt.’

When the launch came in to Port Wallace one of the harbour police told him that the harbour–master had a chit for him. It was from the Governor’s secretary and informed him that His Excellency desired to see him as soon as convenient after his arrival. It was ten in the morning. Alban went to the club, had a bath and shaved, and then in clean ducks, his hair neatly brushed, he called a rickshaw and told the boy to take him to the Governor’s office. He was at once shown in to the secretary’s room. The secretary shook hands with him. ‘I’ll tell H.E. you’re here,’ he said. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

The secretary left the room and in a little while came back.

‘H.E. will see you in a minute. Do you mind if I get on with my letters?’ Alban smiled. The secretary was not exactly come–hither. He waited, smoking a cigarette, and amused himself with his own thoughts. He was making a good job of the preliminary inquiry. It interested him. Then an orderly came in and told Alban that the Governor was ready for him. He rose from his seat and followed him into the Governor’s room.

‘Good morning, Torel.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

The Governor was sitting at a large desk. He nodded to Alban and motioned to him to take a seat. The Governor was all grey. His hair was grey, his face, his eyes; he looked as though the tropical suns had washed the colour out of him; he had been in the country for thirty years and had risen one by one through all the ranks of the Service; he looked tired and depressed. Even his voice was grey. Alban liked him because he was quiet; he did not think him clever, but he had an unrivalled knowledge of the country, and his great experience was a very good substitute for intelligence. He looked at Alban for a full moment without speaking and the odd idea came to Alban that he was embarrassed. He very nearly gave him a lead.

‘I saw Van Hasseldt yesterday,’ said the Governor suddenly.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Will you give me your account of the occurrences at the Alud Estate and of the steps you took to deal with them.’

Alban had an orderly mind. He was self–possessed. He marshalled his facts well and was able to state them with precision. He chose his words with care and spoke them fluently.

‘You had a sergeant and eight policemen. Why did you not immediately go to the scene of the disturbance?’

‘I thought the risk was unjustifiable.’

A thin smile was outlined on the Governor’s grey face.

‘If the officers of this Government had hesitated to take unjustifiable risks it would never have become a province of the British Empire.’

Alban was silent. It was difficult to talk to a man who spoke obvious nonsense.

‘I am anxious to hear your reasons for the decision you took.’

Alban gave them coolly. He was quite convinced of the Tightness of his action. He repeated, but more fully, what he had said in the first place to Anne.

The Governor listened attentively.

‘Van Hasseldt, with his manager, a Dutch friend of his, and a native overseer, seems to have coped with the situation very efficiently,’ said the Governor. ‘He had a lucky break. That doesn’t prevent him from being a damned fool. It was madness to do what he did.’

‘Do you realize that by leaving a Dutch planter to do what you should have done yourself, you have covered the Government with ridicule?’ ‘No, sir.’

‘You’ve made yourself a laughing–stock in the whole colony.’

Alban smiled.

‘My back is broad enough to bear the ridicule of persons to whose opinion I am entirely indifferent.’

‘The utility of a government official depends very largely on his prestige, and I’m afraid his prestige is likely to be inconsiderable when he lies under the stigma of cowardice.’

Alban flushed a little.

‘I don’t quite know what you mean by that, sir.’

‘I’ve gone into the matter very carefully. I’ve seen Captain Stratton, and Oakley, poor Prynne’s assistant, and I’ve seen Van Hasseldt. I’ve listened to your defence.’

‘I didn’t know that I was defending myself, sir.’

‘Be so good as not to interrupt me. I think you committed a grave error of judgement. As it turns out, the risk was very small, but whatever it was, I think you should have taken it. In such matters promptness and firmness are essential. It is not for me to conjecture what motive led you to send for a force of constabulary and do nothing till they came. I am afraid, however, that I consider that your usefulness in the Service is no longer very great.’ Alban looked at him with astonishment.

‘But would you have gone under the circumstances?’ he asked him. ‘I should.’

Alban shrugged his shoulders.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ rapped out the Governor.

‘Of course I believe you, sir. But perhaps you will allow me to say that if you had been killed the colony would have suffered an irreparable loss.’ The Governor drummed on the table with his fingers. He looked out of the window and then looked again at Alban. When he spoke it was not unkindly. ‘I think you are unfitted by temperament for this rather rough–and–tumble life, Torel. If you’ll take my advice you’ll go home. With your abilities I feel sure that you’ll soon find an occupation much better suited to you.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, sir.’

‘Oh, come, Torel, you’re not stupid. I’m trying to make things easy for you.

For your wife’s sake as well as for your own I do not wish you to leave the colony with the stigma of being dismissed from the Service for cowardice. I’m giving you the opportunity of resigning.’

‘Thank you very much, sir. I’m not prepared to avail myself of the opportunity. If I resign I admit that I committed an error and that the charge you make against me is justified. I don’t admit it.’

‘You can please yourself. I have considered the matter very carefully and I have no doubt about it in my mind. I am forced to discharge you from the Service. The necessary papers will reach you in due course. Meanwhile you will return to your post and hand over to the officer appointed to succeed you on his arrival.’

‘Very good, sir,’ replied Alban, a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. ‘When do you desire me to return to my post?’

‘At once.’

‘Have you any objection to my going to the club and having tiffin before I go?’ The Governor looked at him with surprise. His exasperation was mingled with an unwilling admiration.

‘Not at all. I’m sorry, Torel, that this unhappy incident should have deprived the Government of a servant whose zeal has always been so apparent and whose tact, intelligence, and industry seemed to point him out in the future for very high office.’

‘Your Excellency does not read Schiller, I suppose. You are probably not acquainted with his celebrated line: mit der Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Roughly: Against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain.’ ‘Good morning.’

With his head in the air, a smile on his lips, Alban left the Governor’s office.

The Governor was human, and he had the curiosity to ask his secretary later in the day if Alban Torel had really gone to the club.

‘Yes, sir. He had tiffin there.’

‘It must have wanted some nerve.’

Alban entered the club jauntily and joined the group of men standing at the bar. He talked to them in the breezy, cordial tone he always used with them. It was designed to put them at their ease. They had been discussing him ever since Stratton had come back to Port Wallace with his story, sneering at him and laughing at him, and all who had resented his superciliousness, and they were the majority, were triumphant because his pride had had a fall. But they were so taken aback at seeing him now, so confused to find him as confident as ever, that it was they who were embarrassed.

One man, though he knew perfectly, asked him what he was doing in Port Wallace.

‘Oh, I came about the riot on the Alud Estate. H.E. wanted to see me. He does not see eye to eye with me about it. The silly old ass has fired me. I’m going home as soon as he appoints a D.O. to take over.’

There was a moment of awkwardness. One, more kindly disposed than the others, said:

‘I’m awfully sorry.’

Alban shrugged his shoulders.

‘My dear fellow, what can you do with a perfect damned fool? The only thing is to let him stew in his own juice.’

When the Governor’s secretary had told his chief as much of this as he thought discreet, the Governor smiled.

‘Courage is a queer thing. I would rather have shot myself than go to the club just then and face all those fellows.’

A fortnight later, having sold to the incoming D.O. all the decorations that Anne had taken so much trouble about, with the rest of their things in packing–cases and trunks, they arrived at Port Wallace to await the local steamer that was to take them to Singapore. The padre’s wife invited them to stay with her, but Anne refused; she insisted that they should go to the hotel.

An hour after their arrival she received a very kind little letter from the Governor’s wife asking her to go and have tea with her. She went. She found Mrs Hannay alone, but in a minute the Governor joined them. He expressed his regret that she was leaving and told her how sorry he was for the cause. ‘It’s very kind of you to say that,’ said Anne, smiling gaily, ‘but you mustn’t think I take it to heart. I’m entirely on Alban’s side. I think what he did was absolutely right and if you don’t mind my saying so I think you’ve treated him most unjustly.’

‘Believe me, I hated having to take the step I took.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it,’ said Anne.

‘What are your plans when you get home? asked Mrs Hannay. Anne began to chat brightly. You would have thought she had not a care in the world. She seemed in great spirits at going home. She was jolly and amusing and made little jokes. When she took leave of the Governor and his wife she thanked them for all their kindness. The Governor escorted her to the door.

The next day but one, after dinner, they went on board the clean and comfortable little ship. The padre and his wife saw them off. When they went into their cabin they found a large parcel on Anne’s bunk. It was addressed to Alban. He opened it and saw that it was an immense powder–puff. ‘Hullo, I wonder who sent us this,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘It must be for you, darling.’

Anne gave him a quick look. She went pale. The brutes! How could they be so cruel? She forced herself to smile.

‘It’s enormous, isn’t it? I’ve never seen such a large powder–puff in my life.’ But when he had left the cabin and they were out at sea, she threw it passionately overboard.

And now, now that they were back in London and Sondurah was nine thousand miles away, she clenched her hands as she thought of it. Somehow, it seemed the worst thing of all. It was so wantonly unkind to send that absurd object to Alban, Powder–Puff Percy; it showed such a petty spite. Was that their idea of humour? Nothing had hurt her more and even now she felt that it was only by holding on to herself that she could prevent herself from crying.

Suddenly she started, for the door opened and Alban came in. She was still sitting in the chair in which he had left her.

‘Hullo, why haven’t you dressed?’ He looked about the room. ‘You haven’t unpacked.’

‘No.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I’m not going to unpack. I’m not going to stay here. I’m leaving you.’ ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve stuck it out till now. I made up my mind I would till we got home. I set my teeth, I’ve borne more than I thought it possible to bear, but now it’s finished. I’ve done all that could be expected of me. We’re back in London now and I can go.’

He looked at her in utter bewilderment.

‘Are you mad, Anne?’

‘Oh, my God, what I’ve endured! The journey to Singapore, with all the officers knowing, and even the Chinese stewards. And at Singapore, the way people looked at us at the hotel, and the sympathy I had to put up with, the bricks they dropped and their embarrassment when they realized what they’d done. My God, I could have killed them. That interminable journey home.

There wasn’t a single passenger on the ship who didn’t know. The contempt they had for you and the kindness they went out of their way to show me. And you so self–complacent and so pleased with yourself, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. You must have the hide of a rhinoceros. The misery of seeing you so chatty and agreeable. Pariahs, that’s what we were. You seemed to ask them to snub you. How can anyone be so shameless?’

She was flaming with passion. Now that at last she need not wear the mask of indifference and pride that she had forced herself to assume she cast aside all reserve and all self–control. The words poured from her trembling lips in a virulent stream.

‘My dear, how can you be so absurd?’ he said good–naturedly, smiling. ‘You must be very nervous and high–strung to have got such ideas in your head.

Why didn’t you tell me? You’re like a country bumpkin who comes to London and thinks everyone is staring at him. Nobody bothered about us, and if they did what on earth did it matter? You ought to have more sense than to bother about what a lot of fools say. And what do you imagine they were saying?’ ‘They were saying you’d been fired.’

‘Well, that was true,’ he laughed.

‘They said you were a coward.’

‘What of it?’

‘Well, you see, that was true too.’

He looked at her for a moment reflectively. His lips tightened a little. ‘And what makes you think so?’ he asked acidly.

‘I saw it in your eyes, that day the news came, when you refused to go to the estate and I followed you into the hall when you went to fetch your topee.

I begged you to go, I felt that whatever the danger you must take it, and suddenly I saw the fear in your eyes. I nearly fainted with the horror.’ ‘I should have been a fool to risk my life to no purpose. Why should I?

Nothing that concerned me was at stake. Courage is the obvious virtue of the stupid. I don’t attach any particular importance to it.’

‘How do you mean that nothing that concerned you was at stake? If that’s true then your whole life is a sham. You’ve given away everything you stood for, everything we both stand for. You’ve let all of us down. We did set ourselves up on a pinnacle, we did think ourselves better than the rest of them because we loved literature and art and music, we weren’t content to live a life of ignoble jealousies and vulgar tittle–tattle, we did cherish the things of the spirit, and we loved beauty. It was our food and drink. They laughed at us and sneered at us. That was inevitable. The ignorant and the common naturally hate and fear those who are interested in things they don’t understand. We didn’t care. We called them Philistines. We despised them and we had a right to despise them. Our justification was that we were better and nobler and wiser and braver than they were. And you weren’t better, you weren’t nobler, you weren’t braver. When the crisis came you slunk away like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs. You of all people hadn’t the right to be a coward. They despise us now and they have the right to despise us. Us and all we stood for.

Now they can say that art and beauty are all rot; when it comes to a pinch people like us always let you down. They never stopped looking for a chance to turn and rend us and you gave it to them. They can say that they always expected it. It’s a triumph for them. I used to be furious because they called you Powder–Puff Percy. Did you know they did?’

‘Of course. I thought it very vulgar, but it left me entirely indifferent.’ ‘It’s funny that their instinct should have been so right.’

‘Do you mean to say you’ve been harbouring this against me all these weeks?

I should never have thought you capable of it.’

‘I couldn’t let you down when everyone was against you. I was too proud for that. Whatever happened I swore to myself that I’d stick to you till we got home. It’s been torture.’

‘Don’t you love me any more?’

‘Love you? I loathe the very sight of you.’

‘Anne!’

‘God knows I loved you. For eight years I worshipped the ground you trod on. You were everything to me. I believed in you as some people believe in God.

When I saw the fear in your eyes that day, when you told me that you weren’t going to risk your life for a kept woman and her half–caste brats, I was shattered. It was as though someone had wrenched my heart out of my body and trampled on it. You killed my love there and then, Alban. You killed it stone–dead. Since then when you’ve kissed me I’ve had to clench my hands so as not to turn my face away. The mere thought of anything else makes me feel physically sick. I loathe your complacence and your frightful insensitiveness.

Perhaps I could have forgiven it if it had been just a moment’s weakness and if afterwards you’d been ashamed. I should have been miserable, but I think my love was so great that I should only have felt pity for you. But you’re incapable of shame. And now I believe in nothing. You’re only a silly, pretentious, vulgar poseur. I would rather be the wife of a second–rate planter so long as he had the common human virtues of a man than the wife of a fake like you.’ He did not answer. Gradually his face began to discompose. Those handsome, regular features of his horribly distorted and suddenly he broke out into loud sobs. She gave a little cry.

‘Don’t Alban, don’t.’

‘Oh, darling, how can you be so cruel to me? I adore you. I’d give my whole life to please you. I can’t live without you.’

She put out her arms as though to ward off a blow.

‘No, no, Alban, don’t try to move me. I can’t. I must go. I can’t live with you any more. It would be frightful. I can never forget. I must tell you the truth, I have only contempt for you and repulsion.’

He sank down at her feet and tried to cling to her knees. With a gasp she sprang up and he buried his head in the empty chair. He cried painfully with sobs that tore his chest. The sound was horrible. The tears streamed from Anne’s eyes and, putting her hands to her ears to shut out that dreadful, hysterical sobbing, blindly stumbling she rushed to the door and ran out.

THE BOOK-BAG

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium–smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw’s Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second–hand bookseller’s list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without–who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him?–and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint–pot.

And like the dope–fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow–travellers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable. I have learnt my lesson. Once, imprisoned by illness for three months in a hill–town in Java, I came to the end of all the books I had brought with me, and knowing no Dutch was obliged to buy the schoolbooks from which intelligent Javanese, I suppose, acquired knowledge of French and German. So I read again after five–and– twenty years the frigid plays of Goethe, the fables of La Fontaine, and the tragedies of the tender and exact Racine. I have the greatest admiration for Racine, but I admit that to read his plays one after the other requires a certain effort in a person who is suffering from colitis. Since then I have made a point of travelling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books to suit every possible occasion and every mood. It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight. Custom–house officials look at it askance, but recoil from it with consternation when I give them my word that it contains nothing but books. Its inconvenience is that the particular work I suddenly hanker to read is always at the bottom and it is impossible for me to get it without emptying the book–bag’s entire contents upon the floor. Except for this, however, I should perhaps never have heard the singular history of Olive Hardy.

I was wandering about Malaya, staying here and there, a week or two if there was a rest–house or a hotel, and a day or so if I was obliged to inflict myself on a planter or a District Officer whose hospitality I had no wish to abuse; and at the moment I happened to be at Penang. It is a pleasant little town, with a hotel that has always seemed to me very agreeable, but the stranger finds little to do there and time hung a trifle heavily on my hands. One morning I received a letter from a man I knew only by name. This was Mark Featherstone. He was Acting Resident, in the absence on leave of the Resident, at a place called Tenggarah. There was a sultan there and it appeared that a water festival of some sort was to take place which Featherstone thought would interest me. He said that he would be glad if I would come and stay with him for a few days. I wired to tell him that I should be delighted and next day took the train to Tenggarah. Featherstone met me at the station. He was a man of about thirty–five, I should think, tall and handsome, with fine eyes and a strong, stern face. He had a wiry black moustache and bushy eyebrows. He looked more like a soldier than a government official. He was very smart in white ducks, with a white topee, and he wore his clothes with elegance. He was a little shy, which seemed odd in a strapping fellow of resolute mien, but I surmised that this was only because he was unused to the society of that strange fish, a writer, and I hoped in a little to put him at his ease.

‘My boys’ll look after your barang,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down to the club. Give them your keys and they’ll unpack before we get back.’

I told him that I had a good deal of luggage and thought it better to leave everything at the station but what I particularly wanted. He would not hear of it.

‘It doesn’t matter a bit. It’ll be safer at my house. It’s always better to have one’s barang with one.’

‘All right.’

I gave my keys and the ticket for my trunk and my book–bag to a Chinese boy who stood at my host’s elbow. Outside the station a car was waiting for us and we stepped in.

‘Do you play bridge?’ asked Featherstone.

‘I do.’

‘I thought most writers didn’t.’

‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s generally considered among authors a sign of deficient intelligence to play cards.’

The club was a bungalow, pleasing but unpretentious; it had a large reading–room, a billiard–room with one table, and a small card–room. When we arrived it was empty but for one or two persons reading the English weeklies, and we walked through to the tennis courts, where a couple of sets were being played. A number of people were sitting on the veranda, looking on, smoking, and sipping long drinks. I was introduced to one or two of them. But the light was failing and soon the players could hardly see the ball. Featherstone asked one of the men I had been introduced to if he would like a rubber. He said he would. Featherstone looked about for a fourth. He caught sight of a man sitting a little by himself, paused for a second, and went up to him. The two exchanged a few words and then came towards us. We strolled in to the card–room. We had a very nice game. I did not pay much attention to the two men who made up the four. They stood me drinks and I, a temporary member of the club, returned the compliment. The drinks were very small, quarter whiskies, and in the two hours we played each of us was able to show his open–handedness without an excessive consumption of alcohol. When the advancing hour suggested that the next rubber must be the last we changed from whisky to gin pahits. The rubber came to an end. Featherstone called for the book and the winnings and losings of each one of us were set down. One of the men got up.

‘Well, I must be going,’ he said.

‘Going back to the estate?’ asked Featherstone.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. He turned to me. ‘Shall you be here tomorrow?’

‘I hope so.’

He went out of the room.

‘I’ll collect my mem and get along home to dinner,’ said the other.

‘We might be going too,’ said Featherstone.

‘I’m ready whenever you are,’ I replied.

We got into the car and drove to his house. It was a longish drive. In the darkness I could see nothing much, but presently I realized that we were going up a rather steep hill. We reached the Residency.

It had been an evening like any other, pleasant, but not at all exciting, and I had spent I don’t know how many just like it. I did not expect it to leave any sort of impression on me.

Featherstone led me into his sitting–room. It looked comfortable, but it was a trifle ordinary. It had large basket arm–chairs covered with cretonne and on the walls were a great many framed photographs; the tables were littered with papers, magazines, and official reports, with pipes, yellow tins of straight–cut cigarettes, and pink tins of tobacco. In a row of shelves were untidily stacked a good many books, their bindings stained with damp and the ravages of white ants. Featherstone showed me my room and left me with the words:

‘Shall you be ready for a gin pahit in ten minutes?’

‘Easily,’ I said.

I had a bath and changed and went downstairs. Featherstone, ready before me, mixed our drinks as he heard me clatter down the wooden staircase. We dined. We talked. The festival which I had been invited to see was the next day but one, but Featherstone told me he had arranged for me before that to be received by the Sultan.

‘He’s a jolly old boy,’ he said. ‘And the palace is a sight for sore eyes.’

After dinner we talked a little more, Featherstone put on the gramophone, and we looked at the latest illustrated papers that had arrived from England. Then we went to bed. Featherstone came to my room to see that I had everything I wanted.

‘I suppose you haven’t any books with you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a thing to read.’

‘Books?’ I cried.

I pointed to my book–bag. It stood upright, bulging oddly, so that it looked like a humpbacked gnome somewhat the worse for liquor.

‘Have you got books in there? I thought that was your dirty linen or a camp–bed or something. Is there anything you can lend me?’

‘Look for yourself.’

Featherstone’s boys had unlocked the bag, but quailing before the sight that then discovered itself had done no more. I knew from long experience how to unpack it. I threw it over on its side, seized its leather bottom and, walking backwards, dragged the sack away from its contents. A river of books poured on to the floor. A look of stupefaction came upon Featherstone’s face.

‘You don’t mean to say you travel with as many books as that? By George, what a snip!’

He bent down and turning over rapidly looked at the titles. There were books of all kinds. Volumes of verse, novels, philosophical works, critical studies (they say books about books are profitless, but they certainly make very pleasant reading), biographies, history; there were books to read when you were ill and books to read when your brain, all alert, craved for something to grapple with; there were books that you had always wanted to read, but in the hurry of life at home had never found time to; there were books to read at sea when you were meandering through narrow waters on a tramp steamer, and there were books for bad weather when your whole cabin creaked and you had to wedge yourself in your bunk in order not to fall out; there were books chosen solely for their length, which you took with you when on some expedition you had to travel light, and there were the books you could read when you could read nothing else. Finally Featherstone picked out a life of Byron that had recently appeared.

‘Hullo, what’s this?’ he said. ‘I read a review of it some time ago.’

‘I believe it’s very good,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t read it yet.’

‘May I take it? It’ll do me for tonight at all events.’

‘Of course. Take anything you like.’

‘No, that’s enough. Well, good night. Breakfast at eight–thirty.’

When I came down next morning the head boy told me that Featherstone, who had been at work since six, would be in shortly. While I waited for him I glanced at his shelves.

‘I see you’ve got a grand library of books on bridge,’ I remarked as we sat down to breakfast.

‘Yes, I get every one that comes out. I’m very keen on it.’

‘That fellow we were playing with yesterday plays a good game.’

‘Which? Hardy?’

‘I don’t know. Not the one who said he was going to collect his wife. The other.’

‘Yes, that was Hardy. That was why I asked him to play. He doesn’t come to the club very often.’

‘I hope he will tonight.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on it. He has an estate about thirty miles away. It’s a longish ride to come just for a rubber of bridge.’

’Is he married?’

‘No. Well, yes. But his wife is in England.’

‘It must be awfully lonely for those men who live by themselves on those estates,’ I said.

‘Oh, he’s not so badly off as some. I don’t think he much cares about seeing people. I think he’d be just as lonely in London.’

There was something in the way Featherstone spoke that struck me as a little strange. His voice had what I can only describe as a shuttered tone. He seemed suddenly to have moved away from me. It was as though one were passing along a street at night and paused for a second to look in at a lighted window that showed a comfortable room and suddenly an invisible hand pulled down a blind. His eyes, which habitually met those of the person he was talking to with frankness, now avoided mine, and I had a notion that it was not only my fancy that read in his face an expression of pain. It was drawn for a moment as it might be by a twinge of neuralgia. I could not think of anything to say and Featherstone did not speak. I was conscious that his thoughts, withdrawn from me and what we were about, were turned upon a subject unknown to me. Presently he gave a little sigh, very slight, but unmistakable, and seemed with a deliberate effort to pull himself together.

‘I’m going down to the office immediately after breakfast,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do with yourself?’

‘Oh, don’t bother about me. I shall slack around. I’ll stroll down and look at the town.’

‘There’s not much to see.’

‘All the better. I’m fed up with sights.’

I found that Featherstone’s veranda gave me sufficient entertainment for the morning. It had one of the most enchanting views I had seen in the F.M.S. The Residency was built on the top of a hill and the garden was large and well cared for. Great trees gave it almost the look of an English park. It had vast lawns and there Tamils, black and emaciated, were scything with deliberate and beautiful gestures. Beyond and below, the jungle grew thickly to the bank of a broad, winding, and swiftly flowing river, and on the other side of this, as far as the eye could reach, stretched the wooded hills of Tenggarah. The contrast between the trim lawns, so strangely English, and the savage growth of the jungle beyond pleasantly titillated the fancy. I sat and read and smoked. It is my business to be curious about people and I asked myself how the peace of this scene, charged nevertheless with a tremulous and dark significance, affected Featherstone who lived with it. He knew it under every aspect: at dawn when the mist rising from the river shrouded it with a ghostly pall; in the splendour of noon; and at last when the shadowy gloaming crept softly out of the jungle, like an army making its way with caution in unknown country, and presently enveloped the green lawns and the great flowering trees and the flaunting cassias in the silent night. I wondered whether, unbeknownst to him, the tender and yet strangely sinister aspect of the scene, acting on his nerves and his loneliness, imbued him with some mystical quality so that the life he led, the life of the capable administrator, the sportsman, and the good fellow, on occasion seemed to him not quite real. I smiled at my own fancies, for certainly the conversation we had had the night before had not indicated in him any stirrings of the soul. I had thought him quite nice. He had been at Oxford and was a member of a good London club. He seemed to attach a good deal of importance to social things. He was a gentleman and slightly conscious of the fact that he belonged to a better class than most of the Englishmen his life had brought him in contact with. I gathered from the various silver pots that adorned his dining–room that he excelled in games. He played tennis and billiards. When he went on leave he hunted and, anxious to keep his weight down, he dieted carefully. He talked a good deal of what he would do when he retired. He hankered after the life of a country gentleman. A little house in Leicestershire, a couple of hunters, and neighbours to play bridge with. He would have his pension and he had a little money of his own. But meanwhile he worked hard and did his work, if not brilliantly, certainly with competence. I have no doubt that he was looked upon by his superiors as a reliable officer. He was cut upon a pattern that I knew too well to find very interesting. He was like a novel that is careful, honest, and efficient, yet a little ordinary, so that you seem to have read it all before, and you turn the pages listlessly, knowing that it will never afford you a surprise or move you to excitement.

But human beings are incalculable and he is a fool who tells himself that he knows what a man is capable of.

In the afternoon Featherstone took me to see the Sultan. We were received by one of his sons, a shy, smiling youth who acted as his A.D.C. He was dressed in a neat blue suit, but round his waist he wore a sarong, white flowers on a yellow ground, on his head a red fez, and on his feet knobby American shoes. The palace, built in the Moorish style, was like a very big doll’s house and it was painted bright yellow, which is the royal colour. We were led into a spacious room, furnished with the sort of furniture you would find in an English lodging–house at the seaside, but the chairs were covered with yellow silk. On the floor was a Brussels carpet and on the walls photographs in very grand gilt frames of the Sultan at various state functions. In a cabinet was a large collection of all kinds of fruit done entirely in crochet work. The Sultan came in with several attendants. He was a man of fifty, perhaps, short and stout, dressed in trousers and tunic of a large white–and–yellow check; round his middle he wore a very beautiful yellow sarong and on his head a white fez. He had large handsome friendly eyes. He gave us coffee to drink, sweet cakes to eat, and cheroots to smoke. Conversation was not difficult, for he was affable, and he told me that he had never been to a theatre or played cards, for he was very religious, and he had four wives and twenty–four children. The only bar to the happiness of his life seemed to be that common decency obliged him to divide his time equally between his four wives. He said than an hour with one was a month and with another five minutes. I remarked that Professor Einstein–or was it Bergson?–had made similar observations upon time and indeed on this question had given the world much to ponder over. Presently we took our leave and the Sultan presented me with some beautiful white Malaccas.

In the evening we went to the club. One of the men we had played with the day before got up from his chair as we entered.

‘Ready for a rubber?’ he said.

‘Where’s our fourth?’ I asked.

‘Oh, there are several fellows here who’ll be glad to play.’

‘What about that man we played with yesterday?’ I had forgotten his name.

‘Hardy? He’s not here.’

‘It’s not worth while waiting for him,’ said Featherstone.

‘He very seldom comes to the club. I was surprised to see him last night.’

I did not know why I had the impression that behind the very ordinary words of these two men there was an odd sense of embarrassment. Hardy had made no impression on me and I did not even remember what he looked like. He was just a fourth at the bridge table. I had a feeling that they had something against him. It was no business of mine and I was quite content to play with a man who at that moment joined us. We certainly had a more cheerful game than before. A good deal of chaff passed from one side of the table to the other. We played less serious bridge. We laughed. I wondered if it was only that they were less shy of the stranger who had happened in upon them or if the presence of Hardy had caused in the other two a certain constraint. At half past eight we broke up and Featherstone and I went back to dine at his house.

After dinner we lounged in arm–chairs and smoked cheroots. For some reason our conversation did not flow easily. I tried topic after topic, but could not get Featherstone to interest himself in any of them. I began to think that in the last twenty–four hours he had said all he had to say. I fell somewhat discouraged into silence. It prolonged itself, and again, I did not know why, I had a faint sensation that it was charged with a significance that escaped me. I felt slightly uncomfortable. I had that queer feeling that one sometimes has when sitting in an empty room that one is not by oneself. Presently I was conscious that Featherstone was steadily looking at me. I was sitting by a lamp, but he was in shadow so that the play of his features was hidden from me. But he had very large brilliant eyes and in the half darkness they seemed to shine dimly. They were like new boot–buttons that caught reflected light. I wondered why he looked at me like that. I gave him a glance and catching his eyes insistently fixed upon me faintly smiled.

‘Interesting book that one you lent me last night,’ he said suddenly, and I could not help thinking his voice did not sound quite natural. The words issued from his lips as though they were pushed from behind.

‘Oh, the Life of Byron?’ I said breezily. ‘Have you read it already?’

‘A good deal of it. I read till three.’

‘I’ve heard it’s very well done. I’m not sure that Byron interests me so much as all that. There was so much in him that was so frightfully second–rate. It makes one rather uncomfortable.’

‘What do you think is the real truth of that story about him and his sister?’

‘Augusta Leigh? I don’t know very much about it. I’ve never read Astarte.’

‘Do you think they were really in love with one another?’

‘I suppose so. Isn’t it generally believed that she was the only woman he ever genuinely loved?’

‘Can you understand it?’

‘I can’t really. It doesn’t particularly shock me. It just seems to me very unnatural. Perhaps “unnatural” isn’t the right word. It’s incomprehensible to me. I can’t throw myself into the state of feeling in which such a thing seems possible. You know, that’s how a writer gets to know the people he writes about, by standing himself in their shoes and feeling with their hearts.’

I know I did not make myself very clear, but I was trying to describe a sensation, an action of the subconscious, which from experience was perfectly familiar to me, but which no words I knew could precisely indicate. I went on:

‘Of course she was only his half–sister, but just as habit kills love I should have thought habit would prevent its arising. When two persons have known one another all their lives and lived together in close contact I can’t imagine how or why that sudden spark should flash that results in love. The probabilities are that they would be joined by mutual affection and I don’t know anything that is more contrary to love than affection.’

I could just see in the dimness the outline of a smile flicker for a moment on my host’s heavy, and it seemed to me then, somewhat saturnine face.

‘You only believe in love at first sight?’

‘Well, I suppose I do, but with the proviso that people may have met twenty times before seeing one another. “Seeing” has an active side and a passive one. Most people we run across mean so little to us that we never bestir ourselves to look at them. We just suffer the impression they make on us.’

‘Oh, but one’s often heard of couples who’ve known one another for years and it’s never occurred to one they cared two straws for each other and suddenly they go and get married. How do you explain that?’

‘Well, if you’re going to bully me into being logical and consistent, I should suggest that their love is of a different kind. After all, passion isn’t the only reason for marriage. It may not even be the best one. Two people may marry because they’re lonely or because they’re good friends or for convenience sake. Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny that it’s a very good substitute. I’m not sure that a marriage founded on it isn’t the happiest.’

‘What did you think of Tim Hardy?’

I was a little surprised at the sudden question, which seemed to have nothing to do with the subject of our conversation.

‘I didn’t think of him very much. He seemed quite nice. Why?’

‘Did he seem to you just like everybody else?’

‘Yes. Is there anything peculiar about him? If you’d told me that, I’d have paid more attention to him.’

‘He’s very quiet, isn’t he? I suppose no one who knew nothing about him would give him a second thought.’

I tried to remember what he looked like. The only thing that had struck me when we were playing cards was that he had fine hands. It passed idly through my mind that they were not the sort of hands I should have expected a planter to have. But why a planter should have different hands from anybody else I did not trouble to ask myself. His were somewhat large, but very well formed with peculiarly long fingers, and the nails were of an admirable shape. They were virile and yet oddly sensitive hands. I noticed this and thought no more about it. But if you are a writer instinct and the habit of years enable you to store up impressions that you are not aware of. Sometimes of course they do not correspond with the facts and a woman for example may remain in your subconsciousness as a dark, massive, and ox–eyed creature when she is indeed rather small and of a nondescript colouring. But that is of no consequence. The impression may very well be more exact than the sober truth. And now, seeking to call up from the depths of me a picture of this man I had a feeling of some ambiguity. He was clean–shaven and his face, oval but not thin, seemed strangely pale under the tan of long exposure to the tropical sun. His features were vague. I did not know whether I remembered it or only imagined now that his rounded chin gave one the impression of a certain weakness. He had thick brown hair, just turning grey, and a long wisp fell down constantly over his forehead. He pushed it back with a gesture that had become habitual. His brown eyes were rather large and gentle, but perhaps a little sad; they had a melting softness which, I could imagine, might be very appealing.

After a pause Featherstone continued:

‘It’s rather strange that I should run across Tim Hardy here after all these years. But that’s the way of the F.M.S. People move about and you find yourself in the same place as a man you’d known years before in another part of the country. I first knew Tim when he had an estate near Sibuku. Have you ever been there?’

‘No. Where is it?’

‘Oh, it’s up north. Towards Siam. It wouldn’t be worth your while to go. It’s just like every other place in the F.M.S. But it was rather nice. It had a very jolly little club and there were some quite decent people. There was the schoolmaster and the head of the police, the doctor, the padre, and the government engineer. The usual lot, you know. A few planters. Three or four women. I was A.D.O. It was one of my first jobs. Tim Hardy had an estate about twenty–five miles away. He lived there with his sister. They had a bit of money of their own and he’d bought the place. Rubber was pretty good then and he wasn’t doing at all badly. We rather cottoned on to one another. Of course it’s a toss–up with planters. Some of them are very good fellows, but they’re not exactly...’ he sought for a word or a phrase that did not sound snobbish. ‘Well, they’re not the sort of people you’d be likely to meet at home. Tim and Olive were of one’s own class, if you understand what I mean.’

‘Olive was the sister?’

‘Yes. They’d had a rather unfortunate past. Their parents had separated when they were quite small, seven or eight, and the mother had taken Olive and the father had kept Tim. Tim went to Clifton, they were West Country people, and only came home for the holidays. His father was a retired naval man who lived at Fowey. But Olive went with her mother to Italy. She was educated in Florence; she spoke Italian perfectly and French too. For all those years Tim and Olive never saw one another once, but they used to write to one another regularly. They’d been very much attached when they were children. As far as I could understand, life when their people were living together had been rather stormy with all sorts of scenes and upsets, you know the sort of thing that happens when two people who are married don’t get on together, and that had thrown them on their own resources. They were left a good deal to themselves. Then Mrs Hardy died and Olive came home to England and went back to her father. She was eighteen then and Tim was seventeen. A year later the war broke out. Tim joined up and his father, who was over fifty, got some job at Portsmouth. I take it he had been a hard liver and a heavy drinker. He broke down before the end of the war and died shortly after a lingering illness. They don’t seem to have had any relations. They were the last of a rather old family; they had a fine old house in Dorsetshire that had belonged to them for a good many generations, but they had never been able to afford to live in it and it was always let. I remember seeing photographs of it. It was very much a gentleman’s house, of grey stone and rather stately, with a coat of arms carved over the front door, and mullioned windows. Their great ambition was to make enough money to be able to live in it. They used to talk about it a lot. They never spoke as though either of them would marry, but always as though it were a settled thing that they would remain together. It was rather funny considering how young they were.’

‘How old were they then?’ I asked.

‘Well, I suppose he was twenty–five or twenty–six and she was a year older. They were awfully kind to me when I first went up to Sibuku. They took a fancy to me at once. You see, we had more in common than most of the people there. I think they were glad of my company. They weren’t particularly popular.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘They were rather reserved and you couldn’t help seeing that they liked their own society better than other people’s. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but that always seems to put people’s backs up. They resent it somehow if they have a feeling that you can get along very well without them.’

‘It’s tiresome, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘It was rather a grievance to the other planters that Tim was his own master and had private means. They had to put up with an old Ford to get about in, but Tim had a real car. Tim and Olive were very nice when they came to the club and they played in the tennis tournaments and all that sort of thing, but you had an impression that they were always glad to get away again. They’d dine out with people and make themselves very pleasant, but it was pretty obvious that they’d just as soon have stayed at home. If you had any sense you couldn’t blame them. I don’t know if you’ve been much to planters’ houses. They’re a bit dreary. A lot of gimcrack furniture and silver ornaments and tiger skins. And the food’s uneatable. But the Hardys had made their bungalow rather nice. There was nothing very grand in it; it was just easy and homelike and comfortable. Their living–room was like a drawing–room in an English country house. You felt that their things meant something to them and that they had had them a long time. It was a very jolly house to stay at. The bungalow was in the middle of the estate, but it was on the brow of a little hill and you looked right over the rubber trees to the sea in the distance. Olive took a lot of trouble with her garden and it was really topping. I never saw such a show of cannas. I used to go there for weekends. It was only about half an hour’s drive to the sea and we’d take our lunch with us and bathe and sail. Tim kept a small boat there. Those days were grand. I never knew one could enjoy oneself so much. It’s a beautiful bit of coast and it was really extraordinarily romantic. Then in the evenings we’d play patience and chess or turn on the gramophone. The cooking was damned good too. It was a change from what one generally got. Olive had taught their cook to make all sorts of Italian dishes and we used to have great wallops of macaroni and risotto and gnocchi and things like that. I couldn’t help envying them their life, it was so jolly and peaceful, and when they talked of what they’d do when they went back to England for good I used to tell them they’d always regret what they’d left.

‘“We’ve been very happy here,” said Olive.

‘She had a way of looking at Tim, with a slow, sidelong glance from under her long eyelashes, that was rather engaging.

‘In their own house they were quite different from what they were when they went out. They were so easy and cordial. Everybody admitted that and I’m bound to say that people enjoyed going there. They often asked people over. They had the gift of making you feel at home. It was a very happy house, if you know what I mean. Of course no one could help seeing how attached they were to one another. And whatever people said about their being stand–offish and self–centred, they were bound to be rather touched by the affection they had for one another. People said they couldn’t have been more united if they had been married, and when you saw how some couples got on you couldn’t help thinking they made most marriages look rather like a wash–out. They seemed to think the same things at the same time. They had little private jokes that made them laugh like children. They were so charming with one another, so gay and happy, that really to stay with them was, well, a spiritual refreshment. I don’t know what else you could call it. When you left them, after a couple of days at the bungalow, you felt you’d absorbed some of their peace and their sober gaiety. It was as though your soul had been sluiced with cool clear water. You felt strangely purified.’

It was singular to hear Featherstone talking in this exalted strain. He looked so spruce in his smart white coat, technically known as a bum–freezer, his moustache was so trim, his thick curly hair so carefully brushed, that his high–flown language made me a trifle uncomfortable. But I realized that he was trying to express in his clumsy way a very sincerely felt emotion.

‘What was Olive Hardy like?’ I asked.

‘I’ll show you. I’ve got quite a lot of snapshots.’

He got up from his chair and going to a shelf brought me a large album. It was the usual thing, indifferent photographs of people in groups and unflattering likenesses of single figures. They were in bathing dress or in shorts or tennis things, generally with their faces screwed up because the sun blinded them, or puckered by the distortion of laughter. I recognized Hardy, not much changed after ten years, with his wisp of hair hanging across his forehead. I remembered him better now that I saw the snapshots. In them he looked nice and fresh and young. He had an alertness of expression that was attractive and that I certainly had not noticed when I saw him. In his eyes was a sort of eagerness for life that danced and sparkled through the fading print. I glanced at the photographs of his sister. Her bathing dress showed that she had a good figure, well–developed, but slender; and her legs were long and slim.

‘They look rather alike,’ I said.

‘Yes, although she was a year older they might have been twins, they were so much alike. They both had the same oval face and that pale skin without any colour in the cheeks, and they both had those soft brown eyes, very liquid and appealing, so that you felt whatever they did you could never be angry with them. And they both had a sort of careless elegance that made them look charming whatever they wore and however untidy they were. He’s lost that now, I suppose, but he certainly had it when I first knew him. They always rather reminded me of the brother and sister in Twelfth Night. You know whom I mean.’

‘Viola and Sebastian.’

‘They never seemed to belong quite to the present. There was something Elizabethan about them. I don’t think it was only because I was very young then that I couldn’t help feeling they were strangely romantic somehow. I could see them living in Illyria.’

I gave one of the snapshots another glance.

‘The girl looks as though she had a good deal more character than her brother,’ I remarked.

‘She had. I don’t know if you’d have called Olive beautiful, but she was awfully attractive. There was something poetic in her, a sort of lyrical quality, as it were, that coloured her movements, her acts, and everything about her. It seemed to exalt her above common cares. There was something so candid in her expression, so courageous and independent in her bearing, that–oh, I don’t know, it made mere beauty just fall flat and dull.’

‘You speak as if you’d been in love with her,’ I interrupted.

‘Of course I was. I should have thought you’d guessed that at once. I was frightfully in love with her.’

‘Was it love at first sight?’ I smiled.

‘Yes, I think it was, but I didn’t know it for a month or so. When it suddenly struck me that what I felt for her–I don’t know how to explain it, it was a sort of shattering turmoil that affected every bit of me–that that was love, I knew I’d felt it all along. It was not only her looks, though they were awfully alluring, the smoothness of her pale skin and the way her hair fell over her forehead and the grave sweetness of her brown eyes, it was more than that; you had a sensation of well–being when you were with her, as though you could relax and be quite natural and needn’t pretend to be anything you weren’t. You felt she was incapable of meanness. It was impossible to think of her as envious of other people or catty. She seemed to have a natural generosity of soul. One could be silent with her for an hour at a time and yet feel that one had had a good time.’

‘A rare gift,’ I said.

‘She was a wonderful companion. If you made a suggestion to do something she was always glad to fall in with it. She was the least exacting girl I ever knew. You could throw her over at the last minute and however disappointed she was it made no difference. Next time you saw her she was just as cordial and serene as ever.’

‘Why didn’t you marry her?’

Featherstone’s cheroot had gone out. He threw the stub away and deliberately lit another. He did not answer for a while. It may seem strange to persons who live in a highly civilized state that he should confide these intimate things to a stranger; it did not seem strange to me. I was used to it. People who live so desperately alone, in the remote places of the earth, find it a relief to tell someone whom in all probability they will never meet again the story that has burdened perhaps for years their waking thoughts and their dreams at night. And I have an inkling that the fact of your being a writer attracts their confidence. They feel that what they tell you will excite your interest in an impersonal way that makes it easier for them to discharge their souls. Besides, as we all know from our own experience, it is never unpleasant to talk about oneself.

‘Why didn’t you marry her?’ I had asked him.

‘I wanted to badly enough,’ Featherstone answered at length. ‘But I hesitated to ask her. Although she was always so nice to me and so easy to get on with, and we were such good friends, I always felt that there was something a little mysterious in her. Although she was so simple, so frank and natural, you never quite got over the feeling of an inner kernel of aloofness, as if deep in her heart she guarded, not a secret, but a sort of privacy of the soul that not a living person would ever be allowed to know. I don’t know if I make myself clear.’

‘I think so.’

‘I put it down to her upbringing. They never talked of their mother, but somehow I got the impression that she was one of those neurotic, emotional women who wreck their own happiness and are a pest to everyone connected with them. I had a suspicion that she’d led rather a hectic life in Florence and it struck me that Olive owed her beautiful serenity to a disciplined effort of her own will, and that her aloofness was a sort of citadel she’d built to protect herself from the knowledge of all sorts of shameful things. But of course that aloofness was awfully captivating. It was strangely exciting to think that if she loved you, and you were married to her, you would at last pierce right into the hidden heart of that mystery; and you felt that if you could share that with her it would be as it were a consummation of all you’d ever desired in your life. Heaven wouldn’t be in it. You know, I felt about it just like Bluebeard’s wife about the forbidden chamber in the castle. Every room was open to me, but I should never rest till I had gone into that last one that was locked against me.’

My eye was caught by a chik–chak, a little brown house lizard with a large head, high up on the wall. It is a friendly little beast and it is good to see it in a house. It watched a fly. It was quite still. On a sudden it made a dart and then as the fly flew away fell back with a sort of jerk into a strange immobility.

‘And there was another thing that made me hesitate. I couldn’t bear the thought that if I proposed to her and she refused me she wouldn’t let me come to the bungalow in the same old way. I should have hated that, I enjoyed going there so awfully. It made me so happy to be with her. But you know, sometimes one can’t help oneself. I did ask her at last, but it was almost by accident. One evening, after dinner, when we were sitting on the veranda by ourselves, I took her hand. She withdrew it at once.

‘“Why did you do that?” I asked her.

‘“I don’t very much like being touched,” she said. She turned her head a little and smiled. “Are you hurt? You mustn’t mind, it’s just a funny feeling I have. I can’t help it.”

‘“I wonder if it’s ever occurred to you that I’m frightfully fond of you,” I said.

‘I expect I was terribly awkward about it, but I’d never proposed to anyone before.’ Featherstone gave a little sound that was not quite a chuckle and not quite a sigh. ‘For the matter of that, I’ve never proposed to anyone since. She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said:

‘“I’m very glad, but I don’t think I want you to be anything more than that.”

‘“Why not?” I asked.

‘“I could never leave Tim.”

‘“But supposing he marries?”

‘“He never will.”

‘I’d gone so far then that I thought I’d better go on. But my throat was so dry that I could hardly speak. I was shaking with nervousness.

‘“I’m frightfully in love with you, Olive. I want to marry you more than anything in the world.”

‘She put her hand very gently on my arm. It was like a flower falling to the ground.

‘“No, dear, I can’t,” she said.

‘I was silent. It was difficult for me to say what I wanted to. I’m naturally rather shy. She was a girl. I couldn’t very well tell her that it wasn’t quite the same thing living with a husband and living with a brother. She was normal and healthy; she must want to have babies; it wasn’t reasonable to starve her natural instincts. It was such a waste of her youth. But it was she who spoke first.

‘“Don’t let’s talk about this any more,” she said. “D’you mind? It did strike me once or twice that perhaps you cared for me. Tim noticed it. I was sorry because I was afraid it would break up our friendship. I don’t want it to do that, Mark. We do get on so well together, the three of us, and we have such jolly times. I don’t know what we should do without you now.”

‘“I thought of that too,” I said.

‘“D’you think it need?” she asked me.

‘“My dear, I don’t want it to,” I said. “You must know how much I love coming here. I’ve never been so happy anywhere before!”

‘“You’re not angry with me?”

‘“Why should I be? It’s not your fault. It only means that you’re not in love with me. If you were you wouldn’t care a hang about Tim.”

‘“You are rather sweet,” she said.

‘She put her arm around my neck and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I had a notion that in her mind it settled our relation. She adopted me as a second brother.

‘A few weeks later Tim went back to England. The tenant of their house in Dorset was leaving and though there was another in the offing, he thought he ought to be on the spot to conduct negotiations. And he wanted some new machinery for the estate. He thought he’d get it at the same time. He didn’t expect to be gone more than three months and Olive made up her mind not to go. She knew hardly anyone in England, and it was practically a foreign country to her, she didn’t mind being left alone, and she wanted to look after the estate. Of course they could have put a manager in charge, but that wasn’t the same thing. Rubber was falling and in case of accidents it was just as well that one or other of them should be there. I promised Tim I’d look after her and if she wanted me she could always call me up. My proposal hadn’t changed anything. We carried on as though nothing had happened. I don’t know whether she’d told Tim. He made no sign that he knew. Of course I loved her as much as ever, but I kept it to myself. I have a good deal of self–control, you know. I had a sort of feeling I hadn’t a chance. I hoped eventually my love would change into something else and we could just be wonderful friends. It’s funny, it never has, you know. I suppose I was hit too badly ever to get quite over it.

‘She went down to Penang to see Tim off and when she came back I met her at the station and drove her home. I couldn’t very well stay at the bungalow while Tim was away, but I went over every Sunday and had tiffin and we’d go down to the sea and have a bathe. People tried to be kind to her and asked her to stay with them, but she wouldn’t. She seldom left the estate. She had plenty to do. She read a lot. She was never bored. She seemed quite happy in her own company, and when she had visitors it was only from a sense of duty. She didn’t want them to think her ungracious. But it was an effort and she told me she heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the last of them and could again enjoy without disturbance the peaceful loneliness of the bungalow. She was a very curious girl. It was strange that at her age she should be so indifferent to parties and the other small gaieties the station afforded. Spiritually, if you know what I mean, she was entirely self–supporting. I don’t know how people found out that I was in love with her; I thought I’d never given myself away in anything, but I had hints here and there that they knew. I gathered they thought Olive hadn’t gone home with her brother on my account. One woman, a Mrs Sergison, the policeman’s wife, actually asked me when they were going to be able to congratulate me. Of course I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it didn’t go down very well. I couldn’t help being amused. I meant so little to Olive in that way that I really believe she’d entirely forgotten that I’d asked her to marry me. I can’t say she was unkind to me, I don’t think she could have been unkind to anyone; but she treated me with just the casualness with which a sister might treat a younger brother. She was two or three years older than I. She was always terribly glad to see me, but it never occurred to her to put herself out for me; she was almost amazingly intimate with me, but unconsciously, you know, as you might be with a person you’d known so well all your life that you never thought of putting on frills with him. I might not have been a man at all, but an old coat that she wore all the time because it was easy and comfortable and she didn’t mind what she did in it. I should have been crazy not to see that she was a thousand miles away from loving me.

‘Then one day, three or four weeks before Tim was due back, when I went to the bungalow I saw she’d been crying. I was startled. She was always so composed. I’d never seen her upset over anything.

‘“Hullo, what’s the matter?” I said.

‘“Nothing.”

‘“Come off it, darling,” I said. “What have you been crying about?”

‘She tried to smile.

‘“I wish you hadn’t got such sharp eyes,” she said. “I think I’m being silly. I’ve just had a cable from Tim to say he’s postponed his sailing.”

‘“Oh, my dear, I am sorry,” I said. “You must be awfully disappointed.”

‘“I’ve been counting the days. I want him back so badly.”

‘“Does he say why he’s postponing?” I asked.

‘“No, he says he’s writing. I’ll show you the cable.”

‘I saw that she was very nervous. Her slow quiet eyes were filled with apprehension and there was a little frown of anxiety between her brows. She went into her bedroom and in a moment came back with the cable. I felt she was watching me anxiously as I read. So far as I remember it ran:

Darling, I cannot sail on the seventh after all. Please forgive me. Am writing fully. Fondest love. Tim.’”Well, perhaps the machinery he wanted isn’t ready and he can’t bring himself to sail without it,” I said.

‘“What could it matter if it came by a later ship? Anyhow, it’ll be hung up at Penang.”

‘“It may be something about the house.”

‘“If it is why doesn’t he say so? He must know how frightfully anxious I am.”

‘“It wouldn’t occur to him,” I said. “After all, when you’re away you don’t realize that the people you’ve left behind don’t know something that you take as a matter of course.”

‘She smiled again, but now more happily.

‘“I dare say you’re right. In point of fact Tim is a little like that. He’s always been rather slack and casual. I dare say I’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill. I must just wait patiently for his letter.”

‘Olive was a girl with a lot of self–control and I saw her by an effort of will pull herself together. The little line between her eyebrows vanished and she was once more her serene, smiling, and kindly self. She was always gentle: that day she had a mildness so heavenly that it was shattering. But for the rest of the time I could see that she kept her restlessness in check only by the deliberate exercise of her common sense. It was as though she had a foreboding of ill. I was with her the day before the mail was due. Her anxiety was all the more pitiful to see because she took such pains to hide it. I was always busy on mail day, but I promised to get up to the estate later on and hear the news. I was just thinking of starting when Hardy’s seis came along in the car with a message from the amah asking me to go at once to her mistress. The amah was a decent, elderly woman to whom I had given a dollar or two and said that if anything went wrong on the estate she was to let me know at once. I jumped into my car. When I arrived I found the amah waiting for me on the steps.

‘“A letter came this morning,” she said.

‘I interrupted her. I ran up the steps. The sitting–room was empty.

‘“Olive,” I called.

‘I went into the passage and suddenly I heard a sound that froze my heart. The amah had followed me and now she opened the door of Olive’s room. The sound I had heard was the sound of Olive crying. I went in. She was lying on her bed, on her face, and her sobs shook her from head to foot. I put my hand on her shoulder.

‘“Olive, what is it?” I asked.

‘“Who’s that?” she cried. She sprang to her feet suddenly, as though she were scared out of her wits. And then: “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She stood in front of me, with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, and the tears streamed from them. It was dreadful. “Tim’s married,” she gasped, and her face screwed up in a sort of grimace of pain.

‘I must admit that for one moment I had a thrill of exultation, it was like a little electric shock tingling through my heart; it struck me that now I had a chance, she might be willing to marry me; I know it was terribly selfish of me; you see, the news had taken me by surprise; but it was only for a moment, after that I was melted by her awful distress and the only thing I felt was deep sorrow because she was unhappy. I put my arm round her waist.

‘“Oh, my dear, I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t stay here. Come into the sitting–room and sit down and we’ll talk about it. Let me give you something to drink.”

‘She let me lead her into the next room and we sat down on the sofa. I told the amah to fetch the whisky and syphon and I mixed her a good strong stengah and made her drink a little. I took her in my arms and rested her head on my shoulder. She let me do what I liked with her. The great tears streamed down her poor face.

‘“How could he?” she moaned. “How could he?”

‘“My darling,” I said, “it was bound to happen sooner or later. He’s a young man. How could you expect him never to marry? It’s only natural.”

‘“No, no, no,” she gasped.

‘Tight–clenched in her hand I saw that she had a letter and I guessed that it was Tim’s.

‘“What does he say?” I asked.

‘She gave a frightened movement and clutched the letter to her heart as though she thought I would take it from her.

‘“He says he couldn’t help himself. He says he had to. What does it mean?”

‘“Well, you know, in his way he’s just as attractive as you are. He has so much charm. I suppose he just fell madly in love with some girl and she with him.”

‘“He’s so weak,” she moaned.

‘“Are they coming out?” I asked.

‘“They sailed yesterday. He says it won’t make any difference. He’s insane. How can I stay here?”

‘She began to cry hysterically. It was torture to see that girl, usually so calm, utterly shattered by her emotion. I had always felt that her lovely serenity masked a capacity for deep feeling. But the abandon of her distress simply broke me up. I held her in my arms and kissed her, her eyes and her wet cheek and her hair. I don’t think she knew what I was doing. I was hardly conscious of it myself. I was so deeply moved.

‘“What shall I do?” she wailed.

‘“Why won’t you marry me?” I said.

‘She tried to withdraw herself from me, but I wouldn’t let her go.

‘“After all, it would be a way out,” I said.

‘“How can I marry you?” she moaned. “I’m years older than you are.”

‘“Oh, what nonsense, two or three. What do I care?”

‘“No, no.”

‘“Why not?” I said.

‘“I don’t love you,” she said.

‘“What does that matter? I love you.”

‘I don’t know what I said. I told her that I’d try to make her happy. I said I’d never ask anything from her but what she was prepared to give me. I talked and talked. I tried to make her see reason. I felt that she didn’t want to stay there, in the same place as Tim, and I told her that I’d be moved soon to some other district. I thought that might tempt her. She couldn’t deny that we’d always got on awfully well together. After a time she did seem to grow a little quieter. I had a feeling that she was listening to me. I had even a sort of feeling that she knew that she was lying in my arms and that it comforted her. I made her drink a drop more whisky. I gave her a cigarette. At last I thought I might be just mildly facetious.

‘“You know, I’m not a bad sort really,” I said. “You might do worse.”

‘“You don’t know me,” she said. “You know nothing whatever about me.”

‘“I’m capable of learning,” I said.

‘She smiled a little.

‘“You’re awfully kind, Mark,” she said.

‘“Say yes, Olive,” I begged.

‘She gave a deep sigh. For a long time she stared at the ground. But she did not move and I felt the softness of her body in my arms. I waited. I was frightfully nervous and the minutes seemed endless.

‘“All right,” she said at last, as though she were not conscious that any time had passed between my prayer and her answer.

‘I was so moved that I had nothing to say. But when I wanted to kiss her lips, she turned her face away, and wouldn’t let me. I wanted us to be married at once, but she was quite firm that she wouldn’t. She insisted on waiting till Tim came back. You know how sometimes you see so clearly into people’s thoughts that you’re more certain of them than if they’d spoken them; I saw that she couldn’t quite believe that what Tim had written was true and that she had a sort of miserable hope that it was all a mistake and he wasn’t married after all. It gave me a pang, but I loved her so much, I just bore it. I was willing to bear anything. I adored her. She wouldn’t even let me tell anyone that we were engaged. She made me promise not to say a word till Tim’s return. She said she couldn’t bear the thought of the congratulations and all that. She wouldn’t even let me make any announcement of Tim’s marriage. She was obstinate about it. I had a notion that she felt if the fact were spread about it gave it a certainty that she didn’t want it to have.

‘But the matter was taken out of her hands. News travels mysteriously in the East. I don’t know what Olive had said in the amah’s hearing when first she received the news of Tim’s marriage; anyhow, the Hardys’ seis told the Sergisons and Mrs Sergison attacked me the next time I went into the club.

‘“I hear Tim Hardy’s married,” she said.

‘“Oh?” I answered, unwilling to commit myself.

‘She smiled at my blank face, and told me that her amah having told her the rumour she had rung up Olive and asked her if it was true. Olive’s answer had been rather odd. She had not exactly confirmed it, but said that she had received a letter from Tim telling her he was married.

‘“She’s a strange girl,” said Mrs Sergison. When I asked her for details she said she had none to give and when I said: “Aren’t you thrilled?” she didn’t answer.

‘“Olive’s devoted to Tim, Mrs Sergison,” I said. “His marriage has naturally been a shock to her. She knows nothing about Tim’s wife. She’s nervous about her.”

‘“And when are you two going to be married?” she asked me abruptly.

‘“What an embarrassing question!” I said, trying to laugh it off.

‘She looked at me shrewdly.

‘“Will you give me your word of honour that you’re not engaged to her?”

‘I didn’t like to tell her a deliberate lie, nor to ask her to mind her own business, and I’d promised Olive faithfully that I would say nothing till Tim got back. I hedged.

‘“Mrs Sergison,” I said, “when there’s anything to tell I promise that you’ll be the first person to hear it. All I can say to you now is that I do want to marry Olive more than anything in the world.”

‘“I’m very glad that Tim’s married,” she answered. “And I hope she’ll marry you very soon. It was a morbid and unhealthy life that they led up there, those two, they kept far too much to themselves and they were far too much absorbed in one another.”

‘I saw Olive practically every day. I felt that she didn’t want me to make love to her, and I contented myself with kissing her when I came and when I went. She was very nice to me, kindly and thoughtful; I knew she was glad to see me and sorry when it was time for me to go. Ordinarily, she was apt to fall into silence but during this time she talked more than I had ever heard her talk before. But never of the future and never of Tim and his wife. She told me a lot about her life in Florence and her mother. She had led a strange lonely life, mostly with servants and governesses, while her mother, I suspected, engaged in one affair after another with vague Italian counts and Russian princes. I guessed that by the time she was fourteen there wasn’t much she didn’t know. It was natural for her to be quite unconventional: in the only world she knew till she was eighteen conventions weren’t mentioned because they didn’t exist. Gradually, Olive seemed to regain her serenity and I should have thought that she was beginning to accustom herself to the thought of Tim’s marriage if it hadn’t been that I couldn’t but notice how pale and tired she looked. I made up my mind that the moment he arrived I’d press her to marry me at once. I could get short leave whenever I asked for it, and by the time that was up I thought I could manage a transfer to some other post. What she wanted was change of air and fresh scenes.

‘We knew, of course, within a day when Tim’s ship would reach Penang, but it was a question whether she’d get in soon enough for him to catch the train and I wrote to the P. & O. agent asking him to telegraph as soon as he had definite news. When I got the wire and took it up to Olive I found that she’d just received one from Tim. The ship had docked early and he was arriving next day. The train was supposed to get in at eight o’clock in the morning, but it was liable to be anything from one to six hours late, and I bore with me an invitation from Mrs Sergison asking Olive to come back with me to stay the night with her so that she would be on the spot and need not go to the station till the news came through that the train was coming.

‘I was immensely relieved. I thought that when the blow at last fell Olive wouldn’t feel it so much. She had worked herself up into such a state that I couldn’t help thinking that she must have a reaction now. She might take a fancy to her sister–in–law. There was no reason why they shouldn’t all three get on very well together. To my surprise Olive said she wasn’t coming down to the station to meet him.

‘“They’ll be awfully disappointed,” I said.

‘“I’d rather wait here,” she answered. She smiled a little. “Don’t argue with me, Mark, I’ve quite made up my mind.”

‘“I’ve ordered breakfast in my house,” I said.

‘“That’s all right. You meet them and take them to your house and give them breakfast, and then they can come along here afterwards. Of course I’ll send the car down.”

‘“I don’t suppose they’ll want to breakfast if you’re not there,” I said.

‘“Oh, I’m sure they will. If the train gets in on time they wouldn’t have thought of breakfasting before it arrived and they’ll be hungry. They won’t want to take this long drive without anything to eat.”

‘I was puzzled. She had been looking forward so intensely to Tim’s coming, it seemed strange that she should want to wait all by herself while the rest of us were having a jolly breakfast. I supposed she was nervous and wanted to delay as long as possible meeting the strange woman who had come to take her place. It seemed unreasonable, I couldn’t see that an hour sooner or an hour later could make any difference, but I knew women were funny, and anyhow I felt Olive wasn’t in the mood for me to press it.

‘“Telephone when you’re starting so that I shall know when to expect you,” she said.

‘“All right,” I said, “but you know I shan’t be able to come with them. It’s my day for going to Lahad.”

‘This was a town that I had to go to once a week to take cases. It was a good way off and one had to ferry across a river, which took some time, so that I never got back till late. There were a few Europeans there and a club. I generally had to go on there for a bit to be sociable and see that things were getting along all right.

‘“Besides,” I added, “with Tim bringing his wife home for the first time I don’t suppose he’ll want me about. But if you’d like to ask me to dinner I’ll be glad to come to that.”

‘Olive smiled.

‘“I don’t think it’ll be my place to issue any more invitations, will it?” she said. “You must ask the bride.”

‘She said this so lightly that my heart leaped. I had a feeling that at last she had made up her mind to accept the altered circumstances and, what was more, was accepting them with cheerfulness. She asked me to stay to dinner. Generally I left about eight and dined at home. She was very sweet, almost tender, and I was happier than I’d been for weeks. I had never been more desperately in love with her. I had a couple of gin pahits and I think I was in rather good form at dinner. I know I made her laugh. I felt that at last she was casting away the load of misery that had oppressed her. That was why I didn’t let myself be very much disturbed by what happened at the end.

‘“Don’t you think it’s about time you were leaving a presumably maiden lady?” she said.

‘She spoke in a manner that was so quietly gay that I answered without hesitation:

‘“Oh, my dear, if you think you’ve got a shred of reputation left you deceive yourself. You’re surely not under the impression that the ladies of Sibuku don’t know that I’ve been coming to see you every day for a month. The general feeling is that if we’re not married it’s high time we were. Don’t you think it would be just as well if I broke it to them that we’re engaged?”

‘“Oh, Mark, you mustn’t take our engagement very seriously,” she said. ‘I laughed.

‘“How else do you expect me to take it? It is serious.” ‘She shook her head a little.

‘“No. I was upset and hysterical that day. You were being very sweet to me. I said yes because I was too miserable to say no. But now I’ve had time to collect myself. Don’t think me unkind. I made a mistake. I’ve been very much to blame. You must forgive me.”

‘“Oh, darling, you’re talking nonsense. You’ve got nothing against me.”

‘She looked at me steadily. She was quite calm. She had even a little smile at the back of her eyes.

‘“I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone. It was absurd of me ever to think I could.”

‘I didn’t answer at once. She was in a queer state and I thought it better not to insist.

‘“I suppose I can’t drag you to the altar by main force,” I said.

‘I held out my hand and she gave me hers. I put my arm round her, and she made no attempt to withdraw. She suffered me to kiss her as usual on her cheek.

‘Next morning I met the train. For once in a way it was punctual. Tim waved to me as his carriage passed the place where I was standing, and by the time I had walked up he had already jumped out and was handing down his wife. He grasped my hand warmly.

‘“Where’s Olive?” he said, with a glance along the platform. “This is Sally.”

‘I shook hands with her and at the same time explained why Olive was not there.

‘“It was frightfully early, wasn’t it?” said Mrs Hardy. ‘I told them that the plan was for them to come and have a bit of breakfast at my house and then drive home.

‘“I’d love a bath,” said Mrs Hardy.

‘“You shall have one,” I said.

‘She was really an extremely pretty little thing, very fair, with enormous blue eyes and a lovely little straight nose. Her skin, all milk and roses, was exquisite. A little of the chorus girl type, of course, and you may happen to think that rather namby–pamby, but in that style she was enchanting. We drove to my house, they both had a bath and Tim a shave; I just had two minutes alone with him. He asked me how Olive had taken his marriage. I told him she’d been upset.

‘“I was afraid so,” he said, frowning a little. He gave a short sigh. “I couldn’t do anything else.”

‘I didn’t understand what he meant. At that moment Mrs Hardy joined us and slipped her arm through her husband’s. He took her hand in his and gently pressed it. He gave her a look that had in it something pleased and humorously affectionate, as though he didn’t take her quite seriously, but enjoyed his sense of proprietorship and was proud of her beauty. She really was lovely. She was not at all shy, she asked me to call her Sally before we’d known one another ten minutes, and she was quick in the uptake. Of course, just then she was excited at arriving. She’d never been East and everything thrilled her. It was quite obvious that she was head over heels in love with Tim. Her eyes never left him and she hung on his words. We had a jolly breakfast and then we parted. They got into their car to go home and I into mine to go to Lahad. I promised to go straight to the estate from there and in point of fact it was out of my way to pass by my house. I took a change with me. I didn’t see why Olive shouldn’t like Sally very much, she was frank and gay, and ingenuous; she was extremely young, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and her wonderful prettiness couldn’t fail to appeal to Olive. I was just as glad to have had a reasonable excuse to leave the three of them by themselves for the day, but as I started out from Lahad I had a notion that by the time I arrived they would all be pleased to see me. I drove up to the bungalow and blew my horn two or three times, expecting someone to appear. Not a soul. The place was in total darkness. I was surprised. It was absolutely silent. I couldn’t make it out. They must be in. Very odd, I thought. I waited a moment, then got out of the car and walked up the steps. At the top of them I stumbled over something. I swore and bent down to see what it was; it had felt like a body. There was a cry and I saw it was the amah. She shrank back cowering as I touched her and broke into loud wails.

‘“What the hell’s the matter?” I cried, and then I felt a hand on my arm and heard a voice: Tuan, Tuan. I turned and in the darkness recognized Tim’s head boy. He began to speak in little frightened gasps. I listened to him with horror. What he told me was unspeakable. I pushed him aside and rushed into the house. The sitting–room was dark. I turned on the light. The first thing I saw was Sally huddled up in an arm–chair. She was startled by my sudden appearance and cried out. I could hardly speak. I asked her if it was true. When she told me it was I felt the room suddenly going round and round me. I had to sit down. As the car that bore Tim and Sally drove up the road that led to the house and Tim sounded the klaxon to announce their arrival and the boys and the amah ran out to greet them there was the sound of a shot. They ran to Olive’s room and found her lying in front of the looking–glass in a pool of blood. She had shot herself with Tim’s revolver.

‘“Is she dead?” I said.

‘“No, they sent for the doctor, and he took her to the hospital.”

‘I hardly knew what I was doing. I didn’t even trouble to tell Sally where I was going. I got up and staggered to the door. I got into the car and told my seis to drive like hell to the hospital. I rushed in. I asked where she was. They tried to bar my way, but I pushed them aside. I knew where the private rooms were. Someone clung to my arm, but I shook him off. I vaguely understood that the doctor had given instructions that no one was to go into the room. I didn’t care about that. There was an orderly at the door; he put out his arm to prevent me from passing. I swore at him and told him to get out of my way. I suppose I made a row, I was beside myself; the door opened and the doctor came out.

‘“Who’s making all this noise?” he said. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

‘“Is she dead?” I asked.

‘“No. But she’s unconscious. She never regained consciousness. It’s only a matter of an hour or two.”

‘“I want to see her.”

‘“You can’t.”

‘“I’m engaged to her.”

‘“You?” he cried, and even at that moment I was aware that he looked at me strangely. “That’s all the more reason.”

‘I didn’t know what he meant. I was stupid with horror.

‘“Surely you can do something to save her,” I cried.

‘He shook his head.

‘“If you saw her you wouldn’t wish it,” he said.

‘I stared at him aghast. In the silence I heard a man’s convulsive sobbing. ‘“Who’s that?” I asked.

‘“Her brother.”

‘Then I felt a hand on my arm. I looked round and saw it was Mrs Sergison. ‘“My poor boy,” she said, “I’m so sorry for you.”

‘“What on earth made her do it?” I groaned.

‘“Come away, my dear,” said Mrs Sergison. “You can do no good here.” ‘“No, I must stay,” I said.

‘“Well, go and sit in my room,” said the doctor.

‘I was so broken that I let Mrs Sergison take me by the arm and lead me into the doctor’s private room. She made me sit down. I couldn’t bring myself to realize that it was true. I thought it was a horrible nightmare from which I must awake. I don’t know how long we sat there. Three hours. Four hours. At last the doctor came in.

‘“It’s all over,” he said.

‘Then I couldn’t help myself, I began to cry. I didn’t care what they thought of me. I was so frightfully unhappy.

‘We buried her next day.

‘Mrs Sergison came back to my house and sat with me for a while. She wanted me to go to the club with her. I hadn’t the heart. She was very kind, but I was glad when she left me by myself. I tried to read, but the words meant nothing to me. I felt dead inside. My boy came in and turned on the lights. My head was aching like mad. Then he came back and said that a lady wished to see me. I asked who it was. He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought it must be the new wife of the tuan at Putatan. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted. I got up and went to the door. He was right. It was Sally. I asked her to come in. I noticed that she was deathly white. I felt sorry for her. It was a frightful experience for a girl of that age and for a bride a miserable homecoming. She sat down. She was very nervous. I tried to put her at her ease by saying conventional things. She made me very uncomfortable because she stared at me with those enormous blue eyes of hers, and they were simply ghastly with horror. She interrupted me suddenly.

‘“You’re the only person here I know,” she said. “I had to come to you. I want you to get me away from here.”

‘I was dumbfounded.

‘“What do you mean?” I said.

‘“I don’t want you to ask me any questions. I just want you to get me away. At once. I want to go back to England!”

‘“But you can’t leave Tim like that just now,” I said. “My dear, you must pull yourself together. I know it’s been awful for you. But think of Tim. If you have any love for him the least you can do is try and make him a little less unhappy.”

‘“Oh, you don’t know,” she cried. “I can’t tell you. It’s too horrible. I beseech you to help me. If there’s a train tonight let me get on it. If I can only get to Penang I can get a ship. I can’t stay in this place another night. I shall go mad.”

‘I was absolutely bewildered.

‘“Does Tim know?” I asked her.

‘“I haven’t seen Tim since last night. I’ll never see him again. I’d rather die.” ‘I wanted to gain a little time.

‘“But how can you go without your things? Have you got any luggage?”

‘“What does that matter?” she cried impatiently. “I’ve got what I want for the journey.”

‘“Have you any money?”

‘“Enough. Is there a train tonight?”

‘“Yes,” I said. “It’s due just after midnight.”

‘“Thank God. Will you arrange everything? Can I stay here till then?”

‘“You’re putting me in a frightful position,” I said. “I don’t know what to do for the best. You know, it’s an awfully serious step you’re taking.”

‘“If you knew everything you’d know it was the only possible thing to do.”

‘“It’ll create an awful scandal here. I don’t know what people’ll say. Have you thought of the effect on Tim?” I was worried and unhappy. “God knows I don’t want to interfere in what isn’t my business. But if you want me to help you I ought to know enough to feel justified in doing so. You must tell me what’s happened.”

‘“I can’t. I can only tell you that I know everything.”

‘She hid her face with her hands and shuddered. Then she gave herself a shake as though she were recoiling from some frightful sight.

‘“He had no right to marry me. It was monstrous.”

‘And as she spoke her voice rose shrill and piercing. I was afraid she was going to have an attack of hysterics. Her pretty doll–like face was terrified and her eyes stared as though she could never close them again.

‘“Don’t you love him any more?” I asked.

‘“After that?”

‘“What will you do if I refuse to help you?” I said.

‘“I suppose there’s a clergyman here or a doctor. You can’t refuse to take me to one of them.”

‘“How did you get here?”

‘“The head boy drove me. He got a car from somewhere.”

‘“Does Tim know you’ve gone?”

‘“I left a letter for him.”

‘“He’ll know you’re here.”

‘“He won’t try to stop me. I promise you that. He daren’t. For God’s sake don’t you try either. I tell you I shall go mad if I stay here another night.”

‘I sighed. After all she was of an age to decide for herself.’

I, the writer of this, hadn’t spoken for a long time.

‘Did you know what she meant?’ I asked Featherstone.

He gave me a long, haggard look.

‘There was only one thing she could mean. It was unspeakable. Yes, I knew all right. It explained everything. Poor Olive. Poor sweet. I suppose it was unreasonable of me, at that moment I only felt a horror of that little pretty fair–haired thing with her terrified eyes. I hated her. I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I told her I’d do as she wished. She didn’t even say thank you. I think she knew what I felt about her. When it was dinner–time I made her eat something and then she asked me if there was a room she could go and lie down in till it was time to go to the station. I showed her into my spare room and left her. I sat in the sitting–room and waited. My God, I don’t think the time has ever passed so slowly for me. I thought twelve would never strike. I rang up the station and was told the train wouldn’t be in till nearly two. At midnight she came back to the sitting–room and we sat there for an hour and a half. We had nothing to say to one another and we didn’t speak. Then I took her to the station and put her on the train.’

‘Was there an awful scandal?’

Featherstone frowned.

‘I don’t know. I applied for short leave. After that I was moved to another post. I heard that Tim had sold his estate and bought another. But I didn’t know where. It was a shock to me at first when I found him here.’

Featherstone, getting up, went over to a table and mixed himself a whisky and soda. In the silence that fell now I heard the monotonous chorus of the croaking frogs. And suddenly the bird that is known as the fever–bird, perched in a tree close to the house, began to call. First, three notes in a descending, chromatic scale, then five, then four. The varying notes of the scale succeeded one another with maddening persistence. One was compelled to listen and to count them, and because one did not know how many there would be it tortured one’s nerves.

‘Blast that bird,’ said Featherstone. ‘That means no sleep for me tonight.’

FRENCH JOE

It was Captain Bartlett who told me of him. I do not think that many people have been to Thursday Island. It is in the Torres Straits and is so called because it was discovered on a Thursday by Captain Cook. I went there since they told me in Sydney that it was the last place God ever made. They said there was nothing to see and warned me that I should probably get my throat cut. I had come up from Sydney in a Japanese tramp and they put me ashore in a small boat. It was the middle of the night and there was not a soul on the jetty. One of the sailors who landed my kit told me that if I turned to the left I should presently come to a two–storey building and this was the hotel. The boat pushed off and I was left alone. I do not much like being separated from my luggage, but I like still less to pass the night on a jetty and sleep on hard stones; so I shouldered a bag and set out. It was pitch dark. I seemed to walk much more than a few hundred yards which they had spoken of and was afraid I had missed my way, but at last saw dimly a building which seemed to be important enough to suggest that it might be the hotel. No light showed, but my eyes by now were pretty well accustomed to the darkness and I found a door. I struck a match, but could see no bell. I knocked; there was no reply; I knocked again, with my stick, as loudly as I could, then a window above me was opened and a woman’s voice asked me what I wanted.

‘I’ve just got off the Shika Maru,’ I said. ‘Can I have a room?’

‘I’ll come down.’

I waited a little longer, and the door was opened by a woman in a red flannel dressing–gown. Her hair was hanging over her shoulders in long black wisps. In her hand she held a paraffin lamp. She greeted me warmly, a little stoutish woman, with keen eyes and a nose suspiciously red, and bade me come in. She took me upstairs and showed me a room.

‘Now you sit down,’ she said, ‘and I’ll make up the bed before you can say Jack Robinson. What will you ‘ave? A drop of whisky would do you good, I should think. You won’t want to be washing at this time of night, I’ll bring you a towel in the morning.’

And while she made the bed she asked me who I was and what I had come to Thursday Island for. She could see I wasn’t a sea–faring man–all the pilots came to this hotel and had done for twenty years–and she didn’t know what business could have brought me. I wasn’t that fellow as was coming to inspect the Customs was I? She’d ‘eard they were sending someone from Sydney. I asked her if there were any pilots staying there then. Yes, there was one, Captain Bartlett, did I know him? A queer fish he was and no mistake. Hadn’t got a hair on his head, but the way he could put his liquor away, well, it was a caution. There, the bed was ready and she expected I’d sleep like a top and one thing she could say was, the sheets were clean. She lit the end of a candle and bade me good night.

Captain Bartlett certainly was a queer fish, but he is of no moment to my present purpose; I made his acquaintance at dinner next day–before I left Thursday Island I had eaten turtle soup so often that I ceased to look upon it as a luxury–and it was because in the course of conversation I mentioned that I spoke French that he asked me to go and see French Joe.

‘It’ll be a treat to the old fellow to talk his own lingo for a bit. He’s ninety–three, you know.’

For the last two years, not because he was ill but because he was old and destitute, he had lived in the hospital and it was here that I visited him. He was lying in bed, in flannel pyjamas much too large for him, a little shrivelled old man with vivacious eyes, a short white beard, and bushy black eyebrows. He was glad to speak French with me, which he spoke with the marked accent of his native isle, for he was a Corsican, but he had dwelt so many years among English–speaking people that he no longer spoke his mother tongue with accuracy. He used English words as though they were French, making verbs of them with French terminations. He talked very quickly, with broad gestures, and his voice for the most part was clear and strong; but now and then it seemed suddenly to fade away so that it sounded as though he spoke from the grave. The hushed and hollow sound gave me an eerie feeling. Indeed I could not look upon him still as of this world. His real name was Joseph de Paoli. He was a nobleman and a gentleman. He was of the same family as the general we have all read of in Boswell’s Johnson, but he showed no interest in his famous ancestor.

‘We have had so many generals in our family,’ he said. ‘You know, of course, that Napoleon Bonaparte was a connexion of mine. No, I have never read Boswell. I have not read books. I have lived.’

He had entered the French army in 1851. Seventy–five years ago. It is terrifying. As a lieutenant of artillery (‘like my cousin Bonaparte,’ he said) he had fought the Russians in the Crimea and as a captain the Prussians in 1870. He showed me a scar on his bald pate from an Uhlan’s lance and then with a dramatic gesture told how he had thrust his sword in the Uhlan’s body with such violence that he could not withdraw it. The Uhlan fell dead and the sword remained in the body. But the Empire perished and he joined the communists. For six weeks he fought against the government troops under Monsieur Thiers. To me Thiers is but a shadowy figure, and it was startling and even a trifle comic to hear French Joe speak with passionate hatred of a man who has been dead for half a century. His voice rose into a shrill scream as he repeated the insults, Oriental in their imagery, which in the council he had flung at the head of this mediocre statesman. French Joe was tried and sentenced to five years in New Caledonia.

‘They should have shot me,’ he said, ‘but, dirty cowards, they dared not.’

Then came the long journey in a sailing vessel, and the antipodes, and his wrath flamed out again when he spoke of the indignity thrust upon him, a political prisoner, when they herded him with vulgar criminals. The ship put in at Melbourne, and one of the officers, a fellow–Corsican, enabled him to slip over the side. He swam ashore and, taking his friend’s advice, went straight to the police–station. No one there could understand a word he said, but an interpreter was sent for, his dripping papers were examined, and he was told that so long as he did not set foot on a French ship he was safe.

‘Freedom,’ he cried to me. ‘Freedom.’

Then came a long series of adventures. He cooked, taught French, swept streets, worked in the gold mines, tramped, starved, and at last found his way to New Guinea. Here he underwent the most astonishing of his experiences, for drifting into the savage interior, and they are cannibals there still, after a hundred desperate adventures and hair–breadth escapes he made himself king of some wild tribe.

‘Look at me, my friend,’ he said, ‘I who lie here on a hospital bed, the object of charity, have been monarch of all I surveyed. Yes, it is something to say that I have been a king.’

But eventually he came into collision with the British, and his sovereignty passed from him. He fled the country and started life once more. It is clear that he was a fellow of resource for eventually he came to own a fleet of pearling luggers on Thursday Island. It looked as though at last he had reached a haven of peace and, an elderly man now, he looked forward to a prosperous and even respectable old age. A hurricane destroyed his boats and ruin fell upon him. He never recovered. He was too old to make a fresh start, and since then had earned as best he could a precarious livelihood till at last, beaten, he had accepted the hospital’s kindly shelter.

‘But why did you not go back to France or Corsica? An amnesty was granted to the communists a quarter of a century ago.’

‘What are France and Corsica to me after fifty years? A cousin of mine seized my land. We Corsicans never forget and never forgive. If I had gone back I should have had to kill him. He had his children.’

‘Funny old French Joe,’ smiled the nurse who stood at the end of the bed.

‘At all events you have had a fine life,’ I said.

‘Never. Never. I have had a frightful life. Misfortune has followed me wherever I turned my steps and look at me now. I am rotten, fit for nothing but the grave. I thank God that I had no children to inherit the curse that is upon me.’

‘Why, Joe, I thought you didn’t believe in God,’ said the nurse.

‘It is true. I am a sceptic. I have never seen a sign that there is in the scheme of things an intelligent purpose. If the universe is the contrivance of some being, that being can only be a criminal imbecile.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyhow, I have not got much longer in this filthy world and then I shall go and see for myself what is the real truth of the whole business.’

The nurse told me it was time to leave the old man and I took his hand to bid him farewell. I asked him if there was anything I could do for him.

‘I want nothing,’ he said. ‘I only want to die.’ His black shining eyes twinkled. ‘But meanwhile I should be grateful for a packet of cigarettes.’

GERMAN HARRY

I WAS in Thursday Island and I wanted very much to go to New Guinea. Now the only way in which I could do this was by getting a pearling lugger to take me across the Arafura Sea. The pearl fishery at that time was in a bad way and a flock of neat little craft lay anchored in the harbour. I found a skipper with nothing much to do (the journey to Merauke and back could hardly take him less than a month) and with him I made the necessary arrangements. He engaged four Torres Straits islanders as crew (the boat was but nineteen tons) and we ransacked the local store for canned goods. A day or two before I sailed a man who owned a number of pearlers came to me and asked whether on my way I would stop at the island of Trebucket and leave a sack of flour, another of rice, and some magazines for the hermit who lived there.

I pricked up my ears. It appeared that the hermit had lived by himself on this remote and tiny island for thirty years, and when opportunity occurred provisions were sent to him by kindly souls. He said that he was a Dane, but in the Torres Straits he was known as German Harry. His history went back a long way. Thirty years before, he had been an able seaman on a sailing vessel that was wrecked in those treacherous waters. Two boats managed to get away and eventually hit upon the desert island of Trebucket. This is well out of the line of traffic and it was three years before any ship sighted the castaways. Sixteen men had landed on the island, but when at last a schooner, driven from her course by stress of weather, put in for shelter, no more than five were left. When the storm abated the skipper took four of these on board and eventually landed them at Sydney. German Harry refused to go with them. He said that during those three years he had seen such terrible things that he had a horror of his fellow-men and wished never to live with them again. He would say no more. He was absolutely fixed in his determination to stay, entirely by himself, in that lonely place. Though now and then opportunity had been given him to leave he had never taken it.

A strange man and a strange story. I learned more about him as we sailed across the desolate sea. The Torres Straits are peppered with islands and at night we anchored on the lee of one or other of them. Of late new pearling grounds have been discovered near Trebucket and in the autumn pearlers, visiting it now and then, have given German Harry various necessities so that he has been able to make himself sufficiently comfortable. They bring him papers, bags of flour and rice, and canned meats. He has a whale boat and used to go fishing in it, but now he is no longer strong enough to manage its unwieldy bulk. There is abundant pearl shell on the reef that surrounds his island and this he used to collect and sell to the pearlers for tobacco, and sometimes he found a good pearl for which he got a considerable sum. It is believed that he has, hidden away somewhere, a collection of magnificent pearls. During the war no pearlers came out and for years he never saw a living soul. For all he knew, a terrible epidemic had killed off the entire human race and he was the only man alive. He was asked later what he thought.

“I thought something had happened,” he said.

He ran out of matches and was afraid that his fire would go out, so he only slept in snatches, putting wood on his fire from time to time all day and all night. He came to the end of his provisions and lived on chickens, fish and coconuts. Sometimes he got a turtle.

During the last four months of the year there may be two or three pearlers about and not infrequently after the day’s work they will row in and spend an evening with him. They try to make him drunk and then they ask him what happened during those three years after the two boat-loads came to the island. How was it that sixteen landed and at the end of that time only five were left? He never says a word. Drunk or sober he is equally silent on that subject and if they insist grows angry and leaves them.

I forget if it was four or five days before we sighted the hermit’s little kingdom. We had been driven by bad weather to take shelter and had spent a couple of days at an island on the way. Trebucket is a low island, perhaps a mile round, covered with coconuts, just raised above the level of the sea and surrounded by a reef so that it can be approached only on one side. There is no opening in the reef and the lugger had to anchor a mile from the shore. We got into a dinghy with the provisions. It was a stiff pull and even within the reef the sea was choppy. I saw the little hut, sheltered by trees, in which German Harry lived, and as we approached he sauntered down slowly to the water’s edge. We shouted a greeting, but he did not answer. He was a man of over seventy, very bald, hatchet-faced, with a grey beard, and he walked with a roll so that you could never have taken him for anything but a sea-faring man. His sunburn made his blue eyes look very pale and they were surrounded by wrinkles as though for long years he had spent interminable hours scanning the vacant sea. He wore dungarees and a singlet, patched, but neat and clean. The house to which he presently led us consisted of a single room with a roof of corrugated iron. There was a bed in it, some rough stools which he himself had made, a table, and his various household utensils. Under a tree in front of it was a table and a bench. Behind was an enclosed run for his chickens.

I cannot say that he was pleased to see us. He accepted our gifts as a right, without thanks, and grumbled a little because something or other he needed had not been brought. He was silent and morose. He was not interested in the news we had to give him, for the outside world was no concern of his: the only thing he cared about was his island. He looked upon it with a jealous, proprietary right; he called it “my health resort” and he feared that the coconuts that covered it would tempt some enterprising trader. He looked at me with suspicion. He was sombrely curious to know what I was doing in these seas. He used words with difficulty, talking to himself rather than to us, and it was a little uncanny to hear him mumble away as though we were not there. But he was moved when my skipper told him that an old man of his own age whom he had known for a long time was dead.

“Old Charlie dead — that’s too bad. Old Charlie dead.”

He repeated it over and over again. I asked him if he read.

“Not much,” he answered indifferently.

He seemed to be occupied with nothing but his food, his dogs and his chickens. If what they tell us in books were true his long communion with nature and the sea should have taught him many subtle secrets. It hadn’t. He was a savage. He was nothing but a narrow, ignorant and cantankerous sea-faring man. As I looked at the wrinkled, mean old face I wondered what was the story of those three dreadful years that had made him welcome this long imprisonment. I sought to see behind those pale blue eyes of his what secrets they were that he would carry to his grave. And then I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water’s edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognisable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man. Perhaps then he would hunt high and low for the great mass of pearls that has haunted the fancy of so many adventurers. But I do not believe he would find it: German Harry would have seen to it that none should discover the treasure, and the pearls would rot in their hiding place. Then the pearl fisher would go back into his dinghy and the island once more be deserted of man.

THE FOUR DUTCHMEN

The Van Dorth Hotel at Singapore was far from grand. The bedrooms were dingy and the mosquito nets patched and darned; the bath–houses, all in a row and detached from the bedrooms, were dank and smelly. But it had character. The people who stayed there, masters of tramps whose round ended at Singapore, mining engineers out of a job, and planters taking a holiday, to my mind bore a more romantic air than the smart folk, globe–trotters, government officials and their wives, wealthy merchants, who gave luncheon–parties at the Europe and played golf and danced and were fashionable. The Van Dorth had a billiard–room, with a table with a threadbare cloth, where ships’ engineers and clerks in insurance offices played snooker. The dining–room was large and bare and silent. Dutch families on the way to Sumatra ate solidly through their dinner without exchanging a word with one another, and single gentlemen on a business trip from Batavia devoured a copious meal while they intently read their paper. On two days a week there was rijstafel and then a few residents of Singapore who had a fancy for this dish came for tiffin. The Van Dorth Hotel should have been a depressing place, but somehow it wasn’t; its quaintness saved it. It had a faint aroma of something strange and half–forgotten. There was a scrap of garden facing the street where you could sit in the shade of trees and drink cold beer. In that crowded and busy city, though motors whizzed past and rickshaws passed continuously, the coolies’ feet pattering on the road and their bells ringing, it had the remote peacefulness of a corner of Holland. It was the third time I had stayed at the Van Dorth. I had been told about it first by the skipper of a Dutch tramp, the S.S. Utrecht, on which I had travelled from Merauke in New Guinea to Macassar. The journey took the best part of a month, since the ship stopped at a number of islands in the Malay Archipelago, the Aru and the Kei Islands, Banda–Neira, Amboina, and others of which I have even forgotten the names, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes for a day, to take on or discharge cargo. It was a charming, monotonous and diverting trip. When we dropped anchor, the agent came out in his launch, and generally the Dutch Resident, and we gathered on deck under the awning and the captain ordered beer. The news of the island was exchanged for the news of the world. We brought papers and mail. If we were staying long enough the Resident asked us to dinner and, leaving the ship in charge of the second officer, we all (the captain, the chief officer, the engineer, the supercargo, and I) piled into the launch and went ashore. We spent a merry evening. These little islands, one so like another, allured my fancy just because I knew that I should never see them again. It made them strangely unreal, and as we sailed away and they vanished into the sea and sky it was only by an effort of the imagination that I could persuade myself that they did not with my last glimpse of them cease to exist.

But there was nothing illusive, mysterious, or fantastic about the captain, the chief officer, the chief engineer, and the supercargo. Their solidity was amazing. They were the four fattest men I ever saw. At first I had great difficulty in telling them apart, for though one, the supercargo, was dark and the others were fair, they looked astonishingly alike. They were all big, with large round bare red faces, with large fat arms and large fat legs and large fat bellies. When they went ashore they buttoned up their stengah–shifters and then their great double chins bulged over the collars and they looked as though they would choke. But generally they wore them unbuttoned. They sweated freely and wiped their shiny faces with bandanas and vigorously fanned themselves with palm–leaf fans.

It was a treat to see them at tiffin. Their appetites were enormous. They had rijstafel every day, and each seemed to vie with the other how high he could pile his plate. They loved it hot and strong.

‘In dis country you can’t eat a ting onless it’s tasty,’ said the skipper. ‘De only way to keep yourself up in dis country is to eat hearty,’ said the chief. They were the greatest friends, all four of them; they were like schoolboys together, playing absurd little pranks with one another. They knew each other’s jokes by heart and no sooner did one of them start the familiar lines than he would splutter with laughter so violently, the heavy shaking laughter of the fat man, that he could not go on. And then the others began to laugh too. They rolled about in their chairs, and grew redder and redder, hotter and hotter, till the skipper shouted for beer, and each, gasping but happy, drank his bottle in one enchanted draught. They had been on this run together for five years and when, a little time before, the chief officer had been offered a ship of his own he refused it. He would not leave his companions. They had made up their minds that when the first of them retired they would all retire.

‘All friends and a good ship. Good grub and good beer. Vot can a sensible man vant more?’

At first they were a little stand–offish with me. Although the ship had accommodation for half a dozen passengers, they did not often get any, and never one whom they did not know. I was a stranger and a foreigner. They liked their bit of fun and did not want anyone to interfere with it. But they were all of them very fond of bridge, and on occasion the chief and the engineer had duties that prevented one or the other playing. They were willing to put up with me when they discovered that I was ready to make a fourth whenever I was wanted. Their bridge was as incredibly fantastic as they were. They played for infinitesimal stakes, five cents a hundred: they did not want to win one another’s money, they said, it was the game they liked. But what a game! Each was wildly determined to play the hand and hardly one was dealt without at least a small slam being declared. The rule was that if you could get a peep at somebody else’s cards you did, and if you could get away with a revoke you told your partner when there was no danger it could be claimed and you both roared with laughter till the tears rolled down your fat cheeks. But if your partner had insisted on taking the bid away from you and had called a grand slam on five spades to the queen, whereas you were positive on your seven little diamonds you could have made it easily, you could always score him off by redoubling without a trick in your hand. He went down two or three thousand and the glasses on the table danced with the laughter that shook your opponents.

I could never remember their difficult Dutch names, but knowing them anonymously as it were, only by the duties they performed, as one knows the characters Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Punchinello, of the old Italian comedy, added grotesquely to their drollery. The mere sight of them, all four together, set you laughing, and I think they got a good deal of amusement from the astonishment they caused in strangers. They boasted that they were the four most famous Dutchmen in the East Indies. To me not the least comic part of them was their serious side. Sometimes late at night, when they had given up all pretence of still wearing their uniforms, and one or the other of them lay by my side on a long chair in a pyjama jacket and a sarong, he would grow sentimental. The chief engineer, due to retire soon, was meditating marriage with a widow whom he had met when last he was home and spending the rest of his life in a little town with old red–brick houses on the shores of the Zuyder Zee. But the captain was very susceptible to the charms of the native girls and his thick English became almost unintelligible from emotion when he described to me the effect they had on him. One of these days he would buy himself a house on the hills in Java and marry a pretty little Javanese. They were so small and so gentle and they made no noise, and he would dress her in silk sarongs and give her gold chains to wear round her neck and gold bangles to put on her arms. But the chief mocked him.

‘Silly all dat is. Silly. She goes mit all your friends and de house boys and everybody. By de time you retire, my dear, vot you’ll vant vill be a nurse, not a vife.’

‘Me?’ cried the skipper. ‘I shall want a vife ven I’m eighty!’

He had picked up a little thing last time the ship was at Macassar and as we approached that port he began to be all of a flutter. The chief officer shrugged fat and indulgent shoulders. The captain was always losing his head over one brazen hussy after another, but his passion never survived the interval between one stop at a port and the next, and then the chief was called in to smooth out the difficulties that ensued. And so it would be this time.

‘De old man suffers from fatty degeneration of de heart. But so long as I’m dere to look after him not much harm comes of it. He vastes his money and dat’s a pity, but as long as he’s got it to vaste, why shouldn’t he?’

The chief officer had a philosophic soul.

At Macassar then I disembarked, and bade farewell to my four fat friends.

‘Make another journey with us,’ they said. ‘Come back next year or the year after. You’ll find us all here just the same as ever.’

A good many months had passed since then and I had wandered through more than one strange land. I had been to Bali and Java and Sumatra; I had been to Cambodia and Annam; and now, feeling as though I were home again, I sat in the garden of the Van Dorth Hotel. It was cool in the very early morning and having had breakfast I was looking at back numbers of the Straits Times to find out what had been happening in the world since last I had been within reach of papers. Nothing very much. Suddenly my eyes caught a headline: The Utrecht Tragedy. Supercargo and Chief Engineer. Not Guilty. I read the paragraph carelessly and then I sat up. The Utrecht was the ship of my four fat Dutchmen and apparently the supercargo and the chief engineer had been on trial for murder. It couldn’t be my two fat friends. The names were given, but the names meant nothing to me. The trial had taken place in Batavia. No details were given in this paragraph; it was only a brief announcement that after the judges had considered the speeches of the prosecution and of the defence their verdict was as stated. I was astounded. It was incredible that the men I knew could have committed a murder. I could not find out who had been murdered. I looked through back numbers of the paper. Nothing.

I got up and went to the manager of the hotel, a genial Dutchman, who spoke admirable English, and showed him the paragraph.

‘That’s the ship I sailed on. I was in her for nearly a month. Surely these fellows aren’t the men I knew. The men I knew were enormously fat.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he answered. ‘They were celebrated all through the Dutch East Indies, the four fattest men in the service. It’s been a terrible thing. It made a great sensation. And they were friends. I knew them all. The best fellows in the world.’

‘But what happened?’

He told me the story and answered my horrified questions. But there were things I wanted to know that he couldn’t tell me. It was all confused. It was unbelievable. What actually had happened was only conjecture. Then someone claimed the manager’s attention and I went back to the garden. It was getting hot now and I went up to my room. I was strangely shattered.

It appeared that on one of the trips the captain took with him a Malay girl that he had been carrying on with and I wondered if it was the one he had been so eager to see when I was on board. The other three had been against her coming–what did they want with a woman in the ship? it would spoil everything–but the captain insisted and she came. I think they were all jealous of her. On that journey they didn’t have the fun they generally had. When they wanted to play bridge the skipper was dallying with the girl in his cabin; when they touched at a port and went ashore the time seemed long to him till he could get back to her. He was crazy about her. It was the end of all their larks. The chief officer was more bitter against her than anybody: he was the captain’s particular chum, they had been shipmates ever since they first came out from Holland; more than once high words passed between them on the subject of the captain’s infatuation. Presently those old friends spoke to one another only when their duties demanded it. It was the end of the good fellowship that had so long obtained between the four fat men. Things went from bad to worse. There was a feeling among the junior officers that something untoward was pending. Uneasiness. Tension. Then one night the ship was aroused by the sound of a shot and the screams of the Malay girl. The supercargo and the chief engineer tumbled out of their bunks and they found the captain, a revolver in his hand, at the door of the chief officer’s cabin. He pushed past them and went on deck. They entered and found the chief officer dead and the girl cowering behind the door. The captain had found them in bed together and had killed the chief. How he had discovered what was going on didn’t seem to be known, nor what was the meaning of the intrigue. Had the chief induced the girl to come to his cabin in order to get back on the captain, or had she, knowing his ill–will and anxious to placate him, lured him to become her lover? It was a mystery that would never be solved. A dozen possible explanations flashed across my mind. While the engineer and the supercargo were in the cabin, horror–struck at the sight before them, another shot was heard. They knew at once what had happened. They rushed up the companion. The captain had gone to his cabin and blown his brains out. Then the story grew dark and enigmatic. Next morning the Malay girl was nowhere to be found and when the second officer, who had taken command of the ship, reported this to the supercargo, the supercargo said: ‘She’s probably jumped overboard. It’s the best thing she could have done. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ But one of the sailors on the watch, just before dawn, had seen the supercargo and the chief engineer carry something up on deck, a bulky package, about the size of the native woman, look about them to see that they were unobserved, and drop it overboard; and it was said all over the ship that these two to avenge their friends had sought the girl out in her cabin and strangled her and flung her body into the sea. When the ship arrived at Macassar they were arrested and taken to Batavia to be tried for murder. The evidence was flimsy and they were acquitted. But all through the East Indies they knew that the supercargo and the chief engineer had executed justice on the trollop who had caused the death of the two men they loved.

And thus ended the comic and celebrated friendship of the four fat Dutchmen.

THE BACK OF BEYOND

George Moon was sitting in his office. His work was finished, and he lingered there because he hadn’t the heart to go down to the club. It was getting on towards tiffin time, and there would be a good many fellows hanging about the bar. Two or three of them would offer him a drink. He could not face their heartiness. Some he had known for thirty years. They had bored him, and on the whole he disliked them, but now that he was seeing them for the last time it gave him a pang. Tonight they were giving him a farewell dinner. Everyone would be there and they were presenting him with a silver tea–service that he did not in the least want. They would make speeches in which they would refer eulogistically to his work in the colony, express their regret at his departure, and wish him long life to enjoy his well–earned leisure. He would reply suitably. He had prepared a speech in which he surveyed the changes that had taken place in the F.M.S. since first, a raw cadet, he had landed at Singapore. He would thank them for their loyal cooperation with him during the term which it had been his privilege to serve as Resident at Timbang Belud, and draw a glowing picture of the future that awaited the country as a whole and Timbang Belud in particular. He would remind them that he had known it as a poverty–stricken village with a few Chinese shops and left it now a prosperous town with paved streets down which ran trams, with stone houses, a rich Chinese settlement, and a clubhouse second in splendour only to that of Singapore. They would sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Then they would dance and a good many of the younger men would get drunk. The Malays had already given him a farewell party and the Chinese an interminable feast. Tomorrow a vast concourse would see him off at the station and that would be the end of him. He wondered what they would say of him. The Malays and the Chinese would say he had been stern, but acknowledge that he had been just. The planters had not liked him. They thought him hard because he would not let them ride roughshod over their labour. His subordinates had feared him. He drove them. He had no patience with slackness or inefficiency. He had never spared himself and saw no reason why he should spare others. They thought him inhuman. It was true that there was nothing come–hither in him. He could not throw off his official position when he went to the club and laugh at bawdy stories, chaff and be chaffed. He was conscious that his arrival cast a gloom, and to play bridge with him (he liked to play every day from six to eight) was looked upon as a privilege rather than an entertainment. When at some other table a young man’s four as the evening wore on grew hilarious, he caught glances thrown in his direction and sometimes an older member would stroll up to the noisy ones and in an undertone advise them to be quiet. George Moon sighed a little. From an official standpoint his career had been a success, he had been the youngest Resident ever appointed in the F.M.S., and for exceptional services a C.M.G. had been conferred upon him; but from the human it had perhaps been otherwise. He had earned respect, respect for his ability, industry, and trustworthiness, but he was too clear–sighted to think for a moment that he had inspired affection. No one would regret him. In a few months he would be forgotten.

He smiled grimly. He was not sentimental He had enjoyed his authority, and it gave him an austere satisfaction to know that he had kept everyone up to the mark. It did not displease him to think that he had been feared rather than loved. He saw his life as a problem in higher mathematics, the working–out of which had required intense application of all his powers, but of which the result had not the least practical consequence. Its interest lay in its intricacy and its beauty in its solution. But like pure beauty it led nowhither. His future was blank. He was fifty–five, and full of energy, and to himself his mind seemed as alert as ever, his experience of men and affairs was wide: all that remained to him was to settle down in a country town in England or in a cheap part of the Riviera and play bridge with elderly ladies and golf with retired colonels. He had met, when on leave, old chiefs of his, and had observed with what difficulty they adapted themselves to the change in their circumstances. They had looked forward to the freedom that would be theirs when they retired and had pictured the charming uses to which they would put their leisure. Mirage. It was not very pleasant to be obscure after having dwelt in a spacious Residency, to make do with a couple of maids when you had been accustomed to the service of half a dozen Chinese boys and, above all, it was not pleasant to realize that you did hot matter a row of beans to anyone when you had grown used to the delicate flattery of knowing that a word of praise could delight and a frown humiliate all sorts and conditions of men.

George Moon stretched out his hand and helped himself to a cigarette from the box on his desk. As he did so he noticed all the little lines on the back of his hand and the thinness of his shrivelled fingers. He frowned with distaste. It was the hand of an old man. There was in his office a Chinese mirror–picture that he had bought long ago and that he was leaving behind. He got up and looked at himself in it. He saw a thin yellow face, wrinkled and tight–lipped, thin grey hair, and grey tired eyes. He was tallish, very spare, with narrow shoulders, and he held himself erect. He had always played polo and even now could beat most of the younger men at tennis. When you talked to him he kept his eyes fixed on your face, listening attentively, but his expression did not change, and you had no notion what effect your words had on him. Perhaps he did not realize how disconcerting this was. He seldom smiled.

An orderly came in with a name written on a chit. George Moon looked at it and told him to show the visitor in. He sat down once more in his chair and looked with his cold eyes at the door through which in a moment the visitor would come. It was Tom Saffary, and he wondered what he wanted. Presumably something to do with the festivity that night. It had amused him to hear that Tom Saffary was the head of the committee that had organized it, for their relations during the last year had been far from cordial. Saffary was a planter and one of his Tamil overseers had lodged a complaint against him for assault. The Tamil had been grossly insolent to him and Saffary had given him a thrashing. George Moon realized that the provocation was great, but he had always set his face against the planters taking the law in their own hands, and when the case was tried he sentenced Saffary to a fine. But when the court rose, to show that there was no ill feeling he asked Saffary to luncheon: Saffary, resentful of what he thought an unmerited affront, curtly refused and since then had declined to have any social relations with the Resident. He answered when George Moon, casually, but resolved not to be affronted, spoke to him; but would neither play bridge nor tennis with him. He was manager of the largest rubber estate in the district, and George Moon asked himself sardonically whether he had arranged the dinner and collected subscriptions for the presentation because he thought his dignity required it or whether, now that his Resident was leaving, it appealed to his sentimentality to make a noble gesture. It tickled George Moon’s frigid sense of humour to think that it would fall to Tom Saffary to make the principal speech of the evening, in which he would enlarge upon the departing Resident’s admirable qualities and voice the community’s regret at their irreparable loss.

Tom Saffary was ushered in. The Resident rose from his chair, shook hands with him and thinly smiled.

‘How do you do? Sit down. Won’t you have a cigarette?’

‘How do you do?’

Saffary took the chair to which the Resident motioned him, and the Resident waited for him to state his business. He had a notion that his visitor was embarrassed. He was a big, burly, stout fellow, with a red face and a double chin, curly black hair, and blue eyes. He was a fine figure of a man, strong as a horse, but it was plain he did himself too well. He drank a good deal and ate too heartily. But he was a good business man and a hard worker. He ran his estate efficiently. He was popular in the community. He was generally known as a good chap. He was free with his money and ready to lend a helping hand to anyone in distress. It occurred to the Resident that Saffary had come in order before the dinner to compose the difference between them. The emotion that might have occasioned such a desire excited in the Resident’s sensibility a very faint, good–humoured contempt. He had no enemies because individuals did not mean enough to him for him to hate any of them, but if he had, he thought, he would have hated them to the end.

‘I dare say you’re a bit surprised to see me here this morning, and I expect, as it’s your last day and all that, you’re pretty busy.’

George Moon did not answer, and the other went on.

‘I’ve come on rather an awkward business. The fact is that my wife and I won’t be able to come to the dinner tonight, and after that unpleasantness we had together last year I thought it only right to come and tell you that it has nothing to do with that. I think you treated me very harshly; it’s not the money I minded, it was the indignity, but bygones are bygones. Now that you’re leaving I don’t want you to think that I bear any more ill–feeling towards you.’

‘I realized that when I heard that you were chiefly responsible for the send–off you’re giving me,’ answered the Resident civilly. ‘I’m sorry that you won’t be able to come tonight.’

‘I’m sorry, too. It’s on account of Knobby Clarke’s death,’ Saffary hesitated for a moment. ‘My wife and I were very much upset by it.’

‘It was very sad. He was a great friend of yours, wasn’t he?’

‘He was the greatest friend I had in the colony.’

Tears shone in Tom Saffary’s eyes. Fat men were very emotional, thought George Moon.

‘I quite understand that in that case you should have no heart for what looks like being a rather uproarious party,’ he said kindly. ‘Have you heard anything of the circumstances?’

‘No, nothing but what appeared in the paper.’

‘He seemed all right when he left here.’

‘As far as I know he’d never had a day’s illness in his life.’

‘Heart, I suppose. How old was he?’

‘Same age as me. Thirty–eight.’

‘That’s young to die.’

Knobby Clarke was a planter and the estate he managed was next door to Saffary’s. George Moon had liked him. He was a rather ugly man, sandy, with high cheek–bones and hollow temples, large pale eyes in deep sockets and a big mouth. But he had an attractive smile and an easy manner. He was amusing and could tell a good story. He had a careless good–humour that people found pleasing. He played games well. He was no fool. George Moon would have said he was somewhat colourless. In the course of his career he had known a good many men like him. They came and went. A fortnight before, he had left for England on leave and the Resident knew that the Saffarys had given a large dinner–party on his last night. He was married and his wife of course went with him.

‘I’m sorry for her,’ said George Moon. ‘It must have been a terrible blow. He was buried at sea, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. That’s what it said in the paper.’

The news had reached Timbang the night before. The Singapore papers arrived at six, just as people were getting to the club, and a good many men waited to play bridge or billiards till they had had a glance at them. Suddenly one fellow had called out:

‘I say, do you see this? Knobby’s dead.’

‘Knobby who? Not Knobby Clarke?’

There was a three–line paragraph in a column of general intelligence:

Messrs Star, Mosley and Co. have received a cable informing them that Mr Harold Clarke of Timbang Batu died suddenly on his way home and was buried at sea.A man came up and took the paper from the speaker’s hand, and incredulously read the note for himself. Another peered over his shoulder. Such as happened to be reading the paper turned to the page in question and read the three indifferent lines.

‘By George,’ cried one.

‘I say, what tough luck,’ said another.

‘He was as fit as a fiddle when he left here.’

A shiver of dismay pierced those hearty, jovial, careless men, and each one for a moment remembered that he too was mortal. Other members came in and as they entered, braced by the thought of the six o’clock drink, and eager to meet their friends, they were met by the grim tidings.

‘I say, have you heard? Poor Knobby Clarke’s dead.’

‘No? I say, how awful!’

‘Rotten luck, isn’t it?’

‘Rotten.’

‘Damned good sort.’

‘One of the best.’

‘It gave me quite a turn when I saw it in the paper just by chance.’ ‘I don’t wonder.’

One man with the paper in his hand went into the billiard–room to break the news. They were playing off the handicap for the Prince of Wales’s Cup. That august personage had presented it to the club on the occasion of his visit to Timbang Belud. Tom Saffary was playing against a man called Douglas, and the Resident, who had been beaten in the previous round, was seated with about a dozen others watching the game. The marker was monotonously calling out the score. The newcomer waited for Saffary to finish his break and then he called out to him.

‘I say, Tom, Knobby’s dead.’

‘Knobby? It’s not true.’

The other handed him the paper. Three or four gathered round to read with him.

‘Good God!’

There was a moment’s awed silence. The paper was passed from hand to hand. It was odd that none seemed willing to believe till he saw it for himself in black and white.

‘Oh, I am sorry.’

‘I say, it’s awful for his wife,’ said Tom Saffary. ‘She was going to have a baby. My poor missus’ll be upset.’

‘Why, it’s only a fortnight since he left here.’

‘He was all right then.’

‘In the pink.’

Saffary, his fat red face sagging a little, went over to a table and, seizing his glass, drank deeply.

‘Look here, Tom,’ said his opponent, ‘would you like to call the game off?’

‘Can’t very well do that.’ Saffary’s eye sought the score board and he saw that he was ahead. ‘No, let’s finish. Then I’ll go home and break it to Violet.’

Douglas had his shot and made fourteen. Tom Saffary missed an easy in–off, but left nothing. Douglas played again, but did not score and again Saffary missed a shot that ordinarily he could have been sure of. He frowned a little. He knew his friends had betted on him pretty heavily and he did not like the idea of failing them. Douglas made twenty–two. Saffary emptied his glass and by an effort of will that was quite patent to the sympathetic onlookers settled down to concentrate on the game. He made a break of eighteen and when he just failed to do a long Jenny they gave him a round of applause. He was sure of himself now and began to score quickly. Douglas was playing well too, and the match grew exciting to watch. The few minutes during which Saffary’s attention wandered had allowed his opponent to catch up with him, and now it was anybody’s game.

‘Spot two hundred and thirty–five,’ called the Malay, in his queer clipped English. ‘Plain two hundred and twenty–eight. Spot to play.’

Douglas made eight, and then Saffary, who was plain, drew up to two hundred and forty. He left his opponent a double balk. Douglas hit neither ball, and so gave Saffary another point.

‘Spot two hundred and forty–three,’ called the marker. ‘Plain two hundred and forty–one. Plain to play.’

Saffary played three beautiful shots off the red and finished the game.

‘A popular victory,’ the bystanders cried.

‘Congratulations, old man,’ said Douglas.

‘Boy,’ called Saffary, ‘ask these gentlemen what they’ll have. Poor old–Knobby.’

He sighed heavily. The drinks were brought and Saffary signed the chit. Then he said he’d be getting along. Two others had already begun to play.

‘Sporting of him to go on like that,’ said someone when the door was closed on Saffary.

‘Yes, it shows grit.’

‘For a while I thought his game had gone all to pieces.’

‘He pulled himself together in grand style. He knew there were a lot of bets on him. He didn’t want to let his backers down.’

‘Of course it’s a shock, a thing like that.’

‘They were great pals. I wonder what he died of.’

‘Good shot, sir.’

George Moon, remembering this scene, thought it strange that Tom Saffary, who on hearing of his friend’s death had shown such self–control, should now apparently take it so hard. It might be that just as in the war a man when hit often did not know it till some time afterwards, Saffary had not realized how great a blow to him Harold Clarke’s death was till he had had time to think it over. It seemed to him, however, more probable that Saffary, left to himself, would have carried on as usual, seeking sympathy for his loss in the company of his fellows, but that his wife’s conventional sense of propriety had insisted that it would be bad form to go to a party when the grief they were suffering from made it only decent for them to eschew for a little festive gatherings. Violet Saffary was a nice little woman, three or four years younger than her husband; not very pretty, but pleasant to look at and always becomingly dressed; amiable, ladylike, and unassuming. In the days when he had been on friendly terms with the Saffarys the Resident had from time to time dined with them. He had found her agreeable, but not very amusing. They had never talked but of commonplace things. Of late he had seen little of her. When they chanced to meet she always gave him a friendly smile, and on occasion he said one or two civil words to her. But it was only by an effort of memory that he distinguished her from half a dozen of the other ladies in the community whom his official position brought him in contact with.

Saffary had presumably said what he had come to say and the Resident wondered why he did not get up and go. He sat heaped up in his chair oddly, so that it gave you the feeling that his skeleton had ceased to support him and his considerable mass of flesh was falling in on him. He looked dully at the desk that separated him from the Resident. He sighed deeply.

‘You must try not to take it too hard, Saffary,’ said George Moon. ‘You know how uncertain life is in the East. One has to resign oneself to losing people one’s fond of.’

Saffary’s eyes slowly moved from the desk, and he fixed them on George Moon’s. They stared unwinking. George Moon liked people to look him in the eyes. Perhaps he felt that when he thus held their vision he held them in his power. Presently two tears formed themselves in Saffary’s blue eyes and slowly ran down his cheeks. He had a strangely puzzled look. Something had frightened him. Was it death? No. Something that he thought worse. He looked cowed. His mien was cringing so that he made you think of a dog unjustly beaten.

‘It’s not that,’ he faltered. ‘I could have borne that.’

George Moon did not answer. He held that big, powerful man with his cold level gaze and waited. He was pleasantly conscious of his absolute indifference. Saffary gave a harassed glance at the papers on the desk.

‘I’m afraid I’m taking up too much of your time.’

‘No, I have nothing to do at the moment.’

Saffary looked out of the window. A little shudder passed between his shoulders. He seemed to hesitate.

‘I wonder if I might ask your advice,’ he said at last.

‘Of course,’ said the Resident, with the shadow of a smile, ‘that’s one of the things I’m here for.’

‘It’s a purely private matter.’

‘You may be quite sure that I shan’t betray any confidence you place in me.’

‘No, I know you wouldn’t do that, but it’s rather an awkward thing to speak about, and I shouldn’t feel very comfortable meeting you afterwards. But you’re going away tomorrow, and that makes it easier, if you understand what I mean.’

‘Quite.’

Saffary began to speak, in a low voice, sulkily, as though he were ashamed, and he spoke with the awkwardness of a man unused to words. He went back and said the same thing over again. He got mixed up. He started a long, elaborate sentence and then broke off abruptly because he did not know how to finish it. George Moon listened in silence, his face a mask, smoking, and he only took his eyes off Saffary’s face to reach for another cigarette from the box in front of him and light it from the stub of that which he was just finishing. And while he listened he saw, as it were a background, the monotonous round of the planter’s life. It was like an accompaniment of muted strings that threw into sharper relief the calculated dissonances of an unexpected melody.

With rubber at so low a price every economy had to be exercised and Tom Saffary, notwithstanding the size of the estate, had to do work which in better times he had had an assistant for. He rose before dawn and went down to the lines where the coolies were assembled. When there was just enough light to see he read out the names, ticking them off according to the answers, and assigned the various squads to their work. Some tapped, some weeded, and others tended the ditches. Saffary went back to his solid breakfast, lit his pipe, and sallied forth again to inspect the coolies’ quarters. Children were playing and babies sprawling here and there. On the sidewalks Tamil women cooked their rice. Their black skins shone with oil. They were draped about in dull red cotton and wore gold ornaments in their hair. There were handsome creatures among them, upright of carriage, with delicate features and small, exquisite hands; but Saffary looked upon them only with distaste. He set out on his rounds. On his well–grown estate the trees planted in rows gave one a charming feeling of the prim forest of a German fairy–tale. The ground was thick with dead leaves. He was accompanied by a Tamil overseer, his long black hair done in a chignon, barefooted, in sarong and baju, with a showy ring on his finger. Saffary walked hard, jumping the ditches when he came to them, and soon he dripped with sweat. He examined the trees to see that they were properly tapped, and when he came across a coolie at work looked at the shavings and if they were too thick swore at him and docked him half a day’s pay. When a tree was not to be tapped any more he told the overseer to take away the cup and the wire that held it to the trunk. The weeders worked in gangs.

At noon Saffary returned to the bungalow and had a drink of beer which, because there was no ice, was hike–warm. He stripped off the khaki shorts, the flannel shirt, the heavy boots and stockings in which he had been walking, and shaved and bathed. He lunched in a sarong and baju. He lay off for half an hour, and then went down to his office and worked till five; he had tea and went to the club. About eight he started back for the bungalow, dined, and half an hour after went to bed.

But last night he went home immediately he had finished his match. Violet had not accompanied him that day. When the Clarkes were there they had met at the club every afternoon, but now they had gone home she came less often. She said there was no one there who much amused her and she had heard everything everyone had to say till she was fed to the teeth. She did not play bridge and it was dull for her to wait about while he played. She told Tom he need not mind leaving her alone. She had plenty of things to do in the house.

As soon as she saw him back so early she guessed that he had come to tell her that he had won his match. He was like a child in his self–satisfaction over one of these small triumphs. He was a kindly, simple creature and she knew that his pleasure at winning was not only on his own account, but because he thought it must give her pleasure too. It was rather sweet of him to hurry home in order to tell her all about it without delay.

‘Well, how did your match go?’ she said as soon as he came lumbering into the sitting–room.

‘I won.’

‘Easily?’

‘Well, not as easily as I should have. I was a bit ahead, and then I stuck, I couldn’t do a thing, and you know what Douglas is, not at all showy, but steady, and he pulled up with me. Then I said to myself, well, if I don’t buck up I shall get a licking. I had a bit of luck here and there, and then, to cut a long story short, I beat him by seven.’

‘Isn’t that splendid? You ought to win the cup now, oughtn’t you?’

‘Well, I’ve got three matches more. If I can get into the semi–finals I ought to have a chance.’

Violet smiled. She was anxious to show him that she was as much interested as he expected her to be.

‘What made you go to pieces when you did?’

His face sagged.

‘That’s why I came back at once. I’d have scratched only I thought it wasn’t fair on the fellows who’d backed me. I don’t know how to tell you, Violet.’

She gave him a questioning look.

‘Why, what’s the matter? Not bad news?’

‘Rotten. Knobby’s dead.’

For a full minute she stared at him, and her face, her neat friendly little face, grew haggard with horror. At first it seemed as though she could not understand.

‘What do you mean?’ she cried.

‘It was in the paper. He died on board. They buried him at sea.’

Suddenly she gave a piercing cry and fell headlong to the floor. She had fainted dead away.

‘Violet,’ he cried, and threw himself down on his knees and took her head in his arms. ‘Boy, boy.’

A boy, startled by the terror in his master’s voice, rushed in, and Saffary shouted him to bring brandy. He forced a little between Violet’s lips. She opened her eyes, and as she remembered they grew dark with anguish. Her face was screwed up like a little child’s when it is just going to burst into tears. He lifted her up in his arms and laid her on the sofa. She turned her head away.

‘Oh, Tom, it isn’t true. It can’t be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘No, no, no.’

She burst into tears. She wept convulsively. It was dreadful to hear her. Saffary did not know what to do. He knelt beside her and tried to soothe her. He sought to take her in his arms, but with a sudden gesture she repelled him.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried, and she said it so sharply that he was startled.

He rose to his feet.

‘Try not to take it too hard, sweetie,’ he said. ‘I know it’s been an awful shock. He was one of the best.’

She buried her face in the cushions and wept despairingly. It tortured him to see her body shaken by those uncontrollable sobs. She was beside herself. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.

‘Darling, don’t give way like that. It’s so bad for you.’

She shook herself free from his hand.

‘For God’s sake leave me alone,’ she cried. ‘Oh, Hal, Hal.’ He had never heard her call the dead man that before. Of course his name was Harold, but everyone called him Knobby. ‘What shall I do?’ she wailed. ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.’

Saffary began to grow a trifle impatient. So much grief did seem to him exaggerated. Violet was not normally so emotional. He supposed it was the damned climate. It made women nervous and high–strung. Violet hadn’t been home for four years. She was not hiding her face now. She lay, almost falling off the sofa, her mouth open in the extremity of her pain, and the tears streamed from her staring eyes. She was distraught.

‘Have a little more brandy,’ he said. ‘Try to pull yourself together, darling. You can’t do Knobby any good by getting in such a state.’

With a sudden gesture she sprang to her feet and pushed him aside. She gave him a look of hatred.

‘Go away, Tom. I don’t want your sympathy. I want to be left alone.’

She walked swiftly over to an arm–chair and threw herself down in it. She flung back her head and her poor white face was wrenched into a grimace of agony.

‘Oh, it’s not fair,’ she moaned. ‘What’s to become of me now? Oh, God, I wish I were dead.’

‘Violet.’

His voice quavered with pain. He was very nearly crying too. She stamped her foot impatiently.

‘Go away, I tell you. Go away.’

He started. He stared at her and suddenly gasped. A shudder passed through his great bulk. He took a step towards her and stopped, but his eyes never left her white, tortured face; he stared as though he saw in it something that appalled him. Then he dropped his head and without a word walked out of the room. He went into a little sitting–room they had at the back, but seldom used, and sank heavily into a chair. He thought. Presently the gong sounded for dinner. He had not had his bath. He gave his hands a glance. He could not be bothered to wash them. He walked slowly into the dining–room. He told the boy to go and tell Violet that dinner was ready. The boy came back and said she did not want any.

‘All right. Let me have mine then,’ said Saffary.

He sent Violet in a plate of soup and a piece of toast, and when the fish was served he put some on a plate for her and gave it to the boy. But the boy came back with it at once.

‘Mem, she say no wantchee,’ he said.

Saffary ate his dinner alone. He ate from habit, solidly, through the familiar courses. He drank a bottle of beer. When he had finished the boy brought him a cup of coffee and he lit a cheroot. Saffary sat still till he had finished it. He thought. At last he got up and went back into the large veranda which was where they always sat. Violet was still huddled in the chair in which he had left her. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them when she heard him come. He took a light chair and sat down in front of her.

‘What was Knobby to you, Violet?’ he said.

She gave a slight start. She turned away her eyes, but did not speak.

‘I can’t quite make out why you should have been so frightfully upset by the news of his death.’

‘It was an awful shock.’

‘Of course. But it seems very strange that anyone should go simply to pieces over the death of a friend.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said.

She could hardly speak the words and he saw that her lips were trembling.

‘I’ve never heard you call him Hal. Even his wife called him Knobby.’

She did not say anything. Her eyes, heavy with grief, were fixed on vacancy.

‘Look at me, Violet.’

She turned her head slightly and listlessly gazed at him.

‘Was he your lover?’

She closed her eyes and tears flowed from them. Her mouth was strangely twisted.

‘Haven’t you got anything to say at all?’

She shook her head.

‘You must answer me, Violet.’

‘I’m not fit to talk to you now,’ she moaned. ‘How can you be so heartless?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t feel very sympathetic at the moment. We must get this straight now. Would you like a drink of water?’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘Then answer my question.’

‘You have no right to ask it. It’s insulting.’

‘Do you ask me to believe that a woman like you who hears of the death of someone she knew is going to faint dead away and then, when she comes to, is going to cry like that? Why, one wouldn’t be so upset over the death of one’s only child. When we heard of your mother’s death you cried of course, anyone would, and I know you were utterly miserable, but you came to me for comfort and you said you didn’t know what you’d have done without me.’

‘This was so frightfully sudden.’

‘Your mother’s death was sudden, too.’

‘Naturally I was very fond of Knobby.’

‘How fond? So fond that when you heard he was dead you didn’t know and you didn’t care what you said? Why did you say it wasn’t fair? Why did you say, “What’s going to become of me now?”?’

She sighed deeply. She turned her head this way and that like a sheep trying to avoid the hands of the butcher.

‘You musn’t take me for an utter fool, Violet. I tell you it’s impossible that you should be so shattered by the blow if there hadn’t been something between you.’

‘Well, if you think that, why do you torture me with questions?’

‘My dear, it’s no good shilly–shallying. We can’t go on like this. What d’you think I’m feeling?’

She looked at him when he said this. She hadn’t thought of him at all. She had been too much absorbed in her own misery to be concerned with his.

‘I’m so tired,’ she sighed.

He leaned forward and roughly seized her wrist.

‘Speak,’ he cried.

‘You’re hurting me.’

‘And what about me? D’you think you’re not hurting me? How can you have the heart to let me suffer like this?’

He let go of her arm and sprang to his feet. He walked to the end of the room and back again. It looked as though the movement had suddenly roused him to fury. He caught her by the shoulders and dragged her to her feet. He shook her.

‘If you don’t tell me the truth I’ll kill you,’ he cried.

‘I wish you would,’ she said.

‘He was your lover?’

‘Yes.’

‘You swine.’

With one hand still on her shoulder so that she could not move he swung back his other arm and with a flat palm struck her repeatedly, with all his strength, on the side of her face. She quivered under the blows, but did not flinch or cry out. He struck her again and again. All at once he felt her strangely inert, he let go of her and she sank unconscious to the floor. Fear seized him. He bent down and touched her, calling her name. She did not move. He lifted her up and put her back into the chair from which a little while before he had pulled her. The brandy that had been brought when first she fainted was still in the room and he fetched it and tried to force it down her throat. She choked and it spilt over her chin and neck. One side of her pale face was livid from the blows of his heavy hand. She sighed a little and opened her eyes. He held the glass again to her lips, supporting her head, and she sipped a little of the neat spirit. He looked at her with penitent, anxious eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Violet. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m dreadfully ashamed of myself. I never thought I could sink so low as to hit a woman.’

Though she was feeling very weak and her face was hurting, the flicker of a smile crossed her lips. Poor Tom. He did say things like that. He felt like that. And how scandalized he would be if you asked him why a man shouldn’t hit a woman. But Saffary, seeing the wan smile, put it down to her indomitable courage. By God, she’s a plucky little woman, he thought. Game isn’t the word.

‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

He took one out of his case and put it in her mouth. He made two or three ineffectual attempts to strike his lighter. It would not work.

‘Hadn’t you better get a match?’ she said.

For the moment she had forgotten her heart–rending grief and was faintly amused at the situation. He took a box from the table and held the lighted match to her cigarette. She inhaled the first puff with a sense of infinite relief.

‘I can’t tell you how ashamed I am, Violet,’ he said. ‘I’m disgusted with myself. I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. It was very natural. Why don’t you have a drink? It’ll do you good.’

Without a word, his shoulders all hunched up as though the burden that oppressed him were material, he helped himself to a brandy and soda. Then, still silent, he sat down. She watched the blue smoke curl into the air.

‘What are you going to do?’ she said at last.

He gave a weary gesture of despair.

‘We’ll talk about that tomorrow. You’re not in a fit state tonight. As soon as you’ve finished your cigarette you’d better go to bed.’

‘You know so much, you’d better know everything.’

‘Not now, Violet.’

‘Yes, now.’

She began to speak. He heard her words, but could hardly make sense of them. He felt like a man who has built himself a house with loving care and thought to live in it all his life, and then, he does not understand why, sees the housebreakers come and with their picks and heavy hammers destroy it room by room, till what was a fair dwelling–place is only a heap of rubble. What made it so awful was that it was Knobby Clarke who had done this thing. They had come to the F.M.S. on the same ship and had worked at first on the same estate. They call the young planter a creeper and you can tell him in the streets of Singapore by his double felt hat and his khaki coat turned up at the wrists. Callow youths who saunter about staring and are inveigled by wily Chinese into buying worthless truck from Birmingham which they send home as Eastern curios, sit in the lounges of cheap hotels drinking innumerable stengahs, and after an evening at the pictures get into rickshaws and finish the night in the Chinese quarter. Tom and Knobby were inseparable. Tom, a big, powerful fellow, simple, very honest, hard–working; and Knobby, ungainly, but curiously attractive, with his deep–set eyes, hollow cheeks, and large humorous mouth. It was Knobby who made the jokes and Tom who laughed at them. Tom married first. He met Violet when he went on leave. The daughter of a doctor killed in the war, she was governess in the house of some people who lived in the same place as his father. He fell in love with her because she was alone in the world, and his tender heart was touched by the thought of the drab life that lay before her. But Knobby married, because Tom had and he felt lost without him, a girl who had come East to spend the winter with relations. Enid Clarke had been very pretty then in her blonde way, and full–face she was pretty still, though her skin, once so clear and fresh, was already faded; but she had a very weak, small, insignificant chin and in profile reminded you of a sheep. She had pretty flaxen hair, straight, because in the heat it would not keep its wave, and china–blue eyes. Though but twenty–six, she had already a tired look. A year after marriage she had a baby, but it died when only two years old. It was after this that Tom Saffary managed to get Knobby the post of manager of the estate next his own. The two men pleasantly resumed their old familiarity, and their wives, who till then had not known one another very well, soon made friends. They copied one another’s frocks and lent one another servants and crockery when they gave a party. The four of them met every day. They went everywhere together. Tom Saffary thought it grand.

The strange thing was that Violet and Knobby Clarke lived on those terms of close intimacy for three years before they fell in love with one another. Neither saw love approaching. Neither suspected that in the pleasure each took in the other’s company there was anything more than the casual friendship of two persons thrown together by the circumstances of life. To be together gave them no particular happiness, but merely a quiet sense of comfort. If by chance a day passed without their meeting they felt unaccountably bored. That seemed very natural. They played games together. They danced together. They chaffed one another. The revelation came to them by what looked like pure accident. They had all been to a dance at the club and were driving home in Saffary’s car. The Clarkes’s estate was on the way and he was dropping them at their bungalow. Violet and Knobby sat in the back. He had had a good deal to drink, but was not drunk; their hands touched by chance, and he took hers and held it. They did not speak. They were all tired. But suddenly the exhilaration of the champagne left him and he was cold sober. They knew in a flash that they were madly in love with one another and at the same moment they realized they had never been in love before. When they reached the Clarkes’s Tom said:

‘You’d better hop in beside me, Violet.’

‘I’m too exhausted to move,’ she said.

Her legs seemed so weak that she thought she would never be able to stand.

When they met next day neither referred to what had happened, but each knew that something inevitable had passed. They behaved to one another as they had always done, they continued to behave so for weeks, but they felt that everything was different. At last flesh and blood could stand it no longer and they became lovers. But the physical tie seemed to them the least important element in their relation, and indeed their way of living made it impossible for them, except very seldom, to enjoy any intimate connexion. It was enough that they saw one another, though in the company of others, every day; a glance, a touch of the hand, assured them of their love, and that was all that mattered. The sexual act was no more than an affirmation of the union of their souls.

They very seldom talked of Tom or Enid. If sometimes they laughed together at their foibles it was not unkindly. It might have seemed odd to them to realize how completely these two people whom they saw so constantly had ceased to matter to them if they had given them enough thought to consider the matter. Their relations with them fell into the routine of life that nobody notices, like shaving oneself, dressing, and eating three meals a day. They felt tenderly towards them. They even took pains to please them, as you would with a bed–ridden invalid, because their own happiness was so great that in charity they must do what they could for others less fortunate. They had no scruples. They were too much absorbed in one another to be touched even for a moment by remorse. Beauty now excitingly kindled the pleasant humdrum life they had led so long.

But then an event took place that filled them with consternation. The company for which Tom worked entered into negotiations to buy extensive rubber plantations in British North Borneo and invited Tom to manage them. It was a better job than his present one, with a higher salary, and since he would have assistants under him he would not have to work so hard. Saffary welcomed the offer. Both Clarke and Saffary were due for leave and the two couples had arranged to travel home together. They had already booked their passages. This changed everything. Tom would not be able to get away for at least a year. By the time the Clarkes came back the Saffarys would be settled in Borneo. It did not take Violet and Knobby long to decide that there was only one thing to do. They had been willing enough to go on as they were, notwithstanding the hindrance to the enjoyment of their love, when they were certain of seeing one another continually; they felt that they had endless time before them and the future was coloured with a happiness that seemed to have no limit; but neither could suffer for an instant the thought of separation. They made up their minds to run away together, and then it seemed to them on a sudden that every day that passed before they could be together always and all the time was a day lost. Their love took another guise. It flamed into a devouring passion that left them no emotion to waste on others. They cared little for the pain they must cause Tom and Enid. It was unfortunate, but inevitable. They made their plans deliberately. Knobby on the pretence of business would go to Singapore and Violet, telling Tom that she was going to spend a week with friends on an estate down the line, would join him there. They would go over to Java and thence take ship to Sydney. In Sydney Knobby would look for a job. When Violet told Tom that the Mackenzies had asked her to spend a few days with them, he was pleased.

‘That’s grand. I think you want a change, darling,’ he said. I’ve fancied you’ve been looking a bit peaked lately.’

He stroked her cheek affectionately. The gesture stabbed her heart.

‘You’ve always been awfully good to me, Tom,’ she said, her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

‘Well, that’s the least I could be. You’re the best little woman in the world.’

‘Have you been happy with me these eight years?’

‘Frightfully.’

‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it? No one can ever take that away from you.’

She told herself that he was the kind of man who would soon console himself. He liked women for themselves and it would not be long after he had regained his freedom before he found someone that he would wish to marry. And he would be just as happy with his new wife as he had been with her. Perhaps he would marry Enid. Enid was one of those dependent little things that somewhat exasperated her and she did not think her capable of deep feeling. Her vanity would be hurt; her heart would not be broken. But now that the die was cast, everything settled and the day fixed, she had a qualm. Remorse beset her. She wished that it had been possible not to cause those two people such fearful distress. She faltered.

‘We’ve had a very good time here, Tom,’ she said. ‘I wonder if it’s wise to leave it all. We’re giving up a certainty for we don’t know what.’

‘My dear child, it’s a chance in a million and much better money.’

‘Money isn’t everything. There’s happiness.’

‘I know that, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be just as happy in B.N.B. And besides, there was no alternative. I’m not my own master. The directors want me to go and I must, and that’s all there is to it.’

She sighed. There was no alternative for her either. She shrugged her shoulders. It was hateful to cause others pain; sometimes you couldn’t help yourself. Tom meant no more to her than the casual man on the voyage out who was civil to you: it was absurd that she should be asked to sacrifice her life for him.

The Clarkes were due to sail for England in a fortnight and this determined the date of their elopement. The days passed. Violet was restless and excited. She looked forward with a joy that was almost painful to the peace that she anticipated when they were once on board the ship and could begin the life which she was sure would give her at last perfect happiness.

She began to pack. The friends she was supposed to be going to stay with entertained a good deal and this gave her an excuse to take quite a lot of luggage. She was starting next day. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and Tom was making his round of the estate. One of the boys came to her room and told her that Mrs Clarke was there and at the same moment she heard Enid calling her. Quickly closing the lid of her trunk, she went out on to the veranda. To her astonishment Enid came up to her, flung her arms round her neck and kissed her eagerly. She looked at Enid and saw her cheeks, usually pale, were flushed and that her eyes were shining. Enid burst into tears.

‘What on earth’s the matter, darling?’ she cried.

For one moment she was afraid that Enid knew everything. But Enid was flushed with delight and not with jealousy or anger.

‘I’ve just seen Dr Harrow,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to say anything about it. I’ve had two or three false alarms, but this time he says it’s all right.’

A sudden coldness pierced Violet’s heart.

‘What do you mean? You’re not going to...’

She looked at Enid and Enid nodded.

‘Yes, he says there’s no doubt about it at all. He thinks I’m at least three months gone. Oh, my dear, I’m so wildly happy.’

She flung herself again into Violet’s arms and clung to her, weeping.

‘Oh, darling, don’t.’

Violet felt herself grow pale as death and knew that if she didn’t keep a tight hold of herself she would faint.

‘Does Knobby know?’

‘No, I didn’t say a word. He was so disappointed before. He was so frightfully cut up when baby died. He’s wanted me to have another so badly.’

Violet forced herself to say the things that were expected of her, but Enid was not listening. She wanted to tell the whole story of her hopes and fears, of her symptoms, and then of her interview with the doctor. She went on and on.

‘When are you going to tell Knobby?’ Violet asked at last. ‘Now, when he gets in?’

‘Oh, no, he’s tired and hungry when he gets back from his round. I shall wait until tonight after dinner.’

Violet repressed a movement of exasperation; Enid was going to make a scene of it and was choosing her moment; but after all, it was only natural. It was lucky, for it would give her the chance to see Knobby first. As soon as she was rid of her she rang him up. She knew that he always looked in at his office on his way home, and she left a message asking him to call her. She was only afraid that he would not do so till Tom was back, but she had to take a chance of that. The bell rang and Tom had not come in.

‘Hal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be at the hut at three?’

‘Yes. Has anything happened?’

‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Don’t worry.’

She rang off. The hut was a little shelter on Knobby’s estate which she could get to without difficulty and where they occasionally met. The coolies passed it while they worked and it had no privacy; but it was a convenient place for them without exciting comment to exchange a few minutes’ conversation. At three Enid would be resting and Tom at work in his office.

When Violet walked up Knobby was already there. He gave a gasp.

‘Violet, how white you are.’

She gave him her hand. They did not know what eyes might be watching them and their behaviour here was always such as anyone could observe.

‘Enid came to see me this morning. She’s going to tell you tonight. I thought you ought to be warned. She’s going to have a baby.’

‘Violet!’

He looked at her aghast. She began to cry. They had never talked of the relations they had, he with his wife and she with her husband. They ignored the subject because it was to each horribly painful. Violet knew what her own life was; she satisfied her husband’s appetite, but, with a woman’s strange nonchalance, because to do so gave her no pleasure, attached no importance to it; but somehow she had persuaded herself that with Hal it was different. He felt now instinctively how bitterly what she had learned wounded her. He tried to excuse himself.

‘Darling, I couldn’t help myself.’

She cried silently and he watched her with miserable eyes.

‘I know it seems beastly,’ he said, ‘but what could I do? It wasn’t as if I had any reason to...’

She interrupted him.

‘I don’t blame you. It was inevitable. It’s only because I’m stupid that it gives me such a frightful pain in my heart.’

‘Darling!’

‘We ought to have gone away together two years ago. It was madness to think we could go on like this.’

‘Are you sure Enid’s right? She thought she was in the family way three or four years ago.’

‘Oh, yes, she’s right. She’s frightfully happy. She says you wanted a child so badly.’

‘It’s come as such an awful surprise. I don’t seem able to realize it yet.’

She looked at him. He was staring at the leaf–strewn earth with harassed eyes. She smiled a little.

‘Poor Hal.’ She sighed deeply. ‘There’s nothing to be done about it. It’s the end of us.’

‘What do you mean?’ he cried.

‘Oh, my dear, you can’t very well leave her now, can you? It was all right before. She would have been unhappy, but she would have got over it. But now it’s different. It’s not a very nice time for a woman anyhow. For months she feels more or less ill. She wants affection. She wants to be taken care of. It would be frightful to leave her to bear it all alone. We couldn’t be such beasts.’

‘Do you mean to say you want me to go back to England with her?’

She nodded gravely.

‘It’s lucky you’re going. It’ll be easier when you get away and we don’t see one another every day.’

‘But I can’t live without you now.’

‘Oh, yes, you can. You must. I can. And it’ll be worse for me, because I stay behind and I shall have nothing.’

‘Oh, Violet, it’s impossible.’

‘My dear, it’s no good arguing. The moment she told me I saw it meant that. That’s why I wanted to see you first. I thought the shock might lead you to blurt out the whole truth. You know I love you more than anything in the world. She’s never done me any harm. I couldn’t take you away from her now. It’s bad luck on both of us, but there it is, I simply wouldn’t dare to do a filthy thing like that.’

‘I wish I were dead,’ he moaned.

‘That wouldn’t do her any good, or me either,’ she smiled.

‘What about the future? Have we got to sacrifice our whole lives?’

‘I’m afraid so. It sounds rather grim, darling, but I suppose sooner or later we shall get over it. One gets over everything.’

She looked at her wrist–watch.

‘I ought to be getting back. Tom will be in soon. We’re all meeting at the club at five.’

‘Tom and I are supposed to be playing tennis.’ He gave her a pitiful look. ‘Oh, Violet, I’m so frightfully unhappy.’

‘I know. So am I. But we shan’t do any good by talking about it.’

She gave him her hand, but he took her in his arms and kissed her, and when she released herself her cheeks were wet with his tears. But she was so desperate she could not cry.

Ten days later the Clarkes sailed.

While George Moon was listening to as much of this story as Tom Saffary was able to tell him, he reflected in his cool, detached way how odd it was that these commonplace people, leading lives so monotonous, should have been convulsed by such a tragedy. Who would have thought that Violet Saffary, so neat and demure, sitting in the club reading the illustrated papers or chatting with her friends over a lemon squash, should have been eating her heart out for love of that ordinary man? George Moon remembered seeing Knobby at the club the evening before he sailed. He seemed in great spirits. Fellows envied him because he was going home. Those who had recently come back told him by no means to miss the show at the Pavilion. Drink flowed freely. The Resident had not been asked to the farewell party the Saffarys gave for the Clarkes, but he knew very well what it had been like, the good cheer, the cordiality, the chaff, and then after dinner the gramophone turned on and everyone dancing. He wondered what Violet and Clarke had felt as they danced together. It gave him an odd sensation of dismay to think of the despair that must have filled their hearts while they pretended to be so gay.

And with another part of his mind George Moon thought of his own past. Very few knew that story. After all, it happened twenty–five years ago.

‘What are you going to do now, Saffary?’ he asked.

‘Well, that’s what I wanted you to advise me about. Now that Knobby’s dead I don’t know what’s going to happen to Violet if I divorce her. I was wondering if I oughtn’t to let her divorce me.’

‘Oh, you want to divorce?’

‘Well, I must.’

George Moon lit another cigarette and watched for a moment the smoke that curled away into the air.

‘Did you ever know that I’d been married?’

‘Yes, I think I’d heard. You’re a widower, aren’t you?’

‘No, I divorced my wife. I have a son of twenty–seven. He’s farming in New Zealand. I saw my wife the last time I was home on leave. We met at a play. At first we didn’t recognize one another. She spoke to me. I asked her to lunch at the Berkeley.’

George Moon chuckled to himself. He was alone. It was a musical comedy. He found himself sitting next to a large fat dark woman whom he vaguely thought he had seen before, but the play was just starting and he did not give her a second look. When the curtain fell after the first act she looked at him with bright eyes and spoke.

‘How are you, George?’

It was his wife. She had a bold, friendly manner and was very much at her ease.

‘It’s a long time since we met,’ she said.

‘It is.’

‘How has life been treating you?’

‘Oh, all right.’

‘I suppose you’re a Resident now. You’re still in the Service, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I’m retiring soon, worse luck.’

‘Why? You look very fit.’

‘I’m reaching the age limit. I’m supposed to be an old buffer and no good any more.’

‘You’re lucky to have kept so thin. I’m terrible, aren’t I?’

‘You don’t look as though you were wasting away.’

‘I know. I’m stout and I’m growing stouter all the time. I can’t help it and I love food. I can’t resist cream and bread and potatoes.’

George Moon laughed, but not at what she said; at his own thoughts. In years gone by it had sometimes occurred to him that he might meet her, but he had never thought that the meeting would take this turn. When the play was ended and with a smile she bade him good night, he said:

‘I suppose you wouldn’t lunch with me one day?’

‘Any day you like.’

They arranged a date and duly met. He knew that she had married the man on whose account he had divorced her, and he judged by her clothes that she was in comfortable circumstances. They drank a cocktail. She ate the hors–d’oeuvre with gusto. She was fifty if she was a day, but she carried her years with spirit. There was something jolly and careless about her, she was quick on the uptake, chatty, and she had the hearty, infectious laugh of the fat woman who has let herself go. If he had not known that her family had for a century been in the Indian Civil Service he would have thought that she had been a chorus girl. She was not flashy, but she had a sort of flamboyance of nature that suggested the stage. She was not in the least embarrassed.

‘You never married again, did you?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Pity. Because it wasn’t a success the first time there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have been the second.’

‘There’s no need for me to ask if you’ve been happy.’

‘I’ve got nothing to complain of. I think I’ve got a happy nature. Jim’s always been very good to me; he’s retired now, you know, and we live in the country, and I adore Betty.’

‘Who’s Betty?’

‘Oh, she’s my daughter. She got married two years ago. I’m expecting to be a grandmother almost any day.’

‘That ages us a bit.’

She gave a laugh.

‘Betty’s twenty–two. It was nice of you to ask me to lunch, George. After all, it would be silly to have any feelings about something that happened so long ago as all that.’

‘Idiotic’

‘We weren’t fitted to one another and it’s lucky we found it out before it was too late. Of course I was foolish, but then I was very young. Have you been happy too?’

‘I think I can say I’ve been a success.’

‘Oh, well, that’s probably all the happiness you were capable of.’

He smiled in appreciation of her shrewdness. And then, putting the whole matter aside easily, she began to talk of other things. Though the courts had given him custody of their son, he, unable to look after him, had allowed his mother to have him. The boy had emigrated at eighteen and was now married. He was a stranger to George Moon, and he was aware that if he met him in the street he would not recognize him. He was too sincere to pretend that he took much interest in him. They talked of him, however, for a while, and then they talked of actors and plays.

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘I must be running away. I’ve had a lovely lunch. It’s been fun meeting you, George. Thanks so much.’

He put her into a taxi and taking off his hat walked down Piccadilly by himself. He thought her quite a pleasant, amusing woman: he laughed to think that he had ever been madly in love with her. There was a smile on his lips when he spoke again to Tom Saffary.

‘She was a damned good–looking girl when I married her. That was the trouble. Though, of course, if she hadn’t been I’d never have married her. They were all after her like flies round a honey–pot. We used to have awful rows. And at last I caught her out. Of course I divorced her.’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes, but I know I was a damned fool to do it.’ He leaned forward. ‘My dear Saffary, I know now that if I’d had any sense I’d have shut my eyes. She’d have settled down and made me an excellent wife.’

He wished he were able to explain to his visitor how grotesque it had seemed to him when he sat and talked with that jolly, comfortable, and good–humoured woman that he should have made so much fuss about what now seemed to him to matter so little.

‘But one has one’s honour to think of,’ said Saffary.

‘Honour be damned. One has one’s happiness to think of. Is one’s honour really concerned because one’s wife hops into bed with another man? We’re not crusaders, you and I, or Spanish grandees. I liked my wife. I don’t say I haven’t had other women. I have. But she had just that something that none of the others could give me. What a fool I was to throw away what I wanted more than anything in the world because I couldn’t enjoy exclusive possession of it!’

‘You’re the last man I should ever have expected to hear speak like that.’

George Moon smiled thinly at the embarrassment that was so clearly expressed on Saffary’s fat troubled face.

‘I’m probably the first man you’ve heard speak the naked truth,’ he retorted.

‘Do you mean to say that if it were all to do over again you would act differently?’

‘If I were twenty–seven again I suppose I should be as big a fool as I was then. But if I had the sense I have now I’ll tell you what I’d do if I found my wife had been unfaithful to me. I’d do just what you did last night: I’d give her a damned good hiding and let it go at that.’

‘Are you asking me to forgive Violet?’

The Resident shook his head slowly and smiled.

‘No. You’ve forgiven her already. I’m merely advising you not to cut off your nose to spite your face.’

Saffary gave him a worried look. It disconcerted him to know that this cold precise man should see in his heart emotions which seemed so unnatural to himself that he thrust them out of his consciousness.

‘You don’t know the circumstances,’ he said. ‘Knobby and I were almost like brothers. I got him his job. He owed everything to me. And except for me Violet might have gone on being a governess for the rest of her life. It seemed such a waste; I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. If you know what I mean, it was pity that first made me take any notice of her. Don’t you think it’s a bit thick that when you’ve been thoroughly decent with people they should go out of their way to do the dirty on you? It’s such awful ingratitude.’

‘Oh, my dear boy, one mustn’t expect gratitude. It’s a thing that no one has a right to. After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It’s the purest form of happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you get it, well, it’s like a bonus on shares on which you’ve already received a dividend; it’s grand, but you mustn’t look upon it as your due.’

Saffary frowned. He was perplexed. He could not quite make it out that George Moon should think so oddly about things that it had always seemed to him there were no two ways of thinking about. After all there were limits. I mean, if you had any sense of decency you had to behave like a tuan. There was your own self–respect to think of. It was funny that George Moon should give reasons that looked so damned plausible for doing something that, well, damn it, you had to admit you’d be only too glad to do if you could see your way to it. Of course George Moon was queer. No one ever quite understood him.

‘Knobby Clarke is dead, Saffary. You can’t be jealous of him any more. No one knows a thing except you and me and your wife, and tomorrow I’m going away for ever. Why don’t you let bygones be bygones?’

‘Violet would only despise me.’

George Moon smiled and, unexpectedly on that prim, fastidious face, his smile had a singular sweetness.

‘I know her very little. I always thought her a very nice woman. Is she as detestable as that?’

Saffary gave a start and reddened to his ears.

‘No, she’s an angel of goodness. It’s me who’s detestable for saying that of her.’ His voice broke and he gave a little sob. ‘God knows I only want to do the right thing.’

‘The right thing is the kind thing.’

Saffary covered his face with his hands. He could not curb the emotion that shook him.

‘I seem to be giving, giving all the time, and no one does a God–damned thing for me. It doesn’t matter if my heart is broken, I must just go on.’ He drew the back of his hand across his eyes and sighed deeply. ‘I’ll forgive her.’ George Moon looked at him reflectively for a little.

‘I wouldn’t make too much of a song and dance about it, if I were you,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to walk warily. She’ll have a lot to forgive too.’

‘Because I hit her, you mean? I know, that was awful of me.’

‘Not a bit. It did her a power of good. I didn’t mean that. You’re behaving generously, old boy, and, you know, one needs a devil of a lot of tact to get people to forgive one one’s generosity. Fortunately women are frivolous and they very quickly forget the benefits conferred upon them. Otherwise, of course, there’d be no living with them.’

Saffary looked at him open–mouthed.

‘Upon my word you’re a rum ‘un, Moon,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you seem as hard as nails and then you talk so that one thinks you’re almost human, and then, just as one thinks one’s misjudged you and you have a heart after all, you come out with something that just shocks one. I suppose that’s what they call a cynic’

‘I haven’t deeply considered the matter,’ smiled George Moon, ‘but if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it’s unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it’s absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it’s pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I’m a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep.’

When Tom Saffary left the room the Resident lit himself with deliberation the last cigarette he meant to smoke before tiffin. It was a new role for him to reconcile an angry husband with an erring wife and it caused him a discreet amusement. He continued to reflect upon human nature. A wintry smile hovered upon his thin and pallid lips. He recalled with what interest in the dry creeks of certain places along the coast he had often stood and watched the Jumping Johnnies. There were hundreds of them sometimes, from little things of a couple of inches long to great fat fellows as long as your foot. They were the colour of the mud they lived in. They sat and looked at you with large round eyes and then with a sudden dash buried themselves in their holes. It was extraordinary to see them scudding on their flappers over the surface of the mud. It teemed with them. They gave you a fearful feeling that the mud itself was mysteriously become alive and an atavistic terror froze your heart when you remembered that such creatures, but gigantic and terrible, were once the only inhabitants of the earth. There was something uncanny about them, but something amusing too. They reminded you very much of human beings. It was quite entertaining to stand there for half an hour and observe their gambols.

George Moon took his topee off the peg and not displeased with life stepped out into the sunshine.

P. & O.

Mrs Hamlyn lay on her long chair and lazily watched the passengers come along the gangway. The ship had reached Singapore in the night, and since dawn had been taking on cargo; the winches had been grinding away all day, but by now her ears were accustomed to their insistent clamour. She had lunched at the Europe, and for lack of anything better to do had driven in a rickshaw through the gay, multitudinous streets of the city. Singapore is the meeting–place of many races. The Malays, though natives of the soil, dwell uneasily in towns, and are few; and it is the Chinese, supple, alert, and industrious, who throng the streets; the dark–skinned Tamils walk on their silent, naked feet, as though they were but brief sojourners in a strange land, but the Bengalis, sleek and prosperous, are easy in their surroundings, and self–assured; the sly and obsequious Japanese seem busy with pressing and secret affairs; and the English in their topees and white ducks, speeding past in motorcars or at leisure in their rickshaws, wear a nonchalant and careless air. The rulers of these teeming peoples take their authority with a smiling unconcern. And now, tired and hot, Mrs Hamlyn waited for the ship to set out again on her long journey across the Indian Ocean.

She waved a rather large hand, for she was a big woman, to the doctor and Mrs Linsell as they came on board. She had been on the ship since she left Yokohama, and had watched with acid amusement the intimacy which had sprung up between the two. Linsell was a naval officer who had been attached to the British Embassy at Tokio, and she had wondered at the indifference with which he took the attentions that the doctor paid his wife. Two men came along the gangway, new passengers, and she amused herself by trying to discover from their demeanour whether they were single or married. Close by, a group of men were sitting together on rattan chairs, planters she judged by their khaki suits and wide–brimmed double felt hats, and they kept the deck–steward busy with their orders. They were talking loudly and laughing, for they had all drunk enough to make them somewhat foolishly hilarious, and they were evidently giving one of their number a send–off; but Mrs Hamlyn could not tell which it was that was to be a fellow–passenger. The time was growing short. More passengers arrived, and then Mr Jephson with dignity strolled up the gangway. He was a consul and was going home on leave. He had joined the ship at Shanghai and had immediately set about making himself agreeable to Mrs Hamlyn. But just then she was disinclined for anything in the nature of a flirtation. She frowned as she thought of the reason which was taking her back to England. She would be spending Christmas at sea, far from anyone who cared two straws about her, and for a moment she felt a little twist of her heartstrings; it vexed her that a subject which she was so resolute to put away from her should so constantly intrude on her unwilling mind.

But a warning bell clanged loudly, and there was a general movement among the men who sat beside her.

‘Well, if we don’t want to be taken on we’d better be toddling,’ said one of them.

They rose and walked towards the gangway. Now that they were all shaking hands she saw who it was that they had come to see the last of. There was nothing very interesting about the man on whom Mrs Hamlyn’s eyes rested, but because she had nothing better to do she gave him more than a casual glance. He was a big fellow, well over six feet high, broad and stout; he was dressed in a bedraggled suit of khaki drill and his hat was battered and shabby. His friends left him, but they bandied chaff from the quay, and Mrs Hamlyn noticed that he had a strong Irish brogue; his voice was full, loud, and hearty.

Mrs Linsell had gone below and the doctor came and sat down beside Mrs Hamlyn. They told one another their small adventures of the day. The bell sounded again and presently the ship slid away from the wharf. The Irishman waved a last farewell to his friends, and then sauntered towards the chair on which he had left papers and magazines. He nodded to the doctor.

’Is that someone you know?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘I was introduced to him at the club before tiffin. His name is Gallagher. He’s a planter.’

After the hubbub of the port and the noisy bustle of departure, the silence of the ship was marked and grateful. They steamed slowly past green–clad, rocky cliffs (the P. & O. anchorage was in a charming and secluded cove), and came out into the main harbour. Ships of all nations lay at anchor, a great multitude, passenger boats, tugs, lighters, tramps; and beyond, behind the breakwater, you saw the crowded masts, a bare straight forest, of the native junks. In the soft light of the evening the busy scene was strangely touched with mystery, and you felt that all those vessels, their activity for the moment suspended, waited for some event of a peculiar significance.

Mrs Hamlyn was a bad sleeper and when the dawn broke she was in the habit of going on deck. It rested her troubled heart to watch the last faint stars fade before the encroaching day, and at that early hour the sea had often an immobility which seemed to make all earthly sorrows of little consequence. The light was wan, and there was a pleasant shiver in the air. But next morning, when she went to the end of the promenade deck, she found that someone was up before her. It was Mr Gallagher. He was watching the low coast of Sumatra which the sunrise like a magician seemed to call forth from the dark sea. She was startled and a little vexed, but before she could turn away he had seen her and nodded.

‘Up early,’ he said. ‘Have a cigarette?’

He was in pyjamas and slippers. He took his case from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She hesitated. She had on nothing but a dressing gown and a little lace cap which she had put over her tousled hair, and she knew that she must look a sight; but she had her reasons for scourging her soul.

‘I suppose a woman of forty has no right to mind how she looks,’ she smiled, as though he must know what vain thoughts occupied her. She took the cigarette. ‘But you’re up early too.’

‘I’m a planter. I’ve had to get up at five in the morning for so many years that I don’t know how I’m going to get out of the habit.’

‘You’ll not find it will make you very popular at home.’

She saw his face better now that it was not shadowed by a hat. It was agreeable without being handsome. He was of course much too fat, and his features, which must have been good enough when he was a young man, were thickened. His skin was red and bloated. But his dark eyes were merry; and though he could not have been less than five and forty his hair was black and thick. He gave you the impression of great strength. He was a heavy, ungraceful, commonplace man, and Mrs Hamlyn, except for the promiscuity of ship–board, would never have thought it worth while to talk to him.

‘Are you going home on leave?’ she hazarded.

‘No, I’m going home for good.’

His black eyes twinkled. He was of a communicative turn, and before it was time for Mrs Hamlyn to go below in order to have her bath he had told her a good deal about himself. He had been in the Federated Malay States for twenty–five years, and for the last ten had managed an estate in Selatan. It was a hundred miles from anything that could be described as civilization and the life had been lonely; but he had made money; during the rubber boom he had done very well, and with an astuteness which was unexpected in a man who looked so happy–go–lucky he had invested his savings in government stock. Now that the slump had come he was prepared to retire.

‘What part of Ireland do you come from?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘Galway.’

Mrs Hamlyn had once motored through Ireland and she had a vague recollection of a sad and moody town with great stone warehouses, deserted and crumbling, which faced the melancholy sea. She had a sensation of greenness and of soft rain, of silence and of resignation. Was it here that Mr Gallagher meant to spend the rest of his life? He spoke of it with boyish eagerness. The thought of his vitality in that grey world of shadows was so incongruous that Mrs Hamlyn was intrigued.

‘Does your family live there?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got no family. My mother and father are dead. So far as I know I haven’t a relation in the world.’

He had made all his plans, he had been making them for twenty–five years, and he was pleased to have someone to talk to of all these things that he had been obliged for so long only to talk to himself about. He meant to buy a house and he would keep a motor–car. He was going to breed horses. He didn’t much care about shooting; he had shot a lot of big game during his first years in the F.M.S.; but now he had lost his zest. He didn’t see why the beasts of the jungle should be killed; he had lived in the jungle so long. But he could hunt.

‘Do you think I’m too heavy?’ he asked.

Mrs Hamlyn, smiling, looked him up and down with appraising eyes.

‘You must weigh a ton,’ she said.

He laughed. The Irish horses were the best in the world, and he’d always kept pretty fit. You had a devil of a lot of walking exercise on a rubber estate and he’d played a good deal of tennis. He’d soon get thin in Ireland. Then he’d marry. Mrs Hamlyn looked silently at the sea coloured now with the tenderness of the sunrise. She sighed.

‘Was it easy to drag up all your roots? Is there no one you regret leaving behind? I should have thought after so many years, however much you’d looked forward to going home, when the time came at last to go it must have given you a pang.’

‘I was glad to get out. I was fed up. I never want to see the country again or anyone in it.’

One or two early passengers now began to walk round the deck and Mrs Hamlyn, remembering that she was scantily clad, went below.

During the next day or two she saw little of Mr Gallagher, who passed his time in the smoking–room. Owing to a strike the ship was not touching at Colombo and passengers settled down to a pleasant voyage across the Indian Ocean. They played deck games, they gossiped about one another, they flirted. The approach of Christmas gave them an occupation, for someone had suggested that there should be a fancy–dress dance on Christmas Day, and the ladies set about making their dresses. A meeting was held of the first–class passengers to decide whether the second–class passengers should be invited, and notwithstanding the heat the discussion was animated. The ladies said that the second–class passengers would only feel ill–at–ease. On Christmas Day it was expected that they would drink more than was good for them and unpleasantness might ensue. Everyone who spoke insisted that there was in his (or her) mind no idea of class distinction, no one would be so snobbish as to think there was any difference between first– and second–class passengers as far as that went, but it would really be kinder to the second–class passengers not to put them in a false position. They would enjoy themselves much more if they had a party of their own in the second–class cabin. On the other hand, no one wanted to hurt their feelings, and of course one had to be more democratic nowadays (this was in reply to the wife of a missionary in China who said she had travelled on the P. & O. for thirty–five years and she had never heard of the second–class passengers being invited to a dance in the first–class saloon) and even though they wouldn’t enjoy it, they might like to come. Mr Gallagher, dragged unwillingly from the card–table, because it had been foreseen that the voting would be close, was asked his opinion by the consul. He was taking home in the second–class a man who had been employed on his estate. He raised his massive bulk from the couch on which he sat.

‘As far as I’m concerned I’ve only got this to say: I’ve got the man who was looking after our engines with me. He’s a rattling good fellow, and he’s just as fit to come to your party as I am. But he won’t come because I’m going to make him so drunk on Christmas Day that by six o’clock he’ll be fit for nothing but to be put to bed.’

Mr Jephson, the consul, gave a distorted smile. On account of his official position, he had been chosen to preside at the meeting and he wished the matter to be taken seriously. He was a man who often said that if a thing was worth doing it was worth doing well.

‘I gather from your observations,’ he said, not without acidity, ‘that the question before the meeting does not seem to you of great importance.’

‘I don’t think it matters a tinker’s curse,’ said Gallagher, with twinkling eyes.

Mrs Hamlyn laughed. The scheme was at last devised to invite the second–class passengers, but to go to the captain privily and point out to him the advisability of withholding his consent to their coming into the first–class saloon. It was on the evening of the day on which this happened that Mrs Hamlyn, having dressed for dinner, came on deck at the same time as Mr Gallagher.

‘Just in time for a cocktail, Mrs Hamlyn,’ he said jovially. ‘I’d like one. To tell you the truth I need cheering up.’

‘Why?’ he smiled.

Mrs Hamlyn thought his smile attractive, but she did not want to answer his question.

‘I told you the other morning,’ she answered cheerfully. ‘I’m forty.’

‘I never met a woman who insisted on the fact so much.’

They went into the lounge and the Irishman ordered a dry Martini for her and a gin pahit for himself. He had lived too long in the East to drink anything else.

‘You’ve got hiccups,’ said Mrs Hamlyn.

‘Yes, I’ve had them all the afternoon,’ he answered carelessly. ‘It’s rather funny, they came on just as we got out of sight of land.’

‘I daresay they’ll pass off after dinner.’

They drank, the second bell rang, and they went into the dining–saloon.

‘You don’t play bridge?’ he said, as they parted.

‘No.’

Mrs Hamlyn did not notice that she saw nothing of Gallagher for two or three days. She was occupied with her own thoughts. They crowded upon her when she was sewing; they came between her and the novel with which she sought to cheat their insistence. She had hoped that as the ship took her further away from the scene of her unhappiness, the torment of her mind would be eased; but contrariwise, each day that brought her nearer England increased her distress. She looked forward with dismay to the bleak emptiness of the life that awaited her; and then, turning her exhausted wits from a prospect that made her flinch, she considered, as she had done she knew not how many times before, the situation from which she had fled.

She had been married for twenty years. It was a long time and of course she could not expect her husband to be still madly in love with her; she was not madly in love with him; but they were good friends and they understood one another. Their marriage, as marriages go, might very well have been looked upon as a success. Suddenly she discovered that he had fallen in love. She would not have objected to a flirtation, he had had those before, and she had chaffed him about them; he had not minded that, it somewhat flattered him, and they had laughed together at an inclination which was neither deep nor serious. But this was different. He was in love as passionately as a boy of eighteen. He was fifty–two. It was ridiculous. It was indecent. And he loved without sense or prudence; by the time the hideous fact was forced upon her all the foreigners in Yokohama knew it. After the first shock of astonished anger, for he was the last man from whom such a folly might have been expected, she tried to persuade herself that she could have understood, and so have forgiven, if he had fallen in love with a girl. Middle–aged men often make fools of themselves with flappers, and after twenty years in the Far East she knew that the fifties were the dangerous age for men. But he had no excuse. He was in love with a woman eight years older than herself. It was grotesque, and it made her, his wife, perfectly absurd. Dorothy Lacom was hard on fifty. He had known her for eighteen years, for Lacom, like her own husband, was a silk merchant in Yokohama. Year in, year out, they had seen one another three or four times a week, and once, when they happened to be in England together, had shared a house at the seaside. But nothing! Not till a year ago had there been anything between them but a chaffing friendship. It was incredible. Of course Dorothy was a handsome woman; she had a good figure, over–developed, perhaps, but still comely; with bold black eyes and a red mouth and lovely hair; but all that she had had years before. She was forty–eight. Forty–eight!

Mrs Hamlyn tackled her husband at once. At first he swore that there was not a word of truth in what she accused him of, but she had her proofs; he grew sulky; and at last he admitted what he could no longer deny. Then he said an astonishing thing.

‘Why should you care?’ he asked.

It maddened her. She answered him with angry scorn. She was voluble, finding in the bitterness of her heart wounding things to say. He listened to her quietly.

‘I’ve not been such a bad husband to you for the twenty years we’ve been married. For a long time now we’ve only been friends. I have a great affection for you, and this hasn’t altered it in the very smallest degree. I’m giving Dorothy nothing that I take away from you.’

‘But what have you to complain of in me?’

‘Nothing. No man could want a better wife.’

‘How can you say that when you have the heart to treat me so cruelly?’

‘I don’t want to be cruel to you. I can’t help myself.’

‘But what on earth made you fall in love with her?’

‘How can I tell? You don’t think I wanted to, do you?’

‘Couldn’t you have resisted?’

‘I tried. I think we both tried.’

‘You talk as though you were twenty. Why, you’re both middle–aged people. She’s eight years older than I am. It makes me look such a perfect fool.’

He did not answer. She did not know what emotions seethed in her heart. Was it jealousy that seemed to clutch at her throat, anger, or was it merely wounded pride?

‘I’m not going to let it go on. If only you and she were concerned I would divorce you, but there’s her husband, and then there are the children. Good heavens, does it occur to you that if they were girls instead of boys she might be a grandmother by now?’

‘Easily.’

‘What a mercy that we have no children!’

He put out an affectionate hand as though to caress her, but she drew back with horror.

‘You’ve made me the laughing stock of all my friends. For all our sakes I’m willing to hold my tongue, but only on the condition that everything stops now, at once, and for ever.’

He looked down and played reflectively with a Japanese knick–knack that was on the table.

‘I’ll tell Dorothy what you say,’ he replied at last.

She gave him a little bow, silently, and walked past him out of the room. She was too angry to observe that she was somewhat melodramatic.

She waited for him to tell the result of his interview with Dorothy Lacom, but he made no further reference to the scene. He was quiet, polite, and silent; and at last she was obliged to ask him.

‘Have you forgotten what I said to you the other day?’ she inquired, frigidly.

‘No. I talked to Dorothy. She wished me to tell you that she is desperately sorry that she has caused you so much pain. She would like to come and see you, but she is afraid you wouldn’t like it.’

‘What decision have you come to?’

He hesitated. He was very grave, but his voice trembled a little.

‘I’m afraid there’s no use in our making a promise we shouldn’t be able to keep.’

‘That settles it then,’ she answered.

‘I think I should tell you that if you brought an action for divorce we should have to contest it. You would find it impossible to get the necessary evidence and you would lose your case.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of doing that. I shall go back to England and consult a lawyer. Nowadays these things can be managed fairly easily, and I shall throw myself on your generosity. I dare say you will enable me to get my freedom without bringing Dorothy Lacom into the matter.’

He sighed.

‘It’s an awful muddle, isn’t it? I don’t want you to divorce me, but of course I’ll do anything I can to meet your wishes.’

‘What on earth do you expect me to do?’ she cried, her anger rising again. ‘Do you expect me to sit still and be made a damned fool of?’

‘I’m awfully sorry to put you in a humiliating position.’ He looked at her with harassed eyes. ‘I’m quite sure we didn’t want to fall in love with one another. We’re both of us very conscious of our age. Dorothy, as you say, is old enough to be a grandmother and I’m a baldish, stoutish gentleman of fifty–two. When you fall in love at twenty you think your love will last for ever, but at fifty you know so much, about life and about love, and you know that it will last so short a time.’ His voice was low and rueful. It was as though before his mind’s eye he saw the sadness of autumn and the leaves falling from the trees. He looked at her gravely. ‘And at that age you feel that you can’t afford to throw away the chance of happiness which a freakish destiny has given you. In five years it will certainly be over, and perhaps in six months. Life is rather drab and grey, and happiness is so rare. We shall be dead so long.’

It gave Mrs Hamlyn a bitter sensation of pain to hear her husband, a matter–of–fact and practical man, speak in a strain which was quite new to her. He had gained on a sudden a wistful and tragic personality of which she knew nothing. The twenty years during which they had lived together had no power over him and she was helpless in face of his determination. She could do nothing but go, and now, resentfully determined to get the divorce with which she had threatened him, she was on her way to England.

The smooth sea, upon which the sun beat down so that it shone like a sheet of glass, was as empty and hostile as life in which there was no place for her. For three days no other craft had broken in upon the solitariness of that expanse. Now and again its even surface was scattered for the twinkling of an eye by the scurry of flying fish. The heat was so great that even the most energetic of passengers had given up deck games, and now (it was after luncheon) such as were not resting in their cabins lay about on chairs. Linsell strolled towards her and sat down.

‘Where’s Mrs Linsell?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘Oh, I don’t know. She’s about somewhere.’

His indifference exasperated her. Was it possible that he did not see that his wife and the surgeon were falling in love with one another? Yet, not so very long ago, he must have cared. Their marriage had been romantic. They had become engaged when Mrs Linsell was still at school and he little more than a boy. They must have been a charming, handsome pair, and their youth and their mutual love must have been touching. And now, after so short a time, they were tired of one another. It was heartbreaking. What had her husband said?

‘I suppose you’re going to live in London when you get home?’ asked Linsell lazily, for something to say.

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Hamlyn.

It was hard to reconcile herself to the fact that she had nowhere to go, and where she lived mattered not in the least to anyone alive. Some association of ideas made her think of Gallagher. She envied the eagerness with which he was returning to his native land, and she was touched, and at the same time amused, when she remembered the exuberant imagination he showed in describing the house he meant to live in and the wife he meant to marry. Her friends in Yokohama, apprised in confidence of her determination to divorce her husband, had assured her that she would marry again. She did not much want to enter a second time upon a state which had once so disappointed her, and besides, most men would think twice before they suggested marriage to a woman of forty. Mr Gallagher wanted a buxom young person,

‘Where is Mr Gallagher?’ she asked the submissive Linsell. ‘I haven’t seen him for the last day or two.’

‘Didn’t you know? He’s ill.’

‘Poor thing. What’s the matter with him?’

‘He’s got hiccups.’

Mrs Hamlyn laughed.

‘Hiccups don’t make one ill, do they?’

‘The surgeon is rather worried. He’s tried all sorts of things, but he can’t stop them.’

‘How very odd.’

She thought no more about it, but next morning, chancing upon the surgeon, she asked him how Mr Gallagher was. She was surprised to see his boyish, cheerful face darken and grow perplexed.

‘I’m afraid he’s very bad, poor chap.’

‘With hiccups?’ she cried in amazement.

It was a disorder that really it was impossible to take seriously.

‘You see, he can’t keep any food down. He can’t sleep. He’s fearfully exhausted. I’ve tried everything I can think of.’ He hesitated. ‘Unless I can stop them soon–I don’t quite know what’ll happen.’

Mrs Hamlyn was startled.

‘But he’s so strong. He seemed so full of vitality.’

‘I wish you could see him now.’

‘Would he like me to go and see him?’

‘Come along.’

Gallagher had been moved from his cabin into the ship’s hospital, and as they approached it they heard a loud hiccup. The sound, perhaps owing to its connexion with insobriety, had in it something ludicrous. But Gallagher’s appearance gave Mrs Hamlyn a shock. He had lost flesh and the skin hung about his neck in loose folds; under the sunburn his face was pale. His eyes, before full of fun and laughter, were haggard and tormented. His great body was shaken incessantly by the hiccups and now there was nothing ludicrous in the sound; to Mrs Hamlyn, for no reason that she knew, it seemed strangely terrifying. He smiled when she came in.

‘I’m sorry to see you like this,’ she said.

‘I shan’t die of it, you know,’ he gasped. ‘I shall reach the green shores of Erin all right.’

There was a man sitting beside him and he rose as they entered.

‘This is Mr Pryce,’ said the surgeon. ‘He was in charge of the machinery on Mr Gallagher’s estate.’

Mrs Hamlyn nodded. This was the second–class passenger to whom Gallagher had referred when they had discussed the party which was to be given on Christmas Day. He was a very small man, but sturdy, with a pleasantly impudent countenance and an air of self–assurance.

‘Are you glad to be going home?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘You bet I am, lady,’ he answered.

The intonation of the few words told Mrs Hamlyn that he was a cockney and, recognizing the cheerful, sensible, good–humoured, and careless type, her heart warmed to him.

‘You’re not Irish?’ she smiled.

‘Not me, miss. London’s my ‘ome and I shan’t be sorry to see it again, I can tell you.’

Mrs Hamlyn never thought it offensive to be called miss.

‘Well, sir, I’ll be getting along,’ he said to Gallagher, with the beginning of a gesture as though he were going to touch a cap which he hadn’t got on.

Mrs Hamlyn asked the sick man whether she could do anything for him and in a minute or two left him with the doctor. The little cockney was waiting outside the door.

‘Can I speak to you a minute or two, miss?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

The hospital cabin was aft and they stood, leaning against the rail, and looked down on the well–deck where lascars and stewards off duty were lounging about on the covered hatches.

‘I don’t know exactly ‘ow to begin,’ said Pryce, uncertainly, a serious look strangely changing his lively, puckered face. ‘I’ve been with Mr Gallagher for four years now and a better gentleman you wouldn’t find in a week of Sundays.’

He hesitated again.

‘I don’t like it and that’s the truth.’

‘What don’t you like?’

‘Well, if you ask me ‘e’s for it, and the doctor don’t know it. I told ’im, but ’e won’t listen to a word I say.’

‘You mustn’t be too depressed, Mr Pryce. Of course the doctor’s young, but I think he’s quite clever, and people don’t die of hiccups, you know. I’m sure Mr Gallagher will be all right in a day or two.’

‘You know when it came on? Just as we was out of sight of land. She said ‘e’d never see ’is ‘ome.’

Mrs Hamlyn turned and faced him. She stood a good three inches taller than he.

‘What do you mean?’

‘My belief is, it’s a spell been put on ’im, if you understand what I mean. Medicine’s going to do ’im no good. You don’t know them Malay women like what I do.’

For a moment Mrs Hamlyn was startled, and because she was startled she shrugged her shoulders and laughed. ‘Oh, Mr Pryce, that’s nonsense.’

‘That’s what the doctor said when I told ’im. But you mark my words, ‘e’ll die before we see land again.’

The man was so serious that Mrs Hamlyn, vaguely uneasy, was against her will impressed.

‘Why should anyone cast a spell on Mr Gallagher?’ she asked. ‘Well, it’s a bit awkward speakin’ of it to a lady.’

‘Please tell me.’

Pryce was so embarrassed that at another time Mrs Hamlyn would have had difficulty in concealing her amusement.

‘Mr Gallagher’s lived a long time up–country, if you understand what I mean, and of course it’s lonely, and you know what men are, miss.’

‘I’ve been married for twenty years,’ she replied, smiling.

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. The fact is he had a Malay girl living with him. I don’t know ‘ow long, ten or twelve years, I think. Well, when ’e made up ’is mind to come ‘ome for good she didn’t say nothing. She just sat there. He thought she’d carry on no end, but she didn’t. Of course ’e provided for ‘er all right, ’e gave ‘er a little ‘ouse for herself, an’ ’e fixed it up so as so much should be paid ‘er every month. ’E wasn’t mean, I will say that for ’im, an’ she knew all along as ‘e’d be going some time. She didn’t cry or anything. When ’e packed up all ’is things and sent them off, she just sat there an’ watched ’em go. And when ’e sold ’is furniture to the Chinks she never said a word. He’d give ‘er all she wanted. And when it was time for ’im to go so as to catch the boat she just kep’ on sitting on the steps of the bungalow, you know, and she just looked an’ said nothing. He wanted to say good–bye to ‘er, same as anyone would, an’, would you believe it? she never even moved. “Aren’t you going to say good–bye to me?” he says. A rare funny look come over ‘er face. And do you know what she says? “You go,” she says; they ‘ave a funny way of talking, them natives, not like we ‘ave, “you go,” she says, “but I tell you that you will never come to your own country. When the land sinks into the sea, death will come upon you, an’ before them as goes with you sees the land again, death will have took you.” It gave me quite a turn.’

‘What did Mr Gallagher say?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘Oh, well, you know what ’e is. He just laughed. “Always merry and bright,” ’e says and ’e jumps into the motor, an’ off we go.’

Mrs Hamlyn saw the bright and sunny road that ran through the rubber estates, with their trim green trees, carefully spaced, and their silence, and then wound its way up hill and down through the tangled jungle. The car raced on, driven by a reckless Malay, with its white passengers, past Malay houses that stood away from the road among the coconut trees, sequestered and taciturn, and through busy villages where the market–place was crowded with dark–skinned little people in gay sarongs. Then towards evening it reached the trim, modern town, with its clubs and its golf links, its well–ordered rest–house, its white people, and its railway–station, from which the two men could take the train to Singapore. And the woman sat on the steps of the bungalow, empty till the new manager moved in, and watched the road down which the car had panted, watched the car as it sped on, and watched till at last it was lost in the shadow of the night.

‘What was she like?’ Mrs Hamlyn asked.

‘Oh, well, to my way of thinking them Malay women are all very much alike, you know,’ Pryce answered. ‘Of course she wasn’t so young any more, and you know what they are, them natives, they run to fat something terrible.’

‘Fat?’

The thought, absurdly enough, filled Mrs Hamlyn with dismay. ‘Mr Gallagher was always one to do himself well, if you understand what I mean.’

The idea of corpulence at once brought Mrs Hamlyn back to common sense. She was impatient with herself because for an instant she had seemed to accept the little cockney’s suggestion.

‘It’s perfectly absurd, Mr Pryce. Fat women can’t throw spells on people at a distance of a thousand miles. In fact life is very difficult for a fat woman anyway.’

‘You can laugh, miss, but unless something’s done, you mark my words, the governor’s for it. And medicine ain’t goin’ to save him, not white man’s medicine.’

‘Pull yourself together, Mr Pryce. This fat lady had no particular grievance against Mr Gallagher. As these things are done in the East he seems to have treated her very well. Why should she wish him any harm?’

‘We don’t know ‘ow they look at things. Why, a man can live there for twenty years with one them natives, and d’you think ’e knows what’s goin’ on in that black heart of hers? Not ’im!’

She could not smile at his melodramatic language, for his intensity was impressive. And she knew, if anyone did, that the hearts of men, whether their skins are yellow or white or brown, are incalculable.

‘But even if she felt angry with him, even if she hated him and wanted to kill him, what could she do?’ It was strange that Mrs Hamlyn with her questions was trying now, unconsciously, to reassure herself. ‘There’s no poison that could start working after six or seven days.’

‘I never said it was poison.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Pryce,’ she smiled, ‘but I’m not going to believe in a magic spell, you know.’

‘You’ve lived in the East?’

‘Off and on for twenty years.’

‘Well, if you can say what they can do and what they can’t, it’s more than I can.’ He clenched his fist and beat it on the rail with sudden, angry violence. ‘I’m fed up with the bloody country. It’s got on my nerves, that’s what it is. We’re no match for them, us white men, and that’s a fact. If you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go an’ ‘ave a tiddley. I’ve got the jumps.’

He nodded abruptly and left her. Mrs Hamlyn watched him, a sturdy, shuffling little man in a shabby khaki, slither down the companion into the waist of the ship, walk across it with bent head, and disappear into the second–class saloon. She did not know why he left with her a vague uneasiness. She could not get out of her mind that picture of a stout woman, no longer young, in a sarong, a coloured jacket, and gold ornaments, who sat on the steps of a bungalow looking at an empty road. Her heavy face was painted, but in her large, tearless eyes there was no expression. The men who drove in the car were like schoolboys going home for the holidays. Gallagher gave a sigh of relief. In the early morning, under the bright sky, his spirits bubbled. The future was like a sunny road that wandered through a wide–flung, wooded plain.

Later in the day Mrs Hamlyn asked the doctor how his patient did. The doctor shook his head.

‘I’m done. I’m at the end of my tether.’ He frowned unhappily. ‘It’s rotten luck, striking a case like this. It would be bad enough at home, but on board ship...’

He was an Edinburgh man, but recently qualified, and he was taking his voyage as a holiday before settling down to practice. He felt himself aggrieved. He wanted to have a good time and, faced with this mysterious illness, he was worried to death. Of course he was inexperienced, but he was doing everything that could be done and it exasperated him to suspect that the passengers thought him an ignorant fool.

‘Have you heard what Mr Pryce thinks?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘I never heard such rot. I told the captain and he’s right up in the air. He doesn’t want it talked about. He thinks it’ll upset the passengers.’

‘I’ll be as silent as the grave.’

The surgeon looked at her sharply.

‘Of course you don’t believe that there can be any truth in nonsense of that sort?’ he asked.

‘Of course not.’ She looked out at the sea, which shone, blue and oily and still, all round them. ‘I’ve lived in the East a long time,’ she added. ‘Strange things happen there.’

‘This is getting on my nerves,’ said the doctor.

Near them two little Japanese gentlemen were playing deck quoits. They were trim and neat in their tennis shirts, white trousers, and buckram shoes. They looked very European, they even called the score to one another in English, and yet somehow to look at them filled Mrs Hamlyn at that moment with a vague disquiet. Because they seemed to wear so easily a disguise there was about them something sinister. Her nerves too were on edge.

And presently, no one quite knew how, the notion spread through the ship that Gallagher was bewitched. While the ladies sat about on their deck–chairs, stitching away at the costumes they were making for the fancy–dress party on Christmas Day, they gossiped about it in undertones, and the men in the smoking–room talked of it over their cocktails. A good many of the passengers had lived long in the East and from the recesses of their memory they produced strange and inexplicable stories. Of course it was absurd to think seriously that Gallagher was suffering from a malignant spell, such things were impossible, and yet this and that was a fact and no one had been able to explain it. The doctor had to confess that he could suggest no cause for Gallagher’s condition, he was able to give a physiological explanation, but why these terrible spasms should have suddenly assailed him he did not say. Feeling vaguely to blame, he tried to defend himself.

‘Why, it’s the sort of case you might never come across in the whole of your practice,’ he said. ‘It’s rotten luck.’

He was in wireless communication with passing ships, and suggestions for treatment came from here and there.

‘I’ve tried everything they tell me,’ he said irritably. ‘The doctor of the Japanese boat advised adrenalin. How the devil does he expect me to have adrenalin in the middle of the Indian Ocean?’

There was something impressive in the thought of this ship speeding through a deserted sea, while to her from all parts came unseen messages. She seemed at that moment strangely alone and yet the centre of the world. In the lazaret the sick man, shaken by the cruel spasms, gasped for life. Then the passengers became conscious that the ship’s course was altered, and they heard that the captain had made up his mind to put in at Aden. Gallagher was to be landed there and taken to the hospital, where he could have attention which on board was impossible. The chief engineer received orders to force his engines. The ship was an old one and she throbbed with the greater effort. The passengers had grown used to the sound and feel of her engines, and now the greater vibration shook their nerves with a new sensation. It would not pass into each one’s unconsciousness, but beat on their sensibilities so that each felt a personal concern. And still the wide sea was empty of traffic, so they seemed to traverse an empty world. And now the uneasiness which had descended upon the ship, but which no one had been willing to acknowledge, became a definite malaise. The passengers grew irritable, and people quarrelled over trifles which at another time would have seemed insignificant. Mr Jephson made his hackneyed jokes, but no one any longer repaid him with a smile. The Linsells had an altercation, and Mrs Linsell was heard late at night walking round the deck with her husband and uttering in a low, tense voice a stream of vehement reproaches. There was a violent scene in the smoking–room one night over a game of bridge, and the reconciliation which followed it was attended with general intoxication. People talked little of Gallagher, but he was seldom absent from their thoughts. They examined the route map. The doctor said now that Gallagher could not live more than three or four days, and they discussed acrimoniously what was the shortest time in which Aden could be reached. What happened to him after he was landed was no affair of theirs; they did not want him to die on board.

Mrs Hamlyn saw Gallagher every day. With the suddenness with which after tropical rain in the spring you seem to see the herbage grow before your very eyes, she saw him go to pieces. Already his skin hung loosely on his bones, and his double chin was like the wrinkled wattle of a turkey–cock. His cheeks were sunken. You saw now how large his frame was, and through the sheet under which he lay his bony structure was like the skeleton of a prehistoric giant. For the most part he lay with his eyes closed, torpid with morphia, but shaken still with terrible spasms, and when now and again he opened his eyes they were preternaturally large; they looked at you vaguely, perplexed and troubled, from the depths of their bony sockets. But when, emerging from his stupor, he recognized Mrs Hamlyn, he forced a gallant smile to his lips.

‘How are you, Mr Gallagher?’ she said.

‘Getting along, getting along. I shall be all right when we get out of this confounded heat. Lord, how I look forward to a dip in the Atlantic. I’d give anything for a good long swim. I want to feel the cold grey sea of Gal way beating against my chest.’

Then the hiccup shook him from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet. Mr Pryce and the stewardess shared the care of him. The little cockney’s face wore no longer its look of impudent gaiety, but instead was sullen.

‘The captain sent for me yesterday,’ he told Mrs Hamlyn when they were alone. ‘He gave me a rare talking to.’

‘What about?’

‘He said ’e wouldn’t ‘ave all this hoodoo stuff. He said it was frightening the passengers and I’d better keep a watch on me tongue or I’d ‘ave ’im to reckon with. It’s not my doing. I never said a word except to you and the doctor.’ ‘It’s all over the ship.’

‘I know it is. D’you think it’s only me that’s saying it? All them Lascars and the Chinese, they all know what’s the matter with him. You don’t think you can teach them much, do you? They know it ain’t a natural illness.’

Mrs Hamlyn was silent. She knew through the amahs of some of the passengers that there was no one on the ship, except the whites, who doubted that the woman whom Gallagher had left in distant Selantan was killing him with her magic. All were convinced that as they sighted the barren rocks of Arabia his soul would be parted from his body.

‘The captain says if he hears of me trying any hanky–panky he’ll confine me to my cabin for the rest of the voyage,’ said Pryce, suddenly, a surly frown on his puckered face.

‘What do you mean by hanky–panky?’

He looked at her for a moment fiercely as though she too were an object of the anger he felt against the captain.

‘The doctor’s tried every damned thing he knows, and he’s wirelessed all over the place, and what good ‘as ’e done? Tell me that. Can’t ’e see the man’s dying? There’s only one way to save him now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s magic what’s killing ’im, and it’s only magic what’ll save him. Oh, don’t say it can’t be done. I’ve seen it with me own eyes.’ His voice rose, irritable and shrill. ‘I’ve seen a man dragged from the jaws of death, as you might say, when they got in a pawang, what we call a witch–doctor, an’ ’e did ’is little tricks. I seen it with me own eyes, I tell you.’

Mrs Hamlyn did not speak. Pryce gave her a searching look.

‘One of them Lascars on board, he’s a witch–doctor, same as the pawang that we ‘ave in the F.M.S. An’ ’e says he’ll do it. Only he must ‘ave a live animal. A cock would do.’

‘What do you want a live animal for?’ Mrs Hamlyn asked, frowning a little.

The cockney looked at her with quick suspicion.

‘If you take my advice you won’t know anything about it. But I tell you what, I’m going to leave no stone unturned to save my governor. An’ if the captain ‘ears of it and shuts me up in me cabin, well, let ’im.’

At that moment Mrs Linsell came up and Pryce with his quaint gesture of salute left them. Mrs Linsell wanted Mrs Hamlyn to fit the dress she had been making herself for the fancy–dress ball, and on the way down to the cabin she spoke to her anxiously of the possibility that Mr Gallagher might die on Christmas Day. They could not possibly have the dance if he did. She had told the doctor that she would never speak to him again if this happened, and the doctor had promised her faithfully that he would keep the man alive over Christmas Day somehow.

‘It would be nice for him, too,’ said Mrs Linsell.

‘For whom?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn.

‘For poor Mr Gallagher. Naturally no one likes to die on Christmas Day. Do they?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Mrs Hamlyn.

That night, after she had been asleep a little while, she awoke weeping. It dismayed her that she should cry in her sleep. It was as though then the weakness of the flesh mastered her, and, her will broken, she were defenceless against a natural sorrow. She turned over in her mind, as so often before, the details of the disaster which had so profoundly affected her; she repeated the conversations with her husband, wishing she had said this and blaming herself because she had said the other. She wished with all her heart that she had remained in comfortable ignorance of her husband’s infatuation, and asked herself whether she would not have been wiser to pocket her pride and shut her eyes to the unwelcome truth. She was a woman of the world, and she knew too well how much more she lost in separating herself from her husband than his love; she lost the settled establishment and the assured position, the ample means and the support of a recognized background. She had known of many separated wives, living equivocally on smallish incomes, and knew how quickly their friends found them tiresome. And she was lonely. She was as lonely as the ship that throbbed her hasting way through an unpeopled sea, and lonely as the friendless man who lay dying in the ship’s lazaret. Mrs Hamlyn knew that her thoughts had got the better of her now and that she would not easily sleep again. It was very hot in her cabin. She looked at the time; it was between four and half past; she must pass two mortal hours before broke the reassuring day.

She slipped into a kimono and went on deck. The night was sombre and although the sky was unclouded no stars were visible. Panting and shaking, the old ship under full steam lumbered through the darkness. The silence was uncanny. Mrs Hamlyn with bare feet groped her way slowly along the deserted deck.

It was so black that she could see nothing. She came to the end of the promenade deck and leaned against the rail. Suddenly she started and her attention was fixed, for on the lower deck she caught a fitful glow. She leaned forward cautiously. It was a little fire, and she saw only the glow because the naked backs of men, crouched round, hid the flame. At the edge of the circle she divined, rather than saw, a stocky figure in pyjamas. The rest were natives, but this was a European. It must be Pryce and she guessed immediately that some dark ceremony of exorcism was in progress. Straining her ears she heard a low voice muttering a string of secret words. She began to tremble. She was aware that they were too intent upon their business to think that anyone was watching them, but she dared not move. Suddenly, rending the sultry silence of the night like a piece of silk violently torn in two, came the crowing of a cock. Mrs Hamlyn almost shrieked. Mr Pryce was trying to save the life of his friend and master by a sacrifice to the strange gods of the East. The voice went on, low and insistent. Then in the dark circle there was a movement, something was happening, she knew not what; there was a cluck–cluck from the cock, angry and frightened, and then a strange, indescribable sound; the magician was cutting the cock’s throat; then silence; there were vague doings that she could not follow, and in a little while it looked as though someone were stamping out the fire. The figures she had dimly seen were dissolved in the night and all once more was still. She heard again the regular throbbing of the engines.

Mrs Hamlyn stood still for a little while, strangely shaken, and then walked slowly along the deck. She found a chair and lay down in it. She was trembling still. She could only guess what had happened. She did not know how long she lay there, but at last she felt that the dawn was approaching. It was not yet day, and it was no longer night. Against the darkness of the sky she could now see the ship’s rail. Then she saw a figure come towards her. It was a man in pyjamas.

‘Who’s that?’ she cried nervously.

‘Only the doctor,’ came a friendly voice.

‘Oh! What are you doing here at this time of night?’

‘I’ve been with Gallagher.’ He sat down beside her and lit a cigarette. ‘I’ve given him a good strong hypodermic and he’s quiet now.’

‘Has he been very ill?’

‘I thought he was going to pass out. I was watching him, and suddenly he started up on his bed and began to talk Malay. Of course I couldn’t understand a thing. He kept on saying one word over and over again.’

‘Perhaps it was a name, a woman’s name.’

‘He wanted to get out of bed. He’s a damned powerful man even now. By George, I had a struggle with him. I was afraid he’d throw himself overboard. He seemed to think someone was calling him.’

‘When was that?’ asked Mrs Hamlyn slowly.

‘Between four and half past. Why?’

‘Nothing.’

She shuddered.

Later in the morning when the ship’s life was set upon its daily round, Mrs Hamlyn passed Pryce on the deck, but he gave her a brief greeting and walked on with quickly averted gaze. He looked tired and overwrought. Mrs Hamlyn thought again of the fat woman, with golden ornaments in her thick, black hair, who sat on the steps of the deserted bungalow and looked at the road which ran through the trim lines of the rubber trees.

It was fearfully hot. She knew now why the night had been so dark. The sky was no longer blue, but a dead, level white; its surface was too even to give the effect of cloud; it was as though in the upper air the heat hung like a pall. There was no breeze, and the sea, as colourless as the sky, was smooth and shining like the dye in a dyer’s vat. The passengers were listless, when they walked round the deck they panted, and beads of sweat broke out on their foreheads. They spoke in undertones. Something uncanny and disquieting brooded over the ship, and they could not bring themselves to laugh. A feeling of resentment arose in their hearts; they were alive and well, and it exasperated them that, so near, a man should be dying and by the fact (which was after all no concern of theirs) so mysteriously affect them. A planter in the smoking–room over a gin sling said brutally what most of them felt, though none had confessed.

‘Well, if he’s going to peg out,’ he said, ‘I wish he’d hurry up and get it over. It gives me the creeps.’

The day was interminable. Mrs Hamlyn was thankful when the dinner hour arrived. So much time, at all events, was passed. She sat at the doctor’s table.

‘When do we reach Aden?’ she asked.

‘Some time tomorrow. The captain says we shall sight land between five and six in the morning.’

She gave him a sharp look. He stared at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes and reddened. He remembered that the woman, the fat woman sitting on the bungalow steps, had said that Gallagher would never see the land. Mrs Hamlyn wondered whether he, the sceptical, matter–of–fact young doctor, was wavering at last. He frowned a little and then, as though he sought to pull himself together, looked at her once more.

‘I shan’t be sorry to hand over my patient to the hospital people at Aden, I can tell you,’ he said.

Next day was Christmas Eve. When Mrs Hamlyn awoke from a troubled sleep the dawn was breaking. She looked out of her port–hole and saw that the sky was clear and silvery; during the night the haze had melted, and the morning was brilliant. With a lighter heart she went on deck. She walked as far forward as she could go. A late star twinkled palely close to the horizon. There was a shimmer on the sea as though a loitering breeze passed playful fingers over its surface. The light was wonderfully soft, tenuous like a budding wood in spring, and crystalline so that it reminded you of the bubbling of water in a mountain brook. She turned to look at the sun rising rosy in the east, and saw coming towards her the doctor. He wore his uniform; he had not been to bed all night; he was dishevelled and he walked, with bowed shoulders, as though he were dog–tired. She knew at once that Gallagher was dead. When he came up to her she saw that he was crying. He looked so young then that her heart went out to him. She took his hand.

‘You poor dear,’ she said. ‘You’re tired out.’

‘I did all I could,’ he said. ‘I wanted so awfully to save him.’

His voice shook and she saw that he was almost hysterical.

‘When did he die?’ she asked.

He closed his eyes, trying to control himself, and his lips trembled.

‘A few minutes ago.’

Mrs Hamlyn sighed. She found nothing to say. Her gaze wandered across the calm, dispassionate, and ageless sea. It stretched on all sides of them as infinite as human sorrow. But on a sudden her eyes were held, for there, ahead of them, on the horizon was something which looked like a precipitous and massy cloud. But its outline was too sharp to be a cloud’s. She touched the doctor on the arm.

‘What’s that?’

He looked at it for a moment and under his sunburn she saw him grow white.

‘Land.’

Once more Mrs Hamlyn thought of the fat Malay woman who sat silent on the steps of Gallagher’s bungalow. Did she know?

They buried him when the sun was high in the heavens. They stood on the lower deck and on the hatches, the first–and second–class passengers, the white stewards and the European officers. The missionary read the burial service.

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’

Pryce looked down at the deck with knit brows. His teeth were tight clenched. He did not grieve, for his heart was hot with anger. The doctor and the consul stood side by side. The consul bore to a nicety the expression of an official regret, but the doctor, clean–shaven now, in his neat fresh uniform and his gold braid, was pale and harassed. From him Mrs Hamlyn’s eyes wandered to Mrs Linsell. She was pressed against her husband, weeping, and he was holding her hand tenderly. Mrs Hamlyn did not know why this sight singularly affected her. At that moment of grief, her nerves distraught, the little woman went by instinct to the protection and support of her husband. But then Mrs Hamlyn felt a little shudder pass through her and she fixed her eyes on the seams in the deck, for she did not want to see what was toward. There was a pause in the reading. There were various movements. One of the officers gave an order. The missionary’s voice continued:

‘Forasmuch as it has pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commend his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up its dead.’

Mrs Hamlyn felt the hot tears flow down her cheeks. There was a dull splash. The missionary’s voice went on.

When the service was finished the passengers scattered; the second–class passengers returned to their quarters and a bell rang to summon them to luncheon. But the first–class passengers sauntered aimlessly about the promenade deck. Most of the men made for the smoking–room and sought to cheer themselves with whiskies and sodas and with gin slings. But the consul put up a notice on the board outside the dining–saloon summoning the passengers to a meeting. Most of them had an idea for what purpose it was called, and at the appointed hour they assembled. They were more cheerful than they had been for a week and they chattered with a gaiety which was only subdued by a mannerly reserve. The consul, an eyeglass in his eye, said that he had gathered them together to discuss the question of the fancy–dress dance on the following day. He knew they all had the deepest sympathy for Mr Gallagher and he would have proposed that they should combine to send an appropriate message to the deceased’s relatives, but his papers had been examined by the purser and no trace could be found of any relative or friend with whom it was possible to communicate. The late Mr Gallagher appeared to be quite alone in the world. Meanwhile he (the consul) ventured to offer his sincere sympathy to the doctor, who, he was quite sure, had done everything that was possible in the circumstances.

‘Hear, hear,’ said the passengers.

They had all passed through a very trying time, proceeded the consul, and to some it might seem that it would be more respectful to the deceased’s memory if the fancy–dress ball were postponed till New Year’s Eve. This, however, he told them frankly was not his view, and he was convinced that Mr Gallagher himself would not have wished it. Of course it was a question for the majority to decide. The doctor got up and thanked the consul and the passengers for the kind things that had been said of him, it had of course been a very trying time, but he was authorized by the captain to say that the captain expressly wished that all the festivities to be carried out on Christmas Day as though nothing had happened. He (the doctor) told them in confidence that the captain felt the passengers had got into a rather morbid state, and thought it would do them all good if they had a jolly good time on Christmas Day. Then the missionary’s wife rose and said they mustn’t think only of themselves; it had been arranged by the Entertainment Committee that there should be a Christmas Tree for the children, immediately after the first–class passengers’ dinner, and the children had been looking forward to seeing everyone in fancy–dress; it would be too bad to disappoint them; she yielded to no one in her respect for the dead, and she sympathized with anyone who felt too sad to think of dancing just then, her own heart was very heavy, but she did feel it would be merely selfish to give way to a feeling which could do no good to anyone. Let them think of the little ones. This very much impressed the passengers. They wanted to forget the brooding terror which had hung over the boat for so many days, they were alive and they wanted to enjoy themselves; but they had an uneasy notion that it would be decent to exhibit a certain grief. It was quite another matter if they could do as they wished from altruistic motives. When the consul called for a show of hands everyone but Mrs Hamlyn, and one old lady who was rather rheumatic, held up an eager arm.

‘The ayes have it,’ said the consul. ‘And I venture to congratulate the meeting on a very sensible decision.’

It was just going to break up when one of the planters got on his feet and said he wished to offer a suggestion. Under the circumstances didn’t they think it would be as well to invite the second–class passengers? They had all come to the funeral that morning. The missionary jumped up and seconded the motion. The events of the last few days had drawn them all together, he said, and in the presence of death all men were equal. The consul again addressed them. This matter had been discussed at a previous meeting and the conclusion had been reached that it would be pleasanter for the second–class passengers to have their own party, but circumstances alter cases, and he was distinctly of opinion that their previous decision should be reversed.

‘Hear, hear,’ said the passengers.

A wave of democratic feeling swept over them and the motion was carried by acclamation. They separated light–heartedly, they felt charitable and kindly. Everyone stood everyone else drinks in the smoking–room.

And so, on the following evening, Mrs Hamlyn put on her fancy–dress. She had no heart for the gaiety before her, and for a moment had thought of feigning illness, but she knew no one would believe her, and was afraid to be thought affected. She was dressed as Carmen and she could not resist the vanity of making herself as attractive as possible. She darkened her eyelashes and rouged her cheeks. The costume suited her. When the bugle sounded and she went into the saloon she was received with flattering surprise. The consul (always a humorist) was dressed as a ballet–girl and was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter. The missionary and his wife, self–conscious but pleased with themselves, were very grand as Manchus. Mrs Linsell, as Columbine, showed all that was possible of her very pretty legs. Her husband was an Arab sheik and the doctor was a Malay sultan.

A subscription had been collected to provide champagne at dinner and the meal was hilarious. The company had provided crackers in which were paper hats of various shapes and these the passengers put on. There were paper streamers too which they threw at one another and little balloons which they beat from one to the other across the room. They laughed and shouted. They were very gay. No one could say that they were not having a good time. As soon as dinner was finished they went into the saloon, where the Christmas Tree, with candles lit, was ready, and the children were brought in, shrieking with delight, and given presents. Then the dance began. The second–class passengers stood about shyly round the part of the deck reserved for dancing and occasionally danced with one another.

‘I’m glad we had them,’ said the consul, dancing with Mrs Hamlyn. ‘I’m all for democracy, and I think they’re very sensible to keep themselves to themselves.’

But she noticed that Pryce was not to be seen, and when an opportunity presented asked one of the second–class passengers where he was.

‘Blind to the world,’ was the answer. ‘We put him to bed in the afternoon and locked him up in his cabin.’

The consul claimed her for another dance. He was very facetious. Suddenly Mrs Hamlyn felt that she could not bear it any more, the noise of the amateur band, the consul’s jokes, the gaiety of the dancers. She knew not why, but the merriment of those people passing on their ship through the night and the solitary sea affected her on a sudden with horror. When the consul released her she slipped away and, with a look to see that no one had noticed her, ascended the companion to the boat deck. Here everything was in darkness. She walked softly to a spot where she knew she would be safe from all intrusion. But she heard a faint laugh and she caught sight in a hidden corner of a Columbine and a Malay sultan. Mrs Linsell and the doctor had resumed already the flirtation which the death of Gallagher had interrupted.

Already all those people had put out of their minds with a kind of ferocity the thought of that poor lonely man who had so strangely died in their midst. They felt no compassion for him but resentment rather, because on his account they had been ill–at–ease. They seized upon life avidly. They made their jokes, they flirted, they gossiped. Mrs Hamlyn remembered what the consul had said, that among Mr Gallagher’s papers no letters could be found, not the name of a single friend to whom the news of his death might be sent, and she knew not why this seemed to her unbearably tragic. There was something mysterious in a man who could pass through the world in such solitariness. When she remembered how he had come on deck in Singapore, so short a while since, in such rude health, full of vitality, and his arrogant plans for the future, she was seized with dismay. Those words of the burial service filled her with a solemn awe: Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower... Year in, year out, he had made his plans for the future, he wanted to live so much and he had so much to live for, and then just when he stretched out his hand–oh, it was pitiful; it made all the other distresses of the world of small account. Death with its mystery was the only thing that really mattered. Mrs Hamlyn leaned over the rail and looked at the starry sky. Why did people make themselves unhappy? Let them weep for the death of those they loved, death was terrible always, but for the rest, was it worth while to be wretched, to harbour malice, to be vain and uncharitable? She thought again of herself and her husband and the woman he so strangely loved. He too had said that we live to be happy so short a time and we are so long dead. She pondered long and intently, and suddenly, as summer lightning flashes across the darkness of the night, she made a discovery which filled her with tremulous surprise; for she found that in her heart was no longer anger with her husband nor jealousy of her rival. A notion dawned on some remote horizon of her consciousness and like the morning sun suffused her soul with a tender, blissful glow. Out of the tragedy of that unknown Irishman’s death she gathered elatedly the courage for a desperate resolution. Her heart beat quickly, she was impatient to carry it into effect. A passion for self–sacrifice seized her.

The music had stopped, the ball was over; most of the passengers would have gone to bed and the rest would be in the smoking–room. She went down to her cabin and met no one on the way. She took her writing pad and wrote a letter to her husband:

My dear,

It is Christmas Day and I want to tell you that my heart is filled with kindly thoughts towards both of you. I have been foolish and unreasonable. I think we should allow those we care for to be happy in their own way, and we should care for them enough not to let it make us unhappy. I want you to know that I grudge you none of the joy that has so strangely come into your life. I am no longer jealous, nor hurt, nor vindictive. Do not think I shall be unhappy or lonely. If ever you feel that you need me, come to me, and I will welcome you with a cheerful spirit and without reproach or ill–will. I am most grateful for all the years of happiness and of tenderness that you gave me, and in return I wish to offer you an affection which makes no claim on you and is, I hope, utterly disinterested. Think kindly of me and be happy, happy, happy.

She signed her name and put the letter into an envelope. Though it would not go till they reached Port Said she wanted to place it at once in the letter–box. When she had done this, beginning to undress, she looked at herself in the glass. Her eyes were shining and under her rouge her colour was bright. The future was no longer desolate, but bright with a fair hope. She slipped into bed and fell at once into a sound and dreamless sleep.

EPISODE

It was quite a small party, because our hostess liked general conversation; we never sat down to dinner more than eight, and generally only six, and after dinner when we went up to the drawing–room the chairs were so arranged that it was impossible for two persons to go into a huddle in a corner and so break things up. I was glad on arriving to find that I knew everyone. There were two nice clever women besides our hostess and two men besides myself. One was my friend Ned Preston. Our hostess made it a point never to ask wives with their husbands, because she said each cramped the other’s style and if they didn’t like to come separately they needn’t come at all. But since her food and her wine were good and the talk almost always entertaining they generally came. People sometimes accused her of asking husbands more often than wives, but she defended herself by saying that she couldn’t possibly help it because more men were husbands than women were wives.

Ned Preston was a Scot, a good–humoured, merry soul, with a gift for telling a story, sometimes too lengthily, for he was uncommonly loquacious, but with dramatic intensity. He was a bachelor with a small income which sufficed for his modest needs, and in this he was lucky since he suffered from that form of chronic tuberculosis which may last for years without killing you, but which prevents you from working for your living. Now and then he would be ill enough to stay in bed for two or three weeks, but then he would get better and be as gay, cheerful, and talkative as ever. I doubt whether he had enough money to live in an expensive sanatorium and he certainly hadn’t the temperament to suit himself to its life. He was worldly. When he was well he liked to go out, out to lunch, out to dinner, and he liked to sit up late into the night smoking his pipe and drinking a good deal of whisky. If he had been content to live the life of an invalid he might have been alive now, but he wasn’t; and who can blame him? He died at the age of fifty–five of a haemorrhage which he had one night after coming home from some house where, he may well have flattered himself, he was the success of the party.

He had that febrile vitality that some consumptives have, and was always looking for an occupation to satisfy his desire for activity. I don’t know how he heard that at Wormwood Scrubs they were in want of prison visitors, but the idea took his fancy so he went to the Home Office and saw the official in charge of prisons to offer his services. The job is unpaid, and though a number of persons are willing to undertake it, either from compassion or curiosity, they are apt to grow tired of it, or find it takes up too much time, and the prisoners whose problems, interests and future they have been concerned with are left somewhat in the lurch. The Home Office people consequently are wary of taking on anyone who does not look as if he would persevere, and they make careful inquiries into the applicant’s antecedents, character, and general suitability. Then he is given a trial, is discreetly watched, and if the impression is unfavourable is politely thanked and told that his services are no longer required. But Ned Preston satisfied the dour and shrewd official who interviewed him that he was in every way reliable, and from the beginning he got on well with the governor, the warders, and the prisoners. He was entirely lacking in class–consciousness, so prisoners, whatever their station in life, felt at ease with him. He neither preached nor moralized. He had never done a criminal, or even a mean, thing in his life, but he treated the crime of the prisoners he had to deal with as though it were an illness like his own tuberculosis which was a nuisance you had to put up with, but which it did no good to talk about.

Wormwood Scrubs is a first offenders’ prison and it is a building, grim and cold, of forbidding appearance. Ned took me over it once and I had goose–flesh as the gates were unlocked for us and we went in. We passed through the halls in which the men were working.

‘If you see any pals of yours take no notice of them,’ Ned said to me. ‘They don’t like it.’

‘Am I likely to see any pals of mine?’ I asked drily.

‘You never can tell. I shouldn’t be surprised if you had had friends who’d passed bad cheques once too often or were caught in a compromising situation in one of the parks. You’d be surprised how often I run across chaps I’ve met out at dinner.’

One of Ned’s duties was to see prisoners through the first difficult days of their confinement. They were often badly shaken by their trial and sentence; and when, after the preliminary proceedings they had to go through on entering the jail, the stripping, the bath, the medical examination and the questioning, the getting into prison clothes, they were led into a cell and locked up, they were apt to break down. Sometimes they cried hysterically; sometimes they could neither eat nor sleep. Ned’s business then was to cheer them, and his breezy manner, his natural kindliness, often worked wonders. If they were anxious about their wives and children he would go to see them and if they were destitute provide them with money. He brought them news so that they might get over the awful feeling that they were shut away from the common interests of their fellow–men. He read the sporting papers to be able to tell them what horse had won an important race or whether the champion had won his fight. He would advise them about their future, and when the time approached for their release see what jobs they were fitted for and then persuade employers to give them a chance to make good.

Since everyone is interested in crime it was inevitable that sooner or later, with Ned there, the conversation should turn upon it. It was after dinner and we were sitting comfortably in the drawing–room with drinks in our hands.

‘Had any interesting cases at the Scrubs lately, Ned?’ I asked him.

‘No, nothing much.’

He had a high, rasping voice and his laugh was a raucous cackle. He broke into it now.

‘I went to see an old girl today who was a packet of fun. Her husband’s a burglar. The police have known about him for years, but they’ve never been able to get him till just now. Before he did a job he and his wife concocted an alibi, and though he’s been arrested three or four times and sent up for trial, the police have never been able to break it and he’s always got off. Well, he was arrested again a little while ago, but he wasn’t upset, the alibi he and his wife had made up was perfect and he expected to be acquitted as he’d been before. His wife went into the witness–box and to his utter amazement she didn’t give the alibi and he was convicted. I went to see him. He wasn’t so much worried at being in gaol as puzzled by his wife not having spoken up, and he asked me to go and see her and ask what the game was. Well I went, and d’you know what she said to me? She said: “Well, sir, it’s like this; it was such a beautiful alibi I just couldn’t bear to waste it.”’

Of course we all laughed. The story–teller likes an appreciative audience, and Ned Preston was never disinclined to hold the floor. He narrated two or three more anecdotes. They tended to prove a point he was fond of making, that in what till we all got democratic in England were called the lower orders there was more passion, more romance, more disregard of consequences than could ever be found in the well–to–do and presumably educated classes, whom prudence has made timid and convention inhibited.

‘Because the working man doesn’t read much,’ he said, ‘because he has no great gift for expressing himself, you think he has no imagination. You’re wrong. He’s extravagantly imaginative. Because he’s a great husky brute you think he has no nerves. You’re wrong again. He’s a bundle of nerves.’

Then he told us a story which I shall tell as best I can in my own words.

Fred Manson was a good–looking fellow, tall, well–made, with blue eyes, good features, and a friendly, agreeable smile, but what made him remarkable so that people turned round in the streets to stare at him was that he had a thick head of hair, with a great wave in it, of a deep rich red. It was really a great beauty. Perhaps it was this that gave him so sensual a look. His maleness was like a heady perfume. His eyebrows were thick, only a little lighter that his hair, and he was lucky enough not to have the ugly skin that so disfigures red–heads. His was a smooth olive. His eyes were bold, and when he smiled or laughed, which in the healthy vitality of his youth he did constantly, his expression was wonderfully alluring. He was twenty–two and he gave you the rather pleasant impression of just loving to be alive. It was inevitable that with such looks and above all with that troubling sexuality he should have success with women. He was charming, tender, and passionate, but immensely promiscuous. He was not exactly callous or brazen, he had a kindly nature, but somehow or other he made it quite clear to the objects of his passing fancy that all he wanted was a little bit of fun and it was impossible for him to remain faithful to anyone.

Fred was a postman. He worked in Brixton. It is a densely populated part of London, and has the curious reputation of harbouring more criminals than any other suburb because trams run to it from across the river all night long, so that when a man has done a job of housebreaking in the West End he can be sure of getting home without difficulty. Fred liked his job. Brixton is a district of innumerable streets lined with little houses inhabited by the people who work in the neighbourhood and also by clerks, shop–assistants, skilled workers of one sort or another whose jobs take them every day across the river. He was strong and healthy and it was a pleasure to him to walk from street to street delivering the letters. Sometimes there would be a postal packet to hand in or a registered letter that had to be signed for, and then he would have the opportunity of seeing people. He was a sociable creature. It was never long before he was well known on whatever round he was assigned to. After a time his job was changed. His duty then was to go to the red pillar–boxes into which the letters were put, empty them, and take the contents to the main post–office of the district. His bag would be pretty heavy sometimes by the time he was through, but he was proud of his strength and the weight only made him laugh.

One day he was emptying a box in one of the better streets, a street of semi–detached houses, and had just closed his bag when a girl came running along.

‘Postman,’ she cried, ‘take this letter, will you. I want it to go by this post most particularly.’

He gave her his good–natured smile.

‘I never mind obliging a lady,’ he said, putting down his bag and opening it.

‘I wouldn’t trouble you, only it’s urgent,’ she said as she handed him the letter she had in her hand.

‘Who is it to–a feller?’ he grinned. ‘None of your business.’

‘All right, be haughty. But I tell you this, he’s no good. Don’t you trust him.’

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said.

‘So they tell me.’

He took off his cap and ran his hand through his mop of curling red hair. The sight of it made her gasp.

‘Where d’you get your perm?’ she asked with a giggle.

‘I’ll show you one of these days if you like.’

He was looking down at her with his amused eyes, and there was something about him that gave her a funny little feeling in the pit of her stomach.

‘Well, I must be on my way,’ he said. ‘If I don’t get on with the job pretty damn quick I don’t know what’ll happen to the country.’

‘I’m not detaining you,’ she said coolly.

‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ he answered.

He gave her a look that made her heart beat nineteen to the dozen and she felt herself blushing all over. She turned away and ran back to the house. Fred noticed it was four doors away from the pillar–box. He had to pass it and as he did so he looked up. He saw the net curtains twitch and knew she was watching. He felt pleased with himself. During the next few days he looked at the house whenever he passed it, but never caught a glimpse of the girl. One afternoon he ran across her by chance just as he was entering the street in which she lived.

‘Hullo,’ he said, stopping.

‘Hullo.’

She blushed scarlet. ‘Haven’t seen you about lately.’

‘You haven’t missed much.’

‘That’s what you think.’

She was prettier than he remembered, dark–haired, dark–eyed, rather tall, slight, with a good figure, a pale skin, and very white teeth. ‘What about coming to the pictures with me one evening?’

‘Taking a lot for granted, aren’t you?’

‘It pays,’ he said with his impudent, charming grin.

She couldn’t help laughing.

‘Not with me, it doesn’t.’

‘Oh, come on. One’s only young once.’

There was something so attractive in him that she couldn’t bring herself to give him a saucy answer.

‘I couldn’t really. My people wouldn’t like me going out with a fellow I don’t know. You see, I’m the only one they have and they think a rare lot of me. Why, I don’t even know your name.’

‘Well, I can tell you, can’t I? Fred. Fred Manson. Can’t you say you’re going to the pictures with a girl friend?’

She had never felt before what she was feeling then. She didn’t know if it was pain or pleasure. She was strangely breathless.

‘I suppose I could do that.’

They fixed the night, the time, and the place. Fred was waiting for her and they went in, but when the picture started and he put his arm round her waist, without a word, her eyes fixed on the screen, she quietly took it away. He took hold of her hand, but she withdrew it. He was surprised. That wasn’t the way girls usually behaved. He didn’t know what one went to the pictures for if it wasn’t to have a bit of a cuddle. He walked home with her after the show. She told him her name. Grace Carter. Her father had a shop of his own in the Brixton Road, he was a draper and he had four assistants.

‘He must be doing well,’ said Fred.

‘He doesn’t complain.’

Gracie was a student at London University. When she got her degree she was going to be a school teacher.

‘What d’you want to do that for when there’s a good business waiting for you?’

‘Pa doesn’t want me to have anything to do with the shop–not after the education he’s given me. He wants me to better myself, if you know what I mean.’

Her father had started life as an errand boy, then became a draper’s assistant, and because he was hard–working, honest, and intelligent was now owner of a prosperous little business. Success had given him grand ideas for his only child. He didn’t want her to have anything to do with trade. He hoped she’d marry a professional man perhaps, or at least someone in the City. Then he’d sell the business and retire, and Gracie would be quite the lady.

When they reached the corner of her street Gracie held out her hand.

‘You’d better not come to the door,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?’

‘I am not.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘You’ll come to the pictures again, won’t you?’

‘I think I’d better not.’

‘Oh, come on.’

There was such a warm urgency in his voice that she felt as though her knees would give way.

‘Will you behave if I do?’ He nodded. ‘Promise?’

‘Swop me bob.’

He scratched his head when he left her. Funny girl. He’d never met anyone quite like her. Superior, there was no doubt about that. There was something in her voice that got you. It was warm and soft. He tried to think what it was like. It was like as if the words kissed you. Sounded silly, that did, but that’s just what it was like.

From then on they went to the pictures once or twice a week. After a while she allowed him to put his arm round her waist and to hold her hand, but she never let him go farther than that.

‘Have you ever been kissed by a fellow?’ he asked her once.

‘No, I haven’t,’ she said simply. ‘My ma’s funny, she says you’ve got to keep a man’s respect.’

‘I’d give anything in the world just to kiss you, Grade.’

‘Don’t be so silly.’

‘Won’t you let me just once?’ She shook her head. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I like you too much,’ she said hoarsely, and then walked quickly away from him.

It gave him quite a turn. He wanted her as he’d never wanted a woman before. What she’d said finished him. He’d been thinking of her a lot, and he’d looked forward to the evenings they spent together as he’d never looked forward to anything in his life. For the first time he was uncertain of himself. She was above him in every way, what with her father making money hand over fist and her education and everything, and him only a postman. They had made a date for the following Friday night and he was in a fever of anxiety lest she shouldn’t come. He repeated to himself over and over again what she’d said: perhaps it meant that she’d made up her mind to drop him. When at last he saw her walking along the street he almost sobbed with relief. That evening he neither put his arm round her nor took her hand and when he walked her home he never said a word.

‘You’re very quiet tonight, Fred,’ she said at last. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

He walked a few steps before he answered.

‘I don’t like to tell you.’

She stopped suddenly and looked up at him. There was terror on her face.

‘Tell me whatever it is,’ she said unsteadily.

‘I’m gone, I can’t help myself, I’m so stuck on you I can’t see straight. I didn’t know what it was to love like I love you.’

‘Oh, is that all? You gave me such a fright. I thought you were going to say you were going to be married.’

‘Me? Who d’you take me for? It’s you I want to marry.’

‘Well, what’s to prevent you, silly?’

‘Gracie! D’you mean it?’

He flung his arms round her and kissed her full on the mouth. She didn’t resist. She returned his kiss and he felt in her a passion as eager as his own.

They arranged that Gracie should tell her parents that she was engaged to him and that on the Sunday he should come and be introduced to them. Since the shop stayed open late on Saturday and by the time Mr Carter got home he was tired out, it was not till after dinner on Sunday that Gracie broke her news. George Carter was a brisk, not very tall man, but sturdy, with a high colour, who with increasing prosperity had put on weight. He was more than rather bald and he had a bristle of grey moustache. Like many another employer who had risen from the working class he was a slave–driver and he got as much work out of his assistants for as little money as was possible. He had an eye for every thing and he wouldn’t put up with any nonsense, but he was reasonable and even kindly, so that they did not dislike him. Mrs Carter was a quiet, nice woman, with a pleasant face and the remains of good looks. They were both in the early fifties, for they had married late after ‘walking out’ for nearly ten years.

They were very much surprised when Gracie told them what she had to tell, but not displeased.

‘You’re a sly one,’ said her father. ‘Why, I never suspected for a minute you’d taken up with anyone. Well, I suppose it had to come sooner or later. What’s his name?’

‘Fred Manson.’

‘A fellow you met at college?’

‘No. You must have seen him about. He clears our pillar–box. He’s a postman.’

‘Oh, Gracie,’ cried Mrs Carter, ‘you can’t mean it. You can’t marry a common postman, not after all the education we’ve given you.’

For an instant Mr Carter was speechless. He got redder in the face than ever.

‘Your ma’s right, my girl,’ he burst out now. ‘You can’t throw yourself away like that. Why, it’s ridiculous.’

‘I’m not throwing myself away. You wait till you see him.’

Mrs Carter began to cry.

‘It’s such a come–down. It’s such a humiliation. I shall never be able to hold up my head again.’

‘Oh, Ma, don’t talk like that. He’s a nice fellow and he’s got a good job.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she moaned.

‘How d’you get to know him?’ Mr Carter interrupted. ‘What sort of family’s he got?’

‘His pa drives one of the post–office vans,’ Gracie answered defiantly.

‘Working–class people.’

‘Well, what of it? His pa’s worked twenty–four years for the post–office and they think a lot of him.’

Mrs Carter was biting the corner of her handkerchief.

‘Gracie, I want to tell you something. Before your pa and me got married I was in domestic service. He wouldn’t ever let me tell you because he didn’t want you to be ashamed of me. That’s why we was engaged all those years. The lady I was with said she’d leave me something in her will if I stayed with her till she passed away.’

‘It was that money that gave me my start,’ Mr Carter broke in. ‘Except for that I’d never have been where I am today. And I don’t mind telling you you’re ma’s the best wife a man ever had.’

‘I never had a proper education,’ Mrs Carter went on, ‘but I always was ambitious. The proudest moment of my life was when your pa said we could afford a girl to help me and he said then: “The time’ll come when you have a cook and a house–maid,” and he’s been as good as his word, and now you’re going back to what I come from. I’d set my heart on your marrying a gentleman.’

She began crying again. Gracie loved her parents and couldn’t bear to see them so distressed.

‘I’m sorry, Ma, I knew it would be a disappointment to you, but I can’t help it, I can’t really. I love him so. I love him so terribly. I’m sure you’ll like him when you see him. We’re going for a walk on the Common this afternoon. Can’t I bring him back to supper?’

Mrs Carter gave her husband a harassed look. He sighed.

‘I don’t like it and it’s no good pretending I do, but I suppose we’d better have a look at him.’

Supper passed off better than might have been expected. Fred wasn’t shy, and he talked to Gracie’s parents as though he had known them all his life. If to be waited on by a maid, if to sup in a dining–room furnished in solid mahogany and afterwards to sit in a drawing–room that had a grand piano in it was new to him, he showed no embarrassment. After he had gone and they were alone in their bedroom Mr and Mrs Carter talked him over.

‘He is handsome, you can’t deny that,’ she said.

‘Handsome is as handsome does. D’you think he’s after her money?’

‘Well, he must know that you’ve got a tidy little bit tucked away somewhere, but he’s in love with her all right.’

‘Oh, what makes you think that?’

‘Why, you’ve only got to see the way he looks at her.’

‘Well, that’s something at all events.’

In the end the Carters withdrew their opposition on the condition that the young things shouldn’t marry until Gracie had taken her degree. That would give them a year, and at the back of their minds was the hope that by then she would have changed her mind. They saw a good deal of Fred after that. He spent every Sunday with them. Little by little they began quite to like him. He was so easy, so gay, so full of high spirits, and above all so obviously head over ears in love with Gracie, that Mrs Carter soon succumbed to his charm, and after a while even Mr Carter was prepared to admit that he didn’t seem a bad fellow. Fred and Gracie were happy. She went to London every day to attend lectures and worked hard. They spent blissful evenings together. He gave her a very nice engagement ring and often took her out to dinner in the West End and to a play. On fine Sundays he drove her out into the country in a car that he said a friend had lent him. When she asked him if he could afford all the money he spent on her he laughed, and said a chap had given him a tip on an outsider and he’d made a packet. They talked interminably of the little flat they would have when they were married and the fun it would be to furnish it. They were more in love with one another than ever.

Then the blow fell. Fred was arrested for stealing money from the letters he collected. Many people, to save themselves the trouble of buying postal orders, put notes in their envelopes, and it wasn’t difficult to tell that they were there. Fred went up for trial, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Gracie went to the trial. Up to the last moment she had hoped that he would be able to prove his innocence. It was a dreadful shock to her when he pleaded guilty. She was not allowed to see him. He went straight from the dock to the prison van. She went home and, locking herself up in her bedroom, threw herself on the bed and wept. When Mr Carter came back from the shop Gracie’s mother went up to her room.

‘Gracie, you’re to come downstairs,’ she said. ‘Your father wants to speak to you.’

Gracie got up and went down. She did not trouble to dry her eyes.

‘Seen the paper?’ he said, holding out to her the Evening News. She didn’t answer.

‘Well, that’s the end of that young man,’ he went on harshly.

They too, Grade’s parents, had been shocked when Fred was arrested, but she was so distressed, she was so convinced that everything could be explained, that they hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she must have nothing more to do with him. But now they felt it time to have things out with her.

‘So that’s where the money came from for those dinners and theatres. And the car. I thought it funny he should have a friend who’d lend him a car on Sundays when he’d be wanting it himself. He hired it, didn’t he?’

‘I suppose so,’ she answered miserably. ‘I just believed what he told me.’

‘You’ve had a lucky escape, my girl, that’s all I can say.’

‘He only did it because he wanted to give me a good time. He didn’t want me to think I couldn’t have everything as nice when I was with him as what I’ve been used to at home.’

‘You’re not going to make excuses for him, I hope. He’s a thief, that’s what he is.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said sullenly.

‘You don’t care? What d’you mean by that?’

‘Exactly what I say. I’m going to wait for him and the moment he comes out I’m going to marry him.’

Mrs Carter gave a gasp of horror.

‘Gracie, you can’t do a thing like that,’ she cried. ‘Think of the disgrace. And what about us? We’ve always held our heads high. He’s a thief, and once a thief always a thief.’

‘Don’t go on calling him a thief,’ Gracie shrieked, stamping her foot with rage. ‘What he did he did just because he loved me. I don’t care if he is a thief. I love him more than I ever loved him. You don’t know what love is. You waited ten years to marry Pa just so as an old woman should leave you some money. D’you call that love?’

‘You leave your ma out of this,’ Mr Carter shouted. Then an idea occurred to him and he gave a piercing glance. ‘Have you got to marry the feller?’

Gracie blushed furiously.

‘No. There’s never been anything of that sort. And not through any fault of mine either. He loved me too much. He didn’t want to do anything perhaps he’d regret afterwards.’

Often on summer evenings in the country when they’d been lying in a field in one another’s arms, mouth to mouth, her desire had been as intense as his. She knew how much he wanted her and she was ready to give him what he asked. But when things got too desperate he’d suddenly jump up and say:

‘Come on, let’s walk.’

He’d drag her to her feet. She knew what was in his mind. He wanted to wait till they were married. His love had given him a delicacy of sentiment that he’d never known before. He couldn’t make it out himself, but he had a funny sort of feeling about her, he felt that if he had her before marriage it would spoil things. Because she guessed what was in his heart she loved him all the more.

‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ moaned Mrs Carter. ‘You was always such a good girl. You’ve never given us a day’s uneasiness.’

‘Stop it, Ma,’ said Mr Carter violently. ‘We’ve got to get this straight once and for all. You’ve got to give up this man, see? I’ve got me own position to think of and if you think I’m going to have a gaol–bird for a son–in–law you’d better think again. I’ve had enough of this nonsense. You’ve got to promise me that you’ll have nothing more to do with the feller ever.’

‘D’you think I’m going to give him up now? How often d’you want me to tell you I’m going to marry him the moment he gets out?’

‘All right, then you can get out of my house and get out pretty damn quick. And stay out.’

‘Pa!’ cried Mrs Carter.

‘Shut up.’

‘I’ll be glad to go,’ said Gracie.

‘Oh, will you? And how d’you think you’re going to live?’

‘I can work, can’t I? I can get a job at Payne and Perkins. They’ll be glad to have me.’

‘Oh, Gracie, you couldn’t go and work in a shop, you can’t demean yourself like that,’ said Mrs Carter.

‘Will you shut up, Ma,’ shouted Mr Carter, beside himself now with rage. ‘Work, will you? You that’s never done a stroke of work in your life except that tomfoolery at the college. Bright idea it was of your ma’s to give you an education. Fat lot of good it’ll be to you when you’ve got to stand on your feet for hours and got to be civil and pleasant to a lot of old trouts who just try and give you all the trouble they can just to show how superior they are. I bet you’ll like it when you’re bawled out by the manageress because you’re not bright and snappy. All right, marry your gaol–bird. I suppose you know you’ll have to keep him too. You don’t think anyone’s going to give him a job, do you, not with his record. Get out, get out, get out.’

He had worked himself up to such a pitch of fury that he sank panting into a chair. Mrs Carter, frightened, poured out a glass of water and gave him some to drink. Gracie slipped out of the room.

Next day, when her father had gone to work and her mother was out shopping, she left the house with such effects as she could get into a suit–case. Payne and Perkins was a large department store in the Brixton Road, and with her good appearance and pleasant manner she found no difficulty in getting taken on. She was put in the ladies’ lingerie. For a few days she stayed at the Y. W.C.A. and then arranged to share a room with one of the girls who worked with her.

Ned Preston saw Fred in the evening of the day he went to gaol. He found him shattered, but only because of Gracie. He took his thieving very lightly.

‘I had to do the right thing by her, didn’t I? Her people, they didn’t think I was good enough for her; I wanted to show them I was just as good as they were. When we went up to the West End I couldn’t give her a sandwich and half of bitter in a pub, why, she’s never been in a pub in her life, I had to take her to a restaurant. If people are such fools as to put money in letters, well, they’re just asking for it.’

But he was frightened. He wasn’t sure that Gracie would see it like that.

‘I’ve got to know what she’s going to do. If she chucks me now–well, it’s the end of everything for me, see? I’ll find some way of doing meself in, I swear to God I will.’

He told Ned the whole story of his love for Gracie.

‘I could have had her over and over again if I’d wanted to. And I did want to and so did she. I knew that. But I respected her, see? She’s not like other girls. She’s one in a thousand, I tell you.’

He talked and talked. He stormed, he wept. From that confused torrent of words emerged one thing very clearly. A passionate, a frenzied love. Ned promised that he would see the girl.

‘Tell her I love her, tell her that what I did I just did because I wanted her to have the best of everything, and tell her I just can’t live without her.’

As soon as he could find time Ned Preston went to the Carters’ house, but when he asked for Gracie the maid who opened the door told him that she didn’t live there any more. Then he asked to see her mother.

‘I’ll go and see if she’s in.’

He gave the maid his card, thinking the name of his club engraved in the corner would impress Mrs Carter enough to make her willing to see him. The maid left him at the door, but in a minute or two asked him to come in. He was shown into the stiff and little–used sitting–room. Mrs Carter kept him waiting for some time and when she came in, holding his card in the tips of her fingers, he guessed it was because she had thought fit to change her dress. The black silk she wore was evidently a dress for occasions. He told her his connexion with Wormwood Scrubs and said that he had to do with a man named Frederick Manson. The moment he mentioned the name Mrs Carter assumed a hostile attitude.

‘Don’t speak to me of that man,’ she cried. ‘A thief, that’s what he is. The trouble he’s caused us. They ought to have given him five years, they ought.’

‘I’m sorry he’s caused you trouble,’ said Ned mildly. ‘Perhaps if you’d give me a few facts I might help to straighten things out.’

Ned Preston certainly had a way with him. Perhaps Mrs Carter was impressed because he was a gentleman. ‘Class he is,’ she probably said to herself. Anyhow it was not long before she was telling him the whole story. She grew upset as she told it and began to cry.

‘And now she’s gone and left us. Run away. I don’t know how she could bring herself to do a thing like that. God knows, we love her. She’s all we’ve got and we done everything in the world for her. Her pa never meant it when he told her to get out of the house. Only she was so obstinate. He got in a temper, he always was a quick–tempered man, he was just as upset as I was when we found she’d gone. And d’you know what she’s been and gone and done? Got herself a job at Payne and Perkins. Mr Carter can’t abide them. Cutting prices all the time they are. Unfair competition, he calls it. And to think of our Gracie working with a lot of shop–girls–oh, it’s so humiliating.’

Ned made a mental note of the store’s name. He hadn’t been at all sure of getting Grade’s address out of Mrs Carter.

‘Have you seen her since she left you?’ he asked.

‘Of course I have. I knew they’d jump at her at Payne and Perkins, a superior girl like that, and I went there, and there she was, sure enough–in the ladies’ lingerie. I waited outside till closing time and then I spoke to her. I asked her to come home. I said her pa was willing to let bygones be bygones. And d’you know what she said? She said she’d come home if we never said a word against Fred and if we was prepared to have her marry him as soon as ever he got out. Of course I had to tell her pa. I never saw him in such a state, I thought he was going to have a fit, he said he’d rather see her dead at his feet than married to that gaol–bird.’

Mrs Carter again burst into tears and as soon as he could Ned Preston left her. He went to the department store, up to the ladies’ lingerie, and asked for Grace Carter. She was pointed out to him and he went up to her.

‘Can I speak to you for a minute? I’ve come from Fred Manson.’

She went deathly white. For a moment it seemed that she could not utter a word.

‘Follow me, please.’

She took him into a passage smelling of disinfectants which seemed to lead to the lavatories. They were alone. She stared at him anxiously.

‘He sends you his love. He’s worried about you. He’s afraid you’re awfully unhappy. What he wants to know really is if you’re going to chuck him.’

‘Me?’ Her eyes filled with tears, but on her face was a look of ecstasy. ‘Tell him that nothing matters to me as long as he loves me. Tell him I’d wait twenty years for him if I had to. Tell him I’m counting the days till he gets out so as we can get married.’

For fear of the manageress she couldn’t stay away from her work for more than a minute or two. She gave Ned all the loving messages she could get into the time to give Fred Manson. Ned didn’t get to the Scrubs till nearly six. The prisoners are allowed to put down their tools at five–thirty and Fred had just put his down. When Ned entered the cell he turned pale and sank on to the bed as though his anxiety was such that he didn’t trust his legs. But when Ned told him his news he gave a gasp of relief. For a while he couldn’t trust himself to speak.

‘I knew you’d seen her the moment you came in. I smelt her.’

He sniffed as though the smell of her body were strong in his nostrils, and his face was as it were a mask of desire. His features on a sudden seemed strangely blurred.

‘You know, it made me feel quite uncomfortable so that I had to look the other way,’ said Ned Preston when he told us this, with a cackle of his shrill laughter. ‘It was sex in its nakedness all right.’

Fred was an exemplary prisoner. He worked well, he gave no trouble. Ned suggested books for him to read and he took them out of the library, but that was about as far as he got.

‘I can’t get on well with them somehow,’ he said. ‘I start reading and then I begin thinking of Gracie. You know, when she kisses you ordinary–like–oh, it’s so sweet, but when she kisses you really, my God, it’s lovely.’

Fred was allowed to see Gracie once a month, but their meetings, with a glass screen between, under the eyes of a warder, were so painful that after several visits they agreed it would be better if she didn’t come any more. A year passed. Owing to his good behaviour he could count on a remittance of his sentence and so would be free in another six months. Gracie had saved every penny she could out of her wages and now as the time approached for Fred’s release she set about getting a home ready for him. She took two rooms in a house and furnished them on the hire purchase system. One room of course was to be their bedroom and the other the living–room and kitchen. There was an old–fashioned range in it and this she had taken out and replaced by a gas–stove. She wanted everything to be nice and new and clean and comfortable. She took pains to make the two little rooms bright and pretty. To do all this she had to go without all the barest necessities of existence and she grew thin and pale. Ned suspected that she was starving herself and when he went to see her took a box of chocolates or a cake so that she should have at least something to eat. He brought the prisoner news of what Gracie was doing and she made him promise to give him accurate accounts of every article she bought. He took fond, more than fond, passionate messages from one to the other. He was convinced that Fred would go straight in future and he got him a job as commissionaire from a firm that had a chain of restaurants in London. The wages were good and by calling taxis or fetching cars he would be able to make money on the side. He was to start work as soon as he came out of gaol. Gracie took the necessary steps so that they could get married at once. The eighteen months of Fred’s imprisonment were drawing to an end. Gracie was in a fever of excitement.

It happened then that Ned Preston had one of his periodical bouts of illness and was unable to go to the prison for three weeks. It bothered him, for he didn’t like to abandon his prisoners, so as soon as he could get out of bed he went to the Scrubs. The chief warder told him that Manson had been asking for him.

‘I think you’d better go and see him. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He’s been acting rather funny since you’ve been away.’

It was just a fortnight before Fred was due to be released. Ned Preston went to his cell.

‘Well, Fred, how are you?’ he asked. ‘Sorry I haven’t been able to come and see you. I’ve been ill, and I haven’t been able to see Gracie either. She must be all of a dither by now.’

‘Well, I want you to go and see her.’

His manner was so surly that Ned was taken aback. It was unlike him to be anything but pleasant and civil.

‘Of course I will.’

‘I want you to tell her that I’m not going to marry her.’

Ned was so astounded that for a minute he could only stare blankly at Fred Manson.

‘What on earth d’you mean?’

‘Exactly what I say.’

‘You can’t let her down now. Her people have thrown her out. She’s been working all this time to get a home ready for you. She’s got the licence and everything.’

‘I don’t care. I’m not going to marry her.’

‘But why, why, why?’

Ned was flabbergasted. Fred Manson was silent for a bit. His face was dark and sullen.

‘I’ll tell you. I’ve thought about her night and day for eighteen months and now I’m sick to death of her.’

When Ned Preston reached this point of his story our hostess and our fellow guests broke into loud laughter. He was plainly taken aback. There was some little talk after that and the party broke up. Ned and I, having to go in the same direction, walked along Piccadilly together. For a time we walked in silence.

‘I noticed you didn’t laugh with the others,’ he said abruptly.

‘I didn’t think it funny.’

‘What d’you make of it?’

‘Well, I can see his point, you know. Imagination’s an odd thing, it dries up; I suppose, thinking of her incessantly all that time he’d exhausted every emotion she could give him, and I think it was quite literally true, he’d just got sick to death of her. He’d squeezed the lemon dry and there was nothing to do but throw away the rind.’

‘I didn’t think it funny either. That’s why I didn’t tell them the rest of the story. I wouldn’t accept it at first. I thought it was just hysteria or something. I went to see him two or three days running. I argued with him. I really did my damnedest. I thought if he’d only see her it would be all right, but he wouldn’t even do that. He said he hated the sight of her. I couldn’t move him. At last I had to go and tell her.’

We walked on a little longer in silence.

‘I saw her in that beastly, stinking corridor. She saw at once there was something the matter and she went awfully white. She wasn’t a girl to show much emotion. There was something gracious and rather noble about her face. Tranquil. Her lips quivered a bit when I told her and she didn’t say anything for a minute. When she spoke it was quite calmly, as though–well, as though she’d just missed a bus and would have to wait for another. As though it was a nuisance, you know, but nothing to make a song and dance about. “There’s nothing for me to do now but put my head in the gas–oven,” she said.

‘And she did.’

THE KITE

I know this is an odd story. I don’t understand it myself and if I set it down in black and white it is only with a faint hope that when I have written it I may get a clearer view of it, or rather with the hope that some reader, better acquainted with the complications of human nature than I am, may offer me an explanation that will make it comprehensible to me. Of course the first thing that occurs to me is that there is something Freudian about it. Now, I have read a good deal by Freud, and some books by his followers, and intending to write this story I have recently flipped through again the volume published by the Modern Library which contains his basic writings. It was something of a task, for he is a dull and verbose writer, and the acrimony with which he claims to have originated such and such a theory shows a vanity and a jealousy of others working in the same field which somewhat ill become the man of science. I believe, however, that he was a kindly and benign old party. As we know, there is often a great difference between the man and the writer. The writer may be bitter, harsh, and brutal, while the man may be so meek and mild that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But that is neither here nor there. I found nothing in my re–reading of Freud’s works that cast any light on the subject I had in mind. I can only relate the facts and leave it at that.

First of all I must make it plain that it is not my story and that I knew none of the persons with whom it is concerned. It was told me one evening by my friend Ned Preston, and he told it me because he didn’t know how to deal with the circumstances and he thought, quite wrongly as it happened, that I might be able to give him some advice that would help him. In a previous story I have related what I thought the reader should know about Ned Preston, and so now I need only remind him that my friend was a prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs. He took his duties very seriously and made the prisoners’ troubles his own. We had been dining together at the Café Royal in that long, low room with its absurd and charming decoration which is all that remains of the old Café Royal that painters have loved to paint; and we were sitting over our coffee and liqueurs and, so far as Ned was concerned against his doctor’s orders, smoking very long and very good Havanas.

‘I’ve got a funny chap to deal with at the Scrubs just now,’ he said, after a pause, ‘and I’m blowed if I know how to deal with him.’

‘What’s he in for?’ I asked.

‘He left his wife and the court ordered him to pay so much a week in alimony and he’s absolutely refused to pay it. I’ve argued with him till I was blue in the face. I’ve told him he’s only cutting off his nose to spite his face. He says he’ll stay in jail all his life rather than pay her a penny. I tell him he can’t let her starve, and all he says is: “Why not?” He’s perfectly well behaved, he’s no trouble, he works well, he seems quite happy, he’s just getting a lot of fun out of thinking what a devil of a time his wife is having.’

‘What’s he got against her?’

‘She smashed his kite.’

‘She did what?’ I cried.

‘Exactly that. She smashed his kite. He says he’ll never forgive her for that till his dying day.’

‘He must be crazy.’

‘No, he isn’t, he’s a perfectly reasonable, quite intelligent, decent fellow.’

Herbert Sunbury was his name, and his mother, who was very refined, never allowed him to be called Herb or Bertie, but always Herbert, just as she never called her husband Sam but only Samuel. Mrs Sunbury’s first name was Beatrice, and when she got engaged to Mr Sunbury and he ventured to call her Bea she put her foot down firmly.

‘Beatrice I was christened,’ she said, ‘and Beatrice I always have been and always shall be, to you and to my nearest and dearest.’

She was a little woman, but strong, active, and wiry, with a sallow skin, sharp, regular features, and small beady eyes. Her hair, suspiciously black for her age, was always very neat, and she wore it in the style of Queen Victoria’s daughters, which she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to put it up and had never thought fit to change. The possibility that she did something to keep her hair its original colour was, if such was the case, her only concession to frivolity, for, far from using rouge or lipstick, she had never in her life so much as passed a powder–puff over her nose. She never wore anything but black dresses of good material, but made (by that little woman round the corner) regardless of fashion after a pattern that was both serviceable and decorous. Her only ornament was a thin gold chain from which hung a small gold cross.

Samuel Sunbury was a little man too. He was as thin and spare as his wife, but he had sandy hair, gone very thin now so that he had to wear it very long on one side and brushed it carefully over the large bald patch. He had pale blue eyes and his complexion was pasty. He was a clerk in a lawyer’s office and had worked his way up from office boy to a respectable position. His employer called him Mr Sunbury and sometimes asked him to see an unimportant client. Every morning for twenty–four years Samuel Sunbury had taken the same train to the City, except of course on Sundays and during his fortnight’s holiday at the seaside, and every evening he had taken the same train back to the suburb in which he lived. He was neat in his dress; he went to work in quiet grey trousers, a black coat, and a bowler hat, and when he came home he put on his slippers and a black coat which was too old and shiny to wear at the office; but on Sundays when he went to the chapel he and Mrs Sunbury attended he wore a morning coat with his bowler. Thus he showed his respect for the day of rest and at the same time registered a protest against the ungodly who went bicycling or lounged about the streets until the pubs opened. On principle the Sunburys were total abstainers, but on Sundays, when to make up for the frugal lunch, consisting of a scone and butter with a glass of milk, which Samuel had during the week, Beatrice gave him a good dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, for his health’s sake she liked him to have a glass of beer. Since she wouldn’t for the world have kept liquor in the house, he sneaked out with a jug after morning service and got a quart from the pub round the corner; but nothing would induce him to drink alone, so, just to be sociable–like, she had a glass too.

Herbert was the only child the Lord had vouchsafed to them, and this certainly through no precaution on their part. It just happened that way. They doted on him. He was a pretty baby and then a good–looking child. Mrs Sunbury brought him up carefully. She taught him to sit up at table and not put his elbows on it, and she taught him how to use his knife and fork like a little gentleman. She taught him to stretch out his little finger when he took his teacup to drink out of it and when he asked why, she said:

‘Never you mind. That’s how it’s done. It shows you know what’s what.’

In due course Herbert grew old enough to go to school. Mrs Sunbury was anxious because she had never let him play with the children in the street.

‘Evil communications corrupt good manners,’ she said. ‘I always have kept myself to myself and I always shall keep myself to myself.’

Although they had lived in the same house ever since they were married she had taken care to keep her neighbours at a distance.

‘You never know who people are in London,’ she said. ‘One thing leads to another, and before you know where you are you’re mixed up with a lot of riff–raff and you can’t get rid of them.’

She didn’t like the idea of Herbert being thrown into contact with a lot of rough boys at the County Council school and she said to him:

‘Now, Herbert, do what I do; keep yourself to yourself and don’t have anything more to do with them than you can help.’

But Herbert got on very well at school. He was a good worker and far from stupid. His reports were excellent. It turned out that he had a good head for figures.

‘If that’s a fact,’ said Samuel Sunbury, ‘he’d better be an accountant. There’s always a good job waiting for a good accountant.’

So it was settled there and then that this was what Herbert was to be. He grew tall.

‘Why, Herbert,’ said his mother, ‘soon you’ll be as tall as your dad.’

By the time he left school he was two inches taller, and by the time he stopped growing he was five feet ten.

‘Just the right height,’ said his mother. ‘Not too tall and not too short.’

He was a nice–looking boy, with his mother’s regular features and dark hair, but he had inherited his father’s blue eyes, and though he was rather pale his skin was smooth and clear. Samuel Sunbury had got him into the office of the accountants who came twice a year to do the accounts of his own firm and by the time he was twenty–one he was able to bring back to his mother every week quite a nice little sum. She gave him back three half–crowns for his lunches and ten shillings for pocket money, and the rest she put in the Savings Bank for him against a rainy day.

When Mr and Mrs Sunbury went to bed on the night of Herbert’s twenty–first birthday, and in passing I may say that Mrs Sunbury never went to bed, she retired, but Mr Sunbury, who was not quite so refined as his wife, always said: ‘Me for Bedford,’–when then Mr and Mrs Sunbury went to bed, Mrs Sunbury said:

‘Some people don’t know how lucky they are; thank the Lord, I do. No one’s ever had a better son than our Herbert. Hardly a day’s illness in his life and he’s never given me a moment’s worry. It just shows if you bring up somebody right they’ll be a credit to you. Fancy him being twenty–one, I can hardly believe it.’

‘Yes, I suppose before we know where we are he’ll be marrying and leaving us.’

‘What should he want to do that for?’ asked Mrs Sunbury with asperity. ‘He’s got a good home here, hasn’t he? Don’t you go putting silly ideas into his head, Samuel, or you and me’ll have words and you know that’s the last thing I want. Marry indeed! He’s got more sense than that. He knows when he’s well off. He’s got sense, Herbert has.’

Mr Sunbury was silent. He had long ago learnt that it didn’t get him anywhere with Beatrice to answer back.

‘I don’t hold with a man marrying till he knows his own mind,’ she went on. ‘And a man doesn’t know his own mind till he’s thirty or thirty–five.’

‘He was pleased with his presents,’ said Mr Sunbury to change the conversation.

‘And so he ought to be,’ said Mrs Sunbury still upset.

They had in fact been handsome. Mr Sunbury had given him a silver wrist–watch, with hands that you could see in the dark, and Mrs Sunbury had given him a kite. It wasn’t by any means the first one she had given him. That was when he was seven years old, and it happened this way. There was a large common near where they lived and on Saturday afternoons when it was fine Mrs Sunbury took her husband and son for a walk there. She said it was good for Samuel to get a breath of fresh air after being cooped up in a stuffy office all the week. There were always a lot of people on the common, but Mrs Sunbury who liked to keep herself to herself kept out of their way as much as possible.

‘Look at them kites, Mum,’ said Herbert suddenly one day.

There was a fresh breeze blowing and a number of kites, small and large, were sailing through the air.

‘Those, Herbert, not them,’ said Mrs Sunbury.

‘Would you like to go and see where they start, Herbert?’ asked his father.

‘Oh, yes, Dad.’

There was a slight elevation in the middle of the common and as they approached it they saw boys and girls and some men racing down it to give their kites a start and catch the wind. Sometimes they didn’t and fell to the ground, but when they did they would rise, and as the owner unravelled his string go higher and higher. Herbert looked with ravishment.

‘Mum, can I have a kite?’ he cried.

He had already learnt that when he wanted anything it was better to ask his mother first.

‘Whatever for?’ she said.

‘To fly it, Mum.’

‘If you’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself,’ she said.

Mr and Mrs Sunbury exchanged a smile over the little boy’s head. Fancy him wanting a kite. Growing quite a little man he was.

‘If you’re a good boy and wash your teeth regular every morning without me telling you I shouldn’t be surprised if Santa Claus didn’t bring you a kite on Christmas Day.’

Christmas wasn’t far off and Santa Claus brought Herbert his first kite. At the beginning he wasn’t very clever at managing it, and Mr Sunbury had to run down the hill himself and start it for him. It was a very small kite, but when Herbert saw it swim through the air and felt the little tug it gave his hand he was thrilled; and then every Saturday afternoon, when his father got back from the City, he would pester his parents to hurry over to the common. He quickly learnt how to fly it, and Mr and Mrs Sunbury, their hearts swelling with pride, would watch him from the top of the knoll while he ran down and as the kite caught the breeze lengthened the cord in his hand.

It became a passion with Herbert, and as he grew older and bigger his mother bought him larger and larger kites. He grew very clever at gauging the winds and could do things with his kite you wouldn’t have thought possible. There were other kite–flyers on the common, not only children, but men, and since nothing brings people together so naturally as a hobby they share it was not long before Mrs Sunbury, notwithstanding her exclusiveness, found that she, her Samuel, and her son were on speaking terms with all and sundry. They would compare their respective kites and boast of their accomplishments. Sometimes Herbert, a big boy of sixteen now, would challenge another kite–flyer. Then he would manoeuvre his kite to windward of the other fellow’s, allow his cord to drift against his, and by a sudden jerk bring the enemy kite down. But long before this Mr Sunbury had succumbed to his son’s enthusiasm and he would often ask to have a go himself. It must have been a funny sight to see him running down the hill in his striped trousers, black coat, and bowler hat. Mrs Sunbury would trot sedately behind him and when the kite was sailing free would take the cord from him and watch it as it soared. Saturday afternoon became the great day of the week for them, and when Mr Sunbury and Herbert left the house in the morning to catch their train to the City the first thing they did was to look up at the sky to see if it was flying weather. They liked best of all a gusty day, with uncertain winds, for that gave them the best chance to exercise their skill. All through the week, in the evenings, they talked about it. They were contemptuous of smaller kites than theirs and envious of bigger ones. They discussed the performances of other flyers as hotly, and as scornfully, as boxers or football–players discuss their rivals. Their ambition was to have a bigger kite than anyone else and a kite that would go higher. They had long given up a cord, for the kite they gave Herbert on his twenty–first birthday was seven feet high, and they used piano wire wound round a drum. But that did not satisfy Herbert. Somehow or other he had heard of a box–kite which had been invented by somebody, and the idea appealed to him at once. He thought he could devise something of the sort himself and since he could draw a little he set about making designs of it. He got a small model made and tried it out one afternoon, but it wasn’t a success. He was a stubborn boy and he wasn’t going to be beaten. Something was wrong, and it was up to him to put it right.

Then an unfortunate thing happened. Herbert began to go out after supper. Mrs Sunbury didn’t like it much, but Mr Sunbury reasoned with her. After all, the boy was twenty–two, and it must be dull for him to stay home all the time. If he wanted to go for a walk or see a movie there was no great harm. Herbert had fallen in love. One Saturday evening, after they’d had a wonderful time on the common, while they were at supper, out of a clear sky he said suddenly:

‘Mum, I’ve asked a young lady to come in to tea tomorrow. Is that all right?’

‘You done what?’ said Mrs Sunbury, for a moment forgetting her grammar.

‘You heard, Mum.’

‘And may I ask who she is and how you got to know her?’

‘Her name’s Bevan, Betty Bevan, and I met her first at the pictures one Saturday afternoon when it was raining. It was an accident–like. She was sitting next to me and she dropped her bag and I picked it up and she said thank you and so naturally we got talking.’

‘And d’you mean to tell me you fell for an old trick like that? Dropped her bag indeed!’

‘You’re making a mistake, Mum, she’s a nice girl, she is really and well educated too.’

‘And when did all this happen?’

‘About three months ago.’

‘Oh, you met her three months ago and you’ve asked her to come to tea tomorrow?’

‘Well, I’ve seen her since of course. That first day, after the show, I asked her if she’d come to the pictures with me on the Tuesday evening, and she said she didn’t know, perhaps she would and perhaps she wouldn’t. But she came all right.’

‘She would. I could have told you that.’

‘And we’ve been going to the pictures about twice a week ever since.’

‘So that’s why you’ve taken to going out so often?’

‘That’s right. But, look, I don’t want to force her on you, if you don’t want her to come to tea I’ll say you’ve got a headache and take her out.’

‘Your mum will have her to tea all right,’ said Mr Sunbury. ‘Won’t you, dear? It’s only that your mum can’t abide strangers. She never has liked them.’

‘I keep myself to myself,’ said Mrs Sunbury gloomily. ‘What does she do?’

‘She works in a typewriting office in the City and she lives at home, if you call it home; you see, her mum died and her dad married again, and they’ve got three kids and she doesn’t get on with her step–ma. Nag, nag, nag all the time, she says.’

Mrs Sunbury arranged the tea very stylishly. She took the knick–knacks off the little table in the sitting room, which they never used, and put a tea–cloth on it. She got out the tea–service and the plated tea–kettle which they never used either, and she made scones, baked a cake, and cut thin bread–and–butter.

‘I want her to see that we’re not just nobody,’ she told her Samuel.

Herbert went to fetch Miss Bevan, and Mr Sunbury intercepted them at the door in case Herbert should take her into the dining–room where normally they ate and sat. Herbert gave the tea–table a glance of surprise as he ushered the young woman into the sitting–room.

‘This is Betty, Mum,’ he said.

‘Miss Bevan, I presume,’ said Mrs Sunbury.

‘That’s right, but call me Betty, won’t you?’

‘Perhaps the acquaintance is a bit short for that,’ said Mrs Sunbury with a gracious smile. ‘Won’t you sit down, Miss Bevan?’

Strangely enough, or perhaps not strangely at all, Betty Bevan looked very much as Mrs Sunbury must have looked at her age. She had the same sharp features and the same rather small beady eyes, but her lips were scarlet with paint, her cheeks lightly rouged, and her short black hair permanently waved. Mrs Sunbury took in all this at a glance, and she reckoned to a penny how much her smart rayon dress had cost, her extravagantly high–heeled shoes, and the saucy hat on her head. Her frock was very short and she showed a good deal of flesh–coloured stocking. Mrs Sunbury, disapproving of her make–up and of her apparel, took an instant dislike to her, but she had made up her mind to behave like a lady, and if she didn’t know how to behave like a lady nobody did, so that at first things went well. She poured out tea and asked Herbert to give a cup to his lady friend.

‘Ask Miss Bevan if she’ll have some bread–and–butter or a scone, Samuel, my dear.’

‘Have both,’ said Samuel, handing round the two plates, in his coarse way. ‘I like to see people eat hearty.’

Betty insecurely perched a piece of bread–and–butter and a scone on her saucer and Mrs Sunbury talked affably about the weather. She had the satisfaction of seeing that Betty was getting more and more ill–at–ease. Then she cut the cake and pressed a large piece on her guest. Betty took a bite at it and when she put it in her saucer it fell to the ground.

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said the girl, as she picked it up.

‘It doesn’t matter at all, I’ll cut you another piece,’ said Mrs Sunbury.

‘Oh, don’t bother, I’m not particular. The floor’s clean.’

‘I hope so,’ said Mrs Sunbury with an acid smile, ‘but I wouldn’t dream of letting you eat a piece of cake that’s been on the floor. Bring it here, Herbert, and I’ll give Miss Bevan some more.’

‘I don’t want any more, Mrs Sunbury, I don’t really.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like my cake. I made it specially for you.’ She took a bit. ‘It tastes all right to me.’

‘It’s not that, Mrs Sunbury, it’s a beautiful cake, it’s only that I’m not hungry.’

She refused to have more tea and Mrs Sunbury saw she was glad to get rid of the cup. ‘I expect they have their meals in the kitchen,’ she said to herself. Then Herbert lit a cigarette.

‘Give us a fag, Herb,’ said Betty. ‘I’m simply dying for a smoke.’

Mrs Sunbury didn’t approve of women smoking, but she only raised her eyebrows slightly.

‘We prefer to call him Herbert, Miss Bevan,’ she said.

Betty wasn’t such a fool as not to see that Mrs Sunbury had been doing all she could to make her uncomfortable, and now she saw a chance to get back on her.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘When he told me his name was Herbert I nearly burst out laughing. Fancy calling anyone Herbert. A scream, I call it.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like the name my son was given at his baptism. I think it’s a very nice name. But I suppose it all depends on what sort of class of people one is.’

Herbert stepped in to the rescue.

‘At the office they call me Bertie, Mum.’

‘Then all I can say is, they’re a lot of very common men.’

Mrs Sunbury lapsed into a dignified silence and the conversation, such as it was, was maintained by Mr Sunbury and Herbert. It was not without satisfaction that Mrs Sunbury perceived that Betty was offended. She also perceived that the girl wanted to go, but didn’t quite know how to manage it. She was determined not to help her. Finally Herbert took the matter into his own hands.

‘Well, Betty, I think it’s about time we were getting along,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk back with you.’

‘Must you go already?’ said Mrs Sunbury, rising to her feet. ‘It’s been a pleasure, I’m sure.’

‘Pretty little thing,’ said Mr Sunbury tentatively after the young things had left.

‘Pretty my foot. All that paint and powder. You take my word for it, she’d look very different with her face washed and without a perm. Common, that’s what she is, common as dirt.’

An hour later Herbert came back. He was angry.

‘Look here, Mum, what d’you mean by treating the poor girl like that? I was simply ashamed of you.’

‘Don’t talk to your mother like that, Herbert,’ she flared up. ‘You didn’t ought to have brought a woman like that into my house. Common, she is, common as dirt.’

When Mrs Sunbury got angry not only did her grammar grow shaky, but she wasn’t quite safe on her aitches. Herbert took no notice of what she said.

‘She said she’d never been so insulted in her life. I had a rare job pacifying her.’

‘Well, she’s never coming here again, I tell you that straight.’

‘That’s what you think. I’m engaged to her, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

Mrs Sunbury gasped. ‘You’re not?’

‘Yes, I am. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and then she was so upset tonight I felt sorry for her, so I popped the question and I had a rare job persuading her, I can tell you.’

‘You fool,’ screamed Mrs Sunbury. ‘You fool.’

There was quite a scene then. Mrs Sunbury and her son went at it hammer and tongs, and when poor Samuel tried to intervene they both told him roughly to shut up. At last Herbert flung out of the room and out of the house and Mrs Sunbury burst into angry tears.

No reference was made next day to what had passed. Mrs Sunbury was frigidly polite to Herbert and he was sullen and silent. After supper he went out. On Saturday he told his father and mother that he was engaged that afternoon and wouldn’t be able to come to the common with them.

‘I dare say we shall be able to do without you,’ said Mrs Sunbury grimly.

It was getting on to the time for their usual fortnight at the seaside. They always went to Heme Bay, because Mrs Sunbury said you had a nice class of people there, and for years they had taken the same lodgings. One evening, in as casual a way as he could, Herbert said:

‘By the way, Mum, you’d better write and tell them I shan’t be wanting my room this year. Betty and me are getting married and we’re going to Southend for the honeymoon.’

For a moment there was dead silence in the room.

‘Bit sudden–like, isn’t it, Herbert?’ said Mr Sunbury uneasily.

‘Well, they’re cutting down at Betty’s office and she’s out of a job, so we thought we’d better get married at once. We’ve taken two rooms in Dabney Street and we’re furnishing out of my Savings Bank money.’

Mrs Sunbury didn’t say a word. She went deathly pale and tears rolled down her thin cheeks.

‘Oh, come on, Mum, don’t take it so hard,’ said Herbert. ‘A fellow has to marry sometime. If Dad hadn’t married you, I shouldn’t be here now, should I?’ Mrs Sunbury brushed her tears away with an impatient hand.

‘Your dad didn’t marry me; I married ’im. I knew he was steady and respectable. I knew he’d make a good ‘usband and father. I’ve never ‘ad cause to regret it and no more ‘as your dad. That’s right, Samuel, isn’t it?’

‘Right as rain, Beatrice,’ he said quickly.

‘You know, you’ll like Betty when you get to know her. She’s a nice girl, she is really. I believe you’d find you had a lot in common. You must give her a chance, Mum.’

‘She’s never going to set foot in this house only over my dead body.’

‘That’s absurd, Mum. Why, everything’ll be just the same if you’ll only be reasonable. I mean, we can go flying on Saturday afternoons same as we always did. Just this time I’ve been engaged it’s been difficult. You see, she can’t see what there is in kite–flying, but she’ll come round to it, and after I’m married it’ll be different, I mean I can come and fly with you and Dad; that stands to reason.’

‘That’s what you think. Well, let me tell you that if you marry that woman you’re not going to fly my kite. I never gave it you, I bought it out of the housekeeping money, and it’s mine, see.’

‘All right then, have it your own way. Betty says it’s a kid’s game anyway and I ought to be ashamed of myself, flying a kite at my age.’

He got up and once more stalked angrily out of the house. A fortnight later he was married. Mrs Sunbury refused to go to the wedding and wouldn’t let Samuel go either. They went for their holiday and came back. They resumed their usual round. On Saturday afternoons they went to the common by themselves and flew their enormous kite. Mrs Sunbury never mentioned her son. She was determined not to forgive him. But Mr Sunbury used to meet him on the morning train they both took and they chatted a little when they managed to get into the same carriage. One morning Mr Sunbury looked up at the sky.

‘Good flying weather today,’ he said. ‘D’you and Mum still fly?’

‘What do you think? She’s getting as clever as I am. You should see her with her skirts pinned up running down the hill. I give you my word, I never knew she had it in her. Run? Why, she can run better than what I can.’

‘Don’t make me laugh, Dad!’

‘I wonder you don’t buy a kite of your own, Herbert. You’ve been always so keen on it.’

‘I know I was. I did suggest it once, but you know what women are, Betty said: “Be your age,” and oh, I don’t know what all. I don’t want a kid’s kite, of course, and them big kites cost money. When we started to furnish Betty said it was cheaper in the long run to buy the best and so we went to one of them hire purchase places and what with paying them every month and the rent, well, I haven’t got any more money than just what we can manage on. They say it doesn’t cost any more to keep two than one, well, that’s not my experience so far.’

‘Isn’t she working?’

‘Well, no, she says after working for donkeys’ years as you might say, now she’s married she’s going to take it easy, and of course someone’s got to keep the place clean and do the cooking.’

So it went on for six months, and then one Saturday afternoon when the Sunburys were as usual on the common Mrs Sunbury said to her husband:

‘Did you see what I saw, Samuel?’

‘I saw Herbert, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t mention it because I thought it would only upset you.’

‘Don’t speak to him. Pretend you haven’t seen him.’

Herbert was standing among the idle lookers–on. He made no attempt to speak to his parents, but it did not escape Mrs Sunbury that he followed with all his eyes the flight of the big kite he had flown so often. It began to grow chilly and the Sunburys went home. Mrs Sunbury’s face was brisk with malice.

‘I wonder if he’ll come next Saturday,’ said Samuel.

‘If I didn’t think betting was wrong I’d bet you sixpence he will, Samuel. I’ve been waiting for this all along.’

‘You have?’

‘I knew from the beginning he wouldn’t be able to keep away from it.’

She was right. On the following Saturday and on every Saturday after that when the weather was fine Herbert turned up on the common. No intercourse passed. He just stood there for a while looking on and then strolled away. But after things had been going on like this for several weeks, the Sunburys had a surprise for him. They weren’t flying the big kite which he was used to, but a new one, a box–kite, a small one, on the model for which he had made the designs himself. He saw it was creating a lot of interest among the other kite–flyers; they were standing round it and Mrs Sunbury was talking volubly. The first time Samuel ran down the hill with it the thing didn’t rise, but flopped miserably on the ground, and Herbert clenched his hands and ground his teeth. He couldn’t bear to see it fail. Mr Sunbury climbed up the little hill again, and the second time the box–kite took the air. There was a cheer among the bystanders. After a while Mr Sunbury pulled it down and walked back with it to the hill. Mrs Sunbury went up to her son.

‘Like to have a try, Herbert?’

He caught his breath.

‘Yes, Mum, I should.’

‘It’s just a small one because they say you have to get the knack of it. It’s not like the old–fashioned sort. But we’ve got specifications for a big one, and they say when you get to know about it and the wind’s right you can go up to two miles with it.’

Mr Sunbury joined them.

‘Samuel, Herbert wants to try the kite.’

Mr Sunbury handed it to him, a pleased smile on his face, and Herbert gave his mother his hat to hold. Then he raced down the hill, the kite took the air beautifully, and as he watched it rise his heart was filled with exultation. It was grand to see that little black thing soaring so sweetly, but even as he watched it he thought of the great big one they were having made. They’d never be able to manage that. Two miles in the air, mum had said. Whew!

‘Why don’t you come back and have a cup of tea, Herbert,’ said Mrs Sunbury, ‘and we’ll show you the designs for the new one they want to build for us. Perhaps you could make some suggestions.’

He hesitated. He’d told Betty he was just going for a walk to stretch his legs, she didn’t know he’d been coming to the common every week, and she’d be waiting for him. But the temptation was irresistible.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ he said.

After tea they looked at the specifications. The kite was huge, with gadgets he had never seen before, and it would cost a lot of money.

‘You’ll never be able to fly it by yourselves,’ he said.

‘We can try.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t like me to help you just at first?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Mightn’t be a bad idea,’ said Mrs Sunbury.

It was late when he got home, much later than he thought, and Betty was vexed.

‘Wherever have you been, Herb? I thought you were dead. Supper’s waiting and everything.’

‘I met some fellows and got talking.’

She gave him a sharp look, but didn’t answer. She sulked.

After supper he suggested they should go to a movie, but she refused.

‘You go if you want to,’ she said. ‘I don’t care to.’

On the following Saturday he went again to the common and again his mother let him fly the kite. They had ordered the new one and expected to get it in three weeks. Present his mother said to him:

‘Elizabeth is here.’

‘Betty?’

‘Spying on you.’

It gave him a nasty turn, but he put on a bold front.

‘Let her spy. I don’t care.’

But he was nervous and wouldn’t go back to tea with his parents. He went straight home. Betty was waiting for him.

‘So that’s the fellows you got talking to. I’ve been suspicious for some time, you going for a walk on Saturday afternoon, and all of a sudden I tumbled to it. Flying a kite, you, a grown man. Contemptible I call it.’

‘I don’t care what you call it. I like it, and if you don’t like it you can lump it.’

‘I won’t have it and I tell you that straight. I’m not going to have you make a fool of yourself.’

‘I’ve flown a kite every Saturday afternoon ever since I was a kid, and I’m going to fly a kite as long as ever I want to.’

‘It’s that old bitch, she’s just trying to get you away from me. I know her. If you were a man you’d never speak to her again, not after the way she’s treated me.’

‘I won’t have you call her that. She’s my mother and I’ve got the right to see her as often as ever I want to.’

The quarrel went on hour after hour. Betty screamed at him and Herbert shouted at her. They had had trifling disagreements before, because they were both obstinate, but this was the first serious row they had had. They didn’t speak to one another on the Sunday, and during the rest of the week, though outwardly there was peace between them, their ill–feeling rankled. It happened that the next two Saturdays it poured with rain. Betty smiled to herself when she saw the downpour, but if Herbert was disappointed he gave no sign of it. The recollection of their quarrel grew dim. Living in two rooms as they did, sleeping in the same bed, it was inevitable that they should agree to forget their differences. Betty went out of her way to be nice to her Herb, and she thought that now she had given him a taste of her tongue and he knew she wasn’t going to be put upon by anyone, he’d be reasonable. He was a good husband in his way, generous with his money and steady. Give her time and she’d manage him all right.

But after a fortnight of bad weather it cleared.

‘Looks as if we’re going to have good flying weather tomorrow,’ said Mr Sunbury as they met on the platform to await their morning train. ‘The new kite’s come.’

‘It has?’

‘Your mum says of course we’d like you to come and help us with it, but no one’s got the right to come between a man and his wife, and if you’re afraid of Betty, her kicking up a rumpus, I mean, you’d better not come. There’s a young fellow we’ve got to know on the common who’s just mad about it, and he says he’ll get it to fly if anybody can.’

Herbert was seized with a pang of jealousy.

‘Don’t you let any strangers touch our kite. I’ll be there all right.’

‘Well, you think it over, Herbert, and if you don’t come we shall quite understand.’

‘I’ll come,’ said Herbert.

So next day when he got back from the City he changed from his business clothes into slacks and an old coat. Betty came into the bedroom.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Changing,’ he answered gaily. He was so excited, he couldn’t keep the secret to himself. ‘Their new kite’s come and I’m going to fly it.’

‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ she said. ‘I won’t have it.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Betty. I’m going, I tell you, and if you don’t like it you can do the other thing.’

‘I’m not going to let you, so that’s that.’

She shut the door and stood in front of it. Her eyes flashed and her jaw was set. She was a little thing and he was a tall strong man. He took hold of her two arms to push her out of the way, but she kicked him violently on the shin.

‘D’you want me to give you a sock on the jaw?’

‘If you go you don’t come back,’ she shouted.

He caught her up, though she struggled and kicked, threw her on to the bed and went out.

If the small box–kite had caused an excitement on the common it was nothing to what the new one caused. But it was was difficult to manage, and though they ran and panted and other enthusiastic flyers helped them Herbert couldn’t get it up.

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘we’ll get the knack of it presently. The wind’s not right today, that’s all.’

He went back to tea with his father and mother and they talked it over just as they had talked in the old days. He delayed going because he didn’t fancy the scene Betty would make him, but when Mrs Sunbury went into the kitchen to get supper ready he had to go home. Betty was reading the paper. She looked up.

‘Your bag’s packed,’ she said.

‘My what?’

‘You heard what I said. I said if you went you needn’t come back. I forgot about your things. Everything’s packed. It’s in the bedroom.’

He looked at her for a moment with surprise. She pretended to be reading again. He would have liked to give her a good hiding.

‘All right, have it your own way,’ he said.

He went into the bedroom. His clothes were packed in a suitcase, and there was a brown–paper parcel in which Betty had put whatever was left over. He took the bag in one hand, the parcel in the other, walked through the sitting–room without a word and out of the house. He walked to his mother’s and rang the bell. She opened the door.

‘I’ve come home, Mum,’ he said.

‘Have you, Herbert? Your room’s ready for you. Put your things down and come in. We were just sitting down to supper.’ They went into the dining–room. ‘Samuel, Herbert’s come home. Run out and get a quart of beer.’

Over supper and during the rest of the evening he told them the trouble he had had with Betty.

‘Well, you’re well out of it, Herbert,’ said Mrs Sunbury when he had finished. ‘I told you she was no wife for you. Common she is, common as dirt, and you who’s always been brought up so nice.’

He found it good to sleep in his own bed, the bed he’d been used to all his life, and to come down to breakfast on the Sunday morning, unshaved and unwashed, and read the News of the World.

‘We won’t go to chapel this morning,’ said Mrs Sunbury. ‘It’s been an upset to you, Herbert; we’ll all take it easy today.’

During the week they talked a lot about the kite, but they also talked a lot about Betty. They discussed what she would do next.

‘She’ll try and get you back,’ said Mrs Sunbury.

‘A fat chance she’s got of doing that,’ said Herbert.

‘You’ll have to provide for her,’ said his father.

‘Why should he do that?’ cried Mrs Sunbury. ‘She trapped him into marrying her and now she’s turned him out of the home he made for her.’

‘I’ll give her what’s right as long as she leaves me alone.’

He was feeling more comfortable every day, in fact he was beginning to feel as if he’s never been away, he settled in like a dog in its own particular basket; it was nice having his mother to brush his clothes and mend his socks; she gave him the sort of things he’d always eaten and liked best; Betty was a scrappy sort of cook, it had been fun just at first, like picnicking, but it wasn’t the sort of eating a man could get his teeth into, and he could never get over his mother’s idea that fresh food was better than the stuff you bought in tins. He got sick of the sight of tinned salmon. Then it was nice to have space to move about in rather than be cooped up in two small rooms, one of which had to serve as a kitchen as well.

‘I never made a bigger mistake in my life than when I left home, Mum,’ he said to her once.

‘I know that, Herbert, but you’re back now and you’ve got no cause ever to leave it again.’

His salary was paid on Friday and in the evening when they had just finished supper the bell rang.

‘That’s her,’ they said with one voice.

Herbert went pale. His mother gave him a glance.

‘You leave it to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll see her.’

She opened the door. Betty was standing on the threshold. She tried to push her way in, but Mrs Sunbury prevented her.

‘I want to see Herb.’

‘You can’t. He’s out.’

‘No, he isn’t. I watched him go in with his dad and he hasn’t come out again.’

‘Well, he doesn’t want to see you, and if you start making a disturbance I’ll call the police.’

‘I want my week’s money.’

‘That’s all you’ve ever wanted of him.’ She took out her purse. ‘There’s thirty–five shillings for you.’

‘Thirty–five shillings? The rent’s twelve shillings a week.’

‘That’s all you’re going to get. He’s got to pay his board here, hasn’t he?’ ‘And then there’s the instalments on the furniture.’

‘We’ll see about that when the time comes. D’you want the money or don’t you?’

Confused, unhappy, browbeaten, Betty stood irresolutely. Mrs Sunbury thrust the money in her hand and slammed the door in her face. She went back to the dining–room.

‘I’ve settled her hash all right,’ she said.

The bell rang again, it rang repeatedly, but they did not answer it, and presently it stopped. They guessed that Betty had gone away.

It was fine next day, with just the right velocity in the wind, and Herbert, after failing two or three times, found he had got the knack of flying the big box–kite. It soared into the air and up and up as he unreeled the wire.

‘Why, it’s a mile up if it’s a yard,’ he told his mother excitedly.

He had never had such a thrill in his life.

Several weeks passed by. They concocted a letter for Herbert to write in which he told Betty that so long as she didn’t molest him or members of his family she would receive a postal order for thirty–five shillings every Saturday morning and he would pay the instalments on the furniture as they came due. Mrs Sunbury had been much against this, but Mr Sunbury, for once at variance with her, and Herbert agreed that it was the right thing to do. Herbert by then had learnt the ways of the new kite and was able to do great things with it. He no longer bothered to have contests with the other kite–flyers. He was out of their class. Saturday afternoons were his moments of glory. He revelled in the admiration he aroused in the bystanders and enjoyed the envy he knew he excited in the less fortunate flyers. Then one evening when he was walking back from the station with his father Betty waylaid him.

‘Hullo, Herb,’ she said.

‘Hullo.’

‘I want to talk to my husband alone, Mr Sunbury.’

‘There’s nothing you’ve got to say to me that my dad can’t hear,’ said Herbert sullenly.

She hesitated. Mr Sunbury fidgeted. He didn’t know whether to stay or go.

‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘I want you to come back home, Herb. I didn’t mean it that night when I packed your bag. I only did it to frighten you. I was in a temper. I’m sorry for what I did. It’s all so silly, quarrelling about a kite.’

‘Well, I’m not coming back, see. When you turned me out you did me the best turn you ever did me.’

Tears began to trickle down Betty’s cheeks.

‘But I love you, Herb. If you want to fly your silly old kite, you fly it, I don’t care so long as you come back.’

‘Thank you very much, but it’s not good enough. I know when I’m well off and I’ve had enough of married life to last me a lifetime. Come on, Dad.’

They walked on quickly and Betty made no attempt to follow them. On the following Sunday they went to chapel and after dinner Herbert went to the coal–shed where he kept the kite to have a look at it. He just couldn’t keep away from it. He doted on it. In a minute he rushed back, his face white, with a hatchet in his hand.

‘She’s smashed it up. She did it with this.’

The Sunburys gave a cry of consternation and hurried to the coal–shed. What Herbert had said was true. The kite, the new expensive kite, was in fragments. It had been savagely attacked with the hatchet, the woodwork was all in pieces, the reel was hacked to bits.

‘She must have done it while we were at chapel. Watched us go out, that’s what she did.’

‘But how did she get in?’ asked Mr Sunbury.

‘I had two keys. When I came home I noticed one was missing, but I didn’t think anything about it.’

‘You can’t be sure she did it, some of them fellows on the common have been very snooty, I wouldn’t put it past them to have done this.’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ said Herbert. ‘I’ll go and ask her, and if she did it I’ll kill her.’

His rage was so terrible that Mrs Sunbury was frightened.

‘And get yourself hung for murder? No, Herbert, I won’t let you go. Let your dad go, and when he comes back we’ll decide what to do.’

‘That’s right, Herbert, let me go.’

They had a job to persuade him, but in the end Mr Sunbury went. And in half an hour he came back.

‘She did it all right. She told me straight out. She’s proud of it. I won’t repeat her language, it fair startled me, but the long and short of it was she was jealous of the kite. She said Herbert loved the kite more than he loved her and so she smashed it up and if she had to do it again she’d do it again.’

‘Lucky she didn’t tell me that. I’d have wrung her neck even if I’d had to swing for it. Well, she never gets another penny out of me, that’s all.’

‘She’ll sue you,’ said his father.

‘Let her.’

‘The instalment on the furniture is due next week, Herbert,’ said Mrs Sunbury quietly. ‘In your place I wouldn’t pay it.’

‘Then they’ll just take it away,’ said Samuel, ‘and all the money he’s paid on it so far will be wasted.’

‘Well, what of it?’ she answered. ‘He can afford it. He’s rid of her for good and all and we’ve got him back and that’s the chief thing.’

‘I don’t care twopence about the money,’ said Herbert. ‘I can see her face when they come to take the furniture away. It meant a lot to her, it did, and the piano, she set a rare store on that piano.’

So on the following Friday he did not send Betty her weekly money, and when she sent him on a letter from the furniture people to say that if he didn’t pay the instalment due by such and such a date they would remove it, he wrote back and said he wasn’t in a position to continue the payments and they could remove the furniture at their convenience. Betty took to waiting for him at the station, and when he wouldn’t speak to her followed him down the street screaming curses at him. In the evenings she would come to the house and ring the bell till they thought they would go mad, and Mr and Mrs Sunbury had the greatest difficulty in preventing Herbert from going out and giving her a sound thrashing. Once she threw a stone and broke the sitting–room window. She wrote obscene and abusive postcards to him at his office. At last she went to the magistrate’s court and complained that her husband had left her and wasn’t providing for her support. Herbert received a summons. They both told their story and if the magistrate thought it a strange one he didn’t say so. He tried to effect a reconciliation between them, but Herbert resolutely refused to go back to his wife. The magistrate ordered him to pay Betty twenty–five shillings a week. He said he wouldn’t pay it.

‘Then you’ll go to prison,’ said the magistrate. ‘Next case.’

But Herbert meant what he said. On Betty’s complaint he was brought once more before the magistrate, who asked him what reason he had for not obeying the order.

‘I said I wouldn’t pay her and I won’t, not after she smashed my kite. And if you send me to prison I’ll go to prison.’

The magistrate was stern with him this time.

‘You’re a very foolish young man,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a week to pay the arrears, and if I have any more nonsense from you you’ll go to prison till you come to your senses.’

Herbert didn’t pay, and that is how my friend Ned Preston came to know him and I heard the story.

‘What d’you make of it?’ asked Ned as he finished. ‘You know, Betty isn’t a bad girl. I’ve seen her several times, there’s nothing wrong with her except her insane jealousy of Herbert’s kite; and he isn’t a fool by any means. In fact he’s smarter than the average. What d’you suppose there is in kite–flying that makes the damned fool so mad about it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I took my time to think. ‘You see, I don’t know a thing about flying a kite. Perhaps it gives him a sense of power as he watches it soaring towards the clouds and of mastery over the elements as he seems to bend the winds of heaven to his will. It may be that in some queer way he identifies himself with the kite flying so free and so high above him, and it’s as it were an escape from the monotony of life. It may be that in some dim, confused way it represents an ideal of freedom and adventure. And you know, when a man once gets bitten with the virus of the ideal not all the King’s doctors and not all the King’s surgeons can rid him of it. But all this is very fanciful and I dare say it’s just stuff and nonsense. I think you’d better put your problem before someone who knows a lot more about the psychology of the human animal than I do.’

A WOMAN OF FIFTY

My friend Wyman Holt is a professor of English Literature in one of the smaller universities of the Middle West, and hearing that I was speaking in a near–by city–near–by as distances go in the vastness of America–he wrote to ask me if I would come and give a talk to his class. He suggested that I should stay with him for a few days so that he could show me something of the surrounding country. I accepted the invitation, but told him that my engagements would prevent me from spending more than a couple of nights with him. He met me at the station, drove me to his house, and after we had had a drink we walked over to the campus. I was somewhat taken aback to find so many people in the hall in which I was to speak, for I had not expected more than twenty at the outside and I was not prepared to give a solemn lecture, but only an informal chat. I was more than a little intimidated to see a number of middle–aged and elderly persons, some of whom I suspected were members of the faculty, and I was afraid they would find what I had to say very superficial. However, there was nothing to do but to start and, after Wyman had introduced me to the audience in a manner that I very well knew I couldn’t live up to, that is what I did. I said my say, I answered as best I could a number of questions, and then I retired with Wyman into a little room at the back of the stage from which I had spoken.

Several people came in. They said the usual kindly things to me that are said on these occasions, and I made the usual polite replies. I was thirsting for a drink. Then a woman came in and held out her hand to me.

‘How very nice it is to see you again,’ she said. ‘It’s years since we last met.’ To the best of my belief I’d never set eyes on her before. I forced a cordial smile to my tired, stiff lips, shook her proffered hand effusively and wondered who the devil she was. My professor must have seen from my face that I was trying to place her, for he said:

‘Mrs Greene is married to a member of our faculty and she gives a course on the Renaissance and Italian literature.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

I was no wiser than before.

‘Has Wyman told you that you’re dining with us tomorrow night?’

‘I’m very glad,’ I said.

‘It’s not a party. Only my husband, his brother, and my sister–in–law. I suppose Florence has changed a lot since then.’

‘Florence?’ I said to myself. ‘Florence?’

That was evidently where I’d known her. She was a woman of about fifty with grey hair simply done and marcelled without exaggeration. She was a trifle too stout and she was dressed neatly enough, but without distinction, in a dress that I guessed had been bought ready–made at the local branch of a big store. She had rather large eyes of a pale blue and a poor complexion; she wore no rouge and had used a lipstick but sparingly. She seemed a nice creature. There was something maternal in her demeanour, something placid and fulfilled, which I found appealing. I supposed that I had run across her on one of my frequent visits to Florence and because it was perhaps the only time she had been there our meeting made more of an impression on her than on me. I must confess that my acquaintance with the wives of members of a faculty is very limited, but she was just the sort of person I should have expected the wife of a professor to be, and picturing her life, useful but uneventful, on scanty means, with its little social gatherings, its bickerings, its gossip, its busy dullness, I could easily imagine that her trip to Florence must linger with her as a thrilling and unforgettable experience.

On the way back to his house Wyman said to me:

‘You’ll like Jasper Greene. He’s clever.’

‘What’s he a professor of?’

‘He’s not a professor; he’s an instructor. A fine scholar. He’s her second husband. She was married to an Italian before.’

‘Oh?’ That didn’t chime in with my ideas at all. ‘What was her name?’

‘I haven’t a notion. I don’t believe it was a great success.’ Wyman chuckled. ‘That’s only a deduction I draw from the fact that she hasn’t a single thing in the house to suggest that she ever spent any time in Italy. I should have expected her to have at least a refectory table, an old chest or two, and an embroidered cope hanging on the wall.’

I laughed. I knew those rather dreary pieces that people buy when they’re in Italy, the gilt wooden candlesticks, the Venetian glass mirrors, and the high–backed, comfortless chairs. They look well enough when you see them in the crowded shops of the dealers in antiques, but when you bring them to another country they’re too often a sad disappointment. Even if they’re genuine, which they seldom are, they look ill–at–ease and out of place.

‘Laura has money,’ Wyman went on. ‘When they married she furnished the house from cellar to attic in Chicago. It’s quite a show place; it’s a little masterpiece of hideousness and vulgarity. I never go into the living–room without marvelling at the unerring taste with which she picked out exactly what you’d expect to find in the bridal suite of a second–class hotel in Atlantic City.’

To explain this irony I should state that Wyman’s living–room was all chromium and glass, rough modern fabrics, with a boldly Cubist rug on the floor, and on the walls Picasso prints and drawings by Tchelicheff. However, he gave me a very good dinner. We spent the evening chatting pleasantly about things that mutually interested us and finished it with a couple of bottles of beer. I went to bed in a room of somewhat aggressive modernity. I read for a while and then putting out the light composed myself to sleep.

‘Laura?’ I said to myself. ‘Laura what?’

I tried to think back. I thought of all the people I knew in Florence, hoping that by association I might recall when and where I had come in contact with Mrs Greene. Since I was going to dine with her I wanted to recall something that would prove that I had not forgotten her. People look upon it as a slight if you don’t remember them. I suppose we all attach a sort of importance to ourselves, and it is humiliating to realize that we have left no impression at all upon the persons we have associated with. I dozed off, but before I fell into the blessedness of deep sleep, my subconscious, released from the effort of striving at recollection, I suppose, grew active and I was suddenly wide awake, for I remembered who Laura Greene was. It was no wonder that I had forgotten her, for it was twenty–five years since I had seen her, and then only haphazardly during a month I spent in Florence.

It was just after the First World War. She had been engaged to a man who was killed in it and she and her mother had managed to get over to France to see his grave. They were San Francisco people. After doing their sad errand they had come down to Italy and were spending the winter in Florence. At that time there was quite a large colony of English and Americans. I had some American friends, a Colonel Harding and his wife, colonel because he had occupied an important position in the Red Cross, who had a handsome villa in the Via Bolognese, and they asked me to stay with them. I spent most of my mornings sightseeing and met my friends at Doney’s in the Via Tornabuoni round about noon to drink a cocktail. Doney’s was the gathering–place of everybody one knew, Americans, English, and such of the Italians as frequented their society. There you heard all the gossip of the town. There was generally a lunch–party either at a restaurant or at one or other of the villas with their fine old gardens a mile or two from the centre of the city. I had been given a card to the Florence Club, and in the afternoon Charley Harding and I used to go there to play bridge or a dangerous game of poker with a pack of thirty–two cards. In the evening there would be a dinner–party with more bridge perhaps and often dancing. One met the same people all the time, but the group was large enough, the people sufficiently various, to prevent it from being tedious. Everyone was more or less interested in the arts, as was only right and proper in Florence, so that, idle as life seemed, it was not entirely frivolous.

Laura and her mother, Mrs Clayton, a widow, lived in one of the better boarding–houses. They appeared to be comfortably off. They had come to Florence with letters of introduction and soon made many friends. Laura’s story appealed to their sympathies, and people were glad on that account to do what they could for the two women, but they were in themselves nice and quickly became liked for themselves. They were hospitable and gave frequent lunches at one or other of the restaurants where one ate macaroni and the inevitable scaloppini, and drank Chianti. Mrs Glayton was perhaps a little lost in this cosmopolitan society, where matters that were strange to her were seriously or gaily talked about, but Laura took to it as though it were her native element. She engaged an Italian woman to teach her the language and soon was reading the Inferno with her; she devoured books on the art of the Renaissance and on Florentine history, and I sometimes came across her, Baedeker in hand, at the Uffizzi or in some church studiously examining works of art.

She was twenty–four or twenty–five then and I was well over forty, so that though we often met we became cordially acquainted rather than intimate. She was by no means beautiful, but she was comely in rather an unusual way; she had an oval face with bright blue eyes and very dark hair which she wore very simply, parted in the middle, drawn over her ears and tied in a chignon low on the nape of her neck. She had a good skin and naturally high colour; her features were good without being remarkable, and her teeth were even, small, and white; but her chief asset was her easy grace of movement, and I was not surprised when they told me that she danced ‘divinely’. Her figure was very good, somewhat fuller than was the fashion of the moment; and I think what made her attractive was the odd mingling in her appearance of the Madonna in an altar–piece by one of the later Italian painters and a suggestion of sensuality. It certainly made her very alluring to the Italians who gathered at Doney’s in the morning or were occasionally invited to lunch or dinner in the American or English villas. She was evidently accustomed to dealing with amorous young men, for though she was charming, gracious, and friendly with them she kept them at their distance. She quickly discovered that they were all looking for an American heiress who would restore the family fortunes, and with a demure amusement which I found admirable made them delicately understand that she was far from rich. They sighed a little and turned their attentions at Doney’s, which was their happy hunting–ground, to more likely objects. They continued to dance with her, and to keep their hand in flirted with her, but their aspirations ceased to be matrimonial.

But there was one young man who persisted. I knew him slightly because he was one of the regular poker–players at the club. I played occasionally. It was impossible to win and the disgruntled foreigners used sometimes to say that the Italians ganged up on us, but it may be only that they knew the particular game they played better than we did. Laura’s admirer, Tito di San Pietro, was a bold and even reckless player and would often lose sums he could ill afford. (That was not his real name, but I call him that since his own is famous in Florentine history.) He was a good–looking youth, neither short nor tall, with fine black eyes, thick black hair brushed back from his forehead and shining with oil, an olive skin, and features of classical regularity. He was poor and he had some vague occupation, which did not seem to interfere with his amusements, but he was always beautifully dressed. No one quite knew where he lived, in a furnished room perhaps or in the attic of some relation; and all that remained of his ancestors’ great possessions was a Cinquecento villa about thirty miles from the city. I never saw it, but I was told that it was of amazing beauty, with a great neglected garden of cypresses and live oaks, overgrown borders of box, terraces, artificial grottoes, and crumbling statues. His widowed father, the count, lived there alone and subsisted on the wine he made from the vines of the small property he still owned and the oil from his olive trees. He seldom came to Florence, so I never met him, but Charley Harding knew him fairly well.

‘He’s a perfect specimen of the Tuscan nobleman of the old school,’ he said. ‘He was in the diplomatic service in his youth and he knows the world. He has beautiful manners and such an air, you almost feel he’s doing you a favour when he says how d’you do to you. He’s a brilliant talker. Of course he hasn’t a penny, he squandered the little he inherited on gambling and women, but he bears his poverty with great dignity. He acts as though money were something beneath his notice.’

‘What sort of age is he?’ I asked.

‘Fifty, I should say, but he’s still the handsomest man I’ve ever seen in my life.’ ‘Oh?’

‘You describe him, Bessie. When he first came here he made a pass at Bessie. I’ve never been quite sure how far it went.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Charley,’ Mrs Harding laughed.

She gave him the sort of look a woman gives her husband when she has been married to him many years and is quite satisfied with him.

‘He’s very attractive to women and he knows it,’ she said. ‘When he talks to you he gives you the impression that you’re the only woman in the world and of course it’s flattering. But it’s only a game and a woman would have to be a perfect fool to take him seriously. He is very handsome. Tall and spare and he holds himself well. He has great dark liquid eyes, like the boy’s; his hair is snow–white, but very thick still, and the contrast with his bronzed, young face is really breath–taking. He has a ravaged, rather battered look, but at the same time a look of such distinction, it’s really quite incredibly romantic’

‘He also has his great dark liquid eyes on the main chance,’ said Charley Harding dryly. ‘And he’ll never let Tito marry a girl who has no more money than Laura.’

‘She has about five thousand dollars a year of her own,’ said Bessie. ‘And she’ll get that much more when her mother dies.’

‘Her mother can live for another thirty years, and five thousand a year won’t go far to keep a husband, a father, and two or three children, and restore a ruined villa with practically not a stick of furniture in it.’

‘I think the boy’s desperately in love with her.’

‘How old is he?’ I asked.

‘Twenty–six.’

A few days after this Charley, on coming back to lunch, since for once we were lunching by ourselves, told me that he had run across Mrs Clayton in the Via Tornabuoni and she had said that she and Laura were driving out that afternoon with Tito to meet his father and see the villa.

‘What d’you suppose that means?’ asked Bessie.

‘My guess is that Tito is taking Laura to be inspected by his old man, and if he approves he’s going to ask her to marry him.’

‘And will he approve?’

‘Not on your life.’

But Charley was wrong. After the two women had been shown over the house they were taken for a walk round the garden. Without exactly knowing how it had happened Mrs Clayton found herself alone in an alley with the old count. She spoke no Italian, but he had been an attaché in London and his English was tolerable.

‘Your daughter is charming, Mrs Clayton,’ he said. ‘I am not surprised that my Tito has fallen in love with her.’

Mrs Clayton was no fool and it may be that she too had guessed why the young man had asked them to go and see the ancestral villa.

‘Young Italians are very impressionable. Laura is sensible enough not to take their attention too seriously.’

‘I was hoping she was not quite indifferent to the boy.’

‘I have no reason to believe that she likes him any more than any other of the young men who dance with her,’ Mrs Clayton answered somewhat coldly. ‘I think I should tell you at once that my daughter has a very moderate income and she will have no more till I die.’

‘I will be frank with you. I have nothing in the world but this house and the few acres that surround it. My son could not afford to marry a penniless girl, but he is not a fortune–hunter and he loves your daughter.’

The count had not only the grand manner, but a great deal of charm and Mrs Clayton was not insensible to it. She softened a little.

‘All that is neither here nor there. We don’t arrange our children’s marriages in America. If Tito wants to marry her, let him ask her, and if she’s prepared to marry him she’ll presumably say so.’

‘Unless I am greatly mistaken that is just what he is doing now. I hope with all my heart that he will be successful.’

They strolled on and presently saw walking towards them the two young people hand in hand. It was not difficult to guess what had passed. Tito kissed Mrs Clayton’s hand and his father on both cheeks.

‘Mrs Clayton, Papa, Laura has consented to be my wife.’

The engagement made something of a stir in Florentine society and a number of parties were given for the young couple. It was quite evident that Tito was very much in love, but less so that Laura was. He was good–looking, adoring, high–spirited, and gay; it was likely enough that she loved him; but she was a girl who did not display emotion and she remained what she had always been, somewhat placid, amiable, serious but friendly, and easy to talk to. I wondered to what extent she had been influenced to accept Tito’s offer by his great name, with its historical associations, and the sight of that beautiful house with its lovely view and the romantic garden.

‘Anyhow there’s no doubt about its being a love match on his side,’ said Bessie Harding, when we were talking it over. ‘Mrs Clayton tells me that neither Tito nor his father has shown any desire to know how much Laura has.’

‘I’d bet a million dollars that they know to the last cent what she’s got and they’ve calculated exactly how much it comes to in lire,’ said Harding with a grunt.

‘You’re a beastly old man, darling,’ she answered.

He gave another grunt.

Shortly after that I left Florence. The marriage took place from the Hardings’ house and a vast crowd came to it, ate their food and drank their champagne. Tito and his wife took an apartment on the Lungarno and the old count returned to his lonely villa in the hills. I did not go to Florence again for three years and then only for a week. I was staying once more with the Hardings. I asked about my old friends and then remembered Laura and her mother.

‘Mrs Clayton went back to San Francisco,’ said Bessie, ‘and Laura and Tito live at the villa with the count. They’re very happy.’

‘Any babies?’

‘No.’

‘Go on,’ said Harding.

Bessie gave her husband a look.

‘I cannot imagine why I’ve lived thirty years with a man I dislike so much,’ she said. ‘They gave up the apartment on the Lungarno. Laura spent a good deal of money doing things to the villa, there wasn’t a bathroom in it, she put in central heating, and she had to buy a lot of furniture to make it habitable, and then Tito lost a small fortune playing poker and poor Laura had to pay up.’

‘Hadn’t he got a job?’

‘It didn’t amount to anything and it came to an end.’

‘What Bessie means by that is that he was fired,’ Harding put in.

‘Well, to cut a long story short, they thought it would be more economical to live at the villa and Laura had the idea that it would keep Tito out of mischief. She loves the garden and she’s made it lovely. Tito simply worships her and the old count’s taken quite a fancy to her. So really it’s all turned out very well.’

‘It may interest you to know that Tito was in last Thursday,’ said Harding. ‘He played like a madman and I don’t know how much he lost.’

‘Oh, Charley. He promised Laura he’d never play again.’

‘As if a gambler ever kept a promise like that. It’ll be like last time. He’ll burst into tears and say he loves her and it’s a debt of honour and unless he can get the money he’ll blow his brains out. And Laura will pay as she paid before.’

‘He’s weak, poor dear, but that’s his only fault. Unlike most Italian husbands he’s absolutely faithful to her and he’s kindness itself.’ She looked at Harding with a sort of humorous grimness. ‘I’ve yet to find a husband who was perfect.’

‘You’d better start looking around pretty soon, dear, or it’ll be too late,’ he retorted with a grin.

I left the Hardings and returned to London. Charley Harding and I corresponded in a desultory sort of way, and about a year later I got a letter from him. He told me as usual what he had been doing in the interval, and mentioned that he had been to Montecatini for the baths and had gone with Bessie to visit friends in Rome; he spoke of the various people I knew in Florence, So–and–so had just bought a Bellini and Mrs Such–and–such had gone to America to divorce her husband. Then he went on: ‘I suppose you’ve heard about the San Pietros. It’s shaken us all and we can talk of nothing else. Laura’s terribly upset, poor thing, and she’s going to have a baby. The police keep on questioning her and that doesn’t make it any easier for her. Of course we brought her to stay here. Tito comes up for trial in another month.’

I hadn’t the faintest notion what all this was about. So I wrote at once to Harding asking him what it meant. He answered with a long letter. What he had to tell me was terrible. I will relate the bare and brutal facts as shortly as I can. I learned them partly from Harding’s letter and partly from what he and Bessie told me when two years later I was with them once more.

The count and Laura took to one another at once and Tito was pleased to see how quickly they had formed an affectionate friendship, for he was as devoted to his father as he was in love with his wife. He was glad that the count began to come more often to Florence than he had been used to. They had a spare room in the apartment and on occasion he spent two or three nights with them. He and Laura would go bargain–hunting in the antique shops and buy old pieces to put in the villa. He had tact and knowledge and little by little the house, with its spacious rooms and marble floors, lost its forlorn air and became a friendly place to live in. Laura had a passion for gardening and she and the count spent long hours together planning and then supervising the workmen who were restoring the gardens to their ancient, rather stately, beauty.

Laura made light of it when Tito’s financial difficulties forced them to give up the apartment in Florence; she had had enough of Florentine society by then and was not displeased to live altogether in the grand house that had belonged to his ancestors. Tito liked city life and the prospect dismayed him, but he could not complain since it was his own folly that had made it necessary for them to cut down expenses. They still had the car and he amused himself by taking long drives while his father and Laura were busy, and if they knew that now and then he went into Florence to have a flutter at the club they shut their eyes to it. So a year passed. Then, he hardly knew why, he was seized with a vague misgiving. He couldn’t put his finger on anything; he had an uneasy feeling that perhaps Laura didn’t care for him so much as she had at first; sometimes it seemed to him that his father was inclined to be impatient with him; they appeared to have a great deal to say to one another, but he got the impression that he was being edged out of their conversation, as though he were a child who was expected to sit still and not interrupt while his elders talked of things over his head; he had a notion that often his presence was unwelcome to them and that they were more at their ease when he was not there. He knew his father, and his reputation, but the suspicion that rose in him was so horrible that he refused to entertain it. And yet sometimes he caught a look passing between them that disconcerted him, there was a tender possessiveness in his father’s eyes, a sensual complacency in Laura’s, which, if he had seen it in others, would have convinced him that they were lovers. But he couldn’t, he wouldn’t believe that there was anything between them. The count couldn’t help making love to a woman and it was likely enough that Laura felt his extraordinary fascination, but it was shameful to suppose for a moment that they, these two people he loved, had formed a criminal, almost an incestuous, connexion. He was sure that Laura had no idea that there was anything more in her feeling than the natural affection of a young, happily married woman for her father–in–law. Notwithstanding he thought it better that she should not remain in everyday contact with his father, and one day he suggested that they should go back to live in Florence. Laura and the count were astonished that he should propose such a thing and would not hear of it. Laura said that, having spent so much money on the villa, she couldn’t afford to leave it, now that Laura had made it so comfortable, to live in a wretched apartment in the city. An argument started and Tito got rather excited. He took some remark of Laura’s to mean that if she lived at the villa it was to keep him out of temptation. This reference to his losses at the poker–table angered him.

‘You always throw your money in my face,’ he said passionately. ‘If I’d wanted to marry money I’d have had the sense to marry someone who had a great deal more than you.’

Laura went very pale and glanced at the count.

‘You have no right to speak to Laura like that,’ he said. ‘You are an ill–mannered oaf.’

‘I shall speak to my wife exactly as I choose.’

‘You are mistaken. So long as you are in my house you will treat her with the respect which is her right and your duty.’

‘When I want lessons in behaviour from you, Father, I will let you know.’

‘You are very impertinent, Tito. You will kindly leave the room.’

He looked very stern and dignified, and Tito, furious and yet slightly intimidated, leapt to his feet and stalked out slamming the door behind him. He took the car and drove in to Florence. He won quite a lot of money that day (lucky at cards, unlucky in love) and to celebrate his winnings got more than a little drunk. He did not go back to the villa till the following morning. Laura was as friendly and placid as ever, but his father was somewhat cool. No reference was made to the scene. But from then on things went from bad to worse. Tito was sullen and moody, the count critical and on occasion sharp words passed between them. Laura did not interfere, but Tito gained the impression that after a dispute that had been more than acrimonious Laura interceded with his father, for the count thenceforward, refusing to be annoyed, began to treat him with the tolerant patience with which you would treat a wayward child. He convinced himself that they were acting in concert and his suspicions grew formidable. They even increased when Laura in her good–natured way, saying that it must be very dull for him to remain so much in the country, encouraged him to go more often to Florence to see his friends.

He jumped to the conclusion that she said this only to be rid of him. He began to watch them. He would enter suddenly a room in which he knew they were, expecting to catch them in a compromising position, or silently follow them to a secluded part of the garden. They were chatting unconcernedly of trivial things. Laura greeted him with a pleasant smile. He could put his finger on nothing to confirm his torturing suspicions. He started to drink. He grew nervous and irritable. He had no proof, no proof whatever, that there was anything between them, and yet in his bones he was certain that they were grossly, shockingly deceiving him. He brooded till he felt he was going mad. A dark aching fire within him consumed his being. On one of his visits to Florence he bought a pistol. He made up his mind that if he could have proof of what in his heart he was certain of, he would kill them both.

I don’t know what brought on the final catastrophe. All that came out at the trial was that, driven beyond endurance, Tito had gone one night to his father’s room to have it out with him. His father mocked and laughed at him. They had a furious quarrel and Tito took out his pistol and shot the count dead. Then he collapsed and fell, weeping hysterically, on his father’s body; the repeated shots brought Laura and the servants rushing in. He jumped up and grabbed the pistol, to shoot himself he said afterwards, but he hesitated or they were too quick for him, and they snatched it out of his hand. The police were sent for. He spent most of his time in prison weeping; he would not eat and had to be forcibly fed; he told the examining magistrate that he had killed his father because he was his wife’s lover. Laura, examined and examined again, swore that there had never been anything between the count and herself but a natural affection. The murder filled the Florentine public with horror. The Italians were convinced of her guilt, but her friends, English and American, felt that she was incapable of the crime of which she was accused. They went about saying that Tito was neurotic and insanely jealous and in his stupid way had mistaken her American freedom of behaviour for a criminal passion. On the face of it Tito’s charge was absurd. Carlo di San Pietro was nearly thirty years older than she, an elderly man with white hair; who could suppose that there would have been anything between her and her father–in–law, when her husband was young, handsome, and in love with her?

It was in Harding’s presence that she saw the examining magistrate and the lawyers who had been engaged to defend Tito. They had decided to plead insanity. Experts for the defence examined him and decided that he was insane, experts for the prosecution examined him and decided that he was sane. The fact that he had bought a pistol three months before he committed the dreadful crime went to prove that it was premeditated. It was discovered that he was deeply in debt and his creditors were pressing him; the only means he had of settling with them was by selling the villa, and his father’s death put him in possession of it. There is no capital punishment in Italy, but murder with premeditation is punished by solitary confinement for life. On the approach of the trial the lawyers came to Laura and told her that the only way in which Tito could be saved from this was for her to admit in court that the count had been her lover. Laura went very pale. Harding protested violently. He said they had no right to ask her to perjure herself and ruin her reputation to save that shiftless, drunken gambler whom she had been so unfortunate as to marry. Laura remained silent for a while.

‘Very well,’ she said at last, ‘if that’s the only way to save him I’ll do it.’ Harding tried to dissuade her, but she was decided.

‘I should never have a moment’s peace if I knew that Tito had to spend the rest of his life alone in a prison cell.’

And that is what happened. The trial opened. She was called and under oath stated that for more than a year her father–in–law had been her lover. Tito was declared insane and sent to an asylum. Laura wanted to leave Florence at once, but in Italy the preliminaries to a trial are endless and by then she was near her time. The Hardings insisted on her remaining with them till she was confined. She had a child, a boy, but it only lived twenty–four hours. Her plan was to go back to San Francisco and live with her mother till she could find a job, for Tito’s extravagance, the money she had spent on the villa, and then the cost of the trial had seriously impoverished her.

It was Harding who told me most of this; but one day when he was at the club and I was having a cup of tea with Bessie and we were again talking over these tragic happenings she said to me:

‘You know, Charley hasn’t told you the whole story because he doesn’t know it. I never told him. Men are funny in some ways; they’re much more easily shocked than women.’

I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.

‘Just before Laura went away we had a talk. She was very low and I thought she was grieving over the loss of her baby. I wanted to say something to help her. “You mustn’t take the baby’s death too hardly,” I said. “As things are, perhaps it’s better it died.” “Why?” she said. “Think what the poor little thing’s future would have been with a murderer for his father.” She looked at me for a moment in that strange quiet way of hers. And then what d’you think she said?’

‘I haven’t a notion,’ said I.

‘She said: “What makes you think his father was a murderer?”

‘I felt myself grow as red as a turkey–cock. I could hardly believe my ears. “Laura, what do you mean?” I said. “You were in court,” she said. “You heard me say Carlo was my lover.”’

Bessie Harding stared at me as she must have stared at Laura.

‘What did you say then?’ I asked.

‘What was there for me to say? I said nothing. I wasn’t so much horrified, I was bewildered. Laura looked at me and, believe it or not, I’m convinced there was a twinkle in her eyes. I felt a perfect fool.’

‘Poor Bessie,’ I smiled.

Poor Bessie, I repeated to myself now as I thought of this strange story. She and Charley were long since dead and by their death I had lost good friends. I went to sleep then, and next day Wyman Holt took me for a long drive.

We were to dine with the Greenes at seven and we reached their house on the dot. Now that I had remembered who Laura was I was filled with an immense curiosity to see her again. Wyman had exaggerated nothing. The living–room into which we went was the quintessence of commonplace. It was comfortable enough, but there was not a trace of personality in it. It might have been furnished en bloc by a mail–order house. It had the bleakness of a government office. I was introduced first to my host Jasper Greene and then to his brother Emery and to his brother’s wife Fanny. Jasper Greene was a large, plump man with a moon face and a shock of black, coarse, unkempt hair. He wore large cellulose–rimmed spectacles. I was staggered by his youth. He could not have been much over thirty and was therefore nearly twenty years younger than Laura. His brother, Emery, a composer and teacher in a New York school of music, might have been seven or eight and twenty. His wife, a pretty little thing, was an actress for the moment out of a job. Jasper Greene mixed us some very adequate cocktails but for a trifle too much vermouth, and we sat down to dinner. The conversation was gay and even boisterous. Jasper and his brother were loud–voiced and all three of them, Jasper, Emery, and Emery’s wife, were loquacious talkers. They chaffed one another, they joked and laughed; they discussed art, literature, music, and the theatre. Wyman and I joined in when we had a chance, which was not often; Laura did not try to. She sat at the head of the table, serene, with an amused, indulgent smile on her lips as she listened to their scatter–brained nonsense; it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same. There was something maternal in her attitude, and I was reminded oddly of a sleek dachshund lying quietly in the sun while she looks lazily, and yet watchfully, at her litter of puppies romping round her. I wondered whether it crossed her mind that all this chatter about art didn’t amount to much when compared with those incidents of blood and passion that she remembered. But did she remember? It had all happened a long time ago and perhaps it seemed no more than a bad dream. Perhaps those commonplace surroundings were part of her deliberate effort to forget, and to be among these young people was restful to her spirit. Perhaps Jasper’s clever stupidity was a comfort. After that searing tragedy it might be that she wanted nothing but the security of the humdrum.

Possibly because Wyman was an authority on the Elizabethan drama the conversation at one moment touched on that. I had already discovered that Jasper Greene was prepared to lay down the law on subjects all and sundry, and now he delivered himself as follows:

‘Our theatre has gone all to pot because the dramatists of our day are afraid to deal with the violent emotions which are the proper subject matter of tragedy,’ he boomed. ‘In the sixteenth century they had a wealth of melodramatic and bloody themes to suit their purpose and so they produced great plays. But where can our playwrights look for themes? Our Anglo–Saxon blood is too phlegmatic, too supine, to provide them with material they can make anything of, and so they are condemned to occupy themselves with the trivialities of social intercourse.’

I wondered what Laura thought of this, but I took care not to catch her eye. She could have told them a story of illicit love, jealousy, and parricide which would have been meat to one of Shakespeare’s successors, but had he treated it, I suppose he would have felt bound to finish it with at least one more corpse strewn about the stage. The end of her story, as I knew it now, was unexpected certainly, but sadly prosaic and a trifle grotesque. Real life more often ends things with a whimper than with a bang. I wondered too why she had gone out of her way to renew our old acquaintance. Of course she had no reason to suppose that I knew as much as I did; perhaps with a true instinct she was confident that I would not give her away; perhaps she didn’t care if I did. I stole a glance at her now and then while she was quietly listening to the excited babbling of the three young people, but her friendly, pleasant face told me nothing. If I hadn’t known otherwise I would have sworn that no untoward circumstance had ever troubled the course of her uneventful life.

The evening came to an end and this is the end of my story, but for the fun of it I am going to relate a small incident that happened when Wyman and I got back to his house. We decided to have a bottle of beer before going to bed and went into the kitchen to fetch it. The clock in the hall struck eleven and at that moment the phone rang. Wyman went to answer it and when he came back was quietly chortling to himself.

‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.

‘It was one of my students. They’re not supposed to call members of the faculty after ten–thirty, but he was all hot and bothered. He asked me how evil had come into the world.’

‘And did you tell him?’

‘I told him that St Thomas Aquinas had got hot and bothered too about that very question and he’d better worry it out for himself. I said that when he found the solution he was to call me, no matter what time it was. Two o’clock in the morning if he liked.’

‘I think you’re pretty safe not to be disturbed for many a long night,’ I said.

‘I won’t conceal from you that I have formed pretty much the same impression myself,’ he grinned.

MAYHEW

THE lives of most men are determined by their environment.

They accept the circumstances amid which fate has thrown them not only with resignation but even with good will. They are like street-cars running contentedly on their rails and they despise the sprightly flivver that dashes in and out of the traffic and speeds so jauntily across the open country. I respect them; they are good citizens, good husbands, and good fathers, and of course somebody has to pay the taxes; but I do not find them exciting. I am fascinated by the men, few enough in all conscience, who take life in their own hands and seem to mould it to their own liking. It may be that we have no such thing as free will, but at all events we have the illusion of it. At a cross-road it does seem to us that we might go either to the right or to the left and, the choice once made, it is difficult to see that the whole course of the world’s history obliged us to take the turning we did.

I never met a more interesting man than Mayhew. He was a lawyer in Detroit. He was an able and a successful one. By the time he was thirty-five he had a large and a lucrative practice, he had amassed a competence, and he stood on the threshold of a distinguished career. He had an acute brain, an attractive personality, and uprightness. There was no reason why he should not become, financially or politically, a power in the land. One evening he was sitting in his club with a group of friends and they were perhaps a little the worse (or the better) for liquor. One of them had recently come from Italy and he told them of a house he had seen at Capri, a house on the hill, overlooking the Bay of Naples, with a large and shady garden. He described to them the beauty of the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean.

“It sounds fine,” said Mayhew. “Is that house for sale?”

“Everything is for sale in Italy.”

“Let’s send ’em a cable and make an offer for it.”

“What in heaven’s name would you do with a house in Capri?”

“Live in it,” said Mayhew.

He sent for a cable form, wrote it out, and despatched it. In a few hours the reply came back. The offer was accepted.

Mayhew was no hypocrite and he made no secret of the fact that he would never have done so wild a thing if he had been sober, but when he was he did not regret it. He was neither an impulsive nor an emotional man, but a very honest and sincere one. He would never have continued from bravado in a course that he had come to the conclusion was unwise. He made up his mind to do exactly as he had said. He did not care for wealth and he had enough money on which to live in Italy. He thought he could do more with life than spend it on composing the trivial quarrels of unimportant people. He had no definite plan. He merely wanted to get away from a life that had given him all it had to offer. I suppose his friends thought him crazy; some must have done all they could to dissuade him. He arranged his affairs, packed up his furniture and started.

Capri is a gaunt rock of austere outline, bathed in a deep blue sea; but its vineyards, green and smiling, give it a soft and easy grace. It is friendly, remote and debonair. I find it strange that Mayhew should have settled on this lovely island, for I never knew a man more insensible to beauty. I do not know what he sought there: happiness, freedom, or merely leisure; I know what he found. In this place which appeals so extravagantly to the senses he lived a life entirely of the spirit. For the island is rich with historic associations and over it broods always the enigmatic memory of Tiberius the Emperor. From his windows which overlooked the Bay of Naples, with the noble shape of Vesuvius changing colour with the changing light, Mayhew saw a hundred places that recalled the Romans and the Greeks. The past began to haunt him. All that he saw for the first time, for he had never been abroad before, excited his fancy; and in his soul stirred the creative imagination. He was a man of energy. Presently he made up his mind to write a history. For some time he looked about for a subject, and at last decided on the second century of the Roman Empire. It was little known and it seemed to him to offer problems analogous with those of our own day.

He began to collect books and soon he had an immense library. His legal training had taught him to read quickly. He settled down to work. At first he had been accustomed to foregather in the evening with the painters, writers and suchlike who met in the little tavern near the Piazza, but presently he withdrew himself, for his absorption in his studies became more pressing. He had been accustomed to bathe in that bland sea and to take long walks among the pleasant vineyards, but little by little, grudging the time, he ceased to do so. He worked harder than he had ever worked in Detroit. He would start at noon and work all through the night till the whistle of the steamer that goes every morning from Capri to Naples told him that it was five o’clock and time to go to bed. His subject opened out before him, vaster and more significant, and he imagined a work that would put him for ever beside the great historians of the past. As the years went by he was to be found seldom in the ways of men. He could be tempted to come out of his house only by a game of chess or the chance of an argument. He loved to set his brain against another’s. He was widely read now, not only in history, but in philosophy and science; and he was a skilful controversialist, quick, logical and incisive. But he had good-humour and kindliness; though he took a very human pleasure in victory, he did not exult in it to your mortification.

When first he came to the island he was a big, brawny fellow, with thick black hair and a black beard, of a powerful physique; but gradually his skin became pale and waxy; he grew thin and frail. It was an odd contradiction in the most logical of men that, though a convinced and impetuous materialist, he despised the body; he looked upon it as a vile instrument which he could force to do the spirit’s bidding. Neither illness nor lassitude prevented him from going on with his work. For fourteen years he toiled unremittingly. He made thousands and thousands of notes. He sorted and classified them. He had his subject at his finger ends, and at last was ready to begin. He sat down to write. He died.

The body that he, the materialist, had treated so contumeliously took its revenge on him.

That vast accumulation of knowledge is lost for ever. Vain was that ambition, surely not an ignoble one, to set his name beside those of Gibbon and Mommsen. His memory is treasured in the hearts of a few friends, fewer, alas! as the years pass on, and to the world he is unknown in death as he was in life.

And yet to me his life was a success. The pattern is good and complete. He did what he wanted, and he died when his goal was in sight and never knew the bitterness of an end achieved.

THE LOTUS EATER

Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like tram–cars travelling for ever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap–iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him.

That was why I was curious to meet Thomas Wilson. It was an interesting and a bold thing he had done. Of course the end was not yet and until the experiment was concluded it was impossible to call it successful. But from what I had heard it seemed he must be an odd sort of fellow and I thought I should like to know him. I had been told he was reserved, but I had a notion that with patience and tact I could persuade him to confide in me. I wanted to hear the facts from his own lips. People exaggerate, they love to romanticize, and I was quite prepared to discover that his story was not nearly so singular as I had been led to believe.

And this impression was confirmed when at last I made his acquaintance. It was on the Piazza in Capri, where I was spending the month of August at a friend’s villa, and a little before sunset, when most of the inhabitants, native and foreign, gather together to chat with their friends in the cool of the evening. There is a terrace that overlooks the Bay of Naples, and when the sun sinks slowly into the sea the island of Ischia is silhouetted against a blaze of splendour. It is one of the most lovely sights in the world. I was standing there with my friend and host watching it, when suddenly he said:

‘Look, there’s Wilson.’

‘Where?’

‘The man sitting on the parapet, with his back to us. He’s got a blue shirt on.’

I saw an undistinguished back and a small head of grey hair, short and rather thin.

‘I wish he’d turn round,’ I said.

‘He will presently.’

‘Ask him to come and have a drink with us at Morgano’s.’

‘All right.’

The instant of overwhelming beauty had passed and the sun, like the top of an orange, was dipping into a wine–red sea. We turned round and leaning our backs against the parapet looked at the people who were sauntering to and fro. They were all talking their heads off and the cheerful noise was exhilarating. Then the church bell, rather cracked, but with a fine resonant note, began to ring. The Piazza at Capri, with its clock tower over the footpath that leads up from the harbour, with the church up a flight of steps, is a perfect setting for an opera by Donizetti, and you felt that the voluble crowd might at any moment break out into a rattling chorus. It was charming and unreal.

I was so intent on the scene that I had not noticed Wilson get off the parapet and come towards us. As he passed us my friend stopped him.

‘Hullo, Wilson, I haven’t seen you bathing the last few days.’

‘I’ve been bathing on the other side for a change.’

My friend then introduced me. Wilson shook hands with me politely, but with indifference; a great many strangers come to Capri for a few days, or a few weeks, and I had no doubt he was constantly meeting people who came and went; and then my friend asked him to come along and have a drink with us.

‘I was just going back to supper,’ he said.

‘Can’t it wait?’ I asked.

‘I suppose it can,’ he smiled.

Though his teeth were not very good his smile was attractive. It was gentle and kindly. He was dressed in a blue cotton shirt and a pair of grey trousers, much creased and none too clean, of a thin canvas, and on his feet he wore a pair of very old espadrilles. The get–up was picturesque, and very suitable to the place and the weather, but it did not at all go with his face. It was a lined, long face, deeply sunburned, thin–lipped, with small grey eyes rather close together and tight, neat features. The grey hair was carefully brushed. It was not a plain face, indeed in his youth Wilson might have been good–looking, but a prim one. He wore the blue shirt, open at the neck, and the grey canvas trousers, not as though they belonged to him, but as though, shipwrecked in his pyjamas, he had been fitted out with odd garments by compassionate strangers. Notwithstanding this careless attire he looked like the manager of a branch office in an insurance company, who should by rights be wearing a black coat with pepper–and–salt trousers, a white collar, and an unobjectionable tie. I could very well see myself going to him to claim the insurance money when I had lost a watch, and being rather disconcerted while I answered the questions he put to me by his obvious impression, for all his politeness, that people who made such claims were either fools or knaves.

Moving off, we strolled across the Piazza and down the street till we came to Morgano’s. We sat in the garden. Around us people were talking in Russian, German, Italian, and English. We ordered drinks. Donna Lucia, the host’s wife, waddled up and in her low, sweet voice passed the time of day with us. Though middle–aged now and portly, she had still traces of the wonderful beauty that thirty years before had driven artists to paint so many bad portraits of her. Her eyes, large and liquid, were the eyes of Hera and her smile was affectionate and gracious. We three gossiped for a while, for there is always a scandal of one sort or another in Capri to make a topic of conversation, but nothing was said of particular interest and in a little while Wilson got up and left us. Soon afterwards we strolled up to my friend’s villa to dine. On the way he asked me what I had thought of Wilson.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe there’s a word of truth in your story.’

‘Why not?’

‘He isn’t the sort of man to do that sort of thing.’

‘How does anyone know what anyone is capable of?’

‘I should put him down as an absolutely normal man of business who’s retired on a comfortable income from gilt–edged securities. I think your story’s just the ordinary Capri tittle–tattle.’

‘Have it your own way,’ said my friend.

We were in the habit of bathing at a beach called the Baths of Tiberius. We took a fly down the road to a certain point and then wandered through lemon groves and vineyards, noisy with cicadas and heavy with the hot smell of the sun, till we came to the top of the cliff down which a steep winding path led to the sea. A day or two later, just before we got down my friend said:

‘Oh, there’s Wilson back again.’

We scrunched over the beach, the only drawback to the bathing–place being that it was shingle and not sand, and as we came along Wilson saw us and waved. He was standing up, a pipe in his mouth, and he wore nothing but a pair of trunks. His body was dark brown, thin, but not emaciated, and, considering his wrinkled face and grey hair, youthful. Hot from our walk, we undressed quickly and plunged at once into the water. Six feet from the shore it was thirty feet deep, but so clear that you could see the bottom. It was warm, yet invigorating.

When I got out Wilson was lying on his belly, with a towel under him, reading a book. I lit a cigarette and went and sat down beside him.

‘Had a nice swim?’ he asked.

He put his pipe inside his book to mark the place and closing it put it down on the pebbles beside him. He was evidently willing to talk.

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘It’s the best bathing in the world.’

‘Of course people think those were the Baths of Tiberius.’ He waved his hand towards a shapeless mass of masonry that stood half in the water and half out. ‘But that’s all rot. It was just one of his villas, you know.’

I did. But it is just as well to let people tell you things when they want to. It disposes them kindly towards you if you suffer them to impart information. Wilson gave a chuckle.

‘Funny old fellow, Tiberius. Pity they’re saying now there’s not a word of truth in all those stories about him.’

He began to tell me all about Tiberius. Well, I had read my Suetonius too and I had read histories of the Early Roman Empire, so there was nothing very new to me in what he said. But I observed that he was not ill–read. I remarked on it.

‘Oh, well, when I settled down here I was naturally interested, and I have plenty of time for reading. When you live in a place like this, with all its associations, it seems to make history so actual. You might almost be living in historical times yourself.’

I should remark here that this was in 1913. The world was an easy, comfortable place and no one could have imagined that anything might happen seriously to disturb the serenity of existence.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘Fifteen years.’ He gave the blue and placid sea a glance, and a strangely tender smile hovered on his thin lips. ‘I fell in love with the place at first sight. You’ve heard, I daresay, of the mythical German who came here on the Naples boat just for lunch and a look at the Blue Grotto and stayed forty years; well, I can’t say I exactly did that, but it’s come to the same thing in the end. Only it won’t be forty years in my case. Twenty–five. Still, that’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’

I waited for him to go on. For what he had just said looked indeed as though there might be something after all in the singular story I had heard. But at that moment my friend came dripping out of the water very proud of himself because he had swum a mile, and the conversation turned to other things.

After that I met Wilson several times, either in the Piazza or on the beach. He was amiable and polite. He was always pleased to have a talk and I found out that he not only knew every inch of the island but also the adjacent mainland. He had read a great deal on all sorts of subjects, but his speciality was the history of Rome and on this he was very well informed. He seemed to have little imagination and to be of no more than average intelligence. He laughed a good deal, but with restraint, and his sense of humour was tickled by simple jokes. A commonplace man. I did not forget the odd remark he had made during the first short chat we had had by ourselves, but he never so much as approached the topic again. One day on our return from the beach, dismissing the cab at the Piazza, my friend and I told the driver to be ready to take us up to Anacapri at five. We were going to climb Monte Solaro, dine at a tavern we favoured, and walk down in the moonlight. For it was full moon and the views by night were lovely. Wilson was standing by while we gave the cabman instructions, for we had given him a lift to save him the hot dusty walk, and more from politeness than for any other reason I asked him if he would care to join us.

‘It’s my party,’ I said.

‘I’ll come with pleasure,’ he answered.

But when the time came to set out my friend was not feeling well, he thought he had stayed too long in the water, and would not face the long and tiring walk. So I went alone with Wilson. We climbed the mountain, admired the spacious view, and got back to the inn as night was falling, hot, hungry, and thirsty. We had ordered our dinner beforehand. The food was good, for Antonio was an excellent cook, and the wine came from his own vineyard. It was so light that you felt you could drink it like water and we finished the first bottle with our macaroni. By the time we had finished the second we felt that there was nothing much wrong with life. We sat in a little garden under a great vine laden with grapes. The air was exquisitely soft. The night was still and we were alone. The maid brought us bel paese cheese and a plate of figs. I ordered coffee and Strega, which is the best liqueur they make in Italy. Wilson would not have a cigar, but lit his pipe.

‘We’ve got plenty of time before we need start,’ he said, ‘the moon won’t be over the hill for another hour.’

‘Moon or no moon,’ I said briskly, ‘of course we’ve got plenty of time. That’s one of the delights of Capri, that there’s never any hurry.’

‘Leisure,’ he said. ‘If people only knew! It’s the most priceless thing a man can have and they’re such fools they don’t even know it’s something to aim at. Work? They work for work’s sake. They haven’t got the brains to realize that the only object of work is to obtain leisure.’

Wine has the effect on some people of making them indulge in general reflections. These remarks were true, but no one could have claimed that they were original. I did not say anything, but struck a match to light my cigar.

‘It was full moon the first time I came to Capri,’ he went on reflectively. ‘It might be the same moon as tonight.’

‘It was, you know,’ I smiled.

He grinned. The only light in the garden was what came from an oil lamp that hung over our heads. It had been scanty to eat by, but it was good now for confidences.

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean, it might be yesterday. Fifteen years it is, and when I look back it seems like a month. I’d never been to Italy before. I came for my summer holiday. I went to Naples by boat from Marseilles and I had a look round, Pompeii, you know, and Paestum and one or two places like that; then I came here for a week. I liked the look of the place right away, from the sea, I mean, as I watched it come closer and closer; and then when we got into the little boats from the steamer and landed at the quay, with all that crowd of jabbering people who wanted to take your luggage, and the hotel touts, and the tumbledown houses on the Marina and the walk up to the hotel, and dining on the terrace–well, it just got me. That’s the truth. I didn’t know if I was standing on my head or my heels. I’d never drunk Capri wine before, but I’d heard of it; I think I must have got a bit tight. I sat on that terrace after they’d all gone to bed and watched the moon over the sea, and there was Vesuvius with a great red plume of smoke rising up from it. Of course I know now that wine I drank was ink, Capri wine my eye, but I thought it all right then. But it wasn’t the wine that made me drunk, it was the shape of the island and those jabbering people, the moon and the sea and the oleander in the hotel garden. I’d never seen an oleander before.’

It was a long speech and it had made him thirsty. He took up his glass, but it was empty. I asked him if he would have another Strega.

‘It’s sickly stuff. Let’s have a bottle of wine. That’s sound, that is, pure juice of the grape and can’t hurt anyone.’

I ordered more wine, and when it came filled the glasses. He took a long drink and after a sigh of pleasure went on.

‘Next day I found my way to the bathing–place we go to. Not bad bathing, I thought. Then I wandered about the island. As luck would have it, there was a festa up at the Punta di Timberio and I ran straight into the middle of it. An image of the Virgin and priests, acolytes swinging censers, and a whole crowd of jolly, laughing, excited people, a lot of them all dressed up. I ran across an Englishman there and asked him what it was all about. “Oh, it’s the feast of the Assumption,” he said, “at least that’s what the Catholic Church says it is, but that’s just their hanky–panky. It’s the festival of Venus. Pagan, you know. Aphrodite rising from the sea and all that.” It gave me quite a funny feeling to hear him. It seemed to take one a long way back, if you know what I mean. After that I went down one night to have a look at the Faraglioni by moonlight. If the fates had wanted me to go on being a bank manager they oughtn’t to have let me take that walk.’

‘You were a bank manager, were you?’ I asked.

I had been wrong about him, but not far wrong.

‘Yes. I was manager of the Crawford Street branch of the York and City. It was convenient for me because I lived up Hendon way. I could get from door to door in thirty–seven minutes.’

He puffed at his pipe and relit it.

‘That was my last night, that was. I’d got to be back at the bank on Monday morning. When I looked at those two great rocks sticking out of the water, with the moon above them, and all the little lights of the fishermen in their boats catching cuttlefish, all so peaceful and beautiful, I said to myself, well, after all, why should I go back? It wasn’t as if I had anyone dependent on me. My wife had died of bronchial pneumonia four years before and the kid went to live with her grandmother, my wife’s mother. She was an old fool, she didn’t look after the kid properly and she got blood–poisoning, they amputated her leg, but they couldn’t save her and she died, poor little thing.’

‘How terrible,’ I said.

‘Yes, I was cut up at the time, though of course not so much as if the kid had been living with me, but I dare say it was a mercy. Not much chance for a girl with only one leg. I was sorry about my wife too. We got on very well together. Though I don’t know if it would have continued. She was the sort of woman who was always bothering about what other people’d think. She didn’t like travelling. Eastbourne was her idea of a holiday. D’you know, I’d never crossed the Channel till after her death.’

‘But I suppose you’ve got other relations, haven’t you?’

‘None. I was an only child. My father had a brother, but he went to Australia before I was born. I don’t think anyone could easily be more alone in the world than I am. There wasn’t any reason I could see why I shouldn’t do exactly what I wanted. I was thirty–four at that time.’

He had told me he had been on the island for fifteen years. That would make him forty–nine. Just about the age I should have given him.

‘I’d been working since I was seventeen. All I had to look forward to was doing the same old thing day after day till I retired on my pension. I said to myself, is it worth it? What’s wrong with chucking it all up and spending the rest of my life down here? It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. But I’d had a business training, I was cautious by nature. “No,” I said, “I won’t be carried away like this, I’ll go tomorrow like I said I would and think it over. Perhaps when I get back to London I’ll think quite differently.” Damned fool, wasn’t I? I lost a whole year that way.’

‘You didn’t change your mind, then?’

‘You bet I didn’t. All the time I was working I kept thinking of the bathing here and the vineyards and the walks over the hills and the moon and the sea, and the Piazza in the evening when everyone walks about for a bit of a chat after the day’s work is over. There was only one thing that bothered me: I wasn’t sure if I was justified in not working like everybody else did. Then I read a sort of history book, by a man called Marion Crawford it was, and there was a story about Sybaris and Crotona. There were two cities; and in Sybaris they just enjoyed life and had a good time, and in Crotona they were hardy and industrious and all that. And one day the men of Crotona came over and wiped Sybaris out, and then after a while a lot of other fellows came over from somewhere else and wiped Crotona out. Nothing remains of Sybaris, not a stone, and all that’s left of Crotona is just one column. That settled the matter for me.’

‘Oh?’

‘It came to the same in the end, didn’t it? And when you look back now, who were the mugs?’

I did not reply and he went on.

‘The money was rather a bother. The bank didn’t pension one off till after thirty years’ service, but if you retired before that they gave you a gratuity. With that and what I’d got for the sale of my house and the little I’d managed to save, I just hadn’t enough to buy an annuity to last the rest of my life. It would have been silly to sacrifice everything so as to lead a pleasant life and not have a sufficient income to make it pleasant. I wanted to have a little place of my own, a servant to look after me, enough to buy tobacco, decent food, books now and then, and something over for emergencies. I knew pretty well how much I needed. I found I had just enough to buy an annuity for twenty–five years.’

‘You were thirty–five at the time?’

‘Yes. It would carry me on till I was sixty. After all, no one can be certain of living longer than that, a lot of men die in their fifties, and by the time a man’s sixty he’s had the best of life.’

‘On the other hand no one can be sure of dying at sixty,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t know. It depends on himself, doesn’t it?’

‘In your place I should have stayed on at the bank till I was entitled to my pension.’

‘I should have been forty–seven then. I shouldn’t have been too old to enjoy my life here, I’m older than that now and I enjoy it as much as I ever did, but I should have been too old to experience the particular pleasure of a young man. You know, you can have just as good a time at fifty as you can at thirty, but it’s not the same sort of good time. I wanted to live the perfect life while I still had the energy and the spirit to make the most of it. Twenty–five years seemed a long time to me, and twenty–five years of happiness seemed worth paying something pretty substantial for. I’d made up my mind to wait a year and I waited a year. Then I sent in my resignation and as soon as they paid me my gratuity I bought the annuity and came on here.’

‘An annuity for twenty–five years?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Have you never regretted?’

‘Never. I’ve had my money’s worth already. And I’ve got ten years more. Don’t you think after twenty–five years of perfect happiness one ought to be satisfied to call it a day?’

‘Perhaps.’

He did not say in so many words what he would do then, but his intention was clear. It was pretty much the story my friend had told me, but it sounded different when I heard it from his own lips. I stole a glance at him. There was nothing about him that was not ordinary. No one, looking at that neat, prim face, could have thought him capable of an unconventional action. I did not blame him. It was his own life that he had arranged in this strange manner, and I did not see why he should not do what he liked with it. Still, I could not prevent the little shiver that ran down my spine.

‘Getting chilly?’ he smiled. ‘We might as well start walking down. The moon’ll be up by now.’

Before we parted Wilson asked me if I would like to go and see his house one day; and two or three days later, finding out where he lived, I strolled up to see him. It was a peasant’s cottage, well away from the town, in a vineyard, with a view of the sea. By the side of the door grew a great oleander in full flower. There were only two small rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a lean–to in which firewood could be kept. The bedroom was furnished like a monk’s cell, but the sitting–room, smelling agreeably of tobacco, was comfortable enough, with two large arm–chairs that he had brought from England, a large roll–top desk, a cottage piano, and crowded bookshelves. On the walls were framed engravings of pictures by G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton. Wilson told me that the house belonged to the owner of the vineyard who lived in another cottage higher up the hill, and his wife came in every day to do the rooms and the cooking. He had found the place on his first visit to Capri, and taking it on his return for good had been there ever since. Seeing the piano and music open on it, I asked him if he would play.

‘I’m no good, you know, but I’ve always been fond of music and I get a lot of fun out of strumming.’

He sat down at the piano and played one of the movements from a Beethoven sonata. He did not play very well. I looked at his music, Schumann and Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin. On the table on which he had his meals was a greasy pack of cards. I asked him if he played patience.

‘A lot.’

From what I saw of him then and from what I heard from other people I made for myself what I think must have been a fairly accurate picture of the life he had led for the last fifteen years. It was certainly a very harmless one. He bathed; he walked a great deal, and he seemed never to lose his sense of the beauty of the island which he knew so intimately; he played the piano and he played patience; he read. When he was asked to a party he went and, though a trifle dull, was agreeable. He was not affronted if he was neglected. He liked people, but with an aloofness that prevented intimacy. He lived thriftily, but with sufficient comfort. He never owed a penny. I imagine he had never been a man whom sex had greatly troubled, and if in his younger days he had had now and then a passing affair with a visitor to the island whose head was turned by the atmosphere, his emotion, while it lasted, remained, I am pretty sure, well under his control. I think he was determined that nothing should interfere with his independence of spirit. His only passion was for the beauty of nature, and he sought felicity in the simple and natural things that life offers to everyone. You may say that it was a grossly selfish existence. It was. He was of no use to anybody, but on the other hand he did nobody any harm. His only object was his own happiness, and it looked as though he had attained it. Very few people know where to look for happiness; fewer still find it. I don’t know whether he was a fool or a wise man. He was certainly a man who knew his own mind. The odd thing about him to me was that he was so immensely commonplace. I should never have given him a second thought but for what I knew, that on a certain day, ten years from then, unless a chance illness cut the thread before, he must deliberately take leave of the world he loved so well. I wondered whether it was the thought of this, never quite absent from his mind, that gave him the peculiar zest with which he enjoyed every moment of the day.

I should do him an injustice if I omitted to state that he was not at all in the habit of talking about himself. I think the friend I was staying with was the only person in whom he had confided. I believe he only told me the story because he suspected I already knew it, and on the evening on which he told it me he had drunk a good deal of wine.

My visit drew to a close and I left the island. The year after, war broke out. A number of things happened to me, so that the course of my life was greatly altered, and it was thirteen years before I went to Capri again. My friend had been back some time, but he was no longer so well off, and had moved into a house that had no room for me; so I was putting up at the hotel. He came to meet me at the boat and we dined together. During dinner I asked him where exactly his house was.

‘You know it,’ he answered. ‘It’s the little place Wilson had. I’ve built on a room and made it quite nice.’

With so many other things to occupy my mind I had not given Wilson a thought for years; but now, with a little shock, I remembered. The ten years he had before him when I made his acquaintance must have elapsed long ago.

‘Did he commit suicide as he said he would?’

‘It’s rather a grim story.’

Wilson’s plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to him that after twenty–five years of complete happiness, in this quiet backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve ones desires, because one has placed one’s desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one’s hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson’s annuity expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy tranquillity. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what my friend told me and afterwards from others, that he wanted courage. It was just that he couldn’t make up his mind. He put it off from day to day.

He had lived on the island for so long and had always settled his accounts so punctually that it was easy for him to get credit; never having borrowed money before, he found a number of people who were willing to lend him small sums when now he asked for them. He had paid his rent regularly for so many years that his landlord, whose wife Assunta still acted as his servant, was content to let things slide for several months. Everyone believed him when he said that a relative had died and that he was temporarily embarrassed because owing to legal formalities he could not for some time get the money that was due to him. He managed to hang on after this fashion for something over a year. Then he could get no more credit from the local tradesmen, and there was no one to lend him any more money. His landlord gave him notice to leave the house unless he paid up arrears of rent before a certain date.

The day before this he went into his tiny bedroom, closed the door and the window, drew the curtain, and lit a brazier of charcoal. Next morning when Assunta came to make his breakfast she found him insensible but still alive. The room was draughty, and though he had done this and that to keep out the fresh air he had not done it very thoroughly. It almost looked as though at the last moment, and desperate though his situation was, he had suffered from a certain infirmity of purpose. Wilson was taken to the hospital, and though very ill for some time he at last recovered. But as a result either of the charcoal poisoning or of the shock he was no longer in complete possession of his faculties. He was not insane, at all events not insane enough to be put in an asylum, but he was quite obviously no longer in his right mind.

‘I went to see him,’ said my friend. ‘I tried to get him to talk, but he kept looking at me in a funny sort of way, as though he couldn’t quite make out where he’d seen me before. He looked rather awful lying there in bed, with a week’s growth of grey beard on his chin; but except for that funny look in his eyes he seemed quite normal.’

‘What funny look in his eyes?’

‘I don’t know exactly how to describe it. Puzzled. It’s an absurd comparison, but suppose you threw a stone up into the air and it didn’t come down but just stayed there ‘It would be rather bewildering,’ I smiled.

‘Well, that’s the sort of look he had.’

It was difficult to know what to do with him. He had no money and no means of getting any. His effects were sold, but for too little to pay what he owed. He was English, and the Italian authorities did not wish to make themselves responsible for him. The British Consul in Naples had no funds to deal with the case. He could of course be sent back to England, but no one seemed to know what could be done with him when he got there. Then Assunta, the servant, said that he had been a good master and a good tenant, and as long as he had the money had paid his way; he could sleep in the woodshed in the cottage in which she and her husband lived, and he could share their meals. This was suggested to him. It was difficult to know whether he understood or not. When Assunta came to take him from the hospital he went with her without remark. He seemed to have no longer a will of his own. She had been keeping him now for two years.

‘It’s not very comfortable, you know,’ said my friend. ‘They’ve rigged him up a ramshackle bed and given him a couple of blankets, but there’s no window, and it’s icy cold in winter and like an oven in summer. And the food’s pretty rough. You know how these peasants eat: macaroni on Sundays and meat once in a blue moon.’

‘What does he do with himself all the time?’

‘He wanders about the hills. I’ve tried to see him two or three times, but it’s no good; when he sees you coming he runs like a hare. Assunta comes down to have a chat with me now and then and I give her a bit of money so that she can buy him tobacco, but God knows if he ever gets it.’

‘Do they treat him all right?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure Assunta’s kind enough. She treats him like a child. I’m afraid her husband’s not very nice to him. He grudges the cost of his keep. I don’t believe he’s cruel or anything like that, but I think he’s a bit sharp with him. He makes him fetch water and clean the cow–shed and that sort of thing.’

‘It sounds pretty rotten,’ I said.

‘He brought it on himself. After all, he’s only got what he deserved.’

‘I think on the whole we all get what we deserve,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prevent its being rather horrible.’

Two or three days later my friend and I were taking a walk. We were strolling along a narrow path through an olive grove.

‘There’s Wilson,’ said my friend suddenly. ‘Don’t look, you’ll only frighten him. Go straight on.’

I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I felt that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safety. That was the last I ever saw of him.

He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that night.

SALVATORE

I WONDER if I can do it.

I knew Salvatore first when he was a boy of fifteen with a pleasant, ugly face, a laughing mouth and care-free eyes. He used to spend the morning lying about the beach with next to nothing on and his brown body was as thin as a rail. He was full of grace. He was in and out of the sea all the time, swimming with the clumsy, effortless stroke common to the fisher boys. Scrambling up the jagged rocks on his hard feet, for except on Sundays he never wore shoes, he would throw himself into the deep water with a cry of delight. His father was a fisherman who owned his own little vineyard and Salvatore acted as nursemaid to his two younger brothers. He shouted to them to come inshore when they ventured out too far and made them dress when it was time to climb the hot, vineclad hill for the frugal midday meal.

But boys in those Southern parts grow apace and in a little while he was madly in love with a pretty girl who lived on the Grande Marina. She had eyes like forest pools and held herself like a daughter of the Cæsars. They were affianced, but they could not marry till Salvatore had done his military service, and when he left the island which he had never left in his life before, to become a sailor in the navy of King Victor Emmanuel, he wept like a child. It was hard for one who had never been less free than the birds to be at the beck and call of others; it was harder still to live in a battleship with strangers instead of in a little white cottage among the vines; and when he was ashore, to walk in noisy, friendless cities with streets so crowded that he was frightened to cross them, when he had been used to silent paths and the mountains and the sea. I suppose it had never struck him that Ischia, which he looked at every evening (it was like a fairy island in the sunset) to see what the weather would be like next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realised in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet. He was dreadfully homesick. But it was hardest of all to be parted from the girl he loved with ail his passionate young heart. He wrote to her (in his childlike handwriting) long, ill-spelt letters in which he told her how constantly he thought of her and how much he longed to be back. He was sent here and there, to Spezzia, to Venice, to Bari and finally to China. Here he fell ill of some mysterious ailment that kept him in hospital for months. He bore it with the mute and uncomprehending patience of a dog. When he learnt that it was a form of rheumatism that made him unfit for further service his heart exulted, for he could go home; and he did not bother, in fact he scarcely listened, when the doctors told him that he would never again be quite well. What did he care when he was going back to the little island he loved so well and the girl who was waiting for him?

When he got into the rowing-boat that met the steamer from Naples and was rowed ashore he saw his father and mother standing on the jetty and his two brothers, big boys now, and he waved to them. His eyes searched among the crowd that waited there, for the girl. He could not see her. There was a great deal of kissing when he jumped up the steps and they all, emotional creatures, cried a little as they exchanged their greetings. He asked where the girl was. His mother told him that she did not know; they had not seen her for two or three weeks; so in the evening when the moon was shining over the placid sea and the lights of Naples twinkled in the distance he walked down to the Grande Marina to her house. She was sitting on the doorstep with her mother. He was a little shy because he had not seen her for so long. He asked her if she had not received the letter that he had written to her to say that he was coming home. Yes, they had received a letter, and they had been told by another of the island boys that he was ill. Yes, that was why he was back; was it not a piece of luck? Oh, but they had heard that he would never be quite well again. The doctors talked a lot of nonsense, but he knew very well that now he was home again he would recover. They were silent for a little, and then the mother nudged the girl. She did not try to soften the blow. She told him straight out, with the blunt directness of her race, that she could not marry a man who would never be strong enough to work like a man. They had made up their minds, her mother and father and she, and her father would never give his consent.

When Salvatore went home he found that they all knew. The girl’s father had been to tell them what they had decided, but they had lacked the courage to tell him themselves. He wept on his mother’s bosom. He was terribly unhappy, but he did not blame the girl. A fisherman’s life is hard and it needs strength and endurance. He knew very well that a girl could not afford to marry a man who might not be able to support her. His smile was very sad and his eyes had the look of a dog that has been beaten, but he did not complain, and he never said a hard word of the girl he had loved so well. Then, a few months later, when he had settled down to the common round, working in his father’s vineyard and fishing, his mother told him that there was a young woman in the village who was willing to marry him. Her name was Assunta.

“She’s as ugly as the devil,” he said.

She was older than he, twenty-four or twenty-five, and she had been engaged to a man who, while doing his military service, had been killed in Africa. She had a little money of her own and if Salvatore married her she could buy him a boat of his own and they could take a vineyard that by a happy chance happened at that moment to be without a tenant. His mother told him that Assunta had seen him at the festa and had fallen in love with him. Salvatore smiled his sweet smile and said he would think about it. On the following Sunday, dressed in the stiff black clothes in which he looked so much less well than in the ragged shirt and trousers of every day, he went up to High Mass at the parish church and placed himself so that he could have a good look at the young woman. When he came down again he told his mother that he was willing.

Well, they were married and they settled down in a tiny whitewashed house in the middle of a handsome vineyard. Salvatore was now a great big husky fellow, tall and broad, but still with that ingenuous smile and those trusting, kindly eyes that he had had as a boy. He had the most beautiful manners I have ever seen in my life. Assunta was a grim-visaged female, with decided features, and she looked old for her years. But she had a good heart and she was no fool. I used to be amused by the little smile of devotion that she gave her husband when he was being very masculine and masterful; she never ceased to be touched by his gentle sweetness. But she could not bear the girl who had thrown him over, and notwithstanding Salvatore’s smiling expostulations she had nothing but harsh words for her. Presently children were born to them.

It was a hard enough life. All through the fishing season towards evening he set out in his boat with one of his brothers for the fishing grounds. It was a long pull of six or seven miles, and he spent the night catching the profitable cuttlefish. Then there was the long row back again in order to sell the catch in time for it to go on the early boat to Naples. At other times he was working in his vineyard from dawn till the heat drove him to rest and then again, when it was a trifle cooler, till dusk. Often his rheumatism prevented him from doing anything at all and then he would lie about the beach, smoking cigarettes, with a pleasant word for everyone notwithstanding the pain that racked his limbs. The foreigners who came down to bathe and saw him there said that these Italian fishermen were lazy devils.

Sometimes he used to bring his children down to give them a bath. They were both boys and at this time the elder was three and the younger less than two. They sprawled about at the water’s edge stark naked and Salvatore standing on a rock would dip them in the water. The elder one bore it with stoicism, but the baby screamed lustily. Salvatore had enormous hands, like legs of mutton, coarse and hard from constant toil, but when he bathed his children, holding them so tenderly, drying them with delicate care, upon my word they were like flowers. He would seat the naked baby on the palm of his hand and hold him up, laughing a little at his smallness, and his laugh was like the laughter of an angel. His eyes then were as candid as his child’s.

I started by saying that I wondered if I could do it and now I must tell you what it is that I have tried to do. I wanted to see whether I could hold your attention for a few pages while I drew for you the portrait of a man, just an ordinary fisherman who possessed nothing in the world except a quality which is the rarest, the most precious and the loveliest that anyone can have. Heaven only knows why he should so strangely and unexpectedly have possessed it. All I know is that it shone in him with a radiance that, if it had not been so unconscious and so humble, would have been to the common run of men hardly bearable. And in case you have not guessed what the quality was, I will tell you. Goodness, just goodness.

THE WASH-TUB

Positano stands on the side of a steep hill, a disarray of huddled white houses, their tiled roofs washed pale by the suns of a hundred years; but unlike many of these Italian towns perched out of harm’s way on a rocky eminence it does not offer you at one delightful glance all it has to give. It has quaint streets that zigzag up the hill, and battered, painted houses in the baroque style, but very late, in which Neapolitan noblemen led for a season lives of penurious grandeur. It is indeed almost excessively picturesque and in winter its two or three modest hotels are crowded with painters, male and female, who in their different ways acknowledge by their daily labours the emotion it has excited in them. Some take infinite pains to place on canvas every window and every tile their peering eyes can discover and doubtless achieve the satisfaction that rewards honest industry. ‘At all events it’s sincere,’ they say modestly when they show you their work. Some, rugged and dashing, in a fine frenzy attack their canvas with a pallet knife charged with a wad of paint, and they say: ‘You see, what I was trying to bring out was my personality.’ They slightly close their eyes and tentatively murmur: ‘I think it’s rather me, don’t you?’ And there are some who give you highly entertaining arrangements of spheres and cubes and utter sombrely: ‘That’s how I see it!’ These for the most part are strong silent men who waste no words.

But Positano looks full south and the chances are that in summer you will have it to yourself. The hotel is clean and cool and there is a terrace, overhung with vines, where you can sit at night and look at the sea bespangled with dim stars. Down at the Marine, on the quay, is a little tavern where you can dine under an archway off anchovies and ham, macaroni and fresh–caught mullet, and drink cold wine. Once a day the steamer from Naples comes in, bringing the mail, and for a quarter of an hour gives the beach (there is no port and the passengers are landed in small boats) an air of animation.

One August, tiring of Capri where I had been staying, I made up my mind to spend a few days at Positano, so I hired a fishing–boat and rowed over. I stopped on the way in a shady cove to bathe and lunch and sleep, and did not arrive till evening. I strolled up the hill, my two bags following me on the heads of two sturdy women, to the hotel, and was surprised to learn that I was not its only guest. The waiter, whose name was Giuseppe, was an old friend of mine, and at that season he was boots, porter, chambermaid, and cook as well. He told me that an American signore had been staying there for three months.

’Is he a painter or writer or something?’ I asked.

‘No, Signore, he’s a gentleman.’

Odd, I thought. No foreigners came to Positano at that time of year but German Wandervogel, looking hot and dusty, with satchels on their backs, and they only stayed overnight. I could not imagine anyone wishing to spend three months there; unless of course he were hiding. And since all London had been excited by the flight earlier in the year of an eminent, but dishonest, financier, the amusing thought occurred to me that this mysterious stranger was perhaps he. I knew him slightly and trusted that my sudden arrival would not disconcert him.

‘You’ll see the Signore at the Marina,’ said Giuseppe, as I was setting out to go down again. ‘He always dines there.’

He was certainly not there when I arrived. I asked what there was for dinner and drank an americano, which is by no means a bad substitute for a cocktail. In a few minutes, however, a man walked in who could be no other than my fellow–guest at the hotel and I had a moment’s disappointment when I saw that it was not the absconding financier. A tall, elderly man, bronzed after his summer on the Mediterranean, with a handsome, thin face. He wore a very neat, even smart, suit of cream–coloured silk and no hat. His grey hair was cut very short, but was still thick. There was ease in his bearing, and elegance. He looked round the half–dozen tables under the archway at which the natives of the place were playing cards or dominoes and his eyes rested on me. They smiled pleasantly. He came up.

‘I hear you have just arrived at the hotel. Giuseppe suggested that as he couldn’t come down here to effect an introduction you wouldn’t mind if I introduced myself. Would it bore you to dine with a total stranger?’

‘Of course not. Sit down.’

He turned to the maid who was laying a cover for me and in beautiful Italian told her that I would eat with him. He looked at my americano.

‘I have got them to stock a little gin and French vermouth for me. Would you allow me to mix you a very dry Martini?’

‘Without hesitation.’

‘It gives an exotic note to the surroundings which brings out the local colour.’

He certainly made a very good cocktail and with added appetite we ate the ham and anchovies with which our dinner began. My host had a pleasant humour and his fluent conversation was agreeable.

‘You must forgive me if I talk too much,’ he said presently. ‘This is the first chance I’ve had to speak English for three months. I don’t suppose you will stay here long and I mean to make the most of it.’

‘Three months is a long time to stay at Positano.’

‘I’ve hired a boat and I bathe and fish. I read a great deal. I have a good many books here and if there’s anything I can lend you I shall be very glad.’

‘I think I have enough reading matter. But I should love to look at what you have. It’s always fun looking at other people’s books.’

He gave me a sharp look and his eyes twinkled.

‘It also tells you a good deal about them,’ he murmured.

When we finished dinner we went on talking. The stranger was well–read and interested in a diversity of topics. He spoke with so much knowledge of painting that I wondered if he was an art critic or a dealer. But then it appeared that he had been reading Suetonius and I came to the conclusion that he was a college professor. I asked him his name.

‘Barnaby,’ he answered.

‘That’s a name that has recently acquired an amazing celebrity.’

‘Oh, how so?’

‘Have you never heard of the celebrated Mrs Barnaby? She’s a compatriot of yours.’

‘I admit that I’ve seen her name in the papers rather frequently of late. Do you know her?’

‘Yes, quite well. She gave the grandest parties all last season and I went to them whenever she asked me. Everyone did. She’s an astounding woman. She came to London to do the season, and, by George, she did it. She just swept everything before her.’

‘I understand she’s very rich?’

‘Fabulously, I believe, but it’s not that that has made her success. Plenty of American women have money. Mrs Barnaby has got where she has by sheer force of character. She never pretends to be anything but what she is. She’s natural. She’s priceless. You know her history, of course?’

My friend smiled.

‘Mrs Barnaby may be a great celebrity in London, but to the best of my belief in America she is almost inconceivably unknown.’

I smiled also, but within me; I could well imagine how shocked this distinguished and cultured man would be by the rollicking humour, the frankness, with its tang of the soil, and the rich and vital experience of the amazing Mrs Barnaby.

‘Well, I’ll tell you about her. Her husband appears to be a very rough diamond; he’s a great hulking fellow, she says, who could fell a steer with his fist. He’s known in Arizona as One–Bullet Mike.’

‘Good gracious! Why?’

‘Well, years ago in the old days he killed two men with a single shot. She says he’s handier with his gun even now than any man West of the Rockies. He’s a miner, but he’s been a cowpuncher, a gun–runner, and God knows what in his day.’

‘A thoroughly Western type,’ said my professor a trifle acidly, I thought.

‘Something of a desperado, I imagine. Mrs Barnaby’s stories about him are a real treat. Of course everyone’s been begging her to let him come over, but she says he’d never leave the wide open spaces. He struck oil a year or two ago and now he’s got all the money in the world. He must be a great character. I’ve heard her keep the whole dinner–table spellbound when she’s talked of the old days when they roughed it together. It gives you quite a thrill when you see this grey–haired woman, not at all pretty, but exquisitely dressed, with the most wonderful pearls, and hear her tell how she washed the miners’ clothes and cooked for the camp. Your American women have an adaptability that’s really stupendous. When you see Mrs Barnaby sitting at the head of her table, perfectly at home with princes of the blood, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, and the duke of this and the duke of that, it seems almost incredible that only a few years ago she was cooking the food of seventy miners.’

‘Can she read or write?’

‘I suppose her invitations are written by her secretary, but she’s by no means an ignorant woman. She told me she used to make a point of reading for an hour every night after the fellows in camp had gone to bed.’

‘Remarkable!’

‘On the other hand One–Bullet Mike only learnt to write his name when he suddenly found himself under the necessity of signing cheques.’

We walked up the hill to our hotel and before separating for the night arranged to take our luncheon with us next day and row over to a cove that my friend had discovered. We spent a charming day bathing, reading, eating, sleeping, and talking, and we dined together in the evening. The following morning, after breakfast on the terrace, I reminded Barnaby of his promise to show me his books.

‘Come right along.’

I accompanied him to his bedroom, where Giuseppe, the waiter, was making his bed. The first thing I caught sight of was a photograph in a gorgeous frame of the celebrated Mrs Barnaby. My friend caught sight of it too and suddenly turned pale with anger.

‘You fool, Giuseppe. Why have you taken that photograph out of my wardrobe? Why the devil did you think I put it away?’

‘I didn’t know, Signore. That’s why I put it back on the Signore’s table. I thought he liked to see the portrait of his signora.’

I was staggered.

’Is my Mrs Barnaby your wife?’ I cried.

‘She is.’

‘Good Lord, are you One–Bullet Mike?’

‘Do I look it?’

I began to laugh.

‘I’m bound to say you don’t.’

I glanced at his hands. He smiled grimly and held them out.

‘No, sir. I have never felled a steer with my naked fist.’

For a moment we stared at one another in silence.

‘She’ll never forgive me,’ he moaned. ‘She wanted me to take a false name, and when I wouldn’t she was quite vexed with me. She said it wasn’t safe. I said it was bad enough to hide myself in Positano for three months, but I’d be damned if I’d use any other name than my own.’ He hesitated. ‘I throw myself on your mercy. I can do nothing but trust to your generosity not to disclose a secret that you have discovered by the most unlikely chance.’

‘I will be as silent as the grave, but honestly I don’t understand. What does it all mean?’

‘I am a doctor by profession and for the last thirty years my wife and I have lived in Pennsylvania. I don’t know if I have struck you as a roughneck, but I venture to say that Mrs Barnaby is one of the most cultivated women I have ever known. Then a cousin of hers died and left her a very large fortune. There’s no mistake about that. My wife is a very, very rich woman. She has always read a great deal of English fiction and her one desire was to have a London season and entertain and do all the grand things she had read about in books. It was her money and although the prospect did not particularly tempt me, I was very glad that she should gratify her wish. We sailed last April. The young Duke and Duchess of Hereford happened to be on board.’

‘I know. It was they who first launched Mrs Barnaby. They were crazy about her. They’ve boomed her like an army of press–agents.’

‘I was ill when we sailed, I had a carbuncle which confined me to my stateroom, and Mrs Barnaby was left to look after herself. Her deck–chair happened to be next the duchess’s, and from a remark she overheard it occurred to her that the English aristocracy were not so wrapped up in our social leaders as one might have expected. My wife is a quick little woman and she remarked to me that if you had an ancestor who signed Magna Carta perhaps you were not excessively impressed because the grandfather of one of your acquaintances sold skunks and the grandfather of another ran ferryboats. My wife has a very keen sense of humour. Getting into conversation with the duchess, she told her a little Western anecdote, and to make it more interesting told it as having happened to herself. Its success was immediate. The duchess begged for another and my wife ventured a little further. Twenty–four hours later she had the duke and duchess eating out of her hand. She used to come down to my stateroom at intervals and tell me of her progress. In the innocence of my heart, I was tickled to death and since I had nothing else to do, I sent to the library for the works of Bret Harte and primed her with effective touches.’

I slapped my forehead.

‘We said she was as good as Bret Harte,’ I cried.

‘I had a grand time thinking of the consternation of my wife’s friends when at the end of the voyage I appeared and we told them the truth. But I reckoned without my wife. The day before we reached Southampton Mrs Barnaby told me that the Herefords were arranging parties for her. The duchess was crazy to introduce her to all sorts of wonderful people. It was a chance in a thousand; but of course I should spoil everything, she admitted that she had been forced by the course of events to represent me as very different from what I was. I did not know that she had already transformed me into One–Bullet Mike, but I had a shrewd suspicion that she had forgotten to mention that I was on board. Well, to make a long story short, she asked me to go to Paris for a week or two till she had consolidated her position. I didn’t mind that. I was much more inclined to do a little work at the Sorbonne than to go to parties in Mayfair, and so leaving her to go on to Southampton, I got off at Cherbourg. But when I had been in Paris ten days she flew over to see me. She told me that her success had exceeded her wildest dreams: it was ten times more wonderful than any of the novels; but my appearance would ruin it all. Very well, I said, I would stay in Paris. She didn’t like the idea of that; she said she’d never have a moment’s peace so long as I was so near and I might run across someone who knew me. I suggested Vienna or Rome. They wouldn’t do either, and at last I came here and here have I been hiding like a criminal for three interminable months.’

‘Do you mean to say you never killed the two gamblers, shooting one with your right hand and the other with your left?’

‘Sir, I have never fired a pistol in my life.’

‘And what about the attack on your log–cabin by the Mexican bandits when your wife loaded your guns for you and you stood the siege for three days till the Federal troops rescued you?’

Mr Barnaby smiled grimly.

‘I never heard that one. Isn’t it a trifle crude?’

‘Crude! It was as good as any Wild West picture.’

‘If I may venture a guess, that is where my wife in all probability got the idea.’

‘But the wash–tub. Washing the miners’ clothes and all that. You don’t know how she made us roar with that story. Why, she swam into London Society in her wash–tub.’

I began to laugh.

‘She’s made the most gorgeous fools of us all,’ I said.

‘She’s made a pretty considerable fool of me, I would have you observe,’ remarked Mr Barnaby.

‘She’s a marvellous woman and you’re right to be proud of her. I always said she was priceless. She realized the passion for romance that beats in every British heart and she’s given us exactly what we wanted. I wouldn’t betray her for worlds.’

‘It’s all very fine for you, sir. London may have gained a wonderful hostess, but I’m beginning to think that I have lost a perfectly good wife.’

‘The only place for One–Bullet Mike is the great open West. My dear Mr Barnaby, there is only one course open to you now. You must continue to disappear.’

‘I’m very much obliged to you.’

I thought he replied with a good deal of acidity.

A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE

St Laurent de Maroni is a pretty little place. It is neat and clean. It has an Hôtel de Ville and a Palais de Justice of which many a town in France would be proud. The streets are wide, and the fine trees that border them give a grateful shade. The houses look as though they had just had a coat of paint. Many of them nestle in little gardens, and in the gardens are palm trees and flame of the forest; cannas flaunt their bright colours and crotons their variety; the bougainvillaeas, purple or red, riot profusely, and the elegant hibiscus offers its gorgeous flowers with a negligence that seems almost affected. St Laurent de Maroni is the centre of the French penal settlements of Guiana, and a hundred yards from the quay at which you land is the great gateway of the prison camp. These pretty little houses in their tropical gardens are the residence of the prison officials, and if the streets are neat and clean it is because there is no lack of convicts to keep them so. One day, walking with a casual acquaintance, I came upon a young man, in the round straw hat and the pink and white stripes of the convict’s uniform, who was standing by the road–side with a pick. He was doing nothing.

‘Why are you idling?’ my companion asked him.

The man gave his shoulders a scornful shrug.

‘Look at the blade of grass there,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got twenty years to scratch it away.’ St Laurent de Maroni exists for the group of prison camps of which it is the centre. Such trade as it has depends on them; its shops, kept by Chinese, are there to satisfy the wants of the warders, the doctors, and the numerous officials who are connected with the penal settlements. The streets are silent and deserted. You pass a convict with a dispatch–case under his arm; he has some job in the administration; or another with a basket; he is a servant in somebody’s house. Sometimes you come upon a little group in the charge of a warder; often you see them strolling to or from the prison unguarded. The prison gates are open all day long and the prisoners freely saunter in and out. If you see a man not in the prison uniform he is probably a freed man who is condemned to spend a number of years in the colony and who, unable to get work, living on the edge of starvation, is drinking himself to death on the cheap strong rum which is called tafia.

There is an hotel at St Laurent de–Maroni and here I had my meals. I soon got to know by sight the habitual frequenters. They came in and sat each at his little table, ate their meals in silence, and went out again. The hotel was kept by a coloured woman, and the man she lived with, an ex–convict, was the only waiter. But the Governor of the colony, who lives at Cayenne, had put at my disposal his own bungalow and it was there I slept. An old Arab looked after it; he was a devout Mahommedan, and at intervals during the day I heard him say his prayers. To make my bed, keep my rooms tidy, and run errands for me, the commandant of the prison had assigned me another convict. Both were serving life sentences for murder; the commandant told me that I could place entire confidence in them; they were as honest as the day, and I could leave anything about without the slightest risk. But I will not conceal from the reader that when I went to bed at night I took the precaution to lock my door and to bolt my shutters. It was foolish no doubt, but I slept more comfortably.

I had come with letters of introduction, and both the governor of the prison settlements and the commandant of the camp at St Laurent did everything they could to make my visit agreeable and instructive. I will not here narrate all I heard and saw. I am not a reporter. It is not my business to attack or to defend the system which the French have thought fit to adopt in regard to their criminals. Besides, the system is now condemned; prisoners will soon cease to be sent out to French Guiana, to suffer the illnesses incidental to the climate and the work in malarial jungles to which so many are relegated, to endure nameless degradations, to lose hope, to rot, to die. I will only say that I saw no physical cruelty. On the other hand I saw no attempt to make the criminal on the expiration of his sentence a useful citizen. I saw nothing done for his spiritual welfare. I heard nothing of classes that he could attend in order to improve his education or organized games that might distract his mind. I saw no library where he could get books to read when his day’s work was done. I saw a condition of affairs that only the strongest character could hope to surmount. I saw a brutishness that must reduce all but a very few to apathy and despair.

All this has nothing to do with me. It is vain to torment oneself over sufferings that one cannot alleviate. My object here is to tell a story. As I am well aware, one can never know everything there is to be known about human nature. One can be sure only of one thing, and that is that it will never cease to have a surprise in store for you. When I had got over the impression of bewilderment, surprise, and horror to which my first visit to the prison camp gave rise, I bethought myself that there were certain matters that I was interested to inquire into. I should inform the reader that three–quarters of the convicts at St Laurent de Maroni are there for murder. This is not official information and it may be that I exaggerate; every prisoner has a little book in which are set down his crime, his sentence, his punishments, and whatever else the authorities think necessary to keep note of; and it was from an examination of a considerable number of these that I formed my estimate. It gave me something of a shock to realize that in England far, far the greater number of these men whom I saw working in shops, lounging about the verandas of their dormitories, or sauntering through the streets would have suffered capital punishment. I found them not at all disinclined to speak of the crime for which they had been convicted, and in pursuance of my purpose I spent the better part of one day inquiring into crimes of passion. I wanted to know exactly what was the motive that had made a man kill his wife or his girl. I had a notion that jealousy and wounded honour might not perhaps tell the whole story. I got some curious replies, and among them one that was not to my mind lacking in humour. This was from a man working in the carpenter’s shop who had cut his wife’s throat; when I asked him why he had done it, he answered with a shrug of the shoulders: Manque d’entente. His casual tone made the best translation of this: We didn’t get on very well. I could not help observing that if men in general looked upon this as an adequate reason for murdering their wives, the mortality in the female sex would be alarming. But after putting a good many questions to a good many men I arrived at the conclusion that at the bottom of nearly all these crimes was an economic motive; they had killed their wives or mistresses not only from jealousy, because they were unfaithful to them, but also because somehow it affected their pockets. A woman’s infidelity was sometimes an occasion of financial loss, and it was this in the end that drove a man to his desperate act; or, himself in need of money to gratify other passions, he murdered because his victim was an obstacle to his exclusive possession of it. I do not conclude that a man never kills his woman because his love is spurned or his honour tarnished, I only offer my observation on these particular cases as a curious sidelight on human nature. I should not venture to deduce from it a general rule.

I spent another day inquiring into the matter of conscience. Moralists have sought to persuade us that it is one of the most powerful agents in human behaviour. Now that reason and pity have agreed to regard hell–fire as a hateful myth, many good men have seen in conscience the chief safeguard that shall induce the human race to walk in the way of righteousness. Shakespeare has told us that it makes cowards of us all. Novelists and playwrights have described for us the pangs that assail the wicked; they have vividly pictured the anguish of a stricken conscience and the sleepless nights it occasions; they have shown it poisoning every pleasure till life is so intolerable that discovery and punishment come as a welcome relief. I had often wondered how much of all this was true. Moralists have an axe to grind; they must draw a moral. They think that if they say a thing often enough people will believe it. They are apt to state that a thing is so when they consider it desirable that it should be. They tell us that the wages of sin is death; we know very well that it is not always. And so far as the authors of fiction are concerned, the playwrights and the novelists, when they get hold of an effective theme they are disposed to make use of it without bothering very much whether it agrees with the facts of life. Certain statements about human nature become, as it were, common property, and so are accepted as self–evident. In the same way painters for ages painted shadows black, and it was not till the impressionists looked at them with unprejudiced eyes and painted what they saw that we discovered that shadows were coloured. It had sometimes struck me that perhaps conscience was the expression of a high moral development, so that its influence was strong only in those whose virtue was so shining that they were unlikely to commit any action for which they could seriously reproach themselves. It is generally accepted that murder is a shocking crime, and it is the murderer above all other criminals who is supposed to suffer remorse. His victim, we have been led to believe, haunts his dreams in horrifying nightmares, and the recollection of his dreadful deed tortures his waking hours. I could not miss the opportunity to inquire into the truth of this. I had no intention of insisting if I encountered reticence or distress, but I found in none of those with whom I talked any such thing. Some said that in the same circumstances they would do as they had done before. Determinists without knowing it, they seemed to look upon their action as ordained by a fate over which they had no control. Some appeared to think that their crime was committed by someone with whom they had no connexion.

‘When one’s young, one’s foolish,’ they said, with a careless gesture or a deprecating smile.

Others told me that if they had known what the punishment was they would suffer, they would certainly have held their hands. I found in none any regret for the human being they had violently bereft of life. It seemed to me that they had no more feeling for the creature they had killed than if it had been a pig whose throat they had cut in the way of business. Far from feeling pity for their victim, they were more inclined to feel anger because he had been the occasion of their imprisonment in that distant land. In only one man did I discern anything that might appropriately be called a conscience, and his story was so remarkable that I think it well worth narrating. For in this case it was, so far as I can understand, remorse that was the motive of the crime. I noticed the man’s number, which was printed on the chest of the pink and white pyjamas of his prison uniform, but I have forgotten it. Anyhow it is of no consequence. I never knew his name. He did not offer to tell me and I did not like to ask it. I will call him Jean Charvin.

I met him on my first visit to the camp with the commandant. We were walking through a courtyard round which were cells, not punishment cells, but individual cells which are given to well–behaved prisoners who ask for them. They are sought after by those to whom the promiscuity of the dormitories is odious. Most of them were empty, for their occupants were engaged in their various employments. Jean Charvin was at work in his cell, writing at a small table, and the door was open. The commandant called him and he came out. I looked into the cell. It contained a fixed hammock, with a dingy mosquito–net; by the side of this was a small table on which were his bits and pieces, a shaving–mop and a razor, a hairbrush and two or three battered books. On the walls were photographs of persons of respectable appearance and illustrations from picture papers. He had been sitting on his bed to write and the table on which he had been writing was covered with papers. They looked like accounts. He was a handsome man, tall, erect, and lean, with flashing dark eyes and clean–cut, strong features. The first thing I noticed about him was that he had a fine head of long, naturally–waving dark brown hair. This at once made him look different from the rest of the prisoners, whose hair is close–cropped, but cropped so badly, in ridges, that it gives them a sinister look. The commandant spoke to him of some official business, and then as we were leaving added in a friendly way:

‘I see your hair is growing well.’

Jean Charvin reddened and smiled. His smile was boyish and engaging.

‘It’ll be some time yet before I get it right again.’

The commandant dismissed him and we went on.

‘He’s a very decent fellow,’ he said. ‘He’s in the accountant’s department, and he’s had leave to let his hair grow. He’s delighted.’

‘What is he here for?’ I asked.

‘He killed his wife. But he’s only got six years. He’s clever and a good worker. He’ll do well. He comes from a very decent family and he’s had an excellent education.’

I thought no more of Jean Charvin, but by chance I met him next day on the road. He was coming towards me. He carried a black dispatch–case under his arm, and except for the pink and white stripes of his uniform and the ugly round straw hat that concealed his handsome head of hair, you might have taken him for a young lawyer on his way to court. He walked with a long, leisurely stride, and he had an easy, you might almost say a gallant, bearing. He recognized me, and taking off his hat bade me good morning. I stopped, and for something to say asked him where he was going. He told me he was taking some papers from the governor’s office to the bank. There was a pleasing frankness in his face, and his eyes, his really beautiful eyes, shone with good will. I supposed that the vigour of his youth was such that it made life, notwithstanding his position and his surroundings, more than tolerable, even pleasant. You would have said that here was a young man without a care in the world.

‘I hear you’re going to St Jean tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Yes. It appears I must start at dawn.’

St Jean is a camp seventeen kilometres from St Laurent, and it is here that are interned the habitual criminals who have been sentenced to transportation after repeated terms of imprisonment. They are petty thieves, confidence men, forgers, tricksters, and suchlike; the prisoners of St Laurent, condemned for more serious offences, look upon them with contempt.

‘You should find it an interesting experience,’ Jean Charvin said, with his frank and engaging smile. ‘But keep your pocket–book buttoned up, they’d steal the shirt off your back if they had half a chance. They’re a dirty lot of scoundrels!’

That afternoon, waiting till the heat of the day was less, I sat on the veranda outside my bedroom and read: I had drawn the jalousies and it was tolerably cool. My old Arab came up the stairs on his bare feet, and in his halting French told me that there was a man from the commandant who wanted to see me.

‘Send him up,’ I said.

In a moment the man came, and it was Jean Charvin. He told me that the commandant had sent him to give me a message about my excursion next day to St Jean. When he had delivered it I asked him if he would not sit down and have a cigarette with me. He wore a cheap wrist–watch and he looked at it.

‘I have a few minutes to spare. I should be glad to.’ He sat down and lit the cigarette I offered him. He gave me a smiling look of his soft eyes. ‘Do you know, this is the first time I’ve ever been asked to sit down since I was sentenced.’ He inhaled a long whiff of his cigarette. ‘Egyptian. I haven’t smoked an Egyptian cigarette for three years.’

The convicts make their own cigarettes out of a coarse, strong tobacco that is sold in square blue packets. Since one is not allowed to pay them for the services they may render you, but may give them tobacco, I had bought a good many packets of this.

‘How does it taste?’

‘One gets accustomed to everything and, to tell you the truth, my palate is so vitiated, I prefer the stuff we get here.’

‘I’ll give you a couple of packets.’

I went into my room and fetched them. When I returned he was looking at some books that were lying on the table. ‘Are you fond of reading?’ I asked.

‘Very. I think the want of books is what I most suffer from now. The few I can get hold of I’m forced to read over and over again.’

To so great a reader as myself no deprivation seems more insupportable than the lack of books.

‘I have several French ones in my bag. I’ll look them out and if you care to have them I’ll give them to you if you can come along again.’

My offer was due only in part to kindness; I wanted to have another chance of a talk with him.

‘I should have to show them to the commandant. He would only let me keep them if there was no doubt they couldn’t possibly corrupt my morals. But he’s a good–natured man, I don’t think he’ll make any difficulties.’

There was a hint of slyness in the smile with which he said this, and I suspected that he had taken the measure of the well–meaning conscientious chief of the camp and knew pretty well how to get on the right side of him. It would have been unjust to blame him if he exercised tact, and even cunning, to render his lot as tolerable as might be.

‘The commandant has a very good opinion of you.’

‘He’s a fine man. I’m very grateful to him, he’s done a great deal for me. I’m an accountant by profession and he’s put me in the accountant’s department. I love figures, it gives me an intense satisfaction to deal with them, they’re living things to me, and now that I can handle them all day long I feel myself again.’

‘And are you glad to have a cell of your own?’

‘It’s made all the difference. To be herded with fifty men, the scum of the earth, and never to be alone for a minute–it was awful. That was the worst of all. At home, at Le Havre, that is where I lived, I had an apartment, modest of course, but my own, and we had a maid who came in by the day. We lived decently. It made it ten times harder for me than for the rest, most of them, who have never known anything but squalor, filth, and promiscuity.’

I had asked him about the cell in the hope that I could get him to talk about the life that is led in those vast dormitories in which the men are locked from five in the evening till five next morning. During these twelve hours they are their own masters. A warder can enter, they told me, only at the risk of his life. They have no light after eight o’clock, but from sardine–tins, a little oil, and a rag they make lamps by the light of which they can see enough to play cards. They gamble furiously, not for love, but for the money they keep secreted on their bodies; they are unscrupulous ruthless men, and naturally enough bitter quarrels often arise. They are settled with knives. Often in the morning, when the dormitory is opened, a man is found dead, but no threats, no promises, will induce anyone to betray the slayer. Other things Jean Charvin told me which I cannot narrate. He told me of one young fellow who had come out from France on the same ship with himself and with whom he had made friends. He was a good–looking boy. One day he went to the commandant and asked him if he could have a cell to himself. The commandant asked him why he wanted one. He explained. The commandant looked through his list and told him that at the moment all were occupied, but that as soon as there was a vacancy he should have one. Next morning when the dormitory was opened, he was found dead on his hammock with his belly ripped open to the breast–bone.

‘They’re savage brutes, and if one isn’t a brute by the time one arrives only a miracle can save one from becoming as brutal as the rest.’

Jean Charvin looked at his watch and got up. He walked away from me and then, with his charming smile, turned and faced me.

‘I must go now. If the commandant gives me permission I will come and get the books you were kind enough to offer me.’

In Guiana you do not shake hands with a convict, and a tactful man, taking leave of you, puts himself in such a position that there can be no question of your offering him your hand or of refusing his should he, forgetting for a moment, instinctively tender it. Heaven knows, it would have meant nothing to me to shake hands with Jean Charvin; it gave me a pang to see the care he had taken to spare me embarrassment.

I saw him twice more during my stay at St Laurent. He told me his story, but I will tell it now in my words rather than in his, for I had to piece it together from what he said at one time and another, and what he left out I have had to supply out of my own imagination. I do not believe it has led me astray. It was as though he had given me three letters out of a number of live–letter words; the chances are that I have guessed most of the words correctly.

Jean Charvin was born and bred in the great seaport of Le Havre. His father had a good post in the Customs. Having finished his education, he did his military service, and then looked about for a job. Like a great many other young Frenchmen he was prepared to sacrifice the hazardous chance of wealth for a respectable security. His natural gift for figures made it easy for him to get a place in the accountant’s department of a large exporting house. His future was assured. He could look forward to earning a sufficient income to live in the modest comfort of the class to which he belonged. He was industrious and well–behaved. Like most young Frenchmen of his generation he was athletic. He swam and played tennis in summer, and in winter he bicycled. On two evenings a week to keep himself fit he spent a couple of hours in a gymnasium. Through his childhood, his adolescence, and his young manhood, he lived in the constant companionship of a boy called, shall we say for the purposes of this narrative, Henri Renard, whose father was also an official in the Customs. Jean and Riri went to school together, played together, worked for their examinations together, spent their holidays together, for the two families were intimate, had their first affairs with girls together, partnered one another in the local tennis tournaments, and did their military service together. They never quarrelled. They were never so happy as in one another’s society. They were inseparable. When the time came for them to start working they decided that they would go into the same firm; but that was not so easy; Jean tried to get Riri a job in the exporting house that had engaged him, but could not manage it, and it was not till a year later that Riri got something to do. But by then trade was as bad at Le Havre as everywhere else, and in a few months he found himself once more without employment.

Riri was a light–hearted youth, and he enjoyed his leisure. He danced, bathed, and played tennis. It was thus that he made the acquaintance of a girl who had recently come to live at Le Havre. Her father had been a captain in the colonial army and on his death her mother had returned to Le Havre, which was her native place. Marie–Louise was then eighteen. She had spent almost all her life in Tonkin. This gave her an exotic attraction for the young men who had never been out of France in their lives, and first Riri, then Jean, fell in love with her. Perhaps that was inevitable: it was certainly unfortunate. She was a well–brought–up girl, an only child, and her mother, besides her pension, had a little money of her own. It was evident that she could be pursued only with a view of marriage. Of course Riri, dependent for the while entirely on his father, could not make an offer that there was the least chance of Madame Meurice, Marie–Louise’s mother, accepting; but having the whole day to himself he was able to see a great deal more of Marie–Louise than Jean could. Madame Meurice was something of an invalid, so that Marie–Louise had more liberty than most French girls of her age and station. She knew that both Riri and Jean were in love with her, she liked them both and was pleased by their attentions, but she gave no sign that she was in love with either. It was impossible to tell which she preferred. She was well aware that Riri was not in a position to marry her.

‘What did she look like?’ I asked Jean Charvin.

‘She was small, with a pretty little figure, with large grey eyes, a pale skin, and soft, mouse–coloured hair. She was rather like a little mouse. She was not beautiful, but pretty, in a quaint demure way; there was something very appealing about her. She was easy to get on with. She was simple and unaffected. You couldn’t help feeling that she was reliable and would make anyone a good wife.’

Jean and Riri hid nothing from one another and Jean made no secret of the fact that he was in love with Marie–Louise, but Riri had met her first and it was an understood thing between them that Jean should not stand in his way. At length she made her choice. One day Riri waited for Jean to come away from his office and told him that Marie–Louise had consented to marry him. They had arranged that as soon as he got a job his father should go to her mother and make the formal offer. Jean was hard hit. It was not easy to listen with eager sympathy to the plans that the excitable and enchanted Riri made for the future. But he was too much attached to Riri to feel sore with him; he knew how lovable he was and he could not blame Marie–Louise. He tried with all his might to accept honestly the sacrifice he made on the altar of friendship.

‘Why did she choose him rather than you?’ I asked.

‘He had immense vitality. He was the gayest, most amusing lad you ever met. His high spirits were infectious. You couldn’t be dull in his company.’

‘He had pep,’ I smiled.

‘And an incredible charm.’

‘Was he good–looking?’

‘No, not very. He was shorter than me, slight and wiry; but he had a nice, good–humoured face.’ Jean Charvin smiled rather pleasantly. ‘I think without any vanity I can say that I was better–looking than Riri.’

But Riri did not get a job. His father, tired of keeping him in idleness, wrote to everyone he could think of, the members of his family and his friends in various parts of France, asking them if they could not find something, however modest, for Riri to do; and at last he got a letter from a cousin in Lyons who was in the silk business to say that his firm were looking for a young man to go out to Phnom–Penh, in Cambodia, where they had a branch, to buy native silk for them. If Riri was willing to take the job he could get it for him.

Though like all French parents Riri’s hated him to emigrate, there seemed no help for it, and it was determined, although the salary was small, that he must go. He was not disinclined. Cambodia was not so far from Tonkin, and Marie–Louise must be familiar with the life. She had so often talked of it that he had come to the conclusion that she would be glad to go back to the East. To his dismay she told him that nothing would induce her to. In the first place she could not desert her mother, whose health was obviously declining; and then, after having at last settled down in France, she was determined never again to leave it. She was sympathetic to Riri, but resolute. With nothing else in prospect his father would not hear of his refusing the offer; there was no help for it, he had to go. Jean hated losing him, but from the moment Riri told him his bad news, he had realized with an exulting heart that fate was playing into his hands. With Riri out of his way for five years at least, and unless he were incompetent with the probability that he would settle in the East for good, Jean could not doubt that after a while Marie–Louise would marry him. His circumstances, his settled, respectable position in Le Havre, where she could be near her mother, would make her think it very sensible; and when she was no longer under the spell of Riri’s charm there was no reason why her great liking for him should not turn to love. Life changed for him. After months of misery he was happy again, and though he kept them to himself he too now made great plans for the future. There was no need any longer to try not to love Marie–Louise.

Suddenly his hopes were shattered. One of the shipping firms at Le Havre had a vacancy, and it looked as though the application that Riri had quickly made would be favourably considered. A friend in the office told him that it was a certainty. It would settle everything. It was an old and conservative house, and it was well known that when you once got into it you were there for life. Jean Charvin was in despair, and the worst of it was that he had to keep his anguish to himself. One day the director of his own firm sent for him.

When he reached this point Jean stopped. A harassed look came into his eyes.

‘I’m going to tell you something now that I’ve never told to anyone before. I’m an honest man, a man of principle; I’m going to tell you of the only discreditable action I’ve ever done in my life.’

I must remind the reader here that Jean Charvin was wearing the pink and white stripes of the convict’s uniform, with his number stencilled on his chest, and that he was serving a term of imprisonment for the murder of his wife.

‘I couldn’t imagine what the director wanted with me. He was sitting at his desk when I went into his office, and he gave me a searching look.

‘“I want to ask you a question of great importance,” he said. “I wish you to treat it as confidential. I shall of course treat your answer as equally so.”

‘I waited. He went on:

‘“You’ve been with us for a considerable time. I am very well satisfied with you, there is no reason why you shouldn’t reach a very good position in the firm. I put implicit confidence in you.”

‘“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I will always try to merit your good opinion.”

‘“The question at issue is this. Monsieur Untel is proposing to engage Henri Renard. He is very particular about the character of his employees, and in this case it is essential that he shouldn’t make a mistake. Part of Henri Renard’s duties would be to pay the crews of the firm’s ships, and many hundreds of thousand francs will pass through his hands. I know that Henri Renard is your great friend and that your families have always been very intimate. I put you on your honour to tell me whether Monsieur Untel would be justified in engaging this young man.”

‘I saw at once what the question meant. If Riri got the job he would stay and marry Marie–Louise, if he didn’t he would go out to Cambodia and I should marry her. I swear to you it was not I who answered, it was someone who stood in my shoes and spoke with my voice, I had nothing to do with the words that came from my mouth.

‘“Monsieur le directeur,” I said, “Henri and I have been friends all our lives. We have never been separated for a week. We went to school together; we shared our pocket–money and our mistresses when we were old enough to have them; we did our military service together.”

‘“I know. You know him better than anyone in the world. That is why I ask you these questions.”

‘“It is not fair, Monsieur le directeur. You are asking me to betray my friend. I cannot, and I will not answer your questions.”

‘The director gave me a shrewd smile. He thought himself much cleverer than he really was.

‘“Your answer does you credit, but it has told me all I wished to know.” Then he smiled kindly. I suppose I was pale, I dare say I was trembling a little. “Pull yourself together, my dear boy; you’re upset and I can understand it. Sometimes in life one is faced by a situation where honesty stands on the one side and loyalty on the other. Of course one mustn’t hesitate, but the choice is bitter. I shall not forget your behaviour in this case and on behalf of Monsieur Untel I thank you.”

‘I withdrew. Next morning Riri received a letter informing him that his services were not required, and a month later he sailed for the Far East.’

Six months after this Jean Charvin and Marie–Louise were married. The marriage was hastened by the increasing gravity of Madame Meurice’s illness. Knowing that she could not live long, she was anxious to see her daughter settled before she died. Jean wrote to Riri telling him the facts and Riri wrote back warmly congratulating him. He assured him that he need have no compunctions on his behalf; when he had left France he realized that he could never marry Marie–Louise, and he was glad that Jean was going to. He was finding consolation at Phnom–Penh. His letter was very cheerful. From the beginning Jean had told himself that Riri, with his mercurial temperament, would soon forget Marie–Louise, and his letter looked as if he had already done so. He had done him no irreparable injury. It was a justification. For if he had lost Marie–Louise he would have died; with him it was a matter of life and death.

For a year Jean and Marie–Louise were extremely happy. Madame Meurice died, and Marie–Louise inherited a couple of hundred thousand francs; but with the depression and the unstable currency they decided not to have a child till the economic situation was less uncertain. Marie–Louise was a good and frugal housekeeper. She was an affectionate, amiable, and satisfactory wife. She was placid. This before he married her had seemed to Jean a rather charming trait, but as time wore on it was borne in upon him that her placidity came from a certain lack of emotional ardour. It concealed no depth. He had always thought she was like a little mouse; there was something mouse–like in her furtive reticences; she was oddly serious about trivial matters and could busy herself indefinitely with things that were of no consequence. She had her own little set of interests and they left no room in her pretty sleek head for any others. She sometimes began a novel, but seldom cared to finish it. Jean was obliged to admit to himself that she was rather dull. The uneasy thought came to him that perhaps it had not been worth while to do a dirty trick for her sake. It began to worry him. He missed Riri. He tried to persuade himself that what was done was done and that he had really not been a free agent, but he could not quite still the prickings of his conscience. He wished now that when the director of his firm spoke to him he had answered differently.

Then a terrible thing happened. Riri contracted typhoid fever and died. It was a frightful shock for Jean. It was a shock to Marie–Louise too; she paid Riri’s parents the proper visit of condolence, but she neither ate less heartily nor slept less soundly. Jean was exasperated by her composure.

‘Poor chap, he was always so gay,’ she said, ‘he must have hated dying. But why did he go out there? I told him the climate was bad; it killed my father and I knew what I was talking about.’

Jean felt that he had killed him. If he had told the director all the good he knew of Riri, knew as no one else in the world did, he would have got the post and would now be alive and well.

‘I shall never forgive myself,’ he thought. ‘I shall never be happy again. Oh, what a fool I was, and what a cad!’

He wept for Riri. Marie–Louise sought to comfort him. She was a kind little thing and she loved him.

‘You mustn’t take it too hardly. After all, you wouldn’t have seen him for five years, and you’d have found him so changed that there wouldn’t have been anything between you any more. He would have been a stranger to you. I’ve seen that sort of thing happen so often. You’d have been delighted to see him, and in half an hour you’d have discovered that you had nothing to say to one another.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ he sighed.

‘He was too scatter–brained ever to have amounted to anything very much. He never had your firmness of character and your clear, solid intellect.’

He knew what she was thinking. What would have been her position now if she had followed Riri to Indo–China and found herself at twenty–one a widow with nothing but her own two hundred thousand francs to live on? It was a lucky escape and she congratulated herself on her good sense. Jean was a husband of whom she could be proud. He was earning good money. Jean was tortured by remorse. What he had suffered before was nothing to what he suffered now. The anguish that the recollection of his treachery caused him was worse than a physical pain gnawing at his vitals. It would assail him suddenly when he was in the middle of his work and twist his heartstrings with a violent pang. His agony was such that he craved for relief, and it was only by an effort of all his will that he prevented himself from making a full confession to Marie–Louise. But he knew how she would take it; she would not be shocked, she would think it rather a clever trick and be even subtly flattered that for her sake he had been guilty of a despicable act. She could not help him. He began to dislike her. For it was for her that he had done the shameful thing, and what was she? An ordinary, commonplace, rather calculating little woman.

‘What a fool I’ve been,’ he repeated.

He did not even find her pretty any more. He knew now that she was terribly stupid. But of course she was not to blame for that, she was not to blame because he had been false to his friend; and he forced himself to be as sweet and tender to her as he had always been. He did whatever she wanted. She had only to express a wish for him to fulfil it if it was in his power. He tried to pity her, he tried to be tolerant; he told himself that from her own petty standpoint she was a good wife, methodical, saving, and in her manner, dress, and appearance a credit to a respectable young man. All that was true; but it was on her account that Riri had died, and he loathed her. She bored him to distraction. Though he said nothing, though he was kind, amiable, and indulgent, he could often have killed her. When he did, however, it was almost without meaning to. It was ten months after Riri’s death, and Riri’s parents, Monsieur and Madame Renard, gave a party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter. Jean had seen little of them since Riri’s death and he did not want to go. But Marie–Louise said they must; he had been Riri’s greatest friend and it would be a grave lack of politeness on Jean’s part not to attend an important celebration in the family. She had a keen sense of social obligation.

‘Besides, it’ll be a distraction for you. You’ve been in poor spirits for so long, a little amusement will do you good. There’ll be champagne, won’t there? Madame Renard doesn’t like spending money, but on an occasion like this she’ll have to sacrifice herself.’

Marie–Louise chuckled slyly when she thought what a wrench it would be to Madame Renard to unloose her purse–strings.

The party had been very gay. It gave Jean a nasty turn when he found that they were using Riri’s old room for the women to put their wraps in and the men their coats. There was plenty of champagne. Jean drank a great deal to drown the bitter remorse that tormented him. He wanted to deaden the sound in his ears of Riri’s laugh and to shut his eyes to the good–humour of his shining glance. It was three o’clock when they got home. Next day was Sunday, so Jean had no work to go to. They slept late. The rest I can tell in Jean Charvin’s own words.

‘I had a headache when I woke. Marie–Louise was not in bed. She was sitting at the dressing–table brushing her hair. I’ve always been very keen on physical culture, and I was in the habit of doing exercises every morning. I didn’t feel very much inclined to do them that morning, but after all that champagne I thought I’d better. I got out of bed and took up my Indian clubs. Our bedroom was fairly large and there was plenty of room to swing them between the bed and the dressing–table where Marie–Louise was sitting. I did my usual exercises. Marie–Louise had started a little while before having her hair cut differently, quite short, and I thought it repulsive. From the back she looked like a boy, and the stubble of cropped hair on her neck made me feel rather sick. She put down her brushes and began to powder her face. She gave a nasty little laugh.

‘“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

‘“Madame Renard. That was the same dress she wore at our wedding, she’d had it dyed and done over; but it didn’t deceive me. I’d have known it anywhere.”

‘It was such a stupid remark, it infuriated me. I was seized with rage, and with all my might I hit her over the head with my Indian club. I broke her skull, apparently, and she died two days later in hospital without recovering consciousness.’

He paused for a moment. I handed him a cigarette and lit another myself.

‘I was glad she did. We could never have lived together again, and it would have been very hard to explain my action.’

‘Very.’

‘I was arrested and tried for murder. Of course I swore it was an accident, I said the club had slipped out of my hand, but the medical evidence was against me. The prosecution proved that such an injury as Marie–Louise had suffered could only have been caused by a violent and deliberate blow. Fortunately for me they could find no motive. The public prosecutor tried to make out that I had been jealous of the attentions some man had paid her at the party and that we had quarrelled on that account, but the man he mentioned swore that he had done nothing to arouse my suspicions and others at the party testified that we had left the best of friends. They found on the dressing–table an unpaid dressmaker’s bill and the prosecutor suggested that we had quarrelled about that, but I was able to prove that Marie–Louise paid for her clothes out of her own money, so that the bill could not possibly have been the cause of a dispute. Witnesses came forward and said that I had always been kind to Marie–Louise. We were generally looked upon as a devoted couple. My character was excellent and my employer spoke in the highest terms of me. I was never in danger of losing my head, and at one moment I thought I had a chance of getting off altogether. In the end I was sentenced to six years. I don’t regret what I did, for from that day, all the time I was in prison awaiting my trial, and since, while I’ve been here, I’ve ceased to worry about Riri. If I believed in ghosts I’d be inclined to say that Marie–Louise’s death had laid Riri’s. Anyhow, my conscience is at rest, and after all the torture I suffered I can assure you that everything I’ve gone through since is worth it; I feel I can now look the world in the face again.’

I know that this is a fantastic story; I am by way of being a realist, and in the stories I write I seek verisimilitude. I eschew the bizarre as scrupulously as I avoid the whimsical. If this had been a tale that I was inventing I would certainly have made it more probable. As it is, unless I had heard it with my own ears I am not sure that I should believe it. I do not know whether Jean Charvin told me the truth, and yet the words with which he closed his final visit to me had a convincing ring. I had asked him what were his plans for the future.

‘I have friends working for me in France,’ he answered. ‘A great many people thought at the time that I was the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice; the director of my firm is convinced that I was unjustly condemned; and I may get a reduction of my sentence. Even if I don’t, I think I can count upon getting back to France at the end of my six years. You see, I’m making myself useful here. The accounts were very badly kept when I took them over, and I’ve got them in apple–pie order. There have been leakages, and I’m convinced that if they’ll give me a free hand, I can stop them. The commandant likes me and I’m certain that he’ll do everything he can for me. At the worst I shan’t be much over thirty when I get back.’

‘But won’t you find it rather difficult to get work?’

‘A clever accountant like me, and a man who’s honest and industrious, can always get work. Of course I shan’t be able to live in Le Havre, but the director of my firm has business connexions at Lille and Lyons and Marseilles. He’s promised to do something for me. No, I look forward to the years to come with a good deal of confidence. I shall settle down somewhere, and as soon as I’m comfortably fixed up I shall marry. After what I’ve been through I want a home.’

We were sitting in one of the corners of the veranda that surrounded my house in order to get any draught there might be, and on the north side I had left a jalousie undrawn. The strip of sky you saw with a single coconut tree on one side, its green foliage harsh against the blue, looked like an advertisement for a tropical cruise. Jean Charvin’s eyes searched the distance as though he sought to see the future.

‘But next time I marry,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I shan’t marry for love, I shall marry for money.’

AN OFFICIAL POSITION

HE was a sturdy broad-shouldered fellow, of the middle height; though his bones were well covered as became his age, which was fifty, he was not fat; he had a ruddy complexion which neither the heat of the sun nor the unwholesomeness of the climate had affected. It was good rich blood that ran through his veins. His hair was brown and thick, and only at the temples touched with grey; he was very proud of his fair, handsome moustache and he kept it carefully brushed. There was a pleasant twinkle in his blue eyes. You would have said that this was a man whom life had treated well. There was in his appearance an air of good nature and in his vigour a glow of health that gave you confidence. He reminded you of one of those well-fed, rubicund burghers in an old Dutch picture, with their pink-cheeked wives, who made money and enjoyed the good things with which their industry provided them. He was, however, a widower. His name was Louis Remire, and his number 68763. He was serving a twelve-year sentence at St. Laurent de Maroni, the great penal settlement of French Guiana, for killing his wife, but partly because he had served in the police force at Lyons, his native town, and partly on account of his good character, he had been given an official position. He had been chosen among nearly two hundred applicants to be the public executioner.

That was why he was allowed to sport the handsome moustache of which he took so much care. He was the only convict who wore one. It was in a manner of speaking his badge of office. That also was why he was allowed to wear his own clothes. The convicts wear pyjamas in pink and white stripes, round straw hats and clumsy boots with wooden soles and leather tops. Louis Remire wore espadrilles on his bare feet, blue cotton trousers, and a khaki shirt the open neck of which exposed to view his hairy and virile chest. When you saw him strolling about the public garden, with a kindly eye looking at the children, black or half-caste, who played there, you would have taken him for a respectable shopkeeper who was enjoying an hour’s leisure. He had his own house. That was not only one of the perquisites of his office, but it was a necessity, since if he had lodged in the prison camp the convicts would have made short work of him. One morning he would have been found with his belly ripped open. It was true that the house was small, it was just a wooden shack of one room, with a lean-to that served as a kitchen; but it was surrounded by a tiny garden, within a palisade, and in the garden grew bananas, papaias and such vegetables as the climate allowed him to raise. The garden faced the sea and was surrounded by a coconut grove. The situation was charming. It was only a quarter of a mile from the prison, which was convenient for his rations. They were fetched by his assistant, who lived with him. The assistant, a tall, gawky, ungainly fellow, with deep-set, staring eyes and cavernous jaws, was serving a life sentence for rape and murder; he was not very intelligent, but in civil life he had been a cook and it was wonderful what, with the help of the vegetables they grew and such condiments as Louis Remire could afford to buy at the Chinese grocer’s, he managed to do with the soup, potatoes and cabbage, and eternal beef, beef for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, which the prison kitchens provided. It was on this account that Louis Remire had pressed his claim on the commandant when it had been found necessary to get a new assistant. The last one’s nerves had given way and, absurdly enough, thought Louis Remire with a good-natured laugh, he had developed scruples about capital punishment; now, suffering from neurasthenia, he was on the Ile St. Joseph, where the insane were confined.

His present assistant happened to be ill. He had high fever, and looked very much as if he were going to die. It had been necessary to send him to hospital. Louis Remire was sorry; he would not easily find so good a cook again. It was bad luck that this should have happened just now, for next day there was a job of work to be done. Six men were to be executed. Two were Algerians, one was a Pole, another a Spaniard from the mainland, and only two were French. They had escaped from prison in a band and gone up the river. For nearly twelve months, stealing, raping and killing they had spread terror through the colony. People scarcely dared move from their homesteads. Recaptured at last, they had all been sentenced to death, but the sentence had to be confirmed by the Minister of the Colonies, and the confirmation had only just arrived. Louis Remire could not manage without help, and besides there was a lot to arrange beforehand; it was particularly unfortunate that on this occasion of all others he should have to depend on an inexperienced man. The commandant had assigned to him one of the turnkeys. The turnkeys are convicts like the others, but they have been given their places for good behaviour and they live in separate quarters. They are on the side of the authorities and so are disliked by the other prisoners. Louis Remire was a conscientious fellow, and he was anxious that everything next day should go without a hitch. He arranged that his temporary assistant should come that afternoon to the place where the guillotine was kept so that he might explain to him thoroughly how it worked and show him exactly what he would have to do.

The guillotine, when not in use, stood in a small room which was part of the prison building, but which was entered by a separate door from the outside. When he sauntered along there at the appointed hour he found the man already waiting. He was a large-limbed, coarse-faced fellow. He was dressed in the pink and white stripes of the prison garb, but as turnkey he wore a felt hat instead of the straw of common convicts.

“What are you here for?”

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“I killed a farmer and his wife.”

“H’m. How long have you got?”

“Life.”

He looked a brute, but you could never be sure of people. He had himself seen a warder, a big, powerful man, faint dead away at an execution. He did not want his assistant to have an attack of nerves at the wrong moment. He gave him a friendly smile, and with his thumb pointed to the closed door behind which stood the guillotine.

“This is another sort of job,” he said. “There are six of them, you know. They’re a bad lot. The sooner they’re out of the way the better.”

“Oh, that’s all right. After what I’ve seen in this place I’m scared of nothing. It means no more to me than cutting the head off a chicken.”

Louis Remire unlocked the door and walked in. His assistant followed him. The guillotine in that small room, hardly larger than a cell, seemed to take up a great deal of space. It stood grim and sinister. Louis Remire heard a slight gasp and turning round saw that the turnkey was staring at the instrument with terrified eyes. His face was sallow and drawn from the fever and the hookworm from which all the convicts intermittently suffered, but now its pallor was ghastly. The executioner smiled good-naturedly.

“Gives you a turn, does it? Have you never seen it before?”

“Never.”

Louis Remire gave a little throaty chuckle.

“If you had, I suppose you wouldn’t have survived to tell the tale. How did you escape it?”

“I was starving when I did my job. I’d asked for something to eat and they set the dogs on me. I was condemned to death. My lawyer went to Paris and he got the President to reprieve me.

“It’s better to be alive than dead, there’s no denying that,” said Louis Remire, with that agreeable twinkle in his eyes.

He always kept his guillotine in perfect order. The wood, a dark hard native wood somewhat like mahogany, was highly polished; but there was a certain amount of brass, and it was Louis Remire’s pride that this should be as bright and clean as the brass-work on a yacht. The knife shone as though it had just come out of the workshop. It was necessary not only to see that everything functioned properly, but to show his assistant how it functioned. It was part of the assistant’s duty to refix the rope when the knife had dropped, and to do this he had to climb a short ladder.

It was with the satisfaction of a competent workman who knows his job from A to Z that Remire entered upon the necessary explanations. It gave him a certain quiet pleasure to point out the ingenuity of the apparatus. The condemned man was strapped to the bascule, a sort of shelf, and this by a simple mechanism was precipitated down and forwards so that the man’s neck was conveniently under the knife. The conscientious fellow had brought with him a banana stem, about five feet long, and the turnkey had wondered why. He was now to learn. The stem was of about the same circumference and consistency as the human neck, so that it afforded a very good way, not only of showing a novice how the apparatus worked, but of making sure beforehand that it was in perfect order. Louis Remire placed the banana stem in position. He released the knife. It fell with incredible speed and with a great bang. From the time the man was attached to the bascule to the time his head was off only thirty seconds elapsed. The head fell in the basket. The executioner took it up by the ears and exhibited it to those whose duty it was to watch the execution. He uttered the solemn words:

“Au nom du peuple français justice est faite. In the name of the French people justice is done.”

Then he dropped the head back into the basket. To-morrow, with six to be dispatched, the trunk would have to be unstrapped from the bascule and placed with the head on a stretcher, and the next man brought forward. They were taken in the order of their guilt. The least guilty, executed first, were spared the horror of seeing the death of their mates.

“We shall have to be careful that the right head goes with the right body,” said Louis Remire, in that rather jovial manner of his, “or there may be no end of confusion at the Resurrection.”

He let down the knife two or three times in order to make quite sure that the assistant understood how to fix it, and then getting his cleaning-materials from the shelf on which he kept them set him to work on the brass. Though it was spotless he thought that a final polish would do no harm. He leaned against the wall and idly smoked cigarettes.

Finally everything was in order and Louis Remire dismissed the assistant till midnight. At midnight they were moving the guillotine from the room in which it stood to the prison yard. It was always a bit of a job to set it up again, but it had to be in place an hour before dawn, at which time the execution took place. Louis Remire strolled slowly home to his shack. The afternoon was drawing to its close, and as he walked along he passed a working party who were returning to the prison. They spoke to one another In undertones and he guessed that they spoke of him; some looked down, two or three threw him a glance of hatred and one spat on the ground. Louis Remire, the end of a cigarette sticking to his lip, looked at them with irony. He was indifferent to the loathing, mingled with fear, with which they regarded him. It did not matter to him that not one of them would speak to him, and it only amused him to think that there was hardly one who would not gladly have thrust a knife into his guts. He had a supreme contempt for them all. He could take care of himself. He could use a knife as well as any of them, and he had confidence in his strength. The convicts knew that men were to be executed next day, and as always before an execution they were depressed and nervous. They went about their work in sullen silence, and the warders had to be more than usually on the alert.

“They’ll settle down when it’s all over,” said Louis Remire as he let himself into his little compound.

The dogs barked as he came along, and brave though he was, he listened to their uproar with satisfaction. With his own assistant ill, so that he was alone in the house, he was not sorry that he had the protection of those two savage mongrels. They prowled about the coconut grove outside his compound all night and they would give him good warning if anyone lurked there. They could be relied on to spring at the throat of any stranger who ventured too near. If his predecessor had had these dogs he wouldn’t have come to his end.

The man who had been executioner before Louis Remire had only held the job a couple of years when one day he disappeared. The authorities thought he had run away; he was known to have a bit of money, and it was very probable that he had managed to make arrangements with the captain of a schooner to take him to Brazil. His nerves had given way. He had gone two or three times to the governor of the prison and told him that he feared for his life. He was convinced that the convicts were out to kill him. The governor felt pretty sure that his fears were groundless and paid no attention, but when the man was nowhere to be found he concluded that his terror had got the better of him and he had preferred to run the danger of escape, and the danger of being recaptured and put back into prison, rather than face the risk of an avenging convict’s knife. About three weeks later the warder in charge of a working party in the jungle noticed a great flock of vultures clustered round a tree. These vultures, called urubus, are large black birds, of a horrible aspect, and they fly about the market-place of St. Laurent, picking up the offal that is left there by the starving liberated convicts, and flit heavily from tree to tree in the neat, well-kept streets of the town. They fly in the prison yard to remind the convicts that if they attempt an escape into the jungle their end, ten to one, will be to have their bones picked clean by these loathsome creatures. They were fighting and screaming in such a mass round the tree that the warder thought there was something strange there. He reported it and the commandant sent a party to see. They found a man hanging by the neck from one of the branches, and when they cut him down discovered that he was the executioner. It was given out that he had committed suicide, but there was a knife-thrust in his back, and the convicts knew that he had been stabbed and then, still alive, taken to the jungle and hanged.

Louis Remire had no fear that anything of that sort would happen to him. He knew how his predecessor had been caught. The job had not been done by the convicts. By the French law when a man is sentenced to hard labour for a certain number of years he has at the expiration of his sentence to remain in the colony for the same number of years. He is free, but he may not stir from the spot that is assigned to him as a residence. In certain circumstances he can get a concession and if he works hard he manages to scrape a bare living from it, but after a long term of penal servitude, during which he has lost all power of initiative, what with the debilitating effect of fever, hookworm and so on, he is unfit for heavy and continuous labour, and so most of the liberated men subsist on begging, larceny, smuggling tobacco or money to the prisoners, and loading and unloading cargoes when two or three times a month a steamer comes into the harbour. It was the wife of one of these freed men that had been the means of the undoing of Louis Remire’s predecessor. She was a coloured woman, young and pretty, with a neat little figure and mischievous eyes. The plot was well-considered. The executioner was a burly, sanguine man, of ardent passions. She had thrown herself in his way, and when she caught his approving glance, had cast him a saucy look. He saw her a day or two later in the public garden. He did not venture to speak to her (no one, man, woman or child, would be seen speaking to him), but when he winked at her she smiled. One evening he met her walking through the coconut grove that surrounded his compound. No one was about. He got into conversation with her. They only exchanged a few words, for she was evidently terrified of being seen with him. But she came again to the coconut grove. She played him carefully till his suspicions were allayed; she teased his desires; she made him give her little presents, and at last on the promise of what was for both of them quite a sum of money she agreed to come one dark night to the compound. A ship had just come in and her husband would be working till dawn. It was when he opened the door for her and she hesitated to come in as though at the last moment she could not make up her mind, that he stepped outside to draw her in, and fell to the ground with the violence of the knife-thrust in his back.

“The fool,” muttered Louis Remire. “He only got what he deserved. He should have smelt a rat. The eternal vanity of man.” For his part he was through with women. It was on account of women that he found himself in the situation he was in now, at least on account of one woman; and besides, at his time of life, his passions were assuaged. There were other things in life and after a certain age a man, if he was sensible, turned his attention to them. He had always been a great fisherman. In the old days, at home in France before he had had his misfortune, as soon as he came off duty, he took his rod and line and went down to the Rhone. He got a lot of fishing now. Every morning, till the sun grew hot, he sat on his favourite rock and generally managed to get enough for the prison governor’s table. The governor’s wife knew the value of things and beat him down on the price he asked, but he did not blame her for that; she knew that he had to take what she was prepared to give and it would have been stupid of her to pay a penny more than she had to. In any case it brought in a little money useful for tobacco and rum and other odds and ends. But this evening he was going to fish for himself. He got his bait from the lean-to, and his rod, and settled down on his rock. No fish was so good as the fish you caught yourself, and by now he knew which were those that were good to eat and which were so tough and flavourless that you could only throw them back into the sea. There was one sort that, fried in real olive oil, was as good as mullet. He had not been sitting there five minutes when his float gave a sudden jerk, and when he pulled up his line, there, like an answer to prayer, was one of those very fish wriggling on the hook. He took it off, banged its head on the rock, and putting it down, replaced his bait. Four of them would make a good supper, the best a man could have, and with a night’s hard work before him he needed a hearty meal. He would not have time to fish to-morrow morning. First of all the scaffold would have to be taken down and the pieces brought back to the room in which it was kept, and there would be a lot of cleaning to do. It was a bloody business; last time he had had his pants so soaked that he had been able to do nothing with them and had had to throw them away. The brass would have to be polished, the knife would have to be honed. He was not a man to leave a job half finished, and by the time it was through he would be pretty peckish. It would be worth while to catch a few more fish and put them in a cool place so that he could have a substantial breakfast. A cup of coffee, a couple of eggs and a bit of fried fish; he could do with that. Then he would have a good sleep; after a night on his feet, the anxiety of an inexperienced assistant, and the clearing away of all the mess, God knew he would deserve it.

In front of him was spread the bay in a noble sweep, and in the distance was a little island green with trees. The afternoon was exquisitely still. Peace descended on the fisherman’s soul. He watched his float idly. When you came to think of it, he reflected, he might be a great deal worse off; some of them, the convicts he meant, the convicts who swarmed in the prison a few hundred yards away from him, some of them had such a nostalgia for France that they went mad with melancholy; but he was a bit of a philosopher, so long as he could fish he was content; and did it really matter if he watched his float on the southern sea or in the Rhone? His thoughts wandered back to the past. His wife was an intolerable woman and he did not regret that he had killed her. He had never meant to marry her. She was a dressmaker, and he had taken a fancy to her because she was always neatly and smartly dressed. She seemed respectable and ladylike. He would not have been surprised if she had looked upon herself as a cut above a policeman. But he had a way with him. She soon gave him to understand that she was no snob, and when he made the customary advances he discovered to his relief, for he was not a man who considered that resistance added a flavour to conquest, that she was no prude. He liked to be seen with her when he took her out to dinner. She talked intelligently, and she was economical. She knew where they could dine well at the cheapest price. His situation was enviable. It added to his satisfaction that he could gratify the sexual desires natural to his healthy temperament at so moderate an expense. When she came to him and said she was going to have a baby it seemed natural enough that they should get married. He was earning good wages, and it was time that he should settle down. He often grew tired of eating, en pension, at a restaurant, and he looked forward to having his own home and home cooking. Well, it turned out that it had been a mistake about the baby, but Louis Remire was a good-natured fellow, and he didn’t hold it up against Adèle. But he found, as many men have found before, that the wife was a very different woman from the mistress. She was jealous and possessive. She seemed to think that on a Sunday afternoon he ought to take her for a walk instead of going out fishing, and she made it a grievance that, on coming off duty, he would go to the café. There was one café he frequented where other fishermen went and where he met men with whom he had a lot in common. He found it much pleasanter to spend his free evenings there over a glass or two of beer, whiling away the time with a game of cards, than to sit at home with his wife. She began to make scenes. Though sociable and jovial by nature he had a quick temper. There was a rough crowd at Lyons, and sometimes you could not manage them unless you were prepared to show a certain amount of firmness. When his wife began to make a nuisance of herself it never occurred to him that there was any other way of dealing with her than that he adopted. He let her know the strength of his hand. If she had been a sensible woman she would have learnt her lesson, but she was not a sensible woman. He found occasion more and more often to apply a necessary correction; she revenged herself by screaming the place down and by telling the neighbours — they lived in a two-roomed apartment on the fifth floor of a big house — what a brute he was. She told them that she was sure he would kill her one day. And yet never was there a more good-natured man than Louis Remire; she blamed him for the money he spent at the café, she accused him of wasting it on other women; well, in his position he had opportunities now and then, and as any man would he took them, and he was easy with his money, he never minded paying a round of drinks for his friends, and when a girl who had been nice to him wanted a new hat or a pair of silk stockings he wasn’t the man to say no. His wife looked upon money that he did not spend on her as money stolen from her; she tried to make him account for every penny he spent, and when in his jovial way he told her he had thrown it out of the window, she was infuriated. Her tongue grew bitter and her voice was rasping. She was in a sullen rage with him all the time. She could not speak without saying something disagreeable. They led a cat-and-dog life. Louis Remire used to tell his friends what a harridan she was, he used to tell them that he wished ten times a day that he had never married her, and sometimes he would add that if an epidemic of influenza did not carry her off he would really have to kill her.

It was these remarks, made merely in jest, and the fact that she had so often told the neighbours that she knew he would murder her, that had sent him to St. Laurent de Maroni with a twelve-year sentence. Otherwise he might very well have got off with three or four years in a French prison. The end had come one hot summer’s day. He was, which was rare for him, in a bad temper. There was a strike in progress and the strikers had been violent. The police had had to make a good many arrests and the men had not submitted to this peaceably. Louis Remire had got a nasty blow on the jaw and he had had to make free use of his truncheon. To get the arrested men to the station had been a hot and tiring job. On coming off duty he had gone home to get out of his uniform and was intending to go to the café and have a glass of beer and a pleasant game of cards. His jaw was hurting him. His wife chose that moment to ask him for money and when he told her that he had none to give her she made a scene. He had plenty of money to go to the café, but none for her to buy a scrap of food with, she could starve for all he cared. He told her to shut up, and then the row began. She got in front of the door and swore that he should not pass till he gave her money. He told her to get out of the way and took a step towards her. She whipped out his service revolver which he had taken off when he removed his uniform and threatened that she would shoot him if he moved a step. He was used to dealing with dangerous criminals, and the words were hardly out of her mouth before he had sprung upon her and snatched the revolver out of her hand. She screamed and hit him in the face. She hit him exactly where his jaw most hurt him. Blind with rage and mad with pain, he fired, he fired twice and she fell to the floor. For a moment he stood and stared at her. He was dazed. She looked as if she were dead. His first feeling was one of indescribable relief. He listened. No one seemed to have heard the sound of the shot. The neighbours must be out. That was a bit of luck, for it gave him time to do what he had to do in his own way. He changed back into his uniform, went out, locking the door behind him and putting the key in his pocket; he stopped for five minutes at his familiar café to have a glass of beer and then returned to the police-station he had lately left. On account of the day’s disturbances the chief inspector was still there. Louis Remire went to his room and told him what had happened. He spent the night in a cell adjoining those of the strikers he had so recently himself arrested. Even at that tragic moment he was struck by the irony of the situation.

Louis Remire had on frequent occasions appeared as a police witness in criminal cases and he knew how eager are a man’s companions to give any information that may damage him when he gets into troublé. It had caused him a certain grim amusement to realise how often it happened that a conviction was obtained only by the testimony of a prisoner’s best friends. But notwithstanding his experience he was amazed, when his own case came up for trial, to listen to the evidence given by the proprietor of the little café he had so much frequented, and to that of the men who for years had fished with him, played cards with him and drunk with him. They seemed to have treasured every careless word he had ever uttered, the complaints he had made about his wife and the joking threats he had from time to time made that he would get even with her. He knew that at the time they had taken them no more seriously than he meant them. If he was able to do them a small service, and a man in the force often has it in his power to do one, he never hesitated. He had never been ungenerous with his money. You would have thought as you listened to them in the witness-box that it gave them the most intense satisfaction to disclose every trivial detail that could damage him.

From what appeared at the trial you would have thought that he was a bad man, dissolute, of violent temper, extravagant, idle and corrupt. He knew that he was nothing of the kind. He was just an ordinary, good-natured, easy-going fellow, who was willing to let you go your way if you would let him go his. It was true that he liked his game of cards and his glass of beer, it was true that he liked a pretty girl, but what of it? When he looked at the jury he wondered how many of them would come out of it any better than he if all their errors, all their rash words, all their follies were thus laid bare. He did not resent the long term of penal servitude to which he was sentenced. He was an officer of the law; he had committed a crime and it was right that he should be punished. But he was not a criminal; he was the victim of an unfortunate accident.

At St. Laurent de Maroni, in the prison camp, wearing the pink and white stripe of the prison garb and the ugly straw hat, he remembered still that he had been a policeman and that the convicts with whom he must now consort had always been his natural enemies. He despised and disliked them. He had as little to do with them as he could. And he was not frightened of them. He knew them too well. Like all the rest he had a knife and he showed that he was prepared to use it. He did not want to interfere with anybody, but he was not going to allow anyone to interfere with him.

The chief of the Lyons police had liked him, his character while in the force had been exemplary, and the fiche which accompanied every prisoner spoke well of him. He knew that what officials like is a prisoner who gives no trouble, who accepts his position with cheerfulness and who is willing. He got a soft job; very soon he got a cell of his own and so escaped the horrible promiscuity of the dormitories; he got on well with the warders, they were decent chaps, most of them, and knowing that he had formerly been in the police they treated him more as a comrade than as a convict. The commandant of the prison trusted him. Presently he got the job of servant to one of the prison officials. He slept in the prison, but otherwise enjoyed complete freedom. He took the children of his master to school every day and fetched them at the end of their school hours. He made toys for them. He accompanied his mistress to market and carried back the provisions she bought. He spent long hours gossiping with her. The family liked him. They liked his chaffing manner and his good-natured smile. He was industrious and trustworthy. Life once more was tolerable.

But after three years his master was transferred to Cayenne. It was a blow. But it happened just then that the post of executioner fell free and he obtained it. Now once more he was in the service of the state. He was an official. However humble his residence it was his own. He need no longer wear the prison uniform. He could grow his hair and his moustache. He cared little if the convicts looked upon him with horror and contempt. That was how he looked upon them. Scum. When he took the bleeding head of an executed man from the basket and holding it by the ears pronounced those solemn words: Au nom du peuple français justice est faite, he felt that he did represent the Republic. He stood for law and order. He was the protector of society against that vast horde of ruthless criminals.

He got a hundred francs for each execution. That and what the governor’s wife paid him for his fish provided him with many a pleasant comfort and not a few luxuries. And now as he sat on his rock in the peace of eventide he considered what he would do with the money he would earn next day. Occasionally he got a bite, now and then a fish; he drew it out of the water, took it off the hook and put on fresh bait; but he did this mechanically, and it did not disturb the current of his thoughts. Six hundred francs. It was a respectable sum. He scarcely knew what to do with it. He had everything he wanted in his little house, he had a good store of groceries, and plenty of rum for one who was as little of a drinker as he was; he needed no fishing tackle; his clothes were good enough. The only thing was to put it aside. He already had a tidy little sum hidden in the ground at the root of a papaia tree. He chuckled when he thought how Adèle would have stared had she known that he was actually saving. It would have been balm to her avaricious soul. He was saving up gradually for when he was released. That was the difficult moment for the convicts. So long as they were in prison they had a roof over their heads and food to eat, but when they were released, with the obligation of staying for so many years more in the colony, they had to shift for themselves. They all said the same thing: it was at the expiration of their term that their real punishment began. They could not get work. Employers mistrusted them. Contractors would not engage them because the prison authorities hired out convict labour at a price that defied competition. They slept in the open, in the market-place, and for food were often glad to go to the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army made them work hard for what they gave and besides forced them to listen to their services. Sometimes they committed a violent crime merely to get back to the safety of prison. Louis Remire was not going to take any risks. He meant to amass a sufficient capital to start in business. He ought to be able to get permission to settle in Cayenne, and there he might open a bar. People might hesitate to come at first because he had been the executioner, but if he provided good liquor they would get over their prejudice, and with his jovial manner, with his experience in keeping order, he ought to be able to make a go of it. Visitors came to Cayenne now and then and they would come out of curiosity. It would be something interesting to tell their friends when they got home that the best rum punch they had had in Cayenne was at the executioner’s. But he had a good many years to go yet, and if there really was something he needed there was no reason why he shouldn’t get it. He racked his brains. No, there wasn’t a thing in the world he wanted. He was surprised. He allowed his eyes to wander from his float. The sea was wonderfully calm and now it was rich with all the colour of the setting sun. In the sky already a solitary star twinkled. A thought came to him that filled him with an extraordinary sensation.

“But if there’s nothing in the world you want, surely that’s happiness.” He stroked his handsome moustache and his blue eyes shone softly. “There are no two ways about it, I’m a happy man and till this moment I never knew it.”

The notion was so unexpected that he did not know what to make of it. It was certainly a very odd one. But there it was, as obvious to anyone with a logical mind as a proposition of Euclid.

“Happy, that’s what I am. How many men can say the same? In St. Laurent de Maroni of all places, and for the first time in my life.”

The sun was setting. He had caught enough fish for his supper and enough for his breakfast. He drew in his line, gathered up his fish, and went back to his house. It stood but a few yards from the sea. It did not take him long to light his fire and in a little while he had four little fish cheerfully frizzling in a pan. He was always very particular about the oil he used. The best olive oil was expensive, but it was worth the money. The prison bread was good, and after he had fried his fish, he fried a couple of pieces of bread in the rest of the oil. He sniffed the savoury smell with satisfaction. He lit a lamp, washed a lettuce grown in his own garden, and mixed himself a salad. He had a notion that no one in the world could mix a salad better than he. He drank a glass of rum and ate his supper with appetite. He gave a few odds and ends to the two mongrel dogs who were lying at his feet, and then, having washed up, for he was by nature a tidy man and when he came in to breakfast next morning did not want to find things in a mess, let the dogs out of the compound to wander about the coconut grove. He took the lamp into the house, made himself comfortable in his deck-chair, and smoking a cigar smuggled in from the neighbouring Dutch Colony settled down to read one of the French papers that had arrived by the last mail. Replete, his mind at ease, he could not but feel that life, with all its disadvantages, was good to live. He was still affected by the amused surprise that had overcome him when it suddenly occurred to him that he was a happy man. When you considered that men spent their lives seeking for happiness, it seemed hardly believable that he had found it. Yet the fact stared him in the face. A man who has everything he wants is happy, he had everything he wanted; therefore he was happy. He chuckled as a new thought crossed his mind.

“There’s no denying it, I owe it to Adèle.”

Old Adèle. What a foul woman!

Presently he decided that he had better have a nap; he set his alarm clock for a quarter to twelve and lying down on his bed in a few minutes was fast asleep. He slept soundly and no dreams troubled him. He woke with a start when the alarm sounded, but in a moment remembered why he had set it. He yawned and stretched himself lazily.

“Ah, well, I suppose I must get to work. Every job has its inconveniences.”

He slipped from under his mosquito-net and relit his lamp. To freshen himself he washed his hands and face, and then as a protection against the night air drank a glass of rum. He thought for a moment of his inexperienced assistant and wondered whether it would be wise to take some rum in a flask with him.

“It would be a pretty business if his nerves went back on him.”

It was unfortunate that so many as six men had to be executed. If there had been only one, it wouldn’t have mattered so much his assistant being new to the game; but with five others waiting there, it would be awkward if there were a hitch. He shrugged his shoulders. They would just have to do the best they could. He passed a comb through his tousled hair and carefully brushed his handsome moustache. He lit a cigarette. He walked through his compound, unlocked the door in the stout palisade that surrounded it, and locked it again behind him. There was no moon. He whistled for his dogs. He was surprised that they did not come. He whistled again. The brutes. They’d probably caught a rat and were fighting over it. He’d give them a good hiding for that; he’d teach them not to come when he whistled. He set out to walk in the direction of the prison. It was dark under the coconut trees and he would just as soon have had the dogs with him. Still there were only fifty yards to go and then he would be out in the open. There were lights in the governor’s house, and it gave him confidence to see them. He smiled, for he guessed what those lights at that late hour meant; the governor, with the execution before him at dawn, was finding it hard to sleep. The anxiety, the malaise, that affected convicts and ex-convicts alike on the eve of an execution, had got on his nerves. It was true that there was always the chance of an outbreak then, and the warders went around with their eyes skinned and their hands ready to draw their guns at a suspicious movement.

Louis Remire whistled for his dogs once more, but they did not come. He could not understand it. It was a trifle disquieting. He was a man who habitually walked slowly, strolling along with a sort of roll, but now he hastened his pace. He spat the cigarette out of his mouth. It had struck him that it was prudent not to betray his whereabouts by the light it gave. Suddenly he stumbled against something. He stopped dead. He was a brave man, with nerves of steel, but on a sudden he felt sick with terror. It was something soft and rather large that he had stumbled against, and he was pretty sure what it was. He wore espadrilles, and with one foot he cautiously felt the object on the ground before him. Yes, he was right. It was one of his dogs. It was dead. He took a step backwards and drew his knife. He knew it was no good to shout. The only house in the neighbourhood was the prison governor’s, it faced the clearing just beyond the coconut grove; but they would not hear him, or if they did would not stir. St. Laurent de Maroni was not a place where you went out in the dead of night when you heard a man calling for help. If next day one of the freed convicts was found lying dead, well, it was no great loss. Louis Remire saw in a flash what had happened.

He thought rapidly. They had killed his dogs while he was sleeping. They must have got them when he had put them out of his compound after supper. They must have thrown them some poisoned meat and the brutes had snatched at it. If the one he had stumbled over was near his house it was because it tried to crawl home to die. Louis Remire strained his eyes. He could see nothing. The night was pitch black. He could hardly see the trunks of the coconut trees a yard away from him. His first thought was to make a rush for his shack. If he got back to the safety of that he could wait till the prison people, wondering why he did not come, sent to fetch him. But he knew he could never get back. He knew they were there in the darkness, the men who had killed his dogs; he would have to fumble with the key to find the lock and before he found it he would have a knife plunged in his back. He listened intently. There was not a sound. And yet he felt that there were men there, lurking behind the trees, and they were there to kill him. They would kill him as they had killed his dogs. And he would die like a dog. There was more than one certainly. He knew them, there were three or four of them at least, there might be more, convicts in service in private houses who were not obliged to get back to the camp till a late hour, or desperate and starving freed men who had nothing to lose. For a moment he hesitated what to do. He dared not make a run for it, they might easily have put a rope across the pathway that led from his house to the open, and if he tripped he was done for. The coconut trees were loosely planted and among them his enemies would see him as little as he saw them. He stepped over the dead dog and plunged into the grove. He stood with his back to a tree to decide how he should proceed. The silence was terrifying. Suddenly he heard a whisper and the horror of it was frightful. Again a dead silence. He felt he must move on, but his feet seemed rooted to the ground. He felt that they were peering at him out of the darkness and it seemed to him that he was as visible to them as though he stood in the broad light of day. Then from the other side was a little cough. It came as such a shock that Louis Remire nearly screamed. He was conscious now that they were all round him. He could expect no mercy from those robbers and murderers. He remembered the other executioner, his predecessor, whom they had carried still alive into the jungle, whose eyes they had gouged out, and whom they had left hanging for the vultures to devour. His knees began to tremble. What a fool he had been to take on the job! There were soft jobs he could have found in which you ran no risk. It was too late to think of that. He pulled himself together. He had no chance of getting out of the coconut grove alive, he knew that; he wanted to be sure that he would be dead. He tightened his grip on his knife. The awful part was that he could hear no one, he could see no one, and yet he knew that they were lurking there waiting to strike. For one moment he had a mad idea, he would throw his knife away and shout out to them that he was unarmed and they could come and kill him in safety. But he knew them; they would never be satisfied merely to kill him. Rage seized him. He was not the man to surrender tamely to a pack of criminals. He was an honest man and an official of the state; it was his duty to defend himself. He could not stay there all night. It was better to get it over quickly. Yet that tree at his back seemed to offer a sort of security, he could not bring himself to move. He stared at the trunk of a tree in front of him and suddenly it moved and he realised with horror that it was a man. That made up his mind for him and with a huge effort he stepped forwards. He advanced slowly and cautiously. He could hear nothing, he could see nothing. But he knew that as he advanced they advanced too. It was as though he were accompanied by an invisible bodyguard. He thought he could hear the sound of their naked feet on the ground. His fear had left him. He walked on, keeping as close to the trees as he could, so that they should have less chance of attacking him from behind; a wild hope sprang up in his breast that they would be afraid to strike, they knew him, they all knew him, and whoever struck the first blow would be lucky if he escaped a knife in his own guts; he had only another thirty yards to go, and once in the open, able to see, he could make a fight for it. A few yards more and then he would run for his life. Suddenly something happened chat made him start out of his skin, and he stopped dead. A light was flashed and in that heavy darkness the sudden glare was terrifying. It was an electric torch. Instinctively he sprang to a tree and stood with his back to it. He could not see who held the light. He was blinded by it. He did not speak. He held his knife low, he knew that when they struck it was in the belly, and if someone flung himself at him he was prepared to strike back. He was going to sell his life dearly. For half a minute perhaps the light shone on his face, but it seemed to him an eternity. He thought now that he discerned dimly the faces of men. Then a word broke the horrible silence.

“Throw.”

At the same instant a knife came flying through the air and struck him on the breast-bone. He threw up his hands and as he did so someone sprang at him and with a great sweep of the knife ripped up his belly. The light was switched off. Louis Remire sank to the ground with a groan, a terrible groan of pain. Five, six men gathered out of the gloom and stood over him. With his fall the knife that had stuck in his breast-bone was dislodged It lay on the ground. A quick flash of the torch showed where it was. One of the men took it and with a single, swift motion cut Remire’s throat from ear to ear.

“Au nom du peuple français justice est faite,” he said.

They vanished into the darkness and in the coconut grove was the immense silence of death.

WINTER CRUISE

Captain Erdmann knew Miss Reid very little till the Friedrich Weber reached Haiti. She came on board at Plymouth, but by then he had taken on a number of passengers, French, Belgian, and Haitian, many of whom had travelled with him before, and she was placed at the chief engineer’s table. The Friedrich Weber was a freighter sailing regularly from Hamburg to Cartagena on the Colombian coast and on the way touching at a number of islands in the West Indies. She carried phosphates and cement from Germany and took back coffee and timber; but her owners, the Brothers Weber, were always willing to send her out of her route if a cargo of any sort made it worth their while. The Friedrich Weber was prepared to take cattle, mules, potatoes, or anything else that offered the chance of earning an honest penny. She carried passengers. There were six cabins on the upper deck and six below. The accommodation was not luxurious, but the food was good, plain, and abundant, and the fares were cheap. The round trip took nine weeks and was not costing Miss Reid more than forty–five pounds. She looked forward not only to seeing many interesting places, with historical associations, but also to acquiring a great deal of information that would enrich her mind.

The agent had warned her that till the ship reached Port au Prince in Haiti she would have to share a cabin with another woman. Miss Reid did not mind that, she liked company, and when the steward told her that her companion was Madame Bollin she thought at once that it would be a very good opportunity to rub up her French. She was only very slightly disconcerted when she found that Madame Bollin was coal–black. She told herself that one had to accept the rough with the smooth and that it takes all sorts to make a world. Miss Reid was a good sailor, as indeed was only to be expected since her grandfather had been a naval officer, but after a couple of roughish days the weather was fine and in a very short while she knew all her fellow–passengers. She was a good mixer. That was one of the reasons why she had made a success of her business; she owned a tea room at a celebrated beauty spot in the west of England and she always had a smile and a pleasant word for every customer who came in; she closed down in the winter and for the last four years had taken a cruise. You met such interesting people, she said, and you always learnt something. It was true that the passengers on the Friedrich Weber weren’t of quite so good a class as those she had met the year before on her Mediterranean cruise, but Miss Reid was not a snob, and though the table manners of some of them shocked her somewhat, determined to look upon the bright side of things she decided to make the best of them. She was a great reader and she was glad, on looking at the ship’s library, to find that there were a lot of books by Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace, and Agatha Christie; but with so many people to talk to she had no time for reading and she made up her mind to leave them till the ship emptied herself at Haiti.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘human nature is more important than literature.’ Miss Reid had always had the reputation of being a good talker and she flattered herself that not once during the many days they were at sea had she allowed the conversation at table to languish. She knew how to draw people out, and whenever a topic seemed to be exhausted she had a remark ready to revive it or another topic waiting on the tip of her tongue to set the conversation off again. Her friend Miss Prince, daughter of the late Vicar of Campden, who had come to see her off at Plymouth, for she lived there, had often said to her:

‘You know, Venetia, you have a mind like a man. You’re never at a loss for something to say.’

‘Well, I think if you’re interested in everyone, everyone will be interested in you,’ Miss Reid answered modestly. ‘Practice makes perfect, and I have the infinite capacity for taking pains which Dickens said was genius.’

Miss Reid was not really called Venetia, her name was Alice, but disliking it she had, when still a girl, adopted the poetic name which she felt so much better suited to her personality.

Miss Reid had a great many interesting talks with her fellow–passengers and she was really sorry when the ship at length reached Port au Prince and the last of them disembarked. The Friedrich Weber stopped two days there, during which she visited the town and the neighbourhood. When they sailed she was the only passenger. The ship was skirting the coast of the island stopping off at a variety of ports to discharge or to take on cargo.

‘I hope you will not feel embarrassed alone with so many men, Miss Reid,’ said the captain heartily as they sat down to midday dinner.

She was placed on his right hand and at table besides sat the first mate, the chief engineer, and the doctor.

‘I’m a woman of the world, Captain. I always think if a lady is a lady gentlemen will be gentlemen.’

‘We’re only rough sailor men, madam, you mustn’t expect too much.’

‘Kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith than Norman blood, Captain,’ answered Miss Reid.

He was a short, thick–set man, with a clean–shaven head and a red, clean–shaven face. He wore a white stengah–shifter, but except at meal–times unbuttoned at the neck and showing his hairy chest. He was a jovial fellow. He could not speak without bellowing. Miss Reid thought him quite an eccentric, but she had a keen sense of humour and was prepared to make allowances for that. She took the conversation in hand. She had learnt a great deal about Haiti on the voyage out and more during the two days she had spent there, but she knew that men liked to talk rather than to listen, so she put them a number of questions to which she already knew the answers; oddly enough they didn’t. In the end she found herself obliged to give quite a little lecture, and before dinner was over, Mittag Essen they called it in their funny way, she had imparted to them a great deal of interesting information about the history and economic situation of the Republic, the problems that confronted it, and its prospects for the future. She talked rather slowly, in a refined voice, and her vocabulary was extensive.

At nightfall they put in at a small port where they were to load three hundred bags of coffee, and the agent came on board. The captain asked him to stay to supper and ordered cocktails. As the steward brought them Miss Reid swam into the saloon. Her movements were deliberate, elegant, and self–assured. She always said that you could tell at once by the way she walked if a woman was a lady. The captain introduced the agent to her and she sat down.

‘What is that you men are drinking?’ she asked.

‘A cocktail. Will you have one, Miss Reid?’

‘I don’t mind if I do.’

She drank it and the captain somewhat doubtfully asked her if she would have another.

‘Another? Well, just to be matey.’

The agent, much whiter than some, but a good deal darker than many, was the son of a former minister of Haiti to the German court, and having lived for many years in Berlin spoke good German. It was indeed on this account that he had got a job with a German shipping firm. On the strength of this Miss Reid, during supper, told them all about a trip down the Rhine that she had once taken. Afterwards she and the agent, the skipper, the doctor, and the mate sat around a table and drank beer. Miss Reid made it her business to draw the agent out. The fact that they were loading coffee suggested to her that he would be interested in learning how they grew tea in Ceylon, yes, she had been to Ceylon on a cruise, and the fact that his father was a diplomat made it certain that he would be interested in the royal family of England. She had a very pleasant evening. When she at last retired to rest, for she would never have thought of saying she was going to bed, she said to herself:

‘There’s no doubt that travel is a great education.’

It was really an experience to find herself alone with all those men. How they would laugh when she told them all about it when she got home! They would say that things like that only happened to Venetia. She smiled when she heard the captain on deck singing with that great booming voice of his. Germans were so musical. He had a funny way of strutting up and down on his short legs singing Wagner tunes to words of his own invention. It was Tannhäuser he was singing now (that lovely thing about the evening star) but knowing no German Miss Reid could only wonder what absurd words he was putting to it. It was as well.

‘Oh, what a bore that woman is, I shall certainly kill her if she goes on much longer.’ Then he broke into Siegfried’s martial strain. ‘She’s a bore, she’s a bore, she’s a bore. I shall throw her into the sea.’

And that of course is what Miss Reid was. She was a crashing, she was a stupendous, she was an excruciating bore. She talked in a steady monotone, and it was no use to interrupt her because then she started again from the beginning. She had an insatiable thirst for information and no casual remark could be thrown across the table without her asking innumerable questions about it. She was a great dreamer and she narrated her dreams at intolerable length. There was no subject upon which she had not something prosy to say. She had a truism for every occasion. She hit on the commonplace like a hammer driving a nail into the wall. She plunged into the obvious like a clown in a circus jumping through a hoop. Silence did not abash her. Those poor men far away from their homes and the patter of little feet, and with Christmas coming on, no wonder they felt low; she redoubled her efforts to interest and amuse them. She was determined to bring a little gaiety into their dull lives. For that was the awful part of it: Miss Reid meant well. She was not only having a good time herself, but she was trying to give all of them a good time. She was convinced that they liked her as much as she liked them. She felt that she was doing her bit to make the party a success and she was naïvely happy to think that she was succeeding. She told them all about her friend Miss Price and how often she had said to her: Venetia, no one ever has a dull moment in your company. It was the captain’s duty to be polite to a passenger and however much he would have liked to tell her to hold her silly tongue he could not, but even if he had been free to say what he liked, he knew that he could not have brought himself to hurt her feelings. Nothing stemmed the torrent of her loquacity. It was as irresistible as a force of nature. Once in desperation they began talking German, but Miss Reid stopped this at once.

‘Now I won’t have you saying things I don’t understand. You ought all to make the most of your good luck in having me all to yourselves and practise your English.’

‘We were talking of technical matters that would only bore you, Miss Reid,’ said the captain.

‘I’m never bored. That’s why, if you won’t think me a wee bit conceited to say so, I’m never boring. You see, I like to know things. Everything interests me and you never know when a bit of information won’t come in useful.’

The doctor smiled dryly.

‘The captain was only saying that because he was embarrassed. In point of fact he was telling a story that was not fit for the ears of a maiden lady.’

‘I may be a maiden lady but I’m also a woman of the world, I don’t expect sailors to be saints. You need never be afraid of what you say before me, Captain, I shan’t be shocked. I should love to hear your story.’

The doctor was a man of sixty with thin grey hair, a grey moustache, and small bright blue eyes. He was a silent, bitter man, and however hard Miss Reid tried to bring him into the conversation it was almost impossible to get a word out of him. But she wasn’t a woman who would give in without a struggle, and one morning when they were at sea and she saw him sitting on deck with a book, she brought her chair next to his and sat down beside him.

‘Are you fond of reading, Doctor?’ she said brightly.

‘Yes.’

‘So am I. And I suppose like all Germans you’re musical.’

‘I’m fond of music.’

‘So am I. The moment I saw you I thought you looked clever.’

He gave her a brief look and pursing his lips went on reading. Miss Reid was not disconcerted.

‘But of course one can always read. I always prefer a good talk to a good book. Don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘How very interesting. Now do tell me why?’

‘I can’t give you a reason.’

‘That’s very strange, isn’t it? But then I always think human nature is strange. I’m terribly interested in people, you know. I always like doctors, they know so much about human nature, but I could tell you some things that would surprise even you. You learn a great deal about people if you run a tea–shop like I do, that’s to say if you keep your eyes open.’

The doctor got up.

‘I must ask you to excuse me, Miss Reid. I have to go and see a patient.’

‘Anyhow I’ve broken the ice now,’ she thought, as he walked away. ‘I think he was only shy.’

But a day or two later the doctor was not feeling at all well. He had an internal malady that troubled him now and then, but he was used to it and disinclined to talk about it. When he had one of his attacks he only wanted to be left alone. His cabin was small and stuffy, so he settled himself on a long chair on deck and lay with his eyes closed. Miss Reid was walking up and down to get the half–hour’s exercise she took morning and evening. He thought that if he pretended to be asleep she would not disturb him. But when she had passed him half a dozen times she stopped in front of him and stood quite still. Though he kept his eyes closed he knew that she was looking at him.

’Is there anything I can do, Doctor?’ she said.

He started.

‘Why, what should there be?’

He gave her a glance and saw that her eyes were deeply troubled.

‘You look dreadfully ill,’ she said.

‘I’m in great pain.’

‘I know. I can see that. Can’t something be done?’

‘No, it’ll pass off presently.’

She hesitated for a moment then went away. Presently she returned.

‘You look so uncomfortable with no cushions or anything. I’ve brought you my own pillow that I always travel with. Do let me put it behind your head.’

He felt at that moment too ill to remonstrate. She lifted his head gently and put the soft pillow behind it. It really did make him feel more comfortable. She passed her hand across his forehead and it was cool and soft.

‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know what doctors are. They haven’t the first idea how to take care of themselves.’

She left him, but in a minute or two returned with a chair and a bag. The doctor when he saw her gave a twitch of anguish.

‘Now I’m not going to let you talk, I’m just going to sit beside you and knit. I always think it’s a comfort when one isn’t feeling very well to have someone near.’

She sat down and taking an unfinished muffler out of her bag began busily to ply her needles. She never said a word. And strangely enough the doctor found her company a solace. No one else on board had even noticed that he was ill, he had felt lonely, and the sympathy of that crashing bore was grateful to him. It soothed him to see her silently working and presently he fell asleep. When he awoke she was still working. She gave him a little smile, but did not speak. His pain had left him and he felt much better.

He did not go into the saloon till late in the afternoon. He found the captain and Hans Krause, the mate, having a glass of beer together.

‘Sit down, Doctor,’ said the captain. ‘We’re holding a council of war. You know that the day after tomorrow is Sylvester Abend.’

‘Of course.’

Sylvester Abend, New Year’s Eve, is an occasion that means a great deal to a German, and they had all been looking forward to it. They had brought a Christmas tree all the way from Germany with them.

‘At dinner today Miss Reid was more talkative than ever. Hans and I have decided that something must be done about it.’

‘She sat with me for two hours this morning in silence. I suppose she was making up for lost time.’

‘It’s bad enough to be away from one’s home and family just now anyway and all we can do is to make the best of a bad job. We want to enjoy our Sylvester Abend, and unless something is done about Miss Reid we haven’t a chance.’

‘We can’t have a good time if she’s with us,’ said the mate. ‘She’ll spoil it as sure as eggs is eggs.’

‘How do you propose to get rid of her, short of throwing her overboard?’ smiled the doctor. ‘She’s not a bad old soul; all she wants is a lover.’

‘At her age?’ cried Hans Krause.

‘Especially at her age. That inordinate loquacity, that passion for information, the innumerable questions she asks, her prosiness, the way she goes on and on–it is all a sign of her clamouring virginity. A lover would bring her peace. Those jangled nerves of hers would relax. At least for an hour she would have lived. The deep satisfaction which her being demands would travel through those exacerbated centres of speech, and we should have quiet.’

It was always a little difficult to know how much the doctor meant what he said and when he was having a joke at your expense. The captain’s blue eyes, however, twinkled mischievously.

‘Well, Doctor, I have great confidence in your powers of diagnosis. The remedy you suggest is evidently worth trying, and since you are a bachelor it is clear that it is up to you to apply it.’

‘Pardon me, Captain, it is my professional duty to prescribe remedies for the patients under my charge in this ship, but not to administer them personally. Besides, I am sixty.’

‘I am a married man with grown–up children,’ said the captain. ‘I am old and fat and asthmatic, it is obvious that I cannot be expected to undertake a task of this kind. Nature cut me out for the role of a husband and father, not for that of a lover.’

‘Youth in these matters is essential and good looks are advantageous,’ said the doctor gravely.

The captain gave a great bang on the table with his fist.

‘You are thinking of Hans. You’re quite right. Hans must do it.’

The mate sprang to his feet.

‘Me? Never.’

‘Hans, you are tall, handsome, strong as a lion, brave, and young. We have twenty–three days more at sea before we reach Hamburg, you wouldn’t desert your trusted old captain in an emergency or let down your good friend the doctor?’

‘No, Captain, it’s asking too much of me. I have been married less than a year and I love my wife. I can hardly wait to get back to Hamburg. She is yearning for me as I am yearning for her. I will not be unfaithful to her, especially with Miss Reid.’

‘Miss Reid’s not so bad,’ said the doctor.

‘Some people might call her even nice–looking,’ said the captain.

And indeed when you took Miss Reid feature by feature she was not in fact a plain woman. True, she had a long stupid face, but her brown eyes were large and she had very thick lashes; her brown hair was cut short and curled rather prettily over her neck; she hadn’t a bad skin, and she was neither too fat nor too thin. She was not old as people go nowadays, and if she had told you that she was forty you would have been quite willing to believe it. The only thing against her was that she was drab and dull.

‘Must I then for twenty–three mortal days endure the prolixity of that tedious woman? Must I for twenty–three mortal days answer her inane questions and listen to her fatuous remarks? Must I, an old man, have my Silvester Abend, the jolly evening I was looking forward to, ruined by the unwelcome company of that intolerable virgin? And all because no one can be found to show a little gallantry, a little human kindness, a spark of charity to a lonely woman. I shall wreck the ship.’

‘There’s always the radio–operator,’ said Hans.

The captain gave a loud shout.

‘Hans, let the ten thousand virgins of Cologne arise and call you blessed. Steward,’ he bellowed, ‘tell the radio–operator that I want him.’

The radio–operator came into the saloon and smartly clicked his heels together. The three men looked at him in silence. He wondered uneasily whether he had done something for which he was to be hauled over the coals. He was above the middle height, with square shoulders and narrow hips, erect and slender, his tanned, smooth skin looked as though a razor had never touched it, he had large eyes of a startling blue and a mane of curling golden hair. He was a perfect specimen of young Teutonic manhood. He was so healthy, so vigorous, so much alive that even when he stood some way from you, you felt the glow of his vitality.

‘Aryan, all right,’ said the captain. ‘No doubt about that. How old are you, my boy?’

‘Twenty–one, sir.’

‘Married?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Engaged?’

The radio–operator chuckled. There was an engaging boyishness in his laugh.

‘No, sir.’

‘You know that we have a female passenger on board?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘I’ve said good morning to her when I’ve seen her on deck.’

The captain assumed his most official manner. His eyes, which generally twinkled with fun, were stern and he got a sort of bark into his rich, fruity voice.

‘Although this is a cargo–boat and we carry valuable freight, we also take such passengers as we can get, and this is a branch of our business that the company is anxious to encourage. My instructions are to do everything possible to promote the happiness and comfort of the passengers. Miss Reid needs a lover. The doctor and I have come to the conclusion that you are well suited to satisfy Miss Reid’s requirements.’

‘Me, sir?’

The radio–operator blushed scarlet and then began to giggle, but quickly composed himself when he saw the set faces of the three men who confronted him.

‘But she’s old enough to be my mother.’

‘That at your age is a matter of no consequence. She is a woman of the highest distinction and allied to all the great families of England. If she were German she would be at least a countess. That you should have been chosen for this responsible position is an honour that you should greatly appreciate. Furthermore, your English is halting and this will give you an excellent opportunity to improve it.’

‘That of course is something to be thought of,’ said the radio–operator. ‘I know that I want practice.’

‘It is not often in this life that it is possible to combine pleasure with intellectual improvement, and you must congratulate yourself on your good fortune.’

‘But if I may be allowed to put the question, sir, why does Miss Reid want a lover?’

‘It appears to be an old English custom for unmarried women of exalted rank to submit themselves to the embraces of a lover at this time of year. The company is anxious that Miss Reid should be treated exactly as she would be on an English ship, and we trust that if she is satisfied, with her aristocratic connexions she will be able to persuade many of her friends to take cruises in the line’s ships.’

‘Sir, I must ask to be excused.’

‘It is not a request that I am making, it is an order. You will present yourself to Miss Reid, in her cabin, at eleven o’clock tonight.’

‘What shall I do when I get there?’

‘Do?’ thundered the captain. ‘Do? Act naturally.’

With a wave of the hand he dismissed him. The radio–operator clicked his heels, saluted, and went out.

‘Now let us have another glass of beer,’ said the captain.

At supper that evening Miss Reid was at her best. She was verbose. She was playful. She was refined. There was not a truism that she failed to utter. There was not a commonplace that she forebore to express. She bombarded them with foolish questions. The captain’s face grew redder and redder as he sought to contain his fury; he felt that he could not go on being polite to her any longer and if the doctor’s remedy did not help, one day he would forget himself and give her, not a piece, but the whole of his mind.

‘I shall lose my job,’ he thought, ‘but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be worth it.’

Next day they were already sitting at table when she came in to dinner.

‘Sylvester Abend tomorrow,’ she said, brightly. That was the sort of thing she would say. She went on: ‘Well, what have you all been up to this morning?’

Since they did exactly the same thing every day, and she knew very well what that was, the question was enraging. The captain’s heart sank. He briefly told the doctor what he thought of him.

‘Now, no German, please,’ said Miss Reid archly. ‘You know I don’t allow that, and why, Captain, did you give the poor doctor that sour look? It’s Christmas time, you know; peace and goodwill to all men. I’m so excited about tomorrow evening, and will there be candles on the Christmas tree?’

‘Naturally.’

‘How thrilling! I always think a Christmas tree without candles isn’t a Christmas tree. Oh, d’you know, I had such a funny experience last night. I can’t understand it at all.’

A startled pause. They all looked intently at Miss Reid. For once they hung on her lips.

‘Yes,’ she went on in that monotonous, rather finicking way of hers, ‘I was just getting into bed last night when there was a knock at my door. “Who is it?” I said. “It’s the radio–operator,” was the answer. “What is it?” I said. “Can I speak to you?” he said.’

They listened with rapt attention.

‘“Well, I’ll just pop on a dressing–gown,” I said, “and open the door.” So I popped on a dressing–gown and opened the door. The radio–operator said: “Excuse me, miss, but do you want to send a radio?” Well, I did think it was funny his coming at that hour to ask me if I wanted to send a radio, I just laughed in his face, it appealed to my sense of humour if you understand what I mean, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I said: “Thank you so much, but I don’t think I want to send a radio.” He stood there, looking so funny, as if he was quite embarrassed, so I said: “Thank you all the same for asking me,” and then I said “Good night, pleasant dreams”, and shut the door.’

‘The damned fool,’ cried the captain.

‘He’s young, Miss Reid,’ the doctor put in. ‘It was excess of zeal. I suppose he thought you would want to send a New Year’s greeting to your friends and he wished you to get the advantage of the special rate.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mind at all. I like these queer little things that happen to one when one’s travelling. I just get a good laugh out of them.’

As soon as dinner was over and Miss Reid had left them the captain sent for the radio–operator.

‘You idiot, what in heaven’s name made you ask Miss Reid last night whether she wanted to send a radio?’

‘Sir, you told me to act naturally. I am a radio–operator. I thought it natural to ask her if she wanted to send a radio. I didn’t know what else to say.’

‘God in heaven,’ shouted the captain, ‘when Siegfried saw Brunhilde lying on her rock and cried: Das ist kein Mann,’ (the captain sang the words, and being pleased with the sound of his voice, repeated the phrase two or three times before he continued), ‘did Siegfried when she awoke ask her if she wished to send a radio, to announce to her papa, I suppose, that she was sitting up after her long sleep and taking notice?’

‘I beg most respectfully to draw your attention to the fact that Brunhilde was Siegfried’s aunt. Miss Reid is a total stranger to me.’

‘He did not reflect that she was his aunt. He knew only that she was a beautiful and defenceless woman of obviously good family and he acted as any gentleman would have done. You are young, handsome, Aryan to the tips of your fingers, the honour of Germany is in your hands.’

‘Very good, sir. I will do my best.’

That night there was another knock on Miss Reid’s door. ‘Who is it?’

‘The radio–operator. I have a radio for you, Miss Reid.’

‘For me?’ She was surprised, but it at once occurred to her that one of her fellow–passengers who had got off at Haiti had sent her New Year’s greetings. ‘How very kind people are,’ she thought. ‘I’m in bed. Leave it outside the door.’

‘It needs an answer. Ten words prepaid.’

Then it couldn’t be a New Year’s greeting. Her heart stopped beating. It could only mean one thing; her shop had been burned to the ground. She jumped out of bed.

‘Slip it under the door and I’ll write the answer and slip it back to you.’

The envelope was pushed under the door and as it appeared on the carpet it had really a sinister look. Miss Reid snatched it up and tore the envelope open. The words swam before her eyes and she couldn’t for a moment find her spectacles. This is what she read:

‘Happy New Year. Stop. Peace and goodwill to all men. Stop. You are very beautiful. Stop. I love you. Stop. I must speak to you. Stop. Signed: Radio Operator.’

Miss Reid read this through twice. Then she slowly took off her spectacles and hid them under a scarf. She opened the door. ‘Come in,’ she said.

Next day was New Year’s Eve. The officers were cheerful and a little sentimental when they sat down to dinner. The stewards had decorated the saloon with tropical creepers to make up for holly and mistletoe, and the Christmas tree stood on a table with the candles ready to be lit at supper time. Miss Reid did not come in till the officers were seated, and when they bade her good morning she did not speak but merely bowed. They looked at her curiously. She ate a good dinner, but uttered never a word. Her silence was uncanny. At last the captain could stand it no longer, and he said:

‘You’re very quiet today, Miss Reid.’

‘I’m thinking,’ she remarked.

‘And will you not tell us your thoughts, Miss Reid?’ the doctor asked playfully.

She gave him a cool, you might almost have called it a supercilious, look.

‘I prefer to keep them to myself, Doctor. I will have a little more of that hash, I’ve got a very good appetite.’

They finished the meal in a blessed silence. The captain heaved a sigh of relief. That was what meal–time was for, to eat, not to chatter. When they had finished he went up to the doctor and wrung his hand.

‘Something has happened, Doctor.’

‘It has happened. She’s a changed woman.’

‘But will it last?’

‘One can only hope for the best.’

Miss Reid put on an evening dress for the evening’s celebration, a very quiet black dress, with artificial roses at her bosom and a long string of imitation jade round her neck. The lights were dimmed and the candles on the Christmas tree were lit. It felt a little like being in church. The junior officers were supping in the saloon that evening and they looked very smart in their white uniforms. Champagne was served at the company’s expense and after supper they had a Maibowle. They pulled crackers. They sang songs to the gramophone, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, Alt Heidelberg, and Auld Lang Syne. They shouted out the tunes lustily, the captain’s voice rising loud above the others, and Miss Reid joining in with a pleasing contralto. The doctor noticed that Miss Reid’s eyes from time to time rested on the radio–operator, and in them he read an expression of some bewilderment.

‘He’s a good–looking fellow, isn’t he?’ said the doctor.

Miss Reid turned round and looked at the doctor coolly.

‘Who?’

‘The radio–operator. I thought you were looking at him.’

‘Which is he?’

‘The duplicity of women,’ the doctor muttered, but with a smile he answered: ‘He’s sitting next to the chief engineer.’

‘Oh, of course, I recognize him now. You know, I never think it matters what a man looks like. I’m so much more interested in a man’s brains than in his looks.’

‘Ah,’ said the doctor.

They all got a little tight, including Miss Reid, but she did not lose her dignity and when she bade them good night it was in her best manner.

‘I’ve had a very delightful evening. I shall never forget my New Year’s Eve on a German boat. It’s been very interesting. Quite an experience.’

She walked steadily to the door, and this was something of a triumph, for she had drunk drink for drink with the rest of them through the evening.

They were all somewhat jaded next day. When the captain, the mate, the doctor, and the chief engineer came down to dinner they found Miss Reid already seated. Before each place was a small parcel tied up in pink ribbon. On each was written: Happy New Year. They gave Miss Reid a questioning glance.

‘You’ve all been so very kind to me I thought I’d like to give each of you a little present. There wasn’t much choice at Port au Prince, so you mustn’t expect too much.’

There was a pair of briar pipes for the captain, half a dozen silk handkerchiefs for the doctor, a cigar–case for the mate, and a couple of ties for the chief engineer. They had dinner and Miss Reid retired to her cabin to rest. The officers looked at one another uncomfortably. The mate fiddled with the cigar–case she had given him.

‘I’m a little ashamed of myself,’ he said at last.

The captain was pensive and it was plain that he too was a trifle uneasy.

‘I wonder if we ought to have played that trick on Miss Reid,’ he said. ‘She’s a good old soul and she’s not rich; she’s a woman who earns her own living. She must have spent the best part of a hundred marks on these presents. I almost wish we’d left her alone.’

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

‘You wanted her silenced and I’ve silenced her.’

‘When all’s said and done, it wouldn’t have hurt us to listen to her chatter for three weeks more,’ said the mate.

‘I’m not happy about her,’ added the captain. ‘I feel there’s something ominous in her quietness.’

She had spoken hardly a word during the meal they had just shared with her. She seemed hardly to listen to what they said.

‘Don’t you think you ought to ask her if she’s feeling quite well, doctor?’ suggested the captain.

‘Of course she’s feeling quite well. She’s eating like a wolf. If you want inquiries made you’d much better make them of the radio–operator.’

‘You may not be aware of it, Doctor, but I am a man of great delicacy.’

‘I am a man of heart myself,’ said the doctor.

For the rest of the journey those men spoilt Miss Reid outrageously. They treated her with the consideration they would have shown to someone who was convalescent after a long and dangerous illness. Though her appetite was excellent they sought to tempt her with new dishes. The doctor ordered wine and insisted on her sharing his bottle with him. They played dominoes with her. They played chess with her. They played bridge with her. They engaged her in conversation. But there was no doubt about it, though she responded to their advances with politeness, she kept herself to herself. She seemed to regard them with something very like disdain; you might almost have thought that she looked upon those men and their efforts to be amiable as pleasantly ridiculous. She seldom spoke unless spoken to. She read detective stories and at night sat on deck looking at the stars. She lived a life of her own.

At last the journey drew to its close. They sailed up the English Channel on a still grey day; they sighted land. Miss Reid packed her trunk. At two o’clock in the afternoon they docked at Plymouth. The captain, the mate, and the doctor came along to say good–bye to her.

‘Well, Miss Reid,’ said the captain in his jovial way, ‘we’re sorry to lose you, but I suppose you’re glad to be getting home.’

‘You’ve been very kind to me, you’ve all been very kind to me, I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it. I’ve been very happy with you. I shall never forget you.’

She spoke rather shakily, she tried to smile, but her lips quivered, and tears ran down her cheeks. The captain got very red. He smiled awkwardly.

‘May I kiss you, Miss Reid?’

She was taller than he by half a head. She bent down and he planted a fat kiss on one wet cheek and a fat kiss on the other. She turned to the mate and the doctor. They both kissed her.

‘What an old fool I am,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s so good.’

She dried her eyes and slowly, in her graceful, rather absurd way, walked down the companion. The captain’s eyes were wet. When she reached the quay she looked up and waved to someone on the boat deck.

‘Who’s she waving to?’ asked the captain.

‘The radio–operator.’

Miss Price was waiting on the quay to welcome her. When they had passed the Customs and got rid of Miss Reid’s heavy luggage they went to Miss Price’s house and had an early cup of tea. Miss Reid’s train did not start till five. Miss Price had much to tell Miss Reid.

‘But it’s too bad of me to go on like this when you’ve just come home. I’ve been looking forward to hearing all about your journey.’

‘I’m afraid there’s not very much to tell.’

‘I can’t believe that. Your trip was a success, wasn’t it?’

‘A distinct success. It was very nice.’

‘And you didn’t mind being with all those Germans?’

‘Of course they’re not like English people. One has to get used to their ways. They sometimes do things that–well, that English people wouldn’t do, you know. But I always think that one has to take things as they come.’

‘What sort of things do you mean?’

Miss Reid looked at her friend calmly. Her long, stupid face had a placid look, and Miss Price never noticed that in the eyes was a strangely mischievous twinkle.

‘Things of no importance really. Just funny, unexpected, rather nice things. There’s no doubt that travel is a wonderful education.’

MABEL

I WAS at Pagan, in Burma, and from there I took the steamer to Mandalay, but a couple of days before I got there, when the boat tied up for the night at a riverside village, I made up my mind to go ashore. The skipper told me that there was there a pleasant little club in which I had only to make myself at home; they were quite used to having strangers drop off like that from the steamer, and the secretary was a very decent chap; I might even get a game of bridge. I had nothing in the world to do, so I got into one of the bullock-carts that were waiting at the landing-stage and was driven to the club. There was a man sitting on the verandah and as I walked up he nodded to me and asked whether I would have a whisky and soda or a gin and bitters. The possibility that I would have nothing at all did not even occur to him. I chose the longer drink and sat down. He was a tall, thin, bronzed man, with a big moustache, and he wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt. I never knew his name, but when we had been chatting a little while another man came in who told me he was the secretary, and he addressed my friend as George.

“Have you heard from your wife yet?” he asked him.

The other’s eyes brightened.

“Yes, I had letters by this mail. She’s having no end of a time.”

“Did she tell you not to fret?”

George gave a little chuckle, but was I mistaken in thinking that there was in it the shadow of a sob?

“In point of fact she did. But that’s easier said than done. Of course I know she wants a holiday, and I’m glad she should have it, but it’s devilish hard on a chap.” He turned to me. “You see, this is the first time I’ve ever been separated from my missus, and I’m like a lost dog without her.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Five minutes.”

The secretary of the club laughed.

“Don’t be a fool, George. You’ve been married eight years.” After we had talked for a little, George, looking at his watch, said he must go and change his clothes for dinner and left us. The secretary watched him disappear into the night with a smile of not unkindly irony.

“We all ask him as much as we can now that he’s alone,” he told me. “He mopes so terribly since his wife went home.”

“It must be very pleasant for her to know that her husband is as devoted to her as all that.”

“Mabel is a remarkable woman.”

He called the boy and ordered more drinks. In this hospitable place they did not ask you if you would have anything; they took it for granted. Then he settled himself in his long chair and lit a cheroot. He told me the story of George and Mabel.

They became engaged when he was home on leave, and when he returned to Burma it was arranged that she should join him in six months. But one difficulty cropped up after another; Mabel’s father died, the war came, George was sent to a district unsuitable for a white woman; so that in the end it was seven years before she was able to start. He made all arrangements for the marriage, which was to take place on the day of her arrival, and went down to Rangoon to meet her. On the morning on which the ship was due he borrowed a motor-car and drove along to the dock. He paced the quay.

Then, suddenly, without warning, his nerve failed him. He had not seen Mabel for seven years. He had forgotten what she was like. She was a total stranger. He felt a terrible sinking in the pit of his stomach and his knees began to wobble. He couldn’t go through with it. He must tell Mabel that he was very sorry, but he couldn’t, he really couldn’t marry her. But how could a man tell a girl a thing like that when she had been engaged to him for seven years and had come six thousand miles to marry him? He hadn’t the nerve for that either. George was seized with the courage of despair. There was a boat at the quay on the very point of starting for Singapore; he wrote a hurried letter to Mabel, and without a stick of luggage, just in the clothes he stood up in, leaped on board.

The letter Mabel received ran somewhat as follows:

Dearest Mabel, I have been suddenly called away on business and do not know when I shall be back. I think it would be much wiser if you returned to England. My plans are very uncertain. Your loving George.

But when he arrived at Singapore he found a cable waiting for him.

Quite understand. Don’t worry. Love. Mabel.

Terror made him quick-witted.

“By Jove, I believe she’s following me,” he said.

He telegraphed to the shipping-office at Rangoon and sure enough her name was on the passenger list of the ship that was now on its way to Singapore. There was not a moment to lose. He jumped on the train to Bangkok. But he was uneasy; she would have no difficulty in finding out that he had gone to Bangkok and it was just as simple for her to take the train as it had been for him. Fortunately there was a French tramp sailing next day for Saigon. He took it. At Saigon he would be safe; it would never occur to her that he had gone there; and if it did, surely by now she would have taken the hint. It is five days journey from Bangkok to Saigon and the boat is dirty, cramped and uncomfortable. He was glad to arrive and took a rickshaw to the hotel. He signed his name in the visitors’ book and a telegram was immediately handed to him. It contained but two words: Love. Mabel. They were enough to make him break into a cold sweat.

“When is the next boat for Hong-Kong?” he asked.

Now his flight grew serious. He sailed to Hong-Kong, but dared not stay there; he went to Manila; Manila was ominous; he went on to Shanghai: Shanghai was nerve-racking; every time he went out of the hotel he expected to run straight into Mabel’s arms; no, Shanghai would never do. The only thing was to go to Yokohama. At the Grand Hotel at Yokohama a cable awaited him.

“So sorry to have missed you at Manila. Love. Mabel.”

He scanned the shipping intelligence with a fevered brow. Where was she now? He doubled back to Shanghai. This time he went straight to the club and asked for a telegram. It was handed to him.

“Arriving shortly. Love. Mabel.”

No, no, he was not so easy to catch as all that. He had already made his plans. The Yangtse is a long river and the Yangtse was falling. He could just about catch the last steamer that could get up to Chungking and then no one could travel till the following spring except by junk. Such a journey was out of the question for a woman alone. He went to Hankow and from Hankow to Ichang, he changed boats here and from Ichang through the rapids went to Chungking. But he was desperate now, he was not going to take any risks: there was a place called Cheng-tu, the capital of Szechuan, and it was four hundred miles away. It could only be reached by road, and the road was infested with brigands. A man would be safe there.

George collected chair-bearers and coolies and set out. It was with a sigh of relief that he saw at last the crenellated walls of the lonely Chinese city. From those walls at sunset you could see the snowy mountains of Tibet.

He could rest at last: Mabel would never find him there. The consul happened to be a friend of his and he stayed with him. He enjoyed the comfort of a luxurious house, he enjoyed his idleness after that strenuous escape across Asia, and above all he enjoyed his divine security. The weeks passed lazily one after the other.

One morning George and the consul were in the courtyard looking at some curios that a Chinese had brought for their inspection when there was a loud knocking at the great door of the Consulate. The door-man flung it open. A chair borne by four coolies entered, advanced, and was set down. Mabel stepped out. She was neat and cool and fresh. There was nothing in her appearance to suggest that she had just come in after a fortnight on the road. George was petrified. He was as pale as death. She went up to him.

“Hulloa, George, I was so afraid I’d missed you again.”

“Hulloa, Mabel,” he faltered.

He did not know what to say. He looked this way and that: she stood between him and the doorway. She looked at him with a smile in her blue eyes.

“You haven’t altered at all,” she said. “Men can go off so dreadfully in seven years and I was afraid you’d got fat and bald. I’ve been so nervous. It would have been terrible if after all these years I simply hadn’t been able to bring myself to marry you after all.”

She turned to George’s host.

“Are you the consul?” she asked.

“I am.”

“That’s all right. I’m ready to marry him as soon as I’ve had a bath.”

And she did.

MASTERSON

WHEN I left Colombo I had no notion of going to Keng Tung, but on the ship I met a man who told me he had spent five years there. He said it had an important market, held every five days, whither came natives of half a dozen countries and members of half a hundred tribes. It had pagodas darkly splendid and a remoteness that liberated the questing spirit from its anxiety. He said he would sooner live there than anywhere in the world. I asked him what it had offered him and he said, contentment. He was a tall, dark fellow with the aloofness of manner you often find in those who have lived much alone in unfrequented places. Men like this are a little restless in the company of others and though in the smoking-room of a ship or at the club bar they may be talkative and convivial, telling their story with the rest, joking and glad sometimes to narrate their unusual experiences, they seem always to hold something back. They have a life in themselves that they keep apart, and there is a look in their eyes, as it were turned inwards, that informs you that this hidden life is the only one that signifies to them. And now and then their eyes betray their weariness with the social round into which hazard or the fear of seeming odd has for a moment forced them. They seem then to long for the monotonous solitude of some place of their predilection where they can be once more alone with the reality they have found.

It was as much the manner of this chance acquaintance as what he told me that persuaded me to make the journey across the Shan States on which I now set out. From the rail-head in Upper Burma to the rail-head in Siam, whence I could get down to Bangkok, it was between six and seven hundred miles. Kind people had done everything possible to render the excursion easy for me and the Resident at Taunggyi had wired to me that he had made arrangements for mules and ponies to be ready for me on my arrival. I had bought in Rangoon such stores as seemed necessary, folding chairs and a table, a filter, lamps and I know not what. I took the train from Mandalay to Thazi, intending there to hire a car for Taunggyi, and a man I had met at the club at Mandalay and who lived at Thazi asked me to have brunch (the pleasant meal of Burma that combines breakfast and lunch) with him before I started. His name was Masterson. He was a man in the early thirties, with a pleasant friendly face, curling dark hair speckled with grey, and handsome dark eyes. He spoke with a singularly musical voice, very slowly, and this, I hardly know why, inspired you with confidence. You felt that a man who took such a long time to say what he had to say and had found the world with sufficient leisure to listen to him must have qualities that made him sympathetic to his fellows. He took the amiability of mankind for granted and I suppose he could only have done this because he was himself amiable. He had a nice sense of humour, without of course a quick thrust and parry, but agreeably sarcastic; it was of that agreeable type that applies common sense to the accidents of life and so sees them in a faintly ridiculous aspect. He was engaged in a business that kept him travelling up and down Burma most of the year and in his joumeyings he had acquired the collector’s habit. He told me that he spent all his spare money on buying Burmese curiosities and it was especially to see them that he asked me to have a meal with him.

The train got in early in the morning. He had warned me that, having to be at his office, he could not meet me; but brunch was at ten and he told me to go to his house as soon as I was finished with the one or two things I had to do in the town.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, “and if you want a drink ask the boy for it. I’ll get back as soon as I’ve got through with my business.”

I found out where there was a garage and made a bargain with the owner of a very dilapidated Ford to take me and my baggage to Taunggyi. I left my Madrassi servant to see that everything was stowed in it that was possible and the rest tied on to the footboards, and strolled along to Masterson’s house. It was a neat little bungalow in a road shaded by tall trees, and in the early light of a sunny day looked pretty and homelike. I walked up the steps and was hailed by Masterson.

“I got done more quickly than I expected. I shall have time to show you my things before brunch is ready. What will you have? I’m afraid I can only offer you a whisky and soda.”

“Isn’t it rather early for that?”

“Rather. But it’s one of the rules of the house that nobody crosses the threshold without having a drink.”

“What can I do but submit to the rule?”

He called the boy and in a moment a trim Burmese brought in a decanter, a syphon and glasses. I sat down and looked about the room. Though it was still so early the sun was hot outside and the jalousies were drawn. The light was pleasant and cool after the glare of the road. The room was comfortably furnished with rattan chairs and on the walls were water-colour paintings of English scenes. They were a little prim and old-fashioned and I guessed that they had been painted in her youth by the maiden and elderly aunt of my host. There were two of a cathedral I did not know, two or three of a rose garden and one of a Georgian house. When he saw my eyes for an instant rest upon this, he said:

“That was our house at Cheltenham.”

“Oh, is that where you come from?”

Then there was his collection. The room was crowded with Buddhas and with figures, in bronze or wood, of the Buddha’s disciples; there were boxes of all shapes, utensils of one kind and another, curiosities of every sort, and although there were far too many they were arranged with a certain taste so that the effect was pleasing. He had some lovely things. He showed them to me with pride, telling me how he had got this object and that, and how he had heard of another and hunted it down and the incredible astuteness he had employed to induce an unwilling owner to part with it. His kindly eyes shone when he described a great bargain and they flashed darkly when he inveighed against the unreasonableness of a vendor who rather than accept a fair price for a bronze dish had taken it away. There were flowers in the room, and it had not the forlorn look that so many bachelors’ houses have in the East.

“You’ve made the place very comfortable,” I said.

He gave the room a sweeping glance.

“It was all right. It’s not much now.”

I did not quite know what he meant. Then he showed me a long wooden gilt box, decorated with the glass mosaic that I had admired in the palace at Mandalay, but the workmanship was more delicate than anything I had seen there, and this with its gem-like richness had really something of the ornate exquisiteness of the Italian Renaissance.

“They tell me it’s about a couple of hundred years old,” he said. “They’ve not been able to turn out anything like this for a long time.”

It was a piece made obviously for a king’s palace and you wondered to what uses it had been put and what hands it had passed through. It was a jewel.

“What is the inside like?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing much. It’s just lacquered.”

He opened it and I saw that it contained three or four framed photographs.

“Oh, I’d forgotten those were there,” he said.

His soft, musical voice had a queer sound in it, and I gave him a sidelong look. He was bronzed by the sun, but his face notwithstanding flushed a deeper red. He was about to close the box, and then he changed his mind. He took out one of the photographs and showed it to me.

“Some of these Burmese girls are rather sweet when they’re young, aren’t they?” he said.

The photograph showed a young girl standing somewhat self-consciously against the conventional background of a photographer’s studio, a pagoda and a group of palm-trees. She was wearing her best clothes and she had a flower in her hair. But the embarrassment you saw she felt at having her picture taken did not prevent a shy smile from trembling on her lips and her large solemn eyes had nevertheless a roguish twinkle. She was very small and very slender.

“What a ravishing little thing,” I said.

Then Masterson took out another photograph in which she sat with a child standing by her side, his hand timidly on her knee and a baby in her arms. The child stared straight in front of him with a look of terror on his face; he could not understand what that machine and the man behind it, his head under a black cloth, were up to.

“Are those her children?” I asked.

“And mine,” said Masterson.

At that moment the boy came in to say that brunch was ready. We went into the dining-room and sat down.

“I don’t know what you’ll get to eat. Since my girl went away everything in the house has gone to blazes.”

A sulky look came into his red honest face and I did not know what to reply.

“I’m so hungry that whatever I get will seem good,” I hazarded.

He did not say anything and a plate of thin porridge was put before us. I helped myself to milk and sugar. Masterson ate a spoonful or two and pushed his plate aside.

“I wish I hadn’t looked at those damned photographs,” he said. “I put them away on purpose.”

I did not want to be inquisitive or to force a confidence my host had no wish to give, but neither did I desire to seem so unconcerned as to prevent him from telling me something he had in his heart. Often in some lonely post in the jungle or in a stiff grand house, solitary in the midst of a teeming Chinese city, a man has told me stories about himself that I was sure he had never told to a living soul. I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seen before and would never see again, a wanderer for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse led him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting over a syphon or two and a bottle of whisky, the hostile, inexplicable world outside the radius of an acetylene lamp) than I could have if I had known them for ten years. If you are interested in human nature it is one of the great pleasures of travel. And when you separate (for you have to be up betimes) sometimes they will say to you:

“I’m afraid I’ve bored you to death with all this nonsense. I haven’t talked so much for six months. But it’s done me good to get it off my chest.”

The boy removed the porridge plates and gave each of us a piece of pale fried fish. It was rather cold.

“The fish is beastly, isn’t it?” said Masterson. “I hate river fish, except trout; the only thing is to smother it with Worcester sauce.”

He helped himself freely and passed me the bottle.

“She was a damned good housekeeper, my girl; I used to feed like a fighting-cock when she was here. She’d have had the cook out of the house in a quarter of an hour if he’d sent in muck like this.”

He gave me a smile, and I noticed that his smile was very sweet. It gave him a peculiarly gentle look.

“It was rather a wrench parting with her, you know.”

It was quite evident now that he wished to talk and I had no hesitation in giving him a lead.

“Did you have a row?”

“No. You could hardly call it a row. She lived with me five years and we never had a tiff even. She was the best-tempered little thing that ever was. Nothing seemed to put her out. She was always as merry as a cricket. You couldn’t look at her without her lips breaking into a smile. She was always happy. And there was no reason why she shouldn’t be. I was very good to her.”

“I’m sure you were,” I answered.

“She was mistress here. I gave her everything she wanted. Perhaps if I’d been more of a brute she wouldn’t have gone away.”

“Don’t make me say anything so obvious as that women are incalculable.”

He gave me a deprecating glance and there was a trace of shyness in the smile that just flickered in his eyes.

“Would it bore you awfully if I told you about it?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I saw her one day in the street and she rather took my fancy. I showed you her photograph, but the photograph doesn’t begin to do her justice. It sounds silly to say about a Burmese girl, but she was like a rose-bud, not an English rose, you know, she was as little like that as the glass flowers on that box I showed you are like real flowers, but a rose grown in an Eastern garden that had something strange and exotic about it. I don’t know how to make myself plain.”

“I think I understand what you mean all the same,” I smiled.

“I saw her two or three times and found out where she lived, I sent my boy to make enquiries about her, and he told me that her parents were quite willing that I should have her if we could come to an arrangement. I wasn’t inclined to haggle and everything was settled in no time. Her family gave a party to celebrate the occasion and she came to live here. Of course I treated her in every way as my wife and put her in charge of the house. I told the boys that they’d got to take their orders from her and if she complained of any of them out they went. You know, some fellows keep their girls in the servants’ quarters and when they go away on tour the girls have a rotten time. Well, I think that’s a filthy thing to do. If you are going to have a girl to live with you the least you can do is to see that she has a good time.

“She was a great success and I was as pleased as Punch. She kept the house spotless. She saved me money. She wouldn’t let the boys rob me. I taught her to play bridge and, believe me, she learned to play a damned good game.”

“Did she like it?”

“Loved it. When people came here she couldn’t have received them better if she’d been a duchess. You know, these Burmese have beautiful manners. Sometimes it would make me laugh to see the assurance with which she would receive my guests, government officials, you know, and soldiers who were passing through. If some young subaltern was rather shy she’d put him at his ease at once. She was never pushing or obtrusive, but just there when she was wanted and doing her best to see that everything went well and everyone had a good time. And I’ll tell you what, she could mix the best cocktail you’d get anywhere between Rangoon and Bhamo. People used to say I was lucky.”

“I’m bound to say I think you were,” I said.

The curry was served and I piled my plate with rice and helped myself to chicken and then chose from a dozen little dishes the condiments I fancied. It was a good curry.

“Then she had her babies, three in three years, but one died when it was six weeks old. I showed you a photograph of the two that are living. Funny-looking little things, aren’t they? Are you fond of children?”

“Yes. I have a strange and almost unnatural passion for newborn babies.”

“I don’t think I am, you know. I couldn’t even feel very much about my own. I’ve often wondered if it showed that I was rather a rotter.”

“I don’t think so. I think the passion many people affect for children is merely a fashionable pose. I have a notion that children are all the better for not being burdened with too much parental love.”

“Then my girl asked me to marry her, legally I mean, in the English way. I treated it as a joke. I didn’t know how she’d got such an idea in her head. I thought it was only a whim and I gave her a gold bracelet to keep her quiet. But it wasn’t a whim. She was quite serious about it. I told her there was nothing doing. But you know what women are, when they once set their mind on getting something they never give you a moment’s peace. She wheedled and sulked, she cried, she appealed to my compassion, she tried to extract a promise out of me when I was rather tight, she was on the watch for me when I was feeling amorous, she nearly tripped me when she was ill. She watched me more carefully, I should think, than a stockbroker ever watched the market, and I knew that, however natural she seemed, however occupied with something else, she was always warily alert for the unguarded moment when she could pounce on me and gain her point.” Masterson gave me once more his slow, ingenuous smile.

“I suppose women are pretty much the same all the world over,” he said.

“I expect so,” I answered.

“A thing I’ve never been able to understand is why a woman thinks it worth while to make you do something you don’t want to. She’d rather you did a thing against the grain than not do it at all. I don’t see what satisfaction it can be to them.”

“The satisfaction of triumph. A man convinced against his will may be of the same opinion still, but a woman doesn’t mind that. She has conquered. She has proved her power.”

Masterson shrugged his shoulders. He drank a cup of tea. “You see, she said that sooner or later I was bound to marry an English girl and turn her out. I said I wasn’t thinking of marrying. She said she knew all about that. And even if I didn’t I should retire some day and go back to England. And where would she be then? It went on for a year. I held out. Then she said that if I wouldn’t marry her she’d go and take the kids with her. I told her not to be a silly little fool. She said that if she left me now she could marry a Burman, but in a few years nobody would want her. She began to pack her things. I thought it was only a bluff and I called it: I said: ‘Well, go if you want to, but if you do you won’t come back.’ I didn’t think she’d give up a house like this, and the presents I made her, and all the pickings, to go back to her own family. They were as poor as church mice. Well, she went on packing her things. She was just as nice as ever to me, she was gay and smiling; when some fellows came to spend the night here she was just as cordial as usual, and she played bridge with us till two in the morning. I couldn’t believe she meant to go and yet I was rather scared. I was very fond of her. She was a damned good sort.”

“But if you were fond of her why on earth didn’t you marry her? It had been a great success.”

“I’ll tell you. If I married her I’d have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there. I don’t want to be buried out here, I want to be buried in an English churchyard. I’m happy enough here, but I don’t want to live here always. I couldn’t. I want England. Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colours. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I shall be a funny fat elderly man when I go back, too old to hunt even if I could afford it, but I can fish. I don’t want to shoot tigers, I want to shoot rabbits. And I can play golf on a proper course. I know I shall be out of it, we fellows who’ve spent our lives out here always are, but I can potter about the local club and talk to retired Anglo-Indians. I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go and have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me in yesterday was tough, and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops. I want to be said how d’you do to in the street by people who knew me when I was a boy. And I want to have a walled garden at the back of my house and grow roses. I dare say it all sounds very humdrum and provincial and dull to you, but that’s the sort of life my people have always lived and that’s the sort of life I want to live myself. It’s a dream if you like, but it’s all I have, it means everything in the world to me, and I can’t give it up.”

He paused for a moment and looked into my eyes.

“Do you think me an awful fool?”

“No.”

“Then one morning she came to me and said that she was off. She had her things put on a cart and even then I didn’t think she meant it. Then she put the two children in a rickshaw and came to say good-bye to me. She began to cry. By George, that pretty well broke me up. I asked her if she really meant to go and she said yes, unless I married her. I shook my head. I very nearly yielded. I’m afraid I was crying too. Then she gave a great sob and ran out of the house. I had to drink about half a tumbler of whisky to steady my nerves.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Four months. At first I thought she’d come back and then because I thought she was ashamed to make the first step I sent my boy to tell her that if she wanted to come I’d take her. But she refused. The house seemed awfully empty without her. At first I thought I’d get used to it, but somehow it doesn’t seem to get any less empty. I didn’t know how much she meant to me. She’d twined herself round my heart.”

“I suppose she’ll come back if you agree to marry her.”

“Oh, yes, she told the boy that. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth while to sacrifice my happiness for a dream. It is only a dream, isn’t it? It’s funny, one of the things that holds me back is the thought of a muddy lane I know, with great clay banks on both sides of it, and above, beech trees bending over. It’s got a sort of cold, earthy smell that I can never quite get out of my nostrils. I don’t blame her, you know. I rather admire her. I had no idea she had so much character. Sometimes I’m awfully inclined to give way.” He hesitated for a little while. “I think, perhaps, if I thought she loved me I would. But of course, she doesn’t; they never do, these girls who go and live with white men, I think she liked me, but that’s all. What would you do in my place?”

“Oh, my dear fellow, how can I tell? Would you ever forget that dream?”

“Never.”

At that moment the boy came in to say that my Madrassi servant with the Ford car had just come up. Masterson looked at his watch.

“You’ll want to be getting off, won’t you? And I must get back to my office. I’m afraid I’ve rather bored you with my domestic affairs.”

“Not at all,” I said.

We shook hands, I put on my topee, and he waved to me as the car drove off.

PRINCESS SEPTEMBER

FIRST the King of Siam had two daughters and he called them Night and Day. Then he had two more, so he changed the names of the first ones and called the four of them after the seasons, Spring and Autumn, Winter and Summer. But in course of time he had three others and he changed their names again and called all seven by the days of the week. But when his eighth daughter was born he did not know what to do till he suddenly thought of the months of the year. The Queen said there were only twelve and it confused her to have to remember so many new names, but the King had a methodical mind and when he made it up he never could change it if he tried. He changed the names of all his daughters and called them January, February, March (though of course in Siamese) till he came to the youngest, who was called August, and the next one was called September.

“That only leaves October, November, and December,” said the Queen. “And after that we shall have to begin all over again.”

“No, we shan’t,” said the King, “because I think twelve daughters are enough for any man and after the birth of dear little December I shall be reluctantly compelled to cut off your head.”

He cried bitterly when he said this, for he was extremely fond of the Queen. Of course it made the Queen very uneasy because she knew that it would distress the King very much if he had to cut off her head. And it would not be very nice for her. But it so happened that there was no need for either of them to worry because September was the last daughter they ever had. The Queen only had sons after that and they were called by the letters of the alphabet, so there was no cause for anxiety there for a long time, since she had only reached the letter J.

Now the King of Siam’s daughters had had their characters permanently embittered by having to change their names in this way, and the older ones, whose names of course had been changed oftener than the others, had their characters more permanently embittered. But September, who had never known what it was to be called anything but September (except of course by her sisters, who because their characters were embittered called her all sorts of names), had a very sweet and charming nature.

The King of Siam had a habit which I think might be usefully imitated in Europe. Instead of receiving presents on his birthday he gave them and it looks as though he liked it, for he used often to say he was sorry he had only been born on one day and so only had one birthday in the year. But in this way he managed in course of time to give away all his wedding presents and the loyal addresses which the mayors of the cities in Siam presented him with and all his own crowns which had gone out of fashion. One year on his birthday, not having anything else handy, he gave each of his daughters a beautiful green parrot in a beautiful golden cage. There were nine of them and on each cage was written the name of the month which was the name of the princess it belonged to. The nine princesses were very proud of their parrots and they spent an hour every day (for like their father they were of a methodical turn of mind) in teaching them to talk. Presently all the parrots could say God Save the King (in Siamese, which is very difficult) and some of them could say Pretty Polly in no less than seven oriental languages. But one day when the Princess September went to say good-morning to her parrot she found it lying dead at the bottom of its golden cage. She burst into a flood of tears, and nothing that her Maids of Honour could say comforted her. She cried so much that the Maids of Honour, not knowing what to do, told the Queen, and the Queen said it was stuff and nonsense and the child had better go to bed without any supper. The Maids of Honour wanted to go to a party, so they put the Princess September to bed as quickly as they could and left her by herself. And while she lay in her bed, crying still even though she felt rather hungry, she saw a little bird hop into her room. She took her thumb out of her mouth and sat up. Then the little bird began to sing and he sang a beautiful song all about the lake in the King’s garden and the willow trees that looked at themselves in the still water and the goldfish that glided in and out of the branches that were reflected in it. When he had finished, the Princess was not crying any more and she quite forgot that she had had no supper.

“That was a very nice song,” she said.

The little bird gave her a bow, for artists have naturally good manners, and they like to be appreciated.

“Would you care to have me instead of your parrot?” said the little bird. “It’s true that I’m not so pretty to look at, but on the other hand I have a much better voice.”

The Princess September clapped her hands with delight and then the little bird hopped on to the end of her bed and sang her to sleep.

When she awoke next day the little bird was still sitting there, and as she opened her eyes he said good-morning. The Maids of Honour brought in her breakfast, and he ate rice out of her hand and he had his bath in her saucer. He drank out of it too. The Maids of Honour said they didn’t think it was very polite to drink one’s bath water, but the Princess September said that was the artistic temperament. When he had finished his breakfast he began to sing again so beautifully that the Maids of Honour were quite surprised, for they had never heard anything like it, and the Princess September was very proud and happy.

“Now I want to show you to my eight sisters,” said the Princess.

She stretched out the first finger of her right hand so that it served as a perch and the little bird flew down and sat on it. Then, followed by her Maids of Honour, she went through the palace and called on each of the Princesses in turn, starting with January, for she was mindful of etiquette, and going all the way down to August. And for each of the Princesses the little bird sang a different song. But the parrots could only say God Save the King and Pretty Polly. At last she showed the little bird to the King and Queen. They were surprised and delighted.

“I knew I was right to send you to bed without any supper,” said the Queen.

“This bird sings much better than the parrots,” said the King.

“I should have thought you got quite tired of hearing people say God Save the King,” said the Queen. “I can’t think why those girls wanted to teach their parrots to say it too.”

“The sentiment is admirable,” said the King, “and I never mind how often I hear it. But I do get tired of hearing those parrots say Pretty Polly.”

“They say it in seven different languages,” said the Princesses.

“I dare say they do,” said the King, “but it reminds me too much of my councillors. They say the same thing in seven different ways and it never means anything in any way they say it.”

The Princesses, their characters as I have already said being naturally embittered, were vexed at this, and the parrots looked very glum indeed. But the Princess September ran through all the rooms of the palace, singing like a lark, while the little bird flew round and round her, singing like a nightingale, which indeed it was.

Things went on like this for several days and then the eight Princesses put their heads together. They went to September and sat down in a circle round her, hiding their feet as is proper for Siamese princesses to do.

“My poor September,” they said. “We are sorry for the death of your beautiful parrot. It must be dreadful for you not to have a pet bird as we have. So we have all put our pocket-money together and we are going to buy you a lovely green and yellow parrot.”

“Thank you for nothing,” said September. (This was not very civil of her, but Siamese princesses are sometimes a little short with one another.) “I have a pet bird which sings the most charming songs to me and I don’t know what on earth I should do with a green and yellow parrot.”

January sniffed, then February sniffed, then March sniffed; in fact all the Princesses sniffed, but in their proper order of precedence. When they had finished September asked them:

“Why do you sniff? Have you all got colds in the head?”

“Well, my dear,” they said, “it’s absurd to talk of your bird when the little fellow flies in and out just as he likes.” They looked round the room and raised their eyebrows so high that their foreheads entirely disappeared.

“You’ll get dreadful wrinkles,” said September.

“Do you mind our asking where your bird is now?” they said.

“He’s gone to pay a visit to his father-in-law,” said the Princess September.

“And what makes you think he’ll come back?” asked the Princesses.

“He always does come back,” said September.

“Well, my dear,” said the eight Princesses, “if you’ll take our advice you won’t run any risks like that. If he comes back, and mind you, if he does you’ll be lucky, pop him into the cage and keep him there. That’s the only way you can be sure of him.”

“But I like to have him fly about the room,” said the Princess September.

“Safety first,” said her sisters ominously.

They got up and walked out of the room, shaking their heads, and they left September very uneasy. It seemed to her that her little bird was away a long time and she could not think what he was doing. Something might have happened to him. What with hawks and men with snares you never knew what trouble he might get into. Besides, he might forget her, or he might take a fancy to somebody else; that would be dreadful; oh, she wished he were safely back again, and in the golden cage that stood there empty and ready. For when the Maids of Honour had buried the dead parrot they had left the cage in its old place.

Suddenly September heard a tweet-tweet just behind her ear and she saw the little bird sitting on her shoulder. He had come in so quietly and alighted so softly that she had not heard him.

“I wondered what on earth had become of you,” said the Princess.

“I thought you’d wonder that,” said the little bird. “The fact is I very nearly didn’t come back to-night at all. My father-in-law was giving a party and they all wanted me to stay, but I thought you’d be anxious.”

Under the circumstances this was a very unfortunate remark for the little bird to make.

September felt her heart go thump, thump against her chest, and she made up her mind to take no more risks. She put up her hand and took hold of the bird. This he was quite used to, she liked feeling his heart go pit-a-pat, so fast, in the hollow of her hand, and I think he liked the soft warmth of her little hand. So the bird suspected nothing and he was so surprised when she carried him over to the cage, popped him in, and shut the door on him for a moment he could think of nothing to say. But in a moment or two he hopped up on the ivory perch and said:

“What is the joke?”

“There’s no joke,” said September, “but some of mamma’s cats are prowling about to-night, and I think you’re much safer in there.”

“I can’t think why the Queen wants to have all those cats,” said the little bird, rather crossly.

“Well, you see, they’re very special cats,” said the Princess, “they have blue eyes and a kink in their tails, and they’re a speciality of the royal family, if you understand what I mean.”

“Perfectly,” said the little bird, “but why did you put me in this cage without saying anything about it? I don’t think it’s the sort of place I like.”

“I shouldn’t have slept a wink all night if I hadn’t known you were safe.”

“Well, just for this once I don’t mind,” said the little bird, “so long as you let me out in the morning.”

He ate a very good supper and then began to sing. But in the middle of his song he stopped.

“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” he said, “but I don’t feel like singing to-night.”

“Very well,” said September, “go to sleep instead.”

So he put his head under his wing and in a minute was fast asleep. September went to sleep too. But when the dawn broke she was awakened by the little bird calling her at the top of his voice:

“Wake up, wake up,” he said. “Open the door of this cage and let me out. I want to have a good fly while the dew is still on the ground.”

“You’re much better off where you are,” said September. “You have a beautiful golden cage. It was made by the best workman in my papa’s kingdom, and my papa was so pleased with it that he cut off his head so that he should never make another.”

“Let me out, let me out,” said the little bird.

“You’ll have three meals a day served by my Maids of Honour; you’ll have nothing to worry you from morning till night, and you can sing to your heart’s content.”

“Let me out, let me out,” said the little bird. And he tried to slip through the bars of the cage, but of course he couldn’t, and he beat against the door but of course he couldn’t open it. Then the eight Princesses came in and looked at him. They told September she was very wise to take their advice. They said he would soon get used to the cage and in a few days would quite forget that he had ever been free. The little bird said nothing at all while they were there, but as soon as they were gone he began to cry again: “Let me out, let me out.”

“Don’t be such an old silly,” said September. “I’ve only put you in the cage because I’m so fond of you. I know what’s good for you much better than you do yourself. Sing me a little song and I’ll give you a piece of brown sugar.”

But the little bird stood in the corner of his cage, looking out at the blue sky, and never sang a note. He never sang all day.

“What’s the good of sulking?” said September. “Why don’t you sing and forget your troubles?”

“How can I sing?” answered the bird. “I want to see the trees and the lake and the green rice growing in the fields.”

“If that’s all you want I’ll take you for a walk,” said September.

She picked up the cage and went out and she walked down to the lake round which grew the willow trees, and she stood at the edge of the rice-fields that stretched as far as the eye could see.

“I’ll take you out every day,” she said. “I love you and I only want to make you happy.”

“It’s not the same thing,” said the little bird. “The rice-fields and the lake and the willow trees look quite different when you see them through the bars of a cage.”

So she brought him home again and gave him his supper. But he wouldn’t eat a thing. The Princess was a little anxious at this, and asked her sisters what they thought about it.

“You must be firm,” they said.

“But if he won’t eat, he’ll die,” she answered.

“That would be very ungrateful of him,” they said. “He must know that you’re only thinking of his own good. If he’s obstinate and dies it’ll serve him right and you’ll be well rid of him.”

September didn’t see how that was going to do her very much good, but they were eight to one and all older than she, so she said nothing.

“Perhaps he’ll have got used to his cage by to-morrow,” she said.

And next day when she awoke she cried out good-morning in a cheerful voice. She got no answer. She jumped out of bed and ran to the cage. She gave a startled cry, for there the little bird lay, at the bottom, on his side, with his eyes closed,’ and he looked as if he were dead. She opened the door and putting her hand in lifted him out. She gave a sob of relief, for she felt that his little heart was beating still.

“Wake up, wake up, little bird,” she said.

She began to cry and her tears fell on the little bird. He opened his eyes and felt that the bars of the cage were no longer round him.

“I cannot sing unless I’m free and if I cannot sing, I die,” he said.

The Princess gave a great sob.

“Then take your freedom,” she said, “I shut you in a golden cage because I loved you and wanted to have you all to myself. But I never knew it would kill you. Go. Fly away among the trees that are round the lake and fly over the green rice-fields. I love you enough to let you be happy in your own way.”

She threw open the window and gently placed the little bird on the sill. He shook himself a little.

“Come and go as you will, little bird,” she said. “I will never put you in a cage any more.”

“I will come because I love you, little Princess,” said the bird. “And I will sing you the loveliest songs I know. I shall go far away, but I shall always come back, and I shall never forget you.” He gave himself another shake. “Good gracious me, how stiff I am,” he said.

Then he opened his wings and flew right away into the blue. But the little Princess burst into tears, for it is very difficult to put the happiness of someone you love before your own, and with her little bird far out of sight she felt on a sudden very lonely. When her sisters knew what had happened they mocked her and said that the little bird would never return. But he did at last. And he sat on September’s shoulder and ate out of her hand and sang her the beautiful songs he had learned while he was flying up and down the fair places of the world. September kept her window open day and night so that the little bird might come into her room whenever he felt inclined, and this was very good for her; so she grew extremely beautiful. And when she was old enough she married the King of Cambodia and was carried all the way to the city in which he lived on a white elephant. But her sisters never slept with their windows open, so they grew extremely ugly as well as disagreeable, and when the time came to marry them off they were given away to the King’s councillors with a pound of tea and a Siamese cat.

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

I left Bangkok on a shabby little ship of four or five hundred tons. The dingy saloon, which served also as dining–room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel chairs on both sides of them. The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty. Cockroaches walked about on the floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash–basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out.

We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water’s edge. We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me. The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.

I had gone on board early in the morning and soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered. There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his. The circus proprietor was what is termed a good mixer, a type which according to your mood you fly from or welcome, but I happened to be feeling much pleased with life and before I had been on board an hour we had shaken for drinks, and he had shown me his animals. He was a very short fat man, and his stengah–shifter, white but none too clean, outlined the noble proportions of his abdomen, but the collar was so tight that you wondered he did not choke. He had a red, clean–shaven face, a merry blue eye, and short, untidy sandy hair. He wore a battered topee well on the back of his head. His name was Wilkins and he was born in Portland, Oregon. It appears that the Oriental has a passion for the circus and Mr Wilkins for twenty years had been travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama (Aden, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saigon, Huë, Hanoi, Hong–Kong, Shanghai, their names roll on the tongue savourily, crowding the imagination with sunshine and strange sounds and a multicoloured activity) with his menagerie and his merry–go–rounds. It was a strange life he led, unusual, and one that, one would have thought, must offer the occasion for all sorts of curious experiences, but the odd thing about him was that he was a perfectly common–place little man and you would have been prepared to find him running a garage or keeping a third–rate hotel in a second–rate town in California. The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man’s life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate. I wish I could feel it reasonable to tell here the story of the hermit I went to see on an island in the Torres Straits, a shipwrecked mariner who had lived there alone for thirty years, but when you are writing a book you are imprisoned by the four walls of your subject and though for the entertainment of my own digressing mind I set it down now I should be forced in the end, by my sense of what is fit to go between two covers and what is not, to cut it out. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that notwithstanding his long and intimate communion with nature and his thoughts the man was as dull, insensitive, and vulgar an oaf at the end of this experience as he must have been at the beginning.

The Italian singer passed us, and Mr Wilkins told me that he was a Neapolitan who was on his way to Hong–Kong to rejoin his company, which he had been forced to leave owing to an attack of malaria in Bangkok. He was an enormous fellow, and very fat, and when he flung himself into a chair it creaked with dismay. He took off his topee, displayed a great head of long, curly, greasy hair, and ran podgy and beringed fingers through it.

‘He ain’t very sociable,’ said Mr Wilkins. ‘He took the cigar I gave him, but he wouldn’t have a drink. I shouldn’t wonder if there wasn’t somethin’ rather queer about him. Nasty–lookin’ guy, ain’t he?’

Then a little fat woman in white came on deck holding by the hand a Wa–Wa monkey. It walked solemnly by her side.

‘This is Mrs Wilkins,’ said the circus proprietor, ‘and our youngest son. Draw up a chair, Mrs Wilkins, and meet this gentleman. I don’t know his name, but he’s already paid for two drinks for me and if he can’t shake any better than he has yet he’ll pay for one for you too.’

Mrs Wilkins sat down with an abstracted serious look, and with her eyes on the blue sea suggested that she did not see why she shouldn’t have a lemonade.

‘My, it’s hot,’ she murmured, fanning herself with the topee which she took off.

‘Mrs Wilkins feels the heat,’ said her husband. ‘She’s had twenty years of it now.’

‘Twenty–two and a half,’ said Mrs Wilkins, still looking at the sea.

‘And she’s never got used to it yet.’

‘Nor never shall and you know it,’ said Mrs Wilkins.

She was just the same size as her husband and just as fat, and she had a round red face like his and the same sandy, untidy hair. I wondered if they had married because they were so exactly alike, or if in the course of years they had acquired this astonishing resemblance. She did not turn her head but continued to look absently at the sea.

‘Have you shown him the animals?’ she asked.

‘You bet your life I have.’

‘What did he think of Percy?’

‘Thought him fine.’

I could not but feel that I was being unduly left out of a conversation of which I was at all events partly the subject, so I asked:

‘Who’s Percy?’

‘Percy’s our eldest son. There’s a flyin’–fish, Elmer. He’s the orang–utan. Did he eat his food well this morning?’

‘Fine. He’s the biggest orang–utan in captivity. I wouldn’t take a thousand dollars for him.’

‘And what relation is the elephant?’ I asked.

Mrs Wilkins did not look at me, but with her blue eyes still gazed indifferently at the sea.

‘He’s no relation,’ she answered. ‘Only a friend.’

The boy brought lemonade for Mrs Wilkins, a whisky and soda for her husband, and a gin and tonic for me. We shook dice and I signed the chit.

‘It must come expensive if he always loses when he shakes,’ Mrs Wilkins murmured to the coast–line.

‘I guess Egbert would like a sip of your lemonade, my dear,’ said Mr Wilkins.

Mrs Wilkins slightly turned her head and looked at the monkey sitting on her lap.

‘Would you like a sip of mother’s lemonade, Egbert?’

The monkey gave a little squeak and putting her arm round him she handed him a straw. The monkey sucked up a little lemonade and having drunk enough sank back against Mrs Wilkins’s ample bosom.

‘Mrs Wilkins thinks the world of Egbert,’ said her husband. ‘You can’t wonder at it, he’s her youngest.’

Mrs Wilkins took another straw and thoughtfully drank her lemonade.

‘Egbert’s all right,’ she remarked. ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with Egbert.’

Just then the French official, who had been sitting down, got up and began walking up and down. He had been accompanied on board by the French minister at Bangkok, one or two secretaries, and a prince of the royal family. There had been a great deal of bowing and shaking of hands and as the ship slipped away from the quay much waving of hats and handkerchiefs. He was evidently a person of consequence. I had heard the captain address him as Monsieur le Gouverneur.

‘That’s the big noise on this boat,’ said Mr Wilkins. ‘He was Governor of one of the French colonies and now he’s makin’ a tour of the world. He came to see my circus at Bangkok. I guess I’ll ask him what he’ll have. What shall I call him, my dear?’

Mrs Wilkins slowly turned her head and looked at the Frenchman, with the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole, pacing up and down.

‘Don’t call him anythin’,’ she said. ‘Show him a hoop and he’ll jump right through it.’

I could not but laugh. Monsieur le Gouverneur was a little man, well below the average height, and smally made, with a very ugly little face and thick, almost negroid features; and he had a bushy grey head, bushy grey eyebrows, and a bushy grey moustache. He did look a little like a poodle and he had the poodle’s soft, intelligent and shining eyes. Next time he passed us Mr Wilkins called out:

‘Monsoo. Qu’est–ce que vous prenez?’ I cannot reproduce the eccentricities of his accent. ‘Une petite verre de porto.’ He turned to me. ‘Foreigners, they all drink porto. You’re always safe with that.’

‘Not the Dutch,’ said Mrs Wilkins, with a look at the sea. ‘They won’t touch nothin’ but Schnapps.’

The distinguished Frenchman stopped and looked at Mr Wilkins with some bewilderment. Whereupon Mr Wilkins tapped his breast and said:

“Moa, proprietarre Cirque. Vous avez visité.’

Then, for a reason that escaped me, Mr Wilkins made his arms into a hoop and outlined the gestures that represented a poodle jumping through it. Then he pointed at the Wa–Wa that Mrs Wilkins was still holding on her lap.

‘La petit fils de mon femme,’ he said.

Light broke upon the Governor and he burst into a peculiarly musical and infectious laugh. Mr Wilkins began laughing too.

‘Oui, oui,’ he cried. ‘Moa, circus proprietor. Une petite verre de porto. Oui. Oui. N’est–ce–pas?’

‘Mr Wilkins talks French like a Frenchman,’ Mrs Wilkins informed the passing sea.

‘Mais très volontiers,’ said the Governor, still smiling. I drew him up a chair and he sat down with a bow to Mrs Wilkins.

‘Tell poodle–face his name’s Egbert,’ she said, looking at the sea. I called the boy and we ordered a round of drinks.

‘You sign the chit, Elmer,’ she said. ‘It’s not a bit of good Mr What’s–his–name shakin’ if he can’t shake nothin’ better than a pair of treys.’

‘Vous comprenez le français, madame?’ asked the Governor politely.

‘He wants to know if you speak French, my dear.’

‘Where does he think I was raised? Naples?’

Then the Governor, with exuberant gesticulation, burst into a torrent of English so fantastic that it required all my knowledge of French to understand what he was talking about.

Presently Mr Wilkins took him down to look at his animals and a little later we assembled in the stuffy saloon for luncheon. The Governor’s wife appeared and was put on the captain’s right. The Governor explained to her who we all were and she gave us a gracious bow. She was a large woman, tall and of a robust build, of fifty–five perhaps, and she was dressed somewhat severely in black silk. On her head she wore a huge round topee. Her features were so large and regular, her form so statuesque, that you were reminded of the massive females who take part in processions. She would have admirably suited the role of Columbia or Britannia in a patriotic demonstration. She towered over her diminutive husband like a skyscraper over a shack. He talked incessantly, with vivacity and wit, and when he said anything amusing her heavy features relaxed into a large fond smile.

‘Que tu es bête, mon ami,’ she said. She turned to the captain. ‘You must not pay any attention to him. He is always like that.’

We had indeed a very amusing meal and when it was over we separated to our various cabins to sleep away the heat of the afternoon. In such a small ship having once made the acquaintance of my fellow passengers, it would have been impossible, even had I wished it, not to pass with them every moment of the day that I was not in my cabin. The only person who held himself aloof was the Italian tenor. He spoke to no one, but sat by himself as far forward as he could get, twanging a guitar in an undertone so that you had to strain your ears to catch the notes. We remained in sight of land and the sea was like a pail of milk. Talking of one thing and another we watched the day decline, we dined, and then we sat out again on deck under the stars. The two traders played picquet in the hot saloon, but the Belgian colonel joined our little group. He was shy and fat and opened his mouth only to utter a civility. Soon, influenced perhaps by the night and encouraged by the darkness that gave him, up there in the bows, the sensation of being alone with the sea, the Italian tenor, accompanying himself on his guitar, began to sing, first in a low tone, and then a little louder, till presently, his music captivating him, he sang with all his might. He had the real Italian voice, all macaroni, olive oil, and sunshine, and he sang the Neapolitan songs that I had heard in my youth in the Piazza San Ferdinando, and fragments from La Bohème, and Traviata, and Rigoletto. He sang with emotion and false emphasis and his tremolo reminded you of every third–rate Italian tenor you had ever heard, but there in the openness of that lovely night his exaggerations only made you smile and you could not but feel in your heart a lazy sensual pleasure. He sang for an hour, perhaps, and we all fell silent; then he was still, but he did not move and we saw his huge bulk dimly outlined against the luminous sky.

I saw that the little French Governor had been holding the hand of his large wife and the sight was absurd and touching.

‘Do you know that this is the anniversary of the day on which I first saw my wife?’ he said, suddenly breaking the silence which had certainly weighed on him, for I had never met a more loquacious creature. ‘It is also the anniversary of the day on which she promised to be my wife. And, which will surprise you, they were one and the same.’

‘Voyons, mon ami,’ said the lady, ‘you are not going to bore our friends with that old story. You are really quite insupportable.’

But she spoke with a smile on her large, firm face, and in a tone that suggested that she was quite willing to hear it again.

‘But it will interest them, mon petit chou.’ It was in this way that he always addressed his wife and it was funny to hear this imposing and even majestic lady thus addressed by her small husband. ‘Will it not, monsieur?’ he asked me. ‘It is a romance, and who does not like romance, especially on such a night as this?’

I assured the Governor that we were all anxious to hear and the Belgian colonel took the opportunity once more to be polite.

‘You see, ours was a marriage of convenience pure and simple.’

‘C’est vrai,’ said the lady. ‘It would be stupid to deny it. But sometimes love comes after marriage and not before, and then it is better. It lasts longer.’

I could not but notice that the Governor gave her hand an affectionate little squeeze.

‘You see, I had been in the navy, and when I retired I was forty–nine. I was strong and active and I was very anxious to find an occupation. I looked about; I pulled all the strings I could. Fortunately I had a cousin who had some political importance. It is one of the advantages of democratic government that if you have sufficient influence, merit, which otherwise might pass unnoticed, generally receives its due reward.’

‘You are modesty itself, mon pauvre ami,’ said she.

‘And presently I was sent for by the Minister to the Colonies and offered the post of Governor in a certain colony. It was a very distant spot that they wished to send me to and a lonely one, but I had spent my life wandering from port to port, and that was not a matter that troubled me. I accepted with joy. The minister told me that I must be ready to start in a month. I told him that would be easy for an old bachelor who had nothing much in the world but a few clothes and a few books.

‘“Comment, mon lieutenant,” he cried. “You are a bachelor?”

‘“Certainly,” I answered. “And I have every intention of remaining one.”

‘“In that case I am afraid I must withdraw my offer. For this position it is essential that you should be married.”

‘It is too long a story to tell you, but the gist of it was that owing to the scandal my predecessor, a bachelor, had caused by having native girls to live in the Residency and the consequent complaints of the white people, planters and the wives of functionaries, it had been decided that the next Governor must be a model of respectability. I expostulated. I argued. I recapitulated my services to the country and the services my cousin could render at the next elections. Nothing would serve. The minister was adamant.

‘“But what can I do?” I cried with dismay.

‘“You can marry,” said the minister.

‘“Mais voyons, monsieur le ministre, I do not know any women. I am not a lady’s man and I am forty–nine. How do you expect me to find a wife?”

‘“Nothing is more simple. Put an advertisement in the paper.”

‘I was confounded. I did not know what to say.

‘“Well, think it over,” said the minister. “If you can find a wife in a month you can go, but no wife no job. That is my last word.” He smiled a little, to him the situation was not without humour. “And if you think of advertising I recommend the Figaro.”

‘I walked away from the ministry with death in my heart. I knew the place to which they desired to appoint me and I knew it would suit me very well to live there; the climate was tolerable and the Residency was spacious and comfortable. The notion of being a Governor was far from displeasing me and, having nothing much but my pension as a naval officer, the salary was not to be despised. Suddenly I made up my mind. I walked to the offices of the Figaro, composed an advertisement, and handed it in for insertion. But I can tell you, when I walked up the Champs Elysees afterwards my heart was beating much more furiously than it had ever done when my ship was stripped for action.’

The Governor leaned forward and put his hand impressively on my knee.

‘Mon cher monsieur, you will never believe it, but I had four thousand three hundred and seventy–two replies. It was an avalanche. I had expected half–a–dozen; I had to take a cab to take the letters to my hotel. My room was swamped with them. There were four thousand three hundred and seventy–two women who were willing to share my solitude and be a Governor’s lady. It was staggering. They were of all ages from seventeen to seventy. There were maidens of irreproachable ancestry and the highest culture, there were unmarried ladies who had made a little slip at one period of their career and now desired to regularize their situation; there were widows whose husbands had died in the most harrowing circumstances; and there were widows whose children would be a solace to my old age. They were blonde and dark, tall and short, fat and thin; some could speak five languages and others could play the piano. Some offered me love and some craved for it; some could only give me solid friendship but mingled with esteem; some had a fortune and others golden prospects. I was overwhelmed. I was bewildered. At last I lost my temper, for I am a passionate man, and I got up and I stamped on all those letters and all those photographs and I cried: I will marry none of them. It was hopeless, I had less than a month now and I could not see over four thousand aspirants to my hand in that time. I felt that if I did not see them all, I should be tortured for the rest of my life by the thought that I had missed the one woman the fates had destined to make me happy. I gave it up as a bad job.

‘I went out of my room hideous with all those photographs and littered papers and to drive care away went on to the boulevard and sat down at the Café de la Paix. After a time I saw a friend passing and he nodded to me and smiled. I tried to smile but my heart was sore. I realized that I must spend the years that remained to me in a cheap pension at Toulon or Brest as an officier de marine en retraite. Zut! My friend stopped and coming up to me sat down.

‘“What is making you look so glum, mon cher?” he asked me. “You who are the gayest of mortals.”

‘I was glad to have someone in whom I could confide my troubles and told him the whole story. He laughed consumedly. I have thought since that perhaps the incident had its comic side, but at the time, I assure you, I could see in it nothing to laugh at. I mentioned the fact to my friend not without asperity and then, controlling his mirth as best he could, he said to me: “But, my dear fellow, do you really want to marry?” At this I entirely lost my temper.

‘“You are completely idiotic,” I said. “If I did not want to marry, and what is more marry at once, within the next fortnight, do you imagine that I should have spent three days reading love letters from women I have never set eyes on?”

‘“Calm yourself and listen to me,” he replied. “I have a cousin who lives in Geneva. She is Swiss, du reste, and she belongs to a family of the greatest respectability in the republic. Her morals are without reproach, she is of a suitable age, a spinster, for she has spent the last fifteen years nursing an invalid mother who has lately died, she is well educated and par dessus le marché she is not ugly.”

‘“It sounds as though she were a paragon,” I said.

‘“I do not say that, but she has been well brought up and would become the position you have to offer her.”

‘“There is one thing you forget. What inducement would there be for her to give up her friends and her accustomed life to accompany in exile a man of forty–nine who is by no means a beauty?”’

Monsieur le Gouverneur broke off his narrative and shrugging his shoulders so emphatically that his head almost sank between them, turned to us.

‘I am ugly. I admit it. I am of an ugliness that does not inspire terror or respect, but only ridicule, and that is the worst ugliness of all. When people see me for the first time they do not shrink with horror, there would evidently be something flattering in that, they burst out laughing. Listen, when the admirable Mr Wilkins showed me his animals this morning, Percy, the orang–utan, held out his arms and but for the bars of the cage would have clasped me to his bosom as a long lost brother. Once indeed when I was at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and was told that one of the anthropoid apes had escaped I made my way to the exit as quickly as I could for fear that, mistaking me for the refugee, they would seize me and, notwithstanding my expostulations, shut me up in the monkey house.’

‘Voyons, mon ami,’ said Madame his wife, in her deep slow voice, ‘you are talking even greater nonsense than usual. I do not say that you are an Apollo, in your position it is unnecessary that you should be, but you have dignity, you have poise, you are what any woman would call a fine man.’

‘I will resume my story. When I made this remark to my friend he replied: “One can never tell with women. There is something about marriage that wonderfully attracts them. There would be no harm in asking her. After all it is regarded as a compliment by a woman to be asked in marriage. She can but refuse.”

‘“But I do not know your cousin and I do not see how I am to make her acquaintance. I cannot go to her house, ask to see her and when I am shown into the drawing–room say: Voilà, I have come to ask you to marry me. She would think I was a lunatic and scream for help. Besides, I am a man of an extreme timidity, and I could never take such a step.”

‘“I will tell you what to do,” said my friend. “Go to Geneva and take her a box of chocolates from me. She will be glad to have news of me and will receive you with pleasure. You can have a little talk and then if you do not like the look of her you take your leave and no harm is done. If on the other hand–you do, we can go into the matter and you can make a formal demand for her hand.”

‘I was desperate. It seemed the only thing to do. We went to a shop at once and bought an enormous box of chocolates and that night I took the train to Geneva. No sooner had I arrived than I sent her a letter to say that I was the bearer of a gift from her cousin and much wished to give myself the pleasure of delivering it in person. Within an hour I received her reply to the effect that she would be pleased to receive me at four o’clock in the afternoon. I spent the interval before my mirror and seventeen times I tied and retied my tie. As the clock struck four I presented myself at the door of her house and was immediately ushered into the drawing–room. She was waiting for me. Her cousin said she was not ugly. Imagine my surprise to see a young woman, enfin a woman still young, of a noble presence, with the dignity of Juno, the features of Venus, and in her expression the intelligence of Minerva.’

‘You are too absurd,’ said Madame. ‘But by now these gentlemen know that one cannot believe all you say.’

‘I swear to you that I do not exaggerate. I was so taken aback that I nearly dropped the box of chocolates. But I said to myself: La garde meurt mais ne se rend pas. I presented the box of chocolates. I gave her news of her cousin. I found her amiable. We talked for a quarter of an hour. And then I said to myself: Allons–y. I said to her:

‘“Mademoiselle, I must tell you that I did not come here merely to give you a box of chocolates.”

‘She smiled and remarked that evidently I must have had reasons to come to Geneva of more importance than that.

‘“I came to ask you to do me the honour of marrying me.” She gave a start.

‘“But, monsieur, you are mad,” she said.

‘“I beseech you not to answer till you have heard the facts,” I interrupted, and before she could say another word I told her the whole story. I told her about my advertisement in the Figaro and she laughed till the tears ran down her face. Then I repeated my offer.

‘“You are serious?” she asked.

‘“I have never been more serious in my life.”

‘“I will not deny that your offer has come as a surprise. I had not thought of marrying, I have passed the age; but evidently your offer is not one that a woman should refuse without consideration. I am flattered. Will you give me a few days to reflect?”

‘“Mademoiselle, I am absolutely desolated,” I replied. “But I have not time. If you will not marry me I must go back to Paris and resume my perusal of the fifteen or eighteen hundred letters that still await my attention.”

‘“It is quite evident that I cannot possibly give you an answer at once. I had not set eyes on you a quarter of an hour ago. I must consult my friends and my family.”

‘“What have they got to do with it? You are of full age. The matter is pressing. I cannot wait. I have told you everything. You are an intelligent woman. What can prolonged reflection add to the impulse of the moment?”

‘“You are not asking me to say yes or no this very minute? That is outrageous.”

‘“That is exactly what I am asking. My train goes back to Paris in a couple of hours.”

‘She looked at me reflectively.

‘“You are quite evidently a lunatic. You ought to be shut up both for your own safety and that of the public.”

‘“Well, which is it to be?” I said. “Yes or no?”

‘She shrugged her shoulders.

‘“Mon Dieu.” She waited a minute and I was on tenterhooks. “Yes.”

The Governor waved his hand towards his wife.

‘And there she is. We were married in a fortnight and I became Governor of a colony. I married a jewel, my dear sirs, a woman of the most charming character, one in a thousand, a woman of masculine intelligence and a feminine sensibility, an admirable woman.’

‘But hold your tongue, mon ami,’ his wife said. ‘You are making me as ridiculous as yourself.’

He turned to the Belgian colonel.

‘Are you a bachelor, mon colonel? If so I strongly recommend you to go to Geneva. It is a nest (une pépinière was the word he used) of the most adorable young women. You will find a wife there as nowhere else. Geneva is besides a charming city. Do not waste a minute, but go there and I will give you a letter to my wife’s nieces.’

It was she who summed up the story.

‘The fact is that in a marriage of convenience you expect less and so you are less likely to be disappointed. As you do not make senseless claims on one another there is no reason for exasperation. You do not look for perfection and so you are tolerant to one another’s faults. Passion is all very well, but it is not a proper foundation for marriage. Voyez–vous, for two people to be happy in marriage they must be able to respect one another, they must be of the same condition, and their interests must be alike; then if they are decent people and are willing to give and take, to live and let live, there is no reason why their union should not be as happy as ours.’ She paused. ‘But, of course, my husband is a very, very remarkable man.’

MIRAGE

I had been wandering about the East for months and at last reached Haiphong. It is a commercial town and a dull one, but I knew that from there I could find a ship of sorts to take me to Hong–Kong. I had some days to wait and nothing to do. It is true that from Haiphong you can visit the Bay of Along, which is one of the Sehenswurdigkeiten of Indo–China, but I was tired of sights. I contented myself with sitting in the cafés, for here it was none too warm and I was glad to get out of tropical clothes, and reading back numbers of L’Illustration, or for the sake of exercise taking a brisk walk along straight, wide streets. Haiphong is traversed by canals and sometimes I got a glimpse of a scene which in its varied life, with all the native craft on the water, was multicoloured and charming There was one canal, with tall Chinese houses on each side of it, that had a pleasant curve. The houses were whitewashed, but the whitewash was discoloured and stained; with their grey roofs they made an agreeable composition against the pale sky. The picture had the faded elegance of an old water–colour. There was nowhere an emphatic note. It was soft and a little weary and inspired one with a faint melancholy. I was reminded I scarcely know why of an old maid I knew in my youth, a relic of the Victorian age, who wore black silk mittens and made crochet shawls for the poor, black for widows and white for married women. She had suffered in her youth, but whether from ill–health or unrequited love, no one exactly knew.

But there was a local paper at Haiphong, a small dingy sheet with stubby type the ink of which came off on your fingers, and it gave you a political article, the wireless news, advertisements, and local intelligence. The editor, doubtless hard pressed for matter, printed the names of the persons, Europeans, natives of the country, and Chinese, who had arrived at Haiphong or left it, and mine was put in with the rest. On the morning of the day before that on which the Old tub I was taking was to sail for Hong–Kong I was sitting in the café of the hotel drinking a Dubonnet before luncheon when the boy came in and said that a gentleman wished to see me. I did not know a soul in Haiphong and asked who it was. The boy said he was an Englishman and lived there, but he could not tell me his name. The boy spoke very little French and it was hard for me to understand what he said. I was mystified, but told him to show the visitor in. A moment later he came back followed by a white man and pointed me out to him. The man gave me a look and walked towards me. He was a very tall fellow, well over six feet high, rather fat and bloated, with a red, clean–shaven face and extremely pale blue eyes. He wore very shabby khaki shorts and a stengah–shifter unbuttoned at the neck, and a battered helmet. I concluded at once that he was a stranded beachcomber who was going to touch me for a loan and wondered how little I could hope to get off for.

He came up to me and held out a large red hand with broken, dirty nails. ‘I don’t suppose you remember me,’ he said. ‘My name’s Grosely. I was at St Thomas’s Hospital with you. I recognized your name as soon as I saw it in the paper and I thought I’d look you up.’

I had not the smallest recollection of him, but I asked him to sit down and offered him a drink. By his appearance I had first thought he would ask me for ten piastres and I might have given him five, but now it looked more likely that he would ask for a hundred and I should have to think myself lucky if I could content him with fifty. The habitual borrower always asks twice what he expects to get and it only dissatisfies him to give him what he has asked since then he is vexed with himself for not having asked more. He feels you have cheated him.

‘Are you a doctor?’ I asked.

‘No, I was only at the bloody place a year.’

He took off his sun–helmet and showed me a mop of grey hair, which much needed a brush. His face was curiously mottled and he did not look healthy. His teeth were badly decayed and at the corners of his mouth were empty spaces. When the boy came to take the orders he asked for brandy.

‘Bring the bottle,’ he said. ‘La bouteille. Savvy?’ He turned to me. ‘I’ve been living here for the last five years, but I can’t get along with the French somehow. I talk Tonkinese.’ He leaned his chair back and looked at me. ‘I remember you, you know. You used to go about with those twins. What was their name? I expect I’ve changed more than you have. I’ve spent the best part of my life in China. Rotten climate, you know. It plays hell with a man.’

I still had not the smallest recollection of him. I thought it best to say so.

‘Were you the same year as I was?’ I asked.

‘Yes. ‘92.’

‘It’s a devil of a long time ago.’

About sixty boys and young men entered the hospital every year; they were most of them shy and confused by the new life they were entering upon; many had never been in London before; and to me at least they were shadows that passed without any particular rhyme or reason across a white sheet. During the first year a certain number for one reason or another dropped out, and in the second year those that remained gained by degrees the beginnings of a personality. They were not only themselves, but the lectures one had attended with them, the scone and coffee one had eaten at the same table for luncheon, the dissection one had done at the same board in the same dissecting room, and The Belle of New York one had seen together from the pit of the Shaftesbury Theatre.

The boy brought the bottle of brandy, and Grosely, if that was really his name, pouring himself out a generous helping drank it down at a gulp without water or soda.

‘I couldn’t stand doctoring,’ he said. ‘I chucked it. My people got fed up with me and I went out to China. They gave me a hundred pounds and told me to shift for myself. I was damned glad to get out, I can tell you. I guess I was just about as much fed up with them as they were with me. I haven’t troubled them much since.’

Then from somewhere in the depths of my memory a faint hint crept into the rim, as it were, of consciousness, as on a rising tide the water slides up the sand and then withdraws to advance with the next wave in a fuller volume. I had first an inkling of some shabby little scandal that had got into the papers. Then I saw a boy’s face, and so gradually the facts recurred to me; I remembered him now. I didn’t believe he was called Grosely then, I think he had a one–syllabled name, but that I was uncertain of. He was a very tall lad (I began to see him quite well), thin, with a slight stoop, he was only eighteen and had grown too fast for his strength, he had curly, shining brown hair, rather large features (they did not look so large now, perhaps because his face was fat and puffy) and a peculiarly fresh complexion, very pink and white, like a girl’s. I imagine people, women especially, would have thought him a very handsome boy, but to us he was only a clumsy, shuffling lout. Then I remembered that he did not often come to lectures, no, it wasn’t that I remembered, there were too many students in the theatre to recollect who was there and who wasn’t. I remembered the dissecting room. He had a leg at the next table to the one I was working at and he hardly ever touched it; I forget why the men who had other parts of the body complained of his neglecting the work, I suppose somehow it interfered with them. In those days a good deal of gossip went on over the dissection of a ‘part’ and out of the distance of thirty years some of it came back to me. Someone started the story that Grosely was a very gay dog. He drank like a fish and was an awful womanizer. Most of those boys were very simple, and they had brought to the hospital the notions they had acquired at home and at school. Some were prudish and they were shocked; others, those who worked hard, sneered at him and asked how he could hope to pass his exams; but a good many were excited and impressed, he was doing what they would have liked to do if they had had the courage. Grosely had his admirers and you could often see him surrounded by a little band listening open–mouthed to stories of his adventures. Recollections now were crowding upon me. In a very little while he lost his shyness and assumed the airs of a man of the world. They must have looked absurd on this smooth–cheeked boy with his pink and white skin. Men (so they called themselves) used to tell one another of his escapades. He became quite a hero. He would make caustic remarks as he passed the museum and saw a pair of earnest students going over their anatomy together. He was at home in the public–houses of the neighbourhood and was on familiar terms with the barmaids. Looking back, I imagine that, newly arrived from the country and the tutelage of parents and schoolmasters, he was captivated by his freedom and the thrill of London. His dissipations were harmless enough. They were due only to the urge of youth. He lost his head.

But we were all very poor and we did not know how Grosely managed to pay for his garish amusements. We knew his father was a country doctor and I think we knew exactly how much he gave his son a month. It was not enough to pay for the harlots he picked up on the promenade at the Pavilion and for the drinks he stood his friends in the Criterion Bar. We told one another in awestruck tones that he must be getting fearfully into debt. Of course he could pawn things, but we knew by experience that you could not get more than three pounds for a microscope and thirty shillings for a skeleton. We said he must be spending at least ten pounds a week. Our ideas were not very grand and this seemed to us the wildest pitch of extravagance. At last one of his friends disclosed the mystery: Grosely had discovered a wonderful system for making money. It amused and impressed us. None of us would have thought of anything so ingenious or have had the nerve to attempt it if he had. Grosely went to auctions, not Christie’s, of course, but auctions in the Strand and Oxford Street, and in private houses, and bought anything portable that was going cheap. Then he took his purchase to a pawnbroker’s and pawned it for ten shillings or a pound more than he had paid. He was making money, four or five pounds a week, and he said he was going to give up medicine and make a regular business of it. Not one of us had ever made a penny in his life and we regarded Grosely with admiration.

‘By Jove, he’s clever,’ we said.

‘He’s just about as sharp as they make them.’

‘That’s the sort that ends up as a millionaire.’

We were all very worldly–wise and what we didn’t know about life at eighteen we were pretty sure wasn’t worth knowing. It was a pity that when an examiner asked us a question we were so nervous that the answer often flew straight out of our head and when a nurse asked us to post a letter we blushed scarlet. It became known that the Dean had sent for Grosely and hauled him over the coals. He had threatened him with sundry penalties if he continued systematically to neglect his work. Grosely was indignant. He’d had enough of that sort of thing at school, he said, he wasn’t going to let a horse–faced eunuch treat him like a boy. Damn it all, he was getting on for nineteen and there wasn’t much you could teach him. The Dean had said he heard he was drinking more than was good for him. Damned cheek. He could carry his liquor as well as any man of his age, he’d been blind last Saturday and he meant to get blind next Saturday, and if anyone didn’t like it he could do the other thing. Grosely’s friends quite agreed with him that a man couldn’t let himself be insulted like that.

But the blow fell at last and now I remembered quite well the shock it gave us all. I suppose we had not seen Grosely for two or three days, but he had been in the habit of coming to the hospital more and more irregularly, so if we thought anything about it, I imagine we merely said that he was off on one of his bats. He would turn up again in a day or so, rather pale, but with a wonderful story of some girl he had picked up and the time he had had with her. The anatomy lecture was at nine in the morning and it was a rush to get there in time. On this particular day little attention was paid to the lecturer, who, with a visible pleasure in his limpid English and admirable elocution, was describing I know not what part of the human skeleton, for there was much excited whispering along the benches and a newspaper was surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Suddenly the lecturer stopped. He had a pedagogic sarcasm. He affected not to know the names of his students.

‘I am afraid I am disturbing the gentleman who is reading the paper. Anatomy is a very tedious science and I regret that the regulations of the Royal College of Surgeons oblige me to ask you to give it enough of your attention to pass an examination in it. Any gentleman, however, who finds this impossible is at liberty to continue his perusal of the paper outside.’

The wretched boy to whom this reproof was addressed reddened to the roots of his hair and in his embarrassment tried to stuff the newspaper in his pocket. The professor of anatomy observed him coldly.

‘I am afraid, sir, that the paper is a little too large to go into your pocket,’ he remarked. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to hand it down to me?’

The newspaper was passed from row to row to the well of the theatre, and, not content with the confusion to which he had put the poor lad, the eminent surgeon, taking it, asked:

‘May I inquire what it is in the paper that the gentleman in question found of such absorbing interest?’

The student who gave it to him without a word pointed out the paragraph that we had all been reading. The professor read it and we watched him in silence. He put the paper down and went on with his lecture. The headline ran Arrest of a Medical Student. Grosely had been brought before the police–court magistrate for getting goods on credit and pawning them. It appears that this is an indictable offence and the magistrate had remanded him for a week. Bail was refused. It looked as though his method of making money by buying things at auctions and pawning them had not in the long run proved as steady a source of income as he expected and he had found it more profitable to pawn things that he was not at the expense of paying for. We talked the matter over excitedly as soon as the lecture was over and I am bound to say that, having no property ourselves, so deficient was our sense of its sanctity we could none of us look upon his crime as a very serious one; but with the natural love of the young for the terrible there were few who did not think he would get anything from two years’ hard labour to seven years’ penal servitude.

I do not know why, but I did not seem to have any recollection of what happened to Grosely. I think he may have been arrested towards the end of a session and his case may have come on again when we had all separated for holidays. I did not know if it was disposed of by the police–court magistrate or whether it went up for trial. I had a sort of feeling that he was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, six weeks perhaps, for his operations had been pretty extensive; but I knew that he had vanished from our midst and in a little while was thought of no more. It was strange to me that after all these years I should recollect so much of the incident so clearly. It was as though, turning over an album of old snapshots, I saw all at once the photograph of a scene I had quite forgotten.

But of course in that gross elderly man with grey hair and mottled red face I should never have recognized the lanky pink–cheeked boy. He looked sixty, but I knew he must be much less than that. I wondered what he had done with himself in the intervening time. It did not look as though he had excessively prospered.

‘What were you doing in China?’ I asked him.

‘I was a tide–waiter.’

‘Oh, were you?’

It is not a position of great importance and I took care to keep out of my tone any note of surprise. The tide–waiters are employees of the Chinese Customs whose duty it is to board the ships and junks at the various treaty ports and I think their chief business is to prevent opium–smuggling. They are mostly retired A.B.s from the Royal Navy and non–commissioned officers who have finished their time. I have seen them come on board at various places up the Yangtse. They hobnob with the pilot and the engineer, but the skipper is a trifle curt with them. They learn to speak Chinese more fluently than most Europeans and often marry Chinese women.

‘When I left England I swore I wouldn’t go back till I’d made my pile. And I never did. They were glad enough to get anyone to be a tide–waiter in those days, any white man I mean, and they didn’t ask questions. They didn’t care who you were. I was damned glad to get the job, I can tell you, I was about broke to the wide when they took me on. I only took it till I could get something better, but I stayed on, it suited me, I wanted to make money and I found out that a tide–waiter could make a packet if he knew the right way to go about it. I was with the Chinese Customs for the best part of twenty–five years and when I came away I wouldn’t mind betting that lots of commissioners would have been glad to have the money I had.’

He gave me a sly, mean look. I had an inkling of what he meant. But there was a point on which I was willing to be reassured; if he was going to ask me for a hundred piastres (I was resigned to that sum now) I thought I might just as well take the blow at once.

‘I hope you kept it,’ I said.

‘You bet I did. I invested all my money in Shanghai and when I left China I put it all in American railway bonds. Safety first is my motto. I know too much about crooks to take any risks myself.’

I liked that remark, so I asked him if he wouldn’t stay and have luncheon with me.

‘No, I don’t think I will. I don’t eat much tiffin and anyway my chow’s waiting for me at home. I think I’ll be getting along.’ He got up and he towered over me. ‘But look here, why don’t you come along this evening and see my place? I’ve married a Haiphong girl. Got a baby too. It’s not often I get a chance of talking to anyone about London. You’d better not come to dinner. We only eat native food and I don’t suppose you’d care for that. Come along about nine, will you?’

‘All right,’ I said.

I had already told him that I was leaving Haiphong next day. He asked the boy to bring him a piece of paper so that he might write down his address. He wrote laboriously in the hand of a boy of fourteen.

‘Tell the porter to explain to your rickshaw boy where it is. I’m on the second floor. There’s no bell. Just knock. Well, see you later.’

He walked out and I went in to luncheon.

After dinner I called a rickshaw and with the porter’s help made the boy understand where I wanted to go. I found presently that he was taking me along the curved canal the houses of which had looked to me so like a faded Victorian water–colour; he stopped at one of them and pointed to the door. It looked so shabby and the neighbourhood was so squalid that I hesitated, thinking he had made a mistake. It seemed unlikely that Grosely could live so far in the native quarter and in a house so bedraggled. I told the rickshaw boy to wait and pushing open the door saw a dark staircase in front of me. There was no one about and the street was empty. It might have been the small hours of the morning. I struck a match and fumbled my way upstairs; on the second floor I struck another match and saw a large brown door in front of me. I knocked and in a moment it was opened by a little Tonkinese woman holding a candle. She was dressed in the earth–brown of the poorer classes, with a tight little black turban on her head; her lips and the skin round them were stained red with betel and when she opened her mouth to speak I saw that she had the black teeth and black gums that so disfigure these people. She said something in her native language and then I heard Grosely’s voice:

‘Come along in. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to turn up.’

I passed through a little dark ante–chamber and entered a large room that evidently looked on the canal. Grosely was lying on a long chair and he raised his length from it as I came in. He was reading the Hong–Kong papers by the light of a paraffin–lamp that stood on a table by his side.

‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and put your feet up.’

‘There’s no reason I should take your chair.’

‘Go on. I’ll sit on this.’

He took a kitchen chair and sitting on it put his feet on the end of mine.

‘That’s my wife,’ he said pointing with his thumb at the Tonkinese woman who had followed me into the room. ‘And over there in the corner’s the kid.’

I followed his eyes and against the wall, lying on bamboo mats and covered with a blanket, I saw a child sleeping.

‘Lively little beggar when he’s awake. I wish you could have seen him. She’s going to have another soon.’

I glanced at her and the truth of what he said was apparent. She was very small, with tiny hands and feet, but her face was flat and the skin muddy. She looked sullen, but may only have been shy. She went out of the room and presently came back with a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and a syphon. I looked round. There was a partition at the back of dark unpainted wood, which I suppose shut off another room, and pinned against the middle of this was a portrait cut out of an illustrated paper of John Galsworthy. He looked austere, mild, and gentlemanly, and I wondered what he did there. The other walls were whitewashed, but the whitewash was dingy and stained. Pinned on to them were pages of pictures from the Graphic or the Illustrated London News.

‘I put them up,’ said Grosely, ‘I thought they made the place look homelike.’

‘What made you put up Galsworthy? Do you read his books?’

‘No, I didn’t know he wrote books. I liked his face.’

There were one or two torn and shabby rattan mats on the floor and in a corner a great pile of the Hong–Kong Times. The only furniture consisted of a wash–hand stand, two or three kitchen chairs, a table or two, and a large teak native bed. It was cheerless and sordid.

‘Not a bad little place, is it?’ said Grosely. ‘Suits me all right. Sometimes I’ve thought of moving, but I don’t suppose I ever shall now.’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘I came to Haiphong for forty–eight hours and I’ve been here five years. I was on my way to Shanghai really.’

He was silent. Having nothing to say I said nothing. Then the little Tonkinese woman made a remark to him, which I could not of course understand, and he answered her. He was silent again for a minute or two, but I thought he looked at me as though he wanted to ask me something. I did not know why he hesitated.

‘Have you ever tried smoking opium on your travels in the East?’ he inquired at last, casually.

‘Yes, I did once, at Singapore. I thought I’d like to see what it was like.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing very thrilling, to tell you the truth. I thought I was going to have the most exquisite emotions. I expected visions, like de Quincey’s, you know. The only thing I felt was a kind of physical well–being, the same sort of feeling that you get when you’ve had a Turkish bath and are lying in the cooling room, and then a peculiar activity of mind so that everything I thought of seemed extremely clear.’

‘I know.’

‘I really felt that two and two are four and there could not be the smallest doubt about it. But next morning–oh God! My head reeled. I was as sick as a dog, I was sick all day, I vomited my soul out, and as I vomited I said to myself miserably: And there are people who call this fun.’

Grosely leaned back in his chair and gave a low mirthless laugh.

‘I expect it was bad stuff. Or you went at it too hard. They saw you were a mug and gave you dregs that had been smoked already. They’re enough to turn anybody up. Would you like to have another try now? I’ve got some stuff here that I know’s good.’

‘No, I think once was enough for me.’

‘D’you mind if I have a pipe or two? You want it in a climate like this. It keeps you from getting dysentery. And I generally have a bit of a smoke about this time.’

‘Go ahead,’ I said.

He spoke again to the woman and she, raising her voice, called out something in a raucous tone. An answer came from the room behind the wooden partition and after a minute or two an old woman came out carrying a little round tray. She was shrivelled and old and when she entered gave me an ingratiating smile of her stained mouth. Grosely got up and crossed over to the bed and lay on it. The old woman set the tray down on the bed; on it was a spirit–lamp, a pipe, a long needle, and a little round box of opium. She squatted on the bed and Grosely’s wife got on it too and sat, her feet tucked up under her, with her back against the wall. Grosely watched the old woman while she put a little pellet of the drug on the needle, held it over the flame till it sizzled, and then plugged it into the pipe. She handed it to him and with a great breath he inhaled it, he held the smoke for a little while and then blew it out in a thick grey cloud. He handed her back the pipe and she started to make another. Nobody spoke. He smoked three pipes in succession and then sank back.

‘By George, I feel better now. I was feeling all in. She makes a wonderful pipe, this old hag. Are you sure you won’t have one?’

‘Quite.’

‘Please yourself. Have some tea then.’

He spoke to his wife, who scrambled off the bed and went out of the room. Presently she came back with a little china pot of tea and a couple of Chinese bowls.

‘A lot of people smoke here, you know. It does you no harm if you don’t do it to excess. I never smoke more than twenty to twenty–five pipes a day. You can go on for years if you limit yourself to that. Some of the Frenchmen smoke as many as forty or fifty a day. That’s too much. I never do that, except now and then when I feel I want a binge. I’m bound to say it’s never done me any harm.’

We drank our tea, pale and vaguely scented and clean on the palate. Then the old woman made him another pipe and then another. His wife has got back on to the bed and soon curling herself up at his feet went to sleep. Grosely smoked two or three pipes at a time, and while he was smoking seemed intent upon nothing else, but in the intervals he was loquacious. Several times I suggested going, but he would not let me. The hours wore on. Once or twice while he smoked I dozed. He told me all about himself. He went on and on. I spoke only to give him a cue. I cannot relate what he told me in his own words. He repeated himself. He was very long–winded and he told me his story confusedly, first a late bit, then an early bit, so that I had to arrange the sequence for myself; sometimes I saw that, afraid he had said too much, he held something back; sometimes he lied and I had to make a guess at the truth from the smile he gave me or the look in his eyes. He had not the words to describe what he had felt, and I had to conjecture his meaning from slangy metaphors and hackneyed, vulgar phrases. I kept on asking myself what his real name was, it was on the tip of my tongue and it irritated me not to be able to recall it, though why it should in the least matter to me I did not know. He was somewhat suspicious of me at first and I saw that this escapade of his in London and his imprisonment had been all these years a tormenting secret. He had always been haunted by the fear that sooner or later someone would find out.

‘It’s funny that even now you shouldn’t remember me at the hospital,’ he said, looking at me shrewdly. ‘You must have a rotten memory.’

‘Hang it all, it’s nearly thirty years ago. Think of the thousands of people I’ve met since then. There’s no reason why I should remember you any more than you remember me.’

‘That’s right. I don’t suppose there is.’

It seemed to reassure him. At last he had smoked enough and the old woman made herself a pipe and smoked it. Then she went over to the mat on which the child was lying and huddled down beside it. She lay so still that I supposed she had fallen directly asleep. When at last I went I found my boy curled up on the footboard of the rickshaw in so deep a slumber that I had to shake him. I knew where I was and I wanted air and exercise, so I gave him a couple of piastres and told him I would walk.

It was a strange story I carried away with me.

It was with a sort of horror that I had listened to Grosely, telling me of those twenty years he had spent in China. He had made money, I do not know how much, but from the way he talked I should think something between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds, and for a tide–waiter it was a fortune. He could not have come by it honestly, and little as I knew of the details of his trade, by his sudden reticences, by his leers and hints I guessed that there was no base transaction that, if it was made worth his while, he jibbed at. I suppose that nothing paid him better than smuggling opium, and his position gave him the opportunity to do this with safety and profit. I understood that his superior officers had often had their suspicions of him, but had never been able to get such proof of his malpractices as to justify them in taking any steps. They contented themselves with moving him from one port to another, but that did not disturb him; they watched him, but he was too clever for them. I saw that he was divided between the fear of telling me too much to his discredit and the desire to boast of his own astuteness. He prided himself on the confidence the Chinese had placed in him.

‘They knew they could trust me,’ he said, ‘and it gave me a pull. I never double–crossed a Chinaman once.’

The thought filled him with the complacency of the honest man. The Chinese discovered that he was keen on curios and they got in the habit of giving him bits or bringing him things to buy; he never made inquiries how they had come by them and he bought them cheap. When he had got a good lot he sent them to Peking and sold them at a handsome profit. I remembered how he had started his commercial career by buying things at auctions and pawning them. For twenty years by shabby shift and petty dishonesty he added pound to pound, and everything he made he invested in Shanghai. He lived penuriously, saving half his pay; he never went on leave because he did not want to waste his money, he would not have anything to do with the Chinese women, he wanted to keep himself free from any entanglement; he did not drink. He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy. That was the only thing he wanted. He lived in China as though in a dream; he paid no attention to the life around him; its colour and strangeness, its possibilities of pleasure, meant nothing to him. There was always before him the mirage of London, the Criterion Bar, himself standing with his foot on the rail, the promenade at the Empire and the Pavilion, the picked–up harlot, the serio–comic at the music–hall, and the musical comedy at the Gaiety. This was life and love and adventure. This was romance. This was what he yearned for with all his heart. There was surely something impressive in the way in which during all those years he had lived like an anchorite with that one end in view of leading again a life that was so vulgar. It showed character.

‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘even if I’d been able to get back to England on leave I wouldn’t have gone. I didn’t want to go till I could go for good. And then I wanted to do the thing in style.’

He saw himself putting on evening clothes every night and going out with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and he saw himself going to the Derby in a long coat and a brown hat and a pair of opera glasses slung over his shoulder. He saw himself giving the girls a look over and picking out the one he fancied. He made up his mind that on the night he arrived in London he would get blind, he hadn’t been drunk for twenty years; he couldn’t afford to in his job, you had to keep your wits about you. He’d take care not to get drunk on the ship on the way home. He’d wait till he got to London. What a night he’d have! He thought of it for twenty years.

I do not know why Grosely left the Chinese Customs, whether the place was getting too hot for him, whether he had reached the end of his service, or whether he had amassed the sum he had fixed. But at last he sailed. He went second class; he did not intend to start spending money till he reached London. He took rooms in Jermyn Street, he had always wanted to live there, and he went straight to a tailor’s and ordered himself an outfit. Slap up. Then he had a look round the town. It was different from how he remembered it, there was much more traffic and he felt confused and a little at sea. He went to the Criterion and found there was no longer a bar where he had been used to lounge and drink. There was a restaurant in Leicester Square where he had been in the habit of dining when he was in funds, but he could not find it; he supposed it had been torn down. He went to the Pavilion, but there were no women there; he was rather disgusted and went on to the Empire, he found they had done away with the Promenade. It was rather a blow. He could not quite make it out. Well, anyhow, he must be prepared for changes in twenty years, and if he couldn’t do anything else he could get drunk. He had had fever several times in China and the change of climate had brought it on again, he wasn’t feeling any too well, and after four or five drinks he was glad to go to bed.

That first day was only a sample of many that followed it. Everything went wrong. Grosely’s voice grew peevish and bitter as he told me how one thing and another had failed him. The old places were gone, the people were different, he found it hard to make friends, he was strangely lonely; he had never expected that in a great city like London. That’s what was wrong with it, London had become too big, it wasn’t the jolly, intimate place it had been in the early nineties. It had gone to pieces. He picked up a few girls, but they weren’t as nice as the girls he had known before, they weren’t the fun they used to be, and he grew dimly conscious that they thought him a rum sort of cove. He was only just over forty and they looked upon him as an old man. When he tried to cotton on to a lot of young fellows standing round a bar they gave him the cold shoulder. Anyway, these young fellows didn’t know how to drink. He’d show them. He got soused every night, it was the only thing to do in that damned place, but, by Jove, it made him feel rotten next day. He supposed it was the climate of China. When he was a medical student he could drink a bottle of whisky every night and be as fresh as a daisy in the morning. He began to think more about China. All sorts of things that he never knew he had noticed came back to him. It wasn’t a bad life he’d led there. Perhaps he’d been a fool to keep away from those Chinese girls, they were pretty little things some of them, and they didn’t put on the airs these English girls did. One could have a damned good time in China if one had the money he had. One could keep a Chinese girl and get into the club, and there’d be a lot of nice fellows to drink with and play bridge with and billiards. He remembered the Chinese shops and all the row in the streets and the coolies carrying loads and the ports with the junks in them and the rivers with pagodas on the banks. It was funny, he never thought much of China while he was there and now–well, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It obsessed him. He began to think that London was no place for a white man. It had just gone to the dogs, that was the long and short of it, and one day the thought came to him that perhaps it would be a good thing if he went back to China. Of course it was silly, he’d worked like a slave for twenty years to be able to have a good time in London, and it was absurd to go and live in China. With his money he ought to be able to have a good time anywhere. But somehow he couldn’t think of anything else but China. One day he went to the pictures and saw a scene at Shanghai. That settled it. He was fed up with London. He hated it. He was going to get out and this time he’d get out for good. He had been home a year and a half, and it seemed longer to him than all his twenty years in the East. He took a passage on a French boat sailing from Marseilles, and when he saw the coast of Europe sink into the sea he heaved a great sigh of relief. When they got to Suez and he felt the first touch of the East he knew he had done the right thing. Europe was finished. The East was the only place.

He went ashore at Djibouti and again at Colombo and Singapore, but though the ship stopped for two days at Saigon he remained on board there. He’d been drinking a good deal and he was feeling a bit under the weather. But when they reached Haiphong, where they were staying for forty–eight hours, he thought he might just as well have a look at it. That was the last stopping–place before they got to China. He was bound for Shanghai. When he got there he meant to go to a hotel and look around a bit and then get hold of a girl and a place of his own. He would buy a pony or two and race. He’d soon make friends. In the East they weren’t so stiff and stand–offish as they were in London. Going ashore, he dined at the hotel and after dinner got into a rickshaw and told the boy he wanted a woman. The boy took him to the shabby tenement in which I had sat for so many hours and there were the old woman and the girl who was now the mother of his child. After a while the old woman asked him if he wouldn’t like a smoke. He had never tried opium, he had always been frightened of it, but now he didn’t see why he shouldn’t have a go. He was feeling good that night and the girl was a jolly cuddlesome little thing; she was rather like a Chinese girl, small and pretty, like an idol. Well, he had a pipe or two, and he began to feel very happy and comfortable. He stayed all night. He didn’t sleep. He just lay, feeling very restful, and thought about things.

‘I stopped there till my ship went on to Hong–Kong,’ he said. ‘And when she left I just stopped on.’

‘How about your luggage?’ I asked.

For I am perhaps unworthily interested in the manner people combine practical details with the ideal aspects of life. When in a novel penniless lovers drive in a long, swift racing car over the distant hills I have always a desire to know how they managed to pay for it; and I have often asked myself how the characters of Henry James in the intervals of subtly examining their situation coped with the physiological necessities of their bodies.

‘I only had a trunk full of clothes, I was never one to want much more than I stood up in, and I went down with the girl in a rickshaw to fetch it. I only meant to stay on till the next boat came through. You see, I was so near China here I thought I’d wait a bit and get used to things, if you understand what I mean, before I went on.’

I did. Those last words of his revealed him to me. I knew that on the threshold of China his courage had failed him. England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too. If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it.

‘Somehow I stayed on. You know, you’d be surprised how quickly the days pass. I don’t seem to have time to do half the things I want to. After all I’m comfortable here. The old woman makes a damned good pipe, and she’s a jolly little girl, my girl, and then there’s the kid. A lively young beggar. If you’re happy somewhere what’s the good of going somewhere else?’

I looked round that large bare sordid room. There was no comfort in it and not one of the little personal things that one would have thought might have given him the feeling of home. Grosely had taken on this equivocal little apartment, which served as a house of assignation and as a place for Europeans to smoke opium in, with the old woman who kept it, just as it was, and he camped, rather than lived, there still as though next day he would pack his traps and go. After a little while he answered my question.

‘I’ve never been so happy in my life. I often think I’ll go on to Shanghai some day, but I don’t suppose I ever shall. And God knows, I never want to see England again.’

‘Aren’t you awfully lonely sometimes for people to talk to?’

‘No. Sometimes a Chinese tramp comes in with an English skipper or a Scotch engineer, and then I go on board and we have a talk about old times. There’s an old fellow here, a Frenchman who was in the Customs, and he speaks English; I go and see him sometimes. But the fact is I don’t want anybody very much. I think a lot. It gets on my nerves when people come between me and my thoughts. I’m not a big smoker, you know, I just have a pipe or two in the morning to settle my stomach, but I don’t really smoke till night. Then I think.’

‘What d’you think about?’

‘Oh, all sorts of things. Sometimes about London and what it was like when I was a boy. But mostly about China. I think of the good times I had and the way I made my money, and I remember the fellows I used to know, and the Chinese. I had some narrow squeaks now and then, but I always came through all right. And I wonder what the girls would have been like that I might have had. Pretty little things. I’m sorry now I didn’t keep one or two. It’s a great country, China; I love those shops, with an old fellow sitting on his heels smoking a water–pipe, and all the shop–signs. And the temples. By George, that’s the place for a man to live in. There’s life.’

The mirage shone before his eyes. The illusion held him. He was happy. I wondered what would be his end. Well, that was not yet. For the first time in his life perhaps he held the present in his hand.

THE LETTER

Outside on the quay the sun beat fiercely. A stream of motors, lorries and buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another; coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog–trot and shouted to the passer–by to make way; itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares. Singapore is the meeting–place of a hundred peoples; and men of all colours, black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews, and Bengalis, called to one another in raucous tones. But inside the office of Messrs Ripley, Joyce, and Naylor it was pleasantly cool; it was dark after the dusty glitter of the street and agreeably quiet after its unceasing din. Mr Joyce sat in his private room, at the table, with an electric fan turned full on him. He was leaning back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, with the tips of the outstretched fingers of one hand resting neatly against the tips of the outstretched fingers of the other. His gaze rested on the battered volumes of the Law Reports which stood on a long shelf in front of him. On the top of a cupboard were square boxes of japanned tin, on which were painted the names of various clients.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in.’

A Chinese clerk, very neat in his white ducks, opened it.

‘Mr Crosbie is here, sir.’

He spoke beautiful English, accenting each word with precision, and Mr Joyce had often wondered at the extent of his vocabulary. Ong Chi Seng was a Cantonese, and he had studied law at Gray’s Inn. He was spending a year or two with Messrs Ripley, Joyce, and Naylor in order to prepare himself for practice on his own account. He was industrious, obliging, and of exemplary character.

‘Show him in,’ said Mr Joyce.

He rose to shake hands with his visitor and asked him to sit down. The light fell on him as he did so. The face of Mr Joyce remained in shadow. He was by nature a silent man, and now he looked at Robert Crosbie for quite a minute without speaking. Crosbie was a big fellow, well over six feet high, with broad shoulders, and muscular. He was a rubber–planter, hard with the constant exercise of walking over the estate, and with the tennis which was his relaxation when the day’s work was over. He was deeply sunburned. His hairy hands, his feet in clumsy boots were enormous, and Mr Joyce found himself thinking that a blow of that great fist could easily kill the fragile Tamil. But there was no fierceness in his blue eyes; they were confiding and gentle; and his face, with its big, undistinguished features, was open, frank, and honest. But at this moment it bore a look of deep distress. It was drawn and haggard.

‘You look as though you hadn’t had much sleep the last night or two,’ said MrJoyce.

‘I haven’t.’

Mr Joyce noticed now the old felt hat, with its broad double brim, which Crosbie had placed on the table; and then his eyes travelled to the khaki shorts he wore, showing his red hairy thighs, the tennis shirt open at the neck, without a tie, and the dirty khaki jacket with the ends of the sleeves turned up. He looked as though he had just come in from a long tramp among the rubber trees. Mr Joyce gave a slight frown.

‘You must pull yourself together, you know. You must keep your head.’ ‘Oh, I’m all right.’

‘Have you seen your wife today?’

‘No, I’m to see her this afternoon. You know, it is a damned shame that they should have arrested her.’

‘I think they had to do that,’ Mr Joyce answered in his level, soft tone. ‘I should have thought they’d have let her out on bail.’

‘It’s a very serious charge.’

‘It is damnable. She did what any decent woman would do in her place. Only, nine women out of ten wouldn’t have the pluck. Leslie’s the best woman in the world. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why, hang it all, man, I’ve been married to her for twelve years, do you think I don’t know her? God, if I’d got hold of the man I’d have wrung his neck, I’d have killed him without a moment’s hesitation. So would you.’

‘My dear fellow, everybody’s on your side. No one has a good word to say for Hammond. We’re going to get her off. I don’t suppose either the assessors or the judge will go into court without having already made up their minds to bring in a verdict of not guilty.’

‘The whole thing’s a farce,’ said Crosbie violently. ‘She ought never to have been arrested in the first place, and then it’s terrible, after all the poor girl’s gone through, to subject her to the ordeal of a trial. There’s not a soul I’ve met since I’ve been in Singapore, man or woman, who hasn’t told me that Leslie was absolutely justified. I think it’s awful to keep her in prison all these weeks.’ ‘The law is the law. After all, she confesses that she killed the man. It is terrible, and I’m dreadfully sorry for both you and her.’

‘I don’t matter a hang,’ interrupted Crosbie.

‘But the fact remains that murder has been committed, and in a civilized community a trial is inevitable.’

’Is it murder to exterminate noxious vermin? She shot him as she would have shot a mad dog.’

Mr Joyce leaned back again in his chair and once more placed the tips of his ten fingers together. The little construction he formed looked like the skeleton of a roof. He was silent for a moment.

‘I should be wanting in my duty as your legal adviser,’ he said at last, in an even voice, looking at his client with his cool, brown eyes, ‘if I did not tell you that there is one point which causes me just a little anxiety. If your wife had only shot Hammond once, the whole thing would be absolutely plain sailing.

Unfortunately she fired six times.’

‘Her explanation is perfectly simple. In the circumstances anyone would have done the same.’

‘I dare say,’ said Mr Joyce, ‘and of course I think the explanation is very reasonable. But it’s no good closing our eyes to the facts. It’s always a good plan to put yourself in another man’s place, and I can’t deny that if I were prosecuting for the Crown that is the point on which I should centre my inquiry.’

‘My dear fellow, that’s perfectly idiotic’

Mr Joyce shot a sharp glance at Robert Crosbie. The shadow of a smile hovered over his shapely lips. Crosbie was a good fellow, but he could hardly be described as intelligent.

‘I dare say it’s of no importance,’ answered the lawyer, ‘I just thought it was a point worth mentioning. You haven’t got very long to wait now, and when it’s all over I recommend you to go off somewhere with your wife on a trip, and forget all about it. Even though we are almost dead certain to get an acquittal, a trial of that sort is anxious work, and you’ll both want a rest.’

For the first time Crosbie smiled, and his smile strangely changed his face.

You forgot the uncouthness and saw only the goodness of his soul. ‘I think I shall want it more than Leslie. She’s borne up wonderfully. By God, there’s a plucky little woman for you.’

‘Yes, I’ve been very much struck by her self–control,’ said the lawyer. ‘I should never have guessed that she was capable of such determination.’ His duties as her counsel had made it necessary for him to have a good many interviews with Mrs Crosbie since her arrest. Though things had been made as easy as could be for her, the fact remained that she was in gaol, awaiting her trial for murder, and it would not have been surprising if her nerves had failed her. She appeared to bear her ordeal with composure. She read a great deal, took such exercise as was possible, and by favour of the authorities worked at the pillow lace which had always formed the entertainment of her long hours of leisure. When Mr Joyce saw her, she was neatly dressed in cool, fresh, simple frocks, her hair was carefully arranged, and her nails were manicured. Her manner was collected. She was able even to jest upon the little inconveniences of her position. There was something casual about the way in which she spoke of the tragedy, which suggested to Mr Joyce that only her good breeding prevented her from finding something a trifle ludicrous in a situation which was eminently serious. It surprised him, for he had never thought that she had a sense of humour.

He had known her off and on for a good many years. When she paid visits to Singapore she generally came to dine with his wife and himself, and once or twice she had passed a week–end with them at their bungalow by the sea. His wife had spent a fortnight with her on the estate, and had met Geoffrey Hammond several times. The two couples had been on friendly, if not on intimate, terms, and it was on this account that Robert Crosbie had rushed over to Singapore immediately after the catastrophe and begged Mr Joyce to take charge personally of his unhappy wife’s defence.

The story she told him the first time he saw her she had never varied in the smallest detail. She told it as coolly then, a few hours after the tragedy, as she told it now. She told it connectedly, in a level, even voice, and her only sign of confusion was when a slight colour came into her cheeks as she described one or two of its incidents. She was the last woman to whom one would have expected such a thing to happen. She was in the early thirties, a fragile creature, neither short nor tall, and graceful rather than pretty. Her wrists and ankles were very delicate, but she was extremely thin, and you could see the bones of her hands through the white skin, and the veins were large and blue. Her face was colourless, slightly sallow, and her lips were pale. You did not notice the colour of her eyes. She had a great deal of light brown hair, and it had a slight natural wave; it was the sort of hair that with a little touching–up would have been very pretty, but you could not imagine that Mrs Crosbie would think of resorting to any such device. She was a quiet, pleasant, unassuming woman.

Her manner was engaging, and if she was not very popular it was because she suffered from a certain shyness. This was comprehensible enough, for the planter’s life is lonely, and in her own house, with people she knew, she was in her quiet way charming. Mrs Joyce, after her fortnight’s stay, had told her husband that Leslie was a very agreeable hostess. There was more in her, she said, than people thought; and when you came to know her you were surprised how much she had read and how entertaining she could be.

She was the last woman in the world to commit murder.

Mr Joyce dismissed Robert Crosbie with such reassuring words as he could find and, once more alone in his office, turned over the pages of the brief. But it was a mechanical action, for all its details were familiar to him. The case was the sensation of the day, and it was discussed in all the clubs, at all the dinner tables, up and down the Peninsula, from Singapore to Penang. The facts that Mrs Crosbie gave were simple. Her husband had gone to Singapore on business, and she was alone for the night. She dined by herself, late, at a quarter to nine, and after dinner sat in the sitting–room working at her lace. It opened on the veranda. There was no one in the bungalow, for the servants had retired to their own quarters at the back of the compound. She was surprised to hear a step on the gravel path in the garden, a booted step, which suggested a white man rather than a native, for she had not heard a motor drive up, and she could not imagine who could be coming to see her at that time of night. Someone ascended the few stairs that led up to the bungalow, walked across the veranda, and appeared at the door of the room in which she sat. At the first moment she did not recognize the visitor. She sat with a shaded lamp, and he stood with his back to the darkness.

‘May I come in?’ he said.

She did not even recognize the voice.

‘Who is it?’ she asked.

She worked with spectacles, and she took them off as she spoke. ‘Geoff Hammond.’

‘Of course. Come in and have a drink.’

She rose and shook hands with him cordially. She was a little surprised to see him, for though he was a neighbour neither she nor Robert had been lately on very intimate terms with him, and she had not seen him for some weeks. He was the manager of a rubber estate nearly eight miles from theirs, and she wondered why he had chosen this late hour to come and see them. ‘Robert’s away,’ she said. ‘He had to go to Singapore for the night.’ Perhaps he thought his visit called for some explanation, for he said: ‘I’m sorry. I felt rather lonely tonight, so I thought I’d just come along and see how you were getting on.’

‘How on earth did you come? I never heard a car.’

‘I left it down the road. I thought you might both be in bed and asleep.’ This was natural enough. The planter gets up at dawn in order to take the roll–call of the workers, and soon after dinner he is glad to go to bed.

Hammond’s car was in point of fact found next day a quarter of a mile from the bungalow.

Since Robert was away there was no whisky and soda in the room. Leslie did not call the boy, who was probably asleep, but fetched it herself. Her guest mixed himself a drink and filled his pipe.

Geoff Hammond had a host of friends in the colony. He was at this time in the late thirties, but he had come out as a lad. He had been one of the first to volunteer on the outbreak of war, and had done very well. A wound in the knee caused him to be invalided out of the army after two years, but he returned to the Federated Malay States with a D.S.O. and an M.C. He was one of the best billiard–players in the colony. He had been a beautiful dancer and a fine tennis–player, but though able no longer to dance, and his tennis, with a stiff knee, was not so good as it had been, he had the gift of popularity and was universally liked. He was a tall, good–looking fellow, with attractive blue eyes and a fine head of black, curling hair. Old stagers said his only fault was that he was too fond of the girls, and after the catastrophe they shook their heads and vowed that they had always known this would get him into trouble. He began now to talk to Leslie about the local affairs, the forthcoming races in Singapore, the price of rubber, and his chances of killing a tiger which had been lately seen in the neighbourhood. She was anxious to finish by a certain date a piece of lace on which she was working, for she wanted to send it home for her mother’s birthday, and so put on her spectacles again, and drew towards her chair the little table on which stood the pillow.

‘I wish you wouldn’t wear those great horn–spectacles,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why a pretty woman should do her best to look plain.’

She was a trifle taken aback at this remark. He had never used that tone with her before. She thought the best thing was to make light of it.

‘I have no pretensions to being a raving beauty, you know, and if you ask me point–blank, I’m bound to tell you that I don’t care two pins if you think me plain or not.’

‘I don’t think you’re plain. I think you’re awfully pretty.’

‘Sweet of you,’ she answered, ironically. ‘But in that case I can only think you half–witted.’

He chuckled. But he rose from his chair and sat down in another by her side. ‘You’re not going to have the face to deny that you have the prettiest hands in the world,’ he said.

He made a gesture as though to take one of them. She gave him a little tap. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Sit down where you were before and talk sensibly, or else I shall send you home.’

He did not move.

‘Don’t you know that I’m awfully in love with you?’ he said.

She remained quite cool.

‘I don’t. I don’t believe it for a minute, and even if it were true I don’t want you to say it.’

She was the more surprised at what he was saying, since during the seven years she had known him he had never paid her any particular attention.

When he came back from the war they had seen a good deal of one another, and once when he was ill Robert had gone over and brought him back to their bungalow in his car. He had stayed with them for a fortnight. But their interests were dissimilar, and the acquaintance had never ripened into friendship. For the last two or three years they had seen little of him. Now and then he came over to play tennis, now and then they met him at some planter’s who was giving a party, but it often happened that they did not set eyes on him for a month at a time.

Now he took another whisky and soda. Leslie wondered if he had been drinking before. There was something odd about him, and it made her a trifle uneasy. She watched him help himself with disapproval.

‘I wouldn’t drink any more if I were you,’ she said, good–humouredly still. He emptied his glass and put it down.

‘Do you think I’m talking to you like this because I’m drunk?’ he asked abruptly.

‘That is the most obvious explanation, isn’t it?’

‘Well, it’s a lie. I’ve loved you ever since I first knew you. I’ve held my tongue as long as I could, and now it’s got to come out. I love you, I love you, I love you.’

She rose and carefully put aside the pillow.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘I’m not going now.’

At last she began to lose her temper.

‘But, you poor fool, don’t you know that I’ve never loved anyone but Robert, and even if I didn’t love Robert you’re the last man I should care for.’ ‘What do I care? Robert’s away.’

‘If you don’t go away this minute I shall call the boys, and have you thrown out.’

‘They’re out of earshot.’

She was very angry now. She made a movement as though to go on to the veranda, from which the house–boy would certainly hear her, but he seized her arm.

‘Let me go,’ she cried furiously.

‘Not much. I’ve got you now.’

She opened her mouth and called ‘Boy, boy,’ but with a quick gesture he put his hand over it. Then before she knew what he was about he had taken her in his arms and was kissing her passionately. She struggled, turning her lips away from his burning mouth.

‘No, no, no,’ she cried. ‘Leave me alone. I won’t.’

She grew confused about what happened then. All that had been said before she remembered accurately, but now his words assailed her ears through a mist of horror and fear. He seemed to plead for her love. He broke into violent protestations of passion. And all the time he held her in his tempestuous embrace. She was helpless, for he was a strong, powerful man, and her arms were pinioned to her sides; her struggles were unavailing, and she felt herself grow weaker; she was afraid she would faint, and his hot breath on her face made her feel desperately sick. He kissed her mouth, her eyes, her cheeks, her hair. The pressure of his arms was killing her. He lifted her off her feet. She tried to kick him, but he only held her more closely. He was carrying her now. He wasn’t speaking any more, but she knew that his face was pale and his eyes hot with desire. He was taking her into the bedroom. He was no longer a civilized man, but a savage. And as he ran he stumbled against a table which was in the way. His stiff knee made him a little awkward on his feet, and with the burden of the woman in his arms he fell. In a moment she had snatched herself away from him. She ran round the sofa. He was up in a flash, and flung himself towards her. There was a revolver on the desk. She was not a nervous woman, but Robert was to be away for the night, and she had meant to take it into her room when she went to bed. That was why it happened to be there. She was frantic with terror now. She did not know what she was doing. She heard a report. She saw Hammond stagger. He gave a cry. He said something, she didn’t know what. He lurched out of the room on to the veranda. She was in a frenzy now, she was beside herself, she followed him out, yes, that was it, she must have followed him out, though she remembered nothing of it, she followed firing automatically, shot after shot, till the six chambers were empty. Hammond fell down on the floor of the veranda. He crumpled up into a bloody heap.

When the boys, startled by the reports, rushed up, they found her standing over Hammond with the revolver still in her hand and Hammond lifeless. She looked at them for a moment without speaking. They stood in a frightened, huddled bunch. She let the revolver fall from her hand, and without a word turned and went into the sitting–room. They watched her go into her bedroom and turn the key in the lock. They dared not touch the dead body, but looked at it with terrified eyes, talking excitedly to one another in undertones. Then the head–boy collected himself; he had been with them for many years, he was Chinese and a level–headed fellow. Robert had gone into Singapore on his motor–cycle, and the car stood in the garage. He told the seis to get it out; they must go at once to the Assistant District Officer and tell him what had happened. He picked up the revolver and put it in his pocket. The A.D.O., a man called Withers, lived on the outskirts of the nearest town, which was about thirty–five miles away. It took them an hour and a half to reach him.

Everyone was asleep, and they had to rouse the boys. Presently Withers came out and they told him their errand. The head–boy showed him the revolver in proof of what he said. The A.D.O. went into his room to dress, sent for his car, and in a little while was following them back along the deserted road. The dawn was just breaking as he reached the Crosbies’ bungalow. He ran up the steps of the veranda, and stopped short as he saw Hammond’s body lying where he fell. He touched the face. It was quite cold.

‘Where’s mem?’ he asked the house–boy.

The Chinese pointed to the bedroom. Withers went to the door and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again.

‘Mrs Crosbie,’ he called.

‘Who is it?’

‘Withers.’

There was another pause. Then the door was unlocked and slowly opened.

Leslie stood before him. She had not been to bed, and wore the tea–gown in which she had dined. She stood and looked silently at the A.D.O. ‘Your house–boy fetched me,’ he said. ‘Hammond. What have you done?’ ‘He tried to rape me, and I shot him.’

‘My God. I say, you’d better come out here. You must tell me exactly what happened.’

‘Not now. I can’t. You must give me time. Send for my husband.’ Withers was a young man, and he did not know exactly what to do in an emergency which was so out of the run of his duties. Leslie refused to say anything till at last Robert arrived. Then she told the two men the story, from which since then, though she had repeated it over and over again, she had never in the slightest degree diverged.

The point to which Mr Joyce recurred was the shooting. As a lawyer he was bothered that Leslie had fired not once, but six times, and the examination of the dead man showed that four of the shots had been fired close to the body.

One might almost have thought that when the man fell she stood over him and emptied the contents of the revolver into him. She confessed that her memory, so accurate for all that had preceded, failed her here. Her mind was blank. It pointed to an uncontrollable fury; but uncontrollable fury was the last thing you would have expected from this quiet and demure woman. Mr Joyce had known her a good many years, and had always thought her an unemotional person; during the weeks that had passed since the tragedy her composure had been amazing.

Mr Joyce shrugged his shoulders.

‘The fact is, I suppose,’ he reflected, ‘that you can never tell what hidden possibilities of savagery there are in the most respectable of women.’ There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in.’

The Chinese clerk entered and closed the door behind him. He closed it gently, with deliberation, but decidedly, and advanced to the table at which Mr Joyce was sitting.

‘May I trouble you, sir, for a few words’ private conversation?’ he said. The elaborate accuracy with which the clerk expressed himself always faintly amused Mr Joyce, and now he smiled.

‘It’s no trouble, Chi Seng,’ he replied.

‘The matter on which I desire to speak to you, sir, is delicate and confidential.’ ‘Fire away.’

Mr Joyce met his clerk’s shrewd eyes. As usual Ong Chi Seng was dressed in the height of local fashion. He wore very shiny patent–leather shoes and gay silk socks. In his black tie was a pearl and ruby pin, and on the fourth finger of his left hand a diamond ring. From the pocket of his neat white coat protruded a gold fountain pen and a gold pencil. He wore a gold wrist–watch, and on the bridge of his nose invisible pince–nez. He gave a little cough.

‘The matter has to do with the case R. v. Crosbie, sir.’

‘Yes?’

‘A circumstance has come to my knowledge, sir, which seems to me to put a different complexion on it.’

‘What circumstance?’

‘It has come to my knowledge, sir, that there is a letter in existence from the defendant to the unfortunate victim of the tragedy.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised. In the course of the last seven years I have no doubt that Mrs Crosbie often had occasion to write to Mr Hammond.’ Mr Joyce had a high opinion of his clerk’s intelligence and his words were designed to conceal his thoughts.

‘That is very probable, sir. Mrs Crosbie must have communicated with the deceased frequently, to invite him to dine with her for example, or to propose a tennis game. That was my first thought when the matter was brought to my notice. This letter, however, was written on the day of the late Mr Hammond’s death.’

Mr Joyce did not flicker an eyelash. He continued to look at Ong Chi Seng with the smile of faint amusement with which he generally talked to him. ‘Who has told you this?’

‘The circumstances were brought to my knowledge, sir, by a friend of mine.’ Mr Joyce knew better than to insist.

‘You will no doubt recall, sir, that Mrs Crosbie has stated that until the fatal night she had had no communication with the deceased for several weeks.’ ‘Have you got the letter?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What are its contents?’

‘My friend gave me a copy. Would you like to peruse it, sir?’

‘I should.’

Ong Chi Seng took from an inside pocket a bulky wallet. It was filled with papers, Singapore dollar notes and cigarette cards. From the confusion he presently extracted a half–sheet of thin notepaper and placed it before Mr Joyce. The letter read as follows:

R. will be away for the night. I absolutely must see you. I shall expect you at eleven. I am desperate, and if you don’t come I won’t answer for the consequences. Don’t drive up.–L.It was written in the flowing hand which the Chinese were taught at the foreign schools. The writing, so lacking in character, was oddly incongruous with the ominous words.

‘What makes you think that this note was written by Mrs Crosbie?’ ‘I have every confidence in the veracity of my informant, sir,’ replied Ong Chi Seng. ‘And the matter can very easily be put to the proof. Mrs Crosbie will, no doubt, be able to tell you at once whether she wrote such a letter or not.’

Since the beginning of the conversation Mr Joyce had not taken his eyes off the respectable countenance of his clerk. He wondered now if he discerned in it a faint expression of mockery.

‘It is inconceivable that Mrs Crosbie should have written such a letter,’ said Mr Joyce.

‘If that is your opinion, sir, the matter is of course ended. My friend spoke to me on the subject only because he thought, as I was in your office, you might like to know of the existence of this letter before a communication was made to the Deputy Public Prosecutor.’

‘Who has the original?’ asked Mr Joyce sharply.

Ong Chi Seng made no sign that he perceived in this question and its manner a change of attitude.

‘You will remember, sir, no doubt, that after the death of Mr Hammond it was discovered that he had had relations with a Chinese woman. The letter is at present in her possession.’

That was one of the things which had turned public opinion most vehemently against Hammond. It came to be known that for several months he had had a Chinese woman living in his house.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Indeed everything had been said and each understood the other perfectly.

‘I’m obliged to you, Chi Seng. I will give the matter my consideration.’

‘Very good, sir. Do you wish me to make a communication to that effect to my friend?’

‘I dare say it would be as well if you kept in touch with him,’ Mr Joyce answered with gravity. ‘Yes, sir.’

The clerk noiselessly left the room, shutting the door again with deliberation, and left Mr Joyce to his reflections. He stared at the copy, in its neat, impersonal writing, of Leslie’s letter. Vague suspicions troubled him. They were so disconcerting that he made an effort to put them out of his mind. There must be a simple explanation of the letter, and Leslie without doubt could give it at once, but, by heaven, an explanation was needed. He rose from his chair, put the letter in his pocket, and took his topee. When he went out Ong Chi Seng was busily writing at his desk.

‘I’m going out for a few minutes, Chi Seng,’ he said.

‘Mr George Reed is coming by appointment at twelve o’clock, sir. Where shall I say you’ve gone?’

Mr Joyce gave him a thin smile.

‘You can say that you haven’t the least idea.’

But he knew perfectly well that Ong Chi Seng was aware that he was going to the gaol. Though the crime had been committed in Belanda and the trial was to take place at Belanda Bharu, since there was in the gaol no convenience for the detention of a white woman Mrs Crosbie had been brought to Singapore.

When she was led into the room in which he waited she held out her thin, distinguished hand, and gave him a pleasant smile. She was as ever neatly and simply dressed, and her abundant, pale hair was arranged with care.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning,’ she said, graciously.

She might have been in her own house, and Mr Joyce almost expected to hear her call the boy and tell him to bring the visitor a gin pahit.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m in the best of health, thank you.’ A flicker of amusement flashed across her eyes. ‘This is a wonderful place for a rest cure.’

The attendant withdrew and they were left alone.

‘Do sit down,’ said Leslie.

He took a chair. He did not quite know how to begin. She was so cool that it seemed almost impossible to say to her the thing he had come to say. Though she was not pretty there was something agreeable in her appearance. She had elegance, but it was the elegance of good breeding in which there was nothing of the artifice of society. You had only to look at her to know what sort of people she had and what kind of surroundings she had lived in. Her fragility gave her a singular refinement. It was impossible to associate her with the vaguest idea of grossness.

‘I’m looking forward to seeing Robert this afternoon,’ she said, in her good–humoured, easy voice. (It was a pleasure to hear her speak, her voice and her accent were so distinctive of her class.) ‘Poor dear, it’s been a great trial to his nerves. I’m thankful it’ll all be over in a few days.’

‘It’s only five days now.’

‘I know. Each morning when I awake I say to myself, “one less.”’ She smiled then. ‘Just as I used to do at school and the holidays were coming.’

‘By the way, am I right in thinking that you had no communication whatever with Hammond for several weeks before the catastrophe?’

‘I’m quite positive of that. The last time we met was at a tennis–party at the MacFarrens. I don’t think I said more than two words to him. They have two courts, you know, and we didn’t happen to be in the same sets.’

‘And you haven’t written to him?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Are you quite sure of that?’

‘Oh, quite,’ she answered, with a little smile. ‘There was nothing I should write to him for except to ask him to dine or to play tennis, and I hadn’t done either for months.’

‘At one time you’d been on fairly intimate terms with him. How did it happen that you had stopped asking him to anything?’

Mrs Crosbie shrugged her thin shoulders.

‘One gets tired of people. We hadn’t anything very much in common. Of course, when he was ill Robert and I did everything we could for him, but the last year or two he’d been quite well, and he was very popular. He had a good many calls on his time, and there didn’t seem to be any need to shower invitations upon him.’

‘Are you quite certain that was all?’

Mrs Crosbie hesitated for a moment.

‘Well, I may just as well tell you. It had come to our ears that he was living with a Chinese woman, and Robert said he wouldn’t have him in the house. I had seen her myself.’

Mr Joyce was sitting in a straight–backed arm–chair, resting his chin on his hand, and his eyes were fixed on Leslie. Was it his fancy that, as she made this remark, her black pupils were filled on a sudden, for the fraction of a second, with a dull red light? The effect was startling. Mr Joyce shifted in his chair. He placed the tips of his ten fingers together. He spoke very slowly, choosing his words.

‘I think I should tell you that there is in existence a letter in your handwriting to Geoff Hammond.’

He watched her closely. She made no movement, nor did her face change colour, but she took a noticeable time to reply.

‘In the past I’ve often sent him little notes to ask him to something or other, or to get me something when I knew he was going to Singapore.’

‘This letter asks him to come and see you because Robert was going to Singapore.’

‘That’s impossible. I never did anything of the kind.’

‘You’d better read it for yourself.’

He took it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She gave it a glance and with a smile of scorn handed it back to him.

‘That’s not my handwriting.’

‘I know, it’s said to be an exact copy of the original.’

She read the words now, and as she read a horrible change came over her. Her colourless face grew dreadful to look at. It turned green. The flesh seemed on a sudden to fall away and her skin was tightly stretched over the bones. Her lips receded, showing her teeth, so that she had the appearance of making a grimace. She stared at Mr Joyce with eyes that started from their sockets. He was looking now at a gibbering death’s head.

‘What does it mean?’ she whispered.

Her mouth was so dry that she could utter no more than a hoarse sound. It was no longer a human voice.

‘That is for you to say,’ he answered.

‘I didn’t write it. I swear I didn’t write it.’

‘Be very careful what you say. If the original is in your handwriting it would be useless to deny it.’

‘It would be a forgery.’

‘It would be difficult to prove that. It would be easy to prove that it was genuine.’

A shiver passed through her lean body. But great beads of sweat stood on her forehead. She took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped the palms of her hands. She glanced at the letter again and gave Mr Joyce a sidelong look.

‘It’s not dated. If I had written it and forgotten all about it, it might have been written years ago. If you’ll give me time, I’ll try and remember the circumstances.’

‘I noticed there was no date. If this letter were in the hands of the prosecution they would cross–examine the boys. They would soon find out whether someone took a letter to Hammond on the day of his death.’

Mrs Crosbie clasped her hands violently and swayed in her chair so that he thought she would faint.

‘I swear to you that I didn’t write that letter.’

Mr Joyce was silent for a little while. He took his eyes from her distraught face, and looked down on the floor. He was reflecting.

‘In these circumstances we need not go into the matter further,’ he said slowly, at last breaking the silence. ‘If the possessor of this letter sees fit to place it in the hands of the prosecution you will be prepared.’

His words suggested that he had nothing more to say to her, but he made no movement of departure. He waited. To himself he seemed to wait a very long time. He did not look at Leslie, but he was conscious that she sat very still. She made no sound. At last it was he who spoke.

‘If you have nothing more to say to me I think I’ll be getting back to my office.’

‘What would anyone who read the letter be inclined to think that it meant?’ she asked then.

‘He’d know that you had told a deliberate lie,’ answered Mr Joyce sharply.

‘When?’

‘You have stated definitely that you had had no communication with Hammond for at least three months.’

‘The whole thing has been a terrible shock to me. The events of that dreadful night have been a nightmare. It’s not very strange if one detail has escaped my memory.’

‘It would be unfortunate, when your memory has reproduced so exactly every particular of your interview with Hammond, that you should have forgotten so important a point as that he came to see you in the bungalow on the night of his death at your express desire.’

‘I hadn’t forgotten. After what happened I was afraid to mention it. I thought you’d none of you believe my story if I admitted that he’d come at my invitation. I dare say it was stupid of me; but I lost my head, and after I’d said once that I’d had no communication with Hammond I was obliged to stick to it.’

By now Leslie had recovered her admirable composure, and she met Mr Joyce’s appraising glance with candour. Her gentleness was very disarming.

‘You will be required to explain, then, why you asked Hammond to come and see you when Robert was away for the night.’

She turned her eyes full on the lawyer. He had been mistaken in thinking them insignificant, they were rather fine eyes, and unless he was mistaken they were bright now with tears. Her voice had a little break in it.

‘It was a surprise I was preparing for Robert. His birthday is next month. I knew he wanted a new gun and you know I’m dreadfully stupid about sporting things. I wanted to talk to Geoff about it. I thought I’d get him to order it for me.’

‘Perhaps the terms of the letter are not very clear to your recollection. Will you have another look at it?’

‘No, I don’t want to,’ she said quickly.

‘Does it seem to you the sort of letter a woman would write to a somewhat distant acquaintance because she wanted to consult him about buying a gun?’

‘I dare say it’s rather extravagant and emotional. I do express myself like that, you know. I’m quite prepared to admit it’s very silly.’ She smiled. ‘And after all, Geoff Hammond wasn’t quite a distant acquaintance. When he was ill I’d nursed him like a mother. I asked him to come when Robert was away, because Robert wouldn’t have him in the house.’

Mr Joyce was tired of sitting so long in the same position. He rose and walked once or twice up and down the room, choosing the words he proposed to say; then he leaned over the back of the chair in which he had been sitting. He spoke slowly in a tone of deep gravity.

‘Mrs Crosbie, I want to talk to you very, very seriously. This case was comparatively plain sailing. There was only one point which seemed to me to require explanation: as far as I could judge, you had fired no less than four shots into Hammond when he was lying on the ground. It was hard to accept the possibility that a delicate, frightened, and habitually self–controlled woman, of gentle nature and refined instincts, should have surrendered to an absolutely uncontrolled frenzy. But of course it was admissible. Although Geoffrey Hammond was much liked and on the whole thought highly of, I was prepared to prove that he was the sort of man who might be guilty of the crime which in justification of your act you accused him of. The fact, which was discovered after his death, that he had been living with a Chinese woman gave us something very definite to go upon. That robbed him of any sympathy which might have been felt for him. We made up our minds to make use of the odium which such a connexion cast upon him in the minds of all respectable people. I told your husband this morning that I was certain of an acquittal, and I wasn’t just telling him that to give him heart. I do not believe the assessors would have left the court.’

They looked into one another’s eyes. Mrs Crosbie was strangely still. She was like a little bird paralysed by the fascination of a snake. He went on in the same quiet tones.

‘But this letter has thrown an entirely different complexion on the case. I am your legal adviser, I shall represent you in court. I take your story as you tell it me, and I shall conduct your defence according to its terms. It may be that I believe your statements, and it may be that I doubt them. The duty of counsel is to persuade the court that the evidence placed before it is not such as to justify it in bringing in a verdict of guilty, and any private opinion he may have of the guilt or innocence of his client is entirely beside the point.’

He was astonished to see in Leslie’s eyes the flicker of a smile. Piqued, he went on somewhat dryly:

‘You’re not going to deny that Hammond came to your house at your urgent, and I may even say, hysterical invitation?’

Mrs Crosbie, hesitating for an instant, seemed to consider.

‘They can prove that the letter was taken to his bungalow by one of the house–boys. He rode over on his bicycle.’

‘You mustn’t expect other people to be stupider than you. The letter will put them on the track of suspicions which have entered nobody’s head. I will not tell you what I personally thought when I saw the copy. I do not wish you to tell me anything but what is needed to save your neck.’

Mrs Crosbie gave a shrill cry. She sprang to her feet, white with terror.

‘You don’t think they’d hang me?’

‘If they came to the conclusion that you hadn’t killed Hammond in self– defence, it would be the duty of the assessors to bring in a verdict of guilty. The charge is murder. It would be the duty of the judge to sentence you to death.’

‘But what can they prove?’ she gasped.

‘I don’t know what they can prove. You know. I don’t want to know. But if their suspicions are aroused, if they begin to make inquiries, if the natives are questioned–what is it that can be discovered?’

She crumpled up suddenly. She fell on the floor before he could catch her. She had fainted. He looked round the room for water, but there was none there, and he did not want to be disturbed. He stretched her out on the floor, and kneeling beside her waited for her to recover. When she opened her eyes he was disconcerted by the ghastly fear that he saw in them.

‘Keep quite still,’ he said. ‘You’ll be better in a moment.’

‘You won’t let them hang me,’ she whispered.

She began to cry, hysterically, while in undertones he sought to quieten her.

‘For goodness sake pull yourself together,’ he said.

‘Give me a minute.’

Her courage was amazing. He could see the effort she made to regain her self–control, and soon she was once more calm.

‘Let me get up now.’

He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. Taking her arm, he led her to the chair. She sat down wearily.

‘Don’t talk to me for a minute or two,’ she said.

‘Very well.’

When at last she spoke it was to say something which he did not expect. She gave a little sigh.

‘I’m afraid I’ve made rather a mess of things,’ she said.

He did not answer, and once more there was a silence.

‘Isn’t it possible to get hold of the letter?’ she said at last.

‘I do not think anything would have been said to me about it if the person in whose possession it is was not prepared to sell it.’

‘Who’s got it?’

‘The Chinese woman who was living in Hammond’s house.’

A spot of colour flickered for an instant on Leslie’s cheek–bones.

‘Does she want an awful lot for it?’

‘I imagine that she has a very shrewd idea of its value. I doubt if it would be possible to get hold of it except for a very large sum.’

‘Are you going to let me be hanged?’

‘Do you think it’s so simple as all that to secure possession of an unwelcome piece of evidence? It’s no different from suborning a witness. You have no right to make any such suggestion to me.’

‘Then what is going to happen to me?’

‘Justice must take its course.’

She grew very pale. A little shudder passed through her body.

‘I put myself in your hands. Of course I have no right to ask you to do anything that isn’t proper.’

Mr Joyce had not bargained for the little break in her voice which her habitual self–restraint made quite intolerably moving. She looked at him with humble eyes, and he thought that if he rejected their appeal they would haunt him for the rest of his life. After all, nothing could bring poor Hammond back to life again. He wondered what really was the explanation of that letter. It was not fair to conclude from it that she had killed Hammond without provocation. He had lived in the East a long time and his sense of professional honour was not perhaps so acute as it had been twenty years before. He stared at the floor. He made up his mind to do something which he knew was unjustifiable, but it stuck in his throat and he felt dully resentful towards Leslie. It embarrassed him a little to speak.

‘I don’t know exactly what your husband’s circumstances are?’

Flushing a rosy red, she shot a swift glance at him.

‘He has a good many tin shares and a small share in two or three rubber estates. I suppose he could raise money.’

‘He would have to be told what it was for.’

She was silent for a moment. She seemed to think.

‘He’s in love with me still. He would make any sacrifice to save me. Is there any need for him to see the letter?’

Mr Joyce frowned a little, and, quick to notice, she went on.

‘Robert is an old friend of yours. I’m not asking you to do anything for me, I’m asking you to save a rather simple, kind man who never did you any harm from all the pain that’s possible.’

Mr Joyce did not reply. He rose to go and Mrs Crosbie, with the grace that was natural to her, held out her hand. She was shaken by the scene, and her look was haggard, but she made a brave attempt to speed him with courtesy.

‘It’s so good of you to take all this trouble for me. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am.’

Mr Joyce returned to his office. He sat in his own room, quite still, attempting to do no work, and pondered. His imagination brought him many strange ideas. He shuddered a little. At last there was the discreet knock on the door which he was expecting. Ong Chi Seng came in.

‘I was just going out to have my tiffin, sir,’ he said.

‘All right.’

‘I didn’t know if there was anything you wanted before I went, sir.’

‘I don’t think so. Did you make another appointment for Mr Reed?’

‘Yes, sir. He will come at three o’clock.’

‘Good.’

Ong Chi Seng turned away, walked to the door, and put his long slim fingers on the handle. Then, as though on an afterthought, he turned back.

’Is there anything you wish me to say to my friend, sir?’

Although Ong Chi Seng spoke English so admirably he had still a difficulty with the letter R, and he pronounced it ‘fliend’.

‘What friend?’

‘About the letter Mrs Crosbie wrote to Hammond deceased, sir.’

‘Oh! I’d forgotten about that. I mentioned it to Mrs Crosbie and she denies having written anything of the sort. It’s evidently a forgery.’

Mr Joyce took the copy from his pocket and handed it to Ong Chi Seng. Ong Chi Seng ignored the gesture.

‘In that case, sir, I suppose there would be no objection if my fliend delivered the letter to the Deputy Public Prosecutor.’

‘None. But I don’t quite see what good that would do your friend.’

‘My fliend, sir, thought it was his duty in the interests of justice.’

‘I am the last man in the world to interfere with anyone who wishes to do his duty, Chi Seng.’

The eyes of the lawyer and of the Chinese clerk met. Not the shadow of a smile hovered on the lips of either, but they understood each other perfectly.

‘I quite understand, sir,’ said Ong Chi Seng, ‘but from my study of the case R. v. Crosbie I am of opinion that the production of such a letter would be damaging to our client.’

‘I have always had a very high opinion of your legal acumen, Chi Seng.’

‘It had occurred to me, sir, that if I could persuade my fliend to induce the Chinese woman who has the letter to deliver it into our hands it would save a great deal of trouble.’

Mr Joyce idly drew faces on his blotting–paper.

‘I suppose your friend is a business man. In what circumstances do you think he would be induced to part with the letter?’

‘He has not got the letter. The Chinese woman has the letter. He is only a relation of the Chinese woman. She is ignorant woman; she did not know the value of that letter till my friend told her.’

‘What value did he put on it?’

‘Ten thousand dollars, sir.’

‘Good God! Where on earth do you suppose Mrs Crosbie can get ten thousand dollars! I tell you the letter’s a forgery.’

He looked up at Ong Chi Seng as he spoke. The clerk was unmoved by the outburst. He stood at the side of the desk, civil, cool, and observant.

‘Mr Crosbie owns an eighth share of the Betong Rubber Estate and a sixth share of the Selantan River Rubber Estate. I have a fliend who will lend him the money on the security of–his property.’

‘You have a large circle of acquaintance, Chi Seng.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, you can tell them all to go to hell. I would never advise Mr Crosbie to give a penny more than five thousand for a letter that can be very easily explained.’

‘The Chinese woman does not want to sell the letter, sir. My fliend took a long time to persuade her. It is useless to offer her less than the sum mentioned.’

Mr Joyce looked at Ong Chi Seng for at least three minutes. The clerk bore the searching scrutiny without embarrassment. He stood in a respectful attitude with downcast eyes. Mr Joyce knew his man. Clever fellow, Chi Seng, he thought, I wonder how much he’s going to get out of it.

‘Ten thousand dollars is a very large sum.’

‘Mr Crosbie will certainly pay it rather than see his wife hanged, sir.’

Again Mr Joyce paused. What more did Chi Seng know than he had said? He must be pretty sure of his ground if he was obviously so unwilling to bargain. That sum had been fixed because whoever it was that was managing the affair knew it was the largest amount that Robert Crosbie could raise.

‘Where is the Chinese woman now?’ asked Mr Joyce.

‘She is staying at the house of my fliend, sir.’

‘Will she come here?’

‘I think it more better if you go to her, sir. I can take you to the house tonight and she will give you the letter. She is very ignorant woman, sir, and she does not understand cheques.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of giving her a cheque. I will bring bank notes with me.’

‘It would only be waste of valuable time to bring less than ten thousand dollars, sir.’

‘I quite understand.’

‘I will go and tell my fliend after I have had my tiffin, sir.’

‘Very good. You’d better meet me outside the club at ten o’clock tonight.’

‘With pleasure, sir,’ said Ong Chi Seng.

He gave Mr Joyce a little bow and left the room. Mr Joyce went out to have luncheon, too. He went to the club and here, as he had expected, he saw Robert Crosbie. He was sitting at a crowded table, and as he passed him, looking for a place, Mr Joyce touched him on the shoulder.

‘I’d like a word or two with you before you go,’ he said.

‘Right you are. Let me know when you’re ready.’

Mr Joyce had made up his mind how to tackle him. He played a rubber of bridge after luncheon in order to allow time for the club to empty itself. He did not want on this particular matter to see Crosbie in his office. Presently Crosbie came into the card–room and looked on till the game was finished. The other players went on their various affairs, and the two were left alone.

‘A rather unfortunate thing has happened, old man,’ said Mr Joyce, in a tone which he sought to render as casual as possible. ‘It appears that your wife sent a letter to Hammond asking him to come to the bungalow on the night he was killed.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ cried Crosbie. ‘She’s always stated that she had had no communication with Hammond. I know from my own knowledge that she hadn’t set eyes on him for a couple of months.’

‘The fact remains that the letter exists. It’s in the possession of the Chinese woman Hammond was living with. Your wife meant to give you a present on your birthday, and she wanted Hammond to help her to get it. In the emotional excitement that she suffered from after the tragedy, she forgot all about it, and having once denied having any communication with Hammond she was afraid to say that she had made a mistake. It was, of course, very unfortunate, but I dare say it was not unnatural.’

Crosbie did not speak. His large, red face bore an expression of complete bewilderment, and Mr Joyce was at once relieved and exasperated by his lack of comprehension. He was a stupid man, and Mr Joyce had no patience with stupidity. But his distress since the catastrophe had touched a soft spot in the lawyer’s heart; and Mrs Crosbie had struck the right note when she asked him to help her, not for her sake, but for her husband’s.

‘I need not tell you that it would be very awkward if this letter found its way into the hands of the prosecution. Your wife has lied, and she would be asked to explain the lie. It alters things a little if Hammond did not intrude, an unwanted guest, but came to your house by invitation. It would be easy to arouse in the assessors a certain indecision of mind.’

Mr Joyce hesitated. He was face to face now with his decision. If it had been a time for humour, he could have smiled at the reflection that he was taking so grave a step, and that the man for whom he was taking it had not the smallest conception of its gravity. If he gave the matter a thought, he probably imagined that what Mr Joyce was doing was what any lawyer did in the ordinary run of business.

‘My dear Robert, you are not only my client, but my friend. I think we must get hold of that letter. It’ll cost a good deal of money. Except for that I should have preferred to say nothing to you about it.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten thousand dollars.’

‘That’s a devil of a lot. With the slump and one thing and another it’ll take just about all I’ve got.’

‘Can you get it at once?’

‘I suppose so. Old Charlie Meadows will let me have it on my tin shares and on those two estates I’m interested in.’

‘Then will you?’

’Is it absolutely necessary?’

‘If you want your wife to be acquitted.’

Crosbie grew very red. His mouth sagged strangely.

‘But...’ he could not find words, his face now was purple. ‘But I don’t understand. She can explain. You don’t mean to say they’d find her guilty? They couldn’t hang her for putting a noxious vermin out of the way.’

‘Of course they wouldn’t hang her. They might only find her guilty of manslaughter. She’d probably get off with two or three years.’

Crosbie started to his feet and his red face was distraught with horror.

‘Three years.’

Then something seemed to dawn in that slow intelligence of his. His mind was darkness across which shot suddenly a flash of lightning, and though the succeeding darkness was as profound, there remained the memory of something not seen but perhaps just descried. Mr Joyce saw that Crosbie’s big red hands, coarse and hard with all the odd jobs he had set them to, trembled.

‘What was the present she wanted to make me?’

‘She says she wanted to give you a new gun.’

Once more that great red face flushed a deeper red.

‘When have you got to have the money ready?’

There was something odd in his voice now. It sounded as though he spoke with invisible hands clutching at his throat.

‘At ten o’clock tonight. I thought you could bring it to my office at about six.’

’Is the woman coming to you?’

‘No, I’m going to her.’

‘I’ll bring the money. I’ll come with you.’

Mr Joyce looked at him sharply.

‘Do you think there’s any need for you to do that? I think it would be better if you left me to deal with this matter by myself.’

‘It’s my money, isn’t it? I’m going to come.’

Mr Joyce shrugged his shoulders. They rose and shook hands. Mr Joyce looked at him curiously.

At ten o’clock they met in the empty club.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Mr Joyce.

‘Yes. I’ve got the money in my pocket.’

‘Let’s go then.’

They walked down the steps. Mr Joyce’s car was waiting for them in the square, silent at that hour, and as they came to it Ong Chi Seng stepped out of the shadow of a house. He took his seat beside the driver and gave him a direction. They drove past the Hotel de l’Europe and turned up by the Sailor’s Home to get into Victoria Street. Here the Chinese shops were still open, idlers lounged about, and in the roadway rickshaws and motor–cars and gharries gave a busy air to the scene. Suddenly their car stopped and Chi Seng turned round.

‘I think it more better if we walk here, sir,’ he said.

They got out and he went on. They followed a step or two behind. Then he asked them to stop.

‘You wait here, sir. I go in and speak to my fliend.’

He went into a shop, open to the street, where three or four Chinese were standing behind the counter. It was one of those strange shops where nothing was on view, and you wondered what it was they sold there. They saw him address a stout man in a duck suit with a large gold chain across his breast, and the man shot a quick glance out into the night. He gave Chi Seng a key and Chi Seng came out. He beckoned to the two men waiting and slid into a doorway at the side of the shop. They followed him and found themselves at the foot of a flight of stairs.

‘If you wait a minute I will light a match,’ he said, always resourceful. ‘You come upstairs, please.’

He held a Japanese match in front of them, but it scarcely dispelled the darkness and they groped their way up behind him. On the first floor he unlocked a door and going in lit a gas–jet.

‘Come in, please,’ he said.

It was a small square room, with one window, and the only furniture consisted of two low Chinese beds covered with matting. In one corner was a large chest, with an elaborate lock, and on this stood a shabby tray with an opium pipe on it and a lamp. There was in the room the faint, acrid scent of the drug. They sat down and Ong Chi Seng offered them cigarettes. In a moment the door was opened by the fat Chinaman whom they had seen behind the counter. He bade them good evening in very good English, and sat down by the side of his fellow–countryman.

‘The Chinese woman is just coming,’ said Chi Seng.

A boy from the shop brought in a tray with a teapot and cups and the Chinaman offered them a cup of tea. Crosbie refused. The Chinese talked to one another in undertones, but Crosbie and Mr Joyce were silent. At last there was the sound of a voice outside; someone was calling in a low tone; and the Chinaman went to the door. He opened it, spoke a few words, and ushered a woman in. Mr Joyce looked at her. He had heard much about her since Hammond’s death, but he had never seen her. She was a stoutish person, not very young, with a broad, phlegmatic face, she was powdered and rouged and her eyebrows were a thin black line, but she gave you the impression of a woman of character. She wore a pale blue jacket and a white skirt, her costume was not quite European nor quite Chinese, but on her feet were little Chinese silk slippers. She wore heavy gold chains round her neck, gold bangles on her wrists, gold ear–rings, and elaborate gold pins in her black hair. She walked in slowly, with the air of a woman sure of herself, but with a certain heaviness of tread, and sat down on the bed beside Ong Chi Seng. He said something to her and nodding she gave an incurious glance at the two white men.

‘Has she got the letter?’ asked Mr Joyce.

‘Yes, sir.’

Crosbie said nothing, but produced a roll of five–hundred–dollar notes. He counted out twenty and handed them to Chi Seng.

‘Will you see if that is correct?’

The clerk counted them and gave them to the fat Chinaman.

‘Quite correct, sir.’

The Chinaman counted them once more and put them in his pocket. He spoke again to the woman and she drew from her bosom a letter. She gave it to Chi Seng who cast his eyes over it.

‘This is the right document, sir,’ he said, and was about to give it to Mr Joyce when Crosbie took it from him.

‘Let me look at it,’ he said.

Mr Joyce watched him read and then held out his hand for it.

‘You’d better let me have it.’

Crosbie folded it up deliberately and put it in his pocket.

‘No, I’m going to keep it myself. It’s cost me enough money.’

Mr Joyce made no rejoinder. The three Chinese watched the little passage, but what they thought about it, or whether they thought, it was impossible to tell from their impassive countenances. Mr Joyce rose to his feet.

‘Do you want me any more tonight, sir?’ said Ong Chi Seng.

‘No.’ He knew that the clerk wished to stay behind in order to get his agreed share of the money, and he turned to Crosbie. ‘Are you ready?’

Crosbie did not answer, but stood up. The Chinaman went to the door and opened it for them. Chi Seng found a bit of candle and lit it in order to light them down, and the two Chinese accompanied them to the street. They left the woman sitting quietly on the bed smoking a cigarette. When they reached the street the Chinese left them and went once more upstairs.

‘What are you going to do with that letter?’ asked Mr Joyce.

‘Keep it.’

They walked to where the car was waiting for them and here Mr Joyce offered his friend a lift. Crosbie shook his head.

‘I’m going to walk.’ He hesitated a little and shuffled his feet. ‘I went to Singapore on the night of Hammond’s death partly to buy a new gun that a man I knew wanted to dispose of. Good night.’

He disappeared quickly into the darkness.

Mr Joyce was quite right about the trial. The assessors went into court fully determined to acquit Mrs Crosbie. She gave evidence on her own behalf. She told her story simply and with straightforwardness. The D.P.P. was a kindly man and it was plain that he took no great pleasure in his task. He asked the necessary questions in a deprecating manner. His speech for the prosecution might really have been a speech for the defence, and the assessors took less than five minutes to consider their popular verdict. It was impossible to prevent the great outburst of applause with which it was received by the crowd that packed the courthouse. The judge congratulated Mrs Crosbie and she was a free woman.

No one had expressed a more violent disapprobation of Hammond’s behaviour than Mrs Joyce; she was a woman loyal to her friends and she had insisted on the Crosbies staying with her after the trial, for she in common with everyone else had no doubt of the result, till they could make arrangements to go away. It was out of the question for poor, dear, brave Leslie to return to the bungalow at which the horrible catastrophe had taken place. The trial was over by half past twelve and when they reached the Joyces’ house a grand luncheon was awaiting them. Cocktails were ready, Mrs Joyce’s million–dollar cocktail was celebrated through all the Malay States, and Mrs Joyce drank Leslie’s health. She was a talkative, vivacious woman, and now she was in the highest spirits. It was fortunate, for the rest of them were silent. She did not wonder; her husband never had much to say, and the other two were naturally exhausted from the long strain to which they had been subjected. During luncheon she carried on a bright and spirited monologue. Then coffee was served.

‘Now, children,’ she said in her gay, bustling fashion, ‘you must have a rest and after tea I shall take you both for a drive to the sea.’

Mr Joyce, who lunched at home only by exception, had of course to go back to his office.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mrs Joyce,’ said Crosbie. ‘I’ve got to get back to the estate at once.’

‘Not today?’ she cried.

‘Yes, now. I’ve neglected it for too long and I have urgent business. But I shall be very grateful if you will keep Leslie until we have decided what to do.’ Mrs Joyce was about to expostulate, but her husband prevented her. ‘If he must go, he must, and there’s an end of it.’

There was something in the lawyer’s tone which made her look at him quickly. She held her tongue and there was a moment’s silence. Then Crosbie spoke again.

‘If you’ll forgive me, I’ll start at once so that I can get there before dark.’ He rose from the table. ‘Will you come and see me off, Leslie?’

‘Of course.’

They went out of the dining–room together.

‘I think that’s rather inconsiderate of him,’ said Mrs Joyce. ‘He must know that Leslie wants to be with him just now.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t go if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.’

‘Well, I’ll just see that Leslie’s room is ready for her. She wants a complete rest, of course, and then amusement.’

Mrs Joyce left the room and Joyce sat down again. In a short time he heard Crosbie start the engine of his motor–cycle and then noisily scrunch over the gravel of the garden path. He got up and went into the drawing–room. Mrs Crosbie was standing in the middle of it, looking into space, and in her hand was an open letter. He recognized it. She gave him a glance as he came in and he saw that she was deathly pale.

‘He knows,’ she whispered.

Mr Joyce went up to her and took the letter from her hand. He lit a match and set the paper afire. She watched it burn. When he could hold it no longer he dropped it on the tiled floor and they both looked at the paper curl and blacken. Then he trod it into ashes with his foot.

‘What does he know?’

She gave him a long, long stare and into her eyes came a strange look. Was it contempt or despair? Mr Joyce could not tell.

‘He knows that Geoff was my lover.’

Mr Joyce made no movement and uttered no sound.

‘He’d been my lover for years. He became my lover almost immediately after he came back from the war. We knew how careful we must be. When we became lovers I pretended I was tired of him, and he seldom came to the house when Robert was there. I used to drive out to a place we knew and he met me, two or three times a week, and when Robert went to Singapore he used to come to the bungalow late, when the boys had gone for the night. We saw one another constantly, all the time, and not a soul had the smallest suspicion of it. And then lately, a year ago, he began to change. I didn’t know what was the matter. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t care for me any more. He always denied it. I was frantic. I made him scenes. Sometimes I thought he hated me. Oh, if you knew what agonies I endured. I passed through hell. I knew he didn’t want me any more and I wouldn’t let him go. Misery! Misery! I loved him. I’d given him everything. He was my life. And then I heard he was living with a Chinese woman. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. At last I saw her, I saw her with my own eyes, walking in the village, with her gold bracelets and her necklaces, an old, fat Chinese woman. She was older than I was. Horrible! They all knew in the kampong that she was his mistress. And when I passed her, she looked at me and I knew that she knew I was his mistress too. I sent for him. I told him I must see him. You’ve read the letter. I was mad to write it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t care. I hadn’t seen him for ten days. It was a lifetime. And when last we’d parted he took me in his arms and kissed me, and told me not to worry. And he went straight from my arms to hers.’

She had been speaking in a low voice, vehemently, and now she stopped and wrung her hands.

‘That damned letter. We’d always been so careful. He always tore up any word I wrote to him the moment he’d read it. How was I to know he’d leave that one? He came, and I told him I knew about the Chinawoman. He denied it. He said it was only scandal. I was beside myself. I don’t know what I said to him. Oh, I hated him then. I tore him limb from limb. I said everything I could to wound him. I insulted him. I could have spat in his face. And at last he turned on me. He told me he was sick and tired of me and never wanted to see me again. He said I bored him to death. And then he acknowledged that it was true about the Chinawoman. He said he’d known her for years, before the war, and she was the only woman who really meant anything to him, and the rest was just pastime. And he said he was glad I knew and now at last I’d leave him alone. And then I don’t know what happened, I was beside myself, I saw red. I seized the revolver and I fired. He gave a cry and I saw I’d hit him. He staggered and rushed for the veranda. I ran after him and fired again. He fell and then I stood over him and I fired till the revolver went click, click, and I knew there were no more cartridges.’

At last she stopped, panting. Her face was no longer human, it was distorted with cruelty, and rage and pain. You would never have thought that this quiet, refined woman was capable of such fiendish passion. Mr Joyce took a step backwards. He was absolutely aghast at the sight of her. It was not a face, it was a gibbering, hideous mask. Then they heard a voice calling from another room, a loud, friendly, cheerful voice. It was Mrs Joyce.

‘Come along, Leslie darling, your room’s ready. You must be dropping with sleep.’

Mrs Crosbie’s features gradually composed themselves. Those passions, so clearly delineated, were smoothed away as with your hand you would smooth crumpled paper, and in a minute the face was cool and calm and unlined. She was a trifle pale, but her lips broke into a pleasant, affable smile. She was once more the well–bred and even distinguished woman.

‘I’m coming, Dorothy dear. I’m sorry to give you so much trouble.’

THE OUTSTATION

THE new assistant arrived in the afternoon. When the Resident, Mr. Warburton, was told that the prahu was in sight he put on his solar topee and went down to the landing-stage. The guard, eight little Dyak soldiers, stood to attention as he passed. He noted with satisfaction that their bearing was martial, their uniforms neat and clean, and their guns shining. They were a credit to him. From the landing-stage he watched the bend of the river round which in a moment the boat would sweep. He looked very smart in his spotless ducks and white shoes. He held under his arm a gold-headed Malacca cane which had been given him by the Sultan of Perak. He awaited the newcomer with mingled feelings. There was more work in the district than one man could properly do, and during his periodical tours of the country under his charge it had been inconvenient to leave the station in the hands of a native clerk, but he had been so long the only white man there that he could not face the arrival of another without misgiving. He was accustomed to loneliness. During the war he had not seen an English face for three years; and once when he was instructed to put up an afforestation officer he was seized with panic, so that when the stranger was due to arrive, having arranged everything for his reception, he wrote a note telling him he was obliged to go up-river, and fled; he remained away till he was informed by a messenger that his guest had left.

Now the prahu appeared in the broad reach. It was manned by prisoners, Dyaks under various sentences, and a couple of warders were waiting on the landing-stage to take them back to gaol. They were sturdy fellows, used to the river, and they rowed with a powerful stroke. As the boat reached the side a man got out from under the attap awning and stepped on shore. The guard presented arms.

“Here we are at last. By God, I’m as cramped as the devil. I’ve brought you your mail.”

He spoke with exuberant joviality. Mr. Warburton politely held out his hand.

“Mr. Cooper, I presume?”

“That’s right. Were you expecting anyone else?”

The question had a facetious intent, but the Resident did not smile.

“My name is Warburton. I’ll show you your quarters. They’ll bring your kit along.”

He preceded Cooper along the narrow pathway and they entered a compound in which stood a small bungalow.

“I’ve had it made as habitable as I could, but of course no one has lived in it for a good many years.”

It was built on piles. It consisted of a long living-room which opened on to a broad verandah, and behind, on each side of a passage, were two bedrooms.

“This’ll do me all right,” said Cooper.

“I dare say you want to have a bath and a change. I shall be very much pleased if you’ll dine with me to-night. Will eight o’clock suit you?”

“Any old time will do for me.”

The Resident gave a polite, but slightly disconcerted smile, and withdrew. He returned to the Fort where his own residence was. The impression which Allen Cooper had given him was not very favourable, but he was a fair man, and he knew that it was unjust to form an opinion on so brief a glimpse. Cooper seemed to be about thirty. He was a tall, thin fellow, with a sallow face in which there was not a spot of colour. It was a face all in one tone. He had a large, hooked nose and blue eyes. When, entering the bungalow, he had taken off his topee and flung it to a waiting boy, Mr. Warburton noticed that his large skull, covered with short, brown hair, contrasted somewhat oddly with a weak, small chin. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, but they were shabby and soiled; and his battered topee had not been cleaned for days. Mr. Warburton reflected that the young man had spent a week on a coasting steamer and had passed the last forty-eight hours lying in the bottom of a prahu.

“We’ll see what he looks like when he comes in to dinner.”

He went into his room, where his things were as neatly laid out as if he had an English valet, undressed, and, walking down the stairs to the bath-house, sluiced himself with cool water. The only concession he made to the climate was to wear a white dinner jacket; but otherwise, in a boiled shirt and a high collar, silk socks and patent-leather shoes, he dressed as formally as though he were dining at his club in Pall Mall. A careful host, he went into the dining-room to see that the table was properly laid. It was gay with orchids, and the silver shone brightly. The napkins were folded into elaborate shapes. Shaded candles in silver candlesticks shed a soft light. Mr. Warburton smiled his approval and returned to the sitting-room to await his guest. Presently he appeared. Cooper was wearing the khaki shorts, the khaki shirt, and the ragged jacket in which he had landed. Mr. Warburton’s smile of greeting froze on his face.

“Hulloa, you’re all dressed up,” said Cooper. “I didn’t know you were going to do that. I very nearly put on a sarong.”

“It doesn’t matter at all. I dare say your boys were busy.”

“You needn’t have bothered to dress on my account, you know.”

“I didn’t. I always dress for dinner.”

“Even when you’re alone?”

“Especially when I’m alone,” replied Mr. Warburton, with a frigid stare.

He saw a twinkle of amusement in Cooper’s eyes, and he flushed an angry red. Mr. Warburton was a hot-tempered man; you might have guessed that from his red face with its pugnacious features and from his red hair now growing white; his blue eyes, cold as a rule and observing, could flash with sudden wrath; but he was a man of the world and he hoped a just one. He must do his best o get on with this fellow.

“When I lived in London I moved in circles in which it would have been just as eccentric not to dress for dinner every night as not to have a bath every morning. When I came to Borneo I saw no reason to discontinue so good a habit. For three years during the war I never saw a white man. I never omitted to dress on a single occasion on which I was well enough to come into dinner. You have not been very long in this country; believe me, there is no better way to maintain the proper pride which you should have in yourself. When a white man surrenders in the slightest degree to the influences that surround him he very soon loses his self-respect, and when he loses his self-respect you may be quite sure the natives will soon cease to respect him.”

“Well, if you expect me to put on a boiled shirt and a stiff collar in this heat I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”

“When you are dining in your own bungalow you will, of course, dress as you think fit, but when you do me the pleasure of dining with me, perhaps you will come to the conclusion that it is only polite to wear the costume usual in civilised society.”

Two Malay boys, in sarongs and songkoks, with smart white coats and brass buttons, came in, one bearing gin pahits, and the other a tray on which were olives and anchovies. Then they went in to dinner. Mr. Warburton flattered himself that he had the best cook, a Chinese, in Borneo, and he took great trouble to have as good food as in the difficult circumstances was possible. He exercised much ingenuity in making the best of his materials.

“Would you care to look at the menu?” he said, handing it to Cooper.

It was written in French and the dishes had resounding names. They were waited on by the two boys. In opposite corners of the room two more waved immense fans, and so gave movement to the sultry air. The fare was sumptuous and the champagne excellent. “Do you do yourself like this every day?” said Cooper.

Mr. Warburton gave the menu a careless glance.

“I have not noticed that the dinner is any different from usual,” he said. “I eat very little myself, but I make a point of having a proper dinner served to me every night. It keeps the cook in practice and it’s good discipline for the boys.”

The conversation proceeded with effort. Mr. Warburton was elaborately courteous and, it may be, found a slightly malicious amusement in the embarrassment which he thereby occasioned in his companion. Cooper had not been more than a few months in Sembulu, and Mr. Warburton’s enquiries about friends of his in Kuala Solor were soon exhausted.

“By the way,” he said presently, “did you meet a lad called Hennerley? He’s come out recently, I believe.”

“Oh yes, he’s in the police. A rotten bounder.”

“I should hardly have expected him to be that. His uncle is my friend Lord Barraclough. I had a letter from Lady Barraclough only the other day asking me to look out for him.”

“I heard he was related to somebody or other. I suppose that’s how he got the job. He’s been to Eton and Oxford and he doesn’t forget to let you know it.”

“You surprise me,” said Mr. Warburton. “All his family have been at Eton and Oxford for a couple of hundred years. I should have expected him to take it as a matter of course.”

“I thought him a damned prig.”

“To what school did you go?”

“I was born in Barbados. I was educated there.”

“Oh, I see.”

Mr. Warburton managed to put so much offensiveness into his brief reply that Cooper flushed. For a moment he was silent.

“I’ve had two or three letters from Kuala Solor,” continued Mr. Warburton, “and my impression was that young Hennerley was a great success. They say he’s a first-rate sportsman.”

“Oh, yes, he’s very popular. He’s just the sort of fellow they would like in K.S. I haven’t got much use for the first-rate sportsman myself. What does it amount to in the long run that a man can play golf and tennis better than other people? And who cares if he can make a break of seventy-five at billiards? They attach a damned sight too much importance to that sort of thing in England.’ “Do you think so? I was under the impression that the first-rate sportsman had come out of the war certainly no worse than anyone else.”

“Oh, if you’re going to talk of the war then I do know what I’m talking about. I was in the same regiment as Hennerley and I can tell you that the men couldn’t stick him at any price.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was one of the men.”

“Oh, you hadn’t got a commission.”

“A fat chance I had of getting a commission. I was what was called a Colonial. I hadn’t been to a public school and I had no influence. I was in the ranks the whole damned time.”

Cooper frowned. He seemed to have difficulty in preventing himself from breaking out into violent invective. Mr. Warburton watched him, his little blue eyes narrowed, watched him and formed his opinion. Changing the conversation, he began to speak to Cooper about the work that would be required of him, and as the clock struck ten he rose.

“Well, I won’t keep you any more. I dare say you’re tired by your journey.”

They shook hands.

“Oh, I say, look here,” said Cooper, “I wonder if you can find me a boy. The boy I had before never turned up when I was starting from K.S. He took my kit on board and all that, and then disappeared. I didn’t know he wasn’t there till we were out of the river.”

“I’ll ask my head-boy. I have no doubt he can find you someone.”

“All right. Just tell him to send the boy along and if I like the look of him I’ll take him.”

There was a moon, so that no lantern was needed. Cooper walked across from the Fort to his bungalow.

“I wonder why on earth they’ve sent me a fellow like that?” reflected Mr. Warburton. “If that’s ‘ the kind of man they’re going to get out now I don’t think much of it.”

He strolled down his garden. The Fort was built on the top of a little hill and the garden ran down to the river’s edge; on the bank was an arbour, and hither it was his habit to come after dinner to smoke a cheroot. And often from the river that flowed below him a voice was heard, the voice of some Malay too timorous to venture into the light of day, and a complaint or an accusation was softly wafted to his ears, a piece of information was whispered to him or a useful hint, which otherwise would never have come into his official ken. He threw himself heavily into a long rattan chair. Cooper! An envious, ill-bred fellow, bumptious, self-assertive and vain. But Mr. Warburton’s irritation could not withstand the silent beauty of the night. The air was scented with the sweet-smelling flowers of a tree that grew at the entrance to the arbour, and the fire-flies, sparkling dimly, flew with their slow and silvery flight. The moon made a pathway on the broad river for the light feet of Sila’s bride, and on the further bank a row of palm trees was delicately silhouetted against the sky. Peace stole into the soul of Mr. Warburton.

He was a queer creature and he had had a singular career. At the age of twenty-one he had inherited a considerable fortune, a hundred thousand pounds, and when he left Oxford he threw himself into the gay life, which in those days (now Mr. Warburton was a man of four and fifty) offered itself to the young man of good family. He had his flat in Mount Street, his private hansom, and his hunting-box in Warwickshire. He went to all the places where the fashionable congregate. He was handsome, amusing, and generous. He was a figure in the society of London in the early nineties, and society then had not lost its exclusiveness nor its brilliance. The Boer War which shook it was unthought of; the Great War which destroyed it was prophesied only by the pessimists. It was no unpleasant thing to be a rich young man in those days, and Mr. Warburton’s chimney-piece during the season was packed with cards for one great function after another. Mr. Warburton displayed them with complacency. For Mr. Warburton was a snob. He was not a timid snob, a little ashamed of being impressed by his betters, nor a snob who sought the intimacy of persons who had acquired celebrity in politics or notoriety in the arts, nor the snob who was dazzled by riches; he was the naked, unadulterated common snob who dearly loved a lord. He was touchy and quick-tempered, but he would much rather have been snubbed by a person of quality than flattered by a commoner. His name figured insignificantly in Burke’s Peerage, and it was marvellous to watch the ingenuity he used to mention his distant relationship to the noble family he belonged to; but never a word did he say of the honest Liverpool manufacturer from whom, through his mother, a Miss Gubbins, he had come by his fortune. It was the terror of his fashionable life that at Cowes, maybe, or at Ascot, when he was with a duchess or even with a prince of the blood, one of these relatives would claim acquaintance with him.

His failing was too obvious not soon to become notorious, but its extravagance saved it from being merely despicable. The great whom he adored laughed at him, but in their hearts felt his adora-not unnatural. Poor Warburton was a dreadful snob, of course, but after all he was a good fellow. He was always ready to back a bill for an impecunious nobleman, and if you were in a tight corner you could safely count on him for a hundred pounds. He gave good dinners. He played whist badly, but never minded how much he lost if the company was select. He happened to be a gambler, an unlucky one, but he was a good loser, and it was impossible not to admire the coolness with which he lost five hundred pounds at a sitting. His passion for cards, almost as strong as his passion for titles, was the cause of his undoing. The life he led was expensive and his gambling losses were formidable. He began to plunge more heavily, first on horses, and then on the Stock Exchange. He had a certain simplicity of character, and the unscrupulous found him an ingenuous prey. I do not know if he ever realised that his smart friends laughed at him behind his back, but I think he had an obscure instinct that he could not afford to appear other than careless of his money. He got into the hands of money-lenders. At the age of thirty-four he was ruined.

He was too much imbued with the spirit of his class to hesitate in the choice of his next step. When a man in his set had run through his money, he went out to the colonies. No one heard Mr. Warburton repine. He made no complaint because a noble friend had advised a disastrous speculation, he pressed nobody to whom he had lent money to repay it, he paid his debts (if he had only known it, the despised blood of the Liverpool manufacturer came out in him there), sought help from no one, and, never having done a stroke of work in his life, looked for a means of livelihood. He remained cheerful, unconcerned and full of humour. He had no wish to make anyone with whom he happened to be uncomfortable by the recital of his misfortune. Mr. Warburton was a snob, but he was also a gentleman.

The only favour he asked of any of the great friends in whose daily company he had lived for years was a recommendation. The able man who was at that time Sultan of Sembulu took him into his service. The night before he sailed he dined for the last time at his club.

“I hear you’re going away, Warburton,” the old Duke of Hereford said to him.

“Yes, I’m going to Borneo.”

“Good God, what are you going there for?”

“Oh, I’m broke.”

“Are you? I’m sorry. Well, let us know when you come back. I hope you have a good time.”

“Oh yes. Lots of shooting, you know.”

The Duke nodded and passed on. A few hours later Mr. Warburton watched the coast of England recede into the mist, and he left behind everything which to him made life worth living.

Twenty years had passed since then. He kept up a busy correspondence with various great ladies and his letters were amusing and chatty. He never lost his love for titled persons and paid careful attention to the announcements in The Times (which reached him six weeks after publication) of their comings and goings. He perused the column which records births, deaths, and marriages, and he was always ready with his letter of congratulation or condolence. The illustrated papers told him how people looked and on his periodical visits to England, able to take up the threads as though they had never been broken, he knew all about any new person who might have appeared on the social surface. His interest in the world of fashion was as vivid as when himself had been a figure in it. It still seemed to him the only thing that mattered.

But insensibly another interest had entered into his life. The position he found himself in flattered his vanity; he was no longer the sycophant craving the smiles of the great, he was the master whose word was law. He was gratified by the guard of Dyak soldiers who presented arms as he passed. He liked to sit in judgement on his fellow men. It pleased him to compose quarrels between rival chiefs. When the head-hunters were troublesome in the old days he set out to chastise them with a thrill of pride in his own behaviour. He was too vain not to be of dauntless courage, and a pretty story was told of his coolness in adventuring single-handed into a stockaded village and demanding the surrender of a bloodthirsty pirate. He became a skilful administrator. He was strict, just and honest.

And little by little he conceived a deep love for the Malays. He interested himself in their habits and customs. He was never tired of listening to their talk. He admired their virtues, and with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders condoned their vices.

“In my day,” he would say, “I have been on intimate terms with some of the greatest gentlemen in England, but I have never known finer gentlemen than some well-born Malays whom I am proud to call my friends.”

He liked their courtesy and their distinguished manners, their gentleness and their sudden passions. He knew by instinct exactly how to treat them. He had a genuine tenderness for them. But he never forgot that he was an English gentleman, and he had no patience with the white men who yielded to native customs. He made no surrenders. And he did not imitate so many of the white men in taking a native woman to wife, for an intrigue of this nature, however sanctified by custom, seemed to him not only shocking but undignified. A man who had been called George by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, could hardly be expected to have any connection with a native. And when he returned to Borneo from his visits to England it was now with something like relief. His friends, like himself, were no longer young, and there was a new generation which looked upon him as a tiresome old man. It seemed to him that the England of to-day had lost a good deal of what he had loved in the England of his youth. But Borneo remained the same. It was home to him now. He meant to remain in service as long as was possible, and the hope in his heart was that he would die before at last he was forced to retire. He had stated in his will that wherever he died he wished his body to be brought back to Sembulu, and buried among the people he loved within the sound of the softly flowing river.

But these emotions he kept hidden from the eyes of men; and no one, seeing this spruce, stout, well-set up man, with his cleanshaven strong face and his whitening hair, would have dreamed that he cherished so profound a sentiment.

He knew how the work of the station should be done, and during the next few days he kept a suspicious eye on his assistant. He saw very soon that he was painstaking and competent. The only fault he had to find with him was that he was brusque with the natives.

“The Malays are shy and very sensitive,” he said to him. “I think you will find that you will get much better results if you take care always to be polite, patient and kindly.

Cooper gave a short, grating laugh.

“I was born in Barbados and I was in Africa in the war. I don’t think there’s much about niggers that I don’t know.”

“I know nothing,” said Mr. Warburton acidly. “But we were not talking of them. We were talking of Malays.”

“Aren’t they niggers?”

“You are very ignorant,” replied Mr. Warburton.

He said no more.

On the first Sunday after Cooper’s arrival he asked him to dinner. He did everything ceremoniously, and though they had met on the previous day in the office and later, on the Fort verandah where they drank a gin and bitters together at six o’clock, he sent a polite note across to the bungalow by a boy. Cooper, however unwillingly, came in evening dress and Mr. Warburton, though gratified that his wish was respected, noticed with disdain that the young man’s clothes were badly cut and his shirt ill-fitting. But Mr. Warburton was in a good temper that evening.

“By the way,” he said to him, as he shook hands, “I’ve talked to my head-boy about finding you someone and he recommends his nephew. I’ve seen him and he seems a bright and willing lad. Would you like to see him?”

“I don’t mind.”

“He’s waiting now.”

Mr. Warburton called his boy and told him to send for his nephew. In a moment a tall, slender youth of twenty appeared. He had large dark eyes and a good profile. He was very neat in his sarong, a little white coat, and a fez, without a tassel, of plum-covered velvet. He answered to the name of Abas. Mr. Warburton looked on him with approval, and his manner insensibly softened as he spoke to him in fluent and idiomatic Malay. He was inclined to be sarcastic with white people, but with the Malays he had a happy mixture of condescension and kindliness. He stood in the place of the Sultan. He knew perfectly how to preserve his own dignity and at the same time put a native at his ease.

“Will he do?” said Mr. Warburton, turning to Cooper.

“Yes, I dare say he’s no more of a scoundrel than any of the rest of them.”

Mr. Warburton informed the boy that he was engaged, and dismissed him.

“You’re very lucky to get a boy like that,” he told Cooper. “He belongs to a very good family. They came over from Malacca nearly a hundred years ago.”

“I don’t much mind if the boy who cleans my shoes and brings me a drink when I want it has blue blood in his veins or not. All I ask is that he should do what I tell him and look sharp about it.”

Mr. Warburton pursed his lips, but made no reply.

They went in to dinner. It was excellent, and the wine was good. Its influence presently had its effect on them, and they talked not only without acrimony, but even with friendliness. Mr. Warburton liked to do himself well, and on Sunday night he made it a habit to do himself even a little better than usual. He began to think he was unfair to Cooper. Of course he was not a gentleman, but that was not his fault, and when you got to know him it might be that he would turn out a very good fellow. His faults, perhaps, were faults of manner. And he was certainly good at his work, quick, conscientious and thorough. When they reached the dessert Mr. Warburton was feeling kindly disposed towards all mankind.

“This is your first Sunday, and I’m going to give you a very special glass of port. I’ve only got about two dozen of it left and I keep it for special occasions.”

He gave his boy instructions and presently the bottle was brought. Mr. Warburton watched the boy open it.

“I got this port from my old friend Charles Hollington. He’d had it for forty years, and I’ve had it for a good many. He was well-known to have the best cellar in England.”

“Is he a wine merchant?”

“Not exactly,” smiled Mr. Warburton. “I was speaking of Lord Hollington of Castle Reagh. He’s one of the richest peers in England. A very old friend of mine. I was at Eton with his brother.”

This was an opportunity that Mr. Warburton could never resist, and he told a little anecdote of which the only point seemed to be that he knew an Earl. The port was certainly very good; he drank a glass and then a second. He lost all caution. He had not talked to a white man for months. He began to tell stories. He showed himself in the company of the great. Hearing him, you would have thought that at one time ministries were formed and policies decided on his suggestion whispered into the ear of a duchess or thrown over the dinner-table to be gratefully acted on by the confidential adviser of the Sovereign. The old days at Ascot, Goodwood and Cowes lived again for him. Another glass of port. There were the great house-parties in Yorkshire and in Scotland to which he went every year.

“I had a man called Foreman then, the best valet I ever had, and why do you think he gave me notice? You know in the Housekeeper’s Room the ladies’ maids and the gentlemen’s gentlemen sit according to the precedence of their masters. He told me he was sick of going to party after party at which I was the only commoner.

It meant that he always had to sit at the bottom of the table, and all the best bits were taken before a dish reached him. I told the story to the old Duke of Hereford, and he roared. ‘By God, sir,’ he said, ‘if I were King of England, I’d make you a viscount just to give your man a chance.’

‘Take him yourself, Duke,’ I said. ‘He’s the best valet I’ve ever had.’

‘Well, Warburton,’ he said, ‘if he’s good enough for you he’s good enough for me. Send him along.’”

Then there was Monte Carlo, where Mr. Warburton and the Grand Duke Fyodor, playing in partnership, had broken the bank one evening; and there was Marienbad. At Marienbad Mr. Warburton had played baccarat with Edward VII.

“He was only Prince of Wales then, of course. I remember him saying to me, ‘George, if you draw on a five you’ll lose your shirt.’ He was right; I don’t think he ever said a truer word in his life. He was a wonderful man. I always said he was the greatest diplomatist in Europe. But I was a young fool in those days, I hadn’t the sense to take his advice. If I had, if I’d never drawn on a five, I dare say I shouldn’t be here to-day.”

Cooper was watching him. His brown eyes, deep in their sockets, were hard and supercilious, and on his lips was a mocking smile. He had heard a good deal about Mr. Warburton in Kuala Solor, not a bad sort, and he ran his district like clockwork, they said, but by heaven, what a snob! They laughed at him good-naturedly, for it was impossible to dislike a man who was so generous and so kindly, and Cooper had already heard the story of the Prince of Wales and the game of baccarat. But Cooper listened without indulgence. From the beginning he had resented the Resident’s manner. He was very sensitive, and he writhed under Mr. Warburton’s polite sarcasms. Mr. Warburton had a knack of receiving a remark of which he disapproved with a devastating silence. Cooper had lived little in England and he had a peculiar dislike of the English. He resented especially the public-school boy since he always feared that he was going to patronise him. He was so much afraid of others putting on airs with him that, in order as it were to get in first, he put on such airs as to make everyone think him insufferably conceited.

“Well, at all events the war has done one good thing for us,” he said at last. “It’s smashed up the power of the aristocracy. The Boer War started it, and 1914 put the lid on.”

“The great families of England are doomed,” said Mr. Warburton with the complacent melancholy of an émigré who remembered the court of Louis XV. “They cannot afford any longer to live in their splendid palaces and their princely hospitality will soon be nothing but a memory.”

“And a damned good job too in my opinion.”

“My poor Cooper, what can you know of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome?”

Mr. Warburton made an ample gesture. His eyes for an instant grew dreamy with a vision of the past.

“Well, believe me, we’re fed up with all that rot. What we want is a business government by business men. I was born in a Crown Colony, and I’ve lived practically all my life in the colonies. I don’t give a row of pins for a lord. What’s wrong with England is snobbishness. And if there’s anything that gets my goat it’s a snob.”

A snob! Mr. Warburton’s face grew purple and his eyes blazed with anger. That was a word that had pursued him all his life. The great ladies whose society he had enjoyed in his youth were not inclined to look upon his appreciation of themselves as unworthy, but even great ladies are sometimes out of temper and more than once Mr. Warburton had had the dreadful word flung in his teeth. He knew, he could not help knowing, that there were odious people who called him a snob. How unfair it was! Why, there was no vice he found so detestable as snobbishness. After all, he liked to mix with people of his own class, he was only at home in their company, and how in heaven’s name could anyone say that was snobbish? Birds of a feather.

“I quite agree with you,” he answered. “A snob is a man who admires or despises another because he is of a higher social rank than his own. It is the most vulgar failing of our English middle-class.”

He saw a flicker of amusement in Cooper’s eyes. Cooper put up his hand to hide the broad smile that rose to his lips, and so made it more noticeable. Mr. Warburton’s hands trembled a little.

Probably Cooper never knew how greatly he had offended his chief. A sensitive man himself he was strangely insensitive to the feelings of others.

Their work forced them to see one another for a few minutes now and then during the day, and they met at six to have a drink on Mr. Warburton’s verandah. This was an old-established custom of the country which Mr. Warburton would not for the world have broken. But they ate their meals separately, Cooper in his bungalow and Mr. Warburton at the Fort. After the office work was over they walked till dusk fell, but they walked apart. There were but few paths in this country where the jungle pressed close upon the plantations of the village, and when Mr. Warburton caught sight of his assistant passing along with his loose stride, he would make a circuit in order to avoid him. Cooper with his bad manners, his conceit in his own judgment and his intolerance had already got on his nerves; but it was not till Cooper had been on the station for a couple of months that an incident happened which turned the Resident’s dislike into bitter hatred.

Mr. Warburton was obliged to go up-country on a tour of inspection, and he left the station in Cooper’s charge with more confidence, since he had definitely come to the conclusion that he was a capable fellow. The only thing he did not like was that he had no indulgence. He was honest, just and painstaking, but he had no sympathy for the natives. It bitterly amused Mr. Warburton to observe that this man who looked upon himself as every man’s equal should look upon so many men as his own inferiors. He was hard, he had no patience with the native mind, and he was a bully. Mr. Warburton very quickly realised that the Malays disliked and feared him. He was not altogether displeased. He would not have liked it very much if his assistant had enjoyed a popularity which might rival his own. Mr. Warburton made his elaborate preparations, set out on his expedition, and in three weeks returned. Meanwhile the mail had arrived. The first thing that struck his eyes when he entered his sitting-room was a great pile of open newspapers. Cooper had met him, and they went into the room together. Mr. Warburton turned to one of the servants who had been left behind, and sternly asked him what was the meaning of those open papers. Cooper hastened to explain.

“I wanted to read all about the Wolverhampton murder, and so I borrowed your Times. I brought them back again. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

Mr. Warburton turned on him, white with anger.

“But I do mind. I mind very much.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cooper, with composure. “The fact is, I simply couldn’t wait till you came back.”

“I wonder you didn’t open my letters as well.”

Cooper, unmoved, smiled at his chief’s exasperation.

“Oh, that’s not quite the same thing. After all, I couldn’t imagine you’d mind my looking at your newspapers. There’s nothing private in them.”

“I very much object to anyone reading my paper before me.” He went up to the pile. There were nearly thirty numbers there. “I think it extremely impertinent of you. They’re all mixed up.”

“We can easily put them in order,” said Cooper, joining him at the table.

“Don’t touch them,” cried Mr. Warburton.

“I say, it’s childish to make a scene about a little thing like that.”

“How dare you speak to me like that?”

“Oh, go to hell,” said Cooper, and he flung out of the room.

Mr. Warburton, trembling with passion, was left contemplating his papers. His greatest pleasure in life had been destroyed by those callous, brutal hands. Most people living in out-of-the-way places when the mail comes tear open impatiently their papers and taking the last ones first glance at the latest news from home. Not so Mr. Warburton. His newsagent had instructions to write on the outside of the wrapper the date of each paper he despatched, and when the great bundle arrived Mr. Warburton looked at these dates and with his blue pencil numbered them. His head-boy’s orders were to place one on the table every morning in the verandah with the early cup of tea and it was Mr. Warburton’s especial delight to break the wrapper as he sipped his tea, and read the morning paper. It gave him the illusion of living at home. Every Monday morning he read the Monday Times of six weeks back, and so went through the week. On Sunday he read the Observer. Like his habit of dressing for dinner it was a tie to civilisation. And it was his pride that no matter how exciting the news was he had never yielded to the temptation of opening a paper before its allotted time. During the war the suspense sometimes had been intolerable, and when he read one day that a push was begun he had undergone agonies of suspense which he might have saved himself by the simple expedient of opening a later paper which lay waiting for him on a shelf. It had been the severest trial to which he had ever exposed himself, but he victoriously surmounted it. And that clumsy fool had broken open those neat tight packages because he wanted to know whether some horrid woman had murdered her odious husband.

Mr. Warburton sent for his boy and told him to bring wrappers. He folded up the papers as neatly as he could, placed a wrapper round each and numbered it. But it was a melancholy task.

“I shall never forgive him,” he said. “Never.”

Of course his boy had been with him on his expedition; he never travelled without him, for his boy knew exactly how he liked things, and Mr. Warburton was not the kind of jungle traveller who was prepared to dispense with his comforts; but in the interval since their arrival he had been gossiping in the servants’ quarters. He had learnt that Cooper had had trouble with his boys. All but the youth Abas had left him. Abas had desired to go too, but his uncle had placed him there on the instructions of the Resident, and he was afraid to leave without his uncle’s permission.

“I told him he had done well, Tuan,” said the boy. “But he is unhappy. He says it is not a good house, and he wishes to know if he may go as the others have gone.”

“No, he must stay. The Tuan must have servants. Have those who went been replaced?”

“No, Tuan, no one will go.”

Mr. Warburton frowned. Cooper was an insolent fool, but he had an official position and must be suitably provided with servants. It was not seemly that his house should be improperly conducted. “Where are the boys who ran away?”

“They are in the kampong, Tuan.”

“Go and see them to-night, and tell them that I expect them to be back in Tuan Cooper’s house at dawn to-morrow.”

“They say they will not go, Tuan.”

“On my order?”

The boy had been with Mr. Warburton for fifteen years, and he knew every intonation of his master’s voice. He was not afraid of him, they had gone through too much together, once in the jungle the Resident had saved his life, and once, upset in some rapids, but for him the Resident would have been drowned; but he knew when the Resident must be obeyed without question.

“I will go to the kampong,” he said.

Mr. Warburton expected that his subordinate would take the first opportunity to apologise for his rudeness, but Cooper had the ill-bred man’s inability to express regret; and when they met next morning in the office he ignored the incident. Since Mr. Warburton had been away for three weeks it was necessary for them to have a somewhat prolonged interview. At the end of it, Mr. Warburton dismissed him.

“I don’t think there’s anything else, thank you.” Cooper turned to go, but Mr. Warburton stopped him. “I understand you’ve been having some trouble with your boys.”

Cooper gave a harsh laugh.

“They tried to blackmail me. They had the damned cheek to run away, all except that incompetent fellow Abas — he knew when he was well off — but I just sat tight. They’ve all come to heel again.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“This morning they were all back on their jobs, the Chinese cook and all. There they were, as cool as cucumbers; you would have thought they owned the place. I suppose they’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t such a fool as I looked.”

“By no means. They came back on my express order.”

Cooper flushed slightly.

“I should be obliged if you wouldn’t interfere with my private concerns.”

“They’re not your private concerns. When your servants run away it makes you ridiculous. You are perfectly free to make a fool of yourself, but I cannot allow you to be made a fool of. It is unseemly that your house should not be properly staffed. As soon as I heard that your boys had left you, I had them told to be back in their places at dawn. That’ll do.’

Mr. Warburton nodded to signify that the interview was at an end. Cooper took no notice.

“Shall I tell you what I did? I called them and gave the whole bally lot the sack. I gave them ten minutes to get out of the compound.”

Mr. Warburton shrugged his shoulders.

“What makes you think you can get others?”

“I’ve told my own clerk to see about it.”

Mr. Warburton reflected for a moment.

“I think you behaved very foolishly. You will do well to remember in future that good masters make good servants.”

“Is there anything else you want to teach me?”

“I should like to teach you manners, but it would be an arduous task, and I have not the time to waste. I will see that you get boys.”

“Please don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account. I’m quite capable of getting them for myself.”

Mr. Warburton smiled acidly. He had an inkling that Cooper disliked him as much as he disliked Cooper, and he knew that nothing is more galling than to be forced to accept the favours of a man you detest.

“Allow me to tell you that you have no more chance of getting Malay or Chinese servants here now than you have of getting an English butler or a French chef. No one will come to you except on an order from me. Would you like me to give it?”

“No.”

“As you please. Good-morning.”

Mr. Warburton watched the development of the situation with acrid humour. Cooper’s clerk was unable to persuade Malay, Dyak or Chinese to enter the house of such a master. Abas, the boy who remained faithful to him, knew how to cook only native food, and Cooper, a coarse feeder, found his gorge rise against the everlasting rice. There was no water-carrier, and in that great heat he needed several baths a day. He cursed Abas, but Abas opposed him with sullen resistance and would not do more than he chose. It was galling to know that the lad stayed with him only because the Resident insisted. This went on for a fortnight and then, one morning, he found in his house the very servants whom he had previously dismissed. He fell into a violent rage, but he had learnt a little sense, and this time, without a word, he let them stay. He swallowed his humiliation, but the impatient contempt he had felt for Mr. Warburton’s idiosyncrasies changed into a sullen hatred: the Resident with this malicious stroke had made him the laughing-stock of all the natives.

The two men now held no communication with one another. They broke the time-honoured custom of sharing, notwithstanding personal dislike, a drink at six o’clock with any white man who happened to be at the station. Each lived in his own house as though the other did not exist. Now that Cooper had fallen into the work, it was necessary for them to have little to do with one another in the office. Mr. Warburton used his orderly to send any message he had to give his assistant, and his instructions he sent by formal letter. They saw one another constantly, that was inevitable, but did not exchange half a dozen words in a week. The fact that they could not avoid catching sight of one another got on their nerves. They brooded over their antagonism, and Mr. Warburton, taking his daily walk, could think of nothing but how much he detested his assistant.

And the dreadful thing was that in all probability they would remain thus, facing each other in deadly enmity, till Mr. Warburton went on leave. It might be three years. He had no reason to send in a complaint to headquarters: Cooper did his work very well, and at that time men were hard to get. True, vague complaints reached him and hints that the natives found Cooper harsh. There was certainly a feeling of dissatisfaction among them. But when Mr. Warburton looked into specific cases, all he could say was that Cooper had shown severity where mildness would not have been misplaced, and had been unfeeling when himself would have been sympathetic. He had done nothing for which he could be taken to task. But Mr. Warburton watched him. Hatred will often make a man clear-sighted, and he had a suspicion that Cooper was using the natives without consideration, yet keeping within the law, because he felt that thus he could exasperate his chief. One day perhaps he would go too far. None knew better than Mr. Warburton how irritable the incessant heat could make a man and how difficult it was to keep one’s self-control after a sleepless night. He smiled softly to himself. Sooner or later Cooper would deliver himself into his hand.

When at last the opportunity came, Mr. Warburton laughed aloud. Cooper had charge of the prisoners; they made roads, built sheds, rowed when it was necessary to send the prahu up or down stream, kept the town clean and otherwise usefully employed themselves. If well-behaved they even on occasion served as house-boys. Cooper kept them hard at it. He liked to see them work. He took pleasure in devising tasks for them; and seeing quickly enough that they were being made to do useless things the prisoners worked badly. He punished them by lengthening their hours. This was contrary to the regulations, and as soon as it was brought to the attention of Mr. Warburton, without referring the matter back to his subordinate, he gave instructions that the old hours should be kept; Cooper, going out for his walk, was astounded to see the prisoners strolling back to the gaol; he had given instructions that they were not to knock off till dusk. When he asked the warder in charge why they had left off work he was told that it was the Resident’s bidding.

White with rage he strode to the Fort. Mr. Warburton, in his spotless white ducks and his neat topee, with a walking-stick in his hand, followed by his dogs, was on the point of starting out on his afternoon stroll. He had watched Cooper go, and knew that he had taken the road by the river. Cooper jumped up the steps and went straight up to the Resident.

“I want to know what the hell you mean by countermanding my order that the prisoners were to work till six,” he burst out, beside himself with fury.

Mr. Warburton opened his cold blue eyes very wide and assumed an expression of great surprise.

“Are you out of your mind? Are you so ignorant that you do not know that that is not the way to speak to your official superior?”

“Oh, go to hell. The prisoners are my pidgin, and you’ve got no right to interfere. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine. I want to know what the devil you mean by making a damned fool of me. Everyone in the place will know that you’ve countermanded my order.”

Mr. Warburton kept very cool.

“You had no power to give the order you did. I countermanded it because it was harsh and tyrannical. Believe me, I have not made half such a damned fool of you as you have made of yourself.”

“You disliked me from the first moment I came here. You’ve done everything you could to make the place impossible for me because I wouldn’t lick your boots for you. You got your knife into me because I wouldn’t flatter you.”

Cooper, spluttering with rage, was nearing dangerous ground, and Mr. Warburton’s eyes grew on a sudden colder and more piercing.

“You are wrong. I thought you were a cad, but I was perfectly satisfied with the way you did your work.”

“You snob. You damned snob. You thought me a cad because I hadn’t been to Eton. Oh, they told me in K.S. what to expect. Why, don’t you know that you’re the laughing-stock of the whole country? I could hardly help bursting into a roar of laughter when you told your celebrated story about the Prince of Wales My God, how they shouted at the club when they told it. By God, I’d rather be the cad I am than the snob you are.”

He got Mr. Warburton on the raw.

“If you don’t get out of my house this minute I shall knock you down,” he cried.

The other came a little closer to him and put his face in his.

“Touch me, touch me,” he said. “By God, I’d like to see you hit me. Do you want me to say it again? Snob. Snob.”

Cooper was three inches taller than Mr. Warburton, a strong, muscular young man. Mr. Warburton was fat and fifty-four. His clenched fist shot out. Cooper caught him by the arm and pushed him back.

“Don’t be a damned fool. Remember I’m not a gentleman. I know how to use my hands.”

He gave a sort of hoot, and grinning all over his pale, sharp face jumped down the verandah steps. Mr. Warburton, his heart in his anger pounding against his ribs, sank exhausted into a chair. His body tingled as though he had prickly heat. For one horrible moment he thought he was going to cry. But suddenly he was conscious that his head-boy was on the verandah and instinctively regained control of himself. The boy came forward and filled him a glass of whisky and soda. Without a word Mr. Warburton took it and drank it to the dregs.

“What do you want to say to me?” asked Mr. Warburton, trying to force a smile on to his strained lips.

“Tuan, the assistant Tuan is a bad man. Abas wishes again to leave him.”

“Let him wait a little. I shall write to Kuala Solor and ask that Tuan Cooper should go elsewhere.”

“Tuan Cooper is not good with the Malays.”

“Leave me.”

The boy silently withdrew. Mr. Warburton was left alone with his thoughts. He saw the club at Kuala Solor, the men sitting round the table in the window in their flannels, when the night had driven them in from golf and tennis, drinking whiskies and gin pahits, and laughing when they told the celebrated story of the Prince of Wales and himself at Marienbad. He was hot with shame and misery. A snob! They all thought him a snob. And he had always thought them very good fellows, he had always been gentleman enough to let it make no difference to him that they were of very second-rate position. He hated them now. But his hatred for them was nothing compared with his hatred for Cooper. And if it had come to blows Cooper could have thrashed him. Tears of mortification ran down his red, fat face. He sat there for a couple of hours smoking cigarette after cigarette, and he wished he were dead.

At last the boy came back and asked him if he would dress for dinner. Of course! He always dressed for dinner. He rose wearily from his chair and put on his stiff shirt and the high collar. He sat down at the prettily decorated table, and was waited on as usual by the two boys while two others waved their great fans. Over there in the bungalow, two hundred yards away, Cooper was eating a filthy meal clad only in a sarong and a baju. His feet were bare and while he ate he probably read a detective story. After dinner Mr. Warburton sat down to write a letter. The Sultan was away, but he wrote, privately and confidentially, to his representative. Cooper did his work very well, he said, but the fact was that he couldn’t get on with him. They were getting dreadfully on each other’s nerves and he would look upon it as a very great favour if Cooper could be transferred to another post.

He despatched the letter next morning by special messenger. The answer came a fortnight later with the month’s mail. It was a private note, and ran as follows:

“My dear Warburton, “I do not want to answer your letter officially, and so I am writing you a few lines myself. Of course if you insist I will put the matter up to the Sultan, but I think you would be much wiser to drop it. I know Cooper is a rough diamond, but he is capable, and he had a pretty thin time in the war, and I think he should be given every chance. I think you are a little too much inclined to attach importance to a man’s social position. You must remember that times have changed. Of course it’s a very good thing for a man to be a gentleman, but it’s better that he should be competent and hard-working. I think if you’ll exercise a little tolerance you’ll get on very well with Cooper.

“Yours very sincerely, “Richard Temple.”

The letter dropped from Mr. Warburton’s hand. It was easy to read between the lines. Dick Temple, whom he had known for twenty years, Dick Temple who came from quite a good county family, thought him a snob, and for that reason had no patience with his request. Mr. Warburton felt on a sudden discouraged with life. The world of which he was a part had passed away and the future belonged to a meaner generation. Cooper represented it and Cooper he hated with all his heart. He stretched out his hand to fill his glass, and at the gesture his head-boy stepped forward.

“I didn’t know you were there.”

The boy picked up the official letter. Ah, that was why he was waiting.

“Does Tuan Cooper go, Tuan?”

“No.”

“There will be a misfortune.”

For a moment the words conveyed nothing to his lassitude. But only for a moment. He sat up in his chair and looked at the boy. He was all attention.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Tuan Cooper is not behaving rightly with Abas.”

Mr. Warburton shrugged his shoulders. How should a man like Cooper know how to treat servants? Mr. Warburton knew the type: he would be grossly familiar with them at one moment and rude and inconsiderate the next.

“Let Abas go back to his family.”

“Tuan Cooper holds back his wages so that he may not run away. He has paid him nothing for three months. I tell him to be patient. But he is angry, he will not listen to reason. If the Tuan continues to use him ill there will be a misfortune.”

“You were right to tell me.”

The fool! Did he know so little of the Malays as to think he could safely injure them? It would serve him damned well right if he got a kris in his back. A kris. Mr. Warburton’s heart seemed on a sudden to miss a beat. He had only to let things take their course and one fine day he would be rid of Cooper. He smiled faintly as the phrase, a masterly inactivity, crossed his mind. And now his heart beat a little quicker, for he saw the man he hated lying on his face in a pathway of the jungle with a knife in his back. A fit end for the cad and the bully. Mr. Warburton sighed. It was his duty to warn him, and of course he must do it. He wrote a brief and formal note to Cooper asking him to come to the Fort at once.

In ten minutes Cooper stood before him. They had not spoken to one another since the day when Mr. Warburton had nearly struck him. He did not now ask him to sit down.

“Did you wish to see me?” asked Cooper.

He was untidy and none too clean. His face and hands were covered with little red blotches where mosquitoes had bitten him and he had scratched himself till the blood came. His long, thin face bore a sullen look.

“I understand that you are again having trouble with your servants. Abas, my head-boy’s nephew, complains that you have held back his wages for three months. I consider it a most arbitrary proceeding. The lad wishes to leave you, and I certainly do not blame him. I must insist on your paying what is due to him.”

“I don’t choose that he should leave me. I am holding back his wages as a pledge of his good behaviour.”

“You do not know the Malay character. The Malays are very sensitive to injury and ridicule. They are passionate and revengeful. It is my duty to warn you that if you drive this boy beyond a certain point you run a great risk.”

Cooper gave a contemptuous chuckle.

“What do you think he’ll do?”

“I think he’ll kill you.”

“Why should you mind?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” replied Mr. Warburton, with a faint laugh. “I should bear it with the utmost fortitude. But I feel the official obligation to give you a proper warning.”

“Do you think I’m afraid of a damned nigger?”

“It’s a matter of entire indifference to me.”

“Well, let me tell you this, I know how to take care of myself; that boy Abas is a dirty, thieving rascal, and if he tries any monkey tricks on me, by God, I’ll wring his bloody neck.”

“That was all I wished to say to you,” said Mr. Warburton. “Good-evening.”

Mr. Warburton gave him a little nod of dismissal. Cooper flushed, did not for a moment know what to say or do, turned on his heel and stumbled out of the room. Mr. Warburton watched him go with an icy smile on his lips. He had done his duty. But what would he have thought had he known that when Cooper got back to his bungalow, so silent and cheerless, he threw himself down on his bed and in his bitter loneliness on a sudden lost all control of himself? Painful sobs tore his chest and heavy tears rolled down his thin cheeks.

After this Mr. Warburton seldom saw Cooper, and never spoke to him. He read his Times every morning, did his work at the office, took his exercise, dressed for dinner, dined and sat by the river smoking his cheroot. If by chance he ran across Cooper he cut him dead. Each, though never for a moment unconscious of the propinquity, acted as though the other did not exist. Time did nothing to assuage their animosity. They watched one another’s actions and each knew what the other did. Though Mr. Warburton had been a keen shot in his youth, with age he had acquired a distaste for killing the wild things of the jungle, but on Sundays and holidays Cooper went out with his gun: if he got something it was a triumph over Mr. Warburton; if not, Mr. Warburton shrugged his shoulders and chuckled. These counter-jumpers trying to be sportsmen! Christmas was a bad time for both of them: they ate their dinners alone, each in his own quarters, and they got deliberately drunk. They were the only white men within two hundred miles and they lived within shouting distance of each other. At the beginning of the year Cooper went down with fever, and when Mr. Warburton caught sight of him again he was surprised to see how thin he had grown. He looked ill and worn. The solitude, so much more unnatural because it was due to no necessity, was getting on his nerves. It was getting on Mr. Warburton’s too, and often he could not sleep at night. He lay awake brooding. Cooper was drinking heavily and surely the breaking point was near; but in his dealings with the natives he took care to do nothing that might expose him to his chief’s rebuke. They fought a grim and silent battle with one another. It was a test of endurance. The months passed, and neither gave sign of weakening. They were like men dwelling in regions of eternal night, and their souls were oppressed with the knowledge that never would the day dawn for them. It looked as though their lives would continue for ever in this dull and hideous monotony of hatred.

And when at last the inevitable happened it came upon Mr. Warburton with all the shock of the unexpected. Cooper accused the boy Abas of stealing some of his clothes, and when the boy denied the theft took him by the scruff of the neck and kicked him down the steps of the bungalow. The boy demanded his wages and Cooper flung at his head every word of abuse he knew.

If he saw him in the compound in an hour he would hand him over to the police. Next morning the boy waylaid him outside the Fort when he was walking over to his office, and again demanded his wages. Cooper struck him in the face with his clenched fist. The boy fell to the ground and got up with blood streaming from his nose.

Cooper walked on and set about his work. But he could not attend to it. The blow had calmed his irritation, and he knew that he had gone too far. He was worried. He felt ill, miserable and discouraged. In the adjoining office sat Mr. Warburton, and his impulse was to go and tell him what he had done; he made a movement in his chair, but he knew with what icy scorn he would listen to the story. He could see his patronising smile. For a moment he had an uneasy fear of what Abas might do. Warburton had warned him all right. He sighed. What a fool he had been! But he shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He did not care; a fat lot he had to live for. It was all Warburton’s fault; if he hadn’t put his back up nothing like this would have happened. Warburton had made life a hell for him from the start. The snob. But they were all like that: it was because he was a Colonial. It was a damned shame that he had never got his commission in the war; he was as good as anyone else. They were a lot of dirty snobs. He was damned if he was going to knuckle under now. Of course Warburton would hear of what had happened; the old devil knew everything. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of any Malay in Borneo, and Warburton could go to blazes.

He was right in thinking that Mr. Warburton would know what had happened. His head-boy told him when he went in to tiffin.

“Where is your nephew now?”

“I do not know, Tuan. He has gone.”

Mr. Warburton remained silent. After luncheon as a rule he slept a little, but to-day he found himself very wide awake. His eyes involuntarily sought the bungalow where Cooper was now resting.

‘The idiot! Hesitation for a little was in Mr. Warburton’s mind. Did the man know in what peril he was? He supposed he ought to send for him. But each time he had tried to reason with Cooper, Cooper had insulted him. Anger, furious anger welled up suddenly in Mr. Warburton’s heart, so that the veins on his temples stood out and he clenched his fists. The cad had had his warning. Now let him take what was coming to him. It was no business of his, and if anything happened it was not his fault. But perhaps they would wish in Kuala Solor that they had taken his advice and transferred Cooper to another station.

He was strangely restless that night. After dinner he walked up and down the verandah. When the boy went away to his own quarters, Mr. Warburton asked him whether anything had been seen of Abas.

“No, Tuan, I think maybe he has gone to the village of his mother’s brother.”

Mr. Warburton gave him a sharp glance, but the boy was looking down, and their eyes did not meet. Mr. Warburton went down to the river and sat in his arbour. But peace was denied him. The river flowed ominously silent. It was like a great serpent gliding with sluggish movement towards the sea. And the trees of the jungle over the water were heavy with a breathless menace. No bird sang. No breeze ruffled the leaves of the cassias. All around him it seemed as though something waited.

He walked across the garden to the road. He had Cooper’s bungalow in full view from there. There was a light in his sitting-room, and across the road floated the sound of rag-time. Cooper was playing his gramophone. Mr. Warburton shuddered; he had never got over his instinctive dislike of that instrument. But for that he would have gone over and spoken to Cooper. He turned and went back to his own house. He read late into the night, and at last he slept. But he did not sleep very long, he had terrible dreams, and he seemed to be awakened by a cry. Of course that was a dream too, for no cry — from the bungalow for instance — could be heard in his room. He lay awake till dawn. Then he heard hurried steps and the sound of voices, his head-boy burst suddenly into the room without his fez, and Mr. Warburton’s heart stood still.

“Tuan, Tuan.”

Mr. Warburton jumped out of bed.

“I’ll come at once.”

He put on his slippers, and in his sarong and pyjama-jacket walked across his compound and into Cooper’s. Cooper was lying in bed, with his mouth open, and a kris sticking in his heart. He had been killed in his sleep. Mr. Warburton started, but not because he had not expected to see just such a sight, he started because he felt in himself a sudden glow of exultation. A great burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

Cooper was quite cold. Mr. Warburton took the kris out of the wound, it had been thrust in with such force that he had to use an effort to get it out, and looked at it. He recognised it. It was a kris that a dealer had offered him some weeks before, and which he knew Cooper had bought.

“Where is Abas?” he asked sternly.

“Abas is at the village of his mother’s brother.”

The sergeant of the native police was standing at the foot of the bed.

“Take two men and go to the village and arrest him.”

Mr. Warburton did what was immediately necessary. With set face he gave orders. His words were short and peremptory. Then he went back to the Fort. He shaved and had his bath, dressed and went into the dining-room. By the side of his plate The Times in its wrapper lay waiting for him. He helped himself to some fruit. The head-boy poured out his tea while the second handed him a dish of eggs. Mr. Warburton ate with a good appetite. The head-boy waited.

“What is it?” asked Mr. Warburton.

“Tuan, Abas, my nephew, was in the house of his mother’s brother all night. It can be proved. His uncle will swear that he did not leave the kampong.”

Mr. Warburton turned upon him with a frown.

“Tuan Cooper was killed by Abas. You know it as well as I know it. Justice must be done.”

“Tuan, you would not hang him?”

Mr. Warburton hesitated an instant, and though his voice remained set and stern a change came into his eyes. It was a flicker which the Malay was quick to notice and across his own eyes flashed an answering look of understanding.

“The provocation was very great. Abas will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment.” There was a pause while Mr. Warburton helped himself to marmalade. “When he has served a part of his sentence in prison I will take him into this house as a boy. You can train him in his duties. I have no doubt that in the house of Tuan Cooper he got into bad habits.”

“Shall Abas give himself up, Tuan?”

“It would be wise of him.”

The boy withdrew. Mr. Warburton took his Times and neatly slit the wrapper. He loved to unfold the heavy, rustling pages. The morning, so fresh and cool, was delicious and for a moment his eyes wandered out over the garden with a friendly glance. A great weight had been lifted from his mind. He turned to the columns in which were announced the births, deaths, and marriages. That was what he always looked at first. A name he knew caught his attention. Lady Ormskirk had had a son at last. By George, how pleased the old dowager must be! He would write her a note of congratulation by the next mail.

Abas would make a very good house-boy.

That fool Cooper!

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

I arrived in Seoul towards evening and after dinner, tired by the long railway journey from Peking, to stretch my cramped legs I went for a walk. I wandered at random along a narrow and busy street. The Koreans in their long white gowns and their little white top–hats were amusing to look at and the open shops displayed wares that arrested my foreign eyes. Presently I came to a second–hand bookseller’s and catching sight of shelves filled with English books went in to have a look at them. I glanced at the titles and my heart sank. They were commentaries on the Old Testament, treatises on the Epistles of St Paul, sermons and lives of divines doubtless eminent, but whose names were unfamiliar to me; I am an ignorant person. I supposed that this was the library of some missionary whom death had claimed in the midst of his labours and whose books then had been purchased by a Japanese bookseller. The Japanese are astute, but I could not imagine who in Seoul would be found to buy a work in three volumes on the Epistle to the Corinthians. But as I was turning away, between volume two and volume three of this treatise I noticed a little book bound in paper. I do not know what induced me to take it out. It was called The Complete Poker Player and its cover was illustrated with a hand holding four aces. I looked at the title–page. The author was Mr John Blackbridge, actuary and counsellor–at–law, and the preface was dated 1879. I wondered how this work happened to be among the books of a deceased missionary and I looked in one or two of them to see if I could find his name. Perhaps it was there only by accident. It may be that it was the entire library of a stranded gambler and had found its way to those shelves when his effects were sold to pay his hotel bill. But I preferred to think that it was indeed the property of the missionary and that when he was weary of reading divinity he rested his mind by the perusal of these lively pages. Perhaps somewhere in Korea, at night and alone in his mission–house, he dealt innumerable poker hands in order to see for himself whether you could really only get a straight flush once in sixty–five thousand hands. But the owner of the shop was looking at me with disfavour so I turned to him and asked the price of the book. He gave it a contemptuous glance and told me I could have it for twenty sen. I put it in my pocket.

I do not remember that for so small a sum I have ever purchased better entertainment. For Mr John Blackbridge in these pages of his did a thing no writer can do who deliberately tries to, but that, if done unconsciously, gives a book a rare and precious savour; he painted a complete portrait of himself. He stands before the reader so vividly that I was convinced that a wood–cut of him figured as a frontispiece and I was surprised to discover, on looking at the book again the other day, that there was nothing of the kind. I see him very distinctly as a man of middle–age, in a black frockcoat and a chimney–pot hat, wearing a black satin stock; he is clean–shaven and his jaw is square; his lips are thin and his eyes wary; his face is sallow and somewhat wrinkled. It is a countenance not without severity, but when he tells a story or makes one of his dry jokes his eyes light up and his smile is winning. He enjoyed his bottle of Burgundy, but I cannot believe that he ever drank enough to confuse his excellent faculties. He was just rather than merciful at the card–table and he was prepared to punish presumption with rigour. He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: ‘Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self–interest; gratitude is a lively sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.’

It may be presumed that he was a Southerner, for while speaking of Jack Pots, which he describes as a frivolous attempt to make the game more interesting, he remarks that they are not popular in the South. ‘This last fact,’ he says, ‘contains much promise, because the South is the conservative portion of the country, and may be relied on as the last resort of good sense in social matters. The revolutionary Kossuth made no progress below Richmond; neither Spiritualism, nor Free Love, nor Communism, has ever been received with the least favour by the Southern mind; and it is for this reason that we greatly respect the Southern verdict upon the Jack Pot.’ It was in his day an innovation and he condemned it. ‘The time has arrived when all additions to the present standard combinations in Draw Poker must be worthless; the game being complete. The Jack Pot,’ he says, ‘was invented (in Toledo, Ohio) by reckless players to compensate losses incurred by playing against cautious players; and the principle is the same as if a party should play whist for stakes, and all be obliged every few minutes to stop, and purchase tickets in a lottery; or raffle for a turkey; or share a deal in Keno.’

Poker is a game for gentlemen (he does not hesitate to make frequent use of this abused word; he lived in a day when to be a gentleman had its obligations but also its privileges) and a straight flush is to be respected, not because you make money on it (‘I have never seen anyone make much money upon a straight flush,’ he says) but ‘because it prevents any hand from being absolutely the winning hand, and thus relieves gentlemen from the necessity of betting on a certainty. Without the use of straights, and hence without the use of a straight flush, four aces would be a certainty and no gentleman could do more than call on them.’ This, I confess, catches me on the raw, for once in my life I had a straight flush, and bet on it till I was called.

Mr John Blackbridge had personal dignity, rectitude, humour, and common sense. ‘The amusements of mankind,’ he says, ‘have not as yet received proper recognition at the hands of the makers of the civil law, and of the unwritten social law,’ and he had no patience with the persons who condemn the most agreeable pastime that has been invented, namely gambling, because risk is attached to it. Every transaction in life is a risk, he truly observes, and involves the question of loss and gain. ‘To retire to rest at night is a practice that is fortified by countless precedents, and it is generally regarded as prudent and necessary. Yet it is surrounded by risks of every kind.’ He enumerates them and finally sums up his argument with these reasonable words: ‘If social circles welcome the banker and merchant who live by taking fair risks for the sake of profit, there is no apparent reason why they should not at least tolerate the man who at times employs himself in giving and taking fair risks for the sake of amusement.’ But here his good sense is obvious. ‘Twenty years of experience in the city of New York, both professionally (you must not forget that he is an actuary and counsellor–at–law) and as a student of social life, satisfy me that the average American gentleman in a large city has not over three thousand dollars a year to spend upon amusements. Will it be fair to devote more than one–third of his fund to cards? I do not think that anyone will say that one–third is not ample allowance for a single amusement. Given, therefore, a thousand dollars a year for the purpose of playing Draw Poker, what should be the limit of the stakes, in order that the average American gentleman may play the game with a contented mind, and with the certainty not only that he can pay his losses, but that his winnings will be paid to him?’ Mr Blackbridge has no doubt that the answer is two dollars and a half. ‘The game of Poker should be intellectual and not emotional; and it is impossible to exclude the emotions from it, if the stakes are so high that the question of loss and gain penetrates to the feelings.’ From this quotation it may be seen that Mr Blackbridge looked upon poker as only on the side a game of chance. He considered that it needed as much force of character, mental ability, power of decision, and insight into motive to play poker as to govern a country or to lead an army, and I have an idea that on the whole he would have thought it a more sensible use of a man’s faculties.

I am tempted to quote interminably, for Mr Blackbridge seldom writes a sentence that is other than characteristic, and his language is excellent; it is dignified as befits his subject and his condition (he does not forget that he is a gentleman), measured, clear, and pointed. His phrase takes an ample sweep when he treats of mankind and its foibles, but he can be as direct and simple as you please. Could anything be better than this terse but adequate description of a card–sharper? ‘He was a very good–looking man of about forty years of age, having the appearance of one who had been leading a temperate and thoughtful life.’ But I will content myself with giving a few of his aphorisms and wise saws chosen almost at random from the wealth of his book.

‘Let your chips talk for you. A silent player is so far forth, a mystery; and a mystery is always feared.’

‘In this game never do anything that you are not compelled to; while cheerfully responding to your obligations.’

‘At Draw Poker all statements not called for by the laws of the game, or supported by ocular demonstration, may be set down as fictitious; designed to enliven the path of truth throughout the game, as flowers in summer enliven the margins of the highway.’

‘Lost money is never recovered. After losing you may win, but the losing does not bring the winning.’

‘No gentleman will ever play any game of cards with the design of habitually winning and never losing.’

‘A gentleman is always willing to pay a fair price for recreation and amusement.’

‘. . . that habit of mind which continually leads us to undervalue the mental force of other men, while we continually overvalue their good luck.’

‘The injury done to your capital by a loss is never compensated by the benefit done to your capital by a gain of the same amount.’

‘Players usually straddle when they are in bad luck, upon the principle that bad play and bad luck united will win. A slight degree of intoxication aids to perfect this intellectual deduction.’

‘Euchre is a contemptible game.’

‘The lower cards as well as the lower classes are only useful in combination or in excess, and cannot be depended upon under any other circumstances.’

‘It is a hard matter to hold four Aces as steadily as a pair, but the table will bear their weight with as much equanimity as a pair of deuces.’

Of good luck and bad luck: ‘To feel emotions over such incidents is unworthy of a man; and it is much more unworthy to express them. But no words need be wasted over practices which all men despise in others; and, in their reflecting moments, lament in themselves.’

‘Endorsing for your friends is a bad habit, but it is nothing to playing Poker on credit.... Debit and credit ought never to interfere with the fine intellectual calculations of this game.’

There is a grand ring in his remarks on the player who has trained his intellect to bring logic to bear upon the principles and phenomena of the game. ‘He will thus feel a constant sense of security amid all possible fluctuations that occur, and he will also abstain from pressing an ignorant or an intellectually weak opponent, beyond what may be necessary either for the purpose of playing the game correctly, or of punishing presumption.’

I leave Mr John Blackbridge with this last word and I can hear him saying it gently, but with a tolerant smile:

‘For we must take human nature as it is.’

RAW MATERIAL

I have long had in mind a novel in which a card–sharper was the principal character; and, going up and down the world, I have kept my eyes open for members of this profession. Because the idea is prevalent that it is a slightly dishonourable one the persons who follow it do not openly acknowledge the fact. Their reticence is such that it is often not till you have become quite closely acquainted with them, or even have played cards with them two or three times, that you discover in what fashion they earn their living. But even then they have a disinclination to enlarge upon the mysteries of their craft. They have a weakness for passing themselves off for cavalrymen, commercial agents, or landed proprietors. This snobbish attitude makes them the most difficult class in the world for the novelist to study. It has been my good fortune to meet a number of these gentlemen, and though I have found them affable, obliging, and debonair, I have no sooner hinted, however discreetly, at my curiosity (after all purely professional) in the technique of their calling than they have grown shy and uncommunicative. An airy reference on my part to stacking the cards has made them assume immediately the appearance of a clam. I am not easily discouraged, and learning by experience that I could hope for no good results from a direct method, I have adopted the oblique. I have been childlike with them and bland. I have found that they gave me their attention and even their sympathy. Though they confessed honestly that they had never read a word I had written they were interested by the fact that I was a writer. I suppose they felt obscurely that I too followed a calling that the Philistine regarded without indulgence. But I have been forced to gather my facts by a bold surmise. It has needed patience and industry.

It may be imagined with what enthusiasm I made the acquaintance a little while ago of two gentlemen who seemed likely to add appreciably to my small store of information. I was travelling from Haiphong on a French liner going East, and they joined the ship at Hong–Kong. They had gone there for the races and were now on their way back to Shanghai. I was going there too, and thence to Peking. I soon learned that they had come from New York for a trip, were bound for Peking also, and by a happy coincidence meant to return to America in the ship in which I had myself booked a passage. I was naturally attracted to them, for they were pleasant fellows, but it was not till a fellow–passenger warned me that they were professional gamblers that I settled down to complete enjoyment of their acquaintance. I had no hope that they would ever discuss with frankness their interesting occupation, but I expected from a hint here, from a casual remark there, to learn some very useful things.

One–Campbell was his name–was a man in the late thirties, small, but so well built as not to look short, slender, with large, melancholy eyes and beautiful hands. But for a premature baldness he would have been more than commonly good–looking. He was neatly dressed. He spoke slowly, in a low voice, and his movements were deliberate. The other was made on another pattern. He was a big, burly man with a red face and crisp black hair, of powerful appearance, strong in the arm and pugnacious. His name was Peterson.

The merits of the combination were obvious. The elegant, exquisite Campbell had the subtle brain, the knowledge of character, and the deft hands; but the hazards of the card–sharper’s life are many, and when it came to a scrap Peterson’s ready fist must often have proved invaluable. I do not know how it spread through the ship so quickly that a blow of Peterson’s would stretch any man out. But during the short voyage from Hong–Kong to Shanghai they never even suggested a game of cards. Perhaps they had done well during the race–week and felt entitled to a holiday. They were certainly enjoying the advantages of not living for the time in a dry country and I do not think I do them an injustice if I say that for the most part they were far from sober. Each one talked little of himself but willingly of the other. Campbell informed me that Peterson was one of the most distinguished mining engineers in New York and Peterson assured me that Campbell was an eminent banker. He said that his wealth was fabulous. And who was I not to accept ingenuously all that was told me? But I thought it negligent of Campbell not to wear jewellery of a more expensive character. It seemed to me that to use a silver cigarette case was rather careless.

I stayed but a day in Shanghai, and though I met the pair again in Peking I was then so much engaged that I saw little of them. I thought it a little odd that Campbell should spend his entire time in the hotel. I do not think he even went to see the Temple of Heaven. But I could quite understand that from his point of view Peking was unsatisfactory and I was not surprised when the pair returned to Shanghai, where, I knew, the wealthy merchants played for big money. I met them again in the ship that was to take us across the Pacific and I could not but sympathize with my friends when I saw that the passengers were little inclined to gamble. There were no rich people among them. It was a dull crowd. Campbell indeed suggested a game of poker, but no one would play more than twenty–dollar table stakes, and Peterson, evidently not thinking it worth while, would not join. Although we played afternoon and evening through the journey he sat down with us only on the last day. I suppose he thought he might just as well make his bar chits, and this he did very satisfactorily in a single sitting. But Campbell evidently loved the game for itself. Of course it is only if you have a passion for the business by which you earn your living that you can make a success of it. The stakes were nothing to him and he played all day and every day. It fascinated me to see the way in which he dealt the cards, very slowly, with his delicate hands. His eyes seemed to bore through the back of each one. He drank heavily, but remained quiet and self–controlled. His face was expressionless. I judged him to be a perfect card–player and I wished that I could see him at work. It increased my esteem for him to see that he could take what was only a relaxation so seriously.

I parted with the pair at Victoria and concluded that I should never see them again. I set about sorting my impressions and made notes of the various points that I thought would prove useful.

When I arrived in New York I found an invitation to luncheon at the Ritz with an old friend of mine. When I went she said to me:

‘It’s quite a small party. A man is coming whom I think you’ll like. He’s a prominent banker; he’s bringing a friend with him.’

The words were hardly out of her mouth when I saw coming up to us Campbell and Peterson. The truth flashed across me: Campbell really was an opulent banker; Peterson really was a distinguished engineer; they were not card–sharpers at all. I flatter myself I kept my face, but as I blandly shook hands with them I muttered under my breath furiously:

‘Impostors!’

STRAIGHT FLUSH

I am not a bad sailor and when under stress of weather the game broke up I did not go below. We were in the habit of playing poker into the small hours, a mild game that could hurt nobody, but it had been blowing all day and with nightfall the wind strengthened to half a gale. One or two of our bunch admitted that they felt none too comfortable and one or two others played with unwonted detachment. But even if you are not sick dirty weather at sea is an unpleasant thing. I hate the fool who tells you he loves a storm and tramping the deck lustily vows that it can never be too rough for him. When the woodwork groans and creaks, glasses crash to the floor and you lurch in your chair as the ship heels over, when the wind howls and the waves thunder against the side, I very much prefer dry land. I think no one was sorry when one of the players said he had had enough, and the last round of jack pots was agreed to without demur. I remained alone in the smoking–room, for I knew I should not easily get to sleep in that racket and I could not read in bed with any comfort when the North Pacific kept dashing itself against my port–holes. I shuffled together the two packs we had been playing with and set out a complicated patience.

I had been playing about ten minutes when the door was opened with a blast of wind that sent my cards flying, and two passengers, rather breathless, slipped into the smoking–room. We were not a full ship and we were ten days out from Hong–Kong, so that I had had time to become acquainted with pretty well everyone on board. I had spoken on several occasions to the pair who now entered, and seeing me by myself they came over to my table.

They were very old men, both of them. That perhaps was what had brought them together, for they had first met when they got on board at Hong–Kong, and now you saw them sitting together in the smoking–room most of the day, not talking very much, but just comfortable to be side by side, with a bottle of Vichy water between them. They were very rich old men too and that was a bond between them. The rich feel at ease in one another’s company. They know that money means merit. Their experience of the poor is that they always want something. It is true that the poor admire the rich and it is pleasant to be admired, but they envy them as well and this prevents their admiration from being quite candid. Mr Rosenbaum was a little hunched–up Jew, very frail in clothes that looked too big for him, and he gave you the impression of hanging on to mortality only by a hair. His ancient, emaciated body looked as though it were already attacked by the corruption of the grave. The only expression his face ever bore was one of cunning, but it was purely habitual, the result of ever so many years’ astuteness; he was a kindly, friendly person, very free with his drinks and cigars, and his charity was world–famous. The other was called Donaldson. He was a Scot, but had gone to California as a little boy and made a great deal of money mining. He was short and stout, with a red, clean–shaven, shiny face and no hair but a sickle of silver above his neck, and very gentle eyes. Whatever force he had had to make his way in the world had been worn away by the years and he was now a picture of mild beneficence.

‘I thought you’d turned in long ago,’ I remarked.’I should have,’ returned the Scot, ‘only Mr Rosenbaum kept me up talking of old times.’

‘What’s the good of going to bed when you can’t sleep?’ said Mr Rosenbaum.

‘Walk ten times round the deck with me tomorrow morning and you’ll sleep all right.’

‘I’ve never taken any exercise in my life and I’m not going to begin now.’

‘That’s foolishness. You’d be twice the man you are now if you’d taken exercise. Look at me. You’d never think I was seventy–nine, would you.’

Mr Rosenbaum looked critically at Mr Donaldson.

‘No, I wouldn’t . You’re very well preserved. You look younger than me and I’m only seventy–six. But then I never had a chance to take care of myself.’

At that moment the steward came up.

‘The bar’s just going to close, gentlemen. Is there anything I can get you?’

‘It’s a stormy night,’ said Mr Rosenbaum. ‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne.’

‘Small Vichy for me,’ said Mr Donaldson.

‘Oh, very well, small Vichy for me too.’

The steward went away.

‘But mind you,’ continued Mr Rosenbaum testily, ‘I wouldn’t have done without the things you’ve done without, not for all the money in the world.’

Mr Donaldson gave me his gentle smile.

‘Mr Rosenbaum can’t get over it because I’ve never touched a card nor a drop of alcohol for fifty–seven years.’

‘Now I ask you, what sort of a life is that?’

‘I was a very heavy drinker when I was a young fellow and a desperate gambler, but I had a very terrible experience. It was a lesson to me and I took it.’

‘Tell him about it,’ said Mr Rosenbaum. ‘He’s an author. He’ll write it up and perhaps he’ll be able to make his passage money.’

‘It’s not a story I like telling very much even now. I’ll make it as short as I can. Me and three others had staked out a claim, friends all of us, and the oldest wasn’t twenty–five; there was me and my partner and a couple of brothers, McDermott their name was, but they were more like friends than brothers. What was one’s was the other’s, and one wouldn’t go into town without the other went too, and they were always laughing and joking together. A fine clean pair of boys, over six feet high both of them, and handsome. We were a wild bunch and we had pretty good luck on the whole and when we made money we didn’t hesitate to spend it. Well, one night we’d all been drinking very heavily and we started a poker game. I guess we were a good deal drunker than we realized. Anyhow suddenly a row started between the McDermotts. One of them accused the other of cheating. “You take that back,” cried Jamie. “I’ll see you in hell first,” says Eddie. And before me and my partner could do anything Jamie had pulled out his gun and shot his brother dead.’

The ship gave a huge roll and we all clung to our seats. In the steward’s pantry there was a great clatter as bottles and glasses slid along a shelf. It was strange to hear that grim little story told by that mild old man. It was a story of another age and you could hardly believe that this fat, red–faced little fellow, with his silver fringe of hair, in a dinner jacket, two large pearls in his shirt–front, had really taken part in it.

‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘We sobered up pretty quick. At first Jamie couldn’t believe Eddie was dead. He took him in his arms and kept calling him. “Eddie,” he says, “wake up, old boy, wake up.” He cried all night and next day we rode in with him to town, forty miles it was, me on one side of him and my partner on the other, and handed him over to the sheriff. I was crying too when we shook hands with him and said good–bye. I told my partner I’d never touch a card again or drink as long as I lived, and I never have, and I never will.’

Mr Donaldson looked down, and his lips were trembling. He seemed to see again that scene of long ago. There was one thing I should have liked to ask him about, but he was evidently so much moved I did not like to. They seem not to have hesitated, his partner and himself, but delivered up this wretched boy to justice as though it were the most natural thing in the world. It suggested that even in those rough, wild men the respect for the law had somehow the force of an instinct. A little shiver ran through me. Mr Donaldson emptied his glass of Vichy and with a curt good night left us.

‘The old fellow’s getting a bit childish,’ said Mr Rosenbaum. ‘I don’t believe he was ever very bright.’

‘Well, apparently he was bright enough to make an awful lot of money.’

‘But how? In those days in California you didn’t want brains to make money, you only wanted luck. I know what I’m talking about. Johannesburg was the place where you had to have your wits about you. Joburg in the eighties. It was grand. We were a tough lot of guys, I can tell you. It was each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.’

He took a meditative sip of his Vichy.

‘You talk of your cricket and baseball, your golf and tennis and football, you can have them, they’re all very well for boys; is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker’s the only game fit for a grown man. Then your hand is against every man and every man’s hand is against yours. Team–work? Who ever made a fortune by team–work? There’s only one way to make a fortune and that’s to down the fellow who’s up against you.’

‘I didn’t know you were a poker player,’ I interrupted. ‘Why don’t you take a hand one evening?’

‘I don’t play any more. I’ve given it up too, but for the only reason a man should. I can’t see myself giving it up because a friend of mine was unlucky enough to get killed. Anyway a man who’s damn fool enough to get killed isn’t worth having as a friend. But in the old days! If you wanted to know what poker was you ought to have been in South Africa then. It was the biggest game I’ve ever seen. And they were fine players; there wasn’t a crooked dodge they weren’t up to. It was grand. Just to give you an example, one night I was playing with some of the biggest men in Johannesburg and I was called away. There was a couple of thousand pounds in the pot! “Deal me a hand, I won’t keep you waiting,” I said. “All right,” they said, “don’t hurry.” Well, I wasn’t gone more than a minute. When I came back I picked up my cards and saw I’d got a straight flush to the queen. I didn’t say a word, I just threw in my hand. I knew my company. And do you know, I was wrong.’

‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

‘It was a perfectly straight deal and the pot was won on three sevens. But how could I tell that? Naturally I thought someone else had a straight flush to the king. It looked to me just the sort of hand I might lose a hundred thousand pounds on.’

‘Too bad,’ I said.

‘I very nearly had a stroke. And it was on account of another pat straight flush that I gave up playing poker. I’ve only had about five in my life.’

‘I believe the chances are nearly sixty–six thousand to one against.’

‘In San Francisco it was, the year before last. I’d been playing in poor luck all the evening. I hadn’t lost much money because I never had a chance to play. I’d hardly had a pair and if I got a pair I couldn’t improve. Then I got a hand just as bad as the others and I didn’t come in. The man next to me wasn’t playing either and I showed him my hand. “That’s the kind of thing I’ve been getting all the evening,” I said. “How can anyone be expected to play with cards like that?” “Well, I don’t know what more you want,” he said, as he looked at them. “Most of us would be prepared to come in on a straight flush.” “What’s that,” I cried. I was trembling like a leaf. I looked at the cards again. I thought I had two or three little hearts and two or three little diamonds. It was a straight flush in hearts all right and I hadn’t seen it. My eyes, it was. I knew what it meant. Old age. I don’t cry much. I’m not that sort of man. But I couldn’t help it then. I tried to control myself, but the tears just rolled down my cheeks. Then I got up. “I’m through, gentlemen,” I said. “When a man’s eyes are so dim that he can’t see a straight flush when it’s dealt him he has no business to play poker. Nature’s given me a hint and I’m taking it. I’ll never play poker again as long as I live.” I cashed in my chips, all but one, and I left the house. I’ve never played since.’

Mr Rosenbaum took a chip out of his waistcoat pocket and showed it to me.

‘I kept this as a souvenir. I always carry it about with me. I’m a sentimental old fool, I know that, but, you see, poker was the only thing I cared for. Now I’ve only got one thing left.’

‘What is that?’ I asked.

A smile flickered across his cunning little face and behind his thick glasses his rheumy eyes twinkled with ironic glee. He looked incredibly astute and malicious. He gave the thin, high–pitched cackle of an old man amused and answered with a single word ‘Philanthropy’.

THE END OF THE FLIGHT

I SHOOK hands with the skipper and he wished me luck. Then I went down to the lower deck crowded with passengers, Malays, Chinese and Dyaks, and made my way to the ladder. Looking over the ship’s side I saw that my luggage was already in the boat. It was a large, clumsy-looking craft, with a great square sail of bamboo matting, and it was crammed full of gesticulating natives. I scrambled in and a place was made for me. We were about three miles from the shore and a stiff breeze was blowing. As we drew near I saw that the coconut trees in a green abundance grew to the water’s edge, and among them I saw the brown roofs of the village. A Chinese who spoke English pointed out to me a white bungalow as the residence of the District Officer. Though he did not know it, it was with him that I was going to stay. I had a letter of introduction to him in my pocket.

I felt somewhat forlorn when I landed and my bags were set down beside me on the glistening beach. This was a remote spot to find myself in, this little town on the north coast of Borneo, and I felt a trifle shy at the thought of presenting myself to a total stranger with the announcement that I was going to sleep under his roof, eat his food and drink his whisky, till another boat came in to take me to the port for which I was bound.

But I might have spared myself these misgivings, for the moment I reached the bungalow and sent in my letter he came out, a sturdy, ruddy, jovial man, of thirty-five perhaps, and greeted me with heartiness. While he held my hand he shouted to a boy to bring drinks and to another to look after my luggage. He cut short my apologies.

“Good God, man, you have no idea how glad I am to see you. Don’t think I’m doing anything for you in putting you up. The boot’s on the other leg. And stay as long as you damned well like. Stay a year.”

I laughed. He put away his day’s work, assuring me that he had nothing to do that could not wait till the morrow, and threw himself into a long chair. We talked and drank and talked. When the heat of the day wore off we went for a long tramp in the jungle and came back wet to the skin. A bath and a change were very grateful, and then we dined. I was tired out and though my host was plainly willing to go on talking straight through the night I was obliged to beg him to allow me to go to bed.

“All right, I’ll just come along to your room and see everything’s all right.”

It was a large room with verandahs on two sides of it, sparsely furnished, but with a huge bed protected by mosquito netting.

“The bed is rather hard. Do you mind?”

“Not a bit. I shall sleep without rocking to-night.”

My host looked at the bed reflectively.

“It was a Dutchman who slept in it last. Do you want to hear a funny story?”

I wanted chiefly to go to bed, but he was my host, and being at times somewhat of a humorist myself I know that it is hard to have an amusing story to tell and find no listener.

“He came on the boat that brought you, on its last journey along the coast, he came into my office and asked where the dak bungalow was. I told him there wasn’t one, but if he hadn’t anywhere to go I didn’t mind putting him up. He jumped at the invitation. I told him to have his kit sent along.

“‘This is all I’ve got,’ he said.

“He held out a little shiny black grip. It seemed a bit scanty, but it was no business of mine, so I told him to go along to the bungalow and I’d come as soon as I was through with my work. While I was speaking the door of my office was opened and my clerk came in. The Dutchman had his back to the door and it may be that my clerk opened it a bit suddenly. Anyhow, the Dutchman gave a shout, he jumped about two feet into the air and whipped out a revolver.

“‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said.

“When he saw it was the clerk he collapsed. He leaned against the desk, panting, and upon my word he was shaking as though he’d got fever.

“T beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘It’s my nerves. My nerves are terrible.’

“‘It looks like it,’ I said.

“I was rather short with him. To tell you the truth I wished I hadn’t asked him to stop with me. He didn’t look as though he’d been drinking a lot and I wondered if he was some fellow the police were after. If he were, I said to myself, he could hardly be such a fool as to walk right into the lion’s den.

“‘You’d better go and lie down,’ I said.

“He took himself off, and when I got back to my bungalow I found him sitting quite quietly, but bolt upright, on the verandah. He’d had a bath and shaved and put on clean things and he looked fairly presentable.

“‘Why are you sitting in the middle of the place like that?’ I asked him. ‘You’ll be much more comfortable in one of the long chairs.’

“‘I prefer to sit up,’ he said.

“Queer, I thought. But if a man in this heat would rather sit up than lie down it’s his own lookout. He wasn’t much to look at, tallish and heavily built, with a square head and close-cropped bristly hair. I should think he was about forty. The thing that chiefly struck me about him was his expression. There was a look in his eyes, blue eyes they were and rather small, that beat me altogether; and his face sagged as it were; it gave you the feeling he was going to cry. He had a way of looking quickly over his left shoulder as though he thought he heard something. By God, he was nervous. But we had a couple of drinks and he began to talk. He spoke English very well; except for a slight accent you’d never have known that he was a foreigner, and I’m bound to admit he was a good talker. He’d been everywhere and he’d read any amount. It was a treat to listen to him.

“We had three or four whiskies in the afternoon and a lot of gin pahits later on, so that when dinner came along we were by way of being rather hilarious and I’d come to the conclusion that he was a damned good fellow. Of course we had a lot of whisky at dinner and I happened to have a bottle of Benedictine, so we had some liqueurs afterwards. I can’t help thinking we both got very tight.

“And at last he told me why he’d come. It was a rum story.”

My host stopped and looked at me with his mouth slightly open as though, remembering it now, he was struck again with its rumness.

“He came from Sumatra, the Dutchman, and he’d done something to an Achinese and the Achinese had sworn to kill him. At first he made light of it, but the fellow tried two or three times and it began to be rather a nuisance, so he thought he’d better go away for a bit. He went over to Batavia and made up his mind to have a good time. But when he’d been there a week he saw the fellow slinking along a wall. By God, he’d followed him. It looked as though he meant business. The Dutchman began to think it was getting beyond a joke and he thought the best thing he could do would be to skip off to Soerabaya. Well, he was strolling about there one day, you know how crowded the streets are, when he happened to turn round and saw the Achinese walking quite quietly just behind him. It gave him a turn. It would give anyone a turn.

“The Dutchman went straight back to his hotel, packed his things, and took the next boat to Singapore. Of course he put up at the Van Wyck, all the Dutch stay there, and one day when he was having a drink in the courtyard in front of the hotel, the Achinese walked in as bold as brass, looked at him for a minute, and walked out again. The Dutchman told me he was just paralysed. The fellow could have stuck his kris into him there and then and he wouldn’t have been able to move a hand to defend himself. The Dutchman knew he was just biding his time, that damned native was going to kill him, he saw it in his eyes; and he went all to pieces.”

“But why didn’t he go to the police?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I expect it wasn’t a thing he wanted the police to be mixed up in.”

“But what had he done to the man?”

“I don’t know that either. He wouldn’t tell me. But by the look he gave when I asked him, I expect it was something pretty rotten. I have an idea he knew he deserved whatever the Achinese could do.”

My host lit a cigarette.

“Go on,” I said.

“The skipper of the boat that runs between Singapore and Kuching lives at the Van Wyck between trips and the boat was starting at dawn. The Dutchman thought it a grand chance to give the fellow the slip; he left his luggage at the hotel and walked down to the ship with the skipper, as if he were just going to see him off, and stayed on her when she sailed. His nerves were all anyhow by then. He didn’t care about anything but getting rid of the Achinese. He felt pretty safe at Kuching. He got a room at the rest-house and bought himself a couple of suits and some shirts in the Chinese shops. But he told me he couldn’t sleep. He dreamt of that man and half a dozen times he awakened just as he thought a kris was being drawn across his throat. By God, I felt quite sorry for him. He just shook as he talked to me and his voice was hoarse with terror. That was the meaning of the look I had noticed. You remember, I told you he had a funny look on his face and I couldn’t tell what it meant. Well, it was fear, “And one day when he was in the club at Kuching he looked out of the window and saw the Achinese sitting there. Their eyes met. The Dutchman just crumpled up and fainted. When he came to, his first idea was to get out. Well, you know, there’s not a hell of a lot of traffic at Kuching and this boat that brought you was the only one that gave him a chance to get away quickly. He got on her. He was positive the man was not on board.”

“But what made him come here?”

“Well, the old tramp stops at a dozen places on the coast and the Achinese couldn’t possibly guess he’d chosen this one because he only made up his mind to get off when he saw there was only one boat to take the passengers ashore, and there weren’t more than a dozen people in it.

“‘I’m safe here for a bit at all events,’ he said, ‘and if I can only be quiet for a while I shall get my nerve back.’

“‘Stay as long as you like,’ I said. ‘You’re all right here, at all events till the boat comes along next month, and if you like we’ll watch the people who come off.’

“He was all over me. I could see what a relief it was to him. “It was pretty late and I suggested to him that we should turn in. I took him to his room to see that it was all right. He locked the door of the bath-house and bolted the shutters, though I told him there was no risk, and when I left him I heard him lock the door I had just gone out of.

“Next morning when the boy brought me my tea I asked him if he’d called the Dutchman. He said he was just going to. I heard him knock and knock again. Funny, I thought. The boy hammered on the door, but there was no answer. I felt a little nervous, so I got up. I knocked too. We made enough noise to rouse the dead, but the Dutchman slept on. Then I broke down the door. The mosquito curtains were neatly tucked in round the bed. I pulled them apart. He was lying there on his back with his eyes wide open. He was as dead as mutton. A kris lay across his throat, and say I’m a liar if you like, but I swear to God it’s true, there wasn’t a wound about him anywhere. The room was empty. “Funny, wasn’t it?”

“Well, that all depends on your idea of humour,” I replied. My host looked at me quickly.

“You don’t mind sleeping in that bed, do you?”

“N-no. But I’d just as soon you’d told me the story to-morrow morning.”

A CASUAL AFFAIR

I am telling this story in the first person, though I am in no way connected with it, because I do not want to pretend to the reader that I know more about it than I really do. The facts are as I state them, but the reasons for them I can only guess, and it may be that when the reader has read them he will think me wrong. No one can know for certain. But if you are interested in human nature there are few things more diverting than to consider the motives that have resulted in certain actions. It was only by chance that I heard anything of the unhappy circumstances at all. I was spending two or three days on an island on the north coast of Borneo, and the District Officer had very kindly offered to put me up. I had been roughing it for some time and I was glad enough to have a rest. The island had been at one time a place of some consequence, with a Governor of its own, but was so no longer; and now there was nothing much to be seen of its former importance except the imposing stone house in which the Governor had once lived and which now the District Officer, grumblingly because of its unnecessary size, inhabited. But it was a comfortable house to stay in, with an immense drawing–room, a dining–room large enough to seat forty people, and lofty, spacious bedrooms. It was shabby, because the government at Singapore very wisely spent as little money on it as possible; but I rather liked this, and the heavy official furniture gave it a sort of dull stateliness that was amusing. The garden was too large for the District Officer to keep up and it was a wild tangle of tropical vegetation. His name was Arthur Low; he was a quiet, smallish man in the later thirties, married, with two young children. The Lows had not tried to make themselves at home in this great place, but camped there, like refugees from a stricken area, and looked forward to the time when they would be moved to some other post where they could settle down in surroundings more familiar to them.

I took a fancy to them at once. The D.O. had an easy manner and a humorous way with him. I am sure he performed his various duties admirably, but he did everything he could to avoid the official demeanour. He was slangy of speech and pleasantly caustic. It was charming to see him play with the two children. It was quite obvious that he had found marriage a very satisfactory state. Mrs Low was an extremely nice little woman, plump, with dark eyes under fine eyebrows, not very pretty, but certainly attractive. She looked healthy and she had high spirits. They chaffed one another continually and each one seemed to look upon the other as immensely comic. Their jokes were neither very good nor very new, but they thought them so killing that you were obliged to laugh with them.

I think they were glad to see me, especially Mrs Low, for with nothing much to do but keep an eye on the house and the children, she was thrown very much on her own resources. There were so few white people on the island that the social life was soon exhausted; and before I had been there twenty–four hours she pressed me to stay a week, a month, or a year. On the evening of my arrival they gave a dinner–party to which the official population, the government surveyor, the doctor, the schoolmaster, the chief of constabulary, were invited, but on the following evening the three of us dined by ourselves. At the dinnerparty the guests had brought their house–boys to help, but that night we were waited on by the Lows’ one boy and my travelling servant. They brought in the coffee and left us to ourselves. Low and I lit cheroots.

‘You know that I’ve seen you before,’ said Mrs Low.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘In London. At a party. I heard someone point you out to somebody else. In Carlton House Terrace at Lady Kastellan’s.’

‘Oh? When was that?’

‘Last time we were home on leave. There were Russian dancers.’ ‘I remember. About two or three years ago. Fancy you being there!’ ‘That’s exactly what we said to one another at the time,’ said Low, with a slow,

engaging smile. ‘We’d never been at such a party in our lives.’

‘It made a great splash, you know,’ I said. ‘It was the party of the season. Did you enjoy it?’

‘I hated every minute of it,’ said Mrs Low.

‘Don’t let’s overlook the fact that you insisted on going, Bee.’ said Low. ‘I knew we’d be out of it among all those swells. My dress clothes were the same I’d had at Cambridge and they’d never been much of a fit.’

‘I bought a frock specially at Peter Robinson’s. It looked lovely in the shop.

I wished I hadn’t wasted so much money when I got there; I never felt so dowdy in my life.’

‘Well it didn’t much matter. We weren’t introduced to anybody.’ I remembered the party quite well. The magnificent rooms in Carlton House Terrace had been decorated with great festoons of yellow roses and at one end of the vast drawing–room a stage had been erected. Special costumes of the Regency period had been designed for the dancers and a modern composer had written the music for the two charming ballets they danced. It was hard to look at it all and not allow the vulgar thought to cross one’s mind that the affair must have cost an enormous amount of money. Lady Kastellan was a beautiful woman and a great hostess, but I do not think anyone would have ascribed to her any vast amount of kindliness, she knew too many people to care much for any one in particular, and I couldn’t help wondering why she had asked to such a grand party two obscure and quite unimportant little persons from a distant colony.

‘Had you known Lady Kastellan long?’ I asked.

‘We didn’t know her at all. She sent us a card and we went because I wanted to see what she was like,’ said Mrs Low.

‘She’s a very able woman,’ I said.

‘I dare say she is. She hadn’t an idea who we were when the butler man announced us, but she remembered at once. “Oh, yes,” she said, “you’re poor Jack’s friends. Do go and find yourselves seats where you can see. You’ll adore Lifar, he’s too marvellous.” And then she turned to say how d’you do to the next people. But she gave me a look. She wondered how much I knew and she saw at once that I knew everything.’

‘Don’t talk such nonsense, darling,’ said Low. ‘How could she know all you think she did by just looking at you, and how could you tell what she was thinking?’

‘It’s true, I tell you. We said everything in that one look, and unless I’m very much mistaken I spoilt her party for her.’

Low laughed and I smiled, for Mrs Low spoke in a tone of triumphant vindictiveness.

‘You are terribly indiscreet, Bee.’

’Is she a great friend of yours?’ Mrs Low asked me.

‘Hardly. I’ve met her here and there for fifteen years. I’ve been to a good many parties at her house. She gives very good parties and she always asks you to meet the people you want to see.’

‘What d’you think of her?’

‘She’s by way of being a considerable figure in London. She’s amusing to talk to and she’s nice to look at. She does a lot for art and music. What do you think of her?’

‘I think she’s a bitch,’ said Mrs Low, with cheerful but decided frankness. ‘That settles her,’ I said.

‘Tell him, Arthur.’

Low hesitated for a moment.

‘I don’t know that I ought to.’

‘If you don’t, I shall.’

‘Bee’s got her knife into her all right,’ he smiled. ‘It was rather a bad business really.’

He made a perfect smoke–ring and watched it with absorption. ‘Go on, Arthur,’ said Mrs Low.

‘Oh, well. It was before we went home last time. I was D.O. in Selangor and one day they came and told me that a white man was dead in a small town a couple of hours up the river. I didn’t know there was a white man living there.

I thought I’d better go and see about it, so, I got in the launch and went up.

I made inquiries when I got there. The police didn’t know anything about him except that he’d been living there for a couple of years with a Chinese woman in the bazaar. It was rather a picturesque bazaar, tall houses on each side, with a board walk in between, built on piles on the river–bank, and there were awnings above to keep out the sun. I took a couple of policemen with me and they led me to the house. They sold brass–ware in the shop below and the rooms above were let out. The master of the shop took me up two flights of dark, rickety stairs, foul with every kind of Chinese stench, and called out when we got to the top. The door was opened by a middle–aged Chinese woman and I saw that her face was all bloated with weeping. She didn’t say anything, but made way for us to pass. It wasn’t much more than a cubby–hole under the roof; there was a small window that looked on the street, but the awning that stretched across it dimmed the light. There wasn’t any furniture except a deal table and a kitchen chair with a broken back. On a mat against the wall a dead man was lying. The first thing I did was to have the window opened. The room was so frowsty that I retched, and the strongest smell was the smell of opium. There was a small oil–lamp on the table and a long needle, and of course I knew what they were there for. The pipe had been hidden. The dead man lay on his back with nothing on but a sarong and a dirty singlet. He had long brown hair, going grey, and a short beard. He was a white man all right. I examined him as best I could. I had to judge whether death was due to natural causes. There were no signs of violence. He was nothing but skin and bone. It looked to me as though he might very likely have died of starvation. I asked the man of the shop and the woman a number of questions. The policeman corroborated their statements. It appeared that the man coughed a great deal and brought up blood now and then, and his appearance suggested that he might very well have had T.B. The Chinaman said he’d been a confirmed opium smoker. It all seemed pretty obvious. Fortunately cases of that sort are rare, but they’re not unheard of–the white man who goes under and gradually sinks to the last stage of degradation. It appeared that the Chinese woman had been fond of him. She’d kept him on her own miserable earnings for the last two years. I gave the necessary instructions. Of course I wanted to know who he was. I supposed he’d been a clerk in some English firm or an assistant in an English store at Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. I asked the Chinese woman if he’d left any effects. Considering the destitution in which they’d lived it seemed a rather absurd question, but she went to a shabby suit–case that lay in a corner, opened it, and showed me a square parcel about the size of two novels put together wrapped in an old newspaper. I had a look at the suit–case. It contained nothing of any value. I took the parcel.’

Low’s cheroot had gone out and he leaned over to relight it from one of the candles on the table.

‘I opened it. Inside was another wrapping, and on this, in a neat, well–educated writing: To the District Officer, me as it happened, and then the words: please deliver personally to the Viscountess Kastellan, 53 Carlton House Terrace, London, sw. That was a bit of a surprise. Of course I had to examine the contents. I cut the string and the first thing I found was a gold and platinum cigarette–case. As you can imagine I was mystified. From all I’d heard the pair of them, the dead man and the Chinese woman, had scarcely enough to eat, and the cigarette–case looked as if it had cost a packet. Besides the cigarette–case there was nothing but a bundle of letters. There were no envelopes. They were in the same neat writing as the directions and they were signed with the initial J. There were forty of fifty of them. I couldn’t read them all there, but a rapid glance showed me that they were a man’s love letters to a woman. I sent for the Chinese woman to ask her the name of the dead man.

Either she didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me. I gave orders that he should be buried and got back into the launch to go home. I told Bee.’

He gave her his sweet little smile.

‘I had to be rather firm with Arthur,’ she said. ‘At first he wouldn’t let me read the letters, but of course I wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense like that.’ ‘It was none of our business.’

‘You had to find out the name if you could.’

‘And where exactly did you come in?’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ she laughed. ‘I should have gone mad if you hadn’t let me read them.’

‘And did you find out his name?’ I asked. ‘No.’

‘Was there no address?’

‘Yes, there was, and a very unexpected one. Most of the letters were written on Foreign Office paper.’

‘That was funny.’

‘I didn’t quite know what to do. I had half a mind to write to the Viscountess Kastellan and explain the circumstances, but I didn’t know what trouble I might be starting; the directions were to deliver the parcel to her personally, so I wrapped everything up again and put it in the safe. We were going home on leave in the spring and I thought the best thing was to leave everything over till then. The letters were by way of being rather compromising.’

‘To put it mildly,’ giggled Mrs Low. ‘The truth is they gave the whole show away.’

‘I don’t think we need go into that,’ said Low.

A slight altercation ensued; but I think on his part it was more for form’s sake, since he must have known that his desire to preserve an official discretion stood small chance against his wife’s determination to tell me everything. She had a down on Lady Kastellan and didn’t care what she said about her. Her sympathies were with the man. Low did his best to tone down her rash assertions. He corrected her exaggerations. He told her that she’d let her imagination run away with her and had read into the letters more than was there. She would have done it. They’d evidently made a deep impression on her, and from her vivid account and Low’s interruptions I gained a fairly coherent impression of them. It was plain for one thing that they were very moving.

‘I can’t tell you how it revolted me, the way Bee gloated over them,’ said Low. ‘They were the most wonderful letters I’ve ever read. You never wrote letters like that to me.’

‘What a damned fool you would have thought me if I had,’ he grinned. She gave him a charming, affectionate smile.

‘I suppose I should, and yet, God knows I was crazy about you, and I’m damned if I know why.’

The story emerged clearly enough. The writer, the mysterious J., presumably a clerk in the Foreign Office, had fallen in love with Lady Kastellan and she with him. They had become lovers and the early letters were passionately lyrical.

They were happy. They expected their love to last for ever. He wrote to her immediately after he had left her and told her how much he adored her and how much she meant to him. She was never for a moment absent from his thoughts. It looked as though her infatuation was equal to his, for in one letter he justified himself because she had reproached him for not coming to some place where he knew she would be. He told her what agony it had been to him that a sudden job had prevented him from being with her when he’d so eagerly looked forward to it.

Then came the catastrophe. How it came or why one could only guess. Lord Kastellan learnt the truth. He not merely suspected his wife’s infidelity, he had proofs of it. There was a fearful scene between them, she left him and went to her father’s. Lord Kastellan announced his intention of divorcing her. The letters changed in character. J. wrote at once asking to see Lady Kastellan, but she begged him not to come. Her father insisted that they shouldn’t meet. J. was distressed at her unhappiness and dismayed by the trouble he had brought upon her, and he was deeply sympathetic because of what she was enduring at home, for her father and mother were furious; but at the same time it was plain that he was relieved that the crisis had come. Nothing mattered except that they loved one another. He said he hated Kastellan. Let him bring his action.

The sooner they could get married the better. The correspondence was one–sided, there were no letters from her, and one had to guess from his replies what she said in them. She was obviously frightened out of her wits and nothing that he could say helped. Of course he would have to leave the Foreign Office. He assured her that this meant nothing to him. He could get a job somewhere, in the colonies, where he would earn much more money. He was sure he could make her happy. Naturally there would be a scandal, but it would be forgotten, and away from England people would not bother. He besought her to have courage. Then it looked as though she had written somewhat peevishly. She hated being divorced, Kastellan refused to take the blame on himself and be made respondent, she did not want to leave London, it was her whole life, and bury herself in some God–forsaken place on the other side of nowhere. He answered unhappily. He said he would do anything she wanted.

He implored her not to love him less and he was tortured by the thought that this disaster had changed her feelings for him. She reproached him for the mess they had got into; he did not try to defend himself; he was prepared to admit that he alone was to blame. Then it appeared that pressure was being brought to bear on Kastellan from some high quarter and there was even yet a chance that something might be arranged. Whatever she wrote made J., the unknown J., desperate. His letter was almost incoherent. He begged her again to see him, he implored her to have strength, he repeated that she meant everything in the world to him, he was frightened that she would let people influence her, he asked her to burn her boats behind her and bolt with him to Paris. He was frantic. Then it seemed that for some days she did not write to him. He could not understand. He did not know if she was receiving his letters.

He was in an agony. The blow fell. She must have written to say that if he would resign from the Foreign Office and leave England her husband was prepared to take her back. His answer was broken–hearted.

‘He never saw through her for a moment,’ said Mrs Low.

‘What was there to see through?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you know what she wrote to him? I do.’

‘Don’t be such an ass, Bee. You can’t possibly know.’

‘Ass yourself. Of course I do. She put it up to him. She threw herself on his mercy. She dragged in her father and mother. She brought in her children; I bet that was the first thought she’d given them since they were born. She knew that he loved her so much that he was willing to do everything in the world for her, even lose her. She knew that he was prepared to accept the sacrifice of his love, his life, his career, everything for her sake, and she let him make it. She let the offer come from him. She let him persuade her to accept it.’

I listened to Mrs Low with a smile, but with attention. She was a woman and she felt instinctively how a woman in those circumstances would act. She thought it hateful, but she felt in her bones that in just that way would she herself have acted. Of course it was pure invention, with nothing but J.’s letter as a foundation, but I had an impression that it was very likely.

That was the last letter in the bundle.

I was astonished. I had known Lady Kastellan for a good many years, but only casually; and I knew her husband even less. He was immersed in politics, he was Under–Secretary at the Home Office at the time of the great do to which the Lows and I had been invited; and I never saw him but in his own house.

Lady Kastellan had the reputation of being a beauty; she was tall and her figure was good in a massive way. She had a lovely skin. Her blue eyes were large, set rather wide apart and her face was broad. It gave her a slightly cow–like look.

She had pretty pale brown hair and she held herself superbly. She was a woman of great self–possession, and it amazed me to learn that she had ever surrendered to such passion as the letters suggested. She was ambitious and there was no doubt that she was very useful to Kastellan in his political life.

I should have thought her incapable of indiscretion. Searching my memory I seemed to remember hearing years before that the Kastellans were not getting on very well, but I had never heard any details, and whenever I saw them it looked as though they were on very good terms with one another.

Kastellan was a big, red–faced fellow with sleek black hair, jovial and loud–voiced, but with little shrewd eyes that watched and noted. He was industrious, an effective speaker, but a trifle pompous. He was a little too conscious of his own importance. He did not let you forget that he had rank and wealth. He was inclined to be patronizing with people of less consequence than himself.

I could well believe that when he discovered that his wife was having an affair with a junior clerk in the Foreign Office there was a devil of a row. Lady Kastellan’s father had been for many years permanent Under–Secretary for Foreign Affairs and it would have been more than usually embarrassing for his daughter to be divorced on account of one of his subordinates. For all I knew Kastellan was in love with his wife and he may have been teased by a very natural jealousy. But he was a proud man, deficient in humour. He feared ridicule. The role of the deceived husband is difficult to play with dignity.

I do not suppose he wanted a scandal that might well jeopardize his political future. It may be that Lady Kastellan’s advisers threatened to defend the case and the prospect of washing dirty linen in public horrified him. It is likely enough that pressure was brought to bear on him and the solution to forgive and take his wife back if her lover were definitely eliminated may have seemed the best to adopt. I have no doubt Lady Kastellan promised everything she was asked.

She must have had a bad fright. I didn’t take such a severe view of her conduct as Mrs Low. She was very young; she was not more than thirty–five now. Who could tell by what accident she had become J.’s mistress? I suspect that love had caught her unawares and that she was in the middle of an affair almost before she knew what she was about. She must always have been a cold, self–possessed woman, but it is just with people like that that nature at times plays strange tricks. I am prepared to believe that she lost her head completely.

There is no means of knowing how Kastellan discovered what was going on, but the fact that she kept her lover’s letters shows that she was too much in love to be prudent. Arthur Low had mentioned that it was strange to find in the dead man’s possession his letters and not hers; but that seemed to me easily explainable. At the time of the catastrophe they were doubtless given back to him in exchange for hers. He very naturally kept them. Reading them again he could relive the love that meant everything in the world to him.

I didn’t suppose that Lady Kastellan, devoured by passion, could ever have considered what would happen if she were found out. When the blow fell it is not strange that she was scared out of her wits. She may not have had more to do with her children than most women who live the sort of life she lived, but she may for all that not have wanted to lose them. I did not even know whether she had ever cared for her husband, but from what I knew of her I guessed that she was not indifferent to his name and wealth. The future must have looked pretty grim. She was losing everything, the grand house in Carlton House Terrace, the position, the security; her father could give her no money and her lover had still to find a job. It may not have been heroic that she should yield to the entreaties of her family, but it was comprehensible.

While I was thinking all this Arthur Low went on with his story. ‘I didn’t quite know how to set about getting in touch with Lady Kastellan,’ he said. ‘It was awkward not knowing the chap’s name. However, when we got home I wrote to her. I explained who I was and said that I’d been asked to give her some letters and a gold and platinum cigarette–case by a man who’d recently died in my district. I said I’d been asked to deliver them to her in person. I thought perhaps she wouldn’t answer at all or else communicate with me through a solicitor. But she answered all right. She made an appointment for me to come to Carlton House Terrace at twelve one morning. Of course it was stupid of me, but when finally I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell I was quite nervous. The door was opened by a butler. I said I had an appointment with Lady Kastellan. A footman took my hat and coat. I was led upstairs to an enormous drawing–room.

‘“I’ll tell her ladyship you’re here, sir,” the butler said.

‘He left me and I sat on the edge of a chair and looked round. There were huge pictures on the walls, portraits you know, I don’t know who they were by,

Reynolds I should think and Romney, and there was a lot of Oriental china, and gilded consoles and mirrors. It was all terribly grand and it made me feel very shabby and insignificant. My suit smelt of camphor and it was baggy at the knees. My tie felt a bit loud. The butler came in again and asked me to go with him. He opened another door from the one I’d come in by and I found myself in a further room, not so large as the drawing–room, but large all the same and very grand too. A lady was standing by the fireplace. She looked at me as I came in and bowed slightly. I felt frightfully awkward as I walked along the whole length of the room and I was afraid of stumbling over the furniture. I can only hope I didn’t look such a fool as I felt. She didn’t ask me to sit down. ‘“I understand you have some things that you wish to deliver to me personally,” she said. “It’s very good of you to bother.”

‘She didn’t smile. She seemed perfectly self–possessed, but I had a notion that she was sizing me up. To tell you the truth it put my back up. I didn’t much fancy being treated as if I were a chauffeur applying for a situation. ‘“Please don’t mention it,” I said, rather stiffly. “It’s all in the day’s work.” ‘“Have you got the things with you?” she asked.

‘I didn’t answer, but I opened the dispatch–case I’d brought with me and took out the letters. I handed them to her. She accepted them without a word. She gave them a glance. She was very much made up, but I swear she went white underneath. The expression of her face didn’t change. I looked at her hands.

They were trembling a little. Then she seemed to pull herself together. ‘“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?”

‘I took a chair. For a moment she didn’t seem to know quite what to do. She held the letters in her hand. I, knowing what they were, wondered what she felt. She didn’t give much away. There was a desk beside the chimney–piece and she opened a drawer and put them in. Then she sat down opposite me and asked me to have a cigarette. I handed her the cigarette–case. I’d had it in my breast pocket.

‘“I was asked to give you this too,” I said.

‘She took it and looked at it. For a moment she didn’t speak and I waited.

I didn’t quite know if I ought to get up and go.

‘“Did you know Jack well?” she asked suddenly.

‘“I didn’t know him at all,” I answered. “I never saw him until after his death.” ‘“I had no idea he was dead till I got your note,” she said. “I’d lost sight of him for a long time. Of course he was a very old friend of mine.”

‘I wondered if she thought I hadn’t read the letters or if she’d forgotten what sort of letters they were. If the sight of them had given her a shock she had quite got over it by then. She spoke almost casually.

‘“What did he die of in point of fact?” she asked.

‘“Tuberculosis, opium, and starvation,” I answered.

‘“How dreadful,” she said.

‘But she said it quite conventionally. Whatever she felt she wasn’t going to let me see. She was as cool as a cucumber, but I fancied, though it may have been only my fancy, that she was watching me, with all her wits about her, and wondering how much I knew. I think she’d have given a good deal to be certain of that.

‘“How did you happen to get hold of these things?” she asked me. ‘“I took possession of his effects after his death.” I explained. “They were done up in a parcel and I was directed to give them to you.”

‘“Was there any need to undo the parcel?”

‘I wish I could tell you what frigid insolence she managed to get into the question. It made me go white and I hadn’t any make–up on to hide it.

I answered that I thought it my duty to find out if I could who the dead man was. I should have liked to be able to communicate with his relations. ‘“I see,” she said.

‘She looked at me as though that were the end of the interview and she expected me to get up and take myself off. But I didn’t. I thought I’d like to get a bit of my own back. I told her how I’d been sent for and how I’d found him.

I described the whole thing and I told her how, as far as I knew, there’d been no one at the end to take pity on him but a Chinese woman. Suddenly the door was opened and we both looked round. A big, middle–aged man came in and stopped when he saw me.

‘“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I didn’t know you were busy.”

‘“Come in,” she said, and when he had approached, “This is Mr Low. My husband.”

‘Lord Kastellan gave me a nod.

‘“I just wanted to ask you,” he began, and then he stopped.

‘His eyes had caught the cigarette–case that was still resting on Lady Kastellan’s open hand. I don’t know if she saw the look of inquiry in his eyes.

She gave him a friendly little smile. She was quite amazingly mistress of herself. ‘“Mr Low comes from the Federated Malay States. Poor Jack Almond’s dead and he’s left me his cigarette–case.”

‘“Really?” said Lord Kastellan. “When did he die?”

‘“About six months ago,” I said.

‘Lady Kastellan got up.

‘“Well, I won’t keep you any longer. I dare say you’re busy. Thank you so much for carrying out Jack’s request.”

‘“Things are pretty bad just now in the F.M.S. if all I hear is true,” said Lord Kastellan.

‘I shook hands with them both and Lady Kastellan rang a bell. ‘“Are you staying in London?” she asked, as I was going. “I wonder if you’d like to come to a little party I’m giving next week.”

‘“I have my wife with me,” I said.

‘“Oh, how very nice. I’ll send you a card.”

‘A couple of minutes later I found myself in the street. I was glad to be alone.

I’d had a bad shock. As soon as Lady Kastellan mentioned the name I remembered. It was Jack Almond, the wretched bum I’d found dead in the Chinese house, dead of starvation. I’d known him quite well. It never struck me for a moment that it was he. Why, I’d dined and played cards with him, and we’d played tennis together. It was awful to think of him dying quite near me and me never knowing. He must have known he only had to send me a message and I’d have done something. I made my way into St James’s Park and sat down. I wanted to have a good think.’

I could understand that it was a shock to Arthur Low to discover who the dead wastrel had been, for it was a shock to me too. Oddly enough I also had known him. Not intimately, but as a man I met at parties and now and then at a house in the country where we were both passing the week–end. Except that it was years since I had even thought of him it would have been stupid of me not to put two and two together. With his name there flashed back into my memory all my recollections of him. So that was why he had suddenly thrown up a career he liked so much! At that time, it was just after the war, I happened to know several people in the Foreign Office; Jack Almond was thought the cleverest of all the young men attached to it, and the highest posts the Diplomatic Service had to offer were within his reach. Of course it meant waiting. But it did seem absurd for him to fling away his chances in order to go into business in the Far East. His friends did all they could to dissuade him. He said he had had losses and found it impossible to live on his salary. One would have thought he could scrape along till things grew better. I remembered very well what he looked like. He was tall and well–made, a trifle dressy, but he was young enough to carry off his faultless clothes with a dash, with dark brown hair, very neat and sleek, blue eyes with very long lashes, and a fresh brilliant colour. He looked the picture of health. He was amusing, gay, and quickwitted.

I never knew anyone who had more charm. It is a dangerous quality and those who have it trade on it. Often they think it enough to get them through life without any further effort. It is well to be on one’s guard against it. But with Jack Almond it was the expression of a sweet and generous nature. He delighted because he was delightful. He was entirely without conceit. He had a gift for languages, he spoke French and German without a trace of accent, and his manners were admirable. You felt that when the time came he could play the part of an ambassador to a foreign power in the grand style. No one could fail to like him. It was not strange that Lady Kastellan should have fallen madly in love with him. My fancy ran away with me. What is there more moving than young love? The walks together of that handsome pair in one of the parks in the warm evenings of early summer, the dances they went to where he held her in his arms, the enchantment of the secret they shared when they exchanged glances across a dinner–table, and the passionate encounters, hurried and dangerous, but worth a thousand risks, when at some clandestine meeting–place they could give themselves to the fulfilment of their desire. They drank the milk of Paradise.

How frightful that the end of it all should have been so tragic! ‘How did you know him?’ I now asked Low.

‘He was with Dexter and Farmilow. You know, the shipping people. He had quite a good job. He’d brought letters to the Governor and people like that.

I was in Singapore at the time. I think I met him first at the club. He was damned good at games and all that sort of thing. Played polo. He was a fine tennis–player. You couldn’t help liking him.’

‘Did he drink, or what?’

‘No.’ Arthur Low was quite emphatic. ‘He was one of the best. The women were crazy about him, and you couldn’t blame them. He was one of the most decent fellows I’ve ever met.’

I turned to Mrs Low.

‘Did you know him?’

‘Only just. When Arthur and I were married we went to Perak. He was sweet,

I remember that. He had the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man.’ ‘He was out quite a long time without going home. Five years, I think. I don’t want to use hackneyed phrases, but the fact is I can’t say it in any other way, he’d won golden opinions. There were a certain number of fellows who’d been rather sick at his being shoved into a damned good job by influence, but they couldn’t deny that he’d made good. We knew about his having been in the F.O. and all that, but he never put on any frills.’

‘I think what took me,’ Mrs Low interrupted, ‘was that he was so tremendously alive. It bucked you up just to talk to him.’

‘He had a wonderful send–off when he sailed. I happened to have run up to Singapore for a couple of days and I went to the dinner at the Europe the night before. We all got rather tight. It was a grand lark. There was quite a crowd to see him off. He was only going for six months. I think everybody looked forward to his coming back. It would have been better for him if he never had.’ ‘Why, what happened then?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I’d been moved again, and I was right away north.’ How exasperating! It is really much easier to invent a story out of your own head than to tell one about real people, of whom you not only must guess the motives, but whose behaviour even at crucial moments you are ignorant of. ‘He was a very good chap, but he was never an intimate friend of ours, you know how cliquey Singapore is, and he moved in rather more exalted circles that we did; when we went north I forgot about him. But one day at the club I heard a couple of fellows talking. Walton and Kenning. Walton had just come up from Singapore. There’d been a big polo match.

‘“Did Almond play?” asked Kenning.

‘“You bet your life he didn’t,” said Walton. “They kicked him out of the team last season.”

‘I interrupted.

‘“What are you talking about?” I said.

‘“Don’t you know?” said Walton. “He’s gone all to pot, poor devil.” ‘“How?” I asked.

‘“Drink.”

‘“They say he dopes too,” said Kenning.

‘“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Walton. “He won’t last long at that rate. Opium, isn’t it?”

‘“If he doesn’t look out he’ll lose his job.” said Kenning.

‘I couldn’t make it out,’ Low went on. ‘He was the last man I should ever have expected to go that way. He was so typically English and he was a gentleman and all that. It appeared that Walton had travelled out with him on the same ship when Jack came back from leave. He joined the ship at Marseilles. He was rather low, but there was nothing funny about that; a lot of people don’t feel any too good when they’re leaving home and have to get back to the mill. He drank a good deal. Fellows do that sometimes too. But Walton said rather a curious thing about him. He said it looked as if the life had gone out of him.

You couldn’t help noticing it because he’d always had such high spirits. There’d been a general sort of idea that he was engaged to some girl in England and on the ship they jumped to the conclusion that she’d thrown him over.’ ‘That’s what I said when Arthur told me,’ said Mrs Low. ‘After all, five years is a long time to leave a girl.’

‘Anyhow they thought he’d get over it when he got back to work. But he didn’t, unfortunately. He went from bad to worse. A lot of people liked him and they did all they could to persuade him to pull himself together. But there was nothing doing. He just told them to mind their own business. He was snappy and rude, which was funny because he’d always been so nice to everybody.

Walton said you could hardly believe it was the same man. Government House dropped him and a lot of others followed suit. Lady Ormonde, the Governor’s wife, was a snob, she knew he was well–connected and all that, and she wouldn’t have given him the cold shoulder unless things had got pretty bad. He was a nice chap, Jack Almond, it seemed a pity that he should make such a mess of things. I was sorry, you know, but of course it didn’t impair my appetite or disturb my night’s sleep. A few months later I happened to be in Singapore myself, and when I went to the club I asked about him. He’d lost his job all right, it appeared that he often didn’t go to the office for two or three days at a time; and I was told that someone had made him manager of a rubber estate in Sumatra in the hope that away from the temptations of Singapore he might pull himself together. You see, everyone had liked him so much, they couldn’t bear the thought of his going under without some sort of a struggle.

But it was no good. The opium had got him. He didn’t keep the job in Sumatra long and he was back again in Singapore. I heard afterwards that you would hardly have recognized him. He’d always been so spruce and smart; he was shabby and unwashed and wild–eyed. A number of fellows at the club got together and arranged something. They felt they had to give him one more chance and they sent him out to Sarawak. But it wasn’t any use. The fact is,

I think, he didn’t want to be helped. I think he just wanted to go to hell in his own way and be as quick as he could about it. Then he disappeared; someone said he’d gone home; anyhow he was forgotten. You know how people drop out in the F.M.S. I suppose that’s why when I found a dead man in a sarong, with a beard, lying in a little smelly room in a Chinese house thirty miles from anywhere, it never occurred to me for a moment that it might be Jack Almond.

I hadn’t heard his name for years.’

‘Just think what he must have gone through in that time,’ said Mrs Low, and her eyes were bright with tears, for she had a good and tender heart. ‘The whole thing’s inexplicable,’ said Low. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Well, if he was going to pieces, why didn’t he do it when he first came out?

His first five years he was all right. One of the best. If this affair of his had broken him you’d have expected him to break when it was all fresh. All that time he was as gay as a bird. You’d have said he hadn’t a care in the world. From all I heard it was a different man who came back from leave.’

‘Something happened during those six months in London,’ said Mrs Low.

‘That’s obvious.’

‘We shall never know,’ sighed Low.

‘But we can guess,’ I smiled. ‘That’s where the novelist comes in. Shall I tell you what I think happened?’

‘Fire away.’

‘Well, I think that during those first five years he was buoyed up by the sacrifice he’d made. He had a chivalrous soul. He had given up everything that made life worth living to him to save the woman he loved better than anything in the world. I think he had an exaltation of spirit that never left him. He loved her still, with all his heart; most of us fall in and out of love; some men can only love once, and I think he was one of them. And in a strange way he was happy because he’d been able to sacrifice his happiness for the sake of someone who was worthy of the sacrifice. I think she was always in his thoughts. Then he went home. I think he loved her as much as ever and I don’t suppose he ever doubted that her love was as strong and enduring as his. I don’t know what he expected. He may have thought she’d see it was no good fighting her inclination any more and would run away with him. It may have been that he’d have been satisfied to realize that she loved him still. It was inevitable that they should meet; they lived in the same world. He saw that she didn’t care a row of pins for him any longer. He saw that the passionate girl had become a prudent, experienced woman of the world, he saw that she’d never loved him as he thought she loved him, and he may have suspected that she’d lured him coldly into making the sacrifice that was to save her. He saw her at parties, self–possessed and triumphant. He knew that the lovely qualities he’d ascribed to her were of his own imagining and she was just an ordinary woman who had been carried away by a momentary infatuation and having got over it had returned to her true life. A great name, wealth, social distinction, worldly success: those were the things that mattered to her. He’d sacrificed everything, his friends, his familiar surroundings, his profession, his usefulness in the world, all that gives value to existence–for nothing. He’d been cheated, and it broke him. Your friend Walton said the true thing, you noticed it yourself, he said it looked as if the life had gone out of him. It had. After that he didn’t care any more and perhaps the worst thing was that even with it all, though he knew Lady Kastellan for what she was, he loved her still. I know nothing more shattering than to love with all your heart, than not to be able however hard you try to break yourself of it, someone who you know is worthless. Perhaps that is why he took to opium. To forget and to remember.’

It was a long speech I had made, and now I stopped.

‘All that’s only fancy,’ said Low.

‘I know it is,’ I answered, ‘but it seems to fit the circumstances.’ ‘There must have been a weak strain in him. Otherwise he could have fought and conquered.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps there is always a certain weakness attached to such great charm as he possessed. Perhaps few people love as wholeheartedly and as devotedly as he loved. Perhaps he didn’t want to fight and conquer. I can’t bring myself to blame him.’

I didn’t add, because I was afraid they would think it cynical, that maybe if only Jack Almond hadn’t had those wonderfully long eyelashes he might now have been alive and well, minister to some foreign power and on the high road to the Embassy in Paris.

‘Let’s go into the drawing–room,’ said Mrs Low. ‘The boy wants to clear the table.’

And that was the end of Jack Almond.

RED

THE skipper thrust his hand into one of his trouser pockets and with difficulty, for they were not at the sides but in front and he was a portly man, pulled out a large silver watch. He looked at it and then looked again at the declining sun. The Kanaka at the wheel gave him a glance, but did not speak. The skipper’s eyes rested on the island they were approaching. A white line of foam marked the reef. He knew there was an opening large enough to get his ship through, and when they came a little nearer he counted on seeing it. They had nearly an hour of daylight still before them. In the lagoon the water was deep and they could anchor comfortably. The chief of the village which he could already see among the coconut trees was a friend of the mate’s, and it would be pleasant to go ashore for the night. The mate came forward at that minute and the skipper turned to him.

“We’ll take a bottle of booze along with us and get some girls in to dance,” he said.

“I don’t see the opening,” said the mate.

He was a Kanaka, a handsome, swarthy fellow, with somewhat the look of a later Roman emperor, inclined to stoutness; but his face was fine and clean-cut.

“I’m dead sure there’s one right here,” said the captain, looking through his glasses. “I can’t understand why I can’t pick it up. Send one of the boys up the mast to have a look.”

The mate called one of the crew and gave him the order. The captain watched the Kanaka climb and waited for him to speak. But the Kanaka shouted down that he could see nothing but the unbroken line of foam. The captain spoke Samoan like a native, and he cursed him freely.

“Shall he stay up there?” asked the mate.

“What the hell good does that do?” answered the captain. “The blame fool can’t see worth a cent. You bet your sweet life I’d find the opening if I was up there.”

He looked at the slender mast with anger. It was all very well for a native who had been used to climbing up coconut trees all his life. He was fat and heavy.

“Come down,” he shouted. “You’re no more use than a dead dog. We’ll just have to go along the reef till we find the opening.”

It was a seventy-ton schooner with paraffin auxiliary, and it ran, when there was no head wind, between four and five knots an hour. It was a bedraggled object; it had been painted white a very long time ago, but it was now dirty, dingy, and mottled. It smelt strongly of paraffin and of the copra which was its usual cargo. They were within a hundred feet of the reef now and the captain told the steersman to run along it till they came to the opening. But when they had gone a couple of miles he realised that they had missed it. He went about and slowly worked back again. The white foam of the reef continued without interruption and now the sun was setting. With a curse at the stupidity of the crew the skipper resigned himself to waiting till next morning.

“Put her about,” he said. “I can’t anchor here.”

They went out to sea a little and presently it was quite dark. They anchored. When the sail was furled the ship began to roll a good deal. They said in Apia that one day she would roll right over; and the owner, a German-American who managed one of the largest stores, said that no money was big enough to induce him to go out in her. The cook, a Chinese in white trousers, very dirty and ragged, and a thin white tunic, came to say that supper was ready, and when the skipper went into the cabin he found the engineer already seated at table. The engineer was a long, lean man with a scraggy neck. He was dressed in blue overalls and a sleeveless jersey which showed his thin arms tattooed from elbow to wrist.

“Hell, having to spend the night outside,” said the skipper.

The engineer did not answer, and they ate their supper in silence. The cabin was lit by a dim oil-lamp. When they had eaten the canned apricots with which the meal finished the Chink brought them a cup of tea. The skipper lit a cigar and went on the upper deck. The island now was only a darker mass against the night. The stars were very bright. The only sound was the ceaseless breaking of the surf. The skipper sank into a deck-chair and smoked idly. Presently three or four members of the crew came up and sat down. One of them had a banjo and another a concertina. They began to play, and one of them sang. The native song sounded strange on these instruments. Then to the singing a couple began to dance. It was a barbaric dance, savage and primeval, rapid, with quick movements of the hands and feet and contortions of the body, it was sensual, sexual even, but sexual without passion. It was very animal, direct, weird without mystery, natural in short, and one might almost say childlike. At last they grew tired. They stretched themselves on the deck and slept, and all was silent. The skipper lifted himself heavily out of his chair and clambered down the companion. He went into his cabin and got out of his clothes. He climbed into his bunk and lay there. He panted a little in the heat of the night.

But next morning, when the dawn crept over the tranquil sea, the opening in the reef which had eluded them the night before was seen a little to the east of where they lay. The schooner entered the lagoon. There was not a ripple on the surface of the water. Deep down among the coral rocks you saw little coloured fish swim. When he had anchored his ship the skipper ate his breakfast and went on deck. The sun shone from an unclouded sky, but in the early morning the air was grateful and cool. It was Sunday, and there was a feeling of quietness, a silence as though nature were at rest, which gave him a peculiar sense of comfort. He sat, looking at the wooded coast, and felt lazy and well at ease. Presently a slow smile moved his lips and he threw the stump of his cigar into the water.

“I guess I’ll go ashore,” he said. “Get the boat out.”

He climbed stiffly down the ladder and was rowed to a little cove. The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge, not in rows, but spaced out with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, standing in affected attitudes with the simpering graces of a bygone age. He sauntered idly through them, along a path that could be just seen winding its tortuous way, and it led him presently to a broad creek. There was a bridge across it, but a bridge constructed of single trunks of coconut trees, a dozen of them, placed end to end and supported where they met by a forked branch driven into the bed of the creek. You walked on a smooth, round surface, narrow and slippery, and there was no support for the hand. To cross such a bridge required sure feet and a stout heart. The skipper hesitated. But he saw on the other side, nestling among the trees, a white man’s house; he made up his mind and, rather gingerly, began to walk. He watched his feet carefully, and where one trunk joined on to the next and there was a difference of level, he tottered a little. It was with a gasp of relief that he reached the last tree and finally set his feet on the firm ground of the other side. He had been so intent on the difficult crossing that he never noticed anyone was watching him, and it was with surprise that he heard himself spoken to.

“It takes a bit of nerve to cross these bridges when you’re not used to them.”

He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him. He had evidently come out of the house which he had seen.

“I saw you hesitate,” the man continued, with a smile on his lips, “and I was watching to see you fall in.”

“Not on your life,” said the captain, who had now recovered his confidence.

“I’ve fallen in myself before now. I remember, one evening I came back from shooting, and I fell in, gun and all. Now I get a boy to carry my gun for me.”

He was a man no longer young, with a small beard, now somewhat grey, and a thin face. He was dressed in a singlet, without arms, and a pair of duck trousers. He wore neither shoes nor socks. He spoke English with a slight accent.

“Are you Neilson?” asked the skipper.

“I am.”

“I’ve heard about you. I thought you lived somewheres round here.”

The skipper followed his host into the little bungalow and sat down heavily in the chair which the other motioned him to take. While Neilson went out to fetch whisky and glasses he took a look round the room. It filled him with amazement. He had never seen so many books. The shelves reached from floor to ceiling on all four walls, and they were closely packed. There was a grand piano littered with music, and a large table on which books and magazines lay in disorder. The room made him feel embarrassed. He remembered that Neilson was a queer fellow. No one knew very much about him, although he had been in the islands for so many years, but those who knew him agreed that he was queer. He was a Swede.

“You’ve got one big heap of books here,” he said, when Neilson returned.

“They do no harm,” answered Neilson with a smile.

“Have you read them all?” asked the skipper.

“Most of them.”

“I’m a bit of a reader myself. I have the Saturday Evening Post sent me regler.”

Neilson poured his visitor a good stiff glass of whisky and gave him a cigar. The skipper volunteered a little information.

“I got in last night, but I couldn’t find the opening, so I had to anchor outside. I never been this run before, but my people had some stuff they wanted to bring over here. Gray, d’you know him?”

“Yes, he’s got a store a little way along.”

“Well, there was a lot of canned stuff that he wanted over, an’ he’s got some copra. They thought I might just as well come over as lie idle at Apia. I run between Apia and Pago-Pago mostly, but they’ve got smallpox there just now, and there’s nothing stirring.”

He took a drink of his whisky and lit a cigar. He was a taciturn man, but there was something in Neilson that made him nervous, and his nervousness made him talk. The Swede was looking at him with large dark eyes in which there was an expression of faint amusement.

“This is a tidy little place you’ve got here.”

“I’ve done my best with it.”

“You must do pretty well with your trees. They look fine. With copra at the price it is now. I had a bit of a plantation myself once, in Upolu it was, but I had to sell it.”

He looked round the room again, where all those books gave him a feeling of something incomprehensible and hostile.

“I guess you must find it a bit lonesome here though,” he said.

“I’ve got used to it. I’ve been here for twenty-five years.”

Now the captain could think of nothing more to say, and he smoked in silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a fringe of long curly hair, nearly white, at the back of his head, he was quite bald; and that immense, shiny surface of forehead, which might have given him a false look of intelligence, on the contrary gave him one of peculiar imbecility. He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers. He sat in his chair in a heavy ungainly attitude, his great belly thrust forward and his fat legs uncrossed. All elasticity had gone from his limbs. Neilson wondered idly what sort of man he had been in his youth. It was almost impossible to imagine that this creature of vast bulk had ever been a boy who ran about. The skipper finished his whisky, and Neilson pushed the bottle towards him.

“Help yourself.”

The skipper leaned forward and with his great hand seized it.

“And how come you in these parts anyways?” he said.

“Oh, I came out to the islands for my health. My lungs were bad and they said I hadn’t a year to live. You see they were wrong.”

“I meant, how come you to settle down right here?”

“I am a sentimentalist.”

“Oh!”

Neilson knew that the skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized him to talk further.

“You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the bridge, but this spot is generally considered radier pretty.”

“It’s a cute little house you’ve got here.”

“Ah, that wasn’t here when I first came. There was a native hut, with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers; and the croton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden, made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees, as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water’s edge and spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then — good heavens, it’s a quarter of a century ago — and I wanted to enjoy all the loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was afraid I was going to cry. I wasn’t more than twenty-five, and though I put the best face I could on it, I didn’t want to die. And somehow it seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality which our doctors of philosophy — I am one myself, you know — had discussed so much.

‘A year,’ I cried to myself. ‘I have a year. I will spend it here and then I am content to die.’

“We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren’t perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.

“Now drink, my friend. Don’t let the nonsense I talk interfere with you.”

He waved his thin hand towards the bottle, and the skipper finished what remained in his glass.

“You ain’t drinking nothin’,” he said, reaching for the whisky.

“I am of a sober habit,” smiled the Swede. “I intoxicate myself in ways which I fancy are more subtle. But perhaps that is only vanity. Anyhow, the effects are more lasting and the results less deleterious.”

“They say there’s a deal of cocaine taken in the States now,” said the captain.

Neilson chuckled.

“But I do not see a white man often,” he continued, “and for once I don’t think a drop of whisky can do me any harm.”

He poured himself out a little, added some soda, and took a sip.

“And presently I found out why the spot had such an unearthly loveliness. Here love had tarried for a moment like a migrant bird that happens on a ship in mid-ocean and for a little while folds its tired wings. The fragrance of a beautiful passion hovered over it like the fragrance of hawthorn in May in the meadows of my home. It seems to me that the places where men have loved or suffered keep about them always some faint aroma of something that has not wholly died. It is as though they had acquired a spiritual significance which mysteriously affects those who pass. I wish I could make myself clear.” He smiled a little. “Though I cannot imagine that if I did you would understand.”

He paused.

“I think this place was beautiful because here for a period the ecstasy of love had invested it with beauty.” And now he shrugged his shoulders. “But perhaps it is only that my aesthetic sense is gratified by the happy conjunction of young love and a suitable setting.”

Even a man less thick-witted than the skipper might have been forgiven if he were bewildered by Neilson’s words. For he seemed faintly to laugh at what he said. It was as though he spoke from emotion which his intellect found ridiculous. He had said himself that he was a sentimentalist, and when sentimentality is joined with scepticism there is often the devil to pay.

He was silent for an instant and looked at the captain with eyes in which there was a sudden perplexity.

“You know, I can’t help thinking that I’ve seen you before somewhere or other,” he said.

“I couldn’t say as I remember you,” returned the skipper.

“I have a curious feeling as though your face were familiar to me. It’s been puzzling me for some time. But I can’t situate my recollection in any place or at any time.”

The skipper massively shrugged his heavy shoulders.

“It’s thirty years since I first come to the islands. A man can’t figure on remembering all the folk he meets in a while like that.”

The Swede shook his head.

“You know how one sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never been to before is strangely familiar. That’s how I seem to see you.” He gave a whimsical smile. “Perhaps I knew you in some past existence. Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I was a slave at the oar. Thirty years have you been here?”

“Every bit of thirty years.”

“I wonder if you knew a man called Red?”

“Red?”

“That is the only name I’ve ever known him by. I never knew him personally. I never even set eyes on him. And yet I seem to see him more clearly than many men, my brothers, for instance, with whom I passed my daily life for many years. He lives in my imagination with the distinctness of a Paolo Malatesta or a Romeo. But I dare say you have never read Dante or Shakespeare?”

“I can’t say as I have,” said the captain.

Neilson, smoking a cigar, leaned back in his chair and looked vacantly at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air. A smile played on his lips, but his eyes were grave. Then he looked at the captain. There was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent. He had the plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat. It was an outrage. It set Neilson’s nerves on edge. But the contrast between the man before him and the man he had in mind was pleasant.

“It appears that Red was the most comely thing you ever saw. I’ve talked to quite a number of people who knew him in those days, white men, and they all agree that the first time you saw him his beauty just took your breath away. They called him Red on account of his flaming hair. It had a natural wave and he wore it long. It must have been of that wonderful colour that the pre-Raphaelites raved over. I don’t think he was vain of it, he was much too ingenuous for that, but no one could have blamed him if he had been. He was tall, six feet and an inch or two — in the native house that used to stand here was the mark of his height cut with a knife on the central trunk that supported the roof — and he was made like a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was like a woman’s.”

“I had kind of a white skin myself when I was a kiddie,” said the skipper, with a twinkle in his bloodshot eyes.

But Neilson paid no attention to him. He was telling his story now and interruption made him impatient.

“And his face was just as beautiful as his body. He had large blue eyes, very dark, so that some say they were black, and unlike most red-haired people he had dark eyebrows and long dark lashes. His features were perfectly regular and his mouth was like a scarlet wound. He was twenty.”

On these words the Swede stopped with a certain sense of the dramatic. He took a sip of whisky.

“He was unique. There never was anyone more beautiful. There was no more reason for him than for a wonderful blossom to flower on a wild plant. He was a happy accident of nature.

“One day he landed at that cove into which you must have put this morning. He was an American sailor, and he had deserted from a man-of-war in Apia. He had induced some good-humoured native to give him a passage on a cutter that happened to be sailing from Apia to Safoto, and he had been put ashore here in a dug-out. I do not know why he deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider’s web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite’s. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this secluded nook till his ship had sailed from Samoa.

“There was a native hut at the cove and as he stood there, wondering where exactly he should turn his steps, a young girl came out and invited him to enter. He knew scarcely two words of the native tongue and she as little English. But he understood well enough what her smiles meant, and her pretty gestures, and he followed her. He sat down on a mat and she gave him slices of pineapple to eat. I can speak of Red only from hearsay, but I saw the girl three years after he first met her, and she was scarcely nineteen then. You cannot imagine how exquisite she was. She had the passionate grace of the hibiscus and the rich colour. She was rather tall, slim, with the delicate features of her race, and large eyes like pools of still water under the palm trees; her hair, black and curling, fell down her back, and she wore a wreath of scented flowers. Her hands were lovely. They were so small, so exquisitely formed, they gave your heart-strings a wrench. And in those days she laughed easily. Her smile was so delightful that it made your knees shake. Her skin was like a field of ripe com on a summer day. Good heavens, how can I describe her? She was too beautiful to be real.

“And these two young things, she was sixteen and he was twenty, fell in love with one another at first sight. That is the real love, not the love that comes from sympathy, common interests, or intellectual community, but love pure and simple. That is the love that Adam felt for Eve when he awoke and found her in the garden gazing at him with dewy eyes. That is the love that draws the beasts to one another, and the Gods. That is the love that makes the world a miracle. That is the love which gives life its pregnant meaning. You have never heard of the wise, cynical French duke who said that with two lovers there is always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved; it is a bitter truth to which most of us have to resign ourselves; but now and then there are two who love and two who let themselves be loved. Then one might fancy that the sun stands still as it stood when Joshua prayed to the God of Israel.

“And even now after all these years, when I think of these two, so young, so fair, so simple, and of their love, I feel a pang. It tears my heart just as my heart is torn when on certain nights I watch the full moon shining on the lagoon from an unclouded sky. There is always pain in the contemplation of perfect beauty.

“They were children. She was good and sweet and kind. I know nothing of him, and I like to think that then at all events he was ingenuous and frank. I like to think that his soul was as comely as his body. But I dare say he had no more soul than the creatures of the woods and forests who made pipes from reeds and bathed in the mountain streams when the world was young, and you might catch sight of little fawns galloping through the glade on the back of a bearded centaur. A soul is a troublesome possession and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

“Well, when Red came to the island it had recently been visited by one of those epidemics which the white man has brought to the South Seas, and one third of the inhabitants had died. It seems that the girl had lost all her near kin and she lived now in the house of distant cousins. The household consisted of two ancient crones, bowed and wrinkled, two younger women, and a man and a boy. For a few days he stayed there. But perhaps he felt himself too near the shore, with the possibility that he might fall in with white men who would reveal his hiding-place; perhaps the lovers could not bear that the company of others should rob them for an instant of the delight of being together. One morning they set out, the pair of them, with the few things that belonged to the girl, and walked along a grassy path under the coconuts, till they came to the creek you see. They had to cross the bridge you crossed, and the girl laughed gleefully because he was afraid. She held his hand till they came to the end of the first tree, and then his courage failed him and he had to go back. He was obliged to take off all his clothes before he could risk it, and she carried them over for him on her head. They settled down in the empty hut that stood there. Whether she had any rights over it (land tenure is a complicated business in the islands), or whether the owner had died during the epidemic, I do not know, but anyhow no one questioned them, and they took possession. Their furniture consisted of a couple of grass mats on which they slept, a fragment of looking-glass, and a bowl or two. In this pleasant land that is enough to start housekeeping on.

“They say that happy people have no history, and certainly a happy love has none. They did nothing all day long and yet the days seemed all too short. The girl had a native name, but Red called her Sally. He picked up the easy language very quickly, and he used to lie on the mat for hours while she chattered gaily to him. He was a silent fellow, and perhaps his mind was lethargic. He smoked incessantly the cigarettes which she made him out of the native tobacco and pandanus leaf, and he watched her while with deft fingers she made grass mats. Often natives would come in and tell long stories of the old days when the island was disturbed by tribal wars. Sometimes he would go fishing on the reef, and bring home a basket full of coloured fish. Sometimes at night he would go out with a lantern to catch lobster. There were plantains round the hut and Sally would roast them for their frugal meal. She knew how to make delicious messes from coconuts, and the breadfruit tree by the side of the creek gave them its fruit. On feast-days they killed a little pig and cooked it on hot stones. They bathed together in the creek; and in the evening they went down to the lagoon and paddled about in a dug-out, with its great outrigger. The sea was deep blue, wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece; but in the lagoon the colour had an infinite variety, aquamarine and amethyst and emerald; and the setting sun turned it for a short moment to liquid gold. Then there was the colour of the coral, brown, white, pink, red, purple; and the shapes it took were marvellous. It was like a magic garden, and the hurrying fish were like butterflies.

It strangely lacked reality. Among the coral were pools with a floor of white sand and here, where the water was dazzling clear, it was very good to bathe. Then, cool and happy, they wandered back in the gloaming over the soft grass road to the creek, walking hand in hand, and now the mynah birds filled the coconut trees with their clamour. And then the night, with that great sky shining with gold, that seemed to stretch more widely than the skies of Europe, and the soft airs that blew gently through the open hut, the long night again was all too short. She was sixteen and he was barely twenty. The dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut and looked at those lovely children sleeping in one another’s arms. The sun hid behind the great tattered leaves of the plantains so that it might not disturb them, and then, with playful malice, shot a golden ray, like the outstretched paw of a Persian cat, on their faces. They opened their sleepy eyes and they smiled to welcome another day. The weeks lengthened into months, and a year passed. They seemed to love one another as — I hesitate to say passionately, for passion has in it always a shade of sadness, a touch of bitterness or anguish, but as wholeheartedly, as simply and naturally as on that first day on which, meeting, they had recognised that a god was in them.

“If you had asked them I have no doubt that they would have thought it impossible to suppose their love could ever cease. Do we not know that the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity? And yet perhaps in Red there was already a very little seed, unknown to himself and unsuspected by the girl, which would in time have grown to weariness. For one day one of the natives from the cove told them that some way down the coast at the anchorage was a British whaling ship.

“‘Gee,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I could make a trade of some nuts and plantains for a pound or two of tobacco.’

“The pandanus cigarettes that Sally made him with untiring hands were strong and pleasant enough to smoke, but they left him unsatisfied; and he yearned on a sudden for real tobacco, hard, rank, and pungent. He had not smoked a pipe for many months. His mouth watered at the thought of it. One would have thought some premonition of harm would have made Sally seek to dissuade him, but love possessed her so completely that it never occurred to her any power on earth could take him from her. They went up into the hills together and gathered a great basket of wild oranges, green, but sweet and juicy; and they picked plantains from around the hut, and coconuts from their trees, and breadfruit and mangoes; and they carried them down to the cove. They loaded the unstable canoe with them, and Red and the native boy who had brought them the news of the ship paddled along outside the reef.

“It was the last time she ever saw him.

“Next day the boy came back alone. He was all in tears. This is the story he told. When after their long paddle they reached the ship and Red hailed it, a white man looked over the side and told them to come on board. They took the fruit they had brought with them and Red piled it up on the deck. The white man and he began to talk, and they seemed to come to some agreement. One of them went below and brought up tobacco. Red took some at once and lit a pipe. The boy imitated the zest with which he blew a great cloud of smoke from his mouth. Then they said something to him and he went into the cabin. Through the open door the boy, watching curiously, saw a bottle brought out and glasses. Red drank and smoked. They seemed to ask him something, for he shook his head and laughed. The man, the first man who had spoken to them, laughed too, and he filled Red’s glass once more. They went on talking and drinking, and presently, growing tired of watching a sight that meant nothing to him, the boy curled himself up on the deck and slept. He was awakened by a kick; and, jumping to his feet, he saw that the ship was slowly sailing out of the lagoon. He caught sight of Red seated at the table, with his head resting heavily on his arms, fast asleep. He made a movement towards him, intending to wake him, but a rough hand seized his arm, and a man, with a scowl and words which he did not understand, pointed to the side. He shouted to Red, but in a moment he was seized and flung overboard. Helpless, he swam round to his canoe, which was drifting a little way off, and pushed it on to the reef. He climbed in and, sobbing all the way, paddled back to shore.

“What had happened was obvious enough. The whaler, by desertion or sickness, was short of hands, and the captain when Red came aboard had asked him to sign on; on his refusal he had made him drunk and kidnapped him.

“Sally was beside herself with grief. For three days she screamed and cried. The natives did what they could to comfort her, but she would not be comforted. She would not eat. And then, exhausted, she sank into a sullen apathy. She spent long days at the cove, watching the lagoon, in the vain hope that Red somehow or other would manage to escape. She sat on the white sand, hour after hour, with the tears running down her cheeks, and at night dragged herself wearily back across the creek to the little hut where she had been happy. The people with whom she had lived before Red came to the island wished her to return to them, but she would not; she was convinced that Red would come back, and she wanted him to find her where he had left her. Four months later she was delivered of a still-born child, and the old woman who had come to help her through her confinement remained with her in the hut. All joy was taken from her life. If her anguish with time became less intolerable it was replaced by a settled melancholy. You would not have thought that among these people, whose emotions, though so violent, are very transient, a woman could be found capable of so enduring a passion. She never lost the profound conviction that sooner or later Red would come back. She watched for him, and every time someone crossed this slender little bridge of coconut trees she looked. It might at last be he.”

Neilson stopped talking and gave a faint sigh.

“And what happened to her in the end?” asked the skipper, Neilson smiled bitterly.

“Oh, three years afterwards she took up with another white man.”

The skipper gave a fat, cynical chuckle.

“That’s generally what happens to them,” he said.

The Swede shot him a look of hatred. He did not know why that gross, obese man excited in him so violent a repulsion. But his thoughts wandered and he found his mind filled with memories of the past. He went back five and twenty years. It was when, he first came to the island, weary of Apia, with its heavy drinking, its gambling and coarse sensuality, a sick man, trying to resign himself to the loss of the career which had fired his imagination with ambitious thoughts. He set behind him resolutely all his hopes of making a great name for himself and strove to content himself with the few poor months of careful life which was all that he could count on. He was boarding with a half-caste trader who had a store a couple of miles along the coast at the edge of a native village; and one day, wandering aimlessly along the grassy paths of the coconut groves, he had come upon the hut in which Sally lived. The beauty of the spot had filled him with a rapture so great that it was almost painful, and then he had seen Sally. She was the loveliest creature he had ever seen, and the sadness in those dark, magnificent eyes of hers affected him strangely. The Kanakas were a handsome race, and beauty was not rare among them, but it was the beauty of shapely animals. It was empty. But those tragic eyes were dark with mystery, and you felt in them the bitter complexity of the groping, human soul. The trader told him the story and it moved him.

“Do you think he’ll ever come back?” asked Neilson.

“No fear. Why, it’ll be a couple of years before the ship is paid off, and by then he’ll have forgotten all about her. I bet he was pretty mad when he woke up and found he’d been shanghaied, and I shouldn’t wonder but he wanted to fight somebody. But he’d got to grin and bear it, and I guess in a month he was thinking it the best thing that had ever happened to him that he got away from the island.”

But Neilson could not get the story out of his head. Perhaps because he was sick and weakly, the radiant health of Red appealed to his imagination. Himself an ugly man, insignificant of appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others. He had never been passionately in love, and certainly he had never been passionately loved. The mutual attraction of those two young things gave him a singular delight. It had the ineffable beauty of the Absolute. He went again to the little hut by the creek. He had a gift for languages and an energetic mind, accustomed to work, and he had already given much time to the study of the local tongue. Old habit was strong in him and he was gathering together material for a paper on the Samoan speech. The old crone who shared the hut with Sally invited him to come in and sit down. She gave him kava to drink and cigarettes to smoke. She was glad to have someone to chat with and while she talked he looked at Sally. She reminded him of the Psyche in the museum at Naples. Her features had the same clear purity of line, and though she had borne a child she had still a virginal aspect.

It was not till he had seen her two or three times that he induced her to speak. Then it was only to ask him if he had seen in Apia a man called Red. Two years had passed since his disappearance, but it was plain that she still thought of him incessantly.

It did not take Neilson long to discover that he was in love with her. It was only by an effort of will now that he prevented himself from going every day to the creek, and when he was not with Sally his thoughts were. At first, looking upon himself as a dying man, he asked only to look at her, and occasionally hear her speak, and his love gave him a wonderful happiness. He exulted in its purity. He wanted nothing from her but the opportunity to weave around her graceful person a web of beautiful fancies. But the open air, the equable temperature, the rest, the simple fare, began to have an unexpected effect on his health. His temperature did not soar at night to such alarming heights, he coughed less and began to put on weight; six months passed without his having a haemorrhage; and on a sudden he saw the possiblity that he might live. He had studied his disease carefully, and the hope dawned upon him that with great care he might arrest its course. It exhilarated him to look forward once more to the future. He made plans. It was evident that any active life was out of the question, but he could live on the islands, and the small income he had, insufficient elsewhere, would be ample to keep him. He could grow coconuts; that would give him an occupation; and he would send for his books and a piano; but his quick mind saw that in all this he was merely trying to conceal from himself the desire which obsessed him.

He wanted Sally. He loved not only her beauty, but that dim soul which he divined behind her suffering eyes. He would intoxicate her with his passion. In the end he would make her forget. And in an ecstasy of surrender he fancied himself giving her too the happiness which he had thought never to know again, but had now so miraculously achieved.

He asked her to live with him. She refused. He had expected that and did not let it depress him, for he was sure that sooner or later she would yield. His love was irresistible. He told the old woman of his wishes, and found somewhat to his surprise that she and the neighbours, long aware of them, were strongly urging Sally to accept his offer. After all, every native was glad to keep house for a white man, and Neilson according to the standards of the island was a rich one. The trader with whom he boarded went to her and told her not to be a fool; such an opportunity would not come again, and after so long she could not still believe that Red would ever return. The girl’s resistance only increased Neilson’s desire, and what had been a very pure love now became an agonising passion. He was determined that nothing should stand in his way. He gave Sally no peace. At last, worn out by his persistence and the persuasions, by turns pleading and angry, of everyone around her, she consented. But the day after, when exultant he went to see her he found that in the night she had burnt down the hut in which she and Red had lived together. The old crone ran towards him full of angry abuse of Sally, but he waved her aside; it did not matter; they would build a bungalow on the place where the hut had stood. A European house would really be more convenient if he wanted to bring out a piano and a vast number of books.

And so the little wooden house was built in which he had now lived for many years, and Sally became his wife. But after the first few weeks of rapture, during which he was satisfied with what she gave him, he had known little happiness. She had yielded to him, through weariness, but she had only yielded what she set no store on. The soul which he had dimly glimpsed escaped him. He knew that she cared nothing for him. She still loved Red, and all the time she was waiting for his return. At a sign from him, Neilson knew that, notwithstanding his love, his tenderness, his sympathy, his generosity, she would leave him without a moment’s hesitation. She would never give a thought to his distress. Anguish seized him and he battered at that impenetrable self of hers which sullenly resisted him. His love became bitter. He tried to melt her heart with kindness, but it remained as hard as before; he feigned indifference, but she did not notice it. Sometimes he lost his temper and abused her, and then she wept silently. Sometimes he thought she was nothing but a fraud, and that soul simply an invention of his own, and that he could not get into the sanctuary of her heart because there was no sanctuary there. His love became a prison from which he longed to escape, but he had not the strength merely to open the door — that was all it needed — and walk out into the open air. It was torture and at last he became numb and hopeless. In the end the fire burnt itself out and, when he saw her eyes rest for an instant on the slender bridge, it was no longer rage that filled his heart but impatience. For many years now they had lived together bound by the ties of habit and convenience, and it was with a smile that he looked back on his old passion. She was an old woman, for the women on the islands age quickly, and if he had no love for her any more he had tolerance. She left him alone. He was contented with his piano and his books.

His thoughts led him to a desire for words.

“When I look back now and reflect on that brief passionate love of Red and Sally, I think that perhaps they should thank the ruthless fate that separated them when their love seemed still to be at its height. They suffered, but they suffered in beauty. They were spared the real tragedy of love.”

“I don’t know exactly as I get you,” said the skipper.

“The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care? Oh, it is dreadfully bitter to look at a woman whom you have loved with all your heart and soul, so that you felt you could not bear to let her out of your sight, and realise that you would not mind if you never saw her again. The tragedy of love is indifference.”

But while he was speaking a very extraordinary thing happened. Though he had been addressing the skipper he had not been talking to him, he had been putting his thoughts into words for himself, and with his eyes fixed on the man in front of him he had not seen him. But now an image presented itself to them, an image not of the man he saw, but of another man. It was as though he were looking into one of those distorting mirrors that make you extraordinarily squat or outrageously elongate, but here exactly the opposite took place, and in the obese, ugly old man he caught the shadowy glimpse of a stripling. He gave him now a quick, searching scrutiny. Why had a haphazard stroll brought him just to this place? A sudden tremor of his heart made him slightly breathless. An absurd suspicion seized him. What had occurred to him was impossible, and yet it might be a fact.

“What is your name?” he asked abruptly.

The skipper’s face puckered and he gave a cunning chuckle. He looked then malicious and horribly vulgar.

“It’s such a damned long time since I heard it that I almost forgot it myself. But for thirty years now in the islands they’ve always called me Red.”

His huge form shook as he gave a low, almost silent laugh. It was obscene. Neilson shuddered. Red was hugely amused, and from his bloodshot eyes tears ran down his cheeks.

Neilson gave a gasp, for at that moment a woman came in. She was a native, a woman of somewhat commanding presence, stout without being corpulent, dark, for the natives grow darker with age, with very grey hair. She wore a black Mother Hubbard, and its thinness showed her heavy breasts. The moment had come.

She made an observation to Neilson about some household matter and he answered. He wondered if his voice sounded as unnatural to her as it did to himself. She gave the man who was sitting in the chair by the window an indifferent glance, and went out of the room. The moment had come and gone.

Neilson for a moment could not speak. He was strangely shaken. Then he said:

“I’d be very glad if you’d stay and have a bit of dinner with me. Pot luck.”

“I don’t think I will,” said Red. “I must go after this fellow Gray. I’ll give him his stuff and then I’ll get away. I want to be back in Apia to-morrow.”

“I’ll send a boy along with you to show you the way.”

“That’ll be fine.”

Red heaved himself out of his chair, while the Swede called one of the boys who worked on the plantation. He told him where the skipper wanted to go, and the boy stepped along the bridge. Red prepared to follow him.

“Don’t fall in,” said Neilson.

“Not on your life.”

Neilson watched him make his way across and when he had disappeared among the coconuts he looked still. Then he sank heavily in his chair. Was that the man who had prevented him from being happy? Was that the man whom Sally had loved all these years and for whom she had waited so desperately? It was grotesque. A sudden fury seized him so that he had an instinct to spring up and smash everything around him. He had been cheated. They had seen each other at last and had not known it. He began to laugh, mirthlessly, and his laughter grew till it became hysterical. The Gods had played him a cruel trick. And he was old now.

At last Sally came in to tell him dinner was ready. He sat down in front of her and tried to eat. He wondered what she would say if he told her now that the fat old man sitting in the chair was the lover whom she remembered still with the passionate abandonment of her youth. Years ago, when he hated her because she made him so unhappy, he would have been glad to tell her. He wanted to hurt her then as she hurt him, because his hatred was only love. But now he did not care. He shrugged his shoulders listlessly.

“What did that man want?” she asked presently.

He did not answer at once. She was too old, a fat old native woman. He wondered why he had ever loved her so madly. He had laid at her feet all the treasures of his soul, and she had cared nothing for them. Waste, what waste! And now, when he looked at her, he felt only contempt. His patience was at last exhausted. He answered her question.

“He’s the captain of a schooner. He’s come from Apia.”

“Yes.”

“He brought me news from home. My eldest brother is very ill and I must go back.”

“Will you be gone long?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

NEIL MACADAM

Captain Bredon was good–natured. When Angus Munro, the Curator of the museum at Kuala Solor, told him that he had advised Neil MacAdam, his new assistant, on his arrival at Singapore to put up at the Van Dyke Hotel, and asked him to see that the lad got into no mischief during the few days he must spend there, he said he would do his best. Captain Bredon commanded the Sultan Ahmed, and when he was at Singapore always stayed at the Van Dyke. He had a Japanese wife and kept a room there. It was his home. When he got back after his fortnight’s trip along the coast of Borneo the Dutch manager told him that Neil had been there for two days. The boy was sitting in the little dusty garden of the hotel reading old numbers of The Straits Times. Captain Bredon took a look at him first and then went up.

‘You’re MacAdam, aren’t you?’

Neil rose to his feet, flushed to the roots of his hair, and answered shyly:’I am.’

‘My name’s Bredon. I’m skipper of the Sultan Ahmed. You’re sailing with me next Tuesday. Munro asked me to look after you. What about a stengah?

I suppose you’ve learned what that means by now.’

‘Thank you very much, but I don’t drink.’

He spoke with a broad Scots accent.

‘I don’t blame you. Drink’s been the ruin of many a good man in this country.’ He called the Chinese boy and ordered himself a double whisky and a small soda.

‘What have you been doing with yourself since you got in?’

‘Walking about.’

‘There’s nothing much to see in Singapore.’

‘I’ve found plenty.’

Of course the first thing he had done was to go to the museum. There was little that he had not seen at home, but the fact that those beasts and birds, those reptiles, moths, butterflies, and insects were native to the country excited him. There was one section devoted to that part of Borneo of which Kuala Solor was the capital, and since these were the creatures that for the next three years would chiefly concern him, he examined them with attention. But it was outside, in the streets, that it was most thrilling, and except that he was a grave and sober young man he would have laughed aloud with joy. Everything was new to him. He walked till he was footsore. He stood at the corner of a busy street and wondered at the long line of rickshaws and the little men between the shafts running with dogged steps. He stood on a bridge over a canal and looked at the sampans wedged up against one another like sardines in a tin. He peered into the Chinese shops in Victoria Road where so many strange things were sold. Bombay merchants, fat and exuberant, stood at their shop doors and sought to sell him silks and tinsel jewellery. He watched the Tamils, pensive and forlorn, who walked with a sinister grace, and the bearded Arabs, in white skull–caps, who bore themselves with scornful dignity. The sun shone upon the varied scene with hard, acrid brilliance. He was confused. He thought it would take him years to find his bearings in this multi–coloured and excessive world.

After dinner that night Captain Bredon asked him if he would like to go round the town.

‘You ought to see a bit of life while you’re here,’ he said.

They stepped into rickshaws and drove to the Chinese quarter. The Captain, who never drank at sea, had been making up for his abstinence during the day.

He was feeling good. The rickshaws stopped at a house in a side street and they knocked at the door. It was opened and they passed through a narrow passage into a large room with benches all round it covered with red plush. A number of women were sitting about–French, Italian, and American. A mechanical piano was grinding out harsh music and a few couples were dancing. Captain Bredon ordered drinks. Two or three women, waiting for an invitation, gave them inviting glances.

‘Well, young feller, is there anyone you fancy here?’ the Captain asked facetiously.

‘To sleep with, d’you mean? No.’

‘No white girls where you’re going, you know.’

‘Oh, well.’

‘Like to go an’ see some natives?’

‘I don’t mind.’

The Captain paid for the drinks and they strolled on. They went to another house. Here the girls were Chinese, small and dainty, with tiny feet and hands like flowers, and they wore suits of flowered silk. But their painted faces were like masks. They looked at the strangers with black derisive eyes. They were strangely inhuman.

‘I brought you here because I thought you ought to see the place,’ said Captain Bredon, with the air of a man doing his bounden duty, ‘but just look–see is all. They don’t like us for some reason. In some of these Chinese joints they won’t even let a white man in. Fact is, they say we stink. Funny, ain’t it? They say we smell of corpses.’

‘We?’

‘Give me Japs,’ said the Captain. ‘They’re fine. My wife’s a Jap, you know. You come along with me and I’ll take you to a place where they have Japanese girls, and if you don’t see something you like there I’m a Dutchman.’ Their rickshaws were waiting and they stepped into them. Captain Bredon gave a direction and the boys started off. They were let into the house by a stout middle–aged Japanese woman, who bowed low as they entered. She took them into a neat, clean room furnished only with mats on the floor; they sat down and presently a little girl came in with a tray on which were two bowls of pale tea. With a shy bow she handed one to each of them. The Captain spoke to the middle–aged woman and she looked at Neil and giggled. She said something to the child, who went out, and presently four girls tripped in. They were sweet in their kimonos, with the shining black hair artfully dressed; they were small and plump, with round faces and laughing eyes. They bowed low as they came in and with good manners murmured polite greetings. Their speech sounded like the twittering of birds. Then they knelt, one on each side of the two men, and charmingly flirted with them. Captain Bredon soon had his arms round two slim waists. They all talked nineteen to the dozen. They were very gay. It seemed to Neil that the Captain’s girls were mocking him, for their gleaming eyes were mischievously turned towards him, and he blushed. But the other two cuddled up to him, smiling, and spoke in Japanese as though he understood every word they said. They seemed so happy and guileless that he laughed. They were very attentive. They handed him the bowl so that he should drink his tea, and then took it from him so that he should not have the trouble of holding it. They lit his cigarette for him and one put out a small, delicate hand to take the ash so that it should not fall on his clothes. They stroked his smooth face and looked with curiosity at his large young hands.

They were as playful as kittens.

‘Well, which is it to be?’ said the Captain after a while. ‘Made your choice yet?’ ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ll just wait and see you settled and then I’ll fix myself up.’

‘Oh, I don’t want either of them. I’m going home to bed.’

‘Why, what’s the matter? You’re not scared, are you?’

‘No, I just don’t fancy it. But don’t let me stand in your way. I’ll get back to the hotel all right.’

‘Oh, if you’re not going to do anything I won’t either. I only wanted to be matey.’

He spoke to the middle–aged woman and what he said caused the girls to look at Neil with sudden surprise. She answered and the Captain shrugged his shoulders. Then one of the girls made a remark that set them all laughing. ‘What does she say?’ asked Neil.

‘She’s pulling your leg,’ replied the Captain, smiling.

But he gave Neil a curious look. The girl, having made them laugh once, now said something directly to Neil. He could not understand, but the mockery of her eyes made him blush and frown. He did not like to be made fun of. Then she laughed outright and throwing her arm round his neck lightly kissed him. ‘Come on, let’s be going,’ said the Captain.

When they dismissed their rickshaws and walked into the hotel Neil asked him:

‘What was it that girl said that made them all laugh?’

‘She said you were a virgin.’

‘I don’t see anything to laugh at in that,’ said Neil, with his slow Scots accent. ’Is it true?’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty–two.’

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Till I marry.’

The Captain was silent. At the top of the stairs he held out his hand. There was a twinkle in his eyes when he bade the lad good night, but Neil met it with a level, candid, and untroubled gaze.

Three days later they sailed. Neil was the only white passenger. When the Captain was busy he read. He was reading again Wallace’s Malay Archipelago.

He had read it as a boy, but now it had a new and absorbing interest for him.

When the Captain was at leisure they played cribbage or sat in long chairs on the deck, smoking, and talked. Neil was the son of a country doctor, and he could not remember when he had not been interested in natural history. When he had done with school he went to the University of Edinburgh and there took a B.Sc. with Honours. He was looking out for a job as demonstrator in biology when he chanced to see in Nature an advertisement for an assistant curator of the museum at Kuala Solor. The Curator, Angus Munro, had been at Edinburgh with his uncle, a Glasgow merchant, and his uncle wrote to ask him if he would give the boy a trial. Though Neil was especially interested in entomology he was a trained taxidermist, which the advertisement said was essential; he enclosed certificates from Neil’s old teachers; he added that Neil had played football for his university. In a few weeks a cable arrived engaging him and a fortnight later he sailed.

‘What’s Mr Munro like?’ asked Neil.

‘Good fellow. Everybody likes him.’

‘I looked out his papers in the scientific journals. He had one in the last number of The Ibis on the Gymnathidæ.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I know he’s got a Russian wife. They don’t like her much.’

‘I got a letter from him at Singapore saying they’d put me up for a bit till I could look round and see what I wanted to do.’

Now they were steaming up the river. At the mouth was a straggling fishermen’s village standing on piles on the water; on the bank grew thickly nipah palm and the tortured mangrove; beyond stretched the dense green of the virgin forest. In the distance, darkly silhouetted against the blue sky, was the rugged outline of a mountain. Neil, his heart beating with the excitement that possessed him, devoured the scene with eager eyes. He was surprised. He knew his Conrad almost by heart and he was expecting a land of brooding mystery. He was not prepared for the blue milky sky. Little white clouds on the horizon, like sailing boats becalmed, shone in the sun. The green trees of the forest glittered in the brilliant light. Here and there, on the banks, were Malay houses with thatched roofs, and they nestled cosily among fruit trees. Natives in dugouts rowed, standing, up the river. Neil had no feeling of being shut in, nor, in that radiant morning, of gloom, but of space and freedom. The country offered him a gracious welcome. He knew he was going to be happy in it.

Captain Bredon from the bridge threw a friendly glance at the lad standing below him. He had taken quite a fancy to him during the four days the journey had lasted. It was true he did not drink, and when you made a joke he was as likely as not to take you seriously, but there was something very taking in his seriousness; everything was interesting and important to him–that, of course, was why he did not find your jokes amusing; but even though he didn’t see them he laughed, because he felt you expected it. He laughed because life was grand. He was grateful for every little thing you told him. He was very polite. He never asked you to pass him anything without saying ‘please’ and always said ‘thank you’ when you gave it. And he was a good–looking fellow, no one could deny that. Neil was standing with his hands on the rail, bare–headed, looking at the passing bank. He was tall, six foot two, with long, loose limbs, broad shoulders, and narrow hips; there was something charmingly coltish about him, so that you expected him at any moment to break into a caper. He had brown curly hair with a peculiar shine in it; sometimes when the light caught it, it glittered like gold. His eyes, large and very blue, shone with good–humour. They reflected his happy disposition. His nose was short and blunt and his mouth big, his chin determined; his face was rather broad. But his most striking feature was his skin; it was very white and smooth, with a lovely patch of red on either cheek. It would have been a beautiful skin even for a woman. Captain Bredon made the same joke to him every morning. ‘Well, my lad, have you shaved today?’

Neil passed his hand over his chin.

‘No, d’you think I need it?’

The Captain always laughed at this.

‘Need it? Why, you’ve got a face like a baby’s bottom.’

And invariably Neil reddened to the roots of his hair.

‘I shave once a week,’ he retorted.

But it wasn’t only his looks that made you like him. It was his ingenuousness, his candour, and the freshness with which he confronted the world. For all his intentness and the solemn way in which he took everything, and his inclination to argue upon every point that came up, there was something strangely simple in him that gave you quite an odd feeling. The Captain couldn’t make it out. ‘I wonder if it’s because he’s never had a woman,’ he said to himself. ‘Funny.

I should have thought the girls never left him alone. With a complexion like that.’

But the Sultan Ahmed was nearing the bend after rounding which Kuala Solor would be in sight and the Captain’s reflections were interrupted by the necessities of his work. He rang down to the engine room. The ship slackened to half speed. Kuala Solor straggled along the left bank of the river, a white, neat, and trim little town, and on the right on a hill were the fort and the Sultan’s palace. There was a breeze and the Sultan’s flag, at the top of a tall staff, waved bravely against the sky. They anchored in mid–stream. The doctor and a police officer came on board in the government launch. They were accompanied by a tall thin man in white ducks. The Captain stood at the head of the gangway and shook hands with them. Then he turned to the last comer. ‘Well, I’ve brought you your young hopeful safe and sound.’ And a glance at Neil: ‘This is Munro.’

The tall thin man held out his hand and gave Neil an appraising look. Neil flushed a little and smiled. He had beautiful teeth.

‘How do you do, sir?’

Munro did not smile with his lips, but faintly with his grey eyes. His cheeks were hollow and he had a thin aquiline nose and pale lips. He was deeply sunburned. His face looked tired, but his expression was very gentle, and Neil immediately felt confidence in him. The Captain introduced him to the doctor and the policeman and suggested that they should have a drink. When they sat down and the boy brought bottles of beer Munro took off his topee. Neil saw that he had close–cropped brown hair turning grey. He was a man of forty, quiet, self–possessed in manner, with an intellectual air that distinguished him from the brisk little doctor and the heavy swaggering police officer. ‘MacAdam doesn’t drink,’ said the Captain when the boy poured out four glasses of beer.’

‘All the better,’ said Munro. ‘I hope you haven’t been trying to lure him into evil ways.’

‘I tried to in Singapore,’ returned the Captain, with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but there was nothing doing.’

When he had finished his beer Munro turned to Neil.

‘Well, we’ll be getting ashore, shall we?’

Neil’s baggage was put in charge of Munro’s boy and the two men got into a sampan. They landed.

‘Do you want to go straight up to the bungalow or would you like to have a look round first? We’ve got a couple of hours before tiffin.’

‘Couldn’t we go to the museum?’ said Neil.

Munro’s eyes smiled gently. He was pleased. Neil was shy and Munro not by nature talkative, so they walked in silence. By the river were the native huts, and here, living their immemorial lives, dwelt the Malays. They were busy, but without haste, and you were conscious of a happy, normal activity. There was a sense of the rhythm of life of which the pattern was birth and death, love, and the affairs common to mankind. They came to the bazaars, narrow streets with arcades, where the teeming Chinese, working and eating, noisily talking, as is their way, indefatigably strove with eternity.

‘It’s not much after Singapore,’ said Munro, ‘but I always think it’s rather picturesque.’

He spoke with an accent less broad than Neil’s but the Scots burr was there and it put Neil at his ease. He could never quite get it out of his head that the English of English people was affected.

The museum was a handsome stone building and as they entered its portals Munro instinctively straightened himself. The attendant at the door saluted and Munro spoke to him in Malay, evidently explaining who Neil was, for the attendant gave him a smile and saluted again. It was cool in there in comparison with the heat without and the light was pleasant after the glare of the street.

‘I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,’ said Munro. ‘We haven’t got half the things we ought to have, but up to now we’ve been handicapped by lack of money.

We’ve had to do the best we could. So you must make allowances.’ Neil stepped in like a swimmer diving confidently into a summer sea. The specimens were admirably arranged. Munro had sought to please as well as to instruct, and birds and beasts and reptiles were presented, as far as possible in their natural surroundings, in such a way as to give a vivid impression of life.

Neil lost his shyness and began with boyish enthusiasm to talk of this and that.

He asked an infinity of questions. He was excited. Neither of them was conscious of the passage of time, and when Munro glanced at his watch he was surprised to see what the hour was. They got into rickshaws and drove to the bungalow.

Munro led the young man into a drawing–room. A woman was lying on a sofa reading a book and as they came in she slowly rose.

‘This is my wife. I’m afraid we’re dreadfully late, Darya.’

‘What does it matter?’ she smiled. ‘What is more unimportant than time?’ She held out her hand, a rather large hand, to Neil and gave him a long, reflective, but friendly look.

‘I suppose you’ve been showing him the museum.’

She was a woman of five–and–thirty, of medium height, with a pale brown face of a uniform colour and pale blue eyes. Her hair, parted in the middle and wound into a knot on the nape of her neck, was untidy; it had a moth–like quality and was of a curious pale brown. Her face was broad, with high cheekbones, and she had a rather fleshy nose. She was not a pretty woman, but there was in her slow movements a sensual grace and in her manner as it were a physical casualness that only very dull people could have failed to find interesting. She wore a frock of green cotton. She spoke English perfectly, but with a slight accent.

They sat down to tiffin. Neil was overcome once more with shyness, but Darya did not seem to notice it. She talked freely and easily. She asked him about his journey and what he had thought of Singapore. She told him about the people he would have to meet. That afternoon Munro was to take him to call on the Resident, the Sultan being away, and later they would go to the club.

There he would see everybody.

‘You will be popular,’ she said, her pale blue eyes resting on him with attention. A man less ingenuous than Neil might have noticed that she took stock of his size and youthful virility, his shiny curling hair and his lovely skin.

‘They don’t think much of us.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Darya. You’re too sensitive. They’re English, that’s all.’ ‘They think it’s rather funny of Angus to be a scientist and they think it’s rather vulgar of me to be a Russian. I don’t care. They’re fools. They’re the most commonplace, the most narrow–minded, the most conventional people it has ever been my misfortune to live amongst.’

‘Don’t put MacAdam off the moment he arrives. He’ll find them kind and hospitable.’

‘What is your first name?’ she asked the boy.

‘Neil.’

‘I shall call you by it. And you must call me Darya. I hate being called Mrs Munro. It makes me feel like a minister’s wife.’

Neil blushed. He was embarrassed that she should ask him so soon to be so familiar. She went on.

‘Some of the men are not bad.’

‘They do their job competently and that’s what they’re here for,’ said Munro. ‘They shoot. They play football and tennis and cricket. I get on with them quite well. The women are intolerable. They are jealous and spiteful and lazy.

They can talk of nothing. If you introduce an intellectual subject they look down their noses as though you were indecent. What can they talk about now?

They’re interested in nothing. If you speak of the body they think you improper, and if you speak of the soul they think you priggish.’

‘You mustn’t take what my wife says too literally,’ smiled Munro, in his gentle, tolerant way. ‘The community here is just like any other in the East, neither very clever, nor very stupid, but amiable and kindly. And that’s a good deal.’

‘I don’t want people to be amiable and kindly. I want them to be vital and passionate. I want them to be interested in mankind. I want them to attach more importance to the things of the spirit than to a gin pahit or a curry tiffin.

I want art to matter to them, and literature.’ She addressed herself abruptly to Neil: ‘Have you got a soul?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what you mean.’

‘Why do you blush when I ask you? Why should you be ashamed of your soul? It is what is important in you. Tell me about it. I am interested in you and I want to know.’

It seemed very awkward to Neil to be tackled in this way by a perfect stranger.

He had never met anyone like this. But he was a serious young man and when he was asked a question straight out he did his best to answer it. It was Munro’s presence that embarrassed him.

‘I don’t know what you mean by the soul. If you mean an immaterial or spiritual entity, separately produced by the creator, in temporary conjunction with the material body, then my answer is in the negative. It seems to me that such a radically dualistic view of human personality cannot be defended by anyone who is able to take a calm view of the evidence. If, on the other hand, you mean by soul the aggregate of psychic elements which form what we know as the personality of the individual, then, of course, I have.’ ‘You’re very sweet and you’re wonderfully handsome,’ she said, smiling. ‘No, I mean the heart with its longings and the body with its desires and the infinite in us. Tell me, what did you read on the journey, or did you only play deck tennis?’

Neil was taken aback at the inconsequence of her reply. He would have been a little affronted except for the good–humour in her eyes and the naturalness in her manner. Munro smiled quietly at the young man’s bewilderment, when he smiled the lines that ran from the wings of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth became deep furrows.

‘I read a lot of Conrad.’

‘For pleasure or to improve your mind?’

‘Both. I admire him awfully.’

Darya threw up her arms in an extravagant gesture of protest.

‘That Pole,’ she cried. ‘How can you English ever have let yourselves be taken in by that wordy mountebank? He was all the superficiality of his countrymen.

That stream of words, those involved sentences, the showy rhetoric, that affection of profundity: when you get through all that to the thought at the bottom, what do you find but a trivial commonplace? He was like a second–rate actor who puts on a romantic dress and declaims a play by Victor Hugo. For five minutes you say this is heroic, and then your whole soul revolts and you cry, no, this is false, false, false.’

She spoke with a passion that Neil had never known anyone show when speaking of art or literature. Her cheeks, usually colourless, flushed and her pale eyes glowed.

‘There’s no one who got atmosphere like Conrad,’ said Neil. ‘I can smell and see and feel the East when I read him.’

‘Nonsense. What do you know about the East? Everyone will tell you that he made the grossest blunders. Ask Angus.’

‘Of course he was not always accurate,’ said Munro, in his measured, reflective way. ‘The Borneo he described is not the Borneo we know. He saw it from the deck of a merchant–vessel and he was not an acute observer even of what he saw. But does it matter? I don’t know why fiction should be hampered by fact. I don’t think it’s a mean achievement to have created a country, a dark, sinister, romantic, and heroic country of the soul.’

‘You’re a sentimentalist, my poor Angus.’ And then again to Neil: ‘You must read Turgenev, you must read Tolstoy, you must read Dostoyevsky.’ Neil did not in the least know what to make of Darya Munro. She skipped over the first stages of acquaintance and treated him at once like someone she had known intimately all her life. It puzzled him. It seemed so reckless. When he met anyone his own instinct was to go cautiously. He was amiable, but he did not like to step too far before he saw his way before him. He did not want to give anyone his confidence before he thought himself justified. But with Darya you could not help yourself; she forced your confidence. She poured out the feelings and thoughts that most people keep to themselves like a prodigal flinging gold pieces to a scrambling crowd. She did not talk, she did not act, like anyone he had ever known. She did not mind what she said. She would speak of the natural functions of the human animal in a way that brought the blushes coursing to his cheeks. They excited her ridicule.

‘Oh, what a prig you are! What is there indecent in it? When I’m going to take a purge, why shouldn’t I say so, and when I think you want one, why shouldn’t I tell you?’

‘Theoretically I dare say you’re right,’ said Neil, always judicious and reasonable.

She made him tell her of his father and mother, his brothers, his life at school and at the university. She told him about herself. Her father was a general killed in the war and her mother a Princess Lutchkov. They were in Eastern Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power, and fled to Yokohama. Here they had subsisted miserably on the sale of their jewels and such objects of art as they had been able to save, and here she married a fellow–exile. She was unhappy with him and in two years divorced him. Her mother died and, penniless, she was driven to earn her living as best she could. She was employed by an American relief organization. She taught in a mission school. She worked in a hospital. She made Neil’s blood boil, and at the same time embarrassed him very much, when she spoke of the men who tried to take advantage of her defencelessness and her poverty. She spared him no details.

‘Brutes,’ he said.

‘Oh, all men are like that,’ she replied, with a shrug of her shoulders. She told him how once she protected her virtue at the point of her revolver. ‘I swore I’d kill him if he took another step, and if he had I’d have shot him like a dog.’

‘Gosh!’ said Neil.

It was at Yokohama that she met Angus. He was spending his leave in Japan.

She was captivated by his straightforwardness, the decency which was so obvious in him, his tenderness and his consideration. He was not a business man; he was a scientist, and science is milk–brother to art. He offered her peace. He offered her security. And she was tired of Japan. Borneo was a land of mystery. They had been married for five years.

She gave Neil the Russian novelists to read. She gave him Fathers and Sons,

Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov.

‘Those are the three peaks of our literature. Read them. They are the greatest novels the world has ever seen.’

Like many of her countrymen she talked as though no other literature counted, and as though a few novels and stories, some indifferent poetry, and half a dozen good plays had made whatever else the world has produced negligible. Neil was fascinated and overwhelmed.

‘You’re rather like Alyosha yourself, Neil,’ she said, looking at him with eyes that were now so soft and tender, ‘an Alyosha with a Scotch dourness, suspicious and prudent, that will not let the soul in you, the spiritual beauty, come out.’

‘I’m not a bit like Alyosha,’ he answered self–consciously.

‘You don’t know what you’re like. You don’t know anything about yourself.

Why are you a naturalist? Is it for money? You could have made much more money by going into your uncle’s office in Glasgow. I feel in you something strange and unearthly. I could bow down at your feet as Father Zossima did to Dimitri.’

‘Please don’t,’ he said, smiling, but flushing a little too.

But the novels he read made her seem a little less strange to him. They gave her an environment and he recognized in her traits which, however unusual in the women he knew in Scotland, his mother and the daughters of his uncle in Glasgow, were common to many of the characters in Russian fiction. He no longer wondered that she should like to sit up so late, drinking innumerable cups of tea, and lie on the sofa nearly all day long reading and incessantly smoking cigarettes. She could do nothing at all for days on end without being bored. She had a curious mixture of languor and zest. She often said, with a shrug of her shoulders, that she was an Oriental, and a European only by chance. She had a feline grace that indeed suggested the Oriental. She was immensely untidy and it did not seem to affect her that cigarette–ends, old papers, and empty tins should lie about their living–room. But he thought she had something of Anna Karenina in her and he transferred to her the sympathy he felt for that pathetic creature. He understood her arrogance. It was not unnatural that she despised the women of the community, whose acquaintance little by little he made; they were commonplace; her mind was quicker than theirs, she had a wider culture, and she had above all a sort of tremulous sensitiveness that made them extraordinarily colourless. She certainly took no pains to conciliate them. Though at home she slopped about in a sarong and baju, when she and Angus went out to dinner she dressed with a splendour that was somewhat out of place. She liked to display her ample bosom and her shapely back. She painted her cheeks and made up her eyes like an actress for the footlights. Though it made Neil angry to see the amused or outraged glances that her appearance provoked, he could not in his heart but think it a pity that she should make such an object of herself. She looked grand, of course, but if you hadn’t known who she was you would have thought she wasn’t respectable. There were things about her that he could never get over. She had an enormous appetite and it fashed him that she ate more than he and Angus together. He could never quite get used to the bluntness with which she discussed sexual matters. She took it for granted that at home and in Edinburgh he had had affairs with a host of women. She pressed him for details of his adventures. His Scotch pawkiness helped him to parry her thrusts and he evaded her questions with native caution. She laughed at his reticence.

Sometimes she shocked him. He grew accustomed to the frankness with which she admired his looks, and when she told him that he was as beautiful as a young Norse god he did not turn a hair. Flattery fell off him like water from a duck’s back. But he did not like it when she ran her hand, though large, very soft, with caressing fingers, through his curly hair or, a smile on her lips, stroked his smooth face. He couldn’t bear being mussed about. One day she wanted a drink of tonic water and began pouring some out in a glass that stood on the table.

‘That’s my glass,’ he said quickly. I’ve just been drinking out of it.’ ‘Well, what of it? You haven’t got syphilis, have you?’

‘I hate drinking out of other people’s glasses myself.’

She was funny about cigarettes too. Once, when he hadn’t been there very long, he had just lit one, when she passed and said:

‘I want that.’

She took it out of his mouth and began to smoke it. After two or three puffs, she said she did not want any more and handed it back to him. The end she had had in her mouth was red from the rouge on her lips, and he didn’t want to go on smoking it at all. But he was afraid she would think it rude if he threw it away. It somewhat disgusted him. Often she would ask him for a cigarette and when he handed it to her, say:

‘Oh, light it for me, will you?’

When he did so, and held it out to her, she opened her mouth so that he should put it in. He hadn’t been able to help wetting the end a little. He wondered she could bear to put it in her mouth after it had been in his. The whole thing seemed to him awfully familiar. He was sure Munro wouldn’t like it. She had even done this once or twice at the club. Neil had felt himself go purple. He wished she hadn’t got these rather unpleasant habits, but he supposed that they were Russian, and one couldn’t deny that she was wonderfully good company. Her conversation was very stimulating. It was like champagne (which Neil had tasted once and thought wretched stuff),

‘metaphorically speaking’. There was nothing she couldn’t talk about. She didn’t talk like a man; with a man you generally knew what he would say next, but with her you never did; her intuition was quite remarkable. She gave you ideas. She enlarged your mind and excited your imagination. Neil felt alive as he had never felt alive before. He seemed to walk on mountain peaks, and the horizons of the spirit were unbounded. Neil felt a certain complacency when he stopped to reflect on what an exalted plane his mind communed with hers.

Such conversations made very small beer of the vaunted pleasure of sense. She was in many ways (he was of a cautious nature and seldom made a statement even to himself that he did not qualify) the most intelligent woman he had ever met. And besides, she was Angus Munro’s wife.

For, whatever Neil’s reservations were about Darya, he had none about Munro, and she would have had to be a much less remarkable woman not to profit by the enormous admiration he conceived for her husband. With him Neil let himself go. He felt for him what he had never felt for anyone before. He was so sane, so balanced, so tolerant. This was the sort of man he would himself like to be when he was older. He talked little, but when he did, with good sense. He was wise. He had a dry humour that Neil understood. It made the hearty English fun of the men at the club seem inane. He was kind and patient. He had a dignity that made it impossible to conceive anyone taking a liberty with him, but he was neither pompous nor solemn. He was honest and absolutely truthful. But Neil admired him no less as a scientist than as a man.

He had imagination. He was careful and painstaking. Though his interest was in research he did the routine work of the museum conscientiously. He was just then much interested in stick–insects and intended to write a paper on their powers of parthenogenetic reproduction. An incident occurred in connexion with the experiments he was making that made a great impression on Neil. One day, a little captive gibbon escaped from its chain and ate up all the larvae and so destroyed the whole of Munro’s evidence. Neil nearly cried.

Angus Munro took the gibbon in his arms and, smiling, stroked it. ‘Diamond, Diamond,’ he said, quoting Sir Isaac Newton, ‘you little know the damage you have done.’

He was also studying mimicry and instilled into Neil his absorbed interest in this controversial subject. They had interminable talks about it. Neil was astonished at the Curator’s wonderful knowledge. It was encyclopaedic, and he was abashed at his own ignorance. But it was when Munro spoke of the trips into the country to collect specimens that his enthusiasm was most contagious.

That was the perfect life, a life of hardship, difficulty, often of privation and sometimes of danger, but rewarded by the thrill of finding a rare, or even a new, species, by the beauty of the scenery, and the intimate observation of nature, and above all the sense of freedom from every tie. It was for this part of the work that Neil had been chiefly engaged. Munro was occupied in research work that made it difficult for him to be away from home for several weeks at a time, and Darya had always refused to accompany him. She had an unreasoning fear of the jungle. She was terrified of wild beasts, snakes, and venomous insects. Though Munro had told her over and over again that no animal hurt you unless you molested or frightened it, she could not get over her instinctive horror. He did not like leaving her. She cared little for the local society and with him away he realized that life for her must be intolerably dull.

But the Sultan was keenly interested in natural history and was anxious that the museum should be completely representative of the country’s fauna. One expedition Munro and Neil were to make together, so that Neil should learn how to go to work, and the plans for this were discussed by them for months.

Neil looked forward to it as he had never looked forward to anything in his life. Meanwhile he learned Malay and acquired a smattering of the dialects that would be useful to him on future journeys. He played tennis and football. He soon knew everyone in the community. On the football field he threw off his absorption in science and his interest in Russian fiction and gave himself up to the pleasure of the game. He was strong, quick, and active. After it was all over it was grand to have a sluice down and a long tonic with a slice of lemon and go over it all with the other fellows. It had never been intended that Neil should live permanently with the Munros. There was a roomy rest–house at Kuala Solor, but the rule was that no one should stay in it for more than a fortnight and such of the bachelors as had no official quarters clubbed together and took a house between them. When Neil arrived it so happened that there was no vacancy in any of these messes. One evening, however, when he had been about four months in the colony, two men, Waring and Jonson, when they were sitting together after a game of tennis, told him that one member of their mess was going home and if he would like to join them they would be glad to have him. They were young fellows of his own age, in the football team, and Neil liked them both. Waring was in the Customs and Jonson in the police. He jumped at the suggestion. They told him how much it would cost and fixed a day, a fortnight later, when it would be convenient for him to move in. At dinner he told the Munros.

‘It’s been awfully good of you to let me stay so long. It’s made me very uncomfortable planting myself on you like this, I’ve been quite ashamed, but now there’s no excuse for me.’

‘But we like having you here,’ said Darya. ‘You don’t need an excuse.’ ‘I can hardly go on staying here indefinitely.’

‘Why not? Your salary’s miserable, what’s the use of wasting it on board and lodging? You’d be bored stiff with Jonson and Waring. Stupids. They haven’t an idea in their heads outside playing the gramophone and knocking balls about.’ It was true that it had been very convenient to live free of cost. He had saved the greater part of his salary. He had a thrifty soul and had never been used to spending money when it wasn’t necessary, but he was proud. He could not go on living at other people’s expense. Darya looked at him with her quiet, observant eyes.

‘Angus and I have got used to you now. I think we’d miss you. If you like, you can pay us for your board. You don’t cost anything, but if it’ll make you easier I’ll find out exactly what difference you make in cookie’s book and you can pay that.’

‘It must be an awful nuisance having a stranger in the house,’ he answered uncertainly.

‘It’ll be miserable for you there. Good heavens, the filth they eat.’ It was true also that at the Munros you ate better than anywhere else at Kuala Solor. He had dined out now and then, and even at the Resident’s you didn’t get a very good dinner. Darya liked her food and kept the cook up to the mark. He made Russian dishes which were a fair treat. That cabbage soup of Darya’s was worth walking five miles for. But Munro hadn’t said anything.

‘I’d be glad if you’d stay here,’ he said now. ‘It’s very convenient to have you on the spot. If anything comes up we can talk it over there and then. Waring and Jonson are very good fellows, but I dare say you’d find them rather limited after a bit.’

‘Oh, well, then I’ll be very pleased. Heaven knows, I couldn’t want anything better than this. I was only afraid I was in the way.’

Next day it was raining cats and dogs and it was impossible to play tennis or football, but towards six Neil put on a mackintosh and went to the club. It was empty but for the Resident, who was sitting in an arm–chair reading The Fortnightly. His name was Trevelyan, and he claimed to be related to the friend of Byron. He was a tall fat man, with close–cropped white hair and the large red face of a comic actor. He was fond of amateur theatricals and specialized in cynical dukes and facetious butlers. He was a bachelor, but generally supposed to be fond of the girls, and he liked his gin pahit before dinner. He owed his position to the Sultan’s friendship. He was a slack, complacent man, a great talker, not very fond of work, who wanted everything to go smoothly and no one to give trouble. Though not considered especially competent he was popular in the community because he was easy–going and hospitable, and he certainly made life more comfortable than if he had been energetic and efficient. He nodded to Neil.

‘Well, young fellow, how are bugs today?’

‘Feeling the weather, sir,’ said Neil gravely.

‘Hi–hi.’

In a few minutes Waring, Jonson, and another man, called Bishop, came in.

He was in the Civil Service. Neil did not play bridge, so Bishop went up to the Resident.

‘Would you care to make a fourth, sir?’ he asked him. ‘There’s nobody much in the club today.’

The Resident gave the others a glance.

‘All right. I’ll just finish this article and join you. Cut for me and deal. I shall only be five minutes.’

Neil went up to the three men.

‘Oh, I say, Waring, thanks awfully, but I can’t move over to you after all. The Munros have asked me to stay on with them for good.’

A broad smile broke on Waring’s face.

‘Fancy that.’

‘It’s awfully nice of them, isn’t it? They made rather a point of it. I couldn’t very well refuse.’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Bishop.

‘I don’t blame the boy,’ said Waring.

There was something in their manner that Neil did not like. They seemed to be amused. He flushed.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he cried.

‘Oh, come off it,’ said Bishop. ‘We know our Darya. You’re not the first good–looking young fellow she’s had a romp with, and you won’t be the last.’ The words were hardly out of his mouth before Neil’s clenched fist shot out like a flash. He hit Bishop on the face and he fell heavily to the floor. Jonson sprang at Neil and seized him round the middle, for he was beside himself. ‘Let me go,’ he shouted. ‘If he doesn’t withdraw that I’ll kill him.’ The Resident, startled by the commotion, looked up and rose to his feet. He walked heavily towards them.

‘What’s this? What’s this? What the hell are you boys playing at?’ They were taken aback. They had forgotten him. He was their master. Jonson let go of Neil and Bishop picked himself up. The Resident, a frown on his face, spoke to Neil sharply.

‘What’s the meaning of this? Did you hit Bishop?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘He made a foul suggestion reflecting on a woman’s honour,’ said Neil, very haughtily, and still white with rage.

The Resident’s eyes twinkled, but he kept a grave face.

‘What woman?’

‘I refuse to answer,’ said Neil, throwing back his head and drawing himself up to his full imposing height.

It would have been more effective if the Resident hadn’t been a good two inches taller, and very much stouter.

‘Don’t be a damned young fool.’

‘Darya Munro,’ said Jonson.

‘What did you say, Bishop?’

‘I forget the exact words I used. I said she’d hopped into bed with a good many young chaps here, and I supposed she hadn’t missed the chance of doing the same with MacAdam.’

‘It was a most offensive suggestion. Will you be so good as to apologize and shake hands. Both of you.’

‘I’ve had a hell of a biff, sir. My eye’s going to look like the devil. I’m damned if I apologize for telling the truth.’

‘You’re old enough to know that the fact that your statement is true only makes it more offensive, and as far as your eye is concerned I’m told that a raw beef–steak is very efficacious in these circumstances. Though I put my desire that you should apologize in the form of a request out of politeness, it is in point of fact an order.’

There was a moment’s silence. The Resident looked bland.

‘I apologize for what I said, sir,’ Bishop said sulkily.

‘Now then, MacAdam.’

‘I’m sorry I hit him, sir. I apologize, too.’

‘Shake hands.’

The two young men solemnly did so.

‘I shouldn’t like this to go any further. It wouldn’t be nice for Munro, whom I think we all like. Can I count on you all holding your tongues?’ They nodded.

‘Now be off with you. You stay, MacAdam, I want to have a few words with you.’

When the two of them were left alone, the Resident sat down and lit himself a cheroot. He offered one to Neil, but he only smoked cigarettes.

‘You’re a very violent young man,’ said the Resident, with a smile. ‘I don’t like my officers to make scenes in a public place like this.’

‘Mrs Munro is a great friend of mine. She’s been kindness itself to me. I won’t hear a word said against her.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have your job cut out for you if you stay here much longer.’

Neil was silent for a moment. He stood, tall and slim, before the Resident, and his grave young face was guileless. He flung back his head defiantly. His emotion made him speak in broader Scots even than usual.

‘I’ve lived with the Munros for four months, and I give you my word of honour that so far as I am concerned there is not an iota of truth in what that beast said. Mrs Munro has never treated me with anything that you could call undue familiarity. She’s never by word or deed given me the smallest hint that she had an improper idea in her head. She’s been like a mother to me or an elder sister.’

The Resident watched him with ironical eyes.

‘I’m very glad to hear it. That’s the best thing I’ve heard about her for a long time.’

‘You believe me, sir, don’t you?’

‘Of course. Perhaps you’ve reformed her.’ He called out, ‘Boy. Bring me a gin pahit.’ And then to Neil. ‘That’ll do. You can go now if you want to. But no more fighting, mind you, or you’ll get the order of the boot.’

When Neil walked back to the Munros’ bungalow the rain had stopped and the velvet sky was bright with stars. In the garden the fire–flies were flitting here and there. From the earth rose a scented warmth and you felt that if you stopped you would hear the growth of that luxuriant vegetation. A white flower of the night gave forth an overwhelming perfume. In the veranda Munro was typing some notes, and Darya, lying at full length on a long chair, was reading. The lamp behind her lit her smoky hair so that it shone like an aureole. She looked up at Neil and, putting down her book, smiled. Her smile was very friendly.

‘Where have you been, Neil?’

‘At the club.’

‘Anybody there?’

The scene was so cosy and domestic, Darya’s manner so peaceful and quietly assured, that it was impossible not to be touched. The two of them there, each occupied with his own concerns, seemed so united, their intimacy so natural, that no one could have conceived that they were not perfectly happy in one another. Neil did not believe a single word of what Bishop had said and the Resident had hinted. It was incredible. After all, he knew that what they had suspected of him was untrue, so what reason was there to think that the rest was any truer? They had dirty minds, all those people; because they were a lot of swine they thought everyone else as bad as they were. His knuckle hurt him a little. He was glad he had hit Bishop. He wished he knew who had started that filthy story. He’d wring his neck.

But now Munro fixed a date for the expedition that they had so much discussed, and in his careful way began to make preparations so that at the last moment nothing should be forgotten. The plan was to go as far up the river as possible and then make their way through the jungle and hunt for specimens on the little–known Mount Hitam. They expected to be away two months. As the day on which they were to start grew nearer Munro’s spirits rose, and though he did not say very much, though he remained quiet and self–controlled, you could tell by the light in his eyes and the jauntiness of his step how much he looked forward to it. One morning, at the museum, he was almost sprightly.

‘I’ve got some good news for you,’ he said suddenly to Neil, after they had been looking at some experiments they were making. ‘Darya’s coming with us.’ ’Is she? That’s grand.’

Neil was delighted. That made it perfect.

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to induce her to accompany me. I told her she’d enjoy it, but she would never listen to me. Queer cattle, women, I’d given it up and never thought of asking her to come this time, and suddenly, last night, out of a blue sky she said she’d like to.’

‘I’m awfully glad,’ said Neil.

‘I didn’t much like the idea of leaving her by herself so long; now we can stay just as long as we want to.’

They started early one morning in four prahus, manned by Malays, and besides themselves the party consisted of their servants and four Dyak hunters.

The three of them lay on cushions side by side, under an awning; in the other boats were the Chinese servants and the Dyaks. They carried bags of rice for the whole party, provisions for themselves, clothes, books, and all that was necessary for their work. It was heavenly to leave civilization behind them and they were all excited. They talked. They smoked. They read. The motion of the river was exquisitely soothing. They lunched on a grassy bank. Dusk fell and they moored for the night. They slept at a long house and their Dyak hosts celebrated their visit with arrak, eloquence, and a fantastic dance. Next day the river, narrowing, gave them more definitely the feeling that they were adventuring into the unknown, and the exotic vegetation that crowded the banks to the water’s edge, like an excited mob pushed from behind by a multitude, caused Neil a breathless ravishment. O wonder and delight! On the third day, because the water was shallower and the stream more rapid, they changed into lighter boats, and soon it grew so strong that the boatmen could paddle no longer, and they poled against the current with powerful and magnificent gestures. Now and then they came to rapids and had to disembark, unload, and haul the boats through a rock–strewn passage. After five days they reached a point beyond which they could go no further. There was a government bungalow there, and they settled in for a couple of nights while Munro made arrangements for their excursion into the interior. He wanted bearers for their baggage, and men to build a house for them when they reached Mount Hitam. It was necessary for Munro to see the headman of a village in the vicinity, and thinking it would save time if he went himself rather than let the headman come to him, the day after they arrived he set out at dawn with a guide and a couple of Dyaks. He expected to be back in a few hours. When he had seen him off Neil thought he would have a bathe. There was a pool a little way from the bungalow, and the water was so clear that you saw every grain of the sandy bottom. The river was so narrow there that the trees over–arched it. It was a lovely spot. It reminded Neil of the pools in Scotch streams he had bathed in as a boy, and yet it was strangely different. It had an air of romance, a feeling of virgin nature, that filled him with sensations that he found hard to analyse. He tried, of course, but older heads than his have found it difficult to anatomize happiness. A kingfisher was sitting on an overhanging branch and its vivid blue was reflected as bluely in the crystal stream. It flew away with a flashing glitter of jewelled wings when Neil, slipping off his sarong and baju, scrambled down into the water. It was fresh without being cold. He splashed and tumbled about. He enjoyed the movement of his strong limbs. He floated and looked at the blue sky peeping through the leaves and the sun that here and there gilded the water. Suddenly he heard a voice.

‘How white your body is, Neil.’

With a gasp he let himself sink and turning round saw Darya standing on the bank.

‘I say, I haven’t got any clothes on.’

‘So I saw. It’s much nicer bathing without. Wait a minute, I’ll come in, it looks lovely.’

She also was wearing a sarong and a baju. He turned away his head quickly, for he saw that she was taking them off. He heard her splash into the water. He gave two or three strokes in order that she should have room to swim about at a good distance from him, but she swam up to him.

‘Isn’t the feel of the water on one’s body lovely?’ she said.

She laughed and opening her hand splashed water in his face. He was so embarrassed he did not know which way to look. In that limpid water it was impossible not to see that she was stark naked. It was not so bad now, but he could not help thinking how difficult it would be to get out. She seemed to be having a grand time.

‘I don’t care if I do get my hair wet,’ she said.

She turned over on her back and with strong strokes swam round the pool.

When she wanted to get out, he thought, the best thing would be if he turned his back and when she was dressed she could go and he would get out later.

She seemed quite unconscious of the awkwardness of the situation. He was vexed with her. It really was rather tactless to behave like that. She kept on talking to him just as if they were on dry land and properly dressed. She even called his attention to herself.

‘Does my hair look awful? It’s so fine it gets like rat tails when it’s wet. Hold me under the shoulders a moment while I try to screw it up.’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’d better leave it now.’

‘I’m getting frightfully hungry,’ she said presently. ‘What about breakfast?’ ‘If you’ll get out first and put on your things, I’ll follow you in a minute.’ ‘All right.’

She swam the two strokes needed to bring her to the side, and he modestly looked away so that he should not see her get out nude from the water. ‘I can’t get up,’ she cried.

‘You’ll have to help me.’

It had been easy enough to get in, but the bank overhung the water and one had to lift oneself up by the branch of a tree.

‘I can’t. I haven’t got a stitch of clothing on.’

‘I know that. Don’t be so Scotch. Get up on the bank and give me a hand.’ There was no help for it. Neil swung himself up and pulled her after him. She had left her sarong beside his. She took it up unconcernedly and began to dry herself with it. There was nothing for him but do to the same, but for decency’s sake he turned his back on her.

‘You really have a most lovely skin,’ she said. ‘It’s as smooth and white as a woman’s. It’s funny on such a manly virile figure. And you haven’t got a hair on your chest.’

Neil wrapped the sarong round him and slipped his arms into the baju. ‘Are you ready?’

She had porridge for breakfast, and eggs and bacon, cold meat, and marmalade. Neil was a trifle sulky. She was really almost too Russian. It was stupid of her to behave like that; of course there was no harm in it, but it was just the sort of thing that made people think the things they did about her. The worst of it was that you couldn’t give her a hint. She’d only laugh at you. But the fact was that if any of those men at Kuala Solor had seen them bathing like that together, stark naked, nothing would have persuaded them that something improper hadn’t happened. In his judicious way Neil admitted to himself that you could hardly blame them. It was too bad of her. She had no right to put a fellow in such a position. He had felt such a fool. And say what you liked, it was indecent.

Next morning, having seen their carriers on the way, a long procession in single file, each man carrying his load in a creel on his back, with their servants, guides, and hunters, they started to walk. The path ran over the foothills of the mountain, through scrub and tall grass, and now and then they came to narrow streams which they crossed by rickety bridges of bamboo. The sun beat on them fiercely. In the afternoon they reached the shade of a bamboo forest, grateful after the glare, and the bamboos in their slender elegance rose to incredible heights, and the green light was like the light under the sea. At last they reached the primeval forest, huge trees swathed in luxuriant creepers, an inextricable tangle, and awe descended upon them. They cut their way through the undergrowth. They walked in twilight and only now and then caught through the dense foliage above them a glimpse of sunshine. They saw neither man nor beast, for the denizens of the jungle are shy and at the first sound of footsteps vanish from sight. They heard birds up high in the tall trees, but saw none save the twittering sunbirds that flew in the underwoods and delicately coquetted with the wild flowers. They halted for the night. The carriers made a floor of branches and on this spread waterproof sheets. The Chinese cook made them their dinner and then they turned in.

It was the first night Neil had ever spent in the jungle and he could not sleep.

The darkness was profound. The noise was deafening of innumerable insects, but like the roar of traffic in a great city it was so constant that in a little while it was like an impenetrable silence, and when on a sudden he heard the shriek of a monkey seized by a snake or the scream of a night–bird he nearly jumped out of his skin. He had a mysterious sensation that all around creatures were watching them. Over there, beyond the camp–fires, savage warfare was waged and they three on their bed of branches were defenceless and alone in face of the horror of nature. By his side Munro was breathing quietly in his deep sleep. ‘Are you awake, Neil?’ Darya whispered.

‘Yes. Is anything the matter?’

‘I’m terrified.’

‘It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘The silence is so awful. I wish I hadn’t come.’

She lit a cigarette.

Neil, having at last dozed off, was awakened by the hammering of a woodpecker, and its complacent laugh as it flew from one tree to another seemed to mock the sluggards. A hurried breakfast, and the caravan started.

The gibbons swung from branch to branch, gathering in the dawn dew from the leaves, and their strange cry was like the call of a bird. The light had driven away Darya’s fears, and notwithstanding a sleepless night she was alert and gay.

They continued to climb. In the afternoon they reached the spot that the guides had told them would be a good camping place, and here Munro decided to build a house. The men set to work. With their long knives they cut palm leaves and saplings and soon had erected a two–roomed hut raised on piles from the ground. It was neat and fresh and green. It smelt good. The Munros, he from old habit, she because she had for years wandered about the world and had a catlike knack of making herself comfortable wherever she went, were at home anywhere. In a day they had arranged everything and settled down. Their routine was invariable. Every morning Neil and Munro started out separately, collecting. The afternoon was devoted to pinning insects in boxes, placing butterflies between sheets of paper and skinning birds. When dusk came they caught moths. Darya busied herself with the hut and the servants, sewed and read and smoked innumerable cigarettes.

The days passed very pleasantly, monotonous but eventful. Neil was enraptured. He explored the mountain in all directions. One day, to his pride, he found a new species of stick–insect. Munro named it Cuniculina MacAdami.

This was fame. Neil (at twenty–two) realized that he had not lived in vain. But another day he only just escaped being bitten by a viper. Owing to its green colour he had not seen it and was only saved from lurching against it by the Dyak hunter who was with him. They killed it and brought it back to camp.

Darya shuddered at the sight of it. She had a terror of the wild creatures of the jungle and was almost hysterical. She would never go more than a few yards from the camp for fear of being lost.

‘Has Angus ever told you how he was lost?’ she asked Neil one evening when they were sitting quietly together after dinner.

‘It wasn’t a very pleasant experience,’ he smiled.

‘Tell him, Angus.’

He hesitated a little. It was not a thing he liked to recall.

‘It was some years ago, I’d gone out with my butterfly net and I’d been very lucky. I’d got several rare specimens that I’d been looking for a long time. After a while I thought I was getting hungry so I turned back. I walked for some time and it struck me I’d come a good deal farther than I knew. Suddenly I caught sight of an empty match–box. I’d thrown it away when I started to come back;

I’d been walking in a circle and was exactly where I was an hour before. I was not pleased. But I had a look round and set off again. It was fearfully hot and I was simply dripping with sweat. I knew more or less the direction the camp was in and I looked about for traces of my passage to see if I had come that way. I thought I found one or two and went on hopefully. I was frightfully thirsty. I walked on and on, picking my way over snags and trailing plants, and suddenly I knew I was lost. I couldn’t have gone so far in the right direction without hitting the camp. I can tell you I was startled. I knew I must keep my head, so I sat down and thought the situation over. I was tortured by thirst. It was long past midday and in three or four hours it would be dark. I didn’t like the idea of spending a night in the jungle at all. The only thing I could think of was to try and find a stream; if I followed its course, it would eventually bring me to a larger stream and sooner or later to the river. But of course it might take a couple of days. I cursed myself for being such a fool, but there was nothing better to do and I began walking. At all events if I found a stream I should be able to get a drink. I couldn’t find a trickle of water anywhere, not the smallest brook that might lead to something like a stream. I began to be alarmed. I saw myself wandering on till at last I fell exhausted. I knew there was a lot of game in the forest and if I came upon a rhino I was done for. The maddening thing was I knew I couldn’t be more than ten miles from my camp. I forced myself to keep my head. The day was waning and in the depths of the jungle it was growing dark already. If I’d brought a gun I could have fired it. In the camp they must have realized I was lost and would be looking for me. The undergrowth was so thick that I couldn’t see six feet into it and presently, I don’t know if it was nerves or not, I had the sensation that some animal was walking stealthily beside me. I stopped and it stopped too. I went on and it went on. I couldn’t see it. I could see no movement in the undergrowth. I didn’t even hear the breaking of a twig or the brushing of a body through leaves, but I knew how silently those beasts could move, and I was positive something was stalking me. My heart beat so violently against my ribs that I thought it would break. I was scared out of my wits. It was only by the exercise of all the self–control I had that I prevented myself from breaking into a run. I knew if I did that I was lost. I should be tripped up before I had gone twenty yards by a tangle root and when I was down it would spring on me. And if I started to run God knew where I should get to. And I had to husband my strength. I felt very like crying. And that intolerable thirst. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. Believe me, if I’d had a revolver I think I’d have blown my brains out. It was so awful I just wanted to finish with it. I was so exhausted I could hardly stagger. If I had an enemy who’d done me a deadly injury I wouldn’t wish him the agony I endured then. Suddenly I heard two shots. My heart stood still. They were looking for me. Then I did lose my head. I ran in the direction of the sound, screaming at the top of my voice. I fell, I picked myself up again. I ran on, I shouted till I thought my lungs would burst, there was another shot, nearer, I shouted again, I heard answering shouts; there was a scramble of men in the undergrowth. In a minute I was surrounded by Dyak hunters. They wrung and kissed my hands. They laughed and cried. I very nearly cried too. I was down and out, but they gave me a drink. We were only three miles from the camp. It was pitch dark when we got back. By God, it was a near thing.’

A convulsive shudder passed through Darya.

‘Believe me, I don’t want to be lost in the jungle again.’

‘What would have happened if you hadn’t been found?’

‘I can tell you. I should have gone mad. If I hadn’t been stung by a snake or attacked by a rhino I should have gone on blindly till I fell exhausted. I should have starved to death. I should have died of thirst. Wild beasts would have eaten my body and ants cleaned my bones.’

Silence fell upon them.

Then it happened, when they had spent nearly a month on Mount Hitam, that Neil, notwithstanding the quinine Munro had made him take regularly, was stricken with fever. It was not a bad attack, but he felt very sorry for himself and was obliged to stay in bed. Darya nursed him. He was ashamed to give her so much trouble, but she would not listen to his protests. She was certainly very capable. He resigned himself to letting her do things for him that one of the Chinese boys could have done just as well. He was touched. She waited on him hand and foot. But when the fever was at its height and she sponged him all over with cold water, though the comfort was indescribable, he was excessively embarrassed. She insisted on washing him night and morning. ‘I wasn’t in the British hospital at Yokohama for six months without learning at least the routine of nursing,’ she said, smiling.

She kissed him on the lips each time after she had finished. It was friendly and sweet of her. He rather liked it, but attached no importance to it; he even went so far, a rare thing for him, as to be facetious on the subject. ‘Did you always kiss your patients at the hospital?’ he asked her. ‘Don’t you like me to kiss you?’ she smiled.

‘It doesn’t do me any harm.’

‘It may even hasten your recovery,’ she mocked.

One night he dreamt of her. He awoke with a start. He was sweating profusely. The relief was wonderful, and he knew that his temperature had fallen; he was well. He did not care. For what he had dreamt filled him with shame. He was horrified. That he should have such thoughts, even in his sleep, made him feel awful. He must be a monster of depravity. Day was breaking, and he heard Munro getting up in the room next door that he occupied with Darya. She slept late, and he took care not to disturb her. When he passed through Neil’s room, Neil in a low voice called him.

‘Hullo, are you awake?’

‘Yes, I’ve had the crisis. I’m all right now.’

‘Good. You’d better stay in bed today. Tomorrow you’ll be as fit as a fiddle.’ ‘Send Ah Tan to me when you’ve had your breakfast, will you?’ ‘Right–ho.’

He heard Munro start out. The Chinese boy came and asked him what he wanted. An hour later Darya awoke. She came in to bid him good morning. He could hardly look at her.

‘I’ll just have my breakfast and then I’ll come in and wash you,’ she said. ‘I’m washed. I got Ah Tan to do it.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to spare you the trouble.’

‘It isn’t a trouble. I like doing it.’

She came over to the bed and bent down to kiss him, but he turned away his head.

‘Oh, don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s silly.’

She looked at him for a moment, surprised, and then with a slight shrug of the shoulders left him. A little later she came back to see if there was anything he wanted. He pretended to be asleep. She very gently stroked his cheek. ‘For God’s sake don’t do that,’ he cried.

‘I thought you were sleeping. What’s the matter with you today?’ ‘Nothing.’

‘Why are you being horrid to me? Have I done anything to offend you?’ ‘No.’

‘Tell me what it is.’

She sat down on the bed and took his hand. He turned his face to the wall. He was so ashamed he could hardly speak.

‘You seem to forget I’m a man. You treat me as if I was a boy of twelve.’ ‘Oh?’

He was blushing furiously. He was angry with himself and vexed with her.

She really should be more tactful. He plucked nervously at the sheet. ‘I know it means nothing to you and it ought not to mean anything to me. It doesn’t when I’m well and up and about. One can’t help one’s dreams, but they are an indication of what is going on in the subconscious.’

‘Have you been dreaming about me? Well, I don’t think there’s any harm in that.’

He turned his head and looked at her. Her eyes were gleaming, but his were sombre with remorse.

‘You don’t know men,’ he said.

She gave a little burble of laughter. She bent down and threw her arms round his neck. She had nothing on but her sarong and baju.

‘You darling,’ she cried. ‘Tell me, what did you dream?’

He was startled out of his wits. He pushed her violently aside. ‘What are you doing? You’re crazy.’

He jumped half out of bed.

‘Don’t you know that I’m madly in love with you?’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’

He sat down on the side of the bed. He was frankly bewildered. She chuckled. ‘Why do you suppose I came up to this horrible place? To be with you, ducky.

Don’t you know I’m scared stiff of the jungle? Even in here I’m frightened there’ll be snakes or scorpions or something. I adore you.’

‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ he said sternly.

‘Oh, don’t be so prim,’ she smiled.

‘Let’s get out of here.’

He walked out on to the veranda and she followed him. He threw himself into a chair. She knelt by his side and tried to take his hands, but he withdrew them.

‘I think you must be mad. I hope to God you don’t mean what you say.’ ‘I do. Every word of it,’ she smiled.

It exasperated him that she seemed unconscious of the frightfulness of her confession.

‘Have you forgotten your husband?’

‘Oh, what does he matter?’

‘Darya.’

‘I can’t be bothered about Angus now.’

‘I’m afraid you’re a very wicked woman,’ he said slowly, a frown darkening his smooth brow.

She giggled.

‘Because I’ve fallen in love with you? Darling, you shouldn’t be so absurdly good–looking.’

‘For God’s sake don’t laugh.’

‘I can’t help it; you’re comic–but still adorable. I love your white skin and your shining curly hair. I love you because you’re so prim and Scotch and humourless. I love your strength. I love your youth.’

Her eyes glowed and her breath came quickly. She stooped and kissed his naked feet. He drew them away quickly, with a cry of protest, and in the agitation of his gesture nearly overthrew the rickety chair.

‘Woman, you’re insane. Have you no shame?’

‘No.’

‘What do you want of me?’ he asked fiercely.

‘Love.’

‘What sort of man do you take me for?’

‘A man like any other,’ she replied calmly.

‘Do you think after all that Angus Munro has done for me I could be such a damned beast as to play about with his wife? I admire him more than any man I’ve ever known. He’s grand. He’s worth a dozen of me and you put together. I’d sooner kill myself than betray him. I don’t know how you can think me capable of such a dastardly act.’

‘Oh, my dear, don’t talk such bilge. What harm is it going to do him? You mustn’t take that sort of thing so tragically. After all, life is very short; we’re fools if we don’t take what pleasure we can out of it.’

‘You can’t make wrong right by talking about it.’

‘I don’t know about that. I think that’s a very controvertible statement.’ He looked at her with amazement. She was sitting at his feet, cool to all appearance and collected, and she seemed to be enjoying the situation. She seemed quite unconscious of its seriousness.

‘Do you know that I knocked a fellow down at the club because he made an insulting remark about you?’

‘Who?’

‘Bishop.’

‘Dirty dog. What did he say?’

‘He said you’d had affairs with men.’

‘I don’t know why people won’t mind their own business. Anyhow, who cares what they say? I love you. I’ve never loved anyone like you. I’m absolutely sick with love for you.’

‘Be quiet. Be quiet.’

‘Listen, tonight when Angus is asleep I’ll slip into your room. He sleeps like a rock. There’s no risk.’

‘You mustn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘No, no, no.’

He was frightened out of his wits. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and went into the house.

Munro came back at noon, and in the afternoon they busied themselves as usual. Darya, as she sometimes did, worked with them. She was in high spirits.

She was so gay that Munro suggested that she was beginning to enjoy the life. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she admitted. ‘I’m feeling happy today.’

She teased Neil. She seemed not to notice that he was silent and kept his eyes averted from her.

‘Neil’s very quiet,’ said Munro. ‘I suppose you’re feeling a bit weak still.’ ‘No. I just don’t feel very talkative.’

He was harassed. He was convinced that Darya was capable of anything. He remembered the hysterical frenzy of Nastasya Filipovna in The Idiot, and felt that she too could behave with that unfortunate lack of balance. He had seen her more than once fly into a temper with one of the Chinese servants and he knew how completely she could lose her self–control. Resistance only exasperated her. If she did not immediately get what she wanted she would go almost insane with rage. Fortunately she lost interest in a thing with the same suddenness with which she hankered for it, and if you could distract her attention for a minute she forgot all about it. It was in such situations that Neil had most admired Munro’s tact. He had often been slyly amused to see with what a pawky and yet tender cunning he appeased her feminine tantrums. It was on Munro’s account that Neil’s indignation was so great. Munro was a saint, and from what a state of humiliation and penury and random shifts had he not taken her to make her his wife! She owed everything to him. His name protected her. She had respectability. The commonest gratitude should have made it impossible for her to harbour such thoughts as she had that morning expressed. It was all very well for men to make advances, that was what men did, but for women to do so was disgusting. His modesty was outraged. The passion he had seen in her face, and the indelicacy of her gestures, scandalized him.

He wondered whether she would really carry out her threat to come to his room. He didn’t think she would dare. But when night came and they all went to bed, he was so terrified that he could not sleep. He lay there listening anxiously. The silence was broken only by the repeated and monotonous cry of an owl. Through the thin wall of woven palm leaves he heard Munro’s steady breathing. Suddenly he was conscious that someone was stealthily creeping into his room. He had already made up his mind what to do.

’Is that you, Mr Munro?’ he called in a loud voice.

Darya stopped suddenly. Munro awoke.

‘There’s someone in my room. I thought it was you.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Darya. ‘It’s only me, I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d go and smoke a cigarette on the veranda.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ said Munro. ‘Don’t catch cold.’

She walked through Neil’s room and out. He saw her light a cigarette.

Presently she went back and he heard her get into bed.

He did not see her next morning, for he started out collecting before she was up, and he took care not to get in till he was pretty sure Munro would be back.

He avoided being alone with her till it was dark and Munro went down for a few minutes to arrange the moth–traps.

‘Why did you wake Angus last night?’ she said in a low angry whisper. He shrugged his shoulders and going on with his work did not answer. ‘Were you frightened?’

‘I have a certain sense of decency.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a prig.’

‘I’d rather be a prig than a dirty swine.’

‘I hate you.’

‘Then leave me alone.’

She did not answer, but with her open hand smartly slapped his face. He flushed, but did not speak. Munro returned and they pretended to be intent on whatever they were doing.

For the next few days Darya, except at meal–times and in the evenings, never spoke to Neil. Without prearrangement they exerted themselves to conceal from Munro that their relations were strained. But the effort with which Darya roused herself from a brooding silence would have been obvious to anyone more suspicious than Angus, and sometimes she could not help herself from being a trifle sharp with Neil. She chaffed him, but in her chaff was a sting. She knew how to wound and caught him on the raw, but he took care not to let her see it. He had an inkling that the good–humour he affected infuriated her. Then one day when Neil came back from collecting, though he had delayed till the last possible minute before tiffin, he was surprised to find that Munro had not yet returned. Darya was lying on a mattress on the veranda, sipping a gin pahit and smoking. She did not speak to him when he passed through to wash. In a minute the Chinese boy came into his room and told him that tiffin was ready. He walked out.

‘Where’s Mr Munro?’ he asked.

‘He’s not coming,’ said Darya. ‘He sent a message to say that the place he’s at is so good he won’t come down till night.’

Munro had set out that morning for the summit of the mountain. The lower levels had yielded poor results in the way of mammals, and Munro’s idea was, if he could find a good place higher up, with a supply of water, to transfer the camp. Neil and Darya ate their meal in silence. After they had finished he went into the house and came out again with his topee and his collecting gear. It was unusual for him to go out in the afternoon.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Out.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t feel tired. I’ve got nothing much else to do this afternoon.’ Suddenly she burst into tears.

‘How can you be so unkind to me?’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, it is cruel to treat me like this.’

He looked down at her from his great height, his handsome, somewhat stolid face bearing a harassed look. ‘What have I done?’

‘You’ve been beastly to me. Bad as I am I haven’t deserved to suffer like this.

I’ve done everything in the world for you. Tell me one single little thing I could do that I haven’t done gladly. I’m so terribly unhappy.’

He moved on his feet uneasily. It was horrible to hear her say that. He loathed and feared her, but he had still the respect for her that he had always felt, not only because she was a woman, but because she was Angus Munro’s wife. She wept uncontrollably. Fortunately the Dyak hunters had gone that morning with Munro. There was no one about the camp but the three Chinese servants and they, after tiffin, were asleep in their own quarters fifty yards away. They were alone.

‘I don’t want to make you unhappy. It’s all so silly. It’s absurd of a woman like you to fall in love with a fellow like me. It makes me look such a fool. Haven’t you got any self–control?’

‘Oh, God. Self–control!’

‘I mean, if you really cared for me you couldn’t want me to be such a cad.

Doesn’t it mean anything to you that your husband trusts us implicitly? The mere fact of his leaving us alone like this puts us on our honour. He’s a man who would never hurt a fly. I should never respect myself again if I betrayed his confidence.’

She looked up suddenly.

‘What makes you think he would never hurt a fly? Why, all those bottles and cases are full of the harmless animals he’s killed.’

‘In the interests of science. That’s quite another thing.’

‘Oh, you fool, you fool.’

‘Well, if I am a fool I can’t help it. Why do you bother about me?’ ‘Do you think I wanted to fall in love with you?’

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Ashamed? How stupid! My God, what have I done that I should eat my heart out for such a pretentious ass?’

‘You talk about what you’ve done for me. What has Munro done for you?’ ‘Munro bores me to death. I’m sick of him. Sick to death of him.’ ‘Then I’m not the first?’

Ever since her amazing avowal he had been tortured by the suspicion that what those men at Kuala Solor had said of her was true. He had refused to believe a word of it, and even now he could not bring himself to think that she could be such a monster of depravity. It was frightful to think that Angus Munro, so trusting and tender, should have lived in a fool’s paradise. She could not be as bad as that. But she misunderstood him. She smiled through her tears.

‘Of course not. How can you be so silly? Oh, darling, don’t be so desperately serious. I love you.’

Then it was true. He had sought to persuade himself that what she felt for him was exceptional, a madness that together they could contend with and vanquish. But she was simply promiscuous.

‘Aren’t you afraid Munro will find out?’

She was not crying any more. She adored talking about herself, and she had a feeling that she was inveigling Neil into a new interest in her.

‘I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t know, if not with his mind, then with his heart. He’s got the intuition of a woman and a woman’s sensitiveness.

Sometimes I’ve been certain he suspected and in his anguish I’ve sensed a strange, spiritual exaltation. I’ve wondered if in his pain he didn’t find an infinitely subtle pleasure. There are souls, you know, that feel a voluptuous joy in laceration.’

‘How horrible!’ Neil had no patience with these conceits. ‘The only excuse for you is that you’re insane.’

She was now much more sure of herself. She gave him a bold look. ‘Don’t you think I’m attractive? A good many men have. You must have had dozens of women in Scotland who weren’t so well made as I am.’ She looked down at her shapely, sensual figure with calm pride. ‘I’ve never had a woman,’ he said gravely.

‘Why not?’

She was so surprised that she sprang to her feet. He shrugged his shoulders.

He could not bring himself to tell her how disgusting the idea of such a thing was to him, and how vile he had thought the haphazard amours of his fellow–students at Edinburgh. He took a mystical joy in his purity. Love was sacred. The sexual act horrified him. Its excuse was the procreation of children and its sanctification marriage. But Darya, her whole body rigid, stared at him, panting; and suddenly, with a sobbing cry in which there was exultation and at the same time wild desire, she flung herself on her knees and seizing his hand passionately kissed it.

‘Alyosha,’ she gasped. ‘Alyosha.’

And then, crying and laughing, she crumpled up in a heap at his feet. Strange, hardly human sounds issued from her throat and convulsive tremors passed through her body so that you would have thought she was receiving one electric shock after another. Neil did not know if it was an attack of hysteria or an epileptic fit.

‘Stop it,’ he cried. ‘Stop it.’

He took her up in his strong arms and laid her in the chair. But when he tried to leave her she would not let him. She flung her arms round his neck and held him. She covered his face with kisses. He struggled. He turned his face away. He put his hand between her face and his to protect himself. Suddenly she dug her teeth into it. The pain was so great that, without thinking, he gave her a great swinging blow.

‘You devil,’ he cried.

His violent gesture had forced her to release him. He held his hand and looked at it. She had caught him by the fleshy part on the side, and it was bleeding. Her eyes blazed. She was feeling alert and active.

‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going out,’ he said.

She sprang to her feet.

‘I’ll come with you.’

He put on his topee and, snatching up his collecting gear without a word, turned on his heel. With one stride he leaped down the three steps that led from the floor of the house to the ground. She followed him.

‘I’m going into the jungle,’ he said.

‘I don’t care.’

In the ravening desire that possessed her she forgot her morbid fear of the jungle. She recked nothing of snakes and wild beasts. She did not mind the branches that hit her face or the creepers that entangled her feet. For a month Neil had explored all that part of the forest and he knew every yard of it. He told himself grimly that he’d teach her to come with him. He forced his way through the undergrowth with rapid strides; she followed him, stumbling but determined; he crashed on, blind with rage, and she crashed after him. She talked; he did not listen to what she said. She besought him to have pity on her.

She bemoaned her fate. She made herself humble. She wept and wrung her hands. She tried to cajole him. The words poured from her lips in an unceasing stream. She was like a mad woman. At last in a little clearing he stopped suddenly and turning round faced her.

‘This is impossible,’ he cried. ‘I’m fed up. When Angus comes back I must tell him I’ve got to go. I shall go back to Kuala Solor tomorrow morning and go home.’

‘He won’t let you go, he wants you. He finds you invaluable.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll fake up something.’

‘What?’

He mistook her.

‘Oh, you needn’t be frightened, I shan’t tell him the truth. You can break his heart if you want to; I’m not going to.’

‘You worship him, don’t you? That dull, phlegmatic man.’

‘He’s worth a hundred of you.’

‘It would be rather funny if I told him you’d gone because I wouldn’t yield to your advances.’

He gave a slight start and looked at her to see if she was serious. ‘Don’t be such a fool. You don’t think he’d believe that, do you? He knows it would never occur to me.’

‘Don’t be too sure.’

She had spoken carelessly, with no particular intention other than to continue the argument, but she saw that he was frightened and some instinct of cruelty made her press the advantage.

‘Do you expect mercy from me? You’ve humiliated me beyond endurance.

You’ve treated me like dirt. I swear that if you make any suggestion of going I shall go straight to Angus and say that you took advantage of his absence to try and assault me.’

‘I can deny it. After all it’s only your word against mine.’

‘Yes, but my word’ll count. I can prove what I say.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I bruise easily. I can show him the bruise where you struck me. And look at your hand.’ He turned and gave it a sudden glance. ‘How did those teeth marks get there?’

He stared at her stupidly. He had gone quite pale. How could he explain that bruise and that scar? If he was forced to in self–defence he could tell the truth, but was it likely that Angus would believe it? He worshipped Darya. He would take her word against anyone’s. What monstrous ingratitude it would seem for all Munro’s kindness and what treachery in return for so much confidence! He would think him a filthy skunk and from his standpoint with justice. That was what shattered him, the thought that Munro, for whom he would willingly have laid down his life, should think ill of him. He was so unhappy that tears, unmanly tears that he hated, came to his eyes. Darya saw that he was broken.

She exulted. She was paying him back for the misery he had made her suffer.

She held him now. He was in her power. She savoured her triumph, and in the midst of her anguish laughed in her heart because he was such a fool. At that moment she did not know whether she loved or despised him.

‘Now will you be good?’ she said.

He gave a sob and blindly, with a sudden instinct of escape from that abominable woman, took to his heels and ran as hard as he could. He plunged through the jungle, like a wounded animal, not looking where he was going, till he was out of breath. Then, panting, he stopped. He took out his handkerchief and wiped away the sweat that was pouring into his eyes and blinding him. He was exhausted and he sat down to rest.

‘I must take care I don’t get lost,’ he said to himself.

That was the least of his troubles, but all the same he was glad that he had a pocket compass, and he knew in which direction he must go. He heaved a deep sigh and rose wearily to his feet. He started walking. He watched his way and with another part of his mind miserably asked himself what he should do. He was convinced that Darya would do what she had threatened. They were to be another three weeks in that accursed place. He dared not go; he dared not stay.

His mind was in a whirl. The only thing was to get back to camp and think it out quietly. In about a quarter of an hour he came to a spot that he recognized.

In an hour he was back. He flung himself miserably into a chair. And it was Angus who filled his thoughts. His heart bled for him. Neil saw now all sorts of things that before had been dark to him. They were revealed to him in a flash of bitter insight. He knew why the women at Kuala Solor were so hostile to Darya and why they looked at Angus so strangely. They treated him with a sort of affectionate levity. Neil thought it was because Angus was a man of science and so in their foolish eyes somewhat absurd. He knew now it was because they were sorry for him and at the same time found him ridiculous. Darya had made him the laughing–stock of the community. If ever there was a man who hadn’t deserved ill usage at a woman’s hands it was he. Suddenly Neil gasped and began to tremble all over. It had suddenly occurred to him that Darya did not know her way through the jungle; in his anguish he had hardly been conscious of where they went. Supposing she could not find her way home? She would be terrified. He remembered the ghastly story Angus had told them of being lost in the forest. His first instinct was to go back and find her, and he sprang to his feet. Then a fierce anger seized him. No, let her shift for herself. She had gone of her own free will. Let her find her own way back. She was an abominable woman and deserved all that might come to her. Neil threw back his head defiantly, a frown of indignation on his smooth young brow, and clenched his hands. Courage. He made up his mind. It would be better for Angus if she never returned. He sat down and began trying to mount a skin of a Mountain Trogon. But the Trogon has a skin like wet tissue–paper and his hands trembled. He tried to apply his mind to the work he was doing, but his thoughts fluttered desperately, like moths in a trap, and he could not control them. What was happening over there in the jungle? What had she done when he suddenly bolted? Every now and then, against his will, he looked up. At any moment she might appear in the clearing and walk calmly up to the house. He was not to blame. It was the hand of God. He shuddered. Storm clouds were gathering in the sky and night fell quickly.

Just after dusk Munro arrived.

‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be a hell of a storm.’

He was in great spirits. He had come upon a fine plateau, with lots of water, from which there was a magnificent view to the sea. He had found two or three rare butterflies and a flying squirrel. He was full of plans to move the camp to his new place. All about it he had seen abundant evidence of animal life.

Presently he went into the house to take off his heavy walking boots. He came out at once.

‘Where’s Darya?’

Neil stiffened himself to behave with naturalness.

‘Isn’t she in her room?’

‘No. Perhaps she’s gone down to the servants’ quarters for something.’ He walked down the steps and strolled a few yards.

‘Darya,’ he called. ‘Darya.’ There was no answer. ‘Boy.’

A Chinese servant came running up and Angus asked him where his mistress was. He did not know. He had not seen her since tiffin.

‘Where can she be?’ asked Munro, coming back, puzzled.

He went to the back of the house and shouted.

‘She can’t have gone out. There’s nowhere to go. When did you see her last,

Neil?’

‘I went out collecting after tiffin. I’d had a rather unsatisfactory morning and I thought I’d try my luck again.’

‘Strange.’

They hunted everywhere round the camp. Munro thought she might have made herself comfortable somewhere and gone to sleep.

‘It’s too bad of her to frighten one like this.’

The whole party joined in the search. Munro began to grow alarmed. ‘It’s not possible that she should have gone for a stroll in the jungle and lost her way. She’s never moved more than a hundred yards from the house to the best of my knowledge since we’ve been here.’

Neil saw the fear in Munro’s eyes and looked down.

‘We’d better get everyone along and start hunting. There’s one thing, she can’t be far. She knows that if you get lost the best thing is to stay where you are and wait for people to come and find you. She’ll be scared out of her wits, poor thing.’

He called out the Dyak hunters and told the Chinese servants to bring lanterns. He fired his gun as a signal. They separated into two parties, one under Munro, the other under Neil, and went down the two rough paths that in the course of the month they had made in their comings and goings. It was arranged that whoever found Darya should fire three shots in quick succession.

Neil walked with his face stern and set. His conscience was clear. He seemed to bear in his hands the decree of immanent justice. He knew that Darya would never be found. The two parties met. It was not necessary to look at Munro’s face. He was distracted. Neil felt like a surgeon who is forced to perform a dangerous operation without assistance or appliances to save the life of someone he loves. It behoved him to be firm.

‘She could never have got so far as this,’ said Munro. ‘We must go back and beat the jungle within the radius of a mile from the house inch by inch. The only explanation is that she was frightened by something or fainted or was stung by a snake.’

Neil did not answer. They started out again and, making lines, combed the undergrowth. They shouted. Every now and then they fired a gun and listened for a faint call in answer. Birds of the night flew with a whirring of wings, frightened, as they advanced with their lanterns; and now and then they half saw, half guessed at an animal, deer, boar, or rhino, that fled at their approach.

The storm broke suddenly. A great wind blew and then the lightning rent the darkness, like a scream of a woman in pain, and the tortured flashes, quick, quick, one on the heels of the other, like demon dancers in a frantic reel, wriggled down the night. The horror of the forest was revealed in an unearthly day. The thunder crashed down the sky in huge rollers, peal upon peal, like vast, primeval waves dashing against the shores of eternity. That fearful din hurtled through space as though sound had size and weight. The rain pelted in fierce torrents. Rocks and gigantic trees came tumbling down the mountain.

The tumult was awful. The Dyak hunters cowered, gibbering in terror of the angry spirits who spoke in the storm, but Munro urged them on. The rain fell all night, with lightning and thunder, and did not cease till dawn. Wet through and shivering they returned to the camp. They were exhausted. When they had eaten Munro meant to resume the desperate search. But he knew that it was hopeless. They would never see her alive again. He flung himself down wearily.

His face was tired and white and anguished.

‘Poor child. Poor child.’

The Plays

Maugham studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. During his year in Heidelberg, Maugham met and had a sexual affair with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. He also wrote his first book there, a biography of Giacomo Meyerbeer, an opera composer.

A MAN OF HONOUR

CONTENTS

GENERAL PREFACE

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

TO

GERALD KELLY

“Ich übersah meine Sache und wusste

wohin ich wollte.”

Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe.

GENERAL PREFACE

For Clisthenes, son of Aristonymus, son of Myron, son of Andreas, had a daughter whose name was Agarista: her he resolved to give in marriage to the man whom he should find the most accomplished of all the Greeks. When therefore the Olympian games were being celebrated, Clisthenes, being victorious in them in the chariot race, made a proclamation; “that whoever of the Greeks deemed himself worthy to become the son-in-law of Clisthenes, should come to Sicyon on the sixtieth day, or even before; since Clisthenes had determined on the marriage in a year, reckoning from the sixtieth day.” Thereupon such of the Greeks as were puffed up with themselves and their country, came as suitors; and Clisthenes, having made a race-course and palæstra for them, kept it for this very purpose. From Italy, accordingly, came Smindyrides, son of Hippocrates, a Sybarite, who more than any other man reached the highest pitch of luxury, (and Sybaris was at that time in a most flourishing condition;) and Damasus of Siris, son of Amyris called the Wise: these came from Italy. From the Ionian gulf, Amphimnestus, son of Epistrophus, an Epidamnian; he came from the Ionian gulf. An Ætolian came, Males, brother of that Titormus who surpassed the Greeks in strength, and fled from the society of men to the extremity of the Ætolian territory. And from Peloponnesus, Leocedes, son of Pheidon, tyrant of the Argives, a decendant of that Pheidon, who introduced measures among the Peloponnesians, and was the most insolent of all the Greeks, who having removed the Elean umpires, himself regulated the games at Olympia; his son accordingly came. And Amiantus, son of Lycurgus, an Arcadian from Trapezus; and an Azenian from the city of Pæos, Laphanes, son of Euphorion, who, as the story is told in Arcadia, received the Dioscuri in his house, and after that entertained all men; and an Elean, Onomastus, son of Agæus: these accordingly came from the Peloponnesus itself. From Athens there came Megacles, son of Alcmæon, the same who had visited Crœsus, and another, Hippoclides, son of Tisander, who surpassed the Athenians in wealth and beauty. From Eretria, which was flourishing at that time, came Lysanias; he was the only one from Eubœa. And from Thessaly there came, of the Scopades, Diactorides a Cranonian; and from the Molossi, Alcon. So many were the suitors. When they had arrived on the appointed day, Clisthenes made inquiries of their country, and the family of each; then detaining them for a year, he made trial of their manly qualities, their dispositions, learning, and morals; holding familiar intercourse with each separately, and with all together, and leading out to the gymnasia such of them as were younger; but most of all he made trial of them at the banquet; for as long as he detained them, he did this throughout, and at the same time entertained them magnificently. And somehow of all the suitors those that had come from Athens pleased him most, and of these Hippoclides, son of Tisander, was preferred both on account of his manly qualities, and because he was distantly related to the Cypselidæ in Corinth. When the day appointed for the consummation of the marriage arrived, and for the declaration of Clisthenes himself, whom he would choose of them all, Clisthenes, having sacrificed a hundred oxen, entertained both the suitors themselves and all the Sicyonians; and when they had concluded the feast, the suitors had a contest about music, and any subject proposed for conversation. As the drinking went on, Hippoclides, who much attracted the attention of the rest, ordered the flute-player to play a dance; and when the flute-player obeyed, he began to dance: and he danced, probably so as to please himself; but Clisthenes, seeing it, beheld the whole matter with suspicion. Afterwards, Hippoclides, having rested awhile, ordered some one to bring in a table; and when the table came in, he first danced Laconian figures on it, and then Attic ones; and in the third place, having leant his head on the table he gesticulated with his legs. But Clisthenes, when he danced the first and second time, revolted from the thought of having Hippoclides for his son-in-law, on account of his dancing and want of decorum, yet restrained himself, not wishing to burst out against him; but when he saw him gesticulating with his legs, he was no longer able to restrain himself, and said: “Son of Tisander, you have danced away your marriage.” But Hippoclides answered: “Hippoclides cares not.” Hence this answer became a proverb. (Herodotus VI. 126, Cary’s Translation.)

CHARACTERS

This play was first performed by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre on February 22, 1903, with the following cast:

Basil Kent

H. Granville Barker

Jenny Bush

Winifred Fraser

James Bush

O. B. Clarence

John Halliwell

Dennis Eadie

Mabel

Gertrude Burnett

Hilda Murray

Mabel Terry-Lewis

Robert Brackley

Nigel Playfair

Mrs. Griggs

Henrietta Cowen

Fanny

Gertrude de Burgh

Butler

A. Bowyer

CHARACTERS

Basil Kent

Jenny Bush

James Bush

John Halliwell

Mabel

Hilda Murray

Robert Brackley

Mrs. Griggs

Fanny

Butler

Time: The Present Day.

Act I — Basil’s lodgings in Bloomsbury.

Acts II and IV — The drawing-room of Basil’s house at Putney.

Act III — Mrs. Murray’s house in Charles Street.

The Performing Rights of this Play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

A MAN OF HONOUR

THE FIRST ACT

Sitting-room of Basil’s Lodgings in Bloomsbury.

In the wall facing the auditorium, two windows with little iron balconies, giving a view of London roofs. Between the windows, against the wall, is a writing-desk littered with papers and books. On the right is a door, leading into the passage; on the left a fire-place with arm-chairs on either side; on the chimney-piece various smoking utensils. There are numerous bookshelves filled with books; while on the walls are one or two Delft plates, etchings after Rossetti, autotypes of paintings by Fra Angelico and Botticelli. The furniture is simple and inexpensive, but there is nothing ugly in the room. It is the dwelling-place of a person who reads a great deal and takes pleasure in beautiful things.

Basil Kent is leaning back in his chair, with his feet on the writing-table, smoking a pipe and cutting the pages of a book. He is a very good-looking man of six-and-twenty, clean-shaven, with a delicate face and clear-cut features. He is dressed in a lounge-suit.

[There is a knock at the door.

Basil.

Come in.

Mrs. Griggs.

Did you ring, sir?

Basil.

Yes. I expect a lady to tea. And there’s a cake that I bought on my way in.

Mrs. Griggs.

Very well, sir.

[She goes out, and immediately comes in with a

tray on which are two cups, sugar, milk,

&c.

Basil.

Oh, Mrs. Griggs, I want to give up these rooms this day week. I’m going to be married. I’m sorry to leave you. You’ve made me very comfortable.

Mrs. Griggs.

[With a sigh of resignation.] Ah, well, sir, that’s lodgers all over. If they’re gents they get married; and if they’re ladies they ain’t respectable.

[A ring is heard.

Basil.

There’s the bell, Mrs. Griggs. I dare say it’s the lady I expect. If any one else comes, I’m not at home.

Mrs. Griggs.

Very well, sir.

[She goes out, and Basil occupies himself for a

moment in putting things in order. Mrs.

Griggs, opening the door, ushers in the

new-comers.

Mrs. Griggs.

If you please, sir.

[She goes out again, and during the next few

speeches brings two more cups and the tea.

[Mabel and Hilda enter, followed by John

Halliwell. Basil going towards them

very cordially, half stops when he notices

who they are; and a slight expression of

embarrassment passes over his face. But

he immediately recovers himself and is

extremely gracious. Hilda Murray is a

tall, handsome woman, self-possessed and

admirably gowned. Mabel Halliwell is

smaller, pretty rather than beautiful,

younger than her sister, vivacious, very

talkative, and somewhat irresponsible.

John is of the same age as Basil, good-humoured,

neither handsome nor plain

blunt of speech and open.

Basil.

[Shaking hands.] How d’you do?

Mabel.

Look pleased to see us, Mr. Kent.

Basil.

I’m perfectly enchanted.

Hilda.

You did ask us to come and have tea with you, didn’t you?

Basil.

I’ve asked you fifty times. Hulloa, John! I didn’t see you.

John.

I’m the discreet husband, I keep in the background.

Mabel.

Why don’t you praise me instead of praising yourself? People would think it so much nicer.

John.

On the contrary, they’d be convinced that when we were alone I beat you. Besides, I couldn’t honestly say that you kept in the background.

Hilda.

[To Basil.] I feel rather ashamed at taking you unawares.

Basil.

I was only slacking. I was cutting a book.

Mabel.

That’s ever so much more fun than reading it, isn’t it? [She catches sight of the tea things.] Oh, what a beautiful cake — and two cups! [She looks at him, questioning.]

Basil.

[A little awkwardly.] Oh — I always have an extra cup in case some one turns up, you know.

Mabel.

How unselfish! And do you always have such expensive cake?

Hilda.

[With a smile, remonstrating.] Mabel!

Mabel.

Oh, but I know them well, and I love them dearly. They cost two shillings at the Army and Navy Stores, but I can’t afford them myself.

John.

I wish you’d explain why we’ve come, or Basil will think I’m responsible.

Mabel.

[Lightly.] I’ve been trying to remember ever since we arrived. You say it, Hilda; you invented it.

Hilda.

[With a laugh.] Mabel, I’ll never take you out again. They’re perfectly incorrigible, Mr. Kent.

Basil.

[To John and Mabel, smiling.] I don’t know why you’ve come. Mrs. Murry has promised to come and have tea with me for ages.

Mabel.

[Pretending to feel injured.] Well, you needn’t turn me out the moment we arrive. Besides, I refuse to go till I’ve had a piece of that cake.

Basil.

Well, here’s the tea! [Mrs. Griggs brings it in as he speaks. He turns to Hilda.] I wish you’d pour it out. I’m so clumsy.

Hilda.

[Smiling at him affectionately.] I shall be delighted.

[She proceeds to do so, and the conversation goes

on while Basil hands Mabel tea and cake.

John.

I told them it was improper for more than one woman at a time to call at a bachelor’s rooms, Basil.

Basil.

If you’d warned me I’d have made the show a bit tidier.

Mabel.

Oh, that’s just what we didn’t want. We wanted to see the Celebrity at Home, without lime-light.

Basil.

[Ironically.] You’re too flattering.

Mabel.

By the way, how is the book?

Basil.

Quite well, thanks.

Mabel.

I always forget to ask how it’s getting on.

Basil.

On the contrary, you never let slip an opportunity of making kind inquiries.

Mabel.

I don’t believe you’ve written a word of it.

Hilda.

Nonsense, Mabel. I’ve read it.

Mabel.

Oh, but you’re such a monster of discretion.... Now I want to see your medals, Mr. Kent.

Basil.

[Smiling.] What medals?

Mabel.

Don’t be coy! You know I mean the medals they gave you for going to the Cape.

Basil.

[Gets them from a drawer, and with a smile hands them to Mabel.] If you really care to see them, here they are.

Mabel.

[Taking one.] What’s this?

Basil.

Oh, that’s just the common or garden South African medal.

Mabel.

And the other one?

Basil.

That’s the D.S.M.

Mabel.

Why didn’t they give you the D.S.O.?

Basil.

Oh, I was only a trooper, you know. They only give the D.S.O. to officers.

Mabel.

And what did you do to deserve it?

Basil.

[Smiling.] I really forget.

Hilda.

It’s given for distinguished service in the field, Mabel.

Mabel.

I knew. Only I wanted to see if Mr. Kent was modest or vain.

Basil.

[With a smile, taking the medals from her and putting them away.] How spiteful of you!

Mabel.

John, why didn’t you go to the Cape, and do heroic things?

John.

I confined my heroism to the British Isles. I married you, my angel.

Mabel.

Is that funny or vulgar?

Basil.

[Laughing.] Are there no more questions you want to ask me, Mrs. Halliwell?

Mabel.

Yes, I want to know why you live up six flights of stairs.

Basil.

[Amused.] For the view, simply and solely.

Mabel.

But, good heavens, there is no view. There are only chimney-pots.

Basil.

But they’re most æsthetic chimney-pots. Do come and look, Mrs. Murray. [Basil and Hilda approach one of the windows, and he opens it.] And at night they’re so mysterious. They look just like strange goblins playing on the house-tops. And you can’t think how gorgeous the sunsets are: sometimes, after the rain, the slate roofs glitter like burnished gold. [To Hilda.] Often I think I couldn’t have lived without my view, it says such wonderful things to me. [Turning to Mabel gaily.] Scoff, Mrs. Halliwell, I’m on the verge of being sentimental.

Mabel.

I was wondering if you’d made that up on the spur of the moment, or if you’d fished it out of an old note-book.

Hilda.

[With a look at Basil.] May I go out?

Basil.

Yes, do come.

[Hilda and Basil step out on the balcony,

whereupon John goes to Mabel and tries

to steal a kiss from her.

Mabel.

[Springing up.] Go away, you horror!

John.

Don’t be silly. I shall kiss you if I want to.

[She laughing, walks round the sofa while he pursues her.

Mabel.

I wish you’d treat life more seriously.

John.

I wish you wouldn’t wear such prominent hats.

Mabel.

[As he puts his arm round her waist.] John, some body’ll see us.

John.

Mabel, I command you to let yourself be kissed.

Mabel.

How much will you give me?

John.

Sixpence.

Mabel.

[Slipping away from him.] I can’t do it for less than half-a-crown.

John.

[Laughing.] I’ll give you two shillings.

Mabel.

[Coaxing.] Make it two-and-three.

[He kisses her.

John.

Now come and sit down quietly.

Mabel.

[Sitting down by his side.] John, you mustn’t make love to me. It would look so odd if they came in.

John.

After all, I am your husband.

Mabel.

That’s just it. If you wanted to make love to me you ought to have married somebody else. [He puts his arm round her waist.] John, don’t, I’m sure they’ll come in.

John.

I don’t care if they do.

Mabel.

[Sighing.] John, you do love me?

John.

Yes.

Mabel.

And you won’t ever care for anybody else?

John.

No.

Mabel.

[In the same tone.] And you will give me that two-and-threepence, won’t you?

John.

Mabel, it was only two shillings.

Mabel.

Oh, you cheat!

John.

[Getting up.] I’m going out on the balcony. I’m passionately devoted to chimney-pots.

Mabel.

No, John, I want you.

John.

Why?

Mabel.

Isn’t it enough for me to say I want you for you to hurl yourself at my feet immediately?

John.

Oh, you poor thing, can’t you do without me for two minutes?

Mabel.

Now you’re taking a mean advantage. It’s only this particular two minutes that I want you. Come and sit by me like a nice, dear boy.

John.

Now what have you been doing that you shouldn’t?

Mabel.

[Laughing.] Nothing. But I want you to do something for me.

John.

Ha, ha! I thought so.

Mabel.

It’s merely to tie up my shoe. [She puts out her foot.]

John.

Is that all — honour bright?

Mabel.

[Laughing.] Yes. [John kneels down.]

John.

But, my good girl, it’s not undone.

Mabel.

Then, my good boy, undo it and do it up again.

John.

[Starting up.] Mabel, are we playing gooseberry — at our time of life?

Mabel.

[Ironically.] Oh, you are clever! Do you think Hilda would have climbed six flights of stairs unless Love had lent her wings?

John.

I wish Love would provide wings for the chaperons as well.

Mabel.

Don’t be flippant. It’s a serious matter.

John.

My dear girl, you really can’t expect me to play the heavy father when we’ve only been married six months. It would be almost improper.

Mabel.

Don’t be horrid, John.

John.

It isn’t horrid, it’s natural history.

Mabel.

[Primly.] I was never taught it. It’s not thought nice for young girls to know.

John.

Why didn’t you tell me that Hilda was fond of Basil! Does he like her?

Mabel.

I don’t know. I expect that’s precisely what she’s asking him.

John.

Mabel, do you mean to say you brought me here, an inoffensive, harmless creature, for your sister to propose to a pal of mine? It’s an outrage.

Mabel.

She’s doing nothing of the sort.

John.

You needn’t look indignant. You can’t deny that you proposed to me.

Mabel.

I can, indeed. If I had I should never have taken such an unconscionably long time about it.

John.

I wonder why Hilda wants to marry poor Basil!

Mabel.

Well, Captain Murray left her five thousand a year, and she thinks Basil Kent a genius.

John.

There’s not a drawing-room in Regent’s Park or in Bayswater that hasn’t got its tame genius. I don’t know if Basil Kent is much more than very clever.

Mabel.

Anyhow, I’m sure it’s a mistake to marry geniuses. They’re horribly bad-tempered, and they invariably make love to other people’s wives.

John.

Hilda always has gone in for literary people. That’s the worst of marrying a cavalryman, it leads you to attach so much importance to brains.

Mabel.

Yes, but she needn’t marry them. If she wants to encourage Basil let her do it from a discreet distance. Genius always thrives best on bread and water and platonic attachments. If Hilda marries him he’ll only become fat and ugly and bald-headed and stupid.

John.

Why, then he’ll make an ideal Member of Parliament.

[Basil and Hilda come into the room again.

Mabel.

[Maliciously.] Well, what have you been talking about?

Hilda.

[Acidly.] The weather and the crops, Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses.

Mabel.

[Raising her eyebrows.] Oh!

Hilda.

It’s getting very late, Mabel. We really must be going.

Mabel.

[Getting up.] And I’ve got to pay at least twelve calls. I hope every one will be out.

Hilda.

People are so stupid, they’re always in when you call.

Mabel.

[Holding out her hand to Basil.] Good-bye.

Hilda.

[Coldly.] Thanks so much, Mr. Kent. I’m afraid we disturbed you awfully.

Basil.

[Shaking hands with her.] I’ve been enchanted to see you. Good-bye.

Mabel.

[Lightly.] We shall see you again before you go to Italy, shan’t we?

Basil.

Oh, I’m not going to Italy now, I’ve changed all my plans.

Mabel.

[Giving John a look.] Oh! Well, good-bye. Aren’t you coming, John.

John.

No: I think I’ll stay and have a little chat with Basil, while you tread the path of duty.

Mabel.

Well, mind you’re in early. We’ve got a lot of disgusting people coming to dinner.

Hilda.

[With a smile.] Poor things! Who are they?

Mabel.

I forget who they are. But I know they’re loathsome. That’s why I asked them.

[Basil opens the door, and the two women go out.

John.

[Sitting down and stretching himself.] Now that we’ve got rid of our womankind let’s make ourselves comfortable. [Taking a pipe out of his pocket.] I think I’ll sample your baccy if you’ll pass it along.

Basil.

[Handing him the jar.] I’m rather glad you stayed, John. I wanted to talk to you.

John.

Ha! ha!

[Basil pauses a moment, while John looks at

him with amusement. He fills his pipe.

John.

[Lighting his pipe.] Nice gal, Hilda — ain’t she?

Basil.

[Enthusiastically.] Oh, I think she’s perfectly charming.... But what makes you say that?

John.

[Innocently.] Oh, I don’t know. Passed through my head.

Basil.

I say, I’ve got something to tell you, John.

John.

Well, don’t be so beastly solemn about it.

Basil.

[Smiling.] It’s a solemn thing.

John.

No, it ain’t. I’ve done it myself. It’s like a high dive. When you look down at the water it fairly takes your breath away, but after you’ve done it — it’s not so bad as you think. You’re going to be married, my boy.

Basil.

[With a smile.] How the deuce d’you know?

John.

[Gaily.] Saw it with mine own eyes. I congratulate you, and I give you my blessing. I’ll get a new frock-coat to give the lady away in.

Basil.

You?... [Suddenly understanding.] You’re on the wrong tack, old man. It’s not your sister-in-law I’m going to marry.

John.

Then why the dickens did you say it was?

Basil.

I never mentioned her name.

John.

H’m! I’ve made rather more than an average ass of myself, haven’t I?

Basil.

What on earth made you think...?

John.

[Interrupting.] Oh, it was only some stupid idea of my wife’s. Women are such fools, you know. And they think they’re so confoundedly sharp.

Basil.

[Disconcerted — looking at him.] Has Mrs. Murray...?

John.

No, of course not! Well, who the deuce are you going to marry?

Basil.

[Flushing.] I’m going to marry Miss Jenny Bush.

John.

Never heard of her. Is it any one I know?

Basil.

Yes, you knew her.

John.

[Searching his memory.] Bush ... Bush.... [With a smile.] The only Jenny Bush I’ve ever heard of was a rather pretty little barmaid in Fleet Street. Presumably you’re not going to marry her.

[John has said this quite lightly, not guessing for a moment that it can have anything to do with the person Basil proposes to marry. Then, since Basil makes no answer, John looks at him sharply: there is a silence while the two men stare at one another.

John.

Basil, it’s not the woman we used to know before you went out to the Cape?

Basil.

[Pale and nervous, but determined.] I’ve just told you that you used to know Jenny.

John.

Man alive, you’re not going to marry the barmaid of the “Golden Crown”?

Basil.

[Looking at him steadily.] Jenny was a barmaid at the “Golden Crown.”

John.

But, good Lord, Basil, what d’you mean? You’re not serious?

Basil.

Perfectly! We’re going to be married this day week.

John.

Are you stark, staring mad? Why on earth d’you want to marry Jenny Bush?

Basil.

That’s rather a delicate question, isn’t it? [With a smile.] Presumably because I’m in love with her.

John.

Well, that’s a silly ass of an answer.

Basil.

It’s quite the most obvious.

John.

Nonsense! Why, I’ve been in love with twenty girls, and I haven’t married them all. One can’t do that sort of thing in a country where they give you seven years for bigamy. Every public-house along the Thames from Barnes to Taplow is the tombstone of an unrequited passion of my youth. I loved ’em dearly, but I never asked ’em to marry me.

Basil.

[Tightening his lips.] I’d rather you didn’t make jokes about it, John.

John.

Are you sure you’re not making an ass of yourself? If you’ve got into a mess, surely we can get you out. Marriage, like hanging, is rather a desperate remedy.

[Basil is sitting down and moodily shrugs his shoulders. John goes up to him, and putting his hands on his friend’s shoulders looks into his eyes.

John.

Why are you going to marry her, Basil?

Basil.

[Springing up impatiently.] Damn you, why don’t you mind your own business?

John.

Don’t be a fool, Basil.

Basil.

Can’t I marry any one I choose? It’s nothing to you, is it? D’you suppose I care if she’s a barmaid?

[He walks up and down excitedly, while John with steady eyes watches him.

John.

Basil, old man, we’ve known each other a good many years now. Don’t you think you’d better trust me?

Basil.

[Setting his teeth.] What d’you want to know?

John.

Why are you going to marry her?

Basil.

[Abruptly, fiercely.] Because I must.

John.

[Nodding his head quietly.] I see.

[There is a silence. Then Basil, more calmly turns to John.

Basil.

D’you remember Jenny?

John.

Yes, rather. Why, we always lunched there in the old days.

Basil.

Well, after I came back from the Cape I began going there again. When I was out there she took it into her head to write me a letter, rather ill-spelt and funny — but I was touched that she thought of me. And she sent some tobacco and some cigarettes.

John.

My maiden aunt sent you a woollen comforter, but I’m not aware that in return you ever made her a proposal of marriage.

Basil.

And so in one way and another I came to know Jenny rather well. She appeared to get rather fond of me — and I couldn’t help seeing it.

John.

But she always pretended to be engaged to that scrubby little chap with false teeth who used to hang about the bar and make sheep’s eyes at her over innumerable Scotch-and-sodas.

Basil.

He made a scene because I took her out on one of her off-nights, and she broke it off. I couldn’t help knowing it was on my account.

John.

Well, and after that?

Basil.

After that I got into the habit of taking her to the play, and so on. And finally...!

John.

How long has this been going on?

Basil.

Several months.

John.

And then?

Basil.

Well, the other day she wired for me. I found her in the most awful state. She was simply crying her eyes out, poor thing. She’d been seedy and gone to the doctor’s. And he told her ...

John.

What you might really have foreseen.

Basil.

Yes.... She was quite hysterical. She said she didn’t know what to do nor where to go. And she was in an awful funk about her people. She said she’d kill herself.

John.

[Drily.] Naturally she was very much upset.

Basil.

I felt the only thing I could do was to ask her to marry me. And when I saw the joy that came into her poor, tear-stained face I knew I’d done the right thing.

[There is a pause. John walks up and down, then stops suddenly and turns to Basil.

John.

Have you thought that you, who’ve never needed to economise, will have to look at every shilling you spend? You’ve always been careless with your money, and what you’ve had you’ve flung about freely.

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] If I have to submit to nothing worse than going without a lot of useless luxuries, I really don’t think I need complain.

John.

But you can’t afford to keep a wife and an increasing family.

Basil.

I suppose I can make money as well as other men.

John.

By writing books?

Basil.

I shall set to work to earn my living at the Bar. Up till now I’ve never troubled myself.

John.

I don’t know any man less fit than you for the dreary waiting and the drudgery of the Bar.

Basil.

We shall see.

John.

And what d’you think your friends will say to your marrying — a barmaid?

Basil.

[Contemptuously.] I don’t care two straws for my friends.

John.

That’s pleasant for them. You know, men and women without end have snapped their fingers at society and laughed at it, and for a while thought they had the better of it. But all the time society was quietly smiling up its sleeve, and suddenly it put out an iron hand — and scrunched them up.

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] It only means that a few snobs will cut me.

John.

Not you — your wife.

Basil.

I’m not such a cad as to go to a house where I can’t take my wife.

John.

But you’re the last man in the world to give up these things. There’s nothing you enjoy more than going to dinner-parties and staying in country houses. Women’s smiles are the very breath of your nostrils.

Basil.

You talk of me as if I were a tame cat. I don’t want to brag, John, but after all, I’ve shown that I’m fit for something in this world. I went to the Cape because I thought it was my duty. I intend to marry Jenny for the same reason.

John.

[Seriously.] Will you answer me one question — on your honour?

Basil.

Yes.

John.

Are you in love with her?

Basil.

[After a pause.] No.

John.

[Passionately.] Then, by God, you have no right to marry her. A man has no right to marry a woman for pity. It’s a cruel thing to do. You can only end by making yourself and her entirely wretched.

Basil.

I can’t break the poor girl’s heart.

John.

You don’t know what marriage is. Even with two people who are devoted to one another, who have the same interests and belong to the same class, it’s sometimes almost unbearable. Marriage is the most terrible thing in the world unless passion makes it absolutely inevitable.

Basil.

My marriage is absolutely inevitable — for another reason.

John.

You talk as if such things had never happened before.

Basil.

Oh, I know, they happen every day. It’s no business of the man’s. And as for the girl, let her throw herself in the river. Let her go to the deuce, and be hanged to her.

John.

Nonsense. She can be provided for. It only needs a little discretion — and no one will be a ha’porth the wiser, nor she a ha’porth the worse.

Basil.

But it’s not a matter of people knowing. It’s a matter of honour.

John.

[Opening his eyes.] And where precisely did the honour come in when you...?

Basil.

Good heavens, I’m a man like any other. I have passions as other men have.

John.

[Gravely.] My dear Basil, I wouldn’t venture to judge you. But I think it’s rather late in the day to set up for a moralist.

Basil.

D’you think I’ve not regretted what I did? It’s easy enough afterwards to say that I should have resisted. The world would be a Sunday School if we were all as level-headed at night as we are next morning.

John.

[Shaking his head.] After all, it’s only a very regrettable incident due to your youth and — want of innocence.

Basil.

[With vehement seriousness.] I may have acted like a cur. I don’t know. I acted as I suppose every other man would. But now I have a plain duty before me, and, by God, I mean to do it.

John.

Don’t you realise that you’ve only one life and that mistakes are irreparable? People play with life as if it were a game of chess in which they can try this move and that, and when they get into a muddle, sweep the board clear and begin again.

Basil.

But life is a game of chess in which one is always beaten. Death sits on the other side of the board, and for every move he has a counter-move. And for all your deep-laid schemes he has a parry.

John.

But if at the end Death always mates you, the fight is surely worth the fighting. Don’t handicap yourself at the beginning by foolish quixotry. Life is so full. It has so much to offer, and you’re throwing away almost everything that makes it worth the trouble.

Basil.

[Gravely.] Jenny would kill herself if I didn’t marry her.

John.

You don’t seriously think she’d do that. People don’t commit suicide so easily, you know.

Basil.

You’ve thought of a great deal, John — you’ve not thought of the child. I can’t let the child skulk into the world like a thief. Let him come in openly and lawfully. And let him go through the world with an honest name. Good heavens, the world’s bad enough without fettering him all his life with a hideous stigma.

John.

Oh, my dear Basil ...

Basil.

[Interrupting.] You can bring forward a thousand objections, but nothing alters the fact that, under the circumstances, there’s only one way open to a man of honour.

John.

[Drily.] Well, it’s a way that may do credit to your heart, but scarcely to your understanding.

Basil.

I thought you’d see at once that I was doing the only possible thing.

John.

My dear Basil, you talk of pity, and you talk of duty, but are you sure there’s anything more in it than vanity? You’ve set yourself up on a sort of moral pinnacle. Are you sure you don’t admire your own heroism a little too much?

Basil.

[With a good-natured smile.] Does it look so petty as that in your eyes? After all, it’s only common morality.

John.

[Impatiently.] But, my dear chap, its absurd to act according to an unrealisable ideal in a world that’s satisfied with the second-rate. You’re tendering bank-notes to African savages, among whom cowrie shells are common coin.

Basil.

[Smiling.] I don’t know what you mean.

John.

Society has made its own decalogue, a code that’s just fit for middling people who are not very good and not very wicked. But Society punishes you equally if your actions are higher than its ideal or lower.

Basil.

Sometimes it makes a god of you when you’re dead.

John.

But it takes precious good care to crucify you when you’re alive.

[There is a knock at the door, and Mrs. Griggs comes in.

Mrs. Griggs.

Some more visitors, Sir.

Basil.

Show ’em in. [To John] It’s Jenny. She said she was coming to tea.

John.

[With a smile.] Oh, the cake was for her, was it? Would you like me to go?

Basil.

Not unless you choose. Do you suppose I’m ashamed?

John.

I thought, after all you’ve told me, you might not care for me to see her.

[Jenny Bush and her brother James come in. She is very pretty, with delicate features and a beautiful complexion: her fair hair is abundant and very elaborately arranged. She is dressed smartly, rather showily. It is the usual type of barmaid, or tea-girl, a shade more refined perhaps than the common run. Her manners are unobjectionable, but not those of a gentlewoman. James is a young man with clean-shaven face and a sharp expression. He is over-dressed in a very horsey manner, and is distinctly more vulgar than his sister. He talks English with a cockney accent, not invariably dropping his aitches, but only now and then. He is over cordial and over genial.

Jenny.

[Going up to Basil.] I’m awfully late, I couldn’t come before.

James.

[Jocosely.] Don’t mind me. Give ’im a kiss, old tart.

Jenny.

Oh, I brought my brother Jimmie to see you.

Basil.

[Shaking hands.] How d’you do?

James.

Nicely, thanks. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

Jenny.

[Looking at John and suddenly recognising him.]

Well, I never! If that isn’t old John Halliwell. I didn’t expect to see you. This is a treat.

John.

How d’you do?

Jenny.

What are you doing here?

John.

I’ve been having a cup of tea with Basil.

Jenny.

[Looking at the tea-things.] D’you always drink out of three cups at once?

John.

My wife has been here — and her sister.

Jenny.

Oh, I see. Fancy your being married. How d’you like it?

John.

All right, thanks.

[Basil pours out a cup of tea, and during the following speeches gives Jenny milk and sugar and cake.

James.

People say it wants a bit of gettin’ used to.

John.

Mr. Bush, you’re a philosopher.

James.

Well, I will say this for myself, you’d want to get up early in the morning to catch me nappin’. I didn’t catch your name.

John.

Halliwell.

James.

‘Alliwell?

John.

[Emphasising the H.] Halliwell.

James.

That’s what I say— ‘Alliwell. I knew a fellow in the meat trade called ‘Alliwell. Any relation?

John.

I don’t think so.

James.

Fine business ’e ‘ad too. There’s a rare lot of money to be made out of meat.

John.

I dare say.

Jenny.

[To John.] It is a long time since I’ve seen you. I suppose you’ve quietened down now you’re a married man. You were a hot ‘un when you was a bachelor.

James.

[Facetiously.] Don’t make ’im blush, Jenny. Accidents will ‘appen in the best regulated families. And boys will be boys, as they say in the Bible.

John.

I think I must be off, Basil.

James.

Well, I’ll be toddlin’ too. I only come in just to say ‘ow d’you do to my future brother-in-law. I’m a fellow as likes to be cordial. There’s no ‘aughtiness about me.

Basil.

[Politely, but not effusively.] Oh; won’t you stay and have some tea?

James.

No, thanks. I’m not much of an ‘and at tea; I leave that to females. I like something stronger myself.

Jenny.

[Remonstrating.] Jimmie!

Basil.

I have some whisky, Mr. Bush.

James.

Oh, blow the Mister and blow the Bush. Call me Jimmie. I can’t stand ceremony. The way I look on it is this. We’re both of us gentlemen. Now, mind you, I’m not a fellow to praise myself. But I will say this: I am a gentleman. That’s not self-praise, is it?

John.

Dear me, no. Mere statement of fact.

James.

Well, as I was saying, I know I’m a gentleman. It’s a thing you can’t ‘elp, so what’s the good of being proud about it? If I meet a chap in a pub, and he invites me to have a drink, I don’t ask him if he’s a Lord.

Basil.

But you just take it.

James.

Well, you’d do the same yourself, wouldn’t you?

Basil.

I dare say. But will you have a drink now?

James.

Oh, bless you, I know what it is to be engaged. I don’t want to disturb you canary-birds. Me and ‘Alliwell ‘ll go and have a gargle round the corner. I see you’ve got a public nice and ‘andy. [To John.] I suppose you’re not above goin’ in there now and again, eh?

Jenny.

[With a laugh.] He came into the “Golden Crown” every day of his life, and chance it!

John.

I’m afraid I’m in a great hurry.

James.

‘Ang it all, one’s always got time to have a drop of Scotch in this life.

Basil.

[To James, handing him the box.] Well, take a cigar with you.

James.

[Taking and examining one.] If you are so pressing. Villar y Villar.... What do they run you in a hundred?

Basil.

They were given to me, I really don’t know what they cost. [He lights a match.] Won’t you take the label off?

James.

Not if I know it. I don’t smoke a Villar y Villar every day, but when I do, I smoke it with the label on.

Jenny.

[Laughing.] Jimmie, you are a caution!

John.

[Shaking hands with Jenny.] Good-bye and — my best wishes.

Jenny.

Thanks. You didn’t expect I’d marry Basil when I used to mix cocktails for you in the “Golden Crown,” did you?

James.

Come on, ‘Alliwell. Don’t stop there gassing. You’ll only disturb the canary-birds. So long, old tart, see you later. Ta-ta, Basil, old man.

Basil.

Good-bye — Jimmie.

[John Halliwell and James go out, Jenny goes up to Basil impulsively.

Jenny.

Kiss me. [He kisses her, smiling.] There! Now I can sit down quietly and talk. How d’you like my brother?

Basil.

Oh — I hardly know him yet. He seems very amiable.

Jenny.

He’s not a bad sort when you know him. He’s just like my mother.

Basil.

[Raising his brows.] Is he? And — is your father like that too?

Jenny.

Well, you know, Pa hasn’t had the education that Jimmie’s had. Jimmie was at a boarding-school at Margate.

Basil.

Was he?

Jenny.

You were at a boarding-school, too, weren’t you?

Basil.

[Smiling.] Yes, I was at Harrow.

Jenny.

Ah, you don’t get the fine air at Harrow that you get at Margate.

Basil.

Shall I put down your cup?

Jenny.

[Placing it on a table.] Oh, thanks, it’s all right. Come and sit by me, Basil.

Basil.

[Seating himself on the arm of her chair.] There.

Jenny.

[Taking his hand.] I’m so glad we’re alone. I should like to be alone with you all my life. You do love me, don’t you, Basil?

Basil.

Yes.

Jenny.

Much?

Basil.

[Smiling.] Yes.

Jenny.

I’m so glad. Oh, I don’t know what I should do if you didn’t love me. If you hadn’t been kind to me I should have thrown myself in the river.

Basil.

What nonsense you talk.

Jenny.

I mean it.

[He passes his hand affectionately over her hair.

Jenny.

Oh, you are so good, Basil. I’m so proud of you. I shall be so proud to be your wife.

Basil.

[Gravely.] Don’t think too well of me Jenny.

Jenny.

[With a laugh.] I’m not afraid of that. You’re brave and you’re clever and you’re a professional man, and you’re everything.

Basil.

You foolish child.

Jenny.

[Passionately.] I can’t tell you how much I love you.

Basil.

I’ll try with all my might to be a good husband to you, Jenny.

[She flings her arms round his neck and they

kiss one another.

End of the First Act.

THE SECOND ACT

An Interval of One Year Elapses Between Acts I. and II.

The drawing-room in Basil’s house at Putney. In the wall facing the auditorium there is a door leading from the passage. On the right two doors lead into bedrooms, and opposite these is a bay window. The same pictures and plates decorate the walls as in the preceding Scene; the writing-table is between the side doors. Jenny’s influence is noticeable in the cushions in the wicker-work arm-chairs, in the window curtains and portières of art serge, and in the huge chrysanthemums of the wall paper.

[Jenny is sewing while James Bush is lounging

in one of the arm chairs.

James.

Where’s his lordship this afternoon?

Jenny.

He’s gone out for a walk.

James.

[With a malevolent laugh.] That’s what he tells you, my dear.

Jenny.

[Looking up quickly.] Have you seen him anywhere?

James.

No, I can’t say I ‘ave. And if I ‘ad I wouldn’t boast about it.

Jenny.

[Insisting.] What did you mean then?

James.

Well, whenever I come here he’s out for a walk.... I say, old tart, could you oblige me with a couple of sovereigns till next Saturday?

Jenny.

[Pained to refuse.] Oh no, Jimmie, I can’t manage it. Basil made me promise I wouldn’t let you have any more.

James.

What! He made you promise that? — Ugh, the mean skinflint.

Jenny.

We’ve lent you so much, Jimmie. And ma’s had a lot, too.

James.

Well, look here, you can manage a sovereign, can’t you? You needn’t say anything about it.

Jenny.

I can’t really, Jimmie. I would if I could. But we’ve got a rare lot of debts worrying us, and the rent will be coming along next week.

James.

[Sulkily.] You can’t lend it me because you won’t. I should just like to know what Basil spends his money on.

Jenny.

He’s had a bad year — it’s not his fault. And I was so ill after the baby died, we had to pay the doctor nearly fifty pounds.

James.

[With a sneer.] Well, it was a wonderful fine thing you did when you married him, Jenny. And you thought you done precious well for yourself, too.

Jenny.

Jimmie, don’t!

James.

I can’t stick ’im at any price, and I don’t mind who knows it.

Jenny.

[Impetuously.] I won’t have you say anything against him.

James.

All right — keep your shirt in. I’m blowed if I know what you’ve got to stick up for him about. He don’t care much about you.

Jenny.

[Hastily.] How d’you know?

James.

Think I can’t see!

Jenny.

It’s not true. It’s not true.

James.

You can’t get round me, Jenny. I suppose you ‘aven’t been crying to-day?

Jenny.

[Flushing.] I had a headache.

James.

I know those sort of headaches.

Jenny.

We had a little tiff this morning. That’s why he went out.... Oh, don’t say he doesn’t care for me. I couldn’t live.

James.

[With a laugh.] Go along with you. Basil Kent ain’t the only pebble on the beach.

Jenny.

[Vehemently.] Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie, sometimes I don’t know which way to turn, I’m that unhappy. If the baby had only lived I might have kept my husband — I might have made him love me. [The sound is heard of a door being closed.] There’s Basil.

James.

Good luck to ’im.

Jenny.

Oh, Jimmie, take care not to say anything to make him angry.

James.

I’d just like to give ’im a piece of my mind.

Jenny.

Oh, Jimmie, don’t. It was my fault that we quarrelled this morning. I wanted to make him angry, and I nagged at him. Don’t let him see that I’ve said anything to you. I’ll see — I’ll see if I can’t send you a pound to-morrow, Jimmie.

James.

[Defiantly.] He’d better not start patronising me, because I won’t put up with it. I’m a gentleman, and I’m every bit as good as he is — if not better.

[Basil comes in, notices James, but does not

speak.

James.

Afternoon, Basil.

Basil.

[Indifferently.] You here again?

James.

Looks like it, don’t it.

Basil.

[Quietly.] I’m afraid it does.

James.

[Becoming more aggressive as the conversation proceeds.] Are you? I suppose I can come and see my own sister?

Basil.

I suppose it’s inevitable.

James.

Well?

Basil.

[Smiling.] Only I should be excessively grateful if you’d time your coming with my — with my going. And vice versa.

James.

That means you want me to get out, I reckon.

Basil.

You show unusual perspicacity, dear James.

James.

And who are you with your long words, I should like to know?

Basil.

[Blandly.] I? A person of not the least importance.

James.

[Angrily.] Well, I wouldn’t put on so much side if I was you.

Basil.

I observe that you have not acquired the useful art of being uncivil without being impertinent.

James.

Look ’ere, I’m not going to stand this. I’m as good as you are any day.

Basil.

That is a fact I should never dream of contradicting.

James.

[Indignantly.] Then what ‘ave you got to turn up your nose about, eh? What d’you mean by sneerin’ and snarlin’ at me when I come here?

Jenny.

[Nervously.] Jimmie, don’t!

Basil.

[With a smile.] You’re very eloquent, James. You should join a debating society.

James.

Yes, go on. That’s right. You seem to think I’m nobody. I should just like to know why you go on as if I was I don’t know what.

Basil.

[Abruptly.] Because I choose.

James.

You can bet anything you like I don’t come ’ere to see you.

Basil.

[Smiling acidly.] Then I have at least something to be thankful for.

James.

I’ve got a right to come here as much as anybody. I come to see my sister.

Basil.

Really, that’s very thoughtful of you. I was under the impression you generally came to borrow money.

James.

Throw that in my face now. I can’t ‘elp it if I’m out of work.

Basil.

Oh, I haven’t the least objection to your being out of work. All I protest against — and that very mildly — is that I should be expected to keep you. How much did you want to-day?

James.

I don’t want your dirty money.

Basil.

[With a laugh.] Have you already tried to borrow it from Jenny?

James.

No, I ‘aven’t.

Basil.

And she refused, I suppose.

James.

[Storming.] I tell you I don’t want your dirty money.

Basil.

Well, then, we’re both quite satisfied. You seemed to think that because I married Jenny I was bound to keep the whole gang of you for the rest of your lives. I’m sorry I can’t afford it. And you will kindly tell the rest of them that I’m sick and tired of forking out.

James.

I wonder you don’t forbid me your house while you’re about it.

Basil.

[Coolly.] You may come here when I’m not at home — if you behave yourself.

James.

I’m not good enough for you, I suppose?

Basil.

No, you’re not.

James.

[Angrily.] Ah, you’re a pretty specimen, you are. You mean skinflint!

Basil.

Don’t be abusive, James. It’s rude.

James.

I shall say what I choose.

Basil.

And please don’t talk so loud. It annoys me.

James.

[Malevolently.] I dare say you’d like to get me out of the way. But I mean to keep my eye on you.

Basil.

[Sharply.] What d’you mean by that?

James.

You know what I mean. Jenny has something to put up with, I lay.

Basil.

[Containing his anger.] You’ll have the goodness to leave the relations between Jenny and myself alone — d’you hear?

James.

Ha, that’s touched you up, has it? You think I don’t know what sort of a feller you are. I can just about see through two of you. And I know a good deal more about you than you think.

Basil.

[Contemptuously.] Don’t be foolish, James.

James.

[Sarcastic.] A nice thing Jenny did when she married you.

Basil.

[Recovering himself, with a smile.] Has she been telling you my numerous faults? [To Jenny.] You must have had plenty to talk about, my love.

Jenny.

[Who has been going on with her sewing, looking up now and then uneasily.] I haven’t said a word against you, Basil.

Basil.

[Turning his back on James.] Oh, my dear Jenny, if it amuses you, by all means discuss me with your brother and your sister and your father and your mother, and the whole crew of them.... I should be so dull if I had no faults.

Jenny.

[Anxiously.] Tell him I’ve not said anything against him, Jimmie.

James.

It’s not for want of something to say, I lay.

Basil.

[Over his shoulder.] I’m getting rather tired, brother James. I’d go, if I were you.

James.

[Very aggressively.] I shan’t go till I choose.

Basil.

[Turns round, smiling blandly.] Of course, we’re both Christians, dear James; and there’s a good deal of civilisation kicking about the world nowadays. But, notwithstanding, the last word is still with the strongest.

James.

What d’you mean by that?

Basil.

[Good-humouredly.] Merely that discretion is the better part of valour. They say that proverbs are the wealth of nations.

James.

[Indignantly.] That’s just the sort of thing you’d do — to ‘it a feller smaller than yourself.

Basil.

Oh, I wouldn’t hit you for worlds, brother James. I should merely throw you downstairs.

James.

[Making for the door.] I should just like to see you try it on.

Basil.

Don’t be silly, James. You know you wouldn’t like it at all.

James.

I’m not afraid of you.

Basil.

Of course not. But still — you’re not very muscular, are you?

James.

You coward!

Basil.

[Smiling.] Your repartees are not brilliant, James.

James.

[Standing at the door for safety’s sake.] I’ll pay you out before I’ve done.

Basil.

[Raising his eyebrows.] James, I told you to get out five minutes ago.

James.

I’m going. D’you think I want to stay ’ere? Good-bye, Jenny, I’m not going to stand being insulted by any one. [He goes out slamming the door.]

[Basil, smiling quietly, goes to his writing-table

and turns over some papers.

Basil.

The only compensation in brother James is that he sometimes causes one a little mild amusement.

Jenny.

You might at least be polite to him, Basil.

Basil.

I used up all my politeness six months ago.

Jenny.

After all, he is my brother.

Basil.

That is a fact I deplore with all my heart, I assure you.

Jenny.

I don’t know what’s wrong with him.

Basil.

Don’t you? It doesn’t matter.

Jenny.

I know he isn’t a Society man.

Basil.

[With a laugh.] No, he wouldn’t shine at duchesses tea-parties.

Jenny.

Well, he’s none the worse for that, is he?

Basil.

Not at all.

Jenny.

Then why d’you treat him as if he was a dog?

Basil.

My dear Jenny, I don’t.... I’m very fond of dogs.

Jenny.

Oh, you’re always sneering. Isn’t he as good as I am? And you condescended to marry me.

Basil.

[Coldly.] I really can’t see that because I married you I must necessarily take your whole family to my bosom.

Jenny.

Why don’t you like them? They’re honest and respectable.

Basil.

[With a little sigh of boredom.] My dear Jenny, we don’t choose our friends because they’re honest and respectable any more than we choose them because they change their linen daily.

Jenny.

They can’t help it if they’re poor.

Basil.

My dear, I’m willing to acknowledge that they have every grace and every virtue, but they rather bore me.

Jenny.

They wouldn’t if they were swells.

[Basil gives a short laugh, but does not answer;

and Jenny irritated, continues more

angrily.

Jenny.

And after all we’re not in such a bad position as all that. My mother’s father was a gentleman.

Basil.

I wish your mother’s son were.

Jenny.

D’you know what Jimmie says you are?

Basil.

I don’t vastly care. But if it pleases you very much you may tell me.

Jenny.

[Flushing angrily.] He says you’re a damned snob.

Basil.

Is that all? I could have invented far worse things than that to say of myself.... [With a change of tone.] You know, Jenny, it’s not worth while to worry ourselves about such trifles. One can’t force oneself to like people. I’m very sorry that I can’t stand your relations. Why on earth don’t you resign yourself and make the best of it?

Jenny.

[Vindictively.] You don’t think they’re good enough for you to associate with because they’re not in swell positions.

Basil.

My dear Jenny, I don’t in the least object to their being grocers and haberdashers. I only wish they’d sell us things at cost price.

Jenny.

Jimmie isn’t a grocer or a haberdasher. He’s an auctioneer’s clerk.

Basil.

[Ironically.] I humbly apologise. I thought he was a grocer, because last time he did us the honour of visiting us he asked how much a pound we paid for our tea and offered to sell us some at the same price.... But then he also offered to insure our house against fire and to sell me a gold mine in Australia.

Jenny.

Well, it’s better to make a bit as best one can than to.... [She stops.]

Basil.

[Smiling.] Go on. Pray don’t hesitate for fear of hurting my feelings.

Jenny.

[Defiantly.] Well, then, it’s better to do that than moon about like you do.

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] Really, even to please you, I’m afraid I can’t go about with little samples of tea in my pocket and sell my friends a pound or two when I call on them. Besides, I don’t believe they’d ever pay me.

Jenny.

[Scornfully.] Oh no, you’re a gentleman and a barrister and an author, and you couldn’t do anything to dirty those white hands that you’re so careful about, could you?

Basil.

[Looking at his hands, then up at Jenny.] And what is it precisely you want me to do?

Jenny.

Well, you’ve been at the Bar for five years. I should have thought you could make something after all that time.

Basil.

I can’t force the wily solicitor to give me briefs.

Jenny.

How do other fellows manage it?

Basil.

[With a laugh.] The simplest way, I believe, is to marry the wily solicitor’s daughter.

Jenny.

Instead of a barmaid?

Basil.

[Gravely.] I didn’t say that, Jenny.

Jenny.

[Passionately.] Oh no. You didn’t say it, but you hinted it. You never say anything, but you’re always hinting and insinuating — till you drive me out of my senses.

Basil.

[After a moment’s pause, gravely.] I’m very sorry if I hurt your feelings. I promise you I don’t mean to. I always try to be kind to you.

[He looks at Jenny, expecting her to say something

in forgiveness or in apology. But

she, shrugging her shoulders, looks down

sullenly at her work, without a word, and

begins again to sew. Then Basil, tightening

his lips, picks up writing materials and

goes towards the door.

Jenny.

[Looking up quickly.] Where are you going?

Basil.

[Stopping.] I have some letters to write.

Jenny.

Can’t you write them here?

Basil.

Certainly — if it pleases you.

Jenny.

Don’t you want me to see who you’re writing to?

Basil.

I haven’t the least objection to your knowing all about my correspondence.... And that’s fortunate, since you invariably make yourself acquainted with it.

Jenny.

Accuse me of reading your letters now.

Basil.

[With a smile.] You always leave my papers in such disorder after you’ve been to my desk.

Jenny.

You’ve got no right to say that.

[Basil pauses and looks at her steadily.

Basil.

Are you willing to swear that you don’t go to my desk when I’m away to read my letters? Come, Jenny, answer that question.

Jenny.

[Disturbed but forced by his glance to reply.] Well, I’m you’re wife, I have a right to know.

Basil.

[Bitterly.] You have such odd ideas about the duties of a wife, Jenny. They include reading my letters and following me in the street. But tolerance and charity and forbearance don’t seem to come in your scheme of things.

Jenny.

[Sullenly.] Why d’you want to write your letters elsewhere?

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] I thought I should be quieter.

Jenny.

I suppose I disturb you?

Basil.

It’s a little difficult to write when you’re talking.

Jenny.

Why shouldn’t I talk? D’you think I’m not good enough, eh? I should have thought I was more important than your letters.

[Basil does not answer.

Jenny.

[Angrily.] Am I your wife or not?

Basil.

[Ironically.] You have your marriage lines carefully locked up to prove it.

Jenny.

Then why don’t you treat me as your wife? You seem to think I’m only fit to see after the house and order the dinner and mend your clothes. And after that I can go and sit in the kitchen with the servant.

Basil.

[Moving again towards the door.] D’you think it’s worth while making a scene? We seem to have said all this before so many times.

Jenny.

[Interrupting him.] I want to have it out.

Basil.

[Bored.] We’ve been having it out twice a week for the last six months — and we’ve never got anywhere yet.

Jenny.

I’m not going to be always put upon, I’m your wife and I’m as good as you are.

Basil.

[With a thin smile.] Oh, my dear, if you’re going in for women’s rights, you may have my vote by all means. And you can plump for all the candidates at once if you choose.

Jenny.

You seem to think it’s a joke.

Basil.

[Bitterly.] Oh no, I promise you I don’t do that. It’s lasted too long. And God knows where it’ll end.... They say the first year of marriage is the worst; ours has been bad enough in all conscience.

Jenny.

[Aggressively.] And I suppose you think it’s my fault?

Basil.

Don’t you think we’re both more or less to blame?

Jenny.

[With a laugh.] Oh, I’m glad you acknowledge that you have something to do with it.

Basil.

I tried to make you happy.

Jenny.

Well, you haven’t succeeded very well. Did you think I was likely to be happy — when you leave me alone all day and half the night for your swell friends that I’m not good enough for?

Basil.

That’s not true. I hardly ever see any of my old friends.

Jenny.

Except Mrs. Murray, eh?

Basil.

I’ve seen Mrs. Murray perhaps a dozen times in the last year.

Jenny.

Oh, you needn’t tell me that. I know it. She’s a lady, isn’t she?

Basil.

[Ignoring the charge.] And my work takes me away from you. I can’t always be down here. Think how bored you’d be.

Jenny.

A precious lot of good your work does. You can’t earn enough money to keep us out of debt.

Basil.

[Good-humouredly.] We are in debt. But we share that very respectable condition with half the nobility and gentry in the kingdom. We’re neither of us good managers, and we’ve lived a bit beyond our means this year. But in future we’ll be more economical.

Jenny.

[Sullenly.] All the neighbours know that we’ve got bills with the tradesmen.

Basil.

[Acidly.] I’m sorry that you shouldn’t have made so good a bargain as you expected when you married me.

Jenny.

I wonder what you do succeed in? Your book was very successful, wasn’t it? You thought you were going to set the Thames on fire, and the book fell flat, flat, flat.

Basil.

[Recovering his good temper.] That is a fate which has befallen better books than mine.

Jenny.

It deserved it.

Basil.

Oh, I didn’t expect you to appreciate it. It isn’t given to all of us to write about wicked earls and beautiful duchesses.

Jenny.

Well, I wasn’t the only one. The papers praised it, didn’t they?

Basil.

The unanimity of their blame was the only thing that consoled me.

Jenny.

And one of them advised you to study an English grammar. And you’re the fine gentleman who looks down on poor things like us!

Basil.

I often wonder if the reviewer who abuses you for a printer’s error realises what pleasure he causes the wife of your bosom.

Jenny.

Oh, I’ve learnt to know you so well this last six months — since the baby died. You’ve got no cause to set yourself up on a pedestal.

Basil.

[With a laugh.] My dear Jenny, I never pretended to be a golden idol.

Jenny.

I know what you are now. And I was such a fool as to think you a hero. You’re merely a failure. In everything you try you’re a miserable failure.

Basil.

[With a slight sigh.] Perhaps you’re right, Jenny.

[Basil walks up and down; and then, stopping,

looks at her for a moment meditatively.

Basil.

I sometimes wonder whether we shouldn’t be happier — if we lived apart.

Jenny.

[With a start.] What d’you mean?

Basil.

We don’t seem able to get on very well. And I see no chance of things going any better.

Jenny.

[With staring eyes.] D’you mean to say you want to separate?

Basil.

I think it might be better for both of us — at least for a time. Perhaps later on we might try again.

Jenny.

And what’ll you do?

Basil.

I should go abroad for a while.

Jenny.

With Mrs. Murray. Is that it? You want to go away with her.

Basil.

[Impatiently.] No. Of course not.

Jenny.

I don’t believe it. You’re in love with her.

Basil.

You’ve got no right to say that.

Jenny.

Haven’t I? I suppose I must shut my eyes and say nothing. You’re in love with her. D’you think I’ve not seen it in these months? That’s why you want to leave me.

Basil.

It’s impossible for us to live together. We shall never agree, and we shall never be happy. For God’s sake let us separate and have done with it.

Jenny.

You’re sick of me. You’ve had all you want out of me, and now I can go. The fine lady comes along, and you send me away like a housemaid. D’you think I can’t see that you’re in love with her? You’d sacrifice me without a thought to save her a moment’s unpleasantness. And because you love her you hate me.

Basil.

It’s not true.

Jenny.

Can you deny that you’re in love with her?

Basil.

You’re simply mad. Good heavens, I’ve done nothing that could give you the least cause to be jealous.

Jenny.

[Passionately.] Will you swear that you’re not in love with her? Swear it on your honour?

Basil.

You’re mad.

Jenny.

[With growing excitement.] Swear it. You can’t. You’re simply madly in love with her.

Basil.

Nonsense.

Jenny.

Swear it. Swear it on your honour. Swear you don’t care for her.

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] I swear it ... on my honour.

Jenny.

[Scornfully.] It’s a lie!... And she’s just as much in love with you as you are with her.

Basil.

[Seizing her wrists.] What d’you mean?

Jenny.

D’you think I haven’t got eyes in my head? I saw it that day she came here. D’you suppose she came to see me? She despises me. I’m not a lady. She came here to please you. She was polite to me to please you. She asked me to go and see her to please you.

Basil.

[Trying to compose himself.] It’s absurd. She was an old friend of mine. Of course she came.

Jenny.

I know that sort of friend. D’you think I didn’t see the way she looked at you, and how she followed you with her eyes? She simply hung on every word you said. When you smiled, she smiled. When you laughed, she laughed. Oh, I should think she was in love with you; I know what love is, and I felt it. And when she looked at me I know she hated me because I’d robbed her of you.

Basil.

[Unable to contain himself.] Oh, what a dog’s life it is we lead! We’ve been both utterly wretched. It can’t go on — and I only see one way out.

Jenny.

That’s what you’ve been brooding over this last week, is it? Separation! I knew there was something, and I couldn’t find out what it was.

Basil.

I do my best to hold myself in, but sometimes I feel it’s impossible. I shall be led to saying things that we shall both regret. For Heaven’s sake let us part.

Jenny.

No.

Basil.

We can’t go on having these awful quarrels. It’s too degrading. It was a horrible mistake that we ever married.

Jenny.

[Horror-stricken.] Basil!

Basil.

Oh, you must see that as well as I. We’re utterly unsuited to one another. And the baby’s death removed the only necessity that held us together.

Jenny.

You talk as if we only remained together because it was convenient.

Basil.

[Passionately.] Let me go, Jenny. I can’t stand it any more. I feel as if I shall go mad.

Jenny.

[Full of pain and anguish.] It’s nothing at all to you.

Basil.

Jenny, I did my best for you a year ago. I gave you all I had to give. It was little enough in all conscience. Now I ask you to give me back my freedom.

Jenny.

[Distracted.] You only think of yourself. What is to become of me?

Basil.

You’ll be much happier. It’s the best thing for both of us. I’ll do all I can for you, and you can have your mother and sister to live here.

Jenny.

[With a cry of grief and passion.] But I love you, Basil.

Basil.

You!! Why, you’ve tortured me for six months beyond all endurance. You’ve made all my days a burden to me. You’ve made my life a perfect hell.

Jenny.

[Gives a long groan of horror and dismay.] Oh!

[They stand facing one another, when the

housemaid, Fanny, comes in.

Fanny.

Mr. Halliwell.

[John comes in. Jenny, after taking his hand,

sinks down on a chair, paying no attention

to the following conversation; she stares in

front of her, quite distraught. Basil tries

with all his might to appear calm and

natural.

Basil.

Hulloa, what are you doing in these parts?

John.

How d’you do, Mrs. Kent? I’ve been having an early lunch at Richmond, and I thought I’d just drop in on my way back. As it was Saturday afternoon I thought I might find you.

Basil.

I’m sure we’re delighted to see you. [John gives a side-glance at Jenny, and slightly raises his eyebrows.] But you’ve only just come in time, because I’ve got to go up to town. We might travel up together.

John.

Certainly.

Jenny.

Where are you going, Basil?

Basil.

To Chancery Lane, to see my agent on business.

Jenny.

[Suspiciously.] On Saturday afternoon? Why, he won’t be there.

Basil.

I have an appointment with him.

[Jenny does not answer, but is obviously unconvinced.

John, somewhat embarrassed, exerts

himself to make conversation.

John.

I was thinking as I came along that one must lead quite an idyllic existence in the suburbs — with the river — and one’s little garden.

Basil.

[Ironically.] And the spectacle of the fifty little houses opposite all exactly like one another.

John.

And the quiet is perfectly enchanting.

Basil.

Oh, yes. The only vehicles that disturb the peaceful seclusion are the milk-cart and the barrel-organs. It’s quite idyllic.

Jenny.

I think it’s a very nice neighbourhood. And you get such a superior class of people here.

Basil.

I’ll just go and change. [Looking at his watch. There’s a train at 4.15.

John.

All right, hurry up.

[Basil goes out of the room. Jenny at once

springs to her feet and goes towards John.

She is distracted and hardly knows what

she says.

Jenny.

Can I trust you?

John.

What d’you mean?

[She stares into his eyes, doubting, trying to see

whether he will be willing to help her.

Jenny.

You used to be a good sort. You never looked down on me because I was a barmaid. Tell me I can trust you, John. There’s no one I can speak to, and I feel if I don’t speak I shall go off my head.

John.

What is the matter?

Jenny.

Will you tell me the truth if I ask you something?

John.

Of course.

Jenny.

On your oath?

John.

On my oath.

Jenny.

[After a momentary pause.] Is there anything between Basil and Mrs. Murray?

John.

[Aghast.] No. Certainly not.

Jenny.

How d’you know? Are you sure? You wouldn’t tell me, if there was. You’re all against me because I’m not a lady.... Oh, I’m so unhappy.

[She tries to restrain her tears, she is half-hysterical.

John stares at her, surprised,

at a loss for words.

Jenny.

If you only knew what a life we lead! He calls it a dog’s life, and he’s right.

John.

I thought you got on so well.

Jenny.

Oh, before you we’ve always kept up appearances. He’s ashamed to let you know he regrets he ever married me. He wants to separate.

John.

What!

Jenny.

[Impatiently.] Oh, don’t look so surprised. You’re not an utter fool, are you? He proposed it to-day before you came in. We’d been having one of our rows.

John.

But what on earth is it all about?

Jenny.

God knows!

John.

It’s nonsense. It can only be a little passing quarrel. You must expect to have those.

Jenny.

No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t. He doesn’t love me. He’s in love with your sister-in-law.

John.

It’s impossible.

Jenny.

He’s always there. He was there twice last week and twice the week before.

John.

How d’you know?

Jenny.

I’ve followed him.

John.

You followed him in the street, Jenny?

Jenny.

[Defiantly.] Yes. If I’m not ladylike enough for him, I needn’t play the lady there. You’re shocked now, I suppose?

John.

I wouldn’t presume to judge you, Jenny.

Jenny.

And I’ve read his letters, too — because I wanted to know what he was doing. I steamed one open, and he saw it, and he never said a word.

John.

Good heavens, why did you do it?

Jenny.

Because I can’t live unless I know the truth. I thought it was Mrs. Murray’s handwriting.

John.

Was it from her?

Jenny.

No. It was a receipt from the coal merchant. I could see how he despised me when he looked at the envelope — I didn’t stick it down again very well. And I saw him smile when he found it was only a receipt.

John.

Upon my word, I don’t think you’ve got much cause to be jealous.

Jenny.

Oh, you don’t know. Last Tuesday he was dining there, and you should have seen the state he was in. He was so restless he couldn’t sit still. He looked at his watch every minute. His eyes simply glittered with excitement, and I could almost hear his heart beating.

John.

It can’t be true.

Jenny.

He never loved me. He married me because he thought it was his duty. And then when the baby died — he thought I’d entrapped him.

John.

He didn’t say so.

Jenny.

No. He never says anything — but I saw it in his eyes. [Passionately clasping her hands.] Oh, you don’t know what our life is. For days he doesn’t say a word except to answer my questions. And the silence simply drives me mad. I shouldn’t mind if he blackguarded me. I’d rather he hit me than simply look and look. I can see he’s keeping himself in. He’s said more to-day than he’s ever said before. I knew it was getting towards the end.

John.

[With a helpless gesture.] I’m very sorry.

Jenny.

Oh, don’t you pity me, too. I’ve had a great deal too much pity. I don’t want it. Basil married me from pity. Oh, I wish he hadn’t. I can’t stand the unhappiness.

John.

[Gravely.] You know, Jenny, he’s a man of honour.

Jenny.

Oh, I know he’s a man of honour. I wish he had a little less of it. One doesn’t want a lot of fine sentiments in married life. They don’t work.... Oh, why couldn’t I fall in love with a man of my own class? I should have been so much happier. I used to be so proud that Basil wasn’t a clerk, or something in the City. He’s right, we shall never be happy.

John.

[Trying to calm her.] Oh, yes, you will. You mustn’t take things too seriously.

Jenny.

It isn’t a matter of yesterday, or to-day, or to-morrow. I can’t alter myself. He knew I wasn’t a lady when he married me. My father had to bring up five children on two-ten a week. You can’t expect a man to send his daughters to a boarding-school at Brighton on that, and have them finished in Paris.... He doesn’t say a word when I do something or say something a lady wouldn’t — but he purses up his lips, and looks.... Then I get so mad that I do things just to aggravate him. Sometimes I try to be vulgar. One learns a good deal in a bar in the City, and I know so well the things to say that’ll make Basil curl up. I want to get a bit of revenge out of him sometimes, and I know exactly where he’s raw and where I can hurt him. [With a laugh of scorn.] You should see the way he looks when I don’t eat properly, or when I call a man a Johnny.

John.

[Drily.] It opens up endless possibilities of domestic unhappiness.

Jenny.

Oh, I know it isn’t fair to him, but I lose my head. I can’t always be refined. Sometimes I can’t help breaking out. I feel I must let myself go.

John.

Why don’t you separate, then?

Jenny.

Because I love him. Oh, John, you don’t know how I love him. I’d do anything to make him happy. I’d give my life if he wanted it. Oh, I can’t say it, but when I think of him my heart burns so that sometimes I can hardly breathe. I can never show him that he’s all in the world to me; I try to make him love me, and I only make him hate me. What can I do to show him? Ah, if he only knew, I’m sure he’d not regret that he married me. I feel — I feel as if my heart was full of music, and yet something prevents me from ever bringing it out.

John.

D’you think he means it seriously when he talks of separation?

Jenny.

He’s been brooding over it. I know him so well, I knew there was something he was thinking over. Oh, John, I couldn’t live without him. I’d rather die. If he leaves me, I swear I’ll kill myself.

John.

[Walking up and down.] I wish I could help you. I don’t see anything I can do.

Jenny.

Oh, yes, there is. Speak to your sister-in-law. Ask her to have mercy on me. Perhaps she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Tell her I love him.... Take care. There’s Basil. If he knew what I’d said he’d never speak to me again.

[Basil comes in, dressed in a frock-coat; with a

tall hat in his hand.

Basil.

I’m ready. We’ve just got time to catch the train.

John.

All right. Good-bye, Mrs. Kent.

Jenny.

[Keeping her eyes fixed on Basil.] Good-bye.

[The two men go out. Jenny runs to the door

and calls out.

Jenny.

Basil, I want you a moment, Basil!

[Basil appears at the door.

Jenny.

Are you really going to Chancery Lane?

[Basil makes a movement of impatience and

goes out again without answering.

Jenny.

[Alone.] Oh, well, I’m going to see that for myself. [Calling to the Maid.] Fanny!... Bring my hat and my jacket. Quick!

[She runs to the window and looks out at Basil

and John going away. Fanny appears

with the clothes. Jenny hurriedly puts

them on.

Jenny.

[As Fanny is helping her.] What time is it?

Fanny.

[Looking up at the clock.] Five minutes past four.

Jenny.

I think I can catch it. He said 4.15.

Fanny.

Will you be in to tea, mum?

Jenny.

I don’t know. [She runs to the door and rushes out.]

THE THIRD ACT

The Same Afternoon.

[A luxuriously furnished drawing-room at Mrs. Murray’s house in Charles Street, Mayfair. Everything in it is beautiful, but suggests in the owner good taste rather than originality.]

[Hilda is seated near a tea-table, elaborately gowned, and with her is Mabel. Mr. Robert Brackley is sitting down, a stout, round-faced man, clean-shaven and very bald; about forty; he is attired in the height of fashion, in a frock-coat, patent-leather boots and an eye-glass. He talks very quickly, in a careless frivolous fashion, and is always much amused at what he says.]

Mabel.

What is the time, Mr. Brackley?

Brackley.

I shan’t tell you again.

Mabel.

How brutal of you!

Brackley.

There’s something unhealthy in your passion for information. I’ve already told you five times.

Hilda.

It’s very unflattering to us who’ve been doing our little best to amuse you.

Mabel.

I can’t imagine what’s happened to John. He promised to fetch me here.

Hilda.

He’s sure to come if you’ll only wait patiently.

Mabel.

But I hate waiting patiently.

Hilda.

You shouldn’t have let him out of your sight.

Mabel.

He went to Putney after luncheon to see your friend Mr. Kent. Have you seen him lately?

Hilda.

John? I saw him at the Martins yesterday.

Mabel.

[Slyly.] I meant Mr. Kent.

Hilda.

[Indifferently.] Yes. He called the other day. [To change the conversation.] You’re unusually silent, Mr. Brackley.

Brackley.

[Smiling.] I have nothing whatever to say.

Mabel.

That’s usually when clever people talk most.

Hilda.

Are you doing anything now?

Brackley.

Oh yes, I’m writing a play in blank verse.

Hilda.

You brave man. What is it about?

Brackley.

Cleopatra.

Hilda.

Dear me! Shakespeare wrote a play about Cleopatra, didn’t he?

Brackley.

I daresay. I haven’t read it. Shakespeare bores me. He lived so long ago.

Mabel.

Of course there are people who read him.

Brackley.

Are there? What do they look like?

Hilda.

[Smiling.] They bear no distinctive mark of their eccentricity.

Brackley.

The English are so original.

Mabel.

I think I shall go and ring up the flat. I wonder if John has gone straight home.

Brackley.

Do. I’m growing very uneasy about him.

Mabel.

[Laughing.] You absurd creature.

[She goes out.

Hilda.

You talk more nonsense than anyone I ever met.

Brackley.

That’s my stock in trade. You don’t imagine people would read my poems if they knew that I was sober, industrious, and economical. As a matter of fact I lead the virtuous life of a clergyman’s daughter, but not a reviewer would notice me if he knew it.

Hilda.

And the little things that the indiscreet read of in the papers....

Brackley.

Are merely another proof of my passion for duty. The British public wants its poets to lead romantic lives.

Hilda.

Are you ever serious?

Brackley.

May I come to lunch with you on Thursday?

Hilda.

[A little surprised.] Certainly. But why on Thursday?

Brackley.

Because on that day I intend to ask you to marry me.

Hilda.

[With a smile.] I’m sorry, I’ve just remembered that I’m lunching out.

Brackley.

You break my heart.

Hilda.

On the contrary, I provide you with the materials for a sonnet.

Brackley.

Won’t you marry me?

Hilda.

No.

Brackley.

Why not?

Hilda.

[Amused.] I’m not in the least in love with you.

Brackley.

People who propose to marry should ask themselves if they can look forward with equanimity to breakfasting opposite one another for an indefinite number of years.

Hilda.

You’re very unromantic.

Brackley.

My dear lady, if you want romance I’ll send you my complete works bound in vellum. I’ve ground out ten volumes of romance to Phyllis and Chloe and heaven knows who. The Lord save me from a romantic wife.

Hilda.

But I’m afraid I’m hopelessly romantic.

Brackley.

Well, six months of marriage with a poet will cure you.

Hilda.

I’d rather not be cured.

Brackley.

Won’t you be in to luncheon on Thursday?

Hilda.

No.

[The Butler comes in.

Butler.

Mr. Halliwell, Mr. Kent.

[Basil and John appear, and at the same

moment Mabel comes in from the room in

which she has been telephoning.

Mabel.

[To John.] Wretched creature! I’ve been trying to ring you up.

John.

Have I kept you waiting? I went down to Chancery Lane with Basil.

[John turns to shake hands with Hilda and

Brackley, while Basil, who has said how

d’you do to Hilda, comes down to speak to

Mabel. The conversation between Mabel

and Basil is in an undertone.

Basil.

How d’you do. You must scold me for keeping John so long.

Mabel.

I didn’t really want him, you know.

Basil.

[Pointing with his head to Brackley.] I say, who is that?

Mabel.

Robert Brackley. Don’t you know him?

Basil.

The poet?

Mabel.

Of course. They say he’d have been given the Laureateship if it hadn’t been abolished at Tennyson’s death.

Basil.

[Tightening his lips.] He’s rather a low blackguard, isn’t he?

Mabel.

Heavens, what’s the matter with him, poor man? He’s Hilda’s latest celebrity. He pretends to adore her.

Basil.

Don’t you remember the Grange case that he was mixed up in?

Mabel.

[In tones of surprise.] But, my dear Mr. Kent, that was two years ago.

Hilda.

Mr. Kent, I want to introduce you to Mr. Brackley.

Basil.

[Going up.] How d’you do.

[John comes down to his wife.

Mabel.

Wretched creature!

John.

I say, Mabel, is Basil often here?

Mabel.

I don’t know. I met him here last week.

John.

Why the Dickens does he come? He’s got no business to.

Mabel.

You brought him yourself to-day.

John.

I didn’t. He insisted on coming — when I said I had to fetch you.

Mabel.

Perhaps he came to see me.

John.

Fiddledidee! I think you ought to speak to Hilda about it.

Mabel.

My dear John, are you mad? She’d jump down my throat.

John.

Why does she let him hang about her? She must know she’s turning his silly head.

Mabel.

I daresay she wants to prove to him that he showed very bad taste a year ago. It is rather annoying when you’re attached to a young man that he should go and marry somebody else.

John.

Well, I don’t think she’s playing the game, and I shall tell her so.

Mabel.

She’ll snub you awfully.

John.

I don’t care.... Look here, you make a diversion so that I can get hold of her.

Mabel.

How?

John.

[Dryly.] I don’t know. Exercise your invention.

Mabel.

[Going towards the others.] Hilda, John is clamouring for some tea.

Hilda.

[Coming down.] Why on earth can’t he help himself?

John.

My native modesty prevents.

Hilda.

That’s quite a new trait in you.

[Hilda sits down and pours out tea for John.

He looks at her silently.

Hilda.

You’ve been lunching at Richmond?

John.

Yes.... Then I went on to Putney.

Hilda.

You’ve been making quite a day of it.

John.

[Taking the cup.] I say, old gal — you’re not going to make a fool of yourself, are you?

Hilda.

[Opening her eyes.] Oh, I hope not. Why?

John.

I thought it might have slipped your memory that Basil was married about a year ago.

Hilda.

[Freezing.] What on earth d’you mean? [Calling] Mabel.

John.

One moment.... You can give me a little conversation, can’t you?

Hilda.

I’m afraid you’re going to bore me.

John.

[Good-humouredly.] I assure you I’m not.... Isn’t Basil here rather often?

Hilda.

I wonder you haven’t learnt to mind your own business, John.

John.

Don’t you think it’s rather rough on that poor little woman in Putney?

Hilda.

[With a suspicion of contempt.] I went down to see her. I thought she was vulgar and pretentious. I’m afraid I can’t arouse any interest in her.

John.

[Gently.] She may be vulgar, but she told me her love was like music in her heart. Don’t you think she must have suffered awfully to get hold of a thought like that?

Hilda.

[After a pause, changing suddenly both voice and manner.] And d’you think I’ve not suffered, John? I’m so unhappy.

John.

Do you really care for him?

Hilda.

[In a low voice hoarse with passion.] No, I don’t care for him. I worship the very ground he treads on.

John.

[Very gravely.] Then you must do as you think best.... You’re playing the most dangerous game in the world. You’re playing with human hearts.... Good-bye.

Hilda.

[Taking his hand.] Good-bye, John. You’re not angry with me because I was horrid.... I’m glad you told me about his wife. Now I shall know what to do.

John.

Mabel.

Mabel.

[Coming forward.] Yes, we really must be going. I’ve not seen my precious baby for two hours.

Hilda.

[Taking both her hands.] Good-bye, you happy child. You’ve got a precious baby, and you’ve got a husband you love. What can you want more?

Mabel.

[Flippantly.] I want a motor-car.

Hilda.

[Kissing her.] Good-bye, darling.

[Mabel and John go out.

Brackley.

I like this room, Mrs. Murray. It never seems to say to you: now it’s really time for you to go away, as some drawing-rooms do.

Hilda.

[Recovering her serenity.] I suppose it’s the furniture. I’m thinking of changing it.

Brackley.

[With a smile.] Upon my word, that almost suggests that I’ve outstayed my welcome.

Hilda.

[Gaily.] I shouldn’t have said that if I didn’t know that nothing would induce you to go till you wanted to.

Brackley.

[Rising.] You know me like your glove. But it really is growing monstrous late.

Hilda.

You mustn’t go till you’ve told me who the fair charmer was I saw you with at the play last night.

Brackley.

Ah, the green-eyed monster!

Hilda.

[Laughing.] Don’t be so absurd, but I thought you’d like to know her yellow hair was dyed.

[Basil looks over the pages of a book, somewhat

annoyed that Hilda takes no notice of him.

Brackley.

Of course it was dyed. That was just the charm of it. Any woman can have yellow hair naturally: there’s no more credit in that than in having it blue or green.

Hilda.

I’ve always wanted to make mine purple.

Brackley.

Don’t you think women ought to be artificial? It’s just as much their duty to rouge their cheeks and powder their noses as it is for them to wear nice frocks.

Hilda.

But I know many women who wear horrid frocks.

Brackley.

Oh, those are the others. I treat them as non-existent.

Hilda.

What do you mean?

Brackley.

There are only two sorts of women in the world — the women who powder their noses and the others.

Hilda.

And who are they if you please?

Brackley.

I haven’t examined the matter very carefully, but I understand they are clergymen’s daughters by profession.

[He shakes hands with her.

Hilda.

It’s so nice of you to have come.

Brackley.

[Nodding at Basil.] Good-bye.... May I come again soon?

Hilda.

[Looking at him quickly.] Were you serious just now, or were you laughing at me?

Brackley.

I’ve never been more serious in my life.

Hilda.

Then perhaps I shall be in to luncheon on Thursday after all.

Brackley.

A thousand thanks. Good-bye.

[He nods to Basil and goes out. Hilda looks

at Basil with a smile.

Hilda.

Is that a very interesting book?

Basil.

[Putting it down.] I thought that man was never going away.

Hilda.

[Laughing.] I suspect he thought precisely the same of you.

Basil.

[Ill-temperedly.] What an ass he is! How can you stand him?

Hilda.

I’m rather attached to him. I don’t take everything he says very seriously. And young men ought to be foolish.

Basil.

He didn’t strike me as so juvenile as all that.

Hilda.

He’s only forty, poor thing — and I’ve never known a coming young man who was less than that.

Basil.

He’s a young man with a very bald head.

Hilda.

[Amused.] I wonder why you dislike him!

Basil.

[With a jealous glance, icily.] I thought he wasn’t admitted into decent houses.

Hilda.

[Opening her eyes.] He comes here, Mr. Kent.

Basil.

[Unable to restrain his ill-temper.] Don’t you know that he’s been mixed up in every scandal for the last twenty years?

Hilda.

[Good-humouredly, seeing that Basil is merely jealous.] There must be people in the world to provide gossip for their neighbours.

Basil.

It’s no business of mine. I have no right to talk to you like this.

Hilda.

I wonder why you do it?

Basil.

[Almost savagely.] Because I love you.

[There is a little pause.

Hilda.

[With a smile, ironically.] Won’t you have some more tea, Mr. Kent?

Basil.

[Going up to her, speaking with a sort of vehement gravity.] You don’t know what I’ve suffered. You don’t know what a hell my life is.... I tried so hard to prevent myself from coming here. When I married I swore I’d break with all my old friends.... When I married I found I loved you.

Hilda.

I can’t listen to you if you talk like that.

Basil.

D’you want me to go?

[She does not answer for a moment, but walks

up and down in agitation. At last she

stops and faces him.

Hilda.

Did you hear me tell Mr. Brackley to come on Thursday?

Basil.

Yes.

Hilda.

He’s asked me to be his wife. And on Thursday I shall give him an answer.

Basil.

Hilda!

Hilda.

[Earnestly.] It’s you who’ve driven me into it.

Basil.

Hilda, what are you going to say to him?

Hilda.

I don’t know — perhaps, yes?

Basil.

Oh, Hilda, Hilda, you don’t care for him?

Hilda.

[Shrugging her shoulders.] He amuses me. I dare say we should get on very well together.

Basil.

[Passionately.] Oh, you can’t. You don’t know what you’re doing. I thought — I thought you loved me.

Hilda.

It’s because I love you that I shall marry Mr. Brackley.

Basil.

Oh, it’s absurd. I won’t let you. You’re making us both utterly wretched. I won’t let you sacrifice our happiness. Oh, Hilda, I love you. I can’t live without you. At first I tried to resist seeing you. I used to pass your door and look up at your windows; and the door seemed as if it were waiting for me. And at the end of the street I used to look back. Oh, how I used to want to come in and see you once more! I thought if I saw you just once, I should get over it. And at last I couldn’t help myself. I’m so weak. Do you despise me?

Hilda.

[Almost in a whisper.] I don’t know.

Basil.

And you were so kind I couldn’t help coming again. I thought I did no harm.

Hilda.

I saw you were unhappy.

Basil.

I should think I was unhappy. For months I’ve dreaded going home. When I saw my house as I walked along I almost turned sick. You don’t know how fervently I’ve wished that I’d got killed in the war. I can’t go on.

Hilda.

But you must. It’s your duty.

Basil.

Oh, I think I’ve had enough of duty and honour. I’ve used up all my principles in the last year.

Hilda.

Don’t say that, Basil.

Basil.

After all, it’s my own fault. I brought it on myself, and I must take the consequences.... But I haven’t the strength, I don’t love her.

Hilda.

Then don’t let her ever find it out. Be kind to her, and gentle and forbearing.

Basil.

I can’t be kind and gentle and forbearing day after day, for weeks, and months, and years.

Hilda.

I thought you were a brave man. They wouldn’t have given you that medal if you’d been a coward.

Basil.

Oh, my dearest, it’s not hard to risk your life in the midst of battle. I can do that — but this needs more strength than I’ve got. I tell you I can’t endure it.

Hilda.

[Tenderly.] But it’ll get better. You’ll get used to one another, and you’ll understand one another better.

Basil.

We’re too different. It’s impossible for it to get better. We can’t even go on as we have been. I’ve felt that the end was coming.

Hilda.

But try — try for my sake.

Basil.

You don’t know what it is. Everything she says, everything she does, jars upon me so frightfully. I try to restrain myself. I clench my teeth to prevent myself from breaking out at her. Sometimes I can’t help it, and I say things that I’d give anything to have left unsaid. She’s dragging me down. I’m getting as common and vulgar as she is.

Hilda.

How can you say that of your wife?

Basil.

Don’t you think I must have gone through a good deal before I could acknowledge to myself what she was? I’m chained to her for all my life. And when I look into the future — I see her a vulgar, slatternly shrew like her mother, and myself abject, degraded, and despicable. The woman never tires in her conflict with the man, and in the end he always succumbs. A man, when he marries a woman like that, thinks he’s going to lift her up to his own station. The fool! It’s she who drags him down to hers.

Hilda.

[Much disturbed, rising from her seat.] I wanted you to be so happy.

Basil.

[Going towards her.] Hilda!

Hilda.

No — don’t.... Please!

Basil.

If it weren’t for you I couldn’t have lived. It was only by seeing you that I gathered courage to go on with it. And each time I came here I loved you more passionately.

Hilda.

Oh, why did you come?

Basil.

I couldn’t help it. I knew it was poison, but I loved the poison. I would give my whole soul for one look of your eyes.

Hilda.

If you care for me at all, do your duty like a brave man — and let me respect you.

Basil.

Say that you love me, Hilda.

Hilda.

[Distracted.] You’re making our friendship impossible. Don’t you see that you’re preventing me from ever having you here again?

Basil.

I can’t help it.

Hilda.

I ought never to have seen you again. I thought there was no harm in your coming, and I — I couldn’t bear to lose you altogether.

Basil.

Even if I never see you again, I must tell you now that I love you. I made you suffer, I was blind. But I love you with all my heart, Hilda. All day I think of you, and I dream of you in the night. I long to take you in my arms and kiss you, to kiss your lips, and your beautiful hair, and your hands. My whole soul is yours, Hilda.

[He goes towards her again to take her in his

arms.

Hilda.

Oh, no, go away. For God’s sake, go now. I can’t bear it.

Basil.

Hilda, I can’t live without you.

Hilda.

Have mercy on me. Don’t you see how weak I am? Oh, God help me!

Basil.

You don’t love me?

Hilda.

[Vehemently.] You know I love you. But because of my great love I beseech you to do your duty.

Basil.

My duty is to be happy. Let us go where we can love one another — away from England, to a land where love isn’t sinful and ugly.

Hilda.

Oh, Basil, let us try to walk straight. Think of your wife, who loves you also — as much as I do. You’re all the world to her. You can’t treat her so shamefully.

[She puts her handkerchief to her eyes, and Basil

gently takes away her hand.

Basil.

Don’t cry, Hilda. I can’t bear it.

Hilda.

[In broken tones.] Don’t you understand that we could never respect ourselves again if we did that poor creature such a fearful wrong? She would be always between us with her tears and her sorrows. I tell you I couldn’t bear it. Have mercy on me — if you love me at all.

Basil.

[Wavering.] Hilda, it’s too hard. I can’t leave you.

Hilda.

You must. I know it’s better to do our duty. For my sake, dearest, go back to your wife, and don’t let her ever know that you love me. It’s because we’re stronger than she that we must sacrifice ourselves.

[He leans his head on his hands, and sighs

deeply. For a while they remain in silence.

At last, with another sigh, he gets up.

Basil.

I don’t know any longer what’s right and what’s wrong. It all seems confused. It’s very hard.

Hilda.

[Hoarsely.] It’s just as hard for me, Basil.

Basil.

[Broken-hearted.] Good-bye, then. I dare say you’re right. And perhaps I should only make you very unhappy.

Hilda.

Good-bye, my dearest.

[He bends down and kisses her hands. She

stifles a sob. He goes slowly to the door,

with his back turned to her; and then

Hilda, unable to endure it, gives a groan.

Hilda.

Basil. Don’t go.

Basil.

[With a cry of joy.] Ah! Hilda.

[He clasps her passionately in his arms.

Hilda.

Oh, I can’t bear it. I won’t lose you. Basil, say you love me.

Basil.

[In a madness of joy.] Yes. I love you with all my heart.

Hilda.

I could have borne it if you’d been happy.

Basil.

Now nothing can separate us, Hilda. You belong to me for ever.

Hilda.

God help me! What have I done?

Basil.

If we lose our souls, what does it matter? We gain the whole world.

Hilda.

Oh, Basil, I want your love. I want your love so badly.

Basil.

Will you come with me, Hilda? I can take you to a land where the whole earth speaks only of love — and where only love and youth and beauty matter.

Hilda.

Let us go where we can be together always. We have so short a time; let us snatch all the happiness we can.

Basil.

[Kissing her again.] My darling.

Hilda.

Oh, Basil, Basil.... [She starts away.] Take care!

[The Butler comes in.]

Butler.

Mrs. Kent.

[Jenny enters hurriedly, as he gives her name.

The Butler at once goes out.

Basil.

Jenny!

Jenny.

I’ve caught you.

Basil.

[Trying to be urbane — to Hilda] I think you know my wife.

Jenny.

[In a loud angry voice.] Oh, yes, I know her. You needn’t introduce me. I’ve come for my husband.

Basil.

Jenny, what are you saying?

Jenny.

Oh, I don’t want any of your Society shams. I’ve come here to speak out.

Basil.

[To Hilda.] Would you mind leaving us alone?

Jenny.

[Also to Hilda, passionately.] No, I want to speak to you. You’re trying to get my husband from me. He’s my husband.

Basil.

Be quiet, Jenny. Are you mad? Mrs. Murray, for God’s sake leave us. She’ll insult you.

Jenny.

You think of her, you don’t think of me. You don’t care how much I suffer.

Basil.

[Taking her arm.] Come away, Jenny.

Jenny.

[Shaking him off.] I won’t. You’re afraid to let me see her.

Hilda.

[Pale and trembling, conscience-stricken.] Let her speak.

Jenny.

[Going up to Hilda threateningly.] You’re stealing my husband from me. Oh, you.... [She is at a loss for words violent enough.

Hilda.

I don’t want to make you unhappy, Mrs. Kent.

Jenny.

You can’t get round me with polite words. I’m sick of all that. I want to speak straight.

Basil.

[To Hilda.] Please go. You can do no good.

Jenny.

[Still more vehemently.] You’re stealing my husband from me. You’re a wicked woman.

Hilda.

[Almost in a whisper.] If you like I’ll promise you never to see your husband again.

Jenny.

[With angry scorn.] Much good your promises will do me. I wouldn’t believe a word you said. I know what Society ladies are. We know all about them in the City.

Basil.

[To Hilda.] You must leave us alone.

[He opens the door, and she goes out, looking

away from him.

Jenny.

[Savagely.] She’s frightened of me. She daren’t stand up to me.

Basil.

[As Hilda goes.] I’m so sorry.

Jenny.

You’re sorry for her.

Basil.

[Turning on her.] Yes, I am. What d’you mean by coming here and behaving like this?

Jenny.

I’ve caught you at last.... You liar! You dirty liar! You told me you were going to Chancery Lane.

Basil.

I have been to Chancery Lane.

Jenny.

Oh, I know you have — for five minutes. It was only an excuse. You might just as well have come here straight.

Basil.

[Angrily.] How dare you follow me?

Jenny.

I’ve got a right to follow you.

Basil.

[Unable to contain himself.] What d’you want here?

Jenny.

I want you. D’you think I didn’t guess what was going on? I saw you come in with Halliwell. Then I saw him go out with his wife. Then another man went out, and I knew you were alone with her.

Basil.

[Sharply.] How did you know?

Jenny.

I gave the butler a sovereign, and he told me.

Basil.

[Looking for a word to express his contempt.] Oh, you ... you cad! It’s only what I should have expected you to do.

Jenny.

And then I waited for you, and you didn’t come. And at last I couldn’t wait any longer.

Basil.

Well, you’ve finished it now.

[Jenny catches sight of a photograph of Basil, standing on a table.

Jenny.

[Pointing to it.] What’s she got your photograph here for?

Basil.

I gave it to Mrs. Murray before I was married.

Jenny.

She’s got no right to keep it there.

[She takes the photograph and flings it violently

on the floor.

Basil.

Jenny, what are you doing?

[Jenny digs her heel into it savagely, viciously.

Jenny.

[Hissing the words.] Oh, I hate her. I hate her.

Basil.

[Striving to contain himself.] You drive me perfectly mad. You’ll make me say things that I shall regret all my life. For Heaven’s sake, go.

Jenny.

I shan’t go till you come with me.

Basil.

[Beside himself.] I choose to remain.

Jenny.

What d’you mean?

Basil.

Look here, until to-day I swear to you before God that I’ve never done anything or said anything that you couldn’t have known. Do you believe me?

Jenny.

I don’t believe that you’re not in love with that woman.

Basil.

I don’t ask you to.

Jenny.

What!

Basil.

I said, until to-day I’ve been absolutely faithful to you. Heaven knows, I’ve tried to do my duty. I’ve done all I could to make you happy. And I’ve struggled with all my might to love you.

Jenny.

Say it out if you’ve got anything to say, I’m not afraid to hear.

Basil.

I don’t wish to deceive you. It’s best that you should know what has happened.

Jenny.

[Scornfully.] Now for another thumping lie.

Basil.

This afternoon I told Hilda I loved her.... And she loves me too.

Jenny.

[With a cry of rage.] Oh!

[She hits at his face with her umbrella, but he

wards the blow, and, snatching the umbrella

from her, throws it away.

Basil.

You’ve brought it on yourself. You made me too unhappy.

[Jenny, panting and bewildered, stands helpless,

trying to control herself.

Basil.

And now it’s the end. The life we led was impossible. I tried to do something that was beyond my power. I’m going away. I can’t and I won’t live with you any longer.

Jenny.

[Frightened at herself and at what he says.] Basil, you don’t mean that?

Basil.

I’ve struggled against it for months. And now I’m beaten.

Jenny.

You’ve got me to count with. I won’t let you go.

Basil.

[Bitterly.] What more d’you want? Isn’t it enough that you’ve ruined my whole life?

Jenny.

[Hoarsely.] You don’t love me?

Basil.

I never loved you.

Jenny.

Why did you marry me?

Basil.

Because you made me.

Jenny.

[In a whisper.] You never loved me — even at the beginning?

Basil.

Never.

Jenny.

Basil!

Basil.

It’s too late now to keep it in. I must tell you and have done with it. You’ve been having it out for months — now it’s my turn.

Jenny.

[Going up to him and trying to put her arm round his neck.] But I love you, Basil. I’ll make you love me.

Basil.

[Shrinking from her.] Don’t touch me!

Jenny.

[With a movement of despair.] I really think you loathe me.

Basil.

For Heaven’s sake, Jenny, let us finish with it. I’m very sorry. I don’t wish to be unkind to you. But you must have seen that — that I didn’t care for you. What’s the good of going on humbugging, and pretending, and making ourselves utterly wretched?

Jenny.

Yes, I’ve seen it. But I wouldn’t believe it. When I’ve put my hand on your shoulder, I’ve seen that you could hardly help shuddering. And sometimes when I’ve kissed you, I’ve seen you put out all your strength to prevent yourself from pushing me away.

Basil.

Jenny, I can’t help it if I don’t love you. I can’t help it if I — if I love some one else.

Jenny.

[Dazed and cowed.] What are you going to do?

Basil.

I’m going away.

Jenny.

Where?

Basil.

God knows.

[There is a knock at the door.

Basil.

Come in.

[The Butler enters with a note, which he gives

to Basil.

Butler.

Mrs. Murray told me to give you this note, Sir.

Basil.

[Taking it.] Thank you.

[He opens and reads it as the Servant goes out

of the room, then looks up at Jenny, who

is anxiously watching him.

[Reading.] “You may tell your wife that I’ve made up my mind to marry Mr. Brackley. I will never see you again.”

Jenny.

What does she mean?

Basil.

[Bitterly.] Isn’t it clear? Some one has asked her to marry him, and she means to accept.

Jenny.

But you said she loved you.

[He shrugs his shoulders without answering.

Jenny goes up to him imploringly.

Jenny.

Oh, Basil, if it’s true, give me another chance. She doesn’t love you as I love you. I’ve been selfish and quarrelsome and exacting, but I’ve always loved you. Oh, don’t leave me, Basil. Let me try once more if I can’t make you care for me.

Basil.

[Looking down, hoarsely.] I’m very sorry. It’s too late.

Jenny.

[Despairingly.] Oh, God, what shall I do? And even though she’s going to marry somebody else, you care for her better than any one else in the world?

Basil.

[In a whisper.] Yes.

Jenny.

And even if she does marry that other man she’ll love you still. There’s no room for me between you. I can go away like a discharged servant.... Oh, God! oh, God! what have I done to deserve it?

Basil.

[Touched by her utter misery.] I’m very sorry to make you so unhappy.

Jenny.

Oh, don’t pity me. D’you think I want your pity now?

Basil.

You had better come away, Jenny.

Jenny.

No. You’ve told me you don’t want me any more. I shall go my own way.

Basil.

[Looks at her for a moment, hesitating; then shrugs his shoulders.] Then good-bye.

[He goes out, and Jenny, looking after him,

passes her hand wearily over her forehead.

Jenny.

[With a sigh.] He’s so glad to go.... [She gives a little sob.] They’ve got no room for me.

[She takes up from the floor the photograph on

which she stamped, and looks at it; then

sinks down, burying her face in her hands,

and bursts into a passion of tears.

THE FOURTH ACT

The Next Morning.

[The scene is the same as in the Second Act, the drawing-room at Basil’s house in Putney. Basil is sitting at the table, with his head in his hands. He looks tired and worn; his face is very white, and there are great black lines under his eyes. His hair is dishevelled. On the table lies a revolver.

[A knock at the door.

Basil.

[Without looking up.] Come in.

[Fanny enters.]

Fanny.

[Subdued and pale.] I came to see if you wanted anything, sir.

Basil.

[Looking up at her slowly, his voice is dull and hoarse.] No.

Fanny.

Shall I open the windows, Sir? It’s a beautiful morning.

Basil.

No, I’m cold. Make up the fire.

Fanny.

Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea? You ought to ‘ave something after not going to bed all night.

Basil.

I don’t want anything.... Don’t worry, there’s a good woman.

[Fanny puts coals on the fire, while BASIL

listlessly watches her.

Basil.

How long is it since you sent the telegrams?

Fanny.

I took them the moment the office was opened.

Basil.

What’s the time?

Fanny.

Well, sir, it must be ‘alf-past nine by now.

Basil.

Good Heavens, how slowly the hours go. I thought the night would never end.... Oh, God, what shall I do?

Fanny.

I’ll make you a strong cup of tea. If you don’t ‘ave something to pull you together — I don’t know what’ll ‘appen to you.

Basil.

Yes, make it quickly, I’m thirsty.... And I’m so cold.

[A ring at the front door is heard.

Basil.

[Jumping up.] There’s some one at the door, Fanny. Hurry up.

[She goes out, and he follows her to the door of

the room.

Basil.

Fanny, don’t let any one up beside Mr. Halliwell. Say I can see no one. [He waits for a moment, anxiously.] Is that you, John?

John.

[Outside.] Yes.

Basil.

[To himself.] Thank God!

[John comes in.

Basil.

I thought you were never coming. I begged you to come at once.

John.

I started immediately I got your wire.

Basil.

It seems hours since the girl went to the post-office.

John.

What’s the matter?

Basil.

[Hoarsely.] Don’t you know? I thought I had said it in my telegram.

John.

You simply wired that you were in great trouble.

Basil.

I suppose I thought you’d see it in the papers.

John.

What on earth d’you mean? I’ve not seen a paper. Where’s your wife?

Basil.

[After a pause, almost in a whisper.] She’s dead.

John.

[Thunderstruck.] Good God!

Basil.

[Impatiently.] Don’t look at me like that. Isn’t it plain enough? Don’t you understand?

John.

But she was all right yesterday.

Basil.

[Dully.] Yes. She was all right yesterday.

John.

For goodness sake tell me what you mean, Basil.

Basil.

She’s dead.... And she was all right yesterday.

[John does not understand. He is greatly

distressed, and does not know what to say.

Basil.

I killed her — as surely as if I’d strangled her with my own hands.

John.

What d’you mean? She’s not really dead!

Basil.

[In agony.] She threw herself into the river last night.

John.

How awful!

Basil.

Haven’t you got something more to say than how awful? I feel as if I were going mad.

John.

But I can’t understand! Why did she do it?

Basil.

Oh — yesterday we had an awful row ... before you came.

John.

I know.

Basil.

Then she followed me to ... to your sister-in-law’s. And she came up and made another scene. Then I lost my head. I was so furious, I don’t know what I said. I was mad. I told her I’d have nothing more to do with her.... Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.

[He breaks down and hides his face in his hands,

sobbing.

John.

Come, Basil — pull yourself together a bit.

Basil.

[Looking up despairingly.] I can hear her voice now. I can see the look of her eyes. She asked me to give her another chance, and I refused. It was so pitiful to hear the way she appealed to me, only I was mad, and I couldn’t feel it.

[Fanny comes in with the cup of tea, which

Basil silently takes and drinks.

Fanny.

[To John.] He ain’t slept a wink all night, sir.... No more ‘ave I, for the matter of that.

[John nods, but does not answer; and Fanny,

wiping her eyes with her apron, leaves the

room.

Basil.

Oh, I’d give everything not to have said what I did. I’d always held myself in before, but yesterday — I couldn’t.

John.

Well?

Basil.

I didn’t get back here till nearly ten, and the maid told me Jenny had just gone out. I thought she’d gone back to her mother’s.

John.

Yes?

Basil.

And soon after a constable came up and asked me to go down to the river. He said there’d been an accident.... She was dead. A man had seen her walk along the tow-path and throw herself in.

John.

Where is she now?

Basil.

[Pointing to one of the doors.] In there.

John.

Will you take me in?

Basil.

Go in alone, John. I daren’t, I’m afraid to look at her. I can’t bear the look on her face.... I killed her — as surely as if I’d strangled her with my own hands. I’ve been looking at the door all night, and once I thought I heard a sound. I thought she was coming to reproach me for killing her.

[John goes to the door, and as he opens it, Basil

averts his head. When John shuts the

door after him, he looks at it with staring,

frightened eyes, half mad with agony. He

tries to contain himself. After a while

John comes back, very quietly.

Basil.

[Whispering.] What does she look like?

John.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, Basil. She might be sleeping.

Basil.

[Clenching his hands.] But the ghastly pallor....

John.

[Gravely.] She’s happier than she would ever have been if she’d lived.

[Basil sighs deeply.

John.

[Seeing the revolver.] What’s this for?

Basil.

[With a groan of self-contempt.] I tried to kill myself in the night.

John.

H’m!

[He takes the cartridges out and puts the revolver

in his pocket.

Basil.

[Bitterly.] Oh, don’t be afraid, I haven’t got the pluck.... I was afraid to go on living. I thought if I killed myself it would be a reparation for her death. I went down to the river, and I walked along the tow-path to the same spot — but I couldn’t do it. The water looked so black and cold and pitiless. And yet she did it so easily. She just walked along and threw herself in. [A pause.] Then I came back, and I thought I’d shoot myself.

John.

D’you think that would have done any one much good?

Basil.

I despised myself. I felt I hadn’t the right to live, and I thought it would be easier just to pull a trigger.... People say it’s cowardly to destroy oneself, they don’t know what courage it wants. I couldn’t face the pain — and then, I don’t know what’s on the other side. After all, it may be true that there’s a cruel, avenging God, who will punish us to all eternity if we break His unknown laws.

John.

I’m very glad you sent for me. You had better come back to London, and stay with me for the present.

Basil.

And d’you know what happened in the night? I couldn’t go to bed. I felt I could never sleep again — and then, presently, I dozed off quite quietly in my chair. And I slept as comfortably — as if Jenny weren’t lying in there, cold and dead. And the maid pities me because she thinks I passed as sleepless a night as she did.

[A sound of voices is heard outside, in altercation.

Fanny comes in.

Fanny.

Please, sir, Mr. James.

Basil.

[Angrily.] I won’t see him.

Fanny.

He won’t go away, I told ’im you was too ill to see anybody.

Basil.

I won’t see him. I knew he’d be round, curse him!

John.

After all, I suppose he has a certain right to come here — under the circumstances. Hadn’t you better see what he wants?

Basil.

Oh, he’ll make a scene. I shall knock him down. I’ve suffered too much through him already.

John.

Let me see him. You don’t want him to make a fuss at the inquest.

Basil.

I’ve been thinking of that. I know the stories he and his people will make up. And the papers will get hold of it, and every one will blackguard me. They’ll say it was my fault.

John.

D’you mind if I have a talk to him? I think I can save you from all that.

Basil.

[Shrugging his shoulders, impatiently.] Do whatever you like.

John.

[To Fanny.] Show him up, Fanny.

Fanny.

Yes, sir.

[She goes out.

Basil.

Then I shall go.

[John nods, and Basil goes out by the door

next to that of the room in which Jenny is

lying. James Bush appears.

John.

[Grave and cold.] Good morning, Mr. Bush.

James.

[Aggressively.] Where’s that man?

John.

[Raising his eyebrows.] It’s usual to take one’s hat off in other people’s houses.

James.

I’m a man of principle, I am; and I keep my ‘at on to show it.

John.

Ah, well, we won’t discuss the point.

James.

I want to see that man.

John.

May I ask to whom you’re referring? There are so many men in the world. In fact, it’s very over-crowded.

James.

Who are you, I should like to know?

John.

[Politely.] My name is Halliwell. I had the pleasure of meeting you at Basil’s rooms in Bloomsbury.

James.

[Aggressively.] I know that.

John.

I beg your pardon. I thought you were asking for information.

James.

I tell you I want to see my brother-in-law.

John.

I’m afraid you can’t.

James.

I tell you I will see ’im. He’s murdered my sister. He’s a blackguard and a murderer, and I’ll tell him so to his face.

John.

[Sarcastic.] Take care he doesn’t hear you.

James.

I want him to hear me. I’m not frightened of him. I should just like to see him touch me now. [He sidles viciously to John.] H’m, you tried to keep me out, did yer? Said I couldn’t come to my sister’s ‘ouse — and kept me waitin’ in the ‘all like a tradesman. Oh, I’ll make you all pay for this. I’ll get my own back now. Measley set of West End curs, that’s all you are.

John.

Mr. Bush, you’ll be so good as to keep a civil tongue in your mouth while you’re here — and you’ll talk less loudly.

James.

[Scornfully.] Who says so?

John.

[Looking at him quietly.] I do.

James.

[Less decisively.] Don’t you try and bully me.

John.

[Pointing to a chair.] Won’t you sit down?

James.

No, I won’t sit down. This ain’t the ‘ouse that a gentleman would sit down in. I’ll be even with ’im yet. I’ll tell the jury a pretty story. He deserves to be strung up, he does.

John.

I can’t tell you how extremely sorry I am for what has happened.

James.

Oh, don’t try and get round me.

John.

Really, Mr. Bush, you have no reason to be indignant with me.

James.

Well, I don’t think much of you, any ‘ow.

John.

I’m very sorry. Last time we met I thought you a very amiable person. Don’t you remember, we went and had a drink together?

James.

I don’t say you’re not a gentleman.

John.

[Taking out his cigar-case.] Won’t you have a cigar?

James.

[Suspiciously.] Look here, you’re not trying to bluff me, are you?

John.

Certainly not. I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.

James.

[Taking a cigar.] Larranaga.

John.

[With an acid smile.] Nine pounds a hundred.

James.

That’s one and nine apiece, ain’t it?

John.

How quickly you reckon!

James.

You must be pretty oofy to be able to afford that.

John.

[Drily.] It does inspire respect, doesn’t it?

James.

I don’t know what you mean by that. But I flatter myself I know a good cigar when I see it.

[John sits down, and James Bush, without

thinking, follows his example.]

John.

What d’you think you’ll get out of making a row at the inquest? Of course, there’ll be an inquest.

James.

Yes, I know there will. And I’m lookin’ forward to it, I can tell you.

John.

I wouldn’t have said that if I’d been you.

James.

[Quite unconscious of the construction that may be put on his last words — full of his own grievances.] I’ve ‘ad something to put up with, I ‘ave.

John.

Really?

James.

Oh, he’s treated me shockin’! He simply treated me like dirt. I wouldn’t ‘ave stood it a minute, except for Jenny’s sake. I wasn’t good enough for ’im, if you please. And the way he used to look right through me as if I wasn’t there at all — Oh, I’ll be even with ’im now.

John.

What are you going to do?

James.

Never you mind. I’m going to make it hot for ’im.

John.

D’you think that’ll do you any good?

James.

[Springing up.] Yes. And I mean to....

John.

[Interrupting.] Now sit down, there’s a good chap, and let’s have a little talk about it.

James.

[Angrily.] You’re trying to bamboozle me.

John.

Nonsense.

James.

Oh, yes, you are. Don’t try to deny it. I can see through you as if you was a pane of glass. You people in the West End — you think you know everything.

John.

I assure you....

James.

[Interrupting.] But I’ve had a City training, and you can lay anything you like there ain’t no flies on me.

John.

We’re both men of the world, Mr. Bush. Will you do me a great favour as a — friend?

James.

[Suspiciously.] That depends on what it is.

John.

It’s merely to listen to me quietly for two or three minutes.

James.

I don’t mind doing that.

John.

Well, the fact is — Basil’s going away, and he wants to get rid of the furniture and the house. What d’you think it’s worth, as an auctioneer?

James.

[Looking round.] It’s a very different business what a thing’s worth, and what it’ll fetch.

John.

Of course, but a clever man like you....

James.

Now then, no bluff. I tell you it won’t work with me.... D’you include plate and linen?

John.

Everything.

James.

Well, if it was well sold — by a man as knew his business....

John.

If you sold it, for instance?

James.

It might fetch a hundred pounds — it might fetch a hundred and fifty.

John.

That wouldn’t be a bad present to make to any one, would it?

James.

No. I think I can agree with you there.

John.

Well, Basil thought of giving the entire contents of the house to your mother and sister.

James.

To tell you the truth, it’s no more than he ought to do.

John.

The condition is, of course, that nothing is said at the inquest.

James.

[With a sneer.] You make me laugh. D’you think you can gag me by giving a houseful of furniture to my mother?

John.

I had no such exalted opinion of your disinterestedness, Mr. Bush. I come to you now.

James.

[Sharply.] What d’you mean by that?

John.

It appears that you owe Basil a good deal of money. Can you pay it?

James.

No.

John.

Also it appears that there was some difficulty with your accounts in your last place.

James.

That’s a lie.

John.

Possibly. But altogether I fancy we could make it uncommonly nasty for you if you made a fuss. If dirty linen is going to be washed in public — there’s generally a good deal to be done on both sides.

James.

I don’t care. I mean to get my own back. If I can only get my knife into that man — I’ll take the consequences.

John.

On the other hand — if you won’t make a fuss at the inquest, I’ll give you fifty pounds.

James.

[Jumping up indignantly.] Are you trying to bribe me?

John.

[Calmly.] Yes.

James.

I would ‘ave you know that I’m a gentleman, and what’s more, I’m an Englishman. And I’m proud of it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’ve never ‘ad any one try and bribe me before.

John.

[Indifferently.] Otherwise you would, doubtless, have accepted.

James.

I’ve got more than half a mind to knock you down.

John.

[With a slight smile.] Come, come, Mr. Bush, don’t be ridiculous. You’d far better keep quiet, you know.

James.

[Scornfully.] What do you think fifty pounds is to me?

John.

[With a sharp look.] Who spoke of fifty pounds?

James.

You did.

John.

You must have mistaken me. A hundred and fifty.

James.

Oh! [At first he is surprised, then, as the amount sinks into his mind, grows doubtful.] That’s a very different pair of shoes.

John.

I don’t ask you to say anything untrue. After all, it’s not worth while for a man of the world like you — a business man — to give way to petty spite. And we don’t want to have any scandal. That would be just as unpleasant for you as for us.

James.

[Undecided.] There’s no denying that she was hysterical. If he’d only treated me like a gentleman, I shouldn’t have had anything to say.

John.

Well?

James.

[With a foxy, keen glance at John.] Make it two ‘undred, and I’ll say done.

John.

[Firmly.] No. You can take a hundred and fifty, or go to the devil.

James.

Oh, well, ‘and it over.

John.

[Taking a cheque out of his pocket.] I’ll give you fifty now and the rest after the inquest.

James.

[With a certain admiration.] You’re a sharp ‘un, you are.

[John writes out the cheque and gives it to

James Bush.

James.

Shall I give you a receipt? I’m a business man, you know.

John.

Yes, I know; but it’s not necessary. You’ll tell your mother and sister?

James.

Don’t you fear. I’m a gentleman, and I don’t go back on my friends.

John.

Now I think I’ll say good morning to you. You can understand that Basil isn’t fit to see any one.

James.

I understand. So long.

[He stretches out his hand, which John shakes

gravely.]

John.

Good morning.

[Fanny comes in by one door as James Bush

goes out by another.]

Fanny.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

John.

Ah, Fanny, if there were no rogues in the world, life would really be too difficult for honest men.

[Fanny goes out, and John walks to the door

and calls.]

John.

Basil — he’s gone.... Where are you?

[Basil comes out of the room in which is lying Jenny’s body.]

John.

I didn’t know you were in there.

Basil.

I wonder if she forgives me?

John.

I wouldn’t worry myself too much if I were you, Basil, old man.

Basil.

If you only knew how I despise myself!

John.

Come, come, Basil, you must make an effort....

Basil.

I’ve not told you the worst. I feel such a cad. There’s one thought that’s been with me all night. And I can’t drive it away. It’s worse than anything else. It’s too shameful.

John.

What do you mean?

Basil.

Oh, it’s so despicable. And yet it’s too strong for me.... I can’t help thinking that I’m — free.

John.

Free?

Basil.

It’s treachery to her memory. But you don’t know what it is when your prison door is opened. [As he speaks he grows more and more excited.] I don’t want to die. I want to live, and I want to take life by both hands and enjoy it. I’ve got such a desire for happiness. Let’s open the windows, and let the sunlight in. [He goes to the window and flings it open.] It’s so good just to be alive. How can I help thinking that now I can start fresh? The slate is wiped clean, and I can begin again. I will be happy. God forgive me, I can’t help the thought. I’m free. I made a ghastly mistake, and I suffered for it. Heaven knows how I suffered, and how hard I tried to make the best of it. It wasn’t all my fault. In this world we’re made to act and think things because other people have thought them good. We never have a chance of going our own way. We’re bound down by the prejudices and the morals of everybody else. For God’s sake, let us be free. Let us do this and that because we want to and because we must, not because other people think we ought. [He stops suddenly in front of John.] Why don’t you say something? You stare at me as if you thought me raving mad!

John.

I don’t know what to say.

Basil.

Oh, I suppose you’re shocked and scandalised. I ought to go on posing. I ought to act the part decently to the end. You would never have had the courage to do what I did, and yet, because I’ve failed, you think you can look down on me from the height of your moral elevation.

John.

[Gravely.] I was thinking how far a man may fall when he attempts to climb the stars.

Basil.

I gave the world fine gold, and their currency is only cowrie-shells. I held up an ideal, and they sneered at me. In this world you must wallow in the trough with the rest of them.... The only moral I can see is that if I’d acted like a blackguard — as ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done — and let Jenny go to the dogs, I should have remained happy and contented and prosperous. And she, I dare say, wouldn’t have died.... It’s because I tried to do my duty and act like a gentleman and a man of honour, that all this misery has come about.

John.

[Looking at him quietly.] I think I should put it in another way. One has to be very strong and very sure of oneself to go against the ordinary view of things. And if one isn’t, perhaps it’s better not to run any risks, but just to walk along the same secure old road as the common herd. It’s not exhilarating, it’s not brave, and it’s rather dull. But it’s eminently safe.

[Basil scarcely hears the last words, but listens

intently to other sounds outside.

Basil.

What’s that? I thought I heard a carriage.

John.

[A little surprised.] Do you expect any one?

Basil.

I sent a wire to — to Hilda at the same time as to you.

John.

Already?

Basil.

[Excited.] D’you think she’ll come?

John.

I don’t know. [A ring is heard at the front door.

Basil.

[Running to the window.] There’s some one at the door.

John.

Perhaps it’s occurred to her also that you’re free.

Basil.

[With the utmost passion.] Oh, she loves me, and I — I adore her. God forgive me, I can’t help it.

[Fanny comes in.

Fanny.

If you please, sir, the Coroner’s officer.

THE END

LADY FREDERICK

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THIRD ACT

CHARACTERS

This play was produced at the Court Theatre on Saturday, October 26, 1907, with the following cast:

Lady Frederick Berolles

Ethel Irving

Sir Gerald O’Mara

Edmund Breon

Mr. Paradine Fouldes

C. M. Lowne

Marchioness of Mereston

Beryl Faber

Marquess of Mereston

W. Graham Brown

Captain Montgomerie

Arthur Holmes-Gore

Admiral Carlisle

E. W. Garden

Rose

Beatrice Terry

Lady Frederick’s Dressmaker

Florence Wood

Lady Frederick’s Footman

Claude Vernon

Lady Frederick’s Maid

Ina Pelly

Thompson

Reginald Eyre

A Waiter

Heath J. Haviland

LADY FREDERICK

CHARACTERS

Lady Frederick Berolles

Sir Gerald O’Mara

Mr. Paradine Fouldes

Marchioness of Mereston

Marquess of Mereston

Admiral Carlisle

Rose

Lady Frederick’s Dressmaker

Lady Frederick’s Footman

Lady Frederick’s Maid

Thompson

A Waiter at the Hotel Splendide

Time: The Present Day

Acts I and II — Drawing-room at the Hotel Splendide, Monte Carlo.

Act III — Lady Frederick’s Dressing-Room.

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: Drawing-room of the Hotel Splendide at Monte Carlo. A large, handsomely furnished room, with doors right and left, and French windows at the back leading to a terrace. Through these is seen the starry southern night. On one side is a piano, on the other a table with papers neatly laid out on it. There is a lighted stove.

Lady Mereston, in evening dress, rather magnificently attired, is reading the papers. She is a handsome woman of forty. She puts down the paper impatiently and rings the bell. A servant answers. He has a French accent.

Lady Mereston.

Did Mr. Paradine Fouldes come this evening?

Servant.

Yes, miladi.

Lady Mereston.

Is he in the hotel now?

Servant.

Yes, miladi.

Lady Mereston.

Will you send some one up to his room to say I’m waiting to see him?

Servant.

Pardon, miladi, but the gentleman say ’e was on no account to be disturbed.

Lady Mereston.

Nonsense. Mr. Fouldes is my brother. You must go to him immediately.

Servant.

Mr. Fouldes his valet is in the ‘all. Will your ladyship speak with him?

Lady Mereston.

Mr. Fouldes is more difficult to see than a cabinet minister. Send his servant to me.

Servant.

Very good, miladi.

[Exit Servant, and presently Thompson, Mr. Fouldes’ man, comes in.

Thompson.

Your ladyship wished to see me.

Lady Mereston.

Good evening, Thompson. I hope you had a comfortable journey.

Thompson.

Yes, my lady. Mr. Fouldes always has a comfortable journey.

Lady Mereston.

Was the sea calm when you crossed?

Thompson.

Yes, my lady. Mr. Fouldes would look upon it as a great liberty if the sea was not calm.

Lady Mereston.

Will you tell Mr. Fouldes that I should like to see him at once?

Thompson.

[Looking at his watch.] Excuse me, my lady, but Mr. Fouldes said no one was to disturb him till ten o’clock. It’s more than my place is worth to go to him at five minutes to.

Lady Mereston.

But what on earth’s he doing?

Thompson.

I don’t know at all, my lady.

Lady Mereston.

How long have you been with Mr. Fouldes?

Thompson.

Twenty-five years, my lady.

Lady Mereston.

I should have thought you knew how he spent every minute of his day.

[Paradine comes in. He is a very well-dressed

man of forty-odd. Self-possessed, worldly,

urbane. He is never at a loss or put out

of countenance. He overhears Lady

Mereston’s last words.

Fouldes.

When I engaged Thompson I told him the first thing he must learn was the very difficult feat of keeping his eyes open and shut at one and the same time.

Lady Mereston.

My dear Paradine, I’ve been waiting to see you for the last two hours. How tiresome you are.

Fouldes.

You may give me a kiss, Maud, but don’t be rough.

Lady Mereston.

[Kissing his cheek.] You ridiculous creature. You really might have come to see me at once.

Fouldes.

My dear, you cannot grudge me a little repose after a long and tedious journey. I had to repair the ravages to my person caused by twenty-seven hours in the train.

Lady Mereston.

Don’t be so absurd. I’m sure your person is never ravished.

Fouldes.

Ravaged, my dear, ravaged. I should look upon it as an affectation at my age if I were not a little upset by the journey from London to Monte Carlo.

Lady Mereston.

I’ll be bound you ate a very hearty dinner.

Fouldes.

Thompson, did I eat any dinner at all?

Thompson.

[Stolidly.] Soup, sir.

Fouldes.

I remember looking at it.

Thompson.

Fish, sir.

Fouldes.

I trifled with a fried sole.

Thompson.

Bouchées à la Reine, sir.

Fouldes.

They have left absolutely no impression upon me.

Thompson.

Tournedos à la Splendide.

Fouldes.

They were distinctly tough, Thompson. You must lodge a complaint in the proper quarter.

Thompson.

Roast pheasant, sir.

Fouldes.

Yes, yes, now you mention it, I do remember the pheasant.

Thompson.

Chocolate ice, sir.

Fouldes.

It was too cold, Thompson. It was distinctly too cold.

Lady Mereston.

My dear Paradine, I think you dined uncommonly well.

Fouldes.

I have reached an age when love, ambition and wealth pale into insignificance beside a really well-grilled steak. That’ll do, Thompson.

Thompson.

Very well, sir.

[He goes out.

Lady Mereston.

It’s too bad of you, Paradine, to devour a substantial meal when I’m eating out my very heart with anxiety.

Fouldes.

It seems to agree with you very well. I’ve not seen you look better for years.

Lady Mereston.

For heaven’s sake be serious and listen to me.

Fouldes.

I started immediately I got your telegram. Pray tell me what I can do for you?

Lady Mereston.

My dear Paradine, Charlie’s head over ears in love.

Fouldes.

It’s not altogether an unexpected condition for a young man of twenty-two. If the lady’s respectable, marry him and resign yourself to being a dowager. If she’s not, give her five hundred pounds and pack her off to Paris or London or wherever else she habitually practises her arts and graces.

Lady Mereston.

I wish I could. But who d’you think it is?

Fouldes.

My dear, there’s nothing I detest more than riddles. I can imagine quite a number of fair ladies who would look without disdain upon a young marquess with fifty thousand a year.

Lady Mereston.

Lady Frederick Berolles.

Fouldes.

By Jupiter!

Lady Mereston.

She’s fifteen years older than he is.

Fouldes.

Then she’s not old enough to be his mother, which is a distinct advantage.

Lady Mereston.

She dyes her hair.

Fouldes.

She dyes it uncommonly well.

Lady Mereston.

She paints.

Fouldes.

Much better than a Royal Academician.

Lady Mereston.

And poor Charlie’s simply infatuated. He rides with her all the morning, motors with her all the afternoon, and gambles with her half the night. I never see him.

Fouldes.

But why should you think Lady Frederick cares two straws for him?

Lady Mereston.

Don’t be ridiculous, Paradine. Every one knows she hasn’t a penny, and she’s crippled with debts.

Fouldes.

One has to keep up appearances in this world. Life nowadays for the woman of fashion is a dilemma of which one horn is the Bankruptcy Court and the other — dear Sir Francis Jeune.

Lady Mereston.

I wish I knew how she manages to dress so beautifully. It’s one of the injustices of fate that clothes only hang on a woman really well when she’s lost every shred of reputation.

Fouldes.

My dear, you must console yourself with the thought that she’ll probably frizzle for it hereafter.

Lady Mereston.

I hope I’m not wicked, Paradine, but to wear draperies and wings in the next world offers me no compensation for looking dowdy in a Paquin gown in this.

Fouldes.

I surmised she was on the verge of bankruptcy when I heard she’d bought a new motor. And you seriously think Charlie wants to marry her?

Lady Mereston.

I’m sure of it.

Fouldes.

And what d’you want me to do?

Lady Mereston.

Good heavens, I want you to prevent it. After all he has a magnificent position; he’s got every chance of making a career for himself. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be Prime Minister — it’s not fair to the boy to let him marry a woman like that.

Fouldes.

Of course you know Lady Frederick?

Lady Mereston.

My dear Paradine, we’re the greatest friends. You don’t suppose I’m going to give her the advantage of quarrelling with me. I think I shall ask her to luncheon to meet you.

Fouldes.

Women have such an advantage over men in affairs of this sort. They’re troubled by no scruples, and, like George Washington, never hesitate to lie.

Lady Mereston.

I look upon her as an abandoned creature, and I tell you frankly I shall stop at nothing to save my son from her clutches.

Fouldes.

Only a thoroughly good woman could so calmly announce her intention of using the crookedest ways to gain her ends.

Lady Mereston.

[Looking at him.] There must be some incident in her career which she wouldn’t like raked up. If we could only get hold of that....

Fouldes.

[Blandly.] How d’you imagine I can help you?

Lady Mereston.

A reformed burglar is always the best detective.

Fouldes.

My dear, I wish you could be frank without being sententious.

Lady Mereston.

You’ve run through two fortunes, and if we all got our deserts you would be starving now instead of being richer than ever.

Fouldes.

My second cousins have a knack of dying at the psychological moment.

Lady Mereston.

You’ve been a horrid, dissipated wretch all your life, and heaven knows the disreputable people who’ve been your bosom friends.

Fouldes.

With my knowledge of the world and your entire lack of scruple we should certainly be a match for one defenceless woman.

Lady Mereston.

[Looking at him sharply.] Common report says that at one time you were very much in love with her.

Fouldes.

Common report is an ass whose long ears only catch its own braying.

Lady Mereston.

I was wondering how far things went. If you could tell Charlie of the relations between you....

Fouldes.

My good Maud, there were no relations — unfortunately.

Lady Mereston.

Poor George was very uneasy about you at the time.

Fouldes.

Your deceased husband, being a strictly religious man, made a point of believing the worst about his neighbours.

Lady Mereston.

Don’t, Paradine; I know you didn’t like one another, but remember that I loved him with all my heart. I shall never get over his death.

Fouldes.

My dear girl, you know I didn’t mean to wound you.

Lady Mereston.

After all, it was largely your fault. He was deeply religious, and as the president of the Broad Church Union he couldn’t countenance your mode of life.

Fouldes.

[With great unction.] Thank God in my day I’ve been a miserable sinner!

Lady Mereston.

[Laughing.] You’re quite incurable, Paradine. But you will help me now. Since his father’s death, the boy and I have lived a very retired life, and now we’re quite helpless. It would break my heart if Charlie married that woman.

Fouldes.

I’ll do my best. I think I can promise you that nothing will come of it.

[The door is flung open, and Lady Frederick

enters, followed by Mereston, a young

boyish man of twenty-two; by her brother,

Sir Gerald O’Mara, a handsome fellow of

six-and-twenty; by Captain Montgomerie,

Admiral Carlisle, and Rose, his daughter.

Lady Frederick is a handsome Irish

woman of thirty to thirty-five, beautifully

dressed. She is very vivacious, and light-hearted.

She has all the Irish recklessness

and unconcern for the morrow. Whenever

she wants to get round anybody she falls

into an Irish brogue, and then, as she knows

very well, she is quite irresistible. Captain

Montgomerie is a polished, well-groomed

man of thirty-five, with suave manners.

The Admiral is bluff and downright.

Rose is a pretty ingénue of nineteen.

Lady Mereston.

Here they are.

Lady Frederick.

[Enthusiastically going to him with open arms.] Paradine! Paradine! Paradine!

Mererston.

Oh, my prophetic soul, mine uncle!

Fouldes.

[Shaking hands with Lady Frederick.] I heard you were at the Casino.

Lady Frederick.

Charlie lost all his money, so I brought him away.

Lady Mereston.

I wish you wouldn’t gamble, Charlie dear.

Mererston.

My dear mother, I’ve only lost ten thousand francs.

Lady Frederick.

[To Paradine Fouldes.] I see you’re in your usual robust health.

Fouldes.

You needn’t throw it in my face. I shall probably be very unwell to-morrow.

Lady Frederick.

D’you know Admiral Carlisle? This is my brother Gerald.

Fouldes.

[Shaking hands.] How d’you do?

Lady Frederick.

[Introducing.] Captain Montgomerie.

Captain Montgomerie.

I think we’ve met before.

Fouldes.

I’m very pleased to hear it. How d’you do. [To Mererston.] Are you having a good time in Monte Carlo, Charles?

Mererston.

A 1, thanks.

Fouldes.

And what do you do with yourself?

Mererston.

Oh, hang about generally, you know — and there’s always the tables.

Fouldes.

That’s right, my boy; I’m glad to see that you prepare yourself properly for your duties as a hereditary legislator.

Mererston.

[Laughing.] Oh, shut it, Uncle Paradine.

Fouldes.

I rejoice also to find that you have already a certain command of the vernacular.

Mererston.

Well, if you can browbeat a London cabby and hold your own in repartee with a barmaid, it oughtn’t to be difficult to get on all right in the House of Lords.

Fouldes.

But let me give you a solemn warning. You have a magnificent chance, dear boy, with all the advantages of wealth and station. I beseech you not to throw it away by any exhibition of talent. The field is clear and the British people are waiting for a leader. But remember that the British people like their leaders dull. Capacity they mistrust, versatility they cannot bear, and wit they utterly abhor. Look at the fate of poor Lord Parnaby. His urbanity gained him the premiership, but his brilliancy overthrew him. How could the fortunes of the nation be safe with a man whose speeches were pointed and sparkling, whose mind was so quick, so agile, that it reminded you of a fencer’s play? Every one is agreed that Lord Parnaby is flippant and unsubstantial; we doubt his principles and we have grave fears about his morality. Take warning, my dear boy, take warning. Let the sprightly epigram never lighten the long periods of your speech nor the Attic salt flavour the roast beef of your conversation. Be careful that your metaphors show no imagination and conceal your brains as you would a discreditable secret. Above all, if you have a sense of humour, crush it. Crush it.

Mereston.

My dear uncle, you move me very much. I will be as stupid as an owl.

Fouldes.

There’s a good, brave boy.

Mereston.

I will be heavy and tedious.

Fouldes.

I see already the riband of the Garter adorning your shirt-front. Remember, there’s no damned merit about that.

Mereston.

None shall listen to my speeches without falling into a profound sleep.

Fouldes.

[Seizing his hand.] The premiership itself is within your grasp.

Lady Mereston.

Dear Paradine, let us take a stroll on the terrace before we go to bed.

Fouldes.

And you shall softly whisper all the latest scandal in my ear.

[He puts on her cloak and they go out.

Lady Frederick.

May I speak to you, Admiral?

Admiral.

Certainly, certainly. What can I do for you?

[While Lady Frederick and the Admiral talk,

the others go slowly out. Through the

conversation she uses her Irish brogue.

Lady Frederick.

Are you in a good temper?

Admiral.

Fairly, fairly.

Lady Frederick.

I’m glad of that because I want to make you a proposal of marriage.

Admiral.

My dear Lady Frederick, you take me entirely by surprise.

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Not on my own behalf, you know.

Admiral.

Oh, I see.

Lady Frederick.

The fact is, my brother Gerald has asked your daughter to marry him, and she has accepted.

Admiral.

Rose is a minx, Lady Frederick, and she’s much too young to marry.

Lady Frederick.

Now don’t fly into a passion. We’re going to talk it over quite calmly.

Admiral.

I tell you I won’t hear of it. The boy’s penniless.

Lady Frederick.

That’s why it’s so lucky you’re rich.

Admiral.

Eh?

Lady Frederick.

You’ve been talking of buying a place in Ireland. You couldn’t want anything nicer than Gerald’s — gravel soil, you know. And you simply dote on Elizabethan architecture.

Admiral.

I can’t bear it.

Lady Frederick.

How fortunate, then, that the house was burnt down in the eighteenth century and rebuilt in the best Georgian style.

Admiral.

Ugh.

Lady Frederick.

And you’d love to have little grandsons to dandle on your knee.

Admiral.

How do I know they wouldn’t be girls?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, it’s most unusual in our family.

Admiral.

I tell you I won’t hear of it.

Lady Frederick.

You know, it’s not bad to have the oldest baronetcy in the country but one.

Admiral.

I suppose I shall have to pack Rose off to England.

Lady Frederick.

And break her heart?

Admiral.

Women’s hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

Lady Frederick.

Did you ever know my husband, Admiral?

Admiral.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

I was married to him at seventeen because my mother thought it a good match, and I was desperately in love with another man. Before we’d been married a fortnight he came home blind drunk, and I had never seen a drunken man before. Then I found out he was a confirmed tippler. I was so ashamed. If you only knew what my life was for the ten years I lived with him. I’ve done a lot of foolish things in my time, but, my God, I have suffered.

Admiral.

Yes, I know, I know.

Lady Frederick.

And believe me, when two young things love one another it’s better to let them marry. Love is so very rare in this world. One really ought to make the most of it when it’s there.

Admiral.

I’m very sorry, but I’ve made up my mind.

Lady Frederick.

Ah, but won’t you alter it — like Nelson. Don’t be hard on Rose. She’s really in love with Gerald. Do give them a chance. Won’t you? Ah, do — there’s a dear.

Admiral.

I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but Sir Gerald is about the most ineligible young man that I’ve ever come across.

Lady Frederick.

[Triumphantly.] There, I knew we should agree. That’s precisely what I told him this morning.

Admiral.

I understand his place is heavily mortgaged.

Lady Frederick.

No one will lend a penny more on it. If they would Gerald would borrow it at once.

Admiral.

He’s got nothing but his pay to live upon.

Lady Frederick.

And his tastes are very extravagant.

Admiral.

He’s a gambler.

Lady Frederick.

Yes, but then he’s so good looking.

Admiral.

Eh?

Lady Frederick.

I’m glad that we agree so entirely about him. Now there’s nothing left but to call the young things in, join their hands and give them our united blessing.

Admiral.

Before I consent to this marriage, madam, I’ll see your brother ——

Lady Frederick.

Damned?

Admiral.

Yes, madam, damned.

Lady Frederick.

Now listen to me quietly, will you?

Admiral.

I should warn you, Lady Frederick, that when I once make up my mind about a thing, I never change it.

Lady Frederick.

Now that is what I really admire. I like a man of character. You know, I’ve always been impressed by your strength and determination.

Admiral.

I don’t know about that. But when I say a thing, I do it.

Lady Frederick.

Yes, I know. And in five minutes you’re going to say that Gerald may marry your pretty Rose.

Admiral.

No, no, no.

Lady Frederick.

Now look here, don’t be obstinate, I don’t like you when you’re obstinate.

Admiral.

I’m not obstinate. I’m firm.

Lady Frederick.

After all, Gerald has lots of good qualities. He’s simply devoted to your daughter. He’s been a little wild, but you know you wouldn’t give much for a young man who hadn’t.

Admiral.

[Gruffly.] I don’t want a milksop for a son-in-law.

Lady Frederick.

As soon as he’s married, he’ll settle into a model country squire.

Admiral.

Well, he’s a gambler, and I can’t get over that.

Lady Frederick.

Shall he promise you never to play cards again? Now, don’t be horrid. You don’t want to make me utterly wretched, do you?

Admiral.

[Unwillingly.] Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do — they shall marry if he doesn’t gamble for a year.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, you duck. [She impulsively throws her arms round his neck and kisses him. He is a good deal taken aback.] I beg your pardon, I couldn’t help it.

Admiral.

I don’t altogether object, you know.

Lady Frederick.

Upon my word, in some ways you’re rather fascinating.

Admiral.

D’you think so, really?

Lady Frederick.

I do indeed.

Admiral.

I rather wish that proposal of marriage had been on your own behalf.

Lady Frederick.

Ah, with me, dear Admiral, experience triumphs over hope. I must tell the children. [Calling.] Gerald, come here. Rose.

[Gerald and Rose come in.

Lady Frederick.

I always knew your father was a perfect darling, Rose.

Rose.

Oh, papa, you are a brick.

Admiral.

I thoroughly disapprove of the marriage, my dear, but — it’s not easy to say no to Lady Frederick.

Gerald.

It’s awfully good of you, Admiral, and I’ll do my best to make Rose a ripping husband.

Admiral.

Not so fast, young man, not so fast. There’s a condition.

Rose.

Oh, father!

Lady Frederick.

Gerald is to behave himself for a year, and then you may marry.

Rose.

But won’t Gerald grow very dull if he behaves himself?

Lady Frederick.

I have no doubt of it. But dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.

Admiral.

Now you must pack off to bed, my dear. I’m going to smoke my pipe before turning in.

Rose.

[Kissing Lady Frederick.] Good-night, dearest. I’ll never forget your kindness.

Lady Frederick.

You’d better not thank me till you’ve been married a few years.

Rose.

[Holding out her hand to GERALD.] Good-night.

Gerald.

[Taking it and looking at her.] Good-night.

Admiral.

[Gruffly.] You may as well do it in front of my face as behind my back.

Rose.

[Lifting up her lips.] Good-night.

[He kisses her, and the Admiral and Rose go out.

Lady Frederick.

Oh lord, I wish I were eighteen.

[She sinks into a chair, and an expression of utter weariness comes over her face.

Gerald.

I say, what’s up?

Lady Frederick.

[Starting.] I thought you’d gone. Nothing.

Gerald.

Come, out with it.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my poor boy, if you only knew. I’m so worried that I don’t know what on earth to do.

Gerald.

Money?

Lady Frederick.

Last year I made a solemn determination to be economical. And it’s ruined me.

Gerald.

My dear, how could it?

Lady Frederick.

I can’t make it out. It seems very unfair. The more I tried not to be extravagant, the more I spent.

Gerald.

Can’t you borrow?

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] I have borrowed. That’s just it.

Gerald.

Well, borrow again.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve tried to. But no one’s such a fool as to lend me a penny.

Gerald.

Did you say I’d sign anything they liked?

Lady Frederick.

I was so desperate I said we’d both sign anything. It was Dick Cohen.

Gerald.

Oh lord, what did he say?

Lady Frederick.

[Imitating a Jewish accent.] What’s the good of wathting a nithe clean sheet of paper, my dear lady?

Gerald.

[Shouting with laughter.] By George, don’t I know it.

Lady Frederick.

For heaven’s sake don’t let’s talk of my affairs. They’re in such a state that if I think of them at all I shall have a violent fit of hysterics.

Gerald.

But look here, what d’you really mean?

Lady Frederick.

Well, if you want it — I owe my dressmaker seven hundred pounds, and last year I signed two horrid bills, one for fifteen hundred and the other for two thousand. They fall due the day after to-morrow, and if I can’t raise the money I shall have to go through the Bankruptcy Court.

Gerald.

By George, that’s serious.

Lady Frederick.

It’s so serious that I can’t help thinking something will happen. Whenever I’ve got in a really tight fix something has turned up and put me on my legs again. Last time, Aunt Elizabeth had an apoplectic fit. But of course it wasn’t really very profitable because mourning is so desperately expensive.

Gerald.

Why don’t you marry?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my dear Gerald, you know I’m always unlucky at games of chance.

Gerald.

Charlie Mereston’s awfully gone on you.

Lady Frederick.

That must be obvious to the meanest intelligence.

Gerald.

Well, why don’t you have him?

Lady Frederick.

Good heavens, I’m old enough to be his mother.

Gerald.

Nonsense. You’re only ten years older than he is, and nowadays no nice young man marries a woman younger than himself.

Lady Frederick.

He’s such a good fellow. I couldn’t do him a nasty turn like that.

Gerald.

How about Montgomerie? He simply stinks of money, and he’s not a bad sort.

Lady Frederick.

[Surprised.] My dear boy, I hardly know him.

Gerald.

Well, I’m afraid it means marriage or bankruptcy.

Lady Frederick.

Here’s Charlie. Take him away, there’s a dear. I want to talk to Paradine.

Enter Paradine Fouldes with Mereston.

Fouldes.

What, still here, Lady Frederick?

Lady Frederick.

As large as life.

Fouldes.

We’ve been taking a turn on the terrace.

Lady Frederick.

[To Mereston.] And has your astute uncle been pumping you, Charlie?

Fouldes.

Eh, what?

Mereston.

I don’t think he got much out of me.

Fouldes.

[Good-naturedly.] All I wanted, dear boy. There’s no one so transparent as the person who thinks he’s devilish deep. By the way, what’s the time?

Gerald.

About eleven, isn’t it?

Fouldes.

Ah! How old are you, Charlie?

Mereston.

Twenty-two.

Fouldes.

Then it’s high time you went to bed.

Lady Frederick.

Charlie’s not going to bed till I tell him. Are you?

Mereston.

Of course not.

Fouldes.

Has it escaped your acute intelligence, my friend, that I want to talk to Lady Frederick?

Mereston.

Not at all. But I have no reason to believe that Lady Frederick wants to talk to you.

Gerald.

Let’s go and have a game of pills, Charlie.

Mereston.

D’you want to be left alone with the old villain?

Fouldes.

You show no respect for my dyed hairs, young man.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve not seen him for years, you know.

Mereston.

Oh, all right. I say, you’re coming for a ride to-morrow, aren’t you?

Lady Frederick.

Certainly. But it must be in the afternoon.

Fouldes.

I’m sorry, but Charles has arranged to motor me over to Nice in the afternoon.

Mereston.

[To Lady Frederick.] That’ll suit me A 1. I had an engagement, but it was quite unimportant.

Lady Frederick.

Then that’s settled. Good-night.

Mereston.

Good-night.

[He goes out with Gerald. Lady Frederick

turns and good-humouredly scrutinises

Paradise Fouldes.

Lady Frederick.

Well?

Fouldes.

Well?

Lady Frederick.

You wear excellently, Paradine.

Fouldes.

Thanks.

Lady Frederick.

How do you manage it?

Fouldes.

By getting up late and never going to bed early, by eating whatever I like and drinking whenever I’m thirsty, by smoking strong cigars, taking no exercise, and refusing under any circumstances to be bored.

Lady Frederick.

I’m sorry you had to leave town in such a hurry. Were you amusing yourself?

Fouldes.

I come to the Riviera every year.

Lady Frederick.

I daresay, but not so early.

Fouldes.

I’ve never surrendered so far to middle age as to make habits.

Lady Frederick.

My dear Paradine, the day before yesterday, Lady Mereston, quite distracted, went to the post office and sent you the following wire: “Come at once, your help urgently needed. Charlie in toils designing female, Maud.” Am I right?

Fouldes.

I never admit even to myself that a well-dressed woman is mistaken.

Lady Frederick.

So you started post-haste, bent upon protecting your nephew, and were infinitely surprised to learn that the designing female was no other than your humble servant.

Fouldes.

You’d be irresistible, Lady Frederick, if you didn’t know you were so clever.

Lady Frederick.

And now what are you going to do?

Fouldes.

My dear lady, I’m not a police officer, but a very harmless, inoffensive old bachelor.

Lady Frederick.

With more wiles than the mother of many daughters and the subtlety of a company promoter.

Fouldes.

Maud seems to think that as I’ve racketted about a little in my time, I’m just the sort of man to deal with you. Set a thief to catch a thief, don’t you know? She’s rather fond of proverbs.

Lady Frederick.

She should have thought rather of: When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war. I hear Lady Mereston has been saying the most agreeable things about me.

Fouldes.

Ah, that’s women’s fault; they always show their hand. You’re the only woman I ever knew who didn’t.

Lady Frederick.

[With a brogue.] You should have avoided the Blarney Stone when you went to Ireland.

Fouldes.

Look here, d’you want to marry Charlie?

Lady Frederick.

Why should I?

Fouldes.

Because he’s got fifty thousand a year, and you’re head over ears in debt. You’ve got to raise something like four thousand pounds at once, or you go under. You’ve got yourself a good deal talked about during the last ten years, but people have stood you because you had plenty of money. If you go broke they’ll drop you like a hot potato. And I daresay it wouldn’t be inconvenient to change Lady Frederick Berolles into Lady Mereston. My sister has always led me to believe that it is rather attractive to be a Marchioness.

Lady Frederick.

Unlike a duchess, its cheap without being gaudy.

Fouldes.

You asked me why you might want to marry a boy from ten to fifteen years younger than yourself, and I’ve told you.

Lady Frederick.

And now perhaps you’ll tell me why you’re going to interfere in my private concerns?

Fouldes.

Well, you see his mother happens to be my sister, and I’m rather fond of her. It’s true her husband was the most sanctimonious prig I’ve ever met in my life.

Lady Frederick.

I remember him well. He was president of the Broad Church Union and wore side-whiskers.

Fouldes.

But she stuck to me through thick and thin. I’ve been in some pretty tight places in my day, and she’s always given me a leg up when I wanted it. I’ve got an idea it would just about break her heart if Charlie married you.

Lady Frederick.

Thanks.

Fouldes.

You know, I don’t want to be offensive, but I think it would be a pity myself. And besides, unless I’m much mistaken, I’ve got a little score of my own that I want to pay off.

Lady Frederick.

Have you?

Fouldes.

You’ve got a good enough memory not to have forgotten that you made a blithering fool of me once. I swore I’d get even with you, and by George, I mean to do it.

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] And how do you propose to stop me if I make up my mind that I’m going to accept Charlie?

Fouldes.

Well, he’s not proposed yet, has he?

Lady Frederick.

Not yet, but I’ve had to use every trick and device I can think of to prevent him.

Fouldes.

Look here, I’m going to play this game with my cards on the table.

Lady Frederick.

Then I shall be on my guard. You’re never so dangerous as when you pretend to be frank.

Fouldes.

I’m sorry you should think so badly of me.

Lady Frederick.

I don’t. Only it was a stroke of genius when Nature put the soul of a Jesuit priest into the body of a Yorkshire squire.

Fouldes.

I wonder what you’re paying me compliments for. You must be rather afraid of me.

[They look at one another for a moment.

Lady Frederick.

Well, let’s look at these cards.

Fouldes.

First of all, there’s this money you’ve got to raise.

Lady Frederick.

Well?

Fouldes.

This is my sister’s suggestion.

Lady Frederick.

That means you don’t much like it.

Fouldes.

If you’ll refuse the boy and clear out — we’ll give you forty thousand pounds.

Lady Frederick.

I suppose you’d be rather surprised if I boxed your ears.

Fouldes.

Now, look here, between you and me high falutin’s rather absurd, don’t you think so? You’re in desperate want of money, and I don’t suppose it would amuse you much to have a young hobbledehoy hanging about your skirts for the rest of your life.

Lady Frederick.

Very well, we’ll have no high falutin! You may tell Lady Mereston that if I really wanted the money I shouldn’t be such an idiot as to take forty thousand down when I can have fifty thousand a year for the asking.

Fouldes.

I told her that.

Lady Frederick.

You showed great perspicacity. Now for the second card.

Fouldes.

My dear, it’s no good getting into a paddy over it.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve never been calmer in my life.

Fouldes.

You always had the very deuce of a temper. I suppose you’ve not given Charlie a sample of it yet, have you?

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Not yet.

Fouldes.

Well, the second card’s your reputation.

Lady Frederick.

But I haven’t got any. I thought that such an advantage.

Fouldes.

You see Charlie is a young fool. He thinks you a paragon of all the virtues, and it’s never occurred to him that you’ve rather gone the pace in your time.

Lady Frederick.

It’s one of my greatest consolations to think that even a hundred horse-power racing motor couldn’t be more rapid than I’ve been.

Fouldes.

Still it’ll be rather a shock to Charlie when he hears that this modest flower whom he trembles to adore has....

Lady Frederick.

Very nearly eloped with his own uncle. But you won’t tell him that story because you hate looking a perfect ass.

Fouldes.

Madam, when duty calls, Paradine Fouldes consents even to look ridiculous. But I was thinking of the Bellingham affair.

Lady Frederick.

Ah, of course, there’s the Bellingham affair. I’d forgotten it.

Fouldes.

Nasty little business that, eh?

Lady Frederick.

Horrid.

Fouldes.

Don’t you think it would choke him off?

Lady Frederick.

I think it very probable.

Fouldes.

Well, hadn’t you better cave in?

Lady Frederick.

[Ringing the bell.] Ah, but you’ve not seen my cards yet. [A servant enters.] Tell my servant to bring down the despatch-box which is on my writing-table.

SERVANT.

Yes, miladi.

[Exit.

Fouldes.

What’s up now?

Lady Frederick.

Well, four or five years ago I was staying at this hotel, and Mimi la Bretonne had rooms here.

Fouldes.

I never heard of the lady, but her name suggests that she had an affectionate nature.

Lady Frederick.

She was a little singer at the Folies Bergères, and she had the loveliest emeralds I ever saw.

Fouldes.

But you don’t know Maud’s.

Lady Frederick.

The late Lord Mereston had a passion for emeralds. He always thought they were such pure stones.

Fouldes.

[Quickly.] I beg your pardon?

Lady Frederick.

Well, Mimi fell desperately ill, and there was no one to look after her. Of course the pious English ladies in the hotel wouldn’t go within a mile of her, so I went and did the usual thing, don’t you know.

[Lady Frederick’s man comes in with a small

despatch-box which he places on a table. He

goes out. Lady Frederick as she talks,

unlocks it.

Fouldes.

Thank God I’m a bachelor, and no ministering angel ever smoothes my pillow when I particularly want to be left alone.

Lady Frederick.

I nursed her more or less through the whole illness, and afterwards she fancied she owed me her worthless little life. She wanted to give me the precious emeralds, and when I refused was so heart-broken that I said I’d take one thing if I might.

Fouldes.

And what was that?

Lady Frederick.

A bundle of letters. I’d seen the address on the back of the envelope, and then I recognised the writing. I thought they’d be much safer in my hands than in hers. [She takes them out of the box and hands them to Paradine.] Here they are.

[He looks and starts violently.

Fouldes.

89 Grosvenor Square. It’s Mereston’s writing. You don’t mean? What! Ah, ah, ah. [He bursts into a shout of laughter.] The old sinner. And Mereston wouldn’t have me in the house, if you please, because I was a dissolute libertine. And he was the president of the Broad Church Union. Good Lord, how often have I heard him say: “Gentlemen, I take my stand on the morality, the cleanliness and the purity of English Family Life.” Oh, oh, oh.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve often noticed that the religious temperament is very susceptible to the charms of my sex.

Fouldes.

May I look?

Lady Frederick.

Well, I don’t know. I suppose so.

Fouldes.

[Reading.] “Heart’s delight”.... And he signs himself, “your darling chickabiddy.” The old ruffian.

Lady Frederick.

She was a very pretty little thing.

Fouldes.

I daresay, but thank heaven, I have some sense of decency left, and it outrages all my susceptibilities that a man in side-whiskers should call himself anybody’s chickabiddy.

Lady Frederick.

Protestations of undying affection are never ridiculous when they are accompanied by such splendid emeralds.

Fouldes.

[Starting and growing suddenly serious.] And what about Maud?

Lady Frederick.

Well?

Fouldes.

Poor girl, it’d simply break her heart. He preached at her steadily for twenty years, and she worshipped the very ground he trod on. She’d have died of grief at his death except she felt it her duty to go on with his work.

Lady Frederick.

I know.

Fouldes.

By Jove, it’s a good card. You were quite right to refuse the emeralds: these letters are twice as valuable.

Lady Frederick.

Would you like to burn them?

Fouldes.

Betsy!

Lady Frederick.

There’s the stove. Put them in.

[He takes them up in both hands and hurries to

the stove. But he stops and brings them

back, he throws them on the sofa.

Fouldes.

No, I won’t.

Lady Frederick.

Why not?

Fouldes.

It’s too dooced generous. I’ll fight you tooth and nail, but it’s not fair to take an advantage over me like that. You’ll bind my hands with fetters.

Lady Frederick.

Very well. You’ve had your chance.

Fouldes.

But, by Jove, you must have a good hand to throw away a card like that. What have you got — a straight flush?

Lady Frederick.

I may be only bluffing, you know.

Fouldes.

Lord, it does me good to hear your nice old Irish brogue again.

Lady Frederick.

Faith, and does it?

Fouldes.

I believe you only put it on to get over people.

Lady Frederick.

[Smiling.] Begorrah, it’s not easy to get over you.

Fouldes.

Lord, I was in love with you once, wasn’t I?

Lady Frederick.

Not more than lots of other people have been.

Fouldes.

And you did treat me abominably.

Lady Frederick.

Ah, that’s what they all said. But you got over it very well.

Fouldes.

I didn’t. My digestion was permanently impaired by your brutal treatment.

Lady Frederick.

Is that why you went to Carlsbad afterwards instead of the Rocky Mountains?

Fouldes.

You may laugh, but the fact remains that I’ve only been in love once, and that was with you.

Lady Frederick.

[Smiling as she holds out her hand.] Good-night.

Fouldes.

For all that I’m going to fight you now for all I’m worth.

Lady Frederick.

I’m not frightened of you, Paradine.

Fouldes.

Good-night.

[As he goes out, Captain Montgomerie enters.

Lady Frederick.

[Yawning and stretching her arms.] Oh I’m so sleepy.

Captain Montgomerie.

I’m sorry for that. I wanted to have a talk with you.

Lady Frederick.

[Smiling.] I daresay I can keep awake for five minutes, you know — especially if you offer me a cigarette.

Captain Montgomerie.

Here you are.

[He hands her his case and lights her cigarette.

Lady Frederick.

[With a sigh.] Oh, what a comfort.

Captain Montgomerie.

I wanted to tell you, I had a letter this morning from my solicitor to say that he’s just bought Crowley Castle on my behalf.

Lady Frederick.

Really. But it’s a lovely place. You must ask me to come and stay.

Captain Montgomerie.

I should like you to stay there indefinitely.

Lady Frederick.

[With a quick look.] That’s charming of you, but I never desert my London long.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Smiling.] I have a very nice house in Portman Square.

Lady Frederick.

[Surprised.] Really?

Captain Montgomerie.

And I’m thinking of going into Parliament at the next election.

Lady Frederick.

It appears to be a very delightful pastime to govern the British nation, dignified without being laborious.

Captain Montgomerie.

Lady Frederick, although I’ve been in the service I have rather a good head for business, and I hate beating about the bush. I wanted to ask you to marry me.

Lady Frederick.

It’s nice of you not to make a fuss about it. I’m very much obliged but I’m afraid I can’t.

Captain Montgomerie.

Why not?

Lady Frederick.

Well, you see, I don’t know you.

Captain Montgomerie.

We could spend the beginning of our married life so usefully in making one another’s acquaintance.

Lady Frederick.

It would be rather late in the day then to come to the conclusion that we couldn’t bear the sight of one another.

Captain Montgomerie.

Shall I send my banker’s book so that you may see that my antecedents are respectable and my circumstances — such as to inspire affection.

Lady Frederick.

I have no doubt it would be very interesting — but not to me.

[She makes as if to go.

Captain Montgomerie.

Ah, don’t go yet. Won’t you give me some reason?

Lady Frederick.

If you insist. I’m not in the least in love with you.

Captain Montgomerie.

D’you think that much matters?

Lady Frederick.

You’re a friend of Gerald’s, and he says you’re a very good sort. But I really can’t marry every one that Gerald rather likes.

Captain Montgomerie.

He said he’d put in a good word for me.

Lady Frederick.

If I ever marry again it shall be to please myself, not to please my brother.

Captain Montgomerie.

I hope I shall induce you to alter your mind.

Lady Frederick.

I’m afraid I can give you no hope of that.

Captain Montgomerie.

You know, when I determine to do a thing, I generally do it.

Lady Frederick.

That sounds very like a threat.

Captain Montgomerie.

You may take it as such if you please.

Lady Frederick.

And you’ve made up your mind that you’re going to marry me?

Captain Montgomerie.

Quite.

Lady Frederick.

Well, I’ve made up mine that you shan’t. So we’re quits.

Captain Montgomerie.

Why don’t you talk to your brother about it?

Lady Frederick.

Because it’s no business of his.

Captain Montgomerie.

Isn’t it? Ask him!

Lady Frederick.

What do you mean by that?

Captain Montgomerie.

Ask him? Good-night.

Lady Frederick.

Good-night. [He goes out. Lady Frederick goes to the French window that leads to the terrace and calls.] Gerald!

Gerald.

Hulloa!

[He appears and comes into the room.

Lady Frederick.

Did you know that Captain Montgomerie was going to propose to me?

Gerald.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

Is there any reason why I should marry him?

Gerald.

Only that I owe him nine hundred pounds.

Lady Frederick.

[Aghast.] Oh, why didn’t you tell me?

Gerald.

You were so worried, I couldn’t. Oh, I’ve been such a fool. I tried to make a coup for Rose’s sake.

Lady Frederick.

Is it a gambling debt?

Gerald.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

[Ironically.] What they call a debt of honour?

Gerald.

I must pay it the day after to-morrow without fail.

Lady Frederick.

But that’s the day my two bills fall due. And if you don’t?

Gerald.

I shall have to send in my papers, and I shall lose Rosie. And then I shall blow out my silly brains.

Lady Frederick.

But who is the man?

Gerald.

He’s the son of Aaron Levitzki, the money-lender.

Lady Frederick.

[Half-comic, half-aghast.] Oh lord!

THE SECOND ACT

The scene is the same as in Act I. Admiral Carlisle is sleeping in an armchair with a handkerchief over his face. Rose is sitting on a grandfather’s chair, and Gerald is leaning over the back.

Rose.

Isn’t papa a perfectly adorable chaperon?

[The Admiral snores.

Gerald.

Perfectly.

[A pause.

Rose.

I’ve started fifteen topics of conversation in the last quarter of an hour, Gerald.

Gerald.

[Smiling.] Have you?

Rose.

You always agree with me, and there’s an end of it. So I have to rack my brains again.

Gerald.

All you say is so very wise and sensible. Of course I agree.

Rose.

I wonder if you’ll think me sensible and wise in ten years.

Gerald.

I’m quite sure I shall.

Rose.

Why, then, I’m afraid we shan’t cultivate any great brilliancy of repartee.

Gerald.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

Rose.

Oh, don’t say that. When a man’s in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman’s in love she doesn’t care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

Gerald.

When a woman’s in love she can put her heart on the slide of a microscope and examine how it beats. When a man’s in love, what do you think he cares for science and philosophy and all the rest of it!

Rose.

When a man’s in love he can only write sonnets to the moon. When a woman’s in love she can still cook his dinner and darn her own stockings.

Gerald.

I wish you wouldn’t cap all my observations.

[She lifts up her face, and he kisses her lips.

Rose.

I’m beginning to think you’re rather nice, you know.

Gerald.

That’s reassuring, at all events.

Rose.

But no one could accuse you of being a scintillating talker.

Gerald.

Have you ever watched the lovers in the Park sitting on the benches hour after hour without saying a word?

Rose.

Why?

Gerald.

Because I’ve always thought that they must be bored to the verge of tears. Now I know they’re only happy.

Rose.

You’re certainly my soldier, so I suppose I’m your nursery-maid.

Gerald.

You know, when I was at Trinity College, Dublin ——

Rose.

[Interrupting.] Were you there? I thought you went to Oxford.

Gerald.

No, why?

Rose.

Only all my people go to Magdalen.

Gerald.

Yes.

Rose.

And I’ve decided that if I ever have a son he shall go there too.

[The Admiral starts and pulls the handkerchief

off his face. The others do not notice him.

He is aghast and astounded at the conversation.

Lady Frederick comes in later and

stands smiling as she listens.

Gerald.

My darling, you know I hate to thwart you in any way, but I’ve quite made up my mind that my son shall go to Dublin as I did.

Rose.

I’m awfully sorry, Gerald, but the boy must be educated like a gentleman.

Gerald.

There I quite agree, Rose, but first of all he’s an Irishman, and it’s right that he should be educated in Ireland.

Rose.

Darling Gerald, a mother’s love is naturally the safest guide in these things.

Gerald.

Dearest Rose, a father’s wisdom is always the most reliable.

Lady Frederick.

Pardon my interfering, but — aren’t you just a little previous?

Admiral.

[Bursting out.] Did you ever hear such a conversation in your life between a young unmarried couple?

Rose.

My dear papa, we must be prepared for everything.

Admiral.

In my youth young ladies did not refer to things of that sort.

Lady Frederick.

Well, I don’t suppose they’re any the worse for having an elementary knowledge of natural history. Personally I doubt whether ignorance is quite the same thing as virtue, and I’m not quite sure that a girl makes a better wife because she’s been brought up like a perfect fool.

Admiral.

I am old-fashioned, Lady Frederick; and my idea of a modest girl is that when certain topics are mentioned she should swoon. Swoon, madam, swoon. They always did it when I was a lad.

Rose.

Well, father, I’ve often tried to faint when I wanted something that you wouldn’t give me, and I’ve never been able to manage it. So I’m sure I couldn’t swoon.

Admiral.

And with regard to this ridiculous discussion as to which University your son is to be sent, you seem to forget that I have the right to be consulted.

Gerald.

My dear Admiral, I don’t see how it can possibly matter to you.

Admiral.

And before we go any further I should like you to know that the very day Rose was born I determined that her son should go to Cambridge.

Rose.

My dear papa, I think Gerald and I are far and away the best judges of our son’s welfare.

Admiral.

The boy must work, Rose. I will have no good-for-nothing as my grandson.

Gerald.

Exactly. And that is why I’m resolved he shall go to Dublin.

Rose.

The important thing is that he should have really nice manners, and that they teach at Oxford if they teach nothing else.

Lady Frederick.

Well, don’t you think you’d better wait another twenty years or so before you discuss this?

Admiral.

There are some matters which must be settled at once, Lady Frederick.

Lady Frederick.

You know, young things are fairly independent nowadays. I don’t know what they’ll be in twenty years’ time.

Gerald.

The first thing the boy shall learn is obedience.

Rose. Certainly. There’s nothing so hateful as a disobedient child.

Admiral.

I can’t see my grandson venturing to disobey me.

Lady Frederick.

Then you’re all agreed. So that’s settled. I came to tell you your carriage was ready.

Admiral.

Go and put on your bonnet, Rose. [To Lady Frederick.] Are you coming with us?

Lady Frederick.

I’m afraid I can’t. Au revoir.

Admiral.

A tout à l’heure.

[He and Rose go out.

Gerald.

Have you ever seen in your life any one so entirely delightful as Rose?

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Only when I’ve looked in the glass.

Gerald.

My dear Elizabeth, how vain you are.

Lady Frederick.

You’re very happy, my Gerald.

Gerald.

It’s such a relief to have got over all the difficulties. I thought it never would come right. You are a brick, Elizabeth.

Lady Frederick.

I really think I am rather.

Gerald.

The moment you promised to arrange things I felt as safe as a house.

Lady Frederick.

I said I’d do my best, didn’t I? And I told you not to worry.

Gerald.

[Turning round suddenly.] Isn’t it all right?

Lady Frederick.

No, it’s about as wrong as it can possibly be. I knew Cohen was staying here, and I thought I could get him to hold the bills over for a few days.

Gerald.

And won’t he?

Lady Frederick.

He hasn’t got them any more.

Gerald.

[Startled.] What!

Lady Frederick.

They’ve been negotiated, and he swears he doesn’t know who has them.

Gerald.

But who could have been such a fool?

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know, that’s just the awful part of it. It was bad enough before. I knew the worst Cohen could do, but now.... It couldn’t be Paradine.

Gerald.

And then there’s Montgomerie.

Lady Frederick.

I shall see him to-day.

Gerald.

What are you going to say to him?

Lady Frederick.

I haven’t an idea. I’m rather frightened of him.

Gerald.

You know, dear, if the worst comes to the worst....

Lady Frederick.

Whatever happens you shall marry Rose. I promise you that.

[Paradine Fouldes appears.

Fouldes.

May I come in?

Lady Frederick.

[Gaily.] It’s a public room. I don’t see how we can possibly prevent you.

Gerald.

I’m just going to take a stroll.

Lady Frederick.

Do.

[He goes out.

Fouldes.

Well? How are things going?

Lady Frederick.

Quite well, thank you.

Fouldes.

I’ve left Charlie with his mother. I hope you can spare him for a couple of hours.

Lady Frederick.

I told him he must spend the afternoon with her. I don’t approve of his neglecting his filial duty.

Fouldes.

Ah!... I saw Dick Cohen this morning.

Lady Frederick.

[Quickly.] Did you?

Fouldes.

It seems to interest you?

Lady Frederick.

Not at all. Why should it?

Fouldes.

[Smiling.] Nice little man, isn’t he?

Lady Frederick.

[Good humouredly.] I wish I had something to throw at you.

Fouldes.

[With a laugh.] Well, I haven’t got the confounded bills. I was too late.

Lady Frederick.

Did you try?

Fouldes.

Oh — yes, I thought it would interest Charlie to know how extremely needful it was for you to marry him.

Lady Frederick.

Then who on earth has got them?

Fouldes.

I haven’t an idea, but they must make you very uncomfortable. Three thousand five hundred, eh?

Lady Frederick.

Don’t say it all at once. It sounds so much.

Fouldes.

You wouldn’t like to exchange those letters of Mereston’s for seven thousand pounds, would you?

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] No.

Fouldes.

Ah.... By the way, d’you mind if I tell Charlie the full story of your — relations with me?

Lady Frederick.

Why should I? It’s not I who’ll look ridiculous.

Fouldes.

Thanks. I may avail myself of your permission.

Lady Frederick.

I daresay you’ve noticed that Charlie has a very keen sense of humour.

Fouldes.

If you’re going to be disagreeable to me I shall go. [He stops.] I say, are you quite sure there’s nothing else that can be brought up against you?

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Quite sure, thanks.

Fouldes.

My sister’s very jubilant to-day. What about the Bellingham affair?

Lady Frederick.

Merely scandal, my friend.

Fouldes.

Well, look out. She’s a woman, and she’ll stick at nothing.

Lady Frederick.

I wonder why you warn me.

Fouldes.

For the sake of old times, my dear.

Lady Frederick.

You’re growing sentimental, Paradine. It’s the punishment which the gods inflict on a cynic when he grows old.

Fouldes.

It may be, but for the life of me I can’t forget that once ——

Lady Frederick.

[Interrupting.] My dear friend, don’t rake up my lamentable past.

Fouldes.

I don’t think I’ve met any one so entirely devoid of sentiment as you are.

Lady Frederick.

Let us agree that I have every vice under the sun and have done with it.

[A Servant comes in.]

Servant.

Madame Claude wishes to see your ladyship.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my dressmaker.

Fouldes.

Another bill?

Lady Frederick.

That’s the worst of Monte. One meets as many creditors as in Bond Street. Say I’m engaged.

Servant.

Madame Claude says she will wait till miladi is free.

Fouldes.

You make a mistake. One should always be polite to people whose bills one can’t pay.

Lady Frederick.

Show her in.

Servant.

Yes, miladi.

[Exit Servant.

Fouldes.

Is it a big one?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, no; only seven hundred pounds.

Fouldes.

By Jove.

Lady Frederick.

My dear friend, one must dress. I can’t go about in fig-leaves.

Fouldes.

One can dress simply.

Lady Frederick.

I do. That’s why it costs so much.

Fouldes.

You know, you’re devilish extravagant.

Lady Frederick.

I’m not. I’m content with the barest necessities of existence.

Fouldes.

You’ve got a maid.

Lady Frederick.

Of course I’ve got a maid. I was never taught to dress myself.

Fouldes.

And you’ve got a footman.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve always had a footman. And my mother always had a footman. I couldn’t live a day without him.

Fouldes.

What does he do for you?

Lady Frederick.

He inspires confidence in tradesmen.

Fouldes.

And you have the most expensive suite of rooms in the hotel.

Lady Frederick.

I’m in such a dreadful mess. If I hadn’t got nice rooms I should brood over it.

Fouldes.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, you fling your money away at the tables.

Lady Frederick.

When you’re as poor as I am, a few louis more or less can make absolutely no difference.

Fouldes.

[With a laugh.] You’re quite incorrigible.

Lady Frederick.

It’s really not my fault. I do try to be economical, but money slips through my fingers like water. I can’t help it.

Fouldes.

You want a sensible sort of a man to look after you.

Lady Frederick.

I want a very rich sort of a man to look after me.

Fouldes.

If you were my wife, I should advertise in the papers that I wasn’t responsible for your debts.

Lady Frederick.

If you were my husband, I’d advertise immediately underneath that I wasn’t responsible for your manners.

Fouldes.

I wonder why you’re so reckless.

Lady Frederick.

When my husband was alive I was so utterly wretched. And afterwards, when I looked forward to a little happiness, my boy died. Then I didn’t care any more. I did everything I could to stupefy myself. I squandered money as other women take morphia — that’s all.

Fouldes.

It’s the same dear scatter-brained, good-hearted Betsy that I used to know.

Lady Frederick.

You’re the only person who calls me Betsy now. To all the others I’m only Elizabeth.

Fouldes.

Look here, what are you going to do with this dressmaker?

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know. I always trust to the inspiration of the moment.

Fouldes.

She’ll make a devil of a fuss, won’t she?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, no; I shall be quite nice to her.

Fouldes.

I daresay. But won’t she be very disagreeable to you?

Lady Frederick.

You don’t know what a way I have with my creditors.

Fouldes.

I know it’s not a paying way.

Lady Frederick.

Isn’t it? I bet you a hundred louis that I offer her the money and she refuses it.

Fouldes.

I’ll take that.

Lady Frederick.

Here she is.

[Madame Claude enters, ushered in by the

Servant. She is a stout, genteel person,

very splendidly gowned, with a Cockney

accent. Her face is set to sternness, decision

to make a scene, and general sourness.

Servant.

Madame Claude.

[Exit Servant. Lady Frederick goes up to

her enthusiastically and takes both her

hands.

Lady Frederick.

Best of women. This is a joyful surprise.

Madame Claude.

[Drawing herself up.] I ‘eard quite by chance that your ladyship was at Monte.

Lady Frederick.

So you came to see me at once. That was nice of you. You’re the very person I wanted to see.

Madame Claude.

[Significantly.] I’m glad of that, my lady, I must confess.

Lady Frederick.

You dear creature. That’s one advantage of Monte Carlo, one meets all one’s friends. Do you know Mr. Fouldes? This is Madame Claude, an artist, my dear Paradine, a real artist.

Madame Claude.

[Grimly.] I’m pleased that your ladyship should think so.

Fouldes.

How d’you do.

Lady Frederick.

Now, this gown. Look, look, look. In this skirt there’s genius, mon cher. In the way it hangs my whole character is expressed. Observe the fullness of it, that indicates those admirable virtues which make me an ornament to Society, while the frill at the bottom just suggests those foibles — you can hardly call them faults — which add a certain grace and interest to my personality. And the flounce. Paradine, I beseech you to look at it carefully. I would sooner have designed this flounce than won the Battle of Waterloo.

Madame Claude.

Your ladyship is very kind.

Lady Frederick.

Not at all, not at all. You remember that rose chiffon. I wore it the other day, and the dear Archduchess came up to me and said: “My dear, my dear.” I thought she was going to have a fit. But when she recovered she kissed me on both cheeks and said: “Lady Frederick, you have a dressmaker worth her weight in gold.” You heard her, Paradine, didn’t you?

Fouldes.

You forget that I only arrived last night.

Lady Frederick.

Of course. How stupid of me. She’ll be perfectly delighted to hear that you’re in Monte Carlo. But I shall have to break it to her gently.

Madame Claude.

[Unmoved.] I’m sorry to intrude upon your ladyship.

Lady Frederick.

Now what are you talking about? If you hadn’t come to see me I should never have forgiven you.

Madame Claude.

I wanted to have a little talk with your ladyship.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, but I hope we shall have many little talks. Have you brought your motor down?

Madame Claude.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

That’s charming. You shall take me for a drive in it every day. I hope you’re going to stay some time.

Madame Claude.

That depends on circumstances, Lady Frederick. I ‘ave a little business to do here.

Lady Frederick.

Then let me give you one warning — don’t gamble.

Madame Claude.

Oh, no, my lady. I gamble quite enough in my business as it is. I never know when my customers will pay their bills — if ever.

Lady Frederick.

[Slightly taken aback.] Ha, ha, ha.

Fouldes.

[With a deep guffaw.] Ho, ho, ho.

Lady Frederick.

Isn’t she clever? I must tell that to the Archduchess. She’ll be so amused. Ha, ha, ha, ha. The dear Archduchess, you know she loves a little joke. You must really meet her. Will you come and lunch? I know you’d hit it off together.

Madame Claude.

[More genially.] That’s very kind of your ladyship.

Lady Frederick.

My dear, you know perfectly well that I’ve always looked upon you as one of my best friends. Now who shall we have? There’s you and me and the Archduchess. Then I’ll ask Lord Mereston.

Madame Claude.

The Marquess of Mereston, Lady Frederick?

Lady Frederick.

Yes. And Mr. Fouldes, his uncle.

Madame Claude.

Excuse me, are you the Mr. Paradine Fouldes?

Fouldes.

[Bowing.] At your service, madam.

Madame Claude.

I’m so glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Fouldes. [Unctuously.] I’ve always heard you’re such a bad man.

Fouldes.

Madam, you overwhelm me with confusion.

Madame Claude.

Believe me, Mr. Fouldes, it’s not the ladies that are married to saints who take the trouble to dress well.

Lady Frederick.

Now we want a third man. Shall we ask my brother — you know Sir Gerald O’Mara, don’t you? Or shall we ask Prince Doniani? Yes, I think we’ll ask the Prince. I’m sure you’d like him. Such a handsome man! That’ll make six.

Madame Claude.

It’s very kind of you, Lady Frederick, but — well, I’m only a tradeswoman, you know.

Lady Frederick.

A tradeswoman? How can you talk such nonsense. You are an artist — a real artist, my dear. And an artist is fit to meet a king.

Madame Claude.

Well, I don’t deny that I’d be ashamed to dress my customers in the gowns I see painted at the Royal Academy.

Lady Frederick.

Then it’s quite settled, isn’t it, Madame Claude — oh, may I call you Ada?

Madame Claude.

Oh, Lady Frederick, I should be very much flattered. But how did you know that was my name?

Lady Frederick.

Why you wrote me a letter only the other day.

Madame Claude.

Did I?

Lady Frederick.

And such a cross letter too.

Madame Claude.

[Apologetically.] Oh, but Lady Frederick, that was only in the way of business. I don’t exactly remember what expressions I may have made use of ——

Lady Frederick.

[Interrupting, as if the truth had suddenly flashed across her.] Ada! I do believe you came here to-day about my account.

Madame Claude.

Oh, no, my lady, I promise you.

Lady Frederick.

You did; I know you did. I see it in your face. Now that really wasn’t nice of you. I thought you came as a friend.

Madame Claude.

I did, Lady Frederick.

Lady Frederick.

No, you wanted to dun me. I’m disappointed in you. I did think, after all the things I’ve had from you, you wouldn’t treat me like that.

Madame Claude.

But I assure your ladyship....

Lady Frederick.

Not another word. You came to ask for a cheque. You shall have it.

Madame Claude.

No, Lady Frederick, I wouldn’t take it.

Lady Frederick.

What is the exact figure, Madame Claude?

Madame Claude.

I — I don’t remember.

Lady Frederick.

Seven hundred and fifty pounds, seventeen and ninepence. You see, I remember. You came for your cheque and you shall have it.

[She sits down and takes a pen.

Madame Claude.

Now, Lady Frederick, I should look upon that as most unkind. It’s treating me like a very second-rate establishment.

Lady Frederick.

I’m sorry, but you should have thought of that before. Now I haven’t got a cheque; how tiresome.

Madame Claude.

Oh, it doesn’t matter, Lady Frederick. I promise you it never entered my ‘ead.

Lady Frederick.

What shall I do?

Fouldes.

You can write it on a sheet of paper, you know.

Lady Frederick.

[With a look, aside to him.] Monster! [Aloud.] Of course I can. I hadn’t thought of that. [She takes a sheet of paper.] But how on earth am I to get a stamp?

Fouldes.

[Much amused.] I happen to have one on me.

Lady Frederick.

I wonder why on earth you should have English stamps in Monte Carlo?

Fouldes.

[Handing her one.] A penny stamp may sometimes save one a hundred louis.

Lady Frederick.

[Ironically.] Thanks so much. I write the name of my bank on the top, don’t I? Pay Madame Claude....

Madame Claude.

Now, it’s no good, Lady Frederick, I won’t take it. After all I ‘ave my self-respect to think of.

Lady Frederick.

It’s too late now.

Madame Claude.

[Sniffing a little.] No, no, Lady Frederick. Don’t be too ‘ard on me. As one lady to another I ask you to forgive me. I did come about my account, but — well, I don’t want the money.

Lady Frederick.

[Looking up good-humouredly.] Well, well. [She looks at the cheque.] It shall be as you wish. There. [She tears it up.]

Madame Claude.

Oh, thank you, Lady Frederick. I look upon that as a real favour. And now I really must be getting off.

Lady Frederick.

Must you go? Well, good-bye. Paradine, take Madame Claude to her motor. Ada!

[She kisses her on the cheek.

Madame Claude.

[Going.] I am pleased to have seen you.

[Paradine offers his arm and goes out with

Madame Claude. Lady Frederick goes

to the window, stands on a chair and waves

her handkerchief. While she is doing this

Captain Montgomerie enters.

Captain Montgomerie.

How d’you do?

Lady Frederick.

[Getting down.] How nice of you to come. I wanted to see you.

Captain Montgomerie.

May I sit down?

Lady Frederick.

Of course. There are one or two things I’d like to talk to you about.

Captain Montgomerie.

Yes?

Lady Frederick.

First I must thank you for your great kindness to Gerald. I didn’t know last night that he owed you a good deal of money.

Captain Montgomerie.

It’s a mere trifle.

Lady Frederick.

You must be very rich to call nine hundred pounds that?

Captain Montgomerie.

I am.

Lady Frederick.

[With a laugh.] All the same it’s extremely good of you to give him plenty of time.

Captain Montgomerie.

I told Gerald he could have till to-morrow.

Lady Frederick.

Obviously he wants to settle with you as soon as ever he can.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Quietly.] I often wonder why gambling debts are known as debts of honour.

Lady Frederick.

[Looking at him steadily.] Of course I realise that if you choose to press for the money and Gerald can’t pay — he’ll have to send in his papers.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Lightly.] You may be quite sure I have no wish to bring about such a calamity. By the way, have you thought over our little talk of last night?

Lady Frederick.

No.

Captain Montgomerie.

You would have been wise to do so.

Lady Frederick.

My dear Captain Montgomerie, you really can’t expect me to marry you because my brother has been so foolish as to lose more money at poker than he can afford.

Captain Montgomerie.

Did you ever hear that my father was a money-lender?

Lady Frederick.

A lucrative profession, I believe.

Captain Montgomerie.

He found it so. He was a Polish Jew called Aaron Levitzki. He came to this country with three shillings in his pocket. He lent half-a-crown of it to a friend on the condition that he should be paid back seven and six in three days.

Lady Frederick.

I’m not good at figures, but the interest sounds rather high.

Captain Montgomerie.

It is. That was one of my father’s specialities. From these humble beginnings his business grew to such proportions that at his death he was able to leave me the name and arms of the great family of Montgomerie and something over a million of money.

Lady Frederick.

The result of thrift, industry, and good fortune.

Captain Montgomerie.

My father was able to gratify all his ambitions but one. He was eaten up with the desire to move in good society, and this he was never able to achieve. His dying wish was that I should live in those circles which he knew only....

Lady Frederick.

Across the counter?

Captain Montgomerie.

Precisely. But my poor father was a little ignorant in these matters. To him one lord was as good as another. He thought a Marquess a finer man than an Earl, and a Viscount than a Baron. He would never have understood that a penniless Irish baronet might go into better society than many a belted earl.

Lady Frederick.

And what is the application of this?

Captain Montgomerie.

I wanted to explain to you one of the reasons which emboldened me last night to make you a proposal of marriage.

Lady Frederick.

But surely you know some very nice people. I saw you lunching the other day with the widow of a city knight.

Captain Montgomerie.

Many very excellent persons are glad to have me to dine with them. But I know quite well that they’re not the real article. I’m as far off as ever from getting into those houses which you have been used to all your life. I’m not content with third-rate earls and rather seedy dowagers.

Lady Frederick.

Forgive my frankness, but — aren’t you rather a snob?

Captain Montgomerie.

My father, Aaron Levitzki, married an English woman, and I have all the English virtues.

Lady Frederick.

But I’m not quite sure that people would swallow you even as my husband.

Captain Montgomerie.

They’d make a face, but they’d swallow me right enough. And when I asked them down to the best shoot in England they’d come to the conclusion that I agreed with them very well.

Lady Frederick.

[Still rather amused.] Your offer is eminently businesslike, but you see I’m not a business woman. It doesn’t appeal to me.

Captain Montgomerie.

I only ask you to perform such of the duties of a wife as are required by Society. They are few enough in all conscience. I should wish you to entertain largely and receive my guests, be polite to me, at least in public, and go with me to the various places people go to. Otherwise I leave you entire freedom. You will find me generous and heedful to all your wishes.

Lady Frederick.

Captain Montgomerie, I don’t know how much of all that you have said is meant seriously. But, surely you’re not choosing the right time to make such a proposal when my brother owes you so much money that if you care to be hard you can ruin him.

Captain Montgomerie.

Why not?

Lady Frederick.

D’you mean to say...?

Captain Montgomerie.

I will be quite frank with you. I should never have allowed Gerald to lose so much money which there was no likelihood of his being able to pay, if I had not thought it earned me some claim upon your gratitude.

Lady Frederick.

[Shortly.] Gerald will pay every penny he owes you to-morrow.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Blandly.] Where d’you suppose he’ll get it?

Lady Frederick.

I have no doubt I shall be able to manage something.

Captain Montgomerie.

Have you not tried this morning, entirely without success?

Lady Frederick.

[Startled.] What?

Captain Montgomerie.

You do not forget that you have sundry moneys of your own which are payable to-morrow?

Lady Frederick.

How d’you know that?

Captain Montgomerie.

I told you that when I took a thing in hand I carried it through. You went to Dick Cohen, and he told you he’d parted with the bills. Didn’t you guess that only one man could have the least interest in taking them over?

Lady Frederick.

You?

Captain Montgomerie.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, God.

Captain Montgomerie.

Come, come, don’t be worried over it. There’s nothing to be alarmed about. I’m a very decent chap — if you’d accepted me right away you would never have known that those bills were in my possession. Think it over once more. I’m sure we should get on well together. I can give you what you most need, money and the liberty to fling it away as recklessly as you choose; you can give me the assured and fixed position on which — my father’s heart was set.

Lady Frederick.

And if I don’t accept, you’ll make me a bankrupt and you’ll ruin Gerald?

Captain Montgomerie.

I refuse to consider that very unpleasant alternative.

Lady Frederick.

Oh! I can’t, I can’t.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Laughing.] But you must, you must. When shall I come for your answer? To-morrow? I’ll come with the bills and Gerald’s I.O.U. in my pocket, and you shall burn them yourself. Good-bye.

[He kisses her hand and goes out. Lady

Frederick remains staring in front of

her. Mereston enters, followed by Lady

Mereston and Paradine.

Mereston.

[Going to her eagerly.] Hulloa! I wondered what on earth had become of you.

Lady Frederick.

[With a laugh.] It’s only two hours since I chased you away from me.

Mereston.

I’m afraid I bore you to death.

Lady Frederick.

Don’t be so silly. You know you don’t.

Mereston.

Where are you going now?

Lady Frederick.

I have rather a headache. I’m going to lie down.

Mereston.

I’m so sorry.

[Lady Frederick goes out. Mereston stares

after her anxiously, and makes a step

towards the door.

Lady Mereston.

[Sharply.] Where are you going, Charlie?

Mereston.

I never asked Lady Frederick if I could do anything.

Lady Mereston.

Good heavens, there are surely plenty of servants in the hotel to get her anything she wants.

Mereston.

Don’t you think a drive in the motor would do her good?

Lady Mereston.

[Unable to control herself.] Oh, I have no patience with you. I never saw such a ridiculous infatuation in my life.

Paradine.

Steady, old girl, steady.

Mereston.

What on earth d’you mean, mother?

Lady Mereston.

Presumably you’re not going to deny that you’re in love with that woman.

Mereston.

[Growing pale.] Would you mind speaking of her as Lady Frederick?

Lady Mereston.

You try me very much, Charlie. Please answer my question.

Mereston.

I don’t want to seem unkind to you, mother, but I think you have no right to ask about my private affairs.

Fouldes.

If you’re going to talk this matter over you’re more likely to come to an understanding if you both keep your tempers.

Mereston.

There’s nothing I wish to discuss.

Lady Mereston.

Don’t be absurd, Charlie. You’re with Lady Frederick morning, noon and night. She can never stir a yard from the hotel but you go flying after. You pester her with your ridiculous attentions.

Fouldes.

[Blandly.] One’s relations have always such an engaging frankness. Like a bad looking-glass, they always represent you with a crooked nose and a cast in your eye.

Lady Mereston.

[To Mereston.] I have certainly a right to know what you mean by all this and what is going to come of it.

Mereston.

I don’t know what will come of it.

Fouldes.

The question that excites our curiosity is this: are you going to ask Lady Frederick to marry you?

Mereston.

I refuse to answer that. It seems to me excessively impertinent.

Fouldes.

Come, come, my boy, you’re too young to play the heavy father. We’re both your friends. Hadn’t you better make a clean breast of it? After all, your mother and I are interested in nothing so much as your welfare.

Lady Mereston.

[Imploring.] Charlie!

Mereston.

Of course I’d ask her to marry me if I thought for a moment that she’d accept. But I’m so terrified that she’ll refuse, and then perhaps I shall never see her again.

Lady Mereston.

The boy’s stark, staring mad.

Mereston.

I don’t know what I should do if she sent me about my business. I’d rather continue in this awful uncertainty than lose all hope for ever.

Fouldes.

By George. You’re pretty far gone, my son. The lover who’s diffident is in a much worse way than the lover who protests.

Lady Mereston.

[With a little laugh.] I must say it amuses me that Lady Frederick should have had both my brother and my son dangling at her skirts. Your respective passions are separated by quite a number of years.

Mereston.

Lady Frederick has already told me of that incident.

Fouldes.

With the usual indiscretion of her sex.

Mereston.

It appears that she was very unhappy and you, with questionable taste, made love to her.

Fouldes.

Do your best not to preach at me, dear boy. It reminds me of your lamented father.

Mereston.

And at last she promised to go away with you. You were to meet at Waterloo Station.

Fouldes.

Such a draughty place for an assignation.

Mereston.

Your train was to start at nine, and you were going to take the boat over to the Channel Isles.

Fouldes.

Lady Frederick has a very remarkable memory. I remember hoping the sea wouldn’t be rough.

Mereston.

And just as the train was starting her eye fell on the clock. At that moment her child was coming down to breakfast and would ask for her. Before you could stop her she’d jumped out of the carriage. The train was moving, and you couldn’t get out, so you were taken on to Weymouth — alone.

Lady Mereston.

You must have felt a quite egregious ass, Paradine.

Fouldes.

I did, but you need not rub it in.

Lady Mereston.

Doesn’t it occur to you, Charlie, that a woman who loves so easily can’t be very worthy of your affection?

Mereston.

But, my dear mother, d’you think she cared for my uncle?

Fouldes.

What the dickens d’you mean?

Mereston.

D’you suppose if she loved you she would have hesitated to come? D’you know her so little as that? She thought of her child only because she was quite indifferent to you.

Fouldes.

[Crossly.] You know nothing about it, and you’re an impertinent young jackanapes.

Lady Mereston.

My dear Paradine, what can it matter if Lady Frederick was in love with you or not?

Fouldes.

[Calming down.] Of course it doesn’t matter a bit.

Lady Mereston.

I have no doubt you mistook wounded vanity for a broken heart.

Fouldes.

[Acidly.] My dear, you sometimes say things which explain to me why my brother-in-law so frequently abandoned his own fireside for the platform of Exeter Hall.

Mereston.

It may also interest you to learn that I am perfectly aware of Lady Frederick’s financial difficulties. I know she has two bills falling due to-morrow.

Fouldes.

She’s a very clever woman.

Mereston.

I’ve implored her to let me lend her the money, and she absolutely refuses. You see, she’s kept nothing from me at all.

Lady Mereston.

My dear Charlie, it’s a very old dodge to confess what doesn’t matter in order to conceal what does.

Mereston.

What do you mean, mother?

Lady Mereston.

Lady Frederick has told you nothing of the Bellingham affair?

Mereston.

Why should she?

Lady Mereston.

It is surely expedient you should know that the woman you have some idea of marrying escaped the divorce court only by the skin of her teeth.

Mereston.

I don’t believe that, mother.

Fouldes.

Remember that you’re talking to your respected parent, my boy.

Mereston.

I’m sorry that my mother should utter base and contemptible libels on — my greatest friend.

Lady Mereston.

You may be quite sure that I say nothing which I can’t prove.

Mereston.

I won’t listen to anything against Lady Frederick.

Lady Mereston.

But you must.

Mereston.

Are you quite indifferent to the great pain you cause me?

Lady Mereston.

I can’t allow you to marry a woman who’s hopelessly immoral.

Mereston.

Mother, how dare you say that?

Fouldes.

This isn’t the sort of thing I much like, but hadn’t you better hear the worst at once?

Mereston.

Very well. But if my mother insists on saying things, she must say them in Lady Frederick’s presence.

Lady Mereston.

That I’m quite willing to do.

Mereston.

Good.

[He rings the bell. A servant enters.

Fouldes.

You’d better take care, Maudie. Lady Frederick’s a dangerous woman to play the fool with.

Mereston.

[To the servant.] Go to Lady Frederick Berolles and say Lord Mereston is extremely sorry to trouble her ladyship, but would be very much obliged if she’d come to the drawing-room for two minutes.

Servant.

Very well, my lord.

[Exit.

Fouldes.

What are you going to do, Maud?

Lady Mereston.

I knew there was a letter in existence in Lady Frederick’s handwriting which proved all I’ve said about her. I’ve moved heaven and earth to get hold of it, and it came this morning.

Fouldes.

Don’t be such a fool. You’re not going to use that?

Lady Mereston.

I am indeed.

Fouldes.

Your blood be upon your own head. Unless I’m vastly mistaken you’ll suffer the greatest humiliation that you can imagine.

Lady Mereston.

That’s absurd. I have nothing to fear.

Lady Frederick. comes in.

Mereston.

I’m so sorry to disturb you. I hope you don’t mind?

Lady Frederick.

Not at all. I knew you wouldn’t have sent for me in that fashion without good cause.

Mereston.

I’m afraid you’ll think me dreadfully impertinent.

Lady Mereston.

Really you need not apologise so much, Charlie.

Mereston.

My mother has something to say against you, and I think it right that she should say it in your presence.

Lady Frederick.

That’s very nice of you, Charlie — though I confess I prefer people to say horrid things of me only behind my back. Especially if they’re true.

Fouldes.

Look here, I think all this is rather nonsense. We’ve most of us got something in our past history that we don’t want raked up, and we’d all better let bygones be bygones.

Lady Frederick.

I’m waiting, Lady Mereston.

Lady Mereston.

It’s merely that I thought my son should know that Lady Frederick had been the mistress of Roger Bellingham. [Lady Frederick turns quickly and looks at her; then bursts into a peal of laughter. Lady Mereston springs up angrily and hands her a letter.] Is this in your handwriting?

Lady Frederick.

[Not at all disconcerted.] Dear me, how did you get hold of this?

Lady Mereston.

You see that I have ample proof, Lady Frederick.

Lady Frederick.

[Handing the letter to Mereston.] Would you like to read it? You know my writing well enough to be able to answer Lady Mereston’s question.

[He reads it through and looks at her in dismay.

Mereston.

Good God!... What does it mean?

Lady Frederick.

Pray read it aloud.

Mereston.

I can’t.

Lady Frederick.

Then give it to me. [She takes it from him.] It’s addressed to my brother-in-law, Peter Berolles. The Kate to whom it refers was his wife. [Reads.] Dear Peter: I’m sorry you should have had a row with Kate about Roger Bellingham. You are quite wrong in all you thought. There is absolutely nothing between them. I don’t know where Kate was on Tuesday night, but certainly she was not within a hundred miles of Roger. This I know because....

Mereston.

[Interrupting.] For God’s sake don’t go on.

[Lady Frederick looks at him and shrugs her

shoulders.

Lady Frederick.

It’s signed Elizabeth Berolles. And there’s a postscript: You may make what use of this letter you like.

Mereston.

What does it mean? What does it mean?

Lady Mereston.

Surely it’s very clear? You can’t want a more explicit confession of guilt.

Lady Frederick.

I tried to make it as explicit as possible.

Lady Mereston.

Won’t you say something? I’m sure there must be some explanation.

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know how you got hold of this letter, Lady Mereston. I agree with you, it is compromising. But Kate and Peter are dead now, and there’s nothing to prevent me from telling the truth.

[Paradine Fouldes takes a step forward and

watches her.

Lady Frederick.

My sister-in-law was a meek and mild little person, as demure as you can imagine, and no one would have suspected her for a moment of kicking over the traces. Well, one morning she came to me in floods of tears and confessed that she and Roger Bellingham [with a shrug] had been foolish. Her husband suspected that something was wrong and had kicked up a row.

Fouldes.

[Drily.] There are men who will make a scene on the smallest provocation.

Lady Frederick.

To shield herself she told the first lie that came into her head. She said to Peter that Roger Bellingham was my lover — and she threw herself on my mercy. She was a poor, weak little creature, and if there’d been a scandal she’d have gone to the dogs altogether. It had only been a momentary infatuation for Roger, and the scare had cured her. At the bottom of her heart she loved her husband still. I was desperately unhappy, and I didn’t care much what became of me. She promised to turn over a new leaf and all that sort of thing. I thought I’d better give her another chance of going straight. I did what she wanted. I wrote that letter taking all the blame on myself, and Kate lived happily with her husband till she died.

Mereston.

It was just like you.

Lady Mereston.

But Lord and Lady Peter are dead?

Lady Frederick.

Yes.

Lady Mereston.

And Roger Bellingham?

Lady Frederick.

He’s dead too.

Lady Mereston.

Then how can you prove your account of this affair?

Lady Frederick.

I can’t.

Lady Mereston.

And does this convince you, Charlie?

Mereston.

Of course.

Lady Mereston.

[Impatiently.] Good heavens, the boy’s out of his senses. Paradine, for Heaven’s sake say something.

Fouldes.

Well, much as it may displease you, my dear, I’m afraid I agree with Charlie.

Lady Mereston.

You don’t mean to say you believe this cock-and-bull story?

Fouldes.

I do.

Lady Mereston.

Why?

Fouldes.

Well, you see, Lady Frederick’s a very clever woman. She would never have invented such an utterly improbable tale, which can’t possibly be proved. If she’d been guilty, she’d have had ready at least a dozen proofs of her innocence.

Lady Mereston.

But that’s absurd.

Fouldes.

Besides, I’ve known Lady Frederick a long time, and she has at least a thousand faults.

Lady Frederick.

[With flashing eyes.] Thanks.

Fouldes.

But there’s something I will say for her. She’s not a liar. If she tells me a thing, I don’t hesitate for a moment to believe it.

Lady Frederick.

It’s not a matter of the smallest importance if any of you believe me or not. Be so good as to ring, Charlie.

Mereston.

Certainly.

[He rings, and a Servant immediately comes in.

Lady Frederick.

Tell my servant that he’s to come here at once and bring the despatch-box which is in my dressing-room.

Servant.

Yes, miladi.

[Exit.

Fouldes.

[Quickly.] I say, what are you going to do?

Lady Frederick.

That is absolutely no business of yours.

Fouldes.

Be a brick, Betsy, and don’t give her those letters.

Lady Frederick.

I think I’ve had enough of this business. I’m proposing to finish with it.

Fouldes.

Temper, temper.

Lady Frederick.

[Stamping her foot.] Don’t say temper to me, Paradine.

[She walks up and down angrily. Paradine

sits at the piano and with one finger strums

“Rule Britannia.”

Mereston.

Shut up.

[He takes a book, flings it at his head and

misses.

Fouldes.

Good shot, sir.

Lady Frederick.

I often wonder how you got your reputation for wit, Paradine.

Fouldes.

By making a point of laughing heartily at other people’s jokes.

[The Footman enters with the despatch-box,

which Lady Frederick opens. She takes

a bundle of letters from it.

Fouldes.

Betsy, Betsy, for heaven’s sake don’t! Have mercy.

Lady Frederick.

Was mercy shown to me? Albert!

Footman.

Yes, miladi.

Lady Frederick.

You’ll go to the proprietor of the hotel and tell him that I propose to leave Monte Carlo to-morrow.

Mereston.

[Aghast.] Are you going?

Footman.

Very well, my lady.

Lady Frederick.

Have you a good memory for faces?

Footman.

Yes, my lady.

Lady Frederick.

You’re not likely to forget Lord Mereston?

Footman.

No, my lady.

Lady Frederick.

Then please take note that if his lordship calls upon me in London I’m not at home.

Mereston.

Lady Frederick!

Lady Frederick.

[To Footman.] Go.

[Exit Footman.

Mereston.

What d’you mean? What have I done?

[Without answering Lady Frederick takes

the letters. Paradine is watching her

anxiously. She goes up to the stove and

throws them in one by one.

Lady Mereston.

What on earth is she doing?

Lady Frederick.

I have some letters here which would ruin the happiness of a very worthless woman I know. I’m burning them so that I may never have the temptation to use them.

Fouldes.

I never saw anything so melodramatic.

Lady Frederick.

Hold your tongue, Paradine. [Turning to Mereston.] My dear Charlie, I came to Monte Carlo to be amused. Your mother has persecuted me incessantly. Your uncle — is too well-bred to talk to his servants as he has talked to me. I’ve been pestered in one way and another, and insulted till my blood boiled, because apparently they’re afraid you may want to marry me. I’m sick and tired of it. I’m not used to treatment of this sort; my patience is quite exhausted. And since you are the cause of the whole thing I have an obvious remedy. I would much rather not have anything more to do with you. If we meet one another in the street you need not trouble to look my way because I shall cut you dead.

Lady Mereston.

[In an undertone.] Thank God for that.

Mereston.

Mother, mother. [To Lady Frederick.] I’m awfully sorry. I feel that you have a right to be angry. For all that you’ve suffered I beg your pardon most humbly. My mother has said and done things which I regret to say are quite unjustifiable.

Lady Mereston.

Charlie!

Mereston.

On her behalf and on mine I apologise with all my heart.

Lady Frederick.

[Smiling.] Don’t take it too seriously. It really doesn’t matter. But I think it’s far wiser that we shouldn’t see one another again.

Mereston.

But I can’t live without you.

Lady Mereston.

[With a gasp.] Ah!

Mereston.

Don’t you know that my whole happiness is wrapped up in you? I love you with all my heart and soul. I can never love any one but you.

Fouldes.

[To Lady Mereston.] Now you’ve done it. You’ve done it very neatly.

Mereston.

Don’t think me a presumptuous fool. I’ve been wanting to say this ever since I knew you, but I haven’t dared. You’re brilliant and charming and fascinating, but I have nothing whatever to offer you.

Lady Frederick.

[Gently.] My dear Charlie.

Mereston.

But if you can overlook my faults, I daresay you could make something of me. Won’t you marry me? I should look upon it as a great honour, and I would love you always to the end of my life. I’d try to be worthy of my great happiness and you.

Lady Frederick.

You’re very much too modest, Charlie. I’m enormously flattered and grateful. You must give me time to think it over.

Lady Mereston.

Time?

Mereston.

But I can’t wait. Don’t you see how I love you? You’ll never meet any one who’ll care for you as I do.

Lady Frederick.

I think you can wait a little. Come and see me to-morrow morning at ten, and I’ll give you an answer.

Mereston.

Very well, if I must.

Lady Frederick.

[Smiling.] I’m afraid so.

Fouldes.

[To Lady Frederick.] I wonder what the deuce your little game is now.

[She smiles triumphantly and gives him a deep,

ironical curtsey.

Lady Frederick.

Sir, your much obliged and very obedient, humble servant.

THIRD ACT

Scene: Lady Frederick’s dressing-room. At the back is a large opening, curtained, which leads to the bedroom; on the right a door leading to the passage; on the left a window. In front of the window, of which the blind is drawn, is a dressing-table. Lady Frederick’s maid is in the room, a very neat pretty Frenchwoman. She speaks with a slight accent. She rings the bell, and the Footman enters.

Maid.

As soon as Lord Mereston arrives he is to be shown in.

Footman.

[Surprised.] Here?

Maid.

Where else?

[The Footman winks significantly. The Maid

draws herself up with dignity, and with a

dramatic gesture points to the door.

Maid.

Depart.

[The Footman goes out.

Lady Frederick.

[From the bedroom.] Have you drawn the blind, Angélique?

Maid.

I will do so, miladi. [She draws the blind, and the light falls brightly on the dressing-table.] But miladi will never be able to stand it. [She looks at herself in the glass.] Oh, the light of the sun in the morning! I cannot look at myself.

Lady Frederick.

[As before.] There’s no reason that you should — especially in my glass.

Maid.

But if ’is lordship is coming, miladi must let me draw the blind. Oh, it is impossible.

Lady Frederick.

Do as you’re told and don’t interfere.

[The Footman enters to announce Mereston.

The Maid goes out.

Footman.

Lord Mereston.

Lady Frederick.

[As before.] Is that you, Charlie? You’re very punctual.

Mereston.

I’ve been walking about outside till the clock struck.

Lady Frederick.

I’m not nearly dressed, you know. I’ve only just had my bath.

Mereston.

Must I go?

Lady Frederick.

No, of course not. You can talk to me while I’m finishing.

Mereston.

All right. How are you this morning?

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know. I haven’t looked at myself in the glass yet. How are you?

Mereston.

A 1, thanks.

Lady Frederick.

Are you looking nice?

Mereston.

[Going to the glass.] I hope so. By Jove, what a strong light. You must be pretty sure of your complexion to be able to stand that.

Lady Frederick.

[Appearing.] I am.

Mereston.

[Going forward eagerly.] Ah.

[She comes through the curtains. She wears a

kimono, her hair is all dishevelled, hanging

about her head in a tangled mop. She is

not made up and looks haggard and yellow

and lined. When Mereston sees her he

gives a slight start of surprise. She plays

the scene throughout with her broadest

brogue.

Lady Frederick.

Good-morning.

Mereston.

[Staring at her in dismay.] Good-morning.

Lady Frederick.

Well, what have you to say to me?

Mereston.

[Embarrassed.] I — er — hope you slept all right.

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Did you?

Mereston.

I forget.

Lady Frederick.

I believe you slept like a top, Charlie. You really might have lain awake and thought of me. What is the matter? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.

Mereston.

Oh no, not at all.

Lady Frederick.

You’re not disappointed already?

Mereston.

No, of course not. Only — you look so different with your hair not done.

Lady Frederick.

[With a little cry.] Oh, I’d forgotten all about it. Angélique, come and do my hair.

Maid.

[Appearing.] Yes, miladi.

[Lady Frederick sits down at the dressing-table.

Lady Frederick.

Now, take pains, Angélique. I want to look my very best. Angélique is a jewel of incalculable value.

Maid.

Miladi is very kind.

Lady Frederick.

If I’m light-hearted, she does it one way. If I’m depressed she does it another.

Maid.

Oh, miladi, the perruquier who taught me said always that a good hairdresser could express every mood and every passion of the human heart.

Lady Frederick.

Good heavens, you don’t mean to say you can do all that?

Maid.

Miladi, he said I was his best pupil.

Lady Frederick.

Very well. Express — express a great crisis in my affairs.

Maid.

That is the easiest thing in the world, miladi. I bring the hair rather low on the forehead, and that expresses a crisis in her ladyship’s affairs.

Lady Frederick.

But I always wear my hair low on the forehead.

Maid.

Then it is plain her ladyship’s affairs are always in a critical condition.

Lady Frederick.

So they are. I never thought of that.

Mereston.

You’ve got awfully stunning hair, Lady Frederick.

Lady Frederick.

D’you like it, really?

Mereston.

The colour’s perfectly beautiful.

Lady Frederick.

It ought to be. It’s frightfully expensive.

Mereston.

You don’t mean to say it’s dyed?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, no. Only touched up. That’s quite a different thing.

Mereston.

Is it?

Lady Frederick.

It’s like superstition, you know, which is what other people believe. My friends dye their hair, but I only touch mine up. Unfortunately, it costs just as much.

Mereston.

And you have such a lot.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, heaps. [She opens a drawer and takes out a long switch.] Give him a bit to look at.

Maid.

Yes, miladi.

[She gives it to him.

Mereston.

Er — yes. [Not knowing what on earth to say.] How silky it is.

Lady Frederick.

A poor thing, but mine own. At least, I paid for it. By the way, have I paid for it yet, Angélique?

Maid.

Not yet, miladi. But the man can wait.

Lady Frederick.

[Taking it from Mereston.] A poor thing, then, but my hairdresser’s. Shall I put it on?

Mereston.

I wouldn’t, if I were you.

Maid.

If her ladyship anticipates a tragic situation, I would venture to recommend it. A really pathetic scene is impossible without a quantity of hair worn quite high on the head.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, I know. Whenever I want to soften the hard heart of a creditor I clap on every bit I’ve got. But I don’t think I will to-day. I’ll tell you what, a temple curl would just fit the case.

Maid.

Then her ladyship inclines to comedy. Very well, I say no more.

[Lady Frederick takes two temple-curls from

the drawer.

Lady Frederick.

Aren’t they dears?

Mereston.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

You’ve admired them very often, Charlie, haven’t you? I suppose you never knew they cost a guinea each?

Mereston.

It never occurred to me they were false.

Lady Frederick.

The masculine intelligence is so gross. Didn’t your mother tell you?

Mereston.

My mother told me a great deal.

Lady Frederick.

I expect she overdid it. There. Now that’s done. D’you think it looks nice?

Mereston.

Charming.

Lady Frederick.

Angélique, his lordship is satisfied. You may disappear.

Maid.

Yes, miladi.

[She goes.

Lady Frederick.

Now, tell me you think I’m the most ravishing creature you ever saw in your life.

Mereston.

I’ve told you that so often.

Lady Frederick.

[Stretching out her hands.] You are a nice boy. It was charming of you to say — what you did yesterday. I could have hugged you there and then.

Mereston.

Could you?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my dear, don’t be so cold.

Mereston.

I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to be.

Lady Frederick.

Haven’t you got anything nice to say to me at all?

Mereston.

I don’t know what I can say that I’ve not said a thousand times already.

Lady Frederick.

Tell me what you thought of all night when you tossed on that sleepless pillow of yours.

Mereston.

I was awfully anxious to see you again.

Lady Frederick.

Didn’t you have a dreadful fear that I shouldn’t be as nice as you imagined? Now, come — honestly.

Mereston.

Well, yes, I suppose it crossed my mind.

Lady Frederick.

And am I?

Mereston.

Of course.

Lady Frederick.

You’re sure you’re not disappointed?

Mereston.

Quite sure.

Lady Frederick.

What a relief! You know, I’ve been tormenting myself dreadfully. I said to myself: “He’ll go on thinking of me till he imagines I’m the most beautiful woman in the world, and then, when he comes here and sees the plain reality, it’ll be an awful blow.”

Mereston.

What nonsense! How could you think anything of the kind?

Lady Frederick.

Are you aware that you haven’t shown the least desire to kiss me yet?

Mereston.

I thought — I thought you might not like it.

Lady Frederick.

It’ll be too late in a minute.

Mereston.

Why?

Lady Frederick.

Because I’m just going to make up, you silly boy.

Mereston.

How? I don’t understand.

Lady Frederick.

You said I must be very sure of my complexion. Of course I am. Here it is.

[She runs her fingers over a row of little pots

and vases.

Mereston.

Oh, I see. I beg your pardon.

Lady Frederick.

You don’t mean to say you thought it natural?

Mereston.

It never occurred to me it might be anything else.

Lady Frederick.

It’s really too disheartening. I spend an hour every day of my life making the best complexion in Monte Carlo, and you think it’s natural. Why, I might as well be a dairymaid of eighteen.

Mereston.

I’m very sorry.

Lady Frederick.

I forgive you.... You may kiss my hand. [He does so.] You dear boy. [Looking at herself in the glass.] Oh, Betsy, you’re not looking your best to-day. [Shaking her finger at the glass.] This won’t do, Betsy, my dear. You’re very nearly looking your age. [Turning round quickly.] D’you think I look forty?

Mereston.

I never asked myself how old you were.

Lady Frederick.

Well, I’m not, you know. And I shan’t be as long as there’s a pot of rouge and a powder puff in the world. [She rubs grease paint all over her face.]

Mereston.

What are you doing?

Lady Frederick.

I wish I were an actress. They have such an advantage. They only have to make up to look well behind the footlights; but I have to expose myself to that beastly sun.

Mereston.

[Nervously.] Yes, of course.

Lady Frederick.

Is your mother dreadfully annoyed with you? And Paradine must be furious. I shall call him Uncle Paradine next time I see him. It’ll make him feel so middle-aged. Charlie, you don’t know how grateful I am for what you did yesterday. You acted like a real brick.

Mereston.

It’s awfully good of you to say so.

Lady Frederick.

[Turning.] Do I look a fright?

Mereston.

Oh, no, not at all.

Lady Frederick.

I love this powder. It plays no tricks with you. Once I put on a new powder that I bought in Paris, and as soon as I went into artificial light it turned a bright mauve. I was very much annoyed. You wouldn’t like to go about with a mauve face, would you?

Mereston.

No, not at all.

Lady Frederick.

Fortunately I had a green frock on. And mauve and green were very fashionable that year. Still I’d sooner it hadn’t been on my face.... There. I think that’ll do as a foundation. I’m beginning to feel younger already. Now for the delicate soft bloom of youth. The great difficulty, you know, is to make both your cheeks the same colour. [Turning to him.] Charlie, you’re not bored, are you?

Mereston.

No, no.

Lady Frederick.

I always think my observations have a peculiar piquancy when I have only one cheek rouged. I remember once I went out to dinner, and as soon as I sat down I grew conscious of the fact that one of my cheeks was much redder than the other.

Mereston.

By George, that was awkward.

Lady Frederick.

Charlie, you are a good-looking boy. I had no idea you were so handsome. And you look so young and fresh, it’s quite a pleasure to look at you.

Mereston.

[Laughing awkwardly.] D’you think so? What did you do when you discovered your predicament?

Lady Frederick.

Well, by a merciful interposition of Providence, I had a foreign diplomatist on my right side which bloomed like a rose, and a bishop on my left which was white like the lily. The diplomatist told me risky stories all through dinner so it was quite natural that this cheek should blush fiery red. And as the Bishop whispered in my left ear harrowing details of distress in the East End, it was only decent that the other should exhibit a becoming pallor. [Meanwhile she has been rouging her cheeks.] Now look carefully, Charlie, and you’ll see how I make the Cupid’s bow which is my mouth. I like a nice healthy colour on the lips, don’t you?

Mereston.

Isn’t it awfully uncomfortable to have all that stuff on?

Lady Frederick.

Ah, my dear boy, it’s woman’s lot to suffer in this world. But it’s a great comfort to think that one is submitting to the decrees of Providence and at the same time adding to one’s personal attractiveness. But I confess I sometimes wish I needn’t blow my nose so carefully. Smile, Charlie. I don’t think you’re a very ardent lover, you know.

Mereston.

I’m sorry. What would you like me to do?

Lady Frederick.

I should like you to make me impassioned speeches.

Mereston.

I’m afraid they’d be so hackneyed.

Lady Frederick.

Never mind that. I’ve long discovered that under the influence of profound emotion a man always expresses himself in the terms of the Family Herald.

Mereston.

You must remember that I’m awfully inexperienced.

Lady Frederick.

Well, I’ll let you off this time — because I like your curly hair. [She sighs amorously.] Now for the delicate arch of my eyebrows. I don’t know what I should do without this. I’ve got no eyebrows at all really.... Have you ever noticed that dark line under the eyes which gives such intensity to my expression?

Mereston.

Yes, often.

Lady Frederick.

[Holding out the pencil.] Well, here it is. Ah, my dear boy, in this pencil you have at will roguishness and languor, tenderness and indifference, sprightliness, passion, malice, what you will. Now be very quiet for one moment. If I overdo it my whole day will be spoilt. You mustn’t breathe even. Whenever I do this I think how true those lines are:

“The little more and how much it is.

The little less and what worlds away.”

There! Now just one puff of powder, and the whole world’s kind. [Looking at herself in the glass and sighing with satisfaction.] Ah! I feel eighteen. I think it’s a success, and I shall have a happy day. Oh, Betsy, Betsy, I think you’ll do. You know, you’re not unattractive, my dear. Not strictly beautiful, perhaps; but then I don’t like the chocolate-box sort of woman. I’ll just go and take off this dressing-gown. [Mereston gets up.] No, don’t move. I’ll go into my bedroom. I shall only be one moment. [Lady Frederick goes through the curtains.] Angélique.

[The Maid enters.

Maid.

Yes, miladi.

Lady Frederick.

Just clear away those things on the dressing-table.

Maid.

[Doing so.] Very well, miladi.

Lady Frederick.

You may have a cigarette, Charlie.

Mereston.

Thanks. My nerves are a bit dicky this morning.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, blow the thing! Angélique, come and help me.

Maid.

Yes, miladi.

[She goes out.

Lady Frederick.

At last.

[She comes in, having changed the kimono for

a very beautiful dressing-gown of silk and

lace.

Lady Frederick.

Now, are you pleased?

Mereston.

Of course I’m pleased.

Lady Frederick.

Then you may make love to me.

Mereston.

You say such disconcerting things.

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] Well, Charlie, you’ve found no difficulty in doing it for the last fortnight. You’re not going to pretend that you’re already at a loss for pretty speeches?

Mereston.

When I came here, I had a thousand things to say to you, but you’ve driven them all out of my head. Won’t you give me an answer now?

Lady Frederick.

What to?

Mereston.

You’ve not forgotten that I asked you to marry me?

Lady Frederick.

No, but you asked me under very peculiar circumstances. I wonder if you can repeat the offer now in cold blood?

Mereston.

Of course. What a cad you must think me!

Lady Frederick.

Are you sure you want to marry me still — after having slept over it?

Mereston.

Yes.

Lady Frederick.

You are a good boy, and I’m a beast to treat you so abominably. It’s awfully nice of you.

Mereston.

Well, what is the answer?

Lady Frederick.

My dear, I’ve been giving it you for the last half-hour.

Mereston.

How?

Lady Frederick.

You don’t for a moment suppose I should have let you into those horrible mysteries of my toilette if I’d had any intention of marrying you? Give me credit for a certain amount of intelligence and good feeling. I should have kept up the illusion, at all events till after the honeymoon.

Mereston.

Are you going to refuse me?

Lady Frederick.

Aren’t you rather glad?

Mereston.

No, no, no.

Lady Frederick.

[Putting her arm through his.] Now let us talk it over sensibly. You’re a very nice boy, and I’m awfully fond of you. But you’re twenty-two, and heaven only knows my age. You see, the church in which I was baptized was burnt down the year I was born, so I don’t know how old I am.

Mereston.

[Smiling.] Where was it burnt?

Lady Frederick.

In Ireland.

Mereston.

I thought so.

Lady Frederick.

Just at present I can make a decent enough show by taking infinite pains; and my hand is not so heavy that the innocent eyes of your sex can discover how much of me is due to art. But in ten years you’ll only be thirty-two, and then, if I married you, my whole life would be a mortal struggle to preserve some semblance of youth. Haven’t you seen those old hags who’ve never surrendered to Anno Domini, with their poor, thin, wrinkled cheeks covered with paint, and the dreadful wigs that hide a hairless pate? Rather cock-eyed, don’t you know, and invariably flaxen. You’ve laughed at their ridiculous graces, and you’ve been disgusted too. Oh, I’m so sorry for them, poor things. And I should become just like that, for I should never have the courage to let my hair be white so long as yours was brown. But if I don’t marry you, I can look forward to the white hairs fairly happily. The first I shall pluck out, and the second I shall pluck out. But when the third comes I’ll give in, and I’ll throw my rouge and my poudre de riz and my pencils into the fire.

Mereston.

But d’you think I should ever change?

Lady Frederick.

My dear boy, I’m sure of it. Can’t you imagine what it would be to be tied to a woman who was always bound to sit with her back to the light? And sometimes you might want to kiss me.

Mereston.

I think it very probable.

Lady Frederick.

Well, you couldn’t — in case you disarranged my complexion. [Mereston sighs deeply.] Don’t sigh, Charlie. I daresay I was horrid to let you fall in love with me, but I’m only human, and I was desperately flattered.

Mereston.

Was that all?

Lady Frederick.

And rather touched. That is why I want to give a cure with my refusal.

Mereston.

But you break my heart.

Lady Frederick.

My dear, men have said that to me ever since I was fifteen, but I’ve never noticed that in consequence they ate their dinner less heartily.

Mereston.

I suppose you think it was only calf-love?

Lady Frederick.

I’m not such a fool as to imagine a boy can love any less than a man. If I’d thought your affection ridiculous I shouldn’t have been so flattered.

Mereston.

It doesn’t hurt any the less because the wounds you make are clean cut.

Lady Frederick.

But they’ll soon heal. And you’ll fall in love with a nice girl of your own age, whose cheeks flush with youth and not with rouge, and whose eyes sparkle because they love you, and not because they’re carefully made up.

Mereston.

But I wanted to help you. You’re in such an awful scrape, and if you’ll only marry me it can all be set right.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my dear, don’t go in for self-sacrifice. You must leave that to women. They’re so much more used to it.

Mereston.

Isn’t there anything I can do for you?

Lady Frederick.

No, dear. I shall get out of the mess somehow. I always do. You really need not worry about me.

Mereston.

You know, you are a brick.

Lady Frederick.

Then it’s all settled, isn’t it? And you’re not going to be unhappy?

Mereston.

I’ll try not to be.

Lady Frederick.

I’d like to imprint a chaste kiss on your forehead, only I’m afraid it would leave a mark.

[The Footman comes in and announces Paradine

Fouldes.

Footman.

Mr. Paradine Fouldes.

[Exit.

Fouldes.

Do I disturb?

Lady Frederick.

Not at all. We’ve just finished our conversation.

Fouldes.

Well?

Mereston.

If any one wants to know who the best woman in the world is send ’em to me, and I’ll tell them.

Lady Frederick.

[Taking his hand.] You dear! Good-bye.

Mereston.

Good-bye. And thanks for being so kind to me.

[He goes out.

Fouldes.

Do I see in front of me my prospective niece?

Lady Frederick.

Why d’you ask, Uncle Paradine?

Fouldes.

Singularly enough because I want to know.

Lady Frederick.

Well, it so happens — you don’t.

Fouldes.

You’ve refused him?

Lady Frederick.

I have.

Fouldes.

Then will you tell me why you’ve been leading us all such a devil of a dance?

Lady Frederick.

Because you interfered with me, and I allow no one to do that.

Fouldes.

Hoity-toity.

Lady Frederick.

You weren’t really so foolish as to imagine I should marry a boy who set me up on a pedestal and vowed he was unworthy to kiss the hem of my garment?

Fouldes.

Why not?

Lady Frederick.

My dear Paradine, I don’t want to commit suicide by sheer boredom. There’s only one thing in the world more insufferable than being in love.

Fouldes.

And what is that, pray?

Lady Frederick.

Why, having some one in love with you.

Fouldes.

I’ve suffered from it all my life.

Lady Frederick.

Think of living up to the ideal Charlie has of me. My hair would turn a hydrogen yellow in a week. And then to be so desperately adored as all that — oh, it’s so dull! I should have to wear a mask all day long. I could never venture to be natural in case I shocked him. And notwithstanding all my efforts I should see the illusions tumbling about his ears one by one till he realised I was no ethereal goddess, but a very ordinary human woman neither better nor worse than anybody else.

Fouldes.

Your maxim appears to be, marry any one you like except the man that’s in love with you.

Lady Frederick.

Ah, but don’t you think I might find a man who loved me though he knew me through and through? I’d far rather that he saw my faults and forgave them than that he thought me perfect.

Fouldes.

But how d’you know you’ve choked the boy off for good?

Lady Frederick.

I took good care. I wanted to cure him. If it had been possible I would have shown him my naked soul. But I couldn’t do that, so I let him see....

Fouldes.

[Interrupting.] What!

Lady Frederick.

[Laughing.] No, not quite. I had a dressing-gown on and other paraphernalia. But I made him come here when I wasn’t made up, and he sat by while I rouged my cheeks.

Fouldes.

And the young fool thought there was nothing more in you than a carefully prepared complexion?

Lady Frederick.

He was very nice about it. But I think he was rather relieved when I refused him.

[There is a knock at the door.]

Gerald.

[Outside.] May we come in?

Lady Frederick.

Yes do.

Enter Gerald and Rose and the Admiral.

Gerald.

[Excitedly.] I say, it’s all right. The Admiral’s come down like a real brick. I’ve told him everything.

Lady Frederick.

What do you mean? Good-morning, dear Admiral.

Admiral.

Good-morning.

Gerald.

I’ve made a clean breast of it. I talked it over with Rosie.

Rose.

And we went to papa together.

Gerald.

And told him that I owed Montgomerie nine hundred pounds.

Rose.

And we thought papa would make an awful scene.

Gerald.

Raise Cain, don’t you know.

Rose.

But he never said a word.

Gerald.

He was simply ripping over it.

Lady Frederick.

[Putting her hands to her ears.] Oh, oh, oh. For heaven’s sake be calm and coherent.

Gerald.

My dear, you don’t know what a relief it is.

Rose.

I saw Gerald was dreadfully worried, and I wormed it out of him.

Gerald.

I’m so glad to be out of the clutches of that brute.

Rose.

Now we’re going to live happily ever afterwards.

[All the while the Admiral has been trying to get a word in, but each time he is about to start one of the others has broken in.

Admiral.

Silence. [He puffs and blows.] I never saw such a pair in my life.

Lady Frederick.

Now do explain it all, Admiral. I can’t make head or tail out of these foolish creatures.

Admiral.

Well, they came and told me that Montgomerie had an I.O.U. of Gerald’s for nine hundred pounds and was using it to blackmail you.

Fouldes.

Is that a fact?

Lady Frederick.

Yes.

Admiral.

I never liked the man’s face. And when they said his terms were that you were to marry him or Gerald would have to send in his papers, I said ...

Fouldes.

Damn his impudence.

Admiral.

How did you know?

Fouldes.

Because I’d have said it myself.

Gerald.

And the Admiral stumped up like a man. He gave me a cheque for the money, and I’ve just this moment sent it on to Montgomerie.

Lady Frederick.

[Taking both his hands.] It’s awfully good of you, and I’m sure you’ll never regret that you gave Gerald a chance.

Admiral.

May I have a few words’ private conversation with you?

Lady Frederick.

Of course. [To the others.] Make yourselves scarce.

Fouldes.

We’ll go on the balcony, shall we?

Admiral.

I’m sorry to trouble you, but it’ll only take three minutes.

[Gerald and Rose and Fouldes go on to the balcony.

Lady Frederick.

[When they’ve gone.] There.

Admiral.

Well, what I wanted to say to you was this: I like Gerald, but I think he wants guiding. D’you follow me?

Lady Frederick.

I’m sure he will take your advice always.

Admiral.

It’s a woman’s hand that he wants. Now if you and I were to join forces we could keep him out of mischief, couldn’t we?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, I’ll come and stay with you whenever you ask me. I love giving good advice when I’m quite sure it won’t be taken.

Admiral.

I was thinking of a more permanent arrangement. Look here, why don’t you marry me?

Lady Frederick.

My dear Admiral!

Admiral.

I don’t think an attractive woman like you ought to live alone. She’s bound to get in a scrape.

Lady Frederick.

It’s awfully good of you, but....

Admiral.

You don’t think I’m too old, do you?

Lady Frederick.

Of course not. You’re in the very prime of life.

Admiral.

There’s life in the old dog yet, I can tell you.

Lady Frederick.

I feel sure of that. I never doubted it for a moment.

Admiral.

Then what have you got against me?

Lady Frederick.

You wouldn’t like to commit polygamy, would you?

Admiral.

Eh?

Lady Frederick.

You see, it’s not a question of marrying me only, but all my tradespeople.

Admiral.

I hadn’t thought of that.

Lady Frederick.

Besides, you’re Rose’s father, and I’m Gerald’s sister. If we married I should be my brother’s mother-in-law, and my step-daughter would be my sister. Your daughter would be your sister-in-law, and your brother would just snap his fingers at your fatherly advice.

Admiral.

[Confused.] Eh?

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know if the prayer-book allows things like that, but if it does I think it’s hopelessly immoral.

Admiral.

Well, shall I tell them I’ve changed my mind and they can’t marry?

Lady Frederick.

Then there’d be no reason for us to — commit the crime, would there?

Admiral.

I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose not.

Lady Frederick.

You’re not cross with me, are you? I’m very much flattered, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Admiral.

Not at all, not at all. I only thought it might save trouble.

Lady Frederick.

[Calling.] Gerald. Come along. [They come in.] We’ve had our little talk.

Gerald.

Everything satisfactory?

Lady Frederick.

[With a look at the Admiral.] Quite.

Admiral.

[Gruffly.] Quite.

Lady Frederick’s Footman enters.

Footman.

Captain Montgomerie wishes to know if he may see your ladyship.

Lady Frederick.

I’d forgotten all about him.

Gerald.

Let me go to him, shall I?

Lady Frederick.

No, I’m not afraid of him any longer. He can’t do anything to you. And as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter.

Gerald.

Then I’ll tell him to go to the devil.

Lady Frederick.

No, I’m going to tell him that myself. [To the Footman.] Ask Captain Montgomerie to come here.

Footman.

Yes, miladi.

[Exit.

Lady Frederick.

[Walking up and down furiously.] I’m going to tell him that myself.

Fouldes.

Now keep calm, Betsy.

Lady Frederick.

[Very deliberately.] I shall not keep calm.

Fouldes.

Remember that you’re a perfect lady.

Lady Frederick.

Don’t interfere with me. I ate humble pie yesterday, and it didn’t agree with me at all.

[Footman enters to announce Captain Montgomerie, who follows him, and immediately withdraws.

Footman.

Captain Montgomerie.

Captain Montgomerie.

How d’you do.

[He is obviously surprised to see the others.

Lady Frederick.

[Pleasantly.] Quite a party, aren’t we?

Captain Montgomerie.

Yes. [A pause.] I hope you don’t mind my coming so early?

Lady Frederick.

Not at all. You made an appointment for half-past ten.

Captain Montgomerie.

I trust you have good news for me.

Lady Frederick.

Captain Montgomerie, every one here knows the circumstances that have brought you.

Captain Montgomerie.

I should have thought it wiser for both our sakes not to make them too public.

Lady Frederick.

[Very amiably.] I don’t see why you should be ashamed because you made me a proposal of marriage?

Captain Montgomerie.

I’m sorry you should think it a laughing matter, Lady Frederick.

Lady Frederick.

I don’t. I never laugh at an impertinence.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Taken aback.] I beg your pardon.

Lady Frederick.

Surely the receipt of my brother’s letter was sufficient answer for you. After that you must have guessed there was no likelihood that I should change my mind.

Captain Montgomerie.

What letter? I don’t understand.

Gerald.

I sent you a note this morning enclosing a cheque for the money I lost to you.

Captain Montgomerie.

I’ve not received it.

Gerald.

It must be waiting for you at the hotel.

[Captain Montgomerie pauses and looks meditatively

at the assembled company.

Lady Frederick.

I think there’s nothing for which I need detain you longer.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Smiling.] I don’t think I’ve quite finished yet. Has it slipped your memory that the two bills fall due to-day? Allow me to present them.

[He takes them out of his pocket-book.

Lady Frederick.

I’m very sorry I can’t pay them — at present.

Captain Montgomerie.

I regret that I can’t wait. You must pay them.

Lady Frederick.

I tell you it’s impossible.

Captain Montgomerie.

Then I shall get an order against you.

Lady Frederick.

That you may do to your heart’s content.

Captain Montgomerie.

You realise the consequences. It’s not very nice to be an undischarged bankrupt.

Lady Frederick.

Much nicer than to marry a rascally money-lender.

Fouldes.

May I look at these interesting documents?

Captain Montgomerie.

Certainly. [Blandly.] I haven’t the least wish to be offensive.

Fouldes.

[Taking them.] You fail lamentably in achieving your wish. Three thousand five hundred pounds in all. It seems hardly worth while to make a fuss about so small a sum.

Captain Montgomerie.

I’m in urgent need of money.

Fouldes.

[Ironically.] So rich a man as you?

Captain Montgomerie.

Even a rich man may be temporarily embarrassed.

Fouldes.

Then be so good as to wait for one moment. [He sits down at a table and writes a cheque.] No sight is more affecting than that of a millionaire in financial straits.

Lady Frederick.

Paradine!

Fouldes.

[Handing the cheque.] Now, sir, I think that settles it. Will you exchange my cheque for those bills?

Captain Montgomerie.

Damn you, I forgot you.

Fouldes.

You may not be aware that it’s unusual to swear in the presence of ladies.

Captain Montgomerie.

[Looking at the cheque.] I suppose it’s all right.

[Paradine goes to the door and opens it.

Fouldes.

There is the window, and here is the door. Which will you choose?

[Captain Montgomerie looks at him without

answering, shrugs his shoulders and goes

out.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, Paradine, you are a brick.

Gerald.

I say it’s awfully good of you.

Fouldes.

Nonsense. I’ve got a strong sense of effect, and I always cultivate the dramatic situation.

Lady Frederick.

I shall never be able to pay you back, Paradine.

Fouldes.

My dear, I’m not entirely devoid of intelligence.

Admiral.

Well, well, I must be off to take my constitutional.

Lady Frederick.

And Rose and Gerald must take care of you. We shall all meet at luncheon.

Admiral.

Yes, yes.

[The Admiral, Rose and Gerald go out. Lady Frederick goes up to Paradine and takes his hands.

Lady Frederick.

Thanks awfully. You are a good friend.

Fouldes.

By George, how your eyes glitter!

Lady Frederick.

It’s only belladonna, you know.

Fouldes.

I’m not such a fool as my nephew, my dear.

Lady Frederick.

Why did you do it?

Fouldes.

D’you know what gratitude is?

Lady Frederick.

Thanks for past favours and a lively sense of benefits to come.

Fouldes.

Well, yesterday you had my sister in the hollow of your hand. She gave you great provocation, and you burnt those confounded letters.

Lady Frederick.

My dear Paradine, I can’t get over my own magnanimity. And what are the benefits to come?

Fouldes.

Well it might be five per cent. on the capital.

Lady Frederick.

I don’t know why you should squeeze my hands all the time.

Fouldes.

But it isn’t. Look here, don’t you get awfully tired of racketting about?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, my dear friend, I’m sick to death of it. I’ve got half a mind to retire from the world and bury myself in a hermitage.

Fouldes.

So have I, and I’ve bought the lease of a little house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane.

Lady Frederick.

Just the place for a hermitage — fashionable without being vulgar.

Fouldes.

And I propose to live there quite quietly, and I shall just subsist on a few dried herbs, don’t you know.

Lady Frederick.

But do have them cooked by a really good French chef; it makes such a difference.

Fouldes.

And what d’you say to joining me?

Lady Frederick.

I?

Fouldes.

You.

Lady Frederick.

Oh, I am a success to-day. That’s another proposal of marriage.

Fouldes.

It sounds very much like it.

Lady Frederick.

I’ve already had three this morning.

Fouldes.

Then I should think you’ve said “no” quite often enough.

Lady Frederick.

Come at ten o’clock to-morrow, and you shall see me make up.

Fouldes.

D’you think that would choke me off? D’you suppose I don’t know that behind that very artificial complexion there’s a dear little woman called Betsy who’s genuine to the bottom of her soul?

Lady Frederick.

Oh, don’t be so sentimental or I shall cry.

Fouldes.

Well, what is it to be?

Lady Frederick.

[Her voice breaking.] D’you like me still, Paradine, after all these years?

Fouldes.

Yes. [She looks at him, her lips quivering. He stretches out his arms, and she, breaking down, hides her face on his shoulder.] Now don’t be an ass, Betsy.... I know you’ll say in a minute I’m the only man you ever loved.

Lady Frederick.

[Looking up with a laugh.] I shan’t.... But what will your sister say?

Fouldes.

I’ll tell her there was only one way in which I could save Charlie from your clutches.

Lady Frederick.

What?

Fouldes.

By marrying you myself.

Lady Frederick.

[Putting up her face.] Monster.

[He kisses her lips.]

JACK STRAW

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

CHARACTERS

This play was produced at the Vaudeville Theatre on March 26, 1908, with the following cast:

Jack Straw

Charles Hawtrey

Count von Bremer

H. R. Hignett

Marquess of Serlo

Louis Goodrich

Rev. Lewis Abbott

Charles Troode

Ambrose Holland

Edmund Maurice

Mr. Parker-Jennings

Robert White, Junr

Vincent Parker-Jennings

Percy R. Goodyer

Head Waiter

Vincent Erne

Servant

Norman Wrighton

Lady Wanley

Vane Featherstone

Ethel Parker-Jennings

Dagmar Wiehe

Rosie Abbott

Mona Harrison

Mrs. Withers

Joy Chatwyn

Mrs. Parker-Jennings

Lottie Venne

Jack Straw

Mr. Parker-Jennings

Mrs. Parker-Jennings

Vincent

Ethel

Ambrose Holland

Lady Wanley

Lord Serlo

Count Adrian von Bremer

Horton Withers

Mrs. Withers

The Rev. Lewis Abbott

Rosie Abbott

Waiters at the Grand Babylon Hotel and Footmen at Taverner, the Parker-Jennings’ place in Cheshire

Time: The Present Day

Act I — The Lounge of the Grand Babylon Hotel

Acts II and III — The Parker-Jennings’ place in Cheshire

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: The lounge and winter garden of the Grand Babylon Hotel. There are palms and flowers in profusion, and numbers of little tables, surrounded each by two or three chairs. Several people are seated, drinking coffee and liqueurs. At the back a flight of steps leads to the restaurant, separated from the winter garden by a leaded glass partition and swinging doors. In the restaurant a band is playing.

Two or three waiters in uniform are standing about or serving customers.

Ambrose Holland and Lady Wanley come out from the restaurant. He is a well-dressed, elegant man of five and thirty. She is a handsome widow of uncertain age.

Lady Wanley.

[Pausing at the foot of the steps.] Where shall we sit?

Holland.

Let us choose a retired corner where we can gossip in peace.

Lady Wanley.

Nonsense! I didn’t come to the Grand Babylon in order to blush unseen. I caught sight of a number of people during luncheon, who I’m quite determined shall catch sight of me now.

Holland.

I was sufficiently gallant to have eyes for you only.

Lady Wanley.

[Pointing to a table.] Shall we sit there?

Holland.

D’you mind sitting on the other side? The waiter’s rather a pal of mine.

Lady Wanley.

[Sitting down.] What queer friends you have.

Holland.

Waiter.

A Waiter.

[Coming forward.] Your waiter will be here in one minute, sir.

Holland.

[To Lady Wanley.] You see, I’ve knocked about in so many places that I have friends in every city in the world and every rank in life.

Lady Wanley.

I suppose you saw the Parker-Jennings? They were sitting three tables from us.

Holland.

I did.

Lady Wanley.

Do you know that she cut me dead when I came in?

Holland.

I’ve long told you that Mrs. Parker-Jennings is growing exclusive.

Lady Wanley.

But, my dear Ambrose, that she should have the impudence to cut me....

Holland.

[Smiling.] I respect her for it.

Lady Wanley.

I’m much obliged to you.

Holland.

I don’t think it does much credit to her heart, but it certainly does to her understanding. She has discovered that a title nowadays is not nearly such a good passport to the world of fashion as she thought it was. She knows you’re as poor as a church mouse, and she’s realised that in Society the poor are quite rightly hated and despised by all who know them.

Lady Wanley.

Yes, but remember the circumstances. Five years ago the Parker-Jennings didn’t know a soul in the world. They’d lived in Brixton all their lives.

Holland.

It has been whispered to me that in those days they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Bob Jennings — not nearly so smart, is it?

Lady Wanley.

He used to go to the City every morning with a black bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

Holland.

I wish that confounded waiter would come.

Lady Wanley.

One day an uncle in the North, from whom they vaguely had expectations, died suddenly and left them nearly two millions.

Holland.

Some people are so lucky in the way they choose their uncles.

Lady Wanley.

He was a hardware manufacturer, and no one dreamt that he had a tenth part of that fortune. I came across them in Switzerland and found they were looking for a house.

Holland.

So, with a burst of hospitality, you asked them down to Taverner, and they took it for twenty-one years.

Lady Wanley.

I introduced them to every one in the county. I gave little parties so that they might meet people. And now, if you please, the woman cuts me.

Holland.

[Dryly.] You have left out an essential detail in the account of your relations with these good folk.

Lady Wanley.

Have I?

Holland.

[Smiling.] You have omitted to mention that when they took Taverner they agreed to pay an exorbitant rent.

Lady Wanley.

They could well afford it. Besides, it was a historic place. It was worth whatever I could get for it.

Holland.

Parker-Jennings may be very vulgar, but he’s as shrewd a man as you’d find anywhere between Park Lane and Jerusalem.

Lady Wanley.

I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.

Holland.

Haven’t you? Well, then, I venture to suggest that if Mr. Parker-Jennings gave you such an enormous rent for Taverner, it was on a certain understanding. He was wise enough to find out that people can live in Cheshire all their lives and never know a soul. I don’t suppose he put it in the agreement between you, but unless I am very much mistaken he took your place only on the condition that you should get every one to call.

Lady Wanley.

[After a brief pause.] I was crippled with mortgages, and I had to send my boys to Eton.

Holland.

Good heavens, I’m not blaming you. I only wish to point out that if you introduced Mrs. Jennings to your friends, it was a matter of business rather than of sentiment.

Lady Wanley.

[With a little laugh.] I suppose you think it’s very natural that she should wish to kick away the ladder by which she climbed.

[A Waiter comes up to Holland.

Waiter (Jack Straw).

Yes, sir.

Holland.

Two coffees and two Benedictines. But you’re not my usual waiter. Where’s Pierre?

Waiter.

[Blandly.] He’s attending the funeral of an elderly female relative, sir.

[Holland looks up quickly, and then stares in a puzzled way.

Holland.

I seem to know your face. Have I seen you anywhere?

Waiter.

[With a smile.] Mr. Ambrose Holland, I think.

Holland.

Jack Straw! What on earth are you doing here?

Jack Straw.

My dear fellow, it is possible to be no less of a philosopher in the uniform of a waiter at the Grand Babylon Hotel than in the gown of a professor at the University of Oxford.

[He goes out.

Lady Wanley.

[Laughing.] It’s really very odd that waiters should address you as my dear fellow.

Holland.

What an extraordinary encounter!

Lady Wanley.

Please tell me who your friend is.

Holland.

I haven’t the ghost of an idea.

Lady Wanley.

My dear Ambrose.

Holland.

I first met him in the States. I was in considerable financial difficulties in those days — it’s three or four years ago now — and I got a small part in a travelling company. Jack Straw was a member of it, and we became great friends.

Lady Wanley.

Is that his name?

Holland.

So he assures me.

Lady Wanley.

It’s very improbable, isn’t it?

Holland.

Very. I believe Jack Straw was a highwayman, or something like that, and he’s given his name to a public-house in Hampstead.

Lady Wanley.

He must be an extraordinary man.

Holland.

He is. I don’t know whether I admire most his self-assurance or his resourcefulness. I spent with him the last two years before my ship came home. We had some pretty rough times together, but he was a pillar of strength. Difficulties seemed to arise only that he might surmount them.

Lady Wanley.

He sounds quite splendid.

Holland.

The worst of living with him was that you had no breathing-time. He’s a man with an uncontrollable love of adventure. Prosperity bores him to death, and time after time, when we’d managed to get out of rough water into smooth, he’d throw up everything for some wild goose chase.

Lady Wanley.

But who are his people?

Holland.

Heaven only knows. I know he isn’t English, though he speaks it wonderfully.

Lady Wanley.

Is he by way of being a gentleman?

Holland.

I can only tell you that he’s thoroughly at home in whatever society he finds himself.

Lady Wanley.

I daresay that’s not a bad definition of a gentleman.

Holland.

He’s sailed before the mast, been a bar-tender in New York, and an engine-driver on the Canadian Pacific. He’s been a miner up in the Klondyke, and he’s worked on a ranch in Texas. And if he’s a waiter now, I daresay he’ll be an organ-grinder next week, and a company-promoter the week after. I’ve seen half a dozen fortunes within his grasp, and he’s let them all slip through his fingers from sheer indifference to money.

Lady Wanley.

Here he is with the coffee.

[Jack Straw comes in with coffee and liqueurs.

Holland.

I should be overwhelmed with confusion at allowing you to wait on me, if I did not feel certain that it appeals enormously to your sense of humour.

Jack Straw.

It has occurred to me that you will feel a natural hesitation about giving me a tip. I may as well tell you at once that I shall feel none about taking it.

Holland.

It’s thoughtful of you to warn me. How much do I owe you?

Jack Straw.

Two shillings the coffee and three shillings the liqueur. The prices seem exorbitant to me, but I suppose people must expect to pay for the privilege of letting their friends see them at the best hotel in Europe.

Holland.

[Putting down a coin.] Don’t bother about the change.

Jack Straw.

Half a sovereign. My dear fellow, when you offer me a tip of five shillings you are presuming unwarrantably on our former acquaintance.

Holland.

[Helplessly.] I’m sure I beg your pardon.

Jack Straw.

I will keep one shilling as an adequate remuneration for my services and return you four.

Holland.

I am overpowered by your condescension.

Jack Straw.

[To Lady Wanley, who has put a cigarette in her mouth.] Light, madam?

Holland.

I should like to ask you to sit down.

Jack Straw.

It would be eminently improper. Besides, I have other tables to attend to. But I shall be delighted to dine with you to-night if you have no other engagement.

Holland.

It’s very kind of you. But will not your duties here detain you?... Mr. Straw — Lady Wanley.

Jack Straw.

[Bowing.] How do you do. I’m only engaged here for the afternoon. Your ladyship is aware that the lower orders make a speciality in the decease of elderly female relatives.

Lady Wanley.

I have often been impressed by the piety with which they bury their maternal grandmothers.

Jack Straw.

It appears that Pierre, an old acquaintance of mine, wished to attend the funeral of a widowed aunt, the relic of an egg importer in Soho, and a highly respectable person.

Lady Wanley.

I can well imagine that nothing could be more respectable than to import eggs to Soho.

Jack Straw.

The head-waiter, who is an excellent fellow, with female relatives of his own, promised to overlook his absence if he could find a substitute. Pierre, like myself, is a person of somewhat striking physique and could find no one able to wear his clothes. He confided his distress to me, and I, knowing that his uniform would fit me like a glove offered, at once to step into the — breach.

Holland.

I am relieved to hear that your appearance in this capacity is not due to embarrassed circumstances.

Jack Straw.

I deplore the hastiness of your reasoning. My circumstances are excessively embarrassed. Excuse me, I see some people who are proposing to sit at one of my tables.

[Meanwhile people have been coming down from the restaurant and sitting at the various tables. Waiters have been handing them coffee. Horton Withers and Mrs. Withers come down, accompanied by the Rev. Lewis Abbott and Mrs. Abbott (Rosie). Jack Straw leaves Holland and Lady Wanley to attend to some people.

Lady Wanley.

There are the Withers. Why, they’ve got Rosie with them and her husband.

[She gets up and goes towards the Withers, who are honest, simple people, not distinguished, but good-natured and kindly. Lewis Abbott is a nice-looking, frank young parson. Rosie is very pretty and fragile. She is simply dressed.

Lady Wanley.

[Smiling to Rosie.] My dear, what are you doing in this sink of iniquity? I am surprised to see you. And Lewis!

[She shakes hands, evidently delighted to see them.

Withers.

We’ve brought them up to London for a little jaunt.

Holland.

Won’t you all sit at our table? There’s plenty of room.

Withers.

That’s very kind of you. [To his wife.] Fanny, you know Mr. Holland.

Mrs. Withers.

Yes, of course I do. How do you do, Lady Wanley.

Lady Wanley.

How do you do? Now you two young things must sit one on each side of me, and you must tell me all about Taverner.

Rosie.

Oh, we’re so happy there, and everything’s beautiful, and we just love the house.

Lady Wanley.

I don’t believe you know Mr. Holland. Ambrose, this is Rosie, Jasper Neville’s daughter. You knew him well, didn’t you?

Holland.

Of course I did.

Lady Wanley.

And this is Rosie’s husband and my new Vicar at Taverner.

Abbott.

It makes me feel awfully grand.

Lady Wanley.

I adore them both, so you must like them. These dear things were waiting to be married. Lewis was a curate in some dreadfully shabby suburb, and he’s a saint.

Abbott.

I wish you wouldn’t say such absurd things about me.

Lady Wanley.

Nonsense. He’s a saint, but quite a modern nice sort of saint, who plays cricket and doesn’t wear a hair shirt. And of course he couldn’t marry Rosie, who hadn’t a penny to bless herself with, but Providence came to the rescue and carried off our old Vicar with influenza.

Rosie.

What dreadful things you say, Lady Wanley!

Lady Wanley.

And the living’s in my gift, so I gave it to them, and there they are.

Rosie.

You have been nice to us.

Lady Wanley.

My dears, you’re the only really good people I’ve ever known in my life. I used to think my boys were till they went to Eton, and now I know they’re devils.

Withers.

We’re all under a debt of gratitude to you, Lady Wanley. Every one worships them in the parish.

Abbott.

Every one’s been very jolly, and they all try to make things easy for us.

Mrs. Withers.

You know, they will work so hard, we could hardly persuade them to come up to London for two or three days.

Withers.

I daresay you’ve heard that we’ve taken a little place near Taverner.

Holland.

Lady Wanley was telling me at luncheon.

Lady Wanley.

[To Rosie.] And are you enjoying yourself in London, darling?

Rosie.

[Enthusiastically.] Oh, it’s simply splendid. You don’t know what a treat it is to us to come to the Grand Babylon. It makes us feel so smart. And to-night we’re going to the Gaiety.

Lady Wanley.

[To Withers.] It’s very nice of you to be so good to these young people.

Mrs. Withers.

It’s a pleasure to us to see how they enjoy everything.

Rosie.

D’you know the Parker-Jennings are here? Isn’t it nice? They will be surprised when they see us, won’t they, Lewis?

Mrs. Withers.

[With a little sniff.] I see Maria Jennings has got a lord with her.

Holland.

Serlo, isn’t it? I thought I saw him.

Withers.

I suppose you know they’re trying to hook him for Ethel?

Lady Wanley.

Good heavens!

Mrs. Withers.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] As long as he’s a Marquess, and he’s that all right, Maria Jennings don’t mind the rest.

Lady Wanley.

I hope Ethel will refuse to have anything to do with him.

Rosie.

She’s a dear, isn’t she? I’m so fond of her, and she’s simply devoted to Lewis.

Lady Wanley.

My dear, do you never say anything against any one?

Rosie.

[With a laugh.] Seldom. Everybody’s so nice.

Lady Wanley.

It must make conversation very difficult. But Ethel is a charming girl, and I shouldn’t like her to fall into the hands of that disgraceful young rip.

Mrs. Withers.

She’s the only one of the family who hasn’t had her head turned by all the money.

Lady Wanley.

Of course you knew Mrs. Jennings before she was the exalted person she is now.

Mrs. Withers.

Bless you, I’ve known her all my life. We went to the Brixton High School together, and I was a bridesmaid at her wedding. Why, we used to be popping in and out of one another’s houses all day long.

Withers.

And now, if you please, she’ll hardly look at us.

Abbott.

I’m afraid people don’t much like her at Taverner, but she’s done everything she could for us, and they’re awfully generous.

Rosie.

I don’t care what anybody says about her, she’s been perfectly sweet to me. She told me that I might come to the Hall whenever I wanted to, and I’m always dropping in to lunch there.

Lady Wanley.

Oh well, if they’re nice to you, I forgive them. Mrs. Jennings can cut me till she’s blue in the face.

Rosie.

Oh look, there’s the Count.

[A distinguished-looking old man comes out of the restaurant and walks slowly down the steps.

Lady Wanley.

It’s Adrian von Bremer. How on earth d’you know him?

Rosie.

I don’t, but he’s rented a place in Cheshire, and he came to church once.

Lady Wanley.

It’s the Pomeranian Ambassador, you know.

Mrs. Withers.

I know him well by sight.

Lady Wanley.

I wish he’d come and talk to us. I should like to introduce Lewis to him.

Holland.

He’s as blind as a bat. I don’t suppose he’ll see us.

[Meanwhile Von Bremer has reflectively put an eyeglass in his eye, and looks round as he walks out. He catches sight of Lady Wanley, and smiling, comes up to her.

Von Bremer.

How do you do.

Holland.

You look as if you were just going.

Von Bremer.

I am. I had my coffee in the restaurant.

Lady Wanley.

What is the news in Pomerania?

Von Bremer.

None except that our Emperor is growing old. All these domestic troubles of his are breaking him down.

Lady Wanley.

Poor old thing.

Holland.

I suppose nothing has been heard of the Archduke Sebastian?

Von Bremer.

Nothing. We’ve given up the search.

Holland.

[To Lady Wanley.] You remember that affair, don’t you? There was some quarrel in the domestic circle, and the Archduke Sebastian suddenly disappeared — four years ago, now, isn’t it? — and hasn’t been heard of since. He simply vanished into thin air.

Lady Wanley.

But how do you know he’s alive?

Von Bremer.

Every Christmas the Emperor receives a letter from him, sent from different parts of the world, saying he’s well and happy.

Lady Wanley.

It’s really very romantic. I wonder what on earth he’s doing.

Von Bremer.

Heaven only knows.

Lady Wanley.

Tell me, how is that nice young attaché of yours that I met at luncheon the other day.

Von Bremer.

The nice young attaché has come to a bad end. I’ve had to send him back to Pomerania.

Lady Wanley.

Really?

Von Bremer.

The story is rather entertaining. There’s an American woman here who has a passion for titles, and it occurred to my attaché one day to introduce his valet to her as Count So-and-So. Of course she was full of attentions and immediately asked the valet to dinner. Presently the story came to my ears. I really couldn’t have my attachés playing practical jokes of that sort, and so I sent him home.

Lady Wanley.

Poor boy, he was so nice.

Von Bremer.

Good-bye.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, may I introduce Mr. Abbott to you. He’s your new Vicar at Taverner. And this is Mrs. Abbott. You must be very nice to her.

Von Bremer.

I’m delighted to meet you. I’ve heard wonderful stories of your good works in the parish.

Abbott.

It’s very kind of you to say so.

Von Bremer.

[To Rosie.] If you will allow me I should like to call on you when I come down to Cheshire.

Rosie.

I shall be so pleased to see you.

Von Bremer.

Good-bye.

[He bows and goes out.

Rosie.

Wasn’t it nice of him to say he’d call? You know, he never goes anywhere.

Withers.

I can see Mrs. Jennings’ face when she hears that the Count has been to see you, my dear.

Holland.

Why do you say that?

Mrs. Withers.

The Count lives next door to them in the country, and they’ve moved heaven and earth to know him, but he simply won’t look at them. Maria would give her eyes if he’d call on her.

Rosie.

How can you say such horrid things about her!

[During the last two or three speeches Mr. and Mrs. Parker-Jennings come down the steps, followed by Ethel, Vincent and Serlo. Serlo goes over to talk to a flashily dressed girl at another table. Parker-Jennings is a little stoutish man, very common and self-assertive. His wife is of a determined appearance, vulgar, and magnificently dressed. Vincent is showy and aggressive. Ethel is very charming and very pretty. Serlo is quite insignificant. Mrs. Parker-Jennings comes down the centre of the stage, with her party, elaborately ignoring Lady Wanley’s table. Rosie gets up and goes to her impulsively. Mrs. Withers and her husband rise.

Rosie.

Mrs. Jennings, I am so glad to see you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Frigidly putting up her glasses.] Mrs. Abbott.

Withers.

Hullo, Bob, old man, how are the chicks?

Parker-Jennings.

We’re all in the best of ‘ealth, thank you.

Ethel.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Withers.] I was hoping we should have a chance of speaking to you.

Mrs. Withers.

What a picture you look, my dear! What’s the matter with Vincent? Why are you trying to look as if you’d never seen me before?

Vincent.

You’ll never allow me to forget you, Mrs. Withers.

Mrs. Withers.

No, I won’t. And many’s the time I’ve bathed you, my lad, in that little back room in St. John’s Road, Brixton, and don’t you forget that either.

Rosie.

[Enthusiastically to Mrs. Parker-Jennings.] Aren’t you surprised to see us here? Mr. and Mrs. Withers are giving us such a treat.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I shouldn’t ‘ave thought this quite the place for a clergyman’s wife to come to. I confess I’m surprised you should find time to leave your work at Taverner in order to gad about in London.

[Rosie is taken aback by the snub, and her face falls.

Rosie.

But we’re only here for a day or two. We shall be home on Thursday. I was wondering if I might come up to luncheon as Lewis has got to go out.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m expecting Lord Serlo’s mother and Lady Eleanor King to stay with me, so perhaps you’d better not come up to the ‘all for a few days. I’m sure you understand, don’t you. I don’t want to ‘urt your feelings, but I don’t think you’re quite the sort of person they’d like to meet.

[Rosie gives a little gasp.

Ethel.

[Indignantly.] Mother.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’ll let you know when it’s convenient for you to call. I’m afraid you’re a little inclined to be pushing, my dear. You don’t mind my telling you, do you? It’s not quite the correct thing in a clergyman’s wife.

[She turns her back on Rosie, who is left gasping. She tries to choke her sobs, but tears of mortification roll down her cheeks.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, the cad, the cad.

[She makes Rosie sit down and comforts her.

Ethel.

Mother, how could you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Hold your tongue, Ethel. I’ve been wanting to give those people a lesson for some time. Where’s our table, Robert?

Parker-Jennings.

There are some people sitting there, my dear. We shall ‘ave to take this one.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Didn’t you tell the waiter to reserve it? Waiter!

Jack Straw.

Yes, madam.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You must tell those people that that table’s taken.

Jack Straw.

I’m very sorry, madam. Will this one not do instead?

Ethel.

Yes, mother. Let’s sit here.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m not going to let people push me into any ‘ole and corner they like.

Vincent.

Cheek, I call it.

Parker-Jennings.

Come on, sit down, mother.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Unwillingly taking her seat at a vacant table.] How often ‘ave I told you not to call me mother? My name’s Marion; I’m sure you ought to know it by now.

Parker-Jennings.

Is it? I always thought it was Maria.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[To Jack Straw.] What are you waiting there for?

Jack Straw.

I thought the gentleman wished to give an order, madam.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Why didn’t you keep that table, eh?

Jack Straw.

I’m very sorry, madam, I daresay I misunderstood you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t you know English?

Jack Straw.

Perfectly, madam.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I don’t know what they want to engage these dirty foreigners for, they make me sick.

Ethel.

Mother, he can hear every word you say.

Parker-Jennings.

Two coffees, and bring all the liqueurs you’ve got.

Jack Straw.

Very well, sir, cigars or cigarettes?

Parker-Jennings.

Bring some cigars, and none of your twopenny stinkers. Bring the most expensive cigars you’ve got. I’ll soon show them who I am.

Jack Straw.

Very well, sir.

[Exit.

Ethel.

Mother, how could you be so brutal to poor Rosie. What has she done to you?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish you wouldn’t call me mother, Ethel. It sounds so common. Why don’t you call me mamma?

Parker-Jennings.

Who’s ’is lordship talking to?

Vincent.

Oh, that’s little Flossie Squaretoes. I’ll go and give her a look up in a minute.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish you were a little more like your brother, Ethel. He knows ‘ow to live up to ’is position.

Vincent.

Aitches, mater, aitches.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, you always say I drop my aitches, Vincent. Well, if I do I can afford it.

Vincent.

You’re wrong, mater, only the aristocracy can afford to drop their aitches.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, well, p’raps we shall be aristocracy one of these days, eh, Robert?

Parker-Jennings.

You leave it to me, my dear. If money can do it.... I say, ’is lordship lapped up that ‘ock of mine at luncheon, didn’t he?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish you could get out of that ‘abit of yours of always looking at what people eat and drink. And what if he did lap it up. You didn’t put it there for people to look at, did you?

Vincent.

I say, Ethel, you needn’t have turned your back on him all the time.

Ethel.

I thought he drank too much.

Vincent.

Your ideas are so beastly middle-class. You mustn’t expect a man like Serlo to do things like — like the people we used to know at....

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

That’ll do, Vincent. We all know quite well where we used to live before your father’s poor uncle was taken, and you needn’t refer to it. [Ethel shrugs her shoulders impatiently.] It seems to me that Vincent and I are the only ones of the family who know ‘ow to live up to our position. [Jack Straw comes up with the coffee and liqueurs. Another waiter hands round the cigars. Serlo rejoins them.] [Very affably.] Come and sit by me, Lord Serlo. Now what liqueurs will you ‘ave? If there’s anything you fancy, you just ask for it.

[Rosie gives a little sob.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, my dear, don’t, don’t. You mustn’t mind.

Rosie.

I feel so frightfully humiliated. She asked me to go to the hall whenever I felt inclined, and I thought she really meant it. I never knew that I wasn’t wanted. It’s so awful to know that they only thought me horribly pushing.

Abbott.

By Jove, I wish it had been one of the men. I should have liked to knock him down and stamp on him.

Lady Wanley.

My dear Lewis, how nice and unchristian of you! I always said you were just the right sort of saint for me.

Mrs. Withers.

Wouldn’t you like to come away now, my dear?

Rosie.

Oh yes, I feel I want to hide myself.

Lady Wanley.

Good-bye darling, don’t take it too much to heart. [The Withers, Abbott, and Rosie shake hands with Holland and Lady Wanley, and go out.] Did you ever hear anything so fiendish? Oh, if I could only make that woman suffer as she’s made poor little Rosie suffer. [Suddenly Lady Wanley gets an idea. She leans forward.] Ambrose.

Holland.

What’s the matter?

Lady Wanley.

I’ve got it.

Holland.

What d’you mean?

Lady Wanley.

One of these days Mrs. Jennings will give her eyes not to have insulted that poor child. I’m going to give her a lesson that she’ll never forget.

Holland.

She deserves pretty well anything that your feminine spite can suggest.

Lady Wanley.

I can do nothing without you, Ambrose.

Holland.

Don’t ask me to do anything very disreputable.

Lady Wanley.

I’ve got her in the hollow of my hand, Ambrose.

Holland.

Well?

Lady Wanley.

Don’t you remember that story Adrian von Bremer told us about the attaché? Let’s try it on Mrs. Jennings.

Holland.

But....

Lady Wanley.

Oh, don’t make any objections. You must remember. He introduced his valet to a woman as a foreign nobleman of sorts.

Holland.

I’m bound to say I thought it a very silly trick.

Lady Wanley.

I have no patience with you. Think how exactly the punishment fits the crime. What a triumph it would be if we got Mrs. Parker-Jennings to take to her bosom....

Holland.

Who?

Lady Wanley.

Your friend the waiter. I’m sure he’ll do it if you ask him. He’ll look upon it as an adventure.

Holland.

I don’t think he’d do it. He’s an odd fellow.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, but ask him. There can be no harm in that.

Holland.

It’s all very well. But one has to consider the possible complications.

Lady Wanley.

There can’t be any complications. We only want to punish an insolent snob who’s wantonly insulted a woman who never hurt a fly in her life.

[Jack Straw comes up to their table.

Jack Straw.

Have you done with the Benedictine, sir?

Lady Wanley.

Mr. Straw, will you do something for me?

Jack Straw.

Anything in the world, madam.

Lady Wanley.

Mr. Holland tells me you’re a man of spirit.

Jack Straw.

Pray tell Mr. Holland he’s a man of discernment.

Lady Wanley.

Are you ready still for any adventure that comes your way?

Jack Straw.

So long as I can do it with clean hands.

Lady Wanley.

Dear me.

Jack Straw.

I daresay your ladyship thinks it odd that a waiter should have susceptibilities.

Holland.

Let me tell you at once that I highly disapprove of Lady Wanley’s idea.

Jack Straw.

Then pray let me hear it. You always disapprove of everything that is not hopelessly commonplace.

Lady Wanley.

You told us just now that you were only temporarily engaged here.

Jack Straw.

Quite right, madam.

Lady Wanley.

You see those people over there — two women and three men?

Jack Straw.

The elder lady was so amiable as to call me a dirty foreigner.

Lady Wanley.

They’re the worst sort of parvenus. I think they’re the greatest snobs in London. I have a little grudge against them.

Jack Straw.

Yes?

Lady Wanley.

[Slightly embarrassed.] I want to introduce you to them — as a foreign nobleman.

Jack Straw.

[Giving her a searching look.] Why?

Parker-Jennings.

[Loudly.] Waiter.

Lady Wanley.

It would amuse me to see them fawn upon you.

[A pause.

Jack Straw.

No, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Lady Wanley.

[Frigidly.] Then we’ll say no more about it.

Parker-Jennings.

[Loudly.] Waiter.

Jack Straw.

[Going to him.] Yes, sir.

Parker-Jennings.

Why the devil don’t you hurry up. I’ve called three times.

Jack Straw.

[Blandly.] I’m very sorry, sir. I was engaged at another table.

Parker-Jennings.

You seem to think you can keep me waiting all day. I suppose that’s why you’re called a waiter.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Robert, don’t make jokes with menials.

Parker-Jennings.

I’ve got a good mind to report you to the management.

Ethel.

Papa, he came as quickly as he could.

Parker-Jennings.

This coffee’s disgusting. I don’t know what you make it out of. It tastes like ditchwater.

Jack Straw.

I’m very sorry, sir. Let me get you some more.

Parker-Jennings.

And look sharp about it, or you’ll find yourself decorated with an order you don’t know in your country.

Jack Straw.

I beg your pardon, sir?

Parker-Jennings.

The order of the boot.

Vincent.

I can’t think why they don’t have English waiters in a smart hotel like this instead of these damned foreigners.

Parker-Jennings.

Now then, look slippy.

[Jack Straw has fixed his eyes on Ethel. She has been looking down. She gives him a glance. He takes the coffee things and gives them to another waiter.

Ethel.

[Her voice trembling with indignation.] How can you talk like that to a man who can’t defend himself! It’s so cowardly to insult a servant who daren’t answer.

Vincent.

I should think not indeed. I should like to see any servant answer me.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You never ‘ave learnt ‘ow to treat servants, Ethel. You always talk to them as if they was one of ourselves. I wish you could take a leaf out of Vincent’s book. Treat ’em like dirt, and they’ll respect you.

[Jack Straw, having given instructions to the waiter, goes to Holland and Lady Wanley.

Jack Straw.

I’m willing to do what you asked me to.

Holland.

Why have you changed your mind?

Jack Straw.

To tell you the truth I’m perfectly indifferent to the rudeness and the vulgarity of your friends, but I think I should like to know that young lady.

Holland.

Would you, by Jove!

Jack Straw.

When her father insulted me, the most ravishing colour came into her pale cheeks, and she looked at me with the most beautiful eyes in the world. And they were veiled with tears.

Lady Wanley.

And is that enough to make you change your mind?

Holland.

Fortunately Mr. Straw is not in the habit of falling in love, or I should refuse to hear anything more of this cracked-brained scheme.

Lady Wanley.

When will you be ready?

Jack Straw.

I’m ready now. It’s three o’clock, and Pierre is waiting in the basement to put on this uniform.

Lady Wanley.

We couldn’t find a better place than this to effect an introduction.

Jack Straw.

Give me two minutes to change my clothes, and I am at your service.

Lady Wanley.

You have indeed an adventurous spirit.

Jack Straw.

But I must make one condition — two, in fact.

Lady Wanley.

What are they?

Jack Straw.

Well, although you have glided over the point with singular discretion, it is plain that you do not want me to assume a certain character merely in order to enjoy a private snigger at the expense of these amiable people.

Lady Wanley.

I don’t think I know what you mean?

Jack Straw.

Madam, it is always dangerous to count too much on the stupidity of one’s fellows. We shall arrange this matter much better if you realise that I’m a person of some shrewdness.

Holland.

Go on.

Jack Straw.

It is evident that you wish these good folk to take me to their bosom in order that you may have the opportunity of telling them one day that I’m merely an impostor.

Lady Wanley.

I really hadn’t thought about that.

Jack Straw.

I venture to suspect that you rate your intelligence too low.

Lady Wanley.

Well, what is your condition?

Jack Straw.

The position will be very humiliating to me. For all I know it may bring me into uncomfortable relations with the police.

Holland.

I think the whole plan had better be dropped. It will lead to endless bother.

Jack Straw.

I have no wish to drop it. You want to revenge yourself on some people who have insulted you. I, for reasons of my own, am willing to help. But I make the condition that you do not disclose the truth till I give you leave. I promise not to withhold it unreasonably.

Lady Wanley.

I accept that. And the second condition?

Jack Straw.

Is very easy. I insist that you should behave towards me, whether we’re alone or in public, as you naturally would if I were really the individual I propose to personate.

Lady Wanley.

That’s only fair. Now who can we suggest that you should be?

Holland.

You’d better try and invent some character who you’re quite sure doesn’t exist.

Lady Wanley.

We want something very extravagant and high-sounding.

Jack Straw.

Pray do not put yourselves to the trouble of thinking. You will introduce me to your friends as the Archduke Sebastian of Pomerania.

Holland.

What!

Lady Wanley.

But that’s a real person!

Jack Straw.

To invent an imaginary one would be ridiculous. Your friends would only need to look in the Almanack de Gotha to discover the fraud.

Lady Wanley.

But Count von Bremer was talking to us about him just now. The Archduke Sebastian is the man who mysteriously disappeared.

Jack Straw.

It’s because his whereabouts are unknown that he’s the safest person to choose.

Holland.

You would never be able to pass yourself off for an Archduke.

Jack Straw.

Strange as it may seem to you, a royal prince eats, drinks, breathes, and behaves generally very much like men of baser clay.

Lady Wanley.

You’d be found out in a week.

Jack Straw.

But how do you know I’m not the Archduke Sebastian?

Holland.

[With a scornful laugh.] You look it.

Lady Wanley.

But you’d want a suite and all sorts of things.

Jack Straw.

The man is notoriously eccentric. I think it very likely that the company of a stuffy old Colonel of Dragoons would bore him to death.

Holland.

It’s preposterous.

Jack Straw.

You may either take it or leave it. I will be the Archduke Sebastian or nobody.

Lady Wanley.

After all, Mrs. Jennings will probably never have heard of this trumpery Archduke.

Jack Straw.

And if she has, what more probable than that, having had enough of retirement, he should enter once more upon the position which is his by rights?

Lady Wanley.

[Looking at Holland.] It makes the joke infinitely better.

Jack Straw.

You must make up your minds at once.

Lady Wanley.

Ambrose, let’s toss. Heads it is, and tails it isn’t.

Holland.

All right. [He tosses a coin.] Tails.

Lady Wanley.

I said, tails it is, didn’t I?... I’m willing to risk it.

Jack Straw.

Give me two minutes.

[He goes out.

Holland.

Heaven only knows what will be the end of it.

[Lord Serlo comes up to them.

Serlo.

Hello, Ambrose. How’s life? How d’ye do?

Lady Wanley.

What have you been doing?

Serlo.

I’ve been lettin’ Jennings’ Patent Hardware stand me a lunch. My word, that old woman’s so vulgar she just about takes the roof of your head off.

Holland.

Why do you lunch with people you thoroughly despise?

Serlo.

Despise ’em! I don’t despise people who’ve got eighty thousand a year. They’re trying to hook me for their girl.

Holland.

And are you proposing to — throw yourself away?

Serlo.

She’s a very neat-steppin’ little filly — swallowed a poker in her childhood — regrettable accident in the nursery, don’t you know, but sound in wind and limb and all that sort of thing.

Lady Wanley.

I admire your romantic air.

Serlo.

Whoever talked of romance? There’s half a million down on one side and an old-established marquisate on the other.

Holland.

When is the happy event to take place?

Serlo.

Well, as soon as we can get over a triflin’ impediment.

Lady Wanley.

What’s that?

Serlo.

Well, the filly’s kicking. Have to put a red ribbon on her tail, don’t you know.

Lady Wanley.

She’s refusing the coronet you lay at her feet?

Serlo.

Won’t touch it with the fag end of a barge pole. I was sittin’ next to her at lunch, and she simply turned her back on me — no mistakin’ it, don’t you know. Wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways. Mother’s all over me, father’s all over me, son’s all over me. What’s the good of that? Can’t marry them. Rotten, I call it. Came over here to have a bit of a rest.

Lady Wanley.

[Laughing.] And how d’you like Vincent?

Serlo.

Rotten bounder. Can’t stick him at any price, knows too many lords for me. When he’s my brother-in-law — hoof him out, don’t you know — double quick march. Pretty Polly’s all very well but I’m not takin’ her family. Can’t do it for half a million, don’t you know. Must be practical.

[Vincent comes up to them.

Vincent.

How d’you do, Lady Wanley? I saw you driving with Lady Mary Ware yesterday. Such a nice girl, isn’t she? I suppose you know her brother Tregury, don’t you? Great pal of mine at Oxford.

Lady Wanley.

He’s my second cousin, Mr. Jennings, and he pronounces his name Tregary.

Vincent.

Oh yes, of course. I always used to call him Tregury for fun.

Lady Wanley.

Did you?

Holland.

You have a very keen sense of humour.

Vincent.

I was just having an argument with the mater as to what relation he was to the Duke of Sherwin.

Lady Wanley.

I’m afraid I haven’t your intimate knowledge of the peerage, but I should think the only relation they’ve had in common for the last two centuries is that lamented monarch, Charles II.

Vincent.

[To Serlo.] Nice chap, Sherwin.

Serlo.

Dunno him.

Vincent.

Don’t you? Not know Sherwin? I must introduce you to him. I’m sure he’d like to know you. Thorough sportsman.

Serlo.

Is he?

Vincent.

Yes, rather. I saw him looking on at a cricket match the other day. Great pal of my governor’s, you know. Thorough English gentleman.

Serlo.

They’d get on well together.

Lady Wanley.

[To Holland.] Here is our friend.

Jack Straw comes in, hat and cane in hand. He wears a very smart suit, tail coat, grey trousers, &c.

Jack Straw.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t come to lunch with you.

[He shakes Lady Wanley’s hand, she slightly curtsies to him. Mrs. Jennings nudges her husband, and they both stare with all their eyes.

Lady Wanley.

It’s very good of you to have come now, sir.

Jack Straw.

Ah, my dear Holland, you are looking the picture of health.

Holland.

It’s very kind of you, sir.

Lady Wanley.

May I introduce Lord Serlo to you?

Jack Straw.

[Shaking hands with him.] How d’you do. I think your father was ambassador in Pomerania for some time.

Serlo.

Yes, he was.

Holland.

[Surprised.] How did you know that — sir?

Jack Straw.

I remember him quite well. He used to play with me when I was a little boy. I was so sorry to hear of his death.

Serlo.

He wasn’t a bad old buffer. Kept me dooced short of money, though.

Jack Straw.

[Gaily.] But unless you introduce me to Lord Serlo he won’t know who on earth I am.

Lady Wanley.

I thought every one knew, at least by sight, the — Archduke Sebastian of Pomerania.

Jack Straw.

You talk of me as if I were a notorious character. [Meanwhile Vincent has been making frantic signs to be introduced, coughing and shuffling on his feet. Jack Straw looks at him through his eyeglass.] Won’t you introduce your friend to me?

Lady Wanley.

Mr. Vincent Parker-Jennings.

Vincent.

I’m very proud and honoured to make your Royal Highness’s acquaintance.

Jack Straw.

It’s very polite of you to say so.

Vincent.

I’ve always had a great sympathy for Pomerania. Most wonderful country in Europe, that’s what I always say.

Jack Straw.

I will tell my grandfather you think so. He will be pleased and flattered.

Vincent.

I haven’t ever been there, you know, sir. But I know all about it through Adrian von Bremer.

Holland.

[Hastily.] Your ambassador lives quite near Mr. Jennings.

Jack Straw.

Oh yes.

Vincent.

His place marches with ours, don’t you know. He’s a great pal of my people’s. Jolly old thing, isn’t he, sir? Thorough sportsman. That’s what I call a gentleman.

Jack Straw.

I seem to know your name so well.

Lady Wanley.

Mr. Parker-Jennings is the great philanthropist. He’s provided books to put in all Mr. Carnegie’s free libraries.

Jack Straw.

What a noble act. I should very much like to make his acquaintance.

Vincent.

He’s sitting over there with my mother and sister. Shall I go and fetch him, sir?

Jack Straw.

It’s very kind of you to take so much trouble.

Holland.

[To Jack Straw in an undertone.] For goodness sake be careful.

Jack Straw.

[Putting up his eyeglass.] I beg your pardon, I did not catch what you said.... Pray repeat it.

Holland.

[Embarrassed.] It was of no consequence, sir.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[To Vincent.] Who is he, Vincent? I saw ‘er curtsey to him.

Vincent.

Come along, pater. He wants to be introduced to you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m coming too, Vincent.

Vincent.

Awfully jolly chap. Archduke Sebastian. What ho!

Parker-Jennings.

But look here, Vincent, I don’t know how to talk to Royalty. How shall I address him?

Vincent.

Oh, that’s all right. Say Sir wherever you can slip it in and when you can’t say Royal Highness.

[Jack Straw comes forward a little with Lady Wanley.

Lady Wanley.

This is Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Jack Straw.

[Shaking hands with her.] I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. [Turning to Parker-Jennings.] I have often heard of you, Mr.... Mr....

Lady Wanley.

[Prompting.] Parker-Jennings.

Jack Straw.

[With a relieved smile.] Mr. Parker-Jennings. I’m sure I wish we had in my country more men of your public spirit and disinterestedness.

Parker-Jennings.

[Very nervously.] I try to do my little best, you know, sir, your Royal Highness.

Jack Straw.

Won’t you introduce me to your daughter?

Parker-Jennings.

I’m sure, sir, your Royal Highness is very affable. Ethel!

[Ethel slowly comes forward, and curtsies. He looks at her steadily, takes her hand and kisses it.

Vincent.

[In an undertone.] What ho!

END OF THE FIRST ACT.

THE SECOND ACT

The drawing-room at Taverner, the Parker-Jennings’ place in Cheshire. Large French windows lead out on to the garden. Mrs. Parker-Jennings, magnificently dressed, is standing in the middle of the room. Parker-Jennings comes in, rubbing his hands.

Parker-Jennings.

The band has come, my dear, and they’re ready to start playing the moment any one turns up.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

‘Ave you told ’em about the Pomeranian anthem?

Parker-Jennings.

What do you think, my dear?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish you wouldn’t answer me like that. Why don’t you say yes or no? I can’t abide these city ways of yours.

Parker-Jennings.

I was only being facetious, my dear.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I should ‘ave thought you’d learned by now that it’s vulgar to be funny. You’ve never ‘eard a duchess make a joke, ‘ave you?

Vincent comes in.

Vincent.

I’ve just been round the refreshment tents. There’s one thing, people can’t say we haven’t spread ourselves out.

Parker-Jennings.

[Rubbing his hands.] I ‘aven’t spared a single expense. The band’s down from London, and the refreshments are from Gunter’s. There’s not a cigar on the place that cost less than one and six — and that’s the wholesale price.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, we’ve done it well, there’s no denying that. I’ve asked the Withers, Robert. Florrie Withers will be mad with jealousy. I shouldn’t wonder if she didn’t choke with envy when she swallowed a caviar sandwich.

Parker-Jennings.

It was a rare stroke of business when we got the Archduke to come and stay.

Vincent.

That’s through me, pater. You’d never have known him if I hadn’t been on the spot.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And I’ve asked Lady Wanley. I just want her to see that I can get on without her. All the county’s coming. I sent ’em all cards, whether I knew ’em or not, and they’ve all accepted.

Parker-Jennings.

Don’t you remember, Marion, how bucked we were in the old days when Mrs. Bromsgrove came to dine with us, because her husband was on the L.C.C.?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish she could see me now. D’you remember ‘ow she used to patronise me? I wish all that stuck-up lot on Brixton ‘ill was here to see us ‘ob-nob with the aristocracy.

Parker-Jennings.

It’s the Archduke that done it, my dear.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What’s Serlo now? Marquis of Serlo — pooh. He isn’t going to get any more opportunities from me — and if he says anything I’ll just send him off with a flea in his ear.

Vincent.

Draw it mild, mater.

Parker-Jennings.

Your mother’s a great woman, Vincent. This is the day of her life.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I wish I ‘adn’t been such a fool as to ask Serlo to stay here. And it’s just like that aggravating girl. When I wanted Ethel to marry him, she wouldn’t so much as look at him, and now that she can have some one else for the asking, she’s with ’im all day.

Vincent.

Well, I’m for the bird in the hand, mater. The Archduke don’t look much like a marrying man to me.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t you worry about that, my dear. Every man’s a marrying man when he’s got a chance of a pretty girl with ‘alf a million of money.

Parker-Jennings.

Here she is.

Ethel comes in with Lord Serlo.

Ethel.

The Withers have just motored over, mother.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

They would be first, wouldn’t they? I expect Florrie Withers was waiting on the doorstep till the clock struck four. Where’s his Royal Highness?

Ethel.

I don’t know at all.

Serlo.

He’s asleep in the garden; he’s sittin’ in the most comfortable arm-chair in the place, with another for each of his legs, and he’s clasping in his hands what looks suspiciously like a very long gin and soda to me.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, somebody must go and wake him up. I’ve asked ‘alf the county to meet him, and he can’t go on sleeping.

Jack Straw comes in.

Jack Straw.

I say, what have you got a beastly band playing the Pomeranian anthem for? Woke me up. I was having such a jolly sleep too.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Very affably.] The people are just coming, sir.

Jack Straw.

What people?

Parker-Jennings.

All the very best people in Cheshire, sir — no outsiders to-day. What ho!

Jack Straw.

Good lord, are you giving a party?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t you remember, sir? I asked if I might invite a few friends to meet you.

Jack Straw.

Oh, yes — Lady Wanley and Holland. I thought we might have a jolly little game of bridge in the garden. What have you got the village band in for?

Vincent.

That’s not the village band, sir. That’s the Royal Blue Orchestra.

Parker-Jennings.

Cost me £150 to have them down. Special train from London, and I don’t know what all.

Vincent.

Shut up, pater. You needn’t tell every one how much you paid for things.

Jack Straw.

How many do you expect?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh — only my most intimate friends — about....

Jack Straw.

Yes?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, about three hundred and fifty.

Jack Straw.

By George, that’s cheerful. D’you want me to shake hands with them all?

Parker-Jennings.

They’re the very best people in the county, sir. Crème de la crème.

A servant enters to announce Mr. and Mrs. Withers.

They come in.

Servant.

Mr. and Mrs. Withers.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

How d’you do? It’s so nice of you to come before any one else.

Mrs. Withers.

We know you’re not used to these grand affairs, Maria, and we thought you might want a couple of old friends to do something for you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, thank you. But there are plenty of servants. May I introduce Mr. and Mrs. Withers to your Royal ‘Ighness.

Jack Straw.

How d’you do.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

We were just going into the garden. I daresay people will begin to come presently.

[They all go out except Ethel and Lord Serlo.

Serlo.

I say, I’m going to hook it to-morrow.

Ethel.

Are you? I’m very sorry.

Serlo.

I wish I thought that.

Ethel.

Why are you going so soon?

Serlo.

Your respected mother has given your humble notice to quit.

Ethel.

What do you mean?

Serlo.

Look here, let’s be frank with one another, shall we?

Ethel.

Aren’t we always?

Serlo.

Well, if you ask me point blank, anythin’ but.

Ethel.

Then let us be frank at once.

Serlo.

Well, ten days ago your people were all over me. I suppose you know why as well as I do.

Ethel.

D’you think we need talk of that?

Serlo.

Frankness is rather tryin’, ain’t it?

Ethel.

No. Please go on.

Serlo.

It was dear Lord Serlo all day long; they couldn’t have enough of me. Rippin’ good chap, Serlo. Just the sort of cove one would like to have for a son-in-law.

Ethel.

Lord Serlo!

Serlo.

Half a mo. I ain’t done yet. Eminently suitable match, and all that sort of thing, only the young lady couldn’t stick me at any price.

Ethel.

I don’t know why you should say this.

Serlo.

Better have it out, you know; rotten, keepin’ things on your chest. Don’t blame the young lady. Don’t know that I should much fancy myself if I was a blushing damsel. Not everybody’s money. Got a bit damaged in transit, eh, what? Been mixed up in one or two scandals. Not the right thing for an old-established marquess. Bit inclined to drink. No harm in him, you know, but not the sort of man you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. Young woman got a mind of her own. Lets the noble lord see she wouldn’t take him if he was given away with a pound of tea. All right, says noble lord, bet’s off. Not much, says mother of young woman. Half a million goin’ beggin’. Give her time to get used to you. Fascinating cove really. More she knows you more she’ll like you. Come down and stay in the country.

Ethel.

[With a laugh.] How can you talk such nonsense!

Serlo.

All right, says noble lord, I’m on. Jolly nice girl, and all that sort of thing. Noble lord rather smit. Thinks if she’ll have him he’ll turn over a new leaf — give up everythin’ rotten and try and make her a good husband. Rather taken with the idea of double harness. He may look a fool, but noble lord knows a good thing when he sees it, and the young lady’s about the best thing he’s ever set eyes on.

Ethel.

Are you talking seriously by any chance?

Serlo.

Now don’t interrupt me. I’ve just got into a good steady canter, and I’ll get it all off my chest at once.

Ethel.

I’m so sorry.

Serlo.

Well, when eligible marquess gets down in the country, what d’you think he finds? Blessed if there ain’t a foreign prince on the scene. My word, that’s enough to put the noble lord’s aristocratic nose right out of joint, ain’t it? Look here, old boy, you keep your weather eye open, and all that sort of thing, says the noble lord to himself. May be an ass, don’t you know, but when there’s a bloomin’ hurricane comin’ along he can see which way the wind is blowin’. Brother rather chilly, father rather chilly, mother regular iceberg. All right, says noble lord to himself, but what about Pretty Polly?

Ethel.

Is that me by any chance?

Serlo.

For the last month Pretty Polly had been simply turnin’ her back on noble lord, snubbin’ him right and left, and all of a sudden she becomes extraordinary affable. Hulloa, what’s this, says noble lord, and his little heart goes pit-a-pat. He may be a fool, but he ain’t a damned fool, and in a day or two he tumbles to it. So, like a wise man, he packs his bag and hooks it.

Ethel.

I don’t know what on earth you mean?

Serlo.

Don’t you? Well, will you have it straight from the shoulder?

Ethel.

We agreed to be quite frank.

Serlo.

All right. No spoof. My dear, I just saw that you were fairly knocked silly by the Archduke, and there wasn’t a ghost of a chance for little Ned Serlo.

Ethel.

It’s not true.

Serlo.

Oh, yes, it is. You see, I’m a bit knocked silly myself, and that makes you precious far-sighted.

Ethel.

You!

Serlo.

All right, you needn’t get up on your hind legs. I’m not goin’ to propose to you now. I know it would be no precious good. At first I didn’t care twopence; it was just a business arrangement — half a million down on one side and an old-established marquisate on the other. But now.... Well, you know I’m rather an ass at saying what I mean — when I really mean it.

Ethel.

I’m very sorry. I’m afraid I’ve been unkind to you.

Serlo.

Oh, no, you haven’t. I do seem a rotten little bounder, don’t I?

Ethel.

No, I think you might be an awfully good friend.

Serlo.

It’s jolly of you to say so. You know, I can’t stick your family. Can you?

Ethel.

[Smiling.] You see, I knew them before they were rich. When you’ve lived all your life in a sordid narrow way, it’s very hard to have such enormous wealth as ours.

Serlo.

You make allowances for them, but you never did for me.

Ethel.

It would have been very impertinent of me.

Serlo.

It never struck you that it’s devilish hard to be a marquess with no means of livelihood but your title. And the worst of a title is that it’ll get you plenty of credit, but dooced little hard cash.

Ethel.

I never thought of that.

Serlo.

Well, look here, what I wanted to say is this: it’s no business of mine about the Archduke. You know, I don’t know much about royalty, but I don’t think a foreign prince is likely to marry the daughter of nobody in particular just because she’s got nice eyes and a pot of money. [Ethel is about to speak.] No, let me go on. You may be going to have a rotten time, and I just want you to know that if at any time you want me — well, you know what I mean, don’t you. Let’s forget that you’re an heiress, and I’m an old-established marquess. You’re an awfully ripping sort, and I’m just Ned Serlo. I’m not a bad sort either, and perhaps we might be happy together.

Ethel.

[Touched.] It’s very charming of you. I’m so glad that I know you better now. Whatever happens I know I can count on you.

Serlo.

That’s all right then. Meanwhile noble lord’s goin’ to hook it — leave the coast clear, and bear it like a man, don’t you know.

Enter Jack Straw.

Jack Straw.

Well, how are the weather and the crops?

Serlo.

[Rather surprised.] Blessed if I know, sir.

Jack Straw.

I merely asked because you looked as if you’d been discussing them.

[He gives Serlo a glance. Serlo shows no sign of moving.

Jack Straw.

I’m not driving you away, am I?

Serlo.

[Getting up.] Not at all, sir. I thought I’d go and have a look at the party.

Jack Straw.

Do go and pretend you’re me, there’s a good fellow, and shake hands with some of those confounded people. You’ll see where I ought to stand, because there’s a little piece of red carpet on the lawn.

Serlo.

I’m afraid they’re not takin’ any of me, sir.

[Exit.

Jack Straw.

The only advantage I’ve ever been able to find in being a royal personage is that when anybody’s in your way you just tell him to go, and he goes.

Ethel.

Why did you want Lord Serlo to go, sir?

Jack Straw.

Because I wanted to be alone with you. Ask me another, quickly.

Ethel.

Oughtn’t I to help mother to receive people?

Jack Straw.

I’m sure you ought. But, you see, that’s another advantage of being a royal personage, that you can’t go till I give you your dismissal. I say, don’t you hate parties?

Ethel.

Dreadfully.

Jack Straw.

So do I. Let’s pretend there isn’t one, shall we? I say, why don’t you sit down and make yourself comfy?

Ethel.

I should like to have a little talk with you, sir.

Jack Straw.

That’s jolly. I wish we had a regiment of soldiers there to turn all those people out.

Ethel.

May I say anything I like to you, sir?

Jack Straw.

Good heavens, why not?

Ethel.

Until I was sixteen the most exalted person I’d ever met in my life was a London County Councillor. I’m not quite sure if I know how to behave with royal personages.

Jack Straw.

Why on earth don’t you buy a book on etiquette? I always carry one about with me.

Ethel.

Mother bought several when you said you’d come down.

Jack Straw.

I wonder if she’s got the same as mine. You know I never can remember to call a serviette a napkin.

Ethel.

Mamma’s very particular about that.

Jack Straw.

And look here, d’you know that you ought never to call a chicken a fowl? It’s awfully bad form. I wonder if that’s in your mother’s books. I say, what charming eyes you have.

Ethel.

That’s another of the advantages of being a royal personage, that you can make pretty speeches, and no one takes them seriously.

Jack Straw.

But you know, I’m a very insignificant royal personage. You mustn’t think I’m anything very grand really.

Ethel.

It’s very nice of you to say so.

Jack Straw.

You see, there are seventy-nine archdukes and duchesses in Pomerania. My grandfather had seventeen children, and they all married. How many children would each have had to make seventy-nine of us?

Ethel.

It sounds very difficult.

Jack Straw.

But you see I can’t be very important, can I? And of course I’ve got practically no money to speak of.

Ethel.

It’s very good of you to put me at my ease. Then you wont mind if I say exactly what I want to?

Jack Straw.

You won’t give me good advice, will you? I’ve got seventy-nine relations, and they all do that.

Ethel.

I wouldn’t venture.

Jack Straw.

I’ll bear whatever else you say with fortitude. We’ll pretend that you’re just Miss So-and-So.

Ethel.

As in point of fact, I am.

Jack Straw.

And that I’m — Jack Straw.

Ethel.

[Surprised.] Why on earth Jack Straw?

Jack Straw.

[Indifferently.] It’s the name of a public-house in Hampstead. Pray go on.

Ethel.

I wondered if you’d do me a great favour.

Jack Straw.

Ask me for the moon, and it shall be left at your front door by Carter Paterson to-morrow morning.

Ethel.

It’s something much simpler than that.

Jack Straw.

Put me out of suspense quickly.

Ethel.

I should be very much obliged if — if you’d go away.

Jack Straw.

[Much surprised.] I? Now?

Ethel.

I didn’t mean actually this minute. But if it suited your arrangements to go to-morrow....

Jack Straw.

You don’t mean to say you want me to go away altogether?

Ethel.

That is precisely what I did mean.

Jack Straw.

Couldn’t you ask me something easier than that? Ask me for a lawyer who never told a lie, and I’ll deliver him to you, bound hand and foot.

Ethel.

I don’t happen to want one just at this moment, thank you.

Jack Straw.

But I’m having a very jolly time down here.

Ethel.

[With a change of tone.] Don’t you see that you’re exposing me every day to the most cruel humiliation?

Jack Straw.

I thought I was making myself so pleasant.

Ethel.

Oh, don’t pretend you don’t understand. I’ve seen the twinkle in your eyes when my mother set a little trap for you to fall in.

Jack Straw.

I always fall in very neatly.

Ethel.

But what do you think I felt when I knew how clearly you saw that she was throwing me at your head?

Jack Straw.

It’s a distinctly pleasing sensation to have a pretty girl thrown at your head.

Ethel.

It was only a joke to you; you don’t know how ashamed I was.

Jack Straw.

But why do you suppose I came down to Taverner — to see your father and mother?

Ethel.

I don’t know why you came — unless it was to make me desperately wretched.

Jack Straw.

What would you say if I told you that I came because I loved you at first sight?

Ethel.

I should say that your Royal Highness was very polite.

Jack Straw.

Now, look here, don’t you think I’m rather nice, really?

Ethel.

It would surely be very impertinent of me to have any opinion on the subject.

Jack Straw.

Our friend Serlo would describe that as one in the eye.

Ethel.

Would you allow me to go back to my mother’s guests, sir?

Jack Straw.

[Imperturbably.] Do you think you’d like me any better if I weren’t an Archduke?

Ethel.

I haven’t thought about it.

Jack Straw.

Then please give the matter your immediate attention.

Ethel.

I should certainly like you no less.

Jack Straw.

I have no doubt that if I were just a penniless adventurer you’d simply dote upon me.

Ethel.

I don’t know if I’d put it quite so strongly as that.

Jack Straw.

You know, I’m afraid you’re hopelessly romantic. You’ve confessed your attachment to me, and just because I happen incautiously to have chosen an Emperor for my grandfather, you want me to go away. It’s so unreasonable.

Ethel.

But I haven’t confessed anything of the sort.

Jack Straw.

I look upon your request that I should go away as equivalent to an avowal of undying passion.

Ethel.

Shall I tell you what I would say to you if you weren’t an Archduke?

Jack Straw.

Yes.

Ethel.

I’d say you were the most audacious, impudent, and impertinent man I’d ever seen in my life.

[She gives a rapid, ironical curtsey, and goes out. He is about to follow her when Lady Wanley and Holland come in. Jack Straw stops and shakes hands with them.

Jack Straw.

Ah, I was hoping to have the pleasure of seeing you. You wrote me a little note, Mr. Holland.

Holland.

[Ironically.] I ventured to ask if I might have a few minutes’ private conversation with you.

Jack Straw.

Perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting here. I will rejoin you immediately.

[He goes out.

Holland.

You know, he positively freezes me.

Lady Wanley.

I think it’s wonderful. One couldn’t suspect for a moment that he’s only....

Holland.

Take care.

[He looks round.

Lady Wanley.

No one will come here. We can talk quite safely.

Holland.

I wish to goodness we hadn’t ever thought of this fool trick. I knew it would lead to all sorts of bother.

Lady Wanley.

It’s no good saying that now. We must keep our heads and get out of it as best we can.

Holland.

What are you going to do?

Lady Wanley.

Oh, that’s just like a man. You’re trying to put the whole blame on me. What are you going to do?

Holland.

Well, we must finish with it as quickly as we can.

Lady Wanley.

Whatever happens, there must be no scene. I couldn’t bear to see him publicly humiliated.

Holland.

Why on earth should you think of him?

Lady Wanley.

Oh, I’m such a fool, Ambrose.

Holland.

My dear, what do you mean?

Lady Wanley.

After all, I’m not a girl — I’m the mother of two healthy boys with enormous appetites. I think the man has bewitched me.

Holland.

Good Lord!

Lady Wanley.

It’s no good saying that. Of course he’s the most fascinating creature I’ve ever seen in my life.

Holland.

You don’t mean to say you’re seriously in love with him?

Lady Wanley.

A widow with a sense of humour is never seriously in love with anybody.

Holland.

Well?

Lady Wanley.

But I think it’s much better the young man should disappear as mysteriously as he came.

Holland.

There we’re quite agreed. And we’ll tell him so with considerable frankness.

Enter Jack Straw.

Jack Straw.

Now, my dear people, I am at your service.

[Holland and Lady Wanley are sitting down. Jack Straw looks at Holland, who rises uneasily.

Holland.

Oh, don’t be such an ass, Jack.

Jack Straw.

[Frigidly.] I beg your pardon. [Pause.] Perhaps you’d be good enough to put down my hat.

[Holland takes it and flings it crossly on a chair.

Jack Straw.

I don’t think you’re in a very good humour this afternoon, Mr. Holland. I venture to think your manners leave something to be desired.

Holland.

Look here, we’ve had enough of this tomfoolery.

Jack Straw.

Pray sit down. It distresses me to see you standing.

Holland.

I believe the man’s out of his senses.

Lady Wanley.

[Very amiably.] Have you forgotten the waiter’s uniform which fitted you so wonderfully, Mr. Straw?

Jack Straw.

[Calmly.] Quite. I only remember the condition your ladyship was good enough to agree to, when I accepted your humorous suggestion.

Holland.

But, look here, we must talk the matter out.

Jack Straw.

I am quite willing to listen to you, my dear Holland. Your conversation is often interesting and sometimes epigrammatic. I stipulate only that you should use those forms of politeness which are usual between a person of your position and a person of mine.

Holland.

I should never have consented to this folly if I’d known to what it was going to lead. In a moment of uncontrollable irritation, because Mrs. Jennings had behaved with the greatest insolence to a defenceless girl, we made up our minds to punish her. There was no great harm in it. We thought perhaps she’d ask you to dinner, and there would be an end of it. It never dawned on us that you’d come and stay here indefinitely.

Jack Straw.

My dear fellow, why should you blame me for your own lack of intelligence?

Holland.

[Impatiently.] Ugh!

[Jack Straw goes over and sits beside Lady Wanley.

Jack Straw.

Our friend is quite incoherent, isn’t he?

Lady Wanley.

We want you to go away, sir.

Jack Straw.

Do you? I say, what a jolly frock. Where did you get it?

Lady Wanley.

[With a little laugh, disarmed by his impudence.] You’re perfectly irresistible.

Jack Straw.

You’ve taken the words out of my mouth, that’s just what I was going to say to you.

Lady Wanley.

Are you ever serious?

Jack Straw.

Always when I’m talking to a pretty woman.

Lady Wanley.

I wish I could understand you.

Jack Straw.

My dear lady, I’ve been trying to understand myself for the last thirty odd years. By the way, how old am I, Holland?

Holland.

How the deuce should I know?

Jack Straw.

Well, my dear fellow, I think it’s very careless of you. You might have looked it out. Supposing some one had asked me my age?

Lady Wanley.

I wish you really were a royal personage.

Jack Straw.

It does seem hard that a waiter should have such a way with him, doesn’t it?

Lady Wanley.

[Confidentially.] Who are you really?

Jack Straw.

Your devoted servant, madam. Who could be anything else after knowing you for ten minutes?

Lady Wanley.

It’s charming of you to say so.

Jack Straw.

I am very nice, aren’t I?

Lady Wanley.

Much too nice. That is why I beseech your Royal Highness graciously to take his departure.

Jack Straw.

You know, you haven’t yet told me where you got that frock.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, I bought it in Paris. Do you like it?

Jack Straw.

It’s ripping. And it suits you admirably.

Holland.

Isabel, Isabel, we came here to be sensible.

Lady Wanley.

My dear Ambrose, let me be sensible in my own way.

Jack Straw.

Oh, my dear Holland, I wonder if you’d very much mind going to see if my red carpet is still in its place.

Holland.

I’m not going to be made a fool of by you, my friend.

Jack Straw.

Why not? You’re doing it very well.

Lady Wanley.

Don’t be piggy, Ambrose.

Holland.

What on earth do you want me to do?

Lady Wanley.

I’m simply dying of thirst. I wish you’d get me a glass of lemonade.

Holland.

I have no intention whatever of stirring from this spot.

Jack Straw.

I’ve been wondering for the last week what I should do if I signified his dismissal to any one, and he flatly refused to go. Very awkward, isn’t it?

Lady Wanley.

Mahomet and the mountain isn’t in it.

Jack Straw.

Of course a hundred years ago I’d have cast him into a dungeon. But, between ourselves, I don’t happen to have a dungeon handy.

Holland.

Now look here, we’ve had enough of this nonsense. The joke has gone far enough. Are you going or not?

Jack Straw.

Well, if you ask me point blank, I’m not.

Holland.

But don’t you know that I have only to say two words for you to be kicked out of the house by the servants?

Jack Straw.

You forget that you’d be undoubtedly kicked out with me.

Holland.

Now look here, Jack, we’ve been old pals, and we’ve gone through a deuce of a lot together. I don’t want to say beastly things to you. I know I’ve made a fool of myself, but you’re a decent chap. You must see that it’s necessary for you to go at once.

Jack Straw.

I cannot for the life of me see anything of the sort. I have no other engagements, and the country is charming at this time of year.

Holland.

You’re behaving like a common impostor.

Jack Straw.

What language to use to a royal personage! I assure you we’re not used to such frankness.

Holland.

Do you deliberately refuse to go?

Jack Straw.

Deliberately.

Holland.

And shall I tell you why?

Jack Straw.

I happen to know, thank you.

Holland.

You’re going to commit the most disgraceful action of your life. Do you think any one can’t see that you’re madly in love with Ethel Jennings?

Lady Wanley.

[Springing to her feet.] Is that true?

Jack Straw.

Quite.

Lady Wanley.

Then why have you been flirting with me so disgracefully?

Jack Straw.

I assure you I had no intention of doing so. It must be my unfortunate manner.

Lady Wanley.

It’s an unfortunate manner that’s quite likely to get you into trouble with widow ladies.

Jack Straw.

In that case you can only applaud my determination to marry as quickly as possible.

Holland.

Not Ethel Jennings?

Lady Wanley.

You must be joking?

Jack Straw.

My dear madam, when I make a joke I always laugh quickly, so that there should be no doubt about it.

Holland.

It’s preposterous. I shall allow you to do nothing of the sort.

Jack Straw.

My dear fellow, what is the use of getting violently excited about it? More especially as I haven’t yet proposed to the young lady.

Holland.

I think you must be stark staring mad. You don’t suppose for a moment that we shall allow you to carry out such an odious deception. I can’t imagine how you can even think of anything so heartless and cruel.

Lady Wanley.

It’s going too far. You must understand that it’s impossible. I beseech you to leave Taverner immediately.

Jack Straw.

It drives me to distraction that I should have to refuse your smallest whim, but in this matter [with a dramatic flourish] I am adamant.

Holland.

Now, look here, we’ve talked about it enough. Either you leave this place immediately or I shall tell Mrs. Jennings the whole story.

Jack Straw.

It is only fair to give you that satisfaction. That was part of our arrangement.

Holland.

You realise the consequences?

Jack Straw.

[Very amiably.] I did that before I entered into your scheme.

Holland.

You leave me no alternative.

Jack Straw.

My dear Holland, I really believe you’re rather nervous about the disclosure which it is evidently your duty to make.

Holland.

For your own sake I ask you once more: will you give me your word of honour to leave the house and under no circumstances communicate with any member of the family?

Jack Straw.

It’s charming of you to give me one more chance. I can only repeat that I am deeply in love with Ethel, and I have every intention of marrying her.

Holland.

Your blood be upon your own head.

Jack Straw.

If I perish, I perish.

[Holland goes to the door.

Lady Wanley.

No, Ambrose, I beseech you not to.

Holland.

Good heavens, the whole thing was done so that you might have an opportunity to crow over Mrs. Jennings. Now you’re going to have it.

Lady Wanley.

But I don’t want it any more. It was a foolish thing. Let him go quietly.

Holland.

But, you see, he won’t go.

Enter Mr. and Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, your Royal ‘Ighness, we’ve been looking for you everywhere. We couldn’t make out what ‘ad become of you.

Parker-Jennings.

All the county is there. Crème de la crème.

Vincent comes in hurriedly.

Vincent.

I say, mater, what on earth are you doing? Hurry up, the duchess has just driven up.... Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t know you were there.

Holland.

Vincent, go and fetch your sister. I have something important to say that it is necessary for her to hear.

Vincent.

But look here, the duchess has just....

Holland.

Oh, hang the duchess. Where’s Ethel?

Vincent.

She’s sitting just outside, talking to Serlo.

Holland.

Then call her.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Looking round with astonishment.] ‘As anythin ‘appened?

[Vincent goes out and in a moment returns with Ethel and Serlo.

Lady Wanley.

[To Holland.] Ambrose, be gentle.

Parker-Jennings.

Your Royal Highness isn’t put out about anything?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Quickly.] Oh, I ‘ope we ‘aven’t made any faux pas.

Jack Straw.

Nothing has happened to displease me. I’m in the best possible humour, thank you.

Holland.

[Seeing Ethel.] Oh, there you are. [Addressing himself to the company in general.] I have something very painful to say, and I don’t know how I’m going to make it clear to you.

Serlo.

I say, is this any business of mine? Shall I hook it?

Jack Straw.

Oh no, pray stay by all means.

Lady Wanley.

[To Jack Straw.] Haven’t you changed your mind, sir?

Jack Straw.

I’m like a historical character whose name I can’t remember at the moment: I never change my mind.

Holland.

Mrs. Jennings, I’m afraid there’s no use in my trying to excuse myself. I had better just tell you everything as shortly as I can.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Mr. Holland, don’t you think it can wait till later? The duchess ‘as just come, and it’ll look so funny if I’m not there to receive her.

Jack Straw.

Mr. Holland has a communication to make which cannot fail to interest you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, of course, if it’s your Royal ‘Ighness’s wish.

Holland.

I daresay you remember that a fortnight ago we all met at the Grand Babylon Hotel.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

How could I forget, when that was the auspicious occasion of my introduction to his Royal ‘Ighness.

Lady Wanley.

Ambrose.

Holland.

You may remember, also, that Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were sitting with us in the lounge.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I ‘ave other things to do than to remember where Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were sitting.

Holland.

I daresay you’ve forgotten that you behaved very cruelly to her. We were all very indignant. We thought it necessary to punish you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Really, Mr. Holland, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to.

Holland.

I find it very difficult to say what I have to — I realise now that the whole business has been preposterously silly — I can manage far better if you don’t interrupt.

Jack Straw.

Please let him go on, Mrs. Jennings.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Of, of course, if your Royal ‘Ighness wishes it I ‘ave no more to say.

Holland.

It struck me that it would be amusing to pass off a nobody as a person of great consequence. I had just recognised one of the waiters as an old friend of mine. I introduced him to you as the Archduke Sebastian of Pomerania.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What! Then ...?

[She is at a loss for words. Serlo goes into a shout of laughter.

Serlo.

What a sell! By George, what a sell!

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Going up to Jack Straw.] Do you mean to say you’re not....

Vincent.

I thought I knew his face the moment I saw him.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Speak, man, speak.

—

These four

speeches are said

very quickly,

almost

simultaneously.

Jack Straw.

[With the greatest urbanity.] Madam, I stepped out of the uniform of a waiter at the Grand Babylon Hotel into the sober garb of the person you now see before you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Then you’re nothing short of an impostor. Oh! Oh! Now, then, Jennings, you’re a man. Do something.

Parker-Jennings.

And he’s been lappin’ up my best champagne lunch and dinner for a week.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, damn your champagne.

Vincent.

Mater!

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, you fool, you fool! You’ve ‘ad the education. You’ve been to Oxford, and we gave you four thousand a year. Didn’t you learn enough to tell the difference between an archduke and a waiter?

Vincent.

Serlo didn’t spot him.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Who’s Serlo? Fine marquess he is — spends all his time with stable boys and barmaids. How do I know he is a marquess?

Serlo.

Don’t mind me, will you?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Is there no one who can do something? And that man stands there as if he didn’t care a ball of worsted. Don’t you be too sure, my young friend. It’s your Royal ‘Ighness this, and your Royal ‘Ighness that. And we had to call you sir. Waiter, ‘alf a pint of bitter, and look sharp about it.

Ethel.

Mother!

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, don’t talk to me. [To Jack Straw.] Well, what have you got to say?

Jack Straw.

My dear lady, you’re so voluble, it would be difficult for me to get a word in edgeways.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, I’m listening.

Jack Straw.

Ah, there you have me, for in point of fact I can think of no appropriate observation.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And you’ve been laughing at me all the time, ‘ave you? Well, you’re going to laugh on the other side of your face now, young feller-my-lad.

Jack Straw.

I shall be interested to see how one performs that very curious operation.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, shall I tell you who’ll show you?

Jack Straw.

Yes, do.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

The police, my lad, the police.

Jack Straw.

I wouldn’t send for them if I were you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Wouldn’t you?

Jack Straw.

I wouldn’t really.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, I would.

Jack Straw.

Don’t you think it’ll be a little awkward with all these people here?

Vincent.

We can’t have a scene now, mater.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

D’you mean to say I’ve got to sit still and lump it?

Jack Straw.

If you ask my advice, that is what I should recommend.

Parker-Jennings.

All the county’s here, Maria. Crème de la crème.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I wish they were all dead. I know why they come here. D’you think I don’t know that they call me a vulgar old woman behind my back? But they come all the same because I’ve got two millions of money. I’m so rich that they can’t ‘elp coming.

Jack Straw.

You know, I don’t want to seem stuck up, but in point of fact they’ve come to-day to meet me. Don’t you think I’d better go and make myself amiable to them?

Holland.

You don’t mean to say you’re going back to them?

Jack Straw.

Why not?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

‘Ave I got to introduce you to the duchess?

Jack Straw.

I’m afraid she’ll make a point of it. Even duchesses have a weakness for royal personages.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

If she ever finds out!

Jack Straw.

The situation is not without an element of humour.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, upon my soul, you ‘ave got a cheek!

Jack Straw.

The motto on my coat of arms is audacity. Only we put it in Latin because it sounds better.

Vincent.

Your coat of arms, I like that.

Jack Straw.

My dear fellow, I have no doubt it is as authentic as yours.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And do you mean to say I’ve got to pretend I don’t know anything?

Jack Straw.

I think it’s the only thing to do.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I can never do it. I shall never ‘old up my ‘ead again.

Jack Straw.

Come. I am convinced that the duchess is growing restive. I will murmur a few soft nothings in her ear.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, well, I suppose the only thing is to risk it. But you just wait, young man, you wait.

Jack Straw.

I think I can promise you that no one here will — blow the gaff.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Upon my soul, you talk as if I was the criminal.

[She starts and stops suddenly with a cry.

Holland.

What’s the matter?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, it give me such a turn. What’s to be done now? The Count.

Holland.

How d’you mean?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’d forgotten all about him. Count von Bremer coming.

Jack Straw.

Who the deuce is he?

Holland.

He’s your ambassador.

Jack Straw.

Of course, how stupid of me!

Lady Wanley.

[With a little scornful smile.] But he won’t come.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t you make too sure about that. He’s coming right enough. The British aristocracy was quite willing to ‘ob-nob with the Parker-Jennings, but this duty foreigner wouldn’t be seen in the same street with us. And you all sniggered up your sleeves, because you thought you was getting a bit of your own back. But I’ve got ’im to-day, and I was going to fling him in your faces. I wrote ’im a personal letter — as if I’d known him all my life — and said....

Jack Straw.

Well?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And said ’is Royal ‘Ighness particularly wished him to come. I sent the letter by one of the footmen this morning.

Jack Straw.

By Jove!

Holland.

Well, they mustn’t meet. You must say that the Archduke has been seized with sudden indisposition.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Every one knows he was quite well half an hour ago.

Lady Wanley.

Besides, Count von Bremer would probably insist on seeing him. It must have come as a great surprise that the Archduke Sebastian had turned up.

Jack Straw.

My dear people, don’t put yourselves out. If Count von Bremer has come here to see me, it would be manifestly most discourteous to rob him of that pleasure.

Holland.

I think you’re quite mad, Jack.

Jack Straw.

Unless I’m greatly mistaken, Count von Bremer has excessively bad sight.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You don’t mean to say you’re going to meet ’im face to face?

Jack Straw.

Remember that there are eighty-one Archdukes in Pomerania.

Ethel.

You told me seventy-nine a little while ago.

Jack Straw.

I have since seen in the paper that the Archduchess Anastasia has had twins, which makes eighty-one. What more probable than that the Ambassador has never seen the Archduke Sebastian?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, but what a risk to take. It’s enough to turn my false ‘air grey.

Jack Straw.

In any case, he can’t have set eyes on him for four years, because nobody has.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I suppose it ‘asn’t struck you that he may talk to you in Pomeranian.

Jack Straw.

Have you ever met a waiter who couldn’t discourse fluently in seven languages at least?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Does that mean you can talk the Count’s beastly language?

Jack Straw.

Like a beastly native, madam. But I may suggest to you that there will be no need, since if I address the Count in English it would be the height of discourtesy for him to answer in any other tongue.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, of all the cheek I’ve ever come across in my life, you just about take the cake.

Holland.

But look here, I remember seeing the Archduke described as a very handsome man.

Jack Straw.

Spare my blushes, dear friend. We are as like as two peas.

Mrs. Withers comes in.

Mrs. Withers.

Maria, the Count is looking for you everywhere. [Seeing Jack Straw.] Oh, I beg your pardon, sir.

Jack Straw.

Not at all.

Mrs. Withers.

He’s just coming along with Mr. Withers.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[In an aside to Jack Straw.] Try and behave like a gentleman.

Enter Count Adrian von Bremer and Withers.

Jack Straw.

My dear Count!

Count.

This is a welcome surprise, sir.

Jack Straw.

You know my hostess?

Count.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Parker-Jennings.] How do you do?

Jack Straw.

It is many years since we met.

Count.

I should have never recognised you, sir.

Jack Straw.

I expect I had a moustache when you last saw me.

Count.

That changes a face so much. And then I am so blind nowadays.

Jack Straw.

I daresay you have later news of the Emperor than I.

Count.

It will be a great pleasure to His Majesty to know that you are in England, sir. I have ventured to telegraph to him.

Jack Straw.

Have you, by Jove!

Count.

It was my duty to do so.

Jack Straw.

I daresay you have several things you want to talk to me about?

Count.

I was hoping you would give me a few minutes conversation.

Jack Straw.

[To Mrs. Parker-Jennings.] Will you forgive us if we take a little stroll in the rose garden?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Grimly.] I am much honoured, sir, that your Royal Highness should condescend to walk in my rose garden.

Jack Straw.

Come. [He takes the Count’s arm. At the door the Count hesitates.] [Motioning to him to go first.] No, I pray you. I am at home here — the most comfortable, hospitable home I have known for many a long day.

Count.

Do you propose to stay in these parts much longer, sir?

Jack Straw.

I shall stay till Mrs. Parker-Jennings turns me out.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You do us a great honour, sir. [The Count goes out. Just as he is going Jack Straw turns round and gives Mrs. Parker-Jennings an elaborate wink.] [Furiously.] You, you, you, you, damned waiter!

END OF THE SECOND ACT.

THE THIRD ACT

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Act.

Next morning.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings and Vincent are discovered.

Vincent.

Where’s the governor?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

He’s ‘aving an interview with the waiter.

Vincent.

I hope he’ll give him what for.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You trust your father for that. Oh, I thought I should never get through last night. Eighteen people to dinner, and me on pins and needles the whole time.

Vincent.

There’s a ripping long account of the Garden Party in the Cheshire Times.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Do you think I’ve not seen it?

Vincent.

It went off beautifully; no one can deny that. There wasn’t a hitch.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[With a little cry of rage.] Oh!

Enter Mr. Parker-Jennings.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well?

Parker-Jennings.

[Apologetically.] My dear.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Indignantly.] You’ve been and gone and made another old fool of yourself, Jennings.

Parker-Jennings.

[With a deprecating laugh.] I’m afraid it’s the same old fool as usual, Maria.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t make jokes at me, Robert. Keep them for your City friends.

Parker-Jennings.

He’s had breakfast.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

‘As he indeed. At ‘alf-past eleven. He’s not putting himself out, is he?

Vincent.

When’s he going, father?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

It isn’t a question of when he’s going. Your father went to him and said he was to clear out before twelve o’clock or we’d send for the police, come what might. That’s what you told him, Robert, isn’t it?

Parker-Jennings.

Well, my dear....

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You always were a fool, Jennings. What have you done now?

Parker-Jennings.

Well, my dear, he insisted on having one of the footmen in the room. He said he didn’t like this English habit of ours of having no servants at the breakfast-table.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You don’t mean to say you let him order my servants about?

Parker-Jennings.

My dear, what could I do? There was one of them in the room at the time.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And you sat by while he ate his breakfast?

Parker-Jennings.

He has a very healthy appetite, Maria.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Don’t talk to me. You must ‘ave ‘ad some opportunity to give him a piece of your mind.

Parker-Jennings.

Well, my dear, we were left alone for a minute.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well?

Parker-Jennings.

[Helplessly.] He was so affable that....

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Affable! Oh, you blithering fool. Wait till I get a word with him.

Parker-Jennings.

Well, my dear, why didn’t you get rid of him last night?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

How could I get rid of ’im last night, with eighteen people come to dinner to meet ’im?

Vincent.

What about Lady Wanley?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I never want to set eyes on her again. I know she was at the bottom of this.

Vincent.

But I thought you’d sent for her.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

So I ‘ave, and for Holland too. They got us into the mess, and they must get us out of it. It’s just as bad for them as for us now. That’s one comfort.

Jack Straw comes in, in flannels, looking very cool and comfortable.

Jack Straw.

Hulloa, there you are! I was just hunting around for some one to give me a cigarette.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Ironically.] I ‘ope you ‘ad a comfortable breakfast.

Jack Straw.

A 1, thanks. Give me a cigarette, old man?

[Vincent is helping himself to one, and Jack Straw takes the case out of his hand, helps himself, and returns it.

Vincent.

Don’t mind me, will you?

Jack Straw.

Not at all.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Aggressively.] Well?

Jack Straw.

Jolly party you gave yesterday, Mrs. Jennings. It was a great success, wasn’t it? [Turning to Parker-Jennings.] By the way, what was that port we drank last night?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

No, you don’t, my friend. You may be able to bluff Jennings, but you don’t bluff me.

Jack Straw.

Bluff? Bluff? I flatter myself on my knowledge of English, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across that word.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Haven’t you? Perhaps you ‘aven’t come across the word skilly either? But, unless you look out, you’ll know what it is before you want to.

Jack Straw.

You talk in riddles, dear lady. I always think it a fatiguing habit.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I’ll make myself clear. Don’t you ‘ave any fear about that.

Jack Straw.

[Sitting down lazily.] I can’t help feeling the interval between breakfast and luncheon in a country house is one of the most agreeable moments of the day.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

See that there’s no one about, Vincent.

Vincent.

It’s all right, mater.

Jack Straw.

[Looking at him blandly.] You have all the airs of a conspirator in a romantic play, my friend. You only want a false beard and some blue spectacles to make the picture perfect.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Now then, you listen to me, young man.

Jack Straw.

You flatter me, madam.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

We’ve talked it over, my ‘usband and me, and we’re no fools, whatever you may think. You richly deserve to be ‘anded over to the police.

Jack Straw.

One moment. To which character are you now addressing yourself, to the Archduke Sebastian or the waiter from the Grand Babylon Hotel?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, if you don’t take care, I’ll give you such a box on the ears.

Jack Straw.

You certainly wouldn’t do that to a royal personage, would you? You must be concerned for the moment with Jack Straw.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

It may surprise you, but I ‘ave been for the last ‘alf hour.

Jack Straw.

I thought your manner had been a little abrupt.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I was saying that you richly deserved to be ‘anded over to the police.

Jack Straw.

There may be two opinions on that question, but we will let it pass.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

But we don’t want a scandal.

Jack Straw.

One has to be so careful in the smart set, doesn’t one?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And we’re willing to let you go. Your luggage shall be packed, the motor shall take you to the station.

Vincent.

Mother, we shall all have to see him off, or it’ll look so fishy.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, we’ll see him off. Anything to get rid of ’im safely. There’s a train in an hour from now. And I ‘ave only one piece of advice to you, and that is, take the chance while you’ve got it.

Jack Straw.

It’s very kind of you, but I’m extremely comfortable here.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You make me laugh.

Jack Straw.

I always think it hard that it should be so difficult to make people do that when you’re trying to be funny, and so easy when you’re trying to be serious.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You don’t want me to tell my footman to take you by the scruff of the neck, and....

Jack Straw.

My dear lady, let us keep perfectly calm. It would become neither of us to lose our tempers.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Do you mean to say you won’t go?

Jack Straw.

You put it in such a brutal way. Let us say rather, that I cannot tear myself away from your hospitable roof.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Ha, and how long do you propose to give us the honour of your company?

Jack Straw.

Well, I really haven’t quite made up my mind. I’m proposing to await developments.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Send for the police, Robert. I won’t put up with it.

Vincent.

You know, mother....

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Hold your tongue, Vincent.... [To Jack Straw.] Oh, my friend, I’m sorry for you. Those nice white ‘ands of yours will look pretty after they’ve been picking oakum for six months.

Jack Straw.

I had an idea that had been abolished in England.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh no, I think not.

Jack Straw.

Ah, perhaps it was the treadmill I was thinking of.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, Vincent, ‘ow much longer are you going to stand there like a stuffed owl?

Jack Straw.

Do my eyes deceive me, or is that a local paper that I see? [He takes it up.] Ah, I surmised that it would have an account of your garden party. Two columns of it, by Jove! You must wish you hadn’t asked so many people. [Reading.] The Duchess of St. Erth, the Marchioness of Mereston, the Marquess of Mereston, Lord and Lady Hollington, Viscount Parnaby — dear me, how smart — Lady Wanley, Mr. and Mrs. Lamberville, the Bishop of Sheffield, and the Honourable Mrs. Spratte.... I say, won’t your humbler friends grind their teeth with envy. But doesn’t it say anything about me? Here it is. [Reading.] “The Archduke Sebastian looked every inch a prince.” I said so. [Reading to himself.] Oh, spare my blushes. [Aloud.] “His Royal Highness enchanted every one by the grace of his bearing and the charm of his Imperial personality.” Blood will tell.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[To Parker-Jennings.] Are you going to stand there and let this man insult me, Robert?

Jack Straw.

[Blandly.] And what do you imagine all these noble and distinguished persons will think when they read in the next number of the local paper that the royal personage whose hand they were so pleased to shake — I did my duty like a hero, didn’t I? — was serving coffee and liqueurs a fortnight ago in the Grand Babylon Hotel?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, be quiet, you....

Jack Straw.

I can hear a titter rising softly in the village, with the doctor and the parson and the solicitor, whom you didn’t ask to your party, and I can hear it increase to a ripple of laughter as the story spreads through Cheshire. I can hear a Homeric peal as it travels from county to county. It’s a great guffaw in Manchester and Liverpool and the cities of the North, and already I hear the deep laughter of Bristol and Portsmouth and the West. And when it reaches London — you know how things go in London, it’s so large that it takes it a little time really to get hold of anything, but when at last it comes, can’t you see the huge city holding its aching sides and bellowing with laughter. But I’ll tell you who won’t see the joke — [taking up the paper and reading] — oh, they’ll laugh very much on the wrong side of their mouths; the Duchess of St. Erth, the Marchioness of Mereston, and my Lady Hollington and my Lord Parnaby, and the Bishop of Sheffield and the Honourable Mrs. Spratte.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, you devil!

Jack Straw.

I can see you flying before the laughter like three tremulous leaves before the wind, and the laughter will pursue you to Paris, where they’ll make little songs about you on the boulevards, and the Riviera, where they’ll sell your photographs on picture postcards. I can see you fleeing across the Atlantic to hide your heads in the immensity of America, and there the Yellow Press, pea-green with frenzy, will pile column of ridicule upon column of invective. Oh, my dear lady, do you think it isn’t worth while to endure six months hard labour to amuse the world so profoundly?

[There is a silence. Parker-Jennings takes out his handkerchief, makes it into a ball and mops his forehead. Vincent, noticing him, does the same. Mrs. Parker-Jennings gives the two a glance, sees what they are doing, takes out her handkerchief, rolls it up into a ball, and slowly mops her forehead.

Parker-Jennings.

It’s no good, Maria; we can’t give him in charge.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Tell me something I don’t know. We’re in the man’s hands, and he knows it.

Jack Straw.

[With an amiable smile.] I thought you would come to see the situation from my point of view.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Beaten.] What are you going to do?

Jack Straw.

At the present moment, with your permission, I am going to have a small brandy and soda. Ring the bell, Vincent.

Vincent.

Shall I, ma?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[With angry resignation.] Oh, yes, ring it.

Jack Straw.

For your own sake, I warn you to behave with the utmost decorum before the servant.

[A Footman appears.

Parker-Jennings.

Bring his Royal Highness a brandy and soda, James.

Servant.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I wish it would choke you.

Jack Straw.

I’m afraid I can hold out no hope of that.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Now, look here, I’m no fool, Mr. —— I don’t know what to call you....

Jack Straw.

You’ll find it’ll be more convenient to address me as you have always done.

Vincent.

The cheek of it! I can see myself saying sir to a damned waiter.

Jack Straw.

You were assuring me that you were no fool madam.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You know just as well as we do that the last thing we want is a scandal, and you’ve got us on toast.

Jack Straw.

Well browned on both sides.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

If you’ll go quietly and at once we’ll give you a couple of hundred pounds. There!

Jack Straw.

Oh, this is a blow. To think that any one should be willing to give two hundred pounds to get rid of me! And I’ve always flattered myself that I was such an agreeable guest in a country house.

Vincent.

They have funny tastes in the servants’ hall, I daresay.

Jack Straw.

You have quite a knack of saying clever things, haven’t you?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well?

Jack Straw.

Madam, nothing will induce me to leave you till I have eradicated the unfortunate impression which I appear to have made on you.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Do you mean to say....

Parker-Jennings.

[Interrupting.] Take care, mother. There’s James.

The Footman enters with brandy and soda and glasses.

Jack Straw.

Be a good fellow, Vincent, and mix it for me, will you?

Vincent.

Certainly, sir.

Jack Straw.

Where do you get your brandy, Mr. Jennings? I like it very much.

Parker-Jennings.

It’s very good of your Royal Highness to say so.

[Exit Footman.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, it’s insufferable.

Enter the Footman to announce.

Footman.

Lady Wanley. Mr. Holland.

[They enter. Exit Footman.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

There you are at last! This is a pretty kettle of fish.

Vincent.

Mother, for heaven’s sake don’t be vulgar.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I can’t be refined now. If I’m vulgar, I can’t ‘elp it.

Holland.

But what is the matter?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Good heavens, he’s the matter. He won’t go.

Lady Wanley.

What!

Jack Straw.

You know, it makes me feel very uncomfortable to hear you discussing me like this. Wouldn’t you like me to retire?

Parker-Jennings.

We’ve threatened him with the police.

Holland.

Well?

Parker-Jennings.

He just laughs at us.

Vincent.

We’ve even demeaned ourselves by offering him money.

Holland.

Of course he doesn’t want your money.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well, ‘adn’t you better suggest what he does want?

Holland.

Look here, Jack, you’ve made fools of the whole lot of us. Won’t you be a brick and clear out? We really are in a deuce of a scrape.

Jack Straw.

I am always touched by an appeal to my better nature, but in this case I propose to steel myself against your entreaties.

Holland.

Damn you!

Jack Straw.

Don’t lose your temper. You’ll only say something foolish, and I shall score off you.

Holland.

There’s only one thing to do, and that is to turn you out by main force.

Jack Straw.

That, strange as it may seem to you, has already been suggested, but I have explained to dear Mrs. Jennings the inconvenience of that course.

Enter the Footman.

Footman.

Mrs. Withers is in her motor, madam, and wishes to know if you can see her for a moment.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I can see nobody.

Jack Straw.

I hope you’re not refusing to see her on my account, dear Mrs. Jennings.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Very affably, before the servant.] Oh no, sir.

Jack Straw.

I wonder if you’d very much mind her coming in. I thought her such a nice woman, I should like to see her again.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, of course, if your Royal Highness wishes it....

Jack Straw.

Thanks so much.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Show ‘er in, James.

Footman.

Very good, madam.

[Exit Footman.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

My own ‘ouse isn’t my own now. I’m forced to see every one I don’t want to. If there’s any one I can’t bear it’s Fanny Withers. I only asked her yesterday because I thought she’d eat her ‘eart out with jealousy. She’s a snob if you like. I don’t know what she wants to come here for at this hour. [To Jack Straw.] Impostor! Impostor!

Jack Straw.

You know, upon my word you’re all very ungrateful. I lent an éclat to your party which has found lasting fame in the columns of the local paper. I chatted cordially with the Duchess of St. Erth, I allowed the Bishop of Sheffield to tell me harrowing stories about the immorality of the very best people, and when Count what’s his name....

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Adrian von Bremer — you might trouble to remember the name of your own Ambassador.

Jack Straw.

And when Count von Bremer came on the scene, and you were all at your wits’ end, I carried the whole thing off in a way which only my native modesty prevents me from describing as superb.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

How he didn’t find you out I don’t know. I was on pins and needles all the time he was here.

Enter the Footman, followed by Mrs. Withers.

Footman.

Mrs. Horton Withers.

[Exit.

Mrs. Withers.

Oh, my dear, I had to pop in just to tell you how beautifully everything went off yesterday.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m glad our party had your approval.

Jack Straw.

How do you do, Mrs. Withers?

Mrs. Withers.

It’s very good of your Royal Highness to remember me.

Jack Straw.

It’s one of the specialities of my profession, you know.

Mrs. Withers.

Are you going to favour us much longer with your presence in the neighbourhood, sir?

Jack Straw.

If Mrs. Jennings will keep me I don’t propose to make an immediate move.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

My house is at your disposal, sir, as long as you choose to honour it.

Jack Straw.

Mrs. Jennings is the most amiable hostess. Don’t you think it would be nice if we took a turn in the garden, Mrs. Jennings? I’m sure Lady Wanley would like you to show her your roses.

Lady Wanley.

Mrs. Jennings was good enough to show them to us yesterday.

Jack Straw.

We have it on good authority that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Mr. Jennings will show them to you again to-day.

Parker-Jennings.

I shall be very proud and ‘appy to carry out your Royal Highness’s wishes.

[Jack Straw stands at the door for Lady Wanley and Parker-Jennings to go out.

Jack Straw.

[To Vincent.] Won’t you come?

Vincent.

Certainly, sir.

[Mrs. Withers and Vincent go out.

Jack Straw.

I will join you in one moment. By the way, where is your daughter?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

She’s gone for a walk with Lord Serlo.

Jack Straw.

Be so good as to tell her the moment she comes in that I should be very grateful if I could see her.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What about?

Jack Straw.

She’ll doubtless be able to tell you that herself after our interview.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m not going to do anything of the kind.

Jack Straw.

You will be so good as to do what I ask, Mrs. Jennings.

[Exit.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

There, you see he actually orders me about now. I’m beginning to think we shall never get rid of him. I feel that he’ll stay on here always. I can see him growing old under this roof, eating my food and drinking my wine, and sending in his tailor’s bills for Jennings to pay. And it’s all your doing.

Holland.

I’m very sorry. I promise you that.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What’s the good of being sorry? The only thing you can do is to ‘elp us to get rid of ’im. And it’s ruined Ethel’s chances with Serlo. He won’t look at her now.

Holland.

Well, I daresay that’s not much loss.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m only thankful she wouldn’t ‘ave anything to do with that man when we thought ’e was an Archduke.

Holland.

Do you know, if I were you I’d let her see him. I have an idea that when he’s had a talk with her he’ll be quite willing to go.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What do you mean by that?

Enter Ethel and Lord Serlo.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Very affably.] Has Ethel been taking you for a walk, dear Lord Serlo?

Serlo.

Yes, we’ve been for a little stroll, don’t you know.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I do ‘ope she ‘asn’t tired you. She’s such a walker, ain’t you, my dear?

Serlo.

My idea of goin’ for a walk is sitting on a gate, don’t you know.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And a very good idea too. That’s just what I like myself.

Serlo.

[Drily.] Change in the wind to-day, isn’t there?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Innocently.] Is there? I didn’t notice it.

[Parker-Jennings comes in frantically.

Parker-Jennings.

Maria, he’s cutting all our prize roses for the show and giving them to Fannie Withers.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh!

[She is just going to bolt out when Jack Straw appears with a handful of magnificent roses.

Jack Straw.

I say, you haven’t got a basket, have you?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

You — you — you perfect fool!

Jack Straw.

What have I done now?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

We were going to show those next week at the Crystal Palace.

Jack Straw.

I thought they were very nice. That’s why it struck me Mrs. Withers might like them.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Snatching them from him.] Oh!

[She flounces out, followed by Parker-Jennings.

Jack Straw.

[Coming into the room calmly.] I’m afraid I haven’t done the right thing.

Serlo.

You’ve put your foot right in it this time, old man.

Jack Straw.

I wish I had that little book of etiquette on me. I wonder if it says anything about prize roses. [To Ethel.] I haven’t had the pleasure of saying good-morning to you yet.

Serlo.

You know, old man, I don’t want to seem disagreeable, but when Miss Jennings and I went for a walk we had some sort of idea that by the time we came back you’d have hooked it, don’t you know.

Jack Straw.

My dear Holland, I wonder if you’d do me the service of telling Mrs. Withers that dear Mrs. Jennings is putting the roses into a basket for her.

Holland.

[Laughing against his will.] It’s not the least use being angry with you, Jack. I’ll go by all means.

[Exit.

Jack Straw.

There goes a man of tact. If I were a Sultan I’d make him my Grand Vizier.

[He looks reflectively, but very pointedly, at Serlo.

Serlo.

What are you starin’ at me for?

Jack Straw.

I was wondering how I could suggest to you with proper delicacy that you might conveniently follow his example.

Ethel.

I should much prefer Lord Serlo to stay here.

Jack Straw.

I have matters of some importance to discuss with you.

Ethel.

I am sure that you have nothing to say that Lord Serlo cannot hear.

Jack Straw.

Very well, I will make an effort to overcome my customary modesty.

Serlo.

I don’t know where that comes in. You’ve got about the biggest cheek that I’ve ever come across.

Jack Straw.

To tell you the truth, it has been my only means of livelihood for the last four years.

Ethel.

What have you to say to me?

Jack Straw.

Couldn’t you give me a slight smile just to encourage me a little?

Ethel.

You force me to say what I would rather have left unsaid. I’m horrified that you should be so hatefully cruel. I think it’s infamous that you should lend yourself to a stupid practical joke.

Jack Straw.

My dear Serlo, won’t you — hook it?

Ethel.

I want him to stay.

Jack Straw.

It makes him feel very uncomfortable. He’s full of tact too — I’ll make him a grand vizier — and he’s feeling awfully de trop.

Serlo.

You needn’t bother about my feelings so much as all that, you know.

Jack Straw.

[To Ethel.] Won’t you hear what I’ve got to say for myself? You don’t think I care twopence about their practical joke? I came here because it was my only chance of seeing you.

Ethel.

What you’ve done fills me with horror and disgust.

Jack Straw.

Didn’t you see from the first minute that I was desperately in love with you?

Serlo.

I say, this really is very awkward for me.

Jack Straw.

You told me not to bother about your feelings.

Ethel.

[Unable to prevent a laugh.] You know, you’re too absurd. I know I ought to be very angry with you, but I can’t.

Jack Straw.

Do you remember what you said to me yesterday?

Ethel.

No.

Jack Straw.

Then I’ll remind you. You asked me to go away — because I was a royal personage. Do you still want me to go if I’m only a waiter?

Ethel.

I might have known that you were laughing at me all the time.

Jack Straw.

You know, if I had been a royal personage and disguised myself as a waiter in order to be by your side you’d have thought it very romantic. Why should it shock you when it is a waiter who for the same reason assumes the royal personage?

Ethel.

If you can’t see the difference it’s useless for me to tell you.

Jack Straw.

Won’t you marry me, Ethel?

Serlo.

I say, I’ve got a good mind to kick you out of the house.

Jack Straw.

Have you? In that case I can only congratulate myself that I’m the champion amateur boxer in Pomerania.

Serlo.

That complicates matters a bit, don’t it?

Jack Straw.

Upon my soul, I’ve never made a proposal of marriage under such embarrassing circumstances. [To Ethel.] Now, my dear, don’t be unreasonable. You practically refused me yesterday because I was an Archduke. You’re not going to refuse me now because I’m nobody in particular?

Ethel.

[Frigidly.] And can you give me any reason why I should accept you?

Jack Straw.

Well, it may have escaped your notice, but there’s the very good reason that you’re just as much in love with me as I am with you.

Ethel.

I?

Jack Straw.

Can you honestly deny it? But if you do I shall venture to disbelieve you.

Ethel.

It’s very easy to convince you. Lord Serlo, you were good enough to tell me yesterday that....

[She stops with a little tremor of hesitation.

Serlo.

By Jove, d’you mean it?

Ethel.

[Smiling.] I mean anything you like.

Serlo.

[With a low bow.] Mr. Straw, I beg to announce to you my engagement with Miss Ethel Parker-Jennings.

Jack Straw.

I’m still unconvinced. I’m afraid you’re incorrigibly romantic, my dear, and I’m certain your mamma will be very much annoyed.

Ethel.

Oh, you are too exasperating. I wish I could make you really angry.

Holland runs in.

Holland.

I say, Jack, look out.

Jack Straw.

What’s the matter?

Enter Mrs. Parker-Jennings, much agitated, and Parker-Jennings.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

The game’s up. It’s too late now to do anything.

Holland.

Von Bremer has come again.

Parker-Jennings.

And he’s got some one with him in his motor, who looks suspiciously like a policeman in plain clothes.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What’s to be done? For ‘eaven’s sake, don’t stand there grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Ethel.

[Quickly.] You won’t be arrested?

Holland.

Look here, there’s still time for you to get out.

Enter Vincent.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Well?

Vincent.

Lady Wanley’s talking to him. She’ll detain him as long as she can.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Blessings on her! I’ll forgive ‘er everything.

Ethel.

Oh, please go while you have a chance. I couldn’t bear to see you arrested.

Jack Straw.

Why should you care?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Now, look here. You’ve played a nasty trick on me, but you’ve got the cheek of the devil. I don’t want you to get into trouble. I don’t know what there is about you, but I can’t ‘elp liking you.

Jack Straw.

Madam, only the importunate presence of your lord and master prevents me from hurling myself at your feet.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, don’t talk stuff. I want to ‘elp you to get away.

Jack Straw.

[With a dramatic gesture.] Madam, my mother’s only son has never fled before a foe. I will stay and face the music.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I’m not thinking of myself now. If there is a scandal I’m rich enough to make people forget it.

Serlo.

I say, old man, you’d better hook it. England’s no place for you just now.

Ethel.

[In an undertone.] If you care for me at all, don’t run this horrible risk.

Jack Straw.

If you were only pressing me to stay this unanimity would be extremely flattering.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

The man’s mad. The man’s as mad as a March ‘are. He ought to be shut up in a lunatic asylum.

Jack Straw.

I forget if Napoleon was one of my ancestors, but I feel just like him at this moment. “J’y suis, j’y reste.”

Serlo.

In point of fact it was MacMahon who said that.

Jack Straw.

[With a noble flourish.] I prefer to think it was Napoleon.

Parker-Jennings.

They’re just strolling along.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Then it’s too late. And it’s all got to come out before Florrie Withers.

Vincent.

[From the window.] I say, Lady Wanley is making him look at the roses.

Holland.

She is a brick; she’s gaining every moment she can.

Jack Straw.

By the way, talking about roses, have you had that bunch put in a basket that I cut for Mrs. Withers?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, I should like to take you by the neck and strangle you.

Parker-Jennings.

Look out.

[They all stop for a moment in a state of breathless expectation. Lady Wanley comes in with Mrs. Withers. She gasps as she sees Jack Straw.

Lady Wanley.

Oh, I thought you’d gone.

[She is immediately followed by Adrian von Bremer. Jack Straw goes up to him very cordially.

Jack Straw.

Ah, my dear friend, I’ve been expecting you all the morning.

[They all start. As the scene proceeds there is in every one increasing astonishment and perplexity.

Von Bremer.

I couldn’t come before. I have only just received the answer to my telegram.

Jack Straw.

Have you good news for me?

Von Bremer.

The best. The Emperor agrees to all your wishes.

Jack Straw.

Bless his old head.

Von Bremer.

His Majesty is all eagerness to see you again. He is expecting a letter from you by every post. [He goes up to Ethel.] Madam, I am commanded by my august master to offer you his most cordial greeting.

Ethel.

Me?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I don’t know if I’m standing on my ‘ead or my ‘eels.

Jack Straw.

Then nothing remains but for me to make my declaration in due form. Mrs. Jennings, I have my grandfather’s permission to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[Breaking out.] But the man’s an impostor. He’s no more the Archduke Sebastian than I am.

Mrs. Withers.

What do you mean?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Oh, well, if you like you can ‘ave it. You were there when it all started. I suppose I got out the wrong side of bed that morning, and when Mrs. Thing-a-magig, the Vicar’s wife, come up to me at the Grand Babylon Hotel, I snubbed her. I’ve been very sorry for it since, and I’ve been punished for it. They knew I was an old snob — like you, Florrie — they thought they’d pay me out. They got one of the waiters from the ‘otel to dress up like a gentleman, and they introduced him as the Archduke Sebastian.

Mrs. Withers.

[Pointing to Jack Straw.] That?

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Yes, that! He’s a waiter, that’s what he is. And for the last week I’ve been making a perfect fool of myself over ’im.

Von Bremer.

[Much mystified.] But — I don’t understand. I’ve known the Archduke Sebastian since he was born.

Holland.

You’re mistaken. This person and I were in America together. I lived with him for two years. I don’t know his real name, but he passes under that of Jack Straw.

Von Bremer.

But what you say is absurd. I know him as well as my own son.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

D’you mean to say he really is an Archduke?

Von Bremer.

Of course he is. The only mystery is how he turned up here when we’ve been hunting the whole world for the last four years to find him.

Holland.

But are you the Jack Straw who was with me in the States?

Jack Straw.

Yes.

Lady Wanley.

And are you the waiter of the Grand Babylon Hotel?

Jack Straw.

Yes.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And are you the Archduke Sebastian of Pomerania?

Jack Straw.

Yes.

Serlo.

Well, I’m jiggered.

Jack Straw.

Perhaps you will allow me to explain. Four years ago I fell desperately in love with a lady whose speciality it was to kick higher than any one else in the world. She could kick a man’s tall hat off his head with such grace that I asked her to marry me. My grandfather refused to consent, and the lady was hurried over the frontier. [With a glance at Ethel.] I was a romantic dog myself in those days, and I followed her, only to find that she had already three more or less lawful husbands. The sight of them, and the conviction that her peculiar talent would not greatly add to the felicity of domestic life, cured me of my passion. But the world did seem a bit hollow and empty, and I thought I’d see how it looked from the point of view of a man who had nothing but his wits to live on. After trying it, I tell you frankly that I much prefer living on the revenues which rise from the strength of arm of my ancestors. When you saw me at the Grand Babylon Hotel I was preparing to return to the bosom of my family, but I saw this young lady, and the chance offering, decided to come down here. It was not unnatural that when I was asked to assume a grandiloquent name I should assume my own. Yesterday, when I met Count von Bremer, I begged him to wire to the Emperor, asking for his consent to my marriage with Miss Ethel Jennings.

Von Bremer.

I have only to add that the Emperor, delighted with the prospect of seeing once more his favourite grandson, has gladly given his consent.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

And when I think of all the things I’ve called you these last few hours....

Jack Straw.

They went in at the ear of a waiter, Madam, and slipped out at that of an Archduke.

[He goes up to Ethel.

Jack Straw.

And now it only rests with you to give peace to an aged Emperor, satisfaction to eighty-one Archdukes, and happiness to your unworthy servant.

Ethel.

I am engaged to be married to Lord Serlo.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

What! I know nothing about this.

Jack Straw.

I knew our mamma wouldn’t be pleased.

Ethel.

The fact remains.

Jack Straw.

[Going to Serlo.] Now, my dear friend, you’ve got the chance of a lifetime. It’s quite clear to me that there’s only one course open to you. Take the centre of the stage and renounce the lady with all the moving expressions you can think of.

Serlo.

Look here, old man, I don’t think I quite like the way you keep on pulling my leg.

Jack Straw.

Put a little dignity into it, man.

Serlo.

I may be a blithering ass, but I can see without your tellin’ me that Ethel wouldn’t have had me at any price if she hadn’t wanted to score off you.

Jack Straw.

Oh, how some men throw away their chances! Strike the pathetic note, old man, or you’re done. When you’ve finished there oughtn’t to be a dry eye in the place.

Serlo.

Well, the fact is — it had entirely slipped my memory at the moment, but I had a letter this morning from the lady’s solicitor to remind me — I happen to be engaged to a young woman who can kick a man’s topper off too.

Jack Straw.

By Jove, I wonder if it’s the same one.

Ethel.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Serlo.

Well, you know, it was a bit awk when you — er....

Jack Straw.

Threw yourself at his head.

Ethel.

[To Jack Straw with a smile.] I ought to be very angry with you. You’ve laughed at me all the time. I don’t believe you’ll ever take me seriously. If I really were the romantic creature you say I am, I’d be very dignified and refuse to have anything to do with you at all.

Jack Straw.

But like all women you’re very sensible at heart, and you’ll do nothing of the kind.

Ethel.

It’s not because I’m sensible, but because I suppose you were quite right in what you said just now.

Jack Straw.

Bless you! I’d throw myself down on the floor and implore you to walk on me only I’m convinced you’d take me at my word.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

[With enormous satisfaction.] I knew he was an Archduke all the time. You can’t deceive a mother.

Jack Straw.

[With a start.] There’s one thing I must break to you at once. Pomerania is in some ways still a barbarous country. We have a dreadful law that when a member of the royal family marries a foreigner not of royal blood, his wife’s relations are prohibited from entering it.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

I should like to see any one prohibit me from going to see my own daughter.

Jack Straw.

My dear lady, it grieves me infinitely to say it, but no sooner had you crossed our frontier than you would be instantly beheaded.

Mrs. Parker-Jennings.

Truly, sir, a barbarous country.

THE END

MRS DOT

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

CHARACTERS

This play, originally called Worthley’s Entire, was produced at the Comedy Theatre on April 26, 1908, with the following cast:

James Blenkinsop

Fred Kerr

Gerald Halstane

W. Graham Browne

Freddie Perkins

Kenneth Douglas

Charles

Herbert Ross

Mr. Rixon

George Bellamy

Mason

Horton Cooper

Mr. Wright

Brian Egerton

George

H. Gerrish

Lady Sellenger

Marie Illington

Nellie Sellenger

Lydia Billbrooke

Miss Eliza MacGregor

Lena Halliday

Mrs. Worthley

Marie Tempest

Mrs. Worthley

Freddie Perkins, her nephew and secretary

Miss Eliza MacGregor, her aunt

Gerald Halstane

James Blenkinsop

Lady Sellenger

Nellie, her daughter

Charles, Gerald’s servant

Mason, Mrs. Worthley’s Butler

Mr. Wright, a tailor

Mr. Rixon, Gerald’s solicitor

Blenkinsop’s Man

Time: The present day

Act I — Gerald’s rooms in Grafton Street

Acts II and III — Mrs. Worthley’s house on the river

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: Gerald’s rooms in Grafton Street. A man’s room, pleasantly furnished, with very comfortable arm-chairs, and prints on the walls. Books are lying about, and smoking utensils.

Charles, Gerald Halstane’s servant, opens the door. Mr. Wright comes in, a dapper young man, smartly dressed.

Charles.

There, you can see for yourself that Mr. Halstane is not at home.

Mr. Wright.

Very well, I’ll wait for him.

Charles.

You’ll have to wait till midnight, because I don’t expect him in.

Mr. Wright.

Last time I came you said he’d be back in half an hour, and when I returned you said he’d just gone out. You don’t catch me napping a second time.

Charles.

The governor don’t take impertinence lying down, Mr. Wright, and he’ll look upon it as a great liberty your dunning him in this way.

Mr. Wright.

I don’t know about taking impertinence, but he’ll have to take a summons if my account is not settled at once.

[There is a ring at the bell.

Charles.

[Ironically.] Make yourself quite at home, won’t you?

Mr. Wright.

Thank you. I will.

[Charles goes out and leaves the door open so that the conversation with Rixon, the solicitor, is heard.

Rixon.

[Outside.] Is Mr. Halstane in?

Charles.

No, sir. He’s gone to his club.

Rixon.

Well, I’ll ring him up. I must see him on a matter of the very greatest importance. You’re on the telephone, aren’t you?

Charles.

Yes, sir. But there’s a person waiting to see him.

Rixon.

[Coming in.] Oh, never mind.

[Rixon is a short, rubicund man, with white whiskers and a hearty manner.

Mr. Wright.

[Going towards him.] Mr. Rixon. [Rixon looks at him without recognising him.] Don’t you remember me, sir? I’m the junior partner in Andrews and Wright.

Rixon.

Of course I do. I saw your father on business the other day. [To Charles.] Where’s the telephone book?

Charles.

I’ll just go and fetch it, sir. Mr. Halstane lent it to the gentleman upstairs.

Rixon.

Be as quick as you can.

[Charles goes out.

Rixon.

[To Mr. Wright.] What are you doing here?

Mr. Wright.

Well, the fact is, we’ve got a very large account with Halstane, and I’m told he’s in queer street. I want to get the money before the crash comes.

Rixon.

Queer street? The man’s just come into seven thousand a year.

Mr. Wright.

What!

Rixon.

That’s why I’m running all over the place to find him. You know he’s a relation of the Hollingtons. I was at her ladyship’s not half an hour ago — the Dowager, you know — my firm has acted for the whole family for the last hundred years. Well, I’d hardly arrived before a message came from the War Office to say that her grandson, the present lord, had been killed in India. So as soon as I could, I bolted round here. Mr. Halstane is the next heir, and he comes into seven thousand a year and the title.

Mr. Wright.

My gracious, that’s a piece of luck.

Rixon.

I don’t mind telling you now that he’d pretty well come to the end of his tether. Your money was all right because he’d have paid everything up, but he wouldn’t have had much left.

Mr. Wright.

Of course he doesn’t know anything about this yet?

Rixon.

Not a word. For all he knows, he’s a ruined man, and here am I trying to get him on the telephone to tell him he’s come into a peerage and a very handsome income.

[Charles enters with the telephone book.

Charles.

7869 Gerrard, sir.

Rixon.

Thanks.

[He rings up and asks for the number.

Rixon.

7869 Gerrard, please, Miss.... What? Confound it, the line’s engaged.... I must go round to his club in a cab. I suppose you don’t want to wait here now, Wright?

Mr. Wright.

No, sir. I’ll get back to the shop.

Charles.

I ‘ope you’ll suit your own convenience, sir. [Charles shows them out and comes back.] I don’t know what these tradespeople are coming to when they expect gentlemen to pay their bills.

[He seats himself in the most comfortable chair in the room and puts his feet on the table. His back is to the door. The newspaper is lying by his side. He shuts his eyes and dozes.

[Gerald enters silently, followed immediately by Blenkinsop and Freddie Perkins.

[Gerald is a handsome man of seven or eight and twenty, simple in his manners, carefully dressed but without exaggeration. Freddie is a vivacious boy of two and twenty, Blenkinsop is an old bachelor of five and forty; he is well-preserved and takes a good deal of care of his appearance. He is dressed in the height of fashion.

[For a moment they look silently at Charles, who wakes with a start and jumps up in confusion.

Charles.

I beg your pardon, sir; I didn’t hear you come in.

Gerald.

[With an ironical politeness which he preserves during all his remarks to Charles.] Pray don’t let us disturb you. I shall never forgive myself if I think I’ve interrupted your nap.

Charles.

Shall I take your hat, sir?

Gerald.

It’s very kind of you. I shouldn’t like you to put yourself out.

Freddie.

[Sitting down.] By Jove, what a ripping chair! No wonder that Charles went to sleep.

Charles.

Mr. Rixon has just been, sir. He’s gone on to the club.

Gerald.

[With a laugh.] I’m not sorry to miss him. One’s solicitor seldom has any good news to bring one.

Charles.

Will you have the whiskey and soda, sir?

Gerald.

If it wouldn’t give you too much trouble.

[Charles goes out, and Gerald hands the cigarette box to Blenkinsop and Freddie.

Gerald.

Sit down and make yourself comfortable, James.

Blenkinsop.

To do that is one of the few principles I’ve adhered to in the course of an easy and unadventurous life.

[Charles enters with a tray on which are glasses, whiskey and sodas.

Charles.

Is there anything else you want, sir?

Gerald.

If you can spare me two minutes of your valuable time, I should like to make a few observations to you.

Freddie.

Collect yourself, Charles, to receive the words of wisdom that fall from Mr. Halstane’s lips.

Charles.

Things is very bad on the Stock Exchange, sir.

Gerald.

Charles, I have no objection to your sitting in my arm-chair and putting your feet on my table. I am willing to ignore the fact that you smoke my cigars and drink my whiskey.

Blenkinsop.

[Sipping.] You show excellent judgment, Charles. The whiskey’s capital.

Charles.

[Imperturbably.] Pot-still, sir. Fifteen years in bottle.

Gerald.

I can even bear with equanimity that you should read my letters. For the most part they’re excessively tedious, and they will only show you how deplorable is the education of the upper classes. But I must insist on your not reading my paper till I’ve done with it.

Charles.

I’m very sorry, sir. I thought there was no objection.

Gerald.

A newspaper, a suit of clothes, and a bottle of wine are three things at which I prefer....

Charles.

To ‘ave the first cut in, sir.

Gerald.

I thank you, Charles; I couldn’t have expressed my meaning more idiomatically.

Freddie.

[Laughing.] You’d better have a drink.

Charles.

Allow me, sir.

[He mixes a whiskey and soda.

Gerald.

You need not pour out the whiskey with such a generous hand as when you help yourself. Thank you.

Charles.

Them mining shares of yours is very low, sir.

Gerald.

They are.

Charles.

If you’ll remember, sir, I was all against them at the time you bought.

Blenkinsop.

You are a jewel, Charles, if besides administering to your master’s wants you advise him in his financial transactions.

Gerald.

Unless I’m mistaken, Charles strongly recommended me to invest my money in public-houses.

Charles.

Them being frequented in peace and war, and not subject to clandestine removals. In peace men drink to celebrate their ‘appiness, and in war to drown their sorrow.

Gerald.

[Smiling.] You are a philosopher, Charles, and it cuts me to the quick that I should be forced to deny myself the charm of your conversation.

Charles.

[Astonished.] I beg your pardon, sir?

Gerald.

I am endeavouring to give you notice in such a manner as not to outrage your susceptibilities.

Charles.

Me, sir? I’m sorry if I don’t give satisfaction.

Gerald.

On the contrary, you give every satisfaction. It has never been my good fortune to run across a servant who had an equal talent for blacking boots and for repartee. I am grateful for the care with which you have kept my wardrobe, and the encouragement you have offered to my attempts at humour. I have never seen you perturbed by a rebuke, or discouraged by ill-temper. Your merits, in fact, are overwhelming, but I’m afraid I must ask you to find another place.

Blenkinsop.

You really shouldn’t be so abrupt, Gerald. Look at him staggering under the blow.

Charles.

I’m very comfortable here, sir. Can you give me no reason for this decision?

Gerald.

You gave it yourself, Charles. As you justly observed, them mining shares is very low. You are sufficiently acquainted with my correspondence to be aware that my creditors have passed with singular unanimity from the stage of remonstrance to that of indignation.

Blenkinsop.

I say, I’m sorry to hear this, old man.

Charles.

If it’s just a matter of wages, sir, I shall be ‘appy to wait till it suits your convenience to pay me.

Gerald.

[With a smile of thanks.] I’m grateful to you for that, Charles; but, honestly, do you think half-measures can be of any use to me?

Charles.

Well, sir, so far as I’m acquainted with your circumstances....

Gerald.

Come, come, this modesty ill becomes you. Is there a bill in this room, or a solicitor’s letter, with which you are not intimately acquainted?

Charles.

Well, sir, if you ask me outright — things is pretty bad.

Freddie.

I say, don’t play the ass any more. What the deuce does it all mean?

Gerald.

I’m sorry the manner in which I’m imparting to you an interesting piece of information, doesn’t meet with your approval. Would you like me to tear my hair in handfuls?

Blenkinsop.

It would be picturesque, but painful.

Freddie.

Are you really broke?

Gerald.

So much so that I’ve to-day sublet my rooms. In a week, Charles, I shall cast the dust of London off my feet, a victim to the British custom of primogeniture.

Charles.

Yes, sir.

Gerald.

Have you the least idea what I mean?

Charles.

No, sir.

Gerald.

Well, I feel certain that during some of the many leisure moments you have enjoyed in my service, you have cast an eye upon that page in Burke upon which my name figures — insignificantly.

Charles.

Begging your pardon, sir, I looked you up in the Peerage before I accepted the situation.

Gerald.

It rejoices me to learn that your investigations were satisfactory.

Charles.

Well, sir, always having lived before with titled gentlemen, I felt I owed it to myself to be careful.

Gerald.

I am overpowered by your condescension, Charles. It never occurred to me that you were taking my character while I was taking yours.

Charles.

If servants wanted as good characters from masters as masters want from servants, I ‘ave an idea that many gentlemen would ‘ave to clean their own boots.

Gerald.

You scintillate, Charles, but I deplore your tendency to digress.

Charles.

I beg pardon, sir. As you was the second son of an honourable and very well connected, I didn’t mind stretching a point. If I may say so, your father was almost a nobleman.

Gerald.

The consequence is, however, that I was brought up without in the least knowing how to earn my living. I belong to that vast army of younger sons whose sole means of livelihood is a connection with a peer of the realm and such mother-wit as Dame Nature has provided them with.

[A ring is heard.

Charles.

There’s some one at the door, sir. Are you at home?

Gerald.

No, I expect two ladies to tea in half an hour, but you must admit no one else. These gentlemen will be forced to deprive me of their society in twenty-five minutes.

Blenkinsop.

Not at all. Not at all.

Gerald.

I repeat with considerable firmness that these gentlemen will be compelled by a previous engagement to leave me in twenty minutes.

Blenkinsop.

It’ll be difficult after that to make our departure seem perfectly natural, won’t it?

[A second ring is heard.

Gerald.

Nobody’s to come in.

Charles.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out.

Blenkinsop.

I say, old man, I’m awfully sorry to hear this bad news of yours. Can’t I do anything to help you?

Gerald.

No, thanks.

[The bell is rung continuously, with the greatest impatience.

Freddie.

By Jove, whoever your visitor is, he doesn’t like being kept waiting.

Mrs. Dot.

[Outside.] Is Mr. Halstane at home?

Freddie.

[Softly.] Why, it’s my aunt.

Blenkinsop.

Mrs. Dot.

Gerald.

Ssh!

Charles.

Not at home, madam.

Mrs. Dot.

[Outside.] Nonsense. I want to see him very particularly.

Charles.

I’m very sorry, madam. Mr. Halstane went out not five minutes ago. I almost wonder you didn’t meet him on the stairs.

Mrs. Dot.

Yes, I know all about that.

[Mrs. Worthley comes in. She is a pretty little woman, very wonderfully gowned. She is frank, open and full of spirits. Charles follows her into the room.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh! Three of you. Charles, how can you tell such stories?

Charles.

[Very gravely.] Mr. Halstane is not at home, madam.

Gerald.

[Coming forward and taking her hand.] Charles is shocked at your lack of decorum.

Mrs. Dot.

Run away, Charles. And don’t do it again.... I suppose you think this sort of thing isn’t done in the best families?

Charles.

[Stiffly.] No, madam.

Mrs. Dot.

I saw one of my drays outside, so I thought I’d just look in to see how you liked it.

Charles.

[Icily.] I beg your pardon, madam?

Mrs. Dot.

The beer, my good man, the beer! Don’t you know that I’m Worthley’s Entire?

Charles.

I never gave the subject a thought, madam.

Mrs. Dot.

And very good our half-crown family ale is, although I say it as shouldn’t.

Gerald.

You may go, Charles.

[Without a word, much on his dignity Charles departs.

Gerald.

[Gaily.] It’s fortunate I’ve just given him notice, because Charles would certainly never stay in a house where he’d been so grossly insulted.

Mrs. Dot.

I love shocking Charles. He’s so genteel. Whenever I come here I see him obviously trying not to show that he’s perfectly well aware that I have anything to do with trade.

Blenkinsop.

The world is so degenerate that it’s only among domestic servants that you find any respect for landed gentry and any contempt for commerce.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Freddie.] I’m glad to see that you’re not ruining your health by working too hard as my secretary.

Freddie.

I’ve been lunching with Blenkinsop. I answered about fifty begging letters before I came out this morning.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Gerald.] You’ve not said you’re glad to see me yet.

Gerald.

I’m not sure that I am, very.

Mrs. Dot.

[Not at all disconcerted.] Then say you like my frock.

Gerald.

Yes, it’s very nice.

Mrs. Dot.

Very nice! I should think it was very nice. There’s no one in London who’d venture to wear anything half so outrageous. And as for the hat....

Blenkinsop.

The hat’s hideous. But I suppose it’s fashionable.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear James, where were you educated?

Blenkinsop.

At Eton.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, they taught you nothing about clothes.

Blenkinsop.

I wish sometimes that nice women wouldn’t get themselves up as if they were no better than they should be.

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t be so absurd. The ideal of a woman who takes any pains about her frocks is to look as like an abandoned hussy as she possibly can.

[Mrs. Dot chooses the most comfortable chair in the room.

Gerald.

I’m afraid I can’t ask you to sit down.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, don’t trouble. I’m perfectly capable of doing that of my own accord.... If you think I’m going before you’ve answered a hundred and fifty questions you’re very much mistaken. First, I want to know why you’ve not been near me for the last week? Then why you try to keep me out of the place? And lastly, why you show every desire to get rid of me when I’m here?

Gerald.

I’ve not seen you because I’ve been uncommonly busy. I said I was not at home because I’m in the worst possible temper. And I want to get rid of you because I’m expecting somebody else.

Mrs. Dot.

I suppose if I were a thoroughly tactful person I should now ring for my carriage?

Gerald.

I daresay you would ask me to ring for it.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, I shall neither do the one nor the other. In the first place your answers are all nonsense and in the second I want to know who’s coming? If it’s some one I know, I shall stop and say, How d’you do, and if it isn’t I want to see what it’s like.

Gerald.

I suppose you know I’m perfectly capable of turning you out by main force.

Mrs. Dot.

If you touch me I shall scream.

[She looks quickly at Freddie and Blenkinsop, then gives a smile.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, Freddie, I quite forgot. I’ve got a pile of letters that I found on my way out this afternoon. There are three poor clergymen who can’t pay their bills, and there are five elderly spinsters who don’t know which way to turn for their quarter’s rent, and there are seven deserving ladies with a starving husband each and sixteen children.

Blenkinsop.

How very immoral!

Mrs. Dot.

It would be much more immoral if they had a starving child each and sixteen husbands.

Blenkinsop.

I suppose it’s never occurred to you that you do a great deal more harm than good by your indiscriminate charity?

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t be such an old frump. If it gives me a certain amount of pleasure to give money away, why on earth shouldn’t I? I daresay that nineteen out of every twenty people I help are thoroughly worthless, but it’s only by doing something for them all that I can be quite certain of not missing the twentieth.

Freddie.

D’you want me to write to them at once?

Mrs. Dot.

This very minute.

Freddie.

[With a smile.] But that’ll only get rid of me, you know. Blenkinsop will still be here.

Mrs. Dot.

[Coolly.] James, do go and see that Freddie writes his letters nicely. He’s only just come down from Oxford, and his spelling is rather shaky.

Blenkinsop.

[With a grunt.] You can give us a shout when you’ve had your talk.

Mrs. Dot.

Now mind, Freddie. I before E except after C.

[They go out.

Gerald.

[Laughing.] You’re a very bold woman, Mrs. Dot.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a change of tone.] What’s the matter, Gerald?

Gerald.

[Surprised.] With me?

Mrs. Dot.

Won’t you tell an old friend?

Gerald.

[After a very short pause.] Nothing that you can help me in, Mrs. Dot.

Mrs. Dot.

Won’t you leave the Mrs. out? It makes me feel so five and thirtyish.

Gerald.

You’re a ripping good sort, and we’ve had some charming times together. I’m glad that you came to-day, because it’s given me an opportunity to thank you for all your kindness to me.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear boy, what are you talking about?

Gerald.

Well, the fact is, I’ve been spending a good deal of money lately, and I’m rather broke.

Mrs. Dot.

How stupid of me! I’ve always had such lots myself it never occurs to me that any one else may be hard up. And I’ve let you pay all sorts of things for me, theatres and dinners and heaven knows what. I must owe you a perfect fortune.

Gerald.

Nonsense! You don’t owe me a penny.

Mrs. Dot.

Well then, in future I insist on paying for everything. I’m not going to give up our little dinners at the Savoy and our suppers and all the rest of it. Don’t be so silly. You know I have ten times more money than I know what to do with.

Gerald.

Yes, I can see you furtively slipping your purse into my hand so that I should pay for a luncheon, and giving me a shilling over for the cab. No, thank you.

Mrs. Dot.

Then we’ll economise together. It only means going to the pit of a theatre instead of taking a box. Well, I like the pit much better. You see all the women come in and you criticise their back hair. And you suck delicious oranges all the time. It makes my mouth water to think of it. And we’ll go on a bus instead of taking cabs. They’re much safer, and I like sitting on the front seat and talking to the driver. Bus-drivers are always such handsome men.

Gerald.

It’s not a question of driving in buses, but of walking on my flat feet.

Mrs. Dot.

Very well. You shall walk on your flat feet, and I’ll trip along by your side on my arched instep.

Gerald.

Things have come to such a pass that I must either beg, steal, or work.

Mrs. Dot.

Then tell me exactly how matters stand.

Gerald.

It would only bore you, and besides you wouldn’t understand.

Mrs. Dot.

Now you’re talking through your hat, my friend. You’re simply talking through your hat. I flatter myself there are few men who have a better head for business than I have. Why, since my husband died I’ve almost doubled our profits. The brewery has never been so flourishing. I’ve told the British People on fifty thousand hoardings to drink Worthley’s Half-crown Family Ale, and by Jove, the British People do.

Gerald.

You funny little thing.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, now tell me all about it, and let’s see if things can’t be put straight.

Gerald.

Oh, my dear, I’m afraid they’re in a most awful mess. I never had much money to start with, and I got into debt. Then I tried a flutter on the Stock Exchange, and the confounded shares went down steadily from the day I bought.

Mrs. Dot.

It’s a way shares have when fools buy them.

Gerald.

But I daresay I could have weathered that, only a pal of mine got into a hole, and I backed a bill for him.

Mrs. Dot.

You don’t mean to say you did that?

Gerald.

I was obliged to. I couldn’t let him go under without trying to do something.

Mrs. Dot.

You donkey, you perfect donkey!

Gerald.

He swore he’d be able to pay the money.

Mrs. Dot.

I never knew a man yet, or a woman either for that matter, who’d stick at a thundering lie when he wanted money. And what’s the result?

Gerald.

Well, the result is that after I’ve paid everything up, I shall have about five hundred pounds left. I’m proposing to go out to America and rough it a bit.

Mrs. Dot.

Pardon my asking, but do you think a handsome face, a talent for small talk, and a certain charm of manner will enable you to earn your daily bread?

Gerald.

[Laughing.] I don’t want to seem vain, but although I’ve done my best to conceal them, I fancy I have two or three other qualifications which will be of more service.

Mrs. Dot.

Then the long and the short of it is that you’re ruined.

Gerald.

Absolutely.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m delighted to hear it.

Gerald.

Dot!

Mrs. Dot.

I am. I can’t help it. But I think your plan of going to the States is simply foolish.

Gerald.

What else can I do? The Cape’s entirely played out.

Mrs. Dot.

You stupid creature.

Gerald.

I beg your pardon!

Mrs. Dot.

You belong to a class whose chief resource when it has squandered its money is a rich marriage. The custom is so well recognised that when a man of good family emigrates rather than have recourse to it, society is outraged and suspicious.

Gerald.

Thanks. I don’t think I can see myself marrying for money.

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t be so absurd. I never heard that the course of true love ran any less smoothly because a charming widow had sixty thousand a year.

Gerald.

What do you mean?

Mrs. Dot.

My dear boy, I’m not a perfect fool. A man thinks a woman never sees anything unless she looks at it with both eyes at once wide open. Don’t you know that she can see things through the back of her head with a stone wall in between?

Gerald.

What have you seen, then?

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve seen a thousand things. I’ve seen your eyes light up when I came into the room, I’ve seen you watch me when you thought I wasn’t looking. I’ve seen you scowl at any young fool who paid me an outrageous compliment. I’ve seen the pleasure it gave you to do me any trifling service. I’ve seen you watch for the opportunity of putting my cloak on my shoulders after the play. And — I’m sorry — but I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re in love with me. I dare say the fact has escaped your notice, but that’s only because men are so deplorably stupid.

Gerald.

[Gravely.] D’you think it’s quite kind to laugh at me now?

Mrs. Dot.

But I’m not laughing at you, my dear. I’m so pleased, and so flattered and so touched. At first I thought I was only a fool, and that I saw those things only because I wanted to. And when your hand trembled a little as it took mine, I was afraid it was only my hand that was trembling. And at last when I was certain that you were just as much in love with me as I was with you, I was so glad that I cried for two hours. And I had to use a whole box of powder before I could make myself presentable again.

Gerald.

[Grimly.] I’m afraid you’ll think me an utter brute. I ought to have told you long ago that I’m engaged to be married.

Mrs. Dot.

Gerald!

Gerald.

I’ve been engaged to Nellie Sellenger for the last three years.

Mrs. Dot.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Gerald.

No one was supposed to know anything about it. And — I was afraid of losing you. Oh, Dot, Dot, I love you with all my heart. And I’m so glad to be forced to tell you at last.

Mrs. Dot.

But I don’t understand in the least.

Gerald.

You know Nellie Sellenger is an old friend of mine.

Mrs. Dot.

Yes, it was at the Sellengers’ I first met you.

Gerald.

Well, three years ago we were staying at the same place in the country, and I was a young fool.

Mrs. Dot.

You mean that there was no other girl there, and so you flirted with her. But you need not have asked her to marry you.

Gerald.

[Apologetically.] It was the merest accident. It came to pieces in my ‘ands, so to speak.

Mrs. Dot.

Really?

Gerald.

We were taking a walk in the garden after dinner, and a perfectly absurd moon was shining. It seemed the obvious thing to do.

Mrs. Dot.

And of course she accepted. The girl of eighteen always does.

Gerald.

But Lady Sellenger refused to hear of it. She thought me most ineligible.

Mrs. Dot.

Lady Sellenger’s a sensible woman. She was quite right.

Gerald.

I’m not so sure. If she’d given us her blessing and told us to do as we liked, we should probably have broken it off in three weeks. But she was really rather offensive about it. She refused to let Nellie see me, and the result was that we were always running across one another in Bond Street tea-shops.

Mrs. Dot.

Monstrous! And so bad for the digestion.

Gerald.

Some time ago Lady Sellenger found out that we were writing to one another and so on, so she came to see me and said she’d made up her mind to take Nellie abroad for a year. She made me promise to hold no communication with her during that time, and agreed that if we were still of the same mind when they came back, she would withdraw the opposition and let us be properly engaged.

Mrs. Dot.

An announcement in the Morning Post and all that sort of thing?

Gerald.

I suppose so.

Mrs. Dot.

And when are they coming back?

Gerald.

They came back last week. But I haven’t had a chance of speaking to Nellie yet. The year is up to-day, and this morning I had a note from Lady Sellenger asking if they might come to tea.

Mrs. Dot.

And what are you going to say to her?

Gerald.

Good heavens! What can I say? I was poor enough a year ago, but now I’m penniless. I’m bound to ask for my release.

Mrs. Dot.

Then why on earth have you been trying to make me utterly miserable?

Gerald.

You know, I don’t want to seem an awful prig, but I don’t think I should much like doing anything shabby. If Nellie wants me to keep my promise I shan’t draw back.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, but she won’t. She’ll be only too glad to get rid of you.

Gerald.

I’m afraid there’s something else I must tell you.

Mrs. Dot.

More? Don’t say you’ve got a horrible past, because I shan’t turn a hair.

Gerald.

No, it’s not that. You know that Lord Hollington is a relation of mine.

Mrs. Dot.

Only a fifteenth cousin, isn’t he? Far too distant to brag about.

Gerald.

A year ago three lives stood between me and the peerage. It seemed impossible that I could ever come into anything.

Mrs. Dot.

Well?

Gerald.

But last winter my cousin George unfortunately broke his neck in the hunting-field, and his poor old father died of the shock. If anything happened to my cousin Charles everything would come to me.

Mrs. Dot.

And Lady Sellenger would doubtless withdraw her opposition to your marriage.

Gerald.

She’s a very nice woman, but she has rather a keen eye for the main chance.

Mrs. Dot.

Even her best friend would hesitate to call her disinterested. But why should anything happen to Lord Hollington? He’s quite young, isn’t he? I saw his engagement announced in the Morning Post a little while ago.

Gerald.

He’s out in India at this moment. He’s a soldier, you know. It appears there’s some trouble on the North-West Frontier, and he’s in command of the expedition.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, but nothing is going to happen to him. He’ll live till he’s eighty.

Gerald.

I’m sure I hope he will.

Mrs. Dot.

Say again that you love me, Gerald.

Gerald.

[Smiling.] I oughtn’t to yet.

Mrs. Dot.

You know, you’ve got to marry me. I insist upon it. After all, you’ve been trifling with my affections shamefully. Oh, we shall be so happy, Gerald. And we’ll never grow any older than we are now. You know, I’m an awfully good sort, really. I talk a lot of nonsense, but I don’t mean it. I very seldom listen to it myself. I’m sick of society. I want to settle down and be domesticated. I’ll sit at home and darn your socks. And I shall hate it, and I shall be so happy. And if you want to be independent you can have a job at the brewery. We want a smart energetic man to keep us up to the times. And we’ll have a lovely box at the opera, and you can always get away for the shooting.

[A ring is heard.

Gerald.

There they are.

Mrs. Dot.

Good heavens! I quite forgot about those wretched people in there.

[She opens the door of the dining-room.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t want to disturb you, but if you’ve quite finished your conversation perhaps you’d like to come and have tea.

[Blenkinsop and Freddie come in and go to the fire.

Blenkinsop.

I observe with interest that your remark is facetious.

Freddie.

I’m simply freezing.

Mrs. Dot.

You didn’t mind being shut up in there, did you?

Blenkinsop.

Not at all. I rather like sitting in an arctic room without a fire, with a window looking on a blank wall, and the society of your nephew and the Sporting Times of the week before last as my only means of entertainment.

[Charles enters to announce the Sellengers. He goes out and brings in the tea.

Charles.

Lady and Miss Sellenger.

[Enter Lady Sellenger and Nellie. Lady Sellenger is a pompous woman of fifty, stout, alert and clever. Nellie is very pretty and graceful, and fashionably gowned. She appears to be much under her mother’s influence.

Lady Sellenger.

How d’you do? Ah, Mrs. Worthley! Delightful!

Gerald.

[Shaking hands.] How d’you do? I think you know Mr. Blenkinsop?

Lady Sellenger.

Of course. But I don’t approve of him.

Blenkinsop.

Why not?

Lady Sellenger.

Because you’re a cynic, a millionaire, and a bachelor. And no man has the right to be all three.

Mrs. Dot.

And how did you like Italy?

Lady Sellenger.

A grossly over-rated place. So many marriageable daughters and so few eligible men.

Gerald.

[Introducing.] Mr. Perkins, Lady Sellenger — Miss Sellenger.

Mrs. Dot.

My nephew and my secretary.

Lady Sellenger.

Really. How very interesting! Almost romantic.

Freddie.

How d’you do?

Lady Sellenger.

Dear Mrs. Worthley, what a charming gown! You always wear such — striking things.

Mrs. Dot.

It advertises the beer, don’t you know.

Lady Sellenger.

I wish I could drink it, Mrs. Worthley, but it’s so fattening. I understand you always have it on your table.

Mrs. Dot.

I think that’s the least I can do, as it’s only on account of the beer that I can have a table at all.

Nellie.

[To Mrs. Dot.] May I give you some tea?

Mrs. Dot.

[Going to the tea-table.] Thanks so much.

[Gerald comes over to Lady Sellenger with a cup. She takes it. The others are gathered round the tea-table, which is right at the back, and talk among themselves.

Lady Sellenger.

Come and sit by me, Gerald. I’ve not had a word with you since we came back from Italy.

Gerald.

[Lightly.] What are you going to say to me?

Lady Sellenger.

You can guess why I wrote to ask if we might come and see you to-day?

Gerald.

[Rising.] Yes.

Lady Sellenger.

Now do sit down. And look as if you were talking of the weather.

Gerald.

It’s a little difficult to discuss the matter quite indifferently.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear boy, it’s the little difficulties of life which prevent it from being dull. We should be no better than the beasts of the field if we had no anxieties about our soul and our position in society.

Gerald.

I see.

Lady Sellenger.

[Rather impatiently.] My dear Gerald, why don’t you help me? What I have to say is so very unpleasant. You know I have always had a most sincere affection for you. Under other circumstances I would have wanted no better son-in-law.

Gerald.

It’s very kind of you to say so.

Lady Sellenger.

I’ve assured you for the last three years that a marriage was absurd, and now I want to tell you that it’s impossible. Love is all very well in its way, but it doesn’t make up for a shabby house in the suburbs.

Gerald.

You’re not romantic, Lady Sellenger.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear, when you reach my age you’ll agree with me that it’s only the matter of fact which really signifies. Love in a cottage is a delusion of youth. It’s difficult enough after ten years of solid matrimony in Grosvenor Square.

Gerald.

You married for love, Lady Sellenger.

Lady Sellenger.

I’m anxious that my daughter shouldn’t make the same mistake. Now let us be quite frank with one another.... Are you sure they’re not listening?

Gerald.

[Glancing at the others.] They seem very much occupied with their own affairs. What is your ultimatum?

Lady Sellenger.

Well, Gerald, I’m not in the least mercenary. I know that money can’t give happiness. But I do feel that unless you have at least two thousand a year you can’t make my daughter even comfortable.

Gerald.

I’m sure that’s very modest.

Lady Sellenger.

It’s not love in a cottage. It’s not love in a palace. It’s just — matrimony in Onslow Gardens.

Gerald.

I may as well tell you at once that I’ve had very bad luck. I wanted to make money, and I’ve come an absolute cropper.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear Gerald, I’m very sorry. Is it as bad as all that?

Gerald.

It couldn’t be much worse.

Lady Sellenger.

Dear me, that’s very sad. But, of course, it simplifies matters, doesn’t it?

Gerald.

Enormously. It puts marriage entirely out of the question and leaves only one course open to me. I’ll take the earliest opportunity to ask Nellie for my release.

Lady Sellenger.

What a pity it is you’re so poor! Your principles are really excellent.

Gerald.

But what about Nellie? How will she take it?

Lady Sellenger.

She’s so reserved, poor dear! She never speaks of her feelings. But after three London seasons most girls have learnt to bow to the inevitable. And how is Lord Hollington?

Gerald.

He’s to be married as soon as he comes back from India.

Lady Sellenger.

It was dreadfully sad that his uncle and his cousin should die within a year. If anything happened to him you’d be in very different circumstances. But, of course, it would be wicked to wish it. I hope you never do.

Gerald.

Never. I trust he’ll live to a hundred.

Lady Sellenger.

And I daresay he’ll have fifteen children. Those delicate men often do.... Why don’t you speak to Nellie now and get it over?

Gerald.

This very minute? With others in the room?

Lady Sellenger.

That’s just it, I want to give neither of you any opportunity for sentiment.

Gerald.

You’re certainly very practical.

Lady Sellenger.

No woman can afford to be sentimental when she has a marriageable daughter.... For heaven’s sake don’t make Nellie cry, we’re dining out to-night.

Gerald.

I’ll do my best to be very matter of fact.

Lady Sellenger.

[Raising her voice.] Mr. Blenkinsop, I want to quarrel with you!

Blenkinsop.

[Coming forward.] You fill me with consternation.

Lady Sellenger.

You passed us in Pall Mall this afternoon and you cut us dead.

Blenkinsop.

I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you. I’d just been to the War Office to inquire if there was any news of those fellows out in India. By the way, Halstane, isn’t Hollington a relation of yours?

Gerald.

Yes, why?

Blenkinsop.

Haven’t you seen anything in the paper?

Gerald.

No.

Blenkinsop.

Oh, but surely. There’s sure to be something about it in the Westminster.

[He takes up the paper.

Gerald.

That’s an early one.

[Faintly are heard the cries of “Special.”

Freddie.

Listen, there’s the last edition coming along.

Lady Sellenger.

But what is it, Mr. Blenkinsop?

Blenkinsop.

A small force was sent out to punish some local people up in the hills, who’d been making themselves troublesome, and it hasn’t been heard of since. The idea is that there may have been some trouble and they’ve all got cut up.

Mrs. Dot.

But how does it concern Lord Hollington?

Blenkinsop.

He was in command of it.

Gerald.

Good God!

Blenkinsop.

When I was there a couple of hours ago the War Office had no news at all.

Gerald.

But why didn’t you tell me about it?

Blenkinsop.

I thought you knew. I’d forgotten for the moment that Hollington had anything to do with you. He’s a very distant relation, isn’t he?

Gerald.

Yes, I hardly know him.

Lady Sellenger.

But if anything has happened to him....

[Cries outside of “Special, Special.”

Mrs. Dot.

Why don’t you get a paper? Freddie, run and get one, will you?

Gerald.

No, Charles can go.

[He rings, and Charles immediately comes in.

Gerald.

Oh, Charles, get a paper at once. Hurry up!

Charles.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out. Outside, cries of “Terrible catastrophe in India.”

Gerald.

By Jove, did you hear that?

[Cries of “Special, Special.”

Lady Sellenger.

Why doesn’t he make haste?

Gerald.

Nonsense. It can’t have anything to do with Hollington.

Mrs. Dot.

[With her hand on his arm, anxiously.] Gerald.

[Freddie Perkins is looking out of the window.

Freddie.

Here’s Charles. By Jove, he isn’t hurrying himself much.

Gerald.

Has he got a newsboy?

Freddie.

Yes. What the deuce is he doing?

Gerald.

[At the window.] Good lord, he’s reading the paper.

Lady Sellenger.

The suspense is too awful.

Freddie.

There’s another newsboy running down the street.

[Cries of “Special, Special.”

Gerald.

Thank God, he’s coming upstairs at last. I should like to kick him.

[Cries of “Terrible catastrophe in India. ‘Eroic death of Lord ‘Ollington.”

Good God!

[They all remain in silence, full of consternation. Charles enters with the paper.

Hurry up, man! What the deuce have you been doing?

[He snatches the paper from him.

Charles.

[With dignity.] I made all the ‘aste I could, my lord.

[Gerald stops for a moment from looking up and down the paper, and stares at him.

Gerald.

What the dickens d’you mean?

[He looks at the paper, reads, and drops it.

Mrs. Dot.

Is it true, Gerald?

[He looks at her and nods.

Gerald.

Poor chap. And just as he was going to be married.

Charles.

Shall I bring your hat and coat, my lord?

Gerald.

What on earth are you talking about?

Charles.

I thought your lordship would like to go round to the War Office.

Gerald.

Shut up!

[Exit Charles.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear boy, I congratulate you with all my heart.

Gerald.

Oh, don’t remind me of that already.

Lady Sellenger.

I can quite understand you’re a little upset, but after all he was only a very distant relation of yours.

Blenkinsop.

I don’t understand what all this means.

Gerald.

Didn’t you hear that fool of a servant? It was the first thing he thought of.

Mrs. Dot.

Gerald succeeds to the peerage!

Gerald.

Yes.

Mrs. Dot.

Wouldn’t you like us to leave you alone? I’m sure you want to think things out a bit?

Lady Sellenger.

Come, Nellie!

Gerald.

I’m sorry to turn you out. Good-bye. I had something to say to you, Nellie.

Nellie.

We’ve not had a chance of speaking to one another.

Lady Sellenger.

[Unctuously.] It’s very fortunate. Now you’ll have much pleasanter things to talk about.

[He stares at her without understanding.

Lady Sellenger.

Things are very different now, Gerald. It just came in time, didn’t it?

Nellie.

Good-bye.

[Lady Sellenger and Nellie go out.

Blenkinsop.

Good-bye, old man, I’m sorry your cousin has had such an awful death. But after all, we none of us knew him and we do know you. I can’t tell you how glad I am that all your difficulties are at an end.

Gerald.

I would give my right hand to bring Hollington back to life again.

Blenkinsop.

Good-bye.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Dot.

Go away, Freddie. I want to talk to Gerald.

Freddie.

Good-bye, old man. I say, what a nice girl Miss Sellenger is!

Gerald.

Good-bye.

[Freddie goes out.

Mrs. Dot.

Well?

Gerald.

The news has come just an hour too soon. It’s bound me hand and foot.

Mrs. Dot.

What d’you mean by that?

Gerald.

Nellie accepted me when I was poor and of no account. Now that I’m well off I can’t go to her and say: I’ve changed my mind and don’t want to marry you.

Mrs. Dot.

What d’you mean by being well off?

Gerald.

I believe I shall have six or seven thousand a year.

Mrs. Dot.

But you can’t live on that. It’s absurd.

Gerald.

[With a smile.] There are people who live on much less, you know.

Mrs. Dot.

Besides, she doesn’t care for you in the least. I could see that at a glance.

Gerald.

How?

Mrs. Dot.

A girl who loved you wouldn’t have a skirt cut like that.

Gerald.

I can’t draw back now, Dot. You must see that I can’t.

Mrs. Dot.

If you cared for me, you’d easily find some way out of the difficulty.

Gerald.

I must be honest, Dot.... I don’t want to seem a snob, but I’ve got an ancient name, and it’s rather honourable. I’m by way of being the head of the family now. I don’t want to begin by acting like a cad.

Mrs. Dot.

You know, I’m much nicer than Nellie. I’m more amusing, and I’m better dressed, and I’ve got five motor cars. It’s true she’s younger than I am, but I don’t feel a day more than seventeen. [With a little look at him.] And if you had any sense of decency at all you’d say I looked it. You said you loved me just now. Say it again, Gerald. It’s so good to hear.

Gerald.

I don’t see how we can help ourselves.

Mrs. Dot.

[Beginning to lose her temper.] I suppose you just want to finish an awkward scene? I don’t want to harrow you. Why don’t you go to the War Office?

Gerald.

You must see it’s not my fault. If we must part, let us part friends.

Mrs. Dot.

Now, I declare he wants to sentimentalise. Isn’t it enough that you’ve made me frightfully unhappy? D’you want me to say it doesn’t matter at all, as if you’d spilt a cup of tea on me? D’you think I like being utterly wretched?

Gerald.

For heaven’s sake, don’t talk like that. You’re tearing my heart to pieces.

Mrs. Dot.

Your heart? I should like to bang it on the floor and stamp on it. You must expect to suffer a little. You can’t put it all on me.

Gerald.

I don’t want you to suffer.

Mrs. Dot.

[In a temper.] You were willing enough to marry me when you hadn’t got sixpence to bless yourself with. How fortunate your cousin didn’t die a week later!

Gerald.

Do you think I was proposing to marry you for your money?

Mrs. Dot.

Yes.

Gerald.

Really?

Mrs. Dot.

No, of course not.

Gerald.

Thanks.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, you needn’t take it as a compliment. I’d much sooner have to deal with a clever knave than an honest fool.

Gerald.

Won’t you say that you bear me no ill-will?

Mrs. Dot.

No.

Gerald.

I really must go to the War Office.

Mrs. Dot.

Very well, you can go.

Gerald.

Won’t you come with me?

Mrs. Dot.

No.

Gerald.

I’m afraid you’ll get rather bored here.

[He rings the bell, and Charles comes in.

Charles.

Yes, my lord.

Gerald.

I want my hat and coat.

[Charles goes out.

Mrs. Dot.

Do you care for Nellie Sellenger?

Gerald.

If you don’t mind, I won’t answer that question. Unless she asks for her freedom, I propose to marry her.

[Charles brings in the hat and coat. Mrs. Dot watches him while he puts them on.

Gerald.

Good-bye.

[He goes out. Mrs. Dot turns round and faces Charles.

Mrs. Dot.

Charles, have you ever been married?

Charles.

Twice, madam.

Mrs. Dot.

And has experience taught you that when a woman wants a thing she generally gets it?

Charles.

[With a sigh.] It has, madam.

Mrs. Dot.

That is my opinion, too, Charles.

[She goes out. Charles begins to clear the tea things away.

END OF THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

The terrace of Mrs. Dot’s house on the River. There are masses of rose trees in full flower. At the back is the house, covered with creepers.

A table is set out for luncheon, with four chairs.

Miss MacGregor is sitting in a garden chair, sewing. She is an elderly, quiet woman, thin, somewhat angular, good-humoured and amiable.

Mrs. Dot is walking up and down impatiently.

Aunt Eliza.

My dear, why don’t you sit down and rest yourself? I’m sure you’ve walked at least ten miles up and down this terrace.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m in a temper.

Aunt Eliza.

That must be obvious to the meanest intelligence.

Mrs. Dot.

Have you read the paper to-day?

Aunt Eliza.

I’ve tried to, but as you’ve spent most of the morning in stamping on it, I haven’t had much success.

Mrs. Dot.

Then I beg you to listen to this: [Taking up a “Morning Post” and reading it.] A marriage has been arranged between Lord Hollington and Eleanor, only daughter of the late General Sir Robert Sellenger.

[She crumples up the paper and stamps on it.

Aunt Eliza.

That’s the twenty-third time you’ve read this announcement to me. I assure you that it’s beginning to lose its novelty.

Mrs. Dot.

You can’t deny that it’s rather annoying to take up your paper in the morning and discover an official announcement that the man you’ve made up your mind to marry is taking serious steps to marry somebody else.

Aunt Eliza.

But would you tell me why you want to marry him?

Mrs. Dot.

Why does anybody ever want to marry anybody?

Aunt Eliza.

That is a question to which during the fifty-five years of my life I’ve been totally unable to discover an answer.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, because he’s clever, and handsome, and amusing.

Aunt Eliza.

He’s not really very clever, you know.

Mrs. Dot.

Of course he isn’t. He’s as stupid as an owl. I’ve told him so till I’m blue in the face.

Aunt Eliza.

And he’s not really very good-looking, is he?

Mrs. Dot.

On the contrary, I think he’s rather plain.

Aunt Eliza.

I suppose you find him amusing?

Mrs. Dot.

Not at all. I find him dull.

Aunt Eliza.

Then, perhaps, you can find me some other explanation.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, I’m head over ears in love with him.

Aunt Eliza.

But why, my dear? Why?

Mrs. Dot.

Because I am. That’s the most conclusive reason possible. And I’ve set my heart on marrying him. And the more obstacles there are the more I mean to marry him.

Aunt Eliza.

I can’t imagine why you hadn’t the sense to fall in love with one of the various eligible persons who want to marry you.

Mrs. Dot.

But he does want to marry me. He’s desperately in love with me.

Aunt Eliza.

I should have thought he could find a better way of showing it than by getting engaged to somebody else.

Mrs. Dot.

He’s a sentimentalist, like all his sex. Good heavens, what a mess the world would get into if it weren’t for the practical common sense of the average women.

Aunt Eliza.

And what do you propose to do?

Mrs. Dot.

That’s just it. I don’t in the least know. They’ll all be here in half an hour, and I haven’t the shadow of a scheme. I lie awake all night racking my brains, and I can’t think of anything.

Aunt Eliza.

Why did you ask them to come here?

Mrs. Dot.

I thought I might hit upon something if they were under my eyes. Gerald had promised to spend Whitsun with me and, so that he shouldn’t put me off, I asked the Sellengers, too. Lady Sellenger was only too glad to get a week’s board and lodging for nothing. [The sound is heard of a motor stopping.] There’s Jimmie Blenkinsop. I told you he was going to motor down in time for luncheon, didn’t I? [Blenkinsop comes in with Freddie. Freddie has on a gay tweed suit.] Jimmie!

Blenkinsop.

How d’you do?

[He shakes hands with Mrs. Dot and Aunt Eliza.

Mrs. Dot.

Now we’ll have luncheon. You must be starving with hunger.

Blenkinsop.

You must let me wash first.

Mrs. Dot.

No, we’re all far too hungry. Freddie will go and wash his hands for you.

[She rings half a dozen times quickly on a little bell on the table.

Freddie.

I shall be back in one minute.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Dot.

Now sit down. I’m perfectly ravenous.

[The Butler and the Footman bring in luncheon, which is eaten during the next scene.

Aunt Eliza.

I perceive that the tender passion hasn’t in the least interfered with your appetite.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, my dear James, I’m so unhappy.

Blenkinsop.

You look it.

Mrs. Dot.

By the way, how do I look?

Blenkinsop.

All right. You’ve changed your cook.

Mrs. Dot.

Hang my cook.

Blenkinsop.

I wouldn’t if I were you. She’s very good.

Mrs. Dot.

Of course you’ll drink the family ale?

Blenkinsop.

Of course I’ll do nothing of the kind.

Mrs. Dot.

You know it’s one of my principles to have it on the table.

Blenkinsop.

Yes, but it’s one of my principles not to drink it. I seem to remember that you have some particularly fine hock.

Mrs. Dot.

Jimmie, have you never been in love?

Blenkinsop.

Never, thank God.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t believe it. Every one’s in love. I’m in love.

Blenkinsop.

Not with me, I trust.

Mrs. Dot.

You perfect idiot.

Blenkinsop.

Not at all. I should think it very natural.

Mrs. Dot.

I wonder why you never married, James.

Blenkinsop.

Because I have a considerable gift for repartee. I discovered in my early youth that men propose not because they want to marry, but because on certain occasions they are entirely at a loss for topics of conversation.

Aunt Eliza.

[Smiling.] It was a momentous discovery.

Blenkinsop.

No sooner had I made it than I began to cultivate my power of small talk. I felt that my only chance was to be ready with appropriate subjects at the shortest notice, and I spent a considerable part of my last year at Oxford in studying the best masters.

Mrs. Dot.

I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant.

Blenkinsop.

I never played for brilliancy. I played for safety. I flatter myself that when prattle was needed I have never been found wanting. I have met the ingenuity of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy. The skittish widow of uncertain age has retired in disorder before a complete acquaintance with the restoration dramatists, and I have routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my remarkable knowledge of the results of missionary endeavour in Central Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at her astonished head an entire article from the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an epigram or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation from the poets.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t believe a word you say. I believe you never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you.

Blenkinsop.

Do me the justice to acknowledge that I’m the only man who’s known you ten days without being tempted by your preposterous income to offer you his hand and heart.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t believe my income has anything to do with it. I put it down entirely to my very considerable personal attractions.

Aunt Eliza.

Here is Freddie, at last. What has he been doing?

[Freddie comes in, having changed into flannels.

Mrs. Dot.

Why on earth have you changed your clothes?

Freddie.

[Sitting down at table.] I regard it as part of my duties as your secretary to look nice.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t know that I think it essential for you to put on seven different suits a day.

Freddie.

I thought Miss Sellenger would probably like to go on the river before tea.

Aunt Eliza.

If she does, it’s more likely to be with Lord Hollington than with you.

Freddie.

Oh, that’s rot. Gerald’s an awfully good sort, but he’s not the sort of chap a girl’s desperately fond of.

Mrs. Dot.

You think that, do you?

Freddie.

Well, you can’t see yourself falling in love with him can you?

Mrs. Dot.

No. No.

Aunt Eliza.

And what is the sort of man a girl’s desperately fond of?

Freddie.

Oh, I don’t know. [Taking up a spoon and looking at himself, twisting an infinitesimal moustache.] I should think some one a bit younger than Gerald.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a little shriek.] You!

Freddie.

You needn’t be so surprised. One might do worse, you know.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Aunt Eliza pointing with a scornful finger at Freddie.] Do you think any one could possibly fall in love with that?

Aunt Eliza.

Of course not.

Freddie.

I say, come now. That’s a bit thick.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Blenkinsop.] If you were a young and lovely maiden would you fall in love with Freddie?

Blenkinsop.

[Looking at him doubtfully.] Well, if you ask me point blank I don’t think I should.

Freddie.

You’re all of you jolly supercilious.

Mrs. Dot.

He’s not positively plain, is he?

Blenkinsop.

Not positively.

Freddie.

Look here, you shut up. I bet I could cut you out with any girl you like to mention.

Blenkinsop.

Rubbish!

Mrs. Dot.

I daresay he can whisper nonsense in a woman’s ear as well as any one else.

Aunt Eliza.

It’s born in them, the brutes.

Blenkinsop.

Pooh! I wouldn’t waste my time on whispering nonsense. I’d just send my pass-book round by a messenger boy.

Freddie.

Well, I flatter myself Miss Sellenger will be much more pleased to see me than to see anybody else down here.

Blenkinsop.

You’ve only seen her once.

Freddie.

She’s a jolly nice girl, I can tell you that.

Blenkinsop.

[Ironically.] I suppose she squeezed your hand when you went away?

Freddie.

Well, it so happens, she did.

Blenkinsop.

You needn’t be set up about it, because she squeezed mine, too. It’s evidently a habit.

Freddie.

Yours! What rot!

[Mrs. Dot has been staring at him, with both elbows on the table. A servant is standing at her side with a tray on which is the coffee.

Aunt Eliza.

Thompson is offering you some coffee, my dear.

Mrs. Dot.

[Absently.] Take it away.

Freddie.

What on earth are you staring at? Isn’t my tie all right?

Mrs. Dot.

You certainly are rather good-looking. I’ve never noticed it before.

Freddie.

It’s no good, you know. You’re my aunt, and the prayer book wouldn’t let you marry me.

Mrs. Dot.

Now I come to think of it, I daresay you’re quite grown up to any one who didn’t know you in Etons.

Freddie.

I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.

Mrs. Dot.

I suppose a girl might quite easily fall in love with you. It had never occurred to me.

Blenkinsop.

Which means that you’ve found him a wife, and you’re going to marry him to some one whether he likes it or not.

Mrs. Dot.

[Suddenly.] Freddie.

Freddie.

Hulloa!

Mrs. Dot.

Go away and play.

Freddie.

Hang it all, I want to drink my coffee.

Mrs. Dot.

Go and make a mud pie in the garden. There’s a dear.

[A bell is heard ringing loudly.

Aunt Eliza.

There they are!

Mrs. Dot.

Come on!

[They all get up. Mrs. Dot and Aunt Eliza go out. Freddie and Blenkinsop light cigarettes.

Freddie.

What’s the matter with my virtuous aunt?

Blenkinsop.

How old are you, dear boy?

Freddie.

Twenty-two. Why?

Blenkinsop.

The delightful age when it’s still possible to feel desperately wicked. But you are old enough to have learnt that the moods of women are inscrutable.

Freddie.

Oh, rot! I never met a woman whom I couldn’t read at a glance.

Blenkinsop.

[Ironically.] Really?

Freddie.

You know, they talk about the incomprehensibility of women, but it’s all humbug.

Blenkinsop.

When you see a blank wall, does it ever occur to you that there’s anything on the other side?

[Mrs. Dot and Aunt Eliza come in with Lady Sellenger, Nellie and Hollington. They are all talking.

Lady Sellenger.

We had a delightful journey. Oh, how beautiful your garden is! So romantic. I love romance.

Blenkinsop.

When it’s backed by an adequate income.

Lady Sellenger.

How d’you do? You cynic.

Blenkinsop.

I’m nothing of the sort. But I occasionally tell the truth.

Lady Sellenger.

You’re the most cynical man in London, and I’m frightened to death of you.

Blenkinsop.

There’s nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future. When I was quite young it occurred to some one that I was a cynic, and since then I’ve never been able to remark that it was a fine day without being accused of odious cynicism.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear Mr. Blenkinsop, what every one says is always true. That is one of the foundations of society.

Blenkinsop.

I gained my reputation by remarking once that it was possible for a penniless young man who married a very rich woman old enough to be his mother to be genuinely in love with her.

Lady Sellenger.

I think it was a very cynical observation.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Lady Sellenger.] You know my nephew, don’t you?

Lady Sellenger.

How d’you do? I think we met at dear Gerald’s a week or two ago.

Freddie.

[Shaking hands.] How d’you do? [To Nellie.] Have you quite forgotten me?

Nellie.

Not quite!

Freddie.

Jolly day, isn’t it?

Nellie.

Awfully jolly.

[Mrs. Dot watches them as they shake hands.

Aunt Eliza.

[To Lady Sellenger.] Would you like me to show you your rooms?

Lady Sellenger.

Thanks, so much.

Mrs. Dot.

Freddie, is Gerald’s room ready?

Freddie.

Yes, I think so. I’ll just go and find out.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Dot.

I was so delighted to see the announcement in the morning’s paper. I offer my very warmest congratulations.

Nellie.

Thanks, so much.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve known Gerald for ages. I’m delighted to see him on the way to such a happy marriage. I couldn’t have wished him to get engaged to any one nicer than you.

Lady Sellenger.

It’s all so romantic, isn’t it? It ought to be an answer to a cynical creature like you to see the course of true love run so smoothly.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Gerald.] I offer you also my best congratulations. I think you’re very lucky.

Gerald.

[Stiffly.] Thank you, very much. I suppose I have my usual room?

Mrs. Dot.

Yes.

[He goes into the house. Lady Sellenger and Nellie accompany Aunt Eliza. Mrs. Dot is left alone with Blenkinsop.

James!

Blenkinsop.

Hulloa!

Mrs. Dot.

Do you love me?

Blenkinsop.

Passionately.

Mrs. Dot.

[Stamping her foot.] Don’t be so silly.

Blenkinsop.

You can’t expect me to be so uncivil as to say no.

Mrs. Dot.

But I’m perfectly serious.

Blenkinsop.

Are you, by Jove? That alters the matter. In that case the answer is in the negative.

Mrs. Dot.

And is there the least chance of your falling in love with me?

Blenkinsop.

Not so long as I remain in full possession of my senses.

Mrs. Dot.

Do you want to marry me?

Blenkinsop.

Really you embarrass me very much.

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t hedge.

Blenkinsop.

It’s a little disconcerting to have a pistol put to your head in the form of a proposal of marriage.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m not making you a proposal of marriage, idiot.

Blenkinsop.

Then I should very much like to know what you are doing.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m asking you a very simple and ordinary question.

Blenkinsop.

Thank God, it’s not one that women ask often.

Mrs. Dot.

I never saw any one out of whom it’s harder to get a straight answer.

Blenkinsop.

You must make allowances for a pardonable agitation.

Mrs. Dot.

James, do you want to marry me?

Blenkinsop.

No, bless you!

Mrs. Dot.

Are you quite sure?

Blenkinsop.

Positive.

Mrs. Dot.

Would nothing induce you to marry me?

Blenkinsop.

Nothing.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a sigh of relief.] Then you may kiss my hand.

Blenkinsop.

[Doing so.] You’re not hurt?

Mrs. Dot.

I’m infinitely relieved.

Blenkinsop.

And Freddie, the dear boy, says he can read a woman at a glance.

Mrs. Dot.

Now listen to me quite seriously. I want you to do something for me.

Blenkinsop.

[Nervously.] We’ve put marriage out of the question, haven’t we?

Mrs. Dot.

Certainly.

Blenkinsop.

[Generously.] You may ask anything else of me.

Mrs. Dot.

I want you to let me make love to you.

Blenkinsop.

My dear friend, this is very surprising.

Mrs. Dot.

There are people who’d welcome the proposal with alacrity.

Blenkinsop.

For how long?

Mrs. Dot.

Only for a week.

Blenkinsop.

You’re sure it’s not in earnest?

Mrs. Dot.

Quite sure.

Blenkinsop.

And what have I got to do?

Mrs. Dot.

Well, you’ve got to look as if you liked it.

Blenkinsop.

[Sombrely.] Of course, it sounds very delightful.

Mrs. Dot.

You must show a coming-on disposition, you know, or I can do nothing.

Blenkinsop.

Do you want me to make love to you?

Mrs. Dot.

I’m afraid it’s asking a great deal of you.

Blenkinsop.

Not at all. Not at all. But I wish you’d tell me what your little game is.

Mrs. Dot.

Ah, here’s Aunt Eliza. The very person I wanted. [Aunt Eliza comes on the terrace from the house. Impulsively.] Aunt Eliza, will you be a perfect brick? Will you do something for me, that’s an awful nuisance?

Aunt Eliza.

My dear, why on earth are you so excited? Of course I’ll do anything in reason for you.

Mrs. Dot.

But it’s not in reason.

Aunt Eliza.

Well, I’ll do it all the same.

Mrs. Dot.

I want you to take a motor and bolt up to London and get a special licence.

Aunt Eliza.

A special licence!

Blenkinsop.

A special licence!

Mrs. Dot.

[Catching sight of his face.] Get two special licences. They’re always useful things to have in a house.

Aunt Eliza.

But they must be made out to certain names.

Mrs. Dot.

Must they? How stupid! Well, have one made out for Frederick Perkins and Eleanor Sellenger.

Aunt Eliza.

My dear child, you must be crazy.

Mrs. Dot.

Now don’t argue, but do as I tell you. If two young things are thrown together with a certain amount of skill they always marry.

Aunt Eliza.

But they hardly know one another.

Mrs. Dot.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be so grossly over-populated as it is now.

Aunt Eliza.

You’re certainly quite crazy.

Mrs. Dot.

No, I’m not. I shall never get Gerald to break his word. My only chance is with Nellie.

Blenkinsop.

[Uneasily.] But you’ve told her to get two licences.

Mrs. Dot.

Make the second one out in the names of James Blenkinsop and Frances Annandale Worthley.

Blenkinsop.

I absolutely refuse.

Mrs. Dot.

But you must let me. You can’t leave an old friend in the lurch.

Blenkinsop.

It’s all very fine to invoke the claims of friendship, but it’s carrying it rather far when you pay three guineas for a special licence.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear man, I can’t drag you to the altar.

Blenkinsop.

I’m beginning to think you’re capable of anything.

Mrs. Dot.

But don’t you see, you idiot, that I want to marry Gerald Hollington? And I’m eating my heart out.

Blenkinsop.

[Crossly.] It’s evidently a diet that agrees with you. You’re growing fat on it.

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t be spiteful. I’ve not gained half a pound in the last five years.

Aunt Eliza.

And how on earth are you going to get Freddie and Nellie Sellenger to use this licence?

Mrs. Dot.

Never mind, leave everything to me. And make haste to get up to London.

Aunt Eliza.

Very well, I’ll go at once.

[Just as Aunt Eliza is going into the house Lady Sellenger comes out, followed by Nellie; Aunt Eliza stops and listens to the conversation from the doorway.

Mrs. Dot.

I hope you’ve found everything you wanted.

Lady Sellenger.

Oh, yes, thanks. I’m quite delighted with the view from my room.

Mrs. Dot.

Come and sit down. I have something very serious I want to talk to you about.

Lady Sellenger.

Dear Mr. Blenkinsop, do take Nellie for a little stroll in the garden.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, but it concerns Nellie, and I want her to hear.

Blenkinsop.

I perceive you are inclined to think that the serious cannot fail to be improper, Lady Sellenger.

Lady Sellenger.

Be quiet, you horrible cynic.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, a most ridiculous thing has happened, and I want Nellie to help me.

Nellie.

Me?

Mrs. Dot.

My dear, it’s so unfortunate, but my nephew has fallen head over ears in love with you.

Nellie.

Nonsense!

Mrs. Dot.

I can’t understand it. After all, he’s only seen you once, and you can’t have exchanged more than a dozen words.

Lady Sellenger.

How very annoying!

Mrs. Dot.

And it’s so unexpected, because he’s not at all the sort of boy who falls in and out of love with every pretty girl he meets. I think you’re his first passion, and he’s inclined to take it very seriously.

Lady Sellenger.

Poor boy, I can afford to sympathise with him now that Nellie is safely engaged to Gerald Hollington.

Nellie.

It’s really rather flattering, isn’t it? But how on earth d’you know?

Mrs. Dot.

He tells me everything. You see I’ve always tried to be his friend as well as his aunt. He has no secrets from me.

Blenkinsop.

You’ll tell us next that a boy who’s been to Eton and Oxford has a pure and innocent mind.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear child, he simply raves about you. He’s been talking of nothing else ever since you met.

Lady Sellenger.

But doesn’t he know that Nellie is going to be married at the end of the season?

Mrs. Dot.

Of course, he does. I’ve dinned it into his ears, but it seems to have no effect on him. He’s the sort of lover that will hear of no obstacles. It’s really quite pathetic to hear the passionate harangues that he pours into my ears.

Nellie.

What sort of things does he say?

Mrs. Dot.

My dear, I suppose very much the same as Gerald.

Nellie.

No one could accuse Gerald of being a passionate lover.

Mrs. Dot.

Really?

Lady Sellenger.

I’m very glad he’s not. He’s going to be your husband, and that’s more satisfactory than any amount of pretty speeches.

Nellie.

I could wish that he talked to me of something besides the weather and the Royal Academy.

Lady Sellenger.

My dear child, what are you saying? Gerald has a charming nature and the very highest principles.

Blenkinsop.

[Imitating her pompous manner.] To say nothing of a peerage and a considerable income.

Mrs. Dot.

He certainly has every advantage over poor Freddie, who is nobody in particular and hasn’t a penny to bless himself with.

Nellie.

I think he’s awfully nice.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, that’s just what I don’t want you to think. I shouldn’t have said anything to you about his — mad infatuation, only I want you to be very careful.

Lady Sellenger.

Of course. It’s quite natural.

Nellie.

What do you want me to do?

Mrs. Dot.

Well, I want you to be very good and sweet and help me to cure him. I’d send him away, only it would have no effect. I thought if he saw you again he might find out that you have at least one or two faults. At present he thinks you too perfect for words.

Nellie.

I’m not that, really.

Mrs. Dot.

I didn’t think you were. I want you to promise that you’ll do nothing that he can in the least take as encouragement. I want you to be very distant and very cold.

Nellie.

Of course, I’ll be only too glad to do anything I can.

Mrs. Dot.

You’d be doing him a real kindness if you could snub him at every opportunity. Then you must avoid him as much as you can. Of course, you’ll be very much with Gerald while you’re down here.

Lady Sellenger.

Of course. The dears, they’ve not seen one another for a year, and they have an infinity of things to discuss.

Mrs. Dot.

It’ll be quite easy for you to show my poor Freddie that he’s only making a prodigious fool of himself.

Nellie.

I feel so sorry for him.

Mrs. Dot.

You will do what you can, won’t you?

Nellie.

I’ll make it quite plain to him at once that he mustn’t care for me.

Mrs. Dot.

Treat it as an impertinence that you resent.

Nellie.

I’ll do that on the first opportunity.

Mrs. Dot.

I know you have the sweetest nature in the world, but if you could be really brutal to him at once, it would cure him instantly.

Nellie.

I can be horrid when I like.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m sure you can. I put infinite reliance in your tact.

Lady Sellenger.

And now I think we really might take a little turn in the garden before tea. [Seeing that Nellie, instead of accompanying her, strolls towards the house.] Where are you going, Nellie?

Nellie.

[Stopping.] I’ve just remembered I must write a letter. I’ll join you in five minutes.

Lady Sellenger.

[To Blenkinsop and Mrs. Dot who are getting up.] Oh, don’t let me disturb you, I shall enjoy wandering about and looking at the flowers by myself.

[She goes away. Just as Nellie is entering the house Freddie comes out. She gives him a glance and as she passes, drops a rose. Freddie picks it up and comes forward.

Mrs. Dot.

You monster!

Freddie.

What’s the matter?

Mrs. Dot.

Give me that flower!

Freddie.

I shall do nothing of the sort. I shall put it in my button-hole.

Mrs. Dot.

Freddie, I’ve come to the conclusion that you want a holiday. I wish you to pack up your things at once and go to Brighton for a week. You’re looking pale and tired. I’m sure you’ve been working too hard.

Freddie.

Oh, rot! I’m as fit as a fiddle.

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t you agree with me, James?

Blenkinsop.

Certainly. I think a change of air is distinctly indicated.

Freddie.

But I can’t go away when you’ve got people in the house. Besides, who’s to look after your correspondence?

Mrs. Dot.

My dear boy, your health is the chief thing. I should never forgive myself if you came to any harm while you were my secretary. I’ll write my letters myself.

Blenkinsop.

Besides, I shall be here, and I’ll do all I can to help you.

Freddie.

I don’t believe I’m pale.

Mrs. Dot.

You only have to look at yourself.

[She takes out a little pocket mirror and hands it to him.

Blenkinsop.

Let’s look at your tongue. [He puts it out.] Tut, tut, tut.

Freddie.

Look here, there’s something behind this.

Blenkinsop.

You’re too clever, my boy.

Freddie.

I see through your little game. Aunt Dot, you want to get rid of me.

Mrs. Dot.

How can you be so absurd?

Freddie.

Now, I wonder what your reason is.

Mrs. Dot.

Shall we tell him the truth?

Blenkinsop.

Yes, perhaps you’d better. He’s a very bright boy.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, the fact is, Freddie, a dreadful thing has happened. Poor Nellie Sellenger is desperately in love with you.

Freddie.

I don’t see why you should want me to go away on that account.

Blenkinsop.

Good lord, man, don’t be so self-satisfied. Aren’t you surprised, aren’t you dumfounded that a pretty girl should fall in love with you?

Freddie.

I thought it meant something when she dropped that rose.

Blenkinsop.

Bless my stars, the dolt takes it as a matter of course.

Freddie.

I’m awfully flattered and all that sort of thing.

Mrs. Dot.

But not exactly surprised?

Freddie.

It’s not fair to ask a fellow a question like that.

Blenkinsop.

At all events, you see now the necessity for depriving us for a time of your charming society.

Freddie.

Nothing will induce me to desert a post of danger. I’m going to face the music.

Blenkinsop.

Don’t be such an ass. It’s not you we’re thinking of, it’s that unfortunate girl.

Freddie.

I don’t know why you think she’s unfortunate.

Mrs. Dot.

But, my dear boy, she’s engaged to Gerald Hollington. Don’t you see how serious the whole thing is? The only chance is for you to go away. We must try and make her forget you.

Freddie.

I don’t want to do anybody a bad turn. I wouldn’t do anything to queer Gerald’s pitch for worlds.

Blenkinsop.

You must combine with us in order to save her from herself.

Mrs. Dot.

There’s no use in her eating her heart out for you, when she must inevitably marry Gerald.

Freddie.

Poor old Gerald, I told you he wasn’t the sort of chap a girl would be desperately in love with.

Blenkinsop.

The acumen you have shown does credit to your years.

Freddie.

Still, you know, I don’t think it’s wise for me to go away. Don’t you think it would be rather marked? And they always say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Blenkinsop.

It was a woman who invented that proverb. There’s no truth in it.

Mrs. Dot.

What else can you suggest? The fact remains that Nellie must be cured of this — of this passion.

Freddie.

My own idea is that the best thing is for me to hang on here as if I knew nothing about it. I’ll take care to be very distant. I’ll ignore her as much as I can.

Mrs. Dot.

Will you promise to do that?

Freddie.

Yes, rather. I’ll let her see that I’m really a deuced dissipated dog.

Blenkinsop.

Don’t let her think you’re too great a devil with the ladies, or that’ll be the last straw. If there’s one thing a woman likes it’s a really bad man. She’ll start reforming you, and then there’ll be no holding her back.

Mrs. Dot.

No, you must seem rather dull and stupid. Let her think you’re a bit of a milksop.

[Freddie looks at them suspiciously.

Freddie.

Look here, you’re not pulling my leg all the time, are you?

Mrs. Dot.

My dear, I should never take such a liberty.

Freddie.

I don’t believe a word of what you’ve told me. Why should she care for me? You’ve simply been humbugging me right and left.

[For a moment Mrs. Dot is taken aback, but she sees Lady Sellenger coming through the garden with Gerald.

Mrs. Dot.

Here’s Lady Sellenger. You won’t accuse her of trying to make a fool of you. [Lady Sellenger and Gerald appear.] I’ve just been talking to Freddie about — about your girl.

Lady Sellenger.

Oh yes. [To Freddie.] My poor boy, you’re in a very difficult position.

Freddie.

Then you know all about it, too?

Lady Sellenger.

I really feel for you very much. You’ll want a great deal of tact and a great deal of courage. But you must do your duty.

[She turns aside to Blenkinsop.

Mrs. Dot.

[In an undertone to Freddie.] Now have I been pulling your leg?

Freddie.

Poor girl!

[He goes into the house.

Lady Sellenger.

[Looking at him as he goes.] What a beautiful and touching thing love is.

Blenkinsop.

You must take care, Lady Sellenger. You’re growing sentimental.

Lady Sellenger.

But I’ve always been as sentimental as a schoolgirl in my heart. Only, so long as Nellie’s future was unarranged, I was obliged to keep a tight hand on myself.

Mrs. Dot.

Of course, Jimmie laughs; he doesn’t know what love is.

Lady Sellenger.

Have you never been loved for yourself, Mr. Blenkinsop?

Blenkinsop.

I have, but I have always found it deuced expensive.

Gerald.

I’m afraid Blenkinsop doesn’t set much store on the gentle sex.

Blenkinsop.

Don’t call them gentle. They’re very much rougher than men.

Mrs. Dot.

Stop him, or he’ll utter a whole string of horrors.

Blenkinsop.

Have you never watched the gentle sex fight and push and scramble as it gets into the Hammersmith bus? I assure you, the unlucky man who finds himself in that seething feminine crowd is fortunate if he escapes without losing an eye or half his teeth. And have you seen the fury of the gentle sex at a sale as they seize some worthless fragment, and the bitterness with which they haggle? The other day I was in the Army and Navy Stores, and two women were standing on the stairs, discussing their servants, so that no one could pass up and down. I took off my hat and said: Excuse me, would you allow me to pass. They moved barely two inches, and one of them said in a loud voice to the other: What an impertinent man. The gentle sex! Yesterday I was hanging on a strap in a crowded train coming from the city, and I saw a pale-faced weary clerk give up his seat to a strong and bouncing girl. She took it without saying thank you, because she was a lady and he wasn’t a gentleman. Then a tired old woman came in and stood, but the bouncing girl never thought of giving up the seat to her. The gentle sex! They have such tender hearts they couldn’t bear to hurt a fly. Have you ever seen a woman get out of a bus ten yards before her destination in order to save the wretched horses another start? Not much. Have you ever known a woman of fashion who sends her maid to bed when she knows she won’t be in till four in the morning? Not much. And is there anything like the insolence with which a woman treats her social inferiors of the same sex? Is it men who put on their backs the sealskins that are torn off the living bodies of helpless brutes? Is it men who put on their hats the beautiful birds of the forest? It’s the gentle sex. Boys are taught manners. They are taught to take off their hats and hold open the door for their sisters. They are taught to fetch and carry for women, and to give up the front seat in life to women. But what are girls taught? Girls are taught etiquette, and that, I suppose, makes them in due course the gentle sex.

Lady Sellenger.

Every one knows you’re a horrible cynic, so there can’t be a word of truth in anything you say.

Blenkinsop.

Q.E.D.

Gerald.

Here comes Nellie.

[Nellie comes in, having changed her dress. She now wears a very pretty white frock, all flounces and furbelows, and a large white hat. At the same moment from the other side Freddie enters. He also has changed, and is now in spotless white.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a laugh, whispering to Blenkinsop.] They’ve both changed their clothes.

Gerald.

Would you like to come for a row, Nellie?

Nellie.

I’m too tired. Won’t you go with Mrs. Dot? I’ll rest here till tea-time.

[Nellie sits down, and the others go.

Lady Sellenger.

Personally, I must walk. I sacrifice all my inclinations to my fear of growing too stout. I often wonder if we shall get our good dinners in heaven that we’ve done without on earth.

Blenkinsop.

It’s generally understood that we shall only get our deserts.

[Nellie watches them go from over her shoulder. She sees that Freddie is hanging back. She smiles and elaborately disregards him. He comes forward and leans over her chair.

Nellie.

Aren’t you going with the others?

Freddie.

Do you mind if I stay with you?

Nellie.

I like it.

Freddie.

Jolly here, isn’t it?

Nellie.

Awfully jolly.

Freddie.

I’ve not congratulated you on your engagement yet.

Nellie.

I didn’t expect you would.

Freddie.

Why?

Nellie.

Oh, I don’t know.

Freddie.

It seems a long time since we first met, doesn’t it?

Nellie.

Why?

Freddie.

Because I seem to know you so well.

Nellie.

You’re very easy to get to know, aren’t you?

Freddie.

I say, you look just like another rose in this garden.

Nellie.

I suppose you say that to every girl who sits here?

Freddie.

I’ve never said it to any one but you.

Nellie.

They tell me you’re very impressionable.

Freddie.

They lie.

Nellie.

I think I shall take off my hat.

Freddie.

Yes, do.

[She proceeds to do so. She pretends that she cannot.

Nellie.

Oh, how stupid of me! Something has caught.

Freddie.

May I help you?

Nellie.

I’m afraid I’m giving you a lot of trouble.

[He helps her, and she gives a little scream.

Freddie.

Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?

Nellie.

No, but it tickled.

[She takes off the hat. One hand of hers remains in his. Their eyes meet for the first time, and they smile.

Freddie.

I say, what a pretty hand you have! It looks so white on mine, doesn’t it?

[Mrs. Dot creeps back and stands behind a bush, so that she cannot be seen.

Nellie.

I rather like your hand. It’s so strong and brown.

Freddie.

You know, you’re awfully easy to get on with. Sometimes I feel dreadfully shy and nervous with women, but I can think of all sorts of things I want to say to you.

Nellie.

I seem to have known you all my life.

Freddie.

[Impulsively.] Isn’t it jolly here?

Nellie.

Awfully jolly.

[He looks at her for a moment.

Freddie.

I want to ask you something. You won’t be angry, will you?

Nellie.

No.

Freddie.

May I kiss you?

Nellie.

No.

Freddie.

It’s awfully unkind of you.

Nellie.

You shouldn’t have asked.

Freddie.

Shouldn’t I? I wanted to, badly.

Nellie.

There are some things one should do without asking.

Freddie.

You are a brick.

[He kisses her. As he does so, Hollington comes in and sees them. He stops for a moment in astonishment, then withdraws.

Freddie.

Let’s go on the river, shall we?

Nellie.

I told Gerald I was too tired.

Freddie.

Oh, hang Gerald!

Nellie.

We might go and play the piano in the drawing-room.

Freddie.

I’m awfully fond of music. Cake-walks, and things like that, you know.

[They get up. Mrs. Dot comes forward.

Mrs. Dot.

Are you going? I thought you were tired.

Nellie.

We’re just going to look at the kitchen garden.

Freddie.

I’ve told Miss Sellenger that you’ve got some most awfully good carrots.

Mrs. Dot.

[As they go to the house.] That’s not the way, you know.

Nellie.

[Coolly.] I’m only just going to get a handkerchief.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, I see. I beg your pardon.

[They go. Gerald comes forward. He is rather grave and solemn.

Mrs. Dot.

What a picture they make, don’t they? I can’t tell you how much I like Nellie.

Gerald.

You’ve come to the conclusion that the cut of her skirt’s all right.

Mrs. Dot.

Ah, you mustn’t recall what I said when I was in a temper. You know, I’m rather touched by her obvious affection for you.

Gerald.

It’s very good of you to say so.

Mrs. Dot.

It’s so nice to see two people head over ears in love with one another.

Gerald.

I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to think Nellie was so much in love with me as all that.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear boy, I’ve just had proof of it.

Gerald.

Have you? That’s more than I have.

Mrs. Dot.

And is dear Lady Sellenger going to live with you when you’re married?

Gerald.

Look here, Dot, what’s the meaning of all this?

Mrs. Dot.

[Much surprised.] Of what?

Gerald.

Why did you ask us all down?

Mrs. Dot.

Because I’m of a hospitable turn of mind. Didn’t you want to come? I’m so sorry.

Gerald.

You’ve utterly ignored me since I arrived.

Mrs. Dot.

[Ironically.] Much as I should have liked to devote myself exclusively to your entertainment, I’ve been really obliged to remember that my other guests had equal claims upon me.

Gerald.

I should very much like to take you by the shoulders and give you a good shaking.

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t think you’re in a very good temper to-day.

Gerald.

[Crossly.] Pardon me, I’m in the best possible temper.

Mrs. Dot.

You certainly ought to be with the prospect of spending a week in almost uninterrupted tête-à-tête with the object of your affections.

Gerald.

I can’t make you out. You’re so changed since last we met.

Mrs. Dot.

You see, last time I thought I was in love with you. Now I know I’m not.

Gerald.

[Bitterly.] I’m glad you’ve got over it so quickly.

Mrs. Dot.

Really, you couldn’t wish me to continue eating my heart out for a young man, however charming, who is going to marry somebody else.

Gerald.

Of course not.

Mrs. Dot.

[Mockingly.] Well?

Gerald.

I was a fool to think you ever cared at all.

Mrs. Dot.

But why should you think it when you took the greatest pains to assure me that you didn’t care two straws for me?

Gerald.

[Quickly.] I didn’t!

Mrs. Dot.

You did!

Gerald.

I didn’t!

Mrs. Dot.

Then you did care for me?

Gerald.

I never said that.

Mrs. Dot.

Anyhow, whatever your sentiments were, it would gratify your self-esteem to think that I was languishing with a hopeless passion.

Gerald.

It’s cruel of you to laugh at me.

Mrs. Dot.

By the way, are you by any chance in love with me now?

Gerald.

You have no right to ask me that question.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear boy, I’m not keeping you from spending an idyllic afternoon with Nellie. You’ve forced this conversation upon me. I assure you it’s most distasteful.

Gerald.

If I had married you, I should certainly have beaten you with a big stick.

Mrs. Dot.

What do you think is my chief characteristic?

Gerald.

That’s a question I can answer. The most confounded and aggravating unreasonableness that I ever saw.

Mrs. Dot.

Nonsense. It’s obvious that my chief characteristic is a sweet and yielding nature. But as there’s no likelihood of our agreeing on that, what do you think is the second?

Gerald.

Obstinacy.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, I prefer to call it strength of mind. Now, I’ll acknowledge that I was in love with you — a month ago. That’s a feather in your cap.

Gerald.

Oh, I wish we were back again. I’ve had such rotten luck.

Mrs. Dot.

But when I saw that my sweetness was likely to be wasted on the desert air, I made up my mind to cure myself. First I cried for two days.

Gerald.

Dot.

Mrs. Dot.

No, don’t sympathise. I have rather a high colour, and when I’ve had a good cry it always improves my complexion. After that, I ordered some new frocks, and I bought a diamond necklace that I’d been hankering after for some time.

Gerald.

And that thoroughly consoled you, I suppose?

Mrs. Dot.

It helped. Then I came to the conclusion that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. I thought you over. After all, you’re not really very good-looking, are you?

Gerald.

I’m not aware that I ever made any pretence of being so.

Mrs. Dot.

And I’m sure no one could accuse you of being extremely amusing.

Gerald.

I have no doubt I’m excessively dull.

Mrs. Dot.

I couldn’t help seeing that you’d suit Nellie much better than you would have suited me. She has that comfortable stupidity which the average Englishman looks upon as the highest recommendation for a wife.

Gerald.

It’s charming of you to say so.

Mrs. Dot.

She is a little dull, isn’t she?

Gerald.

I don’t think her so.

Mrs. Dot.

Doesn’t time hang rather heavily on your hands now and then? Isn’t it difficult to find topics of conversation?

Gerald.

I don’t find it so.

Mrs. Dot.

Ah — she does.

Gerald.

And the long and short of it is that the emotion which you dignify with the name of love, had entirely disappeared after a week.

Mrs. Dot.

Make it ten days to be on the safe side.

Gerald.

I congratulate you.

Mrs. Dot.

You wouldn’t have it otherwise, surely?

Gerald.

Of course not.

Mrs. Dot.

Then all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Gerald.

[Furiously.] I think you must be quite heartless.

Mrs. Dot.

[Delighted.] Ah, that’s what I said to you a month ago, Philippine.

Gerald.

Now, perhaps, you’d like to know what my feeling is towards you?

Mrs. Dot.

No, I’m quite indifferent, thanks!

Gerald.

Well, I shall tell you for all that. It’s a joke to you, and you can afford to laugh at it.

[He goes up to her and then stops suddenly.

Mrs. Dot.

Well?

Gerald.

Nothing.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh! My poor heart went pit-a-pat. I thought you were going to kiss me.

Gerald.

I hate you. And I wish I’d never set eyes on you.

[He turns on his heel and walks out quickly. As soon as he is gone Mrs. Dot begins to dance a break-down. She cocks a snook after him.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ll marry you yet, you beast, I’ll marry you yet.

[Blenkinsop comes in.

Blenkinsop.

What on earth is the matter with you now?

[From inside is heard the sound of a cake-walk.

Mrs. Dot.

Come on.

[She seizes him and begins to dance.

Blenkinsop.

Unhand me, woman!

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, you dear, you dear, you dear.

[She flings both arms round his neck and kisses him soundly. At this moment Gerald returns.

Gerald.

I beg your pardon. I forgot my hat.

[He takes it and goes out stiffly. Mrs. Dot bursts into a shriek of laughter.

Blenkinsop.

That’s all very fine. But what about my character?

END OF THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

A hall in Mrs. Worthley’s house on the River.

Gerald and Nellie are seated in arm-chairs. She stifles a yawn. Then he yawns.

Gerald.

I beg your pardon.

Nellie.

[Yawning.] I never saw any one who yawned so much as you.

Gerald.

[Ironically.] I suppose you’ve never looked at yourself in the glass?

Nellie.

Is your family very long-lived, Gerald?

Gerald.

[Rather surprised.] Are you already asking yourself how you’ll look in widow’s weeds?

Nellie.

You may very well live for forty years, mayn’t you?

Gerald.

My maternal grandfather survived to plague his descendants to the ripe age of ninety-seven.

Nellie.

How many days are there in forty years?

Gerald.

I should think about fifteen thousand.

Nellie.

Has it occurred to you that we may eat fifteen thousand breakfasts sitting opposite one another, and fifteen thousand luncheons, and fifteen thousand dinners?

Gerald.

[Gloomily.] Yes, it had occurred to me.

Nellie.

And how do you look upon the prospect?

Gerald.

[Grimly.] It fills me with satisfaction, naturally.

Nellie.

[Abruptly.] I suppose you’re very much in love with me?

Gerald.

What an extraordinary question!

Nellie.

I don’t think any one but a lunatic would describe you as an ardent lover.

Gerald.

[Coldly.] I regret that my behaviour doesn’t meet with your satisfaction.

Nellie.

Do you know that since we became definitely engaged you’ve never told me that you cared for me?

Gerald.

[Apologetically.] Yes, I ought to have done that, oughtn’t I? I suppose I thought you’d take it for granted.

Nellie.

Every girl likes a suspicion of romance thrown over her love-affairs.

Gerald.

Your mother will tell you that the certainty of marriage is much more satisfactory.

Nellie.

[Dryly.] You would have made an excellent husband — for mother.

Gerald.

Have you noticed that when we do think of something to talk about, we get perilously near a squabble?

Nellie.

I sometimes think it would be better to quarrel outright now and then than be always so desperately polite to one another.

Gerald.

I’m afraid I have an admirable temper.

Nellie.

Mother always says you have all the virtues.

Gerald.

Shall we look at the Sketch together?

Nellie.

We’ve looked at the Sketch together three times. [Following his eye, which goes to other illustrated papers on the table.] And the Illustrated, and the Sphere, and the Graphic.

Gerald.

Then what would you like to do?

Nellie.

I should like to SCREAM.

Gerald.

Would you, by George? So would I.

Nellie.

Oh, Gerald, let’s have a good scream together.

Enter Lady Sellenger and Mrs. Dot.

Lady Sellenger.

[With a bland smile.] What a picture they make!

Mrs. Dot.

[Acidly.] It’s quite charming to see two young things so engrossed in one another’s society.

Lady Sellenger.

Now, you really mustn’t waste this beautiful afternoon. You must go and have a nice long walk together.

Nellie.

We had a nice long walk this morning.

Mrs. Dot.

[Sweetly.] Then why don’t you go on the river? You can take your tea with you and spend the whole afternoon there.

Gerald.

We spent the whole afternoon on the river yesterday, and you kindly gave us our tea to take with us.

Lady Sellenger.

It reminds me of the happy days when I was engaged to your poor father, Nellie. We were just like you and Gerald. We couldn’t bear to be out of one another’s sight. Now, run and get your hat, darling.

Nellie.

Oh, mamma, I’ve got the most dreadful headache that I’ve ever had in my life, and I must really go and lie down.

Lady Sellenger.

Nonsense. An afternoon in the fresh air with Gerald is just the thing to put you right.

Gerald.

I’m so sorry, but I have some very important letters to write. I must catch the post.

Mrs. Dot.

[Sweetly.] You’ll have lots of time when you come in. The post doesn’t go till after dinner.

Lady Sellenger.

If you make excuses like that, poor Nellie will think she bores you already.

Gerald.

In that case I shall be only too glad to go on the river.

Mrs. Dot.

Take my sunshade, darling. You won’t want a hat.

Nellie.

[Savagely.] Thank you, dear.

[Nellie and Gerald go out gloomily.

Lady Sellenger.

Just like humming-birds, aren’t they?

Mrs. Dot.

Do you mean turtle-doves by any chance?

Lady Sellenger.

I was never very good at natural history.... Dear Mrs. Worthley, I must really thank you for the tact with which you’ve thrown Gerald and Nellie in one another’s society every moment of the day.

Mrs. Dot.

I can flatter myself that they’ve thoroughly enjoyed their week here.

[Aunt Eliza, comes in with Blenkinsop.

Lady Sellenger.

[With a look of intelligence.] Dear Mr. Blenkinsop, you wicked, wicked cynic. [Meaningly.] I shall go and lie down. Are you coming upstairs, Miss MacGregor?

Aunt Eliza.

In one minute.

Lady Sellenger.

I want to have a little talk with you. [As Blenkinsop holds open the door for her, in a whisper.] Aren’t I tactful?

[Lady Sellenger goes out.

Blenkinsop.

What villainy is that old woman up to now?

Mrs. Dot.

You idiot! Don’t you see that she’s discovered the passion that devours our hearts — your manly bosom and my timid, fluttering heart — and she wants to leave us alone.

Blenkinsop.

I’m beginning to feel very unwell.

Mrs. Dot.

[Archly.] Wouldn’t you be rather flattered if I really were in love with you?

Blenkinsop.

[Alarmed.] Dot, don’t make these horrible suggestions. You make my flesh creep.

Mrs. Dot.

But you’ve been so cold, you haven’t given me a chance.

Blenkinsop.

Cold! Heaven knows what would have happened if I’d given you any encouragement. I’ve never been able to take my eyes off the ground without finding yours fixed on me with the languishing expression of a dying duck in a thunderstorm. I’ve never been able to go near you without your stroking me as if I were a velvet cushion or a Persian cat. I’ve not eaten a single meal in peace in case you suddenly took it into your head to press my foot under the table.

Mrs. Dot.

What would you have done if I had?

Blenkinsop.

[With outraged dignity.] I should have screamed! And the thought of that special licence has cast a chill in my heart. I don’t know what it’s all coming to. You are my witness, Miss MacGregor, that I won’t marry her, however deeply she compromises me.

Aunt Eliza.

[Smiling.] I am your witness.

Blenkinsop.

She shan’t make an honest man of me.

[Mrs. Dot takes from a drawer of the escritoire one of the licences.

Mrs. Dot.

[Smiling.] Frances Annandale Worthley — James Blenkinsop.

Blenkinsop.

I feel as though some one were walking over my grave.

Aunt Eliza.

But how on earth are you going to get Nellie Sellenger and Freddie to use the other licence?

Mrs. Dot.

When the right moment comes I shall leave it under their noses, and allow them to draw what consequences they choose.... If any woman ever earned a husband, I have. I’ve taken every opportunity to snub Gerald till he can hardly contain himself with rage. I’ve thrown him in Nellie’s company till they’re both so bored they could almost cry. I’ve been constantly on the watch to prevent Nellie and Freddie from having two minutes by themselves till they can hardly bear the sight of me. And I’ve made love to you with a persistence that would have melted the heart of a fish. If I fail, it will be your fault.

Blenkinsop.

But what on earth do you want me to do?

Mrs. Dot.

Good heavens, throw a little passion into your behaviour. Look at me as though you’d never seen any one so ravishing in your life. When you take my hand, hold it as if you would never let it go.

[She takes his hand.

Blenkinsop.

Remember, there’s no one but Miss MacGregor present.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a yearning glance.] Look into my eyes like this.

Blenkinsop.

Don’t. You make me feel very uncomfortable.

Mrs. Dot.

[Impatiently.] Oh, you’re too stupid. You’re a stock and a stone. You’re an owl. You’re a ridiculous idiot.

Blenkinsop.

Temper, temper.

Mrs. Dot.

You’ll ruin my whole life, because you’re such a perfect fool that you can’t make love to a woman.

[She breaks away from him and begins to cry. He walks up and down, then looks at her with a smile. He makes a sign to Miss MacGregor that Mrs. Dot cannot see.

Blenkinsop.

[In a different voice.] Dot, this little game of ours has lasted long enough.

Mrs. Dot.

[Sobbing in her handkerchief.] Yes, it has. I’m sick to death of the whole thing.

Blenkinsop.

You asked me to play a part, and you didn’t know that it might be deadly earnest.

Mrs. Dot.

Fiddlesticks!

Blenkinsop.

I have a secret that I can no longer keep from you.

Mrs. Dot.

Well, tell it to the horse-marines.

Blenkinsop.

Dot, I love you!

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, don’t be so silly.

Blenkinsop.

But I tell you I’m not joking.

Mrs. Dot.

Thank heaven for that. I’m weary of your bad jokes.

Blenkinsop.

The thing started as a bad joke, but it has ended in something very different. A change has come over me, and I’m ashamed.

Mrs. Dot.

[Looking up.] Eh?

Blenkinsop.

Don’t you see that I’m a different man? Dot, it’s you who’ve changed me.

Mrs. Dot.

I really believe he’s waking up.

Blenkinsop.

If I was shy and awkward, it’s because I wouldn’t give in to myself. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t understand.

Mrs. Dot.

That’s much better. There really is a ring of emotion in your voice.

Blenkinsop.

How shouldn’t there be, when I’m saying at last what has trembled on the tip of my tongue for ten days?

Mrs. Dot.

[Delighted.] There! That’s just the tone I want. Talk with that quiver in your voice when you ask me to pass you the mustard at dinner.

Blenkinsop.

I lie awake at night thinking of you, and when I fall asleep I seem to hold you in my arms.

Mrs. Dot.

That’s splendid. Why couldn’t you say all this before?

Blenkinsop.

Dot, Dot, don’t torture me. Don’t you see I mean it.

Mrs. Dot.

What!

Blenkinsop.

I’m not jesting now. I wish to heaven I were.

Mrs. Dot.

[Forcing a laugh.] My dear James, you’re really piling it on too much.

Blenkinsop.

You must be mad or blind. Can’t you feel that I love you?

Mrs. Dot.

Don’t be so absurd. You know you’re only — you’re only pulling my leg.

Blenkinsop.

Oh, I’ve been a perfect ass. I should never have consented to play this ghastly trick. If you only knew what tortures I’ve suffered!

Mrs. Dot.

He isn’t really serious, Aunt Eliza?

Aunt Eliza.

[Smiling.] Upon my soul, it looks very much like it.

Blenkinsop.

What did you expect? You’ve played on my heart-strings as though they were an instrument that had no feeling. You’ve put a caress into every tone of your voice.

Mrs. Dot.

[Ruefully.] Of course, I am fascinating. I can’t deny that.

Blenkinsop.

When you touched my hand, every nerve of my body thrilled.

Mrs. Dot.

You’re not really in love with me?

Blenkinsop.

Passionately.

Mrs. Dot.

You’re ridiculous, James Blenkinsop.

Blenkinsop.

I was a fool. I played with fire, and I never dreamed I’d burn myself.

Mrs. Dot.

But you mustn’t be in love with me. I won’t hear of it.

Blenkinsop.

It’s too late to say that now. I adore you.

Mrs. Dot.

But what on earth’s to be done?

Blenkinsop.

You must marry me.

Mrs. Dot.

Nothing will induce me to do anything of the sort.

Blenkinsop.

[Going up to her with outstretched arms.] You can’t realise the wealth of tenderness and affection which I’ll lavish upon you.

Mrs. Dot.

Go away! Don’t come near me.

Blenkinsop.

Why should you care for Gerald? Do you think if he loved you, he would let a trifling engagement with somebody else stand in the way?

Mrs. Dot.

The fact is that men are never to be trusted.

Blenkinsop.

I can’t live without you now. I’ll give up my whole life to make you happy.

Mrs. Dot.

But I’m in love with Gerald. I’m not in love with you. I shall never be in love with you.

Blenkinsop.

You owe me something for all the agony you’ve made me endure. Dot, remember that licence. It was bought in jest, but the Archbishop of Canterbury was in earnest.

Mrs. Dot.

But my dear James, for heaven’s sake be reasonable. You know just as well as I do that you’re not a marrying man.

Blenkinsop.

Give me the chance, and you’ll see.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m sure you wouldn’t like me. I’m horrid really.

Blenkinsop.

I know that you’re full of faults, but, bless you, I love them all.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve got a beastly temper.

Blenkinsop.

I dote upon you when I see your eyes flash with anger.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m awfully extravagant, and if the Government brings in temperance legislation I shall be ruined.

Blenkinsop.

I’m rich. I should look upon it as the greatest happiness to spend my last penny to gratify your smallest wish.

Mrs. Dot.

I won’t marry you. I won’t marry you. I won’t!

Blenkinsop.

Dot, Dot!

[He catches her in his arms and kisses her. At this moment Gerald comes in, Mrs. Dot breaks away from Blenkinsop. There is an awkward pause.

Mrs. Dot.

[To Gerald.] I thought you were on the river.

Gerald.

Hang the river!

[She goes to the door, which Blenkinsop opens for her. She goes out. As Aunt Eliza follows, he speaks to her in a low tone.

Blenkinsop.

There’s passion for you.

Aunt Eliza.

You brutes, you can all do it. You positively made my heart beat.

[She goes out.

Gerald.

What did Miss MacGregor say?

Blenkinsop.

A vague suggestion of bigamy if I understood correctly.

Gerald.

[Frigidly.] I’m afraid I came at an inopportune moment.

Blenkinsop.

It appears to be one of your happy little ways.

Gerald.

Every one seems to kiss every one else in this house.

Blenkinsop.

[With effrontery.] You have only to envelop Lady Sellenger in your arms, and the picture will be complete.

Gerald.

Would you kindly explain this incident?

Blenkinsop.

If you’ll allow me to say so, I really can’t see that it’s any business of yours.

Gerald.

[Hotly.] Look here, Blenkinsop, you’ve got no right to play your fool-tricks with Mrs. Dot. She’s a very excitable and thoughtless woman. She’s....

Blenkinsop.

Well?

Gerald.

Oh, damn you!

Blenkinsop.

Not at all, not at all.

Gerald.

[Angrily.] What the deuce is the meaning of all this tomfoolery?

Blenkinsop.

[Blandly.] I suppose you couldn’t be a little more civil, could you?

Gerald.

Look here, Blenkinsop, the best thing you can do is to receive a telegram that requires your immediate presence in town.

Blenkinsop.

Thanks very much, but I’m extremely comfortable down here.

Gerald.

You’d be rather surprised if I threw you out of the window, wouldn’t you?

Blenkinsop.

I should not only be surprised, but I should look upon it as an odious familiarity.

Gerald.

Would you like to know my private opinion of you?

Blenkinsop.

Spare me my blushes, dear boy. It always embarrasses me to be flattered to my face.

Gerald.

You silly old fool.

Blenkinsop.

I believe you’re considerably annoyed.

Gerald.

Not in the least. What the dickens is there about you that should annoy me?

Blenkinsop.

Now that I come to think of it, you are certainly in a passion. Your face is red, your attire is disordered, and you have a slight squint in your eye.

Gerald.

My dear fellow, if I hadn’t the best temper in the world, I should kick you.

Blenkinsop.

You’d far better go and lie down. You’ll only say something which you’ll regret.

Gerald.

I suppose you’re not for a moment under the impression that Mrs. Dot cares twopence about you.

Blenkinsop.

May I ask how that can in the least concern you?

Gerald.

Mrs. Dot is an old friend of mine. I’m not going to see her made ridiculous by a conceited nincompoop.

Blenkinsop.

By the way, has it slipped your memory that you’re engaged to Miss Sellenger?

Gerald.

Good Lord, no!

Blenkinsop.

I daresay you wish it had.

Gerald.

That’s a confounded impertinent thing to say.

Blenkinsop.

My dear fellow, I never saw any one with less common sense in my life. Surely it’s not very extraordinary that the same tender passion which inflames the chaste breasts of yourself and Miss Sellenger, should attack the equally chaste breasts of myself and Mrs. Worthley.

Gerald.

Don’t talk such twaddle.

Blenkinsop.

I suppose you’d be considerably astonished if I told you that I’d just asked Mrs. Dot to be my wife.

Gerald.

She must have screamed with laughter.

Blenkinsop.

You noticed her unconcealed hilarity when you came in.

Gerald.

[Going up to him quickly.] You don’t mean it!

Blenkinsop.

No man is quite safe from the toils of women till he’s safely in his grave. And even then a feminine worm probably makes a dead set at him.

Gerald.

And does Mrs. Dot — reciprocate your affection?

Blenkinsop.

Really you ask me a very delicate question.

Gerald.

By the great Harry, the man thinks she’s in love with him.

Blenkinsop.

[Rather indignant.] And pray, why shouldn’t she be just as much in love with me as with you?

Gerald.

[With a burst of laughter.] Ha, ha, ha.

Blenkinsop.

What the blazes are you laughing at?

Gerald.

Ha! ha! ha!

Blenkinsop.

Shut up, you blithering idiot!

Gerald.

[Still laughing.] She has made a fool of you. Ha! ha! ha! [Seriously.] And did you really think any woman would care for you? My poor Blenkinsop! My poor, poor Blenkinsop!

Blenkinsop.

You’re a jackanapes, sir, you’re an impudent jackanapes. And why not, pray?

Gerald.

[Furiously.] Because you’re revolting to look upon, and your conversation is inexpressibly tedious.

Blenkinsop.

It’s charming of you to say so.

Gerald.

If you want to marry any one, marry Lady Sellenger.

Blenkinsop.

You are evidently under the impression that if a woman can’t be so fortunate as to marry you, she had far better retire into a nunnery.

Gerald.

You’re a cantankerous cynic and a fatuous donkey.

Blenkinsop.

I like the delicacy with which you express your appreciation of my merits.

Gerald.

Listen to me, Blenkinsop! Clear out of the house before you make a greater mess of things than you have already. Mrs. Dot would as soon marry her groom as marry you.

Blenkinsop.

You think it’s quite impossible that she should ever have dreamt of such a thing?

Gerald.

Not only impossible, but grotesque.

[Blenkinsop goes to the drawer in which is the licence and takes it out.

Blenkinsop.

Perhaps, then, it would interest you to inspect this document.

[Gerald takes it and looks at it, dumfounded.

Gerald.

It’s a special licence.

Blenkinsop.

So much less bother than banns, you know.

Gerald.

James Blenkinsop.

Blenkinsop.

And Frances Annandale Worthley.

Gerald.

It’s a mistake! It’s all a preposterous mistake.

Blenkinsop.

You see, the Archbishop of Canterbury calls me his right well-beloved brother. Friendly, isn’t it?

[Gerald violently tears it in pieces and flings them on the ground. Blenkinsop gives a sigh of relief. Gerald stalks out of the room into the garden. Blenkinsop goes to the door and waves his hand at him. Mrs. Dot comes in. She has discovered that Blenkinsop has been making a fool of her.

Blenkinsop.

He’s torn up your precious licence.

Mrs. Dot.

[Quickly.] Which one?

Blenkinsop.

Ours, of course. Three guineas gone bang, my dear.

Mrs. Dot.

[Counting on her fingers.] I’m reckoning how many bottles of beer the British public will have to drink for us to buy another.

Blenkinsop.

But your refusal of my hand will happily prevent you from going to that expense. Thereby considerably forwarding the cause of temperance.

Mrs. Dot.

[With an assumption of overwhelming gravity.]

James, I have been thinking over all you said, and I am willing to marry you.

Blenkinsop.

[A chill going down his spine.] I thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I cannot accept this sacrifice.

Mrs. Dot.

It is no sacrifice when I think that I can make you happy.

Blenkinsop.

But you mustn’t think of me. It’s your happiness that we have to consider. Don’t let a momentary impulse ruin your whole life.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve thought it over very carefully. I cannot resist your passionate pleading.

Blenkinsop.

I will not be outdone in generosity. You have refused me. I accept your refusal as final.

Mrs. Dot.

I never realised that your nature was so great and tender. Every word you say makes me more determined to devote my life to your happiness.

Blenkinsop.

My dear Dot, much as I appreciate the beauty of your sentiments, I must confess that I could never marry a woman who did not love me.

Mrs. Dot.

[As though she were struggling with her modesty.] I see that you want to force from me the avowal that is so hard to make. Oh, you men!

Blenkinsop.

Good God, you don’t mean to say you’re in love with me?

Mrs. Dot.

[Languishing.] James. Is it so very wonderful?

Blenkinsop.

Half an hour ago you said you couldn’t stand me at any price.

Mrs. Dot.

It’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind. The passion which you threw into your proposal has completely changed me. I am touched by the vehemence with which you flung your heart at my feet. I have struggled, but I cannot resist. Take me in your arms, James, and never let me go.

Blenkinsop.

Dot, I have a confession to make to you. I didn’t mean a word I said.

Mrs. Dot.

Ah, James, do not jest.

Blenkinsop.

I assure you I’m perfectly serious. You taunted me that I couldn’t make love, so I just let myself go to show you I could. I daresay it was a silly joke, but it certainly was a joke.

Mrs. Dot.

[Unmoved.] James, every word you say increases my admiration for you. I can’t think now how I was ever blind to your great affection.

Blenkinsop.

But don’t you hear what I say?

Mrs. Dot.

Do you think you can take me in so easily?

Blenkinsop.

You don’t believe me?

Mrs. Dot.

Not a word.

Blenkinsop.

[Thoroughly alarmed.] Now, look here. I don’t love you, I’ve never loved you, and I never shall love you. I can’t put it any clearer than that.

Mrs. Dot.

[With rapture.] God, how he adores me!

Blenkinsop.

I say, look here, this is a bit too thick.

Mrs. Dot.

I know you only say these cruel things because you think I should be throwing myself away on you.

Blenkinsop.

[Huffily.] I don’t know about that.

Mrs. Dot.

You cannot bear to think that I should accept you from pity. But it isn’t that, James. You are handsome and noble and chivalrous. How shouldn’t a woman love you?

Blenkinsop.

I repeat that I do not reciprocate your passion.

Mrs. Dot.

You can’t deceive me so easily as that, James. I know you love me. We women have such quick intuitions.

Blenkinsop.

So you always say.

Mrs. Dot.

I see you simply quivering with restrained emotion. Oh, James, James, you’ve made me so happy.

[She flings herself on his bosom and pretends to burst into tears.

Blenkinsop.

I say, take care. Supposing somebody saw us.

Mrs. Dot.

I should like all the world to see us.

Blenkinsop.

But it’s devilish compromising.

Mrs. Dot.

I want to compromise myself. Only thus can I make you certain of my love. Oh, think of the many happy years we shall spend in one another’s arms, James.

Blenkinsop.

[Extricating himself from her embrace.] Is there nothing I can say to undeceive you?

Mrs. Dot.

Nothing! I am yours till death.

Blenkinsop.

I will never give way to my sense of humour again.

Mrs. Dot.

[Archly.] Do you mind if I leave you just for one minute? After so much agitation I must really go and powder my nose.

Blenkinsop.

[Ironically.] Pray don’t let me detain you.

Mrs. Dot.

Remember I am yours till death.

Blenkinsop.

It is very good of you to say so.

[She goes out. He rings the bell impatiently. The Butler comes in.

Blenkinsop.

Tell my servant I want him.

[The Butler goes out. Blenkinsop walks up and down, wringing his hands. The Servant enters.

George, pack up my things at once and get the motor. There’s not a moment to lose.

George.

Are you going away, sir?

Blenkinsop.

[Flying into a passion.] You blithering fool, do you suppose I should want my things packed if I were staying? I’m going abroad to-night.

George.

Very well, sir.

Blenkinsop.

You must take the train and go to Cook’s at once and get some tickets.

George.

Very well, sir. Where to, sir?

Blenkinsop.

Don’t argue, sir, but do as I tell you.

George.

I must know where to get the tickets for, sir.

Blenkinsop.

Oh, what it is to have a fool for a servant! Take a month’s notice. I dismiss you. Where to, sir? Anywhere, sir? Somewhere that’s a damned long way off. South Africa! I’ll go and shoot lions in Uganda. And if there isn’t a boat sailing at once, I’ll go to America and shoot grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains.

George.

Very dangerous climate, sir.

Blenkinsop.

Dangerous climate, sir? I would have you know it’s not half such a dangerous climate as the valley of the Thames.

George.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out. Mrs. Dot comes in. At the sight of her Blenkinsop at once cools down.

Mrs. Dot.

James, dear, did I hear you give orders for your things to be packed up?

Blenkinsop.

[Calmly.] No, my love. What could have put such an idea in your head?

Mrs. Dot.

You wouldn’t leave me — darling?

Blenkinsop.

My angel, nothing now shall tear me from your side.

Mrs. Dot.

Dearest!

Blenkinsop.

[Trying to restrain himself.] Pet!

[He goes into the garden. Mrs. Dot begins to laugh. Freddie comes in, with letters in his hand.

Freddie.

I say, I wish you’d just have a look at these letters.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh, yes. I want to have a little talk with you, Freddie. [She takes one of the letters and reads.] “I am directed by Mrs. Worthley to congratulate you on the recent addition to your family, but to express her regret that she cannot accede to your request.” How brutal you are, Freddie! Surely Mrs. Murphy is an old friend.

Freddie.

I looked her out in my note-book. Six months ago we sent her fifteen pounds because she had nine children. Now she has eleven.

Mrs. Dot.

And yet they complain that the birth-rate is falling. I think we’d better send her five pounds.

Freddie.

You really can’t encourage a woman who has twins twice a year, when her husband is not only bed-ridden but a hopeless lunatic.

Mrs. Dot.

Perhaps she is a little prolific.

Freddie.

Here is my answer to Mrs. MacTavish, who wants help to bury a husband.

Mrs. Dot.

Poor thing! You’d better send her ten pounds.

Freddie.

I’ve answered: “Madam, I regret to see that this is the third time you have lost your husband within two years. The mortality among the unhappy gentlemen on whom you bestow your hand is so great that I can only recommend you in future to remain a widow. Yours faithfully, Frederick Perkins.”

Mrs. Dot.

[Reading a letter which he hands to her.] “I am pleased to hear that the wooden leg for which Mrs. Worthley paid for last year has proved satisfactory, but I cannot recommend her to provide you with another. To lose one leg in a railway accident is a misfortune, but to lose a second in a colliery explosion points to carelessness.” That’s not original, Freddie.

Freddie.

I’m so hard up, I can only afford to make other people’s jokes.

Mrs. Dot.

[With a shrewd look at him.] Freddie, I’ve been exceedingly pleased with your behaviour during the last week. I’ve watched you carefully, and I’m glad to see that you’ve done all that was possible to destroy poor Nellie’s affection for you.

Freddie.

[Gravely.] I’ve tried to do my duty.

Mrs. Dot.

I know. And in recognition of this I want you to accept a little present. Where is my cheque-book?

Freddie.

[Producing it promptly.] Oh, no, really, I shouldn’t like you to do anything of the sort. [Putting it in front of her, and giving her a pen.] I feel that I’m amply paid for all that I do for you. I simply can’t accept anything more.

Mrs. Dot.

I was afraid you would object.

[She writes, and he watches her carefully.

Freddie.

Five hundred pounds. Oh, you are a ripper! But why on earth do you give me that?

Mrs. Dot.

It may be useful to you. Suppose you had an idea of getting married, for instance, it would be very convenient to have a sum like that in your pocket.

Freddie.

But I’m not thinking of getting married.

Mrs. Dot.

Aren’t you? I suppose you know that when you do, I’m proposing to give you two thousand a year.

Freddie.

I say, that’s awfully good of you.

[He takes the cheque and gloats over it. Mrs. Dot quickly takes a special licence out of the drawer and puts it on the table.

Mrs. Dot.

Now I’m going for a turn in the garden.

Freddie.

You are a brick.

[She goes out. As soon as he sees the coast is clear, he gives a peculiar whistle. Nellie comes in.

Nellie.

I thought your whistle was never coming. They wanted me to go on the river. I had to invent all sorts of excuses.

Freddie.

I don’t know how it is, but somehow we never manage to get a minute by ourselves.

Nellie.

It’s perfectly maddening. What a good idea it was of yours to meet in the garden after they’d all gone to bed.

Freddie.

Was it my idea? I always thought it was yours!

Nellie.

[With wounded dignity.] It’s not likely I should have proposed a thing like that.

Freddie.

No, it isn’t likely.

Nellie.

I’m perfectly distracted. If you only knew how that man bores me!

Freddie.

I can’t think what you ever saw in him.

Nellie.

I was never really fond of him, you know. I only accepted him because he was so desperately in love with me, and mamma wouldn’t hear of it.

Freddie.

When did you first know that you cared for me?

Nellie.

Oh, I don’t know. I think as soon as ever I found out you were in love with me.

Freddie.

[Rather taken aback.] Oh!

Nellie.

When did you begin to love me?

Freddie.

Well, you know, I was awfully flattered by your caring for me.

Nellie.

Oh!... [There is a pause.] I don’t think I quite understand.

Freddie.

[Opening his arms.] Darling!

Nellie.

[Cuddling in them.] Oh, it makes me feel so delightfully wicked. I know I oughtn’t to let you kiss me. I know it’s treachery to poor Gerald.

Freddie.

He isn’t worthy of you.

Nellie.

He simply worships the ground I tread on. I am a perfect beast.

Freddie.

We’re treating him shamefully.

Nellie.

I shall never forgive myself.

Freddie.

Poor Gerald.... He is an ass, isn’t he?

Nellie.

Oh, awful.

[They both go into shrieks of laughter.

Nellie.

Take care!

[Mrs. Dot comes in with flowers in her hands.

Mrs. Dot.

Did I leave my scissors here? Just see if you can find them, Freddie. Perhaps they’re in the next room. [He goes out.] I wonder if I left them on the writing-table.

[Nellie looks, sees the licence, starts, and turns round to hide it.

Nellie.]

[Agitated.] No, there’s nothing here at all.

[Freddie comes in with the scissors.

Freddie.

Here they are!

Mrs. Dot.

Thanks so much.

[She goes out.

Nellie.

Freddie, how could you be so incautious? It was only by the greatest presence of mind that I was able to hide it.

Freddie.

What do you mean?

Nellie.

You ought to have told me. I don’t think it was nice of you to get a licence without saying a word to me about it. I think it was a great liberty.

Freddie.

A licence?

Nellie.

You must know that I can’t marry you. Nothing will induce me to break my promise to Gerald. I’m very angry with you.

Freddie.

I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.

Nellie.

How can you tell such stories?

[She hands him the licence. He stares at it, utterly astonished.

Freddie.

Where did you find this?

Nellie.

It was lying on the writing-table. I suppose you’re not going to deny all knowledge of it. [He stares at it still.] Freddie, how bold of you! But you really couldn’t imagine for a moment that I’d consent to run away with you. Oh, Freddie, I’m so flattered. How you must love me!

Freddie.

[To himself.] Two thousand a year! [He takes the cheque from his pocket and looks at it. Suddenly light dawns on him. He puts cheque and licence back into his pocket.] It’s fairly clear that a licence couldn’t have got there by itself.

Nellie.

What on earth made you think of sending for it?

Freddie.

[Brazenly.] I thought it was the only way to win you.

Nellie.

Have you had it long?

Freddie.

It only arrived this morning. Look here, why shouldn’t we bolt? You don’t care a straw for Gerald, and you do care for me.

Nellie.

It would break his heart. I couldn’t, I couldn’t! Besides, where are we to bolt to? I daren’t. Mamma would never forgive me.

Freddie.

You see, with this we can be married anywhere. Let’s jump into the motor and go down to my father near Oxford. We shall arrive by dinner-time, and he’ll marry us to-morrow morning.

Nellie.

You don’t mean to say your father’s in the Church?

Freddie.

Of course he’s in the Church. I was most careful in my choice of a parent.

Nellie.

Oh, how clever of you to have a father who’s a clergyman! You think of everything, Freddie.

Freddie.

Look here, there’s not a minute to waste. Will you risk it?

Nellie.

No, no, no! Freddie, how can you ask me such a thing.... I’ll just go and put on my hat.

Freddie.

You brick.

[She runs out. He walks up and down excitedly. The servants bring in the tea. Nellie comes back with her hat on.]

Freddie.

Hurry up!

Nellie.

This is romance, isn’t it?

[They go to the door that leads into the garden, hand in hand. They are confronted by Lady Sellenger and Gerald, Blenkinsop and Miss MacGregor.

Lady Sellenger.

Where are you going in such a hurry?

Nellie.

[Promptly.] We were just going to call you all in to tea.

[Mrs. Dot comes in.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve just had the motor brought round in case any one would like to go out.

[She goes to the writing-table to see if the licence has been removed. They all sit down and have tea.

Lady Sellenger.

Nellie, my love, I’ve been discussing a very important matter with Gerald.

Mrs. Dot.

I know. You asked him to name the day.

Lady Sellenger.

I feel that I have no right to restrain any longer the very natural impatience of these young things.

Nellie.

[Aghast.] And what did Gerald say?

Lady Sellenger.

He wishes to leave it entirely to you.

Nellie.

I’m sure that’s very obliging of him.

Gerald.

Not at all.

Mrs. Dot.

Of course, he’s all eagerness.

Gerald.

[Grimly.] Yes.

Nellie.

I would much sooner — let Gerald fix it at his own convenience.

Lady Sellenger.

I think it’s delightful, the way they give in to one another.

Gerald.

We shall only bore Mrs. Dot if we discuss the matter now.

Lady Sellenger.

We’re all old friends here. I’m sure Mrs. Dot will help us with her advice.

Mrs. Dot.

My own opinion is, that in these matters the sooner the better.

Blenkinsop.

When you have to take a pill the best thing is to swallow it down without thinking.

Lady Sellenger.

Cynic! What do you say to six weeks from to-day?

Nellie.

That would suit me beautifully.

Gerald.

Then there’s no more to be said.

Lady Sellenger.

What a beautiful thing love is!

[Nellie gets up.

Nellie.

[To Freddie.] Are you coming?

Freddie.

Certainly.

Lady Sellenger.

[Surprised.] Where are you going, Nellie?

Nellie.

Mr. Perkins has promised to take me for a little drive in the motor. I feel it’s the only thing to send away my headache.

Lady Sellenger.

[In an undertone.] My darling, is this wise? Remember the feelings of this poor young man.

Nellie.

[Also in an undertone.] I thought you’d like an opportunity of talking privately to Gerald.

Lady Sellenger.

Why, darling?

Nellie.

Dear mamma, the settlements.

Lady Sellenger.

[Smiling affectionately.] You sweet, practical child! You’ll be your own mother again at my age.

Nellie.

May I go then?

Lady Sellenger.

Do. But don’t be away very long.

Nellie.

[Kissing her.] Good-bye, mamma.

[She goes out with Freddie. Almost immediately the sound of a motor-horn is heard, as they drive away.

Lady Sellenger.

The dear child, she has such a sweet, trusting nature. You must kiss me, too, Gerald!

Gerald.

I shall be delighted, I’m sure.

[She puts up her cheek, which he kisses. A Servant comes in with a note.

Servant.

Miss Sellenger told me to give you this at once, Madam.

Mrs. Dot.

Oh. [She opens it and gives a cry.] Good heavens! Oh, the deceitful wretch! Lady Sellenger, how shall I tell you? It’s from Nellie.

Lady Sellenger.

From Nellie!

Mrs. Dot.

[Reading.] “Dear Mrs. Dot, I’m just off to marry Freddie. Break it to Mamma gently.”

Lady Sellenger.

[Starting up.] Impossible! Stop them! Stop them! Where are they?

Mrs. Dot.

[Reading.] “I couldn’t marry Gerald. He’s too great a” — there’s a word in big letters. I never could read capitals.

[She hands the note to Gerald.

Gerald.

The word is “B. O. R. E.”

Mrs. Dot.

[Pretending to be much surprised.] Bore!

Blenkinsop.

[With immense satisfaction.] Bore!

Aunt Eliza.

[Meditatively.] Bore!

Lady Sellenger.

Oh, how monstrous! My poor Gerald, what shall I do?

[Gerald goes into a roar of laughter. He laughs louder and louder.

Lady Sellenger.

Gerald! Gerald! Don’t! Pull yourself together. The poor boy, he’s perfectly hysterical. Where are my salts? Mrs. Dot, for heaven’s sake calm him down. Oh, my dear! You mustn’t upset yourself yet.

Blenkinsop.

He looks cut up, doesn’t he?

Lady Sellenger.

We’ll pursue them. There’s no harm done yet. We’ll catch them. I promise you we’ll catch them. You shall marry her, Gerald, if I have to drag her to church by the hair of her head.

[At this he stops suddenly and stares at her in dismay.

Gerald.

What are you going to do?

Lady Sellenger.

We must chase them. Where’s your motor, Mr. Blenkinsop? Didn’t you tell me it was the fastest machine in England?

Blenkinsop.

I did say something of the sort.

Lady Sellenger.

We shall catch them up. Gerald, you must drive me. I can’t trust any one else to go fast enough.

Mrs. Dot.

But you don’t know which way they’ve gone.

Lady Sellenger.

Don’t be so silly. Of course they’ve gone to Brighton. When people elope they always go to Brighton.

[Mrs. Dot slips out of the room.

Gerald.

And what’ll you do if we come up to them? You can’t force them to come back.

Lady Sellenger.

If a woman can’t force her daughter to marry any man she chooses, I don’t know what the English nation is coming to.

Gerald.

I won’t marry the girl against her will.

Lady Sellenger.

Fiddlededee! Of course you’ll marry her. Who is this creature she’s run away with? Perkins! Perkins with a P. I never heard anything so ridiculous. Do you suppose my daughter is going to be Mrs. Perkins — Perkins with a P?

Blenkinsop.

You couldn’t very well spell it with a W could you?

Lady Sellenger.

Hold your impudent tongue, sir!

Gerald.

Now, let’s have this out and be done with it. I’m no more in love with Nellie than she is with me, I was going to marry her because I’d promised to, and it seemed a low down trick to draw back....

Lady Sellenger.

The man’s mad. The shock has turned his brain.

Gerald.

When I heard she’d bolted, I could have jumped for joy. I seem to have awaked out of a ghastly nightmare. Nothing will induce me to try and catch her up.

Lady Sellenger.

You monster! How dare you trifle with the affections of my daughter! You don’t mean to stand by and see her marry a man called Perkins!

Gerald.

I wouldn’t even mind if she married a man called Vere de Vere.

Lady Sellenger.

Very well, then, the chauffeur shall drive me. You’re a heartless brute. Perkins with a P. And penniless to boot.

[She flounces out of the room and bangs the door.

Gerald.

Where’s Mrs. Dot?

[He goes into the garden.

Blenkinsop.

What a charming mother-in-law that woman will make!

[Mrs. Dot comes in with a large kitchen knife in one hand and a poker in the other.

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve done it!

Blenkinsop.

Done what?

Mrs. Dot.

Lady Sellenger thinks she’s going in your motor, but she isn’t.

Blenkinsop.

[Starting up.] What have you done to my motor?

Mrs. Dot.

As soon as she talked of it, I ran to the kitchen and seized this knife and I seized this poker.

Blenkinsop.

Woman!

Mrs. Dot.

I’ve ripped up all the tyres, they’re simply in ribands, James.

Blenkinsop.

Good Lord!

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t know what I’ve done to the steering gear, but I know it’ll never work again. Oh, it’s in an awful state.

Blenkinsop.

But that’s a bran-new motor. I’ve just paid eighteen hundred pounds for it.

Mrs. Dot.

And so that there shouldn’t be any risk I opened the place where the works are, and I rummaged around with the poker. I think I’ve smashed everything.

Blenkinsop.

Oh! Oh!

[He buries his head in his hands.

Mrs. Dot.

The thing’s a wreck and a ruin. You should have seen the tyres go flop, flop, flop.

Blenkinsop.

But I’m going to race next week.

Mrs. Dot.

It’ll be impossible to move it for a month. It is in a state.

Blenkinsop.

Eighteen hundred pounds!

Mrs. Dot.

I don’t know how much it’ll cost to put right. You don’t mind, James, do you?

Blenkinsop.

Mind!

Mrs. Dot.

I shouldn’t like you to be cross with me.

Blenkinsop.

[Furiously.] Oh!

Mrs. Dot.

You won’t let this disturb your affection for me? Remember that you’re going to marry me.

Blenkinsop.

Marry you. I’d rather marry my cook.

[He flings out of the room.

Mrs. Dot.

[Looking after him, innocently.] He is in a temper, isn’t he? It’s very hard to please everybody in this life.

Aunt Eliza.

You’re quite incorrigible.

Mrs. Dot.

Would you mind taking these implements away? I’m really very tired.

Aunt Eliza.

I suppose breaking motors is rather hard work.

Mrs. Dot.

And you get very little thanks for it.

[Aunt Eliza goes out. Mrs. Dot sinks into a chair, with a sigh of relief. Gerald comes in. She realises that he is behind her, but pretends not to notice him. He comes up softly.

Gerald.

Dot!

Mrs. Dot.

[Pretending to start.] Oh, how you frightened me! You might remember that my nerves are in a very agitated state.

Gerald.

You asked me a question a little while ago. I can answer it now.

Mrs. Dot.

I’m so sorry, I’ve quite forgotten what it was. It can’t have been of the smallest importance.

Gerald.

You asked me if I loved you.

Mrs. Dot.

How absurd! And do you?

Gerald.

With all my heart, and I’ve loved you passionately from the first moment I saw you.

Mrs. Dot.

With never a day off?

Gerald.

With never a day off. I wanted to tell you every minute, and yet I couldn’t be such a cad.

Mrs. Dot.

[Sarcastically.] It’s awfully nice of you to say all this, and I can’t tell you how flattered I am.

Gerald.

Dot!

Mrs. Dot.

Only it’s rather late in the day. I’ve promised my hand and heart to James Blenkinsop.

Gerald.

Fiddle!

Mrs. Dot.

[Raising her eyebrows.] I beg your pardon?

Gerald.

[Firmly.] Fiddle!

Mrs. Dot.

Are you under the delusion that because a happy chance has freed you from a previous engagement, I’m going to seize the opportunity and leap into your arms?

Gerald.

You know, women are brutes. One tries to do the straight thing and behave more or less like a white man, and they make you feel as if you’d been an utter beast.

Mrs. Dot.

Do you know why Nellie jilted you? Because you’re a bore.

Gerald.

[Smiling.] I daresay I’m very stupid. I suppose that’s why I love you so much.

Mrs. Dot.

My dear Gerald, you were cured of your passion for Nellie in a month. I have no doubt that a week in Paris will make your heart whole once more.

Gerald.

[Calmly.] Are you packing me off by any chance?

Mrs. Dot.

Marked — damaged.

Gerald.

[With his tongue in his cheek.] Then Good-bye!

Mrs. Dot.

Bon voyage.

[He turns to go and walks slowly to the door. She seizes a cushion and throws it at him, then turns her back on him. He stops, picks up the cushion and gravely brings it to her.

Gerald.

I think you dropped something.

Mrs. Dot.

[Gravely.] Thank you.

[He looks at her, with a smile. She begins to laugh. Suddenly he takes her in his arms.

Gerald.

You silly little fool.

THE END

PENELOPE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

CHARACTERS

This play, originally called Man and Wife, was produced at the Comedy Theatre on Saturday, January 9, 1909, with the following cast:

Dr. O’Farrell

W. Graham Browne

Professor Golightly

Alfred Bishop

Davenport Barlow

Eric Lewis

Mr. Beadsworth

Herbert Ross

Mr. Anderson

J. H. Brewer

Mrs. Fergusson

Norma Whalley

Mrs. Golightly

Kate Bishop

Mrs. Watson

Mrs. Charles Calvert

Peyton

E. Arthur Jones

Penelope

Marie Tempest

Penelope

Dr. O’Farrell

Professor Golightly

Mrs. Golightly

Mr. Davenport Barlow

Mrs. Fergusson

Mr. Beadsworth

Mrs. Watson

A Patient

Peyton

Scene: Dr. O’Farrell’s house in John Street, Mayfair

Time: The Present Day

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: A drawing-room in O’Farrell’s house in John Street. It is very prettily but not extravagantly furnished. The O’Farrells are a young married couple of modest income.

It is between six and seven in the evening.

Peyton, a neat parlour-maid, opens the door and shows in Mr. Davenport Barlow.

Barlow is a short, self-important person of middle age. He is very bald, red in the face, and wears a small, neatly curled moustache; he is dressed in the height of fashion. His manner is fussy and pompous. He comes forward as though he expected to find some one in the room. Seeing that it is empty, he stops and looks at Peyton. He cannot make out why there is no one to receive him.

Barlow.

[In a tone of surprise.] Is Mrs. O’Farrell not here?

Peyton.

No, sir.

Barlow.

H’m.... Will you let her know I’ve come?

Peyton.

Mrs. O’Farrell is not at home, sir.

Barlow.

Not at home?... But....

Peyton.

Mrs. O’Farrell said, would you kindly sit down and make yourself comfortable? And I was to give you the Morning Post.

Barlow.

[Pompously.] I can’t imagine why Mrs. O’Farrell should think I haven’t read the Morning Post at six o’clock in the evening.

Peyton.

[Imperturbably.] And Mrs. O’Farrell said, will you have a whisky and soda, sir?

Barlow.

But when is Mrs. O’Farrell coming in?

Peyton.

I don’t know at all, sir.

Barlow.

But she telegraphed to me this afternoon, asking me to come and see her at once.

Peyton.

Yes, sir; I took the telegram to the post office myself.

Barlow.

It seems very extraordinary that she should have gone out. The matter was of considerable importance.

Peyton.

[Politely.] Yes, sir.

Barlow.

Very well, I’ll sit down and wait. But I can’t stay long. I’m dining at ... no matter.

Peyton.

Very good, sir.

[Peyton goes out. Barlow goes to a looking-glass, takes a little brush out of his pocket, and brushes his moustache. Peyton comes in again with a small tray on which are a decanter, a syphon, and a glass.

Barlow.

Oh, thank you. Did you say you had the Morning Post?

Peyton.

Yes, sir. [She hands it to him.

Barlow.

Ah, thank you.

[Peyton goes out. Barlow helps himself to a whisky and soda, turns to the fashionable intelligence in the paper, and begins to read it with a little smile of self-satisfaction.

Barlow.

[Half to himself.] The Duchess of St. Erth returned to Wales yesterday. The Marchioness of Mereston has arrived at 89 Grosvenor Square. The Marchioness of Serlo and Lady Eleanor King leave for Paris this morning.

[Peyton comes in, followed by Mrs. Golightly. Mrs. Golightly is an extremely stout, good-natured lady of middle age. She is very active, but short of breath. She gives one a continual impression of having just run up a steep hill. She is Davenport Barlow’s sister.

Peyton.

Mrs. Golightly.

Barlow.

Isabel!

Mrs. Golightly.

Are you here, Davenport? Where’s Penelope?

Barlow.

[As if it were the most extraordinary thing in the world.] She’s out!

Mrs. Golightly.

[Astonished.] Out?

[She turns to Peyton with a look of inquiry.

Peyton.

Mrs. O’Farrell said, would you kindly sit down and make yourself comfortable, ma’am? And I was to bring you the Church Times.

Barlow.

But....

Peyton.

[Calmly.] And Mrs. O’Farrell said, will you have a strong cup of tea, ma’am?

Mrs. Golightly.

I’m surprised that Mrs. O’Farrell should have gone out, because she expected me.

Peyton.

[Handing Mrs. Golightly a paper.] Yes, ma’am.

Mrs. Golightly.

[Taking it.] What is this?

Peyton.

The Church Times, ma’am.

Mrs. Golightly.

[With a look of exasperation at Barlow.] Oh, thank you.... I think I will have a cup of tea, please.

Peyton.

Very good, ma’am.

[Exit.

Mrs. Golightly.

I wonder why on earth Penelope should insist on my reading the Church Times.

Barlow.

I’ve just had a telegram from her.

Mrs. Golightly.

So have I, asking me to come at once. [With a ray of light.] Perhaps we shall find some explanation in the Church Times.

Barlow.

Nonsense. What can the Church Times have to do with the Archduchess Anastasia?

Mrs. Golightly.

My dear Davenport, what are you talking about?

[Peyton enters to announce Professor Golightly and immediately afterwards goes out. Golightly is a tall, spare man with grey hair, well groomed and alert. He is neatly dressed, quite tidy, and might just as well be a lawyer or a doctor as a professor of mathematics. He is clean-shaven.

Peyton.

Professor Golightly.

Golightly.

Hulloa, Davenport! [To his wife.] My dear, you’re the last person I expected to find here. I thought there was a meeting of the Missionary Society at the Albert Hall.

[Peyton comes in with a tray on which are tea-things, a glass of barley-water, and a copy of the “Athenæum.”

Mrs. Golightly.

Oh, thank you.

Peyton.

[To Golightly.] Mrs. O’Farrell said, will you have a glass of barley-water, sir?

Golightly.

Barley-water!

Peyton.

And I was to bring you the Athenæum. We couldn’t get this week’s, sir, but this is last week’s, and Mrs. O’Farrell hopes it will do as well.

Golightly.

[With a faint smile.] It’s very kind of you to have taken so much trouble.

Peyton.

Thank you, sir.

[Exit.

Golightly.

What on earth does Penelope want me to do with last week’s Athenæum and a glass of barley-water?

Barlow.

Well, presumably she wants you to drink the one and to read the other.

Golightly.

[To his wife.] My dear, I think it’s very hard that you should have brought up our only child on the idea that my favourite form of refreshment is barley-water.

Barlow.

It looks as if Penelope expected you, too.

Golightly.

I’ve just had a wire from her.

Barlow.

Have you? I wonder why on earth she wired to you.

Mrs. Golightly.

It’s so extraordinary that she shouldn’t be here. It makes me feel very nervous.

Golightly.

Well, frankly, I couldn’t make head or tail of it, so I jumped into a motor cab and came round from the club at once.

[Peyton comes in, followed by Beadsworth. He is a middle-aged solicitor, with a benign manner.

Peyton.

Mr. Beadsworth.

Golightly.

Well, I’m hanged.

Barlow.

My dear Charles, I wish you wouldn’t be slangy. It’s gone out in our set.

Beadsworth.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Golightly.] I’ve just had a telegram from Penelope asking me to come at once. [Turning to Peyton.] Will you let Mrs. O’Farrell know I’m here?

Golightly.

She’s out.

Peyton.

Mrs. O’Farrell said, would you make yourself comfortable, sir, and we’ve got the Law Times if you’d like to read it, and will you have a glass of port, sir?

[Beadsworth looks round at the others in bewilderment.

Golightly.

By all means have a glass of port, and I’ll swop it for my barley-water.

Beadsworth.

[To Peyton.] Thank you.

Peyton.

[Handing him the paper.] Very good, sir.

[Exit.

Beadsworth.

What does she want me to do with the Law Times?

Golightly.

I asked the same question when Peyton handed me last week’s Athenæum, and Davenport, with the perspicacity that distinguishes him, answered: read it.

Beadsworth.

Can you tell me what Penelope wants? Her telegram suggested that she wished to see me not as an old friend, but in my official capacity as the family solicitor.

Golightly.

I haven’t an idea. I thought her telegram most mysterious.

Mrs. Golightly.

I wish she’d come in. I’m beginning to be dreadfully uneasy.

Barlow.

[Rather pompously.] I think I can put your minds at rest. I am in a position to explain the whole matter to you. The telegram she sent me makes it perfectly clear. I daresay you know that the Archduchess Anastasia is a patient of Dickie’s. And a very nice patient for him to have. I’ve never met her, though I happen to know several members of her family, and she’s a very cultivated, pleasant woman. I’ve always said to Dickie that that is the sort of practice he ought to get. The middle classes do a doctor no good.

Golightly.

My dear Davenport, do go on with your story.

Barlow.

Well, it appears that the Archduchess Anastasia has signified her desire to know Penelope. Very charming and graceful action on her part, and just like her. Of course she’s extremely grateful to Dickie for all he’s done. He’s worked a miraculous cure, and I daresay she’s heard that Penelope is my niece. It’s a maxim you can always go on: royalty knows everything. And the long and the short of it is that she’s coming to lunch here. Of course Penelope knows nothing about these matters, and in a state of great excitement she’s sent for me. It’s the best thing she could do. I can tell her everything. I’ve lived in that set all my life. It’s nothing to be particularly proud about — mere accident of birth — I happen to be a gentleman. A certain family. Well, there it is, you see.

Golightly.

But do you mean to say that Penelope wired all that to you? It must have cost her a perfect fortune.

Barlow.

She put it a little more briefly, of course, but that was the gist of it.

Beadsworth.

I can’t imagine why she should send for me because a royalty is coming to luncheon with her. It was very inconvenient to get away. I had a dozen people waiting to see me, and I was obliged to slip out by the back door in order to avoid them.

Golightly.

But what are the exact words of the wire she sent you, Davenport?

Barlow.

You can see it if you like. [Taking it from his pocket and reading.] “Come at once. Archduchess Anastasia. Penelope.”

Golightly.

But d’you mean to say that you made up all that story out of those three words?

Barlow.

Penelope knew I had a certain amount of intelligence. She didn’t want to waste her money, so she just put what was essential, and left me to gather the rest.

Mrs. Golightly.

But my telegram says nothing about the Archduchess Anastasia.

Barlow.

What did Penelope say to you?

Mrs. Golightly.

[Taking out the telegram.] “Come at once! Grave scandal! Central African Mission. Penelope.”

Barlow.

But that’s absurd. You know how stupid the Post Office is. They must have made a mistake. I know that the Pomeranian Royal Family is very odd, but there are limits, and I can’t imagine the Archduchess Anastasia being mixed up in a scandal with a Central African missionary.

Beadsworth.

Well, my wire merely said: “Come at once; six and eightpence. Penelope.”

Barlow.

Six and eightpence! Why six and eightpence?

Beadsworth.

I don’t know. That is why I lost no time in coming.

Golightly.

[With a twinkle.] My impression is that the Archduchess Anastasia, instead of paying Dickie’s bill for miraculously curing her, has eloped with a missionary, and Penelope, by aid of the law [with a gesture towards Beadsworth], wants to recover the money.

Barlow.

It’s nonsense! You’re so unpractical, Charles.

Mrs. Golightly.

[To her husband.] But you had a telegram too, dear.

Golightly.

“Come at once. Decimal 7035. Penelope.”

Barlow.

How very odd.

[The door is softly opened and Penelope slips in; for a moment the others do not see her, and she stands smiling at them. Golightly catches sight of her. All the others turn.]

Golightly.

Penelope.

The Others.

Penelope.

Penelope.

[Coming forward and kissing Mrs. Golightly.] Good evening, mamma!

Barlow.

[Eagerly.] Well?

Penelope.

Well, papa. [She puts her face up for him to kiss.]

Mrs. Golightly.

[Anxiously.] Now, Penelope.

Penelope.

Oh, Mr. Beadsworth, how nice of you to come. [She shakes hands with him.] Kiss me, Uncle Davenport. [She calmly puts up her face. With some irritation he kisses her.]

Penelope.

Thank you.... Was your whisky and soda quite right? [Looking round.] And the port? Father, you haven’t touched the barley-water. You ungrateful old thing!

Mrs. Golightly.

[Exasperated.] My dear, for goodness’ sake explain.

Barlow.

Where have you been all this time?

Penelope.

I — I’ve been sitting in the consulting-room. [With a roguish smile.] I watched you all come in.

Mrs. Golightly.

[Rather injured.] Peyton said you were out.

Barlow.

Really, Penelope, I think your behaviour is outrageous.

Penelope.

You see, I thought if I saw you one after the other as you came in, I should have to make four scenes instead of one. It would have been very exhausting and not nearly so effective.

Golightly.

Are you going to make a scene?

Penelope.

[With the greatest satisfaction.] I’m going to make a dreadful scene in a minute.

Mrs. Golightly.

Now, my dear, before you go any further, for goodness’ sake tell us what you meant by your telegrams.

Penelope.

Well, you see, I wanted you all to come immediately, and I thought the best thing was to trail your ruling passions under your noses.

Mrs. Golightly.

Do you understand what she means, Charles?

Penelope.

My dear mother, it’s the simplest thing in the world. You spend your life in converting the heathen — from a distance — and I knew if I mentioned the Central African Mission you’d fly here on the wings of the wind.

Mrs. Golightly.

In point of fact I came in an omnibus. But do you mean to tell me that there has been no scandal in connection with the Central African Mission?

Penelope.

[Smiling.] I’m dreadfully sorry to disappoint you, mother.

Golightly.

And what in heaven’s name made you wire decimal 7035 to me?

Penelope.

Oh, that’s our telephone number, and I just put decimal instead of Gerrard.

Golightly.

I thought the figures were strangely familiar.

Penelope.

And there you are, you see.

Barlow.

[Chuckling.] I think it’s a capital idea. And she just flung the words six and eightpence at you, Beadsworth, and knew she’d fetch the lawyer.

Penelope.

[To Beadsworth.] You’re not cross with me, are you?

[He shakes his head, smiling.

Barlow.

And now, my dear, that you’ve disposed of them, tell me all about the Archduchess Anastasia.

Penelope.

[Looking at him blankly.] The Archduchess Anastasia? But I invented her.

Barlow.

What d’you mean, you invented her? I know her well, I’ve known her for years. I know her whole family.

Penelope.

[Rather embarrassed, but trying not to laugh.] Well, you see — I wanted you to come, too. And....

Barlow.

I don’t understand what you mean at all, Penelope. You mention one of my most intimate friends, and then you tell me you invented her.

Penelope.

I’m awfully sorry. I really didn’t know there was such a person, and I thought I’d made her up out of my own head.... [With a chuckle.] I think it was rather clever of me to hit upon some one you know so well.

Barlow.

I don’t know why you should think the mere mention of the Archduchess’s name would make me come here.

Penelope.

Well, you see, I know that you go out a great deal, and you know such crowds of people. I felt quite sure that if there were an Archduchess Anastasia you’d know her, and [with a wave of the hand] well, there it is you see.

[Barlow fumes silently, but does not answer.

Mrs. Golightly.

Now, Penelope, tell us what you really do want.

Penelope.

[In matter-of-fact tones.] I want to divorce Dickie.

Mrs. Golightly.

What!

Golightly.

My dear child.

Barlow.

Good gracious!

[These three speeches are said simultaneously.

Penelope.

[Ruefully.] I intended to make such a scene, and now you’ve made me blurt it all out in three words.

Mrs. Golightly.

But I don’t understand.

Penelope.

I’ll say it again, shall I? I want to divorce Dickie.

Beadsworth.

You don’t really mean it, do you?

Penelope.

[Indignantly.] Of course I mean it. I’m never going to speak to him again. That’s to say, I shall have a scene with him first. I’m quite determined to have a scene with somebody.

Golightly.

And where is Dickie now?

Penelope.

He’s on his way home with the usual story. [With a sudden break in her voice.] Oh, if you only knew how utterably miserable I am.

Mrs. Golightly.

My darling, is it really serious?

Penelope.

[Desperately.] Oh, what can I do to make you all understand?

Golightly.

The best way would be to begin at the beginning, and tell us all about it coherently.

Barlow.

[Pompously.] My dear Charles, this is not the kind of matter in which you can be of any use. You’re a mathematician, and you’re not expected to know anything about practical affairs.

Golightly.

[Faintly ironic.] I apologise profusely.

Mrs. Golightly.

[To Penelope, to ask her to speak.] Darling?

Penelope.

Well, the first thing is that I simply dote upon Dickie. I’ve never loved any one else, and I never shall.

Beadsworth.

That’s a very satisfactory confession after four years of matrimony.

Penelope.

Five years, three months, and two days. And every day I’ve loved Dickie more.

Beadsworth.

I’ve never seen a more devoted couple.

Penelope.

We’ve never had a quarrel. We’ve never even been cross with one another. It’s been a honeymoon that’s never come to an end.

Mrs. Golightly.

Well?

Penelope.

And now I’ve discovered that he’s been lying to me for the last month. He’s been coming home dreadfully late, and when I’ve asked him where he’s been, he’s said that he had to see a patient who was very ill — such an interesting case — and it worried him so much that he was obliged to go to his club and have a rubber to settle his nerves. And the interesting case and the rubber of bridge are Ada Fergusson.

Barlow.

[Pompously.] But who is Ada Fergusson? I’ve never heard of her.

Penelope.

Ada Fergusson’s a great friend of mine. And I hate her. I always knew she was a cat. For the last four weeks Dickie’s been spending every afternoon with her from four till seven.

Golightly.

[Raising his eyebrows.] But do you always ask your husband where he’s been when he comes in?

Penelope.

[Impatiently.] My dear papa, what has that got to do with it? We all know that you’re an old dear, and the greatest mathematician in the world, but you know nothing about life at all.

Golightly.

I apologise again.

Mrs. Golightly.

Give him a sheet of paper and a pencil, Penelope, and he’ll amuse himself by doing sums while we talk the matter out.

Penelope.

[Pushing writing materials over to him.] There you are, papa.

Beadsworth.

But how did you find out?

Penelope.

[Impatiently.] Oh, what does it matter how I found out! I’ve got all sorts of proofs.

Mrs. Golightly.

You could knock me down with a feather.

Golightly.

[With a smile.] My dear!

Barlow.

I am not in the least surprised.

Penelope.

Uncle Davenport!

Barlow.

I have expected it all along. You will remember, Isabel, that I was against the marriage from the beginning. I said, one doesn’t marry a doctor. One sometimes meets them in society when they’ve had their angles rubbed off a little and perhaps have been knighted, but one never meets their wives. We suppose they do marry, but they don’t marry any one we know. I may be old-fashioned, but I stick to my opinion that there are only three possible professions for a gentleman, the law, the army, and the church.

Penelope.

My dear Uncle Davenport, you’re talking nonsense.

Barlow.

[Huffily.] You ask me for my opinion, and I give it you. I regret that you should think it nonsense.

Beadsworth.

And what are you proposing to do now?

Penelope.

[With great determination.] I’m never going to live with Dickie again. As soon as I’ve seen him I shall leave this house for ever.

Beadsworth.

You’re proposing to have a few words with him?

Penelope.

Several. I’m going to tell him that I despise him, and that I hate him; I’m going to throw my wedding ring in his face, and then I shall sweep out of the room.

Beadsworth.

Have you really made up your mind that you won’t forgive him?

Penelope.

Nothing would induce me ever to speak to him again if it weren’t that I want to tell him exactly what I think of him.

Barlow.

Besides, you’ve got your family to think of. Of course you must leave him. You see, that is what I say, you’re not safe with people of no birth. I look upon all this as a blessing in disguise.

Beadsworth.

Do you wish to bring an action for judicial separation?

Penelope.

My dear Mr. Beadsworth, what are you talking about! I’m going to divorce him. I’m going to make an awful scandal.

Beadsworth.

Well, I suppose we could arrange that at a pinch with the help of the newspapers. Has he ever been cruel to you?

Penelope.

Good heavens, no! That’s what makes me so angry. The last month he’s been more perfectly charming and delightful than ever. Oh, I wish I could do something really unpleasant to Ada Fergusson. Something with boiling oil in it.

Mrs. Golightly.

I am shocked, frankly shocked. I would never have thought that Dickie could be so wicked.

Barlow.

Family life in England is going to the dogs. That is the long and short of it.

[Suddenly Penelope catches sight of what Golightly has been diligently writing. She gives the paper a startled look and then turns round.

Penelope.

Mother, a dreadful thing has happened. Papa has suddenly become a drivelling lunatic.

Mrs. Golightly.

My dear, what are you saying?

Penelope.

He’s been adding two and two together all over that piece of paper, and he makes it five every time.

Mrs. Golightly.

Charles!

[Penelope hands the sheet to Barlow.

Penelope.

Look.

Barlow.

Two and two are five. Two and two are five.

[He passes it on to Beadsworth.

Beadsworth.

Two and two are five. Two and two are five.

Barlow.

I knew this would happen. I’ve been expecting it for years.

Mrs. Golightly.

Charles, pull yourself together.

Penelope.

Papa, you don’t really think that two and two are five?

Golightly.

On the contrary, I’m convinced that two and two are four.

Penelope.

Then why on earth have you made it five?

Golightly.

Do you know why you buy Pears’ soap?

Penelope.

I expect you’ve been working too hard, father dear. Why don’t you go and lie down for half an hour? And when Dickie comes in he’ll give you a tonic.

Golightly.

You buy Pears’ soap because you’re told on fifty thousand hoardings that it’s matchless for the complexion.

Penelope.

That’s not funny, papa, that’s silly.

Golightly.

You’ve only got to say a thing often enough, and all the world will believe it. And when the world believes it, it’s very hard to say if it’s true or not.

Penelope.

What has that got to do with two and two?

Golightly.

I thought if I wrote “two and two are five” often enough I might come to think it true.

Penelope.

But if you wrote it a million times it wouldn’t be any truer.

Golightly.

That is the conclusion I’m regretfully forced to.

Penelope.

Well?

Golightly.

The whole of life is merely a matter of adding two and two together and getting the right answer.

Barlow.

My dear Charles, if you’re going to discuss life I think there’s no need for me to stay. I’ve told you for twenty years that you’re a scholar and a recluse. I have lived in the world, and I’m a practical man. If Penelope wants to consult me, I am at her service; if not....

Penelope.

Hold your tongue, Uncle Davenport.

Barlow.

Really, Penelope.

Golightly.

During the last five years I’ve seen you adding two and two together and making them about seventy-nine.

Mrs. Golightly.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Charles. Dickie’s behaviour is abominable, and there are no excuses for him. It’s a mere matter of common morality.

Golightly.

My dear, I have no objection to you talking common morality if you’ll let me talk common sense.

Mrs. Golightly.

My dear Charles, they’re the same thing.

Penelope.

If you think you can make me forgive Dickie by telling me that you were a wicked old thing yourself in your youth, I may as well tell you at once that it won’t wash.

Mrs. Golightly.

[Outraged.] What are you talking about, my dear?

Penelope.

Well, I’ve noticed that when a woman discovers that her husband has been unfaithful, her male relations invariably try to console her by telling her how shockingly they’ve treated their own wives.

Golightly.

My dear, I was going to confess nothing of the sort. I never confess.

Penelope.

Of course, if it were the other way about, and mamma had kicked over the traces a little....

Mrs. Golightly.

Darling, can you see me performing an acrobatic feat of that character?

Penelope.

Go on, papa.

Golightly.

I think you’ve treated Dickie shamefully.

Penelope.

[Astounded.] I?

Golightly.

If your mother had behaved to me as you’ve behaved to Dickie, I should certainly have taken to drink.

Penelope.

But I’ve been a perfect angel. I’ve simply worshipped the ground he walked on. I’ve loved him as no man was ever loved before.

Golightly.

No man could stand it.

Penelope.

Papa, what do you mean?

Golightly.

My dear, you’ve loved him morning, noon, and night. You’ve loved him when he talked, and you’ve loved him when he was silent. You’ve loved him walking, you’ve loved him eating, you’ve loved him sleeping. He’s never been able to escape from your love.

Penelope.

But I couldn’t help it.

Golightly.

You need not have shown it.

Penelope.

And do you mean to say that justifies him in philandering with Ada Fergusson?

Golightly.

It excuses him.

Penelope.

What beasts men must be!

Golightly.

No; but strange as it may seem to you, they’re human beings. When you were a child you doted on strawberry ices.

Penelope.

I dote on them still.

Golightly.

Would you like to eat strawberry ice for breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner every day for a month?

Penelope.

Good heavens! the thought fills me with horror.

Golightly.

Poor Dickie has lived on strawberry ice for five years. It’s been his only means of sustenance.

Penelope.

[With consternation.] Oh!

Golightly.

You’ve never let him go out without coming into the hall to put on his hat and kiss him good-bye; he’s never come into the house without you running down to help him off with his coat and kiss him welcome. When he sat down after breakfast in the morning to read his paper and smoke his pipe, I’ve seen you sit down on the arm of his chair and put your arm round his neck.

Barlow.

[Outraged.] Penelope!

Penelope.

Do you think it was very awful?

Barlow.

My dear child!

Penelope.

[To Beadsworth.] Did Mrs. Beadsworth never sit on the arm of your chair when you were smoking your pipe?

Beadsworth.

I must confess I’m thankful my wife occupied those moments in attending to her household duties.

Penelope.

You are a lot of horrid old things. I ask you to come here to sympathise with me, and you’re perfectly brutal to me.

Barlow.

My dear Penelope, there are limits.

Penelope.

Well, I don’t care; I’m going to divorce him.

Golightly.

Let’s do another little simple addition, shall we? Perhaps two and two will make four a second time.

Penelope.

I don’t know that I much like being a mathematician’s daughter.

Golightly.

Don’t you think, instead of divorcing your husband, it would be better to win back his affection?

Penelope.

I don’t want his affection.

Golightly.

[Smiling.] Are you sure you wouldn’t if you could get it?

[Penelope looks at her father for a moment, then goes up to him quickly.

Penelope.

[With tears in her voice.] Papa, d’you think I ever could win back his love? You say I’ve lost it through my own fault. Oh, I don’t know what to do without him. I’ve been so wretched since I knew. I’ve tried to put a cheerful face on it, but if you knew what I feel in my heart.... Oh, the brutes, why didn’t they hide it from me?

Barlow.

My dear Penelope, I expected you to have more spirit. He’s a person of no family. I should have thought you were well rid of him.

Penelope.

Uncle Davenport, if you say a word against him, I will immediately have an attack of hysterics.

Barlow.

What you expect your father to be able to tell you I can’t imagine.

Golightly.

[Smiling.] Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, Davenport....

Barlow.

I shouldn’t have thought one could describe you as either. But, in any case, I can stay no longer.

Penelope.

Oh, no, don’t go yet, Uncle Davenport.

Barlow.

It appears that my advice is not wanted, and I promised to look in on dear Lady Hollington before dinner.

Penelope.

Do telephone to her that you can’t come. You’ll find a telephone in my sitting-room.

Barlow.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] I’m too indulgent. People don’t rate me at my proper value.

[He goes out.

Penelope.

Papa, say you’ll get Dickie back for me. I want him. I want him.

Golightly.

My dear, it’s very simple. It merely requires a great deal of tact, a great deal of courage, and a great deal of self-control.

Penelope.

[Ironically.] Nothing else?

Golightly.

A good deal. You must never let yourself out of hand; you must keep guard on your tongue and your eyes and your smiles — and your temper.

Penelope.

I think you said it was very simple.

Golightly.

Is Ada Fergusson pretty?

Penelope.

No, she’s perfectly hideous.

Golightly.

Is she? That makes it more serious.

Penelope.

Why?

Golightly.

If a man falls in love with a pretty woman, he falls out of it. But if he falls in love with a plain one, he’ll be in love with her all his life.

Penelope.

You take a load off my mind. Ada Fergusson’s extremely attractive.

Golightly.

Then you’ll get him back.

Penelope.

Tell me exactly what to do, and I’ll do it.

Golightly.

Give him his head.

Penelope.

Is that all?

Golightly.

It means a good deal. When he comes in, don’t make a scene, but be charming to him. For once, don’t ask him where he’s been. When he leaves you, don’t ask him where he’s going, nor at what time he’ll be back. Don’t let him know that you have the least suspicion that anything has happened. On the contrary, take every opportunity of throwing him into Ada Fergusson’s society.

Mrs. Golightly.

Charles, you’re asking Penelope to connive at immorality.

Golightly.

When every difficulty disappears, Dickie will find half the savour of the intrigue gone. Half your battle is won. Leave the rest to time and Ada Fergusson. Let Ada Fergusson sit on the arm of his chair when he wants to read his paper. Let him account to Ada Fergusson for all his movements. Under such circumstances a woman is always on tenterhooks, and consequently she’s always exacting. Whenever there’s a pause in the conversation, Ada Fergusson will say, Do you care for me as much as ever you did? That speech is the rope around love’s throat. Whenever he wants to go away, Ada Fergusson will implore him to stay five minutes longer. Those five minutes that a man stays against his will are the nails in love’s coffin. Each time he leaves her Ada Fergusson will say, At what time will you be back? That question is the earth shovelled into love’s grave.

[All this while Penelope has been staring at Golightly with astonishment.

Penelope.

Where did you learn all this, father?

Golightly.

[With a deprecating shrug.] It’s a mere matter of adding two and two together, my darling.

Penelope.

I had no idea that mathematics were so interesting — nor so immoral.

Golightly.

What do you think of it?

Penelope.

But if Dickie falls out of love with Ada Fergusson there’s no reason why he should fall in love again with me.

Golightly.

You must make him.

Penelope.

I wish I knew how.

Golightly.

It only requires a little more tact, a little more courage, and a little more self-control.

Penelope.

But if I acquire so many virtues I shan’t be a woman, but a monster, and how can he love me then?

Beadsworth.

[From the window.] There’s a car stopping at the door.

Penelope.

Listen.... I can hear a key being turned. It must be Dickie.

Beadsworth.

What are you going to do?

Penelope.

[Hesitating.] What do you think, mamma?

Mrs. Golightly.

My dear, I highly disapprove of your father’s idea, and I can’t imagine how it ever came into his head, but I’m bound to say I think there’s some sense in it.

Penelope.

[Making up her mind.] I’ll try. Remember, no one knows anything that has happened. You’ll back me up, mamma, won’t you?

Mrs. Golightly.

You’re not going to ask me to tell a pack of lies, darling?

Penelope.

Only white ones, mother. If there’s a whopper to tell, I’ll tell it myself.

Beadsworth.

But what about Barlow?

Golightly.

He’s a man of the world. He’s sure to put his foot in it.

Penelope.

I’ll settle him.

[Barlow comes in.

Penelope.

Ah!

Barlow.

I could not get on to her. I don’t know what’s the matter with those telephone girls. Hussies!

Penelope.

Uncle Davenport, I find I’ve been entirely mistaken about Dickie. He’s not to blame in any way.

Barlow.

Good gracious me! And Ada Fergusson?

Penelope.

Is, I have no doubt, no worse than anybody else.

Barlow.

This is a surprise. How on earth have you come to this conclusion?

Penelope.

By adding two and two together.

Barlow.

Upon my word! I must say, it annoys me that I should have been forced to break an important engagement for no reason. I should have thought....

Penelope.

[Interrupting.] Uncle Davenport, it’s quite bad enough that I should be done out of a scene, but if you’re going to make one it’s more than I can stand.

Beadsworth.

Well, as I can’t be of any more use to you, I think I’ll get back to the bosom of my family.

Penelope.

Of course, I look upon this as a professional visit.

Beadsworth.

Oh, nonsense!

Penelope.

I couldn’t dream of accepting your services for nothing. You must really let me know what I owe you.

Beadsworth.

I really don’t know what to say.

Penelope.

Dickie charges a guinea when he goes to see anybody.

Beadsworth.

You only mentioned six and eightpence in your telegram.

Penelope.

Very well, I’ll owe you that. It would really make me feel more comfortable.

Beadsworth.

You’re not going to hand it over in hard cash?

Penelope.

I wasn’t thinking of paying you. But I’d like to think I owed it you. You see, then, I shan’t feel under any obligation.

Beadsworth.

In that case I surrender. Good-bye.

Penelope.

Good-bye.

Barlow.

Good-bye, Beadsworth. You must come and dine with me at the club one of these days.

Beadsworth.

I should like to. Good-bye.

[Exit.

Barlow.

Very nice fellow. Quite a gentleman. No one would think he was a solicitor. I shall ask him to dinner with one or two people who don’t matter.

Penelope.

There’s Dickie. D’you hear him whistling? He’s evidently in the best of spirits.

[Dickie comes in. He is a good-looking, well-dressed, professional man of five-and-thirty. He has boisterous spirits and high good humour. He is seldom put out of countenance. He has a charm of manner which explains Penelope’s infatuation.

Dickie.

Hulloa! I couldn’t make out what had become of you, Pen.

Penelope.

Why?

Dickie.

You generally come down to meet me when I get in.

[Penelope gives a slight start and conceals a smile.

Penelope.

My sainted mother is here.

Dickie.

[Gaily.] That’s no reason why you should neglect a devoted husband. [Shaking hands with Mrs. Golightly.] How is your sainted mother? Hulloa, Uncle Davenport, what price duchesses to-day?

Barlow.

I beg your pardon. I don’t know what you mean.

Dickie.

[Looking round at the decanters and glasses with which the room is scattered.] I say, you’ve been doing yourselves rather proud, haven’t you? Who’s been drinking port?

Penelope.

Nobody. It’s an empty glass.

Dickie.

That’s how providence behaves to me. Deliberately puts temptation in my way. It’s simply poison. Gout in my family, you know. My ancestors have lived on colchicum for a hundred years. I feel a tingling in my toes at the mere sight of a bottle of port. And yet I drink it.

[He fills himself a glass and sips it with great content.

Barlow.

It’s a great mistake, of course, to think that gout is a mark of good family. The porter of my club is a martyr to it.

Dickie.

Perhaps he’s the illegitimate son of an earl. You should ask him if he has a strawberry mark on his left shoulder. What’s the matter, Pen?

Penelope.

[Astonished.] With me?

Dickie.

I thought you seemed a bit under the weather.

Penelope.

Why?

Dickie.

I don’t know. You’re not quite up to your usual form, are you? You’ve not asked me what I’ve been doing to-day. As a rule you’re so interested in my movements.

Penelope.

[With a glance at her father.] I thought you’d tell me if you wanted to.

Dickie.

I say, I do think that’s a bit thick. I go slaving my very soul out to provide you with a motor and nice frocks and things, and you don’t take the smallest interest in what I do.

Penelope.

[Smiling.] Well, what have you been doing this afternoon?

Dickie.

[With a sigh of relief.] Oh, I’ve had the very deuce of a day. I’ve got a very interesting case on just now. Taking up a lot of my time. Of course, it worries me rather, but I suppose all these things come in the day’s march. Well, I spent the best part of an hour there.

Penelope.

An hour?

Dickie.

Yes, we had a consultation, you know.

Penelope.

But you had a consultation yesterday.

Dickie.

Yesterday? Yes, she’s a fussy old thing. She’s always wanting consultations.

Penelope.

That’s jolly, isn’t it?

Dickie.

I don’t think it is. It looks as if she hadn’t really confidence in me.

Penelope.

On the other hand, you can charge double, can’t you?

Dickie.

Yes, of course, it has that advantage.

Penelope.

I’ve been hankering after an ermine stole for a long time. I shall buy it now.

Dickie.

[His face falling.] Oh, but I haven’t been paid yet.

Penelope.

They’ll be only too glad to wait. And it’s such a bargain.

Dickie.

[To change the conversation.] Well, after my consultation I was so fagged that I had to go into the club to have a rubber of Bridge.

Golightly.

By the way, what is the name of your patient?

Dickie.

The name of my patient?

Penelope.

Oh, yes, I was telling papa that you’d got a new patient who was bringing in pots of money. I couldn’t remember her name.

Dickie.

[Embarrassed.] Oh — er, Mrs. Mac....

Penelope.

Mrs. Mac what?

Dickie.

Mrs. Macnothing.

Barlow.

How d’you mean, Mrs. Macnothing? I’ve never heard of a family called Macnothing.

Dickie.

No, of course, her name isn’t Macnothing.

Barlow.

But you distinctly said it was Mrs. Macnothing.

Dickie.

Now, my dear Pen, did I say anything about Macnothing?

Penelope.

Well, what is her name then?

Dickie.

I’ve been telling you for the last ten minutes. Her name’s Mrs. Mack.

Barlow.

Why on earth didn’t you say so at once?

Golightly.

How did you find such a profitable patient?

Dickie.

Oh, it was a great piece of luck. She heard about me from that little friend of yours, Pen. What is her name?

Golightly.

You seem to have a very bad memory for names, Dickie. You should make a knot in your handkerchief.

Dickie.

It’s a friend of Pen’s. [Pretending to try and remember.] Her husband’s in the navy, stationed at Malta, isn’t he?

Penelope.

Ada Fergusson.

Dickie.

That’s it, of course. Mrs. Fergusson.

Barlow.

One of the Fergussons of Kingarth, I suppose?

Dickie.

I don’t know at all. Quite a nice little thing, I thought. I must confess that she didn’t interest me very much.

[Peyton comes in to announce Mrs. Fergusson. Mrs. Fergusson is a handsome, showy woman of about thirty.

Peyton.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Dickie is filled with consternation. Peyton goes out. There is a very brief moment of embarrassment, but Penelope quickly recovers herself and goes up to the visitor effusively.

Penelope.

How d’you do?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Is it a preposterous hour to pay a call?

Penelope.

Of course not. I’m always delighted to see you.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’ve been shopping the whole afternoon, and it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen you for ages.

Penelope.

Do you know my sainted mother?

Mrs. Fergusson.

How d’you do?

Penelope.

This is my noble father, and this is my uncle.

Barlow.

How d’you do?

[He is evidently much struck by Mrs. Fergusson.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Turning blandly to Dickie.] You haven’t forgotten me?

Dickie.

Of course not.

Mrs. Fergusson.

We haven’t met for ages, have we?

Dickie.

Simply ages.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I passed you in Piccadilly the other day, and you cut me dead.

Dickie.

I’m so sorry, I’m so short-sighted.

Penelope.

Dickie, you’re not at all short-sighted. How can you tell such fibs?

Barlow.

[With pompous gallantry.] Dickie feels that only a physical impediment can excuse a man for not seeing a pretty woman.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, how very nice of you to say that.

Barlow.

Not at all, not at all.

Penelope.

I wanted to thank you for getting Dickie such a splendid patient.

Dickie.

[Hastily, seeing her look of astonishment.] I’ve just been telling my wife about Mrs. Mack.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Not in the least understanding.] Oh, yes.

Dickie.

It was really awfully good of you to tell her to send for me. I’ve been to see her this afternoon.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Understanding.] Oh, yes. I like to do all I can for people. I hope you’ll find her a nice patient.

Penelope.

She seems to require a lot of visits.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Yes, she was only telling me the other day how much she liked Dr. O’Farrell. I’m afraid she’s very ill, poor dear.

Dickie.

To tell you the truth, I’m extremely worried about her.

Mrs. Fergusson.

It’s a great comfort to all her friends to know that Dr. O’Farrell is looking after her.

Barlow.

I’ve been wondering if she’s one of the Staffordshire Macks or one of the Somersetshire Macks.

Dickie.

I don’t know at all.

Barlow.

How d’you mean you don’t know at all? She must be one or the other.

Dickie.

I don’t see that it matters either way.

Penelope.

What is she like?

Dickie.

Oh, I don’t know. Like everybody else, I suppose.

Penelope.

Don’t be silly, Dickie. You must know if she’s fat or thin.

Dickie.

[Looking at Mrs. Fergusson.] I should say fat, wouldn’t you?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Obese.

Penelope.

Yes?

Dickie.

She has grey hair.

Mrs. Fergusson.

All in little corkscrew curls.

Dickie.

[Laughing.] Yes. I wonder how she does them.

Mrs. Fergusson.

She has very pretty blue eyes, hasn’t she?

Dickie.

Yes, very pretty blue eyes.

Penelope.

What is her Christian name?

Dickie.

Er — I don’t know at all.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Promptly.] Catherine.

Penelope.

Catherine Mack? Mother, it’s your old friend Catherine Mack. What an extraordinary coincidence!

Golightly.

Catherine Mack. Why, of course, I remember her perfectly. Little grey corkscrew curls and very pretty blue eyes.

Penelope.

Wouldn’t she like mamma to go and see her?

Dickie.

I’m afraid she can’t see any one just yet.

Golightly.

You must tell her how sorry we are to hear she’s so ill.

Dickie.

Oh, yes, I’ll give her any message you like.

Mrs. Golightly.

[Rather stiffly, getting up.] I think I ought to be going. Will you come, Charles?

Golightly.

Yes, my dear.

Penelope.

Good-bye, mother, darling.

[They talk aside as Mrs. Golightly is helped on with her cloak. Dickie is left practically alone with Mrs. Fergusson.

Dickie.

[In an undertone.] I say, what the dickens have you come here for now?

Mrs. Fergusson.

You didn’t tell me when I should see you to-morrow.

Dickie.

Good heavens, you might have rung me up on the telephone.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, I never trust the telephone.

Dickie.

How do you mean you never trust the telephone? Are you in the habit....

Mrs. Fergusson.

Dickie!

Dickie.

I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean that.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Why on earth did you invent that cock-and-bull story about Mrs. Mack?

Dickie.

I didn’t. It invented itself. I was obliged to account for my movements.

Mrs. Fergusson.

D’you mean to say your wife asks you where you’ve been and where you’re going? How like a woman. [Innocently.] By the way, what are you doing this evening?

Dickie.

[With amusement.] Oh, Penelope and I are dining at the Carlton grill room, and going to a music hall.

[Barlow comes up to them.

Barlow.

Good-bye, Mrs. Fergusson.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Effusively.] Good-bye.

Barlow.

[To Penelope, as he shakes hands with her.] Devilish fine woman.

Penelope.

[Pretending to be outraged.] Uncle Davenport!

Barlow.

Good-bye, dear. Quite a lady.

Penelope.

Good-bye.

[Barlow and Mrs. Golightly go out.

Golightly.

[As he is following.] Are you all right?

Penelope.

Yes, leave it to me. I’m beginning to feel my feet.

Golightly.

[With a smile.] I noticed it.

[Golightly goes out.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Charming man your uncle is, Penelope. So distinguished.

Penelope.

You’ve made a conquest of him. He told me you were a devilish fine woman.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Not really? Men often tell me I’m a womanly woman.

Penelope.

I daresay it means the same thing.

Mrs. Fergusson.

But I must fly too. I really had no idea it was so late.

Penelope.

Are you doing anything to-night?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, no! I live very quietly. There’s nothing that I enjoy more than an evening all by myself, with a book.

Penelope.

You used to be so fond of going out.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I know that my husband prefers me to remain at home. And when I think of him bravely serving his country in a foreign land I have no heart for gaiety.

Penelope.

What a charming nature you have.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Dickie.] My husband’s in a man-of-war. He’s stationed at Malta, you know. It’s so dreadful that my health forces me to remain in England.

Penelope.

I wonder if you’d do me a great kindness.

Mrs. Fergusson.

My dear, I’ll always do anything for an old friend.

Penelope.

The fact is, I’ve had a perfectly fiendish headache the whole afternoon.

Dickie.

[Triumphantly.] I knew there was something the matter with you the moment I came in.

Penelope.

We’ve got a couple of stalls for a music hall to-night. It would be awfully kind of you if you’d go with Dickie instead of me.

[A look of intelligence passes between Dickie and Mrs. Fergusson.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I?

Penelope.

Dickie hates going out alone, and I simply can’t stir. You can have a jolly little dinner together at a restaurant, and you can go on afterwards.

Dickie.

Are you really sure you can’t go, Pen?

Penelope.

It’s absolutely out of the question.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Don’t you think Dr. O’Farrell ought to stay and look after you?

Penelope.

Oh, no! It’ll do him good to go out. He’s been working so dreadfully hard. This afternoon he had a consultation that lasted nearly an hour.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Dickie.] Would you like me to come with you?

Dickie.

I should love it, if it wouldn’t bore you.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Then I shall be delighted.

Penelope.

Thanks so much. But it’s getting very late. I think you ought to start at once.

Dickie.

You’re sure you don’t mind my leaving you, Penelope?

Penelope.

Positive.

Dickie.

Well, just wait a moment, and I’ll make you up a dose of something.

Penelope.

[Hastily.] Oh, no, I promise you I’m much better without medicine.

Dickie.

Nonsense. Of course I must give you something.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Fergusson.

That’s the advantage of having a doctor in the family.

Penelope.

[Crossly.] Yes, it’s a great advantage.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I do envy you, having your husband always at hand. When I think of mine bravely serving his country — and you know, every doctor I go to tells me it would be most dangerous for me to join him.

[Dickie comes in with a little medicine glass, filled with a milky fluid.

Dickie.

Here it is.

Penelope.

Oh, no, Dickie, I’d much rather not.

Dickie.

Don’t be silly, darling. This’ll pull you together like anything.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’m sure she ought to lie down.

Penelope.

No, I think I’d rather stand up if you don’t mind.

Dickie.

How extraordinarily unreasonable you are! Now lie down on this sofa.

Penelope.

Of course, if I absolutely must.

[She lies down on a sofa.

Mrs. Fergusson.

We must make you comfortable before we go.

Dickie.

Let’s put all the cushions behind her. Is that nice?

Penelope.

Yes, thank you.

Dickie.

Poor little thing.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’m sure she ought to have something over her feet.

Dickie.

Let’s put this rug over her feet. There. Now take this medicine.... There....

Penelope.

Oh, no, Dickie. I’ll take it after you’ve gone. I really will. I promise you I’ll take it.

Dickie.

Why on earth can’t you take it now?

Penelope.

Well, I hate making faces before you.

Dickie.

But I’ve often seen you make faces.

Penelope.

Yes, at you. That’s quite a different thing.

Dickie.

Now, take it like a good girl.

Penelope.

After you’ve gone.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With great determination.] I’m not going to stir from this room till you’ve taken it.

Penelope.

[Resigned.] Give it me. Hold my nose, Dickie.

[She swallows it and makes a face.

Oh, I wish I’d never married you, Dickie.

Dickie.

It’ll make you feel like one o’clock.

Penelope.

I don’t want to feel like one o’clock.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Good-bye. So sorry you’re feeling seedy.

Dickie.

Good-bye, darling.

Penelope.

I hope you’ll have an awfully good time.

[Dickie and Mrs. Fergusson go out. Penelope springs up, throws the cushions angrily aside, makes one or two quick steps towards the door as though to call them back, then stops.

Penelope.

No, I won’t. I won’t.

[She comes slowly back, then sinks down and bursts into tears.

End of the First Act.

THE SECOND ACT

Scene: Dr. O’Farrell’s consulting-room. It is a comfortably furnished room, with engravings on the walls, photographs in silver frames, and flowers on the chimney-piece. There is a large desk on one side, with papers on it, books, and a reading-lamp. There is a revolving-chair for Dickie to sit in, and a chair on the other side of the desk for the patient. On a side table are a microscope, a stand for test tubes, one or two medicine bottles, a row of large bottles containing chemicals, and an electric lamp. There is a sofa without arms for patients to lie upon, and there are two or three chairs besides. On the shelves are medical books. On a little table is a pile of “Lancets.”

Dickie is sitting at his desk, with his stethoscope still in his ears. A patient is standing up, buttoning up his braces. He puts on his waistcoat and coat as the conversation proceeds. He is a very timid little man, with a bald head and gold spectacles. He has an intensely nervous, apologetic manner.

Dickie.

I’ll just write you out a prescription, shall I?

Patient.

Oh, it’s too good of you. I’m afraid I’m giving you so much trouble.

Dickie.

Not at all. Now what would you like me to give you?

Patient.

[Dreadfully embarrassed.] Oh, whatever you like, please. It’s too good of you.

Dickie.

You know, there’s not much the matter with you.

Patient.

Oh, I’m so sorry. I really, really....

Dickie.

I should have thought you’d be rather pleased.

Patient.

[Apologetically.] Yes, of course, I’m very much pleased. I didn’t mean that. I’ve taken up so much of your time.

Dickie.

It’s only out of the people who’ve got nothing the matter with them that I make a living. The people who are ill either get well or die, and that’s the end of them.

Patient.

Yes, I see. I never thought of that. Beautiful day it is, isn’t it?

Dickie.

Won’t you sit down?

Patient.

Oh, it’s too good of you. Thank you, thank you. I’m afraid I’m taking up so much of your time.

Dickie.

I always make my patients sit on the other side of my desk since one of them suddenly saw a snake on me, and flung himself at my throat in order to save me from being bitten. He nearly throttled me in the process, and when I knelt on his chest, he said I was an ungrateful devil, and he wouldn’t interfere with the snakes next time they went for me.

Patient.

[Extremely agitated.] Oh, but you don’t think there’s any danger of my flying at your throat, do you?

Dickie.

[With a laugh.] No, of course not.

Patient.

I drink nothing for my luncheon, and only claret and water for my dinner.

Dickie.

I suppose you wouldn’t think you’d had your money’s worth if I gave you no medicine?

Patient.

Oh, it’s too good of you, but I think, for my wife’s sake, I’d like to take something.

Dickie.

Well, look here, I’ve given you some strychnine to buck you up, and some bismuth to quiet you down. Take it three times a day after meals.

Patient.

Oh, thank you so much. I’m sure it’s just what I want. And now — er. And now — er....

[He gets up, overcome with embarrassment.

Dickie.

I think there’s nothing more I can do for you.

Patient.

No, er — thank you very much. I — er — it’s so good of you to have taken so much trouble. Yes, er....

Dickie.

[Understanding.] Oh.... My fee is two guineas.

Patient.

[Infinitely relieved.] Oh, thank you so much. That’s just what I wanted to ask you. Shall I write you a cheque?

Dickie.

We always prefer to have it in hard cash, you know, in case it’s a bogus cheque.

Patient.

Oh, certainly. It’s too good of you. I thought you mightn’t like it.

Dickie.

It’s extraordinary how nervous people are about giving a doctor money. If you only knew how jolly glad he is to get it.

Patient.

Yes. Thank you very much.

[The patient takes two guineas out of his pocket and puts them nervously on the chimney-piece.

Dickie.

Hang it all, man, not on the mantelpiece. There are limits.

Patient.

Oh, I beg your pardon. I’m so sorry.

Dickie.

We always like it put on the desk.

Patient.

I don’t often come and consult doctors.

Dickie.

I can see that. If you did you’d probably give me two pounds and say you hadn’t got two shillings on you, especially if you were a woman.

Patient.

You don’t say so. Really it never occurred to me.

Dickie.

Thank you. Well, good-bye.

Patient.

Good-bye, and thank you so much. Beautiful day, isn’t it? Good-bye.

[Dickie leads him to the door and shows him out. At the door he sees Golightly.

Dickie.

Hulloa! Come in, won’t you? [Calling upstairs.] Pen, here’s your noble parent.

[Golightly comes in.

Golightly.

I was just going up to see Pen.

Dickie.

Come and sit down here, and we’ll have a smoke.

Golightly.

Aren’t you expecting patients?

Dickie.

Oh, it’s just on five o’clock. I don’t suppose any one else will come. We might have tea down here.

Golightly.

How are things going?

Dickie.

Rotten. Look here, a wretched two guineas. That’s all I’ve made this afternoon.

[Penelope comes in.

Penelope.

Well, father?

Golightly.

Kiss your noble parent, my child. You’ve got a new dress on.

Penelope.

I rather like it, don’t you?

Dickie.

Is that another new frock, Pen?

Penelope.

Yes, darling. Why?

Dickie.

Oh, nothing.

Penelope.

The wife of a fashionable physician has to spend a lot of money on her clothes.

Golightly.

Dickie was lamenting that times were very bad.

Dickie.

What can you expect with this beastly weather! Fine, dry, cold day after day. We haven’t had a fog this autumn. It doesn’t give one a chance. Of course everybody keeps well. Times are getting worse and worse. Everybody has decent drains now. An officious Government gives people pure water. If it weren’t for patent medicines and the malade imaginaire half the doctors in London would starve.

Penelope.

Never mind, Dickie. There may be a motor accident just outside our front door one of these days.

Dickie.

It would be just like my luck if they were all killed outright. No, what I want is a really good epidemic, a very complicated form of influenza that’d keep people on their backs for about a month.

Penelope.

And supposing I got it?

Dickie.

Well, if you got it that bounder on the other side of the street would have to treat you. And he couldn’t charge you as you’re my wife, and he’d simply grind his teeth at having to waste his time.

Penelope.

The bounder on the other side of the street is Dr. Rogers. I like him much better than Dickie.

Dickie.

Pompous ass.

Penelope.

He’s got such a pleasant bedside manner.

Dickie.

You’ve never seen my bedside manner. [Looking at his hands.] I say, I must just go and wash my hands, they’re covered with Picric Acid.

[Exit.

Penelope.

Where’s mother? Converting the heathen?

Golightly.

From the safe distance of the Albert Hall.

Penelope.

[With a change of manner.] I’m glad you came alone.

Golightly.

Is anything the matter?

Penelope.

[Breaking out.] I can’t go on with it any longer. I’ve come to the end of my strength.

Golightly.

Is Dickie still ...?

Penelope.

Yes. I can’t imagine what he sees in her. I sit and watch her sometimes and wonder what she has that I haven’t got. You don’t think I’m plain, do you?

Golightly.

Certainly not. If you had been I should have exposed you at your birth, like the ancient Spartans.

Penelope.

There are lots of men who are willing to tell me that I’m extremely attractive.

Golightly.

Why don’t you let them?

Penelope.

My dear father, you’re the most immoral parent I’ve ever come across.

Golightly.

[With a little deprecatory shrug.] It might be politic.

Penelope.

[Shaking her head.] No, I don’t know whether I shall ever get Dickie back again, but I don’t want to get him back by exciting his jealousy. I don’t want his love if I can only have it by making him think other men are in love with me.

Golightly.

Remember that two and two never make five.

Penelope.

[Impatiently.] It’s easy enough to give advice. You’ve only got to sit still and watch. I’ve got to do things. And the worst of it is that doing things means doing nothing.

Golightly.

My dear.

Penelope.

Now, father, don’t look as if you didn’t understand or I shall throw something at your head. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could be up and doing, but I just have to sit still and keep my temper. You don’t know what I’ve suffered this month with a smiling face. I’ve laughed while my heart ached. I’ve chaffed Dickie when I’ve known he was just going to meet Ada Fergusson. I’ve arranged little parties so that they might be together. I haven’t even dared to cry by myself in case Ada Fergusson should see that my eyes were red and tell Dickie. He’s seen her every day, every single day for the last month, and all the time I’ve been cheerful and pleasant and amusing.

Golightly.

But how does he manage to get the time?

Penelope.

Of course he’s been neglecting his practice. He’s sent his assistant to people he ought to have seen himself. You remember Mrs. Mack, don’t you?

Golightly.

[Smiling.] The imaginary Mrs. Mack? Yes.

Penelope.

If you knew how I hated Mrs. Mack! She’s been having operations. She has an operation about once a week, and Dickie goes off for the whole day in his car.

Golightly.

She must have the constitution of a boa-constrictor.

Penelope.

And the curious thing is that she always has an operation when there’s a race meeting. She had an operation for the Duke of York’s Stakes at Kempton; and she had another operation for the Cesarewitch, and a third for Sandown.

Golightly.

How very singular.

Penelope.

It is till you know that Ada Fergusson adores racing. And the thing that makes me so furious is that I’m quite certain Dickie puts on her money for her; and when her horse wins she pockets the profits, and when it loses she doesn’t pay her stake.

Golightly.

That sounds very nasty of her. What makes you think it?

Penelope.

I do it myself.... Poor Dickie, it’s going to cost him a lot of money this month.

Golightly.

Why?

Penelope.

Because whenever he goes out for the day I have to console myself by buying something. I generally choose something rather dear.

Golightly.

I don’t remember that I advised that in the treatment of a volatile husband.

Penelope.

No, I added it of my own accord.

Golightly.

But why did you send for me to-day?

Penelope.

Because the end has come. And I can’t stand it any longer. This morning Dickie said that Mrs. Mack was well enough to be moved, and he was going to take her over to Paris to put her in the Riviera train.

Golightly.

Do you mean to say that....

Penelope.

[With an angry shrug of the shoulders.] Ada Fergusson wants a little jaunt in Paris.

Golightly.

What are you going to do?

Penelope.

I’m going to tell him he must choose between us. I’m going to do everything I can to prevent him from going. And I mean to let him know that if he goes it’s the end.

Golightly.

Oh!

Penelope.

Don’t say oh! Say I’m quite right. Say it’s the only thing to do.

Golightly.

But I think you’re quite wrong.

Penelope.

Wrong!

Golightly.

You don’t suppose he wants to go to Paris. No man in his senses would take the risk.

Penelope.

Then why is he going?

Golightly.

Because she’s making him. And once a woman in these circumstances makes a man do what he doesn’t want to, it’s the beginning of the end.

Penelope.

How d’you know?

Golightly.

I don’t know. I guess it.

Penelope.

It seems to me that a lifetime spent in the study of mathematics has resulted in some very various knowledge.

Golightly.

Be a good girl, Pen, and let them go.

[There is a pause while Penelope, resting her face on her hands, looks straight at her father. She thinks the matter out.

Penelope.

You were right when you said I should want a great deal of tact, and a great deal of patience, and a great deal of self-control. My word!

Golightly.

[Smiling.] Well?

Penelope.

I’ll do nothing. I’ll hold my tongue, I’ll smile, I’ll make jokes, but....

Golightly.

Yes?

Penelope.

I want some hats badly. I’ll just go and ring up Françoise and tell her to send me all she’s got in the shop.

[Dickie comes in.

Golightly.

I was just going.

Dickie.

I’m sorry. Why so soon?

Golightly.

I promised to fetch my wife.

Penelope.

You must come back. This is the first time I’ve been separated from Dickie since our marriage, and I shall want to hide my head in the maternal bosom while my noble father pats my hand.

Dickie.

I wish you wouldn’t take it so calmly, Pen. You might be a bit cut up.

Penelope.

But, darling, I’m making every preparation to have fit after fit of violent hysterics. I can’t do more.

Dickie.

Rot me, that’s right.

Penelope.

[With meaning.] After all, Dickie, I know you wouldn’t go if you could help it. It’s only because you feel it’s your duty, isn’t it?

[Dickie is rather uncomfortable, but says nothing. Golightly breaks the momentary silence.

Golightly.

Why are you going by night?

Dickie.

[Relieved.] Oh, you see, there’s so much less of a crowd. It’s more convenient when you’re carting an invalid about.

Penelope.

[Gaily.] It’ll be great fun, because you’ll see all the gay young men who are making a little excursion to Paris with the object of their affections. I’m told they always go by night so that no one should see them on the journey.

Golightly.

Well, I must be getting on or I shall be late. Au revoir.

Penelope.

Don’t be too long, father, in case my emotions get the better of me before you come back.

Golightly.

[Nodding.] I may see you later, Dickie.

[He goes out. Penelope makes as if to follow him.

Penelope.

I’m going upstairs to have tea.

Dickie.

[Rather stiffly.] I’d like to have a little talk with you, Pen.

Penelope.

Then come up into the drawing-room.

Dickie.

I’d rather talk to you down here.

Penelope.

[Sitting down.] Very well. Talk.

Dickie.

You can send for the tea if you like.

Penelope.

No; I’ll let it stand and ruin my digestion.

Dickie.

[Taking papers out of his pocket and giving them to Penelope.] D’you know what these are?

Penelope.

[With a charming smile.] Bills, darling?

Dickie.

I can see they’re bills, thank you!

Penelope.

[Flourishing one of them.] This is for the frock I’ve got on. You wouldn’t think it cost so much, would you? [Looking down at it.] You see, you have to pay for the cut.

Dickie.

[Trying to keep his temper.] And what do you expect me to do with them?

Penelope.

[Indifferently.] You can put them in the waste-paper basket if you like, but it would be shorter to pay them.

Dickie.

[Flying into a passion.] Now, look here, Pen. It’s perfectly preposterous. You know I’m not going to stand this sort of thing.

Penelope.

[Apparently much astonished, quite good-humouredly.] Darling, you’re not going to make a scene for a few little things I’ve bought myself. I was positively in rags, and I thought you liked me to dress neatly.

Dickie.

Hang it all, I’m a poor man, and you’ve spent more than a hundred and fifty pounds in this one month.

Penelope.

[Calmly.] Does it come to as much as that? It’s lucky you’ve got such a good patient in Mrs. Mack, isn’t it?

[He gives her a suspicious look, but to get away from Mrs. Mack breaks out angrily.

Dickie.

Senseless extravagance I call it. Now look here, here’s thirty-five pounds for a dress in blue cloth — absurd price to pay — on 9th of October.

Penelope.

Duke of York’s Stakes at Kempton.

Dickie.

How d’you mean, Duke of York’s Stakes at Kempton?

Penelope.

I just happen to remember they were on that day because Madame Claude was so surprised to see me. It was only by the merest chance that she hadn’t gone to the races herself.

Dickie.

But what on earth put it into your head to go and buy a blue cloth dress?

Penelope.

[Sweetly.] Well, you see, darling, it was the day of the first operation that was performed on Mrs. Mack. And you were away all day, and I felt awfully depressed and lonely. And I knew how anxious you were, and it made me anxious, so I just went and ordered a blue cloth to cheer myself up a bit.

[Dickie looks at her for a moment, then looks down at the bill, is about to speak, but says nothing. Penelope watches him.

Dickie.

[Suddenly.] And look here, on the 13th of October there’s an ermine stole and a muff.

Penelope.

Yes, that was the second operation on poor Mrs. Mack.

Dickie.

I say, I think it’s a bit thick.

Penelope.

Well, I had to do something while you were away. And it made me feel so miserable to see everybody driving off with race glasses to Liverpool Street.

Dickie.

I beg your pardon.

Penelope.

You see, the 13th of October was the Cesarewitch.

Dickie.

And I suppose all the others are to be explained in the same way. [Looking at a bill.] October 22.

Penelope.

Sandown Races.

[Dickie looks through the bill crossly, but does not speak.

[Innocently.] I wonder why you always had your operations on the same day as an important race meeting.

Dickie.

I suppose you think it odd?

Penelope.

A little.

Dickie.

Well, it isn’t odd at all. It’s one of old Peter Marsden’s cranky ways. I told you it was Peter Marsden who did the operations, didn’t I? [Penelope nods.] The fact is, he’s simply mad on racing. And he’s lost such a pot of money that he always fixes an important operation for the same day as a race meeting so that he absolutely won’t be able to go to it.

Penelope.

Funny old thing.

[Dickie looks up suspiciously.

[With a laugh.] Peter Marsden, not you, darling.

Dickie.

Now look here, Pen, we’ll say no more about these bills. I’ll pay them this time....

Penelope.

I knew you would.

Dickie.

But there must be no more of them.

Penelope.

I really don’t know why you should make such a fuss. After all, you’ve been earning simply heaps and heaps of money with Mrs. Mack.

Dickie.

We mustn’t count our chickens before they’re hatched. I haven’t had a penny out of her yet.

Penelope.

But now that she’s going away you can send in your bill.

Dickie.

Oh, I couldn’t possibly. It would kill her.

Penelope.

Don’t you think you might risk it?

Dickie.

I think you’re awfully heartless, Pen. You forget that I’m very much attached to the old lady. I look upon her as a friend as well as a patient.

Penelope.

Perhaps she’ll leave you something in her will. We want a new electric brougham, don’t we?

Dickie.

Oh, I shouldn’t accept it. I have the strongest feeling against doctors getting legacies from their patients.

Penelope.

Well, you’ll be able to charge at least a hundred and fifty pounds for taking her to Paris.

Dickie.

[With a start.] Pen!

Penelope.

Oh, you made me jump.

Dickie.

You’re not proposing to buy anything more?

Penelope.

Well, darling, I know that when I get up to-morrow morning and you’re not here, I shall feel dreadfully lonely and depressed.

Dickie.

[Interrupting.] Have your sainted mother to stay with you.

Penelope.

And it’s struck me that I simply haven’t got a hat I can wear.

Dickie.

[Sternly.] Penelope.

Penelope.

[Persuasively.] It’ll make my frocks last so much longer if I have some nice hats. You see, you ring the changes, and people think you have a new gown on.

Dickie.

And may I venture to inquire how many hats you’ll want to overcome your depression?

Penelope.

[Decidedly.] Three.

Dickie.

I never heard anything so preposterous.

Penelope.

Now look here, Dickie, I’m willing to meet you half way; I promise you they shan’t cost more than five pounds each. You can afford that out of the hundred and fifty.

Dickie.

The fact is, Pen, that Mrs. Mack is more a friend than a patient, and she’s not so well to do as I thought. I’m proposing to make no charge for accompanying her to Paris.

Penelope.

[Quite firmly.] Oh, no, Dickie, I won’t hear of it. You’ve got a wife to think of — if you died to-morrow I should be totally unprovided for. You have no right to be quixotic. It’s not fair to me.

[Dickie is just going to answer when Peyton comes in.

Peyton.

A lady wishes to see you, sir.

Dickie.

[Irritably.] At this hour?

Peyton.

It’s Mrs. Watson, sir.

Dickie.

Oh, yes, I know. Show her in.

[Exit Peyton.

Dickie.

Thank heaven, there’s somebody. I’ll get a few guineas out of her at all events. [Looking at his case book.] Four visits. That’ll be five guineas. By Jove, I want them.

Penelope.

What’s the matter with her?

Dickie.

I don’t know, but I’m pretending I do. And she probably won’t find out.

Penelope.

I’ll leave you. I must just telephone to some one.

[She goes out. Dickie walks up and down irritably. When Mrs. Watson appears he at once puts on his professional manner, and is very bland and affable. Mrs. Watson is a little, old lady in black.

Dickie.

Well, Mrs. Watson?

Mrs. Watson.

You mustn’t mind my coming so late. I know you don’t see any one after five, but I’m going away.

Dickie.

I’m delighted to see you. I promise you that.

Mrs. Watson.

I’m starting for the Riviera with my daughter to-morrow, and I thought I’d like to see you again before I went.

Dickie.

Of course. And how have you been getting on?

Mrs. Watson.

[With the keenest satisfaction.] Oh! I don’t get on. I never get better.

Dickie.

Have you been taking your medicine regularly?

Mrs. Watson.

[Cheerfully.] Yes; but it doesn’t do me any good.

Dickie.

Let’s try your knee jerks, shall we?

[Mrs. Watson crosses one leg over the other, and Dickie taps below the knee; the leg is slightly jerked up.

Dickie.

That seems right enough.

Mrs. Watson.

Sir Benjamin Broadstairs tried everything, and he couldn’t cure me; and then I went to Sir William Wilson, and he told me not to do any of the things that Sir Benjamin Broadstairs told me to do, and I got worse and worse!

Dickie.

You seem uncommonly cheerful about it.

Mrs. Watson.

I’ve been to every doctor in London, and they all say I’m a wonderful case. I like being examined by doctors, and they take such an interest in me. The hours and hours they’ve spent over me. I can never be grateful enough for all the kindness I’ve had from them.

Dickie.

It’s very nice of you to say so. I think I’ll try you on something else to-day.

Mrs. Watson.

Oh! make it nice and strong; won’t you, doctor?

Dickie.

You seem to like your medicine with some body in it.

Mrs. Watson.

Well, I like taking medicines. It’s something to do; and now my daughter’s married I’m very much alone. I think I’ve taken every medicine in the Pharmacopœia, and they’ve none of them done me any good.

Dickie.

[Handing her a prescription.] Well, perhaps this will. You must take it three times a day before meals.

Mrs. Watson.

[Looking at it.] Oh! but I’ve had this before, Dr. O’Farrell. Sir Arthur Thomas gave me this only a few months ago.

Dickie.

Well, try it again. Perhaps you didn’t give it a fair chance.

Mrs. Watson.

I was reading in the Lancet the other day that a German doctor had discovered a new medicine which does nerve cases such a lot of good. I’m sure it’s the very thing for me.

Dickie.

What on earth were you reading the Lancet for?

Mrs. Watson.

Oh, I always read the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. You see, my poor husband had to take them in for his practice.

Dickie.

[With a gasp.] You don’t mean to say your husband was a doctor?

Mrs. Watson.

Oh, I thought I told you that I was a doctor’s widow.

[Dickie tries to master his agitation while Mrs. Watson prattles on.

Mrs. Watson.

I can never bear to hear doctors spoken badly of. They never do me any good, but they’ve been kindness itself. I’ve only once been rudely treated, and that — if you’ll believe it — was by a mere nobody. I told him all my symptoms, and he said to me, Madam, can you eat? Yes, I said. I have breakfast in the morning and a little soup at eleven o’clock; and then I have lunch, and I always make a good tea, and I eat a little dinner at half-past seven, and before I go to bed I have some bread and milk. Then he said, Madam, can you sleep? Yes, I said, for an old woman I sleep very well; I sleep eight or nine hours regularly. Then he said, Madam, can you walk? Oh! yes, I said, I always make a point of walking four miles a day. Then he said, My opinion is that you’ve got nothing the matter with you at all. Good afternoon.

Dickie.

Fancy.

Mrs. Watson.

Well, I just looked him up and down, and I said to him, Sir, your opinion is not shared by Sir Benjamin Broadstairs, or Sir William Wilson, or Sir Arthur Thomas. And I didn’t even offer him a fee, but I just swept out of the room. [Archly.] You won’t give me that new medicine?

Dickie.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s quite what you want.

Mrs. Watson.

Very well. I expect you know best. And now I mustn’t take up any more of your time.

Dickie.

[Sarcastically.] Oh, it’s of no value, thank you.

Mrs. Watson.

[Persuasively.] Will you tell me what I owe you?

Dickie.

Oh, as a doctor’s widow, of course, I couldn’t dream of accepting a fee.

Mrs. Watson.

That is kind of you. But you must allow me to give you a little present.

Dickie.

[Rather feebly, but brightening up a little.] Oh, really, you know....

Mrs. Watson.

I’ve seen every doctor in London of any importance, and they’ve none of them charged me a penny, but I always make them a little present. I know that you doctors have to go out in all weathers, and you never wrap yourselves up. So I give them a woollen comforter.

[She takes out of her bag a large red woollen comforter.

Dickie.

[Blankly.] Oh, thank you very much.

Mrs. Watson.

I made it myself.

Dickie.

Did you!

Mrs. Watson.

And Sir Benjamin promised to wear his every winter. You’ll find it so warm.

Dickie.

I’m very grateful to you.

Mrs. Watson.

And now, good-bye, and thank you so much.

Dickie.

When you come back from the Riviera, you might do worse than consult Dr. Rogers. He lives just at the other end of the street, you know. He’s very good in cases like yours.

Mrs. Watson.

Thank you so much.

Dickie.

Good-bye.

[She goes out, and he shuts the door. He runs to the other and calls out.

Dickie.

Pen! Pen!

Penelope’s Voice.

Yes.

[There is a knock at the door.

Dickie.

[Irritably.] Come in.

[Mrs. Watson enters.

Mrs. Watson.

I knew there was something I wanted to ask you particularly, and I nearly forgot it. Sir Benjamin Broadstairs said I ought never to eat anything but toast, and Sir William Wilson said he didn’t think toast was at all good for me, and I only ought to eat bread. Now, I wonder what I had better do?

Dickie.

[Seriously, as if he were deliberating.] Well, if I were you, I’d eat bread toasted only on one side.

Mrs. Watson.

Thank you so much. Good-bye. I hope you’ll like the comforter.

Dickie.

I’m sure I shall. Good-bye.

[She goes out again, and Dickie shuts the door.

Dickie.

Pen! Pen!

[Penelope comes in by the other door.

Penelope.

What is the matter?

[Dickie goes up to her furiously with the comforter in his hands.

Dickie.

Look! That’s my fee! That!

Penelope.

It’s a woollen comforter.

Dickie.

Don’t be idiotic, Penelope. I can see it’s a woollen comforter.

Penelope.

But what’s the meaning of it?

Dickie.

She’s a doctor’s widow. Of course I couldn’t charge her anything. She kept it dark till to-day. I’ll tell you what, doctors’ widows oughtn’t to be allowed to survive their husbands.

Penelope.

Oh!

Dickie.

When you’re my widow, Pen, you go right up one side of Harley Street and then right down the other and see them all.

Penelope.

But supposing I’m not ill?

Dickie.

Hang it all, when you’ve lost me the least you can do is to enjoy indifferent health.

[Peyton comes in.

Peyton.

If you please, sir, Mrs. Watson says, may she just see you for one minute.

Dickie.

[Resigned.] Yes.

[Exit Peyton.

Dickie.

What the dickens does she want now?

[Peyton shows Mrs. Watson in.

Mrs. Watson.

You’ll think you’ve never seen the last of me.

Dickie.

[Blandly.] Not at all. Not at all.

Mrs. Watson.

I’ve been thinking about what you said about toasting my bread on one side.... On which side shall I put the butter?

Dickie.

[With his chin in his hand.] H’m. H’m. You must put the butter on the toasted side.

Mrs. Watson.

Oh, thank you. Now just one more question, do you think a little jam would hurt me?

Dickie.

No, I don’t think a little jam would hurt you, but you mustn’t put it on the same side as you put the butter.

Mrs. Watson.

Oh, thank you. Good afternoon. I’m so much obliged.

Dickie.

Not at all. Not at all.

[Mrs. Watson goes out.

Dickie.

[Shaking his fist at the door.] Suttee.... That’s the word. Suttee.

Penelope.

Dickie, what are you talking about?

Dickie.

I’ve been trying to think of it for ten minutes. That’s what doctors’ widows ought to do — Suttee. Like the Hindoos.

Penelope.

Burn themselves alive at their husbands’ death?

Dickie.

You’ve hit it. Suttee. That’s the word.

Penelope.

But, darling, I should hate to grace your funeral by making a bonfire of myself.

Dickie.

Oh, you have no affection for me.

Penelope.

Lots, but that’s asking a great deal, isn’t it?

Dickie.

No, you don’t care for me as much as you used to. You’re quite different. I’ve noticed lots of things.

Penelope.

[With a rapid glance at him, but keeping her chaffing manner.] Oh, nonsense.

Dickie.

You’ve changed lately. You never come down to see me off in the morning, and you don’t ask me at what time I’m coming back. You always used to sit on the arm of my chair after breakfast when I was smoking my pipe and reading the paper.

Penelope.

You must have hated it, didn’t you?

Dickie.

Of course I hated it, but it showed you were fond of me, and now that you don’t do it any more I miss it.

[Peyton comes in, followed by Mrs. Fergusson, and withdraws.

Peyton.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Dickie gives a slight start, and shows faint signs of annoyance. He cannot make out what Mrs. Fergusson has come for.

Mrs. Fergusson.

The maid told me you were here, so I asked her to show me straight in. I hope you don’t mind.

Penelope.

Of course not. We’re delighted to see you anywhere. Won’t you have some tea?

Mrs. Fergusson.

No, thank you. The fact is, I’ve come to see Dr. O’Farrell professionally.

Penelope.

You’re not ill?

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’ve not been very well lately, and I thought I’d like to see a doctor. [To Dickie.] Will you treat me?

Dickie.

I’ll do anything I can for you.

Mrs. Fergusson.

But it must be really a professional visit. You know, I want to pay.

Penelope.

Oh, nonsense, Dickie couldn’t dream of accepting money from one of my friends.

Mrs. Fergusson.

No, I’ve got the strictest principles on that point. I think it’s too bad of people to want a doctor to treat them for nothing. I really insist on paying the usual fee.

Dickie.

Oh, well, we’ll discuss that later.

Penelope.

I’ll leave you alone, shall I?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Do you mind, dear? It makes me a little uncomfortable to discuss my symptoms before a third party.

Penelope.

Of course.

Mrs. Fergusson.

We shall only be five minutes.

Penelope.

I warn you that Dickie’s medicines are perfectly beastly.

[She goes out.

Dickie.

I’m sorry you’re seedy. You were all right yesterday.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Laughing.] I’ve never been better in my life, thank you.

[Dickie is rather taken aback.

Mrs. Fergusson.

That’s the advantage of you being a doctor. When I want to see you alone I can do it under your wife’s very nose. Don’t you think it was rather ingenious?

Dickie.

[Dryly.] Very.

[She gives a little laugh. She gets up and steps cautiously to the door, and suddenly flings it open.

Dickie.

What on earth are you doing?

Mrs. Fergusson.

I wanted to see if Penelope was listening.

Dickie.

[Rather sharply.] Of course she wasn’t listening. That’s about the last thing she’d do.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, my dear, don’t get in a temper about it. Lots of women do listen, you know.

Dickie.

Do they? I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting them.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Fiddle.

Dickie.

Then will you tell me in what way I can be of use to you?

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Good-humouredly.] Certainly not, if you ask me as crossly as that. You may kiss my hand. [He does so.] That’s right. Still cross?

Dickie.

No.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Do you love me as much as ever?

Dickie.

Yes.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You wouldn’t say no if you didn’t, would you?

Dickie.

No.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Brute!

Dickie.

[Rather impatiently.] I say, what on earth have you come for?

Mrs. Fergusson.

You are nice to me to-day.

Dickie.

Well, when I left you yesterday we fixed up everything. I gave you your ticket, and I wrote down the time the train started.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Well, for one thing I wanted to see Penelope.

Dickie.

Why?

Mrs. Fergusson.

It amuses me to see her simplicity. I get a lot of pleasure in looking at her and thinking how little she suspects what is going on under her very nose. She’s the most trusting person I ever met in my life.

Dickie.

If you want to know anything, it makes me feel devilish uncomfortable.

Mrs. Fergusson.

My poor, dear boy, what are you talking about?

Dickie.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we had to take any precautions. But she trusts us absolutely. Why, she’s always throwing us together. It never enters her head that there can be the least reason for suspicion. It’s like knocking a man down who can’t defend himself.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I suppose that means that you no longer love me?

Dickie.

Of course I love you. Good heavens, I’ve told you so till I’m blue in the face.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, no, you no longer love me. Men only begin to have scruples when they stop caring for you.

[Dickie gives a sigh of resignation. This is not the first scene he has had to put up with.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’ve sacrificed everything for your sake. And now you insult me. And when I think of my poor husband bravely serving his country in a foreign land! Oh, it’s cruel, cruel!

Dickie.

But I’ve only said it made me feel low down to treat Penelope badly.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You don’t think of my feelings. You don’t think how I feel. What about my husband?

Dickie.

Well, you see I don’t happen to know your husband, and I do know my wife.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Don’t be so stupid. Of course you know your wife.

Dickie.

That’s why I don’t like behaving like an utter cad.

Mrs. Fergusson.

If you really loved me you would think of nothing but me, nothing, nothing, nothing.

[She puts her handkerchief to her eyes.

Dickie.

Oh, I say, don’t cry.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I shall cry. I’ve never been treated like this before. If you don’t love me any more, why don’t you say so?

Dickie.

Yes, I do love you. But....

Mrs. Fergusson.

But what?

Dickie.

[Nervously.] Well — er — I think it would be much better if we — put the trip to Paris off for a bit.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Gasping with anger.] Oh! Oh! Oh!

Dickie.

Penelope’s so blindly confident.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’ll never speak to you again. I wish I had never met you. Oh, how can you insult me like this!

[She begins to sob.

Dickie.

Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! I say, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to be horrid. I’m awfully sorry.

[He tries to take away her hands from her face.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.

Dickie.

I’ll do anything you like if you won’t cry. I say, just think if Penelope came in — I was only thinking of the risk to you. Of course, there’s nothing I’d like so much as a jaunt over the Channel.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Is that true?

Dickie.

Yes.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Do you really want me to come?

Dickie.

Of course I do, if you don’t mind the risk.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With a smile.] Oh, I’ll make that all right.

Dickie.

Why, what are you going to do?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Wait a minute or two and you’ll see.

[She is perfectly composed again, and in high good-humour.

Dickie.

We might tell Penelope that we’re ready.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Very well. [As Dickie goes to the door.] Oh, I quite forgot. I’ve simply got a head like a sieve.

Dickie.

What’s the matter?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Well, I almost forgot the very thing I came to see you about. And all through you making a scene.

Dickie.

Did I make a scene? I wasn’t aware of it.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I want to ask you something. You won’t be angry, will you?

Dickie.

I shouldn’t think so.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Of course it’s nothing very important really, but it’s just a little awkward to ask.

Dickie.

Oh, nonsense. Of course I’ll do anything I can.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Well, a friend of mine on the Stock Exchange gave me a splendid tip, and....

Dickie.

It hasn’t come off. I know those splendid tips.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, but it’s bound to be all right, only there are some differences to pay. I don’t quite understand what it all means, but Solly Abrahams....

Dickie.

[Interrupting.] Is that your friend on the Stock Exchange?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Yes, why?

Dickie.

Oh, nothing. Good old Scotch name, that’s all.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Solly says I must send him a cheque for a hundred and eighty pounds.

[Dickie gives a slight start, and his face falls.

Mrs. Fergusson.

And it’s just a little awkward for me to pay that just now. You see my income is always paid me half-yearly, and I really haven’t got a hundred and eighty pounds in the bank. I never borrow — it’s a thing I can’t bear — and I felt the only person I could come to now was you.

Dickie.

I’m sure that’s awfully nice of you, not to say flattering.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I knew you’d give it me at once, and, of course, I’ll pay you back out of my profits.

Dickie.

Oh, that’s very good of you. I’ll see what I can do.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Would it be too much trouble if I asked you to write out a cheque now? It’ll be such a weight off my mind.

Dickie.

Of course. I’ll be only too glad. By the way, what are the shares called?

[He sits down at his desk and writes a cheque.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, it’s a gold mine. It’s called the Johannesburg and New Jerusalem.

Dickie.

The name inspires confidence.

[He gives her the cheque.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Thanks, so much. It’s awfully good of you. Now just write out a little prescription so as to have something to show Penelope.

Dickie.

You forget nothing.

[He writes.

Mrs. Fergusson.

And I must give you a fee.

Dickie.

Oh, I wouldn’t bother about that.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh yes, I insist. Besides, it makes it look so much more probable.

[She looks in her purse.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, how stupid of me! I’ve only got a two-shilling bit in my purse. You don’t happen to have a couple of sovereigns on you.

Dickie.

Oh, yes, I think I have. The only money I’ve earned to-day.

[He takes them out of his pocket and gives them to Mrs. Fergusson. She puts them on the desk with a two-shilling piece.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Thank you.... There. That looks a most imposing fee. You must leave it on there for Penelope to see.

Dickie.

Shall I call her?

Mrs. Fergusson.

I will. [She goes to the door and calls.] Penelope, we’ve quite done.

Dickie.

[Hearing voices upstairs.] Hulloa, there’s our Uncle Davenport.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, I met him in the park the other day. He made himself so pleasant. He asked me if I was a Fergusson of Glengary. I didn’t know what he meant, but I said I was, and he seemed so pleased.

Dickie.

You’d better not let him know you were a Miss Jones or he’ll have a fit.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, I shall tell him I’m a Jones of Llandudno. I think that sounds rather smart.

Dickie.

You have what one might politely describe as a remarkable power of invention.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I don’t know about that, but I am a womanly woman, and that’s why men like me.

[Penelope and Barlow come in.

Barlow.

Ah, Mrs. Fergusson, this is a delightful surprise.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You wicked, wicked man, I am told you’re such a rake.

Penelope.

Uncle Davenport?

Barlow.

[Delighted.] Ah, ah. Tales out of school, Mrs. Fergusson.

Mrs. Fergusson.

If I’d known what a reputation you had I wouldn’t have let you talk to me for half an hour in the park.

Barlow.

[Bubbling over with delight.] Oh, you mustn’t listen to all you hear. A man who goes out as much as I do is sure to get talked about. Our world is so small and so censorious.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Dr. O’Farrell has been writing a prescription for me. I haven’t been very well lately.

Barlow.

Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. You look the picture of health and extremely handsome.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, you horrid cruel thing! I wanted you to sympathise with me and tell me how ill I looked.

Barlow.

If you will allow me to call on you I can promise to sympathise with you, but I’m afraid I shall never be able to tell you that you look anything but charming.

Mrs. Fergusson.

That’s too nice of you. You must come and see me the moment I get back from Paris.

[Dickie gives a start.

Penelope.

Are you going to Paris?

Mrs. Fergusson.

I came on purpose to tell you. Really, I’ve got a head like a sieve. Poor Mrs. Mack has asked me if I would go as far as Paris with her. A most unfortunate thing has happened. Her maid’s mother has suddenly died, and the poor thing naturally wants to go to the funeral. And so....

Penelope.

Mrs. Mack has asked you to go in her maid’s place?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Only for two days, of course. Now, I want to know, dear, tell me honestly, do you mind?

Penelope.

I?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Some women are so funny. I thought you mightn’t like the idea of my going with Dr. O’Farrell as far as Paris, and, of course, we shall be travelling back together.

Penelope.

What nonsense! Of course, I’m only too glad. It’ll be so nice for Dickie to have some one to travel with.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Then that settles it. I like to do everything above board, you know.

Barlow.

[Seeing the guineas on the desk.] I see you’ve been raking in the shekels, Dickie.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, that’s my fee. I insisted on paying a fee — I particularly want you to know that, Penelope — I’m so scrupulous about that sort of thing.

Penelope.

Oh, but Dickie can’t accept it. [To Dickie.] You are a grasping old thing!

Dickie.

I’m sure I didn’t want the money.

Penelope.

You really must take it back, Ada.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Putting up a defensive hand.] No, I couldn’t really. It’s one of my principles.

Penelope.

I know your principles are excellent, but I really shouldn’t like Dickie to accept a fee for seeing my greatest friend.

[Penelope takes up the money and gives it to Mrs. Fergusson.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, well, of course, if you take it like that, I don’t know what to do.

Penelope.

Put it in your purse and say no more about it.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, it’s too good of you.

[She puts it in her purse. Dickie’s face falls as he sees his own money disappearing.

Mrs. Fergusson.

And now I must really fly. [Holding out her hand to Barlow.] Good-bye. Don’t forget to come and see me, but, remember, I shall expect to hear all about that little ballet-girl.

Barlow.

[Delighted to be thought so gay.] You mustn’t ask me to be indiscreet.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Penelope.] Good-bye, dear.

Penelope.

I’ll come to the door with you.

[Penelope and Mrs. Fergusson go out.

Dickie.

[Going to the telephone.] I don’t believe you’ve ever known a ballet-girl in your life.

Barlow.

No, but it pleases women of our class to think one is hand and glove with persons of that profession.

Dickie.

Central 1234. If they only knew that nine ballet-girls out of ten go home every night to their children and a husband in the suburbs! I just want to ring up my broker. Is that you, Robertson? I say, d’you know anything about a mine called the Johannesburg and New Jerusalem? Rotten? I thought as much. That’s all, thank you. [He puts on the receiver — to himself, acidly.] A hundred and eighty pounds gone bang.

Barlow.

Look here, Dickie, now that you have a moment to spare you might give me a little professional advice. Of course, I shan’t pay you.

Dickie.

Good Lord! I might as well be a hospital. I’m not even supported by voluntary contributions.

Barlow.

The fact is, I’ve noticed lately that I’m not so thin as I was.

Dickie.

It can’t have required great perspicacity to notice that.

Barlow.

I’m not asking you for repartee, Dickie, but advice.

Dickie.

You don’t want to bother about a figure at your time of life.

Barlow.

To tell you the truth, I have an inkling that I’ve made something of an impression on a very charming lady....

Dickie.

[Interrupting.] Take my advice and marry her quickly before the impression wears off.

Barlow.

Strange as it may appear to you, she’s a married woman.

Dickie.

Then don’t hesitate — do a bolt.

Barlow.

What do you mean, Dickie?

Dickie.

My dear Uncle Davenport, I’m young enough to be your son; philandering with a married woman is the most exaggerated form of amusement that’s ever been invented. Take care! That’s all I say. Take care!

Barlow.

Why?

Dickie.

She’ll bind you hand and foot, and put a halter round your neck and lead you about by it. She’ll ask you ten times a day if you love her, and each time you get up to go away she’ll make a scene to force you to stay longer. Each time you put on your hat she’ll pin you down to the exact hour of your next visit.

Barlow.

But all women do that. It only shows that they like you.

Dickie.

Yes, I suppose all women do that — except Pen. Pen never bothers. She never asks you if you love her. She never keeps you when you want to get away. She never insists on knowing all your movements. And when you leave her she never asks that fatal, fiendish question, at what time will you be back?

Barlow.

Well, my boy, if my wife were as indifferent to me as that, I should ask myself who the other feller was.

Dickie.

What the dickens do you mean by that?

Barlow.

My dear Dickie, it’s woman’s nature to be exacting. If she’s in love with you she’s always a nuisance, and a very charming nuisance too, to my mind. I like it.

Dickie.

You are not suggesting that Penelope....

Barlow.

Now, my dear boy, I didn’t come to talk to you about Penelope, but about my own health.

Dickie.

[Impatiently.] Oh, you’ve got chronic adiposity. That’s all that’s the matter with you.

Barlow.

Good gracious me, that sounds very alarming. And what shall I do for it?

Dickie.

[Savagely, very quickly.] Give up wines, spirits and liqueurs, bread, butter, milk, cream, sugar, potatoes, carrots, cauliflowers, peas, turnips, rice, sago, tapioca, macaroni, jam, honey, and marmalade.

Barlow.

But that’s not treatment, that’s homicide!

Dickie.

[Taking no notice.] Put on a sweater and run round the park every morning before breakfast. Let’s have a look at your liver.

Barlow.

But, my dear Dickie....

Dickie.

Lie down on that sofa. Now don’t make a fuss about it. I’m not going to kill you. [Barlow lies down.] Put your knees up.

Barlow.

[As Dickie feels his liver.] She’s a fine, dashing woman. There’s no doubt about that.

Dickie.

Let yourself go quite loose. Who’s a fine, dashing woman?

Barlow.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Dickie starts. He gives Barlow a look, and then walks away, open-mouthed.

Barlow.

Dickie, Dickie.

[Much alarmed he gets off the sofa.

Barlow.

Is my liver very wrong?

Dickie.

[Completely abstracted.] It’s in a beastly state. I thought it would be.

Barlow.

[In tragic tones.] Richard, tell me the worst at once.

Dickie.

[Impatiently.] Don’t be such an old donkey. Your liver’s as right as mine is. There’s nothing the matter with you except that you do yourself too well, and don’t take enough exercise.

Barlow.

[With unction.] I suppose one has to pay for being the most popular diner-out of one’s time.

Dickie.

[Looking at him sharply.] Is it on Mrs. Fergusson that you’ve made something of an impression?

Barlow.

[With great self-satisfaction.] My dear fellow, I am the last man to give a woman away.

Dickie.

Ah!

Barlow.

Between ourselves, Dickie, do you think Mrs. Fergusson would find it peculiar if I asked her to lunch with me tête-à-tête at the Carlton?

Dickie.

Peculiar! She’d jump at it.

Barlow.

Do you think her husband would mind?

Dickie.

Oh, her husband’s all right. He keeps on bravely serving his country in a foreign land.

Barlow.

It shows that she has a nice nature, or she wouldn’t have come to ask Penelope if she minded your going to Paris together.

Dickie.

Yes, she has a charming nature.

Barlow.

Lucky dog, I wish I were going to Paris with her.

Dickie.

[Fervently.] I wish you were.

Barlow.

Ha, ha. Well, well, I must be running away. I’m dining out as usual. These good duchesses, they will not leave me alone. Good-bye.

[He goes out. Dickie walks up and down the room thinking. In a moment Penelope puts her head in.

Penelope.

I say, darling, oughtn’t you to be packing?

Dickie.

Come in and let’s smoke a cigarette together.

Penelope.

All right.

[She takes a cigarette, which he lights for her.

Penelope.

I hope you’ll have a splendid time in Paris.

[She sits down.

Dickie.

You never sit on the arm of my chair as you used to.

Penelope.

I’m horribly afraid I’m growing middle-aged. I’ve discovered how much more comfortable it is to have a chair of my own.

Dickie.

[Trying to hide a slight embarrassment.] Weren’t you rather surprised when Mrs. Fergusson told you she was going to Paris to-night?

Penelope.

Surprised?

[Penelope gives a little gurgle, tries to stifle it but cannot, then, giving way, bursts into peal upon peal of laughter. Dickie watches her with increasing astonishment.

Dickie.

What on earth are you laughing at?

Penelope.

[Bubbling over.] Darling, you must think me an old silly. Of course, I knew you were going together.

Dickie.

[Thoroughly startled.] I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Penelope.

I have tried not to see anything, but you do make it so difficult.

Dickie.

[Making up his mind to be very haughty.] Will you have the goodness to explain yourself?

Penelope.

My dear, of course I know all about it.

Dickie.

I entirely fail to gather your meaning. What do you know all about?

Penelope.

About you and Ada, silly.

Dickie.

[Very haughtily.] Penelope, do you mean to say you suspect me of ...?

Penelope.

[With an affectionate smile.] Darling!

Dickie.

[Suddenly alarmed.] What d’you know?

Penelope.

Everything.

[He gives a gasp and looks at Penelope anxiously.

Penelope.

I’ve been so amused to watch you during the last two months.

Dickie.

Amused?

Penelope.

Upon my word, it’s been as good as a play.

Dickie.

[Quite at a loss.] Have you known all along?

Penelope.

My dear, didn’t you see that I did everything in the world to throw you together?

Dickie.

But I assure you there’s not a word of truth in it.

Penelope.

[Good-humouredly.] Come, come, Dickie!

Dickie.

But why haven’t you said anything?

Penelope.

I thought it would only embarrass you. I didn’t mean to say anything to-day, but I couldn’t help laughing when you asked me if I was surprised.

Dickie.

Aren’t you angry?

Penelope.

Angry? What about?

Dickie.

Aren’t you jealous?

Penelope.

Jealous? You must think me a little donkey.

Dickie.

You took it as a matter of course? It amused you? It was as good as a play?

Penelope.

Darling, we’ve been married for five years. It’s absurd to think there could be anything between us after all that time.

Dickie.

Oh, is it? I wasn’t aware of that fact.

Penelope.

The whole thing seemed to me of no importance. I was pleased to think you were happy.

Dickie.

[Flying into a passion.] Well, I think it’s positively disgraceful, Penelope.

Penelope.

Oh, my dear, don’t exaggerate. It was a harmless peccadillo.

Dickie.

I’m not talking of my behaviour, but of yours.

Penelope.

Mine?

Dickie.

Yes, scandalous I call it.

Penelope.

[Quite disappointed.] And I thought it was so tactful.

Dickie.

Tactful be blowed. You must be entirely devoid of any sense of decency.

Penelope.

My dear, I haven’t done anything.

Dickie.

That’s just it. You ought to have done something. You ought to have kicked up a row; you ought to have made scenes; you ought to have divorced me. But just to sit there and let it go on as if it were nothing at all! It’s too monstrous.

Penelope.

I’m awfully sorry. If I’d known you wanted me to make a scene of course I would have, but really it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about.

Dickie.

I’ve never heard anything so callous, anything so cold-blooded, anything so cynical.

Penelope.

You are difficult to please.

Dickie.

But don’t you realise that I’ve treated you abominably.

Penelope.

Oh, no, you’ve always been the best and most discreet of husbands.

Dickie.

No, I’ve been a bad husband. I’m man enough to acknowledge it. And I mean to turn over a new leaf, Penelope; I will give Ada up. I promise you never to see her again.

Penelope.

Darling, why should you cause her needless pain? After all, she’s an old friend of mine. I think the least I can expect is that you should treat her nicely.

Dickie.

D’you mean to say you want it to go on?

Penelope.

It’s an arrangement that suits us all three. It amuses you, Ada has some one to take her about, and I get a lot of new frocks.

Dickie.

Frocks?

Penelope.

Yes, you see, I’ve been consoling my aching heart by replenishing my wardrobe.

Dickie.

So you’re willing to sacrifice our whole happiness to your frocks. Oh, I’ve cherished a viper in my bosom. I may have acted like a perfect beast, but, hang it all, I do know what’s right and wrong. I have a moral sense.

Penelope.

It seems to have displaced your sense of humour.

Dickie.

Do you know that all these weeks I’ve been tortured with remorse? I’ve told myself every day that I was treating you shamefully, I’ve not had a moment’s happiness. I’ve lived on a perfect rack.

Penelope.

It doesn’t seem to have had any serious effect on your health.

Dickie.

And here have you been laughing up your sleeve all the time. It can’t go on.

Penelope.

Upon my word, I don’t see why not?

Dickie.

We’ve been mistaken in one another. I’m not the man to stand such a position with indifference. And I’ve been mistaken in you, Penelope. I thought you cared for me.

Penelope.

I dote upon you.

Dickie.

That’s a jolly nice way of showing it.

Penelope.

That’s just what I thought it was.

Dickie.

You’ve outraged all my better nature.

Penelope.

Then what do you propose to do?

Dickie.

I’m going to do the only possible thing. Separate.

Penelope.

[Hearing voices in the hall.] Here are papa and mamma. They said they were coming back.

Dickie.

I hope they’ll never find out what a wicked, cruel woman you are. It would send down their grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.

Penelope.

But, my dear, they know all about it.

Dickie.

What! Is there any one who doesn’t know?

Penelope.

We didn’t tell Uncle Davenport. He’s such a man of the world, he has no sense of humour.

[Peyton comes in to announce the Golightlys, then goes out.

Peyton.

Professor and Mrs. Golightly.

[The Golightlys come in.

Penelope.

[Kissing Mrs. Golightly.] Well, mother ... Papa, Dickie wants to separate from me because I won’t divorce him.

Golightly.

That doesn’t sound very logical.

Mrs. Golightly.

What has happened?

Penelope.

Nothing’s happened. I can’t make out why Dickie’s so cross.

Dickie.

[Indignantly.] Nothing!

Penelope.

I didn’t mean to say anything about it, but Dickie found out that we knew all about his little love affair.

Golightly.

My dear, how tactless of you! A man likes to keep those things from his wife.

Dickie.

And d’you know the attitude Penelope takes up?

Golightly.

She hasn’t been making a scene?

Dickie.

That’s just it. Any woman of feeling would make a scene. There must be something radically wrong about her, or she would have wept and stamped and torn her hair.

Golightly.

[Mildly.] Oh, my dear boy, don’t you exaggerate the enormity of your offence?

Dickie.

There are no excuses for me.

Golightly.

It was a mere trifle. It would show a lamentable want of humour in Penelope if she took it seriously.

Dickie.

D’you mean to say you agree with her?

Golightly.

My dear fellow, we’re in the twentieth century.

Dickie.

Oh! Mrs. Golightly, you spend your time in converting the heathen. Don’t you think your own family needs some of your attention?

[Penelope, unseen by Dickie, makes a face at Mrs. Golightly to induce her to keep up the scene.

Mrs. Golightly.

A long acquaintance with savage races has led me to the conclusion that man is naturally a polygamous animal.

Dickie.

My brain reels.

Mrs. Golightly.

I confess I was relieved to hear it was a married woman. It seems to make it so much more respectable.

Dickie.

It appears to me I’m the only moral man here.

Penelope.

Dickie, darling, I haven’t been having an affair with the policeman.

Dickie.

I wish you had. I wouldn’t have treated you like this.

Penelope.

I thought of it, but I didn’t like the colour of his moustache.

Dickie.

I know I’m to blame. I’ve behaved like a perfect brute.

Penelope.

Oh, nonsense.

Dickie.

Don’t contradict, Penelope. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself.

Golightly.

Come, come!

Dickie.

I repeat, there are no excuses for me.

Mrs. Golightly.

Poor fellow, he seems quite cut up.

Dickie.

I haven’t a leg to stand on, but, by Jove, I’ve got a moral sense, and I tell you all that I’m simply outraged. You’re overthrowing the foundations of society. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve got more respect for the sanctity of the home and the decencies of family life than all of you put together.

[He flings towards the door, stops, and turns round to shake his fist at them.

Dickie.

A moral sense. That’s what I’ve got.

[He goes out, slamming the door behind him.

Penelope.

[With a laugh.] Poor darling.

Golightly.

What on earth made you blurt it all out?

Penelope.

She came here to-day, and I saw that he was sick to death of her.... Mamma, you behaved like a heroine of romance.

Mrs. Golightly.

I shall never forgive myself for the dreadful things you’ve made me say.

Penelope.

Oh, yes, you will, mother. Fast an extra day all through next Lent. It’ll be equally good for your soul and for your figure.

Mrs. Golightly.

Penelope!

Penelope.

[To Golightly.] I suddenly felt the moment had come.

Golightly.

Take care.

[Dickie bursts violently into the room.

Dickie.

I say, what are these two confounded women doing in the hall?

Penelope.

What women? Oh, I know.... [She goes to the door.] Please come in. They’re from Françoise. The Modiste.

[The girls come in, laden with hat boxes.

Penelope.

You told me I might get a hat or two to console myself for your trip to Paris.

Golightly.

Very nice of you, Dickie. That shows you haven’t a selfish nature.

[Penelope makes another face at her mother.

Mrs. Golightly.

You’ve never given me a free hand to buy hats, Charles.

Golightly.

On the other hand, I’ve never taken little jaunts to Paris without you, my dear.

Mrs. Golightly.

Some women are so lucky in their husbands.

[Meanwhile the girls have been taking hats out, and Penelope puts one on. She is perfectly delighted.

Penelope.

Oh, isn’t this a dream? [Looking at the other.] Oh! oh! Did you ever see anything so lovely? Dickie, you are a dear. I’m so glad you’re going to Paris.

Dickie.

[Furiously.] I’m not going to Paris.

Penelope.

What!

Dickie.

Take all these hats away.

Penelope.

But Mrs. Mack?

Dickie.

Mrs. Mack can go to the devil.

[He seizes the telephone.

Dickie.

Hulloa, hulloa. Gerrard 1234. Tell Mrs. Fergusson that Mrs. Mack has had a relapse, and will not be able to go to Paris to-night.

End of the Second Act.

THE THIRD ACT

Scene: Penelope’s boudoir. It is an attractive room, furnished with bright-coloured chintzes, and gay with autumn flowers and great bunches of leaves. There is a large looking-glass. It is a room to live in, and there are books and magazines scattered about. Photographs of Dickie in every imaginable attitude.

Pen, in a ravishing costume, is alone, standing in the middle of the room. She looks at herself in the glass and turns right round, smiling with satisfaction. She preens herself. Suddenly she sees something she does not quite like; she frowns a little, then she makes a face at herself, solemnly and elaborately curtsies, and gaily throws herself a kiss.

Peyton comes in, followed by the Golightlys.

Peyton.

Professor and Mrs. Golightly.

Penelope.

[Stretching out her arms.] Oh, my sainted mother!

Mrs. Golightly.

[Out of breath.] I’ve never climbed up so many stairs in my life.

Penelope.

I told Peyton to bring you up here so that no one should come and bother us. [With a dramatic gesture.] My noble father!

Golightly.

My chiyld!

Mrs. Golightly.

Don’t be ridiculous, Pen.

Penelope.

Sit down, mamma, and get your breath back, because I’m just going to take it away again.

Mrs. Golightly.

It sounds hardly worth while.

Penelope.

Dickie adores me.

Mrs. Golightly.

Is that all?

Penelope.

But it’s the most surprising, exquisite, wonderful thing in the world, and I’m in the seventh heaven of delight.

Golightly.

But has he told you so?

Penelope.

Oh, no, we’re not on speaking terms at present.

Golightly.

Ah, I suppose you express your mutual affection in dumb show.

Penelope.

He went out immediately after you left last night, and didn’t come home till past twelve. I heard him stop at my door, so I huddled myself under the bed-clothes and pretended to be fast asleep, but I just let my hand drop carelessly over one side of the bed. Then he gave a tiny little knock, and as I didn’t answer he came in, and he crept up on tip-toe, and he looked at me as if — as if he’d like to eat me up.

Golightly.

Penelope, you’re romancing. How on earth could you know that?

Penelope.

[Putting her finger at the back of her head.] I saw him through the back of my head — there. And then he bent down and just touched my hand with his lips. [Showing her hand to Golightly.] Look, that’s where he kissed it — just on the knuckle.

Golightly.

[Gravely looking at her hand.] It seems to have left no mark.

Penelope.

Don’t be silly. And then he crept softly out again, and I had the first really good sleep I’ve had for a month. And this morning I had my breakfast in bed, and when I got up he’d gone out.

Mrs. Golightly.

You haven’t seen him to-day at all?

Penelope.

No, he didn’t come in to luncheon.

Mrs. Golightly.

Well, Charles, I’m grateful that you never showed your passion for me by keeping systematically out of my way.

Penelope.

But, my dear, it’s so simple. Of course, he’s in a dreadful temper. I’ve made him feel a perfect fool, and he hates it. But, good heavens! after five years I know how to deal with him when I’ve hurt his pride. I’ll just give him a chance of saving his face, and then we’ll fall into one another’s arms and be happy ever afterwards.

[Golightly, who has been sitting near a table, draws a sheet of paper towards him and begins, meditatively, to write.

Mrs. Golightly.

But, darling, don’t waste the precious hours, do it at once.

Penelope.

No, I’m wiser than that. I’m not going to do anything till Ada Fergusson is quite disposed of.

Mrs. Golightly.

Has anything been seen of her?

Penelope.

No, but I expect her here every minute.

Mrs. Golightly.

[With a gasp.] Here?

Penelope.

She rang up last night and spoke [imitating a man’s tones] in a deep voice, like this, so that I shouldn’t recognise her. She asked if Dickie was at home, and I said he wasn’t. [Imitating the man’s voice again.] Will you ask him to ring up Mrs. Mack as soon as he comes back? Oh! I said, I think he’s been at Mrs. Mack’s all the evening, and I rang off quickly. And this morning I just took the receiver off, and I think by now Ada must be in a pretty temper.

[She catches sight of Golightly and goes up to look at what he is writing.

Penelope.

[Tapping the table sharply with her open hand.] Two and two don’t make five, father.

Golightly.

I never said they did, darling.

Penelope.

Then why are you writing it down?

Golightly.

You seem to think they do, my dear; and I have the highest respect for your intelligence.

Penelope.

Mamma, if you thought it absolutely necessary to provide a father for your offspring, I wish you had chosen one who wasn’t quite so irritating.

[Golightly does not answer, but quietly adds two and two together. Penelope watches him for a moment.

Penelope.

D’you think I’m a perfect fool, father?

Golightly.

Yes, my dear.

Penelope.

Why?

Golightly.

You’re preparing for Dickie once more an uninterrupted diet of strawberry ices.

[Penelope goes up to her father and sits down opposite to him. She takes the pencil out of his hand.

Penelope.

Put that down, father, and tell me what you’re talking about.

Golightly.

[Joining his hands and leaning back in his chair.] How are you going to keep your husband’s love now you have got it back?

Penelope.

[With a nod and a smile.] I’m never going to bore him with demonstrations of affection. I’m never going to ask him if he loves me. And when he goes out I’m never going to inquire at what time he’ll be back.

Golightly.

[Calmly.] And what will you do when the next pretty little grass-widow throws herself at his head?

Penelope.

[Rather outraged at the mere thought.] I hope he’ll duck and dodge her.

Golightly.

[With a deprecating shrug of the shoulders.] Your mother, from her unrivalled knowledge of heathen races, has told you that man is naturally a polygamous animal.

Mrs. Golightly.

I shall never forgive myself.

Penelope.

Do you mean to say I’m to expect Dickie to have flirtations with half a dozen different women?

Golightly.

I only see one way to avoid it.

Penelope.

And what is that?

Golightly.

Be half a dozen different women yourself.

Penelope.

It sounds dreadfully exhausting.

Golightly.

Remember that man is by nature a hunter. But how the dickens can he pursue if you’re always flinging yourself in his arms? Even the barndoor hen gives her lawful mate a run for his money.

[Penelope looks from her father to her mother. She gives a little sigh.

Penelope.

It was so easy for me to love, honour, and obey him, and so delightful. It never struck me that I ought to keep watch over my feelings.

Golightly.

We all strive for happiness, but what would happiness be if it clung to us like a poor relation?

Penelope.

[Nodding her head.] Strawberry ice for breakfast, strawberry ice for luncheon, and strawberry ice for tea.

Golightly.

Put a Rembrandt on your walls, and in a week you’ll pass it without a glance.

Penelope.

[Pulling out deprecating hands.] Papa, don’t batter me with metaphors.

Golightly.

[With a smile.] Well, you made your love too cheap, my dear. You should have let your husband beg for it, and you made it a drug in the market. Dole out your riches. Make yourself a fortress that must be freshly stormed each day. Let him never know that he has all your heart. He must think always that at the bottom of your soul there is a jewel of great price that is beyond his reach.

Penelope.

Do you mean to say that I must be always on my guard?

Golightly.

A wise woman never lets her husband be quite, quite sure of her. The moment he is — [with a shrug of the shoulders] — Cupid puts on a top-hat and becomes a churchwarden.

Penelope.

[Huskily.] D’you think it’s worth all that?

Golightly.

That is a question only you can answer.

Penelope.

I suppose you mean it depends on how much I love Dickie. [A pause. Tremulously.] I love him with all my heart, and if I can keep his love everything is worth while. [She rests her face on her hands, and looks straight in front of her. Her voice is filled with tears.] But, oh, father, why can’t we go back to the beginning when we loved one another without a thought of wisdom or prudence? That was the real love. Why couldn’t it last?

Golightly.

[Tenderly.] Because you and Dickie are man and woman, my dear.

Penelope.

[With a flash of her old spirit.] But my friends have husbands, and they don’t philander with every pretty woman they meet.

Golightly.

Scylla and Charybdis. The price they pay is satiety. Would you rather have the placid indifference of nine couples out of ten, or at the cost of a little trouble and a little common sense keep Dickie loving you passionately to the end of his days?

Penelope.

[With a roguish twinkle.] You and mamma show no signs of being bored to death with one another.

Golightly.

Your sainted mother has been systematically unfaithful to me for twenty years.

Mrs. Golightly.

Charles!

Golightly.

She has had an affair with the Additional Curates’ Society, and an intrigue with the English Church Mission. She has flirted with Christian Science, made eyes at Homœopathy, and her relations with vegetarianism have left a distinct mark on her figure. How could I help adoring a woman so depraved?

Mrs. Golightly.

[Good-humouredly.] It’s monstrous of you to reproach me, Charles, when you have conducted for years a harem of algebraical symbols.

Penelope.

[Lifting up her hands in mock horror.] And to think that I never knew how immoral my parents were!

Golightly.

[Patting his wife’s hand.] I think we must be the lucky ones, dear. We’ve been married for twenty years....

Penelope.

[Interrupting.] Make it a quarter of a century, father. I really can’t pass for less than twenty-four.

Golightly.

[To his wife.] And we seem to have got on pretty well, don’t we?

Mrs. Golightly.

[Affectionately.] You’ve been very good to me, Charles, dear.

Golightly.

We’ve clomb the hill together....

Penelope.

Sh! sh! sh! I cannot allow my parents to flirt in my presence. I never heard of such a thing.

Golightly.

We tender our apologies.

Penelope.

[Hearing a sound.] Listen. There’s Dickie. Father, quickly — what must I do to make him love me always?

Golightly.

In two words, lead him a devil of a life.

Penelope.

[Ruefully.] If you only knew how I want to fly into his arms and forget the wretched past!

Golightly.

Don’t, but tell him you’re going for a motor trip.

Penelope.

[Her face falling.] Supposing he lets me go?

Golightly.

My dear, a merciful providence has given you roguish eyes and a sharp tongue. Make use of them.

Mrs. Golightly.

Charles, I shall be thankful when you return to your mathematics. The morals of that hussy X are already so bad that you can’t make them much worse.

Penelope.

The fact is, papa, that as a guide for the young you have rather advanced views.

Golightly.

[With a grotesque, dramatic flourish.] Ungrateful child! And I, like the pelican, have offered you my very heart to dine on.

[Dickie comes in. He is a little embarrassed and uncomfortable.

Dickie.

May I come in?

Penelope.

Yes, do!

Dickie.

[Nodding to the Golightlys.] How d’you do?

Golightly.

[To his wife.] Are you ready?

Mrs. Golightly.

[Getting up.] Yes.

Dickie.

I hope I’m not driving you away.

Golightly.

Oh no, we only came in for ten minutes to say good-bye to Penelope.

[Dickie, rather puzzled at this, gives Penelope a quick look.

Dickie.

Are you ...? [He stops.]

Golightly.

I hope you’ll enjoy yourself, dear.

Penelope.

Oh, I’m sure I shall.

Mrs. Golightly.

Good-bye, darling.

Penelope.

[Kissing her mother.] Good-bye.

[She goes to the bell and rings it.

Golightly.

We can find our way out. Don’t bother about Peyton.

Penelope.

I want to speak to her.

Golightly.

Oh, I see. [Nodding to Dickie.] Good-bye.

[The Golightlys go out. Penelope, with a slight smile, lies down on the sofa and takes up a magazine. She pays no attention to Dickie. He gives her a sidelong glance and arranges his tie in the glass. Peyton comes in.

Penelope.

[Looking up from her magazine.] Oh, Peyton, you might pack up some things for me in that little flat portmanteau of the doctor’s. Put my green charmeuse in.

Peyton.

Very well, ma’am.

Penelope.

You can call a cab in half an hour.

Peyton.

Very well, ma’am.

[Exit.

Dickie.

Are you going away?

Penelope.

Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you?

Dickie.

[Stiffly.] No.

Penelope.

How stupid of me! You see, I was expecting you to spend two or three days in Paris with Ada, and I arranged to motor down to Cornwall with the Hendersons.

Dickie.

But I gave up the trip to Paris so as not to annoy you.

Penelope.

[Smiling.] It wouldn’t have annoyed me a bit, darling.

Dickie.

It ought to have annoyed you.

Penelope.

In any case I’m afraid I can’t throw the Hendersons over. They’ve made up a little partie carrée so that we can play bridge in the evenings.

[Dickie goes up to Pen and sits on the sofa beside her.

Dickie.

Look here, Pen, let’s make it up.

Penelope.

[Quite pleasantly.] But we haven’t quarrelled, have we?

Dickie.

[With a smile.] I don’t know whether I want to shake you or hug you.

Penelope.

Well, if I were you, I’d do neither.

Dickie.

[Taking her hands.] Pen, I want to talk seriously to you.

Penelope.

[Releasing them, with a look at the clock.] Have you time?

Dickie.

What on earth d’you mean?

Penelope.

You generally start off for Mrs. Mack’s about now.

[Dickie gets up and walks up and down the room.

Dickie.

[Resolutely.] Mrs. Mack’s dead.

Penelope.

[Jumping off the sofa.] Dead! When’s the funeral?

Dickie.

The date hasn’t been settled yet.

Penelope.

Well, now you’ll be able to send in your bill.

Dickie.

[Nervously.] Pen, Mrs. Mack never existed.

Penelope.

[With a smile.] I never thought she did, darling.

Dickie.

What!

[Penelope giggles.

Dickie.

D’you mean to say you knew all the time that I’d invented her?

Penelope.

I thought it was very nice of you to make up a plausible excuse for being away so much.

Dickie.

Then, when you bought all those things because I was making such a pot of money, you were just pulling my leg.

Penelope.

[With a smile.] Well....

[Dickie suddenly bursts into a shout of laughter.

Dickie.

[When he recovers.] I say, you have scored us off. Upon my soul, you are a wonderful little woman. I can’t think how I ever saw anything in Ada Fergusson.

Penelope.

Oh, but I think she’s charming.

Dickie.

What nonsense! You know you don’t. If you only knew the life she led me!

Penelope.

I suppose she often asked you if you really loved her?

Dickie.

Ten times a day.

Penelope.

And when you left her, did she want to know exactly at what time you’d come back?

Dickie.

How did you know?

Penelope.

I guessed it.

Dickie.

[Going towards her as if to take her in his arms.] Oh, Pen, let’s forget and forgive.

Penelope.

[Getting out of his way.] There’s nothing to forgive, darling.

Dickie.

[Making a step towards her.] I suppose you want me to eat the dust.... I have behaved like a perfect brute. I’m awfully sorry, and I’ll never do it again.

Penelope.

[Eluding him as though by accident.] I daresay the game isn’t worth the candle.

Dickie.

[Trying to intercept her.] Don’t speak of it.

Penelope.

[Keeping out of his reach.] And I was under the impression you were having such a good time.

Dickie.

I was feeling awfully conscience-stricken.

Penelope.

That’s where women have such an advantage over men. Their conscience never strikes them till they’ve lost their figure and their complexion.

Dickie.

[Stopping.] I say, what are you running round the room for in that ridiculous fashion?

Penelope.

I thought we were playing touch-last.

Dickie.

Don’t be a little beast, Pen. You know you love me, and I simply dote upon you.... I can’t do more than I have done.

Penelope.

What d’you want me to do?

Dickie.

I want you to kiss and make friends.

Penelope.

[Quite good-naturedly.] I think you’re a little previous, aren’t you?

Dickie.

I suppose you’re thinking of Ada Fergusson.

Penelope.

I confess she hadn’t entirely slipped my mind.

Dickie.

Hang Ada Fergusson!

Penelope.

I think that’s rather drastic punishment. After all, she did nothing but succumb to your fatal fascination.

Dickie.

That’s right, put all the blame on me. As if it were men who made the running on these occasions! I never want to see her again.

Penelope.

How changeable you are.

Dickie.

[Going towards her eagerly.] I’m never going to change again. I’ve had my lesson, and I’m going to be good in future.

Penelope.

[Getting a chair between herself and him.] Anyhow, don’t you think you’d better be off with the old love before you get on with the new?

Dickie.

Yes, but you might help me.

Penelope.

You don’t want me by any chance to tell Ada Fergusson that you don’t care for her any more?

Dickie.

It’s a devilish awkward thing to say oneself.

Penelope.

I can imagine that the best-tempered woman would take it a little amiss.

Dickie.

I say, can’t you suggest something to help me out?

Penelope.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] My dear, since the days of Ariadne there’s only been one satisfactory way of consoling a deserted maiden.

Dickie.

[With a jump.] Uncle Davenport!

Penelope.

What about Uncle Davenport?

Dickie.

He told me yesterday he thought she was a devilish fine woman.

Penelope.

Oh, no, Dickie, I’m not going to allow you to sacrifice my only uncle.

Dickie.

I’ll just ring him up and tell him she’s not gone to Paris.

Penelope.

No, Dickie. No, Dickie. No, Dickie!

Dickie.

[At the telephone.] Mayfair 7521. I promise you he shall come to no harm. Before it gets serious we’ll tell him that she’s not a Jones of Llandudno, but a Jones of Notting Hill Gate.

Penelope.

[With a giggle.] I don’t think it’s quite nice what you’re doing.

Dickie.

I think it’s horrid. I shall blame myself very much afterwards.

Penelope.

With your moral sense too.

Dickie.

Hulloa, can I speak to Mr. Barlow? Hulloa, is that you, Uncle Davenport? No, I didn’t go to Paris after all. [With a wink at Penelope.] Mrs. Mack had a sudden relapse, and couldn’t be moved. No, Mrs. Fergusson hasn’t gone either.

[Peyton comes in.

Peyton.

Mrs. Fergusson is in the drawing-room, ma’am.

Dickie.

[Speaking down the telephone.] What! Half a minute. Hold on.

Penelope.

I’ve been expecting her all the afternoon. Ask her if she wouldn’t mind coming up here.

Peyton.

Very well, ma’am.

[Exit.

Dickie.

I say, there’s no getting out of it. [At the telephone.] Hulloa. Why don’t you come round? Mrs. Fergusson is calling on Pen, and you can arrange about your luncheon party then.... All right. Good-bye.... I say, I’m going to bolt.

Penelope.

You coward!

Dickie.

[Pretending to be very dignified.] I’m not a coward, Penelope. I shall be back in two minutes. But I’m thirsty, and I’m going to have a brandy and soda.

[He bends down to kiss her, but she moves away.

Dickie.

I say, hang it all, you needn’t grudge me one kiss.

Penelope.

[Smiling.] Wait till you’re off with the old love, my friend.

Dickie.

I think it’s a bit thick that a man shouldn’t be allowed to embrace the wife of his bosom.

Penelope.

You shall afterwards, if you’re good.

Dickie.

I say, she’s just coming. What a blessing this room has two doors!

[He goes out. Penelope gets up, looks at herself in the glass, arranges a stray lock of hair, and powders her nose. Ada Fergusson comes in.

Penelope.

[Kissing her effusively.] Dearest ... I hope you don’t mind being dragged up here.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Of course not. I like this room. I always think it’s just the place for a heart-to-heart talk.

Penelope.

How nice you’re looking!

Mrs. Fergusson.

D’you like my frock?

Penelope.

I always think it suits you so well.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Acidly.] It is the first time I have put it on.

Penelope.

Oh, then I suppose I’ve seen one just like it on other people.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You’ll think I’m coming here a great deal, dearest.

Penelope.

You know that Dickie and I are always glad to see you.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Is Dr. O’Farrell at home? I wanted to ask him something about the medicine he prescribed for me yesterday.

Penelope.

Now don’t say you’ve come to see Dickie. I was hoping you’d come to see me.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I wanted to kill two birds with one stone.

Penelope.

That is a feat of marksmanship which always gives one satisfaction.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I forget if you said that Dr. O’Farrell was at home.

Penelope.

You know, I think you must be the only person who’s known him ten minutes without calling him Dickie.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I should have no confidence in him as a doctor if I did.

Penelope.

I never employ him myself. I always go to Dr. Rogers.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You look as if you had robust health, dearest.

Penelope.

Oh, I just manage to trip along above ground to save funeral expenses.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Is Dr. O’Farrell quite well?

Penelope.

Tired.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Wondering why.] Oh?

[A slight pause.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I suppose you haven’t the least idea when he’ll be home?

Penelope.

I didn’t know he was out.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said he was out.

Penelope.

No.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I must have misunderstood you.

Penelope.

I think he’s lying down. You see he was with poor Mrs. Mack till twelve o’clock last night.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With a slight start.] Was he?

Penelope.

It’s so bad that she should have had a relapse when she seemed to be going on so well.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Puzzled, but trying not to show it.] I was more distressed than I can say.

Penelope.

And it must have been so inconvenient for you after you’d made all your arrangements for going to Paris.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, of course, I didn’t think of my convenience at all.

Penelope.

Dickie says the way you’ve nursed her is beyond all praise.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I think in this life we ought to do what we can for one another. I only did my duty.

Penelope.

So few of us do that.

Mrs. Fergusson.

When I think of my husband bravely serving his country in a foreign land, I feel that I ought to do anything I can to help others.

[Penelope meditatively winks to herself.

Penelope.

Were you there at the end?

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Astounded.] What end?

Penelope.

You don’t mean to say you don’t know?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Penelope, I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about.

Penelope.

But Dickie was with Mrs. Mack all this morning.

Mrs. Fergusson.

That’s absurd.

Penelope.

I wonder you weren’t sent for.

Mrs. Fergusson.

But....

[She is speechless with anger and amazement.

Penelope.

Then you really don’t know?

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Desperately.] I know nothing.

Penelope.

My poor, dear Ada. I’m distracted that I should have to give you this bitter, bitter blow. Mrs. Mack is — dead.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Dead!

Penelope.

She died in Dickie’s arms, thanking him for all he’d done for her.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Impossible!

Penelope.

I don’t wonder you say that. She was quite frisky a day or two ago.... Sit down, dear. You’re quite upset. You were very fond of her, weren’t you?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Dead!

Penelope.

Why don’t you have a good cry? Can’t you find your handkerchief? Take this. It’s very sad, isn’t it? And after all you’d done for her?

[Mrs. Fergusson dabs her eyes with the handkerchief.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Forcing herself to be natural.] It’s a great blow.

Penelope.

Oh, I know. I feel for you, dear. Dickie was devoted to her. He said he’d never had such a patient. [Putting her handkerchief to her own eyes.] She died, with a smile on her lips, mentioning her dead husband’s name. Dickie was so moved, he couldn’t eat any lunch, poor boy; and we’re going to have a new landaulette.

[Dickie comes in and stops at the door for a moment as he sees the two women apparently in tears.

Dickie.

I say, what’s up?

Penelope.

[With a sob.] I’ve just broken the news to poor Ada.

Dickie.

What news?

Penelope.

She didn’t know that Mrs. Mack was — no more.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Trying to conceal her rage and mystification.] I certainly didn’t!

Penelope.

You ought to have let her know, Dickie. She would have liked to be — in at the death.

Dickie.

I wanted to spare you.

Mrs. Fergusson.

It’s too kind of you.

Penelope.

I knew that was it. Dickie has such a kind heart.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With restrained anger.] I have already noticed it.

Penelope.

[To her husband.] And you were so fond of her, weren’t you?

Dickie.

I looked upon her as a real friend.

Penelope.

I’ve told Ada that she expired in your arms, darling.

Dickie.

With a smile on her lips.

Penelope.

That’s just what I said. Murmuring the name of her husband, who’d been dead for forty years. What did you say the name was, Dickie?

Dickie.

Walker, darling.

Penelope.

Tell Ada more. She wants to hear the details.

Dickie.

She asked to be remembered to you. She sent her love to your husband.

Penelope.

She seems to have thought of everything. You must go to the funeral, Dickie.

Dickie.

Yes; I should like to show her that sign of respect.

Penelope.

[To Mrs. Fergusson.] Wouldn’t you like a glass of sherry, dearest? I can see you’re quite upset.

Mrs. Fergusson.

The — news has taken me by surprise.

Penelope.

To tell you the truth, I expected it last night. But I quite understand your emotion.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’m so much obliged for your sympathy.

Penelope.

I’m going to get you some sherry myself.

Dickie.

Oh, let me.

Penelope.

No, stay with Ada, darling. You have such a way with you when one’s in trouble.

Dickie.

[Edging off.] On an occasion like this a woman wants another woman with her.

Penelope.

[Preventing him from moving.] No, you know just the right thing to say. I shall never forget how charming you were when our last cook gave notice.

[She goes out. Mrs. Fergusson springs to her feet.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Now!

Dickie.

Good heavens! You made me positively jump.

Mrs. Fergusson.

What does all this mean?

Dickie.

It means that Mrs. Mack, like the rest of us, is mortal. The funeral takes place the day after to-morrow at Kensal Green. Friends kindly accept this the only intimation.

Mrs. Fergusson.

How can Mrs. Mack be dead? You know just as well as I do that she never existed.

Dickie.

Upon my word, I’m beginning to be not quite certain. I’ve talked about her so much that she seems much more real than — than my bank balance, for instance. And I could write a beautiful article for the Lancet on the case.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Furiously.] Oh!

Dickie.

After all, she did have a rotten time of it, poor old lady. Operation after operation. Life wasn’t worth living. She was bound to die. And I call it a jolly happy release.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Where were you last night?

Dickie.

I was at Mrs. Mack’s — no, of course, I wasn’t. I’m so used to saying that that it slips out quite naturally. I’m awfully sorry.

Mrs. Fergusson.

How can you tell me such lies?

Dickie.

I don’t know. I suppose it’s growing into a habit.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I recommend you to keep them for Penelope.

Dickie.

I suppose you think, then, they don’t matter?

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, she’s your wife. That’s quite another story.

Dickie.

I see.

Mrs. Fergusson.

What d’you mean by saying, I see?

Dickie.

It was the only reply I could think of at the moment.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’m sure you meant something by it.

[Peyton comes in with a tray on which are two wine glasses and a decanter. They keep silence till she has gone out.

Dickie.

Have a glass of sherry, will you?

Mrs. Fergusson.

No.

Dickie.

Well, I think I will if you don’t mind. [He pours himself out a glass.] I have an idea that sherry’s coming into fashion again.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Have you?

Dickie.

I always think I have a knack of making myself pleasant under difficulties.

[He drinks a glass of sherry to give himself courage.

Dickie.

Look here, I’ve got something to tell you that I’m afraid you won’t very much like. I daresay you’ll think me an awful brute, but I’m bound to say it. [Mrs. Fergusson does not answer, and after a moment’s pause he goes on.] The fact is, I’m not built the proper way for intrigue. All these lies make me awfully uncomfortable. I don’t like to think I’m treating Penelope badly. [Another pause.] I may as well tell you the whole truth bang out. I’ve discovered that I’m desperately in love with Penelope.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Calmly.] And?

Dickie.

[Rather surprised.] And that’s all.

Mrs. Fergusson.

And how do you imagine that interests me?

Dickie.

[Quite embarrassed.] I thought — er....

[Mrs. Fergusson goes into a peal of laughter. Dickie, quite taken aback, looks at her with astonishment.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You haven’t been under the impression that I ever cared for you?

Dickie.

[Trying to make it out.] No, no. Of course a man’s a conceited ass who thinks a woman’s in love with him.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You amused me when I first met you, but you’ve long ceased to do that.

Dickie.

It’s kind of you to say so.

Mrs. Fergusson.

It was convenient to have some one to do things for me. I’m a womanly woman and....

Dickie.

You don’t know your way about.

Mrs. Fergusson.

For the last month you’ve bored me to extinction. I’ve done everything in my power to show you except say it right out.

Dickie.

I’m afraid I’ve been very dense.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Dreadfully dense.

Dickie.

But it was good of you to spare my feelings.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With an amiable smile.] D’you think it would be rude if I described you in your own words as a conceited ass?

Dickie.

It might make our future acquaintance rather formal.

Mrs. Fergusson.

There will be no future acquaintance.

Dickie.

Then there’s nothing more to be said.

[Mrs. Fergusson sweeps to the door. She stops.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Does Penelope adore you as blindly as when first I met you?

Dickie.

I venture to think she’s as much in love with me as I am with her.

Mrs. Fergusson.

What have you done with the letters I wrote to you?

Dickie.

I did as we agreed. I burnt them at once.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I didn’t. I kept yours.

Dickie.

I shouldn’t have thought they were interesting enough.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I have an idea that Penelope would find them positively absorbing.

Dickie.

Why don’t you send them to her?

Mrs. Fergusson.

If you have no objection, I think I will.

Dickie.

They will tell her nothing that she doesn’t know already.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Coming back, startled.] You don’t mean to say you’ve told her?

Dickie.

Of course not.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Well?

Dickie.

She’s known it all along.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Known what?

Dickie.

Everything. From the beginning.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Terrified.] How did she find out?

Dickie.

Heaven only knows.

Mrs. Fergusson.

It’s a trap! I might have known she wasn’t such a fool as she seemed. She wants to divorce you, and she’s used me. My husband will never stand that.

Dickie.

I can imagine that even the most affectionate husband would draw the line there.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, don’t try and be funny now.

Dickie.

I wasn’t. The funny part is yet to come.

Mrs. Fergusson.

What?

Dickie.

Well, you needn’t get into a state about it. Penelope’s not going to do anything.

Mrs. Fergusson.

But then, why ...?

Dickie.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] She doesn’t care a hang.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I don’t understand.

Dickie.

Don’t you? It’s very simple. It’s a matter of no importance. She’s glad that I’ve been amused. If she only knew how much amusement I’ve got out of it! She looks upon it in the light of a — of a change of air.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Furiously.] Oh! Oh! Oh! A fortnight’s golf at the seaside, I suppose.

Dickie.

Something like that.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I’d sooner she divorced you.

Dickie.

Thanks, I wouldn’t.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Oh, what a humiliation! I’ve been just a convenience because she had other fish to fry. How sordid it makes the whole thing! And I was yearning for romance. I would never have looked at you if I hadn’t thought she doted on you.

Dickie.

I have an idea that affairs of this sort are only romantic when they happen to other people. When they happen to yourself — well, sordid’s just the word.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Suddenly remembering.] And Mrs. Mack?

Dickie.

She’s known all about that too.

Mrs. Fergusson.

D’you mean that to-day when we ...?

Dickie.

Mingled your tears? I think hers were about as real as yours.

Mrs. Fergusson.

And she led me on to say one thing after another.

Dickie.

I think she’s been pulling both our legs successfully.

Mrs. Fergusson.

How on earth am I going to meet her now?

Dickie.

She’ll be all right. She’ll be just as charming as ever.

Mrs. Fergusson.

You fool! Don’t you see that if she’s charming to me it’s because she thinks she’s prettier than I am, and cleverer than I am, and more fascinating than I am? She doesn’t even despise me, she’s indifferent to me.

[She goes to the glass and looks at herself.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[Furiously.] A change of air.

[The door opens slowly, and Penelope comes in. She has changed into motoring things. Mrs. Fergusson gives a sudden gasp as she sees her and turns her face away. For a moment Penelope stands still, looking at them reflectively. Dickie aimlessly arranges things on a table.

Penelope.

[With a faint smile.] I’m not disturbing you, am I?

Dickie.

Er....

Penelope.

Yes?

Dickie.

Nothing.

[Suddenly, with a sob, Mrs. Fergusson sinks into a chair, and hiding her face bursts into tears. Penelope gives her a look of surprise and goes swiftly up to her. She leans over her, with her hand on Mrs. Fergusson’s shoulder.

Penelope.

[Almost tenderly.] What? Real tears?

Mrs. Fergusson.

[In a broken voice.] I feel so ridiculous.

Penelope.

[With a little smile, as if she were talking to a child.] Don’t. Don’t cry.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I look such a perfect fool.

Penelope.

It’s so tiresome of our little sins to look foolish when they’re found out, instead of wicked.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I shall never respect myself again.

Penelope.

Dry your tears, dear. Uncle Davenport has just come, and he wants to know if it’s respectable to ask you to lunch with him alone.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[With a suspicion of her old manner.] He’s so sympathetic. I’d like to have a heart-to-heart talk with him.

Penelope.

You’ll find the Carlton a most suitable place.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Are my eyes red?

Penelope.

Not a bit. I’ll get you some powder.

[She takes the powder-box off a table, and Mrs. Fergusson meditatively powders her nose.

Mrs. Fergusson.

I like him. He talks of all the duchesses by their Christian names.

[Peyton announces Barlow and goes out.

Peyton.

Mr. Davenport Barlow.

[As he comes in, Mrs. Fergusson finally and entirely regains her usual manner.

Penelope.

[Kissing her uncle.] How d’you do?

Barlow.

[Advancing gallantly to Mrs. Fergusson.] This is a pleasing surprise. I was under the impression you were in Paris.

Mrs. Fergusson.

No, poor Mrs. Mack was suddenly taken much worse.

Barlow.

It is my gain.

Mrs. Fergusson.

It’s too nice of you to say so, but I’m leaving London at once all the same.

Barlow.

But this is very sudden. What shall we do without you?

Mrs. Fergusson.

You must blame Dr. O’Farrell.

Dickie.

[Astonished.] Me?

Mrs. Fergusson.

He tells me that now I’m quite strong enough for a foreign climate, and, of course, nothing will induce me to remain an hour away from my husband if I’m not obliged to.

Barlow.

But I thought he was bravely fighting for his country.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Well, you see, there doesn’t happen to be any fighting for him to do just now, and he’s taken a very nice house at Malta. And I shall start to-morrow.

Barlow.

This is more distressing than I can say. And are you going straight through?

Mrs. Fergusson.

No, I shall stop a day or two in Paris on my way.

Barlow.

How very singular! I had made all arrangements to go to Paris to-morrow myself.

Mrs. Fergusson.

Then would you mind looking after me on the journey? You see, I’m a womanly woman, and I’m quite helpless in the train by myself.

Barlow.

I should look upon it as a privilege. And perhaps we might go to one or two plays while you’re there.

Mrs. Fergusson.

If you’ll promise not to take me to anything risky.

Barlow.

Ha, ha, ha.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Penelope.] Well, dear, I must say good-bye to you. I’m afraid we shan’t meet again for some time.

Penelope.

Good-bye.

[They kiss one another affectionately.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Dickie.] Good-bye. If you hear of anything good on the Stock Exchange, you might let me know. I think I shall cut my loss on Johannesburg and New Jerusalems.

Dickie.

I would.

Mrs. Fergusson.

[To Barlow.] I have a cab downstairs. Can I give you a lift anywhere?

Barlow.

It would be very kind of you.

[With a nod to Dickie she goes out.

Barlow.

[Shaking hands with Penelope.] Charming creature. So dashing and a thorough gentlewoman.

Penelope.

Now, mind, Uncle Davenport, no pranks.

Barlow.

My dear, I’m not only the soul of honour, but fifty-two.

[Exit.

Penelope.

[As he goes out.] I suppose that does induce a platonic state of mind.

Dickie.

[With a sigh of relief.] Ouf!

[Penelope turns to a glass to arrange her hat. Dickie watches her with a smile.

Well?

Penelope.

[Pretending to be surprised.] I beg your pardon?

Dickie.

You promised to kiss me.

Penelope.

I didn’t. I promised to allow myself to be kissed.

Dickie.

[Taking her in his arms and kissing her.] You little beast.

Penelope.

Finished?

Dickie.

Not nearly.

Penelope.

Then I’m afraid you must go on another time. I’ve got a taxi at the door, and it’s costing twopence a minute.

Dickie.

[Stepping back.] What d’you want a taxi for?

Penelope.

[With a laugh.] I thought that would chill your ardour.

Dickie.

You’re not going on that beastly motor trip now?

Penelope.

Why on earth not?

Dickie.

[Half injured, half surprised.] Pen!

Penelope.

[Looking at the watch on her wrist.] Good gracious, I’m keeping them waiting.

Dickie.

[Taking both her hands.] Now don’t tease me. Go and take those horrid motor things off, and let’s have a comfortable little tea together. And tell Peyton you’re not at home.

Penelope.

I’m dreadfully sorry to disappoint you, but I’m afraid I can’t break an engagement.

Dickie.

You’re not serious?

Penelope.

Abnormally.

Dickie.

But, Pen dear, everything’s different now. Don’t you know that I love you?

Penelope.

It’s very nice of you to say so.

Dickie.

Doesn’t it mean anything to you?

Penelope.

Not much.

Dickie.

[Beginning to be rather perplexed.] But, Pen dear, pull yourself together. I love you just as much as you love me.

Penelope.

[With a little smile.] But what makes you think I love you?

Dickie.

[Aghast.] You — you don’t mean to say that you don’t care for me any more?

Penelope.

[Judicially.] I — no longer feel that the world is coming to an end when you go out of the room.

Dickie.

What!... Why don’t you say straight out that you can’t bear the sight of me?

Penelope.

Because it wouldn’t be quite true. I like you very well.

Dickie.

Like me! I don’t want you to like me. I want you to love me.

Penelope.

I wish I could. It would save a lot of bother.

Dickie.

I don’t understand. This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I always thought you adored me.

Penelope.

Why?

Dickie.

Because I adore you.

Penelope.

Since when?

Dickie.

Always, always, always.

Penelope.

Fancy.

Dickie.

Oh, I know I made a fool of myself. I shall never cease to regret it. D’you think I was happy? D’you think I had a jolly time? Not much.... I suppose it’s that. You can’t forgive me?

Penelope.

Nonsense. Of course I forgive you. It doesn’t matter a bit.

Dickie.

[With a gesture of desperation.] The whole thing’s Greek to me. I loved you always, Pen. I never ceased for a moment to love you.

Penelope.

My dear, you need not protest so much. It doesn’t very much interest me either way.

Dickie.

What a fool I was! I ought to have known that if you took it so calmly it could only be because you didn’t care. If a woman doesn’t make scenes it can only mean that she doesn’t love you.... You used to love me?

Penelope.

Yes.

Dickie.

How can you be so fickle? I never thought you’d treat me like this.

[Penelope looks about as if she’d lost something.

Dickie.

What are you looking for?

Penelope.

I fancied you’d lost your sense of humour. I was just seeing if I could find it.

Dickie.

How can I have a sense of humour when I’m suffering?

Penelope.

[Starting at the word.] Suffering?

Dickie.

The tortures of the damned. I want you. I want your love.

[He does not see Penelope’s face. An expression of remorse comes into it at the pain she is causing him. She outlines a gesture towards him, but quickly restrains herself.

Penelope.

[With a mocking laugh.] Poor darling.

Dickie.

[Furiously.] Don’t laugh at me.

Penelope.

I wasn’t. I was quite sorry for you.

Dickie.

D’you think I want your pity?

Penelope.

I’m very unfortunate. I seem quite unable to please you. I think it’s just as well that I’m going away for a week.

Dickie.

[Starting up.] No, you’re not going away.

Penelope.

[Raising her eyebrows.] What makes you think that?

Dickie.

Because I forbid you to.

Penelope.

[Smiling.] And are you under the delusion that at your command I shall fall flat on my face?

Dickie.

I’m the master of this house, and I mean to make myself respected.

Penelope.

My dear, since you pay the rent and the taxes it’s quite right that you should rule this house with a rod of iron if you wish it. Personally, at the moment I only want to get out of it.

Dickie.

You’re not going out of it.

Penelope.

Do you propose to keep me here against my will?

Dickie.

Certainly, if needful.

Penelope.

H’m.

[She gets up and goes to the door. He intercepts her, locks the door, and puts the key in his pocket.

Penelope.

Brute force.

Dickie.

I think it’s about time I showed you I’m not going to be made a perfect fool of.

[Penelope shrugs her shoulders and sits down. Suddenly she chuckles.

Dickie.

I don’t see anything to laugh at.

Penelope.

I do. It’s so mediæval. And are you going to feed me on bread and water?

Dickie.

[Angrily.] Ugh. [He looks at her.] Now, look here, Pen, be reasonable about it. Why the deuce d’you want to go for this stupid trip?

Penelope.

I refuse to discuss the matter till you’ve opened the door.

Dickie.

It’s not the time of year for a motor trip. [Pause. Penelope looks straight in front of her, taking no notice of what he says.] It’ll rain cats and dogs, and you’ll catch a beastly cold. You’ll probably get pneumonia. [Pause.] I’m feeling awfully run down, and I shouldn’t wonder if I were sickening for something myself. [Penelope smothers a giggle and continues to stare into vacancy. Dickie breaks out passionately.] But don’t you see that if I’m preventing you from going, it’s because I can’t bear to let you out of my sight? I want you. I want you always by me. I want you to love me.... Oh, if you only knew how much I love you, you wouldn’t be so heartless.

Penelope.

[Turning to him and speaking quite calmly.] But surely, if you cared for me, you wouldn’t try to deprive me of a little enjoyment. You’d be willing to sacrifice yourself sometimes. You’d have a certain regard for my wishes. You wouldn’t put every absurd obstacle in the way when the chance offers for me to have some amusement.

[Dickie looks at her for a moment then turns away and walks up and down, with downcast head. He takes the key out of his pocket and silently puts it on the table beside her.

Penelope.

What does that mean?

Dickie.

[In a broken voice.] You’re quite right. I’ve simply been beastly selfish. I was only thinking of myself. I dare say I bore you. Perhaps you’ll like me better when you’ve been away for a few days.

[Penelope is so moved that she can hardly keep up her acting any longer. She struggles with herself, and in a moment masters the desire to throw herself in his arms.

Penelope.

Since you locked the door, perhaps you’ll be good enough to unlock it.

[Without a word he takes the key and goes to the door. He unlocks it.

Penelope.

Am I to understand that you offer no objection to my trip?

Dickie.

If it’ll give you pleasure to go, I shall be pleased to think you’re happy. I only want you to be happy.

Penelope.

Would you rather I stayed?

Dickie.

No.

[Penelope gives a slight start. This is not at all what she wants.

Penelope.

Oh!

Dickie.

I don’t know what I shall do without you. I feel as if I were only now getting to know you. It’s as though — oh, I don’t know how to express it.

Penelope.

But you’ve just said you would rather I went.

Dickie.

I don’t want to think of myself any more. I want to think only of you. It makes me so happy to think of you, Pen. I want to sacrifice myself.

Penelope.

[Relieved.] Will you go to my room and see if my bag has been taken down?

[He goes out for a moment. She remains with an ecstatic look on her face. He comes back.

Dickie.

Yes. Peyton’s taken it.

Penelope.

Then — [she gives him a look from beneath her eye-lashes] — ring and tell her to bring it up again.

Dickie.

[Hardly able to believe his good fortune.] Pen!

Penelope.

Are you pleased?

Dickie.

Oh, you’re much too good to me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Oh, Pen, if you only knew how much I adore you!

[He falls on his knees and passionately kisses her hands. She can hardly restrain herself from lifting him up and flinging her arms round his neck.

Dickie.

Is there any chance for me at all? D’you think you’ll ever love me as you used to?

Penelope.

How can I tell?

Dickie.

Oh, why can’t we go back to the beginning? D’you remember how we loved one another then? You used to come down with me every day when I went out, and when I came back you always ran down to kiss me. And d’you remember how you used to sit on my chair in the morning while I smoked my pipe and we read the paper together?

Penelope.

[Concealing a smile.] How you must have hated it!

Dickie.

Hate it? I’ve never been so happy in my life.

Penelope.

At all events I hope we shall always continue to be good friends.

Dickie.

[Starting up.] Friends! What’s the good of offering me your friendship when I’m starving for your love? How can you make me so unhappy?

Penelope.

[Smiling indulgently.] But I’m not going to make you unhappy. I hope I shall always be very pleasant and agreeable.

Dickie.

What d’you think I care for that? Pen, promise that you’ll try to love me?

Penelope.

[With a smile.] Yes, I’ll try if you like.

Dickie.

I’ll make you love me. I’ll never rest till I’m sure of your love.

Penelope.

And when you are sure of it I suppose you won’t care twopence for me any more?

Dickie.

Try me! Try me!

[He kisses her hands again. He does not see her face. She smiles and shakes her head.

Dickie.

I never knew that you were so adorable. It fills me with rapture merely to kiss your hands.

[Penelope gives a little laugh and releases herself.

Penelope.

Now I must just go to the Hendersons and tell them I can’t come motoring.

Dickie.

Can’t you telephone? I don’t want to let you out of my sight.

Penelope.

They’re not on the telephone. It’ll be more convenient for me to go.

Dickie.

Very well. If you must, I suppose you must.

[She smiles and goes to the door. When she reaches it he stops her.

Dickie.

Oh, Pen!

Penelope.

Yes.

Dickie.

At what time will you be back?

[Recognising the phrase, she gives a gesture of amusement, quickly kisses her hand to him, and slips out of the door.

THE EXPLORER

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

CHARACTERS

This play was first produced at the Lyric Theatre on Saturday, June 13, 1908, with the following cast:

Alexander Mackenzie

Lewis Waller

Richard Lomas

A. E. George

Dr. Adamson

Charles Rock

Sir Robert Boulger, Bt.

Owen Roughwood

George Allerton

Shiel Barry

Rev. James Carbery

S. J. Warmington

Captain Mallins

A. Caton Woodville

Miller

Charles Cecil

Charles

P. Digan

Mrs. Crowley

Eva Moore

Lady Kelsey

Mary Rorke

Lucy Allerton

Evelyn Millard

THE EXPLORER

CHARACTERS

Alexander Mackenzie

Richard Lomas

Dr. Adamson

Sir Robert Boulger, Bt.

George Allerton

The Rev. James Carbery

Captain Mallins

Miller

Charles

Lady Kelsey

Mrs. Crowley

Lucy Allerton

Time: The Present Day.

Scene: The First and Third Acts take place at Lady Kelsey’s house; the Second at Mackenzie’s camp in Central Africa; and the Fourth at the house of Richard Lomas.

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE EXPLORER

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: Lady Kelsey’s drawing-room in Mayfair. At the back is a window leading on to a balcony. On the right a door leads to the staircase, and on the left is another door. It is the sumptuous room of a rich woman.

[Lady Kelsey is seated, dressed in black; she is a woman of fifty, kind, emotional, and agitated. She is drying her eyes. Mrs. Crowley, a pretty little woman of twenty-eight, very beautifully dressed, vivacious and gesticulative, is watching her quietly. The Rev. James Carbery, a young curate, tall and impressive in appearance, ponderous and self-important, is very immaculate in a silk waistcoat and a large gold cross.

Carbery.

I cannot tell you how sincerely I feel for you in this affliction, Lady Kelsey.

Lady Kelsey.

You’re very kind. Every one has been very kind. But I shall never get over it. I shall never hold up my head again.

Mrs. Crowley.

Nonsense! You talk as if the whole thing weren’t perfectly monstrous. Surely you don’t for a moment suppose that your brother-in-law won’t be able to explain everything away?

Lady Kelsey.

God forbid! But still, it’s dreadful to think that at this very moment my poor sister’s husband is standing in the felon’s dock.

Carbery.

Dreadful, dreadful!

Lady Kelsey.

If you only knew the agonies I’ve suffered since Fred was arrested! At first I couldn’t believe it, I wouldn’t believe it. If I’d only known such a thing was possible, I’d have done anything to help him.

Carbery.

But had you any idea he was in difficulties?

Lady Kelsey.

He came to me and said he must have three thousand pounds at once. But I’d given him money so often since my poor sister died, and every one said I oughtn’t to give him any more. After all, someone must look after his children, and if I don’t hoard my money a little, George and Lucy will be penniless.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, you were quite right to refuse.

Lady Kelsey.

I thought it would only go in senseless extravagances as all the rest has gone, and when he said it was a matter of life and death, I couldn’t believe it. He’d said that so often.

Carbery.

It’s shocking to think a man of his position and abilities should have come to such a pass.

Mrs. Crowley.

Dear Mr. Carbery, don’t draw the very obvious moral. We’re all quite wretched enough as it is.

Lady Kelsey.

And two days later Lucy came to me with a white face to say that he had been arrested for forging a cheque.

Carbery.

I only met him once, and I’m bound to say I thought him a most charming man.

Lady Kelsey.

Ah, that’s what ruined him. He was always so entirely delightful. He could never say no to any one. But there’s not an atom of harm in him. I’m quite certain he’s never done anything criminal; he may have been foolish, but wicked never.

Mrs. Crowley.

Of course he’ll be able to clear himself. There’s not the least doubt about that.

Lady Kelsey.

But think of the disgrace of it. A public trial. And Fred Allerton of all people! The Allertons were always so proud of their family. It was almost a mania with them.

Mrs. Crowley.

For centuries they’ve cherished the firm belief that there was no one in the county fit to black their boots.

Carbery.

Pride goeth before a fall.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Smiling.] And proverbs before a clergyman.

Lady Kelsey.

They wouldn’t give him bail, so he’s remained in prison till now. Of course, I made Lucy and George come here.

Mrs. Crowley.

You’ve been quite charming, Lady Kelsey, as every one knew you’d be. But don’t think of these wretched weeks of suspense. Think only that Mr. Allerton has got his chance at last. Why, the trial may be over now, and he may this very minute be on his way to this house.

Carbery.

What will he do when it’s over? The position will be surely a little unpleasant.

Lady Kelsey.

I’ve talked it over with Lucy, and — I’ve made it possible for them all to go abroad. They’ll need rest and quiet. Poor things, poor things!

Carbery.

I suppose Miss Allerton and George are at the Old Bailey.

Lady Kelsey.

No, their father begged them to stay away. They’ve been in all day, waiting for the papers.

Mrs. Crowley.

But who is going to bring you the news? Surely you’re not going to wait for the papers?

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, no, Dick Lomas is coming. He’s one of the witnesses for Fred, and my nephew Bobby Boulger.

Mrs. Crowley.

And what about Mr. Mackenzie? He told me he would be there.

Carbery.

Is that the great traveller? I thought I saw in the paper that he’d already started for Africa.

Lady Kelsey.

Not yet. He’s going at the beginning of the month. Oh, he’s been so good to us during this time. All our friends have been good to us.

Carbery.

I shouldn’t have thought there was much of the milk of human kindness to overflow in Alexander Mackenzie. By all accounts he dealt with the slave-traders in Africa with a good deal of vigour.

Mrs. Crowley.

The slave-traders must be quaking in their shoes if they know he’s starting out again, for he’s made up his mind to exterminate them, and when Alec Mackenzie makes up his mind to do a thing, he appears to do it.

Lady Kelsey.

He has the reputation of a hard man, but no one could be more delightful than he has been to me.

Mrs. Crowley.

I don’t think I like him, but he’s certainly a strong man, and in England just now every one’s so weak and floppy, it’s rather a relief to come across somebody who’s got a will of iron and nerves of steel.

[George Allerton comes in. He is a very

young man, good-looking, though at the

moment pale and haggard, with a rather

weak face.

George.

I thought Lucy was here. [To Carbery and Mrs. Crowley.] How d’you do? Have you seen Lucy?

Mrs. Crowley.

I went to her room for a moment.

George.

What is she doing?

Mrs. Crowley.

Reading.

George.

I wish I could take it as calmly as she does. An outsider would think there was nothing the matter at all. Oh, it’s too awful!

Lady Kelsey.

My dear, you must bear up. We must all hope for the best.

George.

But there is no best. Whatever happens, it means disgrace and dishonour. How could he? How could he?

Lady Kelsey.

No one knows your father as I do, George. I’m sure he’s never been anything but thoughtless and foolish.

George.

Of course he’s not been actually criminal. That’s absurd. But it’s bad enough as it is.

Mrs. Crowley.

You mustn’t take it too much to heart. In another half-hour at the utmost your father will be here with everything cleared up, and you’ll be able to go back to Oxford with a clear conscience.

George.

D’you think I can go to Oxford again when my father has been tried for forgery? No, no! No, no! I’d rather shoot myself.

Lady Kelsey.

My poor boy.... Where have you been all day?

George.

Heaven knows! I’ve walked through the streets till I’m dog-tired. Oh, the suspense is too awful. My feet carried me to the Old Bailey, and I would have given anything to go in and see how things were going, but I’d promised the Pater I wouldn’t.

Lady Kelsey.

How did he look this morning?

George.

He was most awfully worn and ill. I don’t believe he’ll ever get over it. I saw his counsel before the case began. They told me it was bound to come all right.

Mrs. Crowley.

Is there anything in the evening papers?

George.

I haven’t dared to look. The placards are awful.

Carbery.

Why, what do they say?

George.

Can’t you imagine? “Gentleman charged with forgery.” “County gentleman at the Old Bailey.” And all the rest of it. Damn them! Damn them!

Lady Kelsey.

It may be all over by now.

George.

I feel that I shall never sleep again. I couldn’t close my eyes last night. To think that one’s own father....

Lady Kelsey.

For goodness’ sake be quiet.

George.

[Starting.] There’s a ring at the bell.

Lady Kelsey.

I’ve given orders that no one is to be admitted but Dick Lomas and Bobbie.

Mrs. Crowley.

It must be finished by now. It’s one or the other of them come to tell you the result.

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, I’m so frightfully anxious.

George.

Aunt, you don’t think....

Lady Kelsey.

No, no, of course not. They must find him not guilty.

[The Butler enters followed by Dick Lomas,

a clean-shaven dapper man, with a sharp

face and good-natured smile. He is between

thirty-five and forty, but slim and youthful.

With him comes Sir Robert Boulger,

Lady Kelsey’s nephew, a good-looking,

spruce youth of twenty-two.

Butler.

Mr. Lomas, Sir Robert Boulger.

George.

[Excitedly.] Well, well? For God’s sake tell us quickly.

Dick.

My dear people, I have nothing to tell.

George.

Oh!

[He staggers with sudden faintness and falls

to the floor.

Dick.

Hulloa! What’s this?

Mrs. Crowley.

Poor boy!

[They crowd round him.

George.

It’s all right. What a fool I am! I was so strung up.

Dick.

You’d better come to the window.

[He and Boulger take the boy’s arms and lead

him to the window. George leans against

the balcony.

Carbery.

I’m afraid I must go away. Every Wednesday at four I read Little Lord Fauntleroy to forty charwomen.

Lady Kelsey.

Good-bye. And thanks so much for coming.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Shaking hands with him.] Good-bye. A clergyman always helps one so much to bear other people’s misfortunes.

[Carbery goes out, and in a moment Robert

Boulger comes back into the room.

Lady Kelsey.

Is he better?

Boulger.

Oh, much. He’ll be all right in a minute. [Lady Kelsey goes to the window, and he turns to Mrs. Crowley.] You are a brick to come here to-day, when they’re all in such awful trouble.

Mrs. Crowley.

[With a little hesitation.] Did you really come away before the trial was ended?

Boulger.

Why, of course. What did you think? You don’t imagine they’ll convict him?

Mrs. Crowley.

It’s too dreadful.

Boulger.

Where is Lucy? I was hoping to get a glimpse of her.

Mrs. Crowley.

I wouldn’t trouble her to-day if I were you. I think she most wants to be left alone.

Boulger.

I wanted to tell her that if I could do anything at all, she had only to command.

Mrs. Crowley.

I think she knows that. But I’ll give her the message if you like.... You’re very devoted.

Boulger.

I’ve been madly in love with her ever since I was ten.

Mrs. Crowley.

Take care then. There’s nothing so tedious as the constant lover.

[Dick comes into the room and speaks to

Robert Boulger.

Dick.

George is quite well now. He wants you to smoke a cigarette with him.

Boulger.

Certainly.

[He goes on to the balcony.

Dick.

[When Boulger is gone.] At least, he will the moment he sees you.

Mrs. Crowley.

What do you mean by that?

Dick.

Merely that I wanted to talk to you. And Robert Boulger, being a youth of somewhat limited intelligence, seemed in the way.

Mrs. Crowley.

Why did you leave the Old Bailey?

Dick.

My dear lady, I couldn’t stand it. You don’t know what it is to sit there and watch a man tortured, a man you’ve known all your life, whom you’ve dined with times out of number, in whose house you’ve stayed. He had just the look of a hunted beast, and his face was grey with terror.

Mrs. Crowley.

How was the case going?

Dick.

I couldn’t judge. I could only see those haggard, despairing eyes.

Mrs. Crowley.

But you’re a barrister. You must have heard his answers. What did he reply to all the questions?

Dick.

He seemed quite dazed. I don’t think he took in the gist of his cross-examination.

Mrs. Crowley.

But the man’s innocent.

Dick.

Yes, we all hope that.

Mrs. Crowley.

What d’you mean? There can be no doubt about that. When he was arrested Lucy went to him and begged him to tell her the exact truth. He swore that he wasn’t guilty.

Dick.

Poor Lucy! She’s borne up wonderfully. She’ll stick to her father through thick and thin.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Abruptly.] Mr. Lomas, you’re trying to put me off. It’s not fair to let Lucy buoy herself up with false hopes. She’s absolutely convinced that her father will be acquitted.

Dick.

Well, in another half-hour we shall all know. When I left, the judge was just going to sum up.

Mrs. Crowley.

Mr. Lomas, what is your opinion?

[He looks at her steadily for a moment.

Dick.

Were you very much surprised when you heard Fred Allerton was arrested?

Mrs. Crowley.

Good heavens, I was overwhelmed!

Dick.

[Dryly.] Ah!

Mrs. Crowley.

If you aggravate me I shall box your ears.

Dick.

When first I knew Fred he was a very rich man. You know that the Allertons are one of the oldest families in Cheshire?

Mrs. Crowley.

Yes. I think Lucy’s only failing is an inordinate pride in her family. She thinks it very snobbish to have any particular respect for a peer of the realm, but only natural to look up to persons of good family.

Dick.

Ah, you see, you and I who have a quite indecent lack of ancestors, can’t realise what the cult of family may be. There are families in the remote parts of England — not very rich, not very clever, and not very good-looking — who would look askance at a belted earl who came to demand their daughter’s hand in marriage. They have a natural conviction that they’re the salt of the earth, and in their particular corner they rule more absolutely than half the monarchs in Europe. The Allertons were like that. But Fred somehow seemed to belong to a different stock. The first thing he did was to play ducks and drakes with his fortune.

Mrs. Crowley.

But men ought to be extravagant. That’s what they’re there for.

Dick.

Women always took his side because he had an irresistible charm of manner.

Mrs. Crowley.

I think George has, too, a little.

Dick.

I hope for Lucy’s sake he will turn out a different man from his father. I wish he weren’t so like him in appearance. At last Fred Allerton had squandered every penny, and he married Lady Kelsey’s sister, one of the three rich daughters of a Liverpool merchant. But he ran through her money, too, gambling, racing, and so forth, and she died of a broken heart — adoring him still.

Mrs. Crowley.

You’re as well informed as an encyclopædia, Mr. Lomas.

Dick.

You see, I was made the trustee for the poor remains of Mrs. Allerton’s fortune, and I know how Lucy has managed to keep all their heads above water. She’s wonderful. Ever since she was a child she’s held the reins in her own hands. She’s stuck to her father, though Lady Kelsey implored her to leave him to his own foolish ways. She saw that George was decently educated. She hid from the world all the little shifts and devices to which she had to resort in order to keep up an appearance of decency.

Mrs. Crowley.

I suppose you, too, think Fred Allerton little better than a scamp?

Dick.

My dear lady, when a man has had to leave his club because he plays cards too well, it’s at least permissible to suppose that there’s something odd about him.

Mrs. Crowley.

Here’s Lady Kelsey. For heaven’s sake try and amuse her a little.

[Lady Kelsey comes back into the room.

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, Dick, I’m so full of my own troubles, I forgot to ask about yours. I’m so sorry to hear that you’re ill.

Dick.

On the contrary, I’m in the very best of health.

Lady Kelsey.

But I saw in the papers that you were going to give up your seat in the House owing to ill-health.

Dick.

Of course, I’d forgotten. My heart is seriously deranged.

Mrs. Crowley.

How dreadful! What is the matter with it?

Dick.

Can you ask? I’ve banged it about at your feet so long that its functions are excessively impaired. And it’s beaten all my waistcoats out of shape.

Mrs. Crowley.

Don’t be so foolish. I was quite alarmed.

Dick.

I’m going to retire.

Lady Kelsey.

From the bar as well?

Dick.

From the bar as well. Henceforth I shall cultivate only such arts and graces as are proper to the man of leisure. My fellow men are a great deal too strenuous, and I propose to offer them the spectacle of a complete idler who demands from the world neither honours nor profit, but only entertainment.

Mrs. Crowley.

D’you mean to say you’re going to give up a large practice and a position which may be very important merely to gratify a foolish whim?

Dick.

I haven’t time to work. Life is so much too short. A little while ago it occurred to me that I was nearly forty. [To Mrs. Crowley.] D’you know the feeling?

Mrs. Crowley.

No, of course not. Don’t be so uncivil.

Dick.

By the way, how old are you?

Mrs. Crowley.

Twenty-nine!

Dick.

Nonsense! There’s no such age.

Mrs. Crowley.

I beg your pardon, upper parlourmaids are always twenty-nine.

Dick.

For years I’ve spent eight hours a day meddling with silly persons’ silly quarrels, and eight hours more governing the nation. I’ve never been able to spend more than half my income. I’m merely working myself to death in order to leave a fortune to my nieces, two desperately plain girls with red noses.

Lady Kelsey.

But what are you going to do?

Dick.

Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at big game shooting, if Alec will take me on this expedition of his. I’ve always thought shooting would be an agreeable pastime if partridges were the size of well-grown sheep and pheasants a little larger than a cow.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then the breakdown in your health is all humbug?

Dick.

Absolute humbug. If I were to tell the truth people would shut me up in a lunatic asylum. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s only one game in the world worth playing, and that’s the game of life. I’m rich enough to devote myself to it entirely.

Mrs. Crowley.

But you’ll get bored to death.

Dick.

Not I! Why, I’m growing younger every day. My dear Mrs. Crowley, I don’t feel a day more than eighteen.

Mrs. Crowley.

You certainly look quite twenty-five.

Dick.

I haven’t a white hair in my head.

Mrs. Crowley.

I suppose your servant plucks them out every morning.

Dick.

Oh, very rarely. One a month at the outside.

Mrs. Crowley.

I think I see one on the left temple.

Dick.

Really! How careless of Charles! I must speak to him.

Mrs. Crowley.

Let me pluck it out.

Dick.

I shall allow you to do nothing so familiar.

[George comes hurriedly into the room.

George.

There’s Alec Mackenzie. He’s just driven up in a cab.

Dick.

He must have come from the trial. Then it’s all over.

Lady Kelsey.

Quick! Go to the stairs, or Miller won’t let him up.

[George runs across the room and opens the door.

George.

[Calling.] Miller, Miller, Mr. Mackenzie’s to come up.

[Lucy Allerton, hearing a commotion, comes in. She is older than George, a tall girl, white now, with eyes heavy from want of sleep. She has lived in the country all her life, and has brought up to London a sort of remoteness from the world. She is beautiful in a very English manner, and her clear-cut features are an index to a character in which the moral notions are peculiarly rigid. Self-control is a quality which she possesses in a marked degree, and one which she enormously admires in others.

Lucy.

Who is it?

George.

It’s Alec Mackenzie. He’s come from the trial!

Lucy.

Then it’s finished at last. [She shakes hands with Dick.] It’s so good of you to come.

Boulger.

You’re perfectly wonderful, Lucy. How can you be so calm?

Lucy.

Because I’m quite sure of the result. D’you imagine I’d doubt my father for a moment?

Dick.

Oh, Lucy, for heaven’s sake don’t be so sure. You must be prepared for everything.

Lucy.

Oh, no, I know my father. D’you think I’ve not studied him during these years that I’ve looked after him? He’s a child, with all a child’s thoughtlessness and simplicity. And God knows, he’s weak. I know his faults better than any one, but it would be impossible for him to do anything criminal.

[The Butler enters, followed by Alec Mackenzie.

Alec is a tall, wiry man, well-knit,

with dark hair and a small red

moustache and beard, cut close to the face.

He is about five-and-thirty. He has great

ease of manner, and there is about him an

air as though he were accustomed that

people should do as he told them.

Butler.

Mr. Mackenzie!

George.

Is it finished? For God’s sake tell us quickly, old man.

Lucy.

Why didn’t father come with you? Is he following?

Alec.

Yes, it’s all over.

Lady Kelsey.

Thank goodness. The suspense was really too dreadful.

George.

I knew they’d acquit him. Thank God!

Dick.

[Looking at Alec’s face.] Take care, George.

[Suddenly Lucy goes up to Alec and looks at

him. An expression of horror distorts her

features.

Mrs. Crowley.

Lucy, what is it?

Alec.

I don’t know how I am going to tell you.

Lucy.

You say the trial was over when you came away?

Alec.

Yes.

Lucy.

The jury had given their verdict?

George.

Lucy, what are you driving at? You don’t think...?

Alec.

Your father asked me to come and break it to you.

George.

He’s not dead?

Alec.

Perhaps it would be better if he were.

Lucy.

They found him guilty?

Alec.

Yes.

George.

[With a groan of despair.] Oh! But it’s impossible.

Lucy.

[Putting her hand on his arm.] Ssh!

Lady Kelsey.

My God, my God! I’m thankful that his wife is dead.

Lucy.

I’m awfully stupid, but if he was innocent, how could they find him guilty? I don’t know what you mean.

Alec.

I am afraid it’s very clear.

Lucy.

There must be some horrible mistake.

Alec.

I wish there were.

George.

[Breaking down into tears and sinking into a chair.] Oh, God! What shall I do?

Lucy.

Don’t do that, George. We want all our calmness now.

George.

Don’t you see they all expected it? It was only you and I who believed in his innocence.

Lucy.

[To Alec.] Did you hear the evidence?

Alec.

Yes.

Lucy.

And you followed it carefully?

Alec.

Very.

Lucy.

What impression did it leave on your mind?

Alec.

What can it matter how it affected me?

Lucy.

I want to know.

Dick.

Lucy, you’re torturing us all.

Lucy.

If you had been on the jury would your verdict have been the same as theirs?

Alec.

I should have been obliged to judge according to my conscience.

Lucy.

I see. And you have no doubt that he was guilty?

Alec.

Don’t ask me these horrible questions.

Lucy.

But it’s very important. I know that you are a perfectly honest and upright man. If you think he was guilty, there is nothing more to be said.

Alec.

The case was so plain that the jury were not out of the box for more than ten minutes.

Lucy.

Did the judge say anything?

Alec.

[Hesitatingly.] He said there could be no doubt about the justice of the verdict.

Lucy.

What else?... [He looks at her without answering.] You had better tell me now. I shall see it in the papers to-morrow.

Alec.

[As though the words were dragged out of him.] He called it a very mean and shameful crime, worse than another man’s because your father was a gentleman of ancient family and bore a name of great honour.

Dick.

[To Mrs. Crowley.] These judges have a weakness for pointing a moral.

Lucy.

And what was the sentence? [A pause.] Well?

Alec.

Seven years’ penal servitude.

George.

Oh, God!

Dick.

My dear girl, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.

Lady Kelsey.

Lucy, what is it? You frighten me.

Lucy.

Try and bear up, George. We want all the strength we’ve got, you and I.

[Mrs. Crowley puts her arms round Lucy and kisses her.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, my dear, my dear!

Lucy.

[Disengaging herself.] You’re all very kind, and I know you sympathise with me....

Mrs. Crowley.

[Interrupting her.] You know that we’ll do everything we can to help you.

Lucy.

It’s so good of you. There’s really nothing that any one can do. Would you all mind leaving me alone with George? We must talk this over by ourselves.

Mrs. Crowley.

Very well. Mr. Lomas, will you put me into a cab?

Dick.

Certainly. [To Lucy.] Good-bye, dear, and God bless you.

Lucy.

[Shaking hands with him.] Don’t worry too much about me. If there’s anything I want, I’ll let you know.

Dick.

Thanks.

[He goes out with Mrs. Crowley.

Alec.

May I speak to you for a few minutes alone?

Lucy.

Not now, Mr. Mackenzie. I don’t want to seem rude, but ...

Alec.

[Interrupting.] I know, and I wouldn’t insist unless it were a matter of the most urgent importance.

Lucy.

Very well. George, will you take Aunt Alice to her room? I shall want you in a moment.

George.

Yes.

Lucy.

[To Lady Kelsey.] Won’t you lie down and try and sleep a little? You must be dreadfully exhausted.

Lady Kelsey.

Ah, don’t think of me now, dear. Think of yourself.

Lucy.

[Smiling.] It’s purely selfish. It eases me a little to fuss about you.

George.

I’ll wait in the smoking-room, Lucy.

Lucy.

Do!

[George and Lady Kelsey go out.

Alec.

I think your self-command is wonderful. I’ve never admired you more than at this moment.

Lucy.

You make me feel such a prig. It’s not really very strange if I keep my head, because I’ve had an immensely long training. Since I was fifteen I’ve been alone to care for George and my father.... Won’t you sit down?

Alec.

I can say what I want in a very few words. You know that in a week I start for Mombassa to take charge of the expedition in North-East Africa. I may be away for three or four years, and I shall be exposed to a certain amount of danger. When I left Africa last time to gather supplies, I determined I would crush those wretched slave-traders, and now I think I have the means to do it.

Lucy.

I think you are engaged on a very great work.

Alec.

I don’t know whether you ever noticed that — that I cared more for you than for any one in the world. But with the long journey in front of me I didn’t think it was right to say anything to you. It wasn’t fair to ask you to bind yourself during my long absence. And there was always the risk that a stray bullet might put an end to me. I made up my mind that I must wait till I returned. But things have changed now. Lucy, I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me before I go?

Lucy.

No, I can’t do that. It’s very generous of you, but I couldn’t.

Alec.

Why not? Don’t you know that I love you? It would help me so much if I knew that you were waiting for me at home.

Lucy.

I must look after my father. I shall go and live near the — prison, so that I can see him whenever it’s possible.

Alec.

You can do that as well if you’re my wife.... You have before you a very difficult and trying time. Won’t you let me help you?

Lucy.

I couldn’t. Heaven knows, I’m grateful to you for offering to marry me on this day of my bitter humiliation. I shall never forget your great kindness. But I must stand alone. I must devote myself to my father. When he’s released I must have a home to bring him to, and I must tend him and care for him. Ah, now he wants me more than ever.

Alec.

You’re very proud.

Lucy.

[Giving him her hand.] Dear friend, don’t think hardly of me. I think I love you as much as it’s possible for a woman to love a man.

Alec.

Lucy!

Lucy.

[With a smile.] Did you want me to tell you that in so many words? I admire you, and I trust you. I should be very happy if George could grow into so brave and honest a man as you.

Alec.

They’re very modest crumbs with which you want me to be satisfied.

Lucy.

I know in your heart you think I’m right. You would never seek to dissuade me from what I’m convinced is my duty.

Alec.

Can’t I do anything for you at all?

[She looks at him for a moment intently. She rings the bell.

Lucy.

Yes, you can do me the greatest possible service.

Alec.

I’m so glad. What is it you mean?

Lucy.

Wait, and I’ll tell you. [The Butler enters.] Ask Mr. George to come here, please.

Butler.

Very well, Miss.

[He goes out.

Lucy.

I want you to help me.

[George comes in.

George.

Yes, Lucy?

Lucy.

I want to give into your charge what I love most in the world.... George, have you thought at all what you’re going to do now? I’m afraid you can’t go back to Oxford.

George.

No, I don’t know what’s to become of me. I wish I were dead.

Lucy.

An idea has just come to me. I’m going to ask Mr. Mackenzie to take you with him to Africa. Will you go?

George.

Yes, yes! I’d do anything to get away from England. I daren’t face my friends — I’m too ashamed.

Lucy.

Ah, but it’s not to hide yourself that I want you to go. Mr. Mackenzie, I daresay you know that we’ve always been very proud of our name. And now it’s hopelessly dishonoured.

George.

Lucy, for God’s sake ...

Lucy.

[Turning to him.] Now our only hope is in you. You have the opportunity of achieving a great thing. You can bring back the old name to its old honour. Oh, I wish I were a man. I can do nothing but wait and watch. If I could only fill you with my courage and with my ambition! Mr. Mackenzie, you asked if you could do anything for me. You can give George the chance of wiping out the shame of our family.

Alec.

Do you know that he will have to suffer every sort of danger and privation, that often he will be parched by the heat, and often soaked to the skin for days together? Sometimes he’ll not have enough to eat, and he’ll have to work harder than a navvy.

Lucy.

Do you hear, George? Are you willing to go?

George.

I’ll do anything you want me to, Lucy.

Alec.

And you know that he may get killed. There may be a good deal of fighting.

Lucy.

If he dies a brave man’s death, I have nothing more to ask.

Alec.

[To George.] Very well. Come with me, and I’ll do my best for you.

Lucy.

Ah, thanks. You are really my friend.

Alec.

And when I come back?

Lucy.

Then, if you still care, ask your question again.

Alec.

And the answer?

Lucy.

[With a little smile.] The answer, perhaps, will be different.

THE SECOND ACT

Scene: Alec Mackenzie’s tent in North-East Africa. It is night. The place is dimly lighted. There is a little camp bed in one corner with a mosquito net over it. There are two or three folding chairs, some tin cases, and a table. On this a gun is lying.

Dick is seated with his head on his hands, leaning on the table, fast asleep. Dr. Adamson, the surgeon of the expedition, comes in. He is a large-boned brawny fellow with a Scotch accent. He looks at Dick and smiles.

Doctor.

Hulloa, there! [Dick starts up and seizes the gun. The Doctor laughs.] All right. Don’t shoot. It’s only me.

Dick.

[With a laugh.] Why the dickens did you wake me up? I was dreaming — dreaming of a high-heeled boot and a neat ankle, and the swish of a white lace petticoat.

Doctor.

I thought I’d just have a look at your arm.

Dick.

It’s one of the most æsthetic sights I know.

Doctor.

Your arm?

Dick.

A pretty woman crossing Piccadilly at Swan and Edgar’s. You are a savage, my good doctor, and a barbarian. You don’t know the care and forethought, the hours of anxious meditation, it has needed for her to hold up that well-made skirt with the elegant grace which enchants you.

Doctor.

I’m afraid you’re a very immoral man, Lomas.

Dick.

Ah, my dear fellow, at my time of life I have to content myself with condemning the behaviour of the younger generation. Even a camp bed in a stuffy tent with mosquitoes buzzing all around me has allurements greater than those of youth and beauty. And I declare for all women to hear that I am proof against their wiles. Give me a comfortable bed to sleep in, plenty to eat, tobacco to smoke, and Amaryllis may go hang.

Doctor.

Well, let’s look at this wound of yours. Has it been throbbing at all?

Dick.

Oh, it’s not worth bothering about. It’ll be all right to-morrow.

Doctor.

I’ll put a clean dressing on all the same.

Dick.

All right. [He takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeve. His arm is bandaged, and during the next speeches the Doctor puts on a dressing and a clean bandage.] You must be pretty well done up, aren’t you?

Doctor.

Just about dropping. But I’ve got a deuce of a lot more work before I turn in.

Dick.

The thing that amuses me is to remember that I came to Africa thinking I was going to have a rattling good time.

Doctor.

You couldn’t exactly describe it as a picnic, could you? But I don’t suppose any of us knew it would be such a tough job as it’s turned out.

Dick.

My friend, if ever I return to my native land, I will never be such a crass and blithering idiot as to give way again to a spirit of adventure.

Doctor.

[With a laugh.] You’re not the sort of chap whom one would expect to take to African work. Why the blazes did you come?

Dick.

That’s precisely what I’ve been asking myself ever since we landed in this God-forsaken swamp.

Doctor.

The wound looks healthy enough. It’ll hardly even leave a scar.

Dick.

I’m glad that my fatal beauty won’t be injured.... You see, Alec’s about the oldest friend I have. And then there’s young Allerton, I’ve known him ever since he was a kid.

Doctor.

That’s an acquaintance that most of us wouldn’t boast about.

Dick.

I had an idea I’d like Bond Street all the better when I got back. I never knew that I should be eaten alive by every kind of disgusting animal by night and day. I say, Doctor, do you ever think of a rump steak?

Doctor.

When?

Dick.

[With a wave of the hand.] Sometimes, when we’re marching under a sun that just about takes the roof of your head off, and we’ve had the scantiest and most uncomfortable breakfast possible, I have a vision.

Doctor.

D’you mind only gesticulating with one arm?

Dick.

I see the dining-room of my club and myself sitting at a little table by the window looking out on Piccadilly, and there’s a spotless tablecloth, and all the accessories are spick and span. An obsequious servant brings me a rump steak, grilled to perfection, and so tender that it melts in the mouth. And he puts by my side a plate of crisp, fried potatoes. Can’t you smell them?

Doctor.

[Laughing.] Shut up!

Dick.

And then another obsequious servant brings me a pewter tankard, and into it he pours a bottle, a large bottle, mind you, of foaming ale.

Doctor.

You’ve certainly added considerably to our cheerfulness.

Dick.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] I’ve often been driven to appease the pangs of raging hunger with a careless epigram, and by the laborious composition of a limerick I have sought to deceive a most unholy thirst.

Doctor.

Well, last night I thought you’d made your last joke, old man, and that I had given my last dose of quinine.

Dick.

We were in rather a tight corner, weren’t we?

Doctor.

This is the third expedition I’ve gone with Mackenzie against the slave-raiders, and I promise you I’ve never been so certain that all was over with us.

Dick.

Funny thing death is, you know. When you think of it beforehand, it makes you squirm in your shoes, but when you’ve just got it face to face, it seems so obvious that you forget to be afraid. It’s one of my principles never to be impressed by a platitude.

Doctor.

It’s only by a miracle we escaped. If those Arabs hadn’t hesitated to attack us just those ten minutes we should have been wiped out.

Dick.

Alec was splendid, wasn’t he?

Doctor.

Yes, by Jove! He thought we were done for.

Dick.

What makes you think that?

Doctor.

Well, you see, I know him pretty well. He’s been a pal of yours for twenty years in England, but I’ve been with him out here three times, and I tell you there’s not much about a man that you don’t know then.

Dick.

Well?

Doctor.

Well, when things are going smoothly and everything’s flourishing, he’s apt to be a bit irritable. He keeps rather to himself, and he doesn’t say much unless you do something he doesn’t approve of.

Dick.

And then, by Jove, he comes down on one like a thousand of bricks. It’s not for nothing the natives call him Thunder and Lightning.

Doctor.

But when things begin to look black, his spirits go up like one o’clock. And the worse they are, the more cheerful he is.

Dick.

It’s one of his most irritating characteristics.

Doctor.

When every one is starving with hunger, and dead tired, and soaked to the skin, Mackenzie fairly bubbles over with good-humour.

Dick.

When I’m in a bad temper, I much prefer every one else to be in a bad temper too.

Doctor.

These last few days, he’s been positively hilarious. Yesterday he was cracking jokes with the natives.

Dick.

[Dryly.] Scotch jokes. I daresay they sound funny in an African dialect.

Doctor.

I’ve never seen him more cheerful. I said to myself: By the Lord Harry, the chief thinks we’re in a devil of a bad way.

Dick.

Thank Heaven, it’s all over now. We’ve none of us had any sleep for three days, and when I once get off, I don’t mean to wake up for a week.

Doctor.

I must go and see the rest of my patients. Perkins has got a bad dose of fever this time. He was quite delirious a while ago.

Dick.

By Jove, I’d almost forgotten. How one changes out here! Here am I feeling happy and comfortable and inclined to make a little jest or two, and I’ve forgotten already that poor Richardson is dead and Lord knows how many natives.

Doctor.

Poor chap, we could ill spare him. The fates never choose the right man.

Dick.

What do you mean by that?

Doctor.

If we had to lose some one, it would have been a damned sight better if that young cub had got the bullet which killed poor Richardson.

Dick.

George Allerton?

Doctor.

He wouldn’t have been much loss, would he?

Dick.

No, I’m afraid he wouldn’t.

Doctor.

Mackenzie has been very patient with him. I wonder he didn’t send him back to the coast months ago, when he sacked Macinnery.

Dick.

Poor George, everything has been against him.

Doctor.

Some men have got natures so crooked that with every chance in the world to go straight they can’t manage it. The only thing is to let them go to the devil as best they may.

Dick.

Alec was bound to give him another chance. [Alec Mackenzie comes in.] Hulloa, Alec! Where have you been?

Alec.

I’ve been going the round of the outlying sentries.

Dick.

All serene?

Alec.

Yes. I’ve just seen a native messenger that Mindabi sent to me.

Doctor.

Anything important?

Alec.

[Curtly.] Yes. How’s the arm, Dick?

Dick.

Oh, that’s nothing. It’s only a scratch.

Alec.

You’d better not make too light of it. The smallest wound has a way of being troublesome in this country.

Doctor.

He’ll be all right in a day or two.

Alec.

How are the others?

Doctor.

They’re going on pretty well on the whole. Perkins, of course, will be down for some days longer. And some of the natives are rather badly hurt. Those devils have got explosive bullets.

Alec.

Any one in great danger?

Doctor.

No, I don’t think so. There are two men who are in rather a bad way, but all they want is rest.

Alec.

I see.

Dick.

I say, have you had anything to eat lately?

Alec.

[With a laugh.] Good Lord! I quite forgot. I wonder when the dickens I had some food last.

Dick.

[Smiling.] You’ve had nothing to-day, have you?

Alec.

No, I don’t think so. Those Arabs kept us so confoundedly busy.

Dick.

You must be devilish hungry.

Alec.

Now you mention it, I think I am. And thirsty, by Jove! I wouldn’t give my thirst for an elephant tusk.

Dick.

And to think there’s nothing but tepid water to drink!

Doctor.

I’ll go and tell the boy to bring you some food. It’s a rotten game to play tricks with your digestion like that.

Alec.

[Gaily.] Stern man, the doctor, isn’t he? It won’t hurt me once in a way. And I shall enjoy it all the more now.

Doctor.

[Calling.] Selim!

Alec.

No, don’t trouble. The poor chap’s just turned in, dropping with sleep. I told him he might till I called him. I don’t want much, and I can easily get it myself. [He goes to a case and takes out a tin of meat and some ship’s biscuits.] It’s rather a nuisance that we’ve not been able to get any game lately.

[He sets the food down before him, sits down,

and begins to eat.

Dick.

[Ironically.] Appetising, isn’t it?

Alec.

Splendid!

Dick.

You have all the instincts of the primeval savage, Alec. It enrages and disgusts me.

Alec.

[With a laugh.] Why?

Dick.

You take food for the gross and bestial purpose of appeasing your hunger. You have no appreciation for the delicacies of eating as a fine art.

Alec.

The meat’s getting rather mouldy, isn’t it?

Dick.

Damnable! It’s been a source of great anxiety to me in England.

Alec.

What is he talking about now?

Dick.

I was going on with the thread of my observations, which you interrupted with the entirely obvious remark that the tinned meat was getting mouldy.

Alec.

I apologise profusely. Pray go on!

Dick.

I was about to observe that even in England you will eat the most carefully ordered meal with an indifference which is an outrage to decency. Indeed, you pay less attention to it than here, because at all events you do notice that the meat is mouldy. But if any one gives you a good dinner, you notice nothing. I’ve given him priceless port, Doctor, and he drank it as though it were cooking sherry.

Doctor.

I confess it is lamentable. But why is it a source of anxiety to you?

Dick.

What on earth is to happen to him in his old age?

Alec.

Explain yourself, my friend. Clearly but with as much brevity as possible.

Dick.

The pleasure of eating is the only pleasure that remains to the old. Love — what is love when you lose your figure, and your hair grows thin? Knowledge — one can never know everything, and the desire passes with the fire of youth. Even ambition fails you in the end. But to those who have lived wisely and well, there remain three pleasures every day of their lives: their breakfast, their luncheon, and their dinner.

Alec.

[With a laugh.] I wouldn’t worry about my old age if I were you, Dick.

Dick.

Why?

Alec.

Because I think it’s ten to one that we shall all be dead to-morrow morning.

Doctor.

What?

[There is a slight pause while both men stare

at him.

Dick.

Is this one of your little jokes, Alec?

Alec.

You have often observed that I joke with difficulty.

Doctor.

But what’s wrong now?

Alec.

You’ll neither of you sleep in your beds to-night. Another sell for the mosquitoes, isn’t it? I propose to break up the camp and start marching as soon as the moon goes down.

Dick.

I say, it’s a bit thick after a day like this. We’re all so done up that we shan’t be able to go a mile.

Alec.

Nonsense, you will have had two hours’ rest.

Doctor.

But some of those fellows who are wounded can’t possibly be moved.

Alec.

They must!

Doctor.

I won’t answer for their lives.

Alec.

We must take the risk. Our only chance is to make a bold dash for it, and we can’t leave the wounded here.

Dick.

I suppose there’s going to be a deuce of a row?

Alec.

[Grimly.] There is.

Dick.

Your companions seldom have a chance to complain of the monotony of their existence, Alec. What are you going to do now?

Alec.

At this moment, I’m going to fill my pipe.

[There is a pause while Alec fills and lights

his pipe.

Dick.

I gather from the general amiability of your demeanour that we’re in a rather tight place?

Alec.

Tighter than any of your patent-leather boots, my friend.

Dick.

[Gravely.] Have we any chance of getting through, old man?

Alec.

[Lightly.] Oh, I don’t know. There’s always a chance.

Dick.

Don’t grin at me in that irritating fashion.

Alec.

You must wish you were treading the light fantastic toe in a London ball-room, Dick.

Dick.

Frankly I do.... I suppose we’re going to fight again?

Alec.

Like Kilkenny cats.

Dick.

[Briskly.] Well, at all events that’s some comfort. If I am going to be done out of my night’s rest, I should like to take it out of some one.

Alec.

If things turn out all right, we shall have come near finishing the job, and there won’t be much more slave-raiding in this part of Africa.

Dick.

And if things don’t turn out all right?

Alec.

Why, then I’m afraid the tea-tables of Mayfair will be deprived of your scintillating repartee forever.

Dick.

Well, I’ve had a very good time in my life. I’ve loved a little, I’ve looked at some good pictures, read some thundering fine books, and I’ve worked and played. If I can only account for a few more of those damned scoundrels before I die, I shouldn’t think I had much to complain of.

Alec.

[Smiling.] You’re a philosopher, Dick.

Dick.

Doesn’t the possibility of an extremely unpleasant demise tempt you to a few appropriate reflections?

Alec.

I don’t know that it does. I’m a bit of a fatalist, and my theory is that when my time comes nothing can help me, but at the bottom of my heart I can’t resist the conviction that I shan’t die till I let myself.

Doctor.

Well, I must go and put things in order. I’ll bandage those fellows up, and I hope they’ll stand the jolting.

Alec.

What about Perkins?

Doctor.

Lord knows! I’ll try and keep him quiet with chloral.

Alec.

You needn’t say anything about striking camp. I don’t propose that any one should know till a quarter of an hour before we start.

Doctor.

But that won’t give them time.

Alec.

It must. I’ve trained them often enough to get on the march quickly.

Doctor.

Very well.

[George Allerton comes in as the Doctor is

on the point of going.

George.

Can I come in?

Alec.

Yes ... Doctor!

Doctor.

Hulloa!

Alec.

You might stay a minute, will you?

Doctor.

[Coming back.] Certainly.

Alec.

Didn’t Selim tell you that I wanted to speak to you?

George.

That’s why I’ve come.

Alec.

You’ve taken your time about it.

George.

I say, could you give me a drink of brandy? I’m awfully done up.

Alec.

[Shortly.] There’s no brandy left.

George.

Hasn’t the doctor got some?

Alec.

No!

[There is a pause. Alec looks at him slowly.

George.

Why are you all looking at me like that? You look as if you were going to try me for something.

Dick.

Nonsense! Don’t be so nervous.

Alec.

[Abruptly.] Do you know anything about the death of that Turkana woman?

George.

No! How should I?

Alec.

Come now, you must know something about it. Last Tuesday you came into camp and told me the Turkana were very excited.

George.

[Unwillingly.] Oh, yes! I remember something about it. It had slipped my memory.

Alec.

Well?

George.

I’m not very clear about it. The woman had been shot, hadn’t she? One of our station boys had been playing the fool with her, and he seems to have shot her.

Alec.

Have you made no inquiries as to who the man was?

George.

[In a surly way.] I haven’t had time. We’ve all been worked off our legs during these three days.

Alec.

Do you suspect no one?

George.

I don’t think so.

Alec.

Think a moment.

George.

The only man who might have done it is that big scoundrel whom we got on the coast, the Swahili.

Alec.

What makes you think that?

George.

He’s been making an awful nuisance of himself, and I know he was running after her.

Alec.

I understand she complained about him to you?

George.

Yes.

Alec.

Do you think that would be enough evidence to punish him on?

George.

He’s a thorough blackguard, and after all, if one does make a mistake, he’s only a nigger.

Alec.

You’ll be surprised to hear that when the woman was found she wasn’t dead.

[George gives a movement of consternation.

Alec.

She didn’t die for nearly an hour.

George.

[After a short pause.] Was she able to say anything?

Alec.

She accused you of having shot her.

George.

Me?

Alec.

It appears that you were playing the fool with her, and when she got angry you took out a revolver and fired point blank. Presumably that she should tell no tales.

George.

It’s a stupid lie. You know what they are. It’s just like them to tell an absurd lie like that. You wouldn’t believe a parcel of niggers rather than me, would you? After all, my word’s worth more than theirs.

Alec.

[Taking from his pocket an exploded cartridge.] This was found about two yards from the body. As you see, it’s a revolver cartridge. It was brought to me this evening.

George.

I don’t know what that proves.

Alec.

You know just as well as I do that none of our natives has a revolver. Besides ourselves only two or three of the servants have them.

[George becomes white with fear, he takes out

his handkerchief and wipes his face.

Alec.

[Quietly.] Will you give me your revolver?

George.

I haven’t got it. I lost it in the skirmish this afternoon. I didn’t tell you as I thought you’d be annoyed.

Alec.

I saw you cleaning it less than an hour ago.

George.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] Perhaps it’s in my tent, I’ll go and see.

Alec.

[Sharply.] Stop here.

George.

[Angrily.] You’ve no right to talk to me like that. I’m sick to death of being ordered about. You seem to think I’m a dog. I came out here of my own free will, and I won’t let you treat me as if I were a servant.

Alec.

If you put your hand to your hip pocket, I think you’ll find your revolver there.

George.

I’m not going to give it to you.

Alec.

[Quietly.] D’you want me to come and take it from you myself?

[The two men stare at one another for a moment.

Then George slowly puts his hand to his

pocket. He lakes out the revolver and

suddenly aims at Alec. Dick beats up

his arm as he fires, and the Doctor,

springing forward, seizes him round the

waist. Alec remains still.

Dick.

[During the struggle.] You young blackguard!

George.

Let me go, damn you!

Alec.

You need not hold him.

[They leave go of George, who sinks cowering

into a chair. Dick hands the revolver to

Alec. He silently fits into a chamber the

cartridge that had been brought to him.

Alec.

You see that it fits. Hadn’t you better make a clean breast of it?

George.

[Cowed.] Yes, I shot her. She made a row, and the devil got into me. I didn’t know I’d done anything till she screamed and I saw the blood.... What a fool I was to throw the cartridge away! I wanted to have all the chambers charged.

Alec.

Do you remember that two months ago I hanged a man to the nearest tree because he’d outraged a native woman?

George.

[Springing up in terror.] You wouldn’t do that to me, Alec. Oh, God, no, Alec, have mercy on me. You wouldn’t hang me. Oh, why did I ever come to this damned place?

Alec.

You need not be afraid. I’m not going to do that. In any case I must preserve the native respect for the white man.

George.

I was half drunk when I saw that woman. I wasn’t responsible for my actions.

Alec.

The result is that the whole tribe has turned against us. The chief is my friend, and he sent a message to tell me he couldn’t hold them in. It’s from him I got the cartridge. It wouldn’t be so serious, only the best fighting part of our forces are the Turkana, and we must expect treachery. They’ve stirred up the neighbouring tribes against us, and all the work we’ve been doing for a year is undone. That’s the explanation of the Arabs’ attack three days ago.

George.

[Sullenly.] I knew it was all my fault.

Alec.

The natives have made up their minds to join the slave-traders, and we shall be attacked on all sides to-morrow. We can’t hold out against God knows how many thousands.

George.

D’you mean you’ll all be killed?

Alec.

If we remain here there’s no escape.

George.

[In a whisper.] What are you going to do to me, Alec?

[Alec walks up and down the tent.

Alec.

[Presently.] I think you might go and see your patients now, doctor.

Doctor.

Very well.

Dick.

Shall I go too, Alec?

Alec.

No, you can stay here. But don’t open your mouth till you’re spoken to.

[The Doctor goes out.

George.

I’m sorry I did that silly thing just now. I’m glad I didn’t hit you.

Alec.

It doesn’t matter at all. I’d forgotten all about it.

George.

I lost my head, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Alec.

You need not trouble about that. In Africa even the strongest people are apt to get excited and lose their balance.

[Alec re-lights his pipe, and there its a very short pause.

Alec.

Did you ever know that before we came away I asked Lucy to marry me?

George.

I knew you cared for her.

Alec.

She asked me to bring you here in the hope that you would regain the good name of your family. I think that is the object she has most at heart in the world. It’s as great as her love for you. The plan hasn’t been much of a success, has it?

George.

She ought to have known that I wasn’t suited for this kind of life.

Alec.

I saw very soon that you were weak and irresolute. But I hoped to make something of you. Your intentions seemed good enough, but you never had the strength to carry them out.... I’m sorry if I seem to be preaching to you.

George.

[Bitterly.] Oh, d’you think I care what any one says to me now?

Alec.

[Gravely, but not unkindly.] Then I found you were drinking. I told you that no man could stand liquor in this country, and you gave me your word of honour that you wouldn’t touch it again.

George.

Yes, I broke it. I couldn’t help it; the temptation was too strong.

Alec.

When we came to the station at Muneas you and Macinnery got blind drunk, and the whole camp saw you. I ought to have sent you back to the coast then, but it would have broken Lucy’s heart.

George.

It was Macinnery’s fault.

Alec.

It’s because I thought he was to blame that I sent him back alone. I wanted to give you another chance. It struck me that the feeling of authority might have some influence on you, and so when we came to the lake I left you to guard the ferry. I put the chief part of the stores in your care and marched on. I needn’t remind you what happened then.

[George looks down sulkily, and in default of excuses keeps silent.

Alec.

I came to the conclusion that it was hopeless. You seemed to me rotten through and through.

George.

[With a little laugh.] Like my father before me.

Alec.

I couldn’t believe a word you said. You did everything you shouldn’t have done. The result was that the men mutinied, and if I hadn’t come back in the nick of time they’d have killed you and looted all the stores.

George.

You always blame me for everything. A man’s not responsible for what he does when he’s down with fever.

Alec.

It was too late to send you back to the coast then, and I was obliged to take you on. And now the end has come. Your murder of that woman has put us all in deadly peril. Already to your charge lie the deaths of Richardson and almost twenty natives. Tribes that were friendly have joined with the Arabs, and we’re as near destruction as we can possibly be.

George.

What are you going to do?

Alec.

We’re far away from the coast, and I must take the law into my own hands.

George.

[With a gasp.] You’re not going to kill me?

Alec.

Are you fond of Lucy?

George.

[Brokenly.] You — you know I am. Why d’you remind me of her now? I’ve made a rotten mess of everything, and I’m better out of the way. But think of the disgrace of it. It’ll kill Lucy.... And she was hoping I’d do so much.

Alec.

Listen to me. Our only chance of escaping from the confounded fix we’re in is to make a sudden attack on the Arabs before the natives join them. We shall be enormously outnumbered, but we may just smash them if we can strike to-night. My plan is to start marching as if I didn’t know that the Turkana were going to turn against us. After an hour all the whites but one, and the Swahilis whom I can trust implicitly, will take a short cut. The Arabs will have had news of our starting, and they’ll try to cut us off at the pass. I shall fall on them just as they begin to attack. D’you understand?

George.

Yes.

Alec.

Now I must have one white man to head the Turkana, and that man will run the greatest possible danger. I’d go myself, only the Swahilis won’t fight unless I lead them.... Are you willing to take that post?

George.

I?

Alec.

I could order you, but the job’s too dangerous for me to force it on any one. If you refuse, I shall call the others together and ask some one to volunteer. In that case you will have to find your way back alone as best you can to the coast.

George.

No, no! Anything rather than the shame of that.

Alec.

I won’t hide from you that it means almost certain death. But there’s no other way of saving ourselves. On the other hand, if you show perfect courage at the moment the Arabs attack and the Turkana find that we’ve given them the slip, you may escape. If you do, I promise nothing shall be said of all that has happened here.

George.

All right. I’ll do that. And I thank you with all my heart for giving me the chance.

Alec.

I’m glad you’ve accepted. Whatever happens you’ll have done a brave action in your life. [He holds out his hand to George, who takes it.] I think there’s nothing more to be said. You must be ready to start in half an hour. Here’s your revolver. Remember that one chamber’s empty. You’d better put in another cartridge.

George.

Yes, I’ll do that.

[He goes out.

Dick.

D’you think he has any chance of escaping?

Alec.

If he has pluck he may get through.

Dick.

Well!

Alec.

To-morrow we shall know if he has that last virtue of a blackguard — courage.

Dick.

And if he hasn’t, it’s death you’re sending him to?

Alec.

Yes. It’s death!

THE THIRD ACT

Scene: A smoking-room at Lady Kelsey’s, leading by an archway into a drawing-room at the back. On the right is a glass door which leads into the garden. On one side is a sofa; on the other a table with cigarettes, matches, whiskey, sodas, etc.

Lady Kelsey is giving a dance, and the music of the Lancers is heard vaguely from the ball-room as the curtain rises. Mrs. Crowley and Sir Robert Boulger are sitting down. Lady Kelsey comes in with the Rev. James Carbery.

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, you wretched people, why aren’t you dancing? It’s too bad of you to hide yourselves here!

Mrs. Crowley.

We thought no one would find us in the smoking-room. But why have you abandoned your guests, Lady Kelsey?

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, I’ve got them all comfortably settled in the Lancers, and I’m free to rest myself for a quarter of an hour. You don’t know what agonies I’ve been suffering the whole evening.

Mrs. Crowley.

Good gracious me! Why?

Lady Kelsey.

I’m so afraid Alec Mackenzie will come.

Boulger.

You needn’t worry about that, Aunt Alice. He’ll never venture to show his face.

Lady Kelsey.

I didn’t know what to do. It was impossible to put the dance off. It’s too dreadful that these horrible revelations should....

Carbery.

[Supplying the word.] Transpire.

Lady Kelsey.

Yes, transpire on the very day I’ve at last persuaded Lucy to come into the world again. I wish Dick would come.

Boulger.

Yes, he’ll be able to tell us something.

Mrs. Crowley.

But will he?

Carbery.

Wherever I go people are talking about Mr. Mackenzie, and I’m bound to say I’ve found nobody who has a good word for him.

Boulger.

[Bitterly.] Humpty-dumpty’s had a great fall.

Carbery.

I wonder if I might have a cigarette?

Mrs. Crowley.

I’m sure you might. And if you press me dreadfully, I’ll have one, too.

Boulger.

Don’t press her. She’s already had far too many.

Mrs. Crowley.

Well, I’ll forego the pressing, but not the cigarette.

Carbery.

[Handing her the box and giving her a light.] It’s against all my principles, you know.

Mrs. Crowley.

What is the use of principles except to give one an agreeable sensation of wickedness when one doesn’t act up to them?

[Dick comes in as she speaks.

Dick.

My dear lady, you’re as epigrammatic as a dramatist. Do you say such things from choice or necessity?

Lady Kelsey.

Dick!

Boulger.

Dick!

Mrs. Crowley.

Mr. Lomas!

Carbery.

Ah!

[The four exclamations are simultaneous.

Dick.

This enthusiasm at my appearance is no less gratifying than unexpected.

Lady Kelsey.

I’m so glad you’ve come at last. Now we shall get at the truth.

Boulger.

[Impatiently.] Well?

Dick.

My dear people, what are you talking about?

Boulger.

Oh, don’t be such an ass!

Mrs. Crowley.

Good heavens, didn’t you read the Times this morning?

Dick.

I only came back from Paris to-night. Besides, I never read the papers except in August.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Raising her eyebrows.] When there’s nothing in them?

Dick.

Pardon me, I’m an eager student of the sea-serpent and the giant gooseberry.

Lady Kelsey.

My dear Dick, it’s too shocking. I wish I’d had the courage to write and ask Mr. Mackenzie not to come. But since you both came back from Africa a month ago he’s been here nearly every day. And he’s been so good and kind to us, I couldn’t treat him as though there was no doubt the story was true.

Boulger.

There can’t be the least doubt about it. By George, I should like to kick him.

Dick.

[Dryly.] My dear chap, Alec is a hardy Scot and bigger than you, so I shouldn’t advise you to try.

Boulger.

I was engaged to dine with him to-night, but I wired to say I had a headache.

Lady Kelsey.

What will he think if he sees you here?

Boulger.

He can think what he jolly well likes.

Lady Kelsey.

I hope he has the sense to stay away.

Carbery.

I think you’re pretty safe now, Lady Kelsey. It’s growing late.

Dick.

Will some one kindly explain?

Mrs. Crowley.

D’you mean to say you really don’t know — seriously? After all, you were with him.

Lady Kelsey.

My dear Dick, there are two columns of fiery denunciation in this morning’s Times.

[Dick is a little startled, but at once collects himself.

Dick.

Oh, that’s only the reaction. That’s nothing. Since he arrived in Mombassa, after three years in the heart of Africa, he’s made almost a triumphal progress. Of course, it couldn’t last. The reaction was bound to come.

Boulger.

[Looking at him steadily.] The article is signed by a man named Macinnery.

Dick.

[Calmly.] Alec found Macinnery half starving at Mombassa, and took him solely out of charity. But he was a worthless rascal, and he had to send him back.

Boulger.

He gives ample proof for every word he says.

Dick.

Whenever an explorer comes home, there’s some one to tell nasty stories about him. People forget that kid gloves are not much use in a tropical forest, and grow very indignant when they hear that a man has used a little brute force to make himself respected.

Lady Kelsey.

Oh, my dear Dick, it’s much worse than that. First poor Lucy’s father died....

Dick.

You’re not going to count that as an overwhelming misfortune? We were unanimous in describing that gentleman’s demise as an uncommonly happy release.

Lady Kelsey.

But Lucy was heart-broken all the same. And when her life seemed to grow a little more cheerful, came her brother’s tragic death.

Dick.

[Abruptly, to Mrs. Crowley.] What is it exactly?

Mrs. Crowley.

The long and short of it is that Mr. Mackenzie was the cause of George Allerton’s death.

Dick.

Lucy’s brother was killed by the slave-traders.

Boulger.

Mackenzie sent him into a confounded trap to save his own dirty skin.

Lady Kelsey.

And the worst of it is that I think Lucy is in love with Mr. Mackenzie.

[Boulger makes a slight movement, and for a moment there is an uncomfortable pause.

Carbery.

I saw him this evening in Piccadilly, and I almost ran into his arms. It was quite awkward.

Dick.

[Frigidly.] Why?

Carbery.

I don’t think I want to shake the man’s hand. He’s nothing short of a murderer.

Boulger.

[Savagely.] He’s worse than that. He’s ten times worse.

Lady Kelsey.

Well, for heaven’s sake be polite to him if he comes to-night.

Carbery.

I really couldn’t bring myself to shake hands with him.

Dick.

[Dryly.] Don’t you think you’d better wait for evidence before you condemn him?

Boulger.

My dear fellow, the letter in the Times is absolutely damning. Interviewers went to him from the evening papers, and he refused to see them.

Dick.

What does Lucy say of it? After all, she’s the person most concerned.

Lady Kelsey.

She doesn’t know. I took care that she shouldn’t see the paper. I wanted to give her this evening’s enjoyment unalloyed.

Mrs. Crowley.

Take care, here she is.

[Lucy comes in.

Lady Kelsey.

[Smiling and reaching out her hand.] Well, darling?

Lucy.

[Going to Lady Kelsey.] Are you growing very tired, my aunt?

Lady Kelsey.

I can rest myself for the time. I don’t think any one else will come now.

Lucy.

[Gaily.] You faithless woman, have you forgotten the guest of the evening?

Lady Kelsey.

Mr. Mackenzie?

Lucy.

[Bending over her.] My dear, it was charming of you to hide the paper from me this morning....

Lady Kelsey.

[Startled.] Did you see the letter? I so wanted you not to till to-morrow.

Lucy.

Mr. Mackenzie very rightly thought I should know at once what was said about him and my brother. He sent me the paper himself this evening.

Boulger.

Did he write to you?

Lucy.

No, he merely scribbled on a card: “I think you should read this.”

Boulger.

Well, I’m damned!

Lady Kelsey.

What did you think of the letter, Lucy?

Lucy.

[Proudly.] I didn’t believe it.

BOULGER.

[Bitterly.] You must be blinded by your — friendship for Alec Mackenzie. I never read anything more convincing.

Lucy.

I could hardly believe him guilty of such an odious crime if he confessed it with his own lips.

Boulger.

Of course, he won’t do that.

Dick.

Did I ever tell you how I made acquaintance with Alec? In the Atlantic — about three hundred miles from land.

Mrs. Crowley.

What a perfectly ridiculous place for an introduction.

Dick.

I was a silly young fool in those days, and I habitually played the giddy goat. In the course of which, I fell overboard and was proceeding to drown when Alec jumped in after me. It was an incautious thing to do, because he very nearly got drowned himself.

Lucy.

That’s not the only heroic thing he’s done.

Dick.

No, it’s one of his hobbies to risk his life to save unnecessary and useless people. But the funny thing is that ever since he saved mine, he’s been quite absurdly grateful. He seems to think I did him an intentional service and fell into the water on purpose to give him a chance of pulling me out.

Lucy.

[With a long look at Dick.] It’s very kind and good of you to have told that story.

[The Butler comes in and announces Alec Mackenzie.

Butler.

Mr. Mackenzie.

Alec.

[Blandly.] Ah, I thought I should find you here, Lady Kelsey.

Lady Kelsey.

[Shaking hands with him.] How d’you do? We’ve just been talking of you.

Alec.

Really?

Lady Kelsey.

It’s so late, we were afraid you wouldn’t come. I should have been dreadfully disappointed.

Alec.

It’s very kind of you to say so. I’ve been at the Travellers’, reading various appreciations of my own character.

Lady Kelsey.

[Somewhat embarrassed.] Oh, I heard there was something about you in the papers.

Alec.

There’s a good deal. I really had no idea the world was so interested in me.

Lady Kelsey.

It’s charming of you to come to-night. I’m sure you hate dances!

Alec.

Oh, no, they interest me enormously. I remember, one of the Kings of Uganda gave a dance in my honour. Ten thousand warriors in war-paint. I assure you it was most impressive.

Dick.

My dear fellow, if paint is the attraction you really need not go much farther than Mayfair.

Alec.

[Pretending for the first time to notice Boulger.] Ah, there’s my little friend Bobbie. I thought you had a headache?

Lady Kelsey.

[Quickly.] I’m afraid Bobby is dreadfully dissipated. He’s not looking at all well.

Alec.

[Good-humouredly.] You shouldn’t keep such late hours, Bobbie. At your age one wants one’s beauty sleep.

Boulger.

It’s very kind of you to take an interest in me. My headache has passed off.

Alec.

I’m very glad. What do you use — Phenacetin?

Boulger.

It went away of its own accord — after dinner.

Alec.

[Smiling.] So you resolved to give the girls a treat by coming to Lady Kelsey’s dance? How nice of you not to disappoint them! [He turns to Lucy and holds out his hand. They look into one another’s eyes. She takes his hand.] I sent you a paper this evening.

Lucy.

It was very good of you.

[Carbery comes forward and offers his arm.

Carbery.

I think this is my dance, Miss Allerton. May I take you in?

Alec.

Carbery? I saw you in Piccadilly just now! You were darting about just like a young gazelle. I had no idea you could be so active.

Carbery.

I didn’t see you.

Alec.

I observed that you were deeply interested in the shop windows as I passed. How are you?

[He holds out his hand, and for a moment Carbery hesitates to take it. But Alec’s steady gaze compels him.

Carbery.

How d’you do?

Alec.

[With an amused smile.] So glad to see you again, old man.

[Dick gives an audible chuckle, and Carbery, reddening, draws his hand away angrily. He goes to Lucy and offers his arm.

Boulger.

[To Mrs. Crowley.] Shall I take you back?

Mrs. Crowley.

Do!

Lady Kesley.

Won’t you come, Mr. Mackenzie?

Alec.

If you don’t mind I’ll stay and smoke just one cigarette with Dick Lomas. You know I’m not a dancing man.

Lady Kelsey.

Very well.

[All go out except Alec and Dick.

Dick.

I suppose you know we were all beseeching Providence you’d have the grace to stay away to-night?

Alec.

[With a smile.] I suspected it, I confess. I shouldn’t have come only I wanted to see Lucy. I’ve been in the country all day, and I knew nothing about Macinnery’s letter till I saw the placards at the station.

Dick.

Macinnery proposes to make things rather uncomfortable, I imagine.

Alec.

[With a smile.] I made a mistake, didn’t I? I ought to have dropped him in the river when I had no further use for him.

Dick.

What are you going to do?

Alec.

It’s not easy to clear myself at a dead man’s expense. The earth covers his crime and his sins and his weakness.

Dick.

D’you mean to say that you are going to sit still and let them throw mud at you?

Alec.

When George was dead I wrote to Lucy that he died like a brave man. I can’t now publish to the whole world that he was a coward and a rogue. I can’t rake up again the story of her father’s crime.

Dick.

[Impatiently.] Surely, that’s absolutely quixotic.

Alec.

No, it isn’t. I tell you I can’t do anything else. I’m bound hand and foot. Lucy has talked to me of George’s death, and the only thing that has consoled her is the idea that in a manner he had redeemed his father’s good name. How can I rob her of that? She placed all her hopes in George. How could she face the world with the knowledge that her brother was rotten to the core, as rotten as her father.

Dick.

It seems awfully hard.

Alec.

Besides, when all is said and done, the boy did die game. Don’t you think that should count for something? No, I tell you I can’t give him away now. I should never cease to reproach myself. I love Lucy far too much to cause her such bitter pain.

Dick.

And if it loses you her love?

Alec.

I think she can do without love better than without self-respect.

[Lucy comes in with Mrs. Crowley.

Lucy.

I’ve sent my partner away. I felt I must have a few words alone with you.

Dick.

Shall I take Mrs. Crowley into a retired corner?

Lucy.

No, we have nothing to say that you can’t hear. You and Nellie know that we’re engaged to be married. [To Alec.] I want you to dance with me.

Alec.

It’s very good of you.

Mrs. Crowley.

Don’t you think that’s rather foolish, Lucy?

Lucy.

[To Alec.] I want to show them all that I don’t believe that you’re guilty of an odious crime.

Alec.

They’ve said horrible things about me?

Lucy.

Not to me. They wanted to hide it from me, but I knew they were talking.

Alec.

You’ll grow used to hearing shameful things said of me. I suppose I shall grow used to it, too.

Lucy.

Oh, I hate them.

Alec.

Ah, it’s not that I mind. What torments me is that it was so easy to despise their praise, and now I can’t despise their blame.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Smiling.] I believe you have some glimmerings of human nature in you after all.

Lucy.

When you came to-night, so calm and self-possessed, I admired you as I’d never admired you before.

Alec.

It’s easy enough to command one’s face. I learnt to do that in Africa when often my life depended on my seeming to have no fear. But in my heart ... I never knew that I could feel so bitter. And yet, after all, it’s only your good opinion that I care for.

Lucy.

I’ve trusted you implicitly from the first day I saw you.

Alec.

Thank God for that! To-day is the first time I’ve wanted to be assured that I was trusted. And yet I’m ashamed to want it.

Lucy.

Ah, don’t be too hard upon yourself. You’re so afraid of letting your tenderness appear.

Alec.

The only way to be strong is never to surrender to one’s weakness. Strength is merely a habit like everything else. I want you to be strong, too. I want you never to doubt me whatever you may hear said.

Lucy.

I gave my brother into your hands, and told you that if he died a brave man’s death I could ask for no more.

Alec.

I should tell you that I’ve made up my mind to make no answer to the charges that are made against me.

[There is a very short pause, while he looks at her steadily.

Mrs. Crowley.

But why?

Alec.

[To Lucy.] I can give you my word of honour that I’ve done nothing which I regret. I know that what I did was right with regard to George, and if it were all to come again I would do exactly as I did before.

Lucy.

I think I can trust you.

Alec.

I thought of you always, and everything I did was for your sake. Every single act of mine during these four years in Africa has been done because I loved you.

Lucy.

You must love me always, Alec, for now I have only you. [He bends down and kisses her hand.] Come!

[He gives her his arm and they walk out.

Mrs. Crowley.

I feel as if I should rather like to cry.

Dick.

Do you really? So do I.

Mrs. Crowley.

Don’t be so silly.

Dick.

By the way, you don’t want to dance with me, do you?

Mrs. Crowley.

Certainly not. You dance abominably.

Dick.

It’s charming of you to say so. It puts me at my ease at once.

Mrs. Crowley.

Come and sit on the sofa and talk seriously.

Dick.

Ah, you want to flirt with me, Mrs. Crowley.

Mrs. Crowley.

Good heavens, what on earth makes you think that?

Dick.

It’s what a woman always means when she asks you to talk sensibly.

Mrs. Crowley.

I can’t bear a man who thinks women are in love with him.

Dick.

Bless you, I don’t think that. I only think they want to marry me.

Mrs. Crowley.

That’s equally detestable.

Dick.

Not at all. However old, ugly, and generally undesirable a man is, he’ll find a heap of charming girls who are willing to marry him. Marriage is still the only decent means of livelihood for a really nice girl.

Mrs. Crowley.

But, my dear friend, if a woman really makes up her mind to marry a man, nothing on earth can save him.

Dick.

Don’t say that, you terrify me.

Mrs. Crowley.

You need not be in the least alarmed, because I shall refuse you.

Dick.

Thanks, awfully. But all the same I don’t think I’ll risk a proposal.

Mrs. Crowley.

My dear Mr. Lomas, your only safety is in immediate flight.

Dick.

Why?

Mrs. Crowley.

It must be obvious to the meanest intelligence that you’ve been on the verge of proposing to me for the last month.

Dick.

Oh, I assure you, you’re quite mistaken.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then I shan’t come to the play with you to-morrow?

Dick.

But I’ve taken the seats, and I’ve ordered an exquisite dinner at the Carlton.

Mrs. Crowley.

What have you ordered?

Dick.

Potage Bisque... [She makes a little face.]

Sole Normande... [She shrugs her shoulders.]

Wild Duck.

Mrs. Crowley.

With an orange salad?

Dick.

Yes.

Mrs. Crowley.

I don’t positively dislike that.

Dick.

And I’ve ordered a soufflé with an ice in the middle of it.

Mrs. Crowley.

I shan’t come.

Dick.

I shouldn’t have thought you kept very well abreast of dramatic art if you insist on marrying every man who takes you to a theatre.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Demurely.] I was very nicely brought up.

Dick.

Of course, if you’re going to make yourself systematically disagreeable unless I marry you, I suppose I shall have to do it in self-defence.

Mrs. Crowley.

I don’t know if you have the least idea what you’re talking about. I’m sure I haven’t!

Dick.

I was merely asking you in a rather well-turned phrase to name the day. The lamb shall be ready for the slaughter!

Mrs. Crowley.

Couldn’t you infuse a little romance into it? You might begin by going down on your bended knees.

Dick.

I assure you that’s quite out of fashion. Lovers, nowadays, are much too middle-aged, and their joints are creaky. Besides, it ruins the trousers.

Mrs. Crowley.

At all events, there can be no excuse for your not saying that you know you’re utterly unworthy of me.

Dick.

Wild horses wouldn’t induce me to make a statement which is so remote from the truth.

Mrs. Crowley.

And, of course, you must threaten to commit suicide if I don’t consent.

Dick.

Women are such sticklers for routine. They have no originality.

Mrs. Crowley.

Very well, have it your own way. But I must have a proposal in due form.

Dick.

Only four words are needed. [Counting them on his fingers.] Will you marry me?

Mrs. Crowley.

That is both clear and simple. I reply in one: No!

Dick.

[As though he were not sure that he had heard correctly.] I beg your pardon?

Mrs. Crowley.

The answer is in the negative.

Dick.

You’re joking. You’re certainly joking.

Mrs. Crowley.

I will be a sister to you.

Dick.

Do you mean to say you deliberately refuse me?

Mrs. Crowley.

[Smiling.] I promised you I would.

Dick.

[With much seriousness.] I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Puzzled.] The man’s mad. The man’s nothing short of a raving lunatic.

Dick.

I wanted to see if you were really attached to me. You have given me a proof of esteem which I promise you I will never forget.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Laughing.] You’re a perfect idiot, Mr. Lomas!

Dick.

It’s one of my cherished convictions that a really nice woman is never so cruel as to marry a man she cares for.

Mrs. Crowley.

You’re much too flippant to marry anybody, and you’re perfectly odious into the bargain.

[She goes out. Dick, chuckling, lights a cigarette. Alec comes in and lies down lazily on the sofa.

Alec.

Why, Dick, what’s the matter? You look as pleased as Punch.

Dick.

My dear fellow, I feel like the Terrible Turk. I’ve been wrestling, and I thought I was going to have a fall. But by the display of considerable agility I’ve managed to keep my legs.

Alec.

What do you mean?

Dick.

Nothing. It’s merely the gaiety of forty-two.

[Boulger comes into the room, followed immediately by Mallins and Carbery. He starts slightly when he sees Alec, but then goes over to the table on which is the whiskey.

Mallins.

May we smoke here, Bobby?

Boulger.

Certainly. Dick insisted that this room should be particularly reserved for that purpose.

[The Butler comes in with a small silver salver, and takes up one or two dirty glasses.

Dick.

Lady Kelsey is the most admirable of all hostesses.

Alec.

[Taking a cigarette from his case.] Give me a match, Bobby, there’s a good boy. [Boulger, with his back turned to Alec, takes no notice. He pours himself out some whiskey. Alec smiles slightly.] Bobby, throw me over the matches!

Boulger.

[With his back still turned.] Miller!

Butler.

Yes, sir?

Boulger.

Mr. Mackenzie is asking for something.

Butler.

Yes, sir!

Alec.

You might give me a light, will you?

Butler.

Yes, sir!

[The Butler takes the matches to Alec, who lights his cigarette.

Alec.

Thank you. [Complete silence is preserved till the Butler leaves the room.] I perceive, Bobbie, that during my absence you have not added good manners to your other accomplishments.

Boulger.

If you want things, you can ask the servants for them.

Alec.

[Good-humouredly.] Don’t be foolish, Bobbie!

Boulger.

Would you be so kind as to remember that my name is Boulger?

Alec.

[Smiling.] Perhaps you would like me to call you Sir Robert?

Boulger.

I should prefer that you would call me nothing at all. I have absolutely no wish to know you.

Alec.

Which shows that your taste is as bad as your breeding.

Boulger.

[Angrily, walking up to him.] By God, I’ll knock you down!

Alec.

You could hardly do that when I’m already lying on my back.

Boulger.

Look here, Mackenzie, I’m not going to let you play the fool with me. I want to know what answer you have to make to all these charges that have been brought against you.

Alec.

Might I suggest that only Miss Allerton has the least right to receive answers to her questions? And she hasn’t questioned me.

Boulger.

I’ve given up trying to understand her attitude. If I were she, it would make me sick with horror to look at you. Since this morning you’ve rested under a direct accusation of causing George’s death, and you’ve said nothing in self-defence.

Alec.

Nothing.

Boulger.

You’ve been given an opportunity to explain yourself, and you haven’t taken it.

Alec.

Quite true.

Boulger.

Are you not going to deny the charge?

Alec.

I’m not.

Boulger.

Then I can only draw one conclusion. There appears to be no means of bringing you to justice, but at least I can refuse to know you.

Alec.

All is over between us. And shall I return your letters and your photograph?

Boulger.

I’m not joking.

Alec.

It’s singular that though I’m Scotch and you are English I should be able to see how ridiculous you are, while you’re quite blind to your own absurdity.

Dick.

Come, Alec! Remember he’s only a boy.

Boulger.

[To Dick Lomas.] I’m perfectly able to look after myself, and I’ll thank you not to interfere. [To Alec.] If Lucy’s so indifferent to her brother’s death that she’s willing to keep up with you, that’s her own affair ...

Dick.

[Interrupting.] Come, Bobbie, don’t make a scene.

Boulger.

[Furiously.] Leave me alone, confound you!

Alec.

Do you think this is quite the place for an altercation? Wouldn’t you gain more notoriety if you attacked me in my club or at Church parade on Sunday?

Boulger.

It’s mere shameless impudence that you should come here to-night. You’re using these wretched women as a shield, because you know that as long as Lucy sticks to you there are people who won’t believe the story.

Alec.

I came for the same reason as yourself, dear boy. Because I was invited.

Dick.

Now then, Bobbie, shut up!

Boulger.

I shan’t shut up. The man’s got no right to force himself here.

Dick.

Remember that you’re Lady Kelsey’s nephew.

Boulger.

I didn’t ask him. D’you think I’d have come if I knew he was going to be here? He’s acknowledged that he has no defence.

Alec.

Pardon me, I acknowledge nothing and deny nothing.

Boulger.

That won’t do for me. I want the truth, and I’m going to get it. I’ve got a right to know.

Alec.

[Beginning to lose his temper.] Don’t make an ass of yourself, Bobby.

Boulger.

By God, I’ll make you answer!

[As he says this he goes up to Alec furiously, but Alec. with a twist of his arm, hurls him back.

Alec.

I could break your back, you silly boy.

[With a cry of anger Boulger is about to spring at Alec when Dick gets in the way.

Dick.

Now then, no scenes. And you’ll only get the worst of it, Bobby. Alec could just crumple you up. Take him away, Mallins. Don’t stand there like a stuffed owl, Carbery.

Boulger.

Let me alone, you fool!

Mallins.

Come along, old chap.

Boulger.

[To Alec.] You damned skunk!

Dick.

Now then, be off with you. Don’t make a silly ass of yourself.

[Boulger, Mallins and Carbery go out.

Dick.

Poor Lady Kelsey! To-morrow half London will be saying that you and Bobby had a stand-up fight in her drawing-room.

Alec.

[Furiously.] The damned cubs!

Dick.

The position is growing confoundedly awkward!

Alec.

They lick my boots till I loathe them, and then they turn against me like a pack of curs. Oh, I despise them — these silly boys who stay at home wallowing in their ease while men work. Thank God, I’ve done with them all now. They think one can fight one’s way through Africa as easily as one walks down Piccadilly. They think one goes through hardships and dangers, illness and starvation, to be the lion of a dinner-party in Mayfair.

Dick.

My dear Alec, keep calm.

Alec.

[With a visible effort containing himself completely, with studied nonchalance.] D’you think that I look wildly excited?

Dick.

[Ironically.] I don’t think butter would melt in your mouth.

[Dick and Alec go out into the garden. In a moment Boulger comes in with Lady Kelsey.

Boulger.

Thank heaven, there’s nobody here.

Lady Kelsey.

I think you’re dreadfully foolish, Bobby. You know how Lucy resents any interference with her actions.

Boulger.

Won’t you sit down? You must be dreadfully tired.

Lady Kelsey.

Why won’t you wait till to-morrow?

Boulger.

I feel that it ought to be settled at once.

[Lucy appears.

Lucy.

Did you send for me, my aunt? Mr. Carbery said you wanted to speak to me here.

Lady Kelsey.

Yes, I gave him that message.

Boulger.

I asked Aunt Alice to beg you to come here. I was afraid you wouldn’t if I asked you.

Lucy.

[Lightly.] What nonsense! I’m always delighted to see you.

Boulger.

I wanted to speak to you about something, and I thought Aunt Alice should be present.

Lucy.

Is it so important that it can’t wait till to-morrow?

Boulger.

I venture to think it’s very important.

Lucy.

[Smiling.] I’m all attention.

[He hesitates for a moment, then braces himself to the ordeal.

Boulger.

I’ve told you often, Lucy, that I’ve been in love with you for as many years as I can remember.

Lucy.

Surely you’ve not snatched me from the unwilling arm of my partner in order to make me a proposal of marriage?

Boulger.

I’m perfectly serious, Lucy.

Lucy.

[Smiling.] I assure you it doesn’t suit you at all.

Boulger.

The other day I asked you again to marry me, just before Alec Mackenzie came back.

Lucy.

It was very charming of you. You mustn’t think that because I laugh at you a little I’m not grateful for your affection.

Boulger.

Except for that letter in this morning’s Times, I should never have dared to say anything to you again. But that changes everything.

Lucy.

I don’t understand what you mean.

Boulger.

[After a little pause.] I ask you again if you’ll be my wife? When Alec Mackenzie came back I understood why you were so indifferent to me, but you can’t marry him now.

Lucy.

You have no right to talk to me like this.

Boulger.

I’m the only man who’s related to you at all, and I love you with my whole soul.

Lady Kelsey.

I think you should listen to him, Lucy. I’m growing old, and soon you’ll be quite alone in the world.

Boulger.

I don’t ask you to care for me. I only want to serve you.

Lucy.

I can only repeat that I’m very grateful to you. I can never marry you.

Boulger.

[Beginning to lose his temper again.] Are you going to continue to know Mackenzie? If you’ll take the advice of any unprejudiced person about that letter, you’ll find that he’ll say the same as I. There can be no shadow of doubt that Mackenzie is guilty of a monstrous crime.

Lucy.

I don’t care what the evidence is. I know he can’t have done a shameful thing.

Boulger.

But have you forgotten that it’s your own brother he killed? The whole country is up in arms against him, and you are quite indifferent.

Lucy.

[Much moved.] Oh, Bobbie, how can you be so cruel?

Boulger.

If you ever really cared for George at all, you must wish to punish the man who caused his death.

Lucy.

Oh, why d’you torment me? I tell you that he isn’t guilty. It’s because I’m convinced of that ...

Boulger.

[Interrupting.] But have you asked him?

Lucy.

No.

Boulger.

He might give you the truth.

Lucy.

I couldn’t do that.

Boulger.

Why not?

Lady Kelsey.

It’s very strange that he should insist on this silence.

Lucy.

Do you believe that story too?

Lady Kelsey.

I don’t know what to believe. It’s so extraordinary. If the man’s innocent, why doesn’t he speak?

Lucy.

He knows I trust him. I couldn’t cause him the great pain of asking him questions.

Boulger.

Are you afraid he couldn’t answer them?

Lucy.

No, no, no!

Boulger.

Well, just try. After all, you owe as much as that to the memory of George.

Lady Kelsey.

I think it’s very unreasonable, Lucy. He knows we’re his friends. He can count on our discretion.

Lucy.

I believe in him implicitly. I believe in him with all the strength I’ve got.

Boulger.

Then, surely it can make no difference if you ask him. There can be no reason for him not to trust you.

Lucy.

Oh, why don’t you leave me alone?

Boulger.

Ask him point blank. If he refuses to answer you ...

Lucy.

[Hastily.] It would mean nothing. Why should he answer? I believe in him absolutely. I think he’s the greatest and most honourable man I’ve ever known. I care more for his little finger than for the whole world. I love him with all my heart. And that’s why he can’t be guilty of this horrible crime. Because I’ve loved him for years, and he’s known it. And he loves me. And he’s loved me always.

[Alec and Dick stroll in from the garden.

Lucy.

Alec, Alec, I want you! Thank God, you’ve come!

Alec.

[Going to her quickly.] What is it?

Lucy.

Alec, you must tell them now about you and me.

[Alec looks at Lucy for a moment, and then turns to Lady Kelsey.

Alec.

I think perhaps we ought to have told you before, Lady Kelsey. But we wanted to enjoy our little secret by ourselves.

Lady Kelsey.

I’m afraid to understand.

Alec.

I have asked Lucy to be my wife, and she....

Lucy.

[Interrupting him.] She said she would be honoured and deeply grateful.

Lady Kelsey.

[Greatly embarrassed.] I hardly know what to say.... How long have you been engaged?

Lucy.

Won’t you tell me you’re pleased, my aunt? I know you want me to be happy.

Lady Kelsey.

Of course, I want you to be happy. But I — I....

[Boulger turns on his heel and walks out.

Dick.

[Offering his arm to Lady Kelsey.] Wouldn’t you like to go back to the drawing-room?

[She allows herself to be led away, helplessly.

Alec and Lucy are left alone.

Alec.

[With a smile.] I don’t think our announcement has been received with enthusiasm.

Lucy.

You’re not angry with me, Alec?

Alec.

Of course not. Everything you do is right and charming.

Lucy.

I shall really think I’m a wonderful person if I’ve taught you to pay compliments.

Alec.

I’m so glad to be alone with you. Now, at all events, people will have the sense to leave us by ourselves.

Lucy.

[Passionately.] I want your love. I want your love so badly.

Alec.

[Taking her in his arms.] My darling!

Lucy.

[Clinging to him.] The moment I’m with you I feel so confident and happy.

Alec.

Only when you’re with me? [Lucy looks at him for an instant. He repeats the question in a caressing voice.] Only when you’re with me, darling?

Lucy.

Why d’you think I made you tell them we were engaged?

Alec.

You took me by surprise.

Lucy.

I had to tell them. I couldn’t keep it back. They made me suffer so dreadfully.

Alec.

The brutes! Tell me what they did.

Lucy.

Oh, they said horrible things about you.

Alec.

No more than that?

Lucy.

It’s nothing to you. But to me.... Oh, you don’t know what agony I endure. I’m such a coward! I thought I was so much braver.

Alec.

I don’t understand you.

Lucy.

I wanted to burn my ships behind me. I wanted to reassure myself. [Alec makes a slight movement away from her, but she holds him back anxiously.] Forgive me, dear. You don’t know how terrible it is. I stand so dreadfully alone. Every one is convinced that you caused poor George’s death — every one but me. [Alec looks at her gravely, without speaking.] I try to put the thoughts out of my head, but I can’t — I can’t. That letter in the Times looks so dreadfully true. Don’t you see what I mean? The uncertainty is more than I can bear. At the first moment I felt so absolutely sure of you.

Alec.

And now you don’t?

Lucy.

I trust you just as much as ever. I know it’s impossible that you should have done a shameful thing. But there it stands in black and white, and you have nothing to say in answer.

Alec.

I know it’s very difficult. That is why I asked you to believe in me.

Lucy.

I do, Alec — with all my soul. But have mercy on me. I’m not so strong as I thought. It’s easy for you to stand alone. You’re iron, but I’m a weak woman.

Alec.

Oh, no, you’re not like other women. I was proud of your unconquerable spirit.

Lucy.

It was easy to be brave where my father was concerned, and George, but you’re the man I love, and it’s so different. I don’t know any more how to stand alone.

[Alec looks at her, thinking, but does not reply

for a moment.

Alec.

Do you remember that only an hour ago I told you that I’d done nothing which I wouldn’t do again? I gave you my word of honour that I could reproach myself for nothing.

Lucy.

Oh, I know. I’m so utterly ashamed of myself. But I can’t bear the doubt.

Alec.

Doubt! You’ve said the word at last.

Lucy.

I tell every one that I don’t believe a word of these horrible charges, and I repeat to myself: I’m certain, I’m certain that he’s innocent. And yet at the bottom of my heart there’s a doubt, and I can’t crush it.

Alec.

Is that why you told them we were engaged to be married?

Lucy.

I wanted to kill that gnawing pain of suspicion. I thought if I stood up before them and cried out that my trust in you was so great, I was willing to marry you notwithstanding everything, I should at least have peace in my own heart.

[Alec walks up and down. Then he stops in

front of Lucy.

Alec.

What is it precisely you want me to do?

Lucy.

I want you to have mercy on me because I love you. Don’t tell the world if you choose not to, but tell me the truth. I know you’re incapable of lying. If I only have it from your own lips I shall believe, I want to be certain, certain!

Alec.

Don’t you realise that I would never have asked you to marry me if my conscience hadn’t been quite clear? Don’t you realise that the reasons I have for holding my tongue must be of overwhelming strength?

Lucy.

But I am going to be your wife, and I love you, and you love me.

Alec.

I implore you not to insist, Lucy. Let us remember only that the past is gone and we love one another. It’s impossible for me to tell you anything.

Lucy.

Oh, but you must now. If any part of the story is true, you must give me a chance of judging for myself.

Alec.

I’m very sorry, I can’t.

Lucy.

But you’ll kill my love for you. The doubt which lurked at the bottom of my soul now fills me. How can you let me suffer such maddening torture?

Alec.

I thought you trusted me.

Lucy.

I’ll be satisfied if you’ll only tell me one thing: only tell me that when you sent George on that expedition you didn’t know that he’d be killed. [Alec looks at her steadily.] Only say that, Alec. Say that’s not true, and I’ll believe you.

Alec.

[Very quietly.] But it is true.

[Lucy does not answer, but stares at him with

terrified eyes.

Lucy.

Oh, I don’t understand. Oh, my dearest, don’t treat me as a child. Have mercy on me! You must be serious now. It’s a matter of life and death to both of us.

Alec.

I’m perfectly serious.

Lucy.

You knew that you were sending George into a death-trap? You knew he couldn’t escape alive?

Alec.

Except by a miracle.

Lucy.

And you don’t believe in miracles?

Alec.

No.

Lucy.

Oh, it can’t be true. Oh, Alec, Alec, Alec! Oh, what shall I do?

Alec.

I tell you that whatever I did was inevitable.

Lucy.

Then if that’s true, the rest must be true also. Oh, it’s awful. I can’t realise it. Haven’t you anything to say at all?

Alec.

[In a low voice.] Only that I’ve loved you always with all my soul.

Lucy.

You knew how much I loved my brother. You knew how much it meant to me that he should live to wipe out my father’s dishonour. All the future was centred on him, and you sacrificed him.

Alec.

[Hesitatingly.] I think I might tell you this. He had committed a grave error of judgment. We were entrapped by the Arabs, and our only chance of escape entailed the almost certain death of one of us.

[An inkling of the truth seizes Lucy, and her

face is suddenly distorted with horror. She

goes up to him impulsively. Her voice

trembles with emotion.

Lucy.

Alec, Alec, he didn’t do something — unworthy? You’re not trying to shield him?

Alec.

[Hoarsely.] No, no, no!

Lucy.

[With a gasp of relief, almost to herself.] Thank God! I couldn’t have borne that. [To Alec, hopelessly.] Then I don’t understand.

Alec.

It was not unjust that he should suffer for the catastrophe which he had brought about.

Lucy.

At those times one doesn’t think of justice. He was so young, so frank. Wouldn’t it have been nobler to give your life for his?

Alec.

Oh, my dear, you don’t know how easy it is to give one’s life. How little you know me! Do you think I should have hesitated if my death had been sufficient to solve the difficulty? I had my work to do. I was bound by solemn treaties to the surrounding tribes. It would have been cowardly for me to die. I tell you, my death would have meant the awful death of every man in my party.

Lucy.

I can only see one thing, that you took George, George of all others.

Alec.

I knew at the time that what I did might cost me your love, and though you won’t believe this, I did it for your sake.

[At this moment Mrs. Crowley enters with

Sir Robert Boulger. She has a cloak on.

Mrs. Crowley.

I was just coming to say good-night. Bobby is going to drive me home. [She suddenly notices Lucy’s agitation.] What on earth’s the matter?

[Lady Kelsey and Dick Lomas come in. Lady

Kelsey looks at Lucy and then goes up to

her impulsively.

Lady Kelsey.

Lucy, Lucy!

Lucy.

[Brokenly.] I’m no longer engaged to Mr. Mackenzie. He can’t deny that what is said about him is true.

[They look at him in astonishment, but he makes

no movement.

Mrs. Crowley.

[To Alec.] Haven’t you anything to say at all? You must have some explanation to offer?

Alec.

No, I have none whatever.

Dick.

Alec, old man, have you realised all that this means?

Alec.

Quite. I see now that it was inevitable.

Lucy.

[With a sudden burst of furious anger.] You killed him! You killed him as surely as if you’d strangled him with your own hands.

[Robert Boulger goes to the door and flings

it open. Alec gives Lucy a look, then

slightly shrugs his shoulders. He walks

out without a word. The moment he has

gone Lucy sinks down and bursts into

passionate tears.

THE FOURTH ACT

Scene. — A library in the house of Dick Lomas in Portman Square.

Dick and his Valet. Dick is putting flowers into a vase.

Dick.

Has Mr. Mackenzie come in?

Charles.

Yes, sir. He’s gone to his room.

Dick.

I expect Mrs. Crowley and Miss Allerton to tea. If any one else comes I’m not at home.

Charles.

Very well, sir.

Dick.

And if a caller should ask at what time I’m expected back, you haven’t the least idea.

Charles.

Very well, sir.

Dick.

We shall want breakfast at eight to-morrow. I’m going down to Southampton to see Mr. Mackenzie off. But I shall be home to dinner. How about those cases in the hall?

Charles.

Mr. Mackenzie said they were to be sent for this afternoon. They’re only labelled Zanzibar. Is that sufficient, sir?

Dick.

Oh, I suppose so. Mr. Mackenzie will have given the shippers all directions. You’d better bring the tea at once. Mrs. Crowley is coming at four.

Charles.

Very well, sir.

[He goes out. Dick continues to arrange the

flowers, than goes to the window and looks

out. He comes back. The door is opened by

Charles, who announces Mrs. Crowley.

Charles.

Mrs. Crowley.

Dick.

[Going towards her eagerly and taking both her hands.] Best of women!

Mrs. Crowley.

You seem quite glad to see me?

Dick.

I am. But where is Lucy?

Mrs. Crowley.

She’s coming later.... I don’t know why you should squeeze my hands in this pointed manner.

Dick.

What an age it is since I saw you!

Mrs. Crowley.

If you bury yourself in Scotland all the summer, you can’t expect to see people who go to Homburg and the Italian lakes.

Dick.

Heavens, how you cultivate respectability!

Mrs. Crowley.

It’s a sensitive plant whose vagaries one has to humour.

Dick.

Aren’t you delighted to be back in town?

Mrs. Crowley.

London’s the most charming place in the world to get away from and to come back to. Now tell me all you’ve been doing, if I can hear it without blushing too furiously.

Dick.

My behaviour would have done credit to a clergyman’s only daughter. I dragged Alec off to Scotland after that horrible scene at Lady Kelsey’s, and we played golf.

Mrs. Crowley.

Was he very wretched, poor thing?

Dick.

He didn’t say a word. I wanted to comfort him, but he never gave me a chance. He never mentioned Lucy’s name.

Mrs. Crowley.

Did he seem unhappy?

Dick.

No. He was just the same as ever, impassive and collected.

Mrs. Crowley.

Really he’s inhuman.

Dick.

He’s an anomaly in this juvenile century. He’s an ancient Roman who buys his clothes in Savile Row. An eagle caged with a colony of canaries.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then he’s very much in the way in England, and it’s much better for him that he should go back to Africa.

Dick.

This time to-morrow he’ll be half-way down the channel.

Mrs. Crowley.

I’m really beginning to think you’re a perfect angel, Mr. Lomas.

Dick.

Don’t say that, it makes me feel so middle-aged. I’d much sooner be a young sinner than an elderly cherub.

Mrs. Crowley.

It was sweet of you to look after him through the summer and then insist on his staying here till he went away. How long is he going for this time?

Dick.

Heaven knows! Perhaps for ever.

Mrs. Crowley.

Have you told him that Lucy is coming?

Dick.

No. I thought that was a pleasing piece of information which I’d leave you to impart.

Mrs. Crowley.

Thanks!

Dick.

She’s only coming to indulge a truly feminine passion for making scenes, and she’s made Alec quite wretched enough already. Why doesn’t she marry Robert Boulger?

Mrs. Crowley.

Why should she?

Dick.

Half the women I know merely married their husbands to spite somebody else. It appears to be one of the commonest causes of matrimony.

Mrs. Crowley.

[With a quizzical look at him.] Talking of which, what are you going to do when Mr. Mackenzie is gone?

Dick.

Talking of the weather and the crops, I propose to go to Spain.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Opening her eyes wide.] How very extraordinary! I thought of going there, too.

Dick.

Then, without a moment’s hesitation, I shall go to Norway.

Mrs. Crowley.

It’ll be dreadfully cold.

Dick.

Dreadfully. But I shall be supported by the consciousness of having done my duty.

Mrs. Crowley.

You don’t think there would be room for both of us in Spain?

Dick.

I’m convinced there wouldn’t. We should always be running against one another, and you’d insist on my looking out all your trains in Bradshaw.

Mrs. Crowley.

I hope you remember that you asked me to tea to-day?

Dick.

Pardon me, you asked yourself. I keep the letter next to my heart and put it under my pillow every night.

Mrs. Crowley.

You fibber! Besides, if I did, it was only on Lucy’s account.

Dick.

That, I venture to think, is neither polite nor accurate.

Mrs. Crowley.

I don’t think I should so utterly detest you, if you hadn’t such a good opinion of yourself.

Dick.

You forget that I vowed on the head of my maternal grandmother never to speak to you again.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, I’m always doing that. I tell my maid that time she does my hair badly.

Dick.

You trifled with the tenderest affection of an innocent and unsophisticated old bachelor.

Mrs. Crowley.

Is that you by any chance?

Dick.

Of course, it’s me. D’you think I was talking of the man in the moon?

Mrs. Crowley.

[Looking at him critically.] With the light behind, you might still pass for thirty-five.

Dick.

I’ve given up youth and its vanities. I no longer pluck out my white hairs.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then how on earth do you occupy your leisure?

Dick.

For the last three months I’ve been laboriously piecing together the fragments of a broken heart.

Mrs. Crowley.

If you hadn’t been so certain that I was going to accept you, I should never have refused. I couldn’t resist the temptation of saying “No” just to see how you took it.

Dick.

I flatter myself that I took it very well.

Mrs. Crowley.

You didn’t. You showed an entire lack of humour. You might have known that a nice woman doesn’t marry a man the first time he asks her. It’s making oneself too cheap. It was very silly of you to go off to Scotland as if you didn’t care.... How was I to know that you meant to wait three months before asking me again?

Dick.

I haven’t the least intention of asking you again.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then why in heaven’s name did you invite me to tea?

Dick.

May I respectfully remind you, first, that you invited yourself ...

Mrs. Crowley.

[Interrupting.] You’re so irrelevant.

Dick.

And, secondly, that an invitation to tea is not necessarily accompanied by a proposal of marriage.

Mrs. Crowley.

I’m afraid you’re lamentably ignorant of the usages of good society.

Dick.

I assure you it’s not done in the best circles.

Mrs. Crowley.

[With a little pout.] I shall be very cross with you in a minute.

Dick.

Why?

Mrs. Crowley.

Because you’re not behaving at all prettily.

Dick.

D’you know what I’d do if I were you? Propose to me.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, I couldn’t do anything so immodest.

Dick.

I have registered a vow that I will never offer my hand and heart to any woman again.

Mrs. Crowley.

On the head of your maternal grandmother?

Dick.

Oh no, far more serious than that. On the grave of my maiden aunt, who left me all my money.

Mrs. Crowley.

What will you say if I do?

Dick.

That depends entirely on how you do it. I may remind you, however, that first you go down on your bended knees.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, I waived that with you.

Dick.

And then you confess you’re unworthy of me.

Mrs. Crowley.

Mr. Lomas, I am a widow. I am twenty-nine and extremely eligible. My maid is a treasure. My dressmaker is charming. I am clever enough to laugh at your jokes, and not so learned as to know where they come from.

Dick.

Really you’re very long-winded. I said it all in four words.

Mrs. Crowley.

So could I if I might write it down.

Dick.

You must say it.

Mrs. Crowley.

But what I’m trying to make you understand is that I don’t want to marry you a bit. You’re just the sort of man who’ll beat his wife regularly every Saturday night.... You will say yes if I ask you, won’t you?

Dick.

I’ve never been able to refuse a woman anything.

Mrs. Crowley.

I have no doubt you will after six months of holy matrimony.

Dick.

I never saw any one make such a fuss about so insignificant a detail as a proposal of marriage.

Mrs. Crowley.

Dick. [She stretches out her hands, smiling, and he takes her in his arms.] You really are a detestable person.

Dick.

[With a smile, taking a ring from his pocket.] I bought an engagement ring yesterday on the off chance of its being useful.

Mrs. Crowley.

Then you meant to ask me all the time?

Dick.

Of course I did, you silly.

Mrs. Crowley.

Oh, I wish I had known that before. I’d have refused you again.

Dick.

You absurd creature.

[He kisses her.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Trying to release herself.] There’s somebody coming.

Dick.

It’s only Alec.

[Alec comes in.

Alec.

Hulloa!

Dick.

Alec, we’ve made friends, Mrs. Crowley and I.

Alec.

It certainly looks very much like it.

Dick.

The fact is, I’ve asked her to marry me, and she....

Mrs. Crowley.

[Interrupting, with a smile.] After much pressure —

Dick.

Has consented.

Alec.

I’m so glad. I heartily congratulate you both. I was rather unhappy at leaving Dick, Mrs. Crowley. But now I leave him in your hands, I’m perfectly content. He’s the dearest, kindest old chap I’ve ever known.

Dick.

Shut up, Alec! Don’t play the heavy father, or we shall burst into tears.

Alec.

He’ll be an admirable husband because he’s an admirable friend.

Mrs. Crowley.

I know he will. And I’m only prevented from saying all I think of him and how much I love him, by the fear that he’ll become perfectly unmanageable.

Dick.

Spare me these chaste blushes which mantle my youthful brow. Will you pour out the tea ... Nellie?

Mrs. Crowley.

Yes ... Dick.

[She sits down at the tea-table and Dick makes

himself comfortable in an arm-chair by

her side.

Alec.

Well, I’m thankful to say that everything’s packed and ready.

Mrs. Crowley.

I wish you’d stay for our wedding.

Dick.

Do. You can go just as well by the next boat.

Alec.

I’m afraid that everything is settled now. I’ve given instructions at Zanzibar to collect bearers, and I must arrive as quickly as I can.

Dick.

I wish to goodness you’d give up these horrible explorations.

Alec.

But they’re the very breath of my life. You don’t know the exhilaration of the daily dangers — the joy of treading where only the wild beasts have trodden before. Oh, already I can hardly bear my impatience when I think of the boundless country and the enchanting freedom. Here one grows so small, so despicable, but in Africa everything is built to a nobler standard. There a man is really a man; there one knows what are will and strength and courage. Oh, you don’t know what it is to stand on the edge of some great plain and breathe the pure keen air after the terrors of the forest. Then at last you know what freedom is.

Dick.

The boundless plain of Hyde Park is enough for me, and the aspect of Piccadilly on a fine day in June gives me quite as many emotions as I want.

Mrs. Crowley.

But what will you gain by it all, now that your work in East Africa is over, by all the dangers and the hardships?

Alec.

Nothing. I want to gain nothing. Perhaps I shall discover some new species of antelope or some unknown plant. Perhaps I shall find some new waterway. That is all the reward I want. I love the sense of power and mastery. What do you think I care for the tinsel rewards of kings and peoples?

Dick.

I always said you were melodramatic. I never heard anything so transpontine.

Mrs. Crowley.

And the end of it, what will be the end?

Alec.

The end is death in some fever-stricken swamp, obscurely, worn out by exposure and ague and starvation. And the bearers will seize my gun and my clothes and leave me to the jackals.

Mrs. Crowley.

Don’t. It’s too horrible.

Alec.

Why, what does it matter? I shall die standing up. I shall go the last journey as I have gone every other.

Mrs. Crowley.

Without fear?

Dick.

For all the world like the wicked baronet: Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine!

Mrs. Crowley.

Don’t you want men to remember you?

Alec.

Perhaps they will. Perhaps in a hundred years or so, in some flourishing town where I discovered nothing but wilderness, they will commission a second-rate sculptor to make a fancy statue of me. And I shall stand in front of the Stock Exchange, a convenient perch for birds, to look eternally upon the various shabby deeds of human kind.

[During this speech Mrs. Crowley makes a sign

to Dick, who walks slowly away and goes

out.

Mrs. Crowley.

And is that really everything? I can’t help thinking that at the bottom of your heart is something that you’ve never told to a living soul.

[He gives her a long look, and then after a

moment’s thought breaks into a little smile.

Alec.

Why do you want to know so much?

Mrs. Crowley.

Tell me.

Alec.

I daresay I shall never see you again. Perhaps it doesn’t much matter what I say to you. You’ll think me very silly, but I’m afraid I’m rather — patriotic. It’s only we who live away from England who really love it. I’m so proud of my country, and I wanted so much to do something for it. Often in Africa I’ve thought of this dear England, and longed not to die till I had done my work. Behind all the soldiers and the statesmen whose fame is imperishable, there is a long line of men who’ve built up the Empire piece by piece. Their names are forgotten, and only students know their history, but each one of them gave a province to his country. And I, too, have my place among them. For five years I toiled night and day, and at the end of it was able to hand over to the Commissioners a broad tract of land, rich and fertile. After my death England will forget my faults and my mistakes. I care nothing for the flouts and gibes with which she has repaid all my pain, for I have added another fair jewel to her crown. I don’t want rewards. I only want the honour of serving this dear land of ours.

Mrs. Crowley.

Why is it, when you’re so nice really, that you do all you can to make people think you utterly horrid?

Alec.

Don’t laugh at me because you’ve found out that at heart I’m nothing more than a sentimental old woman.

Mrs. Crowley.

[Putting her hand on his arm.] What would you do if Lucy came here to-day?

[Alec starts, looks at her sharply, then answers

with deliberation.

Alec.

I have always lived in polite society. I should never dream of outraging its conventions. If Miss Allerton happened to come, you may be sure I should be scrupulously polite.

Mrs. Crowley.

Is that all? Lucy has suffered very much.

Alec.

And do you suppose I’ve not suffered? Because I don’t whine my misery to all and sundry, d’you think I don’t care? I’m not the man to fall in and out of love with every pretty face I meet. All my life I’ve kept an ideal before my eyes. Oh, you don’t know what it meant to me to fall in love. I felt that I had lived all my life in a prison, and at last Lucy came and took me by the hand and led me out. And for the first time I breathed the free air of heaven. Oh God! how I’ve suffered for it! Why should it have come to me? Oh, if you knew my agony and the torture!

[He hides his face, trying to master his emotion.

Mrs. Crowley goes to him and puts her

hand on his shoulder.

Mrs. Crowley.

Mr. Mackenzie.

Alec.

[Springing up.] Go away. Don’t look at me. How can you stand there and watch my weakness? Oh God, give me strength.... My love was the last human weakness I had. It was right that I should drink that bitter cup. And I’ve drunk its very dregs. I should have known that I wasn’t meant for happiness and a life of ease. I have other work to do in the world. And now that I have overcome this last temptation, I am ready to do it.

Mrs. Crowley.

But haven’t you any pity for yourself, haven’t you any thought for Lucy?

Alec.

Must I tell you, too, that everything I did was for Lucy’s sake? And still I love her with all my heart and soul....

Dick comes in.

Dick.

Here is Lucy!

[Charles comes in and announces Lucy.

Charles.

Miss Allerton!

[She enters, and Dick, anxious that the meeting

shall not be more awkward than need be,

goes up to her very cordially.

Dick.

Ah, my dear Lucy. So glad you were able to come.

Lucy.

[Giving her hand to Dick, but looking at Alec.] How d’you do?

Alec.

How d’you do? [He forces himself to talk.] How is Lady Kelsey?

Lucy.

She’s much better, thanks. We’ve been to Spa, you know, for her health.

Alec.

Somebody told me you’d gone abroad. Was it you, Dick? Dick is an admirable person, a sort of gazetteer for polite society.

Dick.

Won’t you have some tea, Lucy?

Lucy.

No, thanks!

Mrs. Crowley.

[Trying on her side also to make conversation.] We shall miss you dreadfully when you’re gone, Mr. Mackenzie.

Dick.

[Cheerfully.] Not a bit of it.

Alec.

[Smiling.] London is an excellent place for showing one of how little importance one is in the world. One makes a certain figure, and perhaps is tempted to think oneself of some consequence. Then one goes away, and on returning is surprised to discover that nobody has even noticed one’s absence.

Dick.

You’re over-modest, Alec. If you weren’t, you might be a great man. Now, I make a point of telling my friends that I’m indispensable, and they take me at my word.

Alec.

You are a leaven of flippancy in the heavy dough of British righteousness.

Dick.

The wise man only takes the unimportant quite seriously.

Alec.

[With a smile.] For it is obvious that it needs more brains to do nothing than to be a cabinet minister.

Dick.

You pay me a great compliment, Alec. You repeat to my very face one of my favourite observations.

Lucy.

[Almost in a whisper.] Haven’t I heard you say that only the impossible is worth doing?

Alec.

Good heavens, I must have been reading the headings of a copy-book.

Mrs. Crowley.

[To Dick.] Are you going to Southampton to see Mr. Mackenzie off?

Dick.

I shall hide my face on his shoulder and weep salt tears. It’ll be most affecting, because in moments of emotion I always burst into epigram.

Alec.

I loathe all solemn leave-takings. I prefer to part from people with a nod and a smile, whether I’m going for ever or for a day to Brighton.

Mrs. Crowley.

You’re very hard.

Alec.

Dick has been teaching me to take life flippantly. And I have learnt that things are only serious if you take them seriously, and that is desperately stupid. [To Lucy.] Don’t you agree with me?

Lucy.

No.

[Her tone, almost tragic, makes him pause

for an instant; but he is determined

that the conversation shall be purely conventional.

Alec.

It’s so difficult to be serious without being absurd. That is the chief power of women, that life and death are merely occasions for a change of costume: marriage a creation in white, and the worship of God an opportunity for a Paris bonnet.

[Mrs. Crowley makes up her mind to force a

crisis, and she gets up.

Mrs. Crowley.

It’s growing late, Dick. Won’t you take me round the house?

Alec.

I’m afraid my luggage has made everything very disorderly.

Mrs. Crowley.

It doesn’t matter. Come, Dick!

Dick.

[To Lucy.] You don’t mind if we leave you?

Lucy.

Oh, no.

[Mrs. Crowley and Dick go out. There is a

moment’s silence.

Alec.

Do you know that our friend Dick has offered his hand and heart to Mrs. Crowley this afternoon?

Lucy.

I hope they’ll be very happy. They’re very much in love with one another.

Alec.

[Bitterly.] And is that a reason for marrying? Surely love is the worst possible foundation for marriage. Love creates illusions, and marriages destroy them. True lovers should never marry.

Lucy.

Will you open the window? It seems stifling here.

Alec.

Certainly. [From the window.] You can’t think what a joy it is to look upon London for the last time. I’m so thankful to get away.

[Lucy gives a little sob and Alec turns to the

window. He wants to wound her and yet

cannot bear to see her suffer.

Alec.

To-morrow at this time I shall be well started. Oh, I long for that infinite surface of the clean and comfortable sea.

Lucy.

Are you very glad to go?

Alec.

[Turning to her.] I feel quite boyish at the very thought.

Lucy.

And is there no one you regret to leave?

Alec.

You see, Dick is going to marry. When a man does that, his bachelor friends are wise to depart gracefully before he shows them that he needs their company no longer. I have no relations and few friends. I can’t flatter myself that any one will be much distressed at my departure.

Lucy.

[In a low voice.] You must have no heart at all.

Alec.

[Icily.] If I had, I certainly should not bring it to Portman Square. That sentimental organ would be surely out of place in such a neighbourhood.

Lucy.

[Gets up and goes to him.] Oh, why do you treat me as if we were strangers? How can you be so cruel?

Alec.

[Gravely.] Don’t you think that flippancy is the best refuge from an uncomfortable position. We should really be much wiser merely to discuss the weather.

Lucy.

[Insisting.] Are you angry because I came?

Alec.

That would be ungracious on my part. Perhaps it wasn’t quite necessary that we should meet again.

Lucy.

You’ve been acting all the time I’ve been here. D’you think I didn’t see it was unreal when you talked with such cynical indifference. I know you well enough to tell when you’re hiding your real self behind a mask.

Alec.

If I’m doing that, the inference is obvious that I wish my real self to be hidden.

Lucy.

I would rather you cursed me than treat me with such cold politeness.

Alec.

I’m afraid you’re rather difficult to please.

[Lucy goes up to him passionately, but he draws

back so that she may not touch him.

Lucy.

Oh, you’re of iron. Alec, Alec, I couldn’t let you go without seeing you once more. Even you would be satisfied if you knew what bitter anguish I’ve suffered. Even you would pity me. I don’t want you to think too badly of me.

Alec.

Does it much matter what I think? We shall be so many thousand miles apart.

Lucy.

I suppose that you utterly despise me.

Alec.

No. I loved you far too much ever to do that. Believe me, I only wish you well. Now that the bitterness is past, I see that you did the only possible thing. I hope that you’ll be very happy.

Lucy.

Oh, Alec, don’t be utterly pitiless. Don’t leave me without a single word of kindness.

Alec.

Nothing is changed, Lucy. You sent me away on account of your brother’s death.

[There is a long silence, and when she speaks

it is hesitatingly, as if the words were

painful to utter.

Lucy.

I hated you then, and yet I couldn’t crush the love that was in my heart. I used to try and drive you away from my thoughts, but every word you had ever said came back to me. Don’t you remember? You told me that everything you did was for my sake. Those words hammered at my heart as though it were an anvil. I struggled not to believe them. I said to myself that you had sacrificed George coldly, callously, prudently, but in my heart I knew it wasn’t true. [He looks at her, hardly able to believe what she is going to say, but does not speak.] Your whole life stood on one side and only this hateful story on the other. You couldn’t have grown into a different man in one single instant. I came here to-day to tell you that I don’t understand the reason of what you did. I don’t want to understand. I believe in you now with all my strength. I know that whatever you did was right and just — because you did it.

[He gives a long, deep sigh.

Alec.

Thank God! Oh, I’m so grateful to you for that.

Lucy.

Haven’t you anything more to say to me than that?

Alec.

You see, it comes too late. Nothing much matters now, for to-morrow I go away.

Lucy.

But you’ll come back.

Alec.

I’m going to a part of Africa from which Europeans seldom return.

Lucy.

[With a sudden outburst of passion.] Oh, that’s too horrible. Don’t go, dearest! I can’t bear it!

Alec.

I must now. Everything is settled, and there can be no drawing back.

Lucy.

Don’t you care for me any more?

Alec.

Care for you? I love you with all my heart and soul.

Lucy.

[Eagerly.] Then take me with you.

Alec.

You!

Lucy.

You don’t know what I can do. With you to help me I can be brave. Let me come, Alec?

Alec.

No, it’s impossible. You don’t know what you ask.

Lucy.

Then let me wait for you? Let me wait till you come back?

Alec.

And if I never come back?

Lucy.

I will wait for you still.

Alec.

Then have no fear. I will come back. My journey was only dangerous because I wanted to die. I want to live now, and I shall live.

Lucy.

Oh, Alec, Alec, I’m so glad you love me.

THE TENTH MAN

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

SCENE II

CHARACTERS

This play was produced on the 24th February, 1910, with the following cast:

George Winter

Arthur Bourchier

Lord Francis Etchingham

Edmund Maurice

Mr. Perigal

A. Holmes Gore

James Ford

A. E. George

Robert Colby, M.P.

Godfrey Tearle

Frederick Bennett

Michael Sherbroke

Colonel Boyce

Frank Atherley

Rev. William Swalecliffe

George Beally

Edward O’Donnell

Douglas Imbert

Butler

Dallas Cairns

Lady Francis Etchingham

Kate Sergeantson

Catherine Winter

Francis Dillon

Anne

Daisy Markham

George Winter, M.P.

Lord Francis Etchingham

Robert Colby, M.P.

Mr. Perigal

James Ford

Colonel Boyce

Rev. William Swalecliffe

Frederick Bennett

Edward O’Donnell

Butler at Lord Francis Etchingham’s

Waiter at the Great Northern Hotel

Catherine Winter

Lady Francis Etchingham

Anne

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: A drawing-room at Lord Francis Etchingham’s house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. An Adam room, with bright chintzes on the furniture, photographs on the chimney-piece and the piano, and a great many flowers. There is an archway at the back, leading into another drawing-room, and it is through this that visitors are introduced by the butler. On the left is a large bow window, and on the right a door leading into the library.

Lord and Lady Francis.

Lord Francis Etchingham is a man of fifty, of the middle height, rather bald, with an amiable, weak face. He is a good-natured person, anxious to do his best in all things and to all people so long as he is not bored. He wants everything to go smoothly. He has a comfortable idea of his own capacity. Reduced circumstances have drawn him into affairs, and he regards himself as a fine man of business. Lady Francis is a handsome and well-preserved woman of the same age as her husband, with dyed red hair; she has a massive, almost an imposing, presence, and she is admirably gowned. She treats her husband with good-humoured scorn, aware of his foibles, but amused rather than annoyed by them. When the curtain rises Francis Etchingham is a prey to the liveliest vexation. He is walking nervously across the room, while his wife, with a thin smile, stands quietly watching him. With a gesture of irritation he flings himself into a chair.

Etchingham.

Why the dickens didn’t you tell me last night, Angela?

Lady Francis.

[Smiling.] I had no wish to disturb my night’s rest.

Etchingham.

Upon my soul, I don’t know what you mean. It’s incomprehensible to me that you should have slept like a top. I couldn’t have closed my eyes the whole night.

Lady Francis.

I know. And you would have taken excellent care that I shouldn’t close mine either.

Etchingham.

I should have thought I had enough to do without being pestered with a foolish woman’s matrimonial difficulties.

Lady Francis.

[With a laugh.] You really have a very detached way of looking at things, Frank. No one would imagine, to hear you speak, that the foolish woman in question was your daughter.

Etchingham.

Really, Angela, I must beg you not to make this a subject of flippancy.

Lady Francis.

[Good-humouredly.] Well, what do you propose to do?

Etchingham.

[Flying out of his chair.] Do? What do you expect me to do? You tell me that Kate came home at twelve o’clock last night without a stitch of clothing....

Lady Francis.

My dear, if I told you that I was most unwarrantably distorting the truth.

Etchingham.

[Irritably correcting himself.] In a ball dress, with an opera cloak on — without her luggage, without even a dressing-case — and informs you that she’s left her husband.... It’s absurd.

Lady Francis.

Quite absurd. And so unnecessarily dramatic.

Etchingham.

And when’s she going home?

Lady Francis.

She assures me that she’s not going home.

Etchingham.

[Almost beside himself.] She’s not going to stay here?

Lady Francis.

Those are her plans at the moment.

Etchingham.

And George?

Lady Francis.

Well?

Etchingham.

You don’t suppose her husband’s going to put up with this nonsense? Has he made no sign?

Lady Francis.

Ten minutes after she arrived he sent a messenger boy — with a toothbrush.

Etchingham.

Why a toothbrush?

Lady Francis.

I don’t know. Presumably to brush her teeth.

Etchingham.

Well, that shows he doesn’t look upon the matter as serious. Of course, it was a whim on Kate’s part. Luckily he’s coming here this morning....

Lady Francis.

[Interrupting.] Is he?

Etchingham.

Yes, he promised to fetch me in his car. We’re going to drive down to the City together. I’ll bring him in, and meanwhile you can talk to Kate. I dare say she’s thought better of it already. It only wants a little tact, and we can settle the whole thing. George is clever enough to have given some plausible explanation to the servants.

Lady Francis.

Are you really under the impression things are going to pass off in that way?

Etchingham.

Why not?

Lady Francis.

They say it’s a wise man who knows his own father, but it’s apparently a wiser man still who knows his own daughter.

Etchingham.

Angela, for goodness’ sake don’t try to be bright and amusing.

Lady Francis.

Do you know so little of Kate as to imagine she would have taken a step of this kind without having quite made up her mind?

Etchingham.

You don’t mean to say you think Kate will refuse to go back to her husband?

Lady Francis.

I do.

Etchingham.

But what reasons does she give? Why did she say she left him?

Lady Francis.

She gave no reasons. She merely stated the fact and asked if I could put her up.

Etchingham.

Well, she must go back to her husband.

Lady Francis.

[As if it were the most innocent question.] Why?

Etchingham.

Because a woman’s place is by her husband’s side, Angela. You know just as well as I do that I can’t afford to quarrel with George Winter. I’m chairman of half a dozen of his companies. The position would be intolerable. I should be expected to take Kate’s side if she were right or wrong.

Lady Francis.

I suppose you owe him money?

Etchingham.

No, not exactly.

Lady Francis.

Ah! [With a shrewd look at him and a smile.] And how much is it that you — don’t exactly owe him?

Etchingham.

We’re mixed up together in any number of business undertakings, and naturally we have a sort of running account. If we settled up I dare say I should have to find something like fifteen thousand pounds.

Lady Francis.

Good heavens, I thought you’d been making money.

Etchingham.

Yes, I did, but the fact is, we’ve been very badly hit lately. Practically all our interests are in Central America, and we couldn’t foresee that there’d be a revolution there.

Lady Francis.

The possibility might have crossed your mind.

Etchingham.

Oh, I knew you’d blame me. And I suppose you’ll blame me because a confounded earthquake smashed up one of our railways.

Lady Francis.

And how d’you propose to raise fifteen thousand pounds?

Etchingham.

That’s just it. It would be devilish awkward. And George is in a confounded tight place too.

Lady Francis.

You’d better talk to Kate. I’ll send for her.

[She touches a bell, and gives her order down a speaking tube.

Lady Francis.

Ask Mrs. Winter to be good enough to come to the drawing room.

Etchingham.

You must talk to her seriously, Angela. You must tell her that her behaviour is outrageous.

Lady Francis.

[With a chuckle.] No, my dear. You are going to talk to her.

[Catherine Winter comes in. She is a graceful woman, with a strong, passionate face; and her expression, rather tired but self-contained and resolute, suggests that she has endured great trouble and is now making a desperate effort to escape. She is very simply dressed and wears no jewellery but her wedding ring.

Catherine.

Good-morning, father.

[She goes up to Lord Francis and kisses his cheek.

Etchingham.

[With elaborate politeness.] Be so good as to sit down, Catherine.

[Catherine exchanges with her mother a glance of faint amusement and takes a seat.

Etchingham.

[With a fine assumption of paternal authority.] I want to talk to you. Your mother and I have sent for you.... [Breaking out.] Now what does all this mean? It’s ridiculous nonsense. You’re surely old enough to have learnt a little self-control.

Catherine.

[Calmly.] I’ve shown a good deal of self-control during the four years of my married life, father. I was afraid it was growing into a habit.

Etchingham.

Am I to understand that what your mother tells me is true?

Catherine.

[Quietly.] I lived with George as long as I could. I put up with more than any woman I know would have done. But there are some things no one should suffer who has any self-respect.

Etchingham.

You’ve never complained before of George’s behaviour.

Catherine.

No.

Etchingham.

Why have you never said a word to your mother about it? I can’t imagine why you shouldn’t get on with George. I don’t suppose you’ve ever expressed a whim that he hasn’t gratified. Your allowance is princely. Your pearls are the envy of every woman in London.

Catherine.

Oh, yes, he’s generous. My pearls have been a splendid advertisement.

Etchingham.

[Ignoring the second sentence and pouncing on the admission.] Then what have you got to complain of?

Catherine.

I dare say my mother knows what half London is chattering about.

Etchingham.

Well, Angela?

Lady Francis.

Oh, my dear, I hoped it was idle gossip. A man as much in the public eye as George Winter — the most prominent financier of the moment — is certain to be talked about.

Etchingham.

I suppose he’s been flirting with two or three pretty women.

Lady Francis.

I understand things are supposed to have gone rather further than that.

Etchingham.

That’s the kind of thing a tactful woman must close her eyes to. You’re a woman of the world, Kate. You know what men are. You must extend a certain degree of licence to a man of George Winter’s temperament.

Catherine.

You don’t understand, father. I bore my life till I couldn’t bear it any longer. I’m not the sort of woman to make scenes. I held my tongue, I closed my eyes, till something happened which I couldn’t endure. I’ve left him fully decided to divorce him. Nothing that you can say will move me.

Etchingham.

But you can’t divorce him. You’ve accused him of nothing but infidelity. You can’t be so ignorant of the law....

Catherine.

[Interrupting.] I’m not at all ignorant of the law. I assure you that he has complied fully with all the conditions which are needful.

Lady Francis.

Kate.

Catherine.

Please don’t ask me. I feel that my whole soul is foul with....

Etchingham.

Well, of course there are always two sides to every question.

Catherine.

Oh, father, you’re not going to tell me that that, too, is usual in polite society, for a man to.... Oh!

[She gives a gesture and a cry of disgust.

Lady Francis.

I wonder if you’d go and read your Times, Frank. I should like to talk to Katie alone.

Etchingham.

[With a look from his wife to his daughter.] Eh, very well. Perhaps you can do something with her. Tell her what it means if she persists. I suppose I shall find the Times in the library.

[He goes out.

Lady Francis.

[With a smile.] Your father has such a power of delusion. He never looks at anything but the Daily Mail, but he’s quite convinced that he reads nothing but the Times.

Catherine.

[Passionately.] Oh, mother, you’ll stand by me, won’t you? You know what I’ve gone through. If you care for me at all you must have some pity.

[Lady Francis looks at her coolly. She is quite unmoved by the vehemence of the appeal. She pauses for a moment before answering.

Lady Francis.

Why have you chosen this particular moment to leave your husband?

Catherine.

There are limits to human endurance.

Lady Francis.

You’ve lived a good deal apart. Like civilized people you’ve made the best of a mutual want of sympathy. I should have thought George interfered with you very little. I have an idea that no woman would care to undergo the — inconvenience of proceedings for divorce without a very good reason. You’ve got a peculiarly fastidious taste, Katie. It must be something rather out of the way that induces you to expose your private life to all and sundry.

Catherine.

It’s merely a choice of ignominies.

[Lady Francis pauses an instant, then raps out the question sharply.

Lady Francis.

Are you in love?

Catherine.

You have no right to ask me that, mother.

Lady Francis.

[With a slight smile.] Your indignation is almost an answer in itself, isn’t it? I suppose you want to marry.

[Catherine does not answer. She takes a step or two impatiently.

Lady Francis.

Well?

Catherine.

I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

Lady Francis.

In that case, I should have thought you had nothing to conceal.

Catherine.

[Defiantly.] I haven’t. When I thought that everything was over for me and that life was meaningless, I found it was only just beginning. And I thanked God for all I’d gone through because perhaps it made me less unfit for the great love that descended upon me.

Lady Francis.

It’s Robert Colby, isn’t it?

Catherine.

Yes.

Lady Francis.

And you’ve made your arrangements, I suppose, to be married as soon as the decree is made absolute?

Catherine.

We haven’t discussed the matter.

Lady Francis.

But still, I may take it that is the intention?

Catherine.

Yes.

Lady Francis.

Your father wishes me to tell you that if you quarrel with George it will ruin him. He could hardly keep the position that George has given him on his various boards.

Catherine.

You will be no worse off than before I married.

Lady Francis.

Except that it appears your father owes George fifteen thousand pounds.

Catherine.

Do you want to cheat me again out of the little happiness that seems in store for me?

Lady Francis.

I want you to do what is right in your own eyes.

Catherine.

How can you be so cruel?

George Winter.

[Opening the door.] May I come in?

[He enters with Francis Etchingham. George Winter is a man of powerful build, with fine hair and fine eyes; he wears a short red beard. He is inclined to corpulence, but bears himself with an attractive swagger. He is a jovial, bland fellow. He appears to be the best-natured person in the world, and his great astuteness suggests itself only now and then in a look of his eyes. He has admirable control over an execrable temper. Catherine turns round with a startled cry at the sound of her husband’s voice.

Catherine.

George!

George Winter.

My dear, look pleased to see me. It’s only decent.

Catherine.

It’s infamous that you should come here. If you had any decent feeling....

George Winter.

[Blandly.] My dear child, I had a business engagement with your father. It’s unreasonable to expect me not to keep it because you have temporarily abandoned the conjugal roof.

Catherine.

[To her father.] You might have warned me.

Etchingham.

My dear, I was hoping that after a talk with your mother you’d have....

Catherine.

[Interrupting.] What can I do to show you that I’ve made up my mind for good and all?

George Winter.

Even after one’s made up one’s mind, it’s not too late to listen to reason.

Lady Francis.

I think for all our sakes you should listen to anything that George has to say.

Catherine.

[To George Winter.] Do you understand what my mother means?

George Winter.

[With a little chuckle.] I dimly suspect.

Catherine.

My father owes you a lot of money. He’s chairman of half your companies. He thinks that if I divorce you he’ll have to pay that money....

George Winter.

I’m sure his sense of delicacy would prevent him from remaining in my debt.

Catherine.

And you’ll make him resign his directorships?

George Winter.

[With his tongue in his cheek.] I know him well enough to feel certain that he would never wish to retain them.

Catherine.

Oh, it’s vile.

George Winter.

Or is it common sense?

[There is a moment’s pause, and when George Winter speaks it is with great seriousness.

George Winter.

Now look here, Kate; listen to me carefully. You know that all our interests are in Central America. The Lewishams had it all their own way out there till I came along. They owned the railways and the mines and the trams — everything that was worth having. Well, I knew I couldn’t oust them, but I thought I could make them take me in. I’ve been fighting them tooth and nail for ten years. They’ve done all they could to smash me by fair means and foul, but they haven’t succeeded. And now I’m in sight of my goal. I can force them to come to terms.

Catherine.

All this is nothing to me.

George Winter.

The Lewishams got on to a big thing — a mine called the Campo del Oro. But that earthquake the other day queered their pitch, and they offered bills when hard cash was the only thing to do the trick. I thought that what was good enough for the Lewishams was good enough for me. I knew that if I could get it they’d have to take me in. I had two hours to think it over. I found the cash and bought the mine last week.

Catherine.

It doesn’t interest me.

George Winter.

It will. I sent Macdonald out there.

Etchingham.

Macdonald is George’s expert. He’s the soundest man in the profession.

George Winter.

And straight, straight as a die. I’m expecting his report every day. He may cable me at any moment. Then I shall get to work. I’m going to float the mine as a company with a capital of half a million. Your father will be chairman, and he ought to make close on fifty thousand out of it. For a reason I needn’t tell you, we can’t afford to wait. We must have ready money, and that means floating the company at once. My only chance is in Middlepool, where three parts of my backing have come from before. We shall soon be in the middle of a General Election. And you know how uncertain my seat in Middlepool is. I keep it only by my personal popularity. I’m at the mercy of the Nonconformists, and if there’s talk of a divorce it’s all U.P. with me. They’ll make me retire before the election, and if that happens the new company won’t stand a dog’s chance.

Lady Francis.

Why?

George Winter.

Because with the general public nervous, I shall have to depend on Middlepool, and there I can only float it on my personal character.

Catherine.

I’m afraid you’ll think it very selfish, but I haven’t any more power of self-sacrifice in me.

George Winter.

If the Campo del Oro is a failure, it’ll knock down all the other companies I’m connected with. The Lewishams will seize the opportunity to make a raid on me. I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, and anyone who cares to give me a shove will send me over.... It’ll mean your father’s ruin and mine — I dare say you don’t mind that — but it’ll also mean the ruin of thousands of poor investors all over the country. Three-quarters of the population of Middlepool will lose their savings.

Catherine.

You’ve lied to me so often, George.

George Winter.

I can show you by plain figures that every word I say is true.

Catherine.

I haven’t much sympathy with the gamblers who want to make money without working for it. If they lose, it’s their own look out.

[There is a pause. George Winter looks at her and nods to himself.

George Winter.

[To Etchingham.] I think you’d better go now. The rest of our conversation doesn’t need any listeners.

Catherine.

I have nothing more to say to you.

George Winter.

Don’t be a damned fool. It’s a matter of life and death to me, and d’you think I’m going to ... [He stops.] Please, Lady Francis.

Lady Francis.

Of course we’ll leave you. Come, Frank.

[Lady Francis and her husband go out.

George Winter.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] I don’t think your elopement receives the unqualified approval of your parents.

Catherine.

D’you want to repeat that odious scene of last night? Surely we said all that we had to say to one another.

George Winter.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] You know, I wouldn’t have played the fool with other women if you hadn’t shown me very clearly that you didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

Catherine.

I would rather not discuss that.

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] After all, it isn’t as if I cared a tinker’s cuss for the whole lot of them.

Catherine.

[Flushing.] And you think that makes it any better? I think I could have forgiven you if you’d had any love for those wretched women. But it wasn’t even that. You exposed me to all that humiliation merely to gratify your vanity. When I’ve seen how you’ve treated those women I, even I, have been sorry for them.

George Winter.

If you like I’ll give you my solemn word of honour that you shall have no cause to complain in future.

Catherine.

It’s too late. You’ve given me my chance of freedom and I mean to take it.

George Winter.

You’re not keeping your part of the bargain.

Catherine.

What d’you mean?

George Winter.

You didn’t marry me because you were in love with me....

Catherine.

[Interrupting.] That’s not true.

George Winter.

[With a smile.] Think.

Catherine.

[Hesitating.] A year ago I would have said again that it wasn’t true. I didn’t know what love was.

George Winter.

You married me because I was rich.

Catherine.

[Passionately.] No, no.

George Winter.

I’d just won a seat that they’d given me because they thought I hadn’t a chance. I won it off my own bat, because I imposed myself on Middlepool and forced them to vote for me. I was in the public eye. I was a power already. The world seemed at my feet.

Catherine.

All that’s very harmless. You flattered me. The life you offered me seemed so large, so full, and I was very young. I was dazzled by your brilliancy and your success. I mistook it for love.

George Winter.

And I married you because I wanted a wife. You happened to have an uncle who’s a duke, and aristocratic connexions are devilish useful in England to a Radical politician.

Catherine.

[Bitterly.] Oh, yes, I found out soon enough why you married me.

George Winter.

It was a business arrangement on both sides, and you’ve had your full share of the profits.

Catherine.

[Outraged.] Oh, how can you?

George Winter.

You’d always lived in a pokey way and I gave you magnificence. I’ve kept even the spirit of my part of the bargain. Your father wasn’t mentioned in the settlements. But every stick of furniture in this house has been bought with my money. The very clothes on your mother’s back are paid for by me.

Catherine.

That’s not true.

George Winter.

You don’t think your father is worth the money I give him. He’s as incompetent as all the rest of these damned fools who come from the West-End and think they can make money in the City. The nincompoop thinks himself a financial authority. The charwoman of a bucket-shop could give him points.

Catherine.

He has his name and his position.

George Winter.

Nowadays even a country curate will fight shy of a title on a prospectus. The salaries he gets are merely payments for you.

Catherine.

Oh, you’ve said all this so often. For years you’ve bullied me with your money. I was such a fool, because you said it was dishonest of me to go, rather than that even you should have the smallest cause to blame me, I bore everything. I clenched my hands and suffered.

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] In a diamond tiara and a Paquin dress.

Catherine.

I thought I should have the strength to suffer to the end. But I haven’t. If you bought an article and it hasn’t turned out worth the money you gave for it, that’s your look out. You see, you’ve taught me something after all.

[A very short pause. George Winter makes up his mind to try compromise.

George Winter.

Now, look here; I’m willing to meet you half-way. I don’t ask you to come back to me. You can live as you like and where you like. I’ll give you five thousand a year. Your father can keep his directorships. The only thing I ask is that you shouldn’t apply for a divorce and that you should appear with me at certain public functions.

Catherine.

[Passionately.] I want to be free. I’ve lived in an atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy till I can hardly breathe. Your good nature is merely a pose. Your generosity is merely an advertisement. You care for nothing but your own self-advancement. And I want to be rid of the horrible feeling that all sorts of shady things are going on around me that I don’t know.

George Winter.

[Sharply.] What d’you mean?

Catherine.

I know that you’re not honest.

[With a cry of rage George Winter seizes her by the shoulders violently. His passion for the moment is uncontrollable.

George Winter.

What d’you mean? What d’you mean? What d’you mean?

Catherine.

You’re hurting me.

George Winter.

[In his rage hardly able to articulate.] Damn you, how dare you say that to me?

Catherine.

Let me go.

George Winter.

Why don’t you answer? What d’you mean?

Catherine.

[Shaking herself free.] I’ll tell you what I mean. I know that if the occasion arose you wouldn’t hesitate to steal.

George Winter.

[With a laugh of relief.] Is that all?

Catherine.

For years I’ve been tortured by the horror of it. Each pearl you’ve given me — and you’ve thrust them upon me — I’ve asked myself if it was honestly come by. And that’s why I want to escape from you — not only because you’ve been odiously cruel to me, even now when you’re trying to persuade me to return to you, and because you’ve flaunted before me one vulgar intrigue after another — but because I feel that all this wealth rests on lying, and swindling, and roguery.

George Winter.

[Banteringly.] Well, you must confess that so far I’ve been eminently successful in not getting found out.

Catherine.

[Taking no notice of his remark.] And now surely you have nothing more to say to me.

George Winter.

[With a bland smile.] My dear, knowing how important it is to me that you should return to the conjugal roof, you don’t imagine I have come without some means to persuade you.

Catherine.

I assure you you’re wasting your time. You’ve always told me it was valuable.

George Winter.

[In his most delightful manner.] You seem to be under the delusion it rests with you to make conditions.

Catherine.

I make no conditions. I merely announce my decision.

George Winter.

[Taking a letter from his pocket and quietly smoothing it out on a table.] I’ve never suffered from that form of snobbishness which makes many self-made men hurl their origin in the face of a British public only too anxious to pretend it thinks them the scions of a noble house. But I have never concealed from you that mine was humble.

Catherine.

[Suspiciously.] What is that paper?

George Winter.

[Ignoring the question.] That is one of the pills you had to swallow when I married you and your excellent but impoverished family. I started life with neither friend nor money, but with exceptionally fine parts. I soon discovered that the simplest way to succeed is by blackmail. It is astonishing how many men keep a large-sized skeleton in their cupboards. If you only get a sight of those discreditable bones, you can often make a whole family your bosom friends. I’m not boring you, am I?

Catherine.

You’re torturing me.

George Winter.

This is a copy of a letter which you may remember. The original was so crumpled that I can’t help thinking you were romantic enough to sleep with it under your pillow. It begins: My very dear friend....

Catherine.

[Interrupting.] How did you get that?

George Winter.

I can never understand why people are such fools as to write love-letters. I never do. I only send telegrams.

Catherine.

[With flashing eyes.] You didn’t go to my dressing-case?

George Winter.

[Amused.] I did indeed.

Catherine.

[Looking at the Bramah-key on her bracelet.] You broke it open?

George Winter.

When I made you a present of your dressing-case, I kept the duplicate key in case you lost yours.

Catherine.

It’s infamous. It’s — it’s just like you.

George Winter.

[Smiling.] Why on earth were you so incautious as to leave it behind?

Catherine.

[Indignantly.] I thought I could trust you. It never struck me that you’d pry into my private papers.

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] Nonsense. You were so taken with the dramatic gesture of leaving the house in a pink satin opera cloak that you forgot all about it.

Catherine.

There’s nothing in any of my letters that I’m ashamed of.

George Winter.

Would you like to look at this one?

Catherine.

[Refusing to take it.] I know that there can be absolutely no harm in it.

George Winter.

I wonder what a clever counsel would make of it. I can imagine it read in such a manner that those vague words should gather form and substance. A little irony, a grotesque emphasis here and there, and I can see the junior bar rolling with laughter. I don’t imagine a parliamentary light like your friend Robert Colby would take ridicule very well. It’s only by his entire lack of humour that he’s risen to the exalted position he now adorns.

Catherine.

[Frightened.] What d’you mean, George?

George Winter.

[Good-humouredly.] My dear, I’m going to bring a counter petition, that’s all. You want to wash your dirty linen in public, let’s have an entire spring cleaning.

Catherine.

[Scornfully.] Oh, my dear George, if you only knew how indifferent I am to such a threat! We haven’t done anything with which we can reproach ourselves.

George Winter.

[Banteringly.] You astonish me, my dear Kate. Surely it can’t have slipped your memory that Robert Colby, snatching a brief and well-earned holiday from affairs of state, made a tour of North Italy last Easter, and you accompanied him.

Catherine.

[Flaring up.] That’s not true. You know it’s not true. I went with Barbara Herbert....

George Winter.

[Interrupting, with a twinkle in his eye.] And a maid. It’s always a little unsafe to trust maids, especially Scotch maids with strongly religious principles.

Catherine.

What have you been doing?

George Winter.

[Taking a paper out of his pocket.] Here is another interesting little document that I’ve been at some pains to acquire. Being, alas! aware that the wife of my bosom might — turn troublesome one day or another, I thought it safe to have a weapon in my hand for future use. It is a list of the hotels at which you stayed. Shall I read it to you?

Catherine.

If you choose.

George Winter.

[Hugely amused.] At Milan you stayed at the Palace, and Robert Colby at the Cavour.

Catherine.

[Sarcastically.] Damning, isn’t it?

George Winter.

But perhaps finding the Palace noisy, and trusting in Mr. Robert Colby’s better judgment, at Venice you both stayed at the Danielli.

Catherine.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] Where else should one stay?

George Winter.

I find in my Baedeker that there are twenty-seven hotels in Venice, but I daresay it was very natural that you should both hit upon the Danielli. And you took the precaution of arriving twenty hours after him. But at Ravenna, flinging prudence to the winds, you arrived on the same day, by the same train, and you put up at the same hotel.

Catherine.

There is only one.

George Winter.

You had rooms seventeen and eighteen, and Barbara Herbert had room five.

Catherine.

There was only one vacant room on the first floor, and of course I insisted that Barbara should take it.

George Winter.

Unselfish in the extreme, and just like you, my dear; but don’t you think it was a little indiscreet?

Catherine.

We had nothing to be ashamed of, and therefore we had nothing to fear.

George Winter.

I’ve often thought that was the greatest drawback of innocence. It makes one so devilish imprudent.

Catherine.

I went to Italy with your express consent. I wrote and told you that I’d met Robert Colby. Chance threw us together in Venice; we found we were making practically the same tour, and we joined forces. I saw no harm in it. I see no harm in it now. You can make what use of the admissions you like.

George Winter.

And do you think you will be able to persuade a British jury that you and Robert Colby travelled through Italy together merely to look at churches and pictures?

Catherine.

George, I know now that I never cared for you, but I promise you on my word of honour that I’ve never been unfaithful to you.

George Winter.

My dear, it’s not a question of convincing me — I am the most trusting, the most credulous of mortals — but of convincing the twelve good men and true who form a British jury.

Catherine.

You’re not a fool, George. You know people, and you know what I’m capable of and what I’m not. In your heart you’re certain that I’ve done nothing that can give you any cause for complaint. I’ve suffered a great deal during these four years — I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to go through what I have — I implore you not to drag me through this horror.

George Winter.

My dear, your simple-mindedness positively takes me aback.

Catherine.

[Indignantly.] How can you be so ignoble?

George Winter.

[Dropping his bantering tone, quickly and sternly.] You must know me very little, Kate. My whole life is at stake, and you think I’m going to be moved by entreaties or abuse? I’m at the most critical point of my career. Part of my strength is that I never deceive myself. I’m only an adventurer. My millions are paper millions, and I want to be in such a position that if I’m in need of half a million I can go to the big men and get it, and if one of them asks me for half a million I can afford to put it down. And now, if only I hold on, I shall get everything I want. And you come and whine before me and play the fool. What d’you think I care for your twopenny-halfpenny love-affairs? Do what you like. I don’t care, so long as you’re not flagrant.

Catherine.

[Indignantly.] Oh!

George Winter.

That anyone can be such a fool as to let love interfere with his life! It’s so unimportant.

Catherine.

To me it means the whole world.

George Winter.

Well, I give you your choice. If you bring an action against me I bring a counter-petition.

Catherine.

[Stung into defiance.] My choice is made long ago. I’m strong in my innocence.

George Winter.

You’ll ruin me and ruin your father, but you’ll ruin Robert Colby as well.

Catherine.

[Quickly.] What do you mean?

George Winter.

You don’t mean to say you’re so simple-minded as to imagine he can do anything but resign his seat if he were made co-respondent in a divorce case? They say, if we get in again, he’s to be given the Ministry of War. Humpty-Dumpty. It’s the end of his political career.

Catherine.

[Desperately.] We have nothing to reproach ourselves with. Nothing.

George Winter.

You sent a note to him last night. What did you say?

Catherine.

[Defiantly.] I asked him to come here at twelve o’clock.

George Winter.

[Taking out his watch.] It’s nearly twelve now. I’ll wait. And you shall talk to him.

[Enter Anne Etchingham and Teddie O’Donnell. Anne is like her sister Catherine, but smaller and slighter; she is brighter as well and more vivacious, with pretty caressing ways. Edward O’Donnell is an insignificant, amiable, good-looking young man of three-and-twenty.

Anne.

[As she comes in.] Good morning, good people.

Catherine.

[With a pleasant, affectionate smile.] Ah, Nan.

Anne.

[Going up to George Winter.] Well, how is my great brother-in-law?

George Winter.

He’s in his usual rude health, thank you.

Anne.

I’ve brought Teddie to introduce him to you.

O’Donnell.

How d’you do?

Anne.

[With a flourish.] This is the Napoleon of Finance. He owns seventeen companies, five gold mines, two railways, a house in Portman Square, two places in the country, a yacht, five motor-cars, the family of Etchingham....

George Winter.

[Interrupting.] Take a long breath and say ninety-nine.

Anne.

[Laughing.] Don’t be ridiculous.

George Winter.

Now, what is it you want?

Anne.

I? [Coaxingly.] You’re an old dear, George.

George Winter.

I thought so. Well, what is it?

Anne.

I want you to give Mr. O’Donnell a job.

Catherine.

Anne!

O’Donnell.

I say, Nan, you needn’t put it so bluntly.

Anne.

It’s no good beating about the bush with George, is it?

George Winter.

[Amused and pleased.] Not much.

Anne.

Now, sit down and let me talk sensibly to you.

Catherine.

Anne, I’d rather you didn’t — just now. George and I are busy.

George Winter.

Have they interrupted you, darling? I thought you had nothing more you wanted to say.

Anne.

Is anything the matter?

George Winter.

Nothing. Kate’s a little under the weather this morning.

Anne.

Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry. What is it?

George Winter.

I warned you not to eat that pâté de foie gras last night, my dear. It always disagrees with you.

Catherine.

Please don’t worry about me.

George Winter.

[To Anne.] Why d’you want me to give Mr. O’Donnell a job?

Anne.

Because he’s my young man.

George Winter.

Is he, by Jove!

O’Donnell.

I offered her my hand and heart....

Anne.

[Interrupting.] And being a practical person I promptly inquired what were his worldly possessions.

O’Donnell.

They’re not only nil, they’re astonishingly nil. In point of fact, if you reckon debts they’re positively minus.

Anne.

So I fell into his arms and said, let us put up the banns at once.

George Winter.

[Very jolly and affable.] That’s where I come in.

Anne.

Well, I thought he might manage one of your railways or be your chauffeur, or if you didn’t think he was good enough for that you might make him director of one of your companies.

Catherine.

Nan, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Anne.

Good heavens, if papa can direct companies surely Teddie can.

Catherine.

No, I didn’t mean that. But there are circumstances that you don’t understand. Mr. O’Donnell can’t ask George to do anything for him. Mr. O’Donnell....

George Winter.

[Quite good-humouredly.] Really, Kate, you might let me answer for myself.

Anne.

George always said he’d help me when I wanted to marry.

George Winter.

[To O’Donnell.] I presume your idea is to go into the City?

O’Donnell.

Yes, more or less.

George Winter.

Educated at a public school, I suppose?

O’Donnell.

Yes, I was at Harrow.

George Winter.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] Then I may take it that you tried to get into the Army and failed?

O’Donnell.

Yes, I suppose I did.

George Winter.

And you hadn’t got enough money to go into the diplomatic?

Anne.

How on earth d’you know, George?

George Winter.

When a young man of family and education tells me he wants to go into the City, I know it’s because he’s too incompetent to do anything else. Fifty years ago the fool of good family went into the Church, now he goes into the City.

O’Donnell.

You’re not very flattering.

George Winter.

I dare say you’ll suit me all right.

Anne.

Oh, George, you are a brick.

George Winter.

Give me a kiss and I’ll find him a job.

Anne.

I’ll give you two.

[She kisses him on both cheeks.

George Winter.

I shan’t find him two jobs.

Anne.

I can’t imagine why everybody’s so afraid of you, George. You’re an old dear.

George Winter.

A heart of gold, that’s what I always tell Kate. [To O’Donnell.] Come and see me to-morrow morning, and we’ll have a talk about things.

O’Donnell.

It’s awfully good of you.

George Winter.

You know, you’ll have to do as you’re told if you come to me.

O’Donnell.

I dare say I shan’t mind that.

George Winter.

It’s not always pleasant being at the beck and call of a damned bounder.

O’Donnell.

How d’you mean?

George Winter.

Of course you look upon me as a damned bounder. I know that. I wasn’t educated at Harrow. My father was a hatter at Middlepool, a Nonconformist, and an aitchless one at that. I went to sea when I was fourteen, and when I was your age I was earning twenty-five bob a week as clerk in a bucket shop. Of course I’m a damned bounder.

Anne.

Now, George, don’t be disagreeable.

George Winter.

Well, run along, children.... Have you spoken to your father about this?

Anne.

No, we’re going to leave you to do that.

George Winter.

Are you?

Anne.

Well, you see, father’s sure to kick up a bit of a row because Teddie’s so absolutely stony, but if you say you’ve given him a job....

Catherine.

Father may object....

Anne.

Oh, he wouldn’t dare if George said it was all right.

[Catherine gives a slight gesture, partly of vexation and partly of dismay.

George Winter.

[Kindly.] Are you really very keen on marrying?

Anne.

Awfully.

George Winter.

Well, I’ll see what I can do. Good-bye.

[He nods to O’Donnell. O’Donnell and Anne go out. As soon as they have gone, Catherine starts up.

Catherine.

George, you’re not going to take Teddie O’Donnell in your service. You must understand it’s impossible.

George Winter.

[Coolly.] Why?

Catherine.

We can accept nothing from you.

George Winter.

This disinterestedness is rather a new trait in your family, isn’t it?

Catherine.

You’re only wasting his time in making him come down to see you to-morrow.

George Winter.

I don’t suppose it’s as valuable as all that.

Catherine.

Anne will have to be told the facts, and she’ll see at once that it’s out of the question for Teddie to accept favours from you.

George Winter.

I wonder.

Catherine.

[Defiantly.] I have no doubt of it.

George Winter.

Do you think she’ll be pleased when she’s told that, owing to your unreasonableness, her marriage can’t take place? Are you sure she won’t say that she has no quarrel with me?

Catherine.

I should make her understand.

George Winter.

It seems rather selfish on your part, doesn’t it? If Anne’s heart is set upon marrying this rather foolish boy, have you the heart to prevent her?

Catherine.

I’ve sacrificed myself long enough. It’s Anne’s turn now.

George Winter.

You’ll find self-sacrifice one of the forms of self-indulgence in which people are never wildly anxious to take turn and turn about.

Catherine.

What can you do with Teddie O’Donnell? He’s no good to you.

George Winter.

I’m not sure. I like dealing with gentlemen. When they go into the City they take to dirty work with an alacrity which you often don’t find in the City man born and bred.

Catherine.

Even if there was nothing else, I would do all I could to prevent a decent boy from being exposed to your influence.

George Winter.

Well, you may try yours on Anne. Tell her that I’ll start her young man on four hundred a year, and I’ll allow her a couple of hundred more, so that they can marry next week if they want to. And add that you are divorcing me, and it would be monstrous if either of them accepted my offer.

Catherine.

Oh, I know well enough that you didn’t make him pretty speeches because you took any interest in doing a kindness. It was merely another coil of the chain you’ve twisted round me. Oh, it’s fiendish. Each way I turn I find that you bar my way.

George Winter.

In the agitation of the moment you seem to be mixing your metaphors, my dear.

[Thompson, the butler, comes in.

Thompson.

Mr. Robert Colby has come, madam.

George Winter.

Is he waiting downstairs?

Thompson.

I’ve shown him in the morning-room. He said he would wait till you were disengaged, ma’am.

George Winter.

Ask him to come up. [To Catherine.] I’ll leave you ——

Thompson.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

George Winter.

With my best wishes. I’ll go and discuss the weather and the crops with your excellent father, and you shall discuss the situation with Robert Colby.

Catherine.

For goodness’ sake leave me alone.

George Winter.

Suggest a counter-petition and see how he takes it. My own impression is that he’ll run like a rabbit.

[George Winter goes towards the door that leads into the library and stops.

George Winter.

And if he does, you know whose arms are open to receive you. Whose 60 Mercedes is panting to take you to whose sheltering roof.

[With a guffaw he goes out. Catherine gives a sigh of exhaustion and then braces herself for the coming interview.

[Enter Robert Colby. He is a handsome man of forty, spare and active, with a refined face and good features. He is clean shaven. His hair is grey. He has charming manners and an air of slightly old-fashioned courtesy. His voice is soft and pleasant.

Thompson.

Mr. Robert Colby.

[Catherine goes to him with both hands out-stretched. Her manner becomes brighter and more joyous. She seems to throw off the load of wretchedness which had oppressed her. The Butler goes out.

Catherine.

How good of you to come.

Colby.

[Taking her hands.] You look as if you were surprised to see me.

Catherine.

You must be frantically busy. I thought you might not be able to manage it.

Colby.

You know very well wild labour leaders couldn’t have prevented me.

Catherine.

Of course I know you wouldn’t really let me interfere with anything serious, but it’s very pleasant to flatter myself that the whole country is waiting while you’re wasting your time with me. D’you know what I’ve done?

Colby.

I suspected what your note meant, but I’m anxious to hear it from your own lips.

Catherine.

I’ve crossed the Rubicon. I’m seeing my solicitor to-day, and the petition will be filed as soon as ever it’s possible.

Colby.

I’m so glad. You had no right to go on with that degrading life.

Catherine.

I want you to assure me again that I’m right. I’m so weak. I feel so utterly defenceless.

Colby.

It won’t be very long now before....

Catherine.

[Interrupting.] No, not yet, Robert.

Colby.

I want to tell you at once how passionately I love you.

Catherine.

[With the tenderest of smiles.] D’you think it’s needful? I’m so glad to think you’ve never made love to me. There was all the love I wanted in the look of your eyes, and your voice, though you said quite commonplace things, told me that you cared for me.

Colby.

I’ve never even kissed your hand, Kate.

Catherine.

I’m very grateful to you. Now more than ever I want to feel quite sure that we have nothing to reproach ourselves with.

Colby.

It’s rather hard on me.

Catherine.

Do you think I find it any easier? Sometimes when I’ve been dreadfully lonely, dreadfully wretched, I’ve longed to be able to rest my head on your shoulder, and I’ve thought I might have loved my tears if you could have kissed them away.

Colby.

Were you angry with me when I wrote to you? The one foolish letter?

Catherine.

How could I be?

Colby.

I was dreadfully unhappy then. Everything I tried seemed to go wrong. I was utterly dispirited, and I couldn’t help writing.

Catherine.

I read the letter till I knew every word by heart. Sometimes I wonder how I could have borne my life at all except for the knowledge that you cared for me.

Colby.

You’ve never once told me that you love me, Kate.

Catherine.

D’you want me to say it in so many words? Why else d’you think I’m exposing myself to all the humiliation, all the horrors that are before me? Yes, I love you with all my heart and soul.

Colby.

And after it’s all over?

Catherine.

It shall be as you wish.

Colby.

You’ve meant so much to me, Kate. All the success I’ve had I feel that I owe to you. Sometimes I’ve hated the intrigues and the littleness of politics. I’ve been tempted to give the whole thing up. But you put fresh courage into me. It’s because of you that I’ve been able to ignore the rest and just keep my eyes fixed always on the greatness of the aim.

Catherine.

[Smiling.] It makes me so proud to hear you say that.

Colby.

[Lightly.] Did you read the speech I made yesterday?

Catherine.

No, I’m afraid I haven’t yet.

Colby.

[Gaily.] Wretched woman! And every jack one of the papers has given a leader on it.

Catherine.

I’m so sorry. It’s horrid of me.

Colby.

[Laughing.] What nonsense! Of course you’ve had much more important things to think about.

Catherine.

Tell me all about it. I suppose it was the Army debate.

Colby.

Yes, I burnt my ships behind me. I said I thought some form of compulsory service was essential. Perigal’s going to the country at once. I think we shall get in. And if we do ... I wish to goodness they’d give me the War Office. Of course, after six years in office we can only hope for a small majority, and every seat will count. I wonder what will happen at Middlepool.

Catherine.

George is very popular.

Colby.

Yes, that’s just it. As long as he was there the seat was safe. I wonder if anyone else will be able to hold it.

Catherine.

Do you think it will be impossible for him to stand again?

Colby.

Quite. And rightly. No man’s obliged to go into Parliament. If he does it’s his duty to keep clear of scandal.

[Catherine gives a very slight start, and when she speaks her voice is not quite steady.

Catherine.

That might be very difficult. A man might be an object of scandal, and yet be perfectly innocent. Supposing — a malicious person brought an action for divorce against him. It might be merely an attempt at blackmail. It would be monstrous to punish him for something that wasn’t his fault.

Colby.

D’you honestly think that’s a possible case? If a man is shot at — it’s true he may not be technically guilty — but he can hardly be blameless. If a case can be made out at all against him he must have done something very foolish.

[Catherine does not answer. She is terrified at what he says.

Colby.

George Winter only went into the House for his private ambition. He contested a seat in order to give himself a stronger financial position, and now he wants to use his money to force himself into some sort of job. We’ve got no use for people like that.

Catherine.

[As if she were changing the conversation.] I wonder what you’d do if you were beaten at the General Election?

Colby.

[With a laugh.] I don’t think my constituents will throw me out as long as I behave myself.

Catherine.

[Smiling.] And if they did?

Colby.

[After a little pause.] It would just about break me up. Politics are my whole life. I can’t imagine existence without the House of Commons. And I have so much to do. If they’ll only give me a chance I want to.... [Suddenly stopping himself.] But, good heavens, I’m just going to make a speech.

Catherine.

Oh, my dear, I’m so proud of you. I admire you so enormously.

Colby.

[Gaily.] Not yet. Hang it all, wait to admire me till I’m Minister of War.

Catherine.

[With an affectionate smile.] You dear.... Now you must go. I’ve got ever so much to do, and I’m sure you ought to have.

Colby.

Good-bye, then. God bless you.... Say something nice to me before I leave you.

Catherine.

I shall think of you all day long.

Colby.

Thank you. Good-bye.

[He goes out. Catherine sinks exhausted into a chair, but she hears George Winter approach and pulls herself together. He comes in with Etchingham.

George Winter.

The great man has taken his hook?

[Catherine acknowledges his remark with a look, but does not answer.

George Winter.

I heard his fairy footsteps on the stairs.

Etchingham.

Well, Catherine, I hope you’ve thought better of things.

George Winter.

Well?

[He looks at her with malicious amusement, and she, her head thrown back, stares at him with hatred and anger.

Catherine.

You think every man is a rogue, don’t you?

George Winter.

Certainly not. I think nine men out of ten are rogues or fools. That’s why I make money.

Catherine.

And what’ll you do when you come across the tenth man, who’s neither rogue nor fool?

George Winter.

[Flippantly.] Put him under a glass case.

Catherine.

You may find him awkward to deal with. Take care.

George Winter.

I shall. But I’ve looked for him so long that I can’t help thinking he doesn’t move in my set.... Now and then I’ve thought I’d really got him. But while I was scratching my head and wondering how the deuce I was going to manage, I’ve seen an itching palm steal softly out, and I knew it wasn’t the tenth man after all.

The Butler comes in.

Thompson.

[To George Winter.] Mr. Bennett would like to speak to you, sir.

George Winter.

Is he on the telephone?

Thompson.

No, sir. He’s here.

Etchingham.

What the deuce can he want?

George Winter.

I’ll come down to him.

Etchingham.

No, let him come up. Perhaps it’s something important, and he’ll want to see me too.

George Winter.

[Drily.] Perhaps. Tell him to come up.

Thompson.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

Catherine.

Who is Mr. Bennett?

Etchingham.

He’s the secretary of two or three of our companies. He manages the office and that sort of thing.

George Winter.

He does all the work for which your father gets fees.

Etchingham.

I don’t know about that. I flatter myself I’m worth my salt.

[The Butler shows in Frederick Bennett. He is a little man, thin, middle-aged, clean shaven, with a sharp face, and an extremely respectable appearance. He wears gold spectacles. He is in a tail coat and carries a tall hat in his hand. The Butler goes out after announcing him.

George Winter.

What’s the matter, Fred?

Bennett.

I went round to Portman Square, Governor, and they told me you were here; I thought I’d better come on at once.

Etchingham.

Nothing has happened, Mr. Bennett?

Bennett.

No, my lord. [To George Winter.] May I speak to you for a moment, Governor?

George Winter.

Yes. Etchingham, d’you mind ...?

Etchingham.

Of course not.

[He goes up to Catherine, who is standing at the window, and begins talking to her. The conversation between George Winter and Bennett proceeds in a lower tone, sinking almost to a whisper as it goes on.

George Winter.

What the devil’s the matter, Fred? You’re looking like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.

Bennett.

There’s been a cable from Macdonald, Governor.

George Winter.

Good business. And when’s the report due? I suppose it’s following.

Bennett.

Yes.

George Winter.

Why the deuce didn’t you ring me up? I’d have come down to the office at once. Now we’ve got that we can fire away.

Bennett.

I wouldn’t risk it on the phone. You never know who’s listening.

George Winter.

Drivel. You’re an old woman, Fred. Have you got it on you?

Bennett.

It’s not what you expect, Governor.

George Winter.

[Seizing his wrist.] What the hell d’you mean?

Bennett.

It’s rotten. It’s....

George Winter.

[Interrupting violently.] You filthy liar, what are you talking about?

Bennett.

Take care, they’ll hear you.

George Winter.

Where is it?

Bennett.

I’ve got it in my pocket.

George Winter.

If you’ve been playing the fool with me, Fred....

Bennett.

[Taking out the cable.] I’m in it as deep as you are.

[George Winter takes the cable, is just going to unfold it, when, sick with apprehension, he hesitates. He is too terrified to read it.

George Winter.

What does it say, Fred?

Bennett.

Why, there’s nothing there. We’ve been done in the eye. The mine’s worthless.

[George Winter turns away from him, a look of fear and bewilderment on his face. For a moment he hesitates uncertain what to do, then quickly makes up his mind and clenches his teeth.

Bennett.

[Going up to him.] Governor.

George Winter.

If that’s true, the hundred thousand we paid for it might as well have been thrown down a drain-pipe.

Bennett.

What are you going to do?

George Winter.

Do? Fight it out.

Etchingham.

[Coming forward.] Nothing serious, I hope, George?

George Winter.

[Over his shoulder.] Nothing.

Bennett.

[In a whisper.] You know what it means if you fail?

George Winter.

The Old Bailey. But I shan’t fail.

The Butler comes in.

Thompson.

Luncheon is ready, my lord.

END OF THE FIRST ACT.

THE SECOND ACT

The scene is the same as in the preceding act, the drawing room of Lord Francis Etchingham’s house in Norfolk Street.

It is afternoon. Lady Francis is seated, working at embroidery on a drum. Catherine stands at the window, looking out into the street.

Lady Francis.

Aren’t you tired, Kate?

Catherine.

[Still looking out of the window.] No, mother.

Lady Francis.

You were out all the morning.

Catherine.

I went to see my lawyers.

Lady Francis.

[With a sigh.] I can’t understand that with such a father and such a mother, you should be such a monster of determination.

[Catherine neither answers nor turns.

Lady Francis.

[After a quick look at her.] Dr. O’Farrell says your father will be well enough to come downstairs to-morrow.

Catherine.

I’m glad of that.

Lady Francis.

This is the second attack of gout he’s had this year.

Catherine.

Poor old thing!

Lady Francis.

Aren’t you tired of staring at the house opposite? You’re not expecting anyone, are you?

Catherine.

No.

Lady Francis.

You’re dreadfully restless. [With a faint smile.] I’m growing quite exhausted.

[Catherine gives a little cry of astonishment and alarm.

Lady Francis.

What’s the matter?

Catherine.

[Turning round and coming forward.] George has just driven up.

Lady Francis.

I suppose he’s come to see your father.

Catherine.

They mustn’t let him up. I won’t see him. It’s monstrous that I should have to put up with this.

Lady Francis.

My dear, don’t worry. George hasn’t made any attempt to see you for a fortnight.

[George Winter comes in hurriedly, unannounced; he shuts the door behind him.

Catherine.

[Indignantly.] What d’you want? You’ve got no right to force yourself upon me.

[She makes a movement to leave the room, but he intercepts her. He takes a paper out of his pocket.

George Winter.

I’ve just been served with this.

Catherine.

What else did you expect?

George Winter.

Your father told me that nothing was going to be done for the moment.

Catherine.

I can’t help what father said. It’s my business. I can allow no one to interfere with me.

Lady Francis.

What is that, George?

George Winter.

Would you like to look at it? It’s an interesting document.

Catherine.

It’s the petition, mother.

Lady Francis.

I wish I had my glasses. I’ve never seen one before.

George Winter.

[Grimly.] You’ve been lucky.

Lady Francis.

[With an acid smile.] Or virtuous.

George Winter.

[To Catherine.] You’ve got to withdraw this.

Catherine.

Surely you must see that from now all communications between us must pass through our lawyers.

George Winter.

Rats!

[Catherine crosses the room and rings the bell at the side of the fireplace.

George Winter.

What are you ringing for?

Catherine.

For Thompson to open the door for you.

George Winter.

That’s excessively thoughtful of you.

Catherine.

Mother, can’t you protect me from this?

Lady Francis.

My dear, your husband is six feet high, and broad in proportion. I’ll tell Thompson to kick him downstairs if you like....

George Winter.

But it’s not a job that any well-regulated butler would enjoy.

[The Butler comes in, and waits for an order.

George Winter.

Oh, Thompson, I’m expecting three gentlemen here at five o’clock. You’ll show them into the library, and let me know the moment they come.

Thompson.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out.

Catherine.

What do you mean by this?

George Winter.

That’s precisely what I came to tell you.... I suppose you’ve been talking. There’ve been references to a dispute between us in the Middlepool papers, and the Herald, the Conservative rag, has stated in the current issue that you are divorcing me.

Catherine.

The Middlepool papers are singularly well-informed.

George Winter.

That’s where you’re mistaken. The Argus is printing a special edition with a complete and authoritative denial of the whole story. I’ve issued a writ for libel against the Herald.

Catherine.

One lie more or less on your conscience can make no great difference to you.

George Winter.

I’ve explained your presence here by your susceptibility to fresh paint.

Lady Francis.

What do you mean?

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] The day after Kate left Portman Square I came to the conclusion that the house needed re-decorating. I’m having it papered and painted from cellar to attic. When it’s finished I shall start again.

Lady Francis.

Fortunately the British workman takes his time.

George Winter.

But that’s not enough. The Middlepool people are nervous about the whole thing. You know Swalecliffe — he’s the Nonconformist minister — one of those confounded busybodies who go poking their noses into everybody’s private life. He’s on my committee. He and Ford control the dissenting interest between them.... They’ve got it into their heads that they want the truth from you.

Catherine.

Me?

Lady Francis.

Who is Ford?

George Winter.

Oh, he’s the richest man in Middlepool. He’s one of my directors on the Middlepool Investment Trust. Hard as nails! Shrewd as they make ’em! But a Nonconformist to the tips of his fingers. He’s just built a Congregational church out of his own pocket. He’s a corker to deal with.

Lady Francis.

But I don’t understand. What do these men want Kate to do?

George Winter.

They’re coming here at five o’clock with Boyce, my agent, to ask Kate if there’s any truth in the rumours.

Lady Francis.

But it’s outrageous!

George Winter.

Of course it’s outrageous! But what d’you expect from a parcel of sneaking Middlepool dissenters?

Lady Francis.

And what do you expect Kate to say?

George Winter.

She’s going to say it’s the first she’s heard of it. Then they’re going to ask her if she’s divorcing me, and she’s going to — repudiate the suggestion with all the scorn at her command.

Catherine.

I refuse to see these people.

George Winter.

Do you?

Catherine.

[Satirically.] Or do you want me to tell them before your face that every word they’ve heard is true? Yes, I’ll see them. I’ll settle the whole thing. And then I shall be rid of this persecution. But I shall tell them the exact truth.

George Winter.

[Grimly humorous.] It’s not five o’clock yet.

[The Butler comes in, followed by Mr. Perigal. This is the Prime Minister. He is a stoutish man of middle height, clean-shaven, with abundant grey hair worn long. His face is sensual, shrewd and bland; his manner is kindly and restrained.

Thompson.

Mr. Perigal.

[Exit.

Lady Francis.

[Cordially.] My dear Bob, this is kind of you.

Perigal.

How d’you do? Well, Kate?

Catherine.

You never come and see us now you’re Prime Minister.

Perigal.

It’s a delusion of the public that the Prime Minister has nothing to do but pay afternoon calls. [He turns to George Winter.] I’m very glad to see you here.

George Winter.

On the best possible terms with my mother-in-law.

Lady Francis.

Well, when are you going to dissolve Parliament?

Perigal.

[Making himself comfortable in an arm-chair.] I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to read the papers for some days. What do they say about it?

Lady Francis.

Don’t be irritating, Bob.

Perigal.

My dear, a wise Prime Minister looks upon it as a privilege to fulfil the intelligent anticipations of the press.

Lady Francis.

I hope it’s not true that you’re going to give Emily Lascelles the Home Office?

Perigal.

Good heavens, you talk as if your sex were already comfortably installed in the House.

Lady Francis.

You know perfectly what I mean. It doesn’t matter about the men, because all the work is done by the permanent officials. But their wives are quite another matter. I tell you frankly it will be a great mistake if Emily Lascelles goes to the Home Office.

Perigal.

Why?

Lady Francis.

She can’t entertain. She doesn’t know a word of French. She dresses abominably.

Perigal.

[Ironically.] That settles it. Emily Lascelles shall not go to the Home Office.

George Winter.

[With a smile.] That is how history is made.

Lady Francis.

Oh, George, Frank bought a print of Napoleon the other day that he wants to show you. Do come up, will you?

George Winter.

Of course.

Lady Francis.

George collects things about Napoleon, you know.

Perigal.

Ah, the Napoleon of Finance.... I’m sorry to hear that Frank is laid up.

Lady Francis.

Oh, he’s much better to-day. We shall only be five minutes.

[She goes out with George Winter.

Perigal.

How naturally your mother did that! It almost took me in.

Catherine.

[Gravely.] Have you come to see me by arrangement?

Perigal.

I’m up to my eyes in work! I’m afraid I could hardly find time for a chat in the middle of the afternoon without a rather special object.

Catherine.

I suppose not.

Perigal.

But your husband’s presence leads me to suppose that your common sense has made my errand unnecessary.

Catherine.

Haven’t you heard of the life we led together?

Perigal.

I make a point of never believing the disagreeable things that are said about a man who subscribes so handsomely to the Party funds as your husband.

Catherine.

Then I have you against me too?

Perigal.

My dear child, I’ve known you all your life. Your mother is my first cousin. We all desire nothing more than your happiness.

Catherine.

George was served with the petition this morning.

Perigal.

Ah!... It appears that two prominent supporters of your husband are coming up from Middlepool this afternoon to get from your own lips a denial of the rumours that have been circulating in the constituency.

Catherine.

I can promise you that they’re not going to get it.

Perigal.

I wish I could persuade you to pause before you take such an irrevocable step.

Catherine.

But why should you care?

Perigal.

We’ve been in for six years. We’re dissolving Parliament at once. I don’t know if we shall get in again. It’ll be a very close shave. We can’t afford to risk a couple of seats....

Catherine.

A couple?

Perigal.

The Chief Whip tells me that your husband proposes to lodge a counter petition.

Catherine.

If it weren’t so odious, the idea would be laughable. I promise you that....

Perigal.

Yes, yes, of course. Neither you nor Robert Colby has anything to reproach himself with. That is obvious. But ... well, I gather that the evidence is such that a prima facie case could be made out. It would be awkward just at this moment, for all of us — I myself could wish that my relationship to your dear mother weren’t quite so close. The British people for some reason always judge moral delinquencies on the Radical side with great severity. I have always thought it a hardship that the Tories should have a sort of prescriptive right to the more amusing forms of immorality.

Catherine.

Let us understand one another plainly. Do you mean that if my husband drags Robert Colby through the Divorce Court, you’ll throw Robert overboard, even if his innocence is proved through and through?

Perigal.

My dear, no one is so innocent that there’s not occasion for many people to shake their heads and say: One never knows. I don’t suppose any Prime Minister would invite a man to enter his cabinet who’d been co-respondent in a divorce suit.

Catherine.

It’s nothing short of blackmail. George makes no concealment of the fact.

Perigal.

He has a brutal frankness which is sometimes rather engaging.

Catherine.

Oh, you drive me mad. My whole happiness is at stake, and you can pause to smile at that odious cynicism.... You’ve known Robert and me all our lives. Won’t you believe in us? Won’t you stand by us?

Perigal.

[Very kindly.] My dear, in the position entrusted to me I can’t take risks.... I dare say you know that one of the items in our programme is a modified form of compulsory service. I don’t know that I altogether like it myself, but it’ll take the wind out of the Tory sails, and we’ve got to do something. Robert has enthusiasm and he believes in the measure. He’s just the man to pilot it through the House.

Catherine.

He’s set his heart on getting the War Office.

Perigal.

[Smiling.] Well, you have it in your hands to give it him.

Catherine.

I? Does he know that George Winter has made certain threats?

Perigal.

I think not.

Catherine.

Oh, what a responsibility you put upon me.

Perigal.

That generally goes with power, and at the moment you have that too.

Catherine.

[After a moment’s reflection.] Robert and I have never hidden anything from one another. He wouldn’t wish me to decide on a matter that concerns us both so nearly without consulting him. Do you object to my putting the whole thing before him?

Perigal.

Not a bit! But I can tell you at once what his answer will be. He’ll say that he loves you, and if he must choose between you and everything that has seemed to make his life worth living, he chooses you without a moment’s hesitation.

[Catherine gives a little sigh of relief and delight.

Perigal.

But while he’s in the very act of renouncing the world for your sake, look into his eyes, and perhaps you’ll see in them — oh, only for a moment, and you’ll have to look sharply — the shadow, the merest shadow of regret.... And perhaps in ten years, when I bring an ill-spent life to a close, you’ll say to yourself: If I hadn’t sacrificed him, he might be standing now in the shoes of that poor old incompetent Perigal.

Catherine.

[Hoarsely, more moved than she wishes to show.] I don’t believe Robert is ambitious.

Perigal.

You have to be a shrewd observer always to know the difference between ambition and patriotism.

Catherine.

I could think the world well lost for love.

Perigal.

Yes, but you’re a woman. D’you think a man can?

[Catherine does not answer. Her face expresses the agony of her spirit as Perigal’s words sink in.

Perigal.

May I ring and ask if my carriage has come back?

Catherine.

Let me!

[She rings the bell.

Perigal.

I asked Colby to fetch me in it so that we might run down to the House together.

[The Butler enters to announce Robert Colby, and goes out.

Thompson.

Mr. Colby.

Colby.

I thought I’d come up for one moment just to say how d’you do.

Catherine.

[Forcing some gaiety of manner.] I should have been furious if you hadn’t.

Perigal.

Of course!... I’ll just go up and see your father.

Catherine.

He will be so pleased. I’ll take you up.

Perigal.

No, no, no, no! I couldn’t hear of it. I can easily find my way.

Colby.

I’ll do my best to entertain you while Mr. Perigal is gone. [Mr. Perigal leaves them, and Colby goes up to her gaily.] I jumped for joy when he sent me a note asking me to call for him here.

Catherine.

[Smiling.] You might have come of your own accord.

Colby.

I’m always afraid that I shall bore you if I come too often. I rack my brains for plausible excuses to present myself at your front door.... What’s the matter, Kate?

Catherine.

With me? Nothing.

Colby.

I thought you seemed worried.

Catherine.

D’you know that you haven’t shown the least desire to kiss me?

Colby.

I? My dear, I was obeying your strict commands.

Catherine.

If you really wanted to, you wouldn’t have cared two straws for my commands.

Colby.

[Going towards her.] My darling!

Catherine.

Oh no, don’t. I don’t beg for.... [She breaks off.] If you didn’t think of it of your own accord, it’s too late.

Colby.

What on earth’s the matter with you?

Catherine.

If you love me why don’t you say so sometimes?

Colby.

Good heavens, it’s on the tip of my tongue every moment of the day! I have to hold myself in to prevent falling at your feet and telling you how much I care.

Catherine.

Oh, forgive me! If you knew how dreadfully sometimes I long for a word of love!

Colby.

[Taking her in his arms.] Darling!

Catherine.

Oh, it’s too hard to restrain myself always. Have I been peevish and horrible?

Colby.

[Smiling tenderly.] Of course not.

Catherine.

But I want to know you love me.

Colby.

Kate!

[He turns her face to him and kisses her on the lips.

Catherine.

[Hiding her face and beginning to cry on his shoulder.] You’re all I have in the world. I don’t know what I should do if I lost you.

Colby.

In a very little while now we shall belong to one another for good and all.

Catherine.

[Looking up, withdrawing herself a little and looking into his eyes.] I wonder how much you love me?

Colby.

With all my heart, with all my soul!

Catherine.

D’you love me enough to....

[She breaks off and turns away from him.

Colby.

What?

Catherine.

Nothing. I’m being silly and sentimental. [Smiling.] Let’s be wise and as well behaved as we generally are.

Colby.

I can’t understand you this afternoon, Kate. You’re so different.

Catherine.

I shall frighten you. You’ve never realized that I’m a creature of moods. Are you sure it’s wise to link your life to a woman who’s capable of making almost a scene without any provocation?

Colby.

If you had a bad temper I think I should love it.

Catherine.

[Chaffing him.] Oh!

Colby.

[Stretching out his hands.] Kate!

Catherine.

[Quite cheerfully, as if she were bantering.] I want to put a purely hypothetical case to you. Supposing you had to choose between me and your career — which would you choose?

Colby.

[Smiling.] You, of course.

Catherine.

How glibly you say it!

Colby.

Fortunately I shall never be forced to make such a tremendous choice.

Catherine.

Of course not.

Colby.

Then why the dickens do you suggest it?

Catherine.

Because I’m nervous and restless and rather bored. I wanted to hear you say that you wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice the world for my sake.

Colby.

You absurd, delightful creature!

[She is all smiles and coquetry. Suddenly the tears force themselves into her eyes and her voice breaks.

Catherine.

Bob!

[She stretches out her hands and he takes her in his arms and kisses her passionately; she breaks away from him and stands panting. Mr. Perigal comes in followed by Francis Etchingham, who wears on one foot a large felt slipper, and walks with a stick.

Perigal.

Your father insisted on coming downstairs.

Etchingham.

I really can’t stand my room any longer. And I can walk quite well now.

Catherine.

I thought Dr. O’Farrell said you were to stay upstairs till to-morrow, father.

Etchingham.

O’Farrell’s an idiot.

Colby.

[Smiling.] It certainly looks as if you were better when you start abusing your doctor.

Perigal.

[To Colby.] I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?

Colby.

Not a bit!

Perigal.

[Very amiably.] Lady Francis has been showing me an old photograph.

Etchingham.

[Settling himself heavily into an armchair.] That little joke of Angela’s didn’t quite come off.

[Catherine gives him a footstool and puts his foot on it.

Perigal.

I looked at it blankly, and then she said: Don’t you remember? It’s so-and-so. It gave me quite a start. It was the photograph of a young lady I’d been so madly in love with that I asked her to bolt with me — married woman and all that sort of thing — and, would you believe it? thirty years have passed since then, and upon my soul I didn’t know her from Adam!

Etchingham.

Or Eve!

[Catherine looks at him gravely, seeing the application to herself of his story.

Colby.

You must congratulate yourself.

Perigal.

Well, my friends, I do. I’m not a high-minded, quixotic fellow like you, and I don’t mind telling you that I find it very agreeable to be Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister. And yet, at the time, if anyone had given me the choice between my present position and a trip across Europe with the object of my affections, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

Colby.

A merciful providence evidently had you under its care.

[Catherine gives a slight start and rises as she hears these words, and looks at him steadily.

Perigal.

Well, we must be off. We mustn’t let even this charming lady interfere too much with the working of the British Empire.

Catherine.

Good-bye.

Perigal.

You must get your mother to show you that photograph. Thirty years ago I thought the little hussy much more attractive than that. [Turning to Etchingham.] Good-bye, Frank. I hope your foot’ll be all right in a day or two.

[Perigal and Colby go out.

Etchingham.

I remember that little woman quite well. Not much to look at. I wondered at the time what Perigal saw in her.

Catherine.

You don’t want me just now, father, do you?

Etchingham.

No, dear. Are you going out?

Catherine.

I’m only going to my room. I want — I want to be alone for a little bit.

Etchingham.

Oh!

[Before she can give any explanation, the Butler comes in to announce Bennett, and she takes advantage of this to make her escape.

Thompson.

Mr. Bennett.

[Exit.

Etchingham.

Ah, Mr. Bennett, forgive me if I don’t get up.

Bennett.

I’m glad to see you’re better, my lord.

Etchingham.

Is anything the matter?

Bennett.

[Surprised.] I thought your lordship expected me. You telephoned?

Etchingham.

I?

Bennett.

Perhaps the Governor....

Etchingham.

[Interrupting.] Ah yes, of course. George didn’t mention it. I suppose he wants me to sign cheques. I can do it just as well here as at the office. I expect Mr. Winter is in. Would you mind ringing?

Bennett.

Certainly.

[Before he can ring, George Winter comes in.

George Winter.

I’ve given orders that no one is to be let up until those people arrive from Middlepool.

Etchingham.

By Jove, I’d forgotten all about them. I say, George, you made a mistake in letting them come.

George Winter.

And I’ve told Lady Francis that we shall want this room to ourselves, and no one’s to come in without knocking at the door.

Etchingham.

By the way, was it you who sent for Bennett?

George Winter.

It was. Your gout has come in very handy. Sit down, Fred. We’d better make ourselves cosy. Quite comfortable, Etchingham?

Etchingham.

Quite, thank you.

George Winter.

Foot all right?

Etchingham.

I don’t feel it at the moment.

[Throughout the next scene George Winter is as gay and jovial as possible. He is thoroughly amused by the torture he is inflicting. He plays with Francis Etchingham as a cat would with a mouse.

George Winter.

I thought you might like to know at once that Macdonald’s report on the mine has come.

Etchingham.

Ah, that’s good news. Now we can get to work at once.

George Winter.

Have you got it with you, Fred?

Bennett.

Yes, sir.

George Winter.

I’m sure his lordship would like to have a look at it.

Etchingham.

Yes, hand it over, Bennett. This is really a thrilling moment. I believe I’m going to make my fortune at last.

George Winter.

As you justly remark, it’s a thrilling moment.

[Bennett takes the report out of a despatch-case and hands it to Etchingham.

Etchingham.

Impressive document, isn’t it?

[He smoothes it out and begins to read. George Winter watches him with a certain amusement.

George Winter.

Rather technical, isn’t it?

Etchingham.

[Somewhat irritably.] Upon my soul, I don’t know why Macdonald can’t put it into plain English?

George Winter.

I’m thankful he didn’t put it any plainer.

Etchingham.

I must honestly confess that I don’t quite grasp what he means.

George Winter.

I thought you wouldn’t. The long and the short of it can be told in two words.

Etchingham.

[Putting down the report with a slight sigh of relief.] Ah!

George Winter.

The mine was practically worked out when we bought it. There’s no gold there worth speaking of. We’ve been done in the eye, and we’re eighty thousand pounds to the bad.

[There is a moment’s pause. Etchingham looks at George Winter blankly. Bennett glances nervously from one to the other.

Etchingham.

[Hardly able to speak, his tongue sticking to his throat.] You’re — you’re joking!

George Winter.

Read the report.

Etchingham.

[Looking at it helplessly.] Then....

George Winter.

Your fortune is beginning to look rather silly, isn’t it? So’s mine.

Etchingham.

Is this true, Mr. Bennett?

Bennett.

I’m afraid it is, my lord.

Etchingham.

My God! What’s to be done now?

George Winter.

What do you think ought to be done?

Etchingham.

I?

George Winter.

You’re chairman of the Syndicate. Your opinion can’t fail to be valuable.

Etchingham.

[Hesitatingly.] We must just pocket our loss.

George Winter.

H’m!

Bennett.

With things in their present state a loss like that is about as much as we can stand.

Etchingham.

The slump must come to an end soon.

George Winter.

We’ve been saying that for the last two months.

Etchingham.

Then what the deuce is to be done?

George Winter.

That’s what we’re asking you.

Bennett.

We’ve got the Lewishams to reckon with.

George Winter.

Now’s their time to make a raid on us.

Etchingham.

[Hoarsely.] It doesn’t mean that we smash up, George?

George Winter.

[Taking out his watch.] Boyce will be here in a quarter of an hour.

Etchingham.

George, don’t play the fool now. I’ve put all my eggs in this basket. I thought I was going to be rich at last. I wanted to get out of the whole thing. I wanted to live quietly and comfortably.

Bennett.

What are you going to do, Governor?

George Winter.

[Looking at Etchingham.] Suppress the report.

[Bennett gives a start, but does not speak.

George Winter.

Go ahead as if we believed in the mine. We’ve got the Government expert’s report on which we bought the thing. We’ll put that in the prospectus.

Etchingham.

But isn’t that dishonest?

George Winter.

Very.

Etchingham.

George!

George Winter.

It’s an axiom in mining circles that when you’ve got hold of a rotten thing the proper course is to pass it on to the British public.

Etchingham.

The public will find out there’s no gold there when you pay no dividends.

George Winter.

Oh, we’ll pay dividends for a year or two. By then we shall have turned the corner, and we’ll find another carrot for the British public.

Etchingham.

But you say yourself it’s dishonest.

George Winter.

There’s another point you seem to have forgotten.

Etchingham.

What is that?

[George Winter pauses and looks at him for an instant reflectively.

George Winter.

We paid for the mine with money that didn’t belong to us.

Etchingham.

What d’you mean?

George Winter.

We’re in exactly the same position as the shop-boy who sneaks five bob from his master’s till to put it on a horse. If the horse comes in he puts it back, and if it doesn’t, he gets a month’s hard labour.... We shall get seven years.

Etchingham.

What are you talking about, George?

George Winter.

Has it escaped your memory that you and I are Directors of the Middlepool Investment Trust?

Etchingham.

Well?

George Winter.

We had to plank down eighty thousand pounds within twenty-four hours or lose the mine.

Bennett.

It looked like a certainty.

George Winter.

At that moment it was impossible for us to raise anything like that sum. The bank held a hundred thousand pounds of bearer bonds for the Middlepool Investment Trust. They delivered them on an order signed by you, me, and Bennett. We borrowed on them and completed the purchase of a worthless mine.

Etchingham.

But I’ve never signed anything.

Bennett.

Yes, you did, my lord. They wouldn’t have delivered the bonds without.

Etchingham.

Then my signature’s been forged.

George Winter.

Don’t you remember one day, after an excellent luncheon at Pym’s, you were just off to a wedding, and I asked you to come up into the office and sign some papers?

Etchingham.

But I never looked at them. I didn’t know....

George Winter.

[Interrupting blandly.] Ah, that’s your affair.

Etchingham.

[Indignantly.] I shall go to the police.

George Winter.

D’you think you’ve got a plausible story to tell them? It sounds devilish improbable that a business man, a chairman of half a dozen companies, should sign documents without looking at them. Bennett and I will swear that you carefully read everything that was put before you — as, indeed, was your duty, my dear friend — and fully understood the nature of your act.

Etchingham.

Mr. Bennett, you’ll testify that I never realized for a moment what I was doing. You told me they were purely formal documents. I saw George sign them. I added my signature without hesitation.

George Winter.

I think Mr. Bennett would be more than human if he cleared you at his own expense.

Bennett.

If there were any trouble, my lord, I should have to tell the truth.

Etchingham.

That’s just what I want you to do.

Bennett.

I should have to say that you agreed with us in the necessity of borrowing the bonds with the idea of putting them back as soon as we’d floated the company, and that you signed the order to the bank with full knowledge of the seriousness of your act.

George Winter.

What is truth, said jesting Pilate.

Bennett.

You’re just as deep in it as we are, my lord.

Etchingham.

Oh, my God!

George Winter.

It’s no use losing one’s head because one’s in a tight place.

Etchingham.

You’ve tricked me. You’re a common swindler. In a month we may all be in prison.

George Winter.

I hear they make you very comfortable there nowadays.

Etchingham.

Well, I see my duty before me. I didn’t know, but now there can be no excuse for me. I must go to Scotland Yard at once. I shall make a clean breast of the whole thing.

George Winter.

D’you think that’ll help you? It may mean five years instead of seven.

Etchingham.

Every one will know that I’m incapable of such an act.

George Winter.

Don’t be a silly fool. Listen to me. We’ve got you tight. If we go under, you go under too. Let there be no doubt in your mind about that.

Etchingham.

I must do my duty.

George Winter.

Your duty is to keep your head and help us out of the mess as best you can.

Etchingham.

But nothing can be done. The mine’s worthless. How are we to raise eighty thousand pounds?

George Winter.

We’ve got six weeks before we need replace the bonds. If we can do it by then no one will ever know they’ve left the cellars of the bank.

Etchingham.

There’s no more chance of replacing them in six weeks than there is the day after to-morrow.

George Winter.

Yes, there is, if we can float the company. That’s where you come in. I’ve got to keep my seat. I want all my prestige. I can’t have a divorce. You must go to Kate at once, and tell her that the only way she can save you from prison is by telling these men who are coming from Middlepool that she has no cause for complaint against me.

Etchingham.

Good God! I’d forgotten Kate.

Bennett.

It’s only by going on now that we can save ourselves and the money that’s invested in our companies.

Etchingham.

[Irritably.] You wouldn’t have got into such a mess with Kate if you hadn’t made such a damned fool of yourself. Why couldn’t you leave these women alone?

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] My dear fellow, you speak as if I were to blame. They simply flung themselves into my arms. It would have been very rude if I hadn’t occasionally pressed them to my bosom.

Bennett.

It’s not much the Governor asks you, my lord.

Etchingham.

To go and tell my daughter that I’m a thief and a swindler, and throw myself on her mercy!

George Winter.

That’s it.

Etchingham.

I’ll see you damned first!

George Winter.

The alternative is prison.... It’s not very nice, penal servitude — is it, Fred? You know all about it. You can tell him.

Bennett.

[With a gasp.] Governor!

Etchingham.

What does he mean?

George Winter.

Fred’s a solicitor who was struck off the rolls. He was sentenced to three years for misappropriating a client’s money.

Etchingham.

Good God! Is that true, Mr. Bennett?

Bennett.

[Ashamed.] Yes, my lord.

Etchingham.

I never knew.

George Winter.

Of course you didn’t. It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect him to brag about, is it? But it’ll go worse with him if we’re found out, because he’s been at it before. Tell him what it’s like, Fred.

Bennett.

[With agony.] Oh, Governor, don’t!

George Winter.

I knew him before he went in. His name was Feltman then. And when they let him out I took him because I felt sure he had everything to gain by sticking to me, and everything to lose by giving me away.

Etchingham.

My God!

George Winter.

He can tell you what you’re in for. What the broad arrow’s like to wear, and what the food’s like to eat. And the work — it’s a healthy life, regular hours — you’re strong for your age. I don’t see why you shouldn’t break stones in the quarries with the rest of us. Hour after hour with your back feeling as if it were going to break, and your arms aching, aching, but not so badly as your heart.

[Bennett breaks down and sobs, difficultly trying to restrain himself.

George Winter.

And you count the days, three hundred and sixty-five in a year, and you wonder if they’ll ever come to an end. And your mind keeps on working. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were a brainless hulk like the man who’s sweating away beside you; but you think, and you can’t help thinking. And you curse yourself. And you think of the people outside who are free to do as they like, and you think of the spring-time and the flowers, and you think of the pleasant streets of London. And then there’s the regret which wrings your heart day after day, and you wish — you wish a thousand times you were dead. You sleep, you’re too tired not to, even though you’ve got hunger gnawing at your vitals, for you’re hungry, always hungry — and in your sleep you dream that you’re back again in your home, happy and comfortable; and when you wake up and feel your hard prison bed, you cry like a child.

Bennett.

Oh, my God! My God!

George Winter.

And then when you come out, it’s not over. You slink along the streets, feeling that it’s written on your forehead for every one to see, and your heart beats when you catch sight of a policeman. And at night it all comes back to you. You see it again, the warders, the convict gang, the prison food, and your back aches with the labour. And you wake shrieking with terror, shrieking, shrieking!

[There is a pause. Etchingham looks straight in front of him with chill, stony eyes. Bennett cowers brokenly, trembling in every limb. There is a knock at the door. Tap, tap, tap. Even George Winter starts and a shiver runs through him. The knocking is repeated.

George Winter.

[Angry with his own nervousness.] Who the devil’s that? Come in!

The Butler enters.

George Winter.

What is it? I told you we weren’t to be disturbed.

Thompson.

The gentlemen have come, sir.

[George Winter reflects for an instant, and gives Etchingham a rapid glance.

George Winter.

I’ll ring when you can show them up.

Thompson.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

George Winter.

[Abruptly.] Now go to Kate, tell her what I’ve told you, and say the only way she can save you is by giving in.

Etchingham.

[Hoarsely.] I’ll see you damned first.

George Winter.

[Astounded.] What!

Etchingham.

[Gathering strength and courage.] I tell you I won’t. And you can go to Hell!

Bennett.

My lord, you don’t know what you’re doing.

George Winter.

[Hardly able to believe his ears.] D’you mean to say you refuse to speak to Kate?

Etchingham.

If I speak to her it’ll only be to tell her that you’re a rotten scoundrel, and it’s worth her while to put up with anything to be rid of you.

George Winter.

It means seven years, you know that, don’t you?

Etchingham.

For you and that dirty convict there.

George Winter.

You think you can get off by turning on us, but you can’t. We’ve got you tight.

Etchingham.

You miserable fellow, d’you think I shall try to escape my penalty?

George Winter.

[With angry impatience.] It’s tomfoolery. We haven’t got time for highfalutin now. Those fellows can’t be kept waiting all night. Kate’s the only person who can save us, and you....

Etchingham.

[Throwing the words at him.] I tell you I won’t. You’ve made a catspaw of me. And you thought you’d only got to say the word and I’d come to heel.

George Winter.

[Contemptuously.] You’ve done it often enough before.

Bennett.

Don’t expect any mercy from him, my lord. He’ll do you in as sure as eggs is eggs.

Etchingham.

I don’t want any mercy. You think you’ve got me tight. Don’t you know that I’ve got a way of escape whenever I choose to take it.

George Winter.

What are you going to do?

Etchingham.

That’s my business.

[George Winter understands; he drains a long breath.

Bennett.

[In a whisper.] What does he mean, Governor?

George Winter.

D’you think you’d have the courage?

Bennett.

[Understanding.] Ah!... I tried it once, but I couldn’t do it. My hand shook. I let them take me.

George Winter.

[Reflectively.] I hadn’t thought of that. You can shoot yourself.

Etchingham.

[Bitterly sarcastic.] I’m obliged to you for the permission.

George Winter.

We drove him too far, Fred. We’ve made a mess of it.

Etchingham.

You have, a confounded mess.

[He gets up and hobbles across the room towards the door. George Winter intercepts him.

George Winter.

Where are you going?

Etchingham.

[Insolently.] Get out of my way, you damned bounder.

[George Winter looks at him for a moment and steps aside.

George Winter.

[With a grim smile.] It is plain that you don’t think there’s anything more to be got out of me.

Etchingham.

[With a wave of the hand.] I wish you a pleasant time at Portland, gentlemen.

George Winter.

Ring the bell, Fred.

[Etchingham stops as he hears the order and turns round.

Bennett.

That’ll bring those men up. Don’t you remember you told....

George Winter.

[Interrupting.] Ring the bell, damn you!

[Bennett, without a word, presses the button. Etchingham comes back into the middle of the room.

Etchingham.

What are you going to do?

George Winter.

Hulloa, I thought you were routing out your pistols by now.

Etchingham.

You’re not going to see those fellows?

Bennett.

They’ll insist on seeing Mrs. Winter.

George Winter.

Then I shall send for her.

Etchingham.

Oh, you needn’t think she’ll back you up in your confounded lies.

George Winter.

[Blandly.] Anyhow, I dare say you’d like to wait and see.

Etchingham.

[Suspiciously.] Have you got something up your sleeve?

George Winter.

My dear fellow, our sex would be at an impossible disadvantage in its dealings with the other, if it were not for the most obstinate of all their passions.... Self-sacrifice.

Etchingham.

You’re counting on that?

George Winter.

You’ve given Kate such a training in it that I can’t help thinking it has become a habit.

Etchingham.

I won’t say a word to move her.

[He flings himself heavily into a chair. Already half his heroic resolutions have evaporated. George Winter watches him with cynical amusement.

George Winter.

Like all great men I leave as little as possible to chance.

Etchingham.

[With a start.] Perigal?

George Winter.

That’s it.

Bennett.

D’you think there’s a chance, Governor?

George Winter.

We must risk it. It’s the last fling.

[The Butler ushers in Mr. Swalecliffe, James Ford and Colonel Boyce. Mr. Swalecliffe is a Nonconformist Minister, clean shaven, with a sallow grave face. James Ford is a wealthy man, a pillar of the Nonconformist church in Middlepool and a local politician of importance; he is a large man, stout, oldish, badly dressed, with a slight North Country accent; he gives the impression of shrewdness, but also of complete honesty and straightforwardness. Colonel Boyce, who is George Winter’s agent, is spare and tall, bronzed, with grey hair and a grey waxed moustache; alert, neatly dressed and dapper. He is the kind of retired military man who may be seen by the score in Bath, Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham.

Thompson.

Mr. Swalecliffe, Mr. James Ford, Colonel Boyce.

[Exit.

George Winter.

How d’you do? I’m delighted to see you! I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?

James Ford.

Not a bit! It’s of no consequence.

George Winter.

Let me introduce you to my father-in-law. Mr. Swalecliffe — Lord Francis Etchingham.

[Mr. Swalecliffe bows stiffly. He is not going to open his mouth if he can help it.

George Winter.

Mr. James Ford.

James Ford.

Pleased to meet you, Lord Francis.

Etchingham.

It’s very kind of you to say so.

George Winter.

When I suggested to Lord Francis that it would be more convenient for you to come here, he put his house at my disposal. My wife is staying here, you know. We’re doing up the house in Portman Square, and she can’t stand the smell of paint.

Boyce.

[Anxious to make things easy.] Naturally. I don’t like it myself.

George Winter.

How is your wife, Mr. Swalecliffe? Well, I trust.

Swalecliffe.

Thank you.

George Winter.

And the children?

Swalecliffe.

Yes, thank you.

George Winter.

Now sit down and make yourselves comfortable, won’t you? Have you had tea?

James Ford.

Yes, thank you.

Boyce.

[Rather pompously.] I took them into my club.

George Winter.

Will you have a drink? I can recommend my father-in-law’s whisky. I know it’s no good offering you one, Mr. Swalecliffe?

James Ford.

Boyce and I had a little drop of Scotch to our tea.

George Winter.

Then we’ll get to business at once, shall we?

Swalecliffe.

[Clearing his throat.] I should like to say, before we go any further, that it is with the greatest regret that Mr. Ford and I have come up to London on such an errand.

James Ford.

There’s been a lot of gossip in Middlepool, and, well, we thought the shortest way to settle it was....

Boyce.

I personally don’t think this is a matter of which the committee ought to take any notice. A man’s private life is his private life, and....

James Ford.

That’s all very well, Colonel. Winter’s an old friend of mine. We’ve had business dealings together for the past twenty years. But ... well, it’s a question of winning the election or losing it. There’s never been much in it one way or another, and fifty votes more or less will make all the difference.

Swalecliffe.

I want to tell you frankly, Mr. Winter, that I should feel it my duty to vote against you, if there were any truth in the reports that have been going about. And I should feel it my duty to advise my congregation to follow my example.

George Winter.

That’s clear enough in all conscience. Gentlemen, the best answer I can make to you is that I receive you in my father-in-law’s house. My wife is upstairs in her mother’s boudoir. I give you my word of honour that there is not the smallest shadow of truth in any single syllable that you have heard. I have issued a writ for libel against the Herald, and....

Boyce.

Surely that ought to satisfy anyone.

James Ford.

Well, it doesn’t satisfy me.

George Winter.

Perhaps you would like my father-in-law to tell you that every word I say is scrupulously true?

Swalecliffe.

We don’t doubt your word, Mr. Winter, but we came to London with a particular object.

Boyce.

I must say I thought from the beginning it was open to the gravest question.

James Ford.

The committee discussed it at length, and the majority agreed that....

George Winter.

[Rising.] Of course, of course, Etchingham, will you give these gentlemen the assurance?

Etchingham.

[After a moment’s hesitation.] I think the whole thing’s damned impertinent.

Boyce.

That’s exactly what I said.

James Ford.

[Quietly.] You’re only wasting time, Winter.

Swalecliffe.

We made up our minds that we must have a certain assurance from the lips of Mrs. Winter. Then we can go back to Middlepool with comfortable minds.

George Winter.

[Trying bluster.] D’you mean to say you wish to cross-examine my wife?

Swalecliffe.

I merely wish her to answer the questions that were put to you in Colonel Boyce’s letter on behalf of the committee.

George Winter.

[Pretending to fly into a violent passion.] No decent woman would stand it. I refuse to ask my wife to expose herself to such a degradation.

James Ford.

That means that you don’t represent Middlepool in the next Parliament, George Winter.

George Winter.

I’d sooner lose my seat than expose a defenceless woman to such humiliation. You can go and tell that to your committee and be damned to you!

Swalecliffe.

But we came up from Middlepool on the understanding that we were to see your wife, Mr. Winter.

George Winter.

My wife is in very delicate health.

James Ford.

We shan’t keep her more than five minutes. You’d be wise to let common sense get the better of your pretty sentiments.

[There is a slight pause. George Winter realizes that he cannot bluff them out of their determination: he goes over silently and rings the bell.

George Winter.

Very well.

James Ford.

I think it’s the best thing, you know.

George Winter.

But if my wife refuses to answer I warn you that I shall not say a word to persuade her. I think the whole thing’s a perfect scandal.

[The Butler enters.

George Winter.

Tell Mrs. Winter that Lord Francis and I would be very much obliged if she’d come to the drawing-room for one moment.

Thompson.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

Boyce.

I wish you to know that I have expressed myself very strongly all through against this proceeding.

James Ford.

Shut up, Boyce. When we want your opinion we’ll ask for it.

[They wait in silence. In a moment Catherine comes in.

George Winter.

These are the gentlemen of whom I spoke to you. Gentlemen, here is my wife.

James Ford.

[Cordially.] How d’you do, Mrs. Winter? Pleased to see you.

Catherine.

[With a smile.] How d’you do?

James Ford.

We’ve not had the pleasure of welcoming you in Middlepool for some time.

Catherine.

I’ve not been very well lately.

Swalecliffe.

[To George Winter.] Will you put the question to Mrs. Winter that we set in our letter to you of the day before yesterday?

George Winter.

No, sir. If you’re not ashamed to ask the question you may ask it yourself.

Swalecliffe.

I am a stranger to Mrs. Winter. The matter requires some explanation.

James Ford.

It’s no use making any bones about it, Swalecliffe. Mrs. Winter, I’m sorry to put you in this position, but there it is, and it can’t be helped. There are busybodies everywhere, and Middlepool has its fair share of them. There’s been a lot of gossip about you and your good man, and if we don’t look out it’ll lose him the election.

Catherine.

What do you want me to say to you?

James Ford.

Well, we want to be able to go back to Middlepool and tell them we’ve had it from your own lips that there’s no truth in these reports.

[There is a pause. Etchingham can hardly bear his anxiety. Bennett is trying to hide his agitation. George Winter looks at her with a smile. Catherine and James Ford confront one another, and she looks at him steadily.

Catherine.

That you may do.

[Etchingham cannot prevent a little gasp of relief, but George Winter makes no sign.

Swalecliffe.

You have no intention of divorcing your husband?

Catherine.

None whatever.

Swalecliffe.

You’ve never had any intention?

George Winter.

[Impatiently.] Good lord, isn’t that enough for you?

James Ford.

[Kindly.] Yes, yes, we won’t bother you any more. Thank you, very much! And I’m glad that you’ve put our minds at rest. George Winter, shake hands.

George Winter.

I’ll shake hands with you, but I can’t help saying that I could have expected more charity, more confidence in me from men who make a practice of belief in the Christian Church.

James Ford.

[Unmoved by the rebuke.] That’s all right.

Swalecliffe.

I can understand your vexation, Mr. Winter. But we were in a very difficult position.

James Ford.

Anyhow, we must get along, and if we look sharp we’ll catch the 5.40 back to Middlepool. Good afternoon to you, Mrs. Winter. Good afternoon, gentlemen.

George Winter.

Mr. Bennett will show you out. Good-bye. Good-bye, Boyce. I shall be up at Middlepool in a day or two.... [As they are going out.] Oh, by the way, Boyce, a little bit of information for you — Robert Colby’s going to the War Office in the New Cabinet.

END OF THE SECOND ACT.

THE THIRD ACT

The scene is a spacious sitting-room in the Palace Hotel at Middlepool. It is sumptuously furnished with the lack of taste peculiar to such apartments. Everything is large and rich and rather stiff. It is obvious that the decorations have been carried out on contract by a first-rate firm. They are calculated to give the business man who engages the room the impression that he is getting his money’s worth.

On the left is a large French window, opening to the floor and looking on the square in front of the hotel. At the back is a door leading into George Winter’s bedroom. On the right are two doors; one leads into the passage, and the other is that of Catherine’s room. There is a telephone on the table.

It is some weeks later, between ten and eleven on the morning of the election.

Lord Francis Etchingham, Fred Bennett, James Ford, Colonel Boyce, and Mr. Swalecliffe. Mr. Swalecliffe is standing at the window.

When the curtain rises there is an excited buzz of conversation. Boyce is at the telephone.

Boyce.

[Speaking into the receiver.] Yes, Colonel Boyce. Be sure you don’t make a mistake.

Swalecliffe.

I can’t imagine what’s become of him. One would have thought....

Etchingham.

[To Colonel Boyce.] If he’s not there, you’d better try somewhere else.

James Ford.

[Shouting.] For goodness’ sake let me hear myself speak.

[These speeches are said simultaneously, and immediately afterwards is heard the dull roar of a train passing through the station, and a long, shrill whistle. Etchingham starts nervously.

Etchingham.

Oh, confound those trains.

James Ford.

[Impatiently.] I should have thought you’d got used to them by now.

Etchingham.

Good Lord, I’ve not slept for a week. They go on all night.

Bennett.

They worried me a bit last night. And when I did get to sleep I heard them whistling away through my dreams.

Boyce.

They don’t seem to trouble Winter.

Etchingham.

If they did I suppose he wouldn’t come to this hotel.

James Ford.

[Nodding in the direction of George Winter’s room.] He sleeps next door, doesn’t he?

Boyce.

He told me he slept like a top last night.

Bennett.

[Simultaneously.] He looked as fresh as paint this morning.

Etchingham.

And his room’s practically on the line.

James Ford.

Oh, nonsense.

Etchingham.

Yes, it is. You just walk down a flight of steps into the garden, and there you are within twenty feet of the line.

James Ford.

Worst place in Middlepool for a hotel. I told them so when they came to me about it. Wanted me to put money in it. Not me.

Swalecliffe.

[Breaking in before James Ford has finished.] Surely Mr. Winter ought to be here by now.

James Ford.

You won’t make him come any quicker by looking out of the window.

Boyce.

Every moment’s valuable. Something ought to be done at once.

Etchingham.

[Interrupting.] Don’t you know where he is, Colonel?

Boyce.

He was booked to speak to the men at Parker and Gibbons at 10.30. But you know what he is. Half a dozen places at once. He’s about the most difficult person to catch I know.

Swalecliffe.

Have you sent down to Parker and Gibbons?

Boyce.

Yes, of course I have; I’ve sent a dozen fellows after him to tell him to come to the hotel at once.

Bennett.

[Talking through.] You’ve been careful? You’ve not ...?

Boyce.

You don’t think I’m a beginner at this game, do you?

Bennett.

Well, I didn’t know how you’d made him understand what had happened.

James Ford.

He’s not made him understand. When Winter’s told he’s expected at the Palace at once he’ll guess something’s in the wind.

Swalecliffe.

You’re sure he won’t go to the Committee Rooms?

Boyce.

If he does he’ll be sent on. I thought it would cause a lot of gossip if we had a meeting there. That’s why I suggested the hotel.

Etchingham.

[Interrupting.] I wish to goodness you wouldn’t look so depressed, Mr. Swalecliffe.

Swalecliffe.

You’re a business man, Mr. Ford. D’you think there’s any truth in this article?

James Ford.

You’d better ask Lord Francis. He’s chairman of the new company; I’m only an investor.

Bennett.

Of course there’s nothing in it. The whole thing’s a malicious libel.

James Ford.

Well, we’ll hear what Winter’s got to say about it.

Etchingham.

[Simultaneously.] My Lord, I wish he’d come.

Bennett.

[To James Ford.] You don’t mean to say you think there’s anything in it?

James Ford.

I’ve applied for ten thousand shares. You don’t suppose I like it when an article comes out in a financial paper on the day of issue that the mine’s practically worked out, and Winter’s expert has reported that the ore’s not worth the cost of crushing.

Boyce.

Everybody who’s got a penny to spare in Middlepool has applied for shares.

James Ford.

George Winter told me it was the biggest thing he’d ever had.

Bennett.

He’s never let you down before. Why should he let you down now?

James Ford.

I don’t say he’s let me down. But he told me to put my shirt on it, and ... I don’t want ten thousand worthless shares.

Boyce.

The damnable thing is that it should happen on the day of the election.

Etchingham.

It would be monstrous if people didn’t vote for him because of an article in a London newspaper.

Boyce.

You know what people are. They lose their heads. The seat has always been won and lost on the wobblers.

James Ford.

Oh, the first thing is to win the seat.

Swalecliffe.

Well, we shan’t do that unless Mr. Winter comes at once and we make up our minds what to do.

Etchingham.

Ring up the Committee Rooms, Boyce, and ask if anything’s been heard of him.

Boyce.

All right. I’ll do that.

Swalecliffe.

I was never so taken aback as when Boyce showed me the telephone message from London.

Etchingham.

When do the London papers get here, Mr. Ford?

James Ford.

They ought to be here by half-past ten.

Boyce.

[Speaking into the receiver.] Put me on 78, will you?

Etchingham.

[Simultaneously.] Why the devil don’t they bring them in?

Bennett.

Don’t worry. I’ve told a waiter to bring them as soon as they arrive.

Boyce.

[At the telephone.] I say, is that you, Masters? Has Mr. Winter been there? Well, send Rogers. Here. No, here, confound you! The Palace. [Putting down the receiver.] No, nothing’s been seen of him since early this morning.

Etchingham.

I wonder what the other side are going to do when they hear this.

James Ford.

Oh, don’t you be afraid. They heard about the attack as soon as ever we did.

Bennett.

You ought to have held the line and prevented them from getting on to London.

Boyce.

Good God, one can’t think of everything at once.

Etchingham.

It seems to me the whole thing has been about as disgracefully mismanaged as it could be.

Boyce.

If you’d ever tried to run an election you’d know it wasn’t so easy as all that.

Etchingham.

I’m not an election agent. It’s not my business.

James Ford.

Come, come, gentlemen, it’s no good quarrelling about it.

[These three speeches are spoken at once.

Swalecliffe.

How is the polling going on?

Boyce.

Oh, I think we shall have the heaviest poll we’ve ever had.

James Ford.

Of course there’ll be some slackening off just now. A lot of working men voted when the polling stations opened.

Boyce.

There’ll be twice as many at the dinner-hour.

Swalecliffe.

You don’t know what the Tories are doing, Colonel?

Boyce.

I should think I did know. They’re going to set up the article as soon as it comes in.

Etchingham.

The whole article?

Boyce.

The whole confounded thing.

James Ford.

And placard the streets with it. They’ve made arrangements to print off a thousand, and they’ve got their bill stickers all ready and waiting.

Etchingham.

It’s infamous.

James Ford.

Nonsense! It’s business. We’d have done the same if we’d had the luck to get such a stick as this to beat Morrison with the very morning of the election.

Swalecliffe.

The comfort is, they don’t know Morrison and they do know Winter.

James Ford.

That’s the danger, too. They may know him too well.

Etchingham.

I don’t know what the devil you mean by that. You seem to forget that you’re speaking of my son-in-law.

James Ford.

Oh, we’re not here to pay one another compliments.

Bennett.

If you’ll wait a minute or two he’ll be here himself and you can say to him anything you want to.

Boyce.

What I can’t make out is why he chose this particular day to bring out his company.

Bennett.

He didn’t think the election would take place just yet.

James Ford.

Every one’s been talking of a general election for the last two months.

Bennett.

You know it was sprung upon us at the end.

Swalecliffe.

Couldn’t he have kept the issue back?

Etchingham.

He’d got everything fixed up by then.

James Ford.

[Speaking through.] Of course he could. It was only his obstinacy. I told him it was a bad time to give an American issue to the public.

Etchingham.

Well, you weren’t obliged to apply for shares, were you?

James Ford.

Tell me something I don’t know next, will you?

Etchingham.

I can tell you there’s no harm in keeping a civil tongue in your head.

James Ford.

Thank you, I don’t want lessons in manners from you.

Bennett.

You won’t do yourselves much good by losing your tempers.

Swalecliffe.

Why doesn’t Mr. Winter come?

Boyce.

I dare say he’s sent his car to take some one to the poll and he’s had to walk.

Etchingham.

It seems to me that you’ve bungled everything you could.

Boyce.

I don’t know why the devil you should blame me.

[A waiter comes in with newspapers on a tray.

Bennett.

Here they are at last.

[They crowd round the waiter and take the papers from him. The waiter goes out.

Etchingham.

Thank God, now we shall know the worst.

Boyce.

The Financial News.

James Ford.

No, that’s got nothing.

Bennett.

Here it is. The Financial Standard.

James Ford.

Give it me.

[He takes the paper from Bennett and opens it. Etchingham watches him anxiously.

Swalecliffe.

I wish to goodness I’d never thought of stocks and shares. I knew it was wrong. Oh, what a punishment!

James Ford.

[Impatiently.] We can’t all read the paper at once.

Bennett.

Spread it out on the table. That’s the best way.

[Bennett and Ford rapidly run their eyes down the article.

Bennett.

Steep, isn’t it?

James Ford.

If the Tories print this it’ll about bust us.

Etchingham.

The whole thing’s a pack of lies. It’s scandalous that such methods should be used to influence an election.

James Ford.

[To Swalecliffe.] D’you want to read it?

Swalecliffe.

What does it say?

Bennett.

Merely what they phoned down from London.

James Ford.

But it puts it about as hot as I’ve ever seen a financial article.

Etchingham.

D’you think it’ll interfere with the issue?

James Ford.

It’ll bust it.

Etchingham.

Can’t something be done to find Winter?

Boyce.

All we can do is to wait.

Etchingham.

Hang it all, we can’t go on waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Isn’t there one of you who can do something?

James Ford.

Keep your head, man, that’s about the best thing you can do.

[Edward O’Donnell hurries in.

O’Donnell.

It’s all right. I’ve got him.

Etchingham.

Thank God.

O’Donnell.

I told him to hurry up. He was just going to speak to some fellows in a factory.

Swalecliffe.

He’s coming?

O’Donnell.

Yes, rather. He said he’d be here in a jiffy.

James Ford.

Did he want to know what it was about?

O’Donnell.

There was no time for him to ask. And he was talking to a whole crowd when I found him.

Swalecliffe.

He knows it’s important?

Bennett.

Don’t be afraid about that. If he says he’ll come at once, he’ll come.

Boyce.

Here he is.

Etchingham.

[At the same time.] At last.

[George Winter comes in and surveys them for a moment. He smiles sardonically.

George Winter.

Quite a party.

Etchingham.

We thought you were never coming.

George Winter.

What’s the trouble?

James Ford.

[Pointing to the paper.] That’s the trouble.

Bennett.

The Financial Standard has got an attack on the Campo del Oro.

George Winter.

[Calmly.] Is that all?

James Ford.

It’s a good deal.

George Winter.

The Lewishams have got The Financial Standard in their pockets.

James Ford.

You read it.

Swalecliffe.

They say there’s no gold in the mine.

George Winter.

What do they know about it? They’ve not been there and my expert has.

James Ford.

That’s just it. They say you’re floating it on the report the owners gave you when you bought it, and you’re holding back Macdonald’s.

George Winter.

[Looking over the article.] It’s extraordinary what a lot the papers know. [The telephone rings.] What is it? [He listens for a moment.] London call. You’d better go and speak to them, Fred. [Down the receiver.] No, don’t connect with me. Mr. Bennett will come along. [Bennett goes out.] It’s one of my brokers. Now let’s go on. As abuse I don’t really think very much of it. I could have said much unpleasanter things about myself.

Swalecliffe.

You seem to take it very calmly.

George Winter.

I’ve not been fighting the Lewishams for ten years without getting some pretty hard words broken on my back.

James Ford.

D’you see that bit about where the money came from?

Etchingham.

I didn’t see that.

George Winter.

I’ll read it you, shall I? [Reading.] “It is stated that Mr. Winter paid eighty thousand pounds for this precious mine. It would perhaps be interesting to inquire how he was able to raise such a sum at a time not only of general stringency, but of peculiar difficulty in the Central American market. Perhaps Mr. Winter, like King Midas, is able to turn into gold everything he touches and he may have been able to change his office furniture into precious metal. Perhaps not.” Childish, isn’t it? Do they think I’m going to let out my little trade secrets to please them?

James Ford.

But where did you get the money?

[Etchingham gives a slight start, but George Winter remains perfectly cool.

George Winter.

My dear fellow, you don’t suppose I stole it, do you? That’s where the born financier comes in. He makes money as a conjurer makes a white rabbit appear out of a silk handkerchief.

James Ford.

[Drily.] A very satisfactory explanation.

[For an instant, hardly perceptible to the others, the eyes of George Winter and James Ford meet.

George Winter.

But that’s hardly the point, is it?

[During the rest of the scene James Ford is thinking the matter over. His eyes rest on George Winter as if he were trying to guess something.

Boyce.

Something must be done at once.

George Winter.

Have the Tories got hold of it?

Boyce.

They’re printing the article on posters.

George Winter.

Nuisance, isn’t it?

[He pauses to reflect for a moment. Mr. Swalecliffe breaks in upon his thoughts.

Swalecliffe.

Is there any truth at all in that article, Mr. Winter?

George Winter.

Not a word.

Swalecliffe.

It puts me in a very awkward position.

George Winter.

What’s the matter with you?

Swalecliffe.

I thought the shares would go to a premium before they were issued.

George Winter.

[Smiling.] Like the San José tramways, eh?

Swalecliffe.

Mr. Ford says this will — bust the issue.

George Winter.

Nice of him.... Been having a little gamble, have you?

Swalecliffe.

If it was a certainty I didn’t see there could be any harm in it.

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] Like playing with loaded dice? How many shares have you applied for?

Swalecliffe.

Five hundred.

George Winter.

Sporting of you.

Swalecliffe.

I didn’t mean to take them up, you understand. I haven’t got more than five hundred pounds in the world. I thought they were bound to go up half a crown and....

George Winter.

Five hundred half crowns are quite worth having, aren’t they?

Swalecliffe.

It’s been a lesson to me. I’ll never do anything like it again. I shan’t have the chance. If I have to pay for the shares....

George Winter.

Get my cheque book, Teddie.

O’Donnell.

Yes, sir.

Swalecliffe.

What are you going to do?

George Winter.

I don’t want anyone to come into this concern who doesn’t believe in it. Make out a cheque for five hundred pounds to Mr. Swalecliffe.

[O’Donnell writes out a cheque during the next speeches.

Swalecliffe.

That’s very generous of you.

George Winter.

Generous? Not a bit of it. You don’t think I mind having five hundred shares more, do you?

Swalecliffe.

D’you think they’re worth it?

George Winter.

They’ll be worth ten pounds a piece in six months, or I’m a Dutchman.

[O’Donnell hands him the cheque-book and a pen. George Winter signs his name and tears out a cheque.

James Ford.

[While he is doing this.] That looks as if you had confidence in the mine.

George Winter.

[Handing the cheque to Swalecliffe.] Here you are. [To James Ford.] D’you want me to buy your shares off you?

James Ford.

[With a quiet smile.] Not just yet, thank you.

Swalecliffe.

But what’s the meaning of the article, then?

George Winter.

Why, it’s as plain as a pikestaff. The Lewishams were willing to give their eyes for the mine, but I was too much for them. Now they’re crabbing it. That’s all.

[He says this with great assurance, as if it thoroughly explained the whole thing.

Swalecliffe.

But then....

George Winter.

Pay that into your bank and hand over the certificate to me when you get it.

Swalecliffe.

D’you think they’ll go to a premium?

George Winter.

I’ve no doubt of it. I dare say the five hundred half-crowns will be just as useful to me as to you. But I shall hold on. I want a bigger profit than that.

Swalecliffe.

But if they’re good enough for you, they’re good enough for me.

George Winter.

No, you’ve taken my cheque now. It’s too late.

Swalecliffe.

There’s your cheque. You can have it back again. I’m going to keep the shares.

George Winter.

[Good-humouredly.] Well, I don’t mind. It won’t make much difference to me. But don’t sell them, whatever you read in the papers. What’s a profit of half a crown? Wait till you’ve got a profit of five pounds, and then you can think of selling them.

Swalecliffe.

[With a gasp.] Five pounds? That would be two thousand five hundred.

George Winter.

[Turning to Colonel Boyce.] Wait a minute. Get on to Bishop and Jones.

Boyce.

The printers?

George Winter.

We must answer this article. I’ve just been thinking what we’d better say.

[He sits down and begins to write, while Colonel Boyce goes to the telephone.

Boyce.

What’s their number, d’you know?

James Ford.

703, I think.

Boyce.

Is that the Exchange? Give me 703, will you? That is Bishop and Jones, the printers, isn’t it?

George Winter.

I’m going to make it hot and strong.

O’Donnell.

Isn’t there anything I can do?

Boyce.

Are you Bishop and Jones?

George Winter.

Tell them to have everything ready to print off a couple of thousand posters at once. You’re just coming round in the car.

Boyce.

Hulloa? Will you get everything ready to print off a couple of thousand posters at once. I’m just coming round. Colonel Boyce. Yes. That’s it.

George Winter.

[Speaking through Colonel Boyce’s instructions to the printers.] What d’you think of this, Ford?

James Ford.

Let’s have a look.

George Winter.

You see we’ve got the advantage that they have to print a whole article. And we only need a couple of sentences.

James Ford.

Yes, that seems all right.

Etchingham.

Couldn’t be better.

George Winter.

Make a copy of it, Teddie. Hurry up.

Boyce.

We haven’t got any time to lose.

George Winter.

The car’s at the door.

O’Donnell.

I shan’t be a minute.

George Winter.

You can get hold of the bill-posters, can’t you?

Boyce.

Oh, yes, there’ll be no bother about that.

O’Donnell.

Here you are. That’s done.

George Winter.

Take it, Boyce. And hurry up.

Boyce.

[Taking a copy of the reply.] Trust me.

[He goes out.

George Winter.

[Handing O’Donnell a second copy.] Teddie, jump into a cab and go round to the newspaper offices. And tell them to put that in their next edition. Biggest type they’ve got. Then go to the Committee Rooms and wait. I’ll ring you up there or come round.

O’Donnell.

All right.

George Winter.

And hustle, or I’ll sack you.

[He goes out, and as he does so Bennett comes in.

James Ford.

You’re taking it better than I expected.

George Winter.

What do you expect me to do; bang my head on the floor and tear out my hair? Can’t afford it. Takes me all my time to keep my hair on.

Etchingham.

Here’s Bennett.

George Winter.

Well?

Bennett.

Nothing much has happened. They’re a bit excited in the City.

James Ford.

No bad drop in anything?

Bennett.

Nothing to speak of.

James Ford.

That’s a relief.

George Winter.

Everything is sound. No one would be such a fool as to do a bear.

Bennett.

I’m getting on to MacLaren and Hewitt.

George Winter.

That’s all right. I wanted them.

James Ford.

Are they brokers?

George Winter.

Yes. Look here, Ford. I’m due to speak in the Cattle Market now. I wish you’d go down and keep them going till I turn up. I shall only be ten minutes. You’ve got the line all right, Fred?

Bennett.

Yes.

James Ford.

Well, I don’t mind if I do that. There’s nothing I can do here, is there?

George Winter.

No, leave it all to me. Your interests are my interests.

James Ford.

I’ll make tracks.

George Winter.

That’s good.

[James Ford goes out.

Bennett.

Governor, I thought I’d better not say too much while he was there.

George Winter.

I saw something was up. That’s why I got rid of him.

Bennett.

Things are rotten.

Etchingham.

Good Lord.

Bennett.

The Lewishams are going for us.

George Winter.

I thought they would as soon as I saw the article.

Bennett.

Who’s given it away, d’you think?

George Winter.

How do I know? That doesn’t matter. The only thing is to face it.

Etchingham.

D’you mean our shares are falling, Mr. Bennett?

Bennett.

There’s a lot of selling.

George Winter.

I wish we could corner them. I’d like to give the bears a lesson.

Bennett.

If it goes on there’ll be a panic.

George Winter.

You’ve told the brokers to do all they can to prevent its going too far?

Bennett.

I’ve told them to buy, but carefully.

George Winter.

You must go up to London, Fred. There’s no one there with a head on his shoulders.

Bennett.

I thought that was the best thing myself. I’ve looked out the trains. I can just catch the express. I shall be there soon after one.

George Winter.

Then bolt at once. I give you a free hand.

Bennett.

If the slump can be stopped, I’ll stop it.

George Winter.

It’s not a matter of can. It must be stopped. And wire reassuring messages. We must hang on to the telephone for all we’re worth.

Bennett.

Good-bye.

George Winter.

And come back when the House closes. We must talk over things.

Bennett.

All right. Good luck.

[He goes out.

Etchingham.

Is it all up with us, George?

George Winter.

What the dickens are you talking about?

Etchingham.

They’ve found out the truth. It’s there in black and white that the wretched mine’s worthless.

George Winter.

They can’t prove anything.

Etchingham.

Ever since I knew I’ve scarcely closed my eyes at night. I wish I’d shot myself when you first told me.

George Winter.

My dear fellow, you’re much more comfortable here than you would be at Kensal Green.

Etchingham.

And the worst of it is.... [He breaks off.] At first I was overcome with the horror of it. But little by little I’ve got used to it, used to your being a thief and a swindler.

George Winter.

[With a chuckle.] You put things rather bluntly, don’t you?

Etchingham.

And Bennett was a convict. It all seems quite natural now. And I can talk and laugh with you. And I eat by your side every day.

George Winter.

One can’t make a fortune without taking risks.

Etchingham.

There are always those missing bonds. They’re in my thoughts day and night.

George Winter.

No one can make inquiries for three weeks. By that time we shall have gone to allotment, and the bonds will be safely back in the black box.

Etchingham.

But will you be able to go to allotment?

George Winter.

Of course we shall. This article isn’t going to do us any harm. I shall win the seat. That’ll give these Middlepool people confidence.

Etchingham.

George, I believe Ford is uneasy. I don’t trust him. Supposing he found out about the bonds?

George Winter.

It might be devilish expensive.

Etchingham.

You’ll never buy him.

George Winter.

I never met the man yet who hadn’t his price. Flattery if he’s a fool, hard cash if he’s a wise man. But a price of some sort. There’s always a price.

Etchingham.

Take care of Ford, George.

George Winter.

[With a smile.] I’m not frightened.

Etchingham.

Sometimes I’m afraid, you’re so confident. It’s impossible a thing like this can end well.

George Winter.

I believe in my star. I’ve been in tight corners before, but I’ve wriggled out of them. I’m stronger than ever I was. I’ve got ten times more brains than any of my competitors. The ball is at my feet and I’ve only got to set it rolling. What d’you think difficulties are to me? I’ve never been in better spirits, so alert, so buoyant, as during these last weeks when my neck has been in a noose and every policeman I passed might have a warrant in his pocket for my arrest. If there were ten times more difficulties I’d overcome them all. In ten years I shall be the richest man in London. In fifteen I shall be a peer. My God, I feel as if the world were an orange and I’d got my teeth into it, and I shall suck it dry.

Etchingham.

I wonder how many ruined lives will be sacrificed to give you all you want. You walk over dead bodies and broken hearts.

George Winter.

Rot! I flutter the will-o’-the-wisp of gain before the covetous, and they follow. They want to make money without working for it. Well, I’m cleverer than they are. Swalecliffe gambles with his five hundred pounds. His five hundred pounds will find its way into my pocket. It’s his own look out. Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost. [With a start.] By George, I’ve got an idea.... The Lewishams can’t attack my stocks without weakening their own. We’re in the same boat, and if one of us shakes it both’ll topple out.

Etchingham.

What d’you mean?

George Winter.

Well, we’ll attack the Lewishams. I’ll get on to MacLaren’s at once. Go to the post office and wire to Bennett. He’s sure to call at the office. Sell Lewishams. He’ll twig. By George, that’s the ticket. Why didn’t I think of it before? We’ll make the Lewishams sorry they started this game.

Etchingham.

But supposing ...?

George Winter.

Good God, man, don’t suppose, do as I tell you. Don’t you see we’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain? I know my luck’s in. And I follow my luck. That’s genius.

[Etchingham with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders goes out to send the telegram. George Winter begins to walk excitedly up and down.

CURTAIN.

SCENE II

The scene takes place in the sitting-room of the Palace Hotel, but it is eleven o’clock at night. Only a reading lamp is lit, the light of which falls on Catherine and Lady Francis. Catherine is working at some embroidery.

Lady Francis.

Can you see, dear? Wouldn’t you like some more light?

Catherine.

[With an affectionate smile.] No, the light hurts my eyes.

Lady Francis.

You’re looking very pale, darling.

Catherine.

I haven’t been sleeping very well here. We’re so near the trains, and they seem to run all night.

Lady Francis.

I wonder how George can stand it. His room is practically on the railway.

Catherine.

Thank heaven, it’s over. We shall know the result in half an hour, and to-morrow we can go.

Lady Francis.

What are you going to do?

Catherine.

What can I do? Nothing.

Lady Francis.

I’m afraid you’re very unhappy, Kate.

Catherine.

[Smiling.] Please don’t think that, mother.

Lady Francis.

You’ve given up everything for our sake.

Catherine.

I wish I could think so. I gave up my divorce because — because I was afraid. I couldn’t risk the regret that Robert might feel later. I should always have been looking for it.... One must never forget that love is a woman’s whole life, but it’s never more than part of a man’s, never.

Lady Francis.

What did you tell him?

Catherine.

I wrote and said I found it impossible to go on with my action. I begged him not to try to move me. I told him I was very unhappy.

Lady Francis.

Poor child.

Catherine.

He wrote very kindly. He made it as easy for me as he could. And now it’s all over. I’ve lost my last chance of happiness. I’m bound to my husband for the rest of my life.

Lady Francis.

And do you still love Robert?

Catherine.

[Smiling.] Yes. And I’m glad of what I’ve done. The only thing that helps me is the pride I take in all the great things he’s going to do. And it will have been me. I gave him the opportunity.

[Anne comes in. She is wearing a coat and skirt and a hat.

Anne.

Well! You are strange people. How on earth can you sit there and sew while the counting’s going on? I’ve never been so excited in my life.

Catherine.

Why have you come back?

Anne.

Well, it’s nearly finished now. Teddie said there’d be rather a scrummage when the result was known, and I’d better get out of the way.

Catherine.

[Smiling.] Obedient creature.

Anne.

It rather amuses me to be ordered about. Besides, I couldn’t help seeing that nobody wanted me. Teddie promised he’d bolt round as soon as the result was out. I say, let’s have some light, shall we?

[She turns on the electricity, and the room is suddenly a glare of light.

Lady Francis.

You’ll blind us.

Anne.

I love an election. I’ve never had such a time in my life. I’ve enjoyed every minute of these three weeks. I hope Teddie’ll go into Parliament.

Lady Francis.

[Raising her eyebrows.] On four hundred a year?

Anne.

Oh, George will give us a rise. He says Teddie’s awfully useful. George is good, isn’t he?

Catherine.

I’m glad you’re so happy, darling.

Anne.

[Abruptly, after a little, quick look at her.] You’re not angry with us, Kate?

Catherine.

Good heavens, why should I be?

Anne.

You know, it’s so dreadfully hard to pretend I haven’t got eyes in my head.... Why don’t you make it up with George, Katie?

Catherine.

I don’t know what makes you think there’s anything to make up.

Anne.

Oh, my dear, what I didn’t guess for myself Teddie told me.

Catherine.

He would have been wiser to mind his own business.

Anne.

It was rather....

Catherine.

If you knew how things were between George and myself, and you were willing to accept his favours what do you expect me to say? I didn’t ask you not to. I knew if I had you would only have refused. I’m cynical enough to know that in this world each of us takes care of his own interests.

Lady Francis.

My dear, don’t be so bitter.

Anne.

One has to take people as one finds them; George has always been charming to me. If you’d only make allowances for him....

Catherine.

[Interrupting vehemently.] Oh, my dear, don’t. I’m not in the humour to stand that. Leave me to lead my own life without interference. Surely it’s enough that to bind me to him George should give you an income to marry on. You can’t want more from me than that.

Anne.

Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything that would hurt you.

Catherine.

[Recovering herself.] You haven’t. Forgive me. I didn’t mean to make a scene, but my nerves are a little upset. I’m a very weak, selfish woman, audit’s dreadfully hard to be half as angelic as you think me. I’m very glad that you’re going to marry Teddie. You’re in love with one another, and if you haven’t much money, what does it matter? I’m sure you’ll be tremendously happy.

Anne.

You are a dear.

[Francis Etchingham comes in. He is wearing a dinner jacket and a black tie. Anne springs up impulsively.

Anne.

Is it over?

Etchingham.

No, I was too anxious to stay any longer.

Lady Francis.

But George is going to get in?

Etchingham.

Who can tell? The seat has always been lost or held by a handful of votes.

Anne.

But how did it seem to be going?

Etchingham.

Winter, Morrison, Winter, Morrison. One vote on one side, one vote on the other. It seemed interminable.

Lady Francis.

He won by seventy-five last time.

Etchingham.

Who can tell the effect of all these rumours and suspicions and attacks? They may just have made the difference. Oh, it’s maddening.

Catherine.

Sit down, father, and rest. You look quite done up.

Etchingham.

Even George is anxious. I know his face so well. He’s trying to appear as if he were certain.

Anne.

No human being could help being anxious.

Lady Francis.

[With a sudden start.] I thought I heard some shouting.

Anne.

Oh, I wish I hadn’t come away.

Lady Francis.

Let’s open the window. Perhaps we shall hear something.

[Lady Francis and Anne go to the window and open it.

Lady Francis.

No, I was mistaken.

Anne.

Listen. I’m sure I hear cheering.

[She goes out on to the balcony. She and Lady Francis are half hidden from view, so that it may be supposed the following scene between Catherine and Lord Francis is not heard by them.

Etchingham.

[In a low voice to Catherine.] Oh, my dear, will you ever forgive me?

Catherine.

Oh, father, don’t. It was very noble of you not to tell me anything before I decided. Now that I know the whole truth....

Etchingham.

The only hope we’ve got is to go on. If he gets in, if we can pull things together, we may get out of the muddle. He’s positive of it. The only thing that held me up was the thought of all of you. If I’d gone to the police there and then — or made away with myself, it would have meant the ruin of all of you.

Catherine.

And of all the unhappy people who’ve trusted everything they had to George.

Etchingham.

You think I was right, Kate, don’t you? It wasn’t just cowardice on my part?

Catherine.

I hope you were right.

Etchingham.

But if it was all in vain? If he’s not able to float the company and the truth comes out, then I shall have sacrificed you for nothing.

Catherine.

Oh, don’t think of it.

Etchingham.

I believe if he wins the election he’ll be strong enough to force the issue on them.

Catherine.

But if the mine’s worthless?

Etchingham.

We’re going to buy the shares in when the tide turns in Central America. Things are looking brighter already. He’s promised me that no one shall lose a farthing. When that’s done I go. Oh, how thankful I shall be!

Catherine.

Oh, I know, I know.

Etchingham.

I had to tell some one, and I couldn’t tell your mother.

Catherine.

I’m glad you told me. It makes it easier to bear now we both know.

Anne.

At last!... Father, father.

[She comes back into the room, excitedly, and at the same time a vague, muffled shouting is heard in the distance. Etchingham springs to his feet.

Etchingham.

Thank God. The suspense was awful.

Lady Francis.

There’s no mistaking it this time.

Etchingham.

Is he in? Is he in?

Anne.

Of course he’s in. I’ve never felt so confident in my life.

Etchingham.

If it’s all right, then we’re safe. I’m sure it’s the beginning of the turn.

Lady Francis.

Why doesn’t Teddie make haste?

Anne.

Listen to the shouting. Isn’t it splendid?

[More shouting is heard, this time a little louder.

Etchingham.

I expect they’re reading out the figures.

[Teddie O’Donnell rushes in, rather dishevelled, with his hat on the back of his head.

O’Donnell.

He’s in!

Anne.

How ripping!

[Francis Etchingham sinks into a chair, too overcome to speak, trying to compose himself. Catherine puts her hand on his shoulder to show her sympathy.

Lady Francis.

What’s the majority?

O’Donnell.

Twenty-seven.

Anne.

I say, what a squeak!

O’Donnell.

Just at the end I thought we were beaten. It was Morrison, Morrison, Morrison, until I almost screamed.

Etchingham.

Well, he’s in at all events.

Anne.

I am glad.

[She throws her arms impulsively round O’Donnell’s neck and kisses him.

O’Donnell.

By Jove, it was a moment to live for when the figures were read out. You never heard such shouting.

Catherine.

Where is he now?

O’Donnell.

When I left he was making a speech to the crowd. But one couldn’t hear a word, because every one was shouting at the top of his voice. I simply bellowed.

Anne.

[Enthusiastically.] Aren’t you glad, Kate?

Catherine.

[Smiling.] Yes, very glad.

Anne.

How can you take it so quietly!

Lady Francis.

Is he coming here?

O’Donnell.

Yes. I forgot to give you his message. He sent his love to Kate, and said he’d be here in two twos.

Anne.

I wish he’d hurry up. Isn’t he a darling?

O’Donnell.

He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known. He’s a perfect stunner. I don’t know what there is about him, but you can’t help believing in him. And he was so splendid this morning about those confounded lies in the paper. All the rest of them were as frightened as rabbits, but he never turned a hair.

Anne.

[Excitedly.] There’s a car.

O’Donnell.

That’s it, I bet you anything you like.

Anne.

How jolly of him to come quickly! [She runs to the door and opens it.] George, George!

[George Winter comes in boisterously and clasps Anne in his arms.

Anne.

Isn’t it splendid!

George Winter.

Glorious victory, what!

[He is followed by Colonel Boyce, James Ford, Mr. Swalecliffe, and two other men.

Etchingham.

Thank God!

George Winter.

You haven’t been worried about it? I knew I’d get in. I never had a moment’s doubt about it.

James Ford.

[Drily.] No one can say you don’t believe in yourself.

George Winter.

Hang it all, if you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect other people to believe in you? Drinks, gentlemen!

O’Donnell.

Shall I ring?

George Winter.

I told the waiter on my way up. Here they are. [A couple of waiters come in with glasses and bottles of champagne.] No teetotalism to-night, Mr. Swalecliffe. By Jove, I’m thirsty. Pour it out. Pour it out.

Swalecliffe.

I never touch alcohol, Mr. Winter.

George Winter.

Poor is the heart that never rejoices. Have you all got glasses, gentlemen? Come on, Lady Francis. Don’t be backward, Anne.

Anne.

Yes, please.

George Winter.

That’s right. Now then, Teddie. All ready? Gentlemen, I give you my wife, to whom this glorious victory is due.

All.

Mrs. Winter, Mrs. Winter. Catherine.

Catherine.

[Embarrassed and shy.] Thank you very much.

[There are shouts outside, cheers: Winter, Winter, For he’s a jolly good fellow.

George Winter.

Hulloa, they’ve come round to the hotel.

Anne.

Just look at the crowd.

O’Donnell.

Shall I open the window?

George Winter.

[Stepping forward.] Yes.

[At his appearance the shouts break out more tumultuously. Cheer upon cheer is heard. George Winter puts up his hand for silence.

George Winter.

Gentlemen, we’ve won a great fight. We’ve won in face of a campaign of lies, of misrepresentation, and of scandal. Truth always prevails. Honesty is the best policy. A glorious victory, gentlemen, and a triumph for English honesty, English plain dealing, and English integrity. Gentlemen, I drink your health.

[He drinks his glass of champagne before the crowd. The cheering which has been going on all through the speech now grows louder and louder. There are shouts of Mrs. Winter.

George Winter.

Kate, they want you.

Catherine.

No. Please not.

George Winter.

Come. No false modesty. Give them a bow, that won’t hurt you.

[He takes her hand and draws her to the window. The crowd bursts out again into cheering. George Winter comes back into the room.

George Winter.

My word, what a moment!

Boyce.

You must be dead beat.

George Winter.

I? Fresh as a daisy. Nothing can beat me.

O’Donnell.

[Taking out his watch.] By Jove, I had no idea it was so late.

Boyce.

I think I’ll be getting along.

George Winter.

Oh, nonsense! Why, the evening’s only just beginning.

Boyce.

I’m dog tired.

Swalecliffe.

I must be getting away, too. My wife will be wanting to know all about it.

George Winter.

Well, if I can’t persuade you, I suppose I can’t. I hope you’ll all have as good a night as I mean to.

Swalecliffe.

You think it’s all right about — about that matter?

George Winter.

Don’t you worry your head. It’s as right as rain. I tell you that nothing I touch can fail.

Swalecliffe.

Then good-night.

George Winter.

Good-night.

[Colonel Boyce, Swalecliffe, and the other two men who came in with them, go out.

George Winter.

You’re not going yet, Ford?

James Ford.

No. If you don’t mind I’d like to have a word with you when you can spare me a few minutes.

George Winter.

As many as you like. I’m ready now.

Lady Francis.

If you’re going to talk business, we’d better leave you.

James Ford.

I’m in no hurry, my lady.

Lady Francis.

It really is getting very late.

O’Donnell.

Aren’t you too tired for business now?

George Winter.

Tired? I don’t know what it is to be tired. When you write my biography, young man, you can say that after the hardest fought battle of the election, when the cheers of the multitude were still ringing in his ears, he sat down at midnight, fresh as paint, and talked business with the shrewdest man in Middlepool till break of day.

James Ford.

[Drily.] It’ll be more accurate if you say for ten minutes.

George Winter.

But so much less effective.

Anne.

I’m sure you’ve been drinking too much champagne, George.

George Winter.

[Laughing.] Nonsense. I could drink a gallon, and be as sober as a judge at the end of it.

Anne.

Well, good-night.

George Winter.

[Kissing her.] Good-night, my chick. Have you named the happy day yet?

Lady Francis.

Good-night.

George Winter.

[To O’Donnell.] And you can add that I enveloped my mother-in-law in my arms.

Lady Francis.

[With a smile, warding off his attempt to embrace her.] I congratulate you. It’s been a great triumph.

George Winter.

Oh, it’s only the beginning. I’ve got the world at my feet. In ten years I shall be crying like Alexander because there are no more worlds to conquer.

O’Donnell.

You don’t want me any more, do you?

[Lady Francis and Anne go out.

George Winter.

No, go to bed. You’re young, and you want your beauty sleep. I’ll be bound you’re not worried by the trains. Where’s your room?

O’Donnell.

It’s just above yours. But I sleep like a top.

George Winter.

That’s a good sign. You’ll be as great a man as I am one of these days.

O’Donnell.

[With a laugh.] Good-night.

George Winter.

[To Etchingham.] And you’d better go off too, old man. You look tired out.

Etchingham.

[Wearily.] It’s been an exciting day for all of us.

George Winter.

It’s been one of the days that make life worth living.

Etchingham.

Good-night.

[As they go out Catherine comes forward.

Catherine.

I won’t say good-night to you just yet. If Mr. Ford is not going to keep you long I should like to speak to you afterwards.

James Ford.

It’ll be ten minutes at the utmost, Mrs. Winter.

George Winter.

[With exaggerated gallantry.] I’m at your disposal, darling, now and always.

[With a slight bow to James Ford, Catherine goes out.

George Winter.

I told you I was justified in trusting my luck. Everything is coming out right. The Lewishams won’t be able to stand against me much longer. They’ll have to take me in. We’ll combine our interests, and then we shall hold Central America in the hollow of our hands. You’ll be in it too, James. You’re going to be a richer man than you guess. And when I’m in with the Lewishams I shall bide my time. Manny Lewisham can’t last much longer, and his sons are fools. When he’s gone I shall get the whole business in my hands. I’ve got ten times more brains than anyone in that market. There’s no one who can stand against me.

James Ford.

[Quietly.] You haven’t forgotten that article in The Financial Standard?

George Winter.

[Gaily.] Oh, is that what you want to talk to me about? I tell you that shan’t disturb my night’s rest. By the way, that reminds me: if I have won the election it was through no help of yours. I asked you to go down and speak in the Cattle Market, and when I got there I found there’d been no sign of you. It might have been devilish awkward.

James Ford.

Well, it so happens it didn’t matter.

George Winter.

Where did you get to after all?

James Ford.

[Looking at him.] I went up to London!

George Winter.

[Indifferently, doing all he can to hide his suspicion.] Did you?

James Ford.

[Very quietly, almost diffidently.] I was struck by one of the paragraphs in the article. The one about where you got the money from.

George Winter.

[With a smile.] I noticed that seemed to bother you a bit.

James Ford.

Things were pretty tight at that time.

George Winter.

A man in my position can always lay his hands on money.

James Ford.

It was a big sum.

George Winter.

Fair to moderate.

[There is a very short pause. The two men, both shrewd, hard and keen, face one another like two duellists.

James Ford.

It struck me that the Middlepool Investment Trust had got a large batch of bonds lying in the bank.

[He watches George Winter for the effect of this statement.

George Winter.

[With a smile.] Well, they’re lying there still.

James Ford.

Will you take your oath on that?

George Winter.

Yes.

James Ford.

The more I thought of it, the more nervous I was. I went to the bank.

[George Winter gives him a rapid look, but otherwise makes no sign that he realizes his theft is discovered.

James Ford.

They showed me an order for delivery of the bonds signed by you, Etchingham, and Bennett.

George Winter.

Have a cigar, will you?

James Ford.

No.... What have you done with those bonds?

George Winter.

If they’re in their place when the auditor makes his examination no one has any question to ask.

James Ford.

[More sternly.] You had no more right to touch them than my office boy has the right to take a sovereign from the petty cash.

George Winter.

What the devil d’you mean by that?

James Ford.

I’m a director of the Middlepool Investment Trust. I insist on the bonds being produced at once.

George Winter.

They shall be produced in a fortnight.

James Ford.

No, no, my friend, that won’t do.

George Winter.

[Impatiently.] Don’t be a fool, James, you know as well as I do that business is business.

James Ford.

Yes, and not theft.

George Winter.

[Apparently flying into a passion.] How dare you speak to me like that!

James Ford.

It’s no good trying to bluster with me, George. I’ve seen you do it at shareholders’ meetings and very effective it is sometimes, but this isn’t the time for it.

[There is a pause. George Winter considers the position and determines to face it.

George Winter.

All right then.... I knew the mine was a good thing. I pledged the bonds to pay for it. I shall get them back as soon as the money comes in from the issue. Now you’ve got it.

James Ford.

It’s theft pure and simple.

George Winter.

[Insolently.] I suppose you want to come in with me. [He does not notice James Ford’s instinctive movement of repulsion.] I’ll give you your shares for nothing. That means ten thousand pounds, and if you hold on to them they’ll be worth fifty thousand in a year.

James Ford.

Thank you. I’m not going to risk a lifetime’s honest work for a few thousand pounds.

George Winter.

Then what do you want?

James Ford.

Nothing.

George Winter.

[With a slight smile.] You’ve been Mayor of Middlepool twice, and you’ve done a lot of work for the party. I can’t help thinking it’s almost time the Government showed some appreciation of your services.

James Ford.

You’ve mistaken your man, George Winter. I’ve worked like a nigger for thirty years. I’ve not let any chance slip by me, but I’ve never done anything that a man need be ashamed of. I’ve built up an honest business to leave to my sons, and an honest name. I’m too old to start being a rogue now.

George Winter.

[Impatiently.] I thought you wanted to talk business.

James Ford.

Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong. You can’t get over that. I couldn’t rest for a moment if I thought any act of mine wasn’t above board. It’s no credit of mine, I’m just made that way.

George Winter.

[As if he were talking to a child.] Come, James, we’ve been good friends for twenty years.

James Ford.

[In a low voice.] This afternoon, when I found out what you’d done — well, I could have cried.

[There is a real anguish in his tone which startles George Winter. For the first time he realizes that the affair is serious. He begins to get frightened.

George Winter.

[Quickly, hoarsely.] But you don’t mean seriously....

James Ford.

[Desperately.] How can I make you understand? You don’t seem to see that now I know what you’ve done I’m just filled with horror and loathing. If you’ve done this God knows what else you haven’t done. I don’t want to be hard on you. I must do my duty. I’m a director of the company. I put all my friends in it. I put my sister into it. And this mine. Is it true what that paper says? For all I know that’s a swindle too.

George Winter.

[With sudden anxiety.] You’re not going to push me down now that I’m almost at the top of the tree? I’ve got the world at my feet. If you’ll only give me a month I can put everything straight.

James Ford.

Five minutes ago it was a fortnight. I don’t believe it. These things don’t come right. When a man has crossed the line that separates honesty from dishonesty he never gets back.

George Winter.

If you give me away now it’ll mean a general smash. The only chance of saving things is to go on. The money’s gone. You won’t get it back by giving me up to the police.

James Ford.

I must take my chance of that. After all, if I don’t speak it makes me a party to the crime. It can be proved that I went to the bank to-day.

George Winter.

Now you’re saying something I can understand. If I show you by plain figures that I can put everything right if you’ll only give me time....

James Ford.

I tell you I can’t. I’ve got my wife to think of, and my boys. It’s theft, it’s the money of orphans and widows that you’ve taken, and there’s only one course open to me.

George Winter.

What are you going to do?

James Ford.

[Brokenly.] My God, what can I do? I trusted you as I would have trusted my sons.

George Winter.

Out with it!

James Ford.

I must — I must consult the Chief Constable.

George Winter.

You wouldn’t do that? You don’t seriously mean that you’d go to the police? It’s madness. It’s so impractical. It’s stupid.

James Ford.

I could never respect myself again if I.... It’s a matter between my conscience and myself.... Oh, George, why have you put me in this position?

George Winter.

Look here, old man, I’ve done wrong. I admit it. I’ve done something that other men have done before me and it’s come out all right. At the time I thought the slump would only last a few days, and I thought I should be able to replace the bonds in a week. It’s the only slip I’ve made. Don’t be too hard on me.... [With a break in his voice.] Have mercy as you hope in your turn to have mercy shown to you. Don’t ruin me for this one mistake. Let it mean something to you that I’m humiliating myself before you.... It wasn’t a crime. It was only thoughtlessness. Give me another chance.

[James Ford, with his face between his hands, thinks it over. He is deeply moved by George Winter’s appeal. George, watching him keenly, thinks he is going to yield.

George Winter.

We’ve gone through bad times and good together. I’ve been a good friend to you. You’ve never had anything to reproach me with till now.

James Ford.

[Brokenly.] I can’t risk the money of all these poor people again.

George Winter.

Will it satisfy you if I give up the directorship of the Middlepool Trust? Give me six months to save my face and I’ll resign.

[James Ford looks up at him, wondering if he can put any trust in George Winter. George waits for the decision with beating heart. He feels almost sick with fear.

James Ford.

I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If the bonds are in their place by four o’clock to-morrow I’ll say nothing.

George Winter.

[Astounded.] To-morrow? It can’t be done. It’s impossible.

James Ford.

That’s all I can do for you.

George Winter.

[Hardly knowing what he is saying.] But no one could get it. You know it’s impossible. Even if you gave me a week I couldn’t do it. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. With the attack on us to-day we’re — we’re tottering. It’s as much as we shall be able to do to hold out till the tide turns. That’s not giving me a chance. Not a chance. To-morrow! It’s absurd!

James Ford.

That’s my last word.

George Winter.

You might as well send for the police at once. Oh, my God! It’s impossible.

James Ford.

If the money is not there by the time the bank closes I shall apply for a warrant.

George Winter.

D’you know what that means? It means a trial, and then — and then prison.

James Ford.

I can’t do more for you than I’ve offered.

[The finality of this, the deep regret and the decision in Ford’s tone, are like a blow in the face to George Winter. He gives a sudden start, and throwing off his humbleness, flies into ungovernable passion. He whips himself into a rage as he flings the scornful invective at James Ford and ends up on the last words in a positive scream of fury.

George Winter.

Oh, it’s infamous. It’s damned hypocrisy. You don’t care if I’ve taken the money or not. You’re afraid of your own skin. And you’re jealous of me. It’s envy. I knew you envied me all the time. D’you think I’ve been taken in by you? You were a little tin god in Middlepool till I came along. You didn’t fight me like a man. You just sided with me, waiting for your chance to trip me up. You think when I’m gone you’ll have the field to yourself. Why shouldn’t you be the member as well as I? It’s mean. It’s mean. You with your damned Christianity, your parrot cries of honesty. Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!

James Ford.

[Quietly.] You see, you’ve gone too far. I shall never make you understand. You can’t realize that a man may be honest, even if he loses by it, just because he can’t help it, because he’s made straight as some men are made crooked.

George Winter.

It’s childish.

James Ford.

You’ve got through the world by knowing that nine men out of ten are rascals. You’ve forgotten that the tenth man must cross your path at last.

[When he hears these words George Winter gives a start, and he looks at Ford with staring, terrified eyes. He passes his hand over his forehead, trying to recall.

George Winter.

[Almost to himself.] Who said that to me before?

[There is a pause.

James Ford.

Good-bye, George. My promise holds.

George Winter.

[Bitterly.] It’s no good to me. I’m like a rat in a trap. You can get what fun you like out of seeing me wriggle.

[For a moment James Ford looks at him, then silently goes out. George Winter is seized with a horrible, convulsive trembling. He shakes as a man might shake in an ague. With his quick mind he sees that no subtlety will save him now; he is up against the blank wall of a character as strong as his own. In a moment Catherine enters the room.

George Winter.

What the devil d’you want?

Catherine.

I heard Mr. Ford go. May I speak to you now?

[George Winter makes an effort to appear composed.

George Winter.

Well?

Catherine.

Now that the election is over you can have no further use for me. I’ve carried out my part of the bargain scrupulously.

George Winter.

[Putting his hand in a dazed way to his head.] I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Catherine.

I understand that I’ve condoned all your offences towards me, and I’m helpless now to do anything. So you need have no fear that I shall interfere with you in any way. [He turns round and looks at her. He takes in at last what she is saying.] But there’s no reason that I should expose myself any longer to a humiliation that I found unbearable. I’ve come to tell you that now I’ve done all you exacted I’m going to leave you, this time for good. I’m starting early to-morrow morning for the Continent with my friend Barbara Herbert, and I shall not return. You can devise whatever explanation you think necessary, and you may be quite sure I shan’t contradict it. I shall be gone by the time you get up. You will find in my room all the trinkets you’ve given me. I wish to take nothing with me that I have received from you.

George Winter.

[With clenched teeth.] Are you leaving your clothes?

Catherine.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] I think there is nothing more to be said. Good-bye. I trust you to leave me in peace. I promise on my side to do nothing that can inconvenience you.

[She waits for a moment to see if he has anything further to say, but as he remains silent she goes towards the door. As she is about to go out he bursts into a peal of laughter. She stops with a start and looks at him. His laughter grows, peal upon peal. It becomes wild and shrill and hysterical. He bellows with laughter. Already half frightened, not understanding, Catherine makes a step or two back into the room.

Catherine.

What’s the matter? George, George!

[He laughs still, and then suddenly breaks into a sob. He gives way entirely, and bursts into uncontrolled weeping.

Catherine.

[Coming down to him.] George, what is it?

George Winter.

For God’s sake give me a drink.

[She hurries to the half-empty bottle of champagne on the table and pours out a glass of wine. He drinks it at a gulp.

George Winter.

[Recovering himself.] That’s rich, that is. Rich.

[Again he bursts into laughter.

Catherine.

What is it, George? It’s not because I’m going away?

George Winter.

Your going away doesn’t matter a damn to me. It means that I’ve been done in the eye. Those swindling rogues, the Lewishams, have got me at last. That article’s done the trick and I’m dished. You can go your own way now, Kate. You’ve got the better of me after all.

Catherine.

I don’t understand.

George Winter.

James Ford knows that the bonds have gone. And he’s going to Scotland Yard.

Catherine.

Oh! And father?

George Winter.

Oh, I can’t worry about your father now. He must look after his own skin. I’ve got enough to do to think of myself.

Catherine.

What shall I do?

George Winter.

He’ll give me till to-morrow to replace them, but I can’t. It’s impossible. And he knows I can’t. Damned hypocrite! I shouldn’t complain if I’d been beaten fairly; but it’s so childish. And just when I’d got the reins in my hand. He can’t countenance dishonesty. It’s childish. I always distrusted him. Sanctimonious prig! He’s jealous of me. He wants to kick me off my perch, so that he can take my place. And I know him. I know him inside out. He’ll do what he says. [With angry scorn.] It’s his duty.

Catherine.

Can’t we sell things? There’s my jewellery.

George Winter.

A drop in the ocean. How can I get eighty thousand pounds in a falling market.

Catherine.

[Horrified.] D’you mean to say they’ll arrest you?

George Winter.

[With a dull roar, like a wild beast at bay.] No. D’you think I’m going to stand that, and a trial, and — and all the rest?

Catherine.

[Wringing her hands.] Is there no chance that you may get off?

George Winter.

Bennett would give me away to save himself. I know him. There’s not a man I can trust. The only thing’s to have done with it at once. I must get out of it while I have the chance.

Catherine.

D’you think there’s any hope of your getting away?

George Winter.

My way. Yes.

Catherine.

[Understanding.] Oh, George, you wouldn’t do that.

George Winter.

What else d’you expect me to do? D’you think I’m going to bolt to America, to be brought back in six months by a couple of detectives? Not much.

Catherine.

Wouldn’t it be better to stay and face it? If you’ve done wrong, can’t you accept your punishment? You’re young still.

George Winter.

They won’t have mercy on me. It’ll mean ten years. And when I come out, it’ll mean hiding, doing odd jobs, like Bennett, dirty work for other men who won’t risk their own skins. And what d’you suppose a life like that is worth to me? I want the power, and the notoriety, and the glamour. I wanted men to point me out in the street. I’ve aimed too high to be content with anything but the highest.

Catherine.

Oh, it’s horrible.

George Winter.

Come, Kate — honestly — if you loved me, wouldn’t you wish me to make an end of it?

Catherine.

[After a long look at him.] Oh, don’t ask me.

George Winter.

Will you do something for me? It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you.

Catherine.

I’ll do anything I can.

George Winter.

I want half an hour to myself. You must let no one come to me under any pretext whatever.

Catherine.

[With a cry of horror.] You’re not going to do it now?

George Winter.

I don’t trust James Ford. He may have gone to Scotland Yard already. Perhaps the detectives are already on their way.

Catherine.

You’ve said yourself that he’s to be relied on.

George Winter.

Oh, I’m frightened. And what’s the good? I’m dead beat. Perhaps to-morrow I shouldn’t have the nerve.

Catherine.

Oh, it’s awful.

George Winter.

[With a laugh.] Why, it’s your freedom.

[He goes to the table and pours himself out a glass of brandy.

George Winter.

I’m mixing my liquors. Bad habit, isn’t it? You’ll be ravishing in black, darling. It always suited you.

[Catherine gives an inarticulate sob. George Winter, shrugging his shoulders, goes towards the door.

George Winter.

Will you promise to prevent anyone from disturbing me?

Catherine.

Yes.

George Winter.

In half an hour you can go to bed.... I hope you’ll sleep as soundly as I shall.

[He goes out and locks the door behind him. Catherine hides her face in her hands and moans with fright and horror. In a moment O’Donnell comes in. Catherine starts as she hears him.

Catherine.

I thought you’d gone to bed.

O’Donnell.

I feel so awfully wide awake. I came in to see if I could find a book.

Catherine.

[Pointing to a table.] There are some over there.

O’Donnell.

You’re looking dreadfully done up. Why don’t you turn in?

[At that moment shouts are heard in the square below, cheers and cries of Winter.

Catherine.

[Frightened.] What’s that?

O’Donnell.

[Going to the window.] Oh, it’s closing time. Enthusiastic politicians who’ve been turned out of the public-houses.

[Cries of Winter, Winter.

Catherine.

Oh, send them away, I can’t bear it.

O’Donnell.

[Opening the window and calling out.] Mr. Winter has gone to bed, gentlemen, and I strongly recommend you to follow his example.

[He shuts the window, amid the laughter and cheers of the roisterers. They go away singing. Catherine clenches her hands to prevent herself from screaming.

O’Donnell.

[With a laugh.] Splendid, aren’t they?

Catherine.

Now, you really must go to bed.

O’Donnell.

[Taking a book from the table.] All right. I dare say we shall have a busy day to-morrow.... I really think this is the happiest day I’ve ever had. Life is jolly, isn’t it?

Catherine.

[With a strange look at him.] Yes.

O’Donnell.

Good-night.

Catherine.

[With a sudden start.] Oh!

O’Donnell.

What’s the matter?

Catherine.

I thought I heard a sound.

O’Donnell.

I didn’t. The hotel’s as still as death, for a wonder. I hope the trains won’t disturb you to-night.

Catherine.

Good-night.

[He goes out. Catherine turns and looks at the door of George Winter’s room. She takes a step towards it.

Catherine.

George!

[She listens, but there is no answer. With a gesture of horror she turns away. Fred Bennett bursts into the room.

Bennett.

I beg your pardon. I didn’t expect to find any one here. Where’s the Governor?

Catherine.

I don’t know.

Bennett.

I want to see him at once.

Catherine.

He can’t see any one to-night.

Bennett.

He’ll see me.

Catherine.

He left instructions that no one was to bother him.

Bennett.

It’s a matter of life and death.

Catherine.

[With a shiver of apprehension.] I tell you, you can’t see him.

Bennett.

Isn’t he in his room?

Catherine.

No.

Bennett.

[Going towards the door.] Are you sure?

Catherine.

[Getting in his way.] He’s tired out. Can’t you let him rest?

Bennett.

Oh, but you don’t know what’s happened. The mine’s all right. For goodness’ sake, let me go to him.

Catherine.

[Quickly.] What do you mean?

Bennett.

[The words tumbling over one another in his hurry.] The manager had taken Macdonald in, hadn’t shown him a new shaft they’d sunk. The place is crammed full of gold. It was only a dodge of the Lewishams. I did what the Governor told me. I just flooded the market with selling orders of their stocks, and at closing time Manny Lewisham sent for me. I smelt a rat. I was too clever for him. He’s offered to take the Governor in. He’ll buy a huge block of shares to-morrow at par. He’s going to pay on the nail. And we’re safe, we’re safe, we’re safe.

Catherine.

D’you mean to say....

Bennett.

[Interrupting.] It’s what the Governor’s been fighting for for ten years. At last he’s got there. The shares’ll be worth anything you like in a month. It means wealth, safety, everything.

Catherine.

Then George is....

Bennett.

He’s at the top of the tree. He’s where he ought to be. In ten years he’ll be in the House of Lords. Would you like to tell him yourself?

[Catherine hesitates for a moment. She sees her chance of freedom slipping away from her once more. For a moment she struggles with herself. All her life, past and future, comes before her in a flash.

Catherine.

I don’t know where he is.

Bennett.

You don’t know?

Catherine.

He went down to the smoking-room.

Bennett.

I must find him.

[He runs towards the door, but before he can get out Catherine has a revulsion of feeling. She gives a cry.

Catherine.

No, stop. He’s in his bedroom. Oh, be quick! Be quick!

[Bennett stops and looks at her with surprise. She runs to the door and beats against it with her hands.

Catherine.

George, George, George! Open the door! George, George!

Bennett.

What’s the matter? What d’you mean?

Catherine.

George! It’s all right. Open the door, for God’s sake. [To Bennett.] Oh, can’t you open the door?

Bennett.

Good God, what’s he doing?

Catherine.

George, George!

[Bennett puts his shoulder against it and tries to burst the door open. It does not yield.

Bennett.

Governor. It’s me.

Catherine.

He locked it. Break the glass.

[She gives him a bronze ornament which is at her hand, and he breaks it against the pane of glass which is above the lock. The glass splinters. He puts his hand in and turns the key. Then he opens the door and bursts in.

Bennett.

He’s not there.

Catherine.

He must be. He must be.

Bennett.

The windows are wide open. He must have gone out.

Catherine.

There’s nowhere to go. There’s only about two yards of garden and then the line. Call out.

Bennett.

Perhaps he’s in the garden.

[Bennett runs out through the door of George Winter’s room. As he does this, Francis Etchingham comes in from the left, in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown.

Etchingham.

I say, what the devil’s all this row? It’s bad enough to have the trains banging under one’s window all night long. Upon my soul.

Catherine.

Where’s George? Father, father!

Etchingham.

How the deuce should I know?

[Bennett comes back.

Bennett.

He’s not in the garden anywhere.

Catherine.

Oh, I’m so frightened!

Etchingham.

What on earth’s the matter with you, Kate?

Catherine.

Oh, my God, my God!

Bennett.

We can’t find the Governor.

Etchingham.

Perhaps he’s gone for a walk.

Catherine.

Along the line?

[Teddie O’Donnell comes running in. He has taken his coat and waistcoat off.

O’Donnell.

I say, I’ve just seen a most awful accident. A man’s been run over on the line.

[Catherine gives a shrill scream of horror, and, falling on her knees, hides her face.

THE END

LANDED GENTRY

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

CHARACTERS

This play was produced under the title “Grace,” at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, October 15, 1910, with the following cast:

Claude Insoley

Dennis Eadie

Rev. Archibald Insoley

Leslie Faber

Henry Cobbett

Arthur Wontner

Gann

Edmund Gwenn

Moore

Heston Cooper

Grace Insoley

Irene Vanbrugh

Mrs. Insoley

Lady Tree

Miss Vernon of Foley

Lillah MacCarthy

Miss Hall

Mary Barton

Edith Lewis

Nina Sevening

Margaret Gann

Gertrude Lang

Claude Insoley

Rev. Archibald Insoley

Henry Cobbett

Gann

Moore

Grace Insoley

Mrs. Insoley

Miss Vernon of Foley

Miss Hall

Edith Lewis

Margaret Gann

The Action takes place at Kenyon-Fulton, Claude Insoley’s place in Somersetshire.

The Performing Rights of this play are fully protected, and permission to perform it, whether by Amateurs or Professionals, must be obtained in advance from the author’s Sole Agent, R. Golding Bright, 20 Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C., from whom all particulars can be obtained.

THE FIRST ACT

Scene: The drawing-room at Kenyon-Fulton. It is a handsome apartment with large windows, reaching to the ground. On the walls are old masters whose darkness conceals their artistic insignificance. The furniture is fine and solid. Nothing is very new or smart. The chintzes have a rather pallid Victorian air. The room with its substantial magnificence represents the character of a family rather than the taste of an individual.

It is night and one or two electric lamps are burning.

Moore, an elderly impressive butler, comes in, followed by Gann. This is Claude Insoley’s gamekeeper, a short, sturdy man, grizzled, with wild stubborn hair and a fringe of beard round his chin. He wears his Sunday clothes of sombre broadcloth.

Moore.

You’re to wait here.

[Gann, hat in hand, advances to the middle of the room.

Moore.

They’ve not got up from dinner yet, but he’ll come and see you at once.

Gann.

I’ll wait.

Moore.

He said I was to tell him the moment you come. What can he be wanting of you at this time of night?

Gann.

Maybe if he wished you to know he’d have told you.

Moore.

I don’t want to know what don’t concern me.

Gann.

Pity there ain’t more like you.

Moore.

It’s the missus’ birthday to-day.

Gann.

Didn’t he say you was to tell him the moment I come?

Moore.

I’ve only just took in the dessert. Give ’em a minute to sample the peaches.

Gann.

I thought them was your orders.

Moore.

You’re a nice civil-spoken one, you are.

[With an effort Gann prevents himself from replying. It is as much as he can do to keep his hands off the sleek, obsequious butler. Moore after a glance at him goes out. The gamekeeper begins to walk up and down the room like a caged beast. In a moment he hears a sound and stops still. He turns his hat round and round in his hands.

[Claude Insoley comes in. He is a man of thirty-five, rather dried-up, rather precise, neither good-looking nor plain, with a slightly dogmatic, authoritative manner.

Claude.

Good evening, Gann.

Gann.

Good evening, sir.

[Claude hesitates for a moment; to conceal a slight embarrassment he lights a cigarette. Gann watches him steadily.

Claude.

I suppose you know what I’ve sent for you about.

Gann.

No, sir.

Claude.

I should have thought you might guess without hurting yourself. The Rector tells me that your daughter Peggy came back last night.

Gann.

Yes, sir.

Claude.

Bit thick, isn’t it?

Gann.

I don’t know what you mean, sir.

Claude.

Oh, that’s all rot, Gann. You know perfectly well what I mean. It’s a beastly matter for both of us, but it’s no good funking it.... You’ve been on the estate pretty well all your life, haven’t you?

Gann.

It’s fifty-four years come next Michaelmas that my father was took on, and I was earning wages here before you was born.

Claude.

My governor always said you were the best keeper he ever struck, and hang it all, I haven’t had anything to complain about either.

Gann.

Thank you, sir.

Claude.

Anyhow, we shan’t make it any better by beating about the bush. It appears that Peggy has got into trouble in London.... I’m awfully sorry for you, and all that sort of thing.

Gann.

Poor child. She’s not to blame.

[Claude gives a slight shrug of the shoulders.

Gann.

I want ‘er to forget all she’s gone through. It was a mistake she ever went to London, but she would go. Now I’ll keep ‘er beside me. She’ll never leave me again till I’m put underground.

Claude.

That’s all very fine and large, but I’m afraid Peggy can’t stay on here, Gann.

Gann.

Why not?

Claude.

You know the rule of the estate as well as I do. When a girl gets into a mess she has to go.

Gann.

It’s a wicked rule!

Claude.

You never thought so before, and this isn’t the first time you’ve seen it applied, by a long chalk.

Gann.

The girl went away once and come to grief. She wellnigh killed herself with the shame of it. I’m not going to let ‘er out of my sight again.

Claude.

I’m afraid I can’t make an exception in your favour, Gann.

Gann.

[Desperately.] Where’s she to go to?

Claude.

Oh, I expect she’ll be able to get a job somewhere. Mrs. Insoley’ll do all she can.

Gann.

It’s no good, Squire. I can’t let ‘er go. I want ‘er.

Claude.

I don’t want to be unreasonable. I’ll give you a certain amount of time to make arrangements.

Gann.

Time’s no good to me. I haven’t the ‘eart to send her away.

Claude.

I’m afraid it’s not a question of whether you like it or not. You must do as you’re told.

Gann.

I can’t part with her, and there’s an end of it.

Claude.

You’d better go and talk it over with your wife.

Gann.

I don’t want to talk it over with anyone. I’ve made up my mind.

[Claude is silent for a moment. He looks at Gann thoughtfully.

Claude.

[Deliberately.] I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think about it.

Gann.

[Startled.] What d’you mean by that, sir?

Claude.

If Peggy isn’t gone by that time, I am afraid I shall have to send you away.

Gann.

You wouldn’t do that, sir? You couldn’t do it, Squire, not after all these years.

Claude.

We’ll soon see about that, my friend.

Gann.

You can’t dismiss me for that. I’ll have the law of you. I’ll sue you for wrongful dismissal.

Claude.

You can do what you damned well like; but if Peggy hasn’t gone by to-morrow night I shall turn you off the estate on Tuesday.

Gann.

[Hoarsely.] You wouldn’t do it! You couldn’t do it.

[There is a sound of talking and laughter, and of a general movement as the dining-room door is opened.

Claude.

They’re just coming in. You’d better hook it.

[Miss Vernon and Edith Lewis come in, followed by Grace. For a moment Gann stands awkwardly, and then leaves the room. Miss Vernon is a slight, faded, rather gaunt woman of thirty-five. Her deliberate manner, her composure, suggest a woman of means and a woman who knows her own mind. Edith Lewis is a pretty girl of twenty. Grace is thirty. She is a beautiful creature with an eager, earnest face and fine eyes. She has a restless manner, and her frequent laughter strikes you as forced. She is always falling from one emotion to another. She uses a slightly satirical note when she speaks to her husband.

Edith.

[Going to the window.] Oh, what a lovely night! Do let’s go out. [To Grace.] May we?

Grace.

Of course, if you want to.

Edith.

I’m perfectly sick with envy every time I look out of the window. Those lovely old trees!

Grace.

I wonder if you’d be sick with envy if you looked at nothing else for forty-six weeks in the year?

Edith.

I adore the country.

Grace.

People who habitually live in London generally do.

Miss Vernon.

Aren’t you fond of the country?

Grace.

[Vehemently.] I hate it! I hate it with all my heart and soul.

Claude.

My dear Grace, what are you saying?

Grace.

It bores me. It bores me stiff. Those endless trees, and those dreary meadows, and those ploughed fields. Oh!

Edith.

I don’t think I could ever get tired of the view from your dining-room.

Grace.

Not if you saw it for three meals a day for ten years? Oh, my dear, you don’t know what that view is like at an early breakfast on a winter’s morning. You sit there looking at it, with icy fingers, wondering if your nose is red, while your husband reads morning prayers, because his father read morning prayers before him; and the sky looks as if it were going to sink down and crush you.

Claude.

You can’t expect sunshine all the year round, can you?

Grace.

[Smiling.] True, O King!

Edith.

Well, I’m a Cockney, and I feel inclined to fall down on my very knees and worship those big trees in your park. Oh, what a night!

Miss Vernon.

In such a night as this,

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees

And they did make no noise....

[Miss Vernon and Edith Lewis go out. Grace is left alone with her husband.

Grace.

What on earth was Gann doing here?

Claude.

I had something to say to him.

Grace.

May I know what?

Claude.

It would only bore you.

Grace.

That wouldn’t be a new experience.

Claude.

I say, you’re looking jolly to-night, darling.

Grace.

It’s kind of you to say so.

Claude.

Were you pleased with the necklace I gave you this morning?

Grace.

[Smiling.] Surely I said so at the time.

Claude.

I was rather hoping you’d wear it to-night.

Grace.

It wouldn’t have gone with my frock.

Claude.

You might have put it on all the same.

Grace.

You see, your example hasn’t been lost on me. I’ve learnt to put propriety before sentiment.

Claude.

[Rather shyly.] I should have thought, if you cared for me, you wouldn’t have minded.

Grace.

Are you reproaching me?

Claude.

No!

Grace.

Only?

Claude.

Hang it all, I can’t help wishing sometimes you’d seem as if — you were fond of me, don’t you know.

Grace.

If you’ll point out anything you particularly object to in my behaviour, I’ll try to change it.

Claude.

My dear, I don’t want much, do I?

Grace.

I don’t know why you should choose this particular time to make a scene.

Claude.

Hang it all, I’m not making a scene!

Grace.

I beg your pardon, I forgot that only women make scenes.

Claude.

I only wanted to tell you that I’m just about as fond of you as I can stick.

Grace.

[Suddenly touched.] After ten years of holy matrimony?

Claude.

It seems about ten days to me.

Grace.

Good God, to me it seems a lifetime.

Claude.

I say, Grace, what d’you mean by that?

Grace.

[Recovering herself.] Oughtn’t you to go back to the dining-room? Your brother and Mr. Cobbett will be boring one another.

[Claude looks at her for a moment, then rises and goes out. Grace clenches her hands, and an expression of utter wretchedness crosses her face. She passes her hand across her eyes with an impatient gesture, as if she were trying to shake herself free from some torturing thought. Moore comes in with coffee on a salver.

Grace.

Put it down on the table.

Moore.

Yes, madam.

Grace.

Miss Vernon’s in the garden with Miss Lewis. Will you tell them that coffee is here?

Moore.

Very good, ma’am.

[He goes out of one of the French windows into the garden. In a moment Miss Vernon comes in.

Grace.

Isn’t Edith coming?

Miss Vernon.

I sent her to get a wrap. We want to go down to the lake.

Grace.

Will you have some coffee?

Miss Vernon.

Thank you.... I was trying to remember how long it is since I was here last.

Grace.

[Pouring out the coffee.] It was before I was married.

Miss Vernon.

I’m devoted to Kenyon, I’m so glad you asked me to come and spend Whitsun here.

Grace.

My mother-in-law wrote and told us that you weren’t engaged.

Miss Vernon.

[With a smile.] That sounds rather chilly.

Grace.

Does it?

Miss Vernon.

[Abruptly.] May I call you Grace?

Grace.

[Looking up, faintly surprised.] Certainly. If you wish it.

Miss Vernon.

My name is Helen.

Grace.

Is it?

[Miss Vernon gives a slight smile of amusement, then gets up and stands before the fire-place with her hands behind her back.

Miss Vernon.

I wonder why you dislike me so much?

Grace.

I don’t know why you should think I do.

Miss Vernon.

You don’t take much trouble to hide it, do you?

Grace.

I’m sorry. In future I’ll be more careful.

Miss Vernon.

[Rather wistfully.] I wanted to be great friends with you.

Grace.

I’m afraid I don’t make friends very easily.

Miss Vernon.

We live so near one another. It seems rather silly that we should only just be on speaking terms.

[A very short pause.

Grace.

They wanted Claude to marry you, didn’t they? And he married me instead.

Miss Vernon.

When I saw you at your wedding, I couldn’t help feeling I’d have done just the same in his place.

Grace.

[With a twinkle in her eye.] And now they want you to marry his brother Archibald.

Miss Vernon.

[Smiling.] So I understand.

Grace.

Are you going to?

Miss Vernon.

He hasn’t asked me yet.

Grace.

Five thousand acres in a ring fence. It seems a pity to let it go out of the family.

Miss Vernon.

It’s such a nuisance that a plainish woman of six-and-thirty has to be taken along with it.

Grace.

Did you ever care for Claude?

Miss Vernon.

If I did or not, I’m very anxious to care for his wife.

Grace.

Why?

Miss Vernon.

Well, partly because I’m afraid you’re not very happy.

Grace.

[Startled.] I? [Almost defiantly.] I should have thought I had everything that a woman can want to make her happy. I’ve got a husband who adores me. We’re rich. We’re — [with a sudden break in her voice] — happy! I wish to God he had married you! It’s clear enough now that he made a mistake.

Miss Vernon.

[With a chuckle.] I don’t think it’s occurred to him, you know.

Grace.

How many times d’you suppose his mother has said to Claude: Things would be very different now if you’d had the sense to marry Helen Vernon.

Miss Vernon.

Yes, in that case I must say it’s not to be wondered at if you don’t like me very much.

Grace.

Like you! I hate you with all my heart and soul!

Miss Vernon.

Good gracious me, you don’t say so?

Grace.

[With a sudden flash of humour.] You don’t mind my telling you, do you?

Miss Vernon.

Not a bit, but I should very much like to know why?

Grace.

Because I’ve got an envious disposition and I envy you.

Miss Vernon.

A solitary old maid like me?

Grace.

You’ve got everything that I haven’t got. D’you suppose I’ve lived ten years in my husband’s family without realising the gulf that separates Miss Vernon of Foley from the very middle-class young woman that Claude Insoley was such a damned fool as to marry? You’ve got money and I haven’t a farthing.

Miss Vernon.

Money isn’t everything.

Grace.

Oh, don’t talk such nonsense! How would you like to be dependent on somebody else for every penny you had? If I want to get Claude a Christmas present I have to buy it out of his money.... It wouldn’t be so maddening if I only had forty pounds a year of my own, but I haven’t a penny, not a penny! And I have to keep accounts. After all, it’s his money. If he wants accounts why shouldn’t he have them? I have to write down the cost of every packet of hair-pins. [With a sudden chuckle.] And the worst of it is, I never could add.

Miss Vernon.

That, of course, must increase the difficulty of keeping accounts.

Grace.

I’ve been an utter failure from the beginning. They despised me because I was a nobody and not even a rich nobody; but I was a strapping, healthy sort of young woman and they consoled themselves by thinking I’d have children — a milch cow was what they wanted — and I haven’t even had children....

[Miss Vernon, not knowing what to say, makes a little gesture of perplexity and helplessness. There is a brief pause.

Grace.

Oh! I’m about fed up with all the humiliations I’ve had to endure.

[Edith Lewis comes in with a wrap which she gives to Miss Vernon.

Edith.

Will this do?

Miss Vernon.

Thanks so much. You’re a perfect angel.

Grace.

You mustn’t stay out more than a few minutes. The men will be here in a moment, and I want to play poker. When my mother-in-law comes we shall have to mind our p’s and q’s.

Edith.

You don’t like Mrs. Insoley?

Grace.

Mrs. Insoley doesn’t like me.

Miss Vernon.

Nonsense! She’s very fond of you indeed.

Grace.

I could wish she had some pleasanter way of showing it than finding fault with everything I do, everything I say, and everything I wear.

Edith.

She’s coming to-morrow, isn’t she?

Grace.

Yes. [With a quizzical smile.] She’ll thoroughly disapprove of you. When I introduce you to her: This is Miss Lewis — she’ll look at you for a moment as if you were a kitchen-maid applying for a situation and say: Lewis.

Edith.

Why?

Grace.

Because, like myself, you’re not county.

Edith.

Oh!

Grace.

It’s all very fine to say: Oh! but you don’t know what that means. In London, if you’re pretty and amusing and don’t give yourself airs, people are quite ready to be nice to you; but in a place like this, you can have every virtue under the sun, and if you’re not county you’re of no importance in this world, and you’ll certainly be very uncomfortable in the next.

Miss Vernon.

[Smiling.] I think you’re extremely hard on us. If you have the advantage of....

Grace.

[Seizing the opportunity which Miss Vernon’s hesitation gives her.] Middle-class origins?

Miss Vernon.

You needn’t grudge us the perfectly harmless delusion that there is a difference between a family that has lived in the same place for three or four centuries, with traditions of good breeding and service to the country — and one that has no roots in the soil.

Grace.

I seem to hear Claude’s very words.

Miss Vernon.

[Good-humouredly.] Of course we have our faults.

Grace.

You’re the first member of your class that I’ve ever heard acknowledge it.

Miss Vernon.

[Meditatively.] I wonder if you’d despise us so much if you had a string of drunken, fox-hunting squires behind you.

Grace.

Oh, my dear, when I was first married I used to lie awake at night wishing for them with all my heart. When the neighbours came to call on me I could see them obviously lying in wait for the aitches they were expecting me to drop. A Miss Robinson, wasn’t she? Robinson! Are there people called Robinson? Oh, how I wanted to scratch their ugly old faces!

Miss Vernon.

How lucky I was abroad for so long! You might have disfigured me for life.

Grace.

I’ve often thought that if the Archangel Gabriel came down in Somersetshire, they’d look him out in the “Landed Gentry” before they asked him to a shooting-party.

Miss Vernon.

I don’t think you ought to judge us all on Mrs. Insoley. She’s a type that’s dying out.

Edith.

I don’t want to seem inquisitive, but if you don’t like Mrs. Insoley why on earth d’you have her to stay here?

Grace.

Simple-minded child! Because even in a county family money’s the only thing in the world that really matters, and we’re penniless, while Mrs. Insoley — [with a quick, defiant look at Miss Vernon] — Mrs. Insoley stinks of it.... Do I shock you?

Miss Vernon.

[With a smile.] No, because I see you’re trying to.

Grace.

Claude has nothing but the house and land and his principles. And if we’re able to have the hounds and the shooting and a couple of cars, it’s because Mrs. Insoley pays for it.

Miss Vernon.

[Explaining to Edith Lewis.] Mrs. Insoley was an heiress.

Grace.

She was a Bainbridge, and you’ll hear her thank God for it frequently.

[Archibald Insoley and Henry Cobbett come in. Archibald is a pleasant, good-looking man of thirty-four, with a humorous way about him, and a kindly expression. He holds the family living of Kenyon-Fulton, but there is nothing in him of the sanctimoniousness of the cloth. Cobbett is an agreeable youth of four-and-twenty. They are followed by Claude Insoley.

Cobbett.

[Seeing Edith Lewis at the window.] Are you going out?

Edith.

We were — but we won’t.

Grace.

I’ve been preparing Miss Lewis for your mother’s arrival.

Edith.

I’m beginning to tremble in my shoes.

Archibald.

Our mother is what is usually described as a woman of character. With the best intentions in the world and the highest principles she succeeds in making life almost intolerable to every one connected with her.

Claude.

You won’t forget to send the carriage for her to-morrow, Grace?

Grace.

I won’t.... Last time we sent the car by mistake, and she sent it back again.

Miss Vernon.

Good heavens, why did she do that?

Grace.

Mrs. Insoley never has driven in a motor-car, and Mrs. Insoley never will drive in a motor-car.

Claude.

[Not unamiably.] I don’t think you ought to make fun of my mother, Grace.

Grace.

I wouldn’t if I could make anything else of her.

[As she says this she sits down at the piano and rattles her fingers over the keys.

Grace.

Will you sing us a song, Mr. Cobbett?

Cobbett.

No, thank you.

Grace.

I want to be amused.

Archibald.

How desperately you say that!

Grace.

[To Cobbett.] What will you sing?

Cobbett.

I’m afraid I don’t know anything that will fit the occasion.

Grace.

I seem to have heard you warble a graceful little ditty about a top note.

Cobbett.

Thank you very much, but I’m not fond of making a fool of myself.

Grace.

Part of a gentleman’s education should be how to make himself ridiculous with dignity.

Claude.

[To Cobbett.] You make more fuss about singing than a young lady at a tea-party.

Grace.

[Looking at him with smiling lips but with hard eyes.] Let us have no more maidenly coyness.

[She begins to play, and Cobbett, shrugging his shoulders, begins with rather bad grace to sing the song, “I can’t reach that top note.” While they are in the middle of it the door opens, and the Butler announces Mrs. Insoley and her companion. Mrs. Insoley is a little old lady of some corpulence, shabbily dressed in rusty black. She looks rather like a charwoman in her Sunday best. Miss Hall, her companion, is a self-effacing silent person of uncertain age. She is always very anxious to make herself useful.

Moore.

Mrs. Insoley, Miss Hall.

Claude.

Mother!

[The singing abruptly ceases. There is general consternation. Mrs. Insoley stops still for one moment, and surveys the party with indignation. Then she sweeps into the room with such majesty as is compatible with her small size and considerable obesity.

Mrs. Insoley.

Is this a lunatic asylum that I have come into?

Grace.

We didn’t expect you till to-morrow.

Mrs. Insoley.

So I imagined by the fact that I found no conveyance at the station. I had to take a fly, and it cost me four-and-sixpence.

Claude.

But why didn’t you let us know you’d changed your plans, mother?

Mrs. Insoley.

I did let you know. I wrote to Grace yesterday. She must have got my letter this morning.

Grace.

Oh, how stupid of me! I recognised your writing, and as it was my birthday I thought I wouldn’t open it till to-morrow.

Claude.

Grace!

Grace.

I’m dreadfully sorry.

Mrs. Insoley.

It was only by the mercy of Providence that I didn’t have to walk.

Grace.

There are always flies at the station.

Mrs. Insoley.

Providence might very well have caused them to be all engaged.

Grace.

I don’t know why you should think Providence has nothing better to do than to play practical jokes on us.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Looking round.] And may I inquire why you have turned the house in which your father died into a bear garden?

Claude.

It’s Grace’s birthday, and we thought there would be no harm in our having a little fun.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Putting up her face-à-main and staring at the company.] I’m old-fashioned enough and well-bred enough to like people to be introduced to me.

Grace.

Nowadays every one’s so disreputable that we think it safer not to make introductions.... This is Miss Lewis.

Edith.

How d’you do?

Mrs. Insoley.

Lewis!

Grace.

[With a little smile of amusement.] I think you know Miss Vernon of Foley.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Very affably.] Of course I know Miss Vernon of Foley. My dear Helen, you’re looking very handsome. It wants a woman of birth to wear the outrageous costumes of the present day.

Miss Vernon.

[Shaking hands with her.] It’s so nice of you to say so.

Grace.

I forget if you know Mr. Cobbett.

Cobbett.

How do you do?

[He bows slightly as Mrs. Insoley looks at him through her glasses.

Mrs. Insoley.

Cobbett!

Cobbett.

[With some asperity.] Cobbett!

Mrs. Insoley.

[Turning to Miss Hall.] We used to have a milkman called Cobbett, Louisa.

Miss Hall.

Our milkman is called Wilkinson now.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Very graciously.] You were singing a song when I came in. What was it called?

Cobbett.

[Rather sulkily.] “I can’t reach that top note.”

Mrs. Insoley.

I wondered why you were trying.... Why are you hiding behind that sofa, Archibald? Do you not intend to kiss your mother?

Archibald.

I’m delighted to see you, my dear mother.

[He kisses her on the forehead.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m rather surprised to see a clergyman at a dinner-party on a Sunday night.

Archibald.

I find two sermons a day excellent for the appetite. And the Bible tells us that corn makes the young men cheerful.

Grace.

[Smiling.] Aren’t you dreadfully hungry? Wouldn’t you like something to eat?

Mrs. Insoley.

No, I shall go straight to my room. It always upsets me to drive in a hired carriage.

Grace.

I’ll just go and see that everything’s nice and comfortable.

Mrs. Insoley.

Pray don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account. It would distress me.

[Grace goes out.

Edith.

[Aside to Miss Vernon.] Don’t you think we might go down to the lake?

Miss Vernon.

By all means.... There’s nothing I can get you, Mrs. Insoley?

Mrs. Insoley.

[Graciously.] Nothing, my dear Helen.

[Miss Vernon and Edith Lewis go out, and a moment later Cobbett slips out also.

Mrs. Insoley.

Claude, will you take Miss Hall into the dining-room and give her a sandwich and a glass of port?

Claude.

Certainly.

Miss Hall.

I don’t think I want anything, thank you, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

Nonsense, Louisa! Allow me to know what is good for you. You’ll see that she drinks the port, Claude. [As they go out.] I want to talk to Archibald.

Archibald.

My dear mother, I throw myself at your feet.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a chuckle.] I very much doubt if you could. You’re growing much too fat. It’s quite time they made you something.

Archibald.

[Smiling.] The landed gentry hasn’t its old power. Promotion in the Church nowadays is given with new-fangled ideas about merit and scholarship and heaven knows what.

Mrs. Insoley.

I hope you never eat potatoes or bread?

Archibald.

I fly from them as I would from temptation.

Mrs. Insoley.

Nor soup?

Archibald.

It is as the scarlet woman to me.

Mrs. Insoley.

And I trust you never touch green peas.

Archibald.

Ah, there you have me. Even the saints had their weaknesses. I confess that when green peas are in season I always put on flesh.

Mrs. Insoley.

You want some one to keep a firm hand on you. You must marry.

Archibald.

I saw you approaching that topic by leaps and bounds, mother.

Mrs. Insoley.

It’s a clergyman’s duty to marry.

Archibald.

[Chaffing her.] St. Paul says....

Mrs. Insoley.

[Interrupting.] I know what St. Paul’s views were, Archibald, and I disagree with them.

Archibald.

[Dryly.] I have every reason to believe he was of excellent family, mother.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Giving him a quick look.] We all know that it was a great disappointment to Helen Vernon when — you know what I mean.

Archibald.

I can’t help thinking she showed bad taste in surviving the blow.

Mrs. Insoley.

It was a great disappointment to me. I had set my heart on joining Foley to Kenyon-Fulton.... It wouldn’t be too late even now if you had the sense to appreciate Helen Vernon’s affection for you.

Archibald.

My dear mother, I can’t persuade myself for a moment that Helen Vernon has any affection for me.

Mrs. Insoley.

A woman of her age is prepared to have affection for any one who asks her to marry him.

Archibald.

Even if he’s a poor country parson?

Mrs. Insoley.

You’re a great deal more than a country parson, Archibald. It is unlikely that Grace will have any children, so unless — something happens to allow Claude to marry again....

Archibald.

What d’you mean by that, mother?

Mrs. Insoley.

Grace is not immortal.

Archibald.

On the other hand, she has excellent health.

Mrs. Insoley.

There may be other ways of disposing of her.

Archibald.

What ways?

Mrs. Insoley.

[Looking at him calmly.] Since when have you laboured under the delusion that I am the sort of woman to submit to cross-examination, Archibald?

[The entrance of Grace interrupts the conversation.

Grace.

I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. I think you’ll find everything all right.

Mrs. Insoley.

In that case I shall go to my room. Archibald, tell Louisa that I am ready to go to my room.

Archibald.

Certainly.

[He goes out, leaving Grace alone with Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

Who is the young lady you have staying with you, Grace?

Grace.

Edith Lewis. She’s a friend of mine.

Mrs. Insoley.

Ah! And who is this Mr. Cobbett?

Grace.

He’s a friend of mine too.

Mrs. Insoley.

I didn’t imagine that you would invite total strangers to stay with you.

Grace.

I don’t know that there’s any other way of describing them.

Mrs. Insoley.

I dare say that is a sufficient description in itself.

[Miss Hall comes back with Claude and Archibald.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m going to my room, Louisa. I shall be ready for you to read to me in a quarter of an hour.

Miss Hall.

Very good, Mrs. Insoley. [To Grace.] I suppose you don’t have prayers on Sunday night?

Grace.

No, we read our pedigree instead. You’ll find the “Landed Gentry” in your bedroom.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Icily.] In my young days it was thought more important for a young lady to be well-born than to be clever.

Grace.

[Chuckling.] The result has been disastrous for the present generation.

Mrs. Insoley.

Good night.

Grace.

[Shaking hands cordially with Miss Hall.] Be sure and let me know if you’re not quite comfortable. I hope you’ll find everything you want in your room.

Mrs. Insoley.

Of course Louisa will find everything she wants. She wants nothing. Come, Louisa.

[Mrs. Insoley and Miss Hall go out.

Archibald.

I think I’ll be toddling back to my rectory.

Claude.

Oh, all right.

Archibald.

Good night, Grace.

Grace.

Good night.

Claude.

[To Archibald.] I talked to Gann about that matter.

Archibald.

I’m afraid he’s going to make rather a nuisance of himself.

Claude.

I took a good firm line, you know.

Archibald.

That’s right. It’s the only way with those sort of fellows. Good night, old man.

Claude.

Good night.

[Archibald goes out.

Claude.

You were asking about Gann just now, Grace?

Grace.

I was.

Claude.

At first I thought I’d better not tell you anything about it, but I’ve been thinking it over....

Grace.

[Interrupting.] It was quite unnecessary. I’m not at all curious.

Claude.

I think perhaps it would be better if I told you what I’d done.

Grace.

I’m sure that whatever you’ve done is right, Claude. [Smiling.] That’s why you’re so detestable.

Claude.

That’s all very fine and large, but I think I’d like to have your approval.

Grace.

We agreed very early in our married life that your acts were such as must necessarily meet with my approval.

Claude.

What’s the matter with you, Grace?

Grace.

With me? Nothing.

Claude.

You’ve been so funny lately. I haven’t been able to make you out at all.

Grace.

I should have thought you had more important things to do than to bother about me.

Claude.

I’ve got nothing in the world to do more important than to bother about you, Grace.

[She looks at him for an instant, with a catch in her breath.

Grace.

Don’t worry me to-night, Claude; my head’s aching so that I feel I could scream.

Claude.

[With the tenderest concern.] My poor child, why didn’t you tell me? I’m so sorry I’ve been bothering you. Is it very bad?

Grace.

What a beast I am! How can you like me when I’m so absolutely horrid to you?

Claude.

My darling, I don’t blame you for having a headache.

Grace.

I’m sorry I was beastly to you just now.

Claude.

What nonsense!

[He tries to take her in his arms, but she draws herself away.

Grace.

Please don’t, Claude.

Claude.

Why don’t you go to bed, darling?

Grace.

[With a cry of something like fright.] Oh, no!

Claude.

Bed’s the best place for everybody at this hour.

Grace.

I want to amuse myself. Go and fetch the others, they’re down by the lake. And we’ll all play poker.

[He is just going to make an observation, but she bursts in vehemently.

Grace.

For God’s sake do as I ask you.

[He looks at her. With a shrug of the shoulders he goes out into the garden. Grace gives a deep sigh. In a moment Henry Cobbett enters. Grace looks at him silently as he advances into the room.

Cobbett.

I’ve been waiting for the chance of speaking to you by yourself.

Grace.

Have you?

Cobbett.

Why did you make me sing that idiotic song just now?

Grace.

[Her eyes cold and hostile.] Because I chose.

Cobbett.

You made me look a perfect fool.

Grace.

That’s what I wanted to make you look.

Cobbett.

[Surprised.] Did you? Why?

Grace.

I have no explanation to offer.

Cobbett.

You know, I’m hanged if I can make you out. You’re never the same for two minutes together.

Grace.

[Frigidly.] I suppose it is disconcerting. Claude complains of it too.

Cobbett.

Oh, hang Claude.

Grace.

You’re growing more and more like him every day, Harry.

Cobbett.

I don’t quite know what you mean by that.

Grace.

It seems hardly worth while to have — made a long journey to find oneself exactly where one started.

Cobbett.

I never know what people are driving at when they talk metaphorically.

Grace.

[Looking at him deliberately.] I thought I loved you, Harry.

Cobbett.

You’ve said it often enough.

Grace.

[Slowly.] I wonder if I just said it to persuade myself. My heart’s empty! Empty! I know now that it wasn’t love I felt for you.

Cobbett.

It’s rather late in the day to have found that out, isn’t it?

Grace.

[Bitterly.] Yes, that’s just it. It’s late in the day for everything.... Here they are.

[A sound of talking is heard as Edith Lewis approaches with Helen Vernon and Claude.

Claude.

[At the window.] I found them on their way back.

Grace.

[To Cobbett, with a little bitter laugh.] We’re going to play poker.

END OF THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Act. It is evening, towards seven o’clock, but it is still perfectly light. Grace and Peggy Gann are in the room, both standing. Peggy is a pretty girl, quite young, but very pale, with black rings round her eyes. She is dressed like a housemaid in her going-out things. Grace is evidently much distressed.

Peggy.

You will try, mum, won’t you?

[Peggy’s voice seems to call Grace back with a start from her own thoughts.

Grace.

I ought to have been told before. It was wicked to keep it from me.

Peggy.

I thought you knew, mum. I wasn’t to know that you ‘adn’t been told anything.

Grace.

[With a friendly smile.] I’m not blaming you, Peggy.... Mr. Insoley’s out now, but I’ll talk to him as soon as she come in. You’d better go home and fetch your father.

Peggy.

You know what father is, mum. I’m afraid he won’t come.

Grace.

Oh, but I think it’s very important. Tell him that....

[Henry Cobbett comes in, and she stops when she sees him.

Cobbett.

Hulloa, am I in the way? Shall I go?

Grace.

[Passing her hand wearily across her forehead.] No. I’ve just finished.... Try and get your father to come, Peggy.

Peggy.

Well, I’ll do what I can, mum.

[She goes out. Grace gives a little exclamation, partly of distress, partly of indignation.

Cobbett.

What’s the matter? You seem rather put out.

Grace.

That’s the daughter of one of the keepers. She came to me just now and asked me to beg Claude to give them a little more time. I hadn’t an idea what she meant. Then she said Claude had told her father he must send her away within twenty-four hours or lose his place.

Cobbett.

[Flippantly.] Oh, yes, I know. She seems to be rather a flighty young person. Claude and your brother-in-law were talking about it after lunch in the smoking-room.

Grace.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Cobbett.

Well, it never struck me you didn’t know. Besides — you haven’t shown any great desire for my society the last day or two.

Grace.

[With a quick look at him.] I’ve had other guests to attend to.

Cobbett.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] And it seemed rather a sordid little story. I don’t think I can interest myself very much at this time of day in the gamekeeper’s daughter who kicks over the traces.

Grace.

[Sarcastically.] It’s so devilish mid-Victorian, isn’t it?

Cobbett.

[Surprised at her tone.] It’s not really bothering you, is it?

Grace.

[With a sudden vehement outburst.] Don’t you see that wretched girl has done no more than I have?

Cobbett.

[With a chuckle.] Great Scott, you haven’t produced an unexpected baby, have you?

Grace.

Oh, don’t, don’t.

Cobbett.

[Coolly.] In point of fact she’s done a great deal more than you have. She’s been found out.

Grace.

How can you be so odiously cynical?

Cobbett.

I notice people always call you odiously cynical when you talk plain horse-sense to them.

Grace.

Can’t you realise what I’m feeling? She had excuses. She was alone, and little more than a child; she had no education. How could she be expected to resist temptation?

Cobbett.

It’s an absolute delusion that the lower classes are less able to resist temptation than their betters. In the first place, they have a much more systematic moral education, and then they’re taught from early youth to look upon virtue as a valuable asset.

Grace.

[Going up to him suddenly.] Harry, would you mind very much if I stopped the whole thing?

Cobbett.

Of course I should mind.

Grace.

Oh, no, don’t say that because it’s the conventional thing to say. I want you to be frank with me.

Cobbett.

[Uneasily.] Why do you ask me now?

Grace.

[After a look at him, a little unwillingly.] I feel so horribly mean.

Cobbett.

Claude?

Grace.

[With a sort of appeal, as if she were excusing herself.] He’s so awfully good to me, Harry. Every present he gives me, every kind word is like a stab in my heart. I’m beastly to him sometimes, I can’t help it, but nothing seems to make any difference to him.... Whatever I do, he loves me.

Cobbett.

Are you beginning to care for Claude — differently?

Grace.

Oh, it’s no use pretending. I never loved him as he loved me. I couldn’t. I was bored by his love. Yes, all the time we’ve been married.... It’s only lately....

[She pauses abruptly. Cobbett gives her a sidelong glance.

Cobbett.

Oh!

Grace.

I don’t know what I feel or what to do. I’m so bewildered and wretched.... He bores me still — oh, horribly sometimes. And yet at moments I feel as though I were a good deal more than half in love with him. It’s too absurd. With Claude — after all these years. Something has changed me.... It’s the last thing that ought to have changed me towards him.

[She flushes hotly, and again Cobbett looks at her, and a rather sulky expression comes into his face.

Cobbett.

It’s not a very pleasant position for me, is it?

Grace.

I shouldn’t have thought it ever had been a very pleasant position considering what a good friend Claude has been to you.

Cobbett.

If you look at it in that way, I dare say it would be better to put an end to the whole thing.

Grace.

You have been rather a blackguard, haven’t you?

Cobbett.

No. I don’t pretend to be better than anybody else, but I’m quite certain I’m no worse. I’m a perfectly normal man in good health. It’s idiotic to abuse me because I’ve done what any other fellow would have done in my place.

Grace.

[Suddenly understanding.] Is that all it was to you?

Cobbett.

What d’you mean?

Grace.

Wasn’t I anything to you at all? Only a more or less attractive woman who happened to cross your path? If I was only that, why couldn’t you leave me alone? What harm did I ever do you? Oh, it was cruel of you. Cruel!

Cobbett.

[Quietly.] No man’s able to have an affair all by himself, you know.

Grace.

What d’you mean by that?

Cobbett.

Well, most fellows are very shy, and they’re dreadfully frightened of a rebuff. A man doesn’t take much risk until — well, until he finds there’s not much risk to take.

Grace.

D’you mean to say I gave you to understand.... Oh, how can you humiliate me like that?

Cobbett.

Isn’t there a certain amount of truth in it?

Grace.

[Looking as it were into her own soul.] Yes.... Oh, I’m so ashamed.

Cobbett.

The world would be a jolly sight easier place to live in if people weren’t such humbugs.

Grace.

[Hardly able to believe the truth that presents itself to her, yet eager to probe it.] D’you think it was only curiosity on my side and nothing more than opportunity on yours?

Cobbett.

That’s the foundation of nine love affairs out of ten, you know.

Grace.

[Trying to justify herself in her own eyes.] I was so bored — so lonely. I never felt at home with the people I had to live with. They humiliated me. And you seemed the same sort of person as I was. I felt at my ease with you. At first I thought you cared for the things I cared for — music and books and pictures: it took me quite a time to discover that you didn’t know the difference between a fiddle and a jews’ harp.... I wonder why you troubled to take me in.

Cobbett.

I naturally talked about what I thought would please you.

Grace.

I remember at first I felt as if I were just stepping out of a prison into the fresh air. It seemed to me as if — oh, I don’t know how to put it — as if spring flowers were suddenly blossoming in my heart.

Cobbett.

I’m afraid you were asking more from me than I was able to give you.

Grace.

Oh, I don’t blame you. You’re quite right: it’s I who am to blame. [With sudden vehemence.] Oh, how I envy that wretched girl! If she fell it was because she loved. I asked her who the man was, and she wouldn’t tell me. She said she didn’t want to get him into trouble. She must love him still.

Cobbett.

[Moved by the pain which he sees she is suffering.] I hope you don’t think me an awful skunk, Grace. I’m sorry we’ve made such a hash of things.

Grace.

[Going on with her own thoughts.] It would be horrible if that wretched girl were punished while I go scot-free. I can’t let her be turned away like a leper. I should never rest in peace again.

Cobbett.

Claude’s not very fond of going back on his word. He seems to have delivered an ultimatum, and I expect he’ll stick to it.

Grace.

It means so much to me. I feel somehow that if I can only save that poor child it’ll make up in a way — oh, very little — for all the harm I’ve done.... D’you think I’m perfectly absurd?

Cobbett.

Life seems devilish complicated sometimes, doesn’t it?

Grace.

[With a smile.] Devilish.

[The sound is heard of a carriage stopping outside.

Cobbett.

Hulloa, what’s that?

Grace.

It’s my mother-in-law. She’s been out for her drive. [With a glance at her watch.] Claude ought to be in soon.

Cobbett.

What are you going to do?

Grace.

I’m going to use every means in my power to persuade him to change his mind.

Cobbett.

You’re not going to do anything foolish, Grace?

Grace.

How d’you mean? [His meaning suddenly strikes her.] You don’t think I might have to.... Oh, that would be too much to ask me.... D’you think I might have to tell him?

Cobbett.

Whatever you do, Grace, I want you to know that if anything happens I’m willing to do the straight thing.

Grace.

[Shaking her head.] No, I should never ask you to marry me. Now we both know how things are between us — how they’ve always been....

Cobbett.

I’m awfully sorry, Grace.

Grace.

There’s no need to be. I’m glad to know the truth. There was nothing that held us together before but my cowardice. I was so afraid of going back to that dreary loneliness. But you’ve given me courage.

Cobbett.

Is there nothing left of it at all?

Grace.

So far as I’m concerned nothing at all — but shame.

[Edith Lewis comes in. Grace, recovering herself quickly, throws off her seriousness and greets the girl with a pleasant smile.

Edith.

We’ve had such a lovely drive.

Grace.

And d’you think the country’s as beautiful as ever?

Edith.

[Gaily.] Oh, I didn’t look at the country. I was much too excited. Mrs. Insoley has been telling me the dreadful pasts of all the families in the neighbourhood. It appears the further they go back the more shocking their behaviour has been.

Cobbett.

I notice that even the grossest immorality becomes respectable when it’s a hundred years old.

Grace.

[Ironically.] It’s very hard, isn’t it? Mrs. Grundy has no mercy. She’ll take even you to her bosom before you know where you are.

[Enter Mrs. Insoley, followed by Miss Vernon and Miss Hall. Miss Hall is carrying Mrs. Insoley’s lap-dog.

Grace.

I hope you enjoyed your drive.

Mrs. Insoley.

I didn’t go for my enjoyment, Grace; I went to exercise the horses.

Grace.

[Smiling.] Meanwhile, I hear you took the opportunity of enlarging Edith’s young mind.

Miss Vernon.

[To Edith.] When you come to Foley you must remind me to show you the portraits of my great-grandmother, Mary Vernon. She had a tremendous affair with the Regent, you know.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Pleasantly.] My dear Helen, I have the greatest affection for you, but I cannot allow a statement like that to go unchallenged. There is no evidence whatever of the truth of it.

Miss Vernon.

I don’t know how you can say that, Mrs. Insoley, considering that I have all my great-grandmother’s letters to the Regent.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a chuckle.] Where are his letters to your great-grandmother?

Miss Vernon.

She gave them back at the time he returned hers, naturally.

Mrs. Insoley.

I can see her. If she had any letters she would have kept them. Any woman would.

Miss Vernon.

[Bridling a little.] I can’t imagine why you should suddenly throw doubts on a story that the whole county has believed for a hundred years. Every one knew all about Mary Vernon.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Chaffing her.] I am aware that your great-grandmother was an abandoned hussy, but that in itself is no proof that she ever had anything to do with the Regent.

Miss Vernon.

You can’t deny that he slept at Foley, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

Only one night.

Miss Vernon.

Well?

Mrs. Insoley.

It’s notorious that at that very time he was on terms of the greatest intimacy with Pamela Bainbridge. [To Edith Lewis.] I am not an Insoley, thank God; I am a Bainbridge. And whenever he came to this part of the country he stayed with us.

Miss Vernon.

I know you’ve always flattered yourself that there was something between them.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With complete self-assurance.] And well I may, considering that I still have a lock of hair which he gave my grandmother.

Miss Vernon.

Half the families in the country have a greasy lock of hair which they tell you was the Regent’s. Personally, I think it’s rather snobbish to make a claim of that sort unless one’s perfectly sure.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Bridling in her turn.] I think you’re extremely rude, Helen. In the presence of a man I can’t go into details, but I have proof of every word I say. You know what I mean, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

I believed the worst from the beginning, Mrs. Insoley.

Miss Vernon.

I have no doubt you firmly believe what you say, Mrs. Insoley; but if you don’t mind my saying so, one has only to look at the portrait of Pamela Bainbridge to know the whole thing’s absurd.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Frigidly.] We won’t argue the point, Helen; I know I’m right, and there’s an end of it.... Put the dog on that chair, Louisa.

Miss Hall.

That’s Mr. Cobbett’s chair, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Still a little out of temper.] Has Mr. Cobbett bought it?

Cobbett.

No, but Mr. Cobbett’s been sitting in it.

Mrs. Insoley.

And may no one use a chair that Mr. Cobbett has been sitting in?

Cobbett.

Certainly. But it so happens that Mr. Cobbett is just going to sit in it again.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a grim smile.] Mr. Cobbett has legs.

Cobbett.

Only two, and if a merciful Providence had intended him to stand on them it would undoubtedly have provided him with four.

Mrs. Insoley.

Mr. Cobbett seems to be better acquainted with the designs of Providence than I should have expected.... Louisa, give me the dog. He shall sit on my lap.

Cobbett.

[Chaffing her.] Ah, if you’d only told me that was the alternative, of course I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment.

Mrs. Insoley.

I think you are very vulgar, sir.... I’m surprised that you should laugh at such an inane joke, Grace.

Grace.

You forget that I have a naturally vulgar nature.

Mrs. Insoley.

I try to, but you take great pains to remind me.

[Claude comes in with Archibald.

Claude.

Well, did you enjoy your drive, mother?

Mrs. Insoley.

I didn’t go for my enjoyment, Claude; I went to exercise the horses.

Archibald.

We’ve been to a parish meeting.

Claude.

[Rather peevishly.] It’s getting almost impossible to do anything for these Somersetshire people. They’re such an obstinate, pig-headed lot.

Mrs. Insoley.

I prophesied it forty years ago. When they first introduced all this nonsense about education, I said it was a serious matter.

Archibald.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] Like all good prophets you apparently took care to be rather vague about it, mother.

Mrs. Insoley.

Considering you weren’t born I don’t see what you can know about it, Archibald. I said this would happen. I said they would make the lower classes so independent that no one would be able to do anything with them. I went for a walk in the village this morning and nobody took any notice of me. Isn’t that so, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

No, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

What do you mean by no, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

[Hastily.] I beg your pardon. I mean yes, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

A few old men touched their hats, and one old woman curtsied, but that was all.

Claude.

[With a little nod.] Of course it’s not important in itself, but it’s the sign of a change. The long and short of it is that they don’t look up to their betters as they used to.

Grace.

[Ironically.] Perhaps they’ve ceased to realise that we are their betters.

Claude.

It’s not too late to teach them their mistake. Personally I mean to be master in my own house.

Grace.

[Abruptly.] Peggy Gann came to see me this afternoon, Claude.

Claude.

Did she?

[There is a very short pause. Cobbett sees what is going to happen and gets up.

Cobbett.

[To Edith Lewis.] Wouldn’t you like to come for a stroll in the garden?

Edith Lewis.

Yes.

Grace.

I’ve asked her to fetch her father.

[Cobbett and Edith Lewis go out.

Claude.

[Without waiting for the movement.] I’m sorry you did that, Grace. I’ve got nothing to say to him.

Grace.

[To Mrs. Insoley.] Do you know that Claude has threatened to dismiss Gann if Peggy hasn’t gone by ten o’clock to-night?

Mrs. Insoley.

For once in his life Claude has acted with spirit. He gave Gann twenty-four hours to think it over. My father would have given him fifteen minutes.

Grace.

Why was it all kept from me? It seems that everybody knew but me.

Claude.

Hang it all, Grace, I wanted to tell you last night and you wouldn’t let me.

Grace.

[Startled.] Oh! Was it that? I didn’t know.... Claude, I want you to be very kind and forgive that wretched girl. I want you to tell Gann that she needn’t go.

Claude.

[Quite firmly.] My dear, I can’t do that. I’ve made up my mind and I must stick to it.

Grace.

Why?

Claude.

Hang it all, what would happen to the discipline of the estate if I were always shilly-shallying? Every one in the place knows that when I say a thing I mean it. It’s an enormous advantage to all concerned.

Grace.

[With a coaxing smile.] It wouldn’t do any harm if you made an exception just this once.

Claude.

It’s a matter of upholding my authority. Gann refused to do what I told him, and I had to threaten him with immediate dismissal. I couldn’t eat my words now without looking a perfect fool.

Grace.

Don’t you think it’s awfully unjust to send a girl away because she’s got into trouble?

Claude.

It’s a rule of the estate. I didn’t make it.

Grace.

[Turning to Miss Vernon.] Helen, you’re a woman. You must see how cruel it is. Can’t you say something to help me?

Miss Vernon.

I don’t know what else one’s to do. After all, we have the same rule at Foley.

Claude.

They have it on half the large estates in the kingdom. It’s absolutely essential if one has any regard for decency.

Miss Vernon.

I don’t suppose it would be so common, and it certainly wouldn’t have lasted so long, if there hadn’t been some good in it.

Grace.

[Violently.] Oh, it’s maddening. Always, always, there’s that stone wall in front of me. Whatever is, is good. However cruel and unjust a custom is, no one must touch it because it’s a custom. If a law is infamous, does it become any less infamous because people have suffered from it for a dozen generations?

Mrs. Insoley.

Perhaps you’re not very competent to judge matters of this sort, my dear.

Archibald.

I’m afraid your sympathy is rather wasted in this particular case. Peggy Gann isn’t a very deserving young woman.

Grace.

If she were, there’d be no need for me to plead for her.

Mrs. Insoley.

On those lines the more of a hussy a girl is the more she’s deserving of sympathy.

Grace.

[To Archibald.] You had nothing against her till this happened.

Archibald.

Nothing very definite. She was always rather cheeky, and she never came to Sunday-school very regularly.

Grace.

Is that all?

Mrs. Insoley.

My own belief is that the Ganns are really Dissenters.

Grace.

[Impatiently.] Good heavens, they positively revel in going to church.

Mrs. Insoley.

That may be or it may not. But they give me the impression of chapel people.

Archibald.

Heaven knows, I don’t want to seem hard and unsympathetic, but after all, you’re not going to keep people moral if you pamper those who aren’t.

Grace.

And what d’you think’ll happen to her if you make her leave here?

Archibald.

We’ll do our best for her. It’s not a pleasant position for any of us, Grace. I’ve been wretched about the whole thing, and I’m sure Claude has too.

Claude.

Of course I have. But hang it all, in our position we can’t afford to think of sentiment. Especially now that they’re attacking us all round we’ve got to show them that we can keep a firm hand on the reins.

Archibald.

Do us the justice to see that we’re really trying to do what’s right. It may be very wrong that we should be in our particular positions, and we may be quite unworthy of them. But we didn’t make society, and we’re not responsible for its inequalities. We find ourselves in a certain station, and we have to act accordingly.

Claude.

The long and the short of it is that it’s our duty to look after those whom Providence has placed in our charge. And it’s our duty to punish as well as to reward.

Grace.

Oh, how hard you are! One would think you’d never done anything in your life that you regret. [With increasing violence.] Oh, you virtuous people, I hate you. You’re never content till you see the sinner actually frizzling. As if hell were needed when every sin brings its own punishment! And you never make excuses. You don’t know how many temptations we resist for the one we fall to.

Miss Vernon.

Grace! What are you saying!

[Grace, almost beside herself, looks at her with haggard eyes. Suddenly she gives a start, and stares at Miss Vernon with horror. She has realised that Miss Vernon knows the relations that have existed between her and Henry Cobbett. There is a pause. The Butler comes in.

Moore.

Gann and his daughter are here, sir.

Claude.

Oh, yes, I’ll come at once.

Moore.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Insoley.

Why shouldn’t he come here, Claude?

Grace.

Yes, let him come by all means. And then you can see for yourselves.

Archibald.

I’ll tell Moore, shall I? [He goes to the door as he says this and calls.] Moore. Tell Gann to come here.

Miss Vernon.

[Rising.] I think I’ll leave you. This isn’t any business of mine. [To Miss Hall.] Will you come with me?

Miss Hall.

Do you want me, Mrs. Insoley?

Mrs. Insoley.

No. You’ve had no exercise to-day, Louisa. You’d better walk three times round the garden.

Miss Hall.

I’m not very well to-day, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

Oh, nonsense! You’re in the best of health. And you can take the dog with you.

Miss Hall.

Very well, Mrs. Insoley.

[Miss Vernon and Miss Hall go out.

Mrs. Insoley.

Louisa’s very troublesome sometimes. She fancies she’s not feeling well. But she’s twenty-five years younger than I am, and I’ve never had a day’s illness in my life.

[Moore opens the door for Gann, who comes into the room, cap in hand, and stands at the door awkwardly. He is in his working clothes.

Claude.

Good afternoon, Gann.

Gann.

Good afternoon, sir. Peggy said you wished to see me, sir.

Grace.

I asked her to bring you here, Gann. I thought it would be better if you spoke to Mr. Insoley.

Gann.

I’ve got nothing to say to Mr. Insoley, ma’am.

Claude.

I was hoping to find you in a more reasonable state of mind, Gann. You know, you can only hurt yourself by being pig-headed and stubborn.

Gann.

I didn’t know as how I was, sir.

Claude.

[To Grace.] You see, the man doesn’t give me a chance.

Gann.

[Making an effort on himself.] Please, Squire, I come to know if I’m really to go to-morrow? I know you said you’d send me away, Squire. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe you meant it.

Claude.

I’m willing to listen to anything you’ve got to say. I want to be quite fair to you.

Gann.

If I could only make you see as what you ask ain’t possible, I’m sure you’d let us stay. There’s nowhere Peggy can go to.

Claude.

Hang it all, Mrs. Insoley’ll do all she can for her. You may be quite sure that Peggy shan’t want for money.

Gann.

It isn’t money the girl wants. If I send ‘er away she’ll just go to the bad altogether.

Claude.

You see, it’s a matter of principle, Gann. It would be devilish unjust to make an exception in your favour.

Gann.

[Stepping forward with surly indignation and facing Claude.] I love the girl and I can’t bear to part with ‘er. She’s a good girl in her ‘eart, only she’s had a misfortune.

Claude.

That’s all very fine and large, Gann. But if she’d been a good girl, hang it all, she’d have had power to resist temptation.

Grace.

[Terrified.] Claude, you don’t know what you’re saying.

Claude.

I don’t want to rub it in and all that sort of thing, but my own feeling is that if she came rather a cropper, it was because she was — if you don’t mind my saying so — because she was that way inclined. I don’t think anyone can accuse me of being a hard man, but I’m afraid I haven’t much pity for women who....

Grace.

[Interrupting.] Claude, don’t go on — for God’s sake.

Gann.

That’s your last word, Squire? If the girl don’t go, I must?

Claude.

I’m afraid so.

Gann.

I’ve served you faithful, man and boy, for forty years. And I was born in that there cottage I live in now. If you turn us out where are we to go to? I’m getting on in years, and I shan’t find it easy to get another job. It’ll mean the work’us.

Claude.

I’m very sorry. I can’t do anything for you. You’ve had your chance and you’ve refused to take it.

[Gann turns his cap round nervously. His face is distorted with agony. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come, only an inarticulate groan. He turns on his heel.

Claude.

In consideration of your long service I’ll give you fifty pounds so that you can tide over the next few months.

Gann.

[Violently.] You can keep your dirty money.

[He goes out. Grace goes up to Claude desperately.

Grace.

Oh, Claude, you can’t do it. You’ll break the man’s heart. Haven’t you any pity? Haven’t you any forgiveness?

Claude.

It’s no good, Grace. I must stick to what I’ve said.

Grace.

It’s not often I’ve begged you to do anything for me.

Claude.

Well, hang it all, this is the first time I’ve ever refused.

Grace.

[Bitterly.] I suppose because I’ve never asked you for anything before that wasn’t absolutely trifling.

Mrs. Insoley.

Why are you making such a point of it, Grace?

Grace.

Is it very strange that I should feel sorry for anyone who’s in distress?

Claude.

I’ll do anything in the world to please you, darling, but in this case you must trust to my better judgment.

Grace.

How can you be so hard?

Claude.

Come, Grace, don’t be angry with me. It’s bad enough as it is.

Mrs. Insoley.

I have no patience with you, Claude. When your father made up his mind to do anything it was done, and it would never have occurred to me to oppose him.

Archibald.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] You forget, mother, that was because you generally made up my father’s mind some time before he did.

Grace.

[To Mrs. Insoley and Archibald.] Will you leave me alone with Claude. I must talk to him alone.

Archibald.

Come, mother. Let me take you for a stroll three times round the garden.

[Mrs. Insoley and Archibald go out.

Grace.

I couldn’t say it before them. They’d never understand. They’d only sneer. But can’t you see, Claude, that it’s out of the question to drive Gann away so callously? He loves the place just as much as you love it.... In my heart I seem to feel suddenly all that his shabby little cottage means to him — the woods and coverts and the meadows and the trees. His life is bound up with Kenyon. His roots are in the earth as if he were a growing thing. Can’t you see what it must mean to him to leave it?

Claude.

He only goes because he’s headstrong and obstinate. He’s the Somersetshire peasant all over. You do your best for them and you get no gratitude. You try to reason with them, but you can’t get a single idea into their thick heads.

Grace.

You can’t punish him because he’s stupid and dull. You’re throwing him upon the world in his old age. It means starvation.

Claude.

You must know that I’m only doing it because I think it’s my duty.

Grace.

[Impatiently.] Oh, men always talk of their duty when they want to be odiously cruel.

Claude.

Grace, how can you be so unkind to me?

Grace.

Oh, Claude, if you love me at all, give in to me this time. You don’t know what it means to me. I’ve often been horrible to you, but I’m going to be different. I want to love you. I want to be more to you than I’ve ever been. Claude, I implore you to do what I ask you — just because I ask it, because you love me.

Claude.

[Withdrawing himself a little.] I could not love you, dear, so much, loved I not honour....

Grace.

[Interrupting passionately.] Oh, no, don’t, Claude; for God’s sake be sincere and natural. Can’t you forget that you’re a landed proprietor and a J.P. and all the rest of it, and remember that you’re only a man, as weak and as — as frail as the rest of us? You hope to be forgiven yourself, and you’re utterly pitiless.

Claude.

My darling, it’s just as much for your sake that I’m firm.

Grace.

[Impatiently.] Oh, how can you make phrases! What on earth have I got to do with it?

Claude.

Hang it all, don’t you see that it’s because of you that I can’t give way? It’s beastly having to say it. It makes me feel such an ass.

Grace.

[Beginning to be frightened.] What have I got to do with it?

Claude.

Until I knew you I don’t suppose I had a higher opinion of women than most men, but you taught me what a — what a stunning fine thing a good woman is.

Grace.

[Hoarsely.] It’s perfectly absurd. It’s — it’s unreasonable. I’ve not been.... Only the other day you said I was cold. And just now you told me I was unkind.

Claude.

I dare say that’s all my fault. I expect I bore you sometimes. After all, I know you’re worth about six of me. I can’t expect you to love me as I love you.

Grace.

D’you mean to say that if I weren’t — what you think me, you wouldn’t insist on that poor girl going away?

Claude.

I don’t suppose I should feel quite the same about it.

Grace.

[Trying to keep back her sobs.] It’s so unreasonable.

Claude.

Even if it weren’t for the rule of the estate, I couldn’t let her live in the same place as you. I can’t help it. It’s just a sort of instinct. It simply disgusts me to think that you may meet that — that woman when you walk about, and her kid.

Grace.

Oh, Claude, you don’t know what you’re saying.

Claude.

When I heard she’d been here and you’d been talking to her, I felt almost sick.

Grace.

[Breaking down.] Oh, I can’t bear it.

Claude.

Come, darling, don’t let’s quarrel any more. It hurts me so awfully.

Grace.

[To herself.] Oh, I can’t. I can’t.

Claude.

Say you forgive me, darling.

Grace.

I?... If I weren’t what you.... Oh, it’s too much to ask anyone. Claude, I beseech you to give way.

[He shakes his head. She falls back in despair, realising that there is no way to move him.

Grace.

Oh, what a punishment!

[The sound of a gong is heard. Claude looks at his watch.

Claude.

By Jove, I had no idea it was so late. There’s the dressing gong. You must hurry up.

Grace.

[Looking at him vaguely.] What is it?

Claude.

Time to dress for dinner, darling. You won’t be late, will you? You know how mother hates to be kept waiting.

Grace.

[Dully.] No, I won’t be late.

[He takes her hand and presses it, then hurries out. She has given him her hand inertly, and it falls heavily to her side as he drops it. She remains standing where he left her. She tries to stifle the tearless sobs that seem to choke her. The Butler comes in.

Moore.

Peggy Gann wishes to know if you want to see her again, madam.

Grace.

[With a start.] Has she been waiting all this time?

Moore.

Yes’m. She didn’t know as Gann had left. He never come back to the servants’ hall.

Grace.

Tell her to come here.

Moore.

Very good, madam.

[He goes out. In a moment he opens the door for Peggy Gann.

Grace.

Oh, Peggy, how ill you look! I’ve been able to do nothing for you.

Peggy.

[With a cry of distress.] Oh, mum, I was hoping. You said you’d do your best for me.

Grace.

My dear, I’m so dreadfully sorry for you.

Peggy.

It’s so ‘ard on me, mum, and so ‘ard on father. Wasn’t there something more you could do, mum?

Grace.

[With a little gasp of anguish.] I did all I could. I couldn’t do anything more. I couldn’t really.... [Almost to herself.] It’s too much to ask anyone.

Peggy.

I’ve got to go then, and there’s an end of it. You won’t let father be turned away, will you, mum? That’s all I care about now. It ‘ud just break his ‘eart.

Grace.

[With a ray of hope.] D’you think he’ll let you go? I think it’s the best thing after all, Peggy. I’ve done — I’ve done all I could.

Peggy.

No, he won’t hear of it. But I shall go all the same — somewhere he can’t find me.

Grace.

[Anxious now to make the best of it.] I dare say it won’t be for very long, Peggy. Have you as much money as you want? I should like to do something for you.

Peggy.

I shan’t want anything, thank you, mum. And thank you for all you’ve done. And if anything come to ‘appen to me, you’d see as the baby wasn’t sent to the workhouse, wouldn’t you, mum?

Grace.

How d’you mean? I don’t understand.

Peggy.

I’m not going to take the baby with me, mum. It would only be a hindrance.

Grace.

[With a sigh of relief.] Oh, I was so afraid you meant....

Peggy.

Is there anything else you want me for, mum?

Grace.

No, Peggy.

Peggy.

Then I’ll say good evening, mum.

Grace.

Good evening, Peggy.

[She watches Peggy go out, then she gives a little moan of despair.

Grace.

No, I couldn’t, I couldn’t.

Edith Lewis comes in gaily.

Edith Lewis.

There you are! I thought you were in your room. Your maid said you hadn’t come up yet.

Grace.

[Wearily.] I was just going.

Edith Lewis.

[With a smile.] I’ve got something dreadfully important to ask you.

Grace.

[Forcing a smile.] What is it?

Edith Lewis.

Well, I want to know if you’re going to wear the grey satin you wore on Saturday. You see, I only brought three dinner dresses down with me, and one of them’s a grey, only it’s much more slaty than yours, and it’ll look so cold beside it. So I shan’t put it on if you’re going to wear yours.

Grace.

[Dully.] No, I won’t wear my grey satin.

Edith Lewis.

What are you going to wear?

Grace.

I don’t know.

Edith Lewis.

But you must know.

Grace.

Does it matter?

Edith Lewis.

I don’t want to clash with you.

Grace.

[Clenching her hands to prevent herself from screaming.] I won’t put on anything that’ll interfere with your grey.

Edith Lewis.

Thank you. Now I can be quite happy. I say, we shall be so late.

[She runs off. Grace gives a little answering laugh to hers; and as Edith Lewis goes out, it lengthens into a mirthless, low, hysterical peal, broken with sobs.

END OF THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

[The dining-room at Kenyon Fulton. It is a fine room with French windows leading into the garden. On the walls are departed Insoleys of the last two or three generations, stiff ladies and gentlemen of the Victorian era, military-looking fellows in the uniform of the early nineteenth century, and ungainly Georgian squires with their wives in powdered hair. Between the windows, standing well away from the wall, rather far back, is a round table laid out for breakfast. On the Sheraton sideboard is a cloth, a stand for keeping dishes warm, a large ham, and plates and forks and spoons. Against the wall opposite the sideboard are a row of chairs, and there are half a dozen chairs round the table. There are doors right and left.

It is the morning after the events which occur in the Second Act, and when the curtain rises prayers have just finished. Claude is seated at the table with an immense prayer-book and a still larger Bible in front of him. The rest of the party are rising to their feet. They have been kneeling against various chairs. They consist of Mrs. Insoley, Miss Hall, and Miss Vernon. Well away from them, emphasising the fact that even the Almighty must recognise the difference between the gentry and their inferiors, have been praying the servants. They have been kneeling against the row of chairs that line the wall, according to their precedence, ranging from the Cook at one end to the Butler at the other; and they consist of the Cook, obese, elderly and respectable, Mrs. Insoley’s Maid, two Housemaids, the Kitchenmaid, the Footman, and Moore the butler. When they have scrambled to their feet they pause for a moment to gather themselves together, and, headed by the Cook, walk out. The Butler takes the Bible and the prayer-book off the table and carries them away. Claude gets up. He takes up his letters and the Times, which he puts under his arm.

Mrs. Insoley.

I didn’t see Grace’s maid, Claude.

Claude.

I dare say Grace couldn’t spare her.

Mrs. Insoley.

If Grace were more punctual she wouldn’t be obliged to deprive her maid of the pleasure and the duty of attending morning prayers.

Miss Hall.

I didn’t see your maid either, Miss Vernon.

Miss Vernon.

She’s a Roman Catholic.

Mrs. Insoley.

A Papist, Helen? Isn’t that very risky?

Miss Vernon.

Good gracious me, why?

Mrs. Insoley.

Aren’t you afraid she’ll corrupt the other servants?

Miss Vernon.

[With a smile.] She’s a highly respectable person of well over forty.

Mrs. Insoley.

She must be very flighty. I would as soon have an atheist.

Miss Hall.

I would never dream of having a Romish maid myself.

Mrs. Insoley.

Is there any likelihood of your having a maid at all, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

No, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

In that case I can’t quite see what is the use of your having an opinion on the subject.

Claude.

[Looking up from his letters, with a smile.] Miss Hall was only making a general reflection.

Mrs. Insoley.

I don’t like general reflections at the breakfast table.

[During the next few speeches the Butler and the Footman come in with covered entrée dishes which they put on the sideboard, coffee and milk in silver pots, and tea. They go out. Claude retires to the window to read his letters.

Mrs. Insoley.

I suppose you have prayers at Foley, Helen?

Miss Vernon.

I’m afraid I don’t. It makes me feel rather shy to read them.

Mrs. Insoley.

I don’t see why it should. It doesn’t make me feel shy.

Miss Hall.

You read them so well, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

I never forget while I’m reading them that I’m a woman of birth and a woman of property.

Miss Vernon.

And then I always think the servants hate them.

Mrs. Insoley.

The more they hate them, the better it is for them. That is life, my dear Helen. It’s a very good thing to begin the day by making it distinctly understood that masters are masters and servants are servants.

Miss Hall.

And I think servants like that, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

It is not a matter of interest to me if they like it or not, Louisa. I have the authority of my maker for it, and that is quite enough for me.

Henry Cobbett comes in.

Cobbett.

I’m sorry I’m late.

Mrs. Insoley.

When breakfast’s at ten o’clock I cannot imagine why people shouldn’t be punctual.

Cobbett.

Neither can I. [Going to the sideboard.] Let’s have a look at the food.

Mrs. Insoley.

See if there’s anything I’d like, Louisa.

Cobbett.

[Taking off the covers.] There’s fried sole — eggs and bacon.

Mrs. Insoley.

The staple of every middle-class hotel in the kingdom.

Cobbett.

And devilled kidneys.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’ll begin with fried sole, and then I’ll have eggs and bacon, Louisa.

Claude.

[Coming forward.] Oh, I’m sorry. Is there anything I can get you?

Mrs. Insoley.

[Chaffing her fellow-guest.] And then, if Mr. Cobbett has left any, perhaps I’ll see if I can eat a devilled kidney.

Cobbett.

[With a chuckle.] Mr. Cobbett thinks he’ll have to look nippy to get anything at all.

Claude.

[To Miss Vernon.] I wonder what I can tempt you with?

Miss Vernon.

I think I’ll have some fried sole.

Claude.

That’s the beauty of the country. One does relish one’s breakfast, doesn’t one?

[He hands a plate to Miss Vernon, and sits down with another for himself. As he does this he takes the Times from under his arm and sits on it.

Miss Vernon.

[With a smile at his peculiarity.] Is there anything in the Times, Claude?

Claude.

I haven’t read it yet.

Mrs. Insoley.

In some ways you’re much more of a Bainbridge than an Insoley, Claude. My father used always to sit on the Times so that no one should read it before him.

Claude.

I must say I don’t like to have my paper messed about by a lot of people before I’ve had a chance of looking at it. Half the pleasure of reading the Times is reading it first. Besides, the Morning Post and the Mail are on the sideboard for anyone who wants them.

Edith Lewis comes in.

Edith.

Oh, I know I’m dreadfully late. Everybody’s going to scold me. And I’m so sorry.

Cobbett.

[Imitating Mrs. Insoley.] When breakfast’s at ten o’clock I cannot imagine why people shouldn’t be punctual.

Edith.

[Smiling.] Isn’t Grace down yet? [To Claude, who rises to give her something to eat.] No, don’t bother. I’ll help myself.

Mrs. Insoley.

When I was mistress of this house breakfast was served punctually at eight o’clock every morning.

Cobbett.

[Flippantly.] It must have seemed just like supper. Did you have it the last thing before going to bed?

Mrs. Insoley.

I made no exceptions. The day after my cousin James broke his neck in the hunting-field and was brought to this very house on a stretcher, I came down as the clock struck. And a very hearty breakfast I ate too.

Cobbett.

Perhaps he didn’t leave you anything.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a chuckle.] On the contrary, he left me all his debts.

Enter Grace.

Grace.

Good morning.

Mrs. Insoley.

Good afternoon, Grace.

Grace.

Am I late? I think punctuality’s the most detestable of all the virtues.

Mrs. Insoley.

It’s a royal virtue, my dear.

Grace.

In that case, as a member of the middle classes, it’s not surprising that I don’t practise it.

Claude.

What can I get you, darling?

Grace.

Is there anything nice to eat?

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a grim smile.] That is a matter of opinion.

Claude.

There’s fried sole and eggs and bacon.

Grace.

Oh, I don’t think I’ll have anything. I’ll just have some tea and toast.

Claude.

My dear, you’re not off your feed, are you?

Mrs. Insoley.

Grace has probably been stuffing herself with bread and butter in her room. I have no patience with the new-fangled custom of giving people tea when they wake up. I never give it to my guests.

Cobbett.

Then don’t ask me to come and stay with you.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Delighted with the opportunity he has given her.] It may surprise you, but I have no intention of doing so.

Cobbett.

[Cheerfully.] There now. And I thought I’d made such an impression on you, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

That’s why I couldn’t risk asking you to stay with me. Perhaps at my age I am safe from your blandishments, but Louisa is extremely susceptible.

Miss Hall.

Oh, Mrs. Insoley, how can you! Why, Mr. Cobbett must be ten years younger than I am.

Mrs. Insoley.

I should put it at fifteen.

Cobbett.

Don’t dash my hopes to the ground, Miss Hall. I was flattering myself you didn’t look upon me altogether with indifference.

[Archibald Insoley comes in from the garden.

Archibald.

Ah, I thought I’d find you still at breakfast.

Claude.

We’re a lazy lot. I suppose you’ve been up and about for the last two hours.

Grace.

[Looking at him.] Is anything the matter?

Archibald.

Yes.

Claude.

I thought you looked a bit odd.

Archibald.

A most awful thing has happened. I’ve only just heard of it.

Claude.

[Getting up from his chair.] What is it, old man?

[By this time the breakfasters are disturbed; there is a certain embarrassment about them; they are suffering from the awkwardness people feel when they see some one in a condition of distress, but do not suppose it has anything to do with themselves.

Archibald.

You’d better come along with me to the smoking-room.

Grace.

It’s too late to make a secret of it, Archibald. You’d better tell us all.

Claude.

Fire away, old man.

Archibald.

[After a moment’s hesitation.] Peggy Gann has killed herself.

[Grace springs to her feet with a cry.

Claude.

[Looking at Grace.] My God.

[Grace comes forward, horror on her face, and walks unsteadily to a chair. She sinks into it and stares in front of her.

Claude.

Why on earth did she do it?

Grace.

How horrible!

Claude.

[Going up to her, about to put his hand on her shoulder.] Grace.

Grace.

[With a shiver.] Don’t touch me.

[He stops and looks at her, puzzled and unhappy.

Archibald.

You’d better come along.

Claude.

[With his eyes on Grace.] I feel I ought to do something. I don’t know what to do.

Archibald.

I’m afraid there’s nothing much that can be done.

Claude.

I’d better go and see Gann, hadn’t I?

Mrs. Insoley.

Won’t you finish your breakfast before you go, Claude?

Claude.

Oh, I can’t eat anything more.

[He goes out with Archibald.

Miss Hall.

What a dreadful thing.

[Grace gets up and goes to the window.

Mrs. Insoley.

Where are you going, Grace?

Grace.

[Almost beside herself.] For heaven’s sake, leave me alone.

[She stands with her back to the rest of the party, looking out of the window. There is a little awkward pause.

Mrs. Insoley.

Louisa, get me some of those devilled kidneys that Mr. Cobbett has been making so much fuss about.

Cobbett.

Let me.

Mrs. Insoley.

Louisa will get them. She likes to wait on me herself. Don’t you, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

Yes, Mrs. Insoley.

[Miss Vernon pushes back her chair.

Mrs. Insoley.

Have you finished, Helen?

Miss Vernon.

Yes.

Mrs. Insoley.

You’ve eaten nothing.

Miss Vernon.

I couldn’t.

[Miss Vernon looks as if she were going to speak to Grace, but she changes her mind and merely sits down in another chair. Every now and then she looks up at Grace.

Mrs. Insoley.

I cannot imagine why anyone should be upset because an abandoned hussy has been so wicked as to destroy herself.

Cobbett.

Well, it hasn’t taken my appetite away, at all events.

Mrs. Insoley.

If we were honest with ourselves, Mr. Cobbett, we should acknowledge that nobody’s death is important enough to interfere with one’s appetite.

Miss Hall.

Oh, Mrs. Insoley, how can you say such a thing?

Mrs. Insoley.

Louisa, I’ve been like a mother to you for ten years. Would you eat one potato less for your dinner if I were found dead in my bed to-morrow morning?

Miss Hall.

[Taking out her handkerchief.] Oh, yes, Mrs. Insoley. I really, really would.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Touched.] You are a good girl, Louisa, and you may have that black lace shawl of mine. If you mend it carefully, it’ll last you for years.

Miss Hall.

Oh, thank you, Mrs. Insoley. You are so kind to me.

Edith.

D’you think I ought to offer to go away to-day? I was going to stay till to-morrow.

Cobbett.

I was going to-day in any case. I’m due to stay with some people in Wiltshire.

Mrs. Insoley.

You seem to be in great demand.

Cobbett.

I have a very pleasant fund of small talk.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m afraid this is not an occasion upon which you’ll find it of any use.

[There is a moment’s pause.

Edith.

I’m going into the garden.

Cobbett.

Come on. I’m dying for a smoke.

[She gets up and walks out through the French windows. Cobbett follows her.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Getting up from the table.] I think you should remember, my dear Grace, that suicide is not only very wicked, but very cowardly. I have no patience with the sentimentalities of the present day. Our fathers buried people who were sinful enough to destroy themselves at the cross-roads with a stake in their insides. And it served them right.

[Grace does not answer. Mrs. Insoley, with a shrug of the shoulders, walks out of the room, followed by Miss Hall. As soon as Grace hears the door shut she turns round with an exclamation, half-smothered, of impatient anger.

Grace.

Oh, did you hear? They have the heart to chatter like that when that unhappy girl is lying dead. They haven’t a word of pity. It seems to mean nothing to them that she sacrificed herself. If she died, it was to save her father, so that he shouldn’t be thrown out of work in his old age. And they call her wicked and sinful.

Miss Vernon.

But is that anything new to you? Haven’t you noticed that people always rather resent the heroism of others? They don’t like the claim it makes on them, and the easiest way to defend themselves is with a sneer.

Grace.

I might have saved her life if I’d chosen, but I hadn’t the courage.

Miss Vernon.

[Afraid that she is going to blurt out a secret which had much better not be referred to.] Grace, don’t be stupid.

Grace.

Once I suspected what she was going to do, but she was too clever for me. I so wanted to believe it was all right. I wanted her to go away quietly.

Miss Vernon.

[Trying to calm her.] Lots of women have been in difficulties before, and they haven’t killed themselves. There must have been some kink in her nature. I suppose the instinct of life wasn’t so strong as it is with most of us, and — and she would have committed suicide for almost any reason.

Grace.

There was only one thing to say, and I didn’t say it. I couldn’t.

Miss Vernon.

My dear, for heaven’s sake pull yourself together.

Grace.

D’you know why Claude was so determined she should go? Because he couldn’t bear that I should come in contact with a woman who’d done wrong.

Miss Vernon.

[Looking down.] I had an idea that was at the back of his mind.

Grace.

[With sudden suspicion.] Why should you know what Claude feels better than I do?

Miss Vernon.

[Fearing she has given herself away.] It was a mere guess on my part.

Grace.

[With a keen look at her.] When I asked you the other day whether you’d been very much in love with Claude, you wouldn’t answer.

Miss Vernon.

[Smiling.] I really thought it was no business of yours.

Grace.

[Gravely.] Are you in love with him still?

[Miss Vernon is about to break out indignantly, but quickly controls herself.

Miss Vernon.

Yes, I suppose I am.

Grace.

Much?

Miss Vernon.

Hoarsely.] Yes.

[There is a pause.

Grace.

D’you know that my mother-in-law would give half her fortune to know — what you know? She’s been on the look-out to trip me up for years. It only wants a hint, and she can be trusted to make the most of it.

Miss Vernon.

My dear, I haven’t a notion what you’re talking about.

Grace.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] How did you find out?

[Miss Vernon looks at her for a moment, then looks away in embarrassment.

Miss Vernon.

I suspected before. In those circumstances hardly any men seem able to help a sort of proprietary air. He rather gave it away, you know.... And then yesterday I felt quite certain.

Grace.

I’m in your hands. What are you going to do?

Miss Vernon.

My dear, what can I do? Claude wouldn’t love me more because he loved you less.

Grace.

You must utterly despise me.

Miss Vernon.

No.... I feel awfully sorry for Claude.

Grace.

[Almost jealously.] Claude’s your first thought always.

Miss Vernon.

He’s been the whole world to me since I was a girl of sixteen.

Grace.

Is that why you never married?

Miss Vernon.

I suppose it is.

Grace.

I never dreamt that anyone could care for Claude like that. I suppose you see something in him that I’ve never seen.... He has a hundred different ways of getting on my nerves.

Miss Vernon.

You see, I’m not irritated by the mannerisms that irritate you.

Grace.

[Reflectively.] Real love accepts them, I suppose.

Miss Vernon.

It wants them even because it’s something individual to cling to.... And then it laughs at them a little, and the best love of all includes a sense of humour.

Grace.

It’s made me feel so strange to know that you love him, Helen. It’s given him something that he’s never had before.

Miss Vernon.

I don’t suppose any woman likes her husband less because she knows that another woman is eating her heart out for him.

Grace.

[Slowly.] I wonder if I’ve misjudged him all these years.... D’you think I found him shallow because there was no depth in me, and narrow because I was narrow myself.

[Enter Claude Insoley. Grace turns to him quickly.

Grace.

Did you see Gann?

Claude.

[Touching the bell.] No, he wasn’t at the cottage. I’ve sent for him and told him to come here.

Grace.

They know where he is then?

Claude.

Yes, worse luck. He’s been soaking at the public-house since it opened.

Miss Vernon.

But when did it happen?

Claude.

Peggy, d’you mean? She did it last night.

Grace.

Last night? But why have we only just heard of it?

Claude.

[Deeply discouraged.] Because they don’t come to us any more when they’re in trouble. They keep it to themselves.

[Moore answers the bell.

Claude.

Oh, Moore, when Gann comes let me know. I’ll come and see him at once.

Moore.

He’s here now, sir.

Claude.

Is he? I didn’t expect him yet. All right.

Grace.

Won’t you let him come here, Claude? I should like to speak to him too.

Claude.

I don’t think you’d better see him if he’s been drinking. He may be going to make himself rather objectionable.

Grace.

I must say to him what I’ve got on my heart, Claude.

Claude.

Very well. [To Moore.] Tell Gann to come here.

Moore.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.

Miss Vernon.

I dare say you’d like me to leave you.

Grace.

You don’t mind, do you?

[With a shake of the head and a smile Miss Vernon goes out. Claude looks a little uncertainly at his wife. He seeks for something to say.

Claude.

What a nice woman that is! I can’t imagine why Archibald doesn’t hurry up and marry her.

Grace.

Perhaps he’s not in love with her.

Claude.

Any man in his senses would be in love with her.

[Grace does not answer, but she gives him a curious glance. Moore opens the door to show Gann in. Gann is dishevelled and untidy, his face haggard and drawn. He is not exactly drunk, but he is stupefied, partly with liquor and partly with grief. He carries his gun. He comes in, his cap on his head, and stands clumsily near the door.

Claude.

Take off your cap, Gann.

[Gann looks at him unsteadily and slowly takes off his cap.

Gann.

Did you want to speak to me, Squire?

Claude.

I’ve just been round to your cottage, Gann. I saw Peggy.... I want to tell you how awfully sorry I am for what’s happened. I can never forgive myself.

[Gann steps forward with a lurch and faces Claude.

Gann.

What d’you want me for? Couldn’t you let me be? D’you still want me to go?

Claude.

No. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

Gann.

Give us time and we’ll clear. We don’t want long. Give us time to bury the girl. That’s all we want.

[Grace gives an exclamation of horror.

Claude.

I hope you’ll stay. I want to do everything I can to make up for your loss. I want you to know that I blame myself most awfully.

Gann.

Will that bring ‘er back to life, d’you think?

Claude.

I’d give anything for this horrible accident not to have happened. [With a look at Grace.] I’m afraid it’s my fault.

Gann.

She killed ‘erself so as I shouldn’t be turned off. That’s why she killed ‘erself. You’re a hard master — you always was. She thought it was the only way to save me from the work’us.

Claude.

[Very awkwardly.] In future I’ll try to be different. I didn’t think I was hard. I thought I was only just.

Grace.

It was a cruel rule.

Claude.

I thought I was only doing my duty.

Gann.

She was a good girl, after all, Squire, a good girl.

Claude.

I’m sure she was.

Gann.

It’s easy enough for you people to keep straight. You don’t ‘ave temptations like we ‘ave.

Claude.

No, that’s true enough. I suppose it’s not really very hard for us to be moderately decent.

Grace.

[In a choking voice.] Where is the child now, Gann?

Gann.

[Violently.] D’you want that too? Ain’t you satisfied yet? Has the child got to go before I stay?

Grace.

No, no. I only wanted to know if there was anything I could do. I wanted to help you.

Gann.

I don’t want your ‘elp. I only want you to let me work and earn my wages.

Claude.

That you shall do, I promise you.

Gann.

Can I go now? I’ve got a deal to do this morning.

Claude.

Yes.... Will you shake hands with me before you go?

Gann.

What good’ll that do you?

[Claude gives a gesture of discouragement.

Claude.

I can only repeat that I’m most awfully sorry. I’m afraid there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make up for your great loss.... You can go now.

[Gann turns to go, while Claude and Grace watch him silently. Suddenly he comes back and thrusts his gun into Claude’s hand.

Gann.

Look ’ere, Squire, you take my gun. I ain’t fit to keep it.

Claude.

[Sharply.] What the devil d’you mean?

Gann.

Last night when the liquor was in me I swore I’d blow your brains out and swing for it. Don’t let me ‘ave the gun. I’m not fit to keep it yet. If I get on the drink again I’ll kill you.

Claude.

What the dickens d’you mean by speaking to me like that! Of course you must have your gun. I can’t allow you to neglect your work.

Grace.

[Almost in a whisper.] Claude, take care.

Claude.

[Looking at the lock.] Why isn’t it loaded?

Gann.

They took the cartridges out. I was about mad, and I don’t know what I said. If I’d come across you then — you wouldn’t be standing where you are now.

Claude.

I suppose you take eights?

[Grace and Gann both look at him. Grace gives a start when she realises what he is going to do.

Gann.

That’s right.

[Claude nods and goes to the door. He hesitates, with a look at Grace.

Grace.

I shall be all right.

[He goes out. In a moment he comes back with two cartridges. He puts them in the gun, and hands it back to the gamekeeper.

Claude.

Here you are. I don’t think I’m afraid. I’ll take my chance of your wanting to shoot me.

[Gann takes the gun, and his hands close round it convulsively. He half raises it. Claude goes to the door through which he has just come, and closes it. Then, almost mastered by the temptation, Gann pulls himself together and advances a step towards his master. Grace gives a stifled cry. Claude turns round and faces the man.

Claude.

That’ll do, Gann. I don’t think I have anything more to say to you. You can go.

[Gann struggles to command himself. His fingers itch to shoot, but Claude’s unconcern prevents him.

Gann.

By God!

[He turns round to go, and flings the gun violently from him.

Claude.

[Peremptorily.] Gann, take your gun.

[The man stops, looks at his master, and then, cowed, picks it up. He lurches heavily out of the room. There is a pause. Grace draws a long breath.

Grace.

I’m glad you did that, Claude.

Claude.

[Thinking she refers to his attempts at apology.] It was very difficult to know what to say to him.

Grace.

I didn’t mean that. I meant, I’m glad you made him take the gun.

Claude.

Oh! Hang it all, you didn’t think I was likely to be frightened of one of my own servants, did you?

Grace.

[In a low voice.] I was rather afraid he was going to shoot you.

Claude.

So was I. But I felt pretty sure he saw two of me, and I thought he’d probably shoot at the wrong one.

Grace.

You’re very plucky.

Claude.

Rot! [He hesitates for a moment.] Grace, I’m afraid you think I’ve been an awful skunk.

Grace.

[With a quick look at him.] We none of us knew anything like this was going to happen.

Claude.

Will you forgive me?

Grace.

[Startled.] I?

Claude.

I’ve been feeling such an awful cad. If I’d only done what you wanted me to, this wouldn’t have happened.

Grace.

That’s not your fault. I didn’t say — what I should have said to make you change your mind.

Claude.

It rather put my back up that you should be so set on letting Peggy stay. But it struck me afterwards, of course you couldn’t feel the same about it as I did. I think if one’s awfully straight, one’s full of charity, don’t you know.

Grace.

My dear Claude, you talk as if I were a girl of eighteen.

Claude.

I don’t suppose you remember, but when Archibald told us, I wanted to say something to you....

Grace.

Yes, your first thought was for me, wasn’t it?

Claude.

[Going on.] And I came near you. And — and you sort of shuddered, and said: “For God’s sake, don’t touch me!”

Grace.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be unkind.

Claude.

No, I know you didn’t. It just came out unawares. And — oh, Grace, I couldn’t bear to think you — you couldn’t stick me, don’t you know.... I suppose I’m a damned fool, but I haven’t made you hate and loathe me, have I?

Grace.

I’m not worth so much troubling about, Claude.

Claude.

I can’t help it. You’ve just somehow got in my blood and bones, and if it didn’t sound such drivel, I’d say you meant everything in the world to me. Only you just laugh at me when I say things like that.

Grace.

[Explaining to herself rather than to him.] It’s very hard for all of us to say what we mean. The words we use are so frayed. One ought to guess at — at the soul within them.

Claude.

I’ve been trying to think about Gann and his daughter, but I can’t really think of anything but you.

Grace.

You know, Claude, no one’s so wonderful as you think me. I’m no longer so young as all that, and you’re the only person who ever thought me very pretty.

Claude.

I don’t mind. Sometimes, so that my love should mean more to you, don’t you know, I’ve wanted you to get older quickly, and I’ve wanted you to be plain.

Grace.

[With a little hysterical laugh.] Oh, my dear, what a horrible prospect.

Claude.

Don’t laugh at me now, Grace.

Grace.

[With tears in her voice.] I’m not laughing at you. God knows I’m not laughing at you.

Claude.

I’m such an ass at explaining myself. What I want to make you understand is that I don’t love you for anything that other people could love you for. I love you because you’re you, don’t you know. Because you’re so awfully good and straight. And you know I respect you so awfully.

Grace.

[In a hoarse voice.] I’m not good, Claude.

Claude.

If I didn’t believe it, I should think the world a pretty rotten place.

Grace.

I haven’t been the sort of wife you wanted. I felt that always.

Claude.

You’ve been the only woman in the world for me. Always.

Grace.

[Deeply moved.] Not many women can say that, can they? One ought to be very grateful.

Claude.

D’you remember the first time I ever saw you?

Grace.

[Looking away from him.] I wonder you didn’t marry Helen Vernon years before you came across me.

Claude.

Hang it all, why on earth should I have done that!

Grace.

Your mother was very anxious that you should.

Claude.

I was just as little in love with Helen Vernon as she was in love with me.

Grace.

I can’t help seeing that she would have made you a much better wife than I have. She would have understood you. I don’t think I ever understood you. I’ve been a wretched failure, Claude.

Claude.

Darling, how can you talk such rot?

Grace.

She might have had children. You wanted them so much, Claude, and I haven’t given you any.

Claude.

That’s been hard luck on both of us, darling.

Grace.

[With deep feeling.] It might have made all the difference.

Claude.

If I wanted children it was chiefly because I thought you’d be happier. You wouldn’t have minded the dull life down here then. And you might have cared a bit more for me because I was their father.

Grace.

It all comes back to me, doesn’t it? I’m in all your thoughts always.

Claude.

D’you mind?

Grace.

I’m so ashamed.

[Archibald comes in from the hall.

Archibald.

Oh, Claude, I met the coroner’s officer on my way along here. He wants to see you.

Claude.

All right. I’ll come. Is he in the hall?

Archibald.

[With a nod.] I told him you knew nothing more than I’d said. But I’m afraid they’ll call you at the inquest.

Claude.

The only thing’s to grin and bear it.

[They go out. Grace sinks into a chair at the writing-table and buries her face in her hands. In a moment Henry Cobbett enters. She starts up when she hears his footstep on the gravel. He has his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm.

Cobbett.

I’m just starting. I was looking for you to say good-bye.

Grace.

Is it time for you to go already? I didn’t know it was late.

Cobbett.

Thanks awfully for putting me up. It’s been perfectly topping.

Grace.

It was nice of you to come. I hope you’ll run down again one of these days.

Cobbett.

[In a lower tone.] I suppose you never want to set eyes on me again.

Grace.

Never.

Cobbett.

You’re not awfully unhappy, are you?

Grace.

[With something between a sob and a chuckle.] Awfully.

Cobbett.

I’m dreadfully sorry.

Grace.

That doesn’t do me much good, does it?

Cobbett.

If there’s anything I can do, I’d like awfully to do it if you’d let me.

Grace.

No, whatever happens no one can help me but myself.

Cobbett.

I shouldn’t have played the fool if I’d thought you were going to take things so much to heart.

Grace.

[Ironically.] That’s the nuisance of women, isn’t it? They will make an affair of what’s really only an episode.

Cobbett.

You have a way of saying things that makes one feel an awful bounder. After all, one can’t help falling in love, and one’s not a blackguard because one falls out of it.

Grace.

D’you remember asking me yesterday if I was beginning to care for Claude differently?

Cobbett.

Yes.

Grace.

I love him as I never thought it was possible to love. I don’t know why I love him. It’s come to me suddenly. I — oh, I can’t tell you what it is. It’s like hunger in my soul. And I’m frightened.

Cobbett.

I should have thought that made everything all right.

Grace.

It’s come too late. I’m — soiled. Afterwards — you know what I mean, when you and I — the first thing I felt was surprise because I found myself no different. I thought when a woman had done that everything would seem altered. But I felt just the same as before. It’s only now. It’s like the stain of blood — don’t you remember — not all the perfumes of Arabia....

Cobbett.

[Worried and moved.] You know, it’s absurd to take it like that.

Grace.

[With increasing agitation.] Oh, what have I done! If I’d only had the strength to resist! It’s now that I see it all, the utter degradation of it, the hateful ugliness. Oh, I loathe myself. How can I take my heart to Claude when there’s you standing between us?

Cobbett.

I’m awfully sorry, Grace.

Grace.

I’d give anything in the world if I hadn’t done what I have done. I might be so happy now. I haven’t a chance. The fates are against me. What’s the good of loving Claude now — I’m not fit to be his wife.

[She is beside herself. Cobbett, not knowing what to do, stands looking at her. The sound is heard of a motor-horn blowing.

Cobbett.

[With a slight start.] What’s that?

Grace.

It’s Rooney. He’s afraid you’ll miss the train. You’d better hurry up.

Cobbett.

I can’t leave you like this.

Grace.

[Ironically.] I shouldn’t like you to miss your train.

Cobbett.

I suppose you hate and loathe me.

Grace.

I’d wish you were dead, only it wouldn’t do me much good, would it?

Cobbett.

[Reflectively.] The fact is, only the wicked should sin.... When the virtuous do things they shouldn’t they do make such an awful hash of it.

[Moore comes in followed by the Footman.

Grace.

What is it?

Moore.

I was going to clear away, madam.

Grace.

Oh, yes, I forgot. [Holding out her hand to Cobbett.] You’ll have to look sharp.

END OF THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

The Scene is the same as in the first and second Acts, the drawing-room at Kenyon-Fulton. Two days have elapsed. It is about twelve o’clock in the morning. Mrs. Insoley is seated with her dog on her lap, and Miss Hall is reading the leading article of the Times to her.

Miss Hall.

[Reading.] “ ... to whom it would give the suffrage are marked off from all citizens who have ever and anywhere enjoyed the franchise in great civil communities by physical differences which no legislation can affect. Women, they insist, pay rates and taxes as men do, and therefore, they argue, women ought to vote as men do. But rates and taxes may be imposed or abolished by legislation. Men may become ratepayers and taxpayers, or cease to be ratepayers and taxpayers. The one thing that no enthusiasm, no reasoning, no eloquence, demonstrations, or statutes can achieve is to make a woman a man.”

Mrs. Insoley.

How true that is, Louisa.

Miss Hall.

I’ve always thought exactly the same myself, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

And there’s another thing, Louisa. No man can become a mother.

Miss Hall.

[Reflectively.] No, I suppose not.

Mrs. Insoley.

Have you any doubts on the subject, Louisa?

Miss Hall.

Oh, no, Mrs. Insoley.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Ironically.] You may take it from me that no man can become a mother. And apparently very few women either nowadays.

[Archibald Insoley comes in.

Archibald.

Good morning, mother.

Mrs. Insoley.

Good morning, my dear.

[He bends down and kisses her.

Archibald.

Good morning, Miss Hall.

Miss Hall.

Good morning.

Mrs. Insoley.

Louisa, you may read the rest of that article to yourself in the garden.

Miss Hall.

[Getting up.] Very well, Mrs. Insoley. Shall I take the dog?

Mrs. Insoley.

[Handing it over.] Yes. And be very careful with him. He says he’s not very well to-day.

[Miss Hall takes the dog and goes out.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m glad to have an opportunity of talking to you, Archibald. I’ve fancied that you’ve been rather avoiding me the last day or two.

Archibald.

[Cheerfully.] Oh, no, my dear mother.

Mrs. Insoley.

When I asked Grace to invite Helen Vernon to stay here for a few days, it was in the confident hope that you would make her a proposal of marriage.

Archibald.

I respect and esteem Miss Vernon, but I confess that no warmer feeling has ever entered my bosom.

Mrs. Insoley.

It’s not necessary that warm feelings should enter a clergyman’s bosom, Archibald. She’s of very good family indeed, and an heiress. Five thousand acres and a house that’s only just been done up.

Archibald.

[With a chuckle.] If there only weren’t a wife to be taken along with the property!

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a twinkle in her eyes.] It shouldn’t be necessary for me to tell a person of your profession that none of the pleasures of this world can be had without some drawback.

Archibald.

What a pity it is you weren’t a man, mother. You would have made such a bishop.

Mrs. Insoley.

Are you trying to change the conversation, Archibald?

Archibald.

I don’t think it would be a bad idea.

Mrs. Insoley.

Then I will only say one thing more. I am the meekest woman in the world, and a lamb could lead me. But I should like to remind you that the living of Kenyon-Fulton is not worth more than a hundred and seventy a year, and if you can keep a curate and live like a gentleman it’s only owing to my generosity.

Archibald.

I’m quite prepared to live on a hundred and seventy a year, mother. I dare say it would have just as good an effect on my figure as matrimony.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Rather crossly.] I don’t know what you’re talking about, Archibald.

Archibald.

I understood you to recommend marriage as a sort of heroic remedy for corpulence.

Mrs. Insoley.

You have nothing against Helen, I presume?

Archibald.

[Smiling.] I could have wished that fewer summers had passed over a fringe which I shrewdly suspect to be artificial.

Mrs. Insoley.

Of course it’s artificial, but you’re no chicken yourself, Archibald.

Archibald.

On the contrary, I’m much too old a bird to be caught by chaff.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m sure we don’t want another flighty young thing in the family.

Archibald.

I don’t think Grace has been very flighty the last day or two.

Mrs. Insoley.

What’s the matter with her? She’s been going about with a face as long as one of your sermons.

Archibald.

I’m afraid Peggy’s death upset her very much.

Mrs. Insoley.

[Irritably.] That’s the worst of those sort of people, they have no self-control. If she’s going to give way like this at the death of a kitchen-maid, what on earth is she going to do at the death of a duchess?

Archibald.

Is it a riddle, mother?

[Grace comes in. She looks tired and worn. She is in a very nervous state. She gives the impression that any folly, any wildness may be expected from her.

Grace.

Good morning, Archibald.

Archibald.

Good morning.

Grace.

I thought you’d be at the inquest.

Archibald.

No. There was no need for me to go. And Claude seemed to think he’d rather I didn’t.

Mrs. Insoley.

What is this?

Archibald.

The inquest on Peggy Gann.

Grace.

Have you seen Claude?

Archibald.

He looked in at the Rectory for five minutes. I’m afraid he’s awfully worried.

Mrs. Insoley.

I have no patience with Claude. He should have more self-respect than to let such a thing worry him.

Archibald.

He’s afraid he may be asked some very unpleasant questions.

Mrs. Insoley.

You seem entirely to forget the relative positions of the parties concerned. If Claude doesn’t want to answer an impertinent question, it’s the easiest thing in the world for him to fly into a passion and refuse. Who is the coroner?

Grace.

His name is Davies. He’s the local doctor.

Mrs. Insoley.

You’re not going to suggest that the local doctor would dream of asking a question unless he was quite sure Claude was prepared to answer it?

Archibald.

Davies is an advanced Radical. I’m afraid he may take the opportunity to have a fling at Claude.

Mrs. Insoley.

I’m all at sea. In my day we wouldn’t have stood a doctor for five minutes who was a Radical. We’d have made life unbearable for him until he became a Conservative or left the district.

Archibald.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] You’re looking rather dicky, Grace.

Grace.

Oh, I’m quite well, thank you.

Mrs. Insoley.

Am I mistaken in thinking you have rouge on your cheeks?

Grace.

I’ve not been sleeping very well, and I didn’t want to look ill.

Mrs. Insoley.

In my young days ladies did not paint their faces.

Grace.

[With suppressed rage.] We don’t live in your young days, and I’m not a lady.

Mrs. Insoley.

[With a chuckle at the opportunity Grace has given her.] As you are my hostess, it would be insolent of me to contradict you, my dear Grace.

[Delighted with her repartee, she gets up and walks out of the room. Grace goes up to the looking-glass over the chimney-piece and rubs her cheeks with a handkerchief.

Archibald.

I wonder if you’d be very angry if I said something to you?

Grace.

[Icily.] Do you object to the way I do my hair, or is it the cut of my skirt that doesn’t quite meet with your approval?

Archibald.

I was going to say something to you about Claude.

[Grace gives a slight, an almost imperceptible start, but does not answer or look round.

Archibald.

You know how funny he is. He doesn’t say much when anything’s on his mind. But if one knows him well it’s not hard to tell when something’s bothering him.... He’s awfully worried about you.

Grace.

[Still looking in the glass.] I don’t know why I should worry him now more than I usually do.

Archibald.

He’s afraid you blame him for Peggy’s death.

Grace.

Why should I?

Archibald.

He feels it was his fault.

Grace.

I suppose it was in a way.

Archibald.

He’s so fond of you he can’t bear to think that — that it’s made a difference to you.

Grace.

Has he said anything to you about it?

Archibald.

No.

Grace.

Perhaps it’s only your fancy. [Turning round.] Why are you telling me now?

Archibald.

I’m afraid he’ll have rather a rough time at the inquest. I thought you might say something to buck him up a little. A word or two from you would mean so much.

[There is a short pause.

Grace.

I think it’s so strange that you should say all this to me now. It’s not as if we’d ever been great friends, is it?

Archibald.

Our best friends are always those who put us in a good conceit of ourselves. I always think it’s a dreadful thing when a man loses his nerve.... You can do so much for Claude if you choose.

Grace.

I think you exaggerate the influence I have over him. After all, he’s always taken care to keep me and his life strictly apart.

Archibald.

I think you should remember that if he made a mistake it was an honest one. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t put his foot in it sometimes.

Grace.

You speak as if I were perfection itself.

Archibald.

And then, if he was so determined not to break that particular rule of the estate, it was partly for your sake, wasn’t it? Because he thought it his duty to keep you from any possibility of contact with evil.

Grace.

Did he tell you that?

Archibald.

No. It was not very difficult to guess.

Grace.

I suppose not — for anyone who had eyes to see.

Archibald.

You will do your best, Grace?

Grace.

What do you suggest I should do?

Archibald.

It’s very difficult for me to tell you. I think the chief thing is that you should tell Claude — if you can — that you’re fond of him, and that, whatever happens, you always will be fond of him.

Grace.

[Hoarsely.] That oughtn’t to be very hard. I love him with all my heart and soul.

Archibald.

[Smiling.] If you could only say that to him — just in that way, as if you really felt it — you would make him so happy.

[There is a pause. Grace puts her hands in front of her eyes, and she keeps them there for a moment so that she should not see Archibald while she is speaking.

Grace.

Archibald, I want to speak to you for a minute — as a clergyman.

Archibald.

My dear Grace, you frighten me.

Grace.

I’m sorry if I’ve been often bitter and unkind to you. I’m ashamed when I think of all the silly, cruel things I must have said to you during the ten years I’ve lived here.

Archibald.

[Cheerfully.] Oh, what nonsense! You’ve got a clever tongue, and like most people who have, you can’t resist saying a sharp thing when it strikes you.

Grace.

I’ve often set out to wound you. I’ve been fiendish sometimes. I’d like you to know that I’m grateful to you for being so patient with me. It wouldn’t be surprising if you loathed me.

Archibald.

Oh, I think I’ve always had a very great affection for you, Grace. I know you’ve often found life down here rather dull. If any allowances have been necessary, I’ve been perfectly ready to make them.

Grace.

I expect I was often unjust to you. I sometimes felt you weren’t quite sincere.... I thought you’d only become a clergyman on account of the living and the house.

Archibald.

Yes, I felt that. But I couldn’t bear you any ill-will on that account. It was true.

[Grace turns and looks at him with startled eyes.

Archibald.

I’m afraid I’m not much in the way of parsons. My class means so much more to me than my calling. I know it’s a mistake, and yet I can’t help it. I’m bound down by conventions that I haven’t the will to escape from. The day’s past of the family living, the perquisite of a younger son, and I’m out of place here. I can’t feel that the position is mine by right as my Uncle Robert felt before me, and I haven’t the enthusiasm which might make me feel I’d earned it by my own efforts.

Grace.

I’m so ashamed of myself. Because people didn’t carry their hearts on their sleeves I thought they had no hearts at all.

Archibald.

For three years after I was ordained I was a curate at Wakefield. I was worked so hard that I never had a moment to myself. I think those were my happy days. And that’s what I ought to do now. I ought to exchange all this for some living in a city, and do some real work before it’s too late. But I haven’t the courage. And then I should do no good, for I haven’t conviction. That’s why I have no influence in the parish. They come to me for beef-tea and for coal-tickets, but when it’s real help they want they go elsewhere. All I’m fit for is to hold a family living and dine with the neighbouring gentry. You summed me up with the utmost precision.

Grace.

I don’t think so any more. I have an idea that perhaps one sees people most truly when one sees them charitably.

Archibald.

[With a smile.] You said you wanted to speak to me, and I’ve been talking only about myself.

Grace.

I think you’ve made it a little easier for me, Archibald. It’s kind of you.

[She pauses and there is a silence. She walks up and down the room in agitation.

Grace.

[With a series of little gasps.] Archibald, I’m dreadfully unhappy. I’ve done something which I bitterly regret. I don’t know how to tell you. But I must tell you.... I’ve been unfaithful to Claude.

Archibald.

Grace, you must be mad. You can’t mean what you say. It’s — it’s impossible.

Grace.

It’s torturing me. It’s torturing me.

Archibald.

But I don’t understand. You don’t mean that....

Grace.

[Desperately.] Oh, yes, I mean exactly what I say. Please understand me.

Archibald.

You said you were in love with Claude.

Grace.

Yes. That’s why I can’t bear the agony of it. I’m so unhappy. I’m so dreadfully unhappy. I want you to help me. I want you to tell me what to do.

[There is a moment’s pause. Archibald is so bewildered that he can find not a word to say.

Grace.

You can hardly believe it, can you? It sounds incredible. Sometimes I can’t help saying to myself that it is not possible it should be true.

Archibald.

[Trying to collect himself.] It’s come as a most dreadful blow.

Grace.

Don’t reproach me. I’ve said all the obvious things to myself already.... Oh, I hate myself.

Archibald.

I’m so bewildered. Why d’you tell me? I feel I ought to ask you all sorts of questions, and I can’t bear to ask you anything.

Grace.

I don’t think anything matters but that I’ve behaved odiously. Claude was always very good to me, and I’ve deceived him. And every kindness, every word of love he says to me is a reproach. And I love him with all my soul, and there’s always the horror of what I’ve done between us. And I can’t bear it any longer.

Archibald.

I’m so helpless.

Grace.

Are you going to tell Claude?

Archibald.

I? You must be mad.

Grace.

I thought perhaps you might feel it was your duty. You’re his brother.

Archibald.

It would never occur to me to betray the confidence you’ve put in me.

Grace.

Then what shall I do?

Archibald.

I can’t advise you. I haven’t got the experience. I know so little of the world.

Grace.

You must advise me. I’m at the end of my strength. I can’t go on like this any more.

Archibald.

Is it all over between you and ... you know what I mean?

Grace.

Yes, it’s all over.

Archibald.

I don’t know what to say to you. I’m awfully sorry.

Grace.

[Desperately.] Is there no one who can do anything for me?

Archibald.

I suppose nobody else knows?

Grace.

Helen Vernon. She found out. But I can’t go to her for advice. I can’t. I can’t humiliate myself. And the remorse is just killing me.

Archibald.

It’s so difficult for me to say things that won’t seem sanctimonious. I don’t want to say a word that you can think is a reproach.

Grace.

I don’t mind what you say so long as you help me.

[There is a moment’s pause.

Archibald.

[Hesitatingly.] We’re taught that there’s one course clear to the sinner that repenteth.

[Grace starts to her feet and looks at him wildly.

Grace.

You want me to tell Claude?

Archibald.

[In a low voice.] I don’t see how there can be forgiveness till one has confessed one’s sin.

Grace.

[With a deep, deep sigh.] Oh, if you knew what a relief it would be! For days I’ve been fighting with the temptation to make a clean breast of it. I’ve been trying to keep it from me, trying not to think of it. But it meets me at every turn. It haunts me. It’s like an obsession, and it’s stronger than I am. It’s driving me — driving me to confess. I know I shall have to do it; I can’t help myself. I shall go mad if I don’t tell him.

Archibald.

For goodness’ sake, calm yourself.

Grace.

If I’d told him before, when I was trying to persuade him to let Gann stay, that girl wouldn’t have died. I hadn’t the courage. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself. It was too much to ask me. And since then I’ve been tortured by remorse. They say she had the suicidal instinct, and would have killed herself for almost anything. But I seem to see her lying there reproaching me. Reproaching me.

Archibald.

Why don’t you go to Claude at once and get it over?

Grace.

I’m frightened. I’m just sick with fear. A dozen times I’ve been on the point of it — just to have done with it, to get rid of the agony that burnt my heart — and at the last moment I couldn’t. But it’s like being on a high place and looking down and holding on to something so that you shouldn’t throw yourself over. Sooner or later I shall have to do it. It’s the only way to get back my self-respect. It’s the only chance I have of living at all.

Archibald.

I wish I could do more for you.

Grace.

No one can do anything for me. Oh, it is cruel. And to come just now when I love Claude! I didn’t love him at first. It came quite suddenly — as if scales had been torn away from my eyes. And it wasn’t till then that I saw the sin and the wickedness of it. Oh, it was so much more than sin and wickedness. The filthiness. The only thing’s to tell him and have done with it. You know he’ll divorce me, don’t you?

Archibald.

He loves you so much.

Grace.

Even if it breaks his heart, he’ll force himself to divorce me. You know what Claude is. He’ll think it’s his duty. He’ll do what he thinks he ought to do even if it kills him. Oh, but if he’d only forgive me, I would try to make amends. It’s so hard that I’ve only learnt how to be a good wife now that I’m unfit to be his wife at all.

Archibald.

[Deeply moved.] Be brave, Grace.

[She looks at him for a moment, then suddenly makes up her mind. She takes a letter from her dress and sits down at the desk. She puts it into an envelope on which she writes Claude’s name.

Grace.

Will you ring the bell?

Archibald.

[Touching it.] What are you going to do?

Grace.

It’s a letter that I had from — the other. It’s proof of everything. I felt I couldn’t tell Claude. It was hopeless. And I thought I’d just press it into his hand....

[As she is speaking Moore comes in. She hands him the letter.

Grace.

Have that given to Mr. Insoley the moment he comes in.

Moore.

Very good, madam.

[Exit.

Archibald.

[Startled.] D’you mean to say you’re going to tell him like that?

Grace.

It’s the only way I can do it.

Archibald.

[Overcome.] Good God, what have I done?

Grace.

He’ll read the letter, and then the worst will be over. I couldn’t have told him — I couldn’t.

Archibald.

I hope you’ve done right.

Grace.

Anyhow, it’s the end of everything — just when I might have started a new life.... I wonder when I shall have to go away from here?

Archibald.

Don’t put it like that.

Grace.

[Looking out of the window.] I thought I hated the place. It’s bored me to the verge of tears. And now I shall never again see the night fall on the park slowly. And I feel ... and I feel that with me, too, those great trees, and the meadows, and the cawing rooks have come to be part of my blood and my bones.

[The door is opened, and Grace gives a start and a little frightened cry. Helen Vernon comes in.

Grace.

Oh, I thought it was Claude.

[She puts her hand to her heart and steadies herself against a chair.

Miss Vernon.

What on earth’s the matter?

Grace.

[With a gesture of the head towards Archibald.] I’ve told him about me and....

Miss Vernon.

[In short exclamation, which does not interrupt Grace.] Oh!

Grace.

I’m going to tell Claude. It’s the only thing to do.

Miss Vernon.

[To Archibald, sharply.] Is that your advice? You fool, Archibald!

Grace.

I can’t bear the torture any more.

Miss Vernon.

I suspected you were thinking of something like this. But you wouldn’t let me speak to you.

Grace.

I’ve been struggling against it, and now I’ve made up my mind.

Miss Vernon.

My dear, there are three good rules in life. The first is — never sin; and that’s the most sensible. The second is — if you sin, never repent; and that’s the bravest. But the third is — if you repent, never never confess; and that’s the hardest of them all.

Archibald.

I don’t think this is the time for flippancy, Helen.

Miss Vernon.

Good heavens, I’m being as serious as I possibly can.

Archibald.

D’you mean to say you think Grace oughtn’t to say anything?

Miss Vernon.

I think it would be monstrous of her to say anything.

Archibald.

If the sinner wants forgiveness, first of all he must confess his sin.

Miss Vernon.

You still look upon your God as a God of vengeance, who wants sacrifices to appease Him.

Archibald.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.”

Miss Vernon.

That was said to a stiff-necked generation that wanted humbling. But no one can want to humble us, surely. We’re so timid already. We’re so unsure of ourselves. We’ve all got a morbid desire to unbosom ourselves. The commonest ailment of the day is a vulgar feminine passion for making scenes. Confession’s like a drug we fly to because we’ve lost the last shadow of our self-reliance.

Archibald.

Don’t let her move you, Grace. I beseech you, for your soul’s sake. Be brave.

Grace.

I know that it’s my only chance of happiness.

Miss Vernon.

But who cares about your happiness?

Archibald.

Helen, how can you be so unkind?

Miss Vernon.

No one knows why we’ve been brought into the world, but it evidently wasn’t for our happiness. Or if it was, the Being who put us here has made a most outrageous mess of it. Put your happiness out of the question.

Archibald.

[Very earnestly to Grace.] If the sinner repents, let him confess his sin. That’s the only proof he can give of a contrite spirit.

Miss Vernon.

Nonsense. He can give a much more sensible proof by acting differently in future.

Grace.

That would be so easy now.

Miss Vernon.

But actions aren’t good because they’re difficult.

Grace.

Part of my punishment is the feeling that except for this horrible mistake we should both be so much happier than we were before.

Miss Vernon.

You love Claude now, don’t you?

Grace.

With all my heart.

Miss Vernon.

I have an idea that it’s only your sin that has made your love worth having.

Archibald.

[Rather shocked.] Helen.

Miss Vernon.

You were rather hard and selfish before because you had nothing in particular to reproach yourself with. Perhaps it was necessary that you should step from the narrow path of virtue in order to become a virtuous woman.

Archibald.

Helen, you can’t mean that.

Miss Vernon.

It’s very often only repentance that makes men and women human.

Archibald.

Repentance is useless without sacrifice.

Grace.

Yes, I feel that. And the only sacrifice I can make is to lay bare my soul before Claude and accept my punishment.

Archibald.

And then, I think Claude should be given the chance of deciding for himself. It’s not fair to leave him in ignorance.

Miss Vernon.

[To Grace.] Don’t you know that Claude loves you, and trusts you, and believes in you?

Grace.

That is all my torment. I’m so unworthy. If I didn’t love him — if I didn’t want him to love me so much — it wouldn’t be so dreadful.... I can’t bear that there should be this secret between us. I know that he’s not loving me, but some fancy of his own heart. And I’m jealous. I’m jealous of the woman he loves who isn’t me. And I want him to love me as I am, as I love him.

Miss Vernon.

Grace, don’t forget that I’ve loved him, too, hopelessly, without any thought of a return. It gives me some claim, doesn’t it?

[Archibald looks at her quickly, with surprise, but does not speak.

Miss Vernon.

The only thing I care for is his happiness. And I beseech you to have mercy on him.

Grace.

What do you mean?

Miss Vernon.

If you destroy his belief in you he’ll have nothing left. He thinks he’s strong, but he isn’t. He depends on a few simple principles, and some of them are already giving way under his feet. He wants you now more than ever. You can give him back his self-reliance. And you’re going to humiliate him. Besides everything else, the misery and the grief, don’t you see what a blow it’ll be to his vanity? I beseech you to have mercy.

Grace.

You’re asking me to go on living the hateful lie. But I can’t breathe. The air about me seems heavy with deceit. If Claude doesn’t love me for what I am, what can his love be to me?

Miss Vernon.

My dear, it’s not for ourselves that our friends love us, but for the grace and the beauty that they’ve given us out of their own hearts. And the only way we can show them our gratitude is by doing all we can to preserve those precious illusions they have about us.

Grace.

I don’t want a love that’s based on illusion. At the back of my mind there was the hope that if I told Claude, some day in the future he might forgive me. And we could start fresh with mutual knowledge and mutual confidence. But if I don’t tell him, we can never come together. Even though we’re not separated for an hour, there’ll always be this barrier between us.

Miss Vernon.

Then let that be your punishment.

Grace.

[Startled.] That! [With a little laugh of scorn.] You don’t know what you’re asking me to do. It’s because I love Claude so much that I can’t let him go on thinking I’m good and pure and chaste.

Archibald.

And how can good come out of a lie, Helen?

Miss Vernon.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a lie always. Don’t you remember the Happy Hypocrite? Love can work many miracles.

Grace.

[With a sort of gasp.] You mean — you think I might become really what Claude thinks me?

Miss Vernon.

You might try.

Grace.

D’you know that I should never have a moment’s peace?

Miss Vernon.

If you love Claude really, that mightn’t be too great a price to pay for his happiness.

Grace.

[Vehemently.] Oh, it’s all very well for you to talk, but you don’t know what this sense of shame is. It’s killing me. And the degradation of being loved for what you’re not. And you want me never to escape from it. Oh, you’re right. It would be a fiendish punishment.

Miss Vernon.

It’s the only return you can make for all the love that Claude has given you.

Grace.

[Taking up the thought.] For his wonderful kindness, and all these years of thought and loving tenderness.

[For a moment Grace stares in front of her as the words sink in.

Miss Vernon.

Grace, it’s I who ask you now to be brave.

Grace.

[With a great sigh.] I seem to see the chance of a greater sacrifice than anything I’d ever dreamt of. I wonder.... I believe there’s a chance.... [With a sudden start.] Oh! listen.

[She has heard Claude come in. There is a sound of voices in the hall.

Grace.

That’s settled it. It’s too late now to do anything.

Miss Vernon.

What is it?

Grace.

Claude’s just come in. I heard him speaking to Moore. He’s been given the letter.

Miss Vernon.

D’you mean to say.... [Some part of the facts dawns upon her and she bursts out violently.] Oh, it’s not that the human race are wicked that I mind, or that they’re weak — you can give them backbone; but what I can’t get over is that they are such blooming fools.

Grace.

Will you leave me, both of you? Claude had better find me alone.

Miss Vernon.

[To Archibald, after a glance at Grace.] Come.

[They go out. Grace is horribly frightened. She stands quite still, pulling her handkerchief about. Claude comes in. He has a letter in his hand. He flings it on a table. Grace sees with a start that it is unopened.

Grace.

[Forcing herself to seem natural.] Is the inquest over?

Claude.

[Sinking dejectedly into a chair.] They brought in a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind.

Grace.

That was what you expected, wasn’t it?

Claude.

Yes.

Grace.

You must be thankful it’s finished and done with.

Claude.

[With an effort.] The jury passed a vote of censure on me.

Grace.

Claude!

Claude.

Oh, if you’d only heard the questions they asked me! There were reporters there, so it’ll be in the papers and you can read for yourself. They made me appear a perfect brute.

Grace.

I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you fancy.

Claude.

You see, I hadn’t a chance of defending myself. I wasn’t going to make excuses to a parcel of Dissenting shopkeepers. It made me look as if I hadn’t a leg to stand on.

Grace.

After all, what can it matter what a dozen yokels think of you?

Claude.

And afterwards when I came out — they had the inquest in that big room upstairs at the Insoley Arms — there was a crowd outside, people I’d known all my life, I suppose they’d been taking the opportunity to have a good soak, and they hissed me as I passed.

Grace.

Didn’t you say that you were going to abolish the rule?

Claude.

Of course I’m going to abolish the rule. Hang it all, it’s caused wretchedness enough.

Grace.

I wish you’d had an opportunity of telling them.

Claude.

[Rather shamefacedly.] The coroner asked me what I was going to do about it. I couldn’t knuckle under then with all those people round me. I simply couldn’t, Grace. I was obliged to say that I meant to be master in my own house, and I didn’t propose to let anyone dictate to me.

Grace.

[Putting her hand on his shoulder.] I’m afraid you’ve been awfully worried, old man.

Claude.

It’s given me a bit of a knock to find out that they — they just hate me. I was rather fond of the people on the estate, and I thought they were fond of me. When they’ve been in trouble I’ve done every damned thing I could to help them. When times have been bad I’ve not bothered much about the rents, and we’ve never been rich. Hang it all, I’ve given them all my time and my thoughts for years, and the only result is that they can’t stick me. They haven’t got any mercy if I’ve made a mistake. They give me no credit for good intentions.

Grace.

I’m sure you exaggerate, Claude. You fancy they feel more bitter than they really do.

Claude.

Oh, if you’d only seen them! The pleasure they took in having a dig at me! I could see the hatred on their faces. Oh, I expect Archibald is right. Our time down here is over. The only fellow they want in the country now is the Jew stockbroker with his pockets full of money.

Grace.

Darling, I know that you’ve always acted for the best. I know how much you’ve done for the people on the estate. After all, it wasn’t for their gratitude that you did it, was it? It was because it was your duty.

Claude.

[Rising.] Oh, Grace, I don’t know what I should do without you. You’ve been so awfully good to me through the whole thing. I’m so grateful to you.

Grace.

What nonsense!

Claude.

I was so afraid it would make a difference to you, but it hasn’t, has it?

Grace.

[Shaking her head.] No.

Claude.

If I lost you, Grace, I couldn’t live. Without you — I can’t imagine life without you.

Grace.

How absurd you are, Claude.

Claude.

I’m talking rot, aren’t I?

[He notices the letter, which he had put on the table, and picks it up. Grace catches her breath.

Claude.

Hulloa! I forgot to open this. Moore gave it me as I came in. [With surprise.] It’s your hand-writing.

Grace.

[Quite naturally, holding out her hand.] It’s nothing. I was afraid I should have gone out by the time you came in, and I wanted to remind you about the herbaceous border. It’s only a note.

Claude.

[Giving her the letter.] Are you going out?

Grace.

I was going to motor to Wells with Helen Vernon.

[As she speaks she tears the letter into little bits.

Claude.

Don’t leave me to-day, Grace. I want you so awfully badly.

Grace.

[Sinking with exhaustion into a chair.] No, I won’t leave you ... if you want me.

[Claude kneels down by her side.

Claude.

I always want you, Grace. You’re so much to me.... After all, nothing can really matter to me so long as I have you. It’s such a comfort to think that I can trust you. And you’ll never round on me. I’m awfully grateful for you, Grace.

[He buries his face in her lap, kissing her hands.

Grace.

[In a trembling voice.] I can never be such a wife to you as you deserve, Claude. But I can try. If you can believe in me always, Claude, perhaps in time I can become what you believe me. [He makes a movement.] No, don’t look at me. I want you to know that I love you with all my heart, I love you with my body, and I love you with my soul. I want to forget myself and think only of you. What does my happiness matter so long as I can make you happy?

[She bends down and kisses his hair.

THE END

THE LAND OF PROMISE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

TO

IRENE VANBRUGH

CHARACTERS

All applications regarding the Performance Rights of this play should be addressed to Mr. R. Golding Bright, 20, Green Street, Leicester Square, London, W.C. 2. This play was produced on February 26, 1914, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, with the following cast:

Norah Marsh

Irene Vanbrugh.

Edward Marsh

C. V. France.

Gertrude Marsh

Marion Ashworth.

Frank Taylor

Godfrey Tearle.

Reginald Hornby

Basil Foster.

Benjamin Trotter

George Tully.

Sidney Sharp

J. Woodall-Birde.

Emma Sharp

Mary Rorke.

James Wickham

Athol Stewart.

Dorothy Wickham

Netta Westcott.

Agnes Pringle

Lena Halliday.

Clement Wynne

Charles Goodwin.

Kate

Marion Christie Murray.

Norah Marsh.

Edward Marsh.

Gertrude Marsh.

Frank Taylor.

Reginald Hornby.

Benjamin Trotter.

Sidney Sharp.

Emma Sharp.

James Wickham.

Dorothy Wickham.

Agnes Pringle.

Clement Wynne.

Kate.

The action of the play takes place at Tunbridge Wells, and later in Canada.

ACT I

Scene: The drawing-room at Miss Wickham’s house in Tunbridge Wells. It is a room in which there is too much furniture. There are armchairs covered with faded chintz, little tables here and there, cabinets containing china, a great many photographs in silver frames, porcelain ornaments wherever there is a vacant space, Chippendale chairs and chairs from the Tottenham Court Road. There are flowers in vases and growing plants. The wall-paper has a pattern of enormous chrysanthemums, and on the walls are a large number of old-fashioned watercolours in gilt frames. There is one door, which leads into the hall; and a French window opens on to the garden. The window is decorated with white lace curtains. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun is streaming through the drawn blinds. There is a wreath of white flowers in a cardboard box on one of the chairs. The door is opened by Kate, the parlour-maid. She is of respectable appearance and of a decent age. She admits Miss Pringle. Miss Pringle is companion to a wealthy old lady in Tunbridge Wells. She is a woman of middle age, plainly dressed, thin and narrow of shoulders, with a weather-beaten, tired face and grey hair.

Kate.

I’ll tell Miss Marsh you’re here, Miss Pringle.

Miss Pringle.

How is she to-day, Kate?

Kate.

She’s tired out, poor thing. She’s lying down now. But I’m sure she’d like to see you, Miss.

Miss Pringle.

I’m very glad she didn’t go to the funeral.

Kate.

Dr. Evans thought she’d better stay at home, Miss, and Mrs. Wickham said she’d only upset herself if she went.

Miss Pringle.

I wonder how she stood it all those months, waiting on Miss Wickham hand and foot.

Kate.

Miss Wickham wouldn’t have a professional nurse. And you know what she was, Miss.... Miss Marsh slept in Miss Wickham’s room, and the moment she fell asleep Miss Wickham would have her up because her pillow wanted shaking, or she was thirsty, or something.

Miss Pringle.

I suppose she was very inconsiderate.

Kate.

Inconsiderate isn’t the word, Miss. I wouldn’t be a lady’s companion, not for anything. What they have to put up with!

Miss Pringle.

Oh, well, everyone isn’t like Miss Wickham. The lady I’m companion to, Mrs. Hubbard, is kindness itself.

Kate.

That sounds like Miss Marsh coming downstairs [She goes to the door and opens it.] Miss Pringle is here, Miss.

[Norah comes in. She is a woman of twenty-eight, with a pleasant, honest face and a happy smile. She is gentle, with quiet manners, but she has a quick temper, under very good control, and a passionate nature which is hidden under a demure appearance. She is simply dressed in black.]

Norah.

I am glad to see you. I was hoping you’d be able to come here this afternoon.

Miss Pringle.

Mrs. Hubbard has gone for a drive with somebody or other, and didn’t want me.

[They kiss one another. Norah notices the wreath.]

Norah.

What’s this?

Kate.

It didn’t arrive till after they’d started, Miss.

Norah.

I wonder whom it’s from. [She looks at a card which is attached to the wreath.] “From Mrs. Alfred Vincent, with deepest regret for my dear Miss Wickham and heartiest sympathy for her sorrowing relatives.”

Kate.

Sorrowing relatives is good, Miss.

Norah.

[Remonstrating.] Kate ... I think you’d better take it away.

Kate.

What shall I do with it, Miss?

Norah.

I’m going to the cemetery a little later. I’ll take it with me.

Kate.

Very good, Miss.

[Kate takes up the box and goes out.]

Miss Pringle.

You haven’t been crying, Norah?

Norah.

[With a little apologetic smile.] Yes, I couldn’t help it.

Miss Pringle.

What on earth for?

Norah.

My dear, it’s not unnatural.

Miss Pringle.

Well, I don’t want to say anything against her now she’s dead and gone, poor thing, but Miss Wickham was the most detestable old woman I ever met.

Norah.

I don’t suppose one can live all that time with anyone and not be a little sorry to part with them for ever. I was Miss Wickham’s companion for ten years.

Miss Pringle.

How you stood it! Exacting, domineering, disagreeable.

Norah.

Yes, I suppose she was. Because she paid me a salary she thought I wasn’t a human being. I never saw anyone with such a bitter tongue. At first I used to cry every night when I went to bed because of the things she said to me. But I got used to them.

Miss Pringle.

I wonder you didn’t leave her. I would have.

Norah.

It’s not easy to get posts as lady’s companion.

Miss Pringle.

That’s true. They tell me the agents’ books are full of people wanting situations. Before I went to Mrs. Hubbard I was out of one for nearly two years.

Norah.

It’s not so bad for you. You can always go and stay with your brother.

Miss Pringle.

You’ve got a brother too.

Norah.

Yes, but he’s farming in Canada. He had all he could do to keep himself, he couldn’t keep me too.

Miss Pringle.

How is he doing now?

Norah.

Oh, he’s doing very well. He’s got a farm of his own. He wrote over a couple of years ago and told me he could always give me a home if I wanted one.

Miss Pringle.

Canada’s so far off.

Norah.

Not when you get there.

Miss Pringle.

Why don’t you draw the blinds?

Norah.

I thought I ought to wait till they come back from the funeral.

Miss Pringle.

It must be a great relief to you now it’s all over.

Norah.

Sometimes I can’t realise it. These last few weeks I hardly got to bed at all, and when the end came I was utterly exhausted. For two days I could do nothing but sleep. Poor Miss Wickham. She did hate dying.

Miss Pringle.

That’s the extraordinary part of it. I believe you were really fond of her.

Norah.

D’you know that for nearly a year she would eat nothing but what I gave her with my own hands. And she liked me as much as she was capable of liking anybody.

Miss Pringle.

That wasn’t much.

Norah.

And then, I was so dreadfully sorry for her.

Miss Pringle.

Good heavens!

Norah.

She’d been a hard and selfish woman all her life, and there was no one who cared for her. It seemed so dreadful to die like that and leave not a soul to regret one. Her nephew and his wife were just waiting for her death. It was dreadful. Each time they came down from London I saw them looking at her to see if she was any worse than when last they’d seen her.

Miss Pringle.

Well, I thought her a horrid old woman, and I’m glad she’s dead. And I hope she’s left you well provided for.

Norah.

[With a smile.] Oh, I think she’s done that. Two years ago when I nearly went away she said she’d left me enough to live upon.

Miss Pringle.

You mean when that assistant of Dr. Evans wanted to marry you? I’m glad you wouldn’t have him.

Norah.

He was very nice. But, of course, he wasn’t a gentleman.

Miss Pringle.

I shouldn’t like to live with a man at all; I think they’re horrid, but, of course, it would be impossible if he weren’t a gentleman.

Norah.

[With a twinkle in her eye.] He came to see Miss Wickham, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. First she said that she couldn’t spare me, and then she said that I had a very bad temper.

Miss Pringle.

I like her saying that.

Norah.

It’s quite true. Every now and then I felt I couldn’t put up with her any more. I forgot that I was dependent on her, and if she dismissed me I probably shouldn’t be able to find another situation, and I just flew at her. I must say she was very nice about it; she used to look at me and grin, and, when it was all over, say: “My dear, when you marry, if your husband’s a wise man, he’ll use a big stick now and then.”

Miss Pringle.

Old cat.

Norah.

[Smiling.] I should like to see a man try.

Miss Pringle.

How much d’you think she’s left you?

Norah.

Well, of course, I don’t know; the will is going to be read this afternoon when they come back from the funeral, but from what she said I believe about two hundred and fifty a year.

Miss Pringle.

It’s the least she could do. She’s had the ten best years of your life.

Norah.

[With a sigh of relief.] I shall never be at anybody’s beck and call again. I shall be able to get up when I like and go to bed when I like, go out when I choose, and come in when I choose.

Miss Pringle.

[Drily.] You’ll probably marry.

Norah.

Never.

Miss Pringle.

Then what’ll you do?

Norah.

I shall go to Italy, Florence, Rome. D’you think it’s horrible of me, I’m so happy?

Miss Pringle.

My dear child.

[There is a sound of carriage wheels on the drive.]

Norah.

There they are.

Miss Pringle.

I’d better go, hadn’t I?

Norah.

I’m afraid you must.

Miss Pringle.

I do so want to know about the will. Can’t I go up to your room and wait there?

Norah.

No. I’ll tell you what, go and sit in the garden. They want to catch the four something back to London, and we can have a cosy little tea all by ourselves.

Miss Pringle.

Very well. Oh, my dear, I’m so happy in your good luck.

Norah.

Take care.

[Miss Pringle slips out into the garden, and a moment later Mr. and Mrs. Wickham enter the room. Mrs. Wickham is a pretty young woman. She is dressed in black, but her gown is elegant and fashionable. James Wickham is a clean-shaven, thin-faced man, with a baldish head. He is dressed in black and wears black kid gloves.]

Dorothy.

[Cheerfully.] Ouf! Do put the blinds up, Miss Marsh. We really needn’t be depressed any more. Jim, if you love me, take those gloves off. They’re perfectly revolting.

[Norah goes to the window and draws up the blind.]

Wickham.

Why, what’s wrong with them? The fellow in the shop told me they were the right thing.

Dorothy.

I never saw anyone look quite so funereal as you do.

Wickham.

Well, you didn’t want me to get myself up as though I were going to a wedding, did you?

Norah.

Were there many people?

Dorothy.

Quite a lot. The sort of people who indulge in other people’s funerals as a mild form of dissipation.

Wickham.

[Looking at his watch.] I hope Wynne will look sharp. I don’t want to miss that train.

Dorothy.

Who were all those stodgy old things who wrung your hand afterwards, Jim?

Wickham.

I can’t think. They made me feel such a fool.

Dorothy.

Oh, was that it? I saw you looking a perfect owl, and I thought you were giving a very bad imitation of restrained emotion.

Wickham.

[Remonstrating.] Dorothy.

Norah.

Would you like some tea, Mrs. Wickham?

Dorothy.

Well, you might send some in so that it’ll be ready when Mr. Wynne comes.

[Norah is just going to ring the bell, but Mrs. Wickham stops her with a pleasant smile.]

We’ll ring for you, shall we? I daresay you’ve got one or two things you want to do now.

Norah.

Very good, Mrs. Wickham.

[She goes out.]

Wickham.

I say, Dorothy, you oughtn’t to be facetious before Miss Marsh. She was extremely attached to Aunt Louisa.

Dorothy.

Oh, what nonsense! It’s always a very good rule to judge people by oneself, and I’m positive she was just longing for the old lady to die.

Wickham.

She was awfully upset at the end.

Dorothy.

Nerves! Men are so idiotic. They never understand that there are tears and tears. I cried myself, and heaven knows I didn’t regret her death.

Wickham.

My dear Dorothy, you oughtn’t to say that.

Dorothy.

Why not? It’s perfectly true. Aunt Louisa was a detestable person and no one would have stood her for a minute if she hadn’t had money. I don’t see any use in being a hypocrite now that it can’t make any difference either way.

Wickham.

[Looking at his watch again.] I wish Wynne would hurry up. It’ll be beastly inconvenient if we miss that train.

Dorothy.

I don’t trust Miss Marsh. She looks as if she knew what was in the will.

Wickham.

I don’t suppose she does. Aunt Louisa wasn’t the sort of person to talk.

Dorothy.

I’m sure she knows she’s been left something.

Wickham.

Oh, well, I think she has a right to expect that. Aunt Louisa led her a dog’s life.

Dorothy.

She had wages and a comfortable home. If she didn’t like the place she could have left it.... After all it’s family money. I don’t think Aunt Louisa had the right to leave it to strangers.

Wickham.

We oughtn’t to complain if Miss Marsh gets a small annuity. Aunt Louisa promised her something of the sort when she had a chance of marrying a couple of years ago.

Dorothy.

Miss Marsh is quite young. It isn’t as if she’d been here for thirty years.

Wickham.

Well, I’ve got an idea that Aunt Louisa meant to leave her about two hundred and fifty a year.

Dorothy.

But what’s the estate?

Wickham.

About nineteen thousand pounds, I believe.

Dorothy.

Oh, it’s absurd. It’s a most unfair proportion. It makes all the difference to us. On that extra two hundred and fifty a year we could almost keep a car.

Wickham.

My dear, be thankful if we get anything at all.

Dorothy.

[Aghast.] Jim! [She stares at him.] Jim, you don’t think! Oh! That would be too horrible.

Wickham.

Take care.

[The door opens and Kate brings in the tea-things. She puts them on a small table.]

How lucky it is we had a fine day, isn’t it?

Dorothy.

Yes.

Wickham.

It looks as if we were going to have a spell of fine weather.

Dorothy.

Yes.

Wickham.

It’s funny how often it rains for weddings.

Dorothy.

Very funny.

[Exit Kate.]

I’ve been counting on that money for years. I used to dream at night that I was reading a telegram with the news of Aunt Louisa’s death. And I’ve thought of all we should be able to do when we got it. It’ll make such a difference.

Wickham.

You know what she was. She didn’t care two-pence for us. We ought to be prepared for the worst.

Dorothy.

D’you think she could have left everything to Miss Marsh?

Wickham.

I shouldn’t be surprised.

Dorothy.

We’ll dispute the will. It’s undue influence. I suspected Miss Marsh from the beginning. I hate her. Oh, why doesn’t Wynne come?

[There is a ring at the bell.]

Wickham.

Here he is, I expect.

Dorothy.

The suspense is too awful.

Wickham.

Pull yourself together, old girl. And I say, look a bit dismal. After all, we’ve just come from a funeral.

Dorothy.

Are we downhearted?

[Kate enters to announce Mr. Wynne.]

Kate.

Mr. Wynne.

[He enters and she goes out and closes the door. Mr. Wynne, the late Miss Wickham’s solicitor, is a tallish man with a bald head. He has the red cheeks and hearty manner of a man who plays in his spare time at being a country gentleman. He is dressed in mourning because he has been to Miss Wickham’s funeral.]

Wickham.

Hulloa!

Wynne.

[Taking Dorothy’s hand rather solemnly.] I didn’t have an opportunity of shaking hands with you at the cemetery.

Dorothy.

[Somewhat helplessly.] How do you do?

Wynne.

Pray accept my sincerest sympathy on your great bereavement.

Dorothy.

Of course, the end was not entirely unexpected.

Wynne.

No, I know. But it must have been a great shock all the same.

Wickham.

My wife was very much upset, but of course my poor aunt had suffered great pain, and we couldn’t help looking upon it as a happy release.

Wynne.

How is Miss Marsh?

[Dorothy gives him a quick look, wondering whether there is anything behind the polite inquiry.]

Dorothy.

Oh, she’s very well.

Wynne.

Her devotion to Miss Wickham was wonderful. Dr. Evans — he’s my brother-in-law, you know — told me no trained nurse could have been more competent. She was like a daughter to Miss Wickham.

Dorothy.

[Rather coldly.] I suppose we’d better send for her.

Wickham.

Have you brought the.... [He stops in some embarrassment.]

Wynne.

Yes, I have it in my pocket.

Dorothy.

I’ll ring.

[She touches the bell.]

Wickham.

I expect Mr. Wynne would like a cup of tea, Dorothy.

Dorothy.

Oh, I’m so sorry, I quite forgot about it.

Wynne.

No, thank you very much. I never take tea.

[He takes a long envelope out of his pocket, and from it the will. He smooths it out reflectively. Dorothy gives the document a nervous glance. Kate comes in.]

Wickham.

Will you ask Miss Marsh to be good enough to come here.

Kate.

Very good, sir.

[Exit.]

Dorothy.

What is the time, Jim?

Wickham.

[Looking at his watch.] Oh, there’s no hurry. [To Wynne.] We’ve got an important engagement in London this evening. We’re very anxious not to miss the fast train.

Dorothy.

The train service is rotten.

Wynne.

The will is very short. It won’t take me two minutes to read it.

Dorothy.

[Nervous and impatient.] What on earth is Miss Marsh doing?

Wynne.

How pretty the garden is looking now.

Wickham.

[Abruptly.] Very.

Wynne.

Miss Wickham was always so interested in her garden.

Dorothy.

Yes.

Wynne.

My own tulips aren’t so advanced as those.

Wickham.

[Irritably.] Aren’t they?

Wynne.

[To Dorothy.] Are you interested in gardening?

Dorothy.

[Hardly able to control her impatience.] No, I hate it.... At last!

[The door is opened and Miss Marsh comes in. Wynne gets up.]

Wynne.

How d’you do, Miss Marsh?

Norah.

How d’you do?

Wickham.

Will you have a cup of tea?

Dorothy.

[All nerves.] Jim, Miss Marsh would much prefer to have tea quietly after we’re gone.

Norah.

[With a faint smile.] I won’t have any tea, thank you.

Dorothy.

Mr. Wynne has brought the will with him.

Norah.

Oh, yes.

[She sits down calmly. Dorothy, with clenched hands, watches her. She tries to make out from her face whether Norah knows anything.]

Wynne.

Miss Marsh, so far as you know, there’s no other will?

Norah.

How d’you mean?

Wynne.

Miss Wickham didn’t make a later one — without my assistance, I mean? You know of nothing in the house, for instance?

Norah.

[Quite decidedly.] Oh, no. Miss Wickham always said you had her will. She was extremely methodical.

Wynne.

I feel I ought to ask because she consulted me about making a fresh will a couple of years ago. She told me what she wanted to do, but gave me no actual instructions to draw it. I thought perhaps she might have done it herself.

Norah.

I heard nothing about it. I’m sure that her only will is in your hands.

Wynne.

Then I think we may take it that this....

[Dorothy suddenly understands; she interrupts quickly.]

Dorothy.

When was that will made?

Wynne.

Eight or nine years ago.... The exact date was March 4th, 1904.

[Dorothy gives Norah a long, searching look.]

Dorothy.

When did you first come to Miss Wickham?

Norah.

At the end of nineteen hundred and three.

[There is a slight pause.]

Wynne.

Shall I read it, or would you just like to know the particulars? It is very short.

Dorothy.

Let us just know roughly.

Wynne.

Well, Miss Wickham left one hundred pounds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and one hundred pounds to the General Hospital at Tunbridge Wells, and the entire residue of her fortune to her nephew, Mr. James Wickham.

[Dorothy gives a sharp inspiration of triumph. She looks again at Norah, but Norah gives no sign of emotion.]

Wickham.

And Miss Marsh?

Wynne.

Miss Marsh is not mentioned.

Norah.

[With a faint smile.] I could hardly expect to be. At the time the will was drawn I had been Miss Wickham’s companion for only a few months.

Wynne.

That is why I asked whether you knew of any later will. When I talked to Miss Wickham on the subject she said her wish was to make adequate provision for you after her death. I think she had spoken to you about it.

Norah.

Yes.

Wynne.

She mentioned three hundred a year.

Norah.

That was very kind of her. I’m glad she wished to do something for me.

Wynne.

Oddly enough she spoke about it to Dr. Evans only a few days before she died.

Wickham.

Perhaps there is a later will somewhere?

Wynne.

I honestly don’t think so.

Norah.

I’m sure there isn’t.

Wynne.

Dr. Evans was talking to Miss Wickham about Miss Marsh. She was tired out and he wanted Miss Wickham to have a professional nurse. She told him then that I had the will and she had left Miss Marsh amply provided for.

Dorothy.

[Quickly.] That isn’t legal, of course?

Wynne.

What isn’t?

Dorothy.

I mean, no one could force us — I mean, the will stands as it is, doesn’t it?

Wynne.

Certainly.

Wickham.

I’m afraid it’s a great disappointment to you, Miss Marsh.

Norah.

[Lightly.] I never count my chickens before they’re hatched.

Wynne.

It would be very natural if Miss Marsh were disappointed under the circumstances. I think she’d been led to expect....

Dorothy.

[Interrupting.] Our aunt left a very small fortune, I understand, and I suppose she felt it wouldn’t be fair to leave a large part of it away from her own family.

Wickham.

Of course, it is family money; she inherited it from my grandfather, and ... but I want you to know, Miss Marsh, that my wife and I thoroughly appreciate all you did for my aunt. Money couldn’t repay your care and devotion. You’ve been perfectly wonderful.

Norah.

It’s extremely good of you to say so. I was very fond of Miss Wickham. Nothing I did for her was any trouble.

Wynne.

I think everyone who saw Miss Marsh with Miss Wickham must be aware that during the ten years she was with her she never spared herself.

Wickham.

[Hesitatingly, with a glance at his wife.] Of course, my aunt was a very trying woman.

Dorothy.

[Agreeably.] Earning one’s living is always unpleasant. If it weren’t there’d be no incentive to work.

[Norah gives her a glance of quiet amusement at this surprising remark.]

Wickham.

My wife and I would be very glad to make some kind of acknowledgment of your services.

Dorothy.

I was just going to mention it.

Wynne.

[Brightening a little.] I felt sure that under the circumstances....

Dorothy.

[Interrupting him quickly.] What were your wages, Miss Marsh?

Norah.

Thirty pounds a year.

Dorothy.

Really? Many ladies are glad to go as companion without any salary, just for the sake of a home and congenial society. I daresay you’ve been able to save a good deal in all these years.

Norah.

[Frigidly.] I had to dress myself decently, Mrs. Wickham.

Dorothy.

[With all the charm she can put into her manner.] Well, I’m sure my husband will be very glad to give you a year’s salary, won’t you, Jim?

Norah.

It’s very kind of you, but I’m not inclined to accept anything but what’s legally due to me.

Dorothy.

[Undisturbed.] You must remember that there’ll be very heavy death duties to pay. They’ll swallow up the income from Miss Wickham’s estate for at least two years, won’t they, Mr. Wynne?

Norah.

I quite understand.

Dorothy.

Perhaps you’ll change your mind.

Norah.

I don’t think so.

[There is a slight, rather awkward pause. Mr. Wynne gets up. His manner shows that he is not impressed by Mrs. Wickham’s generosity.]

Wynne.

Well, I think I must leave you.

Wickham.

We must go, too, Dorothy.

Dorothy.

[Quite at ease.] Oh, it’ll only take five minutes to get down to the station in a cab.

Wynne.

Good-bye, Miss Marsh. If I can be of any help to you I hope you’ll let me know.

Norah.

That’s very kind of you.

Wynne.

[To Dorothy.] Good-bye.

[He bows slightly to her, nods to Wickham and during Dorothy’s next speech goes out.]

Dorothy.

[Very friendly and affable.] Jim will be writing to you in a day or two. You know how grateful we both are for all you did for our poor aunt. We shall be glad to give you the very highest references.

Wickham.

[Relieved to be able to offer something.] Oh, yes, we’ll do everything we can.

Dorothy.

You’re such a wonderful nurse, I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty in getting another situation. I expect I can find you something myself. I’ll ask among all my friends.

[Norah looks at her reflectively, but does not answer. Dorothy beams and smiles at her.]

Wickham.

Come on, Dorothy, we really haven’t got any time to lose. Good-bye, Miss Marsh.

Norah.

Good-bye.

[They bustle out and in a moment the sound is heard of wheels on the drive as the cab carries them away. Norah is left alone. She stands staring in front of her. She does not hear Miss Pringle come in from the garden.]

Miss Pringle.

I thought they were never going. Well?

[Norah turns and looks at her without a word.

[Miss Pringle is startled.] Norah! What’s the matter? Isn’t it as much as you thought?

Norah.

Miss Wickham’s left me nothing.

Miss Pringle.

Oh!

Norah.

Not a penny! Oh, it’s cruel. After all, there was no need for her to leave me anything. She gave me board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. If I stayed it was because I chose. She needn’t have promised me anything. She needn’t have prevented me from marrying.

Miss Pringle.

My dear, you could never have married the little assistant. He wasn’t a gentleman.

Norah.

Ten years! The ten best years of a woman’s life, when other girls are enjoying themselves. And what did I get for it? Board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. A cook does better than that.

Miss Pringle.

We can’t expect to make so much money as a good cook. One has to pay something for living like a lady among people of one’s own class.

Norah.

Oh, it’s cruel.

Miss Pringle.

[Trying to console her.] My dear, don’t give way. I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty in finding another situation. You wash lace beautifully, and no one can arrange flowers like you.

Norah.

I was dreaming of France and Italy.... I shall spend ten years more with an old lady, and then she’ll die, and I shall look out for another situation. It won’t be so easy then because I shan’t be so young. And so it’ll go on till I can’t find a situation because I’m too old, and some charitable people will get me into a home. You like the life, don’t you?

Miss Pringle.

My dear, there are so few things a gentlewoman can do.

Norah.

When I think of these ten years! Having to put up with every unreasonableness! Never being allowed to feel ill or tired! No servant would have stood what I have. The humiliation I’ve endured!

Miss Pringle.

You’re tired and out of sorts. Everyone isn’t so trying as Miss Wickham. I’m sure Mrs. Hubbard has been kindness itself to me.

Norah.

Considering.

Miss Pringle.

I don’t know what you mean by considering.

Norah.

Considering that she’s rich and you’re poor. She gives you her old clothes. She often doesn’t ask you to have dinner by yourself when she’s giving a party. She doesn’t remind you that you’re dependent unless she’s very much put out. But you — you’ve had thirty years of it. You’ve eaten the bitter bread of slavery till — till it tastes like plum cake.

Miss Pringle.

[Rather hurt.] I don’t know why you say such things to me, Norah.

[Before Norah has time to answer Kate comes in.]

Kate.

Mr. Hornby would like to see you for a minute, Miss.

Norah.

[Surprised.] Now?

Kate.

I told him I didn’t think it would be convenient, Miss, but he says it’s very important, and he won’t detain you more than five minutes.

Norah.

What a nuisance.... Ask him to come in.

Kate.

Very good, Miss. [Exit.]

Norah.

I wonder what on earth he wants.

Miss Pringle.

Who is he, Norah?

Norah.

Oh, he’s the son of Colonel Hornby. Don’t you know, he lives at the top of Molyneux Park. His mother was a great friend of Miss Wickham’s. He comes down here now and then for week-ends. He’s got something to do with motor-cars.

[Kate shows the visitor in.]

Kate.

Mr. Hornby.

[She goes out. Reginald Hornby is a good-looking young man, with a neat head on a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair is carefully brushed, his small moustache is trim and curled. His beautiful clothes suggest the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. His tie, his handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket, his boots, are the very latest thing. He is a nut.]

Hornby.

I say, I’m awfully sorry to blow in like this. But I didn’t know if you’d be staying on here, and I wanted to catch you. And I’m off in a day or two, myself.

Norah.

Won’t you sit down? Mr. Hornby — Miss Pringle.

Hornby.

How d’you do? Everything go off O.K.?

Norah.

I beg your pardon?

Hornby.

Funeral, I mean. Mother went. Regular beano for her.

[Miss Pringle, rather shocked, draws herself up primly, but Norah’s eyes twinkle with amusement at his airy manner.]

Norah.

Really?

Hornby.

You see, she’s getting on. I’m the child of her old age — Benjamin, don’t you know. [He turns to Miss Pringle.] Benjamin and Sarah, you know.

Miss Pringle.

I understand perfectly, but it wasn’t Sarah.

Hornby.

Wasn’t it? When one of her old friends dies, mother goes to the funeral and says to herself: “Well, I’ve seen her out, anyhow.” Then she comes back and eats muffins for tea. She always eats muffins after she’s been to a funeral.

Norah.

The maid said you wanted to see about something.

Hornby.

That’s right, I was forgetting. [To Miss Pringle.] If Sarah wasn’t Benjamin’s mother, whose mother was she?

Miss Pringle.

If you want to know, I recommend you to read your Bible.

Hornby.

[With much satisfaction.] I thought it was a stumper. [To Norah.] The fact is, I’m going to Canada, and mother told me you’d got a brother or something out there.

Norah.

A brother, not a something.

Hornby.

And she said, perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me a letter to him.

Norah.

I will with pleasure. But I’m afraid he won’t be much use to you. He’s a farmer and he lives miles away from anywhere.

Hornby.

But I’m going in for farming.

Norah.

Are you? What on earth for?

Hornby.

I’ve jolly well got to do something, and I think farming’s about the best thing I can do. One gets a lot of shooting and riding, you know. And then there are tennis parties and dances. And you make a pot of money, there’s no doubt about that.

Norah.

I thought you were in some motor business in London.

Hornby.

Well, I was in a way. But ... I thought you’d have heard about it. Mother’s been telling everybody. Governor won’t speak to me. Altogether things are rotten. I want to get out of this beastly country as quick as I can.

Norah.

Would you like me to give you the letter at once?

Hornby.

I wish you would.

[Norah sits down at an escritoire and begins to write a letter.]

Fact is, I’m broke. I was all right as long as I stuck to bridge. I used to make money on that. Over a thousand a year.

Miss Pringle.

[Horrified.] What!

Hornby.

Playing regularly, you know. If I hadn’t been a fool I’d have stuck to that. But I got bitten with chemi.

Norah.

[Turning round.] With what?

Hornby.

Chemin de fer. Never heard of it? I got in the habit of going to Thornton’s. I suppose you never heard of him either. He keeps a gambling hell. Gives you a slap-up supper for nothing, as much pop as you can drink, and changes your cheques like a bird. The result is I’ve lost every bob I had, and then Thornton sued me on a cheque I’d given him. The Governor forked out, but he says I’ve got to go to Canada. I’m never going to gamble again, I can tell you that.

Norah.

Oh, well, that’s something.

Hornby.

You can’t make money at chemi. The cagnotte’s bound to clear you out in the end. When I come back I’m going to stick to bridge. There are always plenty of mugs about, and if you’ve got a good head for cards you can’t help making an income out of it.

Norah.

Here is your letter.

Hornby.

Thanks awfully. I daresay I shan’t want it, you know. I expect I shall get offered a job the moment I land, but there’s no harm having it. I’ll be getting along.

Norah.

Good-bye, then, and good luck.

Hornby.

Good-bye.

[He shakes hands with Norah and Miss Pringle and goes out.]

Miss Pringle.

Norah, why don’t you go to Canada? Now your brother has a farm of his own I should have thought....

Norah.

[Interrupting.] My brother’s married. He married four years ago.

Miss Pringle.

You never told me.

Norah.

I couldn’t.

Miss Pringle.

Why? Isn’t his wife ... isn’t his wife nice?

Norah.

She was a waitress at a scrubby little hotel in Winnipeg.

Miss Pringle.

What are you going to do, then?

Norah.

It’s no good crying over spilt milk. I’ll look out for another situation.

END OF FIRST ACT

ACT II

Scene: The living-room and kitchen on Edward Marsh’s farm at Dyer, Manitoba. It is a room lined with brown planks, and on the walls in cheap gilt frames are coloured supplements from the Christmas numbers of illustrated papers. Over one door is the head of a moose, and over the other a large kitchen clock. The floor is covered with shiny oil-cloth. In the window are geraniums growing in maple-syrup tins. On one side is a large American stove. There is a dresser of unvarnished deal on which are plates and cups and saucers. They are of the plainest earthenware, and few of them match. There are two American rockers and a number of kitchen chairs. There is a plain kitchen table. On the stove is an enormous kettle and a couple of saucepans. There is a small bookshelf on which are a few tattered novels and some old magazines. The table is set for dinner with a cheap white cloth, none too clean. Ed Marsh is sitting at one end, with the remains of a joint of cold beef in front of him, and at the other end is his wife, with a teapot, milk-jug, and sugar-basin. There is a loaf of bread on the table, a large tin containing maple-syrup, and the remains of a milk pudding. Norah is sitting next to her sister-in-law and beside her is Reginald Hornby. Opposite are Frank Taylor and Benjamin Trotter. Dinner is just finished. Gertie Marsh is a dark little person, with a hard look and a dried-up skin. She is thin and nervous, an active, hard-working woman with a sharp tongue and, outwardly at least, little tenderness. She is dressed in a shirt-waist, a serge skirt, and brown, rather smart high-heeled shoes. She wears a small apron. Norah wears a white blouse and a green skirt. Ed Marsh is a good-natured, easy-going man, with a small moustache and untidy hair. He wears a black flannel shirt, with white lines on it, a black waistcoat, and dark grubby trousers. The others are hired men. Frank Taylor is a tall fellow, strong, with clean-cut features and frank, humorous eyes. He is clean shaven. His movements are slow and he speaks with a marked accent. He is very sure of himself. He wears a dark flannel shirt and a pair of overalls, which have been blue, but are now black and grimy with age. The braces which hold them up announce that they come from Eaton’s, Winnipeg. Ben Trotter is an English labourer, with broken, discoloured teeth, and hair cut very short, with something like a love-lock plastered on his forehead. He is dressed in the same way as Frank Taylor. Reggie Hornby’s head is still neat and trim, his hair is carefully brushed. His overalls are much newer than the others’. He wears a flannel shirt which was obviously made in Piccadilly.

Marsh.

Have some more syrup, Reg?

Hornby.

No, thank you.

Marsh.

Has everyone finished?

Gertie.

It looks like it.

[Marsh pushes back his chair, takes a pouch and pipe from his pocket and lights up. Taylor does the same.]

Gertie.

We’ll be able to start on the ironing this afternoon.

Norah.

Very well.

Trotter.

It was a rare big wash you done this morning by the look of it on the line.

Norah.

My arms are just aching.

Gertie.

When you’ve been out in this country a bit longer you’ll learn not to wear more things than you can help.

Norah.

Was there more than my fair share?

Gertie.

You use double the number of stockings than what I do. And everything else is the same.

Norah.

[With a smile.] Clean but incompetent.

Gertie.

There’s many a true word spoken in jest.

Taylor.

Say, Reg, is it true that when you first come out you asked Ed where the bath-room was?

Trotter.

[With a chuckle.] That’s right. Ed told ’im there was a river a mile and a ‘alf from ’ere, an’ that was the only bath-room ’e knew.

Marsh.

One soon gets used to that sort of thing, eh, Reg?

Hornby.

Rather. If I saw a bath-room now it would only make me nervous.

Taylor.

Out in B.C. I knew a couple of Englishmen who were baching and the only other people around were Indians. The first two years they was there they wouldn’t have anything to do with the Indians because they was so dirty, and after that the Indians wouldn’t have anything to do with them. [He puts his fingers to his nose to indicate a nasty smell.]

Norah.

What a disgusting story!

Taylor.

D’you think so? I rather like it.

Norah.

You would.

[He looks at her with a little smile, but does not answer.]

Gertie.

[Getting up.] Are you going to sit there all day, Norah?

Marsh.

Why don’t you keep quiet for five minutes? I guess Norah’s not sorry to have a rest after that wash.

Gertie.

The amount of work Norah did isn’t going to tire her much, I reckon.

Norah.

I’m not used to that sort of work yet. It takes it out of me a bit.

Gertie.

I’ve not found out what sort of work you are used to.

[Norah gets up and the two women start clearing away the table. Marsh moves into one of the rocking-chairs and smokes.]

Marsh.

Give her time to get used to the life, Gertie. You can’t expect everything all at once.

Gertie.

It’s always the same with English people. You have to teach them everything.

Marsh.

Well, you didn’t have to teach me to propose, Gertie.

[Norah takes away things from before Taylor and he gets up.]

Taylor.

I guess I’m in your way.

Norah.

Not more than usual, thank you.

Taylor.

[Smiling.] I guess you’ll not be sorry to see the last of me.

Norah.

I can’t honestly say that it makes the least difference to me whether you go or stay.

Marsh.

Now don’t start quarrelling, you two.

Hornby.

When does your train go, Frank?

Taylor.

Half-past three. I’ll be starting from here in about an hour.

Marsh.

Reg can go over with you and he’ll drive the rig back again.

Taylor.

All right. I’ll go and dress myself in a bit.

Gertie.

I guess you’ll be glad to get back to your own place.

Taylor.

I guess I shan’t be sorry.

[The clearing away is finished. Gertie gets a large metal basin and puts it on the table. Norah fetches the kettle and pours hot water into the basin. They begin washing up.]

Gertie.

I’ll do the washing, Norah, and you can dry.

Norah.

All right.

Gertie.

I’ve noticed the things aren’t half clean when I leave them to you to do.

Norah.

I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?

Gertie.

I suppose you never did the washing up in England. Too grand?

Norah.

I don’t suppose anyone would wash up if they could help it. It’s not very amusing.

Gertie.

You always want to be amused.

Norah.

No. But I want to be happy.

Gertie.

Well, you’ve got a room over your head and a comfortable bed to sleep in, three good meals a day, and plenty to do; that’s all anybody wants to make them happy, I guess.

Hornby.

Oh, lord!

Gertie.

[Turning sharply on him.] Well, if you don’t like Canada, why did you come out?

Hornby.

[Rising slowly to his feet.] You don’t suppose I’d have let them send me if I’d known what I was in for? Not much. Up at five in the morning and working in the fields like a navvy till your back feels as if it ‘ud break, and then back again in the afternoon. And the same thing day after day. What was the good of sending me to Harrow and Oxford if that’s what I’ve got to do all my life?

Marsh.

You’ll get used to it soon enough, Reg. It’s a bit hard at first, but when you get your foot in you wouldn’t change it for any other life.

Gertie.

This isn’t a country for a man to go to sleep with and wait for something to turn up.

Trotter.

I wouldn’t go back to England now, not for nothing. England! Eighteen bob a week, that’s what I earned, and no prospects. Out of work five months in the year.

Norah.

What did you do in England?

Trotter.

Bricklayer, Miss.

Gertie.

You needn’t call her miss. Norah’s her name. You call me Gertie, don’t you?

Trotter.

What with strikes an’ bad times you never knew where you was. And the foreman bullying you. I don’t know what all. I ‘ad about enough of it, I can tell you. I’ve never been out of work since the day I landed. I’ve had as much to eat as I wanted and I’m saving money. In this country everybody’s as good as everybody else.

Norah.

If not better.

Trotter.

In two years I shall be able to set up for myself. Why, there’s old man Thompson, up at Pratt, he started as a bricklayer, come from Yorkshire, he did. He’s got seven thousand dollars in the bank now.

Marsh.

You fellows who come out now have a much softer thing on than I did when I first came. In those days they wouldn’t have an Englishman, they’d have a Galician rather. In Winnipeg, when they advertised in the paper for labour, you’d see often as not no English need apply.

Gertie.

Well, it was their own fault. They wouldn’t work or anything. They just soaked.

Marsh.

It was their own fault right enough. This was the dumping ground for all the idlers, drunkards, and scallywags in England. They had the delusion over there that if a man was too big a rotter to do anything at all in England he’d only got to be sent out here and he’d make a fortune.

Taylor.

I guess things ain’t as bad as that now. They send us a different class. It takes an Englishman two years longer than anybody else to get the hang of things, but when once he tumbles to it he’s better than any of them.

Marsh.

I guess nowadays everyone’s glad to see the Englishman make good. When I nearly smashed up three years ago, I had no end of offers to help.

Hornby.

How did you smash up?

Marsh.

Oh, I had a run of bad luck. One year my crop was frosted and then next year I was hailed out. It wants a good deal of capital to stand up against that.

Taylor.

That’s what happened to me. I was hailed out, and I hadn’t got capital, so I just had to hire out. [To Norah.] If it hadn’t been for that hailstorm you wouldn’t have had the pleasure of making my acquaintance.

Norah.

[Ironically.] How hollow and empty life would have been without that.

Gertie.

I wonder you didn’t just quit and start out Calgary way.

Taylor.

Well, I’d put in two years on my homestead and done a lot of clearing. It seemed kind of silly to lose my rights now. And when you’ve been hailed out once the chances are it won’t happen again, for some years that is, and by that time I ought to have put a bit by.

Norah.

What sort of a house have you got?

Taylor.

Well, it ain’t what you might call a palace, but it’s large enough for two.

Marsh.

Thinking of marrying?

Taylor.

Well, I guess it’s kind of lonesome on a farm without a woman. But it’s not so easy to find a wife when you’re just starting on your own. Canadian girls think twice before taking a farmer.

Gertie.

They know something, I guess.

Marsh.

Well, you took one, Gertie.

Gertie.

Not because I wanted to, you can be sure of that. I don’t know how you got round me.

Marsh.

I wonder.

Gertie.

I guess it was because you was kind of helpless, and I didn’t know what you’d do without me.

Marsh.

I guess it was love and you couldn’t help yourself.

Taylor.

I’m thinking of going to one of them employment agencies when I get to Winnipeg and looking the girls over.

Norah.

Like sheep.

Taylor.

I don’t know anythin’ about sheep. I’ve never had to do with sheep.

Norah.

And d’you think you know anything about women?

Taylor.

I guess I can tell if they’re strong and willing. And so long as they ain’t cock-eyed I don’t mind taking the rest on trust.

Norah.

And what inducement is there for a girl to have you?

Trotter.

That’s why he wants to catch ’em young, when they’ve just landed and don’t know much.

Taylor.

I’ve got my quarter section — a hundred and sixty acres, with seventy of it cleared — and I’ve got a shack that I built myself. That’s something, ain’t it?

Norah.

You’ve got a home to offer and enough to eat and drink. A girl can get that anywhere. Why, they’re simply begging for service.

Taylor.

Some girls like getting married. There’s something in the word that appeals to them.

Norah.

You seem to think a girl would jump at the chance of marrying you.

Taylor.

She might do worse.

Norah.

I think you flatter yourself.

Taylor.

I know my job and there ain’t too many as can say that. I’ve got brains.

Norah.

What makes you think so?

Taylor.

Well, I can see you’re no fool.

Gertie.

[With a chuckle.] He put one over on you then, Norah.

Taylor.

[Good-humouredly.] Because you’ve got no use for me, there’s no saying but what others may have.

[Gertie takes the basin out in order to pour away the water. Norah goes on drying the crockery.]

Norah.

Of course, there’s no accounting for tastes.

Taylor.

I can try, can’t I?

Norah.

It’s very wise of you to go to an agency. A girl’s more likely to marry you when she’s only seen you once than when she’s seen you often.

Taylor.

[With a wink at the others.] It seems to make you quite mad, the thought of me marrying.

Norah.

You wouldn’t talk about it like that unless you looked down upon women. Oh, I pity the poor wretched creature who becomes your wife.

Taylor.

I guess she won’t have a bad time when I’ve broken her in to my ways.

Norah.

Are you under the impression you can do that?

Taylor.

Yep.

Norah.

You’re not expecting that there’ll be much love lost between you and the girl you — honour with your choice?

Taylor.

What’s love got to do with it? It’s a business proposition.

Norah.

What!

Taylor.

I give her board and lodging and the charm of my society. And in return she’s got to cook and bake and wash and keep the shack clean and tidy. And if she can do that I’ll not be particular what she looks like.

Marsh.

So long as she’s not cock-eyed.

Taylor.

No, I draw the line at that.

Norah.

[Ironically.] I beg your pardon. I didn’t know it was a general servant you wanted. You spend a dollar and a half on a marriage licence, and then you don’t have to pay any wages. It’s a good investment.

Taylor.

You’ve got a sharp tongue in your head for a girl, Norah.

Norah.

Please don’t call me Norah.

Marsh.

Don’t be so silly. It’s the custom of the country. Why, they all call me Ed.

Norah.

I don’t care what the custom of the country is. I’m not going to be called Norah by the hired man.

Taylor.

Don’t you bother, Ed. I’ll call her Miss Marsh if she likes it better.

Norah.

I should like to see you married to someone who’d give you what you deserved. I’d like to see your pride humbled. You think yourself very high and mighty, don’t you? I’d like to see a woman take you by the heart-strings and wring them till you screamed with pain.

Marsh.

[With a laugh.] Norah, how violent you are.

Norah.

You’re overbearing, supercilious, egotistic.

Taylor.

I’m not sure as I know what them long words means, but I guess they ain’t exactly complimentary.

Norah.

[Furiously.] I guess they ain’t.

Taylor.

I’m sorry for that. I was thinking of offering you the position before I went to the employment agency.

Norah.

How dare you speak to me like that!

Marsh.

Don’t fly into a temper, Norah.

Norah.

He’s got no right to say impudent things to me.

Marsh.

Don’t you see he’s only having a joke with you?

Norah.

He shouldn’t joke. He’s got no sense of humour.

[Norah drops a cup and breaks it, and as this happens Gertie comes in.]

Gertie.

Butter fingers.

Norah.

I’m so sorry.

Gertie.

You clumsy thing. You’re always doing something wrong.

Norah.

You needn’t worry, I’ll pay for it.

Gertie.

Who wants you to pay for it? D’you think I can’t afford to pay for a cup? You might say you’re sorry — that’s all I want you to do.

Norah.

I said I was sorry.

Gertie.

No, you didn’t.

Marsh.

I heard her, Gertie.

Gertie.

She said she was sorry as if she was doing me a favour.

Norah.

You don’t expect me to go down on my knees to you? The cup’s worth twopence.

Gertie.

It isn’t the value I’m thinking about, it’s the carelessness.

Norah.

It’s only the third thing I’ve broken since I’ve been here.

Gertie.

You can’t do anything; you’re more helpless than a child of six. You’re all the same, all of you.

Norah.

You’re not going to abuse the whole British nation because I’ve broken a cup worth twopence, are you?

Gertie.

And the airs you put on. Condescending isn’t the word. It’s enough to try the patience of a saint.

Marsh.

Oh, shut up.

Gertie.

You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life, and you come here and think you can teach me everything.

Norah.

I don’t know about that, but I think I can teach you manners.

Gertie.

How dare you say that! How dare you! You come here and I give you a home, you sleep in my blankets and eat my food, and then you insult me.

[She bursts into tears.]

Marsh.

Now then, Gertie, don’t cry. Don’t be so silly.

Gertie.

Oh, leave me alone. Of course you take her part. You would. It’s nothing to you that I’ve slaved for you for three years. As soon as she comes along and plays the lady....

[She hurries out of the room. Marsh hesitates for a moment and then follows his wife. There is a momentary pause.]

Taylor.

I reckon I might be cleaning myself. Time’s getting on. You’re coming, Ben?

Trotter.

Yes, I’m coming. I suppose you’ll take the mare?

Taylor.

Yep. That’s what Ed said this morning.

[They go out. Norah is left alone with Reggie Hornby.]

Hornby.

[With a little smile.] Well, are you enjoying the land of promise as much as you said I should?

Norah.

We’ve both made our bed and we must lie in it.

Hornby.

D’you remember that afternoon at Miss Wickham’s when I came for a letter to your brother?

Norah.

I hadn’t much intention of coming to Canada then.

Hornby.

I don’t mind telling you that I mean to get back to England the very first opportunity I get. I’m willing to give away my share of the White Man’s Burden with a packet of chewing gum.

Norah.

[Smiling.] You prefer the Effete East?

Hornby.

Rather. Give me the degrading influence of a decadent civilisation every time.

Norah.

Your father will be pleased to see you, won’t he?

Hornby.

I don’t think. Of course, I was a damned fool ever to leave Winnipeg.

Norah.

I understand you didn’t till you were forced to.

Hornby.

Your brother behaved like a perfect brick. I sent him on your letter and told him I was up against it — d’you know I hadn’t got a bob? I was jolly glad to earn half a dollar by digging a pit in a man’s garden. Bit thick, you know.

Norah.

[Laughing.] I can see you.

Hornby.

Your brother sent me my fare to come here and told me I could do the chores. I didn’t know what they were. I found out it was doing all the jobs that it wasn’t anybody else’s job to do. And they call it God’s own country.

[Meanwhile Norah has put a couple of irons on the stove and now she gets the board. It is rather heavy for her.]

Norah.

I think you’re falling into the ways very well.

Hornby.

What makes you think that?

Norah.

[With a smile.] You can sit by and smoke your pipe, and watch me carry the ironing board about.

Hornby.

[Without moving.] D’you want me to help you?

Norah.

No.... It would remind me of home.

Hornby.

I suppose I shall have to stick it out at least a year, unless I can humbug the mater into sending me enough money to get home with.

Norah.

She won’t send you a penny if she’s wise.

Hornby.

Wouldn’t you chuck it if you could?

Norah.

[With a flash of spirit.] And acknowledge myself beaten? [There is a short pause.] You don’t know what I went through before I came here. I tried to get another position as lady’s companion. I answered advertisements. I hung about the agent’s offices.... Two people offered to take me without a salary. One woman suggested ten shillings a week and my lunch. She expected me to find myself a room, clothes, breakfast and supper on ten shillings a week. That settled me. I wrote to Eddie and said I was coming. When I’d paid my fare I had eight pounds in the world. That’s the result of ten years’ work as lady’s companion. When he came to meet me at the station at Dyer....

Hornby.

Don’t call it a station, call it a depôt.

Norah.

My whole fortune consisted of seven dollars and thirty-five cents.

[Marsh comes in and gives Hornby a glance.]

Marsh.

What about that wood you were splitting, Reg? You’d better be getting on with it.

Hornby.

Oh, lord, is there no rest for the wicked?

[He gets up slowly and saunters lazily to the door.]

Marsh.

Don’t hurry yourself, will you?

Hornby.

Brilliant sarcasm is just flying about the house to-day.

[He goes out.]

Marsh.

That’s about the toughest nut I’ve ever been set to crack. Why on earth did you give him a letter to me?

Norah.

He asked me. I couldn’t very well say no.

[Throughout the scene Norah goes on ironing things which she takes from a pile of washing in the basket.]

Marsh.

I can’t make out what people are up to in the Old Country. They think that if a man is too big a rotter to do anything at all in England they’ve only got to send him out here and he’ll make a fortune.

Norah.

He may improve.

Marsh.

[With a look at Norah.] You’ve thoroughly upset Gertie.

Norah.

She’s very easily upset, isn’t she?

Marsh.

It’s only since you came that things haven’t gone right. We never used to have scenes.

Norah.

Do you blame me? I came prepared to like her and help her. She met all my advances with suspicion.

Marsh.

She thinks you look down upon her. You ought to remember that she never had your opportunities. She’s earned her own living from the time she was thirteen. You can’t expect in her the refinements of a woman who’s led the protected life that you have.

Norah.

I haven’t said a word that could be turned into the least suggestion of disapproval of anything she did.

Marsh.

My dear, your whole manner has expressed disapproval. You won’t do things in the way we do them. After all, the way you lived in Tunbridge Wells isn’t the only way people can live. Our ways suit us, and when you live amongst us you must adopt them.

Norah.

She never gave me a chance to learn them. She treated me with suspicion and enmity from the very first day I came here. When she sneered at me because I talked of a station instead of a depôt, of course I went on talking of a station. Because I prefer to drink water with my meals instead of strong tea she said I was putting on side.

Marsh.

Why can’t you humour her? You see, you’ve got to take the blame for all the English people who came here in the past and were lazy, worthless, and supercilious. They called us Colonials and turned up their noses at us. What d’you expect us to do? Say, “Thank you very much, sir; we know we’re not worthy to black your boots; and don’t bother to work — it’ll be a pleasure for us to give you money”? It’s no good blinking the fact, there was a great prejudice against the English, but it’s giving way now, and every sensible man and woman who comes out can do something to destroy it.

Norah.

[With a shrug of the shoulders.] If you’re tired of having me here I can go back to Winnipeg. I shan’t have any difficulty in finding something to do.

Marsh.

Good lord, I don’t want you to go. I like having you here, and it’s company for Gertie. And you know, jobs aren’t so easy to find as you think, especially now the winter’s coming on. Everyone wants a job in the city.

Norah.

What d’you want me to do?

Marsh.

Well, you’ve got to live with Gertie. Why can’t you make the best of things and meet her half way? You might make allowances for her even if you think her unreasonable.

Norah.

I’ll have a try.

Marsh.

I think you ought to apologise for what you said to her just now.

Norah.

I? I’ve got nothing to apologise for. She drove me to distraction.

[There is a moment’s pause. Marsh, now that he has come to the object of all he has been saying, is a little embarrassed.]

Marsh.

She says she won’t speak to you again until you beg her pardon.

Norah.

Does she look upon that as a great hardship?

Marsh.

My dear, we’re twelve miles from the nearest store. We’re thrown upon one another through the whole of the winter. Last year there was a bad blizzard, and for six weeks we didn’t see a soul outside the farm. Unless we learn to put up with one another’s whims life becomes a perfect hell.

Norah.

You can go on talking all night, Eddie — I’ll never apologise. Time after time when she sneered at me till my blood boiled. I’ve kept my temper. She deserved ten times more than I said. D’you think I’m going to knuckle under to a woman like that?

Marsh.

Remember she’s my wife, Norah.

Norah.

Why didn’t you marry a lady?

Marsh.

What the dickens d’you think is the use of being a lady out here?

Norah.

You’ve degenerated since you left England.

Marsh.

Now, look here, my dear, I’ll just tell you what Gertie did for me. She was a waitress in Winnipeg at the Minnedosa Hotel, and she was making money. She knew what the life was on a farm, much harder than anything she’d been used to in the city, but she accepted all the hardship of it, and the monotony — because she loved me.

Norah.

She thought it a good match. You were a gentleman.

Marsh.

Fiddledidee. She had the chance of much better men than me.... And when I lost my harvest two years running, d’you know what she did? She went back to the hotel in Winnipeg for the winter so as to carry things on till the next harvest. And at the end of the winter she gave me every cent she’d earned to pay the interest of my mortgage and the instalments on the machinery.

[There is a pause.]

Norah.

Very well, I’ll apologise. But leave me alone with her. I — I don’t think I could do it before anyone else.

Marsh.

All right. I’ll go and tell her.

[He goes out. Norah is left alone with her thoughts. In a moment Gertie comes back, followed by Marsh.]

Norah.

[Trying to take things lightly.] I’ve been getting on with the ironing.

Gertie.

Have you?

Norah.

[With a smile.] That is one of the few things I can do all right.

Gertie.

Any child can iron.

Marsh.

Well, I’ll be going down to the shed.

Gertie.

[Turning to him quickly.] What for?

Marsh.

I want to see about mending that door. It hasn’t been closing properly.

Gertie.

I thought Norah had something to say to me.

Marsh.

That’s what I’m going to leave you alone for.

Gertie.

I like that. She insults me before everybody and then when she’s going to apologise it’s got to be private. No, thank you.

Norah.

What d’you mean, Gertie?

Gertie.

You sent Ed in to tell me you was going to apologise for what you’d said, didn’t you?

Norah.

For peace and quietness.

Gertie.

Well, what you said was before the men, and it’s before the men you must say you’re sorry.

Norah.

How can you ask me to do such a thing!

Marsh.

Don’t be rough on her, Gertie. No one likes apologising.

Gertie.

People who don’t like apologising should keep a better lookout on their tongue.

Marsh.

It can’t do you any good to have her eat humble pie before the men.

Gertie.

Perhaps not, but it’ll do her good.

Norah.

Gertie, don’t be cruel. I’m sorry if I lost my temper just now and said anything that hurt you. Please don’t make me humiliate myself before the others.

Gertie.

I’ve made up my mind, so it’s no good talking.

Norah.

Don’t you see it’s bad enough to beg your pardon before Eddie?

Gertie.

[Irritably.] Why don’t you call him Ed like the rest of us? Eddie sounds so soppy.

Norah.

I’ve called him Eddie all my life.... It’s what his mother called him.

Gertie.

You do everything you can to make yourself different from all of us.

Norah.

No, I don’t, I promise you I don’t. Why won’t you give me any credit for trying to do my best to please you?

Gertie.

That’s neither here nor there. Go and fetch the men, Ed, and then I’ll hear what she’s got to say.

Norah.

No, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. You drive me too far.

Gertie.

You won’t beg my pardon?

Norah.

[Beside herself.] I said I could teach you manners. I made a mistake, I couldn’t teach you manners. One can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Marsh.

[Sharply.] Shut up, Norah.

Gertie.

Now you must make her, Ed.

Marsh.

I’m sick to death of the pair of you.

Gertie.

I’m your wife, and I’m going to be mistress of this house.

Marsh.

It’s horrible to make her eat humble pie before three strange men. You’ve got no right to ask her to do a thing like that.

Gertie.

[Furiously.] Are you taking her part? What’s come over you since she come here? You’re not the same to me as you used to be. Why did she come here and get between us?

Marsh.

I haven’t done anything.

Gertie.

Haven’t I been a good wife to you? Have you ever had any complaint to make about me?

Marsh.

You know I haven’t.

Gertie.

As soon as your sister comes along you let me be insulted. You don’t say a word to defend me.

Marsh.

[With a grim smile.] Darling, you’ve said a good many to defend yourself.

Gertie.

I’m sick and tired of being put upon. You must choose between us.

Marsh.

What on earth d’you mean?

Gertie.

If you don’t make her apologise right now before the hired men I’m quit of you.

Marsh.

I can’t make her apologise if she won’t.

Gertie.

Then let her quit.

Norah.

Oh, I wish I could. I wish to God I could.

Marsh.

You know she can’t do that. There’s nowhere she can go. I’ve offered her a home. You were quite willing when I suggested having her here.

Gertie.

I was willing because I thought she’d make herself useful. We can’t afford to feed folks as don’t earn their keep. We have to work for our money, we do.

Norah.

I didn’t know you grudged me the little I eat. I wonder if I should if I were in your place.

Marsh.

Look here, it’s no good talking. I’m not going to turn her out. As long as she wants a home the farm’s open to her. And she’s welcome to everything I’ve got.

Gertie.

Then you choose her?

Marsh.

[Irritably.] I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Gertie.

I said you’d got to choose between us. Very well. Let her stay. I earned my living before, and I can earn it again. I’m going.

Marsh.

Don’t talk such nonsense.

Gertie.

You think I don’t mean it? D’you think I’m going to stay here and be put upon? Why should I?

Marsh.

Don’t you — love me any more?

Gertie.

Haven’t I shown that I love you? Have you forgotten, Ed?

Marsh.

We’ve gone through so much together, darling.

Gertie.

[Hesitatingly.] Yes, we have that.

Marsh.

Won’t you forgive her?

Gertie.

No, I can’t. You’re a man, you don’t understand. If she won’t apologise, either she must go or I shall.

Marsh.

I can’t lose you, Gertie. What should I do without you?

Gertie.

I guess you know me well enough by now. When I say a thing I do it.

Norah.

Eddie.

Marsh.

[Ill at ease.] After all, she’s my wife. If it weren’t for her I should be hiring out now at forty dollars a month.

[Norah hesitates for a moment, then she makes up her mind.]

Norah.

[Hoarsely.] Very well, I’ll do what you want.

Marsh.

You do insist on it, Gertie?

Gertie.

Of course I do.

Marsh.

I’ll go and call the men.

Norah.

Frank Taylor needn’t come, need he?

Gertie.

Why not?

Norah.

He’s going away to-day. It can’t much matter about him, surely.

Gertie.

Why are you so particular about it, then?

Norah.

The others are English. He’ll like to see me humiliated. He looks upon women as dirt. He’s.... Oh, I don’t know, but not before him.

Gertie.

It’ll do you a world of good to be taken down a peg or two, my lady.

Norah.

Oh, how heartless — how cruel.

Gertie.

Go on, Ed — I want to get on with my work.

[Marsh hesitates a moment, then shrugs his shoulders and goes out.]

Norah.

[Passionately.] Why do you humiliate me like this?

Gertie.

You came here and thought you knew everything, I guess. You didn’t know who you’d got to deal with.

Norah.

I was a stranger and homeless. If you’d had any kindness you wouldn’t have treated me so. I wanted to be fond of you.

Gertie.

You despised me before you ever saw me.

[Norah covers her eyes for a moment with both hands, and then forces herself to make another appeal.]

Norah.

Oh, Gertie, can’t we be friends? Can’t we let bygones be bygones and start afresh? We’re both fond of Eddie. He’s your husband and you love him, and he’s the only relation I have in the world. Won’t you let me be a real sister to you?

Gertie.

It’s rather late to say all that now.

Norah.

But it’s not too late, is it? I don’t know what I do that irritates you. I can see how competent you are, and I admire you so much. I know how splendid you’ve been with Eddie, and how you’ve stuck to him through thick and thin. You’ve done everything for him.

Gertie.

[Breaking in violently.] Oh, don’t go on patronising me. I shall go crazy.

Norah.

[Astounded.] Patronising you?

Gertie.

You talk to me as if I was a naughty child. You might be a school teacher.

Norah.

It seems perfectly hopeless.

Gertie.

Even when you’re begging my pardon you put on airs. You ask me to forgive you as if you was doing me a favour.

Norah.

[With a chuckle.] I must have a very unfortunate manner.

Gertie.

[Furiously.] Don’t laugh at me.

Norah.

Don’t make yourself ridiculous, then.

Gertie.

D’you think I shall ever forget what you wrote to Ed before I married him?

Norah.

[Looking at her quickly.] I don’t know what you mean.

Gertie.

Don’t you? You told him it would be a disgrace if he married me. He was a gentleman and I.... Oh, you spread yourself out.

Norah.

He oughtn’t to have shown you the letter.

Gertie.

He was dotty about me.

Norah.

I had a perfect right to try and prevent the marriage before it took place. But after it happened I only wanted to make the best of it. If you had a grudge against me why did you let me come here?

Gertie.

Ed wanted it, and it was lonely enough sometimes with the men away all day and no one to talk to. I thought you’d be company for me.... I can’t bear it when Ed talks to you about the Old Country and people I don’t know nothing about.

Norah.

[Surprised.] Are you jealous?

Gertie.

It’s my house and I’m mistress here. I won’t be put upon. What did you want to come here for, upsetting everybody? Till you come I never had a word with Ed. Oh, I hate you, I hate you.

Norah.

Gertie.

Gertie.

You’ve given me a chance and I’m going to take it. I’m going to take you down a peg or two.

Norah.

You’re doing all you can to drive me away from here.

Gertie.

You don’t think it’s much catch to have you. You talk of getting a job — you couldn’t get one. I know something about that, my girl. You! You can do nothing.... Here they are. Now take your medicine.

[Ed Marsh comes in, followed by Trotter and Frank Taylor. Frank has taken off his overalls.]

Gertie.

Where’s Reg?

Marsh.

He’s just coming.

Gertie.

Do they know what they’re here for?

Marsh.

No, I didn’t tell them.

[Hornby comes in.]

Gertie.

Norah insulted me a while ago before all of you, and I guess she wants to apologise.

Taylor.

If you told me it was that, Ed, you wanted me to come here for, I reckon I’d have told you to go to hell.

Norah.

Why?

Taylor.

I’ve got other things to do beside bothering my head about women’s quarrels.

Norah.

Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought it was some kindly feeling in you.

Gertie.

Go on, Norah, we’re waiting.

[Norah hesitates a moment and then takes her courage in both hands.]

Norah.

I’m sorry I was rude to you, Gertie. I apologise for what I said.

Taylor.

[With a quiet smile.] You didn’t find that very easy to say, I reckon.

Marsh.

There’s nothing more to be said, is there?

Gertie.

I’m quite satisfied.

Marsh.

We’d better get back to work, then.

[The men turn to go.]

Gertie.

Let this be a lesson to you, my girl.

[Norah starts at the words. It is the last straw.]

Norah.

Frank, will you wait a minute?

Taylor.

[A little surprised.] Sure. What can I do for you?

Norah.

I’ve understood that I’m not wanted here. I’m in the way. You said just now you wanted a woman to cook and bake for you, wash and mend your clothes, and keep your shack clean and tidy. Will I do?

Taylor.

[Rather amused.] Sure.

Marsh.

[Horrified.] Norah.

Norah.

[With a twinkle in her eye.] I’m afraid you’ll have to marry me.

Taylor.

I guess it would be more respectable.

Marsh.

Norah, you can’t mean it. You’re in a temper. See here, Frank, you mustn’t pay any attention to her.

Gertie.

Shameless, that’s what I call it.

Norah.

Why? He wants a woman to look after him. He practically proposed to me half an hour ago. Didn’t you?

Taylor.

Practically.

Hornby.

I’m bound to say I’ve never heard a proposal refused so emphatically.

Marsh.

You’ve been like cat and dog with Frank ever since you came. My dear, you don’t know what you’re in for.

Norah.

If he’s willing to risk it, I am.

Taylor.

[Looking at her gravely.] It ain’t an easy life you’re coming to. This farm’s a palace compared with my shack.

Norah.

I’m not wanted here, and you say you want me. If you’ll take me, I’ll come.

Taylor.

I’ll take you all right. When will you be ready? Will an hour do for you?

Norah.

[Suddenly panic-stricken.] An hour?

Taylor.

Why, yes, then we can catch the three-thirty into Winnipeg. You can go to the Y.W.C.A. for the night and we’ll be buckled up in the morning.

Norah.

You’re in a great hurry.

Taylor.

I suppose you meant it? You weren’t just pulling a bluff?

[Norah hesitates for a moment and they look at one another.]

Norah.

I shall be ready in an hour.

END OF THE SECOND ACT

ACT III

Scene: Frank Taylor’s shack at Prentice, Manitoba. It is a low log cabin, consisting of two rooms. The scene is the living-room. There is a door at the back towards the left-hand side, and on the right is another door that leads into the bedroom. A very small low window at the back. There is a stove on the left, with a long chimney. On the walls, untidily tacked up, are pictures cut out of the illustrated papers. Hanging on a nail is a Cariboo coat. On a shelf beside the stove are the few pots and pans that Frank Taylor possesses. They are battered and much used. There is a broom in the corner. The furniture consists of a rocking-chair, worn with use and shabby, a table roughly made by Taylor himself from packing-cases, one kitchen chair and two or three packing-cases used as stools. On another shelf are maple-syrup tins, in which groceries are kept. In one corner there is an old suit-case, locally known as a grip, and a heap of old clothes; in another corner is a pile of tattered magazines and numbers of the Winnipeg Free Press. The shack has an untidy, comfortless, bedraggled air.

When the curtain rises the scene is dark and empty. There is a faint glimmer of light through the window. The night is bright and starry. There is a slight noise of a rig being driven up outside, and then voices are heard.

Sharp.

Woa there! Woa!

Taylor.

A tidy pull, that last bit. Trail’s very bad.

Sharp.

Stop still, you brute.

Taylor.

I guess she wants to get home.

[Now comes the sound of a key being put into the lock. It is turned noisily and the door is opened wide. A rig stands outside and Sharp is seen still seated holding the reins. Norah has just got down. Tied on the back of the rig are Norah’s trunk and Taylor’s grip. There is a glimpse of the prairie and the bright Canadian night. Taylor comes in. He is wearing a waterproof coat lined with sheepskin, a dark, roughly cut suit of some coarse blue material, and a broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat.]

Taylor.

Wait a minute, and I’ll light the lamp. [He strikes a match and looks round.] Where in hell has it got to? The shack’s about two foot by three, and I’m blamed if I can ever find a darned thing.

Sharp.

I’ll give you a hand with that trunk.

[As he speaks he begins to get down. Taylor finds the lamp and lights it.]

Taylor.

I’ll come and help you if you’ll wait a bit. Come in, Norah.

Sharp.

Woa there!

[Norah comes in. She has on a hat and coat. She carries a string bag in which there is a number of parcels.]

Norah.

I’m quite stiff after that long drive.

Taylor.

Are you cold?

Norah.

No, not a bit. I was well wrapped up.

Taylor.

I guess it’s freezing. But it’s your first winter and you won’t feel the cold like we do.

Norah.

[Putting down her bag.] I’ll bring some of the things in.

Taylor.

Don’t touch the trunk, it’s too heavy for you.

Norah.

I’m as strong as a horse.

Taylor.

Don’t touch it.

Norah.

[With a smile.] I won’t.

[He goes out and takes more parcels out of the rig and comes in with them.]

Taylor.

We can all do with a cup of tea. Just have a look at the stove. It won’t take two shakes to light a fire.

Norah.

It seems hardly worth while. It’s so late.

Taylor.

[Cheerily.] Light the fire, my girl, and don’t talk about it.

[He goes out and is seen helping Sharp to unfasten the trunk. Norah, getting down on her knees, rakes out the ashes from the stove. Taylor and Sharp bring the box in between them. Sharp is a rough-looking man of forty. He has been a non-commissioned officer in an English regiment, and has still something of a soldier’s look.]

Sharp.

This trunk of yours isn’t what you might call light, Mrs. Taylor.

Norah.

It contains all I own in the world.

Taylor.

I guess it don’t do that. Since this morning you own a half share in a hundred and sixty acres of as good land as there is in Manitoba and a mighty fine shack.

Norah.

To say nothing of a husband.

Sharp.

Where d’you want this put?

Taylor.

It ‘ud better go in the next room right away, or we shall be falling over it.

[They carry the trunk into the bedroom. Norah gets up from her knees, goes over to a pile of logs by the stove, and takes two or three and some of the newspapers. The men come in again.]

Taylor.

Here, you won’t be able to light a fire with logs like that. Where’s that darned axe? [He glances round and sees it by the logs. He takes a couple and splits them.] I guess you’ll have plenty to do getting the shack tidy. [Sharp brings in Taylor’s grip and his gun.] Now, that’s real good of you, Sid.

Sharp.

Get any shooting down at Dyer, Frank?

Taylor.

There was a rare lot of prairie chickens around, but I didn’t get out more than a couple of days.

Sharp.

Well, I’ll be getting back home now.

Taylor.

Oh, stay and have a cup of tea, won’t you?

Sharp.

I don’t think I will. It’s getting late and the mare’ll get cold.

Taylor.

Put her in the shed.

Sharp.

No, I think I’ll be toddling. My missus says I was to give you her compliments, Mrs. Taylor, and she’ll be round to-morrow to see if there’s anything you want.

Norah.

That’s very kind of her. Thank you very much.

Taylor.

Sid lives where you saw that light just about a mile from here, Norah. Mrs. Sharp’ll be able to help you a lot at first.

Sharp.

Oh, well, we’ve been here for thirteen years, and we know the way of the country by now.

Taylor.

Norah’s about as green as a new dollar bill, I guess.

Sharp.

There’s a lot you can’t be expected to know at first. I’ll say good-night, then, and good luck.

Taylor.

Well, good-night then, Sid, if you won’t stay, and it was real good of you to come and fetch us in the rig.

Sharp.

Oh, that’s all right. Good-night to you, Mrs. Taylor.

Norah.

Good-night.

[Sharp goes out, gets on the rig, and drives away.]

Taylor.

I guess it must seem funny to you to hear him call you Mrs. Taylor, eh?

[Norah gives him a quick look, and represses a little shudder.]

Norah.

Yes.

Taylor.

How are you getting on with that fire?

Norah.

All right.

Taylor.

I guess I’ll get some water.

[He takes a pail and goes out. He is heard pumping. Norah gets up, lifts the lamp so as to see better, and looks round. She is pale, and has a frightened look. She does not hear Frank come in, and starts violently when he speaks to her.]

Taylor.

Having a look at the shack?

Norah.

[Putting the lamp down.] How you startled me.

Taylor.

What d’you think of it?

Norah.

I don’t know.

Taylor.

I built it with my own hands. Every one of them logs was a tree I cut down myself. You wait till the morning and I’ll show you how they’re joined together at the corners. There’s some neat work there, my girl, I guess.

Norah.

Here’s the kettle.

[He pours water into it from the pail, and she puts the kettle on the stove.]

Taylor.

You’ll find some tea in one of them tins on the shelf. Leastways there was some there when I come away. I guess you’re hungry.

Norah.

I don’t think I am, very. I ate a very good supper in the train.

Taylor.

I’m glad you call that a good supper. I guess I could wrap up the amount you ate in a postal stamp.

Norah.

[Smiling.] I haven’t a very large appetite.

Taylor.

I have. Where’s the loaf we got in Winnipeg this afternoon?

Norah.

I’ll get it.

Taylor.

And the butter. You’ll bake to-morrow, I reckon.

[Norah gets a loaf and a piece of butter out of the string bag she brought in with her. She puts them on the table.]

Norah.

Shall I cut you some?

Taylor.

Yep.

Norah.

Please.

Taylor.

Please what?

Norah.

[With a smile.] Yes, please.

Taylor.

Oh!

[He gives her a look, and she, a quiet smile on her face, cuts two or three pieces of bread and butter. Then she gets tea out of the tin and puts it in a teapot.]

Taylor.

I guess you’d better take your hat and coat off.

[Norah does so without answering.]

Taylor.

You ain’t terribly talkative for a woman, my girl.

Norah.

I haven’t got anything to say at the moment.

Taylor.

Well, I guess it’s better to have a wife as talks too little than a wife as talks too much.

Norah.

[With her tongue in her cheek.] I suppose absolute perfection is rare — in women, poor wretches.

Taylor.

What’s that?

Norah.

I was only amusing myself with a reflection.

[Taylor takes off his coat and appears in a grey sweater. He sits down in the rocking chair.]

Taylor.

I guess there’s no place like home. You get a bit fed up with hiring out. Ed was O.K., I reckon, but it ain’t like being your own boss.

Norah.

[Pointing.] What’s through there?

Taylor.

Oh, that’s the bedroom. Like to have a look?

Norah.

No.

Taylor.

When I built the shack I fixed it up so as it would do when I got married. Sid Sharp asked me what in hell I wanted to divide it up in half for, but I guess women like little luxuries like that.

Norah.

Like what?

Taylor.

Like having a room to sleep in and a room to live in.

Norah.

Here’s the bread and butter. Will you have some syrup?

Taylor.

Sure.

[He gets up and sits down at the table.]

Norah.

That water ought to be boiling by now. What about milk?

Taylor.

That’s one of the things you’ll have to do without till I can afford to buy a cow.

Norah.

I can’t drink tea without milk.

Taylor.

You try. Say, can you milk a cow?

Norah.

I? No.

Taylor.

Then it’s just as well I ain’t got one.

Norah.

You’re a philosopher.

[She lifts the cover off the kettle and looks at it, then pours some water into the teapot, and sets it down on the table.]

Norah.

Is there a candle? I’ll just get one or two things out of my box.

Taylor.

Ain’t you going to sit down and have a cup of tea?

Norah.

I don’t want any, thanks.

Taylor.

Sit down, my girl.

Norah.

Why?

Taylor.

[Smiling.] Because I tell you to.

Norah.

[Quite pleasantly.] I don’t think you’d better tell me to do things.

Taylor.

Then I ask you. You ain’t going to refuse the first favour I’ve asked you?

Norah.

[With a pretty smile.] Of course not. [She sits down.] There.

Taylor.

Now pour out my tea for me, will you? [He watches her do it.] It is rum seeing my wife sitting down at my table and pouring out tea for me.

Norah.

Is it pleasant?

Taylor.

Sure. Now have some yourself, my girl. You’ll soon get used to drinking it without milk. And I guess you’ll be able to get some to-morrow from Mrs. Sharp.

[Norah pours herself out some tea.]

Taylor.

I had a sort of a feeling I wanted you and me to have the first meal together in your new home. Just take a bit of the bread and butter.

[He passes over to her a slice and, smiling, she cuts a little piece off and eats it.]

Taylor.

We ain’t lost much time, I guess. Why, it’s only yesterday you told me not to call you Norah.

Norah.

That was very silly of me. I was in a temper.

Taylor.

And now we’re man and wife.

Norah.

Married in haste with a vengeance.

Taylor.

Ain’t you a bit scared?

Norah.

I? What of? You?

Taylor.

With Ed on t’other side of Winnipeg, he might just as well be in the Old Country for all the good he can be to you. You might be a bit scared to find yourself alone with a man you don’t know.

Norah.

I’m not nervous.

Taylor.

Good for you.

Norah.

You did give me a fright, though. When I asked you if you’d take me, I suppose it was only about fifteen seconds before you answered, but it seemed like ten minutes. I thought you might refuse.

Taylor.

I was thinking.

Norah.

[Smiling.] Counting up my good points and setting them against the bad ones?

Taylor.

No, I was thinking you wouldn’t have asked me like that if you hadn’t — despised me.

[Norah, a little taken aback, gives him a quick look, but she tries to pass it off lightly.]

Norah.

I don’t know what makes you think that.

Taylor.

Well, I don’t know how you could have put it more plainly that my name was mud.

Norah.

Why didn’t you refuse, then?

Taylor.

I guess I’m not a nervous fellow, either.

Norah.

[With a twinkle in her eye.] And women are scarce in Manitoba.

Taylor.

I always fancied an Englishwoman. They make the best wives when they’ve been licked into shape.

Norah.

[Frankly amused.] Are you proposing to attempt that operation on me?

Taylor.

You’re clever. I guess a hint or two is about all you’ll want.

Norah.

It embarrasses me when you pay me compliments.

Taylor.

I’ll take you round and show you the land to-morrow. I ain’t done all the clearing yet, so there’ll be plenty of work for the winter. I want to have a hundred acres to sow next year. And then if I get a good crop I’ve a mind to take another quarter. You can’t make it pay really without you’ve got half a section. And it’s a tough proposition when you ain’t got capital.

Norah.

I didn’t think I was marrying a millionaire.

Taylor.

Never mind, my girl, you shan’t live in a shack long, I promise you. It’s the greatest country in the world. We only want three good crops and you shall have a brick house same as you lived in at home.

Norah.

I wonder what they’re doing in England now.

Taylor.

Well, I guess they’re asleep.

Norah.

When I think of England I always think of it at tea-time. [She looks at the tea-things they have just used.] Miss Wickham had a beautiful old silver teapot — George II. — and she was awfully proud of it. And she was very proud of her tea-set — it was old Worcester — and she wouldn’t let anyone wash the things but.... And two or three times a week an old Indian judge came in to tea, and he used to talk to me about the East — oh, why did you make me think of it all?

Taylor.

The past is dead and gone, my girl. We’ve got the future.

Norah.

[Paying no attention to his words.] One never knows when one’s well off, does one? It’s madness to think of what’s gone for ever.

Taylor.

I wish we’d got a drop of liquor here so as we could drink one another’s health. But as we ain’t you’d better give me a kiss instead.

Norah.

[Lightly.] I’m not very fond of kissing.

Taylor.

[With a smile.] It ain’t generally an acquired taste, but I guess you’re peculiar.

Norah.

It looks like it.

Taylor.

Come, my girl, you didn’t even kiss me after we was married.

Norah.

[In a perfectly friendly way.] Isn’t a hint enough for you? Why do you force me to say everything in so many words?

Taylor.

It seems to me it wants a few words to make it plain when a woman refuses to give her husband a kiss.

Norah.

Do sit down, there’s a good fellow, and I’ll tell you one or two things.

Taylor.

That’s terribly kind of you. [He sinks back into the rocking-chair.] Have you any choice of seats?

Norah.

You’ve taken the only one that’s tolerably comfortable. I think there’s nothing to choose between the others.

Taylor.

Nothing.

Norah.

I think we’d better fix things up before we go any further.

Taylor.

Sure.

Norah.

You gave me to understand very plainly that you wanted a wife in order to get a general servant without having to pay her wages. Wages are high in Canada.

Taylor.

That was the way you put it.

Norah.

Baching isn’t very comfortable.

Taylor.

Not very.

Norah.

You wanted someone to cook and bake for you, wash, sweep, and mend. I offered to come and do all that. It never struck me for an instant that there was any possibility of your expecting anything else of me.

Taylor.

Then you’re a damned fool, my girl.

Norah.

[Firing up.] D’you mind not saying things like that to me?

Taylor.

[Good-humouredly.] I guess I shall have to say a good many things like that before we’ve done.

Norah.

I asked you to marry me only because I couldn’t stay in the shack without.

Taylor.

I guess you asked me to marry you because you was in a hell of a temper. You wanted to get away from Ed’s farm right then, and you didn’t care what you did so long as you quit. But you was darned sorry for what you’d done by the time you’d packed your box.

Norah.

[Frigidly.] What makes you think that?

Taylor.

Why, when you come back in the kitchen you was as white as a sheet. You wanted to say you’d changed your mind, but your darned pride wouldn’t let you.

Norah.

I wouldn’t have stayed on in that house for anything in the world.

Taylor.

And this morning, when I called for you at the Y.W.C.A., you wanted to say you wouldn’t marry me. You tried to speak the words, but they wouldn’t come. When you shook hands with me your hand was like ice.

Norah.

I was nervous for a moment. After all, one isn’t married every day of one’s life, is one?

Taylor.

If I hadn’t shown you the licence and the ring, I guess you wouldn’t have done it. You hadn’t the nerve to back out of it then.

Norah.

I hadn’t slept a wink all night. I kept on turning it over in my mind. I was frightened at what I’d done. But I didn’t know a soul in Winnipeg. I hadn’t anywhere to go. I had four dollars in my pocket. I had to go through with it.

Taylor.

You took pretty good stock of me in the train on the way here, I guess.

Norah.

[Recovering herself.] What makes you think so?

Taylor.

Well, I felt you was looking at me a good deal. It wasn’t hard to see that you was turning me over in your mind. What conclusion did you come to?

Norah.

You see, I lived all those years with an old lady. I know very little about men.

Taylor.

I guessed that.

Norah.

I came to the conclusion that you were a decent fellow. I thought you would be kind to me.

Taylor.

Bouquets are just flying around. Have you got anything more to say to me?

Norah.

No.

Taylor.

Then just get me my pouch, will you? I guess it’s in the pocket of my coat.

[She hesitates a moment, looks at him, then gets it.]

Norah.

Here you are.

Taylor.

[With his tongue in his cheek.] I thought you was going to tell me I could darned well get it myself.

Norah.

I don’t very much like being ordered about.

Taylor.

You never paid much attention to me till to-day, I reckon.

Norah.

I was always polite to you.

Taylor.

Very. But I was the hired man, and you never let me forget it. You thought yourself a darned sight better than me because you could play the piano and speak French. But we ain’t got a piano, and there ain’t anyone as speaks French nearer than Winnipeg.

Norah.

What are you driving at?

Taylor.

Parlour tricks ain’t much good on the prairie. They’re like dollar bills up in Hudson Bay. Tobacco’s the only thing you can trade with an Esquimaux. You can’t cook very well, you don’t know how to milk a cow — why, you can’t even harness a horse.

Norah.

Are you regretting your bargain already?

Taylor.

No, I guess I can teach you. But if I was you I wouldn’t put on any frills. We shall get along O.K., I guess, when we’ve shaken down.

Norah.

You’ll find I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

Taylor.

[Ignoring the remark.] When two people live together in a shack there’s got to be a deal of give and take on both sides. As long as you do what I tell you you’ll be all right.

Norah.

[With a smile.] It’s unfortunate that when anyone tells me to do a thing I have an irresistible desire not to do it.

Taylor.

I guess I tumbled to that. You must get over it.

Norah.

You’ve talked to me once or twice in a way I don’t like. I think we shall get on better if you ask me to do things.

Taylor.

Don’t forget that I can make you do them.

Norah.

[Amused.] How?

Taylor.

Well, I’m stronger than you are.

Norah.

A man can hardly use force in his dealings with a woman.

Taylor.

Oh?

Norah.

You seem surprised.

Taylor.

What’s going to prevent him?

Norah.

[With a little laugh.] Don’t be so silly.

[He gives her a look and then smiles quietly to himself.]

Taylor.

Well, I’m going to unpack my grip. [Pointing to the tea-things.] Wash up them things.

Norah.

[With a slight shrug of the shoulders.] I’ll wash them up in the morning.

Taylor.

Wash ’em up now, my girl. You’ll find the only way to keep things clean is to wash ’em the moment you’ve done with them.

[Norah looks at him with a slight smile on her face, but does not move.]

Taylor.

Did you hear what I said?

Norah.

I did.

Taylor.

Why don’t you do as I tell you?

Norah.

[Smiling.] Because I don’t choose.

Taylor.

You ain’t taken long to try it out.

Norah.

They say there’s no time like the present.

Taylor.

Are you going to wash up them things?

Norah.

No.

[He looks at her for a moment, then gets up, pours water into a pail and puts a ragged dishcloth on the table.]

Taylor.

Are you going to wash up them things?

Norah.

No.

Taylor.

D’you want me to make you?

Norah.

How can you do that?

Taylor.

I’ll show you.

Norah.

I’ll just get out these rugs, shall I? I expect it gets very cold towards morning.

[She gets up and goes over to a holdall and begins unstrapping it.]

Taylor.

Norah.

Norah.

Yes.

Taylor.

Come here.

Norah.

Why?

Taylor.

Because I tell you.

[She looks at him, but does not move. He goes over to her and is about to seize her wrist.]

Norah.

You daren’t touch me.

Taylor.

Who told you that?

Norah.

Have you forgotten that I’m a woman?

Taylor.

No, I haven’t. That’s why I’m going to make you do as I tell you. If you was a man I mightn’t be able to. Come now.

[He makes a movement to take her by the arm, but she slips away from him and quickly boxes his ears. He stops.]

Taylor.

That was a darned silly thing to do.

Norah.

What did you expect?

Taylor.

I expected you was cleverer than to hit me. You see, when it comes to — to muscle, I guess I’ve got the bulge on you.

Norah.

I’m not frightened of you.

Taylor.

Now come and wash up these things.

Norah.

I won’t.

Taylor.

Come on.

[He takes her wrists and tries to drag her to the table. She struggles with him, but cannot release herself. She kicks him as he drags her to the table.]

Norah.

Let me go.

Taylor.

Come on now, my girl. What’s the good of making a darned fuss about it?

Norah.

You brute, how dare you touch me! You’ll never force me to do anything. Let go! Let go! Let go!

[As they reach the table she bends down and bites him. Instinctively he releases her.]

Taylor.

Gee, what sharp teeth you’ve got.

Norah.

You cad! You cad!

Taylor.

[Looking at his hand.] I never thought you’d bite. That ain’t much like a lady.

Norah.

You filthy cad to hit a woman.

Taylor.

Gee, I didn’t hit you. You smacked my face and kicked my shins, and you bit my hand. And then you say I hit you.

Norah.

[With all her passion.] You beast! I hate you.

Taylor.

I don’t care about that so long as you wash them cups.

Norah.

Look.

[With a sudden sweep of the arm she brushes them off the table, and they fall on the floor and break.]

Taylor.

That’s a pity. We’re terribly short of crockery. We shall have to drink our tea out of tins now.

Norah.

I said I wouldn’t wash them and I haven’t washed them.

Taylor.

They don’t need it now, I guess.

Norah.

I think I’ve won.

Taylor.

[With a smile.] Sure. Now take the broom and sweep up all the darned mess you’ve made.

Norah.

I won’t.

Taylor.

Look here, my girl, I guess I’ve had about enough of your nonsense. You do as you’re told and look sharp about it.

Norah.

You can kill me if you like.

Taylor.

What’s the good of that? Women are scarce in Manitoba.... Here’s the broom.

Norah.

If you want that mess swept up you can sweep it up yourself.

Taylor.

You make me tired. [He puts the broom into her hands, but she flings it violently away.] Look here, if you don’t clean up that mess at once, I’ll give you the biggest hiding you’ve ever had in your life.

Norah.

[Scornfully.] You?

Taylor.

[Nodding his head.] Yours truly. I’ve done with larking now.

[He turns up the sleeves of his sweater. Suddenly she bursts into loud cries.]

Norah.

Help! Help! Help!

Taylor.

What’s the good of that? There ain’t no one within a mile of us. Listen.

[For a moment they are both silent as they listen to the silence of the prairie.]

Norah.

If you touch me I’ll have you up for cruelty. There are laws to protect me.

Taylor.

I don’t care a curse for the laws. I know I’m going to be master here. And if I tell you to do a thing you’ve darned well got to do it because I can make you. Now stop fooling. Pick up that crockery and get the broom.

Norah.

I won’t.

[He strides up and is just about to catch hold of her when she shrinks back. She sees he is in earnest. She is terrified by his look.]

Norah.

No, don’t. Don’t hurt me.

Taylor.

[He stops and looks at her.] I guess there’s only one law here, and that’s the law of the strongest. I don’t know nothing about cities. Perhaps men and women are equal there. But on the prairie a man’s master because he’s bigger and stronger than a woman.

Norah.

Frank.

Taylor.

Blast you, don’t talk!

[Norah pauses, struggling between her pride and her fear. She will not look at her husband. She feels that he is getting impatient. At last, slowly, she bends down and picks up the teapot, the cups and saucers, and puts them on the table. Then she sinks into the chair and bursts into tears. He watches her with a slight smile on his face, but not unkindly.]

Norah.

Oh, I’m so unhappy.

Taylor.

[Without any anger in his voice.] Come on, my girl, don’t shirk the rest of it.

[She looks up and sees the mess of spilt tea on the floor. She gets up slowly, keeping her face away from him, and picks up the broom. She sweeps up. When she has finished she puts the broom in the corner. He watches her all the time. Then she takes up her hat and coat and starts to put them on.]

Taylor.

What are you doing?

Norah.

I’ve done what you made me do. Now I’m going.

Taylor.

Where?

Norah.

What do I care so long as I get away?

Taylor.

You ain’t under the impression that there’s a first-class hotel round the corner, are you? because there ain’t.

Norah.

I’ll go to the Sharps.

Taylor.

I guess they’re in bed and asleep by now.

Norah.

I can wake them.

Taylor.

You’d never find your way. It’s pitch dark.

Norah.

I’ll sleep out of doors, then.

Taylor.

On the prairie? Why, you’d freeze to death.

Norah.

What does it matter to you whether I live or die?

Taylor.

It matters a great deal. Women are scarce in Manitoba.

Norah.

Are you going to prevent me from going?

Taylor.

Sure.

[He stands in front of the door and faces her.]

Norah.

You can’t keep me here against my will. If I don’t go to-night, I can go to-morrow.

Taylor.

To-morrow’s a long way off.

[She gives a start and looks at him with staring, terrified eyes, her throat is dry with terror.]

Norah.

Frank. What d’you mean?

Taylor.

I don’t know what silly fancies you had in your head. When I married you I intended that you should be a proper wife to me.

Norah.

But ... but.... [She can hardly speak.] But you understood. [He does not answer. At last she collects herself. She tries to talk calmly and reasonably.] I’m sorry for the way I behaved, Frank. It was childish of me to struggle with you. You irritated me by the way you spoke.

Taylor.

Oh, I don’t mind. I don’t know much about women and I guess they’re queer. We had to fix things up sometime and I guess there was no harm in getting it over right now.

Norah.

You’ve beaten me all along the line and I’m in your power. Have mercy on me.

Taylor.

I guess you won’t have much cause to complain.

Norah.

I married you in a fit of temper. It was very stupid of me. I’m very sorry that I — that I’ve been all this trouble to you. Won’t you let me go?

Taylor.

No, I can’t do that.

Norah.

I’m no good to you. You’ve told me that I’m useless. I can’t do any of the things that you want a wife to do. You can’t be so hard-hearted as to make me pay with all my life for one moment’s madness.

Taylor.

What good would it do if I let you go? Will you go to Gertie and ask her to take you back again? You’ve got too much pride for that.

Norah.

I don’t think I’ve got much pride left.

Taylor.

Don’t you think you’d better give it a try?

Norah.

All the life was so strange to me. In England they think it’s so different from what it really is. I thought I should have a horse to ride. I expected dances and tennis parties. And when I came out I was so out of it. I felt in the way. And yesterday they drove me frantic so that I felt I couldn’t stay another moment in that house. It was only an impulse. I made a mistake. I didn’t know what I was doing. You can’t have the heart to take advantage of it.

Taylor.

I knew you was making a mistake, but that was your look out. When I sell a man a horse he can look it over for himself, but I ain’t obliged to tell him its faults.

Norah.

D’you mean to say that after I’ve begged you almost on my knees to let me go you’ll force me to stay?

Taylor.

Sure.

Norah.

Oh, I’m so unhappy.

Taylor.

Perhaps you won’t be when you get used to it.

Norah.

[Desperately.] Oh, why did I ever walk into this trap?

Taylor.

Come, my girl, let us let bygones be bygones and give me a kiss.

[She looks at him for a moment.]

Norah.

I’m not in love with you.

Taylor.

I guessed that.

Norah.

And you’re not in love with me.

Taylor.

You’re a woman and I’m a man.

Norah.

D’you want me to tell you in so many words that you’re physically repellent to me? The thought of letting you kiss me horrifies and disgusts me.

Taylor.

[Good-humouredly.] Thank you.

Norah.

Look at your hands. It gives me goose-flesh when you touch me.

Taylor.

Cutting down trees, diggin’, looking after horses, don’t leave them very white and smooth.

Norah.

Let me go. Let me go.

[Taylor changes his manner, which has been quite good-humoured, and speaks more sharply and with a certain stern force.]

Taylor.

See here, my girl — you was educated like a lady and spent your life doing nothing — a lady’s companion, wasn’t you — taking a little dawg out for a walk of a morning and combing out his pretty little coat? And you look upon yourself as a darned sight better than me. I never had no schooling, and it’s a hell of a job for me to write a letter, but since I was so high I’ve earned my living. I guess I’ve been all over this country. I’ve been a trapper and I’ve worked on the railroad, and for two years I’ve been a freighter. I guess I’ve done pretty near everything but serve in a store. Now you just get busy and forget all the nonsense you’ve got in your head. You’re nothing but an ignorant woman and I’m your master. I’m going to do what I like with you, and if you don’t submit willingly, by God I’ll take you as the trappers in the old days used to take the squaws.

[He steps towards her, and she, escaping from him, seizes his gun, which is lying against the wall. She lifts it and aims at him.]

Norah.

If you move I’ll kill you.

Taylor.

[Stopping suddenly.] You daren’t.

Norah.

Unless you open the door and let me go I’ll shoot you. I’ll shoot you.

Taylor.

[Advancing one step.] Shoot, then.

[She pulls the trigger. A click is heard, but nothing more.]

Taylor.

Gee whiz, you meant it.

Norah.

[Aghast.] It wasn’t loaded.

Taylor.

Of course it wasn’t loaded. D’you think I’d have stood there and told you to shoot if it had been? I guess I ain’t thinking of committing suicide.

Norah.

And I almost admired you.

Taylor.

You hadn’t got no reason to. There’s nothing to admire about a man who stands five feet off a loaded gun that’s being aimed at him. He’s a darned fool, that’s all.

Norah.

[Throwing the gun aside angrily.] You were laughing at me. Now I’ll never forgive you.

Taylor.

You’d have had me dead as mutton if that gun had been loaded. You’re a sport. I never thought you had it in you.

Norah.

I’ll never forgive you.

Taylor.

You’re the girl for me, I guess.

[Before she is prepared he flings his arms round her and tries to kiss her. She struggles desperately, turning her face away from him.]

Norah.

Let me alone. I’ll kill myself if you touch me.

Taylor.

I guess you won’t.

[He gives her a resounding kiss on the cheek and lets her go. Sinking into a chair, she puts her hands up to her flaming cheeks.]

Norah.

Oh, how shameful, how shameful.

[She sobs in helpless, angry despair. He puts his hand gently on her shoulder.]

Taylor.

Hadn’t you better cave in, my girl? You’ve tried your strength against mine and it didn’t amount to much. You tried to shoot me and I only made you look a darned fool. I guess you’re beat, my girl. There’s only one law here, and that’s the law of the strongest. You’ve got to do what I want because I can make you.

Norah.

Haven’t you any generosity?

Taylor.

Not the kind you want, I guess.

Norah.

Oh, I’m so unhappy.

Taylor.

Listen. [He puts up his finger and seems to listen intently. She looks at him, but does not speak.] Listen to the silence. Can’t you hear it, the silence of the prairie? Why, we might be the only two people in the world, you and me, here in this shack right out in the prairie. Listen. There ain’t a sound. It might be the garden of Eden. What’s that about male and female created He them? I guess you’re my wife, my girl, and I want you. [She gives him a sidelong look of terror, but still does not speak. He takes the lamp and goes to the bedroom door. He opens it and, holding the lamp up high, looks at her. Just to do something she takes the dishcloth and rubs the table with it. She wants to gain time.] I guess it’s getting late. You’ll be able to have a good clean out to-morrow.

Norah.

To-morrow.

[A look of shame, fear, anguish, passes over her face, and then, violently, a convulsive shudder runs through her whole body. She puts her hands to her eyes and walks slowly to the door.]

END OF THE THIRD ACT

ACT IV

Scene: The same as in the previous act, Frank Taylor’s shack at Prentice, but there are signs about it of a woman’s presence. There is a cloth on the table, and a cushion on the rocking-chair, there are muslin curtains on the window tied back with ribband, and there are geraniums growing in maple-syrup tins. There is a rough bookshelf against the wall, on which is Norah’s small stock of books. Coloured supplements from the Christmas numbers of illustrated papers are pinned neatly on the walls. The packing-cases which had been used as stools have been replaced by rough chairs which Taylor has made with his own hands during the winter. When the door of the shack is opened the blue sky is seen and the prairie. Norah is arranging mustard flowers in a pudding basin on the table. She wears a serge skirt and a neat shirt-waist: she has a healthier look than before, her face is tanned and she has a higher colour. She hears a sound and looks up. Taylor enters.

Norah.

I didn’t know you were about.

Taylor.

I ain’t got much to do to-day. I’ve been out with Sid Sharp and a man come over from Prentice.

Norah.

Oh!

Taylor.

[Noticing the flowers.] Say, what have you got there?

Norah.

Aren’t they pretty? I picked them just now. They’re so cheerful.

Taylor.

[Drily.] Very.

Norah.

A few flowers make the shack look so much more bright and cosy.

Taylor.

[Looking round him.] You’ve made it a real home, Norah. Mrs. Sharp never stops wondering how you done it. Sid was saying only the other day it was because you was a lady. It does make a difference, I guess.

Norah.

[With a little smile.] I’m glad you haven’t found me quite a hopeless failure.

Taylor.

I guess I’ve never been so comfortable in all my life. It’s what I always said — when English girls do take to the life they make a better job of it than anybody.

Norah.

What’s the man come out from Prentice for?

Taylor.

[After a moment’s pause.] I guess you ain’t been terribly happy here, my girl.

Norah.

What on earth makes you say that?

Taylor.

You’ve got a good memory, I guess, and you ain’t ever forgiven me for that first night.

Norah.

[Looking down.] I made up my mind very soon that I must accept the consequences of what I’d done. I tried to fall in with your ways.

Taylor.

You was clever enough to see that I meant to be master in my own house, and I had the strength to do it.

Norah.

[With a faint smile.] I’ve cooked for you and mended your clothes, and I’ve kept the shack clean. I’ve been obedient and obliging.

Taylor.

[With a little chuckle.] I guess you hated me sometimes.

Norah.

No one likes being humiliated as you humiliated me.

Taylor.

Ed’s coming out here presently, my girl.

Norah.

Ed who?

Taylor.

Your brother.

Norah.

[Astounded.] Eddie? When?

Taylor.

Why, right now, I guess. He was in Prentice this morning.

Norah.

How d’you know?

Taylor.

He phoned over to Sharp’s to say he was riding out.

Norah.

Oh, how ripping! Why didn’t you tell me before?

Taylor.

I didn’t know.

Norah.

Is that why you asked me if I was happy? I couldn’t make out what was the matter with you.

Taylor.

Well, I guess I thought if you still wanted to quit, Ed’s coming would be kind of useful.

Norah.

Why d’you think I want to?

Taylor.

You ain’t been very talkative these months, but I guess it wasn’t hard to see you’d have given pretty near anything in the world to quit.

Norah.

I’m not going back to Eddie’s farm, if that’s what you mean.

Taylor.

If he comes before I get back, tell him I won’t be long. I guess you won’t be sorry to do a bit of yarning with him by yourself.

Norah.

You’re not under the impression I’m going to say beastly things about you to him?

Taylor.

No, I guess not. That ain’t your sort. P’raps we don’t know the best of one another yet, but I reckon we know the worst by now.

Norah.

[Looking at him sharply.] Frank, is anything the matter?

Taylor.

Why, no. Why?

Norah.

You’ve seemed different the last few days.

Taylor.

I guess that’s only your fancy. I’d better be getting along. Sid and the other fellow are waiting for me.

[He goes out. Norah looks at him with a puzzled air, then she gives a touch to the flowers, and gets her work. She sits down at the table and begins to mend a thick woollen sock. Suddenly there is a loud knock at the door. She starts up and runs to open it. Edward Marsh is seen standing outside. She gives a cry of delight and flings her arms round his neck. He comes in.]

Norah.

Eddie! Oh, my dear, I’m so glad to see you.

Marsh.

Hulloa there!

Norah.

But how did you come? I never heard a rig.

Marsh.

Look.

[She goes to the door and looks out.]

Norah.

Why, it’s Reggie Hornby. [Calling.] Reggie.

Hornby.

[Outside.] Hulloa!

Norah.

He can put the horse in the lean-to.

Marsh.

Yes. [Calling.] Reg, give the old lady a feed and put her in the lean-to.

Hornby.

Right-o.

Norah.

Didn’t you see Frank? He’s only just this moment gone out.

Marsh.

No.

Norah.

He’ll be in presently. Now, come in. Oh, my dear, it is splendid to see you.

Marsh.

You’re looking fine, Norah.

Norah.

Have you had dinner?

Marsh.

Sure. We got something to eat before we left Prentice.

Norah.

Well, I’ll make you a cup of tea.

Marsh.

No, I won’t have anything, thanks.

Norah.

You’re not a real Canadian yet if you refuse a cup of tea when it’s offered you. Well, sit down and make yourself comfortable.

Marsh.

How are you getting on, Norah?

Norah.

Oh, never mind about me. Tell me about yourself. How’s Gertie? And what brought you to this part of the world? And what’s Reggie Hornby doing? And is thingamygig still with you? You know, the hired man. What was his name? Trotter, wasn’t it? Oh, my dear, don’t sit there like a stuffed pig, but speak to me, or I shall shake you.

Marsh.

My dear, I can’t answer fifteen questions all at once.

Norah.

Oh, Eddie, I’m so glad to see you. You are a duck to come and see me.

Marsh.

Let me get a word in edgeways.

Norah.

I won’t say another syllable. But for goodness’ sake, hurry up. I want to know all sorts of things.

Marsh.

Well, the first thing is that I’m expecting to be a happy father in three or four months.

Norah.

Oh, Eddie, I’m so glad. How happy Gertie must be!

Marsh.

She doesn’t know what to make of it. But I guess she’s pleased right enough. She sends you her love and says she hopes you’ll follow her example soon.

Norah.

I? But you’ve not told me what you’re doing in this part of the world, anyway.

Marsh.

[Smiling.] Anyway?

Norah.

[With a laugh.] I’ve practically spoken to no one but Frank for months. I get into his ways of speaking.

Marsh.

Well, when I got Frank’s letter about the clearing machine....

Norah.

[Interrupting him.] Has Frank written to you?

Marsh.

Why, yes. Didn’t you know? He said there was a clearing machine going cheap at Prentice. I’ve always thought I could make money down our way if I had one. They say you can clear from three to four acres a day with it. Frank said it was worth my while coming to have a look at it, and he guessed you’d be glad to see me.

Norah.

How funny of him not to say anything to me about it.

Marsh.

I expect he wanted to surprise you. Now, how d’you like being a married woman?

Norah.

Oh, all right. Why has Reggie Hornby come with you?

Marsh.

D’you know, I’ve not seen you since you were married.

Norah.

You haven’t, have you?

Marsh.

I’ve been a bit anxious about you. That’s why, when Frank wrote about the clearing machine, I didn’t stop to think about it, but just came.

Norah.

It was very nice of you. But why has Reggie Hornby come?

Marsh.

Oh, he’s going back to England.

Norah.

Is he?

Marsh.

Yes, he got them to send him his passage at last. His ship doesn’t sail till next week, and he said he might just as well stop off here and say good-bye to you.

Norah.

How has he been getting on?

Marsh.

What do you expect? He looks upon work as something that only damned fools do. Where’s Frank?

Norah.

Oh, he’s out with Sid Sharp. That’s our neighbour. He has the farm you passed on your way here.

Marsh.

Getting on all right with him, Norah?

Norah.

Of course. What’s that boy doing all this time? He is slow, isn’t he?

Marsh.

It’s a great change for you, this, after the sort of life you’ve been used to.

Norah.

[To change the topic.] I was rather hoping you’d have some letters for me. I haven’t had any for a long time.

Marsh.

There now, I’ve got a head like a sieve. Two came by the last mail and I didn’t send them on because I was coming myself.

Norah.

You haven’t forgotten them?

Marsh.

No, here they are.

Norah.

[Reading the addresses.] They don’t look very exciting. One’s from Agnes Pringle. She was a lady’s companion that I used to know in Tunbridge Wells. And the other’s from Mr. Wynne.

Marsh.

Who’s he?

Norah.

Oh, he was Miss Wickham’s solicitor. He wrote to me once before to say he hoped I was getting on all right. [Putting the letters on the table.] I don’t think I want to hear from people in England any more.

Marsh.

My dear, why d’you say that?

Norah.

It’s no good thinking of the past, is it?

Marsh.

Aren’t you going to read your letters?

Norah.

Not now. I’ll read them when I’m alone.

Marsh.

Don’t mind me.

Norah.

It’s so silly of me, but letters from England always make me cry.

Marsh.

[Looking at her sharply.] Norah, aren’t you happy here?

Norah.

Yes, why shouldn’t I be?

Marsh.

Why haven’t you written to me once since you were married?

Norah.

I hadn’t got much to say. [With a smile.] And after all, I’d been practically turned out of your house.

Marsh.

[Puzzled.] I don’t know what to make of you.

Norah.

[Nervous and almost exasperated.] Oh, don’t cross-examine me, there’s a dear.

Marsh.

Frank Taylor’s kind to you and all that sort of thing, isn’t he?

Norah.

Quite.

Marsh.

When I asked you to come and stay on the farm I thought it wouldn’t be long before you married, but I didn’t expect you’d marry one of the hired men.

Norah.

Oh, my dear, don’t worry about me.

Marsh.

It’s all very fine to say that. You’ve got no one in the world belonging to you but me, and when — when our mother died, she said: “You’ll take care of Norah, won’t you, Eddie?”

Norah.

[With a sob in her voice.] Oh, don’t, don’t.

Marsh.

Norah.

Norah.

[With an effort at self-possession.] We’ve never quarrelled since the first day I came here. Here’s Reggie.

[She turns to him with relief. Hornby is dressed in a blue serge suit and again looks like a well-groomed English gentleman.]

Norah.

[Gaily.] I was wondering what on earth you were doing with yourself.

Hornby.

[Shaking hands with her.] I say, this is a very swell shack you’ve got.

Norah.

I’ve tried to make it look pretty and homelike.

[Marsh catches sight of the bowl of mustard flowers.]

Marsh.

Hulloa, what’s this?

Norah.

Aren’t they pretty? I’ve only just picked them. Mustard flowers.

Marsh.

We call it weed. Have you got much of it?

Norah.

Oh yes, lots. Why?

Marsh.

Oh, nothing.

Norah.

[To Hornby.] I hear you’re going home.

Hornby.

Yes, I’m fed up with God’s own country. Nature never intended me to be an agricultural labourer.

Norah.

What are you going to do now?

Hornby.

[With immense conviction.] Loaf!

Norah.

[Amused.] Won’t you get bored?

Hornby.

I’m never bored. It amuses me to look at other people do things. I should hate my fellow creatures to be idle.

Norah.

[With a faint smile.] I should have thought one could do more with life than lounge about clubs and play cards with people who don’t play as well as oneself.

Hornby.

I quite agree with you. I’ve been thinking things over very seriously this winter. And I’m going to look out for a middle-aged widow with money who’ll adopt me.

Norah.

I remember that you have decided views about the White Man’s Burden.

Hornby.

All I want is to get through life comfortably. I don’t mean to do a stroke more work than I’m obliged to, and I’m going to have the very best time I can get.

Norah.

[Smiling.] I’m sure you will.

Hornby.

The moment I get back to London I’m going to stand myself a slap-up dinner at the Ritz, then I shall go and see a musical comedy at the Gaiety, and after that I’ll have a slap-up supper at Romano’s. England, with all thy faults, I love thee well.

Norah.

I suppose it’s being alone with the prairie all these months, things which used to seem rather funny and clever — well, I see them quite differently now.

Hornby.

[Coolly.] I’m afraid you don’t altogether approve of me.

Norah.

[Not disagreeably.] You haven’t got pluck.

Hornby.

I don’t know about that. I expect I have as much as anyone else, only I don’t make a fuss about it.

Norah.

Oh, pluck to stand up and let yourself be shot at — I daresay. But pluck to do the same monotonous thing day after day, plain, honest, hard work — you haven’t got that. You’re a failure, and the worst of it is, you’re not ashamed of it. It fills you with self-satisfaction.

Hornby.

Rule Britannia, and what price the Union Jack?

Norah.

[With a laugh.] You’re incorrigible.

Hornby.

I am.... I suppose there’s nothing you want me to take home. I shall be going down to Tunbridge Wells to see mother. Got any messages?

Norah.

I don’t know that I have. Eddie has just brought me a couple of letters. I’ll have a look at them. [She opens Miss Pringle’s letter, reads two or three lines, and gives a cry.] Oh!

Marsh.

What’s the matter?

Norah.

What does she mean? [Reading.] “I’ve just heard from Mr. Wynne about your good luck, and I have another piece of good news for you.” [She puts the letter down and quickly opens the solicitor’s. She takes out of the envelope a letter and a cheque. She glances at it.] A cheque — for five hundred pounds.... Oh, Eddie, listen. [Reading.] “Dear Miss Marsh, — I have had several interviews with Mr. Wickham in relation to the late Miss Wickham’s estate, and I ventured to represent to him that you had been very badly treated. Now that everything is settled he wishes to send you the enclosed cheque as some recognition of your devoted service to his late aunt....” Five hundred pounds!

Marsh.

That’s a very respectable sum.

Hornby.

I could do with that myself.

Norah.

I’ve never had so much money in all my life.

Marsh.

But what’s the other piece of good news that Miss Stick-in-the-mud talks about?

Norah.

Oh, I forgot. [She takes Miss Pringle’s letter up again and begins to read it.] “...Piece of good news for you. I write at once so that you may make your plans accordingly. I told you in my last letter of my sister-in-law’s sudden death, and now my brother is very anxious that I should live with him. So I am leaving Mrs. Hubbard, and she wishes me to say that if you care to have my place as her companion she will be very pleased to have you. I have been with her for thirteen years, and she has always treated me like an equal. She is very considerate, and there is practically nothing to do but to exercise the dogs. The salary is thirty-five pounds a year.”

Marsh.

Both letters are addressed to Miss Marsh. Don’t they know you’re married?

Norah.

No. I never told them.

Hornby.

What a lark! You could go back to Tunbridge Wells, and none of the old frumps would ever know you’d been married.

[Norah gives a sudden start when he says this and stares at him with wide-open eyes. There is a moment’s pause.]

Marsh.

Just clear out for a minute, Reg. I want to speak to Norah.

Hornby.

Right-o.

[He goes out.]

Marsh.

Norah, d’you want to clear out?

Norah.

What on earth makes you think that?

Marsh.

You gave him such a look when he mentioned it.

Norah.

I’m bewildered. Did Frank know anything about this?

Marsh.

My dear, how could he?

Norah.

It’s so extraordinary. He was talking about my going away just now.

Marsh.

[Quickly.] Why?

Norah.

Oh!

[She realises that she has betrayed the secret inadvertently.]

Marsh.

Norah, for goodness’ sake tell me if there’s anything the matter. After all, it’s now or never. You’re keeping back something from me. Aren’t you getting on well together?

Norah.

[In a low voice.] Not very.

Marsh.

Why didn’t you let me know?

Norah.

I was ashamed.

Marsh.

But you say he’s kind to you.

Norah.

I’ve got nothing to reproach him with.

Marsh.

I felt that something was wrong. I knew you couldn’t be happy with him. A girl like you and a hired man. The whole thing was horrible. Thank God I’m here and you’ve got this chance.

Norah.

What d’you mean?

Marsh.

You’re not fit for this life. You’ve got a chance to go back to England. For God’s sake take it. In six months all you’ve gone through here will seem nothing but a hideous dream. [He is suddenly struck by the expression of her face.] Norah, what’s the matter?

Norah.

[Tragically.] I don’t know.

[Hornby comes in again.]

Hornby.

I say, here’s someone coming to see you.

Norah.

Me? [She goes to the door and looks out.] Oh, it’s Mrs. Sharp. Whatever brings her here on foot? She never walks a step if she can help it. She’s the wife of my neighbour.... Good-afternoon, Mrs. Sharp.

[Mrs. Sharp enters. She is a middle-aged woman, red in the face, stout and rather short of breath. She wears an old sun-bonnet, a faded shirt-waist, none too clean, and a rather battered skirt.]

Norah.

Come right in.

Mrs. Sharp.

Good-afternoon to you, Mrs. Taylor. I’m all in a perspiration. I’ve not walked so far in months.

Norah.

This is my brother.

Mrs. Sharp.

Your brother? Is that who it is?

Norah.

[Smiling.] It seems to surprise you.

Mrs. Sharp.

I was so anxious, I couldn’t stay indoors. I went out to see if I could catch sight of Sid, and I walked on and then I saw the rig what’s outside, and it give me such a turn, I thought it was the inspector. I just had to come. I was that nervous.

Norah.

Is anything the matter?

Mrs. Sharp.

You’re not going to tell me you don’t know about it? Why, Sid and Frank haven’t been talking about anything else since Frank found it.

Norah.

Found what?

Mrs. Sharp.

The weed.

Marsh.

[With a slight gesture towards the pudding bowl of flowers.] You have got it, then?

Mrs. Sharp.

It’s worse at Taylor’s. But we’ve got it too.

Norah.

What does it mean?

Mrs. Sharp.

We can’t make out who reported us. It isn’t as if we had any enemies.

Marsh.

Oh, there’s always someone to report you. No one’s going to take the risk of letting it get on his own land.

Mrs. Sharp.

[Looking at the mustard blossom.] And she has them in the house as if they were flowers.

Norah.

Tell me what she means, Eddie.

Marsh.

My dear, these pretty little flowers which you’ve picked to make your shack look bright and homelike — they may mean ruin.

Norah.

Eddie!

Marsh.

You must have heard us talk about the weed. We farmers have three enemies to fight — frost, hail, and weed.

Mrs. Sharp.

We was hailed out last year. Lost our crop. We never got a dollar for it. And if we lose it this year too — why, we may just as well quit.

Marsh.

When it gets into your crop you’ve got to report it, and if you don’t one of the neighbours will. And then they send an inspector along, and if he condemns it, why you just have to destroy the crop, and all your year’s work is lost. You’re lucky if you’ve got a bit of money in the bank and can go on till the next crop comes along.

Mrs. Sharp.

We’ve only got a quarter section and five children. It’s not much money you can save then.

Marsh.

Are they out with the inspector now?

Mrs. Sharp.

Yes. He came out from Prentice this morning.

Marsh.

This is a bad job for Frank.

Mrs. Sharp.

Oh, he hasn’t got the mouths to feed that we have. He can hire out again. But what’s to become of us?

Norah.

I wonder why he never told me.

Mrs. Sharp.

I guess he’s in the habit of keeping his troubles to himself and you’ve not taught him different yet.

[Norah gives her a quick look, but seeing the woman is all on edge with nervousness does not answer.]

Marsh.

You must hope for the best, Mrs. Sharp.

Mrs. Sharp.

Sid says we’ve only got it in one place, but perhaps he’s only saying it so I shouldn’t worry. You know what them inspectors are. They don’t lose nothing by it. It don’t matter to them if you starve all the winter.

[She gives a sob and heavy tears roll down her cheeks.]

Norah.

Oh don’t — don’t cry, Mrs. Sharp. After all, it may be all right.

Marsh.

They won’t condemn the crop unless it’s very bad. Too many people have got their eyes on it. The machine agent, the loan company.

Mrs. Sharp.

What with the hail that comes and hails you out and the frost that kills your crop just when you’re beginning to count on it, and the weed — I can’t bear it any more. If we lose this crop I won’t go on. I’ll make Sid sell out and we’ll go home. We’ll take a little shop somewhere. That’s what I wanted to do from the beginning, but Sid — he had his heart set on farming.

Norah.

You couldn’t go back now. You’d never be happy in a little shop. And if you’d stayed in England you’d have been always at the beck and call of somebody else. And you own the land. You couldn’t do that in England. When you come out of your door and look at the growing wheat, aren’t you proud to think it’s yours?

Mrs. Sharp.

You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with. When the children came, only once I had a doctor. The other times Sid was the only help I had. I might have been an animal. I wish I’d never come to this country.

Norah.

How can you say that! Your children are strong and healthy. Why, they’ll be able to help you in the work soon. You’ve given them a chance that they’d never have got at home.

Mrs. Sharp.

Oh, it’s all very well for them. They’ll have it easy. I know that. But we’ve had to pay for it, Sid and me.

Norah.

You see, you were the first. It’s bitter work opening up a new country and perhaps it’s others who reap the harvest. But I wonder if those who start don’t get a reward that the later comers never dream of.

Marsh.

She’s right there, Mrs. Sharp. I shall never forget what I felt when I saw my first crop spring up and thought that never since the world began had wheat grown on that little bit of ground.... I wouldn’t go back to England now for anything in the world. I couldn’t breathe.

Mrs. Sharp.

You’re a man. You have the best of it and all the credit.

Norah.

People don’t know. You mustn’t blame them. It’s only those who’ve lived out on the prairie who know that the hardships of opening up a new country fall on the women. But the men who are their husbands, they know.

Marsh.

I guess they do, Mrs. Sharp.

[Norah, on her knees beside her, strokes Mrs. Sharp’s hands. Mrs. Sharp gives her a grateful smile.]

Mrs. Sharp.

Thank you for speaking kindly to me, my dear. I’m that nervous, I hardly know what I’m saying.

Norah.

Sid and Frank will be here in a minute, surely.

Mrs. Sharp.

And you’re right, my dear, I couldn’t go back any more. If we lose our crop, well, we must wait till next year. We shan’t starve. One’s got to take the rough with the smooth, and take it all in all, it’s a good country.

[Frank Taylor comes in.]

Norah.

Frank.

Mrs. Sharp.

[Starting to her feet.] Where’s Sid?

Taylor.

Why he’s up at your place. Hulloa, Ed. I saw you coming along in the rig. Morning, Reg. I wasn’t expecting to see you.

Hornby.

Pleasant surprise for you.

Mrs. Sharp.

What’s happened? Tell me what’s happened.

Norah.

Mrs. Sharp came here because she was so anxious.

Taylor.

[Cheerfully.] Oh, you’re all right.

Mrs. Sharp.

[With a gasp.] We are?

Taylor.

Sure. Only a few acres has got to go. That won’t hurt you.

Mrs. Sharp.

Thank God for that. And it’s going to be the best crop we ever had. It’s the finest country in the world.

Taylor.

You’d better be getting back. Sid’s taken the inspector up to give him some dinner.

Mrs. Sharp.

He hasn’t? That’s just like Sid. It’s a mercy there’s plenty. I’ll be getting along right now.

Norah.

Don’t walk. There’s Eddie’s rig. Reggie will drive you over.

Mrs. Sharp.

Oh, thank you kindly. I’m not used to walking so much and I’m tired out. Good-afternoon, Mrs. Taylor.

Norah.

Good-bye. Reggie, you don’t mind driving Mrs. Sharp back? It’s only just over a mile.

Hornby.

Not a bit.

Marsh.

I’ll come and help you put the mare in.

[Mrs. Sharp and Hornby go out.]

Marsh.

I guess it’s a relief to you now you know, Frank.

Taylor.

Terrible.... I’d like to have a talk with you presently, Ed.

Marsh.

Right you are. [He goes.]

Norah.

I’m so thankful it’s all right. Poor thing, she was in such a state.

Taylor.

They’ve got five children to feed. I guess it makes a powerful lot of difference to them.

Norah.

I wish you’d told me before. I felt that something was worrying you and I didn’t know what.

Taylor.

If I saved the crop there didn’t seem any use fussing, and if I didn’t you’d know quite soon enough.

Norah.

How could you bear to let me put the flowers here?

Taylor.

I guess I didn’t mind if it made you happy. You didn’t know they was only a weed. You thought them darned pretty.

Norah.

[With a little smile.] It was very kind of you, Frank.

Taylor.

I guess it’s queer that a darned little flower like that should be able to do so much damage.

Norah.

Why didn’t you tell me you’d written to Eddie?

Taylor.

I guess I forgot.

Norah.

Frank, Eddie brought me some letters from home to-day. I’ve had the offer of a job in England.

[Frank is just going to make an exclamation, but immediately controls himself and answers quite quietly.]

Taylor.

Gee! I guess you’ll take that.

Norah.

It’s funny that you should have been talking just now of my going away.

Taylor.

Very.

Norah.

[A little surprised at his manner.] Have you any objection?

Taylor.

I guess it wouldn’t make a powerful lot of difference to you if I had.

Norah.

What makes you think that?

Taylor.

I guess you only stayed here because you had to.

[She goes over to the little window and looks out at the prairie.]

Norah.

Is life always like that? The things you’ve wanted so dreadfully seem only to bring you pain when they come. [He gives her a quick look, but does not answer, and she notices nothing.] Month after month I used to sit looking at the prairie and sometimes I wanted to scream at the top of my voice just to break the silence. I thought I should never escape. The shack was like a prison. I was hemmed in by the snow and the cold and the stillness.

Taylor.

Are you going to quit right now with Ed?

Norah.

[With a smile.] You seem in a great hurry to be rid of me.

Taylor.

I guess we ain’t made a great success of married life, my girl.... It’s rum when you come to figure it out. I thought I could make you do everything I wanted. It looked as if I held a straight flush. And you beat me.

Norah.

I?

Taylor.

Why, yes. Didn’t you know that?

Norah.

I don’t know what you mean.

Taylor.

I guess I didn’t know how strong a woman could be. You was always givin’ way, you done everything I told you — and all the time you was keepin’ something from me that I couldn’t get at. Whenever I thought to put my hand on you, I guess I found I’d only caught hold of a shadow.

Norah.

I don’t know what more you wanted.

Taylor.

I guess I wanted love.

Norah.

You?

[She looks at him with consternation. His words give her a queer little twist of the heart-strings.]

Taylor.

I know you now less than when you’d only been a week up at Ed’s. I’ve lost the trail and I’m just floundering around in the bush.

Norah.

[In a low voice.] I never knew you wanted love.

Taylor.

I guess I didn’t either.

Norah.

I suppose parting’s always rather painful.

Taylor.

If you go back to the Old Country, I guess — I guess you’ll never come back.

Norah.

[Rather shyly.] Perhaps you’ll come over to England one of these days. If you have a couple of good years you could easily shut the place up and run over for the winter.

Taylor.

I guess that would be a dangerous experiment. You’ll be a lady in England, and I guess I’d be just the hired man.

Norah.

You’d be my husband.

Taylor.

I guess I wouldn’t risk it.

Norah.

You’ll write to me now and then and tell me how you’re getting on, won’t you?

Taylor.

Will you want to know?

Norah.

[Smiling.] Why, yes.

Taylor.

I’ll write and tell you if I’m making good. If I ain’t, I guess I shan’t feel much like writing.

Norah.

But you’ll make good, Frank. I know you well enough for that.

Taylor.

Do you?

Norah.

I have learnt to respect you during these months we’ve lived together. All sorts of qualities which I used to value seem very unimportant to me now. You’ve taught me a great deal.

Taylor.

You’ll think of me sometimes, my girl, won’t you?

Norah.

[Smiling.] I don’t suppose I shall be able to prevent it.

Taylor.

I was an ignorant, uneducated man. I didn’t know how to treat you properly. I wanted to make you happy and I didn’t seem to know just how to do it.

Norah.

You’ve never been unkind to me, Frank. You’ve been very patient with me.

Taylor.

I guess you’ll be happier away from me. I’ll be able to think that you’re warm and comfortable at home and you’ve got plenty to eat.

Norah.

D’you think that’s all I want?

[He gives her a rapid glance, and then setting his teeth looks away.]

Taylor.

I couldn’t expect you to stay on here, not when you got a chance of going back to the Old Country. This life is all new to you. And you know that one.

Norah.

Oh, yes, I know it — I should think I did. [As she pictures to herself the daily round which awaits her, she is filled with a sort of mirthless scorn, and this presently, as she speaks, is mixed with hatred and dismay.] At eight o’clock every morning a maid will bring me tea and hot water. And I shall get up, and I shall have breakfast, and I shall interview the cook. I shall order luncheon and dinner. And I shall brush the coats of Mrs. Hubbard’s poms and take them for a walk on the common. All the paths on the common are asphalted so that elderly gentlemen and lady’s companions shouldn’t get their feet wet.

Taylor.

Gee!

Norah.

And then I shall come in and lunch, and after luncheon I shall go for a drive, one day in this direction and one day in that. And then I shall have tea, and then I shall go out again on the nice neat asphalt paths to give the dogs another walk. And then I shall change my dress and come down to dinner. And after dinner I shall play bezique with my employer, and I must take care not to beat her because she doesn’t like being beaten. And at ten o’clock I shall go to bed.... [She pauses a moment.] At eight o’clock next morning a maid will bring in my tea and hot water, and the day will begin again. Every day will be just like every other. And there are hundreds of women in England, strong and capable, with blood in their veins, who would be eager to get the place that’s offered to me. Almost a lady and thirty-five pounds a year.

[Taylor has been gazing at her steadily. What she means begins to dawn on him, but he restrains himself. He will not look at her now.]

Taylor.

I guess it’s a bit different from the life you’ve had here.

Norah.

[Turning to him.] And you will be clearing the scrub, cutting down trees, ploughing the land, sowing and reaping. You will be fighting every day, frost, hail, and weed; you will be fighting, but I know you’ll be conquering in the end. Where was wilderness will be cultivated land. And who knows what starving child may eat the bread that has been made from the wheat that you grew. My life will be ineffectual and useless, but you will have done something worth while.

Taylor.

Why, what’s the matter with you, Norah, Norah?

[He does not say the words to her, but rather to himself as though they were forced from him in agony of spirit.]

Norah.

When I was talking to Mrs. Sharp just now I don’t know what I said, I was just trying to comfort her because she was crying, and it seemed to be someone else who was speaking, and I listened to myself. I thought I hated the prairie through the long winter months, and yet somehow it has caught hold of me. It was dreary and monotonous, and yet I can’t get it out of my heart. There’s a beauty and a romance in it which fill my soul with longing.

Taylor.

[Quietly.] I guess we all hate the prairie sometimes, but when you’ve once lived in it, it ain’t easy to live anywhere else.

Norah.

I know the life now. It’s not adventurous and exciting. For men and women it’s the same hard work from morning till night, and I know it’s the women who bear the greater burden. The men go into the towns, they have shooting now and then, and the different seasons bring them different work. But for the women it’s always the same, cooking, mending, washing, sweeping. And yet it’s all got a meaning. We, too, have our part in opening up the country. We are its mothers and the future is in us. We are building up the greatness of the nation. It needs our courage and strength and hope, and because it needs them, they come to us. Oh, Frank, I can’t go back to that petty, narrow life. What have you done to me?

Taylor.

[Hoarsely.] I guess if I asked you to stay now, you’d stay.

Norah.

[In a low voice.] You said you wanted my love. Don’t you know?... Love has been growing in me slowly, month by month, and I wouldn’t see it. I told myself I hated you. I was ashamed. It’s only to-day, when I had the means of leaving you for ever, that I knew I couldn’t live without you. I’m not ashamed any more. I love you.

Taylor.

I guess I loved you from the beginning, Norah.

Norah.

Why d’you say it as if...? What’s the matter, Frank?

Taylor.

I guess you’ll have to take that job in England. I can’t ask you to stay on.

Norah.

Why?

Taylor.

The inspector’s condemned the crop. I’m bust.

Norah.

Oh, why didn’t you tell me?

Taylor.

I guess I couldn’t. I made up my mind when I married you that I’d make good. I couldn’t expect you to see that it was just bad luck. Anyone can get the weed in his crop. But I guess a man oughtn’t to have bad luck. The odds are that it’s his own fault if he has.

Norah.

Now I understand about Eddie.

Taylor.

I wrote to him when I knew I’d been reported.

Norah.

What are you going to do?

Taylor.

It’s all right for me. I can hire out. It’s you I was thinking of. I felt pretty sure you wouldn’t go back to Ed’s. I didn’t fancy you taking a position as lady help. I didn’t know what was to become of you, my girl. And when you told me of the job in England, I thought I’d let you go.

Norah.

Without telling me you were in trouble?

Taylor.

Why, if I wasn’t smashed up, d’you think I’d let you go? By God, I wouldn’t. I’d have kep’ you — by God, I’d have kep’ you.

Norah.

Are you going to give the land up?

Taylor.

No, I guess I can’t do that. I’ve put too much work in it. And I’ve got my back up now. I shall hire out for the summer and next winter I can get work lumbering. The land’s my own now, and I’ll come back in time for the ploughing next year.

Norah.

Look.

Taylor.

What’s that?

[She hands him the cheque which she has received from Mr. Wynne.]

Norah.

The nephew of the lady I was with has made me a present of it. Twenty-five hundred dollars. You can lake the quarter section next to this one and get all the machinery you want and some cows. It’s yours to do what you like with. Now will you keep me?

Taylor.

Oh, my girl, how shall I ever be able to thank you!

Norah.

Good heavens, I don’t want thanks. There’s nothing in the world so wonderful as to be able to give to someone you love.... Give me a kiss and try.

Taylor.

I guess it’s the first time you’ve asked me to do that.

Norah.

Oh, I’m so happy.

THE END

THE UNKNOWN

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

TO

VIOLA TREE.

This play was produced on Monday, August 9, 1920, at the Aldwych Theatre with the following cast:

Colonel Wharton

Mr. Charles V. France

Major Wharton (John)

Mr. Basil Rathbone

Mrs. Wharton

Lady Tree

Mrs. Littlewood

Miss Haidee Wright

Rev. Norman Poole

Mr. H. R. Hignett

Mrs. Poole

Miss Lena Halliday

Sylvia Bullough

Miss Ellen O’Malley

Dr. Macfarlane

Mr. Clarence Blakiston

Kate

Miss Gwendolen Ffloyd

CHARACTERS

Colonel Wharton

Major Wharton (John)

Mrs. Wharton

Mrs. Littlewood

Rev. Norman Poole

Mrs. Poole

Sylvia Bullough

Dr. Macfarlane

Kate

Cook

The action of the play takes place at the Manor House, Stour, in the County of Kent.

The author ventures to suggest to the readers of this play that he makes no pretensions to throw a new light on any of the questions which are discussed in it, nor has he attempted to offer a solution of problems which, judging from the diversity of opinion which they have occasioned, may be regarded as insoluble. He has tried to put into dramatic form some of the thoughts and emotions which have recently agitated many, and for this purpose he has chosen the most ordinary characters in the circle with which, owing to his own circumstances, he is best acquainted. But because it is a good many years since he was on terms of intimate familiarity with a parish priest, and he was not certain how much the views of the clergy had changed, the author has put into the mouth of the Rev. Norman Poole phrases from Dr. Gore’s “The Religion of the Church,” and from a sermon by Dr. Stewart Holden. Since it is impossible in a play to indicate by quotation marks what is borrowed, the author takes this opportunity to acknowledge his indebtedness for the Rev. Norman Poole’s most characteristic speeches.

ACT I

The drawing-room at the Manor House, Colonel Wharton’s residence. It is a simple room, somewhat heavily furnished in an old-fashioned style; there is nothing in it which is in the least artistic; but the furniture is comfortable, and neither new nor shabby. On the papered walls are the Academy pictures of forty years ago. There are a great many framed photographs of men in uniform, and here and there a bunch of simple flowers in a vase. The only things in the room which are at all exotic are silver ornaments from Indian bazaars and flimsy Indian fabrics, used as cloths on the occasional tables and as drapery on the piano. At the back are French windows leading into the garden; and this, with its lawn and trees, is seen through them. It is summer, and the windows are open. Morning.

Mrs. Wharton is sitting in the corner of the sofa, knitting a khaki comforter. She is a slight, tall woman of five-and-fifty; she has deliberate features, with kind eyes and a gentle look; her dark hair is getting very gray; it is simply done; and her dress, too, is simple; it is not at all new and was never fashionable.

Kate, a middle-aged maid-servant, in a print dress, a cap and apron, comes in.

Kate.

If you please, ma’am, the butcher’s called.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh! I arranged with Cook that we should have cold roast beef again for luncheon to-day, Kate. Tell the butcher to bring two and a half pounds of the best end of the neck for to-night, and tell him to pick me out a really nice piece, Kate. It’s so long since the Major has had any good English meat.

Kate.

Very good, ma’am.

Mrs. Wharton.

And he might send in a couple of kidneys. The Colonel and Major Wharton enjoyed the kidneys that they had for breakfast yesterday so much.

Kate.

Very good, ma’am. If you please, ma’am, the gardener hasn’t sent in a very big basket of pease. Cook says it won’t look much for three.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, well, it doesn’t matter as long as there are enough for the gentlemen. I’ll just pretend to take some.

Kate.

Very good, ma’am.

As she is going, Colonel Wharton enters from the garden with a basket of cherries. He is a thin old man, much older than his wife, with white hair; but though very frail he still carries himself erectly. His face is bronzed by long exposure to tropical suns, but even so it is the face of a sick man. He wears a light tweed suit which hangs about him loosely, as though he had shrunk since it was made for him. He has a round tweed hat of the same material.

Colonel Wharton.

Has the paper come yet, Kate?

Kate.

Yes, sir. I’ll bring it.

[Exit Kate

Colonel Wharton.

I’ve brought you in some cherries, Evelyn. They’re the only ripe ones I could find.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, that is nice. I hope you’re not tired.

Colonel Wharton.

Great Scott, I’m not such a crock that it can tire me to pick a few cherries. If I’d been able to find a ladder I’d have got you double the number.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, my dear, you’d better let the gardener get them. I don’t approve of your skipping up and down ladders.

Colonel Wharton.

The gardener’s just as old as I am and not nearly so active. Hasn’t John come in yet? He said he was only going to the post.

Mrs. Wharton.

Perhaps he went in to see Sylvia on the way back.

Colonel Wharton.

I shouldn’t have thought she wanted to be bothered with him in the morning.

Mrs. Wharton.

George!

Colonel Wharton.

Yes, dear.

Mrs. Wharton.

It seems so extraordinary to hear you say: “Hasn’t John come in yet? He said he was only going to the post.” It makes me rather want to cry.

Colonel Wharton.

It’s been a long time, Evelyn. It’s been a bad time for both of us, my dear. But worse for you.

Mrs. Wharton.

I tried not to be troublesome, George.

Colonel Wharton.

Dear child, aren’t I there to share your troubles with you?

Mrs. Wharton.

It seems so natural that he should come in any minute, it seems as though he’d never been away — and yet somehow I can’t quite believe it. It seems incredible that he should really be back.

Colonel Wharton.

[Patting her hand.] My dear Evelyn!

[Kate brings in the paper and gives it to the Colonel. She goes out.

Colonel Wharton.

Thank you. [While he puts on his spectacles.] It’s a blessing to be able to read the births, deaths, and marriages like a gentleman instead of turning before anything else to the casualties.

Mrs. Wharton.

I hope before long that we shall be composing a little announcement for that column.

Colonel Wharton.

Have they settled a day yet, those young people?

Mrs. Wharton.

I don’t know. John hasn’t said anything, and I didn’t see Sylvia yesterday except for a moment after church.

Colonel Wharton.

Evelyn dear, the gardener tells me he hasn’t got much in the way of pease ready for to-night, so I’ve told him to send in a few carrots for me; I think they’re probably better for my digestion.

Mrs. Wharton.

Nonsense, George. You know how much you like pease, and I’m not very fond of them. I was hoping there’d only be enough for two so that I shouldn’t have to eat any.

Colonel Wharton.

Evelyn, where do you expect to go when you die if you tell such stories?

Mrs. Wharton.

Now, George, don’t be obstinate. You might give in to me sometimes. They’re the first pease out of the garden and I should like you to eat them.

Colonel Wharton.

No, my dear, I’d like to see you eat them. I’m an invalid, and I must have my own way.

Mrs. Wharton.

You tyrant! You haven’t seen Dr. Macfarlane this morning? I’m so anxious.

Colonel Wharton.

You old fusser! No sooner have you stopped worrying over your boy than you start worrying over me.

Mrs. Wharton.

Even though you won’t let me call my soul my own, I don’t want to lose you just yet.

Colonel Wharton.

Don’t be alarmed. I shall live to plague you for another twenty years.

[Kate comes in.

Kate.

If you please, ma’am, Mrs. Poole has called.

Mrs. Wharton.

Why haven’t you shown her in?

Kate.

She wouldn’t come in, ma’am. She said she was passing and she just stopped to enquire how you were.

Colonel Wharton.

Tell her to come in, Kate. What’s she making all this fuss about.

Kate.

Very well, sir.

[Exit.

Mrs. Wharton.

I expect she wants to hear all about John.

Colonel Wharton.

If she’ll wait a minute she’ll have the chance of seeing the young fellow himself.

[Kate comes in, followed by Mrs. Poole. The visitor is a thin, rather dour person of middle age, brisk in her movements, competent and firm. She is a woman who knows her own mind and has no hesitation in speaking it. She is not unsympathetic. She wears a serviceable black coat and skirt and a black straw hat.

Kate.

Mrs. Poole.

[Exit.

Colonel Wharton.

What do you mean by trying to get away without showing yourself? Is this how you do your district visiting?

Mrs. Poole.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Wharton and with the Colonel.] I wanted to come in, but I thought you mightn’t wish to see me to-day, so I put it like that to make it easier for you to send me about my business.

Mrs. Wharton.

We always wish to see you, my dear.

Mrs. Poole.

If I had a son that I hadn’t seen for four years and he’d been dangerously wounded, I think I’d want to keep him to myself for the first few days after he got home.

Colonel Wharton.

Then you’re not as unselfish a woman as Evelyn.

Mrs. Wharton.

Or perhaps not nearly so vain.

Mrs. Poole.

Did you go down to the station to meet him on Saturday?

Mrs. Wharton.

The Colonel went. He wouldn’t let me go because he said I’d make a fool of myself on the platform.

Colonel Wharton.

I took Sylvia. I thought that was enough. I knew I could trust her to control herself.

Mrs. Poole.

And when are they going to be married.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, I hope very soon. It’s been a long and anxious time for her.

Mrs. Poole.

Can you bear to give him up when he’s only just come back to you?

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, but it’s not giving him up when he’s marrying Sylvia. She’s been like a daughter to us. D’you know, they’ve been engaged for seven years.

Mrs. Poole.

I hope they’ll be very happy. Sylvia certainly deserves to be.

Colonel Wharton.

She’s done cheerfully the most difficult thing anyone can do. All through the war when she was pining to be off and do her bit she stayed at home with a bed-ridden mother.

Mrs. Wharton.

Poor Mrs. Bullough.

Colonel Wharton.

Yes, but poor Sylvia too. It’s easy enough to do your duty when duty is dangerous and exciting, but when you can do nothing — no one knows better than I what it is to sit still and look on when others are doing the things that are worth while. This war came ten years too late for me.

Mrs. Poole.

That’s what the Vicar has been saying ever since the war began. But after all your son has taken your place, and I think you can be proud of him.

Colonel Wharton.

[With intense satisfaction.] The rascal with his Military Cross and his D.S.O.

Mrs. Poole.

I’m so glad that his first day here was a Sunday.

Mrs. Wharton.

You don’t know what I felt when we knelt down side by side in church. I was very grateful.

Mrs. Poole.

I know. I could see it in your face and the Colonel’s.

Colonel Wharton.

God has vouchsafed us a great mercy.

Mrs. Poole.

The Vicar was dreadfully disappointed that he didn’t stay for Holy Communion. You know that he looks upon that as the essential part of the service.

Mrs. Wharton.

I think we were a little disappointed, too. We were so surprised when John walked out.

Mrs. Poole.

Did he say why he had?

Mrs. Wharton.

No. I talked it over with the Colonel. We didn’t quite know what to do. I don’t know whether to mention it or not.

Mrs. Poole.

I do hope he’ll stay next Sunday.

Mrs. Wharton.

He was always a very regular communicant.

Colonel Wharton.

I don’t see why you shouldn’t say something to him about it, Evelyn.

Mrs. Wharton.

I will if you like.

[There is the sound of a laugh in the garden.

Why, here he is. And Sylvia.

[Sylvia Bullough and John Wharton come in. She is no longer quite young. She has a pleasant, friendly look rather than beauty, and she suggests the homely virtues of a girl very well brought up in a nice English family; she gives the impression of a practical, competent, and sensible woman. She will make a good wife and an excellent mother. She is very simply dressed in light summery things, and she wears a straw hat. She is carrying a string bag, in which are a number of household purchases. John Wharton is in mufti. He is a man of thirty.

Sylvia.

Good morning everybody!

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, how nice of you to come in.

John.

She didn’t want to, but I made her.

[Sylvia kisses Mrs. Wharton and shakes hands with Mrs. Poole, then she kisses the Colonel.

Sylvia.

[Gaily.] That’s a deliberate lie, John.

Mrs. Wharton.

This is my son, Mrs. Poole.

John.

[Shaking hands with her.] I daresay you suspected it.

Mrs. Poole.

I had a good look at you in church, you know.

John.

Is that how vicars’ wives behave themselves?

Mrs. Poole.

They allow themselves a little licence when young people come home on leave.

Colonel Wharton.

Did you meet in the village?

John.

Not exactly. I saw Sylvia darting into Mrs. Gann’s shop, evidently to avoid me....

Sylvia.

[Interrupting.] I don’t know how you imagined I could see you out of the back of my head.

John.

So I ran like a hare, and caught her in the very act of buying two pounds of vermicelli.

Sylvia.

To say nothing of a tin of sardines and a packet of mustard.

John.

Now take off your hat, Sylvia. You mustn’t hide the best feature you’ve got.

Sylvia.

[Taking it off.] I hope you don’t think I shall go on doing exactly what you tell me a minute after the war’s over.

John.

I haven’t noticed any startling alacrity to do what I tell you as it is.

Sylvia.

You ungrateful fellow! When have I hesitated to carry out your slightest wish?

Mrs. Wharton.

He’s only been back forty-eight hours, poor dear.

John.

Didn’t I go down to you on my bended knees in the middle of the road and ask you to come for a walk with me?

Sylvia.

Oh, well, I wanted to see your father. I was anxious to hear what the specialist had said.

John.

[Surprised.] Have you been seeing a specialist, father? Aren’t you well?

Colonel Wharton.

Perfectly. It was only to satisfy your poor mother.

John.

But why didn’t you tell me? Is anything the matter with him, mother?

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, your father wouldn’t let me tell you anything about it when you came. He didn’t want you to be worried. And I thought myself it might just as well keep till to-day.

Colonel Wharton.

The fact is I haven’t been quite up to the mark lately, and Dr. Macfarlane thought I’d better see a specialist. So I went into Canterbury on Saturday and saw Dr. Keller.

Mrs. Poole.

Yes, I heard you’d been to see him. They say he’s very clever.

John.

What did he say?

Colonel Wharton.

Well, you know what these doctor fellows are. He wouldn’t say much to me. He said he’d write to Macfarlane.

John.

Well?

Colonel Wharton.

I suppose Macfarlane got the letter this morning. He’ll probably be round presently.

Mrs. Poole.

I saw him going along the Bleane Road in his dog-cart about an hour ago. You might ask him who it was he was going to see.

John.

Are you feeling ill, father?

Colonel Wharton.

No. I shouldn’t have dreamed of going to a specialist, only your mother was worrying.

Sylvia.

Don’t put all the blame on her. I was, too.

John.

[Going over to him and putting his arm in his.] Poor old father, you mustn’t be ill.

Colonel Wharton.

Oh, I’m not going to die just yet, you know.

John.

I should jolly well think not. Wait till you’re a hundred and two, and then we’ll begin talking about it.

[The Vicar of Stour, the Rev. Norman Poole, appears at the window. He is a tall, thin man, bald, dressed in a short black coat, with a black straw hat. He is energetic, breezy, and cheerful. He likes to show that, although a clergyman, he is a man; and he affects a rather professional joviality. Mr. and Mrs. Poole have that physical resemblance which you sometimes see in married people. You wonder if they married because they were so much alike, or if it is marriage which has created the similarity.

Vicar.

Hulloa, hulloa, hulloa! May I come in?

Mrs. Wharton.

[Smiling.] Of course. How do you do?

Colonel Wharton.

My dear Vicar!

Vicar.

[Entering.] I suppose I ought to have gone round to the front door, and rung the bell like a gentleman. My dear Dorothy, when will you teach me how to behave?

Mrs. Poole.

I’ve long given up the attempt.

Vicar.

I thought I’d look in and say how-do-you-do to the wounded hero.

Mrs. Wharton.

My son. The Vicar.

Vicar.

Welcome! I passed you in the village just now. I had half a mind to come up and wring your hand, but I thought you’d say, who the deuce is this clerical gent?

John.

How do you do?

Vicar.

An authentic hero. And he speaks just like you and me. The world’s a strange place, my masters. Well, what d’you think of Blighty?

John.

I’m very glad to be home again. I thought I never should get back.

Vicar.

You’ve not been home since the beginning of the war, have you?

John.

No, you see I was in India when it broke out. What with Gallipoli and one thing and another, I was done out of my leave every time.

Vicar.

Well, it’s a long lane that has no turning. But I understand that you’ve picked up some bits and pieces here and there. The Military Cross and the D.S.O., isn’t it?

Mrs. Poole.

You must be a very proud man.

Vicar.

How did you win them?

John.

Oh, I don’t know. Playing about generally.

Mrs. Wharton.

I don’t think you’ll get very much more than that out of John.

Vicar.

[To John.] You lucky beggar! You’ve had your chance and you were able to take it. That’s where I should have been, where my heart was, with the brave lads at the front. And my confounded chest has kept me chained to this little tin-pot parish.

Mrs. Poole.

My husband suffers from his lungs.

John.

I’m sorry to hear that.

Vicar.

Yes, the Great White Peril. They say its ravages are terrible. That’s why I came here, you know; I was in charge of the parish of St. Jude’s, Stoke Newington when I crocked up. I tried to get them to let me go when the war broke out, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

Mrs. Wharton.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Vicar.

I know, I know. It’s this confounded energy of mine. I’m a crock, and I’ve just had to make the best of it. I’m on the shelf. The future is in the hands of you brave lads who’ve been through the fire. I suppose you went to sleep during my sermon yesterday.

John.

Not at all. I listened to it very attentively.

Vicar.

I shouldn’t blame you if you had. That’s about all I’ve been able to do during the war, to preach. And, upon my word, I sometimes wonder what good I’ve done.

Mrs. Wharton.

You’ve been a great help to us all.

Vicar.

For my part I don’t deplore the war. Our Lord said: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” The Christian Church has lived by her sword. Every advance which this world of ours has known in liberty, in justice, in enlightenment, has been won for it by the sword of Jesus Christ.

Colonel Wharton.

I wish all parsons were as broad-minded. I know what war is. I was in Egypt and in South Africa. I’ve been through half a dozen wars in India. I have no use for slop and sentimentality. My own belief is that war is necessary to a nation. It brings out all a man’s best qualities.

Vicar.

There I heartily agree with you. It is the great school of character. Amid the clash of arms the great Christian virtues shine forth with an immortal lustre. Courage, self-sacrifice, charity, self-reliance. No one knew before the war what a pinnacle of heroism was within the power of our brave lads at the front.

Mrs. Poole.

What do you think about it, Major Wharton?

John.

[Smiling.] I? I think it’s a lovely day. I have three weeks leave, and the war is a long way off.

Vicar.

[With a chuckle.] A very good answer. I’ve been saying the obvious, I know that just as well as you do, but, you know, sometimes the obvious has to be said, and when it has, I think a man should have the courage to say it. Now, my dear, let’s be off.

Mrs. Poole.

I don’t know what Mrs. Wharton will think of us for inflicting ourselves on her like this.

Vicar.

We’re all friends here, I hope and trust. If we weren’t welcome, Mrs. Wharton only had to say so. To my mind the afternoon call is a convention more honoured in the breach than the observance.

Mrs. Wharton.

It’s been very good of you to come.

[There is a general shaking of hands.

Vicar.

[To John.] Well, good-bye, young fellow. I’ve tried to show you that I’m by way of being rather broad-minded as parsons go. It wouldn’t shock me in the least to hear you say “damn” or “blast.” I’m often inclined to use a bit of strong language myself. I asked you just now if you’d gone to sleep during my sermon. I wouldn’t have turned a hair if you had.

John.

It’s very kind of you to say so. I may avail myself of your suggestion on some future occasion.

Vicar.

On a future occasion, perhaps — shall we say next Sunday? — I hope you won’t leave the House of God without partaking in the greatest of all the Sacraments of our Church. Don’t forget that the Almighty has in His mercy brought you in safety through great and terrible peril. That’s all I wanted to say to you. Good-bye, God bless you.

John.

Good-bye.

Vicar.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Wharton] Good-bye. These parsons, what a nuisance they make of themselves, don’t they?

Mrs. Wharton.

I wanted to ask you if you’d seen poor Mrs. Littlewood since her return.

Vicar.

No, she didn’t come to church yesterday. And of course, Sunday’s my busy day — I’m the only man in the parish who works seven days a week — so I haven’t had a chance to see her yet, poor soul.

Sylvia.

She came down by the 6.35 on Saturday. She was in the same train as John, but I wasn’t bothering much about anyone else just then, and I didn’t speak to her.

Colonel Wharton.

I wish we could do something for her.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Explaining to John.] She was telegraphed for last week to go to Ned at Boulogne. He died on Tuesday.

John.

[With astonishment.] Ned! But he was only a kid.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, he’d grown up since you were home. He was nearly nineteen.

Mrs. Poole.

Both her sons are gone now. She’s quite alone.

Mrs. Wharton.

We must all be very kind to her. It will be terrible for her in that big house all by herself. I wish you’d spoken to her on Saturday, George.

Colonel Wharton.

I felt rather shy about it. After all, we’ve had rather an anxious time over that young scamp there. If anything had happened to him — well, I should have had Evelyn, but she, poor soul, has nobody.

Sylvia.

I ought to have gone to see her yesterday.

Mrs. Wharton.

She must be absolutely prostrated with grief.

Vicar.

I wonder if she’d like to come and stay at the Vicarage. I can’t bear to think of her all alone.

Mrs. Poole.

That’s a splendid idea, Norman, and just like you. I’ll ask her at once. I’ll be glad to do what I can for her.

Sylvia.

Of course one ought to try and find something to occupy her mind.

Vicar.

Happily she has always been a deeply religious woman. When all’s said and done, in grief like that there’s only one unfailing refuge.

[Kate enters, followed by Mrs. Littlewood. She is a little elderly woman. She is not dressed in mourning, but in the clothes she may be expected to have been wearing before her bereavement.

Kate.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Exit Kate.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Rising and going to meet her.] My dear friend, how very glad I am to see you.

Mrs. Littlewood.

How do you do? [She smiles brightly at the assembled company.] Oh, John, have you come back? [To Mrs. Wharton.] I came to ask if you and the Colonel would come and play bridge this afternoon.

Mrs. Wharton.

Bridge!

[They all look at her with surprise, but no one says anything.]

Mrs. Littlewood.

I was going to ask Dr. Macfarlane to make a fourth, but perhaps John will come.

Mrs. Wharton..

[With embarrassment.] It’s very kind of you, but the Colonel hasn’t been very well lately. I don’t think he feels like going out, and I shouldn’t like to leave him.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Oh, I’m sorry.

Mrs. Wharton..

Won’t you sit down?

Mrs. Littlewood.

Thank you very much. I won’t stay. I’ll go round to the Wilkinsons and see if they’ll play.

Vicar.

I hope you weren’t very tired by your journey.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I wasn’t tired at all.

Mrs. Poole.

We thought you were, because we didn’t see you in church.

Mrs. Littlewood.

No, I didn’t come. I thought it would bore me.

[There is a moment’s silence.

Mrs. Wharton.

Did you — did you come straight through from France?

Mrs. Littlewood.

No. I stayed a couple of nights in London.

Mrs. Wharton.

[With pity in her voice.] All alone?

Mrs. Littlewood.

No. I picked up a very nice woman in the hotel, and we went out together. We went to the Gaiety one night and the next we went to the Empire. Do you know that I’d never seen George Robey before?

Mrs. Poole.

Who is George Robey?

Vicar.

I believe he’s a comedian.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Very pleasantly.] How long are you here for, John?

John.

I have three weeks’ leave.

Mrs. Littlewood.

We must all make much of you. I’ll give a tennis party for you, shall I?

Sylvia.

Oh, Mrs. Littlewood, I’m sure you don’t want to give parties just now.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I’d love to. It’s so seldom one gets an excuse for one in a place like this.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Taking her hand.] My dear, I want you to know how deeply we all sympathise with you in your great loss.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Patting Mrs. Wharton’s hand, and then releasing her own.] That’s very kind of you. [To Sylvia and John.] Would Wednesday suit you young people? I’ll have both courts marked out.

Sylvia.

[Desperately.] I couldn’t come, Mrs. Littlewood, I couldn’t come.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Why on earth not?

Sylvia.

[Controlling herself to civility.] I’m engaged that day.

Colonel Wharton.

John has so short a time at home. I think he and Sylvia have a feeling that they don’t want to go to parties.

Vicar.

[Deliberately.] I hope you got over to France in time to find your son alive.

[Mrs. Littlewood gives him a rapid glance, stops a moment as though to collect herself, then answers almost indifferently.

Mrs. Littlewood.

No, he was dead, poor child. [To Mrs. Wharton.] Good-bye, my dear, I’m sorry you can’t come and play bridge this afternoon. I suppose I shall have to send you a wedding-present, John.

John.

I suppose you will.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[With a smile at the rest of the company.] Good-bye.

[She goes out. They are left in amazement.

Mrs. Poole.

Is she absolutely heartless?

Colonel Wharton.

I always thought she was devoted to her sons.

Sylvia.

And Ned was her favourite.

Mrs. Poole.

She wasn’t wearing mourning.

Sylvia.

Isn’t she going to, do you suppose?

Mrs. Wharton.

I can’t understand it. She adored those boys.

Mrs. Poole.

I didn’t ask her to come and stay at the Vicarage, Norman.

Vicar.

I don’t think we’d better till the situation’s a little clearer. She gives one the impression of not caring two straws for Ned’s death. She must be as hard as nails.

Mrs. Wharton.

No, she isn’t that. I’ve known her for thirty-five years. D’you think she’s mad?

Colonel Wharton.

We’d better say a word to Macfarlane when he comes, Evelyn.

Vicar.

I was never so taken aback in my life as when she said she didn’t come to church because she thought she’d be bored.

Mrs. Poole.

Norman, I must go. I’ve got a lot of things to do at home.

Vicar.

Come along then. We’ll just walk out through the garden.

[There are farewells, rather distracted by the queer incident that has just occurred, and the Vicar and Mrs. Poole go out. The Colonel accompanies them to the door.

Sylvia.

You’re very silent, John.

John.

I was thinking about Mrs. Littlewood. She doesn’t give me the impression of being either callous or mad.

Sylvia.

What does she mean, then?

John.

[Reflectively.] I don’t know. [With a shrug of the shoulders, throwing off his mood.] And at the moment I don’t very much care. Come and sit down and be a comfort to a wounded hero.

Sylvia.

Idiot!

Mrs. Wharton.

Will you stay to luncheon, Sylvia dear?

Sylvia.

No, I think I ought to get back to mother.

John.

Before you go let’s tell them what we’ve been talking about.

Colonel Wharton.

I don’t think it’s very hard to guess.

John.

I want Sylvia to marry me as soon as ever it’s possible.

Mrs. Wharton.

Of course.

John.

If we look nippy we can get a special licence and be married on Thursday. We don’t want to go far for our honeymoon, because I have such a short time. And my suggestion is London.

Sylvia.

What do you think, Mrs. Wharton?

Mrs. Wharton.

Well, my dear, I think that whatever you and John decide will be quite right.

Sylvia.

He’s only just come back to you. I can’t bear to take him away immediately. Wouldn’t you prefer us to wait a little longer?

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, we’ve always decided that you should be married the moment he came back. We’ve been quite prepared to lose him. And perhaps after a few days, if the Colonel’s well enough, you wouldn’t mind if we came up to London, too. We’d try not to be in your way.

Sylvia.

[Going down on her knees beside Mrs. Wharton and kissing her.] Oh, my dear, you’re so kind to me. I don’t know how I can ever thank you for all your kindness.

Mrs. Wharton.

It’s been a weary, anxious time for all of us. I know how unhappy you’ve been sometimes. I want you to have him now. He’s a good boy, and I think he’ll make you happy.

Sylvia.

[Getting up and giving John her hand.] I’m sure he will. I’ll try to make you a good wife, John.

John.

I expect you’ll be quite good enough for the likes of me. Then it’s to be Thursday next.

Sylvia.

[With a smile.] It is.

[He draws her to him and kisses her. She very nearly breaks down.

Sylvia.

I’ve wanted you for so long, John, so dreadfully long.

John.

For goodness’ sake don’t cry.

Sylvia.

[Breaking away from him, with a chuckle.] You brute, John! I hate you.

Mrs. Wharton.

Did you like the Vicar, John?

John.

He seemed all right.

Colonel Wharton.

He’s a first-rate fellow. He had a very good living in London at one time, and he resigned and took one in the East End instead.

John.

Really?

Colonel Wharton.

He said he wasn’t ordained to drink China tea with elderly women of means. [With a chuckle.] He says very good things sometimes.

Mrs. Wharton.

They were perfectly wonderful in the East End. They wanted to live in exactly the same way as their parishioners, so they did without a servant, and did all their housework, even their washing, themselves.

John.

It sounds hateful, but of course it really was heroic.

Mrs. Wharton.

D’you remember what he said to you about Holy Communion? Your father and I were a little disappointed that you didn’t stay for it yesterday.

John.

I’m sorry for that, mother dear.

Mrs. Wharton.

It would have been such a great pleasure to both of us if we could all three have received it together.

John.

Dear mother.... If you’re really going home to luncheon, Sylvia, I’ll walk back with you.

Mrs. Wharton.

The Vicar has a Communion service on Wednesday morning. Would you come then? It’ll be the last opportunity before your marriage.

John.

Oh, my dear, you’re not going to ask me to get up in the middle of the night? After all, one of the pleasures of coming home is to lie in bed in the morning. I don’t know how I ever tear myself out of those lavender-scented sheets.

Mrs. Wharton.

Dear John, won’t you come to please us?

John.

[Still trying to pass it off lightly.] Oh, my dear mother, d’you think it’s really necessary?

Mrs. Wharton.

I should like it so much, my dear. You know, it means a great deal to us.

John.

[More gravely.] Don’t you think one should go to a ceremony like that in a certain frame of mind?

Colonel Wharton.

[Good-humouredly.] Come, my boy, you’re not going to refuse the first request your mother has made you since you came back?

John.

I’m awfully sorry, mother. I beg you not to insist.

Mrs. Wharton.

I don’t quite know what you mean. It’s not like you to be obstinate.... Won’t you come, John?

John.

No, mother.

Colonel Wharton.

Why not?

John.

I’ve been away a long time. There are some things one can’t help, you know. I’ve been through very terrible experiences.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Aghast.] Do you mean to say you’ve lost your — faith?

John.

I’m awfully sorry to give you pain, dear.

Sylvia.

[Her eyes fixed on him.] You’ve not answered your mother’s question, John.

John.

If you want a direct answer, I’m afraid it must be — yes.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Overcome.] Oh, John!

Sylvia.

But you came to church yesterday.

John.

That was just a formal ceremony. I assisted passively, as a Jew might assist at the wedding of one of his Christian friends.

Sylvia.

You stood when we stood, and knelt down, and seemed to pray.

John.

I would do that if I were in a Roman Catholic church. That seemed to me only good manners. [With a smile.] Do you think it was very deceitful?

Sylvia.

I don’t quite see why you should strain at a gnat.

John.

I don’t. It’s the camel I can’t swallow. I knew it would distress you if I refused to come to church. I didn’t want to seem a prig. But the other seems to me different. When I’m asked to take an active part in a ceremony that means nothing to me it’s quite another matter. I’d rather not tell a deliberate lie. And surely from your point of view it would be blasphemous.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Occupied with her own thoughts.] How dreadful!

John.

[Going up to her and putting his arm round her.] Don’t be unhappy, mother. I can’t help feeling as I do. After all, these are matters that only concern oneself.

Sylvia.

[Reflecting.] Are they?

John.

Surely. [To his mother.] I would rather not have told you. I knew how much you’d take it to heart. But I was obliged to. And perhaps it’s better as it is. I hated the thought of deceiving you and father. Now let’s put it out of our minds.

Colonel Wharton.

John, have you forgotten, that in three weeks you’ll be going back to the Front? Sooner or later you’ll find yourself once more in the fighting line. Have you asked yourself what it will be like to face death without the help of Almighty God?

John.

It’s always difficult to face death.

Colonel Wharton.

You wouldn’t be the first who found it easy to stand alone when all was going well and found it a very different thing in danger or illness.

John.

[With a smile.] When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.

Sylvia.

Archie, Mrs. Littlewood’s elder boy, was badly wounded on the Somme. His battalion had to retreat and somehow or other he wasn’t picked up. He lay in the corner of a wood for three days and kept himself alive on a beet that he pulled out of the field. Heaven knows, I don’t want anything like that to happen to you, but are you sure your courage wouldn’t fail you then? Are you sure you wouldn’t call on God instinctively to help you?

John.

And if I did, what of it? That wouldn’t be me, that mangled, bleeding, starved, delirious thing. It’s me now that speaks, now that I’m well and conscious and strong. It’s the real me now. I disclaim and disown anything I may feel or say when I’m tortured with pain and sickness. It would give my real self just as little as a prisoner on the rack gives the truth.

Sylvia.

[Looking at him fixedly.] You’re afraid of something like that happening, aren’t you?

John.

Yes, I shouldn’t like my body to play me a dirty trick when I hadn’t the presence of mind to look after it.

Colonel Wharton.

Have you ever been in real danger since you — since you began to think like this?

John.

Yes. Once I was in a trench the Germans had enfiladed. They’d got the line exactly. The shells fell one after another, first at the end of the trench, and then they came slowly down. One could calculate almost mathematically when the shell must come that would blow one to smithereens.

Mrs. Wharton.

[With a little gasp of terror.] Oh, John, don’t!

John.

[Smiling.] Well, something went wrong, or else I certainly shouldn’t be here now.

Colonel Wharton.

Do you mean to say you weren’t frightened?

John.

Frightened isn’t the word for it. Talk of getting the wind up: it was a perfect hurricane. I felt as though I were shrinking up so that my clothes suddenly hung about me like sacks. And against my will a prayer came to my lips. From long habit, I suppose, they tried to form themselves into an appeal to God to turn the shell away. I had to fight with myself. I had to keep saying to myself: “Don’t be a fool. Don’t be a damned fool.”

Mrs. Wharton.

And you resisted? It was the voice of God speaking to you. The prayer was said in your heart, and He in His mercy heard it. Doesn’t that prove to you that you’re wrong? At that moment you believed, even though you struggled not to. Your whole soul cried out its belief in God.

John.

No, not my soul: my fear of death.

Colonel Wharton.

I’ve been in battle, too. In South Africa and in the Soudan we were in some pretty tight places now and then. When I went into action I commended my soul to God, and now that I’m an old man I can say that I never knew fear.

John.

I don’t think I’m particularly brave. Before an attack I’ve often had to light a cigarette to hide the trembling of my lips.

Colonel Wharton.

The Christian doesn’t fear death. His whole life is but a preparation for that awful moment. To him it is the shining gateway to life everlasting.

John.

I should be sorry to think that life was nothing but a preparation for death. To my mind death is very unimportant. I think a man does best to put it out of his thoughts. He should live as though life were endless. Life is the thing that matters.

Sylvia.

Doesn’t that suggest a very base materialism?

John.

No, because you can’t make the most of life unless you’re willing to risk it, and it’s the risk that makes the difference. It’s the most precious thing a man has, but it’s valueless unless he’s prepared to stake it.

Sylvia.

What do you think it can be worth while to risk life for?

John.

Almost anything. Honour or love. A song, a thought. [After a moment’s reflection, with a smile.] A five-barred gate.

Sylvia.

Isn’t that rather illogical?

John.

Perhaps. I don’t put it very well. I think what I mean is that life in itself has no value. It’s what you put in it that gives it worth.

Colonel Wharton.

Why do you think you’ve come safely through the perils and dangers of the war? John, do you know that every day your mother and Sylvia and I prayed that God might see fit to spare you?

John.

[With sudden energy.] Were you the only ones? Why didn’t He see fit to spare the others?

Sylvia.

Who are we to question the inscrutable designs of the Omnipotent?

Colonel Wharton.

[Answering his son.] I don’t know what you mean by that. In war somebody’s got to be killed. When a commander gives battle he knows pretty accurately what his losses are going to be before he starts.

[John gives a slight shrug of the shoulders. He recovers his equanimity.

John.

If you don’t mind my saying so, I think we’d much better not start arguing. Arguments never bring one much forrader, do they?

Mrs. Wharton.

[Gently.] But we want to understand, John. You were always such a pious boy.

John.

[Smiling.] Oh, mother, that’s rather a terrible thing to say to anybody.

Mrs. Wharton.

[With an answering smile.] Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. On the contrary, you were rather troublesome. Sometimes you were very headstrong and obstinate.

John.

That’s better.

Mrs. Wharton.

We tried to bring you up to fear God. It used to make me happy sometimes to see how simple and touching your faith was. You used to pray to God for all sorts of absurd things, to make a lot of runs in a cricket match or to pass an exam, that you hadn’t worked for.

John.

Yes, I remember.

Mrs. Wharton.

If you’ve lost your faith, we know it can’t be as so many lose it, on purpose, because they’ve given themselves over to sensuality, and dare not believe in a God whom every action of their lives insults. If you’ll only tell us everything, perhaps we can help you.

John.

My dear, you’d much better let the matter rest. I should only have to say things that would hurt you all.

Mrs. Wharton.

We’re willing to take the risk of that. We know you wouldn’t hurt us intentionally. Perhaps they’re only difficulties that we might be able to explain. And if we’re not clever enough perhaps the Vicar can.

[John shakes his head without speaking.

Sylvia.

Don’t you want to believe in God, John?

John.

No.

[There is a moment’s pause. Kate comes in to announce Dr. Macfarlane. This is a rather eccentric old man, with long white hair, small, with rosy cheeks. He is an old-fashioned country doctor, and wears rather shabby black clothes and carries a rusty silk hat in his hand. There is in him something of the gentleman farmer and something of the apothecary of a former day.

Kate.

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Exit.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh! I’d forgotten for the moment. [With a smile of welcome.] We’ve been expecting you.

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Shaking hands with the two ladies.] I’ve been busy this morning. [To John.] And how are you, John?

John.

Sitting up and taking nourishment, thank you.

Dr. Macfarlane.

You look none the worse for all your adventures. A little older, perhaps.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, of course, you’ve not seen John before.

Dr. Macfarlane.

No. My wife saw him yesterday in church, but unfortunately I couldn’t go. I had to see a patient.

John.

The same patient?

Dr. Macfarlane.

I beg your pardon.

John.

You’ve had to see a patient at about eleven every Sunday morning for the last twenty-five years. I was wondering if it was the same one.

Dr. Macfarlane.

If it is, I certainly deserve praise for keeping the undertakers at bay so long. [Going up to the Colonel] And how are you feeling to-day, Colonel?

Colonel Wharton.

Oh, I’m feeling pretty well, thank you. Have you had a letter from that fellow in Canterbury?

Dr. Macfarlane.

Yes.

Colonel Wharton.

Well, what does he say?

Dr. Macfarlane.

You military gentlemen, you want to go so fast.

Mrs. Wharton.

Have you brought the letter with you?

Dr. Macfarlane.

It’s very technical. Saving your presence, I don’t think any of you would make head or tail of it. Now, Mrs. Wharton, my dear, shall you and I go for a little stroll in your beautiful garden, and we’ll have a talk about this old tyrant.

Colonel Wharton.

What’s the object of that? Evelyn will only tell me everything you’ve said the moment you’re gone. She’s never been able to keep anything from me in her life.

Dr. Macfarlane.

You must have patience with me. I’m an old man, and I like to do things in my own way.

Colonel Wharton.

Well, I’m no chicken, and I’m not going to stand any of your nonsense. Tell us straight out what the doctor says and be damned to you. I beg your pardon, my dear, but I have to talk to the old fool in the only way he understands.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Very rough, isn’t he?

John.

The gentlest pirate who ever cut a throat.

Colonel Wharton.

You know, you’re a transparent old fraud, Doctor. The moment you came in I saw you had some bad news for me. You were expecting to find Evelyn alone.

Dr. Macfarlane.

This is the hour at which all self-respecting retired colonels are reading the Times in their study.

Mrs. Wharton.

What does Dr. Keller say?

Colonel Wharton.

I suppose he wants an operation. It’s a nuisance but, with God’s help, I can go through with it.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Well, I suppose you’d have to know sooner or later. Let these young people clear out and we’ll talk it all over quietly.

Colonel Wharton.

Nonsense. John is my son and Sylvia is almost my daughter. What concerns me concerns them, I fancy. Why, you couldn’t make more fuss if I’d only got a month to live.

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Hesitating.] Do you want me to tell you the whole thing now — just like this?

Colonel Wharton.

Yes. You don’t think I’m afraid to hear the worst. Whatever it is, I hope I have the pluck to bear it like a Christian and a gentleman.

[There is a pause.

Dr. Macfarlane.

You’re quite right. I have bad news for you. Dr. Keller confirms my diagnosis. I was pretty sure of it, but I didn’t want to believe it. I thought I might be mistaken.... I’m afraid you’re very ill indeed. You must be extremely careful.

Mrs. Wharton.

George!

Colonel Wharton.

Come, come, my dear, don’t get in a state. And does he recommend an operation?

Dr. Macfarlane.

No.

Colonel Wharton.

[Startled.] Do you mean to say that.... But I don’t feel so bad as all that. Now and then I have attacks of pain, but then ... you don’t mean to say you think I’m going to die? For God’s sake tell me the truth.

Dr. Macfarlane.

My dear old friend!

Colonel Wharton.

You mean I’ve got a fatal disease. Can — can nothing be done?

Dr. Macfarlane.

I don’t know about that. There’s always something that can be done.

Colonel Wharton.

But a cure, I mean. Can’t I be cured?

Dr. Macfarlane.

If you want the truth really, then I’m afraid I can hold out no hope of that.

Colonel Wharton.

How long d’you give me? [Trying to laugh.] I suppose you’re not going to grudge me a year or two?

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Pretending to take it lightly.] Oh, you can be quite sure we’ll keep you alive as long as we can.

John.

You’ve got a wonderful physique, father. My own impression is that you’ll make fools of the doctors and live for another twenty years.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Medicine isn’t an exact science like surgery. It’s a doctor’s duty to tell a patient the truth when he asks for it, but if I were a patient I would always take it with a grain of salt.

[The Colonel looks at him suspiciously.

Colonel Wharton.

You’re keeping something from me. If it was only that, why did you want to see Evelyn alone?

Dr. Macfarlane.

Well, some people are very nervous about themselves. I wasn’t quite sure if you’d better know or not. I thought I’d talk it over with her.

Colonel Wharton.

Am I in immediate danger of death? For God’s sake, tell me. It would be cruel to leave me in ignorance.

Mrs. Wharton.

Please answer quite frankly, doctor.

Dr. Macfarlane.

[After a pause.] I think if you have any arrangements to make, it would be wise if you made them soon.

Colonel Wharton.

Then it’s not a question of a year or two even? Is it months or weeks?

Dr. Macfarlane.

I don’t know. No one can tell.

Colonel Wharton.

You’re treating me like a child. [With sudden rage.] Confound you, sir, I order you to tell me.

Dr. Macfarlane.

It may be at any time.

Colonel Wharton.

[With a sudden cry of terror.] Evelyn! Evelyn!

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, my dear! My dear husband!

[She takes him in her arms as though to protect him.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Why did you force me to tell you?

Colonel Wharton.

[In a terrified whisper.] Oh, Evelyn! Evelyn!

Mrs. Wharton.

[To the others.] Please go.

John.

[To Sylvia.] Come. They want to be alone. Dr. Macfarlane, will you come into the garden for a few minutes?

Dr. Macfarlane.

Of course I will. Of course.

[They go out. Colonel and Mrs. Wharton are left alone. For a moment they are silent.

Mrs. Wharton.

Perhaps it isn’t true, my dear.

Colonel Wharton.

It’s true. I know it’s true now.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, it’s so hard. I wish it were I instead. I’d be so glad to take your place, darling.

Colonel Wharton.

We’ve been so happy together, Evelyn.

Mrs. Wharton.

We have very much to be grateful for.

Colonel Wharton.

Oh, Evelyn, what shall I do?

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry for you. I’m so dreadfully sorry.... I think you’re very brave. If I’d been told like that I — I should have broken down.

Colonel Wharton.

It was so unexpected.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Trying to comfort him.] I’m thankful that your faith has always been so bright and clear. What a comfort that is now, darling, what an immense consolation! [She draws him more closely to her.]

You’re throwing aside these poor rags of mortality to put on a heavenly raiment. It is what we’ve always kept in our minds, isn’t it? that this brief life is only a place of passage to the mansions of our dear Father. [She feels the dismay in his heart and she strives to give him courage.] You’ve never hesitated at the call of an earthly leader. You’re a good soldier; it’s a Heavenly Leader that’s calling you now. Christ is holding out His loving arms to you.

Colonel Wharton.

Evelyn — I don’t want to die.

THE END OF THE FIRST ACT.

ACT II

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Act.

Two days have passed. It is Wednesday afternoon.

Mrs. Wharton is sitting by a little table, looking reflectively in front of her. On the table is a work-basket, and by the side of this a baby’s shirt that she is making. A fire is alight in the grate. After a minute, John comes in. She looks up at him with a pleasant smile. He goes to her and puts his hand on her shoulder. She gently pats his hand.

John.

Are you idling, mother? It’s not often I catch you giving the devil an opportunity.

Mrs. Wharton.

Isn’t it wicked of me?

John.

What is this you’re up to? What in heaven’s name are you making a baby’s shirt for? Hang it all, I’m not married yet.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Pretending to be a little shocked.] Don’t be naughty, John. It’s for poor Annie Black’s baby.

John.

Who’s she?

Mrs. Wharton.

She was engaged to Edward Driffield, the carpenter’s second man, and they were going to be married next time he came home on leave. He’s been killed, and she’s expecting a baby.

John.

Poor thing.

Mrs. Wharton.

The Pooles are looking after her. You see, she had nowhere to go, and they didn’t want her to have to go to the Workhouse, so Mrs. Poole has taken her in at the Vicarage. And I said I’d make all the baby’s things.

John.

[Affectionately.] You’re a nice old mother.

Mrs. Wharton.

Don’t you think it was good of the Pooles?

John.

Yes, charming.

Mrs. Wharton.

They’re coming here this afternoon, John. I wanted the Vicar to see your father.... I haven’t told your father they’re coming.

John.

Haven’t you?

Mrs. Wharton.

He’s rather sensitive just now. It’s quite natural, isn’t it? And I didn’t know exactly how he’d take it. I thought if Mrs. Poole came too it would look as though it were just a friendly visit. And perhaps the Vicar will have an opportunity to say a few words to your father.

John.

[Smiling.] I take it that you want me to help you to leave them alone together.

Mrs. Wharton.

I hate doing anything underhand, John, but I think it would help your father so much if he could have a little private talk with the Vicar.

John.

Why didn’t you suggest it to him?

Mrs. Wharton.

I didn’t like to. I was afraid he’d be vexed. I thought he’d suggest it himself.

John.

[Very tenderly.] Don’t distress yourself, mother.

Mrs. Wharton.

I’m trying not to think of it, John. My only hope is that the end may come without suffering.

John.

I wasn’t thinking of that.

Mrs. Wharton.

[After a moment’s pause.] I don’t know what you mean, John.

John.

Yes, you do. You only have to look in father’s face.

Mrs. Wharton.

I really don’t understand. [Almost vehemently.] You’re wrong, John. He suffers much more pain than you think. That’s what gives him that look.

John.

[Gravely.] It’s fear that’s in his face, mother, the fear of death. You know it just as well as I do.

Mrs. Wharton.

[With dismay.] I was so hoping that no one would know but me. It tears my heart. And I can do nothing. And he’s so strange. Sometimes he looks at me almost as though I were his enemy.

John.

He doesn’t want to die, does he? At the bottom of his heart is envy because you can go on living.

Mrs. Wharton.

Have you noticed that? I tried not to see it.

John.

Don’t be angry with him or disappointed. You know, it’s a hard thing to die for all of us. Generally one’s vitality is lowered so that life seems rather a burden, and it’s not very hard then to make a seemly end. But poor father’s got something much more difficult to face.

Mrs. Wharton.

He’s been supported all his life by his confidence in the great truths of our religion. Oh, John, it’s so dreadful that just at this moment, when he must put them all to the test, he should falter. It’s almost a betrayal of the God who loves him.

John.

My dear, you can’t imagine that God won’t understand? What do these last weeks matter beside a life that has been cheerful and innocent, devout, unselfish, and dutiful? We were talking about it the other day, don’t you remember? And I claimed that a man should be judged by what he believed and did in the heyday of his strength, and not by what was wrung from him in a moment of anguish. Pray that God may give my father courage and resignation.

Mrs. Wharton.

How can you ask me to pray, John, when you don’t believe in God?

John.

Pray all the same, my dear, and for me too.

Mrs. Wharton.

I don’t suppose I shall survive your father very long, dear. Husbands and wives who’ve been so much to one another as we have don’t often make a very good job of separation. I’m so glad to think that you’ll have Sylvia.

John.

Sylvia’s a good girl, isn’t she?

Mrs. Wharton.

When you were away I was dreadfully anxious on my own account, of course, but I was anxious on hers too. She’s had a very hard time with her mother, and there’s been dreadfully little money, only their pensions; if anything had happened to you, when her mother died she would have had practically nothing. You’ve been engaged so long and she’s not very young any more. It’s not likely that anyone else would have wanted to marry her.

John.

Mother darling, you’re being terribly sentimental now.

Mrs. Wharton.

[With comic indignation.] I’m not, John. You don’t know what it is for a penniless woman to be quite alone in the world when she’s lost her youth.

John.

Yes, I do. But the tears needn’t come into your eyes, because Sylvia and I are going to be married and her future is quite adequately provided for.

Mrs. Wharton.

She’s the only girl I’ve ever known that I could bear to think of your marrying.

John.

Well, as she’s the only girl I ever knew that I could bear to marry, we’re both quite satisfied.

[Kate enters, followed by Mrs. Littlewood.

Kate.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Exit Kate.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Kissing Mrs. Wharton.] How do you do?

Mrs. Wharton.

How are you, my dear?

Mrs. Littlewood.

[To John.] I brought you a wedding present, John.

[She hands him a small case in which is a pearl pin.

John.

Oh, I say, that is splendid of you. Just look, mother. Isn’t it a ripper?

Mrs. Littlewood.

It was Archie’s, you know. He always used to be so proud of it.

John.

It’s awfully good of you to give me something that belonged to him.

Mrs. Wharton.

That is nice of you, Charlotte.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Nonsense. It wasn’t any use to me any more. I thought it much better that John should have it than that it should lie in a safe. They tell me pearls go yellow if they’re not worn.

Mrs. Wharton.

John, dear, go and smoke a cigarette in the garden. I want to have a chat with Mrs. Littlewood.

John.

All right, mother.

[He goes out.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Do you know that I’m thinking of letting my house? I only kept it so that the boys should have a home to come to when they had a holiday, and now that they’re both dead, I think I shall find it more amusing to live in London. I shall join a bridge club.

Mrs. Wharton.

Charlotte, what does it mean? Why do you talk like that?

Mrs. Littlewood.

My dear, why shouldn’t I join a bridge club? [With a smile.] At my age it’s surely quite respectable.

Mrs. Wharton.

I’m bewildered. Don’t you want me to talk of your boys?

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Drily.] If you feel you really must pour out your sympathy, you may; but I don’t know that I particularly want it.

Mrs. Wharton.

No one can understand you. You’ve behaved so strangely since you came back from France.... I think it was dreadful of you to go to the theatre when the poor lad was hardly cold in his grave. You seem to think of nothing but bridge.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I suppose different people take things in different ways.

Mrs. Wharton.

I wonder if you’re quite in your right mind.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Somewhat amused.] Yes, I saw you wondered that.

Mrs. Wharton.

If you only knew how eager I am to help you. But you won’t let me come near you. We’ve known one another for more than thirty years, Charlotte. Why do you put up a stone wall between us?

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Gently, as though she were talking to a child.] My dear, don’t worry your kind heart. If I wanted your help I would come to you at once. But I don’t. I really don’t.

[Mrs. Wharton hears her husband’s step on the stairs.

Mrs. Wharton.

Here is George. [Going to the window.] You can come in when you want to, John.

[The Colonel comes into the room. His face is a little whiter than it was two days ago, and there is in his eyes every now and then a haunted look.

Mrs. Wharton.

Charlotte Littlewood is here, George.

Colonel Wharton.

So I see. How do you do?

Mrs. Littlewood.

You’re not looking quite up to the mark to-day, Colonel.

Colonel Wharton.

That’s a cheering thing to say to a man. I’m feeling pretty well.

Mrs. Wharton.

I was thinking he was looking much better the last day or two.

Colonel Wharton.

I presume it’s not on my account that you’ve lit the fire on a day like this.

Mrs. Wharton.

No, I feel a little chilly. You always forget that I’m not as young as I was, George.

[The Colonel sits down in an arm-chair and Mrs. Wharton takes a couple of cushions.

Mrs. Wharton.

Let me put them behind you, darling.

Colonel Wharton.

For goodness’ sake don’t fuss me, Evelyn. If I want cushions I’m perfectly capable of getting them for myself.

[John enters with Sylvia and hears the last two speeches.

John.

Come, come, father, you mustn’t spoil mother. She’s waited on us both for thirty years. Don’t let her get into bad habits at her time of life.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, Sylvia, we didn’t expect to see you to-day. You said you’d be too busy.

Sylvia.

I felt I must just look in and see how you all were.

[The Colonel gives her a suspicious look. She kisses Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Littlewood and the Colonel.

John.

[Showing Sylvia the pearl pin.] Look what Mrs. Littlewood has given me. Makes it worth while being married, doesn’t it?

Sylvia.

Oh, how lovely!

Mrs. Littlewood.

You’ll find a little present waiting for you when you get home.

Sylvia.

How exciting! I shall run all the way back.

Mrs. Wharton.

Now you’re here you’d better stay to tea, darling.

Sylvia.

I really can’t. I’ve got so much to do at home.

John.

Nonsense. You’ve got nothing to do at all. We’re not going to dream of letting you go.

Sylvia.

Remember that you’ll have me always from to-morrow on. Don’t you think you could well spare me to-day?

John.

No.

Sylvia.

Tiresome creature. Though I must say it’s rather pleasing.

Colonel Wharton.

I never saw two young people who were so thoroughly satisfied with one another as you are.

John.

[Putting his arm round Sylvia’s waist.] But I’m not in the least satisfied with Sylvia. I should like her to have jet black hair and eyes like sloes.

Sylvia.

What are sloes, idiot?

John.

I don’t know, but I’ve read about them from my youth up.

Sylvia.

Oh, Colonel, d’you know that on my way here through the fields, I actually saw a rabbit?

John.

I hear there’s absolutely nothing on the place now, father.

Colonel Wharton.

No, the vermin’s been allowed to increase so. There are one or two cock pheasants round the house and that’s about all. I don’t know what next season — but after all, I needn’t worry myself about next season. That’ll be your trouble, John.

John.

I wish I had as much chance of getting a shot at those cock pheasants as you have.

Colonel Wharton.

By George, I wish I were twenty years younger. I’d take my chance of being shot by a German. It’s a bit better than dying like a rat in a trap.

[Kate enters to announce the Vicar and Mrs. Poole.

Kate.

Mr. and Mrs. Poole.

[Exit.

Mrs. Wharton.

How do you do?

[There are general greetings. The Colonel looks at them and from them to his wife, suspiciously. The Pooles are rather cold with Mrs. Littlewood.

Colonel Wharton.

How do you do? It’s good of you to have come. Sit down.

Mrs. Poole.

Well, Sylvia, are you all ready for to-morrow?

Sylvia.

More or less.

Mrs. Poole.

We thought you might intend to postpone the wedding for a few days.

Colonel Wharton.

They’ve waited long enough. Why should they wish to do that?

Sylvia.

[Hastily.] I told Mrs. Poole yesterday that I didn’t think I could possibly get everything arranged by to-morrow.

Colonel Wharton.

I see that my wife has told you that I’m not very well.

Mrs. Poole.

Oh, aren’t you, Colonel? I’m so sorry to hear that.

Vicar.

She told me this morning after Communion that you weren’t quite up to the mark these days.

Colonel Wharton.

I remember in Egypt, when a horse or a mule sickened, the vultures used to gather round out of an empty sky. Most remarkable.

Mrs. Wharton.

George, what are you saying?

Colonel Wharton.

[With a bitter chuckle.] Did Evelyn ask you to come and minister to me?

Vicar.

It’s not very unnatural that when I hear you’re ill I should like to come and see you. And, of course, it does happen to be one of the duties of my office.

Colonel Wharton.

I don’t know why Evelyn should think I want to be molly-coddled out of the world like an old woman. I’ve faced death before. I don’t suppose anyone wants to die before he must, but when my time comes I hope to face it like a gentleman and a soldier.

John.

Oh, that I should live to hear my own father talking through his hat. Don’t you believe a word those rotten old doctors say. You’ll live to bully your devoted family for another twenty years.

Colonel Wharton.

Don’t talk nonsense to me, John. You all treat me like a child. No one must cross me. I must be petted and spoilt and amused and humoured. God damn it, you never let me forget it for a minute.

Mrs. Wharton.

Shall we go for a little turn in the garden? The sun is out now.

Colonel Wharton.

If you like. I shall stay here. I’m chilly.

Mrs. Wharton.

A stroll would do you good, George. The Vicar was asking how the new Buff Orpingtons were getting on.

Colonel Wharton.

[With a chuckle.] You’re very transparent, my poor Evelyn. When I want to have a chat with the Vicar I’ll let him know.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Who has been watching the scene with some amusement.] Why don’t you have a game of piquet with me, Colonel?

Colonel Wharton.

I haven’t played piquet for years. I will with pleasure. Where are the cards, Evelyn?

Mrs. Wharton.

I’ll get them for you.

[She gets cards from a drawer, and puts them on the card table. The Colonel sits down at the table and sorts the piquet cards out of the pack.

Vicar.

I called on you on Monday, Mrs. Littlewood.

Mrs. Littlewood.

So I heard.

Vicar.

I was told you were not at home. As I walked away it was impossible for me not to see that you were in your garden.

Mrs. Littlewood.

It’s inadequately protected from the road.

Vicar.

I was rather hurt. I’m not aware that there’s been anything in my behaviour since I came here to justify you in treating me with discourtesy. Our relations have always been more than cordial.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I didn’t wish to see you.

Vicar.

So much as that I had the intelligence to infer. But I felt it my duty not to allow pique to interfere with the due discharge of my office. I had various things to say to you which I thought you should hear, so yesterday I called again, and again was told you were out.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Coolly.] I didn’t wish to see you.

Vicar.

May I ask why?

Mrs. Littlewood.

Well, I suppose you wanted to talk about my boy. I didn’t think your conversation could give him back to me.

Vicar.

Don’t you think I could have helped you to bear your loss? I think I could have found in my heart words to persuade you to resignation. I might at least have offered you my sympathy.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I’m sorry to seem ungracious, but I don’t want your sympathy.

Vicar.

Your attitude amazes me.

Mrs. Poole.

If we didn’t all know how devoted you were to your sons, one might really think you were indifferent to their loss.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Reflectively.] No, I’m not exactly indifferent.

Vicar.

Since you won’t see me alone, I must say things to you here and now which I should rather have kept for your private ear. I have a right to remonstrate with you because your behaviour is a scandal to my parish.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[With a smile.] Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought it was my welfare you were concerned with. If it’s that of the parish, pray say anything you like.

Vicar.

[Flushing, but not to be put off.] I think it was horrible to go to a music-hall on the very day you had returned from your son’s grave in France. But that was in London, and you outraged nobody but yourself. What you do here is different. This is a very small place, and it’s shameful that you should give parties and go about from house to house playing cards.

Mrs. Poole.

It seems so heartless not to wear mourning.

John.

[Rather flippantly, to prevent the conversation from growing too awkward.] Why? I certainly should hate anyone to wear mourning for me.

Vicar.

You give all and sundry the impression that you’re perfectly callous. What influence do you think such a thing may have on these young fellows in the village who have to risk their lives with all the other brave lads at the front? You take from them the comfort that we at home love them and if they fall will hold their memories gratefully in our hearts for ever.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I shouldn’t have thought the eccentricity of one old woman could matter very much to anyone.

[She pauses and looks out into the open for a moment, and then makes up her mind to speak. She speaks quite quietly, almost to herself.

When they sent for me and I went over to France I wasn’t very anxious, because I knew that God, who had taken my eldest son, would leave my second. You see, he was the only one I had left. And when I got there and found he was dead — I suddenly felt that it didn’t matter.

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, what do you mean? How can you say such a thing?

John.

Don’t, mother. Let her go on.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I didn’t feel that anything very much mattered. It’s difficult to explain exactly what I mean. I feel that I have nothing more to do with the world and the world has nothing more to do with me. So far as I’m concerned it’s a failure. You know I wasn’t very happy in my married life, but I loved my two sons, and they made everything worth while, and now they’re gone. Let others take up the — the adventure. I step aside.

Mrs. Wharton.

You’ve suffered too much, my dear.

Mrs. Littlewood.

No, the strange thing is that I haven’t suffered very much. Don’t you know how sometimes one has a horrid dream and knows one’s only dreaming all the time? [To the Vicar, with the same good temper, almost amused.] You’re surprised that I should go to the theatre. Why? To me, it’s no more unreal a spectacle than life. Life does seem to me just like a play now. I can’t take it very seriously. I feel strangely detached. I have no ill-feeling for my fellow-creatures, but you don’t seem very real to me or very important. Why shouldn’t I play bridge with you?

Vicar.

Oh, but, my dear, my dear, there’s one reality that you can never escape from. There’s God.

[A flash passes behind the old woman’s eyes. She rises and puts out her hand as though to ward off a blow.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I don’t think we’ll talk about God if you please. I prefer to play piquet.

[She sits down at the table at which the Colonel has already taken his seat.

Colonel Wharton.

Do you play four hands or six to the game?

Mrs. Littlewood.

Four — and double the first and last. It makes it more exciting.

Colonel Wharton.

Shall we cut for deal?

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Cutting.] You’re not likely to beat that.

Colonel Wharton.

I suppose in the Vicar’s presence we daren’t play for money?

Mrs. Littlewood.

We’ll pretend he’s not there. Will a shilling a hundred suit you?

Colonel Wharton.

I don’t think that’ll break either of us.

[Kate enters, followed by Dr. Macfarlane.

Kate.

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Exit.

Dr. Macfarlane.

How d’you do?

Mrs. Wharton.

[Shaking hands with him.] So nice of you to come in.

Dr. Macfarlane.

How is the Colonel to-day?

Colonel Wharton.

Playing piquet.

John.

You’re coming to-morrow, aren’t you, Doctor?

Dr. Macfarlane.

Of course I am. I brought you both into the world. I have almost a personal interest in seeing you made one flesh.

Vicar.

[Jovially.] It’s many a long day since you’ve been inside a church, Doctor.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Since you clerical gentlemen left off threatening me with eternal flames I feel justified in following my own inclinations in the matter.

Vicar.

[Chaffing him.] But we still believe in annihilation.

Dr. Macfarlane.

I’m willing to take my chance of that. It has no terrors for a man who’s not had a holiday for twenty years.

Vicar.

You’re not an irreligious man. I don’t know why you don’t come to church.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Shall I tell you? Because after repeated experiment I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m not a whit the better for it.

John.

You’ll have to give him up, Vicar. He’s a stubborn old thing. He takes advantage of the fact that he’s the only doctor within ten miles who won’t kill you so long as he can make seven and sixpence a visit by keeping you alive.

Colonel Wharton.

Do you mean to say that our Church doesn’t believe any longer in eternal punishment?

John.

Oh, father, hell has always left me perfectly cold. You and I are quite safe. You see, mother would never be happy in heaven without us, and God couldn’t refuse her anything she asked.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Affectionately.] John, what nonsense you talk.

Mrs. Poole.

I sometimes think the modern Church has been very rash in surrendering a belief which has the authority of Our Lord himself. How many sinners have been brought to repentance by the fear of everlasting punishment!

John.

That rather suggests calling down fire from heaven to light a cigar.

Mrs. Poole.

That may be funny, but I don’t see the point of it.

John.

[Good-humouredly.] Well, I should have thought it hardly required anything so tremendous as eternity to deal with human wickedness. I suppose sin is due to a man’s character, which he can’t help, or to his ignorance, for which he isn’t to blame.

Vicar.

In fact, to your mind sin is all moonshine.

John.

I think it a pity that Christianity has laid so much stress on it. We assert in church that we’re miserable sinners, but I don’t think we mean it, and what’s more I don’t think we are.

Mrs. Poole.

We are conceived in sin, and sin is part of our inheritance. Why did Christ die if not to atone for the sin of men?

John.

In war one gets to know very intimately all sorts of queer people. I don’t suppose I shall ever know any men so well as I knew the men in my company. They were honest and brave and cheerful, unselfish, good fellows; perhaps they swore a good deal, and they got drunk if they had the chance, and they had the glad eye for a pretty girl. But do you think they were sinners for that? I don’t.

Vicar.

Look in your own heart and say if you are not conscious of grievous, terrible sin.

John.

Frankly, I’m not.

Vicar.

Do you mean to say that you have nothing to reproach yourself with?

John.

I’ve done a certain number of things which I think were rather foolish, but I can’t think of anything that I’m particularly ashamed of.

Vicar.

Do you mean to tell me that you’ve always been perfectly chaste?

John.

I’m normal and healthy. I’ve been no more chaste than any other man of my age.

Vicar.

And isn’t that sin?

John.

I don’t think so. I think it’s human nature.

Vicar.

We’re arguing at cross-purposes. If when you say “white” you mean what the rest of the world calls “black,” all words are futile.

John.

[With a smile.] The singular thing is that if I’d answered your question with a “yes,” you would probably have thought me a liar or a fool.

Vicar.

This terrible condition of humanity, which seems to cry out against the very idea either of man’s dignity, or of God’s justice, has but one explanation, and that is sin.

John.

You’re referring to the war? It needs some explaining, doesn’t it?

Vicar.

Every Christian must have asked himself why God allows the infamous horror of war. I’m told the padres are constantly being asked by the brave lads at the Front why the Almighty allows it to continue. I can’t blame anyone for being puzzled. I’ve wrestled with the question long and anxiously.... I can’t believe that God would leave His children to suffer without a clue to His intention.

Mrs. Poole.

The ways of God are inscrutable. How can we tell what are the aims of the eternal? We only know that they are good.

John.

Meanwhile men are being killed like flies, their wives and mothers are left desolate, and their children fatherless.

Vicar.

You mustn’t forget exactly what is meant by “Almighty.” It means not so much able to do all things as powerful over all things.

John.

Ah, the padre of my regiment told me that. I may be very stupid, but I think the distinction rather fine. For the plain man the difficulty remains. Either God can’t stop the war even if He wants to, or He can stop it and won’t.

Mrs. Poole.

In my opinion there can be no hesitation. It is written: “Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father.”

Vicar.

Remember that we have free will and God makes use of our free will to punish us and to teach us and to make us more worthy of His grace and mercy. Man, born in sin, justly brought this long-drawn disaster on himself as surely as Adam brought on himself the divine punishment which we all inherit.

John.

If I saw two small boys fighting I’d separate them, even though one was a lazy little beggar and the other had stolen Farmer Giles’ apples. I wouldn’t sit by and let them seriously hurt one another so that they should be better boys in future.

Mrs. Poole.

But you speak as though all this suffering must be useless. We all know how suffering can purify and elevate. I’ve seen it myself over and over again.

Dr. Macfarlane.

People say that. They’re generally thinking of elderly ladies in comfortable circumstances who with the aid of a very good doctor show a becoming resignation in a chronic disease.

John.

I should like some of those people who talk about the purifying influence of suffering to have a mouthful of gas and see how they liked it.

Vicar.

The war is terrible. Its cruelty is terrible. The suffering it has caused is terrible. There is only one explanation for it; and that is the loving kindness and the infinite mercy of our heavenly Father.

John.

Can you bring yourself to believe that?

Vicar.

We were given over to drunkenness and lust, to selfishness and flippancy and pride. It needed this tremendous trial to purify us. It will be a nobler England that comes out of the furnace. Oh, I pray to God that all this blood may wash our souls clean so that we may once more be found worthy in His sight.

Mrs. Poole.

Amen.

John.

You must evidently know much more about it than I do. When the men in my company did things I thought were wrong I used to jolly them a bit. I fancy I got better results than if I’d bashed them on the head with a sledge-hammer.

Vicar.

Sin began with the beginning of the human story and has continued through all its course. The motive of the divine redemption lies in the fact that men, though created for so lofty a purpose, have plunged so deep into sin and have so deeply defaced in themselves the image of God, that only the self-sacrificing act of God in redeeming them can raise them from ruin.

John.

I wish you’d been a company-commander and had seen how gaily a man can give his life for his friend.

Vicar.

But I know, my dear boy, I know. And do you think God will be unmindful of their sacrifice? I pray and believe that they will find mercy in His sight. I am sure He is more ready to pardon than to punish. After all, our Lord came to call sinners to repentance, and who should know better than the Ministers of God that to err is human, to forgive, divine?

[The piquet players have played their game with a certain distraction, and during the last few speeches have made no more pretence of playing at all. Mrs. Littlewood has listened attentively. Now she puts down her cards, gets up, and walks up to the Vicar.

Mrs. Littlewood.

And who is going to forgive God?

Mrs. Wharton.

[With horror.] Charlotte!

Vicar.

[With grave disapproval.] Don’t you think that is rather blasphemous?

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Quietly and deliberately at first, but with ever-increasing excitement.] Ever since I was a child I’ve served God with all my might, and with all my heart, and with all my soul. I’ve tried always to lead my life in accordance with His will. I never forgot that I was as nothing in His sight. I’ve been weak and sinful, but I’ve tried to do my duty.

Mrs. Wharton.

Yes, dear, you’ve been an example to us all.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Taking no notice.] Honestly, I’ve done everything I could that I thought was pleasing in His sight. I’ve praised Him and magnified His name. You’ve heard that my husband deserted me when I’d borne him two children, and I was left alone. I brought them up to be honest, upright and God-fearing men. When God took my eldest son I wept, but I turned to the Lord and said: “Thy will be done.” He was a soldier, and he took his chance, and he died in a good cause.

Vicar.

A great and a good cause.

Mrs. Littlewood.

But why did God take my second? He was the only one I had left, the only comfort of my old age, my only joy, the only thing I had to prevent me from seeing that my life had been wasted and it would have been better if I had never been born. I haven’t deserved that. When a horse has served me long and faithfully till he’s too old to work I have the right to send him to the knacker’s yard, but I don’t, I put him out to grass. I wouldn’t treat a dog as my Father has treated me. I’ve been cheated. You say that God will forgive us our sins, but who is going to forgive God? Not I. Never. Never!

[In a height of frenzy she rushes out into the garden. There is silence in the room.

Mrs. Wharton.

Don’t be angry with her, Vicar. She’s beside herself with grief.

Vicar.

She’ll come back. She’s like a petulant child that has been thwarted for its good. It cries and stamps, but in a little while it throws itself into its mother’s arms, and begs, all tears, for forgiveness.

Mrs. Poole.

[With a little sigh of relief.] I knew you’d take it like that, Norman. You’re so tolerant and broad-minded.

Vicar.

I think I see my way to help her, poor soul.

John.

I wonder how. Your only explanation of evil is sin. I daresay you can get people to acknowledge that they’ve deserved their own suffering. But you’ll never prevent them from being revolted at the suffering of others. Why is evil permitted in the world by an all-good God?

Vicar.

I can hardly hope that any answer of mine will satisfy you. By God’s grace I am a Christian. You are an atheist.

[There is a moment’s embarrassment. John realises that his mother or Sylvia has repeated what he has said.

John.

That suggests a very dogmatic attitude. I don’t see how anyone can positively assert that there is no God. It would be as reasonable as to assert that there’s nothing on the other side of a wall that you can’t look over.

Vicar.

Do you believe in God?

John.

I don’t think it’s quite your business to ask me. [With a smile.] Wasn’t it St. Paul who said: “Be not zealous overmuch.”

Vicar.

You can’t be unaware that by certain statements of yours the other day you gave the greatest pain to those nearest and dearest to you.

Sylvia.

What you said made me very unhappy, John. I didn’t know what to do. I went to the Vicar and asked his advice.

John.

Don’t you think that a man’s belief is his own affair? I don’t want to interfere with other people’s. Why can’t they leave me quietly to mine?

Sylvia.

It can’t be entirely your affair, John. You and I propose to be married to-morrow. It’s only reasonable that I should know exactly how you stand in a matter that concerns me so closely.

John.

I hadn’t thought of that. I daresay there’s something in what you say. I’m willing to do my best to explain to you and to father and mother. But I really think we needn’t drag strangers in.

Mrs. Wharton.

I think it would be much better if you would talk with the Vicar, John. We don’t pretend to be very clever, and it wouldn’t mean much if you asked us questions that we couldn’t answer.

Vicar.

When you’re ill you send for a doctor, he prescribes for you, and you get well.

John.

[With a smile.] What do you think of that, doctor?

Dr. Macfarlane.

It is an idea that we do our little best to spread about the world.

Vicar.

Anyhow, you take a doctor’s advice and you don’t argue with him. Why? Because he’s an expert, and you presume that he knows his business. Why should the science of the immortal soul be a less complicated affair than the science of the perishable body?

Mrs. Wharton.

Look upon us as very silly, old-fashioned people, and be kind to us. If various doubts are troubling you, put them frankly before the Vicar. Perhaps he can help you.

Vicar.

[Sincerely.] Believe me, I’ll do everything in my power.

Mrs. Wharton.

And if he can convince you that you were wrong, I know you too well to dream that pride would stop you from confessing it. It would give us such heartfelt joy, my dear, if you could believe again as you did when you were a little child and used to say your prayers kneeling on my lap.

Vicar.

I really think I can help you. Won’t you forget that I’m a stranger and let me try?

Dr. Macfarlane.

Perhaps you’d like me to leave you. I was only waiting till the Colonel had finished his game so that I might take him upstairs and have a look at him. But I can come back later.

John.

I don’t mind your staying at all. [To the Vicar.] What is it you wish to ask me?

Vicar.

Do you believe in the God in whose name you were baptised into the Church?

John.

No!

Vicar.

That at all events is frank and honest. But aren’t you a little out of date? One of the most gratifying occurrences of recent years has been the revival of belief among thoughtful men.

John.

I should have thought it was a revival of rhetoric rather than of religion. I’m not enormously impressed by the cultured journalist who uses God to balance a sentence or adorn a phrase.

Vicar.

But it hasn’t only been among educated men. Not the least remarkable thing about the war has been the return of our brave lads at the Front to the faith which so many of us thought they had forgotten. What is your explanation of that?

John.

Fear with the most part. Perplexity with the rest.

Vicar.

Don’t you think it very rash to reject a belief that all the ablest men in the world have held since the dawn of history?

John.

When you’re dealing with a belief, neither the number nor the ability of those who hold it makes it a certainty. Only proof can do that.

Mrs. Poole.

Are you quite sure that at the bottom of your heart it’s not conceit that makes you think differently from the rest of us?

Vicar.

No, my dear, let us not ascribe unworthy motives to our antagonist.

John.

[Smiling.] At all events, not yet.

Vicar.

What makes you think that the existence of God can’t be proved?

John.

I suppose at this time of day people wouldn’t still be proving it if proof were possible.

Vicar.

My dear fellow, the fact that there is no people on the face of the earth, however barbarous and degraded, without some belief in God, is the most conclusive proof you can want.

John.

What of? It’s conclusive proof that the desire for His existence is universal. It’s not proof that the desire is fulfilled.

Vicar.

I see you have the usual Rationalistic arguments at your fingers’ ends. Believe me, they’re old friends, and if I’ve answered them once I’ve answered them a thousand times.

John.

And have you ever convinced anyone who wasn’t convinced before?

Vicar.

I can’t make the blind to see, you know.

John.

I wonder that hasn’t suggested to you a very obvious conclusion.

Vicar.

What?

John.

Why, that arguments are futile. Think for a minute. You don’t believe in God for any of the reasons that are given for His existence. You believe in Him because with all your heart you feel that He exists. No argument can ever touch that feeling. The heart is independent of logic and its rules.

Vicar.

I daresay there’s something in what you say.

John.

Well, it’s the same with me. If you ask me why I don’t believe in the existence of God I suppose I can give you a certain number of reasons, but the real one, the one that gives all the others their force, is that I feel it in my heart.

Vicar.

What is the cause of your feeling?

John.

I’m sure you’ll think it very insufficient. I had a friend and he was killed.

Vicar.

I’m afraid one must be prepared to lose one’s friends in a war like this.

John.

I daresay it’s very silly and sentimental of me. One gets used to one’s pals dying. Someone says to you: “So-and-So’s knocked out.” And you answer: “Is he really? Poor chap.” And you don’t think very much more about it. Robbie Harrison wasn’t quite an ordinary man.

Mrs. Wharton.

I was afraid you’d feel his death very much. You never mentioned it in your letters. I felt it was because you couldn’t bear to speak of it.

John.

He was one of those lucky beggars who do everything a little better than anybody else. He was clever and awfully nice-looking and amusing. I never knew anyone who loved life so much as he did.

Mrs. Wharton.

Yes, I remember his saying to me once: “Isn’t it ripping to be alive?”

John.

But there was something more in him than that. He had one quality which was rather out of the ordinary. It’s difficult to explain what it was like. It seemed to shine about him like a mellow light. It was like the jolly feeling of the country in May. And do you know what it was? Goodness. Just goodness. He was the sort of man that I should like to be.

Mrs. Wharton.

He was a dear.

John.

I was awfully excited when war was declared. I was in India at the time. I moved heaven and earth to get out to the Front. I thought war the noblest sport in the world. I found it a dreary, muddy, dirty, stinking, bloody business. And I suppose Robbie’s death was the last straw. It seemed so unjust. I don’t know that it was grief so much that I felt as indignation. I was revolted by all the horror and pain and suffering.

Mrs. Poole.

You must have seen some dreadful things.

John.

Perhaps it’s Christianity that has shown us the possibility of a higher morality than Christianity teaches. I daresay I’m quite wrong. I can only tell you that all that’s moral in my soul revolts at the thought of a God who can permit the monstrous iniquity of war. I can’t believe that there is a God in heaven.

Vicar.

But do you realise that if there isn’t, the world is meaningless?

John.

That may be. But if there is it’s infamous.

Vicar.

What have you got to put in the place of religion? What answer can you give to the riddle of the universe?

John.

I may think your answer wrong and yet have no better one to put in its place.

Vicar.

Have you nothing to tell us at all when we ask you why man is here and what is his destiny? You are like a rudderless ship in a stormy sea.

John.

I suppose the human race has arisen under the influence of conditions which are part of the earth’s history, and under the influence of other conditions it will come to an end. I don’t see that there is any more meaning in life than in the statement that two and two are four.

Sylvia.

[With suppressed passion.] Then you think that all our efforts and struggles, our pain and sorrow, our aims, are senseless?

John.

Do you remember our going to the Russian ballet before the war? I’ve never forgotten a certain gesture of one of the dancers. It was an attitude she held for an instant, in the air; it was the most lovely thing I ever saw in my life; you felt it could only have been achieved by infinite labour, and the fact that it was so fleeting, like the shadow of a bird flying over a river, made it all the more wonderful. I’ve often thought of it since, and it has seemed to me a very good symbol of life.

Sylvia.

John, you can’t be serious.

John.

I’ll tell you what I mean. Life seems to me like a huge jig-saw puzzle that doesn’t make any picture, but if we like we can make little patterns, as it were, out of the pieces.

Sylvia.

What is the use of that?

John.

There’s no use, and no need. It’s merely something we can do for our own satisfaction. Pain and sorrow are some of the pieces that we have to deal with. By making the most of all our faculties, by using all our opportunities, out of the manifold events of life, our deeds, our feelings, our thoughts, we can make a design which is intricate, dignified, and beautiful. And death at one stroke completes and destroys it.

[There is a moment’s silence.

Mrs. Poole.

I wonder why you’re coming to church to-morrow to be married?

John.

[With a smile.] I think Sylvia would be outraged at the thought of being married in a registry office.

Mrs. Poole.

It’s lucky for you the Vicar is broad-minded. A stricter man might think it his duty to refuse the blessing of the Church to an unbeliever.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Anxiously.] Vicar, you’re not thinking of doing anything like that?

Vicar.

I confess the question has crossed my mind. [Kindly.] I don’t think I can bring myself to expose such good Christians as you and Sylvia to such a humiliation.

Sylvia.

You need not harass yourself, Vicar. I’ve decided not to marry John.

John.

[Aghast.] Sylvia! Sylvia, you can’t mean that!

Sylvia.

I was dreadfully troubled the other day when you told us you’d lost your faith, but I hadn’t the courage to say anything then. It came as such an awful shock.

John.

But you never made the least sign.

Sylvia.

I hadn’t time to think it out, but I’ve been thinking hard ever since, day and night, and I’ve listened very carefully to what you’ve said to-day. I can’t keep up the pretence any more. I’ve quite made up my mind. I won’t marry you.

John.

But in God’s name, why?

Sylvia.

You are not the John I loved and promised myself to. It’s a different man that has come back from abroad. I have nothing in common with that man.

John.

Sylvia, you don’t mean to say that you don’t care for me any more because on certain matters I don’t hold the same views as you?

Sylvia.

But those matters are the most important in the world. You talk as though it were a difference of opinion over the colour of our drawing-room curtains. You don’t even understand me any more.

John.

How can I understand something that seems absolutely unreasonable to me?

Sylvia.

Do you think religion is something I take up with my Prayer-book when I go to church, and put away on a shelf when I get home again? John, God is a living presence that is always with me. I never at any moment lose the consciousness of that divine love which with infinite mercy tends and protects me.

John.

But, dear heart, you know me well enough. You know I would never hinder you in the exercise of your religion. I would always treat it with the utmost respect.

Sylvia.

How could we possibly be happy when all that to me is the reason and the beauty of life, to you is nothing but a lie?

John.

With tolerance on both sides, and, I hope, respect, there’s no reason why two people shouldn’t live peaceably together no matter how different their views are.

Sylvia.

How can I be tolerant when I see you deep in error? Oh, it’s more than error, it’s sin. You’ve had your choice between light and darkness, and you’ve deliberately chosen darkness. You are a deserter. If words mean anything at all you are condemned.

John.

But, my dear, a man believes what he can. You don’t seriously think that a merciful God is going to punish him because he’s unable to believe something that he finds incredible?

Sylvia.

No one doubts that Our Lord will have mercy on those who have never had the chance of receiving His teaching. You’ve had the chance, and you’ve refused to take it. Do you forget the Parable of the Ten Talents? It is a terrible warning.

John.

After all, if I’m wrong I hurt nobody but myself.

Sylvia.

You forget what marriage is. It makes us one flesh. I am bidden to cleave to you and to follow you. How can I, when our souls must ever be separated by an unsurpassable abyss?

Mrs. Wharton.

Sylvia, this is a dreadfully grave decision you’re making. Be careful that you’re acting rightly.

John.

Sylvia, you can’t throw me over like this after we’ve been engaged for seven years. It’s too heartless.

Sylvia.

I don’t trust you. I have no hold over you. What have you to aim at beside the satisfaction of your own vulgar appetite? Sin means nothing to you.

John.

My dear, you don’t suppose it’s religion that makes a man decent? If he’s kind and honest and truthful it’s because it’s his nature, not because he believes in God or fears hell.

Sylvia.

We’re neither of us very young any more, there’s no reason why we should make a mystery of natural things. If we married my greatest hope was that we should have children.

John.

It was mine too.

Sylvia.

Have you asked yourself how this would affect them? Which are they to be, Christians or Agnostics?

John.

My dear, I promise you I will not interfere with your teaching of them.

Sylvia.

Do you mean to say you will stand by while they are taught a pack of worthless lies?

John.

Your faith has been the faith of our people for hundreds of years. In the case of a difference of opinion I could not take it on myself to refuse children instruction in it. When they reach years of discretion they can judge for themselves.

Sylvia.

And supposing they ask you about things? The story of Our Saviour appeals to children, you know. It’s very natural that they should put you questions. What will you answer?

John.

I don’t think you could ask me to say what I thought untrue.

Mrs. Wharton.

He could always refer them to you, Sylvia dear.

Sylvia.

You naturally wouldn’t come to church. What sort of an example would you set your children in a matter of which I was impressing on them the enormous importance?

John.

[With a smile.] My dear, surely you’re letting a lack of humour cloud a lively intelligence. Vast numbers of excellent churchmen don’t go to church, and I’m not aware that their children are corrupted by it.

Sylvia.

[Passionately.] You don’t understand. You’ll never understand. It’s a joke to you. It’s all over and done with, John. Let me go. I beseech you to let me go.

Colonel Wharton.

[Half rising from his chair.] I feel most awfully ill.

Mrs. Wharton.

[In alarm.] George!

John.

[Simultaneously.] Father!

[Mrs. Wharton, John, and the Doctor hurry towards him.

Dr. Macfarlane.

What’s the matter?

Mrs. Wharton.

George, are you in pain?

Colonel Wharton.

Awful!

Dr. Macfarlane.

You’d better lie down on the sofa.

Colonel Wharton.

No, I’d rather go upstairs.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Don’t crowd round him.

Colonel Wharton.

I feel as if I were going to die.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Do you think you can manage to walk?

Colonel Wharton.

Yes. Help me, Evelyn.

John.

Put your arm round my neck, father.

Colonel Wharton.

No, it’s all right. I can manage.

Dr. Macfarlane.

We’ll get you upstairs and put you to bed.

Mrs. Wharton.

Come, darling, put all your weight on me.

Dr. Macfarlane.

That’s right. You needn’t come, John. You’ll only be in the way.

[Mrs. Wharton and the Doctor help the Colonel out of the room.

Mrs. Poole.

We’d better go, Norman. [To John.] I hope it’s nothing very serious.

John.

I’m sure I hope not.

Mrs. Poole.

Please don’t bear us a grudge for any of the things Norman or I have said to you to-day. You know, I saw the letter your Colonel wrote to Mrs. Wharton when you were wounded, and I know how splendid you’ve been.

John.

Oh, nonsense!

Vicar.

I’m afraid you may have to go through a good deal of distress in the near future. If you should change your mind in some of the things that we’ve talked about this afternoon no one would be more happy than myself.

John.

It’s very good of you to say so, but I don’t think it likely.

Vicar.

One never knows by what paths the Most High will call His creatures to Himself. He is more cunning to save His children than they are to lose themselves. If you listen to the call, come to the Communion Table. I will ask no questions. It will be a joyful day for me if I am privileged to offer you the Blessed Sacrament of Our Lord and Saviour.

[He stretches out his hand and John takes it.

John.

Good-bye.

[The Vicar and Mrs. Poole go into the garden. John turns to Sylvia.

John.

Is it the question that the Vicar put me when we were talking about sin that has upset you, Sylvia?

Sylvia.

No, I don’t think it was very nice of him to put it. I never thought about the matter. I don’t see why I should expect you to be better than other men.

John.

Did you really mean all you said just now?

Sylvia.

Every word.

[She takes off her engagement ring and hands it to him. He does not take it.

John.

[With deep emotion.] Sylvia, I couldn’t say it before all those people, it seemed too intimate and private a matter. Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I love you? It’s been so much to me in all I’ve gone through to think of you. You’ve been everything in the world to me. When I was cold and wet and hungry and miserable, I’ve thought of you, and it all grew bearable.

Sylvia.

I’m very sorry. I can’t marry you.

John.

How can you be so cold and heartless? Sylvia, my dear, I love you! Won’t you give it a chance?

[She looks at him steadily for a moment. She braces herself for the final effort.

Sylvia.

But I don’t love you any more, John.

[She hands him the ring again and he takes it silently.

John.

It’s not a very swagger one, is it? I was none too flush in those days and I didn’t want to ask father to help me. I wanted to buy it out of my own money.

Sylvia.

I’ve worn it for seven years, John.

[He turns away from Sylvia and walks over to the fire-place. When Sylvia sees what he is going to do she makes a gesture as though to prevent him, but immediately controls herself. He stands looking at the fire for a moment, then throws the ring in; he watches what will happen to it. Sylvia clutches her heart. She can hardly prevent the sobs which seem to tear her breast.

Sylvia.

I think I’ll be getting home. John — if your father or mother want me you can send, can’t you?

John.

[Looking over his shoulder.] Of course. I’ll let you know at once.

Sylvia.

[In a natural voice.] Good-bye, John.

John.

Good-bye, Sylvia.

[He turns back to look at the fire, and she walks slowly out of the room.

THE END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Acts. It is early morning on the following Wednesday. The dead ashes of yesterday’s fire are still in the grate. Not far away is heard the ringing of a church bell to call the faithful to the first service.

Mrs. Wharton is standing by a table on which is a large basket of white flowers which she had just brought in from the garden. She picks up a rose, and with a faint smile gives it a little caress. Sylvia comes in from the garden.

Sylvia.

[With surprise.] Mrs. Wharton!

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, Sylvia, is it you?

Sylvia.

It startled me to see you there. I came in this way because I saw the door was open and your front door bell’s so noisy. I thought if the Colonel was asleep it might wake him.

Mrs. Wharton.

It’s early, isn’t it?

Sylvia.

Yes, I’m on my way to the early service. I thought I’d look in just to ask how the Colonel was. But I didn’t expect to see you. I thought Kate or Hannah might be about.

Mrs. Wharton.

George is dead, Sylvia.

Sylvia.

[In amazement.] Mrs. Wharton!

Mrs. Wharton.

He died quite peacefully about an hour ago. I’ve just been to gather some flowers to put in his room.

Sylvia.

Oh, Mrs. Wharton, I’m so sorry. I’m so dreadfully sorry for you.

Mrs. Wharton.

[Patting her hand.] Thank you, my dear; you’ve been very kind to us during these days.

Sylvia.

Where is John?

Mrs. Wharton.

I think he must have gone out for a walk. I went to his room a little while ago and he wasn’t there. He wanted to sit up with me last night, but I wouldn’t let him.

Sylvia.

But ... but doesn’t John know his father is dead?

Mrs. Wharton.

No, not yet.

Sylvia.

Didn’t you call him?

Mrs. Wharton.

I had no idea the end was so near. George wanted to be alone with me, Sylvia. We’d been married for thirty-five years, you see. He was conscious almost to the last. He died quite suddenly, like a child going to sleep.

Sylvia.

It’s such a terrible loss. You poor dear, you must be quite heart-broken.

Mrs. Wharton.

It’s a very great loss, but I’m not heart-broken. George is happy and at rest. We should be very poor Christians if the death of those we love made us unhappy. George has entered into eternal life.

Sylvia.

Oh, Mrs. Wharton, what a blessed thing it is to have a faith like yours.

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, a very wonderful thing happened last night. I can’t feel grief for dear George’s death because of the recollection of that. I feel so strange. I feel as though I were walking in an enchanted garden.

Sylvia.

I don’t know what you mean.

Mrs. Wharton.

Since that day when George refused to talk with the Vicar I never dared mention the subject. He was not himself. It made me so unhappy. And then last night, soon after Dr. Macfarlane went away, he asked of his own accord for Mr. Poole. The Vicar’s a dear, kind man. He’d said to me that if ever George asked for him he’d come at once, at any hour of the day or night. So I sent for him. He gave George the Holy Sacrament. And Sylvia, a miracle happened.

Sylvia.

A miracle?

Mrs. Wharton.

No sooner had the bread and the wine touched his lips than he was transfigured. All his — his anxiety left him, and he was once more his dear, good, brave self. He was quite happy to die. It was as though an unseen hand had pulled back a dark curtain of clouds and he saw before him, not night and a black coldness, but a path of golden sunshine that led straight to the arms of God.

Sylvia.

I’m so glad. I’m happy too now.

Mrs. Wharton.

The Vicar read the prayers for the dying and then he left us. We talked of the past and of our reunion in a little while. And then he died.

Sylvia.

It’s wonderful. Yes, it was a miracle.

Mrs. Wharton.

All through my life I’ve been conscious of the hand of God shaping the destinies of man. I’ve never seen His loving mercy more plainly manifest.

[Kate opens the door and stands on the threshold, but does not come into the room.

Kate.

The woman’s come, ma’am.

Mrs. Wharton.

Very well. I’m just coming.

[Kate goes out and shuts the door behind her. Mrs. Wharton takes up her basket of flowers.

Mrs. Wharton.

John will be in immediately, Sylvia. He promised to come and relieve me at half-past eight, so that I might get something to eat. Will you see him?

Sylvia.

Yes, Mrs. Wharton, if you wish me to.

Mrs. Wharton.

Will you tell him that his father is dead? I know you’ll do it very gently.

Sylvia.

Oh, Mrs. Wharton, wouldn’t you prefer to tell him yourself?

Mrs. Wharton.

No.

Sylvia.

Very well.

Mrs. Wharton.

You know he loves you, Sylvia. It would make me so happy if you two could arrive at some understanding. It seems such a pity that the happiness of both of you should be ruined.

Sylvia.

I would do anything in the world for John, but I can’t sacrifice what is and must be dearer to me even than he.

Mrs. Wharton.

Can’t you teach him to believe?

Sylvia.

Oh, I wish I could. I pray for him night and day.

Mrs. Wharton.

I wished afterwards that I’d asked him to be present when his father and I received the Communion. I think at that last solemn moment he might have been moved to receive it with us.

Sylvia.

D’you think.... Perhaps a miracle would have taken place in him, too. Perhaps he would have believed.

Mrs. Wharton.

I must go upstairs.

[An idea seizes Sylvia, and she gives a strange little gasp. As Mrs. Wharton is about to leave the room she stops her with a sudden question.

Sylvia.

Mrs. Wharton ... Mrs. Wharton, do you think the end can ever justify the means?

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, what an extraordinary question! It can never be right to do evil that good may come.

Sylvia.

Are you quite sure that that’s so always? After all, no one would hesitate to tell a lie to save another’s life.

Mrs. Wharton.

Perhaps not. [With a faint smile.] We must thank God that we’re not likely to be put in such a position. Why did you ask me that?

Sylvia.

I was wondering what one should do if one could only rescue somebody from terrible danger by committing a great sin. Do you think one ought to do it or not?

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, you haven’t the right to offend God for the sake of anyone in the world.

Sylvia.

Not even for the sake of anyone you loved?

Mrs. Wharton.

Surely not, my dear. And no one who loved you would wish you for a moment to do a wicked thing for his sake.

Sylvia.

But take your own case, Mrs. Wharton; if you saw the Colonel or John in deadly peril wouldn’t you risk your life to save them?

Mrs. Wharton.

[With a smile.] Of course I should. I should be happy and thankful to have the opportunity. But that’s not the same. I should only be risking my life, not my soul.

Sylvia.

[Almost beside herself.] But if their souls were in peril, wouldn’t you risk your soul?

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, what do you mean? You seem so excited.

Sylvia.

[Controlling herself with a great effort.] I? You mustn’t pay any attention to me. I haven’t been sleeping very well the last three or four nights. I daresay I’m a little hysterical.

Mrs. Wharton.

Wouldn’t you prefer to go home, darling?

Sylvia.

No, I’d like to stay here if you don’t mind. I’d like to see John.

Mrs. Wharton.

Very well. I shan’t be very long.

[She goes out. The church bell gives a hurried tinkle and then stops. Sylvia walks up and down the room and stands still in front of a photograph of John in his uniform. She takes it up and looks at it. Then putting it down she clasps her hands and raises her eyes. She is seen to be praying. She hears a sound in the garden, inclines her head to listen, and goes to the window. She hesitates a moment and then braces herself to a decision. She calls.

Sylvia.

John!

[He comes, stops for a moment on the threshold, and then walks forward casually.

John.

Good morning! You’re very early.

Sylvia.

I looked in to ask how your father was.

John.

When I left him last night he was fairly comfortable. I’ll go and find out from mother how he is.

Sylvia.

No, don’t — don’t disturb him.

John.

I’m going to take mother’s place in a few minutes. I awoke early, so I went for a walk.... You’ve been very good and kind to all of us during these wretched days, Sylvia. I don’t know what we should have done without you.

Sylvia.

I’ve been so dreadfully sorry. And you all had so much to bear. It wasn’t only the thought that the poor dear couldn’t — can’t recover, but ... it was so much worse than that.

John.

[With a quick glance at her.] I suppose it was inevitable that you should see it too. Somehow I hoped that only I and mother knew.

Sylvia.

Oh, John, you can’t mind about me. I’ve loved your father as though he were my own. Nothing he did could make me love him less.

John.

He’s afraid to die. It’s dreadful to see his terror and to be able to do nothing to help him.

Sylvia.

Would you do anything to help him if you could?

John.

Of course.

Sylvia.

It’s unfortunate that you found it necessary to say what you did about religion. He’s always been a very simple man. He always accepted without question the faith in which he was brought up. Perhaps he’s not quite so sure now.

John.

Nonsense, Sylvia. Father’s faith is very much too steady for it to be unsettled by any opinions of mine.

Sylvia.

Ordinarily, I dare say. But he’s ill, he’s in terrible pain, he’s not himself. I think perhaps it’s a pity you didn’t hold your tongue. It’s so easy to create doubts and so hard to allay them.

John.

[Much disturbed.] That’s an awful thought to have put into my head, Sylvia. I should never forgive myself if....

Sylvia.

If you’d believed as we believe, he would have been supported, as it were, by all our faith. It would have made that terrible passage from this life to the life to come a little less terrible. You’ve failed him just when he needed you.

John.

[Indignantly.] Oh, Sylvia, how can you say anything so heartless?

Sylvia.

[Coldly.] It’s true.

John.

Heaven knows, I know that death isn’t easy. You can’t think I’d be so inhuman as to do anything to make it more difficult?

Sylvia.

Except mortify your pride.

John.

[Impatiently.] What has pride got to do with it?

Sylvia.

There was pride in every word you said. Are you sure it’s not pride of intellect that’s responsible for your change of heart?

John.

[Icily.] Perhaps. How do you suggest I should mortify it?

Sylvia.

Well, you see, you can confess your error.

John.

I don’t think it’s an error.

Sylvia.

At least you can undo some of the harm you’ve done. Do you know what is chiefly tormenting your father? Your refusal to receive the Holy Communion. He keeps talking about it to your mother. He keeps harping on it. He’s dreadfully distressed about it. If you received the Communion, John, it would give your father peace.

John.

Sylvia, how can I?

Sylvia.

All your life your father has done everything in the world for you. Nothing’s been too good for you. You owe him all your happiness, everything you are and hope to be. Can’t you do this one little thing for him?

John.

No, it’s out of the question. I really can’t. I’m awfully sorry.

Sylvia.

How can you be so hard? It’s the last wish he’ll ever have in the world. It’s your last chance of showing your love for him. Oh, John, show a little mercy to his weakness!

John.

But, Sylvia, it would be blasphemous.

Sylvia.

What are you talking about? You don’t believe. To you it’s merely an idle ceremony. What can it matter to you if you go through a meaningless form?

John.

I’ve been a Christian too long. I have a hundred generations of Christianity behind me.

Sylvia.

You never hesitated at coming to church when we were going to be married.

John.

That was different.

Sylvia.

How? That was a sacrament, too. Are you afraid of a little bread and wine that a priest has said a few words over?

John.

Sylvia, don’t torment me. I tell you I can’t.

Sylvia.

[Scornfully.] I never imagined you would be superstitious. You’re frightened. You feel just like people about sitting thirteen at table. Of course it’s all nonsense, but there may be something in it.

John.

I don’t know what I feel. I only know that I, an unbeliever, can’t take part in a ceremony that was sacred to me when I believed.

Sylvia.

[Bitterly.] It’s very natural. It only means that you love yourself better than anyone else. Why should one expect you to have pity for your father, or gratitude?

John.

Oh, Sylvia, where did you learn to say such cruel things? I can’t, I tell you, I can’t. If father were in his normal mind, neither he nor mother would wish me to do such a thing.

Sylvia.

But your mother does wish it. Oh, John, don’t be stubborn. For God’s sake give yourself the opportunity. Your father’s dying, John; you have no time to lose.... John, the Communion Service has only just begun. If you get on your bicycle you’ll be there in time. The other day the Vicar said if you presented yourself at the Communion table he would not hesitate to administer it.

[John looks steadily in front of him for a moment, then makes up his mind; he stands up suddenly and without a word goes out of the room.

Sylvia.

[In a whisper.] O God, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me!

[The Curtain is lowered for one minute to denote the lapse of half an hour. When it rises Sylvia is standing at the window, looking out into the garden.

[Mrs. Littlewood enters.

Mrs. Littlewood.

May I come in?

Sylvia.

Oh, Mrs. Littlewood, do!

Mrs. Littlewood.

I met Dr. Macfarlane just outside my house, and he told me the Colonel was dead. I came with him to see if I could be of any use.

Sylvia.

It’s very kind of you. Is Dr. Macfarlane here?

Mrs. Littlewood.

Yes. He went upstairs. Where is John?

Sylvia.

He’ll be here directly.

[Mrs. Wharton comes in, followed by Dr. Macfarlane. Mrs. Littlewood goes up to her and the two old ladies kiss one another. For a moment they stand clasped in one another’s arms.

Mrs. Littlewood.

My dear old friend!

Mrs. Wharton.

It was dear of you to come, Charlotte. I knew you’d feel for me.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Now sit down, my dear Mrs. Wharton, sit down and rest yourself.

[He puts her into a chair and places a cushion behind her.

Mrs. Wharton.

Hasn’t John come in yet?

Sylvia.

I’m sure he won’t be long now. He should be here almost at once.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Sylvia, my dear child, won’t you go and get Mrs. Wharton a cup of tea? I think it would do her good.

Sylvia.

Certainly.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, my dear, don’t trouble.

Sylvia.

But it’s no trouble. You know I love doing things for you.

[She goes out.

Mrs. Wharton.

Everybody’s so very kind in this world. It makes one feel humble.... George and I have been married for five and thirty years. He never said a cross word to me. He was always gentle and considerate. I daresay I was very troublesome now and then, but he was never impatient with me.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Is it true that John and Sylvia are not going to be married after all?

Mrs. Wharton.

I’m afraid so.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Isn’t it strange how people in this world seem to go out of their way to make themselves unhappy!

Mrs. Wharton.

I’ve talked it over with Sylvia. Religion means so much to her. She wouldn’t have minded if John had come back blind and crippled, she’d have devoted her life to him without a murmur.

Dr. Macfarlane.

People always think they could put up with the faults we haven’t got. Somehow or other it’s always those we have that stick in their throats.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, Doctor, don’t say sarcastic things. You don’t know how deeply Sylvia is suffering. But it’s a matter of conscience. And I do see that one can’t ask anyone to compromise with his soul.

Dr. Macfarlane.

I have an idea our souls are like our manners, all the better when we don’t think too much about them.

Mrs. Wharton.

Sylvia’s giving up a great deal. I don’t know what’s to become of her if she doesn’t marry John. When her mother dies she’ll only have thirty pounds a year.

[Sylvia comes back with a cup of tea on a small tray and puts it on a table by Mrs. Wharton’s side.

Sylvia.

Here is the tea, Mrs. Wharton.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, thank you, my dear, so much. You do spoil me.... I can’t imagine why John is so long. He’s generally so very punctual.

Sylvia.

[In a low voice.] John came in, Mrs. Wharton.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, then, you saw him?

Sylvia.

Yes.

Mrs. Wharton.

Did you speak to him?

Sylvia.

Yes.

Mrs. Wharton.

Why did he go out again? Where has he gone?

Sylvia.

He’ll be back immediately.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Drink your tea, dear lady, drink your tea.

[Sylvia takes her place again at the window and looks into the garden. She takes no notice of the people in the room.

Mrs. Wharton.

I’m glad to have you two old friends with me now. The only thing that really seems to belong to me any more is the past, and you were both so much part of it.

Dr. Macfarlane.

You came here immediately after your honeymoon. Is that really thirty-five years ago?

Mrs. Littlewood.

My mother and I were the first people who called on you. I remember how stylish we thought you in your green velvet, Evelyn.

Mrs. Wharton.

I remember it well. I had it dyed black its third year. I think the fashions were very much more ladylike in those days. A bustle did set off a woman’s figure, there’s no denying that.

Dr. Macfarlane.

What waists you had and how tight you used to lace!

Mrs. Wharton.

I often wonder if the young people ever enjoy themselves as much as we used to. Do you remember the picnics we used to have?

Mrs. Littlewood.

And now it’s all as if it had never been, all our love and pain and joy and sorrow. We’re just two funny old women, and it really wouldn’t have mattered a row of pins if we’d never been born.

Dr. Macfarlane.

I wonder, I wonder.

Mrs. Wharton.

You’ve had the privilege of giving two sons to a noble cause. Wasn’t it worth while to be born for that?

Mrs. Littlewood.

Sometimes I’ve asked myself if this world in which we’re living now isn’t hell. Perhaps all the unhappiness my husband caused me and the death of those two boys of mine is a punishment for sins that I committed in some other life in some other part of the universe.

Mrs. Wharton.

Charlotte, sometimes you say things that frighten me. I’m haunted by the fear that you may destroy yourself.

Mrs. Littlewood.

I? No, why should I? I don’t feel that life is important enough for me to give it a deliberate end. I don’t trouble to kill the fly that walks over my ceiling.

Dr. Macfarlane.

I’ve been curing or killing people for hard on fifty years, and it seems to me that I’ve seen innumerable generations enter upon the shifting scene, act their little part, and pass away. Alas, who can deny that in this world virtue is very often unrewarded and vice unpunished? Happiness too rarely comes to the good, and the prizes of this life go too frequently to the undeserving. The rain falls on the just and on the unjust alike, but the unjust generally have a stout umbrella. It looks as though there were little justice in the world, and chance seems to rule man and all his circumstances.

Mrs. Wharton.

But we know that all that is mere idle seeming.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Seeming perhaps, but why idle? Seeming is all we know. The other day when you were talking I held my tongue, because I thought you’d say I was a silly old fool if I put my word in, but I’ve puzzled over suffering and pain too. You see, in my trade we see so much of them. It made me unhappy, and for long I doubted the goodness of God, as you doubt it, dear friend.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[With a smile.] I think you’re preaching at me, Doctor.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Then it’s the first time in my life.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Go on.

Dr. Macfarlane.

I want to tell you how I found peace. My explanation is as old as the hills, and I believe many perfectly virtuous persons have been frizzled alive for accepting it. Our good Vicar would say I was a heretic. I can’t help it. I can’t see any other way of reconciling the goodness of God with the existence of evil.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Well, what is it?

Dr. Macfarlane.

I don’t believe that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. But I think He struggles against evil as we do. I don’t believe He means to chasten us by suffering or to purify us by pain. I believe pain and suffering are evil, and that He hates them, and would crush them if He could. And I believe that in this age-long struggle between God and evil we can help, all of us, even the meanest; for in some way, I don’t know how, I believe that all our goodness adds to the strength of God, and perhaps — who can tell? — will give Him such power that at last He will be able utterly to destroy evil — utterly, with its pain and suffering. [With a smile.] When we’re good, we’re buying silver bullets for the King of Heaven, and when we’re bad, well, we’re trading with the enemy.

Sylvia.

[Without looking round.] John has just ridden back on his bicycle.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Come, Mrs. Littlewood, they don’t want us here just now.

Mrs. Littlewood.

[Getting up.] No, I’m sure you will prefer to be alone with John.

Mrs. Wharton.

It was very good of you to come. Good-bye, my dear, and God bless you.

Mrs. Littlewood.

Good-bye.

[They kiss one another and Mrs. Littlewood goes out.]

Dr. Macfarlane.

[Shaking hands with Mrs. Wharton.] I may look in later in the day to see how you are.

Mrs. Wharton.

Oh, my dear doctor, I’m not in the least ill, you know.

Dr. Macfarlane.

Still, don’t try to do too much. You’re not quite a young woman, you know. Good-bye, Sylvia.

[Sylvia does not answer. Dr. Macfarlane goes out. Sylvia advances into the room and then turns and looks again at the door through which John must come. She does all she can to control her great nervousness.

Mrs. Wharton.

Sylvia, is anything the matter?

Sylvia.

No. Why?

Mrs. Wharton.

You seem so strange.

Sylvia.

[Paying no attention to the remark.] John is just coming.

Mrs. Wharton.

You know, my dear, it seems to me that in this life most difficulties can be arranged if both parties are willing to give way a little.

Sylvia.

Sometimes it’s impossible to give way, and then the only hope is — a miracle.

[She says the last word with a little smile to conceal the fact that she attaches the greatest importance to it. John comes in. He is pale and looks extremely tired. He stops for a moment in surprise on seeing his mother. He goes over and kisses her.

John.

Oh, mother, I thought you were upstairs. I’m afraid I’m very late.

Mrs. Wharton.

It doesn’t matter, my dear. How dreadfully white you look.

John.

I went for a walk this morning. I’ve had nothing to eat. I’m rather tired.

Mrs. Wharton.

My dear, you frighten me, your face is all drawn and pinched.

John.

Oh, mother, don’t worry about me. I shall be all right after breakfast. After all, it’s quite enough to have one invalid on your hands.

[Mrs. Wharton looks at him in surprise. Sylvia gives a nervous start, but immediately controls herself.

Sylvia.

Have you been — where you said you were going?

John.

Yes.

[Sylvia opens her mouth to speak, but stops; she gives John a long, searching look; she realises that what she had hoped for has not taken place, and with a little gasp of misery turns away her head and sinks, dejected and exhausted, into a chair. John has held her look with his and now turns to his mother.

John.

Is father asleep?

Mrs. Wharton.

[With a little shiver.] John!

John.

What’s the matter?

Mrs. Wharton.

I thought you knew. My dearest, your father’s dead.

John.

Mother!

Mrs. Wharton.

I asked Sylvia to break it to you. I thought....

Sylvia.

[In a dull voice.] I didn’t tell him when you asked me to, Mrs. Wharton.

John.

I don’t understand. It seems impossible. He was well enough last night. When did he die?

Mrs. Wharton.

At about seven this morning.

John.

But, mother dear, why didn’t you call me?

Mrs. Wharton.

I didn’t expect it. We’d been talking and he said he was tired and he thought he could sleep a little. He dozed off quietly, and in a little while I saw he was dead.

John.

Oh, my poor mother, how will you bear your grief?

Mrs. Wharton.

You know, it’s so strange, I’m not in the least unhappy. I don’t feel that he’s left me. I feel him just as near to me as before. I don’t know how to explain it to you. I think he’s never been so much alive as now. Oh, John, I know that the soul is immortal.

John.

Darling, I’m so glad you’re not unhappy. Your dear eyes are positively radiant.

Mrs. Wharton.

If you only knew what I seem to see with them!

John.

Won’t you take me up and let me see him?

Mrs. Wharton.

I think the women are not done yet, John. I’ll go up and see. I’ll call you as soon as everything is ready.

John.

I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much pain since I came back, mother. I wish I could have avoided it.

Mrs. Wharton.

[She puts her arms round his neck, and he kisses her.]

My dear son!

[She goes out. John goes towards the window and looks out into the garden. For a moment Sylvia does not dare to speak to him. At last she makes an effort.

Sylvia.

[Desperately.] John, whatever you have to say to me, say it.

John.

[With frigid politeness.] I don’t think I have anything in particular to say to you.

Sylvia.

I suppose you think I’m just a wicked liar.

John.

I ask you no questions. I make you no reproaches. What is the matter?

Sylvia.

Oh, John, after all we’ve been to one another it’s brutal to talk to me like that. If you think I did wrong, say so.

John.

Why?

Sylvia.

You’re cruel and hard. [She goes up to him.] John, you must listen to me.

John.

Well?

Sylvia.

Your mother asked me to tell you of your father’s death. I concealed it from you. I told you a whole tissue of lies. I traded deliberately on your tenderness for your father. I was horrified at myself. It was my only chance of getting you to take the Communion.

John.

If you’d had any affection for me, you couldn’t have done such an abominable thing. If you’d had any respect for me you couldn’t have done it.

Sylvia.

Let me speak, John.

John.

Be quiet! You’ve insisted on talking about it, and now, by God, you’re going to listen to me. Do you know what I felt? Shame. When I took the bread and the wine, I thought they’d choke me. Because once I believed so devoutly it seemed to me that I was doing an awful thing. Deliberately, with full knowledge of what I was doing, I told a dirty lie. And I feel dirty to the depths of my soul.

Sylvia.

I thought perhaps it wouldn’t be a lie. I had to do it, John. It was my only chance.

John.

Why did you do it?

Sylvia.

Don’t look at me so sternly. I can’t bear it. You frighten me. I can’t collect my thoughts.

John.

Why did you do it? Shall I tell you? Because at the back of all your Christian humility there’s the desire to dominate. It isn’t so much that I didn’t believe as that I didn’t believe what you wanted me to believe. You wanted to grind my face in the dust.

Sylvia.

[Passionately.] John, if you only knew! I only thought of you. I only thought of you all the time.

John.

Don’t be such a hypocrite.

Sylvia.

[Brokenly.] I expected a miracle.

John.

At this time of day?

Sylvia.

For God’s sake have mercy on me! It was your mother who put the idea in my head. Your father received the Communion last night.

John.

You have no charity for human weakness. You were all so terrified that he shouldn’t make an edifying end. As if it mattered if the poor dear’s nerve failed him at the last.

Sylvia.

[Eagerly.] But it didn’t. That’s just it. You noticed your mother’s face yourself. Notwithstanding all her grief she’s happy. Do you know why?

John.

Why?

Sylvia.

[As though suddenly inspired.] Because when he’d received the Blessed Sacrament the fear of death left him. He was once more a brave and gallant gentleman. He had no dread any longer of the perilous journey before him. He was happy to die.

John.

[More gently.] Is that true? Dear father, I’m very glad.

Sylvia.

It was a miracle. It was a miracle.

John.

I still don’t follow.

Sylvia.

I thought that when you knelt at the chancel steps, and received the Communion as you used to receive it when you were a boy, all the feelings of your boyhood would rush back on you. I had to make you take it.

John.

In my frame of mind? Surely I had no right to.

Sylvia.

I know. That’s what makes my sin the greater. Perhaps I was mad. To God all things are possible. I felt certain you’d believe.

John.

[Very gravely.] Perhaps you have worked a miracle, but not the one you expected.

Sylvia.

What do you mean?

John.

When you said you wouldn’t marry me I was — I was knocked endways — I felt like a man who’s been shipwrecked. All my plans for the future had been bound up with you. I couldn’t imagine it without you. I felt utterly forlorn.

Sylvia.

But don’t you know what it cost me?

John.

At first I couldn’t think you meant it. When you said you didn’t love me, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too preposterous. I was awfully miserable, Sylvia.

Sylvia.

John, I didn’t want you to be unhappy.

John.

And then, when I received the Communion something quite strange took place in me. I can’t tell you what I felt. I felt as though mother had heard me saying something obscene. I forced myself to go through with it, because I really did think it might give poor father some peace of mind. But it was you who made me do it. The thought of you filled me with horror.

Sylvia.

[With dismay.] John!

John.

You’ve cured me, Sylvia. I ought to be grateful to you for that. My love for you has fallen from me as a cloak might fall from one’s shoulders. I see the truth now. You were quite right. In these long years we’ve become different people and we have nothing to say to one another any more.

Sylvia.

[Passionately.] But I love you, John! How can you be so blind? Don’t you see that I only did it because I loved you? Oh, John, you can’t leave me now! I’ve waited for you all these years. I’ve longed for you to come back. Forgive me if I did wrong. I can’t lose you now. I love you, John, you won’t leave me?

John.

[After a moment’s pause.] Of course I won’t leave you. I thought you didn’t want to marry me.

Sylvia.

[Hardly knowing what she is saying.] I’m not young any more. I’ve lost my freshness. I’ve got nobody but you now. Oh, John, don’t forsake me! I couldn’t bear it.

John.

[As though he were talking to a child.] My dear, don’t distress yourself. I’m not thinking of forsaking you. We’ll be married as soon as ever we can.

Sylvia.

Yes, we’ll be married, won’t we? I love you so much, John, I’ll make you love me. I couldn’t lose you now. I’ve waited too long.

John.

Come, darling, you mustn’t be unhappy. It’s all settled now. Dry your eyes. You don’t want to look a fright, do you?

Sylvia.

[Clinging to him.] I’m so miserable.

John.

Nonsense, give me a nice kiss, and we’ll forget all about our troubles. I’ll try to make you a good husband, Sylvia. I’ll do all I can to make you happy. Give me a kiss.

[When he seeks to raise her face in order to kiss her, she tears herself violently from him.

Sylvia.

No, don’t! Don’t touch me! God give me strength! I’m so pitifully weak.

John.

Sylvia!

Sylvia.

Don’t come near me! For God’s sake! [She puts her hands before her face, trying to control and to collect herself, and there is a moment’s pause.] It never occurred to me that you didn’t care for me any more, and when you told me, for a moment I lost my head. Forgive me for that, dear, and forget it. I’m not going to marry you.

John.

Now, Sylvia, don’t be idiotic. It would be so unseemly if I had to drag you to the altar by the hair of your head.

Sylvia.

You’re very kind, John. I suppose it wouldn’t be very good form to back out of it now. I’m poor, and I’ve wasted my best years waiting for you. You needn’t worry about what is going to happen to me. I can earn my living as well as other women.

John.

Oh, Sylvia, you’re torturing yourself and me. Can’t you forget what I said in a moment of exasperation? You must know how deep my affection is for you.

Sylvia.

I don’t want to forget. It is the will of God. I lied. I did an abominable and evil thing. I don’t think you can imagine how terrible my sin has been. I risked my soul to save you, John, and God has inflicted on me a punishment infinitely less than I deserved. He has taken out of your heart the love you bore me.

John.

But you love me, Sylvia.

Sylvia.

Better than anyone in the world. I’ve loved you ever since I was a child of ten. That’s only the weakness of my flesh. My soul exults in the great mercy that God has shown me.

John.

Oh, my dear, you’re going to be so unhappy.

Sylvia.

No, don’t be sorry for me. You’ve given me a great opportunity.

John.

I?

Sylvia.

I’ve been mortified because I was able to do so little in the war. I knew it was my duty to stay here and look after mother. But I wanted to go out to France and do my bit like all my friends.

John.

That was very natural.

Sylvia.

Now at last I have the chance to do something. No sacrifice is worthless in the eyes of God. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. I sacrifice now all that was precious to me in the world, my love and my hope of happiness in this life, and I sacrifice it with a cheerful heart, and I pray that God may accept it. So shall I do my part to atone for the sins which have brought on this horrible war.

John.

It would have been better if I’d never come back. I’ve caused misery and suffering to all of you.

Sylvia.

John, you took away the ring you gave me when we became engaged. You threw it in the fire.

John.

I’m afraid that was very silly of me. I did it in a moment of bitterness.

Sylvia.

You went into Canterbury to buy a wedding ring. What have you done with it?

John.

I have it here. Why?

Sylvia.

Can I have it?

John.

Of course.

[He takes it out of his waistcoat pocket, and, wondering, gives it to her.

Sylvia.

[Slipping the ring on her finger.] I will put the love of man out of my life. I will turn from what is poor and transitory to what is everlasting. I will be the bride of One whose love is never denied to them that seek it. The love of God is steadfast and enduring. I can put all my trust in that and I shall never find it wanting.... Good-bye, John, God bless you now and always.

John.

Good-bye, dear child.

[She goes out quickly. In a minute Kate comes in. She is carrying a square wooden box in which are papers, firewood, a hearth-brush, and a large soiled glove.

Kate.

Please, sir, Mrs. Wharton says, will you go upstairs now?

John.

Yes.

[He goes out. Kate goes to the fire-place, kneels down, puts on the glove, and begins to rake out the ashes. The Cook enters. She is a stout homely body of forty-five.

Cook.

The butcher’s come, Kate. I don’t exactly like to go up to Mrs. Wharton just now. I’ve got the cold beef for lunch, but they’ll be wanting something for dinner.

Kate.

Oh, well, they always like best end. You can’t go far wrong if you have that.

Cook.

I’ve got a fine lot of pease.

Kate.

Well, they’ll do nicely.

Cook.

I was thinking I’d make a fruit tart. I think p’raps I’d better order two and a half pounds of best end.

[She goes out. Kate continues to lay the fire.

THE END

THE CIRCLE

CONTENTS

PERSONS OF THE PLAY

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

PERSONS OF THE PLAY

Clive Champion-Cheney

Arnold Champion-Cheney, M.P.

Lord Porteous

Edward Luton

Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney

Elizabeth

Mrs. Shenstone.

The action takes place at Aston-Adey, Arnold Champion-Cheney’s house in Dorset.

THE FIRST ACT

The Scene is a stately drawing-room at Aston-Adey, with fine pictures on the walls and Georgian furniture. Aston-Adey has been described, with many illustrations, in Country Life. It is not a house, but a place. Its owner takes a great pride in it, and there is nothing in the room which is not of the period. Through the French windows at the back can be seen the beautiful gardens which are one of the features.

It is a fine summer morning.

Arnold comes in. He is a man of about thirty-five, tall and good-looking, fair, with a clean-cut, sensitive face. He has a look that is intellectual, but somewhat bloodless. He is very well dressed.

Arnold. [Calling.] Elizabeth! [He goes to the window and calls again.] Elizabeth! [He rings the bell. While he is waiting he gives a look round the room. He slightly alters the position of one of the chairs. He takes an ornament from the chimney-piece and blows the dust from it.]

[A Footman comes in.

Oh, George! see if you can find Mrs. Cheney, and ask her if she’d be good enough to come here.

Footman. Very good, sir.

[The Footman turns to go.

Arnold. Who is supposed to look after this room?

Footman. I don’t know, sir.

Arnold. I wish when they dust they’d take care to replace the things exactly as they were before.

Footman. Yes, sir.

Arnold. [Dismissing him.] All right.

[The Footman goes out. He goes again to the window and calls.

Arnold. Elizabeth! [He sees Mrs. Shenstone.] Oh, Anna, do you know where Elizabeth is?

[Mrs. Shenstone comes in from the garden. She is a woman of forty, pleasant and of elegant appearance.

Anna. Isn’t she playing tennis?

Arnold. No, I’ve been down to the tennis court. Something very tiresome has happened.

Anna. Oh?

Arnold. I wonder where the deuce she is.

Anna. When do you expect Lord Porteous and Lady Kitty?

Arnold. They’re motoring down in time for luncheon.

Anna. Are you sure you want me to be here? It’s not too late yet, you know. I can have my things packed and catch a train for somewhere or other.

Arnold. No, of course we want you. It’ll make it so much easier if there are people here. It was exceedingly kind of you to come.

Anna. Oh, nonsense!

Arnold. And I think it was a good thing to have Teddie Luton down.

Anna. He is so breezy, isn’t he?

Arnold. Yes, that’s his great asset. I don’t know that he’s very intelligent, but, you know, there are occasions when you want a bull in a china shop. I sent one of the servants to find Elizabeth.

Anna. I daresay she’s putting on her shoes. She and Teddie were going to have a single.

Arnold. It can’t take all this time to change one’s shoes.

Anna. [With a smile.] One can’t change one’s shoes without powdering one’s nose, you know.

[Elizabeth comes in. She is a very pretty creature in the early twenties. She wears a light summer frock.

Arnold. My dear, I’ve been hunting for you everywhere. What have you been doing?

Elizabeth. Nothing! I’ve been standing on my head.

Arnold. My father’s here.

Elizabeth. [Startled.] Where?

Arnold. At the cottage. He arrived last night.

Elizabeth. Damn!

Arnold. [Good-humouredly.] I wish you wouldn’t say that, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. If you’re not going to say “Damn” when a thing’s damnable, when are you going to say “Damn”?

Arnold. I should have thought you could say, “Oh, bother!” or something like that.

Elizabeth. But that wouldn’t express my sentiments. Besides, at that speech day when you were giving away the prizes you said there were no synonyms in the English language.

Anna. [Smiling.] Oh, Elizabeth! it’s very unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Arnold. I’m always willing to stand by anything I’ve said. There are no synonyms in the English language.

Elizabeth. In that case I shall be regretfully forced to continue to say “Damn” whenever I feel like it.

[Edward Luton shows himself at the window. He is an attractive youth in flannels.

Teddie. I say, what about this tennis?

Elizabeth. Come in. We’re having a scene.

Teddie. [Entering.] How splendid! What about?

Elizabeth. The English language.

Teddie. Don’t tell me you’ve been splitting your infinitives.

Arnold. [With the shadow of a frown.] I wish you’d be serious, Elizabeth. The situation is none too pleasant.

Anna. I think Teddie and I had better make ourselves scarce.

Elizabeth. Nonsense! You’re both in it. If there’s going to be any unpleasantness we want your moral support. That’s why we asked you to come.

Teddie. And I thought I’d been asked for my blue eyes.

Elizabeth. Vain beast! And they happen to be brown.

Teddie. Is anything up?

Elizabeth. Arnold’s father arrived last night.

Teddie. Did he, by Jove! I thought he was in Paris.

Arnold. So did we all. He told me he’d be there for the next month.

Anna. Have you seen him?

Arnold. No! he rang me up. It’s a mercy he had a telephone put in the cottage. It would have been a pretty kettle of fish if he’d just walked in.

Elizabeth. Did you tell him Lady Catherine was coming?

Arnold. Of course not. I was flabbergasted to know he was here. And then I thought we’d better talk it over first.

Elizabeth. Is he coming along here?

Arnold. Yes. He suggested it, and I couldn’t think of any excuse to prevent him.

Teddie. Couldn’t you put the other people off?

Arnold. They’re coming by car. They may be here any minute. It’s too late to do that.

Elizabeth. Besides, it would be beastly.

Arnold. I knew it was silly to have them here. Elizabeth insisted.

Elizabeth. After all, she is your mother, Arnold.

Arnold. That meant precious little to her when she — went away. You can’t imagine it means very much to me now.

Elizabeth. It’s thirty years ago. It seems so absurd to bear malice after all that time.

Arnold. I don’t bear malice, but the fact remains that she did me the most irreparable harm. I can find no excuse for her.

Elizabeth. Have you ever tried to?

Arnold. My dear Elizabeth, it’s no good going over all that again. The facts are lamentably simple. She had a husband who adored her, a wonderful position, all the money she could want, and a child of five. And she ran away with a married man.

Elizabeth. Lady Porteous is not a very attractive woman, Arnold. [To Anna.] Do you know her?

Anna. [Smiling.] “Forbidding” is the word, I think.

Arnold. If you’re going to make little jokes about it, I have nothing more to say.

Anna. I’m sorry, Arnold.

Elizabeth. Perhaps your mother couldn’t help herself — if she was in love?

Arnold. And had no sense of honour, duty, or decency? Oh, yes, under those circumstances you can explain a great deal.

Elizabeth. That’s not a very pretty way to speak of your mother.

Arnold. I can’t look on her as my mother.

Elizabeth. What you can’t get over is that she didn’t think of you. Some of us are more mother and some of us more woman. It gives me a little thrill when I think that she loved that man so much. She sacrificed her name, her position, and her child to him.

Arnold. You really can’t expect the said child to have any great affection for the mother who treated him like that.

Elizabeth. No, I don’t think I do. But I think it’s a pity after all these years that you shouldn’t be friends.

Arnold. I wonder if you realise what it was to grow up under the shadow of that horrible scandal. Everywhere, at school, and at Oxford, and afterwards in London, I was always the son of Lady Kitty Cheney. Oh, it was cruel, cruel!

Elizabeth. Yes, I know, Arnold. It was beastly for you.

Arnold. It would have been bad enough if it had been an ordinary case, but the position of the people made it ten times worse. My father was in the House then, and Porteous — he hadn’t succeeded to the title — was in the House too; he was Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and he was very much in the public eye.

Anna. My father always used to say he was the ablest man in the party. Every one was expecting him to be Prime Minister.

Arnold. You can imagine what a boon it was to the British public. They hadn’t had such a treat for a generation. The most popular song of the day was about my mother. Did you ever hear it? “Naughty Lady Kitty. Thought it such a pity . . .”

Elizabeth. [Interrupting.] Oh, Arnold, don’t!

Arnold. And then they never let people forget them. If they’d lived quietly in Florence and not made a fuss the scandal would have died down. But those constant actions between Lord and Lady Porteous kept on reminding everyone.

Teddie. What were they having actions about?

Arnold. Of course my father divorced his wife, but Lady Porteous refused to divorce Porteous. He tried to force her by refusing to support her and turning her out of her house, and heaven knows what. They were constantly wrangling in the law courts.

Anna. I think it was monstrous of Lady Porteous.

Arnold. She knew he wanted to marry my mother, and she hated my mother. You can’t blame her.

Anna. It must have been very difficult for them.

Arnold. That’s why they’ve lived in Florence. Porteous has money. They found people there who were willing to accept the situation.

Elizabeth. This is the first time they’ve ever come to England.

Arnold. My father will have to be told, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. Yes.

Anna. [To Elizabeth.] Has he ever spoken to you about Lady Kitty?

Elizabeth. Never.

Arnold. I don’t think her name has passed his lips since she ran away from this house thirty years ago.

Teddie. Oh, they lived here?

Arnold. Naturally. There was a house-party, and one evening neither Porteous nor my mother came down to dinner. The rest of them waited. They couldn’t make it out. My father sent up to my mother’s room, and a note was found on the pincushion.

Elizabeth. [With a faint smile.] That’s what they did in the Dark Ages.

Arnold. I think he took a dislike to this house from that horrible night. He never lived here again, and when I married he handed the place over to me. He just has a cottage now on the estate that he comes to when he feels inclined.

Elizabeth. It’s been very nice for us.

Arnold. I owe everything to my father. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me for asking these people to come here.

Elizabeth. I’m going to take all the blame on myself, Arnold.

Arnold. [Irritably.] The situation was embarrassing enough anyhow. I don’t know how I ought to treat them.

Elizabeth. Don’t you think that’ll settle itself when you see them?

Arnold. After all, they’re my guests. I shall try and behave like a gentleman.

Elizabeth. I wouldn’t. We haven’t got central heating.

Arnold. [Taking no notice.] Will she expect me to kiss her?

Elizabeth. [With a smile.] Surely.

Arnold. It always makes me uncomfortable when people are effusive.

Anna. But I can’t understand why you never saw her before.

Arnold. I believe she tried to see me when I was little, but my father thought it better she shouldn’t.

Anna. Yes, but when you were grown up?

Arnold. She was always in Italy. I never went to Italy.

Elizabeth. It seems to me so pathetic that if you saw one another in the street you wouldn’t recognise each other.

Arnold. Is it my fault?

Elizabeth. You’ve promised to be very gentle with her and very kind.

Arnold. The mistake was asking Porteous to come too. It looks as though we condoned the whole thing. And how am I to treat him? Am I to shake him by the hand and slap him on the back? He absolutely ruined my father’s life.

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] How much would you give for a nice motor accident that prevented them from coming?

Arnold. I let you persuade me against my better judgment, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

Elizabeth. [Good-humouredly.] I think it’s very lucky that Anna and Teddie are here. I don’t foresee a very successful party.

Arnold. I’m going to do my best. I gave you my promise and I shall keep it. But I can’t answer for my father.

Anna. Here is your father.

[Mr. Champion-Cheney shows himself at one of the French windows.

C.-C. May I come in through the window, or shall I have myself announced by a supercilious flunkey?

Elizabeth. Come in. We’ve been expecting you.

C.-C. Impatiently, I hope, my dear child.

[Mr. Champion-Cheney is a tall man in the early sixties, spare, with a fine head of gray hair and an intelligent, somewhat ascetic face. He is very carefully dressed. He is a man who makes the most of himself. He bears his years jauntily. He kisses Elizabeth and then holds out his hand to Arnold.

Elizabeth. We thought you’d be in Paris for another month.

C.-C. How are you, Arnold? I always reserve to myself the privilege of changing my mind. It’s the only one elderly gentlemen share with pretty women.

Elizabeth. You know Anna.

C.-C. [Shaking hands with her.] Of course I do. How very nice to see you here! Are you staying long?

Anna. As long as I’m welcome.

Elizabeth. And this is Mr. Luton.

C.-C. How do you do? Do you play bridge?

Luton. I do.

C.-C. Capital. Do you declare without top honours?

Luton. Never.

C.-C. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. I see that you are a good young man.

Luton. But, like the good in general, I am poor.

C.-C. Never mind; if your principles are right, you can play ten shillings a hundred without danger. I never play less, and I never play more.

Arnold. And you — are you going to stay long, father?

C.-C. To luncheon, if you’ll have me.

[Arnold gives Elizabeth a harassed look.

Elizabeth. That’ll be jolly.

Arnold. I didn’t mean that. Of course you’re going to stay for luncheon. I meant, how long are you going to stay down here?

C.-C. A week.

[There is a moment’s pause. Everyone but Champion-Cheney is slightly embarrassed.

Teddie. I think we’d better chuck our tennis.

Elizabeth. Yes. I want my father-in-law to tell me what they’re wearing in Paris this week.

Teddie. I’ll go and put the rackets away.

[Teddie goes out.

Arnold. It’s nearly one o’clock, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. I didn’t know it was so late.

Anna. [To Arnold.] I wonder if I can persuade you to take a turn in the garden before luncheon.

Arnold. [Jumping at the idea.] I’d love it.

[Anna goes out of the window, and as he follows her he stops irresolutely.

I want you to look at this chair I’ve just got. I think it’s rather good.

C.-C. Charming.

Arnold. About 1750, I should say. Good design, isn’t it? It hasn’t been restored or anything.

C.-C. Very pretty.

Arnold. I think it was a good buy, don’t you?

C.-C. Oh, my dear boy! you know I’m entirely ignorant about these things.

Arnold. It’s exactly my period . . . I shall see you at luncheon, then.

[He follows Anna through the window.

C.-C. Who is that young man?

Elizabeth. Mr. Luton. He’s only just been demobilised. He’s the manager of a rubber estate in the F.M.S.

C.-C. And what are the F.M.S. when they’re at home?

Elizabeth. The Federated Malay States. He joined up at the beginning of the war. He’s just going back there.

C.-C. And why have we been left alone in this very marked manner?

Elizabeth. Have we? I didn’t notice it.

C.-C. I suppose it’s difficult for the young to realise that one may be old without being a fool.

Elizabeth. I never thought you that. Everyone knows you’re very intelligent.

C.-C. They certainly ought to by now. I’ve told them often enough. Are you a little nervous?

Elizabeth. Let me feel my pulse. [She puts her finger on her wrist.] It’s perfectly regular.

C.-C. When I suggested staying to luncheon Arnold looked exactly like a dose of castor oil.

Elizabeth. I wish you’d sit down.

C.-C. Will it make it easier for you? [He takes a chair.] You have evidently something very disagreeable to say to me.

Elizabeth. You won’t be cross with me?

C.-C. How old are you?

Elizabeth. Twenty-five.

C.-C. I’m never cross with a woman under thirty.

Elizabeth. Oh, then I’ve got ten years.

C.-C. Mathematics?

Elizabeth. No. Paint.

C.-C. Well?

Elizabeth. [Reflectively.] I think it would be easier if I sat on your knees.

C.-C. That is a pleasing taste of yours, but you must take care not to put on weight.

[She sits down on his knees.

Elizabeth. Am I boney?

C.-C. On the contrary. . . . I’m listening.

Elizabeth. Lady Catherine’s coming here.

C.-C. Who’s Lady Catherine?

Elizabeth. Your — Arnold’s mother.

C.-C. Is she?

[He withdraws himself a little and Elizabeth gets up.

Elizabeth. You mustn’t blame Arnold. It’s my fault. I insisted. He was against it. I nagged him till he gave way. And then I wrote and asked her to come.

C.-C. I didn’t know you knew her.

Elizabeth. I don’t. But I heard she was in London. She’s staying at Claridge’s. It seemed so heartless not to take the smallest notice of her.

C.-C. When is she coming?

Elizabeth. We’re expecting her in time for luncheon.

C.-C. As soon as that? I understand the embarrassment.

Elizabeth. You see, we never expected you to be here. You said you’d be in Paris for another month.

C.-C. My dear child, this is your house. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t ask whom you please to stay with you.

Elizabeth. After all, whatever her faults, she’s Arnold’s mother. It seemed so unnatural that they should never see one another. My heart ached for that poor lonely woman.

C.-C. I never heard that she was lonely, and she certainly isn’t poor.

Elizabeth. And there’s something else. I couldn’t ask her by herself. It would have been so — so insulting. I asked Lord Porteous, too.

C.-C. I see.

Elizabeth. I daresay you’d rather not meet them.

C.-C. I daresay they’d rather not meet me. I shall get a capital luncheon at the cottage. I’ve noticed you always get the best food if you come in unexpectedly and have the same as they’re having in the servants’ hall.

Elizabeth. No one’s ever talked to me about Lady Kitty. It’s always been a subject that everyone has avoided. I’ve never even seen a photograph of her.

C.-C. The house was full of them when she left. I think I told the butler to throw them in the dust-bin. She was very much photographed.

Elizabeth. Won’t you tell me what she was like?

C.-C. She was very like you, Elizabeth, only she had dark hair instead of red.

Elizabeth. Poor dear! it must be quite white now.

C.-C. I daresay. She was a pretty little thing.

Elizabeth. But she was one of the great beauties of her day. They say she was lovely.

C.-C. She had the most adorable little nose, like yours. . . .

Elizabeth. D’you like my nose?

C.-C. And she was very dainty, with a beautiful little figure; very light on her feet. She was like a marquise in an old French comedy. Yes, she was lovely.

Elizabeth. And I’m sure she’s lovely still.

C.-C. She’s no chicken, you know.

Elizabeth. You can’t expect me to look at it as you and Arnold do. When you’ve loved as she’s loved you may grow old, but you grow old beautifully.

C.-C. You’re very romantic.

Elizabeth. If everyone hadn’t made such a mystery of it I daresay I shouldn’t feel as I do. I know she did a great wrong to you and a great wrong to Arnold. I’m willing to acknowledge that.

C.-C. I’m sure it’s very kind of you.

Elizabeth. But she loved and she dared. Romance is such an illusive thing. You read of it in books, but it’s seldom you see it face to face. I can’t help it if it thrills me.

C.-C. I am painfully aware that the husband in these cases is not a romantic object.

Elizabeth. She had the world at her feet. You were rich. She was a figure in society. And she gave up everything for love.

C.-C. [Dryly.] I’m beginning to suspect it wasn’t only for her sake and for Arnold’s that you asked her to come here.

Elizabeth. I seem to know her already. I think her face is a little sad, for a love like that doesn’t leave you gay, it leaves you grave, but I think her pale face is unlined. It’s like a child’s.

C.-C. My dear, how you let your imagination run away with you!

Elizabeth. I imagine her slight and frail.

C.-C. Frail, certainly.

Elizabeth. With beautiful thin hands and white hair. I’ve pictured her so often in that Renaissance Palace that they live in, with old Masters on the walls and lovely carved things all round, sitting in a black silk dress with old lace round her neck and old-fashioned diamonds. You see, I never knew my mother; she died when I was a baby. You can’t confide in aunts with huge families of their own. I want Arnold’s mother to be a mother to me. I’ve got so much to say to her.

C.-C. Are you happy with Arnold?

Elizabeth. Why shouldn’t I be?

C.-C. Why haven’t you got any babies?

Elizabeth. Give us a little time. We’ve only been married three years.

C.-C. I wonder what Hughie is like now!

Elizabeth. Lord Porteous?

C.-C. He wore his clothes better than any man in London. You know he’d have been Prime Minister if he’d remained in politics.

Elizabeth. What was he like then?

C.-C. He was a nice-looking fellow. Fine horseman. I suppose there was something very fascinating about him. Yellow hair and blue eyes, you know. He had a very good figure. I liked him. I was his parliamentary secretary. He was Arnold’s godfather.

Elizabeth. I know.

C.-C. I wonder if he ever regrets!

Elizabeth. I wouldn’t.

C.-C. Well, I must be strolling back to my cottage.

Elizabeth. You’re not angry with me?

C.-C. Not a bit.

[She puts up her face for him to kiss. He kisses her on both cheeks and then goes out. In a moment Teddie is seen at the window.

Teddie. I saw the old blighter go.

Elizabeth. Come in.

Teddie. Everything all right?

Elizabeth. Oh, quite, as far as he’s concerned. He’s going to keep out of the way.

Teddie. Was it beastly?

Elizabeth. No, he made it very easy for me. He’s a nice old thing.

Teddie. You were rather scared.

Elizabeth. A little. I am still. I don’t know why.

Teddie. I guessed you were. I thought I’d come and give you a little moral support. It’s ripping here, isn’t it?

Elizabeth. It is rather nice.

Teddie. It’ll be jolly to think of it when I’m back in the F.M.S.

Elizabeth. Aren’t you homesick sometimes?

Teddie. Oh, everyone is now and then, you know.

Elizabeth. You could have got a job in England if you’d wanted to, couldn’t you?

Teddie. Oh, but I love it out there. England’s ripping to come back to, but I couldn’t live here now. It’s like a woman you’re desperately in love with as long as you don’t see her, but when you’re with her she maddens you so that you can’t bear her.

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] What’s wrong with England?

Teddie. I don’t think anything’s wrong with England. I expect something’s wrong with me. I’ve been away too long. England seems to me full of people doing things they don’t want to because other people expect it of them.

Elizabeth. Isn’t that what you call a high degree of civilisation?

Teddie. People seem to me so insincere. When you go to parties in London they’re all babbling about art, and you feel that in their hearts they don’t care twopence about it. They read the books that everybody is talking about because they don’t want to be out of it. In the F.M.S. we don’t get very many books, and we read those we have over and over again. They mean so much to us. I don’t think the people over there are half so clever as the people at home, but one gets to know them better. You see, there are so few of us that we have to make the best of one another.

Elizabeth. I imagine that frills are not much worn in the F.M.S. It must be a comfort.

Teddie. It’s not much good being pretentious where everyone knows exactly who you are and what your income is.

Elizabeth. I don’t think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.

Teddie. And then, you know, the place is ripping. You get used to a blue sky and you miss it in England.

Elizabeth. What do you do with yourself all the time?

Teddie. Oh, one works like blazes. You have to be a pretty hefty fellow to be a planter. And then there’s ripping bathing. You know, it’s lovely, with palm trees all along the beach. And there’s shooting. And now and then we have a little dance to a gramophone.

Elizabeth. [Pretending to tease him.] I think you’ve got a young woman out there, Teddie.

Teddie. [Vehemently.] Oh, no!

[She is a little taken aback by the earnestness of his disclaimer. There is a moment’s silence, then she recovers herself.

Elizabeth. But you’ll have to marry and settle down one of these days, you know.

Teddie. I want to, but it’s not a thing you can do lightly.

Elizabeth. I don’t know why there more than elsewhere.

Teddie. In England if people don’t get on they go their own ways and jog along after a fashion. In a place like that you’re thrown a great deal on your own resources.

Elizabeth. Of course.

Teddie. Lots of girls come out because they think they’re going to have a good time. But if they’re empty-headed, then they’re just faced with their own emptiness and they’re done. If their husbands can afford it they go home and settle down as grass-widows.

Elizabeth. I’ve met them. They seem to find it a very pleasant occupation.

Teddie. It’s rotten for their husbands, though.

Elizabeth. And if the husbands can’t afford it?

Teddie. Oh, then they tipple.

Elizabeth. It’s not a very alluring prospect.

Teddie. But if the woman’s the right sort she wouldn’t exchange it for any life in the world. When all’s said and done it’s we who’ve made the Empire.

Elizabeth. What sort is the right sort?

Teddie. A woman of courage and endurance and sincerity. Of course, it’s hopeless unless she’s in love with her husband.

[He is looking at her earnestly and she, raising her eyes, gives him a long look. There is silence between them.

Teddie. My house stands on the side of a hill, and the cocoanut trees wind down to the shore. Azaleas grow in my garden, and camellias, and all sorts of ripping flowers. And in front of me is the winding coast line, and then the blue sea.

[A pause.

Do you know that I’m awfully in love with you?

Elizabeth. [Gravely.] I wasn’t quite sure. I wondered.

Teddie. And you?

[She nods slowly.

I’ve never kissed you.

Elizabeth. I don’t want you to.

[They look at one another steadily. They are both grave. Arnold comes in hurriedly.

Arnold. They’re coming, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. [As though returning from a distant world.] Who?

Arnold. [Impatiently.] My dear! My mother, of course. The car is just coming up the drive.

Teddie. Would you like me to clear out?

Arnold. No, no! For goodness’ sake stay.

Elizabeth. We’d better go and meet them, Arnold.

Arnold. No, no; I think they’d much better be shown in. I feel simply sick with nervousness.

[Anna comes in from the garden.

Anna. Your guests have arrived.

Elizabeth. Yes, I know.

Arnold. I’ve given orders that luncheon should be served at once.

Elizabeth. Why? It’s not half-past one already, is it?

Arnold. I thought it would help. When you don’t know exactly what to say you can always eat.

[The Butler comes in and announces.

Butler. Lady Catherine Champion-Cheney! Lord Porteous!

[Lady Kitty comes in followed by Porteous, and the Butler goes out. Lady Kitty is a gay little lady, with dyed red hair and painted cheeks. She is somewhat outrageously dressed. She never forgets that she has been a pretty woman and she still behaves as if she were twenty-five. Lord Porteous is a very bald, elderly gentleman in loose, rather eccentric clothes. He is snappy and gruff. This is not at all the couple that Elizabeth expected, and for a moment she stares at them with round, startled eyes. Lady Kitty goes up to her with outstretched hands.

Lady Kitty. Elizabeth! Elizabeth! [She kisses her effusively.] What an adorable creature! [Turning to Porteous.] Hughie, isn’t she adorable?

Porteous. [With a grunt.] Ugh!

[Elizabeth, smiling now, turns to him and gives him her hand.

Elizabeth. How d’you do?

Porteous. Damnable road you’ve got down here. How d’you do, my dear? Why d’you have such damnable roads in England?

[Lady Kitty’s eyes fall on Teddie and she goes up to him with her arms thrown back, prepared to throw them round him.

Lady Kitty. My boy, my boy! I should have known you anywhere!

Elizabeth. [Hastily.] That’s Arnold.

Lady Kitty. [Without a moment’s hesitation.] The image of his father! I should have known him anywhere! [She throws her arms round his neck.] My boy, my boy!

Porteous. [With a grunt.] Ugh!

Lady Kitty. Tell me, would you have known me again? Have I changed?

Arnold. I was only five, you know, when — when you . . .

Lady Kitty. [Emotionally.] I remember as if it was yesterday. I went up into your room. [With a sudden change of manner.] By the way, I always thought that nurse drank. Did you ever find out if she really did?

Porteous. How the devil can you expect him to know that, Kitty?

Lady Kitty. You’ve never had a child, Hughie; how can you tell what they know and what they don’t?

Elizabeth. [Coming to the rescue.] This is Arnold, Lord Porteous.

Porteous. [Shaking hands with him.] How d’you do? I knew your father.

Arnold. Yes.

Porteous. Alive still?

Arnold. Yes.

Porteous. He must be getting on. Is he well?

Arnold. Very.

Porteous. Ugh! Takes care of himself, I suppose. I’m not at all well. This damned climate doesn’t agree with me.

Elizabeth. [To Lady Kitty.] This is Mrs. Shenstone. And this is Mr. Luton. I hope you don’t mind a very small party.

Lady Kitty. [Shaking hands with Anna and Teddie.] Oh, no, I shall enjoy it. I used to give enormous parties here. Political, you know. How nice you’ve made this room!

Elizabeth. Oh, that’s Arnold.

Arnold. [Nervously.] D’you like this chair? I’ve just bought it. It’s exactly my period.

Porteous. [Bluntly.] It’s a fake.

Arnold. [Indignantly.] I don’t think it is for a minute.

Porteous. The legs are not right.

Arnold. I don’t know how you can say that. If there is anything right about it, it’s the legs.

Lady Kitty. I’m sure they’re right.

Porteous. You know nothing whatever about it, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. That’s what you think. I think it’s a beautiful chair. Hepplewhite?

Arnold. No, Sheraton.

Lady Kitty. Oh, I know. “The School for Scandal.”

Porteous. Sheraton, my dear. Sheraton.

Lady Kitty. Yes, that’s what I say. I acted the screen scene at some amateur theatricals in Florence, and Ermeto Novelli, the great Italian tragedian, told me he’d never seen a Lady Teazle like me.

Porteous. Ugh!

Lady Kitty. [To Elizabeth.] Do you act?

Elizabeth. Oh, I couldn’t. I should be too nervous.

Lady Kitty. I’m never nervous. I’m a born actress. Of course, if I had my time over again I’d go on the stage. You know, it’s extraordinary how they keep young. Actresses, I mean. I think it’s because they’re always playing different parts. Hughie, do you think Arnold takes after me or after his father? Of course I think he’s the very image of me. Arnold, I think I ought to tell you that I was received into the Catholic Church last winter. I’d been thinking about it for years, and last time we were at Monte Carlo I met such a nice monsignore. I told him what my difficulties were and he was too wonderful. I knew Hughie wouldn’t approve, so I kept it a secret. [To Elizabeth.] Are you interested in religion? I think it’s too wonderful. We must have a long talk about it one of these days. [Pointing to her frock.] Callot?

Elizabeth. No, Worth.

Lady Kitty. I knew it was either Worth or Callot. Of course, it’s line that’s the important thing. I go to Worth myself, and I always say to him, “Line, my dear Worth, line.” What is the matter, Hughie?

Porteous. These new teeth of mine are so damned uncomfortable.

Lady Kitty. Men are extraordinary. They can’t stand the smallest discomfort. Why, a woman’s life is uncomfortable from the moment she gets up in the morning till the moment she goes to bed at night. And d’you think it’s comfortable to sleep with a mask on your face?

Porteous. They don’t seem to hold up properly.

Lady Kitty. Well, that’s not the fault of your teeth. That’s the fault of your gums.

Porteous. Damned rotten dentist. That’s what’s the matter.

Lady Kitty. I thought he was a very nice dentist. He told me my teeth would last till I was fifty. He has a Chinese room. It’s so interesting; while he scrapes your teeth he tells you all about the dear Empress Dowager. Are you interested in China? I think it’s too wonderful. You know they’ve cut off their pigtails. I think it’s such a pity. They were so picturesque.

[The Butler comes in.

Butler. Luncheon is served, sir.

Elizabeth. Would you like to see your rooms?

Porteous. We can see our rooms after luncheon.

Lady Kitty. I must powder my nose, Hughie.

Porteous. Powder it down here.

Lady Kitty. I never saw anyone so inconsiderate.

Porteous. You’ll keep us all waiting half an hour. I know you.

Lady Kitty. [Fumbling in her bag.] Oh, well, peace at any price, as Lord Beaconsfield said.

Porteous. He said a lot of damned silly things, Kitty, but he never said that.

[Lady Kitty’s face changes. Perplexity is followed by dismay, and dismay by consternation.

Lady Kitty. Oh!

Elizabeth. What is the matter?

Lady Kitty. [With anguish.] My lip-stick!

Elizabeth. Can’t you find it?

Lady Kitty. I had it in the car. Hughie, you remember that I had it in the car.

Porteous. I don’t remember anything about it.

Lady Kitty. Don’t be so stupid, Hughie. Why, when we came through the gates I said: “My home, my home!” and I took it out and put some on my lips.

Elizabeth. Perhaps you dropped it in the car.

Lady Kitty. For heaven’s sake send some one to look for it.

Arnold. I’ll ring.

Lady Kitty. I’m absolutely lost without my lip-stick. Lend me yours, darling, will you?

Elizabeth. I’m awfully sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t got one.

Lady Kitty. Do you mean to say you don’t use a lip-stick?

Elizabeth. Never.

Porteous. Look at her lips. What the devil d’you think she wants muck like that for?

Lady Kitty. Oh, my dear, what a mistake you make! You must use a lip-stick. It’s so good for the lips. Men like it, you know. I couldn’t live without a lip-stick.

[Champion-Cheney appears at the window holding in his upstretched hand a little gold case.

C.-C. [As he comes in.] Has anyone here lost a diminutive utensil containing, unless I am mistaken, a favourite preparation for the toilet?

[Arnold and Elizabeth are thunderstruck at his appearance and even Teddie and Anna are taken aback. But Lady Kitty is overjoyed.

Lady Kitty. My lip-stick!

C.-C. I found it in the drive and I ventured to bring it in.

Lady Kitty. It’s Saint Antony. I said a little prayer to him when I was hunting in my bag.

Porteous. Saint Antony be blowed! It’s Clive, by God!

Lady Kitty. [Startled, her attention suddenly turning from the lip-stick.] Clive!

C.-C. You didn’t recognise me. It’s many years since we met.

Lady Kitty. My poor Clive, your hair has gone quite white!

C.-C. [Holding out his hand.] I hope you had a pleasant journey down from London.

Lady Kitty. [Offering him her cheek.] You may kiss me, Clive.

C.-C. [Kissing her.] You don’t mind, Hughie?

Porteous. [With a grunt.] Ugh!

C.-C. [Going up to him cordially.] And how are you, my dear Hughie?

Porteous. Damned rheumatic if you want to know. Filthy climate you have in this country.

C.-C. Aren’t you going to shake hands with me, Hughie?

Porteous. I have no objection to shaking hands with you.

C.-C. You’ve aged, my poor Hughie.

Porteous. Some one was asking me how old you were the other day.

C.-C. Were they surprised when you told them?

Porteous. Surprised! They wondered you weren’t dead.

[The Butler comes in.

Butler. Did you ring, sir?

Arnold. No. Oh, yes, I did. It doesn’t matter now.

C.-C. [As the Butler is going.] One moment. My dear Elizabeth, I’ve come to throw myself on your mercy. My servants are busy with their own affairs. There’s not a thing for me to eat in my cottage.

Elizabeth. Oh, but we shall be delighted if you’ll lunch with us.

C.-C. It either means that or my immediate death from starvation. You don’t mind, Arnold?

Arnold. My dear father!

Elizabeth. [To the Butler.] Mr. Cheney will lunch here.

Butler. Very good, ma’am.

C.-C. [To Lady Kitty.] And what do you think of Arnold?

Lady Kitty. I adore him.

C.-C. He’s grown, hasn’t he? But then you’d expect him to do that in thirty years.

Arnold. For God’s sake let’s go in to lunch, Elizabeth!

END OF THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Act.

It is afternoon. When the curtain rises Porteous and Lady Kitty, Anna and Teddie are playing bridge. Elizabeth and Champion-Cheney are watching. Porteous and Lady Kitty are partners.

C.-C. When will Arnold be back, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth. Soon, I think.

C.-C. Is he addressing a meeting?

Elizabeth. No, it’s only a conference with his agent and one or two constituents.

Porteous. [Irritably.] How anyone can be expected to play bridge when people are shouting at the top of their voices all round them, I for one cannot understand.

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] I’m so sorry.

Anna. I can see your hand, Lord Porteous.

Porteous. It may help you.

Lady Kitty. I’ve told you over and over again to hold your cards up. It ruins one’s game when one can’t help seeing one’s opponent’s hand.

Porteous. One isn’t obliged to look.

Lady Kitty. What was Arnold’s majority at the last election?

Elizabeth. Seven hundred and something.

C.-C. He’ll have to fight for it if he wants to keep his seat next time.

Porteous. Are we playing bridge, or talking politics?

Lady Kitty. I never find that conversation interferes with my game.

Porteous. You certainly play no worse when you talk than when you hold your tongue.

Lady Kitty. I think that’s a very offensive thing to say, Hughie. Just because I don’t play the same game as you do you think I can’t play.

Porteous. I’m glad you acknowledge it’s not the same game as I play. But why in God’s name do you call it bridge?

C.-C. I agree with Kitty. I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet.

Porteous. Of course you take Kitty’s part.

Lady Kitty. That’s the least he can do.

C.-C. I have a naturally cheerful disposition.

Porteous. You’ve never had anything to sour it.

Lady Kitty. I don’t know what you mean by that, Hughie.

Porteous. [Trying to contain himself.] Must you trump my ace?

Lady Kitty. [Innocently.] Oh, was that your ace, darling?

Porteous. [Furiously.] Yes, it was my ace.

Lady Kitty. Oh, well, it was the only trump I had. I shouldn’t have made it anyway.

Porteous. You needn’t have told them that. Now she knows exactly what I’ve got.

Lady Kitty. She knew before.

Porteous. How could she know?

Lady Kitty. She said she’d seen your hand.

Anna. Oh, I didn’t. I said I could see it.

Lady Kitty. Well, I naturally supposed that if she could see it she did.

Porteous. Really, Kitty, you have the most extraordinary ideas.

C.-C. Not at all. If anyone is such a fool as to show me his hand, of course I look at it.

Porteous. [Fuming.] If you study the etiquette of bridge, you’ll discover that onlookers are expected not to interfere with the game.

C.-C. My dear Hughie, this is a matter of ethics, not of bridge.

Anna. Anyhow, I get the game. And rubber.

Teddie. I claim a revoke.

Porteous. Who revoked?

Teddie. You did.

Porteous. Nonsense. I’ve never revoked in my life.

Teddie. I’ll show you. [He turns over the tricks to show the faces of the cards.] You threw away a club on the third heart trick and you had another heart.

Porteous. I never had more than two hearts.

Teddie. Oh, yes, you had. Look here. That’s the card you played on the last trick but one.

Lady Kitty. [Delighted to catch him out.] There’s no doubt about it, Hughie. You revoked.

Porteous. I tell you I did not revoke. I never revoke.

C.-C. You did, Hughie. I wondered what on earth you were doing.

Porteous. I don’t know how anyone can be expected not to revoke when there’s this confounded chatter going on all the time.

Teddie. Well, that’s another hundred to us.

Porteous. [To Champion-Cheney.] I wish you wouldn’t breathe down my neck. I never can play bridge when there’s somebody breathing down my neck.

[The party have risen from the bridge-table, and they scatter about the room.

Anna. Well, I’m going to take a book and lie down in the hammock till it’s time to dress.

Teddie. [Who has been adding up.] I’ll put it down in the book, shall I?

Porteous. [Who has not moved, setting out the cards for a patience.] Yes, yes, put it down. I never revoke.

[Anna goes out.

Lady Kitty. Would you like to come for a little stroll, Hughie?

Porteous. What for?

Lady Kitty. Exercise.

Porteous. I hate exercise.

C.-C. [Looking at the patience.] The seven goes on the eight.

[Porteous takes no notice.

Lady Kitty. The seven goes on the eight, Hughie.

Porteous. I don’t choose to put the seven on the eight.

C.-C. That knave goes on the queen.

Porteous. I’m not blind, thank you.

Lady Kitty. The three goes on the four.

C.-C. All these go over.

Porteous. [Furiously.] Am I playing this patience, or are you playing it?

Lady Kitty. But you’re missing everything.

Porteous. That’s my business.

C.-C. It’s no good losing your temper over it, Hughie.

Porteous. Go away, both of you. You irritate me.

Lady Kitty. We were only trying to help you, Hughie.

Porteous. I don’t want to be helped. I want to do it by myself.

Lady Kitty. I think your manners are perfectly deplorable, Hughie.

Porteous. It’s simply maddening when you’re playing patience and people won’t leave you alone.

C.-C. We won’t say another word.

Porteous. That three goes. I believe it’s coming out. If I’d been such a fool as to put that seven up I shouldn’t have been able to bring these down.

[He puts down several cards while they watch him silently.

Lady Kitty and C.-C. [Together.] The four goes on the five.

Porteous. [Throwing down the cards violently.] Damn you! why don’t you leave me alone? It’s intolerable.

C.-C. It was coming out, my dear fellow.

Porteous. I know it was coming out. Confound you!

Lady Kitty. How petty you are, Hughie!

Porteous. Petty, be damned! I’ve told you over and over again that I will not be interfered with when I’m playing patience.

Lady Kitty. Don’t talk to me like that, Hughie.

Porteous. I shall talk to you as I please.

Lady Kitty. [Beginning to cry.] Oh, you brute! You brute! [She flings out of the room.]

Porteous. Oh, damn! now she’s going to cry.

[He shambles out into the garden. Champion-Cheney, Elizabeth and Teddie are left alone. There is a moment’s pause. Champion-Cheney looks from Teddie to Elizabeth, with an ironical smile.

C.-C. Upon my soul, they might be married. They frip so much.

Elizabeth. [Frigidly.] It’s been nice of you to come here so often since they arrived. It’s helped to make things easy.

C.-C. Irony? It’s a rhetorical form not much favoured in this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Elizabeth. What exactly are you getting at?

C.-C. How slangy the young women of the present day are! I suppose the fact that Arnold is a purist leads you to the contrary extravagance.

Elizabeth. Anyhow you know what I mean.

C.-C. [With a smile.] I have a dim, groping suspicion.

Elizabeth. You promised to keep away. Why did you come back the moment they arrived?

C.-C. Curiosity, my dear child. A surely pardonable curiosity.

Elizabeth. And since then you’ve been here all the time. You don’t generally favour us with so much of your company when you’re down at your cottage.

C.-C. I’ve been excessively amused.

Elizabeth. It has struck me that whenever they started fripping you took a malicious pleasure in goading them on.

C.-C. I don’t think there’s much love lost between them now, do you?

[Teddie is making as though to leave the room.

Elizabeth. Don’t go, Teddie.

C.-C. No, please don’t. I’m only staying a minute. We were talking about Lady Kitty just before she arrived. [To Elizabeth.] Do you remember? The pale, frail lady in black satin and old lace.

Elizabeth. [With a chuckle.] You are a devil, you know.

C.-C. Ah, well, he’s always had the reputation of being a humorist and a gentleman.

Elizabeth. Did you expect her to be like that, poor dear?

C.-C. My dear child, I hadn’t the vaguest idea. You were asking me the other day what she was like when she ran away. I didn’t tell you half. She was so gay and so natural. Who would have thought that animation would turn into such frivolity, and that charming impulsiveness lead to such a ridiculous affectation?

Elizabeth. It rather sets my nerves on edge to hear the way you talk of her.

C.-C. It’s the truth that sets your nerves on edge, not I.

Elizabeth. You loved her once. Have you no feeling for her at all?

C.-C. None. Why should I?

Elizabeth. She’s the mother of your son.

C.-C. My dear child, you have a charming nature, as simple, frank, and artless as hers was. Don’t let pure humbug obscure your common sense.

Elizabeth. We have no right to judge. She’s only been here two days. We know nothing about her.

C.-C. My dear, her soul is as thickly rouged as her face. She hasn’t an emotion that’s sincere. She’s tinsel. You think I’m a cruel, cynical old man. Why, when I think of what she was, if I didn’t laugh at what she has become I should cry.

Elizabeth. How do you know she wouldn’t be just the same now if she’d remained your wife? Do you think your influence would have had such a salutary effect on her?

C.-C. [Good-humouredly.] I like you when you’re bitter and rather insolent.

Elizabeth. D’you like me enough to answer my question?

C.-C. She was only twenty-seven when she went away. She might have become anything. She might have become the woman you expected her to be. There are very few of us who are strong enough to make circumstances serve us. We are the creatures of our environment. She’s a silly, worthless woman because she’s led a silly, worthless life.

Elizabeth. [Disturbed.] You’re horrible to-day.

C.-C. I don’t say it’s I who could have prevented her from becoming this ridiculous caricature of a pretty woman grown old. But life could. Here she would have had the friends fit to her station, and a decent activity, and worthy interests. Ask her what her life has been all these years among divorced women and kept women and the men who consort with them. There is no more lamentable pursuit than a life of pleasure.

Elizabeth. At all events she loved and she loved greatly. I have only pity and affection for her.

C.-C. And if she loved what d’you think she felt when she saw that she had ruined Hughie? Look at him. He was tight last night after dinner and tight the night before.

Elizabeth. I know.

C.-C. And she took it as a matter of course. How long do you suppose he’s been getting tight every night? Do you think he was like that thirty years ago? Can you imagine that that was a brilliant young man, whom everyone expected to be Prime Minister? Look at him now. A grumpy sodden old fellow with false teeth.

Elizabeth. You have false teeth, too.

C.-C. Yes, but damn it all, they fit. She’s ruined him and she knows she’s ruined him.

Elizabeth. [Looking at him suspiciously.] Why are you saying all this to me?

C.-C. Am I hurting your feelings?

Elizabeth. I think I’ve had enough for the present.

C.-C. I’ll go and have a look at the gold-fish. I want to see Arnold when he comes in. [Politely.] I’m afraid we’ve been boring Mr. Luton.

Teddie. Not at all.

C.-C. When are you going back to the F.M.S.?

Teddie. In about a month.

C.-C. I see.

[He goes out.

Elizabeth. I wonder what he has at the back of his head.

Teddie. D’you think he was talking at you?

Elizabeth. He’s as clever as a bagful of monkeys.

[There is a moment’s pause. Teddie hesitates a little and when he speaks it is in a different tone. He is grave and somewhat nervous.

Teddie. It seems very difficult to get a few minutes alone with you. I wonder if you’ve been making it difficult?

Elizabeth. I wanted to think.

Teddie. I’ve made up my mind to go away to-morrow.

Elizabeth. Why?

Teddie. I want you altogether or not at all.

Elizabeth. You’re so arbitrary.

Teddie. You said you — you said you cared for me.

Elizabeth. I do.

Teddie. Do you mind if we talk it over now?

Elizabeth. No.

Teddie. [Frowning.] It makes me feel rather shy and awkward. I’ve repeated to myself over and over again exactly what I want to say to you, and now all I’d prepared seems rather footling.

Elizabeth. I’m so afraid I’m going to cry.

Teddie. I feel it’s all so tremendously serious and I think we ought to keep emotion out of it. You’re rather emotional, aren’t you?

Elizabeth. [Half smiling and half in tears.] So are you for the matter of that.

Teddie. That’s why I wanted to have everything I meant to say to you cut and dried. I think it would be awfully unfair if I made love to you and all that sort of thing, and you were carried away. I wrote it all down and thought I’d send it you as a letter.

Elizabeth. Why didn’t you?

Teddie. I got the wind up. A letter seems so — so cold. You see, I love you so awfully.

Elizabeth. For goodness’ sake don’t say that.

Teddie. You mustn’t cry. Please don’t, or I shall go all to pieces.

Elizabeth. [Trying to smile.] I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean anything really. It’s only tears running out of my eyes.

Teddie. Our only chance is to be awfully matter-of-fact.

[He stops for a moment. He finds it quite difficult to control himself. He clears his throat. He frowns with annoyance at himself.

Elizabeth. What’s the matter?

Teddie. I’ve got a sort of lump in my throat. It is idiotic. I think I’ll have a cigarette.

[She watches him in silence while he lights a cigarette.

You see, I’ve never been in love with anyone before, not really. It’s knocked me endways. I don’t know how I can live without you now. . . . Does that old fool know I’m in love with you?

Elizabeth. I think so.

Teddie. When he was talking about Lady Kitty smashing up Lord Porteous’ career I thought there was something at the back of it.

Elizabeth. I think he was trying to persuade me not to smash up yours.

Teddie. I’m sure that’s very considerate of him, but I don’t happen to have one to smash. I wish I had. It’s the only time in my life I’ve wished I were a hell of a swell so that I could chuck it all and show you how much more you are to me than anything else in the world.

Elizabeth. [Affectionately.] You’re a dear old thing, Teddie.

Teddie. You know, I don’t really know how to make love, but if I did I couldn’t do it now because I just want to be absolutely practical.

Elizabeth. [Chaffing him.] I’m glad you don’t know how to make love. It would be almost more than I could bear.

Teddie. You see, I’m not at all romantic and that sort of thing. I’m just a common or garden business man. All this is so dreadfully serious and I think we ought to be sensible.

Elizabeth. [With a break in her voice.] You owl!

Teddie. No, Elizabeth, don’t say things like that to me. I want you to consider all the pros and cons, and my heart’s thumping against my chest, and you know I love you, I love you, I love you.

Elizabeth. [In a sigh of passion.] Oh, my precious!

Teddie. [Impatiently, but with himself, rather than with Elizabeth.] Don’t be idiotic, Elizabeth. I’m not going to tell you that I can’t live without you and a lot of muck like that. You know that you mean everything in the world to me. [Almost giving it up as a bad job.] Oh, my God!

Elizabeth. [Her voice faltering.] D’you think there’s anything you can say to me that I don’t know already?

Teddie. [Desperately.] But I haven’t said a single thing I wanted to. I’m a business man and I want to put it all in a business way, if you understand what I mean.

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] I don’t believe you’re a very good business man.

Teddie. [Sharply.] You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a first-rate business man, but somehow this is different. [Hopelessly.] I don’t know why it won’t go right.

Elizabeth. What are we going to do about it?

Teddie. You see, it’s not just because you’re awfully pretty that I love you. I’d love you just as much if you were old and ugly. It’s you I love, not what you look like. And it’s not only love; love be blowed! It’s that I like you so tremendously. I think you’re such a ripping good sort. I just want to be with you. I feel so jolly and happy just to think you’re there. I’m so awfully fond of you.

Elizabeth. [Laughing through her tears.] I don’t know if this is your idea of introducing a business proposition.

Teddie. Damn you, you won’t let me.

Elizabeth. You said “Damn you.”

Teddie. I meant it.

Elizabeth. Your voice sounded as if you meant it, you perfect duck!

Teddie. Really, Elizabeth, you’re intolerable.

Elizabeth. I’m doing nothing.

Teddie. Yes, you are, you’re putting me off my blow. What I want to say is perfectly simple. I’m a very ordinary business man.

Elizabeth. You’ve said that before.

Teddie. [Angrily.] Shut up. I haven’t got a bob besides what I earn. I’ve got no position. I’m nothing. You’re rich and you’re a big pot and you’ve got everything that anyone can want. It’s awful cheek my saying anything to you at all. But after all there’s only one thing that really matters in the world, and that’s love. I love you. Chuck all this, Elizabeth, and come to me.

Elizabeth. Are you cross with me?

Teddie. Furious.

Elizabeth. Darling!

Teddie. If you don’t want me tell me so at once and let me get out quickly.

Elizabeth. Teddie, nothing in the world matters anything to me but you. I’ll go wherever you take me. I love you.

Teddie. [All to pieces.] Oh, my God!

Elizabeth. Does it mean as much to you as that? Oh, Teddie!

Teddie. [Trying to control himself.] Don’t be a fool, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. It’s you’re the fool. You’re making me cry.

Teddie. You’re so damned emotional.

Elizabeth. Damned emotional yourself. I’m sure you’re a rotten business man.

Teddie. I don’t care what you think. You’ve made me so awfully happy. I say, what a lark life’s going to be!

Elizabeth. Teddie, you are an angel.

Teddie. Let’s get out quick. It’s no good wasting time. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. What?

Teddie. Nothing. I just like to say Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. You fool!

Teddie. I say, can you shoot?

Elizabeth. No.

Teddie. I’ll teach you. You don’t know how ripping it is to start out from your camp at dawn and travel through the jungle. And you’re so tired at night and the sky’s all starry. It’s a fair treat. Of course I didn’t want to say anything about all that till you’d decided. I’d made up my mind to be absolutely practical.

Elizabeth. [Chaffing him.] The only practical thing you said was that love is the only thing that really matters.

Teddie. [Happily.] Pull the other leg next time, will you? I should have to have one longer than the other.

Elizabeth. Isn’t it fun being in love with some one who’s in love with you?

Teddie. I say, I think I’d better clear out at once, don’t you? It seems rather rotten to stay on in — in this house.

Elizabeth. You can’t go to-night. There’s no train.

Teddie. I’ll go to-morrow. I’ll wait in London till you’re ready to join me.

Elizabeth. I’m not going to leave a note on the pincushion like Lady Kitty, you know. I’m going to tell Arnold.

Teddie. Are you? Don’t you think there’ll be an awful bother?

Elizabeth. I must face it. I should hate to be sly and deceitful.

Teddie. Well, then, let’s face it together.

Elizabeth. No, I’ll talk to Arnold by myself.

Teddie. You won’t let anyone influence you?

Elizabeth. No.

[He holds out his hand and she takes it. They look into one another’s eyes with grave, almost solemn affection. There is the sound outside of a car driving up.

Elizabeth. There’s the car. Arnold’s come back. I must go and bathe my eyes. I don’t want them to see I’ve been crying.

Teddie. All right. [As she is going.] Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. [Stopping.] What?

Teddie. Bless you.

Elizabeth. [Affectionately.] Idiot!

[She goes out of the door and Teddie through the French window into the garden. For an instant the room is empty. Arnold comes in. He sits down and takes some papers out of his despatch-case. Lady Kitty enters. He gets up.

Lady Kitty. I saw you come in. Oh, my dear, don’t get up. There’s no reason why you should be so dreadfully polite to me.

Arnold. I’ve just rung for a cup of tea.

Lady Kitty. Perhaps we shall have the chance of a little talk. We don’t seem to have had five minutes by ourselves. I want to make your acquaintance, you know.

Arnold. I should like you to know that it’s not by my wish that my father is here.

Lady Kitty. But I’m so interested to see him.

Arnold. I was afraid that you and Lord Porteous must find it embarrassing.

Lady Kitty. Oh, no. Hughie was his greatest friend. They were at Eton and Oxford together. I think your father has improved so much since I saw him last. He wasn’t good-looking as a young man, but now he’s quite handsome.

[The Footman brings in a tray on which are tea-things.

Lady Kitty. Shall I pour it out for you?

Arnold. Thank you very much.

Lady Kitty. Do you take sugar?

Arnold. No. I gave it up during the war.

Lady Kitty. So wise of you. It’s so bad for the figure. Besides being patriotic, of course. Isn’t it absurd that I should ask my son if he takes sugar or not? Life is really very quaint. Sad, of course, but oh, so quaint! Often I lie in bed at night and have a good laugh to myself as I think how quaint life is.

Arnold. I’m afraid I’m a very serious person.

Lady Kitty. How old are you now, Arnold?

Arnold. Thirty-five.

Lady Kitty. Are you really? Of course, I was a child when I married your father.

Arnold. Really. He always told me you were twenty-two.

Lady Kitty. Oh, what nonsense! Why, I was married out of the nursery. I put my hair up for the first time on my wedding-day.

Arnold. Where is Lord Porteous?

Lady Kitty. My dear, it sounds too absurd to hear you call him Lord Porteous. Why don’t you call him — Uncle Hughie?

Arnold. He doesn’t happen to be my uncle.

Lady Kitty. No, but he’s your godfather. You know, I’m sure you’ll like him when you know him better. I’m so hoping that you and Elizabeth will come and stay with us in Florence. I simply adore Elizabeth. She’s too beautiful.

Arnold. Her hair is very pretty.

Lady Kitty. It’s not touched up, is it?

Arnold. Oh, no.

Lady Kitty. I just wondered. It’s rather a coincidence that her hair should be the same colour as mine. I suppose it shows that your father and you are attracted by just the same thing. So interesting, heredity, isn’t it?

Arnold. Very.

Lady Kitty. Of course, since I joined the Catholic Church I don’t believe in it any more. Darwin and all that sort of thing. Too dreadful. Wicked, you know. Besides, it’s not very good form, is it?

[Champion-Cheney comes in from the garden.

C.-C. Do I intrude?

Lady Kitty. Come in, Clive. Arnold and I have been having such a wonderful heart-to-heart talk.

C.-C. Very nice.

Arnold. Father, I stepped in for a moment at the Harveys’ on my way back. It’s simply criminal what they’re doing with that house.

C.-C. What are they doing?

Arnold. It’s an almost perfect Georgian house and they’ve got a lot of dreadful Victorian furniture. I gave them my ideas on the subject, but it’s quite hopeless. They said they were attached to their furniture.

C.-C. Arnold should have been an interior decorator.

Lady Kitty. He has wonderful taste. He gets that from me.

Arnold. I suppose I have a certain flair. I have a passion for decorating houses.

Lady Kitty. You’ve made this one charming.

C.-C. D’you remember, we just had chintzes and comfortable chairs when we lived here, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. Perfectly hideous, wasn’t it?

C.-C. In those days gentlemen and ladies were not expected to have taste.

Arnold. You know, I’ve been looking at this chair again. Since Lord Porteous said the legs weren’t right I’ve been very uneasy.

Lady Kitty. He only said that because he was in a bad temper.

C.-C. His temper seems to me very short these days, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. Oh, it is.

Arnold. You feel he knows what he’s talking about. I gave seventy-five pounds for that chair. I’m very seldom taken in. I always think if a thing’s right you feel it.

C.-C. Well, don’t let it disturb your night’s rest.

Arnold. But, my dear father, that’s just what it does. I had a most horrible dream about it last night.

Lady Kitty. Here is Hughie.

Arnold. I’m going to fetch a book I have on Old English furniture. There’s an illustration of a chair which is almost identical with this one.

[Porteous comes in.

Porteous. Quite a family gathering, by George!

C.-C. I was thinking just now we’d make a very pleasing picture of a typical English home.

Arnold. I’ll be back in five minutes. There’s something I want to show you, Lord Porteous.

[He goes out.

C.-C. Would you like to play piquet with me, Hughie?

Porteous. Not particularly.

C.-C. You were never much of a piquet player, were you?

Porteous. My dear Clive, you people don’t know what piquet is in England.

C.-C. Let’s have a game then. You may make money.

Porteous. I don’t want to play with you.

Lady Kitty. I don’t know why not, Hughie.

Porteous. Let me tell you that I don’t like your manner.

C.-C. I’m sorry for that. I’m afraid I can’t offer to change it at my age.

Porteous. I don’t know what you want to be hanging around here for.

C.-C. A natural attachment to my home.

Porteous. If you’d had any tact you’d have kept out of the way while we were here.

C.-C. My dear Hughie, I don’t understand your attitude at all. If I’m willing to let bygones be bygones why should you object?

Porteous. Damn it all, they’re not bygones.

C.-C. After all, I am the injured party.

Porteous. How the devil are you the injured party?

C.-C. Well, you did run away with my wife, didn’t you?

Lady Kitty. Now, don’t let’s go into ancient history. I can’t see why we shouldn’t all be friends.

Porteous. I beg you not to interfere, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. I’m very fond of Clive.

Porteous. You never cared two straws for Clive. You only say that to irritate me.

Lady Kitty. Not at all. I don’t see why he shouldn’t come and stay with us.

C.-C. I’d love to. I think Florence in spring-time is delightful. Have you central heating?

Porteous. I never liked you, I don’t like you now, and I never shall like you.

C.-C. How very unfortunate! because I liked you, I like you now, and I shall continue to like you.

Lady Kitty. There’s something very nice about you, Clive.

Porteous. If you think that, why the devil did you leave him?

Lady Kitty. Are you going to reproach me because I loved you? How utterly, utterly, utterly detestable you are!

C.-C. Now, now, don’t quarrel with one another.

Lady Kitty. It’s all his fault. I’m the easiest person in the world to live with. But really he’d try the patience of a saint.

C.-C. Come, come, don’t get upset, Kitty. When two people live together there must be a certain amount of give and take.

Porteous. I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.

C.-C. It hasn’t escaped my observation that you are a little inclined to frip. Many couples are. I think it’s a pity.

Porteous. Would you have the very great kindness to mind your own business?

Lady Kitty. It is his business. He naturally wants me to be happy.

C.-C. I have the very greatest affection for Kitty.

Porteous. Then why the devil didn’t you look after her properly?

C.-C. My dear Hughie, you were my greatest friend. I trusted you. It may have been rash.

Porteous. It was inexcusable.

Lady Kitty. I don’t know what you mean by that, Hughie.

Porteous. Don’t, don’t, don’t try and bully me, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. Oh, I know what you mean.

Porteous. Then why the devil did you say you didn’t?

Lady Kitty. When I think that I sacrificed everything for that man! And for thirty years I’ve had to live in a filthy marble palace with no sanitary conveniences.

C.-C. D’you mean to say you haven’t got a bathroom?

Lady Kitty. I’ve had to wash in a tub.

C.-C. My poor Kitty, how you’ve suffered!

Porteous. Really, Kitty, I’m sick of hearing of the sacrifices you made. I suppose you think I sacrificed nothing. I should have been Prime Minister by now if it hadn’t been for you.

Lady Kitty. Nonsense!

Porteous. What do you mean by that? Everyone said I should be Prime Minister. Shouldn’t I have been Prime Minister, Clive?

C.-C. It was certainly the general expectation.

Porteous. I was the most promising young man of my day. I was bound to get a seat in the Cabinet at the next election.

Lady Kitty. They’d have found you out just as I’ve found you out. I’m sick of hearing that I ruined your career. You never had a career to ruin. Prime Minister! You haven’t the brain. You haven’t the character.

C.-C. Cheek, push, and a gift of the gab will serve very well instead, you know.

Lady Kitty. Besides, in politics it’s not the men that matter. It’s the women at the back of them. I could have made Clive a Cabinet Minister if I’d wanted to.

Porteous. Clive?

Lady Kitty. With my beauty, my charm, my force of character, my wit, I could have done anything.

Porteous. Clive was nothing but my political secretary. When I was Prime Minister I might have made him Governor of some Colony or other. Western Australia, say. Out of pure kindliness.

Lady Kitty. [With flashing eyes.] D’you think I would have buried myself in Western Australia? With my beauty? My charm?

Porteous. Or Barbadoes, perhaps.

Lady Kitty. [Furiously.] Barbadoes! Barbadoes can go to — Barbadoes.

Porteous. That’s all you’d have got.

Lady Kitty. Nonsense! I’d have India.

Porteous. I would never have given you India.

Lady Kitty. You would have given me India.

Porteous. I tell you I wouldn’t.

Lady Kitty. The King would have given me India. The nation would have insisted on my having India. I would have been a vice-reine or nothing.

Porteous. I tell you that as long as the interests of the British Empire — Damn it all, my teeth are coming out!

[He hurries from the room.

Lady Kitty. It’s too much. I can’t bear it any more. I’ve put up with him for thirty years and now I’m at the end of my tether.

C.-C. Calm yourself, my dear Kitty.

Lady Kitty. I won’t listen to a word. I’ve quite made up my mind. It’s finished, finished, finished. [With a change of tone.] I was so touched when I heard that you never lived in this house again after I left it.

C.-C. The cuckoos have always been very plentiful. Their note has a personal application which, I must say, I have found extremely offensive.

Lady Kitty. When I saw that you didn’t marry again I couldn’t help thinking that you still loved me.

C.-C. I am one of the few men I know who is able to profit by experience.

Lady Kitty. In the eyes of the Church I am still your wife. The Church is so wise. It knows that in the end a woman always comes back to her first love. Clive, I am willing to return to you.

C.-C. My dear Kitty, I couldn’t take advantage of your momentary vexation with Hughie to let you take a step which I know you would bitterly regret.

Lady Kitty. You’ve waited for me a long time. For Arnold’s sake.

C.-C. Do you think we really need bother about Arnold? In the last thirty years he’s had time to grow used to the situation.

Lady Kitty. [With a little smile.] I think I’ve sown my wild oats, Clive.

C.-C. I haven’t. I was a good young man, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. I know.

C.-C. And I’m very glad, because it has enabled me to be a wicked old one.

Lady Kitty. I beg your pardon.

[Arnold comes in with a large book in his hand.

Arnold. I say, I’ve found the book I was hunting for. Oh! isn’t Lord Porteous here?

Lady Kitty. One moment, Arnold. Your father and I are busy.

Arnold. I’m so sorry.

[He goes out into the garden.

Lady Kitty. Explain yourself, Clive.

C.-C. When you ran away from me, Kitty, I was sore and angry and miserable. But above all I felt a fool.

Lady Kitty. Men are so vain.

C.-C. But I was a student of history, and presently I reflected that I shared my misfortune with very nearly all the greatest men.

Lady Kitty. I’m a great reader myself. It has always struck me as peculiar.

C.-C. The explanation is very simple. Women dislike intelligence, and when they find it in their husbands they revenge themselves on them in the only way they can, by making them — well, what you made me.

Lady Kitty. It’s ingenious. It may be true.

C.-C. I felt I had done my duty by society and I determined to devote the rest of my life to my own entertainment. The House of Commons had always bored me excessively and the scandal of our divorce gave me an opportunity to resign my seat. I have been relieved to find that the country got on perfectly well without me.

Lady Kitty. But has love never entered your life?

C.-C. Tell me frankly, Kitty, don’t you think people make a lot of unnecessary fuss about love?

Lady Kitty. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

C.-C. You’re incorrigible. Do you really think it was worth sacrificing so much for?

Lady Kitty. My dear Clive, I don’t mind telling you that if I had my time over again I should be unfaithful to you, but I should not leave you.

C.-C. For some years I was notoriously the prey of a secret sorrow. But I found so many charming creatures who were anxious to console that in the end it grew rather fatiguing. Out of regard to my health I ceased to frequent the drawing-rooms of Mayfair.

Lady Kitty. And since then?

C.-C. Since then I have allowed myself the luxury of assisting financially a succession of dear little things, in a somewhat humble sphere, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five.

Lady Kitty. I cannot understand the infatuation of men for young girls. I think they’re so dull.

C.-C. It’s a matter of taste. I love old wine, old friends and old books, but I like young women. On their twenty-fifth birthday I give them a diamond ring and tell them they must no longer waste their youth and beauty on an old fogey like me. We have a most affecting scene, my technique on these occasions is perfect, and then I start all over again.

Lady Kitty. You’re a wicked old man, Clive.

C.-C. That’s what I told you. But, by George! I’m a happy one.

Lady Kitty. There’s only one course open to me now.

C.-C. What is that?

Lady Kitty. [With a flashing smile.] To go and dress for dinner.

C.-C. Capital. I will follow your example.

[As Lady Kitty goes out Elizabeth comes in.

Elizabeth. Where is Arnold?

C.-C. He’s on the terrace. I’ll call him.

Elizabeth. Don’t bother.

C.-C. I was just strolling along to my cottage to put on a dinner jacket. [As he goes out.] Arnold.

[Exit C.-C.

Arnold. Hulloa! [He comes in.] Oh, Elizabeth, I’ve found an illustration here of a chair which is almost identical with mine. It’s dated 1750. Look!

Elizabeth. That’s very interesting.

Arnold. I want to show it to Porteous. [Moving a chair which has been misplaced.] You know, it does exasperate me the way people will not leave things alone. I no sooner put a thing in its place than somebody moves it.

Elizabeth. It must be maddening for you.

Arnold. It is. You are the worst offender. I can’t think why you don’t take the pride that I do in the house. After all, it’s one of the show places in the county.

Elizabeth. I’m afraid you find me very unsatisfactory.

Arnold. [Good-humouredly.] I don’t know about that. But my two subjects are politics and decoration. I should be a perfect fool if I didn’t see that you don’t care two straws about either.

Elizabeth. We haven’t very much in common, Arnold, have we?

Arnold. I don’t think you can blame me for that.

Elizabeth. I don’t. I blame you for nothing. I have no fault to find with you.

Arnold. [Surprised at her significant tone.] Good gracious me! what’s the meaning of all this?

Elizabeth. Well, I don’t think there’s any object in beating about the bush. I want you to let me go.

Arnold. Go where?

Elizabeth. Away. For always.

Arnold. My dear child, what are you talking about?

Elizabeth. I want to be free.

Arnold. [Amused rather than disconcerted.] Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I daresay you’re run down and want a change. I’ll take you over to Paris for a fortnight if you like.

Elizabeth. I shouldn’t have spoken to you if I hadn’t quite made up my mind. We’ve been married for three years and I don’t think it’s been a great success. I’m frankly bored by the life you want me to lead.

Arnold. Well, if you’ll allow me to say so, the fault is yours. We lead a very distinguished, useful life. We know a lot of extremely nice people.

Elizabeth. I’m quite willing to allow that the fault is mine. But how does that make it any better? I’m only twenty-five. If I’ve made a mistake I have time to correct it.

Arnold. I can’t bring myself to take you very seriously.

Elizabeth. You see, I don’t love you.

Arnold. Well, I’m awfully sorry. But you weren’t obliged to marry me. You’ve made your bed and I’m afraid you must lie on it.

Elizabeth. That’s one of the falsest proverbs in the English language. Why should you lie on the bed you’ve made if you don’t want to? There’s always the floor.

Arnold. For goodness’ sake don’t be funny, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. I’ve quite made up my mind to leave you, Arnold.

Arnold. Come, come, Elizabeth, you must be sensible. You haven’t any reason to leave me.

Elizabeth. Why should you wish to keep a woman tied to you who wants to be free?

Arnold. I happen to be in love with you.

Elizabeth. You might have said that before.

Arnold. I thought you’d take it for granted. You can’t expect a man to go on making love to his wife after three years. I’m very busy. I’m awfully keen on politics and I’ve worked like a dog to make this house a thing of beauty. After all, a man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing. I fell in love with you the first time I saw you and I’ve been in love ever since.

Elizabeth. I’m sorry, but if you’re not in love with a man his love doesn’t mean very much to you.

Arnold. It’s so ungrateful. I’ve done everything in the world for you.

Elizabeth. You’ve been very kind to me. But you’ve asked me to lead a life I don’t like and that I’m not suited for. I’m awfully sorry to cause you pain, but now you must let me go.

Arnold. Nonsense! I’m a good deal older than you are and I think I have a little more sense. In your interests as well as in mine I’m not going to do anything of the sort.

Elizabeth. [With a smile.] How can you prevent me? You can’t keep me under lock and key.

Arnold. Please don’t talk to me as if I were a foolish child. You’re my wife and you’re going to remain my wife.

Elizabeth. What sort of a life do you think we should lead? Do you think there’d be any more happiness for you than for me?

Arnold. But what is it precisely that you suggest?

Elizabeth. Well, I want you to let me divorce you.

Arnold. [Astounded.] Me? Thank you very much. Are you under the impression I’m going to sacrifice my career for a whim of yours?

Elizabeth. How will it do that?

Arnold. My seat’s wobbly enough as it is. Do you think I’d be able to hold it if I were in a divorce case? Even if it were a put-up job, as most divorces are nowadays, it would damn me.

Elizabeth. It’s rather hard on a woman to be divorced.

Arnold. [With sudden suspicion.] What do you mean by that? Are you in love with some one?

Elizabeth. Yes.

Arnold. Who?

Elizabeth. Teddie Luton.

[He is astonished for a moment, then bursts into a laugh.

Arnold. My poor child, how can you be so ridiculous? Why, he hasn’t a bob. He’s a perfectly commonplace young man. It’s so absurd I can’t even be angry with you.

Elizabeth. I’ve fallen desperately in love with him, Arnold.

Arnold. Well, you’d better fall desperately out.

Elizabeth. He wants to marry me.

Arnold. I daresay he does. He can go to hell.

Elizabeth. It’s no good talking like that.

Arnold. Is he your lover?

Elizabeth. No, certainly not.

Arnold. It shows that he’s a mean skunk to take advantage of my hospitality to make love to you.

Elizabeth. He’s never even kissed me.

Arnold. I’d try telling that to the horse marines if I were you.

Elizabeth. It’s because I wanted to do nothing shabby that I told you straight out how things were.

Arnold. How long have you been thinking of this?

Elizabeth. I’ve been in love with Teddie ever since I knew him.

Arnold. And you never thought of me at all, I suppose.

Elizabeth. Oh, yes, I did. I was miserable. But I can’t help myself. I wish I loved you, but I don’t.

Arnold. I recommend you to think very carefully before you do anything foolish.

Elizabeth. I have thought very carefully.

Arnold. By God! I don’t know why I don’t give you a sound hiding. I’m not sure if that wouldn’t be the best thing to bring you to your senses.

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold, don’t take it like that.

Arnold. How do you expect me to take it? You come to me quite calmly and say: “I’ve had enough of you. We’ve been married three years and I think I’d like to marry somebody else now. Shall I break up your home? What a bore for you! Do you mind my divorcing you? It’ll smash up your career, will it? What a pity!” Oh, no, my girl, I may be a fool, but I’m not a damned fool.

Elizabeth. Teddie is leaving here by the first train to-morrow. I warn you that I mean to join him as soon as he can make the necessary arrangements.

Arnold. Where is he?

Elizabeth. I don’t know. I suppose he’s in his room.

[Arnold goes to the door and calls.

Arnold. George!

[For a moment he walks up and down the room impatiently. Elizabeth watches him. The Footman comes in.

Footman. Yes, sir.

Arnold. Tell Mr. Luton to come here at once.

Elizabeth. Ask Mr. Luton if he wouldn’t mind coming here for a moment.

Footman. Very good, madam.

[Exit Footman.

Elizabeth. What are you going to say to him?

Arnold. That’s my business.

Elizabeth. I wouldn’t make a scene if I were you.

Arnold. I’m not going to make a scene.

[They wait in silence.

Why did you insist on my mother coming here?

Elizabeth. It seemed to me rather absurd to take up the attitude that I should be contaminated by her when . . .

Arnold. [Interrupting.] When you were proposing to do exactly the same thing. Well, now you’ve seen her what do you think of her? Do you think it’s been a success? Is that the sort of woman a man would like his mother to be?

Elizabeth. I’ve been ashamed. I’ve been so sorry. It all seemed dreadful and horrible. This morning I happened to notice a rose in the garden. It was all overblown and bedraggled. It looked like a painted old woman. And I remembered that I’d looked at it a day or two ago. It was lovely then, fresh and blooming and fragrant. It may be hideous now, but that doesn’t take away from the beauty it had once. That was real.

Arnold. Poetry, by God! As if this were the moment for poetry!

[Teddie comes in. He has changed into a dinner jacket.

Teddie. [To Elizabeth.] Did you want me?

Arnold. I sent for you.

[Teddie looks from Arnold to Elizabeth. He sees that something has happened.

When would it be convenient for you to leave this house?

Teddie. I was proposing to go to-morrow morning. But I can very well go at once if you like.

Arnold. I do like.

Teddie. Very well. Is there anything else you wish to say to me?

Arnold. Do you think it was a very honourable thing to come down here and make love to my wife?

Teddie. No, I don’t. I haven’t been very happy about it. That’s why I wanted to go away.

Arnold. Upon my word you’re cool.

Teddie. I’m afraid it’s no good saying I’m sorry and that sort of thing. You know what the situation is.

Arnold. Is it true that you want to marry Elizabeth?

Teddie. Yes. I should like to marry her as soon as ever I can.

Arnold. Have you thought of me at all? Has it struck you that you’re destroying my home and breaking up my happiness?

Teddie. I don’t see how there could be much happiness for you if Elizabeth doesn’t care for you.

Arnold. Let me tell you that I refuse to have my home broken up by a twopenny-halfpenny adventurer who takes advantage of a foolish woman. I refuse to allow myself to be divorced. I can’t prevent my wife from going off with you if she’s determined to make a damned fool of herself, but this I tell you: nothing will induce me to divorce her.

Elizabeth. Arnold, that would be monstrous.

Teddie. We could force you.

Arnold. How?

Teddie. If we went away together openly you’d have to bring an action.

Arnold. Twenty-four hours after you leave this house I shall go down to Brighton with a chorus-girl. And neither you nor I will be able to get a divorce. We’ve had enough divorces in our family. And now get out, get out, get out!

[Teddie looks uncertainly at Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. [With a little smile.] Don’t bother about me. I shall be all right.

Arnold. Get out! Get out!

END OF THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

The Scene is the same as in the preceding Acts.

It is the night of the same day as that on which takes place the action of the second Act.

Champion-Cheney and Arnold, both in dinner jackets, are discovered. Champion-Cheney is seated. Arnold walks restlessly up and down the room.

C.-C. I think, if you’ll follow my advice to the letter, you’ll probably work the trick.

Arnold. I don’t like it, you know. It’s against all my principles.

C.-C. My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can’t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Arnold. But supposing it doesn’t come off? Women are incalculable.

C.-C. Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence.

Arnold. I never know whether you’re a humorist or a cynic, father.

C.-C. I’m neither, my dear boy; I’m merely a very truthful man. But people are so unused to the truth that they’re apt to mistake it for a joke or a sneer.

Arnold. [Irritably.] It seems so unfair that this should happen to me.

C.-C. Keep your head, my boy, and do what I tell you.

[Lady Kitty and Elizabeth come in. Lady Kitty is in a gorgeous evening gown.

Elizabeth. Where is Lord Porteous?

C.-C. He’s on the terrace. He’s smoking a cigar. [Going to window.] Hughie!

[Porteous comes in.

Porteous. [With a grunt.] Yes? Where’s Mrs. Shenstone?

Elizabeth. Oh, she had a headache. She’s gone to bed.

[When Porteous comes in Lady Kitty with a very haughty air purses her lips and takes up an illustrated paper. Porteous gives her an irritated look, takes another illustrated paper and sits himself down at the other end of the room. They are not on speaking terms.

C.-C. Arnold and I have just been down to my cottage.

Elizabeth. I wondered where you’d gone.

C.-C. I came across an old photograph album this afternoon. I meant to bring it along before dinner, but I forgot, so we went and fetched it.

Elizabeth. Oh, do let me see it! I love old photographs.

[He gives her the album, and she, sitting down, puts it on her knees and begins to turn over the pages. He stands over her. Lady Kitty and Porteous take surreptitious glances at one another.

C.-C. I thought it might amuse you to see what pretty women looked like five-and-thirty years ago. That was the day of beautiful women.

Elizabeth. Do you think they were more beautiful then than they are now?

C.-C. Oh, much. Now you see lots of pretty little things, but very few beautiful women.

Elizabeth. Aren’t their clothes funny?

C.-C. [Pointing to a photograph.] That’s Mrs. Langtry.

Elizabeth. She has a lovely nose.

C.-C. She was the most wonderful thing you ever saw. Dowagers used to jump on chairs in order to get a good look at her when she came into a drawing-room. I was riding with her once, and we had to have the gates of the livery stable closed when she was getting on her horse because the crowd was so great.

Elizabeth. And who’s that?

C.-C. Lady Lonsdale. That’s Lady Dudley.

Elizabeth. This is an actress, isn’t it?

C.-C. It is, indeed. Ellen Terry. By George! how I loved that woman!

Elizabeth. [With a smile.] Dear Ellen Terry!

C.-C. That’s Bwabs. I never saw a smarter man in my life. And Oliver Montagu. Henry Manners with his eye-glass.

Elizabeth. Nice-looking, isn’t he? And this?

C.-C. That’s Mary Anderson. I wish you could have seen her in “A Winter’s Tale.” Her beauty just took your breath away. And look! There’s Lady Randolph. Bernal Osborne — the wittiest man I ever knew.

Elizabeth. I think it’s too sweet. I love their absurd bustles and those tight sleeves.

C.-C. What figures they had! In those days a woman wasn’t supposed to be as thin as a rail and as flat as a pancake.

Elizabeth. Oh, but aren’t they laced in? How could they bear it?

C.-C. They didn’t play golf then, and nonsense like that, you know. They hunted, in a tall hat and a long black habit, and they were very gracious and charitable to the poor in the village.

Elizabeth. Did the poor like it?

C.-C. They had a very thin time if they didn’t. When they were in London they drove in the Park every afternoon, and they went to ten-course dinners, where they never met anybody they didn’t know. And they had their box at the opera when Patti was singing or Madame Albani.

Elizabeth. Oh, what a lovely little thing! Who on earth is that?

C.-C. That?

Elizabeth. She looks so fragile, like a piece of exquisite china, with all those furs on and her face up against her muff, and the snow falling.

C.-C. Yes, there was quite a rage at that time for being taken in an artificial snowstorm.

Elizabeth. What a sweet smile, so roguish and frank, and debonair! Oh, I wish I looked like that! Do tell me who it is!

C.-C. Don’t you know?

Elizabeth. No.

C.-C. Why — it’s Kitty.

Elizabeth. Lady Kitty! [To Lady Kitty.] Oh, my dear, do look! It’s too ravishing. [She takes the album over to her impulsively.] Why didn’t you tell me you looked like that? Everybody must have been in love with you.

[Lady Kitty takes the album and looks at it. Then she lets it slip from her hands and covers her face with her hands. She is crying.

[In consternation.] My dear, what’s the matter? Oh, what have I done? I’m so sorry.

Lady Kitty. Don’t, don’t talk to me. Leave me alone. It’s stupid of me.

[Elizabeth looks at her for a moment perplexed, then, turning round, slips her arm in Champion-Cheney’s and leads him out on to the terrace.

Elizabeth. [As they are going, in a whisper.] Did you do that on purpose?

[Porteous gets up and goes over to Lady Kitty. He puts his hand on her shoulder. They remain thus for a little while.

Porteous. I’m afraid I was very rude to you before dinner, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. [Taking his hand which is on her shoulder.] It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I was very exasperating.

Porteous. I didn’t mean what I said, you know.

Lady Kitty. Neither did I.

Porteous. Of course I know that I’d never have been Prime Minister.

Lady Kitty. How can you talk such nonsense, Hughie? No one would have had a chance if you’d remained in politics.

Porteous. I haven’t the character.

Lady Kitty. You have more character than anyone I’ve ever met.

Porteous. Besides, I don’t know that I much wanted to be Prime Minister.

Lady Kitty. Oh, but I should have been so proud of you. Of course you’d have been Prime Minister.

Porteous. I’d have given you India, you know. I think it would have been a very popular appointment.

Lady Kitty. I don’t care twopence about India. I’d have been quite content with Western Australia.

Porteous. My dear, you don’t think I’d have let you bury yourself in Western Australia?

Lady Kitty. Or Barbadoes.

Porteous. Never. It sounds like a cure for flat feet. I’d have kept you in London.

[He picks up the album and is about to look at the photograph of Lady Kitty. She puts her hand over it.

Lady Kitty. No, don’t look.

[He takes her hand away.

Porteous. Don’t be so silly.

Lady Kitty. Isn’t it hateful to grow old?

Porteous. You know, you haven’t changed much.

Lady Kitty. [Enchanted.] Oh, Hughie, how can you talk such nonsense?

Porteous. Of course you’re a little more mature, but that’s all. A woman’s all the better for being rather mature.

Lady Kitty. Do you really think that?

Porteous. Upon my soul I do.

Lady Kitty. You’re not saying it just to please me?

Porteous. No, no.

Lady Kitty. Let me look at the photograph again.

[She takes the album and looks at the photograph complacently.

The fact is, if your bones are good, age doesn’t really matter. You’ll always be beautiful.

Porteous. [With a little smile, almost as if he were talking to a child.] It was silly of you to cry.

Lady Kitty. It hasn’t made my eyelashes run, has it?

Porteous. Not a bit.

Lady Kitty. It’s very good stuff I use now. They don’t stick together either.

Porteous. Look here, Kitty, how much longer do you want to stay here?

Lady Kitty. Oh, I’m quite ready to go whenever you like.

Porteous. Clive gets on my nerves. I don’t like the way he keeps hanging about you.

Lady Kitty. [Surprised, rather amused, and delighted.] Hughie, you don’t mean to say you’re jealous of poor Clive?

Porteous. Of course I’m not jealous of him, but he does look at you in a way that I can’t help thinking rather objectionable.

Lady Kitty. Hughie, you may throw me downstairs like Amy Robsart; you may drag me about the floor by the hair of my head; I don’t care, you’re jealous. I shall never grow old.

Porteous. Damn it all, the man was your husband.

Lady Kitty. My dear Hughie, he never had your style. Why, the moment you come into a room everyone looks and says: “Who the devil is that?”

Porteous. What? You think that, do you? Well, I daresay there’s something in what you say. These damned Radicals can say what they like, but, by God, Kitty! when a man’s a gentleman — well, damn it all, you know what I mean.

Lady Kitty. I think Clive has degenerated dreadfully since we left him.

Porteous. What do you say to making a bee-line for Italy and going to San Michele?

Lady Kitty. Oh, Hughie! It’s years since we were there.

Porteous. Wouldn’t you like to see it again — just once more?

Lady Kitty. Do you remember the first time we went? It was the most heavenly place I’d ever seen. We’d only left England a month, and I said I’d like to spend all my life there.

Porteous. Of course I remember. And in a fortnight it was yours, lock, stock and barrel.

Lady Kitty. We were very happy there, Hughie.

Porteous. Let’s go back once more.

Lady Kitty. I daren’t. It must be all peopled with the ghosts of our past. One should never go again to a place where one has been happy. It would break my heart.

Porteous. Do you remember how we used to sit on the terrace of the old castle and look at the Adriatic? We might have been the only people in the world, you and I, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. [Tragically.] And we thought our love would last for ever.

[Enter Champion-Cheney.

Porteous. Is there any chance of bridge this evening?

C.-C. I don’t think we can make up a four.

Porteous. What a nuisance that boy went away like that! He wasn’t a bad player.

C.-C. Teddie Luton?

Lady Kitty. I think it was very funny his going without saying good-bye to anyone.

C.-C. The young men of the present day are very casual.

Porteous. I thought there was no train in the evening.

C.-C. There isn’t. The last train leaves at 5.45.

Porteous. How did he go then?

C.-C. He went.

Porteous. Damned selfish I call it.

Lady Kitty. [Intrigued.] Why did he go, Clive?

[Champion-Cheney looks at her for a moment reflectively.

C.-C. I have something very grave to say to you. Elizabeth wants to leave Arnold.

Lady Kitty. Clive! What on earth for?

C.-C. She’s in love with Teddie Luton. That’s why he went. The men of my family are really very unfortunate.

Porteous. Does she want to run away with him?

Lady Kitty. [With consternation.] My dear, what’s to be done?

C.-C. I think you can do a great deal.

Lady Kitty. I? What?

C.-C. Tell her, tell her what it means.

[He looks at her fixedly. She stares at him.

Lady Kitty. Oh, no, no!

C.-C. She’s a child. Not for Arnold’s sake. For her sake. You must.

Lady Kitty. You don’t know what you’re asking.

C.-C. Yes, I do.

Lady Kitty. Hughie, what shall I do?

Porteous. Do what you like. I shall never blame you for anything.

[The Footman comes in with a letter on a salver. He hesitates on seeing that Elizabeth is not in the room.

C.-C. What is it?

Footman. I was looking for Mrs. Champion-Cheney, sir.

C.-C. She’s not here. Is that a letter?

Footman. Yes, sir. It’s just been sent up from the “Champion Arms.”

C.-C. Leave it. I’ll give it to Mrs. Cheney.

Footman. Very good, sir.

[He brings the tray to Clive, who takes the letter. The Footman goes out.

Porteous. Is the “Champion Arms” the local pub?

C.-C. [Looking at the letter.] It’s by way of being a hotel, but I never heard of anyone staying there.

Lady Kitty. If there was no train I suppose he had to go there.

C.-C. Great minds. I wonder what he has to write about! [He goes to the door leading on to the garden.] Elizabeth!

Elizabeth. [Outside.] Yes.

C.-C. Here’s a note for you.

[There is silence. They wait for Elizabeth to come. She enters.

Elizabeth. It’s lovely in the garden to-night.

C.-C. They’ve just sent this up from the “Champion Arms.”

Elizabeth. Thank you.

[Without embarrassment she opens the letter. They watch her while she reads it. It covers three pages. She puts it away in her bag.

Lady Kitty. Hughie, I wish you’d fetch me a cloak. I’d like to take a little stroll in the garden, but after thirty years in Italy I find these English summers rather chilly.

[Without a word Porteous goes out. Elizabeth is lost in thought.

I want to talk to Elizabeth, Clive.

C.-C. I’ll leave you.

[He goes out.

Lady Kitty. What does he say?

Elizabeth. Who?

Lady Kitty. Mr. Luton.

Elizabeth. [Gives a little start. Then she looks at Lady Kitty.] They’ve told you?

Lady Kitty. Yes. And now they have I think I knew it all along.

Elizabeth. I don’t expect you to have much sympathy for me. Arnold is your son.

Lady Kitty. So pitifully little.

Elizabeth. I’m not suited for this sort of existence. Arnold wants me to take what he calls my place in Society. Oh, I get so bored with those parties in London. All those middle-aged painted women, in beautiful clothes, lolloping round ball-rooms with rather old young men. And the endless luncheons where they gossip about so-and-so’s love affairs.

Lady Kitty. Are you very much in love with Mr. Luton?

Elizabeth. I love him with all my heart.

Lady Kitty. And he?

Elizabeth. He’s never cared for anyone but me. He never will.

Lady Kitty. Will Arnold let you divorce him?

Elizabeth. No, he won’t hear of it. He refuses even to divorce me.

Lady Kitty. Why?

Elizabeth. He thinks a scandal will revive all the old gossip.

Lady Kitty. Oh, my poor child!

Elizabeth. It can’t be helped. I’m quite willing to accept the consequences.

Lady Kitty. You don’t know what it is to have a man tied to you only by his honour. When married people don’t get on they can separate, but if they’re not married it’s impossible. It’s a tie that only death can sever.

Elizabeth. If Teddie stopped caring for me I shouldn’t want him to stay with me for five minutes.

Lady Kitty. One says that when one’s sure of a man’s love, but when one isn’t any more — oh, it’s so different. In those circumstances one’s got to keep a man’s love. It’s the only thing one has.

Elizabeth. I’m a human being. I can stand on my own feet.

Lady Kitty. Have you any money of your own?

Elizabeth. None.

Lady Kitty. Then how can you stand on your own feet? You think I’m a silly, frivolous woman, but I’ve learned something in a bitter school. They can make what laws they like, they can give us the suffrage, but when you come down to bedrock it’s the man who pays the piper who calls the tune. Woman will only be the equal of man when she earns her living in the same way that he does.

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] It sounds rather funny to hear you talk like that.

Lady Kitty. A cook who marries a butler can snap her fingers in his face because she can earn just as much as he can. But a woman in your position and a woman in mine will always be dependent on the men who keep them.

Elizabeth. I don’t want luxury. You don’t know how sick I am of all this beautiful furniture. These over-decorated houses are like a prison in which I can’t breathe. When I drive about in a Callot frock and a Rolls-Royce I envy the shop-girl in a coat and skirt whom I see jumping on the tailboard of a bus.

Lady Kitty. You mean that if need be you could earn your own living?

Elizabeth. Yes.

Lady Kitty. What could you be? A nurse or a typist. It’s nonsense. Luxury saps a woman’s nerve. And when she’s known it once it becomes a necessity.

Elizabeth. That depends on the woman.

Lady Kitty. When we’re young we think we’re different from everyone else, but when we grow a little older we discover we’re all very much of a muchness.

Elizabeth. You’re very kind to take so much trouble about me.

Lady Kitty. It breaks my heart to think that you’re going to make the same pitiful mistake that I made.

Elizabeth. Oh, don’t say it was that, don’t, don’t.

Lady Kitty. Look at me, Elizabeth, and look at Hughie. Do you think it’s been a success? If I had my time over again do you think I’d do it again? Do you think he would?

Elizabeth. You see, you don’t know how much I love Teddie.

Lady Kitty. And do you think I didn’t love Hughie? Do you think he didn’t love me?

Elizabeth. I’m sure he did.

Lady Kitty. Oh, of course in the beginning it was heavenly. We felt so brave and adventurous and we were so much in love. The first two years were wonderful. People cut me, you know, but I didn’t mind. I thought love was everything. It is a little uncomfortable when you come upon an old friend and go towards her eagerly, so glad to see her, and are met with an icy stare.

Elizabeth. Do you think friends like that are worth having?

Lady Kitty. Perhaps they’re not very sure of themselves. Perhaps they’re honestly shocked. It’s a test one had better not put one’s friends to if one can help it. It’s rather bitter to find how few one has.

Elizabeth. But one has some.

Lady Kitty. Yes, they ask you to come and see them when they’re quite certain no one will be there who might object to meeting you. Or else they say to you: “My dear, you know I’m devoted to you, and I wouldn’t mind at all, but my girl’s growing up — I’m sure you understand; you won’t think it unkind of me if I don’t ask you to the house?”

Elizabeth. [Smiling.] That doesn’t seem to me very serious.

Lady Kitty. At first I thought it rather a relief, because it threw Hughie and me together more. But you know, men are very funny. Even when they are in love they’re not in love all day long. They want change and recreation.

Elizabeth. I’m not inclined to blame them for that, poor dears.

Lady Kitty. Then we settled in Florence. And because we couldn’t get the society we’d been used to we became used to the society we could get. Loose women and vicious men. Snobs who liked to patronise people with a handle to their names. Vague Italian Princes who were glad to borrow a few francs from Hughie and seedy countesses who liked to drive with me in the Cascine. And then Hughie began to hanker after his old life. He wanted to go big game shooting, but I dared not let him go. I was afraid he’d never come back.

Elizabeth. But you knew he loved you.

Lady Kitty. Oh, my dear, what a blessed institution marriage is — for women, and what fools they are to meddle with it! The Church is so wise to take its stand on the indi — indi —

Elizabeth. Solu —

Lady Kitty. Bility of marriage. Believe me, it’s no joke when you have to rely only on yourself to keep a man. I could never afford to grow old. My dear, I’ll tell you a secret that I’ve never told a living soul.

Elizabeth. What is that?

Lady Kitty. My hair is not naturally this colour.

Elizabeth. Really.

Lady Kitty. I touch it up. You would never have guessed, would you?

Elizabeth. Never.

Lady Kitty. Nobody does. My dear, it’s white, prematurely of course, but white. I always think it’s a symbol of my life. Are you interested in symbolism? I think it’s too wonderful.

Elizabeth. I don’t think I know very much about it.

Lady Kitty. However tired I’ve been I’ve had to be brilliant and gay. I’ve never let Hughie see the aching heart behind my smiling eyes.

Elizabeth. [Amused and touched.] You poor dear.

Lady Kitty. And when I saw he was attracted by some one else the fear and the jealousy that seized me! You see, I didn’t dare make a scene as I should have done if I’d been married — I had to pretend not to notice.

Elizabeth. [Taken aback.] But do you mean to say he fell in love with anyone else?

Lady Kitty. Of course he did eventually.

Elizabeth. [Hardly knowing what to say.] You must have been very unhappy.

Lady Kitty. Oh, I was, dreadfully. Night after night I sobbed my heart out when Hughie told me he was going to play cards at the club and I knew he was with that odious woman. Of course, it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of men who were only too anxious to console me. Men have always been attracted by me, you know.

Elizabeth. Oh, of course, I can quite understand it.

Lady Kitty. But I had my self-respect to think of. I felt that whatever Hughie did I would do nothing that I should regret.

Elizabeth. You must be very glad now.

Lady Kitty. Oh, yes. Notwithstanding all my temptations I’ve been absolutely faithful to Hughie in spirit.

Elizabeth. I don’t think I quite understand what you mean.

Lady Kitty. Well, there was a poor Italian boy, young Count Castel Giovanni, who was so desperately in love with me that his mother begged me not to be too cruel. She was afraid he’d go into a consumption. What could I do? And then, oh, years later, there was Antonio Melita. He said he’d shoot himself unless I — well, you understand I couldn’t let the poor boy shoot himself.

Elizabeth. D’you think he really would have shot himself?

Lady Kitty. Oh, one never knows, you know. Those Italians are so passionate. He was really rather a lamb. He had such beautiful eyes.

[Elizabeth looks at her for a long time and a certain horror seizes her of this dissolute, painted old woman.

Elizabeth. [Hoarsely.] Oh, but I think that’s — dreadful.

Lady Kitty. Are you shocked? One sacrifices one’s life for love and then one finds that love doesn’t last. The tragedy of love isn’t death or separation. One gets over them. The tragedy of love is indifference.

[Arnold comes in.

Arnold. Can I have a little talk with you, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth. Of course.

Arnold. Shall we go for a stroll in the garden?

Elizabeth. If you like.

Lady Kitty. No, stay here. I’m going out anyway.

[Exit Lady Kitty.

Arnold. I want you to listen to me for a few minutes, Elizabeth. I was so taken aback by what you told me just now that I lost my head. I was rather absurd and I beg your pardon. I said things I regret.

Elizabeth. Oh, don’t blame yourself. I’m sorry that I should have given you occasion to say them.

Arnold. I want to ask you if you’ve quite made up your mind to go.

Elizabeth. Quite.

Arnold. Just now I seem to have said all that I didn’t want to say and nothing that I did. I’m stupid and tongue-tied. I never told you how deeply I loved you.

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold!

Arnold. Please let me speak now. It’s so very difficult. If I seemed absorbed in politics and the house, and so on, to the exclusion of my interest in you, I’m dreadfully sorry. I suppose it was absurd of me to think you would take my great love for granted.

Elizabeth. But, Arnold, I’m not reproaching you.

Arnold. I’m reproaching myself. I’ve been tactless and neglectful. But I do ask you to believe that it hasn’t been because I didn’t love you. Can you forgive me?

Elizabeth. I don’t think that there’s anything to forgive.

Arnold. It wasn’t till to-day when you talked of leaving me that I realised how desperately in love with you I was.

Elizabeth. After three years?

Arnold. I’m so proud of you. I admire you so much. When I see you at a party, so fresh and lovely, and everybody wondering at you, I have a sort of little thrill because you’re mine, and afterwards I shall take you home.

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold, you’re exaggerating.

Arnold. I can’t imagine this house without you. Life seems on a sudden all empty and meaningless. Oh, Elizabeth, don’t you love me at all?

Elizabeth. It’s much better to be honest. No.

Arnold. Doesn’t my love mean anything to you?

Elizabeth. I’m very grateful to you. I’m sorry to cause you pain. What would be the good of my staying with you when I should be wretched all the time?

Arnold. Do you love that man as much as all that? Does my unhappiness mean nothing to you?

Elizabeth. Of course it does. It breaks my heart. You see, I never knew I meant so much to you. I’m so touched. And I’m so sorry, Arnold, really sorry. But I can’t help myself.

Arnold. Poor child, it’s cruel of me to torture you.

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold, believe me, I have tried to make the best of it. I’ve tried to love you, but I can’t. After all, one either loves or one doesn’t. Trying is no help. And now I’m at the end of my tether. I can’t help the consequences — I must do what my whole self yearns for.

Arnold. My poor child, I’m so afraid you’ll be unhappy. I’m so afraid you’ll regret.

Elizabeth. You must leave me to my fate. I hope you’ll forget me and all the unhappiness I’ve caused you.

Arnold. [There is a pause. Arnold walks up and down the room reflectively. He stops and faces her.] If you love this man and want to go to him I’ll do nothing to prevent you. My only wish is to do what is best for you.

Elizabeth. Arnold, that’s awfully kind of you. If I’m treating you badly at least I want you to know that I’m grateful for all your kindness to me.

Arnold. But there’s one favour I should like you to do me. Will you?

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold, of course I’ll do anything I can.

Arnold. Teddie hasn’t very much money. You’ve been used to a certain amount of luxury, and I can’t bear to think that you should do without anything you’ve had. It would kill me to think that you were suffering any hardship or privation.

Elizabeth. Oh, but Teddie can earn enough for our needs. After all, we don’t want much money.

Arnold. I’m afraid my mother’s life hasn’t been very easy, but it’s obvious that the only thing that’s made it possible is that Porteous was rich. I want you to let me make you an allowance of two thousand a year.

Elizabeth. Oh, no, I couldn’t think of it. It’s absurd.

Arnold. I beg you to accept it. You don’t know what a difference it will make.

Elizabeth. It’s awfully kind of you, Arnold. It humiliates me to speak about it. Nothing would induce me to take a penny from you.

Arnold. Well, you can’t prevent me from opening an account at my bank in your name. The money shall be paid in every quarter whether you touch it or not, and if you happen to want it, it will be there waiting for you.

Elizabeth. You overwhelm me, Arnold. There’s only one thing I want you to do for me. I should be very grateful if you would divorce me as soon as you possibly can.

Arnold. No, I won’t do that. But I’ll give you cause to divorce me.

Elizabeth. You!

Arnold. Yes. But of course you’ll have to be very careful for a bit. I’ll put it through as quickly as possible, but I’m afraid you can’t hope to be free for over six months.

Elizabeth. But, Arnold, your seat and your political career!

Arnold. Oh, well, my father gave up his seat under similar circumstances. He’s got along very comfortably without politics.

Elizabeth. But they’re your whole life.

Arnold. After all one can’t have it both ways. You can’t serve God and Mammon. If you want to do the decent thing you have to be prepared to suffer for it.

Elizabeth. But I don’t want you to suffer for it.

Arnold. At first I rather hesitated at the scandal. But I daresay that was only weakness on my part. Under the circumstances I should have liked to keep out of the Divorce Court if I could.

Elizabeth. Arnold, you’re making me absolutely miserable.

Arnold. What you said before dinner was quite right. It’s nothing for a man, but it makes so much difference to a woman. Naturally I must think of you first.

Elizabeth. That’s absurd. It’s out of the question. Whatever there’s to pay I must pay it.

Arnold. It’s not very much I’m asking you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. I’m taking everything from you.

Arnold. It’s the only condition I make. My mind is absolutely made up. I will never divorce you, but I will enable you to divorce me.

Elizabeth. Oh, Arnold, it’s cruel to be so generous.

Arnold. It’s not generous at all. It’s the only way I have of showing you how deep and passionate and sincere my love is for you.

[There is a silence. He holds out his hand.

Good-night. I have a great deal of work to do before I go to bed.

Elizabeth. Good-night.

Arnold. Do you mind if I kiss you?

Elizabeth. [With agony.] Oh, Arnold!

[He gravely kisses her on the forehead and then goes out. Elizabeth stands lost in thought. She is shattered. Lady Kitty and Porteous come in. Lady Kitty wears a cloak.

Lady Kitty. You’re alone, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth. That note you asked me about, Lady Kitty, from Teddie . . .

Lady Kitty. Yes?

Elizabeth. He wanted to have a talk with me before he went away. He’s waiting for me in the summer house by the tennis court. Would Lord Porteous mind going down and asking him to come here?

Porteous. Certainly. Certainly.

Elizabeth. Forgive me for troubling you. But it’s very important.

Porteous. No trouble at all.

[He goes out.

Lady Kitty. Hughie and I will leave you alone.

Elizabeth. But I don’t want to be left alone. I want you to stay.

Lady Kitty. What are you going to say to him?

Elizabeth. [Desperately.] Please don’t ask me questions. I’m so frightfully unhappy.

Lady Kitty. My poor child!

Elizabeth. Oh, isn’t life rotten? Why can’t one be happy without making other people unhappy?

Lady Kitty. I wish I knew how to help you. I’m simply devoted to you. [She hunts about in her mind for something to do or say.] Would you like my lip-stick?

Elizabeth. [Smiling through her tears.] Thanks. I never use one.

Lady Kitty. Oh, but just try. It’s such a comfort when you’re in trouble.

[Enter Porteous and Teddie.

Porteous. I brought him. He said he’d be damned if he’d come.

Lady Kitty. When a lady sent for him? Are these the manners of the young men of to-day?

Teddie. When you’ve been solemnly kicked out of a house once I think it seems rather pushing to come back again as though nothing had happened.

Elizabeth. Teddie, I want you to be serious.

Teddie. Darling, I had such a rotten dinner at that pub. If you ask me to be serious on the top of that I shall cry.

Elizabeth. Don’t be idiotic, Teddie. [Her voice faltering.] I’m so utterly wretched.

[He looks at her for a moment gravely.

Teddie. What is it?

Elizabeth. I can’t come away with you, Teddie.

Teddie. Why not?

Elizabeth. [Looking away in embarrassment.] I don’t love you enough.

Teddie. Fiddle!

Elizabeth. [With a flash of anger.] Don’t say “Fiddle” to me.

Teddie. I shall say exactly what I like to you.

Elizabeth. I won’t be bullied.

Teddie. Now look here, Elizabeth, you know perfectly well that I’m in love with you, and I know perfectly well that you’re in love with me. So what are you talking nonsense for?

Elizabeth. [Her voice breaking.] I can’t say it if you’re cross with me.

Teddie. [Smiling very tenderly.] I’m not cross with you, silly.

Elizabeth. It’s harder still when you’re being rather an owl.

Teddie. [With a chuckle.] Am I mistaken in thinking you’re not very easy to please?

Elizabeth. Oh, it’s monstrous. I was all wrought up and ready to do anything, and now you’ve thoroughly put me out. I feel like a great big fat balloon that some one has put a long pin into. [With a sudden look at him.] Have you done it on purpose?

Teddie. Upon my soul I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Elizabeth. I wonder if you’re really much cleverer than I think you are.

Teddie. [Taking her hands and making her sit down.] Now tell me exactly what you want to say. By the way, do you want Lady Kitty and Lord Porteous to be here?

Elizabeth. Yes.

Lady Kitty. Elizabeth asked us to stay.

Teddie. Oh, I don’t mind, bless you. I only thought you might feel rather in the way.

Lady Kitty. [Frigidly.] A gentlewoman never feels in the way, Mr. Luton.

Teddie. Won’t you call me Teddie? Everybody does, you know.

[Lady Kitty tries to give him a withering look, but she finds it very difficult to prevent herself from smiling. Teddie strokes Elizabeth’s hands. She draws them away.

Elizabeth. No, don’t do that. Teddie, it wasn’t true when I said I didn’t love you. Of course I love you. But Arnold loves me, too. I didn’t know how much.

Teddie. What has he been saying to you?

Elizabeth. He’s been very good to me, and so kind. I didn’t know he could be so kind. He offered to let me divorce him.

Teddie. That’s very decent of him.

Elizabeth. But don’t you see, it ties my hands. How can I accept such a sacrifice? I should never forgive myself if I profited by his generosity.

Teddie. If another man and I were devilish hungry and there was only one mutton chop between us, and he said, “You eat it,” I wouldn’t waste a lot of time arguing. I’d wolf it before he changed his mind.

Elizabeth. Don’t talk like that. It maddens me. I’m trying to do the right thing.

Teddie. You’re not in love with Arnold; you’re in love with me. It’s idiotic to sacrifice your life for a slushy sentiment.

Elizabeth. After all, I did marry him.

Teddie. Well, you made a mistake. A marriage without love is no marriage at all.

Elizabeth. I made the mistake. Why should he suffer for it? If anyone has to suffer it’s only right that I should.

Teddie. What sort of a life do you think it would be with him? When two people are married it’s very difficult for one of them to be unhappy without making the other unhappy too.

Elizabeth. I can’t take advantage of his generosity.

Teddie. I daresay he’ll get a lot of satisfaction out of it.

Elizabeth. You’re being beastly, Teddie. He was simply wonderful. I never knew he had it in him. He was really noble.

Teddie. You are talking rot, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. I wonder if you’d be capable of acting like that.

Teddie. Acting like what?

Elizabeth. What would you do if I were married to you and came and told you I loved somebody else and wanted to leave you?

Teddie. You have very pretty blue eyes, Elizabeth. I’d black first one and then the other. And after that we’d see.

Elizabeth. You damned brute!

Teddie. I’ve often thought I wasn’t quite a gentleman. Had it ever struck you?

[They look at one another for a while.

Elizabeth. You know, you are taking an unfair advantage of me. I feel as if I came to you quite unsuspectingly and when I wasn’t looking you kicked me on the shins.

Teddie. Don’t you think we’d get on rather well together?

Porteous. Elizabeth’s a fool if she don’t stick to her husband. It’s bad enough for the man, but for the woman — it’s damnable. I hold no brief for Arnold. He plays bridge like a foot. Saving your presence, Kitty, I think he’s a prig.

Lady Kitty. Poor dear, his father was at his age. I daresay he’ll grow out of it.

Porteous. But you stick to him, Elizabeth, stick to him. Man is a gregarious animal. We’re members of a herd. If we break the herd’s laws we suffer for it. And we suffer damnably.

Lady Kitty. Oh, Elizabeth, my dear child, don’t go. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. I tell you that, and I’ve sacrificed everything to love.

[A pause.

Elizabeth. I’m afraid.

Teddie. [In a whisper.] Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. I can’t face it. It’s asking too much of me. Let’s say good-bye to one another, Teddie. It’s the only thing to do. And have pity on me. I’m giving up all my hope of happiness.

[He goes up to her and looks into her eyes.

Teddie. But I wasn’t offering you happiness. I don’t think my sort of love tends to happiness. I’m jealous. I’m not a very easy man to get on with. I’m often out of temper and irritable. I should be fed to the teeth with you sometimes, and so would you be with me. I daresay we’d fight like cat and dog, and sometimes we’d hate each other. Often you’d be wretched and bored stiff and lonely, and often you’d be frightfully homesick, and then you’d regret all you’d lost. Stupid women would be rude to you because we’d run away together. And some of them would cut you. I don’t offer you peace and quietness. I offer you unrest and anxiety. I don’t offer you happiness. I offer you love.

Elizabeth. [Stretching out her arms.] You hateful creature, I absolutely adore you!

[He throws his arms round her and kisses her passionately on the lips.

Lady Kitty. Of course the moment he said he’d give her a black eye I knew it was finished.

Porteous. [Good-humouredly.] You are a fool, Kitty.

Lady Kitty. I know I am, but I can’t help it.

Teddie. Let’s make a bolt for it now.

Elizabeth. Shall we?

Teddie. This minute.

Porteous. You’re damned fools, both of you, damned fools! If you like you can have my car.

Teddie. That’s awfully kind of you. As a matter of fact I got it out of the garage. It’s just along the drive.

Porteous. [Indignantly.] How do you mean, you got it out of the garage?

Teddie. Well, I thought there’d be a lot of bother, and it seemed to me the best thing would be for Elizabeth and me not to stand upon the order of our going, you know. Do it now. An excellent motto for a business man.

Porteous. Do you mean to say you were going to steal my car?

Teddie. Not exactly. I was only going to bolshevise it, so to speak.

Porteous. I’m speechless. I’m absolutely speechless.

Teddie. Hang it all, I couldn’t carry Elizabeth all the way to London. She’s so damned plump.

Elizabeth. You dirty dog!

Porteous. [Spluttering.] Well, well, well! . . . [Helplessly.] I like him, Kitty, it’s no good pretending I don’t. I like him.

Teddie. The moon’s shining, Elizabeth. We’ll drive all through the night.

Porteous. They’d better go to San Michele. I’ll wire to have it got ready for them.

Lady Kitty. That’s where we went when Hughie and I . . . [Faltering.] Oh, you dear things, how I envy you!

Porteous. [Mopping his eyes.] Now don’t cry, Kitty. Confound you, don’t cry.

Teddie. Come, darling.

Elizabeth. But I can’t go like this.

Teddie. Nonsense! Lady Kitty will lend you her cloak. Won’t you?

Lady Kitty. [Taking it off.] You’re capable of tearing it off my back if I don’t.

Teddie. [Putting the cloak on Elizabeth.] And we’ll buy you a tooth-brush in London in the morning.

Lady Kitty. She must write a note for Arnold. I’ll put it on her pincushion.

Teddie. Pincushion be blowed! Come, darling. We’ll drive through the dawn and through the sunrise.

Elizabeth. [Kissing Lady Kitty and Porteous.] Good-bye. Good-bye.

[Teddie stretches out his hand and she takes it. Hand in hand they go out into the night.

Lady Kitty. Oh, Hughie, how it all comes back to me! Will they suffer all we suffered? And have we suffered all in vain?

Porteous. My dear, I don’t know that in life it matters so much what you do as what you are. No one can learn by the experience of another because no circumstances are quite the same. If we made rather a hash of things perhaps it was because we were rather trivial people. You can do anything in this world if you’re prepared to take the consequences, and consequences depend on character.

[Enter Champion-Cheney, rubbing his hands. He is as pleased as Punch.

C.-C. Well, I think I’ve settled the hash of that young man.

Lady Kitty. Oh!

C.-C. You have to get up very early in the morning to get the better of your humble servant.

[There is the sound of a car starting.

Lady Kitty. What is that?

C.-C. It sounds like a car. I expect it’s your chauffeur taking one of the maids for a joy-ride.

Porteous. Whose hash are you talking about?

C.-C. Mr. Edward Luton’s, my dear Hughie. I told Arnold exactly what to do and he’s done it. What makes a prison? Why, bars and bolts. Remove them and a prisoner won’t want to escape. Clever, I flatter myself.

Porteous. You were always that, Clive, but at the moment you’re obscure.

C.-C. I told Arnold to go to Elizabeth and tell her she could have her freedom. I told him to sacrifice himself all along the line. I know what women are. The moment every obstacle was removed to her marriage with Teddie Luton, half the allurement was gone.

Lady Kitty. Arnold did that?

C.-C. He followed my instructions to the letter. I’ve just seen him. She’s shaken. I’m willing to bet five hundred pounds to a penny that she won’t bolt. A downy old bird, eh? Downy’s the word. Downy.

[He begins to laugh. They laugh, too. Presently they are all three in fits of laughter.

[The Curtain Falls]

CAESAR’S WIFE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

CHARACTERS

This play was produced at the Royalty Theatre, on March 27th, 1919, with the following cast:

Sir Arthur Little

C. Aubrey Smith.

Ronald Parry

George Relph.

Henry Pritchard

V. Sutton Vane.

George Appleby

Townsend Whitling.

Osman Pasha

George C. Desplas.

Violet

Fay Compton.

Mrs. Etheridge

Eva Moore.

Mrs. Pritchard

Helen Haye.

Mrs. Appleby

Mrs. Robert Brough.

CHARACTERS

Sir Arthur Little, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

Ronald Parry.

Henry Pritchard.

Richard Appleby, M.P.

Osman Pasha.

Violet.

Mrs. Etheridge.

Mrs. Pritchard.

Mrs. Appleby.

An English Butler; Native Servants; an Arab Gardener.

The scene is laid in Cairo, in the house and garden of the British Consular Agent.

ACT I

Scene: The morning-room in the Consular Agent’s house at Cairo. The windows are Arabic in character and so are the architraves of the doors, but otherwise it is an English room, airy and spacious. The furniture is lacquer and Chippendale, there are cool chintzes on the chairs and sofas, cut roses in glass vases, and growing azaleas in pots; but here and there an Eastern antiquity, a helmet and a coat of mail, a piece of woodwork, reminds one of the Mussulman conquest of Egypt; while an ancient god in porphyry, graven images in blue pottery, blue bowls, recall an older civilisation still.

When the curtain rises the room is empty, the blinds are down so as to keep out the heat, and it is dim and mysterious. A Servant comes in, a dark-skinned native in the gorgeous uniform, red and gold, of the Consular Agent’s establishment, and draws the blinds. Through the windows is seen the garden with palm-trees, oranges and lemons, tropical plants with giant leaves; and beyond, the radiant blue of the sky. In the distance is heard the plaintive, guttural wailing of an Arab song. A Gardener in a pale blue gaberdine passes with a basket on his arm.

Servant.

Es-salâm ‘alêkum (Peace be with you).

Gardener.

U’alêkum es-Salâm warahmet Allâh wa barakâta (And with you be peace and God’s mercy and blessing).

[The Servant goes out. The Gardener stops for a moment to nail back a straggling creeper and then goes on his way. The door is opened. Mrs. Appleby comes in with Anne Etheridge and they are followed immediately by Violet. Anne is a woman of forty, but handsome still, very pleasant and sympathetic; she is a woman of the world, tactful and self-controlled. She is dressed in light, summery things. Mrs. Appleby is an elderly, homely woman, soberly but not inexpensively dressed. The wife of a North-country manufacturer, she spends a good deal of money on rather dowdy clothes. Violet is a very pretty young woman of twenty. She looks very fresh and English in her muslin frock; there is something spring-like and virginal in her appearance, and her manner of dress is romantic rather than modish. She suggests a lady in a Gainsborough portrait rather than a drawing in a paper of Paris fashions. Luncheon is just finished and when they come in the women leave the door open for the men to follow.]

Mrs. Appleby.

How cool it is in here! This isn’t the room we were in before lunch?

Anne.

No. They keep the windows closed and the blinds drawn all the morning so that it’s beautifully cool when one comes in.

Mrs. Appleby.

I suppose we shan’t feel the heat so much when we’ve been here a few days.

Anne.

Oh, but this is nothing to what you’ll get in Upper Egypt.

Violet.

[As she enters.] Is Mrs. Appleby complaining of the heat? I love it.

Anne.

Dear Violet, wait till May comes and June. You don’t know how exhausting it gets.

Violet.

I’m looking forward to it. I think in some past life I must have been a lizard.

Mrs. Appleby.

I dare say the first year you won’t feel it. I have a brother settled in Canada, and he says the first year people come out from England they don’t feel the cold anything like what they do later on.

Anne.

I’ve spent a good many winters here, and I always make a point of getting away by the fifteenth of March.

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, are you staying as late as that?

Anne.

Good gracious, no. You make Lady Little’s heart positively sink.

Violet.

Nonsense, Anne, you know we want you to stay as long as ever you can.

Anne.

I used to have an apartment in Cairo, but I’ve given it up now and Lady Little asked me to come and stay at the Agency while I was getting everything settled.

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, then you knew Sir Arthur before he married?

Anne.

Oh, yes, he’s one of my oldest friends. I can’t help thinking Lady Little must have great sweetness of character to put up with me.

Violet.

Or you must be a perfect miracle of tact, darling.

Mrs. Appleby.

My belief is, it’s a little of both.

Anne.

When Arthur came to see me one day last July and told me he was going to marry the most wonderful girl in the world, of course I thought good-bye. A man thinks he can keep his bachelor friendships, but he never does.

Mrs. Appleby.

His wife generally sees to that.

Violet.

Well, I think it’s nonsense, especially with a man like Arthur who’d been a bachelor so long and naturally had his life laid out before ever I came into it. And besides, I’m devoted to Anne.

Anne.

It’s dear of you to say so.

Violet.

I came here as an absolute stranger. And after all, I wasn’t very old, was I?

Mrs. Appleby.

Nineteen?

Violet.

Oh, no, I was older than that. I was nearly twenty.

Mrs. Appleby.

[Smiling.] Good gracious!

Violet.

It was rather alarming to find oneself on a sudden the wife of a man in Arthur’s position. I was dreadfully self-conscious; I felt that everybody’s eyes were upon me. And you don’t know how easy it is to make mistakes in a country that’s half Eastern and half European.

Anne.

To say nothing of having to deal with the representatives of half a dozen Great Powers all outrageously susceptible.

Violet.

And, you know, there was the feeling that the smallest false step might do the greatest harm to Arthur and his work here. I had only just left the schoolroom and I found myself almost a political personage. If it hadn’t been for Anne I should have made a dreadful mess of things.

Anne.

Oh, I don’t think that. You had two assets which would have made people excuse a great deal of inexperience, your grace and your beauty.

Violet.

You say very nice things to me, Anne.

Mrs. Appleby.

Your marriage was so romantic, I can’t see how anyone could help feeling very kindly towards you.

Violet.

There’s not much room for romance in the heart of the wife of one of the Agents of the foreign Powers when she thinks she hasn’t been given her proper place at a dinner party.

Mrs. Appleby.

I remember wondering at the time whether you weren’t a little overcome by all the excitement caused by your marriage.

Violet.

I was excited too, you know.

Mrs. Appleby.

Everyone had always looked upon Sir Arthur as a confirmed bachelor. It was thought he cared for nothing but his work. He’s had a wonderful career, hasn’t he?

Violet.

The Prime Minister told me he was the most competent man he’d ever met.

Anne.

I’ve always thought he must be a comfort to any Government. Whenever anyone has made a hash of things he’s been sent to put them straight.

Violet.

Well, he always has.

Mrs. Appleby.

Mr. Appleby was saying only this morning he was the last man one would expect to marry in haste.

Violet.

Let’s hope he won’t repent at leisure.

Anne.

[Smiling.] Mrs. Appleby is dying to know all about it, Violet.

Mrs. Appleby.

I’m an old woman, Lady Little.

Violet.

[Gaily.] Well, I met Arthur at a week-end party. He’d come home on leave and all sorts of important people had been asked to meet him. I was frightened out of my life. The duchesses had strawberry leaves hanging all over them and they looked at me down their noses. And the Cabinet Ministers’ wives had protruding teeth and they looked at me up their noses.

Anne.

What nonsense you talk, Violet!

Violet.

I was expecting to be terrified of Arthur. After all, I knew he was a great man. But you know, I wasn’t a bit. He was inclined to be rather fatherly at first, so I cheeked him.

Anne.

I can imagine his surprise. No one had done that for twenty years.

Violet.

When you know Arthur at all well you discover that when he wants anything he doesn’t hesitate to ask for it. He told our hostess that he wanted me to sit next to him at dinner. That didn’t suit her at all, but she didn’t like to say no. Somehow people don’t say no to Arthur. The Cabinet Ministers’ wives looked more like camels than ever, and by Sunday evening, my dear, the duchesses’ strawberry leaves began to curl and crackle.

Anne.

Your poor hostess, I feel for her. To have got hold of a real lion for your party and then have him refuse to bother himself with anybody but a chit of a girl whom you’d asked just to make an even number!

Mrs. Appleby.

He just fell in love with you at first sight?

Violet.

That’s what he says now.

Mrs. Appleby.

Did you know?

Violet.

I thought it looked very like it, you know, only it was so improbable. Then came an invitation from a woman I only just knew for the next week-end, and she said Arthur would be there. Then my heart really did begin to go pit-a-pat. I took the letter in to my sister and sat on her bed and we talked it over. “Does he mean to propose to me,” I said, “or does he not?” And my sister said: “I can’t imagine what he sees in you. Will you accept him if he does?” she asked. “Oh, no,” I said. “Good heavens, why he’s twenty years older than I am!” But of course I meant to all the time. I shouldn’t have cared if he was a hundred, he was the most wonderful man I’d ever known.

Mrs. Appleby.

And did he propose to you that week-end, when he’d practically only seen you once before?

Violet.

I got down in the afternoon and he was there already. As soon as I swallowed a cup of tea he said: “Come out for a walk.” Well, I’d have loved a second cup, but I didn’t like to say so, so I went. But we had a second tea in a cottage half an hour later, and we were engaged then.

[Appleby comes in with Osman Pasha. Mr. Appleby is a self-made man who has entered Parliament; he is about sixty, grey-bearded, rather short and stout, with some accent in his speech, shrewd, simple and good-natured. He wears a blue serge suit. Osman Pasha is a swarthy, bearded Oriental, obese, elderly but dignified; he wears the official frock-coat of the Khedivial service and a tarbush.]

Appleby.

Sir Arthur is coming in one moment. He is talking to one of his secretaries.

Violet.

Really, it’s too bad of them not to leave him alone even when he’s snatching a mouthful of food.

Osman Pasha.

Vous permettez que j’apporte ma cigarette, chère Madame.

Violet.

Of course. Come and sit here, Pasha.

Appleby.

I wanted to tell his Excellency how interested I am in his proposal to found a technical college in Cairo, but I can’t speak French.

Violet.

Oh, but his Excellency understands English perfectly, and I believe really he talks it as well as I do, only he won’t.

Osman Pasha.

Madame, je ne comprends l’anglais que quand vous le parlez, et tout galant homme sait ce que dit une jolie femme.

Anne.

[Translating for the Applebys.] He says he only understands English when Lady Little speaks it, and every nice man understands what a pretty woman says.

Violet.

No one pays me such charming compliments as you do. You know I’m learning Arabic.

Osman Pasha.

C’est une bien belle langue, et vous, madame, vous avez autant d’intelligence que de beauté.

Violet.

I have a Copt who comes to me every day. And I practise a little with your brother, Anne.

Anne.

[To Mrs. Appleby.] My brother is one of Sir Arthur’s secretaries. I expect it was he that Mr. Appleby left with Sir Arthur.

Violet.

If it is I shall scold him. He knows quite well that he has no right to come and bother Arthur when he’s in the bosom of his family. But they say he’s a wonderful Arabic scholar.

Osman Pasha.

Vous parlez de M. Parry? Je n’ai jamais connu un Anglais qui avait une telle facilité.

Anne.

He says he’s never known an Englishman who speaks so well as Ronny.

Violet.

It’s a fearfully difficult language. Sometimes my head seems to get tied up in knots.

[Two Saises come in, one with a salver on which are coffee cups and the other bearing a small tray on which is a silver vessel containing Turkish coffee. They go round giving coffee to the various people, then wait in silence. When Sir Arthur comes in they give him his coffee and go out.]

Anne.

It’s wonderful of you to persevere.

Violet.

Oh, you know, Ronny’s very encouraging. He says I’m really getting on. I want so badly to be able to talk. You can’t think how enthusiastic I am about Egypt. I love it.

Osman Pasha.

Pas plus que l’Égypte vous aime, Madame.

Violet.

When we landed at Alexandria and I saw that blue sky and that coloured, gesticulating crowd, my heart leapt. I knew I was going to be happy. And every day I’ve loved Egypt more. I love its antiquities, I love the desert and the streets of Cairo and those dear little villages by the Nile. I never knew there was such beauty in the world. I thought you only read of romance in books; I didn’t know there was a country where it sat by the side of a well under the palm-trees, as though it were at home.

Osman Pasha.

Vous êtes charmante, madame. C’est un bien beau pays. Il n’a besoin que d’une chose pour qu’on puisse y vivre.

Anne.

[Translating.] It’s a beautiful country. It only wants one thing to make it livable. And what is that, your Excellency?

Osman Pasha.

La liberté.

Appleby.

Liberty?

[Arthur has come in when first Violet begins to speak of Egypt and he listens to her enthusiasm with an indulgent smile. At the Pasha’s remark he comes forward. Arthur Little is a man of forty-five, alert, young in manner, very intelligent, with the urbanity, self-assurance, tact, and resourcefulness of the experienced diplomatist. Nothing escapes him, but he does not often show how much he notices.]

Arthur.

Egypt has the liberty to do well, your Excellency. Does it need the liberty to do ill before it loses the inclination to do it?

Violet.

[To Mrs. Appleby.] I hope you don’t mind Turkish coffee?

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, no, I like it.

Violet.

I’m so glad. I think it perfectly delicious.

Arthur.

You have in my wife an enthusiastic admirer of this country, Pasha.

Osman Pasha.

J’en suis ravi.

Arthur.

I’ve told Ronny to come in and have a cup of coffee. [To Anne.] I thought you’d like to say how d’you do to him.

Anne.

Are you very busy to-day?

Arthur.

We’re always busy. Isn’t that so, Excellency?

Osman Pasha.

En effet, et je vous demanderai permission de me retirer. Mon bureau m’appelle.

[He gets up and shakes hands with Violet.]

Violet.

It was charming of you to come.

Osman Pasha.

Mon Dieu, madame, c’est moi qui vous remercie de m’avoir donné l’occasion de saluer votre grâce et votre beauté.

[He bows to the rest of the company. Arthur leads him towards the door and he goes out.]

Anne.

You take all these compliments without turning a hair, Violet.

Arthur.

[Coming back.] You know, that’s a wonderful old man. He’s so well-bred, he has such exquisite manners, it’s hard to realise that if it were possible he would have us all massacred to-morrow.

Appleby.

I remember there was a certain uneasiness in England when you recommended that he should be made Minister of Education.

Arthur.

They don’t always understand local conditions in England. Osman is a Moslem of the old school. He has a bitter hatred of the English. In course of years he has come to accept the inevitable, but he’s not resigned to it. He never loses sight of his aim.

Appleby.

And that is?

Arthur.

Why, bless you, to drive the English into the sea. But he’s a clever old rascal, and he sees that one of the first things that must be done is to educate the Egyptians. Well, we want to educate them too. I had all sorts of reforms in mind which I would never have got the strict Mohammedans to accept if they hadn’t been brought forward by a man whose patriotism they believe in and whose orthodoxy is beyond suspicion.

Anne.

Don’t you find it embarrassing to work with a man you distrust?

Arthur.

I don’t distrust him. I have a certain admiration for him, and I bear him no grudge at all because at the bottom of his heart he simply loathes me.

Appleby.

I don’t see why he should do that.

Arthur.

I was in Egypt for three years when I was quite a young man. I was very small fry then, but I came into collision with Osman and he tried to poison me. I was very ill for two months, and he’s never forgiven me because I recovered.

Appleby.

What a scoundrel!

Arthur.

He would be a little out of place in a Nonconformist community. In the good old days of Ismael he had one of his wives beaten to death and thrown into the Nile.

Appleby.

But is it right to give high office to a man of that character?

Arthur.

They were the manners and customs of the times.

Mrs. Appleby.

But he tried to kill you. Don’t you bear him any ill will?

Arthur.

I don’t think it was very friendly, you know, but after all no statesman can afford to pay attention to his private feelings. His duty is to find the round peg for the round hole and put him in.

Anne.

Why does he come here?

Arthur.

He has a very great and respectful admiration for Violet. She chaffs him, if you please, and the old man adores her. I think she’s done more to reconcile him to the British occupation than all our diplomacy.

Mrs. Appleby.

It must be wonderful to have power in a country like this.

Violet.

Power? Oh, I haven’t that. But it makes me so proud to think I can be of any use at all. I only wish I had the chance to do more. Since I’ve been here I’ve grown very patriotic.

[Ronald Parry comes in. He is a young man, very good-looking, fresh and pleasant, with a peculiar charm of manner.]

Arthur.

Ah, here is Ronny.

Ronny.

Am I too late for my cup of coffee?

Violet.

No, it will be brought to you at once.

Ronny.

[Shaking hands with Violet.] Good morning.

Violet.

This is Mr. Parry. Mr. and Mrs. Appleby.

Ronny.

How d’you do?

Arthur.

Now, Ronny, don’t put on your Foreign Office manner. Mr. and Mrs. Appleby are very nice people.

Mrs. Appleby.

I’m glad you think that, Sir Arthur.

Arthur.

Well, when you left your cards with a soup ticket from the F.O. my heart sank.

Appleby.

There, my dear, I told you he wouldn’t want to be bothered with us.

Arthur.

You see, I expected a pompous couple who knew all about everything and were going to tell me exactly how Egypt ought to be governed. A Member of Parliament doesn’t inspire confidence in the worried bosom of a Government official.

Violet.

I don’t know if you think you’re putting Mr. and Mrs. Appleby at their ease, Arthur.

Arthur.

Oh, but I shouldn’t say this if I hadn’t been most agreeably disappointed.

Mrs. Appleby.

I never forget the days when Mr. Appleby used to light the kitchen fire himself and I used to do the week’s washing every Monday morning. I don’t think we’ve changed much since then, either of us.

Arthur.

I know, and I’m really grateful to the Foreign Office for having given you your letter.

Mrs. Appleby.

It’s been a great treat to us to come and see you. And it’s done my heart good to see Lady Little. If you don’t mind my saying so she’s like a spring morning and it makes one glad to be alive just to look at her.

Violet.

Oh, don’t!

Arthur.

I’m inclined to feel very kindly to everyone who feels kindly towards her. You must enjoy yourselves in Upper Egypt and when you come back to Cairo you must let us know.

Appleby.

I’m expecting to learn a good deal from my journey.

Arthur.

You may learn a good deal that will surprise you. You may learn that there are races in the world that seem born to rule and races that seem born to serve; that democracy is not a panacea for all the ills of mankind, but merely one system of government like another, which hasn’t had a long enough trial to make it certain whether it is desirable or not; that freedom generally means the power of the strong to oppress the weak, and that the wise statesman gives men the illusion of it but not the substance — in short, a number of things which must be very disturbing to the equilibrium of a Radical Member of Parliament.

Anne.

On the other hand, you’ll see our beautiful Nile and the temples.

Arthur.

And perhaps they’ll suggest to you that however old the world is it’s ever young, and that when all’s said and done the most permanent on the face of the earth is what seems the most transitory — the ideal.

Appleby.

Fanny, it looks to me as though we’d bitten off as big a piece of cake as we can chew with any comfort.

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, well, we’ll do our best. And though I never could do arithmetic I’ve always thought perhaps one might be saved without. Good-bye, Lady Little, and thank you for having us.

Violet.

Good-bye.

[There are general farewells and they go to the door. Ronny opens it for them. They go out.]

Ronny.

I forgot to tell you, sir, Mrs. Pritchard has just telephoned to ask if she can see you on a matter of business.

Arthur.

[With a grim smile.] Say I’m very busy to-day, and I regret exceedingly that it will be quite impossible for me to see her.

Ronny.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] She said she was coming round at once.

Arthur.

If she’s made up her mind to see me at all costs she might have saved herself the trouble of ringing up to find out if it was convenient.

Anne.

Your sister is a determined creature, Arthur.

Arthur.

I know. I have some authority in the affairs of this country, but none over dear Christina. I wonder what she wants.

Violet.

Let us hope for the best.

Arthur.

I’ve noticed that whenever anyone wants to see me very urgently it’s never to give me anything. When Christina wants to see me urgently my only safety is in instant flight.

Violet.

You must be nice to her, Arthur. If you’re not she’ll only take it out of me.

Arthur.

It’s monstrous, isn’t it?

Violet.

After all, she kept house for you for ten years. Admirably, mind you.

Arthur.

Admirably. She has a genius for order and organisation in the house. Everything went like clockwork. She never wasted a farthing. She saved me hundreds of pounds. She led me a dog’s life. I’ve come to the conclusion there’s nothing so detestable as a good housekeeper.

Violet.

How fortunate you married me, then! But you can’t expect her to see that point of view. It’s very hard for her to be turned out of this very pleasant billet, and it’s natural that when you won’t do something she asks you she should put it down to my influence.

Anne.

It must have been a very difficult position for you.

Violet.

I did all I could to make her like me. I did feel rather like a usurper, you know. I tried to make her see that I didn’t at all want to put on airs.

Arthur.

Fortunately she’s taken it very well. I confess I was a little nervous when she told me she meant to stay on in Egypt to be near her son.

Anne.

It would be a detestable person who didn’t like Violet, I think.

Arthur.

Detestable. I should have no hesitation in having him deported.

Ronny.

I think I’d better be getting back to my work.

Anne.

Oh, Ronny, would you like me to come and help you with your packing?

Violet.

[To Ronny.] Are you going somewhere?

Ronny.

I’m leaving Cairo.

Anne.

Didn’t you know? Ronny has just been appointed to Paris.

Violet.

Is he going to leave Egypt for good?

[She is taken aback by the news. She clenches her hand on the rail of a chair; Arthur and Anne notice the little, instinctive motion.]

Ronny.

I suppose so.

Violet.

But why was it kept from me? Why have you been making a secret of it?

Arthur.

Darling, no one’s been making a secret of it. I — I thought Anne would have told you.

Violet.

Oh, it doesn’t matter at all, but Ronny has been in the habit of doing all sorts of things for me. It would have been convenient if I’d been told that a change was going to be made.

Arthur.

I’m very sorry. It was only arranged this morning. I received a telegram from the Foreign Office. I thought it would interest Anne, so I sent Ronny along to tell her.

Violet.

I hate to be treated like a child.

[There is a moment’s embarrassment.]

Anne.

It was stupid of me. I ought to have come and told you. I was so pleased and excited that I forgot.

Violet.

I don’t quite know why you should have been so excited.

Anne.

It will be very nice for me to have Ronny so near. You see, now I’ve given up my flat I shan’t come to Egypt very often and I should never have seen Ronny. I can run over to Paris constantly. Besides, it’s a step, isn’t it? And I want to see him an Ambassador before I die.

Violet.

I don’t see what good it will do him in Paris to speak Arabic like a native.

Arthur.

Oh, well, that is the F.O. all over. The best Persian scholar in the Service has spent the last six years in Washington.

Ronny.

It’s been a great surprise for me. I expected to remain in Egypt indefinitely.

Violet.

[Recovering herself.] I expect you’ll have a very good time in Paris. When do you go?

Ronny.

There’s a boat the day after to-morrow. Sir Arthur thought I’d better take that.

Violet.

[Scarcely mistress of herself.] As soon as that! [Recovering, gaily.] We shall miss you dreadfully. I can’t imagine what I shall do without you. [To Anne.] You can’t think how useful he’s been to me since I came here.

Ronny.

It’s very kind of you to say so.

Violet.

He’s invaluable at functions and things like that. You see, he knows where everyone should sit at dinner. And at first he used to coach me with details about various people so that I shouldn’t say the wrong thing.

Arthur.

If you had you’d have said it so charmingly that no one would have resented it.

Violet.

I’m so afraid that the man who takes Ronny’s place will refuse to write my invitations for me.

Arthur.

It’s not exactly the duty of my secretaries.

Violet.

No, but I do hate doing it myself. And Ronny was able to imitate my handwriting.

Arthur.

I’m sure he could never write as badly as you.

Violet.

Oh, yes, he could. Couldn’t you?

Ronny.

I managed to write quite enough like you for people not to notice the difference.

Violet.

You know, there are thirty-two invitations to do now.

Anne.

Why don’t you send cards?

Violet.

Oh, I think a letter is so much more polite. Somehow I don’t feel old enough to ask people to dine with me in the third person.

Ronny.

I’ll come and do them the moment Sir Arthur can let me go.

Arthur.

You’d better do them before Violet goes out.

Violet.

That’ll be very soon. The Khedive’s mother has asked me to go and see her at half-past three. I’ll get the list now, shall I? I don’t think I’ll wait for Christina. If she wants to see you on business I dare say she’d rather I wasn’t there.

Arthur.

Very well.

Violet.

[To Ronny.] Will you come here when you’re ready?

Ronny.

Certainly.

[She goes out.]

Arthur.

Have you finished that report yet?

Ronny.

Not quite, sir. It will be ready in ten minutes.

Arthur.

Put it on my desk.

Ronny.

All right, sir.

[Exit. Arthur and Anne are left alone. He looks at her reflectively.]

Arthur.

Violet is very sensitive to anything that might be considered a slight.

Anne.

It’s very natural, isn’t it? A high-spirited girl.

Arthur.

She likes me to tell her my arrangements. It gives her a little feeling of importance to know things before other people.

Anne.

Oh, of course. I quite understand. I should do the same in her place.

Arthur.

I ought to have remembered and told her that Ronny was going. She was just a little vexed because she thought I’d been fixing things up behind her back.

Anne.

Yes, I know. It would naturally put her out for a moment to learn on a sudden that one of the persons she’d been thrown in contact with was going away.

Arthur.

[With a twinkle in his eye.] I’m wondering if I must blame you for the loss of an excellent secretary.

Anne.

Me?

Arthur.

I don’t know why the F.O. should suddenly have made up their minds that your brother was wanted in Paris. Have you been pulling strings?

Anne.

[Smiling.] What a suspicious nature you have!

Arthur.

Anne, own up.

Anne.

I thought Ronny was getting into a groove here. There didn’t seem to be much more for him to do than he has been doing for some time. If you will have the truth, I’ve been moving heaven and earth to get him moved.

Arthur.

How deceitful of you not to have said a word about it!

Anne.

I didn’t want to make him restless. I knew he’d be mad to go to Paris. I thought it much better not to say anything till it was settled.

Arthur.

D’you think he’s mad to go to Paris?

Anne.

[Fencing with him.] Any young man would be.

Arthur.

I wonder if he’d be very much disappointed if I made other arrangements.

Anne.

What do you mean, Arthur? You wouldn’t prevent him from going when I’ve done everything in the world to get him away.

Arthur.

[Abruptly.] Why should you be so anxious for him to go?

[She looks at him for an instant in dismay.]

Anne.

Good heavens, don’t speak so sharply to me. I told Violet just now. I wanted him to be more get-at-able. I think he stands a much better chance of being noticed if he’s in a place like Paris.

Arthur.

[With a smile.] Ah, yes, you said you were coming less frequently to Egypt than in the past. It might be worth while to keep Ronny here in order to tempt you back.

Anne.

Egypt isn’t the same to me that it was.

Arthur.

I hope my marriage has made no difference to our friendship, Anne. You know how deeply I value it.

Anne.

You used to come and see me very often. You knew I was discreet and you used to talk over with me all sorts of matters which occupied you. I was pleased and flattered. Of course I realised that those pleasant conversations of ours must stop when you married. I only came here this winter to collect my goods and chattels.

Arthur.

You make me feel vaguely guilty towards you.

Anne.

Of course you’re nothing of the sort. But I don’t want Violet to feel that I am making any attempt to — to monopolise you. She’s been charming to me. The more I know her the more delightful I find her.

Arthur.

It’s very nice of you to say so.

Anne.

You know I’ve always had a great admiration for you. I’m so glad to see you married to a girl who’s not unworthy of you.

Arthur.

I suppose it was a dangerous experiment for a man of my age to marry a girl of nineteen.

Anne.

I think one can admit that. But you’ve always been one of the favourites of the gods. You’ve made a wonderful success of it.

Arthur.

It needs on a husband’s part infinite tact, patience, and tolerance.

Anne.

You have the great advantage that Violet is genuinely in love with you.

Arthur.

I suppose only a fatuous ass would confess that a beautiful girl was in love with him.

Anne.

You make her very happy.

Arthur.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to achieve that. I’m more desperately in love with Violet even than when I first married her.

Anne.

I’m so glad. I want nothing but your happiness.

Arthur.

Here is Christina.

[The door opens as he says these words and an English Butler ushers in Mrs. Pritchard. She is a tall, spare woman, with hair turning grey, comely, upright in her carriage, with decision of character indicated by every gesture; but though masterful and firm to attain her ends, she is an honest woman, direct, truthful and not without humour. She is admirably gowned in a manner befitting her station and importance.]

Butler.

Mrs. Pritchard.

[Exit.]

Arthur.

I knew it was you, Christina. I felt a sense of responsibility descend upon the house.

Christina.

[Kissing him.] How is Violet?

Arthur.

Lovely.

Christina.

I was inquiring about her health.

Arthur.

Her health is perfect.

Christina.

At her age one’s always well, I suppose. [Kissing Anne.] How d’you do? And how are you, my poor Arthur?

Arthur.

You ask me as though I was a doddering old gentleman, crippled with rheumatism. I’m in the best of health, thank you very much, and very active for my years. [Christina has seen a flower on the table that has fallen from a bowl, and picks it up and puts it back in its place.] Why do you do that?

Christina.

I don’t like untidiness.

Arthur.

I do.

[He takes the flower out again and places it on the table.]

Christina.

I was expecting to find you in your office.

Arthur.

Do you think I’m neglecting my work? I thought it more becoming to wait for you here.

Christina.

I wanted to see you on a matter of business.

Arthur.

So I understood from your message. I feel convinced you’re going to put me in the way of making my fortune.

Anne.

I’ll leave you, shall I?

Christina.

Oh, no, pray don’t. There’s not the least reason why you shouldn’t hear what it’s all about.

Arthur.

You’re not going to make my fortune after all. You’re going to ask me to do something.

Christina.

What makes you think that?

Arthur.

You want a third person present to be witness to my brutal selfishness when I refuse. I know you, Christina.

Christina.

[Smiling.] You’re much too sensible to refuse a perfectly reasonable request.

Arthur.

Let us hear it. [She sits down on the sofa. The cushions have been disordered by people sitting on them and she shakes them out, and pats them and arranges them in their place.] I wish you’d leave the furniture alone, Christina.

Christina.

I cannot make out what pleasure people take in seeing things out of their proper place.

Arthur.

You’re very long in coming to the point.

Christina.

I hear that the Khedive has quarrelled with his secretary.

Arthur.

You’re a marvellous woman, Christina. You get hold of all the harem gossip.

Christina.

It’s true, isn’t it?

Arthur.

Yes. But I only heard of it myself just before luncheon. How did it come to your ears?

Christina.

That doesn’t matter, does it? I have a way of hearing things that may be of interest to me.

Arthur.

I’m afraid I’m very dense, but I don’t see how it can be of any particular interest to you.

Christina.

[Smiling.] Dear Arthur. The Khedive has asked you to recommend him an English secretary.

Anne.

Has he really? That’s a change. He’s never had an English secretary before.

Arthur.

Never.

Anne.

It’s a wonderful opportunity.

Arthur.

If we get the right man he can be of the greatest possible help. If he’s tactful, wise, and courteous, there’s no reason why in time he shouldn’t attain very considerable influence over the Khedive. If we can really get the Khedive to work honestly and sincerely with us, instead of hampering us by all kinds of secret devices, we can do miracles in this country.

Anne.

What a splendid chance for the man who gets the job!

Arthur.

I suppose it is. If he has the right qualities he may achieve anything. And after all, it’s a splendid chance to be able to render such great service to our own old country.

Christina.

Has the Khedive given any particulars about the sort of man he wants?

Arthur.

He naturally wants a young man and a good sportsman. It’s important that he should be able to speak Arabic. But the qualifications which will satisfy the Khedive are nothing beside those which will satisfy me. The wrong man may cause irreparable damage to British interests.

Christina.

Have you thought that Henry would be admirably suited?

Arthur.

I can’t say I have, Christina.

Christina.

He’s young and he’s very good at games. He speaks Arabic.

Arthur.

Quite well, I believe. I think he’s very well suited to the post he has. It would be a pity to disturb him when he’s just got at home with the work.

Christina.

Arthur, you can’t compare a very badly paid job in the Ministry of Education with a private secretaryship to the Khedive.

Arthur.

The best job for a man is the one he’s most fitted to do.

Christina.

You’ve got no fault to find with Henry. He’s a very good worker, he’s honest, industrious, and painstaking.

Arthur.

You don’t praise a pair of boots because you can walk in them without discomfort; if you can’t you chuck them away.

Christina.

What d’you mean by that?

Arthur.

The qualities you mention really don’t deserve any particular reward. If Henry hadn’t got them I’d fire him without a moment’s hesitation.

Christina.

I have no doubt you’d welcome the opportunity. It’s the greatest misfortune of Henry’s life that he happens to be your nephew.

Arthur.

On the other hand, it’s counterbalanced by his extraordinary good luck in being your son.

Christina.

You’ve stood in his way on every possible occasion.

Arthur.

[Good-humouredly.] You know that’s not true, Christina. I’ve refused to perpetrate a number of abominable jobs that you’ve urged me to. He’s had his chances as everyone else has. You’re an admirable mother. If I’d listened to you he’d be Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister by now.

Christina.

I’ve never asked you to do anything for Henry that wasn’t perfectly reasonable.

Arthur.

It’s evident then that we have different views upon what is reasonable.

Christina.

I appeal to you, Anne: do you see any objection to suggesting Henry to the Khedive as a private secretary?

Arthur.

I knew that’s what she wanted you here for, Anne, to be a witness to my pig-headed obstinacy.

Christina.

Don’t be absurd, Arthur. I’m asking Anne for an unprejudiced opinion.

Arthur.

Anne is unlikely to have an opinion of any value on a matter she knows nothing about.

Anne.

[With a chuckle.] That is a very plain hint that I can’t do better than hold my tongue. I’ll take it, Christina.

Christina.

It’s so unreasonable of you, Arthur. You won’t listen to any argument.

Arthur.

The only one you’ve offered yet is: here’s a good job going, Henry’s your nephew, give it him. My dear, don’t you see the Khedive would never accept such a near relation of mine?

Christina.

I don’t agree with you at all. The fact of his asking you to recommend an English secretary shows that he wants to draw the connection between you and himself closer. After all, you might give the boy a chance.

Arthur.

This is not an occasion when one can afford to give a chance. It’s hit or miss. If the man I choose is a failure the Khedive will never ask me to do such a thing for him again. I can’t take any risks.

Christina.

Will you tell me what qualifications Henry lacks to make him suitable for the post?

Arthur.

Certainly. It’s true he speaks Arabic, but he doesn’t understand the native mind. Grammars can’t teach you that, my dear, only sympathy. He has the mind of an official. I often think that you must have swallowed a ramrod in early life and poor Henry was born with a foot-rule in his inside.

Christina.

I am not amused, Arthur.

Arthur.

I have no doubt in course of time he’ll become a very competent official, but he’ll never be anything else. He lacks imagination, and that is just as necessary to a statesman as to a novelist. Finally he has no charm.

Christina.

How can you judge? You’re his uncle. You might just as well say I have no charm.

Arthur.

You haven’t. You’re an admirable woman, with all the substantial virtues which make you an ornament to your sex, but you have no charm.

Christina.

[With a grim smile.] I should be a fool if I expected you to pay me compliments, shouldn’t I?

Arthur.

You would at all events be a woman who is unable to learn by experience.

Christina.

Besides, I don’t agree with you. I think Henry has charm.

Arthur.

Why do we all call him Henry? Why does Henry suit him so admirably? If he had charm we would naturally call him Harry.

Christina.

Really, Arthur, it amazes me that a man in your position can be influenced by such absurd trifles. It’s so unfair, when a boy has a dozen solid real virtues that you should refuse to recommend him for a job because he hasn’t got in your opinion a frivolous, unsubstantial advantage like charm.

Arthur.

Unsubstantial it may be, but frivolous it certainly isn’t. Believe me, charm is the most valuable asset that any man can have. D’you think it sounds immoral to say it compensates for the lack of brains and virtue? Alas! it happens to be true. Brains may bring you to power, but charm enables you to keep it. Without charm you will never lead men.

Christina.

And do you imagine you’re likely to find a young Englishman who’s a sportsman and an Arabic scholar, who has tact, imagination, sympathy, wisdom, courtesy and charm?

Anne.

If you do, Arthur, I’m afraid he won’t remain here very long, because I warn you, I shall insist on marrying him.

Arthur.

It’s not so formidable as it sounds. I’m going to suggest Ronny.

Christina.

[Astounded.] Ronald Parry! That’s the very last person I should have thought you’d be inclined to suggest.

Arthur.

[Sharply.] Why?

Anne.

[With dismay.] You don’t really mean that, Arthur?

Arthur.

Why not?

Christina.

[To Anne.] Didn’t you know?

Anne.

It’s the last thing that would ever have entered my head.

Christina.

I thought you’d made all arrangements for sending him away.

Arthur.

I made no arrangements at all. I received a telegram from the F.O. saying that he’d been appointed to Paris.

Anne.

[After a very short pause.] Don’t you think you’d better leave it at that?

Arthur.

No, I don’t. I’m going to wire to London explaining the circumstances and suggesting that I think him very suitable for the post that’s just offered itself.

Anne.

[Trying to take it lightly.] I feel rather aggrieved, after all the efforts I’ve made to get him appointed to Paris.

Christina.

Oh, he owes that to you, does he? You thought it would be better for him to leave here?

Arthur.

[Deliberately.] I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at, Christina.

Christina.

[Taking him up defiantly.] I cannot imagine anyone more unsuitable than Ronald Parry.

Arthur.

That is for me to judge, isn’t it?

Anne.

Perhaps the Foreign Office will say they see no reason to change their mind.

Arthur.

I don’t think so.

Anne.

Have you told Ronny?

Arthur.

No, I thought it unnecessary till I’d found out whether the Khedive would be willing to take him.

Christina.

I’m amazed, Arthur. When Henry told me Ronald Parry was going I couldn’t help thinking it was very desirable.

Arthur.

Why?

[She looks at him, about to speak, then hesitates. She does not dare, and resolves to be silent. Anne comes to the rescue.]

Anne.

Christina knows that I shall be very little in Egypt in future and how fond Ronny and I are of one another. We naturally want to be as near each other as we can.

Christina.

[With a chuckle.] It really amuses me that you should refuse to give a good job to Henry because you’ve made up your mind to give it to Ronald Parry.

[Arthur walks up to her deliberately and faces her.]

Arthur.

If you’ve got anything to say against him say it.

[They stare at one another for a moment in silence.]

Christina.

If you have nothing against him there’s no reason why I should.

Arthur.

I see. I have a good deal to do this afternoon. If you have nothing more to say to me I’d like to get back to my work.

Christina.

Very well, I’ll go.

Arthur.

You won’t stop and see Violet?

Christina.

I don’t think so, thank you.

[She goes out. He opens the door for her.]

Anne.

Why didn’t you tell me just now that you’d decided to keep Ronny in Cairo?

Arthur.

I thought it was unnecessary till everything was settled. I daresay you’ll be good enough to hold your tongue about it.

Anne.

Have you definitely made up your mind?

Arthur.

Definitely.

[They look at one another steadily.]

Anne.

I think I’ll go up to my room. I keep to my old habit of a siesta after luncheon.

Arthur.

I wish I could get Violet to take it.

Anne.

She’s so young, she doesn’t feel the need of it yet.

Arthur.

Yes, she’s so young.

[Anne goes out. For a moment Arthur gives way to discouragement. He feels old and tired. But he hears a footstep and pulls himself together. He is his usual self, gay, gallant and humorous, when Violet enters the room.]

Violet.

I saw Christina drive away. What did she want?

Arthur.

The earth.

Violet.

I hope you gave it her.

Arthur.

No, I’m trying to get the moon for you just now, darling, and I thought if I gave her the earth it really would upset the universe a little too much.

Violet.

I thought I’d better do these invitations before I dressed.

Arthur.

You’re not going to put on a different frock to go and have tea with the Khedive’s mother? You look charming in that.

Violet.

I think it’s a little too young. It was all right for the morning.

Arthur.

Of course you are older this afternoon, that’s quite true.

Violet.

Can you spare Ronny just now?

Arthur.

[After an instant’s pause.] Yes, I’ll send him to you at once.

Violet.

[As he is going.] I shall be back in time to give you your tea.

Arthur.

That will be very nice. Good-bye till then.

[He goes out. She is meditative. She gives a slight start as Ronny comes in.]

Violet.

I hope I haven’t torn you away from anything very important.

Ronny.

I was only typing a very dull report. I’d just finished it.

Violet.

You mustn’t ever bother about me if it’s not convenient, you know.

Ronny.

I shan’t have much chance, shall I?

Violet.

No.... Look, here’s the list.

[She hands him a sheet of paper on which names are scribbled, and he reads it.]

Ronny.

It looks rather a stodgy party, doesn’t it? I see you’ve crossed my name out.

Violet.

It’s not much good asking you when you won’t be here. Whom d’you advise me to ask in your place?

Ronny.

I don’t know. I hate the idea of anyone being asked in my place. Shall I start on them at once?

Violet.

If you don’t mind. I have to go out, you know.

[He sits down at a writing table.]

Ronny.

I’ll start on those I dislike least.

Violet.

[With a chuckle.] Don’t you remember when Arthur said I must ask the Von Scheidleins how we hated to write them a civil letter?

Ronny.

[Writing.] Dear Lady Sinclair.

Violet.

Oh, she asked me to call her Evelyn.

Ronny.

Hang! I’ll have to start again.

Violet.

It always make me so uncomfortable to address fat old ladies by their Christian names.

Ronny.

I’ll end up “yours affectionately,” shall I?

Violet.

I suppose you’re awfully excited at the thought of going?

Ronny.

No.

Violet.

It’s a step for you, isn’t it? I ... I ought to congratulate you.

Ronny.

You don’t think I want to go, do you? I hate it.

Violet.

Why?

Ronny.

I’ve been very happy here.

Violet.

You knew you couldn’t stay here for the rest of your life.

Ronny.

Why not?

Violet.

[With an effort at self-control.] Who is the next person on the list?

Ronny.

[Looking at it.] Will you miss me at all?

Violet.

I suppose I shall at first.

Ronny.

That’s not a very kind thing to say.

Violet.

Isn’t it? I don’t mean to be unkind, Ronny.

Ronny.

Oh, I’m so miserable!

[She gives a little cry and looks at him. She presses her hands to her heart.]

Violet.

Let us go on with the letters.

[Silently he writes. She does not watch him, but looks hopelessly into space. She is unable to restrain a sob.]

Ronny.

You’re crying.

Violet.

No, I’m not. I’m not. I swear I’m not. [He gets up and goes over to her. He looks into her eyes.] It came so suddenly. I never dreamt you’d be going away.

Ronny.

Oh, Violet!

Violet.

Don’t call me that. Please don’t.

Ronny.

Did you know that I loved you?

Violet.

How should I know? Oh, I’m so unhappy. What have I done to deserve it?

Ronny.

I couldn’t help loving you. It can’t matter if I tell you now. It’s the end of everything. I don’t want to go without your knowing. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Violet.

Oh, Ronny!

Ronny.

It’s been so wonderful, all these months. I’ve never known anyone to come up to you. Everything you said pleased me. I loved the way you walk, and your laugh, and the sound of your voice.

Violet.

Oh, don’t!

Ronny.

I was content just to see you and to talk with you and to know you were here, near me. You’ve made me extraordinarily happy.

Violet.

Have I? Oh, I’m so glad.

Ronny.

I couldn’t help myself. I tried not to think of you. You’re not angry with me?

Violet.

I can’t be. Oh, Ronny, I’ve had such a rotten time. It came upon me unawares, I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I only liked you.

Ronny.

Oh, my dearest! Is it possible ...?

Violet.

And when it struck me — oh, I was so frightened. I thought it must be written on my face and everyone must see. I knew it was wrong. I knew I mustn’t. I couldn’t help myself.

Ronny.

Oh, say it, Violet. I want to hear you say it: “I love you.”

Violet.

I love you. [He kneels down before her and covers her hands with kisses.] Oh, don’t, don’t!

Ronny.

My dearest. My very dearest.

Violet.

What have I done? I made up my mind that no one should ever know. I thought then it wouldn’t matter. It needn’t prevent me from doing my duty to Arthur. It didn’t interfere with my affection for him. I didn’t see how it could hurt anyone if I kept my love for you locked up in my heart, tightly, and it made me so happy. I rejoiced in it.

Ronny.

I never knew. I used to weigh every word you said to me. You never gave me a sign.

Violet.

I didn’t know it was possible to love anybody as I love you, Ronny.

Ronny.

My precious!

Violet.

Oh, don’t say things like that to me. It breaks my heart. I wouldn’t ever have told you only I was upset by your going. If they’d only given me time to get used to the thought I wouldn’t ... I wouldn’t make such a fool of myself.

Ronny.

You can’t grudge me that little bit of comfort.

Violet.

But it all came so suddenly, the announcement that you were going and your going. I felt I couldn’t bear it. Why didn’t they give me time?

Ronny.

Don’t cry, my dearest, it tortures me.

Violet.

This is the last time we shall be alone, Ronny. I couldn’t let you go without ... oh, my God, I can’t bear it.

Ronny.

We might have been so happy together, Violet. Why didn’t we meet sooner? I feel we’re made for one another.

Violet.

Oh, don’t talk of that. D’you suppose I haven’t said to myself: “Oh, if I’d only met him first”? Oh, Ronny, Ronny, Ronny!

Ronny.

I never dared to think that you loved me. It’s maddening that I must go. It’s horrible to think of leaving you now.

Violet.

No, it’s better. We couldn’t have gone on like that. I’m glad you’re going. It breaks my heart.

Ronny.

Oh, Violet, why didn’t you wait for me?

Violet.

I made a mistake. I must pay for it. Arthur’s so good and kind. He loves me with all his heart. Oh, what a fool I was! I didn’t know what love was. I feel that my life is finished, and I’m so young, Ronny.

Ronny.

You know I’d do anything in the world for you.

Violet.

My dear one. [They stand, face to face, looking at one another wistfully and sadly.] It’s no good, Ronny, we’re both making ourselves utterly miserable. Say good-bye to me and let us part. [He draws her towards him.] No, don’t kiss me. I don’t want you to kiss me. [He takes her in his arms and kisses her passionately.] Oh, Ronny, I do love you so. [At last she tears herself away from him. She sinks into a chair. He makes a movement towards her.] No, don’t come near me now. I’m so tired.

[He looks at her for a moment, then he goes back to the table and sits down to write the letters. Their eyes meet slowly.]

Ronny.

It’s good-bye, then?

Violet.

It’s good-bye.

[She presses her hands to her heart as though the aching were unendurable. He buries his head in his hands.]

END OF THE FIRST ACT

ACT II

The scene is the garden of the Consular Agent’s residence. It is an Eastern garden with palm-trees, magnolias, and flowering bushes of azaleas. On one side is an old Arabic well-head decorated with verses from the Koran; a yellow rambler grows over the ironwork above. Rose-trees are in full bloom. On the other side are basket chairs and a table. At the bottom of the garden runs the Nile and on the farther bank are lines of palm-trees and the Eastern sky. It is towards evening and during the act the sun gradually sets.

The table is set out with tea-things. Anne is seated reading a book. The gardener in his blue gaberdine, with brown legs and the little round cap of the Egyptian workman, is watering the flowers. Christina comes in.

Anne.

[Looking up, with a smile.] Ah, Christina!

Christina.

I was told I should find you here. I came to see Violet, but I hear she hasn’t come back yet.

Anne.

She was going to see the Khedive’s mother.

Christina.

I think I’ll wait for her.

Anne.

Would you like tea? I was waiting till Violet came in. I expect she’s been made to eat all sorts of sweet things and she’ll want a cup of tea to take the taste out of her mouth.

Christina.

No, don’t have it brought for me.... I can never quite get over being treated as a guest in the house I was mistress of for so many years. [To the Gardener.] Imshi (Get out).

Gardener.

Dêtak sa ‘ideh (May thy night be happy).

[He goes out.]

Anne.

Your knowledge of Arabic is rather sketchy, Christina.

Christina.

I never see why I should trouble myself with strange languages. If foreigners want to talk to me they can talk to me in English.

Anne.

But surely when we’re out of our own country we’re foreigners.

Christina.

Nonsense, Anne, we’re English. I wonder Arthur allows Violet to learn Arabic. I can’t help thinking it’ll make a bad impression on the natives. I managed this house on fifty words of Arabic.

Anne.

[Smiling.] I’m convinced that on a hundred you’d be prepared to manage the country.

Christina.

I don’t think you can deny that I did my work here competently.

Anne.

You’re a wonderful housekeeper.

Christina.

I have common sense and a talent for organisation. [Pursing her lips.] It breaks my heart to see the way certain things are done here now.

Anne.

You must remember Violet is very young.

Christina.

Much too young to be a suitable wife for Arthur.

Anne.

He seems to be very well satisfied, and after all he is the person most concerned.

Christina.

I know. His infatuation is — blind, don’t you think?

Anne.

[Coolly.] I think it’s very delightful to see two people so much in love with one another.

Christina.

D’you know that I used to be fearfully jealous of you, Anne?

Anne.

[Amused.] I know that you thoroughly disliked me, Christina. You didn’t trouble to hide it.

Christina.

I was always afraid that Arthur would marry you. I didn’t want to be turned out of this house. I suppose you think that’s horrid of me.

Anne.

No, I think it’s very natural.

Christina.

I didn’t see why Arthur should marry. I gave him all the comforts of home life. And I thought it would interfere with his work. Of course I knew that he liked you. I suffered agonies when he used to go and dine with you quietly. [With a sniff.] He said it rested him.

Anne.

Perhaps it did. Did you grudge him that?

Christina.

I knew you were desperately in love with him.

Anne.

Need you throw that in my face now? Really, I haven’t deserved it.

Christina.

My dear, I wish he had married you. It never struck me he’d marry a girl twenty years younger than himself.

Anne.

He never looked upon me as anything but a friend. I don’t suppose it occurred to him for an instant that my feeling might possibly be different.

Christina.

It was stupid of me. I ought to have given him a hint.

Anne.

[With a smile.] You took care not to do that, Christina. Perhaps you knew that was all it wanted.

Christina.

[Reflectively.] I don’t think he’s treated you very well.

Anne.

Nonsense. A man isn’t obliged to marry a woman just because she’s in love with him. I don’t see why loving should give one a claim on the person one loves.

Christina.

You would have made him a splendid wife.

Anne.

So will Violet, my dear. Most men have the wives they deserve.

Christina.

I marvel at your kindness to her. You’re so tolerant and sympathetic, one would never imagine she’s robbed you of what you wanted most in the world.

Anne.

I shouldn’t respect myself very much if I bore her the shadow of a grudge. I’m so glad that she’s sweet and charming and ingenuous; it makes it very easy to be fond of her.

Christina.

I know. I wanted to dislike her. But I can’t really. There is something about her which disarms one.

Anne.

Isn’t it lucky? It’s a difficult position. That irresistible charm of hers will make everything possible. After all, you and I can agree in that we both want Arthur to be happy.

Christina.

I wonder if there’s much chance of that.

[Anne looks at her for a moment inquiringly, and Christina coolly returns the stare.]

Anne.

Why did you come here this afternoon, Christina?

Christina.

[With a faint smile.] Why did you take so much trouble to get your brother moved to Paris?

Anne.

Good heavens, I told you this morning.

Christina.

D’you think we need make pretences with one another?

Anne.

I don’t think I quite understand.

Christina.

Don’t you? You wanted Ronny to leave Egypt because you know he’s in love with Violet.

[For a moment Anne is a little taken aback, but she quickly recovers herself.]

Anne.

He’s very susceptible. He’s always falling in and out of love. I had noticed that he was attracted, and I confess I thought it better to put him out of harm’s way.

Christina.

How cunning you are, Anne! You won’t admit anything till you’re quite certain the person you’re talking to knows it. You know as well as I do that Violet is just as much in love with him.

Anne.

[Much disturbed.] Christina, what are you going to do? How could I help knowing? You’ve only got to see the way they look at one another. They’re sick with love.

Christina.

What did Arthur expect? I’ve never seen a couple more admirably suited to one another.

Anne.

I thought no one knew but me till this morning, when you were talking to Arthur. Then I thought you must know too. My heart was in my mouth, I was afraid you were going to tell him. But you didn’t, and I thought I’d been mistaken.

Christina.

You didn’t give me credit for very nice feeling, Anne. Because I didn’t act like a perfect beast you thought I must be a perfect fool.

Anne.

I know how devoted you are to your son. I didn’t believe you’d stick at anything when his interests were at stake. I’m sorry, Christina.

Christina.

Pray don’t apologise. I didn’t know it myself. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Arthur, but I simply couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything so shabby.

Anne.

Oh, Christina, we mustn’t ever let him know, we can’t make him so miserable. It would break his heart.

Christina.

Well, what is to be done?

Anne.

Heaven knows. I’ve been racking my brains. I can think of nothing. I’d arranged everything so beautifully. And now I’m helpless. I thought even of going to Ronny and asking him to refuse any job that will keep him here. But Arthur looks upon it as so important. He’ll insist on Ronny’s accepting unless his reasons for going are — what’s the word I want?

Christina.

Irrefutable. It seems very hard that my boy should be done out of such a splendid chance by Ronny. Except for your brother I’m sure Arthur would give it to Henry.

Anne.

[Diplomatically.] I know he has the highest opinion of Henry’s abilities.

Christina.

You can’t expect me to sit still and let things go on.

Anne.

Arthur is perfectly unconscious. He thinks Violet is as much in love with him as he is with her. You couldn’t be so cruel as to hint anything to him.

Christina.

How you adore him, Anne! You may set your mind at rest. I’m not going to say a word to Arthur. I’m going to speak to Violet.

Anne.

[Frightened.] What are you going to say?

Christina.

I’m going to ask her to do all she can to persuade Arthur to give Henry the job. And then Ronny can go to Paris.

Anne.

You’re not going to tell her you know?

Christina.

[Deliberately.] If it’s necessary she must make Ronny refuse the appointment. He must invent some excuse that Arthur will accept.

Anne.

But it’s blackmail.

Christina.

I don’t care what it is.

[Violet comes in. She wears an afternoon gown, picturesque and simple, yet elegant enough for the visit she has been paying. She has a large hat, which she presently removes.]

Anne.

Here is Violet.

Violet.

Oh, you poor people, haven’t you had any tea?

Anne.

I thought we’d wait till you came back. It’ll come at once now.

Violet.

How are you, Christina? How is Henry? [They kiss one another.] I’ve not seen him for days.

Christina.

He’s coming to fetch me presently.

Violet.

I shall tell him he neglects me. He’s the only one of my in-laws I’m not a little afraid of.

Christina.

He’s a good boy.

Violet.

He has a good mother. I thought it would be such fun having a nephew several years older than myself, but he won’t treat me as an aunt. He will call me Violet. I tell him he ought to be more respectful.

[Meanwhile Servants have brought the tea.]

Christina.

What have you been doing this afternoon?

Violet.

Oh, I went to see the Khedive’s mother. She made me eat seventeen different things and I feel exactly like a boa-constrictor. [Looking at the cakes and scones.] I’m afraid there’s not a very nice tea.

Christina.

So I notice.

Violet.

[With a smile.] I suppose I couldn’t persuade you to pour it out.

Christina.

[Gratified.] Certainly, if you wish it.

[She sits down in front of the teapot and pours out cups of tea. Arthur comes in.]

Arthur.

Hulloa, Christina, are you pouring out the tea?

Christina.

Violet asked me to.

Violet.

If only I weren’t here it would be quite like old times.

Arthur.

I understand you want to see me, Violet.

Violet.

Oh, I hope you haven’t come out here on purpose. I sent the message that I wished to have a word with you when convenient, but I didn’t want to hurry you. I was quite prepared to go to you.

Arthur.

That sounds very formidable. I had a few minutes to spare while some letters were being prepared for me to sign. But in any case I’m always at your service.

Violet.

The Khedive’s mother has asked me to talk to you about a man called Abdul Said.

Arthur.

Oh!

Violet.

She thought if I put the circumstances before you....

Arthur.

[Interrupting.] What has he got to do with her?

Violet.

He’s been employed for years on an estate of hers up the Nile. His mother was one of her maids. It appears she gave her a dowry when she married.

Arthur.

[Smiling.] I see. I gathered that Abdul Said had powerful influence somewhere or other.

Christina.

Who is this man, Arthur?

Arthur.

He’s been sentenced to death for murder. It was a perfectly clear case, but there was a lot of perjury and we had some difficulty in getting a conviction. What has the Princess asked you to do?

Violet.

She explained the whole thing to me, and then she asked if I wouldn’t intercede with you. I promised to do everything I could.

Arthur.

You shouldn’t have done that. The old lady knows quite well an affair of this sort is no business of yours. I wish you’d told her so.

Violet.

Arthur, what could I do? His wife was there, and his mother. If you’d seen them.... I couldn’t bear to look at their misery and do nothing. I said I was sure that when you knew all the facts you’d reprieve the man.

Arthur.

It’s not in my power to do anything of the sort. The prerogative of mercy is with the Khedive.

Violet.

I know, but if you advise him to exercise it he will. He’s only too anxious to, but he won’t move without your advice.

Arthur.

It’s monstrous of the Princess to try and make use of you in this way. She prepared a complete trap for you.

Anne.

What did the man do exactly?

Arthur.

It’s rather a peculiar case. Abdul Said had a difference of opinion with an Armenian merchant and shortly after his only son fell ill and died. He took it into his head that the Armenian had cast the evil eye on him, and he took his gun, waited for his opportunity, and shot the Armenian dead. The man isn’t a criminal in the ordinary sense of the word, but we can’t afford to make exceptions. If we did there’d be a crop of murders with the same excuse. I looked into the case this morning and I see no reason to advise the Khedive to interfere with the course of justice.

Violet.

This morning? When you came in to luncheon full of spirits, laughing and chaffing, had you just sent a man to his death? How horribly callous!

Arthur.

I’m sorry you should think that. I give every matter my closest attention, and when I’ve settled it to the best of my ability I put it out of my mind. I think it would be just as unwise to let it affect me as for a doctor to let himself be affected by his patients’ sufferings.

Violet.

It seems to me horrible to slaughter that wretched man because he’s ignorant and simple-minded. Don’t you see that for yourself?

Arthur.

I’m afraid I’m not here to interpret the law according to my feelings but according to its own spirit.

Violet.

It’s easy to talk like that when you haven’t got any feeling one way or the other. Don’t you realise the misery of that man condemned to die for what he honestly thought was a mere act of justice? I wish you’d seen the agony of those poor women. And now they’re more or less happy because I promised to help them. The Princess told them I had influence with you. If she only knew!

Arthur.

You should never have been put in such a position. It was grossly unfair. I’ll take care that nothing of the sort occurs again.

Violet.

D’you mean to say you’ll do nothing? Won’t you even go into the matter again — with a little sympathy?

Arthur.

I can’t!

Violet.

It’s the first thing I’ve ever asked you, Arthur.

Arthur.

I know. I’m only sorry that I must refuse you.

Violet.

This is the first sentence of death in Egypt since our marriage. Don’t you know what it would mean to me to think I’d saved a man’s life? The Khedive is waiting to sign the reprieve. It only requires a word from you. Won’t you say it? I feel that the gratitude of these poor women may be like a blessing on us.

Arthur.

My dear, I think my duty is very clear. I must do it.

Violet.

It’s clear because all that grief means nothing to you. What do you care if a man is hanged whom you’ve never even seen? I wonder if you’d find it so easy to do your duty in a matter that affected you. If it meant misery or happiness to you. It’s easy to do one’s duty when one doesn’t care.

Arthur.

You’re quite right. That is the test: if one can do one’s duty when it means the loss of all one holds dear and valuable in the world.

Violet.

I hope you’ll never be put to it.

Arthur.

[With a chuckle.] My dear, you say that as though you hoped precisely the contrary.

Violet.

Must I write to the Princess and say I was entirely mistaken, and I have no more influence over you than a tripper at Shepheard’s Hotel?

Arthur.

I’d sooner you didn’t write to her at all. I will have a message conveyed which you may be sure will save you from any humiliation.

Violet.

[Icily.] I’m afraid you have a lot of business; you mustn’t let me keep you.

[He looks at her reflectively for a moment and then goes out. There is an awkward silence.]

Violet.

Those good people we had to luncheon to-day would be amused to see what the power amounts to that they congratulated me on.

Christina.

There’s very little that Arthur would refuse you. He’d do practically anything in the world to please you.

Violet.

It’ll be a long time before I ask him to do anything else.

Christina.

Don’t say that, Violet. Because I came here to-day on purpose to ask you to use your influence with him.

Violet.

You see how much I have.

Christina.

That was a matter of principle. Men are always funny about principles. You can never get them to understand that circumstances alter cases.

Violet.

Arthur looks upon me as a child. After all, it’s not my fault that I’m twenty years younger than he is.

Christina.

I want your help so badly, Violet. And you know, the fact that Arthur has just refused to do something for you is just the reason that will make him anxious to do anything you ask now.

Violet.

I don’t want to expose myself to the humiliation of another refusal.

Christina.

It’s so important to me. It may mean all the difference to Henry’s future.

Violet.

[With a change of manner, charmingly.] Oh! I’d love to do anything I could for Henry.

Christina.

The Khedive has asked Arthur for an English secretary. It seems to me that Henry has every possible qualification, but you know what Arthur is; he’s terrified of the least suspicion of favouring his friends and relations.

Violet.

My dear Christina, what can I do? Arthur would merely tell me to mind my own business.

Christina.

He wants to give the post to Ronald Parry....

Violet.

[Quickly.] Ronny? But Ronny’s going to Paris. It’s all arranged.

Christina.

It was. But Arthur thinks it essential that he should stay in Egypt.

Violet.

Did you know this, Anne?

Anne.

Not till just now.

Violet.

Does Ronny know?

Anne.

I don’t think so.

[Violet is aghast. She does all she can to hide her agitation. The two women watch her, Christina with cold curiosity, Anne with embarrassment.]

Violet.

I’m ... I’m awfully surprised. It’s only an hour or two ago that Ronny and I bade one another a pathetic farewell.

Christina.

Really? But there was never any talk of his going till the day after to-morrow. You were in a great hurry with your leave-takings.

Violet.

I thought he’d be busy packing and that I mightn’t have another chance.

Christina.

You’ve been so intimate, I’m sure he would have been able to snatch a moment to say good-bye to you and Arthur before his train started.

[Violet does not quite know what this speech means. She gives Christina a look. Anne comes to the rescue quickly.]

Anne.

Ronny has been acting as Violet’s secretary to a certain extent. I expect they had all sorts of little secrets together that they wanted to discuss in private.

Christina.

Of course. That’s very natural. [With great friendliness.] If I thought I were robbing you of anyone who was indispensable to you I wouldn’t ask you to put in a good word for Henry. But, of course, if Ronald became the Khedive’s secretary he couldn’t exactly continue to write letters and pay bills for you, could he?

Violet.

I’m rather taken aback. I’d got it fixed in my head that Ronny was going.

Christina.

I can promise you that in helping Henry you’re not doing any harm to Ronald. Anne is very anxious that he should leave Egypt. Isn’t that so?

Anne.

In a way. Henry is proposing to spend the rest of his official life in Egypt. An appointment like this is naturally more important to him than it would be to Ronny, who is by way of being a bird of passage.

Christina.

Exactly. Ronny has had his experience here. If he stayed longer it would only be waste of time. Anne naturally wants to have him near her. I daresay she’s a little afraid of his getting into mischief here.

Anne.

I don’t know about that, Christina.

Christina.

My dear, you know how susceptible he is. There’s always the possibility that he’ll fall in love with someone who isn’t very desirable.

Violet.

I’ve got an awful headache.

Christina.

Why don’t you take a little aspirin? I’m quite sure that if you set your mind to it you can persuade Arthur to give the job to Henry. And that would settle everything.

Violet.

And if I can’t persuade him?

Christina.

Then you must put it to Ronny.

Violet.

I?

Christina.

You see, if he refused the appointment and left Egypt, then I’m convinced Arthur would accept Henry.

Violet.

Why should I put it to Ronny?

Christina.

[Pleasantly.] You’ve been so very friendly, haven’t you? If you suggested to him that ... he’s standing in Henry’s way....

Violet.

I should have thought it was for Anne to do that.

Christina.

How simple-minded you are! A man will often do for a pretty woman what he won’t do for his sister.

Violet.

You want me to make him go?

Christina.

Don’t you think yourself that would be the very best thing ... for all parties?

[Violet and Christina look steadily at one another. Violet sinks her eyes. She knows that Christina is aware of her love. She is terrified. Ronald comes in. He is in the highest spirits.]

Ronny.

I’ve been sent to have a cup of tea. Sir Arthur is coming along in a minute. I’ve got some news. I’m staying in Egypt. Isn’t it splendid?

[Violet gives a little gasp.]

Violet.

Is it settled then?

Ronny.

Did you know? I thought it would be a surprise.

Violet.

No. I’ve just heard.

Ronny.

Isn’t it magnificent?

Christina.

You’re very changeable. It’s only a few months ago that you were constantly telling Henry you’d had enough of the country.

Ronny.

Never. I love it. I should like to stay here all my life.

Christina.

Fancy that!

Ronny.

[Addressing himself to Violet.] It would be madness to leave a place where you’re so happy, wouldn’t it? I feel so intensely alive here. It’s a wonderful country. One lives every minute of the day.

Christina.

You’re so enthusiastic. One would almost think you’d fallen in love.

Violet.

Ronny is naturally enthusiastic.

Ronny.

[To Christina.] And why shouldn’t I have fallen in love?

Christina.

Won’t you tell us who with?

Ronny.

[With a chuckle.] I was only joking. Isn’t it enough to have a splendid job in a country where there’s so much hope? Sir Arthur has given me a marvellous opportunity. It’ll be my fault if I don’t make the most of it.

Christina.

[Dryly.] Shall I give you a cup of tea?

Ronny.

[Chaffing her.] D’you think I want calming down? I feel like a prisoner who was going to be hanged and has just had a free pardon. I don’t want to be calmed down. I want to revel in my freedom.

Christina.

All that means, I take it, that you don’t want tea.

Ronny.

It’s no good trying to snub me. I’m unsnubable to-day. You haven’t congratulated me, Anne.

Anne.

My dear, you’ve been talking nineteen to the dozen. I’ve not had the chance to get a word in edgeways.

Ronny.

[To Violet.] Will you put my name back on your list for that dinner? It would have broken my heart to miss it.

Violet.

Your official position rather alters things, doesn’t it? I would never dare to ask you now just to make an even number.

Ronny.

Oh, well, I’m sending out the invitations. I shall write a formal letter to myself, explaining the circumstances, and I daresay I shall see my way to accept.

Christina.

Dear Ronald, you might be eighteen.

[Arthur comes in with Henry Pritchard. This is Christina’s son, a pleasant, clean young man, but in no way remarkable.]

Arthur.

Henry tells me he’s come to fetch you away, Christina.

Christina.

So you lose not a moment in bringing him here.

Arthur.

Really, Christina, you do me an injustice. I can’t bear to think you should be parted from your precious boy an instant longer than necessary.

Henry.

[Shaking hands with Violet.] How is my stately aunt?

Violet.

Merry and bright, thank you.

Henry.

You know I’m having a birthday soon, don’t you?

Violet.

What of it?

Henry.

I’ve always been given to understand that aunts give their nephews ten shillings on their birthday.

Violet.

Do they? I am glad. I’d love to press ten shillings into your willing hand.

Henry.

Halloa, Ronny. Lucky devil. I congratulate you.

Ronny.

That’s awfully good of you, old man.

Arthur.

On what? Christina!

Christina.

I told Henry. I didn’t think it would matter, I thought it better that he should know.

Henry.

I say, Uncle Arthur, I’m afraid mother has been giving you a rotten time. It’s not my fault, you know.

Arthur.

What isn’t?

Henry.

Well, when mother told me at luncheon that the Khedive had applied for an English secretary, I saw by the beady look in her eye that if I didn’t get the job she was going to make things unpleasant for somebody.

Christina.

Really, Henry, I don’t know what you mean.

Henry.

Well, mother, you’re an old dear....

Christina.

Not so old either.

Arthur.

Certainly not, Henry. Let us have none of your nonsense.

Henry.

But you know perfectly well that you’d cheerfully bring the British Empire tumbling about our ears if you could get me a good fat billet by doing so.

Arthur.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings....

Christina.

You’ve got no right to say that, Henry. I’ve never asked anything for you that it wasn’t practically your right to have.

Henry.

Well, mother, between you and me I don’t mind telling you that Ronny is much more suited to this particular job than I am. Only a perfect fool would have hesitated, and for the honour of the family we can’t suspect Uncle Arthur of being that.

Arthur.

You see what comes of bringing up a boy properly, Christina; you’ve made him a decent fellow in spite of yourself.

Christina.

You’re a tiresome creature, Henry, but I’m attached to you. You may kiss me.

Henry.

Come along, Mother. I’m not going to kiss you in public.

Christina.

[Getting up.] Well, good-bye, Violet. Don’t forget our little conversation, will you?

Violet.

Good-bye. Good-bye, Henry.

Christina.

[To Anne.] Why don’t you come for a little drive with us? It’s such a beautiful evening.

Anne.

Will you take me? I think I’d like it. It won’t take me a minute to put on my hat.

[She gets up. They start to walk towards the house.]

Christina.

[Putting up her cheek.] Good-bye, Arthur.

Arthur.

Oh, I’ll just come along and put you in your carriage. You shan’t say that I don’t treat you with the ceremony due to your importance.

[They saunter off. Violet and Ronny are left alone.]

Violet.

You’re coming back, Arthur?

Arthur.

Oh, yes, in a minute. [Exit.]

Ronny.

[Under his breath.] Violet.

Violet.

Be quiet.

Ronny.

Isn’t it ripping? I could hardly prevent myself from letting them see how much I loved you.

Violet.

You didn’t. Christina suspected before and now you’ve told her in plain words.

Ronny.

[Gaily.] That’s only your fancy. You think because it’s plain to you it must be plain to anybody else.

Violet.

I’ve never before had anything to hide. D’you think I like it?

Ronny.

And even if she does know, what does it matter? It does her no harm.... And how could anyone help loving you?

Violet.

[Quickly.] Take care what you say.

Ronny.

No one can hear. To look at us anyone would think we were discussing the political situation.

Violet.

You’re cunning, Ronny.

Ronny.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Violet.

For God’s sake don’t keep on saying it. I’m so ashamed.

Ronny.

[Astonished.] What about?

Violet.

Just now, this afternoon, I would never have said what I did only I thought you were going. I wasn’t myself then, Ronny. I ought never to have....

Ronny.

Thank God you did. You can’t grudge me the happiness you gave me. You can’t take it away from me now. I know you love me. I hold the sun and the moon in my hands and all the stars of heaven.

Violet.

[Desperately.] What are we going to do? Oh, it’s not fair to me.

Ronny.

It’s done now. You can’t unsay it. Each time I look at you I shall remember. I’ve held you in my arms and kissed your lips. You can never take that away from me. And I needn’t go. I shall see you constantly. Oh, I’m so happy.

[She walks up and down for a moment, trying to control herself, then she makes up her mind: she stops and faces him.]

Violet.

I want you to go, Ronny. I want you to make some excuse and refuse the appointment here.

Ronny.

No, I can’t leave you now.

Violet.

I beseech you to go.

Ronny.

Do you want me to?

Violet.

Yes.

Ronny.

Give me your hand, then.

Violet.

Why?

Ronny.

Give me your hand. [She gives it him and he holds it.] Say you love me, Violet.

Violet.

No.

Ronny.

How cold your hand is!

Violet.

Let me go.

Ronny.

D’you really want me to go?

Violet.

You know I don’t. I adore you. It’ll kill me if you go. [He bends down and passionately kisses her hand.] Ronny, Ronny, don’t! What are you doing? [She tears her hand away. She is trembling with emotion. He is white and cold with passion. They sit opposite one another for a while in silence.] What a punishment! When you told me this afternoon that you loved me I thought I’d never been happy in my life before, and though it tore my heart to think that you must go I felt — oh, I don’t know — as though my joy was so overwhelming, there was no room in my heart for anything else. And now I’m wretched, wretched.

Ronny.

But why? Darling! My darling, we were going to be parted, and now we’re going to be together. Can anything matter beside that?

Violet.

It’s all so hopeless.

Ronny.

It needn’t be.

Violet.

How can it be anything else?

Ronny.

I don’t love you for a day or a week, Violet; I love you for always.

Violet.

Whatever happens, I’m going to try to do my duty to Arthur.

Ronny.

I’m not seeking to prevent you. What am I asking for? I only want to see you. I want to know that I’m close to you. I want to touch your hand. I want to think of you. What harm can that do you?

Violet.

If I were my own mistress I could laugh and let you do as you choose. But I’m not. I’m bound to you hand and foot. It’s torture to me. And the worst of it is I love my bonds. I can’t wish to be without them. I’m at your mercy, Ronny. I love you.

Ronny.

Oh, but that’s enough for me. I swear to you I don’t want you to do anything that you’ll ever regret.

Violet.

If it could only be taken out of our hands. If something would only happen.

Ronny.

What can happen?

Violet.

Perhaps the Khedive will change his mind. Perhaps the Foreign Office will say you must go to Paris.

Ronny.

Would you be pleased? Violet, I want so little from you. How can it hurt you to give me that? Let us give ourselves a chance to be happy.

Violet.

We shall never be happy. Never. The only thing we can do is to part, and I can’t let you go. I can’t. I can’t. It’s asking too much of me.

Ronny.

I love you with all my heart and soul. I didn’t know it was possible to love anyone as I love you.

[Arthur is heard gaily whistling to himself.]

Violet.

There’s Arthur!

Ronny.

[Quickly.] Shall I go?

Violet.

Yes. No. Have we got to hide ourselves? Has it come to that already? Oh, I hate myself.

[Arthur comes in.]

Violet.

[Brightly.] You’re very gay this afternoon, Arthur. One doesn’t often hear you whistle.

Arthur.

D’you think it’s unbecoming to my years or to my dignity?

Violet.

Shall I give you a cup of tea?

Arthur.

To tell you the honest truth that is what I came here for.

Violet.

And I was flattering myself it was for the pleasure of my company.

Arthur.

Ronny, will you find out if it would be convenient for the Khedive to see me at eleven o’clock to-morrow?

Ronny.

Very good, sir.

[He goes out.]

Violet.

What have you to see the Khedive about — if it isn’t a secret?

Arthur.

Not at all. I’m merely going to place before him Ronny’s name.

Violet.

Then the matter’s not definitely settled yet?

Arthur.

Not formally. I’ve not had the reply yet to my telegram to the Foreign Office, and I’ve not had the Khedive’s acceptance of my suggestion.

Violet.

But supposing the Foreign Office say they think he’d better go to Paris after all?

Arthur.

I think it’s most unlikely. They know by now that the man on the spot is the best judge of the circumstances, and I’ve accustomed them to giving me a free hand.

Violet.

And you think the Khedive will raise no objection?

Arthur.

He knows Ronny a little and likes him. I think he’ll be delighted with my choice.

[There is a pause. Arthur drinks his tea. There is no sign that he is conscious of Violet’s agitation. She is tortured by indecision.]

Violet.

Arthur, I’m sorry if I was cross just now about Abdul Said. It was stupid of me to interfere with something that wasn’t my business.

Arthur.

Oh, my dear, don’t say that. I’m sorry I couldn’t do what you wanted.

Violet.

I made myself needlessly disagreeable. Will you forgive me?

Arthur.

Darling, don’t reproach yourself. That’s more than I can bear. There’s nothing to forgive.

Violet.

I owe so much to you. I hate to think that I was horrid.

Arthur.

You don’t owe anything to me at all. And you’re incapable of being horrid.

[He seizes her hands and is about to kiss them, when she draws them abruptly away.]

Violet.

No, don’t kiss my hands.

Arthur.

Why not?

[He is surprised. For an instant she is taken aback. He looks at her hands and she withdraws them as though he could see on them the kisses which Ronny, a few minutes before, had pressed on them.]

Violet.

[With the faintest laugh of embarrassment.] If you want to kiss me I prefer you to kiss my cheeks.

Arthur.

That is evidently what they’re made for.

[He does not attempt to kiss them. She gives him a quick glance and looks away.]

Violet.

Arthur, I’m afraid Christina will be awfully disappointed at Henry’s not getting that job.

Arthur.

Let us hope she will bear her disappointment with as much fortitude as I do.

Violet.

I don’t think she’s entirely given up hope that you will change your mind.

Arthur.

[With a chuckle.] I’m sure of that. I don’t expect to have much peace till the matter is officially settled. That is why I mean to settle it quickly.

Violet.

What is your objection to Henry?

Arthur.

None. He’s not such a good man as Ronald Parry, that’s all.

Violet.

The last time there was a good job going Henry just missed getting it.

Arthur.

Henry is one of those men who would do very well for a job if there weren’t always somebody just a little bit better applying at the same time.

Violet.

Christina thinks you’re so anxious not to favour him because he’s your nephew that you are positively biassed against him.

Arthur.

Christina, like the majority of her sex, has an unerring eye for the discreditable motive.

Violet.

She blames me because you won’t help Henry. She thinks it’s because I’m jealous of her.

Arthur.

How exactly like her! The best mother and the most unreasonable woman I’ve ever known.

Violet.

[Forcing the words out.] It would be a great pleasure to me if you could change your mind and let Henry have the post instead of Ronald Parry.

Arthur.

Oh, my dear, don’t ask me to do that. You know how I hate refusing to do anything you wish.

Violet.

Anne is so anxious that Ronny should go to Paris. He’s made all his preparations, don’t you think you might just as well let him go?

Arthur.

I’m afraid I don’t. I want him here.

Violet.

It would be such a joy to me if I could go and tell Christina that you’d consented. It would make such a difference to me, you see. I want her to be fond of me, and I know she’d never forget if I’d been able to do her a good turn like that. Oh, Arthur, won’t you?

Arthur.

Darling, I’m afraid I can’t.

Violet.

I promise I’ll never ask you anything again as long as I live if you’ll only do this for me. It means so much to me. You don’t know how much.

Arthur.

I can’t, Violet.

Violet.

Won’t you talk it over with Anne?

Arthur.

To tell you the truth I don’t think it’s any business of hers.

Violet.

[Hesitatingly.] Is it due to her influence that Ronald was appointed to Paris?

Arthur.

Why?

Violet.

I want to know. If she’s been pulling strings to get him moved I suppose it’s for some reason. He was very comfortable here. It’s not often you find a secretary who exactly suits you.

Arthur.

Well, yes, it was her doing. She tells me she doesn’t mean to come to Egypt so much as in the past and wants her brother nearer to her.

Violet.

If she wants to see much of her brother she let him choose rather an unfortunate profession.... I wonder she didn’t tell you the truth.

Arthur.

[Quickly.] I’m convinced she did. I thought her explanation very natural. I’m sorry it’s necessary for me to interfere with her plans.

Violet.

I’m sure she wouldn’t mind my telling you why she’s so anxious Ronny should leave Egypt. She thinks he’s in love with a married woman and it seems desirable to get him away. Perhaps she didn’t want to tell you. I fancy she’s been very uneasy about it.

Arthur.

I daresay it’s only a momentary infatuation. Let us hope he will get over it quickly. I can’t lose a useful public servant because he happens to have formed an unfortunate attachment.

Violet.

I’m afraid I’m not explaining myself very well. Ronny is desperately in love. There’s no other way of putting it. You must let him go. After all, you’re very fond of him, you’ve known him since he was a small boy; it isn’t as though he were a stray young man sent you by the Foreign Office. You can’t be entirely indifferent to him. Perhaps his welfare is at stake. Don’t you think it’s wiser — it’s only kind — to send him out of harm’s way.

Arthur.

My dear, you know that I — Arthur Little — would do anything to please you and that I care very much for the happiness of Anne and the welfare of Ronald Parry. But, you see, I’m an official too, and the official can’t do all sorts of things that the man would be very glad to.

Violet.

How can you separate the official and the man? The official can’t do things that the man disapproves.

Arthur.

Ah! that’s a point that has been discussed ever since states came into being. Are the rules of private morality binding on the statesman? In theory most of us answer yes, but in practice very few act on that principle. In this case, darling, it hardly applies. I see no conflict between the man and the official.

Violet.

You think it doesn’t really concern you, Arthur?

Arthur.

I’ve not said that. But I’m not going to let an appeal to my emotions interfere with my judgment. I think I understand the situation. I’m not proposing to change my mind. I shall present Ronny’s name to the Khedive to-morrow.

Violet.

D’you think me very stupid, Arthur?

Arthur.

Not at all, darling. Only a clever woman could achieve your beauty.

Violet.

Then doesn’t it occur to you that if I’ve made such a point of Ronny’s going it must be for some very good reason?

Arthur.

[With a quick look at her.] Don’t you think we’d better leave that subject alone, darling?

Violet.

I’m afraid you’ll think it silly and vain of me to say so, but I think you should know that — that Ronny’s in love with me. That is why I want him to go.

Arthur.

It’s very natural that he should be in love with you. I’m always surprised that everybody else isn’t. I don’t see how I can prevent that except by taking you to live in the depths of the Sahara.

Violet.

Don’t make light of it, Arthur. It wasn’t very easy for me to tell you.

Arthur.

How do you wish me to take it? I can’t blame Ronald. He’s by way of being a gentleman. I’ve been good to him. He’ll make the best of a bad job.

Violet.

D’you mean to say that it makes no difference to you?

Arthur.

This secretaryship is a stepping-stone to a very important position. You’re not going to ask me to rob him of it because he’s done something so very natural as to fall in love with the most charming woman in Egypt? I imagine that all my secretaries will fall in love with you. Poor devils, I don’t see how they can be expected to help it.

Violet.

You drive me mad. It’s so serious, it’s so tremendously serious, and you have the heart to make little jokes about it.

Arthur.

[Gravely.] Has it ever struck you that flippancy is often the best way of dealing with a serious situation? Sometimes it’s really too serious to be taken seriously.

Violet.

What do you mean by that?

Arthur.

Nothing very much. I was excusing myself for my ill-timed jests.

Violet.

You’re determined to keep Ronny here?

Arthur.

Quite. [There is a pause. Arthur gets up and puts his hand on her shoulder.] I don’t think there’s anything more to say. If you will forgive me I will get back to the office.

Violet.

No, don’t go yet, Arthur. There’s something more I want to say to you.

Arthur.

Will you allow me to advise you not to? It’s so easy to say too much; it’s never unwise to say too little. I beseech you not to say anything that we should both of us regret.

Violet.

You think it’s unimportant if Ronny loves me, because you trust me implicitly.

Arthur.

Implicitly.

Violet.

Has it never occurred to you that I might be influenced by his love against my will? Do you think it’s so very safe?

Arthur.

If I allowed any doubt on that matter to enter my head I should surely be quite unworthy of your affection.

Violet.

Arthur, I don’t want to have any secrets from you.

Arthur.

[Trying to stop her.] Don’t, Violet. I don’t want you to go on.

Violet.

I must now.

Arthur.

Oh, my dear, don’t you see that things said can never be taken back. We may both know something....

Violet.

[Interrupting.] What do you mean?

Arthur.

But so long as we don’t tell one another we can ignore it. If certain words pass our lips then the situation is entirely changed.

Violet.

You’re frightening me.

Arthur.

I don’t wish to do that. Only you can tell me nothing that I don’t know. But if you tell me you may do irreparable harm.

Violet.

D’you mean to say you know? Oh, it’s impossible. Arthur, Arthur, I can’t help it. I must tell you. It burns my heart. I love Ronny with all my body and soul.

[There is a pause while they look at one another.]

Arthur.

Did you think I didn’t know?

Violet.

Then why did you offer him the job?

Arthur.

I had to.

Violet.

No one could have blamed you if you had suggested Henry.

Arthur.

My dear, I’m paid a very considerable salary. It would surely be taking money under false pretences if I didn’t do my work to the best of my ability.

Violet.

It may mean happiness or misery to all three of us.

Arthur.

I must take the risk of that. You see, Ronny is cut out for this particular position. It’s only common honesty to give it him.

Violet.

Don’t you love me any more?

Arthur.

Don’t ask me that, Violet. You know I love you with all my heart.

Violet.

Then I can’t understand.

Arthur.

You don’t think I want him to stay, do you? When the telegram came from the Foreign Office ordering him to Paris my middle-aged heart simply leapt for joy. Do you think I didn’t see all the advantages he had over me? He seemed to have so much to offer you and I so little.

Violet.

Oh, Arthur!

Arthur.

But if he went away I thought presently you’d forget him. I thought if I were very kind to you and tolerant, and if I asked nothing more from you than you were prepared to give I might in time make you feel towards me, not love perhaps, but tenderness and affection. That was all I could hope for, but that would have made me very happy. Then the Khedive asked for an English secretary, and I knew Ronny was the only man for it. You see, I’ve been at this work so long, the official in me makes decisions almost mechanically.

Violet.

And supposing they break the heart of the man in you?

Arthur.

[Smiling.] By a merciful interposition of Providence we all seem to have just enough strength to bear the burdens that are placed on us.

Violet.

D’you think so?

Arthur.

You like the rest of us, Violet.

Violet.

How long have you known I loved him?

Arthur.

Always. I think perhaps I knew before you did.

Violet.

Why didn’t you do something?

Arthur.

Will you tell me what there was to do?

Violet.

Aren’t you angry with us?

Arthur.

I should be a fool to be that. It seems to me so natural, so horribly natural. He’s young and nice-looking and cheery. It seems to me now inevitable that you should have fallen in love with him. You might be made for one another.

Violet.

Oh, do you see that?

Arthur.

It had struck you too, had it? I suppose it’s obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to think about it. [She does not answer.] Haven’t you wished with all your heart that you’d met him first? Don’t you hate me now because I married you? [She looks away.] My dear child, I’m so sorry for you. I’ve been very grateful for your kindness to me during the last month or two. I’ve seen you try to be loving to me and affectionate. I’ve been so anxious to tell you not to force yourself, because I understood and you mustn’t be unhappy about me. But I didn’t know how. I could only make myself as little troublesome as possible.

Violet.

You’ve been immensely good to me, Arthur.

Arthur.

That’s the least you had a right to expect of me. I did you a great wrong in marrying you. I knew you didn’t love me. You were dazzled by the circumstances. You didn’t know what marriage was and how irksome it must be unless love makes its constraints sweeter than freedom. But I adored you. I thought love would come. With all my heart I ask you to forgive me.

Violet.

Oh, Arthur, don’t talk like that. You know I was so happy to marry you. I thought you wonderful, I was so excited and flattered — I thought that was love. I never knew that love would come like this. If I’d only known what to expect I could have fought against it. It took me unawares. I never had a chance. It wasn’t my fault, Arthur.

Arthur.

I’m not blaming you, darling.

Violet.

It would be easier for me if you did.

Arthur.

It’s just bad luck. Bad luck? I might have expected it.

Violet.

Still, I’m glad I’ve told you. I hated having a secret from you. It’s better that we should be frank with one another.

Arthur.

If I can help you in any way I’m glad too that you’ve told me.

Violet.

What is to be done?

Arthur.

There’s nothing to be done.

Violet.

Arthur, until to-day Ronny and I have never exchanged a word that anyone might not have heard. I was happy to be with him, I knew he liked me, I was quite satisfied with that. But when I heard that he was going away suddenly everything was changed. I felt I couldn’t bear to let him go. Oh, I’m so ashamed, Arthur.

Arthur.

Dear child!

Violet.

I don’t know how it happened. He told me he loved me. He didn’t mean to. Don’t think he’s been disloyal to you, Arthur. We were both so upset. It was just as much my fault as his. I couldn’t help letting him see how much he meant to me. We thought we were never going to see one another again. He took me in his arms and held me in them. I was so happy and so miserable. I never thought life could mean so much.

Arthur.

And just now when you were alone he kissed your hands.

Violet.

How do you know?

Arthur.

When I wanted to kiss them you withdrew them. You couldn’t bear that I should touch them. You felt on them still the pressure of his lips.

Violet.

I couldn’t help it. He was beside himself with joy because he needn’t go. I don’t want to love him, Arthur. I want to love you. I’ve tried so desperately hard.

Arthur.

My dear, one either loves or one doesn’t. I’m afraid trying doesn’t do much good.

Violet.

If he stays here I shall have to see him constantly. I shan’t have a chance to get over it. Oh, I can’t. I can’t. It’s intolerable. Have pity on me.

Arthur.

I’m afraid you’ll be very unhappy. But you see, something more than your happiness is at stake. A little while ago you said you wanted to do more for your country than you did. Does it strike you that you can do something for it now?

Violet.

I?

Arthur.

We all want to do great and heroic things, but generally we can only do very modest ones. D’you think we ought to shirk them?

Violet.

I don’t understand.

Arthur.

Ronny can be of infinite value here. You can’t help your feelings for him. I can’t bring myself to blame you. But you are mistress of your words and your actions. What are we to do? You wouldn’t wish me to resign when my work here is but half done. We must make the best of the position. Remember that all of us here, you more than most women, because you’re my wife, work for the common cause by our lives and the example we set. At all costs we must seem honest, straightforward, and without reproach. And one finds by experience that it’s much less trouble to be a thing than only to seem it. There’s only one way in which we can avoid reproach and that is by being irreproachable.

Violet.

You mean that it’s necessary for the country that Ronny and you should stay here? And if my heart breaks it doesn’t matter. I thought I was doing so much in asking you to send him away. Don’t you know that with all my heart I wanted him to stay? D’you know what I feel, Arthur? I can’t think of anything else. I’m obsessed by a hungry longing for him. Till to-day I could have borne it. But now ... I feel his arms about me every moment, and his kisses on my lips. You can’t know the rapture and the torture and the ecstasy that consume me.

Arthur.

Oh, my dear, do you think I don’t know what love is?

Violet.

I want to do the right thing, Arthur, but you mustn’t ask too much of me. If I’ve got to treat him as a casual friend, I can’t go on seeing him. I can’t, Arthur, I can’t! If he must stay then let me go.

Arthur.

Never! I think, even if it weren’t necessary, I should make him stay now. You and I are not people to run away from danger. After all, we’re not obliged to yield to our passions — we can control them if we want to. For your own sake you must stay, Violet.

Violet.

And if I break, I break.

Arthur.

It’s only the worthless who are broken by unhappiness. If you have faith and courage and honesty unhappiness can only make you stronger.

Violet.

Have you thought of yourself, Arthur? What will you feel when you see him with me? What will you suspect when you’re working in your office and don’t know where I am?

Arthur.

I shall know that you are unhappy, and I shall feel the most tender compassion for you.

Violet.

You’re exposing me to a temptation that I want with all my heart to yield to. What is there to hold me back? Only the thought that I must do my duty to you. What is there to reward me? Only the idea that perhaps I’m doing a little something for the country.

Arthur.

I put myself in your hands, Violet. I shall never suspect that you can do anything, not that I should reproach you for — I will never reproach you — but that you may reproach yourself for.

[A pause.]

Violet.

Just now, when we were talking of Abdul Said, I asked if you could do your duty when it was a matter that affected you, if it meant misery or happiness to you, I said.

Arthur.

My dear, duty is rather a forbidding word. Let us say that I — want to earn my screw.

Violet.

You must have thought me very silly. I said I hoped you’d never be put to the test, and the test had come already, and you never hesitated.

Arthur.

These things are very much a matter of habit, you know.

Violet.

What you can do I can do too, Arthur — if you believe in me.

Arthur.

Of course I believe in you.

Violet.

Then let him stay. I’ll do what I can.

[Ronny comes in.]

Ronny.

The Khedive was engaged when I rang up. But I left the message and the answer has just come through. He will be pleased to see you, sir, at eleven o’clock.

Arthur.

That will do admirably. Ronny must lunch with us to-morrow, Violet. We’ll crack a bottle to celebrate his step!

END OF THE SECOND ACT

ACT III

The scene shows part of the garden and a verandah at the Consular Agent’s house. Coloured lanterns are fixed here and there. It is night, and in the distance is seen the blue sky bespangled with stars. At the lack of the verandah are the windows of the house gaily lit. Within a band is heard playing dance-music. Violet is giving a dance. Everyone who appears is magnificently gowned. Violet is wearing all her pearls and diamonds. Arthur has across his shirt front the broad riband of an order. It is the end of the evening. Various people are sealed on the verandah, enjoying the coolness. They are Mr. and Mrs. Appleby, Christina and Arthur.

Appleby.

Well, my dear, I think it’s about time I was taking you back to your hotel.

Arthur.

Oh, nonsense! It’s when everybody has gone that a dance really begins to get amusing.

Christina.

That’s a pleasant remark to make to your guests.

Mrs. Appleby.

I’m really ashamed to have stayed like this to the bitter end, but I do love to see the young folk enjoying themselves.

Arthur.

Ah! you have learnt how to make the most of advancing years. The solace of old age is to take pleasure in the youth of those who come after us.

Christina.

I don’t think you’re very polite, Arthur.

Mrs. Appleby.

Bless your heart, I know I’m not so young as I was.

Arthur.

Do you mind?

Mrs. Appleby.

Me? Why should I? I’ve had my day and I’ve enjoyed it. It’s only fair to give others a chance now.

Christina.

I’m sure you enjoyed your trip up the Nile.

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, we had a wonderful time.

Arthur.

And what conclusions did you come to, Mr. Appleby? I remember that you were looking for instruction as well as amusement.

Appleby.

I didn’t forget what you told me. I just kept my ears open and my mouth shut.

Arthur.

A capital practice, not much favoured by democratic communities.

Appleby.

But I came to one very definite conclusion for all that.

Arthur.

What was it?

Appleby.

In fact, I came to two.

Arthur.

That’s not so satisfactory — unless they contradicted one another; in which case I venture to suggest that you have grasped at all events the elements of the Egyptian problem.

Appleby.

The first is that you’re the right man in the right place.

Arthur.

Christina would never admit that. She has known for many years that she could manage Egypt far better than I do.

Christina.

I don’t deny that for a minute. I think on the whole women are more level-headed than men. They’re not swayed by emotion. They’re more practical. They know that principle must often yield to expediency, and they can do the expedient without surrendering the principle.

Arthur.

You make my head whirl, Christina.

Appleby.

I had the opportunity of seeing a good many different sorts of people. I never heard a reasonable complaint against you. Some of them didn’t like you personally, but they looked up to you, and they believed in you. I asked myself how you managed it.

Mrs. Appleby.

I told him that it’s because you’re human.

Arthur.

Christina thinks it very bad for me to hear pleasant things said of me.

Christina.

Christina doesn’t know what her brother would do if he hadn’t got an affectionate sister to gibe at.

Appleby.

It must be a great satisfaction to you to see the country becoming every year more prosperous and contented.

Arthur.

What was the second conclusion you came to?

Appleby.

I’m coming to that. Most of us are torn asunder as it were by a conflict of duties. This and that urgently needs to be done, and if you put one thing right you put something else wrong. We all want to do for the best, but we don’t exactly know what the best is. Now, you’ve got your duty clearly marked out before you, if you take my meaning; you’re young.

Arthur.

Youngish.

Appleby.

You’ve made a success of your job and of your life. It’s not all of us who can say that. My second conclusion is that you must be the happiest man alive.

Mrs. Appleby.

I’m glad he’s got that off his chest. He’s been dinning it into my ears for the last ten days. My impression is that he fell in love with Lady Little that day he lunched here six weeks ago.

Arthur.

I’m not going to blame him for that. Everybody does.... It was a wise old fellow who said that you must count no man happy till he’s dead. [Christina gives him a look, and puts her hand affectionately on his arm. He quickly withdraws it.] Here is Violet.

[She comes in on Henry Pritchard’s arm and sinks into a chair.]

Violet.

I’m absolutely exhausted. I feel that in another minute my legs will drop off.

Arthur.

Do take care, darling, that would be so disfiguring.

Violet.

Oh, I’d still dance on the stumps.

Arthur.

When are you going to send that unfortunate band away?

Violet.

Oh, we must have one more dance. After all, it’s our last ball of the season. And now that everyone has gone I needn’t be dignified any more. There’s no one but Henry and Anne and Ronny. We’ve just had a gorgeous one-step, haven’t we, Henry?

Henry.

Gorgeous. You’re a ripping dancer.

Violet.

My one accomplishment. [The band is heard beginning a waltz.] Good heavens, they’ve started again. That’s Anne, I’m positive. She’s been playing the British matron too and now she’s having her fling.

Arthur.

You girls, you never grow up.

Henry.

Are you ready for another turn, Violet?

Arthur.

Don’t dance any more, darling, you look worn out.

Violet.

Supposing you danced with your mother, Henry. I can see her toes itching inside her black satin slippers.

Christina.

Nonsense! I haven’t danced for fifteen years.

Henry.

Come on, mother. Just to show them you know how.

[He seizes her hand and drags her to her feet.]

Christina.

I was just as good a dancer as anybody else in my day.

Arthur.

When Christina says that she means she was a great deal better.

Henry.

Come on, mother, or it’ll be over before we begin.

Christina.

Don’t be rough with me, Henry.

[They go into the house.]

Appleby.

We rather fancied ourselves too, Fanny, once upon a time. What d’you say to trying what we can do, my dear?

Mrs. Appleby.

You be quiet, George. Fancy me dancing with my figure!

Appleby.

I don’t deny you’re plump, but I never did like a scrag. Perhaps it’s the last chance we shall ever have.

Mrs. Appleby.

What would they say at home if they ever come to hear you and me had been dancing? Really, George, I’m surprised at you.

Arthur.

[Amused.] I won’t tell.

Appleby.

You know you want to, Fanny. You’re only afraid they’ll laugh. Come on, or else I shall dance by myself.

Mrs. Appleby.

[Getting up.] I see you’ve quite made up your mind to make a fool of yourself.

[They go out. Arthur watches them, smiling.]

Arthur.

What good people! It’s really a treat to see them together.

Violet.

Mr. Appleby is very enthusiastic about you. He was telling me just now about his trip in Upper Egypt. He’s tremendously impressed. He said I ought to be very proud of you.

Arthur.

I can’t imagine any remark more calculated to make you dislike me.

[She gives him a long look and then glances away. When she speaks it is with embarrassment.]

Violet.

Are you satisfied with me, Arthur?

Arthur.

My dear, what do you mean?

Violet.

Since that afternoon when I told you....

Arthur.

Yes, I know.

Violet.

We’ve never talked about it. [Giving him her hand.] I want to thank you for having been so good to me.

Arthur.

I’m afraid you haven’t got much to thank me for. It would have been easier if I’d been able to help you, but I didn’t see anything I could do but just sit still and twiddle my thumbs.

Violet.

I’ve felt your confidence in me and that has been a help. You’ve never given the slightest sign that anything was changed. You used sometimes to ask me what I’d been doing during the day. Of late you haven’t even done that.

Arthur.

I didn’t want you to suspect for a moment that your actions were not perfectly free.

Violet.

I know. No one could have been more considerate than you’ve been. Oh, I’ve been so unhappy, Arthur. I wouldn’t go through the last six weeks for anything in the world.

Arthur.

It’s torn my heart to see you so pale and wan. And when, often, I saw you’d been crying I almost lost my head. I didn’t know what to do.

Violet.

I couldn’t help it if I loved him, Arthur. That wasn’t in my power. But all that was in my power I’ve done. Somehow I’ve managed not to be alone with him.

Arthur.

Haven’t you had any explanation with him?

Violet.

There didn’t seem to be anything to explain. D’you think I ought to have told him I didn’t love him? I couldn’t, Arthur. I couldn’t.

Arthur.

My dear! My dear!

Violet.

Once or twice he wrote to me. I knew he would and I’d made up my mind not to read the letters. But when they came I couldn’t help myself. I had to read them. I was so wretched and it meant so much to me that he loved me. [Arthur makes an instinctive movement of pain.] I didn’t mean to say that. Please forgive me.

Arthur.

I think I understand.

Violet.

I didn’t answer them.

Arthur.

Did he only write once or twice?

Violet.

That’s all. You see, he can’t make it out. He thinks I’ve treated him badly. Oh, I think that’s the hardest thing of all. I’ve seen the misery in his eyes. And there was nothing I could do. I hadn’t the courage to tell him. I’m weak. I’m so horribly weak. And when I’m with him alone I.... Oh, it is cruel that I should make him suffer so when he loves me.

Arthur.

I don’t know what to say to you. It seems cold comfort to say that you must set your hope in the merciful effects of time. Time will ease your pain and his. Perhaps the worst is over already.

Violet.

I hope with all my heart it is. I couldn’t have borne any more, Arthur. I’m at the end of my strength.

Arthur.

Dear heart, you’re tired physically now. We’ll send these people away and you must go to bed.

Violet.

Yes. I’m exhausted. But I want to tell you, Arthur, I think you’re right. The worst is over. I’m not suffering quite so much as I did. I find it a little easier not to think of him. When I meet him I can manage to be gay and flippant and indifferent. I’m so glad, Arthur.

Arthur.

You’ve been very brave. I told you we were all strong enough to bear the burdens that are laid upon us.

Violet.

You mustn’t think too well of me. I couldn’t have done what I have except for the consciousness of his great love for me. Is that awfully disloyal of me, Arthur?

Arthur.

[Gravely.] No, darling.

Violet.

You can understand, can’t you? It means so much to me. It’s helped me more than anything else in the world. It’s the only thing that made these past weeks not intolerable. I’m satisfied to know he loves me. I want nothing more.

[Mr. and Mrs. Appleby come in. Arthur immediately assumes a chaffing manner.]

Arthur.

Why, what’s this? You haven’t given in already?

Appleby.

The spirit is willing enough, but the flesh is weak.

Mrs. Appleby.

We wouldn’t like it talked about at home, but the fact is we got a bit out of breath.

Violet.

Well, sit down a moment and rest yourself.

Mrs. Appleby.

Just a moment if you don’t mind, and then we’ll be going.

[Christina appears with Henry.]

Arthur.

Here is poor Christina in a state of complete mental and physical collapse.

Christina.

Don’t be ridiculous, Arthur.

Arthur.

How did you get on?

Henry.

First rate. Only mother won’t let herself go. I kept on telling her there’s only one thing to do in modern dancing — let all your bones go loose and leave the man to do the rest.

Christina.

[With a chuckle.] I think modern dancing is an abandoned pastime. Nothing will induce me to let all my bones go loose.

Henry.

Mother’s idea of dancing is to keep herself to herself.

Christina.

[Looking at him affectionately.] You’re an impudent boy.

Mrs. Appleby.

[To Violet.] I do wish I’d seen you dancing with Mr. Parry. He’s a wonderful dancer.

Violet.

He does dance well, doesn’t he?

Henry.

Haven’t you danced with him to-night, Violet?

Violet.

No. He came rather late and my card was filled up. I promised him an extra, but some stuffy old diplomatist came and asked me for a dance, so I gave him Ronny’s.

Mrs. Appleby.

It’s too bad. It must be a rare sight to see you and Mr. Parry waltzing together.

Violet.

How do you know he dances so well?

Mrs. Appleby.

There were two or three dances at our hotel last week and we saw him then.

Violet.

Oh, I see.

Appleby.

[With a chuckle.] I like that young man. When he gets hold of a good thing he freezes on to it.

Violet.

Oh?

Appleby.

There’s a young American girl staying at the hotel. She’s a Miss Pender. I wonder if you know her?

Violet.

No, I don’t think so. We get to know very few of the winter visitors.

Mrs. Appleby.

She’s a perfect picture to look at. And a beautiful dancer.

Appleby.

Everyone was looking at them last night. They made a wonderful pair.

Violet.

Do you know this lady, Henry?

Henry.

Yes, I’ve met her two or three times. She’s very pretty.

Appleby.

I don’t think anyone else had much of a look in with her.

Henry.

Well, you needn’t be disagreeable about it.

Appleby.

As far as I could see she danced with Mr. Parry pretty well all the time.

Mrs. Appleby.

It was a treat to see them together.

Violet.

[A little uncertainly.] If one gets hold of a partner who suits one I always think it’s better to stick to him.

Mrs. Appleby.

Oh, I don’t think it was only that. She’s so much in love with him that she can’t help showing it.

Henry.

I never saw such a fellow as Ronny. When there is a bit of luck going he always gets it.

Violet.

And is he in love with her too?

Appleby.

Oh, one can’t tell that.

Mrs. Appleby.

If he isn’t he very soon will be. She’s too pretty for any man to resist long.

Arthur.

[Lightly.] You know them, the brutes, don’t you?

Mrs. Appleby.

Bless their hearts, I don’t blame them. What are pretty girls for except to make nice men happy? I was a pretty girl myself once.

Arthur.

And was Mr. Appleby a nice man?

Appleby.

I think I must have been, for you’ve certainly made me happy, my dear.

Mrs. Appleby.

I wish you’d put that in writing, George. I’d like to have a little something like that by me when you’ve got a bit of a chill on your liver.

Appleby.

H’m, I think bed’s the place for you, Fanny. Say good-night to her ladyship and let’s be going.

Mrs. Appleby.

Good-night, Lady Little, and thank you so much for asking us. We have enjoyed ourselves.

Violet.

Good-night.

Appleby.

Good-night.

Arthur.

I hope you’ll have a pleasant journey home. Lucky people, you’ll see the spring in England. When you get back the hedgerows will be just bursting into leaf.

[The Applebys go out.]

Violet.

How old is this American girl, Henry?

Henry.

Oh, I don’t know, about nineteen or twenty.

Violet.

Is she as pretty as they say?

Henry.

Rather.

Violet.

Is she fair?

Henry.

Very. She’s got wonderful hair.

Violet.

You’ve never mentioned her. Do you think Ronny is in love with her?

Henry.

Oh, I don’t know about that. She’s great fun. And you know, it’s always flattering when a pretty girl makes a dead set at you.

[There is a momentary silence. Violet is extremely disturbed by the news that has just reached her. Arthur realises that a crisis has come.]

Christina.

[In a matter-of-fact way.] Let us hope that something will come of it. There’s no reason why Ronny shouldn’t marry. I think men marry much too late nowadays.

[Anne and Ronny appear.]

Anne.

I’m absolutely ashamed of myself. I half expected to find you’d all gone to bed.

Violet.

[Smiling.] Have you been having a jolly dance?

Anne.

Think of having a good band and the whole floor to oneself. By the way, Violet, the band want to know if they can go away.

Violet.

I’m sorry I had to cut your dance, Ronny.

Ronny.

It was rotten luck. But I suppose on these occasions small fry like me have to put up with that sort of thing.

Violet.

If you like we’ll have a turn now before we send the band away.

Ronny.

I’d love it.

[Arthur gives a little start and looks at Violet curiously. Anne is surprised too.]

Christina.

If you’re going to start dancing again we’ll go. Henry has to be at his office early in the morning.

Violet.

Good-night, then.

Christina.

[Kissing her.] Your dance has been a great success.

Violet.

It’s nice of you to say so.

Christina.

[To Arthur.] Good-night, dear old thing. God bless and guard you always.

Arthur.

My dear Christina, why this embarrassing emotion?

Christina.

I don’t know what we should do if anything happened to you.

Arthur.

Don’t be an idiot, my dear; nothing is going to happen to me.

Christina.

[With a smile.] I can’t get you out of thinking me a perfect fool.

Arthur.

Be off with you, Christina. If you go on finding out things that are not your business I shall have you deported.

Violet.

What has she found out now?

Arthur.

A trifle that we thought it wouldn’t hurt the public to know nothing about.

Christina.

[Shaking hands with Ronny.] I don’t grudge you your job any more. We’re all under a debt of gratitude to you.

Ronny.

I had a bit of luck, that’s all. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.

Arthur.

Go and have your dance, darling. It’s really getting very late.

Violet.

[To Ronny.] Are you ready?

Ronny.

What shall we make them play?

[They go out.]

Christina.

Good-night, Anne.

Anne.

[Kissing her.] Good-night, my dear. [Henry shakes hands with Anne and Arthur. He and his mother go out.] I suppose I mayn’t ask what Christina was referring to?

Arthur.

I can’t prevent you from asking.

Anne.

But you have no intention of answering. What is the matter, Arthur? You look so deadly white.

Arthur.

Nothing. I’m tired. I had a busy day and now the dance. [The sound of a waltz is heard.] Oh, damn that music!

Anne.

Sit down and rest yourself. Why don’t you have a smoke! [Putting her hand on his arm.] My dear friend.

Arthur.

For God’s sake don’t pity me.

Anne.

Won’t you talk to me frankly? I may be able to help you. In the old days you used to bring your troubles to me, Arthur.

Arthur.

I tell you I’m only tired. What is the use of talking about what can’t be helped?

Anne.

You must know that I notice most things that concern your happiness. [Looking away.] Why did you imagine I took so much trouble to get Ronny moved to Paris?

Arthur.

I suspected. Ought I to thank you? I’m too miserable and too humiliated.

Anne.

Have you heard about a Miss Pender? She’s an American girl.

Arthur.

Of course I have. It’s my business to know everything that goes on in Cairo.

Anne.

Don’t you think that may be the solution?

[Henry comes in.]

Arthur.

[Sharply.] What d’you want?

Henry.

I beg your pardon. Mother left her fan here.

[He takes it up from a chair.]

Arthur.

I thought you’d gone five minutes ago.

Henry.

Oh, we just stood for a moment to look at Ronny and Violet dancing. Upon my soul it’s a fair treat.

Arthur.

They make a wonderful couple, don’t they?

Henry.

I’m afraid Violet’s awfully tired. She’s not saying a word and she’s as white as a sheet.

Arthur.

I’ll send her to bed as soon as they’ve finished.

Henry.

Good-night.

Arthur.

[Smiling.] Good-night, my boy.

[Exit Henry.]

Anne.

Is anything the matter?

Arthur.

Tell me about this American girl. She’s in love with Ronny, isn’t she?

Anne.

Yes, that’s obvious.

Arthur.

And he?

Anne.

He’s been very unhappy, you know.

Arthur.

[Almost savagely.] That is a calamity which I find myself able to bear with patience.

Anne.

And now he’s surprised and pleased. I’ve met her. Poor dear, she did everything to make me like her, because Ronny was my brother. She’s awfully pretty. He’s not in love with her yet. But I think he may be. He’s on the brink and if there were nothing else he’d fall over.

Arthur.

That is what I suspected. You know, Anne, the longer I live the more inexplicable I find human beings. I always thought I was by way of being a fairly decent fellow. I never knew what mean beastliness there was inside me. It would be quite impossible for me to tell you how I hate your brother. I’ve had to be jolly and affable with him and, by George, I wanted to kill him.

Anne.

Why didn’t you let him go? Are you sure it was necessary to give him that job?

Arthur.

Already he’s been invaluable.

Anne.

Then one can only hope for the best.

[There is a moment’s pause. When Arthur speaks it is at first rather to himself than to Anne.]

Arthur.

No one knows what I’ve gone through during the last few months. I’ve been devoured with jealousy and I knew it would be fatal if I showed Violet the least trace of ill-temper. I kept on saying to myself that it wasn’t her fault if she was in love with Ronny. [Humorously.] You can’t think how devilish hard it is not to resent the fact that somebody doesn’t care for you.

Anne.

[With a chuckle.] Oh yes, I can.

Arthur.

I knew that almost everything depended on how I acted during these weeks, and the maddening thing was that I could do nothing but sit still and control myself. I saw her miserable and knew that she didn’t want my comfort. I’ve yearned to take her in my arms and I’ve known she’d let me because it was her duty. Those dear good donkeys, the Applebys, told me just now they thought I must be the happiest man alive! Week after week, with an aching heart I’ve forced myself to be gay and amusing. D’you think I’m amusing, Anne?

Anne.

Sometimes.

Arthur.

The battle has been so unfair. All the dice are loaded against me. He has every advantage over me. But at last I thought I’d won. I thought Violet was getting more resigned. She told me herself just now that the worst was over. And those confounded people must go and upset the applecart. Damn their eyes!

Anne.

Why?

Arthur.

The Applebys told her about Miss Pender. It was very natural. They knew no reason for not repeating the hotel gossip.

Anne.

Was that why she asked Ronny to dance with her?

Arthur.

Yes. It’s the crisis. She had the strength to keep him at arm’s length when she knew he loved her. What will she do now?

Anne.

You heard what Henry said. They don’t seem to be talking to one another.

Arthur.

No.

Anne.

Why did you let them dance together? You might easily have said it was too late and the band must go.

Arthur.

What good would that do? No. I’ve done nothing to prevent their meeting. I’ve left them absolute liberty.

Anne.

Do you think it’s fair to Violet? You know, women act so much on impulse. The surroundings and the circumstances have so much influence on them. Think of the excitement of dancing, the magic of this wonderful night, and the solitude under these stars. You complain the dice are loaded against you, but now you’re double-loading them against yourself.

Arthur.

It tortures me, but I must give them the opportunity to fight the matter out for themselves.

Anne.

Poor child, she’s so young.

Arthur.

Too young.

Anne.

Don’t say that; it sounds as though you regretted having married her.

Arthur.

Don’t you imagine that regret has been tormenting her ever since she found out what love really was? Even though I love her with all my heart I know now that I made a mistake. Do you think you can make anyone love you by constant tenderness, devotion, and kindness?

Anne.

Not a man perhaps. But a woman yes, yes, yes!

Arthur.

Whoever loved that loved not at first sight? I want so tremendously to make her happy, and I’ve only made her utterly miserable. And there’s no way out. It’s a pity that a convenient attack of brain fever can’t carry me off, but I’m as strong as a horse.

Anne.

You know, Arthur, there’s one compensation about the pains of love. While one’s suffering from them one feels one will never get over them, but one does, and when they’re gone they don’t even leave a scar. One looks back and remembers one’s torment and marvels that it was possible to suffer like that.

Arthur.

You talk as though you’d had experience.

Anne.

I have.

Arthur.

I always look upon you as so calm and self-controlled.

Anne.

I was desperately in love for years with a man. I should have made him an excellent wife, although it’s I as says it. But it never occurred to him for an instant that my feelings were more than friendly. And eventually he married somebody else.

Arthur.

My dear friend, I hate to think of your being unhappy.

Anne.

I’m not. That’s why I told you the tragic story. I’ve got over it so completely that now I have an equal affection both for him and his wife.

Arthur.

D’you know, Anne, at one time I very nearly asked you to marry me?

Anne.

[Gaily.] Oh, what nonsense!

Arthur.

I daresay it’s as well I didn’t. I should have lost the best friend I’ve ever had.

Anne.

On the other hand, I’ve lost the satisfaction of refusing the most distinguished man of our day. Why didn’t you ask me?

Arthur.

You were such an awfully good friend. I thought we were very well as we were.

Anne.

That isn’t the reason, Arthur. You didn’t ask me because you didn’t love me. If you had you’d have let friendship go hang. [Seeing that he is not paying any attention to her.] What’s the matter?

Arthur.

The music has stopped.

Anne.

[With a slight tightening of the lips.] I’m afraid my concerns don’t interest you very much. I was only talking about them to distract you.

Arthur.

Forgive me, but I’ve got this anguish gnawing at my heart. Anne, when they come back here I want you to come with me for a stroll in the garden.

Anne.

Why? I’m frightfully tired. I think I shall go to bed.

Arthur.

No, do this for me, Anne. I want to give them their chance. It may be the last chance for all of us.

Anne.

[With a little sigh.] Very well, I’ll do even that for you.

Arthur.

You are a good friend, and I’m a selfish beast.

Anne.

I wish you could have a child, Arthur. That might settle everything.

Arthur.

That is what I look forward to with all my heart. I think she might love her baby’s father.

Anne.

Then she’ll realise that only you could have been so tolerant and so immensely patient. When she looks back she’ll be filled with gratitude.

[Ronny and Violet come in.]

Violet.

I’ve told the band they can go.

Arthur.

I don’t suppose they wanted telling twice. Did you have a pleasant dance?

Violet.

I was very tired.

Ronny.

It was brutal of me to make you dance so long. I’ll say good-night before I’m turned out.

Arthur.

Oh, won’t you sit down and have a cigarette before you go? Anne and I were just going to stroll to the end of the garden to have a look at the Nile.

Violet.

Oh.

Anne.

I’m too restless to go to bed just yet.

[Arthur and Anne go out. Violet and Ronny do not speak for a moment. At first the conversation is quite light.]

Violet.

What was it that Christina was referring to just now? Had it anything to do with you?

Ronny.

I don’t think I’m justified in telling you about it. If Sir Arthur thinks you should know I daresay he’d rather tell you himself.

Violet.

Of course you mustn’t tell me if it’s a secret.

Ronny.

I’d almost forgotten what a beautiful dancer you were.

Violet.

[With a smile.] So soon?

Ronny.

You haven’t given me much chance of dancing with you during the last few weeks.

Violet.

I hear there’s a girl at the Ghezireh Palace who dances very well. Miss Pender, isn’t that her name?

Ronny.

Yes, she’s wonderful.

Violet.

I’m told she’s charming.

Ronny.

Very.

Violet.

I should like to meet her. I wonder whom I know that could bring us together.

Ronny.

[With a change of tone.] Why do you speak of her?

Violet.

Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?

Ronny.

Do you know that this is the first time I’ve been quite alone with you for six weeks?

Violet.

[Still quite lightly.] It was inevitable that when you ceased being Arthur’s private secretary we should see less of one another.

Ronny.

I only welcomed my new job because I thought I shouldn’t be utterly parted from you.

Violet.

Don’t you think it was better that we shouldn’t see too much of one another?

Ronny.

What have I done to you, Violet? Why have you been treating me like this?

Violet.

I’m not conscious that I’ve treated you differently from what I used.

Ronny.

Why didn’t you answer my letters?

Violet.

[In a low voice.] I hadn’t anything to say.

Ronny.

I wonder if you can imagine what I went through, the eagerness with which I looked forward to a letter from you, just a word or two would have satisfied me, how anxiously I expected each post, and my despair when day after day went by.

Violet.

You ought not to have written to me.

Ronny.

D’you think I could help myself? Have you forgotten that day when we thought we were never going to meet again? If you wanted me to be nothing more than a friend why did you tell me you loved me? Why did you let me kiss you and hold you in my arms?

Violet.

You know quite well. I lost my head. I was foolish. You — you attached too much importance to the emotion of the moment.

Ronny.

Oh, Violet, how can you say that? I know you loved me then. After all, the past can’t be undone. I loved you. I know you loved me. We couldn’t go back to the time when we were no more than friends.

Violet.

You forget that Arthur is my husband and you owe him everything in the world. We both owe him everything in the world.

Ronny.

No, I don’t forget it for a moment. After all, we’re straight, both of us, and we could have trusted ourselves. I wanted nothing but to be allowed to love you and to know that you loved me.

Violet.

Do you remember what you said in the first letter you wrote me?

Ronny.

Oh, you can’t blame me for that. I’d loved you so long, so passionately. I’d never dared to hope that you cared for me. And when I knew! I never said a tenth part of what I wanted to. I went home and I just wrote all that had filled my heart to overflowing. I wanted you to know how humbly grateful I was for the wonderful happiness you’d given me. I wanted you to know that my soul to its most hidden corners was yours for ever.

Violet.

How could I answer it?

Ronny.

You needn’t have been afraid of me, Violet. If it displeased you I would never even have told you that I loved you. I would have carried you in my heart like an image of the Blessed Virgin. When we met here or there, though there were a thousand people between us and we never exchanged a word, I should have known that we were the only people in the world, and that somehow, in some strange mystic fashion, I belonged to you and you belonged to me. Oh, Violet, I only wanted a little kindness. Was it so much to ask?

[Violet is moved to the very depths of her heart. She can scarcely control herself, the pain she suffers seems unendurable; her throat is so dry that she can hardly speak.]

Violet.

They say that Miss Pender is in love with you. Is it true?

Ronny.

A man’s generally a conceited ass when he thinks girls are in love with him.

Violet.

Never mind that. Is it true? Please be frank with me.

Ronny.

Perhaps it is.

Violet.

Would she marry you if you asked her?

Ronny.

I think so.

Violet.

She can’t have fallen in love with you without some encouragement.

Ronny.

She plays tennis a good deal and she’s very fond of dancing. You know, I was rather wretched. Sometimes you looked at me as though you hated me. You seemed to try and avoid me. I wanted to forget. I didn’t know what I’d done to make you treat me so cruelly. It was very pleasant to be with someone who seemed to want me. Everything I did pleased her. She’s rather like you. When I was with her I was a little less unhappy. When I found she was in love with me I was touched and I was tremendously grateful.

Violet.

Are you sure you’re not in love with her?

Ronny.

Yes, I’m quite sure.

Violet.

But you like her very much, don’t you?

Ronny.

Yes, very much.

Violet.

Don’t you think if it weren’t for me you would be in love with her?

Ronny.

I don’t know.

Violet.

I’d like you to be frank with me.

Ronny.

[Unwillingly.] You don’t want my love. She’s sweet and kind and tender.

Violet.

I think she might make you very happy.

Ronny.

Who knows?

[There is a pause. Violet forces herself to make the final renunciation. Her fingers move spasmodically in the effort she makes to speak calmly.]

Violet.

It seems a pity that you should waste your life for nothing. I’m afraid you’ll think me a heartless flirt. I’m not that. At the time I feel all I say. But ... I don’t quite understand myself. I take a violent fancy to someone, and I lose my head, but somehow it doesn’t last. I ... I suppose I’m not capable of any enduring passion. There are people like that, aren’t there? It goes just as suddenly as it comes. And when it goes — well, it’s gone for ever. I can’t understand then what on earth I saw in the man who made my heart go pit-a-pat. I’m dreadfully sorry I caused you so much pain. You took it so much more seriously than I expected. And afterwards I didn’t know what to do. You must — you must try to forgive me.

[There is a long pause.]

Ronny.

Don’t you love me at all now?

Violet.

It’s much better that I should tell you the truth, isn’t it? even at the risk of hurting your feelings. I’m frightfully ashamed of myself. I’m afraid you’ll think me awfully frivolous.

Ronny.

Why don’t you say it right out?

Violet.

D’you want me to? [She hesitates, but then takes courage.] I’m very sorry, dear Ronny, I’m afraid I don’t care for you in that way at all.

Ronny.

I’m glad to know.

Violet.

You’re not angry with me?

Ronny.

Oh, no, my dear, how can you help it? We’re made as we’re made.... D’you mind if I go now?

Violet.

Won’t you stop and say good-night to Anne?

Ronny.

No, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go quickly.

Violet.

Very well. And try to forgive me, Ronny.

Ronny.

Good-night.

[He takes her hand and they look into one another’s eyes.]

Violet.

Good-night.

[He goes out. Violet clasps her hands to her heart as though to ease its aching. Anne and Arthur return.]

Anne.

Where is Ronny?

Violet.

He’s gone. It was so late. He asked me to say good-night to you.

Anne.

Thank you. It must be very late. I’ll say good-night too. [She bends down and kisses Violet.] Good-night, Arthur.

Arthur.

Good-night. [She goes out. Arthur sits down. A Sais comes in and turns out some of the lights. In the distance is heard the wailing of an Arab song. Arthur motions to the Sais.] Leave these. I’ll turn them out myself. [The Sais goes in and turns out all the lights in the lower rooms but one. The light remains now only just round Arthur and Violet. The Arab song is like a wail of pain.] That sounds strangely after the waltzes and one-steps that we’ve heard this evening.

Violet.

It seems to come from very far away.

Arthur.

It seems to wail down the ages from an immeasurable past.

Violet.

What does it say?

Arthur.

I don’t know. It must be some old lament.

Violet.

It’s heartrending.

Arthur.

Now it stops.

Violet.

The garden is so silent. It seems to be listening too.

Arthur.

Are you awfully unhappy, Violet?

Violet.

Awfully.

Arthur.

It breaks my heart that I, who would do anything in the world for you, can do so little to console you.

Violet.

Had you any idea that Ronny no longer cared for me?

Arthur.

How should I know what his feelings were?

Violet.

It never occurred to me that he could change. I felt so secure in his love. It never occurred to me that anyone could take him from me.

Arthur.

Did he tell you he didn’t care for you any more?

Violet.

No.

Arthur.

I don’t think he’s in love with Miss Pender.

Violet.

I told him that he meant nothing to me any more. I told him that I took fancies and got over them. I made him think I was a silly flirt. And he believed me. If he loved me truly, truly, as he did before, whatever I’d said he’d have known it was incredible. Oh, I wouldn’t have believed him if he’d made himself cheap in my eyes.

Arthur.

My poor child.

Violet.

He’s not in love with her yet. I know that. He’s only pleased and flattered. He’s angry with me. If he’s angry he must love me still. He asked so little. It only needed a word and he would have loved me as much as ever. What have I done? What harm would it have done you? I’ve sent him away now for good. It’s all over and done with. And my heart aches. What shall I do, Arthur?

Arthur.

My dear, have courage. I beseech you to have courage.

Violet.

I suppose it’s shameful that we should have loved one another at all. But how could we help it? We’re masters of our actions, but how can we command our feelings? After all, our feelings are our own. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Arthur. It wasn’t so bad till to-night; I could control myself, I thought my pain was growing less.... I long for him with all my soul, and I must let him go. Oh, I hate him. I hate him. If he’d loved me he might have been faithful to me a few short weeks. He wouldn’t cause me such cruel pain.

Arthur.

Don’t be unjust to him, Violet. I think he fell in love with you without knowing what was happening to him. And when he knew I think he struggled against it as honourably as you did. You know that very little escapes me. I’ve seen a sort of shyness in him when he was with me, as though he were a little ashamed in my presence. I even felt sorry for him because he felt he was behaving badly to me and he couldn’t help himself. He’s suffered just as much as you have. It’s not very strange that when this girl fell in love with him it should seem to offer a new hope. He was unhappy and she comforted him. Anne says she’s rather like you. If ever he loves her perhaps it will be you that he loves in her.

Violet.

Why do you say all this to me?

Arthur.

You’ve been so wretched. I don’t want bitterness to come to you now. I can’t bear that you should think your first love has been for someone not worthy of it. I think time will heal the wounds which now you think are incurable, but when it does I hope that you will look back on your love as a thing only of beauty.

Violet.

I am a beast, Arthur. I don’t deserve anyone to be so good to me as you are.

Arthur.

And there’s something else I must tell you.... It appears that various enterprising people have been laying plans to put me out of the way.

Violet.

[Startled.] Arthur!

Arthur.

I find that there was a plot to kill me this morning on my way to the review.

Violet.

How awful!

Arthur.

Oh, it’s nothing to be alarmed about. We’ve settled everything without any fuss. Our old friend Osman Pasha is going to spend some time on his country estates for the good of his health, and half a dozen foolish young men are under lock and key. But it might have come off except for Ronny. It was Ronny who saved me.

Violet.

Ronny? Oh, I’m so glad. It makes up a little for the rest.

Arthur.

He did a fine thing. He showed determination and presence of mind.

Violet.

Oh, my husband! My dear, dear Arthur!

Arthur.

You’re not sorry?

Violet.

I’m glad I’ve done what I have, Arthur. I’ve sometimes felt I gave you so little in return for all you’ve given me. But at least now I’ve given you all I had to give.

Arthur.

Don’t think it will be profitless. To do one’s duty sounds a rather cold and cheerless business, but somehow in the end it does give one a queer sort of satisfaction.

Violet.

What should I do if I lost you? It makes me sick with fear.

Arthur.

[With a tender smile.] I had an idea you’d be glad I escaped.

Violet.

All I’ve suffered has been worth while. I’ve done something for you, haven’t I? And even something for England ... I’m so tired.

Arthur.

Why don’t you go to bed, darling?

Violet.

No, I don’t want to go yet. I’m too tired. Let me stay here a little longer.

Arthur.

Put your feet up.

Violet.

Come and sit close to me, Arthur. I want to be comforted. You’re so good and kind to me, Arthur. I’m so glad I have you. You will never fail me.

Arthur.

Never. [She gives a little shudder.] What’s the matter?

Violet.

I hope he’ll marry her quickly. I want to be a good wife to you. I want your love. I want your love so badly.

Arthur.

My dear one.

Violet.

Put your arms round me. I’m so tired.

Arthur.

You’re half asleep.... Are you asleep?

[Her eyes are closed. He kisses her gently. In the distance there is heard again the melancholy wail of a Bedouin love-song.]

THE END

EAST OF SUEZ

CONTENTS

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Daisy

George Conway

Henry Anderson

Harold Knox

Lee Tai Cheng

Sylvia Knox

Amah

Wu

The action of the play takes place in Peking

SCENES

SCENE

PAGE

I

A STREET IN PEKING

11

II

A SMALL VERANDAH ON AN UPPER STOREY OF THE BRITISH AMERICAN TOBACCO COMPANY’S PREMISES

17

III

THE TEMPLE OF FIDELITY AND VIRTUOUS INCLINATION

37

IV

THE SITTING-ROOM IN THE ANDERSONS’ APARTMENTS

59

V

THE COURTYARD IN THE ANDERSONS’ PART OF THE TEMPLE

81

VI

A SMALL ROOM IN A CHINESE HOUSE IN PEKING

101

VII

THE SITTING-ROOM IN THE ANDERSONS’ APARTMENTS

121

SCENE I

Scene: A street in Peking

Several shops are shown. Their fronts are richly decorated with carved wood painted red and profusely gilt. The counters are elaborately carved. Outside are huge sign-boards. The shops are open to the street and you can see the various wares they sell. One is a coffin shop, where the coolies are at work on a coffin: other coffins, ready for sale, are displayed; some of them are of plain deal, others are rich, with black and gold. The next shop is a money changer’s. Then there is a lantern shop in which all manner of coloured lanterns are hanging. After this comes a druggist where there are queer things in bottles and dried herbs. A small stuffed crocodile is a prominent object. Next to this is a shop where crockery is sold, large coloured jars, plates, and all manner of strange animals. In all the shops two or three Chinamen are seated. Some read newspapers through great horn spectacles; some smoke water pipes.

The street is crowded. Here is an itinerant cook with his two chests, in one of which is burning charcoal: he serves out bowls of rice and condiments to the passers-by who want food. There is a barber with the utensils of his trade. A coolie, seated on a stool, is having his head shaved. Chinese walk to and fro.

Some are coolies and wear blue cotton in various stages of raggedness; some in black gowns and caps and black shoes are merchants and clerks. There is a beggar, gaunt and thin, with an untidy mop of bristly hair, in tatters of indescribable filthiness. He stops at one of the shops and begins a long wail. For a time no one takes any notice of him, but presently on a word from the fat shopkeeper an assistant gives him a few cash and he wanders on. Coolies, half naked, hurry by, bearing great bales on their yokes. They utter little sharp cries for people to get out of their way. Peking carts with their blue hoods rumble noisily along. Rickshaws pass rapidly in both directions, and the rickshaw boys shout for the crowd to make way. In the rickshaws are grave Chinese. Some are dressed in white ducks after the European fashion; in other rickshaws are Chinese women in long smocks and wide trousers or Manchu ladies, with their faces painted like masks, in embroidered silks. Women of various sorts stroll about the street or enter the shops. You see them chaffering for various articles.

A water-carrier passes along with a creaking barrow, slopping the water as he goes; an old blind woman, a masseuse, advances slowly, striking wooden clappers to proclaim her calling. A musician stands on the curb and plays a tuneless melody on a one-stringed fiddle. From the distance comes the muffled sound of gongs. There is a babel of sound caused by the talking of all these people, by the cries of coolies, the gong, the clappers, and the fiddle. From burning joss-sticks in the shops in front of the household god comes a savour of incense.

A couple of Mongols ride across on shaggy ponies; they wear high boots and Astrakhan caps. Then a string of camels sways slowly down the street. They carry great burdens of skins from the deserts of Mongolia. They are accompanied by wild looking fellows. Two stout Chinese gentlemen are giving their pet birds an airing; the birds are attached by the leg with a string and sit on little wooden perches. The two Chinese gentlemen discuss their merits. Round about them small boys play. They run hither and thither pursuing one another amid the crowd.

END OF SCENE I

SCENE II

A small verandah on an upper storey of the British American Tobacco Company’s premises, the upper part of which the staff lives in. At the back are heavy arches of whitewashed masonry and a low wall which serves as a parapet. Green blinds are drawn. There is a bamboo table on which are copies of illustrated papers. A couple of long bamboo chairs and two or three smaller arm chairs. The floor is tiled.

On one of the long chairs Harold Knox is lying asleep. He is a young man of pleasing appearance. He wears white ducks, but he has taken off his coat, which lies on a chair, and his collar and tie and pin. They are on the table by his side. He is troubled by a fly and, half waking but with his eyes still closed, tries to drive it away.

Knox. Curse it. [He opens his eyes and yawns.] Boy!

Wu. [Outside.] Ye.

Knox. What’s the time?

[Wu comes in; he is a Chinese servant in a long white gown with a black cap on his head. He bears a tray on which is a bottle of whisky, a glass and a syphon.]

Wu. My no sabe.

Knox. Anyhow it’s time for a whisky and soda. [Wu puts the tray down on the table. Knox smiles.] Intelligent anticipation. Model servant and all that sort of thing. [Wu pours out the whisky.] You don’t care if I drink myself to death, Wu — do you? [Wu smiles, showing all his teeth.] Fault of the climate. Give me the glass. [Wu does so.] You’re like a mother to me, Wu. [He drinks and puts down the glass.] By George, I feel another man. The bull-dog breed, Wu. Never say die. Rule Britannia. Pull up the blinds, you lazy blighter. The sun’s off and the place is like a oven.

[Wu goes over and pulls up one blind after the other. An expanse of blue sky is seen. Henry Anderson comes in. He is a man of thirty, fair, good-looking, with a pleasant, honest face. His obvious straightforwardness and sincerity make him attractive.]

Harry. [Breezily.] Hulloa, Harold, you seem to be taking it easy.

Knox. There was nothing to do in the office and I thought I’d get in my beauty sleep while I had the chance.

Harry. I thought you had your beauty sleep before midnight.

Knox. I’m taking time by the forelock so as to be on the safe side.

Harry. Are you going on the loose again to-night?

Knox. Again, Henry?

Harry. You were blind last night.

Knox. [With great satisfaction.] Paralytic.... Hulloa, who’s this? [He catches sight of the Amah who has just entered. She is a little, thin, wrinkled, elderly Chinawoman in a long smock and trousers. She has gold pins in her sleek black hair. When she sees she has been noticed she smiles obsequiously.] Well, fair charmer, what can we do for you?

Harry. What does she want, Wu?

Knox. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

Amah. My Missy have pay my letter.

Harry. [With sudden eager interest.] Are you Mrs. Rathbone’s amah? Have you got a letter for me?

Amah. My belong Missy Rathbone amah.

Harry. Well, hurry up, don’t be all night about it. Lend me a dollar, Harold. I want to give it to the old girl.

[The Amah takes a note out of her sleeve and gives it to Harry. He opens it and reads.

Knox. I haven’t got a dollar. Give her a chit or ask Wu. He’s the only man I know who’s got any money.

Harry. Let me have a dollar, Wu. Chop-chop.

Wu. My go catchee.

[He goes out. The Amah is standing near the table. While Knox and Harry go on talking she notices Knox’s pin. She smiles and smiles and makes little bows to the two men, but at the same time her hand cautiously reaches out for the pin and closes on it. Then she secretes it in her sleeve.

Harry. I thought you were going to play tennis this afternoon.

Knox. So I am later on.

Harry. [Smiling.] Do it now, dear boy. That is a precept a business man should never forget.

Knox. I should hate to think you wanted to be rid of me.

Harry. I dote on your company, but I feel that I mustn’t be selfish.

Knox. [Pulling his leg.] To tell you the truth I don’t feel very fit to-day.

Harry. A little bilious, I dare say. Half a dozen hard sets are just what you want. [He hands Knox his coat.]

Knox. What is this?

Harry. Your coat.

Knox. You’re making yourself almost more distressingly plain than nature has already made you.

[Wu comes back and hands Harry a dollar, and then goes out. Harry gives the dollar to the Amah.

Harry. Here’s a dollar for you, amah. You go back to missy and tell her it’s all right and will she come chop-chop. Sabe?

Amah. My sabe. Goo’-bye.

Knox. God bless you, dearie. It’s done me good to see your winsome little face.

Harry. [With a smile.] Shut up, Harold.

[The Amah with nods, smiles and bows, goes out.

Knox. Harry, my poor friend, is it possible that you have an assignation?

Harry. What is possible is that if you don’t get out quick I’ll throw you out.

Knox. Why didn’t you say you were expecting a girl?

Harry. I’m not; I’m expecting a lady.

Knox. Are you sure you know how to behave? If you’d like me to stay and see you don’t do the wrong thing I’ll chuck my tennis. I’m always ready to sacrifice myself for a friend.

Harry. Has it struck you that the distance from the verandah to the street is very considerable?

Knox. And the pavement is hard. I flatter myself I can take a hint. I wonder where the devil my pin is. I left it on the table.

Harry. I expect Wu put it away.

Knox. It’s much more likely that old woman pinched it.

Harry. Oh, nonsense. She wouldn’t dream of such a thing. I believe Mrs. Rathbone’s had her for ages.

Knox. Who is Mrs. Rathbone?

Harry. [Not wishing to be questioned.] A friend of mine.

[George Conway comes in. He is a tall, dark man in the early thirties. He is a handsome, well-built fellow, of a somewhat rugged appearance, but urbane and self-assured.

George. May I come in?

Harry. [Eagerly, shaking him warmly by the hand.] At last. By Jove, it’s good to see you again. You know Knox, don’t you?

George. I think so.

Knox. I wash bottles in the B. A. T. I don’t expect the legation bloods to be aware of my existence.

George. [With a twinkle in his eye.] I don’t know that an Assistant Chinese Secretary is such a blood as all that.

Knox. You’ve just been down to Fuchow, haven’t you?

George. Yes, I only got back this morning.

Knox. Did you see Freddy Baker by any chance?

George. Yes, poor chap.

Knox. Oh, I’ve got no pity for him. He’s just a damned fool.

Harry. Why?

Knox. Haven’t you heard? He’s married a half-caste.

Harry. What of it? I believe she’s a very pretty girl.

Knox. I daresay she is. But hang it all, he needn’t have married her.

George. I don’t think it was a very wise thing to do.

Harry. I should have thought all those prejudices were out of date. Why shouldn’t a man marry a half-caste if he wants to?

Knox. It can’t be very nice to have a wife whom even the missionary ladies turn up their noses at.

Harry. [With a shrug of the shoulders.] You wait till Freddy’s number one in Hankow and can entertain. I bet the white ladies will be glad enough to know his missus then.

George. Yes, but that’s just it. He’ll never get a good job with a Eurasian wife.

Harry. He’s in Jardine’s, isn’t he? Do you mean to say it’s going to handicap a man in a shipping firm because he’s married a woman who’s partly Chinese?

George. Of course it is. Jardine’s are about the most important firm in China and the manager of one of their principal branches has definite social obligations. Freddy Baker will be sent to twopenny halfpenny outports where his wife doesn’t matter.

Knox. I think he’s damned lucky if he’s not asked to resign.

Harry. It’s cruel. His wife may be a charming and cultivated woman.

Knox. Have you ever known a half-caste that was?

Harry. I have.

Knox. Well, I’ve been in this country for seven years and I’ve never met one, male or female, that didn’t give me the shivers.

Harry. I’ve no patience with you. You’re a perfect damned fool.

Knox. [A little surprised, but quite good-humoured.] You’re getting rather excited, aren’t you?

Harry. [Hotly.] I hate injustice.

George. Do you think it really is injustice? The English are not an unkindly race. If they’ve got a down on half-castes there are probably very good grounds for it.

Harry. What are they?

Knox. We don’t much like their morals, but we can’t stick their manners.

George. Somehow or other they seem to inherit all the bad qualities of the two races from which they spring and none of the good ones. I’m sure there are exceptions, but on the whole the Eurasian is vulgar and noisy. He can’t tell the truth if he tries.

Knox. To do him justice, he seldom tries.

George. He’s as vain as a peacock. He’ll cringe when he’s afraid of you and he’ll bully when he’s not. You can never rely on him. He’s crooked from the crown of his German hat to the toes of his American boots.

Knox. Straight from the shoulder. Take the count, old man.

Harry. [Frigidly.] Oughtn’t you to be going?

Knox. [Smiling.] No, but I will.

Harry. I’m sorry if I was rude to you just now, old man.

Knox. Silly ass, you’ve broken no bones; my self-esteem, thank God, is unimpaired. [He goes out.

Harry. I say, I’m awfully glad you’re back, George. You can’t think how I miss you when you’re away.

George. As soon as the shooting starts we’ll try and get two or three days together in the country.

Harry. Yes, that would be jolly. [Calling.] Wu.

Wu. [Outside.] Ye’.

Harry. Bring tea for three.

George. Who is the third?

Harry. When you said you could come round I asked somebody I want you very much to meet.

George. Who is that?

Harry. Mrs. Rathbone ... I’m going to be married to her and we want you to be our best man.

George. Harry.

Harry. [Boyishly.] I thought you’d be surprised.

George. My dear old boy, I am so glad. I hope you’ll be awfully happy.

Harry. I’m awfully happy now.

George. Why have you kept it so dark?

Harry. I didn’t want to say anything till it was all settled. Besides, I’ve only known her six weeks. I met her when I was down in Shanghai....

George. Is she a widow?

Harry. Yes, she was married to an American in the F. M. S.

George. Is she American?

Harry. Only by marriage. I’m afraid she didn’t have a very happy married life.

George. Poor thing. I think I’d take a small bet that you won’t beat her.

Harry. I mean to try my best to make her happy.

George. You old fool, I’ve never known a man who was likely to make a better husband.

Harry. I’m most awfully in love with her, George.

George. Isn’t that ripping? How old is she?

Harry. Only twenty-two. She’s the loveliest thing you ever saw.

George. And is she in love with you?

Harry. She says so.

George. She damned well ought to be.

Harry. I do hope you’ll like her, George.

George. Of course I shall. You’re not the sort of chap to fall in love with a woman who isn’t nice.

[Harry walks up and down for a moment restlessly.

Harry. Will you have a whisky and soda?

George. No, thanks ... I’ll wait for tea.

Harry. She ought to be here in a moment. [Suddenly making up his mind.] It’s no good beating about the bush. I may as well tell you at once. Her — her mother was Chinese.

George. [Unable to conceal his dismay.] Oh, Harry. [A pause.] I wish I hadn’t said all that I did just now.

Harry. Of course you didn’t know.

George. [Gravely.] I should have had to say something very like it, Harry. But I shouldn’t have put it so bluntly.

Harry. You said yourself there were exceptions.

George. I know. [Distressed.] Won’t your people be rather upset?

Harry. I don’t see how it can matter to them. They’re nine thousand miles away.

George. Who was her father?

Harry. Oh, he was a merchant. He’s dead. And her mother is too.

George. That’s something. I don’t think you’d much like having a Chinese mother-in-law about the place.

Harry. George, you won’t let it make any difference, will you? We’ve known one another all our lives.

George. My dear old chap, as far as I’m concerned I shouldn’t care if you married the first cousin of the Ace of Spades. I don’t want you to make a hash of things.

Harry. Wait till you see her. She’s the most fascinating thing you ever met.

George. Yes, they can be charming. I was awfully in love with a half — with a Eurasian girl myself years ago. It was before you came out to the country. I wanted to marry her.

Harry. Why didn’t you?

George. It was up in Chung-king. I’d just been appointed vice-consul. I was only twenty-three. The Minister wired from Peking that I’d have to resign if I did. I hadn’t a bob except my salary and they transferred me to Canton to get me away.

Harry. It’s different for you. You’re in the service and you may be Minister one of these days. I’m only a merchant.

George. Even for you there’ll be difficulties, you know. Has it occurred to you that the white ladies won’t be very nice?

Harry. I can do without their society.

George. You must know some people. It means you’ll have to hobnob with Eurasian clerks and their wives. I’m afraid you’ll find it pretty rotten.

Harry. If you’ll stick to me I don’t care.

George. I suppose you’ve absolutely made up your mind?

Harry. Absolutely.

George. In that case I’ve got nothing more to say. You can’t expect me not to be a little disappointed, but after all the chief thing is your happiness, and whatever I can do I will. You can put your shirt on that.

Harry. You’re a brick, George.

George. The little lady ought to be here, oughtn’t she?

Harry. I think I hear her on the stairs.

[He goes to the entrance and then out. Wu brings in the tea and sets it on the table. George walks over to the parapet and looks thoughtfully before him. There is a sound of voices in the adjoining room.

Harry. [Outside.] Come in; he’s on the verandah.

Daisy. [Outside.] One brief look in the glass and then I’m ready.

[Harry enters.

Harry. She’s just coming.

George. I bet she’s powdering her nose.

Daisy. Here I am.

[Daisy enters. She is an extremely pretty woman, beautifully, perhaps a little showily, dressed. She has a pale, very clear, slightly sallow skin, and beautiful dark eyes. There is only the very faintest suspicion in them of the Chinese slant. Her hair is abundant and black.

Harry. This is George Conway, Daisy.

[George stares at her. At first he is not quite sure that he recognizes her, then suddenly he does, but only the slightest movement of the eyes betrays him.

Daisy. How do you do. I told Harry I had an idea I must have met you somewhere. I don’t think I have after all.

Harry. George flatters himself he’s not easily forgotten.

Daisy. But I’ve heard so much about you from Harry that I feel as though we were old friends.

George. It’s very kind of you to say so.

Harry. Supposing you poured out the tea, Daisy.

George. I’m dying for a cup.

[She sits down and proceeds to do so.

Daisy. Harry is very anxious that you should like me.

Harry. George and I have known one another since we were kids. His people and mine live quite close to one another at home.

Daisy. But I’m not blaming you. I’m only wondering how I shall ingratiate myself with him.

Harry. He looks rather severe, but he isn’t really. I think you’ve only got to be your natural charming self.

Daisy. Have you told him about the house?

Harry. No. [To George.] You know the temple the Harrisons used to have. We’ve taken that.

George. Oh, it’s a ripping place. But won’t you find it rather a nuisance to have those old monks on the top of you all the time?

Harry. Oh, I don’t think so. Our part is quite separate, you know, and the Harrisons made it very comfortable.

[Harold Knox comes in. He has changed into tennis things.

Knox. I say, Harry ... [He sees Daisy.] Oh, I beg your pardon.

Harry. Mr. Knox — Mrs. Rathbone.

[Knox gives her a curt nod, but she holds out her hand affably. He takes it.

Daisy. How do you do.

Knox. I’m sorry to disturb you, Harry, but old Ku Faung Min is downstairs and wants to see you.

Harry. Tell him to go to blazes. The office is closed.

Knox. He’s going to Hankow to-night and he says he must see you before he goes. He’s got some big order to give.

Harry. Oh, curse him. I know what he is. He’ll keep me talking for half an hour. D’you mind if I leave you?

Daisy. Of course not. It’ll give me a chance of making Mr. Conway’s acquaintance.

Harry. I’ll get rid of him as quickly as I can.

[He goes out accompanied by Knox.

Knox. [As he goes.] Good-bye.

[George looks at Daisy for a moment. She smiles at him. There is a silence.

George. Why didn’t you warn me that it was you I was going to meet?

Daisy. I didn’t know what you’d say about me to Harry if you knew.

George. It was rather a risk, wasn’t it? Supposing I’d blurted out the truth.

Daisy. I trusted to your diplomatic training. Besides, I’d prepared for it. I told him I thought I’d met you.

George. Harry and I have been pals all our lives. I brought him out to China and I got him his job. When he had cholera he would have died if I hadn’t pulled him through.

Daisy. I know. And in return he worships the ground you tread on. I’ve never known one man think so much of another as he does of you.

George. All that’s rot, of course. Sometimes I don’t know how I’m going to live up to the good opinion Harry has of me. But when you’ve done so much for a pal as I have for him it gives you an awful sense of responsibility towards him.

Daisy. What do you mean by that?

[A short pause.

George. I’m not going to let you marry him.

Daisy. He’s so much in love with me that he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

George. I know he is. But if you were in love with him you wouldn’t be so sure of it.

Daisy. [With a sudden change of tone.] Why not? I was sure of your love. And God knows I was in love with you.

[George makes a gesture of dismay. He is taken aback for a moment, but he quickly recovers.

George. You don’t know what sort of a man Harry is. He’s not like the fellows you’ve been used to. He’s never knocked around as most of us do. He’s always been as straight as a die.

Daisy. I know.

George. Have mercy on him. Even if there were nothing else against you he’s not the sort of chap for you to marry. He’s awfully English.

Daisy. If he doesn’t mind marrying a Eurasian I really don’t see what business it is of yours.

George. But you know very well that that isn’t the only thing against you.

Daisy. I haven’t an idea what you mean.

George. Haven’t you? You forget the war. When we heard there was a very pretty young woman, apparently with plenty of money, living at the Hong Kong Hotel on very familiar terms with a lot of naval fellows, it became our business to make enquiries. I think I know everything there is against you.

Daisy. Have you any right to make use of information you’ve acquired officially?

George. Don’t be a fool, Daisy.

Daisy. [Passionately.] Tell him then. You’ll break his heart. You’ll make him utterly wretched. But he’ll marry me all the same. When a man’s as much in love as he is he’ll forgive everything.

George. I think it’s horrible. If you loved him you couldn’t marry him. It’s heartless.

Daisy. [Violently.] How dare you say that? You. You. You know what I am. Yes, it’s all true. I don’t know what you know but it can’t be worse than the truth. And whose fault is it? Yours. If I’m rotten it’s you who made me rotten.

George. I? No. You’ve got no right to say that. It’s cruel. It’s infamous.

Daisy. I’ve touched you at last, have I? Because you know it’s true. Don’t you remember when I first came to Chung-king? I was seventeen. My father had sent me to England to school when I was seven. I never saw him for ten years. And at last he wrote and said I was to come back to China. You came and met me on the boat and told me my father had had a stroke and was dead. You took me to the Presbyterian mission.

George. That was my job. I was awfully sorry for you.

Daisy. And then in a day or two you came and told me that my father hadn’t left anything and what there was went to his relations in England.

George. Naturally he didn’t expect to die.

Daisy. [Passionately.] If he was going to leave me like that why didn’t he let me stay with my Chinese mother? Why did he bring me up like a lady? Oh, it was cruel.

George. Yes. It was unpardonable.

Daisy. I was so lonely and so frightened. You seemed to be sorry for me. You were the only person who was really kind to me. You were practically the first man I’d known. I loved you. I thought you loved me. Oh, say that you loved me then, George.

George. You know I did.

Daisy. I was very innocent in those days. I thought that when two people loved one another they married. I wasn’t a Eurasian then, George. I was like any other English girl. If you’d married me I shouldn’t be what I am now. But they took you away from me. You never even said good-bye to me. You wrote and told me you’d been transferred to Canton.

George. I couldn’t say good-bye to you, Daisy. They said that if I married you I’d have to leave the service. I was absolutely penniless. They dinned it into my ears that if a white man marries a Eurasian he’s done for. I wouldn’t listen to them, but in my heart I knew it was true.

Daisy. I don’t blame you. You wanted to get on, and you have, haven’t you? You’re Assistant Chinese Secretary already and Harry says you’ll be Minister before you’ve done. It seems rather hard that I should have had to pay the price.

George. Daisy, you’ll never know what anguish I suffered. I can’t expect you to care. It’s very natural if you hate me. I was ambitious. I didn’t want to be a failure. I knew that it was madness to marry you. I had to kill my love. I couldn’t. It was stronger than I was. At last I couldn’t help myself. I made up my mind to chuck everything and take the consequences. I was just starting for Chung-king when I heard you were living in Shanghai with a rich Chinaman.

[Daisy gives a little moan. There is a silence.

Daisy. They hated me at the mission. They found fault with me from morning till night. They blamed me because you wanted to marry me and they treated me as if I was a designing cat. When you went away they heaved a sigh of relief. Then they started to convert me. They thought I’d better become a school teacher. They hated me because I was seventeen. They hated me because I was pretty. Oh, the brutes. They killed all the religion I’d got. There was only one person who seemed to care if I was alive or dead. That was my mother. Oh, I was so ashamed the first time I saw her. At school in England I’d told them so often that she was a Chinese princess that I almost believed it myself. My mother was a dirty little ugly Chinawoman. I’d forgotten all my Chinese and I had to talk to her in English. She asked me if I’d like to go to Shanghai with her. I was ready to do anything in the world to get away from the mission and I thought in Shanghai I shouldn’t be so far away from you. They didn’t want me to go, but they couldn’t keep me against my will. When we got to Shanghai she sold me to Lee Tai Cheng for two thousand dollars.

George. How terrible.

Daisy. I’ve never had a chance. Oh, George, isn’t it possible for a woman to turn over a new leaf? You say that Harry’s good and kind. Don’t you see what that means to me? Because he’ll think me good I shall be good. After all, he couldn’t have fallen in love with me if I’d been entirely worthless. I hate the life I’ve led. I want to go straight. I swear I’ll make him a good wife. Oh, George, if you ever loved me have pity on me. If Harry doesn’t marry me I’m done.

George. How can a marriage be happy that’s founded on a tissue of lies?

Daisy. I’ve never told Harry a single lie.

George. You told him you hadn’t been happily married.

Daisy. That wasn’t a lie.

George. You haven’t been married at all.

Daisy. [With a roguish look.] Well then, I haven’t been happily married, have I?

George. Who was this fellow Rathbone?

Daisy. He was an American in business at Singapore. I met him in Shanghai. I hated Lee. Rathbone asked me to go to Singapore with him and I went. I lived with him for four years.

George. Then you went back to Lee Tai Cheng.

Daisy. Rathbone died. There was nothing else to do. My mother was always nagging me to go back to him. He’s rich and she makes a good thing out of it.

George. I thought she was dead.

Daisy. No. I told Harry she was because I thought it would make it easier for him.

George. She isn’t with you now, is she?

Daisy. No, she lives at Ichang. She doesn’t bother me as long as I send her something every month.

George. Why did you tell Harry that you were twenty-two? It’s ten years since you came to China and you were seventeen then.

Daisy. [With a twinkle in her eye.] Any woman of my age will tell you that seventeen and ten are twenty-two.

[George does not smile. With frowning brow he walks up and down.

George. Oh, I wish to God I knew nothing about you. I can’t bring myself to tell him and yet how can I let him marry you in absolute ignorance? Oh, Daisy, for your sake as well as for his I beseech you to tell him the whole truth and let him decide for himself.

Daisy. And break his heart? There’s not a missionary who believes in God as he believes in me. If he loses his trust in me he loses everything. Tell him if you think you must, if you have no pity, if you have no regret for all the shame and misery you brought on me, you, you, you — but if you do, I swear, I swear to God that I shall kill myself. I won’t go back to that hateful life.

[He looks at her earnestly for a moment.

George. I don’t know if I’m doing right or wrong. I shall tell him nothing.

[Daisy gives a deep sigh of relief, Harry comes in.

Harry. I say, I’m awfully sorry to have been so long. I couldn’t get the old blighter to go.

Daisy. [With complete self-control.] If I say you’ve been an age it’ll look as though Mr. Conway had been boring me.

Harry. I hope you’ve made friends.

Daisy. [To George.] Have we?

George. I hope so. But now I think I must bolt. I have a long Chinese document to translate. [Holding out his hand to Daisy.] I hope you’ll both be very happy.

Daisy. I think I’m going to like you.

George. Good-bye, Harry, old man.

Harry. I shall see you later on in the club, sha’n’t I?

George. If I can get through my work.

[He goes out.

Harry. What have you and George been talking about?

Daisy. We discussed the house. It’ll be great fun buying the things for it.

Harry. I could have killed that old Chink for keeping me so long. I grudge every minute that I spend away from you.

Daisy. It’s nice to be loved.

Harry. You do love me a little, don’t you?

Daisy. A little more than a little, my lamb.

Harry. I wish I were more worth your while. You’ve made me feel so dissatisfied with myself. I’m such a rotter.

Daisy. You’re not going to disagree with me already.

Harry. What about?

Daisy. About you. I think you’re a perfect duck.

[The Amah appears.

Harry. Hulloa, who’s this?

Daisy. Oh, it’s my amah.

Harry. I didn’t recognize her for a moment.

Daisy. She doesn’t approve of my being alone with strange gentlemen. She looks after me as if I was a child of ten.

Amah. Velly late, missy Daisy. Time you come along.

Harry. Oh, nonsense.

Daisy. She wants me to go and be fitted. She never lets me go out in Peking alone.

Harry. She’s quite right.

Daisy. Amah, come and be introduced to the gentleman. He’s going to be your master now.

Amah. [Smiling, with little nods.] Velly nice gentleman. You keep missy Daisy old amah — yes? Velly good amah — yes?

Daisy. She’s been with me ever since I was a child.

Harry. Of course we’ll keep her. She was with you when you were in Singapore?

Daisy. [With a little sigh.] Yes, I don’t know what I should have done without her sometimes.

Harry. Oh, Daisy, I do want to make you forget all the unhappiness you have suffered.

[He takes her in his arms and kisses her on the lips. The Amah chuckles to herself silently.

END OF SCENE II.

SCENE III

Scene: The Temple of Fidelity and Virtuous Inclination. The courtyard of the temple is shown. At the back is the sanctuary in which is seen the altar table; on this are two large vases in each of which are seven lotus flowers, gilt but discoloured by incense, and in the middle there is a sand-box in which are burning joss-sticks; behind is the image of Buddha. The sanctuary can be closed by huge doors. These are now open. A flight of steps leads up to it.

A service is finishing. The monks are seen on each side of the altar kneeling in two rows. They are clad in grey gowns and their heads are shaven. They sing the invocation to Buddha, repeating the same words over and over again in a monotonous chaunt. Daisy stands outside the sanctuary door, on the steps, listlessly. The Amah is squatting by her side. Now the service ends; the monks form a procession and two by two, still singing, come down the steps and go out. A tiny acolyte blows out the oil lamps and with an effort shuts the temple doors.

Daisy comes down the steps and sits on one of the lower ones. She is dreadfully bored.

Amah. What is the matter with my pletty one?

Daisy. What should be the matter?

Amah. [With a snigger.] Hi, hi. Old amah got velly good eyes in her head.

Daisy. [As though talking to herself.] I’ve got a husband who adores me and a nice house to live in. I’ve got a position and as much money as I want. I’m safe. I’m respectable. I ought to be happy.

Amah. I say, Harry no good, what for you wanchee marry? You say, I wanchee marry, I wanchee marry? Well, you married. What you want now?

Daisy. They say life is short. Good God, how long the days are.

Amah. You want pony — Harry give you pony. You want jade ring — Harry give you jade ring. You want sable coat — Harry give you sable coat. Why you not happy?

Daisy. I never said I wasn’t happy.

Amah. Hi, hi.

Daisy. If you laugh like that I’ll kill you.

Amah. You no kill old amah. You want old amah. I got something velly pletty for my little Daisy flower.

Daisy. Don’t be an old fool. I’m not a child any more. [Desperately.] I’m growing older, older, older. And every day is just like every other day. I might as well be dead.

Amah. Look this pletty present old amah have got.

[She takes a jade necklace out of her sleeve and puts it, smiling, into Daisy’s hand.

Daisy. [With sudden vivacity,] Oh, what a lovely chain. It’s beautiful jade. How much do they want for it?

Amah. It’s a present for my little Daisy.

Daisy. For me? It must have cost five hundred dollars. Who is it from?

Amah. To-day is my little Daisy’s wedding-day. She have married one year. Perhaps old amah want to give her little flower present.

Daisy. YOU! Have you ever given me anything but a beating?

Amah. Lee Tai Cheng pay me necklace and say you give to Daisy.

Daisy. You old hag. [She flings the necklace away violently.]

Amah. You silly. Worth plenty money. You no wanchee, I sell rich Amelican.

[She is just going after the necklace, when Daisy catches her violently by the arm.

Daisy. How dare you? How dare you? I told you that you were never to let Lee Tai speak to you again.

Amah. You very angry, Daisy. You very angry before, but you go back to Lee Tai; he think perhaps you go back again.

Daisy. Tell him that I loathe the sight of him. Tell him that if I were starving I wouldn’t take a penny from him. Tell him that if he dares to come round here I’ll have him beaten till he screams.

Amah. Hi, hi.

Daisy. And you leave me alone, will you. Harry hates you. I’ve only got to say a word and he’ll kick you out in five minutes.

Amah. What would my little Daisy do without old amah, hi, hi? What for you no talkee true? You think old amah no got eyes? [With a cunning, arch look.] I got something make you very glad. [She takes a note out of her sleeve.]

Daisy. What’s that?

Amah. I got letter.

Daisy. [Snatching it from her.] Give it me. How dare you hide it?

Amah. Have come when you long Harry. I think perhaps you no wanchee read when Harry there. [Daisy tears it open.] What he say?

Daisy. [Reading.] “I’m awfully sorry I can’t dine with you on Thursday, but I’m engaged. I’ve just remembered it’s your wedding-day and I’ll look in for a minute. Ask Harry if he’d like to ride with me.”

Amah. Is that all?

Daisy. “Yours ever. George Conway.”

Amah. You love him very much, George Conway?

Daisy. [Taking no notice of her, passionately.] At last. I haven’t seen him for ten days. Ten mortal days. Oh, I want him. I want him.

Amah. Why you no talkee old amah?

Daisy. [Desperately.] I can’t help myself. Oh, I love him so. What shall I do? I can’t live without him. If you don’t want me to die make him love me.

Amah. You see, you want old amah.

Daisy. Oh, I’m so unhappy. I think I shall go mad.

Amah. Sh, sh. Perhaps he love you too.

Daisy. Never. He hates me. Why does he avoid me? He never comes here. At first he was always looking in. He used to come out and dine two or three days a week. What have I done to him? He only comes now because he does not want to offend Harry. Harry, Harry, what do I care for Harry?

Amah. Sh. Don’t let him see. Give amah the letter.

[She snatches it from Daisy and hides it in her dress as Harry comes in. Daisy pulls herself together.

Harry. I say, Daisy, I’ve just had the ponies saddled. Put on your habit and let’s go for a ride.

Daisy. I’ve got a headache.

Harry. Oh, my poor child. Why don’t you lie down?

Daisy. I thought I was better in the air. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t ride.

Harry. Oh, no, I won’t ride without you.

Daisy. Why on earth not? It’ll do you good. You know when my head’s bad I only want to be left alone. Your pony wants exercising.

Harry. The boy can do that.

Daisy. [Trying to conceal her growing exasperation.] Please do as I ask. I’d rather you went.

Harry. [Laughing.] Of course if you’re so anxious to get rid of me....

Daisy. [Smiling.] I can’t bear that you should be done out of your ride. If you won’t go alone you’ll just force me to come with you.

Harry. I’ll go. Give me a kiss before I do. [She puts up her lips to his.] I’m almost ashamed of myself, I’m just as madly in love with you as the day we were married.

Daisy. You are a dear. Have a nice ride, and when you come back I shall be all right.

Harry. That’s ripping. I shan’t be very long.

[He goes out. The lightness, the smile, with which she has spoken to Harry disappear as he goes, and she looks worried and anxious.

Daisy. Supposing they meet?

Amah. No can. Harry go out back way.

Daisy. Yes, I suppose he will. I wish he’d be quick. [Violently.] I must see George.

Amah. [Picking up the necklace.] Velly pletty necklace. You silly girl. Why you no take?

Daisy. Oh, damn, why can’t you leave me alone? [Listening.] What on earth is Harry doing? I thought the pony was saddled.

Amah. [Looking at the necklace.] What shall I do with this?

Daisy. Throw it in the dust-bin.

Amah. Lee Tai no likee that very much.

Daisy. [Hearing the sound of the pony, with a sigh of relief.] He’s gone. Now I’m safe. Where’s my bag? [She takes a little mirror out of it and looks at herself.] I look perfectly hideous.

Amah. Don’t be silly. You velly pletty girl.

Daisy. [Her ears all alert.] There’s someone riding along.

Amah. That not pony. That Peking cart.

Daisy. You old fool, I tell you it’s a pony. At last. Oh, my heart’s beating so.... It’s stopping at the gate. It’s George. Oh, I love him. I love him. [To the Amah, stamping her foot.] What are you waiting for? I don’t want you here now, and don’t listen, d’you hear. Get out, get out.

Amah. All-light. My go away.

[The Amah slinks away. Daisy stands waiting for George, holding her hands to her heart as though to stop the anguish of its beating. She makes a great effort at self-control as George enters. He is in riding kit. He has a bunch of orchids in his hand.

George. Hulloa, what are you doing here?

Daisy. I was tired of sitting in the drawing-room.

George. I remembered it was your wedding-day. I’ve brought you a few flowers. [She takes them with both hands.]

Daisy. Thank you. That is kind of you.

George. [Gravely.] I hope you’ll always be very happy. I hope you’ll allow me to say how grateful I am that you’ve given Harry so much happiness.

Daisy. You’re very solemn. One would almost think you’d prepared that pretty speech beforehand.

George. [Trying to take it lightly.] I’m sorry if it didn’t sound natural. I can promise you it was sincere.

Daisy. Shall we sit down?

George. I think we ought to go for our ride while the light lasts. I’ll come in and have a drink on the way back.

Daisy. Harry’s out.

George. Is he? I sent you a note this morning. I said I couldn’t dine on Thursday and I’d come and fetch Harry for a ride this afternoon.

Daisy. I didn’t tell him.

George. No?

Daisy. I don’t see you very often nowadays.

George. There’s an awful lot of work to do just now. They lead me a dog’s life at the legation.

Daisy. Even at night? At first you used to come and dine with us two or three nights a week.

George. I can’t always be sponging on you. It’s positively indecent.

Daisy. We don’t know many people. It’s not always very lively here. I should have thought if you didn’t care to come for my sake you’d have come for Harry’s.

George. I come whenever you ask me.

Daisy. You haven’t been here for a month.

George. It just happens that the last two or three times you’ve asked me to dine I’ve been engaged.

Daisy. [Her voice breaking.] You promised that we’d be friends. What have I done to turn you against me?

George. [His armour pierced by the emotion in her voice.] Oh, Daisy, don’t speak like that.

Daisy. I’ve tried to do everything I could to please you. If there’s anything I do that you don’t like, won’t you tell me? I promise you I won’t do it.

George. Oh, my dear child, you make me feel such an awful beast.

Daisy. Is it the past that you can’t forget?

George. Good heavens, no, what do I care about the past?

Daisy. I have so few friends. I’m so awfully fond of you, George.

George. I don’t think I’ve given you much cause to be that.

Daisy. There must be some reason why you won’t ever come near me. Why won’t you tell me?

George. Oh, it’s absurd, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

Daisy. You used to be so jolly, and we used to laugh together. I looked forward so much to your coming here. What has changed you?

George. Nothing has changed me.

Daisy. [With a passion of despair.] Oh, I might as well batter my head against a brick wall. How can you be so unkind to me?

George. For God’s sake ... [He stops.] Heaven knows, I don’t want to be unkind to you.

Daisy. Then why do you treat me as an outcast? Oh, it’s cruel, cruel.

[George is excessively distressed. He walks up and down, frowning. He cannot bear to look at Daisy and he speaks with hesitation.

George. You’ll think me an awful rotter, Daisy, but you can’t think me more of a rotter than I think myself. I don’t know how to say it. It seems such an awful thing to say. I’m so ashamed of myself. I don’t suppose two men have ever been greater pals than Harry and I. He’s married to you and he’s awfully in love with you. And I think you’re in love with him. I was only twenty-three when I — first knew you. It’s an awful long time ago, isn’t it? There are some wounds that never quite heal, you know. Oh, my God, don’t you understand? [His embarrassment, the distraction of his tone, and the way the halting words fall unwillingly from his lips have betrayed the truth to Daisy. She does not speak, she does not stir, she looks at him with great shining eyes. She hardly dares to breathe.] If ever you wanted revenge on me you’ve got it now. You must see that it’s better that I shouldn’t come here too often. Forgive me — Goodby.

[He hurries away with averted face. Daisy stands motionless, erect; she is almost transfigured. She draws a long breath.

Daisy. Oh, God! He loves me.

[She takes the orchids he has brought her and crushes them to her heart. The Amah appears.

Amah. You wantchee buy Manchu dress, Daisy?

Daisy. Go away.

Amah. Velly cheap. You look see. No likee, no buy.

Daisy. [Impatiently.] I’m sick of curio-dealers.

Amah. Velly pletty Manchu dresses.

[She draws aside a little and allows a man with a large bundle wrapped up in a blue cotton cloth to come in. He is a Chinese. He is dressed in a long black robe and a round black cap. It is Lee Tai Cheng. He is big and rather stout. From his smooth and yellow face his black eyes gleam craftily. He lays his bundle on the ground and unties it, showing a pile of gorgeous Manchu dresses. Daisy has taken no notice of him. Suddenly she sees that a man, with his back turned to her, is there.

Daisy. [To the Amah.] I told you I wouldn’t see the man. Send him away at once.

Lee Tai. [Turning round, with a sly smile.] You look see. No likee, no buy.

Daisy. [With a start of surprise and dismay.] Lee!

Lee Tai. [Coming forward coolly.] Good afternoon, Daisy.

Daisy. [Recovering herself.] It’s lucky for you I’m in a good temper or I’d have you thrown out by the boys. What have you brought this junk for?

Lee Tai. A curio-dealer can come and go and no one wonders.

Amah. Lee Tai velly clever man.

Daisy. Give me that chain. [The Amah takes it out of her sleeve and gives it to her. Daisy flings it contemptuously at Lee Tai’s feet.] Take it. Pack up your things and go. If you ever dare to show your face here again, I’ll tell my husband.

Lee Tai. [With a chuckle.] What will you tell him? Don’t you be a silly girl, Daisy.

Daisy. What do you want?

Lee Tai. [Coolly.] You.

Daisy. Don’t you know that I loathe you? You disgust me.

Lee Tai. What do I care? Perhaps if you loved me I shouldn’t want you. Your hatred is like a sharp and bitter sauce that tickles my appetite.

Daisy. You beast.

Lee Tai. I like the horror that makes your body tremble when I hold you in my arms. And sometimes the horror turns on a sudden into a wild tempest of passion.

Daisy. You liar.

Lee Tai. Leave this stupid white man. What is he to you?

Daisy. He is my husband.

Lee Tai. It is a year to-day since you were married. What has marriage done for you? You thought when you married a white man you’d become a white woman. Do you think they can look at you and forget? How many white women do you know? How many friends have you got? You’re a prisoner. I’ll take you to Singapore or Calcutta. Don’t you want to amuse yourself? Do you want to go to Europe? I’ll take you to Paris. I’ll give you more money to spend in a week than your husband earns in a year.

Daisy. I’m very comfortable in Peking, thank you.

Lee Tai. [Snapping his fingers.] You don’t care that for your husband. He loves you. You despise him. Don’t you wish with all your heart that you hadn’t married him?

Amah. He very silly white man. He no likee Daisy’s old amah. Perhaps one day he b’long sick. Daisy cry velly much if he die?

Daisy. [Impatiently.] Don’t be such a fool.

Amah. Perhaps one day he drink whisky soda. Oh, velly ill, velly ill. What’s the matter with me? No sabe. No can stand. Doctor no sabe. Then die. Hi, hi.

Daisy. You silly old woman. Harry’s not a Chinaman and he wouldn’t call in a Chinese doctor.

Lee Tai. [With a smile.] China is a very old and a highly civilized country, Daisy. When anyone is in your way, it’s not very difficult to get rid of him.

Daisy. [Scornfully.] And do you think I’d let poor Harry be murdered so that I might be free to listen to your generous proposals? You must think I’m a fool if you expect me to risk my neck for that.

Lee Tai. You don’t take any risk, Daisy. You know nothing.

Amah. Lee Tai velly clever man, Daisy.

Daisy. I thought so once. Lee Tai, you’re a damned fool. Get out.

Lee Tai. Freedom is a very good thing, Daisy.

Daisy. What should I do with it?

Lee Tai. Wouldn’t you like to be free now? [She looks at him sharply. She wonders if it can possibly be that he suspects her passion for George Conway. He meets her glance steadily.] One day Sen Shi Ming was sitting with his wife looking at a Tang bronze that he had just bought when he heard someone in the street crying for help. Sen Shi was a very brave man and he snatched up a revolver and ran out. Sen Shi forgot that he had cheated his brother out of a house in Hatamen Street or he would have been more prudent. Sen Shi was found by the watchman an hour later with a dagger in his heart. Who killed cock-robin?

Amah. Hi, hi. Sen Shi velly silly man.

Lee Tai. His brother knew that. They had grown up together. If I heard cries for help outside my house late in the night, I should ask myself who had a grudge against me, and I should make sure the door was bolted. But white men are very brave. White men don’t know the Chinese customs. Would you be very sorry if an accident happened to your excellent husband?

Daisy. I wonder what you take me for?

Lee Tai. Why do you pretend to me, Daisy? Do you think I don’t know you?

Daisy. The door is a little on the left of you, Lee Tai. Would you give yourself the trouble of walking through it?

Lee Tai. [With a smile.] I go, but I come back. Perhaps you’ll change your mind.

[He ties up his bundle and is about to go. Harry enters.

Daisy. Oh, Harry, you’re back very soon!

Harry. Yes, the pony went lame. Fortunately I hadn’t gone far before I noticed it. Who’s this?

Daisy. It’s a curio-dealer. He has nothing I want. I was just sending him away.

[Lee Tai takes up his bundle and goes out.

Harry. [Noticing the orchids.] Someone been sending you flowers?

Daisy. George.

Harry. Rather nice of him. [To the Amah.] Run along, amah, I want to talk to missy.

Amah. All light.

Harry. And don’t let me catch you listening round the corner.

Amah. My no listen. What for I listen?

Harry. Run along — chop-chop.

Amah. Can do. [She goes out.]

Harry. [With a laugh.] I couldn’t give you a greater proof of my affection than consenting to have that old woman around all the time.

Daisy. I don’t know why you dislike her. She’s devoted to me.

Harry. That’s the only reason I put up with her. She gives me the creeps. I have the impression that she watches every movement I make.

Daisy. Oh, what nonsense!

Harry. And I’ve caught her eavesdropping.

Daisy. Was it amah that you wanted to talk to me about?

Harry. No, I’ve got something to tell you. How would you like to leave Peking?

Daisy. [With a start, suddenly off her guard.] Not at all.

Harry. I’m afraid it’s awfully dull for you here, darling.

Daisy. I don’t find it so.

Harry. You’re so dear and sweet. Are you sure you don’t say that on my account?

Daisy. I’m very fond of Peking.

Harry. We’ve been married a year now. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, darling, but it’s no good beating about the bush, and I think it’s better to be frank.

Daisy. Surely you can say anything you like to me without hesitation.

Harry. Things have been a little awkward in a way. The women I used to know before we married left cards on you —

Daisy. Having taken the precaution to discover that I should be out.

Harry. And you returned those cards and that was the end of it. I asked George what he thought about my taking you to the club to play tennis and he said he thought we’d better not risk it. The result is that you don’t know a soul.

Daisy. Have I complained?

Harry. You’ve been most awfully decent about it, but I hate to think of your spending day after day entirely by yourself. It can’t be good for you to be so much alone.

Daisy. I might have known Mrs. Chuan. She’s a white woman.

Harry. Oh, my dear, she was — heaven knows what she was! She’s married to a Chinaman. It’s horrible. She’s outside the pale.

Daisy. And there’s Bertha Raymond. She’s very nice, even though she is a Eurasian.

Harry. I’m sure she’s very nice, but we couldn’t very well have the Raymonds here and refuse to go to them. Her brother is one of the clerks in my office. I don’t want to seem an awful snob....

Daisy. You needn’t hesitate to say anything about the Eurasians. You can’t hate and despise them more than I do.

Harry. I don’t hate and despise them. I think that’s odious. But sometimes they’re not very tactful. I don’t know that I much want one of my clerks to come and slap me on the back in the office and call me old chap.

Daisy. Of course not.

Harry. The fact is we’ve been trying to do an impossible thing. It’s no good kicking against the pricks. What with the legations and one thing and another Peking’s hopeless. We’d far better clear out.

Daisy. But if I don’t mind why should you?

Harry. Well, it’s not very nice for me either. It’s for my sake just as much as for yours that I’d be glad to go elsewhere. Of course everybody at the club knows I’m married. Some of them ignore it altogether. I don’t mind that so much. Some of them ask after you with an exaggerated cordiality which is rather offensive. And every now and then some fool begins to slang the Eurasians and everybody kicks him under the table. Then he remembers about me and goes scarlet. By God, it’s hell.

Daisy. [Sulkily.] I don’t want to leave Peking. I’m very happy here.

Harry. Well, darling, I’ve applied for a transfer.

Daisy. [With sudden indignation.] Without saying a word to me?

Harry. I thought you’d be glad. I didn’t want to say anything till it was settled.

Daisy. Do you think I am a child to have everything arranged for me without a word? [Trying to control herself.] After all, you’d never see George. Surely you don’t want to lose sight of your only real friend.

Harry. I’ve talked it over with George and he thinks it’s the best thing to do.

Daisy. Did he advise you to go?

Harry. Strongly.

Daisy. [Violently.] I won’t do it. I won’t leave Peking.

Harry. Why should his advice make the difference?

Daisy. Why? [She is confused for a moment, but quickly recovers herself.] I won’t let George Conway — or anybody else — decide where I’m to go.

Harry. Don’t be unreasonable, darling.

Daisy. I won’t go. I tell you I won’t go.

Harry. Well, I’m afraid you must now. It’s all settled. The transfer is decided.

Daisy. [Bursting into tears.] Oh, Harry, don’t take me away from here. I can’t bear it. I want to stay here.

Harry. Oh, darling, how can you be so silly! You’ll have a much better time at one of the outports. You see, there are so few white people there that they can’t afford to put on frills. They’ll be jolly glad to know us both. We shall lead a normal life and be like everybody else.

Daisy. [Sulkily.] Where do you want to go?

Harry. I’ve been put in charge of our place at Chung-king.

Daisy. [Starting up with a cry.] Chung-king! Of course you’d choose Chung-king.

Harry. Why, what’s wrong with it? Do you know it?

Daisy. No — oh, what am I talking about? I’m all confused. Yes, I was there once when I was a girl. It’s a hateful place.

Harry. Oh, nonsense! The consul’s got a charming wife, and there are quite a nice lot of people there.

Daisy. [Distracted.] Oh, what shall I do? I’m so unhappy. If you cared for me at all you wouldn’t treat me so cruelly. You’re ashamed of me. You want to hide me. Why should I bury myself in a hole two thousand miles up the river? I won’t go! I won’t go! I won’t go! [She bursts into a storm of hysterical weeping.]

Harry. [Trying to take her in his arms.] Oh, Daisy, for God’s sake don’t cry. You know I’m not ashamed of you. I love you more than ever. I love you with all my heart.

Daisy. [Drawing away from him.] Don’t touch me. Leave me alone. I hate you.

Harry. Don’t say that, Daisy. It hurts me frightfully.

Daisy. Oh, go away, go away!

Harry. [Seeking to reason with her.] I can’t leave you like this.

Daisy. Go, go, go, go, go! I don’t want to see you! Oh, God, what shall I do?

[She flings herself doom on the steps, weeping hysterically. Harry, much distressed, looks at her in perplexity. The Amah comes in.

Amah. You make missy cly. You velly bad man.

Harry. What the devil do you want?

Amah. [Going up to Daisy and stroking her head.] What thing he talkee my poor little flower? Maskee. He belong velly bad man.

Harry. Shut up, you old ... I won’t have you talk like that. I’ve put up with a good deal from you, but if you try to make mischief between Daisy and me, by God, I’ll throw you out into the street with my own hands.

Amah. What thing you do my Daisy? Don’t cly, Daisy.

Harry. Darling, don’t be unreasonable.

Daisy. Go away, don’t come near me. I hate you.

Harry. How can you say anything so unkind?

Daisy. Send him away. [She begins to sob again more violently.]

Amah. You go away. You no can see she no wanchee you. You come back bimeby. My sabe talk to little flower.

[Harry hesitates for a moment. He is harassed by the scene. Then he makes up his mind the best thing is to leave Daisy with the Amah. He goes out. Daisy raises her head cautiously.

Daisy. Has he gone?

Amah. Yes. He go drink whisky soda.

Daisy. Do you know what he wants?

Amah. What for he tell me no listen? So fashion I sabe he say something I wanchee hear. He wanchee you leave Peking.

Daisy. I won’t go.

Amah. Harry velly silly man. He alla same pig. You pull thisa way, he pull thata way. If Harry say you go from Peking — you go.

Daisy. Never, never, never!

Amah. You go away from Peking you never see George anymore.

Daisy. I should die. Oh, I want him! I want him to love me. I want him to hurt me. I want.... [In her passion she has dug her hands hard into the Amah.]

Amah. [Pushing away Daisy’s hands.] Oh!

Daisy. He loves me. That’s the only thing that matters. All the rest....

Amah. Harry wanchee you go Chung-king. Missionary ladies like see you again, Daisy. Perhaps they ask you how you like living along Lee Tai Cheng. Perhaps somebody tell Harry.

Daisy. The fool. Of all the places in China he must hit upon Chung-king.

Amah. You know Harry. If he say go Chung-king, he go. You cly, he velly solly, he all same go.

Daisy. Oh, I know his obstinacy. When he’s once made up his mind — [Contemptuously.] — he prides himself on his firmness. Oh, what shall I do?

Amah. I think more better something happen to Harry.

Daisy. No, no, no!

Amah. What you flightened for? You no do anything. I tell Lee Tai more better something happen to Harry. I say you not velly sorry if Harry die.

Daisy. [Putting her hands over her ears.] Be quiet! I won’t listen to you.

Amah. [Roughly tearing her hands away.] Don’t you be such a big fool, Daisy. You go to Chung-king and Harry know everything. Maybe he kill you.

Daisy. What do I care?

Amah. You go to Chung-king, you never see George no more. George, he love my little Daisy. When Harry gone — George, he come say....

Daisy. Oh, don’t tempt me, it’s horrible!

Amah. He put his arms round you and you feel such a little small thing, you hear his heart beat quick, quick against your heart. And he throw back your head and he kiss you. And you think you die, little flower.

Daisy. Oh, I love him, I love him!

Amah. Hi, hi.

Daisy. [Thinking of the scene with George.] He would hardly look at me and his hands were trembling. He was as white as a sheet.

Amah. [Persuasively.] I tell you, Daisy. You no say yes, you no say no. I ask Buddha.

Daisy. [Frightened.] What for?

Amah. If Buddha say yes, I talk with Lee Tai; if Buddha say no, I do nothing. Then you go to Chung-king and you never see George any more.

[The Amah goes up the temple steps and flings open the great doors. Daisy watches her with an agony of horror, expectation, and dread. The Amah lights some joss-sticks on the altar, and strikes a deep-toned gong. Harry comes in, followed by Lee Tai with his bundle.

Harry. [Anxious to make his peace.] Daisy, I found this fellow hanging about in the courtyard. I thought I’d like to buy you a Manchu dress that he’s got.

Daisy. [After a moment’s reflection, with a change of tone.] That’s very nice of you, Harry.

Harry. It’s a real beauty. You’ll look stunning in it.

Lee Tai. [Showing the dress, speaking in Pidgin English.] Firs class dless. He belong Manchu plincess. Manchus no got money. No got money, no can chow. Manchus sell velly cheap. You takee, Missy.

[Daisy and Lee Tai exchange glances. Daisy is grave and tragic, whereas Lee Tai has an ironical glint in his eyes. Meanwhile the Amah has been bowing before the altar. She goes down on her knees and knocks her head on the ground.

Harry. What in God’s Name is amah doing?

Daisy. She’s asking Buddha a question.

Harry. What question?

Daisy. [With a shadow of a smile.] How should I know?

Harry. What’s the idea?

Daisy. Haven’t you ever seen the Chinese do it? You see those pieces of wood she’s holding in her hands. She’s holding them out to the Buddha so that he may see them and she’s telling him that he must answer the question. [Meanwhile the Amah, muttering in a low tone, is seen doing what Daisy describes.] The Buddha smells the incense of the burning joss-sticks, and he’s pleased and he listens to what she says.

Harry. [Smiling.] Don’t be so absurd, Daisy. One might almost think you believed all this nonsense. Why, you’re quite pale.

Daisy. Then she gets up. The pieces of wood are flat on one side and round on the other. She’ll lift them above her head and she’ll drop them in front of the Buddha. If they fall with the round side uppermost it means yes. [Daisy has been growing more and more excited as the ceremony proceeds. Now the Amah steps back a little and she raises her arms. Daisy gives a shriek and starts to run forward.] No! no! Stop!

Harry. [Instinctively seizing her arms.] Daisy!

[At the same moment the Amah has let the pieces of wood fall. She looks at them for an instant and then turns round.

Amah. Buddha talkee, can do.

Daisy. [To Harry.] Why did you stop me?

Harry. Daisy, how can you be so superstitious? What is the result?

Daisy. Amah asked Buddha a question and the answer is yes. [She puts her hand to her heart for an instant, then looking at Harry she smiles.] I’m sorry I was silly and unreasonable just now, Harry.

END OF SCENE III

SCENE IV

The sitting-room in the Andersons’ apartments. At the back are two double doors. The lower part of them is solid, but above they are cut in an intricate trellis. The ceiling is raftered, painted red and decorated with dim, gold dragons; the walls are whitewashed. On them hang Chinese pictures on rolls. Between the doors is a little image of the domestic god, and under it a tiny oil lamp is burning. The furniture is partly Chinese and partly European. There is an English writing-table, but the occasional tables, richly carved, are Chinese. There is a Chinese pallet-bed, covered with bamboo matting, and there is an English Chesterfield. There are a couple of Philippine rattan chairs and one or two of Cantonese blackwood. On the floor is a Chinese carpet. A Ming tile here and there gives a vivid note of colour. It is a summer night and the doors are wide open. Through them you see one of the courtyards of the temple.

The Amah is seated in one of the blackwood chairs by the side of a table. She has her water-pipe. She puts a pinch of tobacco in and then going to the lamp under the image lights a taper. She seats herself again and lights her pipe. She smokes quietly.

Daisy comes in. She wears an evening dress somewhat too splendid for dinner with only her husband and a friend.

Amah. B. A. T. fellow, when he go?

Daisy. You know his name. Why don’t you call him by it? I think he’s going almost at once.

Amah. What for he go so soon?

Daisy. That’s his business, isn’t it? As a matter of fact his sister is arriving from England, and he has to go to meet her.

Amah. More better he go soon.

Daisy. Why do you smoke your pipe here? You know Harry doesn’t like it.

Amah. Harry one big fool, I think. When you go to Chung-king?

Daisy. Harry hasn’t said a word about it since.

Amah. You got key that desk?

Daisy. No. Harry keeps all his private papers there.

[The Amah goes up to the desk and tries one of the drawers. It is locked and she cannot open it.

Amah. What Harry do now?

Daisy. He and Mr. Knox are drinking their port.

[The Amah takes out a skeleton key out of her pocket and inserts it in the lock. She turns the key.

Amah. Velly bad lock. I think him made in Germany. Hi, hi. [She opens the drawer and takes out a revolver. She hands it to Daisy.] Lee Tai say, you take out cartridges.

Daisy. What do you mean? [She suddenly guesses the truth and gives a cry.] Oh!

Amah. [Hurriedly putting her hand over Daisy’s mouth.] Sh, you no make noise. [Holding out the revolver.] Lee Tai say, more better you do it.

Daisy. Take it away. No, no, I won’t, I won’t.

Amah. Sh, sh. I do it. I sabe.

[She takes the cartridges out of the revolver and hides them about her. Daisy looks at her with horror.

Daisy. It’s not for to-night?

Amah. I no sabe.

Daisy. I won’t have it. Do you hear? Oh, I shall go mad!

Amah. Then Harry shut you up. Hi, hi. All same Chung-king.

[She puts the revolver back into the drawer and shuts it just as Harry and Harold Knox come in. They wear dinner jackets.

Knox. Hulloa, there’s the little ray of sunshine. I missed your bonny face before dinner.

Amah. You velly funny man.

Knox. No wonder I dote upon you, dearie. You’re the only attractive woman I’ve ever been able to persuade that I was a humourist.

Harry. [Catching sight of the Amah’s water-pipe.] I told you I wouldn’t have your disgusting pipe in here, amah.

Amah. Belong velly nice pipe.

Harry. I swore I’d throw the damned thing out myself if I found it lying about.

Amah. [Snatching it away.] You no touch my pipe. You velly bad man. Velly bad temper. You no Christian.

Harry. A fat lot you know about Christianity.

Amah. I know plentything about Christianity. My father velly poor man. He say, you go and be Christian. I go Catholic mission and they baptize me. English Church missionary, he come along and say, Catholic mission no good, you go to hell, I baptize you. All right I say, you baptize me. By and by Baptist missionary come along and say, English Church mission no good, you go to hell, I baptize you. All right, I say, you baptize me. By and by Presbyterian missionary come along and say, Baptist mission no good, you go to hell, I baptize you. All right, I say, you baptize me. [To Knox.] You know Seventh Day Adventists?

Knox. I’ve heard of them.

Amah. By and by Seventh Day Adventist he come along and say, Presbyterian mission no good.

Knox. You go to hell.

Amah. How fashion you sabe what he said?

Knox. I guessed it.

Amah. You go to hell, he say. I baptize you. I been baptized one, two, three, four, five times. I velly Christian woman.

Harry. [Smiling.] I apologize.

Amah. They all say to poor Chinese, love one another. I no think missionaries love one another velly much. Hi, hi.

Knox. [Taking out his watch.] D’you mind if I look at the time? I don’t want to get to the station late.

Harry. Of course not. I say, won’t you have a cigar? [He goes to his desk.] I have to keep them locked up. I think the boys find them very much to their taste. [He puts the key into the lock.] Hulloa, the drawer’s open. I could have sworn I locked it. [He takes out a box of cigars and hands it to Knox.]

Knox. [Helping himself.] Thanks very much.

Daisy. You know, you mustn’t let me keep you if you want to be off.

Knox. I’ve got two or three minutes.

Harry. Oh, Daisy, before Harold goes I wish you’d show him that Manchu dress I bought you.

Daisy. I’ll go and fetch it. [To the Amah.] Is it hanging up in the cupboard?

Amah. No, I have puttee in paper. I velly careful woman.

[They both go out.

Knox. I say, old man, I hope you don’t think I’m an awful swine to rush off like this the moment I’ve swallowed my dinner.

Harry. Rather not. As a matter of fact it’s not exactly inconvenient, because I’m expecting George. I want him to have a heart to heart talk with Daisy.

Knox. Oh.

Harry. She’s grousing rather about going to Chung-king and I want him to tell her it’s a very decent place. He was vice-consul up there once. He’s dining at the Carmichael’s, but he said he’d come along here as soon as he could get away.

Knox. Then it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

[Daisy comes in with the dress.

Daisy. Here it is.

Knox. By George, isn’t it stunning? I must try to get one for my sister. She’d simply go off her head if she saw that.

Daisy. Harry spoils me, doesn’t he?

Knox. Harry’s a very lucky young fellow to have you to spoil.

Daisy. [Smiling.] Go away or you’ll never arrive in time.

Knox. I’m off. Goodby and thanks very much. Dinner was top-hole.

Daisy. Goodby.

[He goes out. Harry accompanies him into the courtyard and for a moment is lost to view. The gaiety on Daisy’s face vanishes and a look of anxiety takes its place.

Daisy. [Calling hurriedly.] Amah, amah.

Amah. [Coming in.] What thing?

Daisy. What have you done? Have you...? [She stops, unable to complete the agonised question.]

Amah. What you talk about? I done nothing. I only have joke with you. Hi, hi.

Daisy. Will you swear that’s true?

Amah. Never tell a lie. Velly good Christian.

[Daisy looks at her searchingly. She does not know whether to believe or not. Harry returns.

Harry. I say, Daisy, I wish you’d put on the dress. I’d love to see how you look in it.

Daisy. [With a smile.] Shall I?

Harry. Amah will help you. It’ll suit you right down to the ground.

Daisy. Wait a minute. Bring the dress along, amah.

Amah. All right.

[Daisy goes out, followed by the Amah with the Manchu dress. Harry goes to his desk and opens the drawer. He examines the lock and looks at the keyhole.

Harry. [To himself.] I wonder if that old devil’s got a key.

[He shuts the drawer, but does not lock it. He strolls back to the middle of the room.

Daisy. [In the adjoining room.] Are you getting impatient?

Harry. Not a bit.

Daisy. I’m just ready.

Harry. I’m holding my breath. [Daisy comes in. She is in full Manchu dress. She is strangely changed. There is nothing European about her any more. She is mysterious and enigmatical.] Daisy! [She gives him a little smile but does not answer. She stands quite still for him to look at her.] By George, how Chinese you look!

Daisy. Don’t you like it?

Harry. I don’t know. You’ve just knocked me off my feet. Like it? You’re wonderful. In my wildest dreams I never saw you like that. You’ve brought all the East into the room with you. My head reels as though I were drunk.

Daisy. It’s strange that I feel as if these things were made for me. They make me feel so different.

Harry. I thought that no one in the world was more normal than I. I’m ashamed of myself. You’re almost a stranger to me and by God, I feel as though the marrow of my bones were melting. I hear the East a-calling. I have such a pain in my heart. Oh, my pretty, my precious, I love you.

[He falls down on his knees before her and clasps both his arms round her.

Daisy. [In a low voice, hardly her own.] Why, Harry, what are you talking about?

[She caresses his hair with her long, delicate Chinese hand.

Harry. I’m such a fool. My heart is full of wonderful thoughts and I can only say that — that I worship the very ground you walk on.

Daisy. Don’t kneel, Harry; that isn’t the way a woman wants to be loved.

[She raises him to his feet and as he rises he takes her in his arms.

Harry. [Passionately.] I’d do anything in the world for you.

Daisy. You could make me so happy if you chose.

Harry. I do choose.

Daisy. Won’t you give up this idea of leaving Peking?

Harry. But, my darling, it’s for your happiness I’m doing it.

Daisy. Don’t you think that everyone is the best judge of his own happiness?

Harry. Not always.

Daisy. [Disengaging herself from his arms.] Ah, that’s the English way. You want to make people happy in your way and not in theirs. You’ll never be satisfied till the Chinese wear Norfolk jackets and eat roast beef and plum pudding.

Harry. Oh, my dear, don’t let’s argue now.

Daisy. You say you’ll give me everything in the world and you won’t give me the one thing I want. What’s the good of offering me the moon if I have a nail in my shoe and you won’t take it out?

Harry. Well, you can smile, so it’s not very serious, is it?

Daisy. [Putting her arms round his neck.] Oh, Harry, I’ll love you so much if you’ll only do what I ask. You don’t know me yet. Oh, Harry!

Harry. My darling, I love you with all my heart and soul, but when I’ve once made up my mind nothing on earth is going to make me change it. We can only be happy and natural if we go. You must submit to my judgment.

Daisy. How can you be so obstinate?

Harry. My dear, look at yourself in the glass now.

[She looks down on her Manchu dress. She understands what he means. She is a Chinese woman.

Daisy. [With a change of tone.] Amah, bring me a tea-gown.

[She begins to undo the long Manchu coat. The Amah comes in with a tea-gown.

Harry. [Dryly.] It’s very convenient that you should always be within earshot when you’re wanted, amah.

Amah. I velly good amah. Velly Christian woman.

[Daisy slips off the Manchu clothes and is helped by the Amah into the tea-gown. She wraps it round her. She is once more a white woman.

Daisy. [Pointing to the Manchu dress.] Take those things away. [To Harry.] Would you like to have a game of chess?

Harry. Very much. I’ll get the men.

[Daisy goes to the gramophone and turns on a Chinese tune. It is strange and exotic. Its monotony exacerbates the nerves. Harry gets the chessboard and sets up the pieces. They sit down opposite one another. The Amah has disappeared with the discarded dress.

Harry. Will you take white?

Daisy. If you like. [She moves a piece.]

Harry. I hate your queen opening. It always flummoxes me. I don’t know where you learned to play so well. I never have a chance against you.

Daisy. I was taught by a Chinaman. It’s a game they take to naturally.

[They make two or three moves without a word. Suddenly, breaking across the silence, stridently, there is a shriek outside in the street. Daisy gives a little gasp.

Harry. Hulloa, what’s that?

Daisy. Oh, it’s nothing. It’s only some Chinese quarrelling.

[Two or three shouts are heard and then an agonised cry of “Help, help.” Harry springs to his feet.

Harry. By God, that’s English.

[He is just going to rush out when Daisy seizes his arm.]

Daisy. What are you going to do? No, no, don’t leave me, Harry.

[She clings to him. He pushes her away violently.

Harry. Shut up. Don’t be a fool.

[He runs to the drawer of his desk. The cry is repeated: “For God’s sake, help, help, oh!”

Harry. My God, they’re killing someone. It can’t be ... [He remembers that George is coming that evening.]

Daisy. [Throwing herself on him.] No, Harry, don’t go, don’t go, I won’t let you.

Harry. Get out of my way.

[He pushes her violently aside and runs out. Daisy sinks to the floor and buries her face in her hands.

Daisy. Oh, my God!

[The Amah has been waiting just outside one of the doors, in the courtyard, and now she slips in.

Amah. Harry velly blave man. He hear white man being murdered. He run and help. Hi, hi.

Daisy. Oh, I can’t. Harry, Harry.

[She springs to her feet and runs towards the courtyard, with some instinctive idea of going to her husband’s help. The Amah stops her.

Amah. What side you go?

Daisy. I can’t stand here and let Harry be murdered.

Amah. You stop here.

Daisy. Let me go. For God’s sake let me go. Wu, Wu.

[The Amah puts her hand over Daisy’s mouth.

Amah. You be quiet. You wanchee go prison?

Daisy. [Snatching away her hand.] I’ll give you anything in the world if you’ll only let me go.

Amah. You silly little fool, Daisy.

[Daisy struggles to release herself, but she is helpless in the Amah’s grasp.

Daisy. [In an agony.] It’ll be too late.

Amah. Too late now. You no can help him.

[She releases Daisy. Daisy staggers forward and covers her face with her hands.

Daisy. Oh, what have I done?

Amah. [With a snigger.] You no done nothing, you know nothing.

Daisy. [Violently.] Curse you! It’s you, you, you!

Amah. I velly wicked woman. Curse me. Do me no harm.

Daisy. I told you I wouldn’t have anything done to Harry.

Amah. You say no with your lips but in your belly you say yes.

Daisy. No, no, no!

Amah. You just big damned fool, Daisy. You no love Harry. Him not velly rich. Not velly big man. No good. You velly glad you finish with him.

Daisy. But not that way. He never did me any harm. He was always good to me and kind to me.

Amah. That velly good way. Velly safe way.

Daisy. You devil! I hate the sight of you.

Amah. What for you hate me? I do what you want. Your father velly clever man. He say: no break eggs, no can eat omelette.

Daisy. I wish I’d never been born.

Amah. [Impatiently.] What for you tell me lies? You want Harry dead. Well, I kill him for you. [With a sudden gust of anger.] You no curse me or I beat you. You velly bad girl.

Daisy. [Giving way.] Oh, I feel so awfully faint!

Amah. [Tenderly, as though Daisy were still a child.] You sit down. You take smelly salts. [She helps Daisy into a chair and holds smelling salts to her nostrils.] You feel better in a minute. Amah love her little Daisy flower. Harry him die and Daisy velly sorry. She cry and cry and cry. George velly sorry for Daisy. By and by Daisy no cry any more. She say, more better Harry dead. Good old amah, she do everything for little Daisy.

[Daisy has been looking at her with terrified eyes.

Daisy. What a brute I am! I’d give anything in the world to have Harry back, and yet in the bottom of my heart there’s a feeling — if I were free there’d be nothing to stand between George and me.

Amah. I think George he marry you maybe.

Daisy. Oh, not now! It’ll bring me bad joss.

Amah. You no wanchee fear, my little flower. You sit still or you feel bad again.

Daisy. [Jumping up.] How can I sit still? The suspense is awful. Oh, my God, what’s happened?

Amah. [With a cunning smile.] I tell you what’s happened. Harry run outside and he see two, three men makee fighting. They a little way off. One man cry, “Help, help!” Harry give shout and run. He fall down and him not get up again.

Daisy. He’s as strong as a horse. With his bare hands he’s a match for ten Chinamen.

Amah. Lee Tai velly clever man. He no take risks. I think all finish now.

Daisy. Then for God’s sake let me go.

Amah. More better you stay here, Daisy. Perhaps you get into trouble if you go out. They ask you why you go out, — why you think something happen to your husband.

Daisy. I can’t let him lie there.

Amah. He no lie velly long. By and by night watchman come here, and he say white man in the street — him dead. I think his throat cut.

Daisy. Oh, how horrible! Harry, Harry!

[She buries her face in her hands.

Amah. I light joss-stick. Make everything come all right.

[She goes over to the household image and lights a joss-stick in front of it. She bows before it and going on her knees knocks her head on the ground.

Daisy. How long is it going on? How long have I got to wait? Oh, what have I done? The silence is awful. [There is a silence. Suddenly Daisy breaks out into a shriek.] No, no, no! I won’t have it. I can’t bear it. Oh, God help me! [In the distance of the next courtyard is heard the chanting of the monks at the evening service. The Amah, having finished her devotions, stands at the doorway looking out steadily. Daisy stares straight in front of her. Suddenly there is a loud booming of a gong. Daisy starts up.] What’s that?

Amah. Be quiet, Daisy. Be careful.

[The door of the courtyard is flung open. Harry comes in, through the courtyard, into the room, pushing before him a coolie whom he holds by the wrists and by the scruff of the neck.

Daisy. Harry!

Harry. I’ve got one of the blighters. [Shouting.] Here, bring me a rope.

Daisy. What’s happened?

Harry. Wait a minute. Thank God, I got there when I did. [Wu brings a rope and Harry ties the man’s wrists behind his back.] Keep quiet, you devil, or I’ll break your ruddy neck. [He slips the rope through the great iron ring of one of the doors and ties it so that the man cannot get away.] He’ll be all right there for the present. I’ll just go and telephone to the police station. Wu, you stand outside there. You watch him. Sabe?

Wu. I sabe.

[As Harry goes out a crowd of people surge through the great open doorway of the courtyard. They are monks of the temple, attracted to the street by the quick rumour of accident, coolies, and the night watchman with his rattle. Some of them bear Chinese lanterns, some hurricane lamps. The crowd separates out as they approach the room and then it is seen that three men are bearing what seems to be the body of a man.

Daisy. What’s that?

Amah. I think belong foreign man. [The men bring in the body and lay it on the sofa. The head and part of the chest are covered with a piece of blue cotton. Daisy and the Amah look at it with dismay. They dare not approach. The Abbot drives the crowd out of the room and shuts the doors, only leaving that side of one open at which the prisoner is attached. The Amah turns on the god in the niche.] You say can do. What for you make mistake?

[She seizes a fan which is on the table under her hand and with angry violence hits the image on the face two or three times. Daisy has been staring at the body. She goes up to it softly and lifts the cloth slightly, she gives a start, and with a quick gesture snatches it away. She sees George Conway.

Daisy. George. [She opens her mouth to shriek.]

Amah. Sh, take care. Harry hear.

Daisy. What have you done?

Amah. I do nothing. Buddha, he makee mistake.

Daisy. You fiend!

Amah. How do I know, Daisy? I no can tell George coming here to-night. [The words come gurgling out, for Daisy has sprung upon her and seized her by the throat.] Oh, let me go.

Daisy. You fiend.

[Harry comes in. He is astounded at what he sees.

Harry. Daisy, Daisy. What in God’s name are you doing?

[Restrained by his voice, Daisy releases her hold of the Amah, but violently, pushing her so that she falls to the ground. She lies there, putting her hand to her throat. Daisy turns to HARRY.

Daisy. It’s George.

Harry. [Going up to the sofa and putting his hand on George’s heart.] Confound it, I know it’s George.

Daisy. Is he dead?

Harry. No, he’s only had a bang on the head. He’s stunned. I’ve sent for the doctor. Luckily he was dining at the Carmichaels’ and I sent George’s rickshaw to bring him along as quick as he could come.

Daisy. Supposing he’s gone?

Harry. He won’t have gone. They were going to play poker. By God, what’s this? [He takes away his hand and sees blood upon it.] He’s been wounded. He’s bleeding.

[Daisy goes up to the body and kneeling down, feels the pulse.

Daisy. Are you sure he’s alive?

Harry. Yes, his heart’s beating all right. I wish the doctor would make haste. I don’t know what one ought to do.

Daisy. How do you know he’s at the Carmichaels’?

Harry. George told me yesterday he was going to be there. George said he did not want to play poker and he’d come along here after dinner.

Daisy. [Springing to her feet.] Did you know George was coming?

Harry. Of course I did. When I heard someone shouting in English the first thing I thought of was George.

[Daisy bursts into a scream of hysterical laughter. The Amah suddenly looks up and becomes attentive.

Harry. Daisy, what’s the matter?

Amah. [Sliding to her feet and going up to Daisy, trying to stop her.] Maskee. She only laughy laughy. You no trouble.

Harry. Get some water or something.

Amah. [Frightened.] Now, my pletty, my pletty.

Daisy. [Recovering herself, violently.] Let me be.

Harry. By George, I believe he’s coming to. Bring the water here.

[Daisy takes the glass and leaning over the sofa, moistens George’s lips. He slowly opens his eyes.

George. Funny stuff. What is it?

Harry. [With a chuckle that is half a sob.] Don’t be a fool. Oh, George, you have given me a nasty turn.

George. There’s something the matter with the water.

Daisy. [Looking at it quickly.] What?

George. Damn it all, there’s no brandy in it.

Daisy. If you make a joke I shall cry.

[He tries to move, but suddenly gives a groan.

George. Oh Lord. I’ve got such a pain in my side.

Harry. Keep quiet. The doctor will be here in a minute.

George. What is it?

Harry. I don’t know. There’s a lot of blood.

George. I hope I haven’t made a mess on your nice new sofa.

Harry. Damn the sofa. It’s lucky I heard you shout.

George. I never shouted.

Harry. Oh, nonsense, I heard you. I thought it was you at once.

George. I heard a cry for help too. I was just coming along. I nipped out of my rickshaw and sprinted like hell. I saw some fellows struggling. I think someone hit me on the head. I don’t remember much.

Harry. Who did cry for help?

George. [After a pause.] Nobody.

Harry. But I heard it. Daisy heard it too. It sounded like someone being murdered. [As George gives a little chuckle.] What’s the joke?

George. Someone’s got his knife into you, old man, and the silly ass stuck it into me instead.

[The Amah pricks up her ears.

Daisy. I’m sure you oughtn’t to talk so much.

George. It’s a very old Chinese trick. They just got the wrong man, that’s all.

Harry. By George, that explains why I tripped.

George. Did you trip? A piece of string across the street.

Harry. I wasn’t expecting it. I went down like a ninepin. I was up again in a flash and just threw myself at the blighters. You should have seen ’em scatter. Luckily I got one of them.

George. Good. Where is he?

Harry. He’s here. I’ve tied him up pretty tight.

George. Well, we shall find out who’s at the bottom of this. The methods of the Chinese police may be uncivilized, but they are ... Oh, Lord, I do feel rotten.

Harry. Oh, George.

[Daisy gives Harry the glass and he helps George to drink.

George. That’s better.

Harry. We’d better get you to bed, old man.

George. All right.

Harry. Wu and I will carry you. Wu, come along here.

[The boy approaches. The Amah realizes that for a moment the prisoner is to be left unguarded. There is a table knife on one of the occasional tables with which Daisy has been cutting a book. The Amah’s hand closes over it.

George. Oh, no, that’s all right. I can walk.

[He gets up from the sofa. Harry gives him an arm. He staggers.

Harry. Wu, you fool. [Daisy springs forward.] No, let me take him, Daisy. You’re not strong enough.

George. [Gasping.] Sorry to make such an ass of myself.

[Harry and Wu, holding him one on each side, help him out of the room.

Daisy. Shall I come?

Harry. Oh, I’ll call you if you’re wanted.

[Daisy sinks into a chair, shuddering, and covers her face with her hands. The Amah seizes her opportunity. She cuts the rope which binds the prisoner. As soon as he is free he steps out into the darkness. The Amah watches for a moment and then cries out.

Amah. Help, help!

[Daisy springs up and Harry hurries in.

Harry. What’s the matter?

Amah. Coolie. Him run away.

Harry. [Looking at the place where he had been tied up.] By God!

Amah. Missy feel velly ill. No can stand blood. Feel faint. I run fetch smelly salts and when I come back him gone. Him bad man.

[Harry goes to the door and looks at the rope.

Harry. This rope’s been cut.

Amah. Perhaps he have knife. Why you no look see before you tie him.

Harry. [Looking at her sternly.] How do you think he could get at a knife with his hands tied behind his back?

Amah. I no sabe. Maybe he have friend.

Harry. Didn’t you hear anything, Daisy?

Daisy. No. I wasn’t thinking about him. Oh, Harry, George isn’t going to die, is he?

Harry. I hope not. I don’t know what sort of a wound he’s got. [The Amah, thinking attention is withdrawn from her, is slipping away.] No, you don’t. You stop here.

Amah. What thing you wantchee?

Harry. You let that man go.

Amah. You velly silly man. What for I want let him go?

Harry. [Pointing.] What’s that knife doing there? That’s one of our knives.

Amah. Missy takey knife cutty book.

Harry. When I got into the street I wanted to fire my revolver to frighten them. There wasn’t a cartridge in it. I always keep it loaded and locked up.

Amah. Revolver. I don’t know him. I never have see revolver. Never. Never.

[She makes a movement as though to go away. He seizes her wrist.

Harry. Stop.

Amah. My go chow. My belong velly hungly. You talk by and by.

Harry. If I hadn’t come in just now, Daisy would have strangled you.

Amah. Daisy velly excited. She no sabe what she do. She never hurt old amah.

Harry. Why were you angry with her, Daisy?

Daisy. [Frightened.] I was beside myself. I don’t know what I was doing.

Harry. [With sudden suspicion.] Are you trying to shield her?

Daisy. Of course not. Why on earth should I do that?

Harry. I suppose you look on it as a matter of no importance that she tried to kill me.

Daisy. Oh, Harry, how can you say anything so cruel? Why should she try and kill you?

Harry. I don’t know. How do you expect me to guess what is at the back of a Chinese brain? She’s hated me always.

Amah. You no love me velly much.

Harry. I’ve put up with her just because she was attached to you. I knew she was a liar and a thief. It was a trap and I escaped by a miracle. Only, George has got to suffer for it.

Daisy. Harry, you’re nervous and excited.

Harry. What are you defending her for?

Daisy. I’m not defending her.

Harry. One would almost think she had some hold on you. I’ve never seen anyone let an amah behave as you let her behave.

Daisy. She’s been with me since I was a child. She — she can’t get it into her head that I’m grown up.

Harry. Well, I’ve had about enough of her. [To the

Amah.] The police will be here in ten minutes and I shall give you in charge instead of the man you allowed to escape.

Amah. You give me policeman? I no have do wrong. What for you send me to prison?

Harry. I daresay you know what a Chinese prison is like better than I do. I don’t think it’ll be long before you find it worth while to tell the truth.

Daisy. [With increasing nervousness.] Oh, Harry, I don’t think you ought to do anything before you’ve had time to think. After all, there’s absolutely no proof.

Harry. [Looking at her with perplexity.] I don’t understand. What is the mystery?

Daisy. There is no mystery. Only I can’t bear the idea that my old amah should go to prison. She’s been almost a mother to me for so many years.

[There is a pause. Harry looks from Daisy to the Amah.

Harry. [To the Amah.] Then get out of here before the police come.

Amah. You talkee so quick. No can understand.

Harry. Yes, you can. Unless you’re out of here in ten minutes I shall give you in charge ... Go while the going’s good.

Amah. I think I go smoke pipe.

Harry. No, you don’t, you get out quick or I’ll throw you out myself.

Amah. You no throw me out and I no go to prison.

Harry. We’ll soon see about that.

[He seizes her roughly and is about to run her out into the courtyard.

Daisy. No, don’t, Harry. She’s my mother.

Harry. That!

[He is aghast. He releases the Amah. He looks at her with horror. Daisy covers her face with her hands. The Amah gives a little snigger.

Amah. Yes, Daisy, my daughter. She no wanchee tell. I think she a little ashamed of her mother.

Harry. My God!

Amah. I velly pletty girl long time ago. Daisy’s father, he call me his little lotus flower, he call me his little peach-blossom. By and by I no velly pletty girl any more and Daisy’s father he call me you old witch. Witch, that’s what he call me. Witch. He call me, you old hag. You velly bad man, I say to him. You no Christian. You go to hell, he say. All right, I say, you baptize me.

[Harry turns away, with dismay, and repulsion. The Amah takes her pipe and lights it.

END OF SCENE IV

SCENE V

The courtyard in the Andersons’ part of the temple.

At the back is the outer wall raised by two or three steps from the ground. From the top of the wall, projects a shallow roof of yellow tiles supported by wooden pillars painted red, shabby and rather weather-worn, and this roof is raised in the middle of the wall, where there is a huge wooden gateway. When this is opened the street is seen and on the other side of it a high, blank, white wall. The courtyard is paved with great flags. On each side of it are living rooms.

There is a long rattan chair; a round table and a couple of armchairs. George is lying on the long chair, looking at an illustrated paper, and the Amah is seated on the ground, smoking her water-pipe.

George. [With a smile, putting down the paper.] You’re not as chatty as usual this afternoon, amah.

Amah. Suppose I got nothing to talk about I no talk.

George. You are an example to your sex, amah. Your price is above rubies.

Amah. No likee rubies velly much. No can sell velly much money.

George. In point of fact I wasn’t thinking of giving you rubies, even reconstructed, but if I did I can’t think you’d be so indelicate as to sell them.

Amah. I no think you velly funny man.

George. I was afraid you didn’t. Would you think it funny if I sat on my hat?

Amah. Yes, I laugh then. Hi, hi.

George. The inscrutable heart of China expands to the self-same joke that convulses a duchess in London and a financier in New York.

Amah. You more better read the paper.

George. Where’s Missy?

Amah. I think she in her room. You wanchee?

George. No.

Amah. I think she come by and by.

George. [Looking at his watch.] Mr. Anderson ought to be back from the office soon. [There is a loud knocking at the door.] Hulloa, who’s that?

[A Servant comes out of the house and going to the gateway withdraws the bolt.

Amah. I think doctor come see you, maybe.

George. Oh no, he’s not coming to-day. He said he’d look in to-morrow before I started.

[The Amah gets up and looks at the doorway of which now the Servant has opened one side. Harold Knox and his sister Sylvia are seen.

Knox. May we come in?

George. Good man. Of course.

[They come towards George. Sylvia is a very pretty, simple, healthy, and attractive girl. She is dressed in a light summer frock. There is in her gait and manner something so spring-like and fresh that it is a pleasure to look at her.

Knox. I’ve brought my young sister along with me. [As George rises to his feet.] Don’t get up. You needn’t put on any frills for a chit like that.

George. Nonsense. I’m perfectly well. [Shaking hands with Sylvia.] How d’you do? My name is Conway.

Knox. I only omitted to inform her of that fact because she already knew it.

Sylvia. Strangely enough that happens to be true. But I wish you’d lie down again.

George. I’m sick of lying down. The doctor says I’m perfectly all right. I’m going home to-morrow.

Knox. [Catching sight of the Amah.] Hulloa, sweetheart, I didn’t see you. Sylvia, I want you to know the only woman I’ve ever loved.

George. [Smiling.] This is Mrs. Anderson’s amah.

Sylvia. [With a little friendly nod.] How do you do?

Amah. [All in a breath.] Velly well, thank you. How do you do? Velly well, thank you ... You Mr. Knox sister?

Sylvia. Yes.

Amah. You missionary lady?

Sylvia. No.

Amah. What for you come China then?

Sylvia. I came to see my brother.

Amah. How old are you?

Knox. Be truthful, Sylvia.

Sylvia. I’m twenty-two.

Amah. How many children you got?

Sylvia. I’m not married.

Amah. What for you no married if you twenty-two?

Sylvia. It does need an explanation, doesn’t it? The truth is that nobody’s asked me.

Knox. What a lie!

Amah. You come China catchee husband?

Sylvia. Certainly not.

Amah. You Christian?

Sylvia. Not a very good one, I’m afraid.

Amah. Who baptized you?

Sylvia. Well, you know, it’s an awfully long time ago. I forget.

Knox. She’s like me, amah, she’s a Presbyterian.

Amah. You go to hell then. Only Seventh Day Adventists no go to hell.

Sylvia. It’ll be rather crowded then, I’m afraid.

Amah. You only baptized once?

Sylvia. So far as I know.

Amah. I baptized one, two, three, four, five times. I velly Christian woman.

Knox. I say, old man, I don’t want to dash your fond hopes, but in point of fact we didn’t come here to see you.

George. Why not? Surely Miss Knox must want to see the principal sights of Peking.

Knox. The man is not a raving lunatic, Sylvia. His only delusion is that he’s a humourist ... Sylvia thought she’d like to call on Mrs. Harry.

George. I’m sure Daisy will be very glad. Amah, go and tell Missy that there’s a lady.

Amah. Can do.

[Exit.

Knox. I say, have they caught any of those blighters who tried to kill you?

George. No, not a chance. They weren’t after me, you know; they were after Harry.

Knox. Is there anyone who has a grudge against him?

George. I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem very keen on discussing the incident.

[Daisy comes in.

Knox. Here she is. I’ve brought my sister to see you, Mrs. Harry.

Daisy. [Shaking hands.] How do you do?

Sylvia. What a wonderful place you live in!

Daisy. It’s rather attractive, isn’t it? You must see the temple before you go.

Sylvia. I’d love to.

Daisy. Do sit down. [To Knox.] What do you think of my patient?

Knox. I think he’s a fraud. I never saw anyone look so robust.

Daisy. [Delighted.] He’s made a wonderful recovery.

George. Thanks to you, Daisy. You can’t think how she nursed me.

Knox. It was rather a narrow escape, wasn’t it?

Daisy. For two days we thought he might die at any minute. It was — it was rather dreadful.

George. And do you know, all that time she never left me a minute. [To Daisy.] I don’t know how I can ever thank you.

Daisy. Oh, well, Harry had his work. I didn’t think he ought to be robbed of his night’s rest for a worthless creature like you, and I hated the idea of a paid nurse looking after you.

Sylvia. You must have been worn out at the end of it.

Daisy. No, I’m as strong as a horse. And it was such a relief to me when the doctor said he was out of danger, I forgot I was tired.

Knox. I don’t know why you bothered about him. There are such a lot of fellows who want his job and they all know they could do it much better than he can.

George. Everyone’s been so extraordinarily good to me. I had no idea there was so much kindness in the world.

Daisy. [To Sylvia, very pleasantly.] Will you come and look at the temple now while they’re bringing tea?

Sylvia. Yes, I’d like to very much.

Daisy. I think you’ll enjoy your tea more if you feel you’ve done the sight.

Sylvia. It’s all so new to me. Everything interests me. I’ve fallen passionately in love with Peking.

[They wander off, talking gaily.

George. Harold, you’re a very nice boy.

Knox. That’s what the girls tell me. But I don’t know why you should.

George. I think it was rather sporting of you to bring your sister to see Daisy.

Knox. I don’t deserve any credit for that. She insisted on coming.

George. Oh?

Knox. She met Harry at the club and took rather a fancy to him. When I told her Daisy was a half-caste and people didn’t bother much about her she got right up on her hind legs. I told her she’d only just come out to China and didn’t know what she was talking about and then she gave me what she called a bit of her mind. I was obliged to remark that if that was a bit I didn’t much care about knowing the rest.

George. It sounds as though you’d had a little tiff.

Knox. She said she had no patience with the airs people gave themselves in the East. A Eurasian was just as good as anybody else. And when I happened to say I was coming here to-day to see how you were she said she’d come too.

George. It’s very kind of her. Daisy leads a dreadfully lonely life. It would mean so much to her if she knew one or two white women. If they take to one another, you won’t try to crab it, will you? I fancy Daisy wants a friend rather badly.

Knox. I shouldn’t like it very much, you know. Would you much care for your sister to be very pally with a half-caste?

George. Daisy is one in a thousand. You can’t think what she’s done for me during my illness. My mother couldn’t have taken more care of me.

Knox. They’re often very good-hearted. But as a matter of fact nothing I can say will have the least effect on Sylvia. Girls have changed a lot since the war. If she wants to do a thing and she thinks it right, she’ll do it. And if I try to interfere she’s quite capable of telling me to go to the devil.

George. She seems to be a young woman of some character.

Knox. Perhaps because she’s had rather a rough time. The fellow she was engaged to was killed in the war and she was awfully cut up. She drove an ambulance for the last two years and then she went up to Girton. After that my father thought she’d better come out here for a bit.

George. She ought to like it.

Knox. If she doesn’t put up people’s backs too much. She can’t stand anything like injustice or cruelty. If she thinks people are unkind to Daisy or sniffy about her, she’ll stick to her like a leech. However, I daresay she’ll get married.

George. [Smiling.] That’ll learn her.

Knox. Why don’t you marry her? It’s about time you settled down.

George. [With a chuckle.] You fool.

Knox. Why? You’re by way of being rather eligible, aren’t you?

George. I don’t know why you want to get rid of her. She seems a very nice sister.

Knox. Of course I love having her with me, but she does cramp my style a bit. And she ought to marry. She’d make you a first-rate wife.

George. Much too good for the likes of me.

Knox. Of course she’s a bit independent, but one has to put up with that in girls nowadays. And she’s as good as gold.

George. One can see that at a mile, my son.

Knox. I say, who was Rathbone, Daisy’s first husband, do you know?

George. [His face a blank.] Harry told me he was an American. He said he was in business in the F. M. S.

Knox. That’s what Harry told me. I met a fellow the other day who lives in Singapore who told me he’d never heard of Rathbone.

George. [Chaffing him.] Perhaps he didn’t move in the exalted circles that a friend of yours would naturally move in.

Knox. I suppose there was a Mr. Rathbone?

[There is a distant sound in the street of Chinese instruments being played.

George. Hulloa, there’s the procession coming along.

Knox. What procession?

George. It’s a Manchu wedding. The amah was talking about it this morning.

Knox. I must call Sylvia. She’d love to see it. Sylvia.

[Daisy and Sylvia come out of the house just as he calls.

Sylvia. Don’t shout, Harold.

Knox. Come along and have your education improved. A Manchu wedding is just going to pass by....

Sylvia. Oh, good, let’s go out into the street!

Daisy. You can see it just as well from here. I’ll have the doors opened. Boy, open the gate.

Knox. Yes, that’s the ticket. We shall see it better from here.

[Wu during the last few speeches has appeared with the tea, which he sets down on the table. On receiving Daisy’s order he goes to the doorway and draws the bolt. He pulls back one heavy door while Knox pulls back the other. The empty street is seen. The music grows louder. Now the procession comes, gay, brilliant, and barbaric against the white wall of the street; first men on horseback, then Buddhist monks in gray, with their shaven heads; then the band, playing wild, discordant music; after them passes a long string of retainers in red, with strange shaped hats; then come retainers bearing in open palanquins great masses of cardboard fruits and all manner of foodstuffs, silver vessels and gold; these are followed by two or three youths on horseback, gorgeously dressed, and these again by the palanquin, carved and richly painted and gilt, of the bride. Then pass more priests and another band and finally a last string of retainers in red. When the last one has disappeared a beggar shows himself at the open doorway. He is excessively thin, and he has a bush of long, bristly hair; he is clothed in pale rags, torn and patched; his legs and feet are bare. He puts out a bony hand and breaks into a long, high-pitched whine.

Knox. Oh, Lord, get out!

Daisy. Oh, no, please, Harold, give him a copper or two.

George. Daisy never lets a beggar go away without something.

Daisy. It’s not because I’m charitable. I’m afraid they’ll bring me bad luck.

Knox. [Taking a coin from his pocket.] Here you are, Clarence. Now buzz off.

[The beggar takes his dole and saunters away. Wu closes the doors.

Sylvia. [Enthusiastically.] I am glad I saw that.

Daisy. You’ll get very tired of that sort of thing before you’ve been here long. Now let’s have tea.

Sylvia. Oh, I don’t think we’ll stay, thank you very much. We have another call to make.

Daisy. How tiresome of you. Harry ought to be back in a few minutes. He’ll be disappointed not to have seen you.

Sylvia. I promised to go and see Mrs. Stopfort. Do you know her?

Daisy. I know who you mean.

Sylvia. I think people are being absolutely beastly to her. It simply makes my blood boil.

Daisy. Oh, how?

Sylvia. Well, you know that her husband’s a drunken brute who’s treated her abominably for years. At last she fell in love with a man and now her husband is going to divorce her. It’s monstrous that he should be able to.

Daisy. Are the ladies of Peking giving her the cold shoulder?

Knox. The cold shoulder hardly describes it. The frozen silverside.

George. I think she’s well rid of Reggie Stopfort at any price, but I’m sorry the other party is André Leroux.

Sylvia. Why? She introduced me to him. I thought he was a very nice fellow.

George. Well, you see, if he’d been English or American, he would have married her as a matter of course.

Sylvia. So I should hope.

Daisy. Because she was divorced on his account, you mean?

George. Yes. But the French haven’t our feeling on that matter. I’m not quite sure if André will be willing to marry her.

Sylvia. Oh, that would be dreadful! Under those circumstances the man must marry the woman. He simply must.

George. Of course.

Knox. Come along, Sylvia. We won’t discuss women’s rights now.

Sylvia. [Giving Daisy her hand very cordially.] And if there’s anything I hate it’s people who say they’re going and then don’t go. Good-bye, Mrs. Anderson.

Daisy. It’s been very nice to see you.

Sylvia. I do hope you’ll come and see me soon. I’m so very much alone you’d be doing me a charity if you’d look me up. We might do the curio shops together.

Daisy. That would be great fun.

Sylvia. Good-bye, Mr. Conway. I’m glad to see you so well.

George. Thank you very much, good-bye.

[Knox and Sylvia go out. Daisy has walked with them towards the doorway and now returns to George.

George. What a very nice girl, Daisy.

Daisy. She seems to make a specialty of speckled peaches. First me and then Mrs. Stopfort.

George. I was hoping you’d like her.

Daisy. It’s hardly probable. She’s everything that I’m not. She has everything that I haven’t. No, I don’t like her. But I’d give anything in the world to be her.

George. [Smiling.] I don’t think you need envy her.

Daisy. Don’t you think she’s pretty?

George. Yes, very. But you’re so much more than pretty. I expect you have more brains in your little finger than she has in her whole body.

Daisy. [Gravely.] She has something that I haven’t got, George, and I’d give my soul to have.

George. [Embarrassed.] I don’t know what you mean. [Changing the conversation abruptly.] Daisy, now that I’m going away....

Daisy. [Interrupting.] Are you really going to-morrow?

George. [Breezily.] I’m quite well. I’m ashamed to have stayed so long.

Daisy. I don’t look forward very much to the long, empty days when you’re no longer here.

George. [Seriously.] I must go, Daisy. I really must.

Daisy. [After a moment’s pause.] What were you going to say to me? Don’t thank me for anything I may have done. It’s given me a happiness I never knew before.

George. Except for you I should have died. And when I think of the past I am ashamed.

Daisy. What does the past matter? The past is dead and gone.

George. And I’m ashamed when I think how patient you were when I was irritable, how kind and thoughtful. I hardly knew I wanted a thing before you gave it to me. Sometimes when I felt I couldn’t breathe, the tenderness of your hand on my forehead — oh, it was like a dip in a highland stream on a summer day. I think I never knew that there was in you the most precious thing that anyone can have, goodness. Oh, Daisy, it makes me feel so humble.

Daisy. Goodness? [With the shadow of a laugh.] Oh, George.

George. It’s because Harry is better and simpler than I am that he was able to see it in you. He felt it in you always and he was right.

[The Amah comes in.

Daisy. [Sharply.] What d’you want?

[The Amah crosses from one to the other and a thin smile crosses her eyes.

Amah. Master telephone, Daisy.

Daisy. Why didn’t you take the message?

[She is about to go into the house.

Amah. He have go now. He say very much hurry. I say no can findee you. I think you go out.

Daisy. Why did you say that?

Amah. I think more better, maybe.

George. [Smiling.] That’s right, amah. Never tell the truth when a lie will do as well.

Daisy. Well, what was the message?

Amah. Master say he must to go Tientsin. Very important business. No come back to-night. Come back first train to-morrow.

Daisy. Very well. Tell the boy that we shall be only two to dinner.

Amah. I go talkee he.

[Exit.

George. [Urbanely.] I say, I don’t want to be an awful trouble to you. I think I’d better go back to my own place to-night.

Daisy. [Looking at him.] Why should you do that?

George. I was going to-morrow anyway.

Daisy. Do you think my reputation is such a sensitive flower?

George. [Lightly.] Of course not. But people aren’t very charitable. It seems rather funny I should stay here when Harry’s away.

Daisy. What do you suppose I care if people gossip?

George. I care for you.

Daisy. [With a smile, almost archly.] It’s not very flattering to me that you should insist on going the moment Harry does. Do I bore you so much as all that?

George. [With a chuckle.] How can you talk such nonsense? I haven’t wanted to get well too quickly. I’ve so enjoyed sitting quietly here while you read or sewed. I’ve got so much in the habit of seeing you about me that if I don’t go at once I shall never be able to bring myself to go at all.

Daisy. Since that horrible accident I’ve been rather nervous at the thought of sleeping here by myself. I’m terrified at the thought of being left alone to-night.

George. Come in with me, then. The Knoxes will be delighted to put you up for the night.

Daisy. [With a sudden change of manner.] I don’t want you to go, George. I want you to stay.

George. [As serious as she is.] Daisy, don’t be too hard on me. You don’t know. You don’t know. [With an effort he regains his self-control and returns to his easy, chaffing tone.] Don’t forget it’s not only a wound in the lung that I’ve been suffering from. While you and the doctor between you have been patching that up, I’ve been busy sticking together the pieces of a broken heart. It’s nicely set now, no one could tell that there’d ever been anything wrong with it, but I don’t think it would be very wise to give it a sudden jolt or jerk.

Daisy. [In a low quivering voice.] Why do you say things like that? What is the good of making pretences?

George. [Determined to keep the note of lightness.] It was very silly of me to bother you with my little troubles. It was very hot. I was overworked and nervous at the time or I shouldn’t have made so much of it. I’m sure that you’ll be as pleased as I am to know that I’m making a very good recovery, thank you.

Daisy. [As though asking a casual question.] You don’t care for me any more?

George. I have the greatest affection for you. I admire you and of course I’m grateful to you. But if I thought I was in love with you I was mistaken.

Daisy. Do you know why I wouldn’t have a professional nurse and when you were unconscious for two days refused to leave you for a minute? Do you know why, afterwards, at night when you grew delirious I wouldn’t let Harry watch you? I said it would interfere with his work. I dared not leave you for a single moment. And it was your secret and mine. I wouldn’t let anybody in the world share it with me. Do you know what you said in your delirium?

George. [Disturbed.] I expect I talked an awful lot of rot. People always do, I believe.

Daisy. [Passionately.] You used to call me, “Daisy, Daisy,” as though your heart was breaking. And when I leaned over you and said: “I’m here,” you would take my face in your hands so that I could hardly believe you weren’t conscious. And you said: “I love you.”

George. Oh, God!

Daisy. And sometimes I didn’t know how to calm you. You were frantic because you thought they were taking me away from you. “I can’t bear it,” you said, “I shall die.” I had to put my hands over your mouth so that no one should hear.

George. I didn’t know what I was saying. I wasn’t myself. It was just the madness of the fever.

Daisy. And sometimes you were so exquisitely tender. Your voice was soft and caressing. And you called me by sweet names so that the tears ran down my cheeks. You thought you held me in your arms and you pressed me to your heart. You were happy then; you were so happy that I was afraid you’d die of it. I know what love is and you love me.

George. For God’s sake, stop. Why do you torture me?

Daisy. And then you were madly jealous. You hated Harry. I think you could have killed him.

George. That’s not true. That’s infamous. Never. Never.

Daisy. Oh, you can say that with your lips! Sometimes you thought he put his arms round me and kissed me and you sobbed aloud. Oh, it was so painful. I forgot that you were unconscious and I took your hands and said: “He’s not here. You and I are alone, alone, alone.” And sometimes I think you understood. You fell back. And a look of peace came on your face as if you were in heaven and you said — do you know what you said? You said: “Beloved, beloved, beloved.”

[Her voice breaks and the tears course down her cheeks. George is shattered by what she has told him.

George. I suppose there are few of us that wouldn’t turn away from ourselves in horror if the innermost thoughts of our heart, the thoughts we’re only conscious of to hate, were laid bare. But that shameful thing that showed itself in me isn’t me. I disown it....

Daisy. I thought you had more courage. I thought you had more sense. Do you call that you, a few conventional prejudices? The real you is the love that consumes you more hotly than ever the fever did. The only you is the you that loves me. The rest is only frills. It’s a domino that you put on at a masked ball.

George. You don’t know what you say. Frills? It’s honour, and duty, and decency. It’s everything that makes it possible for me to cling to the shadow of my self-respect.

Daisy. Oh, all that means nothing. You fool. You might as well try with your bare hands to stop the flow of the Yangtze.

George. If I perish I perish. Oh, of course I love you. All night I’m tortured with love and tortured with jealousy, but the day does come at last and then I can get hold of myself again. My love is some horrible thing gnawing at my heart-strings. I hate it and despise it. But I can fight it, fight it all the time. Oh, I’ve been here too long. I ought to have got back to work long ago. Work is my only chance. Daisy, I beseech you to let me go.

Daisy. How can I let you go? I love you.

George. [Thunderstruck.] You? [Impatiently, with a shrug of the shoulders.] Oh, you’re talking nonsense.

Daisy. Why do you suppose I’ve said all these things? Do you think a woman cares twopence for a man’s love when she doesn’t love him?

George. Oh, it’s impossible. You don’t know what you’re saying. I know how good and kind you are. You’ve been touched by my love. You mistake pity for love.

Daisy. I’m not good and I’m not kind. There’s no room in my soul for pity. In my soul there’s only a raging hunger. If I know what you feel it’s because I feel it too. I love you, I love you, I love you.

George. And Harry?

Daisy. What do I care about Harry? I hate him because he’s stood between me and you.

George. He is your husband. He is my friend.

Daisy. He doesn’t exist. I’ve loved you always from the first day I saw you. The others were nothing to me, Lee Tai and Harry and the rest. I’ve loved you always. I’ve never loved anyone but you. All these years I’ve kept the letters you wrote to me. I’ve read them till I know every word by heart. They’re all blurred and smudged with the tears I’ve wept over them. They were all I had. Do you think I’m going to let you go now? All my pain, all my anguish, are nothing any more. I love you and you love me.

George. Oh, don’t, don’t!

Daisy. You can’t leave me now. If you leave me I shall kill myself.

George. I must go away. I must never see you again. Whatever happens we must never meet.

Daisy. [Exasperated and impatient.] That’s impossible. What will you say to Harry?

George. If need be I’ll tell him the truth.

Daisy. What difference will that make? Will you love me any the less? Yes, tell him. Tell him that I love you and you only and that I belong to you and to you only.

George. Oh, Daisy, for God’s sake try and control yourself. We must do our duty, we must, we must.

Daisy. I know no duty. I only know love. There’s no room in my soul for anything else. You say that love is like a wild beast gnawing at your entrails. My love is a liberator. It’s freed me from a hateful past. It’s freed me from Harry. There’s nothing in the world now but you and me and the love that joins us. I want you, I want you.

George. Don’t, don’t! Oh, this is madness! There’s only one thing to be done. God, give me strength. Daisy, you know I love you. I love you with all my heart and soul. But it’s good-bye. I’ll never see you again. Never. Never. So help me God.

Daisy. How can you be so cruel? You’re heartless. I’ve wanted you all these years. I’ve hungered for you. You don’t know what my humiliation has been. Pity me because I loved you. If you leave me now I shall die. You open the doors of heaven to me and then you slam them in my face. Haven’t you made me unhappy enough? You’d have done better to kill me ten years ago. You trampled me in the mud and then you left me. Oh, what shall I do? [She sinks down to the ground, weeping as though her heart would break. George looks at her for a minute, his face distorted with agony; he clenches his hands in the violence of his effort to control himself. He takes his hat and walks slowly towards the gate. He withdraws the bolt that holds it. When Daisy hears the sound of this she starts to her feet and staggers towards him.] George. No, no. Not yet.

[She staggers and with a cry falls headlong. She has fainted.

George. [Rushing towards her.] Daisy. Daisy. [He kneels down and takes her head in his hands. He is fearfully agitated.] Oh, my darling, what is it? Oh, my God! Daisy! Speak to me. [Calling.] Amah, amah! [Daisy slowly opens her eyes.] Oh, my beloved! I thought you were dead.

Daisy. Lift me up.

George. You can’t stand.

[He raises her to her feet so that when she is erect she is in his arms. She puts her arms round his neck.

Daisy. Don’t leave me.

George. My precious. My beloved.

[She turns her face to him, offering her lips, and he bends his head and kisses her. She closes her eyes in ecstasy.

Daisy. Take me in. I feel so ill.

George. I’ll carry you.

[He lifts her up and carries her into the house. From the opposite side the Amah appears. She goes to the gateway and slips the bolt forward into position. Then she comes to the tea-table, sits down and takes a scone.

Amah. Hi, hi.

[She bites the scone and chews placidly. On her face is a smirk of irony.

END OF SCENE V

SCENE VI

A small room in a Chinese house in Peking.

The walls are whitewashed, but the whitewash is not a little stained. Three or four scrolls hang on them, written over in large characters with inscriptions. On the floor is matting. The only furniture consists of a table, with a couple of chairs, a wooden pallet covered with matting, with cushions at one end of it, and a Korean chest heavily ornamented with brass. At the back are two windows, elaborately latticed and covered with rice paper, and a lightly carved door.

Daisy is seated in one of the chairs. She has taken her pocket mirror out of her bag and is looking at herself. She is gay and happy. The Amah comes in. She carries a long-necked vase in which are a couple of carnations.

Amah. I bring you flowers make room look pletty.

Daisy. Oh, you nice old thing! Put them on the table.

Amah. You look at yourself in looking-glass?

Daisy. I’m looking young. It suits me to be happy.

Amah. You very pletty girl. I very pletty girl long time ago. You look alla same me some day.

Daisy. [Amused.] Heaven forbid.

Amah. You velly good temper to-day, Daisy. You glad because George come.

Daisy. I didn’t see him yesterday.

Amah. He keep you waiting.

Daisy. The wretch. He always keeps me waiting. But what do I care as long as he comes? We shall have three hours. Perhaps he’ll dine here. If he says he can, give him what he likes to eat. No one can make such delicious things as you can if you want to.

Amah. You try flatter me.

Daisy. I don’t. You know very well you’re the best cook in China.

Amah. [Tickled.] Oh, Daisy! I know you more better than you think.

Daisy. You’re a wicked old woman. [She gives her a kiss on both cheeks.] What are they making such a row about next door?

Amah. Coolie, he got killed this morning. He have two small children. Their mother, she die long time ago.

Daisy. How dreadful! Poor little things.

Amah. You like see them. They here.

[She goes to the door and beckons. A little, old, shabby Chinaman comes in with two tiny children, a boy and a girl, one holding on to each hand. They are very solemn and shy and silent.

Daisy. Oh, what lambs!

Amah. They no got money. This old man he say he take them and he bring them up. But he only coolie. He no got much money himself.

Daisy. Is he related to them?

Amah. No, him just velly good man. He no can do velly much. He just do what he can. The neighbours, they help little.

Daisy. But I’ll help too. Have you got any money on you?

Amah. I got two, three dollars.

Daisy. What’s the good of that? Let him have this.

[She has a chain of gold beads round her neck. She takes it off and puts it in the old man’s hands.

Amah. That chain very ispensive, Daisy.

Daisy. What do I care? Let him sell it for what it’ll fetch. It’ll bring me luck. [To the old man.] You sabe?

[He nods, smiling.

Amah. I think he understand all right.

Daisy. [Looking at the children.] Aren’t they sweet? And so solemn. [To the Amah.] You go chop-chop to the toy shop opposite and buy them some toys.

Amah. Can do.

[She goes out. Daisy takes the children and sets them up on the table.

Daisy. [Charmingly.] Now you come and talk to me. Sit very still now or you’ll fall off. [To the little boy.] I wonder how old you are. [To the old man.] Wu? Liu?

Old Man. Liu.

Daisy. [To the little boy.] Six years old. Good gracious, you’re quite a man. If I had a little boy he’d be older than you now. If I had a little boy I’d dress him in such smart things. And I’d bath him myself. I wouldn’t let any horrid old amah bath him. And I wouldn’t stuff him up with sweets like the Chinese do; I’d give him one piece of chocolate when he was a good boy. Gracious me, I’ve got some chocolates here. Wait there. Sit quite still. [She goes over to the shelf on which is a bag of chocolates.] There’s one for you and one for you and (to the old man) one for you. And here’s one for me.

[The children and the Chinaman eat the chocolates solemnly. The Amah returns with a doll and a child’s Peking cart.

Amah. Have catchee toys.

Daisy. Look what kind old amah has brought you. [She lifts the children off the table and gives the doll to the little girl and the cart to the boy.] Here’s a beautiful doll for you and here’s a real cart for you. [She sits down on the floor.] Look, the wheels go round and everything.

Amah. Have got more presents.

[She takes out of her sleeve little bladders with mouthpiece attached so that they can be blown up.

Daisy. What on earth is this? Oh, I love them! We must all have one. [She distributes them and they all blow them up. There it the sound of scratching at the door.] Who’s that, I wonder?

Amah. If you say come in, perhaps you see.

Daisy. Open the door, you old silly. [She begins to blow up the balloon again. The Amah goes to the door and opens it. Lee Tai steps in.] Lee Tai. Send these away. [The Amah makes a sign to the old Chinaman, he gives each child a hand and with their presents they go out. The Amah slips out after them.] I thought you were dead.

Lee Tai. I’m very much alive, thank you.

Daisy. Ah, well, we’ll hope for the best.

Lee Tai. I trust you’re not displeased to see me.

Daisy. [Gaily.] If you’d come yesterday I should certainly have smacked your face, but to-day I’m in such a good humour that even the sight of you is tolerable.

Lee Tai. You weren’t here yesterday.

[The Amah comes in carrying on a little wooden tray, two Chinese bowls and a tea-pot.

Daisy. My dear Mamma seems to think you’ve come to pay me a visit. You mustn’t let me keep you too long.

Lee Tai. You are expecting someone? I know.

[The Amah goes out.

Daisy. [Chaffing him.] I always said you had a brain.

Lee Tai. No better a one than yours, Daisy. It was a clever trick when you got me to try to put your husband out of the way so that you should be free for George Conway.

Daisy. It was nothing to do with me. I told you I’d have nothing to do with it. You made a hash of it. One can forgive the good for being stupid, but when rascals are fools there’s no excuse.

Lee Tai. The best laid schemes of mice and men, as my favourite poet Robert Burns so elegantly puts it, gang aft agley.

Daisy. I don’t care a damn about your favourite poet. What have you come here for to-day?

Lee Tai. As it turns out I do not see that there is any cause for regret that George Conway got the knife thrust that was intended for your husband. I wish it had gone a little deeper.

Daisy. [Coolly.] As it turns out you only did me a service. But still you haven’t told me to what I owe the honour of your visit.

Lee Tai. Civility. I like to be on friendly terms with my tenants.

Daisy. [Surprised.] Your what?

Lee Tai. [Urbanely.] This happens to be my house. When I discovered that your honourable mother had taken the rooms in this courtyard so that you might have a place where George Conway and you could safely meet I thought I would buy the whole house.

Daisy. I hope it was a good investment.

Lee Tai. Otherwise perhaps I should have hesitated. It was clever of you to find so convenient a place. With a curio shop in front into which anyone can be seen going without remark and an ill-lit passage leading to this court, it is perfect.

Daisy. What is the idea?

Lee Tai. [With a twinkle in his eyes.] Are you a little frightened?

Daisy. Not a bit. What can you do? You can tell Harry. Tell him.

Lee Tai. [Affably.] George Conway would be ruined.

Daisy. [With a shrug.] He’d lose his job. Perhaps you would give him another. You’re mixed up in so many concerns you could surely find use for a white man who speaks Chinese as well as George does.

Lee Tai. I find even your shamelessness attractive.

Daisy. I’m profoundly grateful for the compliment.

Lee Tai. But do not fear. I shall do nothing. I bought this house because I like you to know that always, always you are in my hand. Where you go, I go. Where you are, I am. Sometimes you do not see me, but nevertheless I am close. I do nothing. I am content to wait.

Daisy. Your time is your own. I have no objection to your wasting it.

Lee Tai. One day, and I think that day is not very far distant, you will come to me. I was the first and I shall be the last. If you like I will marry you.

Daisy. [With a smile.] I thought you had two, if not three, wives already. I fancy that number four would have rather a thin time.

Lee Tai. My wife can be divorced. I am willing to marry you before the British Consul. We will go to Penang. I have a house there. You shall have motor cars.

Daisy. It’s astonishing how easy it is to resist temptations that don’t tempt you.

Lee Tai. Sneer. What do I care? I wait.... What have you to do with white men? You are not a white woman. What power has this blood of your father’s when it is mingled with the tumultuous stream which you have inherited through your mother from innumerable generations? Our race is very pure and very strong. Strange nations have overrun us, but in a little while we have absorbed them so that no trace of a foreign people is left in us. China is like the Yangtze, which is fed by five hundred streams and yet remains unchanged, the river of golden sand, majestic, turbulent, indifferent, and everlasting. What power have you to swim against that mighty current? You can wear European clothes and eat European food, but in your heart you are a Chinawoman. Are your passions the weak and vacillating passions of the white man? There is in your heart a simplicity which the white man can never fathom and a deviousness which he can never understand. Your soul is like a rice patch cleared in the middle of the jungle. All around the jungle hovers, watchful and jealous, and it is only by ceaseless labour that you can prevent its inroads. One day your labour will be vain and the jungle will take back its own. China is closing in on you.

Daisy. My poor Lee Tai, you’re talking perfect nonsense.

Lee Tai. You’re restless and unhappy and dissatisfied because you’re struggling against instincts which were implanted in your breast when the white man was a hungry, naked savage. One day you will surrender. You will cast off the white woman like an outworn garment. You will come back to China as a tired child comes back to his mother. And in the immemorial usages of our great race you will find peace.

[There is a moment’s silence. Daisy passes her hand over her forehead. Against her will she is strangely impressed by what Lee Tai has said. She gives a little shudder and recovers herself.

Daisy. George Conway loves me, and I — Oh!

Lee Tai. The white man’s love lasts no longer than a summer day. It is a red, red rose. Now it flaunts its scented beauty proudly in the sun and to-morrow its petals, wrinkled and stinking, lie scattered on the ground.

[There is a sound of a footstep in the courtyard outside.

Daisy. Here he is. Go quickly.

[George opens the door and stops as he catches sight of Lee Tai.

George. Hulloa, who’s this?

[Lee Tai steps forward, smiling and obsequious.

Lee Tai. I am the owner of this house. The amah complained that the roof leaked and I came to see for myself.

George. [Frowning.] It’s of no consequence. Please don’t bother about it.

Lee Tai. I wish I needn’t. The amah has a virulent and active tongue — I am afraid she will give me no peace till I have satisfied her outrageous demands.

George. You speak extraordinarily good English.

Lee Tai. I am a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.

Daisy. Robert Burns is his favourite poet.

Lee Tai. I spent a year at Oxford and another at Harvard. I can express myself in English not without fluency.

George. Let me compliment you on your good sense in retaining your national costume. I think it a pity that the returned students should insist on wearing ugly tweed suits and billycock hats.

Lee Tai. I spent eight years abroad. I brought back with me no more admiration for Western dress than for Western civilization.

George. That is very interesting.

Lee Tai. You are pleased to be sarcastic.

George. And you, I think, are somewhat supercilious. Believe me, the time has passed when the mandarins of your country, in their impenetrable self-conceit, could put up a barrier against the advance of civilization. If you have any love for China you must see that her only chance to take her rightful place in the world is to accept honestly and sincerely the teaching of the West.

Lee Tai. And if in our hearts we despise and detest what you have to teach us? For what reason are you so confident that you are so superior to us that it behooves us to sit humbly at your feet? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilization been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the world?

George. [Good-naturedly.] What experiment is that?

Lee Tai. We sought to rule this great people not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you?

George. Do.

Lee Tai. [With a smiling contempt.] Because he has invented the machine-gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us into eternity. [With a tinge of sadness.] You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order.... And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Fools. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine-gun and by the machine-gun shall you be judged.

[There is a pause. Suddenly George gives Lee Tai a scrutinizing glance.

George. What is your name?

Lee Tai. [With a thin, amused smile.] Lee Tai Cheng.

George. [With a frigid politeness.] I’m sure you are very busy, Mr. Lee. I won’t detain you any longer.

Lee Tai. [Still smiling.] I wish you a good day.

[He bows slightly and shakes his own hands in the Chinese manner. He goes out. He leaves behind him an impression that is at once ironic and sinister.

George. What the devil is he doing here?

Daisy. [Amused.] He came to make me an offer of marriage. I pointed out to him that I was married already.

George. [Not without irritation.] How did he know you were here?

Daisy. He made it his business to find out.

George. Does he know that...?

Daisy. [Coolly.] You know China better than most Englishmen. You know that the white man can do nothing without the Chinese knowing it. But they won’t tell other white men unless — unless it’s to their advantage to do so.

George. You told me that this house belonged to the amah.

Daisy. [Smiling.] That was a slight exaggeration.

George. You put it very mildly.

Daisy. You said you wouldn’t come to the temple. It meant finding some place where we could meet or never seeing you at all.

George. [Sombrely.] We began with deceit and with deceit we’ve continued.

Daisy. [Tenderly.] There’s no deceit in my love, George. After all, our love is the only thing that matters.

George. [With a certain awkwardness.] I’m afraid I’ve kept you waiting. André Leroux came to see me just as I was leaving the Legation.

Daisy. [Remembering.] I know. Mrs. Stopfort’s young man.

George. He said he knew Mrs. Stopfort’s friends were rather anxious about her future and he wanted them to know that he was going to marry her as soon as she was free.

Daisy. Oh!

George. Of course it’s the only decent thing to do, but I wasn’t sure if he’d see it. He’s a very good fellow. [With a smile.] He spent at least half an hour telling me how he adored Mrs. Stopfort.

Daisy. [Good-humouredly.] Oh, you know I’m not the sort of woman to grouse because you’re a little late. I can always occupy myself by thinking how wonderful it will be to see you. And if I get bored with that I read your letters again.

George. I shouldn’t have thought they were worth that.

Daisy. I think I have every word you have ever written to me — those old letters of ten years ago and the little notes you write to me now. Even though they’re only two or three lines, saying you’ll come here or can’t come, they’re precious to me.

George. But do you keep them here?

Daisy. Yes, they’re safe here. They’re locked up in that box. Only amah has the key of this room ... George.

George. Yes.

Daisy. Will you do something for me?

George. If I can.

Daisy. Will you dine here to-night? Amah will get us a lovely little dinner.

George. Oh, my dear, I can’t! I’ve got an official dinner that I can’t possibly get out of.

Daisy. Oh, how rotten!

George. But I thought Harry was coming back this morning. He’s been gone a week already.

Daisy. I had a letter saying he had to go on to Kalgan. But don’t say anything about it. He told me I was to keep it a secret.

George. He must hate having to be away so much as he’s been lately. The death of that man Gregson has upset things rather.

Daisy. [Smiling.] I wish I could thank Gregson for the good turn he did us by dying at the psychological moment.

George. [Dryly.] I don’t suppose that was his intention.

Daisy. Except for that Harry would have insisted on going to Chung-king. Now there’s no possibility of that for at least a year.

George. I suppose not.

Daisy. We’ve got a year before us, George, a whole year. And in a year anything can happen.

George. [Gravely.] Do you never have any feeling that we’ve behaved rottenly to Harry?

Daisy. I? I’ve been happy for the first time in my life. At last I’ve known peace and rest. Oh, George, I’m so grateful for all you’ve given me! In these three months you’ve changed the whole world for me. I thought I couldn’t love you more than I did. I think every day my love grows more consuming.

George. [With a sigh.] I’ve never known a single moment’s happiness.

Daisy. That’s not true. When I’ve held you in my arms I’ve looked into your eyes and I’ve seen.

George. Oh, I know. There’ve been moments of madness in which I forgot everything but that I loved you. I’m a low rotten cad. No one could despise me more than I despise myself. I’ve loved you so that there was room for nothing else in my soul. Waking and sleeping you’ve obsessed me.

Daisy. That’s how I want you to love me.

George. And I’ve hated myself for loving you. I’ve hated you for making me love you. I’ve struggled with all my might and a hundred times I thought I’d conquered myself and then the touch of your hand, the softness of your lips — I was like a bird in a cage, I beat myself against the bars and all the time the door was open and I hadn’t the will to fly out.

Daisy. [Tenderly.] Oh, darling, why do you make yourself unhappy when happiness lies in the hollow of your hand?

George. Have you never regretted anything?

Daisy. Never.

George. You’re stronger than I am. I’m as weak as dishwater. It’s funny that it should have taken me all these years to find it out. I was weak from the beginning. But I was weakest of all that day. I was distracted, I thought you were dying, I forgot everything except that I loved you.

Daisy. [With passion.] Oh, my sweetheart! Don’t you remember how, late in the night, we went outside the temple and looked at the moonlight on the walls of the Forbidden City? You had no regrets then.

George. [Going on with his own thoughts.] And afterwards your tears, your happiness, the dread of giving you pain and the hot love that burnt me — I was in the toils then. I too knew a happiness that I had never known before. On one side was honesty and duty and everything that makes a man respect himself — and on the other was love. I thought you’d be going away in two or three weeks and that would be the end of it. Oh, it was no excuse — there are no excuses for me, I can never look Harry in the face again, but though my heart was breaking at the thought, I — I knew that in a few days I should see you for the last time.

Daisy. [Scornfully.] Do you think I’d have gone then?

George. And then came that sudden, unexpected, disastrous change in all Harry’s plans. And this house and all the sordid horror of an intrigue. And then there was nothing to do but face the fact that I was a cur. I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy the torture that I’ve undergone.

Daisy. [Full of love and pity.] Oh, my darling, you know I’d do anything in the world to give you happiness!

George. [Sombrely looking away from her.] Daisy, I think you can never give me happiness, but you can help me, not to make amends because that’s impossible, but to ... [Impulsively, looking at her now.] Oh, Daisy, do you really love me?

Daisy. With all my heart. With all my soul.

George. Then help me. Let us finish.

Daisy. [Quickly.] What do you mean?

George. I don’t want to seem a prig. I don’t want to preach. Heaven knows, I’ve never pretended to be a saint. But what we’ve done is wrong. You must see that as plainly as I do.

Daisy. Is it wrong to love? How can I help it?

George. Daisy, I want to — cease doing wrong.

Daisy. You make me impatient. How can you be so weak?

George. I want you to believe that I love you. But I can’t go on with this deceit. I’d sooner shoot myself.

Daisy. You couldn’t say that if you loved me as I love you.

George. [Brutally.] I don’t love you any more.

Daisy. [With a scornful shrug.] That’s not true.

George. [Clenching his teeth.] I came here to-day to tell you that — well, that it’s finished and done with. Oh, God, I don’t want to make you unhappy! But you must see we can’t go on. Everything that’s decent in me revolts at the thought. I beseech you to forget me.

Daisy. As if I could.

George. I’m going away for a bit.

Daisy. [Startled.] You? Why?

George. I didn’t trust myself, you see; I’ve lost my nerve, so I applied for short leave. I’m sailing for Vancouver on the Empress. I leave here the day after to-morrow.

Daisy. [Suddenly distraught.] You don’t mean that you’re going to leave me? I didn’t pay any attention to what you said. I thought it was just a mood. George, George, say that you don’t mean that?

George. It’s the only thing to do, for your sake and Harry’s and mine. [Taking his courage in both hands.] This is good-bye, Daisy.

Daisy. [Seizing him by the shoulders.] Let me look at your eyes. George, you’re crazy. You can’t go.

George. [Drawing away.] For God’s sake, don’t touch me. I wanted to break it to you gently. I don’t know what’s happened. Everything has gone wrong. I’m going, Daisy, and nothing in the world can move me. I implore you to bear it bravely. [She looks at him with suffering, anxious eyes. She is stunned.] I’m afraid you’re going to be awfully unhappy for a little while. But I beseech you to have courage. Soon the pain won’t be so great, and then you’ll see I’ve done the only possible thing.

Daisy. [Sullenly.] How long are you going for?

George. Three or four months. [A pause.] I knew you’d be brave, Daisy. Do you know, I was afraid you’d cry most awfully. It tears my heart to see you cry.

Daisy. Do you think I’m a child? Do you think I can cry now?

George. It’s good-bye, then, Daisy.

[She does not answer. She hardly hears what he says. He hesitates an instant wretchedly, and then goes quickly out of the room. Daisy stands as if she were turned to stone. Her face is haggard. In a minute Lee Tai comes softly in. He stands at the door, looking at her, then gives a little cough. She turns round and sees him.

Daisy. [Fiercely.] What do you want?

Lee Tai. I was waiting till you were disengaged.

Daisy. Have you been listening?

Lee Tai. I have heard.

Daisy. I wish I could have seen you with your ear to the keyhole. You must have looked dignified.

[She begins to laugh, angrily, hysterically, beside herself.

Lee Tai. Let me give you a cup of tea. It’s quite warm still.

Daisy. I should have thought you were rather old and fat to stoop so much.

Lee Tai. Fortunately the windows are only covered with rice paper, so I was saved that inconvenience.

[He hands her a cup of tea. She takes it and flings it at him. The tea is splashed over his black robe.

Daisy. Get out of here or I’ll kill you.

[He wipes his dress with a large silk pocket handkerchief.

Lee Tai. You forget sometimes the manners that were taught you at that elegant school for young ladies in England.

Daisy. I suppose you’ve come to crow over me. Well, crow.

Lee Tai. I told you that I thought I should not have to wait very long.

Daisy. [Scornfully.] You fool. Do you think it’s finished?

Lee Tai. Did I not tell you that the white man’s love was weak and vacillating?

Daisy. He’s going away for four months. Do you think that frightens me? He’s loved me for ten years. I’ve loved him for ten years. Do you think he can forget me in four months? He’ll come back.

Lee Tai. Not to you.

Daisy. Yes, yes, yes. And when he comes it’ll be for good. He’ll hunger for me as he hungered before. He’ll forget his scruples, his remorse, his stupid duties, because he’ll only remember me.

Lee Tai. [Very quietly.] He’s going to be married to Miss Sylvia Knox.

[Daisy springs at him and seizes him by the throat.

Daisy. That’s a lie. That’s a lie. Take it back. You pig.

[He takes her hands and drags them away from his throat. He holds her fast.

Lee Tai. Ask your mother. She knows. The Chinese all know.

Daisy. [Calling.] Amah, amah. It’s a lie. How dare you?

Lee Tai. He told you he was going to an official dinner, but he didn’t tell you that as soon as he could get away he was going to play bridge at the Knoxes’. Pity you don’t play. They might have asked you too.

[The Amah comes in.

Amah. You call me, Daisy?

Daisy. [Snatching her hands away.] Let me go, you fool. [To the Amah.] He says George Conway is engaged to Harold Knox’s sister. It’s not true.

Amah. I no sabe. George’s boy say so. Knox the night before last at the club, he say to his friend, George Conway and my sister, they going to make a match of it.

[A horrible change comes over Daisy’s face as all its features become distorted with rage and jealousy.

Daisy. The liar.

[She stares in front of her, hatred, anger, and mortification seething in her heart. Then she gives a cruel malicious chuckle. She goes quickly to the Korean chest and flings it open. She takes out a parcel of letters and crossing back swiftly to Lee Tai thrusts them in his hands.

Lee Tai. What is this?

Daisy. They’re the letters he wrote me. Let them come into Harry’s hands.

Lee Tai. Why?

Daisy. So that Harry may know everything.

Lee Tai. [After a moment’s thought.] And what will you do for me if I do this for you?

Daisy. What you like.... Only they must get to him quickly. George goes away the day after to-morrow.

Lee Tai. Where is your husband?

Daisy. Kalgan.

Lee Tai. The letters shall reach him to-morrow morning. I’ll send them by car.

Daisy. It’ll be a pleasant surprise for his breakfast.

Lee Tai. Daisy.

Daisy. Go quickly — or I shall change my mind. There’ll be plenty of time for everything else after to-morrow.

Lee Tai. I’ll go.

[Lee Tai goes out. Daisy gives him a look of contempt.

Daisy. Fool.

Amah. What you mean, Daisy?

Daisy. Harry will divorce me. And then....

[Daisy gives a little cry of triumph.

END OF SCENE VI

SCENE VII

The sitting-room in the Andersons’ apartments.

The scene is the same as Scene iv. Daisy and the Amah.

Daisy is walking restlessly backwards and forwards.

Daisy. At what time does the train from Kalgan get in?

Amah. Five o’clock, my think so.

Daisy. What time is it now?

[The Amah takes a large gold watch out and looks at it.

Amah. My watch no walkee.

Daisy. Why don’t you have it mended? What’s the good of a watch that doesn’t go?

Amah. Gold watch. Eighteen carats. Cost velly much money. Give me plenty face.

Daisy. [Impatiently.] Go and ask Wu what time it is.

Amah. I know time. I tell by the sun. More better than European watch. I think half-past four perhaps.

Daisy. Why doesn’t George come?

Amah. Perhaps he velly busy.

Daisy. You gave him the note yourself?

Amah. Yes, I give him letter.

Daisy. What did he say?

Amah. He no say nothing. He look: damn, damn.

Daisy. Did you tell him it was very important?

Amah. I say, you come quick. Chop-chop.

Daisy. Yes.

Amah. I tell you before. Why you want me tell you again? He say he come chop-chop when he get away from office.

Daisy. As if the office mattered now. I ought to have gone to him myself.

Amah. You no make him come more quick because you walk up down. Why you no sit still?

Daisy. The train is never punctual. It’ll take Harry at least twenty minutes to get out here.

Amah. Lee Tai....

Daisy. [Interrupting.] Don’t talk to me of Lee Tai. Why on earth should I bother about Lee Tai?

Amah. [Taking up an opium pipe that is on the table.] Shall Amah make her little Daisy a pipe? Daisy very restless.

Daisy. Have you got opium?

Amah. Lee Tai give me some. [She shows Daisy a small tin box.] Number one quality. You have one little pipe, Daisy.

Daisy. No.

[Wu comes in with a card. He gives it to Daisy.

Miss Knox. Say I’m not at home.

Wu. Yes, missy.

[He is about to go out.

Daisy. Stop. Is she alone?

Wu. She ride up to gate with gentleman and lady. She say can she see you for two, three minutes.

Daisy. [After a moment’s consideration.] Tell her to come in.

[Wu goes out.

Amah. What you want to see her for, Daisy?

Daisy. Mind your own business.

Amah. George come very soon now.

Daisy. I shall get rid of her as soon as he does. [Almost to herself.] I want to see for myself.

[Sylvia comes in. She wears a riding-habit. Daisy greets her cordially. Her manner, which was restless, becomes on a sudden gay, gracious, and friendly.

Daisy. Oh, my dear, how sweet of you to come all this way!

[The Amah slips out.

Sylvia. I can only stop a second. I was riding with the Fergusons and we passed your temple. I thought I’d just run in and see how you were. I haven’t seen you for an age.

Daisy. Are the Fergusons waiting outside?

Sylvia. They rode on. They said they’d fetch me in five minutes.

Daisy. [Smiling.] How did your bridge party go off last night?

Sylvia. How on earth did you hear about that? Did Mr. Conway tell you? I wish you played bridge. We really had rather a lark.

Daisy. George didn’t come in till late, I suppose?

Sylvia. Oh, no, he got away in fairly decent time. Where there’s a will there’s a way, you know, even at official functions.

Daisy. [With a little laugh.] Oh, I know! I’m expecting him here in a minute. I hope you won’t have to go before he comes.

Sylvia. Well, I saw him yesterday. I can live one day without seeing him.

Daisy. I wonder if he can live one day without seeing you?

Sylvia. I’m tolerably sure he can do that.

Daisy. [As if she were merely teasing.] A little bird has whispered to me that there’s a very pretty blonde in Peking....

Sylvia. [Interrupting.] Probably peroxide.

Daisy. Not in this case. Who is not entirely indifferent to the Assistant Chinese Secretary at the British Legation.

Sylvia. Fancy!

Daisy. I suppose you haven’t an idea who I’m talking about?

Sylvia. Not a ghost.

Daisy. Then why do you blush to the roots of your hair?

Sylvia. I was outraged at your suggestion that my hair was dyed.

Daisy. It’s too bad of me to tease you, isn’t it?

Sylvia. I’m a perfect owl. You know what a tactless idiot my brother is. He will chaff me about George Conway, so it makes me self-conscious when anybody talks about him.

Daisy. Darling, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Why shouldn’t you be in love with him?

Sylvia. [With a laugh.] But I’m not in love with him.

Daisy. Why does your brother chaff you then?

Sylvia. Because he’s under the delusion that it’s funny.

Daisy. But you do like him, don’t you?

Sylvia. Of course I like him.... I think he’s a very good sort.

Daisy. Would you marry him if he asked you?

Sylvia. My dear, what are you talking about? The thought never entered my head.

Daisy. Oh, what nonsense! When a man’s as attentive to a girl as George has been to you she can’t help asking herself if she’d like to marry him or not.

Sylvia. [Coldly, but still smiling.] Can’t she? I’m afraid I haven’t a close acquaintance with that sort of girl.

Daisy. Am I being very vulgar? You know, we half-castes are sometimes.

Sylvia. [With a trace of impatience.] Of course you’re not vulgar. But I don’t know why you want to talk about something that’s absolute Greek to me.

Daisy. The natural curiosity of the Eurasian. Everybody tells me that you’re engaged to George.

Sylvia. Look at my hand.

[She stretches out her left hand so that Daisy should see there is no ring on the fourth finger. Daisy stares at it for a moment.

Daisy. You always used to wear an engagement ring.

Sylvia. [Gravely.] It was put on my finger by a poor boy who was killed. I meant to wear it always.

Daisy. Why have you taken it off?

[She looks at Sylvia. She can no longer preserve her artificial gaiety and her voice is cold and hard. Before Sylvia can answer George Conway comes in.

Daisy. [Regaining with an effort her earlier sprightliness.] There you are at last.

George. I couldn’t come sooner. I was with the Minister.

Daisy. We were wondering why you were so late.

Sylvia. Daisy was wondering.

George. [Shaking hands with Sylvia.] I thought that was your pony outside.

Sylvia. Clever.

George. The Fergusons were just riding up as I came.

Sylvia. Oh, they’ve come to fetch me! I must bolt.

George. I’m afraid we kept you up till all sorts of hours last night.

Sylvia. Not a bit. Do I look jaded?

George. Of course not. You young things can stay up till three in the morning and be as fresh as paint. Wait till you’re my age.

Sylvia. You haven’t passed your hundredth birthday yet, have you?

George. Not quite. But I’m old enough to be your father.

Sylvia. I will not stay and listen to you talk rubbish. Good-bye, Daisy. Do come and see me one day this week.

Daisy. Good-bye.

George. I’ll come and help you mount, shall I?

Sylvia. Oh, no, don’t bother! Mr. Ferguson is there.

George. Oh, all right!

[She goes out.

Daisy. [Her smiles vanishing, hostile and cold.] You might shut the door.

George. [Doing so.] I will.

Daisy. Aren’t you going to kiss me?

George. Daisy.

Daisy. [Hastily.] Oh, no, it doesn’t matter! Don’t bother.

George. You said you wanted to see me very importantly.

Daisy. It’s kind of you to have come.

George. [With an effort at ease of manner.] My dear child, what are you talking about? You must know that if there’s anything in the world I can do for you I’m only too anxious to do it.

Daisy. Is that girl in love with you?

George. Good heavens, no! What put that idea in your head?

Daisy. The eyes in my head.

George. What perfect nonsense!

Daisy. Has it never occurred to you that she was in love with you?

George. Never.

Daisy. Why do you lie to me? I’ve been told that you were engaged to her.

George. That’s ludicrous. It’s absolutely untrue.

Daisy. Yes, I think it is. At the first moment I believed it. And then I thought it over and I knew it couldn’t be true. I don’t think you’d do anything underhand.

George. At all events I shouldn’t do that.

Daisy. In fairness to me or in fairness to her?

George. My dear Daisy, what are you talking about?

Daisy. Did you break with me yesterday so that you might be free to propose to her?

George. No, I swear I didn’t.

Daisy. Why are you so emphatic?

George. Oh, Daisy, what’s the good of tormenting yourself and tormenting me? You know I loved you just as much as you loved me. But I’m not like you. It was a torture. I knew it was wrong and hateful. I couldn’t go on.

Daisy. Do you think it would have seemed wrong and hateful if it hadn’t been for Sylvia?

George. Yes.

Daisy. You don’t say that very convincingly.

George. I do think it is because she is so loyal, and good and straight that I saw so clearly what a cad I was. I think I found courage to do the only possible thing in her frankness and honesty.

Daisy. I think you deceive yourself. Are you sure this admiration of yours for all her admirable qualities isn’t — love?

George. My dear, I’m unfit to love her.

Daisy. She doesn’t think so. If you asked her to marry you she’d accept.

George. [Impatiently.] What nonsense. What in heaven’s name made you think that?

Daisy. I made it my business to find out.

George. Well, you can set your mind at rest. I’m not going to ask her to marry me.

[The Amah comes in.

Amah. Five o’clock, Daisy.

Daisy. Leave me alone.

[The Amah goes out.

George. When does Harry come back?

Daisy. [After a pause, in a strange, hoarse voice.] To-day.

George. [Surprised at her tone and manner.] Is anything the matter, Daisy?

Daisy. I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.

George. [Startled.] Oh!

Daisy. You know those letters. I kept them locked in the box. Lee Tai was furious because I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Last night he broke open the box. He’s sent the letters to Harry.

George. [Overwhelmed.] My God!

Daisy. I’m awfully sorry. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t dream that there was any risk.

George. Was that why you sent for me?

Daisy. Say you don’t hate me.

George. Oh, poor Harry!

Daisy. Don’t think of him now. Think of me.

George. What do we matter now, you and I? We’re a pair of rotters. Harry is a white man through and through. He loved you, and he trusted me.

Daisy. What are we going to do?

George. Give me a minute. I’m all at sixes and sevens. It’s such a knock-out blow.

Daisy. Harry will be here soon. His train’s due at five.

George. We’ll wait for him.

Daisy. What?

George. Did you think I was going to run away? I’ll stay and face him.

Daisy. He’ll kill you.

George. [With anguish.] I wish to God he would.

Daisy. Oh, George, how can you be so cruel? Don’t you love me any more? I love you. George, what is to become of me if you desert me?

George. Harry loves you so much and he loves me too. Heaven knows what sacrifices he’s not capable of. Oh, I’m so ashamed!

Daisy. Why do you bother about him? He doesn’t count. He’ll get over it. After all, what can he do? He can only divorce me and perhaps we can get him to let me divorce him.

George. Could you allow him to do that?

Daisy. It means so little to a man. I don’t care, I was thinking of you. It would make it so much easier for you. [He gives her a quick look. He perceives the allusion to marriage.] George, George, you wouldn’t leave — leave me in the cart.

George. Of course I’ll marry you.

Daisy. [Smiling now, loving and tender.] Oh, George, we shall be so happy. And you know, some day I’m sure you’ll think it’s better as it’s turned out. I hate all this deceit just as much as you do. Oh, it’ll make such a difference when our love can be open and above board. When I’m your wife you’ll forget all that has tormented you. Oh, George, I know we shall be happy!

[All this time George has been thinking deeply.

George. How do you know that Lee Tai sent those wretched letters to Harry?

Daisy. He sent me a message. He wasn’t satisfied with doing a dirty trick. He wanted me to know that he’d done it.

George. How did he know you kept my letters there?

Daisy. I told you I was reading them while I waited for you. He came in and I put them away. I suppose he suspected. It was very easy for him to get into the room after amah and I went away.

George. [Sarcastically.] Had you left the key of the box on the table?

Daisy. What do you mean, George? I’d locked it up. Of course I took the key with me. I suppose he broke it open. What does it matter? The harm’s done.

George. How do you know Harry received the letters this morning?

Daisy. Lee Tai said he would.

George. In Kalgan?

Daisy. Yes.

George. How did he know Harry was in Kalgan?

Daisy. The Chinese know all one’s movements.

George. They can’t do miracles. Harry was going up there unexpectedly on a private mission. The fellows in that company know very well how to keep their own counsel when it’s needful.... I imagine you were the only person in Peking who knew Harry was going to Kalgan.

Daisy. [Casually.] Well, it appears I wasn’t.

George. How do you suppose Lee Tai found out something that Harry had particularly told you to keep quiet about?

Daisy. How can I tell? He may have found out from the amah for all I know.

George. Surely you hadn’t told her?

Daisy. Of course not. She may have read the letter. She always does read my letters.

George. Can she read English?

Daisy. Enough to find out about other people’s business.

George. Why should she have told Lee Tai?

Daisy. I suppose he bribed her. She’d do anything for a hundred dollars.

George. Not if it would do you harm.

Daisy. She’s not so devoted to me as all that.

George. She’s your mother, Daisy.

Daisy. [Quickly.] How d’you know?

George. Harry told me.

Daisy. I thought he was too ashamed of it to do that.

George. [Persistently.] How did Lee Tai know that Harry was in Kalgan?

Daisy. I tell you I don’t know. Why do you cross-examine me? Good God, I’m harassed enough without that! What do you mean?

George. [He seizes her wrists and draws her violently to him.] Daisy, did you send those letters to Harry yourself?

Daisy. Never! Do you think I’m crazy?

George. Did you give them to Lee Tai to send?

Daisy. No.

George. God damn you, speak the truth! I will have the truth for once in your life.

[They stare at one another. He is stern and angry. She pulls herself together. She is fierce and defiant. She shakes herself free of him.

Daisy. I gave them to Lee Tai.

George. [Hiding his face with his hands.] My God!

Daisy. He told me you were engaged to Sylvia. For a moment I believed it and I gave him the letters. I hardly knew what I was doing. And now, even though I know it wasn’t true, I’m glad. I wish I’d done it long before.

George. You fiend!

Daisy. [Violently.] Do you think I’m going to let you go so easily? Do you think I’ve done all I have to let you marry that silly little English girl?

George. [With anguish.] Oh, Daisy, how could you?

Daisy. Has it never struck you how you came to be wounded that night? It wasn’t you they wanted. It was Harry.

George. I know. [Suddenly understanding.] Daisy!

Daisy. Yes, I could do that. I only wish it had succeeded.

George. I can’t believe it.

Daisy. You’re mine, mine, mine, and I’ll never let you go.

George. [With increasing violence.] Do you think I can ever look at you again without horror? In my heart I’ve known always that you were evil. Ten years ago when I first loved you there was a deep instinct within that warned me. Even though my heart was breaking for love of you I knew that you were ruthless and cruel. I’ve loved you, yes, but all the time I’ve hated you. I’ve loved you, but with the baser part of me. All that was in me that was honest and decent and upright revolted against you. Always, always. This love has been a loathsome cancer in my heart. I couldn’t rid me of it without killing myself, but I abhorred it. I felt that I was degraded by the love that burned me.

Daisy. What do I care so long as you love? You can think anything you like of me. The fact remains that you love me.

George. If you had no pity for Harry, who raised you from the gutter and gave you everything he had to give, oh, if you’d loved me you’d have had mercy on me. What do you think our life can be together? Don’t you know what I shall be? Ruined and abject and hopeless. Oh, not only in the eyes of everyone who knows me shall I be degraded, but in my own. Do you think there’s much happiness for you there?

Daisy. I shall have you. That’s all the happiness I want. I’d rather be wretched with you — oh, a thousand times — than happy with anyone else.

George. [Wrathfully, trying to wound her.] You were tormenting me just now because you were jealous of Sylvia. Do you know what I felt for her? It wasn’t love — at least not what you mean by love. I can never love anyone as I’ve loved you and God knows I’m thankful. But I had such a respect for her. I’ve been so wretched and she offered me peace. And I did think that some day when all this horror was over, if I could do something to make myself feel clean again, I should go to her and, all unworthy, ask her if she would take me. And now the bitterest pang of all is to think that she must know what an unspeakable cad I’ve always been.

[He has flung himself into a chair. He is in despair. Daisy goes up to him and going down on her knees beside him puts her arm round him. She is very tender.

Daisy. Oh, George, I can make you forget her so easily. You don’t know what my love can do. I know I’ve been horrible, but it’s only been because I loved you. Ten years ago I was all that she is. I’m like clay in your hands and you can make me what you will. Oh, George, say you forgive me!

[In the caressing gestures of her hands as she tries to move him one of them rests by chance on his coat pocket. She feels something hard. He moves slightly away.

George. Take care.

Daisy. What’s that in your pocket?

George. It’s my revolver. Since my accident I’ve always carried it about with me. It’s rather silly, but the Minister asked me to. He said he’d feel safer.

Daisy. Oh, George, if you only knew the agony I suffered when you were brought in! The remorse, the fear! I thought I should go mad.

George. [With a bitter chuckle.] It must have been rather a sell for you.

Daisy. Oh, you can laugh! I knew you’d forgive me. My darling.

George. I’m sorry for all the rough things I said to you, Daisy. I don’t blame you for anything. You only acted according to your lights. The only person I can blame is myself. It’s only reasonable that I should suffer the punishment.

Daisy. My sweetheart!

George. I suppose you know that I shall be quite ruined.

Daisy. You’ll have to leave the service. Does that really matter to you very much?

George. It was my whole life.

Daisy. You’ll get a job in the post office. With your knowledge of the language they’ll simply jump at you. It’s a Chinese service. It has nothing to do with Europeans.

George. Do you think the postmaster in a small Chinese city is a very lucrative position?

Daisy. What does money matter? If I’d wanted money I could have got all I wanted from Lee Tai. We can do with very little. You don’t know what a clever housekeeper I am.

George. [In a level, dead voice.] I’m sure you’re wonderful.

Daisy. We’ll go to some city where there are no foreigners. And we shall be together always. We’ll have a house high up on the bank and below us the river will flow, flow endlessly.

George. You seem to have got it all mapped out.

Daisy. If you only knew how often I’ve dreamed of it. Oh, George, I want rest and peace too! I’m so tired. I want endless days to rest in. [With a puzzled look at him.] What is the matter? You look so strange.

George. [With a weary sigh.] I was thinking of all the things you’ve been saying to me.

Daisy. If you think it’ll be easier for you if you don’t marry me, you need not. I don’t care anything about that. I’ll be your mistress and I’ll lie hidden in your house so that no one shall know I’m there. I’ll live like a Chinese woman. I’ll be your slave and your plaything. I want to get away from all these Europeans. After all, China is the land of my birth and the land of my mother. China is crowding in upon me; I’m sick of these foreign clothes. I have a strange hankering for the ease of the Chinese dress. You’ve never seen me in it?

George. Never.

Daisy. [With a smile.] You’d hardly know me. I’ll be a little Chinese girl living in the foreigner’s house. Have you ever smoked opium?

George. No. [Daisy takes the Amah’s long pipe in her hands.] Who does that belong to?

Daisy. It’s amah’s. One day you shall try and I’ll make your pipes for you. Lee Tai used to say that no one could make them better than I.

George. However low down the ladder you go there’s apparently always a rung lower.

Daisy. After you’ve smoked a pipe or two your mind grows extraordinarily clear. You have a strange facility of speech and yet no desire to speak. All the puzzles of this puzzling world grow plain to you. You are tranquil and free. Your soul is gently released from the bondage of your body, and it plays, happy and careless, like a child with flowers. Death cannot frighten you, and want and misery are like blue mountains far away. You feel a heavenly power possess you and you can venture all things because suffering cannot touch you. Your spirit has wings and you fly like a bird through the starry wastes of the night. You hold space and time in the hollow of your hand. Then you come upon the dawn, all pearly and gray and silent, and there in the distance, like a dreamless sleep, is the sea.

George. You are showing me a side of you I never knew.

Daisy. Do you think you know me yet? I don’t know myself. In my heart there are secrets that are strange even to me, and spells to bind you to me, and enchantments so that you will never weary.

[A pause.

George. [Standing up.] I’ll go and get myself a drink. After all these alarums and excursions I really think I deserve it.

Daisy. Amah will bring it to you.

George. Oh, it doesn’t matter! I can easily fetch it myself. The whisky’s in the dining-room, isn’t it?

Daisy. I expect so.

[He goes out. Daisy goes over to a chest which stands in the room and throws it open. She takes out the Manchu dress which Harry once gave her and handles it smilingly. She holds up in both her hands the sumptuous headdress. There is the sound of a door being locked. Daisy puts down the headdress and looks at the door enquiringly.

Daisy. [With a little smile.] What are you locking the door for, George? [The words are hardly out of her mouth before there is the report of a pistol shot. Daisy gives a shriek and rushes towards the door.] George! George! What have you done? [She beats frantically on the door.] Let me in! Let me in! George!

[The Amah comes in running from the courtyard.

Amah. What’s the matter? I hear shot.

Daisy. Send the boys, quick. We must break down this door.

Amah. I send the boys away. I no want them here when Harry come.

Daisy. George! George! Speak to me. [She beats violently on the door.] Oh, what shall I do?

Amah. Daisy, what’s the matter?

Daisy. He’s killed himself sooner — sooner than....

Amah. [Aghast.] Oh!

[Daisy staggers back into the room.

Daisy. Oh, my God!

[She sinks down on the floor. She beats it with her fist. The Amah looks at her for an instant, then with quick determination seizes her shoulder.

Amah. Daisy, Harry come soon.

Daisy. [With a violent gesture.] Leave me alone. What do I care if Harry comes?

Amah. You no can stay here. Come with me quick.

Daisy. Go away. Damn you!

Amah. [Stern and decided.] Don’t you talk foolish now. You come. Lee Tai waiting for you.

Daisy. [With a sudden suspicion.] Did you know this was going to happen? George! George!

Amah. Harry will kill you if he find you here. Come with me. [There is a knocking at the outer gate.] There he is. Daisy! Daisy!

Daisy. Don’t torture me.

Amah. I bolt that door. He no get in that way. He must come round through temple. You come quick and I hide you. We slip out when he safe.

Daisy. [With scornful rage.] Do you think I’m frightened of Harry?

Amah. He come velly soon now.

[Daisy raises herself to her feet. A strange look comes over her face.

Daisy. Lee Tai has made a mistake again. Bolt that door.

[The Amah runs to it and slips the bolt. While she does this Daisy takes the tin of opium and quickly swallows some of the contents. The Amah turns round and sees her. She gives a gasp. She runs forward and snatches the tin from Daisy’s hand.

Amah. What you do, Daisy? Daisy, you die!

Daisy. Yes, I die. The day has come. The jungle takes back its own.

Amah. [Distraught.] Oh, Daisy! Daisy! My little flower.

Daisy. How long will it take? [The Amah sobs desperately. Daisy goes to the Manchu clothes and takes them up.] Help me to put these on.

Amah. [Dumbfounded.] What you mean, Daisy?

Daisy. Curse you, do as I tell you!

Amah. I think you crazy. [Daisy slips into the long skirt and the Amah with trembling hands helps her into the coat. In the middle of her dressing Daisy staggers.] Daisy.

Daisy. [Recovering herself.] Don’t be a fool. I’m all right.

Amah. [In a terrified whisper.] There’s Harry.

Daisy. Give me the headdress.

Harry. [Outside.] Open the door.

Daisy. Be quick.

Amah. I no understand. You die, Daisy. You die.

[The knocking is repeated more violently.

Harry. [Shouting.] Daisy! Amah! Open the door. If you don’t open I’ll break it down.

[Daisy is ready. She steps on to the pallet and sits in the Chinese fashion.

Daisy. Go to the door. Open when I tell you.

[There is by Daisy’s side a box in which are the paints and pencils the Chinese lady uses to make up her face. Daisy opens it. She takes out a hand mirror.

Harry. Who’s there? Open, I tell you! Open!

[Daisy puts rouge on her cheeks. She takes a black pencil and touches her eyebrows. She gives them a slight slant so that she looks on a sudden absolutely Chinese.

Daisy. Open!

[The Amah draws the bolt and Harry bursts in.

Harry. Daisy! [He comes forward impetuously and then on a sudden stops. He is taken aback. Something, he knows not what, comes over him and he feels helpless and strangely weak.] Daisy, what does it mean? These letters. [He takes them out of his pocket and thrusts them towards her. She takes no notice of him.] Daisy, speak to me. I don’t understand. [He staggers towards her with outstretched hands.] For God’s sake, say it isn’t true.

[Motionless she contemplates in the mirror the Chinese woman of the reflection.

THE END

Selected Non-Fiction

Saint Thomas’ Hospital, London — for five years Maugham studied medicine here in Lambeth. The school was then independent, but is now part of King’s College London.

THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

SKETCHES AND IMPRESSIONS IN ANDALUSIA

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

TO

VIOLET HUNT

I

The Spirit of Andalusia

After one has left a country it is interesting to collect together the emotions it has given in an effort to define its particular character. And with Andalusia the attempt is especially fascinating, for it is a land of contrasts in which work upon one another, diversely, a hundred influences.

In London now, as I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under her arm. A train arrives at an underground station and a score of city folk cross my window, sheltered behind their umbrellas; and two or three groups of workmen, silently, smoking short pipes: they walk with a dull, heavy tramp, with the gait of strong men who are very tired. Still the rain pours down unceasing.

And I think of Andalusia. My mind is suddenly ablaze with its sunshine, with its opulent colour, luminous and soft; I think of the cities, the white cities bathed in light; of the desolate wastes of sand, with their dwarf palms, the broom in flower. And in my ears I hear the twang of the guitar, the rhythmical clapping of hands and the castanets, as two girls dance in the sunlight on a holiday. I see the crowds going to the bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of sleeping towns, and the silence of desert country; I remember old whitewashed taverns, and the perfumed wines of Malaga, of Jerez, and of Manzanilla. (The rain pours down without stay in oblique long lines, the light is quickly failing, the street is sad and very cheerless.) I feel on my shoulder the touch of dainty hands, of little hands with tapering fingers, and on my mouth the kisses of red lips, and I hear a joyous laugh. I remember the voice that bade me farewell that last night in Seville, and the gleam of dark eyes and dark hair at the foot of the stairs, as I looked back from the gate. ‘Feliz viage, mi Inglesito.’

It was not love I felt for you, Rosarito; I wish it had been; but now far away, in the rain, I fancy, (oh no, not that I am at last in love,) but perhaps that I am just faintly enamoured — of your recollection.

But these are all Spanish things, and more than half one’s impressions of Andalusia are connected with the Moors. Not only did they make exquisite buildings, they moulded a whole people to their likeness; the Andalusian character is rich with Oriental traits; the houses, the mode of life, the very atmosphere is Moorish rather than Christian; to this day the peasant at his plough sings the same quavering lament that sang the Moor. And it is to the invaders that Spain as a country owes the magnificence of its golden age: it was contact with them that gave the Spaniards cultivation; it was the conflict of seven hundred years that made them the best soldiers in Europe, and masters of half the world. The long struggle caused that tension of spirit which led to the adventurous descent upon America, teaching recklessness of life and the fascination of unknown dangers; and it caused their downfall as it had caused their rise, for the religious element in the racial war occasioned the most cruel bigotry that has existed on the face of the earth, so that the victors suffered as terribly as the vanquished. The Moors, hounded out of Spain, took with them their arts and handicrafts — as the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes — and though for a while the light of Spain burnt very brightly, the light borrowed from Moordom, the oil jar was broken and the lamp flickered out.

In most countries there is one person in particular who seems to typify the race, whose works are the synthesis, as it were, of an entire people. Bernini expressed in this manner a whole age of Italian society; and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d’Annunzio. And Murillo, though the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no more than a link in the chain of life and cannot be sharply sundered from the civilisation of which it is an outcome: even Velasquez, sans peer, sans parallel, throws a curious light on the world of his day, and the cleverest painters would find their knowledge and understanding of that great genius the fuller if they were acquainted with the plays of Lope de la Vega and the satires of Quevedo. Notwithstanding Murillo’s obvious faults, as you walk through the museum at Seville all Andalusia appears before you. Nothing could be more characteristic than the religious feeling of the many pictures, than the exuberant fancy and utter lack of idealisation: in the contrast between a Holy Family by Murillo and one by Perugino is all the difference between Spain and Italy. Murillo’s Virgin is a peasant girl such as you may see in any village round Seville on a feast-day; her emotions are purely human, and in her face is nothing more than the intense love of a mother for her child. But the Italian shows a creature not of earth, an angelic maid with almond eyes, oval of face: she has a strange air of unrealness, for her body is not of human flesh and blood, and she is linked with mankind only by an infinite sadness; she seems to see already the Dolorous Way, and her eyes are heavy with countless unwept tears.

One picture especially, that which the painter himself thought his best work, Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms, to my mind offers the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn, patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with sores, pale, starving, with their malodorous rags, you feel strangely the swarming poverty of the vast population, downtrodden and vivacious, which you read of in the picaresque novels of a later day. And these same characteristics, the deep religious feeling, the splendour, the poverty, the extreme sense of vigorous life, the discerning may find even now among the Andalusians for all the modern modes with which, as with coats of London and bonnets of Paris, they have sought to liken themselves to the rest of Europe.

And the colours of Murillo’s palette are the typical colours of Andalusia, rich, hot, and deep — again contrasting with the enamelled brilliance of the Umbrians. He seems to have charged his brush with the very light and atmosphere of Seville; the country bathed in the splendour of an August sun has just the luminous character, the haziness of contour, which characterise the paintings of Murillo’s latest manner. They say he adopted the style termed vaporoso for greater rapidity of execution, but he cannot have lived all his life in that radiant atmosphere without being impregnated with it. In Andalusia there is a quality of the air which gives all things a limpid, brilliant softness, the sea of gold poured out upon them voluptuously rounds away their outlines; and one can well imagine that the master deemed it the culmination of his art when he painted with the same aureate effulgence, when he put on canvas those gorgeous tints and that exquisite mellowness.

II

The Churches of Ronda

That necessity of realism which is, perhaps, the most conspicuous of Spanish traits, shows itself nowhere more obviously than in matters religious. It is a very listless emotion that is satisfied with the shadow of the ideal; and the belief of the Andaluz is an intensely living thing, into which he throws himself with a vehemence that requires the nude and brutal fact. His saints must be fashioned after his own likeness, for he has small power of make-believe, and needs all manner of substantial accessories to establish his faith. But then he treats the images as living persons, and it never occurs to him to pray to the Saint in Paradise while kneeling before his presentment upon earth. The Spanish girl at the altar of Mater Dolorosa prays to a veritable woman, able to speak if so she wills, able to descend from the golden shrine to comfort the devout worshipper. To her nothing is more real than these Madonnas, with their dark eyes and their abundant hair: Maria del Pilar, who is Mary of the Fountain, Maria del Rosario, who is Mary of the Rosary, Maria de los Dolores, Maria del Carmen, Maria de los Angeles. And they wear magnificent gowns of brocade and of cloth-of-gold, mantles heavily embroidered, shoes, rings on their fingers, rich jewels about their necks.

In a little town like Ronda, so entirely apart from the world, poverty-stricken, this desire for realism makes a curiously strong impression. The churches, coated with whitewash, are squalid, cold and depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as I lingered, the very poverty of it all touched me; and forgetting the grotesqueness, I perceived that some of the saints in their elaborate dresses were quite charming and graceful. In the church of Santa Maria la Mayor was a Saint Catherine in rich habiliments of red brocade, with a white mantilla arranged as only a Spanish woman could arrange it. She might have been a young gentlewoman of fifty years back when costume was gayer than nowadays, arrayed for a fashionable wedding or for a bull-fight. And in another church I saw a youthful Saint in priest’s robes, a cassock of black silk and a short surplice of exquisite lace; he held a bunch of lilies in his hand and looked very gently, his lips almost trembling to a smile. One can imagine that not to them would come the suppliant with a heavy despair, they would be merely pained at their helplessness before the tears of the grief that kills and the woe of mothers sorrowing for their sons. But when the black-eyed maiden knelt before the priest, courtly and debonair, begging him to send a husband quickly, his lips surely would control themselves no longer, and his smile would set the damsel’s cheek a-blushing. And if a youth knelt before Saint Catherine in her dainty mantilla, and vowed his heart was breaking because his love gave him stony glances, she would look very graciously upon him, so that his courage was restored, and he promised her a silver heart as lovers in Greece made votive offerings to Aphrodite.

At the Church of the Espirito Santo, in a little chapel behind one of the transept altars, I saw, through a huge rococo frame of gilded wood, a Maria de los Dolores that was almost terrifying in poignant realism. She wore a robe of black damask, which stood as if it were cast of bronze in heavy, austere folds, a velvet cloak decorated with the old lace known as rose point d’Espagne; and on her head a massive imperial diadem, and a golden aureole. Seven candles burned before her; and at vespers, when the church was nearly dark, they threw a cold, sharp light upon her countenance. Her eyes were in deep shadow, strangely mysterious, and they made the face, so small beneath the pompous crown, horribly life-like: you could not see the tears, but you felt they were eyes which would never cease from weeping.

I suppose it was all tawdry and vulgar and common, but a woman knelt in front of the Mother of Sorrows, praying, a poor woman in a ragged shawl; I heard a sob, and saw that she was weeping; she sought to restrain herself and in the effort a tremor passed through her body, and she drew the shawl more closely round her.

I walked away, and came presently to the most cruel of all these images. It was a Pietà. The Mother held on her knees the dead Son, looking in His face, and it was a ghastly contrast between her royal array and His naked body. She, too, wore the imperial crown, with its golden aureole, and her cloak was of damask embroidered with heavy gold. Her hair fell in curling abundance about her breast, and the sacristan told me it was the hair of a lady who had lost her husband and her only son. But the dead Christ was terrible, His face half hidden by the long straight hair, long as a woman’s, and His body thin and all discoloured: from the wounds thick blood poured out, and their edges were swollen and red; the broken knees, the feet and hands, were purple and green with the beginning of putrefaction.

III

Ronda

Ronda is set deep among the mountains between Algeciras and Seville; they hem it in on all sides, and it straggles up and down little hills, timidly, as though its presence were an affront to the wild rocks around it. The houses are huddled against the churches, which look like portly hens squatting with ruffled feathers, while their chicks, for warmth, press up against them. It is very cold in Ronda. I saw it first quite early: over the town hung a grey mist shining in the sunlight, and the mountains, opalescent in the morning glow, were so luminous that they seemed hardly solid; they looked as if one could walk through them. The people, covering their mouths in dread of a pulmonia, hastened by, closely muffled in long cloaks. As I passed the open doors I saw them standing round the brasero, warming themselves; for fireplaces are unknown to Andalusia, the only means of heat being the copa, a round brass dish in which is placed burning charcoal.

The height and the cold give Ronda a character which reminds one of Northern Spain; the roofs are quite steep, the houses low and small, built for warmth rather than, as in the rest of Andalusia, for coolness.

But the whitewash and the barred windows with their wooden lattice-work, remind you that you are in Moorish country, in the very heart of it; and Ronda, indeed, figures in chronicles and in old ballads as a stronghold of the invaders. The temperature affects the habits of the people, even their appearance: there is no lounging about the squares or at the doors of wine-shops, the streets are deserted and their great breadth makes the emptiness more apparent. The first setters out of the town had no need to make the ways narrow for the sake of shade, and they are, in fact, so broad that the houses on either side might be laid on their faces, and there would still be room for the rapid stream which hurries down the middle.

The conformation of a Spanish town, even though it lack museums and fine buildings, gives it an interest beyond that of most European places. The Moorish design is always evident. That wise people laid out the streets as was most convenient, tortuous and narrow at Cordova or broad as a king’s highway in Ronda. The Moors stayed their time, and their hour struck, and they went; the houses had fallen to decay and been more than once rebuilt. The Christians returned and Mahomet fled before the Saints; (it was no shame since they grossly out-numbered him;) the mosque was made a church, and the houses as they fell were built again, but on the same foundations and in the same way. The streets have remained as the Moors left them, the houses still are built round little courtyards — the patio — as the Moors built them; and the windows are barred and latticed as of old, the better to protect beauty whose dark eyes flash too meaningly at wandering strangers, whose red lips are over ready to break into a smile for the peace of an absent husband.

After the busy clamour of Gibraltar, that ant-nest of a hundred nationalities, Ronda impresses you by its peculiar silence. The lack of sound is the more noticeable in the frosty clearness of the atmosphere, and is only emphasised by an occasional cry that floats, from some vast distance, along the air. The coldness, too, has pinched the features of the people, and they seem to grow old even earlier than in the rest of Andalusia. Strapping fellows of thirty with slim figures and a youthful air have the faces of elderly men, and their skin is hard, stained and furrowed. The women, ageing as rapidly, have no gaiety. If Spanish girls have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag; the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of vultures. It is easily comprehensible that the Spanish stage should have taken the old woman as one of its most constant, characteristic types. But in Ronda even the girls have a weary look, as though life were not so easy a matter as in warmer places, or as the good God intended; and they seem to suffer from the brevity of youth, which is no sooner come than gone. They walk inertly, clothed in sombre colours, their hair not elaborately arranged as would have it the poorest cigarette-girl, but merely knotted, without the flower which the Sevillan is popularly said to insist upon even at the cost of a dinner. And when they go out the grey shawls they wrap about their heads add to their unattractiveness.

IV

The Swineherd

But if Ronda itself is a somewhat dull and unsympathetic place with nothing more for the edification of the visitor than a melodramatic chasm, the surrounding country is worthy the most extravagant epithets. The mountains have the gloomy barrenness, the slate-grey colour of volcanic ranges; they encircle the town in a gigantic amphitheatre, rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. They seem, indeed, to wear a sombre insolence of demeanour as though the aspect of human kind moved them to lofty contempt. And in their magnificent desolation they offer a fit environment for the exploits of Byronic heroes. The handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself in that theatrical scene most thoroughly at home; nor did Prosper Mérimée fail to seize the opportunity, for the mountains of Ronda were the very hunting-ground of Don Josè, who lost his soul for Carmen. But as a matter of history they were likewise the haunts of brigands in flesh and blood — malefactors in the past had that sense of the picturesque which now is vested in the amateur photographer — and this particular district was as dangerous to the travelling merchant as any in Spain.

The environs of Ronda are barren and unfertile, the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy voice singing a peasant song, a malagueña. I paused to listen, but the sadness was almost unendurable; and it went on interminably, wailing through the air with the insistent monotony of its Moorish origin. I struck into the olives to find the singer and met a swineherd, guarding a dozen brown pigs, a youth thin of face, with dark eyes, clothed in undressed sheep-skins; and the brown wool gave him a singular appearance of community with the earth about him. He stood among the trees like a wild creature, more beast than man, and the lank, busy pigs burrowed around him, running to and fro, with little squeals. He ceased his song when I approached and looked up timidly. I spoke to him but he made no answer, I offered a cigarette but he shook his head.

I went my way, and at first the road was not quite solitary. Two men passed me on donkeys. ‘Vaya Usted con Dios!’ they cried— ‘Go you with God’: it is the commonest greeting in Spain, and the most charming; the roughest peasant calls it as you meet him. A dozen grey asses went towards Ronda, one after the other, their panniers filled with stones; they walked with hanging heads, resigned to all their pain. But when at last I came into the mountains the loneliness was terrible. Not even the olive grew on those dark masses of rock, windswept and sterile; there was not a hut nor a cottage to testify of man’s existence, not even a path such as the wild things of the heights might use. All life, indeed, appeared incongruous with that overwhelming solitude.

Daylight was waning as I returned, but when I passed the olive-grove, where many hours before I had heard the malagueña, the same monotonous song still moaned along the air, carrying back my thoughts to the swineherd. I wondered what he thought of while he sang, whether the sad words brought him some dim emotion. How curious was the life he led! I suppose he had never travelled further than his native town; he could neither write nor read. Madrid to him was a city where the streets were paved with silver and the King’s palace was of fine gold. He was born and grew to manhood and tended his swine, and some day he would marry and beget children, and at length die and return to the Mother of all things. It seemed to me that nowadays, when civilisation has become the mainstay of our lives, it is only with such beings as these that it is possible to realise the closeness of the tie between mankind and nature. To the poor herdsman still clung the soil; he was no foreign element in the scene, but as much part of it as the stunted olives, belonging to the earth intimately as the trees among which he stood, as the beasts he tended.

When I came near the town the sun was setting. In the west, tempestuous clouds were massed upon one another, and the sun shone blood-red above them; but as it sank they were riven asunder, and I saw a great furnace that lit up the whole sky. The mountains were purple, unreal as the painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his court of archangels, Beelzebub, Belial, Moloch, Abaddon.

I had discovered in the morning, from the steeple of Santa Maria, a queer ruined church, and was oddly impressed by the bare façade, with the yawning apertures of empty windows. I went to it, but every entrance was bricked up save one, which had a door of rough boards fastened by a padlock; and in a neighbouring house I found an old man with a key. It was a spot of utter desolation; the roof had gone or had never been. The custodian could not tell whether the church was the wreck of an old building or a framework that had never been completed; the walls were falling to decay. Along the nave and in the chapels trees were growing, shrubs and rank weeds; it was curious the utter ruin in the midst of the populous town. Pigs ran hither and thither, feeding, with noisy grunts, as they burrowed about the crumbling altar.

The old man inquired whether I wished to buy the absolute uselessness of the place fascinated me. I asked the price. He looked me up and down, and seeing I was foreign, suggested a ridiculous sum. And while I amused myself with bargaining, I wondered what on earth one could do with a ruined church in Ronda. Half a dozen fantastic notions passed through my mind, but they were really too melodramatic.

And now when the sun had set I returned. Notwithstanding his suspicions, I induced the keeper to give me his key; he could not understand what I desired at such an hour in that solitary place, and asked if I wished to sleep there! But I calmed his fears with a peseta — money goes a long way in Spain — and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests officiated, passing quietly from side to side, with bows and genuflections. The bell tinkled as they raised an invisible host. Soon it became quite dark, and the moon shone through the great empty windows of the façade.

V

Medinat Az-Zahra

In what you divine rather than in what you see lies half the charm of Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things, in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. Often the Spaniard on his horse vanished, and I saw a Muslim knight riding in pride and glory, his velvet cloak bespattered with the gold initial of his lady, and her favour fluttering from his lance. Once near Granada, standing on a hill, I watched the blood-red sun set tempestuously over the plain; and presently in the distance the gnarled olive-trees seemed living beings, and I saw contending hosts, two ghostly armies silently battling with one another; I saw the flash of scimitars, and the gleam of standards, the whiteness of the turbans. They fought with horrible carnage, and the land was crimson with their blood. Then the sun fell below the horizon, and all again was still and lifeless.

And what can be more fascinating than that magic city of Az-Zahra, the wonder of its age, of which now not a stone remains? It was made to satisfy the whim of a concubine by a Sultan whose flamboyant passion moved him to displace mountains for the sake of his beloved; and the memory thereof is lost so completely that even its situation till lately was uncertain. Az-Zahra the Fairest said to Abd-er-Rahmān, her lord: ‘Raise me a city that shall take my name and be mine.’ The Khalif built at the foot of the mountain which is called the Hill of the Bride; but when at last the lady, from the great hall of the palace, gazed at the snow-white city contrasting with the dark mountain, she remarked: ‘See, O Master! how beautiful this girl looks in the arms of yonder Ethiopian.’ The jealous Khalif immediately commanded the removal of the offending hill; and when he was convinced the task was impossible, ordered that the oaks and other mountain trees which grew upon it should be uprooted, and fig-trees and almonds planted in their stead.

Imagine the Hall of the Khalif, with walls of transparent and many-coloured marble, with roof of gold; on each side were eight doors fixed upon arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with precious metals and with precious stones; and when the sun penetrated them, the reflection of its rays upon the roof and walls was sufficient to deprive the beholders of sight! In the centre was a great basin filled with quicksilver, and the Sultan, wishing to terrify a courtier, would cause the metal to be set in motion, whereupon the apartment would seem traversed by flashes of lightning, and all the company would fall a-trembling.

The old author tells of running streams and of limpid water, of stately buildings for the household guards, and magnificent palaces for the reception of high functionaries of state; of the thronging soldiers, pages, eunuchs, slaves, of all nations and of all religions, in sumptuous habiliments of silk and of brocade; of judges, theologians, and poets, walking with becoming gravity in the ample courts.... Alas! that poets now should rush through Fleet Street with unseemly haste, attired uncouthly in bowler hats and in preposterous tweeds!

From the celebrated legend of Roderick the Goth to that last scene when Boabdil handed the keys of Granada to King Ferdinand, the history of the Moorish occupation reads far more like romance than like sober fact. It is rich with every kind of passionate incident; it has all the strange vicissitudes of oriental history. What career could be more wonderful than that of Almanzor, who began life as a professional letter-writer, (a calling which you may still see exercised in the public places of Madrid or Seville,) and ended it as absolute ruler of an Empire! His charm of manner, his skill in flattery, the military genius which he developed when occasion called, his generosity and sense of justice, his love of literature and art, make him a figure to be contemplated with admiration; and when you add his utter lack of scruple, his selfishness, his ingratitude, his perfidy, you have a character complex enough to satisfy the most exacting.

Those who would read of these things may find an admirable account in Mr. Lane-Poole’s Moors in Spain; but I cannot renounce the pleasure of giving one characteristic detail. After the death of Abd-er-Rahmān, the builder of that magnificent city of Az-Zahra, a paper was found in his own handwriting, upon which he had noted those days in his long reign which had been free from all sorrow: they numbered fourteen. Sovereign lord of a country than which there is on earth none more delightful, his life had been of uninterrupted prosperity; success in peace and war attended him always; he possessed everything that it was possible for man to have. These are the observations of Al Makkary, the Arabic historian, when he narrates the incident:

O man of understanding! Wonder and observe the small portion of real happiness the world affords even in the most enviable position. Praise be given to Him, the Lord of eternal glory and everlasting empire! There is no God but He the Almighty, the Giver of Empire to whomsoever He pleases.

VI

The Mosque

But Cordova, from which Az-Zahra was about four miles distant, has visible delights that can vie with its neighbour’s vanished pomp. I know nothing that can give a more poignant emotion than the interior of the mosque at Cordova; and yet I remember well the splendour of barbaric and oriental magnificence which was my first sight of St. Mark’s at Venice, as I came abruptly from the darkness of an alley into the golden light of the Piazza. But to me at least the famous things of Italy, known from childhood in picture and in description, afford more than anything a joyful sense of recognition, a feeling as it were of home-coming, such as may hope to experience the devout Christian on entering upon his heritage in the Kingdom of Heaven. The mosque of Cordova is oriental and barbaric too; but I had never seen nor imagined anything in the least resembling it; there was no disillusionment possible, as too often in Italy, for the accounts I had read prepared me not at all for that overwhelming impression. It was so weird and strange, I felt myself transported suddenly to another world.

They were singing Vespers when I entered, and I heard the shrill voices of choristers crying the responses; it did not sound like Christian music. The mosque was dimly lit, the air heavy with incense; and I saw this forest of pillars, extending every way, as far as the eye could reach. It was mysterious and awe-inspiring as those enchanted forests of one’s childhood in which huge trees grew in serried masses and where in cavernous darkness goblins and giants of the fairy-tales, wild beasts and monstrous shapes, lay in wait for the terrified traveller who had lost his way. I wandered, keeping the Christian chapels out of sight, trying to lose myself among the columns; and now and then gained views of horseshoe arches interlacing, decorated with Moorish tracery.

At length I came to the Mihrab, which is the Holy of Holies, the most exquisite as well as the most sacred part of the mosque. It is approached by a vestibule of which the roof is a miracle of grace, with mosaics that glow like precious stones, ultramarine, scarlet, emerald, and gold. The arch between the chambers is ornamented with four pillars of coloured marble, and again with mosaic, the gold letters of an Arabic inscription forming on the deep sapphire of the background a decorative pattern. The Mihrab itself, which contained the famous Koran of Othman, has seven sides of white marble, and the roof is a huge shell cut from a single block.

I tried to picture to myself the mosque before the Christians laid their desecrating hands upon it. The floor was of coloured tiles, tiles such as may still be seen in the Alhambra of Granada and in the Alcazar at Seville. The columns are of marble, of porphyry and jasper; tradition says they came from Carthage, from pagan temples in France and Christian churches in Spain; they are slender and unadorned, they must have contrasted astonishingly with the roof of larch wood, all ablaze with gold and with vermilion.

There were three hundred chandeliers; and eight thousand lamps — cast of Christian bells — hung from the roof. The Arab writer tells of gold shining from the ceiling like fire, blazing like lightning when it darts across the clouds. The pulpit, wherein was kept the Koran, was of ivory and of exquisite woods, of ebony and sandal, of plantain, citron and aloe, fastened together with gold and silver nails and encrusted with priceless gems. It needed six Khalifs and Almanzor, the great Vizier, to complete the mosque of which Arab writers, with somewhat prosaic enthusiasm, said that ‘in all the lands of Islam there was none of equal size, none more admirable in its workmanship, in its construction and durability.’

Then the Christians conquered Cordova, and the charming civilisation of the Moors was driven out by monks and priests and soldiers. First they built only chapels in the outermost aisles; but in a little while, to make room for a choir, they destroyed six rows of columns; and at last, when Master Martin Luther had rekindled Catholic piety, they set up a great church in the very middle of the mosque. The story of this vandalism is somewhat quaint, and one detail at least affords a suggestion that might prove useful in the present time; for the Town Council of Cordova menaced with death all who should assist in the work: one imagines that a similar threat from the Lord Mayor of London might have a salutary effect upon the restorers of Westminster Abbey or the decorators of St. Paul’s. How very much more entertaining must have been the world when absolutism was the fashion and the preposterous method of universal suffrage had never been considered! But the Chapter, as those in power always are, was bent upon restoring, and induced Charles V. to give the necessary authority. The king, however, had not understood what they wished to do, and when later he visited Cordova and saw what had happened, he turned to the dignitaries who were pointing out the improvements and said: ‘You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world.’ The words show a fine scorn; but as a warning to later generations it would have been more to the purpose to cut off a dozen priestly heads.

Yet oddly enough the Christian additions are not so utterly discordant as one would expect! Hernan Ruiz did the work well, even though it was work he might conveniently have been drawn and quartered for doing. Typically Spanish in its fine proportion, in its exuberance of fantastic decoration, his church is a masterpiece of plateresque architecture. Nor are the priests entirely out of harmony with the building wherein they worship. For an hour they had sung Vespers, and the deep voices of the canons, chaunting monotonously, rang weird and long among the columns; but they finished, and left the choir one by one, walking silently across the church to the sacristy. The black cassock and the scarlet hood made a fine contrast, while the short cambric surplice added to the costume a most delicate grace. One of them paused to speak with two ladies in mantillas, and the three made a picturesque group, suggesting all manner of old Spanish romance.

VII

The Court of Oranges

I went into the cathedral from the side and issuing by another door, found myself in the Court of Oranges. The setting sun touched it with warm light and overhead the sky was wonderfully blue. In Moorish times the mosque was separated from the court by no dividing-wall, so that the arrangement of pillars within was continued by the even lines of orange-trees; these are of great age and size, laden with fruit, and in their copious foliage stand with a trim self-assurance that is quite imposing.

In the centre, round a fountain into which poured water from jets at the four corners, stood a number of persons with jars of earthenware and bright copper cans. One girl held herself with the fine erectness of a Caryatid, while her jar, propped against the side, filled itself with the cold, sparkling water. A youth, some vessel in his hand, leaned over in an attitude of easy grace; and looking into her eyes, appeared to pay compliments, which she heard with superb indifference. A little boy ran up, and the girl held aside her jar while he put his mouth to the spout and drank. Then, as it overflowed, she lifted it with comely motion to her head and slowly walked away.

By now the canons had unrobed, and several strolled about the court in the sun, smoking cigarettes. The acolytes with the removal of their scarlet cassocks, were become somewhat ragged urchins playing pitch and toss with much gesture and vociferation. Two of them quarrelled fiercely because one player would not yield the halfpenny he had certainly lost, and the altercation must have ended in blows if a corpulent, elderly cleric had not indignantly reproved them, and boxed their ears. A row of tattered beggars, very well contented in the sunshine, were seated on a step, likewise smoking cigarettes, and obviously they did not consider their walk of life unduly hard.

And the thought impressed itself upon me while I lingered in that peaceful spot, that there was far more to be said for the simple pleasures of sense than northern folk would have us believe. The English have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of mind. It is well occasionally to leave the eager turmoil of great cities for such a place as this, where one may learn that there are other, more natural ways of living, that it is possible still to spend long days, undisturbed by restless passion, without regret or longing, content in the various show that nature offers, asking only that the sun should shine and the happy seasons run their course.

An English engineer whom I had seen at the hotel, approaching me, expressed the idea in his own graphic manner. ‘Down here there are a good sight more beer and skittles in life than up in Sheffield!’

One canon especially interested me, a little thin man, bent and wrinkled, apparently of fabulous age, but still something of a dandy, for he wore his clothes with a certain air, as though half a century before, byronically, he had been quite a devil with the ladies. The silver buckle on his shoes was most elegant, and he protruded his foot as though the violet silk of his stocking gave him a discreet pleasure. To the very backbone he was an optimist, finding existence evidently so delightful that it did not even need rose-coloured spectacles. He was an amiable old man, perhaps a little narrow, but very indulgent to the follies of others. He had committed no sin himself — for many years: a suspicion of personal vanity is in itself proof of a pure and gentle mind; and as for the sins of others — they were probably not heinous, and at all events would gain forgiveness. The important thing, surely, was to be sound in dogma. The day wore on and the sun now shone only in a narrow space; and this the canon perambulated, smoking the end of a cigarette, the delectable frivolity of which contrasted pleasantly with his great age. He nodded affably to other priests as they passed, a pair of young men, and one obese old creature with white hair and an expression of comfortable self-esteem. He removed his hat with a great and courteous sweep when a lady of his acquaintance crossed his path. The priests basking in the warmth were like four great black cats. It was indeed a pleasant spot, and contentment oozed into one by every pore. The canon rolled himself another cigarette, smiling as he inhaled the first sweet whiffs; and one could not but think the sovereign herb must greatly ease the journey along the steep and narrow way which leads to Paradise. The smoke rose into the air lazily, and the old cleric paused now and again to look at it, the little smile of self-satisfaction breaking on his lips.

Up in the North, under the cold grey sky, God Almighty may be a hard taskmaster, and the Kingdom of Heaven is attained only by much endeavour; but in Cordova these things come more easily. The aged priest walks in the sun and smokes his cigarillo. Heaven is not such an inaccessible place after all. Evidently he feels that he has done his duty — with the help of Havana tobacco — in that state of life wherein it has pleased a merciful providence to place him; and St. Peter would never be so churlish as to close the golden gates in the face of an ancient canon who sauntered to them jauntily, with the fag end of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Let us cultivate our cabbages in the best of all possible worlds; and afterwards — Dieu pardonnera; c’est son métier.

Three months later in the Porvenir, under the heading, ‘Suicide of a Priest,’ I read that one of these very canons of the Cathedral at Cordova had shot himself. A report was heard, said the journal, and the Civil Guard arriving, found the man prostrate with blood pouring from his ear, a revolver by his side. He was transported to the hospital, the sacrament administered, and he died. In his pockets they found a letter, a pawn-ticket, a woman’s bracelet, and some peppermint lozenges. He was thirty-five years old. The newspaper moralised as follows: ‘When even the illustrious order to which the defunct belonged is tainted with such a crime, it is well to ask whither tends the incredulity of society which finds an end to its sufferings in the barrel of a revolver. Let moralists and philosophers combat with all their might this dreadful tendency; let them make even the despairing comprehend that death is not the highest good but the passage to an unknown world where, according to Christian belief, the ill deeds of this existence are punished and the virtuous rewarded.’

VIII

Cordova

Ronda, owing its peculiarities to the surrounding mountains, was not really very characteristic of the country, and might equally well have been an highland townlet in any part of Southern Europe. But Cordova offers immediately the full sensation of Andalusia. It is absolutely a Moorish city, white and taciturn, so that you are astonished to meet people in European dress rather than Arabs, in shuffling yellow slippers. The streets are curiously silent; for the carriage, as in Tangiers, is done by mules and donkeys, which walk so quietly that you never hear them. Sometimes you are warned by a deep-voiced ‘Cuidado,’ but more often a pannier brushing you against the wall brings the first knowledge of their presence. On looking up you are again surprised to see not a great shining negro in a burnouse, but a Spaniard in tight trousers, with a broad-brimmed hat.

And Cordova has that sweet, exhilarating perfume of Andalusia than which nothing gives more vividly the complete feeling of the country. Those travellers must be obtuse of nostril who do not recognise different smells, grateful or offensive, in different places; no other peculiarity is more distinctive, so that an odour crossing by chance one’s sense is able to recall suddenly all the complicated impressions of a strange land. When I return from England it is always that subtle fragrance which first strikes me, a mingling in warm sunlight of orange-blossom, incense, and cigarette smoke; and two whiffs of a certain brand of tobacco are sufficient to bring back to me Seville, the most enchanting of all my memories. I suppose that nowhere else are cigarettes consumed so incessantly; for in Andalusia it is not only certain classes who use them, but every one, without distinction of age or station — from the ragamuffin selling lottery-tickets in the street to the portly, solemn priest, to the burly countryman, the shop-keeper, the soldier. After all, no better means of killing time have ever been devised, and consequently to smoke them affords an occupation which most thoroughly suits the Spaniard.

I looked at Cordova from the bell-tower of the cathedral. The roofs, very lovely in their diversity of colour, were of rounded tiles, fading with every variety of delicate shade from russet and brown to yellow and the tenderest green. From the courtyards, here and there, rose a tall palm, or an orange-tree, like a dash of jade against the brilliant sun. The houses, plainly whitewashed, have from the outside so mean a look that it is surprising to find them handsome and spacious within. They are built, Moorish fashion, round a patio, which in Cordova at least is always gay with flowers. When you pass the iron gates and note the contrast between the snowy gleaming of the street and that southern greenery, the suggestion is inevitable of charming people who must rest there in the burning heat of summer. With those surroundings and in such a country passion grows surely like a poisonous plant. At night, in the starry darkness, how irresistible must be the flashing eyes of love, how eloquent the pleading of whispered sighs! But woe to the maid who admits the ardent lover among the orange-trees, her head reeling with the sweet intoxication of the blossom; for the Spanish gallant is fickle, quick to forget the vows he spoke so earnestly: he soon grows tired of kissing, and mounting his horse, rides fast away.

The uniformity of lime-washed houses makes Cordova the most difficult place in the world wherein to find your way. The streets are exactly alike, so narrow that a carriage could hardly pass, paved with rough cobbles, and tortuous: their intricacy is amazing, labyrinthine; they wind in and out of one another, leading nowhither; they meander on for half a mile and stop suddenly, or turn back, so that you are forced to go in the direction you came. You may wander for hours, trying to find some point that from the steeple appeared quite close. Sometimes you think they are interminable.

IX

The Bridge of Calahorra

The bridge that the Moors built over the Guadalquivir straggles across the water with easy arches. Somewhat dilapidated and very beautiful, it has not the strenuous look of such things in England, and the mere sight of it fills you with comfort. The clustered houses, with an added softness from the light burning mellow on their roofs and on their white walls, increase the happy impression that the world is not necessarily hurried and toilful. And the town, separated from the river by no formal embankment, lounges at the water’s edge like a giant, prone on the grass and lazy, stretching his limbs after the mid-day sleep.

There is no precipitation in such a place as Cordova; life is quite long enough for all that it is really needful to do; to him who waits come all things, and a little waiting more or less can be of no great consequence. Let everything be taken very leisurely, for there is ample time. Yet in other parts of Andalusia they say the Cordovese are the greatest liars and the biggest thieves in Spain, which points to considerable industry. The traveller, hearing this, will doubtless ask what business has the pot to call the kettle black; and it is true that the standard of veracity throughout the country is by no means high. But this can scarcely be termed a vice, for the Andalusians see in it nothing discreditable, and it can be proved as exactly as a proposition of Euclid that vice and virtue are solely matters of opinion. In Southern Spain bosom friends lie to one another with complete freedom; no man would take his wife’s word, but would believe only what he thought true, and think no worse of her when he caught her fibbing. Mendacity is a thing so perfectly understood that no one is abashed by detection. In England most men equivocate and nearly all women, but they are ashamed to be discovered; they blush and stammer and hesitate, or fly into a passion; the wiser Spaniard laughs, shrugging his shoulders, and utters a dozen rapid falsehoods to make up for the first. It is always said that a good liar needs an excellent memory, but he wants more qualities than that — unblushing countenance, the readiest wit, a manner to beget confidence. In fact it is so difficult to lie systematically and well that the ardour of the Andalusians in that pursuit can be ascribed only to an innate characteristic. Their imaginations, indeed, are so exuberant that the bald fact is to them grotesque and painful. They are like writers in love with words for their own sake, who cannot make the plainest statement without a gay parade of epithet and metaphor. They embroider and decorate, they colour and enhance the trivial details of circumstance. They must see themselves perpetually in an attitude; they must never fail to be effective. They lie for art’s sake, without reason or rhyme, from mere devilry, often when it can only harm them. Mendacity then becomes an intellectual exercise, such as the poet’s sonneteering to an imaginary lady-love.

But the Cordovan very naturally holds himself in no such unflattering estimation. The motto of his town avers that he is a warlike person and a wise one:

Cordoba, casa de guerrera gente

Y de sabiduria clara fuente!

And the history thereof, with its University and its Khalifs, bears him out. Art and science flourished there when the rest of Europe was enveloped in mediæval darkness: when our Saxon ancestors lived in dirty hovels, barbaric brutes who knew only how to kill, to eat, and to propagate their species, the Moors of Cordova cultivated all the elegancies of life from verse-making to cleanliness.

I was standing on the bridge. The river flowed tortuously through the fertile plain, broad and shallow, and in it the blue sky and the white houses of the city were brightly mirrored. In the distance, like a vapour of amethyst, rose the mountains; while at my feet, in mid-stream, there were two mills which might have been untouched since Moorish days. There had been no rain for months, the water stood very low, and here and there were little islands of dry yellow sand, on which grew reeds and sedge. In such a spot might easily have wandered the half-naked fisherman of the oriental tale, bewailing in melodious verse the hardness of his lot; since to his net came no fish, seeking a broken pot or a piece of iron wherewith to buy himself a dinner. There might he find a ring half-buried in the sand, which, when he rubbed to see if it were silver, a smoke would surely rise from the water, increasing till the light of day was obscured; and half dead with fear, he would perceive at last a gigantic body towering above him, and a voice more terrible than the thunder of Allah, crying: ‘What wishest thou from thy slave, O king? Know that I am of the Jin, and Suleyman, whose name be exalted, enslaved me to the ring that thou hast found.’

In Cordova recollections of the Arabian Nights haunt you till the commonest sights assume a fantastic character, and the frankly impossible becomes mere matter of fact. You wonder whether your life is real or whether you have somehow reverted to the days when Scheherazade, with her singular air of veracity, recited such enthralling stories to her lord as to save her own life and that of many other maidens. I looked along the river and saw three slender trees bending over it, reflecting in the placid water their leafless branches, and under them knelt three women washing clothes. Were they three beautiful princesses whose fathers had been killed, and they expelled from their kingdom and thus reduced to menial occupations? Who knows? Indeed, I thought it very probable, for so many royal persons have come down in the world of late; but I did not approach them, since king’s daughters under these circumstances have often lost one eye, and their morals are nearly always of the worst description.

X

Puerta del Puente

I went back to the old gate which led to the bridge. Close by, in the little place, was the hut of the consumo, the local custom-house, with officials lounging at the door or sitting straddle-legged on chairs, lazily smoking. Opposite was a tobacconist’s, with the gaudy red and yellow sign, Campañia arrendataria de tabacos, and a dram-shop where three hardy Spaniards from the mountains stood drinking aguardiente. Than this, by the way, there is in the world no more insidious liquor, for at first you think its taste of aniseed and peppermint very disagreeable; but perseverance, here as in other human affairs, has its reward, and presently you develop for it a liking which time increases to enthusiasm. In Spain, the land of custom and usage, everything is done in a certain way; and there is a proper manner to drink aguardiente. To sip it would show a lamentable want of decorum. A Spaniard lifts the little glass to his lips, and with a comic, abrupt motion tosses the contents into his mouth, immediately afterwards drinking water, a tumbler of which is always given with the spirit. It is really the most epicurean of intoxicants because the charm lies in the after-taste. The water is so cool and refreshing after the fieriness; it gives, without the gasconnade, the emotion Keats experienced when he peppered his mouth with cayenne for the greater enjoyment of iced claret.

But the men wiped their mouths with their hands and came out of the wine shop, mounting their horses which stood outside — shaggy, long-haired beasts with high saddles and great box-stirrups. They rode slowly through the gate one after the other, in the easy slouching way of men who have been used to the saddle all their lives and in the course of the week are accustomed to go a good many miles in an easy jog-trot to and from the town. It seems to me that the Spaniards resolve themselves into types more distinctly than is usual in northern countries, while between individuals there is less difference. These three, clean-shaven and uniformly dressed, of middle size, stout, with heavy strong features and small eyes, certainly resembled one another very strikingly. They were the typical inn-keepers of Goya’s pictures but obviously could not all keep inns; doubtless they were farmers, horse-dealers, or forage-merchants, shrewd men of business, with keen eyes for the main chance. That class is the most trustworthy in Spain, kind, hospitable, and honest; they are old-fashioned people with many antique customs, and preserve much of the courteous dignity which made their fathers famous.

A string of grey donkeys came along the bridge, their panniers earth-laden, poor miserable things that plodded slowly and painfully, with heads bent down, placing one foot before the other with the donkey’s peculiar motion, patiently doing a thing they had patiently done ever since they could bear a load. They seemed to have a dull feeling that it was no use to make a fuss, or to complain; it would just go on till they dropped down dead and their carcases were sold for leather and glue. There was a Spanish note in the red trappings, braided and betasselled, but all worn, discoloured and stained.

Inside the gate they stopped, waiting in a huddled group, with the same heavy patience, for the examination of the consumo. An officer of the custom-house went round with a long steel prong, which he ran into the baskets one by one, to see that there was nothing dutiable hidden in the earth. Then, sparing of his words, he made a sign to the driver and sat down again straddle-wise on his chair. ‘Arre, burra!’ The first donkey walked slowly on, and as they heard the tinkling of the leader’s bell the rest stepped forward in the long line, their heads hanging down, with that hopeless movement of the feet.

In the night, wandering at random through the streets, their silent whiteness filled me again with that intoxicating sensation of the Arabian Nights. I looked through the iron gateways as I passed, into the patios with their dark foliage, and once I heard the melancholy twang of a guitar. I was sure that in one of those houses the three princesses had thrown off their disguise and sat radiant in queenly beauty, their raven tresses falling in a hundred plaits over their shoulders, their fingers stained with henna and their long eyelashes darkened with kohl. But alas! though I lost my way I found them not.

Yet many an amorous Spaniard, too passionate to be admitted within his mistress’ house, stood at her window. This method of philandering, surely most conducive to the ideal, is variously known as comer hierro, to eat iron, and pelar la pava, to pluck the turkey. One imagines that the cold air of a winter’s night must render the most ardent lover platonic. It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby. So it is doubtless wise to separate true love by iron bars, and perchance beauty’s eyes flash more darkly to the gallant standing without the gate; illusions, the magic flower of passion, arise more willingly. But in Spain the blood of youth is very hot, love laughs at most restraints and notwithstanding these precautions, often enough there is a catastrophe. The Spaniard, who will seduce any girl he can, is pitiless under like circumstances to his own womenkind; so there is much weeping, the girl is turned out of doors and falls readily into the hands of the procuress. In the brothels of Seville or of Madrid she finds at least a roof and bread to eat; and the fickle swain goes his way rejoicing.

I found myself at last near the Puerta del Puente, and I stood again on the Moorish bridge. The town was still and mysterious in the night, and the moon shone down on the water with a hard and brilliant coldness. The three trees with their bare branches looked yet more slender, naked and alone, like pre-Raphaelite trees in a landscape of Pélléas et Mélisande; the broad river, almost stagnant, was extraordinarily calm and silent. I wondered what strange things the placid Guadalquivir had seen through the centuries; on its bosom many a body had been borne towards the sea. It recalled those mysterious waters of the Eastern tales which brought to the marble steps of palaces great chests in which lay a fair youth’s headless corpse or a sleeping beautiful maid.

XI

Seville

The impression left by strange towns and cities is often a matter of circumstance, depending upon events in the immediate past; or on the chance which, during his earliest visit, there befell the traveller. After a stormy passage across the Channel, Newhaven, from the mere fact of its situation on solid earth, may gain a fascination which closer acquaintance can never entirely destroy; and even Birmingham, first seen by a lurid sunset, may so affect the imagination as to appear for ever like some infernal, splendid city, restless with the hurried toil of gnomes and goblins. So to myself Seville means ten times more than it can mean to others. I came to it after weary years in London, heartsick with much hoping, my mind dull with drudgery; and it seemed a land of freedom. There I became at last conscious of my youth, and it seemed a belvedere upon a new life. How can I forget the delight of wandering in the Sierpes, released at length from all imprisoning ties, watching the various movement as though it were a stage-play, yet half afraid that the falling curtain would bring back reality! The songs, the dances, the happy idleness of orange-gardens, the gay turbulence of Seville by night; ah! there at least I seized life eagerly, with both hands, forgetting everything but that time was short and existence full of joy. I sat in the warm sunshine, inhaling the pleasant odours, reminding myself that I had no duty to do then, or the morrow, or the day after. I lay a-bed thinking how happy, effortless and free would be my day. Mounting my horse, I clattered through the narrow streets, over the cobbles, till I came to the country; the air was fresh and sweet, and Aguador loved the spring mornings. When he put his feet to the springy turf he gave a little shake of pleasure, and without a sign from me broke into a gallop. To the amazement of shepherds guarding their wild flocks, to the confusion of herds of brown pigs, scampering hastily as we approached, he and I excited by the wind singing in our ears, we pelted madly through the country. And the whole land laughed with the joy of living.

But I love also the recollection of Seville in the grey days of December, when the falling rain offered a grateful contrast to the unvarying sunshine. Then new sights delighted the eye, new perfumes the nostril. In the decay of that long southern autumn a more sombre opulence was added to the gay colours; a different spirit filled the air, so that I realised suddenly that old romantic Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. It lay a-dying still, gorgeous in corruption, sober yet flamboyant, rich and poverty-stricken, squalid, magnificent. The white streets, the dripping trees, the clouds gravid with rain, gave to all things an adorable melancholy, a sad, poetic charm. Looking back, I cannot dismiss the suspicion that my passionate emotions were somewhat ridiculous, but at twenty-three one can afford to lack a sense of humour.

But Seville at first is full of disillusion. It has offered abundant material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more imposing proportions, he colours gaudily; Nature for him is ever posturing in the full glare of footlights. Really he stands on no higher level than the housemaid who sees in every woman a duchess in black velvet, an Aubrey Plantagenet in plain John Smith. So I, in common with many another traveller, expected to find in the Guadalquivir a river of transparent green, with orange-groves along its banks, where wandered ox-eyed youths and maidens beautiful. Palm-trees, I thought, rose towards heaven, like passionate souls longing for release from earthly bondage; Spanish women, full-breasted and sinuous, danced boleros, fandangos, while the air rang with the joyous sound of castanets, and toreadors in picturesque habiliments twanged the light guitar.

Alas! the Guadalquivir is like yellow mud, and moored to the busy quays lie cargo-boats lading fruit or grain or mineral; there no perfume scents the heavy air. The nights, indeed, are calm and clear, and the stars shine brightly; but the river banks see no amours more romantic than those of stokers from Liverpool or Glasgow, and their lady-loves have neither youth nor beauty.

Yet Seville has many a real charm to counter-balance these lost illusions. He that really knows it, like an ardent lover with his mistress’ imperfections, would have no difference; even the Guadalquivir, so matter-of-fact, really so prosaic, has an unimagined attractiveness; the crowded shipping, the hurrying porters, add to that sensation of vivacity which is of Seville the most fascinating characteristic. And Seville is an epitome of Andalusia, with its life and death, with its colour and vivid contrasts, with its boyish gaiety.

It is a city of delightful ease, of freedom and sunshine, of torrid heat. There it does not matter what you do, nor when, nor how you do it. There is none to hinder you, none to watch. Each takes his ease, and is content that his neighbour should do the like. Doubtless people are lazy in Seville, but good heavens! why should one be so terribly strenuous? Go into the Plaza Nueva, and you will see it filled with men of all ages, of all classes, ‘taking the sun’; they promenade slowly, untroubled by any mental activity, or sit on benches between the palm-trees, smoking cigarettes; perhaps the more energetic read the bull-fighting news in the paper. They are not ambitious, and they do not greatly care to make their fortunes; so long as they have enough to eat and drink — food is very cheap — and cigarettes to smoke, they are quite happy. The Corporation provides seats, and the sun shines down for nothing — so let them sit in it and warm themselves. I daresay it is as good a way of getting through life as most others.

A southern city never reveals its true charm till the summer, and few English know what Seville is under the burning sun of July. It was built for the great heat, and it is only then that the refreshing coolness of the patio can be appreciated. In the streets the white glare is mitigated by awnings that stretch from house to house, and the half light in the Sierpes, the High Street, has a curious effect; the people in their summer garb walk noiselessly, as though the warmth made sound impossible. Towards evening the sail-cloths are withdrawn, and a breath of cold air sinks down; the population bestirs itself, and along the Sierpes the cafés become suddenly crowded and noisy.

Then, for it was too hot to ride earlier, I would mount my horse and cross the river. The Guadalquivir had lost its winter russet, and under the blue sky gained varied tints of liquid gold, of emerald and of sapphire. I lingered in Triana, the gipsy-quarter, watching the people. Beautiful girls stood at the windows, so that the whole way was lined with them, and their lips were not unwilling to break into charming smiles. One especially I remember who was used to sit on a balcony at a street-corner; her hair was irreproachable in its elaborate arrangement, and the red carnation in it gleamed like fire against the night. Her face was long, fairer-complexioned than is common, with regular and delicate features. She sat at her balcony, with a huge book open on her knee, which she read with studied disregard of the passers-by; but when I looked back sometimes I saw that she had lifted her eyes, lustrous and dark, and they met mine gravely.

And in the country I passed through long fields of golden corn, which reached as far as I could see; I remembered the spring, when it had all been new, soft, fresh, green. And presently I turned round to look at Seville in the distance, bathed in brilliant light, glowing as though its walls were built of yellow flame. The Giralda arose in its wonderful grace like an arrow; so slim, so comely, it reminded one of an Arab youth, with long, thin limbs. With the setting sun, gradually the city turned rosy-red and seemed to lose all substantiality, till it became a many-shaped mist that was dissolved in the tenderness of the sky.

Late in the night I stood at my window looking at the cloudless heaven. From the earth ascended, like incense, the mellow odours of summer-time; the belfry of the neighbouring church stood boldly outlined against the darkness, and the storks that had built their nest upon it were motionless, not stirring even as the bells rang out the hours. The city slept, and it seemed that I alone watched in the silence; the sky still was blue, and the stars shone in their countless millions. I thought of the city that never rested, of London with its unceasing roar, the endless streets, the greyness. And all around me was a quiet serenity, a tranquillity such as the Christian may hope shall reward him in Paradise for the troublous pilgrimage of life. But that is long ago and passed for ever.

XII

The Alcazar

Arriving at Seville the recollection of Cordova took me quickly to the Alcazar; but I was a little disappointed. It has been ill and tawdrily restored, with crude pigments, with gold that is too bright and too clean; but even before that, Charles V. and his successors had made additions out of harmony with Moorish feeling. Of the palace where lived the Mussulman Kings nothing, indeed, remains; but Pedro the Cruel, with whom the edifice now standing is more especially connected, was no less oriental than his predecessors, and he employed Morisco architects to rebuild it. Parts are said to be exact reproductions of the older structure, while many of the beautiful tiles were taken from Moorish houses.

The atmosphere, then, is but half Arabic; the rest belongs to that flaunting, multi-coloured barbarism which is characteristic of Northern Spain before the union of Arragon and Castile. Wandering in the deserted courts, looking through horseshoe windows of exquisite design at the wild garden, Pedro the Cruel and Maria de Padilla are the figures that occupy the mind.

Seville teems with anecdotes of the monarch who, according to the point of view, has been called the Cruel and the Just. He was an amorist for whom platonic dalliance had no charm, and there are gruesome tales of ladies burned alive because they would not quench the flame of his desires, of others, fiercely virtuous, who poured boiling oil on face and bosom to make themselves unattractive in his sight. But the head that wears a crown apparently has fascinations which few women can resist, and legend tells more frequently of Pedro’s conquests than of his rebuffs. He was an ardent lover to whom marriage vows were of no importance; that he committed bigamy is certain — and pardonable, but some historians are inclined to think that he had at one and the same time no less than three wives. He was oriental in his tastes.

In imitation of the Paynim sovereigns Pedro loved to wander in the streets of Seville at night, alone and disguised, to seek adventure or to see for himself the humour of his subjects; and like them also it pleased him to administer justice seated in the porch of his palace. If he was often hard and proud towards the nobles, with the people he was always very gracious; to them he was the redressor of wrongs and a protector of the oppressed; his justice was that of the Mussulman rulers, rapid, terrible and passionate, often quaint. For instance: a rich priest had done some injury to a cobbler, who brought him before the ecclesiastical tribunals, where he was for a year suspended from his clerical functions. The tradesman thought the punishment inadequate, and taking the law into his own hands gave the priest a drubbing. He was promptly seized, tried, condemned to death. But he appealed to the king who, with a witty parody of the rival Court, changed the punishment to suspension from his trade, and ordered the cobbler for twelve months to make no boots.

On the other hand, the Alcazar itself has been the scene of Pedro’s vilest crimes, in the whole list of which is none more insolent, none more treacherous, than that whereby he secured the priceless ruby which graces still the royal crown of England. There is a school of historians which insists on finding a Baptist Minister in every hero — think what a poor-blooded creature they wish to make of the glorious Nelson — but no casuistry avails to cleanse the memory of Pedro of Castille: even for his own ruthless age he was a monster of cruelty and lust. Indeed the indignation with which his biographers have felt bound to charge their pens has somewhat obscured their judgment; they have so eagerly insisted on the censure with which themselves regard their hero’s villainies, that they have found little opportunity to explain a complex character. Yet the story of his early life affords a simple key to his maturity. Till the age of fifteen he lived in prisons, suffering with his mother every insult and humiliation, while his father’s mistress kept queenly state, and her children received the honours of royal princes. When he came to the throne he found himself a catspaw between his natural brothers and ambitious nobles. His nearest relatives were ever his bitterest enemies, and he was continually betrayed by those he trusted; even his mother delivered to the rebellious peers the strongholds and the treasures he had left in her charge and caused him to be taken prisoner. As a boy he had been violent and impetuous, yet always loyal: but before he was twenty he became suspicious and mistrustful; in his weakness he made craft and perfidy his weapons, practising to compose his face, to feign forgetfulness of injury till the moment of vengeance; he learned to dissemble so that none could tell his mind, and treated no courtiers with greater favour than those upon whose death he had already determined.

Intermingled with this career of vice and perfidy and bloodshed is the love of Maria de Padilla, whom the king met when he was eighteen, and till her death loved passionately — with brief inconstancies, for fidelity has never been a royal virtue; and she figures with gentle pathos in that grim history like wild perfumed flowers on a storm-beaten coast. After the assassination of the unfortunate Blanche, the French Queen whom he loathed with an extraordinary physical repulsion, Pedro acknowledged a secret marriage with Maria de Padilla, which legitimised her children; but for ten years before she had been treated with royal rights. The historian says that she was very beautiful, but her especial charm seems to have been that voluptuous grace which is characteristic of Andalusian women. She was simple and pious, with a nature of great sweetness, and she never abused her power; her influence, as runs the hackneyed phrase, was always for good, and untiringly she did her utmost to incline her despot lover to mercy. She alone sheds a ray of light on Pedro’s memory, only her love can save him from the execration of posterity. When she died rich and poor alike mourned her, and the king was inconsolable. He honoured her with pompous obsequies, and throughout the kingdom ordered masses to be sung for the rest of her soul.

The guardians of the Alcazar show you the chambers in which dwelt this gracious lady, and the garden-fountain wherein she bathed in summer. Moralists, anxious to prove that the way of righteousness is hard, say that beauty dies, but they err, for beauty is immortal. The habitations of a lovely woman never lose the enchantment she has cast over them, her comeliness lingers in their empty chambers like a subtle odour; and centuries after her very bones have crumbled to dust it is her presence alone that is felt, her footfall that is heard on the marble floors.

Garish colours, alas! have driven the tender spirit of Maria de Padilla from the royal palace, but it has betaken itself to the old garden, and there wanders sadly. It is a charming place of rare plants and exotic odours; cypress and tall palm trees rise towards the blue sky with their irresistible melancholy, their far-away suggestion of burning deserts; and at their feet the ground is carpeted with violets. Yet to me the wild roses brought strangely recollections of England, of long summer days when the air was sweet and balmy; the birds sang heavenly songs, the same songs as they sing in June in the fat Kentish fields. The gorgeous palace had only suggested the long past days of history, and Seville the joy of life and the love of sunshine; but the old quiet garden took me far away from Spain, so that I longed to be again in England. In thought I wandered through a garden that I knew in years gone by, filled also with flowers, but with hollyhocks and jasmine; the breeze carried the sweet scent of the honeysuckle to my nostrils, and I looked at the green lawns, with the broad, straight lines of the grass-mower. The low of cattle reached my ears, and wandering to the fence I looked into the fields beyond; yellow cows grazed idly or lay still chewing the cud; they stared at me with listless, sleepy eyes.

But I glanced up and saw a flock of wild geese flying northwards in long lines that met, making two sides of a huge triangle; they flew quickly in the cloudless sky, far above me, and presently were lost to view. About me was the tall box-wood of the southern garden, and tropical plants with rich flowers of yellow and red and purple. A dark fir-tree stood out, ragged and uneven, like a spirit of the North, erect as a life without reproach; but the foliage of the palms hung down with a sad, adorable grace.

XIII

Calle de las Sierpes

In Seville the Andalusian character thrives in its finest flower; and nowhere can it be more conveniently studied than in the narrow, sinuous, crowded thoroughfare which is the oddest street in Europe. The Calle de las Sierpes is merely a pavement, hardly broader than that of Piccadilly, without a carriage-way. The houses on either side are very irregular; some are tall, four-storeyed, others quite tiny; some are well kept and freshly painted, others dilapidated. It is one of the curiosities of Seville that there is no particularly fashionable quarter; and, as though some moralising ruler had wished to place before his people a continual reminder of the uncertainty of human greatness, by the side of a magnificent palace you will find a hovel.

At no hour of the day does the Calle de las Sierpes lack animation, but to see it at its best you must go towards evening, at seven o’clock, for then there is scarcely room to move. Fine gentlemen stand at the club doors or sit within, looking out of the huge windows; the merchants and the students, smoking cigarettes, saunter, wrapped magnificently in their capos. Cigarette-girls pass with roving eyes; they suffer from no false modesty and smile with pleasure when a compliment reaches their ears. Admirers do not speak in too low a tone and the fair Sevillan is never hard of hearing.

Newspaper boys with shrill cries announce evening editions: ‘Porvenir! Noticiero!’ Vendors of lottery-tickets wander up and down, audaciously offering the first prize: ‘Quien quiere el premio gardo?’ Beggars follow you with piteous tales of fasts improbably extended. But most striking is the gente flamenca, the bull-fighter, with his numerous hangers-on. The toreros — toreador is an unknown word, good for comic opera and persons who write novels of Spanish life and cannot be bothered to go to Spain — the toreros sit in their especial cafe, the Cerveceria National, or stand in little groups talking to one another. They are distinguishable by the coleta, which is a little plait of hair used to attach the chignon of full-dress: it is the dearest ambition of the aspirant to the bull-ring to possess this ornament; he grows it as soon as he is full-fledged, and it is solemnly cut off when the weight of years and the responsibility of landed estates induce him to retire from the profession. The bull-fighter dresses peculiarly and the gente flamenca, imitates him so far as its means allow. A famous matador is as well paid as in England a Cabinet Minister or a music-hall artiste. This is his costume: a broad-brimmed hat with a low crown, which is something like a topper absurdly flattened down, with brims preposterously broadened out. The front of his shirt is befrilled and embroidered, and his studs are the largest diamonds; not even financiers in England wear such important stones. He wears a low collar without a necktie, but ties a silk handkerchief round his neck like an English navvy; an Eton jacket, fitting very tightly, brown, black, or grey, with elaborate frogs and much braiding; the trousers, skin-tight above, loosen below, and show off the lower extremities when, like the heroes of feminine romance, the wearer has a fine leg. Indeed, it is a mode of dress which exhibits the figure to great advantage, and many of these young men have admirable forms.

In their strong, picturesque way they are often very handsome. They have a careless grace of gesture, a manner of actors perfectly at ease in an effective part, a brutal healthiness; there is a flamboyance in their bearing, a melodramatic swagger, which is most diverting. And their faces, so contrasted are the colours, so strongly marked the features, are full of interest. Clean shaven, the beard shows violet through the olive skin; they have high cheek bones and thin, almost hollow cheeks, with eyes set far back in the sockets, dark and lustrous under heavy brows. The black hair, admirably attached to the head, is cut short; shaved on the temples and over the ears, brushed forward as in other countries is fashionable with gentlemen of the box: it fits the skull like a second, tighter skin. The lips are red and sensual, the teeth white, regular and well shaped. The bull-fighter is remarkable also for the diamond rings which decorate his fingers and the massive gold, the ponderous seals, of his watch-chain.

Who can wonder then that maidens fair, their hearts turning to thoughts of love, should cast favourable glances upon this hero of a hundred fights? The conquests of tenors and grand-dukes and fiddlers are insignificant beside those of a bull-fighter; and the certainty of feminine smiles is another inducement for youth to exchange the drudgery of menial occupations for the varied excitement of the ring.

At night the Sierpes is different again. Little by little the people scatter to their various homes, the shops are closed, the clubs put out their lights, and by one the loiterers are few. The contrast is vivid between the noisy throng of day-time and this sudden stillness; the emptiness of the winding street seems almost unnatural. The houses, losing all variety, are intensely black; and above, the sinuous line of sky is brilliant with clustering stars. A drunken roysterer reels from a tavern-door, his footfall echoing noisily along the pavement, but quickly he sways round a corner; and the silence, more impressive for the interruption, returns. The night-watchman, huddled in a cloak of many folds, is sleeping in a doorway, dimly outlined by the yellow gleam of his lantern.

Then I, a lover of late hours, returning, seek the guardia. Sevillan houses are locked at midnight by this individual, who keeps the latch-keys of a whole street, and is supposed to be on the look-out for tardy comers. I clap my hands, such being the Spanish way to attract attention, and shout; but he does not appear. He is a good-natured, round man, bibulous, with grey hair and a benevolent manner. I know his habits and resign myself to inquiring for him in the neighbouring dram-shops. I find him at last and assail him with all the abuse at my command; he is too tipsy to answer or to care, and follows me, jangling his keys. He fumbles with them at the door, blaspheming because they are so much alike, and finally lets me in.

‘Buena noche. Descanse v bien.’

XIV

Characteristics

It is a hazardous thing to attempt the analysis of national character, for after all, however careful the traveller may be in his inquiries, it is from the few individuals himself has known that his most definite impressions are drawn. Of course he can control his observations by asking the opinion of foreigners long resident in the country; but curiously enough in Andalusia precisely the opposite occurs from what elsewhere is usual. Aliens in England, France, or Italy, with increasing comprehension, acquire also affection and esteem for the people among whom they live; but I have seldom found in Southern Spain a foreigner — and there are many, merchants, engineers and the like, with intimate knowledge of the inhabitants — who had a good word to say for the Andalusians.

But perhaps it is in the behaviour of crowds that the most accurate picture of national character can be obtained. Like composite photographs which give the appearance of a dozen people together, but a recognisable portrait of none, the multitude offers as it were a likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical, eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money’s worth. If below the surface there are a somewhat brutal savagery, a cruel fickleness, these are traits common with all human beings together assembled; they are merely evidence of man’s close relationship to ape and tiger.

From contemporary novels more or less the same picture appears, and also from the newspapers, though in these somewhat idealised; for the Press, bound to flatter for its living, represents its patrons, as do some portrait-painters, not as they are but as they would like to be. In the eyes of Andalusian journalists their compatriots are for ever making a magnificent gesture; and the condition would be absurd if a hornet’s nest of comic papers, tempering vanity with a lively sense of the ridiculous, did not save the situation by abundantly coarse caricatures.

It is vanity then which emerges as the most distinct of national traits, a vanity so egregious, so childish, so grotesque, that the onlooker is astounded. The Andalusians have a passion for gorgeous raiment and for jewellery. They must see themselves continually in the brightest light, standing for ever on some alpine eminence of vice or virtue, in full view of their fellow men. Like schoolboys they will make themselves out desperate sinners to arouse your horror, and if that does not impress you, accomplished actors ready to suit your every mood, they will pose as saints than whom none more truly pious have existed on the earth. They are the Gascons of Spain, but beside them the Bordelais is a truthful, unimaginative creature.

Next comes laziness. There is in Europe no richer soil than that of Andalusia, and the Arabs, with an elaborate system of irrigation, obtained three crops a year; but now half the land lies uncultivated, and immense tracts are planted only with olives, which, comparatively, entail small labour. But the inhabitants of this fruitful country are happy in this, that boredom is unknown to them; content to lie in the sun for hours, neither talking, thinking, nor reading, they are never tired of idleness: two men will sit for half a day in a cafe, with a glass of water before them, not exchanging three remarks in an hour. I fancy it is this stolidness which has given travellers an impression of dignity; in their quieter moments they remind one of very placid sheep, for they have not half the energy of pigs, which in Spain at least are restless and spirited creatures. But a trifle will rouse them; and then, quite unable to restrain themselves, pallid with rage, they hurl abuse at their enemy — Spanish, they say, is richer in invective than any other European tongue — and quickly long knives are whipped out to avenge the affront.

Universal opinion has given its verdict in an epithet: and just as many people speak of the volatile Frenchman, the stolid Dutchman, the amatory Italian, they talk of the proud Spaniard. But it is pride of a peculiar sort; a Sevillian with only the smallest claims to respectability would rather die than carry a parcel through the street; however poor, some one must perform for him so menial an office: and he would consider it vastly beneath his dignity to accept charity, though if he had the chance would not hesitate to swindle you out of sixpence. But in matters of honesty these good people show a certain discrimination. Your servants, for example, would hesitate to steal money, especially if liable to detection, but not to take wine and sugar and oil: which is proved by the freedom with which they discuss the theft among themselves and the calmness with which they acknowledge it when a wrathful master takes them in the act. The reasoning is, if you’re such a fool as not to keep your things under lock and key you deserve to be robbed; and if dismissed for such a peccadillo they consider themselves very hardly used.

Uncharitable persons, saying that a Spaniard will live for a week on bread and water duly to prepare himself for a meal at another’s expense, accuse them of gluttony; but I have always found the Andalusians abstemious eaters, nor have I wondered at this, since Spanish food is abominable. But drunkards they often are. I should think as many people in proportion get drunk in Seville as in London, though it is only fair to add that their heads are not strong, and very little alcohol will produce in them an indecent exhilaration.

But if the reader, because the Andalusians are slothful, truthless, but moderately honest, vain, concludes that they are an unattractive people he will grossly err. His reasoning, that moral qualities make pleasant companions, is quite false; on the contrary it is rigid principles and unbending character, strength of will and a decided sense of right and wrong, which make intercourse difficult. A sensitive conscience is no addition to the amenities of the dinner-table. But when a man is willing to counter a deadly sin with a shrug of the shoulders, when between white and black he can discover no insupportable contrast, the probabilities are that he will at least humour your whims and respect your prejudices. And so it is that the Andalusians make very agreeable acquaintance. They are free and amiable in their conversation, and will always say the thing that pleases rather than the brutal thing that is. They miss no opportunity to make compliments, which they do so well that at the moment you are assured these flattering remarks come from the bottom of their hearts. Very reasonably, they cannot understand why you should be disagreeable to a man merely because you rob him; to injury, unless their minds are clouded by passion, they have not the bad taste to add insult. Compare with these manners the British abhorrence of polite and complimentary speeches, especially if they happen to be true: the Englishman may hold you in the highest estimation, but wild horses will not drag from him an acknowledgment of the fact; whereby humanism and the general stock of self-esteem are notably diminished.

Nothing can be more graceful than their mode of speech, for the very construction of the language conduces to courtesy. The Spaniards have also an oriental way of offering you things, placing themselves and their houses entirely at your disposal. If you remark on anything of theirs they beg you at once to take it. If you go into a pot-house where a peasant is dining on a plate of ham, a few olives, and a glass of wine, he will ask: ‘Le gusta,’ ‘Will you have some,’ with a little motion of handing you his meal. Of course it would be an outrage to decorum to accept these generous offers, but that is beside the question; for good manners are not an affair of the heart, but a complicated game to be learned and played on either side with due attention to the rules. It may be argued that such details are not serious; but surely for the common round of life politeness is more necessary than any heroic qualities. We need our friends’ self-sacrifice once in a blue moon, but their courtesy every day; and for my own part, I would choose the companions of my leisure rather for their good breeding than for the excellence of their dispositions.

Beside this, however, the Andalusians are much attached to children, and it is pleasant to see the real fondness which exists between various members of a family. One singular point I have noted, that although the Spanish marry for love rather than from convenience, a wife puts kindred before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive list than I could ever produce.

XV

Don Juan Tenorio

On its own behalf each country seems to choose one man, historical or imaginary, to stand for the race, making as it were an incarnation of all the virtues and all the vices wherewith it is pleased to charge itself; and nothing really better explains the character of a people than their choice of a national hero. Fifty years ago John Bull was the typical Englishman. Stout, rubicund and healthy, with a loud voice and a somewhat aggressive manner, he belonged distinctly to the middle classes. He had a precise idea of his rights and a flattering opinion of his merits; he was peaceable, but ready enough to fight for commercial advantages, or if roused, for conscience sake. And when this took place he possessed always the comforting assurance that the Almighty was on his side; he put his faith without hesitation on the Bible and on the superiority of the English Nation. For foreigners he had a magnificent contempt and distinguished between them and monkeys only by a certain mental effort. Art he thought nasty, literature womanish; he was a Tory, middle-aged and well-to-do.

But nowadays all that is changed; John Bull, having amassed great wealth, has been gathered to his fathers and now disports himself in an early Victorian paradise furnished with horse-hair sofas and mahogany sideboards. His son reigns in his stead; and though perhaps not officially recognised as England’s archetype, his appearance in novel and in drama, in the illustrated papers, in countless advertisements, proves the reality of his sway. It is his image that rests in the heart of British maidens, his the example that British youths industriously follow.

But John Bull, Junior, has added his mother’s maiden name to his own, and remembers with pleasure that he belongs to a good old county family. He has changed his address from Bedford Square to South Kensington, and has been educated at a Public School and at a University. Young, tall and fair-haired, there is nothing to suggest that he will ever have that inelegant paunch which prevented the father, even in his loftiest moments of moral indignation, from being dignified. Of course he is a soldier, for the army is still the only profession for a gentleman, and England’s hero is that above all things. His morals are unexceptional, since to the ten commandments of Moses he has added the decalogue of good form. His clothes, whether he wears a Norfolk jacket or a frock coat, fit to perfection. He is a good shot, a daring rider, a serviceable cricketer. His heart beats with simple emotions, he will ever cheer at the sight of the Union Jack, and the strains of Rule Britannia bring patriotic tears to his eyes. Of late, (like myself,) he has become an Imperialist. His intentions are always strictly honourable, and he would not kiss the tip of a woman’s fingers except Hymen gave him the strictest rights to do so. If he became enamoured of a lady with whom such tender sentiments should not be harboured, he would invariably remember his duty at the psychological moment, and with many moving expressions renounce her: in fact he is a devil at renouncing women. I wonder it flatters them.

Contrast with this pattern of excellence, eminently praiseworthy if somewhat dull, Don Juan Tenorio, who stands in exactly the same relation to the Andalusians as does John Bull to the English. He is a worthless, heartless creature, given over to the pursuit of emotion. The main lines of the story are well known. The legend, so far as Seville is concerned, (industrious persons have found analogues throughout the world,) appears to be founded on fact. There actually lived a Comendador de Calatrava who was killed by Don Juan after the abduction of his daughter. The perfect amorist, according to the Cronica de Sevilla, was then inveigled into the church where lay his enemy and assassinated by the Franciscans, who spread the pious fiction that the image of his victim, descending from its pedestal, had itself exacted vengeance. It was an unfortunate invention, for the catastrophe has proved a stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards of Molina’s day may not have minded the clumsy deus ex machina, but later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Molière’s play, for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual exercise and a pastime. ‘Constancy,’ he says, ’is only good for fools. We owe ourselves to pretty women in general, and the mere fact of having met one does not absolve us from our duty to others. The birth of passion has an inexplicable charm, and the pleasure of love is in variety.’ And Zorilla, whose version is the most poetic of them all, has succeeded in giving only a ridiculous exhibition of waxworks.

But the monk, Tirso de Molina, who was the first to apply literary form to the legend, alone gives the character in its primitive simplicity. He drew the men of his time; and his compatriots, recognising themselves, have made the work immortal. For Spain, at all events, the type has been irrevocably fixed. Don Juan Tenorio was indeed a Spaniard of his age, a man of turbulent instincts, with a love of adventure and a fine contempt for danger, of an overwhelming pride; careful of his own honour, and careless of that of others. He looked upon every woman as lawful prey and hesitated at neither perjury nor violence to gain his ends; despair and tears left him indifferent. Love for him was purely carnal, with nothing of the timid flame of pastoral romance, nor of the chivalrous and metaphysic passion of Provence; it was a fierce, consuming fire which quickly burnt itself out. He was a vulgar and unoriginal seducer who stole favours in the dark by pretending to be the lady’s chosen lover, or induced guileless maids to trust him under promise of marriage, then rode away as fast as his horse could carry him. The monotony of his methods and their success are an outrage to the intelligence of the sex. But for all his scoffing he remained a true Catholic, devoutly believing that the day would come when he must account for his acts; and he proposed, when too old to commit more sins, to repent and make his peace with the Almighty.

It is significant that the Andalusians have thus chosen Don Juan Tenorio, for he is an abstract, with the lines somewhat subdued by the advance of civilisation, of the national character. For them his vices, his treachery, his heartlessness, have nothing repellent; nor does his inconstancy rob him of feminine sympathy. He is, indeed, a far greater favourite with the ladies than John Bull. The Englishman they respect, they know he will make a good husband and a model father; but he is too monogamous to arouse enthusiasm.

XVI

Women of Andalusia

It is meet and just that the traveller who desires a closer acquaintance with the country wherein he sojourns than is obtained by the Cockney tripper, should fall in love. The advantages of this proceeding are manifold and obvious. He will acquire the language with a more rapid facility; he will look upon the land with greater sympathy and hence with sharper insight; and little particularities of life will become known to him, which to the dreary creature who surveys a strange world from the portico of an expensive hotel, must necessarily lie hid. If I personally did not arrive at that delectable condition the fault is with the immortal gods rather than with myself; for in my eagerness to learn the gorgeous tongue of Calderon and of Cervantes, I placed myself purposely in circumstances where I thought the darts of young Cupid could never fail to miss me. But finally I was reduced to Ollendorf’s Grammar. However, these are biographical details of interest to none but myself; they are merely to serve as preface for certain observations upon the women whom the traveller in the evening sees hurrying through the Sierpes on their way home.

Human beauty is the most arbitrary of things, and the Englishman, accustomed to the classic type of his own countrywomen, will at first perhaps be somewhat disappointed with the excellence of Spain. It consists but seldom in any regularity of feature, for their appeal is to the amorist rather than to the sculptor in marble. Their red lips carry suggestions of burning kisses, so that his heart must be hard indeed who does not feel some flutterings at their aspect. The teeth are small, very white, regular. Face and body, indeed, are but the expression of a passionate nature.

But when I write of Spanish women I think of you, Rosarito; I find suddenly that it is no impersonal creature that fills my mind, but you — you! When I state solemnly that their greatest beauty lies in their hair and eyes, it is of you I think; it is your dark eyes that were lustrous, soft as velvet, caressing sometimes, and sometimes sparkling with fiery glances. (Alas! that I can find but hackneyed phrases to describe those heart-disturbers!) And when I say that the eyebrows of a Spanish woman are not often so delicately pencilled as with many an English girl, I remember that yours were thick; and the luxuriance gave you a certain tropical and savage charm. And your hair was plentiful and curling, intensely black; I believe it was your greatest care in life. Don’t you remember how often you explained to me that nothing was so harmful as to brush it, and how proud you were that it hung in glorious locks to your very knees?

Hardly any girl in Seville is too poor to have a peinadora to do her hair; and these women go from house to house, combing and arranging the coiffure for such infinitesimal sums as half a real, which is little more than a penny.

Again I try to be impersonal. The complexion ranges through every quality from dark olive to pearly white; but yours, Rosarito, was like the very finest ivory, a perfect miracle of delicacy and brilliance; and the blood in the cheeks shone through with a rich, soft red. I used to think it was a colour by itself, not to be found on palettes, the carnation of your cheeks, Rosarito. And none could walk with such graceful dignity as you; it was a pleasure to watch your perfect ease, your self-command. Your feet, I think, were somewhat long; but your hands were wonderful, very small, admirably modelled, with little tapering fingers, and the most adorable filbert nails. Don’t you remember how I used to look at them, and turn them over and discuss them point by point? And if ever I kissed their soft, warm palms, (I think it possible, though I have no vivid recollections,) remember that I was twenty-three; and it was certainly an appropriate gesture in the little comedy which to our mutual entertainment we played so gravely.

Now, as I write, my heart goes pit-a-pat, thinking of you, Rosarito; and I’m sure that if we had over again that charming time, I should fall head over ears in love. Oh, you know we were both fibbing when we vowed we adored one another; I am a romancer by profession, and you by nature. We parted joyously, and you had the grace not to force a tear, and neither of our hearts was broken. Where are you now, I wonder; and do you ever think of me?

The whole chapter of Andalusian beauty is unfolded in the tobacco factory at Seville. Six thousand women work there, at little tables placed by the columns which uphold the roof; they are of all ages, of all types; plain, pretty, commonplace, beautiful; and ten, perhaps, are lovely. The gipsies are disappointing, not so comely as the pure Spaniards; and they attract only by the sphinx-like mystery of their copper-coloured skin, by their hard, unfathomable eyes.

The Sevillans are perhaps inclined to stoutness, but that is a charm in their lover’s sight, and often have a little down on the upper lip, than which, when it amounts to no more than a shadow, nothing can be more enchanting. They look with malicious eyes as you saunter through room after room in the factory; it is quite an experience to run the gauntlet of their numerous tongues, making uncomplimentary remarks about your person, sometimes to your embarrassment offering you the carnation from their hair, or other things. Their clothes are suspended to the pillars, and their costume in summer is more adapted for coolness than for the inspection of decorous foreigners. They may bring with them babies, and many a girl will have a cradle by her side, which she rocks with one foot as her fingers work nimbly at the cigarettes.

They are very oriental, these women with voluptuous forms; they have no education, and with all their charm are unutterably stupid; they do not read, and find even newspapers tiresome! Those whose circumstances do not force them to work for their living, love nothing better than to lie for long hours on a sofa, neither talking nor thinking, in easy gowns, untrammelled by tight-fitting things. In the morning they put on a mantilla and go to mass, and besides, except to pay a polite visit on a friend or to drive in the Paseo, hardly leave the house. They are content with the simplest life. They adore their children, and willingly devote themselves entirely to them; they seem never to be bored.

For them the days must come and go without distinction. Their fleeting beauty leaves them imperceptibly; they grow fat, they grow thin, wrinkled, and gaunt; the years pass and their life proceeds without change. They do not think, they do not live: they merely exist, and they die, and that is the end of it. I suppose they are as happy as any one else. After all, taking it from one point of view, it matters very little what sort of life one leads, there are so many people in the world, such millions have come and gone, such millions will come and go. If an individual makes no use of his hour what does it signify? He is only one among countless hordes. In the existence of these handsome creatures, so passionate and yet so apathetic, there are no particular pleasures beside the simple joys of sense, but on the other hand, beyond the inevitable separations of death, there are no outstanding griefs. They propagate their species, and that, perhaps, is the only quite certain duty that human beings have.

XVII

The Dance

Cervantes said that there was never born a Spanish woman but she was made to dance; and he might have added that in the South, at all events, most men share the enviable faculty. The dance is one of the most characteristic features of Andalusia, and as an amusement rivals in popularity even the bull-fight. The Sevillans dance on every possible occasion, and nothing pleases them more than the dexterity of professionals. Before a company has been assembled half an hour some one is bound to suggest that a couple should show their skill; room is quickly made, the table pushed against the wall, the chairs drawn back, and they begin. Even when men are alone in a tavern, drinking wine, two of them will often enough stand up to tread a seguidilla. On a rainy day it is the entertainment that naturally recommends itself.

Riding through the villages round Seville on Sundays it delighted me to see little groups making a circle about the house doors, in the middle of which were dancing two girls in bright-coloured clothes, with roses in their hair. A man seated on a broken chair was twanging a guitar, the surrounders beat their hands in time and the dancers made music with their castanets. Sometimes on a feast-day I came across a little band, arrayed in all its best, that had come into the country for an afternoon’s diversion, and sat on the grass in the shade of summer or in the wintry sun. Whenever Andalusians mean to make merry some one will certainly bring a guitar, or if not the girls have their castanets; and though even these are wanting and no one can be induced to sing, a rhythmical clapping of hands will be sufficient accompaniment, and the performers will snap their fingers in lieu of castanets.

It is charming then to see the girls urge one another to dance; each vows with much dramatic gesture that she cannot, calling the Blessed Virgin to witness that she has strained her ankle and has a shocking cold. But some youth springs up and volunteers, inviting a particular damsel to join him. She is pushed forward, and the couple take their places. The man carefully puts down his cigarette, jams his broad-brimmed hat on his head, buttons his short coat and arches his back! The spectators cry: ‘Ole!’ The girl passes an arranging hand over her hair. The measure begins. The pair stand opposite one another, a yard or so distant, and foot it in accordance with one another’s motions. It is not a thing of complicated steps, but, as one might expect from its Moorish origin, of movements of the body. With much graceful swaying from side to side the executants approach and retire, and at the middle of the dance change positions. It finishes with a great clapping of hands, the maiden sinks down among her friends and begins violently to fan herself, while her partner, with a great affectation of nonchalance, takes a seat and relights his cigarette.

And in the music-halls the national dances are, with the national songs, the principal attraction. Seville possesses but one of these establishments; it is a queer place, merely the patio of a private house, with a stage at one end, in which chairs and tables have been placed. On holiday nights it is crammed with students, with countrymen and artisans, with the general riff-raff of the town, and with women of no particular reputation. Now and then appears a gang of soldiers, giving a peculiar note with the uniformity of their brown holland suits; and occasionally a couple of British sailors come sauntering in with fine self-assurance, their fair hair and red cheeks contrasting with the general swartness. You pay no entrance money, but your refreshment costs a real — which is twopence ha’penny; and for that you may enjoy not only a cup of coffee or a glass of manzanilla, but an evening’s entertainment. As the night wears on the heat is oven-like, and the air is thick and grey with the smoke of countless cigarettes.

The performance consists of three ‘turns’ only, and these are repeated every hour. The company boasts generally of a male singer, a female singer, and of the corps de ballet, which is made up of six persons. Spain is the stronghold of the out-of-date, and I suppose it alone preserves the stiff muslin ballet-skirts which delighted our fathers. To see half-a-dozen dancers thus attired in a remote Andalusian music-hall is so entirely unexpected that it quite takes the breath away. But by the time the traveller reaches Seville he must be used to disillusion, and he must be ingenuous indeed if he expects the Spaniards to have preserved their national costume for the most national of their pastimes. Yet the dances are still Spanish; and even if the pianoforte has ousted the guitar, the castanets give, notwithstanding, a characteristic note which the aggressive muslin and the pink, ill-fitting tights cannot entirely destroy.

But I remember one dancer who was really a great artist. She was ill-favoured, of middle age, thin; but every part of her was imbued with grace, expressive, from the tips of her toes to the tips of her fingers. The demands of the public sometimes forced upon her odious ballet-skirts, sometimes she wasted her talent on the futilities of skirt-dancing; but chiefly she loved the national measures, and her phenomenal leanness made her only comfortable in the national dress. She travelled from place to place in Spain with another woman whom she had taught to dance, and whose beauty she used cleverly as a foil to her own uncomeliness; and so wasted herself in these low resorts, earning hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. I wish I could remember her name.

When she began to dance you forgot her ugliness; her gaunt arms gained shape, her face was transfigured, her dark eyes flashed, and her mouth and smile said a thousand eloquent things. Even the nape of her neck, which in most women has no significance, with her was expressive. A consummate actress, she exhibited all her skill in the bolero, which represents a courtship; she threw aside the castanets and wrapped herself in a mantilla, while her companion, dressed as a man, was hidden in a capa. The two passed one another, he trying to see the lady’s face, which she averted, but not too strenuously; he pursued, she fled, but not too rapidly. Dropping his cloak, the lover attacked with greater warmth, while alternately she repelled and lured him on. At last she too cast away the mantilla. They seized the castanets and danced round one another with all manner of graceful and complicated evolutions, making love, quarrelling, pouting, exhibiting every variety of emotion. The dance grew more passionate, the steps flew faster, till at last, with the music, both stopped suddenly dead still. This abrupt cessation is one of the points most appreciated by a Spanish audience. ‘Ole!’ they cry,’bien parado!’

But when, unhampered by a partner, this nameless, exquisite dancer gave full play to her imagination, there was no end to the wildness of her fancy, to the intricacy and elaboration of her measures, to the gay audacity of her movements. She performed a hundred feats, each more difficult than the other — and all impossible to describe.

Then, between Christmas and Lent, at midnight on Saturdays and Sundays, the tables and the chairs are cleared away for the masked ball; and you will see the latest mode of Spanish dance. The women are of the lowest possible class; some, with a kind of savage irony, disguised as nuns, others in grotesque dominos of their own devising; but most wear every-day clothes with great shawls draped about them. The men are of a corresponding station, and through the evening wear their broad-brimmed hats. On the stage is a brass band, which plays one single tune till day-break, and to that one single measure is danced — the habanera.

In this alone may people take part as in any round dance. The couples hold one another in the very tightest embrace, the lady clasping her arms round her partner’s neck, while he places both his about her waist. They go round the room very slowly, immediately behind one another; it is a kind of straight polka, with a peculiar, rhythmic swaying of the body; the feet are not lifted off the floor, and you do not turn at all. The highest gravity is preserved throughout, and the whole performance is — well, very oriental.

XVIII

A Feast Day

I arrived in Seville on the Eve of the Immaculate Conception. All day people had been preparing to celebrate the feast, decorating their houses with great banners of blue and white; and at night the silent, narrow streets had a strange appearance, for in every window were lighted candles, throwing around them a white, unusual glare; they looked a little like the souls of infants dead. All day the bells of a hundred churches had been ringing, half drowned by the rolling peals of the Giralda.

It had been announced that the archbishop would himself officiate at the High Mass in the Blessed Virgin’s honour; and early in the morning the cathedral steps were crowded with black-robed women, making their way to the great sacristy where was to be held the service. I joined the throng, and entering through the darkness of the porch, was almost blinded by the brilliant altar, upon which stood a life-sized image of the Virgin, surrounded by a huge aureole, with great bishops, all of silver, on either side. It was ablaze with the light of many candles, so that the nave was thrown into deep shadow, and the kneeling women were scarcely visible.

The canons in the choir listlessly droned their prayers. At last the organ burst forth, and a long procession slowly came into the chapel, priests in white and blue, the colours of the Virgin, four bishops in mitres, the archbishop with his golden crozier; and preceding them all, in odd contrast, the beadle in black, with a dark periwig, bearing a silver staff. From the choir in due order they returned to the altar, headed this time by three pairs of acolytes, bearing great silver candlesticks, and by incense-burners, that filled the church with rich perfume.

When the Mass was finished, a young dark man in copious robes of violet ascended the pulpit and muttered a text. He waited an instant to collect himself, looking at the congregation; then turning to the altar began a passionate song of praise to the Blessed Virgin, unsoiled by original sin. He described her as in a hundred pictures the great painter of the Immaculate Conception has portrayed her — a young and graceful maid, clothed in a snowy gown of ample folds, with an azure cloak, a maid mysteriously pure; her hair, floating on the shoulders in luxurious ringlets, was an aureole more glorious than the silver rays which surrounded the great image; her dark eyes, with their languid lashes, her mouth, with the red lips, expressed a beautiful and immaculate virtue. It might have been some earthly woman of whom the priest spoke, one of those Andalusians that knelt below him, flashing quick glances at the gallant who negligently leaned against a pillar.

The archbishop sat on his golden throne — a thin, small man with a wrinkled face, with dead and listless eyes; in his gorgeous vestments he looked hardly human, he seemed a puppet, sitting stilly. At the end of the sermon he went back to the altar, and in his low, broken voice read the prayers. And then turning towards the great congregation he gave the plenary absolution, for which the Pope’s Bull had been read from the pulpit steps.

In the afternoon, when the sun was going down behind the Guadalquivir, over the plain, I went again to the cathedral. The canons in the choir still droned their chant in praise of the Blessed Virgin, and in the greater darkness the altar shone more magnificently. The same procession filed through the nave, some priests were in black, some in violet, some in the Virgin’s colours; but this time the archbishop wore gorgeous robes of scarlet, and as he knelt at the altar his train spread to the chancel steps. From the side appeared ten boys and knelt before the altar, and stood in two lines facing one another. They were dressed like pages of the seventeenth century, with white stockings and breeches, and a doublet of blue and silver, holding in their hands hats with long feathers. The archbishop, kneeling in front of the throne, buried his face in his hands.

A soft melody, played by violins and ‘cellos, broke the silence, and presently the ten pages began to sing:

Los cielos y la tierra alaben al Señor

Con imnos de alabanza que inflamen al Señor.

It was a curious, old-fashioned music, reminding one a little of the quiet harmonies of Gluck. Then, putting on their hats, the pages danced, continuing their song; they wound in and out of one another, gravely footing it, swaying to and fro with the music very slowly. The measure was performed with the utmost reverence. Now and then the chorus came, and the fresh boys’ voices, singing in unison, filled the church with delightful melody. And still the old archbishop prayed, his face buried in his hands.

The boys ceased to sing, but continued the dance, marking the time now with castanets, and the mundane instrument contrasted strangely with the glittering altar and with the kneeling priests. I wondered of what the archbishop thought, kneeling so humbly — of the boys dancing before the altar, fresh and young? Was he thinking of their white souls darkening with the sins of the world, or of the troubles, the disillusionments of life, and the decrepitude? Or was it of himself — did he think of his own youth, so long past, so hopelessly gone, or did he think that he was old and worn, and of the dark journey before him, and of the light that seemed so distant? Did he regret his beautiful Seville with the blue sky, and the orange-trees bowed down with their golden fruit? He seemed so small and weak, overwhelmed in his gorgeous robes.

Again the ten boys repeated their song and dance and their castanets, and with a rapid genuflection disappeared.

The archbishop rose painfully from his knees and ascended to the altar. A priest held open a book before him, and another lighted the printed page with a candle; he read out a prayer. Then, kneeling down, he bent very low, as though he felt himself unworthy to behold the magnificence of the Queen of Heaven. The people fell to their knees, and a man’s voice burst forth — Ave Maria, gratia plena; waves of passionate sound floated over the worshippers, upwards, towards heaven. And from the Giralda, the Moorish tower, the Christian bells rang joyfully. The archbishop turned towards the people; and when in his thin, broken voice he gave the benediction, one thought that no man in his heart felt such humility as the magnificent prince of the Church, Don Marcelo Spinola y Maestre, Archbishop of Seville.

The people flocked out quickly, and soon only a few devout penitents remained. A priest came, waving censers before the altar, and thick volumes of perfume ascended to the Blessed Virgin. He disappeared, and one by one the candles were extinguished. The night crept silently along the church, and the silver image sank into the darkness; at last two candles only were left on the altar, high up, shining dimly.

Outside the sky was still blue, bespattered with countless stars.

Note. — I believe there is no definite explanation of this ceremony, and the legend told me by an ancient priest that it was invented during the Moorish dominion so that Christian services might be held under cover of a social gathering — intruding Muslims would be told merely that people were there assembled to see boys dance and to listen to their singing — is more picturesque than probable. Rather does it seem analogous with the leaping of David the King before the Ark of Jehovah, when he danced before the Lord with all his might, girt with a linen Ephod; and this, if I may hazard an opinion, was with a view to amuse a deity apt to be bored or languid, just as Nautch girls dance to this day before the idols of the Hindus, and tops are spun before Krishna to divert him.

XIX

The Giralda

The Christian bells rang joyfully from the Moorish tower, the great old bells christened with holy oil, el Cantor the Singer, la Gorda the Great, San Miguel. I climbed the winding passage till I came to the terrace where stood the ringers, and as they pulled their ropes the bells swung round on their axles, completing a circle, with deafening clamour. The din was terrific, so that the solid masonry appeared to shake, and I felt the vibrations of the surrounding air. It was a strange sensation to shout as loud as possible and hear no sound issue from my mouth.

The Giralda, with its Moorish base and its Christian belfry, is a symbol of Andalusia. There is in the Ayuntamiento an old picture of the Minaret built by Djâbir the Moor, nearly one hundred feet shorter than the completed tower, but surmounted by a battlemented platform on which are huge brazen balls and an iron standard. These were overthrown by an earthquake, and later, when the discoveries of Christopher Columbus had poured unmeasured riches into Seville, the Chapter commissioned Hernan Ruiz to add a belfry to the Moorish base. Hernan Ruiz nearly ruined the mosque at Cordova, but here he was entirely successful. Indeed it is extraordinary that the two parts should be joined in such admirable harmony. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the slender grace of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind of breathless speed, to the belfry platform. And then the renaissance building begins, ascending still more, a sort of filigree work, excessively rich, and elegant beyond all praise. It is surmounted by a female figure of bronze, representing Faith and veering with every breeze, and the artist has surrounded his work with the motto: Nomen Domini Fortissima Turris.

But the older portion gains another charm from the Moorish windows that pierce it, one above the other, with horseshoe arches; and from the arabesque network with which the upper part is diapered, a brick trellis-work against the brick walls, of the most graceful and delicate intricacy. The Giralda is almost toylike in the daintiness of its decoration. Notwithstanding its great size it is a masterpiece of exquisite proportion. At night it stands out with strong lines against the bespangled sky, and the lights of the watchers give it a magic appearance of some lacelike tower of imagination; but on high festivals it is lit with countless lamps, and then, as Richard Ford puts it, hangs from the dark vault of heaven like a brilliant chandelier.

I looked down at Seville from above. A Spanish town wears always its most picturesque appearance thus seen, but it is never different; the patios glaring with whitewash, the roofs of brown and yellow tiles, and the narrow streets, winding in unexpected directions, narrower than ever from such a height and dark with shade, so that they seem black rivulets gliding stealthily through the whiteness. Looking at a northern city from a tall church tower all things are confused with one another, the slate roofs join together till it is like a huge uneven sea of grey; but in Seville the atmosphere is so limpid, the colour so brilliant, that every house is clearly separated from its neighbour, and sometimes there appears to be between them a preternatural distinctness. Each stands independently of any other; you might suppose yourself in a strange city of the Arabian Nights where a great population lived in houses crowded together, but invisibly, so that each person fancied himself in isolation.

Immediately below was the Cathedral and to remind you of Cordova, the Court of Oranges; but here was no sunny restfulness, nor old-world quiet. The Court is gloomy and dark, and the trim rows of orange-trees contrast oddly with the grey stone of the Cathedral, its huge porches, and the flamboyant exuberance of its decoration. The sun never shines in it and no fruit splash the dark foliage with gold. You do not think of the generations of priests who have wandered in it on the summer evenings, basking away their peaceful lives in the sunshine; but rather of the busy merchants who met there in the old days when it was still the exchange of Seville, before the Lonja was built, to discuss the war with England, or the fate of ships bringing gold from America. At one end of the court is an old stone pulpit from which preached St. Francis of Borga and St. Vincent Ferrer and many an unknown monk besides. Then it was thronged with multi-coloured crowds, with townsmen, soldiers and great noblemen, when the faith was living and strong; and the preacher, with all the gesture and the impassioned rhetoric of a Spaniard, poured out burning words of hate for Jew and Moor and Heretic, so that the listeners panted and a veil of blood passed before their eyes; or else uttered so eloquent a song in praise of the Blessed Virgin, immaculately conceived, that strong men burst into tears at the recital of her perfect beauty.

XX

The Cathedral of Seville

Your first impression when you walk round the cathedral of Seville, noting with dismay the crushed cupolas and unsightly excrescences, the dinginess of colour, is not enthusiastic. It was built by German architects without a thought for the surrounding houses, brilliantly whitewashed, and the blue sky, and it proves the incongruity of northern art in a southern country; but even lowering clouds and mist could lend no charm to the late Gothic of Santa Maria de la Sede.

The interior fortunately is very different. Notwithstanding the Gothic groining, as you enter from the splendid heat of noonday, (in the Plaza del Triunfo the sun beats down and the houses are more dazzling than snow,) the effect is thoroughly and delightfully Spanish. Light is very fatal to devotion and the Spaniards have been so wise as to make their churches extremely dark. At first you can see nothing. Incense floats heavily about you, filling the air, and the coolness is like a draught of fresh, perfumed water. But gradually the church detaches itself from the obscurity and you see great columns, immensely lofty. The spaces are large and simple, giving an impression of vast room; and the choir, walled up on three sides, in the middle of the nave as in all Spanish cathedrals, by obstructing the view gives an appearance of almost unlimited extent. To me it seems that in such a place it is easier to comprehend the majesty wherewith man has equipped himself. Science offers only thoughts of human insignificance; the vastness of the sea, the terror of the mountains, emphasise the fact that man is of no account, ephemeral as the leaves of summer. But in those bold aisles, by the pillars rising with such a confident pride towards heaven, it is almost impossible not to feel that man indeed is god-like, lord of the earth; and that the great array of nature is builded for his purpose.

Typically Spanish also is the decoration, and very rich. The choir-stalls are of carved wood, florid and exuberant like the Spanish imagination; the altars gleam with gold; pictures of saints are framed by golden pillars carved with huge bunches of grapes and fruit and fantastic leaves. I was astounded at the opulence of the treasure; there were gorgeous altars of precious metal, great saints of silver, caskets of gold, monstrances studded with rare stones, crosses and crucifixes. The vestments were of unimaginable splendour: there were two hundred copes of all ages and of every variety, fifty of each colour, white for Christmas and Easter, red for Corpus Christi, blue for the Immaculate Conception, violet for Holy Week; there were the special copes of the Primate, copes for officiating bishops, copes for dignitaries from other countries and dioceses. They were of the richest velvet and satin, heavily embroidered with gold, many with saints worked in silk, so heavy that it seemed hardly possible for a man to bear them.

In the Baptistery, filling it with warm light, is the San Antonio of Murillo, than which no picture gives more intensely the religious emotion. The saint, tall and meagre, beautiful of face, looks at the Divine Child hovering in a golden mist with an ecstasy that is no longer human.

It is interesting to consider whether an artist need feel the sentiment he desires to convey. Certainly many pictures have been painted under the influence of profound feeling which leave the spectator entirely cold, and it is probable enough that the early Italians felt few of the emotions which their pictures call forth. We know that the masterpieces of Perugino, so moving, so instinct with religious tenderness, were very much a matter of pounds, shillings and pence. But Luis de Vargas, on the other hand, daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair shirt, and Vicente Joanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion and confession; so that it is impossible to wonder at the rude and savage ardour of their work. And the impression that may be gathered of Murillo from his pictures is borne out by the study of his grave and simple life. He had not the turbulent piety of the other two, but a calm and sweet devotion, which led him to spend long hours in church, meditating. He, at any rate, felt all that he expressed.

I do not know a church that gives the religious sentiment more completely than Seville Cathedral. The worship of the Spaniards is sombre, full-blooded, a thing of dark rich colours; it requires the heaviness of incense and that overloading of rococo decoration. It is curious that notwithstanding their extreme similarity to the Neapolitans, the Andalusians should in their faith differ so entirely. Of course, in Southern Italy religion is as full of superstition — an adoration of images in which all symbolism is lost and only the gross idol remains; but it is a gayer and a lighter thing than in Spain. Most characteristic of this is the difference between the churches; and with Santa Maria de la Sede may well be contrasted the Neapolitan Santa Chiara, with its great windows, so airy and spacious, sparkling with white and gold. The paintings are almost frolicsome. It is like a ballroom, a typical place of worship for a generation that had no desire to pray, but strutted in gaudy silks and ogled over pretty fans, pretending to discuss the latest audacity of Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire.

XXI

The Hospital of Charity

The Spaniards possess to the fullest degree the art of evoking devout emotions, and in their various churches may be experienced every phase of religious feeling. After the majestic size and the solemn mystery of the Cathedral, nothing can come as a greater contrast than the Church of the Hermandad de la Caredad. It was built by don Miguel de Mañara, who rests in the chancel, with the inscription over him: ‘Aqui jacen los huesos y ceñizas del peor hombre que ha habido en el mundo; ruegan por el’— ‘Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man that has ever been in the world; pray for him.’ But like all Andalusians he was a braggart; for a love of chocolate, which appears to have been his besetting sin, is insufficient foundation for such a vaunt: a vice of that order is adequately punished by the corpulence it must occasion. However, legend, representing don Miguel as the most dissolute of libertines, is more friendly. The grave sister who escorts the visitor relates that one day in church don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and undaunted by her habit, made amorous proposals. She did not speak, but turned to look at him, whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his gaze, and it was eaten away by a foul and loathsome disease, so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. The gallant was so terrified that he fainted, and afterwards the face haunted him, the face of matchless beauty and of revolting decay, so that he turned from the world. He devoted his fortune to rebuilding the hospital and church of the Brotherhood of Charity, whose chief office it was to administer the sacraments to those condemned to death and provide for their burial, and was eventually received into their Order.

It was in the seventeenth century that Mañara built his church, and consequently rococo holds sway with all its fantasies. It is small, without aisles or chapels, and the morbid opulence of the decoration gives it a peculiar character. The walls are lined with red damask, and the floor carpeted with a heavy crimson carpet; it gives the sensation of a hothouse, or, with its close odours, of a bedchamber transformed into a chapel for the administration of the last sacrament. The atmosphere is unhealthy: one pants for breath.

At one end, taking up the entire wall, is a reredos by Pedro Roldan, of which the centrepiece is an elaborate ‘Deposition in the Tomb,’ with numerous figures coloured to the life. It is very fine in its mingling of soft, rich hues and flamboyant realism. The artist has revelled in the opportunity for anguish of expression that his subject afforded, but has treated it with such a passionate seriousness that, in his grim, fierce way, he does not fail to be impressive. The frame is of twisted golden pillars, supported by little naked angels, and decorated with grapes and vine-leaves. Above and at the sides are great saints in carved wood, and angels with floating drapery.

Murillo was on terms of intimacy with don Miguel de Mañara, and like him a member of the Hermandad. For his friend he painted some of his most famous pictures, which by the subdued ardour of their colour, by their opulent tones, harmonise most exquisitely with the church. Marshal Soult, with a fine love of art that was profitable, carried off several of them, and their empty frames stare at one still. But before that, when they were all in place, the effect must have been of unique magnificence.

It must be an extraordinary religion that flourishes in such a place, an artificial faith that needs heat like tropical plants, that desires unnatural vows. It breathes of neurotic emotions with its damask-covered walls, with its carpet that deadens the footfall, its sombre, gorgeous pictures. The sweet breeze of heaven never enters there, nor the sunlight; the air is languid with incense; one is oppressed by a strange, heavy silence. In such a church sins must be fostered for the morbid pleasure of confession. One can imagine that the worshippers in that overloaded atmosphere would see strange visions, voluptuous and mystical; the Blessed Mary and the Saints might gain visible and palpable flesh, and the devil would not be far off. There the gruesome imaginings of Valdes Leal are a fitting decoration. Every one knows that grim picture of a bishop in episcopal robes, eaten by worms, his flesh putrefying, which led Murillo to say: ‘Leal, you make me hold my nose,’ and the other answered: ‘You have taken all the flesh and left me nought but the bones.’ Elsewhere, by the same master, there is a painting that suggests, with greater poignancy to my mind because less brutally, the thoughts evoked by the more celebrated work, and since it seems to complete the ideas awakened by this curious chapel, I mention it here.

It represents a priest at the altar, saying his mass, and the altar after the Spanish fashion is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight were more than he could bear; and in the meagre, trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes and in the sunken cheeks, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying. The priest seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him, and the high heavens were empty of their solace. All the beauty of life appears forgotten, and there is nothing in the world but decay. A ghastly putrefaction has attacked already the living man; the worms of the grave, the piteous horror of mortality, and the darkness before him offer nought but fear, and what soul is there to rise again! Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of life whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart.

Then, if you would study yet another phase of the religious sentiment, go to the Museo, where are the fine pictures that Murillo painted for the Capuchin Monastery. You will see all the sombreness of Spanish piety, the savage faith, dissolved into ineffable love. Religion has become a wonderful tenderness, in which passionate human affection is inextricably mingled with god-like adoration. Murillo, these sensual forms quivering with life, brought the Eternal down to earth, and gave terrestrial ardour to the apathy of an impersonal devotion; that, perhaps, is why to women he has always been the most fascinating of painters. In the Madonna de la Servilleta — painted on a napkin for the cook of the monastery — the child is a simple, earthly infant, fresh and rosy, with wide-open, wondering eyes and not a trace of immortality. I myself saw a common woman of the streets stand before this picture with tears running down her cheeks.

‘Corazon de mi alma!’ she said, ‘Heart of my soul! I could cover his little body with kisses.’

She smiled, but could hardly restrain her sobs. The engrossing love of a mother for her child seemed joined in miraculous union with the worship of a mortal for his God.

Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. The saints of these great pictures, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Felix of Cantalicio, St. Thomas of Villanueva, are monks and beggars such as may to this day be seen in the streets of Seville. St. Felix is merely an old man with hollow cheeks and a grey, ragged beard; but yet as he clasps the child in his arms with eager tenderness, he is transfigured by a divine ecstasy: his face is radiant with the most touching emotion. And St. Antony of Padua, in another picture, worships the infant God with a mystic adoration, which, notwithstanding the realism of the presentment, lifts him far, far above the earth.

XXII

Gaol

I was curious to see the prison in Seville. Gruesome tales had been told me of its filth and horror, and the wretched condition of the prisoners; I had even heard that from the street you might see them pressing against the barred windows with arms thrust through, begging the passer-by for money or bread. Mediæval stories recurred to my mind and the clank of chains trailed through my imagination.

I arranged to be conducted by the prison doctor, and one morning soon after five set out to meet him. My guide informed me by a significant gesture that his tendencies were — bibulous, and our meeting-place was a tavern; but when we arrived they told us that don Felipe — such was his name — had been taken his morning dram and gone; however, if we went to another inn we should doubtless find him. But there we heard he had not yet arrived, he was not due till half-past five. To pass the time we drank a mouthful of aguardiente and smoked a cigarette, and eventually the medico was espied in the distance. We went towards him — a round, fat person with a red face and a redder nose, somewhat shabbily dressed.

He looked at me pointedly and said:

‘I’m dry. Vengo seco.’

It was a hint not to be neglected, and we returned to the tavern where don Felipe had his nip.

‘It’s very good for the stomach,’ he assured me.

We sallied forth together, and as we walked he told me the number of prisoners, the sort of crimes for which they were detained — ranging from man-slaughter to petty larceny — and finally, details of his own career. He was an intelligent man, and when we came to the prison door insisted on drinking my health.

The prison is an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the church façade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the doctor appeared several rushed up to ask about a father or a son that lay sick. We went in and there was a melodramatic tinkling of keys and an unlocking of heavy doors.

The male prisoners, the adults, were in the patio of the convent, where in olden days the nuns had wandered on summer evenings, watering their roses. The iron door was opened and shut behind us; there was a movement of curiosity at the sight of a stranger, and many turned to look at me. Such as had illnesses came to the doctor, and he looked at their tongues and felt their pulse, giving directions to an assistant who stood beside him with a note-book. Don Felipe was on excellent terms with his patients, laughing and joking; a malingerer asked if he could not have a little wine because his throat was sore; the doctor jeered and the man began to laugh; they bandied repartees with one another.

There were about two hundred in the patio, and really they did not seem to have so bad a time. There was one large group gathered round a man who read a newspaper aloud; it was Monday morning, and all listened intently to the account of a bull-fight on the previous day, bursting into a little cry of surprise and admiration on hearing that the matador had been caught and tossed. Others lay by a pillar playing draughts for matches, while half a dozen more eagerly watched, giving unsolicited advice with much gesticulation. The draught-board consisted of little squares drawn on the pavement with chalk, and the pieces were scraps of white and yellow paper. One man sat cross-legged by a column busily rolling cigarettes; he had piles of them by his side arranged in packets, which he sold at one penny each; it was certainly an illegal offence, because the sale of tobacco is a government monopoly, but if you cannot break the laws in prison where can you break them? Others occupied themselves by making baskets or nets. But the majority did nothing at all, standing about, sitting when they could, with the eternal cigarette between their lips; and the more energetic watched the blue smoke curl into the air. Altogether a very happy family!

Nor did they seem really very criminal, more especially as they wore no prison uniform, but their own clothes. I saw no difference between them and the people I met casually in the street. They were just very ordinary citizens, countrymen smelling of the soil, labouring men, artisans. Their misfortune had been only to make too free a use of their long curved knives or to be discovered taking something over which another had prior claims. But in Andalusia every one is potentially as criminal, which is the same as saying that these jail-birds were estimable persons whom an unkind fate and a mistaken idea of justice had separated for a little while from their wives and families.

I saw two only whose aspect was distinctly vicious. One was a tall fellow with shifty eyes, a hard thin mouth, a cruel smile, and his face was really horrible. I asked the doctor why he was there. Don Felipe, without speaking, made the peculiar motion of the fingers which signifies robbery, and the man seeing him repeated it with a leer. I have seldom seen a face that was so utterly repellent, so depraved and wicked: I could not get it out of my head, and for a long time saw before me the crafty eyes and the grinning mouth. Obviously the man was a criminal born who would start thieving as soon as he was out of prison, hopelessly and utterly corrupt. But it was curious that his character should be marked so plainly on his face; it was a danger-signal to his fellows, and one would have thought the suspicion it aroused must necessarily keep him virtuous. It was a countenance that would make a man instinctively clap his hand to his pocket.

The other was a Turk, a huge creature, with dark scowling face and prominent brows; he made a singular figure in his bright fez and baggy breeches, looking at his fellow prisoners with a frown of hate.

But the doctor had finished seeing his patients and the iron door was opened for us to go out. We went upstairs to the hospital, a long bare ward, terribly cheerless. Six men, perhaps, lay in bed, guarded by two warders; one old fellow with rheumatism groaning in agony, two others dazed and very still, with high fever. We walked round quickly, don Felipe as before mechanically looking at their tongues and feeling their pulse, speaking a word to the assistant and moving on. The windows were shut and there was a horrid stench of illness and drugs and antiseptics.

We went through long corridors to the female side, and meanwhile the assistant told the doctor that during the night a woman had been confined. Don Felipe sat down in an office to write a certificate.

‘What a nuisance these women are!’ he said. ‘Why can’t they wait till they get out of prison? How is it?’

‘It was still-born.’

‘Pero, hombre,’ said the doctor crossly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before? Now I shall have to write another certificate. This one’s no good.’

He tore it up and painfully made out a second with the slow laborious writing of a man unused to holding a pen.

Then we marched on and came to another smaller patio where the females were. They were comparatively few, not more than twenty or thirty; and when we entered a dark inner-room to see the woman who was ill they all trooped in after us — all but one. They stood round eagerly telling us of the occurrence.

‘Don’t make such a noise, por Dios! I can’t hear myself speak,’ said the doctor.

The woman was lying on her back with flushed cheeks, her eyes staring glassily. The doctor asked a question, but she did not answer. She began to cry, sobbing from utter weakness in a silent, unrestrained way. On a table near her, hidden by a cloth, lay the dead child.

We went out again into the patio. The sun was higher now and it was very warm, the blue sky shone above us without a cloud. The prisoners returned to their occupations. One old hag was doing a younger woman’s hair; I noticed that even for Spain it was beautiful, very thick, curling, and black as night. The girl held a carnation in her hand to put in front of the comb when the operation was completed. Another woman suckled a baby, and several tiny children were playing about happily, while their mothers chatted to one another, knitting.

But there was one, markedly different from the others, who sat alone taking no notice of the scene. It was she who remained in the patio when the rest followed us into the sick room, a gipsy, tall and gaunt, with a skin of the darkest yellow. Her hair was not elaborately arranged as that of her companions, but plainly done, drawn back stiffly from the forehead. She sat there, erect and motionless, looking at the ground with an unnatural stare, silent. They told me she never spoke a word nor paid attention to the women in the court. She might have been entirely alone. She never altered her position, but sat there, sphinx-like, in that attitude of stony grief. She was a stranger among the rest, and her bronzed face, her silence gave a weird impression; she seemed to recall the burning deserts of the East and an endless past.

At last we came out, and the heavy iron door was closed behind us. What a relief it was to be in the street again, to see the sun and the trees, and to breathe the free air! A cart went by with a great racket, drawn by three mules, and the cries of the driver as he cracked his whip were almost musical; a train of donkeys passed; a man trotted by on a brown shaggy cob, his huge panniers filled with glowing vegetables, green and red, and in a corner was a great bunch of roses. I took long breaths of the free air, I shook myself to get rid of those prison odours.

I offered don Felipe refreshment and we repaired to a dram-shop immediately opposite. Two women were standing there.

‘Ole!’ said the doctor to an old toothless hag with a vicious leer. ‘What are you doing here? You’ve not been in for some time.’

She laughed and explained that she was come to fetch her friend, a young woman, who had been released that morning. The doctor nodded to her, asking how long she had been in gaol.

‘Two years and nine months,’ she said.

And she began to laugh hysterically with tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ she cried. ‘I can’t understand it.’

She looked into the street with wild, yearning eyes; everything seemed to her strange and new.

‘I haven’t seen a tree for nearly three years,’ she sobbed.

But the hag was pressing the doctor to drink with her; he accepted without much hesitation, and gallantly proposed her health.

‘What are you going to do?’ he said to the younger woman, she was hardly more than a girl. ‘You’d better not hang about in Seville or you’ll get into trouble again.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’m going to my village — mi pueblo — this afternoon. I want to see my husband and my child.’

Don Felipe turned to me and asked what I thought of the Seville prison. I made some complimentary reply.

‘Are English prisons like that?’ he asked.

I said I did not think so.

‘Are they better?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘I’m told,’ he said, ‘that two years’ hard labour in an English prison kills a man.’

‘The English are a great nation,’ I replied.

‘And a humane one,’ he added, with a bow and a smile.

I bade him good-morning.

XXIII

Before the Bull-fight

If all Andalusians are potential gaol-birds they are also potential bull-fighters. It is impossible for foreigners to realise how firmly the love of that pastime is engrained in all classes. In other countries the gift that children love best is a box of soldiers, but in Spain it is a miniature ring with tin bulls, picadors on horseback and toreros. From their earliest youth boys play at bull-fighting, one of them taking the bull’s part and charging with the movements peculiar to that animal, while the rest make passes with their coats or handkerchiefs. Often, to increase the excitement of the game, they have two horns fixed on a piece of wood. You will see them playing it at every street corner all day long, and no amusement can rival it; with the result that by the time a boy is fifteen he has acquired considerable skill in the exercise, and a favourite entertainment then is to hire a bull-calf for an afternoon and practise with it. Every urchin in Andalusia knows the names of the most prominent champions and can tell you their merits.

The bull-fight is the national spectacle; it excites Spaniards as nothing else can, and the death of a famous torero is more tragic than the loss of a colony. Seville looks upon itself as the very home and centre of the art. The good king Ferdinand VII. — as precious a rascal as ever graced a throne — founded in Seville the first academy for the cultivation of tauromachy, and bull-fighters swagger through the Sierpes in great numbers and the most faultless costume.

There are only five great bull-fights in a year at Seville, namely, on Easter day, on the three days of the fair, and on Corpus Christi. But during the summer novilladas are held every Sunday, with bulls of three years old and young fighters. Long before an important corrida there is quite an excitement in the town. Gaudy bills are posted on the walls with the names of the performers and the proprietor of the bulls; crowds stand round reading them breathlessly, discussing with one another the chances of the fray; the papers give details and forecasts as in England they do for the better cause of horse-racing! And the journeyings of the matador are announced as exactly as with us the doings of the nobility and gentry.

The great matador, Mazzantini or Guerrita, arrives the day before the fight, and perhaps takes a walk in the Sierpes. People turn to look at him and acquaintances shake his hand, pleased that all the world may know how friendly they are with so great a man. The hero himself is calm and gracious. He feels himself a person of merit, and cannot be unconscious that he has a fortune of several million pesetas bringing in a reasonable interest. He talks with ease and assurance, often condescends to joke, and elegantly waves his hand, sparkling with diamonds of great value.

Many persons have described a bull-fight, but generally their emotions have overwhelmed them so that they have seen only part of one performance, and consequently have been obliged to use an indignant imagination to help out a very faulty recollection. This is my excuse for giving one more account of an entertainment which can in no way be defended. It is doubtless vicious and degrading; but with the constant danger, the skill displayed, the courage, the hair-breadth escapes, the catastrophes, it is foolish to deny that any pastime can be more exciting.

The English humanity to animals is one of the best traits of a great people, and they justly thank God they are not as others are. Can anything more horrid be imagined than to kill a horse in the bull-ring, and can any decent hack ask for a better end when he is broken down, than to be driven to death in London streets or to stand for hours on cab ranks in the rain and snow of an English winter? The Spaniards are certainly cruel to animals; on the other hand, they never beat their wives nor kick their children. From the dog’s point of view I would ten times sooner be English, but from the woman’s — I have my doubts. Some while ago certain papers, anxious perhaps to taste the comfortable joys of self-righteousness, turned their attention to the brutality of Spaniards, and a score of journalists wrote indignantly of bull-fights. At the same time, by a singular chance, a prize-fighter was killed in London, and the Spanish papers printed long tirades against the gross, barbaric English. The two sets of writers were equally vehement, inaccurate and flowery; but what seemed most remarkable was that each side evidently felt quite unaffected horror and disgust for the proceedings of the other. Like persons of doubtful character inveighing against the vices of the age, both were so carried away by moral enthusiasm as to forget that there was anything in their own histories which made this virtuous fury a little absurd. There is really a good deal in the point of view.

XXIV

Corrida de Toros — I

On the day before a bull-fight all the world goes down to Tablada to see the bulls. Youth and beauty drive, for every one in Seville of the least pretension to gentility keeps a carriage; the Sevillans, characteristically, may live in houses void of every necessity and comfort, eating bread and water, but they will have a carriage to drive in the paseo. You see vehicles of all kinds, from the new landau with a pair of magnificent Andalusian horses, or the strange omnibus drawn by mules, typical of Southern Spain, to the shabby victoria, with a broken-down hack and a decrepit coachman.

Tablada is a vast common without the town, running along the river side, and here all manner of cattle are kept throughout the year. But the fighting bulls are brought from their respective farms the morning before the day of battle, and each is put in an enclosure with its attendant oxen. The crowd looks eagerly, admiring the length of horn, forecasting the fight.

The handsome brutes remain there till midnight, when they are brought to the ring and shut in little separate boxes till the morrow. The encierro, as it is called, is an interesting sight. The road has been palisaded and the bulls are driven along by oxen. It is very curious to wait in the darkness, in the silence, under the myriad stars of the southern night. Your ear is astrung to hear the distant tramp; the waiting seems endless. A sound is heard and every one runs to the side; but nothing follows, and the waiting continues. Suddenly the stillness is broken by tinkling bells, the oxen; and immediately there is a tramp of rushing hoofs. Three men on horseback gallop through the entrance, and on their heels the cattle; the riders turn sharply round, a door is swung to behind them, and the oxen, with the bulls in their midst, pound through the ring.

The doors are opened two hours before the performance. Through the morning the multitude has trooped to the Plaza San Fernando to buy tickets, and in the afternoon all Seville wends its way towards the ring. The road is thronged with people, they walk in dense crowds, pushing one another to get out of the way of broken-down shays that roll along filled with enthusiasts. The drivers crack their whips, shouting: ‘Un real, un real a los Toros!’{a} The sun beats down and the sky is intensely blue. It is very hot, already people are blowing and panting, boys sell fans at a halfpenny each. ‘Abanicos a perra chica!’{b}

When you come near the ring the din is tremendous; the many vendors shout their wares, middlemen offer tickets at double the usual price, friends call to one another. Now and then is a quarrel, a quick exchange of abuse as one pushes or treads upon his neighbour; but as a rule all are astonishingly good-natured. A man, after a narrow escape from being run over, will shout a joke to the driver, who is always ready with a repartee. And they surge on towards the entrance. Every one is expectant and thrilled, the very air seems to give a sense of exhilaration. The people crowd in like ants. All things are gay and full of colour and life.

A picador passes on horseback in his uncouth clothes, and all turn to look at him.

And in the ring itself the scene is marvellous. On one side the sun beats down with burning rays, and there, the seats being cheaper, notwithstanding the terrific heat people are closely packed. There is a perpetual irregular movement of thousands of women’s fans fluttering to and fro. Opposite, in the shade, are nearly as many persons, but of better class. Above, in the boxes sit ladies in mantillas, and when a beautiful woman appears she is often greeted with a burst of applause, which she takes most unconcernedly. When at last the ring is full, tier above tier crammed so that not a place is vacant, it gives quite an extraordinary emotion. The serried masses cease then to be a collection of individuals, but gain somehow a corporate unity; you realise, with a kind of indeterminate fear, the many-headed beast of savage instincts and of ruthless might. No crowd is more picturesque than the Spanish, and the dark masculine costume vividly contrasts with the bright colours of the women, with flowers in their hair and mantillas of white lace.

But also the tremendous vitality of it all strikes you. Late arrivals walk along looking for room, gesticulating, laughing, bandying jokes; vendors of all sorts cry out their goods: the men who sell prawns, shrimps, and crabs’ claws from Cadiz pass with large baskets: ‘Bocas, bocas!’

The water sellers with huge jars: ‘Agua, quien quiere agua? Agua!’{c} The word sings along the interminable rows. A man demands a glass and hands down a halfpenny; a mug of sparkling water is sent up to him. It is deliciously cool.

The sellers of lottery tickets, offering as usual the first prize: ‘Premio gordo, quien quiere el premio gordo’;{d} or yelling the number of the ticket: ‘Who wants number seventeen hundred and eighty-five for three pesetas?’

And the newsboys add to the din: ‘Noticiero! Porvenir!’ Later on arrives the Madrid paper: ‘Heraldo! Heraldo!’

Lastly the men with stacks of old journals to use as seats: ‘A perra chica, dos periodicos a perra chica!’{e}

Suddenly there is a great clapping of hands, and looking up you find the president has come; he is supported by two friends, and all three, with comic solemnity, wear tall hats and frock coats. They bow to the public. Bull-fighting is the only punctual thing in Spain, and the president arrives precisely as the clock strikes half-past four. He waves a handkerchief, the band strikes up, a door is opened, and the fighters enter. First come the three matadors, the eldest in the middle, the next on his right, and the youngest on the left; they are followed by their respective cuadrillas, the banderilleros, the capeadors, the picadors on horseback, and finally the chulos, whose duty it is to unsaddle dead horses, attach the slaughtered bull to the team of mules, and perform other minor offices. They advance, gorgeous in their coloured satin and gold embroidery, bearing a cloak peculiarly folded over the arm; they walk with a kind of swinging motion, as ordained by the convention of a century. They bow to the president, very solemnly. The applause is renewed. They retire to the side, three picadors take up their places at some distance from one another on the right of the door from which issues the bull. The alguaciles, in black velvet, with peaked and feathered hats, on horseback, come forward, and the key of the bull’s den is thrown to them. They disappear. The fighters meanwhile exchange their satin cloaks for others of less value. There is another flourish of trumpets, the gates are opened for the bull.

Then comes a moment of expectation, every one is trembling with excitement. There is perfect silence. All eyes are fixed on the open gate.

Notes:

{a} ‘Twopence-halfpenny to the Bulls.’

{b} “Fans, one halfpenny each!”

{c} ‘Water, who wants water? Water!’

{d} ‘The first prize, who wants the first prize?’

{e} ‘One halfpenny, two papers for one halfpenny.’

XXV

Corrida de Toros — II

One or two shouts are heard, a murmur passes through the people, and the bull emerges — shining, black, with massive shoulders and fine horns. It advances a little, a splendid beast conscious of its strength, and suddenly stops dead, looking round. The toreros wave their capes and the picadors flourish their lances, long wooden spikes with an iron point. The bull catches sight of a horse, and lowering his head, bears down swiftly upon it. The picador takes firmer hold of his lance, and when the brute reaches him plants the pointed end between its shoulders; at the same moment the senior matador dashes forward and with his cloak distracts the bull’s attention. It wheels round and charges; he makes a pass; it goes by almost under his arm, but quickly turns and again attacks. This time the skilful fighter receives it backwards, looking over his shoulder, and again it passes. There are shouts of enthusiasm from the public. The bull’s glossy coat is stained with red.

A second picador comes forward, and the bull charges again, but furiously now, exerting its full might. The horse is thrown to the ground and the rider, by an evil chance, falls at the bull’s very feet.

It cannot help seeing him and lowers its head; the people catch their breath; many spring instinctively to their feet; here and there is a woman’s frightened cry; but immediately a matador draws the cape over its eyes and passionately the bull turns on him. Others spring forward and lift the picador: his trappings are so heavy that he cannot rise alone; he is dragged to safety and the steed brought back for him. One more horseman advances, and the bull with an angry snort bounds at him; the picador does his best, but is no match for the giant strength. The bull digs its horns deep into the horse’s side and lifts man and beast right off the ground; they fall with a heavy thud, and as the raging brute is drawn off, blood spurts from the horse’s flank. The chulos try to get it up; they drag on the reins with shouts and curses, and beat it with sticks. But the wretched creature, wounded to the death, helplessly lifts its head. They see it is useless and quickly remove saddle and bridle, a man comes with a short dagger called the puntilla, which he drives into its head, the horse falls on its side, a quiver passes through its body, and it is dead. The people are shouting with pleasure; the bull is a good one. The first picador comes up again and the bull attacks for the fourth time, but it has lost much strength, and the man drives it off. It has made a horrible gash in the horse’s belly, and the entrails protrude, dragging along the ground. The horse is taken out.

The president waves his handkerchief, the trumpets sound, and the first act of the drama is over.

The picadors leave the ring and the banderilleros take their darts, about three feet long, gay with decorations of coloured paper. While they make ready, others play with the bull, gradually tiring it: one throws aside his cape and awaits the charge with folded arms; the bull rushes at him, and the man without moving his feet twists his body away and the savage brute passes on. There is a great burst of applause for a daring feat well done.

Each matador has two banderilleros, and it is proper that three pairs of these darts should be placed. One of them steps to within speaking distance of the animal, and holding a banderilla in each hand lifted above his head, stamps his foot and shouts insulting words. The bull does not know what this new thing is, but charges blindly; at the same moment the man runs forward, and passing, plants the two darts between the shoulders. If they are well placed there is plentiful hand-clapping; no audience is so liberal of applause for skill or courage, none so intolerant of cowardice or stupidity; and with equal readiness it will yell with delight or hiss and hoot and whistle. The second banderillero comes forward to plant his pair; a third is inserted and the trumpets sound for the final scene.

This is the great duel between the single man and the bull. The matador advances, sword in hand, with the muleta, the red cloth for the passes, over his arm. Under the president’s box he takes off his hat, and with fine gesture makes a grandiloquent speech, wherein he vows either to conquer or to die: the harangue is finished with a wheel round and a dramatic flinging of his hat to attendants on the other side of the barrier. He pensively walks forward. All eyes are upon him — and he knows it. He motions his companions to stand back and goes close to the bull. He is quite alone, with his life in his hands — a slender figure, very handsome in the gorgeous costume glittering with fine gold. He arranges the muleta over a little stick, so that it hangs down like a flag and conceals his sword. Then quite solemnly he walks up to the bull, holding the red rag in his left hand. The bull watches suspiciously, suddenly charges, and the muleta is passed over its head; the matador does not move a muscle, the bull turns and stands quite motionless. Another charge, another pass. And so he continues, making seven or eight of various sorts, to the growing approbation of the public. At last it is time to kill. With great caution he withdraws the sword; the bull looks warily. He makes two or three passes more and walks round till he gets the animal into proper position: the forefeet must be set squarely on the ground. ‘Ora! Ora!’ cry the people. ‘Now! Now!’ The bull is well placed. The matador draws the sword back a little and takes careful aim. The bull rushes, and at the same moment the man makes one bound forward and buries the sword to the hilt between the brute’s shoulders. It falls to its knees and rolls over.

Then is a perfect storm of applause; and it is worth while to see fourteen thousand people wild with delight. The band bursts into joyous strains, and the mules come galloping in, gaily caparisoned; a rope is passed round the dead beast, and they drag it away. The matador advances to the president’s box and bows, while the shouting grows more frantic. He walks round, bowing and smiling, and the public in its enthusiasm throws down hats and cigars and sticks.

But there are no intervals to a bull-fight, and the picadors immediately reappear and take their places; the doors are flung open, and a second bull rushes forth. The matador still goes round bowing to the applause, elaborately unmindful of the angry beast.

Six animals are killed in an afternoon within two hours, and then the mighty audience troop out with flushed cheeks, the smell of blood strong in their nostrils.

XXVI

On Horseback

I had a desire to see something of the very heart of Andalusia, of that part of the country which had preserved its antique character, where railway trains were not, and the horse, the mule, the donkey were still the only means of transit. After much scrutiny of local maps and conversation with horse-dealers and others, I determined from Seville to go circuitously to Ecija, and thence return by another route as best I could. The district I meant to traverse in olden times was notorious for its brigands; even thirty years ago the prosperous tradesman, voyaging on his mule from town to town, was liable to be seized by unromantic outlaws and detained till his friends forwarded ransom, while ears and fingers were playfully sent to prove identity. In Southern Spain brigandage necessarily flourished, for not only were the country-folk in collusion with the bandits, but the very magistrates united with them to share the profits of lawless undertakings. Drastic measures were needful to put down the evil, and in a truly Spanish way drastic measures were employed. The Civil Guard, whose duty it was to see to the safety of the country side, had no confidence in the justice of Madrid, whither captured highwaymen were sent for trial; once there, for a few hundred dollars, the most murderous ruffian could prove his babe-like innocence, forthwith return to the scene of his former exploits and begin again. So they hit upon an expedient. The Civil Guards set out for the capital with their prisoner handcuffed between them; but, curiously enough, in every single case the brigand had scarcely marched a couple of miles before he incautiously tried to escape, whereupon he was, of course, promptly shot through the back. People noticed two things: first, that the clothes of the dead man were often singed, as if he had not escaped very far before he was shot down; that only proved his guardians’ zeal. But the other was stranger: the two Civil Guards, when after a couple of hours they returned to the town, as though by a mysterious premonition they had known the bandit would make some rash attempt, invariably had waiting for them an excellent hot dinner.

The only robber of importance who avoided such violent death was the chief of a celebrated band who, when captured, signed a declaration that he had not the remotest idea of escaping, and insisted on taking with him to Madrid his solicitor and a witness. He reached the capital alive, and having settled his little affairs with benevolent judges, turned to a different means of livelihood, and eventually, it is said, occupied a responsible post in the Government. It is satisfactory to think that his felonious talents were not in after-life entirely wasted.

It was the beginning of March when I started. According to the old proverb, the dog was already seeking the shade: En Marzo busca la sombra el perro; the chilly Spaniard, loosening the folds of his capa, acknowledged that at mid-day in the sun it was almost warm. The winter rains appeared to have ceased; the sky over Seville was cloudless, not with the intense azure of midsummer, but with a blue that seemed mixed with silver. And in the sun the brown water of the Guadalquivir glittered like the scales on a fish’s back, or like the burnished gold of old Moorish pottery.

I set out in the morning early, with saddle-bags fixed on either side and poncho strapped to my pommel. A loaded revolver, though of course I never had a chance to use it, made me feel pleasantly adventurous. I walked cautiously over the slippery cobbles of the streets, disturbing the silence with the clatter of my horse’s shoes. Now and then a mule or a donkey trotted by, with panniers full of vegetables, of charcoal or of bread, between which on the beast’s neck sat perched a man in a short blouse. I came to the old rampart of the town, now a promenade; and at the gate groups of idlers, with cigarettes between their lips, stood talking.

An hospitable friend had offered lodging for the night and food; after which, my ideas of the probable accommodation being vague, I expected to sleep upon straw, for victuals depending on the wayside inns. I arrived at the Campo de la Cruz, a tiny chapel which marks the same distance from the Cathedral as Jesus Christ walked to the Cross; it is the final boundary of Seville.

Immediately afterwards I left the high-road, striking across country to Carmona. The land was already wild; on either side of the bridle-path were great wastes of sand covered only by palmetto. The air was cool and fresh, like the air of English country in June when it has rained through the night; and Aguador, snorting with pleasure, cantered over the uneven ground, nimbly avoiding holes and deep ruts with the sure-footedness of his Arab blood. An Andalusian horse cares nothing for the ground on which he goes, though it be hard and unyielding as iron; and he clambers up and down steep, rocky precipices as happily as he trots along a cinder-path.

I passed a shepherd in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, holding a crook. He stared at me, his flock of brown sheep clustered about him as I scampered by, and his dog rushed after, barking.

‘Vaya Usted con Dios!’

I came to little woods of pine-trees, with long, thin trunks, and the foliage spreading umbrella-wise; round them circled innumerable hawks, whose nests I saw among the branches. Two ravens crossed my path, their wings heavily flapping.

The great charm of the Andalusian country is that you seize romance, as it were, in the act. In northern lands it is only by a mental effort that you can realise the picturesque value of the life that surrounds you; and, for my part, I can perceive it only by putting it mentally in black and white, and reading it as though between the covers of a book. Once, I remember, in Brittany, in a distant corner of that rock-bound coast, I sat at midnight in a fisherman’s cottage playing cards by the light of two tallow candles. Next door, with only a wall between us, a very old sailor lay dying in the great cupboard-bed which had belonged to his fathers before him; and he fought for life with the remains of that strenuous vigour with which in other years he had battled against the storms of the Atlantic. In the stillness of the night, the waves, with the murmur of a lullaby, washed gently upon the shingle, and the stars shone down from a clear sky. I looked at the yellow light on the faces of the players, gathered in that desolate spot from the four corners of the earth, and cried out: ‘By Jove, this is romance!’ I had never before caught that impression in the very making, and I was delighted with my good fortune.

The answer came quickly from the American: ‘Don’t talk bosh! It’s your deal.’

But for all that it was romance, seized fugitively, and life at that moment threw itself into a decorative pattern fit to be remembered. It is the same effect which you get more constantly in Spain, so that the commonest things are transfigured into beauty. For in the cactus and the aloe and the broad fields of grain, in the mules with their wide panniers and the peasants, in the shepherds’ huts and the straggling farm-houses, the romantic is there, needing no subtlety to be discovered; and the least imaginative may feel a certain thrill when he understands that the life he leads is not without its æsthetic meaning.

I rode for a long way in complete solitude, through many miles of this sandy desert. Then the country changed, and olive-groves in endless succession followed one another, the trees with curiously decorative effect were planted in long, even lines. The earth was a vivid red, contrasting with the blue sky and the sombre olives, gnarled and fantastically twisted, like evil spirits metamorphosed: in places they had sown corn, and the young green enhanced the shrill diversity of colour. With its clear, brilliant outlines and its lack of shadow, the scene reminded one of a prim pattern, such as in Jane Austen’s day young gentlewomen worked in worsted. Sometimes I saw women among the trees, perched like monkeys on the branches, or standing below with large baskets; they were extraordinarily quaint in the trousers which modesty bade them wear for the concealment of their limbs when olive-picking. The costume was so masculine, their faces so red and weather-beaten, that the yellow handkerchief on their heads was really the only means of distinguishing their sex.

But the path became more precipitous, hewn from the sandstone, and so polished by the numberless shoes of donkeys and of mules that I hardly dared walk upon it; and suddenly I saw Carmona in front of me — quite close.

XXVII

By the Road — I

The approach to Carmona is a very broad, white street, much too wide for the cottages which line it, deserted; and the young trees planted on either side are too small to give shade. The sun beat down with a fierce glare and the dust rose in clouds as I passed. Presently I came to a great Moorish gateway, a dark mass of stone, battlemented, with a lofty horseshoe arch. People were gathered about it in many-coloured groups, I found it was a holiday in Carmona, and the animation was unwonted; in a corner stood the hut of the Consumo, and the men advanced to examine my saddle-bags. I passed through, into the town, looking right and left for a parador, an hostelry whereat to leave my horse. I bargained for the price of food and saw Aguador comfortably stalled; then made my way to the Nekropolis where lived my host. There are many churches in Carmona, and into one of these I entered; it had nothing of great interest, but to a certain degree it was rich, rich in its gilded woodwork and in the brocade that adorned the pillars; and I felt that these Spanish churches lent a certain dignity to life: for all the careless flippancy of Andalusia they still remained to strike a nobler note. I forgot willingly that the land was priest-ridden and superstitious, so that a Spaniard could tell me bitterly that there were but two professions open to his countrymen, the priesthood and the bull-ring. It was pleasant to rest in that cool and fragrant darkness.

My host was an archæologist, and we ate surrounded by broken earthenware, fragmentary mosaics, and grinning skulls. It was curious afterwards to wander in the graveyard which, with indefatigable zeal, he had excavated, among the tombs of forgotten races, letting oneself down to explore the subterranean cells. The paths he had made in the giant cemetery were lined with a vast number of square sandstone boxes which had contained human ashes; and now, when the lid was lifted, a green lizard or a scorpion darted out. From the hill I saw stretched before me the great valley of the Guadalquivir: with the squares of olive and of ploughed field, and the various greens of the corn, it was like a vast, multi-coloured carpet. But later, with the sunset, black clouds arose, splendidly piled upon one another; and the twilight air was chill and grey. A certain sternness came over the olive-groves, and they might well have served as a reproach to the facile Andaluz; for their cold passionless green seemed to offer a warning to his folly.

At night my host left me to sleep in the village, and I lay in bed alone in the little house among the tombs; it was very silent. The wind sprang up and blew about me, whistling through the windows, whistling weirdly; and I felt as though the multitudes that had been buried in that old cemetery filled the air with their serried numbers, a vast, silent congregation waiting motionless for they knew not what. I recalled a gruesome fact that my friend had told me: not far from there, in tombs that he had disinterred the skeletons lay huddled spasmodically, with broken skulls and a great stone by the side; for when a man, he said, lay sick unto death, his people took him, and placed him in his grave, and with the stone killed him.

In the morning I set out again. It was five-and-thirty miles to Ecija, but a new high road stretched from place to place and I expected easy riding. Carmona stands on the top of a precipitous hill, round which winds the beginning of the road; below, after many zigzags, I saw its continuation, a straight white line reaching as far as I could see. In Andalusia, till a few years ago, there were practically no high roads, and even now they are few and bad. The chief communication from town to town is usually an uneven track, which none attempts to keep up, with deep ruts, and palmetto growing on either side, and occasional pools of water. A day’s rain makes it a quagmire, impassable for anything beside the sure-footed mule.

I went on, meeting now and then a string of asses, their panniers filled with stones or with wood for Carmona; the drivers sat on the rump of the hindmost animal, for that is the only comfortable way to ride a donkey. A peasant trotted briskly by on his mule, his wife behind him with her arms about his waist. I saw a row of ploughs in a field; to each were attached two oxen, and they went along heavily, one behind the other in regular line. By the side of every pair a man walked bearing a long goad, and one of them sang a Malagueña, its monotonous notes rising and falling slowly. From time to time I passed a white farm, a little way from the road, invitingly cool in the heat; the sun began to beat down fiercely. The inevitable storks were perched on a chimney, by their big nest; and when they flew in front of me, with their broad white wings and their red legs against the blue sky, they gave a quaint impression of a Japanese screen.

A farmhouse such as this seems to me always a type of the Spanish impenetrability. I have been over many of them, and know the manner of their rooms and the furniture, the round of duties there performed and how the day is portioned out; but the real life of the inhabitants escapes me. My knowledge is merely external. I am conscious that it is the same of the Andalusians generally, and am dismayed because I know practically nothing more after a good many years than I learnt in the first months of my acquaintance with them. Below the superficial similarity with the rest of Europe which of late they have acquired, there is a difference which makes it impossible to get at the bottom of their hearts. They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger.

Gradually the cultivation ceased, and I saw no further sign of human beings. I returned to the desert of the previous day, but the land was more dreary. The little groves of pine-trees had disappeared, there were no olives, no cornfields, not even the aloe nor the wilder cactus; but on either side as far as the horizon, desert wastes, littered with stones and with rough boulders, grown over only by palmetto. For many miles I went, dismounting now and then to stretch my legs and sauntering a while with the reins over my shoulder. Towards mid-day I rested by the wayside and let Aguador eat what grass he could.

Presently, continuing my journey, I caught sight of a little hovel where the fir-branch over the door told me wine was to be obtained. I fastened my horse to a ring in the wall, and, going in, found an aged crone who gave me a glass of that thin white wine, produce of the last year’s vintage, which is called Vino de la Hoja, wine of the leaf; she looked at me incuriously as though she saw so many people and they were so much alike that none repaid particular scrutiny. I tried to talk with her, for it seemed a curious life that she must lead, alone in that hut many miles from the nearest hamlet, with never a house in sight; but she was taciturn and eyed me now with something like suspicion. I asked for food, but with a sullen frown she answered that she had none to spare. I inquired the distance to Luisiana, a village on the way to Ecija where I had proposed to lunch, and shrugging her shoulders, she replied: ‘How should I know!’ I was about to go when I heard a great clattering, and a horseman galloped up. He dismounted and walked in, a fine example of the Andalusian countryman, handsome and tall, well-shaved, with close-cropped hair. He wore elaborately decorated gaiters, the usual short, close-fitting jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat; in his belt were a knife and a revolver, and slung across his back a long gun. He would have made an admirable brigand of comic-opera; but was in point of fact a farmer riding, as he told me, to see his novia, or lady-love, at a neighbouring farm.

I found him more communicative and in the politest fashion we discussed the weather and the crops. He had been to Seville.

‘Che maravilla!’ he cried, waving his fine, strong hands. ‘What a marvel! But I cannot bear the town-folk. What thieves and liars!’

‘Town-folk should stick to the towns,’ muttered the old woman, looking at me somewhat pointedly.

The remark drew the farmer’s attention more closely to me.

‘And what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Riding to Ecija.’

‘Ah, you’re a commercial traveller,’ he cried, with fine scorn. ‘You foreigners bleed the country of all its money. You and the government!’

‘Rogues and vagabonds!’ muttered the old woman.

Notwithstanding, the farmer with much condescension accepted one of my cigars, and made me drink with him a glass of aguardiente.

We went off together. The mare he rode was really magnificent, rather large, holding her head beautifully, with a tail that almost swept the ground. She carried as if it were nothing the heavy Spanish saddle, covered with a white sheep-skin, its high triangular pommel of polished wood. Our ways, however, quickly diverged. I inquired again how far it was to the nearest village.

‘Eh!’ said the farmer, with a vague gesture. ‘Two leagues. Three leagues. Quien sabe? Who knows? Adios!’

He put the spurs to his mare and galloped down a bridle-track. I, whom no fair maiden awaited, trotted on soberly.

XXVIII

By the Road — II

The endless desert grew rocky and less sandy, the colours duller. Even the palmetto found scanty sustenance, and huge boulders, strewn as though some vast torrent had passed through the plain, alone broke the desolate flatness. The dusty road pursued its way, invariably straight, neither turning to one side nor to the other, but continually in front of me, a long white line.

Finally in the distance I saw a group of white buildings and a cluster of trees. I thought it was Luisiana, but Luisiana, they had said, was a populous hamlet, and here were only two or three houses and not a soul. I rode up and found among the trees a tall white church, and a pool of murky water, further back a low, new edifice, which was evidently a monastery, and a posada. Presently a Franciscan monk in his brown cowl came out of the church, and he told me that Luisiana was a full league off, but that food could be obtained at the neighbouring inn.

The posada was merely a long barn, with an open roof of wood, on one side of which were half a dozen mangers and in a corner two mules. Against another wall were rough benches for travellers to sleep on. I dismounted and walked to the huge fireplace at one end, where I saw three very old women seated like witches round a brasero, the great brass dish of burning cinders. With true Spanish stolidity they did not rise as I approached, but waited for me to speak, looking at me indifferently. I asked whether I could have anything to eat.

‘Fried eggs.’

‘Anything else?’

The hostess, a tall creature, haggard and grim, shrugged her shoulders. Her jaws were toothless, and when she spoke it was difficult to understand. I tied Aguador to a manger and took off his saddle. The old women stirred themselves at last, and one brought a portion of chopped straw and a little barley. Another with the bellows blew on the cinders, and the third, taking eggs from a basket, fried them on the brasero. Besides, they gave me coarse brown bread and red wine, which was coarser still; for dessert the hostess went to the door and from a neighbouring tree plucked oranges.

When I had finished — it was not a very substantial meal — I drew my chair to the brasero and handed round my cigarette-case. The old women helped themselves, and a smile of thanks made the face of my gaunt hostess somewhat less repellent. We smoked a while in silence.

‘Are you all alone here?’ I asked, at length.

The hostess made a movement of her head towards the country. ‘My son is out shooting,’ she said, ‘and two others are in Cuba, fighting the rebels.’

‘God protect them!’ muttered another.

‘All our sons go to Cuba now,’ said the first. ‘Oh, I don’t blame the Cubans, but the government.’

An angry light filled her eyes, and she lifted her clenched hand, cursing the rulers at Madrid who took her children. ‘They’re robbers and fools. Why can’t they let Cuba go? It isn’t worth the money we pay in taxes.’

She spoke so vehemently, mumbling the words between her toothless gums, that I could scarcely make them out.

‘In Madrid they don’t care if the country goes to rack and ruin so long as they fill their purses. Listen.’ She put one hand on my arm. ‘My boy came back with fever and dysentery. He was ill for months — at death’s door — and I nursed him day and night. And almost before he could walk they sent him out again to that accursed country.’

The tears rolled heavily down her wrinkled cheeks.

Luisiana is a curious place. It was a colony formed by Charles III. of Spain with Germans whom he brought to people the desolate land; and I fancied the Teuton ancestry was apparent in the smaller civility of the inhabitants. They looked sullenly as I passed, and none gave the friendly Andalusian greeting. I saw a woman hanging clothes on the line outside her house; she had blue eyes and flaxen hair, a healthy red face, and a solidity of build which proved the purity of her northern blood. The houses, too, had a certain exotic quaintness; notwithstanding the universal whitewash of the South, there was about them still a northern character. They were prim and regularly built, with little plots of garden; the fences and the shutters were bright green. I almost expected to see German words on the post-office and on the tobacco-shop, and the grandiloquent Spanish seemed out of place; I thought the Spanish clothes of the men sat upon them uneasily.

The day was drawing to a close and I pushed on to reach Ecija before night, but Aguador was tired and I was obliged mostly to walk. Now the highway turned and twisted among little hills and it was a strange relief to leave the dead level of the plains: on each side the land was barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I left him. I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to see the town, but every time was disappointed. The traces of man surrounded me at last; again I rode among olive-groves and cornfields; the highway now was bordered with straggling aloes and with hedges of cactus.

At last! I reached the brink of another hill, and then, absolutely at my feet, so that I could have thrown a stone on its roofs, lay Ecija with its numberless steeples.

XXIX

Ecija

The central square, where are the government offices, the taverns, and a little inn, is a charming place, quiet and lackadaisical, its pale browns and greys very restful in the twilight, and harmonious. The houses with their queer windows and their balconies of wrought iron are built upon arcades which give a pleasant feeling of intimacy: in summer, cool and dark, they must be the promenade of all the gossips and the loungers. One can imagine the uneventful life, the monotonous round of existence; and yet the Andalusian blood runs in the people’s veins. To my writer’s fantasy Ecija seemed a fit background for some tragic story of passion or of crime.

I dined, unromantically enough, with a pair of commercial travellers, a post-office clerk, and two stout, elderly men who appeared to be retired officers. Spanish victuals are terrible and strange; food is even more an affair of birth than religion, since a man may change his faith, but hardly his manner of eating: the stomach used to roast meat and Yorkshire pudding rebels against Eastern cookery, and a Christian may sooner become a Buddhist than a beef-eater a guzzler of olla podrida. The Spaniards without weariness eat the same dinner day after day, year in, year out: it is always the same white, thin, oily soup; a dish of haricot beans and maize swimming in a revolting sauce; a nameless entrée fried in oil — Andalusians have a passion for other animals’ insides; a thin steak, tough as leather and grilled to utter dryness; raisins and oranges. You rise from table feeling that you have been soaked in rancid oil.

My table-companions were disposed to be sociable. The travellers desired to know whether I was there to sell anything, and one drew from his pocket, for my inspection, a case of watch-chains. The officers surmised that I had come from Gibraltar to spy the land, and to terrify me, spoke of the invincible strength of the Spanish forces.

‘Are you aware,’ said the elder, whose adiposity prevented his outward appearance from corresponding with his warlike heart, ‘Are you aware that in the course of history our army has never once been defeated, and our fleet but twice?’

He mentioned the catastrophes, but I had never heard of them; and Trafalgar was certainly not included. I hazarded a discreet inquiry, whereupon, with much emphasis, both explained how on that occasion the Spanish had soundly thrashed old Nelson, although he had discomfited the French.

‘It is odd,’ I observed, ‘that British historians should be so inaccurate.’

‘It is discreditable,’ retorted my acquaintance, with a certain severity.

‘How long did the English take to conquer the Soudan?’ remarked the other, somewhat aggressively picking his teeth. ‘Twenty years? We conquered Morocco in three months.’

‘And the Moors are devils,’ said the commercial traveller. ‘I know, because I once went to Tangiers for my firm.’

After dinner I wandered about the streets, past the great old houses of the nobles in the Calle de los Caballeros, empty now and dilapidated, for every gentleman that can put a penny in his pocket goes to Madrid to spend it; down to the river which flowed swiftly between high banks. Below the bridge two Moorish mills, irregular masses of blackness, stood finely against the night. Near at hand they were still working at a forge, and I watched the flying sparks as the smith hammered a horseshoe; the workers were like silhouettes in front of the leaping flames.

At many windows, to my envy, couples were philandering; the night was cold and Corydon stood huddled in his cape. But the murmuring as I passed was like the flow of a rapid brook, and I imagined, I am sure, far more passionate and romantic speeches than ever the lovers made. I might have uttered them to the moon, but I should have felt ridiculous, and it was more practical to jot them down afterwards in a note-book. In some of the surrounding villages they have so far preserved the Moorish style as to have no windows within reach of the ground, and lovers then must take advantage of the aperture at the bottom of the door made for the domestic cat’s particular convenience. Stretched full length on the ground, on opposite sides of the impenetrable barrier, they can still whisper amorous commonplaces to one another. But imagine the confusion of a polite Spaniard, on a dark night, stumbling over a recumbent swain:

‘My dear sir, I beg your pardon. I had no idea....’

In old days the disturbance would have been sufficient cause for a duel, but now manners are more peaceful: the gallant, turning a little, removes his hat and politely answers:

‘It is of no consequence. Vaya Usted con Dios!’

‘Good-night!’

The intruder passes and the beau endeavours passionately to catch sight of his mistress’ black eyes.

Next day was Sunday, and I walked by the river till I found a plot of grass sheltered from the wind by a bristly hedge of cactus. I lay down in the sun, lazily watching two oxen that ploughed a neighbouring field.

I felt it my duty in the morning to buy a chap-book relating the adventures of the famous brigands who were called the Seven Children of Ecija; and this, somewhat sleepily, I began to read. It required a byronic stomach, for the very first chapter led me to a monastery where mass proceeded in memory of some victim of undiscovered crime. Seven handsome men appeared, most splendidly arrayed, but armed to the teeth; each one was every inch a brigand, pitiless yet great of heart, saturnine yet gentlemanly; and their peculiarity was that though six were killed one day seven would invariably be seen the next. The most gorgeously apparelled of them all, entering the sacristy, flung a purse of gold to the Superior, while a scalding tear coursed down his sunburnt cheek; and this he dried with a noble gesture and a richly embroidered handkerchief! In a whirlwind of romantic properties I read of a wicked miser who refused to support his brother’s widow, of the widow herself, (brought at birth to a gardener in the dead of night by a mysterious mulatto,) and of this lady’s lovely offspring. My own feelings can never be harrowed on behalf of a widow with a marriageable daughter, but I am aware that habitual readers of romance, like ostriches, will swallow anything. I was hurried to a subterranean chamber where the Seven Children, in still more elaborate garments, performed various dark deeds, smoked expensive Havanas, and seated on silken cushions, partook (like Freemasons) of a succulent cold collation.

The sun shone down with comfortable warmth, and I stretched my legs. My pipe was out and I refilled it. A meditative snail crawled up and observed me with flattering interest.

I grew somewhat confused. A stolen will was of course inevitable, and so were prison dungeons; but the characters had an irritating trick of revealing at critical moments that they were long-lost relatives. It must have been a tedious age when poor relations were never safely buried. However, youth and beauty were at last triumphant and villainy confounded, virtue was crowned with orange blossom and vice died a miserable death. Rejoicing in duty performed I went to sleep.

XXX

Wind and Storm

But next morning the sky was dark with clouds; people looked up dubiously when I asked the way and distance to Marchena, prophesying rain. Fetching my horse, the owner of the stable robbed me with peculiar callousness, for he had bound my hands the day before, when I went to see how Aguador was treated, by giving me with most courteous ceremony a glass of aguardiente; and his urbanity was then so captivating that now I lacked assurance to protest. I paid the scandalous overcharge with a good grace, finding some solace in the reflection that he was at least a picturesque blackguard, tall and spare, grey-headed, with fine features sharpened by age to the strongest lines; for I am always grateful to the dishonest when they add a certain æsthetic charm to their crooked ways. There is a proverb which says that in Ecija every man is a thief and every woman — no better than she should be: I was not disinclined to believe it.

I set out, guided by a sign-post, and the good road seemed to promise an easy day. They had told me that the distance was only six leagues, and I expected to arrive before luncheon. Aguador, fresh after his day’s rest, broke into a canter when I put him on the green plot, which the old Spanish law orders to be left for cattle by the side of the highway. But after three miles, without warning, the road suddenly stopped. I found myself in an olive-grove, with only a narrow path in front of me. It looked doubtful, but there was no one in sight and I wandered on, trusting to luck.

Presently, in a clearing, I caught sight of three men on donkeys, walking slowly one after the other, and I galloped after to ask my way. The beasts were laden with undressed skins which they were taking to Fuentes, and each man squatted cross-legged on the top of his load. The hindermost turned right round when I asked my question and sat unconcernedly with his back to the donkey’s head. He looked about him vaguely as though expecting the information I sought to be written on the trunk of an olive-tree, and scratched his head.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I should think it was a matter of seven leagues, but it will rain before you get there.’

‘This is the right way, isn’t it?’

‘It may be. If it doesn’t lead to Marchena it must lead somewhere else.’

There was a philosophic ring about the answer which made up for the uncertainty. The skinner was a fat, good-humoured creature, like all Spaniards intensely curious; and to prepare the way for inquiries, offered a cigarette.

‘But why do you come to Ecija by so roundabout a way as Carmona, and why should you return to Seville by such a route as Marchena?’

His opinion was evidently that the shortest way between two places was also the best. He received my explanation with incredulity and asked, more insistently, why I went to Ecija on horseback when I might go by train to Madrid.

‘For pleasure,’ said I.

‘My good sir, you must have come on some errand.’

‘Oh yes,’ I answered, hoping to satisfy him, ‘on the search for emotion.’

At this he bellowed with laughter and turned round to tell his fellows.

‘Usted es muy guason,’ he said at length, which may be translated: ‘You’re a mighty funny fellow.’

I expressed my pleasure at having provided the skinners with amusement and bidding them farewell, trotted on.

I went for a long time among the interminable olives, grey and sad beneath the sullen clouds, and at last the rain began to fall. I saw a farm not very far away and cantered up to ask for shelter. An old woman and a labourer came to the door and looked at me very doubtfully; they said it was not a posada, but my soft words turned their hearts and they allowed me to come in. The rain poured down in heavy, oblique lines.

The labourer took Aguador to the stable and I went into the parlour, a long, low, airy chamber like the refectory of a monastery, with windows reaching to the ground. Two girls were sitting round the brasero, sewing; they offered me a chair by their side, and as the rain fell steadily we began to talk. The old woman discreetly remained away. They asked about my journey, and as is the Spanish mode, about my country, myself, and my belongings. It was a regular volley of questions I had to answer, but they sounded pleasanter in the mouth of a pretty girl than in that of an obese old skinner; and the rippling laughter which greeted my replies made me feel quite witty. When they smiled they showed the whitest teeth. Then came my turn for questioning. The girl on my right, prettier than her sister, was very Spanish, with black, expressive eyes, an olive skin, and a bunch of violets in her abundant hair. I asked whether she had a novio, or lover; and the question set her laughing immoderately. What was her name? ‘Soledad — Solitude.’

I looked somewhat anxiously at the weather, I feared the shower would cease, and in a minute, alas! the rain passed away; and I was forced to notice it, for the sun-rays came dancing through the window, importunately, making patterns of light upon the floor. I had no further excuse to stay, and said good-bye; but I begged for the bunch of violets in Soledad’s dark hair and she gave it with a pretty smile. I plunged again into the endless olive-groves.

It was a little strange, the momentary irruption into other people’s lives, the friendly gossip with persons of a different tongue and country, whom I had never seen before, whom I should never see again; and were I not strictly truthful I might here lighten my narrative by the invention of a charming and romantic adventure. But if chance brings us often for a moment into other existences, it takes us out with equal suddenness so that we scarcely know whether they were real or mere imaginings of an idle hour: the Fates have a passion for the unfinished sketch and seldom trouble to unravel the threads which they have so laboriously entangled. The little scene brought another to my mind. When I was ‘on accident duty’ at St. Thomas’s Hospital a man brought his son with a broken leg; it was hard luck on the little chap, for he was seated peacefully on the ground when another boy, climbing a wall, fell on him and did the damage. When I returned him, duly bandaged, to his father’s arms, the child bent forward and put out his lips for a kiss, saying good-night with babyish pronunciation. The father and the attendant nurse laughed, and I, being young, was confused and blushed profusely. They went away and somehow or other I never saw them again. I wonder if the pretty child, (he must be eight or ten now,) remembers kissing a very weary medical student, who had not slept much for several days, and was dead tired. Probably he has quite forgotten that he ever broke his leg. And I suppose no recollection remains with the pretty girl in the farm of a foreigner riding mysteriously through the olive-groves, to whom she gave shelter and a bunch of violets.

I came at last to the end of the trees and found then that a mighty wind had risen, which blew straight in my teeth. It was hard work to ride against it, but I saw a white town in the distance, on a hill; and made for it, rejoicing in the prospect. Presently I met some men shooting, and to make sure, asked whether the houses I saw really were Marchena.

‘Oh no,’ said one. ‘You’ve come quite out of the way. That is Fuentes. Marchena is over there, beyond the hill.’

My heart sank, for I was growing very hungry, and I asked whether I could not get shelter at Fuentes. They shrugged their shoulders and advised me to go to Marchena, which had a small inn. I went on for several hours, battling against the wind, bent down in order to expose myself as little as possible, over a huge expanse of pasture land, a desert of green. I reached the crest of the hill, but there was no sign of Marchena, unless that was a tower which I saw very far away, its summit just rising above the horizon.

I was ravenous. My saddle-bags contained spaces for a bottle and for food; and I cursed my folly in stuffing them with such useless refinements of civilisation as hair-brushes and soap. It is possible that one could allay the pangs of hunger with soap; but under no imaginable circumstances with hair-brushes.

It was a tower in the distance, but it seemed to grow neither nearer nor larger; the wind blew without pity, and miserably Aguador tramped on. I no longer felt very hungry, but dreadfully bored. In that waste of greenery the only living things beside myself were a troop of swallows that had accompanied me for miles. They flew close to the ground, in front of me, circling round; and the wind was so high that they could scarcely advance against it.

I remembered the skinner’s question, why I rode through the country when I could go by train. I thought of the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, where persons more fortunate than I had that day eaten hearty luncheons. I imagined to myself a well-grilled steak with boiled potatoes, and a pint of old ale, Stilton! The smoke rose to my nostrils.

But at last, the Saints be praised! I found a real bridle-path, signs of civilisation, ploughed fields; and I came in sight of Marchena perched on a hill-top, surrounded by its walls. When I arrived the sun was setting finely behind the town.

XXXI

Two Villages

Marchena was all white, and on the cold windy evening I spent there, deserted of inhabitants. Quite rarely a man sidled past wrapped to the eyes in his cloak, or a woman with a black shawl over her head. I saw in the town nothing characteristic but the wicker-work frame in front of each window, so that people within could not possibly be seen; it was evidently a Moorish survival. At night men came into the eating-room of the inn, ate their dinner silently, and muffling themselves, quickly went out; the cold seemed to have killed all life in them. I slept in a little windowless cellar, on a straw bed which was somewhat verminous.

But next morning, as I looked back, the view of Marchena was charming. It stood on the crest of a green hill, surrounded by old battlements, and the sun shone down upon it. The wind had fallen, and in the early hour the air was pleasant and balmy. There was no road whatever, not even a bridle-track this time, and I made straight for Seville. I proposed to rest my horse and lunch at Mairena. On one side was a great plain of young corn stretching to the horizon, and on the other, with the same mantle of green, little hills, round which I slowly wound. The sun gave all manner of varied tints to the verdure — sometimes it was all emerald and gold, and at others it was like dark green velvet.

But the clouds in the direction of Seville were very black, and coming nearer I saw that it rained upon the hills. The water fell on the earth like a transparent sheet of grey. Soon I felt an occasional drop, and I put on my poncho.

The rain began in earnest, no northern drizzle, but a streaming downpour that soaked me to the skin. The path became marsh-like, and Aguador splashed along at a walk; it was impossible to go faster. The rain pelted down, blinding me. Then, oddly enough, for the occasion hardly warranted such high-flown thoughts, I felt suddenly the utter helplessness of man: I had never before realised with such completeness his insignificance beside the might of Nature; alone, with not a soul in sight, I felt strangely powerless. The plain flaunted itself insolently in face of my distress, and the hills raised their heads with a scornful pride; they met the rain as equals, but me it crushed; I felt as though it would beat me down into the mire. I fell into a passion with the elements, and was seized with a desire to strike out. But the white sheet of water was senseless and impalpable, and I relieved myself by raging inwardly at the fools who complain of civilisation and of railway-trains; they have never walked for hours foot-deep in mud, terrified lest their horse should slip, with the rain falling as though it would never cease.

The path led me to a river; there was a ford, but the water was very high, and rushed and foamed like a torrent. Ignorant of the depth and mistrustful, I trotted up-stream a little, seeking shallower parts; but none could be seen, and it was no use to look for a bridge. I was bound to cross, and I had to risk it; my only consolation was that even if Aguador could not stand, I was already so wet that I could hardly get wetter. The good horse required some persuasion before he would enter; the water rushed and bubbled and rapidly became deeper; he stopped and tried to turn back, but I urged him on. My feet went under water, and soon it was up to my knees; then, absurdly, it struck me as rather funny, and I began to laugh; I could not help thinking how foolish I should look and feel on arriving at the other side, if I had to swim for it. But immediately it grew shallower; all my adventures tailed off thus unheroically just when they began to grow exciting, and in a minute I was on comparatively dry land.

I went on, still with no view of Mairena; but I was coming nearer. I met a group of women walking with their petticoats over their heads. I passed a labourer sheltered behind a hedge, while his oxen stood in a field, looking miserably at the rain. Still it fell, still it fell!

And when I reached Mairena it was the most cheerless place I had come across on my journey, merely a poverty-stricken hamlet that did not even boast a bad inn. I was directed from place to place before I could find a stable; I was soaked to the skin, and there seemed no shelter. At last I discovered a wretched wine-shop; but the woman who kept it said there was no fire and no food. Then I grew very cross. I explained with heat that I had money; it is true I was bedraggled and disreputable, but when I showed some coins, to prove that I could pay for what I bought, she asked unwillingly what I required. I ordered a brasero, and dried my clothes as best I could by the burning cinders. I ate a scanty meal of eggs, and comforted myself with the thin wine of the leaf, sufficiently alcoholic to be exhilarating, and finally, with aguardiente regained my equilibrium.

But the elements were against me. The rain had ceased while I lunched, but no sooner had I left Mairena than it began again, and Seville was sixteen miles away. It poured steadily. I tramped up the hills, covered with nut-trees; I wound down into valleys; the way seemed interminable. I tramped on. At last from the brow of a hill I saw in the distance the Giralda and the clustering houses of Seville, but all grey in the wet; above it heavy clouds were lowering. On and on!

The day was declining, and Seville now was almost hidden in the mist, but I reached a road. I came to the first tavern of the environs; after a while to the first houses, then the road gave way to slippery cobbles, and I was in Seville. The Saints be praised!

XXXII

Granada

To go from Seville to Granada is like coming out of the sunshine into deep shadow. I arrived, my mind full of Moorish pictures, expecting to find a vivid, tumultuous life; and I was ready with a prodigal hand to dash on the colours of my admiration. But Granada is a sad town, grey and empty; its people meander, melancholy, through the streets, unoccupied. It is a tradeless place living on the monuments which attract strangers, and like many a city famous for stirring history, seems utterly exhausted. Granada gave me an impression that it wished merely to be left alone to drag out its remaining days in peace, away from the advance of civilisation and the fervid hurrying of progress: it seemed like a great adventuress retired from the world after a life of vicissitude, anxious only to be forgotten, and after so much storm and stress to be nothing more than pious. There must be many descendants of the Moors, but the present population is wan and lifeless. They are taciturn, sombre folk, with nothing in them of the chattering and vivacious creatures of Arab history. Indeed, as I wandered through the streets, it was not the Moors that engaged my mind, but rather Ferdinand of Arragon and Isabella of Castille. Their grim strength over-powered the more graceful shadows of Moordom; and it was only by an effort that I recalled Gazul and Musa, most gallant and amorous of Paynim knights, tilting in the square, displaying incredible valour in the slaughter of savage bulls. I thought of the Catholic Kings, in full armour, riding with clank of steel through the captured streets. And the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada, dazzling sometimes under the sun and the blue sky, but more often veiled with mist and capped by heavy clouds, grim and terrifying, lent a sort of tragic interest to the scene; so that I felt those grey masses, with their cloak of white, (they seemed near enough to overwhelm one,) made it impossible for the town built at their very feet, to give itself over altogether to flippancy.

And for a while I found little of interest in Granada but the Alhambra. The gipsy quarter, with neither beauty, colour, nor even a touch of barbarism, is a squalid, brutal place, consisting of little dens built in the rock of the mountain which stands opposite the Alhambra. Worse than hovels, they are the lairs of wild beasts, fœtid and oppressive, inhabited by debased creatures, with the low forehead, the copper skin, and the shifty cruel look of the Spanish gipsy. They surround the visitor in their rags and tatters, clamouring for alms, and for exorbitant sums proposing to dance. Even in the slums of great cities I have not seen a life more bestial. I tried to imagine what sort of existence these people led. In the old days the rock-dwellings among the cactus served the gipsies for winter quarters only, and when the spring came they set off, scouring the country for something to earn or steal; but that is long ago. For two generations they have remained in these hovels — year in, year out — employed in shoeing horses, shearing, and the like menial occupations which the Spaniard thinks beneath his dignity. The women tell fortunes, or dance for the foreigner, or worse. It is a mere struggle for daily bread. I wondered whether in the spring-time the young men loved the maidens, or if they only coupled like the beasts. I saw one pair who seemed quite newly wed; for their scanty furniture was new and they were young. The man, short and squat, sat scowling, cross-legged on a chair, a cigarette between his lips. The woman was taller and not ill-made, a slattern; her hair fell dishevelled on her back and over her forehead; her dress was open, displaying the bosom; her apron was filthy. But when she smiled, asking for money, her teeth were white and regular, and her eyes flashed darkly. She was attractive in a heavy sensual fashion, attractive and at the same time horribly repellant: she was the sort of woman who might fetter a man to herself by some degrading, insuperable passion, the true Carmen of the famous story whom a man might at once love and hate; so that though she dragged him to hell in shame and in despair, he would never find the strength to free himself. But where among that bastard race was the splendid desire for freedom of their fathers, the love of the fresh air of heaven and the untrammeled life of the fields?

At first glance also the cathedral seemed devoid of charm. I suppose travellers seek emotions in the things they see, and often the more beautiful objects do not give the most vivid sensations. Painters complain that men of letters have written chiefly of second-rate pictures, but the literary sentiment is different from the artistic; and a masterpiece of Perugino may excite it less than a mediocre work of Guido Reni.

The cathedral of Granada is said by the excellent Fergusson to be the most noteworthy example in Europe of early Renaissance architecture; its proportions are evidently admirable, and it is designed and carried out according to all the canons of the art. ‘Looking at its plan only,’ he says, ‘this is certainly one of the finest churches in Europe. It would be difficult to point out any other, in which the central aisle leads up to the dome, so well proportioned to its dimensions, and to the dignity of the high altar which stands under it.’ But though I vaguely recognised these perfections, though the spacing appeared fine and simple, and the columns had a certain majesty, I was left more than a little cold. The whitewash with which the interior is coated gives an unsympathetic impression, and the abundant light destroys that mystery which the poorest, gaudiest Spanish church almost invariably possesses. In the Capilla de los Reyes are the elaborate monuments of the Catholic Kings, of their daughter Joan the Mad, and of Philip her husband; below, in the crypt, are four simple coffins, in which after so much grandeur, so much joy and sorrow, they rest. Indeed, for the two poor women who loved without requite, it was a life of pain almost unrelieved: it is a pitiful story, for all its magnificence, of Joan with her fiery passion for the handsome, faithless, worthless husband, and her mad jealousy; and of Isabella, with patient strength bearing every cross, always devoted to the man who tired of her quickly, and repaid her deep affection with naught but coldness and distrust.

Queen Isabella’s sword and sceptre are shown in the sacristry, and in contrast with the implement of war a beautiful cope, worked with her royal hands. And her crown also may be seen, one of the few I have come across which might really become the wearer, of silver, a masterpiece of delicate craftsmanship.

But presently, returning to the cathedral and sitting in front of the high altar, I became at last conscious of its airy, restful grace. The chancel is very lofty. The base is a huge arcade which gives an effect of great lightness; and above are two rows of pictures, and still higher two rows of painted windows. The coloured glass throws the softest lights upon the altar and on the marble floor, rendering even quieter the low tints of the pictures. These are a series of illustrations of the life of the Blessed Virgin, painted by Alonzo Cano, a native of Valladolid, who killed his wife and came to Granada, whereupon those in power made him a prebendary. In the obscurity I could not see the paintings, but divined soft and pleasant things after the style of Murillo, and doubtless that was better than actually to see them. The pulpits are gorgeously carved in wood, and from the walls fly great angels with fine turbulence of golden drapery. And in the contrast of the soft white stone with the gold, which not even the most critical taste could complain was too richly spread, there is a delicate, fascinating lightness: the chancel has almost an Italian gaiety, which comes upon one oddly in the gloomy town. Here the decoration, the gilded virgins, the elaborate carving, do not oppress as elsewhere; the effect is too debonair and too refreshing. It is one colour more, one more distinction, in the complexity of the religious sentiment.

But if what I have said of Granada seems cold, it is because I did not easily catch the spirit of the place. For when you merely observe and admire some view, and if industrious make a note of your impression, and then go home to luncheon, you are but a vulgar tripper, scum of the earth, deserving the ridicule with which the natives treat you. The romantic spirit is your only justification; when by the comeliness of your life or the beauty of your emotion you have attained that, (Shelley when he visited Paestum had it, but Théophile Gautier, flaunting his red waistcoat tras los montes, was perhaps no better than a Cook’s tourist,) then you are no longer unworthy of the loveliness which it is your privilege to see. When the old red brick and the green trees say to you hidden things, and the vega and the mountains are stretched before you with a new significance, when at last the white houses with their brown tiles, and the labouring donkey, and the peasant at his plough, appeal to you so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself. But you may see places long and often before they are thus magically revealed to you, and for myself I caught the real emotion of Granada but once, when from the Generalife I looked over the valley, the Generalife in which are mingled perhaps more admirably than anywhere else in Andalusia all the charm of Arabic architecture, of running water, and of cypress trees, of purple flags and dark red roses. It is a spot, indeed, fit for the plaintive creatures of poets to sing their loves, for Paolo and Francesca, for Juliet and Romeo; and I am glad that there I enjoyed such an exquisite moment.

XXXIII

The Alhambra

From the church of San Nicolas, on the other side of the valley, the Alhambra, like all Moorish buildings externally very plain, with its red walls and low, tiled roofs, looks like some old charter-house. Encircled by the fresh green of the spring-time, it lies along the summit of the hill with an infinite, most simple grace, dun and brown and deep red; and from the sultry wall on which I sat the elm-trees and the poplars seemed very cool. Thirstily, after the long drought, the Darro, the Arab stream which ran scarlet with the blood of Moorish strife, wound its way over its stony bed among the hills; and beyond, in strange contrast with all the fertility, was the grey and silent grandeur of the Sierra Nevada. Few places can be more charming than the green wood in which stands the stronghold of the Moorish kings; the wind sighs among the topmost branches and all about is the sweet sound of running water; in spring the ground is carpeted with violets, and the heavy foliage gives an enchanting coldness. A massive gateway, flanked by watch-towers, forms the approach; but the actual entrance, offering no hint of the incredible magnificence within, is an insignificant door.

But then, then you are immediately transported to a magic palace, existing in some uncertain age of fancy, which does not seem the work of human hands, but rather of Jin, an enchanted dwelling of seven lovely damsels. It is barely conceivable that historical persons inhabited such a place. At the same time it explains the wonderful civilisation of the Moors in Spain, with their fantastic battles, their songs and strange histories; and it brings the Arabian Nights into the bounds of sober reality: after he has seen the Alhambra none can doubt the literal truth of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor and of Hasan of Bassorah.

From the terrace that overlooks the city you enter the Court of Myrtles — a long pool of water with goldfish swimming to and fro, enclosed by myrtle hedges. At the ends are arcades, borne by marble columns with capitals of surpassing beauty. It is very quiet and very restful; the placid water gives an indescribable sensation of delight, and at the end mirrors the slender columns and the decorated arches so that in reflection you see the entrance to a second palace, which is filled with mysterious, beautiful things. But in the Alhambra the imagination finds itself at last out of its depth, it cannot conjure up chambers more beautiful than the reality presents. It serves only to recall the old inhabitants to the deserted halls.

The Moors continually used inscriptions with great effect, and there is one in this court which surpasses all others in its oriental imagery, in praise of Mohammed V.: Thou givest safety from the breeze to the blades of grass, and inspirest terror in the very stars of heaven. When the shining stars quiver, it is through dread of thee, and when the grass of the field bends down it is to give thee thanks.

But it is the Hall of the Ambassadors which shows most fully the unparalleled splendour of Moorish decoration. It is a square room, very lofty, with alcoves on three sides, at the bottom of which are windows; and the walls are covered, from the dado of tiles to the roof, with the richest and most varied ornamentation. The Moorish workmen did not spare themselves nor economise their exuberant invention. One pattern follows another with infinite diversity. Even the alcoves, and there are nine, are covered each with different designs, so that the mind is bewildered by their graceful ingenuity. All kinds of geometrical figures are used, enlacing with graceful intricacy, intersecting, combining and dissolving; conventional foliage and fruit, Arabic inscriptions. An industrious person has counted more than one hundred and fifty patterns in the Hall of the Ambassadors, impressed with iron moulds on the moist plaster of the walls. The roof is a low dome of larch wood, intricately carved and inlaid with ivory and with mother-of-pearl; it has been likened to the faceted surface of an elaborately cut gem. The effect is so gorgeous that you are oppressed; you long for some perfectly plain space whereon to rest the eye; but every inch is covered.

Now the walls have preserved only delicate tints of red and blue, pale Wedgwood blues and faded terracottas, that make with the ivory of the plaster most exquisite harmonies; but to accord with the tiles, their brilliancy still undiminished, the colours must have been very bright. The complicated patterns and the gay hues reproduce the oriental carpets of the nomad’s tent; for from the tent, it is said, (I know not with what justification,) all oriental architecture is derived. The fragile columns upon which rest masses of masonry are, therefore, direct imitations of tent-poles, and the stalactite borders of the arches represent the fringe of the woven hangings. The Moorish architect paid no attention to the rules of architecture, and it has been well said that if they existed for him at all it was only that he might elaborately disregard them. His columns generally support nothing; his arcades, so delicately worked that they seem like carved ivory, are of the lightest wood and plaster.

And it is curious that there should be such durability in those dainty materials: they express well the fatalism of the luxurious Moor, to whom the past and future were as nothing, and the transient hour all in all; yet they have outlasted him and his conqueror. The Spaniard, inglorious and decayed, is now but the showman to this magnificence; time has seen his greatness come and go, as came and went the greatness of the Moor, but still, for all its fragility, the Alhambra stands hardly less beautiful. Travellers have always been astonished at the small size of the Alhambra, especially of the Court of Lions; for here, though the proportion is admirable the scale is tiny; and many have supposed that the Moors were of less imposing physique than modern Europeans. The Court is surrounded by exquisite little columns, singly, in twos, in threes, supporting horseshoe arches; and in the centre is that beautiful fountain, borne by twelve lions with bristly manes, standing very stiffly, whereon is the inscription: O thou who beholdest these lions crouching, fear not. Life is wanting to enable them to show their fury.

Indeed, their surroundings have such a delicate and playful grace that it is hard to believe the Moors had any of our strenuous, latter-day passions. Life must have been to them a masque rather than a tragi-comedy; and whether they belong to sober history or no, those contests of which the curious may read in the lively pages of Gines Perez de Hita accord excellently with the fanciful environment. In the Alhambra nothing seems more reasonable than those never-ending duels in which, for a lady’s favour, gallant knights gave one another such blows that the air rang with them, such wounds that the ground was red with blood; but at sunset they separated and bound up their wounds and returned to the palace. And the king, at the relation of the adventure, was filled with amazement and with great content.

Yet, notwithstanding, I find in the Alhambra something unsatisfying; for many an inferior piece of architecture has set my mind a-working so that I have dreamed charming dreams, or seen vividly the life of other times. But here, I know not why, my imagination helps me scarcely at all. The existence led within these gorgeous walls is too remote; there is but little to indicate the thoughts, the feelings, of these people, and one can take the Alhambra only as a thing of beauty, and despair to understand.

I know that it is useless to attempt with words to give an idea of these numerous chambers and courts. A string of superlatives can do no more than tire the reader, an exact description can only confuse; nor is the painter able to give more than a suggestion of the bewildering charm. The effect is too emotional to be conveyed from man to man, and each must feel it for himself. Charles V. called him unhappy who had lost such treasure — desgraciado el que tal perdio — and showed his own appreciation by demolishing a part to build a Renaissance palace for himself! It appears that kings have not received from heaven with their right divine to govern wrong the inestimable gift of good taste; and for them possibly it is fortunate, since when, perchance, a sovereign has the artistic temperament, a discerning people — cuts off his head.

XXXIV

Boabdil the Unlucky

He was indeed unhappy who lost such treasure. The plain of Granada smiles with luxuriant crops, a beautiful country, gay with a hundred colours, and in summer when the corn is ripe it burns with vivid gold. The sun shines with fiery rays from the blue sky, and from the snow-capped mountains cool breezes temper the heat.

But from his cradle Boabdil was unfortunate; soothsayers prophesied that his reign would see the downfall of the Moorish power, and his every step tended to that end. Never in human existence was more evident the mysterious power of the three sisters, the daughters of Night; the Fates had spun his destiny, they placed the pitfalls before his feet and closed his eyes that he might not see; they hid from him the way of escape. Allah Achbar! It was destiny. In no other way can be explained the madness which sped the victims of that tragedy to their ruin; for with the enemy at their very gates, the Muslims set up and displaced kings, plotted and counterplotted. Boabdil was twice deposed and twice regained the throne. Even when the Christian kingdoms had united to consume the remnant of Moorish sovereignty the Moors could not cease their quarrelling. Boabdil looked on with satisfaction while the territory of the rival claimant to his crown was wrested from him, and did not understand that his turn must inevitably follow. Verily, the gods, wishing to destroy him, had deranged his mind. It is a pitiful history of treachery and folly that was enacted while the Catholic Sovereigns devoured the pomegranate, seed by seed.

To me history, with its hopes bound to be frustrated and its useless efforts, sometimes is so terrible that I can hardly read. I feel myself like one who lives, knowing the inevitable future, and yet is powerless to help. I see the acts of the poor human puppets, and know the disaster that must follow. I wonder if the Calvinists ever realised the agony of that dark God of theirs, omniscient and yet so strangely weak, to whom the eternal majesty of heaven was insufficient to save the predestined from everlasting death.

On March 22, 1491, began the last siege of Granada.

Ferdinand marched his army into the plain and began to destroy the crops, taking one by one the surrounding towns. He made no attempt upon the city itself, and hostilities were confined to skirmishes beneath the walls and single combats between Christian knights and Muslim cavaliers, wherein on either side prodigies of valour were performed. Through the summer the Moors were able to get provisions from the Sierra Nevada, but when, with winter, the produce of the earth grew less and its conveyance more difficult, famine began to make itself felt. The Moors consoled themselves with the hope that the besieging army would retire with the cold weather, for such in those days was the rule of warfare; but Ferdinand was in earnest. When an accidental fire burned his camp, he built him a town of solid stone and mortar, which he named Santa Fè. It stands still, the only town in Spain wherein a Moorish foot has never trod. Then the Muslims understood at last that the Spaniard would never again leave that fruitful land.

And presently they began to talk of surrender; Spanish gold worked its way with Boabdil’s councillors, and before winter was out the capitulation was signed.

On the second day of the new year the final scene of the tragedy was acted. Early in the morning, before break of day, Boabdil had sent his mother and his wife with the treasure to precede him to the Alpuxarras, in which district, by the conditions of the treaty, Ferdinand had assigned him a little kingdom. Himself had one more duty to perform, and at the prearranged hour he sallied forth with a wretched escort of fifty knights. On the Spanish side the night had been spent in joy and feasting; but how must Boabdil have spent his, thinking of the inevitable morrow? To him the hours must have sped like minutes. What must have been the agony of his last look at the Alhambra, that jewel of incalculable price? Mendoza, the cardinal, had been sent forward to occupy the palace, and Boabdil passed him on the hill.

Soon he reached Ferdinand, who was stationed near a mosque surrounded by all the glory of his Court, pennons flying, and knights in their magnificent array. Boabdil would have thrown himself from his horse in sign of homage to kiss the hand of the king of Arragon, but Ferdinand prevented him. Then Boabdil delivered the keys of the Alhambra to the victor, saying: ‘They are thine, O king, since Allah so decrees it; use thy success with clemency and moderation.’ Moving on sadly he saluted Isabella, and passed to rejoin his family; the Christians processioned to the city with psalm-singing.

But when Boabdil was crossing the mountains he turned to look at the city he had lost, and burst into tears.

‘You do well,’ said his mother, ‘to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.’

‘Alas!’ he cried, ‘when were woes ever equal to mine?’

It was not to be expected that the pious Kings of Castille and Arragon would keep their word, and means were soon invented to hound the wretched Boabdil from the principality they had granted. He crossed to Africa, and settled in Fez, of which the Sultan was his kinsman. It is pathetic to learn that there he built himself a palace in imitation of the Alhambra. At last, after many years, he was killed in an obscure battle fighting against the Sultan’s rebels, and the Arab historian finishes the account of him with these words: ‘Wretched man! who could lose his life in another’s cause, though he dared not die in his own! Such was the immutable decree of destiny. Blessed be Allah, who exalteth and abaseth the kings of the earth according to His divine will, in the fulfilment of which consists that eternal justice which regulates all human affairs.’

In the day of El Makkary, the historian of the Moorish Empire, Boabdil’s descendants had so fallen that they were nothing but common beggars, subsisting upon the charitable allowances made to the poor from the funds of the mosques.

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

XXXV

Los Pobres

People say that in Granada the beggars are more importunate than in any other Spanish town, but throughout Andalusia their pertinacity and number are amazing. They are licensed by the State, and the brass badge they wear makes them demand alms almost as a right. It is curious to find that the Spaniard, who is by no means a charitable being, gives very often to beggars — perhaps from superstitious motives, thinking their prayers will be of service, or fearing the evil eye, which may punish a refusal. Begging is quite an honourable profession in Spain; mendicants are charitably termed the poor, and not besmirched, as in England, with an opprobrious name.

I have never seen so many beggars as in Andalusia; at every church door there will be a dozen, and they stand or sit at each street corner, halt, lame and blind. Every possible deformity is paraded to arouse charity. Some look as though their eyes had been torn out, and they glare at you with horrible bleeding sockets; most indeed are blind, and you seldom fail to hear their monotonous cry, sometimes naming the saint’s day to attract particular persons: ‘Alms for the love of God, for a poor blind man on this the day of St. John!’ They stand from morning till night, motionless, with hand extended, repeating the words as the sound of footsteps tells them some one is approaching; and then, as a coin is put in their hands, say gracefully: ‘Dios se lo pagara! God will repay you.’

In Spain you do not pass silently when a beggar demands alms, but pray his mercy for God’s love to excuse you: ‘Perdone Usted por el amor de Dios!’ Or else you beseech God to protect him: ‘Dios le ampare!’ And the mendicant, coming to your gate, sometimes invokes the Immaculate Virgin.

‘Ave Maria purissima!’ he calls.

And you, tired of giving, reply: ‘Y por siempre! And for ever.’

He passes on, satisfied with your answer, and rings at the next door.

It is not only in Burgos that Théophile Gautier might have admired the beggar’s divine rags; everywhere they wrap their cloaks about them in the same magnificent fashion. The capa, I suppose, is the most graceful of all the garments of civilised man, and never more so than when it barely holds together, a mass of rags and patches, stained by the rain and bleached by the sun and wind. It hangs straight from the neck in big simple lines, or else is flung over one shoulder with a pompous wealth of folds.

There is a strange immobility about Andalusian beggars which recalls their Moorish ancestry. They remain for hours in the same attitude, without moving a muscle; and one I knew in Seville stood day after day, from early morning till midnight, with hand outstretched in the same rather crooked position, never saying a word, but merely trusting to the passer-by to notice. The variety is amazing, men and women and children; and Seville at fair-time, or when the foreigners are coming for Holy Week, is like an enormous hospital. Mendicants assail you on all sides, the legless dragging themselves on their hands, the halt running towards you with a crutch, the blind led by wife or child, the deaf and dumb, the idiotic. I remember a woman with dead eyes and a huge hydrocephalic head, who sat in a bath-chair by one of the cathedral doors, and whenever people passed, cried shrilly for money in a high, unnatural voice. Sometimes they protrude maimed limbs, feetless legs or arms without hands; they display loathsome wounds, horribly inflamed; every variety of disease is shown to extort a copper. And so much is it a recognised trade that they have their properties, as it were: one old man whose legs had been shot away, trotted through the narrow streets of Seville on a diminutive ass, driving it into the shop-doors to demand his mite. Then there are the children, the little boys and girls that Murillo painted, barely covered by filthy rags, cherubs with black hair and shining eyes, the most importunate of all the tribe. The refusal of a halfpenny is followed impudently by demands for a cigarette, and as a last resort for a match; they wander about with keen eyes for cigar-ends, and no shred of a smoked leaf is too diminutive for them to get no further use from it.

And beside all these are the blind fiddlers, scraping out old-fashioned tunes that were popular thirty years ago; the guitarists, singing the flamenco songs which have been sung in Spain ever since the Moorish days; the buffoons, who extract tunes from a broomstick; the owners of performing dogs.

They are a picturesque lot, neither vicious nor ill-humoured. Begging is a fairly profitable trade, and not a very hard one; in winter el pobre can always find a little sunshine, and in summer a little shade. It is no hardship for him to sit still all day; he would probably do little else if he were a millionaire. He looks upon life without bitterness; Fate has not been very kind, but it is certainly better to be a live beggar than a dead king, and things might have been ten thousand times worse. For instance, he might not have been born a Spaniard, and every man in his senses knows that Spain is the greatest nation on earth, while to be born a citizen of some other country is the most dreadful misfortune that can befall him. He has his licence from the State, and a charitable public sees that he does not absolutely starve; he has cigarettes to smoke — to say that a blind man cannot enjoy tobacco is evidently absurd — and therefore, all these things being so, why should he think life such a woeful matter? While it lasts the sun is there to shine equally on rich and poor, and afterwards will not a paternal government find a grave in the public cemetery? It is true that the beggar shares it with quite a number of worthy persons, doubtless most estimable corpses, and his coffin even is but a temporary convenience — but still, what does it matter?

XXXVI

The Song

But the Moorish influence is nowhere more apparent than in the Spanish singing. There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills. The sounds are strange to the ear accustomed to less barbarous harmonies, and at first no melody is perceived; it is custom alone which teaches the sad and passionate charm of these things. A malagueña is the particular complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover, of the peasant who ploughs his field in the declining day. The long notes of such a song, floating across the silence of the night, are like a new melody on the great harpsichord of human sorrow. No emotion is more poignant than that given by the faint sad sounds of a Spanish song as one wanders through the deserted streets in the dead of night; or far in the country, with the sun setting red in the cloudless sky, when the stillness is broken only by the melancholy chanting of a shepherd among the olive-trees.

An heritage of Moordom is the Spanish love for the improvisation of well-turned couplets; in olden days a skilful verse might procure the poet a dress of cloth-of-gold, and it did on one occasion actually raise a beggar-maid to a royal throne: even now it has power to secure the lover his lady’s most tender smiles, or at the worst a glass of Manzanilla. The richness of the language helps him with his rhymes, and his southern imagination gives him manifold subjects. But, being the result of improvisation — no lady fair would consider the suit of a gallant who could not address her in couplets of his own devising — the Spanish song has a peculiar character. The various stanzas have no bearing upon one another; they consist of four or seven lines, but in either case each contains its definite sentiment; so that one verse may be a complete song, or the singer may continue as long as the muse prompts and his subject’s charms occasion. The Spanish song is like a barbaric necklace in which all manner of different stones are strung upon a single cord, without thought for their mutual congruity.

Naturally the vast majority of the innumerable couplets thus invented are forgotten as soon as sung, but now and then the fortuitous excellence of one impresses it on the maker’s recollection, and it may be preserved. Here is an example which has been agreeably translated by Mr. J. W. Crombie; but neither original nor English rendering can give an adequate idea of the charm which depends on the oriental melancholy of the music:

Dos besos tengo en el alma

Que no se apartan de mí:

El ultimo de mi madre,

Y el primero que te di.

Deep in my soul two kisses rest,

Forgot they ne’er shall be:

The last my mother’s lips impressed,

The first I stole from thee.

Here is another, the survival of which testifies to the Spanish extreme love of a compliment; and the somewhat hackneyed sentiment can only have made it more pleasant to the feminine ear:

Salga el sol, si ha de salir,

Y si no, que nunca salga;

Que para alumbrarme á mí

La luz de tus ojos basta.

If the sun care to rise, let him rise,

But if not, let him ever lie hid;

For the light from my lady-love’s eyes

Shines forth as the sun never did.

It is a diverting spectacle to watch a professional improviser in the throes of inspiration. This is one of the stock ‘turns’ of the Spanish music-hall, and one of the most popular. I saw a woman in Granada, who was quite a celebrity; and the barbaric wildness of her performance, with its accompaniment of hand-clapping, discordant cries, and twanging of guitar, harmonised well with my impression of the sombre and mediæval city.

She threaded her way to the stage among the crowded tables, through the auditorium, a sallow-faced creature, obese and large-boned, with coarse features and singularly ropy hair. She was accompanied by a fat small man with a guitar and a woman of mature age and ample proportions: it appeared that the cultivation of the muse, evidently more profitable than in England, conduced to adiposity. They stepped on the stage, taking chairs with them, for in Spain you do not stand to sing, and were greeted with plentiful applause. The little fat man began to play the long prelude to the couplet; the old woman clapped her hands and occasionally uttered a raucous cry. The poetess gazed into the air for inspiration. The guitarist twanged on, and in the audience there were scattered cries of Ole! Her companions began to look at the singer anxiously, for the muse was somewhat slow; and she patted her knee and groaned; at last she gave a little start and smiled. Ole! Ole! The inspiration had come. She gave a moan, which lengthened into the characteristic trill, and then began the couplet, beating time with her hands. Such an one as this:

Suspires que de mí salgan,

Y otros que de tí saldran,

Si en el camino se encuentran

Que de cosas se diran!

If all the sighs thy lips now shape

Could meet upon the way

With those that from mine own escape

What things they’d have to say!

She finished, and all three rose from their chairs and withdrew them, but it was only a false exit; immediately the applause grew clamorous they sat down again, and the little fat man repeated his introduction.

But this time there was no waiting. The singer had noticed a well-known bull-fighter and quickly rolled off a couplet in his praise. The subject beamed with delight, and the general enthusiasm knew no bounds. The people excitedly threw their hats on the stage, and these were followed by a shower of coppers, which the performers, more heedful to the compensation of Art than to its dignity, grovelled to picked up.

Here is a lover’s praise of the whiteness of his lady’s skin:

La neve por tu cara

Paso diciendo:

En donde no hago falta

No me detengo.

Before thy brow the snow-flakes

Hurry past and say:

‘Where we are not needed,

Wherefore should we stay?’

And this last, like the preceding translated by Mr. Crombie, shows once more how characteristic are Murillo’s Holy Families of the popular sentiment:

La Virgen lava la ropa,

San José la esta tendiendo,

Santa Ana entretiene el niño,

Y el agua se va riendo.

The Virgin is washing the clothes at the brook.

And Saint Joseph hangs them to dry.

Saint Anna plays with the Holy Babe,

And the water flows smiling by.

XXXVII

Jerez

Jerez is the Andalusian sunshine again after the dark clouds of Granada. It is a little town in the middle of a fertile plain, clean and comfortable and spacious. It is one of the richest places in Spain; the houses have an opulent look, and without the help of Baedeker you may guess that they contain respectable persons with incomes, and carriages and horses, with frock-coats and gold watch-chains. I like the people of Jerez; their habitual expression suggests a consciousness that the Almighty is pleased with them, and they without doubt are well content with the Almighty. The main street, with its trim shops and its cafés, has the air of a French provincial town — an appearance of agreeable ease and dulness.

Every building in Jerez is washed with lime, and in the sunlight the brilliancy is dazzling. You realise then that in Seville the houses are not white — although the general impression is of a white town — but, on the contrary, tinted with various colours from faintest pink to pale blue, pale green; they remind you of the summer dresses of women. The soft tones are all mingled with the sunlight and very restful. But Jerez is like a white banner floating under the cloudless sky, the pure white banner of Bacchus raised defiantly against the gaudy dyes of teetotalism and its shrieking trumpets.

Jerez the White is, of course, the home of sherry, and the whole town is given over to the preparation of the grateful juice. The air is impregnated with a rich smell. The sun shines down on Jerez; and its cleanliness, its prosperity, are a rebuke to harsh-voiced contemners of the grape.

You pass bodega after bodega, cask-factories, bottle-factories. A bottle-factory is a curious, interesting place, an immense barn, sombre, so that the eye loses itself in the shadows of the roof; and the scanty light is red and lurid from the furnaces, which roar hoarsely and long. Against the glow the figures of men, half-naked, move silently, performing the actions of their craft with a monotonous regularity which is strange and solemn. They move to and fro, carrying an iron instrument on which is the molten mass of red-hot glass, and it gleams with an extraordinary warm brilliancy. It twists hither and thither in obedience to the artisan’s deft movements; it coils and writhes into odd shapes, like a fire-snake curling in the torture of its own unearthly ardour. The men pass so regularly, with such a silent and exact precision, that it seems a weird and mystic measure they perform — a rhythmic dance of unimaginable intricacy, whose meaning you cannot gather and whose harmony escapes you. The flames leap and soar in a thousand savage forms, and their dull thunder fills your ears with a confusion of sound. Your eyes become accustomed to the dimness, and you discern more clearly the features of those swarthy men, bearded and gnome-like. But the molten mass has been put into the mould; you watch it withdrawn, the bottom indented, the mouth cut and shaped. And now it is complete, but still red-hot, and glowing with an infernal transparency, gem-like and wonderful; it is a bottle fit now for the juice of satanic vineyards, and the miraculous potions of eternal youth, for which men in the old days bartered their immortal souls.

And the effect of a bodega is picturesque, too, though in a different way. It is a bright and cheerful spot, a huge shed with whitewashed walls and an open roof supported by dark beams; great casks are piled up, impressing you in their vast rotundity with a sort of aldermanic stateliness. The whole place is fragrant with clean, vinous perfumes. Your guide carries a glass and a long filler. You taste wine after wine, in different shades of brown; light wines to drink with your dinner, older wines to drink before your coffee; wines more than a century old, of which the odour is more delicate than violets; new wines of the preceding year, strong and rough; Amontillados, with the softest flavour in the world; Manzanillas for the gouty; Marsalas, heavy and sweet; wines that smell of wild-flowers; cheap wines and expensive wines. Then the brandies — the distiller tells you proudly that Spanish brandy is made from wine, and contemptuously that French brandy is not — old brandies for which a toper would sell his soul; new brandies like fusel-oil; brandies mellow and mild and rich. It is a drunkard’s paradise.

And why should not the drinker have his paradise? The teetotallers have slapped their bosoms and vowed that liquor was the devil’s own invention. (Note, by the way, that liquor is a noble word that should not be applied to those weak-kneed abominations that insolently flaunt their lack of alcohol. Let them be called liquids or fluids or beverages, or what you will. Liquor is a word for heroes, for the British tar who has built up British glory — Imperialism is quite the fashion now.) And for a hundred years none has dared lift his voice in refutation of these dyspeptic slanders. The toper did not care, he nursed his bottle and let the world say what it would; but the moderate drinker was abashed. Who will venture to say that a glass of beer gives savour to the humblest crust, and comforts Corydon, lamenting the inconstancy of Phyllis? Who will come forward and strike an attitude and prove the benefits of the grape? (The attitude is essential, for without it you cannot hope to impress your fellow men.) Rise up in your might, ye lovers of hop and grape and rye — rise up and slay the Egyptians. Be honest and thank your stars for the cup that cheers. Bacchus was not a pot-bellied old sot, but a beautiful youth with vine-leaves in his hair, Bacchus the lover of flowers; and Ariadne was charming.

The country about Jerez undulates in just such an easy comfortable fashion as you would expect. It is scenery of the gentlest and pleasantest type, sinuous; little hills rising with rounded lines and fertile valleys. The vines cover the whole land, creeping over the brown soil fantastically, black stumps, shrivelled and gnarled, tortured into uncouth shapes; they remind you of the creeping things in a naturalist’s museum, of giant spiders and great dried centipedes and scorpions. But imagine the vineyards later, when the spring has stirred the earth with fecundity! The green shoots tenderly forth; at first it is all too delicate for a colour, it is but a mist of indescribable tenuity; and gradually the leaves burst out and trail along the ground with ever-increasing luxuriance; and then it is a rippling sea of passionate verdure.

But I liked Jerez best towards evening, when the sun had set and the twilight glided through the tortuous alleys like a woman dressed in white. Then, as I walked in the silent streets, narrow and steep, with their cobble-paving, the white houses gained a new aspect. There seemed not a soul in the world, and the loneliness was more intoxicating than all their wines; the shining sun was gone, and the sky lost its blue richness, it became so pale that you felt it like a face of death — and the houses looked like long rows of tombs. We walked through the deserted streets, I and the woman dressed in white, side by side silently; our footsteps made no sound upon the stones. And Jerez was wrapped in a ghostly shroud. Ah, the beautiful things I have seen which other men have not!

XXXVIII

Cadiz

I admire the strenuous tourist who sets out in the morning with his well-thumbed Baedeker to examine the curiosities of a foreign town, but I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no imitation. I prefer to wander in old streets at random without a guide-book, trusting that fortune will bring me across things worth seeing; and if occasionally I miss some monument that is world-famous, more often I discover some little dainty piece of architecture, some scrap of decoration, that repays me for all else I lose. And in this fashion the less pretentious beauties of a town delight me, which, if I sought under the guidance of the industrious German, would seem perhaps scarcely worth the trouble. Nor do I know that there is in Cadiz much to attract the traveller beyond the grace with which it lies along the blue sea and the unstudied charm of its gardens, streets, and market-place; the echo in the cathedral to which the gaping tripper listens with astonishment leaves me unmoved; and in the church of Santa Catalina, which contains the last work of Murillo, upon which he was engaged at his death, I am more interested in the tall stout priest, unctuous and astute, who shows me his treasure, than in the picture itself. I am relieved now and again to visit a place that has no obvious claims on my admiration; it throws me back on the peculiarities of the people, on the stray incidents of the street, on the contents of the shops.

Cadiz is said to be the gayest town in Andalusia. Spaniards have always a certain gravity; they are not very talkative, and like the English, take their pleasures a little sadly. But here lightness of heart is thought to reign supreme, and the inhabitants have not even the apparent seriousness with which the Sevillan cloaks a somewhat vacant mind. They are great theatre-goers, and as dancers, of course, have been famous since the world began. But I doubt whether Cadiz deserves its reputation, for it always seems to me a little prim. The streets are well-kept and spacious, the houses, taller than is usual in Andalusia, have almost as cared-for an appearance as those in a prosperous suburb of London; and it is only quite occasionally, when you catch a glimpse of tawny rock and of white breakwater against the blue sea, that by a reminiscence of Naples you can persuade yourself it is as immoral as they say. For, not unlike the Syren City, Cadiz lies white and cool along the bay, with gardens at the water’s edge; but it has not the magic colour of its rival, it is quieter, smaller, more restful; and on the whole lacks that agreeable air of wickedness which the Italian town possesses to perfection. It is impossible to be a day in Naples without discovering that it is the most depraved city in Europe; there is something in the atmosphere which relaxes the moral fibre, and the churchwarden who keeps guard in the bosom of every Englishman falls asleep, so that you feel capable of committing far more than the seven deadly sins. Of course, you don’t, but still it is comfortable to have them within reach.

I came across, while examining the wares of a vendor of antiquities, a contemporary narrative from the Spanish side of the attack made on Cadiz by Sir Francis Drake when he set out to singe the beard of Philip II.; and this induced me afterwards to look into the English story. It is far from me to wish to inform the reader, but the account is not undiverting, and shows, besides, a frame of mind which the Anglo-Saxon has not ceased to cultivate. ‘But the Almighty God,’ says the historian, ‘knowing and seeing his (the Spanish king’s) wicked intent to punish, molest, and trouble His little flock, the children of Israel, hath raised up a faithful Moses for the defence of His chosen, and will not suffer His people utterly to fall into the hands of their enemies.’ Drake set sail from Plymouth with four of her Majesty’s ships, two pinnaces, and some twenty merchantmen. A vessel was sent after, charging him not to show hostilities, but the messenger, owing to contrary winds, could never come near the admiral, and vastly to the annoyance of the Virgin Queen, as she solemnly assured the ambassadors of foreign powers, had to sail home. Under the circumstances it was, perhaps, hardly discreet of her to take so large a share of the booty.

Faithful Moses arrived in Cadiz, spreading horrid consternation, and the Spanish pamphlet shows very vividly the confusion of the enemy. It appears that, had he boldly landed, he might have sacked the town, but he imagined the preparations much greater than they were. However, he was not idle. ‘The same night our general, having, by God’s good favour and sufferance, opportunity to punish the enemy of God’s true gospel and our daily adversary, and further willing to discharge his expected duty towards God, his peace and country, began to sink and fire divers of their ships.’

The English fleet burned thirty sail of great burden, and captured vast quantities of the bread, wheat, wine and oil which had been prepared for the descent upon England. Sir Francis Drake himself remarks that ‘the sight of the terrible fires were to us very pleasant, and mitigated the burden of our continual travail, wherein we were busied for two nights and one day, in discharging, firing, and lading of provisions.’

It is a curious thing to see entirely deserted a place of entertainment, where great numbers of people are in the habit of assembling. A theatre by day, without a soul in it, gives me always a sensation of the ridiculous futility of things; and a public garden towards evening offers the same emotion. On the morrow I was starting for Africa; I watched the sunset from the quays of Cadiz, the vapours of the twilight rise and envelop the ships in greyness, and I walked by the alamadas that stretch along the bay till I came to the park. The light was rapidly failing and I found myself alone. It had quaint avenues of short palms, evidently not long planted, and between them rows of yellow iron chairs arranged with great neatness and precision. It was there that on Sunday I had seen the populace disport itself, and it was full of life then, gay and insouciant. The fair ladies drove in their carriages, and the fine gentlemen, proud of their English clothes, lounged idly. The chairs were taken by all the lesser fry, by stout mothers, dragons attendant on dark-eyed girls, and their lovers in broad hats, in all the gala array of the flamenco. There was a joyous clamour of speech and laughter; the voices of Spanish women are harsh and unrestrained; the park sparkled with colour, and the sun caught the fluttering of countless fans.

For those blithe people it seemed that there was no morrow: the present was there to be enjoyed, divine and various, and the world was full of beauty and of sunshine; merely to live was happiness enough; if there was pain or sorrow it served but to enhance the gladness. The hurrying hours for a while had ceased their journey. Life was a cup of red wine, and they were willing to drink its very dregs, a brimming cup in which there was no bitterness, but a joy more thrilling than the gods could give in all their paradise.

But now I walked alone between the even rows of chairs. The little palms were so precise, with their careful foliage, that they did not look like real trees; the flower-beds were very stiff and neat, and now and then a pine stood out, erect and formal as if it were a cardboard tree from a Noah’s Ark. The scene was so artificial that it brought to my mind the setting of a pantomime. I stopped, almost expecting a thousand ballet-girls to appear from the wings, scantily clad, and go through a measure to the playing of some sudden band, and retire and come forward till the stage was filled and a great tableau formed.

But the day grew quite dim, and the vast stage remained empty. The painted scene became still more unreal, and presently the park was filled with the ghostly shapes of all the light-hearted people who had lived their hour and exhibited their youth in the empty garden. I heard the whispered compliments, and the soft laughter of the ladies; there was a peculiar little snap as gaily they closed their fans.

XXXIX

El Genero Chico

In the evening I wandered again along the quay, my thoughts part occupied with the novel things I expected from Morocco, part sorrowful because I must leave the scented land of Spain. I seemed never before to have enjoyed so intensely the exquisite softness of the air, and there was all about me a sense of spaciousness which gave a curious feeling of power. In the harbour, on the ships, the lights of the masts twinkled like the stars above; and looking over the stony parapet, I heard the waves lap against the granite like a long murmur of regret; I tried to pierce the darkness, straining my eyes to see some deeper obscurity which I might imagine to be the massive coasts of Africa. But at last I could bear the solitude no longer, and I dived into the labyrinth of streets.

At first, in unfrequented ways, I passed people only one by one, some woman walking rapidly with averted face, or a pair of chattering students; but as I came near the centre of the town the passers-by grew more frequent, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a thronging, noisy crowd. I looked up and saw that I was opposite a theatre; the people had just come from the second funcion. I had heard that the natives of Cadiz were eager theatre-goers, and was curious to see how they took this pleasure. I saw also that the next piece was Las Borrachos, a play of Seville life that I had often seen; and I felt that I could not spend my last evening better than in living again some of those scenes which pattered across my heart now like little sorrowful feet.

The theatre in Spain is the only thing that has developed further than in the rest of Europe — in fact, it has nearly developed clean away. The Spaniards were the first to confess that dramatic art bored them to death; and their habits rendered impossible the long play which took an evening to produce. Eating late, they did not wish to go to the theatre till past nine; being somewhat frivolous, they could not sit for more than an hour without going outside and talking to their friends; and they were poor. To satisfy their needs the genero chico, or little style, sprang into existence; and quickly every theatre in Spain was given over to the system of four houses a night. Each function is different, and the stall costs little more than sixpence.

We English are idealists; and on the stage especially reality stinks in our nostrils. The poor are vulgar, and in our franker moments we confess our wish to have nothing to do with them. The middle classes are sordid; we have enough of them in real life, and no desire to observe their doings at the theatre, particularly when we wear our evening clothes. But when a dramatist presents duchesses to our admiring eyes, we feel at last in our element; we watch the acts of persons whom we would willingly meet at dinner, and our craving for the ideal is satisfied.

But in Spain nobles are common and excite no overwhelming awe. The Spaniard, most democratic of Europeans, clamours for realism, and nothing pleases him more than a literal transcript of the life about him. The manners and customs of good society do not entertain him, and the genero chico concerns itself almost exclusively with the lower classes. The bull-fighter is, of course, one of the most usual figures; and round him are gathered the lovers of the ring, inn-keepers, cobblers and carpenters, policemen, workmen, flower-sellers, street-singers, cigarette girls, country maidens. The little pieces are innumerable, and together form a compend of low life in Spain; the best are full of gaiety and high spirits, with a delicate feeling for character, and often enough are touched by a breath of poetry. Songs and dances are introduced, and these come in the more naturally since the action generally takes place on a holiday. The result is a musical comedy in one act; but with nothing in it of the entertainment which is a joy to the British public: an Andalusian audience would never stand that representation of an impossible and vulgar world in which the women are all trollops and the men, rips, nincompoops and bounders; they would never suffer the coarse humour and the shoddy patriotism.

Unfortunately, these one-act plays have destroyed the legitimate drama. Whereas Maria Guerrero, that charming actress, will have a run of twenty nights in a new play by Echegaray, a popular zarzuela will be acted hundreds of times in every town in Spain. But none can regret that the Spaniards have evolved these very national little pieces, and little has been lost in the non-existence of an indefinite number of imitations from the French. The zarzuela, I should add, lasts about an hour, and for the most part is divided into three scenes.

Such a play as Los Borrachos is nothing less than a genre picture of Seville life. It reminds one of a painting by Teniers; and I should like to give some idea of it, since it is really one of the best examples of the class, witty, varied, and vivacious. But an obstacle presents itself in the fact that I can find no vestige of a plot. The authors set out to characterise the various lovers of the vine, (nowhere in Andalusia are the devotees of the yellow Manzanilla more numerous than in Seville,) and with telling strokes have drawn the good-natured tippler, the surly tippler, the religious tippler. To these they have added other types, which every Andalusian can recognise as old friends — the sharp-tongued harridan, the improviser of couplets with his ridiculous vanity, the flower-seller, and the ‘prentice-boy of fifteen, who, notwithstanding his tender years, is afflicted with love for the dark-eyed heroine. The action takes place first in a street, then in a court-yard, lastly in a carpenter’s shop. There are dainty love-scenes between Soledad, the distressed maiden, and Juanillo, the flower-seller; and one, very Spanish, where the witty and precocious apprentice offers her his diminutive hand and heart. Numerous people come and go, the drunkards drink and quarrel and make peace; the whole thing, if somewhat confused, is very life-like, and runs with admirable lightness and ease. It is true that the play has neither beginning nor end, but perhaps that only makes it seem the truer; and if the scenes have no obvious connection they are all amusing and characteristic. It is acted with extraordinary spirit. The players, indeed, are not acting, but living their ordinary lives, and it is pleasant to see the zest with which they throw themselves into the performance. When the hero presses the heroine in his arms, smiles and passionate glances pass between them, which suggest that even the love-making is not entirely make-believe.

I wish I could translate the song which Juanillo sings when he passes his lady’s window, bearing his basket of flowers:

Carnations for pretty girls that are true,

Musk-roses for pretty girls that are coy,

Rosebuds as small as thy mouth, my dearest,

And roses as fair as thy cheeks.

I cannot, indeed, resist the temptation of giving one verse in that Andalusian dialect, from which all harsh consonants and unmusical sounds have been worn away — the most complete and perfect language in the world for lovers and the passion of love:

Sal, morena, á tu ventana,

Mira las flores que traigo;

Sal y di si son bastantes

Pa arfombrita de tu cuarto.

Que yo te quiero

Y a ti te doy

Tos los tesoros der mundo entero,

To le que vargo, to lo que soy.

XL

Adios

And then the morrow was come. Getting up at five to catch my boat, I went down to the harbour; a grey mist hung over the sea, and the sun had barely risen, a pallid, yellow circle; the fishing-boats lolled on the smooth, dim water, and fishermen in little groups blew on their fingers.

And from Cadiz I saw the shores of Spain sink into the sea; I saw my last of Andalusia. Who, when he leaves a place that he has loved, can help wondering when he will see it again? I asked the wind, and it sighed back the Spanish answer: ‘Quien sabe? Who knows?’ The traveller makes up his mind to return quickly, but all manner of things happen, and one accident or another prevents him; time passes till the desire is lost, and when at last he comes back, himself has altered or changes have occurred in the old places and all seems different. He looks quite coldly at what had given an intense emotion, and though he may see new things, the others hardly move him; it is not thus he imagined them in the years of waiting. And how can he tell what the future may have in store; perhaps, notwithstanding all his passionate desires, he will indeed never return.

Of course the intention of this book is not to induce people to go to Spain: railway journeys are long and tedious, the trains crawl, and the hotels are bad. Experienced globe-trotters have told me that all mountains are very much alike, and that pictures, when you have seen a great many, offer no vast difference. It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it. How delightful is the anticipation as he looks over time-tables and books of photographs, forming delightful images of future pleasure! But the reality is full of disappointment, and the more famous the monument the bitterer the disillusion. Has any one seen St. Peter’s without asking himself: Is that all? And the truest enjoyment arises from things that come unexpectedly, that one had never heard of. Then, living in a strange land, one loses all impression of its strangeness; it is only afterwards, in England, that one realises the charm and longs to return; and a hundred pictures rise to fill the mind with delight. Why can one not be strong enough to leave it at that and never tempt the fates again?

The wisest thing is to leave unvisited in every country some place that one wants very much to see. In Italy I have never been to Siena, and in Andalusia I have taken pains to avoid Malaga. The guide-books tell me there is nothing whatever to see there; and according to them it is merely a prosperous sea-port with a good climate. But to me, who have never seen it, Malaga is something very different; it is the very cream of Andalusia, where every trait and characteristic is refined to perfect expression.

I imagine Malaga to be the most smiling town on the seaboard, and it lies along the shore ten times more charmingly than Cadiz. The houses are white, whiter than in Jerez; the patios are beautiful with oranges and palm-trees, and the dark green of the luxuriant foliage contrasts with the snowy walls. In Malaga the sky is always blue and the sun shines, but the narrow Arab streets are cool and shady. The passionate odours of Andalusia float in the air, the perfume of a myriad cigarettes and the fresh scent of fruit and flower. The blue sea lazily kisses the beach and fishing-boats bask on its bosom.

In Malaga, for me, there are dark churches, with massive, tall pillars; the light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The air is heavy with incense, and women in mantillas kneel in the half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors have left their mark.

And in Malaga, for me, the women are more lovely than in Seville; for their dark eyes glitter marvellously, and their lips, so red and soft, are ever trembling with a half-formed smile. They are more graceful than the daffodils, their hands are lovers’ sighs, and their voice is a caressing song. (What was your voice like, Rosarito? Alas! it is so long ago that I forget.) The men are tall and slender, with strong, clear features and shining eyes, deep sunken in their sockets.

In Malaga, for me, life is a holiday in which there are no dullards and no bores; all the world is strong and young and full of health, and there is nothing to remind one of horrible things. Malaga, I know, is the most delightful place in Andalusia. Oh, how refreshing it is to get away from sober fact, but what a fool I should be ever to go there!

The steamer plods on against the wind slowly, and as the land sinks away, unsatisfied to leave the impressions hovering vaguely through my mind, I try to find the moral. The Englishman, ever somewhat sententiously inclined, asks what a place can teach him. The churchwarden in his bosom gives no constant, enduring peace; and after all, though he may be often ridiculous, it is the churchwarden who has made good part of England’s greatness.

And most obviously Andalusia suggests that it might not be ill to take things a little more easily: we English look upon life so very seriously, so much without humour. Is it worth while to be quite so strenuous? At the stations on the line between Jerez and Cadiz, I noticed again how calmly they took things; people lounged idly talking to one another; the officials of the railway smoked their cigarettes; no one was in a hurry, time was long, and whether the train arrived late or punctual could really matter much to no one. A beggar came to the window, a cigarette-end between his lips.

‘Caballero! Alms for the love of God for a poor old man. God will repay you!’

He passed slowly down the train. It waited for no reason; the passengers stared idly at the loungers on the platform, and they stared idly back. No one moved except to roll himself a cigarette. The sky was blue and the air warm and comforting. Life seemed good enough, and above all things easy. There was no particular cause to trouble. What is the use of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little? What is the use of reading these endless books? Why not let things slide a little, and just take what comes our way? It is only for a little while, and then the great antique mother receives us once more in her bosom. And there are so many people in the world. Think again of all the countless hordes who have come and gone, and who will come and go; the immense sea of Time covers them, and what matters the life they led? What odds is it that they ever existed at all? Let us do our best to be happy; the earth is good and sweet-smelling, there is sunshine and colour and youth and loveliness; and afterwards — well, let us shrug our shoulders and not think of it.

And then in bitter irony, contradicting my moral, a train came in with a number of Cuban soldiers. There were above fifty of them, and they had to change at the junction. They reached out to open the carriage doors and crawled down to the platform. Some of them seemed at death’s door; they could not walk, and chairs were brought that they might be carried; others leaned heavily on their companions. And they were dishevelled, with stubbly beards. But what struck me most was the deathly colour; for their faces were almost green, while round their sunken eyes were great white rings, and the white was ghastly, corpse-like. They trooped along in a dazed and listless fashion, wasted with fever, and now and then one stopped, shaken with a racking cough; he leaned against the wall, and put his hand to his heart as if the pain were unendurable. It was a pitiful sight. They were stunted and under-sized; they ceased to develop when they went to the cruel island, and they were puny creatures with hollow chests and thin powerless limbs; often, strangely enough, their faces had remained quite boyish. They were twenty or twenty-two, and they looked sixteen. And then, by the sight of those boys who had never known youth with its joyful flowers, doomed to a hopeless life, I was forced against my will to another moral. Perhaps some would recover, but the majority must drag on with ruined health, fever-stricken, dying one by one, falling like the unripe fruit of a rotten tree. They had no chance, poor wretches! They would return to their miserable homes; they could not work, and their people were too poor to keep them — so they must starve. Their lives were even shorter than those of the rest, and what pleasure had they had?

And that is the result of the Spanish insouciance — death and corruption, loss of power and land and honour, the ruin of countless lives, and absolute decay. It is rather a bitter irony, isn’t it? And now all they have left is their sunshine and the equanimity which nothing can disturb.

ON A CHINESE SCREEN

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

I

THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN

You come to the row of hovels that leads to the gate of the city. They are built of dried mud and so dilapidated that you feel a breath of wind will lay them flat upon the dusty earth from which they have been made. A string of camels, heavily laden, steps warily past you. They wear the disdainful air of profiteers forced to traverse a world in which many people are not so rich as they. A little crowd, tattered in their blue clothes, is gathered about the gate and it scatters as a youth in a pointed cap gallops up on a Mongolian pony. A band of children are chasing a lame dog and they throw clods of mud at it. Two stout gentlemen in long black gowns of figured silk and silk jackets stand talking to one another. Each holds a little stick, perched on which, with a string attached to its leg, is a little bird. They have brought out their pets for an airing and in friendly fashion compare their merits. Now and then the birds give a flutter into the air, the  length of the string, and return quickly to their perch. The two Chinese gentlemen, smiling, look at them with soft eyes. Rude boys cry out at the foreigner in a shrill and scornful voice. The city wall, crumbling, old and crenellated, looks like the city wall in an old picture of some Palestinish town of the Crusaders.

You pass through the gateway into a narrow street lined with shops: many of them with their elegant lattice work, red and gold, and their elaborate carving, have a peculiar ruined magnificence, and you imagine that in their dark recesses are sold all manner of strange wares of the fabulous East. A great multitude surges along the uneven narrow footwalk or in the deepset street; and coolies, bearing heavy loads, shout for way in short sharp cries. Hawkers with guttural sound call their wares.

And now at a sedate pace, drawn by a sleek mule, comes a Peking cart. Its hood is bright blue and its great wheels are studded with nails. The driver sits with dangling legs on a shaft. It is evening and the sun sets red behind the yellow, steep, and fantastic roof of a temple. The Peking cart, the blind in front drawn down, passes silently and you wonder who it is that sits cross-legged within. Perhaps it is a scholar, all the learning of the classics at his finger ends, bound on a visit to a friend with whom he will exchange elaborate compliments and discuss the golden age of Tang and Sung which can return no more; perhaps it is a singing girl in splendid silks and richly  embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair, summoned to a party so that she may sing a little song and exchange elegant repartee with young blades cultured enough to appreciate wit. The Peking cart disappears into the gathering darkness: it seems to carry all the mystery of the East.

II

MY LADY’S PARLOUR

“I really think I can make something of it,” she said.

She looked about her briskly, and the light of the creative imagination filled her eyes with brightness.

It was an old temple, a small one, in the city, which she had taken and was turning into a dwelling house. It had been built for a very holy monk by his admirers three hundred years before, and here in great piety, practising innumerable austerities, he had passed his declining days. For long after in memory of his virtue the faithful had come to worship, but in course of time funds had fallen very low and at last the two or three monks that remained were forced to leave. It was weather-beaten and the green tiles of the roof were overgrown with weeds. The raftered ceiling was still beautiful with its faded gold dragons on a faded red; but she did not like a dark ceiling, so she stretched a canvas across and papered it. Needing air and sunlight, she cut two large windows on one side. She very luckily had some blue curtains which were just the right size. Blue was her favourite colour: it brought out the colour of  her eyes. Since the columns, great red sturdy columns, oppressed her a little she papered them with a very nice paper which did not look Chinese at all. She was lucky also with the paper with which she covered the walls. It was bought in a native shop, but really it might have come from Sandersons’; it was a very nice pink stripe and it made the place look cheerful at once. At the back was a recess in which had stood a great lacquer table and behind it an image of the Buddha in his eternal meditation. Here generations of believers had burned their tapers and prayed, some for this temporal benefit or that, some for release from the returning burden of earthly existence; and this seemed to her the very place for an American stove. She was obliged to buy her carpet in China, but she managed to get one that looked so like an Axminster that you would hardly know the difference. Of course, being hand-made, it had not quite the smoothness of the English article, but it was a very decent substitute. She was able to buy a very nice lot of furniture from a member of the Legation who was leaving the country for a post in Rome, and she got a nice bright chintz from Shanghai to make loose covers with. Fortunately she had quite a number of pictures, wedding presents and some even that she had bought herself, for she was very artistic, and these gave the room a cosy look. She needed a screen and here there was no help for it, she had to buy a Chinese one, but as she very cleverly said, you might perfectly well have a Chinese  screen in England. She had a great many photographs, in silver frames, one of them of a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein, and one of the Queen of Sweden, both signed, and these she put on the grand piano, for they give a room an air of being lived in. Then, having finished, she surveyed her work with satisfaction.

“Of course it doesn’t look like a room in London,” she said, “but it might quite well be a room in some nice place in England, Cheltenham, say, or Tunbridge Wells.”

III

THE MONGOL CHIEF

Heaven knows from what mysterious distance he had come. He rode down the winding pathway from the high Mongolian plateau with the mountains, barren, stony, and inaccessible, stretching on all sides, an impenetrable barrier; he rode down past the temple that guarded the head of the pass till he came to the old river bed which was the gateway into China. It was hedged in by the foothills brilliant under the morning sun, with sharp shadows; and the innumerable traffic of the centuries had formed on that stony floor a rough road. The air was keen and clear, the sky was blue. Here all the year round from daybreak till sundown, passed an unending stream, camels in caravan bearing the brick tea to Urga seven hundred miles away and so to Siberia, long lines of wagons drawn by placid bullocks, and little carts in twos and threes behind stout ponies; and in the contrary direction, into China, again camels in caravan bringing hides to the markets of Peking, and wagons in long procession. Now a mob of horses went by and then a flock of goats. But his eyes did not rest on the various scene. He seemed  not to notice that others were travelling the pass. He was accompanied by his henchmen, six or seven of them, somewhat bedraggled it is true, on sorry nags, but they had a truculent air. They ambled along in a slovenly bunch. He was dressed in a black silk coat and black silk trousers thrust into his long riding boots with their turned-up toes, and on his head he wore the high sable cap of his country. He held himself erect, riding a little ahead of his followers, proudly, and as he rode, his head high and his eyes steady, you wondered if he thought that down this pass in days gone by his ancestors had ridden, ridden down upon the fertile plain of China where rich cities lay ready to their looting.

IV

THE ROLLING STONE

I heard his extraordinary story before I saw him and I expected someone of striking appearance. It seemed to me that anyone who had gone through such singular experiences must have in his outer man something singular too. But I found a person in whose aspect there was nothing remarkable. He was smaller than the average, somewhat frail, sun-burned, with hair beginning to turn grey though he was still under thirty, and brown eyes. He looked like anybody else, and you might see him half a dozen times before remembering who he was. If you had happened upon him behind the counter of a department store or on a stool in a broker’s office you would have thought him perfectly in place. But you would have noticed him as little as you noticed the counter or the stool. There was so little in him to attract attention that in the end it became intriguing: his face, empty of significance, reminded you of the blank wall of a Manchu palace, in a sordid street, behind which you knew were painted courtyards, carved dragons, and heaven knows what subtle intricacy of life.

For his whole career was remarkable. The son of a veterinary surgeon, he had been a reporter in the London police courts and then had gone as steward on board a merchant ship to Buenos Ayres. There he had deserted and somehow or other had worked his way across South America. From a port in Chili he managed to get to the Marquesas where for six months he had lived on the natives always ready to offer hospitality to a white man, and then, begging a passage on a schooner to Tahiti, had shipped to Amoy as second mate of an old tub which carried Chinese labour to the Society Islands.

That was nine years before I met him and since then he had lived in China. First he got work with the B.A.T. Company, but after a couple of years he found it monotonous; and having acquired a certain knowledge of the language he entered the employment of a firm which distributed patent medicines through the length and breadth of the land. For three years he wandered in province after province, selling pills, and at the end of it had saved eight hundred dollars. He cut himself adrift once more.

He began then the most remarkable of his adventures. He set out from Peking on a journey right across the country, travelling in the guise of a poor Chinaman, with his roll of bedding, his Chinese pipe, and his tooth-brush. He stayed in the Chinese inns, sleeping on the kangs huddled up with fellow wayfarers, and ate the Chinese food. This alone is no mean feat. He used the  train but little, going for the most part on foot, by cart, or by river. He went through Shensi and Shansi; he walked on the windy plateaus of Mongolia and risked his life in barbaric Turkestan; he spent long weeks with the nomads of the desert and travelled with the caravans that carried the brick tea across the arid wilderness of Gobi. At last, four years later, having spent his last dollar he reached Peking once more.

He set about looking for a job. The easiest way to earn money seemed to write, and the editor of one of the English papers in China offered to take a series of articles on his journey. I suppose his only difficulty was to choose from the fulness of his experience. He knew much which he was perhaps the only Englishman to know. He had seen all manner of things, quaint, impressive, terrible, amusing, and unexpected. He wrote twenty-four articles. I will not say that they were unreadable, for they showed a careful and a sympathetic observation; but he had seen everything at haphazard, as it were, and they were but the material of art. They were like the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, a mine to the imaginative man, but the foundation of literature rather than literature itself. He was the field naturalist who patiently collects an infinity of facts, but has no gift for generalisation: they remain facts that await the synthesis of minds more complicated than his. He collected neither plants nor beasts, but men. His collection was unrivalled, but his knowledge of it slender.

When I met him I sought to discern how the variety of his experience had affected him; but though he was full of anecdote, a jovial, friendly creature, willing to talk at length of all he had seen, I could not discover that any of his adventures had intimately touched him. The instinct to do all the queer things he had done showed that there was in him a streak of queerness. The civilised world irked him and he had a passion to get away from the beaten trail. The oddities of life amused him. He had an insatiable curiosity. But I think his experiences were merely of the body and were never translated into experiences of the soul. Perhaps that is why at bottom you felt he was commonplace. The insignificance of his mien was a true index to the insignificance of his soul. Behind the blank wall was blankness.

That was certainly why with so much to write about he wrote tediously, for in writing the important thing is less richness of material than richness of personality.

V

THE CABINET MINISTER

He received me in a long room looking on to a sandy garden. The roses withered on the stunted bushes and the great old trees flagged forlorn. He sat me down on a square stool at a square table and took his seat in front of me. A servant brought cups of flowered tea and American cigarettes. He was a thin man, of the middle height, with thin, elegant hands; and through his gold-rimmed spectacles he looked at me with large, dark, and melancholy eyes. He had the look of a student or of a dreamer. His smile was very sweet. He wore a brown silk gown and over it a short black silk jacket, and on his head a billycock hat.

“Is it not strange,” he said, with his charming smile, “that we Chinese wear this gown because three hundred years ago the Manchus were horsemen?”

“Not so strange,” I retorted, “as that because the English won the battle of Waterloo Your Excellency should wear a bowler.”

“Do you think that is why I wear it?”

“I could easily prove it.”

Since I was afraid that his exquisite courtesy would prevent him from asking me how, I hastened in a few well-chosen words to do so.

He took off his hat and looked at it with the shadow of a sigh. I glanced round the room. It had a green Brussels carpet, with great flowers on it, and round the walls were highly carved blackwood chairs. From a picture rail hung scrolls on which were writings by the great masters of the past, and to vary these, in bright gold frames, were oil paintings which in the nineties might very well have been exhibited in the Royal Academy. The minister did his work at an American roll-top desk.

He talked to me with melancholy of the state of China. A civilisation, the oldest the world had known, was now being ruthlessly swept away. The students who came back from Europe and from America were tearing down what endless generations had built up, and they were placing nothing in its stead. They had no love of their country, no religion, no reverence. The temples, deserted by worshipper and priest, were falling into decay and presently their beauty would be nothing but a memory.

But then, with a gesture of his thin, aristocratic hands, he put the subject aside. He asked me whether I would care to see some of his works of art. We walked round the room and he showed me priceless porcelains, bronzes, and Tang figures. There was a horse from a grave in Honan which had the grace and the exquisite modelling  of a Greek work. On a large table by the side of his desk was a number of rolls. He chose one and holding it at the top gave it to me to unroll. It was a picture of some early dynasty of mountains seen through fleecy clouds, and with smiling eyes he watched my pleasure as I looked. The picture was set aside and he showed me another and yet another. Presently I protested that I could not allow a busy man to waste his time on me, but he would not let me go. He brought out picture after picture. He was a connoisseur. He was pleased to tell me the schools and periods to which they belonged and neat anecdotes about their painters.

“I wish I could think it was possible for you to appreciate my greatest treasures,” he said, pointing to the scrolls that adorned his walls. “Here you have examples of the most perfect calligraphies of China.”

“Do you like them better than paintings?” I asked.

“Infinitely. Their beauty is more chaste. There is nothing meretricious in them. But I can quite understand that a European would have difficulty in appreciating so severe and so delicate an art. Your taste in Chinese things tends a little to the grotesque, I think.”

He produced books of paintings and I turned their leaves. Beautiful things! With the dramatic instinct of the collector he kept to the last the book by which he set most store. It was a series of little pictures of birds and flowers,  roughly done with a few strokes, but with such a power of suggestion, with so great a feeling for nature and such a playful tenderness, that it took your breath away. There were sprigs of plum-blossom that held in their dainty freshness all the magic of the spring; there were sparrows in whose ruffled plumage were the beat and the tremor of life. It was the work of a great artist.

“Will these American students ever produce anything like this?” he asked with a rueful smile.

But to me the most charming part of it was that I knew all the time that he was a rascal. Corrupt, inefficient, and unscrupulous, he let nothing stand in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable methods. He was dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and venal. He had certainly had a share in reducing China to the desperate plight which he so sincerely lamented. But when he held in his hand a little vase of the colour of lapis lazuli his fingers seemed to curl about it with a charming tenderness, his melancholy eyes caressed it as they looked, and his lips were slightly parted as though with a sigh of desire.

VI

DINNER PARTIES

I: LEGATION QUARTER

The Swiss director of the Banque Sino-Argentine was announced. He came with a large, handsome wife, who displayed her opulent charms so generously that it made you a little nervous. It was said that she had been a cocotte, and an English maiden lady (in salmon pink satin and beads) who had come early, greeted her with a thin and frigid smile. The Minister of Guatemala and the Chargé d’Affaires of Montenegro entered together. The Chargé d’Affaires was in a state of extreme agitation; he had not understood that it was an official function, he thought he had been asked to dine en petit comité, and he had not put on his orders. And there was the Minister of Guatemala blazing with stars! What in heaven’s name was to be done? The emotion caused by what for a moment seemed almost a diplomatic incident was diverted by the appearance of two Chinese servants in long silk robes and four-sided hats with cocktails and zakouski. Then a Russian princess sailed in. She had white hair and a black silk dress up  to her neck. She looked like the heroine of a play by Victorien Sardou who had outlived the melodramatic fury of her youth and now did crochet. She was infinitely bored when you spoke to her of Tolstoi or Chekov; but grew animated when she talked of Jack London. She put a question to the maiden lady which the maiden lady, though no longer young, had no answer for.

“Why,” she asked, “do you English write such silly books about Russia?”

But then the first secretary of the British Legation appeared. He gave his entrance the significance of an event. He was very tall, baldish but elegant, and he was beautifully dressed: he looked with polite astonishment at the dazzling orders of the Minister of Guatemala. The Chargé d’Affaires of Montenegro, who flattered himself that he was the best dressed man in the diplomatic body, but was not quite sure whether the first secretary of the British Legation thought him so, fluttered up to him to ask his candid opinion of the frilled shirt he wore. The Englishman placed a gold-rimmed glass in his eye and looked at it for a moment gravely; then he paid the other a devastating compliment. Everyone had come by now but the wife of the French Military Attaché. They said she was always late.

“Elle est insupportable,” said the handsome wife of the Swiss banker.

But at last, magnificently indifferent to the fact that she had kept everyone waiting for half an hour, she swam into the room. She was tall on  her outrageously high heels, extremely thin, and she wore a dress that gave you the impression that she had nothing on at all. Her hair was bobbed and blonde, and she was boldly painted. She looked like a post-impressionist’s idea of patient Griselda. When she moved the air was heavy with exotic odours. She gave the Minister of Guatemala a jewelled, emaciated hand to kiss; with a few smiling words made the banker’s wife feel passée, provincial, and portly; flung an improper jest at the English lady whose embarrassment was mitigated by the knowledge that the wife of the French Military Attaché was très bien née; and drank three cocktails in rapid succession.

Dinner was served. The conversation varied from a resonant, rolling French to a somewhat halting English. They talked of this Minister who had just written from Bucharest or Lima, and that Counsellor’s wife who found it so dull in Christiania or so expensive in Washington. On the whole it made little difference to them in what capital they found themselves, for they did precisely the same things in Constantinople, Berne, Stockholm and Peking. Entrenched within their diplomatic privileges and supported by a lively sense of their social consequence, they dwelt in a world in which Copernicus had never existed, for to them sun and stars circled obsequiously round this earth of ours, and they were its centre. No one knew why the English lady was there and the wife of the Swiss director said privately that she was without doubt a German spy. But she  was an authority on the country. She told you that the Chinese had such perfect manners and you really should have known the Empress Dowager; she was a perfect darling. You knew very well that in Constantinople she would have assured you that the Turks were such perfect gentlemen and the Sultana Fatima was a perfect dear and spoke such wonderful French. Homeless, she was at home wherever her country had a diplomatic representative.

The first secretary of the British Legation thought the party rather mixed. He spoke French more like a Frenchman than any Frenchman who ever lived. He was a man of taste, and he had a natural aptitude for being right. He only knew the right people and only read the right books; he admired none but the right music and cared for none but the right pictures; he bought his clothes at the right tailor’s and his shirts from the only possible haberdasher. You listened to him with stupefaction. Presently you wished with all your heart that he would confess to a liking for something just a little vulgar: you would have felt more at your ease if only with bold idiosyncrasy he had claimed that The Soul’s Awakening was a work of art or The Rosary a masterpiece. But his taste was faultless. He was perfect and you were half afraid that he knew it, for in repose his face had the look of one who bears an intolerable burden. And then you discovered that he wrote vers libre. You breathed again.

II: AT A TREATY PORT

There was about the party a splendour which has vanished from the dinner tables of England. The mahogany groaned with silver. In the middle of the snowy damask cloth was a centrepiece of yellow silk such as you were unwillingly constrained to buy in the bazaars of your prim youth and on this was a massive épergne. Tall silver vases in which were large chrysanthemums made it possible to catch only glimpses of the persons opposite you, and tall silver candlesticks reared their proud heads two by two down the length of the table. Each course was served with its appropriate wine, sherry with the soup and hock with the fish; and there were the two entrées, a white entrée and a brown entrée, which the careful housekeeper of the nineties felt were essential to a properly arranged dinner.

Perhaps the conversation was less varied than the courses, for guests and hosts had seen one another nearly every day for an intolerable number of years and each topic that arose was seized upon desperately only to be exhausted and followed by a formidable silence. They talked of racing and golf and shooting. They would have thought it bad form to touch upon the abstract and there were no politics for them to discuss. China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they looked with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese  language. Why should he unless he were a missionary or a Chinese Secretary at the Legation? You could hire an interpreter for twenty-five dollars a month and it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew queer in the head. They were all persons of consequence. There was number one at Jardine’s with his wife, and the manager of the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank with his wife, the A.P.C. man and his wife, and the B.A.T. man with his wife, and the B.&S. man with his wife. They wore their evening clothes a little uneasily as though they wore them from a sense of duty to their country rather than as a comfortable change from day dress. They had come to the party because they had nothing else in the world to do, but when the moment came that they could decently take their leave they would go with a sigh of relief. They were bored to death with one another.

VII

THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN

It stands open to the sky, three round terraces of white marble, placed one above the other, which are reached by four marble staircases, and these face the four points of the compass. It represents the celestial sphere with its cardinal points. A great park surrounds it and this again is surrounded by high walls. And hither, year after year, on the night of the winter solstice, for then heaven is reborn, generation after generation came the Son of Heaven solemnly to worship the original creator of his house. Escorted by princes and the great men of the realm, followed by his troops, the emperor purified by fasting proceeded to the altar. And here awaited him princes and ministers and mandarins, each in his allotted place, musicians and the dancers of the sacred dance. In the scanty light of the great torches the ceremonial robes were darkly splendid. And before the tablet on which were inscribed the words: Imperial Heaven — Supreme Emperor, he offered incense, jade, and silk, broth and rice spirit. He knelt and knocked his forehead against the marble pavement nine times.

And here at the very spot where the vice-regent  of heaven and earth knelt down, Willard B. Untermeyer wrote his name in a fine bold hand and the town and state he came from, Hastings, Nebraska. So he sought to attach his fleeting personality to the recollection of that grandeur of which some dim rumour had reached him. He thought that so men would remember him when he was no more. He aimed in this crude way at immortality. But vain are the hopes of men. For no sooner had he sauntered down the steps than a Chinese caretaker who had been leaning against the balustrade, idly looking at the blue sky, came forward, spat neatly on the spot where Willard B. Untermeyer had written, and with his foot smeared his spittle over the name. In a moment no trace remained that Willard B. Untermeyer had ever visited that place.

VIII

THE SERVANTS OF GOD

They were sitting side by side, two missionaries, talking to one another of perfectly trivial things, in the way people talk who wish to show each other civility but have nothing in common; and they would have been surprised to be told that they had certainly one admirable thing in common, goodness, for both had this also in common, humility; though perhaps in the Englishman it was more deliberate, and so, if more conspicuous less natural, than it was in the Frenchman. Otherwise the contrasts between them were almost ludicrous. The Frenchman was hard on eighty, a tall man, still unbent; and his large bones suggested that in youth he had been a man of uncommon strength. Now his only sign of power lay in his eyes, immensely large so that you could not help noticing their strange expression, and flashing. That is an epithet often applied to eyes, but I do not think I have ever seen any to which it might be applied so fitly. There was really a flame in them and they seemed to emit light. They had a wildness which hardly suggested sanity. They were the eyes of a prophet in Israel. His nose was large and aggressive, his  chin was firm and square. At no time could he have been a man to trifle with, but in his prime he must have been terrific. Perhaps the passion of his eyes bespoke battles long fought out in the uttermost depths of his heart, and his soul cried out in them, vanquished and bleeding, yet triumphant, and he exulted in the unclosed wound which he offered in willing sacrifice to Almighty God. He felt the cold in his old bones and he wore wrapped about him like a soldier’s cloak a great fur and on his head a cap of Chinese sable. He was a magnificent figure. He had been in China for half a century and thrice he had fled for his life when the Chinese had attacked his mission.

“I trust they won’t attack it again,” he said, smiling, “for I am too old now to make these precipitate journeys.” He shrugged his shoulders: “Je serai martyr.”

He lit a long black cigar and puffed it with great enjoyment.

The other was very much younger, he could not have been more than fifty, and he had not been in China for more than twenty years. He was a member of the English Church Mission and he was dressed in a grey tweed suit and a spotted tie. He sought to look as little like a clergyman as possible. He was a little taller than the average, but he was so fat that he looked stumpy. He had a round good-natured face, with red cheeks and a grey moustache of the variety known as toothbrush. He was very bald, but with a pardonable and touching vanity he had grown his hair long  enough on one side to be brought over the scalp and so give himself at all events the illusion that his head was well-covered. He was a jovial fellow, with a hearty laugh, and it rang out loudly, honest and true, when he chaffed his friends or was chaffed by them. He had the humour of a schoolboy and you could imagine him shaking in all his bulk when someone slipped on a piece of orange peel. But the laughter would be stopped, and he would redden, as it struck him suddenly that the man who slipped might have hurt himself, and then he would be all kindness and sympathy. For it was impossible to be with him for ten minutes without realising the tenderness of his heart. You felt that it would be impossible to ask him to do anything he would not gladly do, and if perhaps at first his heartiness would make it difficult to go to him in your spiritual needs you could be sure in all practical affairs of his attention, sympathy, and good sense. He was a man whose purse was always open to the indigent and whose time was always at the service of those who wanted it. And yet perhaps it is unjust to say that in the affairs of the soul his help would not be very effectual, for though he could not speak to you, like the old Frenchman, with the authority of a church that has never admitted doubt or with the compelling fire of the ascetic, he would share your distress with such a candid sympathy, consoling you with his own hesitations, less a minister of God then than a halting, tremulous man of the same flesh as yourself, who sought to share with  you the hope and the consolation with which his own soul was refreshed, that perhaps in his own way he had something as good to offer as the other.

His story was a little unusual. He had been a soldier and he was pleased to talk of the old days when he had hunted with the Quorn and danced through the London season. He had no unhealthy feeling of past sin.

“I was a great dancer in my young days,” he said, “but I expect I should be quite out of it now with all these new dances.”

It was a good life so long as it lasted and though he did not for a moment regret it, he had no feeling of resentment for it. The call had come when he was in India. He did not exactly know how or why, it had just come, a sudden feeling that he must give up his life to bringing the heathen to the belief in Christ, but it was a feeling that he could not resist; it gave him no peace. He was a happy man now, enjoying his work.

“It’s a slow business,” he said, “but I see signs of progress and I love the Chinese. I wouldn’t change my life here for any in the world.”

The two missionaries said good-bye to one another.

“When are you going home?” asked the Englishman.

“Moi? Oh, in a day or two.”

“I may not see you again then. I expect to go home in March.”

But one meant the little town with its narrow  streets where he had lived for fifty years, since when he left France, a young man, he left it for ever; but the other meant the Elizabethan house in Cheshire, with its smooth lawns and its oak trees, where his ancestors had dwelt for three centuries.

IX

THE INN

It seems long since the night fell, and for an hour a coolie has walked before your chair carrying a lantern. It throws a thin circle of light in front of you, and as you pass you catch a pale glimpse (like a thing of beauty emerging vaguely from the ceaseless flux of common life) of a bamboo thicket, a flash of water in a rice field, or the heavy darkness of a banyan. Now and then a belated peasant bearing two heavy baskets on his yoke sidles by. The bearers walk more slowly, but after the long day they have lost none of their spirit, and they chatter gaily; they laugh, and one of them breaks into a fragment of tuneless song. But the causeway rises and the lantern throws its light suddenly on a whitewashed wall: you have reached the first miserable houses that straggle along the path outside the city wall, and two or three minutes more bring you to a steep flight of steps. The bearers take them at a run. You pass through the city gates. The narrow streets are multitudinous and in the shops they are busy still. The bearers shout raucously. The crowd divides and you pass through a double hedge of serried  curious people. Their faces are impassive and their dark eyes stare mysteriously. The bearers, their day’s work done, march with a swinging stride. Suddenly they stop, wheel to the right, into a courtyard, and you have reached the inn. Your chair is set down.

The inn — it consists of a long yard, partly covered, with rooms opening on it on each side — is lit by three or four oil lamps. They throw a dim light immediately around them, but make the surrounding darkness more impenetrable. All the front of the yard is crowded with tables and at these people are packed, eating rice or drinking tea. Some of them play games you do not know. At the great stove, where water in a cauldron is perpetually heating and rice in a huge pan being prepared, stand the persons of the inn. They serve out rapidly great bowls of rice and fill the teapots which are incessantly brought them. Further back a couple of naked coolies, sturdy, thickset and supple, are sluicing themselves with boiling water. You walk to the end of the yard where, facing the entrance but protected from the vulgar gaze by a screen, is the principal guest chamber.

It is a spacious, windowless room, with a floor of trodden earth, lofty, for it goes the whole height of the inn, with an open roof. The walls are whitewashed, showing the beams, so that they remind you of a farmhouse in Sussex. The furniture consists of a square table, with a couple of straight-backed wooden arm-chairs, and three or  four wooden pallets covered with matting on the least dirty of which you will presently lay your bed. In a cup of oil a taper gives a tiny point of light. They bring you your lantern and you wait while your dinner is cooked. The bearers are merry now that they have set down their loads. They wash their feet and put on clean sandals and smoke their long pipes.

How precious then is the inordinate length of your book (for you are travelling light and you have limited yourself to three) and how jealously you read every word of every page so that you may delay as long as possible the dreaded moment when you must reach the end! You are mightily thankful then to the authors of long books and when you turn over their pages, reckoning how long you can make them last, you wish they were half as long again. You do not ask then for the perfect lucidity which he who runs may read. A complicated phraseology which makes it needful to read the sentence a second time to get its meaning is not unwelcome; a profusion of metaphor, giving your fancy ample play, a richness of allusion affording you the delight of recognition, are then qualities beyond price. Then if the thought is elaborate without being profound (for you have been on the road since dawn and of the forty miles of the day’s journey you have footed it more than half) you have the perfect book for the occasion.

But the noise in the inn suddenly increases to a din and looking out you see that more travellers,  a party of Chinese in sedan chairs, have arrived. They take the rooms on each side of you and through the thin walls you hear their loud talking far into the night. With a lazy, restful eye, your whole body conscious of the enjoyment of lying in bed, taking a sensual pleasure in its fatigue, you follow the elaborate pattern of the transom. The dim lamp in the yard shines through the torn paper with which it is covered, and its intricate design is black against the light. At last everything is quiet but for a man in the next room who is coughing painfully. It is the peculiar, repeated cough of phthisis, and hearing it at intervals through the night you wonder how long the poor devil can live. You rejoice in your own rude strength. Then a cock crows loudly, just behind your head, it seems; and not far away a bugler blows a long blast on his bugle, a melancholy wail; the inn begins to stir again; lights are lit, and the coolies make ready their loads for another day.

X

THE GLORY HOLE

It is a sort of little cubicle in a corner of the chandler’s store just under the ceiling and you reach it by a stair which is like a ship’s companion. It is partitioned off from the shop by matchboarding, about four feet high, so that when you sit on the wooden benches that surround the table you can see into the shop with all its stores. Here are coils of rope, oilskins, heavy sea-boots, hurricane lamps, hams, tinned goods, liquor of all sorts, curios to take home to your wife and children, clothes, I know not what. There is everything that a foreign ship can want in an Eastern port. You can watch the Chinese, salesmen and customers, and they have a pleasantly mysterious air as though they were concerned in nefarious business. You can see who comes into the shop and since it is certainly a friend bid him join you in the Glory Hole. Through the wide doorway you see the sun beating down on the stone pavement of the roadway and the coolies scurrying past with their heavy loads. At about midday the company begins to assemble, two or three pilots, Captain Thompson and Captain Brown, old men who have sailed the China Seas  for thirty years and now have a comfortable billet ashore, the skipper of a tramp from Shanghai, and the taipans of one or two tea firms. The boy stands silently waiting for orders and he brings the drinks and the dice-box. Talk flows rather prosily at first. A boat was wrecked the other day going in to Foochow, that fellow Maclean, the engineer of the An-Chan has made a pot of money in rubber lately, the consul’s wife is coming out from home in the Empress; but by the time the dice-box has travelled round the table and the loser has signed the chit, the glasses are empty and the dice-box is reached for once more. The boy brings the second round of drinks. Then the tongues of these stolid, stubborn men are loosened a little and they begin to talk of the past. One of the pilots knew the port first hard on fifty years ago. Ah, those were the great days.

“That’s when you ought to have seen the Glory Hole,” he says, with a smile.

Those were the days of the tea clippers, when there would be thirty or forty ships in the harbour, waiting for their cargo. Everyone had plenty of money to spend then, and the Glory Hole was the centre of life in the port. If you wanted to find a man, why, you came to the Glory Hole, and if he wasn’t there he’d be sure to come along soon. The agents did their business with the skippers there, and the doctor didn’t have office hours; he went to the Glory Hole at noon and if anyone was sick he attended to him there  and then. Those were the days when men knew how to drink. They would come at midday and drink all through the afternoon, a boy bringing them a bite if they were hungry, and drink all through the night. Fortunes were lost and won in the Glory Hole, for they were gamblers then and a man would risk all the profits of his run in a game of cards. Those were the good old days. But now the trade was gone, the tea clippers no longer thronged the harbour, the port was dead, and the young men, the young men of the A.P.C. or of Jardine’s, turned up their noses at the Glory Hole. And as the old pilot talked that dingy little cubicle with its stained table seemed to be for a moment peopled with those old skippers, hardy, reckless, and adventurous, of a day that has gone for ever.

XI

FEAR

I was staying a night with him on the road. The mission stood on a little hill just outside the gates of a populous city. The first thing I noticed about him was the difference of his taste. The missionary’s house as a rule is furnished in a style which is almost an outrage to decency. The parlour, with its air of an unused room, is papered with a gaudy paper, and on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental pictures — The Soul’s Awakening and Luke Filde’s The Doctor — or, if the missionary has been long in the country, congratulatory scrolls on stiff red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the floor, rocking chairs if the household is American and a stiff arm-chair on each side of the fireplace if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed that nobody sits on it and by the grim look of it few can want to. There are lace curtains on the windows. Here and there are occasional tables on which are photographs and what-nots with modern porcelain on them. The dining-room has an appearance of more use, but almost the whole of it is taken up by a large table and when you sit at it you are crowded into the fireplace. But  in Mr. Wingrove’s study there were books from floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains of a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a Tibetan banner. There was a row of Tibetan Buddhas on the chimney piece.

“I don’t know how it is, but you’ve got just the feeling of college rooms about the place,” I said.

“Do you think so?” he answered. “I was a tutor at Oriel for some time.”

He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think, tall and well-covered though not stout, with grey hair cut very short and a reddish face. One imagined that he must be a jovial man fond of laughter, an easy talker and a good fellow; but his eyes disconcerted you: they were grave and unsmiling; they had a look that I could only describe as harassed. I wondered if I had fallen upon him at an inconvenient moment when his mind was taken up with irksome matters, yet somehow I felt that this was not a passing expression, but a settled one rather, and I could not understand it. He had just that look of anxiety which you see in certain forms of heart disease. He chatted about one thing and another, then he said:

“I hear my wife come in. Shall we go into the drawing-room?”

He led me in and introduced me to a little thin woman, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shy manner. It was plain that she belonged to a different class from her husband. The missionaries for the most part with all manner of virtues have not those which we can find no better way to describe  than under the category of good breeding. They may be saints but they are not often gentlemen. Now it struck me that Mr. Wingrove was a gentleman, for it was evident that his wife was not a lady. She had a vulgar intonation. The drawing-room was furnished in a way I had never before seen in a missionary’s house. There was a Chinese carpet on the floor. Chinese pictures, old ones, hung on the yellow walls. Two or three Ming tiles gave a dash of colour. In the middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately carved, and on it was a figure in white porcelain. I made a trivial remark.

“I don’t much care for all these Chinese things meself,” answered my hostess briskly, “but Mr. Wingrove’s set on them. I’d clear them all out if I had my way.”

I laughed, not because I was amused, and then I caught in Mr. Wingrove’s eyes a flash of icy hatred. I was astonished. But it passed in a moment.

“We won’t have them if you don’t like them, my dear,” he said gently. “They can be put away.”

“Oh, I don’t mind them if they please you.”

We began to talk about my journey and in the course of conversation I happened to ask Mr. Wingrove how long it was since he had been in England.

“Seventeen years,” he said.

I was surprised.

“But I thought you had one year’s furlough every seven?”

“Yes, but I haven’t cared to go.”

“Mr. Wingrove thinks it’s bad for the work to go away for a year like that,” explained his wife. “Of course I don’t care to go without him.”

I wondered how it was that he had ever come to China. The actual details of the call fascinate me, and often enough you find people who are willing to talk of it, though you have to form your own opinion on the matter less from the words they say than from the implications of them; but I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was a man who would be induced either directly or indirectly to speak of that intimate experience. He evidently took his work very seriously.

“Are there other foreigners here?” I asked.

“No.”

“It must be very lonely,” I said.

“I think I prefer it so,” he answered, looking at one of the pictures on the wall. “They’d only be business people, and you know” — he smiled— “they haven’t much use for missionaries. And they’re not so intellectual that it is a great hardship to be deprived of their company.”

“And of course we’re not really alone, you know,” said Mrs. Wingrove. “We have two evangelists and then there are two young ladies who teach. And there are the school children.”

Tea was brought in and we gossiped desultorily. Mr. Wingrove seemed to speak with effort, and I had increasingly that feeling in him of perturbed repression. He had pleasing manners and was certainly trying to be cordial and yet I had  a sense of effort. I led the conversation to Oxford, mentioning various friends whom he might know, but he gave me no encouragement.

“It’s so long since I left home,” he said, “and I haven’t kept up with anyone. There’s a great deal of work in a mission like this and it absorbs one entirely.”

I thought he was exaggerating a little, so I remarked:

“Well, by the number of books you have I take it that you get a certain amount of time for reading.”

“I very seldom read,” he answered with abruptness, in a voice that I knew already was not quite his own.

I was puzzled. There was something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose, he began to talk of the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about them that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty, but a faint light was visible in the East; though the results of missionary endeavour were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They no longer believed in their old gods and the power of the literati was broken. It is an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife’s strictures. He dwelt on the good-nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and on their love for their children.

“Mr. Wingrove won’t hear a word against the Chinese,” said his wife, “he simply loves them.”

“I think they have great qualities,” he said. “You can’t walk through those crowded streets of theirs without having that impressed on you.”

“I don’t believe Mr. Wingrove notices the smells,” his wife laughed.

At that moment there was a knock at the door and a young woman came in. She had the long skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian, and on her face a look that was at once cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs. Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr. Wingrove’s face. When he saw her there passed over it an expression of the most intense physical repulsion, it was distorted as though by an odour that nauseated him, and then immediately it vanished and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile; but the effort was too great and he showed only a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amazement. Mrs. Wingrove with an “excuse me” got up and left the room.

“That is one of our teachers,” said Mr. Wingrove in that same set voice which had a little puzzled me before. “She’s invaluable. I put infinite reliance on her. She has a very fine character.”

Then, I hardly know why, in a flash I saw the truth; I saw the disgust in his soul for all that his will loved. I was filled with the excitement which an explorer may feel when after a hazardous journey he comes upon a country with features  new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained themselves, the unnatural voice, the measured restraint with which he praised, that air he had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he said he hated the Chinese with a hatred beside which his wife’s distaste was insignificant. When he walked through the teeming streets of the city it was an agony to him, his missionary life revolted him, his soul was like the raw shoulders of the coolies and the carrying pole burnt the bleeding wound. He would not go home because he could not bear to see again what he cared for so much, he would not read his books because they reminded him of the life he loved so passionately, and perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in order to cut himself off more resolutely from a world that his every instinct craved for. He martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation.

I tried to see how the call had come. I think that for years he had been completely happy in his easy ways at Oxford; and he had loved his work, with its pleasant companionship, his books, his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented man and asked nothing better than to spend the rest of his days in just such a fashion; but I know not what obscure feeling had gradually taken hold of him that his life was too lazy, too contented; I think he was always a religious man and perhaps some early belief, instilled into him in childhood and long forgotten, of a jealous God who hated his creatures to be happy on earth,  rankled in the depths of his heart; I think because he was so well satisfied with his life he began to think it was sinful. A restless anxiety seized him. Whatever he thought with his intelligence his instincts began to tremble with the dread of eternal punishment. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him. I think he said that he would not go, but I think he felt that he would have to. God was pursuing him and wherever he hid himself God followed. With his reason he struggled, but with his heart he was caught. He could not help himself. At least he gave in.

I knew I should never see him again and I had not the time to spend on the commonplaces of conversation before a reasonable familiarity would permit me to talk of more intimate matters. I seized the opportunity while we were still alone.

“Tell me,” I said, “do you believe God will condemn the Chinese to eternal punishment if they don’t accept Christianity?”

I am sure my question was crude and tactless, for the old man in him tightened his lips. But nevertheless he answered.

“The whole teaching of the gospel forces one to that conclusion. There is not a single argument which people have adduced to the contrary which has the force of the plain words of Jesus Christ.”

XII

THE PICTURE

I do not know whether he was a mandarin bound for the capital of the province, or some student travelling to a seat of learning, nor what the reason that delayed him in the most miserable of all the miserable inns in China. Perhaps one or other of his bearers, hidden somewhere to smoke a pipe of opium (for it is cheap in that neighborhood and you must be prepared for trouble with your coolies) could not be found. Perhaps a storm of torrential rain had held him for an hour an unwilling prisoner.

The room was so low that you could easily touch the rafters with your hand. The mud walls were covered with dirty whitewash, here and there worn away, and all round on wooden pallets were straw beds for the coolies who were the inn’s habitual guests. The sun alone enabled you to support the melancholy squalor. It shone through the latticed window, a beam of golden light, and threw on the trodden earth of the floor a pattern of an intricate and splendid richness.

And here to pass an idle moment he had taken his stone tablet and mixing a little water with the stick of ink which he rubbed on it, seized the  fine brush with which he executed the beautiful characters of the Chinese writing (he was surely proud of his exquisite calligraphy and it was a welcome gift which he made his friends when he sent them a scroll on which was written a maxim, glitteringly compact, of the divine Confucius) and with a bold hand he drew on the wall a branch of plum-blossom and a bird perched on it. It was done very lightly, but with an admirable ease; I know not what happy chance guided the artist’s touch, for the bird was all a-quiver with life and the plum-blossoms were tremulous on their stalks. The soft airs of spring blew through the sketch into that sordid chamber, and for the beating of a pulse you were in touch with the Eternal.

XIII

HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S REPRESENTATIVE

He was a man of less than middle height, with stiff brown hair en brosse, a little toothbrush moustache, and glasses through which his blue eyes, looking at you aggressively, were somewhat distorted. There was a defiant perkiness in his appearance which reminded you of the cock-sparrow, and as he asked you to sit down and inquired your business, meanwhile sorting the papers littered on his desk as though you had disturbed him in the midst of important affairs, you had the feeling that he was on the look out for an opportunity to put you in your place. He had cultivated the official manner to perfection. You were the public, an unavoidable nuisance, and the only justification for your existence was that you did what you were told without argument or delay. But even officials have their weakness and somehow it chanced that he found it very difficult to bring any business to an end without confiding his grievance to you. It appeared that people, missionaries especially, thought him supercilious and domineering. He assured you that he thought there was a  great deal of good in missionaries; it is true that many of them were ignorant and unreasonable, and he didn’t like their attitude; in his district most of them were Canadians, and personally he didn’t like Canadians; but as for saying that he put on airs of superiority (he fixed his pince-nez more firmly on his nose) it was monstrously untrue. On the contrary he went out of his way to help them, but it was only natural that he should help them in his way rather than in theirs. It was hard to listen to him without a smile, for in every word he said you felt how exasperating he must be to the unfortunate persons over whom he had control. His manner was deplorable. He had developed the gift of putting up your back to a degree which is very seldom met with. He was in short a vain, irritable, bumptious, and tiresome little man.

During the revolution, while a lot of firing was going on in the city between the rival factions, he had occasion to go to the Southern general on official business connected with the safety of his nationals, and on his way through the yamen he came across three prisoners being led out to execution. He stopped the officer in charge of the firing party and finding out what was about to happen vehemently protested. These were prisoners of war and it was barbarity to kill them. The officer — very rudely, in the consul’s words — told him that he must carry out his orders. The consul fired up. He wasn’t going to let a confounded Chinese officer talk to him in that way. An altercation  ensued. The general informed of what was occurring sent out to ask the consul to come in to him, but the consul refused to move till the prisoners, three wretched coolies green with fear, were handed over to his safe-keeping. The officer waved him aside and ordered his firing squad to take aim. Then the consul — I can see him fixing his glasses on his nose and his hair bristling fiercely — then the consul stepped forwards between the levelled rifles and the three miserable men, and told the soldiers to shoot and be damned. There was hesitation and confusion. It was plain that the rebels did not want to shoot a British consul. I suppose there was a hurried consultation. The three prisoners were given over to him and in triumph the little man marched back to the consulate.

“Damn it, Sir,” he said furiously, “I almost thought the blighters would have the confounded cheek to shoot me.”

They are strange people the British. If their manners were as good as their courage is great they would merit the opinion they have of themselves.

XIV

THE OPIUM DEN

On the stage it makes a very effective set. It is dimly lit. The room is low and squalid. In one corner a lamp burns mysteriously before a hideous image and incense fills the theatre with its exotic scent. A pig-tailed Chinaman wanders to and fro, aloof and saturnine, while on wretched pallets lie stupefied the victims of the drug. Now and then one of them breaks into frantic raving. There is a highly dramatic scene where some poor creature, unable to pay for the satisfaction of his craving, with prayers and curses begs the villainous proprietor for a pipe to still his anguish. I have read also in novels descriptions which made my blood run cold. And when I was taken to an opium den by a smooth-spoken Eurasian the narrow, winding stairway up which he led me prepared me sufficiently to receive the thrill I expected. I was introduced into a neat enough room, brightly lit, divided into cubicles the raised floor of which, covered with clean matting, formed a convenient couch. In one an elderly gentleman, with a grey head and very beautiful hands, was quietly reading a newspaper, with his long pipe by his side. In  another two coolies were lying, with a pipe between them, which they alternately prepared and smoked. They were young men, of a hearty appearance, and they smiled at me in a friendly way. One of them offered me a smoke. In a third four men squatted over a chess-board, and a little further on a man was dandling a baby (the inscrutable Oriental has a passion for children) while the baby’s mother, whom I took to be the landlord’s wife, a plump, pleasant-faced woman, watched him with a broad smile on her lips. It was a cheerful spot, comfortable, home-like, and cosy. It reminded me somewhat of the little intimate beer-houses of Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour. Fiction is stranger than fact.

XV

THE LAST CHANCE

It was pathetically obvious that she had come to China to be married, and what made it almost tragic was that not a single man in the treaty port was ignorant of the fact. She was a big woman with an ungainly figure; her hands and feet were large; she had a large nose, indeed all her features were large; but her blue eyes were fine. She was perhaps a little too conscious of them. She was a blonde and she was thirty. In the daytime when she wore sensible boots, a short skirt, and a slouch hat, she was personable; but in the evening, in blue silk to enhance the colour of her eyes, in a frock cut by heaven knows what suburban dressmaker from the models in an illustrated paper, when she set herself out to be alluring she was an object that made you horribly ill-at-ease. She wished to be all things to all unmarried men. She listened brightly while one of them talked of shooting and she listened gaily when another talked of the freight on tea. She clapped her hands with girlish excitement when they discussed the races which were to be run next week. She was desperately fond of dancing, with a young American, and she  made him promise to take her to a baseball match; but dancing wasn’t the only thing she cared for (you can have too much of a good thing) and, with the elderly, but single, taipan of an important firm, what she simply loved was a game of golf. She was willing to be taught billiards by a young man who had lost his leg in the war and she gave her sprightly attention to the manager of a bank who told her what he thought of silver. She was not much interested in the Chinese, for that was a subject which was not very good form in the circles in which she found herself, but being a woman she could not help being revolted at the way in which Chinese women were treated.

“You know, they don’t have a word to say about who they’re going to marry,” she explained. “It’s all arranged by go-betweens and the man doesn’t even see the girl till he’s married her. There’s no romance or anything like that. And as far as love goes ...”

Words failed her. She was a thoroughly good-natured creature. She would have made any of those men, young or old, a perfectly good wife. And she knew it.

XVI

THE NUN

The convent lay white and cool among the trees on the top of a hill; and as I stood at the gateway, waiting to be let in, I looked down at the tawny river glittering in the sunlight and at the rugged mountains beyond. It was the Mother Superior who received me, a placid, sweet-faced lady with a soft voice and an accent which told me that she came from the South of France. She showed me the orphans who were in her charge, busy at the lace-making which the nuns had taught them, smiling shyly; and she showed me the hospital where lay soldiers suffering from dysentery, typhoid, and malaria. They were squalid and dirty. The Mother Superior told me she was a Basque. The mountains that she looked out on from the convent windows reminded her of the Pyrenees. She had been in China for twenty years. She said that it was hard sometimes never to see the sea; here on the great river they were a thousand miles away from it; and because I knew the country where she was born she talked to me a little of the fine roads that led over the mountains — ah, they did not have them here in China — and the vineyards and  the pleasant villages with their running streams that nestled at the foot of the hills. But the Chinese were good people. The orphans were very quick with their fingers and they were industrious; the Chinese sought them as wives because they had learnt useful things in the convent, and even after they were married they could earn a little money by their needles. And the soldiers too, they were not so bad as people said; after all les pauvres petits, they did not want to be soldiers; they would much sooner be at home working in the fields. Those whom the sisters had nursed through illness were not devoid of gratitude. Sometimes when they were coming along in a chair and overtook two nuns who had been in the town to buy things and were laden with parcels, they would offer to take their parcels in the chair. Au fond, they were not bad hearted.

“They do not go so far as to get out and let the nuns ride in their stead?” I asked.

“A nun in their eyes is only a woman,” she smiled indulgently. “You must not ask from people more than they are capable of giving.”

How true, and yet how hard to remember!

XVII

HENDERSON

It was very hard to look at him without a chuckle, for his appearance immediately told you all about him. When you saw him at the club, reading The London Mercury or lounging at the bar with a gin and bitters at his elbow (no cocktails for him) his unconventionality attracted your attention; but you recognised him at once, for he was a perfect specimen of his class. His unconventionality was exquisitely conventional. Everything about him was according to standard, from his square-toed, serviceable boots to his rather long, untidy hair. He wore a loose low collar that showed a thick neck and loose, somewhat shabby but well-cut clothes. He always smoked a short briar pipe. He was very humorous on the subject of cigarettes. He was a biggish fellow, athletic, with fine eyes and a pleasant voice. He talked fluently. His language was often obscene, not because his mind was impure, but because his bent was democratic. As you guessed by the look of him he drank beer (not in fact but in the spirit) with Mr. Chesterton and walked the Sussex downs with Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He had played football at Oxford, but with Mr. Wells  he despised the ancient seat of learning. He looked upon Mr. Bernard Shaw as a little out of date, but he had still great hopes of Mr. Granville Barker. He had had many serious talks with Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Webb, and he was a member of the Fabian Society. The only point where he touched upon the same world as the frivolous was his appreciation of the Russian Ballet. He wrote rugged poems about prostitutes, dogs, lamp-posts, Magdalen College, public houses and country vicarages. He held English, French, and Americans in scorn; but on the other hand (he was no misanthropist) he would not listen to a word in dispraise of Tamils, Bengalis, Kaffirs, Germans, or Greeks. At the club they thought him rather a wild fellow.

“A socialist, you know,” they said.

But he was junior partner in a well-known and respectable firm, and one of the peculiarities of China is that your position excuses your idiosyncrasies. It may be notorious that you beat your wife, but if you are manager of a well-established bank the world will be civil to you and ask you to dinner. So when Henderson announced his socialistic opinions they merely laughed. When he first came to Shanghai he refused to use the jinrickshaw. It revolted his sense of personal dignity that a man, a human being no different from himself, should drag him hither and thither. So he walked. He swore it was good exercise and it kept him fit; besides, it gave him a thirst he wouldn’t sell for twenty dollars, and he drank his  beer with gusto. But Shanghai is very hot and sometimes he was in a hurry so now and again he was obliged to use the degrading vehicle. It made him feel uncomfortable, but it was certainly convenient. Presently he came to use it frequently, but he always thought of the boy between the shafts as a man and a brother.

He had been three years in Shanghai when I saw him. We had spent the morning in the Chinese city, going from shop to shop and our rickshaw boys were hot with sweat; every minute or two they wiped their foreheads with ragged handkerchiefs. We were bound now for the club and had nearly reached it when Henderson remembered that he wanted to get Mr. Bertrand Russell’s new book, which had just reached Shanghai. He stopped the boys and told them to go back.

“Don’t you think we might leave it till after luncheon?” I said. “Those fellows are sweating like pigs.”

“It’s good for them,” he answered. “You mustn’t ever pay attention to the Chinese. You see, we’re only here because they fear us. We’re the ruling race.”

I did not say anything. I did not even smile.

“The Chinese always have had masters and they always will.”

A passing car separated us for a moment and when he came once more abreast of me he had put the matter aside.

“You men who live in England don’t know what it means to us when new books get out here,” he  remarked. “I read everything that Bertrand Russell writes. Have you seen the last one?”

“Roads to Freedom? Yes. I read it before I left England.”

“I’ve read several reviews. I think he’s got hold of some interesting ideas.”

I think Henderson was going to enlarge on them, but the rickshaw boy passed the turning he should have taken.

“Round the corner, you bloody fool,” cried Henderson, and to emphasize his meaning he gave the man a smart kick on the bottom.

XVIII

DAWN

It is night still and the courtyard of the inn is rich with deep patches of darkness. Lanterns throw fitful lights on the coolies busily preparing their loads for the journey. They shout and laugh, angrily argue with one another, and vociferously quarrel. I go out into the street and walk along preceded by a boy with a lantern. Here and there behind closed doors cocks are crowing. But in many of the shops the shutters are down already and the indefatigable people are beginning their long day. Here an apprentice is sweeping the floor, and there a man is washing his hands and face. A wick burning in a cup of oil is all his light. I pass a tavern where half a dozen persons are seated at an early meal. The ward gate is closed, but a watchman lets me through a postern and I walk along a wall by a sluggish stream in which are reflected the bright stars. Then I reach the great gate of the city, and this time one half of it is open; I pass out, and there, awaiting me, all ghostly, is the dawn. The day and the long road and the open country lie before me.

Put out the lantern. Behind me the darkness  pales to a mist of purple and I know that soon this will kindle to a rosy flush. I can make out the causeway well enough and the water in the padi fields reflects already a wan and shadowy light. It is no longer night, but it is not yet day. This is the moment of most magical beauty, when the hills and the valleys, the trees and the water, have a mystery which is not of earth. For when once the sun has risen, for a time the world is very cheerless, the light is cold and grey like the light in a painter’s studio, and there are no shadows to diaper the ground with a coloured pattern. Skirting the brow of a wooded hill I look down on the padi fields. But to call them fields is too grandiose. They are for the most part crescent shaped patches built on the slope of a hill, one below the other, so that they can be flooded. Firs and bamboos grow in the hollows as though placed there by a skilful gardener with a sense of ordered beauty to imitate formally the abandon of nature. In this moment of enchantment you do not look upon the scene of humble toil, but on the pleasure gardens of an emperor. Here throwing aside the cares of state, he might come in yellow silk embroidered with dragons, with jewelled bracelets on his wrists, to sport with a concubine so beautiful that men in after ages felt it natural if a dynasty was destroyed for her sake.

And now with the increasing day a mist arises from the padi fields and climbs half way up the gentle hills. You may see a hundred pictures of the sight before you, for it is one that the old  masters of China loved exceedingly. The little hills, wooded to their summit, with a line of fir trees along the crest, a firm silhouette against the sky, the little hills rise behind one another, and the varying level of the mist, forming a pattern, gives the composition a completeness which yet allows the imagination ample scope. The bamboos grow right down to the causeway, their thin leaves shivering in the shadow of a breeze, and they grow with a high-bred grace so that they look like groups of ladies in the Great Ming dynasty resting languidly by the way-side. They have been to some temple, and their silken dresses are richly wrought with flowers and in their hair are precious ornaments of jade. They rest there for a while on their small feet, their golden lilies, gossiping elegantly, for do they not know that the best use of culture is to talk nonsense with distinction; and in a moment slipping back into their chairs they will be gone. But the road turns and my God, the bamboos, the Chinese bamboos, transformed by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops of a Kentish field. Do you remember the sweet smelling hop-fields and the fat green meadows, the railway line that runs along the sea and the long shining beach and the desolate greyness of the English Channel? The seagull flies over the wintry coldness and the melancholy of its cry is almost unbearable.

XIX

THE POINT OF HONOUR

Nothing hinders friendly relations between different countries so much as the fantastic notions which they cherish about one another’s characteristics, and perhaps no nation has suffered so much from the misconception of its neighbours as the French. They have been considered a frivolous race, incapable of profound thought, flippant, immoral, and unreliable. Even the virtues that have been allowed them, their brilliancy, their gaiety, have been allowed them (at least by the English) in a patronising way; for they were not virtues on which the Anglo-Saxon set great store. It was never realised that there is a deep seriousness at the bottom of the French character and that the predominant concern of the average Frenchman is the concern for his personal dignity. It is by no hazard that La Rochefoucauld, a keen judge of human nature in general and of his countrymen in particular, should have made l’honneur the pivot of his system. The punctiliousness with which our neighbours regard it has often entertained the Briton who is accustomed to look upon himself with humour; but it is a living force, as the phrase  goes, with the Frenchman, and you cannot hope to understand him unless you bear in mind always the susceptibility of his sense of honour.

These reflections were suggested to me whenever I saw the Vicomte de Steenvoorde driving in his sumptuous car or seated at the head of his own table. He represented certain important French interests in China and was said to have more power at the Quai d’Orsay than the minister himself. There was never a very cordial feeling between the pair, since the latter not unnaturally resented that one of his nationals should deal in diplomatic matters with the Chinese behind his back. The esteem in which M. de Steenvoorde was held at home was sufficiently proved by the red button that adorned the lappet of his frock coat.

The Vicomte had a fine head, somewhat bald, but not unbecomingly (une légère calvitie, as the French novelists put it and thereby rob the cruel fact of half its sting), a nose like the great Duke of Wellington’s, bright black eyes under heavy eyelids, and a small mouth hidden by an exceedingly handsome moustache the ends of which he twisted a great deal with white, richly jewelled fingers. His air of dignity was heightened by three massive chins. He had a big trunk and an imposing corpulence so that when he sat at table he sat a little away from it, as though he ate under protest and were just there for a snack; but nature had played a dirty, though not uncommon trick on him; for his legs were much too short for his body so that, though seated he had all the appearance  of a tall man, you were taken aback to find when he stood up that he was hardly of average height. It was for this reason that he made his best effect at table or when he was driving through the city in his car. Then his presence was commanding. When he waved to you or with a broad gesture took off his hat, you felt that it was incredibly affable of him to take any notice of human beings. He had all the solid respectability of those statesmen of Louis Philippe, in sober black, with their long hair and clean-shaven faces, who look out at you with portentous solemnity from the canvases of Ingres.

One often hears of people who talk like a book. M. de Steenvoorde talked like a magazine, not of course a magazine devoted to light literature and the distraction of an idle hour, but a magazine of sound learning and influential opinion. M. de Steenvoorde talked like the Revue des Deux Mondes. It was a treat, though a little fatiguing, to listen to him. He had the fluency of those who have said the same thing over and over again. He never hesitated for a word. He put everything with lucidity, an admirable choice of language, and such an authority that in his lips the obvious had all the sparkle of an epigram. He was by no means without wit. He could be very amusing at the expense of his neighbours. And when, having said something peculiarly malicious, he turned to you with an observation “Les absents ont toujours tort,” he managed to invest it with the freshness of an original aphorism. He was an ardent  Catholic, but, he flattered himself, no reactionary; a man of standing, substance, and principle.

A poor man, but ambitious (fame, the last infirmity of noble mind) he had married for her enormous dot the daughter of a sugar broker, now a painted little lady with hennaed hair, in beautiful clothes; and it must have been a sore trial to him that when he gave her his honoured name he could not also endow her with the sense of personal pride which was so powerful a motive in all his actions. For, like many great men, M. de Steenvoorde was married to a wife who was extremely unfaithful to him. But this misfortune he bore with a courage and a dignity which were absolutely characteristic. His demeanour was so perfect that his infelicity positively raised him in the eyes of his friends. He was to all an object of sympathy. He might be a cuckold, but he remained a person of quality. Whenever, indeed, Mme. de Steenvoorde took a new lover he insisted that her parents should give him a sufficient sum of money to make good the outrage to his name and honour. Common report put it at a quarter of a million francs, but with silver at its present price I believe that a business man would insist on being paid in dollars. M. de Steenvoorde is already a man of means, but before his wife reaches the canonical age he will undoubtedly be a rich one.

XX

THE BEAST OF BURDEN

At first when you see the coolie on the road, bearing his load, it is as a pleasing object that he strikes the eye. In his blue rags, a blue of all colours from indigo to turquoise and then to the paleness of a milky sky, he fits the landscape. He seems exactly right as he trudges along the narrow causeway between the rice fields or climbs a green hill. His clothing consists of no more than a short coat and a pair of trousers; and if he had a suit which was at the beginning all of a piece, he never thinks when it comes to patching to choose a bit of stuff of the same colour. He takes anything that comes handy. From sun and rain he protects his head with a straw hat shaped like an extinguisher with a preposterously wide, flat brim.

You see a string of coolies come along, one after the other, each with a pole on his shoulders from the ends of which hang two great bales, and they make an agreeable pattern. It is amusing to watch their hurrying reflections in the padi water. You watch their faces as they pass you. They are good-natured faces and frank, you would  have said, if it had not been drilled into you that the oriental is inscrutable; and when you see them lying down with their loads under a banyan tree by a wayside shrine, smoking and chatting gaily, if you have tried to lift the bales they carry for thirty miles or more a day, it seems natural to feel admiration for their endurance and their spirit. But you will be thought somewhat absurd if you mention your admiration to the old residents of China. You will be told with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders that the coolies are animals and for two thousand years from father to son have carried burdens, so it is no wonder if they do it cheerfully. And indeed you can see for yourself that they begin early, for you will encounter little children with a yoke on their shoulders staggering under the weight of vegetable baskets.

The day wears on and it grows warmer. The coolies take off their coats and walk stripped to the waist. Then sometimes in a man resting for an instant, his load on the ground but the pole still on his shoulders so that he has to rest slightly crouched, you see the poor tired heart beating against the ribs: you see it as plainly as in some cases of heart disease in the out-patients’ room of a hospital. It is strangely distressing to watch. Then also you see the coolies’ backs. The pressure of the pole for long years, day after day, has made hard red scars, and sometimes even there are open sores, great sores without bandages or dressing that rub against the wood; but the  strangest thing of all is that sometimes, as though nature sought to adapt man for these cruel uses to which he is put, an odd malformation seems to have arisen so that there is a sort of hump, like a camel’s, against which the pole rests. But beating heart or angry sore, bitter rain or burning sun notwithstanding, they go on eternally, from dawn till dusk, year in year out, from childhood to the extreme of age. You see old men without an ounce of fat on their bodies, their skin loose on their bones, wizened, their little faces wrinkled and apelike, with hair thin and grey; and they totter under their burdens to the edge of the grave in which at last they shall have rest. And still the coolies go, not exactly running, but not walking either, sidling quickly, with their eyes on the ground to choose the spot to place their feet, and on their faces a strained, anxious expression. You can make no longer a pattern of them as they wend their way. Their effort oppresses you. You are filled with a useless compassion.

In China it is man that is the beast of burden.

“To be harassed by the wear and tear of life, and to pass rapidly through it without the possibility of arresting one’s course, — is not this pitiful indeed? To labour without ceasing, and then, without living to enjoy the fruit, worn out, to depart, suddenly, one knows not whither, — is not that a just cause for grief?”

So wrote the Chinese mystic.

XXI

DR. MACALISTER

He was a fine figure of a man, hard upon sixty, I should think, when I knew him, but hale still and active. He was stout, but his great height enabled him to carry his corpulence with dignity. He had a strong, almost a handsome face, with a hooked nose, bushy white eyebrows and a firm chin. He was dressed in black, and he wore a low collar and a white bow tie. He had the look of an English divine of a past generation. His voice was resonant and hearty, and he laughed boisterously.

His career was somewhat out of the common. He had come to China thirty years before as a medical missionary, but now, though still on good terms with the mission, he was no longer a member. It had been decided, it appears, to build a school on a certain desirable spot which the doctor had hit upon, and in a crowded Chinese city it is never very easy to find building land, but when the mission after much bargaining had eventually bought this the discovery was made that the owner was not the Chinese with whom the negotiations had been conducted, but the doctor himself. Knowing that the school must be built and seeing  that no other piece of land was available he had borrowed money from a Chinese banker and bought it himself. The transaction was not dishonest, but perhaps it was a little unscrupulous and the other members of the mission did not look upon it as the good joke that Dr. Macalister did. They displayed even a certain acrimony, and the result was that Dr. Macalister, though preserving friendly relations with persons with whose aims and interests he was in the fullest sympathy, resigned his position. He was known to be a clever doctor and he soon had a large practice both among the foreigners and the Chinese. He started a hostel in which the traveller, at a price, and a high one, could have board and lodging. His guests complained a little because they were not allowed to drink alcohol, but it was much more comfortable than a Chinese inn, and some allowance had to be made for the doctor’s principles. He was a man of resource. He bought a large piece of land on a hill on the other side of the river and put up bungalows which he sold one by one to the missionaries as summer resorts; and he owned a large store in which he sold everything, from picture postcards and curios to Worcester sauce and knitted jumpers, which a foreigner could possibly want. He made a very good thing out of it. He had a commercial bent.

The tiffin he invited me to was quite an imposing function. He lived above his store in a large apartment overlooking the river. The party consisted of Dr. Macalister and his third wife, a lady  of forty-five in gold-rimmed spectacles and black satin, a missionary spending a few days with the doctor on his way into the interior, and two silent young ladies who had just joined the mission and were busily learning Chinese. On the walls of the dining-room hung a number of congratulatory scrolls which had been presented to my host by Chinese friends and converts on his fiftieth birthday. There was a great deal of food, as there always is in China, and Dr. Macalister did full justice to it. The meal began and ended with a long grace which he said in his deep voice, with an impressive unction.

When we returned to the drawing-room Dr. Macalister, standing in front of the grateful fire, for it can be very cold in China, took a little photograph from the chimney piece and showed it to me.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked.

It was the photograph of a very thin young missionary in a low collar and a white tie, with large melancholy eyes and a look of profound seriousness.

“Nice looking fellow, eh?” boomed the doctor.

“Very,” I answered.

A somewhat priggish young man possibly, but priggishness is a pardonable defect in youth, and here it was certainly counterbalanced by the appealing wistfulness of the expression. It was a fine, a sensitive, and even a beautiful face, and those disconsolate eyes were strangely moving. There was fanaticism there, perhaps, but there  was the courage that would not fear martyrdom; there was a charming idealism; and its youth, its ingenuousness, warmed one’s heart.

“A most attractive face,” I said as I returned the photograph.

Dr. Macalister gave a chuckle.

“That’s what I looked like when I first came out to China,” he said.

It was a photograph of himself.

“No one recognises it,” smiled Mrs. Macalister.

“It was the very image of me,” he said.

He spread out the tails of his black coat and planted himself more firmly in front of the fire.

“I often laugh when I think of my first impressions of China,” he said. “I came out expecting to undergo hardships and privations. My first shock was the steamer with ten-course dinners and first-class accommodation. There wasn’t much hardship in that, but I said to myself: wait till you get to China. Well, at Shanghai I was met by some friends and I stayed in a fine house and was waited on by fine servants and I ate fine food. Shanghai, I said, the plague spot of the East. It’ll be different in the interior. At last I reached here. I was to stay with the head of the mission till my own quarters were ready. He lived in a large compound. He had a very nice house with American furniture in it and I slept in a better bed than I’d ever slept in. He was very fond of his garden and he grew all kinds of vegetables in it. We had salads just like the salads we had in America and fruit, all kinds of fruit;  he kept a cow and we had fresh milk and butter. I thought I’d never eaten so much and so well in my life. You did nothing for yourself. If you wanted a glass of water you called a boy and he brought it to you. It was the beginning of summer when I arrived and they were all packing up to go to the hills. They hadn’t got bungalows then, but they used to spend the summer in a temple. I began to think I shouldn’t have to put up with much privation after all. I had been looking forward to a martyr’s crown. Do you know what I did?”

Dr. Macalister chuckled as he thought of that long passed time.

“The first night I got here, when I was alone in my room, I threw myself on my bed and I just cried like a child.”

Dr. Macalister went on talking, but I could not pay much attention to what he said. I wondered by what steps he had come to be the man I knew now from the man he had been then. That is the story I should like to write.

XXII

THE ROAD

It is not a road at all but a causeway, made of paving stones about a foot wide and four feet broad so that there is just room for two sedan chairs with caution to pass each other. For the most part it is in good enough repair, but here and there the stones are broken or swept away by the flooding of the rice fields, and then walking is difficult. It winds tortuously along the path which has connected city to city since first a thousand years ago or more there were cities in the land. It winds between the rice fields following the accidents of the country with a careful nonchalance; and you can tell that it was built on a track made by the peasant of dim ages past who sought not the quickest but the easiest way to walk. The beginnings of it you may see when, leaving the main road you cut across country, bound for some town that is apart from the main line of traffic. Then the causeway is so narrow that there is no room for a coolie bearing a load to pass and if you are in the midst of the rice fields he has to get on the little bank, planted with beans, that divides one from another, till you go by. Presently the stones are wanting and you  travel along a path of trodden mud so narrow that your bearers step warily.

The journey, for all the stories of bandits with which they sought to deter you, and the ragged soldiers of your escort, is devoid of adventure; but it is crowded with incident. First there is the constant variety of the dawn. Poets have written of it with enthusiasm, but they are lie-a-beds, and they have trusted for inspiration to their fancy rather than to their sleepy eyes. Like a mistress known in the dream of a moonlit night who has charms unshared by the beauties of the wakeful day, they have ascribed to it excellencies which are only of the imagination. For the most exquisite dawn has none of the splendour of an indifferent sunset. But because it is a less accustomed sight it seems to have a greater diversity. Every dawn is a little different from every other, and you can fancy that each day the world is created anew not quite the same as it was the day before.

Then there are the common sights of the way-side. A peasant, thigh deep in water, ploughs his field with a plough as primitive as those his fathers have used for forty mortal centuries. The water buffalo splashes sinister through the mud and his cynical eyes seem to ask what end has been served by this unending toil. An old woman goes by in her blue smock and short blue trousers, on bound feet, and she supports her unsteady steps with a long staff. Two fat Chinese in chairs pass you, and passing stare at you with curious yet listless  eyes. Everyone you see is an incident, however trivial, sufficient to arouse your fancy for an instant; and now your eyes rest with pleasure on the smooth skin, like yellow ivory, of a young mother sauntering along with a child strapped to her back, on the wrinkled, inscrutable visage of an old man, or on the fine bones, visible through the flesh of the face, of a strapping coolie. And beside all this there is the constant delight with which, having climbed laboriously a hill, you see the country spread out before you. For days and days it is just the same, but each time you see it you have the same little thrill of discovery. The same little rounded hills, like a flock of sheep, surrounding you, succeeding one another as far as the eye can reach; and on many, a lone tree, as though planted deliberately for the sake of the picturesque, outlines its gracious pattern against the sky. The same groves of bamboo lean delicately, almost surrounding the same farm houses, which with their clustering roofs nestle pleasantly in the same sheltered hollows. The bamboos lean over the highway with an adorable grace. They have the condescension of great ladies which flatters rather than wounds. They have the abandon of flowers, a well-born wantonness that is too sure of its good breeding ever to be in danger of debauchery. But the memorial arch, to virtuous widow or to fortunate scholar, warns you that you are approaching a village or a town, and you pass, affording a moment’s sensation to the inhabitants, through a ragged line of sordid hovels  or a busy street. The street is shaded from the sun by great mats stretched from eave to eave; the light is dim and the thronging crowd has an unnatural air. You think that so must have looked the people in those cities of magicians which the Arab traveller knew, and where during the night a terrible transformation befell you so that till you found the magic formula to free you, you went through life in the guise of a one-eyed ass or of a green and yellow parrot. The merchants in their open shops seem to sell no common merchandise and in the taverns messes are prepared of things horrible for men to eat. Your eye, amid the uniformity, for every Chinese town, at all events to the stranger’s eye, much resembles every other, takes pleasure in noting trivial differences, and so you observe the predominant industries of each one. Every town makes all that its inhabitants require, but it has also a speciality, and here you will find cotton cloth, there string, and here again silk. Now the orange tree, golden with fruit, grows scarce and the sugar cane makes its appearance. The black silk cap gives way to the turban and the red umbrella of oiled paper to the umbrella of bright blue cotton.

But these are the common incidents of every day. They are like the expected happenings of life which keep it from monotony, working days and holidays, meetings with your friends, the coming of spring with its elation and the coming of winter with its long evenings, its easy intimacies and its twilight. Now and then, as love enters  making all the rest but a setting for its radiance and lifts the common affairs of the day to a level on which the most trifling things have a mysterious significance, now and then the common round is interrupted and you are faced by a beauty which takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault. For looming through the mist you may see the fantastic roofs of a temple loftily raised on a huge stone bastion, around which, a natural moat, flows a quiet green river, and when the sun lights it you seem to see the dream of a Chinese palace, a palace as rich and splendid as those which haunted the fancy of the Arabian story tellers; or, crossing a ferry at dawn you may see, a little above you, silhouetted against the sunrise, a sampan in which a ferryman is carrying a crowd of passengers; you recognise on a sudden Charon, and you know that his passengers are the melancholy dead.

XXIII

GOD’S TRUTH

Birch was the agent of the B.A.T. and he was stationed in a little town of the interior with streets which, after it had rained, were a foot deep in mud. Then you had to get right inside your cart to prevent yourself from being splashed from head to foot. The roadway, worn to pieces by the ceaseless traffic, was so full of holes that the breath was jolted out of your body as you jogged along at a foot pace. There were two or three streets of shops, but he knew by heart everything that was in them; and there were interminable winding alleys which presented a monotonous expanse of wall broken only by solid closed doors. These were the Chinese houses and they were as impenetrable to one of his colour as the life which surrounded him. He was very homesick. He had not spoken to a white man for three months.

His day’s work was over. Since he had nothing else to do he went for the only walk there was. He went out of the city gate and strolled along the ragged road, with its deep ruts, into the country. The valley was bounded by wild, barren mountains and they seemed to shut him  in. He felt immeasurably far away from civilisation. He knew he could not afford to surrender to that sense of utter loneliness which beset him, but it was more of an effort than usual to keep a stiff upper lip. He was very nearly at the end of his tether. Suddenly he saw a white man riding towards him on a pony. Behind came slowly a Chinese cart in which presumably were his belongings. Birch guessed at once that this was a missionary going down to one of the treaty-ports from his station further up country, and his heart leaped with joy. At last he would have some one to talk to. He hurried his steps. His lassitude left him. He was all alert. He was almost running when he came up to the rider.

“Hulloa,” he said, “where have you sprung from?”

The rider stopped and named a distant town.

“I am on my way down to take the train,” he added.

“You’d better put up with me for the night. I haven’t seen a white man for three months. There’s lots of room at my place. B.A.T. you know.”

“B.A.T.,” said the rider. His face changed and his eyes, before friendly and smiling, grew hard. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

He gave his pony a kick and started on, but Birch seized the bridle. He could not believe his ears.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t have anything to do with a man who trades in tobacco. Let go that bridle.”

“But I’ve not spoken to a white man for three months.”

“That’s no business of mine. Let go that bridle.”

He gave his pony another kick. His lips were obstinately set and he looked at Birch sternly. Then Birch lost his temper. He clung to the bridle as the pony moved on and began to curse the missionary. He hurled at him every term of abuse he could think of. He swore. He was horribly obscene. The missionary did not answer, but urged his pony on. Birch seized the missionary’s leg and jerked it out of the stirrup; the missionary nearly fell off and he clung in a somewhat undignified fashion to the pony’s mane. Then he half slipped, half tumbled to the ground. The cart had come up to them by now and stopped. The two Chinese who were sitting in it looked at the white men with indolent curiosity. The missionary was livid with rage.

“You’ve assaulted me. I’ll have you fired for that.”

“You can go to hell,” said Birch. “I haven’t seen a white man for three months and you won’t even speak to me. Do you call yourself a Christian?”

“What is your name?”

“Birch is my name and be damned to you.”

“I shall report you to your chief. Now stand back and let me get on my journey.”

Birch clenched his hands.

“Get a move on or I’ll break every bone in your body.”

The missionary mounted, gave his pony a sharp cut with the whip, and cantered away. The Chinese cart lumbered slowly after. But when Birch was left alone his anger left him and a sob broke unwillingly from his lips. The barren mountains were less hard than the heart of man. He turned and walked slowly back to the little walled city.

XXIV

ROMANCE

All day I had been dropping down the river. This was the river up which Chang Chien, seeking its source, had sailed for many days till he came to a city where he saw a girl spinning and a youth leading an ox to the water. He asked what place this was and in reply the girl gave him her shuttle telling him to show it on his return to the astrologer Yen Chün-ping, who would thus know where he had been. He did so and the astrologer at once recognised the shuttle as that of the Spinning Damsel, further declaring that on the day and at the hour when Chang Chien received the shuttle he had noticed a wandering star intrude itself between the Spinning Damsel and the Cowherd. So Chang Chien knew that he had sailed upon the bosom of the Milky Way.

I, however, had not been so far. All day, as for seven days before, my five rowers, standing up, had rowed, and there rang still in my ears the monotonous sound of their oars against the wooden pin that served as rowlock. Now and again the water became very shallow and there was a jar and a jolt as we scraped along the stones  of the river bed. Then two or three of the rowers turned up their blue trousers to the hip and let themselves over the side. Shouting they dragged the flat-bottomed boat over the shoal. Now and again we came to a rapid, of no great consequence when compared with the turbulent rapids of the Yangtze, but sufficiently swift to call for trackers to pull the junks that were going up stream; and we, going down, passed through them with many shouts, shot the foaming breakers and presently reached water as smooth as any lake.

Now it was night and my crew were asleep, forward, huddled together in such shelter as they had been able to rig up when we moored at dusk. I sat on my bed. Bamboo matting spread over three wooden arches made the sorry cabin which for a week had served me as parlour and bedroom. It was closed at one end by matchboarding so roughly put together that there were large chinks between each board. The bitter wind blew through them. It was on the other side of this that the crew — fine sturdy fellows — rowed by day and slept by night, joined then by the steersman who had stood from dawn to dusk, in a tattered blue gown and a wadded coat of faded grey, a black turban round his head, at the long oar which was his helm. There was no furniture but my bed, a shallow dish like an enormous soup-plate in which burned charcoal, for it was cold, a basket containing my clothes which I used as a table, and a hurricane lamp which hung from one of the arches and swayed slightly with the motion of the water.  The cabin was so low that I, a person of no great height (I comfort myself with Bacon’s observation that with tall men it is as with tall houses, the top story is commonly the least furnished) could only just stand upright. One of the sleepers began to snore more loudly, and perhaps he awoke two of the others, for I heard the sound of speaking; but presently this ceased, the snorer was quiet, and all about me once more was silence.

Then suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing me, touching me almost, was the romance I sought. It was a feeling like no other, just as specific as the thrill of art; but I could not for the life of me tell what it was that had given me just then that rare emotion.

In the course of my life I have been often in situations which, had I read of them, would have seemed to me sufficiently romantic; but it is only in retrospect, comparing them with my ideas of what was romantic, that I have seen them as at all out of the ordinary. It is only by an effort of the imagination, making myself as it were a spectator of myself acting a part, that I have caught anything of the precious quality in circumstances which in others would have seemed to me instinct with its fine flower. When I have danced with an actress whose fascination and whose genius made her the idol of my country, or wandered through the halls of some great house in which was gathered all that was distinguished by lineage or intellect that London could show, I have only recognized afterwards that here perhaps, though  in somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance. In battle, when, myself in no great danger, I was able to watch events with a thrill of interest, I had not the phlegm to assume the part of a spectator. I have sailed through the night, under the full moon, to a coral island in the Pacific, and then the beauty and the wonder of the scene gave me a conscious happiness, but only later the exhilarating sense that romance and I had touched fingers. I heard the flutter of its wings when once, in the bedroom of a hotel in New York, I sat round a table with half a dozen others and made plans to restore an ancient kingdom whose wrongs have for a century inspired the poet and the patriot; but my chief feeling was a surprised amusement that through the hazards of war I found myself engaged in business so foreign to my bent. The authentic thrill of romance has seized me under circumstances which one would have thought far less romantic, and I remember that I knew it first one evening when I was playing cards in a cottage on the coast of Brittany. In the next room an old fisherman lay dying and the women of the house said that he would go out with the tide. Without a storm was raging and it seemed fit for the last moments of that aged warrior of the seas that his going should be accompanied by the wild cries of the wind as it hurled itself against the shuttered windows. The waves thundered upon the tortured rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that here was romance.

And now the same exultation seized me, and once more romance, like a bodily presence, was before me. But it had come so unexpectedly that I was intrigued. I could not tell whether it had crept in among the shadows that the lamp threw on the bamboo matting or whether it was wafted down the river that I saw through the opening of my cabin. Curious to know what were the elements that made up the ineffable delight of the moment I went out to the stern of the boat. Alongside were moored half a dozen junks, going up river, for their masts were erect; and everything was silent in them. Their crews were long since asleep. The night was not dark, for though it was cloudy the moon was full, but the river in that veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist blurred the trees on the further bank. It was an enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I sought was not there. I turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter the magic which had given it so extraordinary a character was gone. Alas, I was like a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in what its beauty lay. And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his face a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my little cabin, my dish of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about them something of the thrill which for a moment was mine. I could not see them any more quite indifferently, because for a moment I had seen them magically.

XXV

THE GRAND STYLE

He was a very old man. It was fifty-seven years since he came to China as a ship’s doctor and took the place in one of the Southern ports of a medical officer whose health had obliged him to go home. He could not then have been less than twenty-five so that now he must have been well over eighty. He was a tall man, very thin, and his skin hung on his bones like a suit of clothes much too large for him: under his chin was a great sack like the wattle of an old turkey-cock; but his blue eyes, large and bright, had kept their colour, and his voice was strong and deep. In these seven and fifty years he had bought and sold three or four practices along the coast and now he was back once more within a few miles of the port in which he had first lived. It was an anchorage at the mouth of the river where the steamers, unable owing to their draught to reach the city, discharged and loaded their cargo. There were only seven white men’s houses, a small hospital, and a handful of Chinese, so that it would not have been worth a doctor’s while to settle there; but he was vice-consul as well, and the easy life at his  great age just suited him. There was enough to do to prevent him from feeling idle, but not enough to tire him. His spirit was still hale.

“I’m thinking of retiring,” he said, “it’s about time I gave the youngsters a chance.”

He amused himself with plans for the future: all his life he had wanted to visit the West Indies and upon his soul he meant to now. By George, Sir, he couldn’t afford to leave it much longer. England? Well, from all he heard England was no place for a gentleman nowadays. He was last there thirty years ago. Besides he wasn’t English. He was born in Ireland. Yes, Sir, he took his degree at Trinity College, Dublin; but what with the priests on one side and the Sinn Feiners on the other he could not believe there was much left of the Ireland he knew as a boy. A fine country to hunt in, he said, with a gleam in his open blue eyes.

He had better manners than are usually found in the medical profession which, though blest with many virtues, neglects somewhat the amenities of polite behaviour. I do not know whether it is commerce with the sick which gives the doctor an unfortunate sense of superiority; the example of his teachers some of whom have still a bad tradition of rudeness which certain eminent practitioners of the past cultivated as a professional asset; or his early training among the poor patients of a hospital whom he is apt to look upon as of a lower class than himself; but it is certain  that no body of men is on the whole so wanting in civility.

He was very different from the men of my generation; but whether the difference lay in his voice and gesture, in the ease of his manner, or in the elaborateness of his antique courtesy, it was not easy to discover. I think he was more definitely a gentleman than people are nowadays when a man is a gentleman with deprecation. The word is in bad odour and the qualities it denotes have come in for a deal of ridicule. Persons who by no stretch of the fancy could be so described have made a great stir in the world during the last thirty years and they have used all the resources of their sarcasm to render odious a title which they are perhaps all too conscious of never deserving. Perhaps also the difference in him was due to a difference of education. In his youth he had been taught much useless learning, the classics of Greece and Rome, and they had given a foundation to his character which in the present is somewhat rare. He was young in an age which did not know the weekly press and when the monthly magazine was a staid affair. Reading was more solid. Perhaps men drank more than was good for them, but they read Horace for pleasure and they knew by heart the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He remembered reading The Newcomes when it came out. I think the men of that time were, if not more adventurous than the men of ours, more adventurous in the grand manner: now a man will  risk his life with a joke from Comic Cuts on his lips, then it was with a Latin quotation.

But how can I analyse the subtle quality which distinguished this old man? Read a page of Swift: the words are the same as those we use to-day and there is hardly a sentence in which they are not placed in the simplest order; and yet there is a dignity, a spaciousness, an aroma, which all our modern effort fails to attain: in short there is style. And so with him; there was style, and there is no more to be said.

XXVI

RAIN

Yes, but the sun does not shine every day. Sometimes a cold rain beats down on you and a northeast wind chills you to the bone. Your shoes and your coat are wet still from the day before and you have three hours to go before breakfast. You tramp along in the cheerless light of that bitter dawn, with thirty miles before you and nothing to look forward to at the end but the squalid discomfort of a Chinese inn. There you will find bare walls, a clammy floor of trodden earth, and you will dry yourself as best you can over a dish of burning charcoal.

Then you think of your pleasant room in London. The rain driving in squalls against the windows only makes its warmth more grateful. You sit by the fire, your pipe in your mouth, and read the Times from cover to cover, not the leading articles of course but the agony column and the advertisements of country houses you will never be able to afford. (On the Chiltern Hills, standing in its own park of one hundred and fifty acres, with spacious garden, orchard, etc., a Georgian house in perfect condition, with original woodwork  and chimney pieces, six reception rooms, fourteen bedrooms and usual offices, modern sanitation, stabling with rooms over and excellent garage. Three miles from first rate golf course.) I know then that Messrs. Knight, Frank, and Rutley are my favourite authors. The matters that they treat of like the great commonplaces which are the material of all fine poetry never stale; and their manner like that of the best masters is characteristic but at the same time various. Their style, as is that of Confucius according to the sinologues, is glitteringly compact: succinct but suggestive it combines an admirable exactness with a breadth of image which gives the imagination an agreeable freedom. Their mastery of words such as rood and perch of which I suppose I once knew the meaning but which for many years have been a mystery to me, is amazing, and they will use them with ease and assurance. They can play with technical terms with the ingenuity of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and they can invest them with the Celtic glamour of Mr. W.B. Yeats. They have combined their individualities so completely that I defy the most discerning critic to discover traces of a divided authorship. Literary history is acquainted with the collaboration of two writers, and the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, Erckman Chatrian, Besant and Rice spring to the excited fancy; but now that the higher criticism has destroyed that belief in the triple authorship of the Bible which I was taught in my youth, I  conjecture that the case of Knight, Frank and Rutley is unique.

Then Elizabeth, very smart in the white squirrel I brought her from China, comes in to say good-bye to me, for she, poor child, must go out whatever the weather, and I play trains with her while her pram is being got ready. Then of course I should do a little work, but the weather is so bad that I feel lazy, and I take up instead Professor Giles’ book on Chuang-Tzu. The rigid Confucianists frown upon him because he is an individualist, and it is to the individualism of the age that they ascribe the lamentable decay of China, but he is very good reading; he has the advantage on a rainy day that he can be read without great application and not seldom you come across a thought that sets your own wandering. But presently ideas, insinuating themselves into your consciousness like the lapping waves of a rising tide, absorb you to the exclusion of those which old Chuang-Tzu suggested, and notwithstanding your desire to idle, you sit down at your table. Only the dilettante uses a desk. Your pen goes easily and you write without effort. It is very good to be alive. Then two amusing people come to luncheon and when they are gone you drop into Christie’s. You see some Ming figures there, but they are not so good as those you brought from China yourself, and then you watch being sold pictures you are only too glad not to possess. You look at your watch; there is pretty sure to be a rubber  going at the Garrick, and the shocking weather justifies you in wasting the rest of the afternoon. You cannot stay very late, for you have seats for a first night and you must get home and dress for an early dinner. You will be just in time to tell Elizabeth a little story before she goes to sleep. She looks really very nice in her pyjamas with her hair done up in two plaits. There is something about a first night which only the satiety of the critic can fail to be moved by. It is pleasant to see your friends and amusing to hear the pit’s applause when a favourite of the stage, acting, better than she ever does behind the footlights, a delightful embarrassment at being recognised, advances to take her seat. It may be a bad play that you are going to see, but it has at least the merit that no one has seen it before; and there is always the chance of a moment’s emotion or of a smile.

Towards you in their great straw hats, like the hat of love-sick Pierrot, but with a huge brim, come a string of coolies, lolloping along, bent forward a little under the weight of the great bales of cotton that they carry. The rain plasters their blue clothes, so thin and ragged, against their bodies. The broken stones of the causeway are slippery, and with toil you pick your muddy way.

XXVII

SULLIVAN

He was an Irish sailor. He deserted his ship at Hong-Kong and took it into his head to walk across China. He spent three years wandering about the country, and soon acquired a very good knowledge of Chinese. He learned it, as is common among men of his class, with greater ease than do the more highly educated. He lived on his wits. He made a point of avoiding the British Consul, but went to the magistrate of each town he came to and represented himself as having been robbed on the way of all his money. His story was not improbable and it was told with a wealth of convincing detail which would have excited the admiration of so great a master as Captain Costigan. The magistrate, after the Chinese fashion, was anxious to get rid of him and was glad to do so at the cost of ten or fifteen dollars. If he could get no money he could generally count on a place to sleep in and a good meal. He had a certain rough humour which appealed to the Chinese. So he continued very successfully till he hit by misfortune on a magistrate of a different stamp. This man when he told his story said to him:

“You are nothing but a beggar and a vagabond. You must be beaten.”

He gave an order and the fellow was promptly taken out, thrown on the ground, and soundly thrashed. He was not only very much hurt, but exceedingly surprised, and what is more strangely mortified. It ruined his nerve. There and then he gave up his vagrant life and making his way to one of the out-ports applied to the commissioner of customs for a place as tide-waiter. It is not easy to find white men to take such posts and few questions are asked of those who seek them. He was given a job and you may see him now, a sun-burned, clean-shaven man of forty-five, florid and rather stout, in a neat blue uniform, boarding the steamers and the junks at a little riverside town, where the deputy-commissioner, the postmaster, a missionary, and he are the only Europeans. His knowledge of the Chinese and their ways makes him an invaluable servant. He has a little yellow wife and four children. He has no shame about his past and over a good stiff whisky he will tell you the whole story of his adventurous travels. But the beating is what he can never get over. It surprises him yet and he cannot, he simply cannot understand it. He has no ill-feeling towards the magistrate who ordered it; on the contrary it appeals to his sense of humour.

“He was a great old sportsman, the old blackguard,” he says. “Nerve, eh?”

XXVIII

THE DINING-ROOM

It was an immense room in an immense house. When it was built, building was cheap, and the merchant princes of that day built magnificently. Money was made easily then and life was luxurious. It was not hard to make a fortune and a man, almost before he had reached middle age, could return to England and live the rest of his days no less splendidly in a fine house in Surrey. It is true that the population was hostile and it was always possible that a riot might make it necessary for him to fly for his life, but this only added a spice to the comfort of his existence; and when danger threatened it was fairly certain that a gunboat would arrive in time to offer protection or refuge. The foreign community, largely allied by marriage, was sociable, and its members entertained one another lavishly. They gave pompous dinner parties, they danced together, and they played whist. Work was not so pressing that it was impossible to spend now and again a few days in the interior shooting duck. It was certainly very hot in summer, and after a few years a man was apt to take things easily, but the rest of the year was only warm, with blue skies  and a balmy air, and life was very pleasant. There was a certain liberty of behaviour and no one was thought the worse of, so long as the matter was not intruded on the notice of the ladies, if he had to live with him a little bright-eyed Chinese girl. When he married he sent her away with a present and if there were children they were provided for at a Eurasian school in Shanghai.

But this agreeable life was a thing of the past. The port lived on its export of tea and the change of taste from Chinese to Ceylon had ruined it. For thirty years the port had lain a-dying. Before that the consul had had two vice-consuls to help him in his work, but now he was able to do it easily by himself. He generally managed to get a game of golf in the afternoon and he was seldom too busy for a rubber of bridge. Nothing remained of the old splendour but the enormous hongs, and they were mostly empty. The tea merchants, such as were left of them, turned their hands to all manner of side lines in the effort to make both ends meet. But the effort was listless. Everyone in the port seemed old. It was no place for a young man.

And in the room in which I sat I seemed to read the history of the past and the history of the man I was awaiting. It was Sunday morning and when I arrived after two days on a coasting steamer, he was in church. I tried to construct a portrait of him from the room. There was something pathetic about it. It had the magnificence of a past generation, but a magnificence run to seed,  and its tidiness, I know not why, seemed to emphasize a shame-faced poverty. On the floor was a huge Turkey carpet which in the seventies must have cost a great deal of money, but now it was quite threadbare. The immense mahogany table, at which so many good dinners had been eaten, with such a luxury of wine, was so highly polished that you could see your face in it. It suggested port, old and tawny, and prosperous, red faced gentlemen with side whiskers discussing the antics of the mountebank Disraeli. The walls were of that sombre red which was thought suitable for a dining room when dinner was a respectable function and they were heavy with pictures. Here were the father and mother of my host, an elderly gentleman with grey whiskers and a bald head and a stern dark old lady with her hair dressed in the fashion of the Empress Eugenie, and there his grandfather in a stock and his grandmother in a mob cap. The mahogany sideboard with a mirror at the back, was laden with plated salvers, and a tea service, and much else, while in the middle of the dining table stood an immense épergne. On the black marble chimney piece was a black marble clock, flanked by black marble vases, and in the four corners of the room were cabinets filled with all manner of plated articles. Here and there great palms in pots spread their stiff foliage. The chairs were of massive mahogany, stuffed, and covered with faded red leather, and on each side of the fireplace was an arm-chair. The room, large though it was, seemed crowded, but because  everything was rather shabby it gave you an impression of melancholy. All those things seemed to have a sad life of their own, but a life subdued, as though the force of circumstances had proved too much for them. They had no longer the strength to struggle against fate, but they clung together with a tremulous eagerness as though they had a vague feeling that only so could they retain their significance, and I felt that it was only a little time before the end came when they would lie haphazard, in an unlovely confusion, with little numbers pasted on them, in the dreary coldness of an auction room.

XXIX

ARABESQUE

There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and foursquare, at due intervals stood at their posts. Ruthlessly, for it was built at the cost of a million lives and each one of those great grey stones has been stained with the bloody tears of the captive and the outcast, it forged its dark way through a sea of rugged mountains. Fearlessly, it went on its endless journey, league upon league to the furthermost regions of Asia, in utter solitude, mysterious like the great empire it guarded. There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China.

XXX

THE CONSUL

Mr. Pete was in a state of the liveliest exasperation. He had been in the consular service for more than twenty years and he had had to deal with all manner of vexatious people, officials who would not listen to reason, merchants who took the British Government for a debt collecting agency, missionaries who resented as gross injustice any attempt at fair play; but he never recollected a case which had left him more completely at a loss. He was a mild-mannered man, but for no reason he flew into a passion with his writer and he very nearly sacked the Eurasian clerk because he had wrongly spelt two words in a letter placed before him for his official signature. He was a conscientious man and he could not persuade himself to leave his office before the clock struck four, but the moment it did he jumped up and called for his hat and stick. Because his boy did not bring them at once he abused him roundly. They say that the consuls all grow a little odd; and the merchants who can live for thirty-five years in China without learning enough of the language to ask their way in the street, say that it is because they  have to study Chinese; and there was no doubt that Mr. Pete was decidedly odd. He was a bachelor and on that account had been sent to a series of posts which by reason of their isolation were thought unsuited to married men. He had lived so much alone that his natural tendency to eccentricity had developed to an extravagant degree, and he had habits which surprised the stranger. He was very absent-minded. He paid no attention to his house, which was always in great disorder, nor to his food; his boys gave him to eat what they liked and for everything he had made him pay through the nose. He was untiring in his efforts to suppress the opium traffic, but he was the only person in the city who did not know that his servants kept opium in the consulate itself, and a busy traffic in the drug was openly conducted at the back door of the compound. He was an ardent collector and the house provided for him by the government was filled with the various things which he had collected one after the other, pewter, brass, carved wood; these were his more legitimate enterprises; but he also collected stamps, birds’ eggs, hotel labels, and postmarks: he boasted that he had a collection of postmarks which was unequalled in the Empire. During his long sojourning in lonely places he had read a great deal, and though he was no sinologue he had a greater knowledge of China, its history, literature, and people, than most of his colleagues; but from his wide reading he had acquired not toleration but vanity. He was a  man of a singular appearance. His body was small and frail and when he walked he gave you the idea of a dead leaf dancing before the wind; and then there was something extraordinarily odd in the small Tyrolese hat, with a cock’s feather in it, very old and shabby, which he wore perched rakishly on the side of his large head. He was exceedingly bald. You saw that his eyes, blue and pale, were weak behind the spectacles, and a drooping, ragged, dingy moustache did not hide the peevishness of his mouth. And now, turning out of the street in which was the consulate, he made his way on to the city wall, for there only in the multitudinous city was it possible to walk with comfort.

He was a man who took his work hardly, worrying himself to death over every trifle, but as a rule a walk on the wall soothed and rested him. The city stood in the midst of a great plain and often at sundown from the wall you could see in the distance the snow-capped mountains, the mountains of Tibet; but now he walked quickly, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and his fat spaniel frisked about him unobserved. He talked to himself rapidly in a low monotone. The cause of his irritation was a visit that he had that day received from a lady who called herself Mrs. Yü and whom he with a consular passion for precision insisted on calling Miss Lambert. This in itself sufficed to deprive their intercourse of amenity. She was an Englishwoman married to a Chinese. She had arrived two years before with  her husband from England where he had been studying at the University of London; he had made her believe that he was a great personage in his own country and she had imagined herself to be coming to a gorgeous palace and a position of consequence. It was a bitter surprise when she found herself brought to a shabby Chinese house crowded with people: there was not even a foreign bed in it, nor a knife and fork: everything seemed to her very dirty and smelly. It was a shock to find that she had to live with her husband’s father and mother and he told her that she must do exactly what his mother bade her; but in her complete ignorance of Chinese it was not till she had been two or three days in the house that she realised that she was not her husband’s only wife. He had been married as a boy before he left his native city to acquire the knowledge of the barbarians. When she bitterly upbraided him for deceiving her he shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing to prevent a Chinese from having two wives if he wanted them and, he added with some disregard to truth, no Chinese woman looked upon it as a hardship. It was upon making this discovery that she paid her first visit to the consul. He had already heard of her arrival — in China everyone knows everything about everyone — and he received her without surprise. Nor had he much sympathy to show her. That a foreign woman should marry a Chinese at all filled him with indignation, but that she should do so without making proper inquiries vexed him  like a personal affront. She was not at all the sort of woman whose appearance led you to imagine that she would be guilty of such a folly. She was a solid, thick-set, young person, short, plain, and matter of fact. She was cheaply dressed in a tailor-made suit and she wore a Tam-o’-shanter. She had bad teeth and a muddy skin. Her hands were large and red and ill cared for. You could tell that she was not unused to hard work. She spoke English with a Cockney whine.

“How did you meet Mr. Yü?” asked the consul frigidly.

“Well, you see, it’s like this,” she answered. “Dad was in a very good position, and when he died mother said: ‘Well, it seems a sinful waste to keep all these rooms empty, I’ll put a card in the window.’”

The consul interrupted her.

“He had lodgings with you?”

“Well, they weren’t exactly lodgings,” she said.

“Shall we say apartments then?” replied the consul, with his thin, slightly vain smile.

That was generally the explanation of these marriages. Then because he thought her a very foolish vulgar woman he explained bluntly that according to English law she was not married to Yü and that the best thing she could do was to go back to England at once. She began to cry and his heart softened a little to her. He promised to put her in charge of some missionary ladies who would look after her on the long journey, and indeed, if she liked, he would see if meanwhile she  could not live in one of the missions. But while he talked Miss Lambert dried her tears.

“What’s the good of going back to England?” she said at last. “I ‘aven’t got nowhere to go to.”

“You can go to your mother.”

“She was all against my marrying Mr. Yü. I should never hear the last of it if I was to go back now.”

The consul began to argue with her, but the more he argued the more determined she became, and at last he lost his temper.

“If you like to stay here with a man who isn’t your husband it’s your own look out, but I wash my hands of all responsibility.”

Her retort had often rankled.

“Then you’ve got no cause to worry,” she said, and the look on her face returned to him whenever he thought of her.

That was two years ago and he had seen her once or twice since then. It appeared that she got on very badly both with her mother-in-law and with her husband’s other wife, and she had come to the consul with preposterous questions about her rights according to Chinese law. He repeated his offer to get her away, but she remained steadfast in her refusal to go, and their interview always ended in the consul’s flying into a passion. He was almost inclined to pity the rascally Yü who had to keep the peace between three warring women. According to his English wife’s account he was not unkind to her. He tried to act fairly by both his wives. Miss Lambert did  not improve. The consul knew that ordinarily she wore Chinese clothes, but when she came to see him she put on European dress. She was become extremely blowsy. Her health suffered from the Chinese food she ate and she was beginning to look wretchedly ill. But really he was shocked when she had been shown into his office that day. She wore no hat and her hair was dishevelled. She was in a highly hysterical state.

“They’re trying to poison me,” she screamed and she put before him a bowl of some foul smelling food. “It’s poisoned,” she said. “I’ve been ill for the last ten days, it’s only by a miracle I’ve escaped.”

She gave him a long story, circumstantial and probable enough to convince him: after all nothing was more likely than that the Chinese women should use familiar methods to get rid of an intruder who was hateful to them.

“Do they know you’ve come here?”

“Of course they do; I told them I was going to show them up.”

Now at last was the moment for decisive action. The consul looked at her in his most official manner.

“Well, you must never go back there. I refuse to put up with your nonsense any longer. I insist on your leaving this man who isn’t your husband.”

But he found himself helpless against the woman’s insane obstinacy. He repeated all the arguments he had used so often, but she would not  listen, and as usual he lost his temper. It was then, in answer to his final, desperate question, that she had made the remark which had entirely robbed him of his calm.

“But what on earth makes you stay with the man?” he cried.

She hesitated for a moment and a curious look came into her eyes.

“There’s something in the way his hair grows on his forehead that I can’t help liking,” she answered.

The consul had never heard anything so outrageous. It really was the last straw. And now while he strode along, trying to walk off his anger, though he was not a man who often used bad language he really could not restrain himself, and he said fiercely:

“Women are simply bloody.”

XXXI

THE STRIPLING

He walked along the causeway with an easy confident stride. He was seventeen, tall and slim, with a smooth and yellow skin that had never known a razor. His eyes, but slightly aslant, were large and open and his full red lips were tremulous with a smile. The happy audacity of youth was in his bearing. His little round cap was set jauntily on his head, his black gown was girt about his loins, and his trousers, as a rule gartered at the ankle, were turned up to the knees. He went barefoot but for thin straw sandals, and his feet were small and shapely. He had walked since early morning along the paved causeway that wound its sinuous path up the hills and down into the valleys with their innumerable padi fields, past burial grounds with their serried dead, through busy villages where maybe his eyes rested approvingly for a moment on some pretty girl in her blue smock and her short blue trousers, sitting in an open doorway (but I think his glance claimed admiration rather than gave it), and now he was nearing the end of his journey and the city whither he was bound seeking his fortune. It stood in the  midst of a fertile plain, surrounded by a crenellated wall, and when he saw it he stepped forward with resolution. He threw back his head boldly. He was proud of his strength. All his worldly goods were wrapped up in a parcel of blue cotton which he carried over his shoulder.

Now Dick Whittington, setting out to win fame and fortune, had a cat for his companion, but the Chinese carried with him a round cage with red bars, which he held with a peculiar grace between finger and thumb, and in the cage was a beautiful green parrot.

XXXII

THE FANNINGS

They lived in a fine square house, with a verandah all round it, on the top of a low hill that faced the river, and below them, a little to the right, was another fine square house which was the customs; and to this, for he was deputy commissioner, Fanning went every day. The city was five miles away and on the river bank was nothing but a small village which had sprung up to provide the crews of junks with what gear or food they needed. In the city were a few missionaries but these they saw seldom and the only foreigners in the village besides themselves were the tide-waiters. One of these had been an able seaman and the other was an Italian; they both had Chinese wives. The Fannings asked them to tiffin on Christmas day and on the King’s Birthday; but otherwise their relations with them were purely official. The steamers stayed but half an hour, so they never saw the captains or the chief engineers who were the only white men on them, and for five months in the year the water was too low for steamers to pass. Oddly enough it was then they saw most foreigners, for it happened now and again that a  traveller, a merchant or consular official perhaps, more often a missionary, going up stream by junk, tied up for the night, and then the commissioner went down to the river and asked him to dine. They lived very much alone.

Fanning was extremely bald, a short, thickset man, with a snub nose and a very black moustache. He was a martinet, aggressive, brusque, with a bullying manner; and he never spoke to a Chinese without raising his voice to a tone of rasping command. Though he spoke fluent Chinese, when one of his “boys” did something to displease him he abused him roundly in English. He made a disagreeable impression on you till you discovered that his aggressiveness was merely an armour put on to conceal a painful shyness. It was a triumph of his will over his disposition. His gruffness was an almost absurd attempt to persuade those with whom he came in contact that he was not frightened of them. You felt that no one was more surprised than himself that he was taken seriously. He was like those little grotesque figures that children blow out like balloons and you had an idea that he went in lively fear of bursting and then everyone would see that he was but a hollow bladder. It was his wife who was constantly alert to persuade him that he was a man of iron and when the explosion was over she would say to him:

“You know, you frighten me when you get in those passions,” or “I think I’d better say something to the boy, he’s quite shaken by what you said.”

Then Fanning would puff himself up and smile indulgently. When a visitor came she would say:

“The Chinese are terrified of my husband, but of course they respect him. They know it’s no good trying any of their nonsense with him.”

“Well, I ought to know how to treat them,” he would answer with beetling brows, “I’ve been over twenty years in the country.”

Mrs. Fanning was a little plain woman, wizened like a crab-apple, with a big nose and bad teeth. She was always very untidy, her hair, going a little grey, was continually on the point of falling down. Now and then, in the midst of conversation, she would abstractedly take out a pin or two, give it a shake, and without troubling to look in the glass insecurely fix its few thin wisps. She had a love of brilliant colour and she wore fantastic clothes which she and the sewing amah ran up together from the fashion papers; but when she dressed she could never find anything that went with anything else and she looked like a woman who had been rescued from shipwreck and clothed in any oddments that could be found. She was a caricature, and you could not help smiling when you looked at her. The only attractive thing she had was a soft and extremely musical voice and she spoke with a little drawl which came from I know not what part of England. The Fannings had two sons, one of nine and one of seven, and they completed the solitary household. They were attractive children, affectionate and demonstrative, and it was pleasant to see how united the  family was. They had little jokes together that amused them hugely, and they played pranks with one another as though not one of them was more than ten. Though they had so much of one another’s society it really looked as though they could not bear to be out of one another’s sight, and each day when Fanning went to his office his boys would hardly let him go and each day when he returned they greeted him with extravagant delight. They had no fear of his gruff bluster.

And presently you discovered that the centre of this concord was that little, grotesque, ugly woman; it was not chance that kept the family united, nor peculiarly agreeable dispositions, but a passion of love in her. From the moment she got up in the morning till the time she went to bed her thoughts were occupied with the welfare of the three male persons who were in her charge. Her active mind was busy all the time with schemes for their happiness. I do not think a thought of self ever entered her untidy head. She was a miracle of unselfishness. It was really hardly human. She never had a hard word for anyone. She was very hospitable and it was she who caused her husband to go down to the houseboats and invite travellers to come up to dinner. But I do not think she wanted them for her own sake. She was quite happy in her solitude, but she thought her husband enjoyed a talk with strangers.

“I don’t want him to get in a rut,” she said. “My poor husband, he misses his billiards and his  bridge. It’s very hard for a man to have no one to talk to but a woman.”

Every evening when the children had been put to bed they played piquet. She had no head for cards, poor dear, and she always made mistakes, but when her husband upbraided her, she said:

“You can’t expect everyone to be as clever as you are.”

And because she so obviously meant what she said he could not find it in his heart to be angry with her. Then when the commissioner was tired of beating her they would turn on the gramophone and sitting side by side listen in silence to the latest songs from the musical comedies of London. You may turn up your nose. They lived ten thousand miles away from England and it was their only tie with the home they loved: it made them feel not quite so utterly cut off from civilisation. And presently they would talk of what they would do with the children when they grew up; soon it would be time to send them home to school and perhaps a pang passed through the little woman’s gentle heart.

“It’ll be hard for you, Bertie, when they go,” she said. “But perhaps we shall be moved then to some place where there’s a club and then you’ll be able to go and play bridge in the evenings.”

XXXIII

THE SONG OF THE RIVER

You hear it all along the river. You hear it, loud and strong, from the rowers as they urge the junk with its high stern, the mast lashed alongside, down the swift running stream. You hear it from the trackers, a more breathless chaunt, as they pull desperately against the current, half a dozen of them perhaps if they are taking up a wupan, a couple of hundred if they are hauling a splendid junk, its square sail set, over a rapid. On the junk a man stands amidships beating a drum incessantly to guide their efforts, and they pull with all their strength, like men possessed, bent double; and sometimes in the extremity of their travail they crawl on the ground, on all fours, like the beasts of the field. They strain, strain fiercely, against the pitiless might of the stream. The leader goes up and down the line and when he sees one who is not putting all his will into the task he brings down his split bamboo on the naked back. Each one must do his utmost or the labour of all is vain. And still they sing a vehement, eager chaunt, the chaunt of the turbulent waters. I do not know how words can describe what there is in  it of effort. It serves to express the straining heart, the breaking muscles, and at the same time the indomitable spirit of man which overcomes the pitiless force of nature. Though the rope may part and the great junk swing back, in the end the rapid will be passed; and at the close of the weary day there is the hearty meal and perhaps the opium pipe with its dreams of ease. But the most agonising song is the song of the coolies who bring the great bales from the junk up the steep steps to the town wall. Up and down they go, endlessly, and endless as their toil rises their rhythmic cry. He, aw — ah, oh. They are barefoot and naked to the waist. The sweat pours down their faces and their song is a groan of pain. It is a sigh of despair. It is heart-rending. It is hardly human. It is the cry of souls in infinite distress, only just musical, and that last note is the ultimate sob of humanity. Life is too hard, too cruel, and this is the final despairing protest. That is the song of the river.

XXXIV

MIRAGE

He is a tall man with bulging, sky blue eyes and an embarrassed manner. He looks as though he were a little too large for his skin and you feel that he would be more comfortable if it were a trifle looser. His hair, very smooth and crisp, fits so tightly on his head that it gives you the impression of a wig, and you have an almost irresistible inclination to pull it. He has no small talk. He hunts for topics of conversation and, racking his brain to no purpose, in desperation offers you a whisky and soda.

He is in charge of the B.A.T., and the building in which he lives is office, godown, and residence all in one. His parlour is furnished with a suite of dingy upholstered furniture placed neatly round the walls, and in the middle is a round table. A hanging petroleum lamp gives a melancholy light, and an oil stove heat. In appropriate places are richly framed oleographs from the Christmas numbers of American magazines. But he does not sit in this room. He spends his leisure in his bedroom. In America he has always lived in a boarding house where his bedroom was the only privacy  he knew, and he has gotten the habit of living in one. It seems unnatural to him to sit in a sitting-room; he does not like to take his coat off, and he only feels at home in shirt sleeves. He keeps his books and his private papers in his bedroom; he has a desk and a rocking chair there.

He has lived in China for five years, but he knows no Chinese and takes no interest in the race among whom in all likelihood the best years of his life will be spent. His business is done through an interpreter and his house is managed by a boy. Now and then he takes a journey of several hundred miles into Mongolia, a wild and rugged country, either in Chinese carts or on ponies; and he sleeps at the wayside inns where congregate merchants, drovers, herdsmen, men at arms, ruffians, and wild fellows. The people of the land are turbulent; when there is unrest he is exposed to not a little risk. But these are purely business undertakings. They bore him. He is always glad to get back to his familiar bedroom at the B.A.T. For he is a great reader. He reads nothing but American magazines and the number of those he has sent to him by every mail is amazing. He never throws them away and there are piles of them all over the house. The city in which he lives is the gateway into China from Mongolia. There dwell the teeming Chinese, and through its gates pass constantly the Mongols with their caravans of camels; endless processions of carts, drawn by oxen, which have brought hides from the illimitable distances of  Asia rumble noisily through its crowded streets. He is bored. It has never occurred to him that he lives a life in which the possibility of adventure is at his doors. He can only recognise it through the printed page; and it needs a story of derring-do in Texas or Nevada, of hairbreadth escape in the South Seas, to stir his blood.

XXXV

THE STRANGER

It was a comfort in that sweltering heat to get out of the city. The missionary stepped out of the launch in which he had dropped leisurely down the river and comfortably settled himself in the chair which was waiting for him at the water’s edge. He was carried through the village by the river side and began to ascend the hill. It was an hour’s journey along a pathway of broad stone steps, under fir trees, and now and again you caught a delightful glimpse of the broad river shining in the sun amid the exultant green of the padi fields. The bearers went along with a swinging stride. The sweat on their backs shone. It was a sacred mountain with a Buddhist monastery on the top of it, and on the way up there were rest houses where the coolies set down the chair for a few minutes and a monk in his grey robe gave you a cup of flowered tea. The air was fresh and sweet. The pleasure of that lazy journey — the swing of the chair was very soothing — made a day in the city almost worth while; and at the end of it was his trim little bungalow where he spent the summer, and before him the sweet-scented night. The mail had come in  that day and he was bringing on letters and papers. There were four numbers of the Saturday Evening Post and four of the Literary Digest. He had nothing but pleasant things to look forward to and the usual peace (a peace, as he often said, which passeth all understanding), which filled him whenever he was among these green trees, away from the teeming city, should long since have descended upon him.

But he was harassed. He had had that day an unfortunate encounter and he was unable, trivial as it was, to put it out of his mind. It was on this account that his face bore a somewhat peevish expression. It was a thin and sensitive face, almost ascetic, with regular features and intelligent eyes. He was very long and thin, with the spindly legs of a grasshopper, and as he sat in his chair swaying a little with the motion of his bearers he reminded you, somewhat grotesquely, of a faded lily. A gentle creature. He could never have hurt a fly.

He had run across Dr. Saunders in one of the streets of the city. Dr. Saunders was a little grey-haired man, with a high colour and a snub nose which gave him a strangely impudent expression. He had a large sensual mouth and when he laughed, which he did very often, he showed decayed and discoloured teeth; when he laughed his little blue eyes wrinkled in a curious fashion and then he looked the very picture of malice. There was something faunlike in him. His movements were quick and unexpected. He walked with a  rapid trip as though he were always in a hurry. He was a doctor who lived in the heart of the city among the Chinese. He was not on the register, but someone had made it his business to find out that he had been duly qualified; he had been struck off, but for what crime, whether social or purely professional, none know; nor how he had happened to come to the East and eventually settle on the China coast. But it was evident that he was a very clever doctor and the Chinese had great faith in him. He avoided the foreigners and rather disagreeable stories were circulated about him. Everyone knew him to say how do you do to, but no one asked him to his house nor visited him in his own.

When they had met that afternoon Dr. Saunders had exclaimed:

“What on earth has brought you to the city at this time of year?”

“I have some business that I couldn’t leave any longer,” answered the missionary, “and then I wanted to get the mail.”

“There was a stranger here the other day asking for you,” said the doctor.

“For me?” cried the other with surprise.

“Well, not for you particularly,” explained the doctor. “He wanted to know the way to the American Mission. I told him; but I said he wouldn’t find anyone there. He seemed rather surprised at that, so I told him that you all went up to the hills in May and didn’t come back till September.”

“A foreigner?” asked the missionary, still wondering who the stranger could be.

“Oh, yes, certainly.” The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “Then he asked me about the other missions; I told him the London Mission had a settlement here, but it wasn’t the least use going there as all the missionaries were away in the hills. After all it’s devilish hot in the city. ‘Then I’d like to go to one of the mission schools,’ said the stranger. ‘Oh, they’re all closed,’ I said. ‘Well, then I’ll go to the hospital.’ ‘That’s well worth a visit,’ I said, ‘the American hospital is equipped with all the latest contrivances. Their operating theatre is perfect.’ ‘What is the name of the doctor in charge?’ ‘Oh, he’s up in the hills.’ ‘But what about the sick?’ ‘There are no sick between May and September,’ I said, ‘and if there are they have to put up with the native dispensers.’”

Dr. Saunders paused for a moment. The missionary looked ever so slightly vexed.

“Well?” he said.

“The stranger looked at me irresolutely for a moment or two. ‘I wanted to see something of the missions before I left,’ he said. ‘You might try the Roman Catholics,’ I said, ‘they’re here all the year round.’ ‘When do they take their holidays then?’ he asked. ‘They don’t,’ I said. He left me at that. I think he went to the Spanish convent.”

The missionary fell into the trap and it irritated him to think how ingenuously he had done so. He ought to have seen what was coming.

“Who was this anyway?” he asked innocently.

“I asked him his name,” said the doctor. “‘Oh, I’m Christ,’ he said.”

The missionary shrugged his shoulders and abruptly told his rickshaw boy to go on.

It had put him thoroughly out of temper. It was so unjust. Of course they went away from May to September. The heat made any useful activity quite out of the question and it had been found by experience that the missionaries preserved their health and strength much better if they spent the hot months in the hills. A sick missionary was only an encumbrance. It was a matter of practical politics and it had been found that the Lord’s work was done more efficiently if a certain part of the year was set aside for rest and recreation. And then the reference to the Roman Catholics was grossly unfair. They were unmarried. They had no families to think of. The mortality among them was terrifying. Why, in that very city, of fourteen nuns who had come out to China ten years ago all but three were dead. It was perfectly easy for them, because it was more convenient for their work, to live in the middle of the city and to stay there all the year round. They had no ties. They had no duties to those who were near and dear to them. Oh, it was grossly unjust to drag in the Roman Catholics.

But suddenly an idea flashed through his mind. What rankled most was that he had left the rascally doctor (you only had to look at his face all puckered with malicious amusement to know he was a rogue) without a word. There certainly  was an answer, but he had not had the presence of mind to make it; and now the perfect repartee occurred to him. A glow of satisfaction filled him and he almost fancied that he had made it. It was a crushing rejoinder and he rubbed his very long thin hands with satisfaction. ‘My dear Sir,’ he ought to have said, ‘Our Lord never in the whole course of his ministry claimed to be the Christ.’ It was an unanswerable snub, and thinking of it the missionary forgot his ill-humour.

XXXVI

DEMOCRACY

It was a cold night. I had finished my dinner, and my boy was making up my bed while I sat over a brazier of burning charcoal. Most of the coolies had already settled themselves for the night in a room next to mine and through the thin matchboarding of the wall that separated us I heard a couple of them talk. Another party of travellers had arrived about an hour before and the small inn was full. Suddenly there was a commotion and going to the door of my room to look out I saw three sedan chairs enter the courtyard. They were set down in front of me and from the first stepped out a stout Chinese of imposing aspect. He wore a long black robe of figured silk, lined with squirrel, and on his head a square fur cap. He seemed taken aback when he saw me at the door of the principal guest chamber and turning to the landlord addressed him in authoritative tones. It appeared that he was an official and he was much annoyed to find that the best apartment in the inn was already taken. He was told that but one room was available. It was small, with pallets covered with tumbled straw lining the walls, and was used as a rule only by  coolies. He flung into a violent passion and on a sudden arose a scene of the greatest animation. The official, his two companions, and his bearers exclaimed against the indignity which it was sought to thrust upon him, while the landlord and the servants of the inn argued, expostulated, and entreated. The official stormed and threatened. For a few minutes the courtyard, so silent before, rang with the angry shouts; then, subsiding as quickly as it began, the hubbub ceased and the official went into the vacant room. Hot water was brought by a bedraggled servant, and presently the landlord followed with great bowls of steaming rice. All was once more quiet.

An hour later I went into the yard to stretch my legs for five minutes before going to bed and somewhat to my surprise, I came upon the stout official, a little while ago so pompous and self-important, seated at a table in the front of the inn with the most ragged of my coolies. They were chatting amicably and the official quietly smoked a water-pipe. He had made all that to-do to give himself face, but having achieved his object was satisfied, and feeling the need of conversation had accepted the company of any coolie without a thought of social distinction. His manner was perfectly cordial and there was in it no trace of condescension. The coolie talked with him on an equal footing. It seemed to me that this was true democracy. In the East man is man’s equal in a sense you find neither in Europe nor in America. Position and wealth put a man in a  relation of superiority to another that is purely adventitious, and they are no bar to sociability.

When I lay in my bed I asked myself why in the despotic East there should be between men an equality so much greater than in the free and democratic West, and was forced to the conclusion that the explanation must be sought in the cess-pool. For in the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell. The working man is our master, inclined to rule us with an iron hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none can wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the factory bell rings is no pleasant thing, nor does heavy labour tend to sweetness; and you do not change your linen more than you can help when the week’s washing must be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of a sensitive nostril. The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth, wealth, or education. It is very significant that those novelists who have risen from the ranks of labour are apt to make it a symbol of class prejudice, and one of the most distinguished writers of our day always marks the rascals of his entertaining stories by the fact that they take a bath every morning. Now, the Chinese live all their lives in the proximity of very nasty smells. They do not notice them. Their nostrils are blunted to the odours that assail the Europeans and so they can move on an equal footing with the  tiller of the soil, the coolie, and the artisan. I venture to think that the cess-pool is more necessary to democracy than parliamentary institutions. The invention of the “sanitary convenience” has destroyed the sense of equality in men. It is responsible for class hatred much more than the monopoly of capital in the hands of the few.

It is a tragic thought that the first man who pulled the plug of a water-closet with that negligent gesture rang the knell of democracy.

XXXVII

THE SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST

He was a big man, and his bones were well covered. He gave you the impression that he had put on flesh since he bought his clothes, for they seemed somewhat tight for him. He always wore the same things, a blue suit, evidently bought ready-made in a department store (the lapel decorated with a small American flag) a high starched collar and a white tie on which was a pattern of forget-me-nots. His short nose and pugnacious chin gave his clean-shaven face a determined look; his eyes, behind large, gold-rimmed spectacles, were large and blue; and his hair receding on the temples, lank and dull, was plastered down on his head. But on the crown protruded a rebellious cock’s feather.

He was travelling up the Yangtze for the first time, but he took no interest in his surroundings. He had no eye for the waste of turbulent waters that was spread before him, nor for the colours, tragic or tender, which sunrise and sunset lent the scene. The great junks with their square white sails proceeded stately down the stream. The moon rose, flooding the noble river with silver and giving a strange magic to the temples on the bank,  among a grove of trees. He was frankly bored. During a certain part of the day he studied Chinese, but for the rest of the time he read nothing but a New York Times three months old and the Parliamentary debates of July, 1915, which, heaven knows why, happened to be on board. He took no interest in the religions which flourished in the land he had come to evangelise. He classed them all contemptuously as devil worship. I do not think he had ever read the Analects of Confucius. He was ignorant of the history, art, and literature of China.

I could not make out what had brought him to the country. He spoke of his work as a profession which he had entered as a man might enter the civil service, and which, though it was poorly paid (he complained that he earned less than an artisan) he wanted notwithstanding to make a good job of. He wanted to increase his church membership, he wanted to make his school self-supporting. If ever he had had a serious call to convert the heathen there was in him no trace of it now. He looked upon the whole matter as a business proposition. The secret of success lay in the precious word organization. He was upright, honest, and virtuous, but there was neither passion in him nor enthusiasm. He seemed to be under the impression that the Chinese were very simple people, and because they did not know the same things that he did he thought them ignorant. He could not help showing that he looked upon himself as superior to them. The laws they made  were not applicable to the white man and he resented the fact that they expected him to conform to their customs. But he was not a bad fellow; indeed he was a good-humoured one and so long as you did not attempt to question his authority there is no doubt that he would have done everything in his power to serve you.

XXXVIII

THE PHILOSOPHER

It was surprising to find so vast a city in a spot that seemed to me so remote. From its battlemented gate towards sunset you could see the snowy mountains of Tibet. It was so populous that you could walk at ease only on the walls and it took a rapid walker three hours to complete their circuit. There was no railway within a thousand miles and the river on which it stood was so shallow that only junks of light burden could safely navigate it. Five days in a sampan were needed to reach the Upper Yangtze. For an uneasy moment you asked yourself whether trains and steamships were as necessary to the conduct of life as we who use them every day consider; for here, a million persons throve, married, begat their kind, and died; here a million persons were busily occupied with commerce, art, and thought.

And here lived a philosopher of repute the desire to see whom had been to me one of the incentives of a somewhat arduous journey. He was the greatest authority in China on the Confucian learning. He was said to speak English and German with facility. He had been for  many years secretary to one of the Empress Dowager’s greatest viceroys, but he lived now in retirement. On certain days in the week, however, all through the year he opened his doors to such as sought after knowledge, and discoursed on the teaching of Confucius. He had a body of disciples, but it was small, since the students for the most part preferred to his modest dwelling and his severe exhortations the sumptuous buildings of the foreign university and the useful science of the barbarians: with him this was mentioned only to be scornfully dismissed. From all I heard of him I concluded that he was a man of character.

When I announced my wish to meet this distinguished person my host immediately offered to arrange a meeting; but the days passed and nothing happened. I made enquiries and my host shrugged his shoulders.

“I sent him a chit and told him to come along,” he said. “I don’t know why he hasn’t turned up. He’s a cross-grained old fellow.”

I did not think it was proper to approach a philosopher in so cavalier a fashion and I was hardly surprised that he had ignored a summons such as this. I caused a letter to be sent asking in the politest terms I could devise whether he would allow me to call upon him and within two hours received an answer making an appointment for the following morning at ten o’clock.

I was carried in a chair. The way seemed interminable. I went through crowded streets and through streets deserted till I came at last to one,  silent and empty, in which at a small door in a long white wall my bearers set down my chair. One of them knocked, and after a considerable time a judas was opened; dark eyes looked through; there was a brief colloquy; and finally I was admitted. A youth, pallid of face, wizened, and poorly dressed, motioned me to follow him. I did not know if he was a servant or a pupil of the great man. I passed through a shabby yard and was led into a long low room sparsely furnished with an American roll-top desk, a couple of blackwood chairs and two little Chinese tables. Against the walls were shelves on which were a great number of books: most of them, of course, were Chinese, but there were many, philosophical and scientific works, in English, French and German; and there were hundreds of unbound copies of learned reviews. Where books did not take up the wall space hung scrolls on which in various calligraphies were written, I suppose, Confucian quotations. There was no carpet on the floor. It was a cold, bare, and comfortless chamber. Its sombreness was relieved only by a yellow chrysanthemum which stood by itself on the desk in a long vase.

I waited for some time and the youth who had shown me in brought a pot of tea, two cups, and a tin of Virginian cigarettes. As he went out the philosopher entered. I hastened to express my sense of the honour he did me in allowing me to visit him. He waved me to a chair and poured out the tea.

“I am flattered that you wished to see me,” he returned. “Your countrymen deal only with coolies and with compradores; they think every Chinese must be one or the other.”

I ventured to protest. But I had not caught his point. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression of mockery.

“They think they have but to beckon and we must come.”

I saw then that my friend’s unfortunate communication still rankled. I did not quite know how to reply. I murmured something complimentary.

He was an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue, and bright large eyes under which were heavy bags. His teeth were broken and discoloured. He was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small, were withered and claw-like. I had been told that he was an opium-smoker. He was very shabbily dressed in a black gown, a little black cap, both much the worse for wear, and dark grey trousers gartered at the ankle. He was watching. He did not quite know what attitude to take up, and he had the manner of a man who was on his guard. Of course the philosopher occupies a royal place among those who concern themselves with the things of the spirit and we have the authority of Benjamin Disraeli that royalty must be treated with abundant flattery. I seized my trowel. Presently I was conscious of a certain relaxation in his demeanour. He was like a man who was all set and rigid to have his photograph taken, but  hearing the shutter click lets himself go and eases into his natural self. He showed me his books.

“I took the Ph.D. in Berlin, you know,” he said. “And afterwards I studied for some time in Oxford. But the English, if you will allow me to say so, have no great aptitude for philosophy.”

Though he put the remark apologetically it was evident that he was not displeased to say a slightly disagreeable thing.

“We have had philosophers who have not been without influence in the world of thought,” I suggested.

“Hume and Berkeley? The philosophers who taught at Oxford when I was there were anxious not to offend their theological colleagues. They would not follow their thought to its logical consequences in case they should jeopardise their position in university society.”

“Have you studied the modern developments of philosophy in America?” I asked.

“Are you speaking of Pragmatism? It is the last refuge of those who want to believe the incredible. I have more use for American petroleum than for American philosophy.”

His judgments were tart. We sat down once more and drank another cup of tea. He began to talk with fluency. He spoke a somewhat formal but an idiomatic English. Now and then he helped himself out with a German phrase. So far as it was possible for a man of that stubborn character to be influenced he had been influenced by Germany. The method and the industry of the Germans  had deeply impressed him and their philosophical acumen was patent to him when a laborious professor published in a learned magazine an essay on one of his own writings.

“I have written twenty books,” he said. “And that is the only notice that has ever been taken of me in a European publication.”

But his study of Western philosophy had only served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom after all was to be found within the limits of the Confucian canon. He accepted its philosophy with conviction. It answered the needs of his spirit with a completeness which made all foreign learning seem vain. I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true. If Confucianism gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because it explained and expressed them as no other system of thought could do.

My host lit a cigarette. His voice at first had been thin and tired, but as he grew interested in what he said it gained volume. He talked vehemently. There was in him none of the repose of the sage. He was a polemist and a fighter. He loathed the modern cry for individualism. For him society was the unit, and the family the foundation of society. He upheld the old China and the old school, monarchy, and the rigid canon of  Confucius. He grew violent and bitter as he spoke of the students, fresh from foreign universities, who with sacrilegious hands tore down the oldest civilisation in the world.

“But you, do you know what you are doing?” he exclaimed. “What is the reason for which you deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilisation been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order. And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as  straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by the machine gun shall you be judged.”

But at that moment we were interrupted. A little girl came softly in and nestled close up to the old gentleman. She stared at me with curious eyes. He told me that she was his youngest child. He put his arms round her and with a murmur of caressing words kissed her fondly. She wore a black coat and trousers that barely reached her ankles, and she had a long pig-tail hanging down her back. She was born on the day the revolution was brought to a successful issue by the abdication of the emperor.

“I thought she heralded the Spring of a new era,” he said. “She was but the last flower of this great nation’s Fall.”

From a drawer in his roll-top desk he took a few cash, and handing them to her, sent her away.

“You see that I wear a queue,” he said, taking it in his hands. “It is a symbol. I am the last representative of the old China.”

He talked to me, more gently now, of how philosophers in long past days wandered from state to state with their disciples, teaching all who were worthy to learn. Kings called them to their councils and made them rulers of cities. His erudition was great and his eloquent phrases gave a multicoloured vitality to the incidents he related to me of the history of his country. I could not help thinking him a somewhat pathetic figure. He felt in himself the capacity to administer the state, but there was no king to entrust him with office;  he had vast stores of learning which he was eager to impart to the great band of students that his soul hankered after, and there came to listen but a few, wretched, half-starved, and obtuse provincials.

Once or twice discretion had made me suggest that I should take my leave, but he had been unwilling to let me go. Now at last I was obliged to. I rose. He held my hand.

“I should like to give you something as a recollection of your visit to the last philosopher in China, but I am a poor man and I do not know what I can give you that would be worthy of your acceptance.”

I protested that the recollection of my visit was in itself a priceless gift. He smiled.

“Men have short memories in these degenerate days, and I should like to give you something more substantial. I would give you one of my books, but you cannot read Chinese.”

He looked at me with an amicable perplexity. I had an inspiration.

“Give me a sample of your calligraphy,” I said.

“Would you like that?” He smiled. “In my youth I was considered to wield the brush in a manner that was not entirely despicable.”

He sat down at his desk, took a fair sheet of paper, and placed it before him. He poured a few drops of water on a stone, rubbed the ink stick in it, and took his brush. With a free movement of the arm he began to write. And as I  watched him I remembered with not a little amusement something else which had been told me of him. It appeared that the old gentleman, whenever he could scrape a little money together, spent it wantonly in the streets inhabited by ladies to describe whom a euphemism is generally used. His eldest son, a person of standing in the city, was vexed and humiliated by the scandal of this behaviour; and only his strong sense of filial duty prevented him from reproaching the libertine with severity. I daresay that to a son such looseness would be disconcerting, but the student of human nature could look upon it with equanimity. Philosophers are apt to elaborate their theories in the study, forming conclusions upon life which they know only at second hand, and it has seemed to me often that their works would have a more definite significance if they had exposed themselves to the vicissitudes which befall the common run of men. I was prepared to regard the old gentleman’s dalliance in hidden places with leniency. Perhaps he sought but to elucidate the most inscrutable of human illusions.

He finished. To dry the ink he scattered a little ash on the paper and rising handed it to me.

“What have you written?” I asked.

I thought there was a slightly malicious gleam in his eyes.

“I have ventured to offer you two little poems of my own.”

“I did not know you were a poet.”

“When China was still an uncivilised country,”  he retorted with sarcasm, “all educated men could write verse at least with elegance.”

I took the paper and looked at the Chinese characters. They made an agreeable pattern upon it.

“Won’t you also give me a translation?”

“Traduttore — traditore,” he answered. “You cannot expect me to betray myself. Ask one of your English friends. Those who know most about China know nothing, but you will at least find one who is competent to give you a rendering of a few rough and simple lines.”

I bade him farewell, and with great politeness he showed me to my chair. When I had the opportunity I gave the poems to a sinologue of my acquaintance, and here is the version he made. I confess that, doubtless unreasonably, I was somewhat taken aback when I read it.

You loved me not: your voice was sweet; Your eyes were full of laughter; your hands were tender. And then you loved me: your voice was bitter; Your eyes were full of tears; your hands were cruel. Sad, sad that love should make you Unlovable.

I craved the years would quickly pass That you might lose The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin, And all the cruel splendour of your youth. Then I alone would love you And you at last would care.

The envious years have passed full soon And you have lost The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin, And all the charming splendour of your youth. Alas, I do not love you And I care not if you care.

I owe it to the kindness of my friend Mr. P.W. Davidson.

XXXIX

THE MISSIONARY LADY

She was certainly fifty, but a life of convictions harassed by never a doubt had left her face unwrinkled. The hesitations of thought had never lined the smoothness of her brow. Her features were bold and regular, somewhat masculine, and her determined chin bore out the impression given you by her eyes. They were blue, confident, and unperturbed. They summed you up through large round spectacles. You felt that here was a woman to whom command came easily. Her charity was above all things competent and you were certain that she ran the obvious goodness of her heart on thoroughly business lines. It was possible to suppose that she was not devoid of human vanity (and this is to be counted to her for grace) since she wore a dress of violet silk, heavily embroidered, and a toque of immense pansies which on a less respectable head would have been almost saucy. But my Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, who had decided views on the proper manner of dress for a clergyman’s wife, never objected to my Aunt Sophie wearing violet, and he would have found nothing to criticise in  the missionary lady’s gown. She spoke fluently with the even flow of water turned on at a tap. Her conversation had the admirable volubility of a politician at the end of an electioneering campaign. You felt that she knew what she meant (with most of us so rare an accomplishment) and meant what she said.

“I always think,” she remarked pleasantly, “that if you know both sides of a question you’ll judge differently from what you will if you only know one side. But the fact remains that two and two make four and you can argue all night and you won’t make them five. Am I right or am I wrong?”

I hastened to assure her that she was right, though with these new theories of relativity and parallel lines behaving at infinity in such a surprising manner I was in my heart of hearts none too sure.

“No one can eat their cake and have it,” she continued, exemplifying Benedetto Croce’s theory that grammar has little to do with expression, “and one has to take the rough with the smooth, but as I always say to the children you can’t expect to have everything your own way. No one is perfect in this world and I always think that if you expect the best from people you’ll get the best.”

I confess that I was staggered, but I determined to do my part. It was only civil.

“Most men live long enough to discover that every cloud has a silver lining,” I began earnestly.  “With perseverance you can do most things that are not beyond your powers, and after all, it’s better to want what you have than to have what you want.”

I thought her eyes were glazed with a sudden perplexity when I made this confident statement, but I daresay it was only my fancy, for she nodded vigorously.

“Of course, I see your point,” she said. “We can’t do more than we can.”

But my blood was up now and I waved aside the interruption. I went on.

“Few people realise the profound truth that there are twenty shillings in every pound and twelve pence in every shilling. I’m sure it’s better to see clearly to the end of your nose than indistinctly through a brick wall. If there’s one thing we can be certain about it is that the whole is greater than the part.”

When, with a hearty shake of the hand, firm and characteristic, she bade me farewell, she said:

“Well, we’ve had a most interesting chat. It does one good in a place like this, so far away from civilisation, to exchange ideas with one’s intellectual equals.”

“Especially other people’s,” I murmured.

“I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past,” she retorted. “It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain.”

Her conversation was devastating.

XL

A GAME OF BILLIARDS

I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading a number, several days old, of the South China Times, when the door of the bar was somewhat brusquely thrown open and a very long, thin man appeared.

“Do you care for a game of billiards?” he said.

“By all means.”

I got up and went with him into the bar. It was a small hotel, of stone, somewhat pretentious in appearance, and it was kept by a half-caste Portuguese who smoked opium. There were not half a dozen people staying there, a Portuguese official and his wife waiting for a ship to take them to a distant colony, a Lancashire engineer who was sullenly drunk all day long, a mysterious lady, no longer young but of voluptuous appearance, who came to the dining room for meals and went back to her room immediately afterwards, and I had not seen the stranger before. I supposed he had come in that evening on a Chinese boat. He was a man of over fifty, I should think, shrivelled as though the sap had been dried out of him by tropical suns, with a face that was almost brick red. I could not place him. He might have been  a skipper out of a job or the agent of some foreign firm in Hong Kong. He was very silent and he made no answer to the casual remarks that I made in the course of the game. He played billiards well enough, though not excellently, but he was a very pleasant fellow to play with; and when he pocketed my ball, instead of leaving me a double balk, gave me a reasonable shot. But when the game was over I should never have thought of him again, if suddenly, breaking his silence for the first time, he had not put me a very odd question.

“Do you believe in fate?” he asked.

“At billiards?” I retorted not a little astonished at his remark.

“No, in life.”

I did not want to answer him seriously.

“I hardly know,” I said.

He took his shot. He made a little break. At the end of it, chalking his cue, he said:

“I do. I believe if things are coming to you, you can’t escape them.”

That was all. He said nothing more. When we had finished the game he went up to bed, and I never saw him again. I shall never know what strange emotion impelled him to put that sudden question to a stranger.

XLI

THE SKIPPER

I knew he was drunk.

He was a skipper of the new school, a neat little man, clean-shaven, who might easily have passed for the commander of a submarine. In his cabin there hung a beautiful new coat with gold braid on it, the uniform which for its good service in the war has been granted to the mercantile marine, but he was shy of using it; it seemed absurd when he was no more than captain of a small boat on the Yangtze; and he stood on his bridge in a neat brown suit and a homburg hat; you could almost see yourself in his admirably polished shoes. His eyes were clear and bright and his skin was fresh. Though he had been at sea for twenty years and could not have been much less than forty he did not look more than twenty-eight. You might be sure that he was a clean-living fellow, as healthy in mind as he was in body, and the depravity of the East of which they talk had left him untouched. He had a pleasant taste in light literature and the works of E.V. Lucas adorned his book-case. In his cabin you saw a photograph of a football team in which he figured and two of a young woman  with neatly waved hair whom it was possible enough he was engaged to.

I knew he was drunk, but I did not think he was very drunk, till he asked me suddenly:

“What is democracy?”

I returned an evasive, perhaps a flippant answer, and for some minutes the conversation turned on less unseasonable topics to the occasion. Then breaking his silence, he said:

“I hope you don’t think I’m a socialist because I said, what is democracy.”

“Not at all,” I answered, “but I don’t see why you shouldn’t be a socialist.”

“I give you my word of honour I’m not,” he protested. “If I had my way I’d stand them up against a wall and shoot them.”

“What is socialism?” I asked.

“Oh, you know what I mean, Henderson and Ramsay Macdonald and all that sort of thing,” he answered. “I’m about fed up with the working man.”

“But you’re a working man yourself, I should have thought.”

He was silent for quite a long time and I thought his mind had wandered to other things. But I was wrong; he was thinking my statement over in all its bearings, for at last he said:

“Look here, I’m not a working man. Hang it all, I was at Harrow.”

XLII

THE SIGHTS OF THE TOWN

I am not an industrious sight-seer, and when guides, professional or friendly, urge me to visit a famous monument I have a stubborn inclination to send them about their business. Too many eyes before mine have looked with awe upon Mont Blanc; too many hearts before mine have throbbed with deep emotion in the presence of the Sistine Madonna. Sights like these are like women of too generous sympathies: you feel that so many persons have found solace in their commiseration that you are embarrassed when they bid you, with what practised tact, to whisper in their discreet ears the whole tale of your distress. Supposing you were the last straw that broke the camel’s back! No, Madam, I will take my sorrows (if I cannot bear them alone, which is better) to someone who is not quite so certain of saying so exactly the right thing to comfort me. When I am in a foreign town I prefer to wander at random and if maybe I lose the rapture of a Gothic cathedral I may happen upon a little Romanesque chapel or a Renaissance doorway which I shall be able to flatter myself no one else has troubled about.

But of course this was a very extraordinary sight indeed and it would have been absurd to miss it. I came across it by pure chance. I was sauntering along a dusty road outside the city wall and by the side of it I saw a number of memorial arches. They were small and undecorated, standing not across the way but along it, close to one another, and sometimes one in front of the other, as though they had been erected by no impulse of gratitude to the departed or of admiration for the virtuous but in formal compliment, as knighthoods on the King’s birthday are conferred on prominent citizens of provincial towns. Behind this row of arches the land rose sharply and since in this part of the country the Chinese bury their dead by preference on the side of a hill it was thickly covered with graves. A trodden path led to a little tower and I followed it. It was a stumpy little tower, ten feet high perhaps, made of rough-hewn blocks of stone; it was cone shaped and the roof was like a Pierrot’s hat. It stood on a hillock, quaint and rather picturesque against the blue sky, amid the graves. At its foot were a number of rough baskets thrown about in disorder. I walked round and on one side saw an oblong hole, eighteen inches by eight, perhaps, from which hung a stout string. From the hole there came a very strange, a nauseating odour. Suddenly I understood what the queer little building was. It was a baby tower. The baskets were the baskets in which the babies had been brought, two or three of them were quite new, they could  not have been there more than a few hours. And the string? Why, if the person who brought the baby, parent or grandmother, midwife or obliging friend, were of a humane disposition and did not care to let the new-born child drop to the bottom (for underneath the tower was a deep pit), it could be let down gently by means of the string. The odour was the odour of putrefaction. A lively little boy came up to me while I stood there and made me understand that four babes had been brought to the tower that morning.

There are philosophers who look upon evil with a certain complacency, since without it, they opine, there would be no possibility of good. Without want there would be no occasion for charity, without distress of sympathy, without danger of courage, and without unhappiness of resignation. They would find in the Chinese practice of infanticide an apt illustration of their views. Except for the baby tower there would not be in this city an orphanage: the traveller would miss an interesting and curious sight, and a few poor women would have no opportunity to exercise a beautiful and touching virtue. The orphanage is shabby and bedraggled; it is situated in a poor and crowded part of the city; for the Spanish nuns who conduct it — there are but five of them — think it more convenient to live where they may be most useful; and besides, they have not the money to build commodious premises in a salubrious quarter. The institution is supported by the  work, lace and fine embroidery, which they teach the girls to do, and by the alms of the faithful.

Two nuns, the Mother Superior and another, showed me what there was to see. It was very strange to go through the whitewashed rooms, work-rooms, playrooms, dormitories, and refectory, low, cool, and bare; for you might have been in Spain, and when you passed a window you half expected to catch a glimpse of the Giralda. And it was charming to see the tenderness with which the nuns used the children. There were two hundred of them and they were, of course, orphans only in the sense that their parents had abandoned them. There was one room in which a number were playing, all of the same age, perhaps four, and all of the same size; with their black eyes and black hair, their yellow skins, they all looked so much alike that they might have been the children of a Chinese Old Woman who lived in a Shoe. They crowded round the nuns and began to romp with them. The Mother Superior had the gentlest voice I ever heard, but it became gentler still when she joked with the tiny mites. They nestled about her. She looked a very picture of charity. Some were deformed and some were diseased, some were puny and hideous, some were blind; it gave me a little shudder: I marvelled when I saw the love that filled her kind eyes and the affectionate sweetness of her smile.

Then I was taken into a parlour where I was made to eat little sweet Spanish cakes and given a glass of Manzanilla to drink, and when I told them  that I had lived in Seville a third nun was sent for, so that she might talk for a few minutes with someone who had seen the city she was born in. With pride they showed me their poor little chapel with its tawdry statue of the Blessed Virgin, its paper flowers, and its gaudy, shoddy decoration; for those dear faithful hearts, alas! were possessed of singularly bad taste. I did not care: to me there was something positively touching in that dreadful vulgarity. And when I was on the point of leaving the Mother Superior asked me whether I would care to see the babies who had come in that day. In order to persuade people to bring them they gave twenty cents for every one. Twenty cents!

“You see,” she explained, “they have often a long walk to come here and unless we give them something they won’t take the trouble.”

She took me into a little anteroom, near the entrance, and there lying on a table under a counterpane were four new-born babes. They had just been washed and put into long clothes. The counterpane was lifted off. They lay side by side, on their backs, four tiny wriggling mites, very red in the face, rather cross perhaps because they had been bathed, and very hungry. Their eyes seemed preternaturally large. They were so small, so helpless: you were forced to smile when you looked at them and at the same time you felt a lump in your throat.

XLIII

NIGHTFALL

Towards evening perhaps, tired of walking, you get into your chair and on the crest of a hill you pass through a stone gateway. You cannot tell why there should be a gateway in that deserted spot, far from a village, but a fragment of massive wall suggests the ruin of fortifications against the foes of a forgotten dynasty. And when you come through the gateway you see below you the shining water in the rice fields, diapered, like the chess-board in some Chinese Alice in Wonderland, and then the rounded, tree-clad hills. But making your way down the stone steps of the narrow causeway which is the high road from city to city, in the gathering darkness you pass a coppice, and from it waft towards you chill woodland odours of the night. Then you hear no longer the measured tread of your bearers, your ears are on a sudden deaf to their sharp cries as they change the pole from shoulder to shoulder, and to the ceaseless chatter or the occasional snatch of song with which they enliven the monotonous way, for the woodland odours are the same as those which steal up from the fat Kentish soil when you pass  through the woods of Bleane; and nostalgia seizes you. Your thoughts travel through time and space, far from the Here and Now, and you remember your vanished youth with its high hopes, its passionate love, and its ambition. Then if you are a cynic, as they say, and therefore a sentimentalist, tears come to your unwilling eyes. And when you have regained your self-control the night has fallen.

XLIV

THE NORMAL MAN

I was once obliged to study anatomy, a very dreary business, since there is neither rhyme nor reason for the vast number of things you have to remember; but one remark made by my teacher, when he was helping me in the dissection of a thigh, has always remained in my memory. I was looking in vain for a certain nerve and it needed his greater skill to discover it in a place in which I had not sought it. I was aggrieved because the text book had misled me. He smiled and said:

“You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the world.”

And though he spoke of anatomy he might have spoken with equal truth of man. The casual observation impressed itself upon me as many a profounder one has not and all the years that have passed since then, with the increasing knowledge of human nature which they have brought, have only strengthened my conviction of its truth. I have met a hundred men who seemed perfectly normal only to find in them presently an idiosyncrasy so marked as to put them almost in a class by themselves. It has entertained me not a little  to discover the hidden oddity of men to all appearances most ordinary. I have been often amazed to come upon a hideous depravity in men who you would have sworn were perfectly commonplace. I have at last sought the normal man as a precious work of art. It has seemed to me that to know him would give me that peculiar satisfaction which can only be described as æsthetic.

I really thought I had found him in Robert Webb. He was a consul in one of the smaller ports and I was given a letter to him. I heard a good deal about him on my way through China and I heard nothing but good. Whenever I happened to mention that I was going to the port in which he was stationed someone was sure to say:

“You’ll like Bob Webb. He’s an awfully good chap.”

He was no less popular as an official than he was as a private person. He managed to please the merchants because he was active in their interests, without antagonising the Chinese who praised his firmness or the missionaries who approved his private life. During the revolution by his tact, decision, and courage he had not only saved from great danger the foreign population of the city in which he then was, but also many Chinese. He had come forward as a peacemaker between the warring parties and by his ingenuity had been able to bring about a satisfactory settlement. He was marked down for promotion. I certainly found him a very engaging fellow. Though he was not good-looking his appearance was pleasing;  he was tall, perhaps a little more than of average height, well covered without being fat, with a fresh complexion inclined now (for he was nearly fifty) to be somewhat bloated in the morning. This was not strange, for in China the foreigners both eat and drink a great deal too much, and Robert Webb had a healthy liking for the good things of life. He kept an excellent table. He liked eating in company and it was seldom that he did not have one or two people to tiffin or to dinner with him. His eyes were blue and friendly. He had the social gifts that give pleasure: he played the piano quite well, but he liked the music that other people liked, and he was always ready to play a one step or a waltz if others wanted to dance. With a wife, a son, and a daughter in England he could not afford to keep racing ponies, but he was keenly interested in racing; he was a good tennis player, and his bridge was better than the average. Unlike many of his colleagues he did not allow himself to be overwhelmed by his position, and in the evening at the club he was affable and unaffected. But he did not forget that he was His Britannic Majesty’s Consul and I admired the skill with which without portentousness he preserved the dignity which he thought necessary to his station. In short he had very good manners. He talked agreeably, and his interests, though somewhat ordinary, were varied. He had a nice sense of humour. He could make a joke and tell a good story. He was very happily married. His son was at Charterhouse and he showed me a photograph  of a tall, fair lad in flannels, with a frank and pleasant face. He showed me also the photograph of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies of life in China that a man must be separated for long periods from his family, and owing to the war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years. His wife had taken the children home when the boy was eight and the girl eleven. They had meant to wait till his leave came so that they could go all together, but he was stationed in a place that suited neither of the children and he and his wife agreed that she had better take them at once. His leave was due in three years and then he could spend twelve months with them. But when the time for this came the war broke out, the Consular staff was short-handed, and it was impossible for him to leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated from young children, the journey was difficult and dangerous, no one expected the war to last so long, and one by one the years passed.

“My girl was a child when I saw her last,” he said to me when he showed me the photograph. “Now she’s a married woman.”

“When are you going on leave?” I asked him.

“Oh, my wife’s coming out now.”

“But don’t you want to see your daughter?” I asked.

He looked at the photograph again and then looked away. There was a curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he answered:

“I’ve been away from home too long now. I shall never go back.”

I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb’s daughter was a very alluring young person. I liked that engaging audacity.

“It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph,” he said presently. “I’d always thought of her as a child. If I’d met her in the street I shouldn’t have known her.”

He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.

“It isn’t fair.... When she was a child she used to love being petted.”

His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see in them a very unexpected emotion.

“I can hardly realise she’s my daughter. I thought she’d come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged.”

He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners of his mouth.

“I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind.”

He gave an apologetic laugh.

“I had to, you know,” he said awkwardly. “I had such an awful hump.”

“What’s the young man like?” I asked.

“She’s awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are about nothing else.” There was an odd quaver in his voice. “It’s a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you’ve never even seen. I’ve got his photograph somewhere, I don’t know where it is. I don’t think I’d care about him very much.”

He helped himself to another whisky. He was tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together.

“Well, thank God, her mother’s coming out soon.”

I don’t think he was quite a normal man after all.

XLV

THE OLD TIMER

He was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little more than a boy as second mate of a sailing vessel and had never gone home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He had been master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had fought in the Ever-Victorious Army. He had got a lot of loot in the Boxer troubles and had been in Hankow during the revolution when the rebels shelled the city. He had been married three times, first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese, and finally when he was hard upon fifty to an Englishwoman. They were all dead now and it was the Japanese who lingered in his memory. He would tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house in Shanghai, just one chrysanthemum in a vase or a sprig of cherry blossom; and he always remembered how she held a tea-cup, with both hands, delicately. He had had a number of children, but he took no interest in them; they were settled in the various ports of China, in banks and shipping  offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud of his daughter by his English wife, the only girl he ever had, but she had married well and was gone to England. He would never see her again. The only person now for whom he had any affection was the boy who had been with him for five and forty years. He was a little wizened Chinaman, with a bald head, slow of movement and solemn. He was well over sixty. They quarrelled incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that he was past his work and that he must get rid of him, and then the boy would say that he was tired of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew that the other did not mean a word he said. They were old friends, old men both of them, and they would remain together till death parted them.

It was when he married his English wife that he retired from the water and put his savings into a hotel. But it was not a success. It was a little way from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before there were motor cars in China. He was a sociable fellow and he spent too much of his time in the bar. He was generous and he gave away as many drinks as were paid for. He also had the peculiar habit of spitting in the bath and the more squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his last wife died he found it was she who had kept things from going to pieces and in a little while he could no longer bear up against the difficulty of his circumstances. All his savings had gone into buying the place, now heavily mortgaged, and in making up the deficit year by year. He was  obliged to sell out to a Japanese and having paid his debts at the age of sixty-eight found himself without a penny. But, by God, sir, he was a sailor. One of the companies running boats up the Yangtze, gave him a berth as chief officer — he had no master’s certificate — and he returned to the river which he knew so well. For eight years he had been on the same run.

And now he stood on the bridge of his trim little ship, not so large as a penny steamer on the Thames, a gallant figure, upright and slender as when he was a lad, in a neat blue suit and the company’s cap set jauntily on his white hair, with his pointed beard nattily trimmed. Seventy-six years old. It is a great age. With his head thrown back, his glasses in his hand, the Chinese pilot by his side, he watched the vast expanse of the winding river. A fleet of junks with their high sterns, their square sails set, descended on the swift current, and the rowers chanted a monotonous chant as they worked at their creaking oars. The yellow water in the setting sun was lovely with pale soft tints, it was as smooth as glass; and along the flat banks the trees and the huts of a bedraggled village, hazy in the heat of the day, were now silhouetted sharply, like the shadows of a shadowgraph, against the pale sky. He raised his head as he heard the cry of wild geese and he saw them flying high above him in a great V to what far lands he knew not. In the distance against the sunlight stood a solitary hill crowned with temples. Because he had seen  all this so often it affected him strangely. The dying day made him think, he knew not why, of his long past and of his great age. He regretted nothing.

“By George,” he muttered, “I’ve had a fine life.”

XLVI

THE PLAIN

The incident was of course perfectly trivial, and it could be very easily explained; but I was surprised that the eyes of the spirit could blind me so completely to what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was taken aback to find how completely one could be at the mercy of the laws of association. Day after day I had marched among the uplands and to-day I knew that I must come to the great plain in which lay the ancient city whither I was bound; but when I set out in the morning there was no sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed no less sheer and when I reached the top of one, thinking to see the valley below, it was only to see before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond, climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway that I had followed so long, shining in the sunlight as it skirted the brow of a rugged tawny rock. The sky was blue and in the west hung here and there little clouds like fishing boats becalmed towards evening off Dungeness. I trudged along, mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that awaited me, if not round this bend, then round the next, and at last, suddenly, when I was thinking  of other things, I came upon it. But it was no Chinese landscape that I saw, with its padi fields, its memorial arches and its fantastic temples, with its farmhouses set in a bamboo grove and its wayside inns where under the banyan trees the poor coolies may rest them of their weary loads; it was the valley of the Rhine, the broad plain all golden in the sunset, the valley of the Rhine with its river, a silvery streak, running through it, and the distant towers of Worms; it was the great plain upon which my young eyes rested, when, a student in Heidelberg, after walking long among the fir-clad hills above the old city, I came out upon a clearing. And because I was there first conscious of beauty; because there I knew the first glow of the acquisition of knowledge (each book I read was an extraordinary adventure); because there I first knew the delight of conversation (oh, those wonderful commonplaces which each boy discovers as though none had discovered them before); because of the morning stroll in the sunny Anlage, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my abstemious youth at the end of a strenuous walk, the leisurely evenings on the castle terrace, with the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs of the old town below me; because of Goethe and Heine and Beethoven and Wagner and (why not?) Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer-garden where the band played and girls with yellow plaits walked sedately; because of all these things — recollections which have all the force of the appeal of sense — to me not only does the word plain mean  everywhere and exclusively the valley of the Rhine; but the only symbol for happiness I know is a wide prospect all golden in the setting sun, with a shining stream of silver running through it, like the path of life or like the ideal that guides you through it, and far away the grey towers of an ancient town.

XLVII

FAILURE

A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat, like a bushranger’s, with an immense brim, a pea-jacket such as you see in Leech’s pictures of the sea-faring man, and very wide check trousers of a cut fashionable heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes off his hat you see a fine head of long curly hair, and though he is approaching the sixties it is scarcely grey. His features are regular. He wears a collar several sizes too large for him so that his whole neck, massive and statuesque, is shown. He has the look of a Roman Emperor in a tragedy of the sixties and this air of an actor of the old school is enhanced by his deep booming voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd. You can imagine his declaiming the blank verse of Sheridan Knowles with an emphasis to rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you, with too large a gesture, you guess how that resonant organ would tremble when he wrung your heart (in 1860) over the death of his child. It was splendid a little later to hear him ask the Chinese servant for “me boots, boy, me boots. A  kingdom for me boots.” He confessed that he should have been an actor.

“To be or not to be, that was the question, but me family, me family, dear boy, they would have died of the disgrace, and so I was exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

In short he came out to China as a tea-taster. But he came when the Ceylon tea was already ousting the Chinese and it was no longer possible for the merchant to enrich himself in a few years. But the old lavishness endured and life was led in a grand style when the means to pay for it no longer existed. The struggle became harder. Finally came the Sino-Japanese war, and with the loss of Formosa, ruin. The tea-taster looked about for other means of livelihood. He became a wine-merchant, an undertaker, an estate-agent, a broker, an auctioneer. He tried every way of making money that his ardent imagination suggested, but with the diminishing prosperity of the port his efforts were bootless. Life was too much for him. And now at last he had the pitiful air of a broken man; there was even something touching in it, like the appeal of a woman who cannot believe in the loss of her beauty and implores the compliment which reassures but no longer convinces her. And yet, notwithstanding, he had a solace: he had still a magnificent assurance; he was a failure and he knew it; but it did not really affect him, for he was the victim of fate: no shadow of a doubt in his own capacity had ever crossed his mind.

XLVIII

A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA

He sent in a neat card of the correct shape and size, deeply bordered in black, upon which under his name was printed Professor of Comparative Modern Literature. He turned out to be a young man, small, with tiny elegant hands, with a larger nose than you see as a rule in the Chinese and gold rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day he was dressed, in European clothes, in a suit of heavy tweed. He seemed a trifle shy. He spoke in a high falsetto, as though his voice had never broken, and those shrill notes gave I know not what feeling of unreality to his conversation. He had studied in Geneva and in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English, French, and German.

It appeared that he lectured on the drama and he had lately written, in French, a work on the Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left him with a surprising enthusiasm for Scribe, and this was the model he proposed for the regeneration of the Chinese drama. It was curious to hear him demand that the drama should be exciting. He was asking for the pièce bien faite, the scène  à faire, the curtain, the unexpected, the dramatic. The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate symbolism, has been what we are always crying for, the theatre of ideas; and apparently it has been perishing of dullness. It is true that ideas do not grow on every gooseberry bush, they need novelty to make them appetising, and when they are stale they stink as badly as stale fish.

But then, remembering the description on the card, I asked my friend what books, English and French, he recommended his students to read in order to familiarise themselves with the current literature of the day. He hesitated a little.

“I really don’t know,” he said at last, “you see, that’s not my branch, I only have to do with drama; but if you’re interested I’ll ask my colleague who lectures on European fiction to call on you.”

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“Have you read Les Avariés?” he asked. “I think that is the finest play that has been produced in Europe since Scribe.”

“Do you?” I said politely.

“Yes, you see our students are greatly interested in sociological questions.”

It is my misfortune that I am not, and so as deftly as I could I led the conversation to Chinese philosophy which I was desultorily reading. I mentioned Chuang-Tzu. The professor’s jaw fell.

“He lived a very long time ago,” he said, perplexed.

“So did Aristotle,” I murmured pleasantly.

“I have never studied the philosophers,” he said, “but of course we have at our university a professor of Chinese philosophy and if you are interested in that I will ask him to come and call on you.”

It is useless to argue with a pedagogue, as the Spirit of the Ocean (somewhat portentously to my mind) remarked to the Spirit of the River and I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor was interested in its technique and indeed was preparing a course of lectures on the subject, which he seemed to think both complicated and abstruse. He flattered me by asking me what were the secrets of the craft.

“I know only two,” I answered. “One is to have common-sense and the other is to stick to the point.”

“Does it require no more than that to write a play?” he inquired with a shade of dismay in his tone.

“You want a certain knack,” I allowed, “but no more than to play billiards.”

“They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America,” said he.

“The Americans are an extremely practical people,” I answered. “I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs.”

“I do not think I quite understand you.”

“If you can’t write a play no one can teach  you and if you can it’s as easy as falling off a log.”

Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

“But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?”

“They didn’t, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush.”

“You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play.”

“It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last in despair used the very same that he had used before.”

“What do you mean?” the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream. “I do not understand you at all.”

“Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, then some one comes (from the mountains or from over the sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets a cold in the head and the curtain falls.”

I thought it just possible that the shadow of a smile might lighten for a moment the professor’s grave face, but he knit his brows and gazed for two minutes into space. Then he rose.

“I will peruse the works of Henrik Ibsen once more with that point of view in mind,” he said.

I did not omit before he left to put him the question which one earnest student of the drama always puts another when peradventure they meet. I asked him, namely, what he thought was the future of the theatre. I had an idea that he said, oh hell, but on reflection I believe his exclamation must have been, ô ciel! He sighed, he shook his head, he threw up his elegant hands; he looked the picture of dejection. It was certainly a comfort to find that all thoughtful people considered the drama’s state in China no less desperate than all thoughtful people consider it in England.

XLIX

THE TAIPAN

No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion, with its wide verandahs and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school (he was at St. Paul’s), with his father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate his evening meal. He always dressed and whether he was alone or  not he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entrée, roast, sweet and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he had a guest.

He had indeed gone far. That was why he did not care to go home now, he had not been to England for ten years, and he took his leave in Japan or Vancouver where he was sure of meeting old friends from the China coast. He knew no one at home. His sisters had married in their own station, their husbands were clerks and their sons were clerks; there was nothing between him and them; they bored him. He satisfied the claims of relationship by sending them every Christmas a piece of fine silk, some elaborate embroidery, or a case of tea. He was not a mean man and as long as his mother lived he had made her an allowance. But when the time came for him to retire he had no intention of going back to England, he had seen too many men do that and he knew how often it was a failure; he meant to take a house near the race-course in Shanghai: what with bridge and his ponies and golf he expected to get through the rest of his life very comfortably. But he had a good many years before he need think of retiring. In another five or six Higgins would be going home and then he would take  charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile he was very happy where he was, he could save money, which you couldn’t do in Shanghai, and have a good time into the bargain. This place had another advantage over Shanghai: he was the most prominent man in the community and what he said went. Even the consul took care to keep on the right side of him. Once a consul and he had been at loggerheads and it was not he who had gone to the wall. The taipan thrust out his jaw pugnaciously as he thought of the incident.

But he smiled, for he felt in an excellent humour. He was walking back to his office from a capital luncheon at the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank. They did you very well there. The food was first rate and there was plenty of liquor. He had started with a couple of cocktails, then he had some excellent sauterne and he had finished up with two glasses of port and some fine old brandy. He felt good. And when he left he did a thing that was rare with him; he walked. His bearers with his chair kept a few paces behind him in case he felt inclined to slip into it, but he enjoyed stretching his legs. He did not get enough exercise these days. Now that he was too heavy to ride it was difficult to get exercise. But if he was too heavy to ride he could still keep ponies, and as he strolled along in the balmy air he thought of the spring meeting. He had a couple of griffins that he had hopes of and one of the lads in his office had turned out a fine jockey (he must see they didn’t sneak him away, old Higgins in Shanghai  would give a pot of money to get him over there) and he ought to pull off two or three races. He flattered himself that he had the finest stable in the city. He pouted his broad chest like a pigeon. It was a beautiful day, and it was good to be alive.

He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood there, neat and orderly, as an evident sign of the community’s opulence. He never passed the cemetery without a little glow of pride. He was pleased to be an Englishman. For the cemetery stood in a place, valueless when it was chosen, which with the increase of the city’s affluence was now worth a great deal of money. It had been suggested that the graves should be moved to another spot and the land sold for building, but the feeling of the community was against it. It gave the taipan a sense of satisfaction to think that their dead rested on the most valuable site on the island. It showed that there were things they cared for more than money. Money be blowed! When it came to “the things that mattered” (this was a favourite phrase with the taipan) well, one remembered that money wasn’t everything.

And now he thought he would take a stroll through. He looked at the graves. They were neatly kept and the pathways were free from weeds. There was a look of prosperity. And as he sauntered along he read the names on the tombstones. Here were three side by side; the captain, the first mate, and the second mate of the barque Mary Baxter, who had all perished together in the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well.  There was a little group of two missionaries, their wives and children, who had been massacred during the Boxer troubles. Shocking thing that had been! Not that he took much stock in missionaries; but, hang it all, one couldn’t have these damned Chinese massacring them. Then he came to a cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap, Edward Mulock, but he couldn’t stand his liquor, drank himself to death, poor devil, at twenty-five: the taipan had known a lot of them do that; there were several more neat crosses with a man’s name on them and the age, twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven; it was always the same story; they had come out to China: they had never seen so much money before, they were good fellows and they wanted to drink with the rest: they couldn’t stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You had to have a strong head and a fine constitution to drink drink for drink on the China coast. Of course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly help a smile when he thought how many of those young fellows he had drunk underground. And there was a death that had been useful, a fellow in his own firm, senior to him and a clever chap too: if that fellow had lived he might not have been taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs. Turner, Violet Turner, she had been a pretty little thing, he had had quite an affair with her; he had been devilish cut up when she died. He looked at her age on the tombstone. She’d be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought of all those  dead people a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He had beaten them all. They were dead and he was alive, and by George he’d scored them off. His eyes collected in one picture all those crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his hands.

“No one ever thought I was a fool,” he muttered.

He had a feeling of good-natured contempt for the gibbering dead. Then, as he strolled along, he came suddenly upon two coolies digging a grave. He was astonished, for he had not heard that anyone in the community was dead.

“Who the devil’s that for?” he said aloud.

The coolies did not even look at him, they went on with their work, standing in the grave, deep down, and they shovelled up heavy clods of earth. Though he had been so long in China he knew no Chinese, in his day it was not thought necessary to learn the damned language, and he asked the coolies in English whose grave they were digging. They did not understand. They answered him in Chinese and he cursed them for ignorant fools. He knew that Mrs. Broome’s child was ailing and it might have died, but he would certainly have heard of it, and besides that wasn’t a child’s grave, it was a man’s and a big man’s too. It was uncanny. He wished he hadn’t gone into that cemetery; he hurried out and stepped into his chair. His good humour had all gone and there was an uneasy frown on his face. The moment he got back to his office he called to his number two:

“I say, Peters, who’s dead, d’you know?”

But Peters knew nothing. The taipan was puzzled. He called one of the native clerks and sent him to the cemetery to ask the coolies. He began to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said the coolies had gone and there was no one to ask. The taipan began to feel vaguely annoyed: he did not like things to happen of which he knew nothing. His own boy would know, his boy always knew everything, and he sent for him; but the boy had heard of no death in the community.

“I knew no one was dead,” said the taipan irritably. “But what’s the grave for?”

He told the boy to go to the overseer of the cemetery and find out what the devil he had dug a grave for when no one was dead.

“Let me have a whisky and soda before you go,” he added, as the boy was leaving the room.

He did not know why the sight of the grave had made him uncomfortable. But he tried to put it out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk the whisky, and he finished his work. He went upstairs and turned over the pages of Punch. In a few minutes he would go to the club and play a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it would ease his mind to hear what his boy had to say and he waited for his return. In a little while the boy came back and he brought the overseer with him.

“What are you having a grave dug for?” he asked the overseer point blank. “Nobody’s dead.”

“I no dig glave,” said the man.

“What the devil do you mean by that? There were two coolies digging a grave this afternoon.”

The two Chinese looked at one another. Then the boy said they had been to the cemetery together. There was no new grave there.

The taipan only just stopped himself from speaking.

“But damn it all, I saw it myself,” were the words on the tip of his tongue.

But he did not say them. He grew very red as he choked them down. The two Chinese looked at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his breath failed him.

“All right. Get out,” he gasped.

But as soon as they were gone he shouted for the boy again, and when he came, maddeningly impassive, he told him to bring some whisky. He rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief. His hand trembled when he lifted the glass to his lips. They could say what they liked, but he had seen the grave. Why, he could hear still the dull thud as the coolies threw the spadefuls of earth on the ground above them. What did it mean? He could feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at ease. But he pulled himself together. It was all nonsense. If there was no grave there it must have been an hallucination. The best thing he could do was to go to the club, and if he ran across the doctor he would ask him to give him a look over.

Everyone in the club looked just the same as ever. He did not know why he should have expected  them to look different. It was a comfort. These men, living for many years with one another lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little idiosyncrasies — one of them hummed incessantly while he played bridge, another insisted on drinking beer through a straw — and these tricks which had so often irritated the taipan now gave him a sense of security. He needed it, for he could not get out of his head that strange sight he had seen; he played bridge very badly; his partner was censorious, and the taipan lost his temper. He thought the men were looking at him oddly. He wondered what they saw in him that was unaccustomed.

Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in the club any longer. As he went out he saw the doctor reading The Times in the reading-room, but he could not bring himself to speak to him. He wanted to see for himself whether that grave was really there and stepping into his chair he told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You couldn’t have an hallucination twice, could you? And besides, he would take the overseer in with him and if the grave was not there he wouldn’t see it, and if it was he’d give the overseer the soundest thrashing he’d ever had. But the overseer was nowhere to be found. He had gone out and taken the keys with him. When the taipan found he could not get into the cemetery he felt suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair and told his bearers to take him home. He would lie down for half an hour before dinner. He was  tired out. That was it. He had heard that people had hallucinations when they were tired. When his boy came in to put out his clothes for dinner it was only by an effort of will that he got up. He had a strong inclination not to dress that evening, but he resisted it: he made it a rule to dress, he had dressed every evening for twenty years and it would never do to break his rule. But he ordered a bottle of champagne with his dinner and that made him feel more comfortable. Afterwards he told the boy to bring him the best brandy. When he had drunk a couple of glasses of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be damned! He went to the billiard room and practised a few difficult shots. There could not be much the matter with him when his eye was so sure. When he went to bed he sank immediately into a sound sleep.

But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely. He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it was an hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the night watchman going his rounds. It broke upon the stillness of the night so harshly that it made him jump out of his skin. And then terror seized him. He felt a horror of the winding multitudinous streets of the Chinese city, and there was something ghastly and terrible in the convoluted roofs of the temples with their devils grimacing and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted his nostrils. And the people. Those  myriads of blue clad coolies, and the beggars in their filthy rags, and the merchants and the magistrates, sleek, smiling, and inscrutable, in their long black gowns. They seemed to press upon him with menace. He hated the country. China. Why had he ever come? He was panic-stricken now. He must get out. He would not stay another year, another month. What did he care about Shanghai?

“Oh, my God,” he cried, “if I were only safely back in England.”

He wanted to go home. If he had to die he wanted to die in England. He could not bear to be buried among all these yellow men, with their slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted to be buried at home, not in that grave he had seen that day. He could never rest there. Never. What did it matter what people thought? Let them think what they liked. The only thing that mattered was to get away while he had the chance.

He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the firm and said he had discovered he was dangerously ill. He must be replaced. He could not stay longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go home at once.

They found the letter in the morning clenched in the taipan’s hand. He had slipped down between the desk and the chair. He was stone dead.

L

METEMPSYCHOSIS

He was decently though far from richly clad. He had a small round cap of black silk on his head, and on his feet black silk shoes. His robe was pale green of the flowered silk which is made in Chia-ting, and over it he wore a short black jacket. He was an old man, with a white beard, long and for a Chinese full; his broad face, much wrinkled, especially between the brows, was benign, and his large horn spectacles did not conceal the friendliness of his eyes. He had all the look of one of those sages whom you may see in an old picture seated by a bamboo grove at the foot of a great rocky mountain contemplating the Eternal Way. But now his face bore an expression of great annoyance and his kindly eyes were frowning, for he was engaged in the singular occupation (for a man of his appearance) of leading a little black pig along the causeway between the flooded padi fields. And the little black pig, with sudden jerks, with unexpected dodging, ran hither and thither, in every direction but that in which the old gentleman wished to go. He pulled the string violently, but the pig, squealing, refused to follow; he addressed  it in terms of expostulation and of abuse, but the little pig sat on his haunches and looked at him with malicious eyes. Then I knew that in the Tang dynasty the old gentleman had been a philosopher who had juggled with facts, as philosophers will, making them suit the whims which he called his theories; and now, after who knows how many existences, he was expiating his sins in suffering in his turn the stubborn tyranny of the facts which he had outraged.

LI

THE FRAGMENT

When you travel in China I think nothing amazes you more than the passion for decoration which possesses the Chinese. It is not astonishing that you should find decoration in memorial arches or in temples; here the occasion for it is obvious; and it is natural enough to find it in furniture; nor does it surprise, though it delights you, to discover it on the commoner objects of household use. The pewter pot is enriched with a graceful design; the coolie’s rice bowl has its rough but not inelegant adornment. You may fancy that the Chinese craftsman does not look upon an article as complete till by line or colour he has broken the plainness of a surface. He will even print an arabesque on the paper he uses for wrapping. But it is more unexpected when you see the elaborate embellishment of a shop-front, the splendid carving, gilt or relieved with gold, of its counter, and the intricate sculpture of the signboard. It may be that this magnificence serves as an advertisement; but it does so only because the passer-by, the possible customer, takes pleasure in elegance; and you are apt to think that the  tradesman who owns the shop takes pleasure in it too. When he sits at his door, smoking his water pipe and through his great horn spectacles reading a newspaper, his eyes must rest with good humour sometimes on the fantastic ornamentation. On the counter, in a long-necked pot, stands a solitary carnation.

You will find the same delight in the ornate in the poorest villages where the severity of a door is mitigated by a charming piece of carving, and where the trellis of the windows forms a complicated and graceful pattern. You can seldom cross a bridge, in however unfrequented a district, without seeing in it the hand of an artist. The stones are so laid as to make an intricate decoration, and it seems as though these singular people judged with a careful eye whether a flat bridge or an arched one would fit in best with the surrounding scene. The balustrade is ornamented with lions or with dragons. I remember a bridge that must have been placed just where it was for the pure delight of its beauty rather than for any useful purpose, since, though broad enough for a carriage and pair to pass over it, it served only to connect a narrow path that led from one ragged village to another. The nearest town was thirty miles away. The broad river, narrowing at this point, flowed between two green hills, and nut trees grew on the bank. The bridge had no balustrade. It was constructed of immense slabs of granite and rested on five piers; the middle pier consisted of a huge and fantastic dragon with a  long and scaly tail. On the sides of the outer slabs, running the whole length of the bridge, was cut in very low relief a pattern of an unimaginable lightness, delicacy and grace.

But though the Chinese take such careful pains to avoid fatiguing your eye, with sure taste making the elaborateness of a decoration endurable by contrasting it with a plain surface, in the end weariness overcomes you. Their exuberance bewilders. You cannot refuse your admiration to the ingenuity with which they so diversify the ideas that occupy them as to give you an impression of changing fantasy, but the fact is plain that the ideas are few. The Chinese artist is like a fiddler who with infinite skill should play infinite variations upon a single tune.

Now, I happened upon a French doctor who had been in practice for many years in the city in which I then found myself; and he was a collector of porcelain, bronze, and embroidery. He took me to see his things. They were beautiful, but they were a trifle monotonous. I admired perfunctorily. Suddenly I came upon the fragment of a bust.

“But that is Greek,” I said, in surprise.

“Do you think so? I am glad to hear you say it.”

Head and arms were gone, and the statue, for such it had been, was broken off just above the waist, but there was a breastplate, with a sun in the middle of it, and in relief Perseus killing the dragon. It was a fragment of no great importance,  but it was Greek, and perhaps because I was surfeited with Chinese beauty it affected me strangely. It spoke in a tongue with which I was familiar. It rested my heart. I passed my hands over its age-worn surface with a delight I was myself surprised at. I was like a sailor who, wandering in a tropic sea, has known the lazy loveliness of coral islands and the splendours of the cities of the East, but finds himself once more in the dingy alleys of a Channel port. It is cold and grey and sordid, but it is England.

The doctor — he was a little bald man, with gleaming eyes and an excitable manner — rubbed his hands.

“Do you know it was found within thirty miles of here, on this side of the Tibetan frontier?”

“Found!” I exclaimed. “Found where?”

“Mon Dieu, in the ground. It had been buried for two thousand years. They found this and several fragments more, one or two complete statues, I believe, but they were broken up and only this remained.”

It was incredible that Greek statues should have been discovered in so remote a spot.

“But what is your explanation?” I asked.

“I think this was a statue of Alexander,” he said.

“By George!”

It was a thrill. Was it possible that one of the commanders of the Macedonian, after the expedition into India, had found his way into this mysterious corner of China under the shadow of the  mountains of Tibet? The doctor wanted to show me Manchu dresses, but I could not give them my attention. What bold adventurer was he who had penetrated so far towards the East to found a kingdom? There he had built a temple to Aphrodite and a temple to Dionysus, and in the theatre actors had sung the Antigone and in his halls at night bards had recited the Odyssey. And he and his men listening may have felt themselves the peers of the old seaman and his followers. What magnificence did that stained fragment of marble call up and what fabulous adventures! How long had the kingdom lasted and what tragedy marked its fall? Ah, just then I could not look at Tibetan banners or celadon cups; for I saw the Parthenon, severe and lovely, and beyond, serene, the blue Ægean.

LII

ONE OF THE BEST

I could never remember his name, but whenever he was spoken of in the port he was always described as one of the best. He was a man of fifty perhaps, thin and rather tall, dapper and well-dressed, with a small, neat head and sharp features. His blue eyes were good-natured and jovial behind his pince-nez. He was of a cheerful disposition, and he had a vein of banter which was not ineffective. He could turn out the sort of jokes that make men standing at the club bar laugh heartily, and he could be agreeably malicious, but without ill-nature, about any member of the community who did not happen to be present. His humour was of the same nature as that of the comedian in a musical play. When they spoke of him they often said:

“You know, I wonder he never went on the stage. He’d have made a hit. One of the best.”

He was always ready to have a drink with you and no sooner was your glass empty than he was prompt with the China phrase:

“Ready for the other half?”

But he did not drink more than was good for him.

“Oh, he’s got his head screwed on his shoulders the right way,” they said. “One of the best.”

When the hat was passed round for some charitable object he could always be counted on to give as much as anyone else, and he was always ready to go in for a golf competition or a billiards tournament. He was a bachelor.

“Marriage is no use to a man who lives in China,” he said. “He has to send his wife away every summer and then when the kids are beginning to be interesting they have to go home. It costs a deuce of a lot of money and you get nothing out of it.”

But he was always willing to do a good turn to any woman in the community. He was number one at Jardine’s, and he often had the power to make himself useful. He had been in China for thirty years, and he prided himself on not speaking a word of Chinese. He never went into the Chinese city. His compradore was Chinese, and some of the clerks, his boys of course, and the chair coolies; but they were the only Chinese he had anything to do with, and quite enough too.

“I hate the country, I hate the people,” he said. “As soon as I’ve saved enough money I mean to clear out.”

He laughed.

“Do you know, last time I was home I found everyone cracked over Chinese junk, pictures and porcelain, and stuff. Don’t talk to me about Chinese things, I said to ’em. I never want to see anything Chinese as long as I live.”

He turned to me.

“I’ll tell you what, I don’t believe I’ve got a single Chinese thing in my house.”

But if you wanted him to talk to you about London he was prepared to do so by the hour. He knew all the musical comedies that had been played for twenty years and at the distance of nine thousand miles he was able to keep up with the doings of Miss Lily Elsie and Miss Elsie Janis. He played the piano and he had a pleasing voice; it required little persuasion to induce him to sit down and sing you the popular ditties he had heard when last he was at home. It was quite singular to me, the unfathomable frivolity of this grey-haired man; it was even a little uncanny. But people applauded him loudly when he finished.

“He’s priceless, isn’t he?” they said. “Oh, one of the best.”

LIII

THE SEA-DOG

Ships’ captains for the most part are very dull men. Their conversation is of freights and cargoes. They have seen little more in the ports they visit than their agent’s office, the bar which their kind frequents, and the bawdy houses. They owe the glamour of romance which their connection with the sea has cast over them to the imagination of the landsman. To them the sea is a means of livelihood and they know it, as an engine-driver knows his engine, from a standpoint which is aridly practical. They are men, working men, of a narrow outlook, with small education for the most part and little culture; they are all of a piece, and they have neither subtlety nor imagination. Straightforward, courageous, honest, and reliable, they stand four-square on the immutability of the obvious; and they are definite: they are placed in their surroundings like the objects in a stereoscopic photograph so that you seem to see all round them. They offer themselves to you with salient traits.

But no one could have adhered less to type than Captain Boots. He was the master of a little  Chinese steamer on the Upper Yangtze and because I was his only passenger we spent a good deal of time in one another’s company. But though he was fluent of speech, garrulous even, I see him shadowly; and he remains in my mind indistinctly. I suppose it is on account of his elusiveness that he engages my imagination. There was certainly nothing elusive in his appearance. He was a big man, six foot two, powerfully built, with large features and a red, friendly face. When he laughed he showed a row of handsome gold teeth. He was very bald, and clean-shaven; but he had the most bushy, abundant, and aggressive eyebrows that I have ever seen, and under them mild blue eyes. He was a Dutchman and though he had left Holland when he was eight, he still spoke with an accent. He could not pronounce th, but always made it d. His father, a fisherman who sailed his own schooner on the Zuyder Zee, hearing that fishing was good in Newfoundland, had set out with his wife and his two sons across the broad Atlantic. After some years there and in Hudson’s Bay — all this was hard on half a century ago — they had sailed round the Horn for the Behring Straits. They hunted seal until the law stepped in to save the beasts they were exterminating, and then Boots, a man now and a brave one, God knows, sailed here and there, as third, then as second mate, on sailing vessels. He had been almost all his life in sail and now on a steamer could not make himself at home.

“It’s only in a sailing boat you get comfort,” he said. “Dere’s no comfort anywhere when you got steam.”

He had been all along the coast of South America after nitrates, then to the west coast of Africa, then again, fishing cod off the coast of Maine, to America; and after that with cargoes of salt fish to Spain and Portugal. A tavern acquaintance in Manila suggested that he should try the Chinese Customs. He went to Hong-Kong, where he was taken on as a tide-waiter, and presently was put in command of a steam launch. He spent three years, chasing the opium smugglers, and then, having saved a little money, built himself a forty-five ton schooner with which he determined to go to the Behring Straits and try his luck again with the seal fishery.

“But I guess my crew got scared,” he said. “When I got to Shanghai they deserted and I couldn’t get no oder, so I had to sell de boat and I shipped on a vessel what was going to Vancouver.”

It was then he first left the sea. He met a man who was pushing a patent hay-fork and this he agreed to take round the States. It was a queer occupation for a sailor-man, and it was not a successful one, for at Salt Lake City, the firm that employed him having gone bankrupt, he found himself stranded. Somehow or other he got back to Vancouver, but he was taken with the idea of life ashore, and he found work with an estate-agent. It was his duty to take the purchasers of  land to their plots and if they were not satisfied persuade them that they need not regret their bargain.

“We sold one fellow a farm on de side of a mountain,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling at the recollection, “an’ it was so steep dat de chickens had one leg longer dan de oder.”

After five years he had the idea that he would like to go back to China. He had no difficulty in getting a job as mate of a ship sailing west and soon he was at the old life once more. Since then he had been on most of the China runs, from Vladivostok to Shanghai, from Amoy to Manila, and on all the big rivers; on steamers now, rising from second to first mate, and at last, on Chinese owned ships, to master. He talked willingly of his plans for the future. He had been in China long enough, and he hankered after a farm on the Fraser River. He would build himself a boat and do a bit of fishing, salmon and halibut.

“It’s time I settled down,” he said. “Fifty-dree years I’ve been to sea. An’ I shouldn’t wonder but what I did a bit of boat building too. I’m not one to stick to one ding.”

There he was right and this restlessness of his translated itself into a curious indecision of character. There was something fluid about him so that you did not know where to take hold of him. He reminded you of a scene of mist and rain in a Japanese print where the design, barely suggested, almost escapes you. He had a peculiar gentleness  which was somewhat unexpected in the rough old salt.

“I don’t want to offend anyone,” he said. “Treat ’em kindly, dat’s what I try to do. If people won’t do what you want talk to ’em nicely, persuade ’em. Dere’s no need to be nasty. Try what coaxing’ll do.”

It was a principle which it was unusual to find used with the Chinese, and I do not know that it answered very well, for after some difficulty he would come into the cabin, wave his hands, and say:

“I can do noding wid dem. Dey won’t listen to reason.”

And then his moderation looked very like weakness. But he was no fool. He had a sense of humour. At one place we were drawing over seven feet and since the river at its shallowest was barely that and the course was dangerous the harbour authorities would not give us our papers till part of the cargo was unloaded. It was the ship’s last trip and she was carrying the pay of regiments stationed several days down stream. The military governor refused to let the ship start unless the bullion was taken.

“I guess I got to do what you tell me,” said Captain Boots to the harbour master.

“You don’t get your papers till I see the five foot mark above the water,” answered the harbour master.

“I’ll tell the compradore to take out some of dat silver.”

He took the harbour master up to the Customs’ Club and stood him drinks while this was being done. He drank with him for four hours, and when he returned he walked as steadily as when he went. But the harbour-master was drunk.

“Ah, I see dey’ve got it down two foot,” said Captain Boots. “Dat’s all right den.”

The harbour-master looked at the numbers on the ship’s side and sure enough the five foot mark was at the water’s edge.

“That’s good,” he said. “And now you can go.”

“I’ll be off right away,” said the captain.

Not a pound of cargo had been removed, but an astute Chinaman had neatly repainted the numbers.

And later when mutinous regiments with an eye on the silver we carried sought to prevent us from leaving one of the riverside cities he showed an agreeable firmness. His equable temper was tried and he said:

“No one’s going to make me stay where I don’t want to. I’m de master of dis ship and I’m de man what gives de orders. I’m going.”

The agitated compradore said the military would fire if we attempted to move. An officer uttered a command and the soldiers, going down on one knee, levelled their rifles. Captain Boots looked at them.

“Put down de bullet proof screen,” he said. “I tell you I’m going and de Chinese army can go to hell.”

He gave his orders to raise the anchor and at the same time the officer gave the order to fire. Captain Boots stood on his bridge, a somewhat grotesque figure, for in his old blue jersey, with his red face and burly frame, he looked the very image of those ancient fishermen that you see lounging about Grimsby docks, and he rang his bell. We steamed out slowly to the spatter of rifle shots.

LIV

THE QUESTION

They took me to the temple. It stood on the side of a hill with a semi-circle of tawny mountains behind it, staging it, as it were, with a formal grandeur; and they pointed out to me with what exquisite art the series of buildings climbed the hill till you reached the final edifice, a jewel of white marble encircled by the trees; for the Chinese architect sought to make his creation an ornament to nature and he used the accidents of the landscape to complete his decorative scheme. They pointed out to me how cunningly the trees were planted to contrast with the marble of a gateway, to give an agreeable shadow here, or there to serve as a background; and they made me remark the admirable proportion of those great roofs, rising one beyond the other, in rich profusion, with the grace of flowers; and they showed me that the yellow tiles were of different hues so that the sensibility was not offended by an expanse of colour but amused and pleased by a subtle variety of tone. They showed me how the elaborate carving of a gateway was contrasted with a surface without adornment so that the eye was not wearied. All  this they showed me as we walked through elegant courtyards, over bridges which were a miracle of grace, through temples with strange gods, dark and gesticulating; but when I asked them what was the spiritual state which had caused all this mass of building to be made, they could not tell me.

LV

THE SINOLOGUE

He is a tall man, rather stout, flabby as though he does not take enough exercise, with a red, clean-shaven, broad face and grey hair. He talks very quickly, in a nervous manner, with a voice not quite big enough for his body. He lives in a temple just outside the city gate, inhabiting the guest chambers, and three Buddhist priests, with a tiny acolyte, tend the temple and conduct the rites. There is a little Chinese furniture in the rooms and a vast number of books, but no comfort. It is cold and the study in which we sit is insufficiently warmed by a petroleum stove.

He knows more Chinese than any man in China. He has been working for ten years on a dictionary which will supersede that of a noted scholar whom for a quarter of a century he has personally disliked. He is thus benefiting sinological studies and satisfying a private grudge. He has all the manner of a don and you feel that eventually he will be professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and then at last exactly in his place. He is a man of wider culture than most sinologues, who may know Chinese, and this you must take on  trust, but who, it is lamentably obvious, know nothing else; and his conversation upon Chinese thought and literature has in consequence a fullness and a variety which you do not often find among students of the language. Because he has immersed himself in his particular pursuits and has cared nothing for racing and shooting the Europeans think him queer. They look upon him with the suspicion and awe with which human beings always regard those who do not share their tastes. They suggest that he is not quite sane and some accuse him of smoking opium. It is the charge which is always brought against the white man who has sought to familiarise himself with the civilisation in which he is to pass the greater part of his career. You have only to spend a little while in that apartment bare of the most common luxury to know that this is a man who leads a life wholly of the spirit.

But it is a specialised life. Art and beauty seem not to touch him, and as I listen to him talk so sympathetically of the Chinese poets I cannot help asking myself if the best things have not after all slipped through his fingers. Here is a man who has touched reality only through the printed page. The tragic splendour of the lotus moves him only when its loveliness is enshrined in the verse of Li Po and the laughter of demure Chinese girls stirs his blood but in the perfection of an exquisitely chiselled quatrain.

LVI

THE VICE-CONSUL

His bearers set down his chair in the yamen and unfastened the apron which protected him from the pouring rain. He put out his head, like a bird looking out of its nest, and then his long thin body and finally his thin long legs. He stood for a moment as if he did not quite know what to do with himself. He was a very young man and his long limbs with their ungainliness somehow added to the callowness of his air. His round face (his head looked too small for the length of his body) with its fresh complexion was quite boyish, and his pleasant brown eyes were ingenuous and candid. The sense of importance which his official position gave him (it was not long since he had been no more than a student-interpreter) struggled with his native shyness. He gave his card to the judge’s secretary and was led by him into an inner court and asked to sit down. It was cold and draughty and the vice-consul was glad of his heavy waterproof. A ragged attendant brought tea and cigarettes. The secretary, an emaciated youth in a very shabby  black gown, had been a student at Harvard and was glad to show off his fluent English.

Then the judge came in, and the vice-consul stood up. The judge was a portly gentleman in heavily wadded clothes, with a large smiling face and gold-rimmed spectacles. They sat down and sipped their tea and smoked American cigarettes. They chatted affably. The judge spoke no English, but the vice-consul’s Chinese was fresh in his mind and he could not help thinking that he acquitted himself creditably. Presently an attendant appeared and said a few words to the judge, and the judge very courteously asked the vice-consul if he was ready for the business which had brought him. The door into the outer court was thrown open and the judge, walking through, took his place on a large seat at a table that stood at the top of the steps. He did not smile now. He had assumed instinctively the gravity proper to his office and in his walk, notwithstanding his obesity, there was an impressive dignity. The vice-consul, obeying a polite gesture, took a seat by his side. The secretary stood at the end of the table. Then the outer gateway was flung wide (it seemed to the vice-consul that there was nothing so dramatic as the opening of a door) and quickly, with an odd sort of flurry, the criminal walked in. He walked to the centre of the courtyard and stood still, facing his judge. On each side of him walked a soldier in khaki. He was a young man and the vice-consul thought that he could be no older than  himself. He wore only a pair of cotton trousers and a cotton singlet. They were faded but clean. He was bare-headed and bare-foot. He looked no different from any of the thousands of coolies in their monotonous blue that you passed every day in the crowded streets of the city. The judge and the criminal faced one another in silence. The vice-consul looked at the criminal’s face, but then he looked down quickly: he did not want to see what was there to be seen so plainly. He felt suddenly embarrassed. And looking down he noticed how small the man’s feet were, shapely and slender; his hands were tied behind his back. He was slightly built, of the middle height, a lissome creature that suggested the wild animal, and standing on those beautiful feet of his there was in his carriage a peculiar grace. But the vice-consul’s eyes were drawn back unwillingly to the oval, smooth, and unlined face. It was livid. The vice-consul had often read of faces that were green with terror and he had thought it but a fanciful expression, and here he saw it. It startled him. It made him feel ashamed. And in the eyes too, eyes that did not slant as the Chinese eye is wrongly supposed always to do, but were straight, in the eyes that seemed unnaturally large and bright, fixed on those of the judge, was a terror that was horrible to see. But when the judge put him a question — trial and sentence were over and he had been brought there that morning only for purposes of identification — he answered in a loud plain voice, boldly. However his body might betray  him he was still master of his will. The judge gave a brief order, and, flanked by his two soldiers, the man marched out. The judge and the vice-consul rose and walked to the gateway, where their chairs awaited them. Here stood the criminal with his guard. Notwithstanding his tied hands he smoked a cigarette. A squad of little soldiers had been sheltering themselves under the overhanging roof, and on the appearance of the judge the officer in charge made them form up. The judge and the vice-consul settled themselves in their chairs. The officer gave an order and the squad stepped out. A couple of yards behind them walked the criminal. Then came the judge in his chair and finally the vice-consul.

They went quickly through the busy streets and the shopkeepers gave the procession an incurious stare. The wind was cold and the rain fell steadily. The criminal in his cotton singlet must have been wet through. He walked with a firm step, his head held high, jauntily almost. It was some distance from the judge’s yamen to the city wall and to cover it took them nearly half an hour. Then they came to the city gate and went through it. Four men in ragged blue — they looked like peasants — were standing against the wall by the side of a poor coffin, rough hewn and unpainted. The criminal gave it a glance as he passed by. The judge and the vice-consul dismounted from their chairs and the officer halted his soldiers. The rice fields began at the city wall. The criminal was led to a pathway between two patches and  told to kneel down. But the officer did not think the spot suitable. He told the man to rise. He walked a yard or two and knelt down again. A soldier was detached from the squad and took up his position behind the prisoner, three feet from him perhaps; he raised his gun; the officer gave the word of command; he fired. The criminal fell forward and he moved a little, convulsively. The officer went up to him, and seeing that he was not quite dead emptied two barrels of his revolver into the body. Then he formed up his soldiers once more. The judge gave the vice-consul a smile, but it was a grimace rather than a smile; it distorted painfully that fat good-humoured face.

They stepped into their chairs; but at the city gate their ways parted; the judge bowed the vice-consul a courteous farewell. The vice-consul was carried back towards the consulate through the streets, crowded and tortuous, where life was going on just as usual. And as he went along quickly, for the consular bearers were fine fellows, his mind distracted a little by their constant shouts to make way, he thought how terrible it was to make an end of life deliberately: it seemed an immense responsibility to destroy what was the result of innumerable generations. The human race has existed so long and each one of us is here as the result of an infinite series of miraculous events. But at the same time, puzzling him, he had a sense of the triviality of life. One more or less mattered so little. But just as he reached the consulate he looked at his watch, he had no idea it was so late,  and he told the bearers to take him to the club. It was time for a cocktail and by heaven he could do with one. A dozen men were standing at the bar when he went in. They knew on what errand he had been that morning.

“Well,” they said, “did you see the blighter shot?”

“You bet I did,” he said, in a loud and casual voice.

“Everything go off all right?”

“He wriggled a bit.” He turned to the bartender. “Same as usual, John.”

LVII

A CITY BUILT ON A ROCK

They say of it that the dogs bark when peradventure the sun shines there. It is a grey and gloomy city, shrouded in mist, for it stands upon its rock where two great rivers meet so that it is washed on all sides but one by turbid, rushing waters. The rock is like the prow of an ancient galley and seems, as though possessed of a strange unnatural life, all tremulous with effort; it is as if it were ever on the point of forging into the tumultuous stream. Rugged mountains hem the city round about.

Outside the walls bedraggled houses are built on piles, and here, when the river is low, a hazardous population lives on the needs of the watermen; for at the foot of the rock a thousand junks are moored, wedged in with one another tightly, and men’s lives there have all the turbulence of the river. A steep and tortuous stairway leads to the great gate guarded by a temple, and up and down this all day long go the water coolies, with their dripping buckets; and from their splashing the stair and the street that leads from the gate are wet as though after heavy rain. It is difficult to walk on the level for more than a few minutes,  and there are as many steps as in the hill towns of the Italian Riviera. Because there is so little space the streets are pressed together, narrow and dark, and they wind continuously so that to find your way is like finding it in a labyrinth. The throng is as thick as the throng on a pavement in London when a theatre is emptying itself of its audience. You have to push your way through it, stepping aside every moment as chairs come by and coolies bearing their everlasting loads: itinerant sellers, selling almost anything that anyone can want to buy, jostle you as you pass.

The shops are wide open to the street, without windows or doors, and they are crowded too. They are like an exhibition of arts and crafts, and you may see what a street looked like in medieval England when each town made all that was necessary to its needs. The various industries are huddled together so that you will pass through a street of butchers where carcasses and entrails hang bloody on each side of you, with flies buzzing about them and mangy dogs prowling hungrily below; you will pass through a street where in each house there is a hand-loom and they are busily weaving cloth or silk. There are innumerable eating houses from which come heavy odours and here at all hours people are eating. Then, generally at a corner, you will see tea-houses, and here all day long again the tables are packed with men of all sorts drinking tea and smoking. The barbers ply their trade in the public view and you will see men leaning patiently on their crossed arms  while their heads are being shaved; others are having their ears cleaned, and some, a revolting spectacle, the inside of their eyelids scraped.

It is a city of a thousand noises. There are the peddlers who announce their presence by a wooden gong; the clappers of the blind musician or of the masseuse; the shrill falsetto of a man singing in a tavern; the loud beating of a gong from a house where a wedding or a funeral is being celebrated. There are the raucous shouts of the coolies and chair-bearers; the menacing whines of the beggars, caricatures of humanity, their emaciated limbs barely covered by filthy tatters and revolting with disease; the cracked melancholy of the bugler who incessantly practises a call he can never get; and then, like a bass to which all these are a barbaric melody, the insistent sound of conversation, of people laughing, quarrelling, joking, shouting, arguing, gossiping. It is a ceaseless din. It is extraordinary at first, then confusing, exasperating, and at last maddening. You long for a moment’s utter silence. It seems to you that it would be a voluptuous delight.

And then combining with the irksome throng and the din that exhausts your ears is a stench which time and experience enable you to distinguish into a thousand separate stenches. Your nostrils grow cunning. Foul odours beat upon your harassed nerves like the sound of uncouth instruments playing a horrible symphony.

You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about you. Upon your own people  sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really possess them. By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a fashion part of yourself. But these are as strange to you as you are strange to them. You have no clue to their mystery. For their likeness to yourself in so much does not help you; it serves rather to emphasize their difference. Someone attracts your attention, a pale youth with great horn spectacles and a book under his arm, whose studious look is pleasant, or an old man, wearing a hood, with a grey sparse beard and tired eyes: he looks like one of those sages that the Chinese artists painted in a rocky landscape or under Kang-hsi modelled in porcelain; but you might as well look at a brick wall. You have nothing to go upon, you do not know the first thing about them, and your imagination is baffled.

But when, reaching the top of the hill, you come once more to the crenellated walls that surround the city and go out through the frowning gate, you come to the graves. They stretch over the country, one mile, two miles, three, four, five, interminable green mounds, up and down the hills, with grey stones to which the people once a year come to offer libation and to tell the dead how fare the living whom they left behind; and they are as thickly crowded, the dead, as are the living in the city; and they seem to press upon the living as though they would force them into the turbid, swirling river. There is something menacing  about those serried ranks. It is as though they were laying siege to the city, with a sullen ruthlessness, biding their time; and as though in the end, encroaching irresistibly as fate, they would drive those seething throngs before them till the houses and the streets were covered by them, and the green mounds came down to the water gate. Then at last silence, silence would dwell there undisturbed.

They are uncanny, those green graves, they are terrifying. They seem to wait.

LVIII

A LIBATION TO THE GODS

She was an old woman, and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket, worn and patched, and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was very poor. She was not stout, but squarely built, and in her prime she must have done without effort the heavy work in which her life had been spent. She walked leisurely, with the sedate tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She came down to the harbour; it was crowded with painted junks; her eyes rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants; and then she set about her business. She put down her basket on the stones of the quay, at the water’s edge, and took from it a red candle. This she lit and fixed in a chink of the stones. Then she took several joss-sticks, held each of them for a moment in the flame of the candle and set them up around it. She took three tiny bowls and filled them with  a liquid that she had brought with her in a bottle and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper “shoes,” and unravelled them, so that they should burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and when it was well alight she took the three bowls and poured out some of their contents before the smouldering joss-sticks. She bowed herself three times and muttered certain words. She stirred the burning paper so that the flames burned brightly. Then she emptied the bowls on the stones and again bowed three times. No one took the smallest notice of her. She took a few more paper cash from her basket and flung them in the fire. Then without further ado, she took up her basket, and with the same leisurely, rather heavy tread, walked away. The gods were duly propitiated, and like an old peasant woman in France who has satisfactorily done her day’s housekeeping, she went about her business.

THE END

FRANCE AT WAR

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I

Since the outbreak of war many articles have appeared in the papers dealing with conditions in France, and the war correspondents have narrated what has been happening at the front from day to day, but I do not believe that we in England yet realize how intense the French effort is and with what determination the whole country has applied its energies to the prosecution of the struggle. Nor do I think we yet realize the spirit that has enabled the nation to accept with fortitude and resignation the sacrifices they have been called upon to make. I have spent six weeks making a survey of the activities of France; I have been to the front, I have visited a naval base; I have seen the factories in which are manufactured all things necessary for modern war, from great cannon to shirts for the troops; I have stayed in the districts to which the refugees from Alsace and Lorraine have been evacuated; I have talked to hundreds of people, from generals in command of army corps to the humble priests of country parishes; and though twice the time I had at my disposal would have been needed to give me even a bird’s-eye view of all that strenuous endeavour, I have at least learnt a variety of things which I think it would be well for the people of this country to know.

An acquaintance of mine was spending the summer holiday in his native village, and because he has an official position, he received, before the announcement was made to the public, a telegram telling him that the order for mobilization had been signed. He was walking to the post office when he met a poor woman whom he had known all his life. She was coming up from the lavoir — the public wash-house — with a load of washing that she was taking home to dry, and since he knew that her husband and both her sons would be called up, he stopped and told her the news. She shifted a little the heavy bundle on her shoulder, her eyes filled with tears and she said: “Nous ferons ce que nous pourrons; le Bon Dieu fera le reste” (“We will do what we can; God will do the rest”).

In 1914 the call to the colours was accepted with enthusiasm, men with flowers in their hats joined up shouting and singing; “À Berlin,” they cried; the cafés were full of excited, eager people; it seemed a thrilling adventure they were starting on. But this time the spirit was different. There was no enthusiasm; there was determination and an angry acquiescence, a firm courage and resignation. Everyone knows with what efficiency the mobilization was completed. But what many people are apt to forget is that the French nation has been mobilized three times in one year. In September of 1938, in the following March, and then again last August men were taken away from their peaceful avocations, the peasant from his field, the working man from his factory, the clerk from his office, all the able-bodied men of France between the ages of twenty and fifty, to put on their uniforms and assist the country in its peril. Three times in one year every activity in the pleasant land of France was dislocated. Is it surprising that they said: “It is too much”? Is it surprising that they said to one another: “This time we must make an end of it: il faut en finir”! They set their teeth. I think there are few men in France who do not share the common feeling that this time they are going to see it through. They are going to fight now to the bitter end, and they will never accept a peace that will expose them again, perhaps in a short time, to the affliction, loss and inconvenience of another mobilization. I have known the French all my life; I have never known them more calm, more resolute and more single-minded. They have a sufficient confidence in their leaders and a whole-hearted trust in the generals who command their great armies. Everyone who has lived long in France knows how bitter are its political antagonisms, and none can have seen without admiration the way in which, when the country was in peril, these were composed; but everyone who knows France must have seen it without surprise, for however bitter the quarrels that agitate the French in times of peace — and really the foreigner gets the impression that they are the breath of their nostrils — you can be certain that when the occasion demands it they will be set aside to be resumed at a more convenient moment, and each man will combine with his neighbour to defend the land which they all so proudly love. What ignorance of the French temper it showed when the Germans thought that in France they were fighting a house divided against itself!

I think what has most impressed me during the journeys I have taken from end to end of France is the immense, the splendid seriousness with which the French are confronting their ordeal. It is not honour and glory they are fighting for — that will come, but that is by the way — it is security. We live on an island in England, and, whatever the deluded Hitler may say, that is a great safeguard. It is many centuries since an invader has set foot upon ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’. It has been very different in France. Twice in seventy years the German armies have invaded it, laying waste the land, burning houses and farms, bombarding churches and cathedrals, destroying factories; and three times peaceful populations have been forced to desert their homes, taking such of their poor belongings as they could carry with them, and seek refuge among strangers. When I was on the front I met one of the ablest generals that the army possesses; he told me his mother was eighty-six and she had seen Germany at war with France three times. “It is too much,” he said. And when I was visiting the refugees I talked with a funny little old woman with white hair. “I’m over eighty,” she told me, “and this is the third time I’ve had to flee from my house in Lorraine.” And she added: “It is too much.” It gave me a curious little pang in my heart to hear that poor old peasant woman use the self-same words that the distinguished general had used.

In England politicians have been making speeches, journalists have been writing articles and correspondents have been writing to the papers, about the war aims. And much of what has been said and written has been disconcerting to the French, for it has seemed to them that there is in Great Britain a strong current of opinion which on this question is not in accord with their own. But what are they fighting for? One thing only, I repeat: security. They want to be free for ever from the danger presented by an aggressive and belligerent neighbour; they want to be sure that for at least a century they will be safe from invasion; they want to spare their children from the horror of war which they have had to endure twice within twenty-five years; they want to be allowed to till their fields and tend their vineyards and devote themselves to the arts of peace. Most intelligent Frenchmen will tell you that France is not essentially an industrial nation, it is a nation above all of peasants and of peasant-farmers; its artificers are little interested in mass-production: they prefer to give their time and attention to articles that require for their manufacture taste and the personal touch. Frenchmen have a deep-seated feeling that what they have to give the world does not compete with the products of the industrial nations. Their most valuable exports are those spiritual values which enlarge the mind and add to the elegance, variety and beauty of life.

There is a bitter feeling among the people of France that the present war has been thrust upon them by the obstinacy of the Allies at the Peace Conference which prevented them from obtaining the safeguards which they were convinced were necessary in order to preclude a resumption of the struggle for existence. Many of them already foresaw in 1920 that, with Germany united as it had never been before, it was inevitable. They realize that the attitude that the Allies adopted was due to their fear of French imperialism. But the French are not an imperialistic nation. I am not now giving my own opinions, but merely repeating what I have heard from the mouths of all manner of persons, persons in all walks of life. It is very generally admitted that the Napoleonic imperialism was a disaster to France. The colonial empire has been won almost by accident, and the sense of it has never entered into the consciousness of the French as our own empire has into that of the English. The feeling is universal, I think, that with a democracy like that of France, imperialism is out of the question; in the fierceness of political animosities a government that showed any tendencies in that direction would stand no chance of subsisting. But the census offers the conclusive argument against the possibility of imperialism. There are forty million people in France and the number is diminishing; unless urgent measures are taken after the war to augment it, in another generation the population will be alarmingly smaller. Jean Giraudoux, who is not only a distinguished official at the Quai d’Orsay, but also an author of great talent, told me recently that he ascribed it to the wars from which France had suffered during the last century, for before 1870 the natality of the country continued to increase; he suggested that the fear of war and the uncertainty of the future had made people unwilling to burden themselves with large families, and he expressed the opinion that the certainty of an enduring peace would cause a great change in this respect. In the country they told me that the responsibility must be attributed to the Code Napoléon, which obliged the peasant-farmer to divide his land equally between his children, and so, rather than break up his farm, he limited his family to one son who could carry on, with at the most perhaps a second in case the first one died. Others have told me that the cause was to be sought in the selfishness of parents who hesitated to sacrifice their comforts to the needs of numerous children; others again have ascribed it to the dwindling influence of the Catholic Church. But whatever the cause the fact stands that the French are a nation of forty million people and they are confronted by a nation twice as large. “How can we hope to go on holding our own against that vast number,” they ask you, “unless this time at last we succeed in making ourselves unassailable?” It is not territories they need — they have not the population to occupy them — it is security. To get it they are prepared for any sacrifice, for any sacrifice of ease and money and for great sacrifice of life, and I think it is as well that the world at large should realize that they are determined not to allow themselves again to be cheated of it. They are not prepared to wage another war in five or ten or fifteen years. They will fight to a finish so that their children may be spared the pain and anguish, the danger of death, which they, many of them for the second time, are now forced to endure. But this also should be known abroad. The French do not believe that they can attain security merely by overthrowing Hitler and his Government. It makes them both anxious and impatient when their papers tell them that many persons in England are of opinion that we have no quarrel with Germany, but only with the company of adventurers that have seized supreme power. The French are not at war with a band of gangsters; they are at war with Germany. They are convinced that if the Nazi leaders were overthrown Germany would in a short time spawn other leaders as ruthless and as dangerous. They have not forgotten Bismarck and William II. One brought an army to invade their land in 1870 and the other in 1914. They look upon Hitler as an embodiment of all the instincts of aggression and the desire of domination of the German people, and these his destruction will do nothing to eradicate. He is a symbol and a rallying point. To eliminate him and think you have gained anything is as absurd as to imagine you have rendered a battleship impotent because you have shot away its colours. No. France is at war, doggedly, resignedly, heroically, not with Hitler and the Nazis only, but with Germany. She is prepared to live at peace with Germany, but only with a Germany powerless to threaten her security.

II

I spent a week with the French Armies in Alsace and Lorraine. In that short time I could not hope to get more than a superficial notion of that great machine. The casemate I visited was well in front of the Maginot Line. The Commandant who showed me over it had the look of a well-fed burgher in an old Dutch picture; he was a thick-set, rubicund, jovial man with a red moustache. He took the same pride in his fortress as the commander of a man-of-war takes in his ship. I asked him how long he could hold out against an attacking force. “If necessary I could stand a siege of six months,” he said, and with his eyes twinkling added: “But I should hope they’d come and rescue us before then.” I spent an hour and a half seeing one thing and another and then he said to me: “I’m sorry your time is so short, I haven’t shown you half yet.” When he showed me one of his big machine guns and demonstrated how it could be brought into action, he remarked, he eyes twinkling again: “The one thing a gunner dreams of at night is that he will sight an enemy tank passing within range when there’s no superior officer by and he can have a shot at it on his own.” I saw the men’s quarters. There is not much room and the beds are close together, one row above another; some were lying on their beds reading, others were clustered at the farther end of the dormitory playing cards or chatting. They were all young men, it seemed to me; they had made themselves at home in their narrow space, and you felt that with youth and good humour to help them they were finding life good enough. They knew how much better off they were than the men in the cold and mud of the advanced posts, and though ready to take their place there when the time came, meanwhile enjoyed the warmth, the comfort and the security of their tremendous fortress. They had a neat little canteen where they could buy cigarettes, beer, chocolates and toilet necessaries; they could even buy hair-wash and scent. There were tables in the canteen where they could sit in their leisure hours, drink a glass of beer, listen to the radio and almost think themselves back in the estaminet of their native village.

But one casemate is like another, and when you have read a description of one you have read a description of them all. The war correspondents have said all there is to say about those wonderful and truly awe-inspiring constructions, with their lifts that take you deep underground, their endless passages with their useful trolleys, their electric plant and their air-conditioning, the great stores of food, their armaments and their vast supply of ammunition.

This is not what I have set out to tell. I went to learn how the French soldier fares when he is not in the fighting line, what his relations are with the civil population in the midst of which he is quartered, how he gets on with his comrades in arms and what is the feeling he has towards his officers. I tried to find out how he regards his English allies and what he thinks about the war. With respect to this a general with whom I lunched told me an anecdote. He had been reviewing some troops and on the way back to his car passed a bugler. The bugler saluted smartly, but in the agitation of the moment forgot to bring his feet together; smiling, the general stopped, asked him his name, where he came from and what his occupation was in civil life. When, with some embarrassment, he had answered these questions, the general said: “Well, my boy, and why are you fighting this war?” “Pour la Patrie.” (“For my country.”) The general laughed. “Yes, I know all about that. That’s what they taught you to say at school. But why are you fighting this war?” A smile broke on the bugler’s honest face and he said: “Eh, bien, à cause des Boches, j’en ai marre.” (“Well, because I’m fed to the teeth with the Germans.”) I thought the anecdote significant for the insight it gave one into the soldier’s frame of mind. I would not go so far as to say that it is universal in the French army, but I am sure it is very common. There is no hatred there, no desire to hurt, no irreconcilable antagonism; but impatience — impatience with those Teutons who will not let their neighbours live in the peace they love so well, impatience and the feeling that things have gone too far. Two wars already and three mobilizations in one year; il faut en finir. They’ve asked for it, the Germans, and now they’re for it.

But the anecdote seemed to me significant also for the glimpse it gave of the relation that existed between the general and his men. I am sure that, as in all armies, there are in the French army many officers who are stupid, inconsiderate and conceited. I was so fortunate as not to meet any. The French have a peculiar aptitude for expression and they are able to put their thoughts into orderly, lucid and often eloquent language; but putting aside this natural advantage, it seemed to me that the officers I came across were men of unusual intelligence. They were keen soldiers, proud of their profession and absorbed in it; and they gave me the impression of knowing their business with extreme thoroughness. Modern war is a science and these were scientists. But what particularly struck me was their solicitude for their men, their humanity and their reasonableness. In the course of conversation one of the most brilliant generals on the front told me how he had on one occasion shown an order he had just written to a brother general. They had gone through the last war together in the trenches. My general asked his friend: “If you were in command of a company again and received an order like this, what would you think of it?” “I should think it lousy,” was the reply. (That is the only decent word I can find for the emphatic and Rabelaisian word actually used.) “So should I, to tell you the truth,” said my general, with a laugh, “so I won’t send it.” I was told another little story, which, trivial as it may be, seemed to me rather touching. Half a dozen men, sent out to do some job, had been splashing about all day in the mud and wet, and when they got back to their quarters were soaked to the skin; the company commander knew they had no change of socks and so distributed his own among them till theirs were dry. I imagine that such a story would make a German officer stare.

A real comradeship exists between officers and men. Discipline is maintained as well as in any other army, but there is in the French army a feeling of solidarity between the various ranks which is truly democratic. I think there is in France less class-consciousness than there is in England, and this in any case makes the relations of men, whatever their social status, more fraternal. Now with the whole nation in arms, men in every rank of society are together, bearing the same discomforts and exposed to the same risks. The rather shabby, ill-fitting uniform of the private soldier may well clothe the body of the smart man about town, the bearer of a great title or a millionaire. Whatever their position in private life, all will carry out with perfect good humour whatever work they are called upon to do. A French reporter told me that he and a number of his colleagues had been taken along the front for a trip that lasted several days, and at the end of it a suggestion was made that the drivers of their cars should be tipped. “Watch your step,” said the officer who had charge of them, “some of your drivers could buy you all up a dozen times over.”

At the beginning of the last war the French soldier was badly fed, and though later on the food was better, it was never so good as it is now. I made it my business to ask a number of men how they ate, and I found none who had a complaint to make. They begin the morning with a cup of black coffee and a hunk of bread; at ten they have a snack which they call the casse-croûte, and this consists of sardines or sausages with another cup of coffee. The midday meal is copious: hors d’oeuvres, meat with rice, potatoes or lentils, cheese or stewed fruit to follow, and a quarter of a litre of wine. The evening meal is the same except that soup replaces the hors d’oeuvres. The ration of wine has now been increased to a litre a day. “You should see how the German prisoners stare when they are given our food,” they told me. “At first they can’t believe it’s what we have every day; they think it’s a special meal prepared to impress them.”

But of course the days are long. Except for the men who are in the front line there are interminable hours in which there is nothing much to do but to kill time. The French suffer from the lack of the organized games which enable the British soldier to occupy his leisure, and the General Staff are hard put to it to find ways of combating the boredom which must inevitably affect their men. During the first months of the war it was possible to employ them to help get in the harvest which the mobilization had so rudely interrupted. Up in the Vosges the fir-trees were heavy with snow and on each side of the road it lay thick, but in the valleys, boys and women were gathering in the beet. A peaceful scene. It was hard, as you drove through that undulating country, with its wide views, to remember that on each side of the Rhine, so near, great armies faced one another. In every field soldiers were helping. You had the feeling as you watched them that they were glad to do it; that for many of them this was the work they had been bred to do and it brought them a sense of relief. You did not need then to be told that the French soldier was fighting not for a frontier, but for his field and his vineyard. But by now the crop has been gathered. Night falls early and there are limits to the number of hours you can play belotte. Boredom is one of the enemies that the General Staff has to overcome, for with boredom comes home-sickness and the feeling that when nothing much is going on in the front line it is sad waste of time to stay up in Alsace-Lorraine when your farm, your business or your little shop, needs your attention. Books are wanted, books by the thousand, and radios, with programmes that will cheer and amuse, and without too many patriotic harangues: they do not want their patriotism aroused, these men, it is there deep in their bones; they want to know what is going on, of course, but they want to laugh and sigh at songs, comic and sentimental; and they want entertainments. Heaven knows they deserve all that the kindly and generous can do to help them to pass the cold winter away from their homes in conditions of little comfort.

They’d heard that the British troops were somewhere up the line, and they’d heard that their equipment was better than theirs and their food was as good as in a first-class hotel — bacon and eggs for breakfast and jam for tea. This they said not with envy, but with good humour. If the British were more sumptuously fed than they, well, good luck to them. It must be remembered that the French soldier is above all an infantry man. He heard with sincere distress of the loss of the Courageous and the Royal Oak. That close upon two thousand officers and men should have lost their lives had a peculiar effect on him. Even though these were lamentable catastrophes, they heartened him, for they brought it home to him that he was being supported by the British navy. But the activities of Great Britain on the sea and in the air do not mean very much to him, any more than do those of his own navy and air force. The arm in which he puts his confidence is the infantry.

I will finish this slight, sadly inadequate sketch of a great subject by a little story I was told by a doctor. Three English planes, flying over the German lines, were attacked and two were brought down in flames; the pilot of the third, though badly wounded, managed to bring it down in France; but when French troops got up to him they found that he was unconscious. They took him to the hospital at Nancy. When he recovered consciousness his first question was about the two men in the planes that had gone up with him. The doctor told him they were dead. The pilot was just a boy. He raised himself up in bed and brought his hand up to his bandaged head in a salute. “Never mind,” he said, “it’s for England.”

III

I visited Strasbourg while I was at the front. It is a city of death. Of its population of 200,000 only such municipal employees remain as are necessary for its essential services and the police, the customs officers and a certain number of soldiers who are there to guard the city and keep it swept and garnished. The wide streets, the narrow lanes with their old houses, are unnaturally neat and clean. They are empty and the silence is uncanny. No trams run, and it startles you when now and then a military car speeds by. The city seems to be waiting for something, and you have the impression that those deserted streets are holding their breath in a terrified foreboding. For a wonder on the day I was there the sun shone brightly; it was high noon, but you had the sinister feeling of a city at dead of night. It was like a city in a fairy-tale where everyone who dwelt in it was wrapped in a magic sleep. Here and there, in a house or a flat, a window has remained unshuttered, and you cannot resist the notion that someone is living behind that closed window, closed because there is a nip in the air, and that at any moment a face will appear behind it; but you know that not a soul is there. These hundreds and hundreds of houses, street after street, lane after lane, are empty.

Most of the shops have their shutters up, but some had none to put up, and in these the goods for sale remain on display. Women’s underwear, silk stockings, hats; they have a strangely forlorn look. At a pastry-cook’s little cakes, sweets and what not lie mouldering in the window. There was no time to put anything away when the evacuation took place. Things had to be left just as they were, while the owners huddled a few clothes into a bag, such household linen as they could carry, and fled. They had to leave their cats behind, and now, fed by the soldiers, they wander disconsolate and mew. The pigeons are fed too, flocks of them, and they gather round hungrily when a man comes along with a great hunk of bread and, crumbling it up, throws the pieces into the fluttering crowd.

The Cathedral was rose-red against the pale blue of the wintry sky and here men in khaki were still busy making a protection for the central porch. The stained glass of the windows has been removed to a place of safety and the wind blew bitter through the aisle. The lovely pulpit with its delicate carving had been boarded up. All was cold and grim and bare. It had already the look of the wreck of a church. The city is waiting for destruction. Of that cathedral, which in the Middle Ages was considered one of the marvels of the world, it may be that not one stone will stand upon another. That graceful spire which till modern times was the tallest building in the world may be levelled with the ground. The palace of the Cardinal and Prince Bishop de Rohan, one of the most exquisite buildings in Europe of the first half of the eighteenth century, may be no more than a smouldering ruin.

And as if to call attention to this dreadful possibility, presently, high up, I saw half a dozen planes. They were Allied planes and were, I was told, hunting a Messerschmidt that had been signalled. I watched them till they were lost in a cloud, and walked on. Then on a sudden the sinister note of the siren broke the unearthly silence that wraps the city like a shroud; it rang through the stillness with a merciless intensity, echoing through those empty streets so that it seemed to assail you from every direction; and though I had heard it more than once before, it had in that deserted city an ominous horror. Two or three men started running, and following them I found myself at the police station. There were perhaps a dozen of us, policemen, employees of the municipality and three or four soldiers. They were impatient and exasperated, but facetious. One friendly stranger told me that a German plane came over the city twice a day at such regular hours that they had called it after the popular French paper Paris Midi and Paris Soir, just as you might say Midday Standard and Evening Standard.

I lunched with the Mayor, a large, heavy man with an open, friendly face, who spoke French with an Alsatian accent. He loves his city and he looks forward with anguish to what he fears will be its inevitable ruin. He remains there with his wife to take care of it and with courage awaits the catastrophe which may at any moment befall. Trying to reassure him, I suggested that the Germans were unlikely to bomb what they still regarded as a German city. “They shelled it in 1870,” he answered. “They ran excursion trains from towns on the other side of the Rhine so that sightseers might see Strasbourg burn.” But even should the city be spared the ravages of war its future fills him with misgiving. He reminded me that this was the third time in seventy years that its economic life had been confounded by war. Many of the manufacturers have removed to places where they could set up their factories in safety, and unless peace brought them security for the future they would never return. “It is a dead city,” he said. “No,” I answered, “only sleeping.” He sighed. “That is what I hope, but it is a sleep from which the awakening will be bitter.”

A little while later I visited the districts in the Charente to which the refugees from Alsace and Lorraine have been evacuated. There are altogether about half a million of them, but I will only deal with those, amounting to 150,000, who inhabit the region in front of the Maginot Line. This stretches from the Luxembourg border to the Vosges, and it is the richest part of Lorraine. The order for evacuation was issued as soon as it became known that the Germans had entered Poland; and by train, by car, on foot, the refugees set out for the centre, roughly fifty miles at the rear to which they had been instructed to go. Interminable processions passed along the roads, men and women on foot pushing hand-carts and perambulators, whole villages, at their head the Maire and the Curé telling his rosary, carts by the thousand in which were the old people, children and such effects as it had been found possible to bring away. At night, exhausted, they got what rest they could by the wayside. They flung their weary bodies into the ditches.

From these centres they were entrained for the South-west. They were piled into trucks, often open ones, and they suffered from the heat by day and from the cold at night, from vermin, from hunger and thirst. The trains remained stationary for hours in the open country to allow the passage of troop-trains, and at the stations the halt was so brief that it was impossible for the assistance that had been arranged for to be effective. Those who died on the way, those who fell ill, women in labour, were taken off the train. When finally the refugees reached their destination their state was pitiable.

The department which I visited is a poor one, and its habits and its standards of life are very different from those to which the people of prosperous Lorraine have been accustomed. It has 300,000 inhabitants, and 85,000 refugees have been distributed among its towns and villages. It was not easy for the authorities to find lodging for this great number of persons; from 10,000 to 15,000 arrived every day at Angoulême alone; and it was necessary to put very many in quarters which were in every way unsuitable. The population of the Charente has dwindled by 50,000 since the beginning of the century and there are plenty of empty houses and abandoned cottages, but for the most part they are in a sad state of dilapidation. The refugees set to with a will to make them habitable. They have repaired leaking roofs and mended broken doors. However filthy the hovel was when it was assigned to them — and many of them were deep with the dirt of years — they have made it spotlessly clean; so that now you could eat off the floor. It cannot be easy to keep things clean in an overcrowded room in which two families or more have to live and cook and wash and sleep. Kindly people have provided a good many with small stoves, those who had money bought their own, but in many rooms you see the makeshift stoves they have rigged up for themselves by putting two stones on each side of the hearth and a sheet of iron over them. They have to sleep on straw mattresses, sometimes on the floor, sometimes on deal trestles that they have made themselves. The authorities are providing wooden beds as fast as they can, but there is a shortage of wood, and it takes time to provide beds in war-time for such numbers. There is still a lot of overcrowding. But for all these inconveniences, these real hardships, life still goes on. The general health is good. The children, blue-eyed, with apple-red cheeks, are neat and clean. Though there are no books for their lessons, they go to school, bringing wood with them in the morning to heat the room, and the nuns teach them as best they can in the circumstances. They are bright, nice-mannered children, and for them, indeed, the whole thing is rather a lark. It is wonderful with what spirit these people, snatched away from comfortable homes, bear their lot. They are uncomplaining, and the phrase “mann muss Geduld haben” (“one must have patience”) is constantly on their lips. I should add here that many of them cannot speak French, especially the older ones, and this makes it more difficult for them to get along comfortably with the natives of the district. It is hard when you have been driven out of your home to be called a boche. But they are a kindly, industrious people and they do what is humanly possible to make the best of things. They understand the difficulties of the situation; conditions have already greatly improved since first they arrived, and this helps them to await a better future with fortitude. They are amazingly cheerful. I went to see an old powder-factory, disused for two hundred years, opposite which was a long row of dwellings where the workmen had their quarters. They have been so long unoccupied that they are in a ruinous state. Here the refugees have been crowded in. They are lucky if there is only one family in a room. The roof leaks and on rainy nights the water splashes down on them. One old girl said to me with a laugh: “Lucky I have an umbrella to sleep under.” It was there I saw an elderly wrinkled woman feeding a baby from a bottle. I asked her if it was hers. “No, I’m a widow,” she said. “It’s a love child, but at the evacuation there was no one to take it, so I did. I couldn’t leave it behind, could I?” I went to see some stables standing in the grounds of a chateau; there were six stalls and in each was a straw mattress on the ground, without sheets, and in each stall two persons slept. A tiny room at the side, I suppose the old harness-room, was their living-room. There was an open fireplace with a pot boiling over two sticks. I asked a woman whether there was anyone at the chateau. “No,” she said, “the proprietors only come down in the summer.” A smile broke on her healthy face. “It would be nice if they let us sleep in the servants’ rooms,” she said. “To sleep in a stable — well, Our Saviour was born in one.” A woman with a sense of humour.

There is a great deal of suffering among these unfortunate people, and some of it could be relieved if the natural selfishness of rich and well-to-do householders were more firmly dealt with. But it is useless to draw too harrowing a picture of conditions which war unhappily makes inevitable. There are mitigations to their state. The country is pretty and undulating, truly rural, and it is well wooded; the landlords allow them to take all the wood in reason that they want, so that at least they can keep warm. They are anxious to work, but it is not easy to find anything to do. Still, work is gradually being secured for them, on the land or in factories, with adequate wages. The unemployed receive from the State ten francs a day for each adult and six francs for each child under thirteen. They have large families, and two or three families often pool their resources, so that their meals are good and copious. I saw some at their dinners, others I saw preparing them, and what they were going to eat was very appetizing. My mouth watered at the sight of a Pfannkuchen which a sturdy housewife had just set before her eager children. They are people of a religious turn of mind and they find solace in the services they attend not only on Sundays but on weekdays; their priests are there, full of kindness and energy, to console, cheer and encourage them. With time their housing will be improved. For the rest, generous people can do much to alleviate their hard lot. They left in the middle of summer, thinking they would not be gone long, for they were convinced that this was one more bluff of the Germans and that war would not be declared, so they came away without any warm clothes or any means of coping with the cold winter. Now they need stoves, both to keep warm and to cook, blankets, heavy clothes for cold weather, babies’ clothes, and shoes. Shoes especially, since for lack of them many are going about the muddy farm-yards, the country roads, in felt slippers. They do not ask for charity, but they are in sore need. If any persons who read these pages are moved to do something for these poor folk, their gifts will be gratefully received by the Centre Social Mosellan, Cognac, Charente. It would be an encouragement to these brave, energetic and determined people to think they had friends in England and in America who sympathized with them in their unmerited distress. I have said that they are people of a deeply religious spirit. Few of them in the hurry of departure, gathering together the essential things they could not afford to do without, forgot to bring with them their crucifix. I remember one old woman with a red, lined face and a shock of white hair cut short. She talked to me of the cottage she had left in Lorraine. She must have been over seventy, but she was strong and active still. She had been a working woman all her life and had borne many children. The tears streamed down her cheeks as she told me it was hard at her age to have to leave the little house in her native village. There was a crucifix standing on the table, the figure of Christ in silver on an ebony cross. Suddenly she snatched it up and pressed it to her heart. Her face was lit up as though a ray of sunshine had fallen on it, and with a sob in which, mingled with her pain, was pride and hope, in a strong, full voice she cried out: “Es lebe Lothringen.” (“Long Live Lorraine.”) They are fine, brave people, and they deserve our help. I nearly forgot to say how glad the children would be if they could be sent some toys.

IV

When I went to see Monsieur Dautry to thank him for enabling me to visit the munition factories, I ventured to ask him whether he thought flesh and blood could stand the long hours of labour, day after day, which he was demanding of the workers. He told me that there was no help for it; this was a war of material to an unprecedented extent, and material must be produced at whatever cost. He said that he was well aware that men could not be expected indefinitely to continue to work with such intensity, but in the tragic emergency he felt that he could ask them without hurt to themselves to persevere for a few months; then he added; “Tell your friends in England that for every 100,000 men they send over, 100,000 men now at the front can be released to work in my factories. That will give me 800,000 more hours of work a week, and that means an hour’s work less a day for 800,000 men.”

But first I must tell you who Monsieur Dautry is. He is Minister of Armaments. He is not a politician, but an engineer and a great organizer. It was he who reduced to order the confusion of the French State railways, and characteristic stories are told of his efficiency, his indefatigability and his determination. He is a small man, with a sallow face and decided features, a thick head of greying hair and an eye of piercing brightness. He gives you an impression of enormous energy and you cannot talk to him for ten minutes without realizing that here is a man with a quick, logical brain, who has the gift of summing up a situation so rapidly that it looks as though the process were intuitive, who then without hesitation decides upon a course of action, and who has the individuality to enforce its performance. He is untiring; and himself, it appears, able to do without sleep or rest, he expects an equal activity from his fellow-workers; but such is the enthusiasm with which his personality inspires them, such is the loyalty to himself which his force of character has aroused in them, that they, his fellow-workers, happy and proud to be associated with him, find it possible to fulfil his demands. He is at his office from early in the morning till late at night, and then often goes to some factory or other to see how the work is proceeding and to talk to the men on the night-shift. On the second occasion on which I saw him he mentioned casually that he had been up all the three preceding nights, but he was as alert, his mind was as nimble, as though he had slept soundly through all three of them. It was late one evening that they rang Monsieur Dautry up from the Bureau des Informations to ask him if he would grant me the necessary facilities; he gave me an appointment for the following morning at nine o’clock, and when I presented myself at the Ministry he had already prepared for me a programme, which he had himself made out for me during the night, and which would enable me to visit a sufficient number of factories to get an impression of the effort France was making to supply the troops with all the material needed for the prosecution of the war. I felt bound to tell him that of all the subjects of which I know nothing there was none of which I was more ignorant than of machinery. He said: “I will have you accompanied by two engineers, a military and a naval one, and they will explain to you everything you cannot understand.” I had to my shame to tell him then that in all probability I should not be able to understand their explanations. Nor did I; so the reader must not expect me to give him any details of the manufacture of the latest guns nor to describe to him the newest models of armoured cars. I saw them make powder and explosives; I saw them make planes, and the guns for them; anti-aircraft guns, armoured cars, cannon. When I was on the front I would have said that the whole nation is under arms, but after a week spent in visiting the armament works I was almost inclined to say that the whole country is one huge factory.

I will speak first of three factories I visited on the front. One was a sugar factory almost on the banks of the Rhine and so near the advanced posts of the enemy that it was well within range of a big machine-gun; but except that the women were evacuated, work was proceeding as quietly as in peace-time. The general in command of the troops in that region was eager to maintain the economic life of the country, and my visit chanced to come aptly because, owing to the lack of raw material, the factory was to close next day. Hardly more than half the beet crop had been gathered, and what remained could not be got in because the horses necessary for cartage had been requisitioned. We learnt that 300 horses were needed for six weeks to collect the rest of the crop, and these were immediately promised. I saw also a factory which in peace-time produces woollen goods and under-linen, but now is busily turning out shirts, socks and pull-overs for the troops. It is within range of a not very heavy gun. I think at least 300 women must have been occupied there, but the only indication I could discover that they felt themselves to be working under peculiar conditions was that the permanent wave of a good many seemed to be wearing a trifle thin. I went to a foundry which is, strange as it may seem, in front of the Maginot Line. It could of course be easily bombed by the Germans, but they have so far left it alone for fear, presumably, of the reprisals which would immediately follow. Still, the directors are taking precautions; the women and children have been evacuated; shelters have been built in case of air-raids; and arrangements have been made to remove essential parts, should the Germans advance, so that it would take them the better part of a year to get the factory working again. The steel manufactured is shipped away every night, so that they would find at best only the produce of one day’s work. I think what most struck me in those enormous works, employing now close on 2000 men, was the sense of emptiness. In a vast shed where work was going on at full blast there was only a handful of men, and they seemed to be there merely to supervise the almost human, the strangely purposeful, activity of the machines which pressed and cut and carried the huge ingots of red-hot steel.

It was a very different impression I got when I visited various factories in the neighbourhood of Paris, where in one I saw the manufacture of armoured cars, in another of shells, in a third of aeroplane guns; in these and others which it would be tedious to enumerate, the crowded workers, the serried rows of machines, gave one the feeling of an intense, a fierce but regulated animation. I cannot attempt to describe the wonderful things I saw; I will only mention a few details that peculiarly interested me. One thing that struck me was the pains that are taken to make the powerful and yet wonderfully manageable tank as spick and span as a private car. Every part is quite exquisitely finished. The machines that are used for the manufacture of all these lethal weapons are miracles of ingenuity. They work automatically, so that the man in charge has little more to do than to keep a watchful eye. They have the elegance of perfect adaptation to their use. I could quite understand that the workman took pride in, even feel in love with, this beautiful instrument, so spruce and clean, that could do such delicate and accurate work. Machines are arriving from America with regularity. I saw one huge hall where in February last there was but one automatic machine and where now there are 150. I wish I could give the reader some impression of the immense complication of the labour that goes to produce almost everything that is needed to kill men with. I have seldom seen a more elegant instrument than an aeroplane gun. It was staggering to me to learn that one part, not more than a foot long, went through 109 hands before it was ready, and another part, three inches long, went through 50. Though it takes no more than ten minutes of actual time to make a machine-gun shell, its fabrication, so many are the processes necessary, so many hands must it pass through, requires a week for its completion. There is a multitude of machines, each doing its delicate little job, a string of women, each occupied on a different operation that must be done by hand. The fuse, that elaborate and ingenious part so exquisitely devised, needing such accurate care, is as beautifully turned out as a jewel.

This is the work of miniaturists. It is a very different impression you get when you visit the Government factories where they make heavy guns and big shells. The factory is spacious, and the machines needed to bore those huge steel rods, to manufacture those tremendous carriages, are so enormous that you have none of the crowded effect of other factories. The din is not so terrific, and although work is incessant, going on night and day, day after day for seven days a week, there is an odd effect of dignified leisure. Everything is on a gigantic scale. These monsters, looking ridiculously like the toy guns made for children, take six months to make, and in the factory I saw they produced two a week.

I spent one morning at a powder-factory. It is situated in a wood, nearly 400 acres in extent, which must be charming in spring and summer. The factory was founded in 1870; it was smaller then, and the director rode and shot in those pleasant woods. He has been ousted now, and buildings are to be seen among the trees wherever you look; they are of small size for the most part, and separated from one another, so that should an accident occur in one it would not bring disaster to its neighbour. For the moment you enter you are made aware that danger is close; at the gateway your matches and lighter are taken from you; and so that you may be preserved from temptation you are asked to give up your cigarettes. The workmen wear wooden sabots in case a nail in a leather sole should strike a spark on the concrete floor. They wear black overalls which are fire-proofed, and this uniform sombreness gives them a kind of mystery. The director who showed me round told me that his immediate predecessor was the victim of an explosion. Not a trace of him, not even a trouser button, was ever found; he simply disappeared. I saw the whole process of manufacture from the white cotton flock saturated with ether and alcohol that looks so innocent, to the final operation which is so dangerous that only two men are allowed together into the shed where it is performed, and there is a trench full of water within a few feet of the doors, so that if there is a fire they should immediately plunge in. But in all the buildings in which the complicated business is transacted there are ingenious automatic devices for flooding in case some of the material catches fire. In another factory I saw, where they made explosives, the last part of the process takes place in little cubicles so made that the roof and front will blow out if there is an explosion, and each man works alone, so that he alone may be killed. Grim! And yet so true is it that familiarity breeds contempt, that these workmen — and there are 12,000 of them at the powder-factory — go about their business with as little concern as the women I had seen at the front making shirts and sweaters.

My visits to these various factories had taken me north, east and south in France; I had seen a great deal that was strange to me, and to make head or tail of all this I should have had to be an expert in half a dozen professions; but one thing I could not help growing conscious of, and that is the tremendous effort the country is making and the wonderful spirit that possesses the men and women who are engaged in it. Monsieur Dautry, amazing organizer as he is, could not have kept this gigantic machine going with such efficiency except for the willing collaboration of this army of workmen, and it is of them I wish to say a final word. They have cheerfully accepted the much longer hours of work which the needs of the moment have made essential. The day-shifts work eleven hours, the night-shifts ten, and in many factories they work seven days a week. They earn good money. A proportion of their wages is withheld for the benefit of the poor families of mobilized men; but besides that, once a month each workman makes a voluntary contribution of ten francs, which is sent as a gift to the mobilized workers who in peace-time are engaged in the factory. They were wonderfully alert, with keen faces and intelligent eyes. I could not but be struck by the pride each workman seemed to take in his particular job. He would explain to me, the most ignorant of persons, with technical detail, points that I could only pretend to understand. Not only foremen, but even ordinary workmen, explained almost with eloquence the mechanism of the complicated instrument they dealt with. They were professional men every bit as much as lawyers or doctors. The heartening impression I brought away with me was that they are prepared to endure as long as necessary the interminable hours of arduous toil which are demanded of them, for they are aware that this effort which they are making is for the security of their country and the welfare of their children. One after another they repeated the phrase to me which Mr. Chamberlain has made famous: Il faut en finir.

V

In many provincial towns in France there is a shop called Aux Dames de France. I have never ventured inside, but I suppose these are shops where women can buy at a moderate price whatever they need to clothe their slender or opulent shapes; there are generally trestles on the pavement, and here bargains are displayed: ribbands, remnants, stockings, bust-bodices, which you see women — tempted, doubtful or merely curious — interminably turning over and fingering, while a grim-faced female in a smock watches them with a beady eye. It is Aux Dames de France that the following pages are dedicated.

I think that no one who has not seen them at work can have a notion how great is the effort that the women of France have been making since the war broke out and how much it is due to them that the economic life of the country has been maintained. When war broke out the harvest was still in progress. Between four and five million men were mobilized. Women took their places. They set out at once to gather the beet and to pick the grapes; you saw them working in every field and you saw them driving the heavily laden carts along the roads. Up at the front, busy with their pressing toil, they hardly troubled to give a passing glance to the planes, enemy planes for all they knew, that flew over them.

A vast number of shops had to close because the owners were called up, but in many, the smaller ones especially, their wives took over and kept the business going. Somehow or other they managed to do the men’s work and find time besides to look after the home, take care of the children and cook the dinner. In the districts to which the evacuees have been sent — for the women of Alsace and Lorraine, though many of them speak hardly a word of French, are women of France too — they went to work to render their wretched lodgings habitable. They scrubbed the floors and the stairs, cooked meals on makeshift stoves, washed and mended; and by their courage and good humour preserved the decencies and beauty of family life. Of all the ladies of France it is to the women of Alsace and Lorraine, whose unconquerable spirit has surmounted the difficulties of an unbelievably difficult situation, that most praise is perhaps due. No shipwrecked mariners cast away on a desert island could have given evidence of a more practical inventiveness so to deal with the circumstances as in a little while to reduce confusion to order and restore to life something of a pattern.

Thousands of women are working in factories. In most of them, I think, the wife was offered the job of her mobilized husband, and it is strange to see them, middle-aged women of determined aspect, the mothers of families, young women, evidently not long married, with painted lips and a permanent wave, tending an automatic machine in the crowded din of an armament works. Many of them had never before worked in a factory, but I was told by various directors that they got into the way of it very quickly; I was not surprised, for after what I have seen I am ready to believe that the French woman can do anything she has a mind to. But they have their homes to look after and their children to care for; by a wise decree arrangements have been made to enable them in some measure to do this. In some factories they only work two weeks out of three, in others they are given every third day off, in either case with full pay, so that they should not lose touch with what, after all, are their essential interests, and so that their children should run as little chance as possible of neglect. But it is grim to see this multitude of women occupied in making all manner of things to kill and maim the husbands and brothers of other women. In some work — the delicate and accurate work, for instance, that has to be put into the making of a fuse — they are better than men. It is grim to see them so neatly painting and varnishing the cases of big shells. It is grim to see rows and rows of them making the bags in which powder is to be poured, and when they are filled tying them up into neat parcels or packing them into metal cylinders.

I have dwelt so far on the work that is being done by the women of France in the more modest ranks of society, but it must not be thought that the others have remained idle. In France, as in England, alas! there are still women who look upon the war as an unparalleled nuisance because it interferes with the comfort and amusement of their lives. There are women who want to give parties and go to them and who are exasperated because the mobilization of men-servants renders it difficult to get perfect service and because with a chauffeur at the front it is awkward to get about. There are women who still play bridge half the day and flatter themselves they are doing something for the country when they bring their knitting to the bridge-table and set their maids to making pull-overs. But there are many more who have given their money and their time to the numerous associations that have been instituted to cope with the manifold difficulties of the moment. There are many who have set themselves, alone and obscure, to alleviate the distress, financial and moral, of their neighbours. The Red Cross has founded 150 auxiliary hospitals, with nearly 20,000 beds, and has placed thousands of adequately trained nurses at the disposal of the authorities. The evacuation of half a million people from Alsace and Lorraine was a distressing necessity, and its attendant hardships would have been scarcely tolerable without the willing aid given by the Girl Guides. They helped families to pack such few things as they could take with them, and on train journeys that might well last three or four days they exerted themselves to comfort those frightened and unhappy people, herded sometimes in cattle-trucks, and mitigate their discomforts. Day and night the Girl Guides were at the wayside stations to give what refreshment and help was possible to the refugees. They met them in Paris, fed them, encouraged them and convoyed them across the city to the station from which they were to entrain for their destination. There again the Girl Guides met them, interpreted for them, acted as intermediaries between them and the population which was obliged, somewhat unwillingly, to receive them, distributed clothes among them, provided them with books, and, in short, did everything that human kindness could do to ease the tragic lot of these strangers in a land strange to them.

But this is only a part of the activities of the women of France; I should never end if I attempted to describe them all. Among the many societies engaged in admirable and useful work I will name only L’Union des Femmes de France. It sends parcels to the soldiers and has enrolled a host of women and girls to make jumpers, socks and scarves for the soldiers; but besides this, it has embarked upon two undertakings, one of which shows, to my mind, a touching thoughtfulness, and of which the other peculiarly interests me as a professional writer. Men on leave, or transferred from one post to another, often arrive at a station where they have to spend the best part of the night before their train starts. They are tired and hungry, maybe wet through, and they have perhaps little money in their pockets. L’Union des Femmes de France offers them shelter. A woman opens a door and invites the weary soldier to come in. He finds a warm room, with beds in it, rugs to cover him and hot coffee. There are paper and pencils on a table so that he can write to his family or his girl, and the fact that in one station alone from 250 to 300 letters are written every night shows that he is glad of the opportunity. There is a lavatory where he can wash his feet and put on a clean pair of socks; his own are washed and mended and passed on to another man. He gets a good sleep, and a kindly woman wakes him when his train is due. He leaves rested not only in body, but in spirit.

But a great change has come over the French soldier since 1914; then attack followed attack, and the man in the trenches had to be constantly on the alert. In such leisure as he had he was contented to smoke his pipe and play a game of cards. But since then education has spread, inexpensive books, magazines and innumerable papers have aroused in men who had never read before the desire to do so. Books now are a need almost as urgent as the chocolate, sausages and sardines which the soldier likes best to find in his parcel. For four months now he has had to stand the hardest possible trial to one of his ardent temper: he has had to wait; and his spirit, craving for occupation, demands reading matter. L’Union des Femmes de France issued an appeal for this, and it is heartening to know that the response has been great. One old lady brought in a lot of picture-papers carefully wrapped up in tissue paper, one young man brought his text-books so that a student under arms might continue his studies, an elderly gentleman offered his whole library. The books are sorted, those that are obviously unsuitable are withheld, and the rest are sent to the front to give a soldier a few hours of happy forgetfulness, to give him perhaps some new thought to ponder over and to bring into his monotonous life a little romance or a little laughter. But more books are needed, and anyone who has French books he has read (and, let us admit it, few books are worth reading twice) might do worse than send them to: Le Livre du Combattant, 104 Avenue des Champs Elysées, Paris.

I said just now that I believed that there was little French women could not do if they had a mind to, and the variety of tasks they have undertaken since war was declared is truly amazing. As is well known, at its outbreak steps were taken to remove to places of safety the innumerable treasures of art which France possesses. Among the most important of these is the stained glass in the cathedrals and churches. Rouen has many lovely windows, and an architect was commissioned to do the necessary work, but he had barely begun when he and his skilled workmen were called up. His wife immediately took his place. Since to take down stained glass is a delicate business which requires technical knowledge and she had to make do with what labour she could get, she was obliged to give it her unceasing attention. And no time could be lost. From early morning till the failing light made further work impossible she stayed up in the scaffolding, watching and directing, and at last succeeded in putting that precious glass in safety. And here is a little story which might well serve as the theme for a success novel. There is a factory where not only most of the employees, but also the owner, were young; they were called up and the factory closed down. But the owner’s secretary, whom I know only as Mademoiselle B., could not bear to think that these busy works should stay idle and its many women employees be thrown out of a job; so, with feminine astuteness, she pulled all the strings she could to get the factory requisitioned by the State, by which means work for National Defence could be secured. She was thus able to keep her women workers and, because what the factory produces is of essential service, get such men as were necessary. The machines were set going again and soon work was in full swing. But Mademoiselle B. is evidently a young woman of determination, for during the luncheon hour — lunch being served at a canteen — she has set the women to knit scarves, socks and sweaters for the employees of the factory who are mobilized. There is a fund to which each worker contributes a few sous so that little luxuries may be added to the parcels. Mademoiselle B. must be a person of intelligence, energy and initiative; and of course the end of the story should be orange blossom and marriage bells; but whether she should marry the owner of the factory or a young son of toil who has returned from the front with the Croix de Guerre, the reader must decide for himself.

But there is an excitement in running a factory and a thrill in saving a precious work of art from destruction. There are vast numbers of women in France who are quietly doing obscure and humble tasks of which no one will ever hear. There was a baker in the Poitou who made bread for the whole district, and his wife with her handcart delivered it in the surrounding hamlets. He was called up, and since he was the only baker in the neighbourhood, it would have been a poor look-out for everyone if the wife he had left behind had not set to work to make and bake the bread herself at night and deliver it as usual by day. And in Auvergne there is a lady living in an old chateau to which people round about have been accustomed for generations to come for help in their troubles. It is a poor part of the country, with scattered hamlets and lonely farms. The men are gone and the women are left to shoulder burdens which only their courage prevents from being intolerable. This lady has revived the old custom of sewing bees. Those who do not live too far away she gathers together of an evening so that they may work together in a warm and cosy room, while the children play or learn their lessons, and since almost she alone knows how to read, she reads the paper to them; and they chat together, about their men at the front and the peace they long for and their hope that peace will be a good peace so that there may be no danger that their children when they are grown up will have to go to war again. But, since some of the hamlets are distant, this lady has arranged similar gatherings in them, and in the winter night, by snow and wind, she goes out to hearten and cheer those poor, humble, hard-worked women, for they too, she knows, are working for their country.

I think I have said enough to show how gallantly the ladies of France are taking their share in the tragic struggle and with what valiance, what energy, what intelligence they are coping with the unimaginable difficulties of the situation. With wonderful patience, with their sense of affairs and with fortitude, they are in a large part maintaining the prosperity of the country. In rural districts they are looking after the horses and cattle that have not been requisitioned and getting the fruitful soil ready for next year’s harvest; in the towns they are keeping the shops open and running their men’s business. Women are taking over the practice of the doctors who have been mobilized. In the schools women teachers have taken over the work of men teachers and uncomplainingly added it to their own. In short, they are all doing with energy, good sense and patriotism whatever wants doing.

I cannot finish without mentioning a circumstance which has not a little excited my curiosity. Since the beginning of the war the hair of many of the ladies in France has been growing rapidly darker at the roots, but whether this is due to the anxiety natural to the times, or to some more obscure cause, I am not competent to say. I will, however, hazard the surmise that if the war continues much longer there will be few blondes in France for gentlemen to prefer.

VI

The French people are justly proud of their army. It is well armed, well led and the spirit of the men is as admirable as it has always been. The pages of history are rich with the story of its exploits, and the great victories it has won are of imperishable memory. I suppose every Frenchman could roll you off a long list of its famous generals, from Turenne and Condé, Napoleon and his marshals to Joffre, Gallieni and Foch; but I doubt whether one in a hundred could give you the name of any admiral of his country’s fleet but Suffren, and I am not sure that even he could tell you why exactly this great sailor has achieved renown. For the French have never taken the same interest nor taken the same pride in their navy. Governments have always been parsimonious in the supplies they granted it. It needed the determination of M. Leygues, Minister of Marine, inspired by the enthusiasm of a young officer who is now Admiral Darlan, Commander in Chief, to induce the reluctant deputies to vote at last sufficient funds to reorganize the French navy and thus in due course bring it to its present high state of efficiency. The French navy does not advertise its accomplishments, it goes about its job modestly and discreetly, with the result that the public, both in France and in England, has little notion either of its strength or of the splendid work it has been doing since war broke out. By the end of November the French navy had sunk at least ten German submarines and had seized 200,000 tons of German goods; and since then it has further achievements to its credit. It has made the Mediterranean as safe as the Lake of Lucerne. It has protected the great Atlantic ports in France and Morocco and has transported vast numbers of troops to and from French Colonies. It has convoyed the British troopships on the latter part of their passage of the Channel till their arrival in French harbours.

But to give an account anything like adequate of the French navy at the present moment I should have to be an expert in naval matters. My object in this article is very modest. I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend a little time in a heavy cruiser and in a torpedo boat and go to sea with them while they carried out certain routine exercises. Hoping to interest the reader, I will tell him what I saw. The first difficulty that confronts the stranger in a French man-of-war is the mode of address. In the army you address a general as mon general, a major and a captain as mon commandant and mon capitaine, respectively; but in the navy you do nothing of the sort: you say, oui, amiral, to an admiral, and you address captains, commanders and lieutenant-commanders as Commandant; other officers you address by their names. On meeting for the first time in the day, a junior officer salutes his superior; they shake hands and exchange a few words. The junior says: “Mes respects, Commandant,” while the senior replies: “Comment allez-vous?” or “Ca va bien?” It would be foolish to make any definite statements on the casual observations I was able to gather on so short a visit; I received the impression that the officers’ relations with one another were cordial and polite without being intimate. One of the great differences between the English and the French is the closeness of the family tie. With the Englishman it binds him loosely, but with the Frenchman the family is the centre, the mainstay and the justification of his life. It was very evident that the commander was proud of his ship, as a racing motorist might be proud of the car that had served him well, but it was not his home; his home was the house at Brest or Toulon where his wife and children waited for him. And perhaps it is natural that the naval officer of to-day, a highly trained specialist, should look upon the modern battleship as an instrument under his hand, a delicate, powerful but inanimate instrument, rather than with the warm feeling with which the sea captain of old looked upon his sailing-vessel. There are doubtless many thousand Englishmen who know nothing of the sea, just as there are many thousand Frenchmen who know nothing of the soil, yet the sea has for the English the same deeply spiritual significance that the soil has for the French, so that the British officer can still look upon the great and complicated machine which is a battleship as his home, and his messmates of the wardroom as his family. I have a notion that his French colleague chooses the sea for his profession, loving it certainly, but as other men choose a career in the city, and when he leaves his ship does so as they would leave their office. He enjoys the opportunities the treacheries of the element give him for the exercise of his will and intelligence, but I think he keeps the tenderness of his emotion for the countryside of his birthplace. It is a difference of temperament, and in no way impairs his efficiency. The officers I was fortunate enough to meet appeared to me clever, keen and able. They worked so hard that I could not believe the French navy would ever produce another Loti. In the French navy promotion is automatic up to the rank of commander; after that it is by merit; and I think it will be hard in future for a naval officer, obliged to concentrate on his ceaseless duties, to attain high rank and to achieve as well the distinction as a novelist which was won by the author of Pêcheurs d’Islande. I seemed to discern that, though discipline was perfect, there was the same pleasantly democratic feeling in the French navy as I had found in the French army. Orders are given in a less peremptory fashion than in our own ships. The sailor when he is speaking to an officer does not say monsieur to him, but addresses him by his rank. Officers and men smoke where and when they please on board, during working hours and out of them. I had a feeling that there existed between officers and men not only confidence, but a sort of quiet friendliness. The French soldier is a conscript, but he is a man, often of education, and he is an intelligent man; and he carries out an order better if he knows the meaning of it; he likes to know what he is up to and likes to be treated as a rational being. I should be inclined to say that compared with a man in the British navy he is rather slovenly and untidy, and again from that standpoint, I dare say a good deal is done in a rather happy-go-lucky fashion, but the fact remains that things are done and done well. These are minor details; essentially sailors are the same in every country and the brotherhood of the sea unites them. I happened to be in a torpedo boat when the news came in of the battle between the Rawalpindi and the Deutschland. Officers and men exulted in the British ship’s heroic struggle as frankly as if it had been a ship of their own that had endured for so many hours the unequal contest. Each man seemed to take a personal pride in the magnificent exploit. Shortly before, they had heard of the good fortune the Sirocco had had in sinking two submarines in three days. “What a bit of luck!” said the commander of my torpedo boat; “but it’s enough, she must leave a few for the rest of us.” He would have been superhuman if he had not felt a trace of envy for the commander who, with all the odds of the sea against him, had run across the submarines, but it was offset by a great good will.

I must not forget that in a French ship the food is extremely good. Lunch is at noon, and is a substantial and well-cooked meal. I could not have eaten better in a first-class restaurant, and a patriotic bias shall not prevent me from saying that lunch in a French torpedo boat is a vastly more palatable meal than any I have eaten in an admiral’s flagship in the British navy. Dinner, served according to circumstances between seven and eight, is slighter, but well cooked, and the quality of the food is as good. Messing is paid for by the Government, and this covers all drinks, so that there is no mess bill except for cigarettes. I am told that in some ships bridge in normal circumstances is played after dinner, but officers use the mess little except for meals. As a rule they turn in early.

I will now relate what I saw when I went to sea first in a heavy cruiser, then in a torpedo boat. They were just the ordinary exercises of the fleet, but they may be interesting to someone who, like myself, till then had never seen them. It was splendid to steam out of harbour in that great ship, and we must have made an imposing procession as we set forth, with two aeroplanes flying over us, preceded by a torpedo boat, the mine dredger sweeping behind it, and escorted by two other torpedo boats. We passed through the channel in the mine-fields, and when we reached the appointed spot for the gunnery practice we were to do, the torpedo boats left us. It was strangely uncanny to me to see the stealthy ease with which the heavy guns slewed round in their great steel turrets. They were like huge primeval monsters lurking in their caves for their prey. With powerful glasses one could see quite well the great fountain of water that was thrown up when a shell fell a trifle short or a trifle wide of its mark and the staggering of the target when there was a direct hit. The gunnery was wonderfully accurate. We spent the day in various exercises, we were attacked by a flotilla of torpedo boats, and we practised with anti-aircraft machine-guns. It was beautiful to see the shells speed through the air like a flight of red-hot hornets. Then at night, returning, we fired again at the target at which we had practised in the morning. In the silence and darkness the sound was terrific and awe-inspiring. The lighting shells were wonderfully pretty as they shot through the night, ricocheting when they struck the water and bouncing on the surface like great balls of fire.

In the torpedo boat aboard which I was afterwards taken we were set first of all to act as a target to a shore battery. The guns aimed at us, but their direction was deflected so that the shells fell 600 metres to the right of us. Except for this, their first shell would have sent us to the bottom. Nineteen shots were fired, and of these five were direct hits and two others fell so close that we should have been badly damaged. If it had been real warfare not many of that crew would ever have seen their homes again. Later in the day we were attacked by a flotilla of torpedo boats, but, owing to a mishap to one of these, only a few torpedoes were fired, and we were instructed to accompany the disabled ship back to harbour. We arrived at dead of night, the boom was opened and we steamed slowly in to attach ourselves to the buoy of which the number had been wirelessed to us. The harbour was in pitch darkness, one could just discern the shapes of ships at anchor, and to find the particular buoy we wanted was a long and ticklish job. Next morning we set out again to escort to harbour the cruiser on which I had been before. When we found her we put out our dredger and steamed ahead of her, thus minimizing the danger of her striking a mine, which the smaller torpedo boat might miss, and, if it did not, would prove a less serious loss.

It was about four in the afternoon when the cruiser dismissed us, and then we put on steam to join a flotilla which was already on the way out to sea. They were waiting for us twenty miles away. We were to find and attack a cruiser which had been ordered to go from a certain point on the mainland to a certain island, a distance of 120 miles. By the rules of the game the cruiser had to stick to her course, but, once sighted, could do whatever she chose to get away. The light was failing when we came up with the flotilla. It looked imposing and powerful sitting there in the empty sea. It consisted of two light cruisers, and after we joined it of six torpedo boats. A place had been left for us, and when we had taken it we set out. The two cruisers had the central position, while the torpedo boats flanked them; the formation had the shape of a cock-eyed diamond on a playing-card. The distance we kept from one another was about 1000 metres, but when we reached the appointed spot from which we were to start our search we separated, and then I think there was about 4000 to 5000 metres from ship to ship. Night had fallen now, a heavy sea was running and with all our speed on we were rolling a good deal. I was glad, standing on the bridge, to have a rail to cling to. “This is nothing,” the commander told me: “sometimes she rolls so that when you’re hanging on to that rail your feet are swept away from under you.”

We tore on through the night, with all lights out, trying through our glasses to get a glimpse of the cruiser we were looking for. Nothing could be seen of the rest of our flotilla. I had a sudden realization of the immense loneliness of the sea and of its vastness. It needs an experience like that to make you feel how immense it is, and then you cannot wonder that with dozens of ships looking for her, a raider may escape detection. My commander was a big, vigorous, energetic man, and now as he stood on the bridge his spirits rose with the excitement of the chase. His face was set and even in the darkness you could see the shining of his eyes. His whole body was taut. “Ah, if it were only the real thing,” he cried, “and if it were an enemy cruiser we were after!” The moon rose and he looked at it with misgiving. He feared that it would betray us and so give the cruiser a chance to escape. We pounded on into the empty night and heavy seas swept over our bows. Then a wireless from one of the torpedo boats told us that the cruiser had been sighted; we changed our course and suddenly there was a cry from a dozen throats. The moon was favourable and showed us a vague black mass faintly silhouetted against the sky. Although it was only make-believe, it was a thrilling moment. The commander gave an order, we changed our course again to get into position; a sudden crash of thunder and we had fired our torpedoes. “D’you think you got her?” I asked. “I don’t know, we shall hear to-morrow.” Then from the flagship they wirelessed to us that the rest of the flotilla were taking on the pursuit, so with one torpedo boat ahead of us and another astern we started back for harbour. The moon now was hidden in cloud, and we pounded through the heavy sea in pitch darkness. My unaccustomed eyes could see nothing, but the officers could make out the boat ahead of us, and we followed her between the islands. After the excitement there was a faint sensation of being let down, and the journey home seemed very long. The cold was bitter, but as we were approaching land we saw a dark mass, a ship we did not know. Instantly everyone was on the alert; we turned our search-light on her, messages flickered to and fro, and we discovered, somewhat to my commander’s disappointment, I think, that she was a French auxiliary cruiser setting out on a legitimate errand. At last we crept into harbour. We were to tie up at a quay where a whole line of torpedo boats were moored, in a space between two, and the commander took his ship of 3000 tons in as neatly and as delicately to its appointed berth as though it were a small roadster that he was laying along the crowded kerb in an opening left by a departing car. I was taken off in a launch and landed at another quay from which I could get into the town. I was sorry to say good-bye to my charming and hospitable host. It was the small hours of the morning and it was hard to find the way in the inky blackness through those silent, empty streets. Not a soul was to be seen. It might have been an evacuated city.

VII

There is a cathedral in France in the transept of which, on the wall, is a memorial tablet. In the centre are the arms of Great Britain, and surrounding them those of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland; and the inscription runs: “To the Glory of God and to the Memory of One Million Dead of the British Empire who fell in the Great War, 1914-1918, and of whom the greater part rest in France.” These are simple and solemn words, and they give the lie to the gibes of German propaganda that the British are prepared to fight to the last drop of French blood.

The cathedral was utterly destroyed by the Germans in the last war, but it has been built anew with taste and discretion; its lines are pure and it has a fine austerity. It is a handsome and dignified edifice and needs now only a century or two, which will soften the sharpness of its outlines and give mellowness to its honey-coloured stone, to acquire the shattering tenderness of beauty. But who can tell whether time will have the chance to paint it with its lovely patina? The stained glass has been taken out of the windows and the high altar is protected by sandbags, for though there is now no possibility that the German guns will again bombard it, there is still the danger of attack from the air, and none can be sure that this noble structure, so recently completed, will not once more be brought to ruin. The bishop’s palace was destroyed too, and it was at the door of a very new, spick-and-span building that I rang the bell to keep the appointment the bishop had made with me. I was ushered into a smallish room with an ugly flowered paper, a suite of stiff furniture and portraits of ecclesiastics on the walls. On a table stood a photograph of His Holiness the Pope. The bishop entered, a dark, stoutish man, of middle height, with shining, deep brown eyes. He wore a black cassock and a violet skull-cap.

I think I should explain why I had desired to see him. While waiting in Paris for the arrangements to be made which would enable me to see for myself, both at the front and elsewhere, the great effort France was making in this moment of trial, I went one afternoon to Notre Dame des Victoires. The church was founded by Louis XIII and was so named in memory of his victories. It is held in peculiar devotion. There are many who believe that on September 8th, 1914, German soldiers saw the Blessed Virgin, who is the protector of Paris, with arms outstretched barring the passage of the enemy, in answer to the prayers that were addressed to her before the image in this church. Now the faithful pray to our Lady of Victories so that she may safeguard them from the scourge of war and that all men may live as brothers. It was a cold, grey afternoon when I went there. There was no service, but in the chapel of Our Lady of Victories was a great crowd. Rich and poor together, they sat and knelt in silence, men of all ages, women young and old, and prayed, and some of them wept. There were high officers with the Legion of Honour on their tunics and private soldiers in their drab uniform. I saw a young, strapping boy come in — he might have been just twenty and soon would go to the war — and standing at the back, ashamed perhaps to join the throng, with a set, serious face, his lips just moving, utter his silent supplication. Now and again someone stepped forward with a tall candle and gave it to the attendant, who lit it and placed it in one of the great stands on each side of the altar. The altar blazed with candles, so that you could only just discern the shadowed statue of the Blessed Virgin, with the imperial crown on her head and the crowned Child in her arms. Though all the candles, on the altar and on each side of it, were subject, I should have thought, to the same draught, it was strange that it had not the same effect on all. Some burnt with a clear, motionless flame, and they were like the souls of men steadfast in their faith who faced the dark future with serenity, and some flickered with a wavering, restless light, and they were like the anguished, faltering souls of men who did not know, who feared and doubted, and yet with desperate longing sought that peace which passeth all understanding. When I left the church night had fallen on the darkened streets of Paris.

It is generally said that the French are a nation of sceptics. I have never believed it. They are a mocking people, with a keen sense of irony and a lively wit, but deep down in their inner-most being, notwithstanding their protestations of agnosticism and their ribald jesting at sacred things, there is a religious sense which, however much they would, they can seldom altogether escape. Catholicism is in their bones. It is inextricably connected with their love of the soil; it has its roots in their powerful sense of the family which we in England know so little. It is natural that in times of deadly danger, when the existence of the nation is at stake, the thoughts of men should turn to matters which in other times are crowded out by the multifarious occupations of the day. And while I was visiting the armies in the field, going round the armament factories, talking to the refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, chatting with officers in a man-of-war, I kept my ears open, I slipped in a discreet question when the opportunity presented itself; I wanted to discover what spiritual effect this war was having on those who were engaged in it; I wanted to know whether this great disaster had restored men’s faith in God and whether, face to face with death as so many of them were, they found in that faith strength and solace. I beg the reader to believe that this was no idle curiosity on my part. The things of the spirit are all-important, and a people can neglect them only at its peril. But these are difficult things to get anyone to talk to you about and, thinking that priests must know a good deal which it was only natural would never be disclosed to me, I thought it wiser to address myself to them.

The bishop I was then visiting told me that in his diocese alone 500 priests have been mobilized. They have taken with them portable chapels, with for altar the consecrated tablet which can be placed on any support, the Host, miniature vessels for the celebration of Mass, and vestments made for them by charitable ladies in the diocese. If they can, they get the little case that contains these precious objects put on a truck, but if not, they carry it themselves with their accoutrement. They say Mass, often before dawn if there is work to do, even in the advanced trenches. Mass is served by another priest. I asked the bishop how the priests got on with the soldiers. Very well, he told me. They ate with them, fought with them, sharing their pains, material and spiritual, so that the men who had been accustomed only to see the priest flying by on his bicycle, his cassock tucked round his legs, and after their Confirmation had never had any communication with him, discovered that he was a man like themselves. His spiritual side inspired their respect. I asked the bishop whether in his opinion the war had occasioned in France a revival of religious feeling. “There is no doubt of it,” he answered. “It is unmistakable.” I asked him then whether he thought this was due to the fear of death. “Partly, of course,” he replied, “but not entirely. For it has affected not only the men at the front, but also the reservists at the rear who know they will never be called upon to risk their lives.” Men this time, he said, had not gone to the war with cheering and singing as they went to the last war, but with dismay, yet with determination, with sadness, yet with fortitude; they went as to a crusade; they went to fight in defence of their country with the same holy ardour as possessed the knights of the Middle Ages when they crossed the sea to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Saracen. “Without knowing it, they are mystics,” he added, “and that is why they can never be vanquished.” He told me also that since the outbreak of the war services were attended as never before; soldiers in large numbers came, officers too, and officials of the republic, who in the past would have feared, par respect humain, to be seen at Mass.

This phrase greatly puzzled me. Le respect humain does not mean what one would think it meant, and I had to have it explained to me two or three times before I could make sure that I understood it. I think it can best be translated as the fear of public opinion. A priest told me that when he met a parishioner working in the fields he would take off his hat and pass the time of day, but when he met him in company with others he would look the other way. “Why?” I asked. “Le respect humain.” The priesthood recognize this powerful sentiment, and indeed regard it, if I am not mistaken, with a resigned and ironic tolerance, for none more than they know what allowances must be made for human weakness; but it is a sentiment strange to us English, who, I suggest, are on the whole indifferent to what others think of us. Perhaps we are less sensitive to disapproval and more obstinate in our self-will. In France you can kill a man by ridicule; in England you only have to laugh at him enough to make him an important public character. I have sometimes been inclined to think that one reason why the French and the English understand one another so little is that in England you can think anything you like so long as you behave like everybody else, while in France you can do pretty well anything you choose so long as you think like your neighbours. Le respect humain has had an important influence in France, but the war, by all accounts, has largely broken its power.

Another bishop, whom I met later, told me a little story he had heard from one of his seminarists. A hard-bitten old soldier who had been through the last war was in an advanced post with the seminarist, and he said to him: “Look here, my boy, you’re only a half-baked priest, you don’t know enough to open the gates of Heaven for me, but after all you’re in the business and you can do something; if I’m hit and you think I’m for it, you just give me three good thumps on the chest to remind me to make my peace with God.” This bishop, who during the last war was in command of a regiment, gave me a number of letters which he had received from his priests and deacons in the fighting line. They are infinitely moving, and I cannot but regret that I have only space to quote part of one of them. It begins as follows: “We have just been passing six days in the second line under the German guns and to-morrow we are going back to the front. Trench life will begin again. We shall have to work by day and fight by night. We shall have to dig trenches, build shelters and pump out the water that is flooding everything. Then by night we shall have to take our arms, our machine-guns and grenades and be ready to use them at the first alarm.” And it ends thus: “Another time they called me to a man who had just been mortally wounded. They told him: ‘Here’s R. He’s by your side.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me, and when I said the act of contrition he repeated the words after me. I asked him if he would take the Communion, and he nodded. I put my little case on the corner of my cloak and I took the body of Christ in my hands and with tears in my eyes I said: ‘Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.’ He had no sooner communicated than he died. So to-morrow I’m going up once more to join the men in the front line, but this time without guns or grenades, taking with me only the body of Christ to give to those who are to meet Him. We are all on the way towards Him and our souls are uplifted. Our souls are athirst for the truth, the justice, the love, of which too long they have known nothing.”

Thinking, however, that from dignitaries of the Church I was likely to get only the official view, as it were, of this change of heart which so deeply interested me, I made it my business to get in touch with parish priests in rural districts. I went to see one, the curé of a village in the depths of the country, a red-faced man with waving thick hair and blunt features, who had been through the last war as a private soldier and had been severely gassed. He still suffered from the effects. He was a friendly, hearty soul, a peasant still, as his fathers had been before him for generations, and there clung to him a pleasant savour of the soil from which they had through the years wrung their bread. “It does me good to see how they’re coming back,” he said, his eyes shining with kindliness. I asked him too whether it was from the fear of death. “No,” he answered; “they have gone to war from a sense of duty, and their duty to their country has made them recollect their duty to God.” He told me that he had had a letter from a friend of his at the front, a priest, who told him how men took him aside and started a casual conversation, then made their confession to him; and how others came up to him as he was about to say his Mass and asked him to pray for their wives and children and for their mothers. “And what,” I asked him, “do you priests think of being asked to fight?” He laughed. “There would not be enough stones on the road to stone us with, there wouldn’t be enough slanders for our enemies to fling at us, if when every man in the country is answering the call of duty and honour, we stood aside. But we are glad to go. It is a war of defence, and so as holy as a crusade. Our lives cut us off in many ways from the lives of other men, but the war has brought us nearer to them. We wear the same uniform, we live with them in barracks and suffer with them in the trenches; we share their bread, their dangers, their sacrifices, and often we are united with them in death. The kindness they show us fills our hearts with humility.”

But I do not want to bore the reader with an account of my visits to these country priests. I will only ask him to have patience with me while I tell him of one more, and I will speak of him because he was an Englishman and it was strange to find him as curé of this tiny parish in the middle of France. He had been in France for ten years, and his French, though his accent was terrible, was fluent and idiomatic. He told me that often he did not speak a word of English for months at a time. He lived in a little stone house, two centuries old, next to the church, and when the front door was opened I found myself in the kitchen. On the stove was cooking in a casserole the solitary dish of the priest’s evening meal. An old woman led me along a dark and narrow passage to his living-room. It was untidy and comfortless, but a small stove in front of the chimney-piece afforded a grateful warmth. A shelf of books added a friendly note. The priest was a youngish man, tall and thin, with a weather-beaten face, brown hair receding from the forehead and a tonsure large enough to suggest that nature had left the barber little to do. At first he was very shy and kept trying to tie his long limbs into complicated knots, but he gained confidence over a cup of tea. “That’s the one thing I’ve never given up, my cup of afternoon tea,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without it.” So many priests have been mobilized that now he has had to take charge of six parishes. He says Mass in three on alternate Sundays and in the other three holds services on Sunday afternoons. “It’s a bit of a job to get round to them all on my bicycle,” he said. “I can manage it now, but I really don’t know what I shall do if the winter’s bad and the whole country’s under snow. Who’s that chap I’ve read about in the papers who gives so much away? Something to do with motor-cars, he is.” I suggested a well-known name. “That’s it. I wonder if he’d lend me one of his old second-hand cars for the duration so that I could get round my parishes. I could say Mass every Sunday then, instead of every other.” He had the same story to tell me as the others. He talked to me of such of his parishioners as had gone to the front. He wrote to them constantly, and they told him that they were pleased to receive his letters. He hunted all over the room to find the answer he had just had from one of them, and at last found it under his nose. He wanted to read it to me because it was from an uneducated man, whose father worked in the fields, and who had never before shown any interest in spiritual things. The priest put on his spectacles. “It’s written in such a shocking bad hand that it’s hard to read,” he said. It was very short, but it seemed to me that no educated man could have said better. “I was called up to fight for France. It was hard to leave my home and my family. But of course it was my duty to go. Thank you for your prayers for me. I hope that God will give us the peace with justice that we are fighting for and that by His mercy we shall have security for our children.”

I thought the dish in the casserole must be boiling away by now, and with regret I left the sweet-natured English priest, so willing an exile, to his lonely supper.

BOOKS AND YOU

CONTENTS

Preface

I

II

III

TO

BARBARA ROTHSCHILD

Preface

I was commissioned to write the three articles which make up this little book by The Saturday Evening Post. They are now reissued to satisfy the large number of persons who have expressed their desire to possess them in a form of somewhat greater permanence and in the hope that they will be useful to many who did not chance to come across them when they appeared in the pages of the magazine. I was limited to four thousand words, and though I think I slightly exceeded this, it must be plain that in that space I could not hope to deal with my subject otherwise than in the most cursory manner. There was in truth in each of my articles matter for a fat volume. My object was to give to such readers as are confused by the great riches which we have inherited from the authors of the past a list of books which anyone who is interested in the things of the spirit could read with pleasure and profit; but since I had to take care to make my list short enough not to dismay, I had to leave out a great many works of high significance. With few exceptions I have only mentioned one book by each author, but there are many authors, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac and Dostoevsky, to name but a handful of novelists, who have written several books which have all the qualifications for a place in my list. I had to leave out certain authors of merit, such as Charlotte Brontë, because I had no room for anyone not quite of the first class, and I had to omit all reference to lesser books, such as Izaak Walton’s Lives and James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, books delightful to read, because I could not afford to ask you to occupy yourself with any but recognized masterpieces. So, if I were taking a friend, who had enthusiasm but not much time, round a gallery of antique sculpture, I would ask him to direct his attention not to Roman portraiture, though I would not deny its interest, nor even to the statuary of the archaic period, exciting as I find it, but to give all his powers of apprehension to the great works that have come down to us from the golden age of Greece.

This little book is necessarily slight, but I trust you, the reader, will not find it superficial. I have written its chapters not as a critic (which indeed I am not) nor even as a writer by profession (for in that capacity my interest in literature would tend to be special) but as the plain man with a proper interest in humanity. The first thing I have asked of a book before I put it on my list was that it should be readable; for I want you to read these books, and readability is something which I have a notion the professors of literature and the critics whom they have trained take for granted. But it is not a thing to be taken for granted at all. There are many books important in the history of literature which it is now unnecessary for anybody but the student to read. Few people have the time to-day to read anything but what immediately concerns them. My claim is that the books I have mentioned in the following pages concern everybody. By readability I do not mean that it should be possible to read the book without attention. The reader must bring something of his own; he must have at least the capacity of interesting himself in human affairs and he must have at least some imagination. I know a number of people who say they cannot read novels, and I have noticed that they are apt to suppose that it is because, their minds being busy with important matters, they cannot trouble to occupy themselves with imaginary events; but I think they are deceived; it is either because they are so absorbed in themselves that they cannot take an interest in what happens to others, or because they are so devoid of imagination that they have not the power to enter into the ideas and sympathize with the joys and sorrows of the characters of fiction. No book is readable if you have neither curiosity nor fellow-feeling. To be readable a book must mean something to you here and now, it is but one quality among the others it may have, and it is a quality relative to the interests of the reader. I am confident that on the whole the books I have recommended will appeal to the person of ordinary interests because they have that humanity which is common to us all.

You will notice that I have written the chapter on the classic books of America on slightly different lines from those on which I wrote the other two, and I think I should explain the reason of this. When I dealt with European literature the mass of material was so great that I could afford to speak only of books which all right-minded men have agreed are masterly. I had nothing to do but commend them. If a book did not seem to me to deserve almost unqualified praise, I had no need to mention it. But when I came to American books I was in a different situation. The history of American literature is short. If I had adopted the same standard I should have had no more than perhaps four writers to speak of. I did not think that would be very useful. It seemed to me that I should be of greater service to you if I told you what I feel about certain writers who because they are American rightly demand your attention, but whom now that American literature has found its feet it is sensible to regard without national bias. I have asked you to read them for yourselves and decide their value for you regardless of the opinions of authority. I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong. The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them. To go back to American literature: because it has been in existence so short a time and its products are scanty, sundry authors have attained an eminence and their works are regarded with a reverence which are to my mind undeserved. America can well afford now to look at them without the prejudice of patriotism and, viewing them as citizens of the world, which great artists are, rather than as Americans, esteem them at their proper value.

The narrow limits to which I was confined obliged me in my article on English literature only to name a certain number of novels, and for my own satisfaction I propose to take advantage of this preface to say something more about three of these. They are Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, Meredith’s The Egoist and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. When I wrote I had not read them for many years, but since then I have done so again. I suggested that you should read The Eustace Diamonds rather than Barchester Towers, which is Trollope’s best-known novel, because it is complete in itself. It seemed to me that really to appreciate Barchester Towers you would have to read the series of which it is a part. Neither the motives of the characters nor the results of their activities are quite clear unless you read the novels that come before and after, and I did not think that Trollope was important enough, keeping in view my object of asking you to read books which would be pleasant and profitable, to justify me in asking you to read half a dozen closely-printed volumes. And I remembered that there was in Barchester Towers a good deal of that caricature which to us now seems a tiresome feature of Victorian fiction. But now that I have read The Eustace Diamonds once more, I should recommend you even with these slight drawbacks to read the more celebrated book. The Eustace Diamonds is by way of being a detective story and it has two very ingenious surprises, but it is told at inordinate length. We have learnt a good deal about the manner of writing fiction of this kind since then, and a modern writer could have made a much better story of it by compressing it into three hundred pages. The characters are soundly observed, but they are not very interesting, and most of them are the stock figures of Victorian fiction. You have the impression that Trollope was trying to write the sort of novel that was bringing Dickens so much success, and not making a very good job of it. The most human character is Lizzie Eustace, but Trollope had apparently, or at least wished his readers to have, so great an antipathy for her that he treats her unfairly, and just as when a lawyer browbeats a prisoner in court your sympathies regardless of his crime go out to him, so you feel that Lizzie wasn’t really so much worse than anybody else and therefore scarcely deserved the hard knocks the author has given her. The novel can, however, be read without difficulty, and for anyone interested in Victorian England there is a good deal of entertainment to be got by observing the manners and customs of that long-past day. This is cold commendation. But though I advise you in place of The Eustace Diamonds to read Barchester Towers, I am constrained to add that you would be unwise to expect too much from it. The merit of Trollope has of late years been somewhat exaggerated. For a generation he was almost forgotten, and when he was rediscovered, having in the interval acquired the charm of a period piece, greater praise was awarded him than he deserves. He was an honest and industrious craftsman with a considerable power of observation. He had some gift of pathos and he could tell a straightforward story in a straight-forward, though terribly diffuse, way; but he had neither passion, wit nor subtlety. He had no talent for revealing a character or resuming the significance of an episode in a single pregnant phrase. His interest now lies in his unaffected, accurate and sincere portrayal of a state of society which has perished.

Fifty years ago every intelligent young man with pretensions to culture read Meredith with enthusiasm. He was read as a generation later young men read Shaw and as ten years ago they read T. S. Eliot. Now he has, I believe, few readers among the young. But The Egoist is a fine novel. It is true that it deals with a class of society which we no longer regard with the awe which George Meredith thought was its due. We no longer accept these country gentlemen, these opulent ladies who drive about in barouches, as the salt of the earth, and their behaviour too often strikes us as vulgar and trivial. The world has changed since Meredith wrote, and it is hard for us now to be seriously impressed when Clara Middleton, a high-spirited girl of independent mind and ample fortune, makes such a to-do about breaking her engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne after she has discovered that she no longer cares for him. The girls of our own time would have found it easy to deal with the situation. We demand plausibility in our novels nowadays and we are only impatient with difficulties which can be avoided by the exercise of common sense. When at last Clara makes up her mind to run away to London she slips out of the house with trepidation and walks to the station, but, a storm arising, she gets her feet wet and so misses the train, whereupon she is persuaded to return. She showed little of the wiliness which is supposed to be characteristic of her sex. It is strange that it never occurred to her that as she was going to be married she would need some clothes and no one could think it odd that she should go to London to try them on.

Meredith wrote in a manner which does not make his books easy to read. This posturing of his, this cutting of capers and jumping through verbal hoops, is very tiresome. You would think that he found it almost impossible to make a plain statement plainly, and his wit, on which he seems to have prided himself, is tortured. But he had a gift for creating characters of such vitality that you can never quite forget them. They are not, like for instance the characters of Moby Dick, a little larger than life size, but they are something more than ordinary human beings. They have the artificiality of the persons in a comedy by Congreve, but it is not a dead artificiality; Meredith has inspired them with his own gusto and they live, like the puppets in Hoffmann’s old story which the magician brought to life, with a radiance all their own. They are truly creations and only a real novelist could have invented them. It is this gusto which enables you to read Meredith, if you can read him at all, with delight notwithstanding the coruscations of his style, the falseness of his values and the occasional clumsiness of his intrigue; he carries on his story with a fine swing and you are hurried along with him on the wings of his high spirits and boisterous, windswept joy in the exercise of his creative faculty. The Egoist is Meredith’s best novel because his subject here was universal. Egoism is the mainspring of human nature. It is the one quality from which we can never escape (I do not like to call it a vice, though it is the ugliest of our vices, because it is also the marrow of our virtues), for it determines our existence. Without it we should not be what we are. Without it we should be nought. And yet our constant effort must be to check its claims and we can only live well if we do our best to suppress it. In Sir Willoughby Patterne, Meredith has drawn such a portrait of an egoist as has never been drawn before or since. But I think no one can read this book without some qualms of conscience, for he must be even a greater egoist than Sir Willoughby if he does not see in himself some of the traits at least which make Sir Willoughby at once odious and absurd. Meredith was right when he said that his wretched hero was not this man or that man but all of us. So when I recommend you to read The Egoist it is not only because it is a lively, entertaining novel, but because it may teach you something about yourself that it is good for you to know.

Now I come to Middlemarch. Judged simply as a piece of fiction it seems to me better than either of the novels I have just been discussing. It is an excellent piece of craftsmanship. It cannot have been easy to construct, for George Eliot has taken as her subject not one group of persons in one social sphere, but different groups in different spheres, giving you a picture of the landed gentry who live on their estates round the town of Middlemarch, and the professional men, merchants and tradesmen who inhabit it. You are not asked, as you are by so many novelists, to concern yourself with the fortunes of two or three people who live in a vacuum, as it were, so that the world outside them is of no moment, but with the fortunes of all the sorts and conditions of men who make up the world in which we all live; and their various stories are managed with consummate skill. Nor, as often happens when less skilful writers attempt this complicated form of fiction, is your interest confined to one set of characters so that when you are asked to transfer it to another you do so with disinclination; George Eliot enlists your sympathies equally with them all, and she passes from one lot of people to another as naturally as in real life we pass from the people who are associated with one side of it to the people who are associated with another. This gives the novel a singular air of reality. Although the action begins when George the Fourth was still King of England we say to ourselves that this is the sort of thing we know life to be. The characters, and there are a great many of them, are wonderfully natural; they are observed with precision, so that each one stands on his own feet, a human being with his own idiosyncrasies; but George Eliot had no glow and she could not give the creatures of her invention the quality of the archangel which George Meredith was so often able to give his (and it occurs to me that this is a legitimate excuse for Clara Middleton never giving a thought to her trousseau, for doubtless an archangel would not consider the need of a wedding-gown); George Eliot saw them coolly, accurately, but with sympathy. Her heroes are no more heroic than we are and her villains no more villainous. She got so into the skin of her personages that we see them not only as others see them but as they see themselves, and thus even Mr. Casaubon is not only a hateful figure but also a pitiable one. They have a modern air, for they are not solely occupied with their emotions; they are concerned with politics and interest themselves in the problems of the day; economic questions enter into their lives as they enter into ours: they have heads as well as hearts. They are in short very much the same sort of people as we are. I should be inclined to sum up my judgment of Middlemarch by saying that George Eliot had every gift of the great novelist but fire. No English author has given an ampler and more reasonable interpretation of life; the one quality that escaped her sensible and sympathetic observation was romance.

Before I close this preface I should like to repair an omission. When I was speaking of anthologies I forgot to mention Robert Bridges’ The Spirit of Man. A critic of my article objected to my inclusion of the Oxford Book of English Verse, which to his mind was very bad. I think he was wrong, but I am willing to admit that the later parts of that book contain a number of poems that one could do without. That is inevitable; an anthology is an expression of the anthologist’s choice, and it may well be that his taste, sure enough when he is dealing with the writers of the past, falters when he is confronted with those of his own day. Time has a ravaging effect on the work of our contemporaries. None can be certain that what thrills us now will thrill a generation that comes after. But I think it would be a carping critic indeed who found fault with The Spirit of Man; it is a very definite statement of a personal attitude, so that the reader will not find in it pieces that do not accord with that attitude; but it contains much of excellence that will be unfamiliar to most readers, for Robert Bridges had wide learning, sound judgment and a passion for beauty. The Spirit of Man is a magnanimous and uplifting book.

I close with a quotation from a letter of Doctor Johnson’s to Miss Thrale. “They who do not read,” he writes to her, “can have nothing to think, and little to say.”

I

One isn’t always as careful of what one says as one should be. When I stated in a book of mine called The Summing Up that young people often came to me for advice on the books they would do well to read, I did not reckon with the consequences. I received a multitude of letters from all manner of persons, asking me what the advice was that I gave. I answered them as best I could, but it is not possible to deal fully with such a matter in a private letter; and as many people seem to desire such guidance as I can offer, it has occurred to me that they might like to have a brief account of what suggestions I have to make from my own experience for pleasant and profitable reading.

The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable. Of course, there are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment. We are reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get through them without tedium. Such books we read with resignation rather than with alacrity. But that is not the sort of reading I have in mind. The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither to get a degree nor to earn your living, they will not teach you to sail a boat or get a stalled motor to run, but they will help you to live more fully. That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.

The “you” I address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain leisure and who would like to read the books which cannot without loss be left unread. I do not address the bookworm. He can find his own way. His curiosity leads him along many unfrequented paths and he gathers delight in the discovery of half-forgotten excellence. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have. But there are masterpieces which are acknowledged to be such by all the best critics and to which the historians of literature devote considerable space, yet which no ordinary person can now read with enjoyment. They are important to the student, but changing times and changing tastes have robbed them of their savour and it is hard to read them now without an effort of will. Let me give one instance: I have read George Eliot’s Adam Bede, but I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that it was with pleasure. I read it from a sense of duty: I finished it with a sigh of relief.

Now of such books as this I mean to say nothing. Every man is his own best critic. Whatever the learned say about a book, however unanimous they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you it is no business of yours. Don’t forget that critics often make mistakes, the history of criticism is full of the blunders the most eminent of them have made, and you who read are the final judge of the value to you of the book you are reading. This, of course, applies to the books I am going to recommend to your attention. We are none of us exactly like everyone else, only rather like, and it would be unreasonable to suppose that the books that have meant a great deal to me should be precisely those that will mean a great deal to you. But they are books that I feel the richer for having read, and I think I should not be quite the man I am if I had not read them. And so I beg of you, if any of you who read these pages are tempted to read the books I suggest and cannot get on with them, just put them down; they will be of no service to you if you do not enjoy them. No one is under an obligation to read poetry or fiction or the miscellaneous literature which is classed as belles-lettres. (I wish I knew the English term for this, but I don’t think there is one.) He must read them for pleasure, and who can claim that what pleases one man must necessarily please another?

But let no one think that pleasure is immoral. Pleasure in itself is a great good, all pleasure, but its consequences may be such that the sensible person eschews certain varieties of it. Nor need pleasure be gross and sensual. They are wise in their generation who have discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the most enduring. It is well to acquire the habit of reading. There are few sports in which you can engage to your own satisfaction after you have passed the prime of life; there are no games except patience, chess problems and crossword puzzles that you can play without someone to play them with you. Reading suffers from no such disadvantages; there is no occupation — except perhaps needlework, but that leaves the restless spirit at liberty — which you can more easily take up at any moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when other calls press upon you; there is no other amusement that can be obtained in these happy days of public libraries and cheap editions at so small a cost. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. Almost all, I say, for I would not go so far as to pretend that to read a book will assuage the pangs of hunger or still the pain of unrequited love; but half a dozen good detective stories and a hot-water bottle will enable anyone to snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head. But who is going to acquire the habit of reading for reading’s sake, if he is bidden to read books that bore him?

It is more convenient to take the books of which I am now going to speak in chronological order, but I can see no reason why, if you make up your mind to read them, you should do so in that order. I think you would be much better advised to read them according to your fancy; nor do I see even why you should read them one by one. For my own part, I find it more agreeable to read four or five books together. After all, you aren’t in the same mood on one day as on another, nor have you the same eagerness to read a certain book at all hours of the day. We must suit ourselves in these matters, and I have naturally adopted the plan that best suits me. In the morning before I start work I read for a while a book, either of science or philosophy, that requires a fresh and attentive brain. It sets me off for the day. Later on, when my work is done and I feel at ease, but not inclined for mental exercise of a strenuous character, I read history, essays, criticism or biography; and in the evening I read a novel. Besides these, I keep on hand a volume of poetry in case I feel in the mood for that, and by my bedside I have one of those books, too rarely to be found, alas, which you can dip into at any place and stop reading with equanimity at the end of any paragraph.

Now, the first book on my list is Defoe’s Moll Flanders. No English novelist has ever achieved a greater verisimilitude than Defoe; it is hard, indeed, when you read him, to remember that you are reading a work of fiction; it is more like a consummate piece of reporting. You are convinced that his people spoke exactly as he made them speak, and their actions are so plausible that you cannot doubt that this is how, in the circumstances, they behaved. Moll Flanders is not a moral book. It is bustling, coarse and brutal, but it has a robustness that I like to think is in the English character. Defoe had little imagination and not much humour, but he had a wide and varied experience of life and, being an excellent journalist, he had a keen eye for the curious incident and the telling detail. He had no sense of climax, he attempted no pattern; and so the reader is not swept away by a power that he does not seek to resist; he is carried along in the crowd, as it were, and it may be that when he comes to a side street he will slip down it and get away. He may, to put it plainly, after a couple of hundred pages of very much the same sort of thing feel that he has had enough. Well, that’s all right. But for my part I am quite willing to accompany my author till he brings his ribald heroine to the haven of respectability tempered with penitence.

Then I should like you to read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I am going to deal with Doctor Johnson later on, but here I must note that, speaking of this book, he said: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Doctor Johnson was an excellent critic and a very wise man, but here he talked nonsense. Gulliver’s Travels has wit and irony, ingenious invention, broad humour, savage satire and vigour. Its style is admirable. No one has ever written this difficult language of ours more compactly, more lucidly and more unaffectedly than Swift. I could wish that Dr. Johnson had said of him what he said of another: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” He could then have added a third to his pairs of adjectives: virile but not overweening.

Two novels come next. Fielding’s Tom Jones is, perhaps, the healthiest novel in English literature. It is a dashing, brave and cheerful book, sturdy and generous; it is, of course, very frank, and Tom Jones, with his good looks and vitality, a friendly fellow whom we should all like to have known, does certain things which the moralist will deplore. But do we care? Not unless we are solemn prigs, for he is disinterested and his heart is golden. Fielding was, unlike Defoe, a conscious artist; his scheme gave him the opportunity to describe a multitude of incidents and to create a great number of personages. They are splendidly alive in a world that is pungent with the bustle and turmoil of reality. Fielding took himself seriously — as, of course, every author should — and there were many subjects of importance on which he felt called upon to deliver himself. At the beginning of each part he puts a dissertation in which he discusses one thing and another. These have humour and sincerity, but for my part I think they can be skipped without disadvantage. I have a notion that no one can read Tom Jones without delight, for it is a manly, wholesome book, without any humbug about it, and it warms the cockles of your heart.

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a novel of very different character. You might say of it what Doctor Johnson said of Sir Charles Grandison: “If you were to read it for the story, you would hang yourself.” It is a book that, according to your temperament, you will find either as readable as anything you have ever read, or tiresome and affected. It has no unity. It has no coherence. Digression follows upon digression. But it is wonderfully original, humorous and pathetic; and it increases your spiritual possessions with half a dozen characters so full of idiosyncrasy and so lovable that once you have come to know them, you feel that not to have known them would have been an irreparable loss. Nor would I have anyone fail to read Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey; I have nothing to say of it except that it is enchanting.

Now let us leave fiction for a little. I suppose it is universally acknowledged that Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson is the greatest biography in the language. It is a book that you can read with profit and pleasure at any age. You can pick it up at any time, opening it at random, and be sure of entertainment. But to praise such a work at this time of day is absurd. I should like, however, to add to it a book that, to my mind undeservedly, is less well known. This is Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The purchase by Colonel Isham of the Boswell manuscripts has resulted in a new and unexpurgated edition of it, for, as I suppose everyone knows, Boswell’s manuscript was edited by Malone, who thought proper to tone it down in accordance with the primly elegant taste of the day, and so left out much that gave the book flavour. It enlarges your knowledge both of Johnson and of Boswell, and if it increases your love and admiration for the sturdy old doctor, it adds also to your respect for his poor biographer who has been so much abused. This is not a writer to be despised, who had such a quick eye for an amusing incident, so much appreciation of a racy phrase, and such a rare gift for reproducing the atmosphere of a scene and the liveliness of a conversation.

The figure of Doctor Johnson towers over the eighteenth century, and he has been accepted as representing the English character, with its sterling merits and unhappy defects, at its best. But if we have all read his biography, so that we know him more intimately than we know many of the people we have passed our lives with, few of us have read any of his writings; and yet he produced one work at least which is in the highest degree enjoyable. I know no better book to take on holiday or to keep at one’s bedside than Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It is written with limpidity. It has pungency and humour. It is full of horse sense. Though sometimes his judgments startle us — he found Gray dull and had little good to say of Milton’s Lycidas — you delight in them because they are an expression of his own personality. He was as much interested in the men he wrote of as in their works, and though you may not have read a word of these, you can hardly fail to be diverted by the shrewd, lively and tolerant observation with which he portrays their authors.

I come next to a book that I name with hesitation, for, as I must remind the reader, I wish to speak here only of books that one would be the poorer for not having read, and though I have a great fondness for Gibbon’s Autobiography, I am not quite sure that it would have made much difference to me not to have read it. I should certainly have lost a keen pleasure, but if I mention it I feel that I should mention also a large number of other works, not so great as the greatest, to be judged by a different standard, and they would need a chapter to themselves. But Gibbon’s Autobiography is very readable; it is short, written with the peculiar elegance of which he was master, and it has both dignity and humour. Of the latter I cannot resist giving an example. When he was at Lausanne he fell in love, but his father threatening to disinherit him, he prudently gave up the thought of marrying the object of his affections. He ends his recital of the episode with these words: “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.” I think if the book contained nothing else, it would be worth reading for that delicious sentence.

Now I want to abandon the chronological order to which I have till now roughly adhered, in order to speak of two great novels, David Copperfield and Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. This I do, not only because they are to a notable degree in the great tradition of the English novel, but also because they have eminently the features which, when I think of the works I have hitherto summarily considered, seem characteristic of English literature. With the possible exception of Tristram Shandy, all these books have in common something robust, straightforward, humorous and healthy which, I like to think, is representative of the race. There is no especial subtlety in them and they are somewhat wanting in delicacy. It is a literature of men of action rather than of men of thought. There is a lot of common sense about it, some sentimentality and a great deal of humanity. Of David Copperfield there is nothing to be said but that it is Dickens’ best novel. His defects are here least noticeable and his merits most remarkable. Many long novels have been written since The Way of All Flesh, but I think it is the last English novel to have been written in the grand manner; it is the last, of any importance, that owes nothing to the great novelists of France and Russia. It is a worthy successor of Tom Jones, and its author had in him something of the old lexicographer whom we have agreed to regard as the typical Englishman.

Then I go back to Jane Austen. I would not claim that she is England’s greatest novelist; with all his faults of exaggeration, vulgarity, wordiness and sentimentality, Dickens remains that. He was prodigious. He did not describe the world as we know it; he created a world. He had suspense, drama and humour, and thus was able to give the feel of the multifariousness and bustle of life as, so far as I know, only one other novelist, Tolstoy, has done. Out of his immense vitality he fashioned a whole series of characters, diverse, individual, and tremulous — no, “tremulous” isn’t the right word — turbulent with life. He managed his complicated and often highly improbable stories with a dashing skill that perhaps you must be a novelist thoroughly to appreciate. But Jane Austen is perfect. It is true that her scope is restricted; she deals with a little world of country gentlefolk, clergymen and middle-class persons; but who has equalled her insight into character or surpassed the delicacy and reasonableness with which she probed its depths? She does not need my praise. The only characteristic I would like to impress upon your attention is one which she exhibits with so much ease that you might well take it for granted. Though, on the whole, nothing very much happens in her stories, and she mostly eschews dramatic incident, you are inveigled, I hardly know how, to turn from page to page by the urgent desire to know what is going to happen next; and that is the novelist’s essential gift. Without it he is done. I can think of no one who possessed it more fully than Jane Austen. My only difficulty now is to decide which of her few novels especially to recommend. For my part, I like Mansfield Park best. I recognize that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass, but I do not care; it is wise, witty and tender, a masterpiece of ironical humour and subtle observation.

At this point I would draw your attention to Hazlitt. His fame has been overshadowed by that of Charles Lamb, but to my mind he was the better essayist. Charles Lamb, a charming, gentle, witty creature whom to know was to love, has always appealed to the affections of his readers. Hazlitt could hardly do that. He was rude, tactless, envious and quarrelsome; a man, in truth, of an unpleasing character; but, unfortunately, it is not always the most worthy men who write the best books. In the end it is the personality of the artist that counts, and for my part I find more to interest me in the tormented, striving, acrimonious soul of Hazlitt than in Charles Lamb’s patient but somewhat maudlin amiability. As a writer, Hazlitt was vigorous, bold and healthy. What he had to say, he said with decision. His essays are full of meat, and when you have read one of them you feel, not as you do when you have read one of Lamb’s, that you have made a meal of savoury kickshaws, but that you have satisfied your appetite with substantial fare. Much of his best work can be found in his Table Talk, but there have been published a number of selections from his essays, and none of these can fail to contain My First Acquaintance With Poets, which, I suppose, is not only the most thrilling piece he ever wrote but the finest essay in the English language.

Now, two more novels: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I can say little about them, for my space is growing short. Critics nowadays are inclined to carp at Thackeray. Perhaps he was unfortunate in his period. He should have lived and written in our own time, when he would not have been hampered by the conventions which prevented the Victorian novelist from telling the truth, however bitter, as he saw it. His point of view was modern. He was deeply conscious of the mediocrity of human beings and he was interested in the contradictions of their natures. And however much you may deplore his sentimentality and his sermonizing or regret the weakness that led him to defer unduly to the demands of the public, the fact remains that in Becky Sharp he created one of the most real, living and forcible characters in English fiction.

Wuthering Heights is unique. It is an awkward novel to read, because sometimes it so outrages probability that you are completely bewildered; but it is passionate and profoundly moving; it has the depth and power of a great poem. To read it is not like reading a work of fiction, in which, however absorbed, you can remind yourself, if need be, that it is only a story; it is to have a shattering experience in your own life.

I can but name three novels which I think it would be a pity to have left unread. They are George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and Meredith’s The Egoist.

The reader will have noticed, perhaps with surprise, that hitherto I have said nothing of poetry. I do not think our race has produced either painters, sculptors or composers who can rank with the best of other countries; their achievements have been respectable rather than pre-eminent; but I do not believe it is a racial or national bias that leads me to claim that our poets are supreme. But because poetry is the flower and crown of literature, it cannot afford to be mediocre. I remember Edmund Gosse telling me that he would much rather read a volume of minor verse than an average novel; it took less time, he said, and required no mental effort. Well, I have no use for verse, however accomplished; to me, unless poetry is great, it is nothing, and I would sooner read a newspaper. I cannot read poetry at all times and in all places. I want to be in a particular mood and I want a favourable environment. I like to read poetry in a garden towards the end of a summer day; I like to sit on a cliff with a view of the sea or to lie on a mossy bank in a wood and take out the volume I have brought in my pocket. But even the greatest poets have written a great deal that is tedious to read; many versifiers have written endless volumes and in the end produced no more than two or three poems. I think that is enough to justify them, but I do not want to read so much to gain so little. I like anthologies. The critics, I understand, have a contempt for them; they say that in order to appreciate an author you must read him in full. But I do not read poetry as a critic; I read it as a human being in need of solace, refreshment and peace. I am thankful to the sensitive scholar who has taken the trouble to weed out from the great mass of English poetry what is not so good and has left for my perusal only what is to my purpose. The three best anthologies I know are Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and the admirable English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, by Gerald Bullett. But we live in the world of today and we should not neglect the writings of the poets of our own time. They, too, may have something important to give us. Unfortunately, the only anthology that, to my knowledge, has been made of them is so inadequate that I forbear even to name it.

Of course, everyone must read the great tragedies of Shakespeare. He is not only the greatest poet that ever lived but the glory of our race. But knowing, as I do, these plays pretty well, I wish that someone with taste, knowledge and discretion could be found who would make an anthology of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, putting in not only the famous passages with which we should all be familiar but also fragments, single lines even; so that I might have in a convenient volume a book to which I could always turn when I wanted the cream of all poetry.

Since I wrote these lines George Rylands has produced an anthology under the title of “The Ages of Man,” which comes as near fulfilling the wish I have here expressed as, I suppose, anyone can expect. It is a welcome gift to a troubled world.

II

In my first chapter I confined myself to the works of English authors. They are the common inheritance of the English-speaking peoples. Now I want to tell you about some books in other languages, but for the sake of your convenience, only of such as can be read in translations: and that makes my pleasant task simpler, for it obliges me to leave poetry on one side. That you must read in the original or not at all. I am not a poet, and I speak of poetry with diffidence, but it seems to me that its sound is so inextricably part of the satisfaction it affords that no translation, however skilful, can do more than suggest its quality. I would go farther; and since words have for us associations that we have come by with our mother’s milk, with recollections of our childhood, with our first love, we can to the full only appreciate poetry in our own native tongue.

Let us then deal only with prose. The first book I wish to speak of is Don Quixote. Shelton made a translation of it early in the seventeenth century, but you may not find it very convenient to read; and since I want you to read with delight, I suggest that you should read it in Ormsby’s more recent version, published in 1885. But I should like to warn you of one thing: Cervantes was a poor man and he was paid to provide a certain amount of work; he had by him, one may presume, some short stories, and it seemed to him a very good notion to use them to fill out his book. I have read them, but I read them as Doctor Johnson read Paradise Lost — as a duty rather than with pleasure — and if I were you, I would skip them. In Ormsby’s version, in order to make it easy to do this, they are printed in smaller type. After all, it is Don Quixote himself you want — Don Quixote with his faithful Sancho Panza; he is tender, loyal and great-hearted; and though you cannot but laugh at his misadventures (less now than his contemporaries did, for we are more squeamish than they were and the jests that were played on him are sometimes too cruel to amuse us), you must be very insensitive if you do not feel for the Knight of the Rueful Countenance not only affection but respect. The fantasy of man has never created a personage that so deeply appeals to a generous nature.

I do not want to speak of French literature just yet, because it is so rich, and contains so many books which I should like at least to name, that I am afraid if I once start upon it I shall leave myself no space to deal with certain books in other languages that I am sure it would be a real loss never to have read. But I should like here to mention one, since it, too, offers the portrait of a man, a man of a very different sort from Don Quixote, who insinuates himself into your affections in such a way that when you have once made his acquaintance he becomes your treasured friend. This is Montaigne, who in the course of his essays painted so complete a picture of himself, with his tastes, his oddities, his frailties, that you come to know him more intimately than you are likely ever to know any of your own friends. And in getting to know him you discover not a little about yourself, for in his patient and humorous examination of his own nature he threw a searching light on human nature in general. Much has been said of Montaigne’s scepticism, and if to see that there are two sides to a question, and that when certainty is impossible it is sensible to keep an open mind, is scepticism, I suppose he was a sceptic. But his scepticism taught him tolerance — a virtue our own day more than ever needs — and his interest in human beings, his enjoyment of life, led him to an indulgence that, could we but possess it, would help us not only to be happy ourselves but to make others happy also.

Montaigne was magnificently translated by Florio, but perhaps the later translation of Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt, will be found more readable by those who do not much care for the flamboyance of Elizabethan English. You can choose any of the essays at random and be sure of entertainment, but to get Montaigne at his best you would do better to read the third book as a whole. The essays it contains are longer, and so give greater scope for the charming discursiveness which is characteristic of him; they are more serious, though not less amusing; and in them, master as he was by then of his medium and confident in his readers’ interest, he gives you the quintessence of his vagabond spirit. Do not think from the title that an essay will not interest you, for his titles have generally very little to do with the contents. In the essay entitled On Some Verses of Virgil, for instance, you will find a disquisition on the French language which is one of the most enchanting things he ever wrote, and also a variety of remarks frank enough to bring a blush even to a cheek that is not prudish.

Now I want to leap across a couple of centuries and try to persuade you to read a book which most people will tell you, if they have ever heard of it, is unreadable. This is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and it was very conscientiously translated by Carlyle. Goethe is under a cloud in Germany just now; he aimed at being a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of the state, and that is an attitude which finds small favour with the present rulers of his country; but even before they attained power Wilhelm Meister was little read even in Germany. Once, in Berlin, finding myself in a circle of intellectual persons, I aroused the utmost surprise by expressing my admiration for it. Not one of them had read it, for they had been given to understand that it was of unsurpassed dullness. I besought them to see for themselves, and when, a few months later, I met some of them again, I was not displeased to hear that they had listened to me and, having read the neglected book, were disposed no longer to mock at my admiration. My opinion is that it is a very interesting and significant work. It is the last of the eighteenth-century novels of sentiment, it is the first of the romantic novels of the nineteenth century, and it is the forerunner of the autobiographical novels of which there has been in our own day such a plentiful crop. The hero is as colourless as are the heroes of most autobiographical novels. I do not quite know why this should be. Perhaps it is because when we write about ourselves we are disconcerted by the contrast between our aims and our achievements, and insensibly dwell on the disappointment we feel with ourselves for having made so much less of our opportunities than we had hoped to, and thus present the reader with a frustrated, rather than with a fulfilled, character. Perhaps it is that, just as when we walk down the street all the exciting things seem to happen on the other side, our own experiences appear so commonplace to us that we cannot describe them without making ourselves commonplace too; and it is only the experiences of others that have the thrilling quality of what is strange and romantic. But on the thread of this feckless creature Goethe has strung a great number of curious incidents; he has surrounded him with unusual, varied and fantastic persons, and he has used him as a mouthpiece for his own ideas on all manner of subjects. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship — I cannot recommend the Travels, which are intolerable — is at once poetical, absurd, profound and dull. Well, the dull parts you can skip. Carlyle said that he had not got so many ideas out of any book that he had read for six years, but it is only honest to add that he said also: “Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century and the greatest ass that has lived for three.”

Then, after another leap across the years, I must draw your attention to three Russian novels of the nineteenth century: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Of the three authors, Turgenev is the least considerable. But he was an artist, with a delicate sense of the poetry of life, and he had charm, pathos and humanity. He does not greatly move, but neither does he bore; and in Fathers and Sons, by far his best novel, he has depicted for the first time in fiction the Nihilist who was the forerunner of the Communist of our own day. It is curious to recognize in Bazarov, his hero, many of the traits which we have seen in men who, according to our political opinions, have wrought havoc or opened new vistas on the world we now live in. Bazarov is a brutal creature, but he is strangely impressive and not altogether unsympathetic; his power is manifest, and though he has no opportunity for action and so expends himself in words, you cannot but be convinced that, given propitious circumstances, he is capable of translating into deeds the ideas which his audacious mind has formulated. He has a dark and pitiful greatness.

When I began to write these pages I intended to recommend you to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina rather than War and Peace, for in my recollection it was the better novel of the two; but I took the precaution to read both books again, and now I have no doubt that War and Peace is incomparably the greater. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy painted a rich and vivid picture of Russian society during the last half of the nineteenth century, but the story he had to tell has too much the aspect of a moral tract entirely to please me. Tolstoy strongly disapproved of Anna’s love for Vronsky, and in order to bring it home to the reader that the wages of sin is death he loaded the dice against her. There is no reason, except that Tolstoy had it in for her, why Anna shouldn’t have divorced her husband, whom she had never loved and who cared nothing for her, married Vronsky and lived happily ever after. To bring about the tragic ending on which he had set his mind, Tolstoy had to make his heroine stupid, tiresome, exacting and unreasonable; and though, heaven knows, I would never deny that there are plenty of women who are all these, I do not find it possible greatly to sympathize with the troubles their folly has brought upon them.

If I hesitated about War and Peace, it is because it seems to me sometimes tedious. There are too many battles narrated in too great detail, and the experiences of Pierre with Freemasonry are exceedingly dull. But all this can be skipped. It remains a great novel. It describes in epic proportions the growth and development of an entire generation. The scene of action is all Europe from the Volga to Austerlitz; a vast number of persons, wonderfully realized, march across the huge stage; and this immense amount of material is consummately handled, with the minute attention to detail of a Dutch picture when the occasion demands, and then, when a different treatment is needed, with the breathless sweep of Michael Angelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. You get an overwhelming impression of the confusion of life and of the pettiness of individuals in contrast with the dark forces that mould the fate of nations. War and Peace is a thrilling, tremendous novel. War and Peace is a work of genius. In it, by the way, Tolstoy did one of the most difficult things a novelist can do: he drew a perfectly natural, charming, lively portrait of a young girl; she is perhaps the most enchanting heroine of fiction; but then he did a thing that none but a great novelist would have thought of: in an epilogue he shows her to you as she has become when, happily married, she is the mother of a family. That exquisite creature has grown fussy, commonplace and a trifle too fat. You are shocked, but you have only for a moment to consider the matter to realize how likely this was to happen. It adds a last note of verisimilitude to this amazing novel.

You will remember that in my first chapter I pointed out that it was useless, in my opinion, to read books that you did not enjoy; but now that I come to The Brothers Karamazov I hesitate; for I wonder whether it is possible to read this long, powerful and tragic work with enjoyment. It depends on what you get enjoyment from. If you can get it from the sight of a storm at sea, from the fearful splendour of a forest fire or from the tumult of a great river in flood, then you will get it from The Brothers Karamazov. But I said also that I would speak only of books that you would be the poorer for not having read, only of books that in one way or another increased your spiritual riches and enabled you to live your life with greater fullness; and I have no doubt that The Brothers Karamazov rightly takes its place, perhaps a supreme place, in this list. There is nothing in fiction that remotely resembles the novels of Dostoevsky except the Wuthering Heights of our own Emily Brontë and Melville’s Moby Dick, and The Brothers Karamazov is the most tremendous of all Dostoevsky’s works. But you must not read it as though you were reading a novel about ordinary human beings such as you meet in the ordinary course of life. It is not for nothing that I spoke just now of a storm at sea or a forest on fire. Dostoevsky’s characters have an affinity with the dark forces of nature. They are not common mortals; passionate and intensely spiritual, excruciatingly sensitive, capable of the extremity of suffering, they are in everything inordinate. They are tormented by God. Their actions are the actions of madmen in a madhouse, but there is something strangely significant in their extravagance; and it is borne in upon you that in this agonized revealing of themselves they reveal hidden depths and terrible powers of the human soul.

The Brothers Karamazov is a shapeless book, of great length, and in parts diffuse; but except for certain chapters towards the end, it holds you with a firm grip; if it contains scenes of great horror, it contains others of great beauty. I know no novel in which the sublimity and the vileness of man are so wonderfully portrayed, none in which the tragic adventures and the shattering experiences of which his soul is capable are depicted with so much compassion and so much force. Dostoevsky had the deep tenderness for suffering human beings that only suffering can bring. “Be no man’s judge,” he says; “love men and do not be afraid of their sins; love man in his sin.” It is with no sense of despair that you close the book, but with exhilaration, for the beauty of goodness shines forth through the ugliness of crime.

Upon looking back on what I have written, I notice that I have more than once suggested to you that you would be wise now and then to skip. Perhaps it was unnecessary. I surmise that only scholars will fail to exercise that useful art with the quotations from the Latin with which Montaigne, following the fashion of his day, plentifully peppered his essays; and it would be an assiduous reader indeed who could read in full the last few chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. I know that I found myself content to glance at rather than to peruse the speeches which Dostoevsky put into the mouths of counsel at the trial. I think all the books I have mentioned are important enough to be read thoroughly, but even they are more enjoyable if you exercise your right to skip. Change of taste has rendered certain parts of even great works tedious. We no longer want to be bothered with the moral dissertations of which the eighteenth century was so fond, nor with the lengthy descriptions of scenery which were favoured in the nineteenth. When the novel became realistic authors fell in love with detail for its own sake, and it took them a long time to discover that detail is interesting only if it is relevant. To know how to skip is to know how to read with profit and pleasure, but how you are to learn it I cannot tell you, for it is a trick I have never acquired. I am a bad skipper; I am afraid of missing something that may be of value to me, and so will read pages that only weary me; when once I begin to skip, I cannot stop, and end the book dissatisfied with myself because I am aware I have not done it justice, and then am apt to think that I might just as well never have read it at all.

Now let me get back to French literature. It is the richest and most varied in the world except in one respect; the French on the whole are indifferent poets. They have on the other hand cultivated all the arts of prose with abundance and the most brilliant success. It is only proper that they should have had for so long so great an influence on the writers of our own nation, for till recently, in prose composition the French had almost everything to teach us and we almost everything to learn. France, of course, had manifest advantages: its central position in Europe, its dense population, its wealth, its civilization, were favourable to the growth of a great literature; and the natural bent of the French mind towards lucidity, moderation and reasonableness — qualities more useful to the writer of prose than to the poet — was favourable to the emergence of great talent. French became a precise and logical language, enabling writers to express themselves with grace and clarity, when English, not yet having assimilated the languages it had been for centuries absorbing, was still muddled and cumbersome. From the immense wealth of this literature it is plain that in the small space at my disposal I can pick out but a handful of books.

The first one to which I would draw your attention is very short. It is The Princess of Cleves, by Madame de la Fayette. It was published in 1678, and the historians will tell you that it is the earliest psychological novel. That, of course, is interesting, but what is more to the point is that it is a very singular and a very modern story. The scene is the court of Henri II. The heroine, a very great lady and a virtuous woman, respects but does not love her husband, and when she meets the Duke of Nemours at a court ball, falls deeply in love with him. But she is determined not to dishonour herself; and so that she may with her husband’s help more easily resist the temptation that distracts her, she confesses her passion to him. He is a man of fine character and he trusts his wife, he knows that she is incapable of betraying him; but human nature is weak, and against his will he is racked with jealousy. He becomes suspicious, irritable, exasperating; I know nothing in fiction more natural than the way in which his character, under the strain, gradually deteriorates. It is a moving tale, for the personages concerned are desirous of doing what they consider their duty and are defeated by circumstances beyond their control. The moral seems to be that you should ask of no one more than it is in his power to give. It is an instructive book to read nowadays, when it seems generally accepted that love knows no law and that duty must in all cases yield to inclination.

Next I would have you read another novel, but of a very different sort. This is Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Its persons have none of the nobility of soul which enables those of The Princess of Cleves to face their tragic situation in the grand manner; they are but frail, erring human beings, and our hearts go out to them because we recognize in them our own weakness. Here is a human story. I envy anyone who reads this delicious book for the first time. How fresh, how natural and how charming is Manon, for all her faults; and how moving is Des Grieux’s constant love for the faithless creature! Weak? Of course he is weak. A baggage? Of course she is a baggage. She is inconstant, mercenary and cruel, and she is loving, generous and tender; the type is immortal, and I think it will be long before the memory of pretty Manon fades from the hearts of men.

Now let us speak of another short novel, Voltaire’s Candide, within whose few pages are contained more wit, more mockery, more mischievous invention, more sense and more fun, than ever man compressed in so small a space. It was ostensibly written, as everyone knows, to ridicule the philosophical optimism which was then in fashion, and at a moment when the earthquake of Lisbon, with its widespread destruction and great loss of life, had given a nasty jar to the worthy people who believed that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds. Never has a man had a more versatile and lively mind than Voltaire, and in this novel he exercised his cynical gaiety at the expense of most subjects which men have agreed to take seriously — religion and government, love, ambition and loyalty — and its moral, such as it is (and not a bad one either) is: Be tolerant and cultivate your garden: that is, do whatever you have to do with diligence and fortitude.

Then I come to a very important work — The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is a book that few, I should imagine, will read without interest, though many will read it with disgust. But if you find the study of human nature the most absorbing of all studies, you cannot fail to find this book rewarding, for here you have a man who has laid bare his soul with candour. He does not, like many who have written of themselves, merely exhibit frailties which after all are rather engaging; he does not hesitate to show himself ungrateful, unscrupulous, dishonest, base and mean. You can have little sympathy with him, since he is despicable; and yet such is his love of natural beauty, so tender is his sentiment, so miraculous his narrative gift that, however great your repulsion, you are fascinated; and I don’t know who, if he is completely honest with himself, can read the confessions of this weak-willed, petulant, vain and miserable creature without saying to himself: “After all, is there so much to choose between him and me? If the whole truth were known about me, should I, who turn away shocked from these revelations, cut so pretty a figure?” So I warn you, I think no one can read this book without some disturbance to the self-complacency which is our chief defence in our dealing with this difficult world.

During the nineteenth century France was wonderfully rich in fiction. Its three greatest novelists were Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert. Taking him all in all, I suppose Balzac is the greatest novelist who ever lived. Like Dickens, he was more at his ease with the extraordinary than with the usual, and he depicted the vile with greater force than the deserving; but he was a creator even more prodigious than Dickens, and his scope was greater. He sought to write the history of society in his own time, and in some measure he succeeded. When you read him you do not feel that you are concerned with a limited group of persons, but with the commonweal at large, in which bigger issues than the fate of individuals are involved. I think he was the first novelist to realize the importance of affairs; his people have shops or go to business, make fortunes or lose them; and though love — as with all novelists — plays a large part in his novels, money is the motive force in the world of his invention. He wrote badly, he was excessive, he had no taste, but he had a passion and a vigour which enabled him to create characters, extravagant and abnormal doubtless, who are violently and magnificently alive. He is often blamed for the melodramatic nature of his stories, but I ask myself how it is possible to expect that these exceptional persons should move in a world of measure and restraint. The storm needs the mountains and the sea for its grandeur. It is hard to choose one among the many deeply interesting novels that Balzac wrote, but since to my mind Father Goriot shows most completely his thrilling and varied power, I think that is the one I would recommend to your attention.

Stendhal wrote two novels which I would have you read; first, The Red and the Black, and then, if you like it as much as I do, The Charterhouse of Parma. For I must tell you that he is my favourite novelist. I like the plain and exact manner in which he wrote and the cool precision of his psychological analysis. He scrutinized the workings of the human heart with perspicacity. Energy was the quality that he most admired in men, and the creatures of his fancy that he has studied with most elaborate and anxious care are those who will allow no obstacle to prevent them from exercising their forceful will and who will hesitate at no crime to achieve the end on which they have determined. To my mind, The Red and the Black is for its first two thirds one of the best novels ever written; I think it fails then, and for a very singular reason. Stendhal founded it on fact, but the character he invented, Julien Sorel, ran away with him, as the characters of our invention often do, and when Stendhal forced him to behave in such a way as to fit the actual circumstances which had been the inspiration of his story, you are disconcerted, for you cannot believe that the unscrupulous, ambitious and resolute man whom he has drawn would act with such a foolish disregard of consequences. Now I come to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It is a landmark in the history of modern fiction. On reading it again recently I could not but feel that Flaubert’s desire to be unshrinkingly objective had resulted in a certain frigidity of tone, a certain dryness, and this somewhat qualified my admiration; but I still thought it a great and powerful work. The characters are described with minuteness and verisimilitude. It leaves you, when you have finished it, with a feeling of profound, yet half-contemptuous, pity for those commonplace people for whom life has proved so cruel. The persons that the author has set before you are so real, they suffer so desperately, that they cease to be merely individuals, they become typical of humanity; and if you must extract a moral from a novel, you may extract from Madame Bovary the not-unimportant one that idle dreams, reveries that have no chance of fulfilment, can lead only to disaster; and oddly enough you return to the moral of Candide — take things as they come and do your duty with good will.

I have reached the limits of my space, and though there are other books, of smaller consequence, which I should have liked to talk to you about, I must content myself with only briefly mentioning a few more. Benjamin Constant wrote a short novel called Adolphe in which, reversing the practice of most authors who are more inclined to describe the beginnings of a love affair, he has analyzed with rare power its decline. It is a real human document. In The Three Musketeers you have a grand romantic novel. It may not be literature, the characters may be sketchy and the plot ill-contrived, but it is wonderfully readable; and to be that, I may remind you, is the novelist’s indispensable faculty. Anatole France had a small but exquisite talent, which he displayed with rare felicity in a volume of stories called The Mother-of-Pearl Case. He was at one time too highly esteemed, but the neglect which has now befallen him is unjust.

Finally, I must remind you that our own time has produced in Marcel Proust a novelist who can stand comparison with the greatest. His work has been so well translated that I am inclined to think it alone, of all those I have mentioned, loses nothing in its English dress. He wrote one novel only, but that in fifteen volumes. When first they were made known to an astonished world, they were praised out of all reason. I myself wrote that I preferred being bored by Proust to being amused by any other writer. A second reading has made most of us assume a more sensible attitude. He is often repetitive, his self-analyses grow wearisome, and his obsession with the tedious emotion of jealousy fatigues in the long run even his most willing readers; but his defects are far more than compensated by his merits. He is a great and original writer. He has subtlety, creative power and psychological insight; but I think the future will hail him above all as a wonderful humorist. So I recommend you to start at the beginning of this copious novel, read till you are bored, skip and start reading again; but to take care to miss nothing of Madame Verdurin or the Baron de Charlus. They are the richest creations of the comic fancy our time has seen.

One word more. In these two chapters I have drawn your attention to various books, and I have had little but good to say of them; for if I had not thought them in their various ways valuable, I would not have recommended you to read them. I have by the way said something of their authors; and I am conscious that it must seem rather absurd for me, as though I were a prospective Member of Parliament trying to get on good terms with voters, to give Jane Austen a chuck under the chin, as it were, a pat on the head to Goethe and a friendly nod to Dostoevsky. But I do not know what else I could have done. Merely to have given you a list of books would have been dull. In the short space allowed to me I could treat of them only summarily, but because I wanted to interest you in them I had to say at least something about them. All I can hope now is that if you read them, or any of them, you will find them enjoyable as well as spiritually profitable; and I should be glad to think that when afterwards you look back on them you will feel, as I do, that you are the better for having read them, and that they have given you something of value that you would not be without.

III

When the two articles on books, English and foreign, which I wrote for The Saturday Evening Post appeared, a number of readers expressed the desire that I should write a third on American books. Thinking well of the suggestion, the editor passed it on to me; but I replied that this task was one that should evidently be entrusted to an American author. This, however, was apparently not what his readers wanted and so, not without misgiving, I agreed to do the best I could in the matter. I want to make my position clear. Though in the course of a long life I have read a great many American books — indeed I could not have been more than ten when with gales of laughter I read Artemus Ward and Helen’s Babies — I cannot pretend that I have read nearly as widely as any American fond of reading will certainly have done. There is no reason why I should. I have read at random. There are books in every country that have only a local interest, and the native of another country cannot be expected to find in them much to his purpose. I have not for example felt any need to read the works of Jonathan Edwards, and I have found the dialect of Uncle Remus a stumbling-block too difficult for me to cope with. I claim no authority for any of the opinions I shall here express; I shall state why I hold them; but I freely acknowledge that they are those of an Englishman who has read from his national standpoint and whose opinions thus have a certain bias. I am aware that some of them, disagreeing with the common judgments of critical authority in the United States, may arouse disapproval. I have sought what was most American in American literature and have felt little inclination to concern myself with such writers as found their inspiration in England. To interest me an American book must smack of the soil. I cannot think that I shall be able to tell Americans anything they do not know about the books I propose shortly to discuss, but it may be that I shall be able to give foreigners, including my own countrymen, a list of books which will give them an inkling of the Americanism of America and so enable them to get an understanding of the influences which have gone to form the character of a people with which the future must bring them into ever-increasing communication.

I propose to deal only with those works which may be justly regarded as classics. I shall omit all mention of recent productions, partly from an inadequate knowledge of them and partly because it is too soon to tell what in the immense output of the last fifty years will prove to be of permanent and characteristic value. Contrary to some critical opinion, it is no proof that because a great many people have wanted to read a book and so made it a best seller, it is worthless; David Copperfield, Father Goriot and War and Peace have all been best sellers; but neither is it proof that it is a masterpiece; it may appeal for any one of a dozen reasons and when those reasons no longer obtain it may be unreadable. My own plan is never to let myself be persuaded to read a best seller for two or three years after publication; it is astonishing then how many books that have been received with acclamation I find I can without loss leave unread.

I must remind you here of something that I have already insisted upon, namely that I am very strongly of opinion that you should read for enjoyment. To my mind it is very ill-advised to look upon reading as a task; reading is a pleasure, one of the greatest that life affords, and if these books of which I am now going to speak to you do not move, interest or amuse you, there is no possible reason for you to read them. It is from this consideration, indeed, that I set out to write my article with somewhat less diffidence than, since I was treating of matters in which I could not pretend to be expert, I might reasonably be supposed to have felt. For, conscious that my knowledge was imperfect, when I set about gathering my materials, I read two or three standard histories of American literature. I wanted to compare my views with those of the highest authorities, and when I found that these did not agree with mine, consider whether my own should be modified. But I was very much surprised to discover that they were almost exclusively concerned with matters that I thought had nothing to do with literature. They enlarged, often in an interesting fashion and I have no doubt with sound judgment, upon the social conditions which prevailed when such and such an author wrote, and upon the political circumstances which influenced his work; they discussed his ideas on the burning questions of the day and examined the philosophical implications of his thought. And what not. But they did not seem to think it worth while to say much about his style; they showed small interest in the solidity of his construction, the ingenuity of his invention or the originality of his characterization; they did not trouble to say whether he was readable or not. So far as I could see, it had entirely escaped the attention of these conscientious gentlemen that a book may be read for delight and that literature is an art.

But literature is an art. It is not philosophy, it is not science, it is not social economy, it is not politics; it is an art. And art is for delight.

There is but one more thing to say before I get down to the business of commenting on the books I have chosen to speak of. It must not be expected that they will make such a show as those I have briefly discussed in my previous chapters. Genius is a word often loosely applied; I would not myself apply it to the author of three or four successful plays or of two or three successful novels; genius to my mind is something that arises very rarely, and I am not sure that I should be comfortable in applying it to any of the authors I shall presently mention. It is well enough to have talent. Some of these men had great talent; others had less. Most of them had formidable difficulties to contend with; whether they were conscious of it or not, in order to create a national literature they had to fight their way through the obstruction of the foreign influences to which they were subjected, not only by their own upbringing but also by their readers’ prejudices; they were living in a new country, in process of forming its own civilization, and practical matters had naturally an importance which thrust the arts into the background. As we know, some writers felt themselves unable to cope with the situation and fled to what they thought was the happier environment of Europe. It may be that those who wisely remained would have created more perfect works if circumstances had been more favourable; it speaks well for the vigour of their minds and the authenticity of their talents that they should notwithstanding everything have produced works of uncommon merit. American literature is not much more than a hundred years old. It is only just to remember that English literature would not be the magnificent monument to the English spirit that it is if you left out of it (to say nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the great poets and prose writers of the seventeenth century) the whole of the eighteenth; if it had no Pope, no Swift, no Fielding, no Doctor Johnson and no Boswell.

Yet it is with a book written in the eighteenth century that I propose to begin. The histories of literature contain few autobiographies; they contain none more consistently entertaining than Benjamin Franklin’s. It is written plainly, as befitted its author, but in pleasant easy English, for Franklin, as we know, had studied under good masters; and it is interesting not only for its narrative but for the vivid and credible portrait which the author has succeeded in painting of himself. I cannot understand why in America Franklin is often spoken of with depreciation. Fault is found with his character; his precepts are condemned as mean and his ideals as ignoble. It is obvious that he was not a romanticist. He was shrewd and industrious. He was a good business man. He wished the good of his fellow-men, but was too clear-sighted to be deceived by them, and he used their failings with pawky humour to achieve the ends, sometimes selfish, it is true, but as often altruistic, that he had in view. He liked the good things of life, but accepted hardship with serenity. He had courage and generosity. He was a good companion, a man of witty and caustic conversation, and he liked his liquor; he was fond of women, and being no prude, took his pleasure of them. He was a man of prodigious versatility. He led a happy and a useful life. He achieved great things for his country, his state and the city in which he dwelt. To my thinking he is as truly the typical American as Doctor Johnson is the typical Englishman, and when I ask myself why it is that his countrymen are apt to grudge him their sympathy, I can only think of one explanation. He was entirely devoid of hokum.

Now let us come without further delay to the nineteenth century. The outstanding figures are Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, and if I were constrained to ascribe genius to three American writers I would unhesitatingly choose these names. But I will not speak of them yet. What I want to trace in this article, so far as my limited knowledge extends and my space permits, is the emergence of Americanism in American literature; for that, I repeat, is what chiefly interests me and should, I think, interest you; and so I shall attempt no chronological order. I may add, to save repetition, that I shall only speak of books which I think are for one reason or another eminently readable. No one can afford not to read them; no educated person can read them without both profit and pleasure.

I am bound to confess, however, that on rereading The Scarlet Letter for my present purpose the profit and pleasure I gained were of a limited character. I see no harm in putting things in their proper place, and I must point out to you that the last forty years have seen the rise in America of at least half a dozen much better novelists than Hawthorne ever was. It is only prejudice and the fact that they are alive and in our midst that can blind us to it. But The Scarlet Letter is a famous romance, and it has been read, I suppose, by every American who has read anything at all. For my part I found the introduction entitled The Custom House, more interesting than the tale. It has charm, lightness and humour. The first thing you ask of a novel is that you should believe it; if you feel instinctively that the characters do not behave with ordinary common sense the spell is broken and the novelist has lost his hold on you. Now, Hawthorne early in his narrative was faced with a difficulty; a reason had to be found why Hester Prynne, free to go anywhere, should decide to remain in the place where the humiliation to which she had been exposed must make her life intolerable; and he found it naturally enough in her love for Arthur Dimmesdale, which was so great that she preferred, notwithstanding the attendant shame, to remain where he was. But Hawthorne did not face a much greater difficulty, for if he had he could never have written the story he did: the facts of life were not unknown to the Puritans, who were as practical as they were pious, and no stork brought the baby to a Hester who never suspected that such an event was in prospect. It is incredible that she should not have gone to some distant place to be secretly delivered of her child, and if the lovers could not bear to be separated, it is hard to understand why, since on a later occasion they had no difficulty in arranging to sail back to Europe together, they should not have adopted such an obvious course when the occasion was so much more urgent. For all they knew Roger Chillingworth was dead and, like Benjamin Franklin with the respectable Miss Read a century later, they could have effected a common-law marriage. Hawthorne did not possess the gift of creating living characters; Roger Chillingworth is merely a bundle of malignancies, not a human being, and Hester is but a fine piece of statuary. The Reverend Mr Dimmesdale comes to life only when, the pair having finally decided on flight, he is anxious to know the precise time at which the vessel on which they propose to sail may be expected to depart. He has composed his Election Sermon and is unwilling not to deliver it. That is a nice and human touch. It is not then for its story that I would have you read The Scarlet Letter and if you have done so already to read it again, but for the impressive quality of its language. Hawthorne formed his style on the great writers of the eighteenth century. Such a phrase as: “there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly’s wing,” might well have been written by Sterne, and he would have been pleased with it. Hawthorne had a delicate ear and great skill in the construction of an elaborate phrase. He could write a sentence half a page long, rich with subsidiary clauses, that was resonant, balanced and crystal clear. He could be splendid and various. His prose had the sober opulence of a Gothic tapestry, but under the restraint of his taste it never became turgid or monotonous. His metaphors were significant, his similes apt, and his vocabulary fitting to his matter. Fashions come and go in literature and it may well be that the hairy-chested, rough-neck prose which is in favour today will in the future lose its vogue. It may be that readers will ask for a more formal, a more distinguished way of writing; authors then will be glad to learn from Hawthorne how to manage a sentence of more than half a dozen words, how to combine dignity with lucidity, and how without pedantry to please both the eye and the ear.

Since Hawthorne belongs to what historians of literature call the School of Concord, of which Emerson and Thoreau were distinguished members, this seems a fitting place to speak of them. The interest of Walden must depend on the taste of the reader. For my part I read it without boredom, but without exhilaration. It is very pleasantly written, in a style without formality, with ease and grace; but if I were snowbound on a Western prairie, with a deaf mute as my only companion, I must admit that I should be dismayed to find that Thoreau’s Walden was the only book in the log cabin. It is the kind of work which needs an author of vigorous personality, with a background of singular experience and a store of out-of-the-way learning; but Thoreau was a man of supine character, his knowledge of the world was small, and his reading, though respectable, followed a well trodden path. I do not think he had the emotional force to make the experiment which is the theme of his book very important. He discovered that if you limit your wants you can satisfy them at small expense. We knew that. “It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health,” says Hawthorne, “to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.” This is very true, and none should take it more to heart than the writer of books.

Emerson, of course, is a figure of much greater substance. I was first led to read him many years ago by a fair-haired lady I met on the Lake of Como. On the excursions we took she always carried a volume of the Essays with her and she had heavily underlined in blue pencil (perhaps to bring out the colour of her eyes) the passages that particularly struck her. There were at least two or three on every page. She told me that she found Emerson a great solace. She said that in all the tribulations and difficulties of her life she went to him and found something to her purpose. I met her again many years later in Hawaii and she very kindly asked me to lunch with her at a house she had rented for the season. She had always been wealthy, but since our last meeting had come up in the world, for her husband had been raised to the peerage and she was now a woman of title. She received me in a Callot dress (the Sisters Callot being then the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris), wearing a pearl chain which must have cost fifty thousand pounds, but no shoes or stockings. “You see,” she said, pointing to her bare feet, “here we lead the simple life.” I thought it a pity they had bunions on them. At that moment a Chinese butler, dressed very like one of the Ming emperors, brought in a tray of cocktails. I asked her if she still read Emerson. She seized a volume from the table and clasped it to her by this time withering bosom, and told me, indeed yes, she never went anywhere without a volume of the Essays; she waved a jewelled hand at the blue sea which you saw through the open windows and said that except for Emerson she would never really have grasped the spiritual significance of the Pacific Ocean. She died a little while ago at a ripe old age, but a disciple of Emerson to the last, and she left her yacht and her library to the gigolo who had been the other solace of her declining years. Since she did not leave him enough money to run the yacht he sold it, but secondhand books fetch little and it may be that he kept the library. In that case I can only hope he found the Emerson a solace in his bereavement. I must admit that he has never been a solace to me. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully of a writer in whom his fellow-countrymen take pride; I recognize the charm and benignity of his character; when you read his journals you cannot but be impressed by the thoughtfulness which possessed him, even when he was no more than a young boy, and by the fluency with which he expressed himself; and since he was a lecturer, with the platform in view when he wrote, it may be that his voice and presence added a significance to his discourse which is lost in the printed page; but I can only confess that I cannot find much profit or entertainment in his celebrated Essays. Often he hardly escapes the commonplace by a hair’s breadth. He had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of meaning. He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man. But since in the case of so famous an author one’s natural curiosity impels one to ask what it is that has given him such a position in the world of letters, I should recommend you to read his English Traits. In this book he was bound down to the concrete and so there is less in it of the vague, loose and superficial thinking which in his Essays he was apt to indulge in; he thus managed to be more vivid, more actual and more entertaining than in any of his other works. I certainly read it with pleasure.

It may be that the writers of the School of Concord have a value to Americans which the foreigner cannot hope to comprehend; he must be content to leave it and pass on. This is not the case with Edgar Allan Poe; indeed he is, I think, more honoured in Europe than in the land of his birth, and in France, for example, his influence is still powerful with his fellow-writers. It may be that his moral character and the unsatisfactory nature of his life have unjustly caused Americans to hold him in less esteem than he deserves. But neither an author’s character nor his life has anything to do with the reader, who is concerned only with his works. Poe wrote the most beautiful poetry that has ever been written in America. It is like some of those great pictures of the Venetians whose sudden loveliness takes your breath away so that, for the moment satisfied by the appeal to your senses, you do not care that they can give you no matter for your fancy to work upon. They have nothing but their beauty to offer, but their beauty is matchless. Poe, furthermore, was an acute critic and his analysis of the art of the short story for long governed the practice of his successors. His tales have never been excelled. I need hardly remind you that in The Gold Bug and the narratives in which Monsieur Dupin figures he invented the detective story which has resulted in the flood of books which we all of us at times are glad to read. The field has been cultivated by a great many writers with variety and success, but in essentials no one has added anything to what he at his first attempt accomplished. It may be that his stories of horror and mystery owe something to Hoffmann and to Balzac, but they wonderfully achieve the end he set himself, for he was the most self-conscious of artists, and they deserve their renown. He wrote in a turgid style, and he was lavish of romantic accessories; his dialogue was as bombastic as his people were unreal; his range was narrow; but that you have to put up with: what he has to give us is unique. He wrote very little and almost all he wrote can be read with enjoyment. But there is nothing peculiarly American in him; there is nothing that I can remember either in his prose or his verse that could not have been written by an Englishman, and if we are looking in American literature for something that has in it a relish of the soil we must certainly seek further.

But before doing this I must speak of an author who turned his back deliberately on the American scene. Henry James was not the greatest writer that America has produced, but surely the most distinguished. His gifts were conspicuous; but there was some defect in his character, one must suppose, that prevented him from making the most of them. He had humour, insight, subtlety, a sense of drama; but a triviality of soul that made the elemental emotions of mankind, love and hatred, the fear of death and the sense of life’s mystery, incomprehensible to him. No one ever plumbed the surface of things with a keener scrutiny, but there is no indication that he was ever aware of the depths beneath it. He looked upon The Ambassadors as his best novel; I read it again the other day and I was appalled by its emptiness. It is tedious to read on account of its convoluted style; no attempt is made to render character by manner of speech, and everyone speaks like everyone else, in pure Henry James; the only living person in the book is Mrs Newsome who never appears in the flesh; and Strether is a silly, meanly inquisitive old woman. It would be intolerable but for Henry James’s great gift (the novelist’s essential gift) of carrying the reader on from page to page by the desire to know what is going to happen next, and by the wonderful atmosphere of Paris in spring and summer which no one, to the best of my knowledge, has so exquisitely conveyed. I much prefer The American. It is written with lucidity and elegance, with some pomposity perhaps (people do not go away, they depart; they do not go home, but repair to their domiciles; and they do not go to bed, they retire); but that gives it a period flavour that I do not find displeasing. It is a curious novel in this respect, that it is a love story in which there is no love. Christopher Newman wishes to marry Madame de Cintré because he wants a mother for his children and she will grace the head of his table, and when the engagement is broken off his pride is humiliated but his heart is unaffected. The characters are not human beings; the men are stuffed shirts and the women are crinolines. Madame de Cintré, though charming, graceful and elegant, is a purely conventional figure who gives you the impression that she is drawn not from nature, but from a diligent perusal of Balzac’s novels. Balzac, however, was able to give his most conventional creatures something of his own exuberant vitality; Henry James had nothing of the sort to give, and she has no more life in her than a fashion-plate in a Lady’s Keepsake. Newman, the American, is the Western pioneer, and indeed, judging from the period at which the story is set, he may well have taken part in the gold rush to California; but Henry James seems to have known the sort of man he was trying to portray too little to give his hero even a superficial plausibility. Newman could scarcely have learnt his epistolary style in a pool-room at St Louis or on the water front in San Francisco. My own belief is that he fooled Henry James, and that the real reason why the aristocratic Bellegardes refused the projected alliance was not that Newman had made his fortune in business, but that, as they fortunately discovered in time, he was really an assistant instructor in English at the University of Harvard. But for all that The American is well worth reading. So great is Henry James’s skill in telling a story, so rare his sense of suspense and so sure his touch in working up to a dramatic situation, that you are held from beginning to end. It is as exciting as a detective story and, after all, no more incredible; and you cannot remain unconscious of the charm of contact with the author’s amiable, urbane and cultivated mind. The American is not a great book, but it is a very readable one: there are not many novels of which you can say that sixty years after their appearance.

I will speak of a great book now. This is Moby Dick. I read Melville’s South Sea books, Omoo and Typee, when I was myself on the islands and I read them with interest and pleasure, but I have never been tempted to read them again and I have not read Pierre, accepting the opinion of good critics that Melville went to pieces when he wrote it. But Moby Dick is enough for any man’s reputation. Some critics have complained of the flamboyance of its style. To my mind it is written in a manner that wonderfully suits the theme. Grandiloquence is an affair of hit or miss; when it comes off you may reach the sublime, when it doesn’t you descend to the ridiculous. I must admit that sometimes Melville does so descend; but it is beyond human powers to walk always on the topmost heights, and his tumbles may be condoned when you consider how splendidly, with what a noble force, with what a sustained splendour of phrase, he writes his best passages. There are a number of chapters, the chapters of antiquarian lore mugged-up in a library and those dealing with the natural history of the whale, which I find tedious; but it is obvious that Melville set great store on his recondite knowledge, and you have to accept the crotchets of an author of great parts. Homer sometimes nods and Shakespeare can write passages of empty rhetoric. But in the scenes at New Bedford, and when he describes events, when he deals with men, above all of course with the tremendous Ahab, then he is magnificent. There is a throb, a mystery, a foreboding, a passion, a sense of the horror and terror of life, of the inevitableness of destiny and of the power of evil, which take you by the throat. You are left shattered, but strangely uplifted. And if you are a writer you are proud to think that you cultivate an art which is capable of such altitudes and which can work such wonderful effects on the hearts and senses and minds of men.

But though Melville began his story in New Bedford and the action takes place in an American whaler, I do not find in his book that flavour of the soil, valuable because it is specific, which I am looking for. His culture was European. His prose gives you the impression of having been founded on that of the great English stylists of the seventeenth century. And though his characters, at least the important ones, are American, they are so by accident; they are a little larger than life size and they are inhabitants really of no definite country, but native to that thrilling and strange realm in which live and torture one another the persons of Dostoevsky’s novels and the stormy creatures of Wuthering Heights. It would be difficult in any case, and impossible in the space allotted to me, to say exactly what I mean by the American tang: it is in literature that characteristic which differentiates a work from any that could possibly have been written in another country and so marks it as the unmistakable product of its environment; but I can point to a very good instance of it. You have it conspicuously in Mark Twain, and he gives it you in all its richness and savour in Huckleberry Finn. This book stands head and shoulders above the rest of his work. It is an authentic masterpiece. At one time Mark Twain was somewhat patronized because he was a humorist, and the pundits are apt to look askance at contemporary humour; but his death has reassured them and now he is, I think, universally accepted as one of the greatest of American authors. I need in consequence say little about him. I would only point out one circumstance. When Mark Twain tried to write in a literary manner he produced (as in Life on the Mississippi) but indifferent journalese; but in Huckleberry Finn he had the happy idea of writing in the person of his immortal hero and so produced a model of the vernacular style which, I conjecture, has proved a valuable stimulus to some of the best and most characteristic American writers of the present day. He showed them that a living manner of writing is not to be sought in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers of England, but in the current speech of their own people. It would be foolish to suppose that the language in which Huck Finn expresses himself is what painters call representational; no illiterate small boy could have conceived such neat phrases or made such an apt choice of epithets. Perhaps because he thought it beneath the dignity of literature to write thus colloquially in the first person, Mark Twain, using a literary artifice which we gladly accept, made believe that these were the actual utterances of his little hero; and in so doing freed American style from the shackles that had so long bound it. Huckleberry Finn, with its amazing variety of invention, its gusto and life, is in the tradition of that great and celebrated variety of fiction, the picaresque novel; and it holds its place bravely with the two greatest examples of the genre, Gil Blas and Tom Jones; in fact, if Mark Twain had not had the unfortunate notion of bringing in that boring little muttonhead Tom Sawyer to ruin the last few chapters, it would have been faultless.

My space is growing so short that I can do no more than mention The Oregon Trail. Parkman made his journey less than a hundred years ago, and at that time buffaloes ranged the prairie in hundreds of thousands and the danger from hostile Indians was still something to be reckoned with. He was a man of courage, resolution and dry humour; with these qualities and a grand subject he wrote a book which is entertaining from cover to cover. It is so good that one cannot but regret that it is written without grace.

I must also say a few words about Emily Dickinson. I am afraid that I shall offend many persons in America when I confess that to my mind she has been accorded more praise than she deserves. She has been hailed as the great American poet. But poetry has nothing to do with nationality. Poets inhabit the empyrean and belong to no country. Do we talk of Homer as a great Greek poet or of Dante as a great Italian poet? To do so would be to depreciate them. Nor should our judgment be affected by the circumstances of a poet’s life. That Emily Dickinson had an unhappy love affair and lived for many years in seclusion, that Poe tippled and was ungrateful to those who befriended him, neither makes the poetry of the one any better nor that of the other any worse. Emily Dickinson is best read in anthologies. There her wit, her poignancy, her simplicity make their utmost effect, and it may be that most anthologies would be the richer if they were less niggardly in their selections; but when you read the whole body of her work you are likely to be disappointed. She is at her best when she allows herself to sing; when her rhythm is modulated and varied, when her language serves her emotion and when her invention is spontaneous. But she is too rarely at her best. Like Miss Emmeline Grangerford, Emily Dickinson could rattle off poetry like nothing. There is a great deal of monotony in her constant use of the common or ballad metre in a stanza of four lines; it is in itself a limiting form, and she narrows it still more because her ear was not subtle and her language was seldom simple enough for the measure. She had a strain of sophistication which induced her too often to sacrifice lyric beauty to a desire to make a clever point. In the short epigrammatic poems she wrote it is a matter of hitting the nail accurately on the head; she was very apt to give it a little tap slightly on one side. She had a gift, but a small one, and it is only confusing when claims are made on her behalf which there is little in her work to justify. Poetry is the crown of literature, but we have the right to demand that its pearls should not be cultured nor its rubies reconstructed. America will produce poets (indeed I am inclined to think it has already done so) who will make the encomiums lavished on Emily Dickinson appear extravagant.

Now I have but Walt Whitman to speak of. I have kept him to the end, because I think it is in Leaves of Grass that we at last get, free from European influences, the pure and unadulterated Americanism which in these pages we have sought. Leaves of Grass is a work of immense significance, but since I began by reminding you that I would recommend you to read books which, whatever their other merits, were enjoyable, I am constrained to tell you that few great poets have been more uneven than Whitman. I think many books are spoilt for readers because the critics speak of them as though they had no defects. Perfection is not of this world, and generally merits can only be achieved at the cost of shortcomings. It is much better that the reader should know what to expect; otherwise, finding himself at variance with the panegyrists, he will unduly blame himself for not appreciating something that in fact does not merit appreciation. Whitman was a writer of splendid beginnings, but either because he found his way of writing too easy or because he was intoxicated with his own verbosity, often enough he went on and on when he had nothing of significance to add to what he had already said. That you must put up with. He wrote his poems partly in the rhythmic language of the Bible, partly in the sort of blank verse that was written in the seventeenth century, and partly in an uncouth pedestrian prose that offends the ear. Well, that you must put up with too. These defects are regrettable, but unimportant. It is easy to skip. Leaves of Grass is a book to open anywhere, read on as long as it pleases you, and then turn the pages and start at random elsewhere. Whitman could write lines of pure and lovely poetry, he could turn phrases that thrill, and often he hit upon ideas that were wonderfully moving. There can be no need for me to say that he is one of the most exciting of all poets. He had a vigour and a sense of life, in its manifold variety, in its passion, beauty and exhilaration, which an American may justly and with pride think truly American. He brought poetry home to the common man. He showed that it was not only to be found in moonlight, ruined castles and the pathos of lovesick maidens; but in streets and trains and steamboats, in the labour of the artisan and the humdrum toil of the farmer’s wife, in work and ease; in all life, in short, and the ways it is lived. Just as Wordsworth showed that you need not use poetic language to make poetry, but could make it out of the common words of our everyday speech, so Whitman showed that its subject matter was not only where the romantics had sought it, but was all about you in the most usual circumstances of your daily round. His was not a poetry of escape, but a poetry of acceptance. It would be a dull-spirited American who could read Whitman without receiving a greater apprehension of the vastness of his country, the splendour of its resources, and the illimitable hope that is contained in its future. I think it was really in Whitman that America became aware of itself in literature. It is a virile, democratic poetry; it is the authentic battle cry of a new nation and the solid foundation of a national literature. In European museums you sometimes see the genealogy of the house of Jesse depicted as a tree, with Adam massively outlined in the trunk and the branches ending in figures of the patriarchs and the kings of Israel. If such a tree were made to represent the development of American literature and the branches ended with the shapes of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreisser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill and Edwin Arlington Robinson, the trunk would be rough-hewn in the splendid, dauntless and original form of Walt Whitman.

The Autobiographies

6 Chesterfield Street, Mayfair — Maugham’s London home form 1911 to 1919

Maugham, 1934

THE SUMMING UP

Maugham worked on this memoir over a long period of time, eventually finding the impetus to finish it in order to have it done before travelling to India in the late 1930’s. Although Maugham was now in his sixties, this is not some cathartic reminiscence about his past life, but rather his take on his professional life and various matters relating to that. It does however follow a chronological pattern, starting with his childhood and then exploring his growth as a writer. It does offer insights into the man of course – we learn who his favourite authors are - for example, Dryden, Voltaire, Swift, Hazlitt, Maupassant and Colette, and Maugham reveals what he thinks makes him a good writer, namely, excellent powers of observation and some imagination. He also absorbed the many stories he was told by people he met, storing them up in his mind until they could be of use in his writing (and rarely discreet enough to disguise the real people effectively, causing him considerable backlash over the years). He explores his play writing too, revealing a passionate interest in the theatre and explaining that he felt his talent in this genre came from a keen ear for dialogue and colloquialisms.

Maugham’s insecurities are hinted at too – he points out that only two well respected critics had taken an interest in him and his work, suggesting that he felt he had been sidelined by some of the more “literary” reviewers.

Maugham’s interest in religion is also outlined, and his explorations of philosophy. Never one for organised religion per se, Maugham reveals that he was more a seeker and a researcher than one that followed a specific creed. As a traveller in the “real” world, Maugham tells of his wonder at some of the places he visited, having a particular affection for tropical zones and the culture and laissez faire lifestyle of places like Samoa.

Most surprisingly, Maugham is not afraid to talk openly of his feelings about love and sex. Reciprocated love in its purest and most exquisite form, he states, has always eluded him, and as for sexual relationships, he wishes he had had more! One wonders however, about his motives for embarking on some of his relationships, in particular, his reasons for desiring a marriage. Whilst love must have played a part, he clearly states that he hoped married life would bring a quiet and orderly existence that would enhance his writing career!

The book was finished in 1937 and was pored over by two editors to make it the best it could possibly be. Reviews on publication were rather mixed, although generally kind, but the sections concerning the spiritual and themes such as “goodness” were considered irrelevant. Nevertheless, any book that gives insights into the life and work of an author from their own viewpoint is of value, and this is carefully written and in places, quite endearing.

CONTENTS

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77

1

THIS IS NOT an autobiography nor is it a book of recollections. In one way and another I have used in my writings whatever has happened to me in the course of my life. Sometimes an experience I have had has served as a theme and I have invented a series of incidents to illustrate it; more often I have taken persons with whom I have been slightly or intimately acquainted and used them as the foundation for characters of my invention. Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. It would not interest me to record the facts, even if I could remember them, of which I have already made a better use. They would seem, moreover, very tame. I have had a varied, and often an interesting, life, but not an adventurous one. I have a poor memory. I can never remember a good story till I hear it again and then I forget it before I have had a chance to tell it to somebody else. I have never been able to remember even my own jokes, so that I have been forced to go on making new ones. This disability, I am aware, has made my company less agreeable than it might otherwise have been.

I have never kept a diary. I wish now that during the year that followed my first success as a dramatist I had done so, for I met then many persons of consequence and it might have proved an interesting document. At that period the confidence of the people in the aristocracy and the landed gentry had been shattered by the muddle they had made of things in South Africa, but the aristocracy and the landed gentry had not realized this and they preserved their old self-confidence. At certain political houses I frequented they still talked as though to run the British Empire were their private business. It gave me a peculiar sensation to hear it discussed, when a general election was in the air, whether Tom should have the Home Office and whether Dick would be satisfied with Ireland. I do not suppose that anyone to-day reads the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward, but dull though they may be, my recollection is that some of them give a very good picture of what the life of the ruling class was then. Novelists were still much concerned with it and even writers who had never known a lord thought it necessary to write largely about persons of rank. It would astonish anyone who now looked at the playbills of the day to see how many of the characters were titled. Managers thought that they attracted the public, and actors liked to portray them. But as the political importance of the aristocracy dwindled the public took less interest in it. Playgoers began to be ready to observe the actions of people of their own class, the well-to-do merchants and professional men who were then conducting the affairs of the country; and the rule, though never formulated, prevailed that the writer should not introduce persons of title unless they were essential to his theme. It was still impossible to interest the public in the lower classes. Novels and plays that dealt with them were very generally considered sordid. It will be curious to see if now that these classes have acquired political power the public at large will take the same interest in their lives that for so long it took in the lives of the titled, and for a while in those of the opulent bourgeoisie.

During this period I met persons who by their rank, fame or position might very well have thought themselves destined to become historical figures. I did not find them as brilliant as my fancy had painted them. The English are a political nation and I was often asked to houses where politics were the ruling interest. I could not discover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked capacity. I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to rule a nation. Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have attained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination. At one time I was inclined to think that they owed their illustrious position only to their gift of speech, for it must be next door to impossible to rise to power in a democratic community unless you can catch the ears of the public; and the gift of speech, as we know, is not often accompanied by the power of thought. But since I have seen statesmen who did not seem to me very clever conduct public affairs with reasonable success I cannot but think I was wrong: it must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability. In the same way I have known men of affairs who have made great fortunes and brought vast enterprises to prosperity, but in everything unconcerned with their business appear to be devoid even of common sense.

Nor was the conversation that I heard then as clever as I had expected. It seldom gave you much to think about. It was easy, though not always gay; amiable and superficial. Serious topics were not dealt with, for there was a feeling that to discuss them in general company was embarrassing, and the fear of ‘shop’ seemed to prevent people from speaking of the subjects in which they were most interested. So far as I could judge conversation consisted in little more than a decorous badinage; but it was not often that you heard a witticism worth repeating. One might have thought that the only use of culture was to enable one to talk nonsense with distinction. On the whole I think the most interesting and consistently amusing talker I ever knew was Edmund Gosse. He had read a great deal, though not very carefully, it appears, and his conversation was extremely intelligent. He had a prodigious memory, a keen sense of humour, and malice. He had known Swinburne intimately and could talk about him in an entrancing fashion, but he could also talk of Shelley, whom after all he could not possibly have known, as if he had been a bosom-friend. For many years he had been acquainted with eminent persons. I think he was a vain man and he had observed their absurdities with satisfaction. I am sure he made them much more amusing than they really were.

2

I HAVE ALWAYS wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account. The celebrated develop a technique to deal with the person they come across. They show the world a mask, often an impressive one, but take care to conceal their real selves. They play the part that is expected from them and with practice learn to play it very well, but you are stupid if you think that this public performance of theirs corresponds with the man within.

I have been attached, deeply attached, to a few people; but I have been interested in men in general not for their own sakes, but for the sake of my work. I have not, as Kant enjoined, regarded each man as an end in himself, but as material that might be useful to me as a writer. I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the famous. They are more often themselves. They have had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world or to impress it. Their idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limited circle of their activity, and since they have never been in the public eye it has never occurred to them that they have anything to conceal. They display their oddities because it has never struck them that they are odd. And after all it is with the common run of men that we writers have to deal; kings, dictators, commercial magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory. To write about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to form a proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real. The ordinary is the writer’s richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity, its infinite variety afford unending material. The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.

3

IN THIS BOOK I am going to try to sort out my thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life. But such conclusions as I have come to have drifted about my mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship on a restless sea. It has seemed to me that if I set them down in some sort of order I should see for myself more distinctly what they really were and so might get some kind of coherence into them. I have long thought I should like to make such an attempt and more than once, when starting on a journey that was to last for several months, have determined to set about it. The opportunity seemed ideal. But I have always found that I was assailed by so many impressions, I saw so many strange things and met so many people who excited my fancy, that I had no time to reflect. The experience of the moment was so vivid that I could not attune my mind to introspection.

I have been held back also by the irksomeness of setting down my thoughts in my own person. For though I have written a good deal from this standpoint I have written as a novelist and so in a manner have been able to regard myself as a character in the story. Long habit has made it more comfortable for me to speak through the creatures of my invention. I can decide what they would think more readily than I can decide what I think myself. The one has always been a pleasure to me; the other has been a labour that I have willingly put off. But now I can afford to put it off no longer. In youth the years stretch before one so long that it is hard to realize that they will ever pass, and even in middle age, with the ordinary expectation of life in these days, it is easy to find excuses for delaying what one would like to do but does not want to; but at last a time comes when death must be considered. Here and there one’s contemporaries drop off. We know that all men are mortal (Socrates was a man; therefore — and so forth), but it remains for us little more than a logical premiss till we are forced to recognize that in the ordinary course of things our end can no longer be remote. An occasional glance at the obituary column of The Times has suggested to me that the sixties are very unhealthy; I have long thought that it would exasperate me to die before I had written this book and so it seemed to me that I had better set about it at once. When I have finished it I can face the future with serenity, for I shall have rounded off my life’s work. I can no longer persuade myself that I am not ready to write it, since if I have not by now made up my mind about the things that seem of importance to me there is small likelihood that I shall ever do so. I am glad at last to collect all these thoughts that for so long have floated at haphazard on the various levels of my consciousness. When they are written down I shall have finished with them and my mind will be free to occupy itself with other things. For I hope that this will not be the last book I shall write. One does not die immediately one has made one’s will; one makes one’s will as a precaution. To have settled one’s affairs is a very good preparation to leading the rest of one’s life without concern for the future. When I have finished this book I shall know where I stand. I can afford then to do what I choose with the years that remain to me.

4

IT IS INEVITABLE that in it I should say many things that I have said before; that is why I have called it The Summing Up. When a judge sums up a case he recapitulates the facts that have been put before the jury and comments on the speeches of counsel. He does not offer new evidence. And since I have put the whole of my life into my books much of what I have to say will naturally have found a place in them. There are few subjects within the compass of my interests that I have not lightly or seriously touched upon. All I can attempt to do now is to give a coherent picture of my feelings and opinions; and here and there, maybe, to state with greater elaboration some idea which the limitations I have thought fit to accept in fiction and in the drama have only allowed me to hint at.

This book must be egotistic. It is about certain subjects that are important to me and it is about myself because I can only treat of these subjects as they have affected me. But it is not about my doings. I have no desire to lay bare my heart, and I put limits to the intimacy that I wish the reader to enter upon with me. There are matters on which I am content to maintain my privacy. No one can tell the whole truth about himself. It is not only vanity that has prevented those who have tried to reveal themselves to the world from telling the whole truth; it is direction of interest; their disappointment with themselves, their surprise that they can do things that seem to them so abnormal, make them place too great an emphasis on occurrences that are more common than they suppose. Rousseau in the course of his Confessions narrates incidents that have profoundly shocked the sensibility of mankind. By describing them so frankly he falsified his values and so gave them in his book a greater importance than they had in his life. They were events among a multitude of others, virtuous or at least neutral, that he omitted because they were too ordinary to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. He leaves out his redeeming qualities and so appears only weak, unprincipled and vicious.

5

I WRITE this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover that my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct.

I must write as though I were a person of importance; and indeed, I am — to myself. To myself I am the most important person in the world; though I do not forget that, not even taking into consideration so grand a conception as the Absolute, but from the standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It would have made small difference to the universe if I had never existed. Though I may seem to write as though significance must necessarily be attached to certain of my works, I mean only that they are of moment to me for the purpose of any discussion during which I may have occasion to mention them. I think few serious writers, by which I do not only mean writers of serious things, can be entirely indifferent to the fate that will befall their works after their death. It is pleasant to think, not that one may achieve immortality (immortality for literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years and then is seldom more than the immortality of the schoolroom) but that one may be read with interest by a few generations and find a place, however small, in the history of one’s country’s literature. But so far as I am concerned, I look upon this modest possibility with scepticism. Even in my life I have seen writers who made much more stir in the world of letters than ever I have, sink into oblivion. When I was young George Meredith and Thomas Hardy seemed certain of survival. They have ceased to mean very much to the youth of to-day. From time to time they will doubtless find a critic in search of a subject to write an article about them, which may cause readers here and there to get out one or other of their books from a library; but I think it is clear that neither of them wrote anything that will be read as Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones is read.

If in the following pages I seem to express myself dogmatically, it is only because I find it very boring to qualify every phrase with an ‘I think’ or ‘to my mind’. Everything I say is merely an opinion of my own. The reader can take it or leave it. If he has the patience to read what follows he will see that there is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

6

WHEN I BEGAN to write I did so as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I took to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer; there seems no reason for my having become one except an irresistible inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have arisen in me. For well over a hundred years my family has practised law. According to the Dictionary of National Biography my grandfather was one of the two founders of the Incorporated Law Society, and in the catalogue of the Library at the British Museum there is a long list of his legal works. He wrote only one book that was not of this character. It was a collection of essays that he had contributed to the solid magazines of the day and he issued it, as became his sense of decorum, anonymously. I once had the book in my hands, a handsome volume bound in calf, but I never read it and I have not been able to get hold of a copy since. I wish I had, for I might have learnt from it something of the kind of man he was. For many years he lived in Chancery Lane, for he became secretary of the Society he had founded, and when he retired to a house in Kensington Gore overlooking the Park, he was presented with a salver, a tea and coffee service and an épergne, in silver, so massive and ornate that they have been ever since an embarrassment to his descendants. An old solicitor, whom I knew when I was a boy, told me that as an articled clerk he was once invited to dine with my grandfather. My grandfather carved the beef and then a servant handed him a dish of potatoes baked in their skins. There are few things better to eat than a potato in its skin, with plenty of butter, pepper and salt, but apparently my grandfather did not think so. He rose in his chair at the head of the table and took the potatoes out of the dish one by one and threw one at each picture on the walls. Then without a word he sat down again and went on with his dinner. I asked my friend what effect this behaviour had on the rest of the company. He told me that no one took any notice. He also told me that my grandfather was the ugliest little man he ever saw. I went once to the building of the Incorporated Society in Chancery Lane to see for myself if he was really so ugly as all that, for there is a portrait of him there. If what my old gentleman said was true the painter must have grossly flattered my grandfather; he has given him very fine dark eyes under black eyebrows, and there is a faintly ironic twinkle in them; a firm jaw, a straight nose and pouting red lips. His dark hair is windswept as becomingly as that of Miss Anita Loos. He is holding a quill and there is a pile of books, doubtless his own, by his side. Notwithstanding his black coat, he does not look so respectable as I should have expected, but slightly mischievous. Many years ago when I was destroying the papers of one of his sons, my uncle, who had died, I came across the diary that my grandfather kept when as a young man at the beginning of the nineteenth century he did what I believe was called the Little Tour, France, Germany and Switzerland; and I remember that when he described the not very impressive fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen he offered thanks to God Almighty because in creating ‘this stupendous cataract’ he had given ‘His miserable creatures occasion to realize their insignificance in comparison with the prodigious greatness of His works.’

7

MY PARENTS died when I was so young, my mother when I was eight, my father when I was ten, that I know little of them but from hearsay. My father, I do not know why unless he was drawn by some such restlessness for the unknown as has consumed his son, went to Paris and became solicitor to the British Embassy. He had offices just opposite, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, but he lived in what was then called the Avenue d’Antin, a broad street with chestnut trees on each side of it that leads from the Rond Point. He was a great traveller for those days. He had been to Turkey, Greece and Asia Minor and in Morocco as far as Fez, which was a place few people then visited. He had a considerable library of travel books and the apartment in the Avenue d’Antin was filled with the things he had brought back, Tanagra statuettes, Rhodes ware and Turkish daggers in hilts of richly decorated silver. He was forty when he married my mother, who was more than twenty years younger. She was a very beautiful woman and he was a very ugly man. I have been told that they were known in the Paris of that day as Beauty and the Beast. Her father was in the army; he died in India and his widow, my grandmother, after squandering a considerable fortune, settled down in France to live on her pension. She was a woman of character, I suspect, and perhaps of some talent, for she wrote novels in French pour jeunes filles and composed the music for drawing-room ballads. I like to think that the novels were read and the ballads sung by Octave Feuillet’s high-born heroines. I have a little photograph of her, a middle-aged woman in a crinoline with fine eyes and a look of good-humoured determination. My mother was very small, with large brown eyes and hair of a rich reddish gold, exquisite features and a lovely skin. She was very much admired. One of her great friends was Lady Anglesey, an American woman who died at an advanced age not very long ago, and she told me that she had once said to my mother: ‘You’re so beautiful and there are so many people in love with you, why are you faithful to that ugly little man you’ve married?’ And my mother answered: ‘He never hurts my feelings.’

The only letter of hers I ever saw was one that I came across when I was going through my uncle’s papers after his death. He was a clergyman and she asked him to be godfather to one of her sons. She expressed, very simply and piously, the hope that by reason of his holy calling the relationship into which she invited him to enter would have such an influence on the new-born child that he would grow up to be a good, God-fearing man. She was a great novel-reader and in the billiard-room of the apartment in the Avenue d’Antin were two great bookcases filled with Tauchnitz. She suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs and I remember the string of donkeys that stopped at the door to provide her with asses’ milk, which at that time was thought to be good for that malady. In the summer we used to take a house at Deauville, not then a fashionable spot, but a little fishing village overshadowed by the smarter Trouville, and towards the end of her life we spent winters at Pau. Once when she was lying in bed, I suppose after a hemorrhage, and knew she could not live much longer, the thought came to her that her sons when they grew up would not know what she was like when she died, so she called her maid, had herself dressed in an evening gown of white satin and went to the photographer’s. She had six sons and died in childbirth. The doctors of the period had a theory that to have a child was beneficial to women suffering from consumption. She was thirty-eight.

After my mother’s death, her maid became my nurse. I had till then had French nurses and I had been sent to a French school for children. My knowledge of English must have been slight. I have been told that on one occasion, seeing a horse out of the window of a railway carriage, I cried: ‘Regardez, Maman, voilà un ‘orse.’

I think my father had a romantic mind. He took it into his head to build a house to live in during the summer. He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Sursenes. The view was splendid over the plain, and in the distance was Paris. There was a road down to the river and by the river lay a little village. It was to be like a villa on the Bosphorus and on the top floor it was surrounded by loggias. I used to go down with him every Sunday by the Seine on a bateau-mouche to see how it was getting on. When the roof was on, my father began to furnish it by buying a pair of antique fire-irons. He ordered a great quantity of glass on which he had engraved a sign against the Evil Eye which he had found in Morocco and which the reader may see on the cover of this book. It was a white house and the shutters were painted red. The garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then my father died.

8

I HAD BEEN taken away from the French school and went for my lessons every day to the apartment of the English clergyman at the Church attached to the Embassy. His method of teaching me English was to make me read aloud the police-court news in The Standard and I can still remember the horror with which I read the ghastly details of a murder in the train between Paris and Calais. I must then have been nine. I was for long uncertain about the pronunciation of English words and I have never forgotten the roar of laughter that abashed me when in my preparatory school I read out the phrase ‘unstable as water’ as though unstable rhymed with Dunstable.

I have never had more than two English lessons in my life, for though I wrote essays at school, I do not remember that I ever received any instruction on how to put sentences together. The two lessons I have had were given me so late in life that I am afraid I cannot hope greatly to profit by them. The first was only a few years ago. I was spending some weeks in London and had engaged as temporary secretary a young woman. She was shy, rather pretty, and absorbed in a love affair with a married man. I had written a book called Cakes and Ale and, the typescript arriving one Saturday morning, I asked her if she would be good enough to take it home and correct it over the week-end. I meant her only to make a note of mistakes in spelling that the typist might have made and point out errors occasioned by a handwriting that is not always easy to decipher. But she was a conscientious young person and she took me more literally than I intended. When she brought back the typescript on Monday morning it was accompanied by four foolscap sheets of corrections. I must confess that at the first glance I was a trifle vexed; but then I thought that it would be silly of me not to profit, if I could, by the trouble she had taken and so sat me down to examine them. I suppose the young woman had taken a course at a secretarial college and she had gone through my novel in the same methodical way as her masters had gone through her essays. The remarks that filled the four neat pages of foolscap were incisive and severe. I could not but surmise that the professor of English at the secretarial college did not mince matters. He took a marked line, there could be no doubt about that; and he did not allow that there might be two opinions about anything. His apt pupil would have nothing to do with a preposition at the end of a sentence. A mark of exclamation betokened her disapproval of a colloquial phrase. She had a feeling that you must not use the same word twice on a page and she was ready every time with a synonym to put in its place. If I had indulged myself in the luxury of a sentence of ten lines, she wrote: ‘Clarify this. Better break it up into two or more periods.’ When I had availed myself of the pleasant pause that is indicated by a semi-colon, she noted: ‘A full stop’; and if I had ventured upon a colon she remarked stingingly: ‘Obsolete.’ But the harshest stroke of all was her comment on what I thought was rather a good joke: ‘Are you sure of your facts?’ Taking it all in all I am bound to conclude that the professor at her college would not have given me very high marks.

The second lesson I had was given me by a don, both intelligent and charming, who happened to be staying with me when I was myself correcting the typescript of another book. He was good enough to offer to read it. I hesitated, because I knew that he judged from a standpoint of excellence that is hard to attain; and though I was aware that he had a profound knowledge of Elizabethan literature, his inordinate admiration for Esther Waters made me doubtful of his discernment in the productions of our own day: no one could attach so great a value to that work who had an intimate knowledge of the French novel during the nineteenth century. But I was anxious to make my book as good as I could and I hoped to benefit by his criticisms. They were in point of fact lenient. They interested me peculiarly because I inferred that this was the way in which he dealt with the compositions of undergraduates. My don had, I think, a natural gift for language, which it has been his business to cultivate; his taste appeared to me faultless. I was much struck by his insistence on the force of individual words. He liked the stronger word rather than the euphonious. To give an example, I had written that a statue would be placed in a certain square and he suggested that I should write: the statue will stand. I had not done that because my ear was offended by the alliteration. I noticed also that he had a feeling that words should be used not only to balance a sentence but to balance an idea. This is sound, for an idea may lose its effect if it is delivered abruptly; but it is a matter of delicacy, since it may well lead to verbiage. Here a knowledge of stage dialogue should help. An actor will sometimes say to an author: ‘Couldn’t you give me a word or two more in this speech? It seems to take away all the point of my line if I have nothing else to say.’ As I listened to my don’s remarks I could not but think how much better I should write now if in my youth I had had the advantage of such sensible, broad-minded and kindly advice.

9

AS IT IS, I have had to teach myself. I have looked at the stories I wrote when I was very young in order to discover what natural aptitude I had, my original stock-in-trade, before I developed it by taking thought. The manner had a superciliousness that perhaps my years excused and an irascibility that was a defect of nature; but I am speaking now only of the way in which I expressed myself. It seems to me that I had a natural lucidity and a knack for writing easy dialogue.

When Henry Arthur Jones, then a well-known playwright, read my first novel, he told a friend that in due course I should be one of the most successful dramatists of the day. I suppose he saw in it directness and an effective way of presenting a scene that suggested a sense of the theatre. My language was commonplace, my vocabulary limited, my grammar shaky and my phrases hackneyed. But to write was an instinct that seemed as natural to me as to breathe, and I did not stop to consider if I wrote well or badly. It was not till some years later that it dawned upon me that it was a delicate art that must be painfully acquired. The discovery was forced upon me by the difficulty I found in getting my meaning down on paper. I wrote dialogue fluently, but when it came to a page of description I found myself entangled in all sorts of quandaries. I would struggle for a couple of hours over two or three sentences that I could in no way manage to straighten out. I made up my mind to teach myself how to write. Unfortunately I had no one to help me. I made many mistakes. If I had had someone to guide me like the charming don of whom I spoke just now I might have been saved much time. Such a one might have told me that such gifts as I had lay in one direction and that they must be cultivated in that direction; it was useless to try to do something for which I had no aptitude. But at that time a florid prose was admired. Richness of texture was sought by means of a jewelled phrase and sentences stiff with exotic epithets: the ideal was a brocade so heavy with gold that it stood up by itself. The intelligent young read Walter Pater with enthusiasm. My common sense suggested to me that it was anæmic stuff; behind those elaborate, gracious periods I was conscious of a tired, wan personality. I was young, lusty and energetic; I wanted fresh air, action, violence, and I found it hard to breathe that dead, heavily-scented atmosphere and sit in those hushed rooms in which it was indecorous to speak above a whisper. But I would not listen to my common sense. I persuaded myself that this was the height of culture and turned a scornful shoulder to the outside world where men shouted and swore, played the fool, wenched and got drunk. I read Intentions and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was intoxicated by the colour and rareness of the fantastic words that thickly stud the pages of Salome. Shocked by the poverty of my own vocabulary, I went to the British Museum with pencil and paper and noted down the names of curious jewels, the Byzantine hues of old enamels, the sensual feel of textiles, and made elaborate sentences to bring them in. Fortunately I could never find an opportunity to use them and they lie there yet in an old note-book ready for anyone who has a mind to write nonsense. It was generally thought then that the Authorized Version of the Bible was the greatest piece of prose that the English language has produced. I read it diligently, especially the Song of Solomon, jotting down for future use turns of phrase that struck me and making lists of unusual or beautiful words. I studied Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. In order to assimilate his style I copied out passages and then tried to write them down from memory.

The first fruit of this labour was a little book about Andalusia called The Land of the Blessed Virgin. I had occasion to read parts of it the other day. I know Andalusia a great deal better than I knew it then, and I have changed my mind about a good many things of which I wrote. Since it has continued in America to have a small sale it occurred to me that it might be worth while to revise it. I soon saw that this was impossible. The book was written by someone I have completely forgotten. It bored me to distraction. But what I am concerned with is the prose, for it was as an exercise in style that I wrote it. It is wistful, allusive and elaborate. It has neither case nor spontaneity. It smells of hot-house plants and Sunday dinner like the air in the greenhouse that leads out of the dining-room of a big house in Bayswater. There are a great many melodious adjectives. The vocabulary is sentimental. It does not remind one of an Italian brocade, with its rich pattern of gold, but of a curtain material designed by Burne-Jones and reproduced by Morris.

10

I DO NOT know whether it was a subconscious feeling that this sort of writing was contrary to my bent or a naturally methodical cast of mind that led me then to turn my attention to the writers of the Augustan Period. The prose of Swift enchanted me. I made up my mind that this was the perfect way to write and I started to work on him in the same way as I had done with Jeremy Taylor. I chose The Tale of a Tub. It is said that when the Dean re-read it in his old age he cried: ‘What genius I had then!’ To my mind his genius was better shown in other works. It is a tiresome allegory and the irony is facile. But the style is admirable. I cannot imagine that English can be better written. Here are no flowery periods, fantastic turns of phrase or high-flown images. It is a civilized prose, natural, discreet and pointed. There is no attempt to surprise by an extravagant vocabulary. It looks as though Swift made do with the first word that came to hand, but since he had an acute and logical brain it was always the right one, and he put it in the right place. The strength and balance of his sentences are due to an exquisite taste. As I had done before I copied passages and then tried to write them out again from memory. I tried altering words or the order in which they were set. I found that the only possible words were those Swift had used and that the order in which he had placed them was the only possible order. It is an impeccable prose.

But perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull. Swift’s prose is like a French canal, bordered with poplars, that runs through a gracious and undulating country. Its tranquil charm fills you with satisfaction, but it neither excites the emotions nor stimulates the imagination. You go on and on and presently you are a trifle bored. So, much as you may admire Swift’s wonderful lucidity, his terseness, his naturalness, his lack of affectation, you find your attention wandering after a while unless his matter peculiarly interests you. I think if I had my time over again I would give to the prose of Dryden the close study I gave to that of Swift. I did not come across it till I had lost the inclination to take so much pains. The prose of Dryden is delicious. It has not the perfection of Swift nor the easy elegance of Addison, but it has a springtime gaiety, a conversational ease, a blithe spontaneousness that are enchanting. Dryden was a very good poet, but it is not the general opinion that he had a lyrical quality; it is strange that it is just this that sings in his softly sparkling prose. Prose had never been written in England like that before; it has seldom been written like that since. Dryden flourished at a happy moment. He had in his bones the sonorous periods and the baroque massiveness of Jacobean language and under the influence of the nimble and well-bred felicity that he learnt from the French he turned it into an instrument that was fit not only for solemn themes but also to express the light thought of the passing moment. He was the first of the rococo artists. If Swift reminds you of a French canal, Dryden recalls an English river winding its cheerful way round hills, through quietly busy towns and by nestling villages, pausing now in a noble reach and then running powerfully through a woodland country. It is alive, varied, windswept; and it has the pleasant open-air smell of England.

The work I did was certainly very good for me. I began to write better; I did not write well. I wrote stiffly and self-consciously. I tried to get a pattern into my sentences, but did not see that the pattern was evident. I took care how I placed my words, but did not reflect that an order that was natural at the beginning of the eighteenth century was most unnatural at the beginning of ours. My attempt to write in the manner of Swift made it impossible for me to achieve the effect of inevitable rightness that was just what I so much admired in him. I then wrote a number of plays and ceased to occupy myself with anything but dialogue. It was not till five years had passed that I set out again to write a novel. By then I no longer had any ambition to be a stylist; I put aside all thought of fine writing. I wanted to write without any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a manner as I could. I had so much to say that I could afford to waste no words. I wanted merely to set down the facts. I began with the impossible aim of using no adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find the exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with. As I saw it in my mind’s eye my book would have the appearance of an immensely long telegram in which for economy’s sake you had left out every word that was not necessary to make the sense clear. I have not read it since I corrected the proofs and do not know how near I came to doing what I tried. My impression is that it is written at least more naturally than anything I had written before; but I am sure that it is often slipshod and I daresay there are in it a good many mistakes in grammar.

Since then I have written many other books; and though ceasing my methodical study of the old masters (for though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak), I have continued with increasing assiduity to try to write better. I discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what excellence I could within them. I knew that I had no lyrical quality. I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge it much availed me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to me. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were beyond my powers. I could admire them in others as I could admire their far-fetched tropes and the unusual but suggestive language in which they clothed their thoughts but my own invention never presented me with such embellishments; and I was tired of trying to do what did not come easily to me. On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense, and if no great feeling for the richness and strangeness of words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sound. I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I assigned to them.

11

I HAVE NEVER had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to express with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you; but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly what the meaning of each sentence is. Few people have written English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to wilfulness. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in their works sentence after sentence that you must read twice to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have evidently not said what they intended.

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not before, but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the author must be always on his guard, is that there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the wilful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their thoughts have a significance greater than at first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down one’s impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is another form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd trick. If the sense is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of reading. This is the fate that has befallen the lucubrations of those French writers who were seduced by the example of Guillaume Apollinaire. But occasionally it throws a sharp cold light on what had seemed profound and thus discloses the fact that these contortions of language disguised very commonplace notions. There are few of Mallarmé’s poems now that are not clear; one cannot fail to notice that his thought singularly lacked originality. Some of his phrases were beautiful; the materials of his verse were the poetic platitudes of his day.

12

SIMPLICITY IS not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have aimed at it because I have no gift for richness. Within limits I admire richness in others, though I find it difficult to digest in quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight, but twenty only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give the sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of wave following wave in the open sea; there is no doubt that in all this there is something inspiring. Words thus strung together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all. Your mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a subject that will suit it. It is surely out of place to write in the grand style of inconsiderable things. No one wrote in this manner with greater success than Sir Thomas Browne, but even he did not always escape this pitfall. In the last chapter of Hydriotaphia the matter, which is the destiny of man, wonderfully fits the baroque splendour of the language, and here the Norwich doctor produced a piece of prose that has never been surpassed in our literature; but when he describes the finding of his urns in the same splendid manner the effect (at least to my taste) is less happy. When a modern writer is grandiloquent to tell you whether or no a little trollop shall hop into bed with a commonplace young man you are right to be disgusted.

But if richness needs gifts with which everyone is not endowed, simplicity by no means comes by nature. To achieve it needs rigid discipline. So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic. English prose is elaborate rather than simple. It was not always so. Nothing could be more racy, straightforward and alive than the prose of Shakespeare; but it must be remembered that this was dialogue written to be spoken. We do not know how he would have written if like Corneille he had composed prefaces to his plays. It may be that they would have been as euphuistic as the letters of Queen Elizabeth. But earlier prose, the prose of Sir Thomas More, for instance, is neither ponderous, flowery nor oratorical. It smacks of the English soil. To my mind King James’s Bible has been a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility. The plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was evidently something in the English temper to which this was congenial, perhaps a native lack of precision in thought, perhaps a naïve delight in fine words for their own sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery, I do not know; but the fact remains that ever since, English prose has had to struggle against the tendency to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the language has reasserted itself, as it did with Dryden and the writers of Queen Anne, it was only to be submerged once more by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson. When English prose recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles Lamb at his best, it lost it again with de Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith and Walter Pater. It is obvious that the grand style is more striking than the plain. Indeed many people think that a style that does not attract notice is not style. They will admire Walter Pater’s, but will read an essay by Matthew Arnold without giving a moment’s attention to the elegance, distinction and sobriety with which he set down what he had to say.

The dictum that the style is the man is well known. It is one of those aphorisms that say too much to mean a great deal. Where is the man in Goethe, in his bird-like lyrics or in his clumsy prose? And Hazlitt? But I suppose that if a man has a confused mind he will write in a confused way, if his temper is capricious his prose will be fantastical, and if he has a quick, darting intelligence that is reminded by the matter in hand of a hundred things he will, unless he has great self-control, load his pages with metaphor and simile. There is a great difference between the magniloquence of the Jacobean writers, who were intoxicated with the new wealth that had lately been brought into the language, and the turgidity of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, who were the victims of bad theories. I can read every word that Dr. Johnson wrote with delight, for he had good sense, charm and wit. No one could have written better if he had not wilfully set himself to write in the grand style. He knew good English when he saw it. No critic has praised Dryden’s prose more aptly. He said of him that he appeared to have no art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thought with vigour. And one of his Lives he finished with the words: ‘Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.’ But when he himself sat down to write it was with a very different aim. He mistook the orotund for the dignified. He had not the good breeding to see that simplicity and naturalness are the truest mark of distinction.

For to write good prose is an affair of good manners. It is, unlike verse, a civil art. Poetry is baroque. Baroque is tragic, massive and mystical. It is elemental. It demands depth and insight. I cannot but feel that the prose writers of the baroque period, the authors of King James’s Bible, Sir Thomas Browne, Glanville, were poets who had lost their way. Prose is a rococo art. It needs taste rather than power, decorum rather than inspiration and vigour rather than grandeur. Form for the poet is the bit and the bridle without which (unless you are an acrobat) you cannot ride your horse; but for the writer of prose it is the chassis without which your car does not exist. It is not an accident that the best prose was written when rococo, with its elegance and moderation, at its birth attained its greatest excellence. For rococo was evolved when baroque had become declamatory and the world, tired of the stupendous, asked for restraint. It was the natural expression of persons who valued a civilized life. Humour, tolerance and horse-sense made the great tragic issues that had preoccupied the first half of the seventeenth century seem excessive. The world was a more comfortable place to live in and perhaps for the first time in centuries the cultivated classes could sit back and enjoy their leisure. It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man. Conversation is only possible when men’s minds are free from pressing anxieties. Their lives must be reasonably secure and they must have no grave concern about their souls. They must attach importance to the refinements of civilisation. They must value courtesy, they must pay attention to their persons (and have we not also been told that good prose should be like the clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive?), they must fear to bore, they must be neither flippant nor solemn, but always apt; and they must look upon ‘enthusiasm’ with a critical glance. This is a soil very suitable for prose. It is not to be wondered at that it gave a fitting opportunity for the appearance of the best writer of prose that our modern world has seen, Voltaire. The writers of English, perhaps owing to the poetic nature of the language, have seldom reached the excellence that seems to have come so naturally to him. It is in so far as they have approached the ease, sobriety and precision of the great French masters that they are admirable.

13

WHETHER YOU ascribe importance to euphony, the last of the three characteristics that I mentioned, must depend on the sensitiveness of your ear. A great many readers, and many admirable writers, are devoid of this quality. Poets as we know have always made a great use of alliteration. They are persuaded that the repetition of a sound gives an effect of beauty. I do not think it does so in prose. It seems to me that in prose alliteration should be used only for a special reason; when used by accident it falls on the ear very disagreeably. But its accidental use is so common that one can only suppose that the sound of it is not universally offensive. Many writers without distress will put two rhyming words together, join a monstrous long adjective to a monstrous long noun, or between the end of one word and the beginning of another have a conjunction of consonants that almost breaks your jaw. These are trivial and obvious instances. I mention them only to prove that if careful writers can do such things it is only because they have no ear. Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

I have read many books on English prose, but have found it hard to profit by them; for the most part they are vague, unduly theoretical, and often scolding. But you cannot say this of Fowler’s Dictionary of English Usage. It is a valuable work. I do not think anyone writes so well that he cannot learn much from it. It is lively reading. Fowler liked simplicity, straightforwardness and common sense. He had no patience with pretentiousness. He had a sound feeling that idiom was the backbone of a language and he was all for the racy phrase. He was no slavish admirer of logic and was willing enough to give usage right of way through the exact demesnes of grammar. English grammar is very difficult and few writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So heedful a writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so ungrammatically that a schoolmaster, finding such errors in a schoolboy’s essay, would be justly indignant. It is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test. I would prefer a phrase that was easy and unaffected to a phrase that was grammatical. One of the differences between French and English is that in French you can be grammatical with complete naturalness, but in English not invariably. It is a difficulty in writing English that the sound of the living voice dominates the look of the printed word. I have given the matter of style a great deal of thought and have taken great pains. I have written few pages that I feel I could not improve and far too many that I have left with dissatisfaction because, try as I would, I could do no better. I cannot say of myself what Johnson said of Pope: ‘He never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair.’ I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.

But Fowler had no ear. He did not see that simplicity may sometimes make concessions to euphony. I do not think a far-fetched, an archaic or even an affected word is out of place when it sounds better than the blunt, obvious one or when it gives a sentence a better balance. But, I hasten to add, though I think you may without misgiving make this concession to pleasant sound, I think you should make none to what may obscure your meaning. Anything is better than not to write clearly. There is nothing to be said against lucidity, and against simplicity only the possibility of dryness. This is a risk that is well worth taking when you reflect how much better it is to be bald than to wear a curly wig. But there is in euphony a danger that must be considered. It is very likely to be monotonous. When George Moore began to write, his style was poor; it gave you the impression that he wrote on wrapping paper with a blunt pencil. But he developed gradually a very musical English. He learnt to write sentences that fall away on the ear with a misty languor and it delighted him so much that he could never have enough of it. He did not escape monotony. It is like the sound of water lapping a shingly beach, so soothing that you presently cease to be sensible of it. It is so mellifluous that you hanker for some harshness, for an abrupt dissonance, that will interrupt the silky concord. I do not know how one can guard against this. I suppose the best chance is to have a more lively faculty of boredom than one’s readers so that one is wearied before they are. One must always be on the watch for mannerisms and when certain cadences come too easily to the pen ask oneself whether they have not become mechanical. It is very hard to discover the exact point where the idiom one has formed to express oneself has lost its tang. As Dr. Johnson said: ‘He that has once studiously formed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease’. Admirably as I think Matthew Arnold’s style was suited to his particular purposes, I must admit that his mannerisms are often irritating. His style was an instrument that he had forged once for all; it was not like the human hand capable of performing a variety of actions.

If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with liveliness you would write perfectly: you would write like Voltaire. And yet we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in the tiresome acrobatics of Meredith. Macaulay and Carlyle were in their different ways arresting; but at the heavy cost of naturalness. Their flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. I think no one in France now writes more admirably than Colette, and such is the ease of her expression that you cannot bring yourself to believe that she takes any trouble over it. I am told that there are pianists who have a natural technique so that they can play in a manner that most executants can achieve only as the result of unremitting toil, and I am willing to believe that there are writers who are equally fortunate. Among them I was much inclined to place Colette. I asked her. I was exceedingly surprised to hear that she wrote everything over and over again. She told me that she would often spend a whole morning working upon a single page. But it does not matter how one gets the effect of ease. For my part, if I get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom provides me with the word, the turn of phrase, that is appropriate without being far-fetched or commonplace.

14

I HAVE read that Anatole France tried to use only the constructions and the vocabulary of the writers of the seventeenth century whom he so greatly admired. I do not know if it is true. If so, it may explain why there is some lack of vitality in his beautiful and simple French. But simplicity is false when you do not say a thing that you should say because you cannot say it in a certain way. One should write in the manner of one’s period. The language is alive and constantly changing; to try to write like the authors of a distant past can only give rise to artificiality. I should not hesitate to use the common phrases of the day, knowing that their vogue was ephemeral, or slang, though aware that in ten years it might be incomprehensible, if they gave vividness and actuality. If the style has a classical form it can support the discreet use of a phraseology that has only a local and temporary aptness. I would sooner a writer were vulgar than mincing; for life is vulgar, and it is life he seeks.

I think that we English authors have much to learn from our fellow authors in America. For American writing has escaped the tyranny of King James’s Bible and American writers have been less affected by the old masters whose mode of writing is part of our culture. They have formed their style, unconsciously perhaps, more directly from the living speech that surrounds them; and at its best it has a directness, a vitality and a drive that give our more urbane manner an air of languor. It has been an advantage to American writers, many of whom at one time or another have been reporters, that their journalism has been written in a more trenchant, nervous, graphic English than ours. For we read the newspaper now as our ancestors read the Bible. Not without profit either; for the newspaper, especially when it is of the popular sort, offers us a part of experience that we writers cannot afford to miss. It is raw material straight from the knacker’s yard, and we are stupid if we turn up our noses because it smells of blood and sweat. We cannot, however willingly we would, escape the influence of this workaday prose. But the journalism of a period has very much the same style; it might all have been written by the same hand; it is impersonal. It is well to counteract its effect by reading of another kind. One can do this only by keeping constantly in touch with the writing of an age not too remote from one’s own. So can one have a standard by which to test one’s own style and an ideal which in one’s modern way one can aim at. For my part the two writers I have found most useful to study for this purpose are Hazlitt and Cardinal Newman. I would try to imitate neither. Hazlitt can be unduly rhetorical; and sometimes his decoration is as fussy as Victorian Gothic. Newman can be a trifle flowery. But at their best both are admirable. Time has little touched their style; it is almost contemporary. Hazlitt is vivid, bracing and energetic; he has strength and liveliness. You feel the man in his phrases, not the mean, querulous, disagreeable man that he appeared to the world that knew him, but the man within of his own ideal vision. (And the man within us is as true in reality as the man, pitiful and halting, of our outward seeming.) Newman had an exquisite grace, music, playful sometimes and sometimes grave, a woodland beauty of phrase, dignity and mellowness. Both wrote with extreme lucidity. Neither is quite as simple as the purest taste demands. Here I think Matthew Arnold excels them. Both had a wonderful balance of phrase and both knew how to write sentences pleasing to the eye. Both had an ear of extreme sensitiveness.

If anyone could combine their merits in the manner of writing of the present day he would write as well as it is possible for anyone to write.

15

FROM time to time I have asked myself whether I should have been a better writer if I had devoted my whole life to literature. Somewhat early, but at what age I cannot remember, I made up my mind that, having but one life, I should like to get the most I could out of it. It did not seem to me enough merely to write. I wanted to make a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an essential element, but which would include all the other activities proper to man, and which death would in the end round off in complete fulfilment. I had many disabilities. I was small; I had endurance but little physical strength; I stammered; I was shy; I had poor health. I had no facility for games, which play so great a part in the normal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of these reasons or from nature I do not know, an instinctive shrinking from my fellow men that has made it difficult for me to enter into any familiarity with them. I have loved individuals; I have never much cared for men in the mass. I have none of that engaging come-hitherness that makes people take to one another on first acquaintance. Though in the course of years I have learnt to assume an air of heartiness when forced into contact with a stranger, I have never liked anyone at first sight. I do not think I have ever addressed someone I did not know in a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on board ship unless he first spoke to me. The weakness of my flesh has prevented me from enjoying that communion with the human race that is engendered by alcohol; long before I could reach the state of intoxication that enables so many, more happily constituted, to look upon all men as their brothers, my stomach has turned upon me and I have been as sick as a dog. These are grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I have had to make the best of them. I have followed the pattern I made with persistence. I do not claim that it was a perfect one. I think it was the best that I could hope for in the circumstances and with the very limited powers that were granted to me by nature.

Looking for the special function of man Aristotle decided that since he shares growth with the plants and perception with the beasts, and alone has a rational element, his function is the activity of the soul. From this he concluded, not as you would have thought sensible that man should cultivate the three forms of activity which he ascribed to him, but that he should pursue only that which is especial to him. Philosophers and moralists have looked at the body with misgiving. They have pointed out that its satisfactions are brief. But a pleasure is none the less a pleasure because it does not please for ever. It is delightful to plunge into cold water on a hot day even though in a moment your skin is no longer sensitive to the coldness. White is no whiter if it lasts for a year or a day. I looked upon it then as part of the pattern I was attempting to draw to experience all the pleasures of sense. I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. It tonifies the system and rests the nerves. The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from the hilltop. The keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible is that of sexual congress. I have known men who gave up their whole lives to this; they are grown old now, but I have noticed, not without surprise, that they look upon them as well spent. It has been my misfortune that a native fastidiousness has prevented me from indulging as much in this particular delight as I might have. I have exercised moderation because I was hard to please. When from time to time I have seen the persons with whom the great lovers satisfied their desires I have been more often astonished by the robustness of their appetites than envious of their successes. It is obvious that you need not often go hungry if you are willing to dine off mutton hash and turnip tops.

Most people live haphazard lives subject to the varying winds of fortune. Many are forced by the situation in which they were born and the necessity of earning a living to keep to a straight and narrow road in which there is no possibility of turning to the right or to the left. Upon these the pattern is imposed. Life itself has forced it on them. There is no reason why such a pattern should not be as complete as that which anyone has tried self-consciously to make. But the artist is in a privileged position. I use the word artist, not meaning to attach any measure of value to what he produces, but merely to signify someone who is occupied with the arts. I wish I could find a better word. Creator is pretentious and seems to make a claim to originality that can seldom be justified. Craftsman is not enough. A carpenter is a craftsman, and though he may be in the narrower sense an artist, he has not as a rule the freedom of action which the most incompetent scribbler, the poorest dauber, possesses. The artist can within certain limits make what he likes of his life. In other callings, in medicine for instance or the law, you are free to choose whether you will adopt them or not, but having chosen, you are free no longer. You are bound by the rules of your profession; a standard of conduct is imposed upon you. The pattern is predetermined. It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.

Perhaps it was a natural sense of tidiness that engaged me, when still so young, to design a pattern for my life; perhaps it was due to something I discovered in myself about which I shall have a little to say later. The defect of such an undertaking is that it may kill spontaneity. One great difference between the persons of real life and the persons of fiction is that the persons of real life are creatures of impulse. It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; and it might be said also that in the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do. And to surrender to impulse is part of the pattern. I think a greater defect is that it leads you to live too much in the future. I have long known that this was a fault of mine and have in vain tried to correct it. I have never, except by an effort of will, wished that the passing moment might linger so that I could get more enjoyment from it, for even when it has brought me something I had immensely looked forward to, my imagination in the very moment of fulfilment has been busy with the problematical delight of whatever was to come. I have never walked down the south side of Piccadilly without being all in a dither about what was happening on the north. This is folly. The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now. But common sense avails me little. I do not find the present unsatisfactory; I merely take it for granted. It is interwoven in the pattern and what interests me is what remains to come.

I have made a great many mistakes. I have at times fallen victim to a snare to which the writer is peculiarly liable, the desire to carry out in my own life certain actions which I made the characters of my invention do. I have attempted things that were foreign to my nature and obstinately persevered in them because in my vanity I would not confess myself beaten. I have paid too much attention to the opinion of others. I have made sacrifices to unworthy objects because I had not the courage to inflict pain. I have committed follies. I have a sensitive conscience, and I have done certain things in my life that I am unable entirely to forget; if I had been fortunate enough to be a Catholic I could have delivered myself of them at confession and after performing the penance imposed received absolution and put them out of my mind for ever. I have had to deal with them as my common sense suggested. I do not regret them, for I think it is because of my own grave faults that I have learnt indulgence to others. It took me a long time. In youth I was harshly intolerant. I remember my indignation upon hearing someone make the remark, not an original one, but new to me then, that hypocrisy was the tribute that vice paid to virtue. I thought that one should have the courage of one’s vices. I had ideals of honesty, uprightness, truth; I was impatient not of human weakness, but of cowardice, and I would make no allowances for those who hedged and temporized. It never occurred to me that no one stood in greater need of indulgence than I.

16

AT FIRST sight it is curious that our own offences should seem to us so much less heinous than the offences of others. I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot excuse in others. We turn our attention away from our own defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them find it easy to condone them. For all I know we are right to do this; they are part of us and we must accept the good and the bad in ourselves together. But when we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world. To take a trivial instance: how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say that he has never told not one, but a hundred? We are shocked when we discover that great men were weak and petty, dishonest or selfish, sexually vicious, vain or intemperate; and many people think it disgraceful to disclose to the public its heroes’ failings. There is not much to choose between men. They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness. Some have more strength of character, or more opportunity, and so in one direction or another give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same. For my part I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity.

I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts. A great part of our lives is occupied in reverie, and the more imaginative we are, the more varied and vivid this will be. How many of us could face having our reveries automatically registered and set before us? We should be overcome with shame. We should cry that we could not really be as mean, as wicked, as petty, as selfish, as obscene, as snobbish, as vain, as sentimental, as that. Yet surely our reveries are as much part of us as our actions, and if there were a being to whom our inmost thoughts were known we might just as well be held responsible for them as for our deeds. Men forget the horrible thoughts that wander through their own minds, and are indignant when they discover them in others. In Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung he relates how in his youth he could not bear the idea that his father was a middle-class lawyer in Frankfurt. He felt that noble blood must flow in his veins. So he sought to persuade himself that some prince travelling through the city had met and loved his mother, and that he was the offspring of the union. The editor of the copy I read wrote an indignant footnote on the subject. It seemed to him unworthy of so great a poet that he should impugn the undoubted virtue of his mother in order snobbishly to plume himself on his bastard aristocracy. Of course it was disgraceful, but it was not unnatural and I venture to say not uncommon. There must be few romantic, rebellious and imaginative boys who have not toyed with the idea that they could not be the son of their dull and respectable father, but ascribe the superiority they feel in themselves, according to their own idiosyncrasies, to an unknown poet, great statesman or ruling prince. The Olympian attitude of Goethe’s later years inspires me with esteem; this confession arouses in me a warmer feeling. Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.

It is, I suppose, these lewd, ugly, base and selfish thoughts, dwelling in their minds against their will, that have tormented the saints when their lives were devoted to good works and repentance had redeemed the sins of their past. St. Ignatius Loyola, as we know, when he went to Monserrat made a general confession and received absolution; but he continued to be obsessed by a sense of sin so that he was on the point of killing himself. Till his conversion he had led the ordinary life of the young man of good birth at that time; he was somewhat vain of his appearance, he had wenched and gambled; but at least on one occasion he had shown rare magnanimity and he had always been honourable, loyal, generous and brave. If peace was still denied him it looks as though it was his thoughts that he could not forgive himself. It would be a comfort to know that even the saints were thus afflicted. When I have seen the great ones of the earth, so upright and dignified, sitting in state I have often asked myself whether at such moments they ever remembered how their minds in solitude were sometimes occupied and whether it ever made them uneasy to think of the secrets that their subliminal self harboured. It seems to me that the knowledge that these reveries are common to all men should inspire one with tolerance to oneself as well as to others. It is well also if they enable us to look upon our fellows, even the most eminent and respectable, with humour and if they lead us to take ourselves not too seriously. When I have heard judges on the bench moralizing with unction I have asked myself whether it was possible for them to have forgotten their humanity so completely as their words suggested. I have wished that beside his bunch of flowers at the Old Bailey, his lordship had a packet of toilet paper. It would remind him that he was a man like any other.

17

I HAVE been called cynical. I have been accused of making men out worse than they are. I do not think I have done this. All I have done is to bring into prominence certain traits that many writers shut their eyes to. I think what has chiefly struck me in human beings is their lack of consistency. I have never seen people all of a piece. It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and for all that yield a plausible harmony. I have often asked myself how characteristics, seemingly irreconcilable, can exist in the same person. I have known crooks who were capable of self-sacrifice, sneak-thieves who were sweet-natured and harlots for whom it was a point of honour to give good value for money. The only explanation I can offer is that so instinctive is each one’s conviction that he is unique in the world, and privileged, that he feels that, however wrong it might be for others, what he for his part does, if not natural and right, is at least venial. The contrast that I have found in people has interested me, but I do not think I have unduly emphasized it. The censure that has from time to time been passed on me is due perhaps to the fact that I have not expressly condemned what was bad in the characters of my invention and praised what was good. It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me, and even when they do I have learnt at last generally to excuse them. It is meet not to expect too much of others. You should be grateful when they treat you well, but unperturbed when they treat you ill. ‘For every one of us,’ as the Athenian Stranger said, ’is made pretty much what he is by the bent of his desires and the nature of his soul.’ It is want of imagination that prevents people from seeing things from any point of view but their own, and it is unreasonable to be angry with them because they lack this faculty.

I think I could be justly blamed if I saw only people’s faults and were blind to their virtues. I am not conscious that this is the case. There is nothing more beautiful than goodness and it has pleased me very often to show how much of it there is in persons who by common standards would be relentlessly condemned. I have shown it because I have seen it. It has seemed to me sometimes to shine more brightly in them because it was surrounded by the darkness of sin. I take the goodness of the good for granted and I am amused when I discover their defects or their vices; I am touched when I see the goodness of the wicked and I am willing enough to shrug a tolerant shoulder at their wickedness. I am not my brother’s keeper. I cannot bring myself to judge my fellows; I am content to observe them. My observation has led me to believe that, all in all, there is not so much difference between the good and the bad as the moralists would have us believe.

I have not on the whole taken people at their face value. I do not know if this coolness of scrutiny has been inherited from my fathers; they could hardly have been successful lawyers if they had not possessed a shrewdness that prevented them from being deceived by appearances; or if I owe it to the lack in me of that joyful uprush of emotion on meeting people that makes many, as the saying is, take their geese for swans. It was certainly encouraged by my training as a medical student. I did not want to be a doctor. I did not want to be anything but a writer, but I was much too shy to say so, and in any case at that time it was unheard of that a boy of eighteen, belonging to a respectable family, should adopt literature as a profession. The notion was so preposterous that I never even dreamt of imparting it to anybody. I had always supposed that I should enter the law, but my three brothers, much older than I, were practising it and there did not seem room for me too.

18

I LEFT school early. I had been unhappy at the preparatory school to which I was sent on my father’s death because it was at Canterbury and only six miles from Whitstable of which my uncle and guardian was vicar. It was an annex of the King’s School, an ancient foundation, and to this when I was thirteen I duly went. After I had got out of the lower forms, the masters of which were frightening bullies, I was contented enough, and I was miserable when an illness forced me to spend a term in the South of France. My mother and her only sister had died of tuberculosis and when it was found that my lungs were affected my uncle and aunt were concerned. I was placed at a tutor’s at Hyères. When I went back to Canterbury I did not like it so well. My friends had made new friends. I was lonely. I had been moved into a higher form in which, with three months lost, I could not find my place. My form-master nagged me. I persuaded my uncle that it would be very good for my lungs if instead of staying at school I spent the following winter on the Riviera and that it would be of value to me after that to go to Germany and learn German. I could continue to work there on the subjects which were necessary for me to get into Cambridge. He was a weak man and my arguments were specious. He did not much like me, for which I cannot blame him, since I do not think I was a likeable boy, and as it was my own money that was being spent on my education, he was willing enough to let me do as I chose. My aunt greatly favoured my plan. She was herself German, penniless but of noble birth; her family had a coat of arms with supporters and a great number of quarterings, of which she was primly arrogant. I have related elsewhere how, though but a poor clergyman’s wife, she would not call on the wife of an opulent banker who had taken a house for the summer nearby because he was in trade. It was she who arranged that I should go to a family in Heidelberg whom she had heard of through her relations in Munich.

But when I came back from Germany, aged eighteen, I had very decided views of my own about my future. I had been happier than ever before. I had for the first time tasted freedom and I could not bear the thought of going to Cambridge and being subjected once more to restraint. I felt myself a man and I had a great eagerness to enter at once upon life. I felt that there was not a moment to waste. My uncle had always hoped that I would go into the church, though he should have known that, stammering as I did, no profession could have been more unsuitable; and when I told him that I wouldn’t, he accepted with his usual indifference my refusal to go to Cambridge. I still remember the rather absurd arguments that were held about the calling I should adopt. A suggestion was made that I should become a civil servant and my uncle wrote to an old Oxford friend of his who held an important position in the Home Office for his advice. It was that, owing to the system of examinations and the class of persons it had introduced into the government service, it was now no place for a gentleman. That settled that. It was finally decided that I should become a doctor.

The medical profession did not interest me, but it gave me the chance of living in London and so gaining the experience of life that I hankered after. I entered St. Thomas’s Hospital in the autumn of 1892. I found the first two years of the curriculum very dull and gave my work no more attention than was necessary to scrape through the examinations. I was an unsatisfactory student. But I had the freedom I yearned for. I liked having lodgings of my own, where I could be by myself; I took pride in making them pretty and comfortable. All my spare time, and much that I should have devoted to my medical studies, I spent reading and writing. I read enormously; I filled note-books with ideas for stories and plays, scraps of dialogue and reflections, very ingenuous ones, on what my reading and the various experiences that I was undergoing suggested to me. I entered little into the life of the hospital and made few friends there, for I was occupied with other things; but when, after two years, I became a clerk in the out-patient’s departments I began to grow interested. In due course I started to work in the wards and then my interest so much increased that when I caught septic tonsillitis through doing a post-mortem on a corpse that was in an unreasonable state of decomposition and had to take to my bed, I could not wait to get well to resume my duties. I had to attend a certain number of confinements to get a certificate and this meant going into the slums of Lambeth, often into foul courts that the police hesitated to enter, but in which my black bag amply protected me: I found the work absorbing. For a short period I was on accident duty day and night to give first aid to urgent cases. It left me tired out but wonderfully exhilarated.

19

FOR HERE I was in contact with what I most wanted, life in the raw. In those three years I must have witnessed pretty well every emotion of which man is capable. It appealed to my dramatic instinct. It excited the novelist in me. Even now that forty years have passed I can remember certain people so exactly that I could draw a picture of them. Phrases that I heard then still linger on my ears. I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face; I saw courage and steadfastness. I saw faith shine in the eyes of those who trusted in what I could only think was an illusion and I saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of death with an ironic joke because he was too proud to let those about him see the terror of his soul.

At that time (a time to most people of sufficient ease, when peace seemed certain and prosperity secure) there was a school of writers who enlarged upon the moral value of suffering. They claimed that it was salutary. They claimed that it increased sympathy and enhanced the sensibilities. They claimed that it opened to the spirit new avenues of beauty and enabled it to get into touch with the mystical kingdom of God. They claimed that it strengthened the character, purified it from its human grossness and brought to him who did not avoid but sought it a more perfect happiness. Several books on these lines had a great success and their authors, who lived in comfortable homes, had three meals a day and were in robust health, gained much reputation. I set down in my note-books, not once or twice, but in a dozen places, the facts that I had seen. I knew that suffering did not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things. It did not make them more than men; it made them less than men; and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

All this was a valuable experience to me. I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession. I suppose that you can learn a good deal about human nature in a solicitor’s office; but there on the whole you have to deal with men in full control of themselves. They lie perhaps as much as they lie to the doctor, but they lie more consistently, and it may be that for the solicitor it is not so necessary to know the truth. The interests he deals with, besides, are usually material. He sees human nature from a specialized standpoint. But the doctor, especially the hospital doctor, sees it bare. Reticences can generally be undermined; very often there are none. Fear for the most part will shatter every defence; even vanity is unnerved by it. Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained only by the disinclination of others to listen. Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs. The doctor is discreet. It is his business to listen and no details are too intimate for his ears.

But of course human nature may be displayed before you and if you have not the eyes to see you will learn nothing. If you are hidebound with prejudice, if your temper is sentimental, you can go through the wards of a hospital and be as ignorant of man at the end as you were at the beginning. If you want to get any benefit from such an experience you must have an open mind and an interest in human beings. I look upon myself as very fortunate in that though I have never much liked men I have found them so interesting that I am almost incapable of being bored by them. I do not particularly want to talk and I am very willing to listen. I do not care if people are interested in me or not. I have no desire to impart any knowledge I have to others nor do I feel the need to correct them if they are wrong. You can get a great deal of entertainment out of tedious people if you keep your head. I remember being taken for a drive in a foreign country by a kind lady who wanted to show me round. Her conversation was composed entirely of truisms and she had so large a vocabulary of hackneyed phrases that I despaired of remembering them. But one remark she made has stuck in my memory as have few witticisms; we passed a row of little houses by the sea and she said to me: ‘Those are week-end bungalows, if you understand what I mean; in other words they’re bungalows that people go to on Saturdays and leave on Mondays.’ I should have been sorry to miss that.

I do not want to spend too long a time with boring people, but then I do not want to spend too long a time with amusing ones. I find social intercourse fatiguing. Most persons, I think, are both exhilarated and rested by conversation; to me it has always been an effort. When I was young and stammered, to talk for long singularly exhausted me, and even now that I have to some extent cured myself, it is a strain. It is a relief to me when I can get away and read a book.

20

I WOULD not claim for a moment that those years I spent at St. Thomas’s Hospital gave me a complete knowledge of human nature. I do not suppose anyone can hope to have that. I have been studying it, consciously and subconsciously, for forty years and I still find men unaccountable; people I know intimately can surprise me by some action of which I never thought them capable or by the discovery of some trait exhibit a side of themselves that I never even suspected. It is possible that my training gave me a warped view, for at St. Thomas’s the persons I came in contact with were for the most part sick and poor and ill-educated. I have tried to guard against this. I have tried also to guard against my own prepossessions. I have no natural trust in others. I am more inclined to expect them to do ill than to do good. That is the price one has to pay for having a sense of humour. A sense of humour leads you to take pleasure in the discrepancies of human nature; it leads you to mistrust great professions and look for the unworthy motive that they conceal; the disparity between appearance and reality diverts you and you are apt when you cannot find it to create it. You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous. The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint. But if to see men one-sidedly is a heavy price to pay for a sense of humour there is a compensation that has a value too. You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn. He does not moralize, he is content to understand; and it is true that to understand is to pity and forgive.

But I must admit that, with these reservations that I have tried always to remember, the experience of all the years that have followed has only confirmed the observations on human nature that I made, not deliberately, for I was too young, but unconsciously, in the out-patients’ departments and in the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital. I have seen men since as I saw them then, and thus have I drawn them. It may not be a true picture and I know that many have thought it an unpleasant one. It is doubtless partial, for naturally I have seen men through my own idiosyncrasies. A buoyant, optimistic, healthy and sentimental person would have seen the same people quite differently. I can only claim to have seen them coherently. Many writers seem to me not to observe at all, but to create their characters in stock sizes from images in their own fancy. They are like draughtsmen who draw their figures from recollections of the antique and have never attempted to draw from the living model. At their best they can only give living shape to the fantasies of their own minds. If their minds are noble they can give you noble figures and perhaps it does not matter if they lack the infinite complication of common life.

I have always worked from the living model. I remember that once in the Dissecting Room when I was going over my ‘part’ with the Demonstrator, he asked me what some nerve was and I did not know. He told me; whereupon I remonstrated, for it was in the wrong place. Nevertheless he insisted that it was the nerve I had been in vain looking for. I complained of the abnormality and he, smiling, said that in anatomy it was the normal that was uncommon. I was only annoyed at the time, but the remark sank into my mind and since then it has been forced upon me that it was true of man as well as of anatomy. The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected. It is this false picture that the writers I have spoken of take as their model and it is because they describe what is so exceptional that they seldom achieve the effect of life. Selfishness and kindliness, idealism and sensuality, vanity, shyness, disinterestedness, courage, laziness, nervousness, obstinacy, and diffidence, they can all exist in a single person and form a plausible harmony. It has taken a long time to persuade readers of the truth of this.

I do not suppose men in past centuries were any different from the men we know, but they must surely have appeared to their contemporaries more of a piece than they do to us now, or writers would not have thus represented them. It seemed reasonable to describe every man in his humour. The miser was nothing but miserly, the fop foppish, and the glutton gluttonous. It never occurred to anyone that the miser might be foppish and gluttonous; and yet we see constantly people who are; still less, that he might be an honest and upright man with a disinterested zeal for public service and a genuine passion for art. When novelists began to disclose the diversity that they had found in themselves or seen in others they were accused of maligning the human race. So far as I know the first novelist who did this with deliberate intention was Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir. Contemporary criticism was outraged. Even Sainte-Beuve, who needed only to look into his own heart to discover what contrary qualities could exist side by side in some kind of harmony, took him to task. Julien Sorel is one of the most interesting characters that a novelist has ever created. I do not think that Stendhal has succeeded in making him entirely plausible, but that, I believe, is due to causes that I shall mention in another part of this book. For the first three-quarters of the novel he is perfectly consistent. Sometimes he fills you with horror; sometimes he is entirely sympathetic; but he has an inner coherence, so that though you often shudder you accept.

But it was long before Stendhal’s example bore fruit. Balzac, with all his genius, drew his characters after the old models. He gave them his own immense vitality so that you accept them as real; but in fact they are humours as definitely as are the characters of old comedy. His people are unforgettable, but they are seen from the standpoint of the ruling passion that affected those with whom they were brought in contact. I suppose it is a natural prepossession of mankind to take people as though they were homogeneous. It is evidently less trouble to make up one’s mind about a man one way or the other and dismiss suspense with the phrase, he’s one of the best or he’s a dirty dog. It is disconcerting to find that the saviour of his country may be stingy or that the poet who has opened new horizons to our consciousness may be a snob. Our natural egoism leads us to judge people in their relation to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

These reasons perhaps explain why there is so great a disinclination to accept the attempts to portray man with his incongruous and diverse qualities and why people turn away with dismay when candid biographers reveal the truth about famous persons. It is distressing to think that the composer of the quintet in the Meistersinger was dishonest in money matters and treacherous to those who had benefited him. But it may be that he could not have had great qualities if he had not also had great failings. I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored; I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.

21

BESIDES TEACHING me something about human nature my training in a medical school furnished me with an elementary knowledge of science and scientific method. Till then I had been concerned only with art and literature. It was a very limited knowledge, for the demands of the curriculum at that time were small, but at all events it showed me the road that led to a region of which I was completely ignorant. I grew familiar with certain principles. The scientific world of which I thus obtained a cursory glimpse was rigidly materialistic and because its conceptions coincided with my own prepossessions I embraced them with alacrity: ‘For men,’ as Pope observed, ‘let them say what they will, never approve any other’s sense, but as it squares with their own.’ I was glad to learn that the mind of man (himself the product of natural causes) was a function of the brain subject like the rest of his body to the laws of cause and effect and that these laws were the same as those that governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast machine in which every event was determined by a preceding event so that nothing could be other than it was. These conceptions not only appealed to my dramatic instinct; they filled me besides with a very delectable sense of liberation. With the ferocity of youth I welcomed the hypothesis of the Survival of the Fittest. It gave me much satisfaction to learn that the earth was a speck of mud whirling round a second-rate star which was gradually cooling; and that evolution, which had produced man, would by forcing him to adapt himself to his environment deprive him of all the qualities he had acquired but those that were necessary to enable him to combat the increasing cold till at last the planet, an icy cinder, would no longer support even a vestige of life. I believed that we were wretched puppets at the mercy of a ruthless fate; and that, bound by the inexorable laws of nature, we were doomed to take part in the ceaseless struggle for existence with nothing to look forward to but inevitable defeat. I learnt that men were moved by a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species, and I decided that, whatever aims men set themselves, they were deluded, for it was impossible for them to aim at anything but their own selfish pleasures. When once I happened to do a friend a good turn (for what reasons, since I knew that all our actions were purely selfish, I did not stop to think) and wanting to show his gratitude (which of course he had no business to feel, for my apparent kindness was rigidly determined) he asked me what I would like as a present, I answered without hesitation Herbert Spencer’s First Principles. I read it with complacency. But I was impatient of Spencer’s maudlin belief in progress: the world I knew was going from bad to worse and I was as pleased as Punch at the thought of my remote descendants, having long forgotten art and science and handicraft, cowering skin-clad in caverns as they watched the approach of the cold and eternal night. I was violently pessimistic. All the same, having abundant vitality, I was getting on the whole a lot of fun out of life. I was ambitious to make a name for myself as a writer. I exposed myself to every vicissitude that seemed to offer a chance of gaining the greater experience that I wanted and I read everything I could lay my hands on.

22

I LIVED at this time in a group of young men who had by nature gifts that seemed to me much superior to mine. They could write and draw and compose with a facility that aroused my envy. They had an appreciation of art and a critical instinct that I despaired of attaining. Of these some died without fulfilling the promise I thought they had and the rest have lived on without distinction. I know now that all they had was the natural creativity of youth. To write prose and verse, to hammer out little tunes on the piano and to draw and paint, are instinctive with a great many young persons. It is a form of play, due merely to the exuberance of their years, and is no more significant than a child’s building of a castle on the sands. I suspect that it was my own ingenuousness that led me to admire so much the gifts of my friends. If I had been less ignorant I might have seen that the opinions that seemed to me so original were theirs only at second-hand and that their verses and their music owed more to a retentive memory than to a lively imagination. The point I want to make is that this facility is, if not universal, so common that one can draw no conclusions from it. Youth is the inspiration. One of the tragedies of the arts is the spectacle of the vast number of persons who have been misled by this passing fertility to devote their lives to the effort of creation. Their invention deserts them as they grow older, and they are faced with the long years before them in which, unfitted by now for a more humdrum calling, they harass their wearied brain to beat out material it is incapable of giving them. They are lucky when, with what bitterness we know, they can make a living in ways, like journalism or teaching, that are allied to the arts.

Of course it is from among those who possess by nature this facility that the artist is produced. Without it he cannot have talent; but it is only a part of talent. We start by living, each one of us, in the solitariness of our own minds and from the data given us and our communications with other minds we construct the outside world to suit our needs. Because we are all the result of one evolutionary process, and our environment is more or less the same, the constructions we make are roughly similar. For convenience and simplicity we accept them as identical and speak of a common world. The peculiarity of the artist is that he is in some particular different from other men and so the world of his construction is different too. It is this idiosyncrasy that is the better part of his equipment. When the picture he draws of his private world appeals to a certain number of persons, either by its strangeness, its intrinsic interest or its correspondence with their own prepossessions (for none of us is quite the same as his neighbour, only rather like, and not everyone accepts the world common to us all in every respect) his talent will be acknowledged. If he is a writer he will fulfil some need in the nature of his readers and they will lead with him a life of the spirit that satisfies them better than the life circumstances have forced on them. But there are others to whom this idiosyncrasy does not appeal. They have no patience with the world constructed by its instrumentality. It may actually revolt them. Then the artist has nothing to say to them and they will deny his talent.

I do not believe that genius is an entirely different thing from talent. I am not even sure that it depends on any great difference in the artist’s natural gifts. For example, I do not think that Cervantes had an exceptional gift for writing; few people would deny him genius. Nor would it be easy in English literature to find a poet with a happier gift than Herrick and yet no one would claim that he had more than a delightful talent. It seems to me that what makes genius is the combination of natural gifts for creation with an idiosyncrasy that enables its possessor to see the world personally in the highest degree and yet with such catholicity that his appeal is not to this type of man or to that type, but to all men. His private world is that of common men, but ampler and more pithy. His communication is universal and though men may not be able to tell exactly what it signifies they feel that it is important. He is supremely normal. By a happy accident of nature seeing life with immense vivacity, as it were at concert pitch, he sees it, with its infinite diversity, in the healthy way that mankind at large sees it. In Matthew Arnold’s phrase he sees it steadily and sees it whole. But genius arises once or twice in a century. The lesson of anatomy applies: there is nothing so rare as the normal. It is foolish to do as many do now and call a man a genius because he has written half a dozen clever plays or painted a score of good pictures. It is very well to have talent; few people have. With talent the artist will only reach the second class, but that need not disturb him for it contains the names of many whose works have uncommon merit. When you think it has produced such novels as Le Rouge et le Noir, such poems as The Shropshire Lad, such paintings as those of Watteau, there is not much to be ashamed of. Talent cannot reach the utmost heights, but it can show you many an unexpected and delicious view, an unfrequented dell, a bubbling brook or a romantic cavern, on the way that leads to them. The frowardness of human nature is such that it falters sometimes when it is bidden to take the broadest of all surveys of human nature. It will shrink from the splendour of Tolstoi’s War and Peace to turn with complacency to Voltaire’s Candide. It would be hard to live always with Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, but anyone could do with one of Constable’s pictures of Salisbury Cathedral.

My sympathies are limited. I can only be myself, and partly by nature, partly by the circumstances of my life, it is a partial self. I am not a social person. I cannot get drunk and feel a great love for my fellow-men. Convivial amusement has always somewhat bored me. When people sitting in an ale-house or drifting down the river in a boat start singing I am silent. I have never even sung a hymn. I do not much like being touched and I have always to make a slight effort over myself not to draw away when someone links his arm in mine. I can never forget myself. The hysteria of the world repels me and I never feel more aloof than when I am in the midst of a throng surrendered to a violent feeling of mirth or sorrow. Though I have been in love a good many times I have never experienced the bliss of requited love. I know that this is the best thing that life can offer and it is a thing that almost all men, though perhaps only for a short time, have enjoyed. I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed. It has been a predicament that I have not quite known how to deal with. In order not to hurt their feelings I have often acted a passion that I did not feel. I have tried, with gentleness when possible, and if not, with irritation, to escape from the trammels with which their love bound me. I have been jealous of my independence. I am incapable of complete surrender. And so, never having felt some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give.

23

IT IS dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

But for me the race now is nearly run and it would ill become me to conceal the truth. I do not want anyone to think better of me than I deserve. Let those who like me take me as I am and let the rest leave me. I have more character than brains and more brains than specific gifts. I said something of this sort many years ago to a charming and distinguished critic. I do not know what led me to do so, since I am not much inclined to talk about myself in general company. It was at Montdidier, during the first months of the war, and we were lunching there on our way to Péronne. We had been very hard-worked for some days and it was a pleasure to linger over a meal that seemed to our healthy appetites uncommonly good. I suppose I was flushed with wine and I daresay excited by the discovery, from a statue in the market-place, that Montdidier was the birthplace of Parmentier, who introduced the potato into France. Anyhow as we idled over our coffee and liqueurs I was moved to give an acute and candid analysis of my talent. I was disconcerted some years later to read it, almost in my very words, in the columns of an important paper. I was a trifle vexed, for it is a very different thing to tell the truth about yourself and to have somebody else tell it, and I should have liked the critic to do me the compliment of saying that he had heard it all from my own lips. But I chid myself. I thought it very natural that he should like to think that he had so much perspicacity. And it was the truth. It has been a little unfortunate for me, since the critic is deservedly influential and what he said in this article has been very generally repeated. In another moment of frankness I informed my readers that I was unusually competent. One would think that except for this the critics would never have discovered it; but since then the adjective has been much and depreciatingly applied to me. It has seemed strange to me that so many people concerned, though only at second-hand, with the arts should regard competence with so little favour.

I am told that there are natural singers and made singers. Though of course he must have something of a voice the made singer owes the better part of his accomplishment to training; with taste and musical ability he can eke out the relative poverty of his organ and his singing can afford a great deal of pleasure, especially to the connoisseur; but he will never move you as you are moved to ecstasy by the pure, bird-like notes of the natural singer. The natural singer may be inadequately trained, he may have neither tact nor knowledge, he may outrage all the canons of art, but such is the magic of his voice that you are captivated. You forgive the liberties he takes, his vulgarities, his appeals to obvious emotion, when those heavenly sounds enchant your ear. I am a made writer. But it would be vanity if I thought that such results as I have achieved on myself were due to a design that I deliberately carried out. I was drawn to various courses by very simple motives and it is only on looking back that I discover myself subconsciously working to a certain end. The end was to develop my character and so make up for the deficiencies in my natural gifts.

I have a clear and logical brain, but not a very subtle nor a very powerful one. For long I wished it were better. I used to get exasperated because it would not do for me nearly as much as I wished. I was like a mathematician who could do no more than add and subtract and though he wanted to tackle all manner of complicated operations knew that he simply had not the capacity. It took me a long time to resign myself to making the best of what I had. I think it was a good enough brain to have brought me success in whatever profession I had adopted. I am not one of those persons who is a fool at everything but his own speciality. In law, medicine and politics a clear mind and insight into men are useful.

I have had one advantage; I have never wanted a subject. I have always had more stories in my head than I ever had time to write. I have often heard writers complain that they wanted to write but had nothing to write about, and I remember one distinguished author telling me that she was reading through some book in which were epitomized all the plots that had ever been used in order to find a theme. I have never found myself in such a predicament. Swift, as we know, who claimed that he could write on any subject whatever, when he was challenged to write a discourse on a broomstick acquitted himself very creditably. I am almost inclined to say that I could not spend an hour in anyone’s company without getting the material to write at least a readable story about him. It is pleasant to have so many stories in mind that whatever your mood you have one upon which, for an hour or two, for a week or so, you can let your fancy linger. Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it. His reverie is purposeful. It affords him a delight in comparison with which the pleasures of sense are pale and it affords him the assurance of his freedom. One cannot wonder if sometimes he is unwilling to exchange its enjoyment for the drudgery and loss of execution.

But though I have had variety of invention, and this is not strange since it is the outcome of the variety of mankind, I have had small power of imagination. I have taken living people and put them into the situations, tragic or comic, that their characters suggested. I might well say that they invented their own stories. I have been incapable of those great, sustained flights that carry the author on broad pinions into a celestial sphere. My fancy, never very strong, has been hampered by my sense of probability. I have painted easel pictures, not frescoes.

24

I HEARTILY wish that in my youth I had had someone of good sense to direct my reading. I sigh when I reflect on the amount of time I have wasted on books that were of no great profit to me. What little guidance I had I owe to a young man who came to live with the same family in Heidelberg as I was living with. I will call him Brown. He was then twenty-six. After leaving Cambridge he was called to the bar, but he had a little money, enough to live on in those inexpensive days, and finding the law distasteful he had made up his mind to devote himself to literature. He came to Heidelberg to learn German. I knew him till his death forty years later. For twenty years he amused himself with thinking what he would write when he really got down to it and for another twenty with what he could have written if the fates had been kinder. He wrote a good deal of verse. He had neither imagination, nor passion; and he had a defective ear. He spent some years translating those dialogues of Plato that had been already most often translated. I doubt, however, if he ever got to the end of one. He was completely devoid of will-power. He was sentimental and vain. Though short he was handsome, with finely cut features and curly hair; he had pale blue eyes and a wistful expression. He looked as one imagines a poet should look. As an old man, after a life of complete indolence, bald and emaciated, he had an ascetic air so that you might have taken him for a don who had spent long years in ardent and disinterested research. The spirituality of his expression suggested the tired scepticism of a philosopher who had plumbed the secrets of existence and discovered nothing but vanity. Having gradually wasted his small fortune, he preferred to live on the generosity of others rather than work, and often he found it difficult to make both ends meet. His self-complacency never deserted him. It enabled him to endure poverty with resignation and failure with indifference. I do not think he ever had an inkling that he was an outrageous sham. His whole life was a lie, but when he was dying, if he had known he was going to, which mercifully he didn’t, I am convinced he would have looked upon it as well-spent. He had charm, he was devoid of envy, and though too selfish to do anyone a good turn, he was incapable of unkindness. He had a real appreciation of literature. During the long walks we took together over the hills of Heidelberg he talked to me of books. He talked to me of Italy and Greece, neither of which in point of fact he knew, but he fired my young imagination and I began to learn Italian. I accepted everything he told me with the fervour of the proselyte. I should not blame him because he inspired me with a passionate admiration for certain works that time has shown to be not so admirable. When he arrived he found me reading Tom Jones, which I had got out of the public library, and he told me that of course there was no harm in it, but I should do better to read Diana of the Crossways. Even then he was a Platonist and he gave me Shelley’s translation of the Symposium. He talked to me of Renan, Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold. But Matthew Arnold, he thought, was a bit of a philistine himself. He talked to me of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and of Omar Khayyám. He knew a great many of the quatrains by heart and recited them to me on our walks. I was divided between enthusiasm for the romantic epicureanism of the matter and the embarrassment occasioned by Brown’s delivery, for he recited poetry like a high-church curate intoning the Litany in an ill-lit crypt. But the two writers that it was really necessary to admire if you would be a person of culture and not a British philistine were Walter Pater and George Meredith. I was very ready to do what I was told to achieve this desirable end and incredible as it must seem I read The Shaving of Shagpat with roars of laughter. It seemed to me superlatively funny. Then I read the novels of George Meredith one after the other. I thought them wonderful; but not so wonderful as even to myself I pretended. My admiration was fictitious. I admired because it was the part of a cultured young man to admire. I intoxicated myself with my own enthusiasm. I would not listen to the still small voice within me that carped. Now I know that there is a great deal of fustian in these novels. But the strange thing is that, reading them again, I recapture the days when I first read them. They are rich for me now with sunny mornings and my awakening intelligence and the delicious dreams of youth, so that even as I close a novel of Meredith’s, Evan Harrington for instance, and decide that its insincerity is exasperating, its snobbishness loathsome, its verbosity intolerable and I will never read another, my heart melts and I think it’s grand.

On the other hand I have no such feeling about Walter Pater whom I read at the same time and with a similar excitement. No pleasant associations give him for me a merit to which he has no claim. I find him as dull as a picture of Alma Tadema. It is strange that one can ever have admired that prose. It does not flow. There is no air in it. A careful mosaic constructed by someone without great technical skill to decorate the walls of a station dining-room. Pater’s attitude towards the life about him, cloistered, faintly supercilious, gentlemanly, donnish in short, repels me. Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common-room. But Walter Pater was a feeble creature: it is unnecessary to condemn him with intensity. I dislike him not for himself, but because he is an example of a type in the literary world that is common and detestable. This is the person who is filled with the conceit of culture.

The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness. Too often, as we know, it gives rise to self-complacency. Who has not seen the scholar’s thin-lipped smile when he corrects a misquotation and the connoisseur’s pained look when someone praises a picture he does not care for? There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields. There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motor-car. In each case it is special knowledge. The stockbroker has his knowledge too and so has the artizan. It is a silly prejudice of the intellectual that his is the only one that counts. The True, the Good and the Beautiful are not the perquisites of those who have been to expensive schools, burrowed in libraries and frequented museums. The artist has no excuse when he uses others with condescension. He is a fool if he thinks his knowledge is more important than theirs and an oaf if he cannot comfortably meet them on an equal footing. Matthew Arnold did a great disservice to culture when he insisted on its opposition to philistinism.

25

AT EIGHTEEN I knew French, German and some Italian, but I was extremely uneducated and I was deeply conscious of my ignorance. I read everything that came my way. My curiosity was such that I was as willing to read a history of Peru or the reminiscences of a cowboy as a treatise on Provençal poetry or the Confessions of St. Augustine. I suppose it gained me a certain amount of general knowledge which is useful for the novelist to have. One never knows when an out of the way bit of information will come in handy. I made lists of what I read and one of these lists by some accident I still have. It is my reading for two months and, but that I made it only for myself, I could not believe that it was veracious. It shows that I read three of Shakespeare’s plays, two volumes of Mommsen’s History of Rome, a large part of Lanson’s Littérature Française, two or three novels, some of the French classics, a couple of scientific works and a play of Ibsen’s. I was indeed the industrious apprentice. During the time I was at St. Thomas’s Hospital I went systematically through English, French, Italian and Latin literature. I read a lot of history, a little philosophy and a good deal of science. My curiosity was too great to allow me to give much time to reflect upon what I read; I could hardly wait to finish one book, so eager was I to begin another. This was always an adventure, and I would start upon a famous work as excitedly as a reasonable young man would go in to bat for his side or a nice girl go to a dance. Now and then journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe’s Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood racing through my veins. To me reading is a rest as to other people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than that; it is a necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug. I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. That is putting it too low. I have spent many delightful hours poring over the price-list of the Army and Navy Stores, the lists of second-hand booksellers and the ABC. All these are redolent of romance. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

I have put books aside only because I was conscious that time was passing and that it was my business to live. I have gone into the world because I thought it was necessary in order to get the experience without which I could not write, but I have gone into it also because I wanted experience for its own sake. It did not seem to me enough only to be a writer. The pattern I had designed for myself insisted that I should take the utmost part I could in this fantastic affair of being a man. I desired to feel the common pains and enjoy the common pleasures that are part of the common human lot. I saw no reason to subordinate the claims of sense to the tempting lure of spirit and I was determined to get whatever fulfilment I could out of social intercourse and human relations, out of food, drink and fornication, luxury, sport, art, travel, and as Henry James says, whatever. But it was an effort and I have always returned to my books and my own company with relief.

And yet, though I have read so much, I am a bad reader. I read slowly and I am a poor skipper. I find it difficult to leave a book, however bad and however much it bores me, unfinished. I could count on my fingers the number of books that I have not read from cover to cover. On the other hand there are few books that I have read twice. I know very well that there are many of which I cannot get the full value on a single reading, but in that they have given me all I was capable of getting at the time, and this, though I may forget their details, remains a permanent enrichment. I know people who read the same book over and over again. It can only be that they read with their eyes and not with their sensibility. It is a mechanical exercise like the Tibetan’s turning of a praying-wheel. It is doubtless a harmless occupation, but they are wrong if they think it an intelligent one.

26

IN MY youth, when my instinctive feeling about a book differed from that of authoritative critics I did not hesitate to conclude that I was wrong. I did not know how often critics accept the conventional view and it never occurred to me that they could talk with assurance of what they did not know very much about. It was long before I realized that the only thing that mattered to me in a work of art was what I thought about it. I have acquired now a certain confidence in my own judgement, for I have noticed that what I felt instinctively forty years ago about the writers I read then, and what I would not heed because it did not agree with current opinion, is now pretty generally accepted. For all that I still read a great deal of criticism, for I think it a very agreeable form of literary composition. One does not always want to be reading to the profit of one’s soul and there is no pleasanter way of idling away an hour or two than reading a volume of criticism. It is diverting to agree; it is diverting to differ; and it is always interesting to know what an intelligent man has to say about some writer, Henry More, for instance, or Richardson, whom you have never had occasion to read.

But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you. I do not read a book for the book’s sake, but for my own. It is not my business to judge it, but to absorb what I can of it, as the amoeba absorbs a particle of a foreign body, and what I cannot assimilate has nothing to do with me. I am not a scholar, a student or a critic; I am a professional writer and now I read only what is useful to me professionally. Anyone can write a book that will revolutionize the ideas that have been held for centuries on the Ptolemys and I shall contentedly leave it unread; he can describe an incredibly adventurous journey in the heart of Patagonia and I shall remain ignorant of it. There is no need for the writer of fiction to be an expert on any subject but his own; on the contrary, it is hurtful to him, since, human nature being weak, he is hard put to it to resist the temptation of inappositely using his special knowledge. The novelist is ill-advised to be too technical. The practice, which came into fashion in the nineties, of using a multitude of cant terms is tiresome. It should be possible to give verisimilitude without that, and atmosphere is dearly bought at the price of tediousness. The novelist should know something about the great issues that occupy men, who are his topics, but it is generally enough if he knows a little. He must avoid pedantry at all costs. But even at that the field is vast and I have tried to limit myself to such works as were significant to my purpose. You can never know enough about your characters. Biographies and reminiscences, technical works, will give you often an intimate detail, a telling touch, a revealing hint, that you might never have got from a living model. People are hard to know. It is a slow business to induce them to tell you the particular thing about themselves that can be of use to you. They have the disadvantage that often you cannot look at them and put them aside, as you can a book, and you have to read the whole volume, as it were, only to learn that it had nothing much to tell you.

27

YOUNG PERSONS, who are anxious to write, sometimes pay me the compliment of asking me to tell them of certain books necessary for them to read. I do. They seldom read them, for they seem to have little curiosity. They do not care what their predecessors have done. They think they know everything that it is necessary to know of the art of fiction when they have read two or three novels by Mrs. Woolf, one by E. M. Forster, several by D. H. Lawrence and, oddly enough, the Forsyte Saga. It is true that contemporary literature has a vividness of appeal that classical literature can never have and it is well for a young writer to know what his contemporaries are writing about and how. But there are fashions in literature and it is not easy to tell what intrinsic value there is in a style of writing that happens to be the vogue at the moment. An acquaintance with the great works of the past serves as a very good standard of comparison. I have sometimes wondered whether it is due to their ignorance that many young writers, notwithstanding their facility and cleverness, their skilful technique, so frequently fizzle out. They write two or three books that are not only brilliant, but mature, and then they are done for. But that is not what enriches the literature of a country. For that you must have writers who can produce not just two or three books, but a great body of work. Of course it will be uneven, because so many fortunate circumstances must go together to produce a masterpiece; but a masterpiece is more likely to come as the culminating point of a laborious career than as the lucky fluke of untaught genius. The writer can only be fertile if he renews himself and he can only renew himself if his soul is constantly enriched by fresh experience. There is no more fruitful source of this than the enchanting exploration of the great literatures of the past.

For the production of a work of art is not the result of a miracle. It requires preparation. The soil, be it ever so rich, must be fed. By taking thought, by deliberate effort, the artist must enlarge, deepen and diversify his personality. Then the soil must lie fallow. Like the bride of Christ, the artist waits for the illumination that shall bring forth a new spiritual life. He goes about his ordinary avocations with patience; the subconscious does its mysterious business; and then, suddenly springing, you might think from nowhere, the idea is produced. But like the corn that was sown on stony ground it may easily wither away; it must be tended with anxious care. All the power of the artist’s mind must be set to work on it, all his technical skill, all his experience, and whatever he has in him of character and individuality, so that with infinite pains he may present it with the completeness that is fitting to it.

But I am not impatient with the young when, only at their request, I insist, I advise them to read Shakespeare and Swift, and they tell me that they read Gulliver’s Travels in their nursery and Henry IV at school; and if they find Vanity Fair unendurable and Anna Karenina footling it is their own affair. No reading is worth while unless you enjoy it. There is at least this to be said for them that they do not suffer from the self-conceit of knowledge. They are not withdrawn by a wide culture from sympathy with the common run of men who are after all their material. They are nearer to their fellows and the art they practise is not a mystery, but a craft on the same footing as any other. They write novels and plays as unaffectedly as other men build motor-cars. This is much to the good. For the artist, the writer especially, in the solitariness of his own mind constructs a world that is different from other men’s; the idiosyncrasy that makes him a writer separates him from them and the paradox emerges that though his aim is to describe them truthfully his gift prevents him from knowing them as they really are. It is as though he wanted urgently to see a certain thing and by the act of looking at it drew before it a veil that obscured it. The writer stands outside the very action he is engaged in. He is the comedian who never quite loses himself in the part, for he is at the same time spectator and actor. It is all very well to say that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; but a poet’s emotion is specific, a poet’s rather than a man’s, and it is never quite disinterested. That is why women with their instinctive common sense have so often found the love of poets unsatisfying. It may be that the writers of the present day, who seem to be so much nearer to their raw material, ordinary men among ordinary men, rather than artists in an alien crowd, may break down the barrier that their peculiar gift cannot but raise and so come nearer to the plain truth than has ever been done before.

28

I HAD my full share of the intellectual’s arrogance and if, as I hope, I have lost it, I must ascribe it not to my own virtue or wisdom but to the chance that made me more of a traveller than most writers. I am attached to England, but I have never felt myself very much at home there. I have always been shy with English people. To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfil and responsibilities that irked me. I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me. Some fortunate persons find freedom in their own minds; I, with less spiritual power than they, find it in travel. While still at Heidelberg I managed to visit a good many places in Germany (at Munich I saw Ibsen drinking a glass of beer at the Maximilianerhof and with a scowl on his face reading the paper) and I went to Switzerland; but the first real journey I made was to Italy. I went primed with much reading of Walter Pater, Ruskin and John Addington Symonds. I had the six weeks of the Easter vacation at my disposal and twenty pounds in my pocket. After going to Genoa and Pisa, where I trudged the interminable distance to sit for a while on the pine wood in which Shelley read Sophocles and wrote verses on a guitar, I settled down for the inside of a month in Florence in the house of a widow lady, with whose daughter I read the Purgatorio, and spent laborious days, Ruskin in hand, visiting the sights. I admired everything that Ruskin told me to admire (even that horrible tower of Giotto) and turned away in disgust from what he condemned. Never can he have had a more ardent disciple. After that I went to Venice, Verona and Milan. I returned to England very much pleased with myself and actively contemptuous of anyone who did not share my views (and Ruskin’s) of Botticelli and Bellini. I was twenty.

A year later I went to Italy again, travelling as far down as Naples, and discovered Capri. It was the most enchanting spot I had ever seen and the following summer I spent the whole of my vacation there. Capri was then little known. There was no funicular from the beach to the town. Few people went there in summer and you could get board and lodging, with wine included, and from your bedroom window a view of Vesuvius, for four shillings a day. There was a poet there then, a Belgian composer, my friend from Heidelberg, Brown, a painter or two, a sculptor (Harvard Thomas) and an American colonel who had fought on the southern side in the Civil War. I listened with transport to conversations, up at Anacapri at the colonel’s house, or at Morgano’s, the wine shop just off the Piazza, when they talked of art and beauty, literature and Roman history. I saw two men fly at one another’s throats because they disagreed over the poetic merit of Heredia’s sonnets. I thought it all grand. Art, art for art’s sake, was the only thing that mattered in the world; and the artist alone gave this ridiculous world significance. Politics, commerce, the learned professions — what did they amount to from the standpoint of the Absolute? They might disagree, these friends of mine (dead, dead every jack one of them), about the value of a sonnet or the excellence of a Greek bas-relief (Greek, my eye! I tell you it’s a Roman copy and if I tell you a thing it is so); but they were all agreed about this, that they burned with a hard, gem-like flame. I was too shy to tell them that I had written a novel and was half-way through another and it was a great mortification to me, burning as I was too with a hard, gem-like flame, to be treated as a philistine who cared for nothing but dissecting dead bodies and would seize an unguarded moment to give his best friend an enema.

29

PRESENTLY I was qualified. I had already published a novel and it had had an unexpected success. I thought my fortune was made, and, abandoning medicine to become a writer, I went to Spain. I was then twenty-three. I was much more ignorant than are, it seems to me, young men of that age at the present day. I settled down in Seville. I grew a moustache, smoked Filipino cigars, learnt the guitar, bought a broad-brimmed hat with a flat crown, in which I swaggered down the Sierpes, and hankered for a flowing cape, lined with green and red velvet. But on account of the expense I did not buy it. I rode about the countryside on a horse lent me by a friend. Life was too pleasant to allow me to give an undivided attention to literature. My plan was to spend a year there till I had learnt Spanish, then go to Rome which I knew only as a tripper and perfect my superficial knowledge of Italian, follow that up with a journey to Greece where I intended to learn the vernacular as an approach to ancient Greek, and finally go to Cairo and learn Arabic. It was an ambitious programme, but I am glad now that I did not carry it out. I duly went to Rome (where I wrote my first play) but then I went back to Spain; for something had occurred that I had not anticipated. I fell in love with Seville and the life one led there and incidentally with a young thing with green eyes and a gay smile (but I got over that) and I could not resist its lure. I returned year after year. I wandered through the white and silent streets and strolled along the Guadalquivir, I dawdled about the Cathedral, I went to bull-fights and made light love to pretty little creatures whose demands on me were no more than my exiguous means could satisfy. It was heavenly to live in Seville in the flower of one’s youth. I postponed my education to a more convenient moment. The result is that I have never read the Odyssey but in English and I have never achieved my ambition to read A Thousand Nights and a Night in Arabic.

When the intelligentsia took up Russia I, remembering that Cato had begun to learn Greek when he was eighty, set about learning Russian, but I had by then lost my youthful enthusiasm; I never got farther than being able to read the plays of Chekov and have long since forgotten the little I knew. I think now that these schemes of mine were a trifle nonsensical. Words are not important, but their meanings, and it is of no spiritual advantage that I can see to know half a dozen languages. I have met polyglots; I have not noticed that they were wiser than the rest of us. It is convenient if you are travelling in a country to have a sufficient smattering of its speech to find your way about and get what you want to eat; and if it has a considerable literature it is pleasant to be able to read it. But such a knowledge as this can be acquired easily. To attempt to learn more is futile. Unless you devote your whole life to it, you will never learn to speak the language of another country to perfection; you will never know its people and its literature with complete intimacy. For they, and the literature which is their expression, are wrought, not only of the actions they perform and the words they use, neither of which offer great difficulty, but of ancestral instincts, shades of feeling that they have absorbed with their mothers’ milk, and innate attitudes which the foreigner can never quite seize. It is hard enough for us to know our own people; we deceive ourselves, we English especially, if we think we can know those of other lands. For the sea-girt isle sets us apart and the link that a common religion gave, which once mitigated our insularity, was snapped with the Reformation. It seems hardly worth while to take much trouble to acquire a knowledge that can never be more than superficial. I think then it is merely waste of time to learn more than a smattering of foreign tongues. The only exception I would make to this is French. For French is the common language of educated men and it is certainly convenient to speak it well enough to be able to treat of any subject of discourse that may arise. It has a great literature; other countries, with the exception of England, have great writers, rather than a great literature; and its influence on the rest of the world has, till the last twenty years, been profound. It is very well to be able to read French as easily as if it were your native tongue. There are limits, however, to the excellence with which you should allow yourself to speak it. As a matter of practice it is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attaché in the diplomatic service.

30

I WAS never stage-struck. I have known dramatists who wandered in every night to the theatre in which their play was being acted. They said they did it in order to see that the cast was not getting slack: I suspect it was because they could never hear their own words spoken often enough. Their delight was to sit in a dressing-room during the intervals and talk over this scene or the other, wondering why it had fallen flat that night or congratulating themselves on how well it had gone, and watch an actor make up. They never ceased to find the theatrical gossip of the day absorbing. They loved the theatre and everything connected with it. They had grease-paint in their bones.

I have never been like that. I like a theatre best when it is under dust-sheets, the auditorium in darkness, and the unset stage, with the flats stacked against the back wall, is lit only by footlights. I have passed many happy hours at rehearsals; I have liked their easy camaraderie, the hurried lunch at a restaurant round the corner with a member of the cast and the cup of strong bitter tea, with thick bread and butter, brought in by the charwoman at four o’clock. I have never quite lost that little thrill of surprised amusement I felt when in my first play I heard grown men and women repeat the lines that had come so easily to my pen. It has interested me to watch the way in which a part grows in the actor’s hands from the first lifeless reading of the typescript to something like the character that I have seen in my mind’s eye. I have been diverted by the important discussions about the exact place where a piece of furniture should stand, the self-sufficiency of the director, the tantrums of an actress displeased with her positions, the artfulness of old players determined to get the centre of the stage for their scene, and the desultory talk about any subject that came to hand. But the consummation is the dress-rehearsal. There are half a dozen people in the front-row of the dress-circle. They are the dressmakers, subdued as though they were in church, but very business-like; they exchange short, sharp whispers with one another during the performance and make little significant gestures. You know that they are speaking of the length of a skirt, the cut of a sleeve or the feather in a hat; and the moment the curtain falls, the pins already in their mouths, they hurry through the door on to the stage. The director[*] shouts ‘curtain up’ and when it rises an actress snatches herself away from an agitated colloquy with two grim ladies in black.

[*] I use the American word director rather than the English one, producer, because I think it better describes what should be the function of the person in question.

“Oh, Mr. Thing,” she calls out, “I know that passementerie is wrong, but Madame Floss says she’ll take it off and put a bit of lace instead.”

In the stalls are the photographers, the management and the man from the box-office, the mothers of the actresses in the cast and the wives of the actors, your own agent, a girl-friend of yours, and three or four old actors who haven’t had a part for twenty years. It is the perfect audience. After each act the director reads out the remarks he has jotted down. There is a row with the electrician who, with nothing to do but attend to his switches, has turned on the wrong ones; and the author is indignant with him for being so careless and at the same time indulgent because he has a notion that the electrician only forgot his work because he was so absorbed in the play. Perhaps a little scene is repeated; then effective positions are arranged and with sudden blares of flash-light photographs are taken. The curtain is lowered to set the scene for the next act and the cast separate to their dressing-rooms to change. The dressmakers vanish and the old actors slink round the corner to have a drink. The management despondently smoke gaspers, the wives and mothers of the cast talk to one another in undertones and the author’s agent reads the racing news in the evening paper. It is all unreal and exciting. At last the dressmakers filter through the fire-proof door and resume their seats, the representatives of rival firms at a haughty distance from one another, and the stage-manager puts his head round the curtain.

“All ready, Mr. Thing,” he says.

“All right. Fire away. Curtain up.”

But the dress-rehearsal was the last pleasure my play ever had to give me. At the first nights of my early plays I was on tenterhooks, for on their result my future depended. When Lady Frederick was produced I had reached the end of the little money I had come into when I was twenty-one, my novels did not bring me in enough to live upon, and I could earn nothing by journalism. I had been given a little reviewing now and then and once persuaded an editor to let me do the notice of a play, but I evidently had no gifts in that direction; indeed, the editor in question told me that I had no sense of the theatre. If Lady Frederick was a failure it seemed to me that there was nothing for me but to go back to the hospital for a year to refresh my knowledge of medicine and then get a post as surgeon on a ship. At that time this was a position not much sought after and few men with London degrees applied for it. Later, when I had become a successful dramatist, I went to first nights with my senses alert to discern from the reactions of the public whether there was any falling off in my ability. I did my best to lose myself in the audience. For the audience a first night is a more or less interesting event which they take between a snack at seven-thirty and supper at eleven, and the success or failure of which is no great matter. I tried to go to my own first nights as though they were somebody else’s; but even at that I found it a disagreeable experience. It did me no good to hear the laughter that rewarded a happy jest or the applause that broke out on the fall of the curtain when an act had pleased. The fact is that, even in my lightest pieces, I had put in so much of myself that I was embarrassed to hear it disclosed to a crowd of people. Because they were words I had written myself they had for me an intimacy that I shrank from sharing with all and sundry. This unreasonable feeling I have had even when I have gone to see a play of mine in a translation and have sat in the theatre as an entirely unknown member of the public. Indeed I should never have gone to see my plays at all, on the first night or any other, if I had not thought it necessary to see the effect they had on the audience in order to learn how to write them.

31

THE ACTOR’S calling is a hard one. I am not speaking now of the young women who go on the stage because they have a pretty face and if good looks were a qualification for typists might just as well have gone into an office, or of the young men who do so because they have a good figure and no particular aptitude for anything else. They drift in and out of the profession; the women marry and the men get into a wine-merchant’s office or take up interior decoration. I am speaking of the actors by vocation. They have a natural gift and the desire to use it. It is a profession that requires assiduous labour to achieve proficiency, so that by the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few; it requires boundless patience; it is fraught with disappointments. Long stretches of enforced idleness must be endured. The prizes are few and can be held but for a brief period. The rewards are inadequate. The actor is at the mercy of fortune and the inconstant favour of the public. He is forgotten as soon as he ceases to please. Then it will avail him nothing to have been the idol of the crowd. He can starve for all they care. It is when I think of this that I find it easy to be indulgent to the actor’s airs and graces, his exigence and vanity, when he is on the crest of the wave. Let him be flamboyant and absurd if he likes. It all lasts such a little while. And after all his egotism is part of his talent.

There was a period when the stage was the doorway to romance and everyone connected with it seemed exciting and mysterious. In the civilized world of the eighteenth century the actors gave life a touch of fantasy. Their disorderly existence was a lure to the imagination in the Age of Reason and the heroic parts they played, the verse they spoke, invested them with a halo. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, that wonderful and neglected book, you can see with what tenderness the poet regarded what can have been nothing but a second-rate touring company. And in the nineteenth century the actors offered an escape from the respectability of an industrial era. The bohemianism that was ascribed to them excited the imagination of young men who were forced to earn their living in an office. They were extravagant persons in a sober world, thoughtless in a careful one, and fancy clothed them with glamour. There is in Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues a passage, touching in its unconscious humour, in which with awe, astonishment and a spark of envy for such wildness, the sensible little man describes a supper party with an actress. For once in his life he felt a devil of a fellow. Good gracious, how the champagne flowed and what luxury, what silver, what tiger-skins, were to be seen in her apartment!

This glory has vanished. The actors have become settled, respectable and well-to-do. It offended them to be thought a race apart and they have done their best to be like everybody else. They have shown themselves to us without their make-up in the broad light of day, and besought us to see for ourselves that they are golfers and tax-payers and thinking men and women. To my mind this is all stuff and nonsense.

I have known a number of actors very well. I have found them good company. Their gift of mimicry, their knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them often highly entertaining. They are generous, kindly and courageous. But I have never quite been able to look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded in achieving any intimacy with them. They are like crossword puzzles in which there are no words to fit the clues. The fact is, I suppose, that their personality is made up of the parts they play and that the basis of it is something amorphous. It is a soft, malleable thing that is capable of taking any shape and being painted in any colour. An ingenious writer has suggested that it is not surprising if for so long they were refused burial in consecrated ground because it is preposterous to suppose that they have souls. This is probably an extravagance. They are certainly very interesting. And the novelist, if he is sincere, cannot but acknowledge that there is between him and them a certain affinity: their character, like his, is a harmony that is none too plausible; they are all the persons they can mirror, while he is all the persons he can beget. The writer and the actor represent emotions they do not, at the moment at all events, feel; and standing with one side of themselves outside life portray it for the satisfaction of their creative instincts. Make-believe is their reality, and the public, which is at once their material and their judge, is also their dupe. Because make-believe is their reality they can look upon reality as make-believe.

32

I BEGAN to write plays, as do most young writers, I expect, because it seemed less difficult to set down on paper the things people said than to construct a narrative. Dr. Johnson remarked long ago that it is much more easy to form dialogues than to contrive adventures. Looking through the old note-books in which from eighteen to twenty I wrote down scenes for the plays I had in mind I find the dialogue on the whole easy and probable. The jokes no longer make me smile, but they are said in the words people would have used then. I caught the colloquial note by instinct. But the jokes are few and savage. The themes of my plays were sombre; and they ended in gloom, despair and death. On my first journey to Florence, I took Ghosts with me, and by way of relaxation, for I was seriously studying Dante, translated it into English from a German version in order to acquire a knowledge of technique. I remember that with all my admiration for Ibsen I could not help thinking Pastor Manders a bit of a bore. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was then running at the St. James’s Theatre.

During the next two or three years I finished several curtain-raisers and sent them to various managers. One or two were never returned and since I had no copies were lost; the others I got discouraged over and put away or destroyed. At that time, and for long after, it was much more difficult than it is now for an unknown playwright to get a production. Runs were long, for expenses were small, and a small band of authors, headed by Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, could be counted upon to provide the principal theatres with a play whenever one was needed. The French stage was still flourishing and adaptations from the French in bowdlerized versions were popular. I got it into my head, I think from the fact that George Moore’s Strike at Arlingford was done by the Independent Theatre, that my only chance of being acted was by making a reputation for myself as a novelist. So I put the drama aside and set myself to writing fiction. The reader may think that this methodical fashion of going to work was unbecomingly business-like in a young author. It suggests a matter of fact turn of mind rather than a heaven-sent compulsion to enrich the world with works of art. When I had published a couple of novels and had a volume of short stories ready for the press, I sat down and wrote my first full-length play. It was called A Man of Honour. I sent it to Forbes Robertson, who was then a popular actor, with the reputation of having artistic inclinations, and when he returned it to me after three or four months, to Charles Frohman. He also returned it. I rewrote it and at last, having by then published two more novels, one of which (Mrs. Craddock) had a considerable success, so that I was beginning to be looked upon as a serious and promising novelist, I sent it to the Stage Society. They accepted it and W. L. Courtney, a member of the committee, liked it well enough to print it in the Fortnightly Review. He had only published one play before, Mrs. Clifford’s The Likeness of the Night, so that it was a great honour.

Since the Stage Society was at that time the only organization of its kind, its productions attracted a good deal of attention and my play was treated by the critics as seriously as though it had been put on for a run in an important theatre. The old hacks, with Clement Scott at their head, abused it soundly; the critic of The Sunday Times stated that it showed no sign of any talent for the stage. I have forgotten who he was. But the critics who had succumbed to the influence of Ibsen treated it as a work worthy of consideration. They were sympathetic and encouraging.

I thought I had taken such a step forward that my course from then on would offer no great difficulties. It did not take me long to discover that, beyond learning a good deal about the technique of playwriting, I had achieved nothing. After its two performances my play was dead. My name was known to the small body of people who were interested in the experimental theatre and if I had written suitable plays I have no doubt that the Stage Society would have performed them. But that seemed to me unsatisfactory. During the rehearsals I had come in contact with the people who were interested in the Society and especially with Granville Barker, who played the leading part in my play. The attitude I found there was antagonistic to me. It seemed to me patronizing and narrow. Granville Barker was very young; I was only twenty-eight, and he, I think, was a year younger. He had charm and gaiety and a coltish grace. He was brimming over with other people’s ideas. But I felt in him a fear of life which he sought to cheat by contempt of the common herd. It was difficult to find anything he did not despise. He lacked spiritual vitality. I thought that an artist needed more force, more go, more bluntness, more guts, more beef. He had written a play, The Marriage of Ann Leete, which seemed to me anæmic and affected. I liked life and wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to get all I possibly could out of it. I was not satisfied with the appreciation of a small band of intellectuals. I had my doubts about their quality, for I had been to a stupid and rather common little farce that the Stage Society had unaccountably given and had seen its members consumed with laughter. I was not at all certain that there was not a great deal of pose in their concern for the higher drama. I wanted no such audience as this, but the great public. Moreover I was poor. I had no notion of living on a crust in a garret if I could help it. I had found out that money was like a sixth sense without which you could not make the most of the other five.

During the rehearsals of A Man of Honour I had discovered that some scenes of flirtatious badinage in the first act were amusing and I decided that I could write a comedy. I made up my mind to write one now. I called it Loaves and Fishes. Its hero was a worldly, ambitious parson and the story dealt with his courtship of a rich widow, his intrigues to get a bishopric and his final capture of a pretty heiress. No manager would consider it; it was thought impossible that a play that held a clergyman up to ridicule would be tolerated. I came to the conclusion then that my best chance was to write a comedy with a big part for an actress, who, if she liked it, might induce a manager to give the play a trial. I asked myself what sort of part would be likely to appeal to a leading lady, and having made up my mind on this point, wrote Lady Frederick. But its most effective scene, the scene that afterwards made it so successful, was one in which the heroine in order to disillusion a young lover let him come into her dressing-room and discover her without any make-up on her face and with her hair dishevelled. At that distant time make-up was not universal and most women wore false hair. But no actress would consent to let an audience see her in this condition and manager after manager refused it. I made up my mind then to devise a play in which no one could find anything to object to. I wrote Mrs. Dot. It suffered the same fate as the others. The managers thought it too slight. They complained that there was not enough action and Miss Mary Moore, then a popular actress, suggested that I should insert a burglary to make it more exciting. I began to think that I should never be able to write a piece that a leading lady liked well enough to insist on playing and so tried my hand at a man’s play. I wrote Jack Straw.

I had been under the impression that the small success I had had with the Stage Society would impress managers in my favour. To my mortification I found that this was not so. In fact my connection with that body prejudiced me with them, for they decided that I could only write gloomy and unprofitable plays. They could not say that my comedies were gloomy; but they felt them vaguely unpleasant and were convinced that they were uncommercial. I should certainly have given up in despair the attempt to get acted, for one rejection of a manuscript has always discouraged me; but fortunately for me Golding Bright thought that my plays were marketable and took them in hand. He submitted them to manager after manager and at last, in 1907, when I had written six full-length pieces, after ten years’ waiting, Lady Frederick was produced at the Court Theatre. Three months later Mrs. Dot was being played at the Comedy and Jack Straw at the Vaudeville. In June Lewis Waller put on at the Lyric a play called The Explorer which I had written immediately after The Man of Honour. I had achieved what I wanted.

33

THE FIRST three had long runs. The Explorer was only just not a failure. I did not make a great deal of money, for in those days the takings of a popular play were much less than they are now, and my royalties were small, but I was at all events relieved from financial anxiety and my future seemed sure. The fact that I had four plays running at once brought me great notoriety and Bernard Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch in which William Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my plays. I was much photographed and much interviewed. Distinguished people sought my acquaintance. My success was spectacular and unexpected. I was more relieved than excited. I think I lack the quality of being surprised, and just as in my journeys I have accepted the most curious sights and the most novel circumstances as perfectly ordinary, so that I have had to force myself to notice that they were remarkable, so now I took all this to-do as natural. One evening when I was dining alone at my club a fellow-member, but a stranger to me, was entertaining a guest at the next table to mine; they were going to one of my plays and began to talk of me. The stranger mentioned that I was a member of the club, whereupon his guest said:

“D’you know him at all? I suppose he’s about as swollen-headed as he can be.”

“Oh, yes, I know him well,” answered my fellow member. “He can’t get a hat big enough to fit him.”

He did me an injustice. I took the success as my due. I was amused at my notoriety, but not impressed by it. The only definite reaction that I can recall of that period was a reflection that occurred to me when I was walking along Panton Street one evening. Passing the Comedy Theatre I happened to look up and saw the clouds lit by the setting sun. I paused to look at the lovely sight and I thought to myself: Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it. I meant then never to write another book, but to devote myself for the rest of my life to the drama.

Though the public accepted my plays with enthusiasm, not only in England and America, but on the Continent, critical opinion was by no means unanimous. The more popular organs praised their wit, gaiety and theatrical effectiveness, but found fault with their cynicism; the more serious critics, on the other hand, fell very foul of them. They found them cheap and trivial. They told me that I had sold my soul to mammon; and the intelligentsia, of which I had been a modest, but respected member, not only turned a cold shoulder on me, that would have been bad enough, but flung me, like Lucifer, headlong into the bottomless pit. I was taken aback and a trifle mortified, but I bore my disgrace with fortitude, for I knew it was not the end of the story. I had desired a certain end and had taken what I thought were the only possible means to attain it; I could only shrug my shoulders if there were people so stupid as not to see that. If I had continued to write plays as bitter as A Man of Honour or as sardonic as Loaves and Fishes I should never have been given the opportunity of producing certain pieces to which not even the most severe have refused praise. The critics accused me of writing down to the public; I did not exactly do that; I had then very high spirits, a facility for amusing dialogue, an eye for a comic situation and a flippant gaiety; there was more in me than that, but this I put away for the time, and wrote my comedies with those sides of myself only that were useful to my purpose. They were designed to please and they achieved their aim.

I had no intention of fizzling out with a passing success and I wrote my next two plays to consolidate my hold on the public. They were a little bolder and, mild and unsophisticated as they must seem now, they were attacked by the more strait-laced for their indecency. One of them, Penelope, must have had some merit, for when it was revived in Berlin twenty years later it filled the theatre for a whole season.

I had by now learnt all that I was ever able to learn of the technique of the drama, and with the exception of The Explorer, which for a reason I saw very clearly had failed to please so well, I had had an uninterrupted series of successes. I thought it time to try my hand at more serious work. I wanted to see what I could do with more complicated subjects, I wanted to make one or two small technical experiments which I thought would be theatrically effective, and I wanted to see how far I could go with the public. I wrote The Tenth Man and Landed Gentry, and finally, after it had been lying in my desk a dozen years, produced Loaves and Fishes. None of them was a failure; none of them was a success. The managers neither made nor lost money on them. Loaves and Fishes failed to have a long run because the public of that day was uneasy at seeing a clergyman made fun of. The play is written somewhat extravagantly, so that it suggests farce rather than comedy, but it has some amusing scenes in it. The others fell between two stools. One portrayed the narrow, hide-bound life of country gentlefolk; the other, the political and financial world; with both of which I had some acquaintance. I knew that I must interest, move and amuse, and I heightened the note. They were neither frankly realistic nor frankly theatrical. My indecision was fatal. The audiences found them rather disagreeable and not quite real. Then I took a rest for two years and at the end of it wrote The Land of Promise. This had been played to crowded houses for some months when the war broke out. I had produced ten plays in seven years. The intelligentsia, having passed judgement, ignored me, but I was securely fixed in the public favour.

34

FROM TIME to time I had a good deal of leisure during the war; at first because the work I was doing took up but part of my day and to write plays was a convenient means of distracting attention from the activities I was engaged in; and later, when, having contracted tuberculosis, I had to lie long in bed, because it was a pleasant way of passing the time. I wrote a series of plays in quick succession. It began with Our Betters, which was written in 1915, and ended with The Constant Wife, which was written in 1927.

Most of these plays were comedies. They are written in the tradition which flourished so brightly in the Restoration Period, which was carried on by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and which, since it has had so long a vogue, may be supposed to have something in it that peculiarly appeals to the English temper. The people who do not like it describe it as artificial comedy and by the epithet foolishly think they condemn it. It is drama not of action, but of conversation. It treats with indulgent cynicism the humours, follies and vices of the world of fashion. It is urbane, sentimental at times, for that is in the English character, and a trifle unreal. It does not preach: sometimes it draws a moral, but with a shrug of the shoulders as if to invite you to lay no too great stress on it. When the busy Monsieur de Voltaire went to see Congreve to discuss the current drama with him, Mr. Congreve pointed out to him that he was a gentleman rather than a dramatist. The interviewer answered: ‘If you were nothing but a gentleman I should not have troubled to call upon you.’ Monsieur de Voltaire was certainly the wittiest man of his age, but here he showed want of intelligence. Mr. Congreve’s remark was profound. It showed that he knew very well that the first person the author of comedy must consider from the standpoint of comedy is himself.

35

I HAD by then made up my mind on many things connected with the drama.

One of the conclusions I had come to was that a prose play was scarcely less ephemeral than a news sheet. The playwright and the journalist need very similar gifts, a quick eye for a good story and a telling point, animation and a vivid way of writing. All the dramatist needs besides is a specific knack. I do not know that anyone has been able to discover what this knack consists of. It cannot be learnt. It can exist without education or culture. It is a faculty that enables the playwright so to put words that they carry across the footlights and to tell a story, as it were stereoscopically, so that it visibly moves before an audience. It is a very rare faculty: that is why dramatists are so much more highly paid than other artists. It, has nothing to do with literary ability as we know from the fact that the most distinguished novelists have generally failed lamentably when they have tried to write plays. It is a faculty, like that of being able to play by ear, of no spiritual importance. But without it, though your ideas may be profound, your theme original and your characterisation acute, you will never be able to write a play.

A good deal has been written about the technique of play-writing. I have read most of the books on the subject with interest. The best way of learning how to write a play is to see one of your own produced. That will teach you how to write lines that the actors find easy to say and, if you have an ear, how far you can carry the rhythm of a sentence without losing the spontaneity of conversation. It will show you what sort of speech and what sort of scene are effective. But I think the secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point and whenever you can, cut. The first of these demands a logical mind. Few of us have it. One idea suggests another; it is very pleasant to pursue it, even though it is not directly concerned with the subject. The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for sin may be venial, digression is mortal. The principle is that of direction of interest. It is important in a novel too, but here greater space permits of greater latitude and, just as according to the idealists evil is transformed into the perfect good of the Absolute, so certain digressions may take their necessary part in the development of the main theme. (A very good example of this is the early history of the Elder Zossima in the Brothers Karamazov.) Perhaps I should explain what I mean by direction of interest. It is the method by which an author causes you to concern yourself with the fortunes of certain people under certain conditions and keeps you attached to them till he has reached his solution. If he lets you wander from the main point it is very likely that he will never recapture your attention. It is a psychological trait in human nature that interest is established in the persons whom the playwright introduces at the beginning of his play so firmly that if the interest is then switched off to other persons who enter upon the scene later, a sense of disappointment ensues. The astute dramatist presents his subject as early as possible, and if for theatrical effectiveness he does not introduce his principal characters till later, the conversation of the persons on the stage at the rising of the curtain concentrates the attention of the audience on them so that the delay in their appearance increases the expectation. No one followed this practice more scrupulously than that very competent dramatist William Shakespeare.

It is the difficulty of directing the interest that makes it so hard to write the plays that are known as plays of atmosphere. The best known of them, of course, are Chekov’s. Since the interest is not concentrated on two or three persons, but on a group, and since the theme is their relations with one another and the environment, the author must take care to counteract the natural inclination of the audience to concern themselves with one character or two more than with the rest. With the interest thus dispersed it is possible that the audience will not feel warmly about any of the persons of the play, and since the author must beware that none of his threads is more important than the other, and thus attracts more vividly the attention of the audience, every incident must be subdued to the minor key. So it is very difficult to prevent the audience from feeling a certain monotony and because nothing, either incident or character, has been very forcibly impressed upon them they are very likely to take away with them, when the play is over, some confusion of spirit. In practice it has been shown that such plays are only tolerable when they are perfectly acted.

Now I come to my second maxim. However brilliant a scene may be, however witty a line or profound a reflection, if it is not essential to his play the dramatist must cut it. Here it may serve him if he is also a man of letters. The pure dramatist looks upon it as something of a miracle that he should be able to put words on paper at all, and when they are there, out of his own brain, if not straight from heaven, he looks upon them as sacred. He cannot bear to sacrifice one of them. I well remember Henry Arthur Jones showing me one of his manuscripts and my surprise on noticing that he had written such a simple sentence as, will you have sugar in your tea? in three different ways. It is no wonder that people to whom words come so reluctantly should attach an inordinate importance to them. The man of letters is accustomed to writing; he has learnt how to express himself without intolerable labour and so can cut with fortitude. Of course every writer hits now and then upon a thought that seems to him so happy, a repartee that amuses him so much, that to cut it is worse than having a tooth out: it is then that it is well to have engraved on his heart the maxim, if you can, cut.

To do so is now more than ever necessary, for audiences are at once quicker-witted and more impatient than ever before in the history of the theatre. Plays have been written in such and such a way because they satisfied audiences. Audiences in the past seem to have been willing to sit out scenes that were elaborately developed and to listen to speeches in which the characters fully explained themselves. It is very different now, and the difference has been occasioned, I suppose, by the advent of the cinema. To-day, audiences, especially in English-speaking countries, have learnt to see the point of a scene at once and having seen it want to pass on to the next; they catch the gist of a speech in a few words and having caught it, their attention quickly wanders. The author must curb his natural desire to get the full value out of a scene or to let his characters display themselves in ample expression. Indications are enough. They will be seized. His dialogue must be a sort of spoken shorthand. He must cut and cut till he has arrived at the maximum of concentration.

36

A PLAY is the result of a collaboration between the author, the actors, the audience, and, I suppose one must add now, the director. For the moment I will consider the audience. All the best dramatists have written with their eye on it and though they have more often spoken of it with contempt than with good will they have known that they were dependent on it. It is the public that pays, and if it is not pleased with the entertainment that is offered it, stays away. A play does not exist without an audience. Indeed the definition of a play is a piece of writing in dialogue devised to be spoken by actors and heard by an indefinite number of persons. A play written to be read in the study is a form of the novel in dialogue in which the author for some reason of his own (obscure to most of us) has eschewed the ordinary advantages of narrative. A play that does not appeal to an audience may have merits, but it is no more a play than a mule is a horse. (Alas, all of us dramatists from time to time give birth to these unsatisfactory hybrids.) Everyone who has had to do with the theatre knows how strangely audiences affect plays; a matinée audience and an evening audience may see quite different plays. We are told that the Norwegian public looks upon Ibsen’s plays as comedies rich in laughter; the English public has never seen anything to laugh at in those harassing dramas. The emotion of the audience, its interest, its laughter, are part of the action of the play. It creates it in the same way as we through our senses from the objective data create the beauty of the sunrise and the peace of the sea. The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces. The dramatist then is in the position of a tennis player who is left on the court with nobody to play with.

Now the audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members. If these were graded from A to Z, decreasing with succeeding letters to the zero of the hysterical shop-girl, I should say its mental capacity would come round about the letter O. It is immensely suggestible; individuals will laugh at a joke they have not seen because others who see it do. It is emotional; but it instinctively resents having its emotions stirred and is always ready to escape with a giggle. It is sentimental; but will only accept sentimentality of its own brand: thus in England it will accept the emotions attached to the concept of home, but the concept of a son’s love for his mother only excites its ridicule. It is careless of probability if the situation excites its interest, a trait of which Shakespeare made extravagant use; but jibs at a lack of plausibility. Individuals know that they constantly give way to impulse, but an audience insists that every action must have its cogent reason. Its morality is the average morality of the crowd and it will be sincerely shocked by a sentiment that will offend none of its members taken one by one. It does not think with its brain, but with its solar plexus. It is easily bored. It likes novelty, but a novelty that will fit in with old notions, so that it excites but does not alarm. It likes ideas, so long as they are put in dramatic form, only they must be ideas that it has itself had, but for want of courage has never expressed. It will not play if it is hurt or affronted. Its chief desire is to be assured that the make-believe is real.

In essentials audiences never change, but at different periods and in different countries at the same period they rise to different levels of sophistication. The drama pictures the manners and customs of the day, and in its turn affects them, and as these change minor changes follow both in the trappings of a play and in its themes. The invention of the telephone, for instance, has made many scenes redundant, has quickened the pace of plays and has made it possible to avoid certain improbabilities. Probability is a variable factor. It is merely what the audience is prepared to accept. Often there is no rhyme nor reason for this. People leave compromising letters about or accidentally hear things they are not supposed to hear as often as they did in Elizabethan times and it is merely a convention that rejects such incidents as improbable. But what is more important is that there has been a change of heart among us, owing to changes in civilisation, and so certain themes that dramatists favoured have now fallen into desuetude. We are less revengeful than we were and now a play devoted to revenge would be scarcely plausible. Perhaps because our passions are less strong, perhaps even because the teaching of Christ has at last penetrated our thick heads, we look upon revenge as discreditable. I ventured once to suggest that the liberation of women and their new-won sexual freedom had so altered men’s views on the importance of chastity that jealousy was no longer a theme for tragedy, but only for comedy; but this observation was received with so much indignation that I will not enlarge upon it.

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I HAVE given this little analysis of an audience because the nature of the audience is for the dramatist the most important of the conventions within which he must work. Every artist must accept the conventions of the art which he pursues, but it may be that these are of such a nature as to make the art a minor one. It was a poetic convention in the eighteenth century that enthusiasm was objectionable and that imagination must be curbed by reasonableness; so it was only minor poetry that was produced. Now, the fact that the general mentality of an audience is so very much lower than that of its more intellectual members is a factor that the author must deal with. I think it definitely reduces prose drama to a minor place. It has been noticed over and over again that, intellectually, the theatre is thirty years behind the times, and the intelligent owing to its poverty of thought have largely ceased to frequent it. I have a notion that when the intelligent look for thought in a playhouse, they show less intelligence than one would have expected of them. Thought is a private thing. It is the offspring of reason. It depends on the mental capacity of the individual and on his education. Its communication is private from the mind that conceives it to the mind that is prepared to receive it, and if one man’s meat is another man’s poison, still more is one man’s thought another man’s truism. But an audience is affected by mass suggestion and mass suggestion is excited by emotion. I have hazarded the opinion that if you classified the members of an audience from A to Z, starting, say, with the critic of The Times and ending with the girl who sells sweet-stuffs in a shop off the Tottenham Court Road, its mental capacity would stand about the letter O. How can you write a play of which the ideas are so significant that they will make the critic of The Times sit up in his stall and at the same time induce the shop-girl in the gallery to forget the young man who is holding her hand? The only ideas that can affect them when they are welded together in that unity which is an audience, are those commonplace, fundamental ideas that are almost feelings. These, the root ideas of poetry, are love, death and the destiny of man. It is not any sort of dramatist who can find anything to say about them that has not been said a thousand times already; the great truths are too important to be new.

Besides, ideas do not grow on a gooseberry bush and few people in a generation can devise new ones. It is very unlikely that the dramatist who is lucky enough to have been born with the faculty of putting things so that they carry across the footlights will also be an original thinker. He would not be a dramatist if his mind did not work in the concrete. He has a quick eye for the instance; there is no reason to expect that he will have a faculty for conceptual thinking. He may have a meditative cast of mind and be interested in the speculations of his time, but there is a long way between this and having the power of creative thought. It might be very well if dramatists were philosophers, but in point of fact they are as little likely to be so as are kings. The only two dramatists in our time who have made their mark as thinkers are Ibsen and Shaw. Both were fortunate in the time of their appearance. Ibsen’s advent coincided with the movement for the liberation of women from the inferior position in which they had so long stood; Shaw’s with the revolt of youth from the conventionality of the Victorian epoch and the trammels that age had set upon it. They had to their hands subjects new to the theatre that could be displayed with dramatic effectiveness. Shaw had the advantage, useful to any dramatist, of high spirits, rollicking humour, wit and fertility of comic invention. Ibsen as we know had a meagre power of invention; his characters under different names are very dully repeated and his intrigue from play to play is little varied. It is not a gross exaggeration to say that his only gambit is the sudden arrival of a stranger who comes into a stuffy room and opens the windows; whereupon the people who were sitting there catch their death of cold and everything ends unhappily. When you consider the mental content of what these authors had to offer, you can, unless you are but ill educated, hardly fail to see that it consisted of no more than the common culture of the day. Shaw’s ideas were expressed with great vivacity. They could only have surprised because the intellectual capacity of the audience was inconsiderable. They surprise no longer; indeed, the young tend to look on them now as antiquated buffooneries. The disadvantage of ideas in the theatre is that if they are acceptable, they are accepted and so kill the play that helped to diffuse them. For nothing is so tiresome in the theatre as to be forced to listen to the exposition of ideas that you are willing to take for granted. Now that everyone admits the right of a woman to her own personality it is impossible to listen to A Doll’s House without impatience. The dramatist of ideas loads the dice against himself. Plays are ephemeral enough in any case, because they must be dressed in the fashion of the moment and fashions change so that they lose the actuality which is one of their attractive features; it seems a pity to make them more ephemeral still by founding them on ideas that will be stale the day after to-morrow. When I say that plays are ephemeral, I am of course not speaking of plays in verse; the greatest and noblest of the arts can lend its own life to the humble partner; I am speaking of the plays in prose with which our modern theatre is alone occupied. I can think of no serious prose play that has survived the generation that gave it birth. A few comedies have haphazardly travelled down a couple of centuries or so. They are revived now and then because a famous part tempts a leading actor, or a manager in want of a stop-gap thinks he will put on a play on which he has no royalties to pay. They are museum pieces. The audience laughs at their wit with politeness and at their farce with embarrassment. They are not held nor taken out of themselves. They cannot believe and so are never caught by the illusion of the theatre.

But if a play is naturally ephemeral why, the dramatist may ask, should he not look upon himself as a journalist, a journalist of the better class who writes for the sixpenny weeklies, and produce plays on the current topics, political and social, of the day? His ideas will be neither more nor less original than those of the serious young men who write in these journals. There is no reason why they should be less interesting; and if by the time the play has run its course they are out of date, what of it? The play is dead anyway. Now to this question the answer is that there is no reason at all, if he can get away with it and if he thinks it worth while. But he must be warned that he will get little thanks from the critics. For though they clamour for the play of ideas, when he presents it to them they sniff at it if the ideas are familiar to them, thinking modestly that what they know already is commonplace, and if the ideas are unfamiliar to them, they think them perfect nonsense and come down on him like a thousand of bricks. Even the licensed Shaw has not escaped the horns of this dilemma.

Societies have been founded in order to produce plays that people may go to who disdain the commercial theatre. They languish. The intelligentsia cannot be persuaded to patronise these performances, and if they do, want to go without paying. There are a number of dramatists who spend their whole careers writing plays which are only produced by these societies. They are trying to do something for which the drama is unsuited; once they have got a number of persons into the playhouse, these become an audience, and then, even though their average mentality is higher than the ordinary, they are subject to the reactions by which an audience is governed. They are swayed by emotion rather than by reasoning. They demand action rather than debate. (By action of course I do not mean merely physical action: from the standpoint of the theatre a character who says, I have a headache, performs an action as much as one who falls off a steeple.) When the plays these authors write fail, they claim it is because audiences have not the sense to appreciate them. I do not think they are right. Their plays fail because they have no dramatic value. Let no one think that commercial plays succeed because they are bad plays. The story they tell may be hackneyed, the dialogue commonplace and the characterisation ordinary, they succeed notwithstanding because they have the essential, though doubtless trivial, merit of holding their audiences by the specific appeal of drama. But that this need not be the only merit of the commercial play is shown by those of Lope de Vega, Shakespeare and Molière.

38

IF I have thus enlarged on the play of ideas, it is because I think the demand for it is responsible for the lamentable decadence of our theatre. The critics clamour for them. Now, the critics are of necessity the worst judges of plays. For consider, the play appeals to the audience as a unity, the current that passes infectiously from one person to another is essential to the dramatist; he wants to excite a contagion; he must take people out of themselves so that they become an instrument for him to play on, and what they give back, the resonance, the tone, the emotion, is part of his play. But the critic is there not to feel but to judge. He must hold aloof from the contagion that has captured the group and keep his self-possession. He must not allow his heart to carry him away; his head must remain well screwed on his shoulders. He must take care not to become part of the audience. He is not there to play his part in the play, but to watch it from the outside. The result is that he does not see the play they see because he has not, as they have, acted in it. It is natural enough then that he should ask for different things in a play from those the audience asks for. There is no reason why he should get it. Plays are not written for critics. Or at least, they should not be. But playwrights are sensitive creatures, and when they are told that the plays they write are an insult to the adult intelligence, they are distressed. They would like to do better, and so the young, aspiring ones, still trailing clouds of glory, sit down to write plays of ideas. That it can be done, and bring fame and fortune, the example of Bernard Shaw is there to show them.

The influence of Shaw on the English stage of to-day has been devastating. The public have not always liked his plays, any more than they liked Ibsen’s, but after seeing them they have liked those written according to the old conventions even less. Disciples arose who sought to follow in his steps, but the event has proved that it was impossible to do so without his great gifts. The most talented of these was Granville Barker. As many scenes in his plays show, Granville Barker had it in him to be a very good playwright; he had a dramatic gift, facility for writing easy, natural and amusing dialogue, and an eye for theatrically effective character. The influence of Shaw led him to attach importance to ideas that were somewhat commonplace and to suppose that the natural discursiveness of his mind was a virtue. If he had not been persuaded that the public were fools, who must be bullied rather than cajoled, he would by the usual method of trial and error have learnt to correct his faults, and then might have added to the drama of this country a number of popular plays of great excellence. The lesser followers of Bernard Shaw have only copied his defects. Shaw has succeeded on the stage not because he is a dramatist of ideas, but because he is a dramatist. But he is inimitable. He owes his originality to an idiosyncrasy, not of course peculiar to himself, that had never before found expression on the stage. The English, whatever they were in the Elizabethan era, are not an amorous race. Love with them is more sentimental than passionate. They are of course sufficiently sexual for the purpose of reproducing their species, but they cannot control the instinctive feeling that the sexual act is disgusting. They are more inclined to look upon love as affection or benevolence than as passion. They regard with approval its sublimations which dons describe in scholarly books, and with repulsion or with ridicule its frank expression. English is the only modern language in which it has been found necessary to borrow from the Latin a word with a depreciatory meaning, the word uxorious, for a man’s devoted love for his wife. That love should absorb a man has seemed to them unworthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration; there is a feeling that it was worth while, and the man who has done it feels even a certain pride in the fact; in England he will be thought and will think himself a damned fool. That is why Antony and Cleopatra has always been the least popular of Shakespeare’s greater plays. Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman’s sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible.

To audiences who had been forced to sit through plays in which love was the motive of the intrigue, but who had an instinctive feeling that love, though all very well in its way, was not really quite so important as the dramatists pretended, for after all there were politics, golf, getting on with one’s job and all sorts of other things, it was a welcome relief to come upon a dramatist for whom love was a tiresome, secondary business, a quick gratification of a momentary impulse whose consequences were generally awkward. Though put as things must be put on the stage in an exaggerated way (and it should never be forgotten that Shaw is an extremely skilful dramatist) there was enough truth in this attitude to impress. It responded to the deep-seated puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon race. But, if not amorous, the English are sentimental and emotional, and they felt that it was not the whole truth. When other dramatists repeated it, not because it was, as with Shaw, a natural expression of a personality, but because it was striking and effective, its one-sidedness became tediously apparent. The author describes for you his private world, and if it interests you, you will give him your attention. There is no reason why you should trouble yourself with a description of it at second hand. It is inept to say again what Shaw has said so well.

39

TO MY mind, the drama took a wrong turning when the demand for realism led it to abandon the ornament of verse. Verse has a specific dramatic value as anyone can see by observing in himself the thrilling effect of a tirade in one of Racine’s plays or of any of Shakespeare’s great set pieces; and this is independent of the sense; it is due to the emotional power of rhythmical speech. But more than that: verse forces on the matter a conventional form that heightens the æsthetic effect. It enables the drama to achieve a beauty that is out of the question in a prose play. However much you may admire The Wild Duck, The Importance of Being Earnest or Man and Superman, you cannot without abuse of the word claim that they are beautiful. But the chief value of verse is that it delivers a play from sober reality. It puts it on another level, at one remove from life, and so makes it easier for the audience to attune themselves to that state of feeling in which they are most susceptible to the drama’s specific appeal. In that artificial medium life is not presented in a word-for-word translation, but in a free rendering, and thus the dramatist has ample scope for the effects of which his art is capable. For the drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect. That willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote is essential to it. The importance of truth to the dramatist is that it adds to interest, but to the dramatist truth is only verisimilitude. It is what he can persuade his audience to accept. If they will believe that a man can doubt his wife’s fidelity because someone tells him he has found her handkerchief in somebody else’s possession, well and good, that is sufficient motive for his jealousy; if they will believe that a six-course dinner can be eaten in ten minutes, well and good again, the dramatist can get on with his play. But when a greater and greater realism, both in motive and in action, is demanded of him and he is asked not to embroider gaily or romantically upon life but to copy it, he is robbed of a great part of his resources. He is forced to forgo asides because people do not naturally talk to themselves out loud; he may not telescope events, by which he was able to accelerate his action, but must cause them to occur as deliberately as in real life; he must eschew accident and chance, for we know (in the theatre) that things do not happen like that. The result has shown that realism too often can only produce plays that are drab and dull.

When the movies learnt to talk the prose play was powerless to defend itself. The movies could represent action much more effectively, and action is the essence of drama. The screen gave that artificiality which verse had once given to drama so that a different standard of verisimilitude was set and improbability was acceptable if only it gave rise to situation. It gave the opportunity for all manner of novel, picturesque and dramatic effects that stimulated and excited the public. The dramatist of ideas had to swallow the bitter pill that the intelligentsia for which he wrote would have nothing to do with his plays, but roared with laughter at the farce and wallowed in the thrills and spectacle of the moving pictures. The fact was of course that they had succumbed to the atmosphere the stage-play had taken pains to lose and were delivered to the sway of make-believe that had held the audiences who first saw the plays of Lope de Vega and William Shakespeare.

I have always eschewed the prophetic role and have left to others the reformation of my fellows, but I cannot but state my belief that the prose drama to which I have given so much of my life will soon be dead. The minor arts, which depend on the manners and customs of the time rather than on deep-seated human necessities, come and go. The madrigal which was once a popular form of musical entertainment, exciting composers to write for it and producing an elaborate school of performers, succumbed when musical instruments were invented that produced more beautifully the peculiar effects it sought; and there is no reason why prose drama should not suffer the same fate. It may be said that the screen can never give exactly the sympathetic thrill you feel when you see living persons in flesh and blood before you. It might very well have been said that strings and wood could never make up for the intimate quality of the human voice. The event has proved that they could.

One thing seems certain, and that is that if the stage play has any chance at all of survival, it is not by trying to do any longer what the pictures can do better. Those dramatists have followed a false trail who by a multitude of little scenes have tried to reproduce the rapid action and varied setting of the cinematograph. It has occurred to me that possibly the dramatist would be wise now to go back to the origins of modern drama and call to his aid verse, dancing, music and pageantry so that he might appeal to all possible sources of entertainment; but I am conscious that here again the cinema with its great resources can do better whatever the spoken theatre can do; and of course a play of this kind would need a dramatist who was also a poet. Perhaps the best chance the realistic dramatist has to-day is to occupy himself with what, till now at all events, the screen has not succeeded very well in presenting — the drama in which the action is inner rather than outer and the comedy of wit. The screen demands physical action. Emotion which cannot be translated into this, and the humour whose appeal is mental, have little value for it. It may be that, for some time at all events, such plays would have their appeal.

But so far as comedy is concerned, it should be recognized that the demand for realism is unjustified. Comedy is an artificial thing and so only the appearance, not the reality, of naturalism is in place. The laugh must be sought for its own sake. The playwright’s aim is not now to represent life as it is (a tragic business) but to comment on it satirically and amusingly. The audience should not be allowed to ask, do such things happen? They should be content to laugh. In comedy more than ever must the playwright exact a willing suspension of disbelief. So the critics are wrong when they complain that a comedy now and then ‘degenerates’ into farce. It has been found in practice that it is impossible to hold the attention of an audience through three acts of pure comedy. For comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly. The great writers of comedy, Shakespeare, Molière and Bernard Shaw, have never jibbed at the farcical. It is the life blood that makes the body of comedy viable.

40

THESE IDEAS floating vaguely in my mind had little by little made me increasingly dissatisfied with the theatre and at last I decided to have done with it. I have never taken very comfortably to collaboration, and as I have pointed out, a play is more than any other artistic product a matter of collective effort. I found it more and more difficult to work in harmony with my collaborators.

It is often said that good actors can get out of a play more than the author has put into it. That is not true. A good actor, bringing to a part his own talent, often gives it a value that the layman on reading the play had not seen in it, but at the utmost he can do no more than reach the ideal that the author has seen in his mind’s eye. He has to be an actor of address to do this; for the most part the author has to be satisfied with an approximation to the performance he visualized. In all my plays I have been fortunate enough to have some of the parts acted as I wanted; but in none have I had all the parts so acted. This is obviously inevitable, for the actor who is suited to a certain role may very well be engaged and you have to put up with the second or the third best, because there is no help for it. In recent years, as everyone knows who has had to do with the casting of plays, the competition of New York and of the pictures both in England and America has made it more than ever difficult to get the right person for a certain part; and over and over again a manager finds himself obliged to engage an actor who he knows is mediocre because no one else can be got. Another difficulty is that of salaries. A small part often wants clever playing and so an actor of experience, but from the standpoint of the management it will only stand a certain salary and it is impracticable to engage for it the proper person. The part then is inadequately acted and the balance of the play jeopardized; a scene that has a definite value is thrown away because it is improperly played. It often happens also that the perfect actor for a part will not play it because it is too small or too unsympathetic.

In saying all this, I have no intention of minimizing my obligation to the distinguished actors and actresses to whom is due so much of the success many of my plays have had. My debt to them is great. The list of those who fulfilled all my hopes is so long that it would be tedious to give it, but there is one actor whom, since he has never reached the rank of a star and so has hardly received the recognition that he deserves, I should like to mention. This is C. V. France. He has acted in several of my plays. He has never played a part in which he has not been admirable. He has represented to the smallest particular the character that I had in my mind’s eye. It would be difficult to find on the English stage a more competent, intelligent and versatile actor. On the other hand, I have had plays produced in which I was conscious that the audience were not seeing anything like what I wanted them to see. Errors of casting, especially when they occur with actors of reputation, can often not be rectified, and then the author has the mortification of being judged by something that is merely a misrepresentation of his intent. There is no such thing as an actor-proof part. There are effective parts, and parts, often very important ones, that are the reverse, but however effective a part is, it is only fully realized when it is perfectly played. The funniest line in the world is only funny if it is said in the right way; however tender a scene is it will go for nothing if it is played without tenderness. Another pitfall that the actors prepare for the dramatist is one that is not often realized. The system of choosing actors to play themselves makes it very difficult to avoid. An author devises a character, then an actor is chosen because he has the traits the author has indicated; but the addition of his idiosyncrasies to those the author has already given his character results in an absurd exaggeration; the person of the author’s invention, who was plausible and natural, is in this way turned into a grotesque. I have often sought to cast an actor contrary to his type, but I do not know that the notion has proved successful; it needs a greater adaptability than modern actors have. Probably the dramatist’s best way to cope with this difficulty is to underwrite his parts, lightly sketching the characters and counting on the actors to fill them in with their own individualities. But then he must be certain of getting actors who can do this.

Exaggeration of this kind, wrong casting, inevitable sometimes, already sufficiently distort the author’s intention and this is too often further distorted by the director. When I first began to write for the stage, directors took a more modest view of their functions than they have lately done. Then they confined themselves to cutting where the author had been long-winded and disguising by their ingenuity his errors of construction; they arranged the positions of the actors and helped them to get the best out of their parts. I think it must have been Reinhardt who first exacted for the director a preponderating share in the collaboration. His example was followed by directors who lacked his talent and more than once since the preposterous claim has been made that the author’s script is to be looked upon merely as a vehicle for the director to express his own ideas. Instances have been known of directors who imagined that they were playwrights. Gerald du Maurier, a very good director, told me himself that he took no interest in directing a play that he could not partly rewrite. This was an extreme case. But it has certainly become very hard to find a director who is content to interpret his author’s play; he has too often come to look upon it as an opportunity for an original creation of his own. The public would be surprised if they knew how often an author’s purport is misrepresented by the director’s stupid obstinacy and how much vulgarity and silliness for which they blame him is due to the director. The director is a man of ideas, but of few, and that is a disastrous thing. To conceive ideas is exhilarating, but it is only safe when you conceive so many that you ascribe no undue consequence to them and can take them for what they are worth. People who conceive few find it very difficult not to regard them with inordinate respect. A director who thinks of a scrap of dialogue, a bit of business or a scenic effect, will attach so much importance to it that he will cheerfully hang up the action of the play or distort its meaning in order to introduce it. Too often the director is vain, self-opinionated and unimaginative; he is sometimes so autocratic that he will force the cast to reproduce his own intonations and his own mannerisms; the actors, dependent on his good word to get parts and on their docility to gain his favour, can but slavishly do as they are told, thus taking all spontaneity from their performance. The best director is the one who does least. I have been lucky enough now and then to be given directors who were honestly anxious to do their best by the play and who have tried to fulfil my wishes; but it is very difficult to enter into somebody else’s mind and the most sympathetic director can hardly do more than give an adumbration of the author’s intention. I think he often gives the audience something that they like more than they would have liked what the author meant. But that is not to the author’s purpose.

The remedy of course is for the author to direct his own play. Few can but those who have themselves been actors. It is not enough to be able to tell an actor that an intonation or a gesture is wrong, you must be able to show him by word and deed what is right. This is more than ever necessary now that the players of minor parts have an inadequate technique. Gerald du Maurier used often to do this by the mortifying, but efficacious, expedient of caricaturing the manner in which an actor had done something and then showing him how it should be done. He could do this only because he was a very good mimic and a very good actor. But this is a small matter. Direction is a complicated affair. It is a business, or if you like an art, of its own that has to be acquired with pains. The director deals with the mechanics of the play, the entrances and exits, the positions assigned to various characters so that their grouping may be seemly and that they may be so placed that at the proper time the attention of the audience is easily turned on them; he takes into consideration the peculiarities of individual actors and when one is asked to do something that is not within his powers by subterfuge gets over the difficulty; he is mindful also of the peculiarities of actors in general, such as that no English player can now say a speech of more than twenty lines without feeling self-conscious, and devises means of overcoming their diffidence; he directs the audience’s interest to the main points of the play and lures them by ingenuity to support the necessarily dull passages of exposition and the joins, the introductions to dramatic episodes, that no play can avoid; he takes account of the facility with which their attention wanders and by the invention of ‘business’ holds it at dangerous points; he considers the susceptibilities, the jealousy and vanity of actors and takes care that natural egoism does not disturb the balance of the play; he sees that every part is given its appropriate value and that no actor to make his own more important encroaches on somebody else’s. He decides when to go quick and when to go slow; when to emphasize, when to slur; when to play up and when to play down. He deals with the sets and sees that they are suitable and practicable to the action; he chooses the clothes to fit the parts and keeps a close watch on the actresses who would sooner be beautifully than aptly dressed; he concerns himself with lighting. Direction is a business, or an art, that needs technical knowledge of an elaborate order. It needs moreover tact, patience, good humour, firmness and pliability. For myself, I have been well aware that I possessed none of the knowledge and few of the qualities that are needed to direct a play. I was hampered besides by my stammer and by the unfortunate accident that after I had written a play and finally corrected the typescript I could no longer take any great interest in it. I was curious to see how it would act, but when once I had given it over to others, like a bitch who takes no more concern in her puppies when others have handled them, I could no longer look upon it any more as intimately my own. I have been blamed often for yielding too easily to directors and accepting their opinions when they were contrary to my own; the fact is that I have always been inclined to think that others knew better than I; I have never liked rows unless I was in a temper and I am seldom in a temper, and lastly, I did not very much care. What added to my growing distaste for the theatre was not that directors were sometimes incompetent, but that they were necessary at all.

41

AND NOW the audience. It must seem ungracious that I should express anything but gratitude to the public that has given me, if not fame, at least notoriety and a fortune that has enabled me to live in the same style as my father lived in before me. I have travelled; I live in a house with a view of the sea, silent and apart from other habitations, in the middle of a garden, with spacious rooms. I have always thought life too short to do anything for oneself that one can pay others to do for one and I have been rich enough to afford myself the luxury of only doing for myself what I alone can do. I have been able to entertain my friends and to help people whom I wanted to help. All this I owe to the favour of the public. I found myself, notwithstanding, growing more and more impatient with that section of it that makes up the theatrical audience. I have mentioned the fact that from the first I felt a singular embarrassment at witnessing one of my own plays, and this, instead of growing less with each play I produced, as I might have expected, grew greater. The feeling that a mass of people were seeing my plays became a sort of horror of distaste, so that I found myself going out of my way to avoid the street in which the theatre was situated where they were acting one of my plays.

I had long come to the conclusion that there was not much point in a play that was not successful and I thought I knew exactly how to write a successful play. I knew, that is to say, what I could expect from an audience. Without their collaboration I could do nothing and I knew how far their collaboration could go. I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with this. The dramatist must share the prepossessions of his audience, the example of Lope de Vega and Shakespeare is there to prove it, and at his boldest he can do no more than put into words what they from cowardice or laziness have been contented only to feel and not to express. I was tired of giving half a truth because that was all they were prepared to take. I grew tired of the absurdity that admits in conversation all manner of facts that must be denied on the stage. I wearied of the necessity of fitting my theme into a certain compass, drawing it out to an unnecessary length or unduly constricting it because a play to attract had to be of a definite length. I grew bored with trying never to be boring. In fact, I did not want to conform any longer to the necessary conventions of the drama. I suspected that I was out of touch with the taste of the public and to decide the matter went to a number of plays that were drawing the town. I found them tedious. I could not laugh at the jokes that amused the delighted audience and the scenes that moved them to tears left me stone cold. That settled it.

I sighed for the liberty of fiction and I thought with pleasure of the lonely reader who was willing to listen to all I had to say and with whom I could effect an intimacy that I could never hope for in the garish publicity of the theatre. I had known too many dramatists who had survived their popularity. I had seen them pitifully writing their own plays over and over again without an inkling that the times had changed; I had seen others desperately attempting to capture the modern spirit and dismayed when their efforts were treated with derision. I had seen famous authors treated with contumely, when they offered a play to managers who had once pestered them with contracts. I had heard actors’ scornful comments on them. I had seen the bewilderment, the consternation, the bitterness with which they realized at last that the public was finished with them. I had heard Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, both celebrated in their day, say to me identically the same words, one with a grim, sardonic humour, the other with a puzzled exasperation; the words were: ‘They don’t want me any more.’ I thought I would go while the going was good.

42

BUT I had several plays still in my head. Two or three of these were little more than vague schemes and I was willing enough to let them go, but there were four that were lying pigeon-holed in my fancy all ready to be written, and I knew myself well enough to be aware that they would continue to pester me till I wrote them. I had been thinking of them all for a good many years; I had done nothing about them because I did not think they would please. I have always had a dislike to managers losing money over me, due, I suppose, to my bourgeois instincts, and on the whole they have not. It is generally accepted that it is four to one against a play being profitable to a management; I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that the event has proved that with me it has been four to one on. I wrote these four plays in the order in which I expected them to be increasingly unsuccessful. I did not want to destroy my reputation with the public till I was definitely finished with it. The first two surprised me by having a considerable success. The last two had as little as I expected. I will speak but of one of them, The Sacred Flame, and of this only because in it I tried an experiment that some readers of this book may think interesting enough to merit a few minutes’ consideration. I tried in this play to write a more formal dialogue than I had been in the habit of using. I wrote my first full-length play in 1898, my last in 1933. In that time I have seen dialogue change from the turgid, pedantic speech of Pinero, from the elegant artificiality of Oscar Wilde, to the extreme colloquialism of the present day. The demand for realism has inveigled dramatists into a naturalism ever greater and greater, a style that has been cultivated to its utmost limit, as we know, by Noel Coward. Not only is the ‘literary’ avoided, but actuality has been so much sought after that grammar is eschewed, sentences are broken, for it is said that in ordinary life people speak ungrammatically and in short or unfinished sentences, and a vocabulary has been employed in which only the simplest and most ordinary words are allowed. This dialogue is eked out with shrugs, waves of the hand and grimaces. In thus yielding to the fashion it seems to me that dramatists have gravely handicapped themselves. For this slangy, clipped, broken speech they reproduce is only the speech of a class, the speech of the young, ill-educated well-to-do, who are described in the papers as the smart set. They are the persons who figure in the gossip columns and in the pages of illustrated weeklies. It may be a fact that the English are tongue-tied, but I do not think they are so tongue-tied as we are now asked to believe. There are a great many people, members of the various professions and cultured women, who clothe their thoughts in grammatical, well-chosen language and can say what they want to in the right words, put in the right order, with distinction. The present mode, which forces a judge or an eminent physician to express himself as inadequately as a bar-lounger, grossly misrepresents the truth. It has narrowed the range of character that the dramatist can deal with, for he can only show this by speech, and it is impossible to portray people of any subtlety of mind or intricacy of emotion when his dialogue is but a sort of spoken hieroglyph. He is insensibly led to choose as his characters persons who talk naturally in the way his audience have come to think natural and these inevitably are very simple and obvious. It has restricted his themes since it is hard to deal with the fundamental issues of human life, it is impossible to analyse the complexities of human nature (dramatic subjects both) when you confine yourself to a naturalistic dialogue. It has killed comedy, which depends on verbal wit, which in turn depends on the well-turned phrase. It has thus knocked another nail in the coffin of prose drama.

I thought then that in The Sacred Flame I would try to make my characters speak not the words they would actually have spoken, but in a more formal manner, using the phrases they would have used if they had been able to prepare them beforehand and had known how to put what they wanted to say in exact and well-chosen language. It may be that I did not manage it very well. During rehearsals I found that the actors, no longer used to speeches of this sort, had an uncomfortable feeling that they were delivering a recitation and I had to simplify and break up my sentences. I left enough to give the critics grounds for animadversion, and my dialogue was, in some quarters, blamed because it was ‘literary.’ I was told that people did not speak like that. I never thought they did. But I did not insist. I was in the position of a man in a rented house, whose lease is expiring; it is not worth his while to make structural alterations. In my last two plays I reverted to the naturalistic dialogue I had hitherto used.

When for days you have been going through a mountain pass, a moment comes when you are sure that after winding round the great mass of rock in front of you, you will come upon the plain; but instead you are faced with another huge crag and the weary trail continues; surely after this you will see the plain; no; the path winds on and another mountain bars your way. And then suddenly it lies before you. Your heart exults; there it stretches wide and sunny; the oppression of the mountains is lifted from your shoulders and with exhilaration you breathe the more spacious air. You have a wonderful sense of freedom. So I felt when I had done with my last play.

I could not tell whether I was free from the theatre for good and all, for the author is the slave of what, for want of a more modest word, I am forced to call his inspiration, and I could not be certain that a theme would not some day occur to me that I could not but write in the form of a play. I hoped not. For I was possessed of a notion which I cannot expect the reader to think other than foolishly arrogant. I had had all the experience that it seemed possible the theatre could give me. I had made as much money as I needed to live in the sort of way that pleased me and to provide for such as had claims on me. I had won a great notoriety and perhaps even a passing fame. I might have been satisfied. But there was one thing more I wanted to achieve and this it seemed to me I could not hope to reach in the drama. Perfection. I looked not at my own plays, of whose faults no one could be more irritably conscious than I, but at the plays that have come down to us from the past. Even the greatest have grave defects. You have to make excuses for them by considering the conventions of the time and the conditions of the stage for which they were written. The great Greek tragedies are so far from us and interpret a civilisation that is now so strange that it is hard to judge them candidly. It has seemed to me that perhaps Antigone came very near perfection. In the modern drama I think no one on occasion approached it more closely than Racine. But at the cost of how many a limitation! It was a cherry stone that he carved with infinite skill. Only idolatry can refuse to see the great shortcomings in the conduct and sometimes in the characterisation of Shakespeare’s plays; and this is very comprehensible since, as we know, he sacrificed everything to effective situation. All these plays were written in imperishable verse. When you come to the modern prose drama and look for perfection you will not find it. I suppose it will be admitted that Ibsen is the greatest dramatist the last hundred years have seen. For all the vast merits of his plays, how poverty-stricken was his invention, how repetitive his characters, and how silly, when you go a little below the surface, are too many of his subjects! It looks as though defects of one sort or another were inherent in the art of drama. To get one result you must sacrifice another, so that to write a play perfect in all its particulars, in the interest and significance of its theme, in the subtlety and originality of its characterisation, in the plausibility of its intrigue and in the beauty of its dialogue, is impossible. It seemed to me that in the novel and in the short story perfection had been sometimes achieved, and though I could scarcely hope to reach it, I had a notion that in those mediums I could come nearer to it than I had any chance of doing in the drama.

43

THE FIRST novel I wrote was called Liza of Lambeth. It was accepted by the first publisher to whom I sent it. For some time Fisher Unwin had been bringing out in what he called The Pseudonym Series a number of short novels which had attracted a good deal of attention; among them were those of John Oliver Hobbs. They were thought witty and audacious. They made the author’s name and confirmed the prestige of the series. I wrote two short stories which together, I thought, would make a volume of a size suitable for this collection and sent them to Fisher Unwin. After some time he returned them, but with a letter asking me if I had not a novel I could submit to him. This was so great an encouragement that I immediately sat down and wrote one. Since I was working at the hospital all day I could only write in the evening. I used to get home soon after six, read my Star, which I bought at the corner of Lambeth Bridge, and as soon as the table was cleared after an early meal, set to work.

Fisher Unwin was hard on his authors. He took advantage of my youth, my inexperience, and my delight at having a book accepted, to make a contract with me whereby I was to get no royalty at all till he had sold so many copies; but he knew how to push his wares and he sent my novel to a number of influential persons. It was widely, though diversely, reviewed, and Basil Wilberforce, afterwards Archdeacon of Westminster, preached about it in the Abbey. The Senior Obstetric Physician at St. Thomas’s Hospital was sufficiently impressed by it to offer me a minor appointment under him, for soon after it appeared I passed my final examinations; but this, exaggerating its success, and determined to abandon the medical profession, I unwisely refused. A second edition was called for within a month of publication and I had no doubt that I could easily earn my living as a writer. I was somewhat shaken when, a year later, on my return from Seville, I received from Fisher Unwin a cheque for my royalties. It amounted to twenty pounds. If I may judge by its continuing sales Liza of Lambeth is still readable, but any merit it may have is due to the luck I had in being, by my work as a medical student, thrown into contact with a side of life that at that time had been little exploited by novelists. Arthur Morrison with his Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago had drawn the attention of the public to what were then known as the lower classes and I profited by the interest he had aroused.

I knew nothing about writing. Though for my age I had read a good deal, I had read without discrimination, devouring one after the other books I had heard of to find out what they were about, and though I suppose I got something out of them, it was the novels and short stories of Guy de Maupassant that had most influence on me when I set myself to write. I began to read them when I was sixteen. Whenever I went to Paris I spent my afternoons in the galleries of the Odéon browsing among the books there. A certain number of Maupassant’s books had been reissued in little volumes at seventy-five centimes and these I bought; but the others cost three francs fifty, a sum that I could not afford, so I used to take a book out of the shelves and read what I could of it. The attendants in their pale grey smocks took no notice of me and it was often possible when none of them was looking to cut a page and continue the narrative without interruption. Thus I managed to read most of Maupassant before I was twenty. Though he does not enjoy now the reputation he did then it must be admitted that he had great merits. He was lucid and direct, he had a sense of form, and he knew how to get the utmost dramatic value out of the story he had to tell. I cannot but think that he was a better master to follow than the English novelists who at that time influenced the young. In Liza of Lambeth I described without addition or exaggeration the people I had met in the out-patients’ department at the Hospital and in the district during my service as an obstetric clerk, the incidents that had struck me when I went from house to house as the work called, or, when I had nothing to do, had seen on my idle saunterings. My lack of imagination (for imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young) obliged me to set down quite straightforwardly what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Such success as the book had was due to a lucky chance. It augured nothing for my future. But this I did not know.

Fisher Unwin pressed me to write another much longer book about the slums. He told me that was what the public wanted from me and prophesied that it would have, now that I had broken the ice, a far greater success than Liza of Lambeth. But this was not in my ideas at all. I was ambitious. I had a feeling, I do not know where I got it, that you must not pursue a success, but fly from it; and I had learnt from the French to set no great store on the roman régional. I was no longer interested in the slums once I had written a book about them, and I had indeed already finished a novel of a very different sort. Fisher Unwin must have been dismayed when he received it. It was a novel set in Italy during the Renaissance and it was founded on a story I had read in Machiavelli’s History of Florence. I wrote it because of some articles by Andrew Lang that I read on the art of fiction. In one of them he argued, very convincingly to me, that the historical novel was the only one that the young author could hope to write with success. For he could not have sufficient experience of life to write of contemporary manners; history provided him with a story and characters and the romantic fervour of his young blood gave him the dash that was needed for this sort of composition. I know now that this was nonsense. In the first place it is not true that the young author has not sufficient knowledge to write about his contemporaries. I do not suppose one ever in after life knows people so intimately as those with whom one’s childhood and early youth have been passed. One’s family, the servants with whom so much of a child’s life is spent, one’s masters at school, other boys and girls — the boy knows a great deal about them. He sees them with directness. Adults discover themselves, consciously and unconsciously, to the very young as they never do to other adults. And the child, the boy, is aware of his environment, the house he lives in, the countryside or the streets of the town, in a detail that he can never realize again when a multitude of past impressions has blurred his sensibilities. The historical novel calls surely for a profound experience of men to create living people out of those persons who with their different manners and different notions at first sight seem so alien to us; and to recreate the past needs not only a vast knowledge but an effort of imagination that is hardly to be expected in the young. I should have said that the truth was exactly contrary to what Andrew Lang said. The novelist should turn to the historical novel towards the end of his career, when thought and the vicissitudes of his own life have brought him knowledge of the world, and when, having for years explored the personalities of people around him, he has acquired an intuition into human nature that will enable him to understand and so to recreate the figures of a past age. I had written my first novel of what I knew, but now, seduced by this bad advice, set to work on a historical romance. I wrote it in Capri, during the long vacation, and such was my ardour that I had myself awakened every morning at six and wrote with perseverance till hunger forced me to break off and have breakfast. I had at least the sense to spend the rest of the morning in the sea.

44

THERE IS no need for me to speak of the novels I wrote during the next few years. One of them, Mrs. Craddock, was not unsuccessful and I have reprinted it in the collected edition of my works. Of the others two were novelisations of plays that I had failed to get produced and for long they lay on my conscience like a discreditable action; I would have given much to suppress them. But I know now that my qualms were unnecessary. Even the greatest authors have written a number of very poor books. Balzac himself left a good many out of the Comédie Humaine, and of those he inserted there are several that only the student troubles to read; the writer can rest assured that the books he would like to forget will be forgotten. I wrote one of these books because I had to have enough money to carry me on for the following year; the other because I was at the time much taken with a young person of extravagant tastes and the gratification of my desires was frustrated by the attentions of more opulent admirers who were able to provide the luxuries that her frivolous soul hankered after. I had nothing much to offer but a serious disposition and a sense of humour. I determined to write a book that would enable me to earn three or four hundred pounds with which I could hold my own with my rivals. For the young person was attractive. But even if you work hard it takes a long time to write a novel; you have to get it published; then publishers do not pay you till many months have elapsed. The result was that by the time I received the money the passion that I had thought would last for ever was extinct and I had no longer the slightest wish to spend it in the way I had intended. I went to Egypt on it.

With these two exceptions the books I wrote during the first ten years after I became a professional writer were the exercises by which I sought to learn my business. For one of the difficulties that beset the professional writer is that he must acquire his craft at the expense of the public. He is constrained to write by the instinct within him and his brain teems with subjects. He has not the skill to cope with them. His experience is narrow. He is crude and he does not know how to make the best of such gifts as he has. And when he has finished his book he must publish it if he can, partly of course to get the money to live on; but also because he does not know what it is like till it is in print, and he can only find out his errors from the opinions of his friends and the criticisms of the reviewers. I have always heard that Guy de Maupassant submitted whatever he wrote to Flaubert and it was not till he had been writing for some years that Flaubert allowed him to publish his first story. As all the world knows it was that little masterpiece called Boule de Suif. But this is an exceptional case. Maupassant had a post in a government office that provided him both with a living and with sufficient leisure to write. There are few people who would have the patience to wait so long before trying their luck with the public and fewer still who can have had the good fortune to find so conscientious and great a writer as Flaubert to direct them. For the most part writers waste in this way subjects that they could have made good use of if they had not treated them till they had a greater knowledge of life and a more intimate acquaintance with the technique of their art. I sometimes wish that I had not had the good fortune to get my first book accepted immediately, for then I should have continued with medicine; I should have got the usual hospital appointments, gone as assistant to general practitioners in various parts of the country, and done locums; I should thus have acquired a mass of valuable experience. If my books had been refused one after the other I should have come before the public at last with work less imperfect. I regret that I had no one to guide me; I might have been spared much misdirected effort. I knew a few literary people, not many, for even then I had a feeling that their company, though pleasant enough, was unprofitable to the author, and I was too shy, too arrogant and too diffident, to seek their counsel. I studied the French novelists more than the English, and having got what I was capable of getting from Maupassant, turned to Stendhal, Balzac, the Goncourts, Flaubert and Anatole France.

I tried various experiments. One of them at that time had a certain novelty. The experience of life I was for ever eagerly seeking suggested to me that the novelist’s method of taking two or three people, or even a group, and describing their adventures, spiritual and otherwise, as though no one else existed and nothing else was happening in the world, gave a very partial picture of reality. I was myself living in several sets that had no connection with one another, and it occurred to me that it might give a truer picture of life if one could carry on at the same time the various stories, of equal importance, that were enacted during a certain period in different circles. I took a larger number of persons than I had ever sought to cope with before and devised four or five independent stories. They were attached to one another by a very thin thread, an elderly woman who knew at least one person in each group. The book was called The Merry-Go-Round. It was rather absurd because owing to the influence on me of the æsthetic school of the nineties I made everyone incredibly beautiful, and it was written in a tight and affected manner. But its chief defect was that it lacked the continuous line that directs the reader’s interest; the stories were not after all of equal importance and it was tiresome to divert one’s attention from one set of people to another. I failed from my ignorance of the very simple device of seeing the diverse events and the characters that took part in them through the eyes of a single person. It is a device which of course the autobiographical novel has used for centuries, but which Henry James has very usefully developed. By the simple process of writing he for I and stepping down from the omniscience of an all-knowing narrator to the imperfect acquaintance of a participator he showed how to give unity and verisimilitude to a story.

45

I HAVE a notion that I was more slow to develop than most writers. Around the years that ended the old century and began the new one I was looked upon as a clever young writer, rather precocious, harsh and somewhat unpleasant, but worth consideration. Though I made little money out of them my books were reviewed at length and conscientiously. But when I compare my early novels with those that are written by young men now I cannot but see that theirs are vastly more accomplished. The ageing writer does well to keep in touch with what the young do and from time to time I read their novels. Girls still in their teens, youths at the university, produce books that seem to me well-written, well-composed and ripe with experience. I do not know whether the young mature sooner than they did forty years ago or whether it is that the art of fiction has in that time so much advanced that it is now as easy to write a good novel as then it was difficult to write even a mediocre one. If one takes the trouble to look through the volumes of The Yellow Book, which at that time seemed the last thing in sophisticated intelligence, it is startling to discover how thoroughly bad the majority of its contributions were. For all their parade these writers were no more than an eddy in a backwater and it is unlikely that the history of English literature will give them more than a passing glance. I shiver a little when I turn those musty pages and ask myself whether in another forty years the bright young things of current letters will appear as jejune as do now their maiden aunts of The Yellow Book.

It was fortunate for me that I suddenly achieved popularity as a dramatist and so was relieved of the necessity of writing a novel once a year to earn my living. I found plays easy to write; the notoriety they brought me was not unpleasing; and they earned for me enough money to enable me to live less straitly than I had been obliged to. I have never had the bohemian trait of being unconcerned for the morrow. I have never liked to borrow money. I have hated to be in debt. Nor has the squalid life had any attraction for me. I was not born in squalid circumstances. As soon as I could afford it I bought a house in Mayfair.

There are people who despise possessions. Of course when they say that it ill becomes the artist thus to cumber himself they may be right, but it is not a view that artists themselves have held. They have never lived from choice in the garrets in which their admirers like to see them. They have much more often ruined themselves by the extravagance with which they conducted themselves. After all they are creatures of imagination and state appeals to them, fine houses, servants to do their bidding, rich carpets, lovely pictures, and sumptuous furniture. Titian and Rubens lived like princes. Pope had his Grotto and his Quincunx and Sir Walter his Gothic Abbotsford. El Greco with his suites of rooms, his musicians to play to him while he ate, his library and his grand clothes, died bankrupt. It is unnatural for the artist to live in a semi-detached villa and eat cottage pie cooked by a maid of all work. It shows, not disinterestedness, but an arid, petty soul. For of course to the artist the luxury with which he likes to surround himself is but a diversion. His house, his grounds, his cars, his pictures, are playthings to amuse his fancy; they are visible tokens of his power; they do not penetrate to his essential aloofness. For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy — an experience like another — I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing. I was glad to earn a great deal of money as a dramatist. It gave me liberty. I was careful with it because I did not want ever again to be in a position when for want of it I could not do anything I had really a mind to.

46

I AM a writer as I might have been a doctor or a lawyer. It is so pleasant a profession that it is not surprising if a vast number of persons adopt it who have no qualifications for it. It is exciting and various. The writer is free to work in whatever place and at whatever time he chooses; he is free to idle if he feels ill or dispirited. But it is a profession that has disadvantages. One is that though the whole world, with everyone in it and all its sights and events, is your material, you yourself can only deal with what corresponds to some secret spring in your own nature. The mine is incalculably rich, but each one of us can get from it only a definite amount of ore. Thus in the midst of plenty the writer may starve to death. His material fails him and we say that he has written himself out. I think there are few writers who are not haunted by the fear of this. Another disadvantage is that the professional writer must please. Unless a sufficient number of persons can be found to read him he will starve. Sometimes the stress of circumstances is too great for him and with rage in his heart he yields to the demand of the public. One must not expect too much of human nature and an occasional pot-boiler may be accepted from him with lenity. The writers who are in independent circumstances should sympathize with, rather than sneer at, those of their brethren whom hard necessity sometimes forces to do hack work. One of the minor sages of Chelsea has remarked that the writer who wrote for money did not write for him. He has said a good many wise things (as indeed a sage should) but this was a very silly one; for the reader has nothing to do with the motive for which the author writes. He is only concerned with the result. Many writers need the spur of necessity to write at all (Samuel Johnson was one of them), but they do not write for money. It would be foolish of them if they did, for there are few avocations in which with equal ability and industry you cannot earn more money than by writing. Most of the great portraits of the world have been painted because their painters were paid to do them. In painting as in writing the excitement of the work is such that when it is once started the artist is absorbed in doing it as well as he can. But just as the painter will not get commissions unless on the whole he satisfies his patrons, so the writer’s books will not be read unless on the whole they interest his readers. Yet there is in writers a feeling that the public ought to like what they write and if their books do not sell the fault is not with them but with the public. I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull. There are many instances of artists whose work for long has been little appreciated and who yet in the end achieved fame. We do not, however, hear of those whose work has continued to be ignored. Their number is far greater. Where are the votive offerings of those who perished? If it is true that talent consists in a certain facility combined with a peculiar outlook on the world it is very understandable that originality should not at first be welcomed. In this perpetually changing world people are suspicious of novelty and it takes them some time before they can accustom themselves to it. A writer with an idiosyncrasy has to find little by little the people to whom it appeals. Not only does it take him time to be himself, for the young are themselves only with timidity, but it takes him time to convince that body of persons, whom he will eventually rather pompously call his public, that he has something to give them that they want. The more individual he is the harder will he find it to achieve this and the longer will it take him to earn his living. Nor can he be sure that the result will be lasting, for it may be that with all his individuality he has but one or two things to give and then he will soon sink back into the obscurity from which he difficultly emerged.

It is easy to say that the writer should have an occupation that provides him with his bread and butter and write in such leisure as this occupation affords him. This course, indeed, was forced upon him very generally in the past, when the author, however distinguished and popular, could not earn enough money by writing to keep body and soul together. It is forced upon him still in countries with a small reading public; he must eke out his livelihood by work in an office, preferably under the government, or by journalism. But the English-speaking writer has the potentiality of such an enormous public that writing can very reasonably be adopted as a profession. It would be more overcrowded than it is if in English-speaking countries the cultivation of the arts were not slightly despised. There is a healthy feeling that to write or to paint is not a man’s work, and the social force of this keeps many from entering the ranks. You have to have a very decided urge to enter a profession which exposes you to at least a small degree of moral obloquy. In France and in Germany writing is an honourable occupation, and so is adopted with the consent of parents even though its financial rewards are unsatisfactory. You can often run across a German mother who, when you ask her what her young son is going to be, will answer with complacency, a poet; and in France the family of a girl with a large dot will look upon her marriage with a young novelist of talent as a suitable alliance.

But the author does not only write when he is at his desk; he writes all day long, when he is thinking, when he is reading, when he is experiencing; everything he sees and feels is significant to his purpose and, consciously or unconsciously, he is for ever storing and making over his impressions. He cannot give an undivided attention to any other calling. He will not follow it to his own satisfaction or that of his employers. The most common one for him to adopt is journalism, because it seems to have a closer connection with his proper work. It is the most dangerous. There is an impersonality in a newspaper, that insensibly affects the writer. People who write much for the press seem to lose the faculty of seeing things for themselves; they see them from a generalized standpoint, vividly often, sometimes with hectic brightness, yet never with that idiosyncrasy which may give only a partial picture of the facts, but is suffused by the personality of the observer. The press, in fact, kills the individuality of those who write for it. Nor is reviewing less harmful; the writer has not the time to read any books but those that directly concern him, and this reading of hundreds of books haphazard, not for the spiritual advantage he may gain from them but to give a reasonably honest account of them, deadens his sensibilities and impedes the free flow of his own imagination. Writing is a whole time job. To write must be the main object of the author’s life; that is to say, he must be a professional writer. He is lucky if he has sufficient fortune to make him independent of his earnings, but that does not prevent him from being a professional writer. Swift with his deanery, Wordsworth with his sinecure, were just as much professional writers as Balzac and Dickens.

47

IT IS acknowledged that the technique of painting and of musical composition can only be acquired by assiduous labour, and the productions of dilettantes are rightly regarded with good-humoured or exasperated contempt. We all congratulate ourselves that the radio and the gramophone have driven from our drawing-rooms the amateur pianist and the amateur singer. The technique of writing is no less difficult than that of the other arts and yet, because he can read and write a letter, there is a notion that anyone can write well enough to write a book. Writing seems now the favourite relaxation of the human race. Whole families will take to it as in happier times they entered religious houses. Women will write novels to while away their pregnancies; bored noblemen, axed officers, retired civil servants, fly to the pen as one might fly to the bottle. There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is implied a good book the impression is false. It is true that the amateur may sometimes produce a work of merit. By a lucky chance he may have a natural facility for writing well, he may have had experiences that are in themselves interesting, or he may have a charming or quaint personality that his very inexpertness helps him to get down on the printed page. But let him remember that the saying asserts only that everyone has it in him to write one book; it says nothing about a second. The amateur is wise not to try his luck again. His next book is pretty sure to be worthless.

For one of the great differences between the amateur and the professional is that the latter has the capacity to progress. The literature of a country is made not by a few excellent books, I repeat, but by a great body of work, and this can only be produced by professional writers. The literature of those countries that has been produced chiefly by amateurs is thin in comparison with that of the countries in which a number of men, with difficulty trying to make their living, have followed it as a profession. A body of work, an oeuvre, is the result of long-continued and resolute effort. The author, like other men, learns by the method of trial and error. His early works are tentative; he tries his hand at various subjects and various methods and at the same time develops his character. By a simultaneous process he discovers himself, which is what he has to give, and learns how to display this discovery to the best advantage. Then, in full possession of his faculties, he produces the best of which he is capable. Since writing is a healthy occupation, he will probably go on living long after he has done this, and since by this time writing will have become an ingrained habit he will doubtless continue to produce works of no great consequence. These the public may legitimately neglect. From the standpoint of the reader, very little that the writer produces in the whole course of his life is essential. (By essential, I mean only that small part of him which expresses his individuality, and I attach no implication of absolute value to the word.) But I think he can only give this as the result of a long apprenticeship and at the cost of a good many failures. To do it he must make literature his life’s work. He must be a professional author.

48

I HAVE spoken of the disadvantages of the author’s profession: now I should like to speak of its dangers.

It is evident that no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. If he waits till he is in the mood, till he has the inspiration as he says, he waits indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The professional writer creates the mood. He has his inspiration too, but he controls and subdues it to his bidding by setting himself regular hours of work. But in time writing becomes a habit, and like the old actor in retirement, who gets restless when the hour arrives at which he has been accustomed to go down to the theatre and make up for the evening performance, the writer itches to get to his pens and paper at the hours at which he has been used to write. Then he writes automatically. Words come easily to him and words suggest ideas. They are old and empty ideas, but his practised hand can turn out an acceptable piece. He goes down to luncheon or goes to bed with the assurance that he has done a good day’s work. Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. This is a counsel of perfection and in an imperfect world a certain indulgence should be bestowed on the professional writer; but this surely is the aim he should keep before him. He does well only to write to liberate his spirit of a subject that he has so long meditated that it burdens him and if he is wise he will take care to write only for the sake of his own peace. Perhaps the simplest way to break the habit of writing is by changing the environment to one that gives no opportunity for the daily task. You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit; but habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

But the greatest danger that besets the professional author is one that unfortunately only a few have to guard against. Success. It is the most difficult thing the writer has to cope with. When after a long and bitter struggle he has at last achieved it he finds that it spreads a snare to entangle and destroy him. Few of us have the determination to avoid its perils. It must be dealt with warily. The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man; it does not always improve the character of the author. It may very well deprive him of that force which has brought him success. His individuality has been formed by his experiences, his struggles, his frustrated hopes, his efforts to adapt himself to a hostile world; it must be very stubborn if it is not modified by the softening influences of success.

Success besides often bears within itself the seed of destruction, for it may very well cut the author off from the material that was its occasion. He enters a new world. He is made much of. He must be almost super-human if he is not captivated by the notice taken of him by the great and remains insensible to the attentions of beautiful women. He grows accustomed to another way of life, probably more luxurious than that to which he has been used, and to people who have more of the social graces than those with whom he has consorted before. They are more intellectual and their superficial brilliance is engaging. How difficult it is for him then to move freely still in the circles with which he has been familiar and which have given him his subjects! His success has changed him in the eyes of his old associates and they are no longer at home with him. They may look upon him with envy or with admiration, but no longer as one of themselves. The new world into which his success has brought him excites his imagination and he writes about it; but he sees it from the outside and can never so penetrate it as to become a part of it. No better example of this can be given than Arnold Bennett. He never knew anything intimately but the life of the Five Towns in which he had been born and bred, and it was only when he dealt with them that his work had character. When success brought him into the society of literary people, rich men and smart women, and he sought to deal with them, what he wrote was worthless. Success destroyed him.

49

THE WRITER is wise then who is wary of success. He must look with dread on the claims that others make on him because of it, the responsibilities it forces on him, and the hindering activities that it brings in its wake. It can only give him two good things: one, the more important by far, is the freedom to follow his own bent, and the other is confidence in himself. Notwithstanding his pretension and his susceptible vanity the author when he compares his work with what he intended it to be is never free from misgiving. There is so great a distance between what he saw in his mind’s eye and the best he has been able to do that for him the result is no more than a makeshift. He may be pleased with a page here or there and regard an episode or a character with approval; I think it must be very seldom that he looks upon any work of his as a whole with complete satisfaction. At the back of his mind is the suspicion that it is not good at all and the praises of the public, even if he is inclined to doubt their value, are a heaven-sent reassurance.

That is why praise is important to him. It is a weakness that he should hanker for it; though perhaps a pardonable one. For the artist should be indifferent to praise and blame, since he is concerned with his work only in its relation to himself, and how it affects the public is a matter in which he is materially perhaps, but not spiritually, concerned. The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down hill. It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth. It is something like an organic thing that develops, not of course only in their brains, but in their heart, their nerves and their viscera, something that their creative instinct evolves out of the experiences of their soul and their body, and that at last becomes so oppressive that they must rid themselves of it. When this happens they enjoy a sense of liberation and for one delicious moment rest in peace. But unlike human mothers, they lose interest very soon in the child that is born. It is no longer a part of them. It has given them its satisfaction and now their souls are open to a new impregnation.

In the production of his work, the author has fulfilled himself. But that is not to say that it has any value for anyone else. The reader of a book, the observer of a picture, is not concerned with the artist’s feelings. The artist has sought release, but the layman seeks for a communication, and he alone can judge whether the communication is valuable to him. To the artist the communication he offers is a by-product. I am not speaking now of those who practise an art to teach; they are propagandists and with them art is a side issue. Artistic creation is a specific activity that is satisfied by its own exercise. The work created may be good art or bad art. That is a matter for the layman to decide. He forms his decision from the æsthetic value of the communication that is offered to him. If it yields escape from the reality of the world he will welcome it, but is very likely at best to describe it only as minor art; if it enriches his soul and enlarges his personality he will rightly describe it as great. But this, I insist, has nothing to do with the artist; it is human that he should be pleased if he has given others pleasure or greater strength; but he should not take it amiss if they find nothing to their purpose in the results of his production. He has already had his reward in the satisfaction of his creative instinct. Now this is no counsel of perfection; it is the only condition on which the artist can work his way towards the unattainable perfection that is his aim. If he is a novelist he uses his experience of people and places, his apprehension of himself, his love and hate, his deepest thoughts, his passing fancies, to draw in one work after another a picture of life. It can never be more than a partial one, but if he is fortunate he will succeed in the end in doing something else; he will draw a complete picture of himself.

At all events to think thus is a consolation when you cast your eye over the publishers’ advertisements. When you read those long lists of books and when you discover that reviewers have extolled their wit, profundity, originality and beauty your heart sinks; what chance have you in comparison with so much genius? The publishers will tell you that the average life of a novel is ninety days. It is hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that a book into which you have put, besides your whole self, several months of anxious toil, should be read in three or four hours and after so short a period forgotten. Though it will do him no good, there is no author so small-minded as not to have a secret hope that some part at least of his work will survive him for a generation or two. The belief in posthumous fame is a harmless vanity which often reconciles the artist to the disappointments and failure of his life. How unlikely he is to attain it we see when we look back on the writers who only twenty years ago seemed assured of immortality. Where are their readers now? And with the mass of books that are constantly produced and the ceaseless competition of those that have lived on, how small is the likelihood that work that has been once forgotten will ever be again remembered! There is one very odd, and some may think very unfair, thing about posterity; it seems to choose the works to which it gives attention from those of authors who have been popular in their lifetime. The writers who delight a clique and never reach the great public will never delight posterity, for posterity will never hear about them. It is a consolation to the popular authors who have had it impressed upon them that their popularity was sufficient proof of their worthlessness. It may be that Shakespeare, Scott and Balzac did not write for the minor sage of Chelsea, but it looks as though they did write for after ages. The writer’s only safety is to find his satisfaction in his own performance. If he can realize that in the liberation of soul which his work has brought him and in the pleasure of shaping it in such a way as to satisfy to some extent at least his æsthetic sense, he is amply rewarded for his labours, he can afford to be indifferent to the outcome.

50

FOR THE disadvantages and dangers of the author’s calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant. It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity and terror, which Aristotle tells us is the object of art. For his sins and his follies, the unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love, his physical defects, illness, privation, his hopes abandoned, his griefs, humiliations, everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill, from the glimpse of a face in the street to a war that convulses the civilized world, from the scent of a rose to the death of a friend. Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song or a story, and having done this be rid of it. The artist is the only free man.

Perhaps that is why the world on the whole has had the profound suspicion of him that we know. It is not sure that he can be trusted when he reacts to the common impulses of men so unaccountably. And indeed the artist, to the indignation of mankind, has never felt himself bound by ordinary standards. Why should he? With men in general the primary end of thought and action is to satisfy their needs and preserve their being; but the artist satisfies his needs and preserves his being by the pursuit of art: their pastime is his grim earnest and so his attitude to life can never be the same as theirs. He creates his own values. Men think him cynical because he does not attach importance to the virtues and is not revolted by the vices that move them. He is not cynical. But what they call virtue and what they call vice are not the sort of things that he takes any particular interest in. They are indifferent elements in the scheme of things out of which he constructs his own freedom. Of course common men are quite right to be indignant with him. But that isn’t going to do him any good. He is incorrigible.

51

WHEN, HAVING achieved success as a dramatist, I determined to devote the rest of my life to play-writing I reckoned without my host. I was happy, I was prosperous, I was busy, my head was full of plays that I wanted to write; I do not know whether it was that success did not bring me all I had expected or whether it was a natural reaction from success: I was but just firmly established as a popular playwright when I began to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. The loss of my mother and then the break-up of my home, the wretchedness of my first years at school for which my French childhood had so ill-prepared me and which my stammering made so difficult, the delight of those easy, monotonous and exciting days in Heidelberg, when I first entered upon the intellectual life, the irksomeness of my few years at the hospital and the thrill of London; it all came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my walks, when I was rehearsing plays, when I was at a party, it became such a burden to me that I made up my mind that I could only regain my peace by writing it all down in the form of a novel. I knew it would be a long one and I wanted to be undisturbed, so I refused the contracts managers were anxious to give me and temporarily retired from the stage.

I had written a novel on the same themes when, after taking my medical degrees, I went to Seville. Luckily for me Fisher Unwin refused to give me the hundred pounds I wanted for it and no other publisher would have it at any price; or I should have lost a subject which I was then too young to make proper use of. The manuscript still exists, but I have not looked at it since I corrected the typescript; I have no doubt it is very immature. I was not far enough away from the events I described to see them reasonably and I had not had a number of experiences that later went to enrich the book I finally wrote. It seems to me that if the writing of this first novel did not finally repress into my subconscious the unhappy memories with which it was concerned it is because the writer is not finally disembarrassed of his subject till his work is published. When it is delivered to the public, however heedless the public be, it is his no longer and he is free from the burden that oppressed him. I called my book Beauty from Ashes, which is a quotation from Isaiah, but finding that this title had been recently used, I chose instead the title of one of the books in Spinoza’s Ethics and called it Of Human Bondage. It is not an autobiography, but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate. The book did for me what I wanted, and when it was issued to the world (a world in the throes of a terrible war and too much concerned with its own sufferings to bother with the adventures of a creature of fiction) I found myself free for ever from those pains and unhappy recollections. I put into it everything I then knew and having at last finished it prepared to make a fresh start.

52

I WAS tired. I was tired not only of the people and thoughts that had so long occupied me; I was tired of the people I lived with and the life I was leading. I felt that I had got all that I was capable of getting out of the world in which I had been moving; my success as a playwright and the luxurious existence it had brought me; the social round, the grand dinners at the houses of the great, the brilliant balls and the week-end parties at country houses; the company of clever and brilliant people, writers, painters, actors; the love affairs I had had and the easy companionship of my friends; the comfortableness and security of life. It was stifling me and I hankered after a different mode of existence and new experiences. But I did not know where to turn for them. I thought of travelling. I was tired of the man I was, and it seemed to me that by a long journey to some far distant country I might renew myself. Russia was very much in the thoughts of people then and I had a mind to go there for a year, learn the language of which I already knew the elements and immerse myself in the emotion and mystery of that vast country. I thought that there perhaps I might find something that would give sustenance and enrichment to my spirit. I was forty. If I meant to marry and have children it was high time I did so and for some time I had amused my imagination with pictures of myself in the married state. There was no one I particularly wanted to marry. It was the condition that attracted me. It seemed a necessary motif in the pattern of life that I had designed, and to my ingenuous fancy (for though no longer young and thinking myself so worldly wise, I was still in many ways incredibly naïve) it offered peace; peace from the disturbance of love affairs, casual it might be in the beginning, but bringing in their train such troublesome complications (for it takes two to make a love affair and a man’s meat is too often a woman’s poison); peace that would enable me to write all I wanted to write without the loss of precious time or disturbance of mind; peace and a settled and dignified way of life. I sought freedom and thought I could find it in marriage. I conceived these notions when I was still at work on Of Human Bondage, and turning my wishes into fiction, as writers will, towards the end of it I drew a picture of the marriage I should have liked to make. Readers on the whole have found it the least satisfactory part of my book.

But my uncertainties were resolved by an event over which I had no control. The war broke out. A chapter of my life had finished. A new chapter began.

53

I HAD a friend who was a cabinet minister and I wrote and asked him to help me to do something, whereupon I was invited to present myself at the War Office; but fearing that I should be set to clerical work in England and anxious to get out to France at once I joined a unit of ambulance cars. Though I do not think I was less patriotic than another my patriotism was mingled with the excitement the new experience offered me and I began keeping a note-book the moment I landed in France. I kept it till the work got heavy and then at the end of the day I was too tired to do anything but go to bed. I enjoyed the new life I was thrown into and the lack of responsibility. It was a pleasure to me who had never been ordered about since I was at school to be told to do this and that and when it was done to feel that my time was my own. As a writer I had never felt that; I had felt on the contrary that I had not a minute to lose. Now with a clear conscience I wasted long hours at estaminets in idle chatter. I liked meeting a host of people, and, though writing no longer, I treasured their peculiarities in my memory. I was never in any particular danger. I was anxious to see how I should feel when exposed to it; I have never thought myself very courageous nor did I think there was any necessity for me to be so. The only occasion upon which I might have examined myself was when in the Grande Place at Ypres a shell blew up a wall against which I had been standing just as I had moved over to get a view of the ruined Cloth Makers Hall from the other side; but I was too much surprised to observe my state of mind.

Later on I joined the Intelligence Department where it looked as though I could be more useful than in somewhat inadequately driving an ambulance. The work appealed both to my sense of romance and my sense of the ridiculous. The methods I was instructed to use in order to foil persons who were following me; the secret interviews with agents in unlikely places; the conveying of messages in a mysterious fashion; the reports smuggled over a frontier; it was all doubtless very necessary but so reminiscent of what was then known as the shilling shocker that for me it took most of its reality away from the war and I could not but look upon it as little more than material that might one day be of use to me. But it was so hackneyed that I doubted whether I should ever be able to profit by it. After a year in Switzerland my work there came to an end. It had entailed a good deal of exposure, the winter was bitter and I had to take journeys across the Lake of Geneva in all weathers. I was in very poor health. There seemed nothing much for me to do at the moment, so I went to America where two of my plays were about to be produced. I wanted to recover my peace of mind shattered through my own foolishness and vanity by occurrences upon which I need not dwell and so made up my mind to go to the South Seas. I had wanted to go ever since as a youth I had read The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker and I wanted besides to get material for a novel I had long been thinking over based on the life of Paul Gauguin.

I went, looking for beauty and romance and glad to put a great ocean between me and the trouble that harassed me. I found beauty and romance, but I found also something I had never expected. I found a new self. Ever since I left St. Thomas’s Hospital I had lived with people who attached value to culture. I had come to think that there was nothing in the world more important than art. I looked for a meaning in the universe and the only one I could find was the beauty that men here and there produced. On the surface my life was varied and exciting; but beneath it was narrow. Now I entered a new world, and all the instinct in me of a novelist went out with exhilaration to absorb the novelty. It was not only the beauty of the islands that took me, Herman Melville and Pierre Loti had prepared me for that, and though it is a different beauty it is not a greater beauty than that of Greece or Southern Italy; nor was it their ramshackle, slightly adventurous, easy life; what excited me was to meet one person after another who was new to me. I was like a naturalist who comes into a country where the fauna are of an unimaginable variety. Some I recognized; they were old types that I had read of and they gave me just the same feeling of delighted surprise that I had once in the Malayan Archipelago when I saw sitting on the branch of a tree a bird that I had never seen before but in a zoo. For the first moment I thought it must have escaped from a cage. Others were strange to me and they thrilled me as Wallace was thrilled when he came upon a new species. I found them easy to get on with. They were of all sorts; indeed, the variety would have been bewildering but that my powers of observation were by now well trained and I found it possible without conscious effort to pigeon-hole each one in my awareness. Few of them had culture. They had learnt life in a different school from mine and had come to different conclusions. They led it on a different plane; I could not, with my sense of humour, go on thinking mine a higher one. It was different. Their lives too formed themselves to the discerning eye into a pattern that had order and finally coherence.

I stepped off my pedestal. It seemed to me that these men had more vitality than those I had known hitherto. They did not burn with a hard, gem-like flame, but with a hot, smoky, consuming fire. They had their own narrownesses. They had their prejudices. They were often dull and stupid. I did not care. They were different. In civilized communities men’s idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behaviour. Culture is a mask that hides their faces. Here people showed themselves bare. These heterogeneous creatures thrown into a life that had preserved a great deal of its primitiveness had never felt the need to adapt themselves to conventional standards. Their peculiarities had been given opportunity to develop unchecked. In great cities men are like a lot of stones thrown together in a bag; their jagged corners are rubbed off till in the end they are as smooth as marbles. These men had never had their jagged corners rubbed away. They seemed to me nearer to the elementals of human nature than any of the people I had been living with for so long and my heart leapt towards them as it had done years before to the people who filed into the out-patients’ room at St. Thomas’s. I filled my note-book with brief descriptions of their appearance and their character, and presently, my imagination excited by these multitudinous impressions, from a hint or an incident or a happy invention, stories began to form themselves round certain of the most vivid of them.

54

I RETURNED to America and shortly afterwards was sent on a mission to Petrograd. I was diffident of accepting the post, which seemed to demand capacities that I did not think I possessed; but there seemed to be no one more competent available at the moment and my being a writer was very good ‘cover’ for what I was asked to do. I was not very well. I still knew enough medicine to guess the meaning of the hæmorrhages I was having. An X-ray photograph showed clearly that I had tuberculosis of the lungs. But I could not miss the opportunity of spending certainly a considerable time in the country of Tolstoi, Dostoievski and Chekov; I had a notion that in the intervals of the work I was being sent to do I could get something for myself that would be of value; so I set my foot hard on the loud pedal of patriotism and persuaded the physician I consulted that under the tragic circumstances of the moment I was taking no undue risk. I set off in high spirits with unlimited money at my disposal and four devoted Czechs to act as liaison officers between me and Professor Masaryk who had under his control in various parts of Russia something like sixty thousand of his compatriots. I was exhilarated by the responsibility of my position. I went as a private agent, who could be disavowed if necessary, with instructions to get in touch with parties hostile to the government and devise a scheme that would keep Russia in the war and prevent the Bolsheviks, supported by the Central Powers, from seizing power. It is not necessary for me to inform the reader that in this I failed lamentably and I do not ask him to believe me when I state that it seems to me at least possible that if I had been sent six months before I might quite well have succeeded. Three months after my arrival in Petrograd the crash came and put an end to all my plans.

I returned to England. I had had some interesting experiences and had got to know fairly well one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met. This was Boris Savinkov, the terrorist who had assassinated Trepov and the Grand Duke Sergius. But I came away disillusioned. The endless talk when action was needed, the vacillations, the apathy when apathy could only result in destruction, the high-flown protestations, the insincerity and half-heartedness that I found everywhere sickened me with Russia and the Russians. I also came back very ill indeed, for in the position I was in I could not profit by the abundant supplies that made it possible for the embassies to serve their countries on a full stomach and I was (like the Russians themselves) reduced to a meagre diet. (When I arrived in Stockholm, where I had a day to wait for the destroyer that was to take me across the North Sea, I went into a confectioner’s, bought a pound of chocolates and ate them in the street.) A scheme to send me to Rumania in connection with some Polish intrigue, the details of which I now forget, fell through. I was not sorry, for I was coughing my head off and constant fever made my nights very uncomfortable. I went to see the most eminent specialist I could find in London. He packed me off to a sanatorium in the North of Scotland, Davos and St. Moritz at that time being inconvenient to go to, and for the next two years I led an invalid life.

I had a grand time. I discovered for the first time in my life how very delightful it is to lie in bed. It is astonishing how varied life can be when you stay in bed all day and how much you find to do. I delighted in the privacy of my room with the immense window wide open to the starry winter night. It gave me a delicious sense of security, aloofness and freedom. The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure. My imagination was never more nimble; it was like a barque under press of sail scudding before the breeze. The monotonous days, whose only excitement was the books I read and my reflections, passed with inconceivable rapidity. I left my bed with a pang.

It was a strange world that I entered when I grew well enough to mix during part of the day with my fellow-patients. In their different ways these people, some of whom had been in the sanatorium for years, were as singular as any of those I had met in the South Seas. Illness and the queer, sheltered life affected them strangely, twisting, strengthening, deteriorating their character just as in Samoa or Tahiti it was deteriorated, strengthened or twisted by the languorous climate and the alien environment. I think I learnt a good deal about human nature in that sanatorium that otherwise I should never have known.

55

WHEN I recovered from my illness the war was over. I went to China. I went with the feelings of any traveller interested in art and curious to see what he could of the manners of a strange people whose civilisation was of great antiquity; but I went also with the notion that I must surely run across men of various sorts whose acquaintance would enlarge my experience. I did. I filled note-books with descriptions of places and persons and the stories they suggested. I became aware of the specific benefit I was capable of getting from travel; before, it had been only an instinctive feeling. This was freedom of the spirit on the one hand, and on the other, the collection of all manner of persons who might serve my purposes. After that I travelled to many countries. I journeyed over a dozen seas, in liners, in tramps, in schooners; I went by train, by car, by chair, on foot or on horseback. I kept my eyes open for character, oddness and personality. I learnt very quickly when a place promised me something and then I waited till I had got it. Otherwise I passed on. I accepted every experience that came my way. When I could I travelled as comfortably as my ample means allowed, for it seemed to me merely silly to rough it for the sake of roughing it; but I do not think I ever hesitated to do anything because it was uncomfortable or dangerous.

I have never been much of a sight-seer. So much enthusiasm has been expended over the great sights of the world that I can summon up very little when I am confronted with them. I have preferred common things, a wooden house on piles nestling among fruit-trees, the bend of a little bay lined with coconuts, or a group of bamboos by the wayside. My interest has been in men and the lives they led. I am shy of making acquaintance with strangers, but I was fortunate enough to have on my journeys a companion who had an inestimable social gift. He had an amiability of disposition that enabled him in a very short time to make friends with people in ships, clubs, bar-rooms and hotels, so that through him I was able to get into easy contact with an immense number of persons whom otherwise I should have known only from a distance.

I made acquaintance with them with just the degree of intimacy that suited me. It was an intimacy born on their side of ennui or loneliness, that withheld few secrets, but one that separation irrevocably broke. It was close because its limits were settled in advance. Looking back on that long procession I cannot think of anyone who had not something to tell me that I was glad to know. I seemed to myself to develop the sensitiveness of a photographic plate. It did not matter to me if the picture I formed was true; what mattered was that with the help of my imagination I could make of each person I met a plausible harmony. It was the most entrancing game in which I had ever engaged.

One reads that no one exactly resembles anyone else, and that every man is unique, and in a way this is true, but it is a truth easy to exaggerate: in practice men are very much alike. They are divided into comparatively few types. The same circumstances mould them in the same way. Certain characteristics infer certain others. You can, like the palæontologist, reconstruct the animal from a single bone. The ‘characters’ which have been a popular form of letters since Theophrastus, and the ‘humours’ of the seventeenth century, prove that men sort themselves into a few marked categories. Indeed this is the foundation of realism, which depends for its attractiveness on recognition. The romantic method turns its attention to the exceptional; the realistic to the usual. The slightly abnormal circumstances in which men live in the countries where life is primitive or the environment alien to them, emphasize their ordinariness so that it gains a character of its own; and when they are in themselves extraordinary, which of course they sometimes are, the want of the usual restraints permits them to develop their kinks with a freedom that in more civilized communities can be but hardly won. Then you have creatures that realism can hardly cope with. I used to stay away till my receptivity was exhausted and I found that when I met people I had no longer the power to make the imaginative effort to give them shape and coherence; then I returned to England to sort out my impressions and rest till I felt my powers of assimilation restored. At last, after seven, I think, of these long journeys I found a certain sameness in people. I met more and more often types that I had met before. They ceased to interest me so much. I concluded that I had come to the end of my capacity for seeing with passion and individuality the people I went so far to find, for I had never doubted that it was I who gave them the idiosyncrasy that I discovered in them, and so I decided that there was no further profit for me in travel. I had twice nearly died of fever, I had been nearly drowned, I had been shot at by bandits. I was glad to resume a more ordered way of life.

I came back from each of my journeys a little different. In my youth I had read a great deal, not because I supposed that it would benefit me, but from curiosity and the desire to learn; I travelled because it amused me, and to get material that would be of use to me: it never occurred to me that my new experiences were having an effect on me, and it was not till long afterwards that I saw how they had formed my character. In contact with all these strange people I lost the smoothness that I had acquired when, leading the humdrum life of a man of letters, I was one of the stones in a bag. I got back my jagged edges. I was at last myself. I ceased to travel because I felt that travel could give me nothing more. I was capable of no new development. I had sloughed the arrogance of culture. My mood was complete acceptance. I asked from nobody more than he could give me. I had learnt toleration. I was pleased with the goodness of my fellows; I was not distressed by their badness. I had acquired independence of spirit. I had learnt to go my own way without bothering with what others thought about it. I demanded freedom for myself and I was prepared to give freedom to others. It is easy to laugh and shrug your shoulders when people act badly to others; it is much more difficult when they act badly to you. I have not found it impossible. The conclusion I came to about men I put into the mouth of a man I met on board ship in the China Seas. ‘I’ll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell, brother,’ I made him say. ‘Their heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.’

56

I HAVE always liked to let things simmer in my mind for a long time before setting them down on paper, and it was not till four years after I had made my notes for it that I wrote the first of the stories I had conceived in the South Seas. I had not written short stories for many years. I began my literary career by writing them and my third book was a collection of six. They were not good. After that I tried now and then to write stories for the magazines; my agents pressed me to write humorously, but for this I had no aptitude; I was grim, indignant or satirical. My efforts to satisfy editors and thus earn a little money rarely succeeded. The first story I wrote now was called Rain and it looked for a while as though I should have no better luck with it than with those I had written in my youth, for editor after editor refused it; but I no longer minded and I went on. When I had written six, all of which eventually found their way into magazines, I published them in a book. The success they had was pleasant and unexpected. I liked the form. It was very agreeable to live with the personages of my fancy for two or three weeks and then be done with them. One had no time to grow sick of them as one easily may during the months one has to spend in their company when writing a novel. This sort of story, one of about twelve thousand words, gave me ample room to develop my theme, but forced upon me a concision that my practice as a dramatist had made grateful to me.

It was unlucky for me that I set about writing short stories seriously when the better-class writers in England and America were delivered over to the influence of Chekov. The literary world somewhat lacks balance, and when a fancy takes it, is apt to regard it not as a passing fashion, but as Heaven’s first law; and the notion prevailed that anyone who had artistic leanings and wanted to write short stories must write stories like Chekov. Several writers transplanted Russian melancholy, Russian mysticism, Russian fecklessness, Russian despair, Russian futility, Russian infirmity of purpose, to Surrey or Michigan, Brooklyn or Clapham and made quite a reputation for themselves. It must be admitted that Chekov is not hard to imitate. As I know to my cost there are dozens of Russian refugees who do it quite well: to my cost, because they send me their stories so that I may correct the English and then are offended with me when I cannot get vast sums of money for them from American magazines. Chekov was a very good short story writer, but he had his limitations and he very wisely made them the basis of his art. He had no gift for devising a compact, dramatic story, such a story as you could tell with effect over the dinner-table, like L’Héritage or La Parure. As a man, he seems to have been of a cheerful and practical disposition, but as a writer, he was of a depressed melancholic nature that made him turn away with distaste from violent action or exuberance. His humour, often so painful, is the exasperated reaction of a man whose shuddering sensibilities have been rubbed the wrong way. He saw life in a monotone. His people are not sharply individualized. He does not seem to have been much interested in them as persons. Perhaps that is why he is able to give you the feeling that they are all part of one another, strange groping ectoplasms that melt into each other, the sense of the mystery of life and its futility, which give him his unique quality. It is a quality that has escaped his followers.

I do not know if I could ever have written stories in the Chekov manner. I did not want to. I wanted to write stories that proceeded, tightly knit, in an unbroken line from the exposition to the conclusion. I saw the short story as a narrative of a single event, material or spiritual, to which by the elimination of everything that was not essential to its elucidation a dramatic unity could be given. I had no fear of what is technically known as ‘the point.’ It seemed to me that it was reprehensible only if it was not logical, and I thought that the discredit that had been attached to it was due only to the fact that it had been too often tacked on, merely for effect, without legitimate reason. In short, I preferred to end my short stories with a full-stop rather than with a straggle of dots.

It is this, I imagine, that has led to their being better appreciated in France than in England. Our great novels are shapeless and unwieldy. It has pleased the English to lose themselves in these huge, straggling, intimate works; and this laxity of construction, this haphazard conduct of a rambling story, this wandering in and out of curious characters who have nothing much to do with the theme, have given them a peculiar sense of reality. It is this, however, that has given the French an acute sense of discomfort. The sermons that Henry James preached to the English on form in the novel aroused their interest, but have little affected their practice. The fact is that they are suspicious of form. They find in it a sort of airlessness; its constraint irks them; they feel that when the author has fixed upon his material a wilful shape life has slipped through his fingers. The French critic demands that a piece of fiction should have a beginning, a middle and an end; a theme that is clearly developed to a logical conclusion; and that it should tell you all that is of moment to the point at issue. From the familiarity with Maupassant that I gained at an early age, from my training as a dramatist, and perhaps from personal idiosyncrasy, I have, it may be, acquired a sense of form that is pleasing to the French. At all events they find me neither sentimental nor verbose.

57

IT IS very seldom that life provides the writer with a ready-made story. Facts indeed are often very tiresome. They will give a suggestion that excites the imagination, but then are apt to exercise an authority that is only pernicious. The classic example of this is to be found in Le Rouge et le Noir. This is a very great novel, but it is generally acknowledged that the end is unsatisfactory. The reason is not hard to find. Stendhal got the idea for it from an incident that at the time made a great stir: a young seminarist killed his mistress, was tried and guillotined. But Stendhal put into Julien Sorel, his hero, not only a great deal of himself, but much more of what he would have liked to be and was miserably conscious that he was not; he created one of the most interesting personages of fiction and for fully three quarters of his book made him behave with coherence and probability; but then he found himself forced to return to the facts that had been his inspiration. He could only do this by causing his hero to act incongruously with his character and his intelligence. The shock is so great that you no longer believe, and when you do not believe in a novel you are no longer held. The moral is that you must have the courage to throw your facts overboard if they fail to comply with the logic of your character. I do not know how Stendhal could have ended his novel; but I think it would have been hard to find a more unsatisfactory end than the one he chose.

I have been blamed because I have drawn my characters from living persons, and from criticisms that I have read one might suppose that nobody had ever done this before. That is nonsense. It is the universal custom. From the beginning of literature authors have had originals for their creations. Scholars, I believe, give a name to the rich glutton who served as a model to Petronius for his Trimalchio and Shakespearean students find an original for Mr. Justice Shallow. The very virtuous and upright Scott drew a bitter portrait of his father in one book and a pleasanter one, when the passage of years had softened his asperity, in another. Stendhal, in one of his manuscripts, has written the names of the persons who had suggested his characters; Dickens, as we all know, portrayed his father in Mr. Micawber and Leigh Hunt in Harold Skimpole. Turgenev stated that he could not create a character at all unless as a starting point he could fix his imagination on a living person. I suspect that the writers who deny that they use actual persons deceive themselves (which is not impossible, since you can be a very good novelist without being very intelligent) or deceive us. When they tell the truth and have in fact had no particular person in mind, it will be found, I think, that they owe their characters rather to their memory than to their creative instinct. How many times have we met d’Artagnan, Mrs. Proudie, Archdeacon Grantley, Jane Eyre and Jérome Coignard with other names and in other dress! I should say that the practice of drawing characters from actual models is not only universal but necessary. I do not see why any writer should be ashamed to acknowledge it. As Turgenev said, it is only if you have a definite person in your mind that you can give vitality and idiosyncrasy to your own creation.

I insist that it is a creation. We know very little even of the persons we know most intimately; we do not know them enough to transfer them to the pages of a book and make human beings of them. People are too elusive, too shadowy, to be copied; and they are also too incoherent and contradictory. The writer does not copy his originals; he takes what he wants from them, a few traits that have caught his attention, a turn of mind that has fired his imagination, and therefrom constructs his character. He is not concerned whether it is a truthful likeness; he is concerned only to create a plausible harmony convenient for his own purposes. So different may be the finished product from the original that it must be a common experience of authors to be accused of having drawn a life-like portrait of a certain person when they had in mind someone quite different. Further, it is just chance whether the author chooses his models from persons with whom he is intimately connected or not. It is often enough for him to have caught a glimpse of someone in a tea-shop or chatted with him for a quarter of an hour in a ship’s smoking-room. All he needs is that tiny, fertile substratum which he can then build up by means of his experience of life, his knowledge of human nature and his native intuition.

The whole business would be plain-sailing if it were not for the susceptibilities of the persons who serve as models for the author’s characters. So colossal is human egotism that people who have met an author are constantly on the look out for portraits of themselves in his works and if they can persuade themselves that such and such a character is drawn from them they are bitterly affronted if it is drawn with any imperfections. Though they will find fault with their friends freely and ridicule their absurdities, their vanity is so outrageous that they cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that they too have faults and absurdities. The matter is made worse for them by their friends who with malicious indignation offer them feigned sympathy for the outrage they have suffered. Of course there is a lot of humbug about it all. I do not suppose I am the only author who has been vilified by women who claimed that I had stayed with them and abused their hospitality by writing about them when not only had I not stayed with them, but neither knew nor had ever heard of them. The poor drabs were so vain and their lives so empty that they deliberately identified themselves with a creature of odious character in order in some small circle to give themselves a petty notoriety.

Sometimes the author takes a very commonplace person and from him invents a character who is noble, self-controlled and courageous. He has seen in that person a significance that had escaped those he lived with. Then oddly enough the original goes unrecognized; it is only when you shew somebody with faults or ridiculous foibles that a name is at once assigned. I have been forced to conclude from this that we know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits. The author seldom has the wish to give offence and he uses what means he can to protect his originals; he puts the persons of his invention in different places, gives them another means of livelihood, situates them perhaps in a different class; what he cannot so easily do is to change their appearance. The physical traits of a man influence his character and contrariwise his character is expressed, at least in the rough, in his appearance. You cannot make a tall man short and otherwise keep him the same. A man’s height gives him a different outlook on his environment and so changes his character. Nor to cover your tracks can you make a little brunette into a massive blonde. You have to leave them very much as they are or you will lose what it was that moved you to draw a character from them. But no one has the right to take a character in a book and say, this is meant for me. All he may say is, I provided the suggestion for this character. If he has any common sense he will be interested rather than vexed; and the author’s inventiveness and intuition may suggest to him things about himself that it is useful for him to know.

58

I HAVE no illusions about my literary position. There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I do not resent it. It is very natural. I have never been a propagandist. The reading public has enormously increased during the last thirty years and there is a large mass of ignorant people who want knowledge that can be acquired with little labour. They have thought that they were learning something when they read novels in which the characters delivered their views on the burning topics of the day. A bit of love-making thrown in here and there made the information they were given sufficiently palatable. The novel was regarded as a convenient pulpit for the dissemination of ideas and a good many novelists were willing enough to look upon themselves as leaders of thought. The novels they wrote were journalism rather than fiction. They had a news value. Their disadvantage was that after a little while they were as unreadable as last week’s paper. But the demand of this great new public for knowledge has of late given rise to the production of a number of books in which subjects of common interest, science, education, social welfare and I know not what, are treated in non-technical language. Their success has been very great and has killed the propaganda novel. But it is evident that while its vogue lasted it seemed much more significant and so offered a better subject of discourse than the novel of character or adventure.

The intelligent critics, the more serious novel readers, have since then given most of their attention to the writers who seemed to offer something new in technique, and this is very comprehensible, for the novelties they presented gave a sort of freshness to well-worn material and were a fruitful matter of discussion.

It seems strange that so much attention has been paid to these things. The method that Henry James devised and brought to a high degree of perfection of telling his story through the sensibilities of an observer who had some part in its action was an ingenious dodge that gave the dramatic effect he sought in fiction, a verisimilitude grateful to an author much influenced by the French naturalists and a means of getting round some of the difficulties of the novelist who takes up the attitude of an all-seeing and all-wise narrator. What this observer did not know could be left conveniently mysterious. It was, however, only a slight variation from the autobiographical form that has many of the same advantages, and to speak of it as though it were a great æsthetic discovery is somewhat absurd. Of the other experiments that have been made the most important is the use of the stream of thought. Writers have always been attracted by the philosophers who had an emotional value and who were not too hard to understand. They were taken in turn by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson. It was inevitable that psycho-analysis should captivate their fancy. It had great possibilities for the novelist. He knew how much he owed to his own subconscious for the best of what he wrote and it was tempting to explore greater depths of character by an imaginative picture of the subconscious of the persons of his invention. It was a clever and amusing trick, but nothing more. When writers, instead of using it as an occasional device for a particular purpose, ironical, dramatic or explanatory, made it the basis of their work it proved tedious. I conjecture that what is useful in this and similar devices will be absorbed into the general technique of fiction, but that the works that introduced them will soon lose their interest. It seems to have escaped the attention of those who have been taken by these curious experiments that the matter treated of in the books in which they are made use of is of an extreme triviality. It almost looks as though their authors had been driven to these contrivances by an uneasy consciousness of their own emptiness. The persons they describe with all this ingenuity are intrinsically uninteresting and the subjects at issue unimportant. This might be expected. For the artist is absorbed by his technique only when his theme is of no pressing interest to him. When he is obsessed by his topic he has not much time over to think of the artfulness of his presentation. So in the seventeenth century the writers, exhausted by the mental effort of the Renaissance and prevented by the tyranny of kings and the domination of the church from occupying themselves with the great issues of life, turned their minds to gongorism, concettism and such-like toys. It may be that the interest that has been taken during recent years in every form of technical experiment in the arts points to the fact that our civilisation is crumbling; the subjects that seemed important to the nineteenth century have lost their interest, and artists do not yet see what the great issues are that will affect the generation who will create the civilisation which is in course of displacing our own.

59

I LOOK upon it as very natural then that the world of letters should have attached no great importance to my work. In the drama I have found myself at home in the traditional moulds. As a writer of fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men. I have had some sort of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it. To me it has been a sufficient object in itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now a story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot. (In passing I should like to say that I cannot understand the sharp distinction some clever theorists make between story and plot. A plot is merely the pattern on which the story is arranged.) From these books you would judge that it is only a hindrance to the intelligent author and a concession that he makes to the stupid demands of the public. Indeed, sometimes you might think that the best novelist is the essayist, and that the only perfect short stories have been written by Charles Lamb and Hazlitt.

But the delight in listening to stories is as natural to human nature as the delight in looking at the dancing and miming out of which drama arose. That it exists unimpaired is shown by the vogue of the detective novel. The most intellectual persons read them, with condescension of course, but they read them, and why, if not because the psychological, the pedagogic, the psycho-analytic novels which alone their minds approve do not give them the satisfaction of this particular need? There are a number of clever writers who, with all sorts of good things in their heads to say and a gift for creating living people, do not know what on earth to do with them when they have created them. They cannot invent a plausible story. Like all writers (and in all writers there is a certain amount of humbug) they make a merit of their limitations and either tell the reader that he can imagine for himself what happens or else berate him for wanting to know. They claim that in life stories are not finished, situations are not rounded off and loose ends are left hanging. This is not always true, for at least death finishes all our stories; but even if it were it would not be a good argument.

For the novelist claims to be an artist and the artist does not copy life, he makes an arrangement out of it to suit his own purposes. Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story; his view of life, though he may be unconscious of it, his personality, exist as a series of human actions. When you look back on the art of the past you can hardly fail to notice that artists have seldom attached great value to realism. On the whole they have used nature to make a formal decoration and they have only copied it directly from time to time when their imagination had taken them so far from it that a return was felt necessary. In painting and sculpture it might even be argued that a very close approximation to reality has always announced the decadence of a school. In the sculpture of Phidias you see already the dullness of the Apollo Belvedere and in Raphael’s Miracle at Bolsano the vapidity of Bouguereau. Then art can only gain new vigour by forcing on nature a new convention.

But that is by the way.

It is a natural desire in the reader to want to know what happens to the people in whom his interest has been aroused and the plot is the means by which you gratify this desire. A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it. It should have coherence and sufficient probability for the needs of the theme; it should be of a nature to display the development of character, which is the chief concern of fiction at the present day, and it should have completeness, so that when it is finally unfolded no more questions can be asked about the persons who took part in it. It should have like Aristotle’s tragedy a beginning, a middle and an end. The chief use of a plot is one that many people do not seem to have noticed. It is a line to direct the reader’s interest. That is possibly the most important thing in fiction, for it is by direction of interest that the author carries the reader along from page to page and it is by direction of interest that he induces in him the mood he desires. The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot he can engage the reader’s attention so that he does not perceive what violence has been done him. I am not writing a technical treatise on the novel, so I need not enumerate the various devices that novelists have used to achieve this. But how efficacious this direction of interest may be and how injurious its neglect is well shown in Sense and Sensibility and in L’Education Sentimentale. Jane Austen leads the reader so firmly along the line of the simple story that he does not stop to reflect that Elinor is a prig, Marianne a fool, and the three men lifeless dummies. Flaubert, aiming at a rigid objectivity, directs the reader’s interests so little that he is perfectly indifferent to the fortunes of the various characters. This makes the novel very difficult to read. I cannot think of another that has so many merits and leaves so shadowy an impression.

60

IN MY twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they said I was flippant, in my forties they said I was cynical, in my fifties they said I was competent, and now in my sixties they say I am superficial. I have gone my way, following the course I had mapped out for myself, and trying with my works to fill out the pattern I looked for. I think authors are unwise who do not read criticisms. It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise; for of course it is easy to shrug one’s shoulders when one finds oneself described as a genius, but not so easy to be unconcerned when one is treated as a nincompoop. The history of criticism is there to show that contemporary criticism is fallible. It is a nice point to decide how far the author should consider it and how far ignore it. And such is the diversity of opinion that it is very difficult for an author to arrive at any conclusion about his merit. In England there is a natural tendency to despise the novel. The autobiography of an insignificant politician, the life of a royal courtesan will receive serious critical consideration, whereas half a dozen novels will be reviewed in a bunch by a reviewer who is concerned only too often to be amusing at their expense. The fact is simply that the English are more interested in works of information than in works of art. This makes it difficult for the novelist to get from criticisms of his work anything that will be useful to his own development.

It is a great misfortune to English letters that we have not had in this century a critic of the class, say, of Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold or even Brunetière. It is true that he would not have occupied himself much with current literature, and if we may judge by the three I have mentioned, had he done so it would have been of no direct service to contemporary writers. For Sainte-Beuve, as we know, was too envious of a form of success he hankered after, but never achieved, to treat his contemporaries with fairness; and Matthew Arnold’s taste was so much at fault when he dealt with French writers of his day that there is no reason to suppose it would have been any better if he had dealt with English ones. Brunetière had no tolerance; he measured writers by hard and fast rules and was incapable of seeing merit in those who had aims with which he did not sympathize. His force of character gave him an influence that his talents did not warrant. But notwithstanding, writers benefit by a critic who is gravely concerned with literature; even if they resent him they may be incited by antagonism to a clearer definition of their own aims. He can provoke in them an excitement that calls them to more conscious effort and his example urges them to take their art with a more intense seriousness.

In one of his dialogues Plato seemingly has tried to show the impossibility of criticism; but in fact he has only shown to what extravagance the Socratic method may sometimes lead. There is one sort of criticism that is evidently futile. This is that which is written by the critic to compensate himself for humiliations he has suffered in his early youth. Criticism affords him a means of regaining his self-esteem. Because at school, unable to adapt himself to the standards of that narrow world, he has been kicked and cuffed, he will when grown up cuff and kick in his turn in order to assuage his wounded feelings. His interest is in his reaction to the work he is considering, not in the reaction it has to him.

There can seldom have been a greater need than now of a critic of authority, for the arts are at sixes and sevens. We see composers telling stories, painters philosophizing, and novelists preaching sermons; we see poets impatient with their own harmony trying to fit with their verse the other harmony of prose, and we see the writers of prose trying to force on it the rhythms of verse. Someone is badly wanted to define once more the characters peculiar to the several arts and to point out to those who go astray that their experiments can lead only to their own confusion. It is too much to expect that anyone may be found who can speak with equal competence in all the arts; but, the demand producing the supply, we may still hope that one of these days a critic will arise to ascend the throne once occupied by Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold. He could do much. I have read lately two or three books in which a claim is made to form an exact science of criticism. They have not convinced me that such a thing is possible. Criticism to my mind is a personal matter, but there is nothing against that if the critic has a great personality. It is dangerous for him to look upon his activity as creative. His business is to guide, to appraise, and to point to new avenues of creation, but if he looks upon himself as creative he will be more occupied with creation, the most enthralling of human activities, than with the functions proper to him. It is perhaps well for him to have written a play, a novel and some verse, for thus as in no other way can he acquire the technique of letters; but he cannot be a great critic unless he has realized that to create is not his affair. One of the reasons why current criticism is so useless is that it is done as a side-issue by creative writers. It is only natural that they should think the sort of thing they do the thing best worth doing. The great critic should have a sympathy as wide as his knowledge is universal. It should be grounded not on a general indifference, such as makes men tolerant of things they care nothing about, but on an active delight in diversity. He must be a psychologist and a physiologist, for he must know how the basic elements of literature are related to the minds and bodies of men; and he must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things. He must be familiar not only with the literature of his native land. With standards founded on the literature of the past, and studious of contemporary literature in other countries, he will see clearly the trend that literature in its evolution is pursuing and so be enabled profitably to direct that of his own countrymen. He must support himself on tradition, for tradition is the expression of the inevitable idiosyncrasies of a nation’s literature, but he must do everything he can to encourage its development in its natural direction. Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. He must have patience, firmness and enthusiasm. Each book he reads should be a new and thrilling adventure; he judges it by the universality of his knowledge and the strength of his character. In fact the great critic must be a great man. He must be great enough to recognize with good-humoured resignation that his work, though so important, can have but an ephemeral value; for his merit is that he responds to the needs of, and points the way to, his own generation. A new generation arises with other needs, a new way stretches before it; he has nothing more to say and is thrown with all his works into the dust-heap.

To spend his life to such an end can only be worth his while if he thinks literature one of the most important of human pursuits.

61

THAT IS a claim that the author has always made and to this he has added another claim: he has asserted that he was not as other men and in consequence not amenable to their rules. Other men have received it with obloquy, derision and contempt. This he has met in different ways according to his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes he has flaunted his difference from what he was inclined to call the common herd by wilful eccentricity and to pater le bourgeon has paraded the red waistcoat of Théophile Gautier or, like Gérard de Nerval, led a lobster tied by a pink ribbon down the street; sometimes he has taken an ironic pleasure in pretending to be the same as every one else and with Browning has dressed the poet within him in the likeness of a prosperous banker. It may be that we are all of us a bundle of mutually contradictory selves, but the writer, the artist, is deeply conscious of it. With other men, the life they lead makes one side of them predominant, so that, except perhaps in the depths of the subconscious, it ends by being the whole man. But the painter, the writer, the saint, is always looking in himself for new facets; he is bored at repeating himself and seeks, though it may be without actually knowing it, to prevent himself from becoming one-sided. He never gets the opportunity to grow into a self-consistent, coherent creature.

Other men have been outraged on discovering, as they so often have, the discrepancy between the artist’s life and his work. They have not been able to reconcile Beethoven’s idealism with his meanness of spirit, Wagner’s heavenly rapture with his selfishness and dishonesty, Cervantes’ moral obliquity with his tenderness and magnanimity. Sometimes, in their indignation, they have sought to persuade themselves that the work of such men could not possess the value they thought. When it has been brought to their knowledge that great and pure poets had left behind them a large body of obscene verse they have been horrified. They have had an uneasy feeling that the whole thing was a sham. ‘What arrant humbugs these people are!’ they say. But the point of the writer is that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create many and the measure of his greatness is the number of selves that he comprises. When he fashions a character that does not carry conviction it is because there is in himself nothing of that person; he has had to fall back on observation, and so has only described, not begotten. The writer does not feel with; he feels in. It is not sympathy that he has, that too often results in sentimentality; he has what the psychologists call empathy. It is because Shakespeare had this to so great a degree that he was at once the most living and the least sentimental of authors. I think Goethe was the first writer to grow conscious of this multiple personality and it troubled him all his life. He was always comparing the writer that he was with the man and he could not quite reconcile the discongruity. But the end of the artist and the end of other men are different, for the end of the artist is production while the end of other men is right action. And so the artist’s attitude to life is in a certain way peculiar to himself. The psychologists tell us that with the ordinary man an image is less vivid than a sensation. It is an attenuated experience that serves to give information about objects of sense and in the world of sense is a guide to action. His day-dreams satisfy emotional needs and fulfil desires that in the world of affairs are frustrated. But they are pale shadows of real life and at the back of his mind is the awareness that the demands of the world of sense have another validity. To the writer this is not so. The images, free ideas that throng his mind, are not guides but materials for action. They have all the vividness of sensation. His day-dreams are so significant to him that it is the world of sense that is shadowy and he has to reach out for it by an effort of will. His castles in Spain are no baseless fabric, but real castles that he lives in.

The artist’s egoism is outrageous: it must be; he is by nature a solipsist and the world exists only for him to exercise upon it his powers of creation. He partakes of life only with part of him and never feels the common emotions of men with his whole being, for however urgent the necessity he is an observer as well as an actor. It often makes him seem heartless. Women with their shrewd sense are on the guard against him; they are attracted by him, but instinctively feel that they can never completely dominate him, which is their desire, for they know that somehow he escapes them. Has not Goethe, that great lover, himself told us how he composed verses in the arms of his beloved and with singing fingers softly tapped the beat of his hexameters on her shapely back? The artist is ill to live with. He can be perfectly sincere in his creative emotion and yet there is someone else within him who is capable of cocking a snook at its exercise. He is not dependable.

But the gods never make any of their gifts without adding to them a drawback and this multiplicity of the writer that enables him, like the gods, to create human beings prevents him from achieving perfect truth in their creation. Realism is relative. The most realistic writer by the direction of his interest falsifies his creatures. He sees them through his own eyes. He makes them more self-conscious than they really are. He makes them more reflective and more complicated. He throws himself into them, trying to make them ordinary men, but he never quite succeeds; for the peculiarity that gives him his talent and makes him a writer for ever prevents him from knowing exactly what ordinary men are. It is not truth he attains, but merely a transposition of his own personality. And the greater his talent, the more powerful his individuality, the more fantastic is the picture of life he draws. It has sometimes seemed to me that if posterity wants to know what the world of to-day was like it will not go to those writers whose idiosyncrasy has impressed our contemporaries, but to the mediocre ones whose ordinariness has allowed them to describe their surroundings with a greater faithfulness. I do not mention them since, even though they may be assured of the appreciation of after ages, people do not like to be labelled as mediocre. But I think it may be admitted that one gets the impression of a truer picture of life in the novels of Anthony Trollope than in those of Charles Dickens.

62

SOMETIMES THE writer must ask himself whether what he has written has any value except to himself and the question is perhaps urgent now when the world seems, at least to us who live in it, in such a condition of unrest and wretchedness as it has not often been in before. For me the question has had a special import for I have never wished to be nothing but a writer; I have wished to live life completely. I have been uneasily conscious that it was a duty I owed myself to take some part, however small, in the business of the common weal. My natural inclination has been to keep aloof from every kind of public activity and it has been with the greatest reluctance that I have even served on committees formed to effect some aim of passing interest. Thinking that not the whole of life was long enough to learn to write well, I have been unwilling to give to other activities time that I so much needed to achieve the purpose I had in mind. I have never been able intimately to persuade myself that anything else mattered. Notwithstanding, when men in millions are living on the border-line of starvation, when freedom in great parts of the inhabited globe is dying or dead, when a terrible war has been succeeded by years during which happiness has been out of the reach of the great mass of the human race, when men are distraught because they can see no value in life and the hopes that had enabled them for so many centuries to support its misery seem illusory; it is hard not to ask oneself whether it is anything but futility to write plays and stories and novels. The only answer I can think of is that some of us are so made that there is nothing else we can do. We do not write because we want to; we write because we must. There may be other things in the world that more pressingly want doing: we must liberate our souls of the burden of creation. We must go on though Rome burns. Others may despise us because we do not lend a hand with a bucket of water; we cannot help it; we do not know how to handle a bucket. Besides, the conflagration thrills us and charges our mind with phrases.

From time to time, however, writers have engaged in politics. Its effect on them as writers has been injurious. I have not noticed that their counsel has had much influence on the conduct of affairs. The only exception I can recall is Disraeli; but in his case, it is not unfair to say, writing was not an end in itself, but a means to political advancement. At the present day, living as we do in an age of specialisation, I have a notion that on the whole the cobbler does best to stick to his last.

Because I had heard that Dryden had learnt to write English from his study of Tillotson, I read certain passages of this author and I came across a piece that gave me some consolation in this matter. It ran as follows: ‘We ought to be glad, when those that are fit for government, and called to it, are willing to take the burden of it upon them; yea, and to be very thankful to them too, that they will be at the pains, and can have the patience, to govern and live publicly. Therefore it is happy for the world that there are some who are born and bred up to it; and that custom hath made it easy, or at least tolerable to them.... The advantage which men have by a more devout and retired and contemplative life, is, that they are not distracted about many things; their minds and affections are set upon one thing; and the whole stream and force of their affections run one way. All their thoughts and endeavours are united in one great end and design, which makes their life all of a piece, and to be consistent with itself throughout.’

63

WHEN I started this book I warned the reader that perhaps the only thing of which I was certain was that I was certain of nothing else. I was trying to put my thoughts on sundry subjects in order and I asked no one to agree with me in my opinions. On revising what I have written, I have cut out the words, I think, in a great many places because, though they came to my pen naturally, I found them tedious, but they are to be understood as qualifying my every statement. And now that I come to this last section of my book, I am constrained more anxiously than ever to repeat that what I give are my own private convictions. It may be that they are superficial. It may be that some of them are contradictory. It is unlikely that surmises that are the outcome of thoughts, feelings, and desires built up out of all sorts of haphazard experiences and coloured by a particular personality should fit with the logical precision of a proposition of Euclid. When I wrote of the drama and of fiction I wrote of what by practice I had some cognizance of, but now that I come to deal with matters of which philosophers treat I have no more special knowledge than can be acquired by any man who has lived for many years a busy and varied life. Life also is a school of philosophy, but it is like one of those modern kindergartens in which children are left to their own devices and work only at the subjects that arouse their interest. Their attention is drawn to what seems to have a meaning for them and they take no notice of what does not immediately concern them. In psychological laboratories rats are trained to find their way through a maze and presently by trial and error they learn the path that leads to the food they seek. In the matters with which I now occupy myself I am like one of these rats scurrying along the pathways of the complicated maze, but I do not know that it has a centre where I shall find what I seek. For all I know all the alleys are blind.

I was introduced to philosophy by Kuno Fischer whose lectures I attended when I was at Heidelberg. He had a great reputation there and he was giving that winter a course of lectures on Schopenhauer. They were crowded and one had to queue up early in order to get a good seat. He was a dapper, short, stoutish man, neat in his dress, with a bullet head, white hair en brosse and a red face. His little eyes were quick and shining. He had a funny, flattened snub nose that looked as if it had been bashed in, and you would have been much more likely to take him for an old prize-fighter than for a philosopher. He was a humorist; he had indeed written a book on wit which I read at the time, but which I have completely forgotten, and every now and then a great guffaw broke from his audience of students as he made a joke. His voice was powerful and he was a vivid, impressive and exciting speaker. I was too young and too ignorant to understand much of what he said, but I got a very clear impression of Schopenhauer’s odd and original personality and a confused feeling of the dramatic value and the romantic quality of his system. I hesitate to make any statement after so many years, but I have a notion that Kuno Fischer treated it as a work of art rather than as a serious contribution to metaphysics.

Since then I have read a great deal of philosophy. I have found it very good reading. Indeed, of the various great subjects that afford reading matter to the person for whom reading is a need and a delight it is the most varied, the most copious and the most satisfying. Ancient Greece is thrilling, but from this point of view there is not enough in it; a time comes when you have read the little that remains of its literature and all of significance that has been written about it. The Italian Renaissance is fascinating too, but the subject, comparatively, is small; the ideas that informed it were few, and you get tired of its art which has been long since drained of its creative value so that you are left only with grace, charm and symmetry (qualities of which you can have enough) and you get tired of its men, whose versatility falls into too uniform a pattern. You can go on reading about the Italian Renaissance for ever, but your interest fails before the material is exhausted. The French Revolution is another subject that may well engage the attention and it has the advantage that its significance is actual. It is close to us in point of time so that with a very small effort of imagination we can put ourselves into the men who made it. They are almost contemporaries. And what they did and what they thought affect the lives we lead to-day; after a fashion we are all descendants of the French Revolution. And the material is abundant. The documents that relate to it are countless and the last thing has never been said about it. You can always find something fresh and interesting to read. But it does not satisfy. The art and literature it directly produced are negligible, so that you are driven to the study of the men who made it, and the more you read about them the more are you dismayed by their pettiness and vulgarity. The actors in one of the greatest dramas in the world’s history were pitifully inadequate to their parts. You turn away from the subject at last with a faint disgust.

But metaphysics never lets you down. You can never come to the end of it. It is as various as the soul of man. It has greatness, for it deals with nothing less than the whole of knowledge. It treats of the universe, of God and immortality, of the properties of human reason and the end and purpose of life, of the power and limitations of man; and if it cannot answer the questions that assail him on his journey through this dark and mysterious world it persuades him to support his ignorance with good humour. It teaches resignation and inculcates courage. It appeals to the imagination as well as to the intelligence; and to the amateur, much more, I suppose, than to the professional, it affords matter for that reverie which is the most delicious pleasure with which man can beguile his idleness.

Since, inspired by Kuno Fischer’s lectures, I began to read Schopenhauer I have read pretty well all the most important works of the great classical philosophers. Though there is in them a great deal that I did not understand, and perhaps I did not even understand as much as I thought, I have read them with passionate interest. The only one who has consistently bored me is Hegel. This is doubtless my own fault, for his influence on philosophical thought during the nineteenth century proves his importance. I found him terribly long-winded and I could never reconcile myself to the jugglery with which it seemed to me he proved whatever he had a mind to. Perhaps I was prejudiced against him by the scorn with which Schopenhauer always spoke of him. But to the others, from Plato onwards, I surrendered myself, one after the other, with the pleasure of a traveller adventuring into an unknown country. I did not read critically, but as I might have read a novel, for the excitement and delight of it. (I have already confessed that I read a novel not for instruction, but for pleasure. I crave my reader’s indulgence.) A student of character, I got an immense amount of pleasure out of the self-revelation which these various writers offered to my survey. I saw the man behind his philosophy and I was exalted by the nobility I found in some and amused by the queerness I discerned in others. I felt a wonderful exhilaration when I dizzily followed Plotinus in his flight from the alone to the alone, and though I have learnt since that Descartes drew preposterous conclusions from his effective premiss I was entranced by the lucidity of his expression. To read him was like swimming in a lake so clear that you could see the bottom; that crystalline water was wonderfully refreshing. I look upon my first reading of Spinoza as one of the signal experiences of my life. It filled me with just that feeling of majesty and exulting power that one has at the sight of a great mountain range.

And when I came to the English philosophers, with perhaps a slight prejudice, for it had been impressed upon me in Germany that, with the possible exception of Hume, they were quite negligible and Hume’s only importance was that Kant had demolished him, I found that besides being philosophers they were uncommonly good writers. And though they might not be very great thinkers, of this I could not presume to judge, they were certainly very curious men. I should think that few could read Hobbes’ Leviathan without being taken by the gruff, downright John Bullishness of his personality and surely no one could read Berkeley’s Dialogues without being ravished by the charm of that delightful bishop. And though it may be true that Kant made hay of Hume’s theories it would be impossible, I think, to write philosophy with more elegance, urbanity and clearness. They all, and Locke too for the matter of that, wrote English that the student of style could do much worse than study. Before I start writing a novel I read Candide over again so that I may have in the back of my mind the touchstone of that lucidity, grace and wit; I have a notion that it would not hurt the English philosophers of our own day if before they set about a work they submitted themselves to the discipline of reading Hume’s Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding. For it is not invariably that they write now with distinction. It may be that their thoughts are so much more subtle than those of their predecessors that they are obliged to use a technical vocabulary of their own invention; but it is a dangerous procedure, and when they deal with matters that are of pressing concern to all reflective persons, one can only regret that they cannot make their meaning so plain that all who read may understand. They tell me that Professor Whitehead has the most ingenious brain of anyone who is now engaged in philosophic thought. It seems to me a pity then that he should not always take pains to make his sense clear. It was a good rule of Spinoza’s to indicate the nature of things by words whose customary meanings should not be altogether opposed to the meanings he desired to bestow upon them.

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THERE IS no reason why philosophers should not be also men of letters. But to write well does not come by instinct; it is an art that demands arduous study. The philosopher does not speak only to other philosophers and to undergraduates working for a degree; he speaks also to the men of letters, politicians and reflective persons who directly mould the ideas of the coming generation. They, naturally enough, are taken by a philosophy that is striking and not too difficultly assimilated. We all know how the philosophy of Nietzsche has affected some parts of the world and few would assert that its influence has been other than disastrous. It has prevailed, not by such profundity of thought as it may have, but by a vivid style and an effective form. The philosopher who will not take the trouble to make himself clear shows only that he thinks his thought of no more than academic value.

It has, however, been a consolation to me to discover that sometimes even the professional philosophers do not understand one another. Bradley frequently confesses that he is at a loss to understand what someone with whom he is arguing means and Professor Whitehead in one place states that something Bradley says is beyond his comprehension. When the most eminent philosophers cannot always understand one another the layman may well feel resigned if he often does not understand them. Of course metaphysics is difficult. One must expect that. The layman walks a tight-rope without a pole to balance him and he must be thankful if he can scramble somehow to safety. The feat is exciting enough to make it worth his while to risk a tumble.

I was much disconcerted by the claim that I found here and there advanced that philosophy was the province of the higher mathematicians; and though it seemed hard to me to believe that, if knowledge, as the doctrine of evolution suggests, has been developed for practical reasons in the struggle for existence, the sum total of it, something that is essential to the well-being of man in general, could be reserved only for a small body of men who are gifted by nature with a rare faculty, I might very well have been deterred from pursuing my pleasant studies in this direction, since I have no head for mathematics, if I had not luckily come across an admission of Bradley’s that he knew very little of this abstruse science. And Bradley was no mean philosopher. We know that the sense of taste differs in various persons; but without it men would perish. It seems as unlikely that you may not hold reasonable theories about the universe and man’s place in it, the mystery of evil and the meaning of reality, unless you are a mathematical physicist, as that you cannot enjoy a bottle of wine unless you have the trained sensibility that enables you without error to ascribe a year to twenty different clarets.

For philosophy is not a subject that has to do only with philosophers and mathematicians. It is one that concerns us all. It is true that most of us accept our opinions on the matters with which it deals at second hand and most do not know that they have any philosophy at all. But it is implicit even in the most thoughtless. The old woman who first said, ‘it’s no good crying over spilt milk’ was a philosopher in her way. For what did she mean by this except that regret was useless? A complete system of philosophy is implied. The determinist thinks that you cannot take a step in life that is not motivated by what you are at the moment; and you are not only your muscles, your nerves, your entrails and your brain; you are your habits, your opinions and your ideas. However little you may be aware of them, however contradictory, unreasonable and prejudiced they may be, they are there, influencing your actions and reactions. Even if you have never put them into words they are your philosophy. Perhaps it is well enough that most people should leave this unformulated. It is hardly thoughts they have, at least not conscious thoughts, it is a kind of vague feeling, a sort of experience like that muscular sense that the physiologists not so long ago discovered, which they have absorbed from the notions current in the society in which they live and which has been faintly modified by their own experience. They lead their ordered lives and this confused body of ideas and feelings is enough. Since it includes something of the wisdom of the ages, it is adequate for the ordinary purposes of the ordinary life. But I have sought to make a pattern of mine and from an early age tried to find out what were the elements I had to deal with. I wanted to get what knowledge I could about the general structure of the universe; I wanted to make up my mind whether I had to consider only this life or a life to come; I wanted to discover whether I was a free agent or whether my feeling that I could mould myself according to my will was an illusion; I wanted to know whether life had any meaning or whether it was I that must strive to give it one. So in a desultory way I began to read.

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THE FIRST subject that attracted my attention was religion. For it seemed to me of the greatest importance to decide whether this world I lived in was the only one I had to reckon with or whether I must look upon it as no more than a place of trial which was to prepare me for a life to come. When I wrote Of Human Bondage I gave a chapter to my hero’s loss of the faith in which he had been brought up. The book was read in typescript by a very clever woman who at that time was good enough to be interested in me. She told me that this chapter was inadequate. I rewrote it; but I do not think I much improved it. For it described my own experience and I have no doubt that my reasons for coming to the conclusion I came to were inadequate. They were the reasons of an ignorant boy. They were of the heart rather than of the head. When my parents died I went to live with my uncle who was a clergyman. He was a childless man of fifty, and I am sure that it was a great nuisance to have the charge of a small boy thrust upon him. He read prayers morning and evening, and we went to church twice on Sundays. Sunday was the busy day. My uncle always said that he was the only man in his parish who worked seven days a week. In point of fact he was incredibly idle and left the work of his parish to his curate and his churchwardens. But I was impressionable and soon became very religious. I accepted what I was taught, both in my uncle’s vicarage and afterwards at school, with unquestioning trust.

There was one point that immediately affected me. I had not been long at school before I discovered, through the ridicule to which I was exposed and the humiliations I suffered, how great a misfortune it was to me that I stammered; and I had read in the Bible that if you had faith you could move mountains. My uncle assured me that it was a literal fact. One night, when I was going back to school next day, I prayed to God with all my might that he would take away my impediment; and, such was my faith, I went to sleep quite certain that when I awoke next morning I should be able to speak like everybody else. I pictured to myself the surprise of the boys (I was still at a preparatory school) when they found that I no longer stammered. I woke full of exultation and it was a real, a terrible shock, when I discovered that I stammered as badly as ever.

I grew older. I went to the King’s School. The masters were clergymen; they were stupid and irascible. They were impatient of my stammering and if they did not ignore me completely, which I preferred, they bullied me. They seemed to think it was my fault that I stammered. Presently I discovered that my uncle was a selfish man who cared for nothing but his own comfort. The neighbouring clergy sometimes came to the vicarage. One of them was fined in the county court for starving his cows; another had to resign his living because he was convicted of drunkenness. I was taught that we lived in the presence of God and that the chief business of man was to save his soul. I could not help seeing that none of these clergymen practised what they preached. Fervent though my faith was, I had been terribly bored by all the church-going that was forced upon me, both at home and at school, and on going to Germany I welcomed the freedom that enabled me to stay away. But two or three times out of curiosity I went to High Mass at the Jesuit Church in Heidelberg. Though my uncle had a natural sympathy for Catholics (he was a High Churchman and at election time they painted on the garden fence, ‘This way to Rome’), he had no doubt that they would frizzle in hell. He believed implicitly in eternal punishment. He hated the dissenters in his parish and indeed thought it a monstrous thing that the state tolerated them. His consolation was that they too would suffer eternal damnation. Heaven was reserved for the members of the Church of England. I accepted it as a great mercy of God that I had been bred in that communion. It was as wonderful as being born an Englishman.

But when I went to Germany I discovered that the Germans were just as proud of being Germans as I was proud of being English. I heard them say that the English did not understand music and that Shakespeare was only appreciated in Germany. They spoke of the English as a nation of shop-keepers and had no doubt in their minds that as artists, men of science and philosophers they were greatly superior. It shook me. And now at High Mass in Heidelberg I could not but notice that the students, who filled the church to its doors, seemed very devout. They had, indeed, all the appearance of believing in their religion as sincerely as I believed in mine. It was queer that they could, for of course I knew that theirs was false and mine was true. I think I can have had by nature no strong religious feeling, or else in the intolerance of my youth I must have been so shocked by the contrast of the practice with the professions of the various clergymen with whom I had to do, that I was already inclined to doubt; otherwise I can hardly think that such a simple little notion as then occurred to me could have had consequences that were to me of so much importance. It struck me that I might very well have been born in South Germany, and then I should naturally have been brought up as a Catholic. I found it very hard that thus through no fault of my own I should have been condemned to everlasting torment. My ingenuous nature revolted at the injustice. The next step was easy; I came to the conclusion that it could not matter a row of pins what one believed; God could not condemn people just because they were Spaniards or Hottentots. I might have stopped there and if I had been less ignorant adopted some form of deism like that which was current in the eighteenth century. But the beliefs that had been instilled into me hung together and when one of them came to seem outrageous the others participated in its fate. The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God but on the fear of Hell, tumbled down like a house of cards.

With my mind at all events I ceased to believe in God; I felt the exhilaration of a new freedom. But we do not believe only with our minds; in some deep recess of my soul there lingered still the old dread of hell-fire, and for long my exultation was tempered by the shadow of that ancestral anxiety. I no longer believed in God; I still, in my bones, believed in the Devil.

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IT WAS this fear that I sought to banish when, becoming a medical student, I entered a new world. I read a great many books. They told me that man was a machine subject to mechanical laws; and when the machine ran down that was the end of him. I saw men die at the hospital and my startled sensibilities confirmed what my books had taught me. I was satisfied to believe that religion and the idea of God were constructions that the human race had evolved as a convenience for living, and represented something that had at one time, and for all I was prepared to say still had, value for the survival of the species, but that must be historically explained and corresponded to nothing real. I called myself an agnostic, but in my blood and my bones I looked upon God as a hypothesis that a reasonable man must reject.

But if there was no God who could consign me to eternal flames and no soul that could be thus consigned, if I was the plaything of mechanical forces and the struggle for life was the impelling force, I could not see that there was any meaning in good such as I had been taught it. I began to read Ethics. I waded conscientiously through many formidable tomes. I came to the conclusion that man aimed at nothing but his own pleasure and that when he sacrificed himself for others it was only an illusion that led him to believe that he was seeking anything but his own gratification. And since the future was uncertain it was only common sense to seize every pleasure that the moment offered. I decided that right and wrong were merely words and that the rules of conduct were no more than conventions that men had set up to serve their own selfish purposes. The free man had no reason to follow them except in so far as they suited his convenience. Having then an epigrammatic turn, and epigrams being the fashion, I put my conviction into a phrase and said to myself: follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner. By the time I was twenty-four I had constructed a complete system of philosophy. It rested on two principles: The Relativity of Things and The Circumferentiality of Man. I have learnt since that the first of these was not a very original discovery. It may be that the other was profound, but though I have racked my brains I cannot for the life of me remember what on earth it meant.

On a certain occasion I read a little story that greatly took my fancy. It is to be found in one of the volumes of Anatole France’s La Vie Littéraire. It is many years since I read it, but it has remained in my recollection as follows: a young king of the East, anxious on his ascent of the throne to rule his kingdom justly, sent for the wise men of his country and ordered them to gather the wisdom of the world in books so that he might read them and learn how best to conduct himself. They went away and after thirty years returned with a string of camels laden with five thousand tomes. Here, they told him, is collected everything that wise men have learnt of the history and destiny of man. But the king was immersed in affairs of state and could not read so many books, so he bade them go and condense this knowledge into a smaller number. Fifteen years later they returned and their camels carried but five hundred works. In these volumes, they told the king, you will find all the wisdom of the world. But there were still too many and the king sent them away again. Ten years passed and they came back and now they brought no more than fifty books. But the king was old and tired. He had no time now even to read so few and he ordered his wise men once more to reduce their number and in a single volume give him an epitome of human knowledge so that he might learn at last what it was so important for him to know. They went away and set to work and in five years returned. They were old men when for the last time they came and laid the result of their labours in the king’s hands, but now the king was dying and he had no time any more to read even the one book they brought him.

It was some such book as this that I sought, a book that would answer once for all the questions that puzzled me, so that, everything being settled for good and all, I could pursue the pattern of my life without let or hindrance. I read and read. From the classical philosophers I turned to the moderns, thinking that among them, perhaps, I should find what I wanted. I could not discover much agreement among them. I found myself convinced by the critical parts of their works, but when I came to the constructive, though often I failed to see the flaws, I could not but be conscious that they did not compel my assent. The impression suggested itself to me that notwithstanding their learning, their logic and their classifications, philosophers embraced such and such beliefs not because they were led to them by their reason, but because their temperaments forced these beliefs upon them. Otherwise I could not understand how after all this time they differed from one another so profoundly. When I read, I do not know where, that Fichte had said that the kind of philosophy a man adopts depends on the kind of man he is, it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking for something that could not be found. It seemed to me then that if there was in philosophy no universal truth that everyone could accept, but only a truth that agreed with the personality of the individual, the only thing for me was to narrow my search and look for some philosopher whose system suited me because I was the same sort of man that he was. The answers that he would provide to the questions that puzzled me must satisfy me because they would be the only possible answers to fit my humour.

For some time I was much attracted by the pragmatists. I had not got as much profit as I expected from the metaphysical writings of the dons at the great English universities. They seemed to me too gentlemanlike to be very good philosophers and I could not resist the suspicion that sometimes they failed to pursue an argument to its logical conclusion for fear of offending the susceptibilities of colleagues with whom they were in social relations. The pragmatists had vigour. They were very much alive. The most important of them wrote well, and they gave an appearance of simplicity to problems which I had not been able to make head or tail of. But much as I should have liked to I could not bring myself to believe, as they did, that truth is fashioned by us to meet our practical needs. The sense-datum, on which I thought all knowledge was based, seemed to me something given, which had to be accepted whether it suited the convenience or not. Nor did I feel comfortable with the argument that God existed if it consoled me to believe that he did. The pragmatists ceased to interest me so much. I found Bergson good to read, but singularly unconvincing; nor did I find in Benedetto Croce anything to my purpose. On the other hand, in Bertrand Russell I discovered a writer who greatly pleased me; he was easy to understand and his English was good. I read him with admiration.

I was very willing to accept him as the guide I sought. He had worldly wisdom and common sense. He was tolerant of human weakness. But I discovered in time that he was a guide none too certain of the way. His mind was restless. He was like an architect who, when you want a house to live in, having persuaded you to build it of brick, then sets before you good reasons why it should be built of stone; but when you have agreed to this produces reasons just as good to prove that the only material to use is reinforced concrete. Meanwhile you have not a roof to your head. I was looking for a system of philosophy as coherent and self-contained as Bradley’s, in which one part hung necessarily on another, so that nothing could be altered without the whole fabric falling to pieces. This Bertrand Russell could not give me.

At last I came to the conclusion that I could never find the one, complete and satisfying book I sought, because that book could only be an expression of myself. So with more courage than discretion I made up my mind that I must write it for myself. I found out what were the books set for the undergraduate to read in order to take a philosophical degree and laboriously perused them. I thought I should thus have at least a foundation for my own work. It seemed to me that with this, the knowledge of the world I had acquired during the forty years of my life (for I was forty when I conceived this idea) and the industrious study of philosophical literature to which I was prepared to devote some years, I should be competent to write such a book as I had in mind. I was aware that except to myself it could have no value beyond such a coherent portrait as it might give of the soul (for want of a more exact word) of a reflective person who had led a fuller life and been subject to more varied experiences than generally fall to the lot of professional philosophers. I knew very well that I had no gift for metaphysical speculation. I meant to take from here and there theories that satisfied not only my mind but, what I could not but think more important than my mind, the whole body of my instincts, feelings and deep-rooted prejudices, the prejudices that are so intimate a part of one that they can hardly be distinguished from instincts; and out of them make a system that would be valid for me and enable me to pursue the course of my life.

But the more I read the more complicated the subject seemed to me and the more conscious I grew of my ignorance. I was peculiarly discouraged by the philosophical magazines in which I found topics discussed at great length which were evidently of importance but which seemed to me in my darkness very trivial; and the manner in which they were handled, the logical apparatus, the care with which each point was argued and the possible objections met, the terms which each writer defined when he first used them, the authorities he quoted proved to me that philosophy, at all events now, was a business for the experts to deal with between them. The layman could little hope to comprehend its subtleties. I should need twenty years to prepare myself to write the book I proposed and by the time it was done I might, like the king in Anatole France’s story, be on my death bed and to me at least the labour I had taken would no longer be of use.

I abandoned the idea and all I have to show for my efforts now is the few desultory notes that follow. I claim no originality for them, or even for the words in which I have put them. I am like a tramp who has rigged himself up as best he could with a pair of trousers from a charitable farmer’s wife, a coat off a scarecrow, odd boots out of a dustbin, and a hat that he has found in the road. They are just shreds and patches, but he has fitted himself into them pretty comfortably and, uncomely as they may be, he finds that they suit him well enough. When he passes a gentleman in a smart blue suit, a new hat and well-polished shoes, he thinks he looks very grand, but he is not so sure that in that neat and respectable attire he would be nearly so much at his ease as in his own rags and tatters.

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WHEN I read Kant I found myself obliged to abandon the materialism in which in my youth I had exulted and the physiological determinism that went with it. I did not then know the objections that have riddled Kant’s system and I found an emotional satisfaction in his philosophy. It excited me to contemplate that unknowable ‘thing in itself’ and I was content with a world that man had constructed from appearances. It gave me a peculiar sense of liberation. I jibbed at his maxim that you should so act that your action may be a universal rule. I was too much convinced of the diversity of human nature to believe that this was reasonable. I thought that what was right for one person might very well be wrong for another. For my part I chiefly wanted to be let alone, but I had discovered that not many wanted that, and if I let them alone they thought me unkind, indifferent and selfish. But one cannot study the idealistic philosophers long without coming into touch with solipsism. Idealism is always trembling on the brink of it. The philosophers shy away from it like startled fawns, but their arguments continue to lead them back to it and so far as I can judge they escape it only because they will not pursue them to the end. It is a theory that can hardly fail to allure the writer of fiction. The claims it makes are his common practice. It has a completeness and an elegance that make it infinitely attractive. Since I cannot suppose that everyone who reads this book will know all about the various philosophical systems, the instructed reader will perhaps forgive me if I state briefly what solipsism is. The solipsist believes only in himself and his experience. He creates the world as the theatre of his activity, and the world he creates consists of himself and his thoughts and feelings; and beyond that nothing has being. Every thing knowable, every fact of experience, is an idea in his mind, and without his mind does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity for him to postulate anything outside himself. For him dream and reality are one. Life is a dream in which he creates the objects that come before him, a coherent and consistent dream, and when he ceases to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow and unimaginable variety, ceases to be. It is a perfect theory; it has but one defect; it is unbelievable.

When I cherished the ambition of writing a book on these matters, thinking I must start at the beginning, I studied epistemology. I found none of the theories that I examined very convincing. It seemed to me that the plain man (that object of the philosopher’s contempt, except when it happens that his views agree with the philosopher’s, in which case quite a lot of value is attached to them) incompetent to judge of their value was perhaps entitled to choose that one which most satisfied his prepossessions. If one is unwilling to suspend one’s judgement it appears to me that there is a good deal of plausibility in the theory which holds that, beyond certain fundamental data which they call the given, and the existence of other minds, which they infer, men can be sure of nothing. All the rest of their knowledge is fiction, the construction of their minds, that they have devised for the convenience of living. Having to fit themselves, in the course of evolution, to a constantly changing environment, they have made a picture from fragments that they took here and there because they suited their purposes. This is the world of phenomena that they know. Reality is merely the hypothesis they have suggested as its occasion. It may be that they might have taken other fragments and combined them into another picture. This different world would have been as coherent and as true as the one we imagine we know.

It would be difficult to persuade an author that there was not a close interaction between the body and the mind. The experience of Flaubert when he suffered from the symptoms of arsenical poisoning while writing of Emma Bovary’s suicide is but an extreme instance of what every novelist has undergone. Most writers have chills and fevers, aches and pains, nausea at times, when they are engaged in composition; and contrariwise they are aware to what morbid states of their body they owe many of their happiest inventions. Knowing that many of their deepest emotions, many of the reflections that seem to come straight from heaven, may be due to want of exercise or a sluggish liver, they can hardly fail to regard their spiritual experiences with a certain irony; which is all to the good, for thus they can manage and manipulate them. For my part, of the various theories of the relations between matter and spirit that are offered by the philosophers for the consideration of the plain man that which still seems to me most satisfactory is Spinoza’s conception that substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance. But of course to-day it is more convenient to call it energy. Unless I misunderstand him Bertrand Russell has expressed in his modern fashion an idea not very dissimilar when he speaks of a neutral stuff which is the raw material of the mental and physical worlds. Trying to form for myself some sort of picture of this, I have seen spirit in the likeness of a river that forces its way through the jungle of matter; but river is jungle and jungle is river, for river and jungle are one. It does not seem impossible that the biologists will in the future succeed in creating life in their laboratories and then it may be that we shall know more of these matters.

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BUT THE plain man’s interest in philosophy is practical. He wants to know what is the value of life, how he should live and what sense he can ascribe to the universe. When philosophers stand back and refuse to give even tentative answers to these questions they shirk their responsibilities. Now, the most urgent problem that confronts the plain man is the problem of evil.

It is curious to notice that when they speak of evil, philosophers so often use toothache as their example. They point out with justice that you cannot feel my toothache. In their sheltered, easy lives it looks as though this were the only pain that had much afflicted them and one might almost conclude that with the improvement of American dentistry the whole problem could be conveniently shelved. I have sometimes thought that it would be a very good thing if before philosophers were granted the degrees that will enable them to impart their wisdom to the young, they had to spend a year in social service in the slums of a great city or earn their living by manual labour. If they had ever seen a child die of meningitis they would face some of the problems that concern them with other eyes.

If the subject were not of such pressing moment it would be difficult to read the chapter on evil in Appearance and Reality without ironic amusement. It is appallingly gentlemanlike. It leaves you with the impression that it is really rather bad form to attach any great importance to evil, and though its existence must be admitted it is unreasonable to make a fuss about it. In any case it is much exaggerated and it is evident that there is a lot of good in it. Bradley held that there was no pain on the whole. The Absolute is the richer for every discord and for all diversity which it embraces. Just as in a machine, he tells us, the resistance and pressure of the parts subserve an end beyond any of them, so at a much higher level it may be with the Absolute; and if this is possible it is indubitably real. Evil and error subserve a wider scheme and in this are realized. They play a part in a higher good and in this sense unknowingly are good. Evil in short is a deception of our senses and nothing more.

I have tried to find out what philosophers of other schools had to say on this question. This is not very much. It may be that there is not very much to be said about it, and philosophers quite naturally attach importance to subjects upon which they can discourse at length. And in the little they have said I can find less to satisfy me. It may be that the evils we endure educate us and so make us better; but observation does not allow us to think that this is a universal rule. It may be that courage and sympathy are excellent and that they could not come into existence without danger and suffering. It is hard to see how the Victoria Cross that rewards the soldier who has risked his life to save a blinded man is going to solace him for the loss of his sight. To give alms shows charity, and charity is a virtue, but does that good compensate for the evil of the cripple whose poverty has called it forth? Evils are there, omnipresent; pain and disease, the death of those we love, poverty, crime, sin, frustrated hope: the list is interminable. What explanations have the philosophers to offer? Some say that evil is logically necessary so that we may know good; some say that by the nature of the world there is an opposition between good and evil and that each is metaphysically necessary to the other. What explanations have the theologians to offer? Some say that God has placed evils here for our training; some say that he has sent them upon men to punish them for their sins. But I have seen a child die of meningitis. I have only found one explanation that appealed equally to my sensibility and to my imagination. This is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. As everyone knows, it assumes that life does not begin at birth or end at death, but is a link in an indefinite series of lives each one of which is determined by the acts done in previous existences. Good deeds may exalt a man to the heights of heaven and evil deeds degrade him to the depths of hell. All lives come to an end, even the life of the gods, and happiness is to be sought in release from the round of births and repose in the changeless state called Nirvana. It would be less difficult to bear the evils of one’s own life if one could think that they were but the necessary outcome of one’s errors in a previous existence, and the effort to do better would be less difficult too when there was the hope that in another existence a greater happiness would reward one. But if one feels one’s own woes in a more forcible way than those of others (I cannot feel your toothache, as the philosophers say) it is the woes of others that arouse one’s indignation. It is possible to achieve resignation in regard to one’s own, but only philosophers obsessed with the perfection of the Absolute can look upon those of others, which seem so often unmerited, with an equal mind. If Karma were true one could look upon them with pity, but with fortitude. Revulsion would be out of place and life would be robbed of the meaninglessness of pain which is pessimism’s unanswered argument. I can only regret that I find the doctrine as impossible to believe as the solipsism of which I spoke just now.

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BUT I have not done with evil yet. The problem presses when you come to consider whether God exists, and if he does, what nature must be ascribed to him. The time came when, like everybody else, I read the engaging works of the physicists. I was seized with awe at the contemplation of the immense distances that separated the stars and the vast stretches of time that light traversed in order to come from them to us. I was staggered by the unimaginable extent of the nebulæ. If I understood aright what I read, I must suppose that at the beginning the two forces of cosmical attraction and repulsion balanced so that the universe remained for untold ages in a state of perfect equilibrium. Then at some moment this was disturbed and the universe, toppling off its balance, gave rise to the universe the astronomers tell us of and the little earth we know. But what caused the original act of creation and what upset the balance of equilibrium? I seemed inevitably drawn to the conception of a creator, and what could create this vast, this stupendous universe but a being all-powerful? But the evil of the world then forces on us the conclusion that this being cannot be all-powerful and all-good. A God who is all-powerful may be justly blamed for the evil of the world and it seems absurd to consider him with admiration or accord him worship. But mind and heart revolt against the conception of a God who is not all-good. We are forced then to accept the supposition of a God who is not all-powerful: such a God contains within himself no explanation of his own existence or of that of the universe he creates.

It is singular when you read the documents on which the great religions of the world are founded, to note how much more succeeding ages have read into them than was there. Their teaching, their example, have created an ideal greater than themselves. Most of us find it embarrassing when flowering compliments are paid to us. It is strange that the devout should think God can be pleased when they slavishly pay them to him. When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. At the time it seemed to me a curious eccentricity. I think now that my friend showed very good sense.

Men are passionate, men are weak, men are stupid, men are pitiful; to bring to bear on them anything so tremendous as the wrath of God seems strangely inept. It is not very difficult to forgive other people their sins. When you put yourself into their shoes it is generally easy to see what has caused them to do things they should not have done and excuses can be found for them. There is a natural instinct of anger when some harm is done one that leads one to revengeful action, and it is hard in what concerns oneself to take up an attitude of detachment; but a little reflection enables one to look upon the situation from the outside and with practice it is no more difficult to forgive the harm that is done one than any other. It is much harder to forgive people the harm one has done them; that indeed requires a singular power of mind.

Every artist wishes to be believed in, but he is not angry with those who will not accept the communication he offers. God is not so reasonable. He craves so urgently to be believed in that you might think he needed your belief in order to reassure himself of his own existence. He promises rewards to those who believe in him and threatens with horrible punishment those who do not. For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense. Plutarch long ago put the matter succinctly. ‘I would much rather,’ he writes, ‘have men say of me that there never was a Plutarch, nor is now, than to say that Plutarch is a man inconstant, fickle, easily moved to anger, revengeful for trifling provocations and vexed at small things.’

But though men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves that does not prove that God does not exist. It proves only that the religions that men have accepted are but blind alleys cut into an impenetrable jungle and none of them leads to the heart of the great mystery. Arguments have been adduced to prove the existence of God, and I will ask the reader to have patience with me while I briefly consider them. One of them assumes that man has an idea of a perfect being; and since perfection includes existence a perfect being must exist. Another maintains that every event has a cause and since the universe exists it must have a cause and this cause is the Creator. A third, the argument from design, which Kant said was the clearest, oldest and best suited to human reason, is thus stated by one of the characters in Hume’s great dialogues: ‘the order and arrangement of nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or Author.’ But Kant showed conclusively that there was no more to be said in favour of this argument than in that of the other two. In their place he propounded another. In a few words it is to the effect that without God there is no guarantee that the sense of duty, which presupposes a free and real self, is not an illusion and therefore that it is morally necessary to believe in God. This has been generally thought more creditable to Kant’s amiable nature than to his subtle intelligence. The argument which to me seems more persuasive than any of these is one that has now fallen out of favour. It is known as the proof e consensu gentium. It asserts that all men from the remotest origins have had some sort of belief in God and it is hard to think that a belief that has grown up with the human race, a belief that has been accepted by the wisest men, the sages of the East, the philosophers of Greece, the great Scholastics, should not have a foundation in fact. It has seemed to many instinctive and it may be (one can only say, it may be, for it is far from certain) that an instinct does not exist unless there is a possibility of its being satisfied. Experience has shown that the prevalence of a belief, no matter for how long it has been held, is no guarantee of its truth. It appears, then, that none of the arguments for the existence of God is valid. But of course you do not disprove his existence because you cannot prove it. Awe remains, man’s sense of helplessness, and his desire to attain harmony between himself and the universe at large. These, rather than the worship of nature or of ancestors, magic or morality, are the sources of religion. There is no reason to believe that what you desire exists, but it is a hard saying that you have no right to believe what you cannot prove; there is no reason why you should not believe so long as you are aware that your belief lacks proof. I suppose that if your nature is such that you want comfort in your trials and a love that sustains and encourages you, you will neither ask for proofs nor have need of them. Your intuition suffices.

Mysticism is beyond proof and indeed demands no more than an indwelling conviction. It is independent of the creeds, for it finds sustenance in all of them, and it is so personal that it satisfies every idiosyncrasy. It is the feeling that the world we live in is but part of a spiritual universe and from this gains its significance; it is the sense of a present God who supports and comforts us. The mystics have narrated their experience so often, and in terms so similar, that I do not see how one can deny its reality. Indeed, I have myself had on one occasion an experience that I could only describe in the words the mystics have used to describe their ecstasy. I was sitting in one of the deserted mosques near Cairo when suddenly I felt myself rapt as Ignatius of Loyola was rapt when he sat by the river at Manresa. I had an overwhelming sense of the power and import of the universe, and an intimate, a shattering sense of communion with it. I could almost bring myself to say that I felt the presence of God. It is doubtless a common enough sensation and the mystics have been careful to ascribe value to it only if its influence was clearly seen in its results. I have a notion that it can be occasioned by other causes than the religious. The saints themselves have been willing to admit that the artists may have it, and love, as we know, can produce a state so like it that the mystics have found themselves drawn to use the phrases of lovers to express the beatific vision. I do not know that it is more mysterious than that condition, which the psychologists have not yet explained, when you have a strong feeling that you have at some past time been through an experience that you are in the act of undergoing. The ecstasy of the mystic is real enough, but it is valid only for himself. Mystic and sceptic agree in this, that at the end of all our intellectual efforts there remains a great mystery.

Faced with this, awed by the greatness of the universe and malcontent with what the philosophers told me, and what the saints, I have sometimes gone back, beyond Mohammed, Jesus and Buddha, beyond the gods of Greece, Jehovah and Baal, to the Brahma of the Upanisads. That spirit, if spirit it may be called, self-created and independent of all other existence, though all that exists, exists in it, the sole source of life in all that lives, has at least a grandeur that satisfies the imagination. But I have been busy with words too long not to be suspicious of them, and when I look at those I have just written, I cannot but see that their meaning is tenuous. In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four. I cannot penetrate the mystery. I remain an agnostic, and the practical outcome of agnosticism is that you act as though God did not exist.

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BELIEF IN God is not essential to belief in immortality, but it is difficult to dissociate one from the other. Even in that shadowy form of survival which looks forward to the dissolution of human consciousness, once divorced from the body, into the general consciousness, it is only possible to refuse the name of God to this general consciousness if you deny that it has either efficacy or value. And practically, as we know, the two notions have been so inseparably connected that a life after death has always been looked upon as the most powerful instrument to God’s hand in his dealings with the human race. It has offered a merciful God the happiness of rewarding the good and a revengeful one the satisfaction of punishing the wicked. The arguments for immortality are simple enough, but, if not meaningless, they have no great force unless the premiss of God’s existence is accepted first. I will nevertheless enumerate them. One is based on the incompleteness of life: we have a craving to fulfil ourselves, but the force of events, and our own limitations, leave us with a sense of frustration and this a future life will counterbalance. So Goethe, though he did so much, felt that there was still more for him to do. Akin to this is the argument from desire: if we can conceive immortality and if we desire it, does not that indicate that it exists? Our immortal longings can be understood only by the possibility of their satisfaction. Another argument insists upon the indignation, the anguish and perplexity that beset men when they consider the injustice and the inequality that reign in this world. The wicked flourish like the green bay-tree. Justice demands another life in which the guilty may be punished and the innocent rewarded. Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and God himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man. Then there is the idealistic argument: consciousness cannot be extinguished by death; for the annihilation of consciousness is inconceivable, since only consciousness can conceive the annihilation of consciousness; it goes on to assert that values exist only for mind and point to a supreme mind in which they are completely realized. If God is love, men are values to him, and it cannot be believed that what is of value to God can be allowed to perish. But at this point a certain hesitation has betrayed itself. Common experience, especially the common experience of philosophers, shows that a great many men are no great shakes. Immortality is too stupendous a notion to be entertained in connection with common mortals. They are too insignificant to deserve eternal punishment or to merit eternal bliss. So philosophers have been found to suggest that such as have the possibility of spiritual fulfilment will enjoy a limited survival till they have had the opportunity of reaching the perfection of which they are capable and will then suffer a welcome extinction, while those who have no such possibility will be forthwith mercifully annihilated. But when one comes to enquire into the qualities which in this case will admit the chosen few into the blessings of this limited survival one makes the disconcerting discovery that they are those that few but philosophers possess. One cannot but wonder, however, in what manner the philosophers will pass their time when their virtue has received its due reward, for the questions that occupied them during their sojourn on earth will presumably have received their adequate replies. One can only suppose that they will take piano lessons from Beethoven or learn to paint in water colour under the guidance of Michelangelo. Unless these two great men have much changed they will find them irascible masters. A very good test of the force of arguments on which you accept a belief is to ask yourself whether for reasons of equal weight you would embark on a practical operation of any importance. Would you for example buy a house on hearsay without having the title examined by a lawyer and the drains tested by a surveyor? The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together. They are alluring, like a house-agent’s advertisement in the daily paper, but to me at least no more convincing. For my part I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense the survival of myself. Even if one could persuade oneself that there was any truth in the suggestion that the human consciousness survives in some general consciousness, there would be small comfort in it, and to be satisfied with the notion that one survives in such spiritual force as one has produced is merely to cheat oneself with idle words. The only survival that has any value is the complete survival of the individual.

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IF THEN one puts aside the existence of God and the possibility of survival as too doubtful to have any effect on one’s behaviour, one has to make up one’s mind what is the meaning and use of life. If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good to come nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here for and how in these circumstances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a little while of a small planet, revolving round a minor star which in its turn is a member of one of unnumbered galaxies. It may be that this planet alone can support life, or it may be that in other parts of the universe other planets have had the possibility of forming a suitable environment to that substance from which, we suppose, along the vast course of time the men we are have been gradually created. And if the astronomer tells us truth this planet will eventually reach a condition when living things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the universe will attain that final stage of equilibrium when nothing more can happen. Æons and æons before this man will have disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been a chapter in the history of the universe as pointless as the chapter in which is written the life stories of the strange monsters that inhabited the primæval earth.

I must ask myself then what difference all this makes to me and how I am to deal with these circumstances if I want to make the best use of my life and to get the utmost that I can out of it. Here it is not I that speak, it is the craving within me, which is in every man, to persevere in my own being; it is the egoism that we all inherit from that remote energy which in the unplumbed past first set the ball rolling; it is the need of self-assertion which is in every living thing and which keeps it alive. It is the very essence of man. Its satisfaction is the self-satisfaction which Spinoza has told us is the highest thing for which we can hope, ‘for no one endeavours to preserve his being for the sake of any end.’ We may suppose that consciousness was kindled in man as an instrument to enable him to deal with his environment and that for long ages it reached no higher development than was needed to deal with the vital problems of his practice. But it seems in course of time to have outgrown his immediate needs, and with the rise of imagination man widened his environment to include the unseen. We know with what answers he satisfied the questions that he put to himself then. The energy that flamed within him was so intense that he could admit no doubt of his significance; his egoism was so all-embracing that he could not conceive the possibility of his extinction. To many these answers are satisfactory still. They give meaning to life and comfort to human vanity.

Most people think little. They accept their presence in the world; blind slaves of the striving which is their mainspring they are driven this way and that to satisfy their natural impulses, and when it dwindles they go out like the light of a candle. Their lives are purely instinctive. It may be that theirs is the greater wisdom. But if your consciousness has so far developed that you find certain questions pressing upon you and you think the old answers wrong, what are you going to do? What answers will you give? To at least one of these questions two of the wisest men who ever lived have given their own answers. When you come to look at them they seem to mean pretty much the same thing and I am not so sure that that is very much. Aristotle has said that the end of human activity is right action, and Goethe that the secret of life is living. I suppose that Goethe means that man makes the most of his life when he arrives at self-realization; he had small respect for a life governed by passing whims and uncontrolled instincts. But the difficulty of self-realization, that bringing to the highest perfection every faculty of which you are possessed, so that you get from life all the pleasure, beauty, emotion and interest you can wring from it, is that the claims of other people constantly limit your activity; and moralists, taken by the reasonableness of the theory, but frightened of its consequences, have spilt much ink to prove that in sacrifice and selflessness a man most completely realizes himself. That is certainly not what Goethe meant and it does not seem to be true. That there is a singular delight in self-sacrifice few would deny, and in so far as it offers a new field for activity and the opportunity to develop a new side of the self, it has value in self-realization; but if you aim at self-realization only in so far as it interferes with no one else’s attempts at the same thing you will not get very far. Such an aim demands a good deal of ruthlessness and an absorption in oneself which is offensive to others and thus often stultifies itself. As we well know many of those who came in contact with Goethe were outraged by his frigid egotism.

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IT MAY seem arrogant that I should not have been content to walk in the steps of men much wiser than myself. But much as we resemble one another we are none of us exactly alike (our finger-prints are there to show it), and I have seen no reason why I should not, so far as I could, choose my own course. I have sought to make a pattern of my life. This, I suppose, might be described as self-realization tempered by a lively sense of irony; making the best of a bad job. But a question presents itself which I shirked when, at the beginning of my book, I dealt with this subject; and now that I can avoid it no longer I cannot but draw back. I am conscious that here and there I have taken free-will for granted; I have spoken as though I had power to mould my intentions and direct my actions as the whim took me. In other places I have spoken as though I accepted determinism. Such shilly-shallying would have been deplorable had I been writing a philosophical work. I make no such pretension. But how can I, an amateur, be expected to settle a question which the philosophers have not yet ceased to argue?

It might seem only sensible to leave the matter alone, but it happens to be one in which the writer of fiction is peculiarly concerned. For as a writer he finds himself compelled by his readers to rigid determination. I pointed out earlier in these pages how unwilling an audience is to accept impulse on the stage. Now an impulse is merely an urge to action of whose motive the agent is not conscious; it is analogous to an intuition, which is a judgement you make without being aware of its grounds. But though an impulse has its motive, an audience, because it is not obvious, will not accept it. The spectators of a play and the readers of a book insist on knowing the reasons of action and they will not admit its probability unless the reasons are cogent. Each person must behave in character; that means that he must do what from their knowledge of him they expect him to do. Cunning must be exercised in order to persuade them to accept the coincidences and accidents which in real life they swallow without a second thought. They are determinists to a man and the writer who trifles with their obstinate prejudice is lost.

But when I look back upon my own life I cannot but notice how much that vitally affected me has been due to circumstances that it is hard not to regard as pure chance. Determinism tells us that choice follows the line of least resistance or the strongest motive. I am not conscious that I have always followed the line of least resistance, and if I have followed the strongest motive that motive has been an idea of myself that I have gradually evolved. The metaphor of chess, though frayed and shop-worn, is here wonderfully apposite. The pieces were provided and I had to accept the mode of action that was characteristic of each one; I had to accept the moves of the persons I played with; but it has seemed to me that I had the power to make on my side, in accordance perhaps with my likes and dislikes and the ideal that I set before me, moves that I freely willed. It has seemed to me that I have now and then been able to put forth an effort that was not wholly determined. If it was an illusion it was an illusion that had its own efficacy. The moves I made, I know now, were often mistaken, but in one way and another they have tended to the end in view. I wish that I had not committed a great many errors, but I do not deplore them nor would I now have them undone.

I do not think it unreasonable to hold the opinion that everything in the universe combines to cause every one of our actions, and this naturally includes all our opinions and desires; but whether an action, once performed, was inevitable from all eternity can only be decided when you have made up your mind whether or no there are events, the events that Dr. Broad calls causal progenitors, which are not completely determined. Hume long ago showed that there was no intrinsic connection between cause and effect which could be perceived by the mind; and of late the Principle of Indeterminacy, by bringing to view certain events to which apparently no causes can be assigned, has cast a doubt on the universal efficacy of those laws upon which science has hitherto been based. It looks as if chance must once more be reckoned with. But if we are not certainly bound by the law of cause and effect, then perhaps it is not an illusion that our wills are free. The bishops and the deans have snatched at this new notion as though it were the devil’s tail by which they hoped to drag the old devil himself back into existence. There has been great rejoicing, if not in the courts of heaven, at all events in the palaces of the episcopacy. Perhaps the Te Deum has been sung too soon. It is well to remember that the two most eminent scientists of our day regard Heisenberg’s principle with scepticism. Planck has stated his belief that further research will sweep away the anomaly, and Einstein has described the philosophical ideas that have been based upon it as ‘literature’; I am afraid that this is only his civil way of calling them nonsense. The physicists themselves tell us that physics is making such rapid progress that it is only possible to keep abreast of it by a close study of the periodical literature. It is surely rash to found a theory on principles suggested by a science that is so unstable. Schrödinger himself has stated that a final and comprehensive judgement on the matter is at present impossible. The plain man is justified in sitting on the fence, but perhaps he is prudent to keep his legs dangling on the side of determinism.

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THE LIFE force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counterbalances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living, for it works from within and lights with its own bright flame each one’s circumstances so that, however intolerable, they yet seem tolerable to him. Much pessimism is caused by ascribing to others the feelings you would feel if you were in their place. It is this (among much else) that makes novels so false. The novelist constructs a public world out of his own private world and gives to the characters of his fancy a sensitiveness, a power of reflection and an emotional capacity, which are peculiar to himself. Most people have little imagination and they do not suffer from circumstances that to the imaginative would be unbearable. The lack of privacy, to take an instance, in which the very poor live seems frightful to us who value it; but it does not seem so to the very poor. They hate to be alone; it gives them a sense of security to live in company. No one who has dwelt among them can fail to have noticed how little they envy the well-to-do. The fact is that they do not want many of the things that to others of us appear essential. It is fortunate for the well-to-do. For he is blind who will not see that in the lives of the proletariat in the great cities all is misery and confusion. It is hard to reconcile oneself to the fact that men should have no work to do, that work should be so dreary, that they should live, they, their wives and their children, on the edge of starvation, and in the end have nothing to look forward to but destitution. If only revolution can remedy this, then let revolution come and come quickly. When we see the cruelty with which men even now treat one another in countries that we have been in the habit of calling civilized, it would be rash to say that they are any better than they were, but for all that it does not seem fatuous to think that the world is on the whole a better place to live in than it was in the past that history sets before us, and that the lot of the great majority, bad as it is, is less dreadful than it was then; and one may reasonably hope that with the increase of knowledge, with the discarding of many cruel superstitions and outworn conventions, with a livelier sense of loving-kindness, many of the evils from which men suffer will be removed. But many evils must continue to exist. We are the playthings of nature. Earthquakes will continue to wreak havoc, droughts to ruin crops and unforeseen floods to destroy the prudent constructions of men. Human folly, alas, will continue to devastate the nations with war. Men will continue to be born who are not fitted for life and life will be a burden to them. So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall. So long as men are cursed with the sense of possession, and that I presume is as long as they exist, they will wrest what they can from those who are powerless to hold it. So long as they have the instinct of self-assertion, they will exercise it at the expense of others’ happiness. In short, so long as man is man he must be prepared to face all the woes that he can bear.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish; to bewail it senseless. Spinoza called pity womanish; the epithet has a harsh sound on the lips of that tender and austere spirit. I suppose he thought that it was but waste of emotion to feel strongly about what you could not alter.

I am not a pessimist. Indeed, it would be nonsensical of me to be so, for I have been one of the lucky ones. I have often wondered at my good fortune. I am well aware that many who were more deserving than I have not had the happy fate that has befallen me. An accident here, an accident there, might have changed everything and frustrated me as so many with talents equal to, or greater than, mine, with equal opportunities, have been frustrated. Should any of them chance to read these pages, I would ask them to believe that I do not arrogantly ascribe to my merits what has come to me, but to some concatenation of unlikely circumstances for which I can offer no explanation. With all my limitations, physical and mental, I have been glad to live. I would not live my life over again. There would be no point in that. Nor would I care to pass again through the anguish I have suffered. It is one of the faults of my nature that I have suffered more from the pains, than I have enjoyed the pleasures, of my life. But without my physical imperfections, with a stronger body and a better brain, I would not mind entering upon the world afresh. The years that now stretch immediately in front of us look as if they would be interesting. The young enter upon life now with advantages that were denied to the young of my generation. They are hampered by fewer conventions and they have learnt how great is the value of youth. The world of my twenties was a middle-aged world and youth was something to be got through as quickly as possible so that maturity might be reached. The young things of the present day, at least in that middle-class to which I belong, seem to me better prepared. They are taught now many things that are useful to them, whereas we had to pick them up as best we could. The relation between the sexes is more normal. Young women have learnt now to be the companions of young men. One of the difficulties that my generation had to face, the generation that saw the emancipation of women, was this: women had ceased to be the housekeepers and mothers of an earlier age, who led a life apart from men, with their own interests and particular concerns, and were trying to participate in men’s affairs without the capacity to do so; they demanded the consideration that had been their due when they were content to look upon themselves as men’s inferiors and withal insisted on their right, their new-won right, to join in all the masculine activities in which they knew only enough to make a nuisance of themselves. They were no longer housewives and had not yet learnt to be good fellows. There is no more pleasant spectacle for an elderly gentleman than that of the young girl of the present day, so competent and so self-assured, who can run an office and play a hard game of tennis, who is intelligently concerned with public affairs and can appreciate the arts, and prepared to stand on her own feet, faces life with cool, shrewd and tolerant eyes.

Far be it from me to don the prophet’s mantle, but I think it is clear that these young folk who are now taking the stage must look forward to economic changes that will transform civilisation. They will not know the easy, sheltered life which makes many who were at their prime before the war look upon those years as did the survivors of the French Revolution when they looked back on the Ancien Régime. They will not know the douceur de vivre. We live now on the eve of great revolutions. I cannot doubt that the proletariat, increasingly conscious of its rights, will eventually seize power in one country after the other, and I never cease to marvel that the governing classes of to-day, rather than continue a vain struggle against these overwhelming forces, do not use every effort to train the masses for their future tasks so that when they are dispossessed their fate may be less cruel than that which befell them in Russia. Years ago Disraeli told them what to do. For my part I must candidly say that I hope the present state of things will last my time. But we live in an era of rapid change and I may yet see the countries of the west given over to the rule of communism. A Russian exile of my acquaintance told me that when he lost his estates and his wealth, he was overcome with despair; but at the end of a fortnight he regained his serenity and never since gave a thought to what he had been deprived of. I do not think I have such an attachment to my various possessions as to regret their loss for long. If such a condition of things came to pass in my world I should make an attempt to adapt myself and then, if I found life intolerable, I think I should not lack the courage to quit a stage on which I could no longer play my part to my own satisfaction. I wonder why so many people turn with horror from the thought of suicide. To speak of it as cowardly is nonsense. I can only approve the man who makes an end of himself of his own will when life has nothing to offer him but pain and misfortune. Did not Pliny say that the power of dying when you please is the best thing that God has given to man amid all the sufferings of life? Putting aside those who regard suicide as sinful because it breaks a divine law, I think the reason of the indignation which it seems to arouse in so many is that the suicide flouts the life-force, and by setting at nought the strongest instinct of human beings casts a terrifying doubt on its power to preserve them.

With this book I shall have completed in sufficient outline the pattern I set myself to make. If I live I shall write other books, for my amusement and I hope for the amusement of my readers, but I do not think they will add anything essential to my design. The house is built. There will be additions, a terrace from which one has a pretty view, or an arbour in which to meditate in the heat of summer; but should death prevent me from producing them, the house, though the housebreakers may set to work on it the day after I am buried in an obituary notice, will have been built.

I look forward to old age without dismay. When Lawrence of Arabia was killed I read in an article contributed by a friend that it was his habit to ride his motor-bicycle at an excessive speed with the notion that an accident would end his life while he was still in full possession of his powers and so spare him the indignity of old age. If this is true it was a great weakness in that strange and somewhat theatrical character. It showed want of sense. For the complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth. The philosophers have always told us that we are the slaves of our passions, and is it so small a thing to be liberated from their sway? The fool’s old age will be foolish, but so was his youth. The young man turns away from it with horror because he thinks that when he reaches it, he will still yearn for the things that give variety and gusto to his youth. He is mistaken. It is true that the old man will no longer be able to climb an Alp or tumble a pretty girl on a bed; it is true that he can no longer arouse the concupiscence of others. It is something to be free from the pangs of unrequited love and the torment of jealousy. It is something that envy, which so often poisons youth, should be assuaged by the extinction of desire. But these are negative compensations; old age has positive compensations also. Paradoxical as it may sound it has more time. When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. In old age the taste improves and it is possible to enjoy art and literature without the personal bias that in youth warps the judgement. It has the satisfaction of its own fulfilment. It is liberated from the trammels of human egoism; free at last, the soul delights in the passing moment, but does not bid it stay. It has completed the pattern. Goethe asked for survival after death so that he might realize those sides of himself which he felt that in his life he had not had time to develop. But did he not say that he who would accomplish anything must learn to limit himself? When you read his life you cannot but be struck by the way in which he wasted time in trivial pursuits. Perhaps if he had limited himself more carefully he would have developed everything that properly belonged to his special individuality and so found no need of a future life.

74

SPINOZA SAYS that a free man thinks of nothing less than of death. It is unnecessary to dwell upon it, but it is foolish, as so many do, to shrink from all consideration of it. It is well to make up one’s mind about it. It is impossible to know till death is there facing one whether one will fear it. I have often tried to imagine what my feelings would be if a doctor told me I had a fatal disease and had no more than a little time to live. I have put them into the mouths of various characters of my invention, but I am aware that thus I dramatized them and I cannot tell whether they would be those I should actually feel. I do not think I have a very strong instinctive hold on life. I have had a good many serious illnesses, but have only once known myself to be within measurable distance of death; then I was so tired that I could not fear, I only wanted to be done with the struggle. Death is inevitable and it does not much matter how one meets it. I do not think one can be blamed if one hopes that one will not be aware of its imminence and be fortunate enough to undergo it without pain.

I have always lived so much in the future that now, though the future is so short, I cannot get out of the habit and my mind looks forward with a certain complacency to the completion within an indefinite number of years of the pattern that I have tried to make. There are moments when I have so palpitating an eagerness for death that I could fly to it as to the arms of a lover. It gives me the same passionate thrill as years ago was given me by life. I am drunk with the thought of it. It seems to me then to offer me the final and absolute freedom. Notwithstanding, I am willing enough to go on living so long as the doctors can keep me in tolerable health; I enjoy the spectacle of the world and it interests me to see what is going to happen. The consummation of many lives that have run their course parallel with my own gives me continual food for reflection and sometimes for the confirmation of theories that I formed long ago. I shall be sorry to part from my friends. I cannot be indifferent to the welfare of some whom I have guided and protected, but it is well that after depending on me so long they should enjoy their liberty whithersoever it leads them. Having held a certain place in the world for a long time I am content that others soon should occupy it. After all the point of a pattern is that it should be completed. When nothing can be added without spoiling the design the artist leaves it.

But now if anyone should ask me what is the use or sense of this pattern I should have to answer, none. It is merely something I have imposed on the senselessness of life because I am a novelist. For my own satisfaction, for my amusement and to gratify what feels to me like an organic need, I have shaped my life in accordance with a certain design, with a beginning, a middle and an end, as from people I have met here and there I have constructed a play, a novel or a short story. We are the product of our natures and our environment. I have not made the pattern I thought best, or even the pattern I should have liked to make, but merely that which seemed feasible. There are better patterns than mine. I do not believe that I am influenced only by an illusion natural to the man of letters to think that the best pattern of all is the husbandman’s, who ploughs his land and reaps his crop, who enjoys his toil and enjoys his leisure, loves, marries, begets children and dies. When I have observed the peasantry in those favoured lands in which the earth produces her plenty without excessive labour, where the pleasures and pains of the individual are those incidental to the human race, it has seemed to me that there the perfect life was perfectly realized. There life, like a good story, pursues its way from beginning to end in a firm and unbroken line.

75

THE EGOISM of man makes him unwilling to accept the meaninglessness of life and when he has unhappily found himself no longer able to believe in a higher power whose ends he could flatter himself that he subserved he has sought to give it significance by constructing certain values beyond those that seem to further his immediate welfare. The wisdom of the ages has chosen three of these as most worthy. To aim at them for their own sake has seemed to give life some kind of sense. Though it can hardly be doubted that they too have a biologic utility, they have superficially an appearance of disinterestedness which gives man the illusion that through them he escapes from human bondage. Their nobility strengthens his wavering sense of his spiritual significance and, whatever the result, the pursuit of them appears to justify his efforts. Oases in the vast desert of existence, since he knows no other end to his journey, man persuades himself that they at all events are worth reaching and that there he will find rest and the answer to his question. These three values are Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

I have a notion that Truth finds a place in this list for rhetorical reasons. Man invests it with ethical qualities, such as courage, honour and independence of spirit, which indeed are often shown by his insistence on truth, but which in effect have nothing whatever to do with it. Finding in it so great an occasion for his own self-assertion he will be indifferent to any sacrifice that it entails. But then his interest is in himself and not in the truth. If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it. But truth is a character of judgements and so one would suppose that its value lay in the judgements it characterizes rather than in itself. A bridge that joined two great cities would be more important than a bridge that led from one barren field to another. And if truth is one of the ultimate values, it seems strange that no one seems quite to know what it is. Philosophers still quarrel about its meaning and the upholders of rival doctrines say many sarcastic things of one another. In these circumstances the plain man must leave them to it and content himself with the plain man’s truth. This is a very modest affair and merely asserts something about particular existents. It is a bare statement of the facts. If this is a value one must admit that none is more neglected. The books on ethics give long lists of occasions on which it may be legitimately withheld; their authors might have saved themselves the trouble. The wisdom of the ages has long since decided that toutes vérités ne sont pas bonnes á dire. Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe, and his idealism, it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely his effort to attach the prestige of truth to the fictions he has invented to satisfy his self-conceit.

76

BEAUTY STANDS in a better case. For many years I thought that it was beauty alone that gave significance to life and that the only purpose that could be assigned to the teeming generations that succeed one another on the face of the earth was to produce now and then an artist. The work of art, I decided, was the crowning product of human activity, and the final justification for all the misery, the endless toil and the frustrated strivings of humanity. So that Michelangelo might paint certain figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, so that Shakespeare might write certain speeches and Keats his odes, it seemed to me worth while that untold millions should have lived and suffered and died. And though I modified this extravagance later by including the beautiful life among the works of art that alone gave a meaning to life, it was still beauty that I valued. All these notions I have long since abandoned.

In the first place I discovered that beauty was a full stop. When I considered beautiful things I found that there was nothing for me to do but to gaze and admire. The emotion they gave me was exquisite, but I could not preserve it, nor could I indefinitely repeat it; the most beautiful things in the world finished by boring me. I noticed that I got a more lasting satisfaction from works of a more tentative character. Because they had not achieved complete success they gave more scope for the activity of my imagination. In the greatest of all works of art everything had been realized, I could give nothing, and my restless mind tired of passive contemplation. It seemed to me that beauty was like the summit of a mountain peak; when you had reached it there was nothing to do but to come down again. Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

I suppose that we mean by beauty that object, spiritual or material, more often material, which satisfies our æsthetic sense. That, however, tells you just about as much as you would know about water if you were told that it was wet. I have read a good many books to discover what the authorities had to say that made the matter a little plainer. I have known intimately a great many persons who were absorbed in the arts. I am afraid that neither from them nor from books have I learnt much that greatly profited me. One of the most curious things that has forced itself on my notice is that there is no permanence in the judgement of beauty. The museums are full of objects which the most cultivated taste of a period considered beautiful, but which seem to us now worthless; and in my own lifetime I have seen the beauty evaporate from poems and pictures, exquisite not so long ago, like hoar frost before the morning sun. Vain as we may be we can hardly think our own judgement ultimate; what we think beautiful will doubtless be scorned in another generation, and what we have despised may be raised to honour. The only conclusion is that beauty is relative to the needs of a particular generation, and that to examine the things we consider beautiful for qualities of absolute beauty is futile. If beauty is one of the values that give life significance it is something that is constantly changing and thus cannot be analysed, for we can as little feel the beauty our ancestors felt as we can smell the roses they smelt.

I have tried to find out from the writers on æsthetics what it is in human nature that makes it possible for us to get the emotion of beauty and what exactly this emotion is. It is usual enough to talk of the æsthetic instinct: the term seems to give it a place among the mainsprings of the human being, like hunger and sex, and at the same time to endow it with a specific quality that flatters the philosophic craving for unity. So æsthetics have been derived from an instinct of expression, an exuberance of vitality, a mystical sense of the absolute and I know not what. For my part I should have said it was not an instinct at all, but a state of the body-mind, founded in part on certain powerful instincts, but combined with human characteristics, which are the result of the evolutionary process, and with the common circumstances of life. That it has a great deal to do with the sexual instinct seems to be shown by the fact, commonly admitted, that those who possess an æsthetic sense of unusual delicacy diverge sexually from the norm to an extreme and often pathological degree. There may be in the constitution of the body-mind something that renders certain tones, certain rhythms and certain colours peculiarly attractive to man, so that there may be a physiological reason for the elements of what we consider beautiful. But we also find things beautiful because they remind us of objects, people or places, that we have loved or to which the passage of time has lent a sentimental value. We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us. All this means that association, by likeness or contrast, enters largely into the æsthetic emotion. It is only association that can explain the æsthetic value of the ugly. I do not know that anyone has studied the effect of time on the creation of beauty. It is not only that we grow to see the beauty of things as we know them better; it is rather that the delight that succeeding ages take in them somehow adds to their beauty. That, I suppose, is why certain works whose beauty now seems manifest should, when first given to the world, have attracted no great attention. I have a notion that the odes of Keats are more beautiful than when he wrote them. They are enriched by the emotion of all who have found solace and strength in their loveliness. Far then from thinking the æsthetic emotion a specific, simple affair, I think it is a very complicated one, which is made up of various, often discordant elements. It is no good for the æstheticians to say that you ought not to be moved by a picture or a symphony because it fills you with erotic excitement or melts you to tears by reminding you of some long-forgotten scene, or through its associations exalts you to mystic rapture. It does; and these sides of it are just as much part and parcel of the æsthetic emotion as the disinterested satisfaction in balance and composition.

What exactly is one’s reaction to a great work of art? What does one feel when for instance one looks at Titian’s Entombment in the Louvre or listens to the quintet in the Meistersinger? I know what mine is. It is an excitement that gives me a sense of exhilaration, intellectual but suffused with sensuality, a feeling of well-being in which I seem to discern a sense of power and of liberation from human ties; at the same time I feel in myself a tenderness which is rich with human sympathy; I feel rested, at peace and yet spiritually aloof. Indeed on occasion, looking at certain pictures or statues, listening to certain music, I have had an emotion so strong that I could only describe it in the same words as those the mystics use to describe the union with God. That is why I have thought that this sense of communion with a larger reality is not only the privilege of the religious, but may be reached by other paths than prayer and fasting. But I have asked myself what was the use of this emotion. Of course it is delightful and pleasure in itself is good, but what is there in it that makes it superior to any other pleasure, so superior that to speak of it as pleasure at all seems to depreciate it? Was Jeremy Bentham so foolish after all when he said that one sort of happiness was as good as another, and if the amount of pleasure was equal pushpin as good as poetry? The answer the mystics gave to this question was unequivocal. They said that rapture was worthless unless it strengthened the character and rendered man more capable of right action. The value of it lay in works.

It has been my lot to live much among persons of æsthetic sensibility. I am not speaking now of the creators: to my mind there is a great difference between those who create art and those who enjoy it; the creators produce because of that urge within them that forces them to exteriorize their personality. It is an accident if what they produce has beauty; that is seldom their special aim. Their aim is to disembarrass their souls of the burdens that oppress them and they use the means, their pen, their paints or their clay, for which they have by nature a facility. I am speaking now of those to whom the contemplation and appreciation of art is the main business of life. I have found little to admire in them. They are vain and self-complacent. Inapt for the practical affairs of life, they disdain those who with humility perform the modest offices to which their destiny has constrained them. Because they have read a great many books or seen a great many pictures they think themselves superior to other men. They use art to escape the realities of life and in their imbecile contempt for common things deny value to the essential activities of humanity. They are no better really than drug-fiends; worse rather, for the drug-fiend at all events does not set himself on a pedestal from which to look down on his fellow-men. The value of art, like the value of the Mystic Way, lies in its effects. If it can only give pleasure, however spiritual that pleasure may be, it is of no great consequence or at least of no more consequence than a dozen oysters and a pint of Montrachet. If it is a solace, that is well enough; the world is full of inevitable evils and it is good that man should have some hermitage to which from time to time he may withdraw himself; but not to escape them, rather to gather fresh strength to face them. For art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

If beauty is one of the great values of life, then it seems hard to believe that the æsthetic sense which enables men to appreciate it should be the privilege only of a class. It is not possible to maintain that a form of sensibility that is shared but by the elect can be a necessity of human life. Yet that is what the æsthetes claim. I must confess that in my foolish youth when I considered that art (in which I included the beauties of nature, for I was very much of opinion, as indeed I still am, that their beauty was constructed by men as definitely as they constructed pictures or symphonies) was the crown of human endeavour and the justification of man’s existence, it gave me a peculiar satisfaction to think that it could be appreciated only by the chosen few. But this notion has long stuck in my gizzard. I cannot believe that beauty is the appanage of a set and I am inclined to think that a manifestation of art that has a meaning only to persons who have undergone a peculiar training is as inconsiderable as the set to which it appeals. An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything. I do not know why distinctions are made between ancient art and modern art. There is nothing but art. Art is living. To attempt to give an object of art life by dwelling on its historical, cultural, or archæological associations is senseless. It does not matter whether a statue was hewn by an archaic Greek or a modern Frenchman. Its only importance is that it should give us here and now the æsthetic thrill and that this æsthetic thrill should move us to works. If it is to be anything more than a self-indulgence and an occasion for self-complacency, it must strengthen your character and make it more fitted for right action. And little as I like the deduction, I cannot but accept it; and this is that the work of art must be judged by its fruits, and if these are not good it is valueless. It is an odd fact, which must be accepted as in the nature of things and for which I know no explanation, that the artist achieves this effect only when he does not intend it. His sermon is most efficacious if he has no notion that he is preaching one. The bee produces wax for her own purposes and is unaware that man will put it to diverse uses.

77

IT APPEARS then impossible to say that either truth or beauty has intrinsic value. What about goodness? But before I speak of goodness I would speak of love; for there are philosophers who, thinking that it embraced every other, have accepted it as the highest of human values. Platonism and Christianity have combined to give it a mystical significance. The associations of the word lend it an emotion that makes it more exciting than plain goodness. Goodness in comparison is a trifle dull. But love has two meanings, love pure and simple, sexual love, namely; and loving-kindness. I do not think that even Plato distinguished them with exactness. He seems to me to ascribe the exultation, the sense of power, the feeling of heightened vitality which accompany sexual love to that other love which he calls the heavenly love and which I should prefer to call loving-kindness; and by doing so infects it with the ineradicable vice of earthly love. For love passes. Love dies. The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Not the least of the evils of life, and one for which there is small help, is that someone whom you love no longer loves you; when La Rochefoucauld discovered that between two lovers there is one who loves and one who lets himself be loved he put in an epigram the discord that must ever prevent men from achieving in love perfect happiness. However much people may resent the fact and however angrily deny it, there can surely be no doubt that love depends on certain secretions of the sexual glands. In the immense majority these do not continue indefinitely to be excited by the same object and with advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypocritical in this matter and will not face the truth. They so deceive themselves that they can accept it with complacency when their love dwindles into what they describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection had anything to do with love! Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration. We are creatures of change, change is the atmosphere we breathe, and is it likely that the strongest but one of all our instincts should be free from the law? We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. Mostly, different ourselves, we make a desperate, pathetic effort to love in a different person the person we once loved. It is only because the power of love when it seizes us seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last for ever. When it subsides we are ashamed, and, duped, blame ourselves for our weakness, whereas we should accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our humanity. The experience of mankind has led them to regard love with mingled feelings. They have been suspicious of it. They have as often cursed as praised it. The soul of man, struggling to be free, has except for brief moments looked upon the self-surrender that it claims as a fall from grace. The happiness it brings may be the greatest of which man is capable, but it is seldom, seldom unalloyed. It writes a story that generally has a sad ending. Many have resented its power and angrily prayed to be delivered from its burden. They have hugged their chains, but knowing they were chains hated them too. Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.

But loving-kindness is not coloured with that transitoriness which is the irremediable defect of love. It is true that it is not entirely devoid of the sexual element. It is like dancing; one dances for the pleasure of the rhythmic movement, and it is not necessary that one should wish to go to bed with one’s partner; but it is a pleasant exercise only if to do so would not be disgusting. In loving-kindness the sexual instinct is sublimated, but it lends the emotion something of its own warm and vitalizing energy. Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists and makes it a little less difficult to practise those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint, patience, discipline and tolerance, which are the passive and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so common-place a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my readers would have recognized with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already.

I have little sense of reverence. There is a great deal too much of it in the world. It is claimed for many objects that do not deserve it. It is often no more than the conventional homage we pay to things in which we are not willing to take an active interest. The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past, Dante, Titian, Shakespeare, Spinoza, is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries. Thus we pay them the highest compliment we can; our familiarity acknowledges that they are alive for us. But when now and then I have come across real goodness I have found reverence rise naturally in my heart. It has not seemed to matter then that its rare possessors were perhaps sometimes a trifle less intelligent than I should have liked them to be. When I was a small boy and unhappy I used to dream night after night that my life at school was all a dream and that I should wake to find myself at home again with my mother. Her death was a wound that fifty years have not entirely healed. I have long ceased to have that dream; but I have never quite lost the sense that my living life was a mirage in which I did this and that because that was how it fell out, but which, even while I was playing my part in it, I could look at from a distance and know for the mirage it was. When I look back on my life, with its successes and its failures, its endless errors, its deceptions and its fulfilments, its joys and miseries, it seems to me strangely lacking in reality. It is shadowy and unsubstantial. It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with. In default of anything better it has seemed to me sometimes that I might pretend to myself that the goodness I have not so seldom after all come across in many of those I have encountered on my way had reality. It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life nor an explanation of it, but an extenuation. In this indifferent universe, with its inevitable evils that surround us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve, not as a challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of fate. Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight. But goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy chance if happiness results. Plato, as we know, enjoined upon his wise man to abandon the serene life of contemplation for the turmoil of practical affairs and thereby set the claim of duty above the desire for happiness; and we have all of us, I suppose, on occasion adopted a course because we thought it right though we well knew that it could bring us happiness neither then nor in the future. What then is right action? For my own part the best answer I know is that given by Fray Luis de Leon. To follow it does not look so difficult that human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength. With it I can end my book. The beauty of life, he says, is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business.

THE END

STRICTLY PERSONAL

CONTENTS

A LETTER TO SIR EDWARD MARSH, K.C.V.O.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

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31

32

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35

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38

39

40

The original frontispiece

A LETTER TO SIR EDWARD MARSH, K.C.V.O.

My dear Eddie: —

I send you this little book with hesitation. I am conscious that the small adventures that I describe in it are very tame in comparison with those, so much more thrilling, dangerous and important, that many others have had since the outbreak of war; much of it narrates experiences that everyone in England has had and tells about persons with whom the papers have made most people in England familiar. It was written for American readers because I had certain things to say that I had a notion it would be useful for them to know, and I had no intention of publishing it in England. But when one has been writing as many years as I have it appears that one has acquired a number of readers who like to read what one has written not for its subject so much as for its author’s sake; and so, perhaps unwisely, I have allowed myself to be persuaded that I have friends, unknown and otherwise, who would be glad to read this small volume without going to the trouble of sending to America for it.

But my hesitation in sending it to you is not only due to the fact that you may find it of no great interest, but to the fact also that it is my first book for many years of which you have not corrected the proofs. I am pretty certain that you will find in it much to comment on with that acidity, mitigated fortunately by humour, generosity and kindliness, and humanized by a pleasant weakness for the colon, with which you are wont to castigate looseness of expression and faults of grammar. I am very well aware how much I owe to your keen eye for carelessness, impropriety of phrase and inaccurate punctuation, and it is a misfortune for me that the difficulties of the time have prevented me from taking my customary advantage of your direction. The future (if it is concerned with us at all) will discover that many of the best writers of English of our generation are indebted to you for such proficiency as they have acquired in the practice of writing our difficult language. They said of a composer in this county, better known for his copious output than for his originality, that it would be a bad day for American music when he lost his memory; it will be a bad day for English letters when you, dear Eddie, grow too feeble to hold a pen, to turn the pages of the O.E.D. or to scarify your grateful victims with a sarcastic reference to Fowler’s Dictionary of English Usage. May 1 before then be long, long ago at rest on a dusty shelf.

Yours affectionately, W.M.

New York. November 12th, 1941.

1

I HAVE A NOTION that it is well to tell the reader at the beginning of a narrative what he is in for, and so I shall start by telling you that this is not an account of great events, but of the small things that happened to me during the first fifteen months of the war. For more than two years now the great powers of Europe have been engaged in a fearful struggle, a dozen small nations have been invaded, and France has been vanquished: these are matters that the newspapers have reported and that history will deal with. Life has gone on. People have continued to eat three meals a day, to love, to marry, to die a natural death; but I think there is no one, at least in Europe, whose existence has not been in a hundred small ways affected by the catastrophe that has befallen us; and because so far as I am aware no one has thought it worth while to take note of these little things, of no consequence in the current of great affairs but important to the persons whom they affect, I have thought it might be interesting to set down on paper before I forgot them the incidents, trifling in themselves, which seem to have changed the whole course of my life. This narrative is strictly personal, otherwise it would have no sense, but I ask you to believe that no one is more conscious than I how little I count at this moment when the future of the world may very well be at stake.

I was spending the summer of 1939 at home. My home was a square white house on the side of a hill on Cap Ferrat, a promontory that thrusts its nose boldly into the Mediterranean between Nice and Monte Carlo, and from my house I had a wide view of the blue sea. I had bought it twelve years before when I grew tired of wandering about the world, and I bought it cheap because it was so ugly that everyone who had seen it thought there was nothing to do but to pull it down and build another in its place. It had a large derelict garden and, for the Riviera, where land is expensive, a good deal of land besides. The house had been built at the beginning of the century by a retired bishop in the Catholic Church who had spent his working life in Algeria, and he had built it on the pattern of the houses he had lived in there, round a patio; he put a Moorish cupola on the roof, horseshoe windows in the walls, and a Moorish archway across the living room. Then he had the unfortunate idea of tacking a Renaissance loggia on to the front. It occurred to me that all this Moorish nonsense and Renaissance exuberance were only lath and plaster and could be scraped away to leave a plain house with a flat roof; so I bought it, made the alterations I wanted, whitewashed it inside and out, and furnished it with my books, my pictures and all the various objects I had collected during my travels. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life there, and I was prepared to die in the painted bedstead in my bedroom. I sometimes crossed my hands and closed my eyes to imagine how I should look when at last I lay there dead.

I hadn’t reckoned on the temptation that is afforded by a great neglected garden and a hillside. I had never had a garden of my own before and didn’t know that the more garden you have the more you want, and the more you do the more cries to be done. There were pines in the garden, orange trees, mimosas and aloes, and a tangle of wild thyme and wild rosemary. In that country gardeners are cheap — they were paid then little more than a dollar a day — and everything grows if you give it water. I planted oleanders and camellias and all manner of flowering shrubs, and I brought avocado trees from California. They bore no fruit for the first seven years, but when I left I was getting three or four hundred pears a year and people used to come from all parts to see them, for they were the first that had ever been grown in Europe. But the great luxury on the Riviera is grass, for it will not bear the long heat of summer and must be dug up at the end of every spring and replanted every autumn. It is a trouble and an expense, but the fresh young green, at once tender and brilliant, has the same moving quality as the look in the eyes of a young girl at her first ball. I made lawns on each side of the drive that led to my front door, and I made a broad green pathway that meandered under the pine trees to the end of the garden. I planted orange trees in a formal pattern on the terrace, and here we used to dine on summer nights. High up on the side of the hill I built a swimming pool after an eighteenth-century model, and I found in Florence a marble mask by Bernini for the water to gush through. There was a little natural cave at the back, so that bathers could lie in the shade if the sun was too hot for them, and on each side of this I placed two leaden urns that might well have belonged to Madame de Pompadour. From here your eye could roam the Mediterranean, with Nice on your right, and away in the distance was the noble mass of the Esterels.

Such were my house and garden. The crown of my hill was military property. There was a semaphore on the top of it, and there were guns to protect it. About the time of the unquiet period that immediately preceded the Munich agreement I was concerned in a curious incident. I received one day a communication informing me that a party of naval officers were coming from Toulon and wished me to make an appointment to discuss a matter with them. I had no notion what they wanted, but answered that I would be glad to see them at their early convenience. The following morning two cars drove up and half a dozen middle-aged gentlemen were ushered into my living room. They were in uniform, with the rosette of the Legion of Honour in their buttonholes, and three of them wore beards. By the gold braid on their sleeves I judged that they were of high rank. One was an admiral. They sat down with solemnity, and one of them, clearing his throat, proceeded to explain the purpose of their visit. It appeared that they wished me to let them have a strip of my land high up on the hill for a gun emplacement. They evidently expected me to object, for another, breaking into the conversation, explained that it would not interefere with me at all, but indeed would add to the amenities of my property, and more than that (he was of a facetious turn), if war broke out it could not fail to be a source of satisfaction to me to have a big gun of modern design to fire back at the Italian ships as it were from my own back yard. I fancy that the admiral thought this levity misplaced, for he interrupted to say that I was well known to be a friend of France, that France and Great Britain were united in an indissoluble alliance, and that it was inconceivable to him that I should seek to hinder a plan which was of urgent necessity for the safety of the state. I had not liked to interrupt these gentlemen before (I am always somewhat intimidated by persons in uniform, and in order to feel at my ease with them I have to strip them of it in my imagination and see them in their union suits), but now, speaking up, I said that any discussion was entirely unnecessary, because I was only too glad to let the state have whatever piece of land was required and in whatever situation. A murmur of approval issued from those six throats, and both the admiral and the first spokesman, who was a gunnery expert, expressed their appreciation of my patriotism. To this they added a few apt words on the public spirit so invariably shown by my compatriots. The demeanour of my visitors, which had been courteous but cool, now became almost effusive; there was a buzz of conversation, but I could not help hearing one bearded officer tell another what a fine fellow I was and how much it was to be wished that the French were so pleasant to deal with in matters of this sort. Then we went back to business. An officer who had not yet spoken now made me a longish speech in the well-turned phrases which come so easily to a cultivated Frenchman’s lips. He pointed out that the value of land on the Riviera had diminished in recent years and in case of war would fall still more, that the piece they wanted was of no use to me, and that they only needed so many metres by so many metres and when the work was done I shouldn’t even know it was there. Meanwhile six pairs of eyes watched me closely. At last the speaker asked me outright what I wanted for this worthless, insignificant, useless bit of property. “Nothing,” I said.

I never saw such consternation blanch the faces of six brave men.

“But you said you would offer no objection to our putting a gun emplacement on your property.”

“I have no objection. I shall be very glad to let you have the piece you want for nothing.”

“We are quite prepared to pay a reasonable price.”

“I’m sure you are,” I answered, “but I have lived many years in this country and have received many favours from the French people. I couldn’t think of asking you to pay for a little strip of land that you need for the defence of the country.”

There was a silence. Though their eyes were fixed on me I caught a surreptitious glance passing from one to the other. The atmosphere, which had been genial, quite noticeably grew chilly. Then someone said:

“Of course we greatly appreciate your generosity. The admiral hesitated for a brief period and then rose to his feet.

“I will certainly inform the Minister of your public-spirited offer. We will let you know in due course what we propose to do.”

They all shook hands with me very politely and filed out. I could not but feel that, though seafaring men by profession, they were more at sea than they had ever been before. Two days later I received from Toulon a stiff official letter thanking me for the courtesy with which I had received the delegation and stating that on mature consideration it had been decided not to place a gun on my property.

2

I HAD BEEN SPENDING a few weeks in London and did not get home till the middle of July. I brought my nephew down with me; my daughter and my son-in-law were to arrive in a fortnight. Friends of theirs and friends of mine were coming to stay, and I expected the house to be filled with a succession of visitors till late in September. Then I intended to go back to London for a month before starting for India, where I meant to pass the winter. I had spent a winter there two years before and had found in that wonderful country much to excite my imagination, and I was eager to go back. I have never been able to write anything unless I had a solid and ample store of information for my wits to work upon. I expected this second visit to enable me to get some shape into the multitudinous impressions I had received and to complete the pattern that was vaguely outlined in my fancy. I decided to do no work till I got to India, but to play till then with the ideas that wandered through my mind and get to know more intimately the creatures of my imagination who were to take part in my story. It is this portion of the novelist’s activity that is wholly delightful; no labour is attached to it, and no responsibility; the easy, unsought exercise of the creative faculty fills him with exultation, and the world of his invention is so real that it makes the real world somewhat shadowy and he can hardly bring himself to take it seriously. This world of his is so significant and so abundant that he is inclined to postpone and postpone again the day when by setting pen to paper he must break the spell and let his own private and complete world lose itself in the world common to all and sundry. I was looking forward to a delightful summer shared between my visitors and the exciting persons, nameless as yet, who laughed and loved, who pondered over eternity and discussed the meaning of life in my vagrant fancy.

3

I THINK we all enjoyed ourselves. The life we led was simple, and we did pretty much the same thing every day. I am an early riser and have my breakfast at eight, but the rest of the party sauntered downstairs at all hours in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns. When at last everyone was ready we drove down to Ville-franche, where the yacht was moored, and went round to a little bay on the other side of Cap Ferrât, where we bathed and lay in the sun till we were as hungry as wolves. We had brought some food with us, but Pino, the Italian sailor, cooked us a great dish of macaroni to take the edge off our appetite. We drank the light red wine called vin rosé which I got by the barrel from a place away back in the hills. Then we dawdled and slept till we could bathe again and after tea went back to the house to play tennis. We dined on the terrace among the orange trees, and when the moon was full over the sea, strewing her brilliance on the calm water in a great highway of white light, the scene was so lovely it took your breath away. When there was a pause in the light chatter and in the laughter, you heard the vociferous croaking of hundreds of little green frogs in the lily ponds down in the garden. After dinner Liza and Vincent and their friends took the car and drove in to Monte Carlo to dance.

Of course we talked a good deal about the possibility of war; it seemed remote. A French friend of mine came down from Paris for a few days; he was a banker; he had business dealings with Germany and he was in close touch with the Quai d’Orsay. He told us that the businessmen in Germany were strongly in favour of peace, war would be ruinous to them; after all, there had been a scare in September 1938, France had mobilized and war hadn’t come; there had been another scare in March 1939, France had again mobilized, and war had been averted. He assured us that the same thing would happen this time, and we were only too ready to believe him; but this time, he added, there would be a difference: Hitler didn’t want war; if we had been firmer at Munich he would have yielded; if the British and French governments had made a stand when he marched into Prague he would have retreated; he had bluffed us twice, but now we were going to call his bluff. And when he saw that we were resolute he would give way as he would have given way before. As a proof of his confidence my friend told us that he had just bought a large block of shares in a Polish oil company.

He went away; another guest came to occupy his room; we continued to bathe and play tennis; the weather remained fine; the new moon appeared one evening when it was hardly yet dark, a pale sickle of light in a pale sky, and we bowed to it three times and three times turned the money in our pockets. The moon waxed. The peaceful days passed one after another. And then they were over. I once saw a waiter carrying an immense pile of plates suddenly trip, and all the plates crashed noisily to the floor; things went wrong with just that unexpected and startling effect. It looked as though Hitler were going to carry his bluff through and, there was no doubt about it, we had got to call it. The radio brought us disquieting news, the Paris Daily Mail, a day old, described the situation as critical, and the local paper, which was pro-Italian, was frantic. Then the mayor of my village of St Jean called up to say that the order of mobilization would be posted next day. On the following morning, at breakfast, the cook came into the dining-room and told me that the kitchenmaid, an Italian girl, had disappeared during the night with her belongings. My son-in-law, Vincent, was playing in the tennis tournament at Monte Carlo, which was to begin a few days later, and he went in to have an hour’s practice with the professional. A little later, while I was smoking my pipe, Francesco, the footman, came in, with a white face, and said he wanted to go back to Italy that afternoon. His wife stood at the door to see that he persisted in case I tried to dissuade him.

She was an ill-favoured woman, gaunt and sallow, with a bad temper. She had made me a fearful scene about a fortnight before because she was jealous of the maid. I pointed out to her that the maid was fifty and a good twenty years older than her husband, but she told me that that had nothing to do with it. It only made the vileness of Nina, the maid, and the treachery of this man she had married and the father of her child (he stood there pale and trembling while she stormed) more shameful, and he should not stay another day, not another hour, in this den of iniquity which was my house. She did the laundry and helped with the rooms and made herself generally useful, while Francesco, her husband, was an excellent footman who had been with me for years, and I could spare neither of them when my house was full of guests. I said everything I could to calm her, but nothing served, so I was obliged to make the appeal that I had kept in reserve. Some years before, when she was staying in the village because she was expecting a baby, Francesco came into the room where I was reading and told me that his wife had come up to see him and had been seized with the birth pains. He asked if he could have the car to take her back to her lodging; but this seemed to me very imprudent, so I had her put to bed at once and sent for the doctor. The baby was born an hour later, and she remained in my house till she was able to get about again. I used to go and see her, and she lay there, her ugly face miraculously transformed so that she looked like a haggard Madonna, and the poor little child, tightly strapped in its swaddling clothes so that it could not move a limb, lay by her side like one of those little babies in an old Italian picture. I reminded her now of this incident and suggested that as I had not deserted her then she could not desert me now. She began to cry, then turned to her husband.

“Scoundrel, will you behave?” she cried.

He could hardly speak, he was so terrified.

“As God is my witness,” he answered, crossing himself.

“Come then, you may stay.”

She motioned him peremptorily to follow her and went out of the room, but at the door he turned to me and gave me a slight wink. I had a suspicion then that my warm defence of his virtue was not perhaps entirely justified, and I wondered whether it behoved me to tell the maid she must resist the advances of men twenty years younger than herself.

But on this occasion there was nothing to be done, and I agreed that they should go. Then Vincent came back from Monte Carlo. He told me that everyone was getting out as quickly as possible. There wasn’t a place to be had on the Blue Train. Cars, crammed with luggage, were already streaming along the road. I had told my guests that there was no immediate danger until the Senegalese, the black troops, appeared on the roads; Vincent said he had seen them guarding the railway bridge at the entrance to Cap Ferrât. They must have been brought in trucks during the night. We decided that he and Liza had better go, and he went up to pack. I went down to the garage to have his car filled with petrol, and my chauffeur told me that his class was called up and he had to leave to rejoin his regiment next day. It was noon by now, and the gardeners were trooping in for their midday meal. François, the head gardener, was a middle-aged man who had fought in the last war, and he was not affected by the mobilization, but one of the under-gardeners (the other three were Italian) had to go. He was worried because he had lately been married (an inconveniently short time before the birth of a baby) and did not know how his wife was to live on the eight francs a day which was all the government allowed to soldiers’ wives. I told him I would give the girl enough to carry on with and sent him away happy to eat his bread and sausage.

When I got back to the house I found that Gerald, my friend and secretary, was come back from Ville-franche. He said there was great activity at the port. The Chasseurs Alpins, those brave, sturdy little men who can march in their sloppy, rapid way forty miles a day, had set out at dawn for the frontier, and a regiment of Senegalese had taken their place. The harbourmaster had told him that an order had come through from Toulon that all private yachts were to leave the harbour within twenty-four hours. We decided to take the Sara to Cassis, where there are a number of creeks, up one of which she could lie in safety.

In the agitation of the morning it had slipped my memory that I had asked some people to luncheon, a young English writer and his wife, who were staying at a hotel at St Jean. They suddenly arrived, very gay and debonair; they were enjoying their holiday and had not read a paper for days. They had seen the Senegalese on the road and thought they looked very picturesque. When I told them that war might break out any minute, they would not believe me. It was just a scare like the two preceding ones, and what fools they would feel if they went back to London, losing the rest of that lovely bathing, and nothing happened! I pointed out somewhat tartly that they would feel far bigger fools if their car were requisitioned and, with the trains reserved for troops, they found themselves unable to leave for weeks. This startled them a little, and finally I persuaded them that they had better set out for Paris that afternoon.

4

AN HOUR LATER my house, which had been so lively, was deserted. Gerald and I went into Nice to stock up with provisions. There had been a run on the shops and not much was left, but we were able to get a dozen tins of sardines and a sufficient supply of canned soup, corned beef, tongue and sliced ham to last at least a couple of weeks. We bought several packets of macaroni and rice and a sack of potatoes. All this we stowed away in the boat. When we got back to the house we found that Ernest, my butler, a Swiss, had been to Nice on his motor-cycle to see his consul, who had told him that Switzerland was mobilizing and he would receive shortly his instructions to return. The chauffeur was leaving the following morning after taking us down to Villefranche to embark. The cook and my remaining maid, Nina the temptress, were in tears. They were both Italians, and I asked them if they would like to go home. They had been with me for many years and had nowhere to go, so they preferred to stay; but they were frightened, for my head gardener had announced that he was going to cut the throat of every Italian on the place as soon as my back was turned. With a sigh I went along to find him and informed him that if the Italians on the property were not treated as they were when I was there, he and I would immediately part company. He was very fierce, and when we separated our relations were strained.

I seem to have mentioned a great many servants, but the house was a large one, and servants in France work less hard than servants in America and they do things that in England they would never consent to do.

It is not so grand as it appears to have a footman, for he does a housemaid’s work as well as a footman’s; and a butler in France is not like a butler in England who opens the door, waits at table, and sees that the other servants do all the work they can be badgered into doing; in France, besides doing what an English butler does, he keeps the ground floor in order, sweeps and dusts, and waxes the parquet floors. Wages are moderate. I think I paid higher wages than any of my neighbours, and I paid my butler (at the ordinary rate of exchange) five pounds a month and the footman four. I had discovered long ago that the only way to live in a foreign country with comfort is to resign yourself to paying a little more for everything than a native and to submit to a reasonable degree of robbery with a shrug of the shoulders. In France your cook has a tacit right to charge you five per cent more for everything she buys in the market than she has paid for it, and if she does no more than double that you must consider yourself the happy employer of an honest woman.

I had then a lot of servants. Sometimes it filled me with uneasiness that no less than thirteen persons should spend their lives administering to the comfort of one old party. It is true that I paid them with money I earned myself and that I provided them with a livelihood which otherwise they might have found it hard to get, but my conscience somewhat tormented me.

I knew that I should be just as happy with a small house and a couple of servants to look after me. Now, though the imminence of war had scattered seven of my servants, I was still left with two women and four gardeners. I could not discharge them or they would starve.

I have talked rather grandly of the yacht, but she wasn’t grand at all. The Sara was an old fishing-boat, of forty-five tons, with two masts, into which we had a little time before put a Diesel auxiliary. We had made her as comfortable as possible; there was a saloon in which two persons could sleep, a cabin in which there was one berth, and a passageway between the two in which there was another bunk. There was a bathroom and a bath in which you could lie if you were not more than four feet tall, a kitchen in which two could stand, a refrigerator, a radio, and quarters for the crew. The crew consisted of Pino, a sailor from Capri, a friend of his named Giuseppe from the same island, and a French cabin boy who had been one of my gardeners, but who had been discharged because he would never do any work. He didn’t do any work on the Sara either, but he was civil, obliging and picturesque. I don’t know if you have noticed that the majority of these people I have mentioned were Italian. There were said to be two hundred and fifty thousand of them between Ventimiglia, the Italian frontier, and Marseilles. The French did not like them and resented their presence. But they were better workers than the French. People who employed them found them loyal, easy to get on with and industrious. They flocked into France because work was hard to get in Italy and badly paid. One thing the totalitarian states have never done, notwithstanding their high-flown promises, is to increase the welfare of the working-man.

5

IT WAS A LOVELY DAY, with very little wind, and sunny, when we started off, so as soon as we got out of the harbour I put on my bathing-trunks and lay in the sun. I was enjoying the quiet after those harassing days. I didn’t quite know what would happen to my house. I had no fear that the Italians would succeed in breaking through the French fortifications; they were very strong, and on our way down to Villefranche that morning we had passed truckloads of soldiers going up to strengthen the garrisons. Everyone knew that the French Army was invincible, and Jean, my chauffeur, had remarked that they would be in Rome in six weeks. I presumed that the French would bring down a good many troops as the mobilization proceeded, and it seemed to me quite possible that they would requisition my house. It was a prospect that filled me with some apprehension, for I knew from the last war that when the military, officers or men, occupy a house, a lot of damage is done. Not only do they take anything that catches their fancy, but they are apt to do wanton harm. One of their favourite amusements is to fire their revolvers at the pictures. An acquaintance of mine who had a château sixty miles from Paris had it destroyed during the last war and, when he rebuilt it, placed over the entrance a plaque on which was inscribed: “This château was bombarded by the Germans, looted by the French and burnt by the British.” But I was disinclined for gloomy thoughts, and as soon as we got well out to sea, opposite Nice, I had a swim in deep water. We were in no great hurry, since we did not propose to go further that day than Ste Maxime, where I had friends with whom, if they were still there, we hoped to dine.

The wind freshened as the day wore on and we were able to sail. I read and slept and smoked. There was a feeling of gentle excitement at the notion of getting away from the danger zone and putting the boat in a creek out of harm’s way. The Stars and Stripes floating from her stem ensured her safety. We reached Ste Maxime towards evening and dropped anchor just opposite my friend’s house, got into the dinghy and rowed to the landing-stage. She flew the American flag because she belonged to Gerald, an American citizen. The friend we intended to visit was the proprietor and editor of a weekly paper with a great circulation, and we expected to get from him reliable and late news of the crisis. We only just caught him, for he and his wife were starting for Paris by car and in another ten minutes they would have been gone. But when we arrived they decided to give us dinner and set out early next morning.

I shall call my friend Bouche. He was a Corsican, a man with a bald head, a fat, round, clean-shaven face in which his fine dark eyes flashed intelligently, and a fat, jolly but derisive laugh. He never took any exercise except to shoot at a bottle in the water with his revolver, and he had a flabby, fat body. He had been a deputy, but his election had cost him so much — three million francs, well over twenty thousand pounds — that when the next elections came he did not stand. An attempt had been made to unseat him for bribery and corruption, but by the wit and humour with which he met the charges brought against him he had jockeyed the Chamber into confirming his election. He was married to a woman of fortune and on her money had started a paper which in a very short time had achieved a huge success. He was an unscrupulous but brilliant editor. The literary and artistic sections were very well done. He published excellent translations of my novels and stories. But it was not to these that his success was due. It was due to his intemperate, savage and personal attacks on Freemasons, Jews, communists, socialists and radicals. He had a violence that was truly Corsican; he never forgave an enemy, but on the other hand was a loyal and devoted friend. I have known him intimately for twenty years and have never known him to hesitate to do his best if I wanted help either for myself or anyone else. He was generous, and if ever I had been in need of money I am convinced that he would have put almost any sum at my disposal, and his hospitality was lavish. He had a cynical effrontery that I could not but find fascinating. At the time of the sanctions he adopted a policy that was violently pro-Italian; his enemies said that he was receiving large sums for this from the Italian government, and I have now little doubt that it was true. I hesitated at that time to believe it, because his paper was making so much money that I did not think he needed more; though I believe now I was wrong, I am still inclined to think that he accepted Italian subsidies (and probably insisted that they should be large) to support a policy he honestly believed in. It would have appealed to his sense of humour to be well paid for doing what he would have done for nothing. In the course of his campaign he attacked England ferociously, so ferociously that my government thought fit to protest to the French government. It occurred to him (quite rightly) that I might take offence at these articles, so he sent me a message to the effect that I was not to be disgruntled, it was only politics, and as soon as things calmed down he would have another article written saying that Great Britain was grand and the English the finest fellows in the world. On one occasion a minister of the government was driven to commit suicide by his vitriolic attacks. This caused a reaction on the part of the public, and there was general indignation against my friend’s conduct. He took the event and its consequences to him personally with characteristic coolness.

“It’s not playing the game to commit suicide,” he told me with his fat infectious laugh, “it’s taking an unfair advantage in a political controversy.”

“Has it affected your circulation?” I asked.

“Just for a week or two,” he answered, with a shrug of his shoulders; then with a twinkle in his fine eyes: “I’m starting a first-rate serial next week, and that’ll put us up again.”

He was a gangster who had the gangster’s code of honour and the gangster’s courage. In the last war he was an airman. When he was in the Chamber of Deputies he had fought a duel and, being the good shot he was, had wounded his adversary in the arm, as he had said beforehand he meant to do. He was very funny at the expense of his fellow deputies, who from then on overwhelmed him with their timorous deference. In the troubles of February 6th, 1934, the Minister of the Interior ordered his arrest, whereupon he called him up and told him where he was to be found, adding that he had twelve of his Corsican friends with him, all armed, and he would resist arrest. No one came. I should add, to complete my description of this strange man, that he was a devout Catholic, an affectionate and intelligent father, a considerate husband and a dutiful son. He had so identified himself with his wretched paper that its success was his personal success too; his one aim was to get on, and to do this he was prepared to stick at nothing; he liked the power his paper gave him, and he got a malicious pleasure out of the flatteries people paid him to his face when he knew that behind his back they hadn’t a good word to say for him. He enjoyed going to houses where he knew he was only received because he was feared, and he was unsparing in his contempt of the sycophants who courted him. He had a quick, ironical wit, and he was a wonderful raconteur of droll, bitter stories. I expect to live to see the day when he will be put against a prison wall one cold morning and shot by a firing squad. I ask myself whether if he appealed to me to save him in such a case I would do so. I am convinced that if I were in a similar position he would move heaven and earth to get me out of it.

Looking back and remembering Freud, I have a notion that Bouche’s pleasure at seeing me and eagerness to postpone his journey when he was all set to start were due to a subconscious unwillingness to return to Paris and face the difficulties of the situation. While we waited for dinner, drinking cocktails — an innovation from America which he had adopted with considerable enthusiasm — he told me that he looked upon war as inevitable and had already taken premises in a provincial town to run and print his paper away from the bombardment of Paris, which he expected to follow immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities.

The thought of war exasperated him, and that Great Britain and France should resort to it on account of Poland seemed to him grotesque.

“Why should we care about Poland?” he asked. “The Poles have always been worthless people, and the Russians would have beaten them years ago if the French had not had the idiotic notion of sending Weygand to get them out of the mess they had got themselves into.”

I reminded him that we had contracted to help them.

“What is a contract?” he asked. “It is an agreement to which two parties affix their signatures to affirm that, at the time of signing, it is to their mutual interest, so long as the conditions are the same, to adhere to certain clauses. But when conditions change and it is no longer to their interest to adhere to the clauses, the contract ceases to have any validity. That is the way business is conducted by individuals, and there is no reason why it should be conducted any differently by states.” (STRICTLY BOOK)

Dinner was announced and we drank champagne rosé, which is to ordinary champagne what a peach is to an apricot. We left early because the wind was freshening and we wanted to take the boat to a safer anchorage than the open roadstead in which she lay. We spent the night in the little harbour of Ste Maxime and next day at dawn set out again on our journey.

6

THE SKY WAS CLOUDLESS, but a stiff breeze was blowing and the little boat danced about like a colt the first time a snaffle is put in his mouth. We could not hug the coast, because the passage between the mainland and the islands that face Hyères was already mined and prohibited to navigation. We went out to sea in the teeth of the wind. It increased as the day wore on, and the sea was high. As a rule the mistral sinks with the sun, but on this occasion it continued to blow with increasing violence. Night fell. The lights on the islands had been extinguished, and we had to steer by the compass. At intervals I went on deck to have a smoke and a chat with Pino, who was at the tiller.

He was between thirty-five and forty, a little man but very wiry, with a flat, deeply wrinkled face, a large mouth and shrewd, twinkling eyes. He was a very good sailor. He had sailed the Mediterranean all his life and knew all its fickle moods and all its guile. He was a man of few words but of a wonderful eloquence of gesture. With a bend of the head, a twitch of the shoulder, a turn of the elbow, a wave of the hand he could conduct a conversation, lucid, sensible and humorous, which was as plain as any that most men express with words. I asked him what he was proposing to do if Italy entered the war.

“Nothing,” he said silently.

“But if she does you’ll be interned.”

“What then?” he motioned. He spoke. “I’d rather be interned in France than fight in Italy.”

“You don’t want to fight?”

“Who wants to fight? Not the Italians.”

“You don’t much like the Germans, do you?” I asked.

“Pigs,” he answered.

The dawn brought no relief in the wind. Even the captain of an Atlantic liner who won’t acknowledge that it’s more than half a gale when his huge vessel is bobbing about like a cork would have been obliged to admit that it was dirty weather; green seas were washing over the deck and, below, everything that was movable was being tossed about; you had to cling to your cup of coffee with one hand while you tried to butter your bread with the other; the Sara was a grand sea boat and she rode the waves gallantly; one was safe enough, but no one could say it was comfortable, and we decided to run for shelter. We examined the chart and finding what looked like a little bay in the lee of the wind, thought we had better make for that. We changed our course and with the wind abeam made better time. We ploughed through the angry sea for three or four hours more and then, turning a rugged, rocky cape, found ourselves in water as flat as a pond. The cove was surrounded by green hills, on the top of one of which was a small fortress. Umbrella pines grew down to the seaweed which fringed the beach, and among them a few shabby little houses shyly hid themselves. After we had had a shave and a bathe we went ashore and, finding a general store, bought bread and a newspaper. We met a fisherman who had just caught a handsome fish, and this we bought from him. It would have been hard to find a more beautiful and a more sequestered spot. It was enchanting to lounge away the day there, sleeping, for we had none of us had much sleep the night before, bathing, playing patience and reading. Our meals had been scrappy while we were battling with the storm, and it was very good to have a great plate of spaghetti for luncheon and a fresh fish for dinner.

We stayed there two days. It seemed infinitely remote. It was a place to which you felt two lovers might have fled who wanted to hide their love from the world. No one would have thought of looking for them there. Peace. I never knew a place in which it so seemed a part of the air you breathed. The air was light and warm, the sea was limpid and the night serene and starlit. There was never any noise there; the only people we saw besides two or three fishermen were some Russians who lived in a fisherman’s cottage, but at night the silence was so intense that except for the restless searchlight of the fort you might have conceived yourself alone in the immaterial world of abstract thought.

But we could not linger. We had to pass by Toulon, and if war were declared before we got by, it was possible that we should be turned back; so early on the third morning we set out. There was still a heavy sea running, and it took us a couple of hours to beat up against the wind in order to pass a headland notorious for its confused waters. We came in sight of Toulon, keeping well out for fear of mines, and a boat hurried out to have a look at us, but apparently the Stars and Stripes waving in the breeze allayed suspicion and it chugged away without a hail. I think you need a peculiar temperament to enjoy being tossed about hour after hour in a small boat. I have not got it. We didn’t know exactly where we were going; we knew that the secluded creeks we were looking for were beyond Cassis, but that was all we knew; and the chart showed several places along the coast on the way there that seemed to offer as safe an anchorage. We could see them through the glasses, little seaside resorts that looked gay and friendly from the sea; and the Mediterranean Pilot, that book published by the British Admiralty which is indispensable to all persons who haven’t the sense to stay on dry land, stated that Bandol had a good harbour. I could think of no reason why we should not go there, and when we came abreast of it proposed that we should. My companion and Pino gave me to understand that for seamen like themselves it was just the thing they liked, to bump about in a stormy sea, and they repeated that the good old boat could stand far worse than that (hadn’t she twice crossed the Atlantic? If she had it must have been a hell of a journey, but though I had often told visitors the same thing myself, I never quite believed it), but they accepted my suggestion with more alacrity than I had anticipated. Two hours later we entered the harbour. It was protected on one side by low hills and on the other by a spit of land from which a substantial breakwater had been built to face the quay. Here we found so many yachts moored, sailing-boats and motor-boats, that we had difficulty in finding a vacant berth where we could tie up.

7

I HAD NEVER BEEN to Bandol. It is a seaside resort, but not a smart one like Cannes or Antibes, nor a gay one like St Tropez, where the artistic young, (and the not-so-young), English and American, go in summer to dress themselves in gay colours, wear enormous hats and sit about to all hours in stuffy night clubs under the harmless delusion that they are being bohemian. Bandol is neither fashionable nor artistic and, so far as I could hear, the only person of notoriety who lived there was Mistinguet. The barber who shaved me told with pride that her legs were insured for a million francs. But it is a pretty little place. The crowded yachts, large and small, give it a pleasant, busy aspect; there are trees on the esplanade, and here in the evening the inhabitants saunter up and down; there is a row of shops facing the harbour, and cafés where people sit drinking in the open air.

Here then we settled down to await events. Before leaving England I had spoken with one or two influential persons about the possibility of my making myself useful if war broke out. During the last one I had been in the Intelligence Service until the tuberculosis I had contracted in Switzerland from exposure had been so aggravated by want of nourishment in Russia that I was no good for anything any more and had to retire to a sanatorium in the North of Scotland. I had had a good deal of experience and hoped that use might be made of it. As a second string I had put myself in touch with the Ministry of Information. I made up my mind to get back to England as soon as it was possible to travel; for the moment all trains were being used to move troops, and the ordinary services were suspended.

The days passed. I got up early in the morning and went ashore, across the esplanade, to buy the paper that had just come in from Marseilles; the cabin boy, whose name was Jo, brought a fresh loaf of bread from the baker’s, and I had my café au lait; then I smoked my pipe and shaved and washed, after which it was time to go to market. We had made up our minds to hoard our canned goods in case there was a shortage of food and so bought all the fresh provisions we could. The market was a lively, bustling affair. It was held in a square shaded by plane trees, and the sun shining through the leaves made a pleasant summer pattern of light on the ground. The farmers’ wives stood behind the stands on which they had piled their fruit and vegetables, flowers and cheeses, which they had brought in that morning from their farms in the hills. The display of fruit, grapes, peaches, melons, figs, greengages, apricots, pears, was a sight so gay and rich that it made you happy to look at it. The summer visitors had fled with a rush, and prices had fallen sharply, but you had still to go early if you wanted to be well served; and you had to keep your wits about you or the good farmer’s wife, with her friendly smile and honest face, would take advantage of your inexperience. Mine was great. When one good woman assured me that she would never sell a cheese to an Englishman and an ally, and therefore entitled to the best, which she couldn’t guarantee on her word of honour was a perfect cheese, and I discovered it was mouldy; when another good woman sold me a melon which was as hard as a rock, after vowing on the head of her mother that I should come back next day and tell her I had never eaten a better one in my life — my faith in human nature was sorely shaken. But I learnt. My worst mistake was the spinach. There were five of us to feed, and I bought so much that it almost filled the string bag I carried; I was mortified to find that when it was cooked it shrank to nothing and there was barely enough for two. Fresh eggs were scarce, and you had to buy two or three here and two or three there. Then there was the meat to get. There was only one butcher, and his shop was crowded so that you had to wait your turn. There was little beef; that, it appeared, was reserved for the military, for they would eat nothing else; but there was plenty of mutton and pork. Pino would not eat mutton, which he described as offal, so that when I bought that because it was all I could get he would put on a martyred expression and say that bread and cheese was quite good enough for the likes of him. I bought chickens with trepidation because I could never tell if that dead, featherless creature was young and tender or old and tough; I tried to pretend I knew what I was doing by poking a timid finger into its breast, but the cold and clammy skin gave me goose flesh.

By the time I had finished my marketing the train that brought the English papers was in. They were four or five days old, but I read them anxiously. Great Britain was getting ready to fight. At noon the Marseilles station gave the latest news. Things were looking black, but the Germans had not yet marched; there was still hope. Then it was cocktail time. The Sara’s refrigerator had never worked very well, and we should have been in a predicament if there hadn’t been an iceman who came round every morning and provided us with a big lump of ice. After that, lunch on deck under the awning and a nap. When I woke I took the dinghy and rowed out to the mouth of the harbour to have a bathe in clean water. I was ready for a cup of tea when I came back, and then I strolled about watching the men play boule. It is a form of bowls and with belotte the favourite pastime of the French. There were ten or a dozen matches being played on the esplanade, and the players of reputation would be surrounded by a group of spectators. The stakes were a round of drinks. They played with grim concentration, freely giving one another advice, and it would never have occurred to you that the country was on the verge of a terrible disaster. Presently someone would be seen with a paper and there was a rush to the shop in order to get the evening sheet before it was sold out. The radio news came at seven. Then it was time for another cocktail and dinner. Dinner on deck in the balmy night was delicious. On the boats moored on either side of the Sara people were dining too, and the light that hung from the boom cut a charming little intimate picture out of the darkness. The yacht next to ours was a little smaller than the Sara. The owner was in Paris, and the sailor had his wife and child on board. They made a pleasantly domestic group as they sat on deck eating their simple meal. After dinner I played patience, then took a detective story to bed with me and finished it before I went to sleep.

I think we must have been in Bandol nearly a week when Gerald, who had been ashore on some errand, came on board and told me that the Germans had marched into Poland. I was sun-bathing on deck while I read the Daily Telegraph.

“Good,” I said.

“No, bad,” he answered. “It means war.”

“I know.”

It was a relief after those anxious days of waiting to have the matter decided. Of course I knew that the war would be terrible. I knew that cities would be bombarded, vast numbers of men killed, and that the countries engaged would be ruined, but I believed in the French Army and the British fleet. I thought the Allies would in all probability win, but in any case could not be beaten. I went to the post office to send a telegram to remind the person to whom I had spoken that I was ready to do anything, however modest, that could be found for me. I was told that telegrams must be censored by the mayor and that in any case private messages were subject to unspecified delay.

8

THE DECLARATION OF WAR brought a number of little changes in our daily life on board. A blackout was ordered, and we had to get blue paint and darken the portholes. If a small chink of light showed, we would be sternly hailed from the quay by wardens and told to mask it. We could no longer dine on deck, but had to eat below with the portholes and door carefully closed. Giuseppe, the second sailor, got the jitters and insisted on going back to Italy, and a few days later the cabin boy produced a letter from his mother bidding him come home at once. This left us with no one but the imperturbable Pino, so we had to do a lot of the work ourselves. Gerald, who is a good cook, took care of our food, I made the beds and swept and tidied, while Pino looked after the deck and the engines and did the washing-up. The English papers ceased to come, and when I had done my marketing, instead of reading them, I shelled peas or peeled potatoes. The bureaucracy got busy and issued orders regulating the position of foreigners. We had to get photographs and fill up forms which were signed by the mayor. We were forbidden to leave the department of the Var and could only go to Toulon or Marseilles by getting a safe-conduct, which took at least three days to obtain. The casino was transformed into a hospital. Men went away every day. The sailor on the boat next to ours packed his wife and child off and left for Toulon to join a destroyer. There was only a lanky youth in the barber’s shop. The bars, the cafés lost their staffs, and soon there was no one in Bandol but women, boys and old men. The boys and the old men continued to play boule. There is nothing so woebegone as a seaside resort out of season, and now Bandol, which at first had seemed a bright little place, assumed a melancholy aspect. But its melancholy wasn’t only the normal one of winter; there was something peculiar about it, and strangely depressing; it was as though a death wind had passed over the town and those who survived went about with fear in their hearts, astonished that they were still alive and not quite sure of it. The people of the Midi are boastful, and everyone you met was full of the defeats that were going to be inflicted on the Axis, but the boys were glad they were too young to fight and the old men said they had fought in the last war and that was enough. There was resignation but little enthusiasm. They were angry with the Poles because they were not putting up a greater resistance.

9

ONE DAY a young Englishman came to me from Sanary. Sanary is a place not far from Bandol in which a number of painters and writers have settled; Leon Feuchtwanger lived there, and at one time Aldous Huxley also. The young man introduced himself and said he had come to ask my advice on what he should do. He had lived in Sanary for some years.

“It’s awfully difficult to get to England just now,” he said. “The trains are simply packed.”

Only one passenger train a day was running to Paris, and there were crowds at all the stations. There was a rush when it came in. People squeezed themselves into carriages so tight that no one could move. They sat on the floor and stood in the corridors. Stories had reached me of travellers who had waited three days at a station before they were able to get on the train. The journey, which normally took fourteen hours, now took nearly thirty, and many passengers had to stand the whole time. The restaurant cars had been taken off, and if you wanted to eat you had to take your food with you. There was a frenzied rush to get away. There was no particular reason for this, since it was inconceivable that the Italians should break through — they hadn’t even declared war; but everyone was seized with a panic desire to get back to his own home.

“I don’t know what I should do if I went to England,” the young man said.

I could not but guess why he had come to see me; he wanted me to say that his best course was to stay quietly where he was. He was of an age to join up. But it has always seemed to me that if you are yourself long past the military age you put yourself in no very comfortable position when you tell someone else to go and fight.

“I’m not sure if you’d find it very pleasant staying on here. You see, every able-bodied man is mobilized in this country. I don’t suppose they’ll be very nice to you.”

“Some of them have been rather disagreeable already. In the café I generally go to they make themselves a bit offensive, but I don’t really care, you know. The only thing that bothers me is whether I shall be able to get any money.”

It occurred to me that he had come to ask me to lend him some, but I did him an injustice.

“You know, it’s quite likely to last a long time, this war. You wouldn’t much like to stay in Sanary for four or five years, would you?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I’ve got used to the place. I’d rather do that than fight. If I went back to England, d’you think they’d make me go into the army?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose just yet. How old are you?”

“If I thought I could get a job in the Ministry of Information or something like that, I wouldn’t mind going. But I’m not going to fight. Nothing will induce me to fight. I’m a coward.”

I had never heard anyone say that before. It gave me quite a turn and I didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t want to be a coward. I just am. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

He had rather fine eyes, and there was an odd expression in them. I could not quite fathom it. I felt I must say something.

“In that case I don’t think you’d be much use as a soldier.”

“I shouldn’t be a damned bit of use.”

There didn’t seem to be anything further to say.

“What about a dry Martini?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t say no,” he smiled.

His smile was attractive.

He came to see me again a few days later. It appeared that the German exiles residing on the Riviera had been interned. Those in the immediate neighbourhood had been taken to Toulon, where they had been lodged in an empty garage; there was nothing for them to sleep on but the floor, there was an inadequate supply of water, food was scanty and though at first they had been allowed to receive provisions from outside, this privilege had been quickly withdrawn; they were allowed neither to write nor to receive letters, and they could only see their friends for a few minutes and under the watchful eye of a guard. They were herded like cattle, and they had to put up with a good deal of abuse from the men in charge of them. My visitor was highly indignant that such treatment should be meted out to persons who had fled their country to escape the concentration camps of the Nazis. I could not altogether share his indignation. It was well known that there were Nazi agents among the exiles, and it would have been imprudent to leave men at liberty on the strength of their assurance that they were opposed to the regime of Hitler. It was unfortunate that they should suffer discomfort, but their internment had had to be effected in a hurry, the authorities had put them in the only place that was at the moment available, and it was certain that they were not subjected to ill treatment. These men had found safety in France and had enjoyed the nation’s hospitality; it seemed to me that now was their opportunity to show their gratitude by accepting with equanimity the mischance that had befallen them. The times were critical, and I did not think there was any reason for them to harbour bitterness towards the French, if for the security of the state they had thought fit to treat them as possible enemies. The rain, as we know, has a way of falling on the just and on the unjust alike.

But these reflections were too sensible to appeal to my friend and, all his humanitarian sentiments outraged, he inveighed with vehemence against the stupidity, highhandedness and brutality of the French. Among the prisoners was Leon Feuchtwanger, the author of Jew Suss, and my friend brought me a letter from his wife asking me if I could do anything to effect his release. Feuchtwanger was a man of over fifty and so violent an enemy of the Nazis that his German nationality had been taken away from him. It seemed absurd to place him under restraint. I happened to have a slight acquaintance with Jean Giraudoux, one of the most distinguished of French writers as well as an official at the Quai d’Orsay, who had been put at the head of the Bureau of Information in Paris. I sent him a long telegram, and followed it with a letter, in which I put Feuchtwanger’s case before him and pointed out the danger of antagonizing the German refugees who on their return to their own country after the war would have power to influence opinion. I do not know whether my intervention had any effect, but I heard from Feuchtwanger not so very long afterwards that he had been released.

The weeks dragged on. The weather changed and bathing ceased to be a pleasure and became nothing but a spiritual exercise, and instead of rowing out to the mouth of the harbour I contented myself with diving off the deck of the Sara and a rapid swim. Bandol had the perplexed and ravaged look of an actress whom the fickle public has forgotten. The bartender at the bar where I went in to have a drink now and then came aboard one night to say good-bye, as he was leaving at dawn.

“Are you glad to go?” I asked him.

“I’m not sorry, business is rotten, and I shan’t have to fight. I’m thirty-six and I’m pretty sure I can wangle an easy job where there’s nothing to do.”

One day was exactly like another. It became intolerable. We decided to go home. But we discovered that new regulations had come into force, and it looked as though weeks must pass before we could get the necessary permissions to leave Bandol, to pass through the strictly guarded military zone of Toulon and to go from one department to another. There were police at the station at Bandol who examined your papers before they let you get on the train; police came on the train at Toulon and Nice and, if your papers were not in order, marched you off to the police station. There seemed nothing to do; but having once made up our minds to go, we could not bear to stay, so we determined to take a risk. There is an old story of a prisoner who spent years excavating a tunnel to escape and was foiled, then had the bright idea of trying the handle of his cell door; it turned and he walked out into the street. That is very much like what happened to us. Leaving the yacht in charge of a local sailor, we stepped into a rickety old taxi and told the somewhat astonished driver that we wanted to go to Cap Ferrât. At the boundary of Bandol there was a guard of middle-aged reservists, looking singularly ill at ease in their badly fitting uniforms, who gave us a glance but did not stop us; we drove through Toulon, and neither on going in nor on going out did the guard take any notice of us; we passed from one department to another, which was strictly forbidden, with neither let nor hindrance, and just as night fell reached home. Notwithstanding the severe regulations it was as easy as that.

10

I HAD LEFT two maids in the house, but since we had not been able to let them know we were coming they did not expect us, and the house looked forlorn. There were no flowers in the living-room; it looked cheerless and faintly hostile. It is strange how quickly a house can lose its friendliness; the furniture, the pictures, the books even, had already the air of belonging to nobody, as though they waited with a forbidding indifference to be distributed under the auctioneer’s hammer. The cook set to to prepare a scrappy meal, and I looked through the pile of letters, magazines and books that had arrived during my absence. Among the letters I found one from the Ministry of Information telling me that my name had been put before the Minister, who was of opinion that my services would be useful, so I was requested to hold myself at the Ministry’s disposal and not accept any other work without giving notice of my intention to do so. This raised my spirits, for it looked as though I were at last going to be given something to do. I went on reading my correspondence, and suddenly there was a mad rush and Erda jumped into my lap. I suppose she had been out on private business of her own and only that moment discovered I was back.

There were several dachshunds about the house, never less than four, but when a new litter appeared and until the puppies were old enough to be given away, as many sometimes as ten. They had started years before with a very elegant tawny young thing who was called Elsa after the exasperating heroine of Lohengrin, and all her descendants had received Wagnerian names. Elsa was now a dowager and should have been sedate; she was indeed in demeanour, but youthful fires still burnt in her as, alas, they too often do in the female of the human species when age has too obviously withered her infinite variety, and at certain seasons it was difficult to make her see that, having produced so large a progeny, it was fitting now to call it a day. So many children and grandchildren had she had that it became more and more difficult to find proper names, and Erda was given hers because we could think of no other. She was black and tan, very small, with a beautiful head, but with a thickset body which she had inherited from her father, who belonged to an archdeacon, and whose figure, notwithstanding his irreproachable pedigree, had acquired from his connection with the Church of England a rather pompous stolidity. Erda was one of a litter of six and for reasons only known to herself had from a very early age adopted me as her exclusive property. She strongly resented it if I paid any attention to the other dackels and if I persisted would sometimes refuse to have anything to do with me for a couple of days. She insisted on sleeping in my bed, not at the foot of it as a well-behaved dackel ordinarily does, but to my great inconvenience in the middle, and expostulations on my part were vain. She was convinced that this was her rightful place. She followed me like a shadow. When she was about three months old she had come down with me once when I went to bathe. I dived off a rock, and she thought I would certainly be drowned, so she jumped in to save me. But the element was something she had never had anything to do with before, and she grew frightened; she tried to get out, but the rock was precipitous and she could not climb up it; she was seized with panic and, when I caught hold of her, in her alarm struggled violently. I had some little difficulty in getting her on dry land. Ever after that she would come down part of the way with me, but when she saw what my intention was, would stop and bark at me once or twice to warn me of the danger and scamper off home as fast as she could go. It was quite clear what her thoughts were: if that fool likes to go and drown himself, I for one am not going to be there to see it.

When Erda saw bags and trunks brought down and realized that I was going away, she would wander about miserably and sulk; but when I came back again her joy was tumultuous. She would rush madly about the room, jump on me and throw herself on her back to have her belly rubbed; but then suddenly the notion seized her that I had been terribly unkind to leave her and she would begin sobbing. It was really dreadfully moving and made me feel a selfish brute. She had never loved anyone but me. At appropriate seasons marriages had been arranged for her with husbands of exquisite beauty and the most aristocratic ancestry, but she invariably met their advances with such violent hostility that even the most ardent suitor was discouraged. You may say that her tastes were vulgar and that she would not have remained indifferent to the persuasions of a low-born swain. You would do her an injustice. Mastiff’s, schnauzers, alsatians, poodles, terriers, she spurned them all and, like Henry VIII’s great daughter, the Virgin Queen, was settled to a celibate life.

11

CAP FERRAT was never so densely populated as most parts of the Riviera. Much of it had at one time belonged to Leopold I, King of the Belgians, and when the property was sold at his death it was in lots of some extent. I owned about twelve acres. A considerable part of the cape was still as wild as the country must have been before the English discovered that it had the best climate in Europe. Now it was deserted. Nearly all the villas were closed, and I could walk for an hour without meeting a soul. One afternoon I caught up with a youth whom I had known since he was a ball-boy at the tennis courts belonging to a Beaulieu hotel. His name was Nino, and he made a precarious living by doing odd jobs round the harbour at Villefranche. This had not prevented him from marrying and begetting a couple of children. He was a thin, lanky boy, and he was walking in a lackadaisical manner. I asked him what he was doing now and he said, nothing, there was no work to be got anywhere. I wondered why he was not in uniform. He told me that he had been rejected; he had been taking medicine and eating as little as possible in order to get himself in such a physical condition that the army doctors would declare him unfit to serve; but he had to be careful, they might want to examine him again and he couldn’t afford to take risks.

“I’m hoping they’ll say I’m tuberculous,” he told me.

“Would you rather have tubercle than defend your country?” I asked.

“Every time.”

“Your best friend couldn’t describe you as patriotic, could he?”

“Patriotism — what bunk! [Quel blague!] Patriotism is for the rich.”

Since my departure there had been some military activity on the cape. At one end of the road that ran below my house there was now a small camp, and they had an anti-aircraft battery there. Guns, hidden among the trees, had been placed on the cliffs. They had another battery on the football field near the Duke of Connaught’s house, and this they had surrounded with barbed wire. Nearly opposite this was a friendly little café frequented by the sailors from the semaphore on the top of my hill, and the soldiers when they were off duty. They played belotte and danced in the evening to a gramophone. It was the only place on the cape where there was any life, and now and then I used to go there. I knew some of the sailors, because my garden offered them a short cut to the high road, and several of the soldiers, because they had discovered that when they were short of wine a couple of bottles could generally be got at my house. They made no secret of the fact that they were pleased to be in a spot where there was no likelihood of their ever being called on to fight. The sailors were very frank.

“After all, this isn’t our war,” they said, “it’s the war of you rich people. It has nothing to do with us.”

I thought this was no more than the annoyance natural to men who had been snatched away from their normal occupations and paid no great attention to it. I was wrong. I remember saying something about the treaties that France and Britain had signed with Poland, but my remarks were received with derision.

“Who cares for treaties? Hitler isn’t such a fool as to bother about them. When they don’t suit his convenience he ignores them.”

The sailor who said this put it, however, in a form too scatological for me to translate his words with accuracy. There happened to be present on this occasion a sergeant who in private life was a tailor.

“But there’s the honour of France to take into consideration.”

The sailor answered with the dirtiest word in common use in French conversation. The others laughed. The sailor went on:

“There’s only one war I’m prepared to fight in, and I’ll fight that all right. That’s the war of the poor against the rich, and one of these days that war’s coming.”

12

MEANWHILE I went on with a job of work I had on hand. I hadn’t the heart to write fiction, and I was expecting any day to receive my summons to England. But I was engaged in preparing an anthology of the various things I had said in my books on reading and writing. It was a mechanical and not very interesting task, but it took my mind off the war. The golf links on the other side of Nice were still open, but soldiers were encamped there, and I felt it somewhat indecent to go and play a game under the eyes of men who were resentfully under arms; so for exercise I took long and solitary walks. I had noticed that the letter I had had from the Ministry of Information had taken three weeks to reach me and in my answer had suggested that instructions should be sent me by telephone or telegraph. No private person was allowed to use the long-distance telephone, but I knew that a government office could do so. It appeared, however, that those useful methods of communication were not at that time known to the Ministry, and it was several weeks before I received a reply. In this I was asked to write a series of articles about France in wartime and the French war effort; and I was asked further to make what inquiries I could into the attitude of the French towards their British allies. So far as this was concerned I knew already that I should have little to say that would please. Shortly before, Mr. Hore-Belisha, then Secretary of State for War, had made a speech in which he congratulated himself on having landed 150,000 British troops in France without mishap. The French had been under the impression that there were already at least 300,000 British in France, and Mr. Hore-Belisha’s statement filled them with consternation. I had been asked then to make a private report of the state of mind in. France; I could of course only speak of the region I knew, but in my report I hazarded the opinion that what I said of my own district would be found true of the rest of France also. The French were disgruntled for other reasons besides. They thought the British were not taking the war seriously enough, and it exasperated them to think that whereas all men between twenty and forty-five were mobilized in France, Britain was only training youths in the early twenties. The war was only a few weeks old, but already the spiteful were saying that the British were prepared to fight to the last Frenchman.

I did not much fancy the job that was assigned to me, for I had kept on hoping that I should be asked to do something which did not involve writing, but there was no help for it, and I at once set about making my arrangements. It was absurd to try to write the suggested articles without much more information than I then had, but fortunately I had an intimate friend in the Bureau of Information in Paris. I telegraphed to him asking for his help. He was an energetic man, and on receipt of my telegram he called me on the telephone and told me that if I would come up to Paris at once he would put me in the way of getting the material I needed. Next morning I arrived. I had been used to stay at the Hôtel de France et Choiseul, a pleasantly old-fashioned inn still furnished with furniture bought under the first Empire, which I liked because it had something of the atmosphere of a Balzac novel, but this was closed since the directors and most of the staff were mobilized, and I went to the adjacent Hôtel Vendôme. In the afternoon my friend took me to the Hôtel Continental, which had been requisitioned by the Bureau of Information. It was like a rabbit warren. An enormous number of persons had found occupation there. I was introduced to a number of ex-ambassadors, dignified and busy but I fancied somewhat at a loss in those unaccustomed surroundings, to several young men of title who, a censorious person might have thought, would have been more in place at the front, and to a good many professors. The French have always had a great and laudable respect for letters; Jean Giraudoux, the head of the Bureau, was a literary man of distinction, as well as a diplomatist, and on the face of it you would have said it was a good plan to put the censorship and dissemination of news in the hands of writers of eminence. It proved a failure. The French love fine phrases, and the distinguished authors who were given the task of speaking over the air gave their listeners plenty; they did not realize that this was no time for them and with their well-balanced sentences and rhetorical platitudes they succeeded only in boring the public. In fact the only speaker who was effective was Daladier, the Premier; he had an earnest simplicity and a way of putting anything he had to say so clearly and so sincerely that he gained great hold over the people of France. To this talent may be ascribed his continuance in power long after it was evident that he was not the man for his responsible position. It is one of the defects of the democratic form of government that a gift for oratory may enable a man to achieve power which his character does not fit him to exercise. My friend had told me over lunch that the Bureau was at sixes and sevens. That horde of personnel was scurrying about without direction, for Jean Giraudoux, an amiable, kindly and clever man, had no gift for organization. Efforts were afoot to displace him, but hitherto he had managed to foil the plots laid against him. Few knew exactly what they were to do. No one could get anything done. It was a hotbed of intrigue. No one was secure in his place, for there was sure to be someone who wanted it either for himself or for a friend. An active worker would be hampered in his efforts by the jealousy of his colleagues. Influence was paramount.

So far as I was concerned, however, I must state that everything was done to facilitate my mission. My friend had a bustling, persuasive loquacity, and he had prepared the ground. I was introduced to the proper persons and, when I had explained my object, was offered every help. Within an hour it was settled that I should go to the front. The general attached to the Bureau telephoned to the general in command at Nancy, and arrangements were made there and then that I should go there by a certain train on the next day but one, when a staff officer would take charge of me and show me whatever I wished to see. My friend took me then to another office in the building, and there an appointment was made for me to see Dautry, the Minister for Armaments, next morning at nine. I was pleased to be at work at last and delighted to find that I could count on such willing help. Perhaps it will not be thought immodest in me to add that the way was made easy for me not only because the various persons concerned realized that the articles I proposed to write would be useful, but also because my name was well known in France and they had all read and liked my books. The position of the writer in France is very different from what it is in England. In France he is respected and his opinions are thought worth listening to, whereas in England he is regarded with suspicion and little importance is attached to what he says. In England we keep our esteem for the politician and the man of action. We have an instinctive distrust of ideas.

13

THAT EVENING, feeling that I had done a good day’s work, I dined with my energetic friend and a couple of wise, level-headed journalists. My guests were good talkers, and I kept my ears open. They did not think that Daladier would last long as head of the government, but they could not agree who would succeed him. It appeared that he was unable to make a decision. When something had to be done he hesitated and let it stand over in the vain hope that events would settle the matter without his having to intervene. I learnt that Gamelin, the commander in chief, was occupying himself with politics rather than with winning the war, and was holding on to his post against the intrigues of rival generals through his personal friendship with Daladier. I learnt that the army and the people had confidence in General Georges, Gamelin’s chief of staff, but that the two generals were barely on speaking terms with one another. When I got the chance I introduced the subject that was of interest to me, namely, how the French looked upon the British effort and how the population and the army were getting on with the B.E.F. I was to ask these questions many times before I got home again; I got pretty much the same answers, and I shall give here the result of my inquiry which I subsequently put into a private report. The impression I received was that there was widespread dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of British support and with the behaviour of British troops, and that such cordiality as the French thought fit to display to their allies was due to policy rather than to friendliness. They were shocked by the levity of the British. They thought it very silly that they should chalk wisecracks on the troop trains that took them across France, and it was with some sourness that they commented on the good humour that made them sing songs as they marched. Nor had they much patience with the passion the British soldier has for playing games. The French, except those who have come under Anglo-Saxon influence, look upon games as rather childish, and that grown men should play football when the destinies of the world were at stake seemed to them a sign of absurd frivolity. I had to explain over and over again that you had to take the British soldier as he was.

“He’s prepared to die for you,” I said, “but he’ll die with a joke, possibly a very poor one, on his lips.”

The Americans think the English have no sense of humour. They are wrong; it is only that their sense of humour is different. It is quick, but often so coarse that it is difficult to give an example of it. I like the story of the young college man who was driving a bus during the general strike and when he stopped was surrounded by a threatening crowd bent on beating him up. A woman shouted out, “You dirty bastard!” whereupon he replied, with a grin, “Why, Mother, what are you doing here?” The crowd caught the innuendo, burst into a shout of laughter, and let him go.

In this connection I must relate an incident that caused a good deal of ill feeling in France. The French were asking where the British troops were, and several persons, myself included, were pressing the War Office to let the inhabitants of Paris see the regiments that passed through on their way to the front. The normal procedure was for them to arrive in Paris from the port of debarkation, go round the city in the same train, and then proceed to their destination. I suggested that it would hearten the population if instead of doing this they marched through Paris. The authorities did not favour this plan because when they got into the train the men took off their belts and tunics and made themselves comfortable and it would be a trouble to get them again in proper marching kit. The objections were at last overruled, and one fine day the Welsh Guards marched through the boulevards and down the Champs Elysèes, but they marched to the Lambeth Walk and this profoundly upset the population. They thought it very shocking that these men who were going to the line of battle should march to a flippant dance tune.

But the chief cause of ill feeling between the British and the French troops was that the British were better paid; they could buy themselves luxuries that the French soldiers had to do without, and the girls were more inclined to be friendly to men who had money to spend on them than to men who hadn’t. A minor cause of dissatisfaction was that the French had to return to their cantonments at half-past eight while the British could stay in the cafés till half-past nine. When the French trooped out, the British subjected them to a lot of chaff, which was not ill-naturedly meant, but which went down very badly with the men who had to put up with it. The British got gay during their last hour and would not seldom finish the evening by smashing all the bottles in the café, so that when the French soldiers went in for their apéritif next day there was nothing for them to drink. There was much unfavourable comment on the alcoholism in the British Army, both among officers and men; French officers who were asked to dine at a British mess were shocked to see their hosts get drunk after dinner, and it exasperated them to see them on parade next morning alert, bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, and as fresh as green leaves in spring. On the other hand the civilians both in the towns and in the country were disposed to like the British troops, in the towns because they spent their money freely and in the country because they were always glad to give a hand at work on the farm.

Taking it all in all, there was a lot to be done in the direction of improving the feeling between the B.E.F. and the French. I was a person with no authority, and all I could do was to point out what was wrong and make suggestions to put it right.

Next morning I called on Raoul Dautry, the Minister of Armaments, and found an alert, swarthy little man, with a squint, who had already made an elaborate plan for me to visit various factories. Monsieur Dautry was not a politician but an engineer, and he had gained a great reputation by reorganizing the state railways, which had been in a lamentable condition; he was a hard worker, sparing neither his subordinates nor himself, with a great deal of drive, and an honest man. He is the only member of the government whom the collapse of France has left with an untarnished name. The plan he proposed would have taken at least a month to carry out, and I could not afford the time; as always happens in war, no course of action is decided upon in a hurry, but then one is expected to produce results immediately; to get the data for all I was asked to write about, I needed at least three months, and I was only allowed one. It is difficult for a layman as ignorant of these things as I was to write a readable article about armaments, and I knew I could only do it by getting a mass of material to choose from, but I could not afford to give more than a week to collect it. I explained this to the Minister and left him with the understanding that I would let him know as soon as I returned from the front.

14

THAT AFTERNOON I went to Nancy. A room had been engaged for me at the hotel near the station, the famous hotel in the Place Stanislas being closed; this hotel is in the great square, which is one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. It was built by that Stanislas Leszezynski, for some time King of Poland, who was given Lorraine to console him when he was dispossessed of his kingdom. His daughter married the amorous Louis XV, who said of her after her demise: “She never gave me a moment’s displeasure except by dying” (only he put it more epigrammatically). The square, with the vast palace on one side and its gilt gateways and elegant statuary, is a perfect example of rococo architecture, but now its beauty was concealed by heaped-up sandbags. As I entered my modest inn a spruce young officer presented himself and told me he had been ordered to look after me. We went into the adjoining café and, sitting at a marble-topped table, ordered drinks. The officer was a Breton, in private life an architect, and he spoke English admirably. It was on this account that the general, not knowing that I spoke French, had given him the job. I found him intelligent, cultivated and amiable. I explained to him what I wanted to see and listened to his suggestions. When we had made arrangements for the next couple of days we began to talk of things in general. I was not so anxious to know about what was going on in the battle line — the war correspondents were covering that — as to find out what conditions were in the army, how the peasants were taking the war that was being waged in their midst, and how the German propaganda was affecting the troops. I asked the officer to dinner, and he took me to a restaurant in the town. It was full of officers, some of them in little groups, others alone with a wife or mistress. During dinner he told me a moving story. A British plane on reconnaissance over the German advanced posts was hit and only got above the no-man’s-land between the two lines before it crashed. French soldiers managed to get to it and found the pilot unconscious, but alive, and the two other members of the crew dead. They brought the pilot in, and he was taken to the hospital at Nancy. He was badly wounded. When he recovered consciousness the first thing he asked was what had happened to his crew. The doctor told him that they were dead. He raised himself in his bed to a sitting position, brought his hand up to his bandaged head in a salute and said: “Never mind, it’s for England.”

Next day I started on my tour. I went to the headquarters of General de Lattre, a man of distinguished appearance, with beautiful manners, who looked very elegant in his well-cut uniform, and I had a chat with him. He invited me to dinner so that we could talk at length, and we started off to Strasbourg, where we were to lunch with the mayor. I drove with a staff captain who was to conduct me round Strasbourg. He was a man of about thirty-five, in civil life a novelist of some reputation, and he had got his job because he was a personal friend of Daladier, the Premier. I was told afterwards, I don’t know with what truth, that he wrote his speeches for him. During the drive, as writers will when they get together, we talked of books. Enemy planes flew over us at no great height, and I thought he looked up at them with apprehension. Strasbourg had been evacuated; the streets were empty, the shops closed, and there was the stillness of death in that city ordinarily so busy and crowded. The miaowing of deserted and hungry cats cut the silence like a piece of silk suddenly torn in two. There was an air raid while we wandered about, and we saw German planes overhead. The siren in that melancholy city was strangely sinister. My companion gave me a quick, harassed look and said: “Shall we run?” I didn’t want to at all, but I thought he would imagine I was putting on airs if I refused, so we trotted down the street in a most undignified manner till we reached a shelter. We arrived somewhat out of breath, and I wondered if my staff captain felt such a fool as I did when a few minutes later a buxom young woman came strolling in quite leisurely, having very obviously not hurried herself at all to reach the shelter.

I got to know this man fairly well during the three days I was in his charge. He told me that with his influence he could easily have got a safe billet in Paris, but he had insisted on coming to the front, and he told me how impossible he found it to see dead men without horror. He said that his fellow officers assured him that he would get used to it. In war, they said, death is meaningless, and if your friend is killed it doesn’t affect you any more than if he were transferred to another sector. It’s just part of the game, and you accept it as you accept a bad hand at bridge. He asked me if I had ever seen dead men. I answered that I had been in France at the beginning of the last war, and I told him about an incident that had made a singular impression on me. I forget where I was, but there had been a small battle in which there had been about a thousand casualties, and just outside a hospital I came upon a heap of dead men; they were piled on top of one another like dead sheep, and I had no feeling that they had ever been men, but rather that they were things. Then I noticed something that struck me as peculiar: how small their hands were; they were just ordinary soldiers, and yet their hands had the distinction that we erroneously call aristocratic; in a moment it occurred to me that their hands were so elegant because all the blood had been drained out of them. I asked the captain whether he had made the same observation, but he said he hadn’t been able to look at them at all. It filled him with dismay.

I think he must have been thankful to be rid of me; he never ceased to look up at the planes anxiously as they flew over us, and he could not accustom himself to the sound of gunfire; and though he took me dutifully wherever I wanted to go, it was plain that he was nervous all the time. I do not want to pretend that I showed any courage; there was no danger whatever except in his apprehensive fancy. I read a couple of his novels later. They were charming and sensitive, with a lyrical feeling for the countryside in which he was born and bred, a delicate sense of humour and a loving sympathy for the peasant folk he knew so well. They were tender rather than strong. He interested me, and I enjoyed his company. As I made it out, he had got himself sent to the front from patriotism and on an impulse of heroism, and as often happens with writers, had never realized how great a gulf there is between fact and fiction. I think he was just frightened to death, with that fear that forces a man to a shameful garrulity, frightened of planes, of guns, of all the dangers his imagination presented to him; and yet, perhaps for fear of what his friends and brother officers might say, perhaps for fear of his own opinion of himself, would not use the influence he undoubtedly had to get himself removed to a place of safety.

During the next few days I went here and there; I visited the Maginot Line and went over a casemate. The officer in command told me he could hold out for six months if he were besieged; it came as something of a shock to me to see in the paper some months later that this particular fortress had been captured after four days. At one G.H.Q. where I spent the night a number of officers came into my room after dinner with a bottle of mirabelle, and we discussed conditions. I was struck by their alertness and intelligence. They looked forward to the day when they would come to grips with the Germans and were confident that they could thrash them. One evening I dined with General Prètelat, who was in command of all the armies in the sector. He had the reputation of being one of the ablest generals in the army, and you could not be with him long without recognizing that he was a man of character. He lived in a rather ugly villa on the outskirts of Nancy which had been requisitioned. Dinner was something of an ordeal. His staff sat down with us — I suppose we were twelve in all — but no one opened his mouth except to put food in it, and the conversation rested entirely between my host and myself. He talked with fluent vivacity; and he was a man who did not mince his words. He was full of confidence. He frequently changed the regiments who were occupying the advanced posts so that during this period of waiting he could accustom them in turn to actual war, and in the skirmishes that were constantly taking place he had found to his satisfaction that the French soldier was discovering that, man for man, he was more than a match for the German. His chief difficulty was that his troops were eager to attack, and it was hard for him to persuade them that they must have patience till the spring came and forced the Germans to advance. Then they would annihilate them. Of course there was always this to be faced: there was eighty million Germans and only forty million French; the Germans had a hundred and twenty divisions against ninety French; the British must be ready to put into the field thirty divisions. I believe that would be four hundred and fifty thousand men, and that is about what the British had in France when she collapsed. The general went on to say that France had lost a great many men in the last war and could not afford to lose any more. She must be very careful. It did not occur to me then that it must be hard to win a war if you are not prepared to sacrifice men. He spoke of the peace terms that France would impose on a beaten Germany. This was the third time in a century that France had had to repel the German hordes, and every Frenchman was determined that it should be the last. Of course the only reasonable plan was to kill twenty million Germans, but since that was impossible other means must be found to provide France with security. This time, the general said, they would not allow themselves to be defrauded of the fruits of victory as they had been defrauded after the last war by Wilson and Lloyd George. Germany must be divided once more into a number of small states, and the Rhine must be the frontier of France. I pointed out that this would bring under French rule several million Germans who would be naturally rebellious and discontented; the unrest which often prevailed in Alsace-Lorraine after the French Republic recovered these provinces showed to my mind how hard it was to assimilate an alien population. The general shrugged his shoulders. Of course if there were enough Frenchmen the Germans in those countries could be driven out, but there weren’t enough even to populate France, and so the only thing was to keep strong garrisons at the bridgeheads of the Rhine and hold them by force.

After dinner I asked the general if I could see him for a few minutes in private, and he took me into his study. I had learnt during the busy days that I spent with these armies that what very much disturbed the French was that they never saw British soldiers. They knew that further north they were holding a small sector, but they had never set eyes on them, and they were mistrustful. I had learnt also that the French antiaircraft batteries were inadequate and had not the range to be effective against the German planes. I conceived the idea that it would be a good plan if a number of British anti-aircraft batteries could be placed in suitable positions among the French troops, so that men and officers could get to know one another and so that the German planes would have something to fear. I thought that the moral effect would be great, but before I put the suggestion into the report I proposed to submit I wanted to know how the French would welcome such an offer. The general was so delighted with it that he asked me if I minded his telling his staff; he called them in, and they too received the proposal with enthusiasm. It was never carried out. I was given to understand that the difficulties of providing the British soldiers with the food, drink and cigarettes they were accustomed to made the scheme impossible.

One thing that occurred to me as I went from place to place was that the men seemed to wander about all day long with nothing much to do. They were worried by their letters from home which told them that their farms and their shops were going to rack and ruin in their absence. They played no games but belotte, a card game for two, three or four persons, which I can only describe as a variation of euchre. It is the favourite game of the working classes and of the small bourgeoisie. They played it for hours on end. They were well fed and they had a ration of wine for the two principal meals of the day. In their idleness they had plenty of time to ponder over the German propaganda. Ferdonnet, the traitor of Stuttgart, told them every day that they were being sacrificed to save the fortunes of the capitalists and that while they were at the front the British soldiers at the rear were taking their pleasure with their wives. Now and then a French soldier would have reason to think that this was a fact, and it was easy to conclude from an isolated instance here and there that the charge was true. Just about the time I was with the armies of Alsace the Germans had been strewing over the French lines a broadsheet called the Bath of Blood. On it were four pictures; the first was of a French and a British soldier standing at the edge of a pool of blood; the second showed them preparing to dive in; in the third you saw the Frenchman take the plunge while the Britisher remained on the bank; and in the fourth the Frenchman was up to his neck in blood while the Britisher strolled away with a grin on his face. It was effective. The only answer to this was the tablets in many French cathedrals in memory of one million soldiers from Britain and the Dominions who lay buried in France after the last war.

But notwithstanding the clever propaganda and the idleness that was sapping their morale, I came away with the impression that when the time came for these armies to fight their battles, with those brilliant and energetic officers to lead them, they could be trusted to acquit themselves valiantly.

15

I SPENT THE FOLLOWING WEEK visiting munition works. Everyone seemed to be working very hard; the hours indeed were so long, for seven days a week, that I felt bound to ask Monsieur Dautry, the Minister, whether he was certain flesh and blood could stand it. He told me there was no help for it. I think now it was an error. Men can work twelve hours a day for seven days a week for a short spell, but when it comes to month after month the amount and quality of work are reduced and the exhaustion of the workers greatly affects their morale. It was unfortunate that a large number of skilled workmen had been mobilized and were guarding bridges or scrubbing barrack floors when they would have been better occupied in the factories. I had asked that I might be permitted to talk freely to the workmen, and permission to do this was given me with great cordiality. But I was accompanied everywhere by two engineers, one military and one naval, so that they might explain to a person of my limited knowledge whatever was not clear; and they dogged my steps. I might have been a gangster between two cops. The directors of the various factories were highly civil to me, but when I stopped to talk to a workman, the director and the two engineers stopped too, and I could not be so foolish as to suppose he would tell me anything they would not like me to hear. I did, however, hear one or two things I was not meant to. At one factory I heard the director tell one of my companions that over sixty of his workmen had been sent to prison for sabotage or communist propaganda. On another occasion I heard a director say I had better not go to such and such a factory because the general feeling was bad, and once I was asked outright not to attempt to speak to any workman. The impression I brought away with me was that an immense effort was being made to remedy the lamentable deficiencies in French armaments, and that most of the workmen were collaborating in this with all their power, but that there was a minority, I did not know how formidable, that was discontented or worse. I found that I could get no answers to direct questions that satisfied me, and it was more a feeling I got than convincing evidence that a great many workmen had a fear that the owners were using the war to wrest from them the privileges they had won when the socialist government was in power. I had good reason to know that their misgiving was not unwarranted.

16

MY NEXT TASK was to visit the districts in the South-west of France to which the inhabitants of the danger zone in Alsace-Lorraine had been evacuated. When I returned to Paris after doing this I went to the Bureau of Information and said that if I had to write an article of German propaganda the material I had got was admirable, but as that wasn’t the object of my tour I didn’t know what I was going to do. They looked down their noses and said, yes, they knew that conditions were none too good. They were in fact disgraceful. These wretched people had been hustled out of their houses at two hours’ notice and told to bring with them only what they could carry. They had been put in cattle trucks and had spent three days and sometimes more, in the heat of day, in the cold of night, till they reached Poitiers and Angoulême, where they were distributed in the countryside. Some fell dangerously ill on the way and not a few died. They had been told that all they had to do was to lock their front doors and the troops would guard their houses; they could rest assured that all they left would be in perfect safety. It was with consternation that they learnt after a few weeks time that their houses had been looted by the soldiers who had been entrusted with their care. The mayor of one town, obliged to go back on business connected with his office, told me that he had found everything taken; he had a large library and every book was stolen, and since it must have needed a truck to take them all away he could only conclude that officers had had a hand in the looting; his silver was gone, all his linen, and his pictures had been cut out of their frames. Not unnaturally the refugees were incensed. Many of them wanted to go back to save anything that remained, but the French authorities, unwilling that they should see what had happened, refused to let them go.

They were miserably housed. The rich landowners and the well-to-do bourgeoisie refused to give them shelter, and the mayors of the various communes were unwilling to requisition the houses of these incredibly ungenerous people for fear that it would lose them votes at the next election. Camille Chautemps, the Minister in charge of the refugees, was too busy, too timid or too indifferent to take a strong line. They were put in broken-down hovels in which you wouldn’t have put a pig, in cottages in which the roof leaked, in stables, in abandoned factories, in ruined farms. They were crowded together, often two or three families in a single room, without sanitary conveniences, with no water except from a well that might be three hundred yards away and with no place to cook unless they rigged up a primitive stove for themselves. They suffered from cold, since they had hurried away with only their summer clothes, and, their shoes having worn out, they were forced to tramp the muddy roads in felt slippers. They could not buy wood to render their miserable dwellings rainproof, or make bedsteads for themselves so that they shouldn’t have to sleep on the hard floor, because the merchants were holding up their timber, hoping to get better prices for it as the war increased the need. They were the lucky ones who had mattresses. I saw many who slept on straw.

The whole business was a monstrous example of ineptitude, insensibility to suffering and gross selfishness. It showed want of elementary common sense on the part of the government, for the people of Alsace-

Lorraine were none too satisfied with the French administration, and the neglect, the unnecessary hardship they suffered greatly embittered them. I heard more than one say: “If this is how the French are going to treat us, we’d sooner be German.” I was determined to write nothing that was untrue, but it would have caused a useless scandal to relate the facts as I saw them, and I should have been hard put to it to write my article except for the courage and the good nature of the refugees themselves. I dwelt lightly on their miseries and spoke chiefly of the ingenuity they showed in making their lives tolerable, their cleanliness and order in those unspeakable surroundings, the excellent meals they prepared on their makeshift stoves, their kindness to one another and the brave determination with which they made the best of their intolerable condition. I came away with a great admiration for those tenacious, industrious, honest and good-humoured people.

During my visit to the refugees I had two small experiences which for different reasons have remained in my memory. One evening after I had been driving all day from place to place I was taken to dine at a chateau in the middle of a forest. The chateau and the forest belonged to a French baron with a high-sounding Gascon name. He had an American wife. They had two silent children who came in to dinner in charge of a silent English governess. On the walls of the diningroom were portraits of the baron’s ancestors. They were miles from a town and seldom went to Paris. The baron occupied himself with the management of his forests, and his. American wife was busy with good works. The scene, that old chateau in a wilderness of trees, with the four broad roads that led from it north, west, south and east, so far from the world, was a fit setting for a novel of Balzac’s; and the life those two led there, seldom seeing anyone but the peasantry and the forest workers, was active, but strangely apart. The baron was a fine, upstanding man in the forties, who had been wounded in the last war; he had not yet been called up, but thought he well might be. I asked him what would happen to his forests then.

“Oh, I can safely leave them in the care of my wife. She knows just as much about forestry as I do.”

She was a nice-looking, plump little woman in the late thirties. She came from some state in the Middle West, but her dress, the way she did her hair, her manner and attitude were French, and I marvelled at the adaptability of the American woman who could so insinuate herself into the habits of an alien land. There were two or three copies of the Atlantic Monthly on the drawing-room table, and I had no doubt she read them, for there were a lot of books about and the conversation showed that they were both cultured people, but I had a notion they aroused no nostalgia in her. The pair were happy and they were pleased with their children. Their life was a little idyll; it had the playful, rather sad grace of a fairy story. And now I sometimes wonder whether the invasion has passed them by and they live in their fine chateau with that forest stretching interminably around them, or whether rude German soldiers have installed themselves there and are cutting down pell-mell the trees they laid such store by and loved with such an odd and amusing tenderness. The full moon was shining when I drove away, and in its brilliance the broad road cut through the forest was snow-white. Little animals scared by the headlights scampered across to the safety of the shade. I seemed to be driving away from the Castle of the Sleeping Beauty.

My second adventure was droll. I was being driven round the country by a woman who had been doing a great deal, as had a few charitable English and American women, to alleviate the lot of the unfortunate refugees, and latish in the afternoon I remarked that I must think about getting a room in some hotel for the night.

“You needn’t bother about that,” she said. “I have some distant cousins in this part of the country who’ll be glad to put you up. They’re very simple provincial people, but they’re quite nice, and they’ll give you a good dinner.”

“That’s very kind of them,” I said.

She did not volunteer their name, and it did not occur to me to ask it. I gathered from what she said that they were poor relations who lived very modestly, so I was surprised when at nightfall we drove into a town and stopped at a house that in the darkness seemed quite imposing. We were received by a shortish, fat man with a red, homely face. He was dressed in dark, somewhat ill-fitting clothes and looked the typical French bourgeois. He showed me to a warm and comfortably furnished room, and I was glad to see that there was a bathroom. He told me that dinner was at half-past seven. I took a bath and, as I was very tired, had a nap. At the appointed hour I went downstairs and found my way to a living-room in which a bright fire of logs was blazing. My host was sitting there and he offered me a glass of sherry. I sank into a large armchair.

“Did you find a bottle of brandy in your room?” he asked me.

“I didn’t look,” I said.

“I always keep a bottle of brandy in every bedroom in the house, even the children’s rooms. They never touch it, but I like to know it’s there.”

I thought this an odd notion, but said nothing. Presently my driver of the day came in with a thin, dark woman to whom I was introduced. She was my host’s sister, but I did not catch her name. I gathered from the conversation that my host was a bachelor and that she was staying with him with her two daughters, her husband being mobilized, for the duration of the war. We went in to dinner and found waiting for us two girls of perhaps fourteen and fifteen with a prim governess. We were waited on by an ancient butler and a maid. My host said:

“I’ve opened for you my last magnum of claret, a Chateau Larose. 1874.”

I had never seen a magnum of claret before, and I was impressed. It was delicious. For a poor relation I thought my host was doing very well. The food was excellent, real French country cooking, copious, slightly on the heavy side perhaps, and very rich, but extremely succulent. One dish was so good that I was forced to remark on it.

“I’m glad you liked that,” said my host. “Everything in this house is cooked in brandy.”

I began to think it was a very strange house indeed, and I wished I knew who on earth this hospitable person was. We finished dinner and had coffee. Then the butler brought some large glasses and an immense bottle of brandy. I had done myself very well with the claret, I was among strangers, and thought it wise not to take any more alcohol, so when it was offered to me I refused.

“What,” cried my host, throwing himself back in his chair, “have you come to spend the night in the house of Martell and you refuse a glass of brandy?”

I had been dining in the house of the greatest brandy merchant in the world.

“And mind you,” he added, “this brandy isn’t on the market. It’s something I keep for my own special consumption.”

After that I had to abandon my discretion. The rest of the evening passed quickly while he told me the romantic story of the way in which brandy was discovered and the two centuries of history of his firm. I left next day with a cordial invitation to return when the war was over.

17

MY NEXT JOB was to find out what I could about the special work that women were doing in France during the war, and then what effect the war was having on the outlook of the French on religion. The articles I wrote on these subjects have been widely disseminated, so I need not refer to them any further. I ended my tour with a visit to the French fleet at Toulon. My description of what I saw did not meet with the full approval of French naval officers. I was sorry, because they had given me a cordial reception and I had enjoyed their hospitality. I had not been able to help noticing the slovenliness of the men’s appearance, which contrasted in so marked a manner with the trim cleanliness so conspicuous in British and American vessels, and I had been taken aback by something that looked very like lack of discipline. In the British fleet an order is obeyed without question. I spent a short time in a battleship and on one occasion heard quite a little argument between the captain and one of the petty officers before the latter carried out his superior officer’s order. Indeed he did not do so till the captain got quite in a pet about it. But what chiefly vexed the naval men who read my article was some remarks I made about the attitude of the officers towards their calling. I was sure they were intelligent and conscientious, but I received the impression that they went on board as a man goes to his office, with the thought at the back of his mind that he will go home when the day’s work is done; and from this hazarded the opinion that the French naval officer did not go to sea from any deep-seated, romantic urge, but adopted it, after weighing the pros and cons of the profession, as he might have adopted the law or medicine. It was a means of livelihood rather than a vocation. The family is the centre of the Frenchman’s life, and it seemed to me that the real and passionate concern of these men was not with their ship, but with the home in Brest or Toulon where their wives and children were waiting for them. I think the event has shown that my guess was not far from the truth.

18

I GOT HOME just before Christmas and started at once to write my articles. I had been too tired after my day’s work to write them as I went along, and I have not the journalist’s gift of turning out copy hot on the acquisition of a story. I find this sort of writing more difficult than fiction. I am hampered by the facts I have to deal with and I need time and reflection to set them in order. I had read in one of the English papers the articles written by a correspondent who had been doing very much the same sort of tour as I, and though I found them superficial and sometimes inaccurate, I could only admire the skill with which he had seized on the salient points and produced a readable and striking column. I sweated blood over these trivial little pieces. Much of my subject matter was dull, and I wanted to make them interesting; I wanted too to be truthful, and yet I was obliged to leave some of the truth unsaid; and for my own sake I wanted to write them as well as I could. Even though they would appear in a newspaper and be forgotten the day after publication, I could not bear the thought of letting something go out that was written in a careless and slovenly fashion. I am a very poor journalist.

While I was writing, a young French aviator came over from a neighbouring airport. He was very despondent. He told me that planes were sent to the aerodrome at which he was stationed to be tested, and a certain number of thousand-franc notes found their way from the pocket of the manufacturer’s agent to that of the persons whose duty it was to test them, and then they were passed. Another story of his filled me with dismay. It appeared that an order had been given in America for five hundred planes a month to be delivered to France, but one small yet essential part was made under the patent of a French manufacturer and he was demanding for its use a royalty of a thousand dollars a plane. This meant that the American makers would have had to accept a loss on the transaction, and so delivery was held up. I heard the sequel to this much later. Two days before the fall of Paris this French manufacturer cabled to the American firm that they could use this patented part for fifty dollars a plane.

When I had finished my articles I despatched them and set out for England, where I was told other work awaited me. The journey from Paris to London by train was at that time intolerable. Normally it takes seven hours, but then you were lucky if you did it in seventeen; you might even get on the boat and be held there all night because a submarine was known to be in the Channel, and I knew two or three persons who had been kept waiting in Boulogne for no less than three days. I had never flown before. It had always seemed to me an unnecessary risk to take when I was in no hurry to reach my destination, but I had long before made up my mind that if it was a matter of urgency I would not hesitate. I determined now for the first time to take to the air. But the weather was so bad when I arrived in Paris that no planes were flying; there had been floods in England and most of the airfields were under water. I took advantage of this to see my friends, and while I was there an interesting proposal was made to me. At the end of the last war it was found that no definite plans had been made for a treaty of peace and this had to be improvised upon inadequate data. The French did not want to be caught napping again, and a small committee had been formed under the chairmanship of an able diplomatist who had shown his skill in these matters by drawing up the statutes for the government of Alsace-Lorraine when those provinces were returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles. It was suggested that there should be a representative of the French Foreign Office and a representative of the army and that the British Foreign Office and the British forces should be represented in the same way. I was asked to join the committee and help in the spadework. This entailed the study of past treaties, starting with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the ethnographical study of populations with a view of eliminating the difficulties of alien minorities, and frequent journeys to Geneva to consult documents and people. It looked like a useful though exceedingly tedious undertaking, but of course I could do nothing without the proper authority. I put the notion before the Minister at the British Embassy, and he thought it important enough to refer it to the Foreign Office in London. The somewhat dry reply that came was to the effect that the government of His Majesty did not much fancy deciding what to do with the bear’s skin before the bear was killed.

I found my French friends as confident as ever in the ability of the French Army to crush the German attack when at last it came. Except for this I should have been disquieted by the reports that reached me of the pro-Nazi talk in the salons. The aristocracy hated the republican regime and took small pains to conceal their belief that in the long run they would be better off under Hitler than under a socialist government like Blum’s. One great lady was sent for by Sarraut, the Minister of the Interior, and told that she would be put in jail if she did not hold her tongue. The rich bourgeoisie were declaring that France would be ruined if the war lasted too long and if it was to continue for perhaps three or four years Great Britain must be prepared to pay the piper. Leave was frequent during that period of inaction, and I was shocked to hear that some of the younger officers when they came to Paris were saying openly that the war was a great bore and a waste of time, and perhaps it would do no great harm if Hitler took France and organized it and let them lead their own lives in peace and quiet. I heard that Gamelin, the commander in chief, and Georges, his chief of staff, were not on speaking terms and that Daladier was bitterly hostile to Reynaud, who was intriguing against him in order to get the premiership for himself. One story I found diverting. The President, Monsieur Lebrun, arranged to visit Strasbourg, and his projected journey was kept secret. It was known only to the essential persons on his staff, and even the police who were to escort him to the station were informed only at the last moment. He arrived and was taken to the banks of the Rhine. As he came in sight of the Germans on the other side they hoisted a huge placard on which could be read in immense letters, “Welcome to President Lebrun,” and a military band blared out the “Marseillaise.”

The weather continued bad, but it was necessary to get the embassy bag over with urgent despatches, and I was told to hold myself in readiness to start at an hour’s notice. I was to fly in an R.A.F. plane. I twice went down to the airport at Le Bourget and came back to Paris again. Once I waited in the plane for half an hour before the pilot announced that he could not go up. On the third occasion he said: “Well, I’ll start, but I don’t know if I shall be able to land.” The plane was small and looked very rickety to me. The circumstances were not such as one would have chosen for one’s first flight. We flew low so that we might not be mistaken for an enemy, and over the Channel we could not have been more than a hundred feet above the water. I knew that it only took a quarter of an hour to cross it, and was surprised when the time passed and still there was no sight of land; we went on and on over the sea, and I began to think the pilot had changed his mind and we were heading for America. It was more than an hour before we were over England. We circled round an aerodrome, but the pilot, I suppose, received a message that he could not land there, and eventually we came to ground on a military aerodrome in Sussex. It was bristling with planes. I was given a drink and put on a truck that was going to the nearest town. It was a Sunday and when I got there I found there was no train for two or three hours, and it was a slow train at that, so I hired a car and, after retracing my way twice on account of the floods that made the road impassable, arrived in London cold, tired and hungry, but in time for a late dinner at the Café Royal.

19

I WAS INVITED to two cocktail parties next day. This was my first visit to England since the war, and I was unprepared for the spirit that seemed to prevail. Of course everyone was doing some form of war work, or trying to get some to do, and war was talked about incessantly, but I received the impression that much less than the country’s whole energy was being put into its prosecution. As I went about, saw and spoke to people in high station and in low, this impression was confirmed, but when I tentatively mentioned it I was very tartly rebuked. I met cabinet ministers and leaders of the press at luncheon and at dinner parties, and when I wondered that they had the time for social activities was told that they must eat somewhere. The restaurants were crowded, and at luncheon at the Ritz you saw everyone you knew; the theatres were doing splendid business. The blackout was much more severe in London than in Paris, and there were many complaints that it interfered both with trade and with the amenities of life. Fortunately the taxi drivers had acquired great skill in driving through the darkened streets, and it inconvenienced the patrons of night clubs less than one might have expected.

There was a lot of grumbling with Mr. Chamberlain. I heard many people say that he was grown so conceited that he would listen to no one’s advice. The country, I was told, was being ruled by him with Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare, and Parliament had become a negligible quantity. Any hint of insubordination was ruthlessly crushed by Captain Margesson, the Chief Whip. The more important newspapers blindly supported the Prime Minister. Rebellious spirits in the House of Commons, with a considerable section of the public and the Labour Party, were of opinion that a much greater effort was needed than the cabinet was able to give if the war was to be won, but they could not see how Mr. Chamberlain, strongly entrenched as he was, could be induced to give way to a more vigorous leader until he was driven to it by a disaster either on sea or on land. It was tragic.

During this period I met frequently several members of Mr. Chamberlain’s government. I remember one dinner party where we sat long in the dining-room after the women had left us and no less than three ministers were present. They talked very interestingly on the advantages of a classical education, and two of them showed a knowledge of ancient Greek that filled me with admiration. I never met Mr. Chamberlain, but I met his wife. It was at a large party to which the diplomatic corps and the members of the government had been bidden. In appearance Mrs. Chamberlain suggested a French marquise of the ancient régime and at the same time, oddly enough, the White Queen in Alice. She was very gracious to me. She gave me to understand that with industry and application I might go far as a writer; she had read one of my books, The Summing Up, and very kindly asked me to have tea with her one day in Downing Street so that she could tell me at length what she thought about it; but I was too shy to go.

Mr. Chamberlain is dead now, and on his death the press wrote long eulogies of his character. They were exaggerated. He was a man of mediocre ability who achieved an eminent position because the party to which he belonged had resolutely prevented men of independent talent from emerging from obscurity, and so when a Premier had to be chosen there was no one of outstanding ability to choose. His vanity was great. He surrounded himself with men he could get on with, that is to say with yes-men, and, notwithstanding the wishes of the nation, would not, till he was forced to, admit into his cabinet, whatever their gifts, men who would not be subservient to him. When it was evident at the beginning of the war that a national government was essential and it was made known to him that the Labour leaders would not serve under him, he would, had he been truly patriotic, have resigned the reins of power. He was so self-complacent that he continued to think himself capable of the task that was entrusted to him; and, as we know, it needed the disaster that had been foretold to enforce his unwilling resignation. I think he will go down to history as a man, sincere no doubt and honest, but muddled by self-conceit, who put his party before his country and by his ineptitude and stubbornness brought it to the verge of ruin.

When I arrived in London a new Minister of Information had been appointed. The previous Minister, Lord Macmillan, a distinguished judge, had resigned owing to the hostile criticism of the public and the press, and Sir John Reith, well known because he had been for several years general director of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was put in his place. When answering a letter from him about my articles I had told him that the French listened to their own radio with mistrust, but were very much inclined to believe that what they heard from England was true, and I ventured to suggest that it was important to maintain this confidence. This could only be done, it seemed to me, by being frank with the public and adhering to the facts. I thought I might very well get a snubbing for my pains, but Sir John Reith with great civility replied that he was in accord with me and had every intention of doing what he agreed was not only right but wise. Sir John Reith had the reputation of being a great organizer, but ruthless, domineering and puritanical, and his subordinates at the B.B.C. had chafed at what they considered his tyrannical methods and his interference with their private lives. He seemed the right man to put order into the Ministry of Information, which was overstaffed with a large number of people who didn’t know what they were expected to do and who were at loggerheads with the journalists who depended on them for the release of news. I was immediately impressed by his businesslike methods; he made an appointment to see me at noon on the day after my arrival in England, and when I went to the desk to have myself announced, as the clock struck twelve I heard a messenger ask if I was there. The clock had barely ceased to strike as I was ushered into the Minister’s room.

I already knew Sir John Reith slightly. I found him in a lively state of agitation, for he was that day to take his seat in the House of Commons and make his maiden speech, both as a member and as a minister, before that intimidating body. He was shrewd enough to know that they were all out to gun him if they could. I could not but think that it would have given his underlings at the B.B.C. a lot of satisfaction if they could have seen this huge, dictatorial man, with his rugged countenance, before whom they had with cause trembled, shaking now in apprehension of the ordeal before him. I had a conversation with him during which we discussed what was the best use that could be made of my services, and then, having to go to Westminster, he sent for the director of one of the departments and put me in his charge.

20

DURING THE THREE MONTHS I spent in England I made many visits to the Ministry of Information. There was as much good will as at the Bureau in Paris and almost as much confusion. The personnel was a strange mixture. All manner of people had wangled a job. There were novelists, lawyers, art experts, advertising agents, dons, literary agents; and women whose qualifications I never discovered; some had sought work there because they wanted to do anything they could to help win the war, others because the war had deprived them of their means of livelihood. The profession most scantily represented, it seemed to me, was that of journalism. Journalists were the natural enemies. As I suppose is usual in all government offices, there was a lot of intrigue, and a man had to keep his wits about him to see that his colleague did not manoeuvre himself into his place. Anyone was liable to be fired at a moment’s notice, and the insecurity of tenure interfered with the individual’s efficiency. The more industrious tried to prove they were necessary by turning out masses of printed matter which the recipients threw unread into a wastepaper basket; the more astute, having discovered that the best way never to make a mistake is never to do anything, systematically opposed every suggestion that was made to them. One distinguished head of a department in this manner held his position (and a handsome salary) for more than a year. The Ministry of Information was, moreover, greatly hampered in its work, which is to give the public news, by the obstruction of the services. Those in authority at the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Force could not be made to understand that the public had a right to know what was happening, and they withheld news and refused to allow photographs to be published. The result was that the foreign press was forced to take the circumstantial, though inaccurate, information provided by Germany.

My articles had attracted a good deal of attention, and it was decided to issue them as a sixpenny pamphlet. This came out and, I think to everybody’s surprise, certainly to mine, was a success; within two days the first edition of forty thousand was exhausted and within a month a hundred thousand copies were sold. Meanwhile I had been trying to find something to do. They felt at the Ministry that some use ought to be made of me, but no one could suggest what form it should take; I was like a performing dog in a circus whose tricks the public would probably like, but who somehow couldn’t be quite fitted into the programme. I found the waiting tedious, and since I was not in the mood to write stories, cheated my impatience by taking up the study of Edmund Burke’s style. I read his principal works and various lives of him. His inconsistent character, with its nobility and pettiness, its vanity, irascibility and charm, was of a kind to interest me, and I thought of writing an elaborate essay on the man and his work, but it was too large an undertaking to embark on just then and I contented myself with composing a short piece on his management of the English language. Then some bright spirit at the Ministry of Information conceived the idea that I should write a series of articles about England similar to those I had written about France. I did not welcome the notion, since it seemed to me that much could only be a repetition of what I had done before, but I was willing to do whatever I was asked, and for me personally it had at least the advantage that such a survey would take me to parts of England I did not know and give me the opportunity of meeting fellow countrymen of mine of a type I had never come in contact with. We set about getting the various permissions that were necessary, but they were not so easy to get as they had been in France. There I had been a distinguished English writer to whom all facilities should be granted; in England I was just another of those damned authors who came round interfering with people’s business. The first job assigned to me was to write an article on what was called the little fleet, trawlers, mine-sweepers, lightships, the small craft whose crews were doing useful and perilous work round the coasts of England; for it was rightfully felt that the attention of the public should be called to the men who day after day were obscurely risking their lives in the service of the country. I am timorous at sea but a good sailor, and though I thought it very likely I should be frightened I knew I would not be seasick, and I looked forward to the adventure. Unfortunately, just as arrangements were finally completed and I was about to start for the port where I was to embark on a trawler, the Germans invaded Norway and the picture changed. The military and naval authorities were much too busy to bother with a civilian getting material for a series of articles.

Finally I was sent over to France to do what suited me better because I was better qualified to do it. I was to write further articles there for an illustrated paper with an immense circulation, and at the same time I was to send private reports upon such matters as it behoved the government to be informed of but with which it was unnecessary to acquaint the public. My relations in France with a good many people in the know and the facility I had for making further connections made me hope that I could do this useful work at least adequately. I returned to Paris by air, but this time in a large passenger plane; but I had not been there a week when the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland, and this scheme too came to nothing.

21

I WENT HOME. I expected things to settle down in a few weeks and intended then to return to Paris and get to work. It was very quiet on the Riviera. The weather was beautiful. We received permission to bring the Sara back to her old berth at Villefranche. We were not allowed to take her out, but we used to go down and lunch on board and I bathed from the end of the jetty. I had a long strip of garden which had never been of much use, and I thought it was the very place to make a bulb garden, so, since the gardeners had nothing much to do just then, I set them to work on it. My eyes dazzled with the blaze of colour I foresaw, I watched their progress. There was a man at Antibes who sold bulbs, and he came over and we discussed my plan; of course it wouldn’t be possible to get tulips from Holland that year, but he could provide me with narcissus and daffodils, clusiana, iris and cilia. I had plenty of arums scattered in various places, and these I proposed to transplant. I gave an order for twenty thousand bulbs. They were to be delivered in September.

The news wasn’t too good, but I saw nothing to fear; I had seen the French Army with my own eyes and knew what magnificent troops they were and how intelligent, courageous and patriotic were the officers. The breakthrough at Sedan was puzzling and disappointing, but when Gamelin was dismissed and Weygand took his place I thought everything would be put right. My friends in Paris wrote that things were serious, but that there was no reason to be frightened; victory was certain. The mail began to come irregularly and the English papers either came several days late or not at all. The capitulation of the Belgian Army, the danger that confronted the British Expeditionary Force on their retreat to the sea and their escape from Dunkirk with the loss of their stores, guns and equipment — to us in the South it was staggering, but it did not destroy our confidence; we had faith in Weygand and were certain he would pull things together. My first inkling that Paris was not to be defended came when I got a letter from the British Embassy enclosing various papers which were being held for me there. Then came the flight of the government to Tours. The German Army marched into Paris. No news came any more either from England or the North of France, but the radio kept on telling us that Weygand was retreating according to plan and at his own good time would launch his counter-offensive and drive the invaders out. We believed it. We thought he would make a stand on the Aisne, on the Somme, on the Loire. The government fled to Bordeaux. No one I saw seemed seriously alarmed; they were all still convinced that the French Army was invincible. The first hint I had that things were desperate was when I heard on the radio that the government was holding cabinet meetings almost continuously. I said to my friends then: “I believe the French are going to ask for an armistice.” They laughed at me.

The end came with startling suddenness. Reynaud resigned and Pétain became head of the government. It was fresh and sunny the morning we listened at the radio to the grave heart-rending speech the old marshal made to the French nation in which he told them that they must sue for peace. The sea, the empty sea, was calm and blue. Tears came into our eyes and rolled down our cheeks. I went down to the gardener’s cottage to tell him the dreadful news. He and his wife were sitting at breakfast at a little round table with a checkered oilcloth. Each had a bowl of café au lait and a hunk of bread, and on a dish was a slab of butter and on another some fruit. The gardener pushed his bowl of coffee away from him and hid his face in his hands and wept. His wife, a fat, homely woman of five-and-forty, cried out loud, the tears streaming down her face.

“How shameful!” she moaned. “How shameful!”

The gardener raised his face and it was distorted with grief.

“How shameful!” he gasped. And then he clenched his fists and shouted: “We’ve been betrayed. We’ve been sold.”

Josephine sobbed broken-heartedly.

“La pauvre France,” she murmured.

I waited till they were calmer and then made the suggestions that the situation demanded. For all we knew, the Italians might come in at any moment. François, like all the French on the Riviera, had been very bitter against them, and I had had to speak sharply to him two or three times on account of his behaviour to the Italians, maids and gardeners, on the property. He had not spared his words. The gardeners said nothing when he abused their country and told them that if he had his way he would shoot every Italian on the coast; but I had noted their sullen looks and thought it very probable that short shrift would be shown him if an Italian army marched in. I told him to get into his car with his wife and go up to a little property he had in the hills and wait there to see what happened. The under-gardeners, who lived in the village, had come up for their day’s work as usual, and I stood by while he gave them instructions to water the beds while he was away and see that we had vegetables for the house. Then, with his car packed full of such things as he wanted to save, he started off.

I had myself to think of. It seemed very probable that if the Italians occupied the Riviera they would intern British subjects. Goebbels had spoken on the air about a book of mine called Ashenden which I had written on my experiences during the last war; I had arranged the facts, making them as dramatic as I knew how, to suit my purpose of producing a work of fiction, but the German propagandist had treated them as the naked truth and had somewhat violently attacked the British for their methods of dealing with espionage, and by implication myself; so I thought I should fare better at the hands of the Italians than at those of Goebbels’ compatriots, but to be put even in an Italian internment camp was not a prospect to look forward to with pleasure. I drove to the British consulate in Nice, where I found a mob of anxious people asking for information. The consul general, a large, loose-limbed, amiable man, without a great deal of energy, notwithstanding the crowd that besieged him maintained his nonchalance. In his lazy, drawling voice he told us that he was expecting at any moment to hear from the British Embassy, which had moved to Bordeaux with the French government, what measures were being devised to get the British subjects out of the country.

I drove back to Cap Ferrat and waited all the afternoon for a message from the consulate. None came, and whenever I tried to call, the line was busy. So about half-past five, tired of waiting and anxious, I went back to Nice. The consul told me that he had that moment received an order from the embassy that all British subjects were to leave. Two colliers, which had just discharged their cargo of coal at Marseilles and were about to start for Bone in Algeria to take on a cargo of iron ore, had been requisitioned and were now at Cannes. We were to be on the quay at eight o’clock next morning, bringing with us a handbag, a blanket and three days’ provisions. There were Italian submarines in the Mediterranean, and I asked the consul whether we should have an escort; he said he hoped so but wasn’t certain. Anyhow, it was the last chance of getting away, and if British subjects didn’t take it, the government washed its hands of them. The colliers were of less than four thousand tons, but it was hoped that either at Oran (to which we were to go first) or at Gibraltar the Admiralty would be able to send a liner to take us on. The consul asked me to see the British subjects in my own neighbourhood and give them their instructions. I started off.

Some of them needed a good deal of persuasion. They did not like the notion of leaving their houses, and one or two, who had established themselves on the Riviera for good and had no connections in England, did not know where they could go when they got there. Others quailed before the danger of the journey. When I was asked point-blank what I thought was the likelihood of our reaching England safely, I was obliged to say that I didn’t think there was more than a fifty-fifty chance; but I pointed out that if they stayed there was the risk of internment; it would be impossible for them to get money, and there might be a shortage of food. I left them to decide for themselves whether they thought the risk worth taking. I went home. Though I had tried to put the matter fairly when talking to the various persons I had seen, I was aware that I had weighted the scales a little with my own opinion that they had better go. But I was within myself in a state of indecision. I was determined not to allow myself to be interned, I was too old to undergo such an experience, and I was willing to kill myself rather than be killed by inches in a prison camp. On the other hand it was at least possible that the Italians would allow me to stay in my villa, but I should certainly not be allowed to use the telephone or communicate with my friends, and it might be that I should be confined to my own grounds. The war would be a long one now (of course I did not know that the outside world was predicting the defeat of Britain within a few weeks; the possibility of that never even occurred to me), and I was not prepared to endure the boredom of a useless existence for perhaps three or four years. Rather than that I preferred to slip away from a world from which I could no longer receive entertainment. The activities of the day had tired me, and as I took a last stroll in my garden, which if I went I should in all probability never see again, I asked myself if it was really worth while to take that journey. Ever since I was nearly drowned in Borneo I have had an unreasonable horror of death by drowning: unreasonable, I say, because on that occasion I was so exhausted by the effort of keeping afloat that I wanted nothing more than the rest of death. I felt no fear. I had had a long life, I had done pretty well all the things I wanted to do, and in the few years that remained to me I could look forward only to the gradual falling away of my powers and the gradual decrease of my capacity of enjoyment; I wondered if it was worth while to make a further effort or if it would not be more sensible to call it a day. I had upstairs in my bedroom a little tube of sleeping pills which I knew would bring me the release I sought. But on the other hand there was an even chance of getting through, I knew that my death would grieve one or two persons who were fond of me, I had still several books to write, and I did not really want to lose those last few years of my life when I could sit back, having finished my long labour, and for the first time indulge myself without qualms of conscience in the luxury of leisure. I had borne a good deal of pain in my day, and I didn’t suppose it took more than a minute or two to drown. I made up my mind the risk was worth taking.

22

WE HAD A HURRIED DINNER during which we discussed plans. We decided that Gerald, an American citizen, should stay and try to save the more precious things in my house. Though I had nothing of great value, I had a good many things that were endeared to me by long association. There was hardly an object that was not connected in my mind with the recollection of happy days in some far-distant country, with my youth, to which the passage of time had given a romantic tinge, or to some curious accident that had enabled me to acquire it. There were pieces of furniture and objects of art that it was a wrench to part with, but that were too large to move, and in any case, though I had a sentiment about them, they were not irreplaceable; on the other hand I had a collection of pictures that, once scattered, could never be made again. During the last part of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth there was a fashion in England to have portraits painted of favourite actors in scenes from the plays in which they appeared. A good many artists painted them, but the chief were Zoffany, a Venetian by birth, and a Dutchman called DeWilde. I bought one more than thirty years ago, because I was a dramatist and it was a pleasing picture, and then, hardly meaning to at first, began to collect them. They were little thought of in those days, and I bought them for a pound or thirty shillings each; I bought Zoffany’s best theatrical picture, illustrated in the standard work on this painter, for nineteen pounds. It had belonged to Henry Irving and for years hung in the greenroom at the Lyceum Theatre. Though the pieces slowly rose, I continued to buy them when they came into the market until I had about forty oil paintings and as many water colours. There is a very fine collection of these pictures at the Garrick Club in London, but mine was the best collection in private hands. It was impossible even to attempt to save so many pictures, but I chose out the best ones, about a dozen, and arranged with Gerald that he should put them in a safe place.

I had put a lot of work into the anthology of which I wrote on a previous page, and it was annoying to think that it would be wasted, but it was too bulky to take with me. I did not so much mind, because the work, though tedious, could be done again; on the other hand if I lost the notes I had made during my journey to India I should never be able to write the little book on my experiences which I projected; there were also the notebooks I had kept in a desultory fashion since I was eighteen. I had taken advantage of a few weeks of leisure sometime before to make a selection from these of what seemed to me might interest readers, and I had reduced them to two fat volumes of typescript which I hoped one day to publish. I had then destroyed the notebooks so that if this typescript were lost I could not reconstruct the book. This and the Indian notes Gerald promised to take down to the boat, where we hoped the American flag would serve as a protection. I did not know that American consuls had received instructions from the State Department that if American property were looted or damaged they were not to interfere.

I had to go up to my writing-room to fetch these papers, and my heart was heavy when I took a last look at the table at which for so many years I had passed so many hours of happy activity; I took a last look at the Gauguin which I had bought long ago in Tahiti out of a native hut in the bush; and I took a last look at the shelves which lined the long side of the room. They were packed tight with books. They stared at me with silent reproach because I was leaving them. I had to choose something to read on my journey. For a moment I could not decide what to take. I had very little room to spare. I chose Plato’s Trial and Death of Socrates, and Thackeray’s Esmond and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Both of these novels were long and would take a considerable time to read, and I had read neither for many years.

My writing-room was on the roof. I stepped out, locked the door, and took a last look at the dark sheen of the Mediterranean below me, then went downstairs to my bedroom to pack. It was difficult to know what to put into the one grip I was allowed to have; it seemed to me that linen could be bought anywhere, but that suits had to be made, which took time, so I took only just enough linen to last the journey and stuffed the grip full of suits. It gave me a pang to leave behind a beautiful new tail coat that I had recently had made, but I thought I should never need full dress again; I hesitated about my dinner jacket, but at the last moment decided to put it in. I took a blanket off the bed, and a pillow. When I went into the kitchen to see about my three days’ provisions, the cook and Nina, the amorous maid, were dissolved in tears. I had settled to go so suddenly that there was nothing much in the house that was of any use to me. But we found three or four tins of corned beef and a half-dozen of sardines. One of the persons I had been asked to round up was an old English doctor, who had retired to a little house in the village of St Jean with his wife, and when I went to see him he had told me that with sugar one could sustain life for quite a long time, so I put in the basket three two-pound cartons of lump sugar. I put in a pound of tea, a couple of packets of macaroni, a jar of marmalade and a loaf of bread. Gerald asked me if I wouldn’t take a bottle of gin or whisky, but I said I wouldn’t need it. I little knew. It never struck any of us that I should want a tin opener, a plate, a knife and fork, a glass and a cup or a towel. So when the basket was packed all these highly necessary things were omitted.

I was ready to start. I had made up my mind it would be better to go to Cannes that night in case the police took it into their heads to close the road next morning, and in any event I preferred not to spend another miserable night in the house. There had been so little preparation for my departure that Erda, my dackel, hadn’t noticed that anything unusual was afoot. She had been out in the garden most of the evening, chasing strange cats, and I gave instructions that if the house had to be abandoned she was to be killed. It gave me a lump in my throat. We drove in silence. I was unhappy. Every few miles a lantern was waved at us and we stopped to have our papers examined by a picket of soldiers who were guarding the road. At one of these halts we were asked by a sergeant whether we would give a lift to an Englishwoman who was taking the boat next morning and had no means of getting to Cannes. Of course we said we would be glad to, and there stepped into the car a girl with a rucksack on her back and a retriever. I offered her a cigarette, and when I struck a match to light it, took a look at her. She was a stockily built young woman, with a prettyish face and a bare head of untidy, fair hair. She was in a state of sullen trepidation. She was the daughter of an English father, now dead, and a Dutch mother whom she had left in the little house they lived in at Cagnes and had only heard an hour before that British subjects were to leave. I told her that I didn’t think they would take her dog on board.

“I won’t go without him,” she said sulkily.

I asked her why she went, and she told me that she was engaged to a young Dutchman and, if she stayed, might not see him for years, but she didn’t know where he was; she had an idea somehow of getting to Java, where she had relations. As we approached Cannes I asked her to which hotel she wanted to go, and she told me that she intended to spend the night on the beach. I thought perhaps she couldn’t afford to go to a hotel and asked her if she had money. She answered in a very surly fashion:

“I’ve got enough. Set me down anywhere on the front.”

When we arrived she got out without even a “good night” and lumbered away into the darkness of the blackout. I saw her afterwards on board. She had managed to get the dog on and because of that one of the officers gave up his cabin to her. She walked up and down the deck, in her one dress, with a frown of sullen displeasure on her face. She had brought no food; others fed her; she was penniless; others pressed money into her hands. She took it with an angry shrug. She was informed that her dog would have to go into quarantine when we arrived in England and she would have to pay ten shillings a week for its keep.

“How can I pay ten shillings a week?” she snapped.

Sympathetic women got together and collected enough to pay for the dog. She accepted the gift with resentment. I never saw a girl do quite so well for herself on the strength of a hard-luck story and an ungracious manner.

It was strange to enter the Carlton Hotel, which is the most frequented in Cannes, and find it brilliantly lit and crowded with people. They were in evening clothes, some of them a trifle the worse for liquor, and there was about them an air of hectic, hysterical gaiety which was sinister. They were of all nationalities. Some had decided to stay, some were anxious to get away as soon as they could. Wild rumours flew about. It was said that the Germans would be there in forty-eight hours. Next morning I went down to the quay. The two colliers which were to take us were anchored outside the shallow harbour.

23

THERE WAS ALREADY a crowd on the quay. It increased hour by hour, and when at last we were all embarked there were thirteen hundred of us. The Riviera isn’t only a sunny place for shady people. The people whose pictures you see in the illustrated papers and whose doings the gossip writers tell you of hadn’t come this year, and such as had were long since fled to safety. There were all classes mingled in the dense throng that waited to pass through the customs; for the French, even in that moment of crisis, would not waive the regulations, and we had to pass before the usual stout woman in overalls who marked our scanty luggage with chalk. There were invalids, some so ill, brought straight from the hospital, that they had to be borne on stretchers; but they, poor things, had to be taken back again, none knew to what fate, for it was impossible to get them on the ships or to care for them there. There were numbers of elderly persons, retired soldiers, Indian civilians and their wives, who after many years spent in the service of their country had made their home on the Riviera because the climate was mild and living cheap. There were also a lot of people who had been occupied there in commerce or trade; and they were to be pitied even more than the rest, for they were abandoning flourishing shops or profitable businesses and now, with half a lifetime’s work behind them, were starting off for England with nothing in the world before them. There were old governesses, teachers of English, chauffeurs, butlers, and even a number of young workmen who had been sent over to do a job of engineering for the French government. Their foreman had refused to come because the work was within a few days of completion, and he couldn’t square it with his conscience to leave it unfinished.

It was four hours before I got on board, and many did not manage to do this till late in the afternoon. One poor woman died of the heat while waiting. The two ships that were to take us were the Saltersgate and the Ashcrest. One was just over four thousand tons and the other just under. The crew had spent a couple of days trying to clean them, but the coal dust still lay thick on the iron decks and in every hole and cranny. I was told to go to the first hatch, and the hold below it was to be my living quarters till we reached Gibraltar. We started in the evening and reached Marseilles next day. I slept on deck that night, but it grew very cold by early morning and after that I slept in the hold. The iron deck was uncommon hard. I put my blanket under my greatcoat, but that helped little; I would sleep on one side till I was awaked by the soreness of my hip and then turn over, to be awakened again by the soreness of my other hip; I lay on my back and found that in that position I could not sleep at all. There were seventy-eight of us in the hold. A ladder led down to it, and I could not help reflecting that if there were an accident few of us would be able to get out. In our ship, the Saltersgate, there were five hundred refugees, and in the sister ship, the Ashcrest, eight hundred. When we arrived in Marseilles we were instructed by the French authorities to join a French convoy, and after hanging about all day, forbidden to land, we set out for Oran.

The conditions were so strange to most of us that it took us a day or two to find our bearings. One lady, when she came on board, told an officer that of course she wanted to go first class, and another called the steward (there was only one) and asked him to show her where the games deck was.

“It’s all over the ship, madam,” he replied.

A third, when she discovered that our drinking water came from the ship’s pump, remarked with horror that she had never drunk tap water in her life. But these were exceptions. Most of the people made the best of things and did what they could to make themselves as comfortable as possible in circumstances of extreme discomfort. At first there was some disorder, but we dull Britishers are a practical lot and we soon got things straight. Wardens were chosen for each hatch to keep order, see that nobody smoked below or after dark and that the hold was kept reasonably clean. We were short of water, and hours were fixed at which it could be drawn. But little was available for washing, and it required a strong stomach to wash in soapy water that fifty, a hundred people had washed in before, but there was no help for it, your hands and face and clothes were black with coal dust, and however filthy the water was, one had to wash. Most of the men managed to shave, and the women kept at least their faces fairly clean with the creams and lotions of which somehow or other they seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. But we could do nothing about our hands, they were grey with dirt; and it was no good putting on a clean shirt, because in a couple of hours it looked as if you’d worn it a week. You gave up the unavailing struggle and wore it a week. We just went dirty.

Some of the refugees were destitute and had had no money to buy food; others had had no instructions to bring any, so those of us who had provisions were asked not to come on the ship’s stores; but we had none of us brought enough for the long journey it turned out to be, and after three days we were all joining in the queue to receive our rations. We seemed then to spend most of our day lining up. It was exhausting in the hot sun, and the iron decks made the heat almost unendurable. Then food began to grow short, and at last we were reduced to a small piece of bully beef and four sweet biscuits or a bit of gingerbread for our midday and evening meals. It did not seem very much when you had stood nearly an hour to get it. We were hungry, and I heard one lady say feelingly:

“I’ll never take a slimming cure again as long as I live.”

It was queer to see women queuing up, a plate or an empty can in their grubby hands, with rings on their fingers and a pearl necklace round their necks; but they wore their jewellery because they had to, there being no other place to put it. There was a great run on empty bottles to take one’s ration of water or tea, and an empty jam jar was precious. You used it as a glass or as a receptacle for food. I learnt to wash myself pretty well all over in a pint of water at the bottom of a pail, but I only had one towel, which a kind lady lent me, and by the end of the week it was as black as your hat.

I have mentioned that one of my neighbours on the coast was a retired doctor, and he was in the ship with me. We knew that the Italians had a number of submarines out, and we were not so foolish as to suppose they would hesitate to torpedo us if they got the chance. We had a lookout man in the crow’s-nest day and night, and we had a gun and a gunner. The gunner was a jovial soul who longed for a chance of having a shot at an enemy submarine. There were only boats enough for the normal complement of the crew, which was thirty-eight; there were neither rafts nor life-belts. It was evident that if we were struck nearly all those five hundred refugees would be drowned. I made up my mind that it would be useless to attempt to save myself, so I asked my doctor friend how best to finish quickly.

“Don’t struggle,” he said. “Open your mouth, and the water pouring into your throat will bring on unconsciousness in less than a minute.”

This I made up my mind to do. I thought I could stand anything for a minute. After we had been out about three days, seeing nothing but an occasional school of porpoises, submarines were signalled and an escorting destroyer dropped depth charges. The passengers crowded to the side. They were more interested than scared. After it was all over, I saw a lady pass with a small bundle of wet garments and asked her what she had there.

“Well,” she said jauntily, “I took advantage of the fuss to get a little water and wash my dirty linen.”

The destroyer circled about for an hour, but there was no further sign of the submarine. Our sister ship, the Ashcrest, was less fortunate. She developed engine trouble and had to go back to a French port. There she was able to get provisions, but having repaired the engine, had to set out again without protection. She sighted an Italian submarine close at hand, but she was in Spanish territorial waters and the captain forbade the gunner to fire. The commander of the submarine had no such scruples. He fired. The gunner then opened fire and the submarine disappeared. The passengers had been ordered below, and when the Ashcrest put out a smoke screen, they thought the ship was on fire, for the smoke filled the holds. Everyone remained calm.

24

AS THE LONG DAYS WORE ON, the strain became greater. One morning a little man, a chauffeur, suddenly began to shout incoherent words and looked as though he were going to throw himself overboard. His face was livid and his eyes were frantic. Two or three men seized him, and he was led away to one of the officers’ cabins and guarded by relays of volunteers. On the same afternoon I saw a woman whom I knew slightly show signs of great agitation. I tried to calm her. She started to tremble all over, looked wildly up at the sky as though for enemy planes, then with a shriek fell to the iron deck. Altogether four persons went out of their minds. One of them, a man between forty and fifty, was an ex-officer, and I think he lost his reason owing to a sudden and enforced deprivation of alcohol. He was quite harmless and used to wander about in fantastic clothes that he had somehow got hold of. One day he plastered his chest with decorations he had made out of pieces of paper and with a rolled-up sunshade that represented a swagger stick reviewed his regiment. He went up to a startled group sitting on the bulwarks and said:

“Your buttons aren’t polished. Perfectly disgraceful.”

Then he turned to an imaginary officer behind him and in a barking voice asked him what the devil he meant by not seeing that his men were properly turned out. Once, draped in blankets, he saw himself as an Arab sheik standing proudly on the ramparts of his citadel; he scanned the desert for the oncoming hordes and shouted superbly: “Let ’em all come.” On another occasion he was the squire of dames, and when some woman got up from the deck to change her seat insisted on carrying her knitting for her and with old-world courtesy arranged her cushion when she sat down again. He was probably the happiest man on board, for he lived in a world of illusion. It was a sad day for him when we arrived at Gibraltar and he was able to get a bottle of whisky; he recovered his wits, such as they were, and re-entered the grim world of reality.

But I think the oddest person on board was one who would have been vastly surprised if anyone had told him that he was in any way unusual. This was the butler of a neighbour of mine on Cap Ferrât whom I had persuaded to come with me. A tall grey-haired man, of dignified presence, with a long, thin face, and a manner which was at once affable and distant. Because I was a friend of his mistress he saw fit to give me the sort of attention he would have done if I had been a visitor in her house; at the crack of dawn he brought me a cup of tea, he brushed my grimy clothes and, though I was entirely indifferent to it, shined my shoes. Though we sat on the iron deck to eat our meals, he waited on us with the same ceremony as he would have used at a dinner party. Nothing disturbed him. On the afternoon when we had the scare of which I spoke just now, he came up to his mistress, who was standing with me at the side trying to see the periscope, and said:

“Will you have your tea now, madam, or will you wait till the excitement subsides?”

His clothes got as grimy as ours did, his finger-nails were as black, but he maintained an air of neatness. I tried to get him to tell me what he thought about it all, but he knew his place too well to be willing to confide in me.

“They’re a funny lot of people, sir,” was the utmost I ever got him to say. “Not the sort of people we’re accustomed to.”

I didn’t know where he slept, but when I inquired and asked him whether he was getting enough to eat, he intimated to me in his polite way that it was none of my business.

“I’m not complaining, sir.”

I don’t know whether it occurred to him that, every night when we turned in, it was an even chance that we would all of us end it in the sea. Never by a word, nor by a change of expression, did he give a hint that everything wasn’t what you’d expect in a well-regulated household. To the end he remained calm and unruffled, civil but not obsequious, attentive, good-humoured, faintly sarcastic and dignified.

There was an old lady on board, over eighty, who had not wanted to leave her only home, but had been persuaded by her daughter and her daughter’s husband, with whom she lived. She was unfit to travel. It was a cruel thing to send her away, and it was evident enough that her daughter and son-in-law had looked upon this as a God-given opportunity to be rid of her for good. The shock and fatigue broke her. She became maudlin and spent hour after hour curling her thin white hair with trembling fingers. Then it became plain that she was dying. The ship’s hospital contained three bunks. It had been given to a young man crippled by infantile paralysis so that it would have been impossible for him to climb up and down the ladder that led to the hold. A day or two before sailing he had married a capable, kindly and comely young woman who had been his nurse. The old sick woman was put into the tiny hospital, and the newly married couple nursed her. Never can two people have spent a sadder honeymoon. They shared the cabin with her while she was dying. They shared the cabin with her when she lay dead. Sailors made a shroud for her out of sacking, and she was buried at midnight. A clergyman read the burial service over her, and the bride and bridegroom were the chief mourners. The whole convoy stopped for one minute while those poor remains were cast overboard; but not, as you might think, out of respect for the dead; alas, at that moment there was no time for that: it stopped for fear that the poor little corpse would foul our propeller.

After we had been five days at sea we were told that we would be landed at Oran, in Algeria, there to await instructions from Gibraltar. We hoped another and more suitable ship would be sent to fetch us. The captain of the Saltersgate was most unwilling to take us on. The passengers were exhausted and some of the older people were only just alive. It seemed impossible that they could endure the ordeal any longer. The aged widow had no sooner been removed from the bunk in the hospital than her place was taken by another who was dying of cancer, and she lay there, a woman with small, distinguished features, silent and uncomplaining. Her only wish was to die in England.

The conditions in the ship were dreadful. The food was insufficient and unsuitable. There was lavatory accommodation for a crew of thirty-eight, and there were more than five hundred of us.

We were in great spirits at the thought that our troubles would soon be over; but they fell when we reached the harbour and were told that we were not to go ashore. That morning the news had come of France’s capitulation, and the authorities expected at any moment to receive instructions to hold the ship and perhaps intern the refugees. It was an anxious moment. The day passed in interviews, somewhat heated, between the captain of the ship and the vice-consul at Nice in whose charge we were, on the one side, and the French officials on the other. At last our captain managed with his own wireless to get through to Gibraltar and received an order to get what food he could and come on at once. It was unfortunately a Sunday, and most of the shops were shut, but he went round in a taxi with the ship’s chandler and bought five hundred pounds of bread, all the fruit he could get, matches and cigarettes. Of these we were in great need. A French convoy happened to be starting for Gibraltar that night; we joined it and arrived on the Tuesday morning.

This time we thought our troubles really were over.

We had made plans to go to hotels and rest, to have a bath and a square meal; we had looked forward to seeing the last of that ship. We were told that no one would be permitted to land. Many broke down then, and it was painful to see their distress. Women wept. You must not be too hard on us. We were undernourished; we had been terribly uncomfortable for a week and had had little sleep. I suppose few of us composed ourselves to rest at night without reflecting that we might be torpedoed before morning. But what had most to do with shattering our nerves was not the discomfort, the lack of food or sleep and the danger, but the dirt. We were filthy, and it was intolerable. It was a cruel disappointment. A naval officer came on board and made us a speech. He explained that, with thousands of refugees already arrived, there was no room for us in Gibraltar, that Fifth Column activities were feared, and that Gibraltar was a fortress from which the greater part of the civilian population had been evacuated; finally that the government would do what it could to relieve our necessities, but we must make the best of a bad job, and, worst news of all, must go back to England in the ship we were in. Eventually, however, the captain and vice-consul were allowed to land, and they put our wretched plight before the authorities. The result was that the children, the sick, and persons of seventy and over were taken off. This left us with only two hundred and eighty, and, as directed, we set about making the best of this very bad job. Then we had a bit of luck. An order came that we were to be allowed on shore for a couple of hours in batches of fifty. We used our time in having a bath — I think none of us can ever have enjoyed a bath more — in buying food, rugs and mattresses, pails to wash in, drink and tobacco. Work was done on the ship to make the lavatory accommodation more adequate. Rafts were built. Stores were sent in.

We stayed in Gibraltar three days. Being in the last batch of those who went ashore, I found all the mattresses sold out, but I bought myself a quilt that did instead. I bought sardines, biscuits, sauce to make the bully beef more palatable, canned fruit, a couple of bottles of whisky and a bottle of rum. There was more space in the ship now, and I moved out of the hold and made my bed under the fo’c’sle head in the bosun’s locker. It was smelly because the food was kept there, but I found a couple of planks and, putting them side by side on three baskets, made a bed which was very comfortable after the iron deck. My companion, an Australian, who was an ingenious fellow, made a pail out of an old jam tin, and this served as a washbasin in the morning and as a soup tureen at midday. Soup was our staple meal after we left Gibraltar. We got hold of a broom, and he made a dustpan out of the top of a biscuit tin, so that we were able to keep our cramped quarters tolerably clean. To this man I owe it that I passed the rest of the journey well enough. He was small and spare, with a sharp, wrinkled face and fine eyes. He had been an officer in the last war, but before and after had followed a dozen callings; he had been a tramp, a bartender, a sheep-shearer, an engineer, a journalist; and having, I have no notion how, saved a bit of money, had bought himself a cottage in the hills behind Nice with the intention of passing his remaining years there. He said he was fifty, but I think he was much older. He was returning to England now with five pounds in his pocket to start life again. He could put his hand to anything, and there was no object, a piece of wood, a piece of sacking, a piece of string that he couldn’t find a use for; and he was immeasurably kind: there was no door to our little cabin, though he had made a curtain out of sacking that kept out the worst of the wind, which grew very chilly in the morning as we went north, and on one occasion at dawn I awoke to find that he had put his own blanket over me; and was lying on his back, smoking cigarettes, because j the cold prevented him from sleeping.

25

WE SAILED in a convoy escorted by a destroyer and a sloop. Because I was supposed to be a sensible person, I was told when submarines were signalled and when an air raid was threatened; and I was told that it would be a miracle if our engines held out, and if they broke down we should have to drop out of the convoy. I was told to keep these pleasant bits of information to myself; but, to tell the truth, I would just as soon not have been told them myself. Except for this the days passed pleasantly enough.

After breakfast, which consisted of a piece of stale bread with marmalade and a cup of tea, I smoked my pipe and read. I have been accustomed for years to start the day with some serious reading, and I did not see why I should break the habit, so from the time I got on board the Saltersgate I spent an hour or so every morning reading my Plato. I had often read before the dialogues that tell of the trial and death of Socrates, but never had I found them more moving. The circumstances, the danger we were in, gave them a peculiar significance. During the afternoon I read a novel and played patience. I had not read Esmond for forty years and had completely forgotten it. I had somehow got the idea that it was a cold, dull book; but I did not find it so. I thought it well written and interesting. It had a nobility of spirit and a brave gallantry which seemed to me very appropriate to the moment. I enjoyed Villette too; it is naïve and charming. It may be that excessive use is made of coincidence, but that is too much in the period to offend me, and I liked the plush-and-broadcloth savour of its romance. The headmistress of the school and the irascible little professor may be a trifle absurd, but they are wonderfully alive. After our supper at seven I told stories to anyone who cared to listen. At first I told the stories which I had stored in my memory and which I had a notion someday to write, but I reached the end of these and then I had to go back on experiences of my own. Here is one of them which they thought amusing. It is more than I did. If I relate it here it is not for its own sake, but to show with what a pleasant nonchalance these people took the chance of a submarine popping up on the surface at any moment and sending them all to fight vainly for their lives in the impassive sea.

I was in Munich one summer to attend a Wagner festival and, staying at the same hotel as I was, was a young woman I had met several times in London. Her name was Gladys. She was a very respectable young person, and I was a trifle surprised to see the company she was in. She was with two flashy-looking men and a still more flashy-looking woman. I didn’t know her well and didn’t like her much, so when I saw her with her friends I did no more than give her a distant nod. I was surprised to receive a note from her an hour later asking me to meet her in the hall. When I went down she told me that she was in trouble. She had joined the party, knowing none of them more than slightly, and when they had got to Munich, travelling straight from London, she had discovered that the woman was having an affair with one of the men and that she had been asked for the entertainment of the other. He made it clear what form he expected this to take, and when she objected they all turned very nasty and asked her why on earth she had come. I had only caught a glimpse of her friends, but that had been enough to tell me that their question was very natural. When I suggested that she should leave them, she told me that she was there as their guest and had nowhere to go till she could join her mother, who was arriving at Baden-Baden in five days. She had only enough money to get there.

“But did you think,” I asked her, “that people you hardly know were going to pay your ticket and your hotel expenses just for the pleasure of your conversation?”

“I don’t know why not,” she answered. “I’ve always been considered a very good conversationalist.”

I looked at her reflectively. That’s always a good thing to do when the only thing you have to say is tart.

“I’m in an awful position,” she went on. “The men are foul to me, and Amy only speaks to me to tell me I’m a rotten little prig and a spoil-sport.”

She began to bite her handkerchief, and I thought she was going to cry.

“I don’t know what I can do about it. Would you like me to talk to them?”

I didn’t much fancy the idea of that, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“It wouldn’t do any good. They’ve got it in for me now. I’m absolutely desperate.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“Can’t I go around with you these few days?”

I gave a slight start. I had things to do, and I had looked forward to a little holiday in my own company. I didn’t think it very flattering that she should think I was as safe as all that.

“It would be awfully kind of you,” she added. “I won’t he any trouble, and we can have a grand time together.”

“It would be lovely,” I said.

That afternoon we went for a walk in the English garden. I was then a successful dramatist, and Gladys gave me a long talk, almost a lecture, on the technique of the drama. I got her a seat for the opera, and during the intervals she discoursed upon Wagner’s aesthetic theories and explained to me in detail his use of musical motives to illustrate character. There was no opera next day, and we went for an excursion. In the morning she gave me a circumstantial summary of Bavarian history and in the afternoon explained to me how one should write a novel and illustrated her statements by an acute analysis of the respective merits of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. One morning we went to the picture gallery and with lucidity, though not without diffuseness, she pointed out to me that Rembrandt was a greater artist than Murillo. She told me what I should admire in Albrecht Dürer. I understood why she was considered a good conversationalist.

We lunched together and supped together. Her fund of information never once ran dry. When once or twice we ran across her friend Amy and her two companions, they gave me sour looks, which I thought rather hard, as I was making their party. At last I saw Gladys off at the station.

“You’ve been simply wonderful to me,” she said. “You’ve saved my life.”

I walked wearily back to the hotel. I made up my mind that I would never again come to the rescue of a maiden in distress. Nor have I.

26

WE REACHED the blessed shores of England. We had been in that ship for twenty days without ever taking our clothes off. From beginning to end, with few exceptions, this crowd of refugees behaved with coolness and courage. Social distinctions soon went by the board. Our common dirt did that. There were a number of persons whose selfishness was unconquerable. For instance, they would get into the food queue twice and so get a double supply of our scanty rations. When we were arriving at Oran, thinking we should leave the ship, we got up a subscription for the crew, and when it appeared that we would have no such luck one woman went to the steward and asked him to give her a double ration at supper that evening.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, madam,” he answered.

“I think you ought, you know,” she said crossly. “When they passed round the hat this morning I gave a hundred francs.”

“I’m sorry, madam, I can’t. But I shouldn’t like you to think you’d subscribed to the gratuity fund and got nothing for it.” He took a note out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Let me give you your hundred francs back.”

But such as she were few. Most were astonishingly unselfish. They were eager to help one another. Women with precious face creams would give them to those who had run short. We shared towels and soap and indeed whatever we had to share. It seemed to me that the selfish became more selfish and the unselfish more unselfish. I am bound to add that for the moment the selfish had the better of it. I should not like to end this part of my narrative without paying a tribute to the crew who worked like dogs to make our lot tolerable, to the officers who gave up their cabins to the old and sick, and to the skipper, Captain Stubbs, to whose courage, skill and firmness we owed it that we were brought safely home.

27

IT WAS GOOD to be in England again. I went to London and took a room at the Dorchester. I was tired and dirty. It was good to have a bath, put on clean clothes, dine well and sleep in a bed. I discovered, somewhat to my astonishment, that my friends had been anxious about me; I had been unable to inform them of my whereabouts, and a rumour had gone around that I had been captured by the Germans. People seemed to want to know about my escape, so I described it over the air, with the result that I was inundated with letters from persons with friends or relatives in France who wanted news of them. Some were pathetic, and it was a grief to me that I could tell the writers nothing to relieve their distress.

The first thing that struck me on my return to England was the optimism that everywhere prevailed. I had had an inkling of it when I stepped aboard the Saltersgate. The crew were rough Glasgow boys, and their faces were as black with coal dust as their grimy clothes. They talked with so strong an accent that it was hard for an Englishman to understand them, but there was no mistaking the sense of what they said. They were friendly and willing and they bubbled over with high spirits. Ever since the war began they had been sailing the dangerous seas, and did they care for Jerry’s bombs and Jerry’s torpedoes? Not they.

Their confidence was infectious, and if you asked one of them what he thought about France he replied with gay effrontery:

“It doesn’t matter; we can lick the Jerries alone.”

And at Liverpool, in the officials who came on board, in the porters who took our baggage, in the people in the streets, in the waiters at the restaurant, you felt the same spirit of confidence. Fear of invasion? Not a shadow of it.

“We’ll smash ’em. It’ll take time, of course, but that’s all right; we can hang on.”

I found the same spirit in London; I found the same spirit in the country, where the com in the fields was beginning to turn golden and the apples on the trees already weighed down the branches. Though the collapse of France was a bitter blow and Hitler was announcing that he would sign the treaty of peace in London on August 15th, it was splendidly clear that the people of Britain were undismayed. It was, indeed, a very different England from the England I had left a few weeks before. It was more determined, more energetic and more angry. Winston Churchill had inspired the nation with his own stem and resolute fortitude. There was no more half-heartedness. I talked with numbers of people, from privates to generals, from farm labourers to landed proprietors, to poor women and rich, to clerks and financiers; I found everywhere the same sense of the gravity of the situation, the same resolve to continue the struggle to victory, and the same readiness to give everything to achieve it. The British people had realized at last that they were fighting for their existence, and to defend their freedom they were prepared for any sacrifice that was demanded of them. In that dark hour their courage was transcendent.

The only persons who seemed to me unchanged were the officials of the Foreign Office. I met them sometimes at dinner, and I was amazed to hear the casual, ironical way in which they spoke of the situation. You would have thought the war was a game of chess; if your opponent made a move that endangered your queen you parried it, of course, but you had to admire his nimble strategy, and if in the end he beat you, well, after all it was only a game, a very interesting one, and it didn’t vastly matter; next time, perhaps, you’d beat him. I conceived the notion that they had led lives so shut off from ordinary human interests that they were incapable of taking serious things seriously. I have a hope that after the war the diplomatic service and the consular service will be combined and that before these gentlemen become attachés in embassies and clerks in Downing Street they will serve for a term of years in consulates so that they may come in contact with the ordinary run of men and acquire some knowledge at first hand both of human nature and of the conditions under which men live. It will doubtless dawn upon them then that they are of the same clay as other mortals.

I was eager to get back to work, but there seemed nothing much for me to do except to write articles. In order to get material for such of these as the occasion appeared to call for, I had to see a number of the men in whose control lay the conduct of the war. Among them was Sir Alan Brooke, the commander in chief of the Home Forces. I found a sturdily built man, of about the middle height, with greyish, thick-growing hair, a hooked, rather fleshy nose under which was a line of dark moustache, and with powerful, stubby hands. He gave me an impression of physical strength, and this struck me as peculiar, because he had an intellectual, sensitive face. He looked more like a scientist than a soldier; and if I had been sitting with him in a bus and he were in mufti, I should have taken him for a professor of physics in the University of London. His voice was strident. He spoke well, fluently and with decision. I don’t think anyone could spend an hour with him without coming to the conclusion that he was an able, determined and cool-headed man.

After what I had seen in France, where the failure of morale in the population had, I thought, so greatly contributed to the lamentable collapse, I was anxious to find out if my general impression of the state of mind of the British would be confirmed by one who had better opportunities of judging than I could hope to have, so the first question I put the commander in chief was what he thought of the morale of the people at large. He told me that he could not praise it too highly and as an example mentioned the Home Guards. These are volunteers, men in civil employment — though many of them served in the last war — who have been called for to deal with parachutists and attempts at sabotage, to protect bridges, railways and docks, and generally to make themselves useful in case of invasion. The vast majority are working-men, and they have been asked to perform these duties in addition to their day’s work. The response was so great that it was found necessary to call a halt, since it was impossible immediately to equip so many.

From the morale of the nation, it was natural to go on to talk of the morale of the army. I think no one could have heard the ringing, convinced tone of the general’s voice when he spoke of the troops he had commanded in France without sharing his confidence in them. Nothing demoralizes men more than to hold a position, perhaps with considerable losses, and then be ordered to retire because the support on their flanks has failed them; and when they take up a new position, they are apt to think: “What’s the use? Why should we lose a lot more fellows holding it, when we shall have to fall back again?” This is what happened time and time again in Flanders, when the Belgian Army capitulated and the French on the other flank abandoned the field. The British troops held each successive position with undiminished determination. It is no wonder the general was proud of them. And later, when he was withdrawing his army to the sea, they encountered French troops who had thrown away their arms and were marching haggard and broken, an army no longer, but a rabble surging along the Belgian chaussées. You would have expected such a sight to upset the British troops; but they marched stubbornly on. There are advantages in a race that is so — what? — so unimaginative or so unemotional, so pigheaded or so stolid, that it doesn’t react to impressions of this sort because it doesn’t know how to. The fact is that the British troops in France were never forced to retire by pressure on their front, but only by the withdrawal of their allies on their flanks. They returned to England with nothing but the clothes they stood up in, tired and hungry — but as full of fight as ever.

It had occurred to me that one of the causes of the French defeat was that the army had been left through a long winter of inaction with nothing to do, so that they had grown bored and discontented, and I put it to General Brooke that, if the Germans did not invade England that summer, the vast forces that made Great Britain a huge fortress would have to confront a situation similar to that which had had so unhappy an effect on the French troops. He reminded me that the British Command had had to deal with it during the previous winter; they had done so by keeping the men working, but not excessively, by providing them with entertainment, and by giving them short periods of leave at frequent intervals. I suggested that the soldier of to-day is a more highly educated man than the soldier of five-and-twenty years ago; he is accustomed to using his brain as well as his hands.

“Of course,” he said. “But don’t forget that the training of the modern soldier is very different from what it was a generation back. Then he had only to learn to fire a rifle and drill; a certain amount of drill is needful, but there is nothing so heart-rending, especially to an educated man, as this eternal marching about a barrack square. The modern soldier is a technician who has to learn a great deal. That keeps his brain active and his interest alive.”

It was plain enough that the General Staff was very much alive to the necessity of intensifying activities of all kinds so that the men should be kept occupied and happy.

28

AS WE KNOW, it is the superiority the Germans had in aircraft which allowed them to achieve their victories over the unhappy countries they have conquered. Of course we were building planes, but were we building enough? Of course we were buying them in America, but were we buying enough? These were the questions I heard asked. Thinking an article on the subject would be timely, I made up my mind to find out for myself what I could about the production of aircraft. I thought I need not concern myself about the airmen. Their daring, their coolness and presence of mind, their indifference to odds, their endurance, had been shown in a hundred battles and praised by the press of the whole world. I had myself known several members of the R.A.F., and when I looked at their youth, my heart was wrung because, with all life before them, they had to take such fearful risks. Some of them showed cheeks so smooth that you felt a safety razor was only recently a necessary part of their equipment; and yet they were so light-hearted, so gay, reckless yet confident in their skill, boys in appearance but men in experience, wily and knowledgeable, with old heads on young shoulders, that it was not enough to be proud of them; I was filled in their presence with a great humility.

I knew one somewhat more intimately; he was a little older than the others, twenty-four, and quite a little chap, not more than five foot four, I should guess (just the right height for a pilot, he said), jaunty, with a care-free look in his impudent blue eyes. He had crashed early in the war and had nearly broken his neck, but after a few weeks in hospital and a niggardly leave, had gone to work again. He came to see me soon after his return from France, and he had grim stories to tell of how the French, after their surrender, had tried to prevent the British planes from getting away, how they had refused to give them gas and oil, and how they had driven trucks over the airfield to prevent those whose tanks were full from taking off — bitter, shameful stories, but not such as it is any use to dwell upon. Shortly before, he had had a scrap with two German planes, one of which he brought down; a lucky shot pierced the oil tank, and so close were they that the oil splashed over his own plane, with the result that he could not see through his windscreen, but had to guide himself home by looking backwards over his shoulder.

“They were rather interested in that when I got in,” he said. “An expert came and examined the oil, and he said it was rotten — we wouldn’t use oil like that in a truck.”

I asked him if he wasn’t scared.

“Not then,” he said. “I’ve never been scared in a scrap — it’s too damned exciting.” He thought for a moment. “But I’ll tell you when I have been scared. When I was on a reconnaissance by myself. When you’re up there all alone, hour after hour — Gosh, my knees shook. You feel there’s no one in the world but you, and the sky looks so damned big. There’s nothing to be afraid of really, I don’t know why it should make you feel funny.”

“Infinity,” I suggested.

He was a jovial, cheery soul. He was in tearing spirits because he had two days’ leave and was determined to have the time of his life. He was full of plans for the future. After the war was won, he was going to buy a sailing-boat, forty foot long, and sail with a friend to the South Seas.

“It doesn’t cost anything to live there, does it?”

“Not much,” I answered.

“I shall have a grand time.”

I never saw him again. Perhaps he knows now that there’s nothing so frightening in infinity after all.

No, I didn’t think it was necessary to concern myself with the fighting men. But I wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, who was then Minister of Aircraft Production, and asked him if he could see me. This Ministry had not been in existence long, and I wanted to know something of what Lord Beaverbrook, with his great driving power, had accomplished. He is a man who has achieved success in most things he has set his mind to. He is an optimist, with the optimist’s good conceit of himself, but he is a man of resource. He has boundless energy, and it has been well said of him that if you give him a job to do he will get results almost before the ink on his commission is dry. By return of post I received an answer to my letter saying that he didn’t make appointments but would be glad to see me any time I went to the Ministry. He was engaged when I arrived, but I was immediately shown into his room; his visitor was still with him, but soon after took his leave. It occurred to me that to have another caller brought in was a very efficacious way of disposing of one who had had his say.

Low, the Australian caricaturist, has made the appearance of Lord Beaverbrook so familiar to the British public that each time you see him you have to readjust your impression of him. He is not the little gnome-like creature with a satanic grin of Low’s effective invention; he is not even small, five foot ten, I should say, squarely built, bald, with a rugged, deeply-lined face, grim except when he smiles, but his smile can be very engaging. He was very grim when he sat me down in a chair on the other side of the desk at which he was sitting, and crossing his arms, fixed me with eyes hard under the beetling brows.

“What d’you want of me?” he rasped.

The question was abrupt enough to be disconcerting if I had not known the answer. I asked him first to tell me how the British planes compared with the Germans in numbers.

“How can I?” he answered. “I don’t know how many planes the Germans have got; every expert I consult gives me a different figure. But this I do know: we’ve got enough to crush any attack they can make.”

“That’s pretty good news,” I said. “And when do you expect to reach your peak production?”

“Never. There is no peak,” he answered. “The sky’s the limit.”

I did not after all write the article I intended, because the official at the Ministry of Air to whom I was referred gave me to understand that he would grant me facilities to see what I wanted only on the condition that he collaborated with me in the writing of it, and I have unfortunately no gift for collaboration. He was in private life, I believe, connected with a firm of motor-car manufacturers.

29

ANOTHER MAN I met at this time was A. V. Alexander. It was he whom Winston Churchill, when he formed his government, invited to take the place at the Admiralty which he was himself vacating. Alexander has been for years one of the most respected leaders of the Labour party, but he is not only a politician; he is a business man as well; he was the moving spirit behind the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the astonishing success he has had in developing an undertaking that has been of such immense value to the working-man is sufficient proof of his acumen. He was First Lord of the Admiralty during the Labour administration and then acquitted himself with credit; when he resumed this office, he entered upon a job which he already knew a great deal about. He is a thickset, stoutish man, with something of a jowl, which adds to the rugged determination of his face; a short, aggressive nose; keen, alert eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles; a strong pugnacious jaw and short grey hair neatly cut. His manner is quiet but resolute. He puts on no frills, and when you go to see him, gets straight down at once to the topic of discourse. He talks with the fluency of a man who is accustomed to public speech.

There are huge maps in the stately room of the First Lord, and he got up from his chair every now and then to illustrate a point on one or other of them. He pointed out the immense coastline that Germany had to defend; it reached from the top of Norway to the Spanish frontier of France; and British ships were building, British ships were very near completion. That jaw of his jutted fiercely as he told me that by then the British fleet was ready for anything.

Knowing how long I have lived in France and how close my relations had been with it, he talked to me of the attack the British Navy had made on the French fleet at Oran.

“I can’t tell you how deeply I regretted the necessity of it,” he said, “but what could we do? We possess at present fourteen capital ships, the Germans two or three and the Italians six. The French had nine. Add three and six and nine together. If we’d let the French ships fall into enemy hands, the balance in heavy ships would have been against us, and our ocean convoys would have been liable to destruction by hostile surface forces. We had to do it. We couldn’t help ourselves. The French people were never allowed to know the terms we offered their fleet; they couldn’t have been more reasonable — they couldn’t have been more honourable.” He looked at me suddenly.

“You’re going to America, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Well, what security would there have been for the commerce of America if the power of our main fleet had been outweighed? We’re fighting their battle as well as our own. So long as the British fleet is there, America is safe. I wonder how safe she would be if it was destroyed.”

30

SOON AFTER I got to London I met Monsieur Corbin, till the collapse of France ambassador to the Court of St James; he had then resigned and was staying at the Dorchester till his ship sailed for South America. I had known him for some time and had often lunched with him. He was a cold, distant, severe man, who gave you the impression that any friendly advances you might make to him would fill him with embarrassment. I ran across him as I was getting out of the elevator and he was getting in. We shook hands, and he congratulated me on my safe arrival. I had never seen him before but as the honoured guest at a party or as the courteous host in the splendour of his own embassy; I saw now a pale, worn, broken man, bowed down with the humiliation of his country; he looked twenty years older; I was so shocked I could think of nothing to say; I thought it would be mortifying to him to express my bitter regret at what was so much greater a tragedy to him and impertinent to offer my condolences in a disaster in which consolation was unavailing. I stood there mute, staring at him stupidly, and was relieved when he stepped into the elevator.

As I have related, I spent six weeks towards the end of 1939 going round France in order to get the facts for the little book that was intended to show my fellow countrymen how great an effort the French were making to prepare themselves for the war, with what good will the workers were working to provide the material for its successful prosecution, and how efficient were their army and navy. In my book I told nothing that I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. I reported my impressions as honestly as I could.

Looking back now, I saw that here and there some chance remark, some casual incident, like straws in the wind that show which way it is blowing, should have aroused my suspicions. I could only blame myself because I had paid little attention to them. I was so disconcerted by my obtuseness that when I got back to England I made a point of asking a number of persons who were in a position to have known facts that were hidden from me whether they had anticipated the utter and terrible collapse of France. I discovered that it had been as great a surprise to them as it had been to me. They had foreseen as little as I that the great French nation with its vigorous and patriotic army would make less of a stand than the Poles; they had never envisaged the possibility that Frenchmen would be found to give up their capital without a struggle and to break their solemn and repeated promises.

I would not waste my time or the reader’s, at this time of day, in stating, as I now propose to do, the reasons why, so far as I can learn them, France was driven to a shameful capitulation, if I were not convinced that when these reasons are soberly set forth much may be learnt from them that is of pressing importance both to the people of America and the people of Great Britain. The errors, the defects of temperament and character that caused the defeat of France are not peculiarly and essentially French; they are human, and we are all in our different ways liable to them. It is only by avoiding those errors and guarding against these defects that we can hope to escape the crushing disaster that overwhelmed the French nation.

I must ask the reader to forgive me if I repeat now much of what I have told him before by implication, but the subject seems to me to be important enough to be stated categorically. I must ask him also to believe that I have good authority for all I am going to say. I would not lightly say things that make nonsense of what I wrote in the book to which I have just referred: no one would go out of his way to confess that he had shown want of perspicacity and want of judgment. I have loved France; I have many friends in France; I have never received anything but kindness from the French; they have held me in honour, and if I am the sort of man I am it is due in great measure to French art, French literature and French civilization. It is with grief, and without rancour, that I tell this story of confusion, self-seeking, pusillanimity and broken faith.

It is notorious that the French have always quarrelled bitterly among themselves on political and social questions, but they have always asserted that, when the country was in danger, they laid their disputes aside and presented a united front to the foe. So they said this time. It wasn’t true. Such unity as existed in parliamentary circles was only on the surface; below it, the animosities that had been left behind by the Blum government raged fiercely. In the cabinet there was an ignoble struggle for position, and when the effort of all should have been to prepare France for the struggle, ministers were stabbing one another in the back. The Communist party was dissolved, and the deputies who belonged to it, regardless of the effect it might have on the workers, were arrested or put to flight.

Until the Blum government brought in reforms that in other countries had been secured long since, the condition of the working-man in France was very bad. Few employers ever gave a thought to the welfare of their employees. In one of the biggest department stores in Paris the employees, as the first of their demands, asked that separate lavatory accommodation should be provided for men and women. Hours of work were excessive, and the workers were insufficiently paid to lead decent lives. To indicate the state of mind of the moneyed classes, I shall relate a conversation I had with a friend of mine, a kindly, upright and generous man who was a banker by profession. One afternoon I went to a communist meeting at Père Lachaise, the great Paris cemetery, and I noticed that on banner after banner were emblazoned these three words: “Peace, Work, Well-being.” I met my friend that evening and said how strange I thought it that a hundred and fifty years after the Revolution, the French working classes should still be making this minimum demand.

“Surely, that’s not much to ask,” I said.

He grew very angry.

“Peace certainly,” he said, “and work of course; but well-being, no — that’s out of the question. They can’t expect that.”

Is any comment necessary? I don’t think so. Of course the Blum government went too far and too quickly; the forty-hour week was impracticable in France; the moneyed classes grew frightened and hurried to place their money abroad; the franc fell and with it the government. The well-to-do heaved a sigh of relief, but the working classes were sullenly resentful. The wealthy had had a bad fright and from that time were haunted by the dread of bolshevism. When war broke out, it was the spectre of this that loomed before them. Big business was in close relations with Germany, and among the aristocracy and the prosperous bourgeoisie there were many, very many, who had an admiration for the dictators because they thought they had saved their respective countries from the horror of Russian communism. They hardly made a secret of their conviction that, if they had to choose between a victory for Germany and the bolshevism that they foresaw as a result of the war, they preferred a Germany victory. So stupid were they that they thought the victors would leave them their fortunes, which a communist revolution would certainly take away from them.

Then there was the army. It was supposed to be the finest army in Europe, and the General Staff was generally considered to have achieved the highest possible efficiency. Let us take the men first. During that long winter of inaction the crusading spirit that had fired them at the mobilization died away. They were worried by letters from home telling them that their farms were perishing for want of labour, their shops were doing no trade, and their businesses were going to rack and ruin. Why couldn’t they come home instead of sitting there behind the Maginot Line doing nothing? When fighting began in earnest they had already lost heart. But they would have fought well enough if they had been well led. They weren’t. A great change had come over France. Generalizations must always be qualified, and so I hasten to say that among the French were many, many thousands of men of the highest integrity, men imbued with a profound sense of human dignity, proud of their country and ready to sacrifice their lives to maintain its greatness. There were not enough. Democracy in the end depends on the virtue of the individual, and a democracy that is corrupt is doomed. No one who has not lived long in France can know how widespread was the corruption that existed in all classes of the population. There was a general decay of morality, an insane craving for pleasure, and a cynical contempt for honour. Many of the younger officers were thus affected. They would go to Paris on leave, or go home, and ask what they were fighting for; they would be just as well off under Hitler as under any other government; all they wanted was to live quietly and mind their own business; Hitler would let them do that, and what did they care about their empire or their navy? France was a great nation, and no one could conquer the spirit of France; it would still be France under German rule. The result of this feeling showed itself in battle. Of course there were many acts of heroism and many officers died in the performance of their duty, but there are terrible stories of troops left behind without their officers, who had scampered off to safety in their cars; and there are stories of officers who left their men to fend for themselves in order that they might rescue their own wives and children from districts that the Germans might at any moment occupy. It is well known how the millions of refugees not only hampered the movement of troops, but added to the dismay of the population at large, so I need do no more than refer to this as one of the causes that contributed to the breaking of the French morale.

It was acknowledged that Gamelin was incompetent and was maintained in the supreme command because he knew how to pull political strings, but the French people had confidence in the General Staff. It was composed of men who were too old for their jobs, who had learned nothing since the last war, and who were blindly self-complacent. They refused to learn the lesson of the attack on Poland. Generals at the front themselves told me that Poland was defeated because she refused to accept the advice of the French General Staff. They told me that they were only waiting for the Germans to attack the Maginot Line and were certain that they could crush them. When the Maginot Line proved useless, they had no notion what to do. Nothing had been done to teach the men how to stand up against the German mechanized divisions, though the Polish officers who escaped to France did all they knew to impress upon the General Staff the lesson they had learnt from their own bitter experience; but the French generals despised the Poles and in their arrogant obstinacy would not listen. It is no wonder that the men were seized with panic and put up no resistance.

Foch had said: “If France is in danger, send for Weygand.” When General Weygand was called in to stem disaster he examined the situation and told Reynaud it was hopeless. Reynaud reported this to a friend of mine, and added:

“What can I do when my commander in chief is a defeatist?”

Weygand had been a brilliant staff officer. He had a great reputation, and for fear of destroying this was unwilling to take grave risks. He is vain, ambitious, passionate and authoritative. After his retirement from the chief command under the age limit (he is well over seventy), he appears to have frequented the Paris salons and become infected with the fear of communism that prevailed in them. An ardent Catholic, he was deeply concerned with the degeneration of his fellow countrymen. He conceived a mystical belief that France could only be regenerated by a great trial, and when the catastrophe occurred, his belief was crystallized into this: France has sinned and must suffer. Well, that may be true, but it is not a frame of mind that will incite a commander in chief to strike for victory. When he lost hope of this, he devoted his energies to retaining control of the army so that he might defend the social order.

I need say nothing of Pétain. He is an old, tired man, stubborn and conceited, and by nature a defeatist. His inclinations have always been fascist. To those who had to do with him at the capitulation, he seemed incapable of decision. Nor need I say anything of minor factors that proved the incompetence of the General Staff — the red tape, for instance, that hampered the efforts of energetic officers. One told me of an important document that he saw ready to be delivered to him in an office across the hall from his own office, and that took a week to reach him. It was a distance of ten yards. I need not speak of the lack of armaments in the places where they were needed. I had myself seen the factories where tanks were being manufactured in what seemed to me great quantities. Where were they when they were wanted to withstand the German attack? Large numbers were kept in the vicinity of the big factories. Why? There is only one plausible answer: to crush the workers if they should attempt to revolt.

I come now to the politicians. It is a story as lamentable as it is confused, of self-seeking, disloyalty, irresolution, fear and dishonesty. Ministers who had been dismissed intrigued against the ministers who had replaced them; members of the cabinet distrusted one another; Mandel, the ablest of them all, never had a fair chance because he was a Jew. Ex-ministers were in treasonable communication with the enemy. Women exercised a devastating influence. It is even said that Madame de Portes, Reynaud’s mistress, forced her way into cabinet meetings; there is a story which seems well authenticated, that on one such occasion, when she was insisting on bursting in upon Reynaud, the officer on guard had to restrain her by main force; and there is another story that when the British ambassador was trying to persuade Reynaud to keep his country’s engagements with Great Britain, she burst open the door and cried:

“Ne cédez pas, ne cédez pas.”

It was Madame de Portes who induced Reynaud to take into his cabinet the disastrous Baudouin, who was made Minister for Foreign Affairs. He is a banker, a neo-Catholic, with the same sort of ideas upon the moral reconstruction of society as Weygand has, but I have met no one who believed in his sincerity. In his conversations with the British ambassador and with the Polish ministers (for it must be remembered that France had signed the same solemn treaties with Poland as with Great Britain that she would never make a separate peace with Germany) he showed himself grossly untruthful. He would not let the Polish representative see the terms of the armistice, which were lying on the table before him; and though the cabinet had already decided to accept them, told him that they would be refused and the government would go to Africa to continue the war from there.

But what is the use of going into this tortuous story of terrified, shortsighted men who put private interests before their country’s welfare? Their cause was lost when, rather than blow up bridges and factories, which represented money, they left them to the use of the enemy. Their cause was lost when, rather than see Paris destroyed as the Poles had the courage to see Warsaw destroyed, they abandoned it without a blow. Then panic seized the nation as it had seized the army, and there was no one to stay it. It was a moral failure that led to a material failure.

I can sum up the cause of the collapse of France in very few words. The General Staff was incompetent; the officers were vain, ill-instructed in modern warfare and insufficiently determined; the men were dissatisfied and half-hearted. The people at large were kept ignorant of everything that they should have been informed of; they were profoundly suspicious of the government, and were never convinced that the war was a matter that urgently concerned them; the propertied classes were more afraid of bolshevism than of German domination; their first thought was how to keep their money safely in their pockets; the government was inept, corrupt and, in part, disloyal. Is it a miracle that France was defeated? It would be a miracle if she hadn’t been.

This time there was no Clemenceau, no Foch, to effect a miracle. But is France conquered? The army has been defeated, but there is the great mass of the people. They understand what has happened, or if not yet, they will when they find out what it is to live under the German heel, and will there be nothing they can do to free themselves? I cannot believe it. The French are a proud, brave people. I cannot but think that when they have recovered from the despair caused by their shameful humiliation, leaders will arise, and determined men will be found to follow them.

I cannot believe that the French will submit tamely to the slavery which the Nazi victors will attempt to force upon them. Those of us who love France have no need to lose hope. The scum will be swept away. There are men in France who have integrity, patriotism and courage, thousands upon thousands of them; there are enough, I think, to enable them one day, when the time is ripe, to throw out the invader and restore France once more to her rightful place in the comity of nations.

It is not for pleasure that I have here narrated what seem to me the causes of the fall of this great country. What are the lessons that are to be drawn from the tragic story? Most of them are so obvious that I need not call attention to them, but one I must insist upon: If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. And when a nation has to fight for its freedom, it can only hope to win if it possesses certain qualities: honesty, courage, loyalty, vision and self-sacrifice. If it does not possess them, it has only itself to blame if it loses its freedom.

31

ON MY RETURN to England I was made much of by my friends. They asked me to lunch; they asked me to dine. I soon discovered that there were two subjects especially that were causing them anxiety. One was the incompetence of a certain general. As we all know, one of the disadvantages of the democratic form of government is that when a man is comfortably ensconced in a billet for which he is unfit, it is the devil’s own job to get him out of it; but still, though it takes time, it can be done; and I had not been back long before this general was relegated to a position of dignified obscurity and a better man put in his place.

The other subject was the Fifth Column. That it should be widely talked of was natural, for the impression that it is everywhere invisibly active is precisely that which German propaganda seeks to produce. It aims at spreading fear, despondency, mutual distrust and confusion. Now, the natural tendency of the public is to believe any alarming rumour; and when you have heard one, the inclination to make it a little more startling by adding something of your own when you retail it to your neighbour is difficult to resist. People are wise to take what they hear and read with a pinch of salt. But the Fifth Column is formidable; and since it was a contributary cause to the fall of Poland, Norway, the Low Countries and France, the reader will perhaps have patience with me while I tell him something of what I then learnt of its aims and methods.

I examined a number of secret reports dealing with the Fifth Column, and I was fortunate enough to meet some of the men whose job it is to watch its activities in Britain and to take the necessary steps to counteract them. I cannot tell their names; I can only say that in appearance they do not at all resemble the secret agents of fiction. If you met them, you would never dream that they had anything to do with the occupation they follow. One of them was a tall, thin fellow with a small head, precise in manner, so that you might have taken him for a mathematical tutor; another was a plump man with grey hair and a grey moon face, in rather shabby grey clothes; he had an ingratiating way with him, a pleasant laugh and a soft voice. I don’t know what you would have taken him for if you had found him standing in a doorway where you had sought refuge from a sudden shower — a motor salesman, perhaps, or a retired tea planter.

The purpose of the Fifth Column is to supplement warfare by civilian activities behind the enemy’s lines. This has always been to some extent a method of war; but it has never been used with so much skill and success as by the Germans in the present conflict. They have been clever enough to adapt their measures to the special conditions of each country. Before invasion started, steps were taken to influence opinion, to collect information, and to effect disturbing acts of sabotage; and these steps in numerous cases were facilitated by the fantastic negligence of the authorities: in Norway, for instance, German officials of the Lufthansa, pretending that they wished to investigate the possibilities of an air line, were allowed to inspect airports within three weeks of the invasion. Highly ingenious ways were devised for transmitting information. In Belgium posters advertising popular commodities, with maps and other useful intelligence on the other side, were pasted up on walls. Instructions were issued by means of advertisements in code in the daily papers; and in Yugoslavia advertisements in the pro-Nazi press were used to collect detailed information, ostensibly for holiday-makers, on billeting accommodation, water supplies and transport facilities.

Once invasion had taken place, Fifth Columnists played a more decided rôle. They sought to create confusion through the circulation of false reports by leaflets, telephone messages and word of mouth. They attempted to seize important points, airfields, government buildings, wireless stations, post offices and police stations. In Holland German civilians fired at Dutch troops from windows and roofs. Another important branch of the work was to guide the armed forces of the invader; and this, of course, needed local knowledge. Aircraft and ships may be guided by wireless or by many kinds of signals by night or day.

Here I may interrupt myself to narrate a little incident within my own knowledge. There is a tiny spit of land in an English estuary that guards the approach to an important city, and here are stationed a number of men to repel a landing. They are constantly bombed. It is a lonely life they lead. The Y.M.C.A. has started a canteen there, where they can get tea and coffee, where they can sit and chat and write letters; and to help in the work of this canteen there came an English clergyman. He was a fine, upstanding man of dignified presence, a man of culture but a good mixer, and he made himself very popular with the soldiers by giving them cigarettes and candy; he interested himself in all that concerned them and was always glad to listen when they talked to him about their training camps and told him where their friends were stationed and where they expected to be sent. When the canteen closed for the night, he liked to have a pipe, and who can blame him? It was hot in there, so he drew back the curtains and opened the window; he lit his pipe with a fusee — which holds its flame for quite a considerable time. It was pointed out to him that this was a dangerous thing to do, but he said he must have a breath of air after spending so many hours in that stuffy atmosphere, and it was absurd to think there could be any risk in lighting a match. Half an hour later there was an air raid. Well, it might have been a coincidence. But when the same thing happened a second time and a third, it looked strange; he was sent for; he was asked questions; and then, to his great indignation, was put under arrest while his room was searched. His interest in the soldiers had led him to make notes on much of what they had told him. He was taken back to his room, and a sentry was put on guard at the door; he spent the night walking up and down, up and down, and next morning was driven away by car under escort. So the canteen lost the services of this amiable, generous and sympathetic clergyman; the men didn’t mind that so much; what vexed them was that they hadn’t been allowed to lynch him.

32

IT IS NOT NECESSARY to exaggerate the power of the Fifth Column in Britain; it is foolish to give way to spy psychosis; but it would be idiotic to neglect a danger that the experience of other countries has shown to be very real. There are three sorts of Fifth Columnists in Britain: British subjects, enemy aliens and neutrals. The neutrals can be easily dealt with, for they can be deported; the enemy aliens can be interned. Large numbers have been, and a prodigious outcry was caused by it. Many were anti-fascists, anti-Nazis, and Jews who had fled to Britain to escape the concentration camps of their own countries, and who looked forward to the defeat of the Axis as their only hope of returning to their homes. Many were distinguished men who were prepared to put their talents to the service of the country that had given them asylum. Many were men of the highest character whose sufferings at the hands of their opponents made it impossible to believe that they would engage in activities on their behalf. The press took up their cause with vehemence and exercised all their powers of invective against a bureaucracy that dealt so harshly with these wretched people. On the face of it they had a case. It seemed unbearable to imprison persons who had thrown themselves on the hospitality of a free people. They must eventually return to their own countries, and it would be lamentable if they went back with anger in their hearts because they had suffered unmerited hardships at the hands of those they thought were their friends. On the other hand, there was the lesson of the conquered countries. Germans, who were ostensibly opponents of Nazism, settled residents as well as refugees, were later discovered to be active on the Nazi side. The Gestapo was known to have had spies among the refugees, and these were sometimes Jews. We are at war, and it would have been criminal negligence not to take every possible precaution. Agitation against the indiscriminate internment of enemy aliens, fortunately for the good name of Britain, bore fruit; and all those in Class C (those considered above suspicion) were set at liberty. Many thousands continued to be detained; and many of these, perhaps the majority of those in Class B (those whom the tribunals considered doubtful), are honestly hostile to Nazism and honestly friendly to Britain. They are deserving of every sympathy. A more difficult class to cope with were British subjects — either Germans and Italians who had been naturalized, or British-born. By an Act of Parliament recently passed, if there were good grounds to suspect persons of treasonable activities, they could be arrested and held without trial, but they had the right of appeal. At the time of which I write there were about twelve hundred under arrest. Most of them appealed, and their cases were carefully considered, but the appeal was allowed in only three or four. Since British justice is always sympathetic to the accused, it shows that the Home Office had good reasons for the step it took. Their lot is not a hard one. At first they were detained in prison, at Brixton or Wandsworth, but later they were placed in a military camp under the control of the Home Office. They wear their own clothes and do no work unless they want to; they can read papers, receive visitors and write and receive letters. You have only to read! Was Hitler’s Prisoner, by Stefan Lorant, to see how differently political suspects under preventive custody are treated by the Nazis.

Fifth Column agents may be men, women or even children. The French caught a girl of twelve who was signalling from behind chimneys to give German snipers the position of the French. They may be disguised as clergymen, nurses, policemen, street-car conductors, Boy Scouts, railway employees or taxi drivers. They may be in British naval, military or airforce uniforms. Before the invasion of Holland, Germans bought Dutch uniforms in great quantities, and these were smuggled across the border with the help of Dutch Nazis. They put them to good use later. On one occasion a British torpedo boat was fired on by soldiers in Dutch uniforms whom the commander had offered to evacuate from a quayside in Holland; on another, a Fifth Columnist, disguised as a Dutch policeman, told a group of isolated Dutch troops that their friends were round the corner, and when they turned it, they found German troops barricaded across the road, who promptly slaughtered them. Another dodge was to drop a German woman near a road. She would wave to a truck for a lift, and when it stopped, German troops in ambush would kill the driver and seize the truck. These are ruses of war and must be accepted as part of the horrible game; but the Germans have used methods which even a strong stomach must turn at: for example, after the invasion of Holland, Fifth Columnists in civilian dress would march through the streets singing patriotic Dutch songs, and when a crowd collected, a machine-gun would open fire. If they met a Dutch officer, their leader would salute him, then turn and shoot him in the back.

It is a comfort to think that sometimes the Nazis’ nefarious tricks were less successful. I collected three instances. The Dutch commander of a certain naval base discovered that two men in naval uniform had smuggled themselves into the dockyard. He mustered the garrison, but the intruders could not be found; so he told the men that on the following day they were not to salute their officers. Two did, and were found to be the wanted men. In another case it was noticed that light signals were given at night by Fifth Columnists to German planes to signify that parachutists could be released. A Dutch ship patrolling the shallow waters, hearing the sound of aeroplane engines overhead, gave the same signal; whereupon parachutists were released and dropped into the sea. At Lodz, in Poland, Fifth Columnists on receiving the signal from the Breslau radio station, “The comrades of Dr. Eicholz to work,” were to proceed to blow up railway tracks and bridges and attempt to seize the post office and telephone exchange. Besides revolvers, time mechanisms for bombs, fuses and detonators, they were provided with preserved food cans with false bottoms, the upper part containing meat, vegetables or oil, and the lower part dynamite. The final order to get going was sent to the leaders by telegram. The message ran: “Mother is dead, prepare wreaths.” It seemed odd to the authorities that several different persons should receive this sad news at once and be given the same touching injunction. It certainly showed some poverty of invention. Twenty-four citizens were arrested, and what happened to them the report does not relate.

33

IT IS NO AFFAIR OF MINE to tell the people of America what hazards they run from the activities of the Fifth Column in their country. They are competent to take care of themselves; and an alien is well advised to mind his own business. But after all, if you saw a man about to drive his car over a rickety bridge, you would surely be justified in stopping him and warning him of the danger. It may be that rather than take a long detour he will risk it and get over safely; then he will call you a timorous fool; but you must take your chance of that. The interests of the United States and Great Britain are now so closely connected that no citizen of one country can remain indifferent to the situation in the other. It may be that the idea of union now is an impracticable dream, but there is a union of a common language, a common culture, a common morality which does not depend on the consensus of the people concerned, but which is as absolute and inescapable as the common earth we inhabit and the common air we breathe.

I have not the least doubt that great numbers of Italians and Germans who have settled in America are loyal to it; many have left their homes in Europe because conditions there were intolerable to them; many have fled an odious tyranny, and in their newfound freedom, in the golden opportunities you give them they are happy to throw in their lot with yours; but can they entirely forget the land of their forbears? Is the bond common to them and the people of their own blood so weak that it can be altogether severed? Suppose that you, an exile for political reasons, had been settled in Rumania for a generation and found yourself well-content there, and then the United States were engaged in a war the issue of which none could tell — would not some deep primitive feeling arise in your heart so that you forgot the wrongs you had suffered from your country, and notwithstanding everything desired to see it conquer? I know it would in mine. And from that it is a small step to taking what measures present themselves to help it in its peril.

And do not forget that the Germans are ruthless. When they make threats, they carry them out if they can. You can expect no mercy from them. What would you do if you were a German immigrant, with your father and mother still in Germany, and an agent of the Gestapo (and don’t think there are none of them in the United States; there are scores) came to you and said that if you would do this or the other thing to embarrass the rearmament of the United States, they would be given the ample food that you knew full well they needed, but if you refused, they would be sent to a concentration camp? Are you so sure that you would have the determination to refuse to do what you were asked? We must take human nature as it is. It is better to prevent temptation from being put in a man’s way than to expect him in all circumstances to resist it. To be strong when our humanity, when our affections are involved, is asking more from most of us than we are capable of.

I cannot find it in my heart to blame the people who yield to such threats; I can only be sorry for them; but when the safety of the nation is at stake I think it only prudent to admit the possibility of their frailty.

Nor is it sensible to forget that the Germans are thorough. They have no great gift for improvisation, but they are systematic and far-seeing. They do not wait in our stupid British way to make their plans till the need for action arises. They leave little to chance. Here is a true story to show you with what method they prepare for eventualities. There is an aerodrome somewhere in England which since the war has been repeatedly bombed. The airmen could not make out how the Germans had ever discovered it, for it was in a secluded place and so well camouflaged that it was practically invisible from the air. Yet the Germans found the target with no difficulty and dropped their bombs with unerring precision. One of the duties of the Home Guard is to make themselves familiar with every yard of the district in which they work; and one day a pair of them made their way into a huge property, a mile or two from this airfield, that had for years been untenanted. There was a great bam of a house and a vast park in which the grass had been allowed to grow knee-high. As they forced their way through this, they noticed at a certain point that the ground underfoot felt different and that the grass there was shorter than elsewhere. They thought this odd and explored further. They discovered then that a broad, straight strip of land had been cultivated at one time, and when they went on, found to their surprise that this cultivated piece had a very strange shape. Inquiries were made, and it was learned that three years back, a party of Dutch bulb growers had rented the deserted park in order to try the experiment of growing tulips in England. Apparently the experiment had failed, for shortly before the war they gave it up and returned to Holland. The huge derelict house could be seen from miles off, and from the air that oddly shaped piece of land on which those honest Dutch horticulturists had grown their flowers showed in the long grass on either side as an immense arrow pointing straight at the aerodrome. The reason why the Germans managed to hit it with such wonderful accuracy was now clear to the meanest intelligence. It may seem strange that no British airman should have noticed the arrow, but the fact remains that none did, and I can but suppose that it was only visible if you knew it was there.

And here is a little story from my own knowledge. A childless couple — glad, I suppose, to add something to their modest income — took as a paying guest for the summer a little German boy who wished to learn English. He was a nice lad and they grew very fond of him. His visit was such a success on both sides that it was repeated year after year. The English couple came to love him as though he were their own son, and the boy seemed devoted to them. When the war broke out, he was sixteen. It was with very heavy hearts that they, the man and his wife, took him to the station to see him off to Germany. They wanted to give him a parting present, and they had bought the sort of things a boy of sixteen would like, ties and handkerchiefs and a scarf, and these they made into a parcel which they handed to him as he stepped into the train. The woman kissed him good-bye with tears streaming down her cheeks; the boy seemed heart-broken to leave them. Just as the train started, however, he threw the little parcel at the man’s head, and leaning out of the window, spat in the woman’s face.

They are strange people, the Germans.

34

THERE SEEMED NOTHING for me to do in England, and I decided to go to America. But that is not a thing that anyone can do without difficulty in these days. First I had to get my American visa, and for this I had to give proof that I had business there. I do not know whether American citizens are aware with what suspicion their consuls regard the wish of an alien to visit their country. Once I told the plain truth when I was asked what was the motive of my journey; I said I was going to see my friends and enjoy myself. The consul informed me that this was inadequate, and I had to get a letter from my publisher stating that it was necessary for me to go to New York to arrange for the publication of a book. The alien may come to the United States to make money, but not merely to spend it. It seems an undue modesty on the part of the officials of the State Department to suppose that a foreigner may not wish to visit the United States for pleasure. But on this occasion my reasons were sound enough for me to obtain my visa with ease. But before the Passport Office would give me an exit permit I had to get the permission of the Ministry of Information, which regards authors with some suspicion, and then that of the Treasury.

The bombardment of London started. Since this narrative does not pretend to deal with historical events I shall say nothing about it except in so far as it affected the ordinary life of the private person which I was. The daylight raids caused no great inconvenience. People did not deliberately go out into the streets while they were on, but if they were out, paid little attention to them. At first the government offices closed when the siren sounded and the staffs went down to the shelter, but this interfered with work so much that instructions were issued that they should carry on notwithstanding. The large stores closed their doors, but the smaller shops continued to transact their business. In the beginning the shelters were somewhat extensively used, but later on, going down to one occasionally to see if many people were there, I found it completely empty. The population of London soon grew so accustomed to the raids that the streets remained as crowded as usual and women went about their shopping with unconcern. When the raids came frequently it was sometimes difficult to tell if the siren you heard was the warning or the all-clear. I had a room on the top floor of the Dorchester, and one afternoon I was lying on my bed reading. The siren had sounded and I heard planes overhead. I was wondering whether it would not be prudent to go down to the lounge on the ground floor when a woman called me on the telephone. She had nothing particular to say, but, feeling lonely, wanted to have a chat. I did not think it was a very suitable moment for that, and I was perhaps rather short with her. But it is a thing I have often noticed, when a woman once gets a receiver in her hand she has great difficulty in putting it down again, and notwithstanding my brief replies my friend lightly touched on a large number of topics. At last she said irritably:

“I can’t imagine what’s the matter with this beastly telephone. I can’t hear you. Why is there such a row?”

“There happens to be a raid on,” I answered mildly.

“Is there? Why, I thought it was the all-clear that sounded. Are there any planes about?”

“There are.”

“Oh? Where are they?”

“Well, in point of fact, they’re just over my head,” I replied.

At that moment the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park let fly with a terrific burst of firing. There was a silence at the other end of the telephone, and then a rather subdued voice:

“Perhaps I’d better ring off.”

“Perhaps you had.”

“I’ll call you later,” she said with determination.

Then the Germans began night raids. I think the first was one Saturday early in September. After that they came regularly soon after dusk and lasted till dawn. The first two nights I slept in my room. It was on the twelfth floor, but the noise of the anti-aircraft batteries not more than a hundred yards away was ear-splitting, and when a bomb fell in the vicinity the hotel shook like a dog that’s just come out of the sea, so that sleep was difficult; I put my pride in my pocket and went down to the shelter. The first night I slept on three chairs, but I didn’t find that very commodious, and seeing no reason why I shouldn’t make myself as comfortable as I could, I went to Selfridge’s and bought myself a mattress. I took this down to the shelter and placed it in a convenient spot. I undressed in my room and put on a dressing-gown, took a couple of pillows and the eiderdown with me and went down. After my three weeks on an iron deck in the Saltersgate this was luxury and I slept like a child. Now and then I would be awakened by the roar of the guns in Hyde Park, but that was a noise that filled me with confidence and I immediately went to sleep again. The all-clear sounded between five and six. There was then a general commotion of people getting up which awakened me, and I went into the kitchens which were next door to the shelter and got the cook to give me a cup of coffee; he had the news of the night, and after a little chat with him I went up to bed in my own room and slept again till breakfast time.

35

AT FIRST the social life of London was not much changed. I went to one dinner party that has remained in my memory as one of the most singular experiences I have ever had. It was in one of those little old houses in Westminster which during the last few years have become fashionable partly because, with their panelled walls and pretty chimney-pieces, they have character and partly because they are quiet and near the Houses of Parliament. There were ten of us at dinner, and afterwards when we went upstairs to the drawing-room we found that our hostess had prepared a treat for us. Owing to conditions there was a lot of distress among musicians and to provide them with a little money persons of good-will now and then engaged them. A pianist, a cellist and a violinist were waiting to play to us. We made ourselves comfortable in armchairs and they began with a sonata of Haydn’s. They had scarcely started when the siren screeched through the night; a few minutes later the anti-aircraft guns began to fire, quite close to us, so that it looked as though the German planes were not far off; but the players continued, no one taking the least notice of the infernal row outside, and when they came to the end we all applauded as though nothing had happened to disturb our enjoyment of the charming music. The firing went on and they played another piece. We spent a delightful evening, and since the raid was still going on and we could not stay indefinitely, we made our way home.

It was hard to get taxis at night in outlying districts, and it was inconvenient to walk in the street, not on account of the bombs that might fall, but on account of the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. Some people went about in tin hats. One man who had been dining with me at the Dorchester on his way home saw a bomb drop about fifty yards ahead of him in Piccadilly. He threw himself on the ground and said to me afterwards:

“Lucky it hadn’t been raining. It would have ruined my clothes.”

A good many people spent the night where they dined, and the lounge at the Dorchester was quite crowded with persons who rested there till the all-clear sounded at dawn, some who had just come to dinner, some who had sought refuge from houses near by where there was no shelter, and some who preferred it to the hotel refuge. There were others, however, who would not yield to the conditions. Few dressed in the evenings, but one couple I knew — an old, distinguished man, who had had a great career in the service of the state, and his wife — dressed every evening as though nothing untoward were going on. They used frequently to come to dinner with friends at the Dorchester and about ten, however severe the raid, would send for a taxi and drive quietly home. I happened to be at one of these parties, and the lady reproved me for wearing day clothes.

“I can see no reason,” she said, “why, just because there’s a raid, a gentleman shouldn’t dress like a gentleman.”

On one occasion a very old friend, a very witty woman, came to dine with me. We talked late and then she said to me:

“You’re looking tired, I shall go home.”

The raid happened to be particularly bad that night, so I told her that she really couldn’t go out in it.

“I never heard such nonsense,” she replied. “Call me a taxi. I never pay any attention to the raids.”

I did as she bade me. Next morning I was awakened by a letter from her written in pencil. She told me that when the driver had taken her back to her house she had come to the conclusion that it was unsafe for him to be out on such a night, so she had taken him in and spent the rest of the night talking to him. She had found him a most interesting and delightful man. It was by him she sent me the letter when the all-clear had permitted him to go.

At first there was a lot of grumbling among the very poor because the bombs fell in the districts they lived in, and they asked:

“Why doesn’t Hitler bomb the West End?”

And at that time the poor were the chief sufferers. Rich people who lived in substantially built houses were fairly safe in their basements; and if a bomb fell, they had a good chance of escaping with no more than a few cuts and bruises. Anything but a direct hit would smash the windows, but in all probability do little harm besides. But the long rows of little houses in which the working classes for the most part live are flimsily built. They offer no protection, and a bomb in the middle of the roadway may easily make the entire street uninhabitable. Thousands of people were rendered homeless and lost everything they possessed. And they had no balance at the bank to enable them to go to a hotel and provide themselves with a new outfit; they had no friends in the country with whom they could stay while they considered the situation. They bore the dangers to which they were exposed with courage and the discomforts with humour. I knew a poor woman in Bermondsey who lived in one of the County Council apartment houses which had been built to clear the slums. She was a widow and, owing to the marriage of two of her children, the evacuation to the country of one small boy and the drafting of the older son, it was too large for her, but she had been unwilling to leave it after waiting a number of years to get it. It was destroyed. All she said was:

“Well, I couldn’t really afford the rent, I’d ‘ave ‘ad to move into something smaller and I wouldn’t ‘ave been able to take all my furniture. P’raps it’s just as well the Jerries ‘ave smashed it. I shan’t ‘ave to pay for storing it now.”

And one morning a night porter at the Dorchester went home to breakfast and as he ate his kipper remarked to his wife:

“Shut the window, dearie, will you? It’s a bit chilly this morning.”

She began to giggle.

“There ain’t no window, dear,” she replied. “I quite forgot to tell you, we was bombed last night.”

He roared with laughter.

But the turn of the West End came very soon and the pavements in Bond Street and the adjacent streets were littered with broken glass. A friend of mine who lived in Albany, that old-fashioned, romantic building where Byron once lived, was lifted right out of his bed and deposited on the floor by an explosion. The Burlington Arcade, where thirty years ago fashionable young men bought their shirts and ties, was reduced to a shambles. It was a grim sight to saunter through the eighteenth-century streets of Mayfair and see a great gap where a fine old house had been and sometimes, precariously perched on a fragment of a bedroom floor, a chest of drawers or a coat hanging forlorn on a peg. People took the loss of their possessions with singular equanimity. One morning a woman who had been bombed out of her apartment came in to the Dorchester. She had lost her furniture and all her clothes but those she stood up in. She was in great spirits and took the incident with gaiety. But when she sat down to breakfast and, asking for cream for her coffee, was told there was none, she flew into a passion. That was the last straw.

“I’ve been bombed out of my bloody flat,” she cried, “and lost every damned thing I had in the world, and now there’s no cream. If the country isn’t going to hell, where the hell is it going?”

People carried on with their affairs as best they could. Men who had been bombed out of their houses in the night went to work as usual next morning. I had to go one day to the Bank of England just after it had been hit fair and square. Pretty well every window was broken, and some of the offices were in a sad state of disorder, but business went on, and the chief inconvenience seemed to be that some men had had to move out of their rooms and it took a little time to discover their new quarters. A friend of mine who lives in Maida Vale had a grocer who was accustomed to call at his house for orders every morning at ten o’clock. The small business was run by a man and his wife, their son with his wife, and an unmarried daughter. They all lived over the shop. The daughter was a quick-witted girl and one day she said to her assembled family:

“I think it’s a great mistake, us all living together like this. If the shop was bombed we’d all get killed very likely, and it would be bad for business and upset the customers something dreadful. I think we ought to separate.”

It seemed a good idea, so the son and his wife took a room in a near-by street, the daughter in another, while the father and mother continued to live over the shop. Well, a few days later the house was bombed. The parents were extricated from the ruins and, fortunately not very much hurt, taken to the hospital. Then the young man and his sister put their heads together. The chief thing in their minds was that they mustn’t let their regular customers down, so they went to another grocer who lived two or three streets away and asked him if he would let them conduct their business from his shop. He agreed to this, and that same morning at ten o’clock sharp the young man called at my friend’s house for orders as though nothing in the world had happened to interfere with his usual habit.

A good many people left London, but many who had no business there refused to go. They liked to be in the middle of things, and in some strange way relished the excitement and the risk. There was on the whole much less fear of the raids than there had been during the last war. There was anger. I knew of one man in the East End who was seen stepping over a dead body at the height of a violent attack and furiously shaking his fist at the planes that flew overhead. But you could not tell how people would be affected. A sort of fatalism seemed prevalent, and there was a pretty general feeling, I fancied, that if a bomb was destined to fall on you, it would and there was nothing to do about it. But on the other hand there was also a queer notion that other people might be hit, but you wouldn’t be. There was no difference between women and men. I knew one man, a big, hulking, blustering fellow, whose nerve gave way completely; he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t do his work; when a raid came he was paralyzed with terror and sat in a shelter hour after hour reading detective stories. At last he had to go for safety to some distant part of the country. During the last war he had been in France when a bomb fell on the building in which he was and everyone in the dressing station but himself was killed. I knew some women who were scared out of their wits, but wouldn’t leave London because their husbands or their sons were there and they would not be parted from them. Their love was greater than their fear. But these nervous people were exceptional. The vast majority seemed to enjoy an increased vitality, they liked the thrill of living in stirring times, and they laughed at themselves and one another. One elderly lady wrote to me after I left England: “I don’t know if the raids are getting less severe, or if I’m getting used to them, but they don’t disturb my night’s rest any more. In fact I find them much less boring than my sons-in-law.”

36

ONE DAY I went to Woolwich. The siren began to wail as we drove along, but as usual no one seemed to take much notice; motor traffic went on; people continued to walk in the streets; here and there two or three men standing in a doorway looked up at the sky on the chance of seeing planes, and some of the shops closed their doors; but that was all. We arrived at the great arsenal just as the all-clear sounded before lunch. It was not to see the works that I had come. I had come to see a concert party that was giving a performance in one of the canteens while the workers were having their midday meal.

They were already there waiting, two girls dressed alike in showy, inexpensive stage dresses; a comedian, a pianist and a man who played the fiddle and the guitar. It was the sort of concert party you see on the beach during the summer at English seaside resorts. They play in the open if the weather is fine, under canvas when it grows chilly; and a bad summer is disastrous to them. You wonder what they do in the winter. It must be hard for them to get engagements even in provincial vaudeville houses; perhaps the girls get a few weeks around Christmas in pantomime; for even with all the indulgence possible, one has to acknowledge that it is a very indifferent show they put on. One of the two girls in this particular party was under thirty and prettyish, but the other was a middle-aged woman, raddled under her paint, with pinched features and peroxided hair. The comedian was a man of over fifty, and he told me that his son had been wounded during the retreat from Dunkirk. There would have been something terribly pathetic about this little band if it hadn’t been for their high spirits and the delight they took in their work. They were proud to do their bit.

The workers crowded in. They took their places at the long tables, each with the plate of food handed out by servers at the serving counter; and while they ate prepared to have a good time. It chanced that they were chiefly women, and a number had brought their knitting with them; but men who had hurried through their own lunch to listen to the show stood in groups at the back and sides. It was a good dinner they had; I know because afterwards I ate it myself; there was an ample choice, and it was very cheap; I had beefsteak pudding, a treacle pie and a cup of coffee. The show lasted for twenty minutes. It began ordinarily enough with a song in which the company took part; then the comedian, putting on a derby to show he was a funny man, did his piece; the younger of the two women played the concertina; then the older woman, raddled and painted, began to sing. She had little voice, and she had a cold, but she had immense vitality. The audience warmed up and soon she had them singing with her. In a minute it had ceased to be a set concert and had become a singsong. That was what the audience wanted, and for the rest of the time they all sang choruses and snatches of old songs. The concert came to an end, and the performers hurried off to another canteen to give a second show. They gave four in the twenty-four hours, two for the day shifts and two for the night. Each canteen had a concert once a week, but they had proved so successful that efforts were being made to give them more frequently.

I don’t know who had the idea of starting these concert parties to give workpeople an entertainment in the factories; but I do know that when the idea was set before Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, he at once saw its value and put it into effect. It was at his suggestion that I went down to see for myself how popular the plan was. Ernest Bevin is a remarkable man. He does not look like an Englishman. He is a large man, with a broad, fleshy, bashed-in face, a swarthy skin and bright, dark brown eyes; except for the irregularity of his features you might take him for an Italian. He has a fine resonant voice and expresses himself with vigour. His egoism is aggressive, and the first person singular is undoubtedly the word that recurs most frequently in his conversation. For my part I am not affronted by the conceit of others; I have never I noticed that modesty is a quality characteristic of politicians in general, and I am not sure that it is a valuable one; a man who has achieved a position of responsibility can only act effectively if he is confident in his own judgement; he must be assured that he is right in the decisions he makes, and this assurance he can only have if he has a good opinion of himself. I do not look upon it as a handicap that Ernest Bevin should have a good conceit of himself.

He has had a remarkable career. Born at Bristol of working-class parents, he went to work when he was eleven. He has followed a number of trades and among other things has been a docker. At the outbreak of the war he was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and a member of the Trade Union Council. Content with the great power his position gave him, he had always refused to go into Parliament. His influence with labour was enormous. It was not till Winston Churchill had the brilliant idea of offering him the Ministry of Labour that he accepted a seat in the House of Commons. Here, though some of his fellow members were doubtless affronted by certain of his idiosyncrasies, all were impressed by his sincerity, his patriotism, his eloquence and his energy. Ernest Bevin persuaded the trade unions to accept measures necessary for the successful utilization of labour which from any other man they might very well have refused even to consider. They are significant because they indicate a voluntary surrender on the part of workers of rights which they have achieved in the course of a long struggle and to which they justly attach great value. But it must not be thought that the Ministry of Labour concerns itself only with increasing the effectiveness of labour for the production of war material. The social services have been not only maintained, but augmented. Now there is a curious thing to note about this Ministry: created in 1917 as an offshoot of the Board of Trade, its activities, though useful, were limited in scope; but with the war, it had to deal with a vast increase of business, and a very large staff was engaged. It has a backbone of civil servants who are conversant with the work with which the Ministry is occupied, but the great majority of the persons it employs are amateurs, though amateurs with special qualifications.

The civil servants of Britain are a body of very intelligent men, scrupulously honest and highly conscientious, but they are slaves to red tape. I do not think it unfair to say that they have an instinctive hostility to constructive effort. They have acquired an unparalleled skill in obstruction. They are shy of responsibility, and they have discovered that the safest way not to make a mistake is to do nothing. The unhappy person who is forced to have dealings with them is inclined to think that they do not look upon themselves as the servants of the public, which of course they are, but as masters of a machine. They have gained of late a power that is almost absolute, and they exercise it, certainly with unvarying courtesy, with a ruthless determination. Let me give you one trifling example of red tape. It seems incredible, but I am assured by the trustworthy person who told it to me that it is true. When a general at the War Office needs a car for some official errand, he has to fill up five copies of his application, and this has to be signed by an officer equal in rank to his own; then the application goes to a civil servant — and if he thinks fit, he can refuse it.

The Ministry of Labour enjoys this advantage, that the civil servants employed by it have been for years concerned with industry, its problems and difficulties, and so are less divorced from real life than those of other ministries. They collaborate with good will with the labour men, with their expert knowledge, who occupy important positions in the organization. The result is flexibility, willingness to give promising ideas a trial, and the encouragement of initiative.

37

LABOUR HAS CONSENTED to sacrifice many of its hard-won liberties. Men have worked to the danger of their lives. They have worked many hours a day, and they have given up their Sunday rest and their summer holiday. When victory is won they will want their reward, and every sensible person must allow that they will have deserved it. Well, what will the reward be? It is very likely that the General Election which will then take place will see a great Labour majority in the House of Commons. The working man will have power. How will he use it?

Now, I am not a prophet or a politician and my own views can be of no value; all I can do is to tell the reader what I think are the ideas of the various men I talked with, skilled workmen in factories, foremen and Labour leaders. These Labour leaders are not young, hot-headed revolutionaries; they are men of mature age who have shown their capacity by conducting with success great enterprises, such as the society known as the Co-ops, or managing the affairs of the unions of which they are presidents or secretaries. They are united by the desire to better the conditions of life for the working classes, to assure them work and leisure, and to provide them with security when their working life is over. At Woolwich Arsenal I talked with a man whose job was to see to the comfort of the workers, to smooth out difficulties and to compose disagreements. He was an intelligent, sympathetic man. I asked him how they accepted the long hours, the loss of holidays, and the curtailment of their liberties. With good will, he told me, for they realized that they were inevitable; it was astonishing that among those thousands upon thousand of people there should be so little trouble; they were all intent upon one thing — to win the war.

“But when it’s over,” he added, “they’ll want their liberties back; and if they don’t get them there’ll be trouble. There’s much they’ll want changed.”

When I asked Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty, what sort of an England he foresaw when the war was finished, he put it in a single phrase: a country where there’s work for all, and no very rich people and no very poor people.

These were reasonable men I talked to, and I found nothing in their ideas that need frighten any sensible person. They anticipate a boom immediately after the war, as there was after the last one, but are fully aware that it will, as happened before, be followed by a slump; and profiting by past experience, they are anxious to avoid the disastrous effect it had then. Of course in England we shall all be very poor; there will be immense debts to pay and little money to pay them with; Labour foresees that certainly for some years long hours of work will have to continue, and it will not be till the situation has been straightened out that the ideal of the forty-hour week can be again seriously considered. The intention of labour is to introduce measures that will transfer the prime necessities of life from private ownership to the ownership of the state. It desires the trade of the nation to be conducted for the benefit of the community rather than for the profit of the individual. This means revolution, but I gained the impression that it will be a revolution by consent. I found the propertied classes deeply conscious of the generosity, the reasonableness and the gallantry labour had shown, and, however painful the sacrifice they might be called upon to make, prepared to make it to enable the working class to enjoy the well-being they so richly deserved.

I heard the owners of great houses acknowledge that the time for them was past. They accepted the change they foresaw in their style of living with resignation and even with cheerfulness.

38

WHEN I RETURNED to England I found everyone working like blazes. The incompetent, the self-seeking, the toadies, the timorous had retired into an obscurity, sometimes gilded, from which they should never have emerged. The country was united as, I think, it had never been before. I conceived the notion that the crisis was destroying the class consciousness which has been one of the evils of English life. I have a number of friends in Bermondsey, which is one of the poorer parts of London; the young men of that district who had been drafted found, very much to their surprise, that they liked being soldiers. They had better beds to sleep in and better food to eat than they had ever had before; the regular exercise in the open air improved their health, and when they came home on leave their uniform gave them a success with the girls that added not a little to the satisfaction they felt because they were serving their country. More than one mother said to me of her son: “Why, it’s made a man of him.” Putting it as tactfully as I could, I asked two or three of them how they got on with the men who were not of the working class.

“Oh, they’re all right,” was the answer. “They’re the same as everybody else really.”

I met a number of these men, members of what I think you call in America the privileged class, who had been serving in the ranks, and they too liked the life. They had mixed on equal terms with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; they had eaten with them, slept with them, worked with them, played with them; and they had enjoyed it. It was they, I am pretty sure, who had done the most to level the barriers. For it is a mistake to think that it is the well-to-do (in England at least) who are standoffish to their social inferiors; on the contrary it is the poor who have the strongest feeling of class distinction, it is they who look upon members of the better-educated or more opulent class with suspicion; and it is this suspicion that these young men of gentle birth had managed by their good humour and good sense to dispel. I knew several who were so happy in the ranks that they were loath to accede to the wish of their commanding officers that they should apply for a commission.

The English have been under the impression that they were generally liked abroad; because they had money to spare and were easy-going, because they liked to travel and could make themselves at home wherever they were, they thought they were popular. It has been something of a shock to them to discover in the course of this war that this was a delusion. Now, I think it will be admitted that they have many good qualities; but they are not good mixers and they are shy. It is pathetic sometimes to see them in a foreign country trying to ingratiate themselves and succeeding only in rubbing its inhabitants the wrong way. We are accused of snobbishness; and the charge is justified; it is perhaps our worst defect. It may be that it is natural to the English character; for it must not be supposed that it exists only in the upper and middle classes, it is just as strong in the working classes: the wife of the skilled workman will hesitate to associate with the wife of an unskilled workman; and I know myself of a case in Bermondsey where a very nice and pretty girl was looked down on by the family of her husband, a printer, because she came from a street that was considered mean, though to my eyes there was not a particle of difference between the shabby little row of houses her husband’s family lived in and that in which her own family lived, and they were less than a mile apart.

But the snobbishness of the well-to-do has certainly been fostered by the exclusiveness of their education. The public school — which in the United States is called the private school — has been for more than a century a characteristic feature of English life, and many good people are of opinion that the better qualities of the English are due to its influence. It is generally believed (though I think erroneously) that the Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Now it is evident that parents will no longer be able to pay the sums it has cost them to keep their boys at these expensive schools, and already many of them are at their wits’ end to keep going. They can only survive if they become once more what they were founded to be, public schools in which rich (such rich as there are) and poor can share the same education. They have outlived their usefulness, and I think it will be all to the good if, as the labour leaders desire, they are transformed into the same sort of institutions as the lycées of France and the gymnasia of Germany.

When all are educated together, rich and poor, highborn and low-born, the class consciousness which is the great obstacle in the way of mutual comprehension must surely disappear. Whatever their origins and circumstances, boys in the same school, doing the same tasks, playing the same games, are equal; and I think it permissible to hope that when they grow up, whatever their condition in after life, they will preserve the sense of the essential equality of all men which they learnt unconsciously at school. And it may be also that when the English of this particular class, instead of spending their most impressionable years herded with other boys, spend them at home, going to school for the day, when they mix with boys of all sorts, they will lose that shyness that gives so many people who don’t know them the false impression that they look upon themselves with excessive complacency. Then they will more easily gain the good will that their sterling qualities merit.

39

BUT BY NOW my papers were in order and I only had to wait till I could get a seat on the plane to Lisbon. I started from London one afternoon and went by train to Bristol; next morning, very early, I drove to the airport. It was a land plane I was to travel on, and I asked the pilot what would happen if we had to make a forced landing.

“We shall be very unlucky,” he answered.

We flew out to sea, the windows screened, accompanied part of the way by Spitfires, and six hours later arrived in Lisbon. We carried a lot of mail but very few passengers. I am fortunate in that I seldom go anywhere without meeting with someone who for one reason or another excites my curiosity, and among my fellow-travellers was an American with whom I made friends. He was an uncouth young man, large and clumsily built, with an ingenuous look on his broad face, large, pale, friendly eyes and a mop of untidy hair. He wore ill-fitting baggy clothes and a shocking hat. He told me that he, with a number of other Americans — forty, I think he said — had been studying medicine at the University of Glasgow; the war had caught him just as he was about to take his final examination, and he had been waiting since then for some means of getting away. I asked him why, with so many universities in America, Americans should go to Glasgow to study, and he told me that unless you had money or influence it was impossible to get into a good medical school in the United States. This seemed to me a strange state of affairs to obtain in a country that is both rich and democratic but I had no reason to doubt this statement. I discovered that he had never been on the Continent before, spoke no word of anything but English, and had no money but a few American dollars; I knew that Lisbon was crowded with refugees, and I had taken the precaution to engage by telegram a room at a hotel; he had made no plans; he did not know where he was going and had no notion how he would manage. I never saw anyone quite so helpless.

I thought I could not leave him to his own devices in a strange city, so when we landed I suggested that he should come to my hotel, where, if he couldn’t get a room, he could at least sleep on a sofa or a couple of chairs in the room reserved for me. But when we got there I found to my dismay that there was no room for me. We got back into the taxi, the driver of which fortunately understood Spanish, for I knew no Portuguese, and made a tour of all the principal hotels in the city. Every one was chockablock. After wandering about for two hours we at last found one room with two beds in it in a pension. It was none too clean, and the sheets filled me with misgiving. The food was execrable. But it was very cheap, which was an advantage to both of us, since I had been allowed to take out of England only ten pounds, and with the crowd of people who wanted to get on the clipper or go by sea to America it was impossible to tell how long one would be held up at Lisbon, It was a curious experience to be thrown into such intimate relations with a total stranger. He was amiable and embarrassingly grateful to me for taking care of him. We were together day and night. We spent long hours at the police station in a motley queue of foreigners, Poles, French, Germans, Belgians, Czechs, Russians, having our passports examined, for the Portuguese authorities make the way of foreigners very difficult, and during the week I spent in Lisbon I think I must have passed at least twelve hours of weary standing in one office and another to get permission to stay and permission to go. I never knew my friend’s name. I think I never met a member of a learned profession who was so ill-informed. There wasn’t a subject, except I presume his own, of which he wasn’t abysmally ignorant. I couldn’t imagine how he was going to cope with the hard, competitive life of America; he certainly hadn’t the sense to get out of the rain. At last in a moment of irritation I said to him:

“My poor boy, you don’t know anything about anything.”

He gave me his slow, rather shy, attractive smile.

“I know I don’t. I went to work as an errand boy when I was twelve years old. I’ve never had time to learn anything.”

I felt very badly and wished I hadn’t spoken. His account of the various occupations he had followed in order to get his education was dull and strangely pathetic. I wondered whether it would not be possible so to arrange society that a poor boy who had ambition and industry might acquire the training for his chosen profession without that dreary and deadening drain on his energies. Doubtless this young man knew medicine — anyhow, enough to get the diploma he so proudly showed me — but he knew nothing else. He was without a trace of culture. He had nothing of what a real education can give. During those years of double toil, toil to acquire technical knowledge and toil to earn his living, youth, with its thrill and promise, had slipped through his fingers and now, at nearly thirty, he had the unformed mind of a boy of sixteen. I asked myself whether it was possible for him to be more than an indifferent doctor when he was so lamentably ignorant of the world. To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have been born. He had not even the self-complacency that enables stupid people to accept their mediocrity with unction; he had on the contrary an engaging modesty. He was a tragic figure. However, it was no business of mine. Forty-eight hours later he got a mattress on a ship sailing for New York and in his clumsy, slouching way lumbered out of my life. If I saw him on the street tomorrow I shouldn’t recognize him.

40

I SPENT A WEEK in Lisbon. I did a little sight-seeing, but could make no excursions since I had to hoard the few pounds I had. I stepped aboard the clipper one morning at half-past nine. I landed in New York next day soon after one. I had three dollars in my pocket. I ordered an old-fashioned.

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

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Series Contents

Series One

Anton Chekhov

Charles Dickens

D.H. Lawrence

Dickensiana Volume I

Edgar Allan Poe

Elizabeth Gaskell

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

George Eliot

H. G. Wells

Henry James

Ivan Turgenev

Jack London

James Joyce

Jane Austen

Joseph Conrad

Leo Tolstoy

Louisa May Alcott

Mark Twain

Oscar Wilde

Robert Louis Stevenson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Walter Scott

The Brontës

Thomas Hardy

Virginia Woolf

Wilkie Collins

William Makepeace Thackeray

Series Two

Alexander Pushkin

Alexandre Dumas (English)

Andrew Lang

Anthony Trollope

Bram Stoker

Christopher Marlowe

Daniel Defoe

Edith Wharton

F. Scott Fitzgerald

G. K. Chesterton

Gustave Flaubert (English)

H. Rider Haggard

Herman Melville

Honoré de Balzac (English)

J. W. von Goethe (English)

Jules Verne

L. Frank Baum

Lewis Carroll

Marcel Proust (English)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nikolai Gogol

O. Henry

Rudyard Kipling

Tobias Smollett

Victor Hugo

William Shakespeare

Series Three

Ambrose Bierce

Ann Radcliffe

Ben Jonson

Charles Lever

Émile Zola

Ford Madox Ford

Geoffrey Chaucer

George Gissing

George Orwell

Guy de Maupassant

H. P. Lovecraft

Henrik Ibsen

Henry David Thoreau

Henry Fielding

J. M. Barrie

James Fenimore Cooper

John Buchan

John Galsworthy

Jonathan Swift

Kate Chopin

Katherine Mansfield

L. M. Montgomery

Laurence Sterne

Mary Shelley

Sheridan Le Fanu

Washington Irving

Series Four

Arnold Bennett

Arthur Machen

Beatrix Potter

Bret Harte

Captain Frederick Marryat

Charles Kingsley

Charles Reade

G. A. Henty

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Wallace

E. M. Forster

E. Nesbit

George Meredith

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Jerome K. Jerome

John Ruskin

Maria Edgeworth

M. E. Braddon

Miguel de Cervantes

M. R. James

R. M. Ballantyne

Robert E. Howard

Samuel Johnson

Stendhal

Stephen Crane

Zane Grey

Series Five

Algernon Blackwood

Anatole France

Beaumont and Fletcher

Charles Darwin

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Gibbon

E. F. Benson

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Friedrich Nietzsche

George Bernard Shaw

George MacDonald

Hilaire Belloc

John Bunyan

John Webster

Margaret Oliphant

Maxim Gorky

Oliver Goldsmith

Radclyffe Hall

Robert W. Chambers

Samuel Butler

Samuel Richardson

Sir Thomas Malory

Thomas Carlyle

William Harrison Ainsworth

William Dean Howells

William Morris

Series Six

Anthony Hope

Aphra Behn

Arthur Morrison

Baroness Emma Orczy

Captain Mayne Reid

Charlotte M. Yonge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

E. W. Hornung

Ellen Wood

Frances Burney

Frank Norris

Frank R. Stockton

Hall Caine

Horace Walpole

One Thousand and One Nights

R. Austin Freeman

Rafael Sabatini

Saki

Samuel Pepys

Sir Issac Newton

Stanley J. Weyman

Thomas De Quincey

Thomas Middleton

Voltaire

William Hazlitt

William Hope Hodgson

Series Seven

Adam Smith

Benjamin Disraeli

Confucius

David Hume

E. M. Delafield

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Edmund Burke

Ernest Hemingway

Frances Trollope

Galileo Galilei

Guy Boothby

Hans Christian Andersen

Ian Fleming

Immanuel Kant

Karl Marx

Kenneth Grahame

Lytton Strachey

Mary Wollstonecraft

Michel de Montaigne

René Descartes

Richard Marsh

Sax Rohmer

Sir Richard Burton

Talbot Mundy

Thomas Babington Macaulay

W. W. Jacobs

Series Eight

Anna Katharine Green

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Brothers Grimm

C. S. Lewis

Charles and Mary Lamb

Elizabeth von Arnim

Ernest Bramah

Francis Bacon

Gilbert and Sullivan

Grant Allen

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Hugh Walpole

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

John Locke

John Muir

Joseph Addison

Lafcadio Hearn

Lord Dunsany

Marie Corelli

Niccolò Machiavelli

Ouida

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sigmund Freud

Theodore Dreiser

Walter Pater

W. Somerset Maugham

Ancient Classics

Achilles Tatius

Aeschylus

Ammianus Marcellinus

Apollodorus

Appian

Apuleius

Apollonius of Rhodes

Aristophanes

Aristotle

Arrian

Augustine

Aulus Gellius

Bede

Cassius Dio

Cato

Catullus

Cicero

Clement of Alexandria

Cornelius Nepos

Demosthenes

Diodorus Siculus

Diogenes Laërtius

Euripides

Frontius

Herodotus

Hesiod

Hippocrates

Homer

Horace

Isocrates

Josephus

Julius Caesar

Juvenal

Livy

Longus

Lucan

Lucian

Lucretius

Marcus Aurelius

Martial

Nonnus

Ovid

Pausanias

Petronius

Pindar

Plato

Plautus

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Younger

Plotinus

Plutarch

Polybius

Procopius

Propertius

Ptolemy

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Quintus Smyrnaeus

Sallust

Sappho

Seneca the Younger

Septuagint

Sidonius

Sophocles

Statius

Strabo

Suetonius

Tacitus

Terence

Theocritus

Thucydides

Tibullus

Virgil

Xenophon

Delphi Poets Series

A. E. Housman

Alexander Pope

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Andrew Marvell

Beowulf

Charlotte Smith

Christina Rossetti

D. H Lawrence (poetry)

Dante Alighieri (English)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Delphi Poetry Anthology

Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)

Edmund Spenser

Edward Lear

Edward Thomas

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Emily Dickinson

Ezra Pound

Friedrich Schiller (English)

George Chapman

George Herbert

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gertrude Stein

Hafez

Heinrich Heine

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Isaac Rosenberg

James Russell Lowell

Johan Ludvig Runeberg

John Clare

John Donne

John Dryden

John Keats

John Milton

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Joseph Addison

Leigh Hunt

Lord Byron

Ludovico Ariosto

Luís de Camões

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Prior

Michael Drayton

Nikolai Nekrasov

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Petrarch

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Robert Browning

Robert Burns

Robert Frost

Robert Southey

Rumi

Rupert Brooke

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Walter Raleigh

Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Gray

Thomas Hardy (poetry)

Thomas Hood

Thomas Moore

Torquato Tasso

T. S. Eliot

W. B. Yeats

Walter Savage Landor

Walt Whitman

Wilfred Owen

William Blake

William Cowper

William Wordsworth

Masters of Art

Albrecht Dürer

Amedeo Modigliani

Artemisia Gentileschi

Camille Pissarro

Canaletto

Caravaggio

Caspar David Friedrich

Claude Lorrain

Claude Monet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Diego Velázquez

Edgar Degas

Édouard Manet

Edvard Munch

Eugène Delacroix

Francisco Goya

Giotto

Giovanni Bellini

Gustave Courbet

Gustav Klimt

J. M. W. Turner

Johannes Vermeer

John Constable

Leonardo da Vinci

Michelangelo

Paul Cézanne

Paul Gauguin

Paul Klee

Peter Paul Rubens

Piero della Francesca

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Sandro Botticelli

Raphael

Rembrandt van Rijn

Thomas Gainsborough

Tintoretto

Titian

Vincent van Gogh

Wassily Kandinsky

Alphabetical List of Titles

A. E. Housman

Achilles Tatius

Adam Smith

Aeschylus

Albrecht Dürer

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pushkin

Alexandre Dumas (English)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Ambrose Bierce

Amedeo Modigliani

Ammianus Marcellinus

Anatole France

Andrew Lang

Andrew Marvell

Ann Radcliffe

Anna Katharine Green

Anthony Hope

Anthony Trollope

Anton Chekhov

Aphra Behn

Apollodorus

Apollonius of Rhodes

Appian

Apuleius

Aristophanes

Aristotle

Arnold Bennett

Arrian

Artemisia Gentileschi

Arthur Machen

Arthur Morrison

Arthur Schopenhauer

Augustine

Aulus Gellius

Baroness Emma Orczy

Beatrix Potter

Beaumont and Fletcher

Bede

Ben Jonson

Benjamin Disraeli

Beowulf

Bram Stoker

Bret Harte

C. S. Lewis

Camille Pissarro

Canaletto

Captain Frederick Marryat

Captain Mayne Reid

Caravaggio

Caspar David Friedrich

Cassius Dio

Cato

Catullus

Charles and Mary Lamb

Charles Darwin

Charles Dickens

Charles Kingsley

Charles Lever

Charles Reade

Charlotte M. Yonge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Smith

Christina Rossetti

Christopher Marlowe

Cicero

Claude Lorrain

Claude Monet

Clement of Alexandria

Confucius

Cornelius Nepos

D. H Lawrence (poetry)

D.H. Lawrence

Daniel Defoe

Dante Alighieri (English)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

David Hume

Delphi Poetry Anthology

Demosthenes

Dickensiana Volume I

Diego Velázquez

Diodorus Siculus

Diogenes Laërtius

E. F. Benson

E. M. Delafield

E. M. Forster

E. Nesbit

E. Phillips Oppenheim

E. W. Hornung

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)

Edgar Degas

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Wallace

Edith Wharton

Edmund Burke

Edmund Spenser

Édouard Manet

Edvard Munch

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Gibbon

Edward Lear

Edward Thomas

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth von Arnim

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ellen Wood

Émile Zola

Emily Dickinson

Ernest Bramah

Ernest Hemingway

Eugène Delacroix

Euripides

Ezra Pound

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ford Madox Ford

Frances Burney

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Trollope

Francis Bacon

Francisco Goya

Frank Norris

Frank R. Stockton

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Schiller (English)

Frontius

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

G. A. Henty

G. K. Chesterton

Galileo Galilei

Geoffrey Chaucer

George Bernard Shaw

George Chapman

George Eliot

George Gissing

George Herbert

George MacDonald

George Meredith

George Orwell

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gertrude Stein

Gilbert and Sullivan

Giotto

Giovanni Bellini

Grant Allen

Gustav Klimt

Gustave Courbet

Gustave Flaubert (English)

Guy Boothby

Guy de Maupassant

H. G. Wells

H. P. Lovecraft

H. Rider Haggard

Hafez

Hall Caine

Hans Christian Andersen

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Heinrich Heine

Henrik Ibsen

Henry David Thoreau

Henry Fielding

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry James

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Herman Melville

Herodotus

Hesiod

Hilaire Belloc

Hippocrates

Homer

Honoré de Balzac (English)

Horace

Horace Walpole

Hugh Walpole

Ian Fleming

Immanuel Kant

Isaac Rosenberg

Isocrates

Ivan Turgenev

J. M. Barrie

J. M. W. Turner

J. W. von Goethe (English)

Jack London

James Fenimore Cooper

James Joyce

James Russell Lowell

Jane Austen

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jerome K. Jerome

Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Johannes Vermeer

John Buchan

John Bunyan

John Clare

John Constable

John Donne

John Dryden

John Galsworthy

John Keats

John Locke

John Milton

John Muir

John Ruskin

John Webster

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Jonathan Swift

Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison

Joseph Conrad

Josephus

Jules Verne

Julius Caesar

Juvenal

Karl Marx

Kate Chopin

Katherine Mansfield

Kenneth Grahame

L. Frank Baum

L. M. Montgomery

Lafcadio Hearn

Laurence Sterne

Leigh Hunt

Leo Tolstoy

Leonardo da Vinci

Lewis Carroll

Livy

Longus

Lord Byron

Lord Dunsany

Louisa May Alcott

Lucan

Lucian

Lucretius

Ludovico Ariosto

Luís de Camões

Lytton Strachey

M. E. Braddon

M. R. James

Marcel Proust (English)

Marcus Aurelius

Margaret Oliphant

Maria Edgeworth

Marie Corelli

Mark Twain

Martial

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Prior

Maxim Gorky

Michael Drayton

Michel de Montaigne

Michelangelo

Miguel de Cervantes

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Niccolò Machiavelli

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Nekrasov

Nonnus

O. Henry

Oliver Goldsmith

One Thousand and One Nights

Oscar Wilde

Ouida

Ovid

Paul Cézanne

Paul Gauguin

Paul Klee

Pausanias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peter Paul Rubens

Petrarch

Petronius

Piero della Francesca

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pindar

Plato

Plautus

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Younger

Plotinus

Plutarch

Polybius

Procopius

Propertius

Ptolemy

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Quintus Smyrnaeus

R. Austin Freeman

R. M. Ballantyne

Radclyffe Hall

Rafael Sabatini

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Raphael

Rembrandt van Rijn

René Descartes

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Marsh

Robert Browning

Robert Burns

Robert E. Howard

Robert Frost

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Southey

Robert W. Chambers

Rudyard Kipling

Rumi

Rupert Brooke

Saki

Sallust

Samuel Butler

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Pepys

Samuel Richardson

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sandro Botticelli

Sappho

Sax Rohmer

Seneca the Younger

Septuagint

Sheridan Le Fanu

Sidonius

Sigmund Freud

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Issac Newton

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Richard Burton

Sir Thomas Malory

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Scott

Sophocles

Stanley J. Weyman

Statius

Stendhal

Stephen Crane

Strabo

Suetonius

T. S. Eliot

Tacitus

Talbot Mundy

Terence

The Brontës

The Brothers Grimm

Theocritus

Theodore Dreiser

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Chatterton

Thomas De Quincey

Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gray

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (poetry)

Thomas Hood

Thomas Middleton

Thomas Moore

Thucydides

Tibullus

Tintoretto

Titian

Tobias Smollett

Torquato Tasso

Victor Hugo

Vincent van Gogh

Virgil

Virginia Woolf

Voltaire

W. B. Yeats

W. Somerset Maugham

W. W. Jacobs

Walt Whitman

Walter Pater

Walter Savage Landor

Washington Irving

Wassily Kandinsky

Wilfred Owen

Wilkie Collins

William Blake

William Cowper

William Dean Howells

William Harrison Ainsworth

William Hazlitt

William Hope Hodgson

William Makepeace Thackeray

William Morris

William Shakespeare

William Wordsworth

Xenophon

Zane Grey

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Cap Ferrat, situated in the Alpes-Maritimes, France – in 1926 Maugham purchased a villa on the Rivera, where he would spend the rest of his life, except during World War II (1940-1944), when he resided in the United States.

Canterbury Cathedral, Kent — Maugham was cremated and his ashes were buried beneath a rose bush, near the Maugham Library at Canterbury Cathedral.

The Maugham Library, Canterbury Cathedral

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT

The Novels

LIZA OF LAMBETH

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

THE MAKING OF A SAINT

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

EPILOGUE

THE HERO

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

EPILOGUE

MRS CRADDOCK

EPISTLE DEDICATORY

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

PART II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

THE BISHOP’S APRON

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

THE EXPLORER

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

THE MAGICIAN

CONTENTS

A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

LXXXI

LXXXII

LXXXIII

LXXXIV

LXXXV

LXXXVI

LXXXVII

LXXXVIII

LXXXIX

XC

XCI

XCII

XCIII

XCIV

XCV

XCVI

XCVII

XCVIII

XCIX

C

CI

CII

CIII

CIV

CV

CVI

CVII

CVIII

CIX

CX

CXI

CXII

CXIII

CXIV

CXV

CXVI

CXVII

CXVIII

CXIX

CXX

CXXI

CXXII

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter XLVII

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLIX

Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Chapter LIV

Chapter LV

Chapter LVI

Chapter LVII

Chapter LVIII

THE PAINTED VEIL

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

CAKES AND ALE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

THE NARROW CORNER

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

THEATRE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

UP AT THE VILLA

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

THE RAZOR’S EDGE

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART TWO

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART THREE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

PART SIX

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

THEN AND NOW

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

EPILOGUE

CATALINA

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

The Short Stories

INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORIES

THE SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

THE SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN

A BAD EXAMPLE

DE AMICITIA

FAITH

THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS

DAISY

CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE

LADY HABART

PRO PATRIA

A POINT OF LAW

AN IRISH GENTLEMAN

FLIRTATION

THE FORTUNATE PAINTER

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)

GOOD MANNERS

COUSIN AMY

THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)

THE PACIFIC

ENVOI

RAIN

THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD

HONOLULU

THE LUNCHEON

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

HOME

THE POOL

MACKINTOSH

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

THE THREE FAT WOMEN OF ANTIBES

THE FACTS OF LIFE

GIGOLO AND GIGOLETTE

THE HAPPY COUPLE

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

THE LION’S SKIN

THE UNCONQUERED

THE ESCAPE

THE JUDGMENT SEAT

MR KNOW-ALL

THE HAPPY MAN

THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY

THE POINT OF HONOUR

THE POET

THE MOTHER

A MAN FROM GLASGOW

BEFORE THE PARTY

THE VESSEL OF WRATH

LOUISE

THE PROMISE

A STRING OF BEADS

THE YELLOW STREAK

THE FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

THE ALIEN CORN

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

VIRTUE

THE MAN WITH THE SCAR

THE CLOSED SHOP

THE BUM

THE DREAM

THE TREASURE

THE COLONEL’S LADY

MISS KING

THE HAIRLESS MEXICAN

GIULIA LAZZARI

THE TRAITOR

HIS EXCELLENCY

MR HARRINGTON’S WASHING

LORD MOUNTDRAGO

SANATORIUM

THE SOCIAL SENSE

THE VERGER

IN A STRANGE LAND

THE TAIPAN

THE CONSUL

A FRIEND IN NEED

THE ROUND DOZEN

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

JANE

FOOTPRINTS IN THE JUNGLE

THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY

THE BOOK-BAG

FRENCH JOE

GERMAN HARRY

THE FOUR DUTCHMEN

THE BACK OF BEYOND

P. & O.

EPISODE

THE KITE

A WOMAN OF FIFTY

MAYHEW

THE LOTUS EATER

SALVATORE

THE WASH-TUB

A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE

AN OFFICIAL POSITION

WINTER CRUISE

MABEL

MASTERSON

PRINCESS SEPTEMBER

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

MIRAGE

THE LETTER

THE OUTSTATION

THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

RAW MATERIAL

STRAIGHT FLUSH

THE END OF THE FLIGHT

A CASUAL AFFAIR

RED

NEIL MACADAM

The Plays

A MAN OF HONOUR

CONTENTS

GENERAL PREFACE

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

LADY FREDERICK

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THIRD ACT

JACK STRAW

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

MRS DOT

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

PENELOPE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE EXPLORER

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

THE TENTH MAN

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

SCENE II

LANDED GENTRY

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

THE LAND OF PROMISE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

THE UNKNOWN

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

THE CIRCLE

CONTENTS

PERSONS OF THE PLAY

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

CAESAR’S WIFE

CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

EAST OF SUEZ

CONTENTS

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

Selected Non-Fiction

THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

ON A CHINESE SCREEN

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

FRANCE AT WAR

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

BOOKS AND YOU

CONTENTS

Preface

I

II

III

The Autobiographies

THE SUMMING UP

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

STRICTLY PERSONAL

CONTENTS

A LETTER TO SIR EDWARD MARSH, K.C.V.O.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

Series Contents

Alphabetical List of Titles